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The post-punk rebel incorporates elements of house and hip-hop while retaining the swagger and rawness of her early work. | The post-punk rebel incorporates elements of house and hip-hop while retaining the swagger and rawness of her early work. | Sneaks: Happy Birthday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sneaks-happy-birthday/ | Happy Birthday | If you don’t like a Sneaks song, just wait 60 seconds. A new one will rev up, mesmerize you with its barebones precision, and lurch to an abrupt stop in less time than it takes to microwave a frozen burrito. Eva Moolchan, the punk-adjacent Washington, D.C. musician who has been recording under the Sneaks moniker since 2014 (and for Merge since 2017), has made concision a kind of religion. You could comfortably fit her first three albums onto one CD-R, the kind of DIY treasure trove that might have been passed among friends at a campus radio station in an earlier era.
With 2019’s Highway Hypnosis, Moolchan tried, with varying results, to expand beyond the spiky bass-and-drum-machine minimalism that defined her earlier work. Her latest not-so-long-player, Happy Birthday, more effectively incorporates house and hip-hop textures, while retaining the enigmatic swagger that first brought her an audience in the punk community. Choruses are of no use to Sneaks, and lyrics remain fragmented snatches of mood and attitude. But lengthier, more robust compositions are no longer off-limits.
At its best, Happy Birthday showcases the fullest, most sophisticated grooves of Moolchan’s career. “Faith” is a marvel, with a four-on-the-floor thump and clanging-kitchenware percussion worthy of early LCD Soundsystem; Moolchan is sly and detached, reciting her vocals two syllables at a time, elusive with meaning until she’s not. “Faith in love, my friend/It’s the only thing we’ve got,” she repeats at the song’s close, capping a barrage of puzzles with an unambiguous statement of intent. “Sanity,” a skittering six-minute workout, is her first attempt to ride a beat for more than a couple minutes at a time, swapping out the chintzy drum machines for a heavier, club-ready boom-clap.
Moolchan talks more than she sings, often in an understated murmur. Like a rapper raised on Kraftwerk over Run-D.M.C., she achieves a counterintuitive sort of charisma through quiet force of repetition rather than volume. On “Mars in Virgo,” she repeats the titular phrase 16 times in less than two minutes, accompanied by Depeche Mode-style sequencers. She gives an enthusiastic testimonial of Virgo qualities—“We get things done! We get things done!”—as though narrating a quirky infomercial for the astrological sign. “Scorpio on Your Side” is similarly effusive and astrological: A sputtering synth melody cuts in and out as Moolchan (a known astrology obsessive) celebrates the perks of friendship with a particularly loyal Zodiac sign.
Even with Sneaks’ expanded palette, Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion, heightened by Moolchan’s status as a Black woman blurring the boundaries of a post-punk scene that’s still predominantly white. (“Why can’t a Black girl create?” she asks in “This World.”)
But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation. “Winter Weather” searches for a groove as Moolchan delivers an uncharacteristically wordy rap about her least favorite season. “Slightly Sophisticated” also lacks the cryptic simplicity of Sneaks’ best work, dabbling in glitchy maximalism that never quite gels. Toggle from that track to It’s a Myth’s spare, hypnotic “Look Like That” and it’s like feeling a lock slide into place.
This is a familiar conundrum: How do you expand or refine a sound that subverts the very ideas of expansion and refinement? On Happy Birthday, the jagged electro-funk of “Faith” and “Scorpio on Your Side” cracks the code: bolder grooves, a few more hooks, but still the same Sneaks.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 24, 2020 | 7.1 | e33d3d5c-14b5-4cc0-8c69-7210c112dbb3 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The garage-rock institution rolls on with a loosely conceptual album that is equally inconsistent and ingenious, containing some of Robert Pollard’s most direct lyricism. | The garage-rock institution rolls on with a loosely conceptual album that is equally inconsistent and ingenious, containing some of Robert Pollard’s most direct lyricism. | Guided by Voices: Earth Man Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guided-by-voices-earth-man-blues/ | Earth Man Blues | Is it better to be a long-running band making pretty good music, or is it preferable to craft several classic albums and burn out into the night? Oddly enough, Guided By Voices has managed to do both. They have obvious classics (Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes), and they’ve managed to produce at least one good song every year they’ve existed. This is why for their adoring and long-loving fanbase, it’s easy to call oneself an “eternal GBV fan,” as Jay Carney, Amazon’s PR flack and former Obama press secretary, does; Beto O’Rourke is obviously a fan as well.
Even with the approval of these Gen Xers-turned-politicians, Guided By Voices still feels outside the mainstream. This might come from the fact that the formula (echoey vocals, tin-can guitar riffs, and bizarre lyrics) just hasn’t changed, making the band feel as if it’s permanently sealed in the past. Pollard has called Earth Man Blues, their latest album and the band’s 33rd release, both a “collage of rejected songs” and a loose concept musical “focused on the growth of young Harold Admore Harold through a coming of age and a reckoning with darkness.” This all sounds very ambitious, but “collage of rejected songs” could also describe most Guided By Voices albums, and since the band has often generated escapes into childlike reverie peppered with darkness, the concept-album-focused-on-childhood idea seems like a repetitive, tacked-on frame. If you ignore that framing, you’re left with a GBV album, equally inconsistent and ingenious, containing some of Pollard’s most direct lyricism.
On “Trust Them Now,” Pollard exhorts Harold to embrace life: “Let filthy toxic visions be destroyed/With every expectation for a boy/To find happiness but not joy.” The swaying ballad “The Disconnected Citizen,” is a rare thing: the (vaguely) topical GBV song that reflects on growing political malaise. It’s as if the growing absurdities of life have begun to plague Pollard to the point where sheer abstraction doesn’t cut it anymore.
Like all GBV albums, it’s slipshod and freewheeling. The acoustic opening of “Lights Out In Memphis Egypt” drifts into a rocker that never seems to know where to begin or where to end; a synth progression is added at one moment, only for all the instruments to drop out in the next. It feels like a sketch of something grander. “The Batman Sees the Ball” sounds like something from the GBV song generator, and it resembles hundreds of similar surreal jams of the band’s past. Pollard’s skewed portrait of a pinch-hitter who can send a ball into space is funny in a deflating way, like hearing a once-funny joke told for the eighth time.
Also like GBV albums, there are bright spots, and they make dismissing the band harder than it should be. “Sunshine Girl Hello” has a glowing ’60s guitar lick that animates its darkly intimate lyrics about unrequited love, while album closer “Child’s Play” elevates the simplicity of its doubled guitar noodling with a buzzing harmony that mirrors the boundless energy of its lyrics: “Child’s play is wanton.” Intentionally or not, that phrase hits at the modus operandi of the band: There’s always the belief that by throwing it all out there, you’ll land on something like “How Can a Plumb Be Perfected.” On the song, Pollard finds wonder in the everyday—in a typical bit of Pollardian obfuscation, it’s unclear whether he’s contemplating a piece of fruit or an arcane land-surveying tool, but the awe in his voice is palpable: “How can a plumb be for all time still completely perfect?/I sit around always thinking about how?” It’s an odd image, but by noting every little moment, he inadvertently captures beauty. Being a fan of this band means actively waiting for these moments to happen. Behind the aimlessness, Pollard projects a grand ambition that can’t be summarized in a single story: To create a body of work so sprawling that fans spend their entire lives listening to find hits as great as the song that hooked them.
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. | 2021-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. | May 4, 2021 | 6.8 | e3426abd-50f5-4190-a1d7-4df8919a5601 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
The Houston rapper Fat Tony teams with Los Angeles producer Kyle Mabson for a noisy, synth-funk, outré record that often gels together and pushes at the boundaries of experimental rap. | The Houston rapper Fat Tony teams with Los Angeles producer Kyle Mabson for a noisy, synth-funk, outré record that often gels together and pushes at the boundaries of experimental rap. | Charge It to the Game: House With a Pool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charge-it-to-the-game-house-with-a-pool/ | House With a Pool | Fat Tony’s feature on A$AP Rocky’s “Get Lit,” off Rocky’s star-making 2011 mixtape, LIVELOVEASAP, remains the closest Tony has made it to the center of the rap universe. But the man from Houston’s Third Ward has grown into a reliably funny, incisive, trend-dodging alt-rapper, something like a Southern answer to Open Mike Eagle. He excelled in that role on projects like 2013’s Smart Ass Black Boy (highlighted by “Hood Party,” named one of the 50 best Texas rap songs by the Dallas Observer in 2015) and last year’s MacGregor Park. It’s been a fringy, decade-long career that’s also intersected with other genres, whether it’s Tony releasing music on Ghost Ramp (the rock-oriented label of Wavves’ Nathan Williams) or opening for Russian punks Pussy Riot this past March.
There’s also Charge It to the Game, Tony’s duo with Los Angeles producer Kyle Mabson. From the beginning, their music together has come from an experimental place. “I love industrial and hard electronic stuff, but the genre hasn’t had many changes in the last 30 years, just angsty white people over some sequenced synths,” Mabson explained to Noisey. Mabson hit up Tony to try rapping over those outré sounds and in the spring of 2016, they released the clanging, jittery Urban Hall of Fame EP (whose one guest MC was Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, rapping under his moniker Hemlock Ernst). Now, Tony and Mabson are back with the first Charge It to the Game LP, House with a Pool.
Released on Ghost Ramp and engineered by Jonathan Snipes of the experimental rap group clipping., House with a Pool is a DIY curio on the rap radar. Tony and Mabson relish each other’s company while also gelling stronger than they did on Urban Hall of Fame. And across its 13 songs, Mabson’s production is more varied than it was on the EP, adding elements of synth-funk and trance to the industrial foundation.
Tony is in a supremely assured mode on the album, finding validation in his accomplishments despite (or because of) his commitment to independence, whether that means making money from touring or being able to pick beats without pressure from an A&R. This even results in some shit talk directed at less savvy MCs on “Don’t Wanna Miss”: “You niggas are needy and your manager’s greedy/Your hairline is receding.” On the quirkier side of things, there’s the goofy lead single and goth-girl tribute “Dark Girl” (”You need one in your life!”), but it’s Tony’s general confidence, not conceptual moments, that dominates House with a Pool.
As fun of a presence as Tony can be on his own, House with a Pool’s highlights come when his own animated style meet with Mabson’s production. There’s one of the album’s catchiest songs, “My Way,” where Tony nails an Auto-Tune hook and some of his trickiest flows. Houston’s no-fucks-giving B L A C K I E is one of three guests to show up on the album, bellowing on the aggro “Y.B.N.” The album only underwhelms when that kind of energy is starkly absent, as on parts of “Been a Minute,” “Dive In,” and “Running to the Bag.” But mostly, House with a Pool is the sound of Tony and Mabson clicking and complementing each other, dutifully pushing out the edges of experimental rap. | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ghost Ramp | May 3, 2018 | 6.8 | e34379ca-3fa7-401e-aa63-6e42e296e4ec | Mike Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-madden/ | |
Under his oddball alter ego, Here We Go Magic’s Luke Temple presents himself as an Auto-Tune balladeer, Afrobeat enthusiast, and skilled craftsman of moody synth pop. | Under his oddball alter ego, Here We Go Magic’s Luke Temple presents himself as an Auto-Tune balladeer, Afrobeat enthusiast, and skilled craftsman of moody synth pop. | Art Feynman: Half Price at 3:30 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/art-feynman-half-price-at-330/ | Half Price at 3:30 | Who the hell is Art Feynman? Judging by his babushka, bucket hat, side pony, and sherbet-colored clothing, he might be a psychedelic bee keeper—or maybe a stoned ceramicist with his own public access TV show. The reality is not quite as silly: Feynman is Luke Temple’s oddball alter ego (the ponytail, alas, is a wig). As Feynman, Temple seems to detach slightly from reality, resulting in music that’s more impish than his prior solo work or his output with Here We Go Magic. His peculiar character looks as though he’s tumbled through a number of decades to wander ours as an observant stranger. On Half Price at 3:30—Temple’s second album as Feynman—the narrator roams around at a safe distance from secondary characters. He parcels his reflections into subtle but unexpected pop songs that bridge contemporary production with compositional nods to Paul Simon, Arthur Russell, and Harry Nilsson.
If Temple’s prior release as Feynman—2017’s Blast Off Through the Wicker—marked his most consistent work, Half Price at 3:30 straddles a taut line between cohesion and the urge to flaunt a few styles. Across the album’s tidy 45 minutes, Temple presents himself as an Auto-Tune balladeer, Afrobeat enthusiast, and skilled craftsman of moody synth pop. The brooding duo of “Taking on Hollywood” and “The Physical Life of Marilyn” exemplify the latter genre, sending Temple’s alias stalking the ghosts of Sunset Strip.
In “Taking on Hollywood,” Temple croons through a vocoder while Tron arpeggios and plastic clicks scurry beneath. He sings with the delusions of a fresh L.A. transplant, laying out plans for his “future mausoleum” like an upwardly mobile actor/waiter. (In truth, he sounds more like a robot navigating empty streets.) “The Physical Life of Marilyn,” meanwhile, is a Hollywood noir that evokes the Cars’ darkest hits. Temple reaches into his lower register, coasting on stretched-out synths like he’s driving past the iconic star’s glass house on the hill. Temple is so adept at crafting atmosphere within his songs, it’s easy to see into her home—a box of incandescent light perched on a shadowy slope.
Half Price at 3:30 has no shortage of dark and seedy moments, but Temple keeps bouncy pop numbers in steady rotation. “China Be Better” (which Temple assures is about a friend, not the country) is an early highlight. Temple’s clean alto, dry percussion, and buoyant synth rhythms recall Arthur Russell’s “Arm Around You.” But even smiling Art Feynman’s sweetest melodies contain bitter pith: “You filled up my life with madness,” he sings, before admitting: “Now I can see there’s madness in me.”
“I’m Gonna Miss Your World” and “Not My Guy” are additional displays of Temple’s pop acumen, both bobbing over bubbly Afrobeat arrangements. In the former, Temple repeats a simple refrain of longing, tossing melancholy with rubbery bass and tart horn patches—perhaps a wink at Hearts and Bones-era Paul Simon. “Not My Guy” provides the LP’s goofiest and most delightful moment, taking cues from the bizarro-pop school of Nilsson and Warren Zevon. That it was written in the wake of Trump’s election is its least interesting quality; what is more amusing is Temple’s percussive use of breath, nimble guitar work, and cartoonish summoning of swamp monsters. It’s a prime example of Temple’s range as Art Feynman: a catchy, compact track that’s as fun and approachable as it is musically dexterous.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | July 22, 2020 | 7.1 | e3520105-7d1e-4bde-ad38-3bbac499cbd6 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Australian punk musician continues his prolific streak on a fun and occasionally melancholic tribute to mid-’60s garage-pop. | The Australian punk musician continues his prolific streak on a fun and occasionally melancholic tribute to mid-’60s garage-pop. | Alien Nosejob: The Derivative Sounds Of... or... A Dog Always Returns to Its Vomit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alien-nosejob-the-derivative-sounds-of-or-a-dog-always-returns-to-its-vomit/ | The Derivative Sounds Of... or... A Dog Always Returns to Its Vomit | Jake Robertson has been in some bands: School Damage, Hierophants, Leather Towel, Modal Melodies, SWAB, to name a few. He is perhaps best known for his time in the insouciant Ausmuteants, a group from the early 2010s who garnered fans worldwide for their no-frills take on synth-punk. But the restless punk stalwart seems to have hit a particularly rich creative vein with his solo project, Alien Nosejob. Since 2017, Robertson has issued records at a breakneck pace, from the raw yet hooky classic punk of 2020’s Suddenly Everything Is Twice as Loud to the new-wave-inspired 2021’s Paint It Clear to the glam rippers on 2022’s Stained Glass. He’s got the songwriting chops to draw out what makes these vintage sounds so special, bringing vibrancy to musical ground that has been mined to near-depletion. In an interview with Still in Rock, he describes his style-hopping thusly: “Sometimes I wish I had the focus to concentrate on one sound at a time, but I don’t. I’m part of the microwave generation. I want three meals in three minutes, or I’m not eating.”
Robertson’s latest, The Derivative Sounds Of... or... A Dog Always Returns to Its Vomit, plays specifically with the garage-pop sound of the mid ’60s. As is typical for him, it’s incredibly self-aware but doesn’t take itself too seriously. He may be looking backwards for inspiration, but it’s clear that the album’s title is pushing against the on-the-nose nostalgia of the ’90s and ’00s retro garage boom, which often didn’t question the regressive sexism and racism of the sound’s “trash” tropes. Instead of recreating the past, he carefully teases out the sonic details from the style that hit for maximum satisfaction, and weaves them together tightly in his own signature manner.
Robertson is excellent at self-editing, and these songs are brash and bright and economical. They’re fun, with an underpinning of melancholy both teens and teens-at-heart will recognize as key to growing up in a chaotic world—which has been pop’s primary concern ever since the invention of the teenager as a discrete category. On “Act Different,” a rickety but catchy tune with a warbling, chorus-heavy guitar line, Robertson describes the simple feeling of alienation from one’s peers and how comforting it can be to retreat: “When you’re alone/You can be yourself.”
Beneath the easy approachability of his music, there’s clearly careful craft at work. Opener “I’m Lost,” which rails against people caught up in their own hype, has a thrilling percussive breakdown to highlight the impact of its simple minor-key chord progression. “Ariel View” has a groovy little organ part to rival the Standells, and the lovelorn “There Was a Time I Called Her Name” features delightful psychedelic guitar flourishes. Rather than feeling like studied mimicry, these tracks have a charming lack of professionalism—Robertson’s falsetto on “There Was a Time I Called Her Name” sounds constantly on the verge of cracking—and the genuine enthusiasm of the original wave of garage rockers, kids who were simply excited to be able to pick up newly accessible electric instruments and make a racket together. Consider it home-cooked, with love. | 2023-11-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Goner | November 10, 2023 | 7.3 | e3522939-91e3-41c9-a7fb-2006db1f4666 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | |
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 English duo’s 1981 debut, a daring landmark of synth pop that went unexpectedly mainstream. | 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 English duo’s 1981 debut, a daring landmark of synth pop that went unexpectedly mainstream. | Soft Cell: Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soft-cell-non-stop-erotic-cabaret/ | Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret | From the beginning, Soft Cell never looked quite right together. When the British duo made its debut on Top of the Pops in 1981, as its strutting, stripped-down cover of “Tainted Love” was climbing the charts, 24-year-old singer Marc Almond introduced himself in heavy black eyeliner, a studded neckband, and gold bangles, pouting and gyrating around the stage. Standing at a keyboard behind him was 22-year-old producer Dave Ball, the buttoned-up game-show host to Almond’s outré clubgoer. As Soft Cell, they created electronic pop tempered with Northern soul, the strain of American blues and soul music then being pumped through raucous UK clubs that rivaled New York City’s most debauched discos. The pair would leave a transgressive mark on the early 1980s and beyond, to their dismay.
Almond grew up in Southport, a seaside town north of Liverpool where he felt out of place from an early age. Using pirate radio and movies as an escape from an abusive home life, he fostered an early love of camp and performance as someone “sexually confused, academically disadvantaged, and physically challenged,” as he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, Tainted Life. By the time he left for school in Leeds, Almond found delight in the bedsit he rented beneath a brothel, the only space he could afford. He festooned it with posters and red neon lights, planting the seeds for the delightfully sordid settings that would populate his lyrics.
Ball was raised farther up the coast, adopted into a working-class family in Blackpool. He spent his youth attending parties at clubs like the Highland Room, the town’s premier Northern soul spot, and obsessively collecting Tamla and Stax singles after he heard them on the tartan-carpeted dancefloor. It was at one of those clubs that the 16-year-old Ball heard Gloria Jones’ voice for the first time, when her original rendition of “Tainted Love” sent his head spinning.
By 1977, both were enrolled at Leeds Polytechnic; Almond, who had already earned a reputation as a scandalous performance artist (cat food and bloodletting were common elements), happened to be the first person Ball saw on campus, unmissable in gold lamé jeans and a leopard-print T-shirt. They were fast friends, kindred spirits in their obsessive love of punk and electronic music, cult films, and kitsch. Once Ball started to work seriously with a Korg synthesizer, he brought his experiments to Almond, pushing Soft Cell—a play on words that summed up their favorite themes of “consumerist nightmares and suburban insanity”—into its early stages.
Synth pop was just beginning to find popular audiences in 1980, as the advent of cheaper equipment helped pave the way for a more democratic, far-flung scene. Ball and Almond’s music grew directly out of Kraftwerk’s pleasantly menacing electro pop, plus Suicide’s desiccated punk and the cabaret operatics of French chanson. Soft Cell debuted at a college Christmas show two short months after they met, performing ramshackle, anticonsumerist songs against a backdrop of Super 8 films of destroyed radios and industrial landscapes. The art-punk spark was lit. They would go on to perform more than 20 roughly sketched songs at subsequent shows, many of which formed the basis of their debut album (a spare, stuttering version of opener “Frustration” appeared on their four-track debut EP, Mutant Moments). Even early on, Almond’s lyrics were projected through a filmic lens smeared with grime: the duo’s tinny, galloping single “Girl With the Patent Leather Face,” inspired by J.G. Ballard’s Crash, memorably merges plastic surgery and S&M imagery into one twisted union.
After a haywire performance at Leeds’ Futurama Festival in 1980 that generated some press buzz, the band’s demo found its way to Stephen “Stevo” Pearce, a teenage London DJ who was on the cusp of founding the eccentric label Some Bizzare. His roster would grow more avant-garde, including acts like Psychic TV and Einstürzende Neubauten, but Soft Cell’s moody, diffuse electronic music—now outfitted with the occasional clarinet and saxophone—fit the bill. With Stevo as their manager, the band found its first breakout hit in 1981’s kitschy acid-house cut “Memorabilia,” co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller, which gained a cult following in clubs across the UK. With their second single, they hit an unrepeatable stride.
Written in the 1960s by Ed Cobb, a vocalist in the pop quartet the Four Preps, “Tainted Love” was first recorded by Gloria Jones, the Motown singer-songwriter and eventual T. Rex member (and romantic partner of Marc Bolan, from whom Almond took his stage name). Her original crackles with gritty energy, using an agitated tempo to convey its tormented urgency. Yet Soft Cell’s narcotized version is immortal, a darkly glamorous blend of betrayal and lust. (“I loved the emotion in his voice,” Jones remarked of Almond later. “Their version was far better than mine.”) Rakish and dirtied up, Soft Cell’s recording builds its tension around the sparse interplay between Ball’s secondhand synths and drum machines and the distinctive, glossy pulse of producer Mike Thorne’s expensive Synclavier. Then there’s Almond’s icy voice, which injects a brittle, sexual desperation. For the B-side, they recorded a second cover—a similarly eroded, slow-burning version of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go”—and bloomed into a sensation.
“All we thought was that this weird little record could be a minor hit,” Almond wrote afterward, “then disappear to leave us to get on with being the dark, disturbing alternative band we really were.” But “Tainted Love,” with its metallic, levitational pleasure, became inescapable during the summer of 1981, turning them into stars. Depeche Mode had recently made way for deadpan synth pop to climb the charts, but Soft Cell took it to new heights. Though they were eventually lumped in with groups like Spandau Ballet, Almond and Ball insisted that they were doing something different with the formula: slipping genuine, gimlet-eyed emotion into their rhythmic electronic music, rather than making stuff “to pose against the Berlin Wall to,” as Almond put it. The song brought about swift and unprecedented success, culminating in that iconic Top of the Pops performance. Just watch Almond slink around the stage, totally off the wall and yet unbelievably committed.
It caused a media row. Suddenly Soft Cell were ushering in a new age of indecency: Teenagers began to dress like Almond, sporting his bangles and thick eyeliner at school. The homophobic music press couldn’t grasp the general ambiguity of the song nor Almond’s effete performance of it. “They said there seems to be a lot of homosexuality creeping into our charts, and for example the number one record is obviously about a gay relationship gone wrong,” Almond snickered to The Face. “I wonder if Gloria Jones realized it!” Almond evaded questions about his sexuality in interviews at the time, despite constant, ignominious snooping from gay and straight journalists alike. The silence was enforced by Soft Cell’s record company, Phonogram, who perpetually told him to change outfits, invent girlfriends, and use less makeup. The pressure got to Almond; eager for his art to stand on its own and in denial himself, he felt “wary of all the baggage and consequences that would accompany an admission,” he wrote in Tainted Life. “But in many ways I always thought the question was a bit redundant. If they wanted a sworn affidavit about my sexuality they were never going to get it, yet my sexuality was undeniably obvious to all.”
To escape the growing hype and scrutiny, Almond and Ball fled to New York with Stevo and Thorne for a month to record their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, titled after a neon sign over a revue bar they frequented in London’s Soho district. In the U.S., culture shock gave way to decadence: After recording by day at the famed Media Sound studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Almond and Ball would jet to clubs like Paradise Garage and Danceteria by night, experimenting with party drugs and encountering characters that gave further shape to the band’s seamy songs about the misunderstood. “It’s like a peep show,” Almond explained about the record before it came out. “I like to write about real-life situations, under-the-carpet situations.”
On Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Soft Cell brought those situations to life with lurid, theatrical depravity. “Bedsitter” is a gleaming exercise in urban isolation that pays homage to Almond’s cramped, squalid apartment back in Leeds. Over a bending synth that mimics twangy guitar, they capture a vampiric morning after a night out: “The memories of the night before/Out in club land having fun/And now I’m hiding from the sun,” he moans. The cartoonishly jaunty, upbeat keys on “Secret Life,” meanwhile, punctuate lyrics about a blackmail scheme, with a narrator admonishing someone who has “the favorite persuasions of the people in the headlines” in their little black book, including his own.
That dark, serrated humor is pivotal to Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “Frustration” cuts down heternormative oppression over saxophone and a synth stretched to oblivion. “I have life/Ordinary wife/I have car/A favorite bar,” Almond begins robotically, before the song quickly turns hedonistic: “I wish I could reach right out for the untouchable…/ Experiment with cocaine, LSD, and set a bad, bad example.” The tongue-in-cheek single “Sex Dwarf,” a warped headtrip about “luring disco dollies to a life of vice,” was inspired by a News of the World headline that caught Almond’s eye; the song repackages exploitative tabloid fodder into something approximating John Waters’ gleeful concept of filth. (Its notorious video, another exercise in outright bad taste that provoked a London vice squad to raid the Some Bizzare offices, remains banned from television in the UK.)
The warmer, body-heated music on the album is a snapshot of pre-AIDS queer life at its heady peak. Over a winding funk beat on “Seedy Films,” Almond croons about flickering blue movies and the hands of a stranger, evoking a seductive vision of the era’s anything-goes spirit. “Tainted Love,” which became the best-selling single in England in 1981, also assumed a different light as the epidemic became a pressing concern. The duo first heard of the then-unnamed disease the very day they arrived in New York to record. “It wasn’t an intentional tie-in, but as the record hit the American charts, it took on this other meaning, coming off this hedonistic time of the late ’70s and into this very dark period,” Almond said in 2000.
“Tainted Love” is the album’s most timeless, alluring song, but the most striking is its desperate closer, “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye.” The melodrama places its narrator at the Pink Flamingo club on a rainy night, attempting and failing to maintain distance from an affair with a sex worker. Its histrionic refrain—“I never knew you/You never knew me/Say hello/Goodbye”—is unmistakably direct, but the words grow complicated with longing in Almond’s crooning, barroom delivery, even when he can’t exactly carry its final notes. The ballad is the record’s perfect, atmospheric nightcap, a pleadingly lovesick exhale that showcased their writing and performance skill at its peak.
Soft Cell would go on to make two more albums, selling 10 million records in the process. The wild flush of success proved destructive: Almond bristled under the intense spotlight, and he and Ball both struggled with substance abuse as they recorded their emotive, genre-blurring follow-ups, The Art of Falling Apart and This Last Night in Sodom. “We lived a 10-year band life in three years,” Almond said in 2019. “It was always us against the record company… More ‘Tainted Love’s. More this, that, and the other.” Ball echoed that notion in his autobiography, 2020’s Electronic Boy: “We’d been so successful very quickly, in constant demand and therefore always together—living out of each other’s pockets,” he wrote. “I don’t think any relationship could have endured that pressure.”
Soft Cell disbanded in 1984, and both artists pursued other projects. In his solo career, Almond has released more than 10 albums, sliding from Jacques Brel covers to bruised torch songs. Ball, an electronic-music pioneer in his own right, put out records as part of rave duo the Grid in the ’90s and has produced and written for artists including Kylie Minogue. He and Almond reconciled in 2002 and have continued to tour and release new music since, but Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is still the band’s cocktail-soaked classic, a winking dispatch from the gutter that provided a template for countless synth-based acts to come. It inspired Nine Inch Nails’ scuzzy industrial rock as much as the throbbing electroclash of Fischerspooner and Scissor Sisters, providing sanctuary for artists who shared the duo’s love of battered synths and sinister glamor.
That Soft Cell’s hypnotic music made such an impact isn’t a surprise in hindsight, but it certainly was to them. “We were punks and we just wanted to cause a little bit of trouble. We didn’t want to toe the line,” Ball said in 2020. “It was a weird dichotomy, to be an art school thing that became a pop phenomenon.” Those first blinking, lustrous notes that kick off “Tainted Love” are now stitched into the fabric of the ’80s, in all the decade’s beguiling artificiality. But the proto-electro sound and tawdry sense of humor on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret has endured, a singular style that gave the pop landscape a campy, needed jolt.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2022-10-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Some Bizzare | October 23, 2022 | 8.5 | e353e1f2-f93c-4d2d-a99e-6088c187b3ee | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On their third collaborative project, the duo makes minor but strong tweaks to a reliable system. | On their third collaborative project, the duo makes minor but strong tweaks to a reliable system. | Curren$y / The Alchemist: Continuance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/curreny-the-alchemist-continuance/ | Continuance | New Orleans rapper Curren$y and producer the Alchemist have been so prolific on their own that it’s easy to forget the impact of their 2010 debut Covert Coup. Even before they joined forces, they were distinct figures within the moody landscape of underground rap. But together, their music never sounded so dark; their songs were foreboding yet relaxed, like a cloud of purple haze wafting through an abandoned alley. The duo recorded most of Covert Coup the day they met, and Alchemist credits Curren$y, aka Spitta, with inspiring the subsequent rapper collaborations that have become his calling card.
As their styles have mutated over the years, the partnership has remained strong, and Continuance doesn’t hide that excitement: “I pictured the listening session for it while I was still in here rhyming,” Spitta raps, barely a minute into opener “Half Moon Mornings.” The duo works because they coax themselves just far enough outside of their comfort zones to put outre spins on their laidback capo aspirations. These minor tweaks to a reliable system define Continuance, the next chapter in one of rap’s most fruitful pairings.
On paper, Spitta’s writing and delivery seem at odds. His Nawlins drawl is laidback, but his writing is often hyperfocused, turning the smallest details of any verse into marquee attractions. The chocolate Range Rover with tan seats he describes on “Reese’s Cup” and the coral-colored Air Maxes on “Corvette Rally Stripes” elevate the sense of personality and place in each scene. When he opens “Whale Watching” with the line, “This shit sound like a Saab,” you hear the engine purring precisely. Whether he’s describing an outfit or aspiring to be as fly as the gangsters in Scarface, Spitta knows how to hold your attention.
This descriptive flair extends to his wordplay and the surprises he encounters in everyday life. On “Obsession,” he pulls the occasional gut-busting one-liner out of thin air (“He tried to hide that bitch in him, it came out/Gender reveal” from “No Yeast”) and marvels at other’s come-ups through legal weed and cryptocurrency. The smooth jazz-lounge atmosphere Alchemist conjures on closing track “Kool & the Gang” complements Spitta’s verse about providing for his son. “My son too young to know that he a prince,” he raps, sounding settled and thoughtful.
The beat selection across Continuance reflects how far Alchemist has stretched himself musically. There are reminders of the moody boom-bap of the past (“Obsession,” “Signature Move”), but the production builds on the slight expansion of 2016’s The Carrollton Heist and 2018’s Freddie Gibbs collab Fetti by further embracing the psychedelic and minimal sounds Alchemist has favored for a while. The drums and vocal sample on “No Yeast” are paper-thin, homing in on the intricacies of Spitta and Boldy James’s verses. On standout “Louis Baggage,” Alchemist places a winding guitar lick over light drums, which bring the best out of guest Babyface Ray, who could stand to snag a full-length rapper-producer collab of his own.
Both Spitta and Alchemist have been active for over 20 years, and they’ve proven how far the slightest bit of fine-tuning and experimentation can take you. “Sound like your shit a motherfucking façade/Sound like you ain’t really comfortable with who you are,” Spitta growls on “Whale Watching.” Continuance isn’t an overhaul of the blueprint established on Covert and Carrollton, nor is it straight-faced fan service. It’s a space for two rap veterans who are comfortable enough with their chemistry to continue prodding at their margins. | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Jet Life / ALC / Empire | March 2, 2022 | 7.2 | e35543c7-4580-491a-ac95-7484314d934a | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
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 Toots and the Maytals’ 1975 classic, which captured the country soul of roots reggae at its creative peak. | 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 Toots and the Maytals’ 1975 classic, which captured the country soul of roots reggae at its creative peak. | Toots and the Maytals: Funky Kingston | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/toots-and-the-maytals-funky-kingston/ | Funky Kingston | After a shuffling drum intro, a steady groove invites us to let down our guards and open our ears. With another drum roll, the band pivots to the “one-drop,” Jamaica’s reigning rhythm since the ska days. The kick drum and rimshot anchor the backbeat, often emphasized by an organ stab, while the bass moves a simple, sinuous pattern and the rhythm guitar chops chords between each beat. To heighten our appreciation of this interlocking ensemble texture, the instruments are panned across the stereo field, the lead guitar plucking a lightly bluesy, bubbling counterpoint across the room from the steady offbeat skank.
Centered in the mix, Frederick “Toots” Hibbert begins to preach in terms downhome and direct, in a Jamaican country brogue plain enough for all to understand. Sleep won’t come. The rent is too high. Your brother can’t find a dollar, and neither can I. Time tough. In a sly inversion of hip slang, everything is out of sight, but not in a good way—life is so hard even the basics seem out of reach. Today is judgment day, so let us pray and all join in a rising refrain of higher and higher. But this isn’t about spiritual transcendence or ganja-fueled meditation. What’s getting higher is the cost of living. It’s 1974, and the future is unclear. Yet somehow this group playing secular church music in rubbery sync, with chapel-ready backup harmonies and a lead singer in the throes of ecstasy, lift the song itself up to show that deliverance is possible if we band together.
“Time Tough” immediately frames Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston as a wry testament to the shared circumstances of the black and working-class masses. It registers the depth of struggle, while offering grounds for celebrating the ways life can and does go on. As its title reveals, the album courted an international audience by nodding to what was then the latest form of black musical currency, a suggestion Toots received from Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, who was impressed by the unlikely crossover success of “Funky Nassau” (1971) by Bahamas-based band The Beginning of the End. Funky was a style Jamaican artists like Toots were proud to pull off with unique swagger.
After all, if funk registered an earthy embrace of grit and sweat, Kingston had that in spades. And if funk’s minimalist syncopation of soul mirrored a shift in the Civil Rights movement from liberal reforms to militant demands, reggae was similarly emerging as rebel music, an insurgent expression of Jamaica’s urbanizing, disenfranchised masses—black and proud and loud. Inspired by the strides and styles of their African American brethren and sistren, reggae represented a bottom-up cultural turn in Jamaican music and society, as the Jamaican people voted with their feet to dance along in diaspora rather than have their national culture dictated from above by Eurocentric local elites. Consequently, reggae’s ongoing relationship with American pop is part of what has made it legible for foreign audiences, even when they interpret it on their own terms. An early review of Funky Kingston called it “Jamaican rock’n’roll.”
Almost half a century later, in the shadow of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, and other luminaries, it can be hard to appreciate the impact of Toots and the Maytals as reggae found itself on the verge of worldwide exposure. By the early 1970s, the group had earned their place among the cream of the crop, having won over Jamaican audiences for a decade beginning in the ska era, continuing through rocksteady, and helping to cement yet another turn in style and nomenclature in 1968 with their local hit “Do the Reggay.” The Maytals won the annual national Festival Song Competition three times, including the inaugural year of 1966 with the anthemic and much-versioned “Bam Bam.” The Festival’s mission was to cultivate patriotic pride in Jamaican culture, and Toots knew how to ring that bell.
Toots’ churchy, country upbringing was key to shaping his nationally resonant voice, but it was also central to his appeal abroad. Before moving to Kingston as a young man, Toots grew up in May Pen, Clarendon, a parish to the west of Kingston and part of the large swath of the island Jamaicans refer to as “country” (as in, anything outside of “town”). Learning to sing in what he described to journalist David Katz as “a clapping church,” the son of two Seventh Day Adventist preachers honed his voice like so many soul-singer counterparts in the U.S. At 13, Toots moved to Trench Town, the same downtown Kingston community that fostered Bob Marley. His prowess was quickly recognized by a couple local boys, Ralphus “Raleigh” Gordon and Nathaniel “Jerry” Matthias, and they formed a vocal trio named after Toots’ hometown. The Maytals’ early recordings and performances in 1963 and ’64 reveal a clear debt to the gospel quartet, their songs closer to revivalist hymns than Brill Building confections or bawdy blues. The trio recorded for such premier producers as Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and Prince Buster, but unsatisfied with the financial side of these ventures, they moved from studio to studio, eventually striking up a thriving partnership with producer Leslie Kong of Beverley’s Records, the label he named after his wife.
An 18-month jail sentence for what Toots insists was a trumped-up charge temporarily derailed the Maytals just as the hot new sound of rocksteady—slower, groovier songs played by smaller, more electric ensembles—began to eclipse ska’s jazz-age pomp. Upon his release in 1968, the group reconvened and recorded a song about Toots’ imprisonment for Kong, “54-46 (That’s My Number),” which quickly became the Maytals’ biggest hit. Their success continued over the next few years, and when it was time to cast The Harder They Come, the 1972 cult-favorite film and breakthrough soundtrack that introduced the U.S. counterculture to a new wave of Jamaican music, the Maytals were an obvious choice. The trio steals a scene in the film, singing in the studio as the star-struck country-boy protagonist played by Jimmy Cliff looks on, and two of the dance hall favorites they recorded with Kong in 1969, “Sweet and Dandy” and “Pressure Drop,” were standouts on the soundtrack. In a documentary about Toots, label exec Chris Blackwell describes him as “easily the biggest act in Jamaica” prior to the rise of Bob Marley. As with Marley’s international success, and the aesthetic calculus made to market him abroad, Blackwell looms large in the story of Funky Kingston.
Blackwell signed the Maytals as they were riding reggae’s cresting wave, and as with Marley, he used his marketing savvy to expand the genre’s beachhead overseas. In addition to presenting the music on long-playing albums—not a common format in Jamaica’s single-driven market—he also remixed and overdubbed recordings to make them more sonically familiar to audiences accustomed to rock and pop, and he re-branded his biggest acts through rock’s established lead-man imagery. Under Blackwell’s direction, the Wailers became Bob Marley and the Wailers while the Maytals were recrowned Toots and the Maytals. They were less a group than a vocal trio sutured to the house band at Byron Lee’s Dynamic Sounds studio: Toots, Raleigh, and Jerry, and a group of players called the Beverley’s All-Stars would go on to play together for decades.
Initially, Blackwell focused on the UK, a market where Jamaican artists like Millie Small and Desmond Dekker scored crossover pop hits in the 1960s, and where the Windrush generation had built a sound system culture to locally “broadcast” Jamaica’s latest hits. Under his Dragon Records imprint, a collaboration with Dynamic Sounds, Blackwell pushed two albums by Toots and the Maytals to the UK market: 1973’s Funky Kingston and 1974’s In the Dark. Sensing an opportunity in the U.S., Blackwell repackaged these recordings—along with 1969’s “Pressure Drop” for good measure—for a 1975 Mango/Island release that aimed to introduce Toots and the Maytals to the wider international audience quickly warming up to the sound of his country and countrymen. The Mango version of Funky Kingston was widely hailed by music critics as a remarkable achievement for reggae. Lester Bangs called it “perfection” in Stereo Review, and the album narrowly missed the top 10 in the Village Voice’s 1975 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, edged out by the Who by a single point. (To promote the album, Blackwell sent Toots and the Maytals on tour with the Who, as well as the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Jackson Browne.) Hot on the heels of The Harder They Come (1972) and Marley’s Catch a Fire (1973), Funky Kingston captured the group—and reggae—at a creative peak and offered another strategy for marketing Jamaican music to the wider world: letting it be itself.
While Bob Marley’s music has succeeded in defining reggae through its massive popularity and influence, his best-known albums are less reflective of the core Jamaican sound at the time. Marley’s first album for Island, Catch a Fire (1973), was extensively re-recorded, remixed, and overdubbed in London. Under Blackwell’s direction, the rougher, darker sound of the Wailers’ Kingston-made multitracks were filtered, brightened, and adorned with Muscle Shoals blues licks and au courant clavinets. Verses were excised to make room for Clapton-esque guitar solos, the lower frequencies of Marley’s voice rolled off to set it apart from all the mid-range clutter. Funky Kingston may have been conceived by Blackwell to target the same overseas audiences, but it differs markedly in this regard. The most Blackwell seems to have meddled is by overdubbing occasional soul-style horns from the Sons of Jungle band, a group of Ghanaian musicians based in London. In contrast to the effects-laden dub approach then taking hold among more experimental reggae producers, or the over-the-top multitracking in the world of rock and pop, the audio engineering on Funky Kingston is meant to be invisible.
This lack of aesthetic intervention seems all the more remarkable given how Funky Kingston is so musically invested in genre outreach. Proof of concept and point of pride, the title track offers the clearest example. Built around a one-chord bassline that would make Bootsy Collins grin, “Funky Kingston” carefully balances soul and funk with a solid foundation of one-drop drums and a steady offbeat skank from the piano and rhythm guitar. Eventually, the group indulges in a lightly pedantic James Brown-style breakdown, as Toots brings the instruments back in one by one: “Let me hear your funky guitar … now reggae.” There’s even a guitar solo, though it hardly approaches the blues-rock pyrotechnics that, say, Wayne Perkins added to Marley’s “Concrete Jungle.” The sax here, as with the other horn overdubs on the album, feels gratuitous, but it fits enough to fly. A fusion-forward experiment that could have fallen flat, the song manages to transcend gimmick by mining common ground.
While Funky Kingston is often as cosmopolitan as Marley’s music, it is also more local in character and address. Toots’ sound is grounded in a rural Jamaican sensibility that runs parallel to other sites in the diaspora shaped by similar historical forces: legacies of slavery and colonialism, rural peasantry and urban migration, Afro-Christian approaches to worship, music, and dance. While the son of two preachers from May Pen enjoyed a certain privileged access to Jamaica’s “country soul,” as Charles Hughes might put it, Toots also admired such country-soul brethren as Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown, all of whom he names as favorites. We might hear these godfathers of soul, however, less as novel influences Toots sought to emulate than as kindred contemporaries rooted in the same Afro-Christian traditions that encourage the spontaneous expression of sacred experience. In this musical communion, individuals develop distinctive voices that can sing along with others but still be heard as apart, producing an audible texture of integrative, community engagement. Like so many of his American peers and idols, Toots developed his broadly resonant voice in this sacred context, a medium for collective sentiment, drawing on the powers of fervor and faith, falsetto and distortion, ad-libbed interjection, wordless groans, and other sympathetic vibrations.
Toots’ original, downhome hymns all have this character, of course, but his ability to be heard as an individual among the broader collective comes into starkest relief on Funky Kingston when he turns to cover songs. On “Louie Louie,” Toots and company bring an old I-IV-V cha-cha-chá back to the Caribbean, crisping up the Kingsmen’s sloppy rock version by re-infusing some of the staccato polyrhythms that initially inspired Richard Berry to rewrite a local hit by L.A.’s biggest Latin band. For his customized version of John Denver’s “Country Roads (Take Me Home),” Toots makes the song his own by resetting it in “West Jamaica,” seasoning with gospel interjections, and making a foreign “country” song seem utterly at home in the Jamaican countryside. Jackie Jackson adds a little oom-pah to his bassline, but otherwise, the band fully transforms the song into an easy-skanking one-drop.
For all the nods to soul, funk, rock, and country—references that local audiences would have taken in stride as part of the modern Jamaican soundscape—Funky Kingston nevertheless sounds like an authentic, unadulterated expression of Toots’ and Jamaica’s country soul. With even greater hindsight, the album seems far more prophetic for Jamaica’s lane in the global mainstream than Marley’s exceptional reach. Despite being conceived as a sales pitch, Funky Kingston is, like the best Jamaican crossovers, full of songs geared first and foremost toward Jamaican listeners and local sound systems. From 1980 forward, as roots reggae gave ground to a next-generation style even more locally focused and coded—soon to be known simply as dancehall, after its primary site—the Jamaican artists, from Yellowman to Vybz Kartel, who have enjoyed the warmest embrace abroad have been those who, for all their winking nods to foreign musical kinfolk, insist on pleasing funky Kingston first.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Rock | Mango / Island | March 22, 2020 | 9 | e36ec3a0-5a53-4207-b62c-0596ac1e2cb9 | Wayne Marshall | https://pitchfork.com/staff/wayne-marshall/ | |
Decades into Mavis Staples' storied career, she remains a force to be reckoned with. Her latest release is a four-song EP with Son Little: two originals and two new versions of songs long associated with the Staple Singers. | Decades into Mavis Staples' storied career, she remains a force to be reckoned with. Her latest release is a four-song EP with Son Little: two originals and two new versions of songs long associated with the Staple Singers. | Mavis Staples: Your Good Fortune EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20498-your-good-fortune-ep/ | Your Good Fortune EP | Few singers of Mavis Staples' era have managed to stay as prolific or as relevant; Bettye LaVette comes in a close second, Aretha isn’t even in the race. A pop-gospel lifer who started singing in public when she was barely a teenager, she enjoyed massive success in the '60s and '70s as the mightiest voice in the Staple Singers and as an avatar of post-Civil Rights optimism. Even after a few decades in the wilderness (during which she made a string of fine, yet largely overlooked solo albums, including one produced by Prince), she experienced a resurgence in the new century with a string of albums that updated her message first to the Bush era and next to the age of Obama. She has recorded two (three if you count Pops Staples’ posthumous Don’t Lose This) excellent albums with Jeff Tweedy, one of which—2010’s *You Are Not Alone—*won a Grammy for Best Americana Album. Decades into her storied career, she remains a force to be reckoned with.
Her latest release is a four-song EP with Son Little: two originals and two new versions of songs long associated with the Staple Singers. The man born Aaron Livingston has only a single solo EP to his name, last year’s under-the-radar Things I Forgot, but he is better known for his collaborations with the Roots (that’s him singing on Undun) and RJD2 (the duo record under the name Icebird). Stylistically, he inhabits buffer zones between genres and traditions: a little bit of blues and old-school R&B, but with a strong grounding in hip-hop. Little produced Staples’ latest EP, wrote two of these four songs, and played most of the instruments, and he comes across like a man who can’t quite believe he’s working with someone of Staples’ stature.
"Why did you spend all your good fortune on me?" Mavis sings on the opening track, drawing out that first syllable gravely and letting that final pronoun fade quickly and humbly. The song echoes the gospel sentiments she has been preaching all her life, and the melodic cadence of the verses are perfectly suited to her delivery. Little produces "Your Good Fortune" to gently update or at least comment on the Staples sound: His guitar playing obviously mimics Pops’ signature tone. It’s a powerful performance by both singer and producer, yet ultimately it doesn’t sound like Little wrote it for Mavis. Instead, it sounds like he wrote it to her.
Little wisely keeps the arrangements straightforward, backing Staples with only a few instruments: guitar, bass, looped drums (or drums that sound looped), and a keyboard flourish every once in a while. Instead of spare, however, the songs occasionally sound crowded, as though the music is closing in on Staples. That can be intriguing on "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean", a cover of the Staple Singers’ cover of the Blind Lemon Jefferson tune, which conveys the song title's grim finality. "Wish I Had Answered", however, sounds a bit choked, never quite hitting the groove that handclaps and tambourine are meant to suggest.
Pops wrote "Wish I Had Answered" in the 1960s, years before the Staples would reach the peak of their popularity, and Mavis sings his words as though threading a life’s worth of spiritual regret into three minutes. Not only has her voice gained power with age, but her sheer presence, as a living reminder of pop's social conscience, is commanding. She is a living reminder of the idea that musicians have a great responsibility to the world.
That much comes through on Little’s second original, the righteous "Fight", on which Mavis surveys a range of social ills and invites us to help her solve them. She may not be talking specifically about RFRA, income inequality, or Black Lives Matter, but it’s impossible to hear the song in 2015 and not think of these and other pressing issues. "Talking about Jesus but you treat people dead wrong," she declares in that voice that exudes moral authority and spiritual generosity. "Freedom and justice, they ain’t your playthings." Seldom has she sounded so accusing or so scolding, as though she can’t believe she has to keep telling us all to treat each other with respect and dignity. It takes her a bit outside her comfort zone, which is exciting for an artist of any age and makes the promise of a longer collaboration with Son Little sound particularly glorious. | 2015-04-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-04-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | April 24, 2015 | 6.8 | e376e1ad-008a-4b78-a824-391c1040ae85 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
This Latin-tinged electro-folk project takes a rustic turn with intriguing results. | This Latin-tinged electro-folk project takes a rustic turn with intriguing results. | Helado Negro: Canta Lechuza | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15489-canta-lechuza/ | Canta Lechuza | Roberto Lange makes Latin-tinged electro-folk music under the name Helado Negro (Spanish for "black ice cream") and a recent stint the woods of Connecticut seems to have had a curious impact on his music. Most of Canta Lechuza (which translates as "Owl Singing"), the second full-length offering from the Helado Negro moniker, feels like something of a one-man vacation. The compositions conjure images of lantern-lit patio parties and lightly narcotized comet-gazing, with less focus on the folkier aspects that shaped his debut, Awe Owe.
From the outside looking in, Canta Lechuza shares something with Destroyer's latest LP, Kaputt. Like the latter record, Canta Lechuza finds an artist ignoring his established pastoral leanings while sailing into smoother waters in a style that touches on kitsch. But instead of Bejar's ornate, romantic bluster, Lange is more interested in negative space, noise, and subtlety-- starry-eyed crooning, celestial background textures, and slinky rhythms crafted around bass plinks and plunks that seem to have been stolen from some Barcelona nightclub and slowed to a crawl.
But back to all that noise. Lange is clearly in the mood to experiment, letting more traditional instruments take a backseat while he fiddles with electronic equipment, peppering nearly every track with whirs, burrs, clicks, and clacks. He occasionally takes time to build distinct grooves from all these little pieces ("Cenar en La Manana"), but more often than not, his fiddling is distracting. It's such a pleasure getting wrapped up in the dreamy ethers of a song like "Lechuguilla", you can't help but feel a bit slighted by the fact that Lange didn't choose to dial it back a bit.
Not all of the experimentation is quite so invasive. This is, after all, a record that was composed in the wilds, and Lange's ability to channel his surroundings affords Canta Lechuza an important transportive quality. "El Oeste" concludes with a serrated swell that recalls a summer thunderstorm, while "Calculas" features lightning bug synth flashes. Best of all are the heavily processed blurts on "Oreja De Arena", which provide Lange with what sounds like a belching bullfrog as a backup singer. When Lange goes with the flow and allows elements like this to permeate his music, Canta Lechuza is at its best. | 2011-06-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-06-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Asthmatic Kitty | June 9, 2011 | 6.9 | e3786a2b-915b-41d7-a542-dbc7f209b81b | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
Celebrating the true first chapter in an often brilliant career, David Bowie's second studio album is reissued, complete with a 15-track bonus disc. | Celebrating the true first chapter in an often brilliant career, David Bowie's second studio album is reissued, complete with a 15-track bonus disc. | David Bowie: Space Oddity [40th Anniversary Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13610-space-oddity-40th-anniversary-edition/ | Space Oddity [40th Anniversary Edition] | Through the 1970s, David Bowie built his legend on a parade of changing persona and shrewd stylistic shifts. But his initial, late-1960s forays into the music industry illustrate that there's a fine line between "chameleonic" and "indecisive"-- in his early years, Bowie tried make his name variously as a mod bluesman, a traditional folksinger, an Anthony Newley-schooled theatrical raconteur and, on his 1967 self-titled debut, a music-hall dandy. Ironically, it was a song seemingly most susceptible to a brief, novelty-tune shelf life that would prove to be his first enduring work: the 1969 single "Space Oddity", which, of course, riffed on the similarly titled Stanley Kubrick blockbuster of the day, and was fortuitously timed to court a space-crazed populace still abuzz from that summer's lunar landing.
The ploy didn't quite pay off-- though the "Space Oddity" single cracked the UK Top 5, the sophomore album on which it appeared flopped, as the efforts to establish the David Bowie brand resulted in a confusing release strategy. His UK label, Phillips, issued the album in Britain as David Bowie (making it his second self-titled album), while his U.S. benefactors at Mercury christened it with a title that begged to have it relegated to the folk-section cut-out bin: Man of Words/Man of Music. But rather than prompt another career about-face, the album's prog-folk hymnals (complete with guest keyboard wizardry from Rick Wakeman of Yes) helped point the way to the artful glam-rock that would make Bowie a superstar-- upon which he would reissue the album in 1972 and rename it after its most famous song.
As such, this 40th-anniversary reissue of Space Oddity does not so much commemorate a great album-- it doesn't even rank among Bowie's 10 best-- but rather the true first chapter in an often brilliant career (not to mention the dawn of Bowie's fruitful collaborative relationship with producer Tony Visconti). Tellingly, the title track has opened pretty much every Bowie greatest-hits compilation of note, and rightfully so-- not only does its still-thrilling rocket-launch structure anticipate Bowie's own supernova ascent, the song's themes of splendid isolation and uncertain futurism would prove ever-present motifs in his work up through 1980's Scary Monsters. But if the song dramatically reinvents Bowie as a sci-fi folkie-- serving as the middle-man between late-60s hippie idealism and early-70s disillusionment-- with few exceptions, the rest of Space Oddity isn't quite as eager to thrust forth into the great unknown.
Instead, we hear a young dude who's still back home with his Beatles and his Stones (see: the perfunctory "Hey Jude" group-chorus coda of "Memory of a Free Festival" for the former; the extended blues boogie of "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" for the latter), with a well-worn copy of Love's Forever Changes close at hand-- all that's missing from the mellotronic psych-folk serenade "An Occasional Dream" is an Arthur Lee co-write credit. So amid these stately surroundings, side-one closer "Cygnet Committee" stands out not just by virtue of its nine-minute length, but for its strident disavowal of hippie platitudes ("[we] stoned the poor on slogans such as 'Wish you could hear!' 'Love is all we need!' 'Kick out the jams!' 'Kick out your mother!'"); likewise, Bowie's voice overpowers the song's languid folk-rock sway as if it were a shackle, introducing his signature technique of intensifying and accelerating his delivery to break free of the verses' pre-established cadences. It's the birth of the classic David Bowie Affectation-- the one that's been embraced/lampooned by everyone from the Frogs and Ween and Destroyer to Flight of the Conchords-- making "Cygnet Committee" as important a breakthrough for Bowie as Space Oddity's more celebrated title track.
Comparatively, Space Oddity's other epic set pieces-- the over-orchestrated fable "The Wild-Eyed Boy From Freecloud" and hippie-dream requiem "Memory of a Free Festival"-- are too baroque in their presentation to fully transcend the status of time-capsule curios. But they're still historically significant for introducing Bowie's future foil Mick Ronson, who makes an uncredited appearance on the former, while contributing some six-string muscle to the improved, two-part single version of "Free Festival", included on this set's 15-track bonus disc.
A handful of these rarities have surfaced previously-- namely on the 1989 Sound+Vision box set, the 1990 CD reissue of Space Oddity and the 2000 Bowie on the Beeb radio-sessions compilation-- and the set feels excessively padded with (not-so) alternate mixes. But taken together, they illuminate the rapidity of Bowie's evolution between the album's conception and its promotion, from an embryonic demo version of "Space Oddity" (sung in a higher register and different meter) to the superior, stripped-down versions of "An Occasional Dream" and "Freecloud", the Marc Bolan-backed single version of eventual Aladdin Sane track "The Prettiest Star" and the proto-Spiders From Mars swagger of "London Bye Ta-Ta". And throughout it all, Bowie even found the time to learn another language, cutting a lyrically revised Italian version of "Space Oddity" ("Ragazza Solo, Ragazza Sola") to compete with a wave of successful cover versions in Italy. It 's hardly the most flattering portrait of a man who would go on to sell the world, but still a quaint keepsake from a time when he was just trying to blag his way through mainland Europe. | 2009-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | EMI | November 17, 2009 | 6.7 | e38b158c-5519-40af-ac6f-eb8f040e3955 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Career-spanning comp that the former Voidoids leader and Neon Boys, Heartbreakers, and Dim Stars member himself claims should be "his only album." | Career-spanning comp that the former Voidoids leader and Neon Boys, Heartbreakers, and Dim Stars member himself claims should be "his only album." | Richard Hell: Spurts: The Richard Hell Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4027-spurts-the-richard-hell-story/ | Spurts: The Richard Hell Story | Take a look at the cover of Spurts, with Richard Hell leaning forward and mugging like some collaborative product between Malcolm MacLaren and Franz Oz (though his distinctive style predated both), looking defiant and probably a little strung out on something. Flip it over: There's Hell almost 30 years later, hair grown out and dyed, face filled out, looking over his shoulder through tinted glasses at three decades of music, mistakes, band breakups, and at least one certifiably classic document of the CBGB's punk scene, Blank Generation.
Spurts is not the first time Hell has compiled his own material. He collected the odds-and-sods R.I.P. when he ditched music to pursue writing in 1984; it was later expanded and repackaged as Time-- inexplicably omitting "Blank Generation" on both occasions. This time, the package features interview-style liner notes between Hell and critics Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell giving background info on every track, and includes Hell's material with Dim Stars, recorded in the early 1990s with Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, and Don Fleming. Hell himself claims this compilation should be "his only album," a definitive release that would "cut straight through" like any album would.
The Neon Boys were a precursor to the band Television; Hell was kicked out before they recorded their first album under the new name, but he was magnanimous enough to include two Neon Boys tracks at the start of the disc (not to mention close it with a live version of "Blank Generation" as played by Television). The preliminary version of "Love Comes in Spurts" had music written by Television's Tom Verlaine, and has next to no resemblance to the version on Blank Generation. But Hell's remix shows no signs of a bruised ego, pushing the guitars way up and his vocals down, serving the song well. The Stones-like fury of the rhythm guitar is well captured, and Verlaine's brief-but-inspired ascending lines can be felt in the back of your teeth.
From Hell's time with Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers, he only includes the cream of the crop, "Chinese Rocks". Instead, the lion's share of Spurts leans on the Voidoids' Blank Generation and Destiny Street records. The Blank Generation work has aged best, coupling punk fury with eccentric delivery and rhythm that's not afraid to swing. It also features some inspired anti-guitar hero moments from the inestimable Robert Quine on "Liars Beware" and "Love Comes in Spurts". Destiny Street would show a slightly poppier and more contemplative side to the band, though "Kid With a Replaceable Head" is infectiously sinister and "Time" and "Ignore That Door" show Hell's songwriting growing more frank and direct.
Hell returned to recording in 1992 with a Dim Stars EP preceding one proper album. The songs chosen here mostly sound like jam sessions, like the two-chord "Dim Stars Theme", over which Geffen-era Thurston Moore scrawls recklessly while staying within the lines, bending the compositions but not breaking them, keeping a foothold for Hell's lyrics. "Monkey" is Hell at his most forthright, and the distorted guitars in the background seem incongruous with the popping clean chords and his newfound tenderness ("I swear I held my own hand pretending it was yours").
Spurts includes one more late-era compilation track from the Voidoids, "Oh", and two previously unreleased tracks, the Dennis Cooper-inspired "She'll Be Coming", which combines drum loops, Eastern tones, and a forced hillbilly accent, and the aforementioned Television of performance of "Blank Generation". The first side of Spurts is a righteous blast of indignant punk, and the second half indulges in some experimentation, some mood pieces, and some glances at hard-earned maturity. The best of his many compilations, and certainly the best place to start for the unfamiliar, Spurts flows as well as any original album. People still listen to those, right? | 2005-11-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-11-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Rhino | November 14, 2005 | 8.6 | e38c7207-783a-4ef1-8915-ac0aac9985b7 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
The Fuck Buttons co-founder fills his latest solo album with familiar, quavering synth-pop, less concerned with exploring feelings than expressing what he’s feeling deeply. | The Fuck Buttons co-founder fills his latest solo album with familiar, quavering synth-pop, less concerned with exploring feelings than expressing what he’s feeling deeply. | Andrew Hung: Deliverance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrew-hung-deliverance/ | Deliverance | As a member of Fuck Buttons, the dearly departed electronic noise duo, Andrew Hung helped elevate the experiential over the emotional, imagining Olympian feats of speed and strength far beyond anything that would be considered “relatable.” And in the past decade, Hung’s most celebrated projects—whether in pop or film—bear witness to someone else’s transformation rather than centering himself. The compact synth-pop of Hung’s solo work has offered a quiet counterpoint to his collaborations, and his third album, Deliverance, makes the loudest pronouncement of the project’s modest aims: Meet Andrew Hung, he’s just One of the Guys.
Granted, Deliverance will suffice for anyone trying to catch a contact buzz from the recent 10-year anniversary of Slow Focus. If Fuck Buttons songs were Decepticons—imposing, awesome, bent on destruction—then Hung’s solo work reimagines the same materials in their more familiar, useful modes of planes, boomboxes, or cars. Putting aside his reputation for circuit bending and synth corruption, the mere song titles of “Changes,” “Soldier,” or “Love Is” are truth in advertising, at least in revealing that Hung is wholly uninterested in artifice as a lyricist. “The world has turned and left me in the dark/I feel so lonely now,” he howls on “Don’t Believe Me Now,” its adolescent angst believable if only because Deliverance aspires to only the most formative, gateway synth-pop.
But while Hung’s songcraft has gotten sharper and more streamlined since 2017’s Realisationship, his naked voice is more jarring than anything he fed through a modded-out Playskool mic on Street Horrrsing. Prone to holding a tune like a live eel, Hung sings in a quaver more emo than emotive, less concerned with exploring feelings than with expressing that he’s feeling it deeply. While Hung knows how to let it rip on a chorus, his intensity often modulates at random, conflicting with underlying sentiment and drawing far too much attention to first-rhyme-best-rhyme lyrics like, “It’s like a window into shame/Changes with the rain/It’s hidden from the place I blame.” Or, the chorus on opener “Ocean Mouth,” “The fear I feel is a turning wheel/It’s a bitter taste.”
Regardless of the honesty that this approach brings to Hung’s DIY intentions, Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay—Kele Okereke, Yannis Philappakis, Ed MacFarlane. Or hell, even Robert Smith, as most of the lyrics could pass for the placeholders for the Cure’s 21st-century music; indeed, Deliverance gives us a song called “Never Be the Same,” whereas an official version of the Cure’s “It Can Never Be the Same” has been promised since 2016. Of course, Robert Smith is Robert Smith. Hung—he’s still just One of the Guys. | 2023-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lex | August 15, 2023 | 5.8 | e393bef6-875e-4de1-afdc-96d330c5a4f8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The overlooked Brit-rock stars reissue their sophomore album on its 17th anniversary. It’s easy to say underappreciated bands were ahead of their time, but Six by Seven were totally of their time. | The overlooked Brit-rock stars reissue their sophomore album on its 17th anniversary. It’s easy to say underappreciated bands were ahead of their time, but Six by Seven were totally of their time. | Six by Seven: The Closer You Get | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22922-the-closer-you-get/ | The Closer You Get | Six by Seven were but one of many British bands to carry the “next Radiohead” albatross in the late ’90s. Despite endorsements from tastemakers like Jools Holland and John Peel, their 1998 debut album, The Things We Make, didn’t yield a “Creep”-sized crossover. It did boast a pretty great “Stop Whispering” in the yearning “For You,” but the rest of the record wasn’t so eager to please, as it wrapped singer-guitarist Chris Olley’s plaintive melodicism in slow-roiling surges that owed more to the stalking gaits of post-rock than Britpop. That tension between their congenial and contrarian instincts likely scuttled Six by Seven’s chart potential, but on their follow-up album, the Nottingham band turned their frustrations and square-peg/round-hole relationship with popular culture into a badge of honor.
On the surface, the reappearance of The Closer You Get is an oddly timed archival project—rather than wait until next year to mark the 20th-anniversary of their debut album, Six by Seven are jumping the queue to do a 17th-anniversary deluxe vinyl repackaging of their second (complete with a bonus collection of Peel sessions). Though Olley rebooted the Six by Seven name in 2013 after a half decade hiatus, next month, he’ll be reforming with the band’s original line-up to perform The Closer You Get in its entirety at a couple of shows in the UK—a reunion spurred by group of fans who lobbied to make the album’s lead-off track “Eat Junk Become Junk” a party-crashing contender in the UK’s annual Christmas No. 1 sweepstakes back in 2015. But that stunt campaign speaks to a genuine need—The Closer You Get has resurfaced not out of knee-jerk nostalgia, but because it feels so vitally, viscerally now.
It’s common to say underappreciated bands were ahead of their time, but Six by Seven were totally of their time. It’s just that, in that brief post-Blair, pre-9/11 golden age, most people didn’t want to hear songs about unfettered consumerism, class conflict, media addiction, and social isolation. The Closer You Get resembles the kind of record Radiohead may have put out in 2000 had Thom Yorke chosen Mark E. Smith instead of Richard D. James as his spirit animal—an album for people who like the idea of Muse, but can’t stomach the pretension of the real one. Rather than attempt to make electronic music, Six by Seven filtered its influence through standard guitar-band instrumentation: the patient builds and trembling leads of their debut gave way to frenetic, skittering rhythms and tweaked-out distortion-pedal squalls, transforming the band from art-rock aesthetes to noise-punk preachers.
And in 17 years, Olley’s targets have only become more firmly entrenched. The lacerating invectives of “Eat Junk Become Junk” leave fresh wounds at a time when a trash-TV huckster has moved into the White House, and while “Sawn Off Metallica T-Shirt” may deal in white-trash caricature, its dirtbag protagonist’s delusions of grandeur (“Lenny Bruce Lee Marvin Gaye—I’ve got style, and I’m misunderstood!”) ring all too familiar in an era of toxic, #GHBTP-grade masculinity and #alternativefacts. (Though the two groups are aesthetic opposites, I wouldn’t be surprised if fellow Nottinghammers Sleaford Mods learned a few lessons in bile-spewing from this record.)
But as much as The Closer You Get unleashes Six by Seven’s latent aggression, there’s a part of Olley that’s holding out hope to commune with the masses—and for all its buckshot cultural critique, the album doesn’t sacrifice Olley’s flair for melancholy and impassioned appeals to the heart. The desperate sentiments of “New Year”—“give me something I can live for/Give me something to believe in”—come couched in a psych-pop sway before a string-swept chorus shoots the song skyward, while the fuzzed-out mid-album double shot of “Don’t Wanna Stop” and “Slab Square” burns like the sound of a band raging against the dying of the light.
By contrast, The Closer You Get’s tent-pole ballads—“England and a Broken Radio” and “100 and Something Foxhall Road”—are more like flickering, short-wicked candles that nonetheless illuminate a path out of the darkness. The former communicates its music-as-salvation message through mellow, Mogwai-esque atmospherics; the latter is both a love letter and farewell note—to an old flame, to Nottingham, to the possibility of happiness itself. As Olley’s more famous peers once wrote, “Don’t get sentimental/It always ends up drivel.” But what makes The Closer You Get more than just a delirious dive through modern life’s rubbish is Olley’s desire to forge an emotional connection with those who feel weighed down by it. And if that means occasionally getting sentimental, then, for Olley, it’s a risk worth taking. | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | February 27, 2017 | 8 | e39b5f41-eb16-43ed-bfe2-7f28921384a3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
For her latest creative venture Helen, Liz Harris of Grouper has teamed up with Eternal Tapestry drummer Jed Bindeman, bassist/guitarist Scott Simons__,__ and a mysterious, possibly mythic third collaborator simply named "Helen." Upon cursory listens, the band's debut album, The Original Faces, appears to be an accessible, if noisy, entry into the shoegaze-pop canon. In all actuality, it's a little bit insane. | For her latest creative venture Helen, Liz Harris of Grouper has teamed up with Eternal Tapestry drummer Jed Bindeman, bassist/guitarist Scott Simons__,__ and a mysterious, possibly mythic third collaborator simply named "Helen." Upon cursory listens, the band's debut album, The Original Faces, appears to be an accessible, if noisy, entry into the shoegaze-pop canon. In all actuality, it's a little bit insane. | Helen: The Original Faces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20962-the-original-faces/ | The Original Faces | Liz Harris' music thrives on liminality. Her canny blending of tape loops, field music, and psychedelia strands us somewhere both familiar and strange: Dusty old pianos, chirping frogs, and a defiantly beeping microwave counted as some of the most persistent instrumentation on her last album Ruins. Whether she's releasing new material as Grouper or collaborating with bluesmen and noise savants (Roy Montgomery, Xiu Xiu, and Tiny Vipers), Harris builds up immersive, perplexing landscapes, tearing it all down just as we're starting to figure out where, exactly, we are.
For her latest creative venture Helen, Harris has teamed up with Eternal Tapestry drummer Jed Bindeman, bassist/guitarist Scott Simons__,__ and a mysterious, possibly mythic third collaborator (more on her later). Despite its purported origins as a thrash band, Helen's sun-baked ambient lands somewhere between My Bloody Valentine's distorted bliss and Eternal Tapestry's psyched-out experiments. Upon cursory listens, the band's debut album, The Original Faces, appears to be an accessible, if noisy, entry into the shoegaze-pop canon, not unlike A Sunny Day in Glasgow's excellent Sea When Absent. In all actuality, it's a little bit insane.
Harris' distorted, manipulated vocals divulge their secrets slowly, after the melodic sweetness wears off. She plays with our senses and expectations: Listeners must wade through a creaky, corrupted tape sample to reach the triumphant roar of opening track "Ryder"; when the drums finally kick in on the dreamlike "Pass Me By", it's with exaggerated, almost comic force, as though she's acknowledging our impatience. Her more nocturnal, funereal side informs the The Original Faces' best moments, particularly the achingly beautiful "Violet", which sounds like a memorial service being held 20 yards away from a Slowdive rehearsal.
The other noteworthy member of the band is the album's mysterious, unidentified backup vocalist, whose vocals sound uncannily similar to Harris but are credited separately to "Helen". Is she Grouper's alter ego? An unnamed surprise guest? The mythical Greek heroine, a symbol for unattainable, destructive perfection? These are solid guesses, but I'm partial to imagining her as a ghost, who materializes every so often to bestow the music with an otherworldly presence. "Helen"'s presence is tenuous; on cuts like "Right Outcome" and "City Breathing" her harmonies pierce the void to carry Harris' leads upward, while on "Covered in Shade" and "Allison", they're tucked away into the background. Considering the mythical connotations of Helen's namesake, her presence makes sense here as an extension of the album's interest in the divide between delicate beauty and all-consuming din.
Whatever else she does, "Helen" helps diversify the sound of The Original Faces and injects a youthful spirit into the solemn proceedings. Along with other traces of pop, like the jangly interludes "Motorcycle" and "City Breathing", she provides a respite from the surrounding gloom. These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm. | 2015-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Kranky | September 9, 2015 | 6.9 | e3a09f03-6e43-4850-8fa5-c03ca4b4b475 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Virginia rapper’s latest is musically varied and vocally impressive, revealing an artist who continues to cut extraneous elements out of his songwriting and drill closer to the core of his style. | The Virginia rapper’s latest is musically varied and vocally impressive, revealing an artist who continues to cut extraneous elements out of his songwriting and drill closer to the core of his style. | Pusha T: It’s Almost Dry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pusha-t-its-almost-dry/ | It’s Almost Dry | Pusha T’s voice—snarling and crystalline, among the most distinctive in his generation—would be compelling if he were rapping on a click track. But after the Clipse, the duo he had formed with his brother Malice, disbanded, the Virginia Beach rapper’s early solo efforts were marred by production that often suffocated him. Records like 2011’s Fear of God II: Let Us Pray and 2013’s Wrath of Caine can get lost in the digital-maximalist wilderness. Though he’d navigated similar lanes nimbly in the past, Pusha was now drowned out by beats that were crowded in the most predictable, post-Lex Luger ways, some of which he even let lure him into conspicuously borrowed flows. He eventually shed this to find something meaner and radically spare; his most recent album, 2018’s seven-song, 21-minute Daytona, mirrors this minimalism in its very construction.
The other thing, aside from leanness, that “Numbers on the Board,” “Nosetalgia,” and “Untouchable” have in common with Daytona is that none of them are produced by the Neptunes. After handling the vast majority of Clipse’s studio albums, Pharrell and Chad Hugo were all but absent from Pusha’s solo work. Now Pharrell returns to produce more than half of It’s Almost Dry, Pusha’s first new record in nearly four years. It’s a musically varied and vocally impressive effort from an artist who continues to cut extraneous elements out of his songwriting, drilling closer to the core of his style.
Clipse LPs were once conduits for the Neptunes’ most experimental rap beats; Pharrell’s work on It’s Almost Dry honors that legacy, leading Pusha into narcotized carnivals (“Call My Bluff”) and the climaxes of sci-fi thrillers (the naggingly eerie “Scrape It Off”). In fact, there’s a foreboding quality to all of the Pharrell beats here, from the opening suite of “Brambleton” and “Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes,” where the former’s electronic bounce and latter’s freneticism make each other seem more sinister.
The rest of It’s Almost Dry is helmed by Kanye West, along with a few co-producers, most notably the New York veteran 88-Keys on lead single “Diet Coke.” Kanye’s beats are not as uniformly excellent as Pharrell’s: Closer “I Pray for You” is dragged down by pedestrian drums, and “Diet Coke” plays like paint-by-numbers Pusha. (The latter song is perhaps a victim of the hyper-clear mixes the rapper prefers; it sounds like a slightly sterile version of the grimier songs it attempts to evoke.) But the best Kanye is enrapturing. On first listen, the slight, Colonel Bagshot-sampling “Just So You Remember” reminded me of the Daytona finale “Infrared.” It’s actually closer to being a Ka song, so quiet that it’s barely there. “Dreamin’ of the Past,” which is built around Donny Hathaway’s recording of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” is the sort of song Kanye produced around the turn of the century: maddening at first for the obviousness of its sample flip, and then for its effectiveness. “Hear Me Clearly” sounds like the tail end of a nuclear winter.
The most thunderous beat from either producer is Pharrell’s “Neck & Wrist,” a lavalike midtempo track that would overwhelm most MCs. Instead, Pusha slips into lilting flows reminiscent of 50 Cent and G.O.O.D. Music signee Valee on the song’s verse and hook, respectively. On Daytona, he carried each song with robust performances that he played straight down the middle—often technically impressive, always appropriate for their songs. The beats on Dry simply require more finesse, leading to what’s far and away his most dextrous showing as a vocalist. Pusha feigns exhaustion on “Call My Bluff,” playfully syncopates the ends of bars on “Brambleton,” and maintains metronomic, even mathematical cadences on “Rock N Roll” and “Scrape It Off,” where not a syllable is out of place, but that precision does not come to dominate the songs.
A few months after Daytona’s release, Pusha flew to Berlin to speak at the Red Bull Music Academy. There, he leveled with a concert hall full of aspiring musicians: “If you want to talk about it, I really made variations of the same album for the past 20 years,” he said. “I know exactly who I’m talking to. I know exactly who my core is. I cater to that person. I don’t cater to anyone else.” On a writing level, this is largely true: Though Pusha has told some memorably unnerving anecdotes from his past, he is usually not writing full scenes—he arranges and rearranges shards of detail to create new iterations of familiar pulp. In other words, the currency of his style is execution, not experience.
All of which makes It’s Almost Dry’s opening song one of the most fascinating in Pusha’s catalog. “Brambleton” is an extended, mostly bemused response to Anthony “Geezy” Gonzalez, the former Clipse manager who served a eight-year sentence for running a $20 million drug ring in Virginia Beach, and who, in a 2020 VladTV interview, said that “95 percent” of Clipse’s rhymes were about his life. Inflammatory as Gonzalez’s interview was, Pusha’s rebuke of his claims is measured, even humble—“You would pay 16, I would pay 18” sounds more like forensic accounting than a blood feud—and wraps up tidily.
Pusha likes to lean on crime-movie tropes, but he invokes them with purpose. In some instances, this has the effect of making him seem extraordinarily unfazed by the world around him, as if the strongest response a life-and-death situation can trigger in him is a hazy memory of Carlito’s Way. But he is not willing or able to keep real life at bay forever. It’s Almost Dry’s second song, “Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes,” is also its least verbose, with few lines longer than six words. In its chorus, Pusha calls himself “cocaine’s Dr. Seuss,” which is about as far as one can go toward lowering the stakes of whatever is said next. And still, two things bleed into its opening verse. First Pusha returns, obliquely, to Gonzalez’s claims, which he seemed to have settled on the prior song. “If I never sold dope for you,” he raps, “then you’re 95 percent of who?” Later in the same verse is this line of thinking:
AMGs on auto cruise
The wrist singing’ Auto-Tune
The dope game destroyed my youth
Now Kim Jones Dior my suits
It’s easy to imagine Pusha placing the third of those four lines there to accentuate the thrill and sheer unlikelihood of his wealth. But it has the opposite effect, making the clothes and cars seem like meager consolation prizes for decades spent dodging arrest and assassination. Like Pusha’s other work, It’s Almost Dry stops short of explicitly considering whether what he did—and what he went through—in his early life is justified by the payoff. But lurking at the edges are some regrets that he cannot outrun. | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam | April 25, 2022 | 7.8 | e3b24933-eec9-4db8-8179-8a201f1d8cb2 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
This collection tells the full story of a Madchester band that’s never quite gotten its due, documenting tentative forays into acid house alongside tight, ’60s-inspired songwriting. | This collection tells the full story of a Madchester band that’s never quite gotten its due, documenting tentative forays into acid house alongside tight, ’60s-inspired songwriting. | Inspiral Carpets: The Complete Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inspiral-carpets-the-complete-singles/ | The Complete Singles | Back in the early ’90s, when Madchester was at its peak, Inspiral Carpets were perhaps best known for their “cool as fuck” T-shirts, which were essential wear for any young indie fan looking to annoy their parents. But the Inspiral Carpets were never really cool. They were from Oldham, for a start, a former textile town to the northeast of Manchester, and their sound leaned heavily on a very Northern English social realism, more Shelagh Delaney than Shaun Ryder.
The Stone Roses’ bank-busting return aside, the reputation of the Madchester groups has never really recovered from the critical mauling they received when shoegaze and grunge hit. Most of them are to be found playing retro festivals and small-ish gigs to aging British fans, without ever bothering to clamor for mainstream attention. So why should you care about The Complete Singles, the Inspiral Carpets’ third singles collection, on top of a 2003 greatest hits? The simple answer is that the Inspiral Carpets deserve so much more than the frenzy of middle-aged fans and moderately sized UK tour. From 1988’s “Keep the Circle Around” to 1994’s “I Want You,” featuring the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, the Inspiral Carpets were perhaps the best singles band of the Madchester era, cooking up three-minute tales of tear-jerking psychedelia in which a neat eye for lyrical detail met intricately arranged vocal harmonies and Clint Boon’s stirring organ melodies.
“This Is How It Feels,” their best-known song, has it all: a haunting Farfisa organ riff; a wonderfully compact opening couplet, which paints a depressingly relatable picture of domestic woe (“Husband don’t know what he’s done/Kids don’t know what’s wrong with Mum”); and a perfectly constructed chorus of interlocking vocal lines, which mesh together like an Oldham Beach Boys. Equally poignant is “Move,” a 1989 single with an exquisite chord sequence and one of Tom Hingley’s most heart-on-sleeve vocals, a perfectly English work of diffident emotional release that hits like the third pint of beer after your ex leaving. “Saturn Five” is the 1990s’ best ’60s garage single, hands down; “Dragging Me Down” swings from tragedy to ecstasy in four and a half minutes of cinematic drama; and “I Want You” gives an idea of what the Fall might have sounded like if Mark E. Smith had ceded an inch of control to a backing vocalist. True, the band’s quality control slipped when they reunited in 2011 with original singer Stephen Holt in lieu of Hingley, but the four singles from that era feel at home at the end of the record’s chronological history, while the appearance of punk poet John Cooper Clarke on “Let You Down” sounds charmingly inevitable, like the crowning act of a Manchester psych symposium.
These songs are readily available on other albums and playlists. But The Complete Singles comes into its own on the third CD of the set, where many of the band’s remixes are collected for the first time, alongside new mixes from the Go! Team and Martyn Walsh & Simon Lyon. The Inspiral Carpets may have been less steeped in dance music than many of their peers, but they weren’t oblivious to the rave madness around them: “Caravan,” from 1991, had a piano line that nodded to the triumphant plink-plonk of Italo house, and the band commissioned a significant number of remixes to fill out their 12" singles, many from local producers like Jon Dasilva or Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering. The hit rate among these is not particularly high—they often feel awkward, more an ill-matched game of exquisite corpse than a genuine meeting of minds—and it is probably more interesting to know that a pre-trance Paul van Dyk remixed the Inspiral Carpets than to actually listen to his leaden and rather cheap-sounding take on “Saturn 5.” The Go! Team, meanwhile, make the stately majesty of “This Is How It Feels” sound like an ungainly kids TV theme, with Hingley’s voice relegated to the bottom of a leather boot.
When the remixes do work, though, the results are enlightening, a trip to a Madchester time capsule where Farfisa organ soul meets bubbling house beats. Justin Robertson’s take on “Caravan” manages to be both utterly cosmic and totally Manchester, like Ibiza 1988 under gray Northern skies, using the original song’s piano to great effect over bubbling 303 and the suggestion of bongos. Mike Pickering & Paul Heard’s 12" mix of “Two Worlds Collide” is a charming mixture of dub basslines, distorted guitar, and house beats that lollop around with the fishtail-parka swagger of prime Liam Gallagher, while Sheffield bleep legends the Forgemasters’ mix of “Commercial Reign” rubs the song down to its tough industrial core. Inspiral Carpets never quite reach the gloriously seamless dance-rock fusion that Primal Scream achieved on Screamadelica, but they do sound very much at home on the dancefloor when in the embrace of a sympathetic talent.
Madchester’s role as a forward-looking musical force is sometimes missed by music fans outside of the UK, who see all the Byrds influences in the Stone Roses and none of the Mr. Fingers. The Inspiral Carpets had their retro moments, certainly, but they were never consumed by the past. This makes The Complete Singles the most accurate (and interesting) portrait of the group to date: crack songwriters with their shaggy bowl cuts tilted toward the past and Adidas trainers pointed tentatively toward the future. | 2023-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute / BMG | March 17, 2023 | 7 | e3b6033a-8735-4c11-8645-9df39fe13c37 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The South Korea-born, Berlin-based producer is an expert navigator of the balancing act required to make great house music. | The South Korea-born, Berlin-based producer is an expert navigator of the balancing act required to make great house music. | Peggy Gou: Once EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peggy-gou-once-ep/ | Once EP | To make house music is to walk a fine line between the template and the tangent—between all the things that make house music recognizable as such (the beat, the groove, the repetition) and the things that make a given track stand out across a long, foggy night beneath the disco ball. Peggy Gou has only been putting out music for a couple of years, but the South Korea-born, Berlin-based producer has already proven herself an expert navigator of that balancing act. The best Gou tracks take house music’s familiar form and splash it with color until it’s as splotchy as a tie-dyed piece of fabric. Take “Day Without Yesterday,” from a 2016 12” for London’s Phonica White label. The sound is familiar, with a rippling groove and lush chords that evoke canonical producers like Pépé Bradock and Maurice Fulton. But the sprightly walking bassline and trembling synth chords give the song ample character, ensuring that when you hear it on a dancefloor, mixed in with dozens of songs cut from similar cloth, you’re going to take notice. Likewise, in “Rose,” while her shouted invocations (“Like me! Like you! Like all of us!”) would normally take the spotlight in a club track, they pale alongside the many layers of bright synths and contrasting textures. It’s a clever bit of sleight-of-hand.
Once is Gou’s first new release in nearly a year and a half, and its three tracks mark a significant step forward. For one thing, this is the first time she’s sung on a record: On “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane),” the standout, she oscillates between murmuring and actual singing, and she sounds great. The spoken-word bits lie low in the mix, which has the effect of pulling the listener down to their level. (That she’s singing in Korean only adds an element of intrigue for anyone who doesn’t speak the language.) On the chorus, she adopts a lilting cadence that’s reminiscent of Brazilian popular music; her voice isn’t powerful, but she uses it well, and her sparingly multi-tracked harmonies add dusty color to a track that’s already bursting with vibraphones, jazz-inflected keyboards, and a squelchy hint of acid.
“Hundres Times” loses the vocals and digs into a clubbier, heads-down groove. The drums push forward with the intensity of a 1990s Prescription Records classic, while the track’s tonal center is a loose weave of elastic synth sounds and flickering accents. The arrangement is a model for how to keep things dynamic, teasing individual elements in and out of the mix. Gou’s longstanding fondness for Detroit is evident in the tune’s big, dramatic synth sweeps, and on the closing “Han Jan,” she flips her Motor City instincts into a springy electro jam. Electro is enjoying one of its periodic comebacks right now, with syncopated 808s adding rhythmic spice to many dancefloors more accustomed to house music’s four-on-the-floor thump. But “Han Jan” skips the sci-fi affect of so much contemporary electro and instead reconnects with the genre’s funk roots.
Here, the focus is primarily on the snapping drums and a rubbery bassline that recalls Metro Area’s brand of 1980s revivalism; the synths add a bit of watery background color, and Gou’s rapping feels almost textural. But once she gets to the chorus, the melody, muted as it is, snaps into focus. The hook (“You gotta do it right/Enjoy your life/You gotta do it right”) isn’t much more than dancefloor boilerplate. But it captures your attention, and it sticks with you. Clubs are swimming in indistinguishable tracks—that’s just part of club music. But Gou’s are anything but anonymous. | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | March 3, 2018 | 7.7 | e3b8b0fe-81cd-41d6-ad01-8fcc2ba4dd2c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
With an uncharacteristically somber tone, the Detroit rapper's sixth album is his most introspective and confessional work to date. | With an uncharacteristically somber tone, the Detroit rapper's sixth album is his most introspective and confessional work to date. | Danny Brown: Quaranta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/danny-brown-quaranta/ | Quaranta | As an artist in a genre where emerging stars are rarely old enough to drive, let alone drink, Danny Brown has always seemed self-conscious about his age. His breakout mixtape, XXX, was titled in part to reference his age at the time. His next album title was even less subtle. Quaranta—“40” in Italian but also, a near-homonym for “quarantine”—arrives as Brown enters his fourth decade, and he’s called it a “spiritual sequel to XXX.” That’s a bit misleading though, because Quaranta is a very different record. Across a number of solemn, lyric-heavy tracks, Brown catalogs his regrets and owns up to his personal failings. If XXX felt like a never-ending carousel of sex and drugs, Quaranta feels more like sitting in a therapist's office processing the fallout from a decade of rockstar living.
The last few years have given Brown a lot to unpack. A lifelong Detroiter, he relocated to Austin, Texas following a divorce; earlier this year he got sober after a stint in rehab. He wrote Quaranta during the initial wave of COVID lockdown and it sounds like it. Brown’s stance is isolated and reflective; he raps deliberately over sparse beats, his delivery more confessional than flamboyant. Where his previous albums approached similar topics (Old, in particular, attempted to reconcile Brown’s hedonistic lifestyle and traumatic childhood), the music and rapping were far more dynamic. On Quaranta, Brown’s acrobatic flows, ear for oddball beats, and dark sense of humor are in short supply.
Brown has always been equal parts traditionalist and insurgent. While he led a wave of internet-fluent rappers who crossed over into indie and EDM, his mastery of storytelling and technique betrayed his love of ’90s hip-hop. He leaned into those sounds on 2019’s uknowhatimsayin¿, which was executive-produced by Q-Tip, and goes further on Quaranta, often dropping the nasal honk and frantic delivery in favor of a lower register and slower tempos. He’s never sounded more distant from the current wave of psychedelic rap he influenced, a fact that’s equally evident in his lyrics. The subject matter here is heavy and personal, even by Danny Brown standards—few rappers have aired out this sort of dirty laundry on record. “Down Wit It” delves into heartbreak and addiction (“Now it’s all over, can’t stay sober/Deep in my depression, hoping I can get over”) while “Quaranta'” undercuts Brown’s image with a grim dose of reality: “Lost everything in pursuit of my dream/Pushed everyone away, now no one here but me.”
It’s commendable that Brown would rather make an album about what he’s going through than cater to what his audience expects—as he told us a decade ago, he has no intention of rapping about youthful exploits for the rest of his life. That said, Quaranta often fails to present these topics in compelling ways. On the more diaristic songs, the narratives aren’t as vivid, the rapping isn’t as nimble, and the songs lack momentum. It’s telling that on “Celibate,” the otherwise sedate MIKE easily scores the album’s best verse by injecting some verve into a song that’s otherwise inert. Brown attempts to widen his focus on “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation,” which enlists Kassa Overall for a drum-fill-heavy, Goodie Mob-referencing song about gentrification in Detroit. But the observations feel surface-level and pat (someone, please write a song about gentrification without mentioning Whole Foods). The subject matter lands just outside of Brown’s wheelhouse, and despite rapping in the first-person, he struggles to bring his usual color to the storytelling.
Not everything on Quaranta feels like a break from the past—there are a few glimpses of Brown’s old charisma. The proggy, Alchemist-produced lead single “Tantor” falls into a familiar trap: In picking something challenging to rap over, Brown ends up with a beat that feels clunky. Still, he manages to straddle the line, as he often has, between woke and gleefully ignorant (“It’s that Black Lives Matter, still sniff cocaine”). The beat for “Y.B.P” is a bit goofy and brings to mind early Insane Clown Posse but, as Brown knows well, ICP is a Detroit institution. The song is glowing with the personality and local color that’s missing from many of these songs (Bruiser Wolf hilariously sums up the state of Michigan thusly: “It’s hard to fit in the murder mitten like O.J.’s glove”). “Dark Sword Angel” is Quaranta’s best song and the only track that could easily slot into a noisy, industrial album like Atrocity Exhibition. Over a squelchy instrumental buttressed by live drums, Brown drops the sort of filthy punchlines he’s long been known for (“Tried to put my finger in her like a rotary phone/If I take her for a spin, she will never call home”). The song provides a much-needed jolt of energy and humor to an album that’s lacking in both.
On Quaranta, Danny Brown seems to be questioning his choices while plotting a path forward. And though it’s more compelling in theory than in practice, its meditative tone is a bold move coming from an artist known for giddy hedonism. Whether spending $70,000 on samples, dropping a heater with Purity Ring, or touring with Kitty, Brown has never been one to make safe choices and few rappers with his stellar track record would throw a curveball like this a decade into their career. There are a few hints that this experimentation might yet bear fruit, like the serene closing track, “Bass Jam,” where he sounds open-hearted and nostalgic. But those bright spots aren’t enough to lift the album out of its dour funk. Growth can be awkward, and for better or worse, Quaranta feels like an apt reflection of this process. Given how few rappers are given the opportunity to age gracefully, it still feels like a privilege to hear him work through it. | 2023-11-17T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-17T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warp | November 17, 2023 | 6.5 | e3c0fda8-aecd-41be-99fe-5c3a07bb5771 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
On their Sub Pop debut, LVL UP's more unhinged, existential bent gives a new weight to their songwriting. | On their Sub Pop debut, LVL UP's more unhinged, existential bent gives a new weight to their songwriting. | LVL UP: Return to Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22427-return-to-love/ | Return to Love | The release of New York indie rock quartet LVL UP’s latest album Return to Love hinged on an ultimatum. After years toiling as linchpins in the city’s DIY scene, playing in a half dozen other scummy pop acts, and with half of the band running the small but influential label Double Double Whammy, they decided that they'd had enough. The rock project that Dave Benton and Mike Caridi launched with their college buds—drummer Greg Rutkin and bassist/singer Nick Corbo—would either have to get good enough to draw the attention of a bigger indie label (“Sub Pop, Merge, or Matador,” they said in a recent interview) or call it quits entirely.
As chance would have it, some Sub Pop employees caught a couple shows in the wake of the band’s cult-beloved 2014 record Hoodwink’d and decided to release their new album Return to Love. But happy endings aside, it’s hard not to read that do-or-die period into the relatable agitation of this record. For the first time, the trio of songwriters’ lyrics largely deal with existential turmoils rather than interpersonal ones. It’s as if the possibility of the band ending—or maybe just getting older—forced them to stop and think about bigger themes, to look at the sky and anxiously sputter what they see.
On album opener “Hidden Driver,” Benton meditates on the Biblical fall of man and the nature of God. Corbo considers the meaning of life while telling a creation myth of sorts on the closer “Naked in the River With the Creator.” Caridi processes a loved one’s trauma on “Pain” and offers the line, “I hope you grow old/And never find love” as both a withering send-off and a crippling suggestion that under the circumstances, nothing you can say will ever be enough. These are mammoth questions, the sorts of things that theologians, philosophers, and ethicists spend their whole lives puzzling over. And the decision to confront them, especially without offering easy answers, gives Return to Love a weight that past LVL UP efforts lacked.
The record’s also pushed forward by their three-songwriter lineup. Though their voices are sometimes hard to distinguish—particularly Corbo’s throaty mumble and Benton’s pinched moan—there’s a change in spirit between each one that lends a delightfully erratic energy to the whole effort. On the record’s B-side, Benton opens with the plodding “The Closing Door” before sulking through two of Corbo’s observational downers and then rapidly ratches the energy back up on Caridi’s “I,” which is as perilously caffeinated as anything in Royal Headache’s catalog. Hoodwink’d was a bit more unified both in tempo and tone, but the unhinged style works in favor of these songs. They’re singing about uncomfortable questions, it’s only fitting that the music should follow.
The general shape of Return to Love is familiar. Like the band’s earliest albums, it’s largely a guitar, bass, and drums-driven rock record that mines its song structures from the gold soundz of ’90s indie rock and their peers in the contemporary Northeastern indie rock scene. Even this agitated and disjointed album of existential bummer jams that follows a beloved pop album has precedents—think Dinosaur Jr.’s paranoid Bug after You’re Living All Over Me or Pavement’s Wowee Zowee after Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. But that’s part of what makes *Return to Love *so comforting, so satisfyingly unsatisfied. There’s a sense of possibility in the desperation. They’re just the latest to move these pieces around—to use distortion pedals and droning vocals to unpack the mysteries of the universe. But there’s a confidence that with time they could be the ones to finally solve the puzzle. | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 28, 2016 | 7.3 | e3ce0502-b529-4fdf-ac39-a1b578b28364 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
The Quebecois singer and guitarist transforms French and English folk ballads into songs where hoary tradition yields boldly contemporary sounds. | The Quebecois singer and guitarist transforms French and English folk ballads into songs where hoary tradition yields boldly contemporary sounds. | Myriam Gendron: Mayday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/myriam-gendron-mayday/ | Mayday | Myriam Gendron’s Mayday marks the obvious evolution of a songwriter who cut her teeth busking Leonard Cohen songs in the Paris Metro, whose 2021 release Ma délire - songs of love, lost and found reimagined traditional Quebec folk songs. These are direct, grounded dispatches from the collective unconscious, melodies for sweeping floors or felling trees or mourning that might have existed forever. Between her 2014 debut, Not So Deep as a Well, where Gendron put Dorothy Parker’s poetry to music, and the new record, the Montreal-based artist has sharpened her set of timeworn tools: voice and guitar strings, as fleet and restless as a sparrow in her hands.
Gendron’s voice is earthy and unadorned, a Swiss Army knife that can cut stoic or wistful. One part Fairport Convention and one part Josephine Foster, her warble takes songs like “Look Down That Lonesome Road” and roots them even more deeply in folk tradition, yielding a sound that would be just as at home blaring from a gramophone as it would a forest clearing. Within one listen of a song like “Terres Brulées” (“Burnt Earth”), you can sing the melody back, as if retrieving it from a buried memory. Lyrically, these songs are soil-covered and windswept, sung alternately in English and French. “J’inventerai des aubes constellées d’hirondelles/J’écorcherai le froid tout gris qui nous appelle,” she sings (“I’ll invent dawns studded with swallows/I’ll scratch the cold gray that calls to us”). Later, on “Quand j’étais jeune et belle” (“When I was young and pretty”), she describes a lover soaked and chilled by the rain, who proposes they should marry under the branches of an oak.
But the record’s brightest moments happen when the traditional brushes against the hyper-modern, like a match against kindling. The electrified strumming of closer “Berceuse” collides spectacularly with the free-jazz screech of Zoh Amba’s saxophone, and Marisa Anderson’s riffs on “Long Way Home” electrify Gendron’s tale of being tossed asunder, alone on the ocean. Jim White’s fevered drumming on album highlight “Lully Lullay” reads like a restless mind tethered to a sturdy pair of feet, the push-pull between Gendron’s slow, steady refrain and the frenzied cymbals driving a compelling tension. Mayday’s best songs are unsettled and kinetic, living organisms in a state of flux. With roots in the traditional—“Lully Lullay” was inspired by the Appalachian variant of the 16th-century English “Coventry Carol,” for example—these tracks walk the tightrope between the deeply familiar and the abstract, suggesting lullabies with serrated edges. For “Berceuse,” that’s more literal—in French, Gendron sings “Go to sleep, my daughter,” before the freaky saxophone tugs us towards the surreal.
The track order dilutes some of this magic. Album opener “There Is No East or West,” a peripatetic acoustic melody, feels like a drawn-out preamble to the more compelling snap of “Long Way Home,” with its drums like a pulsing heart. Starting at such a low simmer before the second song’s cresting chorus—“Oh mother, other/Make my bed”—is a gamble, and it risks mislabeling an otherwise dynamic LP.
Yet like a devastating Dorothy Parker couplet, a 500-year old carol, or the opening bars of “Suzanne,” there are moments on Mayday that feel essential, plucked out of the ether as if they’ve always existed. These chimeras of the past and present illustrate what Gendron does best—digging up timeless sounds only to disrupt them, reenvisioning what’s timeless for this precise moment. | 2024-05-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thrill Jockey / Feeding Tube | May 16, 2024 | 7.7 | e3d56c9a-862a-4869-b292-a5c334123951 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Omnivore Records' latest set of Townes Van Zandt reissues speaks to many different aspects of the Texan songwriter's appeal-- the earthy and direct Lone Star troubadour; the decorous, eccentric Cowboy Jack Clement productions-- all playing out the rootlessness, loneliness, senseless tragedy, and unending remorse that featured in his life. | Omnivore Records' latest set of Townes Van Zandt reissues speaks to many different aspects of the Texan songwriter's appeal-- the earthy and direct Lone Star troubadour; the decorous, eccentric Cowboy Jack Clement productions-- all playing out the rootlessness, loneliness, senseless tragedy, and unending remorse that featured in his life. | Townes Van Zandt: High, Low and in Between / The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt / Sunshine Boy: The Unheard Studio Sessions and Demos 1971-1972 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18190-townes-van-zandt-high-low-and-in-between-the-late-great-townes-van-zandt-sunshine-boy-the-unheard-studio-sessions-and-demos-1971-1972/ | High, Low and in Between / The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt / Sunshine Boy: The Unheard Studio Sessions and Demos 1971-1972 | There are literally hundreds of versions of “Pancho & Lefty” out there in the world. It’s Townes Van Zandt’s most popular tune by a good mile, an enigmatic tale of two outlaws on the run from the federales-- like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid if Robert Redford had shot Paul Newman in the back. The most popular version is by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, which hit Number One on the country charts in 1983. Emmylou Harris covered it, as did Steve Earle, Michael Hurley, and countless amateurs on YouTube. Just this past Record Store Day, Elizabeth Cook released a tender version on a b-side with Jason Isbell. It's taken that many people to even begin to figure out what exactly the song is about and how it works: Does it eulogize Pancho Villa, the notorious Mexican outlaw who reportedly had a friend named Lefty? If so, why does it not match up to the known details of his life? Is it an allegorical tale? A huckster’s hoax? A Mexican-American tall tale reduced to life-size proportions? Whatever it is, the song possesses a stark sadness as the lyrics recount not only the death of Pancho but also the last lonely days of Lefty. “Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true, but save a few for Lefty, too,” goes that last verse. “He just did what he had to do, and now he’s growing old.”
Such powerful understatement was typical of Van Zandt, who preferred to insinuate emotions rather than state them outright. That approach put him (and other songwriters like him) at odds with the sentimentality of mainstream Nashville in the 1970s, when such artists as Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and even the Man in Black Himself, deep into his cornball phase, evoked the past in perfectly pastoral terms, as though rural poverty constituted paradise. Rootless and all but disowned by his oil-wealthy Texas family, Van Zandt was too much of a wanderer to indulge such nostalgia for simpler times. Instead, his songs address the present moment, whether implicitly or explicitly. That’s why so many people have read “Pancho & Lefty” as conceptual rather than actual: It’s so unconcerned with evoking a point in time that it becomes somehow timeless-- not merely relevant across decades, which it certainly has proved to be, but more interested in ideas rather than actual men. That’s what is meant when Van Zandt is described as “cosmic.”
There are two versions of “Pancho & Lefty” among the three new Van Zandt reissues from Omnivore Records, who hopefully have many more in the wings. Not only could the pair not be any more different from one another and still be the same song, but each version speaks to a different aspect of Van Zandt’s appeal. The first, from his 1972 album The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, was produced by Cowboy Jack Clement, who fills the space in the song with strings, mariachi horns, and all manner of studio tricks. The second, an alternate mix on the 2xCD demos and alt-takes set Sunshine Boy, is minimal by comparison, with only a handful of live instruments accompanying Van Zandt. The only elements that connect them are his unpretentiously hangdog vocals and that wandering piano line that never finds a place to rest and so enacts the song’s outlaw existentialism.
Here are two sides of Van Zandt, as clearly distinguished as if by state lines. The full studio version is decorous and even a bit gaudy, as was Cowboy Jack’s peculiar style, but it’s also moody and cinematic, with those horns evoking a wide-open plain that’s either a desert or a void. Historically, it’s been too easy to dismiss this version, as many Townes fans disregard Clement’s studio ministrations as overwrought and overbearing. Even Van Zandt himself disowned the horns and strings, claiming they were added without his say-so. And yet, on “Pancho & Lefty” as throughout The Late Great, Clement’s production tends to be as eccentric as Van Zandt himself. The lackadaisical plod of his cover of Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonkin’” implies a Music Row absurdism bolstered by the pots-and-pans percussion and fuzzed-out guitar solo. The sci-fi experiment “Silver Ships of Andilar” is self-consciously grandiose, almost like Serge Gainsbourg drinking Shiner and munching kolaches, and ominous synths interrupt the crushing desperation of “Snow Don’t Fall”, a devastating memorial to his girlfriend, who was murdered while hitchhiking to a recording session. If The Late Great is overwrought, as even Colin Escott claims in the new liners, it’s always overwrought with great purpose and conceptual weight.
The alternate mix of “Pancho & Lefty”, advertised on the tracklist as “without strings and horns,” points to another facet of Van Zandt’s catalog, which jibes more easily and naturally with listeners’ understanding of the Lone Star troubadour. It’s earthier and more direct-- a very real and gritty story rather than a parable-- as the Texan ponders the deep ache of severed friendship, abrupt betrayal, and lifelong regret. Because these demos and alt-takes emphasize austere arrangements that push Van Zandt’s vocals to the forefront, Sunshine Boy may be the ideal point of entry for listeners intimidated by his decades-spanning catalog as well as by his reputation as the ultimate songwriter’s songwriter. It includes many of his best songs, including what may be the best version of “To Live Is to Fly”. The guitar picking is clear and immediate, the vocals more fluid in their phrasings, accentuating the song’s casual melody. Van Zandt considered it among his best compositions, and it’s not hard to see why: In addition to conveying a simple philosophy of existence as a journey to some unknown destination, it evokes the transience of life lived out on the road, culminating in a few verses that are as close to perfect as Van Zandt-- or any other country musician, for that matter-- ever got: “It’s goodbye to all my friends, it’s time to go again,” he sings with affecting stoicism. “But think of all the poetry and the pickin’ down the line.”
Sadly, it’s impossible to miss that the themes Van Zandt explored in his lyrics are themes that played out in his own life, which was defined by rootlessness, loneliness, senseless tragedy, and unending remorse. The songs on these three reissues-- which are so of a piece and of a moment that they may best be thought of as a single, very persuasive box set-- all share a sense of motion, of always passing people by: the life of a touring musician certainly, but also the days of a man unmoored in the American West. Van Zandt had brief careers in college and the Air Force, which were cut short by bouts of depression, alcoholism, and insulin shock therapy. Despite his reputation among his peers as an ace picker and songwriter, his recording career was a non-starter, interrupted by a 10-year absence during which he laid low and played roadhouses around Texas but rarely, if ever, entered a studio. The characters in these songs-- especially those who serve as stand-ins for Van Zandt himself-- are always on the verge of leaving wherever they are, although he manages to cut that melancholy with the optimism that their paths will cross again. “Well, goodbye friends, it’s time to close, everybody knows that’s the way it goes,” he sings on “You Are Not Needed Now”, which loses none of its evocative power for never being too specific about its subject. “Where was it you lived in case I’m ever there?”
That song appears twice on Sunshine Boy and once on High, Low & In Between, but the alternate take, which features a piano intro and a band that knows the absolute best time to come in, may actually be the definitive version of the song, with a hymnal directness and a stoicism in the face of endless farewells. If The Late, Great sharpens the cosmic cowboy orchestrations and Sunshine Boy winnows the songs to their barest essentials, then High, Low and in Between more than lives up to its title. Unsurprisingly, Van Zandt inhabits the in-between so comfortably that this becomes one of the best country-rock records ever made, full of humor (“No Deal”), heartache (“Greensboro Woman”), and commiseration (“Highway Kind”). Softening that melancholy somewhat is a trio of country-gospel numbers that strike a celebratory note: “Two Hands” opens the album by explaining that his physical body makes possible spiritual salvation through music, while “Standin’” (a rearrangement of a traditional tune) suggests that his troubles extend well beyond his birth and death. In other words, his life is just an excerpt of a continuum of despair; the song itself is, cosmically, upbeat. | 2013-07-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-07-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 2, 2013 | 8.8 | e3dbd55e-59c0-43dc-b8e2-10efa18a60d4 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On the Ruby Suns' fourth album, they dive headlong into splashy chart pop before heading back to the surface just as quickly. The poppy moments are effusive and invigorated, although Christopher takes a sobering turn back to reality halfway through. | On the Ruby Suns' fourth album, they dive headlong into splashy chart pop before heading back to the surface just as quickly. The poppy moments are effusive and invigorated, although Christopher takes a sobering turn back to reality halfway through. | The Ruby Suns: Christopher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17517-christopher/ | Christopher | Ryan McPhun admits within the first minute of the Ruby Suns' new album, Christopher, that he's always falling in love. It's hard to dispute, since he spends the rest of "Desert of Pop" enumerating ways to relate the feeling: He's "like a birthday boy, giddy and excited" over someone or something that hits him like "a single malt, pure agave tequila." The good stuff, y'know? But there's one line that doesn't sit quite right: "You are [a] cold glass of water in the desert of pop." I'm almost positive he's referencing pop music, but he does leave open the slightest possibility that it's a reference to soda. It sounds farfetched, but while "Desert of Pop" clearly describes being struck dumb by a singer, a song, or a combination of the two, why would McPhun describe pop as an arid wasteland when the spiffy synth hits and hi-NRG dance beats make it abundantly clear that the Ruby Suns want you to view Christopher as their entry into splashy chart pop? Maybe they're not sure either, as Christopher dives in headfirst and just as quickly heads back to the surface.
Perhaps McPhun feels self-conscious about this change of heart, as he confesses about his situation, "Anyone else would think I'm your cheerleader." While becoming a pop evangelist relatively late in life can generally be healthy, at least as an acknowledgement that wholly rejecting pop music can be just as narrow-minded as wholly accepting it, it's particularly dangerous in the hands of musicians who haven't really shown much of an ear for it previously. Most often, it just results in enthusiastic overcompensation; you can look to fellow Indie Class of 2008 overachievers Ra Ra Riot neglecting nearly all of their strengths to go electronic on their new LP, Beta Love, and hopefully this can be the last time we ever have to mention POP ETC.
While Christopher undoubtedly comes on strong, the Ruby Suns sound undeniably invigorated here. For one thing, they end up discovering new strengths, as this kind of effusive sound fits McPhun's extroverted (and occasionally cloying) lyrics, and his vocals turn out to be more melodically inclined than he's let on to this point. It also gives the Ruby Suns a sense of direction that was previously missing from the sunny, island-hopping indie pop sampler of Sea Lion and Fight Softly's hesitant purveyance of post-chillwave synth murk. After McPhun's opening devotional, the equally headspun "In Real Life" elaborates on a lyric from "Desert of Pop"-- and its sound as well, resulting in what feels like a smartly constructed medley. Having given himself over, McPhun admits, "Real life wasn't what I wanted/ What I wanted was a waste of time," opting instead for an untenable existence where you drink the days away, completely free from the worries of money. Far more common than the getaways evoked on Sea Lion, yet the escapism is every bit as intoxicating.
But from there on out, McPhun gets real with us-- in particular, "Kingfisher Call Me" shows empathy for a misunderstood friend suffering through what he calls a "psychological high school." The balance of Christopher is addressed to people suffering from very specific kinds of teen angst. "Dramatikk" resembles the starstruck and spangled balladry of Autre Ne Veut, and consoles a friend experiencing a breakup; as you could probably tell from the title "Futon Fortress", its narrator can't even get out of bed but appears to be okay with that. "Boy" is a pep talk ("Do you hide in your room/ Away from dad/ To revel in your baseball card collection?") and also a quasi revenge fantasy, assuring a lonely kid that his foes "will turn out losers in the end." It reads embarrassing, but these are the sort of unruly feelings that Capital-P pop helps people understand and even appreciate.
Yet the Ruby Suns quickly lose their nerve and hooks about halfway through Christopher, and it simply becomes a brighter, albeit favorable, take on Fight Softly's mushier innards, only roused by a strange key change during "Starlight" and when they bring out the defibrillators for the closer, "Heart Attack". The dissonance between the docile synth pop and unbridled urges maxes out on would-be cornerstone "Jump In". The title is once again a demonstrative one, as McPhun aspires to live a life free of fears and inhibitions, centering around the lyric, "When you reach the end of the world/ Don't wanna have no regrets." By the time it's over, he's asked about your underwear (really), got involved in a mutual striptease, written a letter to a crush, and sent it without proofreading. Christopher is certainly a welcome call to action from a band who could previously have been cast off as amiable roustabouts. The shame is that, from a musical standpoint, Christopher is too often a result of Ruby Suns failing to take their own advice. | 2013-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 23, 2013 | 5.8 | e3e1f522-080e-4b01-82d5-d2f7d73bb8e4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Machine Messiah skirts the line between metal and conventional “hard rock” more than anything in the Sepultura catalog. | Machine Messiah skirts the line between metal and conventional “hard rock” more than anything in the Sepultura catalog. | Sepultura: Machine Messiah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22748-machine-messiah/ | Machine Messiah | When their endearingly amateurish debut EP Bestial Devastation came out in 1985, you'd have been out of your mind to think that Sepultura would make any kind of splash in their home country of Brazil, let alone go on to become an internationally recognized act. But within five years or so, that's exactly what happened. Originally focused on taking cues from their European and American idols like Metallica, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, and Kreator, Sepultura left an indelible mark on metal with 1993’s Chaos AD, a then-unprecedented fusion of heaviness with the native Latin rhythms the band had consciously avoided up to that point.
Sepultura plunged even further into unexplored realms with 1996’s Roots, a dense mish-mosh of thrash/groove/progressive/nu metal and hardcore loaded with Brazilian percussion and intercut with field recordings of the indigenous Xavante people of Brazil’s western interior. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, with the band's popularity at an all-time high, frontman Max Cavalera quit, leaving bad blood on both sides. In the 20 years since, Cavalera has basically stayed in a holding pattern, endlessly duplicating Roots’ mix of “exotic” flavors and brutish nu-metal riffs with his solo vehicle Soulfly. Meanwhile, Sepultura—who managed to keep Max’s brother Igor on drums for another 10 years—have never tired in their pursuit of new sounds.
While Max Cavalera’s departure made more headlines, Igor’s absence has arguably hurt the band more. For the last two Sepultura albums, the drum chair has been occupied by the far more technically proficient Eloy Casagrande. A fellow Brazilian, Casagrande fits right in with the unique, swaying cadence of Sepultura”s riffing. But his prodigious chops also tend to highlight the absence of Igor Cavalera’s intangible chemistry with guitarist Andreas Kisser. That said, Casagrande—a child prodigy who joined the band at the ripe old age of 20, when his bandmates were twice his age—gives the band a much-needed shot in the arm. and certainly isn't to blame for the spots where *Machine Messiah’*s energy lags.
From its inception, Sepultura’s career has traversed myriad sub-strains of metal, mostly with ease. Where some albums (1989’s Beneath the Remains, 2009’s A-Lex) stick to a uniform approach, others (Roots, 2001’s Nation) switch gears constantly. Machine Messiah falls in the latter category, but also skirts the line between metal and conventional “hard rock” more than anything in the Sepultura catalog. The band has downshifted to slower tempos and incorporated melodies before, but it’s typically been limber enough to accommodate them. This time, the variety sounds more confused than exploratory.
The instrumental “Iceberg Dances,” for example, starts off with a fairly stock thrash-core riff before morphing into a guitar-shredding workout that might have been better suited for an instructional video. It’s probably the first time in the band's history that Kisser, who is generally peerless when it comes to taste and feel, allows the music to take a backseat to the guitar. And in its noodly classical-influenced sections, you half-expect a cameo from gunslingers like Yngwie Malmsteen or Paul Gilbert of Racer X/Mr. Big. The song careens forward aimlessly, with a sped-up boogie-rock organ section clearly intended as a nod to late Deep Purple keyboardist Jon Lord. Kisser then flashes some of his (admittedly untouchable) classical guitar chops while Casagrande throws-in some Latin percussion. Fun as an exercise, “Iceberg Dances” might even be a marvel to watch the band play in person but it doesn’t gel and, worse, actually disrupts the album’s dystopian mood. It’s as if Sepultura hadn’t decided quite what kind of band they want to sound like.
Not all of the songs re-tread old ground: on "Phantom Self," a violin ensemble weaves a Tunisian scale through a northeastern Brazilian maracatu-style rhythm. Ironically, though, Machine Messiah proves that Sepultura don’t even have to be inventive to be rousing. On “I Am the Enemy,” the band still sounds vital playing in the straight-ahead hardcore style it’s employed a dozen times since 1993. Meanwhile, the simplistic snaking main riff of “Resistant Parasites” could have been made up by Beavis and Butt-Head, but it's arguably the most convincingly ominous tune on the record.
Like 2013’s relentlessly hard-charging The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart, the lyrics on Machine Messiah lament the accelerating pace of technological innovation and the many threats it poses. When longtime frontman Derrick Green sings “You are human” at the conclusion of “I Am the Enemy,” it carries the weight of a plea even though he’s grunting. To his credit, Green delivers his most textured performance to date on Machine Messiah, stretching past his arsenal of barks, shrieks and growls to reach melodic heights worthy of the music's philosophical underpinnings. Throughout much of Machine Messiah, in fact, the band's anxiety is palpable. As we fast approach the point where machines might actually usurp us, it’s refreshing—even necessary—to hear Sepultura implore us to retain our humanity at all costs. Machine Messiah, though, is the rare Sepultura album where the vibe of the music doesn’t consistently match its central themes. Let’s hope they aren’t out of creative juice just yet; metal is better when this veteran, trailblazing band is operating at or near the peak of its powers. | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | January 14, 2017 | 6.2 | e3e23a76-71d7-47f5-896c-d71364f2f2e2 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Listening to Cat Power's The Covers Record is distracting me from the task at hand. I'm writing, but ... | Listening to Cat Power's The Covers Record is distracting me from the task at hand. I'm writing, but ... | Cat Power: The Covers Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1344-the-covers-record/ | The Covers Record | Listening to Cat Power's The Covers Record is distracting me from the task at hand. I'm writing, but I'm typing slowly under the album's spell. I'm also asking myself, "Isn't a 7.6 a bit high for a covers album?" Chan Marshall didn't write these songs-- I heard she didn't even practice them. She likely spent less than an afternoon in the studio. Sure, it's an endearing concept, but 7.6 for a "it's just me and my guitar and the fakebook from my brother's closet" kind of affair? Come on, Rockermann; let's be reasonable here.
This, of course, is not about reason, it's about a strange force called Cat Power. Cat Power tempts you to forgive the inconsistencies in her albums. And inexplicably, you won't feel like asking for your money back when Marshall fails to make it through 12 minutes of her $12 show. This bizarre Cat Power also charms an audience into responding "a little higher" when she nonchalantly asks if anyone in the room "knows a B." Cat Power has inspired tautological delusions in more than one skinny boy: "I understand her/ She is misunderstood by everyone/ Like me/ Thus, I understand her." To demonstrate this phenomenon, Matador has taken 12 songs and exposed them to Cat Power. The data was then collected on The Covers Record. Let's check out some of the results.
Chan sings: "When I'm drivin' in my car/ And that man comes on the radio/ And he's tellin' me more and more," but there's no trace of Mick-- or of the renowned chorus-- in this version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Marshall has put a blue cover over a red song, and it's one of the album's stronger tracks. The other standouts come when Chan doses sparse numbers heavily in Cat Power and makes them her own.
Imagine Chan Marshall sending herself, John Malkovich-style, through her own portal, and you have Marshall's cover of the Cat Power original, "In This Hole". The slow sadness of this version has its appeal, but it might have been more effective if the piano arpeggios were less prominent in the mix. It would shift the focus off the amateurish simplicity of the song and onto Marshall's vocals which seem fragile not because they're slight, but because her lyrics sound like they could snap under their own weight. That's what you paid the $12 for.
In the past, I've been wary of Velvets covers. This might be the product of a recurring nightmare about a Velvet Underground tribute album which includes Jewel performing "Afterhours", Belle & Sebastian doing "Sunday Morning", and Wolfie's take on "Black Angel's Death Song". So I was naturally hesitant when I noticed that Marshall covers "I Found a Reason" here. I mention this not to self-indulgently map out what is sacred to me, but to point out that Marshall traipses around on just about everybody's hallowed ground here and pulls it off masterfully.
Cat Power's cover of "I Found a Reason" might actually make you weep until Marshall comes back around to lick your wounds, all in under two minutes. You can call me a wuss or say it's because I'm a girl-- keep in mind that I didn't shed a tear at Saving Private Ryan, which some critic apparently called "wound-porn"-- but Cat Power's The Covers Record is the real deal, the embodiment of wound-porn. Buy it now; hide it under your mattress. | 2000-03-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2000-03-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | March 31, 2000 | 7.6 | e3e2fb4b-049d-4ddf-9446-9df36f35cd04 | Pitchfork | null |
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The 19-year-old rapper’s boisterous new EP projects greater confidence, but its juvenile boasts can leave something to be desired. | The 19-year-old rapper’s boisterous new EP projects greater confidence, but its juvenile boasts can leave something to be desired. | Redveil: Playing w/ Fire EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/redveil-playing-w-fire-ep/ | Playing W/ Fire EP | redveil used to daydream about future stardom in the middle of class. “Writing out this pain, nigga, that's the best solution, it's really all we got/I manifest this shit then watch it bloom like I'm on top,” the then-16-year-old rapper announced on his 2020 album Niagara—and his wishes seemed to be coming true after Niagara caught the attention of one of his inspirations Tyler, the Creator. On his 18th birthday, he released his breakthrough album, learn 2 swim, while preparing to tour with hip-hop veterans twice his age. learn 2 swim put the pandemonium of redveil’s teenage years on full display: On it, he tangled with growing pains and the pressure of newfound recognition, emerging ready for the next phase.
The Maryland rapper-producer’s boisterous new EP, playing w/ fire, walks back any hesitance that he might have faced. Opener “stuck” sounds like a homecoming king’s coronation, with blaring horns imitating a marching band; redveil whoops and hollers (“Bitch it’s up! Bitch it’s up! … And it’s stuck, bitch”) as a diva hits money notes like she’s belting the national anthem. The triumphant mood carries over to “giftbag,” a laidback pop-trap track in which redveil revels in his spoils and wards off suspects angling for a peek: “Nigga get off my dick/Then get out my gift bag,” he commands.
Often, the EP’s lyrics leave something to be desired. redveil’s taunts can seem juvenile: “I ain’t come in to chit chat/I been on hunt for chips,” he asserts, then continues, “Brody done lost his bitch/Nigga come get your lick back.” The plot’s all muddled here. Who is he brushing off? What’s a girl have to do with this? He rarely offers enough detail to elevate his boasts: While Tyler name-drops enough luxury brands that you’ll want to start planning a heist, redveil can’t even muster a Louis Vuitton reference, flexing on “captain” that he “just threw on this fashion for real.”
While the EP loses the concrete intimacy of redveil’s prior work, it reinforces his skill for arrangements. He amps up the BPM for a brighter and noisier palette, rocking out with JPEGMAFIA on “black enuff” as the hectic sound of clashing drums and detuned guitar pulls limbs in every direction. “captain” recreates the liveliness of a block party with its booming bass and rowdy chorus of voices. One of the EP’s highlights is the frenetic closer “pwf”: A robotic sample twitches in and out of place as redveil dismisses detractors trying to shit talk through screens (“Let them finger coils do what they do”). It delivers the best balance of flashiness and specificity, making the teenager sound less like a freshman. | 2023-04-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 24, 2023 | 6.5 | e3e8b9b2-ccbc-43b0-b99a-4377b1726cf5 | Serge Selenou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/serge-selenou/ | |
Another electro-acoustic collaboration, this record from the Japanese group and the Australian head of Room40 rises well above most of its peers. | Another electro-acoustic collaboration, this record from the Japanese group and the Australian head of Room40 rises well above most of its peers. | Lawrence English / Minamo: A Path Less Travelled | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14750-a-path-less-travelled/ | A Path Less Travelled | The Japanese group Minamo plays tiny, dulcet music for guitars, keyboards, and light electronics. Australia's Lawrence English, the owner of the dreamily experimental Room40 label, shares Minamo's knack for pastoral understatement, though his solo music relies more on ambiance than instrumentalism. This collaboration took place in the ether between Tokyo and Brisbane, with English shaping Minamo's instrumental sketches with a toolkit including harmonium, field recordings, and electronics. While it seems like new nice-enough collaborations between niche electro-acoustic artists come out every day, A Path Less Travelled rises above the pack. The two years of work that went into it are evident in its patient cohesion, not to mention its flat-out gorgeousness.
Between the placid beauty of Minamo's disarticulated tunes and English's harmonium and bass, the music courses with warmth. Birds sing on "The Path", crickets chirr on "Headlights", and water splashes against a dock or boat on "Springhead". (Birds sing in 99% of pastoral electro-acoustic music and seldom receive any royalties. English's use of crickets and water is more striking: The former add a subtle Reichian pattern to a nocturnal melody, while the latter kick-starts the rest of the track's liquid swirl.) The drones are fat and windy, the instrumentation spindly and bright, creating a well-balanced sound mass that banks through prismatic timbres and textures. Each track builds toward the merest intimation of a climax that really arrives only with the final song, "Fireworks", a hard-strummed anthem that feels earned after all the delicately shaded moods.
So, okay, an ambient-ish record evoking the great outdoors-- it doesn't exactly sound like press-stopping material. But A Path Less Travelled offers an unusually microcosmic perspective on that scenario. It's less like being swept above nature from a bird's-eye view than sitting still in your yard all day, sinking into a heightened awareness of how much happens in all that apparent [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| stillness, from the constant fluctuations of light and temperature to the shifting sound profiles of wind and animals. Instead of the mountain and the river, we get a little stripe of sunlight on the lawn, and it's plenty. | 2010-10-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-10-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic / Rock | Room40 | October 19, 2010 | 7.7 | e3f37b3a-aca2-4d9e-879b-3aad3d0598a5 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The boisterous rapper’s latest is mellower and more muted than its predecessor, breaking from the maximalist bluster of conventional Brooklyn drill. | The boisterous rapper’s latest is mellower and more muted than its predecessor, breaking from the maximalist bluster of conventional Brooklyn drill. | Sheff G: One and Only | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheff-g-one-and-only/ | One and Only | Like most successful New York rappers from the last few years, Sheff G broke out by looking beyond New York. A pioneer of Brooklyn drill and one of its most technically gifted lyricists, he drew heavily from the implosive ferocity of Chicago street rap while adopting the husky patois of so many UK drill rappers. Even the music was imported: His 2017 street hit “No Suburban” was produced by Londoner AXL Beats, part of a fleet of British producers whose unflinchingly tense beats shaped the sound of Brooklyn drill.
Sheff G’s new album One and Only arrives at a precarious moment for that scene. Pop Smoke, Brooklyn drill's biggest star, was killed in a home invasion in February. Weeks later, the coronavirus put the city on lockdown, closing the clubs where this music is shared and market-tested for the foreseeable future. And while Sheff G is still a star in his borough, his belated debut The Unluccy Luccy Kid landed last fall without much hype or impact. It was fine, but the ideas already felt stale, not worthy of a scene leader.
One and Only doesn’t really feel like an event either, but this time that’s by design. It’s mellower and more muted than its predecessor, breaking from the maximalist bluster of conventional Brooklyn drill in favor of more nuanced shadings. Sheff G has settled on a producer closer to home, New Jersey native Great John, who crafts mood pieces from little more than hard snares and spectral traces of guitar—a distinct signature at a time when drill’s other architects are leaning hard on pianos.
Great John isn’t an elite producer, at least not yet, but he understands how to frame to Sheff G’s nimble, cavernous baritone. It's rare to hear such a weighty voice glide so gracefully. The sparse accompaniments do little to tame Sheff G’s innate rowdiness—“Moody” may be his most deliriously sticky single yet, while “Lil Big Bro Shit” plays up his feral snarl—but they lend an introverted energy that matches the moment. Whether by fluke or intuition, Sheff G’s timing is impeccable: With the clubs empty, he released a headphones album.
One and Only features a sequel to “No Suburban,” which under different circumstances might feel desperate—it's rarely a good look when a rapper tries to rehash a three-year-old hit. Instead of repeating the original’s formula, though, Sheff G uses “No Suburban Pt. 2” to highlight his evolution. The new track is as sparse as the original was boisterous. Stripped of its predecessor’s dramatic church bells and cacophonous embellishments, all that’s left is a husk, but Sheff G navigates it like a gymnast, his nimble voice spiraling over and under the beat at alternating tempos. He can really rap. Sometimes it doesn’t take much more than that. | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Winners Circle / Empire | May 15, 2020 | 7.3 | e3f685da-84d9-4b4a-b69e-09810f376ee4 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld (1998 NTC/Contemporary\n\ Publishing), a lexicon of 19th Century street slang, defines ... | Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld (1998 NTC/Contemporary\n\ Publishing), a lexicon of 19th Century street slang, defines ... | Tool: Lateralus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8104-lateralus/ | Lateralus | Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld (1998 NTC/Contemporary Publishing), a lexicon of 19th Century street slang, defines the idiom "pitch the fork" as "to tell a pitiful tale." The term appeared printed in 1863 in Story of a Lancashire Thief:
"Brummagem Joe, a cove ["fellow" or "dude," if you will] as could patter or pitch the fork with anyone."
At last, the secret motivation of my schtick and the etymology behind our name can be revealed. These reviews have been less critique than loquacious concept reviews by an entertaining tramp. So you'd think an 80-minute opus by Tool would be right up our alley. You'd be wrong.
Undertow, Tool's 1993 debut LP, took studio skill and over-trained chops to metal with aplomb. It was Rush Sabbath. As emotional, melodic metal goes (the cultural impact of which will be left to the reader), it opened doors for bands like the Deftones, and to some degree, Limp Bizkit. However, Tool have always possessed a latent understanding of absurdity and comedy; their videos look like Tim Burton stop-motion, goth Primus.
But with popularity and praise, Tool's shadowy tongue-in-cheek turned into the simple biting of tongues. \xC6nema spiced their sound with electronics and industry, as was the trend at the time. Now, with the early new century demanding "opuses," Tool follows suit. The problem is, Tool defines "opus" as taking their "defining element" (wanking sludge) and stretching it out to the maximum digital capacity of a compact disc.
Dictionary of the Underworld also offers several definitions for "tool," including: "a small boy used to creep through windows," "to steal from women's pockets," and "to loaf, to idle, to do nothing in particular." All of which oddly strike the nail on the head in relation to Lateralus.
And now, the obligatory pitching of the fork.
My Summer Vacation, by Crispin Fubert, Ms. Higgins' Eng. Comp. 901
I believe that music comes and goes in cycles, and some of us are lucky enough to ride the crests. The men in my family are perfect examples of this. Initially, I thought that perfect music appeared every 16 years, which is also the number of years between Fubert generations. My dad was born in 1971. In that year, landmark albums were released. They were Nursery Crime by Genesis (the first with Phil Collins), Yes Album by Yes, Aqualung by Jethro Tull, and In the Land of Grey and Pink by Caravan.
My grandfather skipped out on Vietnam-- because Jimi Hendrix himself told him to-- and he moved to Canterbury, which is in the United England. There, he got married to my grandmother, who used to sell baked goods to people at concerts, and they had my dad. After the war, they moved back with a box of awesome records like the ones I mentioned. I think it was cosmic or fate or something that my dad was born the same exact day Chrysalis released Aqualung, in March of 1971.
Jump ahead 16 years later and my dad got this girl pregnant, who turned out to be my mom. It was 1987 and a whole bunch of lame dance music was ruling the world, like Hitler or Jesus or something. But all of the sudden, albums like Metallica's ...And Justice for All, Celtic Frost's Into the Pandemonium, Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime, and Slayer's South of Heaven came out. That's when I was born.
All those records were sitting around the house we all live in, and I grew up listening to them in the basement. So I couldn't wait until I was 16, because fate says that would be when 1) more kickass records would come out, and 2) I'd get sex. Both were due, because girls are dumb and listen to stuff like N'S(t)ync and BBSuk. But after this summer of 2001, I've had to rethink my entire cycle theory, like maybe the cycles of music are speeding as time goes forward, since two amazing things happened: Tool put out Lateralus and I saw Tool in concert.
I feel like this record was made just for me by super-smart aliens or something, because it's just like a cross of 1971 and 1987. Imagine, like, Peter Gabriel with batwings or a flower on his head singing while Lars Ulrich and Rick Wakeman just hammer it down. It's the best Tool record because it's the longest. All summer I worked at Gadzooks, folding novelty t-shirts, and on each break, I would listen to Lateralus because the store just plays hip-hop and dance. My manager would always get on me for taking my breaks 20 minutes too long, but that's how long the album is and it just sucks you in. It's like this big desert world with mountains of riffs, and drum thunderstorms just roll across the sky. The packaging is also cool, since it has this clear book with a skinless guy, and as you turn the pages, it rips off his muscles and stuff. Tool's music does the same thing. It can just rip the muscles and skin off you. I think that's what they meant. So my manager would be like, "Hey, there's a new box of 'Blunt Simpson' shirts I need you to put out and the 'Original Jackass' shelf is getting low." He's a vegan and I would buy him Orange Julius because he didn't know there's egg powder in there.
The first song is called "The Grudge," and it's about astrology and how people control stuff. Maynard sings like a robot or clone at the opening, spitting, "Wear the crutch like a crown/ Calculate what we will/ Will not tolerate/ Desperate to control/ All and everything." Tool know about space and math, and it's pretty complex. "Saturn ascends/ Not one but ten," he sings. No Doubt and R.E.M. sang out that, too, but those songs were wimpy and short. Maynard shows his intelligence with raw stats. I think there's meaning behind those numbers, like calculus. He also mentions "prison cell" and "tear it down" and "controlling" and "sinking deeper," which all symbolize how he feels. Seven minutes into the song, he does this awesome scream for 24 seconds straight, which is like the longest scream I've ever heard. Then at the end there's this part where Danny Carey hits every drum he has. This wall of drums just pounds you. Then the next song starts and it's quiet and trippy. Tool are the best metal band, since they can get trippy (almost pretty, but in a dark way) then just really loud. Most bands just do loud, so Tool is more prog.
Danny Carey is the best drummer in rock, dispute that and I know you are a dunce. I made a list of all of his gear (from the June issue of Modern Drummer):
Drums, Sonor Designer Series (bubinga wood): 8x14 snare (bronze), 8x8 tom, 10x10 tom, 16x14 tom, 18x16 floor tom, two 18x24 bass drums.
Cymbals, Paiste: 14" Sound Edge Dry Crisp hi-hats, 6" signature bell over 8" signature bell, 10" signature splash, 24" 2002 China, 18" signature full crash, #3 cup chime over #1 cup chime, 18" signature power crash, 12" signature Micro-Hat, 22" signature Dry Heavy ride, 22" signature Thin China, 20" signature Power crash.
Electronics: Simmons SDX pads, Korg Wave Drum, Roland MC-505, Oberheim TVS.
Hardware: Sonor stands, Sonor, Axis or Pro-Mark hi-hat stand, Axis or Pearl bass drum petals with Sonor or Pearl beaters (loose string tension, but with long throw).
Heads: Evans Power Center on snare batter (medium high tuning, no muffling), G2s on tom batters with G1s underneath (medium tuning with bottom head higher than batter), EQ3 bass drum batter with EQ3 resonant on front (medium tuning, with EQ pad touching front and back heads).
Sticks: Trueline Danny Carey model (wood tip).
He has his own sticks, even. In "Schism," the double basses just go nuts at the end. They also do in "Eon Blue Apocalypse." And in "The Grudge." And in "Ticks & Leeches." And nobody uses more toms in metal. You can really hear the 8x8 and 10x10 toms in the opening for "Ticks & Leeches." Over the summer, I counted the number of tom hits in that song, and it's 1,023!! Amazing. That's my favorite song, since it's the one that starts with Maynard screaming, "Suck it!" Then he says, "Little parasite." Later he shouts, "This is what you wanted... I hope you choke on it!" Every time I watched my boss suck down those Orange Juliuses I had that stuck in my head.
There is simply no way you could just dismiss the music (which is excellent). The bass playing is just really creepy and slow and sometimes it has this watery effect. Tool even follow in the footsteps of Caravan with Middle Eastern or Asian or something sounds. "Disposition" features bongos, and then on the next song, "Reflection," Carey's toms sound like bongos or tablas or whatever is in those Fruitopia commercials. Close your eyes and imagine if Asia had a space program. This is like the music they'd play. The song is called "Reflection" since it's quieter and slower and sounds like it's from India, where people go to reflect. Maynard's voice sounds like that little bleached midget girl flying around inside the walls in Polterghost. It's messed up.
In conclusion, there is more emotion on that album than would be on 30 Weezer albums. At the very least, there's 2.5 times as much. Like I said, it's messed up, like the world, which makes it very real. I don't think I'm going to have a kid this year, but that's also a good thing. Just imagine the Tool record that will come out in three years, according to my theory. It will be the future, and albums can be like longer with better compression and technology. Even as amazing as Lateralus is, I feel like there's a monster coming in three years. Music comes in cycles, and works on math, and my life and Tool are proof of that for sure. | 2001-05-15T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-05-15T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Volcano | May 15, 2001 | 1.9 | e3fdd930-d84c-4252-9740-bb216feeba21 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
The Drums made their name on jaunty surf pop, but a collection of little-heard songs from their early years explores themes of longing and heartbreak that guided Jonny Pierce from the start. | The Drums made their name on jaunty surf pop, but a collection of little-heard songs from their early years explores themes of longing and heartbreak that guided Jonny Pierce from the start. | The Drums: Mommy Don’t Spank Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-drums-mommy-dont-spank-me/ | Mommy Don’t Spank Me | Halfway through Mommy Don’t Spank Me, the new collection of early rarities and remixes from the Drums, frontman Jonny Pierce sings mournfully of a woman who so fears the world’s judgment that she has locked herself in her frigid studio. The situation is imagined, but the woman is not: The subject of “Wendy” is synth pioneer Wendy Carlos, and while Pierce and Drums co-founder Jacob Graham cherish her music, the song’s real concern is her queerness. When it was first released as a bonus track on the Japanese edition of 2011’s Portamento, “Wendy” was an outlier in a catalog of keenly melodramatic indie pop widely assumed to be about straight love. Not until a year later did Pierce and Graham talk openly about their homosexuality, casting their work—and the little-heard songs collected here—in a new light.
Pierce understood the fear of being exposed: Early on, when a prying journalist had asked if anyone in the Drums was gay, he’d dodged the subject. His reticence was understandable. The child of Pentacostal pastors from upstate New York, Pierce has described his childhood as abusive, recalling torturous years in religious school and the thrill of listening to secular music in secret. In 2005, a few years before the Drums’ breakout “Summertime!” EP—and four years before the earliest of these songs was written—an experience at New York City’s Pride parade sent Pierce into a crisis of conscience that led him temporarily back to his conservative family home. He’s now reclaimed that trauma as inspiration. Mommy Don’t Spank Me is a reference to a playground chant from his school days, a fittingly cheeky nod from a band that made its name delivering winking sex-and-death lyrics over jaunty surf rock. But there’s little winking in these songs. Without the burden of selling the Drums as cool-kid counterparts to their more buttoned-up indie rock contemporaries, the collection showcases Pierce’s precise writing (important for a band that proudly shirked musicianship) and makes clear the themes of longing and agonizing heartbreak that have been his lodestar since the start.
That’s not to say that these lovelorn tracks, written primarily in 2010 and 2011, lack polish. Even with a thin concept and just 10 repeated words, album opener “The Only Son” is a stunner, relying completely on Pierce’s commitment to sounding like he’s on the edge of bawling. His talent for doing the most with the least is on full display on “You’re the One That Makes Me Happy,” a minimalist love-is-war ballad with a drowsy doo-wop guitar that could soundtrack a post-breakup stumble down a moonlit boardwalk. There’s no earworm here to match “Let’s Go Surfing,” but “The New World” comes close. Its moody synths, jangly guitars, and soaring chorus epitomize the Drums at their best, and in a group of frequently glum songs, Pierce’s closing chant of “hold on, hold on” plays like a welcome message of allyship and hope.
Though matters of the heart are a constant, the only song that tiptoes toward contextualizing love as queer is “Instruct Me.” Written in 2009, soon after Pierce’s brief relapse into fundamentalism, it’s the collection’s oldest song and its most arresting. A plea from a man who is “too young” to be losing his virginity, the track is a ramshackle collage of raygun synths, mouth sounds, and a falsetto that’s shocking to hear from a guy who typically croons like Edwyn Collins. Though still vague, it hints at the more confessional songwriting Pierce would come to embrace as the sole member of the band on 2017’s Abysmal Thoughts and 2019’s Brutalism.
The second half of the collection is less compelling. Aside from a tremendous lo-fi rework of “Let’s Go Surfing” by now-defunct Brooklyn garage rockers Knight School, the compiled remixes serve both as a time capsule of indie electronica c. 2010—super-twinkly synths and other Merriweather Post Pavilion influences abound—and precursors to the dancefloor swerve of Pierce’s most recent singles. Twin Shadow transforms “Me and the Moon” into a patchwork of ’80s horns and exploding synths that sounds alarmingly like “Money for Nothing”; Matthew Dear stretches the same song into a seven-minute dirge. The Beat Connection remix of “Money” is the most exciting of the bunch, chopping up the song’s math rock guitars and resonant drums and rearranging them into a rollercoaster of a dance track.
In naming this collection Mommy Don’t Spank Me, Pierce imbues these songs with a sexual confidence and sense of humor that were decidedly in-progress at the time they were written. These qualities have only grown more pronounced in recent years, as the Drums have become the type of band to put a fetishistic pin-up on an album cover or write a self-actualization anthem culminating in “spit on your own dick, honey.” But the seeds of that bravado are here. Compiling them isn’t a means of putting them on a shelf; it’s Pierce’s way of bringing them into his present.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | April 15, 2021 | 6.7 | e4033367-de9c-42ac-83f3-5676e9c16227 | Shane Barnes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shane-barnes/ | |
The Los Angeles-based pop singer's new EP plunges into her psyche with quiet desperation, producing some of her most vulnerable music yet. | The Los Angeles-based pop singer's new EP plunges into her psyche with quiet desperation, producing some of her most vulnerable music yet. | Miya Folick : 2007 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miya-folick-2007-ep/ | 2007 EP | In a country where more than half of Americans believe in a Christian God, Miya Folick was raised as a Buddhist. Her belief in the spiritual power of community and mutual support—rather than an individual responsibility to rid oneself of sins—echoed across much of her anthemic debut album Premonitions. On its opener, “Thingamajig,” Folick offered herself up as an apologetic vessel, placing her haunting melodies on a foundation of shared suffering and forgiveness. “I can sing an apology for somebody else, because I’m sorry that I’m a human and so are you,” she said in an interview at the time, willing not to absolve sin but refract it.
“Oh God,” the opening track on 2007, Folick’s first collection of music in four years, offers a less assured and more insular take on faith. “Who is God? I’ve never had God,” she sings with both doubt and determination, her voice rich and layered atop a shimmering production. Folick modulates her vocals with precision—she falters, wavers, and quietly screams. It’s a chorus far removed from the composed confidence she once displayed in earlier material. And though she tempers the outsized eccentricity of Premonitions for 2007, what emerges is some of Folick’s most vulnerable music to date: despondent, emotionally frank, and brimming with intimate self-reflection.
Each song on 2007 illustrates a type of yearning that feels eternal, whether it be for the love of a partner, the comfort of a parent, or the safety of the past. On the title track, Folick wishes to retain the innocence she once had when she was on the cusp of young adulthood. “I’ve never gotten used to having tits and ass/I’ve never gotten used to living alone,” she despairs, her voice tumbling along a dusty rock groove. The lyrics aren’t inventive, but genuine emotion still shines through Folick’s full-bodied, classically trained voice, and her angelic falsetto is baked with a touch of desperation in the chorus: “I wanna smile real big/I wanna fucking live.”
Where Premonitions took aim at larger systemic inequality, turning the self outward in service of the whole, Folick’s goal here is to be directly introspective and personal. A messy acoustic guitar line grounds her in the regretful “Nothing to See,” as she castigates herself for losing her sense of personhood in a relationship. Amid a crescendo of drums and synths, she seeks a secure sense of self, supported by distant wails and ethereal lyrics. The lavish instrumental and vocal ornamentation ends abruptly in the last few seconds, as if Folick knows that it’s not always possible to find complete clarity in matters of the soul. 2007 tends to favor these lonesome and occasionally isolating modes of thought: Piano lines loop into a dreamy state of incompletion, lone guitar licks call out without a response, and chanted vocals reach the point of hyperventilation, as heard on “Bad Thing.”
This internal back-and-forth—answering questions with more questions—can be frustrating for anyone with a litany of anxieties, but Folick characterizes it as a reliable and occasionally welcome presence. It’s most evident on the EP’s poppiest track, “Cartoon Clouds,” which reveals Folick at her most inquisitive self. “Look out of the window all the clouds are cartoons/And the sky is so blue,” she sings lightly over a jaunty synth line. “What’s the point in being gloomy/When there’s so much else to do?” Getting out of the doom and gloom in her mind, however briefly, allows her to recognize that not every turning point in life requires an immediate direction. 2007 recognizes a strength in quiet vulnerability, one that is powerful enough without the backing—or even forgiveness—of others. No question needs a detailed answer; sometimes, just asking can be enough. | 2022-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nettwerk | September 14, 2022 | 7.5 | e43303cd-94c8-4e6f-b2df-00e081b41262 | Rachel Saywitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-saywitz/ | |
The boundless debut from the London-based artist is a delirious tug of war between pleasure and unease, shuttling between club sounds and psychedelic mind states with a steely, unbridled intensity. | The boundless debut from the London-based artist is a delirious tug of war between pleasure and unease, shuttling between club sounds and psychedelic mind states with a steely, unbridled intensity. | aya: im hole | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aya-im-hole/ | im hole | A DJ set from aya can be both thrilling and disorienting, a giddy maelstrom of jungle breaks, Dutch techno, UK funky, South African gqom, and who knows what else—plus edits of Charli XCX and “Call Me Maybe,” for good measure. Synthesized voices offer bite-sized philosophical observations (“Google Street View has allowed us to shrink geography,” proclaims a text-to-speech snippet midway through her 2018 Boiler Room set). Mic in hand, aya might shout crowd-stoking interjections, urge her supporters to vote Corbyn, or offer reflective commentary about her own tracks: At Krakow’s Unsound Festival this October, she said that “backsliding,” a queasy, K-holed vision of ambient grime peppered with cryptic references to hedonism and regret, is about leaving Manchester—“probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she added, sounding suddenly serious. On at least one occasion, she has crowd-surfed, oversized chains and tartan plaid flapping as she tumbled over the hands of the crowd. The vibe slips from heady to humorous and back again with whiplashing intensity; the bass is so physical you can feel it in your follicles.
Building on the club sounds of LOFT, aya’s former alter ego, and extending into the realms of musique concrète, drone, and knotty wordplay, the Huddersfield-raised, London-based artist’s debut album, im hole, takes her boundless energy and unbridled creative instincts into a wild new space. On record, her voice is either pitched up and wreathed in the clammy reverb of a small, dank tunnel, or digitally pulverized and scattered to the winds. On paper—the album’s physical edition is a clothbound book—her lyrics take the form of carefully typeset poems whose butterfingered misspellings (“once went west ypp off ur chesdt my ribssn embpdty vessel,abeadt slippd an ekxtra stuttr fluttr midst th wrestl alll breath losstt”) reflect their origin as notes tapped out on her phone in what she has described as states of “transient psychosis.”
aya’s previous releases hewed to more or less familiar traditions of experimental club music. “a fflash gun for a ffiver,” from last year’s Physically Sick 3 compilation, recalls the intricate, jewel-toned bass investigations of labels like Wisdom Teeth, where LOFT released an early EP in 2017. The cartoonish vocal processing of last year’s playful “delishus” sounds like an homage to SOPHIE songs like “Lemonade” and “Hard.” But on im hole, some of aya’s playfulness has burned off, making way for a steely, psychedelic intensity.
The opening track, “somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor,” charts strange new territory. Over a chilly microtonal blast—recorded with her phone in the stairwell between the eighth and ninth floors of her old apartment building, where the wind screaming through a broken window created an uncannily electronic-sounding effect—she intones a sing-song incantation in a witchy pipsqueak: “Me, more, me, more, me, more. Red or blue, me, more, red or blue, red or blue. Red shoes or blue shoes! Red shoes or blue shoes!” It sounds less like a song than a spell being cast. And by the track’s end, a magical transformation has taken place, one that introduces the autobiographical theme that gives this baffling, enveloping album the personal gravitas to balance its dazzling sonic fireworks: “Last year I came round from a hole/With a broken thumb/And a note on my phone/Four words,” she croaks, her voice digitally garbled: “Thee/Vibe/Hath/Changed.”
Change is deeply woven into the album’s fabric. Sounds shift their shapes in midair; rhythms morph; timbres transmogrify. aya favors volatile textures evocative of blown glass, oily concrete, and quaking Jell-O, but the provenance of any given sound is rarely clear. On “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under,” her voice takes on a gravelly, fluctuating buzz, as though she were hissing into the rotors of a swiveling electric fan. On the instrumental “dis yacky,” crows caw over dangerously arrhythmic breakbeats while a gummy acid bassline tries desperately to hold the song’s jagged shards together. Even at the music’s most overwhelmingly physical—like the tinnitus-and-nausea cocktail of pinging highs and oozing sub-bass of “tailwind”—this is as spare as her music has sounded; rarely are more than a handful of elements in play at any given moment. A few tracks are essentially spoken-word poetry set to industrial grinding and buzzing sounds—or post-industrial, seemingly inspired less by rusted-out Northern English factories than the ominous throb of this century’s sprawling underground server farms.
The lyrics play out as blurry snapshots of daily life and nightly follies; the writing is dense but fleet, skipping over tangled internal rhymes like a sailboat riding hard, choppy waves. Druggy allusions and sly double entendres abound, and her twisting wordplay limns the stealth and slipperiness of sex with startling accuracy. im hole can be darkly funny—“Oh the stubble/Oh begone/You unholy cunt,” she snaps on “OoB Prosthesis,” lamenting the indignity of unwanted hair—and she has a talent for zooming in on vivid details that crystallize a whole constellation of feelings. In “3.36,” a poem included in the accompanying book, she sits awake late at night, ketamine in her system, buzzing on the feeling of her fingertips brushing against her ears: “im shaking my body side to side some rhythm gone amiss/fantano’s reviewing billie eilish.”
But despite the spry wit of her writing and the spirited force of her drums, a dull ache is often palpable. The album’s title puns on wholeness and physical orifices but also emptiness. A trans person, aya wrestles in her lyrics with dysmorphia and struggles with irreconcilable binaries (“If I were one or the other/I could smother half of myself/Mother myself for a laugh to a sickening health”). Even sexual pleasure comes cloaked in existential pain: “Come find me undercover/Come over we could fuck the void out of each other,” she offers on “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under,” digitally enabled vocal fry scraping against bass that glints of polished latex. But there are moments of tenderness, too. On the brooding “still i taste the air,” she pays a melancholy visit to an ex-lover and, despite the abiding sadness of the encounter (“His dimensions once undulating, pulsating/Sit still now/Bound, drab”), she returns feeling serene, “lighter somehow,” secure in the knowledge that “one night’s enough to know where’s roots.”
Shuttling between club sounds and psychedelic mind states, assembling brain-rearranging rhythms only to topple them in a jumbled heap, im hole enacts a delirious tug of war between pleasure and unease—between the bodily embrace of dance music and the bottomless pit of the mind. In the closing “backsliding,” aya paints the picture of a narcotic, late-night session, a blur of rolled bills and tunnel vision set to some of the album’s most disorienting production, where a sub-heavy rhythm dissolves into backmasked streaks of icy dissonance. Like all meaningful drug experiences, it pairs the temporary loss of self with the search for something more—in this case, the simple discovery that “some nights the light hits just right.” Electronic music is often predicated on the idea of losing yourself on the dancefloor. But im hole explores a deeper and more regenerative sense of loss; it is an ode to the new self that forms when the old one crumbles. As aya intones in the opening track, “Straighten out your shoulders, love/Push your head up/And don’t forget to breathe.”
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. | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | November 1, 2021 | 8.2 | e4339827-b893-4508-86ba-7a55bf858a76 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Amidon’s self-titled record continues his polyglot blending of folk, classical, and jazz, drawing a resounding personal statement out of songs in the public domain. | Amidon’s self-titled record continues his polyglot blending of folk, classical, and jazz, drawing a resounding personal statement out of songs in the public domain. | Sam Amidon: Sam Amidon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-amidon-sam-amidon/ | Sam Amidon | “Revival” is a funny term for “mass commercialization,” but that’s just one of the paradoxes of the 20th-century folk music revival. Another is that it minted a production line for new folk songs, which once was an oxymoron. Sure, someone had written the old traditional tunes, but often they had been passed down regional and familial generations for so long that no one remembered who. They existed outside of copyright law, and they were played on acoustic instruments because that’s what people had around. None of this can be said for, say, Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” but still, we tend to call that one a “folk song,” too. It’s become conventional to brand any lightly dressed acoustic song as folk without regard for the former essence of the term—that it had been shaped by many voices over time.
This isn’t to say that mass media automatically taints folk music; it can also just provide a larger vessel through which it can travel. Sam Amidon is living proof. There’s hardly an original to be found on the six LPs—two on Bedroom Community and four on Nonesuch—that make up his main discography, though there are many daringly original arrangements, and The Following Mountain mixed original lyrics in the traditional. Amidon stages a polyglot conversation among folk, classical and jazz, re-dreaming traditional tunes as contemporary conservatory music with minimalist grit. Few artists have drawn as strong a personal statement from the public domain.
Amidon reportedly regards his new, self-titled album as the fullest realization of his vision, and indeed, it’s a digestible nine-song omnibus of his modes and moods. Amidon was drawn into the modern classical world of Iceland’s Bedroom Community by Nico Muhly; the icy, crackling ambience of many of the label’s acts and the composer’s lissome orchestrations still influence his work. Regular collaborators such as Shahzad Ismaily and Sam Gendel bathe his guitar and banjo in a high-contrast palette, from flute and saxophone to Moog bass. It can shift as needed from dark coloration (“Spanish Merchant’s Daughter”) to springy rhythms, which peak in a sort of rainforest hoedown on “Cuckoo.”
“Cuckoo” emphasizes Amidon’s habit of pulling folk taut to the edge of dance, befitting its origins as social music with a wide range of practical uses. Likewise, “Maggie” begins with a house-music feint that lingers subliminally in the coldly fiery funk that emerges. But these are balanced by moments of piercing simplicity, where the arrangements melt away from the pure pleasure of Amidon’s voice. All its buoyant softness is revealed on “Hallelujah,” a 19th-century shape note song, and “Time Has Made a Change,” a hymn by Harkins Frye that Amidon’s parents sang around the house when he was young.
Such personal threads are shot through the album. “Pretty Polly,” an oft-covered English murder ballad that Dock Boggs stamped almost a century ago, appears not because it’s novel, but because it was one of the first trad tunes Amidon learned to play. Perhaps it’s telling that he omits just one aspect of his prior albums: the pop cover, whether it was Mariah Carey’s “Shake It Off” or (gulp) R. Kelly’s “Relief” in 2010. In context, these inclusions suggested that these songs had shaped Amidon as much as Appalachian folk. The closest he comes to a pop cover is a version of Taj Mahal’s “Light Rain Blues.” But he doesn’t need to shoehorn in a modern pop song to underscore that this old music is utterly modern, which is demonstrated most vividly in its cool, commanding vitality—a revival in the truest sense.
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. | 2020-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | November 9, 2020 | 7.6 | e43b299d-458d-40a3-b7a6-151ce9307e1b | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
One of the world's best, most interesting rock bands, the Japanese noise group Boris, teams with the former singer of 80s hard rock heroes the Cult. | One of the world's best, most interesting rock bands, the Japanese noise group Boris, teams with the former singer of 80s hard rock heroes the Cult. | Boris / Ian Astbury: BXI EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14713-bxi-ep/ | BXI EP | The four Boris tracks on BXI EP are among the most concise and powerful in the Japanese trio's catalogue. For more than a decade, Boris have moved seamlessly from rigorous thrash to colossal drone to soaring psychedelic metal; but those two qualities-- concision and power-- have often been mutually exclusive. These four tracks, however, each feel like a condensed epic that allows the band's love of dynamics and development to find thoughtful focus. And then, over it all, former Cult singer Ian Astbury croons about animals and witches. Yikes.
The brisk, confident rock punch of the Cult often swept Astbury's histrionic vocals inside. Tracks like "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Love Removal Machine" guided his bombast, never letting him shine too long in any particular spotlight. On BXI, Astbury treats his position as the temporary leader of one of the best, most interesting rock bands in the world like a bully pulpit. During opener "Teeth and Claws", Boris teases again and again, lurching forward just to ease back the volume. Astbury takes the empty space as an invitation to merely roar. Closer "Magickal Child" opens beautifully, with electronic hum and drifting chords; when the band explodes in a haze of cymbals and distortion, Astbury leans back to belt some blend of Wiccan and New Age ideals in a stagy, lachrymose delivery.
Ultimately, BXI-- "Boris multiplied by Ian," we can presume-- is one of the most ignorable releases for a band with nearly a hundred of them. It's not a complete waste, though, neither with regard to the songs themselves nor with what it might mean for Boris' future. Again, the playing is excellent, and when Astbury backs away from the microphone, Boris sound masterful. Guitarist Wata leads the quartet through a cover of the Cult's 1985 hit "Rain", and her soft, wispy coos offer the perfect contrast to the band's rhythmic maw and suffocating guitars. Boris capture the march of the original take perfectly but send it spiraling through the final minutes.
The negative flipside to Boris' eclectic approach has been a tendency to make records that feel like mixtapes, records without a real aim (see 2008's Smile, especially). But the material on BXI proves that, just as they're able to devote an album to resplendent drone, they're as capable of crafting an album of relatively straightforward though still imaginative rock'n'roll. Maybe it took Ian Astbury to show them they could do it; here's hoping that, now that we know, they no longer require his imperial, aggressive British lead. | 2010-10-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-10-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Southern Lord | October 6, 2010 | 3.3 | e4423d28-3f57-4f18-bbe4-1143bb6095ff | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Isolating the rhythm at the center of their work and tapping into a new physicality, the Washington, D.C. experimental duo find joy in improvisation and liberation in the body. | Isolating the rhythm at the center of their work and tapping into a new physicality, the Washington, D.C. experimental duo find joy in improvisation and liberation in the body. | Model Home: both feet en th infinite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/model-home-both-feet-en-th-infinite/ | both feet en th infinite | In their work as Model Home, NappyNappa and Patrick Cain blur the line between affirmation and destruction. NappyNappa is a maker of koans, embracing cryptic lines and repeated ululations in his solo work as a rapper and as MC of the group. Cain lays down sheets of metallic whirs, providing a backdrop of pounding, uneasy electronics for his partner’s esoterica. Their music has its own language and referents, drawing equally from the missionary zeal of Lee “Scratch” Perry and the firmament-destroying power of Khan Jamal’s Drum Dance to the Motherland; listening feels like being sucked down a vortex of splintered beats and horn stabs. You won’t understand every word, but that’s not necessarily the point. What the noise and lyrics generate is a zone of challenging incomprehension, of unexplored terrain. On their latest album, both feet en th infinite, the duo embrace propulsive movement, isolating the rhythm that has always centered their work and tapping into a newfound physicality.
both feet en th infinite foregrounds the precise pulse that lived beneath the dystopian energy of Model Home’s 2020 compilation One Year. The distended production of opener “Night Break” brings to mind the fat bass drum hits and squelching horns of Dinosaur L’s Paradise Garage classic “Go Bang.” Over the top, NappyNappa bleats out different phrases, basking in the haze of distorted disco as he lays down his lines with the tenacity of a motivational speaker. Tinkling piano, synthetic zaps, and his enthusiastic exhortations trap you in the song’s web, forcing you to contend with the complexity of each strand. “Crux of Et All” starts with the type of motorik bass one might associate with the experimental hip-hop of Madlib or Dr. Who Dat?, while NappyNappa yelps and harmonizes over its tangle of snares. There’s something vaguely thrilling about how Model Home adapt this idiom to their style; it’s like watching someone attempt a series of increasingly unlikely tricks on a broken-down vehicle and being surprised when the car actually starts.
While nothing on this record is an easy listen, there are insights to be gained from its fractures. Model Home scatter Mantronix-like hi-hats and piercing sounds throughout, touches that function in the same way as tambourines and shakers on a spiritual jazz record; they’re here to announce the elation that improvisational music-making can inspire. (It’s not for nothing that NappyNappa starts “Crux of Et All” by commanding, “Shout for joy.”) “3D Printed Quinoa” is easily the album’s most abrasive track: NappyNappa’s voice is constantly modulated up and down, and Cain layers on a heavy, mosquito-like synth buzz. Even when the tell-tale vibrations of a deep sub-bass surface towards the end, the movement it summons feels organic. By pricking you with what hurts, Model Home demand focus, toughening your ears but not hardening them so much that you tune out before things click.
While they’ve flirted with dance music on songs like One Year’s “Damn Disco 99” and their remix album with Pure Rave, the overt kineticism on display here is a recent development. On “Body Power,” NappyNappa is in toaster mode, moving the crowd with his words and his voice simultaneously. Over a giddy piano twinkle and kick drums, he screams about the potential of the body as a vector for liberation. He’s eventually joined by other voices, which shout in unison: “More power in your body.” The phrase may seem simple, but Model Home are rummaging through the collected detritus of expression and finding anything—old or new—that produces an intense reaction. Their songs aim to reawaken senses dulled by overexposure, and their refusal to immediately satisfy can feel grueling. Yet there is a purity to their provocation; by putting your senses to the test, both feet en th infinite generates new pathways for hearing and movement.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rap | Don Giovanni | November 9, 2021 | 7.6 | e4464e2c-4b70-48c2-be4a-24d676d6d5f8 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
The Nova Scotia quartet’s chilled-out, endearing indie rock gets a slightly more cutting edge on on their third album. | The Nova Scotia quartet’s chilled-out, endearing indie rock gets a slightly more cutting edge on on their third album. | Nap Eyes: I’m Bad Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nap-eyes-im-bad-now/ | I’m Bad Now | Partway through Nap Eyes’ third record, singer/guitarist Nigel Chapman reveals what he likes to listen to when he’s out for a stroll—and it’s not the Velvet Underground or Pavement or Yo La Tengo or any of the other archetypal indie rock bands to which his Nova Scotian quartet are routinely compared. Sure, Chapman still very much sounds like a Lou Reed who hails from Canada’s East Coast instead of New York’s East Village, but at the moment his interests seem to lay far beyond the rock canon. On the campfire-ready acoustic reprieve “Follow Me Down,” he sings, “Went out walking with my headphones on, classical Indian raga, 20 minutes long/Then I listened to old American folk song/Little bit shorter, still a lot going on.”
“Follow Me Down” is much closer in style to the latter form, even as its subliminal feedback drones try to tilt it toward the former. But that lyric is less a catalog of Champan’s direct influences than a snapshot of the internal contradiction at the core of Nap Eyes’ music—namely, the band’s desire to zone out into zen states versus Chapman’s tendency to share every existential observation bouncing through the synapses of his brain. If folk songs were the original social-media posts, then on I’m Bad Now, Chapman has more than enough on his mind to overwhelm a 280-character limit and then some.
I’m Bad Now is a somewhat cheeky title coming from a band that exudes such a chilled-out, endearing sense of bonhomie. But the commitments to self-improvement and healthy living that permeated 2016’s Thought Rock Fish Scale assume a more cutting tone here, as if Chapman was taking a more aggressive tack to weed out the toxic relationships and unnecessary noise in his life. On the title track, the song’s easy-going jangle belies a biting self-critique, one that leaves Chapman so exhausted that all he can say in the end is “you’re so dumb.” A few songs later, amid the motorik country-rock of “Roses,” he’s plumbing the uneasy feeling of having to maintain pleasant appearances in the face of unwanted attention: “Somebody sent you roses/Now what do you do with them/You’ve got no reason to trim them/No nice place to throw them/Because it doesn’t seem right to throw them away/Yet you can’t very well send them back the other way.” Even at his most withering, Chapman remains nothing if not polite.
Chapman’s—and by extension the band’s—calm demeanor can trick you into thinking there’s not a lot happening in any given Nap Eyes song. And as you hear throughout the album, Chapman is fond of circling back to his opening verses and repurposing them as choruses, changing his inflection and emphasis every so slightly to create just the right amount of dynamic definition. But as Nap Eyes retrace their steps, they’re digging into new ground underfoot. When “Roses” introduces a surprise chorus hook in the song’s dying moments, it’s like suddenly finding your lost car keys in a room that you’ve already searched 20 times over.
I’m Bad Now is a more forthright, steady-going listen than Thought Rock Fish Scale, and, on first pass, it seems a touch less enchanting than that record’s nocturnal reveries. The new album shows Nap Eyes can certainly excel at tight, snappy power-pop (check the incisive opener “Every Time the Feeling”). But there are also all-too-brief flashes of viscerality that you wish the band had explored further—like the noisy, chicken-scratched outburst that momentarily erupts from the simmering build of “Judgment,” or the glorious arena-rockin’ surge that upsets the otherwise mellow slide-guitar sweep of “Sage,” but stops short of elevating the song into Nap Eyes’ own “Impossible Germany.”
The real jamming on I’m Bad Now isn’t happening on the fretboards, but in the lyrics. Atop the countrified dream-pop of “Hearing the Bass,” he revels in the words of songwriter Danika Vandersteen like a guitarist indulges in arpeggios, and practically comes up with a new Dr. Seuss book in the process: “Want to wonder, to watch, to weather, to whisper a tune/To whimper, to will, too well/Swelter, swallow, to switch, to swim, two swan too/To swing, to sing, to sting, to stone, to tone.” But he saves his most bon mots for the astounding “White Disciple,” where the religious undercurrents that have always coursed through Nap Eyes’ music roil into a tsunami. Part Pixies bass rumble, part soulful “Beast of Burden” sway, the song proves to be Chapman’s Mangum opus, a breathless meditation on faith and vice that burrows a winding path from Christianity to Hinduism.
It also happens to contain the album’s best joke: After cycling through seven biblically dense verses, Chapman finally reaches his protagonist’s moment of spiritual awakening, and the only way he can describe it is by unleashing a long, deeply satisfying “shhiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttt” worthy of Clay Davis. Coming from such an eloquent wordsmith, it’s a jarring jump from sacred to profane—but clearly for him, being bad has never felt so good. | 2018-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Paradise of Bachelors / You’ve Changed / Jagjaguwar | March 10, 2018 | 7.6 | e453e2eb-df6a-4f13-9fd9-f01a86af59a6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On their second album, the cheerfully subversive L.A. art-punks critique societal norms as they revel in their own absurdity (and saxophone). | On their second album, the cheerfully subversive L.A. art-punks critique societal norms as they revel in their own absurdity (and saxophone). | French Vanilla: How Am I Not Myself? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/french-vanilla-how-am-i-not-myself/ | How Am I Not Myself? | The most liberal use of saxophone you’re likely to hear on a rock record in 2019 does not involve Bruce Springsteen, nor any titans of third-wave ska (yes, Reel Big Fish put out an album recently). It’s the new album by French Vanilla, a cheerfully subversive art-punk group nurtured in Los Angeles’s queer punk scene. Throughout How Am I Not Myself?, Daniel Trautfield’s saxophone squawks, groans, and erupts into melodies far more playful than you might expect from a band that cites Leonard Cohen and novelist Dodie Bellamy among its lyrical influences. These sax parts share virtually no DNA with the smooth sax solo, that much-mocked ’80s tradition recently rehabilitated by the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and the 1975. Like much of French Vanilla’s music, they are jittery and anxious and a little bit outrageous—critiquing cultural norms and reveling in their own absurdity all at once.
French Vanilla are a relatively new band: They released their self-titled first album in 2017, after finding a local audience playing queer punk parties and then DIY performance spaces in L.A. But their music taps into a deeper lineage, one that includes the nervous energy and eccentric vocal stylings of the B-52’s and the jagged no-wave dissonance of early ’80s acts like Bush Tetras. (You could draw a fuzzy line from the latter band’s underground hit, “Too Many Creeps,” and French Vanilla’s own unease with misogynistic institutions.) On “Suddenly,” a devilishly funky mid-album highlight, an octave-leaping sax solo conveys the simultaneous intoxication and anxiety of modern nightlife. “All the Time” evokes the robotic edge of Devo as vocalist Sally Spitz sings about the terror and glee of an intense crush: “The way you look at me, so deep into my eyes/You’re not like other guys,” she blurts, giddy with panic.
Spitz, French Vanilla’s lead vocalist, studied performance art at UCLA, where she was influenced by avant-garde giants like Diamanda Galás and Nina Hagen. She is a compellingly weird and charismatic singer; on this album, she whoops (“Real or Not”), talk-sings (“Move Along, Move Ahead”), shrieks cartoonishly (“Joan of Marc by Marc”), and enunciates words with the odd pursed-lips affect commonly employed by Mark Mothersbaugh. The rhythms are fast and nervy; the guitars eschew conventional chord progressions because guitarist Ali Day never learned them.
Like Priests, the D.C. punk band with whom French Vanilla have played, much of the songwriting addresses the overlap between the personal and political, with a probing eye towards sexist power structures. “Lost Power,” one of the record’s more conventionally catchy numbers, finds Spitz reflecting on a sense of identity loss she felt while in a long-term heterosexual relationship. “Bromosapien” skewers a sexist and condescending coworker as Spitz hopefully wonders, “Will there be a day when guys like you don't exist?” It’s an irreverent take on a maddening situation; despite the band’s academic interests, they are not above shouting “I think I hate you!” four times in a row.
How Am I Not Myself? is a brief and self-contained album. What it lacks in stylistic diversity it makes up with sustained and unrelenting energy, even on the least distinctive songs, like the relatively flat “Protective.” The saxophone, of course, is present most of the time—including on the final track, “Sensitive (Not Too Sensitive),” where it trades phrases with Spitz’s righteous exhortations against the indignities of wage labor. That insistent sax is the raucous, unwavering id of a band that takes its anti-oppressive, anticapitalist spirit—but never itself—seriously. | 2019-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Danger Collective | June 22, 2019 | 7.2 | e45a4fbe-132a-4190-995e-c0a615e1b157 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The short EP from the Philly rapper might not be essential but it reveals more of the fascinating dark side of her artistry. | The short EP from the Philly rapper might not be essential but it reveals more of the fascinating dark side of her artistry. | Chynna: in case i die first | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chynna-in-case-i-die-first/ | in case i die first | Chynna is honing her craft, balancing her braggadocio and combative jabs on equally violent and hollow sounds. On her fourth EP, in case i die first, the 25-year-old Philly rapper is letting the world in on a late-night car-ride therapy session, full of convoluted, introspective thoughts where Chynna is both the shrink and patient. Each song juggles self-doubt caused by the ex-lovers and friends that fuel her distress and the reassurance that emerge once she finally decides to kill her bad behaviors before they kill her. Having openly battled depression and opioid addiction, Chynna’s latest project centers defining moments of sanity and rejecting everyone’s projections to aid her swaggering rebirth.
Chynna is not just a model cosplaying as a rapper, but a Philly native birthed by same the grit and grime as Ruff Ryders’ Eve and Murder Inc.’s Charli Baltimore, who use their aggressive rhymes to cement their validity in the male-dominated realm of rap. Like Eve and Charli, Chynna’s jarring rhymes are not confounded by her femininity or androgynous tone, but rather the Ford Models signee doesn’t hesitate to let you know she is an attractive woman that is aware of, but not reliant on, the power of her pussy. Women rappers turn their sexuality into a measure of power, but similar to Rico Nasty’s gut-wrenching lyrics, Chynna also dismisses the notion that her beauty supersedes her talent. On “gin,” Chynna masterfully connects “mustang” and “nuts hang,” challenging male counterparts and ensuring those words will be used in phonics exercises for years to come.
In working towards demolishing her self-doubt, Chynna questions the authenticity of her platonic friendships as she recognizes how easy it is to fall back into depression. “Kamikaze soldier/[who] suffers from dark kinks” she raps on “gin,” displaying her proximity to toxic friends and environments. Her smooth delivery sits evenly amid heavy bass production that almost turns her voice into a percussion instrument.
Introspection is the main theme here; it feels like you’re inside her head trying to follow along with her train of thought. Her flow is similarly herky-jerky: The melody of “asmr” almost imitates it. Although Chynna is transparent in her self-analysis—relatable to any woman contemplating dismissing a boy-toy versus keeping him around for convenience—it’s still hard to connect to this brief project. The illusory raps, the ghostly production, the seeming randomness of its moments, all create a mood that’s unique but difficult to translate. And despite the slight deviations in tempo, all four songs on in case i die first run the risk of sounding like one long song. But we see more of who Chynna is as an artist, warts and all, which is never a bad thing. | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | TWIN | January 16, 2020 | 6.3 | e45feea6-90f3-4bc7-8d64-4802e4511827 | Veracia Ankrah | https://pitchfork.com/staff/veracia-ankrah/ | |
The New York rapper attempts to be all things to all people, but in his efforts to split the difference between bar god and pop rapper, he ends up proving he is neither. | The New York rapper attempts to be all things to all people, but in his efforts to split the difference between bar god and pop rapper, he ends up proving he is neither. | Bishop Nehru: Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bishop-nehru-nehruvia-my-disregarded-thoughts/ | Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts | For a while, it seemed like Bishop Nehru was living the dream of every aspiring teenage rapper to ever sleep under an Illmatic poster. Before he’d turned 20, he’d: scored beats from super-looper 9th Wonder; signed with Mass Appeal records; and finished an entire tape with drunken uncle rhymer MF DOOM. Nas, somewhat ridiculously, dubbed the young, earnest rapper “the future of music.” But Nehru has spent the years since 2014’s NehruvianDOOM trying to both live up to these co-signs and play them down. He relishes the notoriety that comes with his lyrical miracle title and getting asked about being endorsed by hip-hop royalty, but he dreads the prospect of being pigeonholed as dated and dusty. His new album, Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts, is an attempt to be all things to all people: conversative wordsmith, progressive curator, storyteller, anthem-maker, introspective entertainer. In his efforts to split the difference between bar god and pop rapper, he ends up proving he is neither.
The album is mostly produced by Nehru with a few assists, including DJ Premier and DOOM. It woefully samples diet trap, jazz rap, and boom bap. Just as Elevators: Act I & II was haplessly divided into two parts, the Kaytranada-produced “Ascension” and the DOOM-produced “Free Falling,” My Disregarded Thoughts follows a similar model. “The Abyss” is supposed to represent the darker recesses of his mind; “The Escape,” his relentless optimism. The binary doesn’t provide any narrative focus, or explore a duality, the way Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded separated Nicki’s rap and pop instincts. Nehru is chasing a balance between his classicist nature and his Grammy ambitions—“still lyrical, still hip-hop, but with a way to make everyone relate to it on a grand level,” he told Clash. His gestures toward relatability aren’t subtle: He does some singing, flexes over some Maaly Raw beats, and even utters the words “too litty” through Auto-Tune. Every one of his attempts to show range demonstrate how limited he is.
The bits of SoundCloud rap parody aren’t fooling anyone. “All of My Years” sounds like the TV movie version of a Chance the Rapper song. In all his straining efforts to show off the skill that landed him a Madvillian apprenticeship, he sounds lightyears away from city dwellers like MIKE and Medhane, meditative rhymers who do far more with less. Even the Premier-produced “Too Lost,” which should be right up his alley, sounds like a chore. He raps some as the voices inside his own head, which can be an effective device, but where a song like Kendrick Lamar’s “u” is tension-filled and gripping, Nehru’s struggle to personify his mounting anxiety doesn’t make any discernible impact.
Too many of these thoughts truly warrant disregarding. On the intro, “Colder,” he laments going over the heads of the closed-minded masses before rapping this galaxy brain couplet: “They want me mad, ’cause cops drop us within a week/But it’s nothin’ new, it’s just now you can send a tweet.” Getting worked up over police violence is pointless, because racism is old hat, he asserts. Wake up sheeple! His songs about being alone and lost are circuitous, constantly reiterating how alone and lost he is without ever probing what he’s feeling or why. His would-be boy-king rants about ruling the rap world are like celebrating winning a race you’ve already been lapped in (on “Emperor”: “I know that I got the recipe/I mixed the grinding with destiny”). So much of this album is vacant and inexpressive. “My main muse and fuse is just life in general,” he declares on “Never Slow,” sounding like the corniest rapping anti-drug PSA. “Little Suzy (Be Okay),” his story of a homeless girl who becomes a drug addict, is all clunky exposition, no activity. There is more talk of thinking than actual thinking taking place.
Nehru is often considered a technical rapper, but his bars are amateurish, cluttered, and inexact. His rapping can be so syntactically bizarre it sounds like it was written by a neural net. And this isn’t zany obfuscation like his metal-faced mentor; it’s a lack of precision. The raps aren’t hard to follow, per se, they’re just off. He forces phrases to fit his schemes instead of letting them unravel naturally. His flows are stilted, pushing to prove expertise he doesn’t have. And the bars that aren’t completely flavorless (“Been broke, my pockets had mad hope/Couldn’t buy a laugh like bad jokes/And they wait for falls like bad ropes”) are mind-numbingly lame.
When given some thought, Bishop Nehru’s bifurcation of rap and pop feels woefully out of touch. Not just because the worlds of rap and pop seem more and more indistinguishable every day, but because even the most hardcore, bar-heavy posturing can reach a really wide audience—DaBaby owned 2019. Nehru doesn’t need to change tactics to become the rapper he seems confident he can be, he simply needs to be a more lucid writer and a more arresting performer. On Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts, he’s convinced himself that the key to unlocking his rap career is broadening his horizons. But Bishop Nehru doesn’t need to branch out; he needs to go back to basics. | 2020-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Nehruvia LLC | May 16, 2020 | 4.4 | e466b630-f3f8-4c11-a54c-7db572bd9d01 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Bradford boys make a bid for commercial glory on their fourth album, but they’re better off staying unhinged than appealing to the mainstream. | The Bradford boys make a bid for commercial glory on their fourth album, but they’re better off staying unhinged than appealing to the mainstream. | Bad Boy Chiller Crew: Influential | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-boy-chiller-crew-influential/ | Influential | Bad Boy Chiller Crew wants to be known for more than their silliness. Never mind the videos of them slugging Smirnoff from the bottle and retching in an alley, or cackling in the passenger seat as they churn through prank calls. Ignore the allegations that one member went to the hospital with a kidney infection after a fan hurled an ounce of ketamine on stage at a show. There they are showing up to the BRIT Awards in a horse and carriage, sharing their tips to avoid a hangover (“Get straight back on it”) and vowing to chop one of the boy’s mullets if their album tops the charts. The trio from Northern England makes frenetic tracks that slam through your skull; the songs explode like a shaken Coke bottle. In the Bad Boy Chiller Crew cinematic universe, every bender leaks into the next—“From the nightclub to the kitchen!” as the boys howl in one of their better new tracks. They make lifelong friends in urinals. They get high, get into hijinks, and get home just in time to hit up an endless blur of clubs. It’s because, not in spite of, this central goofiness that the Bradford boys have found such a broad audience. “People automatically wanna be our friends because we make the world look like a fucking joke,” one of the boys told British GQ; it’s also a large part of why so many listen.
Influential, the group’s latest release, is a bloated bridge between their frenzied bangers and a bid for the mainstream. “We’re going for commercial,” the boys have said in interviews, and with every release, they’ve gotten closer to that goal. Even though they strive to show off their range, the project feels more disparate and distracted than expansive. They wobble between blown-out bangers and a pitched-down Cher interpolation (“Believe”), treacly odes to girls they met at a club on a Tuesday (“Found True Love [You’re the Best Thing]”), wailing wonders about where their soul has gone. They demand to know if love is “true.” “Thought we could have set in stone,” they rap at one point. “Now you’re nothing but a stepping stone.” It’s clever-enough wordplay, but too flimsy to elicit any feeling, and too earnest to excuse as a bit.
Of course, you don’t turn to the Bad Boy Chiller Crew to learn about love. The boys work best when they bludgeon a sample: They take a shimmery vocal and pound any melodrama out of it, thwacking bass drops, grunts, sirens, and bleats over lilting lines about love and fame. Influential lingers way too long on other voices: “Why Did You Play Me” spends 45 seconds with Kyla, of “One Dance” fame, before the Bad Boy Chiller Crew barrels in. “Say Goodbye” begins with a wispy female vocalist pledging eternal devotion for nearly a minute, until the B.B.C.C. steamrolls through, chanting about drinks on tap. They edge dangerously close to sounding like Cascada.
Compared to the fricative pulses of a song like “Bounce to This One,” or the coked-out wallop of “Sliding,” the love songs here are chintzy sugar rushes. The less sense they make, the better they sound. Why are they frantically rapping about how badly they want to go into space? What’s with the squiggle of bagpipes in “Jurgen Kropper,” one of two throbbing tracks named after football players? They remix a 2007 rave anthem from DJ Q, a stalwart of the sped-up cousin of UK garage known as bassline, into a song that sounds like the “Cha Cha Slide” on poppers. Bad Boy Chiller Crew dazzles and delights in absurdity.
That’s not to say they can’t also make you feel something. “Memory” is the most successful song here at smuggling in an actual emotion, likely because the boys sing it themselves. “I want to be there with you, but I can’t trust nobody,” they murmur, before the beat hiccups and accelerates. No matter how hard they try to make themselves palatable to the masses, they’re still most comfortable in chaos. | 2023-12-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Relentless | December 20, 2023 | 6.8 | e4672142-6e4c-4309-aeb1-dbfe2be18b5b | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Sunday School II improves on its first installment in almost every aspect: The songs are stronger, the Chicago rapper's performance more assured, and the "soul trap" production-- with assistance from producer Michael Kolar-- is deeper and denser. | Sunday School II improves on its first installment in almost every aspect: The songs are stronger, the Chicago rapper's performance more assured, and the "soul trap" production-- with assistance from producer Michael Kolar-- is deeper and denser. | Tree: Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18133-tree-sunday-school-ii-when-church-lets-out/ | Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out | Chicago hip-hop’s always had something of a split personality, and the recent global attention on the scene has only served to heighten the contrast between Chief Keef and the giddily sociopathic drill scene on one end of the spectrum, and on the other, Chance the Rapper and a new generation of artists looking to reinvigorate a conscious rap scene that was last at its peak back when Kanye was still a backpacker. And almost exactly halfway between the two ends of the spectrum sits an MC named Tremaine “Tree” Johnson.
Last year Tree released a mixtape called Sunday School. It was a rough record released in an unmastered, unpolished state, but it managed to establish him as something like the David Banner of the Midwest: a rapper/producer with a carefully considered aesthetic that’s organic and insightful, but who doesn’t consider himself above writing songs aimed at the street, the club, or the bedroom. Sunday School II improves on its predecessor in almost every aspect. The songs are stronger, his performance is more assured, and the production-- with assistance from Chicago hip-hop recording kingpin Michael Kolar-- is deeper and denser. He doesn’t feel like an artist sitting between two scenes, skimming off ideas, but one strong enough to stack them atop one another and climb on top.
Tree calls his artistic philosophy “soul trap,” and it’s as honest a name as it is catchy. On a basic musical level, it accurately describes Tree’s preferred blend of soul music elements-- warm, churchy organ lines and vocal samples pitched up, Kanye-as-chipmunk style-- with beats built around the kind of booming 808 kicks and snappy, precisely machined hi-hats that have been a feature of Southern rap mixtapes for years, and which have recently taken hold in the Midwest.
Taking a deeper view, “soul trap” can also describe the emotional and intellectual heart of Tree’s music. A native of the city’s notorious (and now demolished) Cabrini-Green projects, his roots are deep in the street-- in his lyrics Chicago gangs like the Black P. Stone Nation are features of the neighborhood just the same way brick high rises are, and he makes multiple references to a brief stint selling crack at age 13. He sees the nihilism that pervades the gangster lifestyle he opted out of, and wants to stay as far away from it as possible. In Tree’s capable hands these two elements, which on the surface seem so contradictory, combine into a raw but subtly layered portrait of life in black Chicago, one that’s miles away from Keef’s in tone but just as bracing and honest.
Tree delivers this portrait with a ragged melodic howl that recalls Chicago bluesmen as frequently as it does other rappers. Despite the sometimes weighty nature of the material he tackles lyrically, he’s a pop artist at heart (on “King” he gives the chipmunk-soul treatment to a snippet of Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You”), which helps set him apart from many MCs who get tagged as “conscious” and makes Sunday School II a pleasurable repeat listen.
And even when he’s being conscious he’s not a drag about it. On “So Bad” he describes a dream woman who’s independent, intelligent, and self-actualized, but also stacks paper, flashes diamonds, and projects the kind of intensely confident not-giving-a-fuck that’s more common to rappers than the women they write about. The song describes a combination of virtues that also fit Tree’s music: flashy enough to grab your attention and smart enough to know what to do with it, brainy but sensual, and easy to get hooked on. | 2013-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Creative Control | May 22, 2013 | 7.7 | e46aeb2c-2069-417f-a075-4dc3a9889da4 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's second solo album moves away from his taut and sparse early work in favor of something more bombastic but strangely cloistered. | Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's second solo album moves away from his taut and sparse early work in favor of something more bombastic but strangely cloistered. | Lindstrøm: Six Cups of Rebel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16238-six-cups-of-rebel/ | Six Cups of Rebel | Lindstrøm's second proper solo album, Six Cups of Rebel, does away with both the taut sexiness of his early work and the warm yacht breezes of Where You Go I Go Too in favor of something more bombastic but strangely cloistered. The pressure here builds and builds, but rather than taking flight, tracks like "De Javu" struggle with a misdirected explosion of percussion that flattens out into a farty bass riff smothered in layers of percussion. It's bloated, lifeless, and weighed down with its own multi-tracked mayhem, a thick, wet coat of gloss dragging propulsion down to a crawl more than anything else.
Excess is nothing new for Lindstrøm, but on Six Cups of Rebel he sounds lost. Synths layer endlessly and drums bang and clank-- this is some Emerson, Lake & Palmer shit-- but whatever power they might possess is lost as the clutter breeds a numbing sense of saturation. The breathing room that was essential to Lindstrøm's original charm, from the rattling drums of "Arp She Said" to the exhilarating fly-bys of "Where You Go I Go Too", is nowhere to be found, replaced by a suffocating blanket of midtempo muck. For an artist whose signature track's called "I Feel Space", it's disheartening to hear so little of it here.
His last album-length effort, 2010's Real Life is No Cool, a collaboratioin with singer Christabelle, showed that his luxurious disco could harbor vocals just fine (a theme that stretches all the way back to 2003's fantastic "Music in My Mind"). But here Lindstrøm's own weak, garbled vocals are caught up in the soupy current of overdubs, strangled of momentum or melodic cohesion. Even worse, on "Magik", they're pitched-down into ugly, unnatural tones, one of those "what could he have possibly been thinking" moments made only worse by the creepy backing chorus that emerges halfway through. It's cringe-inducing, another misstep for a record that's already treading unsure ground.
Rebel has a few nice moments. "Quiet Place to Live", which spends its first three minutes hobbling on an awkwardly uneven vocal hook complete with stabbing bursts of electric guitar, suddenly melts into a stunning keyboard breakdown halfway through. It's gorgeous in that silvery Lindstrøm way but completely aimless, drenching the track in generic prettiness that wears after a few bars: The vocals continue to clash and everything sounds strangely out of tune, as if he just dropped the organ carelessly on top of an entirely finished track. That brief glimmer of hope dissolves, defining the rest of the album as distinctly unmemorable, little drum fills and other pertinent details like specks of glitter on a gaudy neon canvas only adding to the fatigue. "Call Me Anytime" takes up a whole nine minutes, and I'll be damned if any of it's going to stick with me, as it cycles restlessly through a number of phases like it's desperately searching for some kind of magic glue to hold it all together.
The album finally picks up with 10-minute closer "Hina", an elongated horizon of shimmering keyboards and vocoders, anxiously pumping prog rock like the breakdown of Pink Floyd's "Dogs" sculpted and smoothed-over into a disco edit. Shrouded in filters, Lindstrøm's vocals fit better here, and the track's relative tastefulness ends the album on a strange but refreshing note of restraint. Complacency is to be avoided, but the kind of step forward Lindstrøm tries here is a drunken, misguided one. The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular. | 2012-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | February 9, 2012 | 4.5 | e470fa9f-5889-4d39-85b4-dead0c48fe02 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
On The Hamilton Mixtape, songs from the iconic musical have been reinterpreted by Nas, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Chance the Rapper, and others, for some reason. | On The Hamilton Mixtape, songs from the iconic musical have been reinterpreted by Nas, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Chance the Rapper, and others, for some reason. | Various Artists: The Hamilton Mixtape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22673-the-hamilton-mixtape/ | The Hamilton Mixtape | The Hamilton original cast recording recently passed half-a-billion streams on Spotify. That’s billion, with a “B”: Try to think of more influential, beloved, and ubiquitous cast recordings in history—you will probably end up counting on two hands, maybe one. The music of Hamilton now sits directly in the center of American pop culture, and it has smuggled rapping—the unadulterated, information-dense kind that you can hear tripping from the tongues of the best MCs—into the ears of Dick Cheney and Mike Pence with it, for God’s sake.
So why does Hamilton Mixtape exist? Hamilton doesn’t need any help crossing over, into hip-hop or anywhere else. In its best-case scenario, The Hamilton Mixtape is an afterthought, an asterisk or a curio for Hamilton obsessives. On it, a wide-ranging group of rappers and R&B singers reinterpret, or in many cases simply cover, the tracks from the soundtrack, which has been lightly reworked and retooled by a range of producers, with guidance from Questlove and assistance from J. Period, !llmind, and more. Ja Rule and Ashanti reunite to take on the Eliza Schuyler/Alexander romance tune “Helpless.” Regina Spektor and Ben Folds perform "Dear Theodosia.” Sia is here. Wiz Khalifa is here. Oh, and Jimmy Fallon, too: he performs “You’ll Be Back,” the jaunty break-up song from King George addressed to the unruly colonies. Fallon starts with a painful joke about how he was classically trained, “and by that I mean I was trained by vocal coach Ed Classically.” Then he takes a breath and starts singing. Trust me: You do not want to be in the room where this happens.
The guest list throughout is an assortment of marquee names and WTFs. Black Thought sounds tremendous and forceful on the rework of “My Shot,” but he’s followed by a plodding Joell Ortiz and a humorless Busta Rhymes, who stiffens back into barking-youth-basketball-coach mode once away from the relaxing influence of his fellow Native Tongues members. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing, a lot of faux-motivational bluster, not a lot of good writing. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who doesn’t show up on the song, is missed.
Miranda does show up on one of the mixtape’s only original songs, called “Wrote My Way Out.” He’s joined by Nas, who sounds disengaged, cartoonish, and distant. Miranda, meanwhile, burns through the song’s tissue-thin noble-struggle atmosphere with a verse hot with details. “I caught my first beating from the other kids when I was caught reading/Oh you think you smart? Start bleeding,” he yelps desperately. Yes, his verse also contains the seven-ton-anvil clang of “My mind is where the wild things are/Maurice Sendak.” But he’s a performer, and his ability to convey rising desperation in verse is maybe his purest and clearest link to hip-hop.
The Hamilton Mixtape shares one thing in common with its parent album: It is very, very long. But since it isn’t sequenced as a linear narrative, treating the show like a sort of greatest hits, you lose all sense of the knuckle-whitening tension that propels the original forward. Alicia Keys leeches the marital tenderness out of “That Would Be Enough,” turning an urgent and warm plea from a wife to a husband on a frightening precipice into something for torch-lighting ceremonies, as impersonal and pretty as a hotel lobby chandelier. By the time you get to Chance the Rapper, crooning the show’s devastating “Dear Theodosia (reprise),” you realize that The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work. | 2016-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Atlantic | December 10, 2016 | 4.8 | e476c626-ba84-421a-a65f-a99f6f56547a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On their second album, the metalcore band widens the limits of its genre, incorporating nu-metal, shoegaze, and even early-’00s emo. | On their second album, the metalcore band widens the limits of its genre, incorporating nu-metal, shoegaze, and even early-’00s emo. | Loathe: I Let It In and It Took Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loathe-i-let-it-in-and-it-took-everything/ | I Let It In and It Took Everything | On their second album I Let It In and It Took Everything, the Liverpudlian band Loathe probe the connection between heavy music and ambient, intertwining prog-metal breakdowns with sweeping synthesizers and shoegaze textures. In the same way Deafheaven’s Sunbather served as an effective entry point to black metal for the uninitiated, this album expands the borders of what a metalcore band can sound like, and they do it while writing evocative choruses and fierce breakdowns in equal measure.
Loathe have greatly evolved from the aspirational yet occasionally timid metalcore band they were on their 2017 debut The Cold Sun. Now, nothing is off-limits, from the sample of a Nina Simone interview on the ambient interlude “451 Days” to the catchy nu-metal sludge of “Screaming.” When “New Faces In the Dark” makes an abrupt left turn from a Smiths-style guitar lick to feedback spirals and djent-y riffs, the contrast hits like a fist to the jaw. On “A Sad Cartoon,” they even channel early-’00s emo, juggling clean-toned guitars and dueling vocals. Deftones diehards will immediately spot the influence of Chino Moreno’s lovesick vocals on lead vocalist Kadeem France—Moreno counts himself a fan of the band—while guitarists Erik Bickerstaffe and Connor Sweeney tap into both the sweeping magnificence of Slowdive and the visceral pulse of more extreme groups like Meshuggah.
They balance all of these competing influences with meticulous precision; on “Broken Vision Rhythm,” drummer Sean Radcliffe stuffs a miniature history of prog drumming into a song that doesn’t even crack three minutes. It’s immediately followed by the gauzy epic “Two-Way Mirror,” Loathe’s closest thing to a potential crossover hit. Bickerstaffe is hardly the first metal musician to use (or abuse) the lower tones of a baritone guitar, but he’s able to conjure titanic slabs of distortion that never sound overwrought.
The members of Loathe have bonafides in the UK underground metal scene, having come up in various Liverpool bands before they started playing together in 2014. But the songwriting throughout I Let It In hints at a band more focused on bringing new fans into the fold than appeasing old ones. During a recent interview discussing “Red Room” and “Gored”—two of the more aggressive tracks here, which see France dig deep into his larynx for guttural, inhuman tones—the frontman touched on the all-encompassing ambition of their new record. “If it comes naturally to us, we want to do it,” he said.
In the past, France has referred to Loathe as a collective—a single unit defined by their shared passion, and not their instruments. The songs bear out this ideology; France might handle most of the screaming and singing in Loathe, but he and Bickerstaffe trade off clean vocals for certain songs. The two have similar enough timbres that they can blend effortlessly. Harmonizing at the apex of “Two-Way Mirror,” they put a human stamp on the surrounding walls of distortion, grounding themselves to a shared emotional bond that transcends genre. | 2020-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | SharpTone | February 22, 2020 | 7.8 | e485f25a-f69c-49bf-b435-80b50c28697a | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
The music of songwriter Brian Esser is at once hilarious and horrifying. His debut synth-pop album as Cabo Boing is an unrelenting collection of high-energy jokes. | The music of songwriter Brian Esser is at once hilarious and horrifying. His debut synth-pop album as Cabo Boing is an unrelenting collection of high-energy jokes. | Cabo Boing: Blob on a Grid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23218-cabo-boing-blob-on-a-grid/ | Blob on a Grid | Brian Esser—the songwriter behind the synth-pop act Cabo Boing—seems fascinated with clowns. Aside from the announcement of Blob on a Grid, his debut full-length under the moniker after years playing in the synth-based bands Yip-Yip and Moon Jelly, his Tumblr page is mostly dedicated to the constantly grinning jesters. They beckon menacingly, floating in bodies of water; they show off arcade cabinets to small children; they play the saxophone; or they sit—in ceramic bust form—next to half-consumed jugs of milk. The archive as a whole is surreal, whimsical, and unsettling—a shrine that imagines the clowns as mythical figures from a Jodorowskyan nightmare.
It’s upsetting to say the least. But it’s also a strangely fitting accompaniment for the absurdist electronic music he’s made over the last couple of years as Cabo Boing—and especially the joy-buzzer beats that make up Blob on a Grid. He stuffs 12 tracks in just under 20 minutes, demonstrating a knack for slapstick comedy, garish colors, and even a few funny voices. These hallmarks of the art of clowning have turned the makeup-coated fools into figures of both wordless joy and unspeakable terror in the collective unconscious.
The pranks start from the opening moments of the tape’s first track “Asleep in the Saddle,” which layers several interlocking synth lines in a woozy pattern as sickening as a carousel on a cruise ship. Esser pitch-shifts a human voice into a goofy monstrosity and sings self-assured platitudes like “progress comes from within” and “subdue yourself and return to what is right.” The emotional effect is something like a group of oompa loompas covering OMD or the Residents leading a self-help seminar, which is to say that it’s both hilarious and horrifying.
That track, as well as a few of the album’s other longer tracks—like the neon vomit of the title track and “Nitwit of Gizmo”—show Esser’s predilection for writing pop songs in a long tradition of synth-toting goofballs. Like Mark Mothersbaugh’s electro-contortions or Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs-era surrealism or any of his many labelmates on the New York cassette imprint Haord, he has a keen ability to make music that’s both parasitically catchy and wholly unfamiliar.
But Esser isn’t content to just write singles, however ridiculous they may be. A large portion of the album’s tracklist is dedicated to stuff like the 45-second long “Elevator Pitch.” Its wheedling synth line wheels around erratically, like a unicycle on freshly buffed linoleum, before careening into the next song. Just as you start nodding your head to “Blob on a Grid,” Esser emerges with with the saccharine vocal tics and splattering percussion of “What Am I Bid”—a pie in the face as a punctuation mark.
Down to its title—and even the onomatopoetic prank of Esser’s moniker itself, which sounds something like an unfurling spring when you say it out loud—Blob on a Grid is an unrelenting collection of high-energy jokes. The way the intentionally gaudy synth lines fold into each other like a junkyard quiltwork can almost feel exhausting. But just when a song such as “Nitwit of Gizmo” begins to feel like a carnival ride gone on too long, Esser wisely cuts to another goofy composition. It’s proof in action that the difference between a good and a bad joke is… timing. | 2017-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Haord | May 5, 2017 | 7.5 | e48ba6b2-0faa-4812-8fd9-7584b37299ab | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
Central Belters is a three-disc (or six-LP) compendium celebrating 20 years of Mogwai. | Central Belters is a three-disc (or six-LP) compendium celebrating 20 years of Mogwai. | Mogwai: Central Belters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21086-central-belters/ | Central Belters | In the vinyl-revival era, the box set exists for primarily completists and Record Store Day hoarders—by repackaging entire discographies in 180-gram reissues, they forsake curation for comprehensiveness. But in their initial '80s iteration as CD-stacked behemoths, box sets were actually designed for the casual fan. The earliest paragons of the format—Bob Dylan's Biograph, David Bowie's Sound+Vision—presented expertly compiled overviews of a veteran artist, weaving in hit singles, choice album tracks, rarities and live cuts to form a chronological portrait of their evolution. Sure, they could be prohibitively expensive, but in the days before you could access everything through a YouTube deep dive, box sets made life easy. When faced with the prospect of schooling yourself on an artist 20 albums deep into their career, a three-disc round-up of the best stuff offered maximum return for the least hassle.
So in that sense, there's something quaintly anachronistic about Central Belters, a three-disc (or six-LP) compendium celebrating 20 years of Mogwai. The Scottish art-rockers are ideal subjects for a box-set distillation—they've released eight proper albums, not to mention a handful of soundtracks and stand-alone EPs. They're the sort of reliable band—both in terms of line-up stability and rate of output—that's no doubt lost some old-school fans along the way, and picked up some new ones (2014's Rave Tapes was their first album to crack the UK top 10), so both camps could benefit from a refresher on what they've missed.
While Mogwai's means have changed over the years, the mood of their records has remained consistent. Pretty much every single Mogwai track resides somewhere on the spectrum between rainy-day melancholy and blood-boiling rage; the only laugh to be had in their discography is in the title of 2003's Happy Songs for Happy People. But they've been so good at recreating that despairing atmosphere on an album-by-album basis, that it's easy to overlook how much they've actually deviated from their formative script. Mogwai are an instrumental band, except when they're not; they're noise-loving sonic sadists, except when they're being tenderly delicate; they're slowcore saddos, except when they're making motorik synth-pop. They're a band you think you know, until you realize you don't recognize them anymore.
Mogwai have evolved in baby steps—each of their records has yielded a track or two that opens up new avenues for the band, without radically altering their essence. But the quasi-chronological, best-of compilation that comprises Central Belters*'* first two discs has the effect of making that transformation seem much more pronounced and dramatic. The set charts a mostly linear progression, from the stormy psychedelic surges of 1996 single "Summer" to last year's neon-tinted dream-pop anthem "Teenage Exorcists" (featuring Stuart Braithwaite's most unabashedly melodic vocal performance to date), but emphasizes the aesthetic outliers in their canon. On any given Mogwai record, the vocal tracks make up maybe 10 per cent of the tracklist; here, it's more like a third, lending this set a more vibrant energy than their albums proper.
Greatest-hits compilations in general are something of an endangered species, given that streaming-service playlists can now generate them for you, but there's still something to be said for getting a band's own take on what they deem essential. (To wit, the "Intro to Mogwai" mega-mix on Apple Music features 25 songs; only 12 of them are featured among Central Belters' 34 tracks.) For one, there's a conspicuous lack of tracks from 1997's Young Team, the album that first brought the Glasgow group international attention and solidified their noise-rock bonafides. Yes, Young Team is ably represented by its seismic 16-minute closer "Mogwai Fear Satan", but there's seemingly no room for its equally explosive counterpart "Like Herod", a song that pushed the well-worn indie-rock quiet/LOUD template to atomic extremes. (Perhaps Mogwai have come to see "Like Herod" as their "Creep"—an early, simply structured, attention-seizing track to which they no longer feel a connection.)
A career survey of Mogwai feels incomplete without "Herod", but, otherwise, Central Belters' first disc maps out the band's early peaks: the sad-eyed space rock of "New Paths to Helicon Pt. 1", the creeping, tension-tweaking build of "Christmas Steps", the mountain-scaling triumphalism of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong", and the chrome-gilded grandeur of "Hunted By a Freak", which marked the breakthrough moment where Mogwai's epic canvases began to make room for a more finely tuned pop sensibility.
The second disc covers the era from 2006's Mr. Beast to last fall's Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1 EP, over which the band's guitar-powered onslaughts gradually gave way to synth-driven experimentalism. Even with the benefit of a cherry-picked tracklist, Central Belters still can't mask the inertia that set in for Mogwai in the late 2000s, with tracks like Mr. Beast*'s "Friend of the Night" and The Hawk Is Howling'*s "I'm Jim Morrison I'm Dead" following a well-trodden path from desolate piano meditation to cymbal-crashing climax. However, the robo-Pavement groove of Hawk highlight "The Sun Smells Too Loud" points the way to the electro excursions of 2011's Hardcore Will Never Die But You Wil**l and last year's Rave Tapes, wherein Mogwai toyed with cruise-controlled Krautrock ("Mexican Grand Prix", "How to Be a Werewolf") and sci-fi soundtrack ambience ("Remurdered"), and seemed to genuinely loosen up after so many years of painstaking post-rock crescendo-climbing. And with the aforementioned "Teenage Exorcists", Mogwai proved themselves capable of writing a proper pop song, even if it took them nearly two decades to figure it out.
Central Belters' third disc is given over to B-sides, EP deep cuts and outtakes, but compared to the carefully curated, crafty sequencing of the first two discs, it feels randomly cobbled together. And though it zig-zags between eras—encompassing everything from the elegiac Come On Die Young era castaway "Hugh Dallas" to the band's ragged 2008 collaboration with Roky Erickson, "Devil Rides" to a sampling of their Zidane and Les Revenants soundtracks—the overall tone is more dour and mournful. All but one of these tracks have been officially released (the exception being the loungey, laid-back instrumental "D to E"), so it's hardly some unearthed treasure trove that warrants a separate presentation. Integrating these tracks into the chronological greatest-hits sequence would've made for a more satisfying overview.
But then that would've meant dropping the disc three finale—the 2001 single "My Father My King"—halfway through the collection, and it's the sort of song that's nigh impossible to follow. A perennial Mogwai show closer, "My Father My King" is the band's wordless cover of the traditional Jewish prayer "Avinu Malkeinu", and it's biblical in every sense of the word, using the hymn's dual circular melodies to form a cyclonic 20-minute scorcher. It's the Mogwai song to end all Mogwai songs—and, really, the band never attempted anything as audacious, or brutally savage, from that point on. Its late-game appearance here reinforces Central Belters' raison d'etre: to trace the throughline between Mogwai's old and new testaments for lapsed fans and new converts alike. | 2015-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rock Action | October 9, 2015 | 8 | e496d8e6-9e67-44b5-aec7-e0bd2d8a28e0 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
After the comparatively bleak experimental club sounds of 2018’s Power, the Berlin-based Texan producer embraces the warmth and intimacy of slow-paced R&B, sounding newly at ease. | After the comparatively bleak experimental club sounds of 2018’s Power, the Berlin-based Texan producer embraces the warmth and intimacy of slow-paced R&B, sounding newly at ease. | Lotic: Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lotic-water/ | Water | Sometimes, when a person first starts living in their true identity, a modest weight begins to lift off their shoulders. For a few years afterward, they might still experience an ineffable but persistent mental pressure. Over time, though, that burden often fades, leaving behind a more complete, balanced person, one newly capable of experiencing all-encompassing joy. This transition from hiding one’s true self to fully showing it and then, after years of tumult, being—and loving—that self is what distinguishes Water, the Berlin-via-Houston producer J’Kerian Morgan’s lush, immersive sophomore album as Lotic, from her 2018 LP Power. On that album, she footed herself in unfailingly bleak tones on battering, largely instrumental songs about asserting her identity against the myriad forces attempting to quash it. For Water, she shifts to a fluid, gossamer sound and puts her unhurried falsetto at center stage. She sings about emotions that might seem ordinary to some but feel extraordinary to her—lust, longing, romantic disconnection—now that she’s finally properly experiencing them. She sounds newly at ease, and her self-assurance is thrilling to witness.
As its title suggests, Water—an album where the intimacy of slow-paced R&B unites with her past in experimental, abstract club music—gushes and flows rather than striking with sharp edges. The high-pitched synth squeals and stuttering undercurrent of centerpiece “Always You” are simultaneously propulsive and intimate—part cool jet stream, part warm rush. Beaming, jittery synths introduce “A Plea,” which grows from its enticingly pared-back initial arrangement into harps and rushing percussion. Both these elements could dominate or overwhelm other songs, but Morgan is careful to aerate her sound design. Her unobtrusive, transfixing touch evokes Vespertine, the microbeat-filled, seminal 2001 album from Björk, who Morgan counts as a collaborator and fan. The delicate flutes of “Come Unto Me” could likewise find a home on Björk’s most recent album, 2017’s Utopia.
“Come Unto Me” was the first song Morgan completed for Water; she has described it as “the moment i knew i was onto something.” It’s arguably the album’s apotheosis: Its flutes and tin-can percussion softly, playfully ricochet off one another, and the velvet sound amplifies Morgan’s breathy, high-pitched singing about entangling herself with another person. “Stroking your nape/Breathing you in/Making sure you'll/Never want to leave me,” she exhales as the music’s intertwined calm and clamor reflect the ins and outs of obsession. She often couples intense romantic and sexual feelings with sounds at once cooling and chaotic. As she reaches her highest register during the chorus of “Emergency,” flailing 16th notes and alternatingly thwacked and muffled percussion ensure that her cries of “Please fuck me!” sound gleeful rather than desperate. “It’s so hard to be apart,” she sighs on “Apart,” and the cricket-like synth chirps, astral arpeggios, and lethargic tempo transform this simple refrain into a deeply vulnerable confession.
“Apart” kicks off Water’s second half, which comprises slower, less pop-oriented experiments. These more intimate tracks find Morgan reckoning with the unwelcome aspects of romance: feeling unseen, loving someone more than they love her. The songs’ minimal palette aptly suits this introspection, facilitating a placating slow burn after the vivid, overflowing lust and passion of the album’s first half. The back half is the water that tames the front’s fire, and together, Morgan’s warm embraces and cooler thoughts attest to her full emotional breadth.
Morgan’s knack for sequencing is especially apparent in closing Water with “Diamond.” “Why do I allow all of this pressure?” she asks herself atop fairy-like harps and synths that sound both grumbling and victorious. Later, in an unusually low, placid tone, she murmurs, “This entanglement has expired/But I hope you know that this I admired,” during a passing moment of tranquility. Then the harps and synths return, and the track’s key question dissolves into a series of oohs and aahs. It sounds triumphant: After a transition from overwhelming feelings to less sanguine ones, Morgan emerges unburdened. In this state, she’s entirely ready to love and be loved. She’s fully herself.
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. | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | December 1, 2021 | 7.6 | e498cf7a-fd27-40d4-8e0a-88e926907a7f | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
Titled after the studio where the band rehearsed for a movie-soundtracking job, these purely instrumental pieces from 1986 offer another look at the Sonic Youth who had just recorded EVOL. | Titled after the studio where the band rehearsed for a movie-soundtracking job, these purely instrumental pieces from 1986 offer another look at the Sonic Youth who had just recorded EVOL. | Sonic Youth: Spinhead Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22272-spinhead-sessions/ | Spinhead Sessions | Most Sonic Youth fans know that the full band is unlikely to reunite. In recent years, those eager for new encounters with the group’s sound have made do with various members’ side projects and surprise guest appearances. (Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo even shared a stage at Dinosaur Jr’s 30th birthday bash.) Archived live shows and vinyl reissues of classic albums have trickled out of the band’s surviving merchandise machine. Though given how well Sonic Youth documented its prime-era productivity—with experimental EPs and imaginative collaborations showing up nearly as often as song-based albums—it’s reasonable to assume that the vaults aren’t stacked with unjustly overlooked material.
The gloomy state of this lowered-expectations game means that Spinhead Sessions prompts some moderate thrills. Titled after the studio where the band rehearsed for a movie-soundtracking job, these purely instrumental pieces from 1986 offer another look at musicians who had just recorded EVOL (and who were about to write Sister). At this point, they were so locked-in that they could prove compelling during practice time.
The music Sonic Youth contributed to 1987’s Made in USA was not released until 1995—that is, near the peak of the group’s major label-clout period (as well as that of the CD boom). That official soundtrack has never been mistaken for anything other than a collection of miniatures, few of which are given a chance to develop past the three-minute mark. Spinhead Sessions outdoes Made in USA merely by letting Sonic Youth be Sonic Youth. Freed from the need to provide concise film-music cues, they push a few of the spare themes created for a side-hustle gig into substantial workouts.
These performances are no less subtle for their matter-of-fact titles. “Ambient Guitar and Dreamy Theme,” the 16-minute opener, stirs nervy, tremolo guitar effects and a simple melodic line into a cauldron of dread in its first half. Eventually the atmosphere calms, thanks to some lightly strummed chords. “Theme With Noise” mixes some seductive slide-guitar playing into its miasma, and “High Mesa” builds from dreamy to cathartic, led by Steve Shelley’s gradually more forceful drumming. Overall, this half hour anticipates the tossed-off mastery of EPs the band would later issue through their SYR imprint.
That opening trio of cuts is the best this particular drawer in the vault has to offer. From there, Sessions tenders four shorter, less ambitious tracks. In terms of running time, this sequence pads the release out beyond EP length—though the material isn’t any more compelling than most stretches on Made in USA. Yet despite its clear status as a barrel-scraping effort, this album isn’t just for the most desperate fans. While it’s unavoidably casual in nature, the bulk of this set provides the pleasure of Sonic Youth during an era of good spirits and high creativity. | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Goofin’ | August 19, 2016 | 6.4 | e49e50f2-b57d-4970-a62a-21aca55c8bb9 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Once perennial underdogs and now Mercury Prize winners, Elbow release their first album as a commercial and not just critical force. | Once perennial underdogs and now Mercury Prize winners, Elbow release their first album as a commercial and not just critical force. | Elbow: Build a Rocket Boys! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15178-build-a-rocket-boys/ | Build a Rocket Boys! | Elbow had already been together for nearly a decade when their debut album, Asleep in the Back, dropped in 2001. Unhip even among the unhip bands vying to become the "next Radiohead," playing the underdog worked out well for Elbow-- both at the start and over the span of three critically acclaimed and modestly successful records. After 2008's The Seldom Seen Kid took home the Mercury Prize, Elbow earned platinum status in Britain. Even in the U.S., "Grounds for Divorce" and "One Day Like This" have shown up on TV (even if you were looking at George Clooney the whole time). So what happens now that more people have expectations of Elbow?
A good part of what makes Elbow so beloved is they've always felt impervious to either trends or expectations. Singer Guy Garvey even admitted recently his life isn't providing grist for his typical lyrical gloom. Instead, on Build a Rocket Boys!, the band finds itself camping out in its childhood hometown and reminiscing about days gone by. If that sounds like a return to much-beloved Asleep in the Back closer "Scattered Black & Whites" or Leaders of the Free World's "Station Approach", that's true thematically. The gorgeous "Lippy Kids" harkens back to the Talk Talk spirituals of their early work, but what's remarkable about it is the totality of its lyrical warmth. Garvey avoids lionizing a specific time period, instead offering an empathetic survey of the banality and confusion of childhood-- two features of it that you never seem to outgrow.
But sonically, Elbow continue down the narrow corridor they've established in recent years-- immaculately recorded and stripping away nearly every bit of ethereal studio magic. (It's hard to remember that they used to make records people could conceivably get high to.) It only sounds like rock music when they're going out of their way to announce it as such, as on stomping lead single "Neat Little Rows".
But more than ever, Elbow are hitching their fortunes to their lead singer, and with that, Rocket is by a large margin their quietest record to date, the closest thing to a Garvey solo album we've heard. That's in the quite literal sense: a rhythm section that could always be relied on for crucial texture and propulsion goes missing for large stretches of time. Still, putting Garvey's charmingly tattered burr at the center is a wise move; it's rangy, warm, and no longer making any bones about its resemblance to Peter Gabriel.
But there's a sneaky risk to it, since what has troubled Elbow from the beginning is that while Garvey is a phenomenal vocalist and wordsmith, the dots don't always connect to form memorable songs. That's particularly glaring during Build a Rocket's pokey midsection, which abates melodically and hangs on to Garvey's redolent lyrics for dear life. On the other side, for a band who's often held up to an alternative to Coldplay's more bombastic healing powers, Elbow's never met a gospel choir they didn't think could boost an anthem up to the rafters. But unlike the overblown "With Love", "Open Arms" rings true, a celebration that no one's beyond the convalescent power of the conditional love that one's family or hometown can offer.
"Open Arms" in particular makes the case that the missteps and borderline mawkish sentiments of Build a Rocket Boys! can be attributed to the degree of difficulty involved with making grown-up music about youth without resorting to smugness, sensationalism or pandering. It's no slight to say the record's distinguishing quality is the one Elbow has had since the beginning, an honest humanity that's imperfect but can be appreciated if you live with it. | 2011-03-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-03-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polydor / Fiction | March 18, 2011 | 6.9 | e49f157b-fee0-4e6b-80ee-310d7a369310 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Full of gleaming exteriors, the latest album from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart is essentially a solo outing from frontman Kip Berman, who was on the brink of fatherhood when he wrote it. | Full of gleaming exteriors, the latest album from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart is essentially a solo outing from frontman Kip Berman, who was on the brink of fatherhood when he wrote it. | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Echo of Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-pains-of-being-pure-at-heart-the-echo-of-pleasure/ | The Echo of Pleasure | A whole lot of life happened to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman in the run-up to his fourth LP, The Echo of Pleasure. He got married in 2014, shortly after the release of that year’s Days of Abandon. And much of Pleasure was recorded just at the onset of Berman’s wife’s third trimester, the point at which shit tends to get particularly real. From the initial rush to the all-too-familiar crash, the Pains have spent the better part of a decade charting the highs and lows of young love. But Berman, like many of us, isn’t quite so young anymore. What happens when all the love in your life is no longer as fleeting as a three-minute pop tune? Echo of Pleasure tries to get to the heart of the matter.
Helmed again by Days of Abandon producer Andy Savours, Echo of Pleasure is largely a Berman solo joint. As on Abandon, the great Jen Goma of A Sunny Day in Glasgow is Berman’s closest foil, providing the prismatic backing harmonies and taking another star turn at lead on glimmering late-LP highlight “So True.” The sound of Pleasure is a click or two lusher and more grandiose than the simple and sure hand Savours brought to Abandon. Berman and Savours weave twinkling keyboards and some surprisingly slippery drumwork into an iridescent, instantly familiar synth pop that trades the relative economy of Abandon for a decked out Sadie Hawkins dance dazzle. While a couple new wrinkles have emerged—“The Garret” rides a buckled groove that shares more than a little something with early R.E.M.—Pleasure largely drapes the rippling Johnny Marr-isms of Abandon in a bevy of Psychedelic Furs, a meticulous, bigger-ticket sound that pushes Berman ever further from the bedroom-born urgency of his earliest work.
Playing spot-the-influence here has lost some of the luster it’s had in the past. Berman’s not only swapped out his earlier, geekier forebears for more perennial favorites—less Bunnygrunt, more Bunnymen—but his songwriting has calcified to the point where, no matter how many keyboards he layers on, he mostly sounds like himself. In many ways, he’s a changed man on Pleasure: less concerned with the things he doesn’t have, more concerned with holding onto the things he does, or soon will. The ineffable combo of anxiety and joy that accompanies late-stage pregnancy is written directly into the DNA of these tunes.
Berman has never been one to telegraph his every move. Lyrically, he opts instead for a kind of emotional skywriting, drawing out feelings big enough to cover just about everybody. But these songs are devotionals, re-dedications to something larger than himself. Berman retains a flair for the dramatic—“I wanted to die with you” is a fairly typical chorus—but there’s a longview here that’s a very different look from the pie-eyed, gin-soaked kid chronicling all that young adult friction.
While each Pains album has seen a fairly seismic shift in sound—from the blush-of-youth urgency of their debut to the towering bubblegrunge of Belong—Berman’s way with melody hasn’t changed much. The guy’s always known just how to punch up a chorus, how to deck out an instrumental coda, the kind of songwriting nuts’n’bolts plenty of his peers never quite mastered. Pleasure lays the extended outros, glowing keyboards, and intricate background harmonies on fairly thick, but the song pretty much remains the same. Among all these gleaming exteriors, Berman occasionally loses something in the glare; overlong and sickly sweet, mid-LP trifle “When I Dance With You” is the record’s only real stinker. Pleasure’s onslaught of surface pleasures aren’t quite enough to fully rescue the title track from its laborious chorus, or to pull “The Cure for Death” from its warmed-over you-know-who worship.
Echo of Pleasure could be the last Pains LP; Berman wasn’t even sure he’d get this one in the can. If Abandon was the sound of a young man in flux, then Pleasure is the sound of settling. Maybe Berman’s got a mid-fatherhood return like Double Fantasy in him some years down the road, when his kid’s a little older, and they can look back at this album and be proud of what they made together. | 2017-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Painbow | September 7, 2017 | 6.8 | e4a42d6d-ea33-45d8-8ab0-0e0ec50bac6f | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
On an independently released 30-minute EP, Angel Marcloid slightly recalibrates her uber-maximalist sound to be both lighter and heavier at its extreme poles. | On an independently released 30-minute EP, Angel Marcloid slightly recalibrates her uber-maximalist sound to be both lighter and heavier at its extreme poles. | Fire-Toolz: I will not use the body’s eyes today. EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fire-toolz-i-will-not-use-the-bodys-eyes-today-ep/ | I will not use the body’s eyes today. EP | A casual stroll through the Fire-Toolz’s catalog can induce vertigo. Each song flirts with unabashed forays into disparate genres—extreme metal, IDM, jazz fusion—changing course before you can get a handle on exactly what is happening. Just as you begin to enjoy your newfound affinity for industrial screamo or what sounds like a melted Windham Hill LP played backwards (or both at the same time), producer Angel Marcloid flips the radio dial. It’s like that old saw: “If you don’t like a Fire-Toolz song, just wait five seconds.”
The secret is in these transgressions: Fire-Toolz’s blasphemous potion composed of glitchy breakcore mashed into airy new age synth sections, Marcloid howling underneath the profanity of a fretless bass guitar, decked in corpse paint and burning down a church designed by Lisa Frank. None of it should work, and yet Fire-Toolz has enjoyed a growing legion of fans and near-universal critical acclaim.
After 2021’s brilliant, expansive double album Eternal Home, it was difficult to imagine that Fire-Toolz had any room to grow, like Marcloid had engineered a sandbox-style video game and stuffed its world’s edges with crystalline pyramids and rainbow slime waterfalls. But instead of going bigger, on Fire-Toolz’s new, independently released EP, I will not use the body’s eyes today., Marcloid recalibrates the sound to be both lighter and heavier at its extreme poles.
The EP’s centerpiece is “Soda Lake With Game Genie,” which Marcloid has freely acknowledged is an outlier on the record. Opening with a twinkling piano and clean vocals that would slot in nicely in an early edition of NOW That’s What I Call Music, the song evolves into what sounds like Dystopia re-recording Gaucho. A soloing guitar echoing a shiny sax line seems ripped from the theme song of a mid-’90s WB sitcom. “To stretch out my soul like a fawn in the face of fear until I compress my tears into a heavenly waterfall,” Marcloid growls. That’s the vast expanse above Marcloid’s world, dripping with despair.
On “A Moon in the Morning,” we’re underground. Marcloid demonically screeches over a wave of ambient drone that smacks against a wall of harsh noise, about “the soft bed of infinity” and “the feeling of chewing on dirt.” But there’s hope and rebirth buried beneath. “Gardeners, pull up my weeds and feed them to me like embodiment would,” she invokes. “Create a high & rooted world.” Fire-Toolz is once again triumphant in Marcloid’s unusual contexts and stark dichotomies.
Though four of the EP’s seven tracks are instrumental, Marcloid mines deeper into the unholy instrument that is her voice. Locked into screamo mode on Eternal Home and previous Fire-Toolz releases, I will not use the body’s eyes today. sees Marcloid executing a speedrun through extreme metal. There's high-pitched, lo-fi USBM shrieks; guttural goregrind growls; and the glitchy, grating banshee screams of industrial metal, and that’s just on “Vedic Software ~ Wet Interfacing.”
A sequential imbalance is what holds Fire-Toolz back on I will not use the body’s eyes today, though, as the four instrumentals dilute the sheer power of the seven-track EP. “Air For Breakfast: She Is Safe & So Am I,” which begins as dreamy, cloud-floating techno and abruptly shifts to a nightmare of glitches and oozing drones, stands out. Elsewhere, Marcloid’s missing voice, masterfully utilized on the other three tracks, aches like a phantom limb. Still, within each instrumental are dozens of fantastic and strange micro-genre moments—a single strum of a shoegaze-y guitar that melts away or one measure of frenetic Agoraphobic Nosebleed double-bass—folded into tiny pockets and together forming, at the very least, lush and vivid soundscapes. Demanding repeat voyages, the EP is deep listening for those who believe in hidden worlds.
I will not use the body’s eyes today. never quite reaches the high bar set by its predecessor. As a standalone document, it’s a minor work by a major artist. But ingested holistically among the worlds Fire-Toolz has already constructed, it’s the promise of infinity at Marcloid’s fingertips. | 2022-10-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | October 12, 2022 | 6.8 | e4a5facb-6569-4402-bbeb-58febf85e102 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
The Dirty Three drummer and expansive guitarist collaborate on a freely improvised album that glows with ease. | The Dirty Three drummer and expansive guitarist collaborate on a freely improvised album that glows with ease. | Jim White / Marisa Anderson: The Quickening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-white-marisa-anderson-the-quickening/ | The Quickening | The Quickening opens with an ecstatic swirl of Jim White’s drums and Marisa Anderson’s electric guitar before the pair quickly settles into a trancelike rumble. They sustain this conversational euphoria over the following 10 improvised tracks, with nary a “solo” to be found, while homing in on each other’s frequencies. No matter where the pair travels on this unpredictable set, they do so in intimate dialogue. Anderson and White make for sympathetic collaborators, and their first album together glows with ease.
The Quickening shifts freely between moods and modes, but Anderson and White never sound like they are jamming aimlessly; each piece is a window opened onto a self-contained universe. On “Last Days,” Jim White lays out a lurching, ominous march rhythm while Anderson paints a blasted landscape. On “Diver,” Anderson coaxes an elegant bloom of drone into a conflagration of melody over White’s almost-invisible tom-tom accents and brushed cymbals.
For Anderson, the album represents a breakthrough. Over the years, she’s stretched her vocabulary from the spare blues-folk of her early work to 2018’s astounding Cloud Corner, which was filled with mountain ghosts, empty spaces, and occasional humming keyboards. Anderson contributed to Portland’s Evolutionary Jass Band for years, where her guitar and sitar were subsumed into the larger free ensemble. But The Quickening is unlike anything in her discography, and with it she uncovers a new landscape of possibilities.
Veteran Dirty Three percussion hero Jim White drums the way rain catches the surface as the rain shifts, except that White controls where every drop lands. Especially on the pair of nylon-string acoustic numbers (“The Lucky” and “The Quickening”), White’s powerful sense of flowing no-time works in elegant tandem with Anderson’s phrasing, joining to create a unified third voice that is neither exactly rhythmic nor melodic.
That third voice is the most ecstatic feature The Quickening has to offer. It is music as a frozen moment, a precarious combination of energies and ephemeralities and economies. To listen to any free improvised music is to hear another world, speaking its own spontaneous language. The Quickening comes from a place very nearby our own, now lost, but recoverable by listening.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Thrill Jockey | May 18, 2020 | 7.8 | e4c9628e-0f24-4ac6-a16b-2dccd3236869 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
On her second solo record, Gabrielle Herbst relishes pushing her voice to its limit. | On her second solo record, Gabrielle Herbst relishes pushing her voice to its limit. | GABI: Empty Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gabi-empty-me/ | Empty Me | On her second album as GABI, Gabrielle Herbst strains to linger on notes at the very upper edge of her range. Her soprano frays when she pushes it to its limits, but rather than treat that visceral wavering as a symptom of failure, she relishes it. While the New York singer’s debut, 2015’s Sympathy, treated the voice as a single element in an electroacoustic toolkit, its follow-up, Empty Me, distinguishes Herbst’s vocals for their fragility. Herbst is a skilled composer with classical training who chooses not to write vocal melodies that would showcase her voice’s power. She’s not interested in making it bend to her will. Instead, she busies herself in the space where the voice falters, where it’s in danger of breaking. She can showcase more vulnerability there and Empty Me, a more intimate work than Sympathy, thrives where it’s vulnerable.
Sympathy felt like a mannered exercise in finding common ground between offbeat electronic and contemporary classical music. Empty Me swings more pop: Its songs are shorter and more devotional, less focused on broad compositional experiments and more intrigued by the pop song's ability to excavate the delicate machinations of human affection. Any track on Empty Me sounds like it might shatter at a moment’s notice, and that’s the point—so could love between two people.
Slow, gentle arrangements carry Herbst’s voice through the record. Acoustic instruments, like flutes played by Laura Cox and viola by Jacob Falby, blur together with Steve Hauschildt’s synthesized contributions. Often, Herbst’s vocals serve as their own accompaniment: On “Lets Not Exist,” she layers wordless, breathy syllables that work like woodwinds beneath the main vocal track. “Boom Boom Kiki,” the album’s most alert and playful track, lets a vocal loop act as percussion. These confident, functional uses of voice contrast with the voice Herbst uses to sing her lyrics, which often spins out of orbit. She loses breath control on the words “couldn’t breathe” during “Sleep,” as if she needed to prove her desperation in the moment. On “Until the End,” her voice spikes high on the words “love you,” then fades to a whisper for much of the remaining lyrics, as though their importance paled in comparison, as though they were already being forgotten.
Most pop songs are sung as if they were documents of a moment long past, memories reignited and embellished for an audience. On Empty Me, Herbst sings as though the moments she’s capturing were slipping through her fingers in the present, as if she had to snare them with her voice to prove they were ever real. She treats dreams of weddings in a field of sunflowers (“Wild Sunflowers”) with the same breathlessness as instant infatuation with an unfamiliar face (“Falling for a Stranger”). It can be hard to linger long inside these songs because they sound ephemeral by design. They take the form of pop songs, but abandon the style’s blunt wallop—they don’t mean to catch in the ear and demand repeat listens.
Empty Me refuses to distill sensation into a lucid melody. It chases the difficulty of grasping fleeting emotions as they pass through the body. Love seems from the outside almost to be a formal impossibility. How can you be sure of your communion with another person when your deepest inner workings remain a mystery? It’s unthinkable, and it happens all the time. With its uncertainty, its wild faith, and its holes worn bare, Empty Me dares to imagine what a love song might sound like in the terrifying, honest moment. | 2018-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Double Double Whammy | October 13, 2018 | 7 | e4d5303a-c732-45e6-af18-7e84fb430358 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Mariah Carey's 13th album, Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse, comes on the heels of her most trying period since the infamous Glitter bomb of 13 years ago. The record seemingly acknowledges her increasingly murky future by looking back at loves and sounds of the past. | Mariah Carey's 13th album, Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse, comes on the heels of her most trying period since the infamous Glitter bomb of 13 years ago. The record seemingly acknowledges her increasingly murky future by looking back at loves and sounds of the past. | Mariah Carey: Me. I Am Mariah...the Elusive Chanteuse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19399-mariah-carey-me-i-am-mariahthe-elusive-chanteuse/ | Me. I Am Mariah...the Elusive Chanteuse | Every pop star must, at some point, confront career mortality. For some, the end comes suddenly and without warning, while others experience a slow, bewildering decline into mediocrity. After two decades of nearly uninterrupted chart dominance, one figures that Mariah Carey has spent some of the last year dwelling on the end of her reign. Her 13th album, Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse, comes on the heels of her most trying period since the infamous Glitter bomb of 13 years ago. The rollout for I Am Mariah kicked off in earnest almost two years ago with a single called "Triumphant (Get 'Em)", and three other singles followed—one of which, "The Art of Letting Go," has been relegated to bonus track status—with only the strummy, Miguel-powered "#Beautiful" climbing up the charts. But even that song peaked outside the top 10 of the Billboard's Hot 100, which is basically unheard of for a major single from a Mariah Carey album.
Yet, despite the circumstances, I Am Mariah is not an album that sounds desperate. It makes an argument for Mariah letting pop stardom come as it does— or doesn't—and the record seemingly acknowledges her increasingly murky future by looking back at loves and sounds of the past. She is not Jennifer Lopez or Madonna, leaving smudged fingerprints on the zeitgeist; I Am Mariah does not bend toward the whims of the radio. The album sounds exactly, defiantly like Mariah, acknowledging her place in the pop ecosystem both implicitly and explicitly without chomping at the bit.
The album was executive produced by Jermaine Dupri and Bryan-Michael Cox, a duo who helped jumpstart Mariah's career the first time it flagged. It was Dupri and Carey who wrote "We Belong Together", the impossibly huge smash that reestablished Mariah as a pop titan in 2005, the last time she risked fading away. Cox pitched in on "Shake It Off," the breezy summer follow-up that cemented that status. On I Am Mariah, the three of them circle back to the ethos of The Emancipation of Mimi—the album that held those songs—using classic, stately R&B as a sort of gold-threaded cocoon.
That's not to say that I Am Mariah is reductive; on the contrary, the record pares her sound down to its essence while simultaneously subtly expanding its parameters. Two tracks feature contributions by James "Big Jim" Wright—also a holdover from the Emancipation era—and those songs are ballads that weave the slurred organs of gospel into the album. "Cry." opens the record with Mariah's vocals suspended over a soft cloud of pianos; though she sings about angels' tears in typically dramatic fashion, the track highlights her ability to strike a vocal balance between restraint and power. "One More Try", a faithful and fantastic cover of the George Michael song, pushes the track from the mist of the '80s into the filtered sunlight of church, giving it a glow while still retaining its throbbing ache.
The Dupri and Cox cut "You Don't Know What to Do" is a straight up disco song with rippling guitars and strings that swoop down like birds. (As always, it's best to ignore Wale here.) The song recalls her untouchable roller-rink jams like "Heartbreaker" and "Fantasy" while also feeling like a logical extension of post-Pharrell disco revivalism. This trio of tracks are the implicit acknowledgement of her age: gospel and disco are traditionally genres where middle-aged women can thrive, and Mariah—a legendarily strong voice—fits in unsurprisingly well. There are a few tracks that don't work—"Heavenly (No Ways Tired/Can't Give Up Now)" hauls in an over-the-top choir, and the Q-Tip-produced "Meteorite" is a gloopy scoop of Cher schmaltz—but largely, the record finds Mariah easily settling into what could be her post-pop phase.
And yet, I Am Mariah is definitely not post-pop. The album's other major collaborator is the G.O.O.D. Music secret weapon Hit-Boy, who helms three of the album's strongest tracks. "Thirsty" is a bleepy take-off of "Niggas in Paris", but his style meshes well with Mariah's: she can carry a club track, obviously, but the chorus here is an ethereal puff that melts his signature icy minimalism. "Money ($ * / ..)" clips a greasy horn riff into a loop you could imagine hearing on today's pop radio, but Mariah floats over it gracefully. These tracks, along with the washed-out Mike WiLL Made It elegy "Faded," show that Mariah can still conversate with pop music, even if pop music doesn't talk back.
Still, the two best tracks on I Am Mariah make more explicit references to time passed. "Supernatural" features "Ms. Monroe & Mr. Moroccan Scott Cannon a.k.a Roc 'N Roe", which is Mariah's very theatrical way of saying "my kids". The ballad, a Dupri and Cox number, has a beat that approximates a baby's mobile and a constant stream of coos from the twins themselves. The backdrop puts her newfound motherhood to the forefront, as Mariah delivers the album's most heartfelt devotional and its most astonishing, acrobatic vocal performance.
The true highlight is the Hit-Boy-assisted "Dedicated", built on a loop of Inspectah Deck rapping "carry like Mariah" on "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'". The song opens with dialogue between Mariah and longtime rap executive Steve Stoute about nostalgia. She sings about a long-lost love—"I'll just sit right here and sing that good old school shit to ya"—before referencing Eric B. and the Wu and interpolating Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh. The song is wistful, with a streak of melancholy, but it's also upbeat, and has the glimmer of indulgent memory. "Oh, baby, you know," she sings, her voice falling like a feather. "All that love-making we did, boy, it was so real, I wanna feel that again." Surrounded by the chatter of old friends and older beats, she's rarely sounded as comfortable. | 2014-06-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | June 16, 2014 | 7.7 | e4d57906-00fd-42dc-8e6e-462369571361 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Newly reissued to include the storied demo sessions, Harry Nilsson’s soundtrack to Robert Altman’s 1980 film is a mind-meld of two artists, a mournful little under-appreciated classic. | Newly reissued to include the storied demo sessions, Harry Nilsson’s soundtrack to Robert Altman’s 1980 film is a mind-meld of two artists, a mournful little under-appreciated classic. | Harry Nilsson: Popeye: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harry-nilsson-popeye-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Popeye: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | In the 1970s, Robert Evans seemed invincible. The studio impresario had ushered Chinatown, The Godfather, and Rosemary’s Baby into existence, changing what counted as a major studio film and shifting the culture of Hollywood in the process. He had conquered art; he had conquered commerce. But then he dreamed of a live-action Popeye musical and he discovered he could not conquer Robert Altman.
Altman was in the middle of a widely acknowledged slump when he took up Evans’ invitation to direct Popeye. It had been a few years and a few flops since Nashville, but he didn’t approach the project meekly. First, he flew everyone—cast, crew, and an orchestra of musicians—to the island of Malta to build an entire small town, which would serve as the set. He filled this money pit with a very Altman-esque menagerie of characters: Half the dialogue was obscured by someone else talking, an Altman quirk that Evans probably wished he would tone down for the multiplexes. And then there was Robin Williams, in his first studio picture, looking like a community-theater Quasimodo, mumbling malapropisms with one eye closed and half his mouth shut.
Oh, and Harry Nilsson was hired to write the tunes.
By 1980, Nilsson’s career was similar to Altman’s: a brilliant and once-promising voice floundering in a new decade. When Nilsson was tapped to write the score for the Popeye film, he was nine years away from his Grammy-winning triumph Nilsson Schmilsson and at least six years into an uninterrupted self-destructive slide: He had already burned out his voice screaming drunkenly into a microphone with John Lennon for the 1974 album Pussy Cats and recorded a series of slipshod albums that hit his sterling reputation like a series of hocked loogies. In the eyes of the music industry, he was a great talent gone to seed, and Evans and Altman were warned multiple times against giving him gainful employment.
What’s remarkable in revisiting the soundtrack, reissued with Nilsson’s own demos, is just what a mind-meld Nilsson and Altman had at this moment, in this mournful little under-appreciated classic. They were spiritual cousins, drawn to the sort of lives that were looked on with pity and bewilderment by others—Altman with his succession of frustrated, squinty-eyed antiheroes, and Nilsson with the befuddled souls in his songs, the people who used to “dance until a quarter to ten” but now sat seething in their cars during deadening morning commutes.
The soundtrack Nilsson wrote for Popeye is a mangy patchwork, and like the film, it begs to be underestimated. Many of the songs play out like napkins with the titles written on them, the lyrics meant to be filled in later, and some of them feel like echoes from Nilsson’s more illustrious past: “Sweethaven” sounds quite a bit like a rewriting of “Everything’s Got ‘Em” from his 1971 concept album The Point!, which also memorializes a quaint town trapped in amber. They are ditties more than songs, full of small phrases that rattle around maddeningly—”Everything is food, food, food,” chants the chorus of “Everything is Food,” until the words lose meaning, while Bluto song “I’m Mean” doesn’t really go beyond the title.
And yet, taken together with the film, they are slyly perfect. The souls of Sweethaven are beaten down by the forces governing them, small-minded and bickering and fearful, and the production design, by Wolf Kroeger, turned the town into a sprawling tapestry where everything is filmed at a picture-book distance. Nilsson’s albums also teemed with whimsical creatures that all happened to be him, a chorus of backing vocals that chattered and “do-wacka-do’ed,” and the Popeye songs feel written for characters that behave more like cawing penny-arcade machines than humans: In an early dinner scene, when Popeye arrives at the Oyls’ house, Olive’s father demands “you owe me an apology” six times in three minutes.
The repetitions in the movie and in the songs underline the characters’ sense of limited horizons and options. Preparing glumly for her engagement party to the hirsute bully Bluto, Olive Oyl hunches despondent in a nightie while her friends giggle around her, reluctantly ticking off the good qualities of her husband-to-be in the song “He’s Large.” What she comes up with: “He’s large….tall…large…and he’s mine.” That’s all she’s got, so that’s pretty much all she sings.
Nilsson loved a good, dark joke, and the movie is full of them. There’s another throwaway moment in an early scene when Altman makes slapstick out of a drunkard’s delirium tremens as he tries to down a shot of brown stuff first thing in the morning. It’s bracingly dark and it also feels like pure Nilsson, who wore the shabby cheer of the career alcoholic lightly and well. The lowered expectations and disappointment suited him, somehow. Maybe they reminded him of something close-minded in humanity, or reinforced his sense of solidarity with the middle people, the sorts who expected to be disappointed by life without quite knowing how to bear it.
The heart and soul of both the movie and soundtrack is “He Needs Me,” a mooning song that latched onto the brain of Paul Thomas Anderson, who included it in 2002 Punch Drunk Love, another movie about lonely, stumbling adults. The song is deceptively simple, sending a lazy melody staggering up a chromatic scale, tangling its feet dreamily on the 4/4 rhythm. It’s a simple whistled tune, a song you could play with one hand on the piano, but it never quite lands on the beat in the same way twice. In her iconic performance, Shelley Duvall does a loose-limbed, silent-film comedian dance, nearly tripping over her big cartoon boots and barely scraping the underside of the high notes as she twirls—it is a kind of underlings’ transcendence, performed beneath moonlight with no one to snicker at it.
”This is page 97, Bob, when Popeye and Olive fall in love,” Nilsson explains over a drum machine on the demos, included here in their first official release (they’ve been passed around by Nilsson fanatics for years). His voice is ragged, still pockmarked from his ruptured vocal cord, and a lot of the notes are hollowed out from his once-golden instrument. But they are an intimate glance into the cathedral of his songwriting mind at a time when people had begun treating him like a condemned building. He calls out instructions to Van Dyke Parks, who is helping with the instrumentation. There are two versions of “He Needs Me” on the demo disc, one by Nilsson and one by Duvall, who sounds nervous in the booth. “Good,” Nilsson chuckles fondly to her as she reaches, uncertain, for the first high note. Over nine minutes, she finds her way around the melody, while Nilsson guides her breathing and comes in behind her. It is a fascinating, alternate-universe peek into Nilsson as a Svengali producer, the kind of role Richard Perry played for him on Nilsson Schmilsson.
There are also a few songs the second disc that didn’t make the final cut of the film: “Everybody’s Got To Eat,” a rueful song for the character Wimpy, sung by the actor Paul Dooley who played him. And “Din We,” a languorous ballad with bruise-ripe Nelson Riddle-style strings. They are eloquent testaments to the enormity of Nilsson’s talent and gift, even as he seemed to be actively smothering it with his own albums. Perhaps Altman brought it out of him. The strange, divisive cult classic they made remains a paean to the stubborn power of sheer waywardness: Whistle your own tune loudly enough, and you might derail the ambitions of a titan. | 2017-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Varese Saraband | September 4, 2017 | 8 | e4dc834c-acab-471c-be6b-8dd7e2da6c9b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Tacocat's third album loses some of the brightness that helped make their pointed cultural critiques sound so impossibly fun. | Tacocat's third album loses some of the brightness that helped make their pointed cultural critiques sound so impossibly fun. | Tacocat: Lost Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21594-lost-time/ | Lost Time | The third album by Tacocat starts with a clean garage-rock tribute to discerning "X-Files" lead "Dana Katherine Scully." It's typical for the Seattle four-piece, who mix songs about their love of pop culture—they just did the theme to the "Powerpuff Girls" reboot—with tirades about periods, pervs, and the patriarchy. Released in 2014, Tacocat's NVM riffed on IM slang for "never mind," a reference to the city's most famous sons, and essentially mocked how far we'd veered from Kurt Cobain's future-female ideals. Its vibrant spirit ran on the kind of energy you'd only otherwise get from chugging a giant sports drink before egging someone's house.
Lost Time (another "X-Files" reference) delves into some of the same subject matter. "FDP" is an SOS from the first day of lead singer Emily Nokes' period, "Plan A, Plan B" mocks the wrongheaded GOP idea that women use the morning-after pill as contraceptive, and "Talk" sounds a little like fellow Pacific Northwester Laura Veirs reincarnated as a frustrated millennial, wishing she and her friends would ditch their iPhones for living room dance parties. "Men Explain Things to Me" takes its name from the Rebecca Solnit essay that popularized the term "mansplaining." "Though I know all about the words you're spitting out, the floor is yours without a doubt," Nokes sings, her typically sharp tongue cutting some blowhard down to size.
They also widen the net, in terms of inspiration. "I Love Seattle" references "The Really Big One," a New Yorker article about the earthquake that will destroy much of the coastal Northwest. There's nowhere else they'd rather be, but admit, "at least no-one's pretending like that would even be bad." The highlight of Lost Time is "I Hate the Weekend," which explains their ambivalence about Seattle falling into the Pacific. In a melody Jenny Lewis wouldn't be ashamed to stick on her recent records, Nokes paints an incisive portrait of how tech bros haven't just whitewashed the city's thriving culture ("paint the rainbow shades of beige"), but terrorize the streets when they "cut loose" at weekends. "Got a hall pass from your job just to act like a fucking slob," they sing, filled with catchy disdain.
And that kind of fire is what Lost Time sorely needs more of. There's no question that many of Lost Time's lyrics are funny, but the attitude that fueled NVM feels crushed. In both the vocal delivery and the driving guitars, the vibe is damper, the color somewhat drained. Sometimes the fruit hangs a little low: "The Internet" is a straight-strummer about trolls. With that in mind, it's unsurprising that the peppier songs here are the ones about the things you do for pleasure and pleasure alone. Lost Time's most inventive song, "Horse Grrls," is a fully enthused stop-start shredder about equestrian obsessives: "They know the different breeds of all their favorite steeds!" And "Night Swimming," too, is lovely—a splashy, beatific jam about breaking into a lake at night, where the only rule is, "You can bring a boombox, but you can't play R.E.M." The final song, "Leisure Bees," is ambitious and engaging, shifting between Beach Boys-indebted harmonies, girl-group coos, and shaggy nostalgic jams.
It makes sense that the record starts with an ode to Scully, whose artful eye-rolls have become the internet's go-to meme in the face of the men who plague your @-replies. Tacocat have always approached feminism from a point of fun rather than anger, but inevitably, when bros keep bro-ing and your city's falling apart, and nothing ever seems to change, it's gonna get hard to see the funny side. It feels like perpetuating all that bullshit to even call them on it: U**gh, I can't believe you can no longer laugh at these things for my entertainment. They sound as weary as anyone would. | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | April 8, 2016 | 6.1 | e4de61d8-0f71-4832-ac5d-d5126f87f08b | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On the deluxe version of its debut full-length, the trio struggles to find a middle ground between treacly verses and the bubbly pop-rap they’re known for. | On the deluxe version of its debut full-length, the trio struggles to find a middle ground between treacly verses and the bubbly pop-rap they’re known for. | grouptherapy.: The ADDENDUM - i was mature for my age, but i was still a child | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grouptherapy-the-addendum-i-was-mature-for-my-age-but-i-was-still-a-child/ | The ADDENDUM - i was mature for my age, but i was still a child | California trio grouptherapy. is a product of a particular model of young stardom. Growing up, Tyrel J. “TJOnline” Williams and Coy “SWIM” Stewart appeared on every network and streaming service, from Disney Channel to Nickelodeon to Netflix. Around the same time, Jadagrace featured in 2009’s Terminator: Salvation, had her own TV show, and signed a major-label record deal, all before she started high school. In another era, they might’ve been forced into an ensemble by executives looking to milk the cable-TV-to-pop-star pipeline that birthed Miley Cyrus or Zendaya. Instead, the self-described artist collective first became friends on the audition circuit as kids, bonding over a love for music that pushed them away from the unforgiving and dangerous world of child acting (not that the music industry is much better). grouptherapy. began as three Black misfits making music for themselves and now they’re bringing their genre-straddling music to the world on their terms. There’s a wide-eyed fascination with every sound they dabble in; they sound like giddy theater kids after their first experience with a Tyler, the Creator or BROCKHAMPTON album.
That isn’t to say grouptherapy.’s members are lacking in skill. Their flows are malleable and energetic, but even their best songs have a summer-camp-talent-show quality to them. Take “American Psycho,” the second track on their debut album i was mature for my age, but i was still a child. Over reverb-drenched guitars and Jada’s background growls, TJ and SWIM vent about mental health issues, the corrupting power of money, and being bullied for being Black and queer. What’s supposed to be honest and raw instead feels overly earnest and chintzy. TJ’s verse in particular sounds like a rejected draft from the Saturation III sessions: “I hate niggas ’cause the niggas hate me right on back/I hate hoes ’cause they never wanna see me relax/And it’s not a ho in the sense of having a pussy/But tryna pull the pussy outta me, tryna challenge me.” mature, and its deluxe edition THE ADDENDUM, struggle to find a middle ground between treacly writing and the bubbly pop-rap they’ve made their name on.
The most notable change from earlier projects is a more expansive ear for beats. Both 2020’s there goes the neighborhood and 2022’s Truth Be Told had more uniform production aesthetics, but mature speeds through so many different styles of rap, it often feels overwhelming. Looking for bars over melancholy piano, cribbed straight from the Saba playbook? “smiles :)” has you covered. What about pastiches of Beyoncé’s “PURE/HONEY” or the deadpan hilarity of Rio Da Yung OG-style Michigan street rap? Try “Lightspeed ~>” or TJ’s closing verse on “Nasty.” There are attempts at drum’n’bass (“HOT!”), boom-bap (“Help Pt. 2”), and pluggnB (“GT.”), which strain to illustrate grouptherapy.’s versatility. It’s all serviceable, polished, and competently performed, but it often doesn’t stick; the stuff that does just leaves you wanting more of the trio’s eccentricities, as opposed to what’s currently on their playlist. Outside of critiques of consumer culture that frequently veer toward the contradictory (stating that the impulse to flex “isn’t healthy” on “Help Pt. 1” before claiming to speak “billion-dollar banter” two tracks later on “FUNKFEST”), there’s little that’s refreshing here. We’re left with formless variety, ideas with no spine fusing them together.
Still, grouptherapy.’s enthusiasm can be infectious from time to time, especially on the songs where they cut loose and just bar out. The peppy sing-raps on “thatsmycheck.” and the Memphis crunk-style chants that power the hook for “DYSBF!” help their respective songs crackle and pop (Jada’s fiery verse on “thatsmycheck.” is also one of the funniest and most amped on the album.) This energy goes further on ADDENDUM’s seven extra songs, which are generally less self-serious. Tracks like “Home Alone” and “thank u so much” are breezy and effortless, the trio’s personalities popping as they trade jokes and off-kilter flexes about not having taken the SATs. These details are way more endearing than moments like “still alive,” which sullies the delicate immersion into the group’s backstories with plodding keyboards and vocal harmonies that even Chance the Rapper would find too syrupy. grouptherapy.’s current sound isn’t sprawling in an Odd Future or Tierra Whack sense; it’s just unwieldy. With some more work, they could one day find themselves on similarly hallowed ground as their various influences. For now, they still have some growing up to do. | 2024-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 20, 2024 | 5.8 | e4e1784e-1b57-4e51-830f-9ce190413f66 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Florida rapper’s latest project is uneven and less measured than he’s been in the past. The moments of transparency are overshadowed by disingenuous storytelling and colorless punch lines. | The Florida rapper’s latest project is uneven and less measured than he’s been in the past. The moments of transparency are overshadowed by disingenuous storytelling and colorless punch lines. | Kodak Black: Project Baby 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kodak-black-project-baby-2/ | Project Baby 2 | Since Kodak Black emerged as a prodigious talent at the front of the new rap class, it’s been clear the only thing that could derail his run would be violence. That has largely held true: For every platinum hit or Top 5 charting album, there’s been a corresponding arrest and prison stint, all overshadowed by a felony charge of sexual battery. The pall cast by these charges (and sometimes petty misbehavior) hangs over each new Kodak release. He was in prison when Lil B.I.G. Pac came out, and a probation violation postponed his tour earlier this year. But these crimes haven’t stifled the momentum of the 20-year-old rapper, who, despite controversy, is more popular than ever. He is an introspective MC who dwells on personal tragedies, and his music delves deep into miscreancy, the kinds for which he stands accused or convicted of committing.
His latest mixtape, Project Baby 2, is less measured than he’s been in the past and plays against his strengths. The project is an uneven collection of love songs and self-gratifying ego-boosters that seek to depict a troubled romantic and workhorse snared by street life. But he comes off as disingenuous on a bloated release of limp ballads and his most colorless punch lines.
So much of Kodak’s most evocative writing requires a cold self-analysis and wise-for-his-age world-weariness, but here he only turns his piercing gaze toward those he believes have wronged him, and walls himself off to avoid any maturation in the process. “Everybody tellin’ me I need to change/But then y’all gon’ complain when a nigga change/Bossed up you sayin’ lately he ain’t been the same/Fuck it y’all just wanna hate me anyways,” he raps on “Unexplainable.” The mixtape paints a portrait of an obstinate youngster unwilling to really be held accountable for his actions. Which is especially troubling considering not just his many ongoing run-ins with the law but his tiresome, outspoken homophobia and all-around unrelenting insensitiveness. In his world, he’s the victim: No one is worthy of his trust, while he’s merely misunderstood.
There are always conversations about separating the art from the artist with releases like this, the idea being that art exists free from the restrictions of its creator. But how much separation can there be when Kodak enlists fellow alleged abuser XXXtentacion for “Roll in Peace,” and X proceeds to rap, “Last time I wifed a bitch she told the world I beat her, huh/When they locked Lil Kodak up, my nigga I couldn’t believe it, huh.” These two aren’t just unapologetic, they’re apathetic. And it’s hard to listen to Kodak—who's accused of punching a female bartender and committing acts of sexual violence—rap something like, “Shawty love for me to choke her when I’m in that pussy” or “I can’t be killing bitches, getting blood on my Givenchys,” or “Now she give me head whenever I knock her head off.” These moments are cringe-worthy and disturbing. There is cognitive dissonance, in this case particularly, in enjoying such flagrant showings of sadistic misogyny.
Even putting aside these tone-deaf bits, Project Baby 2 is the most inconsistent Kodak project since he first broke out with “No Flockin.” Nineteen tracks spread the good bars too thin, and his storytelling and scene-setting have regressed, particularly on “Built My Legacy” and “You Do That Shit.” Punches come less often and carry less weight. More off-brand cuts like “First Love” and “Need a Break” expose the most grating aspects of his squawking drawl, which can become a yowl when he pushes the limits of his singing voice.
But at his best, Kodak can be a disarming orator and there are flashes of this transparency on Project Baby 2. “I be too quick reachin’ out for my gun/I hope my son don’t turn out to be a thug/I know that gangster shit run in his blood,” he raps on “Change My Ways,” later adding, “I need to change my surroundings/I’m tryna be a little calmer/I can’t go back to the bottom.” These hopes for a better present for himself and future for his son are raw and gripping. Then there the songs that deliver snapshots of the things that make him a versatile performer. The ghostly “Don’t Wanna Breathe” is intoxicating, slurred take on a star-crossed romance. His heaving cadences propel syllables into downbeats on “Up Late.” But his clearest moment of self-awareness comes on standout “Misunderstood”: “Did so much dirt I wonder how I still be gettin’ any blessings.” This contradiction stands at the core of the conflict in listening to him. | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | August 29, 2017 | 6 | e4e62cae-f82a-4de9-8d99-bbf5464a89a7 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Taking influence from the rock music of the early 1980s, the experimental guitarist settles into the role of a traditional frontman on a sharp, guest-heavy new record. | Taking influence from the rock music of the early 1980s, the experimental guitarist settles into the role of a traditional frontman on a sharp, guest-heavy new record. | Chris Forsyth: Evolution Here We Come | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-forsyth-evolution-here-we-come/ | Evolution Here We Come | Like John Cale before him, guitarist and composer Chris Forsyth has evolved along a multifaceted trajectory, expanding his toolkit with each new record. Where his earlier albums relied on intricate, almost hallucinatory, instrumental explorations, 2019’s All Time Present redirected his electric improvisations into a more structured song-based format. All Time Present encapsulated Forsyth’s love for straightforward rock’n’roll, the logical continuation of his career-long journey from the noise folk of Peeesseye, through the technical art rock of his Solar Motel band, toward a new solo sound that felt equally at home in the studio or on stage.
On his latest album, Evolution Here We Come, Forsyth dials in his unique fusion of tightly constructed instrumental rock and the avant-garde. If All Time Present leaned on the swirling sounds of late 1960s and early ’70s psychedelia, Evolution Here We Come embraces the solid state distortion and lightly phased effects of the early ’80s. For these seven sharp, efficient tracks, Forsyth enlisted a band equipped to complement his vision: Tortoise’s Doug McCombs introduces the record with a pillowy, thumping bassline that’s quickly recontextualized by drummer Ryan Jewell. Sun Ra disciple and Philadelphia experimental music veteran Marshall Allen also appears, floating over the fray with electronic fragments reminiscent of his mentor’s Minimoog improvisations.
Co-produced by Darkside’s Dave Harrington, the album embraces an immersive, underwater sound that stands out in Forsyth’s catalog. His belief in the endless possibilities of his primary instrument remains consistent, and here, he collaborates with several guitarists who help expand his repertoire. Alongside Garcia Peoples’ Tom Malach, Bill Nace contributes a sizzling and buzzing accompaniment (listed in the credits as “Metal Machine Tashigoto”) on “Experimental & Professional,” while Nick Millevoi plays lap steel on a standout cover of Richard Thompson’s “You’re Going to Need Somebody.” Both guest performances feel like abstractions of Forsyth’s style on guitar, respectively tapping into the instrument’s noisier potential and its quieter, pastoral ambience.
The most daring appearance on the record, however, is Forsyth’s own turn as a frontman. On “You’re Going to Need Somebody,” he stands squarely and proudly in front of the microphone. Accompanied by husband-and-wife vocalists Steve Wynn and Linda Pitmon, he summons ghosts of early ’80s Lou Reed or Tom Verlaine, artists whose work he has always been better at conjuring through his instrumental performances. Swapping their detached sneers for a warm, heartfelt tone, he gives his strongest vocal performance to date. As Forsyth ventures into new territory, he’s found a way to bring his influences along for the ride. | 2022-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | No Quarter | August 29, 2022 | 7.3 | e4f1baa6-4ba0-4eb0-859a-f55937c5698f | Maria Barrios | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maria-barrios/ | |
The Mexican duo’s first album in five years applies their customary virtuoso fusion of classical guitar and contemporary rock to six short originals and a 19-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.” | The Mexican duo’s first album in five years applies their customary virtuoso fusion of classical guitar and contemporary rock to six short originals and a 19-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes.” | Rodrigo y Gabriela: Mettavolution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-mettavolution/ | Mettavolution | The story of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s big break almost sounds made up. In 2006, a year in which “thrash metal / instrumental flamenco / acoustic covers” was something you might actually have seen on the MySpace page of a band trying to steal a second glance with facetious tags, the duo emerged delivering a genuine fusion of all those things with dead-serious eyes and the bona fides to back it up. Their self-titled second studio album from that year—complete with covers of Metallica and Led Zeppelin standards—debuted at No. 1 in Ireland, where they’d been living, busking, and refining their two-classical-guitar m.o. after several years stalling out in Mexico’s metal scene. The names below them on that week’s top ten were certainly no jokes: Kelly Clarkson, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, Gorillaz, Johnny Cash.
As they began playing increasingly big stages—all the way up the White House—Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero remained loyal to the equation that helped get them there. Their albums have followed concepts—dedicating each song on 11:11 to one of their musical influences; doing the same for late historical figures on 9 Dead Alive; making a band-backed album with Area 52—but it’s a safe bet that they’ll never abandon their audience by, say, banishing classical guitars, or discontinuing the tributes. Mettavolution, which devotes its second half to a movement-for-movement cover of Pink Floyd’s 24-minute epic “Echoes,” is their first new album in five years and a humble addition to the one-of-a-kind house that they’ve kept for over 10 years.
The most glaring downside to their approach here is that there’s simply not that much original material, especially for the duo’s first release since 2014. With six shorter songs leading up to the Floyd finale, it feels more like an EP with a jackpot of a bonus track—not least of all because each half contrasts so starkly with the other. The first grits its teeth and charges forward: The crunching “Terracentric” and the blurrily agile lines on “Witness Tree” move like hand-cranked cars on a slotted track, wound up by Sanchez and Quintero’s extremely athletic wrists and then turned loose. The dance break “Cumbé” and its slower-breathing follower “Electric Soul” simmer down a bit and lay out their chemistry more simply, to warmer and more pleasant effect, but the dominant energy in part one is fast, heavy, and relentlessly precise.
“Echoes,” meanwhile, re-examines the original with a magnifying glass on texture. While Floyd had a bigger, more amplified setup from which to survey outer space, Rodrigo y Gabriela cleverly and resourcefully get small. Two-thirds of the way through the song (which, on Floyd’s Meddle, also occupied the second half of the album), it rests, suspended. For about two minutes here, Sanchez and Quintero offer some of their most impressive musicianship on the whole record: anti-shredding, actively resisting their signature instincts and thoroughly clearing the air. You can hear every tiny sound they make, down to the friction from each contour of their fingertips as they lightly skim up and down the nylon strings.
Very few groups could pull off a single cover song for 50 percent of an LP without seeming at least a little creatively complacent. But for Rodrigo y Gabriela, interpretation is a founding virtue. In fact, it has always comprised about half of their process—whether in playing covers, honoring another artist’s body of work, or just filtering one generations-old style of music through the language of another. Mettavolution reassures that for as long as they’re around, Rodrigo y Gabriela will be echoing their influences as only they can. | 2019-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | ATO | May 2, 2019 | 7.1 | e4f33e97-4167-4036-9bd4-1ed6c655ba8a | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Melina Duterte is a San Francisco musician who performs as Jay Som. She plays every instrument on her album Turn Into, a kaleidoscopic collection of dream pop touching on multiple moods. | Melina Duterte is a San Francisco musician who performs as Jay Som. She plays every instrument on her album Turn Into, a kaleidoscopic collection of dream pop touching on multiple moods. | Jay Som: Turn Into | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22532-turn-into/ | Turn Into | 2016 has been a surreal and absurd year for most, but what a whirlwind it must have been for Melina Duterte. The San Francisco musician who performs as Jay Som (a moniker meaning “Victory Moon” and pulled from a baby name generator a la Childish Gambino) toured with Mitski and Japanese Breakfast, released a 7” on Fat Possum, opened for Peter Bjorn and John, signed to Polyvinyl, and has been working on a debut LP. This flurry of activity is largely the result of a tipsy decision made on Thanksgiving 2015, when Duterte spontaneously dropped a nine-track collection of “unfinished and finished songs” onto Bandcamp under the name Untitled. “It was completely unplanned,” Duterte told Rookie. “I didn’t even think about the track listing or the album artwork or the order of songs. I have a ton of these songs, and from them I picked nine.”
That these tracks, later retitled as Turn Into, are technically demos is essential to understanding why the collection has been re-released twice, first by Top Shelf and later by Polyvinyl. Each track is a deeply polished offering that reflects Duterte’s past musical experience and forecasts her promising future. She grew up playing the trumpet and planned to attend a conservatory program after high school to pursue her love of jazz. Instead, after realizing that she wanted to continue songwriting, she enrolled at community college to study music production and recording. She turned her bedroom into a studio, even removing the bed to install a drum set and puttered around with the tracks that would become Turn Into. She plays every instrument on the album, a feat that may remind some of Alex G’s home recordings, in addition to mixing and mastering.
Turn Into kicks off with “Peach Boy,” a kaleidoscopic dream-pop number featuring lush vocals and elastic wah-wah guitar effects (appropriately, considering Duterte’s history, early wah pedals were called “Clyde McCoy”s after the jazz trumpeter). Clouds move in for “Ghost” and the daydreaming melodies turn gloomy as Duterte confronts her fears. “Being scared is a huge theme of the album,” Duterte told San Francisco’s KQED, and even its most upbeat, these songs contain undercurrents of anxiety. There are moments on the album where you can feel her audibly pushing against these restraints, like on “Next to Me,” when she calls out “I’m waiting too long I’ve had it I want to scream/And fuck being patient I’m fragile I’m not weak” before disappearing back into the squall.
Turn Into clouds into melancholy during its middle third. “Drown” resembles My Bloody Valentine at their most mellow or Mazzy Star at their murkiest. “Our Red Door” and “Unlimited Touch” feature woozy, extended instrumental swirls that invite you to drift with them. “Why I Say No” and “SLOW” wend slowly back into warmer territory before pale sunlight of the title track pokes through. The slinky guitars and wistful vocals recall Death Cab’s “Your Heart Is an Empty Room,” and confirms that Jay Som is a multifaceted project, capable of painting in multiple shades. | 2016-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | December 23, 2016 | 8.2 | e4f808d4-d686-4865-98da-379d327c63a3 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
In the fourth volume of a proposed 12-part suite, the saxophonist fuses free jazz and folk spirituals into an ecstatic confrontation with American history at its darkest. | In the fourth volume of a proposed 12-part suite, the saxophonist fuses free jazz and folk spirituals into an ecstatic confrontation with American history at its darkest. | Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matana-roberts-coin-coin-chapter-four-memphis/ | Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis | Time has no steady rhythm, despite what a clock insists. Matana Roberts, who might agree, saw how the tempo of history seemed to move irregularly through both her own memory and the national one: how choice points seemed to speed up, wane, cut, coda, and hold; how nostalgia coddled, unsettled, blurred, and muzzled moments. “The past: It sits there,” she said in a 2016 interview, pausing to savor a delicious silence, “but it moves.”
Roberts is one of those artists permanently disturbed by the wing of a single, broad muse—here the muse being America, boiled in its own blood, disquiet, mettle, and hate. Her self-appointed task across a projected 12-part album suite of what can unsatisfyingly be bucketed as free-jazz (but in reality is more like historical fiction accompanied by a loud bouquet of horns, ouds, and vibraphones) is akin to what essayist Elizabeth Hardwick selects as her lodestar on the first page of her best, wooziest, and final work, Sleepless Nights. “This is what I have decided to do with my life,” she writes. “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life.” Like Hardwick, Roberts has a firm sense of purpose and a fabulist’s impulse, beginning with a vision of the past—on this album, memories of a young woman whose parents were killed by the Klan, a story loaned to her by her Memphis-born grandmother—and using it as kindling to cannon a hailstorm of paean and shrapnel.
History, as it often does, crashes in with savagery. Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis is like the other three extant Coin Coins inasmuch as it’s marked by a tumbling of psychic and cosmic ephemera, allowing free improv, folk spirituals, and guttural yawps from throat and sax to mimic the beatitude of a woman’s disguises, passions, and dignity against the thrashings of circumstance. This effort, however, feels firmer, and more fulgid. In this sharper focus, Roberts’ subtractions have an additive effect: Whereas Coin Coin Chapters One, Two, and Three approach women as platforms by which to explode outward into sound, Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis focuses more tightly on myth-making by channeling the protagonist in a broadly narrative form. We learn of her father, of her grandmother, of her prayers for safety, and watch Roberts narrate as a vessel for her spiritspeak.
Both the pieces that utilize her voice—which is most satisfying in a tranced-out, babble-as-hymnal mode—and those that are voiceless somehow summon the sensation that she and her band have swallowed their instruments so as to transcend them. Roberts’ saxophone in the prologue, “Jewels of the Sky: Inscription”—which capitalizes on the horn’s capacity to blare like what one imagines the sun might sound like if it were played (low, eruptive, juicy)—is divine noodling, astral magma. The epilogue, “How Bright They Shine,” ends on deep, reedy emissions like dispatches from a satellite stuck in time and orbit.
Space feels grounded in Roberts’ work, though. Mirages of Chicago’s free-jazz heroes—of which Roberts is now resolutely one—mist through inescapably, but so does the city of Memphis. To call upon Memphis as a signifier of place and time is a choice that irresistibly forces images of its past to projectile into the present: the stuff of Sun and Stax, the Southern rag, Three 6 Mafia, Johnny Cash, the blues. This isn’t to say that she sounds directly reminiscent of them, but instead assumes herself as part of a cultural lineage devoted to confronting the darkness, the grimness, the apocrypha of the South. She summons the same dramatic tensions that surface when staring at a Confederate statue still erect in 2019.
At the substrate, Roberts’ work is that of a woman in thrall to the legacies of family and history, but so sensitive to the sharp pains and violent rearrangements of a national consciousness that she needs to experience them instrumentally, which is to say, through her body. In a recent interview with The Quietus, Roberts devotes a large part of her conversation to a fascination with the idea of moving through water as experienced by indigineous and African-American bodies during the transatlantic slave trade. “The way in which free divers use their lungs is something I’m very curious about as a saxophonist,” she says of deep-sea diving without an oxygen tank, a new hobby. “I do a lot of the breathwork that I learned in my saxophone practice now.” That phrase—breathwork—sums the brio and intensity of Roberts’ vision. It should come as no surprise that respiration and inspiration come from the same Latin root, spir: ‘‘to breathe.” The force of Roberts’ breath—first through the saxophone, all endurance and fits and starts; then through time, inflated and vivified—makes bold how much the retelling of history is a necessary game of survival—an ongoing, fluid act of resuscitating the dead.
Toward the end of Sleepless Nights, Hardwick closes in on her own memory-remaking with a lapidary line that may as well have come from a chorus in the middle of Memphis: “The weak have the purest sense of history.” It takes no effort to imagine Roberts chanting it in one of her fugue states, reaching crescendo as she stacks the words like a highway pile-up: The weak have the purest sense of history; the weak havethepurestsense of history, theweakhavethepurestsenseofhistory… Roberts’ history-making is impure in a literal, fundamental way—that is, part patchwork, part arch composure, part sacrament—but it’s all extremely real. What she does here, and what she will continue to do, is allow her body’s blood to beat loudly enough so that it matches the irregular rhythms of the past. She inhales and exhales life into memory so as to make it new—or, maybe more accurately, she affords history the brief freedom to breathe.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Constellation | October 22, 2019 | 8.3 | e5046994-2264-40cd-ab4b-daec01b218ba | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
There will be big fun in town tonight as we cordially invite YOU (and one big booty guest) to bump ... | There will be big fun in town tonight as we cordially invite YOU (and one big booty guest) to bump ... | The Soft Pink Truth: Do You Party? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7314-do-you-party/ | Do You Party? | There will be big fun in town tonight as we cordially invite YOU (and one big booty guest) to bump bump bump with us at the fabulous Romper Room Frisco for a night of hardbodies and soft pink truth - EGADS!!!~! Non-freaks: Proceed with wanton abandon and naked ambition.
...and now...
"Women"
...prepare...
"Booty"
...to board the mothership...
"I wish I was a..."
A R T Y dancefloor happenings in the name of Makeup and Love 2003.
P
R F werD \\w
O
Matmos'
O S
F T
Um...
N I P
K (truth)
---
L4D135 + ge(nder non-specific)nts: You shan't be disappointed in Wednesday evening's corral of events, featuring The Western cut-up Mr. Drew Daniel! Providing live deviancy via a slew of unrelated sexual incidents (aka the! finest! in! bass-dominated! entertainment!), tonight's master of ceremonies is prepared to offer you an incredible display of haute panache and dddisco flash. Fresh from a storied career as one-half of San Francisco's dashing e-lektronik outfit Matmos-- who themselves have delivered three long-form eclectic fineries of their own, e'en working with an Icelandic butterbird of some kind-- Mr. D. has trimmed the fat and now ventures beyond the mundane and into our house.
The Soft Pink Truth has already presented the world with two 12-inch samples of his manhood on the esteemed Matthew Herbert's Soundslike imprint, but Do You Party? is his first full-length outing. For the project, he's dragged along bongos from Mat-pal Martin Schmidt and the vox stylings of Blevin Blechdom. But rest assured, this is not "intelligent" dance music, nor is it a simple technological experiment-- it is truly a declaration of penetration, a celebration of gender confusion and ONE RED HOT JAM.
Do You Party? is an all-ages event, but attire is strictly adult (girls: that means no dresses). Mini-disco at one moment, electro-shocking the next, this party engorges the senses with only the Holiest four-on-the-floor. It is explicitly prohibited to remain still, and we are not "Soft on Crime". (4warning: Some moments may contain high percentages of European microhousing, especially ones that reference dead French composers.) (2x4warning: Others don't.)
Admission is absolutely nothing for: Girls, girls, girls, girls, women, yo ladies, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, women (I always thought that I knew), all the ladies across the globe, girls, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, girls, girls, (big booty) butt (bitches), Miss E., and anyone who wishes they were a lady. Check the guestlist if you have heretofore accepted [BOOTY] as your savior. There will be old-guard analog synths, a million and three one-second vocalists distilled to their most soulful essences, BASS, tastefully updated mutations of disco, ritualistic orgiastic ceremonies (time permitting), "a devastatingly funky house rhythm" and "staggering compositional talent and sampling virtuosity of the highest order." Strike a pose, there's nothing to it.
The particulars, then--
Time: Soon
Place: SF/Detroit/Köln
Girls: Ladies
Make Up: Lipstick, eyeliner, green, blue, comb hair, I WANNA MAKE IT GOOD 4 U
Smoking: "I'm not ready yet"
Dancing: You're wasting your time if you play this while sitting down. I'm serious, get the fuck up.
Melody: 7.3
Harmony: Vanity 6
Rhythm: 9.4
Blevin: 9.6
Drew Daniel: "I Want to Thank You"
Soundslike: Herbertwithasenseofhumor
Catering: Kid606, DAT Politics and I-Sound
Actual Food: Bump bump bump bump click BASS
Do You Party?: Yes
"Ciao, boys." | 2003-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2003-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Soundslike | February 4, 2003 | 8.4 | e5200bdc-9b3c-4790-9696-a9fca314e0ad | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
With slight changes in disposition and geography, the New York band’s seventh record strives toward a refreshed sound and outlook. | With slight changes in disposition and geography, the New York band’s seventh record strives toward a refreshed sound and outlook. | Interpol: The Other Side of Make-Believe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/interpol-the-other-side-of-make-believe/ | The Other Side of Make-Believe | After 25 years of fronting one of rock’s most recognizable brands, Paul Banks is not merely the vocalist for Interpol. He is Paul Banks, the Voice of Interpol, a character he has embodied with increasing panache. Maybe that’s always been the case, but especially since Interpol’s return to Matador cemented their status as an A-list cult band, Banks has slyly played on the reality that every one of their albums will be taken by a locked-in audience as a referendum on Interpol. I have to imagine a lyricist as self-aware and witty as Banks has read the tempered praise that has followed everything the band has done since 2007’s Our Love to Admire, and within the first couplet of The Other Side of Make-Believe, he has flexed mastery of this craft: “Still in shape, my methods refined,” he croons on “Toni,” a lyric that absolutely knows it’s going to included in just about every single review of their seventh album to speak to Interpol’s refreshed outlook and its modest success.
More important is the actual first line of The Other Side of Make-Believe: “Flame down the Pacific Highway.” Though nearly every one of their peers who was likewise deemed a quintessential New York rock artist in the 2000s has made their way to the West Coast, the concept of Interpol doing the same triggered some kind of mental 404 error. If not slumming in pornographic subways with shady butchers and catatonic sex toy love-joy divers, what would Paul Banks really be? “On the streets of Cozumel/Where the faces glow/I would gladly give my life to be there,” he replies on “Gran Hotel.” Granted, Interpol has achieved a godlike status in Mexico, but the change in disposition as well as geography is revolutionary for a band who’d otherwise only been capable of incremental sonic change.
Yet, like a massive cruise ship, only a few minor shifts in coordinates can eventually send them off course. “Toni” is the heretofore-inconceivable “Interpol California song,” swapping ambient synth washes for a plinking piano, slacking the eighth-note grid just the tiniest bit, allowing Banks’ voice to relax into a world-weary but satisfied tone. Even if the optimistic bent of The Other Side of Make-Believe is more implied than literal, “Toni” lets in enough sunshine and seabreeze for “Fables” to follow with what Banks calls Interpol’s first “summer jam.” I doubt they intended “Fables” to do battle for Hot 97 supremacy against Bad Bunny or Doja Cat, or even a pop song playing against type a la “Friday I’m in Love.” Nonetheless, it does tease out some of the influences that had been suppressed within Banks’ main gig: a love of boomin’ system hip-hop and the most memorable melody he’s penned in ages. Ironically, it sounds more in line with the kind of festival-topping indie rock that Dave Fridmann helped steward before he all but tanked the production of 2018’s Marauder.
Within these first two tracks, there’s a germ of something more intriguing than a return to form: a latter-day Interpol record where the spirit and the sound are finally in alignment. Though the fully-formed aura that Interpol projected into the elegiac atmosphere of post-9/11 New York City has been chipped away like a disintegration tape by dubious side projects, inessential studio albums, and a reconsideration of the indie culture that propped them up, they all have raised the opportunity for Interpol to take on a pathos of post-punk agitators easing into wisened, witty elder statesmanship—maybe like Nick Cave or, hell, By the Way-era Red Hot Chili Peppers. Banks does seem up for this task, repeatedly leveraging his reputation to sell lines that would be ridiculous coming from anyone else—rhyming the title of “Big Shot City” with “girl you lookin’ gritty,” “You’re truly erupting too hard/That’s why you’re a sizable god.”
But like so much of Interpol’s work since Our Love to Admire, the spark in The Other Side of Make-Believe is subsumed in a gray expanse of Interpol Music, which has largely remained undisturbed by a revolving cast of bassists, auteur producers, and the passage of 20 years. Alan Moulder and Flood are at least better suited to Interpol’s strengths than previous charges like Rich Costey and Fridmann. The duo’s work with the likes of Depeche Mode, Curve, and Nine Inch Nails are about one degree of separation from the band’s enduring influences. Though drummer Sam Fogarino claims Flood was trusted to “hyperbolize our best qualities,” he does so on an a la carte basis on songs that largely betray their origin written remotely in different parts of the world. Daniel Kessler’s sonic structures remain instantly identifiable and also interchangeable, a batch of “Interpol-type beats.” Though working at nearly the same tempo throughout The Other Side of Make Believe, Fogarino drops some much-needed math into the rhythms of “Greenwich” and “Into the Night,” though neither finds any kind of melodic footing. Too often, the trio sounds like they’re writing over or past each other instead of locking in.
Compared to the “refined methods” Banks describes in “Toni,” far less attention has been given to the meta self-evaluation on the closing “Go Easy (Palermo)”: “I’ll keep pushing forward/All the obstacles in my way have been falling.” Even if Turn on the Bright Lights still overshadows the majority of their work—and with its 20th anniversary months away, it will do so even more now—a band at Interpol’s stature mostly needs to talk a good game, assuring they’re still engaged enough to bring a good narrative and 20 or so minutes of new material to a career-spanning setlist. This is made clear by the most Paul Banks of Paul Banks lines on The Other Side of Make-Believe. “All along I was different/’Cuz my nature made me great,” he sings, leaving just enough time to raise the question of “is this guy for real?” And then, the punchline: “But not that great,” a nod from a wise band that knows its limitations. | 2022-07-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | July 19, 2022 | 6.2 | e5256d8c-c5d5-4fa0-93e2-c7bbe65f2825 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
In a 2014 session with the late Richard Swift, the Alabama sculptor and blues man builds on the foundation of American roots music, reshaping his influences into works that transcend genre. | In a 2014 session with the late Richard Swift, the Alabama sculptor and blues man builds on the foundation of American roots music, reshaping his influences into works that transcend genre. | Lonnie Holley: National Freedom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lonnie-holley-national-freedom/ | National Freedom | Experimental blues man Lonnie Holley is one of America’s great alchemists. As a visual artist and sculptor, he treats found objects and household materials—rocking chairs, padlocks, a charred television—with their entire history in mind. He respects their past as functioning tools of the mundane, but honors their spiritual and philosophical value as vessels of memory. As a songwriter, the Alabama native similarly builds rich compositions on the foundation of American roots music, but reshapes them into works that are beyond genre. Like his sculptures fashioned from rudimentary components, his songs are often arranged rather simply on a handful of familiar instruments. On his new EP National Freedom—recorded in 2014 at the late Richard Swift’s studio of the same name—Holley invokes a mythical atmosphere from his very human surroundings.
Throughout National Freedom, Holley roams from searing blues to downtempo dub to freeform wanderings on piano. Nothing is particularly beholden to a traditional structure; instead, his compositions sound more like fever dreams of songs—streams of consciousness unimpeded by the architecture of the waking mind. The sparse “In It Too Deep” features just Holley’s voice and kalimba; the plucked instrument, made from a small wooden base and metal tines, sounds like a musical baby mobile twisting above a crib. “Just want to stick my hand out,” Holley sings, “to grab ahold to something extraordinary.” Holley’s philosophy revolves around “the beauty of noticing all,” and in this song he seems to be both the baby marvelling at the dangling mobile and the man who built the nursery all at once.
Opener “Crystal Doorknob” is more tethered to the earth, but it possesses a similar sense of wonder as “In It Too Deep” and its piano-based companion “So Many Rivers (The First Time).” While those tracks are airy and delicate, “Crystal Doorknob” is smeared with soil. Holley’s voice is gravelled, and Marshall Ruffin’s electric guitar sounds born of the swamplands. The loping, repetitive instrumentation supports Holley’s imagery: He recalls walking through a dense forest, where he stumbles upon an ornate door standing alone in the middle of it, without explanation. The door doesn’t lead anywhere, or solve any preexisting mystery. It’s just there, and that’s enough.
For all of Holley’s contented musings and observations—some of which sound downright Buddhist in their detachment—the best song on National Freedom is drowned in longing. On “Like Hell Broke Away,” Holley mourns lost love, singing the most anguished of blues ballads. His woman has left him, and he laments her on three multi-tracked vocal channels: He screeches incoherently, blubbers and growls, and accompanies himself with booming doo-wop backing vocals that sound like perfectly timed sobs. In addition to being the boldest, rawest entry on the EP, it is the richest, musically speaking. Holley commands a whirring Melatron, and Ben Sollee’s cello ups the drama. The synthesis of all these parts mimics the inferno of a fresh heartbreak—even if you can crawl out of the bubbling lava, it still takes a while for the fires to die and the smoke to clear. Unlike many of Holley’s songs, “Like Hell Broke Away” is rooted in an eminently relatable human experience, which might explain its strength. Like his sculptures, it takes the familiar and makes it beautifully strange. | 2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Jagjaguwar | July 6, 2020 | 8 | e53055ce-0d0a-4c00-b9fe-90297745df43 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Surfer Blood's latest seems to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation. | Surfer Blood's latest seems to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation. | Surfer Blood: Pythons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18123-surfer-blood-pythons/ | Pythons | "Apologies, meet apologies," Surfer Blood's John Paul Pitts sings on "Demon Dance", the lead-off track from his band's second LP, Pythons. Pitts spends most of Pythons pleading, bargaining, rationalizing, trying to make some sense of an increasingly dire situation in any way he can. There's a longstanding tendency in pop music to read too much autobiography into lyrics. In Pythons' case, this kind of conflation's all but unavoidable; just before it was recorded, an altercation with his then-girlfriend lead to Pitts' arrest for domestic battery. Ultimately, no charges were filed, but as Pitts told Pitchfork, that same tumultuous relationship inspired many of Pythons' lyrics. Even before you hear one note, you may feel conflicted about it, and rightfully so. Truth be told, Pythons seem to feel pretty conflicted about itself: hooky, Weezer-ish guitar pop offset by desperate, discomfiting lyrics, fleeting hopes of reconciliation quickly dashed by heavy-hearted resignation.
Produced by Gil Norton (Doolittle, Del Amitri), Pythons is a sleeker affair than 2010's bedroom-born Astro Coast and 2011's knotty Tarot Classics EP. With 10 lean songs in 32 minutes, there's hardly a second to waste, so Pythons largely dispenses with pageantry and heads straight for the stomp box. Instrumentally, Surfer Blood's reared-on-Pavement looseness proves hard to shake even on these no-nonsense melodies; guitars dive-bomb into choruses, hooks turn into group shout-alongs. This more focused approach occasionally causes slight tunnelvision, songs that seem to rise and fall in essentially the same fashion. There are exceptions, of course: "I Was Wrong" dips a toe into grunge, and the waltzy "Needles & Pins" harkens back to the Everly Brothers. But there's a satisfying simplicity in all those clean lines and bright-as-can-be hooks, a gleaming surface to bury the dark stuff under.
Pythons' musical confidence is not shared by its narrator. Pitts spends the record sounding one kind of despondent after another: he points fingers, apologizes profusely, hopes something will change, realizes it won't. He sounds stuck in place, his mind constantly reeling, his next move unclear. Pitts certainly seems sorry for something; "Gravity" sees him making apologies for "never stopping when we oughta," a line that both absorbs and assigns some of the blame for the shambolic romance described throughout. Pitts is quick to paint himself in an unflattering light: codependent, unstable, at fault. "Blair Witch" finds Pitts pleading, "I need love, but the more I see love, the more I need love," an unguarded statement that suggests Pitts is at least aware he's got some stuff to work on. "If I fell apart, would you stay?" he asks at one point, aware of the awfulness of the situation but still willing to keep going with it, consequences be damned.
It doesn't always work; "Say Yes to Me" and "Blair Witch" affix themselves to a couple of phrases-- "true blue" and "sour grapes", respectively-- they can't quite rescue from cliche. Whenever the music gets heavier-- the verses of "I Was Wrong", bits of "Slow Six"-- the lyrical self-flagellation and the muddy guitars congeal into a thick, momentum-halting sludge. The songwriting's fairly sturdy overall, but highlights are a little hard to come by; lead single "Weird Shapes." comes close, but there's really nothing here that'll knock the wind out of you quite like Astro Coast's "Swim". Pitts proves adept at conjuring the confusion and conflict of the last days of a troubled relationship, and-- probably wisely-- makes himself seem fairly unsympathetic in the process. But he's not always so great at fleshing out the person on the other end of the line, which leaves Pythons feeling trapped in Pitts' head, a spot where plenty of listeners won't want to spend much time.
When I heard about John Paul Pitts' arrest last summer, my first response, like that of many others, was a swift and decisive, "Fuck you." Even as more information has come to light, my feelings haven't changed much; Pitts maintains his innocence, and plea-and-pass might be enough for the Florida courts where forgiveness is concerned, but without hearing the other side of the story, I'm still not so sure. Pythons, seething with autobiography, doesn't make it easy to forget the circumstances around its creation, and separating the art from the artists here takes some serious doing; that score at the top of the page is for Pythons, not the people who made it. With Pythons out there, Pitts is going to have to get up there again and again and sing these songs, so full of hurt and confusion, penitence and longing. We'll never know completely what happened that night, but I sincerely hope Pitts never lets himself forget it. As long as he's out there singing "I Was Wrong", he probably never will. | 2013-06-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | June 13, 2013 | 6.7 | e5323789-27ae-4593-9482-873dd4e80c5b | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | 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 Keyshia Cole’s 2005 debut, a scrapbook of too-real breakup anthems from a pivotal moment in R&B. | 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 Keyshia Cole’s 2005 debut, a scrapbook of too-real breakup anthems from a pivotal moment in R&B. | Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keyisha-cole-the-way-it-is/ | The Way It Is | Keyshia Cole has likely caught a boyfriend cheating a million times, but one particular indiscretion set her life in motion. It was 2002, and she was 21 years old, broke, running on pure instinct and faith. Fed up and feeling defeated, she packed her belongings and fled from her hometown of Oakland to Los Angeles on a whim. Within a few months, she’d gotten a demo track to A&M Records’ then-president Ron Fair and scored a label deal, unknowingly building a hero’s arc around her ex’s deceit.
Cole’s first two singles weren’t overtly messy. A Luther Vandross remake featuring Eve, “Never” was happy wedding-reception music featured on the soundtrack to Barbershop 2: Back in Business. The follow-up, “I Changed My Mind,” an upbeat termination letter for an ex, produced by a young and hungry Kanye West, brought Cole closer to success in a cluttered R&B scene, but it wasn’t a mainstream hit. A&M’s artist development exec, Michelle Thomas, suggested a more vengeful approach. How about a record where a pissed-off Cole considers cheating on an unfaithful, guilt-tripping partner who’d accused her of cheating?
“I Should Have Cheated” was Cole’s life story and, incidentally, the only song she didn’t write on her debut album, The Way It Is. Daron Jones of 112 produced the track and co-wrote it with bandmate Quinnes “Q” Parker, originally for another R&B singer-songwriter, Nivea. Fair later added spaghetti western-style harmonica and keys over soapy strings and landed a Top 40 hit that pushed sales for Cole’s debut from a meek 89,000 U.S. units in its first week to platinum in nine months. Of course, the subtext of the song was that Cole probably didn’t have the heart to retaliate. “I Should Have Cheated” was more of an emotional chess move than a winning strategy—something every R&B fangirl at the time wished they could say and actually mean.
That type of emotional warfare fit the mood of a new pop decade flooded with empowerment anthems from Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, and Destiny’s Child. By the mid-2000s, “male-bashing” was a go-to, stereotypical label for women singing about stupid love. Released in June 2005, The Way It Is arrived amid an influx of suave soul stars like John Legend and Anthony Hamilton and upstarts like Chris Brown and Trey Songz who made sex-driven R&B. Mary J. Blige was deep in marital bliss by then, five months before releasing her seventh studio album The Breakthrough. Cole emerged at a time when the genre needed a fresh authority on heartbreak to speak to millennial women coping with hurt before the current golden age of therapy in pop culture.
More than just an avatar for pain, Cole saw herself as a voice for Black girls who could barely fathom love, let alone talk about it. The same week The Way It Is dropped, I interviewed for a dream job (which I didn’t get) and discovered my boyfriend of three years was in love with someone else. After a night of crying, I emailed a friend, writing dramatically: “I was so happy just a few days ago and now I don’t know what to do with him. I told him I never wanted to see him again.” She suggested I listen to Keyshia Cole.
Girls like Cole aren’t just repairing the damage of men in their lives but also dealing with family dynamics that lead them into broken relationships. “The girls I sing to is in the hood,” she said in a 2005 interview. “They’re in predicaments that I’m sure it’s hard to get through, to be focused and try to be in school and try to keep a job, try to keep their minds straight. Those are the types of girls that listen to me.”
Like Blige, Cole was never into smoke and mirrors. Unable to hide her discomfort, she often looked visibly over it (meaning everything) in interviews. As recently as last year, she apologized for showing up late to her Verzuz battle with Ashanti and seeming irked half the time. In fairness, back in 2005, the industry was expecting studied professionalism from a twentysomething with a history of abandonment who later said the attention she received from fans was a love she’d never felt.
Cole was born in Oakland and lived alone with her mom, Frankie Lons, who struggled with addiction in the ’80s when crack cocaine hit cities like Oakland hard. When Keyshia was a baby, her grandmother took her from Frankie and put her into the foster care system. Already traumatized at age 7, she turned to music as an outlet, forming a singing-rapping duo with a neighborhood friend. Then at 12, she met M.C. Hammer through her brother and started singing background vocals for the hometown star, who later introduced Cole to another icon and early mentor, 2Pac. Those industry connections fueled her ambitions, but Cole was stuck in Oakland, dropping out of high school at 17 and running away from her foster parents’ home to live with the same boyfriend whose infidelity compelled her to retreat to L.A.
Despite her media allergy throughout her career, Cole was hardly closed off about her life. Less than a year after releasing The Way It Is, she premiered a six-part BET reality series with the same title. Besides being a relic of an unglamorous era in realty television, the series offered a close-up view of how addiction destroys families, documenting Cole’s strained relationship with her mother, who became a beloved pop culture fixture in her own right before she died of a drug overdose in 2021.
Reality TV made it easier to root for Cole, whose upbringing inevitably shaped her views on love. That attitude and weariness allowed her to emote from a deeper, agonized place on The Way It Is. Over mutinous horn stabs on opener “(I Just Want It) To Be Over,” produced by Krucial Keys, she describes a cycle of frustration and rapture with the wrong guy. On records like “Thought You Had My Back,” a classic ballad of resentment where she’s in conflict with two confounding ideas (men and love), she sounds equally youthful and hardened.
The Way It Is was less emotionally expansive and more redemptive than an album like My Life, where Blige bravely spirals into the depths of depression. Cole’s debut is missing the contours of grief that could’ve helped her transcend into a more progressive R&B lane. Still, the record is a worthy entry in the canon of breakup albums, a category too often trivialized because the music appeals largely to young women who believe they’ve failed at finding a lasting romance.
Underneath its series of kiss-offs, The Way It Is is also deeply sensitive. The stringy ballad “Love” has the voice-cracking melodrama of a girl who thinks singing with all her heart might bring back the love she’s lost. “You’ve Changed” flips the weeping Just Blaze beat on Jay-Z’s lovesick manthem “Song Cry.” In response to Jay’s reluctant pathos, Cole interprets the dissolution from her perspective, suggesting that maybe money made him treat a woman differently. Cole’s songwriting is too cosmetic elsewhere, oversimplifying drama. The mid-tempo “Situations” is about being caught in a predictably tempting triangle. On “We Could Be,” she courts a crush with bare-minimum wooing, singing plainly: “If we could be friends, baby, it’d be all I need.” Lines like these connect only when you’re in the most impressionable stage of adolescence, aggrieved but still forming language around amateur feelings.
Cole’s debut is a bridge between unconventional old-soul singers like Blige and Erykah Badu and a new school of SZAs and Summer Walkers, whose generation is even more artfully ruthless in the dating arena. “I’m so mature, I got me a therapist,” SZA sings on her latest album, SOS, while fantasizing about killing an ex. Cole once explained this emotional logic on the premiere of her now-defunct talk show in 2019 (fittingly, her first guest was a boyfriend who’s now an ex). She argued that women today have turned reckless out of a sense of hopelessness, and after reaching a boiling point, she said, “We decided to just be a savage.”
An episode of Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is, which aired for three seasons, features Cole in a studio session with Diddy. While recording the hook to his Press Play single “Last Night,” he coaches the singer to put more stank on her vocals—aka “that conversational shit that you specialize in,” Diddy says, later telling Cole she’s “one of the greatest vocalists I’ve ever worked with.” It’s true that her voice is uniquely tuned to convey a pain rooted in years of adversity. The Way It Is showcased that she can go to those deeper places when she wants to. She just has to feel it.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2022-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | A&M | December 18, 2022 | 7.3 | e533bce9-73c2-4589-89ce-83693c0f77f1 | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
On her debut album, the rising Chicago DJ spins thrilling, multifaceted club music into a celebration of her Belizean heritage and trans identity. | On her debut album, the rising Chicago DJ spins thrilling, multifaceted club music into a celebration of her Belizean heritage and trans identity. | Ariel Zetina: Cyclorama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariel-zetina-cyclorama/ | Cyclorama | In the last couple of years, as a resident DJ at Chicago’s iconic Smartbar, Discwoman artist Ariel Zetina has become a beacon for the queer electronic underground. Playing trance-techno sets informed by her identity as a trans woman of Belizean descent, Zetina combines the rhythms of Garifuna folk genres punta and brukdown with Chicago house, hyperpop, bass music, and maximalist techno. Coming toward the end of a year in which she was nominated for DJ Mag’s “Breakthrough DJ” award, Zetina’s debut album, Cyclorama, is one of 2022’s most expansive techno records. Turning club music into a wide-ranging interrogation of queerness, Cyclorama is soft and hard in the same breath. Zetina combines just about every influence from her DJ sets into an animated, percussion-heavy art performance that pulls back the curtain on her life, centering her trans and Belizean identities every step of the way.
From start to finish, Cyclorama is a rollicking allegory of tropical fantasia and queer fantasy. Tracks like “Chasers” (a term for cis individuals who fetishize trans people), “Birdflight Tonite,” and “Smoke Machine” present queer dancefloor subtexts soaked with Caribbean-infused house rhythms, vocal samples, and breakbeat mutations. Despite its frequently euphoric energy, Cyclorama is grounded in a socio-political landscape in which trans women and nonbinary people, especially those of color, face far greater acts of gender-based violence, murder, and homelessness than any other members of the LGBT community. In carefully detailing the realities of trans women of color and their experiences, Zetina carves out a space of refuge within the album’s bright, reassuring sound. The Mia Arevalo collaboration “Gemstone,” for instance, is an uplifting anthem about self-esteem in a world that devalues and dehumanizes trans women’s livelihoods. “Gemstone” is jolted by its techno tempo, but its colorful array of synths offers a signal for hope amid fear. “Belleza no te preocupes/Don’t forget we all bleed,” she sings, delivering a heartfelt love letter to the dolls.
Cyclorama repeatedly addresses the power struggles trans subjects face in a cis-normative society, especially around sex. On “Have You Ever” (featuring Chicago producer and peer Cae Monāe), she repeats, “Daddy, have you ever been with a girl like me before/Do you want to touch me?” “Slab of Meat” unfolds like a nightmarish spoken-word vision of what it’s like to date, and be sexualised, as a trans woman. “Feeling like a slab of meat forgotten in the freezer/Are you gonna thaw me out? Or are you gonna leave me?/Throw me on the counter babe and pound me with a cleaver,” Zetina intones over thudding kick drums, her ominously processed voice growing more urgent as the track gains intensity. Picking up the playfully insightful thread running through Cyclorama, it’s a theatrical, spellbinding, and relentless confrontation with the id.
In theater, a cyclorama is a large curtain placed on the back wall of a stage, often intended to extend the background or replicate a sky. The nine tracks here suggest the kinds of projections that might be displayed on Zetina’s own personal cyclorama. Using today’s queer club sounds as the album’s foundation, Zetina draws on personal strife as a tool for transformative thinking. At its core, Cyclorama frames the joys of what might be called doll-mania: the frenetic yet euphoric rush of being a trans person equally dedicated to the ritual of the dancefloor, its people, and their place in the world after the set ends. | 2022-10-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Local Action | October 28, 2022 | 7.7 | e53649a9-04a1-43cc-8191-ec00d8a30010 | Gio Santiago | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gio-santiago/ | |
After decades of making music together, the two friends sit down to an unusual collaboration: a series of duets recorded on a single piano, in alternating takes. | After decades of making music together, the two friends sit down to an unusual collaboration: a series of duets recorded on a single piano, in alternating takes. | Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story: 4 Hands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hans-joachim-rodelius-and-tim-story-4-hands/ | 4 Hands | It was a dream come true when Ohio-based composer Tim Story met German experimental music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius in the 1980s. Story had long looked up to Roedelius’ groundbreaking work in kosmische group Cluster, whose sprawling sound influenced his own spacey music. The two would go on to collaborate on a series of albums, including 2002’s Lunz, 2008’s Inlandish, and 2019’s Lunz 3, which all feature electronics, and sometimes strings, that swirl around piano melodies. On 4 Hands, their latest effort, they’ve pared down their musical partnership into something more intimate: Both artists play the same grand piano, twining simple melodies into quietly contemplative songs that oscillate between heartfelt reminiscences and a playful lightness of spirit.
As its title suggests, the 11-track album explores the intimacy of the piano as written for four hands—in their case, not a typical duet formation, but two musicians playing one instrument in alternating takes. Roedelius and Story recorded their parts separately, improvising one on top of the other, but the album still sounds like a collaboration made in one moment. A stripped-down snapshot of the two musicians as they explore a variety of warm textures, their music is at once spontaneous and structured, phrases tumbling out and floating together with ease.
Most pieces on 4 Hands are built from patterns of rippling ostinato bass interwoven with delicate melodies. This structure often works well, like on opener “Nurzu,” whose title comes from a German phrase meaning, roughly, “Go ahead!” and builds on a series of arpeggios that blossom and recede as laid-back chords pulse on top. “Rever” works similarly, highlighting the interplay between rolled melodies that form a loose web of pensive sound. In these tracks, the duo’s goal comes into focus, but at other points, the music becomes easy to tune out—like “Bent Rhyme,” which features the same pattern of interlocking fragments but never latches on to a memorable melody.
The two artists make use of the entire piano on a few occasions, which gives the album much-needed motion. The piano has many parts to play with—some composers have been known to nestle metal objects among the piano’s strings, or pluck them, to explore new ways of making sound with the instrument. On 4 Hands, those extended techniques emerge with electric flair, offering distinctive new timbres that break up the sameness of the duo’s undulating sound. On “Seeweed,” plucks mix with rounded tones to make the piano sound three-dimensional, while on “Crisscrossing,” metallic sounds mix with traditional playing to form an intricate lattice. It’s here that the artists’ more experimental sides come out, showcasing subtle moments of exploration within an even-keeled palette.
But it’s 4 Hands’ intimacy that’s most compelling. The hidden meanings behind every song—one’s a tribute to their departed friend Harold Budd, others are inside jokes that we can only guess at—add to the overall feeling that 4 Hands is a celebration of friendship. They don’t need much more than a few notes sprinkled between a repeating bassline to convey the depth of their bond. | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Erased Tapes | February 25, 2022 | 7 | e5391fa2-9838-4138-a5e9-7cfb45b4479b | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
MaryLou Mayniel’s latest collection of hazy R&B is full of dewy vocal passages rendered cool and distant by heavy processing that lands in the safe space between accessible and experimental. | MaryLou Mayniel’s latest collection of hazy R&B is full of dewy vocal passages rendered cool and distant by heavy processing that lands in the safe space between accessible and experimental. | Oklou: The Rite of May EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oklou-the-rite-of-may-ep/ | The Rite of May EP | Plenty of artists have made exciting music this decade by fusing crystalline, cutting-edge club music to melodies and rhythms rooted in R&B and pop. The same goes for the work of Marylou Mayniel, the French singer and producer who records as Oklou, whose music is almost scientifically midway between accessible and experimental. Her new EP, The Rite of May, is full of dewy vocal passages rendered cool and distant by heavy processing; when she posted a note about single “They Can’t Hear Me” on Facebook last month, she thanked Bok Bok, the head of the London experimental club label Night Slugs, for “turning a soft ballade into a shiny track.” That’s her zone: the space between soft and shiny.
The Rite of May’s thematic heft is tied up in its sound rather than its writing, which is often obscured by a slathered-on layer of Auto-Tune. Its four main tracks are broken up with two enigmatic interludes that sample Instagram stories and field recordings, and the descending motif that cracks open “Samuel” reappears sounding like JRPG soundtrack fodder on “Valley 2.” There’s clearly a vision at work, one that’s apparent even over just 20 minutes of material. This isn’t music that demands you take it seriously—Mayniel evokes the naïveté of childhood by sampling a clip of Cardi B stumbling on a deer outside her hotel room—but it encourages you to look for emotional resonance in its downcast melodies and near-future textures rather than its lyrics.
What you hear may bum you out: The Rite of May oozes loneliness. Mayniel has a great ear for space—the luminous melody at the core of “Samuel” dissipates like fog on a silver pond—but her music is rarely expansive or collaborative. It sounds like the product of late, silent nights in a bedroom with a laptop. The closest the EP gets to joy is “They Can’t Hear Me,” and that’s only because it alludes to the glistening maximalism of producers like Rustie in its second half; when you look past the glittering keyboards, you hear an android crying out for any kind of response. Mammoth closer “Friendless” is an extended exploration of how much it sucks when no one wants to hang out with you. The sense of disconnection is nearly overwhelming.
While there’s no denying The Rite of May’s coherence or concision, something about it leaves you a little cold. It’s not just the ice imagery spiked throughout “Friendless.” Mayniel has no trouble stringing a sticky vocal phrase together, but her penchant for digital obfuscation and vague, unintelligible writing makes it hard to connect with her as a presence. These songs aren’t direct or emotive enough to work as pure pop, but they don’t have the transgressiveness or daring to feel totally satisfying from an experimental perspective. That’s the thing about occupying the middle ground: it’s a safe space, but you don’t have the leverage you need to really turn the listener’s head. | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | NUXXE | March 29, 2018 | 6.7 | e5436bce-3c6b-4abd-aaf7-58c851b7ac1a | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
The instrumental metal quartet’s first album in six years grapples directly with loss and grief, channeling dueling guitars and pummeling rhythms into a dire, haunted sound. | The instrumental metal quartet’s first album in six years grapples directly with loss and grief, channeling dueling guitars and pummeling rhythms into a dire, haunted sound. | Pelican: Nighttime Stories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pelican-nighttime-stories/ | Nighttime Stories | Nighttime Stories is Pelican’s adult album, a direct confrontation with those existential milestones their music once merely suggested through its tension and scope. Family, grief, distance—all are now active components in their songs. The four members of the instrumental metal band are split between their native Chicago and Los Angeles, so they had to schedule blocks of time to hammer out new material together in person. Between sessions, they communicated through a Dropbox folder of fragments and jams and stray recordings from phones—the creative equivalent of a group text with old friends, where you reminisce and make plans that may never actually happen. It’s been six years since the band’s last album, Forever Becoming, and you sense that it’s all been something of a blur.
But if growing up is often a process of coming down, then Pelican are still focused on finding transcendence in subtle places. Their music has always thrived on patience—a virtue that makes aging gracefully feel like a seamless evolution. The benchmark of their current sound is the warring, restless interplay of guitarists Trevor Shelley de Brauw and Dallas Thomas, whose soaring fretwork conveys the emotional candor that most metal acts seek from their vocalists. On Nighttime Stories, they push each other toward aggressive textures they had abandoned after their earliest material. They’re accompanied by blast beats and pummeling rhythms, and they alternate between ragged solos and riffs that sound like they’ve been dragged from the lowest depths of sludge and doom metal. Through sheer volume or atmospheric intensity, it’s the sound of making up for lost time.
Other songs absorb the quiet into their songwriting, lending their music a depth that feels haunted but dire. After an initial burst of songs characterized by concise, melodic crescendos, “It Stared at Me” arrives as a tangled bed of mood music, its spacious arrangement like the scene setting to a violent Western. When a slide guitar winds through the song’s final minute, it ushers in the record’s adventurous second half. The title track staggers and lurches toward a mid-song breakdown that searches for stability but only slips into further chaos. And while the epic “Full Moon, Black Water” embodies the longform template of their previous centerpieces, its gentle finale feels uncommonly emotional.
Nighttime Stories plays like one seamless expression—its 50-minute runtime passes remarkably quickly—but it’s a statement heavy with meaning and memories. Jody Minnoch, a bandmate of Shelley de Brauw and drummer Larry Herweg in the band Tusk, died unexpectedly in 2014, and the album’s title was one of his last ideas. The low, mournful opening track, “WST,” features Thomas strumming an acoustic guitar that once belonged to his late father. These are specific tributes, but the whole record carries an unspoken aura of necessity. That their narratives proceed without lyrics only underpins the poignancy of their message—those implicit connections that go unspoken, the expressions that can be read only by people with an intimate understanding of one another. These relationships do not come easy and, if nurtured and maintained, will only intensify with time. | 2019-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | June 19, 2019 | 7.6 | e5509649-0b58-4664-b6bf-7cbdd136a6ad | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
This focused and forceful 2013 live set showed the reunited grunge band looking to their future before the tragic death of lead singer Chris Cornell. | This focused and forceful 2013 live set showed the reunited grunge band looking to their future before the tragic death of lead singer Chris Cornell. | Soundgarden: Live From the Artists Den | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soundgarden-live-from-the-artists-den/ | Live From the Artists Den | Soundgarden’s episode of Live From the Artists Den arrived just as the group was bringing the supporting tour for King Animal, their first album in sixteen years, to a close. They were roughly three years into their reunion, trading on ’90s nostalgia with an eye toward a sustainable future.
That future never materialized. Chris Cornell took his own life after a gig in Detroit in 2017, writing a sad final chapter to the band he fronted for more than three decades. Live From the Artists Den is the first posthumous Soundgarden release, a multimedia affair available as CD, LP, and BluRay, each presenting the entirety of the February 17, 2013 concert filmed at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theater. The show was meant to celebrate the end of the King Animal tour, but six years later, its accompanying album serves as an accidental epitaph—a career retrospective given right when the group seemed resurgent.
Part of the reason Soundgarden’s comeback seemed secure is that they wore middle age handsomely. Their reunion seemed neither crass nor nostalgic, but a resuscitation of a connection they lost somewhere after Superunknown turned supernova in 1994. King Animal felt assured and confident, with Soundgarden navigating new material with grace, slowing down the tempos slightly while weaving in Cornell’s dextrous rhythm guitar.
Listening to Live From the Artists Den, it’s striking how seamlessly the King Animal material fits between hits and deep cuts. The songs play off of each other, the slow churn of “Blood on the Valley Floor” teeing up the coiled menace of “Rusty Cage.” Soundgarden didn’t mess with the arrangement of “Rusty Cage” or any of their other classics, but the distance of years changed their attack. They sound a trace slower here, which makes the music feel weightier and more measured.
Some of this deliberation may be a side effect of filming a concert. Guitarist Kim Thayil admitted as much when promoting Live From the Artists Den, saying the group may have “played a little bit more conservatively because of the cameras and the lights.” This might sound like a tame performance, but Live From the Artists Den is focused and forceful.
In the four years following this performance, Soundgarden toured regularly, playing Rockfest after Rockfest, selling out amphitheaters named after cellphone companies and headlining places with cumbersome names like Farm Bureau Insurance Lawn at White River State Park. They were riding the circuit afforded to any ’90s rock survivor, toiling away on new material when their individual schedules allowed. Enough demos reportedly exist to form a finished album, but disputes between the band and the Cornell estate may mean that they’ll never be completed, so that leaves Live From the Artists Den as an unintentional swan song. It’s one that suits the band, offering a deep dive into their catalog with no nostalgia. Like all final goodbyes, it’s a bit too sad if you look too closely.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe | August 1, 2019 | 7.7 | e557c3ae-48f8-4b0e-a8cc-2b134da1d4ba | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Behind the elegant sounds of Laurel Canyon, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s vivid and knotty lyrics evoke half-imagined landscapes with startling clarity. | Behind the elegant sounds of Laurel Canyon, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s vivid and knotty lyrics evoke half-imagined landscapes with startling clarity. | Marina Allen: Eight Pointed Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marina-allen-eight-pointed-star/ | Eight Pointed Star | Marina Allen wields familiarity like a weapon. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s clear, quietly powerful voice sometimes recalls Carole King, sometimes Julia Holter, sometimes Maggie Rogers; her lush, Laurel Canyon-referencing production fits squarely within the ’70s folk-rock revival that’s been going on in Los Angeles for the better part of the last decade, epitomized by artists like Weyes Blood, Hand Habits, and Sam Burton. But for all the softness telegraphed in her music, Allen’s third album Eight Pointed Star is spiky and hard to pin down, its familiar environment camouflaging lyrics that can be vivid and fantastical.
What other album uses the image of eating bones as a key metaphor on two separate tracks? “I eat the meat/I eat the bones,” on the rollicking country-rock song “Swinging Doors,” becomes a rousing cry of self-assuredness. On the airy, ambling “Red Cloud,” consumption becomes a way into Allen’s personal history; she makes “a stew with rain water and frozen meat, thick with pine needles, warm beer and baby teeth,” and wakes up “dizzy in Red Cloud,” the Nebraska town from which her family hails. The song’s lazy haze masks the intensity with which Allen tries to condense hundreds of years of history into a pop song, placing herself in the center of it: “I am tainted, I am taught, to be tough, to be raw, to be ruined, to be wrecked/Like the women whose aching backs and blistered skin make me coffee and burnt bread.” Beneath Allen’s laid-back compositions are lyrics that seem to scratch and claw at their seams in search of meaning.
Allen’s lyrics have always been wordy—even the most accessible songs on her underrated 2022 album Centrifics, like the earwormy piano-bar tune “Or Else,” were written in long, knotty run-on sentences that stood at odds with the straightforward production. But the songs on Eight Pointed Star are more oblique and mystifying: They often take place in half-imagined, half-remembered places like the titular town in “Red Cloud” or the stretches of farmland Allen conjures on the fable-like “Bad Eye Opal.” Much of the album is ostensibly about Allen finding a sense of confidence—in art, in relationships, or in herself—and that confidence, true to the adage that the more you learn the less you know, results in songs that plant themselves firmly in life’s gray areas.
Even so, Allen stumbles upon complex truths that she delivers with steely resolve. Opener “I’m the Same,” a piece of serene, spacious Americana, at first seems so placid that it’s unrecognizable as a breakup song. But that calmness feels in line with Allen’s rebukes to a partner, which are frank and cutting in their clarity: “Feeling wronged is not the same as proof,” she sings, delivering the line with the casualness of someone who knows they’re in the right. It’s a rare moment of certainty, and by the record’s last song, “Between Seasons,” all she’s sure of is that change can be a great thing. It feels like a mirror image of “I’m the Same”: Instead of chastising a partner for not seeing her fully, she revels in the feeling of growth. But the final line, once again, is a rug pull that suggests uncertainty can be one of life’s great joys, a quasi-mantra that reverberates through the rest of Eight Pointed Star: “Right on track, getting lost.” | 2024-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fire | June 13, 2024 | 7.3 | e5600325-4646-4de7-878f-dcc5cfa667f8 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Braids’ third album Deep in the Iris deals in the intangible memories that remain when a relationship ends. Vivid sensory images dance above the quicksilver music, illustrating that sometimes the clearest thing you can remember from a long-forgotten moment is the way the sun felt on your skin. | Braids’ third album Deep in the Iris deals in the intangible memories that remain when a relationship ends. Vivid sensory images dance above the quicksilver music, illustrating that sometimes the clearest thing you can remember from a long-forgotten moment is the way the sun felt on your skin. | Braids: Deep in the Iris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20503-deep-in-the-iris/ | Deep in the Iris | What remains of a relationship after it ends? Pictures, text messages, mementos, sure, but the hardest things to hold onto are the fleeting sensations: the taste of a person’s mouth, the feeling of first standing naked in front of them, the dent in the pillow where a lover’s head once laid. Braids’ third album Deep in the Iris plays as a record of all these tiny memories, accrued in the aftermath of losing someone. The record is rich with startling little images: Stories of being pushed down the stairs, being confronted as a child for mistakes made, wanting to crack the eggs of a group of hatching pigeons flicker across the album’s lyrics. They dance above the quicksilver music, vivid and unreal, and illustrate that sometimes the clearest thing you can remember from a long-forgotten moment is the way the sun felt on your skin.
Sonically, Deep in the Iris is dramatically different than the band’s previous release Flourish//Perish. Whereas in the past the Montreal-based trio’s sound has been similar to their electronic contemporaries like Purity Ring and Majical Cloudz, here the band ditches anything stark and futuristic. Instead, they opt for fleet, skittering jazz percussion, crackling beats and stuttering cuts in vocals, while delicate, classical piano runs beneath the electronic instrumentals. The glitchy, warped surface is offset by the clarity and versatility of Standell-Preston’s narrative vocals, which pull everything into focus.
On "Taste", singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston describes how the taste and feeling of someone you love never really leaves you, even when they treated you abusively to begin with ("We experience the love that we think that we deserve/ And I guess I thought I didn't need much from this world," she muses). And sometimes the band examines that isolation in a larger, societal context. "It’s not like I’m feeling much different than a woman my age years ago," Standell-Preston begins on "Miniskirt", a song about rape culture and the cutting feeling of being objectified by men. On "Sore Eyes" the synths rise, hinting at an actual dance track, before they fall back to the throbbing repetition of the song's bassline. The movement echoes the push and pull of the song’s message, as Standell-Preston breathily relays her dual desire and disgust in a song about watching porn on the Internet. Deep in the Iris never lets you get quite too familiar, or comfortable.
In the album’s track "Bunny Rose", Standell-Preston contemplates getting a dog to ail her loneliness, one which will always be waiting for her to come home. And it’s this sort of heartbreakingly simple desire, wanting to be unconditionally embraced by another when you come home, that pulls this album's messages about broken relationships to a universal plane. And while all those intensely specific sensations of an ended relationship do not get clearer with time, on Deep in the Iris it’s clear they are nevertheless always somewhere within you. | 2015-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Arbutus | April 30, 2015 | 7.4 | e568b88d-07a9-4caf-923d-72e71a15341f | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
The UK dance star downshifts on her first new collection in five years, embracing smoky, understated R&B with moody arrangements and a flirty touch. | The UK dance star downshifts on her first new collection in five years, embracing smoky, understated R&B with moody arrangements and a flirty touch. | Katy B: Peace and Offerings EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katy-b-peace-and-offerings-ep/ | Peace and Offerings EP | Katy B has spent over 10 years as the Cinderella of UK dance: a winsome anti-diva upon whom listeners project all their clubbing thrills and dreams. But her music was never just about the club. Just as often, she sang about the liminal spaces between those nights: between one weekend and the next, between sudden spark and future disaster, between dancing past the pain and feeling it full force. So when Katy returns after a five-year break to barren nightlife and a musical world that’s nothing but liminal space, the transition’s remarkably smooth.
Peace and Offerings’ generous eight tracks contain no explosive bangers or erupting drops but build upon her introspective deep cuts—touchpoints include “Disappear” and “Play,” undersung highlights of 2011’s On a Mission and 2014’s Little Red, respectively. They also take Katy further into quiet, smoky R&B than ever before. It’s a far better fit than the adult-contemporary ballads Little Red nudged her toward; she’s steeped in the R&B genre, and lucky that its going sound plays to her strengths: not diva melisma, but subtle interpretation. But that’s the thing: R&B is a crowded space, particularly as a crossover act. The same low-key likability that got Katy B anointed the face of UK dance makes her, in R&B, one among many.
Fortunately, little can suppress her charm on record, even when she doesn’t totally sound like herself. Lead singles “Under My Skin” and “Lay Low”—the former beat by Nigerian British producer P2J, the latter a sun-dappled production by Mike Brainchild—are midtempo Afrobeats cuts that one could imagine as radio hits from any point in the past few years, by Katy or anybody else. “Open Wound,” a duet with fellow BRIT School alum Jaz Karis, isn’t the torch song the title suggests but something subtler and more quietly devastating. The wistful chord progression, yearning melody, and understated vocals suggest the kind of heartbreak that drains the color from months or years to follow. But Katy and Jaz are so similar in timbre and delivery that you’d need the credits to know it’s a duet; while they sell the track, they never quite own it.
Peace and Offerings is strongest when it indulges its moods, no matter what length or structure. “Aftermath” is Katy B’s “History of Touches”: a woozy and unmoored arrangement that seems to warp time around it, with measured lyrics that stretch into slo-mo. Katy delivers her words tentatively, with a buried sigh, as if she’s only now realizing just how many emotions are bubbling up from some self-loathing place. It’s almost a shame when the mood is broken by a ballad chorus and the track is over in less than three minutes. The EP closes with Katy B’s best track in years: “Daydreaming on a Tuesday,” produced by longtime collaborator and UK dance veteran Geeneus. Atop a breakbeat that sounds like twitterpated feels and a chromatic string arrangement full of knowing melodrama, Katy crushes unabashedly. She skips along the melody with a light, flirty touch, rehearses conversations, imagines herself as Marilyn alongside Marlon. The swooning sounds very little like anything she’s released before—and, probably, to come. “I don’t see myself just making really chilled music for the rest of my life,” she told DIY earlier this year. The best moments of Peace and Offerings, though, suggest she could linger there indefinitely.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Rinse | December 21, 2021 | 7 | e56e5e5b-8065-4a69-942d-ad38165d4884 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
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 peak of Marc Bolan’s career, the extravagant and near-perfect The Slider. | 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 peak of Marc Bolan’s career, the extravagant and near-perfect The Slider. | T. Rex: The Slider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/t-rex-the-slider/ | The Slider | In 1969, Marc Bolan published a folio of poetry titled The Warlock of Love. By that point, the man born Mark Feld had already been the guitarist of mod-rock band John’s Children (for all of four months) before turning his attention to folk-rock duo Tyrannosaurus Rex. Together with bongo player Steve Peregrin Took, the group released albums with titles like My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows and Unicorn. Bolan mostly sat cross-legged style on stage, strumming an acoustic guitar, singing with such heavy affect that his future producer Tony Visconti was certain he was French, not English. None of these endeavors turned him into a star. But the last line of that folio portended what was to come: “And now where once stood solid water/Stood the reptile king, Tyrannosaurus Rex, reborn and bopping.”
The very next year, Tyrannosaurus Rex was reborn. Bolan stood up, plugged in a Gibson Les Paul, replaced Took with Mickey Finn, and began to enunciate each syllable with lip-smacking aplomb on the band’s first single as T. Rex. Propelled by handclaps and a strutting gamecock of a guitar lick, “Ride a White Swan” climbed up the UK charts to No. 2. T. Rex was bopping. So much so that The Warlock of Love sold over 40,000 copies, making Bolan a best-selling poet.
When T. Rex’s second single “Hot Love” shot straight to #1, Bolan dabbed some glitter on his cheekbones before a “Top of the Pops” performance. As Simon Reynolds recalled in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, that performance was “the spark that ignited the glam explosion,” confessing himself to “being shaken by the sight and sound of Marc Bolan...that electric frizz of hair, the glitter-speckled cheeks...Marc seemed like a warlord from outer space.” With 1971’s Electric Warrior, T. Rex topped the charts and was poised to break in the U.S., where “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” reached the top 10. For a glorious, nearly two-year reign, England was caught up in what the music mags would call “T. Rextasy.”
What magic ingredients led to this transformation? Theories range, but this band pic offers a clue. Bolan wears a Chuck Berry tee, while Finn’s shirt proudly proclaims: “Enjoy Cocaine.” Stripping their sound back to the giddy early days of rock’n’roll while indulging in coke’s nervy stimulation, T. Rex very suddenly manifested the biggest screamfest since Beatlemania. Visconti deemed Bolan’s genius be in skipping over the Beatles’ influence entirely, instead reaching back to the ’50s: “[He] emulated Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, that was his little trick. It was ingenious.”
Recorded in March and released in July of 1972, The Slider marked both the zenith and imminent approach of the cliff’s edge for T. Rextasy. Recorded in a dilapidated castle in France, it captured Marc Bolan as the King of Glam at the absolute height of his powers. Think Nadia Comăneci in 1976, Prince in the ’80s, or Ronnie O’Sullivan running the snooker table. T. Rex could do no wrong during that span.
As such, every wrist flick and downstroke on The Slider rings out like an act of god. Each cast-off line from Bolan’s notebook transforms into a profound edict from on high. And every cut—be it pop perfection or half-sketched—gets spun into cotton candy by Visconti and the backing vocals of Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (better known as Flo & Eddie), harmonizing their nasal voices towards new adenoidal highs. The Slider exudes confidence to the point of becoming delirious and drunk on Bolan’s own self-regard, careening between bawdy, brash Little Richard lop-bam-booms, weirdo machismo rock, and ethereal acoustic ballads, while line by line Bolan toggles between profundity and inanity, melancholia and nonsense.
“Metal Guru” opens the album with a gush of guitar and Bolan’s mawkish cry, “Mwah-ahah-yeeeah.” It’s a victory lap as introduction and celebratory whoop-along. At least until each verse detours into stranger terrain: surrealistic upholstery (“armour-plated chair”), rock’n’roll cliché (“you're gonna bring my baby to me”), tongue-twisting meter-buster (“just like a silver-studded sabre-tooth dream”). It’s a glorious amount of gobbledygook.
From his earliest days, Bolan knew his way with the juxtapose of strange, slippery words, drawing inspiration from the poetry of fellow countrymen like John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as the fantastical realms of J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll. As Bolan pivoted from hippie-folk underground obscurity to mainstream pop star, discarding elves for automobiles, he kept the mood of his words intact. At the start of a new decade, when the gap between rock and pop was beginning to widen, Bolan was content to blur the lines between genres. No longer happy with those weedy full-lengths and favoring instead the concision of a 45, T. Rex’s greatest songs hit like hard candy: crunchy, mouth-tingling sweet, and a little unreal.
He kept remnants of his folksy roots, though. “Mystic Lady” is a keenly sweet and fragile acoustic number, an ode to a sorceress in dungarees set adrift by strummed acoustic guitar and Visconti’s Romantic strings. In one couplet, cliché and stunning surrealism are wed: “Fills my heart with pain/Fills my toes with rain,” Bolan’s clenched-jaw jitter eliciting that visceral sensation.
Visconti would go on to produce iconic albums for the likes of Bowie and Thin Lizzy later in the decade, but you can hear his golden touch across the album. On the three-minute romp of “Rock On,” he weaves together boogie-woogie piano, overdriven guitar, a prancing snare drum, Flo & Eddie’s glorious and grotesque harmonies, and a sax phased and flanged until it’s a streak of stardust.
Even The Slider’s lesser songs—“Baby Boomerang” and “Baby Strange” are as puerile as their titles suggest—are elevated by Visconti’s touch. The string sections of “Rabbit Fighter” form a sweeping anthem from so much hot air. Just as impressive is how a throwaway like “Spaceball Ricochet” can become wholly evocative. “Ah ah ah/Do the spaceball” doesn’t do a damned thing when written out, but with the bowed cello and Flo & Eddie’s uncanny accompaniment of Bolan’s gasps, this trifle transforms into one of the album’s most ethereal moments.
“Chariot Choogle” (like “Buick Mackane” on the A side) is a polymer of heavy guitars and giddiness. Amid some footballer barks lies a sweetheart of a line: “Girl you are groove/You're like the planets when you move.” It reveals just how T. Rex took the onerousness weight of hypermasculine blues-based rock and replaced it with something featherlight and androgynous, the moment where Reynolds said, “cock rock became coquette rock.” On the 12-bar blues title track, Bolan’s admission that “and when I’m sad, I slide” induces a sense of vertigo with phased strings and voices, the shaker and fricative hiss close in the mix anticipating ASMR. Elsewhere, Bolan sings that the slider is “a sexual glider” while promo for the album asked: “To be or not to be, that is The Slider.” Thousands of spins later, I confess I’m no closer to understanding just what the titular proper noun or verb might mean.
In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine Bolan being that cocksure, but there was a moment in time in the UK when you could utter T. Rex in the same breath as the Beatles and the Stones and not be wrong. Who else would call Bob Dylan “Bobby” and mention him multiple times over the course of the album, even though they never met in real life? Who else was a big enough star to get a Beatle to shoot Born to Boogie, a vanity film about him? Who else but Marc Bolan could out-glam Elton John on the same stage? And when his frenemy David Bowie finally broke onto the charts with the release of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bolan had three other albums in the Top 30 to keep him company.
Bowie, though, would have the last laugh. While wars were waged for or against Bolan in the letters section of Melody Maker and New Musical Express, The Slider topped out at #4 and marked the end of his reign. He’d have two more hits, but neither would reach the #1 slot. The year 1973 marked the last time Bolan placed a song in the top 10 during his lifetime, a precipitous plunge worthy of Icarus.
“He had the biggest ego of any rock star,” his bandmate Volman said. “No one in his own mind was greater than Marc Bolan.” It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that when Flo & Eddie’s manic falsettos first harmonized with him on “Hot Love,” it gave Bolan the first taste of success. But Flo & Eddie were also the first to get fed up with Bolan’s narcissism and left before T. Rex’s next album Tanx. Drummer Bill Legend left after, and Visconti would be unceremoniously relieved of production duties after 1974’s Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow. Mickey Finn was gone by the end of that year. By the time Marc Bolan died in a car crash in 1977, he was already being eclipsed by Bowie.
But just a glance at The Slider’s cover reveals that Bolan’s legacy is still with us. One instantly sees the father of Slash’s own iconic look. Watch the diminutive Bolan stalk the stage like an androgynous elf in his shimmering high-heeled boots and you see where another diminutive yet larger-than-life rock star like Prince took his cues. In the 21st century, as rock bands peeled away excess, Bolan’s DNA readily sprung forth from the likes of the White Stripes and Black Keys. Even without a guitar, dance producers in the new millennium sought the same, with the likes of Superpitcher, Michael Mayer, and Matthew Dear stripping everything back and cranking up the glitter and glam.
While responsible for the birth of glam in the UK, Reynolds argues that T. Rex “was too quicksilver” for a rock legacy. So while Ziggy Stardust tells a fairly coherent story and ascended into “classic album” status, The Slider forever eludes our grasp. By keeping their mystery intact, Bolan’s songs emulate his forebears best, whether it’s wondering where the wang dang doodle is at or what a Jabberwocky is. In that riddling way, Bolan is always reborn to boogie. | 2019-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Spirit Records | April 7, 2019 | 9.5 | e580cd68-af24-4964-bbd0-ef629f7b8a22 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Montreal producer sounds liberated on his latest EP, an idealized evocation of the club made up of fleeting breakbeats and ribbony synths. | The Montreal producer sounds liberated on his latest EP, an idealized evocation of the club made up of fleeting breakbeats and ribbony synths. | Jacques Greene: Fantasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jacques-greene-fantasy/ | Fantasy | On 2019’s Dawn Chorus, Montreal producer Jacques Greene preached salvation on the dancefloor. Murmuring over a pulse-raising backdrop of classic acid, featured vocalist Cadence Weapon likened a night at the club to a church service, sketching out a familiar trope in vivid terms: outstretched hands, primal chants, beams of light illuminating the faithful. “At night service/Saturday mass,” the Toronto rapper intoned, seeing a vision of eternity in a 4/4 beat: “All the nights with stained glass/In the future, see the past.” It made for a stirring encapsulation of what draws people to seek ecstatic communion before the DJ’s pulpit, weekend after weekend. The future that the two musicians didn’t see coming, of course, was the plague on the horizon, one that promised to leave no place of worship—whether temple or discotheque—untouched.
The sudden loss of one’s congregation can occasion a crisis of faith. Greene’s Fantasy EP, his first significant body of new work since that 2019 album, is pitched as his attempt to seek solace in the spiritual wilderness. In a note accompanying the record, he writes of anxiety and loneliness; of wrestling with the restlessness he experienced in the unexpected quiet, “willing a form of peace and inspiration into my surroundings.” In practical terms, you might expect his search to have led him far from his habitual stomping grounds. In fact, these five tracks aren’t all that different from what we’re used to from the veteran bass musician: They’re grounded in breakbeats and rumbling low end, garlanded with ribbony synths and vocal samples. But the new material also feels strangely unburdened, as though perhaps, newly freed from the pressure of satisfying the dancefloor’s needs—Is this kick drum punchy enough? Is this synth hook sharp enough?—he was liberated to simply follow his instincts.
The opening “Taurus” is representative of this newfound lightness of spirit. Dawn Chorus could occasionally feel heavy-handed, weighed down by its own desire for transcendence. But this song’s groove positively glides, chopped and reversed breakbeats carving shapes like a skater on a frozen lake. Suffused in wordless vocals and shimmering pads, the whole thing radiates a rosy glow. None of it is particularly new; in both tone and technique, it’s strongly reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s classic “Xtal.” But it’s immaculately produced and mixed, and profoundly effective—both for the pleasure centers it fires, and also for the associations it triggers. It feels like a genetic memory passed down across generations of ravers, encoded in their very DNA. Whether or not you’ve ever waded across a muddy field at dawn while jungle breaks test the limits of a towering soundsystem, Greene’s idealized evocation of the scene feels intimately familiar.
“Memory Screen + Fantasy” takes a more sedate tack, smearing shoegaze chords over a slow, shuddering house beat, and running coos through an effect like a busted guitar amp. Toward the end, the tempo kicks up a gear or two; even in the absence of drums, syncopated chords pulse in anticipation—a crescendo in search of a climax that never comes. The pastoral “Relay” might be the simplest and sweetest of the bunch: Arraying layers of shimmering synth pads atop a snapping electro groove, it’s another pitch-perfect homage to early Aphex. “Sky River,” on the other hand, conjures images of apocalyptic grandeur, like a leather-clad Imperator Furiosa striding out of a cloud of crimson smoke on a quaking desert plain, even as guest singer Satomimagae’s ethereal Japanese-language vocals lend an airy touch of grace.
Even in good times, Greene’s style of bass music has always had a melancholy tinge to it, and the closing “Leave Here” feels particularly bittersweet. Like the best of his output, it’s marked by strong contrasts—between the forceful, almost sludgy bass, nimble percussion, and airy vocal loop fluttering above. Evoking Burial, it feels like an attempt to recall a fading memory of raving, to capture a sensory epiphany in the fleeting interplay of breakdowns and bass drops. As fantasies of the club go, it’s as vivid as they get; all that’s missing is the bodies and the room.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-31T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | January 31, 2022 | 7.4 | e589c12d-727f-4c4e-bb32-27e68de6c4fb | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The funky retro-soul band aims to set itself apart from leader Anderson .Paak on a solo debut packed with guests, including Syd, Kali Uchi, and the late Mac Miller. | The funky retro-soul band aims to set itself apart from leader Anderson .Paak on a solo debut packed with guests, including Syd, Kali Uchi, and the late Mac Miller. | Free Nationals: Free Nationals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-free-nationals-free-nationals/ | Free Nationals | In less than a year, the Free Nationals went from playing weddings to performing on “Ellen,” opening for Beyoncé, and amping up Coachella crowds. As Anderson .Paak’s live band, they’ve been fundamental in establishing his retro sound. (As influences, they cite Snoop Dogg, Stevie Wonder, and Erykah Badu.) Now, after nearly two years of pump-faking, the band—comprised of guitarist Jose Rios, keyboardist Ron “T.Nava” Avant, bassist Kelsey Gonzales, and drummer Callum Connor— has set off on its own with a 40-minute self-titled debut. Rios has compared their new feature-heavy album to Santana’s 1999 smash hit Supernatural, and while Free Nationals isn’t as universally appealing, it shares that album’s same problems: namely, a lack of cohesion and direction.
The members of the band consider themselves “indigenous to the funk,” and they’ve gotten pretty good at mimicking the pure sound of their chosen era: They ran the album’s music through a cassette machine to add the warmth and distortion of analog compression, hoping to bake nostalgia directly into their songs. While they are all skilled players with a clear familiarity with classic grooves, their music is hampered by a lack of imagination. “I think this is the record AP [Anderson .Paak] wanted to make, but didn’t, after Malibu,” Rios told High Snobiety. But the Free Nationals debut isn’t even in the same stratosphere as .Paak’s breakthrough. The rangy soul of that album came from his distinctive storytelling and point of view, not to mention his raspy voice. Free Nationals just feels like a second-rate compilation of soul covers, a jukebox musical without a plot.
Occasionally, one of their guests catches a spark. T.I. sounds revitalized over the funk-rock riffs of “Cut Met a Break,” boosting his own legend as trap pioneer: “Number one, running up the millions/Show you how to flip a brick and buy a building.” “Oslo” adds a touch of Vocoder to what could pass for a Doobie Brothers song rewritten for Roger Troutman. Anderson .Paak makes a single appearance on the butter-smooth “Gidget,” turning an in-studio phone squabble between Rios and an ex into a story of forgotten love; it is the one song on which they feel whole.
There are plenty of collaborations here that make sense on paper, but Free Nationals doesn’t always know how to integrate the talents of its guests. Daniel Caesar (“Beauty & Essex”), Syd (“Shibuya”), Kali Uchis, and the late Mac Miller (“Time”) have all produced at least one R&B-focused opus in the last few years: the gospel-tinged Freudian, the seamlessly soulful Hive Mind, the genre-bending Isolation, or the funky Divine Feminine, respectively. But this album never manages to do more than use them as pegs on its mood board. There are isolated moments here and there, but even when when they strike an appealing note or two, the Free Nationals never come across as more than a backing band missing its leader. | 2019-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Empire / OBE | December 23, 2019 | 6.4 | e589c99b-f3d5-4834-8005-fb5aec0ea4b1 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Brooklyn’s Real Life Buildings have become an indie supergroup of sorts, counting Vagabon’s Lætitia Tamko and Crying’s Elaiza Santos as members. Their new album carries a smart, raggedy charm. | Brooklyn’s Real Life Buildings have become an indie supergroup of sorts, counting Vagabon’s Lætitia Tamko and Crying’s Elaiza Santos as members. Their new album carries a smart, raggedy charm. | Real Life Buildings: Significant Weather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23187-significant-weather/ | Significant Weather | Before it was known as a Brooklyn indie supergroup, Real Life Buildings was the house Matthew Van Asselt built. A creative jack-of-all-trades, he splits his time as a musician, visual artist, and publisher/labelhead with Mt. Home Arts. He may have conceived Real Life Buildings earlier in the decade as a solo project, but ever since 2014’s debut LP It Snowed, his performances under that moniker have prominently featured his NYC peers—such as Gabrielle Smith (fka Eskimeaux, now Ó) and Felix Walworth, aka Told Slant. In time, Real Life Buildings blossomed into a full band, better suited for the basement than the bedroom.
The current, five-person configuration includes several recent Brooklyn-based notables, like Lætitia Tamko, the auteur known to most as Vagabon—who plays guitar and contributes some vocals here—as well as Elaiza Santos, Crying’s prog-loving bandleader. Together with bassist Griffin Irvine and drummer/backing vocalist Jon Appel, the group churn out a smart, wiry form of indie rock. Real Life Buildings’ sound finds common ground in its members’ respective backgrounds, while retaining its own raggedy charm.
Van Asselt does most of the singing on Significant Weather, and while he’s not exactly a vocal powerhouse, he is a dead ringer for David Berman. However cozy its rumbling timbre, his adenoidal croon lacks the melodic range and tonal nuance of the limber arrangements surrounding it. There’s plenty of nervous energy lurking in the margins of the album’s endearingly grungy siblings “Understanding Gravity” and “Ground Cover,” and in the queasy, Midwestern lurch powering “Thaw.” But Van Asselt’s koans are so high in the mix, it’s difficult to make out the fireworks, much less appreciate them.
That numbness, that disconnect between kinetic force and emo-inspired stasis, has informed many of Van Asselt’s projects, but especially Real Life Buildings. His lyrics frequently explore themes of mental illness, existential malaise, and romantic despair. His personal revelations are framed conversationally and matter-of-factly. With “Other Windows,” Van Asselt laments over only seeing the sun on Instagram. “No News” finds him looking at the enraged post-election narrative with tired eyes, sketching an all-too-relatable still-life: “In my bedroom, I don’t read the paper, I don’t click the links/I just scroll past them through an endless feed of headlines/Each one is worse than the last one,” he deadpans. On “Understanding Gravity,” he tries to stay optimistic about a dead-end job and an aging childhood cat, proffering up the following wisdom on the former subject: “And if it’s less than minimum wage, at least you have a purpose/You’re not sleeping in until two, having lunch, but calling it breakfast.”
Van Asselt lampshades his self-pity with a volley of self-assured quips. “Seeking comfort is not radical for someone like me,” he sings on “No News,” and later “Like any other person, I desire relevance/But hope that I can achieve it just by sitting at my desk.” Real Life Buildings, though, are most appealing when the band’s members are in clear dialogue. Significant Weather is a testament to their smartness and sincerity, reiterated by the sunny setting: Tamko and Santos’ dulcet harmonies and hopscotching fretwork, Appel and Irvine’s straight-shooting percussion, and above all else, a sense of community. | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lauren | April 26, 2017 | 6.5 | e58e8652-e84b-47da-8084-8f9f16839057 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
On his fifth solo album, Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power channels industrial menace and ambient dread to ask a timely question: What is real life, and will life ever feel real again? | On his fifth solo album, Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power channels industrial menace and ambient dread to ask a timely question: What is real life, and will life ever feel real again? | Blanck Mass: In Ferneaux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blanck-mass-in-ferneaux/ | In Ferneaux | For the past decade, Blanck Mass has used the hallmarks of ambient electronic music to create albums that refuse to be relegated to the background. The solo project of Fuck Buttons member Benjamin John Power often alternates between dreamlike soundscapes and punishing, high-octane electro-industrial that evokes an early-’80s cyberpunk vision of our present. Blanck Mass thrives within that contrast: waves of near-bliss crashing against the jet-black jetty before ebbing gently back to the ocean.
On In Ferneaux, his fifth album, Power smashes Blanck Mass’ two selves together so that they are indistinguishable from each other. Equally attracted to the tranquil idyll of kosmische stalwarts Ashra and the crumbling brutality of noise artist Prurient, Power stretches his arms to both these extremes, often in quick succession and sometimes simultaneously, for a stunning, often challenging effect.
The album plays out across two suites, each about 20 minutes long. “Phase I” begins as if Tangerine Dream’s “Choronzon” were played at 45 RPM, morphing into a stretch of familiar hard techno and back in the span of a couple minutes. From there, Blanck Mass layers field recordings made across the last decade—left intentionally vague, but perhaps: cicadas, doors slamming shut, quarters dropping into arcade machines—over long passages of drone synthesizer. The result is one long, menacing autobiographical collage that acknowledges our bleak present and overflows with nostalgia for everything that came before.
It’s impossible to divorce new artworks from our little historic sliver of agony, specifically the unending isolation. In Ferneaux is no different. Even though many of the sounds are archival, they become new as they are heavily processed to convey Power’s detachment from the world in which they originated. Rain or hail clinks on metal grates, sounding like a city-sized broken xylophone. Screams echo, manipulated to feel like a demonic chorus singing from another planet. Three quarters through “Phase I,” warblers trill in a rainforest—or a Rainforest Café, perhaps, as human-esque voices emerge in the collage—sounding alternately real and synthesized. It’s unclear if the birds come from a field recording, were created on Power’s synthesizer, or both. In Ferneaux intentionally blurs the line between the organic and the invented, imbuing naturally occurring ephemera with uncanny musicality.
If this sounds like the audio equivalent of the “beauty in all things” floating plastic bag scene from American Beauty, thankfully In Ferneaux’s delivery is more oblique, and thus palatable. But it’s not an easy listen. The conclusion of “Phase I” is pure noise, a notion Blanck Mass has only teased or layered amid its more dancefloor-ready tracks. The drumbeat glitches and slows to an unholy crawl, the cymbals grating like they’re being fed to a table saw. The first minute of “Phase II” is even harsher, especially for listeners who may know Wolf Eyes solely as an Instagram meme account. But bliss is coming. What follows is In Ferneaux’s central thesis in the form of a field recording made at a San Francisco bar. As the noise recedes, a stranger speaks over a celestial ambient passage: “Do you recognize the misery and blessings go together?” A period of headphone-rattling static ensues, eventually fusing with the ambient soundscape.
The last few Blanck Mass albums have functioned as social commentary steeped in existential dread. The title World Eater, an album that emerged in the wake of Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, was meant to be taken literally; a cannibalistic human race was devouring itself. Animated Violence Mild evoked the paranoiac unease of the surveillance state. In Ferneaux drills down to the root and questions existence as a concept: What is real life, and will life ever feel real again? The pain of reality is perhaps never knowing exactly what is going on.
Sounds fun, right? As the headiest entry in the Blanck Mass catalogue, In Ferneaux is more edifying than satisfying; abandon all hope for bangers, ye who enter here. But taken holistically—and repeatedly—In Ferneaux reveals the intellectual and emotional journey as the reward. As the mysterious prophet on “Phase II” asserts: It’s all in how you handle the misery on the way to the blessings.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | March 1, 2021 | 7 | e58f8181-339d-4dec-9824-441ba9831225 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
On a tape label with links to Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, the German curator delivers a deep-diving, pitch-shifting DJ mix traversing Alice Coltrane, desert blues, and cacophonous synths and drums. | On a tape label with links to Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, the German curator delivers a deep-diving, pitch-shifting DJ mix traversing Alice Coltrane, desert blues, and cacophonous synths and drums. | Çaykh: V I S C 0 9 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caykh-v-i-s-c-0-9/ | V I S C 0 9 | The Berlin-based producer and DJ Çaykh, born Nicolas Sheikholeslami, is a shadow on the wall of the internet, mentioned in passing by those who've admired his remarkable mixes but with almost no presence beyond his SoundCloud. That account reveals that he runs a cassette label dedicated to Somali music; he has released two (excellent) compilations to this effect in recent years, and also co-curated another small collection of Somali music, which was nominated for an unlikely Grammy. His label’s address is listed as “Berlin, in front of BND building, Germany.” And that’s about it. Sheikholeslami is clearly the sort to let his music speak for itself—and happily, it speaks eloquently. This is the second mixtape he’s produced for Hamburg’s V I S label, and like the first, it’s a strikingly original piece of curation.
As with all the other releases in the series, this release comes on cassette, a format that also fits the label’s barely online aesthetic. While this is a DJ mix, it’s certainly not focused on the dancefloor. Instead, if the strange and wonderful sounds arrayed here share anything, it’s a sort of worldly psychedelia. The tracks traverse genre and nationality, but they’re united by their mood: spaced out, atmospheric, portentous. Much of it is generated by echo. This mix feels like it’s somehow distant from you, especially when listening with headphones, and yet also seems completely immersive.
The selection is, as ever, impressively esoteric: If anyone apart from Sheikholeslami himself can name all these songs upon hearing them, I’ll be mightily impressed. (The lack of a tracklisting only adds to the mystery.) Several tracks are noticeably chopped and screwed, which, according to Germany’s Groove magazine, is characteristic of the “sutsche” style (which among other things, involves playing 45s at 33rpm) in vogue at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, whose resident DJs Nina and Good News run V I S, and where Sheikholeslami has also performed.
Radically slowed down 45s are hardly a revolutionary idea—Southern hip-hop DJs have been employing similar techniques for years—but they work a treat in the context of this tape. Instead of hip-hop beats, it’s recordings from much further afield that are stretched and distorted into new forms, then smeared across the mix to create sounds that are at times beautiful and immersive, and at others harsh and abrasive. The set starts with a sparse, pitched-down recitation of Dylan’s “Masters of War,” which dissolves into a cathedral-sized cacophony of synths and drums, and ends 90 minutes later as a barrage of discordant noise recedes into an ancient recording of Swedish singer (and Nazi favorite) Zarah Leander singing “Stein-Lied (Ein schwarzer Stein ein weißer Stein).” In between, it traverses Alice Coltrane, desert blues, tabla-and-dhol rhythms, accordion-led Eastern European foot-stompers, and a crackly hold-music version of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
Throughout, Sheikholeslami seems to delight in creating dramatic contrasts, both in his layering of sounds and in his transitions between tracks. Metaphorically, it feels like wandering through a strange landscape, never entirely sure what you’re going to encounter. One minute you’re stumbling through a firelit haze of distant drums and echoing calls; the next, you’ve emerged into the midst of a sax solo that sounds disconcertingly like a dog in pain. It’s quite a ride.
The result is that rare mix that works on both a visceral level and a cerebral one. Willful obscurantism has fueled DJs’ games of one-upmanship for years, but Çaykh doesn’t just seem to be demonstrating the extent of his formidable record collection here. Instead, he’s deploying a fascinating selection of sounds to create a mix that genuinely resembles nothing else. | 2019-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | V I S | January 8, 2019 | 7.3 | e599ac04-b8fd-4875-9ede-f2c663370346 | Tom Hawking | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-hawking/ | |
Laying bare the strangeness of their repertoire while connecting centuries-old songs to modern struggles, the London collective approaches folk song as a living tradition, not a museum piece. | Laying bare the strangeness of their repertoire while connecting centuries-old songs to modern struggles, the London collective approaches folk song as a living tradition, not a museum piece. | Shovel Dance Collective: The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shovel-dance-collective-the-water-is-the-shovel-of-the-shore/ | The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore | “The Grey Cock,” an English folk ballad whose origin lies sometime in the 17th century or earlier, concerns a pair of lovers who reunite late one night after a long time apart. When a crowing rooster interrupts their rendezvous, the woman sends her lover away, thinking morning has come. By the time she realizes that the bird has marked the day too early, and there is still an hour of night’s cover remaining, it’s too late: He’s already gone. There is some debate among scholars over whether the young man—sometimes called Johnny, others Willie—was still in possession of his mortal soul when he showed up at his girlfriend’s door. In a transcription of the ballad’s text collected in the 19th century, the reason for his predawn departure is left unspoken. But in one of the earliest known audio recordings, from the early 1950s, the singer says it outright: “O Mary dear, the cold clay has changed me/I am but the ghost of your Willie O.”
In one interpretation, the explicitly supernatural character of “The Grey Cock” is a comparatively recent addition, imported from an unrelated Irish ballad; in another, it is a remnant of the song’s original form, scrubbed from the official record to avoid the appearance of superstition and reintroduced via oral tradition sometime later. Shovel Dance Collective, on their remarkable new album The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, go with the ghost story. Nick Granata, one of multiple vocalists in the London ensemble, delivers “The Grey Cock” with controlled vibrato, lingering on certain syllables and letting others rush by, sounding at times as if they've seen a spirit themselves. There are no instruments behind them; only the sound of softly rushing water. As for whether this is some exalted true and original version of “The Grey Cock” or a newer amalgamation, I suspect that Shovel Dance Collective don’t particularly care. For them, folk song is a living tradition, not a museum piece.
Some of Shovel Dance Collective’s nine members grew up playing folk music, and others started as indie rock or experimental musicians and came to it later. They’re part of a loose-knit London scene whose participants have a similarly varied relationship to strict tradition: bands like caroline, whose post-rock instrumentals draw upon English folk as one of many influences, and the Broadside Hacks, who perform centuries-old songs in communal and improvisatory new arrangements. Compared to those two, Shovel Dance Collective are spartan and rigorous in their approach. There is not so much as an acoustic guitar in the credits of The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, which instead favors instruments that conjure a deeper and stranger antiquity: hammered dulcimer, bowed cittern, mountain banjo, pump organ. And though Shovel Dance Collective’s full ensemble playing is lushly beautiful, they mostly withhold it, focusing on the quiet intensity of two or three voices interacting at a time.
The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore contains four roughly 15-minute pieces, each a medley of folk songs—drawn from the histories of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Guyana—interspersed with field recordings of lapping riverbanks and bustling dockyards. Where a previous generation of young Britons sought to revitalize folk music by fusing it with the cutting-edge sounds of their era—Fairport Convention with rangy rock’n’roll, Pentangle with candlelit modal jazz—Shovel Dance Collective emphasize the essential strangeness of the music not by gussying it up but by laying it bare. Though the album’s collage-like presentation is resolutely contemporary, its component pieces are largely faithful to the source material. The sternly declarative vocal delivery of Mataio Austin Dean—one of the collective’s two most prominent singing voices, along with the more dramatically expressive Granata—brings to mind some grizzled old sailor or fisherman entertaining his fellow laborers over a pint after a long day. There are glimpses of the uncanny at the edges, like the instrumental “Waves on the Shore,” whose bowed string lines stretch and flicker as if refracted through a hall of mirrors. The cumulative effect is like that of the films of Robert Eggers, whose thoroughly researched and densely packed period details serve to render both the crushing grind of our ancestors’ daily lives and the figments and phantoms that may have haunted their imaginations.
In interviews, and in an essay that accompanies The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, Shovel Dance Collective’s members argue persuasively for the present-day power of traditional song: as a vessel for the voices of the racially and sexually marginalized, a corrective for historical narratives that serve the rich and powerful, a tool for solidarity among the working class, and a means of communion with the dead. At concerts, they distribute pamphlets of lyrics and historical information, with the intent of bringing audiences closer to their own impassioned understanding of the material. They operate non-hierarchically, with no fixed leader. Even the aforementioned essay they penned together as a collective.
This context is admirable, and knowledge of the history can certainly heighten the experience of the music. Such is the case of the album-closing “Ova Canje Water,” a traditional Guyanese song delivered from the perspective of a formerly enslaved person who is urging his comrades to join him in escape and freedom. Dean, whose mother hails from the Caribbean nation and former British colony, explained the song’s significance in an interview with The Quietus: “Actual stories of people liberating themselves from that are quite rare, and you need to cling onto those. They should be a part of our history that we talk about and understand, because that is how we learn to liberate ourselves.”
But you needn’t be a scholarly folklorist to appreciate The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore. The music speaks for itself, if you let it. Hammered dulcimer curlicues, entwined singing voices, trombone echoing across the gentle roar of the Thames—with close attention, all of it has the capacity to make your hair stand on end, no pamphlets required. | 2023-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Double Dare / Memorials of Distinction | January 10, 2023 | 7.7 | e59c5c6f-e3f2-4569-9431-eba83b5bceac | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Everything on the surface of A Giant Dog's Merge debut screams beware. From the violent lyrics to the grotesque cover art to the very name of the band, the message is clear. | Everything on the surface of A Giant Dog's Merge debut screams beware. From the violent lyrics to the grotesque cover art to the very name of the band, the message is clear. | A Giant Dog: Pile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21887-pile/ | Pile | Some of the best hard rock songs give little glimpses of a soft, damaged heart beating beneath all the rage. Think about that little bit of major chord respite offered by the "when you're high, you never ever wanna come down" part of "Welcome to the Jungle" or the "I've been to the edge, and there I stood and looked down" monologue of "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." These gentle flashes invite you into dangerous orbits, despite their narrators' warnings, with an illusion of safety that makes you overlook the whole "and you're gonna diiiiiiie" part. On Pile, which is A Giant Dog's third official full-length, the Austin band mix moments of sweetness with a whole lot of "and you're gonna diiiiiiie."
The first refrain we hear from singers Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen says it all: "But I love you, honey/Stay away from me/Tenderness is not for me/I could watch you die and not feel a thing." Every track is a similar mix of certain danger and uncertain asylum. Five of the album's 15 tracks deal explicitly with death, mostly with a nonchalance that has been a hallmark of rock ‘n’ roll since Bo Diddley bragged that he was just 22 and didn’t mind dying. In the catchy chorus of the first single, "Sex & Drugs," Ellis and Cashen sing, "I’m too old to die young," their voices stuck together in honeyed harmony against distorted guitars, a swinging rhythm section, and plinking "Crocodile Rock" piano boogie. Later in that song, they rattle off a list of the self-imposed harm they have survived, including "all the people we fucked, and all the hippies who sucked, and all the hearts that we broke, and all the liquor and coke."
That the songs dwell so much on mortality feels like a way of acknowledging grief rather than ignoring it, even if they're dealing with it in a depraved way, using juvenile humor to process fear. (At one point in "Too Much Makeup," they suggest that you "get reborn as a tampon when you die.") Many of the songs on Pile might feel more offensive if the hooks weren't so strong, and if Ellis didn't have amazing pipes. But the combination of pretty melodies and the ugliest of realities is what drives Pile: it feels like the playlist for a rock-bottom party, made by people who are in a bad place, taking the opportunity to celebrate it before rising above it. They sing and play with the enthusiasm of a last hurrah. It's a rare cocktail that mixes sloppy punk passion with precision, but A Giant Dog have both working for them.
Mike McCarthy, who has produced albums for Spoon, in addition to A Giant Dog's less adventurous 2013 LP, Bone, helps make the morbid mood festive, capturing the band's blend of punk rock and glam, and bringing out a performance from the two singers whose energy betrays the jaundiced lyrics. Yes, it's often nasty, but it's also funny. When Ellis sings about a friend who’s an undertaker, who comes home smelling of "formaldehy-eeee-iiiiide," it's clear that she's having fun. Ellis and Cashen also play together in a poppier band called Sweet Spirit, which is also true to its name, and not as dangerous or dirty as A Giant Dog. It’s like with A Giant Dog they've found an outlet to unload all of their basest instincts, so Sweet Spirit can stay sweet.
In "Get With You and Get High," the band are joined by fellow Austin musician and unlikely bedfellow Britt Daniel. Aside from his past collaborations with producer McCarthy, Daniel is also responsible for bringing A Giant Dog to the attention of Merge Records: the label that released much of Spoon’s most celebrated work. His croaky hangover baritone meshes well with Ellis and Cashen, and the track would be A Giant Dog at their most vulnerable, were the desire for personal intimacy not masked by the desire to get wasted. But beneath all of this nihilism is some real skilled songwriting that includes complex rhyme schemes, swaggering rhythms, and stunning harmonies. These qualities are perhaps strongest on Pile's final track, "Failing in Love," where Ramones guitars buzz and lock in with the drum stops and an improbable sax. The words, which seem to detail a divorce, are perhaps the clearest reason for the obsession with death, danger, and keeping affection at bay. "I've tried and grown tired of failing in love," sing Ellis and Cashen, and it’s so simple and honest that you just want to get close to them, despite the band's countless cautions against doing so. | 2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | May 18, 2016 | 8.2 | e59f2e99-eb86-45c6-92b3-f47d715c65a6 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
Heady, funny, and fearless, the Dublin band’s second album is a maudlin and manic triumph, a horror movie shot as comedy, equal parts future-shocked and handcuffed to history. | Heady, funny, and fearless, the Dublin band’s second album is a maudlin and manic triumph, a horror movie shot as comedy, equal parts future-shocked and handcuffed to history. | Fontaines D.C.: A Hero's Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fontaines-dc-a-heros-death/ | A Hero’s Death | The Horsemen of the Apocalypse do not thunder and gallop. They lurch and stagger, weighed down by the grim burden of their brief. Slowly, they stalk humanity with an Amazon Prime package of grief, war, and pestilence, their approach suggested only by the mechanized drone of social media and cable news. When the end finally comes, it’s all so quotidian and tedious; a whimper, not a bang. All around us, the party is ending, and Fontaines D.C. are the final house band. The setlist is A Hero’s Death.
Slinking seeming fully-formed from Dublin’s working-class neighborhood The Liberties, the five-piece established themselves as bona fide inheritors of a centuries-long socialist-bohemian tradition on 2019’s post-post-punk document Dogrel, an album that weaved together the enduring groove of Gang of Four and the psychically dislocating poetry of Allen Ginsberg with unnervingly precocious aplomb. Dogrel was a shouty revelation—part early Mekons, part cider-addled James Brown & the JB’s—all of it suggestive of a crucial talent abuzz with live-wire intensity.
The jet-black comedy of their follow-up A Hero’s Death does nothing to detract from this view, instead geometrically expanding their cantankerous field of vision. Heady, funny, and fearless, A Hero’s Death is a maudlin and manic triumph, a horror movie shot as comedy, equal parts future-shocked and handcuffed to history. Memorable tunes and unforgettable phrases erupt like brush fire over the course of 47 minutes, the mood migrating at a moment’s notice from insouciant nihilism to full-blown rage to radical empathy. As one does these days.
“I Don’t Belong” is all lurking Daydream Nation-menace and nightmare groove, with lead singer Grian Chatten’s haunted incantation, “I don’t belong to anyone,” taking on multiple possible meanings over the song’s slow burn. “A Lucid Dream” steams by like a demented locomotive driven by punk-blues of the Gun Club, while “Televised Mind” turns the Stooges’ “TV Eye” inward, making manifest PiL’s prophecy of a narcotized zombie culture, too dazed and confused by the endless wave of corporate-tech idiotica to raise its voice above a monotone.
As a band, Fontaines D.C. are as forceful as they are versatile, with drummer Tom Coll proving equally adept at holding down the esoteric art-rock feel “Love Is the Main Thing” and the straight-as-string Velvet Underground homage of “I Was Not Born.” Guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell harmonize and deconstruct in a more than credible echo of Television’s Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine. On the terrific, bummer-hang ballad “Oh Such a Spring,” which crops up halfway through the record, the group arrives at a state of beautiful brokenness.
But the heart of A Hero’s Death lies in stiff-upper-lip rockers like the title track, whose unnervingly catchy funeral-glam is rendered all the more frightening for its sprightliness, sounding a bit like “Ballroom Blitz” following the aversion therapy from A Clockwork Orange. “Life ain’t always empty!” Chatten stipulates with a clergy-barker certitude, and proceeds along with catchy-sounding corporate affirmations like, “Sit beneath a light that suits ya/And look forward to a better future.” It’s the Stones’ “Satisfaction” in reverse. No longer is the consumer unhappy with the product. It’s the product that is dissatisfied with you.
And then there is the final track, “No,” a big ballad, a perfect culminating statement, a pensive progression, when the Fontaines backburner their well-honed bitterness in the service of a larger question: Is a fight we’ve probably already lost still worth the fighting? When Chatten sings: “Please don’t lock yourself away/Just appreciate the grey,” the group’s half-measures optimism feels like a benediction. We get knocked down and then maybe, just maybe, we get up again.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | July 31, 2020 | 8.1 | e59fa7ca-7edf-4844-95e9-a1603205ff18 | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
After four good-to-fantastic records, the Hold Steady returned in 2010 with Heaven Is Whenever, a too-sleek, cliche-mottled shrug of a record. From its opening line on, the band's sixth album, Teeth Dreams, tries to position itself as a return to form. | After four good-to-fantastic records, the Hold Steady returned in 2010 with Heaven Is Whenever, a too-sleek, cliche-mottled shrug of a record. From its opening line on, the band's sixth album, Teeth Dreams, tries to position itself as a return to form. | The Hold Steady: Teeth Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19122-the-hold-steady-teeth-dreams/ | Teeth Dreams | "I heard the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again," Craig Finn blurts out at the beginning of Teeth Dreams, the sixth LP from the Hold Steady. Over the years, the Cityscape Skins—a fictional coterie of tattoo-emblazoned Twin Cities street toughs—have darkened the doorways of many a Hold Steady song. But, beyond a fleeting reference to a Skins-stocked Youth of Today show on "Barely Breathing"—from the faintly disastrous Heaven Is Whenever—it's been some time since Finn got the gang together. Teeth Dreams' opening line is a callback, a homing beacon to wayward fans left cold by the overblown, undercooked Heaven. That beautiful shit Finn used to talk? Those beer-battered barroom floors and sloppy upper-Midwestern hagiographies? That neurons-blazing, every line-better-than-the-last Minneapolis mythos? The gang's all here.
After four good-to-fantastic records in five short years, the Hold Steady took their sweet time and returned with 2010's Heaven, a too-sleek, saccharine, cliché-mottled shrug of a record. Heaven's music felt bland and tentative, but its real crimes were strictly lyrical: Finn swapped out the character-defining specifics for faceless generalities and an all-too-sweet sincerity that effectively transplanted his lived-in Minneapolis-St. Paul mythologies to Anyplace USA. At his best, Finn wouldn't just set a scene, he'd introduce you around to the regulars. Those first few Hold Steady records still feel like a gathering of familiars, speaking a shared language. Heaven, then, was clearly the Hold Steady's attempt to cram a few more people into to the party. But, by swinging for the back rows, they seemed to neglect all those weird kids up front, the very ones who'd helped make their singalong songs into scriptures.
From its opening line on, Teeth Dreams announces itself as a return to form, a righting of Heaven Is Whenever's manifold wrongs from the cold comfort of the upper Midwest. Squint a little, and the familiar scenery starts to take shape: the nitrous tanks under the overpasses, the Michelin in Bay City where Gideon's been working. "I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You" finds Finn offering a new love a guided tour of some old haunts; "The Ambassador" swings around a chorus of "you came back to us/ South Minneapolis." Even when they're not ticking off the hours in 3.2 bars, the people of Teeth Dreams are very recognizably denizens of the Hold Steady universe: "I'm pretty sure you recognize these guys," Finn shares on "The Ambassador". They're a little older now, but wiser? Well, they're still sorta working on that. They have their good days, their bad months, their off years. Oh, and they drink. Just maybe not quite so much as they used to.
Produced by Nick Raskulinecz (Rush, Evanescence), Teeth Dreams is handily the Hold Steady's worst-sounding album. The muddy, hyperbolically compressed mix dies a thousand deaths through a couple of halfway decent speakers; it opens up a smidge in headphones, but it strangles most of Finn's exhortations and grounds Tad Kubler's skyscraping solos, casting everything in an ugly, nuance-deadening grey. Musically, Teeth Dreams is pretty much your standard-issue late-era Hold Steady LP: a post-Replacements hard-charger here, a swaying, Schlitzed-up ballad there, all of it sturdy, none of it remotely surprising. The hard edges of Separation Sunday have been sanded down; the soaring expanses of Boys & Girls in America have been dulled under Raskulinecz's heavy hand. Finn's delivery, in particular, gets swallowed up here: Raskulinecz buried his way back in the mix, forcing him to fight his way out of Kubler and new axeman Steve Selvidge's six-string entanglements. With so much of the music taking the path of least resistance—and without Finn up front, cracking wise to the clever kids—Raskulinecz's bizarre production seems hellbent on downplaying exactly what makes the Hold Steady the Hold Steady. Coming off a four-LP hot streak, Heaven Is Whenever was a tough record to hear. But Teeth Dreams, with its dishwater-dull, Finn-diminishing sonics, might be the harder album to actually listen to.
The collection does find Finn back among the third-shifters and the bartender's friends he spent so much time with on those first few Hold Steady LPs. But things, as they'll do, have changed. For starters, he's no longer into naming names: Gideon and Holly—whose addled ambling make up most of the first three Hold Steady LPs—have quickly become "he" and "she," just a couple more pronouns in the crowd. Finn may not be writing about Holly and Gideon anymore, but he's clearly writing about people like them; they live in the same places, know the same people, favor some of the same streetcorners. Having an overarching plot to hinge these episodes around gave a record like Separation Sunday its novelistic depth; Teeth Dreams, comparatively, feels muddled, 10 thumbnail sketches of the down-and-out rather than one long, hard-fought journey towards redemption.
Still, Teeth Dreams isn't meant as a redemption story; instead, it's a record about perseverance. Nameless or not, these people have clearly been through something; for the time being, they're trying to get over it without falling back under it. They find themselves in codependent relationships with complicated backstories, they take—and then try to shake—dope, and they're all stricken by what Finn, on "On With the Business," dubs "that American sadness." These are people who've been seriously rocked by life, but they're mostly past that now; they're taking it one day at a time, with a friendly assist from the "salted rims and frosted mugs."
"Spinners" finds him advising a recent divorcee to get back out there; "it's a big city," he insists, and "there's a lot of love." But his sympathies get the better of him on the the faintly Dylanesque "Wait a While"; different woman, similar situation, yet—in an unchracteristically regressive turn—he's taken to calling this one "little girl" and reminding her "there's other words than yes." On "Big Cig," Finn conjures a pill-popping, mind-changing, value-minded chain-smoker of his recent acquaintence: it's an easy highlight, the kind of impossibly clever, unusually tender character study Finn's always excelled at.
But for every "Big Cig", there's a "Runner's High",a half-told, half-remembered California-by-way-of-Texas dope deal gone horribly awry. Time was, you could hardly get through a Hold Steady song without an intimate knowledge of everybody's sister's names and what high school they dropped out of. But "High," like a lot of Teeth, plays things a little close to the chest; you don't have to guess at anybody's motivations, but you never quite get to know the people in these songs the way you did all those would-be DJs at the Swish and all their little hoodrat friends.
Dreams about teeth are typically interpreted as stemming "from a fear of rejection, sexual impotence or the consequences of getting old." We're probably better off ignoring those first two, but for a band like the Hold Steady—who've seen their share of divorce, disease, and abrupt departures over the years—time's inexorable march can't ever be too far from their minds. The people in Craig Finn's songs have gone through plenty themselves: from the poppers, pills and Pepsi of the early days to the post-breakup malaise and routine regret that hangs over Teeth Dreams like a fog. You can't say they've aged gracefully, exactly, but they've done the best they could, and things do seem to be looking up.
The best thing about Teeth Dreams is seeing these people succeed, even in the smallest of ways. But it's those same small, steady steps that hold Teeth Dreams back. There are triumphs here, but they're modest; there is, after all, little fanfare to be found in just getting up and on with it day in and day out. Consequently, Teeth Dreams—even more than the flavorless Heaven Is Whenever—occasionally feels like the first Hold Steady record that's just going through the motions: introducing a few punchy chords to a few wayward souls and letting them get on with it. All that desperation, redemption, and triumphalism you'll still find on the Hold Steady's first few albums has become a kind of everyday pragmatism here: not every night, he seems to be saying, needs to be so massive.
It's this, I think, that keeps Teeth Dreams from being a true return to form: these people don't especially seem all that keen on going back to their old ways, even when they're not exactly sure how to make those changes stick. Teeth Dreams goes out on a high: "Oaks," a sweeping, epic-length chest-clutcher, depicts two star-crossed addicts who may not even make it down the block without copping something they know they shouldn't. Like the Hold Steady themselves, they don't always get things right, but it's hard not to root for 'em anyway. | 2014-03-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Razor & Tie | March 28, 2014 | 6.4 | e5a67d63-7087-4330-8bd3-71ec8a5ad741 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
A new reissue of the Roxy Music frontman’s 1994 album fleshes out its opulent funk with a wealth of unreleased material that pulls back the curtain on his insular creative process. | A new reissue of the Roxy Music frontman’s 1994 album fleshes out its opulent funk with a wealth of unreleased material that pulls back the curtain on his insular creative process. | Bryan Ferry: Mamouna (Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bryan-ferry-mamouna-deluxe/ | Mamouna (Deluxe) | When Bryan Ferry lamented, in 1973’s “Mother of Pearl,” “If you’re looking for love in a looking glass world/It’s pretty hard to find,” he had not reckoned with how easy the looking would become. Twenty years later, on the cusp of his fifties, the former Roxy Music singer-songwriter released the most insular solo album of his career. He had already exhausted the patience of some reviewers. “Ferry seems increasingly like Narcissus, enraptured by his own reflection in the pond—and the bottomless depth below,” Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis hissed about 1987’s Bête Noire.
Yet to gaze so intently at oneself bespeaks not just narcissism but also confidence. Ferry had spectacular hair and he knew it. Teased and moistened by expert hands, Mamouna is the album equivalent of Ferry’s bangs: singular, an occasion for envy and amusement, an essential component of his mythos—and often genuinely beautiful. This three-disc set includes that 1994 album; previously unreleased tracks Ferry had recorded for a project called Horoscope; and demos, some of which date back to 1989. “The demos I do tend to become the masters,” he explained to Creem in 1993. “They’re on the same tape, and more foliage just grows around them.” Of course the package is excessive—do Ferry fans expect minimalism? He’s a foliage guy.
Horoscope was meant to be Ferry’s new album. He fucked up: He should’ve known not to release the title before the product. That old devil, writer’s block, paralyzed him; the lyrics, which he’d spent years paring down to pointillist suggestion, were a problem. He had no manager and no producer. For a hoarder confronted by the possibilities of 56-track recording, it must’ve been like Narcissus walking into a funhouse. Flailing, he resorted to a tested strategy: He and new producer Robin Trower, of Procol Harum, knocked out a covers album called Taxi, notable for a shivery essential version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and an “All Tomorrow’s Parties” whose lounge-pop vibes might’ve birthed Air. Rejuvenated, he returned to his original material, now called Mamouna, Arabic for good luck, of which he’d been in short supply.
There is nothing remotely Arabic or Middle Eastern about Mamouna; there is nothing remotely human about Bryan Ferry, this Holy Spirit of Divine Melancholy. But hiring Trower made an important difference. Mamouna has a crispness. The guitars and keyboards don’t flicker and dissolve, as on Boys and Girls, or clang and chime, as on Bête Noire—Trower centers them in the mix. Most importantly, Ferry doesn’t peek from behind the beats like he had done to coquettish effect since 1982: He’s upfront and declarative, taking advantage of his upper register before rust enfeebled it. Consonants matter again. “I wanna be just everything/More than you need/I wanna hear you call’/Nothin’ but me,” he declares on opener “Don’t Want to Know” over David Williams’ Chic-indebted riffing, and he doesn’t let up.
Unencumbered by generic sessioneers who might play “better,” Mamouna makes a strong case for Ferry as a musician. “Don’t Want to Know” begins with what sounds like sonar and what the credits cutely call “sonic emphasis,” provided by Brian Eno. Reuniting in the studio after bumping into each other on holiday (“very Somerset Maugham,” Ferry quipped), he and his erstwhile bandmate compete to come up with the coolest keyboard parts: Ferry’s synth-oboe, plus a piano hook conjuring The Exorcist theme (Ferry as an amour-obsessed Pazuzu?), versus Eno’s sampled film dialogue on “Your Painted Smile” (Ferry wins). “I could never be the one,” he moans, without irony, on the title track, a worried mid-tempo shuffle with Shaft rhythm guitar, synthesized choirs, and lovingly drawn-out syllables attempting to summon The Beloved by sheer force of ardor. It fades into the ether as buoyantly as “Over You,” with a piano coda of beguiling concision.
One way to listen to Mamouna is to consider the songs as structures around which “foliage” gathers. Another way is to read them as palimpsests on which Ferry rewrites his evocations of reckless but never quite hysterical desires. The “chained and bound” line from 1985’s “Slave to Love” floats into “Mamouna.” The “Live to Tell” chug (courtesy of Madonna co-producer Patrick Leonard) of Bête Noire’s “The Name of the Game” gets repurposed as “Which Way to Turn.” The acoustic and synth basses on “The 39 Steps” recall “The Chosen One,” also from Boys and Girls. But “The 39 Steps” is the superior take: Ferry sings through gritted teeth as the track accumulates momentum while Eno’s gahoozits flicker like porch lights in fog. Trower and Neil Hubbard’s guitars sound aggrieved. There’s an extraordinary moment where Ferry swaps his anguished flutter for a growl at the end of the line, “Let’s make a move!” Some fragments (like an early version of “Your Painted Smile” with guide vocal) suggest that Ferry could’ve eked out a sideline as a film composer.
Unfazed by developments outside itself, Mamouna plays like a speech by a cult leader. It has incoherences, like “N.Y.C.” (called “Desdemona” on Horoscope), a garbled take on Tutu-era Miles Davis, or an amelodic nothing called “Gemini Moon.” The sight of guitarist Phil Manzanera and reedman Andy Mackay in the credits should quicken no pulses; Ferry’s practices reduce them to contributors as interchangeable as Nile Rodgers and “syn-sax,” respectively. Eno does co-write the anguished shimmy of “Wildcat Days” (Eno’s instrumental credit: “sonic distress”), a wee thing, but if it led to the far better “I Thought” on 2002’s Frantic, then it was worth it. Other ideas, like a nine-minute re-make/re-model of Roxy’s “Mother of Pearl” recorded for Horoscope, make me wonder why Trower didn’t walk.
A middling critical response and okay sales did little to advance Ferry’s reputation as rival David Bowie was finding a new audience in Nirvana fans and Britpoppers. The Horoscope tracks, at least three of which are earlier drafts of finished Mamouna material, went on ice until 2015’s Avonmore, when “Loop de Li” made an appearance with a vocal that sounds like it was grafted from an early-’90s recording. There he was again, 21 years later, chipping away at new structures based on older ones.
There’s a special thrill when an artist whose catalog you’ve gorged on springs a new album on you, and I took to Mamouna hard. On his spring 1995 tour, he sported a fabulous poofy white shirt and, of course, a keytar—the only performer I’ve seen take the instrument seriously. His band played a double-digit-length version of “The 39 Steps” that teased out its white funk possibilities. Three years away from realizing in which direction my lusts pointed, I studied Bryan Ferry because his vision of romance lacked corporeality; his hesitations and shudders corresponded to desires I had no wish to see gratified, much less defined. A manifesto, a last will and testament, Mamouna delineates a worldview that turns loucheness into a singular kind of self-help. If Ferry’s sighs and chord changes made him a better boyfriend or husband, then the obscenity of the album’s budget was pocket change. But then he never has seemed to need other people much. | 2023-11-29T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-29T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | BMG | November 29, 2023 | 8 | e5a92dbb-2853-460d-bc4b-f5a5c76dd856 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Mike and the Melvins is an unearthed collaboration from 1999 between the Melvins and godheadSilo bassist and vocalist Mike Kunka. The overall sensation it gives is of a bunch of guys engaging in playful, sophomoric misanthropy. | Mike and the Melvins is an unearthed collaboration from 1999 between the Melvins and godheadSilo bassist and vocalist Mike Kunka. The overall sensation it gives is of a bunch of guys engaging in playful, sophomoric misanthropy. | Mike and the Melvins: Three Men and a Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21538-three-men-and-a-baby/ | Three Men and a Baby | Over the last 10 years or so, the Melvins have alternated between a quartet lineup that includes the rhythm section of Big Business and a series of trio iterations with various bass players including Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle, Fantômas and others. These days, the band name functions as a chimera-like host for these somewhat distinct entities, with mainstays Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover expressing a desire to introduce even more lineups over time. Their stated plan to add Dunn to the quartet hasn't materialized yet, but—case in point—the band is currently touring with Redd Kross' Steve McDonald on bass as a lead-up to a new album, out in June, that features an assorted cast of guest bassists.
In light of all that personnel shuffling, it makes sense that a newly unearthed collaboration with godheadSilo bassist/vocalist Mike Kunka would surface now, even if it's 17 years old. In 1998, Kunka found himself without a band following godheadSilo drummer Dan Haugh's hand injury that basically put the duo on permanent hiatus. Kunka accompanied the Melvins on tour, recorded the bulk of Three Men and a Baby with them in '99, and the tapes sat unfinished until last year. Upon hitting play, however, you might wonder whether you're listening to a lost album from '89 instead, an era when heavy albums on independent labels came across in muted, almost two-dimensional tones, thanks to production values that verged on demo-level quality.
This is a surprise considering that one-time Big Business guitarist Toshi Kasai, the Melvins' latter-day engineer of choice, recorded the remainder of the parts and also mixed the album. But the dated production works as an asset, distinguishing Three Men and a Baby from the increasingly prolific Melvins' recent output. Even though Osborne, Crover, and co. haven't lost much in terms of vitality, several of the riffs here hearken back to a time when the band was a little more content to just pummel away. Nowadays, if Osborne wants to dial-in a high-fidelity version of the guitar tone on KISS' 1974 album Hotter than Hell (as he did on the 2006 track "Civilized Worm"), he has the resources to do it. And, these days, whenever the Melvins fall back on the distinct brand of sludge that made them proto-grunge poster children, by default they sound like they're referencing themselves.
But there's nothing like stumbling across a 17-year-old musical snapshot to remind audiences of the fact that inspiration just pours from bands like sweat during the intermediate stage of their career arc. Once a band turns the corner on maturity, the ideas may get more sophisticated or adventurous—as in the Melvins' case—yet there's just no substitute for the intangible magic of a band growing into its strengths while still brimming with youthful passion. The main recording for Three Men and a Baby took place between the albums Honky (1997) and The Maggot (1999), which places this dalliance with Kunka close to the beginning of the Melvins' head-first plunge into experimentation, a voraciously creative streak that includes collaborations with Lustmord, Jello Biafra, and Fantômas.
The first four songs on Three Men and a Baby showcase the straightforward side of the bulldozer-riffing vocabulary the Melvins helped create. The testosterone strut of "Bummer Conversation," for example, reminds us how huge of a debt the likes of Mother Love Bone, Alice In Chains, and Gruntruck owed these guys. The rest of the album reminds us that the Melvins wanted nothing to do with those bands, and Kunka turns out to be the perfect partner for crossing the bridge between what the Melvins were and what they were about to become. In godheadSilo, he had shown that the bass guitar can function as a kind of orchestral noise instrument. Here, other than on the moody, spare, sea shanty-esque "A Dead Pile of Worthless Junk," most of what Kunka plays on the bass actually sounds like a guitar, while then-Melvins bassist Kevin Rutmanis occupies a more traditional bassist's role (but gives it personality with his bright, clanging tone).
Kunka also brings some dimension to Osborne's snarling vocals, which all too often reduce the Melvins' music to an affectation. Of course, Three Men and a Baby traffics in the same snide attitude that the Melvins are known and loved for, and if they're presenting us with any actual insight on these songs, they certainly don't show it much. The album doesn't come with a lyric sheet, the oblique song titles obscure the subject matter anyway, and the overall sensation one gets on hearing this music is of a bunch of guys engaging in playful, sophomoric misanthropy.
Nevertheless, while Kunka doesn't exactly sing "straight" either, his comparatively broad melodic range adds a layer of emotional agitation that the Melvins typically lack, even on the albums where Big Business bassist Jared Warren shrieks along with Osborne. This time Osborne, Kunka, Rutmanis and Crover all sing leads in various spots, which gives Three Men and a Baby a loose, freewheeling vibe, especially when coupled with the variety in the music. On "Lifestyle Hammer," for example, Crover's falsetto sounds almost soulful. On "Dead Canaries," a guitar figure that clucks like the palm-in-the-armpit noise provides the main rhythmic punctuation. But when the groove slows down to halftime, the effect is no longer jokey-but genuinely sinister as Osborne goes a few shades darker than Les Claypool as a narrator whose intentions you might not trust.
On "Gravel," Kunka kicks up a dust storm of distortion that both encapsulates and marries the essence of both bands. "Gravel" carries over into the album's closing track, a pulsing, faux-grindcore tunnel of noise, appropriately enough titled "Art School Fight Song." The throbbing sound of Rutmanis' bass falling off a chair channels the recently sidelined godheadSilo on Kunka's behalf—a gesture that heralds the avalanche of creative freedom that this band is still heaping upon its audience to this very day. | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sub Pop | March 31, 2016 | 7 | e5ae36d6-e9c5-4d7f-8016-bf5c2815160a | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Okay, show of hands: how many of you people have listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot recently? Yeah, that's about ... | Okay, show of hands: how many of you people have listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot recently? Yeah, that's about ... | Wilco: More Like the Moon EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8678-more-like-the-moon-ep/ | More Like the Moon EP | Okay, show of hands: how many of you people have listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot recently? Yeah, that's about what I expected, 'cause you know, I haven't pulled it out much lately myself. That kind of bothers me. YHF did, after all, cling battered and bruised to the top spot on my list for the Palindromic Year, and one would expect it would have a better shelf-life, even though it's been wink-wink-available for nigh on two years.
Now, before you start sharpening your Outlook, know that this is not an official Pitchfork backlash war cry, but a mere personal assessment. I was, you should know, the staff's staunchest defender of YHF's canonization, enduring countless hipster rants about its dad-rock/easy-listening nature and the impressionability of the nation's boomer crits. For a period of about nine months, anyone so unlucky as to be around me after three or four beers got to hear my pulpit speech about the horizon-widening effect that Jeff Tweedy & Co.'s masterwork could have on the general populace.
Maybe it's because of this intense love affair that I don't reach for YHF so much anymore, in favor of albums that slipped through my fingers while I proselytized about the genius last two minutes of "Reservations". Surely, then, this miniature collectible e-EP-- originally released as a deal-sweetener for YHF-buyers down under, and now streaming and/or downloadable (if you're an honorable sort) from the Wilco website-- would rekindle some of the romance? Packaging two of the better YHF outtakes with four more recent songs, More Like the Moon is timed like a snack to tide us over while the band gallivants around the U.S. with Sonic Youth and R.E.M. instead of RECORDING A NEW ALBUM DAMMIT WHY WON'T YOU FINISH ITTTTTT!
But for those of us pulling for Tweedy to keep the laptop plugged in, More Like the Moon will stream a bit hollow due to its focus on that old humdrum, outdated tool, the guitar. Two tracks-- the unfamiliar "Woodgrain" and solo-show mainstay "Bob Dylan's 49th Beard"-- are little more than street-corner-strumming Tweedy, "Kamera" resurfaces in grungier form as "Camera", and the title track and "Handshake Drugs" feature extended soloing twixt the verses.
Your enjoyment of those last two tracks will probably determine your final score, as they stretch out over more than half of the EP's twenty minutes and change. "Handshake Drugs" comes off the better of the pair, employing a reclined groove and muffled "Only a Northern Song" noise breaks. "More Like the Moon", on the other hand, is an extremely straightforward purty ballad, with extended near-Flamenco picking lending the track a Chi-Chi's-style ambience. Yeah, it's somewhat moving and hardly faultable, but the bar is set too high now for Wilco to coast like they do here, restricting drummer Glenn Kotche to a first-day-of-drum-school beat and key-man Leroy Bach to gentle organ fills.
The only other misfire of the six tracks is "Camera", a bassy, fuzzed-out version that tramples over the delightfully subtle progression from folk-rock to laser guns in the original. But an arena-size "A Magazine Called Sunset" comes out better than expected, given the several lackluster Springsteen-esque demo versions floating about-- even if it sounds more like a Summerteeth outtake than a Yankee cut (count 1, 2, 3 keyboards in the first thirty seconds and know that Jay Bennett is in the hizzouse). The two folky tracks squeak by on lyrical grins, with Tweedy going meta on "Woodgrain" (break out your touchdown bandaids for the self-ref "Sometimes I rhyme/ Sometimes I don't") and making a defense mechanism out of Dylan's facial hair on "Beard".
If you find the whole effort a tad bit underwhelming, there may be good reasons why; to connect the dots with the stopgap from the other 10.0 hate-mail-inducer of last year, Trail of Dead's The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP seems like a dressing room for the band to try on possible future directions, while More Like the Moon sounds like Wilco cleaning out their fridge, even though it's only 33% leftovers. It's not that the sextet of material here plants any seeds of doubt about the band's future trajectory-- road-tested tracks like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" indicate there's plenty o' future to be excited about-- it's just that this release is less a tease for what lies ahead than an audit of last year's receipts.
But you can easily forgive More Like the Moon for being a bit of a dry-hump, due to its free and easy distribution on Wilco's website. This gracious move is a reminder of what might have been the real epi-musical "Meaning of YHF": the digital-utopia-hinting fact that it was streamed on the band's own site and easy to find on file-sharing bazaars, yet still became Wilco's biggest unit-shifter by a mile, very likely due to (really, could it have been?!?) its Internet leakage.
All the same, my drunken YHF ramblings stay retired, replaced by an even more ludicrous sermon about how The Rapture are going to reinvent indie music based around the mere two songs I've heard from their upcoming full-length. Don't get me wrong, I still stand convinced that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot opened up a lot of aunts' and uncles' ears to new sounds, and assuming Loose Fur didn't shut all of them back up, it's a spell that's still working. Still, More Like the Moon is far too safe a play to keep that momentum rolling between full-lengths, and fails to rise above the fan-club gift bonus it is. | 2003-04-27T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-04-27T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Wilcoworld.net | April 27, 2003 | 7 | e5b329a6-5b81-48ee-b30c-ed4e7e1d7bda | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
John Dwyer leads an instrumental jazz-garage chimera that’s far-out enough to escape predictability and ghoulish enough to go bump in the night. | John Dwyer leads an instrumental jazz-garage chimera that’s far-out enough to escape predictability and ghoulish enough to go bump in the night. | Various Artists: Witch Egg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-witch-egg/ | Witch Egg | Osees’ John Dwyer, a musical polymath adept at everything from prog-psych to the anthemic garage rock that soundtracked “Breaking Bad,” reconfigures sounds and lineups faster than a vaudeville star doing a quick-change. But he’s more savant than dabbler, and the albums keep coming, as frequent as they are diverse, a hit parade completed most recently by Witch Egg, an instrumental jazz-garage chimera peopled by Dwyer; drummer Nick Murray, a former Osees member; keyboardist Tom Dolas, a collaborator on last year’s Bent Arcana; saxophonist Brad Caulkins; and double bassist Greg Coates.
A lean collection of eight tracks under seven minutes, the group’s debut EP straddles dichotomies without losing itself to extremes: freewheeling and contained, exploratory but concise, easy to engage but far-out enough to escape predictability. Opener “Greener Pools” evokes Swedish psych rockers Dungen, a tangle of guitars and cymbals that cede to hypnotic saxophone riffs. From there, a few pinging notes that sound like a dial tone segue into screechy woodwinds on “City Maggot,” embellishing Dwyer’s synth and Murray’s steady drums in a marriage of chaos and order.
Though there are no lyrics, the names of these songs hint at a world akin to Osees’ 2019 album Face Stabber: a ghoulish vision full of Dark Crystal puppets, desolate as Escape From New York. There’s the titular “Witch Egg,” a funereal dirge that could just as easily soundtrack the dead rising from their graves, followed in close succession by “Baphomet,” “Arse,” and “On Your Own Now.” “Sekhu” might be a reference to a “biblical hill or watch-tower,” or—just as likely—it might mean nothing at all, no more or less real than a cast spell.
This holistic union of sound, atmosphere, and imagery propels the record. Listening to the wobbly, otherworldly drone of “Baphomet” after everyone else has gone to bed makes a dark room less trustworthy; the twitchy sax stalks disquietingly through its second half. The apotheosis of this heady vibe is “Sekhu,” where the throb of synth, the whine of saxophone, and the susurrus of cymbals sound like the last thing you hear before you find the skull on the album cover, an egg in its mouth.
Closer “On Your Own Now” eases up on the dread and the tempo, bringing in a bright saxophone and unhurried snares with a few sparkling keys that might even be considered hopeful. Is it alone like abandonment, or alone like one freed of a ghost? The last few seconds, when everything drops out but the reverberating drum beat, are less a definitive answer and more an ellipsis.
“This one is a burner designed optimally for your eco-pod sound system,” writes Dwyer in the band’s terse, inscrutable press release. “When you’ve left the world behind, you will need a soundtrack while you lay in dream stasis.” The best albums are prescient enough to predict the future, or precise enough to document the present. Slick as a ’70s horror film and dense and shrouded as a forest, Witch Egg’s improvisations feel like omens of future dystopia.
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. | 2021-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Rock Is Hell | January 25, 2021 | 7.5 | e5ba2d5f-0edf-43a2-ad31-5a112f98e0db | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Three years after making an ostensible but half-hearted return to his roots, the grime icon more convincingly reconciles underground instincts with pop ambitions. | Three years after making an ostensible but half-hearted return to his roots, the grime icon more convincingly reconciles underground instincts with pop ambitions. | Dizzee Rascal: E3 AF | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dizzee-rascal-e3-af/ | E3 AF | Three years ago, Dizzee Rascal announced he was going back to his roots. While he’d been chasing pop hits in L.A. and Miami with will.i.am and Robbie Williams, the sound he’d birthed at the turn of the millennium had found a new elder statesman in Skepta, a crown prince in Stormzy, and a more lucrative benchmark for success. Grime was not only cool, it was charting. Politicians shamelessly cashed in cultural capital with claims that this fine British export was soundtracking their ministerial drives. So Dizzee revived his teenage nickname and came to collect his dues from the scene. The resulting album, 2017’s Raskit, was well timed and had its moments; critics, seduced by its familiarity, lapped it up. But Dizzee, sounding tired and frustrated, was mostly phoning it in: He rose to the Wiley bait, recounted old pirate-radio tales, protested too much. By contrast, E3 AF sounds like Dizzee making the album he wants to make, rather than the one he thinks people want to hear.
The album’s name nods to Dizzee’s status as a born-and-raised Londoner and grime original (E3 being the east London postcode that both he and grime grew up in), as well as his Ghanaian and Nigerian heritage—“Aff” is an archaic slur that Dizzee has reclaimed, proudly referring to himself as the “E3 African.” And while the acronymic “as fuck” of the title will no doubt stir a well-worn row—that he’s far from “E3 as fuck” and more like “far from E3” most of the time—it’s not one that Dizzee entertains here. Recorded entirely in London over the last three years, the album is grounded in the capital’s rich Black musical history. “God Knows” is Dizzee at his abrasive, urgent best: a rattle of jungle snares, skittish drill hats, ten-ton kicks, and rudeboy basslines. He spars on the track with P Money—a bullish South London MC defined by his steadfast dedication to the grime sound—and distances himself from his more persistent critics with bars like “Trying hard but you ain’t maintaining/Everybody, bar you, that you’re blaming.” As if buffing his credentials, he continues to trade verses with grime Hall of Famers throughout the album: A first studio-minted collaboration with Kano and Ghetts may have been long overdue, but it immediately sounds crisp on “Eastside”; Boy Better Know member Frisco, steadfast as his unwavering hairline, is yet to deliver a bad verse and continues that run on “That’s Too Much” (with D Double E throwing in a few of his iconic ad-libs for good measure).
Brief and assured at 10 tracks, E3 AF is the first time since 2007’s Maths + English that Dizzee has managed to tread the extremes of both his underground and mainstream iterations convincingly on a single album—helped, of course, by the interim injection of grime, garage, and drum’n’bass into the pop canon. He’s able to eschew hit-factory producers for scene insiders, as well as getting back behind the boards himself for a number of tracks. Deekline adds impeccable 2-step swing and euphoric yearning to “You Don’t Know”; proto-grime pioneer Platinum 45 provides “Eastside” with its menacing bassline and whip-snap snares; Splurgeboys employ the kind of throwback sampling that’s catnip to old-school ravers on “Body Loose.” When the veteran grime MC wants to try his hand at UK drill, on “Act Like You Know,” he brings in the Brigade’s MK the Plug and Vader. Within these familiar environs, Dizzee’s performances soar. If he takes a breath on the rapid-fire rap confessional “Energies + Powers,” you wouldn’t know it; his effortless garage flow on “You Don’t Know” adds panache to shallow boasts about bottles, cars, and Instagram clout.
The album isn’t without its dull moments. Forced choruses remain a habit that Dizzee finds hard to throw off: “Love Life Live Large” is about as stirring as the “Live Love Laugh” decor that litters the homes of middle England; the nauseating, Chris Martin-esque hook of “Be Incredible”—with its inspiro-quote reel of “The time is now to make it right, and be incredible” (etc. ad nauseam)—does nothing but puncture what might otherwise have been the album’s introspective “Stay Positive” moment.
It may have taken him another three years to get there, but Dizzee has finally bedded down at home again, rediscovering himself in the process. E3 AF caps a period in which he’s seen more mainstream success than he could have imagined, all while being harried by a grime scene with abandonment issues. This could be the album that pleases both sides equally—no small feat in such fractious times. | 2020-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Dirtee Stank | November 2, 2020 | 7.2 | e5bc7fee-37c9-48b5-b471-b13e62bc6598 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Oft-overlooked outfit reissues two early-1990s albums with bonus tracks, giving another chance to hear its more biting and direct approach to shoegaze. | Oft-overlooked outfit reissues two early-1990s albums with bonus tracks, giving another chance to hear its more biting and direct approach to shoegaze. | Swervedriver: Raise / Mezcal Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12846-raise-mezcal-head/ | Raise / Mezcal Head | It seems that in every musical movement, there are worthy artists who get lost in the shuffle. In the case of Britain's late-1980s/early-90s shoegazer scene, Swervedriver had the unfortunate distinction of being one of those bands. Forged in the same Oxford milieu that produced Ride and Radiohead, they were positioned under the shoegaze umbrella because of their sound, not their attitude. While many bands operating in similar territory earned the title by literally standing on stage staring at the floor (which was covered in guitar pedals) and letting their lyrics get swept away in the texture of the music, Swervedriver projected a tougher image, drawing their name and much of their lyrical imagery from American car culture and films. If their counterparts were about capturing the look of a vapor trail in their guitar tones, Swervedriver's Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge were more about simulating the rocket ride that produced the trail in the first place. They sounded great on a car stereo.
Because of this, they were much better equipped to make it big in the U.S. than peers like Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, and even My Bloody Valentine; for all the usual boring reasons (label trouble, lineup instability), it didn't pan out that way. They released four albums, only three of which came out stateside, and filled in the space around them with a shelf's worth of EPs and 7"s before hanging it up-- temporarily, as it turned out-- in 1999. Their first two albums, Raise and Mezcal Head, languished out of print for years before BMG resurrected them last year, and Hi-Speed Soul is giving them a second run in America with a slightly expanded tracklist.
1991's Raise was a quality debut, and it's dated surprisingly well. The muscular, scorching guitars are the heart of the album, and they still bring the noise like nobody's business. The big distortion and interlocking riffs give most of the album a dense, bright sound with a lot of punch. "Son of Mustang Ford" rumbles like the car it's named for, "Rave Down" launches into hyperspace after three minutes of tense, grungy crunching, and "Sunset" pulls back a bit, layering cleaner guitars than usual over a bubbling bassline and unison vocals. While the band had already perfected its sonic punch, the songwriting was a bit of a work in progress. Outside of "Sunset", Raise is somewhat wanting for sharp vocal melodies, with Franklin and Hartridge trading off deadpan intonations.
Two years later, on Mezcal Head, the songs caught up to the guitars. "For Seeking Heat", "Girl on a Motorbike", "You Find It Everywhere", and "Blowin' Cool" weave laser-guided melodies through tangles of distortion-drenched guitar. The band lost its original rhythm section between albums, but new drummer Jez Hindmarsh absolutely crushes his kit, matching the intensity of the guitar maelstrom. "Last Train to Satansville" is the height of alt-rock badassery, opening with the brilliant couplet "'You look like you've been losing sleep,' said the stranger on a train/ I fixed him with an ice-cold stare and said, 'I've been having those dreams again.'" The sentiment is backed up with a monster guitar riff and chunky rhythm, and if I had to pick just one Swervedriver song to introduce the band, that'd be it. Just as every movement has overlooked artists, every movement has lost classics, and Mezcal Head really is the lost classic of the shoegaze movement, visceral but tuneful, and perhaps the nearest simulation of a rocket launch recorded in the 90s.
The reissues each add four period bonus tracks, which seem more or less to be a random selection from over a dozen available EP and 7" offerings. Mezcal Head drops the 12-minute "Never Lose That Feeling/Never Learn" meltdown that closed the original U.S. version of the album, replacing it with the shorter EP version of "Never Lose That Feeling". Overall, it's high-quality stuff-- especially Raise bonus "Andalucia"-- but it won't give a collector any closure, especially given that one of the passed-over tracks is the wicked, steel guitar-soaked headrush "Scrawl & Scream", from 1991's Reel to Real EP. Castle Music's Juggernaut Rides compilation remains the best source for Swervedriver's rarities. For an introduction to the band, though, Mezcal Head can't be beat, and it's great to have it and Raise available again. If you missed them the first time or simply weren't around to hear them, Swervedriver is worth the trip back in time. | 2009-04-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-04-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 2, 2009 | 7.3 | e5c032a3-6dc0-40e9-bc61-524bce0cce76 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The veteran songwriter contemplates faith on a quiet, ambitious 33-minute suite. It becomes more surreal—and even funny—the deeper into it you get. | The veteran songwriter contemplates faith on a quiet, ambitious 33-minute suite. It becomes more surreal—and even funny—the deeper into it you get. | Paul Simon: Seven Psalms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-simon-seven-psalms/ | Seven Psalms | If you have ever searched for the meaning of life in a pop song, you have likely turned to Paul Simon. The sacred comfort of being alone, the creeping anxiety of getting older, the haunted visitations that follow our failed relationships: For 60 years, he has explored these universal concerns in a tender, conversational voice, often accompanied by complex arrangements that suggest a busy, clattering world, already setting the stage for our next celebration or catastrophe.
On the 81-year-old’s latest record, Seven Psalms, he silences his surroundings. The quiet is arresting, almost uncanny—the sound of venturing into the backyard in the early morning after a long night of rain. For most of the project’s 33-minute runtime, it’s just Simon’s near-whisper and his acoustic guitar, fingerpicking his way through a spare, dewy landscape. His lyrics are similarly uncluttered. “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows,” he sings in one of the most memorable lines, “until the real deal came.”
The way Simon tells it, he was gearing up for retirement, having performed what was billed as his last concert, when he woke from a dream with an imperative to write something called Seven Psalms. “I thought: I’m not sure I even know what a psalm is,” he confessed. Never one to back away from a mysterious creative impulse, he studied the psalms of King David and began chipping away at an ambitious project that he is adamant listeners approach as a single composition. (On streaming services, it plays as one unbroken track, despite being separated into seven movements with distinct titles in the liner notes.)
Within the conceptual framework, Simon tries his hand at modernizing the language of King David. “The COVID virus is the Lord,” he tells us, more than once, suggesting an Old Testament understanding of the divine. Other times he aims for a more idiomatic, empathetic perspective on the trajectory of modern life. “It seems to me we’re all walking down the same road to wherever it ends,” he observes in “Trail of Volcanoes,” which extends a dreamlike narrative about refugees and hitchhikers, blended with Simon’s own autobiography.
From this vantage, Seven Psalms might initially scan as another wistful, self-referential entry in the growing canon of late-era releases from master songwriters contemplating the end of their journeys. But that characterization belies how singular, surreal, and occasionally funny Seven Psalms can be. There’s a bluesy movement titled “My Professional Opinion,” in which Simon assumes the role of the wise old poet mulling over his weighty subject matter; eventually he cracks a joke about cows and cuts through the austerity like a nervous host gathering guests from the funeral to the afterparty: “What in the world are we whispering for?”
Here is where we might expect the orchestra to come in—or, you know, the djembe or jazz band or choir. Instead we get a quick blast of harmonica and a low, grinding drone—as if a country ensemble were passing in a slow-moving truck. The effect is jarring, adding an eerie sense of dynamics, like the dreams where you try to raise your voice but can’t make a sound. With only a few instrumental accompaniments (strings, flute, an instrument called “theorbo”) and guest vocals from Edie Brickell and British a cappella group Voces8, it is easily the most solitary record Simon has made since his early solo work. The restraint is the point; just as he’s found inspiration in wide-ranging rhythms and textures from around the world, he now seems thrilled by just how much quiet he can conjure.
Simon has long been driven by a desire to challenge expectations, annotating his words or retracting them as soon as we’ve absorbed them. Often it’s for comedic effect: “All my life, I’ve been a wanderer,” he sang in 2000’s “Darling Loraine,” swiftly followed by, “Not really, I mostly lived near my parents’ home.” After so much godly imagery of endless flowing rivers and white light that eases the pain, there’s a similar twist near the end of Seven Psalms: Just before the final movement, he shifts his exaltation of the Lord from a distanced, metaphorical interpretation—the face in the atmosphere, a meal for the poorest of the poor—toward a role more suited to his actual surroundings: “The Lord is my engineer/The Lord is my record producer,” he announces with an arched eyebrow.
And with that, we’re right there with Simon in the unromantic, soundproof rooms where he has spent a great deal of his working life. “My hand’s steady/My mind’s still clear,” he tells us. “I hear the ghost songs I own/Jumpin’, jivin’, and moanin’ through a heartbroken microphone.” These lines occur in a movement called “Wait,” as in, “Wait, I’m not ready,” a lyric he sings in as fragile a delivery as he’s ever mustered. Brickell, the singer-songwriter to whom he’s been married for more than 30 years, joins to accompany him, and their voices build to a muted gospel climax around the word “amen.”
That’s where we leave him—standing beside someone he loves, completing the task set out for him, and accepting the inevitable with a prayer. Simon has referred to this record as an “argument I’m having with myself about belief or not,” and happy endings don’t come much clearer than this. But is anything ever so simple? When Brickell assures him that heaven is “beautiful… almost like home,” what does she mean by “almost”? And what about those questions of doubt he raises in “Your Forgiveness,” and the deliberating jury he imagines still pondering our fate? For every resounding major chord Simon strums around that final, elongated iteration of “amen,” there’s one that sounds a little unsteady, shakier and more unresolved. If there’s a comfort to be found in this music, or any certainty in the story that Simon feels compelled to keep telling us, it’s that the searching never ends. | 2023-05-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Owl / Legacy | May 25, 2023 | 7.5 | e5c13ba2-2a70-47c8-bae2-977a48b360eb | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On their second full-length outing, the young Chicago band has delivered on their early promise, with a richer sound and a better batch of songs. | On their second full-length outing, the young Chicago band has delivered on their early promise, with a richer sound and a better batch of songs. | Smith Westerns: Dye It Blonde | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15016-dye-it-blonde/ | Dye It Blonde | Smith Westerns have cleaned up nicely. Just over a year ago, the Chicago foursome were of the strictly "lo-fi" persuasion, stirring up hot, filthy garage-rock candy out of Marc Bolan and Beatles signifiers. It was youthful music in feeling and sound-- their noisy full-length debut was recorded while they were still in high school-- but the remarkable hooks buried therein were clear enough to land them on the increasingly stacked Fat Possum roster. And suddenly, they had a studio budget the likes of which they definitely hadn't enjoyed before. Though the leap is audibly huge, Dye It Blonde's many successes aren't wholly the result of its gilded production values and ambition. This band was able to furnish first-class melodies from the beginning. Now they've grown along with their resources.
You can hear the progress right away in "Imagine, Pt. 3", a song originally released as part of a split 7" in April 2010. Sped up here just a touch, it's also been re-outfitted with a far creamier set of synths and guitars. The way the latter seem to clasp hands during the coda is particularly breathtaking, frontman Cullen Omori and guitarist Max Kakacek letting their individual lines mate rather than duel. While the melodic foundation was already sturdy throughout, here, what once sounded ragged in stretches is now plush-upholstered from start to finish. Every single piece of Dye It Blonde is similarly decadent, whether it's the sweet whine of semi-titular closer "Dye the World" or the twilight jangle of "End of the Night".
In an interview not long after the album's completion, Omori noted that this otherwise new set of songs was influenced by 90s Britpop luminaries like Oasis, Teenage Fanclub, and Suede. All are present sonically and spiritually, be it in brash tones, melodic IQ or the sheer scope of these recordings. Where a Smith Westerns hook may have once sounded like another fuzzy member of the Nuggets family/genus, it now unfolds like crane-shot, mainstage festival fare. "Still New" for example floats some phasered guitar interplay before Kakacek rips a hole across the chest of the song with a woozy line so big it essentially serves as a chorus. Like "Weekend", whose central, hair-flipping lick also hugs all its parts together perfectly, the song just sounds so drunk-- drunk on love, drunk on heavy petting, drunk on drink, or maybe just drunk on a some combination of the above. In song, it all depends on the lean of Omori's voice and the whip of his chord changes, the curves of his brother Cameron's bass lines.
That moony/beery-eyed feel bleeds through every corridor of this album and in turn forms a crystalline expression of what moves this band. Their use of the studio in augmenting that never goes overboard, though: this music still retains the innately psychedelic, lamplit, tongue-kissed sense of atmosphere that set it apart. There's perhaps no better instance of all that than "All Die Young", the album's centerpiece. It's a ballad turned hymn whose grand, tumbling scale and "Oh Yoko"-indebted outro celebration are peaks on an album rich in them. In its closing moments, Omori sings what sounds like, "Love is lovely when you are young." They were convincing before, but now they seem like experts. | 2011-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | January 18, 2011 | 8.4 | e5d8f2f4-11a5-4928-9776-62d3e5bf15ee | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
The 1996 album, newly reissued, finds the drone duo transitioning from their rough-hewn early phase into a more graceful, wordlessly evocative mode. | The 1996 album, newly reissued, finds the drone duo transitioning from their rough-hewn early phase into a more graceful, wordlessly evocative mode. | Stars of the Lid: Gravitational Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stars-of-the-lid-gravitational-pull-vs-the-desire-for-an-aquatic-life/ | Gravitational Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life | “I don't really expect anybody to listen to the music, to be perfectly honest,” Stars of the Lid’s Brian McBride once admitted, neatly summing up how he and bandmate Adam Wiltzie view their long-simmering, late-era success. Over the past 20-plus years, they have gone from Austin weirdos exploring the ether of college radio (McBride’s slot was wincingly called “The Dick Fudge Show”) to intrepid four-track space explorers to drone transcendentalists. In the decade since Stars of the Lid’s last full-length, 2007’s And Their Refinement of the Decline, their distilled sensibilities can be heard echoing through minimalists from Max Richter and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson to Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds. Though perhaps McBride’s statement is more reflective of the group’s most faithful audience, those just trying to fall asleep.
For all of its wide-open plains and famous “stars at night,” Texas wasn’t much known for inspiring ambient music in the early ’90s, and the duo’s earlier albums bear a rougher hew. They may have been aiming for the celestial spaces of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo, but recording to four-track in a rickety house in East Austin imparted something coarser and earthier. Found voices, thunked noises, and tape hiss inform their 1995 debut, Music for Nitrous Oxide, while e-bowed guitars and back-masked effects run throughout their 1996 follow-up, Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire for an Aquatic Life. Originally presented in a noisy and problematic pressing on white vinyl, the album finally gets a deserved vinyl reissue, 22 years on. It reveals less a dream music than one informed, as Wiltzie has recalled, by “blistering heat and massive drugs and depression.”
Looking anew at the cover art depicting a blurry view through a screen door, you can almost feel the oppressive, gelatinous humidity of summer in Texas. A sense of lethargy permeates Gravitational, something that the albums the duo recorded after leaving Austin (McBride for Chicago and Los Angeles and Wiltzie for Brussels) elegantly float above. The 19-minute expanse of “Cantus; In Memory of Warren Wiltzie” feels dark and submerged, full of seismic rumbles, storm-drain echoes, and scraped guitar strings. While the billowing drones of later Stars recordings make the listener feel weightless, “Cantus” instead casts a disorienting haze around you, never quite letting you escape.
The second side of the album is where Stars of the Lid hit their stride, tapping into the sort of hypnagogic sound that would come to be their modus operandi for the next two decades on albums like The Ballasted Orchestra and The Tired Sounds of.... Distant drones, sampled strings, e-bowed guitar swells, and sine waves that sound like alien transmissions are blended together to sublime effect on “Lactate’s Moment.” The elements rise and fall so naturally, they come to feel like part of your own breathing. The strings that emerge toward the end lead seamlessly into the elegiac closer “Be Little With Me.” As glib and peculiar as the duo’s titles can be (see “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface”), the melody of “Be Little With Me” feels vulnerable, sincere, and heart-rending. It’s the sound of the band learning how to be wordlessly evocative, going beyond paralyzing feelings of depression and the urge to self-medicate to get at an emotionally resonant core. | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | March 30, 2018 | 7.7 | e5dce02e-b49d-40e6-8463-d8d9ff6bfb76 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The whistling, shit-talking Detroit rapper has found nationwide appeal without abandoning the core elements of his city’s homegrown style. | The whistling, shit-talking Detroit rapper has found nationwide appeal without abandoning the core elements of his city’s homegrown style. | 42 Dugg: Young & Turnt 2 (Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/42-dugg-young-and-turnt-2-deluxe/ | Young & Turnt 2 (Deluxe) | Seconds into 42 Dugg’s Young and Turnt Vol. 2, you hear him whistle. It’s not a particularly skillful whistle—it’s the type of airy sound you usually make by accident, and actually, at first it was. “I don’t even know why I did that shit, I ain’t even gonna lie,” the 25-year-old East Detroit native said in an interview. But regardless of how amateurish it may be, I can’t imagine a 42 Dugg song without it.
The whistling, shit-talking rapper has accomplished what once seemed impossible in Detroit: he's found nationwide appeal without abandoning the core elements of the city’s homegrown style. It wasn’t always this way. After being granted his freedom in 2017, Dugg began to put out unmixed and offbeat music—common in Detroit. Even though he was raw, he had a vivid touch that recalled influences like Jeezy. It made him a rising Midwest star, one who would subtly evolve when he arrived in Atlanta.
In Atlanta, Dugg formed a friendship playing high-stakes dice games with the emerging Lil Baby, who helped the Detroit rapper’s rugged raps reach the ear of Yo Gotti. Together, Lil Baby and Yo Gotti signed 42 Dugg in 2019, and released his mixtape Young and Turnt, a strong record that began to bridge the gap between Detroit and the South.
Dugg hit his stride earlier this year on a pair of great rap songs from the deluxe version of Lil Baby’s My Turn. On “Grace,” Dugg’s confessional verses are the main attraction, delivered in the same lethargic style popular among East Detroit rappers like Babyface Ray and Peezy. Then there’s the electric “We Paid,” where an animated Dugg overshadows Baby: The opening line has since become his breakout moment: “Fore I go broke like Joc/Fuck with that dog like Vick.” (Just don’t bring it up around Yung Joc.)
Young and Turnt Vol. 2 was originally released in March, but like so many major rap records in 2020, it has been updated with a deluxe edition. In its first form, the mixtape was an easy end-to-end listen, and miraculously, the added nine songs don’t take away from the fun, even though it’s clear that they’re meant to juice streaming numbers and capitalize on his rapidly growing fanbase.
Of the original 14 tracks, the most ambitious are the ones which attempt to balance Dugg’s Atlanta influences with his Detroit flair. “Not a Rapper,” featuring Southside production that sounds like it’s been collecting dust since the Obama era, should have been the typical forced major label album cut, but his signature Midwest flow—always a step ahead of the beat—keeps the song fresh. The balance isn’t perfect though; “Ride With Me” takes a swing at a scratchy melody which should be forever reserved for Atlanta crooners.
Dugg is by far at his best when he’s making traditional Detroit rap songs with a little bit of big-money polish. On “Habit,” Dugg reps his city hard: The track has bass-heavy production from local legend Helluva, and Dugg, spits the rich, boundary-pushing stories that are the norm in Detroit: “Prolly serve fentanyl to five thousand fiends.” He’s even sharper when he’s reflective. “Fell out with my best friend over six grams/Now I ain’t got a best man but I got fans,” he raps over the soulful vocal sample and jittery bassline of “It Get Deeper.”
The deluxe tracks aren’t as focused, and a pair of unnecessary remixes end the album with a whimper. Dugg stumbles back into some of the same missteps as the original record: “Free Dirt” sounds like it could have been recorded by any rising ATL rapper with a Coach K endorsement, and he once again makes us suffer through lousy vocals on “All My Life.” But there are moments that justify the deluxe’s existence beyond making Dugg’s pockets fatter. The Detroit street record “Light This Bitch Up” seems ready to soundtrack a Michigan State football postgame, and “Big 4’s” has an introduction almost as good as his breakout moment on “We Paid”: “I seen niggas hatin’ way before I ever had tints.” And, of course, none of it is complete without the whistle. | 2020-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | CMG / 4 Pockets Full | June 24, 2020 | 7.6 | e5df8ad8-2f05-4212-826f-7d4be918a883 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Dreddy Krueger presents "Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture" on which indie hip-hop artists rhyme over unused tracks from the Wu archives. | Dreddy Krueger presents "Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture" on which indie hip-hop artists rhyme over unused tracks from the Wu archives. | Various Artists: Dreddy Krueger Presents...Think Differently Music: Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8748-dreddy-krueger-presentsthink-differently-music-wu-tang-meets-the-indie-culture/ | Dreddy Krueger Presents...Think Differently Music: Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture | The once-dominant "W" is there, draped in Apple-jocking color waves. The choppy, soul-sampling production is there. RZA and GZA are there. So it's a Wu-Tang Clan record, right? Well, sorta. On Think Differently, longtime Wu affiliate Dreddy Krueger has taken a concept chock with novelty appeal-- your favorite indie rappers over Wu beats!-- and stretched it into a nearly hour-long exercise in necrophilia. If the formerly ubiquitous Clan aren't yet a hip-hop casualty, they're on life support. It's been four years since Iron Flag and four years more since one of their albums made a cultural impact. Ghostface is arguably the only one of the collective who is still turning out essential albums. But Wu-Tang has an everlasting allure. Krueger only managed to wrangle the services of three official Wu members here, one of whom is U-God, the only one I wouldn't want to meet on wax. Would it really have been so difficult to get 16 bars from, say, Masta Killa? Gripes and misleading circumstances aside, Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture is surprisingly coherent and faithful to RZA's model, and it features a few unexpectedly gleaming examples of Wu-aping.
Backed by nostalgic production from Mathematics, designer of the famed W logo, and Wu tenderfoot Bronze Nazareth, each song has a stretched-out leftover appeal. Which makes sense because that's exactly what Krueger did-- he pilfered the unused Wu archives for hidden gems. The whole practice is hit-and-spliff. The tracks you think will quake, like RZA and MF Doom teaming up on "Biochemical Equation", or GZA and Ras Kass squaring off on the thrilling "Lyrical Swords" (Ras easily dominates the suddenly old Genius), are gold. Cannibal Ox's Vast Aire also makes a strong showing over the churning, sweaty harmonica boogie of "Slow Blues". "I'm like Ali, better yet Joe Louis/ I'll put my hands through you/ I don't need bullets," he sneers. Less appealing ventures-- J-Live meets R.A. the Rugged Man, anyone?-- either feel forced or ill-conceived. "Aesop Rock is weird and so is Del tha Funky Homosapien. Get 'em in the booth!"
This only raises an important question: What exactly constitutes "indie" in hip-hop right now? In indie-hop's salad days, when El-P swung a mighty sword and the word "Rawkus" didn't make you groan, this sort of project might have meant something. Now we're subjected to the likes of Scaramanga Shallah. These miscellaneous MCs are only indie because they can't get on commercially, not because they embody some sort of concrete ethos. This makes the whole venture bunk, though not a complete waste of time. Two interludes from Jim Jarmusch, reportedly a friend of Krueger's and the reason RZA steals Coffee and Cigarettes from Bill Murray, are bizarrely pretentious ("Harmony composes compatibility among the incongruous...") and reason alone to give this a listen.
While only a curio in the Wu archive, our friend Dreddy appears to have good intentions. It wouldn't have been a bad thing to hear some more accomplished MCs give these beats a shot; most recall a gloriously synth-less world of East Coast hip-hop production. Of course, that would have spared us the chance to hear Littles, La the Darkman & Byata give their Wu dream whip a spin. | 2005-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Babygrande | October 20, 2005 | 6.9 | e5e06331-cc29-470c-bca4-7857d6029e4a | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
Using a canvas of cosmic synth arpeggios and hissing electronics, the Colombian artist treats folk music as a living entity imbued with liberatory potential. | Using a canvas of cosmic synth arpeggios and hissing electronics, the Colombian artist treats folk music as a living entity imbued with liberatory potential. | Montañera: A Flor de Piel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/montanera-a-flor-de-piel/ | A Flor de Piel | A Flor de Piel, the new album from Colombian artist Montañera, cultivates clarity from communion. You can hear blunted traces of the country’s folk music across the record, but “Como Una Rama” is one of the album’s clearest summonings. At first, only her elastic vocals hang in the air, stretching and sprawling into the thickness of the atmosphere. Her voice starts reverberating into echoes, as if a chorus of ancestral spirits have joined her. Here, Montañera sings in the tradition of bullerengue, a folk style of music and dance developed by maroon communities (enslaved Africans who escaped bondage and formed their own settlements) on the Caribbean coast of her homeland. Before long, her voice short-circuits, glitching into ripples of fuzz, like a spotty radio transmission. All that’s left in the haze is the steadfastness of her voice.
A Flor de Piel transmits centuries of cultural memory, but the hissing electronics and serene synth arrangements transform the music into more than mere homage. The album chronicles stories of rebirth, transformation, and self-discovery, often via the purifying and regenerative motifs of water and flora. But even though María Mónica Gutiérrez’s journey is personal, her muted interpolations of folk styles suggest there is abundant knowledge in community-based traditions. A Flor de Piel is not just a sublime example of folkloric reinterpretation; it’s also a treatise on the liberatory gestures that are possible when you reimagine musical genealogy. In Montañera’s fluid chronal continuum, folk music isn’t an ancient artifact, but a living, breathing entity that was always meant to free us.
Take “Santa Mar,” which features Cankita (from the group Bejuco) and Las Cantadoras de Yerba Buena, a group of traditional musicians from Colombia’s Pacific coast, led by women from Tumaco. The track is an offering to an aquatic deity whose holy water possesses cleansing and life-giving properties. On it, speckled marimbas de chonta and orotund vocals, sung in the style of currulao, are shepherds for cycles of life and death. A repeated chant renders the practice of singing as a conduit for renewal: “Listen to my song, which comes and goes from the water/Wetting the earth so that new life may grow.” While pursuing her master’s degree, Gutiérrez studied vocal traditions from the Colombian Pacific coast, investigating how singing can be a tool for peace-building in the aftermath of violent conflict. Though other songs on A Flor de Piel only gesture at this kind of healing, in its lyrics, “Santa Mar” is a literal declaration of folk music’s curative capacities.
Montañera brandishes her voice as an instrument, and the masterful production across the album only amplifies its elegance. On “Tú - El Borde de Mi Arista,” her voice is fragile and light, but as the track unfolds, it morphs into meandering, Auto-Tuned melodies and crinkly murmurs. On “Un Día Voy a Ser Mariposa,” a six-minute epic of metamorphosis, vocal effects mirror the erratic, non-linear process of healing. Gutiérrez’s voice is distorted and chopped into formless but familiar syllables; soon, it quivers into gauzy harmonies, lying somewhere on the spectrum of ambient music. Sparse, resonant waves of synths drone under her voice, cloaking the production with an immersive and dreamlike kind of oblivion. It’s meticulous but free-flowing, a sensorial delight that feels natural and deliberate all at once.
The concept of “ancestral healing,” or the reclamation of age-old rituals as a radical spiritual pursuit, has become a popular decolonizing practice across the Latin American diaspora over the last few years. Many people are returning to customs that were criminalized or ostracized under colonialism and slavery, decentering Western epistemologies in the process. On A Flor de Piel, Montañera presents an antidote for a world in which ancestral spirituality has sometimes been reduced to Instagram infographics and candle-burning ceremonies stripped of their original context. But Montañera’s relationship to traditional sounds never feels extractive or facile. Across A Flor de Piel, she builds small idylls, where time and tradition coalesce into divine awakening. | 2024-01-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Folk/Country | Western Vinyl | January 10, 2024 | 8 | e5e0b5f4-c635-45c8-839f-b9e668c07f65 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
The Canadian songwriter’s full-length debut is sentimental and melancholy, allowing even songs with ambiguous, conflicted meanings to be subsumed into echoey haze. | The Canadian songwriter’s full-length debut is sentimental and melancholy, allowing even songs with ambiguous, conflicted meanings to be subsumed into echoey haze. | Ellis : Born Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ellis-born-again/ | Born Again | Hamilton, Ontario’s Linnea Siggelkow decided to learn guitar at age 12, when she saw the music video for Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” As the daughter of a piano teacher, it was her first departure from sheet music. When she began writing her own songs, she found herself drawn towards melancholy. That’s the mood that defines Ellis, the dream-pop project she started in her bedroom some four years ago. A series of early GarageBand demos attracted attention, earning her opening slots for Soccer Mommy and Palehound. Her debut LP, Born Again, is an opportunity to hear Ellis in her own right. But with sentimental lyrics and familiar emo-pop tropes—gentle guitar reverb, windswept synths, overblown crescendos—the album too often falls back on cliché.
As the title suggests, Born Again charts Ellis’ disillusionment with her religious upbringing and its lingering effects on her state of mind. “In the pews I lost my hope/Where I was supposed to find it,” she sings in a soft, pining voice reminiscent of contemporaries like Nicole Dollanganger, Long Beard, and Tomberlin. She confesses to a shame “that I will carry ’til I’m dead,” but the feeling doesn’t grade into the music. There’s little specificity, nor much variation in mood, so that even songs with ambiguous, conflicted meanings are subsumed into echoey haze. The closing track takes a hopeful tone—“Had a dream I was a butterfly,” Ellis sings—but it relies on the same sparse guitar, synth overlay, and middle-eight upsurge as “Into the Trees,” a song about dysfunctional relationships and dread.
When Ellis’ unique perspective does emerge, it offers beauty like “a brief gasp between one cliché and another,” in the words of Ezra Pound. “I thought I had found freedom/When I moved into the city/I was puking out the window/I was trying to be pretty,” she sings on the title track—an image so detailed and so arbitrary, it could only be her own. By contrast, lines like, “You’re the monster that still hides under my bed/You’re the words that I thought but never said” (from “Shame”) are so wholly reliant on cliché that there’s little hope of saying anything new. At other times, Ellis struggles to put words to her emotions. “I can’t explain the feeling,” she admits on “Happy”; “I don’t know why, I just feel like a mess,” she sings on “Into the Trees.” With nowhere else to go for emphasis or meaning, she simply gets louder, adding all-caps declarations of “I’m scared” that counteract the very feeling she wants to convey.
Open-heartedness can act as a salve in an irony-hardened world, but the sweet kitsch of Born Again leaves little to latch onto. The songs are buttressed by predictable structures—soft, then bombastic, then soft again—with little room for surprise. The grungy, tuned-down guitar starts just when it’s expected; ditto the pitter-pattering drums and the starry synths that merge the other components together. All the soupy atmospherics wind up obscuring Ellis’ attempts at honest self-reflection. Uniformly and unashamedly sentimental, Born Again leaves too little to remember her by.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 16, 2020 | 5.9 | e5e775c7-3540-4cd1-8bb8-d98800540297 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
More than a decade into their career, Omaha's the Faint-- now self-producing and releasing their music on their own label-- have seen their infatuation with 1980s synth pop become an indie cliché; their first album in four years balances songs about geopolitics and technology with musings on the politics of romance. | More than a decade into their career, Omaha's the Faint-- now self-producing and releasing their music on their own label-- have seen their infatuation with 1980s synth pop become an indie cliché; their first album in four years balances songs about geopolitics and technology with musings on the politics of romance. | The Faint: Fasciinatiion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12073-fasciinatiion/ | Fasciinatiion | Ten years in, the Faint are a) self-producing, b) on their own label, c) still letting Ticketmaster fleece their faithful, and d) as hard to hate on as they are to get excited about. I mean, these stylish Nebraskans, whose packaging always apes vintage Russian poster art, are, in terms of longevity, where Depeche Mode was when Violator came out, and Fasciinatiion is just not Violator solid. This act might have "pioneered" the re-cooling of 1980s keyboard textures in indie rock, but (like the Mode) they've stayed themselves while others ran with their inspiration into the respective electro, dance-punk, and now bloghouse, abysses. Weirdly, bands list them as an influence on press releases these days-- like, they've been lapped by hungry hosts of the very textures they reintroduced. (For proof, consult how Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s remix of this album's first single plays like a decadent, overprocessed "update".)
Genre was never their preoccupation, though, and they've openly resented their critics'/fans' synth-related comparisons/pigeonholing. The Faint play Faint songs, see, and gosh, Fasciinatiion is awful darn Fainty-- if a tad minimal and midtempo compared to their last two platters. Ever since they became a "Societal Ideas" band on Danse Macabre, you know you're going to get some clumsy, too-little-too-late jams about the Big Issues: "Get Seduced" decries cretinous nip-slip tabloidery (kind of a writ-large sequel to Macabre's anti-gossip "Let the Poison Spill From Your Throat"), while the earnest protests of "A Battle Hymn for Children" are almost condescendingly recycled: "In the name of peace we make war," etc. Its stuff about guns-as-toys and violent video games is straight out of Terminator 2, which, like the Faint, awesomely hyper-utilized machinery and digital aesthetics to warn us about the horrific dangers guaranteed by the hyper-utilization of machinery and digital aesthetics.
"Battle Hymn" is just one part of a whole suite of tracks during which frontman Todd Fink (formerly Baechle, he chivalrously "took" wife Orenda's name-- suck it, patriarchy!) attempts to, I don't know, deal with technology. "The Geeks Were Right" (pretty much sung to the tune of their classic "Agenda Suicide") already has the folks at Wired grateful for the acknowledgement of their supreme Gandalfness. The song's dread of the future sounds both rational and like a by-product of, um, getting old. The incredible ambition of "Machine in the Ghost" just makes its choral chant more painful; Fink and his mates try to reconcile, er, everything: "Let's ask the atheists, let's ask the astronauts/ Let's ask the priests! The cults! The witches! The pope!...The monks! Shaman! The nuns! Buddha! The Holy Ghost!/... Meditators, pyramids, mathematicians, acidheads, theologians,...black magicians, physicists..." etc. To be fair, Fink lands some interesting turn-of-phrase blows during the verse part, re: mortal egos wrapped up in a culture of fasco-mystical B.S., but that wack list-as-refrain ruins the song.
Let me applaud Fink for trying. Yes, bro, it is frustrating to feel like people on this planet in 2008 need to be scolded about the bad faith inherent in killing for their god-nation of choice (see "Battle Hymn"), and, man, I too mourn the absence of philosophy-as-such in the popscape, and hey, I also sometimes get tired of songs about riding on rims and boyfriends-n-girlfriends. But the Faint are sounding way out of their depth on the Important Concepts front, while seeming perfectly at home on material about relationship-muck. Both "I Treat You Wrong" and "Psycho" are standout cuts, and they're complex, knowingly ironic self-admissions to a disrespected romantic partner. "Psycho", an amendment to Lennon's "Jealous Guy" over sonics from the B-52's' debut, is also remarkable for giving mononymic guitarist Dapose something to do-- methinks he'll enact his Falco-esque running-in-place thing quite a bit on this tour.
"Fish in a Womb" is also excellent, a ballad that suggests OMD duking it out with Her Space Holiday for a prominent soundtrack slot in a cyborg-directed homage to John Hughes' oeuvre. But even it-- and Clark Baechle's refreshingly very human/analog drumming-- can't save an album whose knob-twisty aural flourishes too often sound like a catalog of simulated farts (from pinched whistlers to airy whorls to wet foghorns). Something's not as vital here-- the band sounds more committed to the songs, at the expense of the neato spazz-outs. Maybe the strangeness of being the elder statesmen of retro-futurism is weighing on them, but at this point, whole-heartedly embracing the imaginative possibilities of their inherent theatricality and campiness would be more revolutionary than preaching the occasional sermon. | 2008-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | blank.wav | August 6, 2008 | 6 | e5e7be51-458a-4fc9-9fbb-936700a3d679 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
It might seem curious that Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood ended up collaborating with Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express. But they make exultant and warmly human music together. Greenwood's role is subdued even when the riotous music is not. | It might seem curious that Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood ended up collaborating with Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express. But they make exultant and warmly human music together. Greenwood's role is subdued even when the riotous music is not. | Shye Ben Tzur / Jonny Greenwood / The Rajasthan Express: Junun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21213-junun/ | Junun | There are a lot of creative forces to keep track of on Junun. Receiving top billing is the Israeli singer and composer, Shye Ben Tzur, who wrote the songs. Then there's his backing band: the 19 performers, hailing from distinct Indian-music traditions, who form the Rajasthan Express. And you've also got Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood contributing rhythm guitar, bass, keyboards, and drum-programming to the arrangements.
Still, aside from the album's complex backstory and multilingual lyrics (written, variously, in Hebrew, Hindi, and Urdu), Junun is readily approachable on its own. When Aamir Bhiyani’s rhythmically crisp trumpet peals out over programmed and acoustic percussion during the first minute of the album's opener and title track, Junun establishes its celebratory side. (Instrumental virtuosity and rhythmic drive: check and check, respectively.) Then the singer comes in, delivering an attractive setting of Sufi mystic poetry. (Warmly humanistic vibe: check.) The song could easily coast from this point. But once a tempo downshift hits, midway through, the assembled performers sound even more exultant. (Are you dancing yet? I was.)
It's the wealth of smart musical touches that make Ben Tzur's songs feel so emotionally legible. The bowed strings of "Hu" have a vulnerable quality that contrasts winningly with the song’s more full-throated vocal exclamations, while Ben Tzur’s breathy flute playing complements Greenwood’s tinny digital programming on the opening of "Kalandar". And the gradual acceleration of a vocal-driven number like "Eloah" also contributes to the album’s impressive range of textures.
"Chala Vahi Des" starts out with melancholic vocals delivered by Afshana Khan and Razia Sultan, before throttling into a harmonium-and-drums groove. In the song’s final section, Greenwood’s surprisingly funky bass playing enters into a dialog with the vocalists and drums. Also making an appearance, during the chorus of the triple-meter tune "Allah Elohim", are the ghostly, sliding tones of the ondes Martenot—an early electronic-keyboard instrument that is one of Greenwood’s favorites. (He's used it on Kid A, Hail to the Thief, as well as in his score for There Will Be Blood.) Given the prominence of his guitar on the same track, "Allah Elohim" is one of the rare moments on Junun that sounds directly influenced by Greenwood's other work.
Concerning Greenwood's mostly background role: the sight of a famous British pop musician collaborating with lesser-known artists from another hemisphere can easily prompt charges of exploitative appropriation. But since Greenwood’s latest releases on Nonesuch have all focused on his work as a composer of film scores and classical music, the pop-world conversation about cultural tourism doesn’t seem all that helpful here.
A better reference point would be the tradition of modern composers looking to escape the "Eastern" and "Western" category trap. In his 2015 memoir Words Without Music, American composer Philip Glass recalled how "it was very common in the 1960s for Western musicians, even composers, to be completely ignorant of global, or world, music." Glass, for his part, famously followed up his studies of the Western canon (at Juilliard and in Paris) by traveling to India, where he eventually worked for Ravi Shankar. Other composers associated with the minimalist movement, such as La Monte Young and Terry Riley, spent decades investigating Hindustani raga with Pandit Pran Nath.
As a post-minimalist himself, Greenwood is a natural heir to that history. And so after happening upon a composer like Ben Tzur, he’s apt to decide to "discover more about him." What Greenwood found was a composer splitting his time between the Middle East and India, who has managed to develop a unique fusion form that is constructed from several traditions—including Bollywood-style brass exuberance, the devotional Qawwali music of Sufi Islam, and bowed-string instruments associated with the Manganiar community.
The result is a mix that includes folk feel and studied arrangements. Naturally, with Greenwood's participation comes that of longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who succeeds in presenting this detailed music with precision. While Greenwood's presence guarantees a certain level of interest, the newsiest takeaways from this album involve the skill of Ben Tzur and the musicians of the Rajasthan Express. The ensemble’s playing and the leader's compositions make Junun an easy stretch—though, crucially, not a condescending one—for listeners otherwise unfamiliar with the great variety of methods often obscured by "world music" market-speak. | 2015-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | November 19, 2015 | 8 | e5f10b4e-b356-4c70-a514-cceda4d301c9 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Subsets and Splits