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Wale is buoyant on his latest LP, but remains fixated on the subjects that have long obsessed him: success, wealth, and the haters who are blocking his path to success and wealth. | Wale is buoyant on his latest LP, but remains fixated on the subjects that have long obsessed him: success, wealth, and the haters who are blocking his path to success and wealth. | Wale: Shine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23290-shine/ | Shine | It’s been almost a decade since Wale released The Mixtape About Nothing, an earnest collection of well-rapped thinkpieces couched in a savvy, “Seinfeld”-referencing framework. The sitcom was a tempting lure to attract the internet tastemakers, and they helped introduce the D.C.-area rapper to the mainstream. But early acclaim came with high expectations, from both Wale’s audience and from Wale himself. Ever since, he’s been striving to reclaim the near-universal praise earned by that mixtape.
Five studio albums, and one mid-career reinvention later, we arrive at Shine, the rapper’s fourth full-length with MMG. Wale has promoted the new project as a record overflowing with contentment, thanks in part to a newborn daughter, Zyla. (The album’s title is an acronym: “Still here ignoring negative energy.”) In an interview with Complex, he said he wanted to put less pressure on himself. “I put myself through a lot of doom and gloom,” he said. “And I’m just like, ‘Wale, man, just be happier.’”
Accordingly, Shine is a more buoyant album than his back-to-basics 2015 offering, The Album About Nothing. There’s not a song here that feels grounded in much more than the desire to enjoy the moment or at least feign doing so well enough to make radio playlists. The album hopscotches its way through a varied set of production styles, with Wale performing his usual acrobatic routine through hoops positioned by marketers and focus groups. The Don Cannon-produced “Colombia Heights (Te Llamo)” refers to the largely-Hispanic D.C. neighborhood and features the reggaeton superstar J Balvin, whose presence livens up a meandering track.
“My Love” and “Fine Girl” chase the Caribbean muse that Drake has exploited so successfully. The former, which features Major Lazer, Dua Lipa and Wizkid and on which Wale doesn’t rap until nearly two minutes in, is pleasant enough to wiggle into a spot on a backyard party playlist. But “Fine Girl” stumbles around blindly, wasting features from the Nigerian artists Olamide and Davido. On these songs, and many others, Wale is there but not there, his lyrics contractually obligated, though every so often he finds time to drop a regrettable line, like “she penetrating my mind, I penetrate that physique,” on the single “PYT.”
Occasionally, on tracks where he’s more present, the mood lures the listener in, as on “Thank God,” an opener meant to sell the idea that Wale is through with pettiness; he uses the orchestral Cool & Dre beat to coo at his daughter, announcing “that feminist side come out when Zyla there” and turning the hook over to the R&B singer Rotimi. “Scarface, Rozay Gotti,” a surprisingly tender tribute to some of Wale’s rap heroes, induces a smile as the rapper sings drunkenly, then launches into deft, empty raps about courtside seats at a Wizards game.
Still, there are hints—beyond that “doth protest too much” acronym—that Wale can’t help but relive the past. His flow remains flexible but he’s fixated on the subjects that have long obsessed him: success, wealth, and the haters who are blocking his path to success and wealth. A strange hook on “Thank God” is preoccupied with his enemies, despite the fact that he’s never had a longstanding public beef with any relevant rapper.
Shine isn’t dark. But it feels like an exercise in avoidance as if Wale took the advice to ease up too far. Even “Smile,” the type of conscious song that animated Mixtape About Nothing, feels dispassionate and obligatory. And for those who were listening to his mixtapes a decade ago, “Running Back” a Lil Wayne feature and one of the best songs on Shine, doubles as a yardstick for what’s happened since. On Wale’s first Wayne feature, you could hear him striving to compete. A decade later, both rappers sound like they’re working solely for the paycheck, their pro forma raps clanging out emptily as a fantastic little sing-song DJ Spinz beat does the heavy lifting. Listening to Shine, you can’t help but think that Wale has finally dropped his rigorous standards for himself. He hadn’t met them in several years, but before this, he was still trying. | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Maybach Music Group | May 20, 2017 | 6 | e06f4e69-f5ea-47a9-ae91-aa80daf7f6d9 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
ELO has been dormant since 2001. But Alone in the Universe, Jeff Lynne's new record under the name, doesn’t simply unearth that classic ELO sound like some ancient artifact. Instead, it gently updates those elements to 2015, and works best when contrasting downcast lyrics with the effervescence of the music. | ELO has been dormant since 2001. But Alone in the Universe, Jeff Lynne's new record under the name, doesn’t simply unearth that classic ELO sound like some ancient artifact. Instead, it gently updates those elements to 2015, and works best when contrasting downcast lyrics with the effervescence of the music. | Jeff Lynne’s ELO: Alone In The Universe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21266-alone-in-the-universe/ | Alone In The Universe | ELO has been largely dormant since they released their thirteenth album in 2001. And yet, their music continues to find new listeners, whether through compilations, car commercials, soundtrack placements, or G+ copies of Eldorado in used record bins. On one hand, the band ought to have aged about as well as Emerson Lake & Palmer or Styx, which is to say, not very well. ELO’s best albums— A New World Record and Discovery in particular—are prime examples of the excesses of the '70s, with all the pomp and studio wankery of the most ambitious prog rock imaginable. And yet, Lynne deployed those techniques in service of songs that had all the exuberance and abandon of early rock 'n' roll. If he was making big statements, then they typically amounted to "I really want tonight to last forever / I really wanna be with you."
Given their propensity for cosmic imagery (have you seen their web site?), the title of their latest album sounds all the more wistful, as though the absence of alien life is the saddest thing Lynne could ever imagine. That particular melancholy informs first single and album opener "When I Was a Boy", which may sound slight but is animated by the kind of nostalgia often found in country songs. "Radio waves kept me company in those beautiful days when there was no money," Lynne sings, as though flipping through old photo albums. "When I was a boy, I had a dream." He’s still no wordsmith, but there’s something bracing about his directness; any lyrical pretensions would ruin the reverie.
On the other hand, you have something like "Dirty to the Bone". With its florid harps and thrumming drums, it’s an upbeat pop song in tone and tempo. But the lyrics are mean-spirited to a near-comical degree, as Lynne describes one of those she-devils who seem to exist only in old rock songs: "She’ll mess you up, she’ll move around… she’ll deceive you till the cows come home." That kind of cartoony straw-woman writing abounded in the '70s, but the casual misogyny, not to mention such threadbare cliché, feels profoundly out of place now.
Alone in the Universe fares best when Lynne is more generous, when he can contrast the downcast sentiments of the lyrics with the effervescence of the music. After a rocky side 1, side 2 picks up considerably, thanks to light-speed "Ain’t It a Drag" and the zero-gravity "I’m Leaving You." Lynne may be a maximalist, but he makes every element count. He still has a good ear for simple but driving rhythm sections, and most of these songs use an acoustic strum to augment the beat and warm the track—a familiar, but still effective, technique. Likewise, the sympathetic backing vocals on "All My Life" underscore the yearning in the songs, making the simplicity of the lyrics ("I’m so glad I found you, just want to be around you") sound all the sweeter.
Alone in the Universe doesn’t simply unearth that classic ELO sound like some ancient artifact. Instead, it gently updates those elements to 2015, the year Lynne celebrates his 68th birthday and his 52nd year in the music business. These songs sound precarious, both musically and emotionally. Partly that is due to age and the slight quaver in Lynne’s vocals, which aren’t quite as robust as they used to be. Partly it is due to technology. Lynne has always used to the studio to define his band’s entire identity, and the difference between then and now is the difference between the air-brushed UFO on A New World Record and the CGI saucer on Alone in the Universe. There’s a gauzy thinness to the sound, an inescapable two-dimensionality that occasionally hinders Lynne’s mission. Still, this is a fine addition to their catalog, perhaps not as consistent as 2001’s Zoom but much better than these late-career revival albums tend to sound. | 2015-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | November 13, 2015 | 6.3 | e074530b-f834-41b5-97ba-0cb584f36f14 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Boston indie rock band craft a winning, cathartic record about grief, capitalism, and all the stuff we leave behind. | The Boston indie rock band craft a winning, cathartic record about grief, capitalism, and all the stuff we leave behind. | Vundabar: Smell Smoke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vundabar-smell-smoke/ | Smell Smoke | From their frivolously chosen band name to a comparison of songwriting and “healthy bowel movements,” Boston’s Vundabar is a ceaselessly jovial band. Even when their latest album deals with the morbid, they insist that “it’s supposed to be fun,” further adding, “please have fun.” By doing so, the restless indie rock band illustrate that, for better or worse, there is no singular way to deal with illness and death. Its inevitability and lingering irrationality feel at odds with capitalism and its American dream. Over labyrinthine melodies and punching distortion, Vundabar thread existential thoughts, fears, and anxieties into their latest album Smell Smoke.
Their third album grew from frontman Brandon Hagen’s intimate, four-year experience of taking care of a loved one in declining health. His songwriting explores the limiting corporeality of being human, the materialism that ostensibly adds value to life, and the abjection that’s a consequence of both. Oftentimes, we are only contemplating the cost of living, but on Smell Smoke, Vundabar reconcile the ironies and pain when dealing with the cost of death. Recently, Hagen dubbed it an “American album,” that emphasizes “a defunct language of morals and ideals.” Although death is a universal reality, profitable exploitation and materialist validation are inherently American.
Albeit dark and strange coming from a place of grief, Vundabar maintain their witty humor when making fun of capitalistic greed. “Big Funny” takes jabs at the cost of healthcare, particularly in a country where there seems to be complete lack of respect for the idea of health itself. “$$$” is a sassy, hard rock reaction to monetary leverage. Hagen’s tone is jaded, complimenting the unrelinquishable power of the man fronting the hundred dollar bill. “God bless the frankness of Franklin the thief,” he sighs before concluding that at least American corruption is transparent. That counts for something, right? The initial dredging whine of guitars transforms from a finger plucking tiptoe into a distorted sprint during the final three minutes. It’s a cataclysmic and therapeutic acknowledgment that everything is fucked.
Smell Smoke is dynamic and riveting, a guitar-forward mosaic that pieces jagged edges of art rock, math rock, punk rock, and pop together. Its instrumentation carried out by Hagen, assisted by drummer Drew McDonald and bassist Grayson Kirtland, emphasizes lyrical complexity and vocal bungee jumping. Lead single “Acetone” reckons with repressed emotions that fractures the self and come back with legs of their own. “There’s nothing that’s poetic about a bedsore,” Hagen asserts on the opening of “Harvest,” before descending into a scene about flies feasting on aged fruits’ rotting flesh. A phantom sigh from background organs creates a vulnerable atmosphere for Hagen’s storytelling.
Hagen acknowledges that the real American dream can be governed by money and emotions. Smell Smoke’s cover alone hints at the paralysis of grief, a forced feeling to smack a smile and pretend everything is peachy. Free-floating grief can conjure shame, projecting societal norms instead of revealing an emotional truth. Death, which is already literally an untouchable subject for us living, feels even more alienating in a society that values valuing things. Numbers, prices, estimates, averages, among other condensable evaluations feel like common-day language until paired with mortality. Hagen’s clever songwriting harnesses the weird, merciless irony of humans not being able to understand or articulate loss when structural institutions assign a cost to it.
The album concludes with a thunderous anecdote about a man who loses his life’s purpose when he loses his hat. Before reaching an existential epiphany, he finds the same hat on sale and returns to his limiting philosophies. You can’t take it with you, but Vundabar have brilliantly crafted an album that feels like it resonates with joy and sorrow both here and in the hereafter. | 2018-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Gawk | February 28, 2018 | 7.5 | e097ec56-955b-4d29-a3ff-1aea9055c5ed | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
In their duo debut, these guitarists step outside of free jazz and indie rock to offer a dozen surprisingly accessible and warm instrumentals. | In their duo debut, these guitarists step outside of free jazz and indie rock to offer a dozen surprisingly accessible and warm instrumentals. | Mary Halvorson / John Dieterich: a tangle of stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-halvorson-john-dieterich-a-tangle-of-stars/ | a tangle of stars | The guitarists Mary Halvorson and John Dieterich appear to inhabit disconnected worlds. During the last decade, Halvorson has reimagined the rules and roles of jazz guitar by pairing a graceful approach to melody with an iron will to warp, corrupt, and subvert it. In September, her work as a composer, bandleader, and improviser earned her a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Dieterich, though, comes from what remains of the indie-rock underground. For two decades, he has been one of two guitarists in Deerhoof, a band whose only allegiance is to its absolute irreverence for genre. They make jock jams for nerds, pop songs for noise lovers—a scrappy, self-styled realm where philanthropic foundations rarely tread.
But Dieterich’s Deerhoof are one of the most enthusiastically exploratory bands of their generation, as emphatic and magnetic covering the songs of The Shining as they are splitting the difference between Stereolab and Don Caballero. And Halvorson is the kind of musician who is perpetually down for whatever, whether supplying her singular approach to Anthony Braxton and Bill Frisell collaborations or writing intricate songs for others to sing. On their debut as a guitars-plus duo, a tangle of stars, this sense of wonder that Halvorson and Dieterich share takes center stage for a dozen disarming instrumentals. They score a frantic fight scene for “short knives” and summon the shapes of acid tracers on “continuous whatever.” They flirt with budget psychedelic rock with “my mother’s lover” and float through a haunted house on “ghost poem,” shaping a record that’s surprisingly accessible and emotional for this idiom.
Guitar duos often suffer from too much or too little bravura: They can feel like masturbatory Guitar Center technical workouts, or limp handshakes upon a cold introduction. But Halvorson and Dieterich bring an easy aplomb to this session, captured at his New Mexico home when the two met to improvise to one another’s loose compositions. Early stunner “drum the rubber hate” is a feat of athleticism fit for metal shredders on a tropical holiday. Their interwoven guitar lines move in and out of phase, each player taking a solo over the other’s rhythmic picking. But it’s a supremely good song, too, full of narrative tension and resolution and built with a hook that sinks deeply. Dietrich and Halvorson are self-assured enough as instrumentalists to realize their rendezvous is about something more than instrumental prowess.
Indeed, the most complicated and compelling aspect of a tangle of stars is the rich and varied emotional landscape it surveys. None of these pieces trace easy moods in obvious ways; conflicted feelings are bound to each other like the rose and its thorn. “lace caps,” for instance, feels at first like an early fall day, the sun sparkling at the onset of the golden hour. It is as gentle and warm as the recent Windham Hill reappraisals of fellow traveler William Tyler. But notes start to wobble from their axes, Halvorson pushing them quickly to one side like a cat batting a ball of string, until the whole thing collapses. You listen again, searching for early trouble. “the handsome” is both ecstatic and panicked, “balloon chord” at once a daydream of drone and a nightmare of echo.
Halvorson and Dieterich remain identifiable as composers and players throughout these pieces—you could spot her hard-edged picking inside a hurricane, after all, and his leads often glow like the neon sign of an all-night pizza parlor. But you can sense both players moving toward a shared space—or, at the very least, making room within their own systems for someone else. During “vega’s array,” Halvorson morphs notes in her trademark way, while Dieterich turns a mesmerizing melody into a never-ending spider web. Toward the middle, their styles begin to blur, one’s tricks dissolving inside the other’s. The song starts to shimmer like a mirage—inviting but illusory, thrilling but dangerous, two worlds collapsing into one unstable beauty. | 2019-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental / Rock | New Amsterdam | October 30, 2019 | 7.7 | e09e9f18-29a0-4e07-984c-e71c1868af37 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
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 Stephin Merrit’s 1994 meta-country album, an idiosyncratic, lo-fi travelogue bursting with gothic wit and pathos. | 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 Stephin Merrit’s 1994 meta-country album, an idiosyncratic, lo-fi travelogue bursting with gothic wit and pathos. | The Magnetic Fields: The Charm of the Highway Strip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-magnetic-fields-the-charm-of-the-highway-strip/ | The Charm of the Highway Strip | Stephin Merritt’s early life makes for a great country song that no one would ever think to write. Born in 1965, he has claimed that he was “conceived by barefoot hippies on a houseboat in St. Thomas.” He likes to say that he and his single mother lived in 33 homes during his first 23 years, mainly in the northeastern United States. She was an English teacher and Buddhist seeker, drawn toward communes and homeopathic remedies. They were “sometimes very poor.” He grew up not knowing his father, an obscure folk-rock singer from the Virgin Islands. Even Merritt’s first name was in flux: He changed the spelling as a teenager, inspired by something he saw on television about junk mail and indulged by the progressive prep school he wound up attending in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Merritt’s musical interests were similarly wayward. He formed the Magnetic Fields with his longtime friend and collaborator Claudia Gonson in the late 1980s, when the Pixies’ dynamic Dadaism was about to burst out of the Boston club scene and help galvanize an alternative-rock revolution. But he was fixated instead on the stylish sophistication of ABBA or the teenage symphonies churned out by the Brill Building’s songwriting assembly line: clever, catchy, and unrepentantly beautiful. In 1991, as Nirvana were overhauling the music industry’s landscape with the sludgy stadium-rock verité of Nevermind, the Magnetic Fields’ debut single, “100,000 Fireflies,” on Cambridge indie label Harriett Records, was wry and wonderful bedroom synth-pop. Every witty lyric, sung at a teasing deadpan remove by guest vocalist Susan Anway, bears meticulous unpacking, but the conclusion could hardly have been more resolutely out of step with the era’s pedal-stomping MTV trends: “Why do we keep shrieking/When we mean soft things?/We should be whispering all the time.”
For all of Merritt’s grand ambitions, his fledgling band could barely draw a crowd, and the Magnetic Fields would soon bounce between labels the way a younger Merritt had once moved homes. “100,000 Fireflies” originally appeared on the Magnetic Fields’ first proper album, 1989’s Distant Plastic Trees, a set of eccentric synth-pop that was available only in Japan, via RCA Victor, and the UK, via indie label Red Flame (Merritt has claimed that Red Flame’s owner vanished with all the overseas proceeds). In 1992, they self-released The Wayward Bus, a homespun electronic update of swooning 1960s girl-group production; the same year, the House of Tomorrow EP followed on the Chicago indie Feel Good All Over. In the meantime, Mac McCaughan of North Carolina indie-rock pioneers Superchunk got hold of the “100,000 Fireflies” single and his band started raucously covering it at shows. Gonson met McCaughan after a Superchunk gig at Brandeis University, and a fateful decision rushed into view: The Magnetic Fields’ next album would be released on Merge, the label McCaughan co-founded with Superchunk bandmate Laura Ballance.
The Charm of the Highway Strip encapsulates the urbane, humane, and above all stubbornly idiosyncratic sensibility that has turned Merritt into one of the more fascinating songwriters of the last few decades. It wasn’t the first Magnetic Fields album, but because it was put out on Merge, it was the first to be widely available in the United States; it was also the first to have Merritt’s lead vocals, a unique morose rumbling not unlike that of Calvin Johnson’s creaky baritone. Like all of Merritt’s best work, it’s centered around a whimsically specific concept that ends up feeling marvelously universal, invoking tropes that could be considered hackneyed or artificial to achieve a genuine emotional connection. “You couldn’t believe it hadn’t been done before,” Merritt has said of hearing songs by his heroes ABBA, Ella Fitzgerald, and Doris Day. “That’s what I want to do.”
For starters, The Charm of the Highway Strip was sort of a country album, or the Magnetic Fields’ version of one. “When we signed the Magnetic Fields, I thought they were going to be an electro-pop band, because the records they’d made up to that point reminded me of Yaz, which I loved,” McCaughan has said. “And then the first record they delivered to us was The Charm of the Highway Strip. So, even that was a left turn compared to what we expected from them.” In 1988, an A&R rep for Capitol paid the Magnetic Fields $2,000 to record the songs that would become The Charm of the Highway Strip but opted to pass on the demo, reputedly objecting, “I hate Johnny Cash.” They were talking about Merritt’s low voice, but the lyrics also center around country staples like the open road, trains, and—naturally—country songs. “I’m never going back to Jackson,” Merritt begins on “Lonely Highway,” the ghostly opening track. “I couldn't bear to show my face/I nearly killed you with my drinking/Wouldn’t be caught dead in that place.”
More specifically, then, this was a road-trip album, as gaudy and gothic as the neon-signed motels strewn alongside the American autobahn. Merritt designed the cover art—dashed yellow lines against a night-black backdrop—himself. On the lonesome, harpsichord-accented “Long Vermont Roads,” he reaches for geographical comparisons that any self-respecting Nashville songsmith might dismiss as a little strained: “Your eyes are the Mesa Verde/Big and brown and far away/And your eyes are Kansas City/In Kansas and in Missouri,” Merritt croons, pronouncing Missouri as “misery.” It’s so audaciously hokey that it somehow circles back again until the narrator’s meta sadness (“And country songs never help you sleep,” Merritt observes) becomes achingly real.
Merritt often protested that his songs weren’t based on his life. Maybe he protested too much: At its best moments, The Charm of the Highway Strip has a gloomy fatalism you might expect of someone who grew up leaving town almost twice a year. The stately electro-rock of “Born on a Train,” for instance, begins with Merritt invoking “ghost roads” and the “walking dead.” But what makes this song one of the finest in the Magnetic Fields’ vast catalog is the heartbreaking contradiction at its core, as Merritt ruefully sings, “And I’ve been makin’ promises I know I’ll never keep/One of these days I’m gonna leave you in your sleep.” Tramps like him weren’t born to run; they were destined to be pulled along by some powerful engine beyond their control.
None of this actually sounds like the alt-country of contemporaries such as Jeff Tweedy’s pre-Wilco band Uncle Tupelo, let alone the mainstream country stars of the era. Thrift-store keyboards, off-kilter percussion, and Magnetic Fields secret weapon Sam Davol’s swooping cello lope along over distant echoes of basslines from the Crystals or the Ronettes, all filtered through a lo-fi murk. But in the Magnetic Fields’ hands, these homespun tools convey vast expanses. “Fear of Trains,” which juxtaposes synth wobbles with jaunty Dukes of Hazzard plucks, is an empathetic sketch of a young woman encircled by the forces of race, religion, and class, all pithily transferred to a railroad phobia. Gay and Loud was the name of Merritt’s publishing company, but tender ballad “I Have the Moon” hints only quietly at a possible romance with a closeted lover: “You have become like other men/But let me kiss you once again,” Merritt dryly intones. The dream-like “When the Open Road Is Closing In,” with a lullaby pace and drowsy vocal delivery that belie its calliope-like keyboards, suggests that the highway isn’t just a part of life. Rather, life—as another poet once put it—is a highway: “The world is a motor inn in the Iowa highway slum,” Merritt sings, then warns, “You won’t be coming home again.”
The Charm of the Highway Strip arrived with all of the impact of a beat-up car stalled on the side of the road. Merritt refused to tour in support of it, and what little coverage the album got tended to pair it with its near-simultaneous follow-up, Holiday. But accolades slowly gathered. In a brief piece in September 1994, several months after the album’s release, SPIN’s Charles Aaron aptly highlighted Merritt’s “mordant lyrics that Morrissey might mope for.” Come December the magazine ranked the record as one of the year’s best, deeming it “metapop of an austere lushness.” (In the 1990s, Merritt worked as a copy editor for SPIN and Time Out New York.)
Of course, before long the Magnetic Fields would upend expectations again with 1999’s 69 Love Songs. An enormous gamble for Merge and also the band’s swan song on the label, the triple-CD set sold out immediately, with Robert Christgau awarding it an A+, The New York Times lauding Merritt as a “contrarian pop genius,” and assorted music publications eventually ranking it in their lists for the greatest albums of all time. Faced with dozens of fresh tracks to sort through, newcomers really would have their work cut out for them going back to find the charms of The Charm of the Highway Strip. But the album’s crafty country-western transience was evident in 69 Love Songs’ “Papa Was a Rodeo,” its slyly bleak determinism in the instant earworm “I’ll never say ‘happy anniversary’” from “I Think I Need a New Heart.” The projects are more alike than they seem. Holiday, too, with its vacationing abandon, now seems like another form of escape, of constant motion. Merritt, like any of us, has been endlessly adrift, perpetually in a state of subtle reinvention.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2022-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 2, 2022 | 8.2 | e0a2c1c2-9366-43bc-afcc-922c23634316 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The UK singer-producer teams up with Rostam for a collection of chilled-out electro-pop that plays it a little too safe. | The UK singer-producer teams up with Rostam for a collection of chilled-out electro-pop that plays it a little too safe. | Georgia: Euphoric | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/georgia-euphoric/ | Euphoric | On Georgia Barnes’ self-produced breakthrough, 2020’s Seeking Thrills, the UK singer and producer embraced a ramshackle approach to synthpop and house music. The album washed her voice in effects and scaffolded hooks in clattering, unpredictable production, netting her a Mercury Prize nomination and establishing her as an up-and-comer in a crowded pop field. On her follow-up, Euphoric, Georgia chose to expand her circle, working with former Vampire Weekend member and indie pop producer Rostam to try on a new sound. Introducing acoustic instrumentation and unvarnished vocals, Euphoric takes an overly safe approach to themes of growth and companionship, largely sanding down Georgia’s steelier, more idiosyncratic production.
Georgia and Rostam first linked up in 2019 by way of Mura Masa, who tapped the singer for his winding club track “Live Like We’re Dancing”; after hearing the song, Rostam quickly reached out via DM to work with her. It’s a combination that works well on paper: Rostam’s effervescent, ’80s-influenced production style has brought about wonders for established pop stars and indie wunderkinds alike. But on Euphoric, the team-up brings forth hit-or-miss arrangements that lose Georgia in the mix. For each tuneful dance workout like standout “Some Things You’ll Never Know,” which ramps up to an prismatic, corkscrewing drop halfway through, there’s an overdressed song like “All Night,” whose garish chorus of widescreen synths induces an instant headache. Some songs just never seem to reach a clear destination: The nervy, muscular electric guitar melody that winds throughout “The Dream” treads water until the song fizzles out.
The expanded instrumentation occasionally works in Georgia’s favor, typically when she branches her percussion out beyond the usual kit and programmed drums. On the late highlight “Keep On,” gentle congas and mellotron open up a peaceful, laidback sound that shapeshifts into a sitar solo and speaker-shaking climax. During “Give It Up for Love,” Georgia dials into a similarly easygoing groove inspired by William Orbit’s spacey, acoustic-driven electronica on Madonna’s Ray of Light. It’s a touchstone you wish Georgia would reach to more often on Euphoric, providing a shimmery, expressive backdrop for her soaring voice.
Georgia’s willingness to experiment is promising, but it’s unfortunate that Euphoric takes such a predominantly safe journey. As on Seeking Thrills, some songs also succumb to vague lyrics that resemble placeholders. “Why do I feel my face /Crumbling all over the place?” she asks on “Friends Will Never Let You Go,” an ode to complicated friendships that quickly gets tied up in a self-conscious jumble. She finds more success on the title track, balancing a simple sentiment of adoration (“It’s euphoric when you’re next to me”) with more specific, grounded relationship details, like meeting up in Regent’s Park and feeling too shy to speak her true feelings. Set to a loping guitar melody and a pulsing blend of congas and 808s, the song promises an album of chilled-out, deeply felt bangers that Georgia doesn’t quite deliver. | 2023-08-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | August 3, 2023 | 6.3 | e0a51111-bb3a-4d42-818f-8104b6e1da06 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
George Lewis Jr.’s self-titled fifth album is an island of good feelings and vacuous summertime indie-pop jams. | George Lewis Jr.’s self-titled fifth album is an island of good feelings and vacuous summertime indie-pop jams. | Twin Shadow: Twin Shadow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/twin-shadow-twin-shadow/ | Twin Shadow | For a moment in 2015, it seemed like George Lewis Jr., who performs as Twin Shadow, was about to break out of indie rock and into actual pop-star fame. Around the time of his major label debut, Eclipse, Lewis wrote a song for Billy Idol and submitted material for Chris Brown and Eminem. He dated Zoë Kravitz, posing on red carpets in a Calvin Klein suit. He donned a pair of white skinny jeans and talked about his artistic process for Levi’s. He became fodder for Page Six. But Eclipse, the album that was supposed to usher Lewis across the velvety threshold into the kind of mainstream success enjoyed by, say, Grimes or the Weeknd, was bizarre and confused. It peaked at No. 91 on the Billboard charts, stranded between indie rock and mainstream pop. His 2018 follow-up, Caer, flew under the radar. Now, Lewis returns with his self-titled, self-released fifth record, blending elements of reggae, funk, and classic rock into a collection of vacuous summertime indie-pop jams.
Twin Shadow is all soft corners. It’s plush, a place to sink in and zone out. It exudes the energy of a vintage conversation pit, upholstered in an unimposing shade of tan, with a little table in the center for your ashtray. Recorded partly in Lewis’ native Dominican Republic, the album is an island of good feelings set apart from the madness of the outside world. Its cozy, prefab sensibility is full of fat bass and anachronistic synths. On opener “Alemania,” Lewis’ rich tenor goes down easy, and when it meets Kadhja Bonet’s opalescent harmonies, you’re likely to fall into a pleasant trance. Perhaps you will be transported to a beachside bar, swaying gently as you ward off brain freeze from a $15 frozen drink. Most of the record is like this: easy to listen to and easy to forget. When the song changes, you’ll barely recall what it was you just heard.
It shouldn’t be alarming that Twin Shadow plays like a mix of the greatest soft-rock hits of the 1970s and ’80s—Lewis has written music that feels plucked from a crate of old 45s for his entire career. Pastiche is his calling card. The guitar on a song like “Sugarcane” would not be out of place on an Eagles B-side. “Is There Any Love” compresses Lewis’ vocals and lays on the funk, building up the kind of bottom-heavy disco track you might hear as a movie protagonist dusts off their leather jacket and slams on the gas pedal. Nacreous synthesizers and four-on-the-floor percussion push to achieve a euphoric liftoff that never arrives.
Twin Shadow is not meant to be deep; Lewis isn’t one to write with thematic complexity. Instead, he’s focused on conveying a mood, making sure you have a good time. He wants you to dance. He wants you to spark up a joint and vibe. The lyrics are clunky and silly in a way that feels lacking in inspiration. On the listless “Modern Man,” Lewis reflects on his love life over languorous keys and stripped-down guitars. “I’m not some stupid Romeo,” he sings with a sense of unearned dolefulness. “I pride myself that I’m a hoe.” On the ridiculous reggae Western “Lonestar,” he dramatically cries, “Don’t kick me off of my wave, boy,” over a looped “Hey, hey,” shotgun blasts, and what sounds like a horse’s neigh.
On a recent episode of How Long Gone, the podcast helmed by men’s fashion and lifestyle gurus Chris Black and Jason Stewart, Lewis revealed he recently recovered from Covid-19, despite getting vaccinated. To this, Black said, “You should not have gone to Tulum with Diplo, I told you not to do that!” It’s a friendly joke that somehow also captures the hollow tone of Lewis’ most recent work: Twin Shadow feels like an overpriced vacation with a bunch of DJs. It’s an aesthetic comprised of scare quotes, where aspirationally vibrant feelings become performative and dull: “trippy,” “vibey,” “psychedelic,” “sun-kissed.” It’s not real fun if you have to try.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cheree Cheree | July 13, 2021 | 5.5 | e0a76fe5-8810-434f-b433-05afcc675795 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Seven years after his debut, the Top Dawg fixture returns to his habitual stylistic fusions but too often, his muddy, psychedelic haze fails to summon the dreamlike quality it’s aiming for. | Seven years after his debut, the Top Dawg fixture returns to his habitual stylistic fusions but too often, his muddy, psychedelic haze fails to summon the dreamlike quality it’s aiming for. | Lance Skiiiwalker: Audiodidactic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lance-skiiiwalker-audiodidactic/ | Audiodidactic | Since his career began, Lance Skiiiwalker has been painted as one of a kind. The Chicago-born vocalist and producer, aka Lance Howard, first popped during a weekend trip to Los Angeles, when a friend who managed a clothing store on Fairfax put on one of his beat tapes. Two customers who patronized the store that day happened to be former Top Dawg Entertainment president Dave Free and Kendrick Lamar, who were so impressed with his music that they had the manager call Skiiiwalker back to the store to meet him. He quickly fell in with TDE’s inner circle, becoming a fixture at the Carson house that served as their de facto headquarters, and bringing woozy touches of R&B, funk, jazz, and hip-hop to songs from Jay Rock’s “Money Trees Deuce” to Kendrick’s “untitled 04 08.14.2014.” He was called a “mad scientist,” a “glitch in the system” capable of unlocking a song’s potential.
After becoming something of a secret weapon for the label, Skiiiwalker signed to TDE in 2016 and dropped his solo debut, the warped and hazy Introverted Intuition. It was certainly unprecedented by Top Dawg standards, an album that dabbled in several genres without committing to any. Songs meander from crunchy beat music and wafting R&B to new-age funk; they feel like attempts to buck convention by throwing everything at the wall. But aside from establishing what separated him from his labelmates, Introverted Intuition offered little insight into Skiiiwalker himself. Being freewheeling is one thing; get too untethered, though, and the ideas simply float away, as sweetly ephemeral as vape smoke. Audiodidactic, his first proper album in seven years, following a handful of EPs, trudges even further into Skiiiwalker’s imagination. Every song is awash in a psychedelic haze that misses the very dreamlike quality it aims for; Skiiiwalker sounds lost in a musical echo chamber of his own creation.
He deserves credit for having honed his craft. His production work on albums like SiR’s 2019 album Chasing Summer and Isaiah Rashad’s 2021 comeback record The House Is Burning pushed Skiiiwalker to develop his piano, vocal, and plugin skills. That dedication informs the album, right down to its title. Through self-teaching and instinctive wanderlust, Skiiiwalker pulls from multiple stylistic corners: neo-soul, prog rock, the 2010s California beat scene. Unfortunately, he’s so determined to throw the listener off his trail that Audiodidactic often feels adrift, the vibes left frustratingly indistinct.
It’s a shame, because in the few places that things come together, Skiiiwalker plays with interesting textures. Audiodidactic’s best moments, self-produced cuts like the shoegaze-esque single “Beantown” or the crisp, futuristic groove of “It Was All,” achieve a soothing mesh of bass, synths, and vocals swirling like quasars. “IG,” another highlight, captures the beauty of smashing punk rhythms and chirpy, muted keys together. The rest of the album tries to stretch across styles but comes out amorphous and bland. Muddy vocals on the Groove-produced opener “Friends” and the title track melt into fields of saxophone and plugin-soaked synths, attempts at collaging that register only as background noise. Many of these songs have pretty melodies (like the Matt Miller-produced “Everybody Hurts Somebody”) but can’t corral them into concrete ideas; instead, they just dissolve into a mush of colors and influences.
Skiiiwalker is a talented musician with good connections who has yet to figure out how to translate his faculties into solo work that amounts to more than a bunch of genres rubbing shoulders for the sake of it. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that: Lil Yachty’s recent excursion into psychedelic synth rock and funk, Let’s Start Here, is also a mess of a record, but Yachty’s passion and presence keep things more focused. Texas singer-producer Liv.e’s recent Girl in the Half Pearl is more successful, weaving gauzy R&B, drum’n’bass, and synth funk into a rich tapestry of love in all its forms. Much of Audiodidactic, on the other hand, feels anonymous, like an amalgamation of Robert Glasper, Mndsgn, and Shabazz Palaces songs searching for a binding agent. Until Skiiiwalker can add some more interesting ideas of his own to the mix, it will be difficult to tell where his influences end and he begins. | 2023-02-15T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-15T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Top Dawg Entertainment | February 15, 2023 | 5.8 | e0a83352-1315-4ced-84d0-74efb8406d15 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
John Cudlip’s shoegaze band evokes the eyes-closed, blown-out atmospheric rock of the 1990s with studied precision and genuine passion. | John Cudlip’s shoegaze band evokes the eyes-closed, blown-out atmospheric rock of the 1990s with studied precision and genuine passion. | Launder: Happening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/launder-happening/ | Happening | Happening is John Cudlip’s first album as Launder, but it’s no stroke of beginner’s luck. Since starting the project in 2018, the Los Angeles songwriter has released a bevy of lo-fi alt-rock singles and an EP, Pink Cloud, before signing with Ghostly in 2019. In those next three pandemic-tainted years, he got sober and tucked 60 demos under his belt, diligently writing while live shows screeched to a halt. Then he and his band—guitarist Nathan Hawelu, bassist Chase Meier, and drummer Bryan De Leon—recorded take after take, commemorating each slight variation with a joke: “It’s happening.” A rapturous love letter to the scuzzy alt-rock of the early ’90s, Happening pays homage to Cudlip’s dream-pop and shoegaze influences. Marrying the angelic, throbbing melt of Slowdive or Beach House with the punchy clarity of the Drop Nineteens, it’s a precise, evocative expansion on the eyes-closed, blown-out atmospheric rock that destroyed countless Gen X eardrums.
Happening is refreshingly unabashed in its reverence. Cudlip recorded at Los Angeles’ New Monkey Studio, formerly owned by Elliott Smith; he used Smith’s microphone and compressor to record his own plaintive vocals. Sonny Diperri (My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails) mixed the album, which is streaked with Loveless and Souvlaki influences, even veering toward Goo-town on mid-album standout “Beggar.” But amid a multiplying flock of genre revivalists who imitate or recycle sounds from previous eras, Cudlip builds on his influences with such studied precision and genuine passion that it all ends up sounding natural.
Though most tracks on Happening chart a similar path—gradual buildup to explosive texture—they feel newly cathartic every time. Collaborating with French singer Soko on “Become,” Cudlip morphs spacey guitars into a heavily layered crunch that nearly drowns out her vocals by the end. Distorted, menacing chords seep and shudder through the latter half of the grunge-influenced “Withdraw” like blood through a bandage. Even the most pedestrian track, “On a Wire,” suddenly blossoms into a lush, guitar-driven blur that surpasses the previous four minutes’ relatively uninspired Souvlaki LARP. Cudlip’s mastery of the slow burn shines on closer “Lantern”; over its eight and a half-minute sprawl, the song evolves with impressive subtlety from a gentle guitar and vocal melody into a full-blown shoegaze arrangement, kicking off a nearly four-minute instrumental section with a Loveless-worthy screech.
In spite of its transcendent, emotive capabilities, Happening can feel a bit too clean at times, a little too influenced. The more ’00s alt-leaning tracks like “Harbour Mouth” and “Chipper” would stand out on a lesser album, but Cudlip’s oblique songwriting feels so perfectly matched to his moodier arrangements that the poppier songs threaten to power-wash the complexity out of the music. Lines like “Chipper”’s “I’m in love with the money, but we can share” feel out of place when delivered so smoothly, particularly in comparison to a sad headbanger like “Beggar,” where gnawing bass and Cudlip’s caustic groaning locate the song perfectly at the intersection of craven horniness and biblical rage.
In spite of its precision, the messiness is what makes Happening a compelling listen. Smashing the distortion pedal into oblivion, Cudlip is a genuine alchemical force, and as each song swells toward fury, euphoria, or something ineffably in between, it becomes clear that he wants us to feel everything that arises simply as it comes. Naturally that includes anxiety about what’s to come at all: “Couldn’t foresee all the misleading,” he croons on “Unwound.” The best shoegaze is all about atmosphere, and Cudlip pays the ultimate tribute to his influences not through imitative flattery but by following their lead and building his own world of towering sound and emotion. | 2022-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ghostly International | July 29, 2022 | 7.2 | e0b66417-4208-4668-b93a-1e2ef9ca5e6a | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
On the second album under her solo alias, the Speedy Ortiz frontwoman uses maximalist electronic pop to explore youth, self-perception, and a reckoning with her past. | On the second album under her solo alias, the Speedy Ortiz frontwoman uses maximalist electronic pop to explore youth, self-perception, and a reckoning with her past. | Sad13: Haunted Painting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sad13-haunted-painting/ | Haunted Painting | A few years ago at Seattle’s Frye Museum, Sadie Dupuis locked eyes with Saharet, painted by Franz von Stuck in a 1902 portrait. The famous vaudeville dancer is pictured in a green gown, a red rose in her hair, her lips slightly parted in a smile; upon first glance, she appears content. But dark shadows encircle Saharet’s eyes and her cheeks are ghostly white, a stark contrast. Drawn to Saharet’s enigmatic face, the Speedy Ortiz leader began thinking about haunted paintings, and then writing new music. In works like The Picture of Dorian Gray and Ghostbusters II, possessed artworks are often avatars for age-old themes like the mutability of the self and the thirst for eternal youth. Dupuis explores these sweeping ideas about art and existence throughout Haunted Painting, the fantastic, frenetic second solo album from her solo project Sad13.
Whereas Sad13 was previously Dupuis’ bucket for poppier Speedy Ortiz songs, Haunted Painting marks a clean break, a bifurcation of her musical personality. It’s Sad13 reckoning with her past, one she doesn’t quite recognize anymore. Recording at five different studios with five female engineers, Dupuis plays 18 instruments, including guitar, theremin, lap steel, glockenspiel, electric sitar, and “toys, trash, ephemera.” If that sounds exhausting, it sometimes is. Most songs are stuffed with diverging melodies and dense instrumentation. But Dupuis is such an adept songwriter and accomplished singer that the excesses are part of the appeal.
Take “Ghost (of a Good Time),” an anthem to aging out of the afterhours. Reaching the other side of 30, Dupuis looks back on nightlife as a “heavy fog, mistook for aura.” But sonically the song evokes exactly what Dupuis claims to abhor: Synthesizers soar, buzz, and twinkle over a jittery, syncopated drumbeat from Zöe Brecher, melding dance music and math rock. A good time in its own right, it’s a party song about being fed up with partying, in which the keyboards throb like an ice-cream headache—the consequence, perhaps, of too much of a good thing.
That incongruity is a neat trick, a bit of sleight of hand that Dupuis pulls across much of the album. As she lyrically paints vivid pictures of mental-health diagnoses, indie-rock misogyny, and disappearing from existence, she fills each canvas with endless layers of glossy, bouncy pop music, juxtaposing weary eyes with a smile.
Dupuis also knows exactly when to pull her foot off the gas. On “Market Hotel,” a comparatively straightforward rock song about confronting both the patriarchy and her self-perception as an adult, Dupuis sings, “I’m working three fucking jobs, I’m too embarrassed to die.” At that moment, most of the noise fades to make way for a heartbreaking moment of honesty, one of many on Haunted Painting. “What a dream when you float out of sight/Dragging the haze that cloaks the morning to decimate my life,” she sings in the final chorus of “Oops...!” as the herky-jerky drums, fuzz guitars, and plonking organ melt away. For a few seconds, it’s just Dupuis, her multi-tracked background vocals, and a sparse acoustic guitar. The New York City native even twangs the word “morning,” stretching into a third syllable and opening the door for a country-pop album when synthesizers go out of vogue.
The opener, “Into the Catacombs,” and the penultimate song, “Take Care,” are windows into an alternate universe in which Haunted Painting is a chamber-pop album, mostly unencumbered by her neon universe of electric instruments. Backed by a classical octet and joined by pair of male vocalists—Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange on the former, Pile frontman Rick Maguire on the latter—Dupuis’s voice is the centerpiece. It’s just two words floating with a pair of flutes, but Dupuis stretching “I care,” across the chorus is affecting enough to make you wish for more songs like this. These moments offer brief, beautiful peeks at one version of Sad13—a hidden world within Haunted Painting. They’re alluring in their own right, but in the end they’re merely parts of the larger self-portrait: the sad eyes to her sly smile, rounding out the complexity that makes her music so appealing in the first place.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wax Nine | September 25, 2020 | 7.6 | e0b67d04-f3f0-4dcc-bcd5-8f05cd78460f | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
With subtle tweaks to her sound, Frankie Rose shows that her glossy, new wave style can be a way of cutting through the murk to find clarity. | With subtle tweaks to her sound, Frankie Rose shows that her glossy, new wave style can be a way of cutting through the murk to find clarity. | Frankie Rose: Cage Tropical | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frankie-rose-cage-tropical/ | Cage Tropical | A style can be a mold—something that gives form to shapeless ideas. It can also be a jumping-off point for points unknown. And sometimes a style can be a straitjacket. Frankie Rose has experienced all of these things. Over the past near-decade of her career, the New York musician has given herself the toughest kind of challenge: How to keep her music fresh without losing its essential Frankie Rose-ness—without giving the impression, in other words, that it has changed at all.
The roots of her style lie in her work with groups like Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls in the late 2000s, hammering out jangly garage-pop anthems that wrapped themselves in Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” as though it were an old fur coat, a moth-eaten vestige of a more glamorous yesteryear. Rose’s solo debut, a self-titled album credited to Frankie Rose and the Outs, followed the same blueprint: fuzzy guitars, ginormous backbeat snares, and girl-group harmonies spun as airy as cotton candy. If those records were the mold, then 2012’s Interstellar was the cosmic launch pad: a sleek, retro-futuristic take on indie pop bathed in wordless coos, layers of luminous synths, and endless reverb—not so much a wall of sound as a doorway to a higher dimension. The difference between the two albums was stark, but that’s when the diminishing returns set in. The lovely Herein Wild, just a year later, was virtually identical to its predecessor; after the surprise of Interstellar’s stylistic quantum leap, it felt like a cosmic cul-de-sac. Fortunately, on Rose’s new album, Cage Tropical, she shows that style can also be a lens, a way of cutting through the murk to find clarity.
Cage Tropical does not break with the form established by its predecessors. Her sound remains vast and yearning, with gut-punch drums pushing through explosions of colored powder; her voice is a chrome-plated sigh, and her agile melodies soar effortlessly. But the best songs manage to take the Frankie Rose formula and subtly tweak it. She’s always had a hybrid sound, as indebted to ’80s new wave (particularly Cocteau Twins and the Cure) as it is ’60s pop, but her alloys have never been as complex as they are here. “Art Bell” begins with Stereolab-like organs and dips into sultry, snake-like goth before diving into one of her characteristically gleaming, ’60s-inspired choruses. “Trouble” rides a motorik rhythm reminiscent of Neu!, marking her most extensive foray into krautrock yet, and it sounds fantastic, particularly when paired with her long, linear melodies and counterpoints. There’s an unmistakable hint of funk in “Cage Tropical,” one of the album’s standouts, which lives up to its title in the lilting, syncopated keys, and on the moody “Dancing Down the Hall,” she lets slip a pitch-bending blue note. Even though it’s over in a fleeting moment, the effect stays with you; it’s a small but significant shift from her usual habit of creating tension by contrasting minor and major-key passages.
Though it was recorded in her longtime home of New York, much of the album was written during an ill-fated stint in Los Angeles, and you can detect traces of the Southern California atmosphere in the record’s grooves—the dry desert heat tamping down her customary reverb, the hours on the freeway yielding a boomy mixdown that feels optimized for car stereos. (The bass on this album marks a major leap forward from the last two records.) The Los Angeles connection might also make you think, however incongruously, of Haim. Rose shares their fondness for the faintly uncool side of ’80s pop, acts that availed themselves of new wave’s sheen without possessing much in the way of underground cred—bands like Tears for Fears, Simple Minds, A Flock of Seagulls. Time and again, she returns to those groups’ glassy digital synthesizers and crystalline guitar tones—the chords at the beginning of “Game to Play” are dead ringers for the ones that open the Fixx’s “Stand or Fall”—and her use of the studio is deeply indebted to a moment in the early ’80s when gloss burned exceptionally bright.
Which shouldn’t be surprising; these were bands that understood how much mileage you could get out of style. Many new wave acts advanced their careers by taking vintage hits and putting a modern polish on them: Soft Cell with “Tainted Love,” Naked Eyes with “Always Something There to Remind Me,” Love and Rockets (whom she references obliquely in the opening “Love in Rockets”) with “Ball of Confusion.” In the best cases, the shift from R&B quartets or easy-listening pop to synthesizers and sequencers made for a spine-tingling sense of defamiliarization. And while one occasionally wishes that Frankie Rose could get a few paces further out from under her own shadow, the best of Cage Tropical does something similar, taking her own retro influences and using them to leapfrog her way out of a creative rut. “Red Museum” is one of the best songs she’s ever written; it’s the rare Frankie Rose song you can imagine being given an acoustic reading. Combined with the four-dimensional production sheen—the gossamer backing vocals, upfront electric bass, an ice storm’s worth of digital keys and electric guitars—it offers a thrilling glimpse of what Rose is capable of. | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland / Grey Market | August 10, 2017 | 7.7 | e0be1c1c-4f67-4c7f-9e13-0a857178c262 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
A comedian known for his absurdity and irony, Tim Heidecker returns with an album of protest art as musical comedy. Its shining moments come when he is honest about his fear and anger over Trump’s regime. | A comedian known for his absurdity and irony, Tim Heidecker returns with an album of protest art as musical comedy. Its shining moments come when he is honest about his fear and anger over Trump’s regime. | Tim Heidecker: Too Dumb for Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-heidecker-too-dumb-for-suicide-tim-heideckers-trump-songs/ | Too Dumb for Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs | In the dizzying, ludicrous, sociopolitical climate America has reduced itself to, what used to feel relevant now seems impotent. Take the overlapping forms of political comedy and protest art. Humor remains useful as a way to avoid insanity, but mocking someone as self-evidently farcical as Donald Trump is sadly futile. At worst, comedy right now can come off as clueless about how bad things really are, like laughter at a funeral. Protest art faces an even bigger quandary: how can artists hope to sway the consciousness of a public paralyzed by endless distractions, algorithmic bubbles, and weaponized lies?
It’s fitting, then, that one of the few explicitly anti-Trump albums released since the November election comes not from a truth-telling comic or a hard-hitting musician. Instead, it’s by an anti-comedian known not for satire or commentary but absurdity and layers of irony. As you might expect, some of Tim Heidecker’s bluntly titled Too Dumb for Suicide: Tim Heidecker’s Trump Songs has the what-the-fuck quality of his surreal TV programs “Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!” and “On Cinema at the Cinema.” When he’s in this mode, the ambiguity of his sincerity—how funny is this really supposed to be?—becomes the point, rather than just making you laugh or giving you clear messages to think about.
But even though there’s a fair share of goofy meta-comedy on Too Dumb For Suicide—an alt-rock anthem about Trump’s bowel movements and a parody of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” called “Mar-A-Lago” being the most obvious examples—the best parts of the album can actually be taken at face value. Heidecker wrote these songs quickly, “with the blood still boiling from whatever indignity or absurdity had popped up on my newsfeed that day,” as he put it. That expediency apparently pushed him to be more direct in places, helping him capture some of the fear and anger in our current miasma.
Too Dumb For Suicide opens quite directly, with a statement of intent called “Trump Tower.” Heidecker insists he’ll keep mocking the president no matter the consequences, even ending by openly thanking the First Amendment. Such a forthright approach produces the album’s best moments. On the Randy Newman homage “Cooked Chinese Chicken,” he makes a compelling case for burning the White House down to eradicate Trump’s stain. A fantasy ballad about Trump’s future legal reckoning, “Sentencing Day,” plays like both a celebration and an elegy. Heidecker’s words—“He’ll be gone/And we’ll all get to move on”—sound hopeful, but his mournful piano echoes the dread that justice might never be delivered. Even better is the buoyant “Trump Talkin’ Nukes,” a meditation on how one crazy person can blow up the world that’s also a surprisingly poignant history of generations dealing with nuclear doom, from hiding under school desks to play-acting Red Dawn.
In between these thoughtful tunes, Heidecker clowns things up to varying degrees of success. In the bluesy “Richard Spencer,” he relays a decree from God that it’s OK to punch Nazis, while the countryfied “For Chan” is a caricature of internet trolls narrated by a greasy-faced alt-righter who “can’t get away with murder/But I can ruin somebody’s weekend.” (Heidecker writes from experience here, having been targeted himself). Less convincing are tracks that indulge in easy cliches, such as “MAGA,” a heavy-handed satire of the stereotypical Trump voter that sounds like a bad Twitter thread.
The weaker spots on Too Dumb for Suicide don’t diminish its high points. It’s perhaps inevitable that a project aimed at a broad yet impenetrable target would be hit or miss. But the hits work in part because they’re coming from someone who is rarely this earnest in his passion. Here and there, Heidecker manages to articulate some of our prevailing confusion and terror in a way that resonates. With the days getting increasingly darker, even a few such moments can feel like the light at the end of a tunnel. | 2017-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | November 22, 2017 | 6.9 | e0cb107b-634b-4f39-8ef7-b9becf5777b6 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Following compilations of Japanese city pop and ambient, Light in the Attic unearths a set of songs lying outside familiar genres. It’s a vital addition to the label’s broader historical project. | Following compilations of Japanese city pop and ambient, Light in the Attic unearths a set of songs lying outside familiar genres. It’s a vital addition to the label’s broader historical project. | Various Artists: Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan 1980-1988 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-somewhere-between-mutant-pop-electronic-minimalism-and-shadow-sounds-of-japan-1980-1988/ | Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan 1980-1988 | These are unprecedented times for 20th century Japanese music in Western culture. Exports in various styles have recently ballooned in popularity, with out-of-print vinyl rarities selling for hundreds of dollars on Discogs and long-forgotten ambient albums racking up millions of views on YouTube. This enthusiasm has been amplified by the team at Light in the Attic, who have spent nearly 20 years reissuing obscurities from around the world on heavily researched compilations packed with hidden gems. Their 2017 compilation Even a Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973 explored the way that American musical traditions were received in the island country, with artists like Kenji Endo and Haruomi Hosono taking direct inspiration from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and the Band. Hosono, whose work with groups like Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra established him as a leading figure in Japanese pop music, became a particular source of intrigue for the label’s archivists, who went on to publish essential reissues of his solo material. The diversity of Hosono’s musical output landed him on the label’s ambient and city pop compilations in 2019, and his legacy continues on their latest release, which attempts to close the gap between these disparate genres.
Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan 1980-1988 assembles 14 tracks that don’t adhere to the rules of city pop but aren’t quite environmental music either. Where the former style tends to rely on steady funk and disco licks to establish danceable grooves, this “mutant pop” (or, for the real heads, “techno-pop”) is more electronic, using grainy synths and drum machines to create a colder, more robotic feel. Equally distant from the sparse, wintry tones of ambient composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, the collection is still mostly legible as dance music, even if it never quite erupts into the kaleidoscopic funk jams of city-pop classics like Tatsuro Yamashita’s For You.
The unifying thread for much of the compilation instead comes from Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose members Haruomi Hosono and Hideki Matsutake make appearances on three of the album’s early tracks. “Hikari No Ito Kin No Ito,” Hosono’s collaboration with the pop vocalist Mishio Ogawa, offers the clearest continuation of the YMO template, using the rigid structure of a drum machine as a foundation from which to build its motorik collage. The track’s soft, minor-key synth lines and melismatic vocals echo YMO albums like Technodelic and ×∞ Multiplies, with lyrical asides that recall the latter’s comedy skits. Noriko Miyamoto’s “Arrows & Eyes” features a similar aesthetic palette, with synth arrangements and programming by Matsutake that bear a close resemblance to his work with YMO. Both tracks feel like clear attempts to expand on YMO’s success at the turn of the 1980s, pairing up-and-coming vocalists with backing music that had a proven ability to top the charts.
YMO’s presence on these recordings also demonstrates the Japanese music industry’s willingness to experiment with new, unconventional forms. Hosono notably produced records for acts like Miharu Koshi, Chiemi Manabe, and Sandii & the Sunsetz throughout the 1980s, and his work with Ogawa’s band Chakra on their 1981 album Satekoso remains among the best prog- and psych-inflected new wave to ever grace Tokyo record bins. “Tira-Rin,” Matsutake’s other contribution to the collection, through his work with the percussionist Midori Takada and her Mkwaju Ensemble, is guided by a similar penchant for experimentalism, pairing Takada’s virtuosity as a performer with a thumping electronic kick drum that almost anticipates the rise of minimal techno. Layers of tonal percussion weave tighter and tighter together as the track rises in speed and intensity, and the ensemble becomes a dizzying blur of performers in perfect sync. An outlier on an album otherwise dominated by muted synth pop, the song reflects an encounter between Takada’s foundation in the Western art-music tradition and Matsutake’s more commercial compositions, one that still sounds great amid the compilation’s warbling electronics.
Beyond cataloging Ogawa and Miyamoto’s pop-star aspirations, Somewhere Between also documents the rising prominence in the early ’80s of independent labels and boutique specialty imprints, which played a key role in bringing this experimental spirit to Japanese audiences. Labels like the Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd. subsidiary Better Days and rock critic Yuzuru Agi’s Vanity Records are featured as prominently as their big-budget counterparts, and Agi himself makes an appearance on the compilation through his work with the band R.N.A.-ORGANISM. Taken from their 1980 album R.N.A.O MEETS P.O.P.O., “Weimar 22” channels the noisy experiments of West German conceptualists like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig into something more approachable, as twinkling chimes and handclaps lighten an otherwise dry composition. The song introduces a stretch of heavier synth tracks that more successfully bridge the gap between noise and pop music, even as it becomes overwhelmingly clear that their creators don’t share the same commitment to genre. Wha Ha Ha’s “Akatere” opens with a chaotic free-jazz breakdown complete with crashing cymbals, saxophone screeches, and babbling water samples before transitioning into a strange piece of dubby electro, while others, like “Hasu No Enishi,” from the Rough Trade and Visible Cloaks-affiliated new-age duo Dip in the Pool, provide the kind of straightforward synth pop that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Ultravox record.
Comparisons to the German experimental tradition feel especially apt in light of the lasting international influence of bands like Neu!, Can, and Kraftwerk. While Japan largely missed out on a comparable global boom beyond the singular success of YMO, these recordings feel like an important attempt to correct the historical record, making space for forgotten artists without resorting to the built-in appeal of familiar genres. While city pop and environmental music thrive in functional settings that immediately translate across cultures, Somewhere Between feels part of a broader refusal to be understood on the same terms, forcing listeners to engage with a history that goes deeper than immediate feeling. Taken together, these are recordings that can’t be reduced to their play counts on streaming platforms or soaring prices in online auctions, with endless mystery—and reward—lurking just beneath the surface.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Light in the Attic | January 22, 2021 | 7.3 | e0d076fd-1567-4c79-9d74-4a8362bc0dc0 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
Played by the five-piece ensemble Transit (plus guests including Julia Holter) Corps Exquis is an album of compositions by the Paris-born composer Daniel Wohl. It rallies together a tiny army's worth of interesting sounds, a zone of confusion between digital glitch and bow-on-string screech. | Played by the five-piece ensemble Transit (plus guests including Julia Holter) Corps Exquis is an album of compositions by the Paris-born composer Daniel Wohl. It rallies together a tiny army's worth of interesting sounds, a zone of confusion between digital glitch and bow-on-string screech. | Daniel Wohl: Corps Exquis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18244-daniel-wohl-corps-exquis/ | Corps Exquis | To listen to Corps Exquis, an album of compositions by the Paris-born composer Daniel Wohl, is to be mowed over by a tiny army's worth of interesting sounds. It's hard to tell, sometimes, if those noises represent the crackle of cell phone interference or the creaky floor of an old house: The opening piece, "Neighborhood", churns together little bits of composer and performer Aaron Roche's processed voice with furious scribbles of tremolo'd string, a waveform that Wohl snags with his software and distends, so that we no longer picture human arms generating the sound. There are an abundance of other noises here, too, all of them of hazy origin-- some percussive clicks, some radiant, soft-edged keyboard arpeggios, a shimmer effect that resembles locusts or a lawn sprinkler. There is some groaning, burping electronic noise in the music's low end that could be a groaning double bass or electronics. This zone of confusion, between the digital glitch and bow-on-string screech, is where Wohl lives, and Corps Exquis gets more interesting the more confused you get.
The album, recorded by the modern classical guitarist and composer Andrew McKenna Lee, is beautiful and maze-like, with sounds emanating from all directions in your listening space. It is performed by the excellent five-piece ensemble Transit (percussion, clarinet and bass clarinet, violin, cello, and piano), which Wohl co-founded. The album is a kind of all-star affair, at least as far as the tight-knit world of NYC contemporary classical is concerned: So Percussion show up on "Neighborhood"; Julia Holter drops by on "Corpus". They render Wohl's music as a world overrun with small scrapes and fidgets, constantly scurrying across the floorboards while larger, more patient sounds operate above. "Insext" opens on a digital storm of white noise, overlaid with wisps of bowed string harmonics. A little string melody eventually rises out of the din, like someone whispering some half-remembered Copland, but it's promptly buffeted by waves of digital percussion. This push and pull, this sense that the music Transit plays is being sucked into the void and spit out transformed, like the tennis-ball scene in Poltergeist, is part of what makes Wohl such an original voice.
His voice is not manic, however, and his canvas is not seething: Even as it's surrounded by a clattering of pots and pans, the center of "323" is a radiant, booming nimbus of major chords, moving slowly. "Cantus" meanwhile, opens on a gently piling snowdrift of strings, all bowing in different pattern to create a gorgeously featureless expanse similar to Arvo Pärt's Fratres For Eight Cellos. Slowly, other noises creep into the frame-- a sharp, stabbing cello sound, some hollow rattles, like bottles being racked up at a bar counter. The piece dissolves, near the end, into a distressed racket of competing cries from all players, but Wohl leaves us with a contemplatively cool sound in its last seconds, a small sigh. In each piece, clamor briefly overwhelms serenity, but each time, clamor loses.
Most pieces operate on both planes at once: "Ouverture" generates a hushed, expectant mood that recalls George Crumb's "Star-Child". That piece builds its most fearsome roar from an old-fashioned pedaled piano, then fans out into a soothing hum of manipulated string textures. Whatever Wohl's vision is, about the noise of digital lives, and how they affect the mind, it isn't binary: Solace, these pieces seem to argue, can come from anywhere we look for it. | 2013-07-08T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2013-07-08T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | July 8, 2013 | 7.9 | e0e0c4d6-fd56-4d1c-be84-12fbda80fe07 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On his first album of new material in six years, Sam Beam mines the onset of middle age for sharp-eyed songs that are lively and relatively breezy, despite the melancholy subject matter. | On his first album of new material in six years, Sam Beam mines the onset of middle age for sharp-eyed songs that are lively and relatively breezy, despite the melancholy subject matter. | Iron & Wine: Light Verse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iron-and-wine-light-verse/ | Light Verse | How do you measure the time between albums? The calendar says that Iron & Wine’s latest studio effort, Light Verses, arrives exactly six years, eight months, and one day after its previous one, 2017’s Beast Epic. Your record shelf, on the other hand, says it’s been two EPs, one Archive Series release, one collab with Calexico, one reissue of his breakthrough album, two live albums, and a documentary. Maybe it’s more useful to tally up all the mundane moments when you’ve tried to be a good partner or patient father or productive artist or engaged citizen—tasks all complicated by a global pandemic that, for Sam Beam, anyway, proved creatively crippling. These various metrics are all bouncing around his skull on Light Verse, an album very much aware of time passing. Beam’s own abacus can be startlingly gruesome: “Time likes pulling my teeth,” he sings on the wry, spry “Cutting It Close.” “I never knew how many teeth I would need.”
All of those yanked molars add up to a new perspective on pretty much everything. Beam reemerges on Light Verse with a dry sense of humor and a newfound ability to laugh off certain tragedies, like death—both others’ and your own—precisely because they are inevitable. Even back on Iron & Wine’s relatively lo-fi 2002 debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle, he had a flair for dressing up bleak truths in warm melodies and reassuringly measured vocals, not only making them palatable but finding beauty in sorrow. Beam can still pull off that sleight of hand gracefully enough to make the title Light Verse sound queasily ironic, but now he’s looking backwards over 49 years. These new songs are about tracing your steps, taking stock, and raising a glass to lovers and friends who pass through your life only briefly. He spends much of the album wondering about people’s whereabouts: “I knew someone long ago, whether I wanted to or not,” he sings on the stark “Taken by Surprise.” “We never said goodbye that I remember.” That person didn’t stay long, but it was enough to provoke gratitude half a lifetime later.
The new outlook of middle age animates these songs and allows Beam to tinker with tone and form. Light Verse is a lively, relatively breezy album, despite its somber subject matter. He worked with a new crew of musicians, including bassist Sebastian Steinberg and multi-instrumentalist Davíd Garza, who make sure their flourishes never distract from the pith of his songs. “Sweet Talk” has the bouncy pomp of ’60s bubblegum psych, which feels new for Beam, and “Yellow Jacket” builds so patiently that it sounds epic despite clocking in at a mere three and a half minutes.
“All in Good Time,” a duet with Fiona Apple, surveys the full arc of a relationship as they repeat the title like a mantra and milk it of every possible implication. “All in good time my angel came back/Made us some money but that didn’t last,” he sings to her. “All in good time and that’s what it was/Mistook that cash in the mattress for love,” she sings back. The imagery becomes outlandish, and it’s fun to think of Apple and Beam holding up banks and stealing cars, but a distinct melancholy underscores each note. Even the good times will end eventually. That idea gestures toward the bittersweet irony of this fine late-career album: All the years have pulled Beam’s teeth, but they have also sharpened his pen. | 2024-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | April 27, 2024 | 7.7 | e0e7c3a6-a66c-426d-9277-48887c8c9f26 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
This is Sarah Lipstate’s biggest record as Noveller yet. Mixing genres to create her epic version of noise, what it loses in detail it makes up for in grandiosity. | This is Sarah Lipstate’s biggest record as Noveller yet. Mixing genres to create her epic version of noise, what it loses in detail it makes up for in grandiosity. | Noveller: A Pink Sunset For No One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22903-a-pink-sunset-for-no-one/ | A Pink Sunset For No One | With each successive release, the self-sustaining universe that is Sarah Lipstate’s output as Noveller pushes outward. Her instrumental sound—built from guitar loops run through pedals—has evolved well past its drone-anchored early incarnation. That relied on layers of distortion to create meditative spaces that enveloped the listener; more recently, synths and percussion have entered her sprawling compositions. A Pink Sunset for No One is ruled by a newly epic sense of scale and narrative. For better or for worse, the album’s more intricate details are at times overshadowed by its glimmering crescendos.
However, the tension between Noveller’s roots as an intimate bedroom project and the outsize shape it takes here is compelling: even if her style has grown to fill the kind of rooms one might play opening for Iggy Pop, it still feels like a dreamworld Lipstate has built primarily for herself. Opener “Deep Shelter” begins with a low-pitched four-note phrase that repeats throughout, accumulating iterative details that begin to soar outward from the humble introduction. Four minutes in, these loops pull back to make way for a gently cinematic piano bridge: self-soothing, yes, but executed in a remarkably high-definition way.
There’s also a heightened sense of energy, Lipstate spending less time luxuriating in her guitar’s textures and more on developing big-picture structure. “Rituals,” which winks at Steve Reich, is anchored by soft, distant percussion and a small chorus of staccato riffing, punctuated by blasts of rippling sustained notes. On “Trials and Trails,” perhaps the album’s most technically impressive track, Lipstate solos heroically over distorted passages, the juxtaposition throwing the liquidity of her playing into relief.
The variety of genres and sounds that emerge within her compositions give Lipstate’s work a multitextured feel, but in moments I found myself wishing for more concision in the way such ideas are digested. Experimental forebears like Reich or Rhys Chatham (with whom she’s performed, in his Guitar Army) are a natural influence, but on songs like “The Unveiling” and “Corridors,” Lipstate’s usual spaciness takes on an almost-proggy feel; meanwhile, the title track feels like a crisp take on a Slowdive instrumental. Clearly, Lipstate has the technical prowess to pull off a near-infinite range of styles. As she shakes off the distortion that might have once smoothed over their messier intersections, the issue becomes, perhaps, how to tastefully marry them.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t a solid sense of self at this record’s core. Its closer “Emergence” is slow but not sleepy, fluttering melodies dancing around its murky base. It’s a pleasure to listen in to the small melodic details folded into its dominant humid texture, but it also feels, as a whole, reassuring: a sound that’s big and confident without relying on excess to sway its listeners, or itself. | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fire | February 18, 2017 | 6.5 | e0f07099-de56-4acd-87e8-82673fba836a | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal debut turned 20 last fall; it was commemorated in glowing reminiscences and a lengthy festival tour, along with word of a new album on the way. A Better Tomorrow took a while and it sounds labored: where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does. | The Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal debut turned 20 last fall; it was commemorated in glowing reminiscences and a lengthy festival tour, along with word of a new album on the way. A Better Tomorrow took a while and it sounds labored: where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does. | Wu-Tang Clan: A Better Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20043-wu-tang-clan-a-better-tomorrow/ | A Better Tomorrow | The Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) turned 20 last fall, commemorated in a litany of glowing reminiscences and a lengthy intercontinental festival tour. There was a clean-cut finality to the proceedings, a sense that the group was sending off a movement that had finally run its course. Producer and de facto group leader RZA thought he’d get the guys together for one last job and spent the year trying to will a new Wu-Tang album into existence in time for 36 Chambers’ November anniversary. The date came and went, but no album surfaced (though we did get "Family Reunion", a sentimental homecoming over a perhaps-too-chunky slice of the O’Jays’ 1975 hit of the same name). Work was plagued by old complaints about RZA’s lush live band arrangements flying in the face of the claustrophobic kung fu grit of the Clan’s classics. Raekwon publicly challenged RZA’s authority and boycotted the sessions. The new album had a name (A Better Tomorrow, after the emotional Wu-Tang Forever cut) but no fully functioning group to record it.
Tense negotiations and a reconciliation followed, but A Better Tomorrow arrives this week illuminating the early apprehensions. The production here is more of a piece with the muscular soundtrack work of RZA’s 2012 directorial debut The Man With the Iron Fists than anything bearing the Wu-Tang name, barring the heavily orchestrated bits of 2007’s 8 Diagrams that inspired Raekwon’s last mutiny attempt. But A Better Tomorrow’s thick and moody soundscapes run off-puttingly perpendicular to the group’s cerebral storytelling. "Felt" practically drowns memorable turns from Ghostface Killah and Method Man in unnecessary drum-n-bass flourishes. Inspectah Deck and Cappadonna come off uncharacteristically plodding over the fluid, proggy groove of "Mistaken Identity". Sounds that were once punishing, tumbling out of shoddy recording equipment in a home studio, are distractingly pretty, pumped full of all the crack session playing A Better Tomorrow favors.
Where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does. 4th Disciple delivers one of the album’s better productions with "Miracle", but a drippy, beatless chorus and melodramatic coda hack the momentum out from under suspenseful verses. "Felt" nicks a chorus from the mawkish '70s weeper "Feelings", and the hokey, swinging Dusty Springfield homage of "Preacher’s Daughter" is only listenable for Meth and Ghost’s flexible senses of humor. The title track fits the methodical build of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ "Wake Up Everybody" under suitably socially conscious verses, but right as you start to hope they’re not just going to play the actual chorus of the original in full, they do, strings ramped noxiously high in the mix. By the time "Family Reunion" hits, A Better Tomorrow will have felt more like a karaoke bar’s old school night than a new album by the guys who gave us "C.R.E.A.M." and "Triumph".
When A Better Tomorrow commits to sounding like an actual Wu-Tang affair it starts to cook. Longtime Wu associate Mathematics brings Meth and GZA to life with a lively soul chop on the album’s lead single "Keep Watch" and imbues "40th Street Black/We Will Fight" with the spirit of The W’s upbeat but by no means peppy "Gravel Pit". "Pioneer the Frontier" fashions the energy of ramshackle W deep cut "Careful (Click, Click)" into a menace RZA can’t even kill when he signs verse one off with "Holla at the moon, my goons at Coachella." "Necklace" and "Ron O’Neal" follow suit in piling on the soot, and for a moment, this thing is heavy enough to bear the weight of the name on the cover. But all too often, A Better Tomorrow prefers to bask in those idyllic blue skies instead.
Raekwon was right: RZA’s vision no longer suits the rabid, renegade spirit the Wu-Tang Clan represents. He’s helmed a record that’s drunk on its own musicality, one that seems to befuddle the very guys rapping on it. It’s impossible to say how engaged the rest of the members were in recording, whether the wonkier moments here are the result of rappers disinterested in their own beats or production crafted awkwardly around pre-existing verses. But it’s deeply telling that the night the Wu-Tang Clan was set to release its first album in seven years (and possibly, its last one ever), Raekwon was already pushing something else entirely on Twitter. The union hasn’t worked in a while, and rather than hiding irreparable fissures by posting up a unified front to tickle fan nostalgia, better to let it crystallize unblemished in memory. Keep up appearances for the kids if you like, but trust and believe that they can tell when something is off. | 2014-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | December 3, 2014 | 5.9 | e1042d04-9672-4cc1-800f-64a27b7d7c61 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Following in the footsteps of 2013’s Twelve Reasons to Die, Ghostface Killah’s new album tells the story of Tony Starks’ revenge on his enemies. Like that earlier record, it plays out over live-band, time-stamped soul music and with the guidance of a young collaborator. | Following in the footsteps of 2013’s Twelve Reasons to Die, Ghostface Killah’s new album tells the story of Tony Starks’ revenge on his enemies. Like that earlier record, it plays out over live-band, time-stamped soul music and with the guidance of a young collaborator. | Ghostface Killah: 36 Seasons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20052-36-seasons/ | 36 Seasons | Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: dashing bon vivant Tony Stark is mangled in a horrifying accident on the job, is resurrected by a confluence of mad science and divine intervention, strikes out to defend his turf and smite his enemies. This is the basic origin story of “Iron Man”, the comic book franchise that gave Ghostface Killah, aka Tony Starks, his first album title and likely, his last shot at a major movie role. It is also the essence of 2013’s Twelve Reasons to Die, where a linear narrative of revenge was told over live-band, time-stamped soul music with the guidance of a young and new collaborator. Does that also sound familiar? It should if you’ve heard anything about 36 Seasons; the main difference is that Adrian Younge is exchanged for Brooklyn revivalists the Revelations and that Tony Starks doesn’t actually die before he rains vengeance upon those who have wronged him.
One can see this continuous and considerable narrowing of Ghostface Killah’s artistic scope as a course correction or an apology to his hardcore fanbase; penance for the shameless bids for commercial relevance on The Big Doe Rehab and Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City. The sadder truth is that Ghostface has been in an artistic tailspin for the past seven years and, as with Twelve Reasons to Die, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that he can’t pull out unless someone else takes the controls.
Though still credited to Ghostface Killah, 36 Seasons is a truly collaborative work. Comic book artist Matthew Rosenberg returns to provide the storyline and Ghostface doesn’t even appear on nearly a third of the tracks, which are earmarked for character introductions and a chance for the Revelations to show their neo-soul credentials. While nowhere near as fantastical as Twelve Reasons’ supernatural storyline—Ghostface was a hired gun murdered by his employees and his remains were melted into 12 vinyl albums—36 Seasons is far more promising. In short, Tony Starks was keeping Staten Island in check just with his presence, but for reasons that aren’t quite clear, he’s exiled for nine years; that amounts to “36 seasons,” as Ghostface constantly reminds the listener throughout. He returns home and sees his girl take up with a local drug kingpin (played by Kool G Rap) and his former running buddy (voiced by AZ) joins the boys in blue. He’s determined to clean up the streets, but has to do some dirt first, which lands him back in jail after he’s double-crossed by those he trusted.
This is straight-up criminology and the potential is off the charts if you have even the slightest shred of hope that Ghost could regain his gifts for plot twists, jaw-dropping detail, and character sketches that resulted in the most vivid storytelling hip-hop has ever witnessed. But that Ghostface disappeared nearly a decade ago. As such, there was no reason to say "spoiler alert" for any of the above. For one thing, it will be mentioned in every single review of 36 Seasons, because the entire story is laid out in a four-panel comic included in the CD’s insert. All of it.
And 36 Seasons is more in line with the spirit of Ghostface’s recent output, where he’s more prolific and "for the love" than ever and somehow lazier at the same time. His lyrics barely deviate from the plot points laid in a comic book that can be read in 20 seconds, reverting to Twelve Reasons’ childlike literalism and chronology. The first line is, "Ayo, I’m back after nine years/ That’s 36 seasons/ Shit is changed up for all types of reasons" and from there on out, potentially graphic scenes are often similarly reduced to, "this happened and then this happened."
How has shit changed and what are these reasons? We’re told that the streets are being overrun with petty thieves and drug dealers, but also that Ghostface’s exile was likely the result of a bid in the Tombs. So who are these kids? Are they like the Polo rubgy-stealing turncoat from "R.A.G.U." or the incompetent, petty drug dealer from "Maxine"? No, on "The Dogs of War" (not to be confused with the Fishscale highlight "Dogs of War"), they’re selling drugs in a way that Ghostface merely finds unacceptable for aesthetic reasons.
When he confronts his estranged lover Bamboo (played by Kandace Springs) on "Love Don’t Live Here", we don’t get the shocking invective of "Wildflower", the wounded alpha wolf cry of "Never Be the Same Again", or a combination of the two as on "Back Like That". It literally goes nowhere; Tony Starks arrives at Bamboo's house; she is surprised. She has moved on. He feels disrespected. He rhymes "the crib" with "the kid" twice in the same verse. It’s actually painful to hear him attempt to modulate his voice trying to muster some kind of emotion during this thing. Starks retells his betrayal ("Double Cross"), his lightbulb moment ("Pieces to the Puzzle"), and his murder plot ("Homicide") in similarly unembellished terms and once the climactic shootout arrives, it’s presented as damn near an afterthought—"I’m filling funeral homes and graves/ It’s no surprise GFK the only one that survive." And then he wins back Bamboo. The end.
Maybe the reference to his past work is unfair and 36 Seasons should be taken at face value. But after you hear the story once, at face value, 36 Seasons is a serviceable, New York soul-rap album that has limited replay value. The frequent absence of Ghostface might actually be the best thing going for it, as he’s consistently outdone by Kool G Rap and AZ; maybe their characters are more well-defined and maybe their relative lack of celebrity makes them more capable of merging with character. More accurately, they simply write better raps in 2014. Likewise, Pharoahe Monch appears as "Dr. X." on "Emergency Procedure", and spits typical tongue-twisting linguistics about the periodic table. But once it’s done, you’re still left with a track about creating a gas mask, which is otherwise useless outside the context of 36 Seasons.
Otherwise, the high points of 36 Seasons often seem unintentional—during the rising action of "The Dogs of War", Theodore Unit lackey Shawn Wigs offers, "you know how we do, O.G. style, I'll dress up like the pizza man," which is hilarious because it’s Shawn Wigs. Likewise, the undercurrent of New York City police corruption somehow makes 36 Seasons uncomfortably prescient, especially when Ghostface complains of "illegal chokeholds" in a moment that feels way too hot to the touch right now. But the peak of 36 Seasons comes during the outro of "Homicide", where Ghostface promises swift retribution and yells, "I’ll wipe my dick on your spaghetti fork!" Once you try to figure out what a spaghetti fork is and the astonishing insult of having someone do that to it, once that... evocative image fades, there’s a lingering sadness that it’s the first time you really hear Ghostface on 36 Seasons instead of the increasingly mundane Tony Starks. | 2014-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Tommy Boy / Salvation | December 10, 2014 | 6 | e108eef0-7de6-4ef4-8676-0f63929d2535 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Everything But the Girl singer continues to play the matriarch of love-lorn electronic music on her latest solo album. Ewan Pearson again produces. | Everything But the Girl singer continues to play the matriarch of love-lorn electronic music on her latest solo album. Ewan Pearson again produces. | Tracey Thorn: Love and Its Opposite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14297-love-and-its-opposite/ | Love and Its Opposite | If you've known Tracey Thorn over the last 20-odd years, you've known her as the maven, if not matriarch, of love-lorn electronic music. With Everything But the Girl, it seemed like her every long-held note wore away the ideal of the stable relationship-- ironic considering that Thorn ended up marrying her co-collaborator Ben Watt. Considering that she and Watt are on a presumably happy course, what with the marriage and the kids and all, Love and Its Opposite seems a unusual effort. The opening cut, "Oh, the Divorces!", says it all: With spare and folksly instrumentation behind her, Thorn pleads "Who's next? Who's next?" implying love's unfortunately serial nature. She's certainly playing a character here, but her resigned candor convincingly suggests that she's been burned enough to carry a record suspicious of love's charms.
Take the title. Thorn invites poetic discussion of what love's opposite actually is, and it sure as shit doesn't have to be hate or war. On "Long White Dress", Thorn suggests that romance does little but gunk up her head, and at this point it's better to settle. Love's opposite? Might as well be reality. Whether she herself believes it or not, the record all over laments the perfectionist disappointment of eluding true love. The curiously ham-fisted "Singles Bar" has Thorn's narrator just past her prime but still trying to fit into the Sexy Jeans, desperate to reel in a guy and the satisfaction to which she once felt entitled but somehow missed. The cliché "I wish you'd help me out of this mess/ I wish you'd help me out of this dress" sums up the shortsighted, long-in-the-tooth gal 20 years removed from the Everything But the Girl heyday.
Working once again with British producer Ewan Pearson, Thorn further dials down the synthesizer-based production that garnered her and Watt their greatest fame. 2007's Out of the Woods was a relatively low-key affair, but Love and Its Opposite plays more like a conventional singer-songwriter album. The shift in gears isn't unwelcome: Thorn, as always, exercises that smoky voice to great effect. It's not especially clear how much self-aware Thorn's hammy singer-songwriter character is, because if you don't suspend a bit of disbelief, then "Singles Bar" and "You Are a Lover" seem more a stilted narration of an unhappily independent woman inhabiting Lilith Fair's second stage. It's nice to think, however, that Thorn's earnest, middle-aged concept album, saddled as it is with its middle-of-the-road folksiness, illustrates that it's not all about love vs. hate, but the truly adult idea of still caring vs. no longer giving a shit. | 2010-05-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Merge | May 26, 2010 | 6.9 | e113e7f3-41af-4384-9c6a-44775c7d084b | Pitchfork | null |
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The veteran rapper continues to leverage the same well-worn blueprint on his latest album, which plays like a back-to-basics revue. | The veteran rapper continues to leverage the same well-worn blueprint on his latest album, which plays like a back-to-basics revue. | Knowledge the Pirate: Hidden Treasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knowledge-the-pirate-hidden-treasure/ | Hidden Treasure | After years spent languishing in industry purgatory, it was only natural that Knowledge the Pirate would hitch his wagon to Roc Marciano’s train. Both sullen New York street rhymers, they’d each been chewed up and spit out by labels who couldn’t market them in the age of Napster and boy bands. But Marciano’s 2010 debut Marcberg gave the lie to their boardroom logic. An insular, self-produced triumph circulated almost entirely through torrents and word-of-mouth, the album presaged a decade’s worth of self-referential East Coast hip-hop, and without any marketing. There was built-in demand for Marciano’s brand of stripped-down neoclassicism—even if it took a miracle like Marcberg to prove it—and Knowledge was along for the ride, appearing on Marcberg’s follow-ups and releasing his Marci-produced full-length, Flintlock, in 2018. In a crowded field, Knowledge continues to leverage the same well-worn blueprint on his latest album.
Hidden Treasure is a great-sounding record, even if that doesn’t always translate to memorable songs. Knowledge’s go-to producer E.L.E.M.N.T. has a knack for squeezing evocative phrasing from concise loops, alternating between muscular horn samples and understated piano instrumentals. As is the case across Marciano’s oeuvre, the percussion is spare, hooks lean and infrequent, and the tempo barely vacillates from 70bpm. E.L.E.M.N.T.’s best arrangements—the shimmering “Bloody Steps,” the contemplative “Righteous Tongue”—augment Knowledge’s noirscapes without being overly prescriptive. “Smoke & Mirrors,” with its chunky snare and choral sample, is the finest of the bunch. While E.L.E.M.N.T. can’t claim the Alchemist and Harry Fraud’s cinematic arcs, his steely loops place him solidly in the second tier of neoclassical producers alongside Giallo Point, Camoflauge Monk, Daringer, Big Ghost Ltd, and Nicholas Craven.
What’s fun about these producers’ roomy arrangements is that pockets abound for rappers who seek them, but Knowledge is akin to MC Eiht and Planet Asia in that he doesn’t flow so much as declaim. Like Marciano, he’s a dour vocalist and methodical scene-setter, slowly embellishing verbal snapshots with context and acuity. But where Marci’s verses burgeon with callbacks and tricky asides, Knowledge’s are mainly static, punctuated by free-standing couplets that impede narrative progress. “He used to be up, now be broke lookin’ lame/And them new gangstas rockin’ skinny jeans and choker chains,” he rhymes on “Righteous Tongue”; in another verse, he name-drops “Freeway” Ricky Ross. The settings—bricks here, narcos there, jewels and femmes fatale everywhere—are by now familiar, and the way he stacks images on top of one another makes them feel like bullet-pointed lists. It’s technically sound—there just aren’t many quotables to write home about.
The post-Marcberg aesthetic increasingly relies on contrasts: vivid stylists rapping over minimalist beats, resplendent narratives relayed by wheezing drug dealers. And when Knowledge and E.L.E.M.N.T. switch up the pace, it really clicks. The sax loop on “Chairman of the Board” rings out like a clarion call, richly foregrounding Knowledge’s lifestyle bars. Fellow Marci protégé Stove God Cooks provides comic relief on “Grenades,” playing the wild-eyed triggerman opposite Knowledge’s wizened street survivor: “Big homie said don’t even speak on it, just lie back/He Rodman with the Pistons, he just ain’t dyed yet.” A flamboyant caricature of a Giuliani-era trafficker, Stove God is a brilliant foil for Knowledge’s deliberate raconteur—they should be a duo.
As a contributor to Reloaded and Marci Beaucoup, Knowledge helped lay the foundation for a sound that’s since become a dominant force in hip-hop. The bar’s been set extremely high, and in light of Mach-Hommy’s immersive world-building, Rome Streetz’s vocal acrobatics, and Crimeapple’s oddball humor, Hidden Treasure plays like a back-to-basics revue: no Goodfellas punchlines or gimmicky ad-libs, just solid rhymes over-expressive loops. With Marciano still at the top of his game, Knowledge’s output can feel apocryphal in a way that the personality-driven work of their more animated peers doesn’t, but there’s truth to the adage that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | TREASURECHEST | June 2, 2021 | 6.8 | e115bb32-8054-4225-8909-0df0fb3634dd | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The Messenger is the big, bright, jangly guitar rock LP that Smiths fans would have killed for in 1994, full of fantastic guitar tones and cavernous choruses. But in 2013, it exists in its own, hermetically sealed context. | The Messenger is the big, bright, jangly guitar rock LP that Smiths fans would have killed for in 1994, full of fantastic guitar tones and cavernous choruses. But in 2013, it exists in its own, hermetically sealed context. | Johnny Marr: The Messenger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17643-johnny-marr-the-messenger/ | The Messenger | Declaring a man to be a "god-like genius" several months shy of his 5oth birthday implies he has no more worlds left to conquer. It's been like this for Johnny Marr since before his 25th birthday, when he co-wrote a couple dozen perfect pop songs with Morrissey and then departed for a series of celebrity rocker odd jobs in other people's bands (including Modest Mouse, the Pretenders, Talking Heads, and Pet Shop Boys). To say Marr ran up the score on his legacy with the Smiths, and has been treading water ever since, would be reductive. But Marr has been playing with house money for as long as many of today's indie-poppers chasing "Hand in Glove" and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" have been alive. Johnny Marr is an institution now-- and institutions are supposed to stay in the same place, right where we left them, until they topple over.
Marr (hopefully) has a long way to go before that happens. So, now that his extended tenure as a gun for hire appears to have been put on hold, he's set about making his first proper solo record, The Messenger. (Marr's 2003 album with the Healers, Boomslang, is apparently being passed off as an equal collaboration between Marr and whoever else was in the Healers.) If it seems like a strange time for Johnny Marr to finally make a record under his own name, that's because it is. The Messenger is precisely the big, bright, jangly guitar rock LP that Smiths fans would have killed for in 1994. The record's immediately appealing "Smiths plus 20 pounds of muscle" sound would have fit in perfectly alongside Oasis' Definitely Maybe and the Verve's A Storm in Heaven on a typical Anglophile's CD rack 20 years ago*.* In 2013, though, The Messenger exists in its own, hermetically sealed context.
As Marr recently told Pitchfork, The Messenger was consciously crafted to appeal to his old fans. "I wanted it to sound effortless, not like I was trying to reinvent the wheel," he said. "I'm not interested in trying to have people who might like other kinds of music follow me. I don't want to please them." Based on this criteria, The Messenger is a success. The guitar tones on this record are fantastic-- which is to say, they instantly bring to mind the dense, intricate, and yet lightly airy riffs that Marr strummed over Morrissey's asexual witticisms in the mid-1980s. "European Me" is manna for Marr obsessives, opening with a stuttering six-string barrage that quickly blossoms into a wondrous expanse of chiming Rickenbackers. The title track is another instant grabber, marrying disco rhythms with Marr's spidery guitar over a bed of mood-setting synths. Lead-off track "The Right Thing Right" is pretty awesomely Smiths-like, too, with Johnny throwing in some frisky Keith Richards licks in for good measure.
The Messenger begs to be received on its own modest terms and its pleasures-- Marr's guitar playing, the no-frills production, those big and cavernous choruses-- wear off after prolonged exposure. Marr is still a top-flight musician, but he's not really a true solo artist. As a vocalist, he's a warm if unexceptional presence; he tends to get lost inside his own immaculately constructed guitar cathedrals, particularly when he has nothing to say in his lyrics. For "I Want the Heartbeat", Marr effectively grinds a metallic bass line against his own over-amped guitar, but the song's narrative about a man falling in love with a machine is a dopey metaphor for our culture's obsession with technology. In the latter half of The Messenger, even Marr's playing starts to lose some of its vigor; "Say Demesne" is draggy, late-period U2 balladry for aging Gen-Xers.
The best parts of The Messenger have a sideman's sensibility; Marr is great at doodling in the margins but falters when it comes to filling up the center with substance. The result is a record that grabs your attention initially, but is unlikely to hold it in the long view. Not that it matters-- Marr was a legend before this record, and he'll still be one after it. The Messenger won't be included in the body of work that made Marr great, but it's a solid approximation of his strengths. | 2013-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sire / ADA Worldwide | February 20, 2013 | 6.3 | e11c1cca-954a-4bdf-82cf-378c4c700ad0 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
With adrenaline, heart, and an unmistakable Baltimore accent, Deetranada breathes fresh life into the familiar struggles of the up-and-coming rapper. | With adrenaline, heart, and an unmistakable Baltimore accent, Deetranada breathes fresh life into the familiar struggles of the up-and-coming rapper. | Deetranada: *NADAWORLD 2 * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deetranada-nadaworld-2/ | NADAWORLD 2 | Is realness in rap about your subject matter and wit on the mic? Your style and image? The people you surround yourself with? Does it stem from a Teflon social media presence, or a willingness to stay 10 toes during a RICO trial? Whether it comes down to living your raps or just being the funniest in the room, any play at realness is an extension of being true to yourself (or at least the version you present to the world). By that criteria, Baltimore rapper Deetranada is as real as it gets.
Since starting out as a teenager recording YouTube videos in secret, her spitfire flows and seamless blend of braggadocio and introspection have made her a powerful force within her city’s underground and in the minds of BET’s Hip-Hop Awards cypher scouts alike. On “Forgiveness,” the first track from her latest mixtape, NADAWORLD 2, she offers a snapshot from her ride on the industry roller coaster: “Just hit a play and they comin’ again/I was just crying ’bout making the rent/Bitches that hate prolly live in a tent.” Managing the successes and anxieties of a rap upstart and sorting out the difference between Deetranada, the budding star, and Diamond Barmer, the woman—if indeed there’s any difference at all—has always been at the core of her music. NADAWORLD 2 continues down that path with adrenaline and heart.
No matter what she’s rapping about, Deetranada’s bullish voice and thick Baltimore accent anchor her songs. She frequently bends the “o” in words like “too” and “you” to give it an “-ew” sound that propels her verses forward like a skateboarder gaining speed down a halfpipe. Notice the way she pronounces “choosing” and “juice” during the first verse of “Chosen”: Her diction is distinctive but subtle, a far cry from exaggerated Baltimore parodies and accent challenges. Her hometown is as much a part of her music as anything, down to the fact that all three of NADAWORLD 2’s guests—Ky$hia, Juan Pachino, and Benji Badazz—are locals.
The stories Deetranada brings to life are both celebratory and fraught. There’s talk of Telfar bags and hitting donuts in luxury cars but also memories of violence and gunshots exposing brains “like lo mein.” Backstabbings, betrayals, and misunderstandings color stories about her ops (“Trust Nobody”) and trying to find emotional middle ground with a partner (“Dark Tango”). But she’s no defeatist. Deetranada sounds energized by her growing success, ready to move the pieces she’s slid into place. “All them times I called you back-to-back and you ain’t pick up nigga/Please don’t hit my phone when I get richer,” she says on “Cold World.” For now, she’s more adept at straight-ahead rapping than singing—sung hooks like “Switched on Me” and “Take Money” lack the heft of the rapped hooks on “Anna Mae” or “Check In”—but each song plays out like an episode of Power that she can’t believe she had to live through.
For all of Deetranada’s gains in recent years—a spot on the Lifetime reality show The Rap Game, freestyles for BET and On the Radar Radio—she has yet to drop the hit record or receive the big cosign that would put her alongside likeminded peers like Glorilla and Rico Nasty. But she’s earned her stripes and become one of her city’s brightest prospects. “The struggle it really excites me/One year, one mil most likely,” she brags on “AF1,” with energy bold enough to make clichés land like revelations. Though she feels primed for stardom, Deetranada’s urgency is more hungry than flashy. She sounds like she could rap forever, regardless of who’s listening. | 2023-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 11, 2023 | 7.3 | e1204aea-c137-4073-a5a3-f1682ea739ff | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Massachusetts-based trio featuring guitarist Wendy Eisenberg is a gnarled, shred-heavy, meta-comment on indie rock that also creates some pretty great indie rock songs along the way. | The Massachusetts-based trio featuring guitarist Wendy Eisenberg is a gnarled, shred-heavy, meta-comment on indie rock that also creates some pretty great indie rock songs along the way. | Editrix: Tell Me I’m Bad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/editrix-tell-me-im-bad/ | Tell Me I’m Bad | Wendy Eisenberg shreds. The guitarist peels off several spectacular solos on Editrix’s debut album Tell Me I’m Bad, most of them chaotic and raw, a couple winding and lyrical, and all inspiring visions of fretboards melting in terrible ecstasy. Eisenberg also shreds in the sense of tearing things up. As an instrumental soloist, singer-songwriter, and member of various ad hoc improv ensembles, they specialize in deconstruction: of compositional forms, orthodox approaches to their instrument, and arbitrary distinctions between the conservatory concert hall and the punk house basement as venues for strange and dissonant music.
Editrix, a Massachusetts-based trio with bassist Steve Cameron and drummer Josh Daniel, is Eisenberg’s most straightforwardly rock-oriented project, though it presents itself in playfully conceptual terms. The band has self-selected “avant butt rock” as a genre tag, and their stated intent is to “annihilate indie rock.” But Tell Me I’m Bad doesn’t sound like an academic exercise or a joke. Instead, it comes across as an exuberant and virtuosic take on the sort of grinding, noisy post-hardcore that has thrived in DIY spaces across the country ever since the late 1980s or so. This is rock neither butt nor avant, but a lot closer to the latter than the former. For the most part, it requires no annihilation to accommodate the weirdness Eisenberg and crew have in mind for it; the weirdness is built right in. And if the moments of guitar worship are intended on some level as a critique of the form, that doesn’t change the fact that they fucking rip.
The players composed the music of Tell Me I’m Bad collaboratively, with Eisenberg penning lyrics and singing. They make impressive use of the trio format, emphasizing the independence of their instruments and the negative space between them. Sometimes, they return to verses and choruses, but just as often their songs unfold in a series of violent breaks, without the comfort of repeated material. On “Torture,” Eisenberg’s guitar buffets their partners like a fierce crosswind, threatening to divert their 4/4 groove into murkier rhythmic waters. “Instant” is lurching and abrasive, its lyrics hinting at some trauma of youth without naming it directly. It sounds like Shellac, if Shellac songs didn’t have predators for protagonists and instead focused on the efforts to pick up the pieces by those that survived their attacks.
In one subtle deviation from the basement sludge tradition, Eisenberg does not strain to be heard over the music, but follows the same conversational delivery of their much quieter recent solo records. The approach feels like a refutation of punk’s macho posturing, and also of its insistence on naturalism and authenticity. Hearing Eisenberg’s voice at the front of the mix, cool and collected above instruments whose roar might obscure it in the room, gives it a certain artificial remove from the rest of the music. This distance in turn affords Eisenberg room for more ambiguity of perspective than your average earnestly bellowing front-dude. On “Chelsea,” one of several songs that juxtapose singsong melody with pummelling instrumental force, they observe a woman whose politics aren’t sufficiently progressive: “Chelsea veers to the left, but not far enough/In this way she’s nothing like me.” From another singer, the line might seem smug. Eisenberg’s taunts suggest that the narrator may be more like Chelsea than they think.
Tell Me I’m Bad comes closest to fulfilling its promise of annihilation in a three-song stretch near its close. “She Wants to Go and Party,” “The History of Dance,” and “Chillwave” are the album’s most conventionally approachable songs, but also the most complex, indulging in various rock’n’roll stock gestures in ways that highlight both their silliness and their power. “Chillwave,” my favorite of the three, has a reggae-ish half-time groove that reminds me equally of Fugazi, 311, and “Watching the Detectives.” When a droning high note from a synth appears halfway through—the only incursion of electronics on the album’s power-trio palette, as far as I can tell—the whole thing begins to feel like it’s hanging in suspended animation, and I’m tempted to add Talk Talk to the list of unlikely reference points. Drifting and borderless, it sounds, at last, like something other than rock. Even the guitar solo, when it arrives moments later, can’t break the spell.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | February 12, 2021 | 7.1 | e1229e2e-40d5-46e7-98c7-da8c8df8dc92 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The eighth album from the Australian psych-rockers is their most melodically realized of their career. The strains of pop offer a lovely imprint of a band in a constant state of flux. | The eighth album from the Australian psych-rockers is their most melodically realized of their career. The strains of pop offer a lovely imprint of a band in a constant state of flux. | Pond: Tasmania | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pond-tasmania/ | Tasmania | The world’s in such a bad state that even psych-rockers are starting to get a little freaked out. “While the whole world melts, am I just meant to watch?” Nick Allbrook of Australian mind-melters Pond asks on “Sixteen Days,” one of a few deceptively groovy tracks on the band’s eighth album, Tasmania. Over the stretched-out glam of the title track, he promises with a wistful ache in his voice, “I might go and shack up in Tasmania before the ozone goes/And paradise burns in Australia, who knows?”
The band described their latest—which also marks their international major-label debut, on the perpetually alt-friendly Interscope—as a “sister album” to 2017’s zonked-out The Weather, an album that Allbrook described to NME as “laying out all the dark things underneath the shimmering exterior of cranes, development, money and white privilege.” This demonstration of social awareness is relatively new to Pond, a fact that Allbrook self-reflexively addresses over the oscillating synths of “Hand Mouth Dancer”: “So you got political, can you speak on that?/I didn’t get political, I just faced the facts.” Ideologically, it’s heavy stuff from a band who once wrote a song called “Heroic Shart.”
Growth comes in many forms, and the increasingly clued-in lyrical trajectory isn’t the only way in which Pond are changing. Through their career, the revolving-door outfit has reliably pumped out albums chock full of psych-rock featuring more twists and turns than a waterslide—the Aussie analogue to Ty Segall’s own dutiful commitment to acid-fried garage rock. But The Weather marked a point in the band’s decade-long career when their pop instincts—previously experienced in brief fits between static obscurities and the acoustic left-turn or two—approached the point of full bloom; on Tasmania, Pond’s melodic gifts are as richly realized as the cherry blossoms name-checked in the album’s opening moments.
If you’ve made it this far into this review, you’re well aware that Pond shares a few members with the touring lineup of Tame Impala—godhead Kevin Parker has produced the Pond’s previous five albums, including Tasmania. Until now, any similarities between the two acts have been purely cosmetic—a colorful guitar doodle here, a widescreen synth-bomb there—but Tasmania marks the point in which Pond seem to be directly taking cues from Tame Impala. Specifically: the rubbery R&B-pop of 2015’s shimmering, emotive Currents, a sound that fits Pond surprisingly well. “The Boys Are Killing Me” is a lovely slow-jam that effortlessly transitions into the kind of massive, mind-expanding breakdown that’s become Parker’s calling card; even the album’s trippiest epic, the eight-minute “Burnt Out Star,” resembles less a full-on freakout than it does a few seamlessly edited melodic suites a la Currents’ squishy, sprawling “Let It Happen.”
On that latter song, Allbrook takes a break from Tasmania’s contemplative doom-and-gloom to wax lyrical on carnal concerns, turning out one of the album’s cleverest lyrics in the process: “She said it’d be romantic if you didn’t use the door/Safe to say I don’t see windows the same no more.” The louche observation calls to mind the seedy, hetero-centric ’80s evocations found on Sydney sax-a-holic Alex Cameron’s Forced Witness from 2017. The soft-rock glow that Tasmania frequently adopts represents a triangulation between Cameron’s yacht-rock yarns, Tame Impala’s starry-eyed neurotic daydreams, and Pond’s wonderfully knotty guitar fantasias. It’s a more straightforward and accessible sound that might leave past admirers missing the all-out weirdness of albums past, but the evolution that Tasmania represents also speaks to the fact that the main constant in Pond’s approach is change. Even as the sea levels keep rising, they’ll doubtless find new waves to ride. | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | March 1, 2019 | 7.5 | e125c7a2-5220-4c7e-8e9c-1e4e26800c08 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The legendary MC has made a career out of evading definition, which he continues to do alongside an array of guests who are all here to simply and inimitably just rap. | The legendary MC has made a career out of evading definition, which he continues to do alongside an array of guests who are all here to simply and inimitably just rap. | Kool Keith: Feature Magnetic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22366-feature-magnetic/ | Feature Magnetic | Kool Keith is the kind of rapper who, instead of telling you he’s a Mets fan, says, “The Yankees lost but the blue-and-orange team amuse us.” He doesn’t meet new love interests, he has flight attendants cooking salmon cakes in high-heeled shoes; wack MCs don’t get booed off stage, they get shipped to deli meat plants in Quebec. In October, Kool Keith will turn 53. He’s been a legacy act for three different generations of rap fans, written off and resurrected innumerable times. He’s been deemed a goofy eccentric by those who won’t tease out the grim humanity in his writing, he’s been hermetically sealed in the space stations of his most devoted fans’ imaginations. But on his newest album, Feature Magnetic, he shirks off all those constraints to, simply and inimitably, just rap.
The premise is clear: Kool Keith trades verses with an array of guest stars, packaged with bare hooks and brisk running times. In most cases, he pulls his collaborators into his own orbit. Necro spits, “You’re emo and you bump Brian Eno.” Slug sounds like he woke up in the early George W. Bush years, laughing about your insecurities over drinks with your therapist. Even the twice-a-decade DOOM appearance feels like it’s supposed to exist in this universe. Though his voice is at a slightly lower register and his delivery rough around the edges, it’s always a minor thrill to hear the villain fly in from Tulsa and drag a mark to the ATM.
That said, Feature Magnetic’s standout track is the one that pulls Keith furthest from his home planet—specifically, to Vallejo, California with Mac Mall on “Bonneville.” The two split the difference between hyphy revivalism and existential dread, with Mac turning in a supremely tongue-twisting verse. Keith slips back and forth from a copper Continental to his private planes, cufflinks always matching the wheel (or yoke). In fact, the Bronx-bred legend is so agile on the album that when the bounce of “Bonneville” gives way to the stone-faced “Tired,” he’s able to stitch together the fantasy and the fatigue in a way that strengthens both.
“Tired” is an elegy of sorts for his contemporaries who haven’t stepped in a booth in years, who “get surprised when I come up and shine like the sun.” And it’s more than that—it’s couched in the fear that Keith will become them, that he’ll sink into a La-Z-Boy and start firing off bitter tweets. Not that he’s showing signs of slowing down; *Feature Magnetic *catches him at his most vivid, steering Lady Gaga through the corporate labyrinth and ransacking the Burlington Coat Factory with his alter-ego. But for all the ways Keith can warp reality and carve out alternate timelines, there's the lingering sense that death is coming for us all.
That point is driven home by Sadat X in the album’s strongest guest verse. After a clip of Malcolm X talking about JFK’s assassination, Sadat renders pools of blood and swarming ambulances, empty wakes and crowded unemployment offices. It’s unnerving to hear a member of Brand Nubian say he should have gone to dentistry school “and took the steady check.” Yet just when you think the album’s come to a head, when Keith is going to fully pull back the curtain and peer through the fourth wall, he follows Sadat’s verse with a wink. “Sounds like it’s a hard time,” he laughs. “I guess I gotta step out the Phantom.” You can’t pin him down.
All the years with Ultramagnetic MCs, all the one-off concept albums and blood feuds with the record industry have left Keith with wisdom that he dispenses through off-kilter parables: “If you see a junkie kneeling, give him cold water and tell him, ‘Little kids is looking, get up’/I’ma sweat and do a lot of sit-ups.” Though he is, at his heart, that craftsman, stacking high his tower of jump-off-the-screen set pieces, there's something darker that lurks underneath. Lest “people get cozy and sit inside the paragraph,” as he sneers on “MC Voltron,” he litters the album with details from Koch-era New York, revealed in the manner of sci-fi world building. Maybe it’s a stylistic choice. Or maybe it's because Keith is from somewhere else entirely. | 2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | September 21, 2016 | 7.5 | e12b94ff-2539-43a3-8bf1-2285c0cd79d6 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
With a pitch-black sense of humor, the Cleveland death metal quartet boils the genre down to its essence but lands just shy of its potential. | With a pitch-black sense of humor, the Cleveland death metal quartet boils the genre down to its essence but lands just shy of its potential. | 200 Stab Wounds: Slave to the Scalpel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/200-stab-wounds-slave-to-the-scalpel/ | Slave to the Scalpel | There’s nothing subtle about 200 Stab Wounds. The Cleveland quartet plays death metal with all the nuance of a power drill to the temple—an experience they describe in detail on “Drilling Your Head,” the lead single from their debut, Slave to the Scalpel. Alongside their Maggot Stomp labelmates Sanguisugabogg and Inoculation, 200 Stab Wounds are helping to establish Ohio as a new headquarters for brutal, bludgeoning death metal. Slave to the Scalpel demonstrates the band’s outstanding command over the core elements of the sound. The album rumbles by in a concise 28 minutes, only relenting in its barrage of knuckle-dragging riffs and pummeling drums to deploy the occasional gross-out sample or chintzy keyboard melody. It also suggests that the band has room to grow.
Like most of their peers in the death metal scene, 200 Stab Wounds are heavily indebted to the genre’s past. Slave to the Scalpel borrows from the bone-dry lurch of Chris Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse, the over-the-top brutality of Dying Fetus, and the guttural ignorance of Mortician, among others. The album can feel like a game of spot-the-influence, but that’s not uncommon in the old-school death metal revival. It’s the execution that matters most, and 200 Stab Wounds clearly know what they’re doing. Guitarists Lance Buckley and Steve Buhl trade chunky, bottom-heavy riffs and frenetic solos, while bassist Ezra Cook and drummer Owen Pooley hold the songs together with lockstep precision, whether riding a groove or inciting a breakdown. A dialed-in rhythm section is critical in death metal, and that’s already 200 Stab Wounds’ greatest strength.
Buoying the band’s tight playing is their pitch-black sense of humor. Slave to the Scalpel’s opening track is called “Skin Milk,” and, yes, that is a pun on “skim milk.” Our narrator pours it over his cereal, which he eats out of a bowl fashioned from a split-open skull. Cannibalism is a tried-and-true motif in death metal, and for longtime fans of the genre, it’s all but lost its ability to shock. 200 Stab Wounds are smart to lean into its comedic potential instead. The “stew made out of you” they cook up on “Stifling Stew” isn’t particularly unsettling—but it is darkly funny.
“Itty Bitty Pieces” is the best song on Slave to the Scalpel, as well as the most vivid rendering of the 200 Stab Wounds aesthetic. It’s built around a chugging, groovy riff that stomps down a path of destruction while squealing guitar harmonics stab around its edges. Buhl moans a surprisingly catchy hook in his deep growl: “Turn your bones into dust/Flay your skin into mush/Cut you up into itty bitty pieces/I’ll save you for lunch.” Then, the song takes a strange detour. For a full minute, all we hear is pitch-shifted retching noises, synthesizer bloops, and sustained, atonal notes from Buhl and Buckley’s guitars. It seems like the song might fade from there, but it’s a false ending. When the full band kicks back in for a vicious coda, it’s the most intense passage on the album.
More often, the songs on Slave to the Scalpel land just shy of their potential. 200 Stab Wounds boil down death metal to its essence, which means they live and die by the riff—and not every riff on the album is memorable. There’s a kind of unpretentious brilliance in the simplicity of their compositions, but too often, that simplicity is all they’re bringing to the table. This is solidly executed death metal for people already devoted to the genre. Still, 200 Stab Wounds are too talented not to eventually stumble upon the spark that will set them apart. In the meantime, Slave to the Scalpel is an offering to the heads.
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 | Metal | Maggot Stomp | November 12, 2021 | 6.8 | e13b1598-1093-4b77-bc0b-0f1ece0f25d7 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Miles Davis' "Lost Quintet" (saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette) never made a proper studio album as a unit, but this previously unissued set shows what they were capable of live. | Miles Davis' "Lost Quintet" (saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette) never made a proper studio album as a unit, but this previously unissued set shows what they were capable of live. | Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17676-the-bootleg-series-volume-2-live-in-europe-1969/ | The Bootleg Series, Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969 | "It was really a bad motherfucker," Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography of the live band he led in 1969. With somewhat less panache, Davis completists have pegged the group the Lost Quintet, since, unlike the two longstanding Davis five-pieces that preceded it, this one never made a proper studio recording. All of the members-- saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette-- appear on 1970's landmark Bitches Brew and other scattered sessions from the time, but only as part of larger ensembles; until now, if you wanted to hear them as a stripped-down unit, you had to consult imports, bootlegs and YouTube. This second installment in the Miles Davis Bootleg Series, which follows an excellent 2011 set focusing on the trumpeter's prior working band, gives us three complete Lost Quintet gigs, plus the majority of a fourth, on three CDs and one DVD.
It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure. In a very clear way, the Lost Quintet is the pivot point between the two main phases of Miles' 40-plus-year career: the acoustic jazz idiom he inhabited, and eventually revolutionized, from the mid-'40s through the late '60s, and the plugged-in ensembles he would lead until his death in 1991. In other words, if you've ever wondered exactly how the dapper jazzman of Kind of Blue morphed into a loudly attired icon in wraparound shades, this set offers some crucial clues. When we last left Miles, on The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, he was leading the world's most advanced and telepathic acoustic jazz group (the so-called Second Great Quintet); by the time of the gigs on Live in Europe 1969, Miles was straddling the fault line. He had already traded acoustic piano for overdriven electric keys and had begun taking rhythmic and textural cues from contemporary funk, but he hadn't yet entered his psychedelic-groove-machine phase in earnest. (For an early taste of the latter, try the 2001 Miles archival release Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About that Time, which features Shorter, Corea, Holland-- who had switched to electric bass in the interim-- and DeJohnette, as well as percussionist Airto Moreira.) Unlike the groups that succeeded it, the Lost Quintet shared a significant portion of its DNA with the acoustic, jazz-centric Miles ensembles that came before.
This is especially apparent on the first two sets here: good-sounding, often-bootlegged performances recorded over successive July nights at the 1969 Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in Antibes, France. The scope of these concerts is remarkable. You hear pieces from the yet-unrecorded Bitches Brew ("Spanish Key," "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down"); a track from the ethereal masterpiece In a Silent Way ("It's About That Time"), recorded that past February but not yet released; staples of the Second Great Quintet repertoire (including "Masqualero" and "Footprints," both by Shorter, the sole holdover from that band); and themes Miles had favored since the late 50s ("Milestones," "Round Midnight")-- all flowing together in the expertly paced suites that were Miles' onstage trademark. But the repertoire is only half of the story; as always with Miles groups, the personnel is the thing. Like the members of the Second Great Quintet, these musicians, aside from the relatively unknown Holland, were already rising or established stars when Miles recruited them. They make for a deadly team, equally at home with low-down groove, in-the-pocket swing and feverish abstraction.
The group displays its raucous intensity right from the start of the first Antibes set. During opener "Directions," Corea, Holland and DeJohnette send some serious whitewater their boss's way, in the form of a near-chaotic proto-breakbeat. Miles responds with a brief but explosive solo, full of blaring peaks and bravura runs. If drummer Tony Williams was the chief upsetter in the Second Great Quintet-- furnishing near-constant turbulence to the delight of his employer-- the entire rhythm section takes on that role in the Lost Quintet. When Davis isn't playing, they get straight-up Dionysian. The night-two version of "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" starts off as crackling uptempo funk. But following Shorter's solo, Corea and Holland engage in a free-form duel between bleepy keyboard and scratchy bowed bass that rivals Sun Ra's freakiest excursions. Here you can hear Corea-- who has gone on record saying he distrusted the electric piano when Miles first suggested he play it-- forgetting about technique and reveling in an alien sound palette.
The band isn't just about disruption. The versions of familiar pieces like "Footprints" and "Round Midnight," both from from the first Antibes set, feature bashing DeJohnette crescendos and bracingly gritty Shorter solos, but they also demonstrate the band's knack for extraordinarily supple, dynamically controlled swing. A brief Miles/Corea duet on "I Fall in Love Too Easily," from night two, is another shrewd pace-changer. On The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, Miles and Herbie Hancock introduce this same piece as an unaccompanied duo, but here, Corea's electric piano lends it a newly dreamlike aura. In retrospect, this interlude plays like a stealthy sneak preview of In a Silent Way's proto-ambient brain massage; like the versions of Shorter's "Sanctuary" that close each Antibes set, it's part jazz balladry, part immersive soundscape.
The material on disc three, portions of two sets from November 5 in Stockholm, contrasts nicely with the fierce, sprawling Antibes shows. Because of an electric-piano malfunction, Corea plays acoustic piano for most of the first set, a swap that has a major effect on the group dynamic. This performance has its dark, unruly moments, including an early take on the ominous title track of Bitches Brew, recorded that past August but not yet released, but overall, it's a surprisingly tame outing. The version of Shorter's "Nefertiti" sounds both elegant and almost quaint, about as close as the Lost Quintet ever came to jazz orthodoxy. The one sample we get of the second Stockholm set offers a tantalizing contrast: a rare take on "This", a Corea composition which the pianist had first recorded in May of '69 with a band that included both Holland and DeJohnette. After a brief group theme statement-- with Corea back on electric piano-- the ensemble embarks on a series of atomized improvisations, including a dense Davis/DeJohnette face-off and a pointillist Shorter/Holland/DeJohnette excursion. This single track, possibly the most concentrated example on record of a Miles Davis group playing free jazz, demonstrates how the members of the Lost Quintet spurred the leader toward the avant-garde even as they helped him achieve a deeper engagement with funk and psychedelia.
The DVD, containing a complete Berlin concert from November 7, is essential; the clarity and intimacy of this pristine multicamera document should assure that no one ever again pegs this band as obscure. The in-progress shift in Miles' aesthetic, already apparent in the music, is right there to behold in the men's dress: Whereas the Second Great Quintet always turned up in black tie, the Lost Quintet looks like it's fresh from a Williamsburg vintage shop. (Holland's ensemble—a cow-skin-pattern vest over a purple sweatsuit—is either a facepalmer or a triumph, depending on your tastes.) The band takes a while to warm up here, turning in an unusually subdued "Directions." But by a mid-set "It's About That Time," the feral magic is back; Shorter's brilliantly jittery, speaking-in-tongues soprano solo and a low-volume, high-intensity free-improv duet between Corea and a mallets-wielding DeJohnette make this piece one of the highlights of the entire box set.
Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette eventually left Miles' band in turn, and Davis began constructing the psych-funk juggernaut heard on records like 1974's aptly titled Dark Magus. As Miles outfitted his trumpet with a wah-wah effect, enlisted a phalanx of guitars and began doubling on organ, the atmosphere thickened and the grooves grew more colossal, but the trumpeter would never again lead a group as thrillingly virtuosic and diabolically mutable as the Lost Quintet. (It's a testament to Miles' eye for talent that Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette still rank among the most popular and esteemed jazz musicians on earth; Shorter's current working quartet, heard on the new Blue Note release Without a Net, exemplifies a volatility that's directly traceable to the Lost Quintet.) That fact is now duly noted in the official record, thanks to this set-- a bad motherfucker in its own right. | 2013-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Columbia / Legacy | January 31, 2013 | 9 | e145d5b1-728d-4431-b10a-b59b7b1eed72 | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | null |
With his debut album, this young Canadian R&B singer signed to Drake’s OVO Sound imprint has trouble escaping the shadow of his brooding musical forebears. | With his debut album, this young Canadian R&B singer signed to Drake’s OVO Sound imprint has trouble escaping the shadow of his brooding musical forebears. | Roy Wood$: Waking at Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22104-waking-at-dawn/ | Waking at Dawn | At 20, Roy Wood$ is the youngest artist signed to Drake’s OVO Sound label. Like the rest of the mostly Toronto-based roster, the singer born Denzel Spencer has the skills of a malleable R&B crossover: a capable and identifiable voice, practiced comfort riding a beat, a knack for moody melody. But these same talents are frequently squandered on his debut album Waking at Dawn, which offers a polished dose of brooding unoriginality.
Up to this point, OVO Sound has been a cautiously experimental vehicle for new musicians, many of whom churned out hits for Drake before struggling to do the same for themselves. Spencer, on the other hand, hasn’t provided a creative burst for his boss yet, and Waking at Dawn finds the artist more interested in conforming to the house style than pushing it forward. Nonetheless, he has enjoyed the benefits of OVO’s infrastructure over the last year: a Drake feature, song premieres on Drake’s Apple Music radio show, Drake retweets, an opening slot on Drake’s upcoming summer tour. Correspondingly, his aesthetic is perilously Drake-adjacent.
Spencer sings confidently in a smooth, thin tenor that he commands with a pattering agility. He also frequently puts on a strained Michael Jackson impression. You can hear the imitation on songs like “How I Feel,” where he hiccups, gasps, and adds breathy grit into an otherwise pure tone. It’s a technically accomplished trick that does nothing in the way of character development; because he slips in and out of these vocal tics, they sound like shticky put-on instead of resourceful identity-building. Elsewhere, on a track called “Why,” he channels the Weeknd in both vocal tone and emotional despondency. He nails the mood via dark and legato synth work, but the upshot is severe: Spencer isn’t doing anything new.
The most troubling shortfall of Waking at Dawn is the songwriter’s lyricism. Instead of coming off as mysterious or suffered, the Ontario native spins drama that is too often dull and vague. On “Why,” a song that tiptoes around the singer’s emotional crimes to a lover, he almost never anchors the romantic separation in specifics, so when he moans a repetitive apology during the outro—“I’m sorry for so much”—it doesn’t mean much. (To his credit, he at least mentions that time he showed up late for prom.) The more gut-wrenching missteps manifest as corniness. “Can I speak some Spanish? Te amo my darling, babe,” he croons for no reason to a distant love interest on “Menace.” There are tedious reference-points of a night out. “I could pop another pill tonight/Even though I don’t really want one,” he sings, sounding both bored and boring.
The ambient production on Waking at Dawn is consistent to a fault, and the best songs switch gears and pace. Spencer slips comfortably into patois for the album’s softly bouncing lead single “Gwan Big Up Urself” (which was premiered alongside a radio respin of Drake’s own dancehall-infused “Controlla”). The isolated lean into the Caribbean sound isn’t forced— the track’s Jamaican producer Krs. expertly colors many of his R&B tracks with dancehall and soca rhythms and textures—but given the style’s singularity in Spencer’s catalog and its current rise in the mainstream, the single seems like a calculated quota-filler. Still, the song is a rare and gratifyingly airy moment on this oppressively swampy album; even when tracks like “Got Me” and “She Knows About Me” threaten to break open into dance numbers, they instead loop back into plodding gloom. Besides his raw talent, Spencer’s greatest asset might be his consistent mood-building, but there’s an obvious peril in his manufactured sameness: Waking at Dawn just sounds sleepy. | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound | July 11, 2016 | 6 | e14c5b9b-c484-4f94-ac7c-9a99e0940d15 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Nyege Nyege’s latest snapshot of Tanzanian singeli pairs an avant-garde producer with a local keyboardist; the high-BPM results sound like a loose, extremely weird jam session. | Nyege Nyege’s latest snapshot of Tanzanian singeli pairs an avant-garde producer with a local keyboardist; the high-BPM results sound like a loose, extremely weird jam session. | Sisso / Maiko: Singeli Ya Maajabu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sisso-maiko-singeli-ya-maajabu/ | Singeli Ya Maajabu | Tanzanian producer Sisso’s eponymous Dar es Salaam studio represents the cutting edge of the singeli genre. Singeli is hardly underground in Tanzania, but its relentless speeds of over 200 BPM provide ample room for experimentation, and thanks to the efforts of Uganda’s Nyege Nyege label—started by two European expats to chronicle East Africa’s fertile electronic underground—its more extreme exponents have picked up more steam abroad than relatively pop-friendly artists like Msaga Sumu. Records like Bamba Pana’s Poaa, DJ Travella’s Mr. Mixondo or Sisso’s own Mateso showcased the Terminator-tough side of the genre, but Singeli Ya Maajabu, Sisso’s new collaboration with keyboardist Maiko, sounds more like an informal, extremely weird jam session.
Drum-machine loops gallop forward with the momentum of a cursorial prey animal, while gobstopping sounds sketch out simple musical motifs. “Kivinje” opens with a blitz of sirens and horn-honk synths, and it might take a few listens to notice that they’re playing a classic set of chord changes, I-IV-V-IV, the same as rock classics like “Louie Louie” and “Wild Thing.” Later, the duo eschews “musical” cues entirely, enriching the landscape with aqueous effects (“Mizuka”) and bubble noises (“Kazi Ipo”). Maiko’s synth leads ascend to an almost neoclassical beauty, finding new and simple ways to trace familiar chord progressions.
While regional club scenes like singeli are often praised abroad for their supposedly sui generis futurism, Sisso and Maiko draw from a wide palette, maintaining a running conversation with other experimental club scenes. The influence of juke is unmistakable on “Kiboko”; “Mizuka” is a desolate expanse of glass-shard sounds and horror-movie creaks not far removed from Marie Davidson’s “The Tunnel”; and the minute-long “Mangwale” pastes together fluttering choir samples into the album’s only ambient respite. Yet these distinctions tend to vanish beneath the sheer onslaught of the music. Even at a hair shy of 40 minutes, this is a maelstrom of an album, and in an environment devoid of opportunities to go as decisively buck as your typical singeli crowd, listening to Singeli Ya Maajabu might feel like hiking up a mountain through a hailstorm, or maybe playing an N64 game based on Gorguts’ Obscura.
There’s nothing like the almost Charlemagne Palestine-like relentlessness of Bamba Pana’s “Biti Three,” but Singeli Ya Maajabu still requires a high tolerance for treble and abrasion. This is true of much of the most cutting-edge pop music in the last few years, from the blown-out rage-rap on Opium to the mind-boggling breakdowns of Brazilian funk to the chipmunk fantasias of hyperpop. Maybe “annoying” is one of the last frontiers the modern-day listener has to cross to find the world’s most vital music, but then, rock’n’roll sounded like noise to Frank Sinatra. Your parents probably aren’t going to enjoy Singeli Ya Maajabu, but once it teaches you how to listen to it, it twists the brain like nothing else. | 2024-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Nyege Nyege Tapes | May 14, 2024 | 7.4 | e152ab83-ed48-4272-9b71-a77771964f72 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The Pennsylvania emo stalwarts never found much fame in their own time, but a decade later, these reissues testify to their influence, idiosyncrasy, and proudly uncommercial spirit. | The Pennsylvania emo stalwarts never found much fame in their own time, but a decade later, these reissues testify to their influence, idiosyncrasy, and proudly uncommercial spirit. | Algernon Cadwallader: Some Kind of Cadwallader | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/algernon-cadwallader-some-kind-of-cadwallader/ | Some Kind of Cadwallader / Parrot Flies / Algernon Cadwallader | Suppose someone tells you about a night they were four beers deep at an Algernon Cadwallader basement show in 2008 and predicted the following: Within the next 10 years, the critical reevaluation of emo would lead to Philadelphia being anointed the epicenter of American indie rock; the Phillies would win the World Series; and the Eagles’ backup quarterback would outgun the Patriots in the Super Bowl, which would be extra satisfying given Tom Brady’s golf dates with President Donald Trump. Which part is least believable? Probably being at the Algernon Cadwallader show in the first place: The trio achieved a decent level of visibility during their short run, but nowadays “that Algernon basement show” is the sort of thing scene diehards will either lie about or never shut the fuck up about. Due to a quintessentially punk combination of DIY ethics and administrative laziness, the majority of Algernon Cadwallader’s output has long been out of print and unavailable on streaming services. Yeah, you could’ve streamed most of it on YouTube or Bandcamp, but Lauren and Asian Man Records’ reissue of Algernon’s entire discography is necessary because it provides something so rarely granted to bands of this nature: a chance to publicly honor its legacy.
The recent 10-year anniversaries celebrated by contemporaries and tourmates like Tigers Jaw, the Menzingers, La Dispute, and Touché Amoré have shone a retrospective spotlight on a parallel universe of underground rock that went largely ignored in the time between MySpace and Twitter. Any future recollections will probably have to be an oral history, as most of the e-zines, message boards, and websites where Mediafire links and show information were passed along have been relegated to history’s digital dustbin. Archived original album and live reviews are virtually nonexistent, whereas interviews from that period languish on blogs that haven’t been updated in years.
One such blog is Alter the Press, where bassist/screamer (he is not a singer) Peter Helmis joked in 2008, “We’re a DIY band from Pennsylvania. We sound like Cap’n Jazz.” It was a deliberately self-deprecating quip, but Algernon’s self-determination played a significant role in their legend. They sidestepped the label ladder to release their records and their friends’ records on Hot Green, never hired a major booking agent or manager, and decided to call it quits in 2012 rather than being beholden to the expectations and budding hype of an emo revival they were largely credited with starting. Bands like Tigers Jaw, Joyce Manor, and the World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die worshipped Algernon for their iconoclasm, which also prevented them from ever being as successful as their acolytes.
Notice how Helmis says they were from Pennsylvania, not Philly. Specifically Yardley, a small town in Bucks County, whose first citizen was named Algernon Cadwallader. Many of the bands responsible for creating this scene were specifically from Keystone State suburbs and not Philadelphia at the outset: the Wonder Years (Lansdale), Balance and Composure (Doylestown), the Menzingers and Tigers Jaw (Scranton), Snowing (Lehigh Valley), and Title Fight (Kingston). Like most of those bands, Algernon would eventually move to the city proper, but even then, Philadelphia was mostly a non-factor in indie-rock conversation; the lack of attention allowed them to go at their own pace, just enough outside the cruel microscope of hype that incinerated bands thrust upon stages they weren’t ready to occupy.
And Cap’n Jazz is clearly the first comparison anyone would make for Algernon Cadwallader. There’s one archived review popping up for Some Kind of Cadwallader on Google and here’s first sentence: “Algernon Cadwallader have studied ’90s Kinsella recordings like they were on tomorrow's final exam.” In that case, “Katie’s Conscious” aces it and gets extra credit, mashing together the shifty hooks of Shmap’n Shmazz with a tribute to the halftime landslide of American Football’s “Honestly?,” all while honoring Joan of Arc’s lean towards conceptual non sequitur: “Radio rap is back for a reason!,” shrieks Helmis, a guy who helped revive uncommercial emo for reasons that still baffle most critics.
Helmis had about as dysfunctional of a relationship with perfect pitch as Tim Kinsella, and the bespoke nature of his vocals is best exemplified by Algernon’s cover of Elvis Costello’s “No Action,” which appears on the patchworked, “new” compilation Algernon Cadwallader alongside their take on the Beatles’ “This Boy.” “No Action” itself is embryonic emo—yelpy, twitchy, and prone to some extremely petty bon mots at an ex’s expense, while “This Boy” plays more toward the emasculated longing for an ex that typified emo’s early-2000s pop phase. But songs that tightly structured and lyrically transparent are a complete mismatch for Algernon’s scattershot energy and antipathy towards straight melody. If Elvis Costello ever hears Helmis’ defilement of the high notes on the chorus of “No Action,” he might seek legal action.
But there’s a right way to sing “THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE” on a song titled “Horror,” and then there’s Helmis’ wrong way, which is the best way, wringing out every last bit of cartoonish, splattered gore the sentiment deserves. It’s worth pointing out that if you read the lyrics straight, it’s a song inspired by studying up on the cruelty of man while sitting on the toilet. Helmis also shared Kinsella’s taste for gnomic, lysergic metaphysical musings (“Dinosaurs died quite a while ago/We still fascinate and look at their bones”; “Try and plant a tree on top of a computer/That’s not happening”). And here’s a song title from their 7” demo, which is bundled with 2009’s Fun EP and a few B-sides on Algernon Cadwallader: “Look Down (Because the Ground Is Easier to Understand and Doesn't Take So Much Work to Figure Out But I'd Rather Not Know Where I'm Standing and Have An Idea of What Life Is All About).”
Still, like most comparisons that arrive early and never really leave, the Cap’n Jazz one is helpful, but becomes less justifiable with distance. The Kinsellas’ group had no choice but to sound like themselves—a bunch of mismatched teenagers dealing with childhood trauma and drug abuse, figuring out their sound in real time, an abstract poetry slam disguised as a “weirdo punk band.” The members of Algernon were beerier and bouncier; more importantly, they purposefully chose Midwestern emo over other forms of punk and hardcore, a choice that liberated from the professionalism, earnestness, and striving that defines indie rock.
Ten years and many label rosters’ worth of imitators later, Some Kind of Cadwallader still leaps out of the speakers, an album that treats its songs like secrets they’re dying to share—they can barely contain themselves even during the starstruck ballads and the 13-minute jam. Some Kind of Cadwallader is always in motion, as a matter of fact. Guitarist Joe Reinhart tossed off riffs like banana peels for Helmis, the elements of what would define fourth-wave emo: spindly arpeggios, finger-tapping, wandering harmonies, rapid-fire hammer-and-pull figures, oblong time signatures, capos where capos aren’t meant to tread. It’s both tossed off and astoundingly technical, even nerdier than the metal and math rock it pulls from, reflected by the dubiously (but accurately) named “twinklecore” subgenre that take shape on labels like Count Your Lucky Stars, Topshelf, and Big Scary Monsters.
Algernon Cadwallader were a band that never really tried to sound like just three guys in a studio, but they didn’t try to sound bigger, either. Some Kind of Cadwallader doesn’t go orchestral; it finds the abandoned toy chest in the basement—a brief hint of melodica on the title track, shakers and maracas on “On Up,” the most canonical use of slide whistle this side of “Groove Is in the Heart.” For all the immediate pleasures, there are moments of real poignancy where Algernon imagine these basement shows as something to grab onto for dear life: “Horror” feints at a tingling, post-rock crescendo before it ends with an a cappella group hug that wants to go on forever; it could just as easily pass for a field recording from a Super Bowl celebration on Broad Street. “Motivational Song” spends its last two minutes collapsing, the sound of a band trying to break down its equipment and load out while an acoustic plays in the background, unwilling to leave the stage and go home. The closing “In Response to Irresponsibility” is 13 minutes of wayward jamming, and if it went on three times as long, no one would mind—if they learned anything from the short and sensational existence of Cap’n Jazz, it’s that this stuff never lasts as long as anyone wants it to.
The modest, grassroots success of Some Kind of Cadwallader sparked label interest, most notably from Jade Tree. This partnership would’ve been a powerful symbolic gesture—Algernon joining a label responsible for many of their primary influences and reestablishing Jade Tree at the forefront of emo after a run of aimless years. Instead, Algernon started their own Hot Green record label, which would release Everything/Nothing, the debut from post-Everyone Everywhere project Hurry, and Get Disowned, the first proper album from Hop Along. In between, Algernon bode their time with 2009’s Fun EP. The endlessly excitable “Spit Fountain” alone makes it essential, proof that Algernon could’ve stayed squarely within the parameters of Some Kind and maybe even improved on it. Fun also includes “Black Clouds,” which some have called “perhaps the least engaging song Algernon ever recorded”—and they work for Be Happy Records, the label who put the damn tape out.
Algernon Cadwallader gave themselves all the time they wanted to work on a follow-up, and Parrot Flies was eventually released three years after Some Kind of Cadwallader. Helmis claims they recorded the album twice, and the results are in the vein of LP2 (The Pink Album) and EndSerenading: a gnarlier, more esoteric successor that spends its immediacy cowering in the shadow of its cult-classic debut and usually ends up being the contrarian’s choice.
In some ways, Algernon became a better band on Parrot Flies. The production is cleaner, the songs less beholden to their influences. Opener “Springing Leaks” reintroduces the band’s proprietary slip-n-slide instrumental interplay and foreshadows Helmis’ and Reinhart’s future transitions towards more standardized indie rock (in Dogs on Acid and Hop Along, respectively) by slowly tailing off into dueling guitars that could pass for Pavement at their shaggiest. It’s an impressive showing for the new two-guitar attack of Algernon that doesn’t arise again until the self-explanatory closing jam “Cruisin’.” In between, Parrot Flies is distinctively Algernon, but more mannered. Aside from a nearly banjo-like acoustic run on “Sad,” it lacks the jack-in-the-box instrumental surprises, and the hooks seem to be stumbled upon rather than confidently projected; likewise, some of Helmis’ more quotable lyrics (“Smoke and mirrors are good for barbecues and vanity”) can feel forced. At the time, Parrot Flies could be viewed as Algernon coming into their own, but in hindsight, it’s a band trying to break free of a movement they started and probably unable to do so as long as the name was attached.
Instead, the band called it quits in 2012—third-wave history repeating itself. Maybe they didn’t spawn American Football and the Promise Ring, but, like Cap’n Jazz, Algernon Cadwallader fractured right before they could capitalize on the swelling public interest in a scene they fostered as things were skewing towards a more pop-oriented format. See Miami-to-Philly transplant Glocca Morra’s Just Married, and also the debuts from Joyce Manor, You Blew It!, Modern Baseball, and a band from Western Massachusetts going by the Hotel Year, to name a few. Helmis recently admitted he was relieved by the timing of Algernon’s breakup, as they never had to be judged by how much they catered to the idea of “emo revival.” And the proof is in what followed: Helmis stayed the course with the trad indie of Dogs on Acid and Yankee Bluff, while Reinhart became a fixture in the full-band version of Hop Along and provided production and engineering on Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost, Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again, and Foxing’s Nearer My God—the kind of “level up” third album Algernon Cadwallader never got to make themselves.
Yet these reissues present Algernon Cadwallader not as a band cruelly cut short in their prime, but one that accomplished everything they set out to do within the span of six years. It’s worth remembering that this kind of thing was probably the least likely candidate for any kind of longevity or success in the mid-2000s. No, Algernon Cadwallader and their peers weren’t intended as an alternative to the MySpace and Fueled By Ramen emo bands who were already starting to hit a lull in popularity by the release of Some Kind of Cadwallader. Nor were they in direct competition with the prevailing trends of indie rock that seem to cycle like Zodiac signs. But Some Kind of Cadwallader makes it easy to think that this was all by design. “If fucking up feels right/Fuck it up,” Helmis screamed on “Motivational Song”—an intracardiac injection not just for emo but for indie rock any time it’s taken to heart. | 2018-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 29, 2018 | 8.3 | e157014d-9b16-4c2a-afa1-636b8e5e6c62 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Meat Puppets’ 1984 album, a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert. | 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 Meat Puppets’ 1984 album, a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert. | Meat Puppets: Meat Puppets II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meat-puppets-meat-puppets-ii/ | Meat Puppets II | On July 8, 1976, a Grumman Goose seaplane refueled at Red Lake, Ontario on its way to the Hudson Bay. The aircraft had trouble staying in the air with the extra fuel—on board were also five people, ten 50-gallon tanks of propane, and a substantial amount of sports fishing equipment. Then, south of Churchill, Manitoba, the left engine stalled. Too heavy to fly with one motor, the plane dropped out of the sky. The wings were cleaved off and the tail twisted upward as it plowed 100 yards through a forest. The pilot broke his knee, but the passengers remained, miraculously, unhurt; they all fled the plane at once, as it now contained a cocktail of propane and gasoline that had been very thoroughly shaken. One of the passengers, a 17-year-old Curt Kirkwood, volunteered to walk to Churchill for help.
During that walk, Kirkwood made a decision: He was never going to do anything that he didn’t want to do. What he wanted to do was play guitar in a rock’n’roll band and stay perpetually high. And so he worked hard to make his way from a solidly middle-class upbringing to the margins of society. After graduating from a private Jesuit high school, he dropped out of a private Jesuit university. Then he dropped out of a public university. Then he moved back home to Phoenix, Arizona and worked a series of odd jobs—bussing tables, mowing lawns, driving buses. He quit those one by one, too. Eventually, just as he intended, music was the only avenue left open to him.
Kirkwood formed the Meat Puppets in 1980 with his younger brother Cris, an inventive bassist with an incurable coattails complex, and their friend Derrick Bostrom, a drummer who steered the band toward punk rock with his collection of hardcore 7-inches from the burgeoning Los Angeles scene. But the trio’s tastes proved too wide-ranging for the strictly policed boundaries of hardcore; they were just as likely to listen to the Grateful Dead or Lynyrd Skynyrd, Petula Clark or George Jones, Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart. They bonded over a love of drawing, filling thousands of pages with doodles inspired by Francis Picabia and Vincent van Gogh, Jack Kirby and Walt Disney. They also bonded over drugs, fueling their shared “trip” with mountains of weed, acid, and MDMA.
By the early ’80s, the tenets of hardcore had calcified into a strict code of conduct, with pummeling guitars, slam dancing, and shaved heads all de rigueur. On the underground punk circuit, the Meat Puppets’ long hair and psychedelic jamming were widely disdained. It was only a matter of time before the band’s volatile mix of influences would breach containment on Meat Puppets II, a sun-baked, country-fried, acid-addled cowpunk album that could have come from nowhere else but the Arizona desert. With its release in 1984, the Puppets proved that hardcore’s independent network of bands, labels, and venues could be harnessed for much stranger deeds.
Chances are that if you listened to college radio as it transformed into alternative rock in the late ’80s, your favorite band’s favorite record was Meat Puppets II. The album earned the respect of contemporaries like R.E.M., Violent Femmes, and Melvins, but it inspired awe in younger acts. Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil speaks of II in reverent tones; Lou Barlow has called it a “blueprint” for Dinosaur Jr. Of course, the Puppets’ most consequential fan would be Kurt Cobain, who invited the band to play three songs from II on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. After that performance, the Meat Puppets would forever be linked to the grunge movement and cited as the primary influence of its tragic figurehead. Yet the Meat Puppets always lagged behind, even on the trail they helped to blaze. It took 10 years for them to catch up to the success of the bands they’d influenced with II; in the meantime, they labored away in the underground as their peers signed to major labels. Finally, caught in the whirlwind of Nirvana’s rise to superstardom, the Puppets experienced their own brief moment in the sun—only to crash down again.
Phoenix in the early ’80s was home to a tumultuous punk scene centered around Madison Square Garden, a dilapidated wrestling ring in the bad part of town. Its denizens made the Meat Puppets look conventional: Frank Discussion, lead singer of the Feederz, was a follower of Situationist philosophy known for killing rats onstage. Killer Pussy’s Lucy LaMode threw dead fish at her audience as she sang songs like “Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage.” JFA, or Jodie Foster’s Army, was formed just a few weeks after John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress the actress—the group’s name was a dark bit of satire from a band whose singer was only 14 years old. The Puppets reveled in this chaos even as they sought to branch out from the local scene. “There was people in Phoenix before us that influenced us, that never made it out,” Curt would later say on a New York public access show. “We’re the first band that got outta there.”
They began sending out recordings, making connections in the L.A. punk scene that had inspired them. The song “Meat Puppets” first appeared on a Los Angeles Free Music Society cassette, and then “H-Elenore” became the only track from an Arizona band on the SoCal punk compilation Keats Rides a Harley. The L.A. band Monitor invited the Puppets to record a song for their debut album in exchange for some studio time, which they used to produce the In a Car EP, five tracks of red-hot hardcore that scream by in as many minutes. These early songs outpaced even the fastest bands in Los Angeles. “We were gaining fans out there, because I guess we could play fast and were totally insane,” Curt told journalist Greg Prato. “We had developed this way of playing a lot faster than most of the punk rock.”
The Puppets’ technical precision and lunatic live shows grabbed the attention of Joe Carducci and Greg Ginn at SST Records, home to an increasingly diverse stable of underground DIY bands including Black Flag, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, and Hüsker Dü. Ginn, SST founder and Black Flag guitarist, asked them to record their debut for the label, leading to a long and contentious relationship. The Puppets recorded the self-titled album over a three-day acid bender on Santa Monica Boulevard. This was a looser and more varied outing, featuring roaming psychedelic detours as well as hyper-focused hardcore. It was also their first recording to hint at their desert origins through covers of Western hits like the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and Doc Watson’s “Walking Boss.” The Puppets’ version of the former is a piss-taking parody with bratty, mocking vocals, but “Walking Boss,” an indignant workers-rights song, is played straight, making plain the band’s sincere debt to folk and country.
But between their debut and Meat Puppets II there’s a rift the size of the Grand Canyon. Ask each member to explain the band’s sudden evolution and you’ll get three different answers. Bostrom told Carducci that “from the beginning of the band Curt and Cris could play anything, and now that he also could play anything they were no longer a punk band.” Cris demurred, telling Matthew Smith-Lahrman that “to us there wasn’t that big of a shift between Meat Puppets I and Meat Puppets II.” For Curt, though, it was simple: “Because I wrote it, and Cris and Derrick wrote most of the first one!”
The shift in songwriting duties goes a long way toward explaining the Western-gothic tone that permeates II. Explaining how exactly Curt wrote such compellingly oblique poetry on his first set of songs is more difficult. The drugs certainly helped. Two of the album’s best tracks, “Lake of Fire” and the instrumental “Magic Toy Missing,” were written during an acid trip while Curt’s friends were at a Halloween party. “‘Lake of Fire’ was kind of like, ‘Oh, the bad people! They're out tonight—look, it’s Frankenstein and the Mummy!’” he told Prato. “‘Magic Toy Missing’ was from looking at the moon and it was making a kaleidoscope happen, when you’re tripped out like that. I tried to make a musical version of the Spirograph sort of thing that the moon was doing. I wrote them both in about 20 minutes.”
But any attempt to write off Curt’s songs as the product of an altered state only tells half the story. He drew on a language of religious fervor that was deep-seated and purely American:
Where do bad folks go when they die?
They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly
They go to the lake of fire and fry
Won’t see ’em again till the Fourth of July
Now people cry and people moan
Look for a dry place to call their home
Try and find someplace to rest their bones
Before the angels and the devils fight to make them their own
The drama of perdition is painted with such simplicity that it seems cribbed from a children’s rhyme, the Book of Revelation compressed into a two-minute sketch.
Curt constructs a new character for II: the slacker-prophet, who, like an omniscient desert flâneur, observes everything that happens from his position of relative idleness. “Plateau” describes striving toward the afterlife as scaling a grand plateau where “holy ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand/To beautify the foothills and shake the many hands.” But our narrator remains unbothered; he knows that “there’s nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop/And an illustrated book about birds,” nothing to meet the newly deceased at their goal other than mundanity. These songs seem like they’ve always existed, like they’ve been channeled from some hymnal lost and forgotten in the sand. But Curt, when pressed, will pause and shrug and say it’s “probably just desert stuff.”
Expressing these strange allegories of doomed America required something new of Curt. Now that he’d written these haunted honky-tonk songs, he dropped his hardcore screaming and adopted a vocal style somewhere between a bored drawl and a strained caterwaul. It also required buy-in from his bandmates, who he recalls as having to be convinced of the Puppets’ country pivot. But Cris and Bostrom didn’t seem to mind. In fact they savored the opportunity to get high—this time the drug of choice was MDMA, scored off an ASU chemistry prof and gulped down in double-locked capsules—and play like their heroes. Bostrom loosened up and played simpler, more expressive drums like his idols Ringo Starr and Keith Moon, while Cris filled up the newly created space with busy, percolating bass lines inspired by Phil Lesh. These were not trendy names in Los Angeles’ punk scene in 1983, but the Puppets embraced their most unfashionable impulses, sticking up for the mainstream yet somehow becoming outsiders even to the outsiders.
The Puppets didn’t immediately reveal their new direction on II. Album opener “Split Myself in Two” could pass as a hardcore song, maybe, with all three Puppets racing each other to the end until they are overtaken by the washes of distortion pouring out of Curt’s guitar. Except that the lyrics give the lie to any punk rock posturing: For those paying attention, the song serves as the introduction to Curt’s mystical main character, who sells his soul for “the card that said I never would fall.” For the rest of the song, and the rest of the album, he’s in a panic about the return of the devil, who “said I’m leaving now but I want what you owe me/I’ll be back in a little while.” Similar paranoid encounters litter the album, as if the singer is on the run across a degraded West that, despite its scope, is still claustrophobic and mean.
“Lost” finds him on the highway in search of a safe haven. It’s a road song worthy of Johnny Cash, but if he’s been everywhere, man, Curt has been nowhere, doing laps around the desert. A shuffling beat and a walking bassline propel him forward, but he’s “lost on the freeway again/Looking for means to an end,” running out of favors and running out of friends. He does his best cowboy impression, complete with unhinged “Yahooo!,” and it’s almost believable; more authentic is his dexterously picked guitar solo, which has a twang more befitting the Grand Ole Opry than the Whisky. The inverse of this suffocating West is Curt’s inner world. “I can’t see the end of me,” he sings on “Oh, Me,” “My whole expanse I cannot see.” It’s a classic stoner conceit of glassy-eyed introspection, finding freedom in his mind as he’s caught wandering the arid plains.
Despite the freewheeling drug use, the Puppets were focused on what they knew would be their statement album. “We recorded it a lot more carefully,” Bostrom told Prato. “We sat down and tried to make the arrangements different, we worked more closely with [SST producer] Spot, chased more people out of the studio—it was just the three of us working intently.” They completed the record in May 1983, but their statement would be delayed. SST did not have the record mixed until November of that year, and it wasn’t released until April 1984, an eternity in the quickly evolving world of punk rock.
Still, II pissed off the punks. Playing these navel-gazing, shit-kicking songs on the hardcore circuit was never going to be easy, especially opening for Black Flag, who were a lightning rod for aggressively macho crowds. But the Puppets didn’t even try to meet them in the middle; if anything, they ran in the opposite direction. They treated their audiences to 15-minute-long Grateful Dead covers. They played selections from Elvis and the Beatles. They practiced their harmonizing with Everly Brothers tunes. In return they were spat at and physically threatened. Not to be intimidated, Curt and company would then scream obscenities and play sloppily on purpose. A portion of the audience would always stick it out anyway, drawn in by their audacity. As with the Replacements, the Puppets put on a good show even when they were bad.
The more pressing concern during the ’84 tour was the Puppets’ deteriorating relationship with SST. Despite a four-star review in Rolling Stone that called II “one of the funniest and most enjoyable albums of 1984,” the band could not find their record on shelves no matter where they went. Were copies sold out, or were they not being distributed at all? It was impossible to say, but after the delay in the album’s production, it was easy for the Puppets to sense that they were not a priority for their label. The root of the problem was a clash of cultures: Bostrom explained to Jim Ruland that touring with Black Flag was “grueling and authoritarian,” an exercise in rigor and discipline that epitomized the strict SST ethos.
Beginning with their next album, Up on the Sun, the Puppets began doing things their own way. They bought an RV and reached out to Frank Riley, who booked artists like Violent Femmes, the Replacements, and R.E.M., to schedule tours outside of the SST bubble. They invited Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn to Phoenix as part of a push for mainstream press. Their intentions were increasingly clear: They wanted to get signed to a major label. Yet in the second half of the ’80s, the work began to suffer. The critically lauded Up on the Sun was followed by a series of hit-or-miss records. “You get into a whole different level of slogging and careering, whereas nothing after Up on the Sun is nearly as brilliant,” Bostrum admitted to Prato. “You get this success and you want to take it further. The only direction that you think to go in is like, mainstream. We’re doing songs that are less quirky, with a greater attempt to replicate standard kind of pop sounds, and not having quite as much success with it.”
Meanwhile, their peers were leaving them behind. By 1990, the Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. had signed to Sire, Hüsker Dü and R.E.M. had signed to Warner Bros., and Sonic Youth had signed to Geffen. A possible deal with Atlantic for the Puppets’ sixth album Monsters was blocked by Ginn, leading to litigation on both sides. Finally, they signed to London Recordings for 1991’s Forbidden Places, which sold 60,000 copies—their biggest hit so far, but still far short of their ambitions.
Help came from an unlikely source. The Puppets learned they were favorites of grunge wunderkind Kurt Cobain through an interview in Spin; shortly thereafter, they were invited to open a leg of the In Utero tour (Cobain used the tour as a sort of showcase of his influences—other openers included the Boredoms, Half Japanese, and Butthole Surfers). Backstage at the Buffalo show, Cobain made an announcement: He had just signed on to play MTV Unplugged, and he wanted the Meat Puppets to play, too. The recording would be in less than two weeks.
It was a gesture of solidarity from the biggest rock star in the world. MTV wasn’t thrilled. They had imagined Cobain’s guest stars would be Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell, not a pair of unknown brothers playing songs from a decade-old album. But on the night, the Kirkwoods were there, hiding behind matching shoulder-length, curly brown hair. Curt used a quarter to pluck Pat Smear’s red, white, and blue Buck Owens guitar while Cris borrowed Krist Novoselic’s acoustic bass. “That’s Curt, and that’s Cris,” Novoselic introduced them to the crowd. “No, that’s Kurt, and that’s Krist,” answered Cris. “No, I’m Thing 1, and that’s Thing 2,” Curt rejoined. The band, backed by Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, played languid versions of “Plateau,” “Oh, Me,” and “Lake of Fire,” with Cobain swiveling in an office chair like a preoccupied child, his voice a softer take on Curt’s wild warble.
The performance garnered publicity on a level completely unprecedented for the band. After Cobain’s death by suicide the following April, MTV ran Unplugged on a loop. DGC released MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1994, giving the Puppets the unenviable fortune of being guest stars on a posthumous album, lauded as a favorite of the deceased. The material benefits were undeniable. The next Puppets album, Too High to Die, released in January 1994, was certified gold, selling more copies than all their other albums combined. But the band had trouble processing its sudden success and the tragic circumstances surrounding it. “At that fucking point in my life, for Kurt Cobain to come from out of nowhere… I mean, I had no fucking association with the guy, none whatsoever, until —BOOM!—there he was,” Curt told Option magazine in 1995. “When you’ve been dogged all your life, and all of a sudden some little champion comes through for you… I don’t know what to say. I wish my thoughts could come out more completely.”
The Meat Puppets had finally reached their peak, and on the other side was not a plateau but a cliff. During an arena tour with Stone Temple Pilots, Cris began using heroin, forming an addiction that quickly led to his ouster from the band. Tragedies piled up, including the deaths of his wife and one of his best friends. Meanwhile, Curt gamely kept on with different iterations of the Puppets and a short-lived supergroup, Eyes Adrift, with Novoselic. On the day after Christmas, 2003, Cris was arrested for attacking a security guard outside a post office in Phoenix; he was shot in the back during the confrontation. He went from the ICU to federal prison. Finally, after getting clean in prison, Cris reconnected with Curt and the Meat Puppets reunited (without Bostrom, who would eventually rejoin in 2018).
One of the highest-profile gigs for the reunited Puppets was All Tomorrow’s Parties 2008, where they were invited to play II in its entirety. The concert served as a long-delayed victory lap for the album that made their name. The Puppets still point to II as their defining moment: Bostrom said, “It will speak to people for the longest… It stands up in the pantheon of rock n’ roll in ways that the other records don’t.” It’s a strange and twisted monument, but out in the desert, it casts a long shadow. | 2024-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Megaforce | March 24, 2024 | 9 | e1574670-b519-4a14-b3f7-25af556cf68b | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Sofia Jensen’s gentle indie-folk debut is a portrait of growing up with soul-baring lyrics and occasional breakthroughs. | Sofia Jensen’s gentle indie-folk debut is a portrait of growing up with soul-baring lyrics and occasional breakthroughs. | Free Range: Practice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/free-range-practice/ | Practice | Sofia Jensen is singing about you. Probably not you, but “you,” as in the subject pronoun, present on all 10 songs of Practice, the debut album from Jensen’s indie-folk project Free Range. Jensen is an 18-year-old songwriter venturing into warmly lit acoustic territory after spending their adolescence exploring the electric guitar and fronting a rock band. With Free Range, they’ve created an outlet for looking inward, a space to reflect and digest after closing the book on childhood. When they take inventory of everything that’s changing around them, it’s enough to start furiously purging thoughts through the pen, but for Jensen—whether the subject is a friend, a family member, a former or present partner, or anything in between—there is no sufficient self-reflection without a whole lot of “you.”
There’s a real sun-setting-on-summer picture that comes into focus as Practice unfurls. Jensen sounds like the high school graduate who didn’t graduate so much as survive, with joviality all but flattened and self-assurance just starting to crystallize. The shift from electric to acoustic makes sense for a songwriter who also seems to be discovering that it’s easier to find footing in peace and quiet: “I asked if we could go up to the countryside/Where I could feel time,” Jensen sings on “Free Range,” a slowly ascending mountain hike of a song that exemplifies the band’s innately unrushed disposition. On Practice, bassist Bailey Minzenberger and drummer and producer Jack Henry handle Jensen’s fragile compositions with appropriately gentle hands, keeping to a softwood framework built from snare brushes and acoustic chords that wouldn’t translate any worse in a living room than on a stage.
Jensen’s voice stays in a mid-range octave with a slightly wounded creakiness. When the band finds its own character, as they do on “Free Range” and the slide-guitar-touched opener “Want to Know,” an alchemy occurs that emboldens Jensen, their openness inspiring the supporting players to open their own doors as well. But when the arrangements are more formulaic, such as on the rocking-chair-like “For Me to Find,” Jensen seems timid, as if passing the day beneath a comfortable security blanket of folky sounds. Although they don’t often feel particularly complex or ambitious, the song structures tend to serve as soft, functional landing pads for the soul-baring lyrics. They tie together Jensen’s abundant internal monologues and dialogues as a neutral rug might a colorful room.
One tune in particular stands clearly above the field. “Growing Away,” which was fittingly the last track that Jensen wrote for the album, is a fine-tuned breakthrough from start to finish, the type of song where you can hear the level-up as it’s happening. Jensen gets as real as ever, reflecting on getting sober and embracing lucidity through the pain of atrophy. The band lifts and illuminates them with precise readings, pulling back at just the right moments to shine more light on the best lines and a perfectly placed electric guitar solo. Every melodic turn is unexpected yet faithful, every rhyme clever without sacrificing sincerity, no crack in Jensen’s voice gratuitous, no harmony unproductive. For Jensen, 90 percent of growing up might be learning how to let go, but if the other 10 percent feels like this, then bring it on. | 2023-02-24T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-24T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mick | February 24, 2023 | 7 | e163da5d-eeac-44de-adc7-b6d3bc4f26a3 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Dave Hartley’s latest album is his most ambitious record yet, one that takes him out of his bedroom and places him out on the open road with deep shades of mysterious Laurel Canyon folk-rock. | Dave Hartley’s latest album is his most ambitious record yet, one that takes him out of his bedroom and places him out on the open road with deep shades of mysterious Laurel Canyon folk-rock. | Nightlands: I Can Feel the Night Around Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23193-i-can-feel-the-night-around-me/ | I Can Feel the Night Around Me | Dave Hartley pinpointed the inspiration for his Nightlands project with the title of a 2012 song: “I Fell in Love With a Feeling.” Hartley—also the bassist for the War on Drugs—makes records that embrace the most atmospheric, ephemeral elements of pop and soft rock. Reverb-coated harmonies, gentle rhythms, and major-key melodies permeate his work, riding high on good vibes without digging for much substance beneath it. After all, his songs suggests, the longer you think about what you’re feeling, the less you’re really feeling it. Hartley’s most memorable recordings, like “I Fell in Love With a Feeling,” aim for a sense of cozy familiarity over any kind of innovation—like Dirty Beaches if they’d been into Bread instead of Suicide.
I Can Feel the Night Around Me is Hartley’s most ambitious record yet, one that takes him out of his bedroom and places him out on the open road. On its best songs, he trades his breezy pop chops for earnest, soul-seeking Americana, like on “Lost Moon”—a swirling ballad that attributes a sense of playfulness to the assumed textures of folk music. Over starry synths and acoustic guitars, Hartley rides a high, lonesome sound that mimics the whine of a pedal steel before twisting into something more like an air horn. Like the best folk music, it’s mysterious and open-ended, comfortable and enveloping.
The following track, “Depending on You,” is another highlight, with a chorus that floats like a band of helium balloons untethering toward the sky. During this opening stretch of songs, Hartley’s music is distinctive and confident, but his lyrics still feel like placeholders. Days go by, yellow moons turn blue, horizons fade. His penchant for layering his voice in tight ribbons of harmony is a pleasant sound, but it depletes most of his sentiments of their emotional resonance. On “Easy Does It,” he lingers on some inner demons but struggles to make them seem real. “There’s a shadow man living inside of me,” he sings, “He’s been there since the day I was born.” Instead of elaborating, however, Hartley just wraps things up with a multi-layered sigh and moves on to the chorus.
I Can Feel the Night Around Me centers on moving on, whether that means hitting the highway or breezing through its 41-minute runtime before anything can harsh its mellow. After a faithful cover of Phil Spector and Gerry Goffin’s “Only You Know,” Hartley ditches most of the Laurel Canyon charm and retreats to his more characteristic, carefree chillwave. The highlights that appear in the second half—like the motion-sick power-pop of “Fear of Flying” or the drowsy bossa nova of “Moonbathin”—are also the record’s most seamless transitions to amiable background music, something to help clear your mind after a stressful day. “I just want to hear you say, ‘Easy does it,’” Hartley sings repeatedly in a track of the same name, and it’s one of the only sentiments here that he really sells. For anyone looking to bask in that simple pleasure with him, Nightlands creates a space where you can feel it all around. | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | May 17, 2017 | 6.8 | e17d8d90-d01f-4efc-a673-31452a44e999 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Working without his longtime collaborator Scott Hirsch, M.C. Taylor enlists guests Jenny Lewis and Aaron Dessner as he explores the heaviest questions and realizes there are no answers. | Working without his longtime collaborator Scott Hirsch, M.C. Taylor enlists guests Jenny Lewis and Aaron Dessner as he explores the heaviest questions and realizes there are no answers. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Terms of Surrender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiss-golden-messenger-terms-of-surrender/ | Terms of Surrender | The phrase “terms of surrender” implies defeat, but surrender can mean also liberation. On his fourth album for Merge Records, Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor splits the difference between the two meanings of the phrase as he tries to make sense of his own increasingly complicated life. Working within his established roots-rock sound, he explores the heaviest questions—how to be an artist, a parent, a citizen—and realizes that there may be fewer and fewer answers as the years go by.
To do so, he enlists two big-name indie-rock guests: the National’s Aaron Dessner contributes guitar and piano, and Jenny Lewis sings backing vocals. But a quieter fact of Terms of Surrender is that the album has no involvement from Scott Hirsch. A longtime collaborator going back to pre-Hiss bands the Court & Spark and Ex Ignota, Hirsch has produced, engineered, and/or played on almost every Hiss Golden Messenger album. His unusual bass patterns helped lock the band into its distinct grooves; his production felt spacious without being sparse. Without him, an intangible element of Hiss’ “secret sauce” has disappeared.
Instead, Brad Cook—former Megafaun bassist and collaborator with acts like Bon Iver, Whitney, and Kevin Morby—handles both bass and production, and fills the frame with ill-fitting sounds as if over-compensating. The album isn’t a mess, per se, but it is cluttered, and it often feels like Cook should’ve adhered to Coco Chanel’s rule of removing one thing before leaving the house. There are just too many elements competing for space, and none of them seem to agree which is the star.
Hiss Golden Messenger have dipped into dub textures before (2009’s “O Nathaniel,” 2012’s “Born on a Crescent Moon”) and they do so again on Surrender’s “Old Enough to Wonder Why (East Side—West Side).” But then tinny banjo plunks appear like gnats, disrupting the wide-open sense of space. Taylor’s voice, meanwhile, feels squished among layers of guitars, keys, and synths. At times, it’s difficult to make out what he’s singing—a shame, as Taylor has a knack for examining existential anxiety with honesty and empathy. On the sweeping opener “I Need a Teacher,” Taylor yearns for “beauty in the broken American moment.” With “Happy Birthday Baby,” a tender song written for his young daughter, he hopes she’ll think better of him than he does of himself.
But the arrangements of songs like “Down at the Uptown” and “Katy (You Don’t Have to Be Good Yet)” feel more in service to broad-strokes Dead-and-Dylan worship than to Taylor’s songwriting. A striking line like, “I’m a little bit lost and a whole lot of things you can’t hang with” gets lost in the anodyne folk-rock mix. Sometimes, Taylor’s lyrics seem to arrive from an entirely different record, one that’s better and more focused. His best songs put his ruminations on spirituality, family, loneliness, and humanity at the center, but here he sounds like the only thing he’s surrendered is his spotlight.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | October 3, 2019 | 6.5 | e17e1a47-a382-49fc-aad1-c449ad740361 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
In contrast with its American and British counterparts, the set positions Italian house as almost exclusively euphoric, a perfect sound to emanate from a land of chiseled Adonises and the Tuscan sun. | In contrast with its American and British counterparts, the set positions Italian house as almost exclusively euphoric, a perfect sound to emanate from a land of chiseled Adonises and the Tuscan sun. | Various Artists: Welcome to Paradise: Italian Dream House 1989-93 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23007-various-artists-welcome-to-paradise-italian-dream-house-1989-93/ | Welcome to Paradise: Italian Dream House 1989-93 | In the summer of 1989, Massimino Lippoli, Angelino Albanese, Andrea Gemolotto, and Claudio Collino made a dance track that sampled a German record (Manuel Göttsching’s 1984 proto-techno masterpiece E2-E4), got a remix from a Detroit legend (Derrick May), gave the track a Spanish title (“Sueño Latino”), and made it into a big hit in Ibiza. Few of its fans could trace the track back to its originating country, which wasn’t a glitch so much as a feature of Italian dance music of that particular era, expertly mimicking sounds and trends from elsewhere while seeming to come from—if not nowhere—then from some idealized land. In compiling Welcome to Paradise: Italian Dream House 1989-93, a twenty-two track collection of this rather fruitful five-year-period, Dutch DJ/producer Young Marco searches for a golden thread connecting them all, a defining characteristic of “Italian dream house.” Of late, it’s appeared to influence a new generation of producers. I can hear it of late in Anthony Naples’ forthcoming “Sky Flowers,” on the Early Sounds roster and the re-booted Rome imprint, Vibraphone Records.
American house music has its roots in resistance and empowerment for its queer and minority cultures and the British variant that soon followed reveled in a darker, druggier edge. Yet Italian house music, as Young Marco configures it here, is almost exclusively euphoric, the perfect sound to emanate from a land of chiseled Adonises, columnated ruins, and the Tuscan sun. Not a care from this earthly realm arises here. Almost every selection here can trace its lineage back to Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage and the evocative house productions rendered by Larry Heard (as well as the house music beginning to emanate from New Jersey), with Open Spaces’ flickering “Sunrise Paradise Garage” being a particularly luminous example, a perfect meld between dark room deep house and sun-kissed Balearic.
For a country whose greatest literary work describes *paradiso *in precise detail, such beauty is a given. And for most Italians, utopia connotes the unblemished beauty of Botticelli’s Primavera and almost every track here showcases a chord progression, an airy atmosphere, a heavenly choir of voices, or a breathless drum machine build that suggests dance music perfection. Edenic ambience wafts in on K2’s “In My Garden” and a gurgling river and that telltale loon sample flow throughout the beatific build of Last Rhythm’s “Last Rhythm (Ambient Mix).”
On the set opener, Key Tronics Ensemble’s “Calypso Of House (Paradise Mix)” is nine dreamy minutes that encapsulate every sound to come: ever-ascendant house piano, quickening house rhythms, heaving synth strings, gauzy ambience that’s revealed once the beat drops out, and a rambunctious vocal trill that punctuates the track. Even a track entitled “Paranoia” (credited to Don Pablo’s Animals, who boast no less than five singles with the word “Ibiza” in them) feels anything but.
The second volume highlights Italian dream house’s primary obsessions. Or, as two words whispered put it, “sex” and “spirit.” Not to be confused with the progressive house legend, Sasha’s sublime “A Key to Heaven for a Heavenly Trance” highlights the set, taking a pattern of tribal drums, divine sweeps of keys, and a burbling synth line that resembles “Voodoo Ray.” Similarly, while Leo Anibaldi would make his name doing dark, acid-tinged techno through the rest of the ’90s and into the 21st century, his submission “Elements” (from 1991) shows off a lush side of his productions that he would soon turn away from. Misty new age atmospheres and elegant piano lines coupled with a tough beat to make a deep house beauty.
So rich and creamy is each track here that listening straight through both sets feels almost too decadent, akin to gorging on gelato every day. There are no earthly cares to be found within the house music here, making for a sense of release even amid the spiritual release that such music originally brought its audience. Even the utterance of the word “problem” on Now Now Now’s track of the same name gets immediately swaddled in heavenly voices. It’s as if one is up on a cloud, now looking down on such difficulties of the world. | 2017-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | null | April 5, 2017 | 8.2 | e17fcf09-06a3-4b6d-8748-73c911a9abbc | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Listening to the newly expanded and finally-back-in-print edition of Jawbreaker's Dear You felt like discovering that once upon a ... | Listening to the newly expanded and finally-back-in-print edition of Jawbreaker's Dear You felt like discovering that once upon a ... | Jawbreaker: Dear You [Expanded Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4215-dear-you-expanded-edition/ | Dear You [Expanded Edition] | Listening to the newly expanded and finally-back-in-print edition of Jawbreaker's Dear You felt like discovering that once upon a time I was a giant asshole. Somewhere between teendom and quasi-adulthood, Dear You had been my jam of choice, a big slab of music as irrationally depressed and eager to rock as I was. After listening to it for days and nights and weeks, I began to work backward through the band's catalog. As these albums took prominence, Dear You dropped out of rotation, and eventually wound up on some nameless secondhand store's shelf to inflict its half-life of misery on someone else.
Coming off the yelping enthusiasm of Unfun, Bivouac, and the stellar 24 Hour Revenge Therapy-- whose songs argued the politics of being a legitimate punk-- Jawbreaker disappointed their indie-thrall fanbase by signing to Geffen for a one-million-dollar, three-album contract, and far worse, selling out their music: Dear You was a slick symphony of guitar and singer Blake Schwarzenbach's soft, post-surgical vocals.
Dear You is emo in denial; a tight-sweatered cry of loneliness, heartbreak, and wallowing in sadness that apes the band's punk roots. "Sluttering" and "Fireman" are love-as-revenge songs in the key of Sylvia Plath. "Jet Black", a paean to alienation, opens and closes with Christopher Walken's car crash monologue from Annie Hall, converting the clip's original surrealistic humor into more grist for the whiny mill. And while these songs admittedly held fast to Jawbreaker's melodic chops, it's clear the band had dulled their edge to appeal to the radio-friendly commercial punk explosion that dominated the mid-90s airwaves.
The problem with Dear You wasn't Jawbreaker's decision to renege on their long-standing anti-major-label policy, but that the album, plainly, is a dramatic step down in quality from Revenge Therapy, despite the fact that it took much longer to record. Songs often wander too long, and their lyrics strain for depth in pursuit of the album's overall sad-sack mood. Unlike Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, whose fatalistic tone ends at a cul-de-sac into rebirth, or Lou Reed's unapologetically despairing Berlin, Dear You waffles between manic and depressive, unsure of which it wants to be.
Tracks like "Chemistry", "Save Your Generation" and "Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault" do manage to inject a small dose of joy into the proceedings, but are obscured by the frantically waving arms of a drowning band. Even "Basilica", a seemingly redemptive number with a more positive outlook, meanders, droning and repeating its vaguely threatening request, "I'm asking you on a date for the rest of your life." That Dear You killed Jawbreaker is no surprise, given how little it sold by major-league standards, and how divisively fans reacted to it. The question is: What happened to the band that merged ragged perfectionism with lyrics that read like fiction?
This expanded edition offers no answers. No new ground is covered here for fans of the original release, though the inclusion of "Sister" and the Psychedelic Furs cover "Into You Like a Train" are quick and dirty little gems. The eventually tiresome "Friendly Fire" is as close to a transition between Revenge Therapy and Dear You as you're likely to find, but are also available on the band's somewhat more worthwhile Etc. collection. Only the throwaway "Shirt" has been previously unissued, and it, along with a baffling, unnecessary remake of "Boxcar", illustrates that the disintegration of Jawbreaker was not worth mourning, especially with so many bands gladly assuming their former position in the underground. | 2004-03-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2004-03-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Geffen | March 30, 2004 | 2.3 | e1860fb9-725d-4cbf-865c-9cc8a7dea407 | Christopher Sebela | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christopher-sebela/ | null |
On her second album, the New York pop songwriter broadens her sound without sacrificing brevity, fitting grander ideas into the same compact frame. It’s one of the best little pop albums of the year. | On her second album, the New York pop songwriter broadens her sound without sacrificing brevity, fitting grander ideas into the same compact frame. It’s one of the best little pop albums of the year. | Grace Ives: Janky Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grace-ives-janky-star/ | Janky Star | Grace Ives works on a miniature scale. The New York musician’s early releases include an album of chirping ringtones and a covers EP of children’s nursery rhymes. Built for simplicity and repetition, these were fertile proving grounds for the synthesizer enthusiast. Pounding with warped vocals and a buzzy bassline, “Row Row Row (Your Boat)” is transformed into something like an Arular outtake; electro-pop legend M.I.A. was, after all, the inspiration for Ives’ preferred synth, the Roland MC-505. Using only that groovebox, she wrote and produced the entirety of 2019’s 2nd, a collection of pocket-sized pop songs that packed girl-group harmonies, skittering drum-n-bass beats, and Daft Punk robotics into just 22 minutes. On Janky Star, Ives broadens her sound—adding guitar and piano, and layering her dynamic vocals—without sacrificing brevity, fitting grander ideas into the same compact frame. It’s one of the best little pop albums of the year.
On Janky Star, Ives searches for slowness and tranquility, not a small task for a musician who experiences “sensory overload” from any song over two minutes. But she sounds convincingly calm at a leisurely pace, starting from the opening synths, languid and aqueous, on “Isn’t It Lovely.” “You’re such a starry night baby/I can look up and relax,” she sings as a hypnotic mantra, like a spirit guide who’s still clinging to her own ego. “Lazy Day” slinks along an R&B groove like a CrazySexyCool B-side while she sings the praises of sobriety and the unhurried search for meaning. “Feels OK to repeat it,” she says, mindful of the pressure of constant forward momentum.
At other times, she gives in to her restless energy, like on the alt-pop romp “On the Ground.” But even here, the beat is deferential to her voice: “Hold it,” she commands, before a cascade of Omnichord-like synths kick in. But her best songs encompass both modes: “Loose,” the first single from Janky Star, starts with the familiar thuds and bleeps of her 505, her vocals syncopated like a cover of “It’s a Small World” performed in a SUNY Purchase basement. But things crack open on the chorus, her voice unspooling over breakbeats—“I’ve been loose/Every night,” she coos, snapping back to her animatronic posture after the chorus’s final directive: “Wind me tight.” The song calls back to “Mirror,” the stand out closer from 2nd, which similarly tempered the snap of her sequencer with stoned, sleepy vocals.
Her voice—versatile, elastic—bends into every role in her ever-expanding one-woman show: the nostalgic romantic watching sunsets and singing wispy falsettos on “Lullaby,” the melodramatic Valley Girl (“Like, oh my god”) on “Loose.” Justin Raisen, Janky Star’s co-producer, provides a richer backdrop for her flexible vocals, pushing beyond her Roland to include guitar, piano, and percussion. Raisen, who helped craft the sounds of Sky Ferreira, Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor, and Charli XCX, brings a similar controlled chaos to the album. “Burn Bridges” crams a bevy of styles into exactly two minutes—glimmering tro-house beats, freestyle freakouts, larger-than-life prog rock percussion—at times switching between the two within the same verse. On “Shelly,” Raisen builds out a power-pop paradise with a circular guitar groove, building from a central riff like the Go-Gos with a loop pedal. Raisen, the self-proclaimed “Dr. Dre of trash,” is a natural fit for Ives’ experimental pop, tilting the balance off-kilter with a cartoonish drum fill or helium-high backing vocals whenever things veer towards conventional pop structures.
The diversity of styles can at times make for a disjointed listen, but at 10 songs in just under 30 minutes, never a boring one. Ives writes to the mold shaped by the production style on each track; the album feels more like a collection of small, discrete episodes, rather than one serialized narrative. There’s the raspy rocker on “Shelly,” who frequents diners and has a thing for red lip liner. “I wanna 1-2-3-4-5 her,” she sings about the eponymous apple of her eye with the giddy energy of Rick Springfield or Tommy Tutone. And “Burn Bridges” isn’t just a pop song, but a song about pop. She sings the praises of the 109 organ and writes about a love song that sounds like “‘White Iverson’ but with the toms on the one” (followed by a Phil Collins–esque, tom-heavy fill). On “Back in LA,” she’s in the thrall of a woman on the opposite coast: “She turns right on red,” she sighs, a shock to any native New Yorker.
Janky Star is like a pop-up book, each song springing into a self-contained life and then winding down as quickly as it began. But there’s a recurring motif across the album, too—yearning for a life worth living, and for the stillness needed to appreciate that life; for all she’s claimed she had “f-figured out” on 2nd, she’s still searching for self-acceptance. “What a mess, what a lovely mess,” she sings on “Lullaby,” not mad, but reflective. “It’s nothing to be sad about/It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.” Ives might not be on the precipice of superstardom, but she is, in her own way, an embodiment of her album’s title: a janky star, rough around the edges but still gleaming with an irrepressible light. | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | True Panther / Harvest | June 10, 2022 | 8.4 | e18763ae-67f5-4931-ad28-05b9521ceec8 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward refine and improve their sound, creating a sequel that actually improves on the original. | Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward refine and improve their sound, creating a sequel that actually improves on the original. | She & Him: Volume Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14036-volume-two/ | Volume Two | It's really not supposed to go this way. Actors from Eddie Murphy to Don Johnson to Lindsay Lohan record albums so that we can laugh at their hubris and casually dismiss their efforts. The story is so common it's created a Hollywood archetype: the actor-turned-singer-turned-punchline. But Zooey Deschanel is rewriting the script. With She & Him's Volume One, her first collaboration with M. Ward, she proved that not only could she act, write songs, and sing, but she could do them all very well, with a sparkle of personality glinting in those big eyes and bigger voice.
Volume Two picks up almost exactly where Volume One left off, with Deschanel still playing a smart, sensitive young woman often on the unrequited end of love but never letting romantic disappointment get her down: "Sometimes lonely isn't sad," she declares on the stately opener "Thieves". She's still the headstrong heroine, though: "Why do I always want to sock it to you hard?" she wonders on "Over It Over Again", sounding as playfully frustrated as Loretta Lynn. And Ward remains content to cede her the spotlight, toiling behind the camera. He dresses her songs in deceptively simple SoCal folk rock, dusty cowboy-trail country music, and crisp Brill Building pop. The similarities to Volume One don't make Volume Two redundant, but reassuring: It's not typecasting if the role is this complex.
On the sequel, Deschanel seems more confident as a singer, songwriter, and vocal arranger. She still has more personality than range, but has learned to maneuver around the parts she can't nail in order to sell them. Transforming herself into her own version of the Watson Twins, Deschanel often backs up herself and channels 1960s country gold classics on the languid "Me and You" and the plaintive "Brand New Shoes", pointing to older styles but never sounding beholden to the past. Her ah-has and mm-hmms make her cover of Skeeter Davis' "Gonna Get Along Without You Now" sound impossibly perky, as if she's lighter for having dumped that creep, and on closer "If You Can't Sleep", Ward layers her humming into a gentle orchestra that add [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| s to the song's lullaby sweetness.
He has a lot of tricks like that up his sleeves. If Volume One seemed a bit compartmentalized, each song working one idea or genre, Volume Two sounds much more synthesized as Ward mixes so many styles into each song. It never plays like an M. Ward album, though, as he tailors the music to fit her deceptively simple songs. As Deschanel fashions a romantic metaphor out of the myth of Orpheus, Ward adds some Beach Boys orchestration to reinforce that sense of longing, that rolling snare suggesting a slow, painful look backwards. An unlikely protégé of Owen Bradley, Ward adds countrypolitan strings to many of these songs, but never crowds her vocals or steps on her lines. In fact, it's easy to forget he's even there, so that his verse on their cover of NRBQ's "Ridin' in My Car" has the force of a surprise cameo, turning the he-said/she-said story into a hipster Grease.
Even as they look to the past for inspiration-- specifically, to some never-was heyday of 60s radio-- they aren't making a period piece on Volume Two. What makes the album so distinctive isn't just the sound of her voice, the quality of her songwriting, or even the resourcefulness of his arrangements, but their joint insistence that these old sounds have as much to say nowadays as they ever did. In that regard, She & Him has given Deschanel her best role yet, one that shows off her charm and intelligence to best effect-- one that she is essentially writing for herself. | 2010-03-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-03-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | March 22, 2010 | 7.6 | e18dba61-7c4d-4d61-92d2-171f4026bc36 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Carving out an intensely introspective space in the overlap between electronic and acoustic sounds, the Los Angeles trio’s third album traffics in melancholy and occasionally ecstatic moods. | Carving out an intensely introspective space in the overlap between electronic and acoustic sounds, the Los Angeles trio’s third album traffics in melancholy and occasionally ecstatic moods. | Hundred Waters: Communicating | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hundred-waters-communicating/ | Communicating | Listening to Hundred Waters can feel like climbing into bed and pulling the duvet over you like a protective shield. The Los Angeles trio’s intimate, intricate music is perfect for when you’re longing for a safe, cozy refuge: It has the power to transport the listener to a hermetic space where there’s magic in the air and normal rules don’t apply. Nicole Miglis sings in a serene murmur, melodies twist and turn, and the lines blur between electronic and acoustic sounds. Voices sound like machines and vice versa; the moon peeks out of the shadows and rings like a bell. Hundred Waters’ music is remarkable in part because of its intense introversion, so the title of their third album, Communicating, is unexpected. Miscommunicating would have been just as fitting: These songs explore the gaps and barriers that keep us from connecting with the people we love.
Much of Communicating rings with melancholy, though there’s no anger or anxious prickle to these songs—more like a dull, lingering ache, the kind you feel when you’ve left something unsaid and lost your chance to say it. Miglis’ voice is still frequently put to textural use: The midsection of the title track is overwhelmed by warped, wordless roaring, and on “Blanket Me,” she chants the titular phrase until the individual syllables melt into meaninglessness. But Communicating also features some of her most direct lyrics and singing to date, and much of the album will undoubtedly resonate with listeners struggling to make connections or find meaning in their lives, despite their best efforts. “Prison Guard” is a futile plea for emotional liberation set to a martial beat; begging a “great defender” for relief, all she can muster is, “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.” She spends the gorgeous “Parade” wandering the streets, full of sorrow and desperate for some kind of purpose.
These songs don’t vary much in tone or tempo, but there’s a quiet flexibility to the band’s piano melodies. While the two notes hammering at the heart of “Prison Guard” throb like something out of Bing & Ruth’s catalog, “Parade” hews closer to stark takes on conventional pop—think of a cross between Fiona Apple and Imogen Heap. The latter approach is particularly satisfying, and it gives Hundred Waters room to embrace sturdier song structures without giving up much in terms of atmosphere. It only starts to falter with closer “Better,” which sounds a hair’s breadth away from anonymous “Grey’s Anatomy” soundtrack fodder.
A few songs express the album’s central themes—isolation, disconnection, existential doubt—in brighter, more propulsive ways, and it’s there that the album really shines. Lead single “Particle” is the only holdover from Currency, a stopgap EP released in May, and it’s also the only song on the album you might imagine hearing on the radio or a popular Spotify playlist. The elements that situate the song within today’s pop landscape—the kind of chipper, wordless hook you associate with the band’s label boss, a featherweight drop a few bars into the chorus—coexist peacefully with Miglis’ yearning for a partner who’s “drifting farther and farther away.” Near the song’s end, when she leaps into her upper register to howl, “I can’t hear you,” you’re hearing her at her most powerful.
“Particle” isn’t the only song on Communicating that benefits from a little extra energy. “At Home & In My Head” percolates until it explodes into a climax fueled by Zach Tetreault’s drumming; “Firelight” strikes a surprisingly optimistic note as it flips between a dreamy waltz and skyscraping digital shoegaze. And on the sparkling, shimmying outlier “Wave to Anchor,” the band opens up the throttle, digs into an honest-to-goodness 4/4 pulse, and puts its virtuosity to work in a song that builds to astronomical scale: splashy hi-hats, squealing feedback, a glowing key change—the whole nine yards. A glittering synth flies through the arrangement like a firefly with a jetpack. And while Miglis is still searching for some greater meaning—you can hear her repeatedly asking, “Who have I lived for?”—“Wave to Anchor” radiates the kind of joy and hope that are absent from much of Communicating. It’s a song that invites you to imagine what could happen if a band that has mastered cocooned whispers decided to throw back the covers and let the light in. | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Owsla | September 14, 2017 | 7.5 | e18ea0bb-e557-4b62-bec9-4277906466e9 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Good Sad Happy Bad toys with a warped minimalism that feels new for Micachu and the Shapes. The record feels intimate and casual, with soft, acoustic guitar and childlike keyboard arrangements. It is their least polished release, but even with the band’s music messily chopped, looped, and jangled, the emotional messages always ring clear. | Good Sad Happy Bad toys with a warped minimalism that feels new for Micachu and the Shapes. The record feels intimate and casual, with soft, acoustic guitar and childlike keyboard arrangements. It is their least polished release, but even with the band’s music messily chopped, looped, and jangled, the emotional messages always ring clear. | Micachu and the Shapes: Good Sad Happy Bad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21069-good-sad-happy-bad/ | Good Sad Happy Bad | Micachu and the Shapes revel in making enjoyable noise. Since their relatively conventional-sounding art-pop debut Jewellery, the band has pushed their experimentation further every new release, from crafting homemade instruments to recording live arrangements alongside orchestras. And now, just a year after releasing her harrowing avant-garde score for the film Under the Skin, Mica Levi has returned to her band to release Good Sad Happy Bad.
Perhaps in the aftermath of composing a soundtrack for a major motion picture, Levi wanted to bring simplicity back to Micachu, as Good Sad Happy Bad toys with a warped minimalism that feels new even for this band. The record counteracts the fuzzy, almost punk rock energy of their last album Never, settling for soft, acoustic guitar and childlike keyboard arrangements. Even the production of the record is spare and unedited, with warbled vocals and frequent inclusions of studio chatter on songs like "Dreaming" and "Crushed".
The record feels intimate and casual in this unrefined state, but the line between relaxed and lazy is shaky on Good Sad Happy Bad. When all the tinker-toy elements align, it works beautifully, as on "L.A. Poison" with Levi singing softly about the loneliness of urban life over mechanically looped strumming guitar and a simple kick-drum. "Oh Baby" sounds like a murky, blues-leaning lullaby, as if its keyboards are being played underwater while Levi croons above them. But the off-key, off-tempo energy of tracks like "Hazes" and "Relaxing" feel thrown together and messy, even if it was purposeful.
The biggest shift here is to be found in Mica Levi’s voice, which is strained and echoed as she sings wearily about bad feelings. You can barely understand her at times, but Good Sad Happy Bad is fundamentally a gloomy self-help record, with its assurances delivered realistically. "It’s gonna be okay," Levi repeats in a chipper, sing-song voice at the end of "Sad". On "Thinking It" Raisa Khan relays how she wants to get better at working out and being healthier so she can enjoy her old age. On "Sea Air", all Levi wants to do is breathe in the ocean air because "all that crap means nothing to [her]."
Although Good Sad Happy Bad is certainly the band’s least polished-sounding record, the combination of the scattered arrangements and Levi’s ruminations on sadness shrewdly underline the topsy-turvy feeling suggested by the title. Even with the band’s music messily chopped, looped, and jangled, the emotional messages always ring clear. "It’s only suffering," Levi sings on "Suffering", her voice suddenly lilting the phrase as the song gains tighter, harder percussion and guitar as the song nears its end. "That keeps my conscious clean." | 2015-09-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Rough Trade | September 24, 2015 | 6.9 | e197c967-fbef-4742-ba7a-1a984b12d05e | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
After a brief hiatus, the restlessly creative group returns with a compelling but disjointed record about self-fulfillment. | After a brief hiatus, the restlessly creative group returns with a compelling but disjointed record about self-fulfillment. | BROCKHAMPTON: GINGER | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brockhampton-ginger/ | GINGER | The BROCKHAMPTON boys are looking for a way forward. After releasing four albums in quick succession and forcing out their best rapper, Ameer Vann, when he was accused of sexual misconduct, the group experienced severe burnout and anxiety. So, they took a six-month hiatus to both regroup and disperse. Abstract put out a solo record and the band’s $15 million RCA deal ushered them out of their communal North Hollywood house and scattered them across Los Angeles; they now meet up at a central home studio, called the Creative House, to record. The album that came of all this upheaval is GINGER, a compelling but disjointed record loosely about self-fulfillment. Even the prettiest BROCKHAMPTON songs can feel cramped, but many of these songs, though each endowed with their little moments, are disorganized or inefficient.
GINGER was, somewhat oddly, born out of a burgeoning relationship between members of BROCKHAMPTON and the actor/performance artist/fledgling rapper Shia LaBeouf, who now leads a weekly group therapy session at Abstract’s place. As Abstract tells it, LaBeouf became something of a guiding light. “We want to make a summer album,” Abstract told GQ in June, a sentiment that has been confirmed by his group mates in recent days. He specified: “Feel-good. Not too sad and like, ‘Oh, our life sucks,’ just more like, ‘Just enjoy what’s in front of you.’”
It’s unclear whether that was a troll or a misunderstanding, but GINGER is not a feel-good summer album. There is little on this record that suggests enjoyment of anything. The mood can be boiled down to a dejected Joba verse on opener “No Halo”: “Been goin’ through it again/Been talkin’ to myself, wonderin’ who I am/Been thinkin’, I am better than him/In times like these, I just need to believe it’s all part of a plan/Lost a part of me, but I am still here.” Being here—present and accounted for, momentarily clear of the debilitating fog that is dysthymia, and usually in between traumas—is what classifies as a win on GINGER. The album is murky and often lovelorn. Pry open any verse and you’re likely to find a lyric about being neglected or counted out or abandoned at its center. It isn’t as pessimistic, jittery, or moody as iridescence but it’s still rather cheerless.
That cheerlessness isn’t a problem, in and of itself, but the writing gets bogged down by the narrow perspective. At the root, BROCKHAMPTON is a group of misfits explaining all the different ways they don’t fit in. That’s at least part of the appeal: they speak to many brands of loneliness. But they’d benefit a lot from, instead, figuring out what they have in common. This unwillingness to find some semblance of comfort in the bond they’ve made, to reconvene as an oddball in-group, feels like a huge source of their dysfunction as a unit. They are constantly trying to piece together broken personal histories amid massive success, like decorated detectives obsessing over an unsolvable cold case.
Romil, Jabari, and the rest of the BROCKHAMPTON production team keep the crew laced with weird and ear-bending beats that shift, split, or branch out enough to accommodate the myriad of performing styles. In the early stages of GINGER, things all click into place: the trilogy of haymakers at the outset—“No Halo,” “Sugar,” and “Boy Bye”—makes it seem like the crew has unlocked its full potential. The bristling cameo from UK rapper slowthai is a nice touch, too. But as the album wears on, things come undone and songs splinter into pieces.
When it comes to the BROCKHAMPTON creative process, the group has always had too many cooks in service of eclecticism. But there are moments on GINGER where it seems like each artist on a given track has their own song in mind. The title track is a broken array of vocal performances that nearly becomes grating. On “I Been Born Again,” a hookless parade of verses, the writing is cluttered and confused. Kevin used to be their star, his gravity pulling everyone into rotation around him. Even on the worst of the Saturation trilogy, there was a sense of alignment, if not continuity.
Just about everyone delivers a standout performance that’s striking at one point or another, and many members seem to sense that they’re growing (“My attention to detail is in scale with classic impressionists,” Dom McLennon raps on “If You Pray Right”). It’s just that they’re growing apart, at least musically. There is little here that suggests holism. They like to call themselves a boy band, but boy bands are, at the very least, in sync. | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Question Everything / RCA | August 23, 2019 | 6.5 | e19e8e80-4bbf-4e06-8d56-603cbd94653d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Recorded in Los Angeles, the songwriter and guitarist’s sixth solo album is ambitious yet effortless. Even his lead guitar seems almost to melt away into the delicate arrangements. | Recorded in Los Angeles, the songwriter and guitarist’s sixth solo album is ambitious yet effortless. Even his lead guitar seems almost to melt away into the delicate arrangements. | Steve Gunn: Other You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-gunn-other-you/ | Other You | Steve Gunn had a note in his head, but his voice couldn’t find it. While tracking harmonies for Other You, his sixth solo album, he was struggling to hit his mark, so producer Rob Schnapf took a recording of Gunn’s voice and digitally shifted the pitch to match the intended note, then instructed him to sing along. The proper target in place, Gunn managed to join in with his digital simulacrum—the “other you” of the title. If this is starting to feel like a very neat metaphor, this idea of aligning yourself to who you can’t yet be and finding a way to get in tune with it until it stretches you into becoming that new thing—well, welcome to Steve Gunn’s L.A. record, baby.
Like the city in which it was recorded, Other You is a sprawling and decentralized tangle of ideas, people, sounds, and, yes, vibes, all of it lit in the merlot purples and maraschino reds and Pacific Ocean blues of a Southern California sunset. It’s the most ambitious album he’s ever made, and the first one in which his guitar-playing—a singular sound that typically draws together the hand-punched tin of old-timey rag with the needle-nose scribbling of Tom Verlaine—is largely undistinguished. Where on Gunn’s earlier albums the guitar functioned as an exceptionally well-honed vessel for his personality, both the delicacy of his arrangements and the calm clarity of his band on Other You make it feel as though that same personality has been distributed across the entire ensemble; even when it’s the lead instrument, Gunn’s guitar sometimes seems to melt away. As a result, Other You sounds unlike any previous Steve Gunn album, but it’s impossible to imagine it being made by anyone else.
Gunn has said that recording in L.A. gave him the space to try out new sounds and compositional approaches. That includes bringing in a number of guest artists who buy completely into his vision. Julianna Barwick’s vocals shine like a cold sun through the dust of “Good Wind,” a perfect complement to the resolute and earthy runs Gunn pulls from his acoustic guitar; alternating between a pair of notes so close she sounds like she’s flipping over a sheet of paper, her vocals are a dome under whose safety the song’s passages are able to thrive. While Gunn sings of “Leaning on the window, feeling more alive” in “Morning River,” Ben Boye turns the ends of the lines around with his piano, as if he’s holding the words up to study them in the light. Even the gorgeous ballad “Reflection” is streaked with a screaming handful of chords from Jerry Borgé’s synth.
Like a plane taking off, Gunn’s songs move at a rapid horizontal speed while their vertical lift feels gentle and eventual. This upward draft is stronger than ever on Other You, owing in large part to Schnapf’s close-tracked production. Everyone’s parts occasionally seem to run into one another, and the album at times feels dewy, like a book left overnight on the beach. In the title track, which opens the album, Gunn sings of unearthing “precious metal memories” and taking them “down to salvage [to] find out what they’re worth.” He’s talking about how the buried self may (or may not) be of much greater value than one would think, that true potential can be plucked from the dirt. But he may as well be talking about the value of sharing the ineffable things we already know about ourselves but can’t quite see or articulate—the non-rational, difficult-to-quantify stuff that springs from the loamy soil of the self. The band here isn’t really playing together so much as they seem to be growing from the same source, like trilling koru of sound that gently roll upward and outward as they depart from Gunn’s vocals at the center of the song.
He retreats from the center in “Sugar Kiss,” the album’s sole instrumental, co-written with Mary Lattimore. As arpeggios trickle from her harp like pebbles over glass, Gunn brushes away at a 12-string guitar set so deep in the distance it virtually becomes a percussion instrument, while Schnapf uses his guitar to bow drones of feedback back and forth across the channel like he’s playing a cello. Matt Schuessler responds like Cecil McBee to the rest of the Alice Coltrane group on Journey in Satchidananda, his bass reacting to the angelic environs with a series of gulping surges that both ground the song and slacken to let it float back up.
But Gunn is not merely the ghost animating Other You’s remarkably ornate machine. The vocal melodies here are among the tenderest he’s ever written, and they carry the same sense of inevitability that he invests in his guitar lines; they sound so natural, it can be easy to overlook their formal complexity. Even when he pushes into new territory, as he does in the cosmically adrift “Reflection,” he doesn’t come across as lost so much as patiently awaiting an outcome. An underlying security, whether in himself and his abilities or in his surroundings, is at the heart of what makes Gunn’s music feel so distinct—the anxiety that exists in his catalog always seems to resolve in the musical equivalent of a centering exhale, which is really just another word for acceptance—and on Other You, the mood never wavers.
Steve Gunn isn’t the first person to take a trip to Los Angeles with the intention of shifting their perspective, only to discover that the possibility they sought was within them all along. There’s something about the way the long light on L.A. evenings paints everything it touches that compels you to find greater meaning in the moment, even if the moment is fairly ordinary; a grand context seems to demand a grand explanation. This light shines through Other You at a low angle, illuminating it like a dinner party on a terrace. Here, surrounded by friends, at ease in the gloam, suspension reigns. Things may be rough, and exhausting, but in this present moment, there is an overwhelming sweetness.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Matador | August 30, 2021 | 8 | e1a202aa-da55-4220-8961-75a780650fdb | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Following 2009's Rick Rubin-produced Music for Men, the Portland trio's fifth album was handled by UK pop mastermind Xenomania, perhaps best known for helming Sugababes and Girls Aloud's clever post-millennial bubblegum. | Following 2009's Rick Rubin-produced Music for Men, the Portland trio's fifth album was handled by UK pop mastermind Xenomania, perhaps best known for helming Sugababes and Girls Aloud's clever post-millennial bubblegum. | Gossip: A Joyful Noise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16777-a-joyful-noise/ | A Joyful Noise | The Gossip made their pop move with 2009's Rick Rubin-produced Music for Men, whose slick coat of gloss propelled the already-UK-famous Portland band into further heights. He tightened their bluesy sound into something that resembled dancepunk, funneling frontwoman Beth Ditto's unequaled soulful wail into clipped bursts of angst and joy. Despite the mechanical boxed-in feel of that album, the band kept their personality intact, producing their most listenable effort even if it wasn't always terribly original. But Music for Men wasn't exactly the bid for American stardom the trio (and their label) might have hoped for, and fifth album A Joyful Noise seems to address that directly. Here the reins are given over to UK pop mastermind Xenomania, perhaps best known for helming Sugababes and Girls Aloud's clever post-millennial bubblegum.
At first glance, it seems like business as usual: Opener "Melody Emergency" has Ditto bleating over a Led Zeppelin lurch more muscly than anything on Men. But when we get to first single "Perfect World", something feels very different. In some ways a stadium-sized rework of their biggest hit to date in "Heavy Cross", it shows how Xenomania's approach veers away from Rubin's. Where the latter turned the band's taut funk into a claustrophobic machine, here the sound is spread wide open, and the admittedly sparse band loses its concentrated strength-- an issue that plagues the rest of Joyful Noise. Xenomania's overbearing synth accents provide a new level of tactile texture, but they just as often overcook the already bland songs, so that tracks like "Into the Wild" sound like cheap jingles drained of the band's essential idiosyncrasies. Too often, Ditto's voice attempts to reach smooth plastic-soul Adele heights, stretching out syllables unnaturally, where before we could revel in her voice cracking into anguished screams.
Xenomania's touch begins to feel invasive over the course of the album, sometimes working in the band's favour-- the irresistibly slick "Move in the Right Direction"-- but more often drowning the group in detrimental cliches. "Get Lost" is an awful attempt at a *True Blue-*era Madonna pastiche, replete with a cringe-worthy chorus about "dancing to the beat of a different drum." Ditto's always been about pulling obvious bits of musical history and making them her own, but here she just feels completely out of ideas (see also her talk of "victims of love" on "I Won't Play"). The same goes for the confused "Get a Job", which aims to be a spiky electroclash jam with ill-advised preachy lyrics about a "rich girl" who "lives every day like a weekend." Hard to swallow coming from someone who lives as a touring artist.
All complaints aside, much like Music for Men, Joyful Noise is an inherently enjoyable pop album at its core, endearing even for all its missteps and pandering. It features Ditto's best-ever performance on the tender "Casualties of War", recalling Ray of Light-era Madonna (an easy touchstone for Gossip despite all their subversive politics) in its siren-like clarity of tone and voice. Her abrasive and relentless shtick is replaced by a tender vulnerability that's more heart-rending than we're used to from Gossip. "Casualties" is where Xenomania's expert studio hand works best, keeping the song restrained to a bubbling-under simmer that would have seemed impossible in the bulging veins and rushing heartbeats of their earlier work. It's enough to give hope for Gossip's future direction and their still unrealized potential as "pure" pop stars, but it's the sole promising moment on an album that ranges from average to disappointing. In the end, Joyful Noise feels like a stopgap. | 2012-06-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | June 4, 2012 | 5.9 | e1abf458-606c-4b74-abbe-d7783af7bdb6 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Roman Fl\xFCgel is one of techno's great shapeshifters, recording everything \n\ from crunching electro, drum & bass so spare ... | Roman Fl\xFCgel is one of techno's great shapeshifters, recording everything \n\ from crunching electro, drum & bass so spare ... | Dell and Flügel: Superstructure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2639-superstructure/ | Superstructure | Roman Flügel is one of techno's great shapeshifters, recording everything from crunching electro, drum & bass so spare it sounds as if it was made out of twigs and debris, and every shade of house-- from tribal to deep to proto-micro to acid revival. But Pitchfork readers without deep crates probably know him best as the creator of two of the most inescapable techno anthems of the past two years: "Gehts Noch?" (under his own name) and "Rocker" (as one half of Alter Ego). These two riff wraiths would do Angus Young and DJ Pierre equally proud.
There's very little anthemic about Superstructure, however, and even less that's rockin'. Instead, Flügel's collaboration with vibraphonist Christopher Dell turns the concept of "jazzy techno" on its head. Fading in on some liquid synth pads and gently brushed, twitchy hi-hats reminiscent of the straighter Farben tracks, the opening title track is quickly upended by a fountain of vibes from Dell. Flügel's beat constructions tease and hint at traditionally club friendly sounds like house and techno and even a kind of lopsided hip-hop without actually coming out and stating them, as Dell sprinkles runs of vibes like Pollock tossing pigment. "Habitation" recalls the starved drum & bass Flügel has made under the Eight Miles High alias, while "Miniaturisation" provides what you'd expect, an almost microtonal duet for drums and vibes that barely resolves into anything as coarse as a groove. "4 Door Body Cell" hews closer to traditional techno, but it's traditionalism pales compared to the more outre experiments, whether they congeal or not. (They usually do.)
Dell is a classically trained vibist whose insistence on repetition has put him at odds with "free" jazz orthodoxy even as it puts him in close proximity to techno. And at its best Superstructure has a hands on, jammed feeling that rubs with productive friction against the rigidity of drum machines. Superstructure is a dark but not oppressive album; the cover, featuring thin white line schematics over a solid black background captures the feeling as much as anything. Dell and Flügel have made an album that recognizes jazz as an engine for improvisation rather than organ or piano samples to be draped over a 4/4 beat. At times it reminds you of everything from the crooked spines of Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch to the astro-black portamento funk of Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band. There's no randomization function that can make an album like this. | 2006-03-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-03-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Laboratory Instinct | March 13, 2006 | 7.8 | e1b7ca57-eb68-4bc1-ad3b-ec541a28da54 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Following a 2019 episode of police harassment in front of his own building, the Detroit house legend’s latest goes hard on depth and funk, but there’s often an ache where the fun used to be. | Following a 2019 episode of police harassment in front of his own building, the Detroit house legend’s latest goes hard on depth and funk, but there’s often an ache where the fun used to be. | Moodymann: Taken Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moodymann-taken-away/ | Taken Away | If you’re black in the U.S., anything from shopping for prom clothes to being a firefighter to minding your own business in your own home can prompt people to call the cops on you. When people call in the police, the force might drag you half-naked into the street; they might pull out your tampon during a cavity search in the middle of that street; they might well kill you. In 2019, according to the Los Angeles Times, “Getting killed by police [was] a leading cause of death for young black men in America.”
This shouldn’t happen to anybody; it shouldn’t happen to one of the most gifted musicians to come out of Detroit. But because this is America, it happened to Kenny Dixon, Jr., better known as deep-house hero Moodymann, whose career spans 25-plus years and an influence that can’t be overstated. Dixon was sitting in a van outside his own building in Detroit when someone reported “suspicious behavior” and the cops rolled up with their chaos. He made it out alive. Echoes of the conflict are all over his new album.
Taken Away dispenses immersion therapy like last year’s woozy beaut, Sinner, and stinks of George Clinton like 2014’s self-titled long-player. But there’s often an ache where the fun used to be. There’s funk, in both senses of the world. “Goodbye Everybody” summons Lowell Fulson’s “Prison Bound,” swapping the original’s bluesy stomp for a roiling swamp of what sound like detuned bells and percussion that hisses like tasers. It’s closer in spirit to Erykah Badu than, say, boompty house. The crisp breaks and comfy swing of “Let Me In” could be legit Badu, or even Mary J., but Moodymann counters the grace of the (uncredited) female voices with spite: “You’ve never been a good soul to anyone/Especially me.”
Some tracks are plush. “Let Me Show You Love” is maybe the most flat-out gorgeous thing he’s made to date, a velveteen expanse of sparkling melodies and little sequin-bright effects and blissed-out whispers. The purple chords and compressed tumble of “I Need Another ____” are horny as hell, but the “relief” that Dixon and his female companions call out for sounds as material and existential as it is sexual. “Just Stay a While” lights up the room with a fiber-optic bassline and irresistible beat; a quiet-storm interlude blows through every now and then, increasing the humidity without relieving it. If the vocals were glamorous, the song could be Luomo. Instead the sentiment is: “My back’s against the wall.” And not because nobody’s dancing. “Slow Down” does just that, buoyed by overlapping vocal vamps and a warm piano riff, and it’s just the sound of summer, complete with kids enjoying themselves. Until sirens interrupt.
Most of Taken Away is fascinatingly ambivalent. A couple tracks lose their balance altogether. “I’m Already Hi” is a person-to-person skit backed up with some light jazz and scatting. It’s fine if what you want from one of the greatest house producers alive is a skit; if not, well, it’s over soon. Less funny are the album’s opener and closer, two versions of “Do Wrong” built on Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” but without much of either. Mixed deep in a midtempo shuffle of organ and tambourine and preacher calls, Moodymann sourly brings receipts to a no-good ex. “You’ve got me back in church,” he sneers, in a way that sounds more like he’d been punished than redeemed. Green was perhaps the most tender of soul singers; he also, among other cruelties, beat his pregnant wife with a boot when she refused to have sex with him. Moodymann chants, “You better find a way to love me/’Cause if you don’t, somebody else will,” while Green eggs him on with wait-a-minutes and yeahs. The groove might get your head bopping with a bad taste in your mouth, wondering if she’s better off without him.
Regardless, Moodymann remains a master of repetition as a form of challenge. In his 1996 epic “I Can’t Kick This Feeling When It Hits,” he takes a quick hit of Chic (“What am I gonna do?” from “I Want Your Love”) and copies it over and over in a feat of disco endurance; the expression shifts from ecstasy to paranoid chant to paralysis and back. He’s also an expert at tension and release. His 1999 classic “Shades of Jae” holds back the kick so long that the samples of crowd cheers seem to shimmer in desperation. Title track “Taken Away” uses both strategies—but to ruminate. Moodymann shatters the crystalline grief of Roberta Flack’s “Sunday and Sister Jones” like a brick through a window. In Flack’s telling, a reverend’s wife wails and warns God not to let her husband die, or she will too: “Lord, if you take him away,” she sings, “I don’t want to live another day.” They both pass. “Sister Jones was taken away,” Flack mourns. Moodymann picks up her phrasings and lets each one glint in the cold glint of his groove, closer in tempo and timbre to Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” than his usual hedonism. The “taken” brings to mind the endless chain of handcuffs, stretchers, coffins; the “away” becomes prison and beyond. Sirens again disrupt focus. When the hi-hat finally opens up about halfway in, it’s less a longed-for exhalation than just a moment to breathe. If you can. | 2020-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | KDJ | May 28, 2020 | 8 | e1bd0d34-6b23-4f57-b6e3-4fd91d94b0e9 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Surfing between piano-driven minimalism and hazy synth experiments, the Maryland rapper’s latest mixtape seeks the next evolution of DMV rap. | Surfing between piano-driven minimalism and hazy synth experiments, the Maryland rapper’s latest mixtape seeks the next evolution of DMV rap. | Tae Dawg: Sorry 4 Da Ooze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tae-dawg-sorry-4-da-ooze/ | Sorry 4 Da Ooze | For more than half a decade, the DMV’s street rap scene has been dominated by ominous piano melodies and skittish triplet flows. The most exciting rappers of this generation have embraced this framework while finding subtle ways to push the style forward. Think Q Da Fool, who with his 2017 mixtape Rich Shoota Vol. 2 showed that the rapid, punchline-stuffed delivery—pioneered by himself, Big Flock, and Shabazz PBG—could be stretched melodically. Or Lil Dude and Goonew, who rewired that same flow with a hushed edge on 2018’s Homicide Boyz. Or Xanman and YungManny, who branched out with a singles run that flaunted their twisted sense of humor.
Prince George’s County, Maryland’s Tae Dawg is less heralded, but has been playing with ways to open up the regional sound for some years now. With his newest mixtape, Sorry 4 Da Ooze, he lets his impulses cook. He’s just as likely to rap in a shout as a whisper, to cram as many words as possible into a punchline, or dig in his R&B bag. Outside influences mingle with homegrown ones. His ear for beats is all over the place, surfing between instrumentals that pull from more traditional piano-driven minimalism in the lane of local beatmaker Cheecho as well as those that owe more to the hazy synth experiments of DMV producers Sparkheem and Spizzledoe.
His process seems to be to just throw everything at the wall, which in the past has made for mixtapes that were as patchy as they were fascinating. Sorry 4 Da Ooze (the word “ooze” is his thing because he thinks the villain in the 1995 Power Rangers movie is cool) is not an exception, but this time the misfires are dampened by the interesting crevices Tae Dawg finds to work within. It’s rare for a track on the mixtape to be one-note—flow switch-ups happen so fast that you don’t even have the chance to be overwhelmed. On “Thirsty,” Tae Dawg quickly shifts between melodic murmurs and hearty wails. He’s not exactly a good singer, but in bursts he can make you think he is. There’s no leash on “Oozin Rambo,” as he skips from a lightning-quick barrage of violent punch-ins to a middle section where it sounds as if he’s a contestant on Silent Library, trying to scream without making too much noise.
What is predictable about Sorry 4 Da Ooze are the lyrics. Tae Dawg’s punchlines don’t have any punch to them—good thing he’s a captivating vocalist. Gun-toting threats and drug talk are fairly standard in street rap, but his are so blank and anonymous that you generally don’t notice them. When you do it’s probably for a bad reason, like his boring chant of “I fucked a bitch, I don’t like her” on “Go TF Off,” a couple of seconds that feel endless. The straightforward R&B ballad “Hallows & Caskets” puts too much focus on vague memories, missing any hint of DMV flavor.
Generally that’s not the case. Even when Sorry 4 Da Ooze strays from DMV production, Tae Dawg doesn’t let regionality escape him. A handful of trend-hopping ventures turn out surprisingly well: His racing flow elevates the played-out rage synths of “Blasting Off” and he sounds almost as comfortable as Shawny Binladen over the pulsating drill beat of “Ooze Drill.” Still, the mixtape is most effective when Tae Dawg fine-tunes the DMV sound in his mold, firing off feathery pews instead of aggressive gunshot ad-libs on “Get Out Ya Feelings” or breaking up the ordinary triplet flow chest-puffing of “Knuck If You Bucc” with a few lines that feel like they’re being rapped through a school PA system. Listening to Tae Dawg advance the sound of his region inch by inch is a reminder of what’s so fulfilling about following DMV rap. | 2023-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Ooze Gang Ent. | January 13, 2023 | 6.9 | e1bd1aeb-6790-4654-af79-bf672a40c57e | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The one-time Jesus of Cool continues his quest to chill out. | The one-time Jesus of Cool continues his quest to chill out. | Nick Lowe: At My Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10399-at-my-age/ | At My Age | No artist gets to decide how they'll be remembered. If, as seems increasingly likely, Nick Lowe ends up remembered as the guy who penned "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding" back in the early 1970s, surely the songwriter will be satisfied.
Yet fans and followers of Lowe know there's a nearly endless stream of legitimate second (or first) choices for pick of his defining moment. As a member of Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe helped bridge pub rock to punk. Lowe inaugurated the Stiff label with his single "So It Goes", and more explicitly helped pave the way for punk's indie movement by producing the Damned's epochal "New Rose". He subsequently produced key tracks for the Pretenders and several albums for Elvis Costello.
But maybe most impressive of all Lowe's feats was "The Beast in Me", a song from his 1994 comeback album The Impossible Bird, long after he had faded from pop prominence. Later that same year, the song also became the best non-stunt cover of one-time father-in-law Johnny Cash's late-career comeback. It was a cred-boosting number all around, and proved once and for all Lowe's worth as a songwriter in the classic sense rather than just a snide wit with an ear for hooks. His nickname "Basher" stemmed from his ability/compulsion to just crank out songs, but The Impossible Bird and songs like "The Beast in Me" showed a more considered, thoughtful, patient side to Lowe.
Fittingly and full circle, in many ways Lowe owes this mellow change of direction to "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding". Curtis Stigers covered the song on the soundtrack to "The Bodyguard", and in Lowe's own words it was like someone suddenly dumped a bag of money on his doorstep. Free from commercial considerations, Lowe started exploring his love of classic country, soul, r&b and crooner jazz, a path that continues with the new At My Age.
There's been some talk of this most recent stage of Lowe's career as being too sentimental, or sans balls. But while Lowe's hardly up to his old tricks, his new tricks have more than their share of pleasures. If Lowe used to attack pop songs with a punk's cynicism and an ironic streak a mile wide, these days he exudes the illusion that he's settled down and settled in when in fact he's been happily exploring formalism with a sly wink. By his account, he started taking his guitar out to the country and playing old dancehalls, letting the new material breath and live a little until it resembled the pre- and early-rock era he aimed to emulate.
In fact, both Lowe and his press materials have made a big deal about distinguishing the covers from the originals contained on At My Age, and Lowe's last few records have made a similar game of spotting the genuine classic amidst the songs that simply sound like genuine classics. It's a cleverly subversive strategy in its own right, the grey-haired and grown-up ex-punk making music his dad would have liked, though experience has added an air of increased authenticity to songs such as "A Better Man" and the almost imperceptibly skanking "Long Limbed Girl".
Indeed, now Lowe is 58, both his parents have passed, and he's an unlikely first time dad, so it's somewhat hard to imagine him twisting the earnest sentiments of Charlie Feathers' "A Man in Love" to suit his former sarcastic mode. Of course, Lowe can still be funny, too, as he is on "The Club", which begins "If you've ever had someone come along/ Reach in, pull out your heart and break it/ Just for fun/ As easy as humming a song/ Join the club." On "People Change" (which features Chrissie Hynde and some nice Stax horns), he basically dismisses the call of nostalgia with a blithe but affable declaration of "People change/ That's the long and short of it."
"Now, you say those times you had were never that many/ Just be thankful you had any/ And cut yourself a slice of reality," Lowe gently advises, and he seems to have taken his own advice and moved on.
At his age, Lowe's still young enough to get away with making music in his former mode, but he's old enough to know better. Instead of looking to the recent past for inspiration, he's looked to the even more distant past, if only because it's the music that-- square or not-- currently makes him the most happy and content. And for 33 minutes or so, if you follow Lowe's lead and let loose any baggage you might be carrying, you're likely to be as happy as he is, too. | 2007-07-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2007-07-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Yep Roc | July 12, 2007 | 7.2 | e1c41545-6312-4426-a950-100041d7200c | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The Chilean-German producer’s steely, slinky polyrhythms are a repudiation of borders and a celebration of the freedom of movement. | The Chilean-German producer’s steely, slinky polyrhythms are a repudiation of borders and a celebration of the freedom of movement. | Matias Aguayo: Support Alien Invasion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matias-aguayo-support-alien-invasion/ | Support Alien Invasion | Electronic music has long loved its intergalactic fables, but Matias Aguayo’s Support Alien Invasion has nothing to do with science fiction. No “Cosmic Cars” or Deep Space here: The title of the Chilean-German producer’s fourth album is a repudiation of borders and a celebration of the freedom of movement. The album is a celebration of movement, full stop: Propelled by wave after wave of polyrhythmic hand percussion, these are some of the wriggliest, ripplingest drum tracks Aguayo has ever created.
Years ago, Aguayo was a member of Closer Musik, a duo whose winsome minimalism helped define the Kompakt label’s pop-ambient era. For the past 14 years, as a solo artist, he has gradually moved away from house and techno, at least as they’re typically understood, toward a more expansive—and inclusive—vision. He had a minor hit in 2008 with “Minimal,” a playful rebuke of minimal techno’s tick-tock tedium; on 2009’s Ay Ay Ay and 2013’s The Visitor he focused largely on his own voice, layering chants and beatboxed rhythms into supple Afro-Latin grooves.
Just as important as his stylistic innovations is what he’s accomplished with his label Cómeme (Spanish for “eat me”), which he and cofounder Avril Ceballos have spent a decade developing into a platform for alternative dance music from the margins of the global club scene. What began as a pan-Latin concern has gradually expanded to encompass artists from Johannesburg, Bucharest, and beyond. Support Alien Invasion is a co-release between Cómeme and Belgium’s Crammed Discs, which seems fitting; since 1981, Crammed has blurred the lines between the European avant-garde and its allies around the globe.
This is Aguayo’s first all-instrumental album, which might be surprising, given its political subtext. But the seriousness of the subject matter is plainly audible in the music’s steely tone. Aguayo’s productions have frequently flashed a sly sense of humor, but the mood here is driven, focused, heads-down. His drum programming is as slinky as ever, but there’s a newfound force to it; his drums could double as battering rams. Glowering rave stabs give “2019” the menacing air of European hardstyle over hard-charging polyrhythms that flout the hegemony of the four-to-the-floor groove. On “We Have Seen Another World,” the bass synth blares like a warship’s warning siren. “Insurgentes” is slow and menacing, made all the more ominous by the fact that there’s so little to it—just a side-winding, minor-key synth melody; in place of drums, just steady, time-keeping handclaps, as though the song’s titular guerrillas were counting down to a pre-dawn assault.
Some tracks are subtler. In the “The Fold,” the opening song, interwoven drums and queasy, carousel-like synth streaks establish the unsettling mood that permeates the album, drawing you deep into his imagined borderland. Tonally, it’s a little like stepping from brilliant sunlight into a shuttered room: Your eyes struggle to adjust to the gloom, but minuscule variations of gray soon become clear. Aguayo can be playful, too: The Errorsmith-like “Laisse-moi parler” is sculpted around a bass synth, halfway between a growl and a sigh, that writhes like an outlandish Claymation creation.
Whether in protest or celebration, the album could have benefited from some vocal tracks. “Between the Risings,” a gloomy drone cut, doesn’t add much to the overall picture, and by album’s end, Aguayo seems to run out of things that can be expressed with drums alone. One example of where he might have gone with this material can be found in his own single “Rain,” from late last year. Its shuffling triplet drums are cut from the same cloth, but there, he turned to a South African singer named Mujaji the Rain, a fixture on Johannesburg’s feminist and queer scene, whose woozily ecstatic vocals in English and Zulu—a supplication to the clouds, rain dance as erotic metaphor—make the song unusual. It’s not what she sings, but how she sings it: She intones her lines with an emotion so rapturous it feels almost dangerous; there’s a real sense of things spilling over, of a pleasure that can’t be contained. In its joyful patchwork of identities, the song invoked the kind of communal experience that can’t be restricted by lines on a map. At its best, Support Alien Invasion picks up that cry, wordlessly—a rain dance calling down the force that will wash all borders away. | 2019-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Cómeme / Crammed Discs | May 28, 2019 | 7.3 | e1c4d27a-c4ac-4acf-9d51-4a4596afa805 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The duo of Adam Wiltzie (also of Stars of the Lid) and Dustin O’Halloran take their cosmic drones to the score for a French erotic thriller called Iris. | The duo of Adam Wiltzie (also of Stars of the Lid) and Dustin O’Halloran take their cosmic drones to the score for a French erotic thriller called Iris. | A Winged Victory for the Sullen: Iris OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22731-iris-ost/ | Iris OST | The music Adam Wiltzie made with Stars of the Lid, and later with the pianist Dustin O’Halloran as A Winged Victory for the Sullen, was often epic in scope. The cosmic drones both those groups utilized were well suited for soundtracking visual moments that showcased how primordial those sounds felt. Even though the swagger was always turned down a notch in the more piano-focused music of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, an element of the size and drama remained. As calm and ruminative they could be, Wiltzie and O’Halloran seemed at the very least poised to craft sounds that begged for visual accompaniment. They dipped their toes in the visual world with their score for Wayne Mcgregor’s delightfully modern dance piece ATOMOS. Now, the duo have decided to tackle the score for Iris, a French erotic thriller directed by Jalil Lespert (whose most recent feature was the Yves Saint Laurent biopic).
Now, stop me if you’ve seen this movie before: femme fatale goes missing in the middle of the night, her mild-mannered banker husband dangles at the age of sanity, and between them a mysterious rake at the center of the mystery. This plot borders on Mad Libs, and of course, Iris is just slightly meatier, but it doesn’t avoid the essential fact that it is a boilerplate drama. Good music and good musicians have been attached to bad films for years, (Will anyone throw shade at Philip Glass for scoring The Fantastic Four?) but this is a bit of an odd project for Wiltzie and O’Halloran to tackle. Iris does not exactly have the makings of a blockbuster, or the trappings of something more high-minded, and in effect it drags their music into schmaltz.
The score was recorded alongside a 40-piece string orchestra at Magyar Radio in Budapest, but the writing sessions happened before filming began, mostly on modular synthesizer, and the score still bears a slight rigidity based on the way it was first crafted. There is something curiously granular about the way they’ve organized the instruments, so that they function more as discrete parts than as an orchestra. The music itself is often timid and generic, as if the pair are afraid to allow their drones to stretch out. A few pieces, like “Galerie” and “Le Renversement” conjure their idiosyncrasies, if just for a flash. Those tracks strike the balance between theatricality, understatement, and experimentation, reminding me of Burning Star Core’s elegant drone. But overall, the compositions are nebulous and merely pretty in a way that feels almost rote. The separate songs spill into each other, without differentiation, or pace. There is very little difference between songs like “L'embauche” or “Flashback Antoine,” where a rumbling drone is given a sprinkling of pleasant string arrangements. This agreeable sameness infects much of the score, turning the voices of two inimitable musicians into hack work for hire, churning out glossy tones for images of cheap thrill and intrigue. | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | January 12, 2017 | 5.9 | e1c770f5-82f4-472b-a25c-3539b76692f8 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
After 13 years, Anohni gets the band back together for a soulful and intense record that provides a safe place to grieve nothing less than the destruction of the planet. | After 13 years, Anohni gets the band back together for a soulful and intense record that provides a safe place to grieve nothing less than the destruction of the planet. | ANOHNI and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anohni-and-the-johnsons-my-back-was-a-bridge-for-you-to-cross/ | My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross | In the years since Anohni’s crushing warning of “4 Degrees,” the global temperature has become perilously close to the point of no return. We just experienced what were likely the hottest days in recorded history. That’s to say nothing of the renewed attacks on trans people, as the few political gains made in the community are jeopardized or eroded altogether through voluminous anti-trans legislation across the U.S. and intensifying legal backlash in the UK. When the Academy of Motion Pictures failed to invite Anohni to perform her nominated song about climate change, she posted an open letter, expressing a desire to “maximize her usefulness” as an artist. But it’s hard to do that in an increasingly polarized world that’s as hostile as ever towards people like her.
So Anohni did what any of us would do: She called her label and said, “I’d like to make a blue-eyed soul record.” It’s an unexpected prompt, but one Anohni hoped would bring out something personal in her voice. She was raised in the South of England on the slick crooning of Boy George and Alison Moyet, artists who mimicked the sound of Black American soul musicians overseas. “I’m just trying to be honest about where my voice… comes from,” Anohni told The Atlantic in response to the complicated history of blue-eyed soul. “And also say ‘thank you,’ because [those voices] saved my life.” She got together with producer Jimmy Hogarth—known for his work with British soul singers like Amy Winehouse and Duffy—and riffed on a decade’s worth of ideas while Hogarth played guitar. She drew on past memories: a meeting with iconic trans activist Marsha P. Johnson shortly before her death, conversations with Lou Reed before his, and her time as a co-founder of the Blacklips performance collective, whose recordings were organized into a compilation earlier this year. My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross—her first album with her band the Johnsons in 13 years—meets this precarious moment with a gritty record that provides a safe place to grieve nothing less than the destruction of the planet. It brings a voice so often described as “otherworldly” back down to Earth.
The backward-looking sound of My Back Was a Bridge sounds nothing like a Culture Club or Yaz record, though. Instead, it takes thematic and musical inspiration from the Marvin Gaye albums that inspired that subsequent generation of soul singers. If it’s daring to make a blue-eyed soul album in 2023, it’s even more provocative to attempt a modern-day What’s Going On within the trappings of blue-eyed soul. On this record, it’s not so much an attempt to provoke as an earnest exploration of Anohni’s vocal identity. These songs sound organic, often like they were recorded live in the studio with barely any reverb, vocal processing, or production flourishes. Anohni’s voice—and its origin story—is powerful enough to carry them alone.
The latest iteration of the Johnsons consists of notable session musicians, including Brian Eno associate Leo Abrahams and drummer Chris Vatalaro. With a band this tight, fleshed out with horns from William Basinski and strings from Rob Moose (whose arrangements most directly recall David Van De Pitte’s laconic lines on What’s Going On), Anohni has room to improvise, stretching her voice in new directions. “It Must Change” and the gospel-adjacent slow burner “Can’t” capture Anonhi’s first vocal takes and actively benefit from that lack of fussiness—there are even some joyous ad-libs on the latter’s outro, in between cries of “I don’t want you to be dead!” For someone so famously meticulous—she’s attuned to the tiniest of changes in her sound mixes—the immediacy is invigorating.
The soothing and somewhat uneasy “It Must Change” steadily builds to its final blow: “No one’s getting out of here/That’s why this is so sad.” That line sums up one of the album’s major themes—taking stock of what we’re losing by continuing to exploit the environment. “Go Ahead” essentially dares those in power to fully destroy the world, capped by a lemur-sampling guitar freakout that would make Lou Reed proud. Then Anohni pays him tribute directly on the next song, “Sliver of Ice,” recounting a discussion in which Reed described the novel sensation of chewing ice. Even the simple joys are at stake.
As on previous records, Anohni eventually turns the gaze upon herself; it’s not necessarily tender, but it’s more compassionate than the way she’d ask herself, “How did I become a virus?” On “It’s My Fault,” she sings, “It’s my fault, the way I broke the Earth,” but leaves room to acknowledge both what she’s losing and her own complicity in its loss: “I ache here, I take here.” Several songs lament the feeling of being too immersed in capitalism to figure out a better path: “Now everything’s gone to the floor/And all I ever want is more.” Even though it’s no one individual’s fault, it’s hard not to internalize the propaganda suggesting otherwise. There aren’t any answers, and for an artist whose most enduring revelations are declarative statements (“I wanna see them burn,” “I’ll grow back like a starfish”), it’s a heavy adjustment.
The internal shaming makes the outward rage of “Scapegoat” all the more effective. On a rare song that explicitly, specifically attacks transphobia, Anohni woozily exaggerates her vibrato and steps into the role of her oppressors. Her narrator flips surface-level sentiments of support—“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from”—into the very reasons why someone is “so killable,” softening the blow with a few ironic refrains of “it’s not personal.” The triumphant guitar at the end just rubs it in.
How do we move forward from cynicism and devastation? Anohni has talked about the role of burnout in societal collapse, saying to the Atlantic: “All they care about doing is making sure that no one gets themselves together to have a broader conversation about the fact that malevolent figures are making decisions that [operate] like ushers of deaths into all of our communities.” There’s no space for mourning in a society hell-bent on overwork. If, as Anohni declares in the liner notes, “it’s time to feel what is really happening,” there’s not exactly time to feel it. That’s the use case for My Back Was a Bridge: It’s post-protest music, made stronger for refusing to endorse personal solutions to systemic problems.
The final two track titles, then, act as call and response: Why am I alive now? So you can be free. With this record, Anohni aims to be that bridge for others the way everyone from Boy George to Marsha P. Johnson inspired her. In maintaining the legacy of activist and musical icons, in acknowledging what has and hasn’t changed since Marvin Gaye sang about ecology 50 years ago, there’s space to mourn what’s already lost and a little room for possibility, too. The bridge does not necessarily lead to an idealistic ecofeminism utopia—for that, we may “need another world,” and we probably won’t get one. If the destination of that bridge is just a place to grieve, that’s good enough. | 2023-07-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Secretly Canadian | July 10, 2023 | 8.7 | e1c9f8a0-8d1a-49bd-9b2b-ab18d19f3333 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Following her Drive My Car soundtrack, the Japanese composer again links up with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi; this time, her ambiguous, atmospheric pieces are even more central to the narrative. | Following her Drive My Car soundtrack, the Japanese composer again links up with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi; this time, her ambiguous, atmospheric pieces are even more central to the narrative. | Eiko Ishibashi: Evil Does Not Exist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eiko-ishibashi-evil-does-not-exist/ | Evil Does Not Exist | Eiko Ishibashi and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi both revel in the unresolved. Ishibashi’s music has flitted between toy-box art punk, wide-open free jazz, zig-zagging classical piano, and dreamy industrialism, arriving now at a tense, quietly graceful form of musique concréte in which it’s never obvious what’s coming next. Hamaguchi, meanwhile, has steadily built a body of work delving into the quotidian unknown; the most mundane moments in his films hide the possibility for strange twists, vulnerable revelations, and open-hearted catharsis. Ishibashi’s soundtrack for Hamaguchi’s acclaimed 2021 film Drive My Car not only offered a sweet, sighing counterbalance to the film’s winding search for closure, but also delivered some of Ishibashi’s downright prettiest music yet. It was so successful that the two have teamed up once again, this time for a project of a very different nature.
Ishibashi wrote the Drive My Car score based on visuals sent to her by Hamaguchi, along with reference points (a theme song in the vein of Henry Mancini; music that sounds “like a landscape,” she told Variety). But Evil Does Not Exist took shape more holistically. The project began when Ishibashi asked Hamaguchi for imagery to accompany a new live performance she was working on, to be titled Gift. After a visit to her studio a few hours outside Tokyo—where, amid the tranquil surroundings, the two discussed the relationship between cities and nature—Hamaguchi began writing a story about a small rural community that becomes disturbed when a glamping company moves in and threatens to contaminate their water supply. Hamaguchi ended up shooting an entire film around the narrative, and in turn, Ishibashi fleshed out her music to match it.
Evil Does Not Exist isn’t a plot-heavy film; as the glamping resort plans how to set up shop in the village, Ishibashi’s music—the secret heart of the story—navigates the uneasy balance between the peacefully snow-covered countryside and the awkward cityfolk trying to interject themselves into its ecosystem. On “Hana V.2,” murky electronic tones bubble like pockets of air in pitch-black tar. Every time the track seems to settle, something interrupts, like lush washes of strings or a sharp piercing tone that returns again and again. “[Ishibashi] doesn't allow you to feel safe while you're listening to her music,” Hamaguchi recently told the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, describing how the composer’s music “seems to continuously develop without ever becoming conclusive.” This constant feeling of being on edge suits Hamaguchi’s own muted, close-to-the-chest rhythms.
Ishibashi deploys a number of subtle sounds to achieve this unsettling effect. On “Fether,” dissonant piano notes float over a shimmering metallic tone that refracts about itself like a spinning quarter. “Smoke” swells to a queasy din with moaning brass and pitter-pattering drums courtesy of regular collaborator Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, while the morbid “Deer Blood” follows a circular string melody that slowly tumbles into a dazed loop of mourning woodwinds. Ishibashi’s acoustic sounds convey this sense of the natural world pleading for its life: The title theme, which appears twice, opens the film on a long tracking shot gazing up at the sky through the trees, their skinny branches both powerful and fragile. Ishibashi, with the help of partner Jim O’Rourke on guitar, evokes the woods’ sorrow with a string theme that dips in and out between uncertainty and weeping beauty.
In Hamaguchi films, music often plays a critical, yet subservient role: When musical themes do emerge, they serve as emotional rudders to steer the long periods of silence that sit between. On screen, Evil Does Not Exist routinely cuts off the music mid-track. On record, though, Ishibashi’s disembodied chamber music is allowed to fully breathe, following her themes as far as the path will allow, even if they never quite reach clear conclusions. The cloudier nature of Ishibashi’s score leaves it feeling less like a standalone piece than the soft, jazzy pop of her Drive My Car soundtrack. But as a mirror to Hamaguchi’s tale of creeping environmental anxiety, Ishibashi’s ghostly music makes a rich companion. | 2024-07-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Drag City | July 3, 2024 | 7.5 | e1e2777f-dcc5-48e4-9394-1d347c1101d1 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Featuring members of Merchandise, the Ukiah Drag, and Uniform, these psych jams evoke a prog-inflected, Madchester-soaked record. They are unafraid to throw in any sound just to watch it whirl around. | Featuring members of Merchandise, the Ukiah Drag, and Uniform, these psych jams evoke a prog-inflected, Madchester-soaked record. They are unafraid to throw in any sound just to watch it whirl around. | Coca Leaf: Deep Marble Sunrise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coca-leaf-deep-marble-sunrise/ | Deep Marble Sunrise | Dig your way through the sprawling catalogs of Coca Leaf’s members (Uniform’s Ben Greenberg, ZZ Ramirez of post-psych rumblers the Ukiah Drag, and David Vassalotti and Carson Cox of Merchandise) looking to sniff out early signs of Deep Marble Sunrise’s wee-hours splatterdelica, and you’re bound to come up a little short. Even in their dubby, drum machine-assisted, “genres are not for us” days, Merchandise never sounded quite so out there; The Ukiah Drag’s more traditionally psychedelic work might be the closest analogue, and even that tends to work more in grays and blues than the full-spectrum explosion on display here. Deep Marble Sunrise is a prog-inflected, Madchester-soaked Spirograph of a record: expansive, exuberant, and unafraid to throw in any sound just to watch it swirl around.
Gliding in across a pool of sputtering rhythm and silverfish synths, “Riding Ice” sounds like the first minute of Miles Davis’ immortal “Shhh/Peaceful.” Soon enough, Ramirez grabs a mic, intoning in a kind of down-tuned half-rap, like a pirate broadcast of Frankie Knuckles’ immortal “Baby Wants to Ride” edging its way into KJAZ Fusion Fridays. It gets weirder from there. Across 37 distended minutes, Deep Marble Sunrise trips through Floydian inner-space, mid-aughts Baltimore art-squelch, heavy-lidded psych, spy movie soundtracks, you name it. The ease with which they move through these disparate styles, juxtaposing and reassembling as they go, is a marvel to listen to.
Deep Marble Sunrise is the product of some deep, purposeful ego dissolution. Carson Cox—who, as Merchandise’s frontman, certainly counts as Coca Leaf’s most public face—busies himself behind the drumkit and beyond the sliced-up Patti Smith sample rippling through the its opening track, Ramirez has the record’s only vocal turn. That no clear leader emerges here is certainly the goal: there’s a loose, improvisational feel to even the most multi-layered tracks here that mostly suggests four undoubtedly talented folks in a room, rolling tape and hoping for the best. All but one track here—ghostly piano interlude “Twilight Haze”—roll on past the six-minute mark, and the extra time allows them ample opportunity to dance their way out of their constrictions. Cox’s persistent rhythms, matched with Ramirez’s spherical low-end, help keep their fellow travelers from flying too afield; rather than shooting directly towards the bardo, Coca Leaf opt for controlled chaos, maintaining a free-floating feel without untethering themselves completely.
Late LP low-light “Marbled Sunset” takes a touch too long to achieve liftoff, while the aforementioned blip “Twilight Haze”—wedged between the icy “No Light Bleeds the Den” and the troubled groove of “Riding Ice”—never even gets off the ground. The extra oomph of their vocal work (sampled and otherwise) gives “Riding Ice” and “New Soft Dawn” makes one long for a few more voices stretched across the orbit. But considering the uncharted territory Coca Leaf survey, it’s only natural to hit a few bumps along the way. Not to underestimate any of these guys, but until now, it’s seemed pretty clear where their skills lie: Merchandise’s widescreen emotions, Ramirez’s subterranean scrim, Greenberg’s blown-out canon fodder. As it turns out, though, it’s this collective willingness to confound expectation, to not only dabble in some new sounds but to dive into them headlong, that sets off Deep Marble Sunrise. Surely this lot doesn’t know how to make freewheeling interplanetary molly-gargling party-prog—ah, but they do. | 2017-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Wharf Cat | July 18, 2017 | 7.1 | e1ed5d17-5a8b-4a5c-8ce0-d9c43089e135 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The punk trio’s unfussy production and precise vocal harmonies are a testament to their well-earned longevity. | The punk trio’s unfussy production and precise vocal harmonies are a testament to their well-earned longevity. | The Coathangers: The Devil You Know | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-coathangers-the-devil-you-know/ | The Devil You Know | When the Coathangers played their first show at an Atlanta house party in 2006, they could barely play their instruments. What began as an excuse to get rowdy with friends quickly evolved into a self-titled debut album with lawless, skull-smashing potency. Thirteen years later, the Coathangers have developed their riotous, lo-fi early work into a more harmonious sound without losing their spiritual connection to the unprocessed simplicity and belligerence of their chaotic origin story. Sixth studio album The Devil You Know is a collection of glorious cassette-tape jams with unfussy production, tight melodies, and precise vocal harmonies. It fits together as easily as a toddler’s jigsaw puzzle.
On "Bimbo," a peppy guitar riff and drum loop bop along under the sweet-toned vocal stylings of guitarist Julia Kugel. The song then shifts into more jagged riffs to support drummer Stephanie Luke’s throaty garbles. The vocal interplay is a hallmark of the Coathangers’ sound, and their instincts when wielding it are near flawless.
A good Coathangers song proves that slick arrangements can facilitate blunt messages. Substance abuse has regularly punctuated their lyrics: "Adderall," a desperate ode to prescription-drug dependency from 2014’s Suck My Shirt, stands as one of their best songs. The new album’s “Step Back” offers a quieter but doomed depiction of the pain and helplessness of addiction. Over scratchy guitar chords and Meredith Franco’s bassline, Kugel reaches out to a loved one in crisis: “You’ve been gone too long,” she sings, “and I want you back.” Her fragile performance at first seems like a soothing anecdote—dissolution of the human spirit never sounded so desirable. Yet when Kugel hits the ethereal “ooooohs” on the song’s hook, her tenderness dissolves, as though the addict has finally slipped out of the arms of care.
The album’s melodic strengths can occasionally become a weakness, and at times a little more of that early rawness would have been appropriate. The creeping "Stranger Danger," for instance, could have used some extra muck on Franco’s bass to punctuate its horror-movie flavor. But this rare sense of caution can’t collapse a well-formed set that ratifies the band’s unflinching code of ethics. When asked to rank the group’s previous albums by Noisey last year, Kugel ranked them in reverse order. On The Devil You Know, their evolution continues. | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Suicide Squeeze | March 20, 2019 | 7.6 | e1eec38f-26c8-4da8-a4b0-746a88120d3f | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The New York electronic musician fashions an evocative tribute to Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, conjuring the flux of gender and desire in shape-shifting sounds. | The New York electronic musician fashions an evocative tribute to Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, conjuring the flux of gender and desire in shape-shifting sounds. | Gavilán Rayna Russom: The Envoy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gavilan-rayna-russom-the-envoy/ | The Envoy | While any music might be speculative fiction—an answer to the question, “What if the world sounded like this?”—experimental electronic music twined itself to science fiction from the start. The first movie to have a completely electronic score was 1956’s Forbidden Planet, blazing a trail leading through Wendy Carlos’ A Clockwork Orange and Mica Levi’s Uncanny-Valley-of-the-Dolls experiments for Under the Skin. Gavilán Rayna Russom has been exploring strange new worlds under her own name and various aliases for more than 20 years, but The Envoy is a particularly concise dispatch. Her early records, like 2003’s El Monte (made with Delia Gonzalez) and Black Meteoric Star’s 2009 self-titled debut, sprawled as they gradually unfurled tangled kosmische and techno webs in single takes. As Russom became an occasional member of LCD Soundsystem, her own releases grew rougher and tougher, sounding closer in spirit to the Long Island Electrical Systems label and New York’s travelling poly-everything Unter parties.
The Envoy explores different territory: Ursula K. LeGuin’s outrageously fascinating 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, in which an ambassador from an interstellar equivalent of the UN explores a frozen planet populated by otherwise agender beings who periodically flux anatomically between male and female, depending on who strikes their fancy. Then they fuck. “As someone whose experience of gender has been complex, layered, and has tended to exist completely outside all social norms and categories,” Russom explained in a statement announcing the album and her gender transition, “I felt I was being seen.”
She’s put that vision into practice, developing nine lovely tracks in tribute to LeGuin’s masterpiece. Opener “Changelings in the Human Cradle” arrives in a brief bloom of scratch and haze, a rocket settling into a puff of ice dust. Closer “Winter” gradually crystalizes into angles of echoing piano chords, gathering stillness around itself. Between them, the album discovers unctuous sinews of industrial dub in “Strength Out of the Dark” and “I Bleed I Weep I Sweat”; on headphones, these tracks might tickle the ear, but when played loud in a room, they storm. “Place Inside the Blizzard,” whose title references an interzone in the book that is populated by suicides and ice-bladed grass, casts an unshakable chill. It’s like ASMR for feeling lonely. Melancholic respites like the Budd-like beauty “Center of Time” and the eerie title track are the sonic equivalent of those moments reading LeGuin’s book when you simply must close your eyes and let the brain unspool.
Much like in The Left Hand of Darkness, though, the true revelations come via making contact. In Russom’s case, it’s with a pair of celebrated ancestors. “Discipline of Presence” is a tense set piece for a full brass ensemble courtesy of Peter Zummo, a collaborator of Arthur Russell (who himself knew a thing or two about queer new sound worlds), who Russom met while touring and recording Russell’s Instrumentals. Zummo’s brass heralds something unknowable but certain as it rises through Russom’s fog; it’s imperial yet sort of shapeless. But “Kemmer” is the album’s true heart. Named for the temporal-sexual moment when LeGuin’s beings transform, the track is graced by Cosey Fanni Tutti’s intonation of Russom’s provocative texts. Cosey is that rarest of creatures, an underappreciated icon. Finding her and Russom together in this world is a great comfort to ours, in which at least 331 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered around the world between last fall and September, as waters rise and land burns. We need these partnerships, these connective visions, so that we might see a future for ourselves. | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ecstatic | December 2, 2019 | 7.8 | e1f5603e-89fb-4e5c-8e8d-ecd2262a7597 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On its first album in over a decade, the UK prog band embraces a newly collaborative process, setting an atmosphere of creeping tension and volatility. | On its first album in over a decade, the UK prog band embraces a newly collaborative process, setting an atmosphere of creeping tension and volatility. | Porcupine Tree: Closure / Continuation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porcupine-tree-closure-continuation/ | Closure / Continuation | The title of Porcupine Tree’s Closure/Continuation reads like a prompt from a choose-your-own-adventure novel that the authors haven’t finished writing yet. The UK prog-rock band’s eleventh studio album comes after more than a decade of silence, a hiatus during which founder and sole constant member Steven Wilson made five solo records. Between those increasingly non-proggy albums and a steady side gig remixing classic albums, Wilson seemed content. But the gravitational pull of Porcupine Tree has yanked him back into orbit—for the time being, at least. “I genuinely don’t know whether this is closure or the start of another continuing strand of the band’s career,” Wilson told The Guardian in March. On Closure/Continuation, this uncertainty arises through a rediscovered sense of musical volatility, a welcome rejoinder to 2009’s tedious, burnout-induced The Incident.
Wilson started Porcupine Tree in 1987 as something slightly more than a joke but considerably less than the wildly ambitious band it became. Hand-dubbed demo tapes with names like Tarquin’s Seaweed Farm and Love, Death & Mussolini were cheeky satires of England’s stuffy progressive rock tradition, but like Jethro Tull’s accidental classic Thick as a Brick, they also utilized its form. By 1996’s Signify, Porcupine Tree had added keyboardist Richard Barbieri, bassist Colin Edwin, and drummer Chris Maitland, and the presence of collaborators helped hone Wilson’s exploratory pieces into sharp rock songs. The band reshaped itself once again when Wilson fell in love with Opeth’s Still Life and struck up an alliance with their frontman, Mikael Åkerfeldt. The loose trilogy of 2002’s In Absentia, 2005’s Deadwing, and 2007’s Fear of a Blank Planet bears the mark of that friendship, augmenting the band’s tightly wound prog with crunching, metallic riffage. Future King Crimson drummer Gavin Harrison replaced Maitland behind the kit on those records, and his pummeling yet dexterous playing suited the heavier material well.
When Porcupine Tree departed the Royal Albert Hall stage on October 14, 2010, Wilson knew it would be their last show for an indefinite period. Barbieri and Harrison, who by then completed the band’s core trio, had not been informed. “You can’t help but feel bitter and hurt,” Barbieri told The Guardian, and their reunion on Closure/Continuation led to a reshaping of the band’s creative process. Despite recording their parts remotely, Wilson, Barbieri, and Harrison worked in closer collaboration than ever before. Of the seven songs on the standard edition of the album, only “Of the New Day” was penned solely by Wilson—a stark contrast to the writing credits of every other Porcupine Tree record. The three musicians frequently sound like they’re working through their decade of estrangement in real time, giving the songs a creeping, anxious tension.
The jarring bass riff that kicks off album opener “Harridan” sets the tone. Wilson plays three repetitions of the off-kilter line without accompaniment before Harrison’s skittering beat and Barbieri’s painterly washes of synth join the fray. When the vocals come in, Wilson defies any intimation of catchiness, singing in a meter that seems to live outside the song entirely: “Gold man bites down on a silver tongue/Takes a deep breath and blows the candle out.” The song eventually introduces a headbangable, Deadwing-style guitar riff, but it mostly exists to keep listener and band alike on their toes. The bridge, a beautifully sung counterpoint to the jagged verses, reappears at the end of the song, leaving both the melody and the narrative unresolved: “And what of us?/And what of me?/And what is left without you?”
This unsettled atmosphere spans the album. Even “Of the New Day,” a ballad roughly in the mold of earlier Porcupine Tree tracks like “Lazarus” and “My Ashes,” has a strangely paranoid sound, as the band switches between time signatures, never settling into a predictable groove. “Rats Return” and “Herd Culling” are cousins of “Harridan,” built on nervy bass lines that joust with impressionistic synths, while the Barbieri cowrite “Walk the Plank” is led by burbling electronics, sublimating Wilson’s guitar in favor of Eno-inspired soundscapes. These experiments don’t always reach the exhilarating heights of the band’s most beloved work, but they show a willingness to push forward into discomfort.
The best song is the towering, 10-minute closer, “Chimera’s Wreck.” (Three pretty-good bonus tracks are tacked onto the end of the limited-edition track list, the strongest of which is the Rush-like instrumental “Population Three.”) “Chimera’s Wreck” is also the song that most closely resembles the band’s mid-’00s peaks, with its labyrinthine structure, tricky rhythms, twitchy drumming, crushing riffs, and exaggerated loud-soft dynamics. It doesn’t feel like Porcupine Tree finding a new path forward so much as doubling down on their strengths. Wilson first walked away when he felt the band’s songwriting had become too formulaic. Closure/Continuation is admirable in its attempts to reject that formula, but in the end, it also proves just how good they were at it. | 2022-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Music for Nations / Megaforce | June 28, 2022 | 6.9 | e1f645bc-25d2-4485-8736-29beb61266ff | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
The Belarusian new wave band’s latest album is an austere gothic dream with no interest in pandering to the audience attracted by their improbable TikTok breakthrough. | The Belarusian new wave band’s latest album is an austere gothic dream with no interest in pandering to the audience attracted by their improbable TikTok breakthrough. | Molchat Doma: Monument | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/molchat-doma-monument/ | Monument | It’s impossible to talk about Molchat Doma without mentioning TikTok. This year, the Belarusian new wave band’s shadowy, wriggling “Судно (Sudno),” from their 2018 album Этажи, unpredictably sprouted as a meme and racked up more than 150,000 associated TikToks. Some videos—outfit try-ons, armpit hair dye jobs—are presumably unrelated, but many involve images of Eastern Europeans vibing as Americans yearn for the same vibes in the comments section. The song’s principal association is of a post-Soviet lifestyle that’s vaguely anti-establishment, bare-bones yet filled with techno, a nebulous aesthetic aided by the fact that the majority of Americans don’t understand Russian.
Molchat Doma’s newest and third album Monument doesn’t pander to their broadened audience with English-language lyrics or “Судно” copies. Instead, it brings the ’80s gothic dream the band first envisioned on 2017’s understated С Крыш Наших Домов to an anxious, glossy head. The performances sound more confident, the music less muddy. Singer Egor Shkutko’s grumbly baritone is better controlled, packing the intensity of a Russian Ian Curtis. There’s even a bit of maximalist sparkle coming off “Дискотека / Discoteque,” where an eager flurry of keyboard accompanies Shkutko as he sings about dancing fervently at a house party. It’s a bright pop sentiment on a song that sounds like the Cure, or like-minded Russian new wave messengers Buerak, and its earnestness makes for a welcome break from the band’s usual chilliness.
But Molchat Doma does despondency well, even with song titles as amusingly explicit as “Ленинградский Блюз / Leningradskiy Blues,” a tinny, sleepy track detailing a doomed love that spans centuries. Shkutko often fixates on ghost stories like these, pleading with someone he has wronged to let him drown peacefully in “Утонуть / Utonut’,” or mythologizing a lover as he reconciles with his own mistakes on “Звезды / Zvezdy.” TikTok has equated Molchat Doma with a more debonair darkness; Monuments makes their solemn intensity clear.
As an American with a Bulgarian mom, I recognize the aesthetic appeal of Eastern Europe firsthand. Whenever I visit Bulgaria, I find myself Instagram-ing the crumbly cobblestone or chipped Cyrillic signs, and my baba looks at what I’m photographing and asks why. It has to do with contrast: America builds enough Apple Stores and gentrification condos to convince you that society isn’t crumbling, while Eastern Europe is mostly too poor to keep up pretenses. My fellow members of Gen Z, who’ve grown up surrounded by social media and its warring obsessions with authenticity and artifice, resent that. America is nothing if not inauthentic.
And yet, when it comes to international music, young Americans can’t help projecting. A notoriously monolingual crowd may have a hard time accepting Molchat Doma’s music as art with a particular historical and cultural context, not just a vehicle for a romanticized socialist fantasy—something that people on TikTok have already noticed and decried. It’s also hard to say why Molchat Doma is the object of American obsession, especially when Eastern Europe’s coldwave renaissance is filled with bands that sound a lot like them. Maybe it’s the way Shkutko sings like he’s reading his last will, or the grim precision of the drum machine. Molchat Doma’s music is so mystically self-possessed that it’s hard not to wish you were part of the magic, too.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | November 17, 2020 | 7 | e1f72404-2518-4046-8c8a-1c785b2e3d17 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Shifting away from the gnawing, emo-inflected power-pop of their first two albums, the Melbourne trio ask: Can softness be as invigorating as fury? | Shifting away from the gnawing, emo-inflected power-pop of their first two albums, the Melbourne trio ask: Can softness be as invigorating as fury? | Camp Cope: Running With the Hurricane | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camp-cope-running-with-the-hurricane/ | Running With the Hurricane | Camp Cope know that it is all too easy to get swept away by a storm bigger than yourself. Since emerging from Melbourne’s punk scene in 2015, the trio—composed of vocalist and guitarist Georgia Maq, bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, and drummer Sarah Thompson—have vehemently opposed the misogyny that is all too common in the music industry. “The Opener,” a breakout single from 2018’s How to Socialise & Make Friends, transformed the band’s own experiences with sexism into a defiant feminist anthem: “It’s another man telling us to book a smaller venue… Now look how far we’ve come not listening to you!” In the four years since “The Opener,” some systems have evolved while others remain frustratingly intact. But Camp Cope have changed and their third album, Running With the Hurricane, has a secret to share: There’s stability to be found within the squall.
Camp Cope started working on Running With the Hurricane in 2019, but the onset of the pandemic forced them to pause. Over the next couple years, as COVID and environmental catastrophes ravaged the planet, the bandmates refocused their priorities; Maq returned to her prior career path, nursing, and helped vaccinate fellow Australians. When the band finally began recording in 2021, they embraced the twangy lightness of the pop-country tunes that Maq turned to for comfort. Songs like the title track or “Blue” could be lost mid-2000s Chicks cuts—Australian and Southern accents alike stretch vowels like taffy. Shifting away from the gnawing, emo-inflected power-pop of their first two albums, Camp Cope ask: Can softness be as invigorating as fury?
Running With the Hurricane answers this question with a collection of songs that focus on matters of the heart and mind. “We could have gotten even angrier and even harder,” Maq told NPR. “But we didn’t. We went the opposite way because we refused to let the world harden us.” Their emotional range has broadened with them. “Now I pull the sound around me and I sing myself to sleep, you’ll see how gentle I can be,” Maq sings on “The Mountain,” one of several songs about finding a newfound peace in vulnerability. But she doesn’t pretend that this growth completely frees her from uglier inclinations. There’s plenty of anxiety in the form of unanswered texts and casual sex, and on the jangly “Jealous,” Maq compares her own attention-seeking behavior and longing for affection to a love interest’s pet dog.
Running With the Hurricane is at its strongest when Camp Cope harness the swirling turmoil and ride it towards self-awareness. On the twangy “Blue,” Maq explores how the same loneliness that feels so isolating in one’s head can become a means of connection: “It’s all blue, that’s why I fit in with you.” The sentiment returns later on “The Mountain,” a gorgeous anthem of self-determination. “I climbed the mountain blind, I turned around to find a heart as complicated as mine,” Maq sings, perhaps pulling inspiration from the same Fleetwood Mac ballad the Chicks once did. The title track is one of the band’s best: Maq reckons with her self-doubt atop a galloping melody and layered harmonies that bring to mind the blooming self-realization of Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud. “There’s no other way to go,” she exuberantly proclaims. “The only way out is up.”
Just a few years ago, Camp Cope were determined to barrel through the hard parts; now, they’ve opened themselves to life’s chaos, ready to cruise alongside it. This shift from outward-looking protest to inward-facing resolve comes to a glorious climax on the album’s closer, “Sing Your Heart Out.” Featuring additional guitar from Courtney Barnett, it begins as a slow-building piano ballad in which Maq pledges herself as a vessel of love, in service to herself and others. “You are not your past, not your mistakes, not your money, not your pain, not the years you spent inside,” she proclaims, as her bandmates fall into place alongside her. “You can change and so can I.” As the song explodes into fireworks, they repeat the final verse like a mantra. It’s hard not to believe in its truth.
Correction: Courtney Barnett plays additional guitar on “Sing Your Heart Out”; she does not sing on the song. | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | March 29, 2022 | 7.8 | e1f8bf58-4a80-4e51-be0f-6f458ef72305 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Recorded straight to tape with a small group of close confidants, the Big Thief singer’s latest solo album is free-flowing and intuitive, reveling in the space between spontaneity and impermanence. | Recorded straight to tape with a small group of close confidants, the Big Thief singer’s latest solo album is free-flowing and intuitive, reveling in the space between spontaneity and impermanence. | Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adrianne-lenker-bright-future/ | Bright Future | Two songs on Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future begin with the woosh of a tape machine settling into its correct speed. The players sometimes murmur among themselves as a song gets going or winds down; Lenker’s voice occasionally grows distant, as though she were turning away from the mic, then rises in volume as she leans forward again. At first blush, these audible moments of calibration signal a certain old-school authenticity. The Big Thief singer-songwriter cut her new album straight to tape, just like the last one, and it has the air of an unadulterated document of the music as it was performed in the studio.
Beneath the surface, these effects suggest a more complex relationship between the recording and the music, drawing attention to the artifice and happenstance of what we’re hearing. By demonstrating so explicitly that this is how the music sounded in this room, on this day, they’re also implying that it might have sounded quite different in another place, another time. The musicians play wispy outlines of folk rock, giving just as much attention to the negative spaces as the notes you actually hear. The aesthetic suits the material. Lenker’s songs find beauty in the attempt to give memory solid shape: to hold it in one’s palms like a wounded bird that sat still when the others flew away, and coax it with a sweet melody into sticking around a while longer. Bright Future is like an attempt to hold the memories of the songs themselves, to stop their wild wings from beating for a moment and get a good look before they vanish in the air.
For all the shaggy-dog presentation of her main band, Lenker often approaches her songs with disciplined attention to form and economy, but opener “Real House” is something different. Its chords float along without clear paths of tension and release; its lyrics are associative rather than linear. In the second verse, a surreal image stands in for feelings not yet addressed directly: “Stars shine like tears on the night’s face.” Eventually, the song reveals its subject as Lenker’s mother, and the fog of ambiguity around the preceding lyrics begins to clear. By the final lines, a devastating recounting of the first time Lenker saw her cry, we’ve moved wholly out of the spectral realm and into everyday heartbreak.
Lenker recorded Bright Future with accompaniment from Philip Weinrobe, her engineer and co-producer, as well as singer-songwriter and frequent Big Thief collaborator Mat Davidson, violinist and percussionist Josefin Runsteen, and alt-R&B auteur Nick Hakim. They did a lot of passing around instruments: The album’s basic palette is voice, guitar, piano, and violin, each of which is credited to at least two different performers at various points. (Runsteen and Lenker’s brother Noah also play occasional percussion.) The free-flowing and intuitive nature of the sessions is apparent in the recordings, which have the amiable looseness of first takes. You get the sense, sometimes, that they are figuring out a song’s ideal arrangement as they track it.
It is a testament to the sensitivity of Lenker’s collaborators that those arrangements so often mirror the concerns of her writing. “Vampire Empire,” a Big Thief fan favorite, gets an alternate rendition here, and its inclusion emphasizes the notion that these recordings are mere glimpses of particular moments in the lifespan of a song, not definitive final versions. Where “Real House” is airy and dreamlike, befitting the reverie of its lyrics, “Vampire Empire,” about passionate and destructive codependence, is furiously agitated. Most of the tracks on Bright Future give a sense of physical space between the players, but on this one they sound like they’re crowded around a single tinny microphone, sweating on each other as they sing and strum. It feels like the searing early home recordings of the Mountain Goats, except for Runsteen’s bouncy mallet percussion, which provides an odd but welcome undercurrent of whimsy.
Lenker is a prolific songwriter, and her solo albums can sometimes feel like release valves for a creative impulse that’s too big for one band. (Shortly before the release of Bright Future, she surprise-dropped i won’t let go of your hand, a more informal collection of songs whose proceeds benefit the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.) Earlier this year, she hosted a songwriting workshop that encouraged attendees to think in terms of craft rather than divine inspiration, with assignments like writing a story based on someone else’s photograph or copying the form of a John Prine song and filling in your own details. “Evol,” one of Bright Future’s best songs, seems like it could have arisen from one such exercise. It begins, in the grand tradition of Sonic Youth and Future, by recognizing that love backwards sounds kind of like evil. From there, Lenker finds other pairs, with varying degrees of exactness: Part becomes trap, teach becomes cheat.
The formal conceit might seem a little dopey if Lenker hadn’t followed it so doggedly to its ideal conclusion: “Evol,” of course, is about the power of language to deceive even as it claims to clarify, especially over matters of the heart. Lenker is so committed to the bit that you may not realize what she’s doing until you read the lyric sheet, which looks a bit like an e.e. Cummings poem. Here’s one particular doozy, with brackets added for how she pronounces the backwards words: “Speech spells hceeps [keeps]/You say for keeps/To keep me llehs [less]/A shell to speak through.” Intermittently, amid the mind-bending wordplay, she returns to a refrain that couldn’t be plainer: “You have my heart/I want it back.”
The wordplay of “Donut Seam” isn’t quite so sophisticated. The title is a pun, of course, as in “Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/Before all the water disappears?” Lenker has woven references to ecological collapse into her songs before, but this may be the most overt. The music is wistful and simple, with Lenker strumming big open chords and her chorus of collaborators singing as one voice behind her. As the planet dies, so does a relationship. Lenker looks on at both fondly. At the beginning of the second verse, a new lover comes into her life like a dream come true. A few lines later, she’s on fire, with acid rain falling all around her. From the goofy title, and Lenker’s easygoing delivery, you might conclude that she’s not particularly bothered by this fate. Like the rest of Bright Future, “Donut Seam” shines with a certain acceptance: that everything—love, home, and the songs we write about them—will eventually pass into memory. | 2024-03-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | March 21, 2024 | 8.4 | e1fe1ace-bb38-427e-bc93-91792a76e732 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The São Paulo songwriter returns with a delicate, well-crafted collection that highlights his dynamic vocals and ear for melody and production. | The São Paulo songwriter returns with a delicate, well-crafted collection that highlights his dynamic vocals and ear for melody and production. | Tim Bernardes: Mil Coisas Invisíveis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-bernardes-mil-coisas-invisiveis/ | Mil Coisas Invisíveis | Tim Bernardes aspires toward grand statements. In 2017, the Brazilian songwriter and multi-instrumentalist released his ambitious debut Recomeçar (Restart). Within its conceptual framework, Bernardes flexed his intellectual and compositional muscles, focusing on new beginnings and cycles of frustration in love and life. His stream of consciousness lyrical approach was matched by wandering orchestral excursions that strayed well beyond typical string-backed indie-folk songs. It was an impressive record, often sounding more like a work of musical theater than a traditional pop album, but its uncompromising structure at times stood in the way of Bernardes’ songcraft: There were many memorable moments but not necessarily memorable songs.
Since then, Bernardes has found subtler ways to blend his high aspirations with his innate gift as a songwriter. He has collaborated with the legendary Tropicália singer Gal Costa and had a guest spot on Fleet Foxes’ latest album, and his own music has sanded down his sprawling worldview to bare essentials: “Nascer, Viver, Morrer,” the first track from his latest album, Mil Coisas Invisíveis (A Thousand Invisible Things), incorporates lyrics about life, death, and rebirth with a straightforward structure and simple guitar-and-drums framework. At just under two minutes, the song seems more relaxed despite the intense emotion of Bernardes’ voice. Rather than surround himself with compositional flourishes, it opens the album with simplicity and a crystal clear vision.
The rest of Mil Coisas Invisíveis is just as concise and well-crafted. “Meus 26” ties together political themes of isolationism and globalism with personal reflections, balancing ghostlike orchestral swells with simple acoustic guitar playing and a solitary vocal take. Bernardes’ vocals drive the song through variations of intensity, shifting with ease between a whisper, a full-bodied chest voice, and soaring falsetto, the whole of the arrangement pulsating with him.
Bernardes is the primary instrumentalist on the album, playing guitar, synth, piano, percussion, and bass, as well as arranging the string and horn sections. Despite the abundance of textures, the production is delicate, precise, and meticulously arranged. Small bells and zills ring out to punctuate a change of pace; spectral string arrangements float in and out of the mix, commanding attention only when necessary. On “Esse Ar,” claves laced in reverb bounce in the distance while a quiet synth fades in and out, adding a psychedelic touch to his bossa-nova heritage. On “BB (Garupa de Moto Amarela),” Bernardes contrasts his whimsical guitar playing with violin, mimicking the joy and drama of the love story in its lyrics.
Bernardes’ greatest assistance comes from his influences, which he is not shy to own up to: “I believe in the Beatles,” he sings, believably, on the lush and monumental “Mistificar.” Other songs, such as “Falta,” sound a bit more relaxed, preferring the loungy, nylon-stringed tinge of ’60s and ’70s Brazilian fusion and vocal takes that sometimes recall a hoarse Jorge Ben. No matter where he’s drawing from, Bernardes is interested in disrupting that tradition, either through surreal orchestration or baroque harmony lines. Nodding to his country’s musical legacy as well as indie-folk music from the U.S., it’s a type of alt-bossa nova that sounds as much like Grizzly Bear as it does Caetano Veloso.
The centerpiece of Mil Coisas Invisíveis is “A Balada de Tim Bernardes,” an introspective epic in which Bernardes characterizes himself as half spirit-guide, half vulnerable-fool, who, in the face of the unknown, chooses to sing: “Why not?” Like the themes of Recomeçar, the song is about change and growth, but Bernardes isn’t being overly intellectual. Instead, his lyrics are untamed and instinctive, framed by a catchy chorus. In both the words and music, he beautifully captures the silliness of life and the magic therein. | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Psychic Hotline | June 15, 2022 | 7.6 | e1fe220b-0ffc-461b-8480-9ff590c18041 | Edward Pomykaj | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edward-pomykaj/ | |
The latest album from the masters of the K-pop formula is a slick, loosely thematic album about love and loss, with a stronger emphasis on rapping than ever before. | The latest album from the masters of the K-pop formula is a slick, loosely thematic album about love and loss, with a stronger emphasis on rapping than ever before. | BTS: Love Yourself 轉 ‘Tear’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bts-love-yourself-tear/ | Love Yourself 轉 ‘Tear’ | K-pop has long been poised for a breakthrough in the U.S., and the stars have aligned for the Korean boy band BTS. It doesn’t hurt that it is easier now than ever to be a K-pop fan on this side of the world, with the genre being tailor-made for our current algorithm-fed content chain. BTS has seized the opportunity, building a ravenous fanbase, not just at home and stateside but in South America and Europe as well. Bangtan Boys (their full name, Bangtan Sonyeondan, translates to “bulletproof boy scouts” in English), are designed for this moment, highly curated, aesthetically optimized for Western consumption.
BTS have been presented as the art-house alternative to K-pop’s manic energy: a modish, dilettantish, act whose music is a vehicle for larger artistic choices and statements. After debuting as a swag rap outfit, they evolved from rap-sung mashups to posh electro-pop pageantry. The concept for their 2016 album, Wings, was inspired by Hermann Hesse’s 1919 book Demian. The visuals for one of the best BTS songs, “Blood Sweat & Tears,” were picturesque stills framed in a pop-up museum featuring “The Fall of the Rebel Angels,” Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” and Nietzsche quotes etched in stone, which all produced dramatic fan readings of the video’s symbolism. The members co-write and co-produce their songs, some of which delve into mental wellness and social responsibility, a process that has led many to dub their songs more “personal,” a word sometimes used as a dog whistle for music appealing to be taken more seriously. Their tactics have been emulated by boy bands who have followed, but in many ways, BTS are simply the K-pop model maximized for efficiency.
Love Yourself: 轉 ‘Tear’, which follows the 2017 mini album Love Yourself: ‘Her’ and the Japanese full-length Face Yourself released earlier this year, is a kaleidoscopic mark of that efficiency, observing the finely tuned formula BTS have been perfecting since 2015. ‘Tear’, like ‘Her’, is a concept album of sorts. Roughly half the songs adhere to the album’s subhead. If ‘Her’ was an assortment of heart-professing love songs, then ‘Tear’ is the inverse. It deals primarily, though not exclusively, with the cycle of grief that lingers through a separation. But all of the songs generally find their way back around to self-love at some point. The album’s opener, “Intro: Singularity,” provides its thesis. “Even in my momentary dreams/The illusions that torture me are still the same,” V sings. “Did I lose myself, or did I gain you?”
Written and arranged with longtime producer and frequent collaborator Pdogg and Big Hit label CEO Hitman Bang along with a team of collaborators (Steve Aoki, MNEK, Chainsmokers co-producer DJ Swivel), ‘Tear’ aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process. There is some level of thematic consistency on ‘Tear’ with at least a semblance of an emotional arc being teased out across the 11 tracks: navigating a dream world and the real one in search of a personal paradise (which at times reads like an analog for being a pop star, especially on “Airplane Pt. 2”), losing love and facing the requisite anxieties and loneliness. These all come to a head on the foreboding lead single “Fake Love,” characterized in full by a lyric that roughly translates to: “I grew a flower that couldn’t bloom/In a dream that can’t come true.”
K-pop is often experimental in form and function, which produces full-lengths that can be spasmodic in tone and quality. BTS aren’t immune to this, but the rappers—RM (or Rap Monster), J-Hope, and Suga—anchor the group, not only keeping it moored to a unified aesthetic amid constant stylistic shifts but dictating much of what happens in the music. On the bruising, all-rap closer “Outro: Tear,” the three take turns ripping through the track with punchy cadences, at times suddenly swapping places. The group’s vocalists trade off short, sweet passages that revolve around and often pivot off of rapped verses. Where rap verses are often stopgaps for other K-pop groups, obligatory aspects of pop roleplaying, they are essential to structure and composition here. Whispered, breathy raps slingshot into the supple hook on the flute-powered “134340.” On “Love Maze,” RM balances elastic syllabics with singsong musings while Suga dashes into a tightly twisting flow. Between them, the other members let loose mellow, honeyed coos. The sequencing of the vocal routines is as carefully synchronized as the choreography in their videos.
‘Tear’ isn’t as ambitious or stunning or tragic as Wings, which gave each of the seven members a solo turn ranging from lounge-ready piano balladry and symphonic, single-spotlight melodrama to brooding alt-rap with “Blood Sweat & Tears” as its ideological and aesthetic centerpiece. But there are moments here when BTS seem more poised and more in sync than ever. The Aoki-produced “The Truth Untold” is an epic misdirection; instead of leaning into their EDM-flavored pop or the blitzing trap of Aoki’s “Mic Drop” remix, they opt for a seamless piano serenade wherein the group’s four singers weave in and out of each stanza. “Paradise” is largely propelled by graceful exchanges from Jungkook, V, Jin, and Jimin, who surface and retreat gently. Across Love Yourself: 轉 ‘Tear’, BTS are at their best when they feel for and support one another. | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Big Hit | May 24, 2018 | 7.1 | e1feb4e3-0fca-43c2-9010-bff52ae1af1c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Baltimore melodic hardcore band Angel Du$t describe themselves as a mix of the Bad Brains and the Lemonheads, and their latest mixes mash notes with double-time tempos. | Baltimore melodic hardcore band Angel Du$t describe themselves as a mix of the Bad Brains and the Lemonheads, and their latest mixes mash notes with double-time tempos. | Angel Du$t: Rock the Fuck on Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21910-rock-the-fuck-on-forever/ | Rock the Fuck on Forever | It’s hard to say whether form or function came first in hardcore, but it’s one hell of an equal partnership—music that effectively conveys the feeling of being extremely intense about something, for about as long as one can feel comfortable being that extremely intense. And yet, its brevity also makes it an interesting filter for pop. With only two minutes to spare at most, the verses have to be cut out or ignored, the chorus just gets yelled a few times and then you move onto the next one. Isn’t that how most people choose to remember pop songs anyway? Angel Du$t isn’t the first band to come up with this idea, but whereas most bands of this sort come off like hardcore acts dabbling in pop, Rock the Fuck on Forever is the exact opposite.
Hell, this isn’t the first time they tried either, though 2014’s *A.D. *seems like an obvious dry run in retrospect. At the time, Angel Du$t were a relatively melodic hardcore band, but they didn’t sound ready to embrace it as their definitive aspect. Fortunately, they were emboldened by its positive underground reception. In an interview from last year, the incredibly well-named Justice Tripp said, “I think in 2015, you can do whatever you want and most hardcore kids will at least try it out.” His native Baltimore is having a bit of a moment right due to a couple of hardcore bands that go far outside of the genre’s strictures. In addition to Angel Du$t, Praise skews emo in a way similar to Title Fight, and the rapidly ascendant Turnstile could pass for an aggro 311 or unwoke Rage Against the Machine at times. Angel Du$t itself contains members of Turnstile and fist-swinging traditionalists Trapped Under Ice.
Angel Du$t still love themselves some hardcore bluster—“Rectify” sounds awful cheerful about the ass-kicking you've got coming your way, Tripp’s pretty sure everyone’s kinda full of shit (“Somebody Else”) and life is kinda pointless (“Headstone”). It’s kind of a posture, though: Tripp sings with a chest-puffing huff and enunciates so every lyric is completely understandable. It’s musclebound and also lovably cartoonish, like being menaced by Zangief from Street Fighter or something*.*
The power of *Rock the Fuck on Forever *actually lies in its love songs. The band describes themselves as a cross between the Lemonheads and Bad Brains, essentially meaning they play goofy pop songs about how much they like girls and/or how much they wish a girl would like them back at extremely fast tempos. Will Yip’s production tends to be divisive in punk circles, but there’s no denying his ability to make bands in this realm sound like they could’ve snuck into a 1995 alt-rock station if things broke right; the stuttering vocals from “Ready 2 Receive U” and “Upside Down” imagine if Cloud Nothings followed their pop-punk muse and worked with Rob Cavallo rather than Steve Albini. In other words, they’re about halfway between *Pinkerton *and Smash.
It’s Angel Du$t’s best trick, but it’s not their only one—there’s nods at surf-rock (“Bad Thing”), rap-metal non-sequitur (“Toxic Boombox”), and classic hardcore hxc call-and-response (“Hurt You Bad”). There’s even an instrumental! *Rock the Fuck on Forever *sees itself as a real-deal album, lending a degree of seriousness to Angel Du$t that would otherwise be absent. Whether it’s necessary is a different issue—even at 20 minutes or so, they've stretched as much as they need to and it’d almost certainly be stronger if it were three minutes shorter rather than three minutes longer.
As much as *Rock the Fuck on Forever *has the *sound *of a crossover, there’s never the sense that the band is playing the angles and hoping to score a ticket out of punk rock. You can’t say a band called Angel Du$t making a record called *Rock the Fuck on Forever *isn’t self aware, but to get a sense of their work ethic, they’ll be playing nine straight nights while traversing Tijuana to Seattle and back to Los Angeles for the purist Sound and Fury Festival. It’s loud, it’s fast and it kicks ass: despite the jokes and mash notes, this *is *hardcore. | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pop Wig | May 31, 2016 | 6.9 | e203d9d6-fd54-4ae3-b86b-efb318718401 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Dean Blunt’s latest semi-unofficial side project is his least inscrutable, featuring 20 minutes of low-key, free-flowing vignettes made largely with guitars, keys, and samples. | Dean Blunt’s latest semi-unofficial side project is his least inscrutable, featuring 20 minutes of low-key, free-flowing vignettes made largely with guitars, keys, and samples. | Blue Iverson: Hotep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23198-hotep/ | Hotep | An interview with Dean Blunt is a rare enough opportunity that you can hardly read one without the fact first being pointed out. If he’s not called “elusive” or “press-shy,” he’s a “prankster,” “piss-taker,” or “provocateur.” As he said in one such piece early last year, “British [people] hate feeling like they have egg on their faces… They’re quick to sew a jester’s hat.” All of which is to say that the Londoner’s public persona has long preceded him. This is no doubt because of the many, largely unanswered questions raised by Hype Williams, Blunt’s defunct avant-pop duo with Inga Copeland, and his striking, inimitable solo work in music and art. And because, well, who isn’t intrigued by a good riddle?
Two albums released under the stage name Dean Blunt, 2013’s The Redeemer and 2014’s Black Metal, teased anyone hoping to catch a glimpse behind the curtain. They sounded sensitive and confessional in a way that Hype Williams hadn’t, and the music was far more clear-headed, sometimes even catchy. But to anyone hearing the music as a recluse letting his guard down and baring his soul, Blunt would have likely said they’re missing the point. Outsiders may see him as a fascinating figure—a mercurial, enigmatic, capital-A Artist—but it takes a true narcissist to see yourself that way. Blunt soon began backstepping. He focused on releasing knotty, stream-of-consciousness mixtapes through anonymous YouTube accounts and obscure websites. By the time of his next official album in 2016, Babyfather’s BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow, Dean Blunt the performer was obfuscated by unknown aliases, vocal effects, and literal smoke. Now, under the name Blue Iverson, his ego has conceded the spotlight entirely.
Released as a free stream and download, like Blunt’s many online mixtapes, Hotep is 20 minutes of low-key, free-flowing vignettes made largely with guitars, keys, and samples. Most songs are instrumental, and the few vocals that appear are female, presumably from Jenna of “Jenna’s Interlude.” Though the reserved grooves running through Hotep aren’t completely alien to Blunt’s catalog, they are more cohesive and traditional than anything else he’s done. It wouldn’t be a Blunt record without a couple unconventional twists, but this is largely “rhythm and blues” boiled down to its original definition: jazzy, soulful blues music with a heavy beat.
Blunt has plenty to say about R&B and its fall in popular culture beneath the “hyper-masculinity” of hip-hop, but you won’t hear about it on Hotep. The hope, it would seem, is that you’ll feel it. The absence of an overt male presence feels intentional; the disjointed femininity of “Brown Grrrl” feels consciously unsettling. In the stunning closer, “Fake Loathe,” Jenna breaks out over the music’s silky bounce, singing, “Oh, you don’t know what you do to me.” Her words feel more deeply pained than lovelorn. Lauryn Hill’s image—taken from her career-defining album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill—adorns the cover like a religious icon. Indeed, she serves as Blunt’s inspirational and moral North Star on Hotep, an album that challenges male supremacy with whispers and negative space.
Hotep’s quiet querying is most effective, however, because Blunt has given his would-be codebreakers a record that doesn’t resemble a question mark. There’s nothing to decipher in “Coy Boy”’s bluesy guitar solo, and a song as warm and groovy as “Soulseek” couldn’t be more immediately accessible. The rickety, good-times funk of “Hush Money” wants only to join whatever party it can, even if its brief boogie will leave dancers asking why the music stopped so soon. But first, Blunt seems to say, more important answers are needed in the everyday world, where everyday issues must be interrogated by everyday people. “We’ve got to question everything we’ve been told about us being black,” he explained to a panel late last year. “There’s a lot of homophobia, there’s a lot of dominance in it… Within the black movement there’s a lot of dominance over women...That has to be addressed first.” In the meantime, Blunt’s music can speak for itself. | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | April 21, 2017 | 7.5 | e20a9bf7-afd2-4ca7-abae-5f2f095a6b3b | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
His name is short for “The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child,” and his ambient pieces are weightless as a sigh, splotchy as a bruise, both cozy and unsettling. | His name is short for “The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child,” and his ambient pieces are weightless as a sigh, splotchy as a bruise, both cozy and unsettling. | TIBSLC: Delusive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tibslc-delusive-tongue-shifts-situation-based-compositions/ | Delusive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions | In just 10 releases over the past four years, Manchester’s Sferic label has established a remarkably consistent identity—one defined, ironically, by the near absence of identifying features. On records from Space Afrika, Jake Muir, and Perila, among others, Sferic has developed an amorphous take on ambient, gently but firmly tugging the music free of any vestigial new-age connotations and pushing it into a nebulous space where certainties dissolve. The label’s releases train a soft-focus lens on hushed synthesizers, spongy textures, and indistinct field recordings, all obscured beneath layers of reverb and hiss. The resulting forms resemble collections of objects buried beneath fresh snowfall, their outlines barely visible, their origins no longer clear. The longer you listen to any given Sferic release, the less apparent it becomes which parts were played, or programmed, and which are pure happenstance. The label’s releases tend to suggest a similar line of inquiry: How pliable are the seams between order and disorder, or intention and chance?
Leipzig’s TIBSLC makes a natural fit for Sferic. Their name is short for “The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child,” the kind of moniker you might expect to find attached to a third-rate ska-punk band, or perhaps a Grand Royal signing that never came close to recouping its advance. But their music over the last few years, mostly self-released, sounds nothing like the associations the alias might evoke. It is a mottled expanse of shimmer and hum: weightless as a sigh, splotchy as a bruise, cozy and unsettling in equal measure.
Delusive Tongue Shifts – Situation Based Compositions, TIBSLC’s first album for Sferic, begins and ends with the sound of trickling water, like snowmelt rushing across mountain rocks. It is an effective framing device: Between these two liquid bookends, the album plunges us into a swirling expanse of constant motion and mutation. The opening “Soft Afternoon Pressure” introduces the sounds and techniques that will recur throughout the album. Muted synthesizer chords roll in waves, joining in a kind of tidal call and response. Tiny clicking sounds evoke pebbles in the surf. Indistinct voices carry on a private conversation, like a radio heard through a neighbor’s walls. As the track drones on, there is a gradual, almost imperceptible intensification reminiscent of an orchestra tuning up, except in place of instruments, there is only running water, wind through dry grass, cicadas, and electrical hum.
Pretty much every track seems to have been made with the same basic tools. The record is awash in indistinct tone clusters, out-of-sync pulses, and fizzy crackling sounds—an abundance of downy chaos. “Extended Stay of Blue Sky” begins with what might be vinyl crackle; “Nightmode” is bathed in a phosphorescent glow. Even at its most peaceful, though, there is a sense of irreconcilable tension at the heart of the music. TIBSLC’s chords rarely resolve neatly; it is difficult even to parse their precise makeup, given the bright overtones that bristle skyward, blurring the intervals between notes. Everything is shrouded in a kind of arctic glare, like a halo around the sun on a foggy day.
It is not necessarily difficult to create ambient music that tumbles, lava-lamp-style, through a succession of ever-changing cotton-candy hues. Every week, it seems, there’s a new wellness app promising an AI-generated soundtrack designed not only to erase its creator’s fingerprints but to make you forget that you are listening to music at all. None of those propositions, frankly, have ever sounded terribly appealing. What draws me back to TIBSLC’s music is the sense that there’s something more there, something just beyond my perception. The buried voices and omnipresent insect buzz lend the impression that there are hidden messages coded into the din; the drone suggests a surfeit of information that resists deciphering.
Listen deeply enough into the murk, and some of TIBSLC’s most outlandish sounds—the chatter of aviary gossip, the whale song crossed with whizzing bottle rockets—begin to reveal their secrets. There are rhythms encrypted into almost every level of the music: galumphing sub-bass pulses, filters that open and close like a bellows, the accelerating clatter of a dropped quarter coming to rest. Innumerable fluttering pulses are in play at any given moment, speeding and slowing, trilling and throbbing, lending movement and purpose to seemingly static sounds. No matter how freely the music seems to drift, there is little doubt that there is a guiding hand behind it; what else could account for this uncanny space where the natural and the synthetic blend so seamlessly and unpredictably? There are entire worlds to be explored in TIBSLC’s mysterious tangle of textures and sensations, and they teem with life.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | sferic | June 22, 2021 | 7.7 | e20d53ed-0ecc-45bb-9f38-86873899a3da | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his fifth Tobacco album, Thomas Fec doubles down on both the most alluring and unsettling aspects of the project. | On his fifth Tobacco album, Thomas Fec doubles down on both the most alluring and unsettling aspects of the project. | TOBACCO: Hot Wet & Sassy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tobacco-hot-wet-and-sassy/ | Hot Wet & Sassy | Since introducing his Tobacco alias in 2008 in the shadow of his more cosmically inclined electro-psych act, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Thomas Fec has been engaged in a prolonged game of, as a track from his debut record put it, “Gross Majick,” reveling in the tension between technical precision and human deviancy. Like his signature melting logo, Tobacco’s synth-funk pastiches are positively dripping with blood, sweat, spit, and other bodily fluids; even when you can’t tell what his corroded voice is saying half the time, his lecherous delivery—sounding like some heavy-breathing prank caller—broadcasts his intentions loud and clear. And on his fifth Tobacco album, Fec doubles down on both the most alluring and unsettling aspects of the project.
Hot, Wet, & Sassy arrives four years after the previous Tobacco album, Sweatbox Dynasty, though Fec’s gear settings were seemingly left untouched in the interim. He continues to build tracks from his toolkit of gritty beats, fuzz-slathered synths, and chiming glockenspiel-like refrains that periodically cut through the crud. But if Tobacco’s past records bore the blurry patina of a VHS cassette that’s been languishing for decades in a milkcrate, Hot, Wet, & Sassy is more like a first-gen DVD, bringing a sharper focus to his melodies while rendering his synth grotesqueries in a more horrifying fidelity. And if Fec’s voice sounds as haunted and horny as ever, Hot, Wet, & Sassy ultimately expands Tobacco’s emotional vocabulary from creepy all the way to weepy.
The opening “Centaur Skin” serves as the showroom model for the reformulated Tobacco. Though its Moroderized Knight Rider pulse reaffirms Fec’s love for ’80s flash’n’trash, Fec issues his ominous admissions—“I’m a bad friend/I got bad ideas/But always sincere”—with a sympathy-for-the-devil pathos. Throughout Hot, Wet, & Sassy, Fec takes delight in toying with your perception, treating each song as a Rorschach test to diagnose your state of mind: “Headless to Headless” alternates between a chainsawed buzz and Kraftwerkian shimmer on a verse-by-verse basis, until you’re unsure of whether its climactic mantra—“It’s going to feel like shit forever!”—is meant to sound like resignation or celebration. At his most monstrous—like on “Stabbed by a Knight”—Fec lets the song’s teeth-grinding metallic riff play call-and-response with disarming R&B breaks and twinkling keyboard frippery, instantly transforming the album’s scariest song into its most playful.
Hot Wet & Sassy is a less intriguing proposition when its enigmatic qualities give way to campy pranksterism and blown-out sonics—like when Fec invites Trent Reznor in for a cameo and renders him as musical mulch to throw into the cauldron. Their collaboration, “Babysitter,” is less a song than a two-minute stutter-funk trailer for some straight-to-video slasher flick, with Fec repeating the line “I’m the new babysitter” as if the flesh was melting off his face, while Reznor hides behind the sort of obfuscating falsetto he’s rarely indulged in since “Heresy.” If anything, Reznor’s presence is more strongly felt on a spiritual level on tracks like “Motherfuckers 64,” which more closely aligns Tobacco’s M.O. with the original Nine Inch Nails mission of making ’80s Depeche Mode sound more demonic. But Fec also spends a great deal of Hot, Wet, & Sassy trying to make his proverbial hate machine look prettier, by exploring how his discomfiting voice adapts to more serene surroundings.
Alas, the results can leave him sounding awkwardly exposed: on “ASS-TO-TRUTH” and “Perfect Shadow,” the contrast between Fec’s mutant vocals and the songs’ slow-jam vibes can leave him looking like a guy who shows up for work November 1st still dressed in his Halloween costume. However, on “Jinmenken,” his breathy delivery fogs up the windows on an intimate ballad, turning the ghostly qualities of his voice into an effective complement to lyrics that ruminate over post-breakup absence and unanswered phone calls. And coming out of the ambient interstitial “Poisonous Horses,” the gently glitching “Mythemim” emerges as Hot, Wet, & Sassy’s greatest revelation, the point where Fec keeps his subversive tendencies in check long enough to fully surrender to beauty. Fec inhabits the song as a benevolent apparition, coasting atop its analog synth clusters and pinballing breakbeats into the sunset. But the song’s blur yields the album’s most profound moment of clarity—because even if you can’t make out what Fec is saying, you can certainly see his smile.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | November 6, 2020 | 6.8 | e219d508-f725-43bd-ac21-f3b652f31961 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On this Thrill Jockey LP, the Detroit duo continue their transformation from cyborg post-punk to cheerleader pogo goth. | On this Thrill Jockey LP, the Detroit duo continue their transformation from cyborg post-punk to cheerleader pogo goth. | ADULT.: Gimme Trouble | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/58-gimme-trouble/ | Gimme Trouble | A funny thing happened the last time I saw Adult. Someone in the crowd requested their 2001 electro favorite "Hand to Phone", which wasn't so strange. Nicola Kuperus said she was sick to death of singing that song, which wasn't so unusual either. But then-- then she did start singing it, in an eye-rolling parody of her old robot monotone: hand to phone, hand to phone, blah blah blah.
I can't think of much better shorthand for the group's career arc-- abandoning those pitch-perfect light-speed electronics and diving off into a world of potentially embarrassing basement trainwrecks. Kuperus traded icy drone for the kind of witchy yelping not much heard since Bauhaus's prime. Adam Lee Miller traded clean-line synth flash for nasty bass-guitar buzz. They added a guitar player; they spazzed out. And as much as each new release came out like a total mess, there was something in each of them that's totally fascinating, as if each of those risky sounds-- from cyborg post-punk to cheerleader pogo goth-- was one wobbly, perilous step in the direction of something much greater. The only question: when-- or whether-- they'd ever break past the wobbles and come out with whatever that great thing was.
Is that thing Gimme Trouble? Not quite-- but this is a whole lot closer than anything we've heard so far. For one thing, there's the sound, which has perked up beautifully. Drum machine pump, bass blurt, synth clatter, guitar screech-- they all mesh clean and shiny here, and on some tracks they take on a slanty, minimalist bounce that practically breaks a smile. "Bad Idea" kicks off sounding like early Devo, something from an era where weirdoid punk and synthesizers got along naturally. The go-go drum machine and one-note guitar on "Still Waiting" leave the whole thing feeling vaguely like an early B-52's rave-up. Half the rest sounds like X-Ray Spex or Siouxsie and the Banshees-- there is vintage new wave rawness and goth-inflected bounce all over this thing, and it manages to leave this band in fresh-sounding territory that's somehow miles away from most everything today's "new wave revivalists" and/or "electro-punks" have even thought about trying. Best of all: no mess. No little time-trials, or side-notes, or half-formed clatters-- just 12 songs that, while somewhat lacking in super-blazing stand-outs, present a giant step up in coherence.
That's good news: It doesn't feel so "confrontational" anymore, does it? With their last full-length, Anxiety Always, it sounded like they were challenging us, deliberately nag-nag-nagging us with the shriekiest, most paranoid rumble they could muster. That was fun, in its way, and it's certainly not as if they've dropped that agenda. But the Adult. on this record can be "fun" in a much more pleasant, straightforward way-- the same jump-around-and-screech-along way their early electro singles could be. The only thing that still worries me is the memory of them on stage, with Kuperus posing and sneering and genuinely trying to act out the cretinous-vampire schtick the band's been working its way through. Are we going to have to get Devo and Fred Schneider to come wave the landing lights and guide them to the sweet spot? This isn't scary tough-guy muscle, guys-- it's spazzed-out pogo geek-punk, and it's almost nearly there. Cover "Rock Lobster" if you have to. | 2005-11-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-11-22T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | November 22, 2005 | 8 | e224e82a-ad76-4e8e-9813-31fbc29b8131 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
The trio’s debut album shifts casually between soulful rap, textured noise, and pensive folk with grace and sometimes too much distance. | The trio’s debut album shifts casually between soulful rap, textured noise, and pensive folk with grace and sometimes too much distance. | 81355: This Time I’ll Be of Use | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/81355-this-time-ill-be-of-use/ | This Time I’ll Be Of Use | Indianapolis rappers Sirius Blvck and Oreo Jones, and producer David Moose Adamson have been orbiting each other for years. Before uniting as 81355 (pronounced “bless”) on Justin Vernon and the Dessner brother’s 37d03d label, the group members were in regular contact through features, shows, and the general closeness of the Naptown music community. Blvck and Jones, in fact, amassed enough recordings to release a joint album, unconcerned., at the tail end of 2020. This shared history is the foundation of This Time I’ll Be of Use, a record that brims with easy fusion and harmony.
The album coheres immediately. 81355 is in constant motion, shifting casually between soulful rap, textured noise, and pensive folk with grace. A single and opening track, “Capstone” builds slowly, accumulating ominous images and airy melodies until the song is an ice sheet of voices and sounds. The group’s arrangements prioritize configuration, avoiding sharp pivots and dissonance in service of steady accretion. Compared to other alt-rap acts like Injury Reserve and Young Fathers, they have no interest in provocation or spectacle, a composure that gives their medleys a quiet sense of confidence but also makes the record feel anonymous and distant.
The trio recorded the album during the pandemic, a backdrop they unsuccessfully try to turn into surtext in their music. There are constant mentions of revolt, dread, and remorse, but they often value mood over perspective. “I never sleep a wink because I think about decades that happened long ago,” Jones says on “The Void,” one of many clumsy lines that nod to the past without engaging with it. (Can one think about a decade?) Throughout the record, Jones makes land acknowledgments, declaring solidarity with the Cherokee, the Potowatomi, and Palestinians, but the shoutouts feel ritualistic, rooted in habit rather than resolve.
Blvck, whose writing is often diaristic, makes frequent mention of fire and hauntings, but he also feels removed from his muses. His best line comes early in the record, on “Capstones.” “Generational curses I still can’t undo/Just taught my little girl to tie her shoes/Now she running to,” he raps, turning a coming-of-age moment into a tragic loss of innocence. Otherwise, his verses are drained of sensation, coming across as sights instead of scenes. Elsewhere, Blvck and Jones are agile, compelling rappers, bursting with energy and specificity; but here, they’re lethargic, weighed down by the magnitude of the concepts they’re trying to wrap their heads around.
81355’s soul-searching works best when the group embraces its view from nowhere, refining their collective dread into a cosmic quest. “Where I go it all depends/I would like to call you friend/Lean you back into my eyes/Maybe I could see you then,” Adamson sings on “Through the Portal,” a shapeshifting track that turns restlessness into shared drive. Though it appears only in flashes on This Time I’ll Be of Use, that sense of dissolution as a new beginning rather than climax or defeat is the group’s clearest strength. They don’t yet have a combined vision, but in their mutual commitment to ego-death, there are signs of life.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 37d03d | June 4, 2021 | 6.3 | e2288ed2-8e47-4840-bad6-7e3a1a76c396 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The twenty-two tracks on this definitive best-of compilation capture the slippery, pliant, ecstatic sound that defined Larry Levan as a producer, DJ and high priest for a club night deemed "Saturday Mass" by its attendees. | The twenty-two tracks on this definitive best-of compilation capture the slippery, pliant, ecstatic sound that defined Larry Levan as a producer, DJ and high priest for a club night deemed "Saturday Mass" by its attendees. | Larry Levan: Genius of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21656-genius-of-time/ | Genius of Time | It's the norm now, but at the birth of modern dance music in the 1970s, DJs, producers and remixers were rarely the same person. As influential as his Loft parties were, you'd be hard-pressed to find a record bearing the credit of "a David Mancuso production." And while Tom Moulton invented the remix (as well as the 12" single), outside of the Sandpiper tapes, his legacy wasn't made behind the decks. So while Lawrence Philpot was well on his way to becoming Larry Levan, the greatest DJ of all time (at the helm of the most revered club of all time, the Paradise Garage), as Tim Lawrence put it in Love Saves the Day, "even at the early stage of his remixing career the Garage DJ had created such an important canon that even when he wasn't spinning it was more than likely that somewhere else he was being spun."
That spinning/ spun dichotomy is part of what defines Levan and his lasting legacy as well as what makes boiling down his genius difficult. Try to put Levan into a handy package and it becomes tricky. Do you capture his DJ sets in situ? Do you focus entirely on the work rendered for a single disco label, like Salsoul or West End? Or do you draw from a back catalog big enough to contain Levan's remixes as well as what he himself would have spun? The strength of Universal's two-disc Genius of Time lies in the latter option, now having the biggest catalog to choose from, be it Island, Motown A&M and more.
The prolific Levan had over 250 remix credits to his name, so Genius of Time has its work cut out cherrypicking them and forming a coherent set. And in drawing on Universal's holdings, it still means not licensing some stone Levan-touched classics: Instant Funk's "I Got My Mind Made Up," Skyy's "First Time Around," Taana Gardener's "Work That Body" and Inner Life's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," to name just a few. The disco sound of the late '70s is eschewed to instead focus on the sinewy, synth-laced pop of the early '80s. Nevertheless, its twenty-two tracks capture the slippery, pliant, ecstatic sound that defined Levan as a producer, DJ and high priest for a club night deemed "Saturday Mass" by its attendees.
The opener "Life is Something Special," credited to NYC Peech Boys, shows Levan's mastery behind the boards. The set is bookended by this track as well as the most seductive song about growing impatient ever set to tape ("Don't Make Me Wait"). "Special" extends for a slow-rolling nine minutes, and it's so expansive one could parallel park in its stereo field. The song is little more than a stately piano line, a synth that spumes like a squeezed juicebox, a rock guitar solo, handclaps so echo-y they seem to come down from heaven and the group harmonizing the title. With so few moving parts, one might imagine it grows tedious, but Levan manipulates everything so that each sound strides towards you and then veers away, cruising you yet remaining ever elusive. As it continues to unfold, the song sublimates so as to be a mantra of uplift. In hindsight of the AIDS epidemic that would soon ravage the Garage's audience and owner (not to mention Keith Haring, who designed the Peech Boys's album cover), decades later it sounds more and more like a song of resistance and resilience in the face of impending death.
As a gay African-American making his dancefloors writhe as one, Levan's sets often highlighted R&B divas, so it makes sense that his production skills were at their finest when he partnered with female singers. Esther Williams's "I'll Be Your Pleasure" is the most classic disco of the set and Levan adds a lavish swirl of strings and percussion to her husky voice. With a rollicking piano, rattling tambourine and tricky-metered hiccup right at the song's chorus, he teases out the gospel, R&B, soul and jazz roots of Dee Dee Bridgewater's voice on "Bad For Me." For Syreeta, the onetime wife of Stevie Wonder, "Can't Shake Your Love" shows Levan at his spry best, adding bass squelches, sax squeals, rolling piano and synth lines that fidget like five year-olds on a church pew.
Levan's greatest muse, though, was Gwen Guthrie, and the mini-LP Padlock epitomized the sound of the Garage. Smooth, subtle, never one to over-sentimentalize her lines, Guthrie found the perfect foil in Levan, who remixed the tapes of Guthrie at Compass Point (already boasting a formidable band in Sly & Robbie, Wally Badarou and Steve Stanley) to sublime effect. The four tracks presented here are bright and shadowy, psychedelic yet body-moving, seductive and ebullient, cool and sultry. You'll never regard a PB&J sandwich the same way after hearing Gwen Guthrie purr: "Spread yourself over me like peanut butter." It's one of the finest amalgams of singer and producer of that decade, equivocal to Jellybean with Madonna or Janet with Jam & Lewis.
It was short-lived however, and as the decade wore on, the closing of the Paradise Garage and the high human cost of AIDS began to take a toll on Levan's psyche and work (along with his ravenous heroin habit). But as Genius of Time shows a new generation of dance fans, Levan was a singular talent. As Moulton put it: "He had the feel. He would always sacrifice the technical if it meant that he could have the feel, and that's the most important thing in music." You can feel that in every track here. | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | EMI | March 25, 2016 | 8.8 | e22b478d-d9db-4271-b64b-449a48f0a5a5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
We pop gobblers are allowing a dark harvest to be reaped. We gaze from our corduroy futons as a strange ... | We pop gobblers are allowing a dark harvest to be reaped. We gaze from our corduroy futons as a strange ... | Various Artists: Saddle Creek 50 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2025-saddle-creek-50/ | Saddle Creek 50 | We pop gobblers are allowing a dark harvest to be reaped. We gaze from our corduroy futons as a strange breed-- the photogenic-- entrench themselves around us. Numbed by our prioritization of hottie-dom, we fail to imagine the entertainment dawn ahead, when no ugly (or even homely or everyperson-looking) talents are left in the spotlight. Who among the current crop of shellacked chesthairs will inherit Christopher Walken's seat at the hall of goons? Will news anchors finally be replaced by seductobots, completing their "evolution" from those crusty-old-whitey beginnings? Will our children ask us to explain how Joey Ramone's visage ever escaped mandatory veiling? (The female version of this look-sharp arc is even more distressing...)
The acts on Saddle Creek Records are effervescently photogenic. Pictures of them are taken, and published, accordingly, to provide a record of how far inland the epidermal epidemic has spread. Before that strapping Conor Oberst belted his woes around the world, Omaha was considered by many outsiders as one of those zones in which no one could hear you scream. Now, just as several eminent indie labels have done (Merge, Matador, etc), the Creek is celebrating itself and thanking its fans with a budget-priced, two-disc roster-showcase that balances the previously available with the unreleased, a self-consciously calmer election than the sometimes redundant or crass "classics"/"rarities" dichotomy. The compilation also reinforces the cultural significance of ten when it is multiplied by five.
Like the Drag City inbred buddy system, but cuter, Saddle Creek is rife with acts which are side-projects or recombinations of the label's key players: Now It's Overhead, whose two tracks showcase their shuffly R.E.Mism, contains Azure Ray, whose two tracks convey their evolution from gorgeous violin naifery to confident 4AD-caliber atmospherics. Desaparecidos is, of course, Bright Eyes with distortion; they include their album's most heartbreaking divorce anthem and a new song that actually benefits from the crap-scrapey production bonding its nuke-propaganda reels ("This explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man"), its Tostito-crisp guitarvalanche (the chips are even featured backstage on one of this disc's 45 tedious/harmless film clips), and Oberst's panic-attack stylings ("I don't want to fight in a war/ I don't want to fight in a war/ I don't want to fight in a war"). The lyrics don't offer anything newer than, say, that decade-old team-up between Slayer and Ice-T, but "war sucks" appears to have attained profound-banality status, and we are thusly obliged to favor its reiterations.
About the Bright Eyes song: Yes, it perpetuates Oberst's long ride atop a champion thoroughbred named Contradiction Shitstorm, as he auditions for the lead in The Strange Case of Dr. Cobain and Mr. Sting. The song's lyrics teeter from fascinatingly perceptive to idiotically obvious, from piercing to quaint (aww, who still says "made love"?), from immediate to warmed-over. An ambitious screed about war-culture, ennui, eclipsed optimism, moodswings, and the weight of sex, the song flirts with its brilliant pop instincts but gets all complicated by the Saddle Creek soundalike syndrome, that tincture of Counting Crows-iness that is self-loving, but masochistically, reveling in the construction of altars to one's problems. At his best, Oberst is a conscientious and uninhibited examiner of manic yesterdays and corporate tomorrows; at his worst, he seems to be oversqueezing his teats to spray his audience with his precious soul-milk.
Elsewhere: The Good Life remains a darker and often deliberately poppier reservoir for Cursive's emoid frontman-- the former's new song is an insidiously catchy Cure-homaging moper, and the latter's "Nonsense" suffers from the risk it takes blending Bachmann-skronk with Smurf-scat. Mayday, whom you might know as Lullaby for the Working Class, don't outshine their hymnic already-available "Captain". Rilo Kiley includes her concert-closing chant-along "With Arms Outstretched", and an urgent femme-Pavement nugget either about depression or anorexia, or at least menstruation. Son, Ambulance won't escape "mini-Bright-Eyes" dismissal, which is unfortunate because his arty-cruise-ship arrangements are so strong, and he's able to write and sing (though in a voice very similar to Oberst's) about a wider range of subjects. Sorry About Dresden prove that they deserve better than being considered the label's Cracker or Spin Doctors; see their Rousing Critique of the Superficiality of Hanging Out #345 entitled "People Have Parties". (Interestingly, The Faint side project Broken Spindles and Desaparecidos side project Statistics found homes on other labels.)
But my secret obsession, The Faint, own this comp's finest moments with their practice-space jam, "Take Me to the Hospital". The Faint are much-reviled for being unnecessary arbiters of hump-me dystopia, but mang, they pretty much rule. Their debut is embarrassing (ahem, see Fork-praised fadboys The Rapture's trajectory, cough, ahem), yet the synth overhaul of The Faint's 1999 sophomore effort beat a lot of the current keyboard/dance voguers to the punch. "Hospital", for all its cheerleader nothingness ("Want you to take me the H/ Take me to the O/ want you take me to the S...") is a booming, spiraling, handclapping, screeching, futro masterwork of a Various Artists toss-off. Perhaps The Faint's next full-length will tone down their concept-album inclinations as they embrace the fun of being frontrunners of a wave of, uh, re-runners, making the years between !!! and Sexual Harassment, or Ladytron and Romeo Void, seem like an instant. Let's hope former skateboarder and frontman Todd Baechle doesn't end up singing to Muppets in Labyrinth Reloaded.
When I set out to follow The Faint for four days, bringing some brusque friends to annoy them and offset their borderline vapidity and nauseating photogenicness, I sent the band this fallacious letter, angry about The Faint's most recent "anti-corporate" album:
"Why the fan-rape, you culture-juh-huh-hammers? I just bought some tickets for The Faint, and was also forced to fuel an SUV for a Ticketmaster exec. WHAT THE FUCK? Why are you Total Jobbers with Ticketmaster? In case you don't know: THE FEES COST MORE THAN TWO TICKETS. For four tickets I paid 12 + 12 + 10 + 10 = 44. For the FUCKING "convenience and processing" fees I paid 4.25 + 4.25 +4.25 + 4.25 (convenience, to lubricate me) + 4.25 + 4.25 (processing, the actual ream) = 26 DOLLARS. FUCK YOU. I watched non-mall-punks have to shrug and go home, unable to buy tickets. I recommended they start swooning for Dischord bands. Rich kids, however, will be there for every subversive throb and squeal. Eddie Vedder's your outcredder. This seems cynical of you folks. Am I supposed to feel bad about the prospect of copying CDs for others from a fave label anymore? Am I supposed to get the same econo-critique rush from yer lyrics? Am I supposed to not chuck Saddle Creek 50 into a landfill?" Etc.
The Faint wrote back, noting with accuracy that I was a "rude person," and that they'd try to make other arrangements in the future (some of their gear was stolen days later). Anyway: My eternally drunken sidekick condemned Saddle Creek 50 as "the longest song I've ever heard," and I'll admit to being traumatized by a self-important soundman's mocking my status as the only person old enough to vote at a recent Cursive show. But The Faint's lovable fashion-dreck saves the Nebraska label's crew from sounding like children of the corn. I don't regret a minute of those consecutive days of being a pathetic Fainthead, even though I got so poisoned that I spray-painted my Mazda hot pink and ended up passed out on a faraway beach holding a hammer instead of my glasses. Police woke me to ask if I knew the naked woman in the water on PCP. My friends and I watched as the officers hauled her away. The scene would have made a perfect Faint video. | 2003-10-14T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-10-14T01:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Saddle Creek | October 14, 2003 | 7 | e22e04bd-eb5a-4fbd-be4b-4b00ec3d4ec6 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
Focus can be a difficult thing to maintain in art. Once you've begun creating something, it's easy to ... | Focus can be a difficult thing to maintain in art. Once you've begun creating something, it's easy to ... | Sparklehorse: It's a Wonderful Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7398-its-a-wonderful-life/ | It's a Wonderful Life | Focus can be a difficult thing to maintain in art. Once you've begun creating something, it's easy to find yourself off on some tangent you never saw coming. It takes a certain amount of discretion, and often, a certain amount of objective distance, to decide which roads to continue down and which ones to abandon. In music, this is, of course, where producers come in. Their job is essentially to stop the artist from getting carried away with a questionable idea and to moderate decisions about direction and material.
Past Sparklehorse efforts have been plagued by a certain lack of focus. This doesn't mean they weren't good records-- in fact, 1998's Good Morning Spider was something of a creative triumph, even in spite of its general disorganization. That said, though, hiring an outside producer (not to mention fully ridding himself of all drug habits) seems to have done Sparklehorse frontman Mark Linkous a great deal of good. Superproducer Dave Fridmann has developed a certain Midas Touch over the years, imbuing nearly every album he works on with a distinctive sonic character, and It's a Wonderful Life has his fingerprints all over it.
The most focused Sparklehorse effort yet, the album flows along with the grace of a river occasionally stirred by a rapid or two. The half-songs and quickly squelched ideas of Linkous' past releases are absent in favor of fully fleshed pieces stuffed full of mellotrons, optigans, orchestrons, and sundry humming keyboards. Only once is its flow badly disrupted. (We'll get to that in a second.)
The majority of It's a Wonderful Life brims with electro American gothic ballads and fuzzy purees of lo-fi and hi-fi aesthetics. There aren't really any out-and-out rave-ups like "Pig" or "Happy Man," but a few of the mid-tempo numbers display enough bite for commercial radio play. (I'm asking too much, aren't I?) "Gold Day" snags the ear with a concise melodic hook and some snazzy mellotron flutes. And Linkous' defiantly surrealist approach to lyrics is in full effect here, with all manner of references to smiling babies, organ music, birds, and celestial bodies.
In fact, some of the lyrics are so surreal that it's hard to imagine they're even metaphors for anything. When Linkous implores, "Can you feel the rings of Saturn on your finger?" in the Vic Chesnutt-cast-adrift-in-a-post-modern-sound-collage number "Sea of Teeth," it's hard to believe that there's much hidden meaning behind it. Animal imagery also abounds; bees, poison frogs, roosters, dogs, doves, and horses all pop up on the first track. How exactly the line, "I'm full of bees that died at sea," proceeds logically to the title refrain of, "It's a wonderful life," is questionable at best, but the claustrophobic mix of optigan, static, chamberlin, and Linkous' plaintive delivery redeems the lyrical content with beautiful production and shimmering instrumentation.
The soulful PJ Harvey duet "Piano Fire" picks up the energy a bit, proffering lyrical imagery of dusty organs and pianos washing up on beaches, amid a heavily distorted guitar racket and subtly employed electronics. In different places, It's a Wonderful Life conjures recent Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Grandaddy, all bands who operate in roughly the same headspace as Linkous. The quietly bleeping "Apple Bed," in particular, recalls some of The Sophtware Slump's more elegiac moments.
Unfortunately, there's that one aforementioned sore thumb that interrupts the otherwise smooth flow of the album, so allow me to preface my next statement with the following diatribe: I love Tom Waits. His music is rarely short of brilliant on some level, and I've long admired his position as one of the most fearless, innovative, and downright unique songwriters on the planet. The man's craft is his genius personified, and I can't get enough of it.
So why does his contribution to It's a Wonderful Life suck so much? "Dog Door" is a miserable distraction. Imagine you're floating down a peaceful river on a raft. It's just you, the trees, the birds, and the fish. You don't have a care in the world. Then, suddenly, the violent hillbillies from Deliverance swoop down out of nowhere, pelting you with rocks and shouting an unmemorable phrase over and over again in an annoying, processed falsetto. That is "Dog Door." Allow me now to sulk like a denied child.
The flow of the album actually picks back up rather easily after "Dog Door" finally, mercifully ends, returning to the eerily placid fare that characterizes the rest of the proceedings with "More Yellow Birds." Soon after, "Babies on the Sun" closes things on a tired, but musically inventive note, with burbling electronics and looped string samples supporting typically cryptic lyrics.
It's a Wonderful Life is a strong offering for Sparklehorse, largely shaking off the excesses of past efforts (maddening Tom Waits collaboration aside) in favor of cohesion and structure. The focus unfortunately keeps Linkous from accessing any truly awe-inspiring standout moments like the ones on past records, but the overall result is a lot more rewarding in the long term. | 2001-09-30T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-09-30T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | September 30, 2001 | 7.7 | e22e18c5-452e-44cf-9be6-eb13e58435ed | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Emo. If you've been reading our site for long enough, you should be behaviorally conditioned to recoil in fear ... | Emo. If you've been reading our site for long enough, you should be behaviorally conditioned to recoil in fear ... | Hot Hot Heat: Make Up the Breakdown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3927-make-up-the-breakdown/ | Make Up the Breakdown | Emo. If you've been reading our site for long enough, you should be behaviorally conditioned to recoil in fear from the word, crawl under your computer desk, and assume the grade-school tornado warning position. Nothing brings out the Pitchfork Ginsu like some earnest musical diary-reading, especially if it's from loyal sponsor Vagrant. One thing I'll grant the Vagrant crowd, though, is good sportsmanship; cheers, mates.
One problem-- and I only feel comfortable telling you this after many months of loyal service-- but yeah, I like some emo. The problem lies in the definition, I guess, since "emo" has a Supreme Court pornography kind of definition; one knows it when one sees it. Emo to me is not so much the three-chord pop riffing of the Get Up Kids or the overpassionate nobody-loves-me preciousness of new-schoolers like Dashboard Confessional, but instead the mid-90s Midwestern scene of bands with a recipe of rhythmic complexity, hardcore/post-punk sensibility co-existing uneasily with anthemic tunefulness, and a tendency to moan about the womenfolk. Hey, the wintry climate of Middle America produces a lot of sensitive dorks, your humble narrator included.
It's these emo-for-lack-of-a-better-term bands (Braid, the Promise Ring's first album, Joan of Arc, and even Rainer Maria) that I fess up to occasionally dusting off for a Saturday afternoon, and pleasingly, they seem to be maintaining some semblance of influence beyond the dumbed-down nu-emo. First there was Pretty Girls Make Graves with their Braid + A Girl! formula, and now comes Canada's Hot Hot Heat, whose sound, lyrics, and album title set off my emo alarm, but in a manner gleefully free of embarrassment.
Of course, the emo label is only one of many arbitrary genre ornaments to hang on Hot Hot Heat; one could equally focus in on their new-wave Attractions fetish for Hammond organ or their post-punk urgency and off-kilter progressions. But if the Canuck quartet resembles anyone, it's Dismemberment Plan circa Emergency & I: insistent, poppy music superbly summarizing most of the melodic states punk rock has evolved through since its invention.
So even if Make Up the Breakdown contains a lyric like "bandages on my legs and my arms from you," there's no navel-gazing to be found, unless you can stay focused on your belly button while spastically thrashing about the room. Breakdown launches with a trio of energetic flashes: "Naked in the City Again" setting the nervous tone with a cymbal groove and jagged guitar; "No, Not Now" traipsing through a series of irresistibly catchy segments; "Get In or Get Out" exploding at one point into an organ freakout during which you can almost hear the keys flying off.
By now you'll have surely noticed singer Steve Bays' voice, and therein lies the swing point of your Hot Hot Heat enjoyment. Rarely pausing for more than a breath, Bays flips violently around the range, speeding up and slowing down to match the stop/starts and time signature fuckery of his bandmates. It's the kind of performance that can either obscure your enjoyment of the entire album (as it did for my esteemed colleague Eric Carr in his review of the band's Knock Knock Knock EP), or enliven the experience as a seeming nod to crazed post-punk vocalists like David Byrne and Wire's Colin Newman. For me, it's the latter-- the voice initially seemed a major flaw atop these otherwise incredibly solid rockers, but by the fourth track I'd dropped my defenses, and now find it gives these tracks the character and caffeinated energy they deserve.
No matter your feelings on the mic work, though, you can't help but notice the musical talent at play here, be it in the unusual song structures or the unobtrusive, color-adding use of the organ behind Dante DeCaro's unpredictable chords. "Oh, Goddamnit" borrows more than messy hair from Is This It? with its tik-tak drumming and poppy bass, but Bays' enthusiasm on the hook is an improvement on the Strokes' studied ennui. "This Town" deftly refuses to allow for standard toe-tapping while remaining singalongable, and "Talk to Me, Dance with Me" features an urgent Latin shuffle that amazingly (given that we're dealing with a north-of-the-border band here) skirts awkwardness.
Make Up the Breakdown still has its weaker moments-- the overlong "In Cairo" or the awkward Long Beach reggae bridge of "Bandages" in particular-- indicating that Hot Hot Heat's peak might be in the gotta-wear-shades future rather than the present. Still, there's no reason Breakdown couldn't put Hot Hot Heat on the national stage-- the band's accessible enough on top of their inventiveness to be a feminine facial structure or two away from superstardom. In the meantime, revel in the rare emo-inflected album that won't earn admonishment from us Pitchforkers. | 2002-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2002-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sub Pop | November 10, 2002 | 8.7 | e22fcf36-8410-4649-a32f-7af318c92f67 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
For his second release as Sinoia Caves, Black Mountain's Jeremy Schmidt has rearranged his work on the score for the cult sci-fi film Beyond the Black Rainbow to craft a work that alludes to the movie but should work for people who’ve never even heard of the film. Schmidt seems to have composed this music based on hazy memories of old soundtracks, with sly nods to John Carpenter and Goblin, Jan Hammer and Jon McCallum. | For his second release as Sinoia Caves, Black Mountain's Jeremy Schmidt has rearranged his work on the score for the cult sci-fi film Beyond the Black Rainbow to craft a work that alludes to the movie but should work for people who’ve never even heard of the film. Schmidt seems to have composed this music based on hazy memories of old soundtracks, with sly nods to John Carpenter and Goblin, Jan Hammer and Jon McCallum. | Sinoia Caves: Beyond the Black Rainbow OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19753-sinoia-caves-beyond-the-black-rainbow-ost/ | Beyond the Black Rainbow OST | As a kid growing growing up on Vancouver Island, Panos Cosmatos spent hours at his local video store, which was then still a new kind of business in North American suburbia. He would browse the endless racks of VHS boxes, especially curious about the fantastical illustrations that lined the horror and science fiction sections. His mother and father (a cinematographer and director whose most famous credits are Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone) wouldn’t let him watch scary movies, but as Cosmatos told Filmmaker Magazine, he would “spend hours looking at the box covers… just imagining my own versions of them.” Decades later, those made-up stories would eventually coalesce into his first feature-length film, 2010’s Beyond the Black Rainbow, a mesmerizing period-piece headtrip sci-fi horror thriller that inevitably became a cult favorite.
As origin stories go, that’s a good one. And it’s borne out by the film itself, which borrows liberally from the past but proves less specifically referential than, say, any Tarantino flick. On first viewing Beyond the Black Rainbow seems visually arresting yet thematically vacuous: The story crawls, yet (or because) each frame is meticulously composed and shot. There’s a strange doctor treating a young woman who is so sedated she can barely speak and whose long, black hair obscures her face to give her the appearance of a j-horror wraith. There’s the suspicious Arboria Institute, straight out of a Cronenberg flick; there are red stormtroopers called sentionauts, two doomed heshers, and the coolest Lotus Esprit since The Spy Who Loved Me. On repeated viewings, however, all of these fantastical elements begin to push forward certain themes—generally, an older generation preying on a younger one. More specifically, it seems to locate the roots of the present generation’s addiction to mood-altering drugs in the Baby Boomer’s pursuit of enlightenment through mind-altering hallucinogens.
Because the film delivers so much of its information visually rather than through expository dialogue—a trick more filmmakers should try—the music must be both bold and nonintrusive, gingerly reinforcing the imaginary 1983 milieu without rendering it as novelty. Working under his Sinoia Caves alias, Jeremy Schmidt has crafted a soundtrack that nods to the early VHS era but is never too specific in its nostalgia; this is music made to tell a story, or at least part of one. Schmidt, a member of the Canadian indie-prog outfit Black Mountain, knows this territory well: In 2002 he released his Sinoia Caves debut, The Enchanter Persuaded, which expertly mixed cosmic synths and kosmische sequencers. Schmidt took a few years to subtly and meticulously rearrange the major suites from his Black Rainbow score into a work that alludes to the movie but should work for people who’ve never even heard of Panos Cosmatos. In doing so, he has done what neither Daft Punk nor M83 could pull off: He has created a soundtrack that works as an imaginative and often moving standalone album.
Just as Cosmatos drew from his own memory to craft the movie, Schmidt seems to have composed this music based on hazy memories of old soundtracks. There are sly nods to John Carpenter and Goblin, Jan Hammer and Jon McCallum. He uses voices well, an old trope that horror flicks have used to imply some ritualistic terror but here sounds more benign—as though Schmidt is peopling Cosmatos’ often empty frames. On opener “Forever Dilating Eye”, a bodiless choir sings the wordless theme, then fades into a quick pulse of dwindling syllables. The effect is that of humans being broadcast via unreliable technology. Those strange vocals reappear at times throughout the album, until they are finally answered by a mechanistic monotone from the movie about better living through chemistry.
“Elena’s Sound-World” recalls Giorgio Moroder’s work for Oliver Stone, but what’s more impressive is how sympathetic the song is toward the title character, imprisoned in the weird Arboria Institute. The pulsing sequencers and bodiless choir of voices not only sound startlingly tender (echoing the sensitivity with which Cosmatos finally shows her face), but the song grows larger with each measure, as though imagining a wide world beyond the confining walls. On the other hand, “Run Program: Sentionauts”, with its towering organ riffs and prismatic synthesizers, conveys nothing but danger and dread as it reimagines a Popol Vuh Herzog score as a teen slasher soundtrack.
In other words, this is music that tells a story—that, crucially, makes its own powerful statement—even when detached from Beyond the Black Rainbow. It ebbs and flows in dramatic arcs, from the fluttery hush of “Arboria Tapes – Award Winning Gardens” to the foreboding synths of “1983 – Main Titles.” The album builds as it proceeds, such that the errant drones and earth-rattling chords of the seventeen-minute “1966 – Let the New Age of Enlightenment Begin” supply rising action and the eerie prog bombast of closer “Sentionauts II” creates a climactic conclusion. In both the film and its soundtrack, there is a constant sense of opening out: Elena’s world grows larger and larger as she ventures from her cell into the wide world, while Schmidt’s score similarly sounds like it is forever dilating, at least until the last synthburst fades. | 2014-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar / Death Waltz | September 3, 2014 | 8.1 | e2333d34-f8f3-4255-99fe-8b18e2eca353 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Decades into their career, this J-pop superstar continues to evolve—both musically and personally. BADモード reads like a friend’s gentle reminder that we’re always coming into our own. | Decades into their career, this J-pop superstar continues to evolve—both musically and personally. BADモード reads like a friend’s gentle reminder that we’re always coming into our own. | Hikaru Utada: BADモード | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hikaru-utada-bad/ | BADモード | The path to understanding one’s identity is circuitous and without clear instructions—a never-ending process. That’s been obvious for Japanese American singer Hikaru Utada from the beginning. After their work as Cubic U proved a commercial failure, they dropped the stage name and swapped covers of the Carpenters and Burt Bacharach for something closer to their heart: R&B. Their debut album under their own name, 1999’s First Love, broke records and remains the best-selling album by a Japanese artist in Japan. In the decades since, they’ve explored various strains of dance pop, gone on a years-long hiatus, had a son, and written songs about grieving following their mother’s death. Despite all this, their latest album, BADモード (“BAD MODE”), is another reinvention, filled with moments of growth and reflection. Largely ditching the live instrumentation of their last two records for electronics and mellower pop, it favors an atmosphere of wisened, down-home warmth. Its most animating force is subtle: the knowledge that aging is an unceasing expansion and crystallization of self. Utada, who has been irrefutable J-pop royalty for more than 20 years, is still feeling themselves out, and BADモード’s depictions of love and reality—so suffused with relatable emotions—read like a friend’s gentle reminder that we’re always coming into our own.
Last year, Utada detailed their frustrations with English honorifics, signing their name Mys. Utada—short for Mystery Utada—to avoid titles that reductively identify people via sex or marital status. A week later they came out as non-binary. “I’d never come across someone who related to what I would say about how I feel about my body or gender,” they recently told Zane Lowe. “It was like a gift—the knowledge of knowing.”
BADモード doesn’t explicitly tackle gender, but it does extend a loving arm to provide a similar gift of resonating comfort. On the title track, Utada aims for disco-leaning city pop, but instead of the genre’s lively verve, there’s a muted energy fitting their thoughtful, genial concern: Their friend is depressed and they’ll do anything to help. “Here’s a diazepam we can each take half of,” they sing in a softly chipper tone, bright horns following in tow. On the earliest display of Utada’s brilliance, 1998’s “Automatic,” they spoke of a blessed serenity: being around somebody who cares for you. They model that same affection here; despite fear and difficulty, Utada sings with compassionate insistence, “When you feel low and alone, you’d better let me know.”
Utada’s objectives on these 10 tracks are clear: they want to love and be loved in completely invigorating ways. Sometimes that’s through friendship, as in “BADモード.” Sometimes it’s through a romantic partner, like on “One Last Kiss,” where their affection is so boundless that every reverberating synth affirms love’s infinitude. Sometimes it’s with someone who transcends descriptors, as on “Time,” a song originally called “Temozolomide,” after the chemotherapy drug their best friend was taking. Utada talks of confiding in someone close to them, and in a manner that isn’t possible with family members or their boyfriend, but things become confusing. They’d kissed before, and then some, but Utada wistfully confesses, “We don’t fit in this mold of romantic love.” There’s desperation and regret over this relationship, one thwarted by relationship norms and hierarchies, and every full-bodied declaration conveys fiery passion. Their missed opportunity—this irreversibility of time—is devastating.
That Utada sings in both English and Japanese is crucial to these stories’ power. They were born in New York City and have lived between the U.S., Japan, and the UK, but this album is the first to fully reflect their bilingual reality. “Find Love,” which is sung entirely in English, is a throwback vocal-house anthem partly indebted to Glenn Underground’s “May Datroit.” It’s subdued but emotive, and words roll off Utada’s tongue to deliver stream-of-consciousness cries for love and self-care. The clarity of each lyric makes the varied moods palpable, recalling the striking bluntness of Simone’s “My Family Depends on Me”; it understands the dancefloor as a site of pleasure, pain, and vulnerability.
Still, the prevailing mood across BADモード is downcast, and Utada’s most convincing portrait of everyday anhedonia is “気分じゃないの (Not in the Mood),” where they detail observations made at a café: colorful furniture, thumb-wrestling kids, a homeless woman selling poetry. Attempts at casual lyricism had been a sticking point in Utada’s past—“Keep Trying’” was too didactic, while “The Workout” overexplained the poignancy of meeting a born-again Christian. But Utada’s too distressed to force any message here, much to the song’s benefit; bleary atmospherics prevail, carried by a slow downtempo beat. To highlight their listlessness, the English-language chorus riffs on the nursery rhyme “Rain Rain Go Away.” It can seem hackneyed in its portrayal of adult depression, of yearning for a simpler time, but the maneuver is redeemed in the final passage: Utada’s son arrives to sing in a playful, carefree register reminiscent of the late Fishmans singer Shinji Sato. For a moment, the future seems bright, and the lightness of childhood joy is closer than previously imagined.
BADモード’s title refers to feeling despondent, and nine consecutive tracks of emotional turmoil can be punishing. It’s cathartic, then, for it to end with the Floating Points co-production “Somewhere Near Marseilles ーマルセイユ辺りー,” a lively Balearic house epic with acid squelches, hand percussion, and an irresistible depiction of romance. “Say I’m not the only one,” Utada repeats, avoidant and anxious of deep commitment. But the song’s too sunny, the groove too seductive; before long, Utada’s all in on this love, their voice manipulated into effervescent coos and embedded into the track’s rhythmic framework. It really captures the spirit of the city: the dynamic energy of the Old Port, the hypnotic swell of the Mediterranean, the towering grandeur of the Notre-Dame de la Garde. Inspiration can’t help but strike in a locale this rich in beauty, so across 12 minutes Utada conjures up a similarly expansive space overflowing with possibility. In their case, it’s newfound eagerness, flirty gestures, and absolute contentment—genuine breakthroughs for an album in constant search of transformative intimacy. Underlining all this is BADモード’s prevailing message: If you want to grow, your love needs to be fearless. | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Sony | February 15, 2022 | 8 | e239d18b-1cf9-4c90-a2e1-eedc761bb159 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Michael Silver of CFCF teams with pianist Jean-Michel Blais on a sometimes-gorgeous collection of ambient pieces. | Michael Silver of CFCF teams with pianist Jean-Michel Blais on a sometimes-gorgeous collection of ambient pieces. | Jean-Michel Blais / CFCF: Cascades | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22987-cascades/ | Cascades | Montreal’s Michael Silver maintains an exhausting workload as CFCF. In 2015 alone, he dropped two albums, a Blowing Up the Workshop mix of original material, and an EP. Equally impressive is how Silver strikes—and maintains—a careful balance between charming electronic music and sounds we otherwise look down on: lite-jazz, adult contemporary, Windham Hill-esque new age. In an appreciation of CFCF last year, the New York Times sussed Silver’s aesthetic as where “uncool become[s] cool” and “defiantly corny.”
That balancing act continues into the present with Cascades, Silver’s collaboration with newcomer and fellow Canadian, pianist Jean-Michel Blais. Together, they move into some new genre terrain to mixed results. Blais only just released his debut album last year, but he's been making minimalist piano music on his own for two decades while teaching music by day. An album featuring piano and electronics is generally an austere exercise, as the resonance between piano keys provides the space in which best to insert electronic washes—see Fennesz and Sakamoto or, more recently, Bing & Ruth. This five-track EP finds Silver and Blais warily feeling one another other out and then synchronizing to exalted effect by the record's end.
They open with “Hasselblad 1,” a restrained piece that showcases Blais’ ability to expand the melodic lines with eloquence, leaving just a few patches of space for Silver to dab in with additional color. It’s lovely, but it feels like they're establishing their respective spaces rather than moving as a single unit. On “Two Mirrors,” Blais hammers a repetitive piano line redolent of Philip Glass, finding new accents and rhythms in it, steadily adding to the theme in the upper and lower registers. Outside of some atmospheric moments, you'd be hard-pressed to pinpoint which sounds belong to Silver, as he allows Blais and his piano to dominate. Silver’s synths swell and find more space on the gentle “Spirit.” At times it’s reminiscent of Boards of Canada, but Blais deftly nudges the piece away from such a tangible aesthetic.
By this point, they're clicking, and the record has successfully outlined its parameters. But the delicate mix of sounds is derailed by “Hypocrite,” wherein the duo edge into questionable territory. A rolling melody from Blais provides the drama for the piece. But when Silver enters, it’s with his synths set to “EDM.” In this setting, the drama of Blais’ piano pushes the track to the brink of being “big tent,” as if the Piano Guys got a makeover by OWSLA.
They remedy the situation with Cascades’s longest piece, a stunning rendition of John Cage’s 1948 piece, “In a Landscape.” For those more familiar with Cage’s later work, which embraces silence, dissonance, and chance operations, “Landscape” is a melodic composition clearly indebted to ambient godfather Erik Satie. On this version, Blais’ piano moves at a stately pace as Silver adds flickering electronics and a bit of radio chatter in the background (perhaps a sly nod to Cage’s shortwave radio piece, “Imaginary Landscape”?). Four minutes in, marimba and chimes ripple and synthesized strings quiver to life and it evokes a rolling pastoral scene the moment the sunlight lands upon it just so, so that every tree and hill on the horizon seems to glow golden. For all of the uneven and uncertain moments of Cascades, it ends on a very high note, and “Landscape” is one of the most unequivocally gorgeous covers imaginable. | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Arts & Crafts | March 15, 2017 | 7.3 | e23ecf48-b99a-47fd-a2b0-1d20332694fe | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Minneapolis MC continues to explore his inner landscape with tales of personal disillusionment, righteous political anger, and emotional calamity. | Minneapolis MC continues to explore his inner landscape with tales of personal disillusionment, righteous political anger, and emotional calamity. | Brother Ali: The Undisputed Truth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10087-the-undisputed-truth/ | The Undisputed Truth | On the surface, Brother Ali is a bruiser. His voice is blunt, his manner curt, and his point of reference planted in a gritty, urban life. But listen closer and you'll notice that he's a tortured soul, with a life that is meticulously and laboriously examined. On "Here", the Minneapolis emcee confides, "We dine here on a balanced diet/ Ego when it's loud/ Self-hatred when it's quiet." And on much of The Undisputed Truth, things are very, very quiet.
Ali's focus on his inner landscape is the rapper's greatest asset and his biggest liability. There are times when his tales of personal disillusionment, righteous political anger, and emotional calamity are scarily realistic, but as often as not this obsession with his own emotions is incredibly megalomaniacal and incalculably boring. It isn't that his troubles are minor or tedious, it's that we don't entirely know his troubles-- only that he's troubled.
Ali does, however, deliver a hell of an opening punch with "Whatcha' Got". Churning power chords crash against a giant bass and restless snares, and Ant's beat bears more than a passing resemblance to Just Blaze's beat for Fat Joe's "Safe to Say". What the song lacks in originality it makes up for in sweaty bombast, and Ali is in loud/ego mode as he declares that the "champion is back" and spends three verse attacking rival rap crews. The bluster works, making this song among the strongest on the album.
But later the focus turns inward. "The Puzzle" finds him playing the part of a victim, musing that the constant struggles define him. It's the sort of idea best delivered by greasy gurus at self-improvement seminars, and everything here is mawkish self-definition or cliché. One minute he claims that he's "tormented and tortured, and got nothing but gray hairs to show for it." The next he tells fans to keep their heads up and demands respect. He does let slip in the song's final verse that he's a single father and that he recently lost his mother to cancer – both reasonably interesting subjects-- but the details are limited.
And it isn't as if Ali doesn't know how to paint a picture or tell a story. The songs that concern themselves with specific incidents and have concrete settings are the set's strongest. "Lookin' At Me Sideways" begins by taking aim at e-thugs-- the wanna-be gangstas who issue threats behind the anonymity of a screen name-- but that's a mere launching point for an amusing bout of self-definition. Here, Ali is "a thugged out nerd," the sort of guy who eats "organic vegetables mixed with fast food" and claims he's somewhere between Howard Zinn and Howard Stern.
Ali honors the former on "Letter from the Government" when he takes aim at Bush's foreign policy misadventures. Over a slow, spare beat (the entire album is produced by the slick but derivative Atmosphere member Ant) Ali recounts opening a letter from the Army Reserves calling him to go to Iraq. His "knuckles turn white/ Eyes begin bulging," and he sulks, remembering the "blue sirens" and abusive cops. "What kind a sucker would I have to be after these years of you harassing and attacking me to go join the calvary?" he asks. "In the name of freedom, I'm supposed to one in his head?"
But what lies at the heart of Ali's malaise is his recent divorce, which he deals with head on in "Walking Away". The song is an open letter of sorts, with Ali directly addressing his ex. "You're about to lose the company your misery loves," he says. Later he'll claim she tried to kill him, and that he never loved her and only stayed as long as he did for the kid. Ant's slow and slinky beat, with a whistle as its centerpiece, provides an effective juxtaposition and makes Ali's vile go down a little easier. It's a great track: honest, heartfelt, and (perhaps most importantly) very descriptive. | 2007-04-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-04-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | April 9, 2007 | 6.6 | e258a050-6de4-4581-989f-4766264a19e9 | Pitchfork | null |
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The title of *Key Markets—*something between Sleaford Mods' third album and their ninth, depending on how you count—refers to a '70s-era supermarket, but it's also a canny reference to the way the post-punk duo's been clawing its way up in the British music scene. | The title of *Key Markets—*something between Sleaford Mods' third album and their ninth, depending on how you count—refers to a '70s-era supermarket, but it's also a canny reference to the way the post-punk duo's been clawing its way up in the British music scene. | Sleaford Mods: Key Markets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20770-key-markets/ | Key Markets | Jason Williamson's speaking voice is gloriously bilious: hoarse with fury, spraying plosives everywhere, turning up the kinked corners of his East Midlands accent as far as they'll go, cramming syllables into every line because nobody's going to fooken shut him up, mate. It's the cornerstone of Sleaford Mods' sound, underscored by double-tracking on crucial phrases; the music behind it is loops made by Andrew Fearn, the other half of the band, mostly from blunt basement-rock bass and drums. (On stage, the two of them are a delightful contrast: Williamson burning-eyed and venting, Fearn hanging back with a beer in his hand, bobbing his head and not even pretending to do more than press the start button at the beginning of each song.)
Williamson and Fearn are both weary-looking white guys in their mid-forties, and they've been kicking around the music world long enough to not have an iota of idealism about it. The title of *Key Markets—*something between Sleaford Mods' third album and their ninth, depending on how you count—refers to a '70s-era supermarket, but it's also a canny reference to the way the band has been clawing its way up in the British music scene. It's been less than a year since Williamson was able to quit his day job as a "benefits adviser," which provided the raw material for both their best-known older song, "Jobseeker", and the new album's "Face to Faces": "Free money, mate, just fill in the form and if you can't then I can 'elp ya."
The state of a working class that politics have kicked in the face over and over is the central subject of Williamson's topical, allusive, syllable-drunk lyrics. His mocking rants spool out like bog roll yanked by a cat, occasionally rhyming, miraculously snapping into sync with Fearn's beats. "Miliband got hit with the ugly stick, not that it matters/ The chirping cunt obviously wants the country in tatters," Williamson spits on "In Quiet Streets"; it's not quite Eminem-caliber for either invective or internal rhyme, and it arrives two months after Ed Miliband resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, but it'll do. (Likewise, you need to have a fairly deep knowledge of both British politics and Britpop to parse a couplet from "Rupert Trousers": "Idiots visit submerged villages in 200-pound wellies, spitting out fine cheese made by that tool from Blur/ Even the drummer’s a fuckin' MP: fuck off, you cunt, sir.")
Sometimes Williamson sings, after a fashion, which is where Key Markets gets weird, in much the same way that early Fall records got weird when Mark E. Smith tried to carry a tune. (The creepily catchy "Tarantula Deadly Cargo", which may or may not be a scatological joke, would fit right in on the Fall's Dragnet, especially Fearn's asthmatic guitar plinks.) "No One's Bothered" is another sung one, the closest thing here to the form of the '70s punk that's deeply embedded in Sleaford Mods' art, and it's built on a smart trick from Fearn. His rhythm track is a three-minute extension of a punk song's bolting bass-and-drums intro, a loop of the few seconds before the guitar inevitably dives in—which it never does here. "You're trapped? Me too," Williamson snaps. "Alienation? No one's bothered." The punk rock on which Williamson and Fearn grew up promised a lot of catharses that weren't actually forthcoming, so they don't even hint at those. But they've adopted its raw elements—crudity, spittle, black humor and unpretty voices—as durable tools to express discontent. | 2015-07-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-07-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Harbinger Sound | July 10, 2015 | 7.5 | e25e986f-f1e5-4514-a330-883a3b148acf | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The Swedish counterculture legends formerly known as Träd, Gräs och Stenar revisit the universe they created in the 1970s, building woolly, choogling rock songs that sound both earthy and sublime. | The Swedish counterculture legends formerly known as Träd, Gräs och Stenar revisit the universe they created in the 1970s, building woolly, choogling rock songs that sound both earthy and sublime. | Träden: Träden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/traden-traden/ | Träden | When Träd, Gräs och Stenar got started in 1969, they were a one-of-a-kind counterculture act. As famous for their expansive, psychedelic jams as they were for their sincere DIY ethos, the Swedish ensemble didn’t just book their own shows and foster a scene—they built their own gear and even cooked macrobiotic meals for audiences at their performances, which were frequently held outdoors.
Through these practices, the band (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass, and Stones”) developed a Be Here Now-adjacent ethos that resonated with left-leaning Swedes of the era. Today, the band endures as Träden (“The Trees”), with guitarist and vocalist Jakob Sjöholm as the sole holdover from those early days. The bandmates he’s recruited over the past decade include Dungen guitarist Reine Fiske and bassist Sigge Krantz, as well as drummer Hanna Östergren. On their self-titled LP, they reverently expand the Träd, Gräs och Stenar universe, building songs that sound both earthy and sublime.
At first blush, Träden easily recalls the early work of Träd, Gräs och Stenar, making the same gestures toward woolly, choogling rock. The band’s winding songs aren’t familiar, per se, but it’s easy to guess their arcs: The rhythm section rumbles along hypnotic grooves while jagged electric guitar riffs spiral in different directions. “När Lingon Mognar (Lingonberries Forever)” makes for a stately and sober opener, before the brisk romp “Kung Karlsson (King Karlsson)” stirs in some sunshine with keys that flit in and out of the mix like butterflies early in the track. From there, the album’s moods vary from the airy, peaceful aura of “Hoppas Du Förstår (Hope You Understand)” to the oozing darkness of “OTO” and the brooding “Hymn.” With the exception of the stormy closing track “Det Finns Blått (There Is Blue),” the music of Träden feels softer, gentler, and the slightest bit clearer on this release, an attribute that is a credit to high-fidelity recording as much as it is to the musicians’ chemistry.
It feels appropriate that the arboreal portion of the band’s original name has remained: Sjöholm’s weathered voice and the songs’ deliberate, unhurried pacing bring to mind a band made up of Ents, the anthropomorphic tree creatures from Tolkien’s Middle Earth, rather than human musicians. “Å Nej (Oh No),” which begins with rain sounds before a swampy acoustic guitar lick takes the lead, cements this impression. An electric guitar’s insectile buzzing furthers the song’s woodsy appeal.
But Träden’s insistence on following the Träd, Gras och Stenar blueprint is also the band’s greatest liability. So much of what made the original group so special was its attachment to particular sentiments, ideals, and people. The band’s ideology—and thus its music—was built on a community in a specific time and place, so what does it mean to reach for similar (if not exactly the same) ends in the absence of the same conditions?
In 2002, original Träd, Gräs och Stenar bassist Torbjörn Abelli (who died in 2010) wrote, “Our music was a sort of ritualistic battle cry, a call for people to be free, follow their own rhythm, their own harmony: set yourself free from your own oppressors.” The contemporary Träden offers one flavor of freedom, kicking open the gate to a new pasture in which listeners can frolic and find respite. If only the band could also break free of its own legacy. | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Subliminal Sounds | August 23, 2018 | 6.8 | e2682a87-f21d-4fe3-8e98-aef03b401d61 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Co-produced with Lydia Lunch, the new Pissed Jeans LP is the sludge-punk band’s cleanest, most hi-fidelity album, and their deepest dive into the inglorious male psyche yet. | Co-produced with Lydia Lunch, the new Pissed Jeans LP is the sludge-punk band’s cleanest, most hi-fidelity album, and their deepest dive into the inglorious male psyche yet. | Pissed Jeans: Why Love Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22889-why-love-now/ | Why Love Now | Sometimes the best thing you can do as a male feminist is shut up and listen to women who know what they’re talking about better than you. That advice might hold doubly true for male musicians. For every “Suggestion”—and, really, there’s only been one “Suggestion”—there are countless self-identified good guys looking for an easy pat on the back simply for having their heart in the right place. There’s a reason why feminist punk spun off into a kind of genre unto itself: This is not subject matter that men usually do well.
Between their territorial growls and bludgeoning guitars, Pennsylvania sludge-punks Pissed Jeans have made a brand out of unfiltered male aggression; each of their four albums has played like an American Splendor comic reenacted by grizzly bears. Yet more so than frontmen who profess to be infinitely more political, Matt Korvette understands what he can contribute to the conversation about gender relations. His songs offer insight into the forces that drive men: the privileges, compulsions, indignities, entitlements, and double standards. He’s touched on this territory often—most notably on “Male Gaze,” his rubbernecking apology from 2013’s terrific Honeys—but he’s never run with the muse as righteously as he does on Why Love Now, the band’s deepest dive yet into the inglorious male psyche.
The record could almost pass for a concept album, if not for all of Korvette’s usual digressions. He balances out his social insights with asides about sugary snacks, laugh-tracked sitcoms, astrology, and the like, and those flashes of irreverence are more welcome than ever, since the core of the album couldn’t be more pointed. “The Bar Is Low” challenges the way society coddles men, rewarding them for the most modest demonstrations of decency, as if simply not being a violent monster entitles them to a medal. “Held down a job/Even snagged a raise,” Korvette sings, “Right there you’re due/For effusive praise.” On “It’s Your Knees,” he demonstrates how men neg women, picking at their insecurities to cut down their esteem.
And since it wouldn’t be a Pissed Jeans album without a healthy dose of sex and shame, there’s plenty of that, too. “Cold Whip Cream” introduces a frustrated guy too embarrassed to ask his partner to indulge his kink. On “Ignorecam,” Korvette goes off over a Motörhead-worthy riff about the absurdity of men paying cam girls to essentially ignore them: “So you're sick of interacting with women, you wanna pay for something that's free?/Shut yourself up and load the ignorecam, getting off on letting her be.” The track ends in angry, carnal release, with Korvette so overcome with self-hating ecstasy he loses track of his spelling. “N-O-R-G-I-E me!” he chants orgasmically, “O-G-I-N-R-E me!” It’s grotesque, funny, and unsettling—the Pissed Jeans sweet spot, basically.
As deft as Korvette is at describing what the patriarchy looks like from a man’s eyes, Why Love Now’s sharpest insights come from outside himself—by actually bringing in a woman. Author Lindsay Hunter penned and performs “I’m a Man,” a mid-album monologue about life as the office alpha male. Adopting her best Danny McBride voice, she assails a coworker with come-ons and double entendres: “You take dic-tations?/You get it?/You ever been stapled?/… You cold?/Put on that cardigan you got hanging over your chair/Do it slow.” Behind her committed comic performance, there’s a threat of real violence.
On a less loaded song cycle, Why Love Now’s relative tunefulness would be the narrative. No wave pioneer Lydia Lunch produced the album along with black metal practitioner Arthur Rizk, and while that seems like it should be a recipe for discord, the pairing somehow resulted in the cleanest, most high-fidelity Pissed Jeans record yet. None of the bands’ primary influences ever made an album this approachable—not Melvins, not the Jesus Lizard, certainly not Pigfuck. The glistening post-punk riff on “Love Without Emotion” could have come from any number of friendly, telegenic British buzz bands; it’d be virtually unidentifiable as a Pissed Jeans track if not for Korvette’s phlegmy ogre routine. The band was wise to offer more carrot than stick for this one, though. Their music has never gone down easier, but their commentary has never hit so uncomfortably hard. | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 1, 2017 | 7.9 | e2683514-39ce-4822-8c28-8cab36711411 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Andreas Kleerup might turn out to have been the Zelig of late-'00s Swedish dance-pop, considering his collaborations with Robyn, Lykke Li, Neneh Cherry, and the Tough Alliance. He returns with a mini-album of his trademark synth pop that's heavy on guests. | Andreas Kleerup might turn out to have been the Zelig of late-'00s Swedish dance-pop, considering his collaborations with Robyn, Lykke Li, Neneh Cherry, and the Tough Alliance. He returns with a mini-album of his trademark synth pop that's heavy on guests. | Kleerup: As If We Never Won | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19925-kleerup-as-if-we-never-won/ | As If We Never Won | Andreas Kleerup might turn out to have been the Zelig of late-'00s Swedish dance-pop. The Stockholm producer's surname originally appeared as the main artist on late-2006 single "With Every Heartbeat", a string-draped beat ballad that went on to become a UK No. 1 for Robyn. His 2008 album, simply titled Kleerup, gave an early glimpse of now-U2-collaborator Lykke Li broadening the coy range of her debut album earlier that year. Neneh Cherry? The Swedish-born pop innovator made herself at home on Kleerup's debut, too. Throw in connections to the Concretes (whose Lisa Millberg guests on Kleerup) and the Tough Alliance (his group the Meat Boys remixed 2004's "Holiday") and this erstwhile drummer is six degrees from just about any Swede you'd care to name. Going beyond Scandinavia for a second: Did I mention he did a remix for Lady Gaga?
Kleerup's first major release since his self-titled debut went international in 2009 shows he still has fine taste in friends, but it's a bit like being introduced to perfectly nice people at a party where the host isn't able or willing to help explain what you have in common. As If We Never Won, the first of two mini-albums Kleerup plans to release in the next couple of years, once again fixes undeniably talented Swedish vocalists to unabashedly warm-blooded synth-pop. This time, though, the combination just doesn't result in songs as fresh and appealing as "With Every Heartbeat" or Lykke Li team-up "Until It Bleeds"; Kleerup doesn't turn out to be endlessly adaptable to the artists he's with, after all. The result is a pleasant yet also mildly puzzling stopgap that fails either to show newcomers what all the original fuss was about or longtime fans why a proper follow-up has taken so long.
Despite the long gap since Kleerup, that album's '80s-immersed spaciousness has remained a common characteristic in more recent pop. So it's not that Kleerup sounds behind the times when he delves into operatic Euro disco with M83/Röyksopp vocalist Susanne Sundfør on "Let Me In"—though the song's video, which mainly focuses on Kleerup and his gear, through occasional colored effects, may speak to where his aesthetic is at these days. He broadens his palette a bit, too: "Rock U", a smoky collaboration with Niki and the Dove's Malin Dahlstrom, winds up somewhere between the new Stevie Nicks album and Haim's "Forever (Giorgio Moroder (Remix)". And an appearance by constantly underrated former First Floor Power singer Jenny Wilson is always welcome, arriving here in the cryptic, mournful pulse of "To Die For".
Still, it's hard to shake the sense these all would have been lesser cuts on the debut album, and nothing here lifts the full record out of its malaise. Opening instrumental "Sad Boys", another one in the Moroder-Cerrone tradition, works as a continuation of Kleerup-closing "I Just Want to Make That Sad Boy Smile" (sorry, anyone reading this hoping for a Yung Lean tie-in). Kleerup's serviceable coo fails to catch a spark in the title track's vocoder-brooding duet with the Sounds' Maja Ivarsson, as the two exchange generic phrases ("I'll never let you down / I'll keep on breaking down/ Signed, sealed, whatever"). Most perplexing of all is the finale, "Thank God for Sending Demons", a hoarse-voiced acoustic dirge that shares its title with a 2011 song by another Kleerup band, Me and My Army, but isn't a recognizable cover. At some point along the six degrees of separation, a true sense of connection has been lost.
Kleerup was, however, wise to use the mini-album format. The setting has recently been good to artists from the Knife and Röyksopp / Robyn to Best Coast, and it's a reasonable length for a Kleerup release in an era when there's no need to fill out an entire CD (my CD version of the first album isn't even that old, yet my computer can't play it anymore—MP3s prevail!). But the lack of time to get lost in a record's particular world makes it all the more important to have songs that resonate in their own right. Kleerup has been busier than you might've thought since 2008—along with the folk-leaning Me and My Army, he released a Sweden-only Kleerup full-length, 2012's *Aniara—*so it's possible he's saving his best stuff for the next mini-album. For now, those interested in hearing the most essential post-Kleerup Kleerup music should probably go back to his production for Robyn on "In My Eyes", from 2010's Body Talk: "You put your dancing shoes on, and you do it again." Or, you know, kick off your Sunday shoes, whatever. | 2014-10-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-10-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Music Group | October 14, 2014 | 5.7 | e270bfe9-c5ce-4cae-bea5-5d074b43433b | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On his latest, Ty asserts his mastery over 25 lush, intricate tracks. With a wide-ranging guest roster including serpentwithfeet and Thundercat, Featuring is a capital-A Album, designed to be consumed in an hour-long gulp. | On his latest, Ty asserts his mastery over 25 lush, intricate tracks. With a wide-ranging guest roster including serpentwithfeet and Thundercat, Featuring is a capital-A Album, designed to be consumed in an hour-long gulp. | Ty Dolla $ign: Featuring Ty Dolla $ign | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ty-dolla-sign-featuring-ty-dolla-sign/ | Featuring Ty Dolla $ign | In the time since Ty Dolla $ign’s last solo album, his gritty vibrato has been everywhere. The summer Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music dropped five albums, Ty was a staple in their credits. There he was on Scorpion, his falsetto undulating beside Drake’s. He warbled over a tepid Chainsmokers beat, resuscitated a limp Post Malone track, released a gleaming, absurdly horny album of duets with Jeremih, found his way onto the chorus of “Hot Girl Summer” and, most recently, harnessed energy from crystals to croon the hook on SZA’s return single. His range is obvious and impressive; he likes to remind us of it. “You really doing them a favor, blessing them with your talent,” his brother Big TC says in the new album’s opening seconds, recorded from the prison where TC is serving a life sentence for a murder Ty has said he didn’t commit. “You can sing, rap, write, produce, engineer, mix, and master.” It’s a callback to the skit at the start of “Bring it Out of Me,” a thumping electro-flecked standout from Ty’s debut album. “You know how to do everything,” Big TC said then, his voice crackling through the phone.
Featuring asserts that mastery over 25 lush, intricate tracks. Every synth and guest verse and snarl of bass glides into place. This is a capital-A Album, designed to be consumed in an hour-long gulp. Some of its most salient moments come in the transitions between songs—the woozy drums in “Temptations” collapse into serpentwithfeet’s elegiac interlude; the screeched adlibs in “Dr. Sebi” drift into the shimmering Gunna collab “Powder Blue.” There are myriad moving parts here: lilting interludes, more guitar than Ty has ever used in a record, an array of high-profile features (including two tracks with Kanye). Ty is less of a curator than a conductor. These songs are intentionally, achingly stitched together, and even the weaker singles shine when played in context.
That’s part of the mystery, and the sheen, of Ty’s craft: moments that objectively should not work somehow do. “Damn, that pussy fuego!” he yelps on “Time Will Tell,” but the gentle thrum of guitar and the gooey harmonies wash away that line’s inanity. “I can’t lie, it’s obvious/ Ain’t nobody sexing good as us,” he murmurs in his honeyed flow on “Slow It Down,” and the statement sounds tender amid an immaculate sweep of strings. The more lackluster of these tracks are still slickly competent, with wobbling hooks primed for TikTok dances; the best are spectral and stunning. “Track 6” is particularly elegant, a panoramic swirl that melds Thundercat’s wriggling, ricocheting bass with Anderson .Paak’s best feature in years. Ty has said that he knows, instinctively, who would pair best with him on a beat as soon as he hears it. That intuition has mesmerizing results. Drill rapper Lil Durk writhes over “Double R”’s pulsing drum pattern. Kehlani’s plush harmonies are a perfect complement to Ty’s rasp on “Universe.” “Lift Me Up” turns Future’s burbles about “codeine in a Hi-C” and Young Thug’s wish for an IV filled with molly into a disarmingly lovely prayer.
“Your Turn” is the most stirring of these collaborations, a mesh of Musiq Soulchild and Tish Hyman’s velvet vocals and a soft 6LACK verse. It’s the longest track by far, with what Ty has said are his favorite lyrics on the album. They anchor the record in a delicate, nuanced hope. “Nobody’s truly yours,” Tish belts in the chorus, not sounding despondent but genuinely awed at the discovery. “I fell in love at sixteen, in love at 20, fell in love at 22,” Soulchild wails. “Now what the hell does it all mean?” In Ty’s previous albums, this prodding may have led him to get drunk and FaceTime his exes; here, he wishes them well and sounds at peace.
The bar for maturity may be pretty low for a guy who’s referred to women as “horses in the stable” and cobbled a breakout hit out of cramming them into a cabana. After a slew of slinky hits about juggling multiple lovers, though, “Temptations” seems like a meditation on fidelity—a sequel to Ty’s club anthem “Paranoid” that sounds actually distressed. “So it’s fuck your feelings, girl, I’m single for the night,” Ty cries, then walks it back later: “My love for you won’t go anywhere,” he breathes, his voice mingling with Kid Cudi’s haunted drone. It’s a more convincing display than the sunny “By Yourself,” a Jhené Aiko-assisted ode to single mothers. Ty’s at his best when he’s wrestling with growth, not proclaiming it.
“Many people have said that when you see a song that says, ‘featuring Ty Dolla $ign,’ you know it’s going to be fire,” Ty wrote on Instagram to announce the album. The title is both joking and not, and the weight of what Ty wants to prove hangs over the record. “I told Ye to run for president,” he raps on “Status.” “He said, ‘Dolla, you too good to put your voice on that generic shit.’” It’s both a flex and a condemnation, a sign that Ty is maybe embarrassed of how he’s spent the last few years. Featuring cements his legacy as a singular, eminent artist — a point he has made again and again and again, but he still sounds so good proving it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | October 28, 2020 | 7.7 | e2715d27-9f12-497c-a1d4-5c7e4f2ee007 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Songwriter Caleb Cordes’ third LP sets aside big hooks for a different kind of immediacy, scaling back reverb and elaborate riffs in favor of a renewed appreciation for taking life as it comes. | Songwriter Caleb Cordes’ third LP sets aside big hooks for a different kind of immediacy, scaling back reverb and elaborate riffs in favor of a renewed appreciation for taking life as it comes. | Sinai Vessel: Ground Aswim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sinai-vessel-ground-aswim/ | Ground Aswim | Ground Aswim begins as a mystery that demands Caleb Cordes’ full attention, and his bandmates respond in kind; if they played any quieter than they do on “Where Did You Go?” Sinai Vessel couldn’t be called a rock band anymore. There’s a shellshocked quality to Cordes’ voice—like he’s survived either an apocalyptic event or a terrible hangover—as he walks the barren streets of a small town where people never just up and leave. A few memories emerge: an abandoned pair of yellow flip-flops in the middle of the road, an empty classroom chair. When he reaches a dead end, the drums drop out as he mutters the song’s title in private prayer. It’s a moment typically described as a “gut punch,” though he’s the one on the receiving end. Sinai Vessel are only interested in the epiphanies that sneak up on you throughout Ground Aswim, an album that looks back patiently on years of seemingly unremarkable days, only to realize that nothing is the same anymore.
Things don’t happen quickly for Sinai Vessel. Cordes tempted fate by calling his debut Labor Pains; its follow-up was rewritten, remixed, and re-recorded over three and a half years. When Brokenlegged finally arrived on the crest of emo’s turbulent fourth wave, it bore little resemblance to the music that inspired Cordes in 2017. Ground Aswim is more in sync with his current taste for spectral indie folk, a Texas-made album that honors an affinity for Big Thief and Lomelda. As with Hannah, Ground Aswim was recorded in Silsbee at Lazybones Audio with Tommy Read, and it aspires to the tactile, live-room immediacy of the Marfa-born Two Hands. Where Brokenlegged slathered guitars in unruly fuzz and reverb, they’re now as dry and gnarled as petrified wood. If the six-minute perpetual motion machine “Tunneling” doesn’t quite deliver his own “Not,” its searing solo still got him a heretofore implausible mention in Guitar World.
Ground Aswim otherwise forgoes showboating, seemingly as a rebuke to the dense arrangements of Brokenlegged. Cordes sets aside big hooks for a different kind of immediacy, one where each musical choice feels like the product of rigorous and unsparing consideration—a brief string swell during “Fragile,” the clenched-teeth tension of “All Days Just End” released with a crash cymbal beaten until it warps. At every turn, he scrutinizes songwriting choices he may have made in the past: Does that chord need four strings when two will suffice? Is that hi-hat necessary or just a habit? How much more effective would that tambourine be if it was just a few bars, or if a piano riff was actually just one note? What if the chorus only happened once? The quietude of Ground Aswim isn’t only an aesthetic preference—inspired by Cordes’ bouts of tinnitus, “Ringing” is both distorted and eerily muted, emulating the experience of hearing his own band through a debilitating headache.
Rather than projecting outwards towards organized religion or intolerant neighbors, Sinai Vessel’s musical evolution permits Cordes to see his past more clearly. He spends nearly every song on Ground Aswim taking stock of things he didn’t allow himself to fully appreciate: relationships both platonic and romantic, live performance, the time we have each day to be useful to one another. It all comes back to the same fear of a level of commitment that leaves one feeling exposed. “There’s a part of me/That’s been taught/That there’s no consequence when I’m not all in,” Cordes sings on “Shameplant.” Consider Ground Aswim a surgical removal.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Single Occupancy | December 11, 2020 | 7.3 | e27e5151-49ac-4f3d-a2a0-ee4605317c55 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Chicago rapper’s new album contains a few flashes of brilliance, but the aloof flows that set him apart now feel a little too familiar. | The Chicago rapper’s new album contains a few flashes of brilliance, but the aloof flows that set him apart now feel a little too familiar. | Valee: Vacabularee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/valee-vacabularee/ | Vacabularee | Name a U.S. city and you can pretty much guarantee it’s home to a new wave of rappers boasting emotionless, too-cool-to-care flows. Among the strongest from the past few years are late Cali storytellers Drakeo the Ruler and Bris, who coldly broke down street politics with a shrug. On 2019’s Days B4 III, Chicago’s Lucki used his inexpressiveness to convey heartbreak and the pain of addiction; meanwhile, the casual deadpans of Detroit spitters like World Tour Mafia, Baby Smoove, and Veeze are designed to make the good life sound routine. With that in mind, Valee’s zen, sleepwalking delivery is not quite the anomaly it was nearly five years ago when he was actively rewiring rap flows with the tumbling nonchalance of “Two 16s.” But his voice still doesn’t sound like anyone else’s: There are layers, switch-ups, and clever intricacies that have kept the Chi-Town native fresh. Detached flows may have become increasingly popular, but Vacabularee is a reminder of Valee’s singularity, even if he’s settled into his comfort zone.
The rapping is skillful here, but it doesn’t feel engineered to blow you away–though it occasionally will. Valee just finds the coolest form in which to rap a verse, a line, or a particular phrase. On “Alpina Beama,” the words themselves aren’t that compelling, but it’s covered up with a flow that works like a continuous stream, making it difficult to tell where bars begin and end. The rhymes are a bit more playful and colorful on “LaFlare;” Valee slows things down, so you can’t miss his punchline about doing donuts in the parking lot of a PetSmart, or misunderstand his slick yet simple wordplay. If some of these bars were said by anyone else, they might feel mailed-in, but Valee’s distinctive vocal wrinkles make them highlights. When he raps, “And I got her right down in Chanel, parentheses” on “Eye Get Money,” the fairly ordinary punchline becomes anthemic as he holds the purr syllable of “parentheses.” It’s like watching the Denzel Washington monologue at the end of Training Day–it would be dumb if he didn’t make it feel so bracing.
Sometimes, though, when Valee isn’t pushing himself, the relative predictability can feel boring. On “Jumpman,” Valee joins ZelooperZ, a like-minded oddball who shares a penchant for flows that are always ahead of the curve. But the possibilities they had for a joint track are a lot wilder in theory, and the straightforwardness is a letdown. The technical rapping is sharp on “Free Willy,” but the murmuring direction makes it feel incomplete. A handful of the blown-out bass beats (see: “Woozi” and “Bell Biv Devoe”) are characteristic for Valee, but they also feel dated, diverting attention from the actual rapping. These moments make you wish that he was chasing brilliance more often, instead of being content with stumbling into it.
It’s hard to harp on this point, considering that Valee is still an exciting rapper without that level of ambition. His array of flows is the draw, but his funny everyman raps are just as good because of how specific they are: Over the spacey groove of “Koala,” he brags about the wall art he purchased on Etsy; he runs up a $900 bill at Costco on “Eye Get Money;” and on “Double Dutch,” he shouts out the most random late era Bruce Willis movie. The only reasonable explanation is that he must’ve been flipping through the deep corners of his cable package directly before entering the booth. It’s something only Valee would do. | 2022-12-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Shell Company | December 14, 2022 | 7 | e28b06a4-b5f0-4f65-8d88-63e11ad2ef66 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Oakland R&B singer’s latest project is a shining example of both her emotional intelligence and her balmy, lucid songwriting. | The Oakland R&B singer’s latest project is a shining example of both her emotional intelligence and her balmy, lucid songwriting. | Kehlani: While We Wait | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kehlani-while-we-wait/ | While We Wait | “Somebody out there really needs to hear this,” Kehlani stated, with earned conviction, on the first track of her second mixtape, 2015’s You Should Be Here. That four-word title alone revealed her emotional intelligence and extraordinary empathy—attuned to the injustice of family members who died before they should have, to friends lost, and to how lovers can be physically present even when they are already long gone. “I’ve felt more pain than some will in their entire lives, all before the age of even being able to buy a fucking drink in a bar,” Kehlani continued on You Should Be Here’s opening monologue, setting the stage and clearing the air for all the raw feeling that would follow.
In her journey from a gauged-ear teen on “America’s Got Talent” to her current zen-like self—pop music sage, wellness app guru, “Come As You Are” tattooed above a portrait of Lauryn Hill on her left bicep—Kehlani, who is now 23, has spoken bluntly about her struggles with mental health and her difficult childhood, likening her parents to Bonnie and Clyde. But in an era of morbid sadness in pop and rap, Kehlani’s songs are tinged with optimism. “Piece of Mind,” the breezy highlight of her 2017 debut LP SweetSexySavage, was a poised anthem about regaining composure and self-worth after a psychologically fraught time. Kehlani’s music knows hurt, but its theme is survival.
While We Wait is Kehlani’s fourth project: her third mixtape and first since SweetSexySavage. Fittingly titled, it was made during her pregnancy (Kehlani’s daughter is due in March) and is her strongest, most distilled release. The playlistification of mainstream music has not hindered this refreshingly concise collection of pop, rap, and ’90s R&B resilience. The sparkling self-respect jam “Morning Glory” evokes TLC, autonomy, and collectedness. The tape’s most thrilling single, “Nunya,” is like Kehlani’s savage take on “Bug A Boo,” with a monster hook to match its monster kiss-off: “You put on a show/’Cause you don’t want the world to know/That you lost the girl who got it on her own.” And the opener “Footsteps” is angelic neo-soul with the piercing emotionality of Joni Mitchell. “When I walked away/I left footsteps in the mud so you could follow me,” Kehlani sings, a simply gorgeous sentiment about leaving a person even if you don’t want to.
The nine songs on While We Wait sometimes feel like a scripted drama about just how complicated love and communication can be in our hyper-mediated present. Kehlani meets peers like SZA and Drake in illustrating those messy realities and then some, sifting through past traumas, suppressed feelings, the shortcomings of language, and the constraints of masculinity. Her primary characters are broken people with baggage attempting to understand one another: “Shoulda never gave you my heart on consignment,” she sings on the aching, moody break-up banger “Nights Like This,” and things grow harder from there. But Kehlani treads into these seas, looks for anchors, and does not shy away from the crashing waves. “I see you duck and dodge at every bend,” she whisper-raps on the spare, vulnerable “Butterfly,” insuring a partner that, “It’ll make you no less of a man/To break your walls and simply grab my hand.” All of Kehlani’s music—but none so much as While We Wait—feels like taking TLC’s “Damaged” and trying to heal it.
An unlikely highlight, then, “Too Deep” is a labyrinth intervention, spiraling into a sublime girl-group choir of Kehlani’s who all narrate that suffocating titular state of feeling suddenly, perilously in over your head. “We was candy crushin,” Kehlani exclaims, “But this shit gettin’ too deep.” Despite its crestfallen subject matter, “Too Deep” is excellent fun. I like to imagine Kehlani listening to her hero, Mariah Carey, in her immortal song “We Belong Together,” remarking “this is too deep” about that one Bobby Womack tune on her radio, and then making a song based on that precise feeling.
The most crushing While We Wait track is “Footsteps,” an ode to honesty and patience in the wake of a dysfunctional relationship. It contains a magical melancholy, the kind that lifts you up. “Cheers to being honest/Neither of us knew what we wanted,” goes the resigned and uncommonly human refrain. An equally potent line—about the tendency of men to use women as therapy—comes later from the featured singer Musiq Soulchild: “I treated you like medicine/But I guess I wasn’t listening.” Kehlani’s truth, though, rings resoundingly. Across While We Wait, her lucidity is pure relief, but “Footsteps” is so eloquent and resolved that you want to bow your head when it ends. Kehlani is teaching us how to talk to one another, and in the process, her voice has emerged more clearly than ever. | 2019-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | TSNMI / Atlantic | February 26, 2019 | 7.6 | e28f4f8e-dce2-4bb5-9a17-883786b210f6 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
It originally came out in 2012, but Hop Along's brilliant Get Disowned, now reissued, feels like it could’ve been the complicated, difficult follow-up to last year's Painted Shut. | It originally came out in 2012, but Hop Along's brilliant Get Disowned, now reissued, feels like it could’ve been the complicated, difficult follow-up to last year's Painted Shut. | Hop Along: Get Disowned | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21510-get-disowned/ | Get Disowned | The consensus critical acclaim for Hop Along’s sophomore LP, Painted Shut, felt like a foregone conclusion, and the band’s singer and songwriter Frances Quinlan was given the title of the best voice in indie rock without much dissent. But Google “Hop Along Get Disowned Review", and you’ll see that the band’s proper 2012 debut (Quinlan had released a solo album under the name) was as universally overlooked as Painted Shut was universally praised. With its swift reissue on Saddle Creek, Get Disowned now feels like it could’ve been Painted Shut’s complicated, difficult follow-up, but one that stands to be just as beloved, because this band remains virtually peerless in indie rock.
In 2012, Hop Along weren’t the robust, road-tested band that could be tasked with warming up amphitheaters for heartland indie acts like the War on Drugs, Modest Mouse, and Dr. Dog. Get Disowned's original release also happened at least a year before any of the narratives that would either directly or peripherally benefit the band—Philadelphia emerging as the nation’s indie rock capital, the emo revival, mainstream attention to Fest, the annual October weekend in Gainesville, Fla., that serves as a proving ground for many of the bands responsible for those first two narratives. Praise would eventually start to accumulate, the most notable being a tweet where blink–182’s Mark Hoppus called this record’s “Tibetan Pop Stars” “the most painfully beautiful song ever.”
Whatever your qualms with the source, Hoppus’ words reached an audience for whom a blink-182 cosign could make a difference. And you know what? “Tibetan Pop Stars” is painfully beautiful, though perhaps not as indicative of any vestigial emo roots as the nearly seven-minute song written from the perspective of a talking mattress, serving as an impartial arbiter in a breakup that just won’t end (“Laments”). But along with beautiful pain and painful beauty, “Tibetan Pop Stars” is also really, really funny, with Quinlan seeking escape from being tied down in any way, especially a boring relationship. And if anyone did ask her about her significant other, fuck something as basic as “he’s in Canada”: Quinlan’s beau is a seducer of Tibetan pop stars and connoisseur of luxury automobiles. It’s the work of a whimsical, wild imagination, but it's also an alibi, one that will probably get the asker to let the subject drop and leave her alone.
The humor of Get Disowned may have deflected from just how brutally honest and devastating it is. In 2012, Quinlan described her ultimate songwriting goal as, “finding [a] character and creating a world,” which seemed more in line with the literary, referential Painted Shut than it does with the songs here. The tragedies and personal failings on Get Disowned feel more like autobiography—“Trouble Found Me” expresses the horrifying imagery of her stepfather after suffering a catastrophic accident (“you came in with your jaw torn, still talking”), along with the vivid memories of technicalities that tend to stick with trauma sufferers. Quinlan remembers things like the chicken in the oven before arriving to the hospital and seeing nurses playing poker while a blind man convalesces in the next bed over. The account of a family friend’s death on the rollicking roots-rocker “Sally II” starts with a literally breathtaking mention of “that unsettling smell had gotten into all the tenants’ rooms,” and it’s the mundane forensic details that are even more unnerving: the apartment is littered with weightlifting magazines and a piece of junk mail with a fake million-dollar check (“you thought it was the real thing”).
Get Disowned is a meditation on death and loss every bit as compelling as Southeastern, Benji, or Carrie & Lowell, and boasts more inventive language than any of them. But Hop Along, in part because the project was so new, initially had a harder time getting noticed. And while Quinlan’s voice is unusually expressive—she often screams and restrains herself at the same time, so it sounds like her lungs might burst—it rarely sounds objectively sad in a way that immediately conveys gravitas or fragility to a casual listener. Play “Sally II” at a party, ask a friend what it’s about and see how close they get to “an older man dying alone in his apartment.”
The record’s most pressing issue may be one that was hit upon in an interview with Quinlan and her brother Mark, Hop Along’s drummer. Frances described the prevailing theme of Get Disowned as “baggage,” to which Mark added, “not being able to have your mistakes written off just because you’re young.” Right there, the siblings touched the nerve that rightfully triggers a shudder in anyone who’s been the target of all those “why can’t these entitled millennials just wash their cereal bowls like we did in the good ol’ days?”-style pieces, written by someone who refuses to take ownership of the degraded world they’ve left for the younger generation. It feels like the Quinlans were speaking to how people can be seriously damaged by their youth and still not be taken seriously.
Sure, kids might learn to process and turn these experiences into assets—“Hop Along” itself was a nickname given to Quinlan in high school for being a slow walker. Or they may repress them and have them mutate into something uglier and intractable that continues throughout their lives. Even if a middle-schooler is aware of what’s at stake in the upcoming presidential election or reads an article about Flint’s water crisis, if they got picked on at school, that’s probably the most important thing in the world to them right now. Get Disowned lends dignity to the truth that each person’s struggle and recovery is theirs, regardless of how it may present to outsiders or how it seems relative to more pervasive and global concerns. As Hop Along would soon find out, the first step to a breakthrough is just to be heard. | 2016-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | February 29, 2016 | 8.5 | e2a3b3ea-acda-48c3-a67a-c375953957c8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Mitski’s sixth album is an austere, nuanced, and disaffected indie-pop record that, in part, addresses her turbulent relationship with her own career. | Mitski’s sixth album is an austere, nuanced, and disaffected indie-pop record that, in part, addresses her turbulent relationship with her own career. | Mitski: Laurel Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mitski-laurel-hell/ | Laurel Hell | Mitski sees the world with the ruthless, knowing gaze of someone who grew up too fast. Her cutting acuity is part of what inspires rapture from her fans, who speak about her as if she’s the only person who has ever understood them. It is also what makes her wary of even the most sincere adoration, insisting on distance between herself and her audience. When a fan at a concert screams “I love you,” Mitski, straining to say the truth kindly, replies with pity: “You don’t know me.”
But Mitski thinks the world of her audience too, because they are the reason that she gets to make music. “Thank you all for saving my life,” she addresses the crowd at the end of her show. All of her intensity serves this one creative pursuit, the most remarkable and doomed relationship of her life. For her dreams, she made the usual exorbitant sacrifices: cramming in gig after gig, forgoing a stable residence or health insurance, abandoning other interests or friends. “I will neglect everything else, including me as a person, just to get to keep making music,” she told Pitchfork, ahead of the release of her ascendant fifth album Be the Cowboy, in 2018. By then, she seemed to have made it. She could do music full-time. She could pay for insurance. “Now my goal is to only make music that I feel is necessary for me to make,” she said.
What happens when you realize your dreams and still feel unhappy? On “Working for the Knife,” the arresting lead single and guiding light of her sixth album, Laurel Hell, Mitski reckons with the idea that the grind wasn’t worth it: “I always thought the choice was mine/And I was right, but I just chose wrong.” The song opens with cold, droning synths and clinks that sound like spikes hammered into railroad tracks. It is incredibly potent, filled with contradiction and unease; Mitski’s cool voice intersects with a piano line that sounds slightly off-key, and a clanging guitar springs in suddenly. “At 29, the road ahead appears the same,” she sings, before pivoting to a small, perhaps futile, note of hope. “Maybe at 30, I’ll see a way to change.”
“Working for the Knife” was written in late 2019 after Mitski had left social media and privately decided to quit the music business. Then she realized her label contract required her to make one last album. Instead of handing in Laurel Hell quietly and disappearing, she committed to promoting it, sitting for profiles and reacting to tweets on camera; if it’s not enough to headline her own 48-stop solo tour, she will also be opening arenas for Harry Styles. “Sometimes I think I am free/Until I find I’m back in line again,” she acknowledges on the low-pulsing “Everyone,” before piano chords that glitter like chandeliers whisk the song to a more beautiful place. The album doesn’t shy from Mitski’s disaffectedness, which is apparent even in the vocals, delivered with less brio than on, say, Puberty 2. On “Stay Soft,” Mitski revives the snappy disco of “Nobody” and suggests that numbness is inevitable for someone just trying to survive: “You stay soft, get eaten/Only natural to harden up.”
The songs on Laurel Hell are wispy, less image-dense than before; the longest line in “I Guess,” for example, is six words, like it was written on the back of a napkin. One blazing counterpoint is “Heat Lightning,” a languid ballad about insomnia that sounds like the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.” “Sleeping eyelid of the sky/Flutters in a dream,” Mitski sings, a spectacular and vivid portrait of 4 a.m. consciousness. Gazing out the window at a liminal hour, she anticipates an oncoming storm, observing trees “swaying in the wind, like sea anemones.” The sweltering air dissipates and the song catches a drift. Hours of restless contemplation lead Mitski to the realization that she must abandon her chosen path, and she sings tenderly, almost religiously: “I surrender.”
The other standout on Laurel Hell is more menacing, less relieved. Opener “Valentine, Texas” introduces us to the album’s abiding metaphor: Mitski returning to her rightful place in the dark. “I’ll show you who my sweetheart’s never met,” she sings, flashing a version of herself that’s brutish like an animal, all “wet teeth, shining eyes.” At first the song is disquietingly minimal, but in a classic Mitski move, it erupts in the middle; the music swirls and coruscates like a snow globe. Hoping a shift in perspective will ease her heaviness, Mitski longs to drive out to where clouds are shaped like mountains: “Let me watch those mountains from underneath,” she sings, “And maybe they’ll finally/Float off of me.”
In press for Laurel Hell, Mitski has distanced herself from the aims of her prior album, where she consciously pivoted to short fiction to prove that her songs were more than confessional outpourings. “I don’t want to make another Be the Cowboy,” she’s said. “I didn’t want to make music that was putting up walls against the listener.” This framing is somewhat misleading because Laurel Hell isn’t necessarily more transparent or revelatory than its predecessor—and in between the woeful reflections on her relationship to music, there are sketches of romantic turbulence that read like stories. “Should’ve Been Me,” a foot-tapping number with Hall & Oates’ blue-eyed pep, could be a sequel to 2018’s arresting “A Pearl”: the partner of an emotionally lost woman can’t break through to her, and so they seek love from someone who’s her spitting image. On “The Only Heartbreaker,” co-written with pop hitmaker Dan Wilson, someone wishes their lover would just fuck up just once, so they’re relieved from always being the bad guy.
It’s an odd coincidence that Laurel Hell contains some of the most commercial-sounding work of Mitski’s career while in interviews she’s wrestled against the industry’s need to distill and market her. In the latter half of Laurel Hell, including on “The Only Heartbreaker,” she embraces ’80s synth-pop so stadium-bright that a collaboration with the Weeknd doesn’t seem that far off. You could argue the flash and bang serves a meta-purpose, like on “Love Me More,” in which Mitski frantically pleads for more nourishment, more reciprocation, just more. “Drown it out, drown me out,” she demands, and the blinding synths fulfill her wishes. But the production has the ultimate effect of anonymizing her, subsuming a first-class songwriter into a tired palette. Mitski has long maintained she values words and melody over instrumentation, and the choices on Laurel Hell can feel like a misuse of her talent.
Laurel Hell went through several iterations over three years, which may explain why the end product feels a bit scattered: big pop numbers next to slow, ambient-leaning passages, narrative capsules next to more plain disclosures. To say that it is the least compelling of her Dead Oceans records is also to acknowledge the stratospheric standard she has set. Laurel Hell still has wrenching lines and artful melodies, proof that Mitski’s every move operates at a baseline level of virtuosity. The existence of the album in and of itself feels climactic. Mitski’s fantasies of leaving music, of destroying everything, didn’t happen overnight. “[If] I could just be a normal healthy person with a regular job, I would do that in a heartbeat,” she told the New York Times in 2016. “I would love to be just happy.”
Of course, it’s never that easy. In the last few minutes of Laurel Hell, Mitski forlornly announces the end, and then reveals her farewell to be the album’s penultimate track. “You say you love me/I believe you do,” Mitski sings on the real closer, “That’s Our Lamp.” “But I walk down and up and down/And up and down this street/’Cause you just don’t like me/Not like you used to.” It plays like a classic lover’s quarrel, set to jubilant disco in the vein of “Dancing Queen.” The mood all but guarantees a happy ending, and you can predict how this one goes: Mitski and music, the remarkable and doomed lovers, giving things one last shot.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | February 2, 2022 | 7.8 | e2aa9a91-7760-42c2-a5a1-188f4838cc52 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Trevor Powers has long shown a penchant for reinvention, but his first album as Youth Lagoon in eight years feels like a homecoming; he’s never sounded so confident or at peace with himself. | Trevor Powers has long shown a penchant for reinvention, but his first album as Youth Lagoon in eight years feels like a homecoming; he’s never sounded so confident or at peace with himself. | Youth Lagoon: Heaven Is a Junkyard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youth-lagoon-heaven-is-a-junkyard/ | Heaven Is a Junkyard | Trevor Powers has reinvented himself with every release. Across his first three albums as Youth Lagoon, he moved from small-town innocence to cosmopolitan experimentalism and hip-hop low end, and on to a bellicose clarity born out of personal tragedy. Then, in dramatic terms, he ended the project. On his first album under his own name, he embraced jagged, industrial-noise dread; on the second, after a scary real-life panic attack, he disappeared almost completely into found-sound abstraction.
Through a dozen years of shifting sounds and trends, Powers has remained faithful to the fundamentals of chamber pop: tunes that stick in your head and arrangements grand enough to get lost in. Also key: his cryptic existential musings, which he delivers in a voice as high and craggy as the Idaho backcountry near his hometown, Boise. His first album under the Youth Lagoon alias in eight years, Heaven Is a Junkyard, channels those familiar qualities into a reinvention that feels like a homecoming. The old anxiety and morbid fascination remain, but Powers has never sounded so confident, so at peace within himself.
Powers has teamed up this time with producer Rodaidh McDonald, whose stately electronic flourishes for artists like Gil Scott-Heron and the xx are echoed here. They achieve a sound that feels at once lush and spacious; synths, lap steel, and unorthodox percussion adorn unhurried songs that revolve around Powers’ rickety piano and quavering vocals, now free of the foggy reverb that cloaked the earliest Youth Lagoon records, but sometimes digitally treated, in keeping with his later solo work. The lyrics are as elliptical as ever, with lurid glimpses of the hardboiled 1950s crime fiction Powers admires, but they also seem more grounded in his particular Mountain West setting and strict Christian upbringing. The resulting catharsis is less a primal scream than a prayerful revelation.
Heaven Is a Junkyard follows another traumatic experience for Powers, an excruciating over-the-counter drug reaction that dragged on for eight months and temporarily robbed him of his voice. Late-album track “Trapeze Artist” addresses his recent plight with harrowing directness, but through indie pop so jubilant that by the time a guest choir sings, “Jesus, please take the pain,” it feels like a hallelujah. Lead single “Idaho Alien” paints a grim scene of self-harm that Powers acknowledges as his way of coping with feeling trapped in his own body during the illness, but its jaunty, observational air could fit anyone who feels out of place. The extraterrestrial theme seems especially apt for a singer whose ethereal vocals—once evoking Daniel Johnston, now and then verging on Jónsi—have always scanned as otherworldly.
Heaven Is a Junkyard powerfully conveys a sense of renewal. On serene opener “Rabbit,” between Alice in Wonderland references and intimations of violent conflict, he sings about “a 1980 Ford” like an older, wiser version of the kid on one of Youth Lagoon’s earliest songs who was “rolling up the windows of my ’96 Buick.” The type of vocal manipulation that Powers explored to menacing effect on 2018’s Mulberry Violence recurs toward the end of this album on “Mercury,” only here it’s for a cello-swept anthem that asks about (and sounds like) a heavenly glow.
At its best, Heaven Is a Junkyard is up there with anything in Youth Lagoon’s catalog. The radiant electronic pop of “Prizefighter,” which wouldn’t have been out of place on 2013’s Wondrous Bughouse, spins an engrossing family narrative drawn from Powers’ background as one of four homeschooled brothers; a line like, “Now all I want is fun,” hits different after a verse about a brother “who left for war with no goodbyes … ’cause he thought I’d see him cry.” The album’s centerpiece, “The Sling,” which features prolific violinist Rob Moose, feels like a breakthrough. Powers’ lyrics are terse but packed with arresting phrases—“Time would bend/Like a drunken tree,” he sings—en route to an eerie yet tender declaration: “Heaven is a junkyard/And it’s my home.” Like a contemporary Huck Finn, Powers’ narrator seeks a salvation that lies beyond what traditionalist authorities preach.
To acknowledge that flawed human beings living in the fucked-up here and now are capable of beauty and goodness may be a useful corrective to reflexive disillusionment, but it’s no guarantee of happiness. “Love is the promise that someday you’ll lose,” Powers sings with devastating certainty on the graceful finale, “Helicopter Toy.” With Heaven Is a Junkyard, he seems to have found himself anew by doing what he has always done, pursuing his musical curiosity in previously unexplored directions. On one of his earliest and most enduring songs, “17,” from 2011’s The Year of Hibernation, he sang of his mom telling him, “Don’t stop imagining/The day that you do is the day that you die.” Youth Lagoon lives. | 2023-06-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | June 13, 2023 | 8.3 | e2afd62b-b138-4ae1-a110-c6b7538bd520 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The guitarist and composer leads his adventurous backing band through immersive instrumentals, creating a tranquil atmosphere from classical minimalism, ambient synth, and nimble fusion. | The guitarist and composer leads his adventurous backing band through immersive instrumentals, creating a tranquil atmosphere from classical minimalism, ambient synth, and nimble fusion. | Ezra Feinberg: Recumbent Speech | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ezra-feinberg-recumbent-speech/ | Recumbent Speech | Recumbent Speech invites you to a world so vivid and intricately textured that you might feel like you are part of it. “Acquainted With the Night,” named after a Robert Frost poem, opens with the sound of Ezra Feinberg’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar, recorded closely enough to hear his fingers brush the strings. The sense of solitude in tight quarters doesn’t last long: Soon, he is surrounded by synth, flute, piano, and fretless bass—a cosmic pastoral landscape, not far from the ones Popol Vuh played to soundtrack Werner Herzog movies in the ’70s. Feinberg’s hypnotic, wordless compositions grow this way, one instrument at a time, letting you settle in before he sweeps you away.
In the 2000s, Feinberg led the San Francisco band Citay. Across three records, the collective drew on styles that were largely unfashionable in indie music: soft rock, jam bands, new age. Ten years since the release of their last album, their earnest embrace of these genres feels ahead of its time. “I don’t feel a need to distance myself from anything I like,” he explained in 2006. “If anything, I want to bring myself (and my bandmates, as well as my friends and family) closer to everything I like.” The same way that artists like Jim O’Rourke or Oneohtrix Point Never return to a distinct set of influences through their myriad releases, Feinberg seemed to create a canon within his own work. You could count the references, but you’d lose track of the feeling: a radiant sense of positivity drawn from the most meditative corners of his record collection.
His second solo album since disbanding Citay and moving to Brooklyn, Recumbent Speech is his most distinct and embracing work. He still draws on many of those same influences, but his work is less tethered to his versatile guitar playing. He is an expert bandleader, guiding a group of like-minded musicians to bring each composition to life. At other times, he is more like a free-form DJ. These six songs are unified by their slow-building serenity and enveloping atmosphere, maintaining a singular mood while Feinberg jumps between genres and influences. Minimalist classical explorations sit beside campfire folk strumming; ambient synths give way to nimble fusion. No two songs sound quite alike, and each of them might feel like the centerpiece on any given listen.
To match his wide-spanning vision, Feinberg enlisted a compact but adventurous backing band. Among his accompanists are Tortoise drummer John McEntire, pedal steel player Chuck Johnson, synth composer Jonas Reinhardt, and vocalists April Haley and Mandy Green. These singers draw a clear line to Feinberg’s utopian work in Citay, their harmonies adding a sense of calm to the moody “Ovation.” But three minutes in, at the point where a Citay song might have burst into a guitar solo, the music drops completely, leaving just a bed of ambience and Feinberg’s amplifier feedback. When the band returns from the quiet, they sound slower and heavier, like they are carrying a great weight behind them.
The record shines through these emotional twists in Feinberg’s compositions and his accompanists’ performances. If Feinberg’s inspiration once came from bringing the styles he loved to as many people as possible, Recumbent Speech draws on the deeper connections from a lifetime of music discovery: the memories those songs conjure, the people we meet through our shared passion, the way an old favorite might sound different under new circumstances. For all his crate-digging tendencies, Feinberg returns again and again to a simple goal: to soothe our worries and guide us somewhere better.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Related States | July 16, 2020 | 7.6 | e2b79190-7f13-45bf-aadb-75df2b806c95 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Wolf Parade have cleaned up further on their streamlined new record, making for solid throwback indie rock. | Wolf Parade have cleaned up further on their streamlined new record, making for solid throwback indie rock. | Wolf Parade: Cry Cry Cry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolf-parade-cry-cry-cry/ | Cry Cry Cry | It stands to reason most listeners who encounter Cry Cry Cry had some real moments with 2005’s “I’ll Believe in Anything”—not just a song that defined Wolf Parade, but an entire era when scrappy bands with bristling guitars, raw-throated vocalists, janky synths, and dog-eared thesauruses all believed in something profound and abstract. They sounded like they were punching far above indie rock’s weight because they really could be thrust from obscurity to relative stardom. It doesn’t quite feel that way anymore, and perhaps it’s fitting that “2005 indie” or pre-blog rock—whatever you want to call it—is having its best year since, well, 2005. Everyone from the National to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sound rejuvenated. Then again, just as many may look back on that time as one where indie rock started to lose its countercultural power and became a quirky, cerebral lifestyle accessory, inextricable from McSweeney’s or Wes Anderson movies. But both sides will likely agree on Cry Cry Cry: that’s indie rock right there.
It makes for a sensible followup to last year’s EP 4, a four-song teaser that functioned better as an accessory to their reunion shows than a substantial addition to the Wolf Parade catalog. It proved that Wolf Parade still had access to the raw materials of their beloved 2005 debut Apologies to the Queen Mary: the earnestness of implacable “heartland rock,” abrasive synths, a smattering of prog pageantry, all cautiously portioned out. You could dutifully tap your foot to “Mr. Startup” or “C’est La Vie Way.” EP 4 just wanted to make sure you were still interested.
Wolf Parade hardly lack for inspiration this time around. Lead single “Valley Boy” finally makes good on EP 4’s promise of a glam-rock retooling, boasting the album’s most ostentatious hook before tipping numerous hats to Leonard Cohen (“you finally became that bird on that wire”). And like all bands in 2017, if Boeckner or Krug were to tell you that any of the more sinister or dour lyrics were political, you’d have to believe them. “Lazarus Online” introduces Cry Cry Cry with its most startling line—“I received your message/You’re a fan of mine/Your name’s Rebecca and you’ve decided not to die.” It’s strikingly similar to a much-maligned lyric from Arcade Fire’s “Creature Comfort”, but unlike their peers in Canada’s mid-2000s ruling class, Wolf Parade aren’t operating from an elevated platform. They may not be in love with the modern world, but they’ve got to live in it like the rest of us, experiencing reality like a sleepless night continually bordering on nightmare. “I’m up all night with the Century Ghosts,” Boeckner barks on the somnambulant sprint “You’re Dreaming.”
Which is to say, this feels like a Wolf Parade album. And once the hiccuping synths kick in on “You’re Dreaming” or “Artificial Life,” it sure sounds like a Wolf Parade album, too. But rather than recapture their early spark—Krug and Boeckner’s vocals toppling over each other, some production grit, a sense that there was conflict or something at stake—Wolf Parade have cleaned up further with production from John Goodmanson. For the most part, Wolf Parade’s synths have matured into pianos, precision drumming, and while Boeckner and Krug have instantly recognizable voices, it’s getting tougher to tell them apart. The result is a more coherent and streamlined record than the previous two, but it likewise echoes Apologies to the Queen Mary enough to present its shortcomings in stark relief.
Wolf Parade are now practical and proficient, more similar to latter-day Spoon cuts than Boeckner’s actual work with Britt Daniel in Divine Fits. Oddly enough, Wolf Parade’s focus is a liability on Cry Cry Cry’s requisite prog-epics. “Baby Blue” and “Weaponized” stretch out past six minutes but do so by cycling in place, lacking the peculiarities that validated the spacious structures of “Kissing the Beehive” or “Dinner Bells.” And in the record’s one truly confounding move, they’re stuck back-to-back as an almost 13-minute valley Wolf Parade spend the rest of Side B admirably trying to crawl and shimmy their way out of.
But once they do, with the admirably vigorous “King of Piss and Paper,” Cry Cry Cry can be heard as an equal to At Mount Zoomer or Expo 86: a solid record, throwback indie rock by default, powered less by defiant belief than muted reliability. Boeckner and Krug’s hearts were on fire on their debut and ever since, that passion has burned just as hot in their other endeavors. And yet, when the two realign on subsequent Wolf Parade records, the results have been workmanlike in all aspects: admirable, handsomely crafted, and ultimately defined by how much they sounded like work. | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 11, 2017 | 6.7 | e2bf0033-58ec-4727-be2b-210e92f746f2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Producer William Harrison King puts quantity before quality on this free, 30-track compilation of sketches, demos, and experiments whose most exciting moments highlight his flair for minimalist composition. | Producer William Harrison King puts quantity before quality on this free, 30-track compilation of sketches, demos, and experiments whose most exciting moments highlight his flair for minimalist composition. | Sharp Veins: detritus preterit selections | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sharp-veins-detritus-preterit-selections/ | detritus preterit selections | The disjointed club music William Harrison King makes as Sharp Veins may sound unruly, but when it comes to his recorded output, the Alabama-born, New York-based producer has tended to privilege quality over quantity. He got his break on a 2014 compilation for the influential grime label and party Boxed, under the moniker William Skeng. The next year, Sharp Veins’ debut EP Inbox Island blended dizzying, bass-heavy club bangers, grime, drone, ambient, and Southern hip-hop into a seamless and euphoric whole.
The project resurfaced last year with a second EP, bleeds colors and puddles. Released on UNO NYC, the dance label best known for putting out early works by Arca and Mykki Blanco, it found Sharp Veins’ style growing even more difficult to pin down. Lush chromatic synths collided with beats carved down from over-processed samples (including one that sounded like a nasty cough) with a newfound liquid ease. Expectations flip even further on detritus preterit selections (which essentially translates as “selected old junk”), a free, 30-track compilation of sketches, demos, experiments, and hidden gems that runs nearly two and a half hours. This warts-and-all document of King’s process offers plenty of satisfying moments and some genuine surprises.
Many of the album’s tracks (whose titles include such straight-off-the-laptop labels as “[ROUGH],” “[demo],” and even “shitty mixdown”) feel like intriguing passages from incomplete songs, but part of the fun is in listening as cuts that start out as duds abruptly explode into greatness. “Misplaced my nostalgia” meanders at first, then bursts into an ever-unfolding rush of synths, while opener “across the cfloor v2 v1” careens wildly from drones to crashing grime before introducing a chirpy hook. Tracks can hit with the maximalist shimmer of Rustie, the whip-crack sweetness of PC Music, or the warped elasticity of vaporwave pioneers like Vektroid.
Many of the best compositions, however, showcase King’s less explored flair for minimalism. Sharp Veins’ mix for the Truants series revealed a deep appreciation for ambient music, lacing his own tracks through pieces by GAS, Grouper, and William Basinski, and he explores that sound in more depth here. More an abstract painting than a rough sketch, “drawing” deploys gorgeously curling synths without ever chasing a melody. “couldnt sleep v1 [137]” buries waves of drone and noise on top of each other to soothing effect. The album’s finest moment comes on “little worm,” in which King delicately handles a single shard of sound—a digital blip that flutters like the dying breaths of one of the Disintegration Loops—until a thunderous bassline shatters the glassy atmosphere.
Detritus lacks the airtight pacing and precision of Sharp Veins’ EPs, but that’s the point. The quantity-over-quality scale and low stakes that come with releasing a free compilation give King the space to chase inspirations and test the edges of his sound. He even finds a powerful singing voice, channeling a young, distortion-bathed Jamie Stewart on the penultimate track, “lets wash our hands v3 [150].” It’s a moment that makes you see earlier tracks in a new light: The standout “crshed like a toad v1” is sweet and sharp in all the ways Xiu Xiu are, and “wash our hands” reinforces that link in a way that feels almost subconscious.
It’s surprising connections like this one that make the uneven release worth digging through. “Take these, the preterit, as a sort of ‘this is what i’ve been doing while i’ve been quiet’ then we can all move on,” King instructs listeners on Bandcamp. It’s hard to say what Sharp Veins will be moving on to, but detritus preterit selections suggests a virtually limitless field of possibilities. | 2018-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | UNO NYC | August 22, 2018 | 6.6 | e2c4e19d-3ac8-4b8c-ab98-05cd8f791b3e | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Though the Philadelphia experimental poet and sound artist has called this her most “accessible” album, her aims remain as radical as ever. | Though the Philadelphia experimental poet and sound artist has called this her most “accessible” album, her aims remain as radical as ever. | Moor Mother: Black Encyclopedia of the Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moor-mother-black-encyclopedia-of-the-air/ | Black Encyclopedia of the Air | Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, has spent the better part of a decade becoming the poet laureate of the apocalypse. So it’s strange to hear the Philadelphia sound artist say, “I ain’t got to fight no more.” Threaded through rolling drums and the squealing upward climb of a violin, the phrase that weaves Black Encyclopedia of the Air closer “Clock Fight” together seems to contradict a ferocious legacy of blurring past, present, and future into hissing indictments of history that still left room for hope. After years of chronicling the advent of armageddon, could the war really be over? She’s joked about calling this album her “sell-out” record, and it’s true that the collection of beats and soundscapes that she’s assembled with collaborator Olof Melander is her most accessible yet, but could Moor Mother really be hanging up her sword?
Ayewa has been locked in combat against the oppressive ideology of linear time for years, and she knows how to punch through the pain. To her, time travel is a birthright. Every tick of the clock flattens the spirit, surrendering our naturally fluid understanding of time as we march along—mindlessly, without empathy—in service of capital. Make no mistake: The battle has left her weary. Opener “Temporal Control of Light Echoes” wastes no time letting you know how it felt to “fight through crowds of humiliation,” only to find herself in a “gathering of bones,” and the smooth rhythms of “Mangrove” do little to cushion the blow of realizing that she “no longer see[s] the shadows of what made me strong.” But when she leans into a venomous groan on “Clock Fight,” rattling off her struggles against “the master’s clock,” “the rich clock,” and “the clock of democracy,” what you hear isn’t resignation or defeat. It’s a catalog of vanquished foes, an ever-expanding list of victories. Black Encyclopedia of the Air is another withering salvo in Moor Mother’s lifelong war of attrition, expertly disguised behind the shadow of a white flag.
For an artist who consistently drapes her work in the language of astronomy, it’s surprising how little space Ayewa has indulged on previous albums. Moor Mother records are typically dense affairs: Crowded with samples and harsh noise, shot through with jazz and body horror, they pound the psyche into a malleable putty. Here, she takes her time, touring through soft interstellar clouds before the inevitable turn into a sonic black hole.
After “Temporal Control of Light Echoes” straps you in, a looping sample of the word “respira” reminds you to breathe. Heed the warning: Though the album drifts into an eight-song stretch of dreamy beats and languid bass, Moor Mother condenses her grim symphony of voices into bite-sized movements that fly by at a satisfying clip. Expanding into the newfound void, Ayewa pulls off a remarkable transformation by sidestepping the abstract and rooting herself firmly in rhythm. It’s no secret that Ayewa can dance around a beat, but her laser focus on rap and R&B phrasing here pays off. Listening to her slide in effortlessly after Elucid’s opening verse on “Mangrove” is thrilling. Witnessing her construct an honest-to-god pop hook on “Shekere,” bouncing through the title’s syllables with a disarming lightness, is even better. That Ayewa sounds just as fluid trading rapid-fire verses with Nappy Nina and Maassai on “Made a Circle” as she does solemnly conjuring the memory of ancestors in a healing spell one track later, on “Tarot,” is mesmerizing.
These more hospitable sounds only heighten the vertigo that occurs when Ayewa lets her well-honed experimental chops take over in the album’s third act. Soundtracked by a churning, hallucinatory beat that squeezes around the mix, “Nighthawk of Time” flashes the alarm: “The clock is for watching you/Not the other way around.” Album highlight “Zami” slams the brakes, crashing directly into the kind of distorted bass drum and grinding synthesizers that could have kicked off any of her previous albums, but arrive now with a chilling sense of finality. She drives a knife into the heart of temporality, pushing it deeper with every screamed “What the fuck you say?” before collapsing into a vacuum of silence. As “Clock Fight” enters with fiery percussion, it feels like the dramatic revelation of a hero surviving a confrontation with their archnemesis.
Black Encyclopedia of the Air’s bold theatricality is perhaps a natural outgrowth of Ayewa’s work creating the 2019 multimedia play Circuit City. There, she activated the “liberation technology” of free jazz to unpack the ongoing urban housing crisis, meditating on capitalism’s ultimate sin of hoarding not only material resources, but time itself. Black Encyclopedia of the Air extends and deepens her commitment to unmasking the surreal forces operating within and around us. Though she’s found a way to make the pill a little easier to swallow, Moor Mother re-emerges from her DIY time machine offering nothing but the bitter truth: Everything must change.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anti- | September 21, 2021 | 7.9 | e2cb0748-9e0a-49b2-818c-3bb498ff91f1 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
The third installment of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s solo jazz project is a powerfully resonant and spiritual record, a call-and-response between herself and a history of Black music. | The third installment of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s solo jazz project is a powerfully resonant and spiritual record, a call-and-response between herself and a history of Black music. | Jyoti: Mama, You Can Bet! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jyoti-mama-you-can-bet/ | Mama, You Can Bet! | During a radio interview in 1961, James Baldwin famously said that to be Black living in America, “and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” Nearly six decades later, that “rage” has yet to be quelled, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter. From Birmingham to Minneapolis to Kenosha. From Emmett Till to George Floyd to Breonna Taylor, and a countless list of black and brown names, eulogized and immortalized only by the senseless violence waged against them, not by the promise of their lives fulfilled. Thankfully, the ineradicable ache of Odetta and Nina Simone’s powerful and resonant calls has given rise to a newer generation of artists like Georgia Anne Muldrow, whose ever-expanding canvas of soul and jazz continues to reimagine, and even reproach the many winding bends of Black life.
With Mama, You Can Bet!, the West Coast-based singer-producer-multi-instrumentalist navigates these unprecedented times, utilizing a keen yet multidirectional lens. The third “Jyoti” installment of her solo jazz series draws from several different sources for inspiration, including the late Alice Coltrane, who gave Muldrow her chosen name, Jyoti, employed as a pseudonym for the series. Set against the backdrop of rampant vilifying and killings of unarmed Black people, her latest album plays as an impassioned, welcoming love letter to the countless musical forebears who crossed her path in her artistic development. As she now summons these predecessors for guidance, Muldrow renders a cosmic hybrid of soul, hip-hop, and call-and-response between herself and her jazz lineage, finding solace, beauty, and deliverance from utter confusion and turmoil.
On the title track, Muldrow sets a sanguine tone for the album’s opening. Layered with looping West African drums, double bass, and choral backing vocals—all courtesy of Muldrow—the arrangement evokes a live hush harbor meeting, where enslaved Blacks once gathered in secret to vent and worship. While this is largely a joyful tribute to her mother, spiritual and jazz singer-songwriter Rickie Byars, who often contributed lead vocals to Pharoah Sanders and the late pianist Roland Hanna, a few sparse, dissonant chord strikes on the piano denotes Muldrow acknowledging the many sacrifices Byars likely had to endure in her lifetime. As praise shouts of “Hey, Mama” reverberate, it soon transitions from personal homage to a declarative mantra, imploring all women to still “believe” that requited love is possible: “Mama, you can bet, there’s many a man, who’d love your hand.”.
Countervailing the title track, as the album’s focus shifts more inward, the mood becomes stark and deeply personal. On the pulsating “This Walk,” Muldrow offers a harrowing glimpse of how violence can both “ignite and snuff out” one’s voice. She does the same on the foreboding “Orgone,” which opens with a few ominous chords that soon are repeated in tandem with a refrain of displacement: “Maladjusted in this land/The powers just can’t end the plan.” Though the most stripped-down of all the tracks, the heft of “Orgone” grows searing and resonant with every listen. Evocative of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s “River of My Fathers,” with just a few simple words and scant piano accompaniment, Muldrow elicits vulnerability and introspection, and in turn finds commonality in her own abandonment, a flagrant exclusion from her country’s promise and potential. Much like earlier releases, notably 2019’s Black Love & War, she outstretches both arms, crying out for refuge from an “Africa” that appears within reach. The silence is deafening.
Muldrow also explores the planetary realms of Sun Ra and Charles Mingus, reinterpreting their works in a modern-day context. On “Bemoanable Lady Geemix” and “Fabus Foo Geemix”—remixes of Mingus’ “Bemoanable Lady” and “Fables of Faubus” respectively—Muldrow places greater emphasis on the melodic lines. Serving mainly as interludes for the album’s socially-charged throughline, the addition of these two tracks not only demonstrates the deep roots of racism but also acknowledges how jazz artists led the charge in addressing it—whether they wanted to or not. “Ra’s Noise (Thukumbado)” invites the only other guest musician on the entire album, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, Muldrow’s longtime friend and collaborator. Together, they envision a genderless and raceless dominion, one that is perhaps only reachable among Sun Ra’s many orbits, just not here on Earth.
“If you believe the ‘Negro’ has a soul,” as borrowed from Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” speech, then why are we continuously refused the rights we have earned, fought for, even bled for. Why burden us with insurmountable odds and disproportionate circumstances, a gross disparity made only more apparent by the ravages of a global pandemic, widespread poverty, and an unending open season on Black people. Mama, You Can Bet! is a splendidly audacious attempt at not only elucidating these societal ills, but also finding resolve in assuming a Pan-Africanist identity, firmly grounded in jazz and spirituality. From the driving blues line in “The Cowrie Waltz,” the lush soundscapes heard on “Ancestral Duckets” and “Bop for Aneho,” and the celestial soul claps that emanate from “Zane, The Scribe,” Georgia Anne Muldrow, once again, engenders her own Afrofuturistic realm, one that is heard, seen, and felt in the here and now.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | eOne / SomeOthaShip | September 3, 2020 | 8.4 | e2d0d9c5-c2bf-4e4a-a009-f57658784543 | Shannon J. Effinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shannon-j. effinger/ | |
Backed by a 23-person guest list that includes Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis, Pavement's Spiral Stairs, and countless members of Broken Social Scene, the debut solo album from BSS leader/co-founder Kevin Drew could pass for a low-key follow-up to his band's 2005 self-titled record. | Backed by a 23-person guest list that includes Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis, Pavement's Spiral Stairs, and countless members of Broken Social Scene, the debut solo album from BSS leader/co-founder Kevin Drew could pass for a low-key follow-up to his band's 2005 self-titled record. | Broken Social Scene / Kevin Drew: Spirit If... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10676-spirit-if/ | Spirit If... | "Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin Drew". The phrasing is clunky and opportunistic, with BSS co-founder and leader Drew cashing in on a beloved brand while also putting his name on the album cover in big letters. But, as exhaustive as it may seem, it's accurate. With its shaggy grace, love-is-life proclamations, and lengthy guest list (23 people, mostly BSS regulars, play or sing on the record), Spirit If… could pass for a relatively low-key follow-up to 2005's blown-out Broken Social Scene. But with Drew taking sole songwriting credit for half of the album's toned-down tracks and covering lead vocal duties on nearly every song, there's also a strong solo vibe. So, in essence, we get Kevin Drew's break-up record, as played by Broken Social Scene; it's a savvy compromise only a collective as familial as BSS could pull off.
While the popularity of Broken Social Scene skyrocketed over the past four years, Drew remained something of an unknown thanks to the group's all-for-one nature and its more magazine-friendly female talents, Leslie Feist and Metric's Emily Haines. But to know Spirit If… is to know Kevin Drew: One-time teenage burn-out, current 31-year-old master of scruff, and lifelong romantic. He hugs audience members during shows, and once described his band's objective to the New York Times Magazine with all the quixotic wonder of a wide-eyed Bono: "We want to affect audiences' hearts and minds with honesty." He's not afraid to include "the kiss in Winnipeg" and "the man who taught me love is free" in his album's laundry list of thank you's. He's a modern hippie, though instead of growing up listening to the Grateful Dead and the Doors, Drew worshiped idols that fall squarely within the classic-rock-subverting indie canon: Sonic Youth, Pavement, and Dinosaur Jr. Consequently, Spirit If… offers jams that don't really jam, acoustic ballads about fights and lies, and lushly orchestrated songs that come together effortlessly while cracking up hopelessly.
Toying with the idea of stops and starts, the record begins with a send-off and ends with a beginning. Alarm-clock opener "Farewell to the Pressure Kids" is a red herring: At first, its blasting intro (stuffed with vibes, avalanche drum fills, stacked guitars, and unintelligible vocals), seems to pick up right where Broken Social Scene's epic closer "It's All Gonna Break" left off. But, after two minutes of organized chaos, the song-- a cryptic exorcism decrying those who "love to hate"-- settles into a homely, quiet groove more indicative of the record's unplugged ambiance. It's the sound of Drew deflating his own bombast in favor of a style that's more personal and direct.
The singer once said 2002's You Forgot It In People "was made with hope" while Broken Social Scene "was made with fear." Spirit If… was seemingly made with pained desperation. On the album, when Drew isn't pining over a "fucked up kid" amidst images of violence and death, he's confessing his sins while lamenting someone who's "too beautiful to fuck." His words can be frustratingly obtuse: "Cats and Christ put you in a tiny box that's filled with all victims," goes one especially head-scratching line. But Drew's random imagery is often translated through straightforward hooks that wisely cut through the dense murk. So while the enlightenment-themed stand-out "Bodhi Sappy Weekend" includes boggling lyrics like, "With our clothes on fire/ I guess we both can wait/ I built an ark for sure," the pleading refrain ("please don't scratch me out") is crushing in its bluntness as it ties the tune together.
The lucidity of Drew's musical influences also lend Spirit If… an understood universality (within indie rock circles, at least): Much of the album could double as an early 90s our-band-could-be-your-life cassette mix. But there's a key difference to, say, Spirit If...'s Dinosaur Jr. tribute "Backed Out on the…" compared to every other Dino-aping rip-off out there: Drew actually recruited J Mascis to spew scalding distortion all over the track. The same first-hand method is employed on the album's only other out-and-out rocker, "Lucky Ones", which boasts some twisting Spiral Stairs-style guitar work from (yep) Spiral Stairs. The indie-star guests are just another example of Drew making the anything-goes BSS collective philosophy work for him-- and a great way to beat name-that-influence critics at their own game.
"The whole idea of starting or finishing something is one of the scariest things in the world to me," Drew told Pitchfork in 2005. Recorded in a hotel room in Norway, the country-style ditty "When It Begins" is a fitting, clear-headed capper to the album that finds Drew facing his fears head-on. "It's gonna be really hard when we get to the end/ Well, you love the start but really it's just to begin," he sings, accompanied by a little strumming and just a few singing Scene-sters. The song's circlular logic is an apt summation of it all-- the album, relationships, bands, tours, etc.-- at once almost naively common and, within the context of the record, disarmingly personal. Then there's the tattooed-heart kicker: "But don't forget what you felt." Confounding yet emotionally bare, derivative yet singular, profane yet child-like, solo yet not so solo, Kevin Drew doesn't shy away from his contradictions on Spirit If…. He revels in them. | 2007-09-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Arts & Crafts | September 17, 2007 | 8.2 | e2d0e1bb-c81d-4fe3-99a8-4a002bf0a240 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The first solo album from Will Butler, Arcade Fire member and younger brother of Win, Policy feels very much like an attempt to recapture some of the happy-accidental spontaneity that defined that band’s early years. | The first solo album from Will Butler, Arcade Fire member and younger brother of Win, Policy feels very much like an attempt to recapture some of the happy-accidental spontaneity that defined that band’s early years. | Will Butler: Policy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20240-policy/ | Policy | Though it can be hard recall amid the black tie arena shows, papier-mâché puppetry, and red carpet appearances that comprise their universe today, Arcade Fire were once a highly volatile, sometimes violent band. In their pre-Funeral genesis, the group projected a startling intensity that often left their hands bloodied and bodies bruised; those motorcycle helmets you see in old concert photos weren’t so much costume props as necessary protective gear for a band prone to using their own heads as auxiliary drum kits. And in the middle of the melee you’d often find Will Butler, younger brother of lead singer Win, bearing the mischievous grin of a corrupted choir boy. As a utility-player multi-instrumentalist, Will’s musical presence isn’t always easy to parse from Arcade Fire’s orchestro-rock onslaught. But onstage, he’s the physical embodiment of the band’s music—deceptively mild-mannered, yet capable of going off without warning. Not surprisingly, his debut solo album makes a virtue of that instability.
Given that Arcade Fire’s last album, 2013’s Reflektor, boasted a rollout strategy more carefully plotted than most military operations, Policy feels very much like an attempt to recapture some of the happy-accidental spontaneity that defined the band’s early years. Where most of Arcade Fire’s extracurricular pursuits—be it Richard Reed Parry’s Bell Orchestre, Sarah Neufeld’s releases on Constellation Records, or the Oscar-nominated score for Spike Jonze’s Her—have served as avant-garde antidotes to the band’s anthemic grandeur, Policy revels in the early rock'n'roll and punk influences that have become an increasingly obscured cornerstone of the band’s sound (think: "(Antichrist Television Blues)", "Month of May", or the sock-hop denouement of "Wake Up"). Recorded at New York’s hallowed Electric Lady Studios, this determinedly off-the-cuff album is nostalgic in sound, but endearingly off-kilter in spirit.
As a lead vocalist, Will sounds exactly as you would expect—i.e., like Win Butler’s wiseacre little brother—and though he’s recently shown an interest in current events, his lovelorn lyrical concerns here are several pounds less weighty than Arcade Fire’s conceptual statements about God and country. (When Jesus does enter the picture—via the folky, Westerbergian power-pop of "Son of God"—it’s merely to be gently blasphemed.) At its most inspired, Policy resembles a screwball musical adaptation of John Lennon’s lost weekend. Rave-ups like "Take My Side", "What I Want", and "Witness" tumble out with infectiously inebriated energy, their charging choruses teetering on the brink like runaway trains. The bacchanalia is compounded by sloppy piano stabs and knowingly cornball come-ons that would make Harry Nilsson flash a thumbs up while face down in puke. (To wit: "If you come and take my hand/ I will buy you a pony/ We can cook it for supper/ I know a great recipe for pony macaroni.")
As Butler recently explained to Pitchfork’s Evan Minsker, Policy is intended to reflect his omnivorous musical taste, but, as the album rolls on, the difference between cunning eclecticism and undercooked experimentalism grows stark. Policy's highlights maintain a precarious balance between classicism and cataclysm, but the album often tips too far in either direction: the dirgey boombox disco of "Something’s Coming" and the cheap-sunglasses new wave of "Anna" suggest an alternate universe where Arcade Fire couldn’t afford James Murphy’s producer fee, while "Sing to Me" and "Finish What I Started" are sullen piano ballads that Butler's restrained vocals can't invest with the necessary gravitas. "Someone please, finish what I started," he sings on the latter song, "I tried my best, but my best was half-hearted." It doubles as an uncomfortably on-the-nose diagnosis of the album itself. | 2015-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 6, 2015 | 6.6 | e2d77c8a-fb42-43c8-ab1d-7a86e6f43fae | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The enigmatic singer-songwriter returns with a dark set of songs backed by spare instrumentation and crafts what might be his best LP yet. | The enigmatic singer-songwriter returns with a dark set of songs backed by spare instrumentation and crafts what might be his best LP yet. | Cass McCombs: WIT'S END | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15343-wits-end/ | WIT'S END | Singer-songwriter Cass McCombs named his fifth album WIT'S END, not WITS' END. The distinction is slight, but telling. Because "wits" usually refers to an overall sense of sanity while "wit" is more commonly associated with one's cleverness or humor. And this record does not mark the end of McCombs' good judgment. Quite the contrary. However, it is not funny or quick or especially nimble-minded. Over the course of his previous four albums, McCombs fashioned himself an enigmatic vagabond in the classic Dylan mold, yet it wasn't until 2009's Catacombs that his enigma started to feel more like a complement than a crutch. While he may have let his wit get the better of him before through knowingly obtuse lyrics and showy arrangements, WIT'S END fittingly leaves those days behind. This is a gorgeous album of despair, the most believable evidence yet that McCombs is living up to his own legend.
Catacombs had McCombs stripping away the instrumentation he had built up around his songs, ending with a bare naturalism that suited him well. And WIT'S END goes even further, its empty spaces and deliberate tempos matching the album's immense loneliness. To get an idea of how desolate, exactly, consider that opening track "County Line"-- an inching ballad about severe unrequited love with its own frighteningly real, syringe-filled junkie video-- is the jauntiest thing here. Catacombs highlight "You Saved My Life" saw McCombs voicing startling sincere and direct affection; if someone played it at a wedding, grandparents might not blink. The direness of WIT'S END suggests the California-born singer may need some more saving; if someone played these songs at a funeral, sons and daughters would bow their heads solemnly.
So yeah, this record is a downer. But there's rare beauty in such darkness, too-- just look at forebears like Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith, and Nick Drake. Or even Edgar Allan Poe. Because, along with its mopiness, WIT'S END is creepy as hell. Its gothic eeriness embodies not Poe's famous tales as much as his more ethereal and lovelorn poems. In the author's 1827 verse "Spirits of the Dead", he characterizes the titular ghosts as comforting-- "a mystery of mysteries!" And that same infatuation with wispy denouements is all over WIT'S END, but much like Poe's spirits, McCombs' songs bring life to their withering characters over and over again.
Take the seven-and-a-half-minute elegy "Memory's Stain", in which a shared thrift-store sweater leads to ruminations on the unwashable blots that reside in our subconscious only to pop up without warning. "Boozing is the highest aim when spittle won't get out Memory's stain," he sings, before a breathy bass clarinet takes over for the back half, its unique low tones planting many new memories of its own. And closer "A Knock Upon the Door" tells what could be a centuries-old tale of the tumultuous relationship between a minstrel and his creative muse. The song's repetitive verse-upon-verse structure stretches out to nearly ten minutes, but more oddball sounds-- the baroque, recorder-like chalumeau, a metallic dink in place of a snare drum, and the ominous door tap itself-- keep things intriguingly askew. "The Lonely Doll", meanwhile, holds its story of a drunken louse and weeping woman aloft over a pillow-y Hammond B3 and brushed drums, the woozy lilt a convincing callback to Leonard Cohen's 1967 debut LP.
In a handwritten note to Stereogum, McCombs recently wrote, "I know people get lonely because I do, so that's what I end up writing songs about, how you get lonely sometimes and come up with these big ideas that give you meaning for a second but then leave you like everything else leaves you." The statement is economical and accurate, if overly modest. Because while there are lots of musicians trading in loneliness out there, most of them often veer into a self-pity that can leave listeners even more far gone. But the intangibility of WIT'S END makes it a more realistic and reliable companion, its elusive secrets offering a queer comfort. At the start of his first album, A, Cass McCombs posed the question, "Is it dying that terrifies you, or just being dead?" On WIT'S END, he's come up with an answer; on "Buried Alive" he sings, "If I'm alive or dead I don't really care, as long as my Soul's intact." He's got soul to spare. | 2011-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | April 22, 2011 | 8.4 | e2de4166-66b8-4772-b96b-79e144c10872 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Drummer John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) taps Laurie Anderson, Yo La Tengo, and more for the group’s most accessible album yet—confounding melody and rhythm into something clear and grandiose. | Drummer John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) taps Laurie Anderson, Yo La Tengo, and more for the group’s most accessible album yet—confounding melody and rhythm into something clear and grandiose. | Man Forever: Play What They Want | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23122-play-what-they-want/ | Play What They Want | For all of ten seconds, Man Forever’s Play What They Want seems like it could be a nightmare. Led by drummer John Colpitts, the album’s first syncopated clonks briefly suggest an oncoming Santana-style superjam. But the panic subsides quickly with a rising drone, the arrival of an upright bass, and the familiar voices of Yo La Tengo in full dreamy splendor. Known as Kid Millions when he’s the propulsive force behind Brooklyn noise-rock heroes Oneida, Play What They Want is his richest and most accessible endeavor yet. Over just five songs, he works with percussion ensemble TIGUE and a full cast of avant-collaborators including Laurie Anderson to build vocal pieces that often land between dry DIY cool and the sung narratives of art music.
A frequent participant in the Boredoms’ multi-drummer extravaganzas, Colpitts’s earliest Man Forever incarnations explored Metal Machine Music-inspired overtones with four or more drummers on tuned kits. Another early voice-discovering iteration was an experiment in rigorous and monastic percussion drone—literally two drummers, one drum—as Colpitts and a partner faced off across a single snare. Since then, Colpitts has expanded the project’s vocabulary, including the simple-but-not-simple ensemble piece “Surface Patterns” and an album-length collaboration with So Percussion. But none approach the clarity and fullness of Play What They Want. While rhythm remains central, it’s rarely obvious that the music’s creator is mainly a drummer.
Sometimes recalling the more art-rock tendencies of Oneida’s earlier studio albums, the brightest and catchiest vocal moment of Play What You Want is positively Eno-esque. Written with Phil Manley of Trans Am, “Debt and Greed” pairs soaring multi-tracked vocals with Manley’s best Frippertronic guitar flourishes. The album-closing “Caternary Smile,” also made with Manley, is likewise a drummerly fantasia dotted with a few verses of proper song and—throughout the rest of the track—a drifting melody that seems to pull the drums along below it. Unlike Oneida, who thrive in a live setting, Play What They Want’s most thrilling moments are nearly pure studio creations.
Laurie Anderson, with whom Colpitts drums in the Symptoms, appears on the nearly ten-minute “Twin Torches.” Beginning with layers of celestial overdubbed vocals, the drums come crashing in, and it becomes the album’s only extended moment of Colpitts in his natural habitat, wailing and dancing behind a drum kit. As Anderson’s voice intones about the mysteries of “two handed stars,” the force at the center remains Colpitts, whose playing stays purposeful even when he’s drumming on the edge of tom-tom thunder.
”It’s more about melting into the whole and not ripping into solos,” Colpitts says in a 2012 instructional video for the Man Forever piece “Surface Patterns” designed for the pick-up crew of musicians accompanying him at various tour stops. Besides breaking down a heady piece of music, the video is also an evocation of a musical ideology of instrumental rigor informed by cosmic seriousness, music that might be meditative for musician and listener alike. Where that rigor has often been expressed in harsher and sometimes physically challenging forms (such as Oneida’s seven-hour sets), it is here accompanied more often by gentle vocals than cleansing blasts of guitar drone.
The album-opening “You Were Never Here” fades in on a bed of vocals from all three members of Yo La Tengo, sounding like a close neighbor to the far-out percussion spaces of the Hoboken band’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. But just as quickly, the song exits through a side door. Colpitts’ steady beats remain the only constant in a picaresque sequence of free piano, wordless vocals, and Mary Lattimore’s concert harp flourishes. Seeming as if it could leap off into an album-length suite of its own, it comes to a close after nearly nine minutes.
For many, it would qualify as a set-piece. For Colpitts, it is a fully realized part of a whole, both the album at large, but also a vast, rewarding, and still-evolving discography. Recording and performing for nearly 20 years with Oneida and spin-offs like People of the North, Colpitts’ drums have sometimes provided an almost melodic key to understanding the full-bore noise-blasts surrounding them. On *Play What They Want, *those melodies can be heard more directly than ever. | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | May 26, 2017 | 7.9 | e2e58f53-3e34-4aed-8d08-208d7344f491 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
Utilizing space recordings and scraps of poetry, the minimalist titan and his long-time collaborators grapple with humanity’s place in the universe. | Utilizing space recordings and scraps of poetry, the minimalist titan and his long-time collaborators grapple with humanity’s place in the universe. | Terry Riley / Kronos Quartet: Sun Rings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terry-riley-kronos-quartet-sun-rings/ | Sun Rings | To call Terry Riley a minimalist is to ignore a large part of his history. Yes, the iconic American composer and his seismic 1964 signature composition In C all but codified the modern classical genre, but Riley has been adding teeming elements to his music ever since, most ambitiously with his writing for Kronos Quartet. Beginning with the string quartets of 1985’s Cadenza on the Night Plain, Riley and the members of Kronos have enjoyed a decades-long dialogue. Along the way Riley’s music has absorbed many other timbres and rhythms, including jazz, rock, waltz, electronic polyrhythms, and Latin music (and that’s not counting the many sounds contained within their epic Salome Dances For Peace), in a way that’s decidedly maximal yet still feels streamlined.
The scope of Riley’s Sun Rings transcends terrestrial music altogether, turning an ear to the sounds beyond Earth and utilizing recordings sent back home by Voyager I and II. The cosmic is inherent in Riley’s most exquisite works, but in making it explicit on Sun Rings, that theme becomes pedestrian. When they played the piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2004, the musicians waved their hands to set off motion sensor-triggered whooshing sounds; it was cringingly archaic. The performance was set against a backdrop of space visuals, but the multimedia piece would have seemed outdated even on a 1980s episode of Nova. Numerous performances have followed in the subsequent decade, giving them opportunities to refine some aspects of the piece. The presentation of Sun Rings in full here—one movement from a studio recording previously appeared in Kronos’ 2015 Terry Riley box set—feels decidedly more mellow, if still a little underwhelming.
A sampled voice discussing “whistlers” (or very low frequency or VLF electromagnetic waves) introduces the piece as sounds swirl. NASA transmissions and outer-space noise have been a part of electronic music since the 1990s, but hearing them folded into Riley’s work in the 21st century feels stiff and a little cheesy. The subtle, thrumming rhythms and hovering melodies of the quartet make early movements like “Hero Danger” a pleasant, albeit mild, listen; the warbling electronics approximate what a Kronos Quartet remix from the Orb might sound like. The murky metallic humming that courses beneath the elegant melodic lines of “Planet Elf Sindoori” almost tip it into the nebulous realm of dub.
But the zigzagging, overwrought theme of “Beebopterismo” wholly disrupts the spacey ambience that precedes it. The quartet saws away in a bizarrely intrusive, busybody fashion, as if trying to simply make their presence known. For all of that showiness, the strings are soon drowned in a wash of garbled electronics. “The Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour” similarly toggles between refined, elongated passages that swim amid the sonic detritus of the Voyager recordings and a more frantic and dramatic theme that lashes against it. That’s not to suggest that some balance isn’t struck, as the noisy, clanging charge of “Venus Upstream” fares far better.
Reveling in the strange, otherworldly textures of outer space may have made Sun Rings a placid enough home listen, but it’s as Riley turns his gaze back to Earth and strives to make grand, overarching platitudes that the piece sputters and buckles under its own weight. Luminous choirs emerge on centerpiece “Prayer Central,” but as voices recite lines from “A Child’s Bedtime Prayer,” the atmosphere turns cluttered. Riley’s desire to “represent the voice of humanity in its struggle to understand the meaning of our place in this unfathomable universe” becomes too much for the piece to bear across its 16 minutes.
The finale, “One Earth, One People, One Love,” drives that point home like a spaceship crashing into earth. “Do you really know where you are at this point in time and space and in reality and existence?” asks a voice, as Alice Walker recites the titular phrase and bits of percussion flutter around in the mix. Such samples would be a virtual godsend were you making an ambient house track in the 1990s, setting up a big, profound, guilty pleasure of a break. But Riley and Kronos oddly tiptoe around such a payoff. Instead of delivering a maximal release, they give us minimalism at its least effective.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | September 12, 2019 | 5.8 | e2f941ed-0d37-4c02-8b8b-5e91e2d72071 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The prolific Atlanta producer enlists 17 women for an all-female mixtape that is well-intentioned and occasionally delightful, but doesn't have enough highlights to sustain its momentum. | The prolific Atlanta producer enlists 17 women for an all-female mixtape that is well-intentioned and occasionally delightful, but doesn't have enough highlights to sustain its momentum. | Zaytoven: Zaytown Sorority Class of 2017 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zaytoven-zaytown-sorority-class-of-2017/ | Zaytown Sorority Class of 2017 | Women rappers so rarely get their due. The barrier to entry has always been much higher, expectations have been unreasonably harsh, and even at the top level, there is intolerance: Rarely have two women have ever been able to dominate hip-hop culture at the same time. There can only be one, if any, and there’s even less room for queer and trans women. The last few years have shown promise, providing glimpses of what the future could hold: Cardi B topped the charts with her strutting single “Bodak Yellow,” becoming the first woman in rap to do so since Lauryn Hill in 1998, longtime indie rap workhorse Rapsody was nominated for Best Rap Album at the Grammys, and upstarts like Kamaiyah, Dreezy, and Kodie Shane continue to rise. The obvious goal is for women rappers not to be judged solely by their female peers but as rappers period. The obstacles to that are clear: patriarchy, resource imbalances, fewer signings, misconceptions about a talent gap between women rappers and their male counterparts, and constant suspicion from skeptics who believe even the best women MCs have their rap's written for them by men.
Prolific Atlanta pianist and beat guru Zaytoven is aware of these discrepancies, and in 2014 he released his Zaytown Sorority mixtape, which spotlit unheralded women in rap. The 17-track second installment focuses on his Class of 2017, returning some old guests, introducing a few new ones, and adding some more star power into the mix. Zaytown Sorority 2 features seasoned charmers of yesteryear Trina and Khia, buzzing would-be stars like Dej Loaf and Kash Doll, “Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta” cast members Joseline Hernandez, Tiffany Foxx, PreMadonna, and Jessica Dime, and a cadre of lesser-known rappers like Ms. GoHam and Chella H. While the tape is well-intentioned and occasionally delightful, there aren’t enough highlights to sustain momentum.
Rapper showcases like this one rarely produce more than mixed results. Even the all-star lineups tend to suffer from a free-for-all aimlessness, as any DJ Khaled album proves. The primary objective is exposure, not curation. On Zaytown Sorority Vol. 2, these fluctuations in quality are compounded by the varying caliber of the MCs enlisted, who range from savvy veterans with commanding presences to amateurs just finding their bearings. Some rappers deliver one-off outtakes, others submit resumes. Accomplished artists clash with MCs in the developmental stages. There is a disparity between talented rappers who understand the lack of stakes and mail it in and enthusiastic underachievers. Form should follow function, particularly on a release like this that lays its intent out so plainly; yet, the product presented doesn’t honor the ambitions.
The mixtape opens with a bang, with its most charismatic personalities and most forceful rappers, before quickly tapering off in its middle section. Zay front loads the heavy hitters, with Trina and Khia doing decent impressions of their past work. Dej, who is among the most clever writers in rap today, shines brightest on “How It Feel,” her bubbly singsong raps carrying on their own buoyancy, each gummy pronunciation betraying her hard-nosed stunt raps. She can’t be bothered in her songs, which plays especially well under these circumstances. “I thank god, I’m in my right mind now/Money in the stash/Put them hundreds on timeout,” she raps casually, creating unusual imagery. On “Supersize,” Kash Doll doesn’t so much rap as swagger through, repeating lines until they fade before suddenly delivering a combo like, “Put a fuckboi on the bench if he got sidelines/Nigga tried to kill the cat but it got nine lives” with an unnerving sense of ease.
Outside of these highlights delivered by clearcut standouts, Zaytown Sorority Vol. 2 does feature some solid showings for a few of the lesser known artists showcased, like Ms. GoHam on “Never Have I Ever” and Tiffany Bleu on “Smile,” but many of these are followed or preceded by a clunker. The melodies on Shanell and Princess’ “Get It Up,” a song about erectile dysfunction, fall flat. Qu Da Queen and Robyn Fly’s “Automatic” is repetitive and grating. Jessica Dime is just one of a few guests who mimic Gucci Mane cadences, but the punches are less effective. When Gucci uses his drawl to lurch through schemes he builds up steam into a big, unforgettable one-liner, and there’s none of that impact on “Shrimp.” Though the mixtape’s quality shifts wildly from song to song, Zaytoven’s icy, keyboard-driven production holds the project together at the seams. He is consistently great, giving the ladies of his sorority class with some of his finest compositions. Zaytown Sorority Vol. 2 isn’t the superb, woman-focused compilation rap needs, but the tape continues the long, unavoidable conversation rap gatekeepers and fans must have about representation. | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 5, 2017 | 6.2 | e304925b-b405-4681-a11d-af90d14d63d1 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Where this Austin outfit's debut album unfurled like a drop of ink in a glass of water, its follow-up has a plan, and was meticulously constructed in the wake of a tough time for the band. They did away with the reverb, lending the album a crystalline clarity, and allowing the wild vocal performances to shine through. | Where this Austin outfit's debut album unfurled like a drop of ink in a glass of water, its follow-up has a plan, and was meticulously constructed in the wake of a tough time for the band. They did away with the reverb, lending the album a crystalline clarity, and allowing the wild vocal performances to shine through. | Pure X: Crawling Up the Stairs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17998-pure-x-crawling-up-the-stairs/ | Crawling Up the Stairs | This time last year was a trying time for Pure X: Nate Grace busted his knee skateboarding but didn't have insurance, multi-instrumentalist Jesse Jenkins was going through a breakup, and drummer Austin Youngblood moved to be with his girlfriend in Los Angeles. While all that was going on, they were also working on Crawling Up the Stairs, the follow-up to their splendidly hazy debut LP, Pleasure. Instead of recording everything live as they did before, Pure X took an arduous year-and-a-half to record C.U.T.S., as they call it, sparing no attention to detail.
Where Pleasure unfurls like a drop of ink in a glass of water, Crawling Up the Stairs has a plan. "There's kind of a hard descent," Jenkins explained, "and the rest of the record is a slow ascent back up to reality." Pure X also made a studied departure from the feedback and reverb that occasionally muffled Pleasure's finer textures. On Crawling Up the Stairs, they looked for guitar sounds "like glass knives slicing through your eardrums," influenced by Nashville's golden era of high-polish production, and honed in producer Larry Seyer's studio, Electric Larryland. The diamond-cut dulcimer that opens "Thousand Year Old Child" sounds more at home on a sunlit Brooklyn rooftop than the dark, dusty Texas basements in which it originated, and the bowed piano splintering the end of "Never Alone" feels almost three-dimensional. When the guitars do squall, they radiantly explode into being instead of burning low and dirty, as they did on Pure X's earlier releases.
Sometimes this clarity comes at the expense of the smoldering noise that made their last album so sensual, but Pure X make up for lost immediacy by giving a lot more attention to Crawling's vocals. Rustling whispers and conspiratorial voices on "Shadows and Lies" are the perfect companions to Grace's rangy, paranoid wails. In fact, it's almost a relief to hear him totally lose it for once, howling himself ragged on "How Did You Find Me" instead of keeping his voice at a safely reverbed distance from the listener. After Grace rips his throat apart, Jenkins-- who, for the first time, shares singing duties-- is there to pick up the pieces with his sweet and haunting falsetto. Despite Grace's injuries, it's Jenkins who sings, "The pain in my body is so great" on "I Fear What I Feel", reaching high octaves of pain repeated across several lines like a dull, throbbing ache.
Jenkins has said Pure X won't make their next record the same way they made Crawling Up the Stairs, which makes sense-- how many times can a band have a collective nervous breakdown?-- but hopefully they'll find a few takeaways from the creative process behind their second album. It may not be as instantly gratifying as Pleasure, but it's more sophisticated and self-aware. | 2013-05-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Acéphale | May 24, 2013 | 7 | e30a093e-0b00-41dc-b3bb-f0bb81de357e | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
This 2xCD, 50-track collection celebrates the golden anniversary of the iconic Memphis label and features tracks by Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MGs, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, and many more. | This 2xCD, 50-track collection celebrates the golden anniversary of the iconic Memphis label and features tracks by Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Booker T. & the MGs, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, and many more. | Various Artists: Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9986-stax-50th-anniversary-celebration/ | Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration | It's telling that Stax Records was located in an old theatre. The music made at 926 E. McLemore Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, emphasized soulful performance above pop poise, with the sweaty spontaneity of the moment always underscoring the intensity of romantic, social, sexual, or musical needs. On the new, 2xCD Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration, you can hear this unscripted quality in Isaac Hayes punctuating a verse of Bacharach and David's "Walk on By" with "you socked it to me, mama!" or for Mavis Staples singing along with the guitar solo on "If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)". It's impossible to imagine Rufus Thomas writing down any lyrics to "Walking the Dog" and "Do the Funky Chicken", two of his best novelty dance songs. Linda Lyndell even made up the verses to "What a Man" on the spot, improvising lyrics almost as she sang them.
Nearly all of the label's early songs were recorded live in that converted theatre studio, a practice born out of necessity rather than aesthetic principle but which nevertheless emphasized the latter. In fact, the label, which was founded in 1957 by former country musician Jim Stewart (ST) and his sister Estelle Axton (AX), kept things in-house, so Stax refers not just to the label and its snapping-fingers logo, but also the studio itself and the musicians who congregated there. Booker T. & the MG's, the house band, typically played on most early tracks, occasionally with Isaac Hayes on organ or piano and the Mar-Keys providing those readily identifiable Memphis horns (the group's key players would later become known as the Memphis Horns). Hayes, from nearby Covington, Tennesse, and Memphian David Porter teamed up to write many of the label's best-known songs, like Sam & Dave's "Soul Man" and "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby" (the latter criminally omitted from this set). Together, all the musicians kept the songs preternaturally tight and targeted, with no fills or showboating, just pure, chugging r&b momentum that is almost businesslike in its precision. As the label developed its sound and its studio, bringing in professional composers and arrangers during the early 1970s, this dynamic all but disappeared, but songs like Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff", Mel & Tim's "Starting All Over Again", and Hayes' decade-defining "Theme from Shaft" prove that the label's musical standard remained high.
The practice of recording live in the studio, often with all the musicians gathered around only one mic, captured the performers' group dynamic along with wrong notes, missed cues, and other enlivening mistakes that reveal the studio's technical primitiveness. This might explain the absence from Stax 50th of Otis Redding's iconic "Try a Little Tenderness", whose big finale falls away as the horns fail to complete their crescendo-- surely a production error. Also missing is Albert King's "Crosscut Saw", a rumbling blues number with vocals buried low in the mix. However, these imperfections make those songs sound even more raw and urgent forty years later, the creations of real musicians in a real studio. Furthermore, the four-minute single version of Isaac Hayes' stellar "Walk on By" included here is a mere trophy compared to the towering monument of the twelve-minute version, and anyone familiar with Hayes' breakthrough 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul will be able to pick out the splices. The list of noticeable omissions is long: Hayes' "Do Your Thing", Sam & Dave's "Wrap It Up" or "I Thank You", Redding's "Hard to Handle", and on and on and on.
Happily, Stax 50th gets more things right than wrong. The tracklist is commendable, with choice cuts from Sam & Dave, the Mar-Keys, Eddie Floyd, the Staple Singers, Soul Children, and Jean Knight, showcasing the label's range as well as its musical and technological development over the years. Johnnie Taylor's "Jody's Got Your Girl and Gone", with its inverted call-and-response chorus, may be channeling Curtis Mayfield, but that doesn't dilute its double indictment of men who don't take care of their women and men who take others' women. Likewise, the Staple Singers' "If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)" may be a rewrite of their hit "I'll Take You There", but that doesn't make it any less transcendent. Too bad it's followed by Taylor's "Cheaper to Keep Her", a gimmick track that sounds the comp's only sour note. But bad transitions are a consequence of chronological sequencing; ultimately, this set contains one incredible song after another: the Bar-Kays' effervescent "Soulfinger", Albert King's doom-boogie "Born Under a Bad Sign", Booker T. & the MG's percolating "Time Is Tight", Soul Children's heartbreakingly resigned "I'll Be the Other Woman", and forty-six more.
Overextended even considering its string of hits, Stax closed in 1976 under the weight of accumulating debt, and the historic building on McLemore Avenue was eventually demolished, an act long considered indicative of the city's misplaced cultural priorities. Despite this tragic end, Stax 50th sounds utterly triumphant-- and why shouldn't it? A few years after the founding of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music on the studio's original site, the label has been revived in conjunction with the Concord Music Group, and has already signed Angie Stone, Soulive, and, best of all, Isaac Hayes. They'll have a large legacy to live up to: The 50 tracks on Stax 50th are merely a fraction of the label's amazing output, making this a fine introduction and hopefully a gateway for many listeners into its massive catalog. | 2007-03-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-03-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Stax | March 13, 2007 | 8.6 | e325c1c0-383b-4193-8991-46b78c872a96 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Five years after indie-rock underdogs the Sidekicks dropped their fifth and final album, Steve Ciolek returns with a new project that recalibrates his ambitions while radiating emotional warmth. | Five years after indie-rock underdogs the Sidekicks dropped their fifth and final album, Steve Ciolek returns with a new project that recalibrates his ambitions while radiating emotional warmth. | Superviolet: Infinite Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/superviolet-infinite-spring/ | Infinite Spring | On Superviolet’s introductory single, “Overrater,” Steve Ciolek hatches a plan: “Surprise release the sixth album as the greatest rock’n’roll band.” It’s safe to assume that Ciolek was addressing fans of his former group, the Sidekicks, and that they got the joke. By the time the Columbus indie rockers dropped their fifth and final album, the distance between their standing and their actual success was self-evident. They were criminally underrated and your favorite band’s favorite band, deserving yet forever denied their rightful mainstream acclaim. At first glance, Infinite Spring treats the December 2022 confirmation of the Sidekicks’ long-assumed breakup as scene trauma, easing Ciolek back in with a more muted singer-songwriter format and lowered stakes. Maybe the latter is what Ciolek needed all along, allowing Superviolet’s debut to be judged solely for its craft rather than a set of unmet commercial expectations.
On Infinite Spring, Ciolek—accompanied by some of his old bandmates and Zac Little of fellow Columbusites Saintseneca—takes a familiar off-ramp from the outlying zones of pop punk and emo. Just like Slaughter Beach, Dog, solo David Bazan, the Weakerthans, and Jets to Brazil, the post-Sidekicks project downsizes and domesticates while keeping the voice at the center—still clearly the work of That Guy From That Band without sounding all that much like That Band. Acoustic guitars are a lead instrument rather than fringe or a tool for writing demos. Synthesizers have been replaced with real horns and flutes. Songs that once found solace in basements and busted tour vans now do so on front porches and modest midsize sedans. Maybe you just shrug your shoulders and admit to liking Wilco, or maybe “heartland rock” and “dad rock” are no longer genre signifiers, just where you end up while writing lyrics that imagine what it might be like to raise a family in the Midwest.
“Life isn’t a highway/It’s a pattern where if I stare long enough/There’s your love,” Ciolek cracks on the opening “Angels on the Ground,” a song whose keening, AM gold arrangement may not be overtly influenced by Tom Cochran, but at least is open to taking his populist wisdom seriously. But as much as Infinite Spring is in dialogue with the pop-rock canon—Spotify’s “Beer and Wings” sports-bar playlist and possibly, based on the appearance of a shithead named Trevor in “Big Songbirds Don’t Cry,” Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better”—it also establishes continuity with Ciolek’s past work. Consider how the chorus of “Angels on the Ground” inverts that of the Sidekicks’ beloved “1940’s Fighter Jet,” as though he were learning to appreciate what’s right in front of him rather than looking to the sky, pining for what might never come.
That shift in perspective isn’t to be confused with complacency. Infinite Spring is driven by sonic ambitions more in line with its message of gratitude and acceptance. The spiffy production, and the presence of indie hitmakers Phil Ek and John Agnello, only reinforced the Sidekicks’ underdog status on “Jesus Christ Supermalls” or “Medium in the Middle”—they sounded every bit as big as their fans thought they could be, yet also marooned in the 2010s, a band that might’ve earned adulation and plum opening gigs for Band of Horses or the Shins rather than Joyce Manor or Oso Oso.
While Infinite Spring might initially register as modest for avoiding big swings, Ciolek’s confidence comes across in less conventional ways—layering surrealist poetry atop a gentle fingerpicking pattern on “Big Songbirds Don’t Cry,” owning up to his own goofy wordplay on the title track, not just baring his soul but making actual soul music on “Long Drive.” The album’s core takes its title to heart: The melodies of “Dream Dating” and “Good Ghost” emanate warmth rather than trying to create heat, their touch as light and satisfying as a breeze on the first day of unseasonably nice weather. (Coincidentally, it was 74 degrees in Columbus on Infinite Spring’s release day.)
Superviolet might actually be the most emo project Ciolek has ever made, inspired by guileless crushes, romantic fatalism, and the kind of googly-eyed star-watching associated with the circles in which the Sidekicks ran. Yet the songs are all rendered with a patience and perspective that can’t be faked or rushed. Bad dates, flubbed jokes, and stupid gifts might have once been torture devices, but now they’re merely props in the tragicomedy that got Ciolek to the place he was always meant to be. | 2023-05-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Lame-O | May 1, 2023 | 7.2 | e3263adc-abdd-497e-9f4a-e28de52eac57 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
While it's unfair to saddle Bob Mould with the same ol' "best album since..." cross, Life and Times does manage to reflect each facet of his career. | While it's unfair to saddle Bob Mould with the same ol' "best album since..." cross, Life and Times does manage to reflect each facet of his career. | Bob Mould: Life and Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12913-life-and-times/ | Life and Times | Bob Mould made his name laying his emotions bare, and it's a trait that's not only stayed with him throughout his 30-year career, but one that perhaps has become even more pronounced. The same holds true for alt-legend Mould's level of self-awareness, which, too, has grown more and more pronounced as his influence continues to seep through every level of the indie strata.
"There's sort of a traditional sound I have," he admitted to me a year ago. "It's singer/songwriter playing mostly electric guitar, writing linear songs that are fairly catchy, and fairly emotionally introspective. Anything that goes too far off of that is a challenge for some fans. Then there are the fans that unconditionally listen to what I do. Having said that, one of the things I've been curious about is that there seems to be this other group of people for whom I'm damned if I do anything, that if I'm not doing free jazz, I'm not progressing."
Needless to say, Life and Times, Mould's ninth solo album, does not mark a free jazz transformation, nor does the disc represent much musical progress at all, per se. Maybe that's for the best, since the closest Mould has come to anything close to "progress," as such, is his divisive foray into dance/rock fusion, Modulate. Yet time marches on, and no matter what the songs themselves may sound like, Mould in 2009 is a much different person from the Mould who helped merge hardcore intensity with pop.
That's a different sort of progress, but one worth acknowledging all the same, as never before has Mould seemed this comfortable with his status as one of the progenitors of a sound adopted and adapted by everyone from Pixies and the Foo Fighters to the Hold Steady and No Age. While it would be unfair to saddle Mould with the same ol' "best album since..." cross, Life and Times does manage to reflect each facet of Mould's career, from his punk roots through his current electronic leanings. In fact, from its melodies to its sheen, the album represent Mould at his most Sugar-y, the disc's easily digestible power-pop fueled by overdriven guitars and break-up regrets yet tempered by Mould's ruminative vocals.
Most importantly, Life and Times offers hook after giant hook. Not that Mould seems particularly settled on the opener and title track-- in the song, the conflict isn't just romantic rejection but the more complex challenge of embracing love at the risk of inviting future hurt. Uncertainty similarly simmers beneath the surface of "The Breach" or the illustratively titled ballad "I'm Sorry, Baby, But You Can't Stand in My Light Any More", but even with the latter, there's an implied light at the end of the tunnel.
"I always find the broken ones/what does this say about me?" Mould sings, the realization offering the possibility of rehabilitation and, ultimately, reconciliation in the midst of an album scented with love gone sour. You root for Mould to pull through, too. Earlier in his life, Mould often responded to inner conflict by lashing out, but here he instead reaches out, with the inviting jangle of "City Lights (Days Go By)" and even on the bitter "Bad Blood Better", pulling us closer than ever into his subconscious. The guy still needs a hug, but more than ever before he sounds like a guy open to giving one back in return.
Yet accessibility never overshadows Mould's innate qualities. Indeed, dozens of acts could pull off a pop-punk squall like "Argos", "Spiraling Down", or "MM 17", but only Bob Mould sounds like Bob Mould when he contemplates "the taste of last night's sex in my mouth." Later, when he peels off a blitzkrieg solo on "Wasted World" it's like hearing decades of punk history come washing out of the speakers like a wave. In the past that racket would have pushed you away. The Mould of Life and Times, on the other hand, has arms outstretched. It's a contemplative work setting the stage for Mould's upcoming memoir, whose hooks will for once have to connect without the almost comforting bark of his vocals or buzz of his guitar behind them. | 2009-04-14T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-04-14T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | April 14, 2009 | 7 | e32f3fae-bd1c-41a8-a308-2129ff2e9c85 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Subsets and Splits