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The Oakland band’s darkly psychedelic country folk suggests things on the verge of collapse. In March 2020, as singer Sawyer Gebauer unwittingly contracted COVID-19, that was truer than anyone knew. | The Oakland band’s darkly psychedelic country folk suggests things on the verge of collapse. In March 2020, as singer Sawyer Gebauer unwittingly contracted COVID-19, that was truer than anyone knew. | Catch Prichard: I Still Miss Theresa Benoit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/catch-prichard-i-still-miss-theresa-benoit/ | I Still Miss Theresa Benoit | Plenty of people sing baritone; few sound as tortured by it as Sawyer Gebauer does on I Still Miss Theresa Benoit. In the best of circumstances, the Catch Prichard singer’s voice seems as though it’s been cooked down until it’s thick, rich, and a little acrid, like coffee reducing on a burner. There is a perpetual flutter in his throat, a mild instability that makes him sound sometimes like ANOHNI and sometimes like Nico, but usually like he’s working hard to keep himself composed. That little gap between what Gebauer is singing and how he’s singing it allows pathos to pour into Catch Prichard’s darkly psychedelic country music in a way that makes it feel appealingly overwrought, its sweetness curdling into menace like Twin Peaks gone spaghetti western.
But this album was not made in the best of circumstances. The quartet recorded I Still Miss Theresa Benoit in the first week of March 2020, just as COVID–19 was beginning to pick up steam on the West Coast. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Gebauer was infected with the virus, which left his brain foggy and his voice ragged. The band considered re-tracking his vocals but ultimately decided to leave them in as a testament to a unique moment in history. As a result, I Still Miss Theresa Benoit is possibly the first album to be sung by someone suffering the effects of COVID–19, and the effect is obvious. Though Gebauer’s voice still contains many mansions, they sound as though they’re all infected with dry rot. You expect things to collapse at any moment.
This sense of high drama suits Catch Prichard’s music perfectly. I Still Miss Theresa Benoit is structured in an arc, its beginning and ending rooted in swampy, abstracted songs while its middle section rises into the more traditionally structured country folk of the band’s earlier work. The haziness of the bookending tracks works to the album’s advantage. “I don’t love no one the way that I love you,” Gebauer sings in the chorus of “Lipstick and Fur.” Like Dickens’ Miss Havisham, he’s become musty and overgrown, and he sings the words like he’s recalling an unfortunate fact; you can practically see the wedding cake molding nearby.
Elsewhere, he luxuriates in the lush settings his band provides. Gebauer treats opener “Cherry Bomb” like a confessional cabaret, his threadbare voice stretched over a mistily arpeggiating Beach House synth. “What a shame/That our shame ain’t enough/For you and I and you and us,” he sings as the song rolls through one of its many dramatic surges. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ways Gebauer reaches for the highest limits of his range, it’s impossible to tell if he’s putting his subject on. The dangled possibility that it’s all for show—the nagging sense that he doesn’t mean any of the things he’s singing—makes it a darkly compelling introduction.
The band seems to know they can’t play it straight around their singer’s voice. Like the Bad Seeds, they operate in a cloud of incense, favoring suggestive gestures over clear articulation. While Gebauer’s narrator sits alone at home tracing his anxieties in “Worried Man,” the soft, juicy tones of synthesizer surrounding him give the song a strange glow that undercuts his fears; as Andy Wilke’s trumpet bathes the song in dawn light, drummer Tim DeCillis practically marches Gebauer out of the house to show him how unfounded his fears are. Even when they shy away from experimentation, they manipulate these songs effortlessly, calmly shifting “Seatbelts” from a haunted cowboy lope into Sonoran dub and back again. The nature of Gebauer’s voice is such that the band could easily allow it to carry the weight of these songs; instead, they consistently find ways to lengthen the shadows it casts.
There’s a fine line between self-awareness and self-parody, though, and Gebauer occasionally strays across it in his pursuit of drama. The narrator of “A Reef of Dead Metaphors” lingers in the shame of his failings, contrasting his experience with that of a vague “they” who “say life is easy.” We’re meant to sympathize, but the idea is so baffling it strains credulity; not even Jimmy Buffett says life is easy. At the peak of the album’s dramatic arc, Gebauer works his way around the line, “I don’t regret no woman yet,” the tension in his voice loosening with every repetition. The song palpably softens as he repeats the lyric, but the word “yet” hangs there ominously; whether intentional or not, it makes it seem like he’s got a wolf on a chain and he wants you to pet it.
The album’s most powerful moment comes when Gebauer abandons artifice entirely. As “A Reef of Dead Metaphors” builds, he worries about the ways love can erase one’s sense of self: “I can’t see the changes,” he practically shouts, “so I’ve written over the pages.” He sounds terrible, frankly, as he pushes his voice far beyond its limitations, and it breaks apart in midair; the song behind him melts into another key, knocking him out of tune. It’s a strange thrill to hear Gebauer relinquish control of his voice in the album’s final moments. And yet, as the song is given over to beautifully droning synths and strings, it feels like in this last gasp and long exhale, Catch Prichard are speaking at their most eloquently.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | June 23, 2021 | 6.7 | e8c5887a-46ef-4808-abc4-329973867c1f | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Thirteen years after her landmark album Pink Friday, the pop-rap superstar aims to conjure and build on that moment with an ambitious 22-song statement that is a very mixed bag. | Thirteen years after her landmark album Pink Friday, the pop-rap superstar aims to conjure and build on that moment with an ambitious 22-song statement that is a very mixed bag. | Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicki-minaj-pink-friday-2/ | Pink Friday 2 | Nicki Minaj’s superpower is her ability to adapt. In her 16-year career, she’s been a for-the-streets mixtape queen, a chrome-pink pop star, an empowered groundbreaker, and—using her formidable theater skills—a chameleonic character rapper, morphing into personas like Harajuku Barbie, Tyrone, Chun Li, and the beloved Roman Zolanski, all with the wittiest wordplay this side of Lil Wayne.
The original Pink Friday—her first album after a string of phenomenal mixtapes in the late 2000s—shifted the industry upon its release in 2010, proving that she could weave a tapestry with her characters, sing her face off, and that sexist rap purism would be left in her dust. Nicki the Boss set records, became a global superstar, and casually shattered the male-rapper stronghold on the mainstream in a way that hadn’t been done since the heyday of Lil Kim and Foxy Brown. For all the belated recognition and chart dominance of women rappers today, it’s undeniable that Minaj was the beginning of a sea change. She was the blueprint for women rappers who didn’t have to be feminine mirrors of their male patrons, but could stand on their own.
Pink Friday 2 aims to conjure and build on that moment in time, and to remind us—her fans, her haters, her mortal enemies—what she’s done for rap, especially women in rap. Like the original, Nicki masters the art of the quick change, jumping from persona to persona, genre to genre, putting her signature cadences on drill, pop, dancehall, afrobeats, R&B, Jersey club, and trap. Yet except for a few excellent tracks and verses peeking through, this 22-song album—unlike 2018’s Queen or even 2014’s bar-setting The Pinkprint—falls apart pretty quickly. While Minaj is still rapping valiantly—especially as Red Ruby Da Sleeze, a new persona introduced on the Diwali riddim-sampling single of the same name—the album’s intention is muddled through its scattershot production, which sounds less like genre innovation and more like an insidious ploy to worm its way into as many crevices on TikTok as possible.
It didn’t have to be this way! Pink Friday 2 includes tracks about her emotional fortitude, her Trini and Caribbean pride, her unfuckwithable armor, and intimate reflections on her life. On the affecting album opener, “Are You Gone Already,” a Finneas production that samples Billie Eilish’s “when the party’s over,” she grapples with the pain of learning her father was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2021, and reflects on her responsibility and love as a mother. She flexes her agility on tracks like “Beep Beep” and “Barbie Dangerous,” which conjure the much beloved Mixtape Nicki: the latter interpolates Biggie’s “Notorious Thugs” and includes the line, “Name a rapper that can channel Big Poppa and push out Papa Bear/Ho, I’m mother of the year.” Or on “RNB,” an otherwise middling track with Tate Kobang and Lil Wayne where she raps, “I keep his secrets/I let him beast it/Kissin’ on my thighs and my breast/He two-pieced it.” Yet on the same song, when Wayne raps, “’Bout to buy a fake booty for a real-ass bitch,” it’s an odious reminder that Minaj felt pressured to get ass shots at the beginning of her Young Money career—an example of context seeping into, and souring, the music.
One of the key problems here began with 2022’s post-“Anaconda” single “Super Freaky Girl.” The chimera of a Rick James song that was famously sampled by MC Hammer and newly manipulated by Dr. Luke and Hipgnosis was proof that mining several generations of nostalgia was a big financial win—no matter that the well-known chorus threatened to drown out Minaj’s playful sex-kitten verses. Though such a path is inevitable for many artists as mining IP becomes an increasingly big business, the choice to include clips from well-worn songs like Junior Senior’s “Move Your Feet” (on the club track “Everybody,” which is at least a grower), Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (on “My Life”) and, least forgivably, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” a song so widely sampled it’s essentially wallpaper, paradoxically suggests a shaky belief in her own ability to create hits by her talent alone. Even the most cynical read here—profit maximization—doesn’t exactly answer why one of the most creative rappers alive would draw up such a hollow plan.
The other specter haunting the background of Pink Friday 2 is Minaj’s ostensible rivals—Cardi B, as well as all the other rap girlies who don’t properly bend the knee. Minaj is a deft and prickly battle rapper, but her sense of fun can curdle into resentment, as on “Fallin 4 U,” a shiv of a Latto diss track that includes the curiously sneering line, “These bitches gotta shake they ass to show sex appeal.” Minaj should be taking a victory lap—she is one of the most important rappers of this century—and yet she seems to feel like she has to keep reiterating her position and punching down, hitting a low point on the Waka Flocka-sampling “FTCU” when she raps, “Stay in your Tory lane, bitch, I’m not Iggy.”
It feels oddly retrograde and beneath her, particularly when, on that same track, she fires up a bar like, “Come on bitch, I just put a milli on my Richie—minus like fifty, mine was nine-fifty, sissy.” Flashes of her notorious humor emerge (“Poppin’ out like a cork/Duckin ’em like Björk” on “Needle”), but her quirkiness feels blunted across the album, like her heart isn’t in it in the same way it used to be. Perhaps it’s just a career crossroads—grief and frustration can fuel a creative plateau as frequently as it produces classic albums—but one wonders if, somehow, ascending the throne has complicated her ability to scrap. As she sings earnestly in the first few minutes of the album: “Rich, yes, but are you happy?” | 2023-12-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Young Money Entertainment / Republic | December 11, 2023 | 6.5 | e8c9a678-1d1d-4926-adf1-f1a6707462e9 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
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 Nigerian superstar King Sunny Adé’s 1982 international breakthrough, an album whose complex fusion of musical traditions produced a singularly captivating groove. | 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 Nigerian superstar King Sunny Adé’s 1982 international breakthrough, an album whose complex fusion of musical traditions produced a singularly captivating groove. | King Sunny Adé: Juju Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-sunny-ade-juju-music/ | Juju Music | African music has been part of America’s cultural DNA since roughly 1619. But in 1982—the year Michael Jackson’s seismic “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” interpolated “Soul Makossa,” the unlikely 1972 global hit by Cameroon’s Manu Dibango—actual African music LPs were thin on U.S. ground. Cratediggers might’ve found the Soul Makossa LP, or albums by South African cultural emissaries Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela; perhaps they lucked upon Fela Kuti’s magnificently excoriating Zombie, issued by Mercury in 1977 in a failed attempt to break the artist stateside. Otherwise, the sounds on offer were less pop than ethnographic: field recordings on the Folkways and Nonesuch Explorer labels, or the handsome one-off Missa Luba LP, an independence-era snapshot of a Congolese boys choir that became a favorite among ’60s hi-fi aficionados—as did Babatunde Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, the percussion-driven firestorm that functioned as a home-study course for the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker, who played along to it in her suburban Long Island bedroom.
This was the backdrop—pre-internet, pre-Graceland—for King Sunny Adé’s Juju Music, a masterpiece of sublime dance music and chill-out grooves that rang the opening bell for the fruitful-if-problematic “world music” marketplace, with Adé leading a vanguard of artists who would introduce a wealth of new sounds and conversations into the American pop biosphere. Juju Music was even a relative commercial success, spending 29 weeks in the bottom half of the Billboard 200, remarkable for a record sung mainly in Yorùbá. Its creative triumph was self-evident: a radiant vortex of melodic ouroboros rhythms, dubby yet dazzling, its gentle flow so irresistible that the chiming first chords of “Ja Funmi,” the dance-trigger lead track, remains for many a musculoskeletal call-to-prayer—what, say, the paired four-note opening of “Dark Star” is for Deadheads.
West African highlife, soukous, Afrobeat, and jùjú were hardly news to local fans, expat communities, or anyone else with access to the music. (Tastemaking British DJ John Peel shopped for African LPs at Stern’s, London’s legendary music import shop, and began playing Adé’s records on his BBC Radio 1 show in the ’70s.) These styles were ongoing dialogues with the (African) American music marketed in Africa, be it rock, blues, jazz, R&B, or country, so the echoes were no accident. Sunday Adeniyi Adegeye, the son of a church organist who left high school to earn money as a drummer, was an avid listener of U.S. soul and country who started his first group, the Green Spot Band, at age 20 in 1966. Like many artists at the time, he took up the electric guitar, and by the mid-’70s, he was self-releasing modern jùjú records on his own Sunny Alade label and distributing them with Decca. When he signed with Island, he was already a wealthy, established Nigerian bandleader, with a mature fanbase buoyed by the country’s oil boom and an elegant, cosmopolitan style—a Yorùbá Philly Soul to the roughneck Afrobeat James Brown of his countryman, Fela. The sound seemed a perfect candidate for export.
Measured against Island’s ambitions, Juju Music was perhaps a letdown. Having turned reggae in general, and Bob Marley in particular, into global commodities, the label assumed they might do the same with the brilliant pop styles of a whole continent. In fact, Marley money got things started: When producer Martin Meissonier sought funding to record Juju Music, Island sent him to CBS Nigeria to collect royalties from Marley’s recordings. (Legend has it that he was presented with bags of cash.)
Island tested Anglo-American waters in 1981 with Sound D’Afrique, a well-curated compilation of motherland gems released on its subsidiary label Mango, usually home to Jamaican and Caribbean releases. With tracks by Senegal’s Étoile de Dakar (fronted by soon-to-be global star Youssou N’Dour) and Congolese guitar hero Pablo Lubadika Porthos, but no liner notes or photos, the LP didn’t register widely. Still, its cascading guitar lines, chortling horns, and polyrhythmic beat webs—which brightened further on 1982’s follow-up Sound D’Afrique II—were revelatory for many newcomers. DJs at my upstate New York college radio station were immediate converts; the spiraling leads and stop-motion arpeggios were guitar-fiend lingua franca, however removed they were from the blues roots of American funk and rock.
Where the Sound D’Afrique material was cherry-picked for English and American audiences from tracks recorded for the African market, Juju Music was tailored differently. Island had experience retooling regional sounds: The original Wailers recordings produced in Jamaica by Lee “Scratch” Perry (“Small Axe,” “Kaya”) were the aesthetic gold standard, but it was the polished remakes that made Marley an international superstar. Juju Music adopted the playbook used for Catch a Fire, the Wailers’ Island debut: Adé recorded at the well-appointed Studio de la Nouvelle Marche, aka Otodi Studio, in Lomé, Togo, and an Island engineer remixed the tracks in London.
The outcome is a subtle shift in Adé’s sound: tighter, brighter, lusher, and more detailed. His Nigerian releases extend songs to fill entire LP sides, or segue them into long medleys. King Sunny Adé G.M.A., a self-released 1980 set on his Sunny Alade label, presented the original “Ja Funmi” (titled “Ori Mi Ja Fun Mi”) as an 18-minute suite. But at the request of Island’s Chris Blackwell, Juju Music featured individuated tracks, fresh recordings of catalog songs ranging from three to eight minutes long. Tempos were scooched up slightly, mixes more layered and filigreed, while dub effects (by reggae vet Godwin Logie) added extra buoyancy and stoner ambiance.
The change is most noticeable in the beat mix, particularly the Yorùbá talking drums, the heartbeat of jùjú. Where the pitch-shifting instruments pop like firecrackers on King Sunny Adé G.M.A., they’re often dialed back on Juju Music into a more uniform, near-ambient swarm. Jùjú traditionalists already felt that Adé was cluttering up the music with too many elements, and Juju Music—recorded with his ’80s band, the 20-plus-member-strong African Beats—pushed that effect to the hilt: six electric guitars, counting steel and bass; keyboards; and a battery of percussionists and singers. The album splits the difference between clubbing and couch-lock, honoring in its way the cool urban spirit of jùjú, a decades-old style rooted as much in listening music (the acoustic barroom “palm-wine” style of the 1920s) as in drum-driven dance parties.
Another Westernized touch is the spotlight on steel guitarist Demola Adepoju, who gets nearly a minute of soloing on “Ja Funmi,” a display missing from the earlier Nigerian version, which keeps his phrases pithier and gives more room to grouped Yorùbá vocals. Adepoju’s silvery skywriting is an invitation for rock and funk fans to hear electric guitar playing in a different way: more as a weave than as strictly demarcated rhythm and leads.
The vocals function in a similarly textural way, at least for non-Yorùbá speakers, with Adé’s buttery tenor triangulating Curtis Mayfield, Brook Benton, and country crooner Jim Reeves (the latter hugely popular in Nigeria) as he unspools fluid call-and-responses with a half-dozen co-vocalists. Perhaps unsurprisingly for music born in the massive port city of a former British colony, the sound is tinged by the swell of Anglican church choirs, as well as the keen of Koranic recitation. Jùjú was melting-pot music from the get-go (the out-of-print 1985 LP Juju Roots 1930s-1950s is a great primer) which mutated just like blues and old-time American music did when electric guitars landed. But it also became music that expressed Yorùbá identity—its very name adopted, by some etymologies, from a disparaging Western term for traditional African religion (others trace the name to a phonaesthetic word for a characteristic beat).
All this made jùjú, like reggae, a supremely inviting export with myriad cross-cultural access points. Juju Music is an object lesson in fusion, beginning with the mellow, churchy uplift of “Ja Funmi,” its unfurling steel-solo phrases bursting through drum layers near the five-minute mark like sun through clouds. The melody has a flicker of American country music; steel guitar struck Adé as a novel way to echo the traditional licks of African fiddle. On “Eje Nlo Gba Ara Mi,” the steel is like the ornamentation of a Kehinde Wiley portrait, both filigree and melody, trading off with the synthesizer. A similar dynamic propels “Sunny Ti De Ariya,” a talking drum workout with a “What’s Going On”-style backdrop of chattering musicians. On “Ma Jaiye Oni,” which gets a distinct tempo boost from the Nigerian version, steel takes center stage with riffs that sound distinctly Hawaiian—music that seeded early jùjú via 78 rpm discs during the international Hawaiian guitar band craze of the 1920s, the ur-“world music” explosion. (Hawaiian music fed the roots of American country music steel the same way.) Given the likely African origin of what country and blues fans know as slide guitar, it’s a marvelously full-circle moment.
Island must have figured the message in Ade’s songs would do little to sell him abroad, because the LP included no lyric sheet. Translations aren’t widely available, which is unfortunate, since Adé, like most good lyricists, seems to operate on multiple levels, alternately seducing, praying, and philosophizing. “Ja Funmi,” which translates as “Fight for Me,” riffs on proverbial warthogs, baobab trees, and the great blue turaco, but Adé also rues life’s hard knocks and gives himself a fame-related pep talk familiar to any modern hip-hop fan. The medley “365 Is My Number/The Message” ratchets up the tempo on a fragment of one of Adé’s rare English-language songs, the side-long “365 Is My Number – Dial,” a pitch to a reluctant lover from 1978’s Private Line, then veers into a hall-of-mirrors dub workout without losing the groove. Steel runs and sci-fi synth squiggles function like the lowing cows and roaring lions on a Lee Perry session, dancefloor punchlines amid echoing rhythm guitar salvos.
Shortly after Juju Music’s release, I saw Adé make his New York debut at the Savoy, a short-lived rock club in Times Square. A streamlined version of the African Beats—only 18 musicians—kept things lit for over two hours, a small taste of the all-night jams they regularly played back home. Melodic phrases and drum grooves flickered, dropped out, then reappeared in the lead-up to another song; multiple guitars and steel spun against twin talking drums and a percussion battery not so far off from the snakey-sneaky vernacular of American jam bands. Adé sang beautifully; experienced fans lined up to praise him with bills, per tradition, pasting currency to his sweaty brow. Adé grinned with gratitude, and the sold-out crowd (unsurprisingly including David Byrne) shimmied into a single pulsing organism, like bees drunk on honey.
The success and sheer gorgeousness of Juju Music led to a windfall of Nigerian releases in the West, including LPs by Adé’s main jùjú competitor, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey. More Fela Kuti recordings appeared in the States, as well as compilations from other African scenes; Paul Simon came across one from South Africa, got inspired, and violated the United Nations cultural boycott of the country to record Graceland, which sold roughly 15 million copies worldwide. “World Music” was launched as a marketing concept in a north London pub, creating a pipeline for all sorts of dazzling and vital traditions while simultaneously marginalizing them.
Adé benefitted from all this, but he never became the Bob Marley-caliber star some thought he might. After two more records for Island, 1983’s Synchro System and 1984’s Aura, which were more polished production-wise and less compelling musically, he parted ways with the label and, without abandoning periodic tours and export LPs, settled back into being a homeland hero. He remains royalty: At a 2013 performance for the pan-African media network EbonyLife, Nigerian pop ambassador Wizkid got down prostrate before the King during a cameo with Adé’s band, which sounded as supple and seductive as ever.
While contemporary Afrobeats isn’t averse to spotlighting its roots—Burna Boy’s 2018 song “Koni Baje” is a straight-up jùjú tribute—these days jùjú itself is a throwback, the kind of music your parents like. But its sweetly swarming melodies and rhythmic webs are infused in the genre-blurred pop sound of young Nigeria, where an ever-growing constellation of stars has proved potent enough to attract comers like Justin Bieber and Brent Faiyaz, trailing Drake, Beyoncé, and others who are building bridges that feel more pan-African than colonial. Wizkid has taken a song sung partly in Yorùbá into the Billboard Top 10; indie labels like the Kampala-based Nyege Nyege Tapes are growing scenes on the ground; and Universal and Sony have opened regional offices in West and South Africa to develop the new wave of music internationally. The doors are open wide, and everyone passing through walks in Adé’s footsteps.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | Island | December 12, 2021 | 10 | e8cbaef8-006b-4bfa-957b-5aeb503e5cf3 | Will Hermes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-hermes/ | |
The Salt Lake City metallic hardcore band Cult Leader features three members of the defunct progressive grindcore group Gaza. Last year they released an EP that included a cover of Mark Kozelek & Desertshore’s "You Are Not My Blood". Their intense debut full-length doesn’t contain any left-field covers and it doesn’t need them. | The Salt Lake City metallic hardcore band Cult Leader features three members of the defunct progressive grindcore group Gaza. Last year they released an EP that included a cover of Mark Kozelek & Desertshore’s "You Are Not My Blood". Their intense debut full-length doesn’t contain any left-field covers and it doesn’t need them. | Cult Leader: Lightless Walk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21152-lightless-walk/ | Lightless Walk | Cult Leader’s Useless Animal EP from last year included a cover of Mark Kozelek & Desertshore’s "You Are Not My Blood"—which wouldn’t be all that remarkable if Cult Leader wasn’t a metallic hardcore band. With that cover, the Salt Lake City foursome established itself as a band that wasn’t afraid to tinker, deconstruct, or simply open up and let its guts spill out. Lightless Walk is the group’s debut full-length, and while it doesn’t contain any left-field covers, it certainly doesn’t need them.
Three-quarters of Cult Leader hail from Gaza, the defunct, progressive grindcore outfit whose 2012 swansong No Absolutes in Human Suffering wound up being the most intense thing they ever produced. Lightless Walk tops it. Gaza bassist Anthony Lucero has moved up to lead vocals for Cult Leader (with new bassist Sam Richards abetting guitarist Mike Mason and drummer Casey Hansen), and his doom-soaked howl is enough to leave you wondering what took him so long to front a band. On the mutated, d-beat-meets-blastbeats jolt that is "Walking Wasteland", Lucero sings from his intestines instead of his lungs, letting Mason’s caustic riffs wash over him like an acid bath. "Great I Am" makes great use of space, hovering distortion, and needles of feedback that are somehow crosshatched into insidious melody. On the whole, Cult Leader is a more aggressive yet concise band than Gaza—and one that gets the notion of merciless self-editing. The closest that the album comes to Gaza’s savage, unrelenting excoriation of organized religion is "Gutter Gods", but even then, Lucero’s head-splitting refrain of "Our eyes are open" feels more introspective, haunted, and full of metaphysical dread than simply accusatory.
Yet Lightless Walk works just as well, if not better, when it crawls and sprawls. "A Good Life" dissolves into a drone of lurching arpeggios and Lucero’s chanted baritone; similarly, "How Deep It Runs" decelerates to a hypnotic slither. But it’s Lightless Walk’s title track that truly shows off the lessons Cult Leader learned from covering Kozelek. At over seven minutes, the song lays a tribal beats over atmospheric, minimalist guitar, a slowcore reinvention of grind that gives Lucero what seems like horrific amounts of room in which to wander, ponder, and lament—not to mention show off his chops as an apocalyptic crooner. At points, the song resembles the recent output of Swans in both ritualistic bleakness and ambition. If that’s a hint of where Cult Leader might head from here on out, even better.
There’s a backstory to Lightless Walk. Gaza’s frontman Jon Parkin was accused of rape in 2012; Gaza broke up shortly thereafter. Since then, the remaining three members have cut all ties with Parkin and spoken of him, when prodded, with a mix of bitterness and frustration. That said, Lightless Walk doesn’t feel in any way like some misguided attempt at vindication. The shadow of Gaza doesn’t hang over the album at all. Instead, the music casts its own shadows: deep, long, and teeming with the ghosts of things lost. | 2015-10-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Deathwish | October 19, 2015 | 7.5 | e8cd747f-c9b3-4c8a-8af2-37a2858e3c51 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The debut from the prodigious singer-songwriter is a fussy and affecting album of baroque art-rock that is crowded with ideas in the best way. | The debut from the prodigious singer-songwriter is a fussy and affecting album of baroque art-rock that is crowded with ideas in the best way. | J. Mamana: Nothing New in the West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-mamana-nothing-new-in-the-west/ | Nothing New in the West | J. Mamana is a young guy who has made a big record, full of vigor and oversized ideas that don’t quite fit him yet. After graduating from Brown University in 2016, he locked himself away—in the time-honored autodidact fashion—and emerged with the kind of elaborately footnoted baroque pop album that testifies to a lot of things—talent, vision, ambition, precocity. But above all, Nothing New in the West reflects a certain urgency of post-collegiate youth, when you have, at least for a brief moment, learned everything and need to share it all.
When asked who he is channeling, Mamana namedrops Bartók, Frank Ocean, and Beethoven—you know, everything. But for the rest of us, the most readily available reference points for Mamana’s debut album will be in the over-educated-singer-songwriter canon: Van Dyke Parks in the ’70s, Kevin Barnes and Joanna Newsom in the ’00s, the Dirty Projectors circa 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan. Randy Newman makes his way in here, too, particularly in the lyrics, which brim with references to faded glories and faux-folksy couplets like, “My old man was a doctor/His allegiance was to the blood.”
What he doesn’t have yet is an original point of view, which is generally not the sort of thing you come fresh out of college sporting. You are crammed full of borrowed ideas and eagerness then, and spilling it out seems to be the most urgent thing in the world; your lungs are burning with the need for this exhalation. If Mamana is borrowing ideas liberally, he is doing so to feed the massive furnace of his prodigious musical gifts. Even when his songs get fussy—and when songs open with a line like, “One night while cursing Japheth, I noticed that I loved my lover more than she did me,” a certain fussiness is guaranteed—there is a stunning moment where you hear Mamana open up into a joyous sprint, taking each song heavenward for at least a moment or two. The stacked vocal harmonies on “Rhoticity,” for instance, or the gorgeous chorale he builds out of his own voice on “I’m Not Yr Guy.” Classical guitar, little gobs of modular synth, woodwinds, and blurts of distortion—all of it is here, and Mamana is doing most of it.
He also works bits of others’ music into his tapestry in small, cunning ways. “Tell the Truth” samples a luxurious little right-hand run from the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam-Guèbrou and turns it into a central riff. “Buried in the Yard,” a nearly seven-minute song, sneaks an interpolation of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” into its chords. You can feel the air of quotation, both as an act and as an idea, swarming all around Nothing New, which tips its hand with its album title. The weight of inherited wisdom, unease about this wisdom’s potential fraudulence, hangs heavy: “The last time I went to the movies/I kept on shouting questions/To the characters in the movies/But these people had no answers at all,” Mamana sings dryly on “Last American.”
It’s a vivid moment of isolation that underlines what makes Nothing New so affecting. It’s a deeply wrought album that has the solipsistic and melancholy tinge of one made purely from imagination. But when all of the nouns and verbs that Mamana throws at us recede—and he throws a lot, including “the great-grandchildren of bootleggers,” the Neolithic proto-city of Catalhöyük, the word “palimpsest,” the word “rhoticity”—we are left with Mamana, alone. Loneliness, pure and sharp and non-negotiable, tends to be more profound than even our most profound thoughts. | 2019-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | January 5, 2019 | 7.4 | e8d873d3-ac3b-46d5-ba01-10b368bda046 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The most substantial solo release yet from RAP’s Guy Gormley feels provocatively out of step with the broad sweep of contemporary dance music. | The most substantial solo release yet from RAP’s Guy Gormley feels provocatively out of step with the broad sweep of contemporary dance music. | Enchante: Mind in Camden 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/enchante-mind-in-camden-2/ | Mind in Camden 2 | The British duo RAP’s EXPORT arrived earlier this year like a manila envelope with no return address, the intent as cryptic as the contents. The music was a mixture of stern techno and melancholy synth-pop that, depending on where you dropped the needle, might recall ’90s trance, Dutch gabber, the ambient pianist Harold Budd, or the doleful poise of Pet Shop Boys. (There was no rap in it at all.) The songs had an uncanny way of making a coherent whole out of odds and ends; the whole thing bore an outsider’s fingerprints, as though this were music made out of pieces that were never meant to fit together in the first place. And yet: It was sleek.
White Londoners making left-field dance and indie pop don’t call their outfit RAP unless they intend to raise eyebrows; the musicians’ art-world ties suggested a knowing approach to their references and juxtapositions. (Not necessarily an ironic one, however; the music was too genuine, too affecting, for that.) Meanwhile, members Guy Gormley and Thomas Bush’s many extracurriculars—a welter of spinoffs and side projects, via the Jolly Discs label and elsewhere—hinted at a garden of forking paths that lay hidden from view. The whole thing was seductively inscrutable.
Enchante is Gormley’s solo project, and Mind in Camden 2, his most substantial release under the alias so far, is similar in spirit and vibe to EXPORT. Traversing nine tracks in 33 minutes, it weaves together field recordings, ambient sketches, and club beats in a way that flows intuitively, if not always logically. The album’s sonics aren’t all that far from what you might find on a label like Dial, Hivern, or even L.I.E.S.—the production is rooted in the no-frills sound of hardware synths and classic drum machines—but Enchante nevertheless feels provocatively out of step with the broad sweep of contemporary dance music.
The album’s materials can seem unusually spartan, the repetition particularly mind-numbing. Gormley’s got a way of making a stretch of kick drums feel like walking on hard pavement in cheap, thin-soled shoes. And on several tracks, he seems to delight in outright wrong-footing listeners, programming drum sequences of unusual lengths and then dropping or adding beats seemingly at random. These aren’t the mind-bending time signatures of Autechre; they’re beats that seem conventional until you try to count them, and you’ll wonder how math so simple could go so wrong. Sometimes, for good measure, he’ll fuck up a groove entirely, mimicking a turntable stylus as it bounces across a rutted record.
Gormley released his first EP under the Enchante alias in 2011, on Joe Goddard’s Greco-Roman label. The record was bursting with ideas—vintage house, old-school rave, grime, dancehall, dub—but its playful approach was still recognizable as belonging to the UK’s dance-music tradition. His music has gradually gotten more idiosyncratic over time. Mind in Camden 2 is nominally the sequel to Mind in Camden, a 2017 EP of minimalist house and oddball ambient, but the new record is exponentially stranger.
Like RAP, Enchante has become a medium for private obsessions, oblique snapshots of everyday life. Just after “St. Michael,” a lovely sketch for quivering organ and the kind of wordless soul-diva wail you might have once found on a 4Hero record, a fellow with a heavy London accent barks: “I want to see some more lighters, see it, come on! Come on! That gas ain’t expensive. It’s very cheap!” It’s not just what he says that’s so disorienting, it’s the way he says it, his voice dripping with derision. What the hell is he on about? The song that unfolds around him is a sad, meandering meditation for acoustic guitar and folky faux-flutes. Over a dirge-like syn-drum beat, a computer-generated voice recites a poem: “On the cold streets I find what I’m looking for/… /To scream in pleasure and in pain/To walk in the open when I choose/And to die in no one’s arms but my own.” Then the shouting man returns, still shouting. “Come on, come on, we’re holding a vigil!” Who is he and where are we? We are left in the middle of this matrix of connections, feverishly trying to make sense of it all.
For all its backward glances, EXPORT didn’t seem nostalgic, exactly—more that it was evocative of a sense of place. Mind in Camden 2, named for the London neighborhood where Gormley grew up, is too. In fact, the album is structured to take the form of a journey. The opening “Enter” sets the scene: footsteps on gravel, a steady downpour, the sound of a car door closing. Suddenly we are in the driver’s seat, rain drumming on the windshield as a navigation voice chirps, “Destination set. Planning route: To Hackney Downs Station, Hackney, London.” The car conceit returns throughout the album, as tracks abruptly break off into the sound of rainfall or freeway noise, sometimes narrated by the eerie, almost-human voice of the GPS. “Turn right,” she says at the end of the title track, and we hear the turn signal clicking; the pounding beat of the song that follows picks up the blinkers’ nervous cadence. Later, “Cleanzing Interlude” is almost certainly a recording from inside an automatic car wash—fifty seconds of whir and chug, suburban noise repackaged as a sound-art readymade.
It all comes to a head with “Vigil,” one of the few tracks that could easily hold its own in any context. That most of these tracks wouldn’t make sense outside the context of the album hardly matters; the pleasure comes from being immersed in them, carried along by the twists and turns of Gormley’s mini epic. “Vigil,” though, is a small ambient masterpiece, as moving as it is unassuming—six minutes’ worth of a single synthesizer spun through a delicate web of delay. When he’s got you fully hypnotized, Gormley brings in a contrapuntal synth melody, soft and sad. It’s as fine an encapsulation of rainy-day melancholy as I can imagine. And then, almost as though embarrassed by this moment of unabashed sentimentalism, he takes us through the car wash and finishes with “Rise to Infinity,” a hypnotic, eight-minute minimal-house jam. It feels like an epilogue to the record: our final destination, and also a reminder that, despite all the trickery and intrigue, Gormley is no stranger to purest and most enveloping of dancefloor vibes. | 2019-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Jolly Discs | November 18, 2019 | 8 | e8eccaf2-1715-46e8-8ea3-ac13c7728a74 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
When Appleseed Cast released The End of the Ring Wars three years ago,\n\ they were the embodiment of late ... | When Appleseed Cast released The End of the Ring Wars three years ago,\n\ they were the embodiment of late ... | The Appleseed Cast: Low Level Owl Vol. I & II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/260-low-level-owl-vol-i-ii/ | Low Level Owl Vol. I & II | When Appleseed Cast released The End of the Ring Wars three years ago, they were the embodiment of late 90s emo-rock, playing with an intense abandon that displayed the extent of their ambition. The problem was, the ambition seemed uncontrolled, and the album came off like an emotional effigy of the band's aspirations which their experience wasn't quite capable of making fully palpable. Last year's Mare Vitalis found them reigning in their sound and softening the edges while simultaneously beginning to experiment with new textures. The album ended with an extended untitled track of feedback and guitar loops that no one could have predicted was the fuse to what was coming next.
Low Level Owl is a supernova and a full redefinition of the band, a sprawling two-disc monster that redirects their ambition from the emotional release of their earlier albums into the meticulous conceptions crafted through endless hours of studio time. Overhauling their sound and incorporating a wide mélange of styles, Low Level Owl goes a long way towards emasculating any of their previous hardcore influences by injecting a thoughtful, gentler Britpop jangle and winsome vocals and harmonies. The result is a mix of elements combining the enterprising studio conceptions of Radiohead with touches of shimmering Stone Roses psychedelia knitted together with the conviction and energetic drumming of the early U2, all draped over a monolithic prog-rock conceptual framework.
The technical execution throughout the album is flawless. The rock tracks are spread evenly across both Low Level Owl discs (which are available separately-- Use Your Illusion-style-- presumably so as to not overwhelm listeners) and are interspersed with instrumental and ambient tracks that act as connective tissue. Josh Baruth's fantastic drumming is placed in the front of the mix and propels all of the traditional songs. Each of the tracks are awash in keyboards with the vocals generally lying low in the mix, making the lyrics difficult to decipher. These are the only constants through the entire work as Appleseed Cast takes you on a tour through most of the highlights of 90s pop and rock.
Both albums are balanced, each beginning and ending with instrumentals and connected in the middle by the droning "View of a Burning City" that ends the first disc and picks back up on the second. The combination of "The Walking of Pertelotte" and "On Reflection" clocks in at 8\xBD minutes, and bookends the front of the project. Over an hour and forty-five minutes later, "Confession," a nine-minute ambient head-trip closes the second disc. Both albums last fifty three minutes. Just the arrangement of the music alone shows the amount of thought that goes into an album of this size.
Hints of other bands occur throughout-- from the Stone Roses in "Mile Marker," to My Bloody Valentine in "The Argument," to Built to Spill in "Reaction"-- all embedded a lush wave of production reminiscent of the Flaming Lips, Spiritualized or Mogwai. There are also elements of Brian Eno and Aphex Twin that pop up during the ambient sections, and tracks like "Flowers Falling from Dying Hands" which remind me of Sonic Youth's "Providence."
Needless to say, Appleseed Cast have come a long way since that 1998 debut of frail failure. With Low Level Owl, they establish their own unique vision for the future of rock, offering hope and brighter possibilities for the genre-- or rather, creating their own. These two albums have generated an incredible amount of hype in small sects of the indie rock population, while most who haven't been privy to the band's peerless new sounds still associate the band with their sensitive suburban roots. It's time to look past the stereotype and herald Appleseed Cast for what they are now, and what they're about to become: groundbreaking. | 2001-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2001-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Deep Elm | December 11, 2001 | 9 | e8ee3245-faa0-4414-8b28-4d7f2e739dea | Pitchfork | null |
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On her first commercial mix album, the producer crafts an unbroken stretch of shapeshifting grooves and psychedelic fireworks. | On her first commercial mix album, the producer crafts an unbroken stretch of shapeshifting grooves and psychedelic fireworks. | Laurel Halo: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurel-halo-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | Laurel Halo has spent much of her career warily circling the dancefloor. For a few years in the middle of this decade, she threw herself into club music with gusto, to thrilling effect: 2013’s Chance of Rain remains an underrated slab of avant-techno, while the broken beats and rumbling sub-bass of 2015’s In Situ still sound ahead of their time. But Dust and Raw Silk Uncut Wood favored more abstracted rhythms and diffuse atmospheres, poised somewhere between ambient music, microtonal composition, and free improv, with pop-adjacent vocals draped loosely over the top.
What those who haven’t caught one of her club sets might not know is that Halo is also a top-notch DJ, with a facility for the sorts of forceful rhythms absent from her recent albums. Chief among her skills: A nonstop negotiation between peak-time thrills and the thorniest rhythmic thickets—an on-again, off-again détente as gripping as any geopolitical drama. That’s precisely what she does on DJ-Kicks, her first commercial mix album. The atonal pianos that open the session—Halo’s own “Public Art,” exclusive to this set—are a fakeout, the equivalent of dry-ice fog wafting over an empty floor as the club’s doors open. Not a minute in, she plunges headfirst into a chugging, EBM-inspired beat, kicking off an unbroken stretch of shapeshifting grooves that won’t let up, save for one brief breather, for the next hour.
But seamless isn’t the same as predictable, and one of the great pleasures of Halo’s mix is its switchbacking path. An early stretch of dank electro, clammy as catacomb walls, swiftly gives way to warm, flickering chords and spiraling synth arpeggios, sleek as a brand-new corkscrew. A long, gauzy passage erupts into gut-punching bass music; an extended foray into Detroit-inspired techno, all trepanation-drill precision, flips into a beatless, Stockhausen-does-Looney-Tunes interlude, which then paves the way for a newly focused son clave rhythm hurtling through the murk. That overarching ebb-and-flow holds sway throughout. Halo toys with the momentum of the mix as though periodically tugging at a Möbius strip, wadding it into a ball, and then smoothing it out again.
If I haven’t named many individual songs here, that’s in part because Halo’s style of mixing has a way of blurring the differences between tracks, of deemphasizing their uniqueness and folding them into an aesthetic that’s hers alone. That’s the case for many great DJs, but it seems especially true of Halo. Her own productions are distinguished by a certain smeariness, like a charcoal drawing smudged by an elbow, and the same hazy qualities distinguish DJ-Kicks. She tends to choose tunes that brim with shakers, brittle hi-hats, 808 cowbells, and other shimmery, trebly sounds; her kick drums are sturdy but slippery, with a tendency to stagger around the downbeat or hurtle forward, as though drunkenly determined.
One exception: Final Cut’s “Temptation,” a 1989 track from an early project of Detroit techno icon Jeff Mills, which pummels away with almost industrial relentlessness. But that, much like fellow Detroit veteran Blake Baxter’s 1991 cut “Funky World,” is an exception, present largely to set up everything that happens around it: a back-to-basics detonator for the ensuing psychedelic fireworks. (For what it’s worth, Mills’ and Baxter’s songs are among the very few tracks here that aren’t of recent vintage.)
It’s probably not a coincidence that one of Halo’s own songs, the Hodge collaboration “The Light Within You,” is built around a sample of what sounds like a self-help audiobook, delivered in mellifluous tones that verge on ASMR—“All good things come to me,” a woman’s voice repeats in a dulcet whisper; then, haltingly, she intones, “Pulling out of a bad mood.” These samples are pure Halo, wryly sardonic but also slyly effective, and they encapsulate what’s so great about the mix. Body music for heady dancers, this is a triumph of dance music at its trippiest, and in its controlled weirdness lies real liberation. | 2019-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | March 23, 2019 | 7.7 | e8fd9ab6-5d69-40bd-ab67-70d6743badc5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On her first album in a decade, the Dominican iconoclast delivers an explosive comeback full of horror scenes, metal sounds, and post-colonial politics. | On her first album in a decade, the Dominican iconoclast delivers an explosive comeback full of horror scenes, metal sounds, and post-colonial politics. | Rita Indiana: Mandinga Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rita-indiana-mandinga-times/ | Mandinga Times | In her decade away from music, Rita Indiana returned to writing novels. Her prose, when dealing in speculative and science fiction, often operates at the end of worlds large and small in the wake of personal and political destruction. Her latest album, Mandinga Times, follows suit. Produced by Eduardo Cabra (formerly of the Puerto Rican band Calle 13), Mandinga Times hangs heavier than the flash of 2010’s El Juidero, this time with inflections of the metal scenes and horror movies that gave her a language for queer identity.
And every horror movie has its monster. The dembow-meets-metal friction of “Como un Dragón” introduces the album’s protagonist, Mandinga, the soothsayer of an apocalypse atrocious and banal unfolding in real time. (As Pitchfork editor Isabelia Herrera also noted, the word “mandinga” is derived from the name of the Mandinka ethnic group of West Africa, a word whose Caribbean history began in the transatlantic slave trade and still carries racist overtones.) With a face painted in black and white, Mandinga shapeshifts in subterfuge against colonial frameworks of power, spirituality, and storytelling with traditional Afro-Caribbean genres woven in with Indiana’s metal instincts.
But it’s on “Mandinga Times” that Mandinga looks outward with apocalyptic clarity: impending climate disaster, the progression of consumerism and late capitalism, violence, persecution, and children in cages. “Tick-tock,” she counts down over a rapid alí-babá beat used in regional Dominican carnavales. She’s joined by an unlikely collaborator, the incredibly popular Dominican dembow artist Kiko El Crazy, whose echoes of the axiom “no te dejes” and “la pámpara” float over the track like a Vincent Price narration in a haunted house.
“Power is like a horror movie,” Indiana recently told Pitchfork. It corrupts the body, it feeds on fear. Throughout the record, Mandinga observes this tension from a precarious ledge. “Miedo” is a reggaeton romántico about the intimacy of intense passion and the inseparable threat of violence that targets queer love around the world. On “El Zahir,” named after the 1947 Jorge Luis Borges short story and its titular coin, Indiana illustrates the power on one side of capital and the death on the other. A post-punk riff churns over gagá, an Afro-Dominican rhythm descended from Haiti’s rara, with a deathly interlude from Norwegian musician Sakari Jäntti.
In her writing and music, Indiana has scrutinized the Dominican Republic’s legacies of anti-Black and anti-Haitian violence and government corruption, the ways that these hegemonies exert power across the Caribbean and Latin America, and how marginalized peoples resist violence throughout history. Mandinga witnesses the lasting fallout. On Mandinga Times, she frequently references Puerto Rico—where she’s lived for the last decade—and its legacy of anti-colonial resistance. On “The Heist,” Indiana partners with boricua singer MIMA in a Western tale that recounts the $7 million robbery of a Wells Fargo in Hartford, Connecticut in 1983 by Los Macheteros in the name of the movement for Puerto Rican independence. “El Flaco de la Mancha” subverts the quixotic hero’s delusions of grandeur and chivalry, guided instead by art, beauty, and the watch of the Afro-Cuban orisha Yemayá. And on the penultimate track, “Pa’ Ayotzinapa,” Indiana departs musically and geographically from the Caribbean for a rock-en-español bolero with Café Tacvba’s Rubén Albarrán, a story of a pilgrimage to Ayotzinapa, Mexico to honor the 43 disappeared teaching student activists that went missing in Iguala in 2014.
Mandinga Times closes on an atypical end for monsters with “Claroscuro”; Mandinga isn’t destroyed and doesn’t evolve out of their monstrosity. By contrast, the reality Mandinga observes is grotesque, a system run by those in power who drape oppression in the myth of normalcy and order. Nothing and no one in Mandinga’s time are free of the responsibility to dismantle systems of oppression. She does not automatically absolve Mandinga either, but she allows them to change, offering something of a final consolation: “Rosas y espinas son parte de una deslumbrante criatura,” or, “Roses and thorns are part of a dazzling creature.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | September 19, 2020 | 7.8 | e9006fa6-ed30-4c5f-b944-961a4f639fe4 | Stefanie Fernández | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stefanie-fernández/ | |
Paying tribute to an idealized era of hip-hop that predated his birth, the 18-year-old Detroit musician proves himself a gifted rapper who’s overinvested in ideas past their sell-by date. | Paying tribute to an idealized era of hip-hop that predated his birth, the 18-year-old Detroit musician proves himself a gifted rapper who’s overinvested in ideas past their sell-by date. | Curtis Roach: Highly Caffeinated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/curtis-roach-highly-caffeinated/ | Highly Caffeinated | Detroit’s Curtis Roach was born in 1999. It was a jiggy time in America. The dot-com bubble was still furiously inflating, our sense of square-jawed adventurism hadn’t yet begotten the Forever War in the Middle East, and rap was flamboyant, wasteful, and extravagant—and in a period of transition. With the aid of Scott Storch’s keyboard and energized by a resurgent Snoop Dogg and an ascendant Eminem, Dr. Dre had emerged from his post-Death Row slumber with a lean, cold take on G-funk. André 3000, once adamant that the South had something to say, was proven correct: Second-tier No Limit artists were going gold and platinum and Cash Money was taking over for the ’99 and the 2000. A Tribe Called Quest had disbanded the year prior to Roach’s birth, and, with J Dilla behind the boards, Q-Tip was transitioning toward a glossier sound. To a lesser extent, De La Soul were, too. Nas, once New York rap’s Golden Child, a boy king of immeasurable potential, had partnered with Puff Daddy, the mortal enemy of every young man with a spray paint-stained Jansport. It’s kind of weird that Roach raps like 1999 never happened.
On Highly Caffeinated, Roach’s musical touchstone is the early-mid-1990s flowering of thoughtful, spiritually unfettered rap. He’s high-pitched like the Pharcyde’s Bootie Brown, conscious and self-aware like Common, and dreadlocked like a young Busta Rhymes. Like his open-minded predecessors, he has a purple, starry-eyed streak; he’s romantic, optimistic, and prematurely nostalgic. These can be grating qualities. On “Colored Shirts,” reminiscing about the good ol’ days of the late aughts, Roach raps, “I miss the days being simple/Before we was popping pimples/We’d sit and giggle/Just clowning in class and breaking pencils/As time trickled, friendships became brittle.” The conceit of the seemingly earnest “Luvofmylife” is—you guessed it—that hip-hop is the love of his life. The bean he’s on isn’t a prescription drug, he says, but coffee.
Roach’s nostalgia for the 1990s, a decade he never really experienced, is understandable; rap history’s dominant narrative is that the early and mid ’90s were an unencumbered, purer, more brilliant time. Even if that were true, it was also a period of wildly overpriced CDs, overinflated label rosters, and a centralized music press unwilling to seriously engage with rap from outside New York City. (For example, The Source gave the California rapper Suga Free’s Street Gospel a paltry, laughable 2.5 mics.) Nostalgia is dangerously easy, particularly if you’ve never spent $20 on a Quad City DJs album.
Still, when Roach’s music lands, it has a comforting warmth and familiarity. A mid-album suite that samples bossa nova and tropicalia is particularly strong, despite the dubious comparison of his paramour—whom Roach calls a “snack,” “treat,” and a “dessert”—with Frida Kahlo (“Frida”). (If he hasn’t yet, Roach might listen to the original, unreleased version of Ghostface Killah’s “Charlie Brown,” which samples Caetano Veloso’s “Alfomega.” It has careening momentum and immediacy without sacrificing the sophistication of its source material.) Roach sounds like an actualized rapper when he questions the normalcy of his parents’ smoking habits (“Carcinogen”) and when, addressing his deceased father, he refers to himself as “your little cub” (“22,” so named for his father’s football number). It’s this kind of specificity—not heavy doses of generalized, universal emotions—that makes for truly engaging art.
Roach’s work is brimming with confidence, but his surety cuts both ways: He’s a legitimately gifted rapper who’s overinvested in ideas a decade-plus expired. A good number of Highly Caffeinated’s shortcomings are the inevitable result of his being 18 and precocious. He’s thoughtful, nattily dressed, and, with a few more years of lived experience, the wide swaths of emotion he cuts will become narrower. Even with its occasional losing bouts with naiveté, Highly Caffeinated compares favorably to a reverent, backwards-looking mixtape that launched a career: Joey Bada$$’s 1999. | 2018-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 24, 2018 | 6.3 | e9070a0f-5336-4c24-bcc5-3a48819e948c | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
The Toronto singer’s latest is a time capsule of moody 2010s R&B, distinguished by its introspection and near-claustrophobic melancholy. | The Toronto singer’s latest is a time capsule of moody 2010s R&B, distinguished by its introspection and near-claustrophobic melancholy. | Rochelle Jordan: Play With the Changes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rochelle-jordan-play-with-the-changes/ | Play With the Changes | You’ve heard Rochelle Jordan’s sound, even if you can’t place her songs. Throughout the early 2010s she released several mixtapes leading up to 2014’s 1021: all solid, all lost amid a flood of similarly moody Torontonian R&B. As her new album implies, afterward came changes: a move to Los Angeles, a few years lost to health complications and a stagnating record deal. What didn’t change was her core group of collaborators—producers KLSH, Machinedrum, and Jimmy Edgar—with whom she slowly crafted Play With the Changes, out on L.A. DJ Tokimonsta’s label Young Art.
The album is a 2010s time capsule of introspective R&B, Jordan’s diaphanous vocals floating over tracks inflected with quiet storm and UK garage. This is still very well-trod territory, but Jordan’s music distinguishes itself with an almost-claustrophobic melancholy. “Love U Good” begins the album, as Jordan sings, “a little closed off,” and while the song unfurls—a few blue chords, a skittering beat—the effect remains hushed, less open space than inner headspace.
What’s remarkable is how Jordan maintains the vibe even as she whirls through genres. “All Along” is lush, loud, unabashed New Jack Swing, featuring Jordan’s most acrobatic vocals on the breakdown. “Situation” advances a couple of years, to the turn of the century and its bounty of UK garage. “Something” is Jordan’s most explicit Aaliyah homage yet, featuring her inimitable stop-start, nimble-slow vocal style and a melodic near-quote of “Are You That Somebody.” Each of these tracks, though, rest upon moody chords and break apart into a cloud of sighs: There is a palpable, inescapable vulnerability throughout.
As the tracks become more restrained, Jordan’s vulnerability becomes more explicit. “Count It” is a prickly ode to the importance of having a “fuck off fund,” in which she reassures herself that a breakup might leave her lonely, but not destitute. “Broken Steel” describes, literally, the instrumental—it’s a track of mechanical-sounding clanking, with an occasional faint metallic buzz in the background—and figuratively, as she and rapper Farrah Fawx lament expectations of superhuman strength because of their demeanor and race. Jordan goes deeper on prayerlike “Lay,” which depicts anxiety over the possibility that a Black friend or partner might not make it home. Over a somber chord progression that repeats and ruminates, Jordan gives her partner a plea, vocals heavy with care: “Drive safely, text me when you get there, keep me up to date if you’re running late.”
Best encapsulating the mood is the penultimate track “Dancing Elephants”—as in, the kind in the room. Structurally it’s a by-the-book house track, from the timing of the buildup and breakdown, to the contours of the hook. But the beat’s a little too rigid to be carefree, the vocals blank and cool. Like the rest of the album, it’s not quite meant for dancing away the pain. It’s music for dancing through it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Young Art | May 5, 2021 | 7 | e90b6bba-5471-4e2b-a657-c6c1001ebbd7 | 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 an inimitable album of New Orleans music, home to the deepest grooves and an enormous foundation for funk, rock, and rap. | 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 an inimitable album of New Orleans music, home to the deepest grooves and an enormous foundation for funk, rock, and rap. | The Meters: Look-Ka Py Py | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-meters-look-ka-py-py/ | Look-Ka Py Py | It is most urgent for me to consistently remind myself that music, most often, didn’t just materialize from nowhere. Most urgent, especially, when confronted with an album or a band that sounds as if they arrived on the wings of some unseen miracle, like someone holy opened their palm somewhere, and out came the Meters, fully formed and already spiraling through a series of immersive grooves, each of them sounding like the birth of a new universe.
But the reality is that someone beat a drum somewhere once. Someone sounded an alarm with a voice that summoned another voice and then another. The reality is that the drums and the voices and the dancing might have taken place in American streets or in American fields, but these traditions were carried over by a people who were forced to be here, forced to work and build and care for land that wasn’t their land, families that were not their families. Their music and celebration was a reaction to that series of ongoing thefts.
And so, in New Orleans during the late-18th century, there were Sundays and Congo Square. For those people enslaved in the Spanish-dominated city, Sunday was treated as a day of rest. Enslaved peoples would take their free afternoon and gather right outside the city, the only place city leaders would allow them to congregate in groups. The space in which they gathered was originally given the name Place des Negres, and then Place Congo, and then Congo Square.
There, hundreds of enslaved Africans could gather to dance, to make music with bamboula drums, bells, gourds, banjos, the instruments of their hands and voice. These gatherings continued well after the Civil War, even when white officials attempted to quell the celebrations, in part by re-naming the area after Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard. But the music and the dancing continued.
These gatherings held together the sounds and traditions of African music, but they also enlivened the ability for improvisation—to grant an improvisor and their audience a doorway to emotional and physical release, or freedom, however brief. For those who know, for those who have ascended to some place—literally or otherwise—with no firm plan on how to descend, improvisation, when aligned with other equally adventurous folks, can be exhilarating. A promise that for each moment you decide to reach your arms out into the air, another set of hands will emerge, ready to pull you along towards whatever is next.
By 1969, the Meters were New Orleans Notorious, a band that you’d heard even if you didn’t know you’d heard them. In their earliest forms, they played as the Neville Sounds: Art Neville (keyboards), his brothers Aaron and Cyril, George Porter Jr. (bass), Leo Nocentelli (guitar), and Ziggy Modeliste (drums). When Aaron and Cyril left, the foursome became the house band for Allen Toussaint at Sansu Studios by day and tore through the New Orleans club circuit by night. It’s always fascinating when a band releases two albums in close proximity, particularly in the same year, and particularly if the two albums are a debut and a so-called sophomore effort. There are those who say you are writing your first book or making your first album your entire life. That everything you’ve lived before the point of creation overflows and pours itself into that first creation. Thus, making any second effort more challenging, with a sometimes shorter timeline, a more shallow well of inspiration to pull from, and so on. But there are moments that feel like an artist is saying, “Well, no. I’m still taming the overflow, and I have learned to do it better than I did the first time, and I can’t wait to show you.”
The self-titled Meters debut was released in May of 1969 and was steered by its opening track, “Cissy Strut,” which was honed for a couple of years as the band’s opening song. While the debut has its brilliant moments, it only suffers (and barely suffers) from what many great debuts suffer from: an attempt to prove everything at once. The Meters wanted to demonstrate the band’s total ability, to show off their immense capabilities in navigating the second line sound of New Orleans and their lack of selfishness, a band so tight that its members didn’t mind sacrificing some time so that another member could chase a melody.
Their second shot, Look-Ka Py Py, was released just seven months later, before the year kicked its last bit of sand down the hourglass. And it is here that the miracle of the Meters flourishes: the band that was on stage tearing the Ivanhoe apart night after night found a way to become that same band on record. It is sort of a reverse effect, their debut album free of pressure, imagined or real. The longest song on the album is three minutes and 18 seconds, and the rest of them barely push past 2:45, each unfurling into what feels like effortless jam sessions, where the band tries to keep up with each other on a quest to find some shared sonic revelation, and then when it is found, the song ends. Take “Funky Miracle,” one of the few songs that doesn’t end with a fade-out, and instead ends with a collision. Modeliste’s drums bump up against the rest of the band, and then a hard stop. Silence before the exit. It is the equivalent of a nod, a gesture. We did it, through the beautiful mess of sound, we found each other.
The album is best defined by Modeliste and Neville’s tug-of-war. On an album with no spoken language, language is born elsewhere. Out of instrumental gestures, out of silences, out of two sounds crawling atop each other over and over. The Meters do all of this well on Look-Ka Py Py, but Neville and Modeliste do the latter the best. They spend most of “Little Old Money Maker” trying to outpace each other in small bursts while Nocentelli plays a mediator, getting his efficient and measured guitar licks in between the delightful grappling. This interplay works best when the two lead each other toward a room of their own, where they can be at their most adventurous. “This Is My Last Affair” opens—as most tracks on the album do—with Modeliste announcing his entry, but then Neville takes over and soars for nearly three whole minutes.
The Meters were an adventurous band, obsessed with the collective sound over individual accolades. George Porter Jr. is one of the greatest bass players who has ever lived, and what makes him great is his unsung work. Every band of more than two people has to have one member at least somewhat content with doing what they do, doing it like no one else, and doing it to serve the greater good without showing off too much. It’s easy to point to songs on Look-Ka Py Py where members of the band get to show out. “The Mob” sees Nocentelli wading to the front of the line, for example. But the labor of Porter is always there, underneath everything else. Another testament to the fullness of this perfect record, a fullness that is as spectacular as it is labyrinthian. If there is an album worth getting lost and wandering through, let it be this one.
Lately, I’ve been considering this idea of doing work for the greater good, even if it means that people don’t know you by name, by voice, by any single aesthetic. In some ways, the Meters are still what they were in 1969. They’re famous far beyond New Orleans, of course. But they’re still a band that some people certainly have heard without knowing they’ve heard them. At a party a few years back, a DJ flipped Cameo’s “Rigor Mortis” into the Meters song “Rigor Mortis” (admittedly, a thrilling moment for me, specifically) and as the latter reached its final 30 seconds, there were a couple of people I was with who did the thing I sometimes do. The “I know this song…but I don’t know this song” gesture that takes place when a series of familiar but unknown sounds descend.
To say that this is, in part, because the Meters were primarily an instrumental band seems too easy. But maybe the real thing I’m trying to unlock is what happens when a band is so good, and so precise, that they make music that serves as an efficient backdrop to anything and everything. The Meters are so good that they can blend into the atmosphere; they can become the air. This, too, is a miracle—one that does not render the band forgettable in any form. It does, in fact, tie them to that old New Orleans history of a people, otherwise bound by their torturous obligations to a land they didn’t choose to be on, seeking a way to transform the world as they knew it for a couple of hours every Sunday. Until, through their movement, through their sound-making, that corner became a new corner. That is where the sound echoed until it was the only sound.
One of my favorite samples, all time, is Amerie’s “1 Thing,” which borrows from the Look-Ka Py Py song “Oh, Calcutta!”—the nine seconds from 1:41 to 1:50 in the track. The Amerie song fractures and loops those nine seconds and runs them over and over again to craft a beat that never gets exhausting and never feels stale. For the brief second in the loop where Modeliste’s drums vanish, I find myself panicked, aching for them to return, like a child watching their beloved parent cover their face with two hands.
There’s some heartbreak in the way the Meters were sampled and the amount they were sampled, particularly in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “Cissy Strut” alone was sampled 71 different times. Even more familiar was 1970’s “Hand Clapping Song,” with its repetitive chant of clap your hands now, people clap now being sampled in 92 different songs. They never got properly credited or compensated for some of those uses. In a 2008 interview, Gary Porter mentioned that the band had been sampled over 140 times, and only about two-thirds of those were properly paid off, in processes that took years.
And so, the miracle of the Meters is also the miracle of restraint. It isn’t just there in the length of the songs themselves, but also in knowing that every movement in every song could be stretched into an epic, and choosing, instead, to offer a small window into a dazzling moment, and then moving on to something else. Let the legacy of the Meters be a great many things, but at the core, I believe them to be a band invested in wonder, in exuberance. In the kind of delightful childlike awe of finding a miracle around every corner, and therefore, eternally seeking new corners.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Josie | September 19, 2021 | 10 | e90f07da-8ea7-41c9-9226-22c66b9207d1 | Hanif Abdurraqib | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hanif-abdurraqib/ | |
The British folk duo returns with a heartfelt collection whose polished production belies the emotional complexity of the lyrics. | The British folk duo returns with a heartfelt collection whose polished production belies the emotional complexity of the lyrics. | Bear’s Den: Blue Hours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bears-den-blue-hours/ | Blue Hours | Soft-rock duo Bear’s Den, made up of songwriter Andrew Davie and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Jones, originate from the British nu-folk scene that spanned the late 2000s and mid-2010s. In 2006, Jones started the Communion record label and publishing company alongside Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett, and Bear’s Den toured alongside both Mumford and early Communion signees Daughter in 2013. Performing fairly standard if tender folk rock (“Guard your hope with your life,” Davie pleads on early single “Elysium”), they took a more modest, intimate approach than their artsier peers or their commercially-minded label co-founders. Helmed by indie-rock producer Phil Ek, 2019’s creative breakthrough So That You Might Hear Me traded in aphorisms for precise, poignant examinations of growing up around alcoholism (the expansive “Hiding Bottles”) and the difficulty of self-forgiveness (“Evangeline”). They continued this self-questioning streak with the moving “Favorite Patient” from 2020’s Christmas Hopefully EP, where Davie fears he can’t support his partner, burnt out from early-pandemic days working in the ICU. On their latest album, Blue Hours, Bear’s Den reunite with longtime producer Ian Grimble to further examine issues of mental health. It is a moving, often heartfelt collection of songs, but the polish belies the complex sentiments Davie writes about companionship and isolation.
Davie largely focuses on the benefits and challenges of intimacy, particularly moments when closeness borders on codependence. His tender approach becomes an advantage when he discusses enmeshed relationships and avoidant partners: Any of Bear’s Den’s peers would love to write a line like “You were dreaming in my nightmares/I’m dreaming in yours.” On the title track, the only way to get inside his lover’s head is to do so literally, crawling around and examining every synapse to find the issues. Even when the band nails a soaring, string-led anthem like “Shadows,” a simple line like “I should know better/But with you I don’t” complicates the chorus’ affirmation.
Davie journeys inward, too, writing about his lack of clarity with an often surprising amount of it. “Spiders” overcomes its underweight motorik beat with some self-lacerating but thoughtful lyrics, the extrapolation of the phrase “stain on your conscious” into “a mural” and a “memorial for all those you tried to be.” “Selective Memories” is the most impressive tonal balance the band has ever struck, with lyrics about losing a parent to dementia, examining confusing feelings with newfound bite. There’s still sentimentality in the song, in a verse where Davie hopes his mom can meet his future granddaughter, but Davie ultimately decides that he’ll let his bad memories slip away in the absence of closure. For a band hell-bent on reassurance, forgiving through forgetting is a surprisingly harsh conclusion.
Barring the occasional crescendo on songs like “New Ways” and some surprisingly heavy low-end on closer “All the Wrong Places,” Grimble’s glossy production doesn’t lean into that darkness enough. Every song sounds clean and punchy, but the refined atmosphere is at odds with the band’s newfound comfort with messiness. Strong lyrics aren’t enough to distinguish “Spiders” from every other moody slow-burner on the record, and for all his growth, Davie still leans heavily on open-ended phrases: “all you cannot see,” “all that I can’t undo,” “all that you are.” It’s a forgivable quirk, especially as the track “All That You Are” dates back to the band’s earliest days, but the repetition increasingly feels like a way to avoid specifying what lies in that “all.” The title track of Blue Hours acknowledges the difficulty of holding “darkness and light” simultaneously, but at their best Bear’s Den can delicately but purposefully navigate the more challenging shades of gray. | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Communion | May 10, 2022 | 6.4 | e9118e66-ba17-4229-9176-257c24baeb0b | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Andrew PM Hunt’s fourth album as Dialect blends vaporwave, field recordings, and sketch-like fragments into an unbroken whole. The result owes as much to collage as to composition, with an emphasis on flow. | Andrew PM Hunt’s fourth album as Dialect blends vaporwave, field recordings, and sketch-like fragments into an unbroken whole. The result owes as much to collage as to composition, with an emphasis on flow. | Dialect: Under~Between | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dialect-under-between/ | Under~Between | Andrew PM Hunt’s fourth album as Dialect begins with a guided meditation. “Under the galaxy,” whispers a woman’s voice, framed by the sounds of bubbling water and burbling electric piano; a soft metallic tapping punctuates the rhythm of her words. “Under atmosphere/Under sky/Under clouds.” She continues to drill down, drawing our gaze past trees, ground, bedrock. Under crust, under lava. “Keep going,” she urges, her voice never rising, as woodwinds and strings rustle gently around her.
It’s a remarkable opening. The whispered instructions (the voice is that of Hunt’s collaborator Hannah Bitowski) clear the mind and focus attention. And the insistence upon a vertical line cuts against the way that music typically moves forward in time. It underscores the spatial qualities of Dialect’s music, which trades rhythm and melody for tone clusters and splotches of color, closer in spirit to an abstract painting than a conventional song.
Blending chamber music with vaporwave, gathering together field recordings and sketch-like musical ideas—minimalist pulses, cinematic drones, streaks of synth and zither—Hunt’s work as Dialect has always had more in common with collage than musical composition. “It started as a way to find a home for a bunch of disparate recordings I had knocking around that felt like they didn’t fit anywhere else,” he told The Wire recently; he approached his debut album, 2015’s Advanced Myth, “by treating the material as if I was making a mix of other people’s music—different styles and approaches being collaged together with unexpected connections and big emphasis on the flow.”
Flow is paramount on Under~Between; the album’s 11 tracks proceed as parts of one unbroken whole, with little to delineate them. As on Advanced Myth and its successors, 2015’s Gowanus Drifts and 2017’s Loose Blooms, Hunt continues to work like a painter or collage artist, not so much writing music as manipulating shapes. This time, for raw material he used a set of pieces commissioned by the Immix Ensemble, a new-music chamber group based, like Hunt, in Liverpool, England. In a video of a 2016 performance by Dialect and Immix Ensemble, his writing for the group shuttles between the pulse minimalism of Terry Riley’s In C and more lyrically expressive modes. Here, however, remixing the group’s recordings of his own compositions, conventional melodic phrases are few and far between, leaving the play of pure texture and color in their place.
Following the opening track, reeds flutter and bows bounce gently against strings in “Yamaha Birds 1,” throwing off bright harmonics that mimic the chattering of a forest canopy; the faintest tonal shading leads from there into “Flame Not Stone,” in which wordless, electronically processed vocals and trilling synthesizer continue the avian theme. A piano melody takes shape, like a constellation coming into focus against a milky galactic backdrop. Held chords and a flourish of strings guide the way into “Stacks,” where marimba pulses and a splash of saxophone briefly hint at Japanese ambient music. The album’s first half comes to a head in “Ringing the Web,” in which a quick-moving saxophone solo, not much louder than breath itself, marks the album’s emotional peak against a porous backdrop of innumerable overdubbed layers.
It goes on like this—non-hierarchical, unstructured, free-flowing. There are few signposts; even after more than a dozen listens, I’d be hard pressed to tell you exactly what happens and at what point. There’s a risk, making music this abstract, that it can leave little to grab onto, and Under~Between’s diaphanous qualities can at first make it seem insubstantial. But the closer you lean in, the more it opens up. Every track is home to at least one event that happens there and only there, one sound that pipes up once and is never heard again before diving back down into the mix, drawing your attention under once again.
Hunt has said that one of the album’s influences is Joanna Macy’s Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory, which examines the Buddist doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda. Sometimes known as “interdependent co-arising,” the term describes the idea that all things are interconnected. That, presumably, is the source of the second half of the album’s title. In the opening “Under~Between,” when Bitowski finishes drawing her line from the heavens to the earth’s core, she shifts her attention to the idea of betweenness. “Between forces/Between sounds/Between light,” she continues, still whispering. Her list is more abstract this time; there’s an apples-and-oranges quality to some of the terms she reels off: “Between rivers/Between families/Between oil/Between sex.” At their root, though, they are all things that connect other things: routes, conduits, relations. The beauty of Under~Between is how elegantly it illustrates the idea of interdependence, tangling together seemingly unrelated sounds so that they are impossible to tease apart, and creating a space for peaceful contemplation in that web of interconnectedness.
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. | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | March 24, 2021 | 7.7 | e9248869-e386-4abd-9daa-2aefbe631fd0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Atlanta indie-rock quartet’s debut album stands out from their contemporaries’ laid-back melancholy with complex instrumental interplay that inspires lean-forward listening. | The Atlanta indie-rock quartet’s debut album stands out from their contemporaries’ laid-back melancholy with complex instrumental interplay that inspires lean-forward listening. | Mamalarky: Mamalarky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mamalarky-mamalarky/ | Mamalarky | Mamalarky’s tenderly tangled indie rock has the internal logic of ridiculous jokes shared between band members after spending weeks on the road together. The young Atlanta-based quartet’s touring plans were curtailed like everyone else’s in 2020, but they’ve had more than enough time in each other’s company to develop an idiosyncratic musical language. The sum of friendships and collaborations dating back to their teenage years, the band’s debut album melds flashy instrumental moves with head-sticking hooks and lovesick lyrics welcoming anyone into their private world.
Singer/guitarist Livvy Bennett met drummer Dylan Hill on the first day of middle school in their hometown of Austin, and they joined forces with keyboardist Michael Hunter (a member of shaggy rock revivalists White Denim) in 2016, first calling themselves the Wipeout Gang before settling on Mamalarky—a name they have jokingly mocked for its similarities to a Joe Biden catchphrase. The band’s 2018 debut EP, Fundamental Thrive Hive, shows slightly less restraint than their debut album, with Hunter’s synth flourishes veering towards zany, but the foundations of their sound were already in place. During a stint in Los Angeles while Bennett joined alt-rockers Cherry Glazerr, bassist Noor Khan entered Mamalarky’s orbit after they put out a call for musicians on Tinder. Swiping right proved to be the correct decision, as they leveled up into a tightly stitched prog-pop unit.
While Mamalarky are ostensibly an indie-pop group, they stand out from the laid-back melancholy moods of contemporaries like Soccer Mommy or (Sandy) Alex G with complex instrumental interplay that inspires lean-forward listening. Whether tearing into the album’s fast-paced songs or swaying through its quiet numbers, Hill is rarely content to play a simple backbeat, punctuating stop-start rhythms with splashy fills like exclamation marks in the middle of a sentence. Basslines bob in lockstep with the guitar’s rapid zigzags, and Hunter paints with splatters of synth in moments like the dazzling conclusion of “Cosine.” On Mamalarky’s most energetic rippers, “Fury” and “Schism Trek,” they sound as frenzied as Deerhoof, while the simple and affecting “You Make Me Smile” recalls the understated arrangements of that band’s former guitarist, Chris Cohen.
Bennett’s vocals hold down the melodic structure of Mamalarky’s various approaches, with a sardonic chanted delivery on “Drug Store Model” or a soft lilt through “Hero.” She repeatedly evokes feelings of fleeting romance, from the sweet reminders of “You Make Me Smile” to the sweaty sheets of “Almighty Heat.” This falls apart on “Schism Trek,” when someone’s absence painfully takes over her imagination: “You are my muse, you are my crush/I sit and think of you too much.” With the exception of tossed-off references to “the Hilton and Bill Clinton” midway through “Fury,” her lyrics avoid the world outside her head, and even then sound years removed from current events.
With this much creativity, it’s unfortunate that the band falls into predictable patterns on wordless bridges or codas that start to feel samey after 10 songs. The spidery instrumental “Singalong,” on the other hand, is a smart sequencing choice to mix up the album’s flow, while “Big Trouble” has the most notable tweaks to their formula. Its warbling sound matches the look of the group’s charming lo-fi videos as they swap out choruses with affirmative shouts and gleefully messy guitar solos. In unexpected moments like these, Mamamlarky sound like they’re capable of inventing a new musical dialect altogether.
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. | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | December 3, 2020 | 7.1 | e9255106-3af5-473c-9aa8-651b586f0820 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
Led by the exquisite brio of Brandon Flowers, the Las Vegas band returns with one of their biggest and best albums, a marvelously absurd collection of synth-rock gems and arena anthems. | Led by the exquisite brio of Brandon Flowers, the Las Vegas band returns with one of their biggest and best albums, a marvelously absurd collection of synth-rock gems and arena anthems. | The Killers: Imploding the Mirage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-killers-imploding-the-mirage/ | Imploding the Mirage | To understand how far queer culture has come in public acceptance, look no further than the immaculately coiffed, straight, Las Vegas Mormon striving to live down every one of those adjectives. Since 2004’s Hot Fuss, Brandon Flowers of the Killers has chipped away at his weaknesses. From the ambisexual roundelay of “Somebody Told Me” and the way he stressed the rival “beautiful boy” in “When You Were Young,” to the cheeky interpolation of Bronski Beat’s epochal he’s-leaving-home anthem “Smalltown Boy” on his solo track “I Can Change,” Flowers has telegraphed a primal longing: Why didn’t God make him a gay musician? Instead, God made Flowers a singer-keyboardist who sets his larynx ablaze from the effort of caring. He writes songs for the young dreamers who hope to be rhinestone cowboys; he wants to see thousands of Brandon Flowers bloom. As tacky and bombastic as a Fourth of July celebration, Imploding the Mirage has more bangers than a Killers album should 16 years after their debut and without copping to “maturity.” This band remains as absurd—marvelously so—as ever.
How quarantine may enervate this most arena of rock bands we don’t know; for now, though, Imploding the Mirage, with key production and songwriting assists from Jonathan Rado, gives no indication Flowers has downsized his ambition to make the loudest, grandest rock album in an era that sees too few of them. The man who allowed the queer-ish dance act Pet Shop Boys to remix “Read My Mind” also adores early Bruce Springsteen: the riffs, the scale, the penchant for florid twaddle. But Flowers doesn’t write Springsteen songs, he writes concordances to Springsteen songs, set to pillowy synths and with drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr.’s beats frisky enough for audiences aware of but not infatuated with dance music—like, say, Springsteen’s. Girls still excite him here—the ones who smoke cigarettes and “breathe in the blowback” and “fight back.” And the Killers are liberated, sort of. “I’m throwin’ caution,” Flowers wails on the first single, abbreviating “throwing” like an honor roll Springsteen student. Is that Can’s “Moonshake” in the nervous opening tap-tap of “Dying Breed”? Does he really sing, “What kind of words would cut through the clutter of the whirlwind of these days?” on “My Own Soul’s Warning”? Smile like you mean it, Brandon!
Applying the lessons learned about sustained ecstasy from previous producer Stuart Price, the Killers sequence Imploding the Mirage so that the circumference of each mushroom cloud of a song expands as the album goes on. “My God,” a prayer and exultation, corrals a choir and Weyes Blood doing their “All These Things That I’ve Done” thing while Flowers pushes his voice toward tones and stresses unheard by mortal man, all for the sake of the adage: “Don’t push/Control is overrated.” Then he loses control again on the next track, the glistening “When the Dreams Run Dry.”
In 2004, when the Killers released “Somebody Told Me” and especially “Mr. Brightside,” the embrace of their wobbly, lurid Technicolor psychodramas coincided with the post-Napster generation’s discovery of a version of the 1980s their older siblings shunned. Flowers may even own a stack of CD-Rs on which songs with gated drums and synth strings compete with a singer determined to outsing and out-hair them both: bands like, who knows, Survivor. In other words, Flowers likes the tacky ’80s; he remains a Las Vegas boy born with eyes sharpened by neon. But here’s the difference: Rather than record treacly updates of “The Search Is Over,” his mission is to find the Neil Tennant in Survivor, as much a quixotic mission as a genuine what-the-fuck moment: a cishet performer who queers anonymous Wembley Stadium tubthumping with bizarre word combinations. After a few listens to the new album, I couldn’t tell you what “imploding the mirage” means. Whether Flowers knows himself is worth debating. The brio is the point.
Sixteen years after Hot Fuss, the Killers benefit from a gradual acceptance of gender fluidity, sheer grinding persistence, and, thanks to COVID, an aversion to male hair trimmings that results in an Icehouse-era generosity. No one quite sounds like them in 2020. No one will sound like them in 2031. They remain inscrutable and delirious, trying for big, cool with small. As he puts it on the title track, “Sometimes it takes a little courage and doubt/To push your boundaries out beyond your imaginings.” Get comfortable aging alongside Flowers as his Talmudic wisdom deepens.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Dave Keuning played guitar on “Running Towards a Place.”
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | August 21, 2020 | 7.4 | e92a5be5-57fa-4232-9a23-c0514c3ba1da | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Three 6 Mafia’s tireless frontman has done it all as an artist and collaborator, which is why it’s disappointing to see him combat his ageless production with uninspired guest features on his new deluxe album. | Three 6 Mafia’s tireless frontman has done it all as an artist and collaborator, which is why it’s disappointing to see him combat his ageless production with uninspired guest features on his new deluxe album. | Juicy J: The Hustle Still Continues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juicy-j-the-hustle-still-continues/ | The Hustle Still Continues | Juicy J has been everywhere. From selling mixtapes with his Three 6 Mafia groupmates on the streets of Memphis to making pop songs with Katy Perry and Fall Out Boy on his way to the Billboard Hot 100 top 10; from rapping about demonic occultism to winning an Oscar for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards. Three 6 Mafia stampeded into the rap game with sinister horrorcore lyrics in the mid-’90s, not mimicking extraterrestrial life like OutKast or the gritty, low-riding Houston music of UGK but rather, showing us that a Southern group could create raps that make us squeamish. Their deliveries were cold, their pianos brooding, as if they were narrating a horror film, and the new generation has respectfully copied their style. Denzel Curry riffed Three 6 Mafia cover art, and Isaiah Rashad’s “Lay Wit Ya” samples “Ridin N Da Chevy.”
But ever since Three 6 Mafia disbanded, Juicy J has abandoned the pursuit of cohesive solo albums and instead opted for blockbuster collaborations that can get him chart placement. There is no doubt that the dynamic keyboards that Juicy made famous as a producer have become a staple in the rap game. That’s why, on his deluxe album, The Hustle Still Continues, it’s disappointing to see him combat such ageless production with uninspired guest features.
Rico Nasty and the late former Three 6 member Lord Infamous appear on “Take It,” where Nasty—an artist who raps like she’s having a shouting match with her therapist—is solid with her frenetic delivery. But the repetitive, unimaginative chorus makes the song sound like a worse version of “Juicy J Can’t,” from the Blue Dream & Lean tape. Logic, who somehow is featured on two songs (as well as an adlib that becomes a nuisance), remains an underwhelming rapper with lines that inspire a fake laugh and a head shake like in a Seinfeld scene (“Was never one for the academics/But knew the everyday struggle,” he raps). “She Gon Pop It” meanwhile pairs Ty Dolla $ign and Megan Thee Stallion—an interesting matchup on paper. But Ty’s melodic alchemy doesn’t gel with what a vocally-pounding rapper like Megan can do. It’s a missed opportunity on an album that has a few of them.
Juicy J remains naturally charismatic. He can tell a silly story and keep you engaged like an uncle at the cookout. He is never trying too hard, and it works. On “Kicked In’,” he recalls a time he took too many mushrooms, rapping, “I done ate too many grams, it got me out here geekin’/Hit the weed to calm me down, but that shit got me tweakin’”—a tale that might have been on a Three 6 album or two. (He then adds that he needs to head back home because he got a text from his “old lady.”) It’s a lighthearted narrative that’s effective from a rap legend who’s blossomed into a legitimate hitmaker. Juicy J is 46 years old. And contrary to belief, rap isn’t just a young person’s genre. The older generations can still drop quality work. But going from a 15-track album to a 25-track project doesn’t do Juicy J any favors here. Instead of building upon a decent record, he turns it into a cash grab.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Entertainment One | July 7, 2021 | 5 | e92d1df0-0047-42d0-8ee3-1628317a19e6 | Jayson Buford | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-buford/ | |
Hip-hop video entrepreneur Cole Bennett directs an inevitable, overstuffed album with a lot of big-name features and little curatorial vision. | Hip-hop video entrepreneur Cole Bennett directs an inevitable, overstuffed album with a lot of big-name features and little curatorial vision. | Lyrical Lemonade: All Is Yellow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lyrical-lemonade-all-is-yellow/ | All Is Yellow | You can spot a Lyrical Lemonade video before you see the bright cartoon carton in the corner. Over the past decade, 27-year-old Cole Bennett has wedged his way into the hip-hop landscape—first as a high schooler hungry for the latest releases and then, quickly, as a director who could anoint a new artist, or at least a new single, with a propulsive, technicolor video. Watch enough of his work and you’ll recognize his go-to moves: the swirl of neon as a sneaker streaks across tile, the animated jolt that brings a chain wiggling to life, the isolated words that twitch dramatically into the foreground. Bennett knows how to zero in on what’s working in a song, how to amplify the mood or emotional register that makes it compelling. With this, he’s built an empire; he reportedly turned down a $30 million offer to retain control of Lyrical Lemonade as the video production house expanded to include merch, a festival, and now, inevitably, an album: All Is Yellow.
Bennett has an undeniable gift for recognizing nascent talent—his videos provided early signal boosts to rappers like Juice WRLD and Ski Mask the Slump God. In theory, he could harness that skill to power an album, to curate a dynamic tracklist that captures some distinct point of view about the sound of rap today. Instead, he stuffs 35 artists into 14 tracks, most of which feel like half-baked thought experiments. Gus Dapperton and Lil Yachty? Why not! Jack Harlow and Dave? They have zero chemistry, but hey, maybe! Sheck Wes hurls ad-libs in the background of “Fly Away” before JID shows up to rattle off melodramatic mixed metaphors: “The journey is a battle/The travel is evil/Let’s spread our wings/Fly like an eagle.” Gothboiclique’s Lil Tracy clumsily interpolates Blink-182. The total effect is cramped and frenetic and unrelenting, like a Jenga tower that collapses over and over and just keeps adding pieces to the pile.
After a while, chaos becomes its own kind of consistency. But it’s hard to discern a purpose in the album’s thicket of lukewarm beats and sporadic bursts of melody. “Hummingbird” comes out of nowhere, with UMI cooing a treacly verse (“It’s been a while since I was 17 again”). Juicy J’s lecture at the end of “First Night,” a convoluted diatribe against one night stands, is even more confusing. Lil Durk’s melodic flow gets boiled down to a spangly punchline: “I’m trying to prove that I’m a star!” All Is Yellow mostly seems like an attempt to justify its own existence, as if enough high-profile features can amount to a spectacle. Sometimes it almost works; there’s a thrill in hearing Eminem’s voice right after Cordae and Juice WRLD finish rapping over his “Role Model” beat, or in the way Lil Yachty commands attention as he glides through “Fallout.” What’s conspicuously missing is Bennett’s ability to highlight these moments that make a given artist feel unique and worthy of your time; he flattens the lot, then stacks them all together. | 2024-01-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Lyrical Lemonade / Def Jam | January 29, 2024 | 5.1 | e93328be-f65a-4f4e-b051-90a305a66e31 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Released in 1991, the Milwaukee trio’s fifth album marked a return to the misfit anthems that had made the Femmes cult heroes in the first place. | Released in 1991, the Milwaukee trio’s fifth album marked a return to the misfit anthems that had made the Femmes cult heroes in the first place. | Violent Femmes: Why Do Birds Sing? (Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/violent-femmes-why-do-birds-sing-deluxe-edition/ | Why Do Birds Sing? (Deluxe Edition) | Do you like American music? Gordon Gano sure does, and he wants to tell you all about it on the Violent Femmes’ fifth and second-best album, Why Do Birds Sing? Opener “American Music” starts with a rushed count-off and a slow chorus, and then the Milwaukee trio launches into a celebration of pop songs in all their weird majesty, undercutting any nostalgia with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. Of course, that title points to a vast ocean of notes and melodies and rhythms, all of which the Femmes attempt to cram into three minutes and fifty seconds. The song is overstuffed, in the best way possible, with knowing nods to Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Aaron Copland’s everyman symphonies, Motown and Sun Records, blues and jazz and girl groups, folk and punk and psychedelia, and those out-of-the-way scenes that produce oddball combinations of these various traditions.
In other words, the song is everything the Violent Femmes do better than anyone else. “American Music” has their habitual street-busker approximations of pop trends, as well as the acoustic punk shuffle that immediately became their signature. Most of all, it’s got Gano playing the sympathetic creep, but this time he’s creeping on his favorite songs. The son of a preacher and a Broadway actress, he loved old hymns and old blues and weird folk even when he was an awkward teen scrawling lyrics in his school notebook. Those obsessions persisted into adulthood with the Femmes, along with a very particular strain of teenage alienation those songs address: neediness mixed with snottiness, anxiety mingled with bravado, rebellion duking it out with conformity. All of those ugly feelings made the Femmes one of the great post-punk bands of the early 1980s, with one of the most confidently eccentric debuts of the decade.
But “American Music” is not simply a mission statement. It’s also something like an apology for the purposefully obscure albums that followed their first album. They saved all their weird-ass Americana for their sophomore album, Hallowed Ground, which sounds like it was made by a band that just huffed the contents of The Anthology of American Folk Music. It’s full of skewed hymns like “Jesus Walking on the Water” and bizarre murder ballads like “Country Death Songs.” Albums three and four lacked even that power to alienate, however, revealing a group harried and unfocused after years of relentless touring.
In other words, they knew Why Do Birds Sing? would necessarily mark a comeback, and 30 years later it still hits with the force of a band finally getting back to what it does best. Working with producer Michael Beinhorn—best known for helming albums by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Soundgarden—the Femmes pared back down to a trio, with Gano on guitar, Brian Ritchie on acoustic bass, bouzouki, and a thousand other random instruments, and Victor DeLorenzo on brushed snare. Each song contains clever musical flourishes, like the tympani on “American Music,” the jangly Byrds guitar on “Look Like That,” and the soft-rock Eagles harmonies that disrupt “I’m Free,” but every song is grounded in that familiar acoustic stew. Drawing from the deep pool of songs the misfit Gano wrote back in high school (where he allegedly wore a bathrobe to class every Monday), it builds on the gangly grooves of their debut, finds new inspiration in the detritus of American pop culture, and finally gets around to the business of growing up.
And for the most part it works. The oddball suicide anthem “Out the Window” sounds like a Gashlycrumb Tinies panel set to music, both humorous and grim as Gano ponders the human inclination toward self-annihilation. “Hey Nonny Nonny” rewrites a staple of 16th-century verse as an outcast’s ode (he really was paying attention in English class), but even better is his rewrite of a much more recent poem: Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” The band alters the lyrics to include some nonsense (“What’s your favorite color of your favorite car?” could be a Marc Bolan pickup line) and to better match Gano’s persona, but that only makes it more affectionate than ironic. He sounds like your friend singing along to the radio and mangling the words, which speaks to something essential about the Violent Femmes: Even when he’s got a clever lyrical conceit, Gano always comes across as relatable, less like a rock star and more like your friend who has a car. Behind his pimpled nihilism lies a disarming sense of empathy.
There is, of course, a fine line between bitter and fucked up, between anguished and sinister. The Violent Femmes toed that line on previous records, but a few moments on Why Do Birds Sing? slip into ugliness. A live favorite from their earliest shows, “Girl Trouble” sounds like the theme to an Elvis beach movie porn parody, but its refrain—“I got girl trouble! Up the ass!”—is juvenile rather than jubilant. “Dance Motherfucker Dance!” is a three-minute joke without a punchline, and “Fat,” a live cut on the bonus disc, entertains an ugly revenge scenario: “I hope you get fat,” Gano taunts, but only so she’ll be less desirable and therefore desperate enough to take him back.
“More Money Tonight,” the album’s climax and the live disc’s encore, remains squirrelly 30 years later, impossible to pin down. “I always felt that I was different, always thought that was good,” Gano sings, and for a brief second you get a sense of him as the bathrobe-clad teenager whose sense of wonder is only just being squelched by the larger world. But then the song descends into a revenge scenario, as he proclaims himself a rock star who’ll “make more money tonight than you’ve ever dreamed of.” Scrawled across the back of his algebra homework, such a lyric might be relatable, but when the Femmes play the song onstage, it seems awfully petty. Gano briefly becomes unsympathetic—a calculating rock star rather than an obsessive fan. On the other hand, this is the Violent Femmes we’re talking about. They weren’t exactly Bon Jovi in the ’80s; they weren’t even Soul Asylum in the ’90s. So maybe they know the joke’s on them for using their modest cult status to mock the haters. It’s certainly powerful to hear so many people singing excitedly along to Gano’s loner anthems, celebrating that feeling of being different that they all have in common.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Craft | October 15, 2021 | 7.9 | e934a314-661e-4418-a46e-451fbdcf87ea | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
On the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's third album, Days of Abandon, frontman Kip Berman is a young romantic in a state of flux. Once a starry-eyed daydreamer pitching woo at anybody in earshot, Berman now sounds like a guy who's looking to reconcile his youthful idealism with the complexities and complications of post-adolescent coupling. | On the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's third album, Days of Abandon, frontman Kip Berman is a young romantic in a state of flux. Once a starry-eyed daydreamer pitching woo at anybody in earshot, Berman now sounds like a guy who's looking to reconcile his youthful idealism with the complexities and complications of post-adolescent coupling. | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Days of Abandon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19335-the-pains-of-being-pure-at-heart-days-of-abandon/ | Days of Abandon | On their third album, Days of Abandon, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart frontman Kip Berman is a young romantic in a state of flux. The Pains' still-stellar self-titled debut and 2011's Flood-helmed, fully Corgan-ized Belong put precious little distance between Berman's heart and his sleeve: these were head-spinning, chest-swelling records, drunk on romance, dizzy with possibility. Abandon doesn't completely ditch the heart-bursting intensity that powered the Pains' previous work, but it's no longer its driving force. Once a starry-eyed daydreamer pitching woo at anybody in earshot, Berman now sounds like a guy who's seen his share of heartbreak, and is looking to reconcile his youthful idealism with the complexities and complications of post-adolescent coupling.
For some, Belong's buzzsawing guitars and brazenly romantic lyrics were all just a bit much. Still, given the leap between the debut's mid-fi melodrama and Belong's amplified alt-rock ambitions, it seemed only natural that Berman might take the Pains into bigger, more bombastic places on his new record—and that notion dissolves just a few seconds into "Art Smock", Abandon's delicate, Felt-referencing opener. From the very first notes, Abandon is subtler, more graceful and, sure, more "mature" than any Pains record before it. The spindly, hushed "Smock" might just be the single most delicate song in the Pains catalog, but more tellingly, it's easily the most nostalgic as well, a sweet-and-sour remembrance of a relationship-that-wasn't. So many of Berman's songs seem to take place in the immediate present: whatever's being felt, it's being felt right then and now, and the vibe of "all we have is this moment" gives his best songs their crackling urgency. Up against those early records, "Smock" feels more reflective, more wistful. It's a look at the present through the lens of the past, in which Berman allows lived-in experience step in and take over for all that untempered passion.
This fine-tuning of Berman's emotional outpouring—more pragmatic, less excitable—carries throughout much of Abandon. "Tell me that we're still so young," Berman sighs atop the high-test twee of "Beautiful You", before adding, "But you’re wrong, so wrong." On "Until the Sun Explodes", Berman's in a hospital room, at the bedside of his betrothed, making big promises. This is hardly Berman's first song about unwavering devotion, but with its implication of mutual addiction and somewhat startling reference to "funeral clothes", it's probably his most complicated. As he sings on bouncy lead single "Simple and Sure," Berman wants something that just feels "absolutely right." But that's the ideal, not necessarily the reality; sometimes, things get messy, and you wind up gurney-side, looking on helplessly as the object of your affection breathes through a tube. These wrinkles—anxious memories, telling recollections, none-too-idyllic scenes from the past—are all over Abandon. Berman's certainly turned in sweeter, more rousing sets, but he's never written anything that feels quite so true to life.
In the wake of Belong, Pains underwent a fairly seismic personnel shift: several original members—singer/keyboardist Peggy Wang, guitarist Chris Hochheim and bassist Alex Naidus —have either left the band or taken diminished roles, leaving just the core lineup of Berman and drummer Kurt Feldman. On Abandon, the pair are joined by Beirut's Kelly Pratt and A Sunny Day in Glasgow singer Jen Goma; when she's not matching Berman harmony-for-harmony, Goma—like Wang before her—takes the lead on several of these tracks. Goma's sweet yet knowing tone makes a good foil for Berman's delicate heart-to-hearts, as her spry turn on the buoyant "Kelly" is maybe Abandon's finest moment, its sputtering drumbeat at one point all but backing up just to make sure it doesn't miss anything she's saying.
Musically, Abandon's the fizziest Pains record yet. Gone are the plumes of distortion, and in their place there's a crisp, effervescent gallop, splitting its time between dreamy balladry and spotless indie-pop. Granted, it's not all perfect: the sun-dappled insurance-commercial chug of the too-rousing-by-half "Coral and Gold" gets smothered by its own bombast, while elsewhere, Pratt's lighter touches fade gently into the background. But there's a newfound patience to just about everything else here, a deliberate, well-heeled sound that sits well with Berman's more ruminative lyrical turns.
On first contact, Abandon can come across as muted and brittle, lacking the laid-bare emotional charge that carried its predecessors. Berman's in fine voice (faux-British accent and all) throughout Abandon, and—the overblown "Coral and Gold" aside—these melodies are sturdy, even regal. But it's certainly a less thrilling record than what came before it, more refinement than reinvention, more likely to gather its thoughts than spill them out to anyone within earshot. the fact that Berman didn't try to outdo the grandiose Belong is a good thing, but Abandon can't help but come across as a transitional record, the first entrant in the Pains' "mature" period, with the promise of more to come.
Berman's called Abandon the most personal Pains record to date, and there's no reason to doubt him: he's applying the lessons of his own life to this music, all the tiny triumphs and harrowing heartbreaks that come from being young and in love. So as good as Abandon is, one can't help but think the more he goes through, the richer and more resonant his music will become. "He’d come to my garret, and we’d make something like love," Goma recalls halfway through the bustling "Life After Life". Still, she says, "The flowers he gave me have wilted/ But I keep them, like I keep him." Some love lasts forever; most dries up like tulips in a vase—but with every heartbreak comes a well-earned lesson, a souvenir to keep until the next one comes along. On Abandon, an increasingly wizened Berman seems to've picked up plenty. | 2014-05-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Yebo | May 16, 2014 | 7.5 | e93ed764-203d-4e88-9ac4-b21a06fbdaa8 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Three albums in, the Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist still sounds as though she’s composing music en plein air. | Three albums in, the Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist still sounds as though she’s composing music en plein air. | Heather Woods Broderick: Invitation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heather-woods-broderick-invitation/ | Invitation | The American pop psychoanalyst Thomas Moore wrote that each of us have three selves: the Eternal Self, who arrives at birth and never changes; the Practical Self, who is shaped by events and experiences; and the Unfolding Self, who is yet to be. On her third album, Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Heather Woods Broderick is most concerned with this third self. Having found Moore’s ideas recorded in her mother’s diaries, Broderick inspirits her third album, Invitation, with his belief that one must reject passivity and persistently choose to accept life’s invitation. Though it is unstinting in its beauty, at times the album feels like Broderick was too lethargic to RSVP.
Having spent the majority of her musical career as a backing singer for the likes of Sharon Van Etten and Alela Diane, as well as playing with Horse Feathers and Efterklang, Broderick’s first challenge is to stand apart from her own backdrop. She shares in the concern that her voice is all too easily subsumed by her scenery, and often, it’s a deliberate kind of defeat. “I take it my words are getting lost rolling over my tongue,” she sings on “Nightcrawler.” “I Try” makes her efforts plain: She wants to keep her unfolding self alive not by being “the motionless body of the honeybee, but to have the stinger in me.”
Growing up alongside brother Peter (himself a prolific member of the Portland indie-folk scene) amid the disparate sounds of the Maine countryside—nightjaws cawing, pine trees tossing in the wind—Broderick’s early sense of song was inextricably tied to her natural surroundings. Three albums in, she still sounds as though she’s composing music en plein air. Where 2015’s Glider carved canyonscapes of echoey electric guitar, Invitation recreates the landscape of the Oregon coast. Strings create the album’s wind, while Broderick’s piano arpeggios sound like waves redistributing pebbles and her airy backing vocals engender a sense of three-dimensional space. It’s a kind of musical landscaping not entirely dissimilar to that of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who once compared himself to a gardener: “Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern, and texture.”
Broderick’s landscape is imputed with feeling, which she recalls with geographical specificity on “Nightcrawler”: “It all takes me back to when I was in a moment of love/Thirteen miles outside Athenry, on the way to my brother’s house.” Each track is augmented with naturalistic details, whether the ricocheting percussion that marks footsteps on “A Stilling Wind” or the orchestra of crickets ushering day into twilight on “Daydream,” but Broderick’s quiet subjectivity hardly imposes itself. Her voice sounds shaky and uncertain on opener “A Stilling Wind” as she feels her “feet swinging in the atmosphere,” and on the string-heavy “Quicksand,” overpowering instrumentation swallows her up completely.
As a songwriter, Broderick thrives in the abstract rather than the pictorial and representational. Her recollections dither between specific and poetic, but her lines seldom seem to cut through. Much of the imagery she ekes from the landscape turns to cliché; a gull “with broken wings/Fever and dreaming of flying away” on “Quicksand”; “fleeting as sun-dappled water” on “My Sunny One.” “White Tail” might be the album’s best song, as Broderick’s elongated vocals take up welcome space at its center. “To remain, in a swollen sphere of all things,” she sings, striking a sumptuous presence over gently brushed drums. Then, in a moment of vitality, she strikes her piano keys in quick repetition; set against the sounds of slide guitar and crickets at dusk, the song sounds almost as deliriously romantic as Yo La Tengo’s instrumental “Green Arrow.”
In turning to pop psychology and her mother’s old journals, Broderick makes it clear she was looking for answers. Sometimes it feels like a futile effort. Despite Invitation’s cinematic and often successful composition, Broderick succumbs to the passivity she’s supposedly working to renounce. The songs are ambient rather than immediate, more decorative than they are distinct. The title track comes as an exception, as Broderick cries out “I accept” in a voice that feels pained, present, unfolding. The rest of Invitation seldom finds equal vigor. | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | April 18, 2019 | 6.2 | e94da5df-8849-4691-9e7d-6ce213232bc7 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The debut EP from TikTok’s favorite teenage shoegazer includes breakout song “Your face” and other delicate acts of genre worship. | The debut EP from TikTok’s favorite teenage shoegazer includes breakout song “Your face” and other delicate acts of genre worship. | Wisp: Pandora EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wisp-pandora-ep/ | Pandora EP | No one can tear TikTok scrollers away from their cherished dust bunny shoegaze—not fatigue, not the U.S. Senate. Gen Z loves the ashen ’90s rock subgenre as dearly as a worn pair of Uggs, and through TikTok, they’ve helped facilitate its contemporary revival. But if every teen were suited to spreading the good word, there’d be fewer paintings of Joan of Arc. Not everyone can have the reach of 19-year-old Natalie Lu, known as Wisp, whose 2023 debut single “Your face” led to thousands of TikTok plays and, now, Interscope releasing her first EP, Pandora.
For a while, “Your face” inspired people to post sullen slideshows demanding romance and videos lusting after pink supermarket cookies. The song, currently approaching 50 million Spotify streams, is a spring storm; its vocals sound soaked and distant like a lost dove or Deftones, and its guitar parts are made of chilled spiderwebs or Souvlaki. The months passed. Wisp assured fans that she was “a broke college student,” not an industry plant, and then she got signed. Now her TikTok and Instagram are full of shades of blue and angel wings—world-building for Pandora, which includes “Your face” and other delicate acts of shoegaze worship. But Pandora never becomes more interesting than that.
So every song on Pandora expertly fries its wistful melodies and Lu’s breathy voice hangs over them like a snowdrop. “See you soon” starts with the sound of the whistling wind and ends with Lu swearing, “I’d give all the stars to see you soon.” It creaks and stings—it does feel good to listen to. The most attractive aspect of shoegaze is how it takes shiny, sexy things—sports car guitar riffs, thunderclap drums, Kazu Makino’s singing voice—and covers them in pond scum. The point of this sopping-wet distortion is to make you believe you have an anonymous valentine: You don’t need the glamor of rock’n’roll, because restraint is more impressive.
But shapeless repetition… not so much. That’s the issue with a cotton-ball wall of sound like “Enough for you,” which follows “Your face” and is generally indistinguishable from it. Like the rest of Pandora, “Enough for you” floats on Lu’s windchime vocals and a loose guitar loop; it sounds like untwisting a Twizzler, and that’s about as deep as it goes. “Your eyes gaze into mine/But sparks don’t seem to fly,” Lu exhales like she’s sleep-talking. Another sweet nothing on an EP frosted with them.
But what about the other things—the painful things, the rejection, the dark nights and sinister crows—that Wisp’s favorite references, bands like Have a Nice Life and Whirr, turn into unforgettable art? Pandora doesn’t touch them. The EP has a filter on, reusing only the prettiest parts of shoegaze without expanding on it. That’s the point of a lot of music on TikTok, to be fair—to luxuriate in evocation. It won’t progress a genre or your life, but few things do. No need to quit your daydream. There’s love in it, at least. | 2024-04-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | April 9, 2024 | 6.4 | e953c8eb-972b-45c7-a687-78b2bc4c6aba | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Just six months after their seismic Big Black Coat, the Canadian electronic duo shifts into a lower gear but stays on the vanguard. | Just six months after their seismic Big Black Coat, the Canadian electronic duo shifts into a lower gear but stays on the vanguard. | Junior Boys: Kiss Me All Night EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22332-kiss-me-all-night-ep/ | Kiss Me All Night EP | Big Black Coat was the sound of Junior Boys injecting their trademark sound (blue-eyed electro-soul and bedroom-confessional IDM) with techno vigor. Six months after Canadian electronic duo released their most stylistic quantum leap of their career, the Kiss Me All Night EP returns to the quiet, introspective feel Junior Boys were known for, all without compromising on their recent musical advancements. This isn't a record to light up the dance floor; it’s a record you put on at the beginning of the night, with its more minimal, ear-expanding instrumentation acting as a preamble to the harder, faster beats to come.
That’s not to say that Kiss Me All Night completely drops Junior Boys’ newfound edge, it just dials back the rave. It draws more on European traditions of deconstructing dance music, rather the hot-blooded abandon other artists may see as the genre’s purpose. Teasing this border has always been an ace up Junior Boys’ sleeve, like on the EP’s opening track, “Yes.” The song coldly spirals around a recurring sample of a slurred vocal repeating “yeah” over and over, the pulsing synth swells becoming more and more hypnotic with each listen. Frontman Jeremy Greenspan’s whisper-croon weaves around the sample, always a blend between passionate lover and emotional car wreck. “Baby Fat” also makes good use of his vocals, as he softly sings of loves lost supported by a pop-rock guitar riff like something Lionel Richie would have pulled out in the mid-’80s.
The centerpiece here is “Some People Are Crazy,” the closest thing Junior Boys will ever come to a power ballad, which it turns out sounds a lot like a tropical house banger slowed down 200 percent and thrown into the deep end of the Milky Way. It’s a cover of a song by British soft-rock icon John Martyn, a subtle touchstone for Junior Boys’ bookishly futuristic funk. Warm tones bubble atop a skittish drum beat that easily drifts through the middle of the record. While the original is a masterclass in electric piano and ultra-slack bass lines, the band have done a stellar job at folding “Some People Are Crazy” into their own mythology, retaining just enough of its retro feel to keep the through line between the past and the present. Recently, Junior Boys have adopted Prince as a rather prominent influence, but while Big Black Coat dipped into the Purple One’s electro-tinged “Controversy”-era, the languorously sexy “Kiss Me All Night” recalls the emotional maturity and erotic playfulness of *Parade**, *with its metronomic disco beat and robotic keyboard stabs.
Since the songs on Kiss Me All Night are good enough to warrant an official release but don’t quite mesh with the boldness of Big Black Coat, the EP feels a little light—at worst, an addendum, at best, a victory lap. However, it is still another transformation for Junior Boys, more proof that by continuously and decidedly evolving their musical identity, they will continue spinning gold out of their detail-oriented, almost scientific approach to dance music. | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | City Slang | September 2, 2016 | 7.3 | e9563665-2ca6-4c38-b8c2-a095dc5795b8 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Neil Young's Tonight's the Night is a harrowing record about loss and death. Yet it often sounds like a raucous party thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life. | Neil Young's Tonight's the Night is a harrowing record about loss and death. Yet it often sounds like a raucous party thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life. | Neil Young: Tonight's the Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22053-tonights-the-night/ | Tonight's the Night | In February 1972, Neil Young put out an album called Harvest and it became massive, going platinum and becoming the best-selling album of the year. In addition to changing Young’s position in the marketplace, the album’s runaway success made a mark on record shopping for years to come. Anyone who went to a store before the vinyl revival began in earnest can tell you that used copies of Harvest were utterly ubiquitous—like Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat and Carole King’s Tapestry, there was seemingly no thrift shop or garage sale without one. With Harvest, Young built on the commercial breakthrough of his work with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, mixing two sounds beloved by aging baby boomers—rootsy country-rock and intimate singer/songwriter folk. Harvest was the right record for this weird, post-‘60s moment, and a shaggy Canadian singer-songwriter with the shaky voice was suddenly something approaching a pop star.
Harvest had its share of wistful and breezy songs, but a number on the second side called “The Needle and the Damage Done” was a sign of things to come. It was a song, in part, about guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten, Young’s friend and a member of his frequent backing band, Crazy Horse, specifically Whitten’s addiction to heroin. “The Needle and the Damage Done,” recorded live in concert and solo, set a template for a certain kind of song about drug abuse: It’s beautiful, elegiac, precise—a focused lament written with a great deal of craft, like Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” or U2's "Running to Stand Still." While he always excelled at this style, Young’s approach to songwriting was about to shift drastically. “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road,” he famously wrote of Harvest’s big single in the liner notes to his 1977 collection Decade, perhaps thinking of his album in the bins next to those by massive sellers by Cat Stevens and Carole King. “Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.” Tonight’s the Night, a noisy, harrowing scrape along the guardrail that sends sparks flying upward, was Young’s most moving dispatch from his chosen place.
As summer turned to fall in 1973, 18 months after Harvest hit stores, Neil Young was 27 years old. He was learning that bad things can start to happen when you reach your late twenties, especially when you’re drinking too much and doing too many drugs and are hanging around people who do the same. Your late twenties is when you might find that certain people who once seemed like “they like to party” are going much further, and the situation is getting dangerous. Bodies that seemed indestructible in youth start to give out; good times suddenly aren’t so good anymore. In August of ’73, when Young started the sessions that produced the bulk of Tonight’s the Night, he found himself in the heart of such a scene, and the center could not hold.
Two events in the previous 10 months had shaken Young to his core, and they shaped how this album came to be and how it was heard. In November 1972, Young was rehearsing the band he dubbed the Stray Gators to take them on tour in support of Harvest. Whitten was asked to join the group but it quickly became clear that his addiction had advanced to the point where playing shows was impossible, so Young fired him and gave him $50 and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. Whitten died of an overdose of valium and alcohol within a day, and Young was overcome with guilt about his friend’s death. In June of ’73, two months before the Tonight’s the Night sessions, Bruce Berry, a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and beloved member of Young’s particular L.A. scene, died of an overdose of heroin.
So Tonight’s the Night comes freighted with a certain amount of legend, and people generally encounter it now through the lens of 40 years of rock writing. If you’ve read enough about music, you’ve read the above “ditch” comment, and you’ll have it somewhere in your mind the first time you press “play” or lower the turntable arm. The general understanding on Tonight’s the Night is that it’s dark, it’s depressing, a record about loss and destruction and the end. If you listen to it knowing these things, you’re in for a surprise. Because it is those things, but it’s also so much more. Tonight’s the Night is shocking the first time you hear it because for a record on the receiving end of so much first-generation rock criticism focusing on its sorrow and grief, it often sounds like a raucous party being thrown by a bunch of lovable knuckleheads having the time of their life.
After the repetition of the opening “tonight’s the night” refrain on the opening title track, the first two words on the album are “Bruce Berry,” and the album’s connection to Young’s deceased friend go deeper. In August ’73, after some sessions at the L.A.’s Sunset Sound, Young decided a proper studio wasn’t the right setting for the album he had in mind. So Young’s producer David Briggs had the idea to record at a Studio Instrument Rentals, which was started by Bruce Berry and his brother Ken. In addition to renting equipment, S.I.R. had a small practice space in the back with an elevated stage. A mobile recording truck was parked behind the building and a hole was knocked in the wall to run cable to the truck. Young’s band now consisted of the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, young guitarist and sometime Crazy Horse member Nils Lofgren, and steel guitar player Ben Keith, who had worked with Young in Nashville on Harvest. Over the course of a month, they’d assemble in the evening with Briggs at S.I.R. to drink and do drugs and play pool and shoot the shit until they were ready to climb onstage and make music.
The Tonight’s the Night songs recorded in the practice space were cut live in this fashion, with no overdubs and minimal editing, and the album itself is one of the most sonically raw albums ever released by a major artist. The band is loose and well-oiled. At times Young is too close or too far away from the microphone, and his voice is often straining at the upper end of his range. Young was recording the month after Steely Dan had released Countdown to Ecstasy, and the rich possibilities of the recording studio were reaching a zenith, but he was recording in a dimly-lit room with a drunk band in the back of a retail store, noisily banging into microphone stands on takes that would eventually be used on an album by a label owned by Warner Brothers.
This off-the-cuff feel defines the album. Working with Young, producer David Briggs was about capturing performances, not making records. The album begins with a ghostly bit of tinkling piano and guitar that sounds like a brief warm-up, the kind of thing that would be cut from any record without a second thought. But here it’s perfect, lending the kind of “here we go!” feeling of the best album-openers. Young’s words on Berry are personal and almost uncomfortably specific, basically saying, “Here was this man; here is what he did, and now he’s gone.” Young talks about Berry picking up Young’s guitar and singing late at night after gigs when everyone was gone, and being moved deeply by a voice that was “as real as the day was long.” That kind of “realness” is the animating idea of this album. The meticulous craftsmanship that had carried Young to the top with Harvest had no place here; now it was time to make some noise.
Tonight’s the Night is an album not so much about death as about mourning. And while we might like to think of mourning as a dignified pursuit grounded in ritual—a black veil, food at the door, loved ones at beck and call—the truth is that mourning can be messy and out of control and it can sometimes look like something else entirely. Sometimes mourning can even look like a macabre celebration, embracing life with one arm while the black figure of death is curled inside the other. That’s where Young and his band found themselves during this period. “Lookout Joe,” one of a couple of songs on Tonight’s the Night recorded in December ’72, has a couplet that conveys the record’s reckless spirit perfectly: “Remember Bill from up on the hill?/A Cadillac put a hole in his arm/But old Bill, he’s up there still/Havin’ a ball rollin’ to the bottom.”
A few songs seem at first to exist more for the people playing them than the listener, but that conspiratorial sense of community between the musicians turns out to be a huge part of the appeal. “Speakin’ Out” is the sound of a band feeling their way through the most basic chord changes possible, the kind of structure even the most intoxicated and most damaged musician could handle with no problem. The meaning lies in hearing these people in this room playing together, the feeling they conjure by the presence, and not in Young’s lines like “I went to the movie the other night/The plot was groovy, it was out of sight.” Tonight's the Night's beauty lies in its imperfections. “Mellow My Mind” has a similarly unfinished feel, but the strain of Young’s voice is so palpable, every half-baked couplet swollen with ache, that it’s almost unbearably affecting.
“Roll Another Number (For the Road)” is a song about the end of a long night of incapacitating inebriation performed by a band that sounds like they’ve just experienced a long night of incapacitating inebriation. Young has always been, on one level, of the hippie generation’s true believers—he did, after all, title the first volume of his memoir Waging Heavy Peace. But he can just as often be repelled by the soft-headedness of the movement. “I’m not goin’ back to Woodstock for a while,” he sings on “Roll Another Number,” explaining that he’s “a million miles away/From that helicopter day.” The road so many of his generation had taken led him here, drunk on a dark stage singing songs about death and loss to nobody.
Sometimes songs are knocked together and passed around, something to be used as much as something performed. And for songs like these, you grab whatever’s at hand. Such a loose and generous approach led Young to a place where he could lift the melody of a song someone else had written wholesale and call his creation “Borrowed Tune” without shame or apology. “I’m singing my borrowed tune, I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room, too wasted to write my own,” he sings over minimal piano, voicing a melody first found on the Jagger/Richards composition “Lady Jane.” Young’s Stones’ interpolation and blues changes suggest that the building blocks of music belong to us all, and we should take what we need and turn the raw material into a new expression. That feeling, of the possibility of transformation, extends to the record as a whole. There are so many loose ends, frayed connections, and smudgy borders, no single song has any one specific meaning. Listening to the album becomes an act of authorship, as its slurred words and pugnacious spirit are mapped onto your own life.
Ben Keith’s pedal steel guitar playing is often astonishing in its beauty, which provides a layer of tension with the often-sloppy playing and rough sonics. In Keith’s hands, the pedal steel imbues every song with a symphonic grandeur, and also a feeling of life-affirming dignity. His show-stopping number here is the gorgeous ballad “Albuquerque.” While Young sings about disappearing western landscape (“So I’ll stop when I can/Find some fried eggs and country ham/I’ll find somewhere/Where they don’t care who I am”), Keith conjures up huge, rich clouds of notes. No matter what else is happening on a given song, how loud the party gets, Keith lends a note of pathos, ensuring that the undercurrent of grief remains.
Whitten’s loss is honored by the inclusion of “(Come on Baby, Let’s Go) Downtown,” a song he composed with Young and sings, heard here on a version recorded at a 1970 Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig. That “Downtown” wound up on Tonight’s the Night is kind of a twisted joke, because the song itself, despite being a joyous rave-up, is actually about scoring heroin. Whitten’s death seems impossible when this song crackles with so much life. It’s both a celebration and a lament. Hearing their voices in unison on the chorus is a kind of prayer, two music lifers realizing in a moment the power of what they could do together. And the album as a whole takes this idea and extends it outward, first to Young’s fellow musicians, and then to us.
The three albums later grouped together as “The Ditch Trilogy” include the 1973 live album Time Fades Away (culled from the shows Whitten had hoped to play on) and 1974’s On the Beach. They are very different documents bound together by the force of Young’s vision. Though Tonight’s the Night was recorded before On the Beach, it wouldn’t be released for another two years. This turned out to be to the album’s advantage, because its final presentation highlighted the fact that it was snapshot of a moment in time, and gave Young the opportunity to inflate its myth.
When it finally emerged, it came inside one of rock’s greatest sleeves, a spooky high contrast black-and-white photo of Young printed on blotter paper. On the LP itself, the Reprise label, usually tan, was black, and there were cryptic carvings in the run-out groove, “Hello Waterface“ in the A-side and “Goodbye Waterface” on the B. An insert included with album features notes from Young with a sort of apology (“I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”) and a lengthy article about Young written in Dutch.
The article, as it turns out, was a harsh pan of a show from Young’s tour following the completion of the Tonight’s the Night material, undertaken a year and a half before the album’s release. These shows, which are now the stuff of legend, were theatrical. “The stage set was very strange,” reads a translation of the liner notes. “At the back a large palm tree; next to the piano and loudspeakers were hanging all sorts of women’s boots and there were hubcaps laid all around. We were in total darkness when Neil and his band—Ben Keith, Nils Lofgren, Ralph Molina & Billy Talbot took the stage and slowly began playing the 1st number ‘Tonight’s the Night.’ The sound was miserable, the band’s coordination was miserable and Neil’s piano and singing were miserable." During these shows, Young would often mix songs with long rants about his deceased friends. He was toying with his place in the entertainment machine, trying to figure out how to sneak these heavier feelings in. His “Miami Beach” routine was a way of externalizing the artifice of your typical music performance to make the real feelings at the core that much more intense. It was a rock show designed to feel like a seance, a way of communing with the dead.
But in the end, Tonight’s the Night is really a record about life. Like a drunk at the end of a long night or a boxer barely on their feet, the record staggers, stumbles, and lunges forward; it’s prevailing mode is “unsteady.” Nothing lands where it should, and it feels like it could collapse at any moment. But while a lurching gait can be a marker of damage or dysfunction, it can also be a sign of defiance. Because some force, whether it's from outside or it’s something you bring on yourself, is trying to cripple you. But guess what: you’re still standing. | 2016-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | June 26, 2016 | 10 | e9603245-f947-4b05-8a0c-fdf8660147d4 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Liv.e’s brilliant second album bends her expressive R&B into fearsome new shapes, acknowledging all the nuance and pain on the long journey to personal truth. | Liv.e’s brilliant second album bends her expressive R&B into fearsome new shapes, acknowledging all the nuance and pain on the long journey to personal truth. | Liv.e: Girl in the Half Pearl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/live-girl-in-the-half-pearl/ | Girl in the Half Pearl | Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e’s debut LP, flipped through the pages of her diary quickly enough to animate her scattered musings on young romance while preserving each entry’s distinct perspective. Its allure rested on Liv.e’s charismatic storytelling, in her belief that “everybody got a love story” and her ability to play every role in those tales herself. Aggressively non-linear and rich in lo-fi charm, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You kept the proceedings light and easy. Even in the album’s darkest moments, Liv.e never felt more than 30 seconds away from a cathartic breakthrough, rescued by a tempo shift, a false ending, or the affirming words of a guest feature. She tore through dreamy realizations like outfits ripped off a garment rack, theorizing that a change of heart could be as easy as a change of costume.
Girl in the Half Pearl cuts to the scene after the diary slams shut, when your face crashes into the pillow before a long and sleepless night. In place of Couldn’t Wait to Tell You’s rose-tinted psychedelia, Liv.e builds a mirror, surgically examining the ugliest parts of her subconscious and clawing toward her worst impulses and most frightening thoughts. Healing is a minefield of doubt and confusion, crossed only by necessity. Liv.e doesn’t waste time idealizing the process. “When I looked inside my brain, there were all these webs of pain,” she groans on opener “Gardetto.,” somersaulting over a wave of pitch-shifted oh nos. She strains like a petulant child, burnt out before the work even begins: “I just wanna play with my toys/I’m too young for the world’s big problems.” Girl in the Half Pearl delves into the rich tension between deciding to change and taking the first step, dwelling in both the pain and promise of learning things about yourself that you sometimes wish you could forget. It’s a mesmerizing documentation of Liv.e’s ongoing rebirth that dares you to keep your eyes open during the scary parts.
Liv.e heads a formidable ensemble of producers in soundtracking Girl in the Half Pearl’s compounding existential crises, eliciting career-high performances from accomplices new and old. Frequent Remi Wolf collaborator Solomonophonic and West Coast new age keyboardist John Carroll Kirby pull out all the stops for the fluorescent “Wild Animals,” wrapping its knowing eye roll to conniving men in trickling piano and the evergreen warmth of a brushed drum backbeat. Ever-reliable L.A. lysergist Mndsgn carves out a sizable chunk of real estate across the record, but lends a particularly inspired hand to “Find Out.” He digs deep in the crates, unearthing a jazzy, snare-less loop that thumps like an aching heartbeat, giving Liv.e’s decision to trade love’s rollercoaster for “precious time alone” the perfect dose of last-kiss sweetness. She walks away, a trilling synthesizer swirls in the mix, and the gut-wrenching resolve of her parting words (“I guess we’ll find out…the hard way”) cuts like a knife.
But true to the record’s “know thyself” thesis, Liv.e tackles the bulk of the production solo, rediscovering herself through electronica and noise, and dousing her R&B foundations in a stunning coat of fresh paint. The most satisfying moments push her to undertake fearsome experiments with her voice. She crashes into the breakbeats of “Ghost” with a metallic howl, roaring with frustration as she bitterly acknowledges her need for security—and recalls how it was denied to her in the past. “I know I said I don’t need the help/Just wanna get back home,” she cries, and the syllables begin to catch in her throat before suddenly vanishing, swallowed by grief. On “Clowns,” Liv.e lures you into the tense moment before the emotional dam between two people bursts. At the breaking point, teasing percussion and sickly sweet strings erupt into gory pyrotechnics. “Can’t be clowns for this long, so baby what do we make it?” she screams, her words sparking against the blown-out crash of the drums.
For years, Liv.e has found a home among some of Black music’s most critically lauded experimentalists like Earl Sweatshirt, Pink Siifu, and Black Noi$e. If you come to Girl in the Half Pearl looking to find a soothing voice in the wilderness, you will instead find a complex maze of battered beats and warped shouts. The gripping soundscape doesn’t allow you to watch its protagonist’s transformation from the safety of the back row—it shoves you through the screen. If Liv.e’s going to “break the mirror 90 times” because she can’t stand to see herself, you’re going to help her sweep up the glass.
When Liv.e announced Girl in the Half Pearl, she described it as a send-off for “people pleasing” behavior, and the album succeeds precisely because it feels so authentic and uncompromising: designed to serve only the needs of its creator. In burying the tender apology of “Snowing!” under a blanket of static, in applying a different vocal style and post-production technique to each vocal line of “Six Weeks,” in refusing to condense the long struggle of finding yourself into a catchy chorus, Liv.e affects an irresistibly magnetic anti-charm. She leads by example, by meeting herself in the present and holding her own gaze. Girl in the Half Pearl doesn’t fixate on the light at the end of the tunnel. It chisels into the rock slowly, humming along to the sound of each strike. | 2023-02-15T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-15T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | In Real Life | February 15, 2023 | 8.3 | e965f6c0-a6d1-4547-907a-c435dafd2e99 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
An eight-disc box set tells the complete story of the talented yet star-crossed UK folk-rock duo, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness. | An eight-disc box set tells the complete story of the talented yet star-crossed UK folk-rock duo, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness. | Richard and Linda Thompson: Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-and-linda-thompson-hard-luck-stories-1972-1983/ | Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982) | Hard-luck stories are one of Richard Thompson’s specialties. He honed the skill in the 1970s, writing songs with the knowledge that his wife Linda would provide the sugar to sweeten his salt. From a certain perspective, the tale of Richard and Linda Thompson—a partnership that intertwined romance and creativity—is itself a hard-luck story, one plagued by missed opportunities and bad breaks, and culminating in a public divorce.
The eight-disc box set Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982) tells this tale in full, adding a host of rarities to the six studio albums the duo released during their decade as collaborators. It’s the rare box set where the rarities feel integral to the compilation’s impact, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness.
During their time together, the Thompsons always seemed to be on the verge of greater recognition, yet success eluded them. Some of this can be blamed on circumstances beyond their control: Their debut, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, was held back from the marketplace during the oil shortage of the early 1970s, not appearing in the UK until 1974; it wouldn’t surface in the U.S. until 1976, when it was added as a bonus LP on the since deleted Live (More or Less). Their attempts at bolder, brighter music—1978’s First Light and the following year’s Sunnyvista—satisfied neither the curious nor the dedicated. Once they finally started to gain a wider audience with 1982’s Shoot Out the Lights, the couple’s partnership fell apart; they promoted the album with an American tour even though it was clear that they were long past the end.
All these unlucky turns have tended to cast a pall over the entirety of the duo’s career, as if they were fated to a miserable ending. Certainly, this impression is strengthened by Richard’s proclivity for sad songs and gloom, but Thompson was too guarded and flinty to traffic in open autobiography—even though his music was so unadorned, it was easy to conflate the two. Linda Thompson helped draw distinctions between the writer and the singer, with a clear, keening voice that stood as a counterpoint to Richard’s gruffness.
The first disc of Hard Luck Stories shows a chemistry that was evident at the start, collecting scraps and strays from 1972, the year Richard Thompson left his groundbreaking British folk-rock group Fairport Convention. As he bided his time with the Bunch, a folk-rock supergroup masterminded by Fotheringay’s Trevor Lucas, he was accompanied by Linda Peters, his romantic partner since the end of the 1960s. Somewhere between the Bunch, sessions for Richard’s first solo album, and a series of live performances (some captured here), the couple found time to marry. Once Henry the Human Fly proved to be an ignominious beginning to his career—legend has it that it was the poorest seller at Reprise Records at that point—the Thompsons formalized their collaboration, touring British folk clubs as a pair and cutting an album together.
The resulting I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is exquisite, balancing the black depths of “Withered and Died” with the spiritual deliverance of “When I Get to the Border.” Omens and misfortune give the record a heavy, foreboding heart, yet the music never quite descends into grimness. Hope lingers on the edges of the title track; the entire affair benefits from the way the Thompsons, surrounded by a sympathetic collection of supporting players, let this otherwise fatalistic, earthbound music breathe. Some of the gloom lifted on the subsequent Hokey Pokey, in which tempos can be jaunty and the songs often play like gimlet-eyed character sketches. Much of the album feels steeped in old British folk traditions—“Smiffy’s Glass Eye” sways like a sea shanty—yet where I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight appears to float outside of time, Hokey Pokey carries scant evidence of its era. “Georgie on a Spree” lopes along on rounded edges, “The Egypt Room” gets considerable mileage out of its desert trappings, and there’s a slight hippie haze to the ballads, particularly the spiritually settled “A Heart Needs a Home."
By the time Hokey Pokey hit stores in 1975, the Thompsons had converted to Sufism, a sect of Islam that renounced materialism in favor of introspection. Fittingly, Pour Down Like Silver, the album the duo recorded prior to an extended retreat in a Sufi community, is an inward affair. So slow and stately that the rhythm section often provides as much texture as momentum, Pour Down Like Silver wears its austerity with pride. Unlike previous Richard Thompson compositions, songs don’t dwell upon dark twists of fate; sadness is felt deeply but then let go.
Soon, Richard and Linda Thompson let music itself go. Upon the encouragement of Richard’s religious mentor, the duo abandoned the stage and the studio to pursue a monastic life within the confines of their chosen community (which, as both Thompsons have stressed over the years, was not a commune). Linda grew impatient with this lifestyle first, but it wasn’t until Richard decided to return to music that they left their community behind to resume their career. A clutch of unreleased live versions of otherwise unrecorded songs from their 1977 comeback tour are featured on the fifth disc of Hard Luck Stories. They tell a fascinating tale in which the duo pursues a shaggy hybrid of folk, funk, jazz, and Middle Eastern music. Thompson later dismissed these tunes, claiming, “some songs deserve to fall off the radar,” yet these performances, however unwieldy, are a vital transition between the stillness of Pour Down Like Silver and its burnished successor, 1978’s First Light.
On First Light, the two abandoned their ragged fusion in favor of a streamlined folk rock so polished it could almost be classified as soft rock. Spirituality remained a paramount concern in Richard’s songwriting, but his intent could be hard to discern beneath the layers of studio varnish. Still, these gleaming surfaces help highlight the underlying sweetness of Linda’s voice, and some songs cut through the gloss, such as the wistful “Pavanne” and “Layla,” which is so loose, it’s nearly funky. “Layla”—not a cover of Eric Clapton’s song of the same name—pointed toward the lively Sunnyvista, the 1979 LP that closed out their ill-fated stint at Chrysalis Records. Bright and brash, Sunnyvista plays like a breezy riposte to the duo’s heavy-hearted masterworks; even the slow-crawling “Sisters” skirts the pain that lies at its core. It’s the rare Richard and Linda Thompson record that engages with contemporary sounds and ideas.
When Sunnyvista didn’t snag a new audience for the Thompsons, Chrysalis dropped the duo. Fellow British folk rocker Gerry Rafferty offered to bankroll a new album, but Richard bristled at the “Baker Street” hitmaker pushing his duo too far into the middle of the road. The experience still seems to sting the Thompsons: Only a few songs from the scrapped album, dubbed Rafferty’s Folly by fans, appear on Hard Luck Stories, all of which are familiar from other CD reissues. Scrounge up some of the rejected cuts floating around on the internet, such as the original take on the tense, propulsive “Don’t Renege on Our Love,” and it’s easy to hear why they didn’t make the cut: They’re stiff and lifeless in a way Richard and Linda Thompson never were again. Once every label passed on Rafferty’s project, the Thompsons reunited with Joe Boyd, the original producer of Fairport Convention, to re-record the songs for the album that became Shoot Out the Lights.
Shoot Out the Lights hangs heavy in the legacy of Richard and Linda Thompson: It was their first album to garner a significant audience in America and the last they recorded together. The divorce followed so swiftly after the album’s release that the record is sometimes said to have been made as the couple separated, which isn’t quite true. Certainly, it doesn’t take a close listen to determine these are songs written by a man whose restlessness is overtaking his spirit. If Thompson winds up pitying himself a bit too much on “A Man in Need,” “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”—one of only two songs in their catalog co-written by both musicians—acts as its soulful counterbalance, placing blame for a decaying relationship squarely at the feet of the man beset by wanderlust.
Richard and Linda Thompson closed Shoot Out the Lights—and their joint career—with “Wall of Death,” a song whose central metaphor compares romance to an amusement park ride. The song opens with the refrain, “Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time”; the line could be interpreted as a desire to give romance another shot, or to run out and find new love. Richard chose the latter route, but his relationship with Linda persists to this day. She invited him to play on her 2002 comeback Fashionably Late, and in 2014 the pair formed the band Family with their son Teddy and daughter Kami, along with various extended relatives. The latter-day mending of fences somewhat tempers the myth of turmoil that hangs over Shoot Out the Lights, and it’s to Hard Luck Stories’ credit that there’s a hint of that reconciliation in the box’s conclusion, in which the duo can be heard tearing through a rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “High School Confidential” taken from their final tour from 1982. The selection neatly dovetails with another rock’n’roll oldie that opens the set (a barreling version of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Rock & Roller” by the Bunch), but it’s more than a nifty trick of sequencing. “High School Confidential” illustrates how Richard and Linda Thompson could conjure joy even during their darkest hour, underscoring Hard Luck Stories’s greatest lesson: No matter how high the peak nor how low the valley, the two musicians never lost their incandescent chemistry.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMC / Universal | September 17, 2020 | 8.4 | e9687210-b8a9-43d1-9e09-327be07a3e9b | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On the latest from his sci-fi-leaning project Fhloston Paradigm, the renowned Philadelphia producer King Britt shows a more vulnerable side, collaborating with Moor Mother, Nosaj Thing, and others. | On the latest from his sci-fi-leaning project Fhloston Paradigm, the renowned Philadelphia producer King Britt shows a more vulnerable side, collaborating with Moor Mother, Nosaj Thing, and others. | Fhloston Paradigm: AFTER... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fhloston-paradigm-after/ | After... | On his latest album as Fhloston Paradigm, the renowned Philadelphia-bred DJ and producer King Britt realizes his most adventurous and dynamic self. In the wake of 2016’s 20-year-anniversary show for his legendary group Sylk 130—itself a precursor to neo-soul—Britt closes the book on his earliest endeavors by traveling deeper into space. The 2014 Fhloston Paradigm debut The Phoenix married analog synths, opera, and electronic music for a solid departure from his previous forays into acid jazz, house, and dance music. With AFTER..., Fhloston Paradigm breaks away from the vehicle that inspired his moniker—the 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element—and the mad scientist aesthetic of his earlier work. He hits his artistic stride with a more focused and polished version of the out Fhloston sound.
As important as the unification of genres on AFTER…, then, is the honesty at the core of the album. Playing to his strengths as a selector and composer, Fhloston Paradigm trades rave nostalgia and experimental noodling for a well-balanced marriage of the melodic expertise, emotion, and appetite for the unknown that live across his vast catalog. He does this without ego or exposition. He does it with a deft hand and a decent amount of vulnerability. The result is a release that speaks as clearly to his futurist leanings and creative maturation as it does the jive, groove, and gut-wrenching emotion endemic to Black American music.
Three years removed from Fhloston Paradigm’s Hyperdub debut, AFTER... takes a measured step away from experimental music to embrace something closer to spiritual trance—something decidedly more personal. Lead single “...MATH” is a prolonged statement of peace. The composition recalls the Eastern breathing tradition of pranayama—the practice of regulating and extending the breath—with its respect for space and the cyclical emergence of light. Breaking open the physical form of AFTER… illuminates a life force; a beating, techno-inflected heart is quickly established as the core of the entire project.
Opera singer and frequent collaborator Pia Ercole, whose vocal is a fixture of the Fhloston Paradigm releases, reprises her role as the voice of God. Connecting AFTER… to The Phoenix with the album’s second track, “...LIFE,” she introduces a new direction that hones in on the dexterity of each singer instead of burying them in ambient melody. On the Nosaj Thing-assisted “...THE HEARTBREAK,” electro-pop singer Kate Faust offers a stylistic nod to the ululations of women in mourning and labor—both experiences that push the soul beyond the physical body.
The album has a thematic preoccupation with the nuance of the female range—one of the pillars of soulful house music, and a clear nod to Britt’s earlier projects, including the seminal King Britt Presents Sylk 130 – When The Funk Hits The Fan. In this case, however, the vocals are as primal as they are tender, operatic moments referential of weepy spirituals and Fhloston’s original muse, Diva Plavalaguna—the statuesque opera singer from The Fifth Element. At about the halfway point, though, the technique of layering vocals to an atmospheric end starts to feel overdone.
Where the lack of discernable lyrics on AFTER… could prove frustrating, the ambiguity seems to ask, “What is language after life?” And in a realm where communication is much less literal, AFTER... suggests spiritual ascension might be achieved through sonic exploration, in lieu of a certain messiah. The Moor Mother-assisted “...ALL” is a brooding, bottom-heavy exercise in raw, polyrhythmic electricity; it conjures ghosts and gives voice to clear and present danger. Puerto Rican Space Program’s album closer “...HOURS” counters that darkness with temple bells and sharp statements that expand and contract at different frequencies against ample bass. It is a prayer punctuated by found sounds and holy tones, affirming ancient traditions and extolling the virtues of life on other planes.
Taken as a sincere meditation, AFTER… suggests that Britt began the project with his own mortality in mind. In it, he revisits and reckons with the unfinished pieces of himself. In the tradition of Kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with precious metals, honoring pieces of pottery instead of discarding them—he gathers scraps of compelling ideas, fleshes them out, and repairs them with gold. Britt has reassembled the very best bits of his past lives as a writhing body electric. Though his previous journeys netted no major losses, Fhloston Paradigm finds itself in AFTER… and finally takes flight. | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | KingBrittArchives | June 22, 2017 | 7.5 | e968e139-ea9d-42ca-adb6-77939c3b29c5 | Karas Lamb | https://pitchfork.com/staff/karas-lamb/ | null |
On a new tape marking his release from prison, the Los Angeles rapper and folk hero sounds battered but resilient, mixing studio sessions with tracks recorded over the phone from inside. | On a new tape marking his release from prison, the Los Angeles rapper and folk hero sounds battered but resilient, mixing studio sessions with tracks recorded over the phone from inside. | 03 Greedo / Mike Free: Free 03 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/03-greedo-mike-free-free-03/ | Free 03 | The late 2010s were a tumultuous time for 03 Greedo. In 2016, after six years of floating his Auto-Tuned melodies on the Watts mixtape circuit, he was arrested on drug and firearms charges that initially came with a 300-year prison sentence. The litigation didn’t stop his constant stream of music, which struck a nerve nationally with the release of The Wolf of Grape Street in March 2018. That April 30, he accepted a plea deal for the charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison—another in a long line of rap stars whose ascents hit the turbulence of the American legal system.
Greedo spent the past four and a half years behind bars, an eternity in rap time, before his release on parole last week. He reportedly recorded more than 3,000 songs before the start of his sentence, and released a fraction of that number over the years he was locked up until the music drip stopped with the three-track 03 Inna Key EP in August 2021. He opens Free 03, which arrived three days ahead of his release, the same way he has in the past: from behind the gravelly static of a jail phone. After an ominous automated message from the prison phone company, he laments the rap icons lost while he was away—Young Dolph, PnB Rock, Takeoff, and fellow Angelenos Nipsey Hussle and Drakeo the Ruler—before brushing the dirt off his shoulders to begin his new era: “It’s probably my last lil’ tape where it’s gon’ have this sound,” he announces. Free 03 blends this celebratory post-prison rush with the emotional fallout from his sentence: a collection of songs that grooves and seethes, always remaining focused on greener pastures.
Given that Greedo has been out for less than a week, it’s safe to assume Free 03 is a mix of songs from that stash of thousands and others recorded during his last days in prison. The tape combines different styles and moods to create what’s essentially a Greedo sampler, like 2018’s sprawling God Level in miniature. “Took a Little Minute” and “No Free Features” commit to hard-nosed, almost breathless rapping over rattling drums and pianos; the bubbly horniness of tracks like “Pourin” and “I Can’t Control Myself” shares space with the slinky paranoia of “Breakfast.”
Most of the vocals on Free 03 are clear and crisp, which makes the handful of tracks recorded through the jail phone all the more jarring. “Today” turns a croaked interpolation of the Ice Cube classic “It Was a Good Day” into a middle finger to fake shooters and crooked cops. On “Hype,” Greedo’s breakneck verse and ad-libs—all recorded over the phone—are interrupted by a “you have one minute” message from the phone company. Even on the verge of Greedo’s release, closing track “If I Die” plays out as a list of his fears (“One of my niggas will probably fuck my baby mama”) and dying wishes (“Leave [my casket] open, even if my face get blasted”). The song’s haunting “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” mentality is reflected through Free 03’s frenetic sequencing. Longing, concern, and pangs of hurt dovetail on every verse.
South Central producer and Mustard affiliate Mike Free matches Greedo’s range, his varied beats landing somewhere between the hyper-focus of RonRonTheProducer’s work on Load It Up, Vol. 1 and the versatility of Kenny Beats’ production on Netflix & Deal. Free moves from anxious piano melodies (“Today,” “If I Die”) to breezy Mustard-inspired ballads (“I Can’t Control Myself”) to moody synth bangers (“Hype”) like he’s guiding listeners through a tour of Greedo’s career. In lesser hands, the tonal jumps might make Free 03 feel unfocused or scattershot, but instead they match and heighten the writing’s rush of blurred emotions.
These days, not a month goes by without a rapper facing prosecutors who split hairs over song lyrics or getting carried off on a stretcher. Greedo is aware of how lucky he is to be out and breathing, and on Free 03, his voice doesn’t sound at all weathered by the turmoil he’s experienced. He sounds anxious but ready to return to the world, keeping his guard up but making his intentions clear. Vocals on the older and newer songs clash sonically—an occupational hazard, all things considered—but both work to show the L.A. folk hero’s resilience. Greedo is now a free man, having served nearly a quarter of his original 20-year sentence. Free 03 captures both the joy and the trepidation that come with that freedom.
CORRECTION: Free 03 came out three days before 03 Greedo’s release from prison; it is not his first post-release tape. This review has been updated. | 2023-01-18T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-18T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Alamo | January 18, 2023 | 7.4 | e96c3566-e731-4431-8a0d-ca073912ab84 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
At 80 years old, Carla Bley remains a vital force as a pianist, composer, and improviser, mixing knowingly wry moments with a sense of mystery. | At 80 years old, Carla Bley remains a vital force as a pianist, composer, and improviser, mixing knowingly wry moments with a sense of mystery. | Carla Bley: Andando el Tiempo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21721-andando-el-tiempo/ | Andando el Tiempo | Bandleader, pianist, and composer Carla Bley’s prowess isn’t difficult to identify or appreciate. From the outset of her long career, she has created memorable tunes like “Ida Lupino”—a song that appeared on an early album by her onetime husband Paul Bley (and which also appeared on avant-guitarist Mary Halvorson’s recent set of covers). Though when it comes to her full-album statements, she's more difficult to pin down. Her humor can move between the slapstick and the wry. She may stage a straightforwardly goofy album cover, or else use musical quotations in performance in a manner that feels both knowing and politically sincere—as with her work in the late Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.
That mixture of immediacy and mystery quickly earned Bley a following in the worlds of jazz and new composition, one that has remained ardent over the decades. On 2013’s Trios, Bley took the step of letting in an outside producer—Manfred Eicher, the head of ECM Records (which has distributed Bley’s independent label offerings). That album looked back at some of Bley’s past compositional work with a trio that included her longtime bassist and partner Steve Swallow, as well as saxophonist Andy Sheppard.
The same players and producer come together again for Andando el Tiempo, this time to tackle an all-new program of music by Bley, with most of the set devoted to the three-movement composition that gives the album its title. The pianist’s liner notes tell us that sections of this work each “represent stages of recovery from addiction.” Opening track “Sin Fin” finds Bley’s piano spiraling through abstracted tango riffs, her harmonic interplay with the other instruments occupying a frustrated-sounding middle ground, never sounding either totally ebullient or fully despondent. Keening, sorrowful phrases set the tone for a slower middle section, “Potación de Guaya.”
The third movement launches with a striking bit of contrast: a joyous sweep of the piano’s keys, suggesting a strutting exit from the world of addiction. (Bley writes that this bit represents a return to “a healthy and sustainable life”). But all is not automatically set to rights by virtue of the narrative arc; staggered bits of phrases, repeated with a stubbornness, suggest the effort that goes into Bley’s happy ending.
Not everything on the album is this weighty. When titling “Saints Alive!,” Bley says she was inspired by the “expression used by old ladies sitting on the porch in the cool of the evening when they exchanged especially juicy gossip.” The gently swaying piece doesn’t seem particularly scandalized—instead sounding warmly conversational (especially in the communion between Bley’s chords and Swallow’s tender, high-register bass playing). It seems like a song that might be destined to reach “jazz standard” status, alongside “Ida Lupino,” a few decades down the road. Even when she’s not throttling into avant-garde theatrics (as on her early-career highlight Escalator Over the Hill) or writing music for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, the casual strangeness of Bley’s aesthetic has been a constant. At 80 years of age, she remains an individual—and still composes like a born melodist, too. | 2016-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | May 21, 2016 | 7.8 | e96e023c-0dee-46e2-b245-938c5517b250 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
At its best, the fifth album from the UK indie-rock stalwarts is sleek, catchy, and enjoyably overwrought, the sound of a snappy hype band no longer burdened by relevance. | At its best, the fifth album from the UK indie-rock stalwarts is sleek, catchy, and enjoyably overwrought, the sound of a snappy hype band no longer burdened by relevance. | Franz Ferdinand: Always Ascending | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/franz-ferdinand-always-ascending/ | Always Ascending | Given their avuncular status in British rock, it’s easy to forget that Franz Ferdinand swept into the previous decade as indie-rock insurgents. Driving their self-titled 2004 debut was a desire to “make records that girls can dance to,” a superficial pronouncement with subtext: Here was a band to reject British indie’s boys-club culture, slyly mock scrappy romantics like the Libertines, and establish a smart, sexy, metropolitan counterpart.
Soon after their arrival, two albums by rising bands refashioned Franz-ian principles to broaden the UK indie-rock scene. Hot Chip’s second LP, The Warning, elevated their funk and disco flourishes by making songs people actually danced to, rather than stiffly thrusting their shoulders; one-upping Franz’s playful homoeroticism, meanwhile, Wild Beasts’ Limbo, Panto crafted an entire aesthetic from fragments of shattered machismo. Outwitted on both fronts—and outsold by Arctic Monkeys—the adopted Scots released a pair of uneventful albums in the next eight years, followed, in 2015, by FFS, a fun if forgettable collaboration with art-pop mavericks Sparks.
For their fifth album, Always Ascending, Franz frontman Alex Kapranos says he wants to “make dance music but play it as a raw band”—a revival of their founding principle, even as they say goodbye to their founding guitarist, Nick McCarthy. But anyone hoping the fresh blood would restore a sense of mischief might be disappointed: The return of synths and disco-ish atmospherics serves, unsurprisingly, to obscure the fact that a nontrivial reinvention still eludes them. But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand are persistently resourceful, and in their theatrical suave and helter-skelter choruses there lingers an obvious knack for starting fires armed only with indie-pop panache.
The best song here is also the most classically Franz in spirit, albeit rendered via sci-fi rockabilly in several undanceable time signatures. After some repetition of a ridiculous hook—”I’m a lazy boy/Yes, a lazy boy/Lazy in the evening boy,” etc.—“Lazy Boy” becomes both a satire and exemplar of pop inanity, syncing with the artificial heartbeat that’s always pulsed through their finest work. “Am I gonna get up-ah?” asks Kapranos’ showboating protagonist, loosely channeling Mark E. Smith. “Never!” he answers, winningly.
The effect dwindles on would-be anthems like “Finally,” which has just enough pizzazz to redeem the serviceable songwriting, while the title track shows what happens when their nerdy ideas overflow, to sometimes joyful effect. “The shepherd misleads so you think you’re transcending,” Kapranos chants, punning on the Shepard tone—a seemingly unending aural illusion—escalating in the song’s background. “It’s never gonna resolve,” he yelps in the chorus, laboring the metaphor a little. But it’s all sleek, catchy, and enjoyably overwrought, the sound of a snappy hype band no longer burdened by relevance.
Some problems arise when they pivot to the current state of things, threatening to veer into an Everything Now moment. There’s the Tinder-skewering “Glimpse of Love,” which whips together a glittery new-wave confection before throwing up a chorus of smug irony: “I need love, so someone better bring me a photographer.” That song’s sibling is “The Academy Award,” a gorgeous and gloomy ballad with the subtlety of Father John Misty writing for late-’60s Scott Walker. Its chorus—“The Academy Award for good times goes to you”—comes off less like social commentary than an unsolicited dad joke, but the chanson mood is dusty and French enough to charm.
In truth, charm might be Franz Ferdinand’s last unblunted asset in 2018. Unwilling to plunge into something more personal, or at least cannibalize their obsolescence for material, the band behind Always Ascending sound unspectacular, their pop sensibilities shorn of the epicurean flair that made them iconic. It’s not that they lack ideas—songs like “Huck and Jim” hint at a band more musically and politically raucous—but while the purpose is there, it all sounds gray and spectral, the mild offerings of a contrarian pop gang who lost interest in showing off. | 2018-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | February 8, 2018 | 6.9 | e9717ea0-3d6b-44d3-a5cf-7e4a04d11c2b | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
The New York band takes the downtempo R&B so familiar from mood-based playlists and makes it strange, using microtonal tunings and fretless bass to tweak synth pop’s conventions. | The New York band takes the downtempo R&B so familiar from mood-based playlists and makes it strange, using microtonal tunings and fretless bass to tweak synth pop’s conventions. | Erica Eso: 192 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erica-eso-192/ | 192 | If you’ve spent any time recently poking through streaming services’ editorial playlists—particularly ones with the word “chill” in the title—you’re likely acquainted with the so-called Spotify sound. It’s moderately paced, laden with jazzy major 7th chords, and smooth as the rounded edges of a plastic phone case. Though it’s the default instrumental palette for those taking care not to interrupt your late-night cram session, New York quintet Erica Eso have managed to use the sound’s unobtrusiveness to their advantage, crafting hushed alt-R&B that’s replete with avant-garde sleight of hand. 192 is their third and best album to date, lifting the synth-pop zeitgeist’s hood and tinkering with the engine underneath.
Led by composer Weston Minissali, who previously played synthesizer in quirky prog outfit Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Erica Eso’s songwriting probes the gaps between Western 12-tone intervals. The band uses microtonal keyboards and fretless bass to conjure harmonies that are familiar but subtly askew. “Yolk,” 192’s second single, orbits a fractured drum-machine beat, assembling organ chords note by note. Even Minissali’s verses feel fragmented, their stuttering syllables spilling from one line to the next. “I’m covered in yolk, the tide’s comin’ in/I got so close an animal screamed,” Minissali sings, contrasting visceral imagery against the band’s airy textures.
“Y.L.M.E.” establishes a similar juxtaposition early on, depicting Erica Eso’s music as an escape from the sustained tragedy of life in the 2020s: “I paint a pretty picture when I’m at home/While my nation’s jaws recoil, spit blood and foam.” Minissali trades lines back and forth with co-lead singer Angelica Bess, intertwined voices fading in and out of focus; a sense of uncertainty grows within the band’s bubble of ambient synth. On “Opening Tumble,” the band’s tempo undulates beneath the song’s cozy refrain, shifting like a waterbed.
Entering the record’s final stretch, the band reins in its glitchy rhythms to make a celebratory, krautrock-inspired sprint to the finish line. On “O Ocean,” Nathaniel Morgan and Rhonda Lowry lay down a classic motorik groove, providing a clean canvas for the rest of the band to splash with vaporous sound design. It’s the record’s steadiest tune, only making two brief detours into pitched-down half time, but it’s an earned break from their more cerebral songcraft—an opportunity for Minissali and fellow keyboardist Lydia Velichkovski to unload their unused patches and riffs in a single cathartic burst.
Two-part coda “Acclaimed Evacuation” continues this foray into early-’70s prog rock, but Erica Eso adhere a bit too closely to the grandiosity of their influences, sacrificing their loose, exploratory appeal. The first movement, a quasi-orchestral interlude, is uncharacteristically formal for the group. Blunting the creative force of “Pt. 2,” it’s almost cinematic, peppered with pizzicato strings and fluttering tones that resemble telegraph messages.
On the surface, Erica Eso appear to be an outlier on Chicago’s Hausu Mountain Records: a proper indie-rock band among a roster of experimental musicians who revel in abstraction. While their work doesn’t immediately resemble the glitchy Sega Genesis soundscapes of Mukqs or the metal-infused smooth jazz Fire-Toolz, the intent is still the same: to incrementally tweak the familiar—the pedestrian, even—until it yields the unease that lay dormant all this time. | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hausu Mountain | April 29, 2022 | 7.5 | e9719ce6-4044-44b3-b147-05e6c811a473 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
After the complex programming of last year’s Patterns of Consciousness, the Berlin-based composer explores new realms with her modular synthesizer, incorporating cello, voice, and doom-laden drones. | After the complex programming of last year’s Patterns of Consciousness, the Berlin-based composer explores new realms with her modular synthesizer, incorporating cello, voice, and doom-laden drones. | Caterina Barbieri: Born Again in the Voltage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caterina-barbieri-born-again-in-the-voltage/ | Born Again in the Voltage | The modular synthesizer is experiencing a renaissance. A new generation of fans has embraced the instrument, revitalizing the careers of old masters like Suzanne Ciani and Morton Subotnick and heralding new innovations like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s kaleidoscopic pop. As modular systems become more affordable for young producers, they have permeated the electronic scene from the dancefloor to the chill-out room. Since releasing her breakthrough album, Patterns of Consciousness, last year, the Italian-born, Berlin-based virtuoso Caterina Barbieri has become one of the modular synth’s brightest and most singular new voices.
Created using the deceptively minimal set-up of just sequencer and harmonic oscillator, Patterns of Consciousness found Barbieri employing light-speed arpeggios and repetitive synth melodies designed to scramble the listener’s sense of perception. The subtlest variations deliver an overwhelming impact, while mind-altering, algorithmically complex patterns allow her to play with perceptual expectations. But none of that immaculate math accounts for the cathartic and often deeply emotional weight Patterns shows in moments like 16-minute closer “Gravity That Binds.” Barbieri’s new album, Born Again in the Voltage, was recorded from 2014 to 2015, prior to Patterns, but it offers an equally compelling perspective.
If each of Patterns’ alternately maximalist and meditative soundscapes acted as universes unto themselves, the four tracks on Voltage feel like one carefully arranged suite. The album opens far from any kosmische tones with “Human Developers,” where Barbieri employs a Buchla 200 modular system (her weapon of choice throughout Voltage) to produce sinister drones more in line with Dylan Carlson’s guitar on Earth 2. Antonello Manzo’s cello only adds to the doom-metal atmosphere as Barbieri’s drones crash and rumble like a rocket engine before the heaviness boils up into clusters of melody. Lift off.
At the heart of the album are two tracks showing Barbieri’s skill in sculpting drones to convey tremendous feeling. A tense, mournful duet with Manzo’s cello on “Rendering Intuitions” picks up the pieces following the quaking opener and then rises into the brighter “How to Decode an Illusion,” which reveals a slowly evolving melody. The track’s raw synth tone and gentle progression give it a quality similar to the aliens’ greeting in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while waves of white noise hiss and hover in the background, far enough away to seem soft. It’s a striking shift from the album’s opening.
Barbieri’s trajectory over those first three tracks is as carefully plotted as Patterns’ algorithms, but Voltage’s joyous finale comes as an unexpected explosion. The jubilant nine-minute track “We Access Only a Fraction” bursts with dizzying patterns and surging energy, creating the kind of overwhelming rush the album previously held back—and out of which comes Barbieri’s own voice. It’s the first instance of singing in any of the composer’s recorded work (her debut, Vertical, includes a spoken-word contribution from fellow composer Ellen Arkbro), but her featherlight vocalizations dance over the whirling arpeggios as if they’ve always belonged there. It’s an astonishing moment, a track pulled from the past that leaves her future excitingly open. It all confirms Born Again in the Voltage as an essential document of contemporary modular-synth music from one of the instrument’s great new explorers. | 2018-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Important Records | August 11, 2018 | 7.6 | e977e4b2-94b6-471c-9c9e-0d0680f1bbe5 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
On her promising, impressively self-produced second EP, Margaret Sohn addresses youthful self-doubt with flair, pairing punchy indie rock with subtle electronic flourishes. | On her promising, impressively self-produced second EP, Margaret Sohn addresses youthful self-doubt with flair, pairing punchy indie rock with subtle electronic flourishes. | Miss Grit: Impostor EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miss-grit-impostor-ep/ | Impostor EP | In her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, the poet and critic Cathy Park Hong winces thinking about the time she’s logged at insufferable, majority-white poetry readings. You can envision the scene: the pathetic whoops following a routine “How’s everyone doing tonight”; the nauseating mmms of recognition; the grainy, solemn “poet’s voice” intended to patch over defective writing. But worse than white peoples’ self-seriousness, Hong thinks, is the shameful reality that she still performs for their approval. At the readings, she radiates difference. No matter how hard she strives to meet the craft’s lofty ideals—transcending identity, speaking boldly to the universal—Hong can’t escape her particularities as an Asian woman.
Racial alienation, sweeping artistic standards, the nagging suspicion of one’s own fraudulence—all of this comes to the fore on Margaret Sohn’s second EP as Miss Grit, Impostor. Despite training at the guitar for 16 years and studying music technology at NYU, the 21-year-old Sohn felt so uneasy about the initial praise for her debut, Talk Talk, that she imagined herself as “someone who was impersonating a musician.” Her sense of disjuncture—between her real and imagined selves, between her Korean and white identities—originated from her awkward upbringing as a mixed person growing up in white suburban Michigan. On her promising, impressively self-produced six-song EP, Sohn addresses youthful self-doubt with flair and polish.
Lyrically, Sohn is somewhat withholding, maintaining the taut composure of an outsider sizing up strangers at a party. “Buy the Banter” is a pitiless, almost Machiavellian analysis of power relations: “Our work pays the water tank for nothing,” she growls, willing herself rather opaquely to keep playing the ruling class’ games. Rather than divulging intimate feelings, or probing past events with serrated humor, her preferred strategy is to let pointed mantras accumulate weight and then dissolve through repetition. Across the last three or so minutes of the grungy “Blonde,” the only statement she provides is one of resignation: “I have nothing to say.” It’s offered mildly at first, as if she’s merely shrugging off a speaking role in a class presentation. But after a 40-plus-second instrumental break—during which crashing drums and guitars meet funky, computerized flourishes—it returns again with heightening anguish. By the very end, pitch-shifted to a sludgy crawl, her wail has completely deflated.
This trailing outro—which could be abridged slightly—parallels the pile-up of slowly disintegrating “nobody”s at the end of Mitski’s “Nobody.” Each persisting “no”—no-body, no-thing—is a cruel diminishment, returning again and again to batter its subject into oblivion. Sohn shares the older indie rocker’s steely poise and inwardness; their similarities show clearly on the existential “Don’t Wander,” where the arrangement skips forward with synthetic burbles and light clacks, but it’s Sohn’s searching, echoing voice that guides the song forward: “Reaching out for my own hand,” she sings tentatively, as if trying to make out shapes in fog. Sohn’s other obvious forebear is St. Vincent, whose influence can be found in the EP’s wiry guitar work and leaping, choral-like melodies. Sohn, like St. Vincent, refuses to pack her songs into tidy, predictable shapes, instead allowing them to sprawl and rip.
The guitar-based arrangements on Impostor are Sohn’s bolder friend, roughening up her observations, imbuing them with gravity. “Dark Side of the Party” is her early-twenties social-anxiety anthem, in which she side-eyes sparkling water and struggles to get wasted. The opening is blustery and swirly, like you’re watching, dazed, as light scatters from sequins onto the floor. Stabs of electric guitar counterbalance somewhat saccharine confessions—“I can’t tell hearts from spare parts,” she cries—and the big, explosive comedown at the chorus perfectly mirrors the chaos of being shoved around. Even better is Impostor’s thrashing, magnetic title track, on which Sohn confronts her fear of fraudulence most directly, speaking as if her thoughts are racing on stage: “They’re clapping awfully loud/For no tribulations or trials.” Like “Blonde,” “Impostor” cools down at the billowing outro, all atmospheric glitter and gentle guitar strums. “Let ’em smile,” she murmurs, before pivoting to a bolder claim: “Let me smile.” Despite her fears, Sohn is not a fraud impersonating a musician—just a musician, finally grasping what it is she has to say.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | February 9, 2021 | 7 | e988d679-1896-45eb-b9b7-e1b9c7eb12d6 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
On his latest solo collection, the Hold Steady frontman summons vast emotions from different points along the way to rock bottom. | On his latest solo collection, the Hold Steady frontman summons vast emotions from different points along the way to rock bottom. | Craig Finn: A Legacy of Rentals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/craig-finn-a-legacy-of-rentals/ | A Legacy of Rentals | Jimmy Webb was taking a solitary drive when he came up with the idea for “Wichita Lineman,” one of the loneliest, most romantic songs in the history of pop music. As the young songwriter watched endless phone lines passing along the highway, he noticed a lone figure working among them and considered what might be going through his head, way up among the clouds. “Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that,” Webb reflected decades later. “We all have this capacity for these huge feelings.”
Craig Finn seems to reach a similar conclusion wherever he goes—and he goes to some pretty depressing places. On his latest solo album, A Legacy of Rentals, the 50-year-old songwriter summons vast emotions from different points along the way to rock bottom. In “A Break From the Barrage,” our protagonist is passed out drunk and alone at a superhero matinee in a movie theater at a suburban mall. In “The Year We Fell Behind,” a couple is despondent and overmedicated in their neglected home, where the air grows thick with houseflies and unspoken resentment. In the closing song, the narrator stands among the wreckage after a wild party and surveys the destruction: “This is what it looks like when we’re joyful,” he reminds himself.
Taking inspiration from songs like “Wichita Lineman,” Finn worked with producer Josh Kaufman to coat the music in a sweet, sentimental glow that adds a layer of longing and wonder to his solitary stories. It is his first release to prominently feature strings—a 14-piece orchestra arranged by Trey Pollard at Richmond, Virginia’s Spacebomb studio. And although they have worked together in the past, Cassandra Jenkins’ presence feels newly crucial to the push-and-pull of these narratives. In elaborate story-songs like “Messing With the Settings” and “A Break From the Barrage,” she adds bursts of melody between the desperate spirals of Finn’s spoken-word delivery; on a more traditional ballad like “The Year We Fell Behind,” their voices fall into a kind of round, reaching a climax in the closing 90 seconds that feels uniquely beautiful within his catalog.
Granted, the word “beautiful” means something different in these songs than any of Finn’s past records. With his most recognizable project, the Hold Steady, acoustic instruments and tender subject matter often appeared like intermissions—a moment to catch your breath, to briefly let in the light to see what these characters were blocking out with their reckless behavior and emotional grandeur. A Legacy of Rentals follows what Finn has called a trilogy of solo records—2015’s Faith in the Future, 2017’s We All Want the Same Things, and 2019’s I Need a New War—and it feels like a fresh start, building from those albums’ increasingly adventurous sound and their turn toward unglamorous, real-life characters.
The writing remains the main attraction in Finn’s work, and both as a storyteller and a rock songwriter, he has never sounded more in control. From the beginning, he had a gift for meticulous, vivid world-building, and his wordplay has gotten tighter as his subjects have come down to earth: “He dreams of sweeping vistas/And machines that sweep the streets,” goes a line in “Curtis & Shepard,” which tells us everything we need to know about the central character’s suffocating lifestyle. Riding a groovy bassline and drum loop that finds the middle ground between “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Streets of Philadelphia,” the density of his rhymes builds with the music, bringing us into the character’s mind as opposed to merely narrating the view.
In a 2021 interview, about a year after lockdown first started, Finn discussed the way it had impacted his songwriting, which for so long was based on traveling and meeting people—hearing their stories, leaving his comfort zone, following conversations to surprising ends. In a press release for the album, he notes that his partner is a hospital nurse, and in the early stages of the pandemic, he was advised to live separately from her to avoid contamination. Coupled with the deaths of several close friends during this time, the circumstances led to an uncommonly dark collection in his body of work, which often strives for hope, celebration, and community. These days, he’s more likely just to shut the blinds and go back to bed: “When the devil starts to show up in your dreams/Then it’s hard to get your dreams back,” he observes sadly in “The Amarillo Kid.”
And yet, “The Amarillo Kid” is one of the most upbeat songs here, with the kind of hummable, singalong chorus that Finn usually reserves for the Hold Steady. The same way his writing is dense with layers and allusions—note each use of the term “fish tank,” and the perspective from which each character observes it—the music often complicates his message, creating a new source of tension. I keep returning to those closing moments of “The Year We Fell Behind,” where Finn and Jenkins’ voices build to a haunted call-and-response. “The devil makes his money on the small moves,” she sings. “All at once has never been his style.” In the background, the strings crescendo toward a happy ending but the chords never resolve for too long, creating the effect of a never-ending stairwell. On any given listen, you might imagine their voices climbing upward or tumbling down, growing increasingly in sync or drifting apart. Finn knows the truth is always somewhere in between. | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers | May 24, 2022 | 8 | e98aa702-4a24-4d54-8729-054d2dd97afb | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
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 Teedra Moses’ silken debut, a cult classic of 2000s 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 Teedra Moses’ silken debut, a cult classic of 2000s R&B. | Teedra Moses: *Complex Simplicity * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teedra-moses-complex-simplicity/ | Complex Simplicity | The mid-2000s were an explosive era for women in R&B. The decade of shiny-suit rap had elevated hook queens to star status, while the maturing neo-soul movement was becoming more playful and varied. The energy of a new millennium had inspired a more direct approach, and as the Neptunes began to define pop radio, beats across the board were acquiring a spacy sheen. The R&B mixtape circuit was thriving like never before, with DJs and labels alike aware that even crooned ballads had to pop with the streets first. New sounds seemed to evolve across every subgenre, no matter if the artist was established or emerging. There were big, shiny soul statements (Beyoncé, Amerie, Nicole Wray), songwriting innovators rooted in tradition (Keyshia Cole, Brandy), a whole crop of Mary J. Blige-informed mixtape one-offs (Deemi was my favorite), and of course Mary J. Blige herself. The pop-R&B spectrum was particularly fruitful, defined by an experimental, gossamer production aesthetic that gestured towards the synth smoothness of the early ’80s, glossed up by technological advances in production.
The clear citadel of this shift was Mariah Carey’s 2005 masterpiece The Emancipation of Mimi—a suite of songs whose high-shine production elevated the glittering effervescence of Carey’s harmonic range and triple-time cadences. It arrived just after Kelis dropped the gleaming Tasty, and just before The-Dream came along and blasted radio playlists with candy paint. But the influential, somewhat obscure indie-label predecessor to all of this was Complex Simplicity, the full-length debut from the lithe-sounding singer and songwriter Teedra Moses, a low-key powerhouse from New Orleans. Released a year before Emancipation, Moses’ album exemplified a sea change, and continues to enjoy cult classic status among R&B obsessives and fellow musicians alike.
Moses had spent years writing the songs that would become Complex Simplicity, but by the time it dropped, she and her producer collaborator, Paul Poli, were already influencing the charts with other artists. Working alongside a young vocal arranger named Shaffer Smith, who would eventually be better known as Ne-Yo, the duo had co-written “Still in Love,” the opening track on Nivea’s 2001 debut, as well as the sensual, charango-sampling “Dip It Low” for Christina Milian. (In a neat example of 2000s messiness and the insularity of the music industry, both Nivea and Milian would later marry, then divorce, The-Dream.) “Dip It Low,” a nasty midtempo dance single that practically body-rolled its way onto the charts, remains Milian’s biggest hit and one of the marquee tracks in a mid-2000s crop of airy, dancefloor-focused singles by burgeoning pop starlets like Ciara, Cassie, Teairra Marí, and Nina Sky that borrowed chutzpah from hip-hop and crunk. These women were starting to break out of the familiar R&B rubric of love and heartbreak, proving their relative youth wasn’t a hindrance to demanding what they wanted, and getting it.
But Moses was 27, writing all her own music, embarking on her second career—she had abandoned a path as a fashion stylist after breaking her leg on the job—and already a mother to twin sons with the rapper Ras Kass. The confidence endemic to a little life experience broke through in her songwriting, and though she wrote evocatively about matters of the heart, there was a depth of soul and resonance within her easy, airy soprano. On “You’ll Never Find (A Better Woman),” which sweetened a majestic boom bap and a verse by Jadakiss, she made plain the painful nuances of an on-again/off-again relationship (a “ghetto love affair”), its chorus as much an admonishment to her man as a reassurance to herself. The vocal arrangements formed simple poetic stanzas, an ode to her inner conflict:
You’ll never find
A better woman
Or a bigger fool
[Tell me what you know about breaking up and getting back together]
You’ll never find
A better woman
Or a bigger fool
[Tell me what you know about love]
The track worked on radio at the time, or at least it did on New York’s then-legendary Hot 97, in part because of Jadakiss’ ubiquity, but also because the songwriting was both of the moment and timeless. Though Moses grew up with a gospel singer mother who tried to keep her away from most secular music, she matches vocal runs and vibes with ’80s soul, and felt indebted to Aaliyah: “I didn’t really want to come in and change nothing,” she told Vibe in 2019. “I just wanted to make an album that sounded like ‘Rock the Boat.’” The slinky sensuality of that classic is stamped all over Complex Simplicity, whether on a molasses-tempoed entreaty to love (“Be Your Girl,” which she later admitted was about her fantasy crush on Nas), a sultry song about sticking in a difficult coupling solely because of her man’s stroke game (“Backstroke,” though the track is hardly about being dickmatized), or just grappling with age-old existential questions of legacy and the afterlife (the stunning, melancholy “Last Day”). Even “Take Me,” a Raphael Saadiq-featuring love jam that showcases his signature classic-soul pocket, mirrors the mahogany rollick of an Aaliyah B-side, with Moses chirping out the chorus in a nostalgic fever dream. She practically cascades: “Take me/Back to the day/When you made me fall.”
While each track is silken and polished, Complex Simplicity remains totally approachable, Moses’ diaristic lyrics arranged as if the phrasing pauses are exactly where she turned the page in her notebook. On “Caution,” which she credits Ne-Yo for helping spiff up, she slips into a Cherrelle-style groove and vamps around her own irresistibility: “I don’t think you realize/That you/You don’t even have a chance/When I spit my G at you I bet you won’t know how to act.” And the tense crunk track “You Better Tell Her” details her reaction when that attraction goes south with infidelity: “Listen daddy, I’m too cute to fight/You better get that bitch told tonight.”
Lil Jon produced the latter track with a minimalist, dirty-South crunch, and the crunk godfather’s presence might paradoxically explain why Complex Simplicity followed the trajectory of a cult classic. At the time, New York-based record label TVT was acting as a clearinghouse for the crunk explosion and Southern rap stars in general, releasing hit records by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz and the Ying Yang Twins, as well as albums by Yo Gotti, Jacki-O, and Pitbull’s entire pre-megaclub discography. (Pitbull and Lil Scrappy appear on a remix of “You Better Tell Her.”) While their crunk stable was solid, they weren’t known so much for R&B, a genre with a reputation for difficulty in breaking new talent—women artists, for one, cost labels more money in the form of styling and glam that men weren’t expected to maintain.
Compared to its major-label counterparts, TVT’s promotional abilities were necessarily limited. Moses dropped just one Hype Williams-directed video, for “Be Your Girl,” and opened on a small, Seagram’s-sponsored tour with CeeLo and Tweet before TVT went bankrupt, having lost a fight over Pitbull’s back catalog. Still, Complex Simplicity has reverberated through the years and its impact remains widely felt: Kaytranada’s 2018 take on “Be Your Girl” helped establish the producer as a maestro of the R&B club remix, and a wide range of singers like Katy B and Ari Lennox have cited Moses as an influence. (In January, SZA called Complex Simplicity a “flawless fuckin masterpiece.”)
Yet as Moses has evolved—three albums and several mixtapes in, she continues touring and releasing fantastic singles—it seems like Complex Simplicity’s cult status worked out the way it was supposed to. Moses sees the record almost like a personal blueprint: She told Vibe that in 2004 she had been a “little broken girl singing those songs, acting so tough,” and has now grown into the “confident woman that people thought they were listening to.” In retrospect, the album feels characteristic of a young woman just beginning to understand her own complexities and grasping to come into her own—a lilt of trepidation, perhaps, when asserting her man will “never find a better woman,” where one might expect a growl—but at 27, who isn’t? The certainty in her melodies and musicianship was always unwavering. The emotional resonance still hits. The timelessness is why it remains one of the best albums in R&B. | 2023-02-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | TVT | February 12, 2023 | 8 | e98fe54f-f90d-406e-90df-60509a32263f | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
To celebrate the cult classic’s 50th anniversary, a new collection of Cat Stevens’ music for the film—including songs later covered by Elliott Smith and others—finally becomes widely available. | To celebrate the cult classic’s 50th anniversary, a new collection of Cat Stevens’ music for the film—including songs later covered by Elliott Smith and others—finally becomes widely available. | Yusuf / Cat Stevens: Harold and Maude (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yusuf-cat-stevens-harold-and-maude-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Harold and Maude (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Hal Ashby’s 1971 film Harold and Maude initially flopped because its ideal audience was just being born. The script by Colin Higgins, who would later write and direct movies including Foul Play and 9 to 5, told the story of the relationship between depressed and suicide-obsessed 19-year-old Harold, played by Bud Cort, and the cheerful 79-year-old Maude, played by Ruth Gordon. Harold and Maude poked fun at those living the straight life and made pointed critiques at the military and the status obsessions of the privileged. One set piece laid out the ethical imperative of ecology and another suggested that sexual expression was a path to freedom and understanding. On paper, it seemed like exactly the kind of film the counterculture would embrace.
The timing was off, though, and the film tanked, both commercially and critically. Harold and Maude struck critics as cloying and audiences went elsewhere. But it built a cult following in second-run houses through the 1970s and reached a new audience a few years later, when the children of those who rejected it upon release found the film’s VHS box on the wire shelving of their local video rental shops. This younger cohort was just the right age to discover the movie—early to mid teens, when one experiences the first flush of existential angst and, perhaps, mixes excitement about the wonders of the world, like Maude, with moments of self-doubt and despair, like Harold. Watch it now, and you may notice that Harold and Maude looks like an indie flick from the 1980s or ’90s. An era of filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, Mike Mills, and Paul Thomas Anderson, found Ashby’s film seeping into their own work.
The surprising thing about the film’s soundtrack is that it didn’t exist until 2007. In the movie, the songs by Cat Stevens serve as a kind of Greek chorus, reflecting Harold’s spiritual development and the evolution of their relationship from friendship to romance. (Stevens, born Steven Georgiou, converted to Islam in 1978 and took the name Yusuf, but it’s his stage name that appears on this record’s cover.) The music is so integral to the story it would have been easy to assume that a soundtrack had existed all along.
But Stevens was hitting a peak in popularity when Ashby approached him about using his songs, and he worried that the soundtrack, which compiled material from the two records he released in 1970, Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman, might confuse his audience. So no official soundtrack album was issued until 2007, when Cameron Crowe assembled a limited reissue on his Vinyl Films label. Now, a different assemblage put together for the film’s 50th anniversary finally makes it widely available.
To listen to Cat Stevens is to figure out where you stand on music whose earnestness tips over into naïveté. If you love his work, you almost certainly need to have gone through a time as a young person where you obsess about what life means and what makes it worth living—to “take the world apart and figure out how it works,” as Doug Martsch put it in Built to Spill’s “Car.” And it probably helps if that surge of curiosity about exploration was accompanied by at least a little joy. And—this is crucial—you would need the capacity to look back on this heady period and feel some love and empathy for the person who dreamed those dreams. If all that comes together, you may find much to admire in this collection, which frames a world where love is better than a song, the answer lies within, you think you’ve seen the light, there’s a million things to be, and Lord, though your body has been a good friend, you won’t need it when you reach the end.
Two of these songs were sketched out before Harold and Maude but completed once Ashby had enlisted Stevens for the soundtrack, and both are inseparable from the film. “Don’t Be Shy,” just a fragment when Stevens was first contacted by Ashby, is a plea to tell the world who you are and what you need; it features a beautifully delicate piano part that sounds like raindrops. “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out” is its companion, and Ashby thought so much of it he made recurring use of it in the film and allowed his characters to sing it on screen.
The rest of Stevens’ songs were recorded before Harold and Maude and placed on his albums, yet they, too, now belong to the film’s world. Where these pieces are mostly about human connection, “Miles From Nowhere” and “On the Road to Find Out” suggest that the search for meaning is a journey ultimately taken alone. “Where Do the Children Play?”is a song about how technology distracts us from the things that really matter. It sounds absurd when you remember it was written over 50 years ago, but the simple beauty of the melody convinces you that Stevens may have had a point. And then there’s “Trouble,” initially a deep cut from Mona Bone Jakon, which after its use in Harold and Maude became a kind of alt-folk standard.
The soundtrack works as an album because it distills the most important aspects of Stevens’ songwriting to its essence. That it contains fragments of dialogue and incidental music from the film only adds to its appeal. Once you’ve seen the movie a few times, you can’t hear these songs without remembering the scenes in which they played, like when Maude asks Harold what kind of flower he wishes to be: He chooses the daisy because “they’re all alike” and she reminds him that each of them is unique as the opening strums of “Where Do the Children Play?” enter. The added sound from the film means the LP functions a bit like one of those pre-video ’70s LPs that allowed you to “own” a version of a movie in audio form.
Stevens was an enormous star during the ascendant singer-songwriter era of the early ’70s, but his decades away from the public eye put him in an unusual position. For a long time, you’d be most likely to encounter his work on an adult contemporary radio station or in the used record bins. But the more his music was identified with Ashby’s film, the more it became a body of work worthy of rediscovery.
In the movie, “Trouble” is heard near the end, after Harold’s world has been shattered. It was always a great song, but its use in the film gave it an extra layer of resonance. In the ’90s, two artists of the generation that rediscovered Harold and Maude heard something special in “Trouble.” Elliott Smith’s cover landed on the soundtrack to Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker, and Kristin Hersh’s spellbinding take landed on her 2001 album Sunny Border Blue. You can hear in those versions what the movie and Stevens’ music—they exist as one, really—meant to those who found it later, when they needed to hear gently earnest music about fundamental human emotions.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | A&M / Cat-O-Log / UMe | February 17, 2022 | 8.4 | e991290c-ab8f-40ba-8dde-02c888bb74b9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
As he makes a long-awaited return to music, Bobby Shmurda’s irrepressible charisma comes up against foggy raps and some sloppy production choices. | As he makes a long-awaited return to music, Bobby Shmurda’s irrepressible charisma comes up against foggy raps and some sloppy production choices. | Bobby Shmurda: BodBoy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bobby-shmurda-bodboy-ep/ | BodBoy EP | In 2014, amid a New York rap landscape increasingly devoid of mythological stories, Bobby Shmurda felt like the last of a dying breed. Though his ascension took place on the now-defunct platform Vine, Shmurda and his GS9 compatriots displayed a magnetism that could have extended past 15 minutes. The meme-ification of his signature song “Hot Nigga” (which peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100) collided with his boisterous, bass-knocking performances on “Bobby Bitch” and Rowdy Rebel’s “Computers,” forming the summer of Shmurda. But that December, in the process of recording a formal debut, Shmurda was arrested and eventually sentenced to seven years in prison, cutting off his meteoric rise and freezing the progression of his artistry in its infancy.
The legend of Shmurda, who won acceptance from the city’s youth and old guard without pandering to either crowd, maintained his candidacy for the “King of New York” crown regardless. Without an album, his fledgling career was bolstered only by charisma and cockiness. But each track seemed to have an innate spark that made you feel as though you were witness to a bright new star. There was nothing revolutionary—just an overflowing personality laced with beats with all the bells and whistles. The new BodBoy EP, Shmurda’s first independent project since his release from prison in February 2021 and a preview of his promised debut Ready to Live, attempts more of the same. But it registers as little more than a rehashing of his previous peak, with a laundry list of boasts and threats that fail to capture the feeling from days of yore.
On paper, Shmurda follows a foolproof plan: Stick to what you know. But recreating prior success requires precise execution, and Bodboy’s sloppiness illuminates faults obscured in the fervor of 2014. “Hoochie Daddy,” a mad grab at TikTok virality with sped-up background vocals and bastardized Jersey club production, is a wholly insulting listen. “From the Slums,” with its crashing piano crescendo and pounding bass, feels ripped from a 2010s mixtape playing through a dirty earbud in Times Square. Shmurda runs tirelessly along the production’s rapid pace, interjecting breathy ad-libs that cloud his raps rather than shining through. Lines mush together, making stream-of-consciousness bars sound like your friend freestyling at the afters at 2 a.m. You don’t come to a Bobby Shmurda song for depth and capital L lyricism, but even if you can comprehend his bars, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cache of memorable phrases. His willingness to say whatever comes to mind produces some funny moments (“’Cause I was shooting in my slippers in the middle of the street,” he spits on “BodMon”), but the aimless rambles get old quick.
Yet there are joyful instances when Shmurda’s slapstick absurdity intersects with production forays into new regional territory. He treats the blaring production of “Glock Inside,” which sounds almost as if it were ripped from a Duke Deuce project, as his personal playground. The first thing we hear him say—“Jumped out my momma pussy straight into the trap”—is undeniably hilarious. His childish teasing comes off as endearing, and his one-liners shoot an acceptable percentage from the field. The hook of “Whole Brick” is a beacon that sounds like it should play every time he enters a room: When he shouts “I’m about to cop a whole brick!” alongside a legion of background voices, it feels like the celebration that his return to music ought to be. | 2022-08-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | GS9 / OneRPM | August 5, 2022 | 5.7 | e9946896-e27d-4075-8bec-6befd1a79f0f | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
The Philly rapper examines growth and longing with a mature assuredness, imbuing her latest album with moments of modest warmth. | The Philly rapper examines growth and longing with a mature assuredness, imbuing her latest album with moments of modest warmth. | Ivy Sole : Candid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ivy-sole-candid/ | Candid | Philadelphia vocalist Ivy Sole is a master of the slow burn. Her narratives unfold in the early, indefinite stages of partnership, attuned to the little signals and concessions upon which affection and submission rely. Her restrained ballads form a diametric counterpoint to the rapturous deliverance favored by dream-pop acts such as Now, Now and Carly Rae Jepsen. Where those artists’ songs alight upon a transcendent, in-the-moment urgency, Sole dwells in the languid aftermath, asking: Now what?
“See, a fault is a beginning, and a fault is an end/We could talk eroding patience, or give lips to the wind,” she raps on “Nights Like This,” a pensive confessional from her latest album Candid. While the new record shares a spare sensibility with its predecessor, 2020’s cerebral SOUTHPAW EP, its wistful instrumentals and easy transitions make for a brighter listen. On “Bamboo,” synthetic drums and muted horns are layered with a light electro-funk touch; the yearning “One More Night” is punctuated with soaring Jodeci-style harmonies. On downtempo tracks, Sole volleys between full-bodied melodies and conversational rapping. Even when she’s at her most laidback, the discursive bridges and interludes recall the winding arrangements of neo-soul maximalists like Res and Rahsaan Patterson.
The diaristic quality is curious given Candid’s lack of linear arcs. Consistent with Sole’s earlier work, the album’s digressions explore overarching themes of love and self-discovery. For all their placid ambiance, the reflections on faith and desire aren’t uncomplicated. An Ivy Leaguer raised in a Southern Christian tradition, Sole identifies as queer and non-binary; infatuation often leaves a trail of unanswered questions in its wake. “Dangerous” addresses an unrequited crush: “And if it sounds like worship, worst case, I’m a sinner/Seeking redemption in the haze of your glimmer.” Much of the album is relayed in the second person, and duets with Kingsley Ibeneche, Bathe, and Topaz Jones add dimension to missed connections, trains passing in the proverbial night.
The program is briefly suspended on Candid’s more hard-nosed rap tracks. On the double-time showcase “Chico,” Sole’s punchlines arrive with a battle rhymer’s sleight-of-hand; the Lil Wayne-inspired “Call Me” feels like a meta-exercise in mixtape acrobatics. Her wordy incantations straddle disparate traditions, but the polymath approach isn’t overly busy or scattered. While her sound complements second-wave neo-soul acts like Mereba and Yaya Bey, the compositions also resemble Oakland singer Mystic’s 2001 debut Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom, an eerily introspective record that balanced gospel-tinged melodies with steely rap verses. Throughout Candid, Sole examines growth and longing with an adult’s assuredness, imbuing disconsolate moments with a modest warmth. “Me and the truth, see, we’ve been closing the distance/You might hear yours, too, if you listen,” she sings on “Bamboo.” It’s music to sit with, content to let the action occur offscreen. | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Les Fleurs | February 8, 2022 | 7.5 | e9a7bce4-ce64-429e-b6e2-e7c853ff70bb | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
What Balearic revivalism does is create a single "genre" that can portray a whole host of different types of music in their best light, and here, Studio-- one of the best purveyors of nu-Balearic-- does the trick to tracks by Kylie Minogue, Love Is All, A Mountain of One, and Shout Out Louds, among others. | What Balearic revivalism does is create a single "genre" that can portray a whole host of different types of music in their best light, and here, Studio-- one of the best purveyors of nu-Balearic-- does the trick to tracks by Kylie Minogue, Love Is All, A Mountain of One, and Shout Out Louds, among others. | Studio: Yearbook 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11923-yearbook-2/ | Yearbook 2 | I'd played Studio's remix of Kylie Minogue's "2 Hearts" to a friend, promising with an evangelist's zeal that her mind would be blown. "It sounds like the Gipsy Kings," she replied in a neutral tone. It wasn't a complaint, but nor was it a compliment; perhaps she was simply commenting on the remarkable fact that someone would want to make a Kylie song sound like the Gipsy Kings, or the even more remarkable fact that Kylie herself would propagate the result. A few months later, over at her house with some friends, the familiar sound of Kylie's vocals and Studio's ringing guitars emerged in the background. The moment passed without comment, but I felt a small, irrational surge of satisfaction: somehow even "it sounds like the Gipsy Kings" had become a selling point.
Before people start rushing towards or away from this release on the assumption that they'll find a "Bamboleo" or two, I suspect "the Gipsy Kings" was shorthand for "lashings of Spanish guitar." But the style of the observation, rather than the content, is what matters: There's something about Studio that compels people to repeat this gesture, emphasizing the purposeless perversity of whatever sonic lineage they identify-- just replace "the Gipsy Kings" with "Sting" or "World Party," or whatever you like. It's not a surprising response: The most widespread and painfully boring critical line on "nu-Balearic" music is that its primary function is to render previously intolerable music tolerable-to-hipsters, redeeming Elton John or Paul Simon via the canny addition of a disco beat and some dub echo. This take isn't wrong, exactly, but it's the kind of sociological analysis that makes you hate the world a little bit more after reading it, rather like earnest discussions of how to woo soccer moms for votes. That, plus pretty much anyone who tries to take a position of knowing "I see through this" superiority towards hipsters is at first glance being hypocritical.
The kernel of truth here is this: What Balearic revivalism does is create a single "genre" that can portray a whole host of different types of music in their best light, giving a sense of second-order purpose to music whose functional purpose wasn't entirely clear previously. Perhaps it was too slow, too elaborate, either too songful or not songful enough, too cheesy or perhaps too self-important. Studio rate highly on all of these fronts: Too enraptured with grooves to be a proper rock band, but too attached to morose rock grandstanding not to be; too torpid and dreamy to be a proper dance outfit, but too in love with dancing to be anything else. More subtly, the Swedish duo's music verges on cheesy at the precise moments that it appears self-important (although it's a truism that these are frequently two sides of the same coin). Studio's self-importance is discomforting because it's never clear whether their reach exceeds the grasp or, rather, the act of reaching just a little too far is the entire point of their music. Half the thrills come from watching just how effectively they can deploy bombast.
Following on from Yearbook 1, a collection of their own songs, this second installment offers an abrupt left-hand turn by focusing on Studio's facility as remixers for others, and it's surprising to discover just how easily the Studio sound can be grafted onto the work of others with surprising versatility. Without their own despairing vocals, Studio sound less like the Cure listening to Fela Kuti on a beach in Ibiza, and rather closer to the emergent nu-Balearic norm of heavy, languorous disco grooves-- the 4x4 kick drum is surprisingly dominant, although not unwelcome. What distinguishes Studio's work from their peers, beyond their ever-present fetish for cascading sprays of iridescent guitar, is their prickly restlessness: Most of the inclusions here resist the temptation to coast on a strong groove, instead continually morphing through a kaleidoscopic succession of interlaced motifs like a Mandelbrot set.
Yearbook 2 alternates between one-offs (like the gentle summertime pop of their remake of the Shout Out Louds' "Impossible"-- the most conservative cut here) and a sort of staple Studio remix sound: mysterious, almost dark disco grooves populated by glistening synthesizers and glittering shards of the duo's trademark guitar. The quietly ominous epic treatment of A Mountain of One's "Brown Piano" and the broiling, dramatic take on Williams' "Love on a Real Train"-- they could almost be movements in a single piece-- win the day for the latter group, if only because their glowing eddies and curlicues of sound offer the most ostentatious display of the duo's strengths. As remixers, Studio are at their best when most tantric, when their grooves submit to the effervescent fluidity summed up in the title (and, vaguely, the sound) of Can's album Flow Motion, sliding inexorably forward from detail to detail on an endless plateau of simmering intensity.
Such is Studio's studio wizardry that it's easy to forget that they're also a rock band, especially when they're crafting such delicate, delectable avant-disco remixes. But it's the absence of Studio-as-themselves which ultimately makes Yearbook 2 a less captivating experience than its predecessor. On a track-by-track basis, this is as much a bonus as a drawback: Freed from the distractions of having to concoct songs, the duo can concentrate on eking out every drop of prettiness from their grooves, and there's a satisfying sense of aesthetic purity to the formal loveliness of much of their work here. But taken as an album, Yearbook 2 can seem emotionally flattened out when compared to its predecessor; there's nothing as gloriously wallowing as "West Side" or as unabashedly emotional as "Out There".
The one tune to transcend this dilemma entirely is the remix of "2 Hearts", perhaps because Studio have simply replaced one exaggerated song blueprint (moping pseudo-goth British indie rock) with another (ecstatic femme-pop). In fact, Studio's version ends up a better song than the source material, its relative spareness allowing Kylie's performance to shine with an intensity that is undetectable in the original's over-cluttered glam homage. Submerged in Studio's glittering guitar spiderwebs, supremely supine disco beats and endless layers of dub echo, Kylie's vocals are genuinely moving. All the glam ambiguity of the original is sensitively excised from this version: The song's deadpan sarcasm had no place amongst Studio's endless horizons of lovestruck earnestness. More than any other tracks here, "2 Hearts" successfully makes the argument for Studio as an in-house band for other pop outfits: a deadly-serious Scandinavian Sly & Robbie, if you will. Hopefully the duo won't be forced to make the choice between backroom boys and rock gods any time soon: More than just about anyone else they deserve to have their cake and eat it too. | 2008-06-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-06-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Information | June 24, 2008 | 7.8 | e9b6105a-9b60-471a-beca-4ae9fb8ed28a | Tyler Grisham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tyler-grisham/ | null |
The London art-rockers’ outstanding debut is a droll album full of surreal images, bizarre obsessions, and sense memories. The cumulative effect of Florence Shaw’s narration is inexplicably wonderful. | The London art-rockers’ outstanding debut is a droll album full of surreal images, bizarre obsessions, and sense memories. The cumulative effect of Florence Shaw’s narration is inexplicably wonderful. | Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dry-cleaning-new-long-leg/ | New Long Leg | In the video for “Scratchcard Lanyard,” Dry Cleaning vocalist Florence Shaw is a floating head in the world’s smallest dive bar. Her face takes up the whole stage, a perch from which she eyes the tiny puppet DJ and the tiny puppet bartender with mild disgust and confusion. She delivers a dry monologue in a wan, extremely British tone, subtly arching her eyebrows for emphasis. The whole affair carries an air of suspicion, with the slightest hint of deer in the headlights. The shot zooms out, and there’s the full band playing animatedly beside her; zoom in again, and it’s the Flo show. It’s a clever video, one that nods to the isolation of the pandemic, the media’s tendency to focus on the girl in the band, and of course, Shaw’s restrained performance style. “Do everything and feel nothing,” she intones, barely moving.
How does someone so static become the lead singer of a noisy rock band? The better question is, how do you deny the strange, funny charisma of someone like Florence Shaw? Just hearing her thoughts, expressed in the tone of a slightly sardonic narrator, was enough for her former art school friend Tom Dowse to suggest she join his new band back in 2017. Shaw, a visual artist more than a musician, was hesitant, but she was assured she could just talk instead of sing. Largely through the specificity of her affect and observations on the world, the band’s debut album arrives fully formed, ready to evacuate the contents of your brain and replace them with the odd images, bizarre obsessions, vivid sense memories, and banal judgements that live rent-free in the mind of another.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum of break-ups, a dentist with a messy back garden, a cab driver sucking on Pop Rocks, llama plushies in a shop, a big jar of mayonnaise in the back of the fridge, a critique of format changes to Antiques Roadshow, a Tokyo bouncy ball, an Oslo bouncy ball, a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball—these are all things you will encounter while navigating the world of New Long Leg. You could throw a competition for Shaw’s best non-sequiturs, food category (the winner: “I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours,” from “Strong Feelings”). The cumulative effect of these lines is surreally welcoming, especially when interspersed with dramatically phrased maxims like, “Never talk about your ex, never never never never, never slag them off because then they know.”
Compared to Dry Cleaning’s scrappier EPs, 2019’s Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, the album’s production and mix are exquisitely calibrated for maximum effect. Helmed by John Parish, who’s produced everyone from PJ Harvey to Aldous Harding, New Long Leg is like a striking black and white photograph with the contrast turned up. Guitarist Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton have always worked as a strong foil to Shaw—moody riffs and sludgy bass on loop, the steady pulse and flash of chaos to her disarming apathy—but in this picture the vocalist now appears even sharper.
The band, in turn, sounds more adventurous—darker and dubbier at times, but also fizzy with touches of indie-pop synths and guitar jangle. When Dry Cleaning first surfaced, they were variously described as post-punk in the vein of Magazine, Wire, and the Fall. Haters left YouTube comments calling them a Sonic Youth rip-off. A broad notion of “London post-punk having a moment” started to take hold among outsiders, lumping the band in with the freakier, more freeform likes of black midi and Black Country, New Road. On New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning emerge as a Rorschach test for listeners’ guitar revivalism of choice. There are echoes of Black Sabbath, the Smiths, the Strokes, even Wilco on the closest thing to a ballad, “More Big Birds.” But it amounts to something tougher and more original than merely the sum of classically cool influences—a sound that activates Shaw’s disparate imagery, making the setting seem more dangerous.
The phrase “emo dead stuff collector,” from “Strong Feelings,” could define Shaw’s songwriting approach—a personal archive of online comments, eavesdropped conversations, writing exercises, and her own reflections—but her lyrics aren’t just random clusters of phrases. She operates in media res, dropping you in on an unknown character, flipping the perspective or dreaming herself into a new headspace mid-song, decontextualizing and recontextualizing everything she uses. Take “Scratchcard Lanyard,” told from the perspective of a mother on the edge, a premise that is not necessarily intuitive but indelibly expressed nonetheless. “I think of myself as a hardy banana with that waxy surface and the small delicate flowers/A woman in aviators firing a bazooka,” Shaw coolly declares, like a woman in aviators firing a bazooka should.
Still, some of the more inscrutable moments are the funniest and most beguiling. I keep thinking of the second verse in the title track, where Shaw is asking questions about doing laundry on a ship, and she cheekily blurts out a joke she realizes is dumb the minute it escapes her lips: “Are there some kind of reverse platforms, shoes that make you go into the ground more, make you reach a lower level?” What are the possible circumstances? Has she won a free trip on a luxury ocean liner? How would reverse platform shoes even work? And what is a record that sparks these kinds of absurd questions even trying to say? Is it secret code?
By Shaw’s estimation, the lyrics and their juxtapositions are an attempt to express her worldview. The cut-up technique of the Beat Generation (and maybe a dash of Kid A-era Thom Yorke) is reimagined for the logged-on and attention-addled, those less interested in codifying their confessions than finding clarity amid cultural debris. On headphones, there’s something almost ASMR-like about it, and not strictly in the textural way of recent pop production: Shaw is right in your ear, not with a flummoxing sound clip but a picture you’ve never seen—the photographer looking at the literal junk in the margins, rather than the hero at the center, and locating a deeper truth. Unlike the distant cool of Kim Gordon’s songs with Sonic Youth, Shaw appears intimate and almost mystical, like she’s guiding a meditation class through the detritus of the mind.
The act of pressing the listener to connect the contextual dots from a random hippo to oven chips to a song called “John Wick” that has little to do with John Wick—even if there’s no right answer at all—is a rare kind of musical storytelling. And it’s one that actually benefits from the fact that Shaw doesn’t sing. After a year stuck in our own houses and brains, the comfort of a record like New Long Leg is in its challenging sense of escape. Half the time I have no idea what she’s even talking about, but that only makes me want to move closer to it.
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. | 2021-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 2, 2021 | 8.6 | e9bf4209-b9f6-4c56-8d11-33bb51226896 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
The singer’s first album in 15 years casts a fond glance back at the vintage sounds she made her name with, but a few new songs—including a Jack Antonoff production—bring her back to the present day. | The singer’s first album in 15 years casts a fond glance back at the vintage sounds she made her name with, but a few new songs—including a Jack Antonoff production—bring her back to the present day. | Diana Ross: Thank You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diana-ross-thank-you/ | Thank You | Diana Ross’ last studio album would have been no way for a musical icon to bow out. I Love You, released in 2006 to widespread indifference, was a collection of under-heated covers (and one new song) that seemed to have been picked at random out of the romantic songbook—from “Take My Breath Away” to the Beatles’ “I Will”—with little sense of cohesion. It was no wonder that Ross sounded distracted as she made her way through an hour’s worth of plasticky, gift-card soul.
Thank You, Ross’ 25th studio album, may not be up there with her very best work—those immortal Motown singles with the Supremes, her buttery smooth 1970s solo records, or the Chic-assisted disco glory of 1980’s Diana—but, by gracefully revisiting these eras while keeping a sparkling eye on the future, it offers a timely reminder of the vast pop smarts and emotional range that made Ross the diva’s diva. The title has a faint ring of finality; if, God forbid, this should prove to be Ms. Ross’ last studio album, then it would be a fitting tribute to one of the most formidable careers in American musical history.
That may sound alarmist. But it is hard to escape the notion of endings on an album that often feels like a long goodbye, which Ross dedicates to “all of you, the listeners.” When she says, “I love you,” at the end of “Beautiful Love,” her voice tingling with quiet emotion, it feels as if she is bidding adieu to the fans who have followed her since she made her recorded debut with the Supremes in 1960.
Musically, too, Thank You carries a distinct whiff of nostalgia. At times, the abrupt transitions between genres suggest Ross’ life flashing before the listener’s eyes, as she moves from silken soul (“All Is Well”) to slinky show tunes (“Count on Me”), 1990s R&B (“Let's Do It”), and disco (the title track). There’s even a nod to the classic Motown pop stomp in the horns that light up the intro to “Tomorrow.”
These nods to the past glow with the quiet satisfaction of a job well done; they’re era-appropriate and perfectly unchallenging. “All Is Well” blows by in a sugary cloud of funk-lite strings, while “Count on Me” has the warmth of a cup of cocoa at the end of a long day. It helps that Ross is in fantastic voice throughout. She may be slightly bereft of the power that once blew the roof off “Ain't No Mountain High Enough,” but her newly vulnerable tone works wonders, adding pathos to the modern Motown torch song of “Just in Case.” (Although whoever decided to use Auto-Tune on “In Your Heart” really should have a word with their ears.)
The best songs on Thank You are those where Ross stretches her wings. "I Still Believe” and “Tomorrow” show that the Motown veteran is very much at home in the world of electronic music—perhaps no surprise, given her history with disco. “I Still Believe,” produced by Jack Antonoff, starts like a show tune, all stirring piano and soft-lipped brass, before abruptly turning into a disco-house stomper, an electrifying transition that makes you want to climb atop a baby-grand piano, waving your dress shoes in the air. “Tomorrow,” meanwhile, blasts its Motown horns into fantastically odd new orbits, combining a filtered breakbeat with a pounding drum line and serpentine bass, like a bastard pop offshoot of shapeshifting UK pop act Girls Aloud.
Whether Ross continues along these bold new paths is perhaps less important than the fact that she is still creating new paths to follow. On Thank You, Diana Ross’ musical star shines strong after six decades of inspiration, offering signs of renaissance even as she teases tender farewells.
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. | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Decca | November 9, 2021 | 6.2 | e9c897bd-ffc9-4ebb-b928-e6c8797b3b40 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
It struck everyone as a little weird that Sub Pop would be the one to issue Sam Beam's hushed ... | It struck everyone as a little weird that Sub Pop would be the one to issue Sam Beam's hushed ... | Iron & Wine: The Sea and The Rhythm EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4125-the-sea-and-the-rhythm-ep/ | The Sea and The Rhythm EP | It struck everyone as a little weird that Sub Pop would be the one to issue Sam Beam's hushed folk debut. From a distance, Beam's lo-fi compositions sounded like a Harry Smith field recording plucked away by Nick Drake with Crosby, Stills & Nash on backup. But close up it was all about the poetry: concrete, ambiguous, and laced with tender irony. Since Beam compares himself to J.J. Cale, and I'd even compare his lyrical style to Beck's Apollinaire-grade symbolism on Mutations, maybe it's not so weird that he's on Nirvana's label after all.
"I think I work with the visual a lot when I write," the part-time musician and full-time Miami film teacher once said. And The Creek Drank the Cradle was unabashedly concrete, studded with disarming pick-up lines like, "The water's there to warm you/ And the earth is warmer/ When you laugh," and, "Needlework and seedlings/ In the way you're walking." Its songs also sank into little moments still warm with loss-- small enough to get inside you, but general enough to fill you with an after-the-fact numbness recognizable as love. Mothers lost sons, daughters lost fathers, lovers lost love, and each song somehow contained a bit of each.
Strikingly, the singers on The Creek Drank the Cradle keep losing their religion, too: outgrowing the bonds of belief, losing their fear of the Lord, letting their mothers' bibles burn. One of them even looks back to see a long-extinct love as a kind of unrecoverable faith: "Found your rosary broken to pieces/ Every night by the bed you'd kiss the beads." Still, the crucifixion is the greatest myth of loss we have, and it's no shock that a lyricist soaked in southern allegory should adapt it for his own purposes. There's even a defiantly un-Christian ring to resurrection one-liners like, "Frozen, the ground refused to die/ And the guitar rose again."
But while the textures, tempos, and diction of the five short songs on The Sea & The Rhythm EP are consistent with what Iron & Wine has been-- and probably will always be-- the theme of loss has itself gone. In its place, Beam pushes trembling expectation, ecstatic abandon, and plain-faced repentance. Now, not one of these faded songs screams old-time religion, but it seems fair to wonder if there is a little revival going on here. "Beneath the Balcony" is a loping folk ballad telling the grim story of a warrior reduced to begging while some kids wait out a storm and "make sure the king won't grant the dead man one more day." At this point, it's an ambiguous parable with a crypto-Christian vibe worthy of C.S. Lewis. But when the Mother Mary appears begging with Christ on her lap, there's no question we're dealing with a gospel story. The song ends with a kid crouched behind a garbage can "who waits for the king to come/ And holds his sweating hand." Salvation, anyone?
The super-sweet title track, a hymn to sensual connection, is driven by its rare present-tense setting, but still sags. It draws its force from an ambiguity (is the "we" here lover/lover or mother/infant?) all a little too cheaply bought by come-ons like, "The milk from your breast is on my lips." Maybe the singer gets off by playing baby Jesus with grown women. Or maybe I just had to get a Jesus reference in for every song. At least I won't have to try for the last two.
The next track is a parable of sin and redemption masquerading as a nursery rhyme. Some Mexican kid-- called, you guessed it, Jesus-- was born in a truck on the fourth of July. A mobile manger for an American nativity scene. With fireworks blooming above like a star in the East, this selfless little immigrant gives the singer the best playing card in his grubby little deck. Such a pure act opens a space for Beam's trademark muffled irony, the kind of brutal understatement common on the LP but up to now absent on this EP: "He never wanted nothing I remember/ Maybe a broken bottle if I had two." Jesus covers for the singer, lets him break a five-dollar bet, and generally assumes his sins. Then, in an oddly specific twist, when the singer succumbs to temptation by secretly eloping to Vegas with Jesus' sister, the beatific child-god is there to greet them: "Naked, the Judas in me/ Fell by the tracks but he lifted me high/ Kissing my head like a brother and never asking why." Unmistakably salvific.
The last track goes down easy but is extremely hard to digest. "Someday the Waves" opens with a man waking at dawn to look down on his lover's face in wonder. The chorus seems like a sober display of faithfulness ("You pick a place that's where I'll be") until some cryptic and perverse forbearance slips in, Matthew-style: "Time, like your cheek, has turned for me." This could mean a number of things: the singer is marking time by his sleeping lover's tossing and turning; the lover's pallid complexion means the singer is running out of time; or, as the lover has patiently taken a beating, the singer has simply gotten older. The next verse promises a pie-in-the-sky day of redemption when "every aching old machine will feel no pain," but neglects to follow through with a credible image of relief.
It's the last verse that adds an oddly appropriate twist: "Waking before you I'm like the Lord/ Who sees his love though we don't know." Sure, it's a simile, but if you think about it, Sam Beam would make a great Holy Spirit. With a full-length album out by next Easter, he's got this Jew's vote for American Jesus in 2004. | 2003-09-14T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-09-14T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | September 14, 2003 | 8.4 | e9cc6a3b-63dd-410e-96e6-a36a80fbb078 | Jascha Hoffman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jascha-hoffman/ | null |
On Kindred, Michael Angelakos shifts focus from the painful public self-examination of Gossamer to focus on the parts of his life that give him strength: his family, his faith, and the radiant love that springs from both. It is also his most concise effort, far from the sprawl of his first two albums. | On Kindred, Michael Angelakos shifts focus from the painful public self-examination of Gossamer to focus on the parts of his life that give him strength: his family, his faith, and the radiant love that springs from both. It is also his most concise effort, far from the sprawl of his first two albums. | Passion Pit: Kindred | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20454-kindred/ | Kindred | Keep your ears open, and you can hear Passion Pit everywhere around you: in fast food commercials and YouTube pre-roll ads you can’t wait to skip, the skewed pop maximalism of PC Music and its imitators, the glossy hybrid EDM-pop of Madeon and Zedd, even the clutter of Taylor Swift’s work with Jack Antonoff on 1989. It’s easy to take for granted now, but Michael Angelakos’ first two records shifted the pop paradigm in meaningful ways. Manners hooked up the '80s synth-pop of M83’s Saturdays=Youth to a glucose IV, piling on children’s choirs and waves of orchestration and Angelakos’ signature falsetto until it forced you into submission; three years later, Gossamer ramped up the density, scale, and emotional rawness of Angelakos’ writing, as he built glittering castles around love, death, and the redeeming power of joy. That rawness is what separates Passion Pit from its lesser contemporaries, and from bands who would seek to duplicate their success: Angelakos' songs dance on the line between sweet and saccharine, but they’re anchored by real stakes. They’re full of light because you can use a lot of it when you’re holding a candle to the darkness.
Kindred is Angelakos’ first record after conducting an unflinching, very public self-examination of his mental health and its effects on his life and loved ones, a process that dominated both Gossamer and the press cycle around the record. Instead of doubling down on that kind of reflection, Angelakos shifts focus to the parts of his life that gave him strength as he endured personal and professional turmoil: his family, his faith, and the radiant love that springs from both. It’s also his most concise record to date, a far cry from the sprawl of both Manners and Gossamer: it’s only 10 songs, and the songs themselves are more interested in speed and economy.
The best songs are the ones that really take that idea of efficiency to heart, stripping away fluff and frippery to focus on core melodic ideas or compositional concepts. This marks a major change in Angelakos’ songwriting: most listeners would agree that Gossamer’s best moments were its biggest, whether the frenzied Rustie-isms of "I’ll Be Alright" or the massive, starlit "Hideaway". That’s not the case here on Kindred, where the highlights hew closer to the soulful heartbreaker "Constant Conversations". There are a lot of moving parts on something like "Whole Life Story", a song-length apology to Angelakos’ wife for the scrutiny placed on their lives post-Gossamer, but each of them are clear and discernible rather than overwhelming, and lithe pop-funk jam "Where the Sky Hangs" sets a new record for "audible space in a Passion Pit song."
When Angelakos opts for an arrangement that recalls the density of his older work, you find yourself wishing he had opted for a similarly pared down approach. "All I Want" is a good example. Its core message—being struck dizzy and dumb by your love for someone, and rejoicing in it with a simple, gorgeous melody—is compromised by the use of every tool in Angelakos’ toolbox: whirring dervishes spat out on guitar, vocal pieces whispering like ghosts in the background, glittering doodads glued on like rhinestones. On earlier albums, the tremendous scale and layering of his songs felt purposeful, like it was meant to reflect the buzzing hornets’ nest in Angelakos’ brain; when he tries to do the same thing on Kindred it feels aimless, a choice that doesn’t move songs forward or help to advance any ideas.
This is also a very spiritual record, which shouldn't be a surprise if you've pored over Angelakos' lyric sheets before. (Consider Gossamer closer "Where We Belong", where after alluding to a suicide attempt Angelakos sings, "Who says that God exists?/ We can't see icons or myths, but/ Well, I believe in you/ Do you believe in me, too?") Opener "Lifted Up (1985)" is another glowing ode to Angelakos' wife, but it traffics in the language of apotheosis: Instead of being born, she descends from heaven, and when she threatens to float back Angelakos grounds her with the force of their love. The album is otherwise scattered with references to prayer and the exertion of subtle divine force, like the conspicuous cloud cover of "Looks Like Rain" and the baptism/savior imagery of "My Brother Taught Me How to Swim". This kind of writing isn't as obviously courageous as the work he did on Gossamer, but it still takes plenty of bravery to write frankly about faith in a medium where it's usually ignored or neglected. It takes guts to say, in effect, "I had to work really hard to get better, and embracing something bigger than myself really helped me." And while Angelakos has never been a particularly artful lyricist, he writes with a wide-eyed sincerity and frankness that makes you want to root for him.
As the first document of Angelakos' shift towards a different songwriting approach, one more focused on efficiency and pop purity than complexity or breadth, Kindred is ultimately both a transitional moment and a mixed bag. Not every song on Manners and Gossamer worked, but at their very least they had something to keep your attention, some grippy sonic piece. Kindred lives and dies on the strength of its melodies, and some of those melodies are submarined by excess rather than enhanced by it. When the album's highlights click ("Whole Life Story", "Where the Sky Hangs", "Looks Like Rain") they're as powerful and resonant as anything in the band's discography, but the chances of success feel a little lower than they were before.
It turns out that the year's best Passion Pit song, and the one that realizes the full potential of Angelakos' new ambitions, isn't even on Kindred. "Pay No Mind", a single from Madeon's excellent March debut Adventure, is the kind of the song that couldn't exist without Passion Pit in the first place—a colorful fusion of pop, funk, and EDM featuring a typically chirpy vocal performance from Angelakos. His connection to the song's lyrics is obvious, a fraternal twin of "Whole Life Story" that finds Angelakos asking for forgiveness and encouraging his loved ones to ignore the external forces swirling around them. It's catchy without relying on gimmickry, undeniably personal, and totally piercing; it's the kind of song I'd love to find more often on Kindred. | 2015-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | April 22, 2015 | 6.8 | e9cfbf88-6ef0-4afe-ada3-f4ba0875b4e9 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
Carlos Niño's music charts an invisible continent where hippy jazz meets new age music and underground hip-hop meets airy, Laurel Canyon-style folk. | Carlos Niño's music charts an invisible continent where hippy jazz meets new age music and underground hip-hop meets airy, Laurel Canyon-style folk. | Carlos Niño & Friends: Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21778-flutes-echoes-its-all-happening/ | Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening! | Like most interesting places, Los Angeles lives in contradiction of itself. The things that make it seem superficial also make it seem happy and industrious, a place where people are always freewheeling from one rad thing to the next. Los Angeles challenges you to take it seriously and wonders—in wounded earnestness—why you can't. It is one of the least believable places I've ever been and a place I consequently never want to leave.
Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening!, by Carlos Niño & Friends, is a very Los Angeles album. Niño is a hub of the city's musical subculture, one of those people whose primary contribution seems to be his ability to connect other people. Over the past 20 years, he has hosted three radio shows and worked on over 50 albums, charting an invisible continent where hippy jazz meets new age music and underground hip-hop meets airy, Laurel Canyon-style folk. (Lately his shows have been focused on the perennially great Dublab.) Along with the vocalist Dwight Trible, he leads a big band called Build an Ark, whose loose, ever-shifting roster of players—inspired by groups like the Sun Ra Arkestra—turns the model of the 1930s jazz orchestra into a metaphor for equality and collectivity. He has helped arrange the music of J Dilla for chamber orchestra and participated in an album-length tribute to tea. Though many of the projects he's worked on credit him as an artist, I'm still not sure what he plays. At the time of writing, he is 39.
Flutes is the fourth of Niño's "and friends" series. Pieced together using fragments and sketches Niño had worked on over the past few years, it's a loose, comfortable and often deliberately comforting experience, the kind of music that makes room for the listener rather than reaching out to be heard. As with Niño's other archive-related releases, the range is wide but the journey is easy. “Metamaravilla," with its bird sounds and untamed cascades of violin, follows a line from the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel through to the postwar exotica of Les Baxter, music designed to transform familiar rooms into wilds of which the listener had only dreamed. "Alice's Chord" is presumably a reference to the pianist, harpist and composer Alice Coltrane, whose loose rhapsodies turned jazz into a metaphor for inner space. (Her husband, John, hovers over the Kamasi Washington–featuring “Joyous Gratitude," as does his collaborator Pharoah Sanders). You can see why guys like Madlib belong here, and where Niño's interest in hip-hop stems from in general: Not as a party-ready extension of funk and disco, but as music that uses groove and repetition as a way to leverage meditative states.
Like any good curator, Niño is proposing an alternative history, one where the sound of a style isn't as important as the spirit behind it, where black and white have more in common than they might otherwise realize, where you can hear the new-age pioneer Iasos digress about the benefits of hanging out near waterfalls alongside a little free jazz. (Negative ions. It's negative ions.) In that sense, the diversity of Flutes often ends up being more interesting than the material itself. I like it best when I listen to it less as music than as a blueprint to how music might be made, a map of Niño's place in the universe. “I don't feel like I'm a citizen of the United States," he told the L.A. Weekly in 2009. “But I do relate to California." California seems to relate back. | 2016-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Leaving | April 20, 2016 | 6.8 | e9d0266a-736c-4efa-8fc2-e952ca2c4630 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Rivers Cuomo’s latest is a tribute to his hair metal heroes, but it never goes all that hard. | Rivers Cuomo’s latest is a tribute to his hair metal heroes, but it never goes all that hard. | Weezer: Van Weezer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weezer-van-weezer/ | Van Weezer | Turning 50 hasn’t tempered Rivers Cuomo’s inner child. The Weezer frontman still writes about romance in the language of a smitten teenager, and a quarter century after “El Scorcho,” he’s still biting rap lingo and chasing whatever the kids are into. His best and worst songs alike resound with the simplicity and shamelessness of youth. Cuomo’s Peter Pan syndrome is why many mortified fans bailed on Weezer years ago, but it also accounts for why so many loyalists have stuck around, even as the band’s discography has barely managed the dire hit-to-miss ratio of late-period Simpsons: Weezer is one of the last bands of their generation that still sounds young.
Delayed a year by the pandemic, along with its corresponding Hella Mega arena tour with Green Day and Fall Out Boy, the band’s latest Van Weezer is even more nostalgic than usual. “Even if we blow up, we’re never gonna grow up,” he sings on “I Need Some of That,” between recounting memories of lazy summer days cruising around on 10-speeds and cranking Aerosmith. As its title promises, the album extrapolates on a foundational piece of Weezer lore: Cuomo’s teenage love of hair metal, first teased way back on The Blue Album with Kiss posters on his wall.
The band has touted Van Weezer as a return to the harder edged rock of 2002’s Maladroit, perhaps the most fondly remembered of Weezer’s dozen post-reunion albums, but in the two decades since, they’ve grown into a considerably kitschier band. Where Maladroit’s guitars winked at the camera occasionally, Van Weezer’s two-handed tapping revels in its hamminess. And for all its pyrotechnic guitars and arena stomp, Van Weezer never actually roars all that hard. The title promises Van Halen, but the volume rarely exceeds Rick Springfield. Paired with Cuomo’s eternally boyish voice, the result is a cuddly, Build-a-Bear tribute to ’80 metal, with little of the rowdiness this music embodied in its heyday. The only parents this metal could piss off are ones with strong opinions about Pinkerton.
At this stage, though, dopiness is a Weezer feature, and as their recent albums go, this is one of the better ones. Coming on the heels of the clock-punching covers record The Teal Album, you could be forgiven for assuming Van Weezer was born more of algorithmic opportunity than personal passion, but it’s never as cynical as that. “The End of the Game” and “All the Good Ones” fully commit to their bedazzled riffs and fist pumps, living up to the album’s promise of dumb, goofy kicks. Weezer are having fun here, and anybody enticed by an album called Van Weezer probably will, too.
There are some stinkers, of course. “1 More Hit” is Cuomo’s latest cringe song about addiction, while “Precious Metal Girl” never overcomes the titular pun. But on the whole this is Cuomo’s most melodically generous batch of songs since 2014’s near return-to-form Everything Will Be Alright in the End, and that stickiness makes up for a lot. When the bright surf harmonies kick in on “Sheila Can Do It,” Blue Album fans will feel sensory throwback as vivid as Proust’s madeleine. Melodies like this are at the heart of the other reason so many fans have remained loyal to this group: Weezer never produced a better copy. Inconsistent as they are, the band that most reliably conjures the pleasures of early Weezer is still Weezer themselves.
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. | 2021-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crush / Atlantic | May 13, 2021 | 5.9 | e9d53473-f718-46ec-939f-31cb52e1ef34 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Amy Klein’s solo debut, after stints as the grinning rhythm guitarist in Titus Andronicus and several other projects, feels like the demo that your college roommate’s band just made. | Amy Klein’s solo debut, after stints as the grinning rhythm guitarist in Titus Andronicus and several other projects, feels like the demo that your college roommate’s band just made. | Amy Klein: Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22001-fire/ | Fire | Amy Klein has always come across as a force of extreme positivity in all of her artistic endeavors, whether it be as the grinning rhythm guitarist for Titus Andronicus or as the thoughtful activist author of a multitude of poems, personal essays, and critiques she has self-published or had published in esteemed outlets over the years. Taking all of this together is what makes it so difficult to accept that her solo debut doesn’t come close to delivering upon these promises. It’s a lot like listening to your friend’s band in college: You have several great conversations with this person; you share a lot of the same interests in art, literature, and film, and you’re so proud to see your friend up onstage that you overlook the imperfections of the performance when you first see the band live. You just want it to be good, but it is not.
That’s exactly what’s going on with Fire, and it’s frustrating. Klein’s band, which includes Sandy Davis on bass, Yoed Nir on cello, and Colin Brooks on drums (who also played in Leda, a previous project that Klein led), sounds proficient enough, but Klein’s jangly rhythm guitar is too high in the mix. The band are at their best when the jangle drops out and they work through instrumental interludes, like on “Yes Men,” which scorches like ‘70s Crazy Horse, and incidentally includes Klein’s strongest vocal performance on the album. The album was produced, engineered, and mixed by Kevin McMahon, who has done powerhouse production work on all of the Titus albums, in addition to working with dozens of other indie rock royalty of previous eras such as the Walkmen, Swans, and French Kicks, but you wouldn’t know it from here. The levels are a distractingly big problem here: When you set the volume at the beginning of the album, you’ll need to lower it again when Klein’s karaoke-level vocal comes in. Where her voice has always been strong as a writer, her voice as a singer doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny that placing it this high in the mix invites. Putting her voice so front-and-center may showcase her artistic bravery, but it also removes the evocative mystery that defined Klein's vocals on previous productions like Hilly Eye and even her own solo demos.
Thematically, Fire seems to deal with coming of age a lot, but the lyrics don’t feel as precise as Klein’s written poetry, and often devolve into cuteness, cliché, or general clunkiness. On the title track she inexplicably paraphrases “The Boys of Summer,” and on “Ocean Grove,” she relays that “Hope works down at the pizza place/she’s giving up.” Klein’s melodies are sometimes memorable, like on the chorus of “Twenty-Seven,” but some of the songs feel like everybody laid down their basic tracks, and then a few days later Klein brought in her poetry book and just tried to force every single syllable of pre-written words into the songs, discovering the melody as she went along. Lead single, “American City” is a prime example of this.
This would be a much better album if somebody had just stepped up and encouraged Klein to revisit the mix, and give the vocals one more shot. Maybe she can do just this, as we are living in the Kanye era of album revision. But until that happens, Fire stands as a lesson to actually tell your college friends who play in bands that their music may sound good for a demo, but you have some suggestions for when they go into the studio for real. You just want it to be good. | 2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Don Giovanni | June 29, 2016 | 4.9 | e9dc4bc1-acfc-4b91-80d4-8658eda60ba4 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | 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 No Doubt’s 1995 record, an icon of the ska revival and the auspicious beginning of Gwen Stefani’s pop stardom. | 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 No Doubt’s 1995 record, an icon of the ska revival and the auspicious beginning of Gwen Stefani’s pop stardom. | No Doubt: Tragic Kingdom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/no-doubt-tragic-kingdom/ | Tragic Kingdom | In the mid-1990s, when alternative was the new pop, there were all sorts of subgenres duking it out for dominance. The success of grunge put everything from Bush to Blind Melon on the radio, but perhaps the most curious alt offshoot to emerge in one corner of the mainstream was the ska revival. The third-wave ska scene ran the gamut from Reel Big Fish’s cornball, horn-driven antics to Less Than Jake’s emo-tinged losercore to Rancid’s gritty take on the Specials to Sublime’s frat-boy-and-420-friendly strain, not to mention the peppy breakthrough of longtime stalwarts the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. But there was no ’90s ska figure quite like Gwen Stefani, the movement’s Dickies-clad poster-girl turned culturally roving ’00s hitmaker turned People Magazine staple. There is also no pop star origin story quite like hers.
At the urging of Gwen’s keyboardist brother Eric, the Stefanis performed at a school talent show in their native Anaheim, California in the mid-’80s. Their song of choice was “On My Radio,” the 1979 hit by the two-tone ska band the Selecter. Gwen wore a homemade dress that resembled one worn by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, her favorite musical. Showtune theatrics and Selecter singer Pauline Black (who mixes a hyper-feminine chirp with an operatic warble) would go on to influence Gwen’s early vocal style, and set her on the path of pursuing hybrid sounds and aesthetics.
In 1986, Gwen and Eric formed a band alongside John Spence, their classmate and co-worker at the local Dairy Queen. Spence, whose go-to response—“No doubt!”—gave the group its name, shared vocal duties with Gwen and served as her gruff-voiced foil. They were just kids in love with the way British bands like the Selecter, Madness, and the Specials made everyday frustrations feel lively, and they were trapped in sunny Orange County, the home of Disneyland and suburban punk ennui. No Doubt played the house-party circuit, quickly found a local following, and picked up members, including bassist Tony Kanal, who would soon start dating Gwen in secret. But tragedy struck when, in 1987, Spence took his own life. It was the first of three destabilizing events that would change the course of No Doubt, a band forever defined by its interpersonal drama.
After trumpet-player-turned-co-vocalist Alan Meade exited No Doubt, Gwen was ready to front the band on her own. By 1990, the lineup was solidified with fan-turned-drummer Adrian Young, local metal guitarist Tom Dumont, and a robust horn section. Their popularity around Southern California clubs and colleges grew until finally, they caught the eye of Interscope A&R Tony Ferguson. In 1991, he brought famed record executive Jimmy Iovine to one of No Doubt’s shows, where “Jimmy told someone, ‘That girl will be a star in five years,’” recalled Gwen (and corroborated by Iovine) in a 1996 SPIN cover story. Over the next five years, Gwen would go from singing two-tone covers and her brother’s originals for devoted local crowds, to zig-zagging the globe with her own tales of heartache and rage. She would have to lose the two men closest to her first.
No Doubt’s debut for Interscope, a 1992 self-titled LP, was mostly (but not entirely) devoid of hooks, and partially informed by Eric’s cabaret flair and goofy sense of humor (they gave away kazoos at the album release party, if that explains anything). Poor sales made Interscope hesitant to dive right into a follow-up, and the label took a stronger hand in guiding the group’s sound, namely with producer Matthew Wilder. Eric didn’t like that, and over time he isolated himself from the band, despite practice being held at his house. After he quit in 1994 to work as an animator on The Simpsons, the other members took over songwriting duties on the album that would become Tragic Kingdom. Right around the same time, Kanal called it off with Gwen, after seven years together.
Gwen had never really written her own lyrics, but it helped that she was suddenly filled with pain and confusion. She was, in many ways, a girl with traditional values: In interviews from this era, she marveled at the fact that she got famous instead of starting a family, and her songs sometimes yearn for a “simple kind of life.” But this is perhaps not the impression you’d get from the initial wallop of Tragic Kingdom, featuring one of the decade’s fieriest opening four-song runs, all of which were singles: “Spiderwebs,” a new-wave rafter-shaker about a girl screening her calls; “Excuse Me Mr.”, a dramatic ska-punk number about a girl confronting a dude who’s avoiding her; “Just a Girl,” a fun-but-menacing-sounding hit about a girl just trying to live; and “Happy Now?”, an ever-shifting rock song about a girl chiding her ex. The point was made: girl mad.
Following the surge of third-wave feminism in the early ’90s, the mid-’90s became the peak of the “angry white female” era in rock and pop. It was a time when feminized aggression—from Hole and riot grrrl to Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette—was suddenly perceived as being on-trend, as if women haven’t been furious forever. Stefani, girly tomboy ultra, arguably benefited from this kind of branding, even while she maintained the fun, energetic personality that led Courtney Love to dub her a “cheerleader” and others to call her the “anti-Courtney Love.”
Lead single “Just a Girl” was Gwen’s bridge to planet angry. Upon its release in September 1995, it became a theme song for any girl fed up with living in a boy’s world—with the emphasis once again being on girl. Spice Girls would soon turn “girl power” into a full-on marketing technique, but “Just a Girl” was some kind of magic middle-ground in the context of ’90s pop-feminism: sassy, addictively sweet and sour, yet still accessible. Dumont’s indelible looping riff adds a taunting feeling, while the lyrics leave interpretation conveniently ajar with lines like “I’m just a girl/So don’t let me have any rights.” Never has Stefani’s vocal style—with its forays into babydoll voice and its breathless, swooping belts—felt more intentional as a performance technique meant to amplify her message. “Just a Girl” is not a subtle song, but what it’s doing is quietly masterful: The sarcasm subverts the underlying victimhood in a sneering way, but victimhood is also something girls (particularly white or privileged girls) quickly understand as a tool for getting what they want.
Gwen’s Tragic Kingdom-era pain was incandescent because it felt off the cuff, uninhibited, and barely removed from its cause. You saw that up close in “Don’t Speak,” the breakup ballad that pushed No Doubt’s success over the edge, topping the Billboard airplay chart for 16 weeks. Starting in late 1996 and continuing for much of 1997, flutters of Spanish guitar and angelic whispers of “hush hush, darling” were inescapable; for those listening across radio formats or watching MTV at the time, the song’s ubiquity reached “if I hear this one more time…” levels. But people also could not look away from the saga of Gwen and Tony, SoCal ska’s Stevie and Lindsey. Every night they’d hit the stage and seemingly be forced to relive their split through “Don’t Speak,” a song musically at odds with nearly everything in their upbeat catalog.
Not every song on Tragic Kingdom is overtly about the breakup or the frustrations of girlhood—this is ’90s California ska, after all, a few mostly positive chillers are required. But the album tracks skew cheesy, especially now. Ska bands of the era would sometimes show off their funk chops with a disco cut on their LPs, but No Doubt’s take, “You Can Do It,” is plagued by fake disco strings and a guitar jangle that borders on musical clip art. “Different People,” a brass-and-keyboard-led ska track about how the world is big and diverse, has the tension of a child’s picture book, and the depth of one too. Eric’s musical-theater-strikes-back closer “Tragic Kingdom” is cringeworthy in highly specific ways: the sampling of theme-park announcements, the egregiously drawn-out tempo changes, the fact that it seems to be about how evil Walt Disney is. (Besides, on an album like this, the most tragic of kingdoms is actually Gwen and Tony’s love story, not the suburbia surrounding Mickey’s castle.)
The rush of energy you get from Tragic Kingdom’s opening run is enough to keep the album within spitting distance of the ’90s canon, emblematic of a specific time and place. Other highs include sixth single “Sunday Morning,” where the seasoned band easily finds the pocket with nimble, driving percussion, reggae rhythms, and overdubbed harmonies. “End It On This,” one of the only songs credited to Dumont, Kanal, and both Stefanis, is low-key pummeling: Gwen, in all her high-low vocal glory, recalls the last kiss with Tony while the band fires on all cylinders. Every player gets to show off a little with their “thing,” but Dumont is the secret all-star: His tough opening riff sets the song into intricate lockstep. Dumont, much like fellow unlikely-’90s-rock-star Rivers Cuomo, was a Kiss fan and longtime metalhead; you can hear that in his guitar hooks, which lent Tragic Kingdom a fizzy edge.
If Weezer were politely challenging the post-grunge alternative landscape with moves copped from the Cars, No Doubt were more like Blondie: a band that came out of a distinct regional punk scene, hit it big with a hybrid new-wave sound, and faced both adoration and criticism largely centered around its platinum-blonde singer. This last factor became a central tension in the narrative of No Doubt once Tragic Kingdom began its long ascent up the charts (it was a diamond-seller by the decade’s end). There was this recursive interview cycle where the band would discuss how Stefani was always the solo cover star, which said magazine would also do; then the band would complain about that in their next interview. They portrayed the meta “photographer singles out Gwen” plotline in the “Don’t Speak” video, and to an extent did it themselves on the album cover, where Gwen poses in front offering up an orange while the guys scatter in the desolate grove behind her.
But Gwen’s solo career was always more a question of when. After Tragic Kingdom’s follow-up, 2000’s new-wave coming-of-age Return of Saturn, Stefani struck out on her own with duets alongside techno star Moby and rapper Eve, which suggested she was defined less by a specific sound than a particular attitude. It would take years, well after she appropriated Japanese Harajuku street style and scored more hip-hop hits, for people to recognize the pattern: the Orange County girl with a bindi between her Chola eyebrows had always been borrowing from other cultures and using it to form her identity in messy ways. Taking its cues from two-tone, where Jamaican rhythms met a punk point of view, Tragic Kingdom was only the beginning for Gwen. Back then, she was just an It Grrrl full of contradictions, pulling a little from everywhere and figuring out where to land. | 2020-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Trauma / Interscope | March 15, 2020 | 7.8 | e9dce74c-0e4d-4504-95c3-c390a9222e6e | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
The Hartford, Connecticut five-piece repurpose what many consider the worst parts of 2000s scene culture and rap-rock into a 22-minute ode to unpretentiousness. | The Hartford, Connecticut five-piece repurpose what many consider the worst parts of 2000s scene culture and rap-rock into a 22-minute ode to unpretentiousness. | Cheem: Guilty Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cheem-guilty-pleasure/ | Guilty Pleasure | Over the past few years, ’00s Hot Topic bands defined by earnest melodrama have caught a second wind and influenced a new crop of stars. For every reappraisal, though, there’s a dozen acts from that era whose musical maximalism and kitschy aesthetics still feel cold to the touch—at least, to most everyone but Cheem. On their new album Guilty Pleasure, the pop-rock five-piece couldn’t be more proud to reclaim their aughts touchstones. The album is an indulgent sundae of sugary harmonies, mall-punk choruses, turntable scratches, and electro-pop beats—like A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out if Hellogoodbye and 311 were featured artists. When you lean on subgenres and stylistic choices widely regarded as cheesy, the project you started for fun quickly becomes the hand that puts the “Kick me” sign on your back. “Critics slam your favorites/Change your mind ’cause you feel like you have to,” Sam Nazaretian complains on “Cheem Szn,” taking comfort in making an argument for unpretentious self-expression in itself.
Formed in 2013 in the backyards of Hartford, Connecticut, Cheem got their start churning out glittery, polished math rock. But where albums like 2017’s Downhill flirted with emo, Guilty Pleasure has a bone to pick with the state of rock music at large. “We tried to make a tape to end it all/But everywhere they still compare us to American Football,” Nazaretian sings on “Mango.” Hence Guilty Pleasure’s chaotic onslaught of genres, few of which have ever scanned as cool—neither during their heyday nor in the present. Cheem aim to get louder and weirder, boosting your mood with the music that defined their childhoods. They’re not trolling, and there’s none of the irony of fellow sensory-overload acts like 100 gecs or Death Grips. Cheem want to detonate the concept of “guilty pleasures” by fully embracing “pleasure.”
Since their inception, Cheem have split vocal duties between two primary singers—a decision modeled after the catchy harmonies of Blink-182 and Barenaked Ladies. With Nazaretian and guitarist Skye Holden holding down vocal melodies, the rest of the band has space to peel off in any direction they choose. “Virtual Boy” brings in glitchy synths, crunchy guitar riffs, and double bass drum kicks while vocoder solos warble in the distance. On “Mango,” a dub rhythm section grounds ska upstrokes, a rap verse, and dueling shouts lifted from hardcore punk. They don’t stick the landing on every style. Even the most nostalgic listener may grimace at the rap-rock verses shouting out Kenny G and Kero Kero Bonito or the dated squeaks of turntable scratches. Experiments aside, the songs on Guilty Pleasure always boast an undeniable hook, aided by hyper-clean production from the band’s own guitarist Gabe Weitzman and mastering by longtime scene veteran Kris Crummett. “Clueless” best illustrates this balance: It sounds like Limp Bizkit, if they decided to lighten their angst with some minor-key falsettos and a few twinkly math-rock runs.
And yet, the most obvious reference points are often the most accurate. Cheem channel early Panic! At the Disco in scope and ambition, and Nazaretian’s vocals are a cross of Brendon Urie and Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, singers whose precise pitch and smooth delivery lent a reputable technique to their bands. Listen to the first 15 seconds of “Snag” and it’s impossible to miss. Contrary to the knee-jerk reaction those names might prompt, Cheem make the comparison seem like high praise—a reminder that Urie’s classical training eventually landed him on Broadway. The voices of these singers—particularly their falsetto range and theatrical showmanship—helped their punk bands ascend to the level of pop stars. Nearly two decades later, Cheem return to that same blend of styles with no hope for commercial success or mainstream fame. Instead, Guilty Pleasure is the sound of taking risks in the name of good fun. | 2022-09-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lonely Ghost | September 6, 2022 | 6.9 | e9e20baa-af25-466a-8c48-5d087d79b031 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Linnea Siggelkow downsized her city of choice, a move that inspired her to confront confusion and ambivalence in six dream-pop gems that carve out a welcome space of security. | Linnea Siggelkow downsized her city of choice, a move that inspired her to confront confusion and ambivalence in six dream-pop gems that carve out a welcome space of security. | Ellis : The Fuzz EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ellis-the-fuzz-ep/ | The Fuzz EP | Unable to keep pace with the rising rents of her home base in Toronto, Ontario, songwriter Linnea Siggelkow decamped last year an hour west to Hamilton, a smaller, less-hectic place with a working-class soul and fertile DIY scene. Liberated from the bustle and hustle of big-city living, she began exploring pensive songs that unfurl at a deliberately languid pace, like someone dipping their toes into a cold swimming pool. The six dream-pop reveries of the resulting debut EP as Ellis crackle with just enough distortion to earn their name, The Fuzz. And that feeling is as mental as it is musical, as she works through a mix of confusion, sadness, anxiety, and ambivalence. But these songs are neither about wallowing in that void nor necessarily rising out of it. They’re about learning to acclimate and carve out a space of security in a world that offers only perpetual instability.
Siggelkow established this template as early as July 2018 with the release of her divine first single, “The Drain,” The Fuzz’s grand opener. A meditation on the disorienting qualities of desire, “The Drain” crystallizes all of Ellis’ defining qualities—rainy-day guitar ripples, slow-motion momentum, luminous synth smears as vivid and static as a nighttime skyline. But Siggelkow’s distant-yet-direct voice projects confidence and fortitude in its naked vulnerability despite barely being pitched above a whisper.
The rest of The Fuzz presents variations on that theme, but each track inhabits its own distinct phase of loneliness. “Frostbite” is about excommunicating a selfish, toxic influence (“I wish that I never knew you,” Siggelkow sings on the chorus) from one’s life; its gradual journey from a Velvets-like torpor to a cathartic crescendo reflects the emotionally fraught process of working up the nerve to tell that person to fuck off. The gorgeous melancholy of “What a Mess!” maps the flipside of achieving independence, as a forlorn Siggelkow ponders sinister amusements: “Took the scissors to my hair again/Another form of self-destruction.” But the way she repeats the chorus—“What a mess I’ve made of this”—feels less like a pity party than an act of accepting responsibility.
As The Fuzz plays out, you sense Siggelkow becoming more resolute. Like a doom-metal Mazzy Star, she leans into the distortion pedal as she lays into an ex on “All This Time.” And her paralyzing ennui finally boils into something resembling rage during the title track; for its stormy finale, she cries out the chorus as if self-administering an emergency adrenaline shot. Still, even if you shake yourself out of the fuzz, the symptoms can creep back. On the EP’s stark closer, “N Y E,” Siggelkow finds herself spending the rowdiest night of the year at a party of one, her ghostly voice enveloped by a guitar whose distortion seems to pick at the scabs. She signs off with a missive heavier than the Times Square apple: “After midnight/In the windowless dark/I was falling asleep/You were breaking my heart.” She drifts off, safe in the knowledge that she’s survived another shitty year just to start the next one. | 2018-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-26T22:54:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | November 27, 2018 | 7.4 | e9e8f05a-7b9c-43f5-9c96-15475ef0755d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The 24-year-old South Londoner Sampha Sisay lent either his voice to nearly every track on SBTRKT's 2011 self-titled debut. After spending time as an integral part of the UK producer's live show, and collaborating with the likes of Jessie Ware and Drake, he's stepping out on his own with this deeply personal EP. | The 24-year-old South Londoner Sampha Sisay lent either his voice to nearly every track on SBTRKT's 2011 self-titled debut. After spending time as an integral part of the UK producer's live show, and collaborating with the likes of Jessie Ware and Drake, he's stepping out on his own with this deeply personal EP. | Sampha: Dual EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18419-sampha-dual-ep/ | Dual EP | Part of the charm of SBTRKT's 2011 self-titled debut was the presence of Sampha Sisay, a now 24-year-old South Londoner who lent his voice to nearly every track on the album. There was never a doubt that, based on raw talent alone, Sampha was not only an artist to keep a close eye on (the same year found him collaborating with then-upstarts Jessie Ware and Lil Silva), but one with star potential. On the bracing "Hold On", his vocals-- warm but damaged, understated yet dynamic-- ache with loneliness, whereas on more movement-minded concoctions like "Sanctuary", it's transformed into a conduit for light-speed, future-minded R&B. In other words, Sampha's instrument is a dexterous one, effortlessly commanding attention in whatever context it's placed. Now after spending the past few years as an integral part of SBTRKT's live show, he's finally stepping out on his own with the deeply personal Dual EP.
Last month, Drake debuted his new single "The Motion" in anticipation of his forthcoming third record Nothing Was the Same, with Sampha in tow on both vocal and production duties. Though Sampha's singing isn't featured prominently, the melancholic tug of his presence is felt in nearly every corner of the track, from the lighter-than-air atmospherics to his downcast, honeyed croon. It signified what could be a more noticeable arrival for Sampha, especially when coupled with the the release of Dual. But somewhat surprisingly, it feels as if he's pushing against the idea of an elevated profile with the 17 minutes of music that make up his first solo venture. Instead of acting as a grand coronation, Dual is a patient piece of work that finds Sampha in no rush to capitalize on a moment, instead opting to showcase simple, relatable musings on loss, uncertainty, and moving forward. At the same time, Dual carries a strange urgency with it, as if these songs had to come out of him now (despite their genesis going back years, in certain cases). The result is unexpected, but refreshing, with Sampha comfortably inhabiting the role of an artist interested in staying true to himself.
So it goes without saying that Dual isn't something you'll find yourself dancing much to (save maybe for the sultry "Without", complete with plastic bucket street drumming and bleary synths). Instead, these ruminative, revealing songs paint a more intimate portrait of Sampha. There are ghosts hiding around almost every corner, like on the lost lullaby "Beneath the Tree", which finds him wishing a monster would "take all its things and go." Anchored by his delicate piano, it's the first thing that truly springs to life on the EP (it follows opener "Demons", one of two very short, homemade sounding one-offs). Sampha's relationship with keys are important to Dual; almost everything here seems to orbit around his voice and piano. The radiant "Indecision", with its gospel-like quality, feels as if it would be just as effective unplugged. But to do away with all the wonderful details, like those strange, mechanized backing vocal snippets, would be to ignore Sampha's deft ear for detail and his restrained but vibrant approach to mixing. These songs are nuanced and uncluttered. At the same time, the humanizing imperfections are never lost. (It's no wonder Drakes has revered him as a producer as much as a singer.)
Unfortunately, this probably means that many won't pay as much attention to Sampha as a bonafide songwriter. And it's a shame, because while a passing glance at these songs may not reveal many layers, his use of repetition and unfussy language afford Dual some startling emotional relevance. Closer "Can't Get Close" is sung for his late father, who Sampha lost at the age of nine and still regards as one of his most important musical influences. Tapping into something haunting and pure, he sings over a mournful weave of pitched vocals, lamenting, "I can't get close to you." The desperation is something that will resonate with anyone familiar with the helplessness of loss. For someone so willing to lay himself this bare as a first impression is rare, but in terms of the music found on Dual, nothing could be more natural. It's further proof that following the sound of your own voice is often more fruitful and rewarding than doing what everyone else expects of you. | 2013-08-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-08-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Young Turks | August 14, 2013 | 7.4 | e9e9d44a-75be-4dad-bd9a-5fc674f351e2 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
Musician/producer Jay Arner excels at sneaking despondence and alienation into airtight, earwormy pop gems. On Jay II he explores his love of New Wave and other '80s pop. | Musician/producer Jay Arner excels at sneaking despondence and alienation into airtight, earwormy pop gems. On Jay II he explores his love of New Wave and other '80s pop. | Jay Arner: Jay II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21968-jay-ii/ | Jay II | Musician/producer Jay Arner is a sharp, efficient, exacting songwriter in the mold of fellow Vancouverites the New Pornographers. At his best, he smuggles expressions of despondence or alienation into airtight, earwormy gems with enviable ease. While 2014’s New Dimensional, the lone release from his Energy Slime duo with Jessica Delisle, traded in truncated bursts of psychedelic garage rock, that’s hardly Arner’s default. He’s predisposed to plunder and pastiche 1980s FM oldies: 2013 solo debut Jay Arner bore Smiths, A-Ha, and New Order echoes, while “Broken Glass (In the Hall of Shattered Mirrors)” half-cannibalized Cyndi Lauper single “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
More taut, concise, and sweeter than its predecessor, Jay II finds its namesake lovingly and enthusiastically exploring new influences and reference points. The nagging “Personal Line” triples an irrepressible core melody with starchy guitar, phased synthesizer, and ramshackle piano: it’s a doting period homage, with lyrical nods to Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” and Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309.” Slick with faux, angelic falsetto, “Crystal Ball” makes for a nervy New Wave comet; “What’s Reality?” suggests the Phil Spector-era Ramones rocking a sock hop.
Jay II is strongest when Arner turns more introspective. On “Back to School” and “Earth to Jay,” he casts himself as a weary stranger to the music scene that nurtured and continues to support him. That’s a sensation familiar to all aging musos hanging in beyond a certain age range; suddenly, everything seems like a blur. Elsewhere, his woes are uncategorized but no less pressing. “I’ve got the perfect life blues again,” he admits in angelic triplicate on the flanged, syrupy “World of Suffering.” There’s no laundry list of injustices or outrages to be found here: just an uber-compressed pop rune that muses on the sheer, disorienting helplessness that results from realizing that we’ll never be able to help everyone. Maybe, just maybe, stolid songcraft can be rescue enough. | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Mint | June 27, 2016 | 7 | e9eb6fe5-2440-446b-8659-1b6bf8f0b61f | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
The new collaborative project from New York Native Tongue veterans Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes, The Abstract and the Dragon, features a handful of interesting exclusives but mostly revised older work. The new cuts, in particular, showcase a madcap chemistry unblemished by the passage of time. | The new collaborative project from New York Native Tongue veterans Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes, The Abstract and the Dragon, features a handful of interesting exclusives but mostly revised older work. The new cuts, in particular, showcase a madcap chemistry unblemished by the passage of time. | Busta Rhymes / Q-Tip: The Abstract And The Dragon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18840-busta-rhymes-q-tip-the-abstract-and-the-dragon/ | The Abstract And The Dragon | The form and function of the hip-hop mixtape have shifted remarkably over the last decade, so that a medium that used to showcase DJs’ cutting and blending abilities in the genre’s early days is now a umbrella format describing the constant flood of releases meted out in the absence of record company tinkering. You never know what you’re getting until you see a tracklist. When New York Native Tongue veterans Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes dropped the loping disco romp “Thank You” late last year and announced the impending release of the collaborative mixtape The Abstract and the Dragon, the impression among breathless fans was that the pair were finally teaming up for a full project. When the mixtape arrived, of course, that rumor was promptly put to rest. The Abstract and the Dragon isn’t the surprise collection of new material we’d hoped for; it’s more a travelogue of a friendship well into its third decade, a Busta and Q-Tip greatest hits collection compiled by hip-hop journalist Shaheem Reid.
Most of the duo’s legendary pow-wows are present, from the inaugural Leaders of the New School & Tribe Called Quest posse cut “Scenario” to select tracks from their solo careers (“Ill Vibe” from Busta’s debut solo album The Coming, The Big Bang’s new jack rebuke “You Can’t Hold the Torch”, the remix to Q-Tip’s breakout solo single “Viv’rant Thing”). Tying it all together is a series of affable skits featuring Busta, Q-Tip and friends shooting the shit and telling stories behind the songs, like when Busta recounts his reluctance to repeat “Scenario”’s “Rawr rawr like a dungeon dragon” shpiel on Big Daddy Kane’s 1991 “Come On Down”, a big get for him and Q-Tip at the time, only to tack it on after Kane hears his verse and asks “Where the ‘rawr rawr’ at?” The song selection hews a little obscure; lesser known fare like Tribe’s Rhyme & Reason soundtrack spot “Wild Hot”, and “For the Nasty”, a Neptunes collaboration from the NBA Live ‘06 soundtrack, appear, but beloved singles Tribe’s “Oh My God” (which samples Busta’s “Scenario” verse) and the Fugees, Tribe & Busta posse cut “Rumble in the Jungle” do not. But the real draw here is The Abstract and the Dragon’s smattering of exclusives.
Scattered throughout the playlist here are a handful of brand new Busta and Q-Tip recordings and revised takes on classics. Alongside “Thank You”, here remixed by Kid Capri, there’s the follow-up tandem cut “Butch & Sundance”. We also get the mixtape’s title track, a snippet of a new song from Busta’s upcoming E.L.E. 2 album, and “We Taking Off”, all Busta spotlights with Q-Tip handling production. Elsewhere E.L.E. DJ Scratch remixes “Gettin’ Up” from Q-Tip’s The Renaissance, and Busta appends a verse to Tribe’s Midnight Marauders closer “God Lives Through”. The new cuts showcase a madcap chemistry unblemished by the passage of time, Tip’s ineffably slippery flow and beat construction anchoring Busta’s verbal gymnastics as heartily now as they did when they were teenagers.
The exclusives are a welcome addition to a mix largely built out of previously released material, but they also point to the more intriguing forms The Abstract and the Dragon could’ve taken with a little more care. “God Lives Through”’s freestyling-over-each-other’s-deep-cuts ethos is a stroke of genius. “Gettin' Up”’s friends-remixing-our-deep-cuts tack is too. Hell, this thing could’ve just been an EP of the new songs. But The Abstract and the Dragon gestures to all these forms but never settles on one. It’s a good mix, but fans of either artist could probably construct the vast majority of it out of their own iTunes and will probably end up stripping the 28-song project for the six they haven’t had kicking around their record collection all these years and decades. | 2014-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 9, 2014 | 6.6 | e9ee3f0f-980c-434d-8afb-e661c67cc46d | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
The legendary British DJ has been around the block. He returns with his Crooked Man project with pedigree, craftsmanship, and, delightfully, zero aspiration to the “new.” | The legendary British DJ has been around the block. He returns with his Crooked Man project with pedigree, craftsmanship, and, delightfully, zero aspiration to the “new.” | Crooked Man: Crooked Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22406-crooked-man/ | Crooked Man | Richard Barratt was there. He was there when the Sheffield youth first started mixing drum machines and soul, when Cabaret Voltaire begat Human League, before Heaven 17 and ABC went global. He was there when pub DJs started giving themselves ridiculous names, like his own pseudonym DJ Parrott, and tried their hand at building a Paradise Garage on every corner. He was there when the soil-your-pants excitement at this thing called house music created the great sampladelic explosion of late-’80s UK pop. He was there, at the Hacienda (which he once gloriously described as “a vision of hell”), and at the birth of Sheffield’s own massively influential “bleep” label. He was also there when it all went to hell in the early ’90s with the anti-rave laws and the drugs, with the cult of the DJ and the lack of musical and human diversity; which is when he stopped being there.
This is all unsubtly true. But as that point about Barratt’s disengagement hopefully makes clear, the facts of history can only account for so much. And while Parrott really did give up DJing (completely) and producing (mostly, kinda), there is a big difference between facts, and the emotional resonance of lives that create them. If there’s one thing that Barratt’s return as Crooked Man makes clear, it's the nature of the resonance which makes the story. Barratt’s stockpile of grumpy tales with hopeful edges is an opportunity to gather round a bassbin and bask.
The basic premise of Crooked Man is house music as a classic songwriting form. The album collects nine vocal tracks, many of which Barratt has self-released in microscopic vinyl quantities since 2012, resulting in a pop-dance album that lives comfortably alongside Caribou and Disclosure, but with pedigree and craftsmanship, and zero aspiration to the “new.” In this, Crooked Man fits the moment: EDM songsmiths’ conservative structures top the charts, popular disco and house remixes gloriously restage contemporary material rather than deconstructing it, while much of the club underground rebels against these dated designs. Yet even though Barratt and writing partner—another Sheffield music lifer, Michael Somerset Ward—come up with results that are undoubtedly old-fashioned, they’re not the slightest bit nostalgic. The pair hook earworms with the pride of professional writers, methodically and gleefully revisit British dance music’s cornerstone structures (electronic soul, dub, acid-house), and reinforce the dancefloor’s inclusive, anti-commercialist ideologies from a position of long-held beliefs. That’s how Crooked Man ends up feeling like the unlikely product of the Brill Building, Wigan Casino, and, say, the Music Box—classy, classic, and defiant.
It helps that the album is also deftly programmed and controlled. There’s a clear narrative arc to the sonic range—ambient-house chill-out to open (“Coming Up for Air”), a deep dub version of a Northern Soul classic (Soul Brothers Six’s “I’ll Be Loving You”), radio-friendly electro-pop (“Girl With Better Clothes”), and a gospel-house anthem that serves as an emotional exclamation point (“Happiness”). The vocalists too, an assortment of 20 Feet From DJ-style locals and lesser knowns, expertly play their roles. The angelic falsetto of Sunburst Band’s Pete Simpson appears in exultation and testifies against soul-destroying machines. Bostonian diva-in-the-making, Amy Douglas, brings the biblical boom. And young, boisterous Sheffielders Rachel E and Danae Wellington get involved in excellent kiss-off moments—not of lovers, but of modern scourges such as fashionistas, bankers, and purveyors of boring-ass beats. When a chorus calls for strength in numbers, they become a gang.
Hence, Crooked Man’s overall vibe is the timeless aspiration of people who share great parts of their lives on dark dance-floors. All these songs boil down to the idea of community and its desires and rules, a set of signposts to keep the party going in the right direction. In many cases, these may be generic—Simpson’s cooing prayer to “love your friends” (“Try Me”), or Douglas’ motivational declaration that “we’ll get on the right track” (“Happiness”)—yet with a great big dollop of soul (and the right piano chords), they blossom exponentially. In at least one case though, it’s specific as all get out: “Tell all the witch doctors/There ain’t no presets,” rings the hands-in-the-air vocal hook of “Preset,” Crooked Man’s most fully-formed address on the beat-wise freedoms. Amid an insistent thumb-piano loop, the track expands, opens up and goes deep, with smiles and tears mixing forever-ever.
This is the natural oblivion of people who live long enough to end up justified and ancient. It’s a curse, but it’s also a source of the joy. Because being there isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if you’re not also willing to be here now; which, whether Barratt will ever admit through all his cynicism, is never a question in his music. | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | September 24, 2016 | 7.8 | e9f8e22d-6c6d-4c4b-b6fa-7bf4f0642afd | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | null |
Big Star's never-completed third album is enshrined in a triple-disc box that contains all known recordings from the 1974 sessions and finally makes sense of all the chaos. | Big Star's never-completed third album is enshrined in a triple-disc box that contains all known recordings from the 1974 sessions and finally makes sense of all the chaos. | Big Star: Complete Third | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22348-complete-third/ | Complete Third | Big Star never completed their third album. In fact, it’s likely that the music collected on Omnivore’s triple-disc box set Complete Third was never intended to be a Big Star album. Alex Chilton maintained as late as 2007 that he and drummer Jody Stephens never considered these 1974 sessions a Big Star project, a testament supported by the fact that none of the tapes in Ardent Studios were labeled with name “Big Star.” Instead, they were credited to Alex Chilton alone, Alex & Jody, and Sister Lovers, a punning reference to the fact the pair were dating sisters at the time.
Sister Lovers also provided Rykodisc with a subtitle for these recordings when they issued Third/Sister Lovers on CD in 1992, marking the first time a label attempted to seriously piece the puzzle of Big Star Third together. Prior to that, the album came out under a variety of titles—3rd, The Third Album, Big Star’s 3rd: Sister Lovers, Sister Lovers (The Third Album), with the alleged provisional title Beale Street Green remaining the province of bootlegs—all bearing a different track listing, none of which mirrored the test pressing that was unsuccessfully shopped around to labels in 1975.
Reissue producer Cheryl Pawelski uses that test pressing as her lodestar on Complete Third, letting it form the foundation of the third disc of final mixes, serving as a culmination to the discs of demos and rough mixes that precede it. A good chunk of these tracks previously appeared on archival releases from Rhino, Big Beat/Ace and Omnivore, but 28 debut here. None of these unheard cuts would make much sense on their own release, but they provide crucial pieces of the narrative on a box set that attempts to make sense of sessions that the creators themselves don't quite understand.
One thing all participants—Chilton and Stephens, producer Jim Dickinson, Ardent owner/producer/engineer John Fry—can agree upon is that no official version of Third exists. Dickinson attempted to piece it together for Rykodisc in 1992 but he freely admits that his vision differed from Chilton’s and once this period passed into history Chilton showed no interest in revisiting it. In the liner notes to Complete Third, Ken Stringfellow—the Posies guitarist who was instrumental in ushering the reunited Big Star into the ’90s and 2000s—recalls a time when he and his partner Jon Auer cajoled Chilton to attempt “Kizza Me” at a latter-day reunion show. Once the band kicked off the song at sound check, Alex stood still as a statue, refusing to lay hands on his guitar or sing. By that point Chilton was finished with Third. But as Chris Stamey— a co-leader of the dB’s who helped maintained the Big Star legend in the ’70s as Stringfellow did in the ’90s—notes elsewhere in the liners, there was a time when these were among his “newest and dearest” tunes.
Those early demos on the first disc do indeed carry traces of sweetness, particularly in the delicate readings of “Lovely Day,” “Thank You Friends,” “Take Care,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Blue Moon,” all sounding like natural extensions of the folk tunes scattered through the first two Big Star albums, not to mention some of the material Chilton attempted just after leaving the Box Tops. Even the album’s towering triptych of gloom—“Holocaust,” “Nightime,” and “Kanga Roo” (entitled “Like St. Joan” in its first incarnation)—feel brokenhearted rather than desolate. So what happened between these initial readings and the final mixes, which often feel like a fever dream from a man embracing madness?
Again, nobody knows for sure, but everybody orbiting Ardent in the mid-’70s agree Chilton was hell bent on self-immolation, bitter at the industry, angry at himself, and involved in a destructive relationship with Lesa Aldridge, his girlfriend and muse who co-wrote “Downs,” an improbably chipper valentine to quaaludes. Jim Dickinson could always spin a yarn, and he invented a tale for Third, determining that the album was all about decomposition—a decay that began with the unraveling of Big Star, spread through the dissolution of the golden age of Memphis music, then taking root at the breakdown of Chilton himself. It’s a good story, one that’s likely true on some level, but it’s also a bit pat, the kind of thing that a producer invents: he’s cobbling together a narrative out of what seems to be a mess.
Complete Third presents that purported mess as a whole, offering every known existing recording from the sessions, and, in doing so, it suggests the sessions weren’t quite as chaotic as lore suggests. Certainly, the demos show that Chilton’s songs were fully formed at the start, so it was a deliberate decision on his part to record the songs just as Jody Stephens was learning them. Ardent producer/engineer Adam Hill supports this theory: “While the lack of pre-production contributed to the loose feel of the songs, there’s no doubt that Alex was chasing sounds he heard in his head, and he knew when had captured them on tape.” If Chilton was deadset in chasing chaos, Dickinson was his ideal partner. Where John Fry favored precision—fitting for an engineer who ran a studio—Dickinson preferred to let things careen out of control, either because he knew magic came with mistakes or because he couldn't resist mischief.
Once Dickinson enters the picture, somewhere around the tail end of the first disc after the initial demos were completed, things start to get weird and heavy. The pivot is a pair of duets between Alex Chilton and Lesa Aldridge, where the pair turn the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired” into a narcotic crawl and pretend to be Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris on “That’s All It Took.” From there, the madness has settled in, so it's no surprise that they stumble through T. Rex’s “Baby Strange” or spend five minutes dicking around on guitar and steel drums dubbed “Pre-Downs”—an indication that the innocence of the initial demos had now curdled.
The second disc documents how the sessions started to congeal, the beauty and the bleakness sometimes existing on the same plane, sometimes separating into their own spheres. If there are no great revelations here—the closest is a version of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” sung by Lesa, one of many Lou Reed allusions here (another is Alex quoting “Perfect Day” at the start of “I’m So Tired”)—it nevertheless gives an idea of the vibe of the recordings, how it was pitched halfway between madness and intention. Comparing the first disc of Complete Third to the second, and it’s clear that Chilton wanted to create the illusion that everything was spinning out of control.
Perhaps Chilton succeeded too well, muddying the barrier between the act and the art. After a while, John Fry pulled the plug. He reached his breaking point when Alex pulled in a drunk off the street to sing on a soused version of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Fry claimed later that the sessions turned “perverted,” which might be a reference to run-of-the-mill late-night seediness but might have a deeper meaning: Third perverted the ideals Fry held for Ardent. When he opened the studio, he allowed the British Invasion mavens of Memphis to hone their craft after hours at a cut rate. It’s how Chilton and collaborator Chris Bell developed the crystalline power pop of #1 Record and Radio City—these largely were songs invented in the studio and executed by Fry—and such late night sessions are also how Third came to be, except they came out curdled instead of clear.
Fry shopped the album to labels in 1975 in the hopes of recouping some of the money poured into the project. Nobody bit. Lenny Waronker at Warner asked, “I don’t have to listen to that again, do I?” Over at Atlantic, Jerry Wexler claimed “This record makes me feel very uncomfortable.”
Wexler was onto something. The bleakest moments of Third remain unsettling, capable of causing existential shivers on a bright, sunny day. Creeping along with no seeming sense of momentum, “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo” have an inexorable pull—listening to them is like being pulled out to sea on an inescapable undercurrent, utterly impossible to navigate your way back to shore. When paired with the carnivalesque flourish of “Jesus Christ,” the homespun baroque pop of “Stroke It Noel,” the explosive carnality of “Kizza Me” and the woozy sway of “O, Dana,” Third can’t help but suggest that Alex Chilton was losing his grip. The primary gift of Complete Third is to reveal that this was a deliberate performance, not audio verite. Perhaps Third was, as Jim Dickinson claimed, the sound of decomposition. But by presenting the demos, working sessions and final mixes in order, Complete Third makes plain that far from being an unwieldy jumble, Alex Chilton meant to have Third sound as tortured, haunting and beautiful as the darkest moments of the soul. | 2016-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Omnivore | October 13, 2016 | 9.5 | ea120830-f12f-4750-bcf4-d403f653ad03 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
Akio Suzuki has been making earthy yet ethereal sounds for over four decades now, all quietly\n\ emanating from the ... | Akio Suzuki has been making earthy yet ethereal sounds for over four decades now, all quietly\n\ emanating from the ... | Akio Suzuki: Odds and Ends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7639-odds-and-ends/ | Odds and Ends | Akio Suzuki has been making earthy yet ethereal sounds for over four decades now, all quietly emanating from the Japanese countryside. Born in 1941, he's made outdoor sound the focus of his career, constructing installations that transcend space and time, turning the outside world into a lucid daydream. In 1997, Suzuki analyzed the French town Enghien-Les-Bains, precisely mapping out (with footsteps) areas where echoes were most resonant. He built a simple concrete enclosure on the banks of their lake, designed to eliminate vision but maximize sound, a natural sensory amplifier with disorienting, very Zen implications. Barely available on record, some of Suzuki's experiments are finally captured on this two-disc compendium available from Hören (most readily available in the US from Forced Exposure).
Most pieces grow out of wind-swept silence, sometimes gathering the force to transform into typhoons of feedback (see "Howling Objects"), but most of this sound barely brushes across the leaves, turning all into Aeolian harps. "Analapos '70", named after an instrument Suzuki built himself, echoes like Watazumido Shuso's bamboo flute drawing its breath through Aphex Twin's ambient hull, an aural free fall that lets the body blow about, weightless. As Jim O'Rourke nicely put it, Suzuki's music "reminds us that we don't need to rush to feel alive, don't need to 'be somewhere' in the next 15 minutes, because we're already 'there', all you have to do is listen."
"Drumming" builds to incomprehension, as incessant waterfalls on a hand drum cascade beyond any rhythmic pattern. The birds and glass tubes of "Ha Go Ro Mo" float between a Pygmy lukembi, Tibetan prayer bowl, and Javanese gamelan, vibrations somehow disembodied from any obvious geography. Most peculiar on the double-disc set is "Plate Juggling", an archived performance from 1984. Set up for lock grooves on three record players, Suzuki's sounds at times approximate ducks on a pond, kazoos, and Tuvan throat singers. As these odd bursts of quacks and skronks build, the audience's unmitigated laughter becomes yet another source, finding its place among the inimitable noises. At turns minimal and maddening, this piece makes for a most singular listening experience, drastically altering concepts of what can be made from such grating sounds.
Suzuki's unadorned sense of play has been cause for admiration: O'Rourke, David Toop, and Eye from Boredoms all sound off in wonderment of what he's capable of creating from such nondescript items. To simply suggest that Suzuki makes incredible soundscapes out of sun-baked brick echo chambers, elongated springs, looping records, rocks, or empty beer bottles is to falsely convey that he's somehow distinct from these objects. As ancient scribe Tzu-ch'I put it: "Blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each can be itself-- all take what they want for themselves, but who does the sounding?" | 2003-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hören | February 25, 2003 | 8.5 | ea12519c-03e6-4070-a975-7556032b8e73 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On a lively new album, the electronic producer is a master of atmosphere, creating a mood of childlike whimsy while teasing a future in dream-pop songwriting. | On a lively new album, the electronic producer is a master of atmosphere, creating a mood of childlike whimsy while teasing a future in dream-pop songwriting. | Khotin: Release Spirit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khotin-release-spirit/ | Release Spirit | Dylan Khotin-Foote has been bobbing between lo-fi house and moth-eaten ambient music for nearly a decade now. On four albums released between 2014 and 2020, the Canadian electronic musician known simply as Khotin established a remarkably consistent palette, not so much developing his style as sinking further into it, as one might into a well-worn yet exceptionally cozy sofa. He is fond of muffled drum hits, plush sub-bass, and washed-out pads from the Casio SK-1, a legendarily basic sampling keyboard from the 1980s. On his debut LP, Hello World, Khotin leaned heavily on vintage Roland drum machines and classic house grooves, but in the years since, he has slowed the tempo and thrown a thick blanket over the percussion without tinkering too much with the essence of his sound. His moods are as unvarying as his toolkit: dreamy, faintly distracted, and unmistakably bittersweet, yet filigreed with something resembling optimism.
Release Spirit, Khotin’s first album since 2020’s Finds You Well, follows a move from Vancouver back to his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, but it’s difficult to discern what impact, if any, those 700 miles may have had on his music. A suggestion of childlike whimsy pervades the music; flutelike leads trace lazy circles in the air, and the squishy contours of his synths occasionally recall Play-Doh, or Silly Putty. Like Boards of Canada, he uses nearly subliminal tape-warping effects to vividly nostalgic ends, and autobiographical tidbits litter the album like yellowing snapshots you might peel from the pages of a spiral-bound photo album. In the opening “HV Road,” he digs out a recording from a family vacation at British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake, his younger siblings’ voices bleeding across the singing of crickets. (“Why are you recording again?” one of them asks with barely veiled disdain.) And “3 pz” borrows its oddly discombobulated, strongly accented spoken-language vocals (“You stained your suit… Oh my god, you stained your dress… This guy is so annoying—you annoy me, do you understand?”) from an English-language learners’ tape he found at the home of his grandparents, who immigrated from Russia in the 1980s.
The album’s pulses are practically cryonic, yet the music is surprisingly lively. Sluggish drum machines and languorous breakbeats are frequently threaded with silvery detailing and cascading metallic accents. In “Lovely,” a trim, bleepy arpeggio embroiders curlicues around a beat that trudges like boots in slush; in “Life Mask,” a calm landscape of Harold Budd-like piano and ambient birdsong is interrupted by rapidly spinning twisters of dub delay. Everywhere you listen, overlapping rhythms—unsteady tremolo effects, pitter-pat hi-hats, stuttering vocal samples—are spreading out and colliding, like ripples on the surface of a lake.
Some of the best tracks use the mercurial sound of the TB-303 as an organizing principle. “Home World 303” unrolls contrapuntal acid lines, one squelchy and one pinging; “Computer Break” tips a portamento lead into seesawing motion. It’s a smart addition to the playbook—music as hazy as Khotin’s benefits from a point of focus. Like his previous records, the wispy Release Spirit is so uniformly pretty that it doesn’t always leave a strong impression. But two tracks point to potential new directions for Khotin’s sound. “Techno Creep” starts out on Andy Stott’s chilly, torpid turf, but—warmed by Balearic guitar and new-age synths—it thaws and blooms as it goes, like a patch of Arctic tundra turning tropical. “Fountain, Growth” begins with a slow-motion acid-trance chug before the voice of Montreal’s Tess Roby comes fading into earshot, her reverberant sighs as blissfully enigmatic as the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. It’s a dream-pop distillation of the classic Khotin sound—and a suggestion that this master of atmosphere might have a future in actual songs. | 2023-02-21T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-21T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | February 21, 2023 | 7.3 | ea1282dc-e8dc-47e1-ad88-1decea8a2930 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Australian band sets tales of the dystopian future to punk rock that’s nasty, cartoonish, and short. | The Australian band sets tales of the dystopian future to punk rock that’s nasty, cartoonish, and short. | 3D & the Holograms: 3D & the Holograms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3d-and-the-holograms-3d-and-the-holograms/ | 3D & the Holograms | Listening to Australian punk band 3D & the Holograms is like thumbing through a comic book killing spree. The carnage is splashy and colorful, an addictive thrill that keeps you turning the page. The Sydney miscreants are fronted by the scuzz-voiced Billy Reilly of Research Reactor Corporation. Ishka Teevee, who records as Tee Vee Repairman and Satanic Togas, handles bass, lead guitar, and synths. JJ Gobington, from Olympia, Washington’s the Gobs, fills in on drums and rhythm guitar. On their self-titled debut, 3D & the Holograms thrash through 12 fast and nasty songs in under 15 minutes, leaving a trail of busted drumsticks and frayed power cables in their wake.
3D & the Holograms formed as a way to combat the idle months of the 2020 lockdown. Reilly was creatively restless and unable to play live with his other bands—Studs, Mainframe, and the Motorheads. So he tapped Gobington to email him guitar and drum tracks that he later fleshed out with Teevee in Sydney. The resulting debut is scrawled with distortion and laser beam guitar, and it’s driven by Reilly’s gristly howl. Each clipped track—none of which reaches the two-minute mark—dispatches grim reports from a dystopian future.
Mostly, Reilly is shouting about technology turning on its master, whether it’s a 3D printer that spits out humanoids (“Machine”) or a murderous AI entity (“Projection”). On “VR Execution,” he imagines a simulation that lets you witness your own death. “Strap you in the chair/Administer the shot,” he croaks. “Screening your own death/Into your frontal lobe.” The band makes these rants about the distant future sound ripped from vintage 7"s: Teevee treats his synthesizer like an electric organ, emitting a shredding hook that glows like plutonium. It recalls the mad-scientist energy of ’70s electro-punks the Screamers or a rabid, street urchin strain of early Devo.
Despite his phlegmy sneer, Reilly is more of an apocalyptic prankster than a politico crust punk, and he prioritizes a sense of humor across his many bands. “It’s like we’re a cartoon or like Toxic Avenger,” he told an interviewer around the time 3D & the Holograms were forming. “We’re like a goofy the-world-is-ending-but-who-cares thing.” He was talking specifically about Research Reactor Corp., but the same themes apply for 3D: wasteoid punks stomping around in combat boots, dodging killer cyborgs Terminator-style. But thanks to his unintelligible delivery—unless you can scrounge up a lyric sheet—you’ll have to enjoy Reilly’s jokes from a glance at the tracklist (see: “Sack of Meat” and “Buried in Leather”).
You might not know exactly what you’re saying, but Reilly’s lyrics are still built to bark along to. On “Asshole Hotline,” he plays an irate phone operator, listing off numbers like “1-800 fuck off” and “1-55 eat my shit” as Teevee whips up a synth line fit to guide a soccer stadium chant. On “C4,” the singer devises his own dramatic end, snarling over trash-can-lid snares. “Dynamite squeezed in my ass/I’m going out with a blast,” he foretells. A sample of glass smashing in the background only underlines the band’s cartoonish shtick—like a “POW” or “KABOOM” scribbled in red block letters. 3D & the Holograms might be mapping out their very own techno dystopia, but it’s inked in Day-Glo and dotted with only the most essential information—like where to get pissed and pogo as as the world crumbles around you. | 2023-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RoachLeg | March 29, 2023 | 7 | ea1cb82c-b1d8-480d-8339-be0bcd5b2ae3 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The electronic duo Odesza are at the center of the current movement in stadium-filling ”chill” music. Their latest is full of billowing vocal harmonies, seismic rumble, and turbo-charged trap beats. | The electronic duo Odesza are at the center of the current movement in stadium-filling ”chill” music. Their latest is full of billowing vocal harmonies, seismic rumble, and turbo-charged trap beats. | Odesza: A Moment Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/odesza-a-moment-apart/ | A Moment Apart | In the past couple of years, chill has become ubiquitous, not just as a verb (“Netflix and chill”) but as adjective (the “chill bro”), prefix (chillstep, chilltrap), and even noun: Per SoundCloud hashtags, at least, “chill” has become a genre unto itself. Contra Moore’s Law and all the breakneck terrors of an accelerated age, chill has been elevated to something like a state of being: a lifestyle, a philosophy, a categorical imperative.
A whole musical scene has evolved to satisfy the urge to decelerate. But as the aforementioned chillstep and chilltrap (faded variants of dubstep and trap, if you hadn’t guessed) suggest, ironically enough, the chill scene, at least in electronic music, is inextricable from its main-stage, peak-hour EDM counterparts. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety, exaggerated gestures, a kind of weaponized softness; in its side-chained whoosh and billion-watt sparkle, it practically screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED NOW! (It seems not coincidental that the rise of chill has appeared alongside not just marijuana’s widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)
Odesza may not be the biggest stars of this movement (that distinction probably falls to Australia’s Flume), but they’re close. If their YouTube stats are impressive—23 million views for 2014’s “Say My Name,” 14 million for “Sun Models”—their numbers on Spotify are just mind-boggling: More than 82 million plays for “Sun Models,” nearly as much for “Say My Name,” close to a third of a billion cumulative plays across their top 10 songs on the platform. Not bad for a couple of guys who started making music together just five years ago, shortly before graduating from Western Washington University.
The first Odesza album, 2012’s Summer’s Gone, offered a fairly innocuous contribution to the emerging chill canon, taking cues from Bonobo, Tycho, and Four Tet and smoothing them into a tantalizing array of chimes, feathery textures, and powdery drum hits. Two years later, In Return bathed in an even more opulent abalone glow; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest turns that channeled the decade’s default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was original and meticulously produced, but it got cloying real fast, like chugging from an oversized hummingbird feeder.
Today, Odesza are a proper stadium act. In May, they did two sold-out nights at Colorado’s Red Rocks, complete with electric guitar, eight-person choreographed drum line, and visuals by in-house live creative director Luke Tanaka. The new album is accordingly ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things, trigger a lot of feelings. It’s full of billowing vocal harmonies and seismic rumble and turbo-charged trap beats; its default mode is a kind of eyes-closed beatitude, and every climax is but a stepping stone to a bigger climax. That it’s an album about desire is obvious; you can sense their anticipation at feeling that brass ring brushing beneath their fingertips.
After a ruminative introduction, the title track explodes with so much light and color that you half expect Animal Collective’s voices to come soaring through the flames. From there, A Moment Apart just keeps chasing bigger thrills, deeper colors, and more heartstring-tugging emotions across an hour-long set of bright-eyed electronic pop, pan-pipe trap, breakbeat soul, and slow-motion house. “Boy” is a gleaming trap/dubstep amalgam fitted out with a yearning vocal hook; “Meridian” flips cascading, exotic-sounding choral harmonies into a soundscape evocative of a CGI-enhanced rainforest flyover in IMAX. As they’ve beefed up their sound, though, Odesza have lost some of their uniqueness. “Higher Ground,” featuring Naomi Wild, borrows from Purity Ring’s Kevlar-coated twee; “Line of Sight,” featuring the singers WYNNE and Mansionair, is a moody, mid-tempo ballad reminiscent of the Chainsmokers’ “Closer,” right down to the wheezy, staccato keys.
It doesn’t help that their guest singers’ lyrics rarely scale heights comparable to the duo’s vertiginous waveforms. “I need you now/Gravity can’t hold us down/So just take me there/To higher ground,” sings Naomi Wild, hemmed in by the confines of her rhyming couplet; two songs later, WYNNE falls into the same moon-June-spoon-shaped rut: “I’m feeling in and out/I turn full circle round and round/So will you help me down/Come grab my hand for solid ground.” But those vague platitudes may be preferable to Leon Bridges’ verses on “Across the Room,” a cloying slow jam whose sappy, sexed-up gravitas brings to mind Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me.” The breakup song “Just a Memory” is less icky; Regina Spektor is a more convincing storyteller, but her soaring soprano coo feels better suited to a Disney theme song. Squeezing genuine emotion out of this music is about as likely as finding comfort snuggling with one of Jeff Koons’ balloon-dog sculptures.
It all comes to a head with the closing “Corners of the Earth”: Over diffuse choral harmonies, RY X does his best Justin Vernon impression, while swelling synths and pounding drums conjure M83 and Sigur Rós. As the song builds, you can practically see the fighter jets crisscrossing overhead, their fuselages kissed with the colors of the fireworks exploding around them. “Tonight we run/Through love we never knew/Our love to everyone/We love tonight for love,” he sings, tautologically; “We’re golden/We’re golden/We’re golden/We’re golden.” But the harder the band strive to reach sublimity, the more earthbound their music feels. It’s fitting that he should begin with “Tonight we run/We run into the sun”; the song, like the album, has Icarus’ charred fingerprints all over it. | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Counter / Foreign Family Collective | September 12, 2017 | 5.8 | ea25191a-6a9c-4da8-8780-18c774679f6a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Hamilton Leithauser and co. faithfully cover the 1974 Harry Nilsson album recorded by his friend and drinking buddy John Lennon. | Hamilton Leithauser and co. faithfully cover the 1974 Harry Nilsson album recorded by his friend and drinking buddy John Lennon. | The Walkmen: Pussy Cats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9548-pussy-cats/ | Pussy Cats | It's not hate, it's practicality: The Walkmen's note-for-note reproduction of Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats (and its accompanying DVD) is not being given away as a free download, nor as a CD-R at shows, a fan club release, or even a limited run-- they're just plain asking for your money on this. It'd be more forgivable if this record were bringing Nilsson's material to a new or wider audience, but despite the Walkmen playing illustrious venues like the Bait Shop, I'd guess the opposite is happening. The Walkmen's Pussy Cats is for the tiny sliver of the Venn diagram where fans of the original LP and long-established Walkmen fans intersect (and where this writer admittedly rests). The band's faithful recasting is a curio to Nilsson followers, and while it'll stir many fans to sing along, it's in all the same places they've been doing for years.
The story behind Nilsson's original is almost as good as the record: Nilsson was friendly with all the Beatles, but was far closer to (and owed more to) John Lennon than the rest. Nilsson was Lennon's main drinking buddy throughout the ex-Beatle's "Lost Weekend" period in L.A., a time when Lennon was separated from Yoko Ono and Pussy Cats came to fruition. When the two finally went into the studio with Lennon as producer, Nilsson's vocal cords ruptured, ruining his impressive higher register for the entirety of the session-- yet he never told Lennon, for fear the project would be halted. It goes to show how Nilsson valued and looked up to his friend, but also why he remained a cult figure despite writing huge hits, being loved by esteemed fellow artists like the Beatles, and remaining incredibly consistent as a songwriter (though the fact this album was originally to be called Strange Pussies is but one example of how Nilsson flouted record company wishes and public regard).
So there's a big reason why the Walkmen are a perfect fit for not just Nilsson, but for this album in particular, and it's not just that Hamilton Leithauser has a talent for sounding like his throat is scorched. The Walkmen cultivate the stubborn, lovable loser segment of Nilsson's persona on a microscale, eschewing structure and expectation from song to song where Nilsson did it album to album-- and we know that the Walkmen are just as capable of writing hits (see "The Rat") if they weren't following their own muse wherever it led and just being so goddamned stubborn. I'm a fan of every incidental noise on Bows and Arrows, but the band's (numerous) slow jams always have that last-call weave just as this particular record does, and anyone who's seen the Walkmen live know they're not afraid to put in a frazzled performance for the sake of spirit , even if they don't quite have the same command of their craft.
Or do they? It's funny how they can reproduce the sounds on the original Pussy Cats so accurately, from the strings on "Many Rivers to Cross" to the guitar tone in "Subterranean Homesick Blues", casting their other records as carefully arranged where they might have sounded vague and unfinished to casual listeners. Funnier that the only track here that sounds like the band themselves ("Black Sails") isn't even sung by Leithauser, but by Mazarin frontman Quentin Stoltzfus (the writer of "Another One Goes By", which the Walkmen cribbed to close A Hundred Miles Off). If I were the type to make assumptions, I'd be tempted to say the boys are having something of an identity crisis this year.
But I hated "Many Rivers to Cross" on first listen and I still do, just as I'm disappointed by "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Whether it was personality or just necessity under the circumstances, Nilsson's covers on this record were distinctive; the Walkmen just paint by numbers, despite that the canvas is unlimited. They were within their bounds to record these songs however they wanted, not just how Nilsson did. Ian Svenonius (of Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, etc.) shows up to add barely-noticeable backup to "Subterranean", though he's more audible on a duet of "Save the Last Dance" that sounds like it's being sung through a home karaoke shelf system while he and Leithauser sound appropriately inebriated.
Still, better they piss all over the source material than the stiff reverence of barroom ballads like "Don't Forget Me", "Old Forgotten Soldier", or even the sprightly teetotaler anthem "All My Life"-- even if the band nails them and Leithauser sounds more comfortable here than on much of his band's last record. Do they embarrass themselves? Not in the least. But they do raise the question of why this album even needs to be heard outside the band themselves, and why it should be in stores. The accompanying press will encourage letting them off easy by emphasizing that it's all in fun, and I'm not saying that's wrong-- I mean, one of them is dressed as a piece of fruit on the cover. It's supposed to be a lark, but rarely does the gaiety or spontaneity so evident on the original Pussy Cats shine through.
One exception: The album was recorded in the last days of the band's self-owned Marcata Studios before being torn down, and the drill sounds that open the final cut "Rock Around the Clock" could be the walls coming down as the band races through their last track, tripping over their feet in their final minutes of fun. Then, and pretty much only then, does something more than admiration materialize, and the band catches some of the intangible legend floating around Nilsson's output of the Pussy Cats era. Every booze-soaked bad idea is remembered the next day with half-grimace, half-impish grin-- there's always a thrill to know what you got away with that you may not have otherwise. This was all over Nilsson's album, and the Walkmen catch at least a glint of it here. | 2006-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Recordcollection | October 24, 2006 | 5.1 | ea265b37-8f6e-46d9-9fd5-25b4ae8348c0 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
A dystopian band for dystopian times, Ladytron return with an angry, pitiless, evil-sounding record whose nihilism presents them as sirens of the apocalypse. | A dystopian band for dystopian times, Ladytron return with an angry, pitiless, evil-sounding record whose nihilism presents them as sirens of the apocalypse. | Ladytron: Ladytron | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ladytron-ladytron/ | Ladytron | Two Decembers ago, news viewers were gripped by videos of flames engulfing the California mountains, cars on the 405 shuttling imperturbably toward the blaze. For the past couple years the world has produced apocalyptic scenarios like people exhale breath, but seldom have they looked so much like an apocalypse, like literally driving into hell—or running into it, as the cover of Ladytron’s first album in nearly eight years seems to depict.
Basically, there’s something going on, and it’s bad, and Ladytron are aware: Since 2011’s Gravity the Seducer, the band members have scattered to Brazil, the U.S., England, and Scotland, a cross-section of recent disaster sites. And much like the world, they have spent the last few years steadily draining their music of any levity, any fun, of anything like Light and Magic’s “cocaine decisions.” (It is mind-boggling to remember this band once did a jokey garage-rock cover of Tweet’s masturbation tease “Oops (Oh My).”) There was always a bitterness to their lyrics, as on the evergreen-like-poison-ivy “Seventeen” (as in, “They only want you when you’re...”), and a striking prescience: the dead-eyed Fiverr-ad gig-economy hellscape of “Weekend” to the ragged, running heroines of Velocifero to the self-explanatory “Fighting in Built-Up Areas.” Their best-known video was already set in an austere ice hell. They are the dystopian band for these dystopian times.
Ladytron is to Gravity the Seducer what Velocifero was to The Witching Hour: the same idea, sharpened into a knife. It is an angry, pitiless, at times evil-sounding record. Opener “Until the Fire” returns to the melting glacier of “Ace of Hz” or “White Elephant” and hitches it to frantic percussion, like staging “Rebel Girl” in a decaying cathedral. The martial drums of Igor Cavalera, of Sepultura, tear through “Horrorscope” like a haunted-carnival Tilt-A-Whirl. “Figurine” pairs the coldest of sawtooth synths with the most windswept of string whooshes: a lonely, gorgeous juxtaposition. Helen Marnie’s swirl of backing vocals on “The Mountain” makes it resemble “The Sound of Silence” shrouded in gas. “Deadzone” rests atop a synth throb not unlike the one in “Dancing on My Own,” but it’s dipped in about three poisons. Early single “The Animals,” with a riff like a war cry, is the closest Ladytron have ever come to making another “Destroy Everything You Touch"; somehow, it may be even bigger.
Despite the cover, Ladytron is not a political record so much as a nihilistic one that just happens to fit the moment. Their records tend to soak up the spirit of the times—Daniel Hunt credits Velocifero’s punishing drive to the recession happening the year before—and so does this. “[The record comments] on all the social things that are going on right now, but I wanted to create a sense of disorientation and maybe claustrophobia, which I think a lot of people are feeling,” Marnie told Paper. With the need to comment comes a streamlining of the lyrics; Ladytron tend to be oblique in their songwriting, but here they are less so. The change isn’t always for the better—the album’s very first couplet lands on a “fire”/”desire” rhyme. But mostly, they get straight to the nihilistic point.
“The Islands” presents the Martin Gore-like slogan, “Faith, lust, desire,” and the Ladytron thesis: “We are sirens of the apocalypse.” “There’s no law, there’s no God,” they warn on “The Animals": “There’s no heart, there’s no love,” and no mood has been bigger. Images recur: bad futures, horror films, shattered glass, animals hunting and hunted; deaths and rebirths, plural, as if Ladytron were providing one of the moody synth pieces from the soundtrack to “Russian Doll.” The occult abounds: “Ballerina palm reader” is the nightmare emcee of the Mira Aroyo-led “Horrorscope"; Aroyo’s other track, “Paper Highways,” mentions turning to tarot cards. “Deadzone” and “You’ve Changed” seethe with anger and unresolved trauma, Helen Marnie less singing than sputtering out words in a panic, tense to the bones.
Every Ladytron album has a few extremely low points, and on Ladytron those are “Run” (a part two to “The Animals,” not a particularly necessary one) and “Paper Highways” (the first part is great, as if wrought from iron wreckage, but it veers into a saccharine, completely misplaced chorus, like they handed it to Disney for a second). Much better as a ray of solace is the quietly experimental “Tomorrow Is Another Day,” getting through a Peter Gabriel-ish beat, a sandblaster of a synth, Jam & Lewis cowbells, and shading chords like disappearing and re-emerging hope. It’s the kind of packed track you can imagine a whole album springing out of, much like Ladytron could have sprung out of “The Lovers.” | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | !K7 | February 15, 2019 | 7.7 | ea37dded-041e-4816-a8c6-bb0945da3e2b | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
On their first album in 17 years, the post-hardcore band comes exploding back with dutiful performances and familiarly obtuse lyrics, but the overall impact of their style has waned. | On their first album in 17 years, the post-hardcore band comes exploding back with dutiful performances and familiarly obtuse lyrics, but the overall impact of their style has waned. | At the Drive In: in•ter a•li•a | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23099-inter-alia/ | in•ter a•li•a | Take a few minutes to reacquaint yourself with the “One Armed Scissor” video. The one shown on MTV, the late night performances, any will do. This was how most of the world was introduced to At the Drive In, and every time, the El Paso band was presented as the most exciting shit imaginable in 2000: the explosive intraband dynamic, their acrobatic musicality, the barely controlled violence of their live performances, the afros. Meanwhile, their first piece of new music since Relationship of Command was premiered with a video that focuses solely on the two things that make At the Drive In seem kinda ridiculous in 2017: the lyrics and their artwork. “Governed by Contagions” maintains a kind of vestigial potency on account of sounding instantly recognizable as At the Drive In, which is true of in•ter a•li•a as well. But just as often, there’s the sense that time has diminished that power, and much like the vanished hyphen in their name and the replacement of Jim Ward with another member of Sparta, the subtractions are as subtle as they are undeniable.
in•ter a•li•a doesn’t exactly pick up where Relationship of Command left off; it just imagines if ATDI continued to coexist alongside the side projects it spawned, like a carton of milk absorbing the odors around it. “Call Broken Arrow” and “Torrentially Cutshaw” are *Relationship of Command *deep cuts refracted through the groove-oriented Antemasque and the stylized psychedelia of Bosnian Rainbows, while “Incurably Innocent” has a third-gen emo edge that could be sourced from guitarist Keeley Davis’ former band Engine Down. Meanwhile, “Governed by Contagions” imagines an inverted trajectory of ATDI, as if they were actually a fusion of the Mars Volta’s hammiest operatics and Sparta’s rigid alt-rock. “Thaaaat’s the way the guillotine claps,” Cedric Bixler-Zavala sings, punctuated by a gimmicky handclap and the swift liquidation of any goodwill generated by their 2016 return.
Hearing it as the fourth track on in•ter a•li•a doesn’t make a good song, but while almost four minutes of slightly off-brand At the Drive In is a massive disappointment in the context of 2017 and Relationship of Command, after 41 minutes, it’s easier to accept what in•ter a•li•a brings to the present day when no one else sounds anything like them. And when Bixler-Zavala’s language is the only one being spoken, it’s easier to meet him on his own incomprehensible terms. At the Drive In’s dispatches on shadow governments, mind-crime operations, and cloak-and-dagger espionage remains resonant like most prog of its kind, even when littered with obvious buzzwords like “bourgeoisie” and “chemtrails.”
In a rare instance of verbal candor, Bixler-Zavala has explained his intent to place in•ter a•li•a firmly within 2017: the writing process drew on the instability of the Korean peninsula, parenthood, his wife’s trauma from sexual assault, and possibly Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma police officer serving life in prison for multiple counts of rape. These are sensitive topics and so Bixler-Zavala’s puzzle-master approach to writing is reasonable. But what exactly are lines like “Smuggled in their faith like an orbit in decay/drools the cloying adulation of the pissants,” or, “Caving the symptom of confessional/Into the licorice forgery/And she dogged the seduction subdued by The Handmaid's Tale” trying to get across? Though it’ll be given a more serious reading than anything on a Mars Volta album, Bixler-Zavala’s verbal indulgences express little more than its own prolificacy, adding distance and distraction rather than depth.
Once again, this isn’t a terribly different approach than what came before; in fact, the band went to great lengths to take the same approach, revisiting old books, movies and even mixtapes to enter the mindset they had while creating Relationship of Command. But when ATDI careened with the same scatterbrained urgency as Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics, their mania cohered into a worldview that could be understood on a gut level. No revelation came immediately: What would “Arcarsenal” be if it didn’t have its 50-second intro or the piano on the bridge? What if “Pattern Against User” lost its tropical punk asides? What about the bridge on “One Armed Scissor” or the a cappella whispering in “Invalid Litter Dept.”? They would probably fit right in on in•ter a•li•a, which only rocks as if bound by duty: the guitars are loud, the tempos are up, and most songs can be momentarily confused for, say, “Cosmonaut.” But even though they’ve spent almost two decades maligning the Andy Wallace and Ross Robinson mix that allowed Relationship of Command to compete with nu-metal on alt-rock playlists, the stiff and textureless sound of Rich Costey's Muse-honed production aesthetic will only help ATDI sound like a fit with the metalcore titans Of Mice & Men and Memphis May Fire that they can now call their labelmates.
It’s tempting to play armchair psychologist and say the lack of stakes or risk inherent in in•ter a•li•a is just the inevitable result of this being an ATDI album where everyone seems to enjoy each other’s company; or, the natural outgrowth of a well-received reunion tour that wasn’t tainted by the band’s own claims of it being a nostalgic cash grab. At the Drive In engaging in fan service is understandable, but they arrived at this point by always having something to push against. Earlier in their career, it was the struggle to be noticed in a notoriously blighted city, and later it would be the limitations of their sound or the stagnancy of rock radio, and certainly against each other. While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark. | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rise | May 9, 2017 | 5.8 | ea3a7d24-d07c-4198-a4a3-b1a675a12db9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The singer-songwriter’s vibrant, self-titled seventh album bridges the gap between his lo-fi impulses and the more conventional pop sound of his debut, without compromising his artistry. | The singer-songwriter’s vibrant, self-titled seventh album bridges the gap between his lo-fi impulses and the more conventional pop sound of his debut, without compromising his artistry. | Shamir: Shamir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shamir-shamir/ | Shamir | Shamir’s music has undergone a few striking overhauls in the past five years. The Las Vegas native abandoned the glossy dance-pop of his debut, Ratchet, after creative differences prompted a split with indie label XL, and spent six follow-up albums as an “anti-career artist.” That meant forgoing the pop-star trajectory and returning to the lo-fi, bare-bones folk and country music he first loved as a youth, taking detours through grunge and indie rock along the way. His uniquely self-reliant catalog represented an effort to divorce the industry and recontextualize himself and his music, mapping out a DIY route to his self-titled seventh album. Here, Shamir’s esoteric musical impulses meet Ratchet’s more conventional songwriting style without forsaking his carefully built artistry. An upbeat and vibrant album, Shamir spans alt-rock, folk, synthpop, and country, heightening the drama of each unpredictable genre shift with agile songwriting and steely confidence.
Often Shamir feels like a pep talk to himself, with lyrics that offer self-assured counters to anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and difficult relationships. “I refuse to fucking suffer/Just to feel whole now,” he trills over jagged guitar riffs and blown-out drums on the standout breakup anthem “On My Own.” The song recalls the guitar pop highlights on 2017’s Revelations and this year’s intimate, fuzzed-out Cataclysm, reveling in a sugar-rush chorus that sounds beamed in from ’90s MTV. Shamir’s dexterous, featherlight voice remains his most powerful tool, able to bend from an offhand whisper to a high-pitched singsong and back down to a growl. “Paranoia seems to be my very best friend,” he quivers softly against a tense, feedback-loaded guitar on “Paranoia”; the clashing elements sound like we’re experiencing a sleepless night in his overactive mind right along with him.
Shamir’s flexible voice imparts joy, yearning, or loss depending on what the moment requires, but the songwriting on Shamir feels newly deft and expressive as well. He worked with several collaborators to help bear out his vision, including indie rock producer Kyle Pulley, who appears on nearly half of the album’s songs. The teamup works especially well on “Running,” where a breezy echo of shoegaze guitar backs up lyrics that wrestle with the conundrum of wanting to be by yourself and in a relationship, too: “I prefer to be alone, but you can join if you like/I’ll stay strong for you ’cause I don’t want to be seen when I cry.” The sticky hooks frame a writerly self-reckoning, turning introversion into armor in a prescient, urgent thematic throughline.
Shamir delights in pivoting from one mood to another, never getting too comfortable with one style for long. On “Pretty When I’m Sad,” a quick drum beat and multi-tracked backing vocals add a delicacy that belies the song’s depiction of a mutually destructive relationship: “Mess with me and face impending doom,” he sings sweetly over a jangling guitar. “Other Side” carries on the album’s contradictory nature, building a country-fried lament that scans as an outlier until its moody lap steel gives way to a sturdy pop chorus about reuniting with a loved one in the afterlife. The genre exercises only falter on the stark closing ballad, “In This Hole,” where a crackling vocal is set against heavy, plaintive strings. The mournful tone is sparse and effective, but the heaviness feels at odds with the rest of the album.
Over a lone, echoing guitar on “I Wonder,” Shamir’s sense of grandeur comes into focus. “I wonder if you’ll be the death of me,” he ponders, stretching out the final three words in anguish. The song builds over a minute and a half until it crests in a blur of synths and drums, scraping up against the piercing emotion of his voice. It’s a raw performance and a gleaming example of the album’s ethos: There’s no element Shamir isn’t willing to try on. By collapsing genre boundaries and molding them into his own homespun image, he’s made an unconventional pop album entirely on his own terms.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | October 8, 2020 | 7.5 | ea3b743d-ac52-4636-9c56-b49f33ad7a5c | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The Russian techno DJ Nina Kraviz enlists Jlin, Buttechno, Midland, and others in remixing all 13 songs from Annie Clark’s 2017 album, to sometimes scattershot effect. | The Russian techno DJ Nina Kraviz enlists Jlin, Buttechno, Midland, and others in remixing all 13 songs from Annie Clark’s 2017 album, to sometimes scattershot effect. | St. Vincent / Nina Kraviz: Nina Kraviz Presents Masseduction Rewired | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/st-vincent-nina-kraviz-nina-kraviz-presents-masseduction-rewired/ | Nina Kraviz Presents Masseduction Rewired | If Masseduction Rewired didn’t exist there would be no great clamor to invent it. St. Vincent’s Masseduction, on which this remix album is based, has already been remade once in acoustic form, and there is no obvious crossover between St. Vincent’s warmly inventive indie pop and the arctic techno freeze of Rewired curator Nina Kraviz. More worryingly, remix albums generally run the gamut from damp squib to outright embarrassment.
Against the odds, though, Masseduction Rewired is actually rather intriguing. No one—bar a rabid and possibly theoretical St. Vincent/Kraviz crossover fan—will enjoy everything here; the 22 tracks frequently stretch the patience, but most people will find something to love. Rewired also provides food for thought: Its catholic approach to remix styles encourages the listener to consider the tangled art of the remake and the question of authorial identity.
Broadly speaking, the remixers on Masseduction Rewired fall somewhere between two poles: those who see the commission as a chance to tweak the original song and those who follow the Aphex Twin school of throwing the master tapes against the wall and seeing what sticks. Steffi’s gilded remix of “Slow Disco” does little more than nudge the original song into deeper disco territory, while EOD’s scuffed up and eerie take on "Los Ageless” makes full use of the original song structure. In both cases, St. Vincent’s songwriting dominates.
At the other end of the scale, Buttechno jettisons all but a few syllables of St. Vincent’s vocal for his remix of “Savior,” which he squanders over a weakling acid-house number that does neither party any lasting good. There’s something rather cheap about this approach, as if the talented Russian producer couldn’t raise himself to properly engage with the material. Icelandic artist Bjarki is also guilty of this; his version of “Pills” reduces the original’s sardonic take on pharmaceutical culture to precisely the two lines —“Pills to fuck” and “Pills, pills, pills”—that you might expect a techno producer with a looming deadline to employ. It’s not a bad song, exactly, just rather uninspired.
Against this are a number of takes where the remixer manages to reinvent or even subvert the original song without destroying it. A remix of “Masseduction” by Midland, the UK producer of “Final Credits” fame, foregrounds the gorgeous string rush in the original’s middle eight to stirring effect; Emika’s take on “Sugarboy” chills St. Vincent’s electro pulse into a glacial, neo-classical synth sweep; and Jlin’s version of “Smoking Section” bustles the original’s languorous waltz into a frisky, devious skip, the authorial spoils shared equally between remixer and remixee.
These individual songs represent the album at its best. But as an overall listening experience, Masseduction Rewired is a slog. It’s not just the album’s fanatical length; the decision (on the digital release) to shadow Masseduction’s original tracklisting means songs get bundled together that are either too similar to their neighbors—Nina Kraviz’ three individually excellent takes on “New York” come in a rather testing row—or too mismatched, with EOD’s mournful remix of “Slow Disco” being rudely interrupted by Kraviz’ more gabber, less gentle “Gabber Me Gently” overhaul of the same song.
Inconsistency and overindulgence mean Masseduction Rewired won’t join Massive Attack’s No Protection in the elite group of truly essential remix albums. But a handful of transformative moments rescue it from the tire fire where Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy Reconfigured pleads guiltily for our pity. Masseduction Rewired is by no means indispensable, but as a distraction it has the frustrating charm of a good crossword puzzle.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Electronic | Loma Vista | December 21, 2019 | 6.7 | ea3fb729-cdfa-45c5-b78b-c8fba8fd6198 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Released on Berghain’s house label, Dominick Fernow’s latest is built around clubbier techno atmospheres, but its transitional nature recalls the spirit of his earlier cassette releases. | Released on Berghain’s house label, Dominick Fernow’s latest is built around clubbier techno atmospheres, but its transitional nature recalls the spirit of his earlier cassette releases. | Vatican Shadow: Rubbish of the Floodwaters EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23264-rubbish-of-the-floodwaters-ep/ | Rubbish of the Floodwaters EP | Stateside, Vatican Shadow is considered the industrial techno side project of Dominick Fernow’s main concern, Prurient. That’s not how it is in Europe, where Vatican Shadow is far more popular than Prurient. It was one of the reasons Fernow relocated to Berlin and made Rubbish of the Floodwaters, his first for noted Berlin club Berghain’s house label Ostgut Ton, and one of his few Vatican Shadow releases not on his own Hospital Productions. It’s built around a club atmosphere, although it’s not as huge of a shift as that might suggest.
Two significant Prurient records were influenced by transition—Bermuda Drain’s abrasive synthpop was shaped by traveling through Europe and moving to Los Angeles as part of his tenure with Cold Cave, and returning to a changed New York City made Frozen Niagara Falls more like his older noise works, but wasn’t a “return to form.” That is somewhat true of Floodwaters, his most polished work yet, even more so than last year's Arthur Rizk-produced Media in the Service of Terror. Two of its three tracks are built around longer grooving, molding the Vatican sound from a post-war wasteland soundtrack into a post-fallout seance. Tape hiss is a thing of the past, as is any semblance of rough edges. The actual songs themselves are more subdued, never approaching the bombast of “Enter Paradise” or “Peace Rage.”
Disembodied, stretched out voices that barely resemble voices permeate the title track. “Floodwaters” is like a more streamlined, murkier version of “Not the Son of Desert Storm, but the Child of Chechnya,” which also built around similar vocal effects. For Vatican Shadow, Fernow’s always used vocals as haunting textures and never as hooks, and that subversion of club convention is still true even as Floodwaters aims for more consistency. “Weapons Inspection” is the most active of the set, with shifting beats, ambient underlays, and bursts of sputtering rumbles. Opener “They Deserve Death” plods along a snowy terrain, a smoother version of a keyboard-driven black metal intro. Honestly, it wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Blut Aus Nord record or a remastered Paysage d’Hiver tape, and it’s so nocturnal Striborg could make some use of it. The icy electronics of “Death” are a staple of Fernow, who wrings the most out of brittle melodies, making it the most ominous song here despite its brevity and beatless nature.
Floodwaters’ transitional nature recalls the spirit of his earlier cassette releases, which were similar in visual aesthetic if not always sound. While they were mostly more industrial and more beat-driven than any of his numerous projects, they ran the gamut from barebones bass rattles to jittery chaos to lo-fi ambient. Here, Fernow is figuring out how to mold Vatican Shadow to his newfound success, while maintaining a mysterious air. It heightens the contradiction that has always driven Vatican Shadow: while it’s Fernow’s most accessible project, it’s shrouded by an oblique presentation. Before, it was vague references to terrorism abroad and the shadowy nature of modern politics; now, it’s a darker overall sound that’s more within reach, but also more impenetrable. Floodwaters looks like the start of a new era, and it’s not as though Vatican Shadow wasn’t danceable. After all, if a minimalist jam like “A.T.F. Sinful Messiah” didn’t translate live in the first place, he wouldn’t have bothered to move to Berlin at all. Fernow’s shown he can adapt Vatican Shadow to more spacious settings, but there’s definitely more he can do to solidify that move, one that might need a full-length to really prove. | 2017-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ostgut Ton | May 22, 2017 | 7.2 | ea417b47-6fb2-4849-a1e3-a79c66be5f20 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Through muscular, chugging guitars and plodding percussion, Nashville's Adia Victoria explores ugly emotional realities with "take it or leave it" boldness. | Through muscular, chugging guitars and plodding percussion, Nashville's Adia Victoria explores ugly emotional realities with "take it or leave it" boldness. | Adia Victoria: Beyond the Bloodhounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21935-beyond-the-bloodhounds/ | Beyond the Bloodhounds | As any woman will readily tell you, our emotions are constantly subjected to public scrutiny. We’re told to “Smile, baby!” We’re reprimanded for being crazy if we seem too angry or too excited. We talk about “ugly crying,” as if we must apologize for our grief not being romantic or beautiful enough. If we talk about our frustrations or feelings too much, we’re dismissed as fretful, overemotional, or just plain bitchy. But on her debut LP Beyond the Bloodhounds, Nashville’s Adia Victoria (full name Adia Victoria Paul) makes it pretty immediately clear she doesn't give much of a shit about any of this.
Paul’s music has been described as "creepy," a notion that barely scratches the surface of what she accomplishes. The album is often unsettling, yes, but that feeling is more a byproduct of the feelings Paul explores on her gnarled songs than an end in itself. Even the record’s “prettiest” song, the wavy and fuzzy “Mortimer’s Blues,” revolves around Paul’s inescapable loneliness. She approaches love-song territory with “Horrible Weather,” but there, she sings about finding that person whose dark clouds and troubles match yours. Paul powers her songs with muscular, chugging guitars and plodding percussion. Her riffs crackle, snarl, and sneer with subtle country and blues signifiers, and keys alternately thrum and prick on “Dead Eyes” and “Howlin’ Shame.”
Paul has a knack for crafting drifting lyrical lines that inch under your skin and stay there. Sometimes, they sneak up on you, as in the spoken section that concludes “Invisible Hands.” The track begins with Paul speculating what her fears look like, but when she arrives at “The choir sings Hallelujah from the ovens,” the song becomes outright chilling. Beyond the Bloodhounds isn’t a blues record per se, but in the grand tradition of the blues, it creates space to look your demons in the eye and acknowledge their foul existence without necessarily doing much about them.
On “Stuck in the South,” Paul reckons with feeling trapped on her home turf. She sings that she’s “dreamin’ of swingin’ from that old palmetto tree,” and notes that her skin color “give ‘em cause to take and take.” She promises to leave, but can’t—she’s stuck. Paul’s ache is familiar for many native Southerners: The political and social dynamics of the South are complex and often ugly, as it’s been forever, but for some reason, you stay. Paul’s recognition of her Southern identity goes beyond cloying “hey y’all” affectations. Instead, she weaves together her disgust, frustration, and uncertainty, building a frank look at how she feels about home. From there, Paul closes the record with “Mexico Blues,” lilting as she sings, “You go your way, and I’ll go mine.” It sounds as though she’s still making up her mind about what her own way is, exactly. But with Beyond the Bloodhounds, she’s made a satisfying plunge into decadent darkness. | 2016-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Canvasback / Atlantic | May 21, 2016 | 7.9 | ea447248-f48e-45fa-ba2b-b1d2e6edebfc | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
Melding disco extravagance with Old Hollywood glamour, the Los Angeles duo’s lush, shape-shifting glam rock transcends pastiche with theatrical flair. | Melding disco extravagance with Old Hollywood glamour, the Los Angeles duo’s lush, shape-shifting glam rock transcends pastiche with theatrical flair. | Midnight Sister: Painting the Roses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/midnight-sister-painting-the-roses/ | Painting the Roses | Inside the velvet-lined world of Midnight Sister, Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian party like it’s 1972. The Los Angeles nu-disco duo make lush, seductive glam rock informed by their respective fields: Lead vocalist Giraffe is a filmmaker and visual artist, and composer Balouzian writes movie scores. Their visually rich approach draws on a pile of colorful references, among them vaudeville, glitter rock, and Lynchian melodrama. In 2017, they introduced their moody, cabaret-influenced style with Saturn Over Sunset, pairing the record with dramatic self-made music videos. A new album, Painting the Roses, ups the theatrical flair, showcasing their love of layered orchestral pop, ornate disco, and breezy psychedelia. Their muses may be familiar, but Midnight Sister approach them with a fascination that transcends mere imitation.
Midnight Sister are not shy about acknowledging their forebears—Saturn Over Sunset’s “Blue Cigar” namechecked one of their more obvious influences, T. Rex. But their total commitment to disco glitz offers the kind of escape we could all use, and their attention to detail is striking. Over the rose-tinted dancefloor groove of “Sirens,” Giraffe sings about a “midnight disco,” her voice enveloped by the genre’s go-to motifs: hot horns, Chic’s chucking guitar, and a breath-heavy bridge à la Donna Summer. Giraffe and Balouzian toy with pastiche throughout Painting the Roses, but it’s done with swagger and musical devotion. Their enthusiasm redeems even the cheesiest moments on the record—it’s hard to deny their infatuation with a bygone era of carefree, extravagant nightlife.
Giraffe, the face and conceptual mastermind of the group, often directs and photographs Midnight Sister’s surrealist music videos. A trained cinematographer and graduate of mime school, she brings an off-kilter flamboyance that shapes the duo’s highly referential sound into something more unique. In the visual for “Foxes”—a glitter-rock ballad heavily indebted to Marc Bolan—Giraffe emerges from a dingy blue curtain wearing a pearl-encrusted catsuit. Instead of stepping onto a stage, she stalks a drab backlot, perching on dumpsters and posing in front of razor wire, her makeup and hair askew. Part diva, part doomed court jester, Giraffe’s performance is a playful subversion of tacky circus revivalism tropes. Fortunately, Midnight Sister’s music is good enough to justify the pageantry.
Recording an album is a far cheaper way to build a world than making a movie, as Giraffe has noted, and Midnight Sister are certainly proficient in world-building. Their snapshots of Los Angeles’ neon-lit motels, desert drives, and doughnut shops could make even a staunch New Yorker (briefly) acknowledge the city’s appeal. Though L.A. is a character in Midnight Sister’s script, it’s a romanticized, filmic L.A.—filled with vibrant characters and vintage buildings, not strip malls or traffic. Balouzian’s arrangements inspire an even more remote vision of the city; his cinematic strings on “Escalators” and the title track conjure the drama of Old Hollywood film scores, the kind performed in theaters by live orchestras.
Giraffe’s choral arrangements are equally well suited to the silver screen, particularly on “Song for the Trees,” where an operatic chorus arrives as a welcome contrast to the sleepy, LSD-era Beatles sound. Here, as on “Wednesday Baby,” Giraffe dips into a low, wispy Nico register, one of her many vocal guises. Unlike the classically trained Balouzian, Giraffe is a self-taught singer. Her range is playful and wide, and she swaps out voices like shades of lipstick. A screech, a dreamy falsetto, and a macho drawl could all exist within the same song—a satisfying manifestation of Midnight Sister’s shape-shifting, character-driven music.
Painting the Roses, as a phrase, echoes another: “gilding the lily,” the unnecessary adornment of an already beautiful thing. Allegedly, it’s something to be avoided. Midnight Sister, whose music is decked out in brass, Mellotron, Wurlitzer, accordion, and all sorts of other bells and whistles, beg to differ. Their album is a celebration of harmless indulgences: dressing up, going out, getting swept into the drama of a song. In Painting the Roses’ one-stop discotheque of the mind, more will always be more.
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. | 2021-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 29, 2021 | 7 | ea46d7c2-ac5a-4807-8233-4220b48752ac | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Ambitious, self-referential, and packed with their signature bad puns, the D.C. emo-punk duo’s double album hones in on the nostalgia and sincerity that lies beneath all adolescent woe. | Ambitious, self-referential, and packed with their signature bad puns, the D.C. emo-punk duo’s double album hones in on the nostalgia and sincerity that lies beneath all adolescent woe. | Origami Angel: Gami Gang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/origami-angel-gami-gang/ | Gami Gang | Life sucks. Origami Angel use this indisputable fact as justification not to take it so seriously. Gami Gang, the double LP that the Washington, D.C. emo-punk duo completed during the pandemic, is an ambitious ode to making the best of unfathomable doom. “This world is such a dead end/I know we’ll make it perfect while we still can,” vocalist/guitarist Ryland Heagy sings on “/trust.” Across Gami Gang—titled after fans’ social media Bat-Signal—Heagy and drummer Pat Doherty capture that ambition by way of expansive emo-pop embellished with screamo, post-rock, and electronic experimentation.
Like their contemporaries Dogleg or Home Is Where, Origami Angel are products of a recent crop of emo bands whose style is more in line with Joyce Manor or Jeff Rosenstock circa WORRY. At its best, Gami Gang feels limitless. When he was first learning guitar, Heagy took lessons from metalheads, whose techniques trickle down to much of Origami Angel’s output; “Bed Bath & Batman Beyond” is spring-loaded with finger-tapping, while “Self-Destruct” opens with ear-splitting power chords atop double-bass drums. Paired with Origami Angel’s lighthearted humor and penchant for twinkly, mathy elements, Gami Gang feels daring and lively rather than flat-out brutal.
Origami Angel have developed their sound beyond the skate-punk of their 2019 breakthrough Somewhere City. But they still have their moments of adolescent woe, like reminiscing about eating Taco Bell and binge-watching Pokémon with a crush on “Caught in the Moment” or coming to terms with cystic acne on “Neutrogena Spektor.” Some of Gami Gang’s more innocuous subject matter borders on cutesy, but their wisdom pokes through elsewhere: “Noah Fence” flips a memory of politely rejecting a door-to-door evangelical into a metaphor for affection. “They keep telling me ’bout heaven, it sounds a lot like when I’m with you,” Heagy sings. “If I could write a book about you, maybe they would see exactly why you mean the world to me.” This heartfelt allegory is a highlight of Gami Gang, and the album could use more like it.
The majority of Gami Gang’s first half is wistful and longing, as if to suggest that love is the key to withstanding life’s turmoil. The latter portion is distinctly darker. “Blanket Statement” unfolds the internal monologues of depression, and the epic closer “gg” confronts stagnation: “I’m incapable of change; you are in a constant state of flux,” Heagy sings. On “Footloose Cannonball Brothers,” he calls out a materialistic antagonist’s attempts at racking up online clout: “When you press send, everybody is the victim.” Gami Gang’s weak points can feel a little green and trifling. But in the right state of mind, these guileless moments strike as nostalgic rather than outgrown; who among us hasn’t indulged in a love interest’s favorite TV show only for it to become our own go-to?
Gami Gang anticipates the worst, but always keeps existential dread at arm’s length; all lazy days on the couch must come to an end, and former flames might barely recognize you on the street. Maybe the messages are obvious, but in the context of the album, they resonate like advice from a trusted friend. When Heagy sings, “I can’t stop smiling, that’s so unlike me,” he’s speaking for people who feel just the same way.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Counter Intuitive | May 6, 2021 | 7.3 | ea47f4d0-a8d9-45da-8c54-7e0536f4a18d | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The NYC rapper’s latest is a 22-minute blast of dank, dingy, experimental rhymes that feels too fleeting to be a long-term stylistic shift. | The NYC rapper’s latest is a 22-minute blast of dank, dingy, experimental rhymes that feels too fleeting to be a long-term stylistic shift. | Wiki / NAH: Telephonebooth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiki-nah-telephonebooth/ | Telephonebooth | Swift and changeable, Patrick Morales is a misfit of many cloaks. Since emerging as a slinger of screwball flows in the New York collective Ratking, Wiki has charted sleepless world tours, coaxed out one of Ghostface Killah’s best latter-day verses, and inducted himself into the “deli hall of fame.” He’s done this across No Mountains in Manhattan, a serious attempt at making the Great East Coast Rap Record, and the grimier OOFIE—two albums that alchemized bodega-level street rhymes and alt-rap weirdness. In commercial terms, it hasn’t made Wiki the next A$AP Rocky—a deal with XL proved short term as he u-turned back to independence. But he did unite The New Yorker and DJ Booth in exalting praise. Now, taking his cues from the colder and more cracked sound of a new generation of NYC bohemians, Wiki dashes into a midtown telephone booth and bursts out in his darkest robes, looking like a rap game Venom.
On the other end of the phone line is NAH. The Philadelphia-born, Antwerp-based producer is a long-time Wiki confidante having previously been called in to add an extra layer of production on OOFIE. But Telephonebooth is something different, more spectral. It’s a 22-minute blast of dank, dingy, experimental rap, as songless as Wiki’s last two projects were songful. No track sees the three-minute mark, and 11 of the 14 cuts clock in at less than two minutes. This slightness is occasionally frustrating: “Shit Blood” features a wonderful beat that harnesses what sounds drawn from 1980s quiet storm and is desperate to be fleshed out into a more full-bodied song. But you take the project for what it is: a bunch of good raps on blood-raw instrumentals.
Telephonebooth comfortably fits in the corner of underground New York rap blazed by the likes of MIKE, Adé Hakim, Caleb Giles, and Slauson Malone. The atmosphere is brutal. NAH’s drums frequently glitch and drop out. The samples warp like misshapen vinyl. Wiki’s verses sound informal—almost freestyled—as he dips and dives in strange patterns and angles, witnessing the world through a sepia lens.
There are fewer overt nods to New York than before but peer in close enough, and you’ll still see a Subway map. Opener “Life Like?” enters the screen with superfly Harlem trumpets that spark memories of Jay-Z’s “The Ruler’s Back.” Jigga’s 1996 classic even gets a shout-out on “Hip Hop”: “Learned to see through the evils/Learned it from Reasonable Doubt when I was a teen, yo.” Wiki also takes the opportunity to name-drop Russell Crowe and Deebo from Friday, admirably dedicated to keeping his references era-specific.
The most well-thought-out song is “No Work.” NAH’s beat sounds like a descent into a mysterious vortex. Wiki’s fluttering delivery may or may not have been directly lifted from Kanye West’s on “Addiction.” Here, the rapper calls in sick for his day job, sounding like a young bum flaking for no good reason, even if it means coming up short on rent. It’s anti-bling-bling rap depicting the daily grind, reminiscent of Ye’s “Spaceship,” a microcosm of Wiki’s ability to pull influence from alternative viewpoints.
“The Crown” could be interpreted as Wiki’s rejection of the legend of the King of New York or even a vicious critique of his homeland’s current rap scene. Morales describes finding a crown among debris, dusting it off, and placing it on his head to see if it fits. The idea that he could be coronated in such a low-key manner, on such a low-key record, feels almost offensive to hip-hop’s birthplace. Then again, this is Wiki jumping on a new and extremely harsh form of New York rap that takes pleasure in deforming the old. It’s as if by insulting the very idea of the King of New York, Wiki finally said what others who indulge in this new style had been secretly thinking.
Telephonebooth feels too fleeting, too minor, to be a long-term stylistic shift for the restless rapper, and for sure it’s not his finest record. Importantly, though, at this point of his trajectory, it’s a strong assertion that Wiki has no problem tearing up what worked for him in the past to keep things moving. In doing so, he remains one of his city’s most gripping voices.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Wikset Enterprise | May 19, 2021 | 6.9 | ea490652-1914-4e1b-852d-a2be4d016710 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The New York group recruits Marina Abramović to narrate a mythological dream-pop epic suffused in rich, swirling arrangements. | The New York group recruits Marina Abramović to narrate a mythological dream-pop epic suffused in rich, swirling arrangements. | Sound of Ceres: Emerald Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sound-of-ceres-emerald-sea/ | Emerald Sea | You don’t often think of shoegaze in terms of theatricality; the genre’s very name evokes the downturned eyes of a non-event. But New York-based duo k and Ryan Hover, of Candy Claws and Sound of Ceres, have always treated the style like a stage production. Across their oeuvre, symbolist plotlines animate an opaque, otherworldly sound: The deities Ceres and Calypso idyllically frolicked through Candy Claws’ Ceres and Calypso in the Deep Time, while Sound of Ceres’ The Twin led a journey through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. On Emerald Sea, the Hovers’ latter group takes their theatrical instincts to new heights. Formatted as an elaborate play in three acts, the record is narrated by Marina Abramović as the omnipresent Universe, who falls in love with the Roman deity Venus; their story plays out against a lush, empyrean backdrop.
On vocals, k plays the central role of Venus with fairy-like wonder, pursued by the Universe as they journey through the titular body of water and back into the sky’s void. Resplendent with harps and flutes, Emerald Sea’s arrangements evoke fantasy, echoing the Apples in Stereo’s rich psychedelia. “Deeper Surround” snakes through waterlogged reverb like a Mario water level, “Handlion’s Palace” thrums and crashes with tsunami-like force, and “The Glare” is imbued with simple dream-pop romanticism. “The Fawn,” the album’s strongest song, describes a flame-lit bacchanal in flickering images and gilded guitar flourishes. Delivered with a dark playfulness that reflects the title’s innocence, “The Fawn” makes the most of k’s voice; their voice sharpens to a fine point as they retreat into a cornered panic, exclaiming, “Come see where I am!”
But for all Emerald Sea’s ambition, the album’s texture is too sumptuous, like a heavy dish of foie gras. k’s breathy delivery rarely changes; to that end, even their uniquely ethereal tone eventually collapses into a grating background instrument. Occasionally, they vary their inflection for effect—during “2nd Star Shroud,” they drop to a reverent hush as they whisper, “Where I find you, moonlight child,” and on “Arm of Golden Flame,” their careful enunciation is genuinely cinematic—but for the most part, this immutability undermines the dynamism of the story. Even Abramović’s judicious Universe delivers her lines as if she’s reading off of cue cards for the first time. Similarly, the sound of Emerald Sea doesn’t hold enough musical variation to stretch across its manifold ideas. Where Sound of Ceres’ debut, Nostalgia for Infinity, drew on its members’ varied strengths, Emerald Sea seems to fall into the same complacent pattern as The Twin, where aesthetic eclipsed substance. Across the swollen strings, harp, and reverb, the magic begins to bleed into monotony.
Sound of Ceres have always had the potential to be extraordinary. The Hover duo’s dream pop sounds nothing like their contemporaries. But there’s something missing on Emerald Sea. Untethered from pop’s punchy foundation, songs play out in opulently drifting shapes—a change that could be refreshing, if only Sound of Ceres could figure out a way to change things up beyond marginal differences in tempo. Emerald Sea is audibly crafted with tremendous skill and love, but its uniformity keeps it from soaring, no matter how many deities fly through the upper reaches. | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Joyful Noise | June 17, 2022 | 6.6 | ea4b6634-196d-483b-8d54-e3864766ce91 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
The frenetic, sample-heavy album from Eric Andre’s clown alter-ego is hard to take seriously, which is probably the point. | The frenetic, sample-heavy album from Eric Andre’s clown alter-ego is hard to take seriously, which is probably the point. | Blarf: Cease & Desist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blarf-cease-and-desist/ | Cease & Desist | Beneath the clown makeup and knockoff Ronald McDonald costume, Blarf is comedian Eric André, creator and star of Adult Swim’s “The Eric André Show.” The madcap TV program parodies late night talk shows with its trademark brand of high-octane anarchic nihilism. He revels in discomfiting celebrity guests through exhibitions of gore and destruction. On a typical show, André will destroy his set with a chainsaw, tackle the house band, or do something that's just plain gross—while interviewing Lauren Conrad of The Hills, Andre vomited on his desk then slowly slurped it back up. Conrad left, dry heaving.
Though André tweeted, “People are confusing this guy BLARF...for me,” it’s pretty clear he made the music. Blarf was the name of André’s band while he was a student at the Berklee School of Music, and, in 2014, he released an album, Blarf, with Toronto based industrial band the First Seed. Aside from these “clues,” Cease & Desist is an absurdist cultural survey, which is kinda André’s whole thing.
Cease & Desist comes with a dare to “make it through six minutes of this album,” a foreboding invitation from André, a master of testing the endurance of his show’s guests with gruesome and strange displays. The tracks on Cease & Desist are bound together like files collected in a downloads folder: a collection of random mp3s that someone found interesting. There are short Girl Talk-style mashups that weave bongos through what sounds like The Fast and the Furious soundtrack, Death Grips’ aggression folding into dream pop, Jorge Ben mixed into intentionally annoying “Soundclown” auditory memes, Scandinavian noise that becomes cheesy violin. Just as the celebrity segments on The Eric André Show are satires of interviews, the tracks on Blarf are musical jokes.
So, is the album a critique of music? Did André succeed in making something that sounds bad? Well, sometimes the music sounds quite good. “I Dunno,” a 36-second distorted witch house-y instrumental sounds like the start of a decent Crystal Castles song. I kind of enjoyed “The Me in Me,” which sounds like an Oasis song that’s been beaten to death and thrown into a quarry. Meanwhile, “Hella Rhymes,” which pairs West Coast rap with glitchy guitar and arrhythmic drumming, just sounds atonal and aggressive—and not in a renegade punk way.
Cease & Desist sounds like the work of a talented person who is too busy or distracted to fully realize their ideas. While juggling a cult television show, an international stand-up tour, and voice-acting as a hyena in the remake of The Lion King, it’s understandable why André may not have devoted himself to polishing Blarf’s debut. The shorter tracks, which are the album’s best, seem like sketches for “real” music, perhaps abandoned because making something actually good requires more time or effort than he’s willing to expend. Meanwhile longer cuts, like “I Worship Satan,”—which sounds like 12 minutes of a pocket-recording while driving a convertible with the top down—didn’t seem to require much effort to produce at all.
The best joke (if it is one?) appears on the second track, “Save It Babe.” It opens with a sample of Katie Couric asking Lil Wayne in an interview from 2009 if he’s a good role model. Her earnest, hopeful tone mimics the precious interludes commonplace in popular music (see: “Futura Free,” the emotional interview with a skateboarder that closes Frank Ocean’s Blonde, or “I Got It” in which a woman tells T-Pain she has HIV directly following club banger “Tipsy.”) “If you need an example for how to live,” Wayne says, drawing us in, “then you just shouldn’t have been born.” Blam. The dunk on the interviewer is punctuated by a blast of electric guitar, as if to punish us for believing, even just for a moment, that this could be genuine.
Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the sample in “Save It Babe.” | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Stones Throw | July 12, 2019 | 6.1 | ea501489-3b9e-4b17-ad40-63722bf6a302 | Zoe Dubno | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-dubno/ | |
Inspired by a cross-continental move following a painful breakup, Lykke Li's ballad-heavy I Never Learn is for the times when heartbreak is so life-affirming that you want to share the feeling with the world. | Inspired by a cross-continental move following a painful breakup, Lykke Li's ballad-heavy I Never Learn is for the times when heartbreak is so life-affirming that you want to share the feeling with the world. | Lykke Li: I Never Learn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19312-lykke-li-i-never-learn/ | I Never Learn | If you’re unsure of why Lykke Li named her third album I Never Learn, the last four songs leave nothing to the imagination: “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”, “Never Gonna Love Again”, “Heart of Steel”, “Sleeping Alone”. The titles alone feel like disclaimers—are you willing to live life on these terms? It's worth noting, then, that Lykke Li moved over 5,400 miles from her native Sweden to Los Angeles at the age of 28 after the most painful breakup of her life. It hardly matters that almost none of us will experience anything like that; what is important is that many of us have endured the kind of heartbreak that made it feel like your old self is halfway across the planet. But if you’ve ever just secretly hoped your life could inspire such romantic ideals of romantic failure, wish fulfillment doesn’t come more potent than I Never Learn.
I Never Learn is both spartan and expansive; it's Li’s most ambitious and shortest album, at nine songs and 33 minutes. This is widescreen drama meant to hit with direct and precise impact, so the operative term for advance singles “No Rest For the Wicked” and “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone” has been “Spector-esque.” It's a fair comparison, as Li plays a winner-take-all game of “He loves me, he loves me not” accompanied by a host of string players and drums that beat and thump like a flawed human heart. Li relies on classic emotive archetypes as well—excepting “I Will Always Love You”, torch songs don’t get much more literal than “Never Gonna Love Again”, and as with most of I Never Learn, its incapacitating sense of impending emptiness is closer in spirit to “I Have Nothing”.
The power ballads are just what the tag implies: ballads that require an enormous amount of exertion and are about power itself, whether it’s helplessly putting in the hands of another (“Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”), taking ownership of your culpability (“No Rest For the Wicked”), or watching it disappear in a moment of passion (“Gunshot”). Rather than evoking a specific decade of music, though, Li approaches this style of songwriting as musical theater that should be created by something other than a proper band—either by professionals just off-screen, or some kind of studio magic.
I Never Learn utilizes the simplest tools of confessional songwriting: uneasily strummed acoustic guitars and resonant piano chords enlarged for texture and dramatic flair, like they’re appearing from behind a just-raised curtain, or from a radio as you sing to yourself. Thanks to the cavernous production, the enduring mental image of I Never Learn isn’t Li slumping over a glass of whiskey, but rather letting fresh wounds breathe, soundchecking alone in an empty arena.
Note the word “arena”, because even if these are stark, personal songs, there’s a tacit acknowledgment here of Li's status as a pop star on the verge. She drops a lot of the ingratiating and occasionally grating mannerisms of Youth Novels and Wounded Rhymes that could be viewed as defense mechanisms—coyly sung melodies, the coquettish humor, and the booming beats and handclaps that endeared her to many but could also did little to dispel the idea of her as a benefactor of “Young Folks”’ cottage industry of meet-cute indie-pop. The onyx-and-gray, dead serious, striking cover shot of I Never Learn isn’t fronting on you; Li hangs around David Lynch, collaborates with A$AP Rocky and admires Beyoncé, Drake, and Rihanna, all of whom commingle celebrity and artistry to serve as avatars, people through whom we can imagine how our idealized selves might sing, dress, fuck, or hurt.
Li is not a tabloid fixture nor a force of nature, and I Never Learn takes advantage of that by emphasizing the rawness of her lower registers and utilizing negative space to keep things from getting too far out of proportion. At times, the record resembles a pocket version of Adele’s eternal 21. Yes, “Love Me Not I’m Not Made of Stone” does American teenagers a disservice by showing up a couple weeks late for prom season, but right when Li chokes on the line, “Even though it….hurts,” she negates any idea of this being makeout music; it’s more like getting told "let's be friends" in the middle of a slow dance.
The artillery-riddled, burnished metal of “Gunshot” was helmed by Greg Kurstin, best known as a collaborator of P!nk, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry—but he’s also the guy who produced Tegan & Sara’s Heartthrob, another record that commingled teenaged emotions with adult situations and vice versa while nudging a beloved, modest act in a way that led to a polished, radio-ready album that reflected their real-life popularity.
“Gunshot” is I Never Learn’s fist-pumping climax and a total outlier, as longtime producer Björn Yttling still handles the majority of I Never Learn, his trademark, treble-harshed reverb making each lovelorn lullaby sound like it’s smeared with Li's own tears and ruined makeup. That lends a crucial, tactile reality in Li's sadness, since very few of her lyrics are going to remind people of things their significant others have actually said to them—“Every time the rain falls, think of me.” “Baby wait a lifetime before you find somebody new”, “Every time I pay the price for a heart that can’t be broken.” Maybe you've thought these things, and hearing them out in the open ensures I Never Learn isn’t an admission of defeat; there’s an unspoken uplift to be had, that you can only hurt this badly after loving way too hard. A chorus of Lykke Li's sing the title of “Never Gonna Love Again”, whereas the gospel choir does the same with “Heart of Steel”, either taunts or acceptance of a fate where grand, sweeping sulks are just a natural and welcome state of being. We’re used to breakup albums that assume you just want to crawl into a hole and die, but I Never Learn is for the times when heartbreak is so life-affirming that you want to share the feeling with the world. | 2014-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | LL | May 5, 2014 | 8.4 | ea5a9a28-aa66-4939-a2be-5c92212f372a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A new anthology of the ’60s folk singer suggests that she could have been a bigger star, had her label known what to do with her—and had she taken her career as seriously as her independence. | A new anthology of the ’60s folk singer suggests that she could have been a bigger star, had her label known what to do with her—and had she taken her career as seriously as her independence. | Norma Tanega: I’m the Sky: Studio and Demo Recordings, 1964-1971 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/norma-tanega-im-the-sky-studio-and-demo-recordings-1964-1971/ | I’m the Sky: Studio and Demo Recordings, 1964-1971 | Imagine the women in Norma Tanega’s songs with arms interlocked, braced against the chill of a Manhattan winter, queering the sleeve of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter of the 1966 semi-hit “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” presented a vision as rounded as Dylan’s or Aretha Franklin’s: self-mockery as self-reliance; folk music verities shorn of messianism and topicality; lesbian and none too oblique about it. Collecting two studio LPs with another album’s worth of unreleased material, I’m the Sky: Studio and Demo Recordings, 1964-1971 marks the first meticulous appraisal this multimedia threat has earned, and it’s a good one—the collection argues for an artist who could’ve been major had her label known what to do with her, and had she taken the arc of a career more seriously than she took her independence.
“I never wanted to be a serious artist because I like to laugh too much,” Tanega once said. The child of a Filipino father and Panamanian mother, Tanega didn’t look like the other folkies. And the outlier turned her birthright into material. I’m the Sky’s “If Only I Had a Name like Norma Tanega” boasts the couplet, “It can rise to the occasion/Even though it’s not Caucasian.” A stint at Claremont College studying classical music precipitated a move to the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, where she eventually hooked up with Bob Crewe after her demos impressed the Four Seasons songwriter; he and producer Herb Bernstein were taken by a tune Tanega wrote about a cat she kept on a leash. This was awesome. In the post-Joan Baez era, Crewe and Bernstein fought the temptation to smother her with solemnity. Perhaps the quietly gay Crewe recognized the sense of fun and the tainting of received forms, the homosexual’s lasting gifts to popular culture.
And what tonal complexity Tanega brought to her songwriting. The songs don’t stop their yuks and clucks. A sardonic epitaph or a pirouette on a tombstone, “You’re Dead” uses doomy chords to address a “you” who might be Tanega herself or a lecture on planned obsolescence: “You’ll never get a second chance/Plan all your moves in advance.” The collection includes “I’m the Sky,” not quite hippie bullshit kept at bay by her mournful, bassoon-like timbre, which darkens the happy songs and buttresses the sad ones. Even better is “Jubilation,” a sexy-as-hell come-on in which an oboe deepens Tanega’s most lovesick melody; the valentine has the lilt of a canticle. “A Street That Rhymes at 6 A.M.” will stand as her anthem. “Syncopate your life and move against the grain/Don’t you let them tell you that they’re all the same” functions as advice to a prospective acolyte, or as a lesbian’s avowal. The alone-and-in-love-in-the-big-city air has a wintry crispness.
Although no evidence exists, it’s tempting to imagine that Paul Simon had “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” in mind when he wrote about cruising Chinatown for Lin’s chow fun. Tanega’s next album, 1971’s defensively titled follow-up I Don’t Think It Will Hurt if You Smile, steeps in its moment too long. Stressing her silly-goose side, the songs flaunt their allegiance to a memory of swinging London and to period pop stylings, to mixed effect. The influence of the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane” flickers over “Elephants, Angels and Roses” and the instrumental “Cowfold.” Much better are baubles like “A Goodbye Song,” a polish away from competing with Janis Ian and Carole King on the pop charts.
Reluctant to adjust to the times, or because she simply lost interest in them, Tanega moved to England in 1967 with her lover Dusty Springfield, for whom she wrote the devastating “Goodbye (Go, My Love)” with the help of one Johann Sebastian Bach, and “Come for a Dream” with Antonio Carlos Jobim. Traces of Tanega’s influence color Springfield’s vocal choices too: The purr on “The Windmills of Your Mind” and Dusty in Memphis’ “In the Land of Make Believe.”
But that was that for Tanega. Returning to California in the Nixon era, she substituted paints for guitar, as commemorated in the recently published Try to Tell a Fish About Water, without entirely giving up on music. She became a familiar figure in Claremont’s LGBTQ community; she even taught English as a second language. She died in 2019. A bit much on first listen, I’m the Sky whets the appetite for more unreleased Tanega. She wasn’t a comer or a could-have-been. “A Street That Rhymes at 6 A.M.” nails it: Tanega found her place in time. Like many queer artists, she stood there in plain sight hoping an audience accepted her unaccountable interests but not giving a damn if they didn’t. Maybe giving a slight damn. Queer artists have mixed motives too. | 2022-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Anthology | May 21, 2022 | 7.5 | ea5f96b3-243f-4e79-8a07-191ad7627a6d | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
On a loosely conceptual project, the singer-songwriter finds his groove in smooth, soft-rock sounds and adolescent optimism. | On a loosely conceptual project, the singer-songwriter finds his groove in smooth, soft-rock sounds and adolescent optimism. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Jump for Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiss-golden-messenger-jump-for-joy/ | Jump for Joy | M.C. Taylor is no stranger to alter egos. It could be argued that Hiss Golden Messenger, the name of the loose collective he’s fronted since 2008, is a nom de plume itself. Cloaking his fears and dreams within the confines of the project gives Taylor enough remove from his introspection to get up on stage, a dynamic that's compounded on Jump for Joy. Stepping somewhat outside of himself, Taylor invented the semi-autobiographical character of Michael Crow, an adolescent who soaks up everything the world has to offer and pours it all into his music. The songs that constitute Jump for Joy are either written from Crow'’ perspective or in dialogue with Taylor’s older, wiser narrator.
If this all sounds convoluted, a sentiment Taylor winkingly underscores by opening the album by singing “There’s no such thing as a simple song,” Jump for Joy doesn’t sound complicated. That’s a deliberate decision. Jump for Joy belongs to an emerging class of albums by artists who’ve chosen to embrace positivity after suffering through the pandemic. This wasn’t a straight line for Taylor. He spent most of his previous record, 2021’s Quietly Blowing It, on a voyage inward, reacting to the onset of COVID-19 with an atypical melancholy that he sought to temper with a stronger sense of soulful rhythm.
Jump for Joy picks up on that thread, pushing beats and grooves to the forefront and moving Taylor’s coded confessions to the back burner. Listening to the album without the aid of a lyric sheet, it’d be difficult to discern the concept; the lyrics support the sound and not the other way around. Hiss Golden Messenger always has traded in ambience, incorporating brief bridges of sound between tracks. To a lesser extent, they have also been groove merchants—the band’s 2009 debut, Country Hai East Cotton, had a swampy little number called “Boogie Boogie.” The difference here is that a lot of Jump for Joy actually does boogie and does so proudly.
Take the title track: With its limber New Orleans polyrhythms, it’s a loving salute to jam-rock legends Little Feat. “Jump for Joy” has clear cousins in the thick funk of “Nu-Grape” and “California King,” a blissed-out number whose guitars burble like the Grateful Dead's on “Sugar Magnolia.” Neither song should be interpreted as Taylor reinventing Hiss Golden Messenger as a jam band, though; he’s working once again with bassist Alex Bingham and guitarist Chris Boerner, adding drummer Nick Falk and pianist Sam Fribush to the mix, a group that’s too focused on individual songs to plunge into the deep waters of improvisation. Rather, the loping rhythms are part of the positivity Jump for Joy exudes, a sensibility that also surfaces in the chilled out shimmer of “Jesus Is Bored” and “Shinbone,” a pop number that sounds like a yacht rock relic, glistening with synths and riding a mellow groove.
All the slickness on Jump for Joy can be beguiling. It’s an album that feels less like a roving party than a backyard BBQ, and the music seems designed to fade pleasingly into its surroundings. Such an anodyne approach has its appeal yet it’s strange that a record from a singer/songwriter as ambitious as M.C. Taylor equates optimism with simplicity. His notion of rekindling his initial music-making spark by writing from the stance of a teenager leads him down a path where he punctuates aphorisms like “I saw the new day in the world” with such evocative imagery as “There’s a tangerine moon over Texas, ripe enough to feel it dripping.” Here, it’s possible to hear the tension between Taylor’s craftsmanship and creative conceit; it can occasionally feel as if he’s purposely muting his colorful verbiage. Then again, those open-ended, vaguely corny affirmations match the sunniness of Jump for Joy. They’re the sentiments that suit the smooth sounds he’s laying down. | 2023-08-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | August 24, 2023 | 6.6 | ea634fce-0e39-412b-ad4c-c97cbc05747a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Finally reunited, Yung Miami and JT bring their signature amped-up party jams, while also making space to acknowledge what they’ve survived. | Finally reunited, Yung Miami and JT bring their signature amped-up party jams, while also making space to acknowledge what they’ve survived. | City Girls: City on Lock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/city-girls-city-on-lock/ | City on Lock | For Miami, Florida duo City Girls, pain and fortune often live in tandem. Yung Miami has balanced becoming both a rap star and a mother of two while separated from collaborator JT, whose recent federal incarceration for credit card fraud highlighted the prison industrial complex that disproportionately affects Black women. The pair have overcome an unfair share of adversity, challenges that represent systematic factors many of us confront while working hard for our dreams and the space to thrive, raise families, and celebrate. So for City Girls, who were finally reunited last fall, the premature leak of their new album City on Lock—much of it recorded from separate states—was especially devastating. But throughout the 15 tracks, Yung Miami and JT come through with their signature amped-up party jams, while also making space to acknowledge what they’ve survived. It’s a dynamic informed by their time apart during a trying period that required confidence and ambition to conquer.
The appeal of City Girls’ music is the duo’s ability to turn up, take up space, and demand the crème da la crème, despite life’s hardships. City on Lock underscores their humor and their money-making mission, but it’s also tempered with reflection. Yung Miami is first up on the punchy double-track album opener “Enough/Better.” She sets the in-your-face energy at the top of her verse: “Enough is enough, bitch/City Girls with the fuck shit,” she snaps. It’s a familiar City Girls mood, one that reminds their foes that she and her crew are prepared to defend themselves. “Don’t make me put my wig in a rubber band!” Yung Miami warns in a jokey ad-lib. Halfway through, the track segues into the breezy “Better,” allowing City Girls to let us in on their vulnerability. “I’m fightin’ loss, fightin’ demons and anxiety/I really used to sleep on pallets/Now I’m sittin’ in the condo like it’s a palace,” JT raps. Yung Miami reflects with the same self-acknowledgment as she recalls losing JT and her mother to the prison system and surviving a shooting at seven months pregnant—all while becoming world-famous. City Girls have always made the kind of music that might support you in dancing through your issues, but seeing the pair make room to talk about their own adds dimension.
On “Jobs,” they make their status clear and revel in the fruits of their labor. “I don’t work jobs/Bitch I am a job,” City Girls say in the hook. Miami in particular shines on the Southside-produced anthem “Pussy Talk,” featuring Doja Cat. She sets the energy of the song with a snooty tone as she rants in the chorus, “Don’t nothin’ but this cash make this pussy talk/Don’t nothin’ but a bag make this pussy talk.” Both anthems are laced with free game on how to receive pleasure and gifts from men willing to ante up.
The friendship between Yung Miami and JT remains the most special component of City Girls. “I go so hard for my sister til the end we came from nothin man,” JT wrote on Twitter last week. It’s a natural synergy that spills out into the enthusiasm of their music. Fully in sync over the chest-shaking bass of Twsyted Genius production on “That’s My Bitch,” City Girls are playful while crushing their time on the mic. “Pretty bitch, plenty racks in the Chanel bag/Yung Miami keep the Glock if you act bad/Pussy juice drippin’ on a nigga durag,” JT brags. They’ve witnessed one another’s laborious come-up and they’re here to cheer each other on.
City on Lock closes with the short and sobering “Ain’t Say Nothin.” As at the start of the album, City Girls go deeper into the traumas they’ve overcome. JT raps about being left by her mother and raised by her father: “Middle finger to my daddy/Why a sucker had to fuck my mammy/Left us and he traumatized us badly/Created him, a savage/Hustle hard just to get cabbage/’Cause growin’ up, a bitch never had it.” At just over a minute, the song feels a bit incomplete, fading out just as they open up: “I get it out the muscle/Nigga, you ain’t sayin’ nothin’/I’m a grown-ass woman/I ain’t a stranger to the struggle.” City Girls have endured tribulations and amassed an abundance they’d always wanted, an underappreciated and compelling piece of their narrative. Though Yung Miami and JT end with a somber look back, City on Lock is also a testament to their blessings.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control | July 6, 2020 | 7.3 | ea673c26-6be6-4f94-9583-b5b5d36471e9 | Lakin Starling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lakin-starling/ | |
On his second album, the cloud-rap innovator hones the decaying instrumentals of his mixtape series to make some of his warmest-sounding music to date. | On his second album, the cloud-rap innovator hones the decaying instrumentals of his mixtape series to make some of his warmest-sounding music to date. | Clams Casino: Moon Trip Radio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clams-casino-moon-trip-radio/ | Moon Trip Radio | Many prominent rap producers parlay their notoriety into touring careers, taking checks to spin their hits on the road, or they lose their signature sound and become “super-producers,” bending their sounds to fit the needs of a given artist. Not Clams Casino. After helping invent cloud rap near the beginning of the decade—lending his hazy, arcane beats to A$AP Rocky, the Weeknd, and Vince Staples—the New Jersey producer born Mike Volpe has devoted himself to refining his oft-copied brand of atmospheric beat music.
After 2016’s major-label debut 32 Levels, featuring vocal turns from singers like Kelela and Future Islands’ Sam T. Herring, it seemed like Volpe was ready to consolidate his own star power. But the album came and went, and Clams Casino was no more a household name than before it was released. This, it seems, is just how he likes it. The following year, he returned to his long-running Instrumental Mixtape series for a fourth edition, and now he’s released his second album, Moon Trip Radio. No longer beholden to the requirements of a major, he eschews features; instead, Volpe gives us an unadulterated stream of his ambient hip-hop amalgam.
By now, the Clams formula is an essential part of 2010s rap canon. His legacy can be felt in the druggy, washed-out productions of SoundCloud rap producers like Ronny J—drums forward, bass up, atmospheres of druggy malaise smeared across the background like black paint and perpetuated by lo-fi samples. Moon Trip Radio’s opening track (and lead single) “Rune“ instantly feels like classic Clams, an ominous and alien-sounding vocal sample perfectly setting the tone for granular textures to come. It sounds like it could have been made at any point of his career.
Nonetheless, there’s a clear arc throughout the album, and by the midpoint, Clams—who used to source new sounds by typing search terms like “cold” and “blue” into LimeWire—is offering some of his warmest-sounding music. The songs are as sonically destroyed as ever, bristling with digital flotsam and tape hiss—see “Twilit”—but the patient harmonic changes give the doomy atmospheres a certain sentimentality. Chopped breaks and angelic electric piano noodling on “Cupidwing” and “Fire Blue” invoke the lovelorn works of DJ Shadow, while “Lyre,” with its lonely guitars and wildlife recordings, reframes Clams as hip-hop’s own Daniel Lanois.
He’s said that he’s ready to get back to making “some fun rap shit or something” now that this new solo release is finished. But the album highlights the difference between Volpe and the myriad imitators in his wake: Anyone can oversaturate some moody samples and chalk it up to a “vibe,” but few can weave those disparate elements together in a compelling way that inspires the listener to fill in their own narratives. | 2019-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 9, 2019 | 7.7 | ea7803ce-b7a6-4889-8d0f-a1744331a066 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
The trio’s latest is a beautiful mess of squelchy psych-pop—emphasis on pop—where effervescent instrumentals soundtrack an earnest and hard-earned lust for life. | The trio’s latest is a beautiful mess of squelchy psych-pop—emphasis on pop—where effervescent instrumentals soundtrack an earnest and hard-earned lust for life. | Guerilla Toss: Famously Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guerilla-toss-famously-alive/ | Famously Alive | On Guerilla Toss’ fifth album, Famously Alive, frontperson Kassie Carlson sings about enjoying every day to the fullest after a years-long opiate addiction that landed her in the hospital for weeks and persuaded her to get sober. The music reflects her shift toward not just surviving but thriving, and it feels like the culmination of a long-brewing transformation for Guerilla Toss, now a New York trio after years in Boston as a five-piece known for earsplitting live shows and head-spinning studio recordings. Famously Alive is a beautiful mess of squelchy psych-pop—emphasis on pop—that feels in conversation with the band’s abrasive, dissonant past: As Guerilla Toss turn a new page musically, Carlson turns one of her own.
On 2019’s What Would the Odd Do? EP, Carlson chronicled her recovery and Guerilla Toss began to soften their harshest, skronkiest musical layers. Famously Alive takes that path to its logical conclusion. These melody-forward songs arrive with crystal-clear fidelity and sugary guitars and synths, but their frantic rhythm and psychedelic tint connect them to the band’s past work. Carlson’s newly steady vocals (she took voice lessons as she wrote the album) transform simple sentiments into earnest revelations about how good it feels just to be. When she sings “You’re famous/Famously alive” on the title track, she holds the notes mid-register, with none of her signature shrieking. Her band, which flanks her with arcade-like synths and ecstatic percussion, sounds just as steadfast.
Famously Alive is jam-packed with Day-Glo cheerleader chants dedicated to celebrating existence right now, today. On “Live Exponential,” against gleaming electronics and harp arpeggios by LEYA’s Marilu Donovan, Carlson sings, “I’m special! You’re special! Live exponential!” On “Wild Fantasy,” Guerilla Toss find a space between the anxious tempo of 2016’s Eraser Stargazer and the stark hallucininations of 2018’s Twisted Crystal with bursts of power chords and synth sparkles that hit like a sax solo. The glittery stomp goes hand-in-hand with Carlson’s excitement as she chants the titular phrase: She sounds elated just to wake up every morning.
Motivational-speaker lyricism can be tough to pull off, but Famously Alive’s exuberant, squishy instrumentals—think Merriweather Post Pavilion with a splash of hyperpop—prevent it from ringing hollow. The sound, far poppier than any past Guerilla Toss release, exudes the same abundant, genuine positivity that Carlson’s lyrics do; the music alone glows brightly enough to impart her newfound perspective, though things do briefly cool down on “Happy Me.” “Each day a celebration/I am a radiant sun/All things a fascination/Happy me, happy me, happy me, happy me,” Carlson coos through a thick vocal filter. Her voice gradually fades into the background as the refrain segues into the outro, but it sounds like it’s ringing out forever. | 2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 28, 2022 | 7.5 | ea78e540-bbc7-41b1-936f-1c8a69b5c9e8 | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
The L.A. band behind 2016’s slow-burning single “Loveless” turns in a perilously top-heavy debut album. | The L.A. band behind 2016’s slow-burning single “Loveless” turns in a perilously top-heavy debut album. | Lo Moon: Lo Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lo-moon-lo-moon/ | Lo Moon | In September 2016, there was the zeitgeist and there was Lo Moon’s debut single “Loveless,” a space about a billion light-years away where sophisti-pop and shoegaze snuck off for seven minutes of heaven. Suspiciously well-produced and promoted, “Loveless” was the only Lo Moon song in existence for nearly a year, during which it attracted the attention of Columbia Records, former Death Cab For Cutie guitarist/producer Chris Walla, festival bookers, and Coachella-core heavyweights MUNA and the Temper Trap. This phenomenon was dutifully documented, most thoroughly by NPR, which has published 20 pieces of Lo Moon content in the past six months. Nearly all would note that their guitarist was the son of Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. Ah, but plausible deniability for you industry-plant theorists: “Loveless” took nearly five years to evolve from singer Matt Lowell’s original demo to its final released version. Nevertheless, “Loveless” remains a song with a lot riding on it. Without it, there’s no Lo Moon and there’s definitely no Lo Moon, the perilously top-heavy LP it’s expected to carry on its own. If they had a more shitposty sense of humor, they could’ve just called it Loveless.
It’s not like they have any real issue with telegraphing their influences. They’ve covered Prefab Sprout in their live sets, and Lowell has acknowledged that Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis is, “especially vocally, a big influence on me.” This is a massive understatement on two levels, the first of which is that Mark Hollis is the biggest overall influence in every conceivable way on this album’s sound. Most specifically, it lookbooks 1986’s The Colour of Spring, the midpoint between the state-of-the-art pop of early Talk Talk and the timeless, anti-pop spirituals of their later work. Meanwhile, Lowell doesn’t just have almost the exact same vocal timbre as Hollis, both sonorous and strangely clipped like a muted horn, but the same inflections and melodic cadences. Hollis isn’t just the biggest influence on Lowell’s vocals—he might be the only one.
You could do a lot worse than Talk Talk as far as role models, and you can’t do much better. But when a relative unknown attempts and mostly succeeds with emulating a singular, inimitable presence, you end up with the same distracting Uncanny Valley effect that plagued those what’s-his-names that played Biggie and 2Pac in their recent biopics. It’s not quite them, and it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.
That might actually work in the album’s favor. Though Lo Moon can occasionally work in a tingly chorus that hits with the satisfying jolt of a synthesized orchestra hit, nearly all aesthetic decisions are in the interest of signifying vulnerability, intimacy, every part of the lovemaking process that makes lust look crass. The thrill of the chase, ugly-crying over your heartbreak—that’s for pop music. But give any serious scrutiny to Lo Moon and it reveals itself as nearly 50 minutes of relationship vaguebooking, with Lowell scattering scraps of Chris Martin’s notepad over Walla’s downy, high-thread-count covers like rose petals. “We’ll learn to outgrow/The thorns on the rose,” “I know I never had a heart of gold/And now I’m crawling in and out of your skin/I only open doors that I can’t close,” “I used to follow my heart/But now I’m safe in the dark.”
But hey, there’s still “Loveless,” a glittering monolith that towers over Lo Moon and at the very least stands out in the muddled indie-major DMZ just like it did back in 2016. Lo Moon may spend the rest of their existence trying to scale its heights once more, but the very next song throws some unexpected shade on the process: “I sang a song with no words/It sounded absurd/But it brought my numbers up/‘Fair game’/Or whatever works/For better or worse/Who are you to be the judge?” Lowell sings on “The Right Thing,” which could conceivably be a slow-release metaphor for romantic intransigence, or him in character as a former pop mercenary with a guilty conscience (like, say, Mark Hollis).
“My Money” tempts even more far-fetched, non-literal interpretation of very literal lyrics to reconcile the jarring conflict between its sour sentiment and every other aspect of Lo Moon. As these things typically turn out, it’s the song that lingers the longest. “Don’t marry me for my money/I’ve got this love for you honey/It’s baby blue,” Lowell sings on the least relatable chorus of this young year. Whenever it pops into my memory, it’s like a sip from a glass of curdled milk I just can’t help taking to make sure it really is spoiled. If it’s not a failed attempt at a playful jab, à la “Gold Digger,” the only other possibility is that of a character study formulated while watching “The Bachelor.” If Arie Luyendyk Jr. said those exact words, it would sustain schadenfreude Twitter for the rest of 2018. Take the sophistication out of sophisti-pop, and Lo Moon is just another L.A. indie R&B act who tries to bring us a higher love but can’t take things much further beyond bed and bath. | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | February 26, 2018 | 5 | ea7f8080-ee82-431a-8678-94f28074cb0d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Film of Life doesn’t break new ground for influential drummer Tony Allen, but it does offer a solid and succinct demonstration of Afrobeat’s adaptability to changing times. Allen's longtime collaborator Damon Albarn guests. | Film of Life doesn’t break new ground for influential drummer Tony Allen, but it does offer a solid and succinct demonstration of Afrobeat’s adaptability to changing times. Allen's longtime collaborator Damon Albarn guests. | Tony Allen: Film of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19953-tony-allen-film-of-life/ | Film of Life | Best known for defining the pulse of Fela Kuti’s propulsive Afrobeat sound, the self-taught Tony Allen is a near superhuman combination of metronomic sense of time, light touch, economy, endurance, and musicality. Though it took a long time, his distinctive beat is part of the world’s musical vocabulary now. Since parting ways with Fela, he’s done quite a range of work, including a couple of recent, fairly high-profile collaborations with Damon Albarn that took him pretty far away from the pigeonhole people tend to place him in on the basis of his best-known playing.
Film of Life doesn’t quite break new ground for Allen, but it does offer a pretty solid and succinct demonstration of Afrobeat’s adaptability to changing times. There are no side-long epics in the Fela mold here, but Allen packs quite a bit into each of these four-to-seven-minute-tracks, building up from his own drums grooves with hypnotic guitar and bass patterns, a richly arranged horn section, and an assortment of other sounds that are nearly all overwhelmed by the massive rhythm that dominates everything.
Allen himself handles vocals on the first two tracks, mostly talking in his deep bass register and aided by a female chorus, narrating a personal history and thanking the listener for being there. His voice is appropriately situated well down in the mix; he does his best talking with his hands, and though he shows a little uncharacteristic flash here and there, the really impressive thing about Allen is the way he can take a simple, slow beat like the one on "Tiger’s Skip" and make it sing when a lot of drummers would have trouble just staying in time at that tempo. Comparing it to the much faster beat on the storming, spacey funk instrumental "Ewa" reveals a lot about what makes his playing so special; no matter what else is going on, Allen has an ability to stay steady and fill time with exactly as much embellishment as necessary.
Albarn’s guest vocal turn on "Go Back" provides the album’s highlight and the closest thing to a single that it has to offer. The man could sound sad singing "The Wheels on the Bus", and the contrast of his hang-dog delivery and Allen’s spryness makes for a song as good as anything the two have done together in the Good, the Bad, and the Queen or Rocket Juice & the Moon. Moments like this and Kuku’s totally unexpected Auto-Tuned vocal in the second half of "Koko Dance" take Film of Life a few steps past a simple summary of the things Allen excels at and make it something to hear even for people who aren’t Afrobeat obsessives. | 2014-11-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-11-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Jazz | Jazz Village | November 26, 2014 | 7.2 | ea7fb89b-2d30-4de6-83e8-fc3f5f625270 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Buffalo rapper digs deeper into his established lore, savoring his victories while further stewing in past regrets. | The Buffalo rapper digs deeper into his established lore, savoring his victories while further stewing in past regrets. | Benny the Butcher: Tana Talk 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benny-the-butcher-tana-talk-4/ | Tana Talk 4 | Benny the Butcher is at the point in his career where he knows exactly what his fans want from him. His 2020 album Burden of Proof, with its distractingly polished Hit-Boy production and victory-lap energy, expanded the Buffalo rapper’s sound from the grainy film stock of his earlier work to IMAX clarity. Burden was warmly received and pushed Benny to another echelon of rap stardom, but the three followups he released shortly after found him back in the mud-stained trenches that made him. Unlike Anderson .Paak—whose attempt to recontextualize his sound on his major label debut Oxnard resulted in fans bullying him back to his vintage microphone stand—Benny’s shift to the familiar wasn’t a defensive play. Griselda’s foundation of traditionalist drug rap has proven to be sturdy, and he’s in no hurry to fix what isn’t broken.
Tana Talk 4 is a sequel to Benny’s 2018 breakout Tana Talk 3, and it plays out like a blockbuster expansion of the original. The guests are bigger—J. Cole and Diddy make show-stopping appearances. The beats crunch with an amplified sense of gravel and warmth, and the raps are equal parts hungry and self-mythologizing. It’s not as reinvigorating as 2021’s The Plugs I Met 2, opting instead to be a greatest hits entry with a few tweaks to the formula. But here, Benny digs deeper into his established lore, savoring his victories while further stewing in past regrets.
For Benny, moving weight has always been a means to an end, a necessary evil that ensured he would survive long enough to see his rap dreams come true. But his thoughts and guilt linger a little longer over every boast and successful drug run across Tana Talk 4. Tinges of sadness shoot through his verses more often, like the image of him hiding drugs in his father’s couch on “Super Plug” or his attempt to pick shooters out of a lineup from his hospital bed on closer “Mr. Chow Hall.” By the time he’s describing the hollowness of celebrating his 36th birthday in a wheelchair after surviving an attempted robbery in Houston on “Bust a Brick Nick,” you can feel the scratch marks on the edge of his soul: “Being honest, this could be karma I probably deserve in the first place,” he says with a sigh. These moments infuse the record with a sense of melancholy that’s rare in a world that runs on the ethos of a rap robber-baron.
But the atmosphere is never grim for too long. Benny’s self-awareness cuts the other way, too, breaking the fourth wall often to address fan expectations and build out his legacy as one of rap’s fiercest stylists. “Guerrero” uses song titles from Tana Talk 3 and Burden to create a Spark Notes retelling of Benny’s origin story. On “10 More Commandments,” he flips the Notorious B.I.G.’s classic “10 Crack Commandments” on its head by pleading with hustlers to get out of the drug game (“Them old stories how you was getting dough won’t amount to shit/Can’t feed your child with it when they come wearing jackets with alphabets.”) “Tyson vs. Ali” recruits cousin Conway the Machine so the duo can set the record straight on any sort of competition between them, bigging each other up in the face of instigation. No Griselda rapper has allowed themselves to get quite this meta before, deconstructing and reaffirming their mythology with a wink and a smirk.
Unfortunately, these relative experiments only make up a portion of the album. Once they fade into the background, Benny’s raps begin to blur. There’s nothing wrong with being a specialist, but Benny’s flows and stories aren’t as fluid as more established artists like Freddie Gibbs or Pusha-T. Multiple guests get the best of the Butcher, whether it’s frequent collaborator 38 Spesh gnashing his way through their back-and-forth on “Uncle Bun” or J. Cole bestowing opener “Johnny P.’s Caddy” with the kind of barn-burning verse he should really be saving for his own albums. The beats throughout are also a mixed bag, with the texture and dimension of Alchemist’s work often outclassing Daringer’s. Alchemist simply brings more variety to the table, the muted prance of “Thowy’s Revenge” and the chandelier luster of “Bust a Brick Nick” being particular standouts. Comparatively, Daringer’s work is serviceable but often lacking in flavor, saved by Beat Butcha’s twangy instrumental flourishes on tracks like “Back 2x” and “Guerrero.”
At this point, there aren’t many people who don’t know that Benny the Butcher can rap. He’s proof that it’s never too late to see the success you deserve, and he’s earned every one of the lofty cosigns legends have tossed his way. While it’s nice to see Benny have a bit of fun deconstructing the Griselda aesthetic, and his skills are as sharp as ever, there isn’t enough excitement or edge to separate this from anything he’s released since 2018. Tana Talk 4 never feels languid or dull, but it lacks the freshness of Tana Talk 3 and the sense of forward motion that propelled The Plugs I Met 2. The Buffalo collective built their empire on this sort of release model, but most kingpins know the cost of being too complacent. | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda / Empire | March 17, 2022 | 7 | ea800987-f447-42b4-ad68-d3fefddadd92 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Orbital's first album in eight years, featuring a collaboration with Zola Jesus, finds the Hartnoll brothers doing what they've always done best. | Orbital's first album in eight years, featuring a collaboration with Zola Jesus, finds the Hartnoll brothers doing what they've always done best. | Orbital: Wonky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16458-wonky/ | Wonky | There was no need for Orbital to release a new album. Eight years ago, The Blue Album sent Phil and Paul Hartnoll out on a moderate high note, a career-spanning compendium of their best ideas, if not always the best executed versions of those ideas. It was a perfectly acceptable cap to the decade-plus career of two reliable purveyors of strong-to-amazing dance music full-lengths. Orbital staged a seven-album run (nine if you count film scores) between 1991 and 2004 that produced only one or two outright clunkers. Looking at the ignoble history of electronic producers as album artists, this is hardly the faint praise it might seem.
As one of the most beloved live acts of the first rave era, Orbital could have reunited to profitably play festivals every year without ever putting out new and potentially rep-tarnishing new music. You had to wonder if they looked at the trajectory of their one-time peers over the course of 21st-century so far and worried a little. The last 12 years have been a downer in this regard, with way too many 1990s dance titans staging major comebacks and making embarrassing attempts to look with-it, even as dance culture's hyper-accelerated trend-hopping had long since passed them by.
So thank whatever god you wish that Wonky mostly finds Orbital deciding to do what they've always done best: gorgeous blends of house drive and techno precision, linking airy whoosh and stadium stomp, melodic hook and rhythmic push. These are dance tracks that hit you with the immediacy of pop singles, occasionally erring toward outright throwback territory but usually with just enough juice purloined from club culture's more recent mutations and underground niches to keep things vital. This doesn't mean the Hartnolls aren't still devoted to the sounds of the 1990s, ideas they helped either pioneer or refine, and there are indeed plenty of sonic nods to rave's (and Orbital's) most fertile decade.
Orbital tap young goth chanteuse Zola Jesus for a guest spot on "New France", turning her steely, gothic vocal into the yearnings of a spooky diva in an ultra-bright world-- a tech-house anthem that would have worked just as well in the days when Alice Deejay was on the radio. Brighter still, "Stringy Acid" is a rush of all the shiniest, most emotional bits from the first few years of Orbital's career, a track so beautifully constructed and 3-D rich that you can forgive how unrepentantly stuck in 1991 it is.
But Orbital's great trick was always to fold the sound of the moment-- whether it was the epic sweep or prog trance or the tricky rhythm programming of jungle-- into the architecture of their own brand of mass-appeal anthems. It's a strategy that served them well as pop ambassadors during the ever-shifting 90s, beholden to no one scene but able to communicate some of the thrill to folks who got most of their dance music from Columbia House. They deploy that trick again on Wonky, except now they seem to be translating the current codes of for-the-kids club sounds for an aging audience of Orbital fans who might not be paying as close attention as they did in the past. And so "Distractions" is their take on the half-time lurch of recent techno-tinged dubstep, stripped of the bass drop, but with enough heart-tugging and Orbital-esque melodic curlicues filling up the haunted space that remains, so that it scans more as unique twist than desperate homage.
The only time this pick-and-mix approach to contemporary dance really falters is "Beelzedub", which attempts to take the distortion of brostep to an almost comically snarling extreme, complete with a headbanging burst of nasty breakbeats in the final third-- the kind we haven't heard since Alec Empire was smashing jungle and feedback together. The problem is that the extreme parts aren't quite extreme enough, distracting wannabe tough-guy kitsch and a desperate reversion to a played-out style. It's the only time the Hartnolls come off like old dudes struggling to outdo the young roughnecks.
And yet despite occasionally stumbling in this quest to keep things short and immediately ear-grabbing, the Hartnolls haven't lost their knack for gracefulness, tracks that seem to effortlessly build to goosebump-inducing climaxes. If anything, they've managed to work within mainstream dance music's current vogue for radio-friendly track lengths without abandoning their patented crest-to-the-big-release style. Nor have they forgotten how to extend the live act's seemingly preternatural knack for pop-rave pacing across the peaks-and-valleys arc of the listening in your bedroom experience, where even the bridge between the shimmer of "Stringy Acid" and the ugliness of "Beelzedub" feels natural. Wonky has the one-jolt-after-another vibe of a great collection of familiar hits but without the disconnected feeling you get when a bunch of obviously Big Moment singles are slapped together and called an album, rather seamlessly covering a whole lot of musical ground without sacrificing concision or intensity. It's not perfect, but it is an unexpectedly great comeback album that manages to seem utterly "Orbital," occasionally backward-looking, and yet up-to-the-minute in a not-embarrassing way. | 2012-04-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | ACP | April 4, 2012 | 7.5 | ea82a874-46cd-4d20-b695-35bcd497f062 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Warp celebrates 20 years in business with a massive box set collection. | Warp celebrates 20 years in business with a massive box set collection. | Various Artists: Warp20 (Box Set) / Warp20 (Chosen) / Warp20 (Recreated) / Warp20 (Unheard) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13668-warp20-box-set-warp20-chosen-warp20-recreated-warp20-unheard/ | Warp20 (Box Set) / Warp20 (Chosen) / Warp20 (Recreated) / Warp20 (Unheard) | Kode9's dubstep label Hyperdub is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year with a two-disc compilation. Venerable Berlin techno imprint Get Physical is turning seven, while the even more beloved Cologne label Kompakt is 10. In the fickle world of electronic music, any anniversary it seems is worth noting. Warp Records-- at 20, almost as old as all three put together-- is doing it right with an expansive, expensive-looking (and, ok, expensive) box set, some elements of which are available separately.
Let's be frank about the overall package: It is in no way for the casual fan. But was it ever going to be? Warp, aware that a 20th anniversary collection couldn't work as both an introduction and a want/need item for its rabid fans, wisely went all in on the latter. If music is now, to many, free, and the draw of a music product is everything but the music, Warp embraced this dilemma: Yes / Dan Holdsworth (designers of the box itself) and the label's longtime visual collaborators at the Designers Republic (who are responsible for much of the art inside of it) have created what amounts to a fetish object. Housed in a 10" slipcase, this thing has physical heft; and with a 192-page book detailing the complete visual history to date of the label, the full Warp set looks more like an item for your shelf. Even the CDs are housed in case-bound 10" folders rather than delicate little sleeves.
Inside the box, aside from the perfect-bound book, are five sets of music, three of which are also available on their own. Warp20 (Chosen), is a 2xCD set featuring 10 songs selected by warp.net users (from a pre-selected pool) and 10 selected by Warp co-founder Steve Beckett. Warp20 (Recreated) is a 2xCD collection of new covers of Warp songs by Warp artists. Each of those are out now. Warp20 (Unheard)-- which comes in the box as a 3x10" set but starting November 9 will be available on its own as a single CD or LP (as well as included as a digital add-on for box-set purchasers)-- is an 11-song gathering of unreleased tracks from Warp stars such as Boards of Canada, Autechre, Broadcast, and Plaid. Also included in the box is Warp20 (Elemental), a 65-minute mix of Warp songs by Osymsyo, and Warp20 (Infinite), a 2x10" set of locked grooves.
The original packaging for Warp's IDM template Artificial Intelligence wondered, "Are you sitting comfortably?" before claiming that the record of home-listening electronic music was for, among other things, "quiet nights." The same could be said of this set, which works best when you allow yourself to live in it, to fully explore the label rather than simply skim off the top of it. That's true of any vinyl experience to a degree, but Warp's collection is a true pairing of art and sound, rather than one being supplemental to the other. The steady avoidance of fashionable, ephemeral stylistic choices in favor of clean, classic lines and colors makes the look of the set seem remarkably timeless and universal. This is particularly impressive for an electronic imprint, which avoided the temptation to look futuristic or au courant, and has allowed the label to retain a look from earliest singles by Forgemasters and Nightmares on Wax through their 10th and now 20th anniversary sets.
When Warp did this whole thing 10 years ago, before the full impact of file-sharing, the music was the thing. Back then, Warp compiled three 2xCD sets-- one of non-Warp techno and house classics, mostly from the half-decade that immediately preceded their label's launch; one of the label's top work; and one of Warp artists remixing songs from the Warp catalogue. If you somehow have not yet heard Warp's music, that actually might be a better place to start, since you'll therefore almost certainly not have also heard the Chicago and Detroit pioneers that populate that set's first disc.
But it's also true that Warp in part succeeded because it hasn't been beholden and overly reverent to the pioneers of techno and house. It avoided the dead end of traditionalism by both breaking from electronic music's dancefloor utilitarianism and embracing artists with wit and charisma over the sometimes monochromatic communalism favored by techno's more faceless producers. It's no surprise then that Warp found many fans outside of dance: Its colorful music tends to emphasize shifts and melodies and complex rhythm structures over the more subtle builds and crescendos of repetitive dance. As Warp has became an influence on rock and hip-hop-- Radiohead most famously championed the label around the turn of the millennium-- the label wisely invited pop-structured acts that carried the spirit and sensibility of electronic music into its fold. It now boasts a roster of not only top-notch electronic producers but also the fussy, prim indie of Grizzly Bear, the loose-limbed modern soul of Jamie Lidell, the haunted, avant-pop of Broadcast, and the askew hip-hop and wonky of Flying Lotus.
Picking out highlights from the 20 years would be nearly impossible, so thankfully the label has done it for me. The half of Warp20 (Chosen) selected by fans is music of extremely high quality, but it is also the least essential aspect of the box set. If you're interested in paying for the set, or even if you're interested in adventurous modern music, you're probably pretty well versed in most of its contents. The results of the vote provided the 10 tracks here, and unfortunately older tracks were undervalued, and arguably novelty was overvalued.
The fan vote disc is complemented by a disc of tracks chosen by Beckett, which breaks up some of the predictability of the choices and thankfully provides spots for first-decade favorites like Nightmares on Wax, Seefeel, and Black Dog Productions (here recording as Xeper). Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Battles, and Aphex Twin make second appearances on the set, but those Beckett-chosen selections provide alternate looks at the work of each, and aren't obvious song selections. The exclusion of more primitive early tracks from artists like Sweet Exorcist, Forgemasters, and Tricky Disco is slightly regrettable. But considering that Warp10's best of, Warp10+2, was limited to tracks from 1989-92 it makes some sense, allowing these discs to work practically as a Volume 2 to that set, with only LFO's "LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)" and Nightmare on Wax's "I'm for Real" appearing on both.
Warp20 (Recreated) is the most grab-baggy thing here, at times leaving you wondering why this is a set of covers rather than remixes (see Luke Vibert's take on "LFO" for one). Not surprisingly, the tracks here work best when artists start with material that isn't within their comfort zone. Nightmares on Wax's slinky version of the stiff "Hey Hey Can U Relate?" is a marvel. Elsewhere, Mira Calix and Autechre manage to re-work Boards of Canada and LFO, respectively, without losing either a sense of the original or their own sensibilities. Gravenhurst's take on Broadcast's "I Found the F" and Born Ruffians' deconstruction of Aphex Twin's "Milkman/To Cure a Weakling Child" are odd clashes on paper that turn out to be highlights. Leila continues the decade-long rehabilitation of Aphex Twin's Drukqs album with a moody, hollow, piano-led take on "Vordhosbn", while Jimi Tenor is one of the few artists here who unearthed a relatively lost gem with his redo of Drexciya-related project Elecktroids' "Japanese Electronics". More on-the-nose things like Jamie Lidell's take on Grizzly Bear's "Little Brother" or Tim Exile's take on Lidell's "A Little Bit More" don't seem necessary.
Osymyso's mix provides a solid overview of the whole label, highlighting the strong universal sensibilities of the founders. Best known for providing himself rigid constructs (his "Intro-Inspection" takes the starts of 100 pop songs and combines them into one 12-minute marvel) and changing out tracks quickly, here Osymyso wisely relaxes and lets the tracks play. Warp devotees can still enjoy trainspotting song titles, but if things moved at the pace of some of Osymyso's other work it wouldn't give the less initiated a chance to catch up and locate sounds and shifts. With deft pacing and relative seamless mixing, it also rewards long after that first listen.
The unreleased set, Warp20 (Unheard), is limited to 11 well-chosen tracks. The new Boards of Canada song "Seven Forty Seven" sounds like Boards of Canada and you're reminded why these guys own this hazy, nostalgic sound. Broadcast, too, have tossed aside the retro albatross and become one of the more singular and consistently excellent artists of our time, and their contribution, "Sixty Forty", keeps the winning streak going. Clark provides the too-short "Rattlesnake", Flying Lotus stretches out a bit on the bleary-eyed "Tronix", and Plaid and Nightmares on Wax each provide a pair of songs. The most consistent record in sound and tone, Warp20 (Unheard) recalls the feel of the Artificial Intelligence comps that helped secure Warp's fame.
The locked grooves disc, Warp20 (Infinite), is obviously a specialty item. But with so many of these tracks built on repetition to start, it's a natural albeit esoteric fit. And if you ever wanted to play "Atlas" by Battles or "On" by Aphex Twin forever, now you can. Hilariously, this leaked as mp3s for some reason.
Warp has long staked out its own ground online, fussy and protective of its product. The label opened its own Warpmart early in the digital music era rather than do so via a third party, and it doesn't seem to subscribe to the idea that just offering free shit all over the web is good for its artists. Part of the reason is Warp's big wigs care about sound and presentation, and it shows. Warp20 (Box) is another reminder of the thought that goes into what they do-- not just the records they release, but the total package of the label. It's one reason they've survived for two decades.
Another reason, aside from the obvious (a good ear; a willingness to regard their artists as family, giving them license to record at their own pace without regard for their bankability), is that they've slowly and organically adapted to the growing indie and dance worlds. Nominally known first as a center for the blippier end of rave, and then as the home of IDM, Warp has made wise, cautious steps toward embracing other sounds and styles. IDM itself, seen as a fad with a sneered-at tag, has proved endurable. Indeed, one of the stories of indie this decade is that mocked sounds from the margins-- freak-folk, dance-punk, electroclash/nu-rave-- wound up becoming central to the whole. IDM is practically the grandfather of this trend, and the best of its music outlasted the name, until the textures and sounds that once necessitated new descriptions no longer had to be boxed in. If Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Authechre, Black Dog/Plaid, and Aphex Twin may have once been IDM musicians, today they're just individual artists making beloved music, more known for their own singular styles than as part of an umbrella trend.
Warp has outlasted conceptual and contextual constructs in ways that are rare in the electronic world, where music is often tagged as easily dated. Throughout Warp's history, care in the construction of sound is important, so are syncopated rhythms, wit and whimsy, and the blending the abstract and the melodic. In the end, that there are no shortcuts to defining a Warp sound; that they are a fully trusted brand name that doesn't embrace 21st century eclecticism for the hell of it is admirable and rare. It may have been unthinkable 20 years ago that an electronic music imprint would still be around today, but it's no surprise Warp made it. And if music labels are still around in another 20, it would be no surprise if Warp was one of the survivors of these times as well. | 2009-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | null | November 6, 2009 | 9.2 | ea82db45-ae4c-49de-9f84-e042063fd7db | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The ex-Yuck frontman Daniel Blumberg's first album as Hebronix is a hangover/breakup record produced by Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. Unreal features frazzled, fuzz-flecked guitar tones and marathon track lengths and comes off as decidedly less wholesome than any of Blumberg’s previous work. | The ex-Yuck frontman Daniel Blumberg's first album as Hebronix is a hangover/breakup record produced by Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. Unreal features frazzled, fuzz-flecked guitar tones and marathon track lengths and comes off as decidedly less wholesome than any of Blumberg’s previous work. | Hebronix: Unreal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18292-hebronix-unreal/ | Unreal | When Daniel Blumberg yelped “I can’t get away!” on Yuck’s self-titled album, it felt like a prime example of their period-specific craftsmanship: the buzzy, hooky guitars and explosive alt-rock dynamics signify a sort of overwhelming, ill-defined angst and here was a perfect, all-purpose phrase giving it a voice. Now that Yuck is carrying on without its primary frontman, the vagueness of that lyric allows us to reverse engineer Blumberg’s personal life into it. First there was Cajun Dance Party, then there was Yuck, then there was Oupa, and now here’s Hebronix-- in the past five years, Blumberg's released widely available records with four different, awkwardly named bands. That takes a lot of commitment and an utter lack of it as well. But while the rambling and roomy songs on Unreal offer Blumberg all the space he wants, it often turns out to be far more than he needs.
In addition to the opening track on Yuck, Unreal recasts that album’s closer, “Rubber”, in a new light; a seven-minute slowcore dirge, “Rubber” smoldered with the speed and intensity of a tire fire. It was an outlier on Yuck and a template here. There are six songs on Unreal and “Rubber” would be the fifth-longest. The initial problem is how this framework can make Blumberg sound more stubborn than ambitious. Opener “Unliving” has some intriguing passages: it begins as a downer solo performance that immediately posits Unreal as a confessional, eventually evolving into a slowly levitating chorus of “ahs.” But they’re splayed about haphazardly and separated by extended subdivisions of laggard drumming and aimless guitar interplay-- it feels like Blumberg started with the goal of making a daunting, 10-minute opener and just worked towards that end. This quality is also shared by its uncompromising and uneventful bookend, “The Plan” which personifies the insularity of its hook (“I’ve got some things to do/ Some private things to do”). In addition to the title of that track, Blumberg’s tastes in frazzled, fuzz-flecked guitar tones will allow comparisons to Built to Spill, another band that’s never shied away from Crazy Horse soloing and marathon track lengths. But where even Doug Martsch’s most labyrinthine studio constructions have a plan, Hebronix can sound fueled by the belief that an eight minute song necessarily grants you twice the ragged glory of one that’s four minutes.
As with most indie artists in the lineage of Neil Young, Blumberg’s proclivity for jangly acoustic/electric jamming can ultimately reveal itself as charming rather than curmudgeonly. Unreal hits a stride during its midsection where “Wild Whim” and the title track strike the right balance of being unforced but not too effortless. They’re every bit as shambling as “Unliving” or “The Plan”, but aren’t meant to convey the idea of Blumberg as a “challenging” artist. “Wild Whim” details a “wild day of sin” but also a solitary one (“There you are on top of him/ Creating situations I’ve never been in”) over an endlessly repeating chord progression, while “Unreal” simply intones “I feel unreal” over and over again until this insouciant state becomes some kind of a stoned reality, a day without clocks where you wake up and just keep going until you shut down. Unreal is a pretty explicit hangover/breakup record, yet “Wild Whim” in particular feels like it’s mining the positive side of those situations, a freedom you get from a sudden a lack of obligation, where you counter the hardships of the previous day by taking back the power and wasting the current one.
It’s easy to draw that conclusion based on the fissuring of Yuck as well as the ramshackle production of Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. A benefit of working with Hagerty is that you appear a little seedier by association and Unreal does come off as decidedly less wholesome than any of Blumberg’s previous work. There was a sweetness and naivety to the heartbreak detailed on Yuck’s “Shook Down” and “Sunday”, whereas here, “Viral” and “Wild Whim” both underline his loneliness with lyrics that make big assumptions about the sex his ex is having elsewhere. Likewise, the rare rhythmic foible or piped-in electronic noise is meant to sound queasy rather than quirky. But you mostly sense Blumberg’s decidedly depressive state in the manner in which Unreal takes its sweet time doing everything. After two minutes of whooshing cello, feedback, and electric piano, “Viral” blooms into Unreal’s most immediately fetching chorus. In fact, it might be the only one. Listening to the sweet co-ed harmonies, the concise and utilitarian lyrics, it stands to reason that Blumberg might feel a little guilty about “Viral”; despite all of his attempts to contort and distend “Viral” during its relatively brief five minutes, you can’t shake how reminiscent it is of Yuck.
It’s an encapsulation of the messy separations that define Unreal. The lyrics talk about disintegrated relationships in the past tense, while the music suggests that while Blumberg has left Yuck, he hasn’t quite quit his last and most successful guise. Blumberg is a capable, if not particularly distinguished guitarist. He is also a songwriter with an unusual gift for sticky, familiar hooks and the issue here is that Unreal puts far more emphasis on the former. On Unreal, Blumberg still can’t get away from himself, he’s just figuring out ways to accept it. | 2013-07-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-07-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | ATP | July 17, 2013 | 6.7 | ea8b06c0-220d-41a6-968f-350ecb015369 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Los Angeles band’s idiosyncratic debut is a whirlwind of post-emo maximalism, fusing mid-aughts pop-punk with synthy, sugarcoated chiptune. | The Los Angeles band’s idiosyncratic debut is a whirlwind of post-emo maximalism, fusing mid-aughts pop-punk with synthy, sugarcoated chiptune. | glass beach: the first glass beach album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glass-beach-the-first-glass-beach-album/ | the first glass beach album | When MySpace lost 12 years’ worth of audio files during a server migration last year, many grieved the loss of what had been a formative source of music discovery. Sure, the site has been a shell of its former self for years now, but the phrase “MySpace music” still feels inextricable from a certain irreverent, malleable sound. Los Angeles’ glass beach breathes life into those audacious bygone trends. Their idiosyncratic debut, the first glass beach album, is a whirlwind of post-emo maximalism, fusing mid-aughts pop-punk with synthy, sugarcoated chiptune. Combined with a mid-century jazz flourish and a few ambient interludes, it makes for one of the more bizarrely inventive recent rock albums.
Glass beach came together sometime around 2015 under singer and multi-instrumentalist J. McClendon, then working under their solo alias Casio Dad. Future bandmates William White and Jonas Newhouse were DJs together at a college radio station in Minnesota, where they occasionally played Casio Dad tracks. A real-life friendship was born, and the trio began making music together in LA. Though glass beach’s unique confluence of influences appears tailored to a niche audience, they’ve found loyal devotees and a measure of underground buzz. Supporters championed the band with such earnestness that Run for Cover has reissued the first glass beach album on vinyl just eight months after its initial Bandcamp release.
Glass beach separates lengthy bursts of electro-punk (“bedroom community,” “yoshi’s island,” “dallas”) with shorter, palette-cleansing instrumentals. “I’ve always just been more into the idea of listening to a whole album all the way through,” McClendon has explained, a philosophy that keeps the sequence feeling orderly even amid its most frantic exaggerations. One such moment is the opening track, “classic j dies and goes to hell part 1,” a jazzy opus best described as The Black Parade off-Broadway. It’s the most overblown track here, but if you can bear it, more polished moments throughout the rest of the record are their own reward.
While glass beach most immediately call to mind recent cyber-pop phenomenons like 100 gecs, they cite the influence of the Brave Little Abacus, an obscure, short-lived emo group from New England with a similar affinity for experimental electronic elements not often heard in rock music. “bedroom community” fits a traditional piano solo between passages that evoke classic video game soundtracks, while the first portion of “dallas” taps into minimal Midwest emo before breakneck synths take over. There’s as much pop-punk and math rock here as there are cartoonish embellishments. But despite the laundry list of resemblances—American Football’s odd time signatures, the Octopus Project’s theremin hooks—nothing on glass beach sounds copied and pasted.
The band falls short when their subject matter starts to rely on hackneyed mid-aughts emo tropes: “I’m always making a list of all the people I’d help if I wasn’t helpless myself,” McClendon croons on “bone skull.” “cold weather” has little to add to its description of a relationship conducted over text: “I love the way you make me feel/When I’m staring at my screen/At 4 a.m., trying not to fall asleep/And you hit me up just to see if I’m OK.” But even when glass beach’s lyrics feel slight, they deliver them with conviction—a confidence that comes from committing to artistic decisions hardly anyone else would make. They’ve learned that genuine connection sometimes means forgetting about trying to appeal to the masses.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | January 30, 2020 | 7.2 | ea8c605c-6cfd-43a5-b931-ee194a76bf7f | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Working with Aaron Dessner, the English singer-songwriter trims down his compositions and expands his comfort zone, experimenting with elements of jazz and historical fiction. | Working with Aaron Dessner, the English singer-songwriter trims down his compositions and expands his comfort zone, experimenting with elements of jazz and historical fiction. | Ben Howard: Collections From the Whiteout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-howard-collections-from-the-whiteout/ | Collections from the Whiteout | Ben Howard was a laid-back star of English neo-folk who garnered comparisons to José González and wrote songs with titles like “Keep Your Head Up.” But in 2014, he released “End of the Affair,” a dramatic, tortured single that stretched towards eight minutes. His subsequent album I Forget Where We Were was successful enough to top the UK album charts and thoughtful enough that Jason Isbell cited the title track as an influence. The 2018 follow-up, Noonday Dream, was a relative disappointment, full of druggy mood pieces without the craft of Where We Were or the hooks of his debut, 2011’s Every Kingdom. Not long after that, Howard heard the experimental piece “Santa Agnes,” by guitarist Aaron Dessner of the National. Over the next 18 months, the two met periodically to work on Howard’s fourth full-length, Collections From the Whiteout.
In theory, Dessner and Howard are natural collaborators but hardly engaging foils; neither lacks for soft-spoken, brooding ballads. Yet they push each other forward, expanding their comfort zone and making choices that feel genuinely unconventional. Dessner likes to emphasize that his main band’s music is more than just the five men at its center, and the albums he produces often employ the same auxiliary musicians and techniques. Whiteout involves a healthy mixture of Dessner’s team (Jason Treuting of So Percussion, ubiquitous keyboardist Thomas Bartlett), Howard’s team (bandmates India Bourne and Mickey Smith), as well as some new collaborators, like Big Thief’s James Krivchenia and jazz drummer Yussef Dayes. Dayes co-writes several highlights here, including driving, oddly sensual lead single “Crowhurst’s Meme”; his drums make “Sage That She Was Burning” sound more like progressive jazz trio GoGo Penguin than a typical Howard song. “Unfurling” rides a slightly off-kilter shuffle that resembles little in his catalog. Even the songs where Dessner and Howard are alone feel new for them: The arrhythmic pulse and lack of percussion make “Finders Keepers” genuinely unsettling.
“Finders Keepers” is also new lyrical territory for Howard, moving the focus away from his own search for purpose to depict an absurd, macabre scenario in which a friend of his father discovers a dead body in a floating suitcase. On this record, he finds inspiration in the stories of amateur yacht racer Donald Crowhurst and airplane thief Richard Russell, though on the outro of “Crowhurst’s Meme,” Howard admits that he’s “aware of the allegory”—using niche historical events to explore the same inward-looking concepts. His attempts to grow beyond his usual soul-searching meet mixed success; “Far Out” aims for Roald Dahl-style dark humor but a groaner about a gravedigger who can’t “make a killing, what with all of this living” feels meaningless, as does the not-quite-wisdom (“half a life is half in dream”) of “Sage.” Fortunately, the timbre of Howard’s double-tracked vocals helps the more koan-like lyrics go down easy. The most successful storytelling experiment is “Rookery,” where he criticizes a lover’s unfeeling attitude: “I bet you think everything’s in its rightful place/That sentiment is man’s disgrace” nails the acuity he reaches for elsewhere.
Howard has long loved a slow burner, but only one song here exceeds five minutes; the rest are sufficiently edited down that the 14-track Whiteout is the same length as the 10-track I Forget Where We Were. Brevity turns out to be a strength, ending songs like “Unfurling” and “Metaphysical Cantations” before the experimentation becomes repetitive. “The Strange Last Flight of Richard Russell” rapidly expands and contracts in its middle section but never builds on that tension, landing with a non-committal ambient fade-out. Considering how routinely Howard’s songs have stretched out in the past, it’s a genuine shock when one feels too short.
Whiteout doesn’t always sound like a revelation, but it allows Howard to open up, letting in new lyrical and musical ideas that complement his own without overwhelming them. On “What a Day” and “You Have Your Ways,” he incorporates the choruses of his UK hits in the odd time signatures and synths that mark an Aaron Dessner production. Howard winds up not in the realm of the National, but of a weirder Dessner side project like Big Red Machine—the kind that thrives on collaboration. The contributions of outsiders wind up proving how well Howard can hold his own.
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. | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Island | March 26, 2021 | 6.9 | ea8dea02-e386-4566-aa09-e2af0ca16e25 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The Swedish producer’s second full-length album is streaked with bright, bold melodies yet marked with a lightness of touch that’s unusual in dance music. | The Swedish producer’s second full-length album is streaked with bright, bold melodies yet marked with a lightness of touch that’s unusual in dance music. | Kornél Kovács: Stockholm Marathon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kornel-kovacs-stockholm-marathon/ | Stockholm Marathon | When Kornél Kovács set out to record his debut album, four or five years ago, the Swedish producer’s initial impulse was to lock himself away, forget about the winking house tunes he’d put out for the past half-decade—mostly on Studio Barnhus, the label he co-founded with Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist—and start from scratch. He’d follow a strict regimen, he told himself; he’d limit himself to just one drum machine, sample only certain types of records. Where his music had previously been all in-jokes and lopsided smiles, he would now be disciplined; he would button up the loosey-goosey. But a funny thing happened on the way to boot camp. He started going through old drafts on his hard drives, tracks from seven or eight years before, when he was just getting started, and found himself won over by these “super naïve, careless, basic productions.” He scrapped his original plan and came up with The Bells, a fusion of his latter-day studio know-how and his earliest, most innocent musical instincts.
Three years later, Stockholm Marathon has a similarly easygoing charm. It’s streaked with bright, bold melodies yet marked with a lightness of touch that’s unusual in dance music. Though the sturdy groove of house music forms its backbone, nothing here really screams “nightclub.” Most of its tracks could work on a dancefloor, at least early in the night, but they’re hardly limited to that environment. His twinkling high end suggests natural light, not neon strobes; his beats and basslines are as plump as feather pillows. The “marathon” of the title seems as likely to refer to a Sunday afternoon on the couch as it might some never-ending after party.
But Stockholm Marathon is clearly a more focused effort than Kovács’ debut. Gone are the rough edges of his early work, and gone too the zanier asides. There’s no “Space Jam” cover here, no giddy voices singing “Pantalón!” (Spanish for “pants”). Taking cues from classic drum’n’bass, his basslines are stitched together out of tuned toms, resulting in a sound that’s beefy and full but also swimming in open space—a velvety backdrop for nimble, intricate drum patterns driven by the swinging pulse of UK garage (“Szombat,” “Rocks”) or the finger snaps and triangle of vintage Neptunes and Timbaland (“Purple Skies,” “Marathon”). His ear for detail lets him play with proportion and shift the emphasis away from the obvious: “Ducks” has all the makings of a climactic, club-closing anthem, but instead of snare rolls, crash cymbals, and other trappings of main-stage bombast, he opts for lawn-sprinkler drums and simple, honeyed synths. It’s like the photographic negative of a peak-time banger.
On several of the album’s best songs, the spotlight falls on Rebecca Scheja and Fiona FitzPatrick, better known as the electro-pop duo Rebecca & Fiona. On the opening “Purple Skies,” their airy, gently processed voices offer a wispy contrast against the song’s crisp, clean-lined instrumentation; on “Marathon,” their R&B-honed hook is sleek and coolly compelling. Their contributions give the album an unusual feel: Voices like theirs tend to be heard in the context of pop, EDM, and other styles that emphasize drama. But Kovács holds back, carving out minimalist synth-and-drums grooves that steadfastly refuse to go where you expect them to. Every time a song seems ready to explode, he dials it back; every teasing drop lands back on tiptoes. On the closing “Baltzar,” chopped-up vocals call back to Joy Orbison’s 2009 bass-music classic, “Hyph Mngo,” yet the bleepy, buoyant synths have more in common with Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby.
One does occasionally wish there were a legitimately barnstorming tune here; dance music is frustratingly short on universally loved anthems these days—songs on the level of “Inspector Norse” or “I Feel Space” or, indeed, “Hyph Mngo”—and Kovács undoubtedly has the talent to deliver one. But he has already shown us that he’s plenty capable of more boisterous jams, whereas Stockholm Marathon, he says, came together largely as a process of reflection. Too big a detour from the cool-headed, warm-hearted feel of these low-profile tracks would have risked upsetting the album’s careful balance. Going forward, if Kovács can bring some of the album’s finesse to a bona fide floor-filler—or, better yet, a proper pop song—we’ll all be hitching up our pantalones and preparing to cut a rug. In the meantime, Stockholm Marathon is a snapshot of one of house music’s sharpest minds following his intuition, to delightful results. | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Studio Barnhus | April 24, 2019 | 7.8 | ea969673-6d4d-49b0-a4e2-cad9b44c69a8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Almost exactly one year after his death last October, Elliott Smith's posthumous final album features 15 songs, most of which are said to have been fully completed by Smith himself before being sent to one-time girlfriend Joanna Bolme and longtime producer Rob Schnapf for mixing. | Almost exactly one year after his death last October, Elliott Smith's posthumous final album features 15 songs, most of which are said to have been fully completed by Smith himself before being sent to one-time girlfriend Joanna Bolme and longtime producer Rob Schnapf for mixing. | Elliott Smith: From a Basement on the Hill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7270-from-a-basement-on-the-hill/ | From a Basement on the Hill | Pontificating at length about the colossal sadness of Elliott Smith's discography might seem reductive or stupidly obvious, but "sad" still stands as the single most accurate label ever slapped onto any of the late singer/songwriter's records. Smith's melancholy is big, pervasive and suffocating: see strummed chords and meekly mewed verses coated in thick, gloppy layers of heartbreak, lyrics hanging heavy with cold defeat, vocals seeped in doom. Even the simplicity of Smith's songs can be oddly disheartening-- the pretty bits always conceal grim, prickly underbellies, with Smith's melodic lightness tempered by the very worst kind of self-alienation.
Pop music has enjoyed a long and tenuous relationship with sadness-as-aesthetic-anchor, and Elliott Smith's role in that lineage was obvious from the start. It was forever preserved the moment that an obviously misplaced Smith stumbled onto the Academy Awards stage sporting an awkward, ill-fitting white suit. Now, nearly a year after his presumed suicide, Elliott Smith has come to occupy a painfully specific spot in our collective pop memory, curled up alongside spiritual brethren Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake-- all somber songwriters who realized their artistic ends in hideously relevant ways, fulfilling every last one of the dismal prophecies they wrote themselves into. And, as with Cobain and Drake, the most devastating part of Elliott Smith's death wasn't the knife slammed deep into his chest, but the bland inevitability of that motion-- how nobody was surprised, how things felt so "validated," how it was disgustingly appropriate, how we were all just waiting for it.
Unsurprisingly, From a Basement on the Hill-- Smith's posthumous sixth solo album-- doesn't break form: Released uncomfortably close to the one-year anniversary of his death, the album is riddled with helpless proclamations and self-incriminating taunts, clanging guitars and foggy, jumbled arrangements. Like nearly all of Smith's records, From a Basement covers his despair in sweet, perky, folk-pop kisses; and yet the album is still the saddest thing you'll hear all year. Smith's gloom may be romanticized into gold, but what's ultimately most harrowing about his unhappiness is its nastiness-- and that same gritty, uncompromising accuracy is also what makes his records so impossibly urgent, so uncomfortable and desperate. Reality is splattered all over From a Basement on the Hill-- dissonant guitars that sometimes coalesce and sometimes clash, vocals that flit from beautiful to strained, lyrics that range from clever to pedantic, production choices that hop maniacally from right to wrong.
For whatever reason, Smith's happier moments have always felt a little meaner than his darkest. They're somehow more smirking and cruel, as if they'd been put in place as pure provocation. Even the lightest tracks here (see the excellent "King's Crossing", or the barely-there "Memory Lane") are bogged down by their own sense of inevitability, or maybe by our own-- it's almost impossible not to judge From a Basement on the Hill without first acknowledging the complicated context of its release, cringing at its song titles, and promptly biting back presumptive words like "foreshadowing."
Supposedly, Smith had finished most of the work on From a Basement before his death last October, and the completed tracks were posthumously compiled by his immediate family and mixed by one-time girlfriend/present-day Jicks member Joanna Bolme and longtime producer Rob Schnapf ("final production" is credited only to "Elliott's family and friends"). And perhaps surprisingly, From a Basement on the Hill is perfectly coherent and cohesive, without any sense of being slapped together from half-finished parts. The record even boasts a classic Smith opener, the booming and majestic "Coast to Coast", which swells in and out in a haze of guitar ping and found sound murmurs. Collaborating again with former Heatmiser bandmate (and current Quasi member) Sam Coomes, "Pretty (Ugly Before)" weds tinkling piano with goofy guitar bits and lyrics that are somehow equally disheartened and optimistic ("Sunshine/ Been keeping me up for days/ There's no nighttime/ It's only a passing phase").
Still, the most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans. It's likely that Elliott Smith will be resurrected and rediscovered countless times over, and that his suicide will become as big a part of his legacy as his discography, feeding the mythology, informing the songs. But while From a Basement on the Hill will certainly have a place in that tradition, its impact will prove a stark contrast to his most affecting work. | 2004-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | October 17, 2004 | 7.2 | ea979f07-53cb-463c-8f04-9b2f031f251e | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The debut from the amazing, helium-huffing Atlanta rapper features production from Brodinski and a grip of other European producers that makes it a standout among the city’s rising stars. | The debut from the amazing, helium-huffing Atlanta rapper features production from Brodinski and a grip of other European producers that makes it a standout among the city’s rising stars. | Lil Reek: The Graduation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-reek-the-graduation/ | The Graduation | Late last year, a pairing like the teenaged Atlanta rapper Lil Reek and 31-year old French producer Brodinski would not have been able to stir up any significant conversation within the Atlanta rap scene. At the time, Metro Boomin had 10 damn songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and it was the high point of an era where it felt like every rapper’s trajectory was to graduate from their beatmakers and land in the laps of the super producers like Metro Boomin, 808 Mafia, Mike WiLL Made-It, etc. But rap moves fast and now there’s an environment where rappers are expected to build with their producers. A debut mixtape like The Graduation from an artist with buzz like Lil Reek is appealing because an Atlanta rap project with a sound rooted both in the city and trance-inducing French electro music in the past would have been cast aside for more traditional records.
In the few months since Brodinski inspired him to give the booth a try, Reek has become a rapper who can seemingly flow over anything. The off-kilter production on The Graduation—handled mostly by European producers Brodinski, Mister Tweeks, and Ikaz Boi—is filled with uncanny pauses and buildups that usually come before major drops on EDM tracks. The intro, “Rock Out,” shouldn’t be easy to rap over: It’s a couple of tweaks away from belonging in a Mad Decent DJ set. But Reek catches the beat effortlessly and blinds you from the fact that it’s not a typical South Atlanta instrumental.
Lil Reek is fun and that feeling is elevated because of how little we know about his rapping ability, everything is a surprise. His voice is odd, pre-pubescent but also slightly raspy, similar to rising Atlanta rapper Young Nudy. On the airy standout “Blind Man”—featuring the album’s sole acceptable guest verse from Atlanta’s songwriting wizard Key!—Reek leans into his voice and adds a smidge of Auto-Tune, hitting a smooth and controlled melody. And then when he wants to, he strips down his voice and lets his South Atlanta accent and hoarse inflection loose like on “Drip”—the closest Brodinski comes to making a straightforward Atlanta trap beat.
The mixtape also serves a purpose beyond being a rap debut, as it’s a reward to Reek from himself for recently graduating high school. He never does capture the celebratory vibe that he set out to create, apparent by the description of the project’s meaning he gave Mass Appeal, “Dedicated to everything that I done worked for, please 13 years in school...it’s most definitely gonna be a lit graduation.” Producers like Brodinski would have been capable of creating more grand production to represent the party-like feel of a graduation, which ultimately is a good decision because the slightly darker tone makes it easier to assimilate the music into Atlanta’s rap circle. Reek also uses the opportunity on “Im Back” to reflect on his strange last couple of months where he unexpectedly had to balance the life of a high school senior while also being a budding rap star, which is a let down because Belgian producer Mister Tweeks isn’t able to balance that South Atlanta rawness with the European flash like Brodinski and strays too far into the world of electronic music.
The Graduation is accessible enough where a single can be posted on WorldStarHipHop without the comments being flooded with Future avatars saying “What the fuck is this?” Lil Reek had to make sure that the tape was a sufficient introduction that established himself as a young presence in an Atlanta rap scene that is overwhelmingly competitive and critical. It’s a project that is impressive because at the risk of being ostracized as an alternative rapper—which would unfairly put a ceiling over the endless potential of Reek—he paired with Brodinski and other European producers to create an album that displayed how to standout in Atlanta without being excessive. Two years ago, a rapper from Atlanta with this much raw ability would have been surely scooped up by Metro or Southside by now and put under their wing, but now the mixtape has a unique has a place in the city: a young artist who will make both the Southern rap purists and trend-seekers for a brief moment get along. | 2018-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Broyal | July 5, 2018 | 7.4 | ea98db30-2b41-4853-92f3-2b80928bd076 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Sheer Mag's music stuffs hip-shaking hooks and burly riffs within impeccably structured pop songs, wrapped in lyrics both open-hearted and openly political. They’re the Jackson 5 raised to play punk rock, with an F-5 tornado for a singer. | Sheer Mag's music stuffs hip-shaking hooks and burly riffs within impeccably structured pop songs, wrapped in lyrics both open-hearted and openly political. They’re the Jackson 5 raised to play punk rock, with an F-5 tornado for a singer. | Sheer Mag: III EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21731-iii-ep/ | III EP | "Jar of whiskey, Skinny Lizzy, that's all I need," sang Christina Halladay on "Sit and Cry," the second song off Sheer Mag's debut 2014 EP. Many rock bands swear allegiance to Lizzy-inspired, booze-fueled riff rock, but Sheer Mag make the formula sound uniquely vital, which makes them uncommon amongst most rock bands in 2016. Their music stuffs hip-shaking hooks and burly riffs within impeccably structured pop songs, wrapped in lyrics both open-hearted and openly political. They're the Jackson 5 raised to play punk rock, with an F-5 tornado for a singer.
Earlier this month they released III, their third EP in the last three years. It upholds the band's gold standard as they continue to refine their formula: kick drums like rifle shots, earworm guitar riffs played with electric glee, no-frills solos no less punk rock for their existence. Halladay still sounds like she's coming through a crackling speaker, as does the rest of the band, but her soulful, gale-force voice is more legible than ever. It's thirteen-and-a-half minutes of pure pleasure.
III is evenly split between love songs and political songs. "Can't Stop Fighting" addresses the chronic violence against women in Ciudad Juarez and in the world at large, with Halladay howling for collective action. "Night Isn't Bright" accomplishes the astonishing task of delivering lines like "It's plain to see these days that there's an agitation / We live and we die by a politics of simplification" without coming off as joyless. Sheer Mag will trick you into dancing while singing about overthrowing the system. You will have fun as you debate whether voting for Bernie over Hillary represents true change, or just a rearranging of the Titanic deck chairs. The songs are imbued with the tangible, bleeding passion that often accompanies political awareness, lest you think wokeness to be the sole province of the dour. They remind me of the MC5, another working-class garage band who used swaggering rock as a vehicle for righteousness.
The love songs find Halladay sounding more vulnerable than usual. She sings about men who've wronged her through their apathy, despite her fearlessness in seeking clarity. "At least I tried," she sings on "Worth the Tears," "and the time we had was worth the tears that you made me cry." The highlight might be "Nobody's Baby," which is built around a clipped riff and a refrain both defiant and depressed. "I'm nobody's baby, I'm nobody's girl," she sings, with the resignation of someone attempting to stay strong despite the pain they feel. The fearlessness of Sheer Mag's politics makes them stick out, but they're also unafraid to get bruised—a contrast of tough and tender that makes their music all the more potent.
It bears mentioning that Sheer Mag are strident anti-capitalists. III was released with no head's up and no PR, all for the price of a latte. (You can stream the EP in its entirety without paying a dime.) The lyrics are printed on their Bandcamp, lest anyone mistake their pointed intentions. They've reportedly turned down offers from plenty of labels. Their upcoming Coachella set seems hilariously out-of-place, though one imagines them concluding a furious set by burning their cash fee on stage ala the KLF. The string of EPs would naturally point toward an upcoming LP, though we can't be sure. For now, they're more than welcome in these limited bursts. They're totally locked into the sound, for all it'll give them. Pour another drink and turn it up. | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Static Shock / Wilsuns RC | March 14, 2016 | 8.3 | ea9c14b8-20a0-4af8-b7c8-68f55fcc29fd | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
On his second album, the Sydney punk fleshes out his filthy bubblegum scuzz with riffs, jokes, the requisite car song, and even a few unexpectedly vulnerable moments. | On his second album, the Sydney punk fleshes out his filthy bubblegum scuzz with riffs, jokes, the requisite car song, and even a few unexpectedly vulnerable moments. | Gee Tee: Goodnight Neanderthal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gee-tee-goodnight-neanderthal/ | Goodnight Neanderthal | A good punk demo can feel either like a riveting mission statement or the fuck-around doodles of some booger trying to make their friends laugh. Kel Mason’s first bedroom-recorded outing as Gee Tee, in 2016, was the latter: a collection of goofy, sample-heavy punk songs about cars, flame decals, and driving too fast. This balaclava-wearing weirdo from Gold Coast, Australia named his project after a Rat Fink-adjacent muscle car illustration, and he rode the gimmick to an excellent 2018 self-titled album. In that underheralded lo-fi power-pop collection, earworm synth melodies and belligerent power chords showcased a songwriting talent capable of more than just easy punchlines. It turns out a song about loitering at the gas station can be funny and a banger.
Goodnight Neanderthal is a long-awaited follow-up for those who eagerly scooped up the last half decade of Mason’s prolific 7" drops, compilation spots, and Bandcamp loosies. Despite laboring over this collection of filthy bubblegum scuzz for the last two years, the Sydney-based punk ultimately settled on just 10 songs totaling 18 minutes of material. With a full band and the backing of the venerated garage-rock heads at Goner Records, he didn’t want any duds on this one. (“I get really picky about what I release,” he said of the album. “If I don’t think it rocks, I don’t see the point in putting it out.”) Two months before Mason sent it off to Memphis, he quickly wrote and recorded the majority of the album’s songs, scrapping much of what he’d done in the months prior. Goodnight Neanderthal bottles the energy of that spontaneous burst of creativity. True to his mission, the new album has no skips.
While Gee Tee is no longer defined by its early motorhead caricatures, Mason leans heavily into the project’s storied playfulness. The album’s title track is defined by a big gaudy keyboard melody oozing Technicolor joy, which is counterbalanced by a bunch of tough-guy shit. Fuzz-caked power chords chug along while Mason sings from his gut about how he just got bonked over the head by a big club. His resilience to blunt-force trauma isn’t his only cartoonish trait; Mason taps into a variety of exaggerated voices, lending each song a distinct vibe. He’s a nasal brat on “Bad Egg,” wondering over a killer rapid-fire guitar hook about a nasty smell in the kitchen. (Spoiler: It’s you—you’re the bad egg!) He’s a goblin with vocal fry on the burly “Heart Throb,” insisting that you can’t get enough of him even when this piece of shit cakes his hair in dirt and grease.
Unsurprisingly, Gee Tee also operates in the tradition of punk songs that find conviviality in horror and the apocalypse. “Within the Walls” pits rollicking carnival music against forces lurking out of sight. In one of the most joyous-sounding songs, “40k”—seemingly set in the universe of the tabletop classic Warhammer 40,000—Mason enthusiastically heralds the nuking of the planet. Over a spare, beautifully written keyboard line, the chorus is engineered for screaming along: “’Cause you’re dying in the 40k!”
Gee Tee have a reputation for rowdy shows, and Goodnight Neanderthal is full of songs that would thrive in a room full of beaming, sweating, shoving punks. Pop sweetness is balanced pretty evenly with scummy and distorted guitars, though the best song is its most subtle. Stacked next to the album’s boldest aesthetic moves, “Rock Phone” shows how much Mason can accomplish with a more minimal approach. The story is simple: Living in the future is a burden, so he ditches his smartphone in favor of a Flintstones boulderphone. Underpinned by layered guitars, the song manages to acknowledge the depression inherent in always being plugged in while also offering a universal plea that goes way back in the history of popular music: “Please call me on my phone.”
It’s not a Gee Tee album without a car song, and “(I Hate) Drivin’ in the City” is his best one yet. Staccato little synth stabs push forward relentlessly, and the chorus’ unbelievable guitar lick seems teleported from a ’70s hard-rock radio standard. Six years in, Mason is far away from the first Gee Tee demo: Instead of bragging about how sick his whip is, he’s riddled with anxiety and swears he’ll never drive in a big city again. His songs feel catchier and more robust than ever. Between this and “Rock Phone,” Goodnight Neanderthal is the most relatable record this Australian rock’n’roll cartoon character has ever made. Maybe Gee Tee never needed a car in the first place. | 2023-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Goner / Urge | March 3, 2023 | 7.7 | ea9c4c8b-0652-4809-be15-341c4f741ca3 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
On Super Saiyan Vol. 3, the standard bearers for Chicago’s kinetic bop scene inch closer toward rap’s center, with mixed results. | On Super Saiyan Vol. 3, the standard bearers for Chicago’s kinetic bop scene inch closer toward rap’s center, with mixed results. | Sicko Mobb: Super Saiyan Vol. 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21554-super-saiyan-vol-3/ | Super Saiyan Vol. 3 | Rappers ranging from Soulja Boy to Chance the Rapper have referenced the '90s anime series “Dragon Ball Z" in their lyrics, while others have dropped entire songs and mixtapes inspired by the show. None, however, have taken the metaphor quite as far as Sicko Mobb, whose bubbly, hyper-melodic sound evokes few things more than a cartoon world rendered in bright hues. To be sure, this is still street rap, albeit street rap that’s engineered for fast-paced, expressive dancing; "party music," as member Lil Trav put it last year. In their native Chicago, they’ve become posterboys for the bop scene, serving as a counterpoint to the darker drill music associated with the city’s south side.
Super Saiyan Vol. 3, the third in Sicko Mobb's series of "Dragonball"-themed mixtapes, finds the duo further extending their reach beyond the confines of bop. They're working with established producers from outside of Chicago, drawing in collaborators from the neighboring footwork scene and landing high-profile features. They’re imagining what it would be like to truly break out and workshopping the sounds that might get them there.
For all of its experimentation, though, Super Saiyan Vol. 3’s strongest songs find the Mobb doubling down on the aesthetic they’ve distilled over the course of three years and just as many mixtapes. Tracks like "Spazz on Ya" and the west-side anthem "Out West Chicago" display the group’s gift for giddy speed runs over syrupy, day-glo beats. More impressive yet are the songs where they manage to pull other artists into their sonic orbit. Take the tape's lead single, "Expensive Taste," which features a hook from fellow Chicagoan Jeremih over a bed of shimmering synth arpeggios. Jeremih disappears, chameleon-like, into the Sicko Mobb sound, adopting Lil Ceno and Lil Trav’s rapid cadence so readily that he’s barely recognizable. Even so, he manages to sneak in some of the song’s best lines ("Got lobsters on my plate/ Got oysters in my Rollie").
A few of the trial balloons here push the signature Sicko Mobb sound in interesting directions. "Eaters" coaxes an uncharacteristically airy chiptune beat out of footwork legend DJ Nate—squint and you’ll hear Kanye's "All of the Lights" rendered in miniature, trumpet fanfare and all. On the anthemic, 808 Mafia-produced stomper "What You Sayin," Trav and Ceno completely forego the gooey Auto-Tune vocals that have become their trademark, proving that straight-ahead trap-pop is more than within their reach.
Sadly, not every attempt to inch toward rap's center pays off. Tracks like "Throwin Money" and "Won't Take Long" are undeniably catchy but veer toward generic radio fodder—there’s not nearly as much here to distinguish Sicko Mobb from their peers. Even worse, the tape’s back half is weighed down by repetitive, lethargic songs like "Going In" and "Last Time." The latter aims for the sort of introspective number that might cap off a Kanye or Future record but with the exception of one pensive Trav verse, feels like a tedious retread of the same old boasts. Projecting energy has rarely been an issue for these guys but it sounds like they haven’t yet figured out how to do so at slower speeds.
In "Dragon Ball" lore, Super Saiyan refers to a series of evolutionary transformations a character can undergo in order to become more powerful; just when a hero seems to have hit a wall, a new level of Super Saiyan is revealed. Evolution seems to be a key objective of the Super Saiyan series: with each new mixtape, Sicko Mobb continue to refine their core sound while branching out in new directions. Super Saiyan Vol. 3 is a bit of a mixed bag, despite the fact that it features some of the duo’s strongest work yet. Thankfully, something tells me that this isn't even their final form. | 2016-02-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 10, 2016 | 6.8 | eaa01e22-8c60-4f48-b013-f84cbeeac614 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Part of the fun of this covers album from the Spacebomb Records crew is hearing how Matthew E. White and Flo Morrissey rethink how male and female voices can relate and react to each other. | Part of the fun of this covers album from the Spacebomb Records crew is hearing how Matthew E. White and Flo Morrissey rethink how male and female voices can relate and react to each other. | Flo Morrissey / Matthew E. White: Gentlewoman, Ruby Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22771-gentlewoman-ruby-man/ | Gentlewoman, Ruby Man | Like all Spacebomb records, the new covers album by English singer-songwriter Flo Morrissey and American musician Matthew E. White is as much about the Spacebomb sound as it is about the singers or the songs they’re singing. For most of the 2010s the small Richmond, Virginia, studio/record label has been refining a silky sound that recalls the florid productions of ’70s R&B visionaries like Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield without succumbing to revivalism. Rather, that aesthetic seems to form an implicit argument about how the past can be revived and even rewritten for the present.
Every Spacebomb record sounds good on some level, even one as minor as Gentlewoman, Ruby Man. Morrissey and White met at a Lee Hazelwood tribute show in London in 2015, singing “Some Velvet Morning” together and striking up a friendship. Vocally, they’re a fine match, each with a laconic delivery that makes them distinctive, albeit limited, interpreters. That Hazelwood tune didn’t make the album cut, possibly because neither is interested in assigning roles based on gender. In fact, part of the fun of this album is hearing them rethink how male and female voices can relate and react to each other. Rather than role play romantic conversations, they trade off lead and backing vocals, and their platonic dynamic only adds to the giddy bounce of Little Wings’ “Look at What the Light Did” and intensifies the eccentric imagery of Frank Ocean’s “Thinking About You.”
With the exception of James Blake’s “Colour of Anything,” which here sounds like an outtake from the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, Morrissey and White fare better with the more recent material than with the old. They play it fairly safe on Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” and they play it even safer on George Harrison’s “Govindam.” Somehow their version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” is even more dour than the 1967 original, thanks to White’s heavy-lidded vocals and an all-elbows R&B groove. The song sticks out not merely as a poor choice of material but as the rare poor showing by the Spacebomb band.
Perhaps their most successful cover is the one that seems the unlikeliest. For many listeners—okay, almost all of them—“Grease” will forever be stuck to the 1978 movie like a wad of hardened bubblegum to the underside of a desk. Barry Gibb penned it as a last-minute addition to the film adaptation of the musical, and since then it has ushered several generations of viewers into that world of the idealized 1950s. By ripping the song right out of the opening credits and placing it alongside nine other covers, Morrissey and White manage to find a new way to hear “Grease,” one that is more Bee Gees than Travolta/Newton-John. They underscore the shaky self-assertion of Gibbs’ lyrics, especially that existential bridge: “This is a life of illusion, a life of control,” they sing together. “Mixed with confusion, what are we doing here?” If Frankie Valli, already an oldies act when he recorded it in 1978, spoke for a generation that had grown up only reluctantly, this twenty- and thirtysomething duo sound terrified that age might not actually grant wisdom. | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Glassnote | January 12, 2017 | 6.4 | eaa17618-b102-414f-9ca0-0e8dba5fcf80 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
With a handful of hits, placements on albums by Young Jeezy and Rick Ross, and a major-label debut on the horizon, the Atlanta rapper's new mixtape is his first big move of the year. | With a handful of hits, placements on albums by Young Jeezy and Rick Ross, and a major-label debut on the horizon, the Atlanta rapper's new mixtape is his first big move of the year. | Future: Astronaut Status | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16217-astronaut-status/ | Astronaut Status | If success brings expectations, then Future is at the point where his mixtapes are starting to matter. With a handful of major and minor hits and recent placements on albums by Young Jeezy and Rick Ross, Future has a major-label debut somewhere on the horizon, but the album will undoubtedly languish if he can't keep his momentum going. Astronaut Status is his first big move of the year, and though the tape doesn't really bring much of anything new to the table, it is Future's strongest, most listenable mixtape yet, and that alone is notable enough.
As much as any of his mixtapes, Astronaut Status puts Future's talents as a songwriter at the forefront. There's nothing here that's elaborate or notably deep, and in fact Future trades on his ability to write quirky, catchy little songs that you could easily picture as playground chants. There is an inclination in the rap world to tag songs likes these as disposable, but the ruthless efficiency in Future's writing makes these tracks endure, even if it's in your head and against your will. There's a circular, almost music-box quality to tracks like "Nunbout" and "Swap it Out", with Future driving the same idea and melody into the ground, that gives them an organic, homespun feel. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine these songs as one-takes, or not being built up much further from demos, but sometimes melodies are indelible enough that they don't really need much more than that. The playground element of the songs is important-- plenty of rap songs have liberally interpolated actual playground classics, though Future's ability to mine the space between seriousness and something close to childish taunting is unique.
Future has said in interviews that he wants to make stadium music, and though that's enough of a jump in ambition that it could lead him down a disastrous path, he does succeed on Astronaut Status when he widens his scope or pushes himself vocally. The obvious standout in this regard is "Deeper Than the Ocean", a track with Spanish guitars and a squealing solo that finds Future singing in a cracked, raspy voice about the pain in his life. The sentiment is real and the lyrics a bit jarring, even if the execution is slightly ridiculous-- but it would only be a small leap of faith to close your eyes and imagine Future as Adele performing "Someone Like You" at the Brit Awards. Elsewhere, "Spaz on Y'all" and "Birds Take a Bath" are more conventionally anthemic, but nonetheless show that Future is capable of picking off where Akon left off, which I promise is more important than it sounds.
Future could likely go on like this forever, prolifically releasing mixtapes with more than enough good songs to justify their existence. At some point, he will need to strike gold again, and in the murky waters of pop-rap hitmaking, it's hard to tell if anything on Astronaut Status stands up to the songs that helped Future ascend to this status in the first place. Until all of that shakes out, though, we can do just fine enjoying his catchy, goofy songs as they are. | 2012-01-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-01-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 30, 2012 | 7.1 | eaa27d24-3569-4884-9cb7-1dd3d71bafe5 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The Massachusetts-based drummer and producer buries pop music in experimental chaos using studio wizardry and a deft compositional touch. | The Massachusetts-based drummer and producer buries pop music in experimental chaos using studio wizardry and a deft compositional touch. | Dan Drohan: You’re a Crusher / drocan! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dan-drohan-youre-a-crusher-drocan/ | You’re a Crusher / drocan! | A scan through Dan Drohan’s Bandcamp page reveals a musician restlessly tinkering with the molecular structure of composition. The Massachusetts-based drummer and producer’s forays into exploratory electronic composition with real-time drums mostly defy classification. Maybe these attempts to create new forms of beauty and intrigue in sound could be called “organic cyborg music.” Amid all the weirdness in his latest album You’re a Crusher / drocan! is a pop record struggling to emerge from the wires. Slivers of melody shoot through the cacophony, but they quickly become subsumed in the pile-up of disjointed rhythms and melted-plastic textures. This perpetual battle gives the album’s its essential friction.
You’re a Crusher / drocan! is divided into two segments, the first ostensibly experimental and the second nominally pop. But to call drocan! “pop” is like calling the idea of death a nuisance. Created with multi-instrumentalist Mike Cantor, the poppier section that comprises the second half of the record indulges in fun-house-mirrored studio wizardry. “The Garden” evokes Cornelius’ 1997 album Fantasma, but on much stronger and stranger drugs, its angelic vocals reverbed into a choir of anomie. “Passwords” sounds like a brutalist version of Japanese city pop, with Drohan pounding out kettledrum thunder. “Through the Night” purveys cherubic Panda Bear vibes, but is much less cloying.
As diverting as drocan! is, it’s the first half, You’re a Crusher, that delivers the real fireworks. “Leave it Loading” rides rickety, uptempo beats and a wonky, foghorn-like bassline akin to Hugh Hopper’s in early Soft Machine over decaying yet vibrant keyboard dabs. This alien, warehouse-pop aura splits the difference between Swell Maps and This Heat. “You’re a Crusher” serves as the bridge to drocan!, filtering Animal Collective’s awry-mushroom-trip inversion of the Beach Boys through Black Dice’s warp-everything-to-the-max mulcher. “CUPOFDRO” comes across as a modern American take on Autechre’s bafflingly complex IDM puzzles. The cumulative effect of this rampant sonic distortion is a cheerful kind of madness. Drohan creates his own bizarre universe out of a mix of organic and synthetic elements, and then arrays the parts in often breathtakingly original ways. He may not be reinventing the wheel, but he is retrofitting it with some spectacular rims.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | DROMAN | July 1, 2020 | 7.3 | eaa6da49-9240-4c23-80cc-6fb94fda262c | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
Patti Smith's new guitar-driven album, her first since 2007's Twelve, is a meditation on exploration and adventure. | Patti Smith's new guitar-driven album, her first since 2007's Twelve, is a meditation on exploration and adventure. | Patti Smith: Banga | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16693-banga/ | Banga | Somehow, over the course of the four years it took her to write and record the material on her latest album, Banga, poet-singer-photographer-mother-activist-shaman-clarinetist Patti Smith managed to do some things she hadn't done yet. She acted in a Jean-Luc Godard film, appearing in his 2010 videotape polemic Film Socialisme and, in a highbrow/lowbrow swivel, then later made her television acting debut in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. She wrote her first memoir, Just Kids, a chronicle of her ardent friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, which earned a National Book Award and critical acclaim. And-- a proud autodidact all her life-- Smith even belatedly racked up a few college degrees, so to speak, receiving honorary doctorates from Rowan University (she dropped out in 1967) and the Pratt Institute. All in all, a pretty average couple of years in the life of Patti Smith, who's spent decade after decade ticking a red pencil against her chin, circling uncharted waters like want ads, and setting sail.
Much like the years during which she was working on it in fits and starts, Banga is a hodgepodge. A song about Amerigo Vespucci comes a few minutes before an elegy for Amy Winehouse; an idyllic ballad inspired by Nikolai Gogol rubs track-list elbows with an idyllic ballad written as a birthday present for Johnny Depp. And all the while Smith scatters handfuls of references to "the future" and "the 21st century" across Banga, suffusing the record with a palpable sense of futurity, horizon-gazing, and, yes, hope. Still, its bright, guitar-driven sound is even-keeled enough to make its motley cast of characters and jumbled, all-over-the-place temporality feel oddly cohesive, as though its parts were carefully fused together in a room where the clock has no hands. Remember those words that shot out of her lips like hot lightning on her brilliant 1978 record Easter: "I don't fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future." Well, more than three decades later, Banga is the work of someone interested in fucking with everything.
Smith's earliest and most iconic albums were animated by her explosive, dribbling vocal style ("If you miss a beat, make up another," Sam Shepard once advised a nervous Smith before an early theater performance, and everything about her method of singing proves she took those words to heart), but what we've learned over her past few records is that Smith's molten lava delivery has cooled off a bit with age. Which means that the longer, spoken-word pieces on Banga-- the underworld swirl of "Constantine's Dream" or the stoic "Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)"-- don't careen with the breakneck energy of, say, Horses' centerpiece reveries of "Land, of a Thousand Dances" and "La Mer (De)". Smith's now got one of those speaking voices that-- like Werner Herzog playing God in voiceover-- lends a cosmic gravity to every word she utters, even when she's improvising. This occasionally makes the denser and more conceptual lines feel leaden ("Constantine" begins, "In Arezzo I dreamed a dream/ Of Saint Francis who kneeled and prayed"), but there's something wonderful about the way it's etched certain lingering qualities of her idiosyncratic vocal thumbprint in stone. For all its imagery of Mercury and magpies, I think "Tarkovsky"'s most humanizing charm to be that Smith still pronounces "wuter" with a New Jersey accent.
Banga meditates on ideas about exploration and adventure, and though the longer tracks tackle these themes more explicitly (the 11-minute "Constantine" was inspired, serendipitously, by a postcard she received of a Dimitri Levas painting of a conquistador), it's actually the shorter, less assuming tracks that best capture that spirit of discovery. The opener "Amerigo"-- which reimagines Vespucci taking a more sympathetic view of the indigenous people of his "new" continent-- has an infectiously buoyant energy that doesn't distract from its political consciousness. The same could be said of the driving, scaled-mountain intensity of "Fuji-san", which Smith wrote in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. The elegies-- "This Is the Girl" for Winehouse and "Maria" for the late French actress Maria Schneider-- are sweet, desolate, and fittingly understated. ("It is a song I wish we never had to write," Smith says of "Girl" in the liner notes.) Smith overstates Banga's overarching themes on the final track, a cover of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" that's smooth sailing until a small children's choir storms the helm at the end to sing, "Look at mother nature on the run in the 21st century." It's a moment of respite from the somber "Costantine" that precedes it, but-- especially coming from someone as cliché-obliterating as Smith-- it feels uncharacteristically heavy-handed.
Though neither a high point nor a low point in her freewheeling, four-decade career, Banga has the same charm of Smith's best albums: It flits with the impressionistic fascinations of a single mind. Even now that she's got those honorary Ph.Ds, Smith is still the eternal college freshman at heart, constantly stumbling upon new artistic heroes and then drawing from them fathomless and unabashedly ebullient inspiration. Horses tacked upon its walls cut-out, doodled-upon photos of Arthur Rimbaud, William S. Burroughs, and Bob Dylan; Easter subbed them out for Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, and Jesus Christ; and Banga keeps the cycle going (though with a decidedly Russian flair) with Tarkovsky, Gogol, and Mikhail Bulgakov (the record's title is the name of the dog in Master and Margarita, a book with which Smith says she was "smitten" when she first read it four years ago). Ultimately, it's Banga's earnestness about the thrill of discovery that makes it feel so out-of-time and refreshing. It runs counter to that sense of maxed-out ennui that governs the way so many people talk about art and artists in the age of Wikipedia-- when posturing that you know it all is more attractive than confessing blind spots, if only so you can bemoan the fact that it's all been done before. Though more in spirit than in sound, Banga pulses with the notion that there are still good books we haven't read, old ideas waiting to be fucked with, and new lands we haven't yet explored. | 2012-06-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | June 6, 2012 | 7.1 | eaac5114-5eb3-40e6-ac0e-f7152e73b109 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The self-assured debut EP from the 20-year-old singer-songwriter deals with those pure and devastating first loves. | The self-assured debut EP from the 20-year-old singer-songwriter deals with those pure and devastating first loves. | Margaux: More Brilliant Is the Hand that Throws the Coin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margaux-more-brilliant-is-the-hand-that-throws-the-coin/ | More Brilliant Is the Hand that Throws the Coin | More Brilliant is the Hand That Throws the Coin, the debut EP from the NYC-based 20-year-old Margaux Bouchegnies, is uncannily wise and self-assured for someone her age. “I want to see myself malfunctioning/I want to see myself skip in place,” she sings on “Hot Faced,” over a knotty and beautiful string arrangement, sounding a million miles from the moment of shame she sings about. Hearing a line like that makes you think about what it would feel like to watch yourself fuck up from space.
Bouchegnies’ music lies two steps away from a lot of familiar indie rock: Her voice recalls Julia Jacklin, and her arrangements might have been plucked from a Fleet Foxes record. But the music she makes from these reference points proves difficult to pin down. A song like “Palm” feels sympatico with jazz standards and Françoise Hardy tearjerkers if anything. “Day time seems as blue and heavy as the lake by home,” Bouchegnies sings, as guitars chirp like cartoon songbirds. When she sings about love, it sounds like she is doing so from the inside of a snowglobe and is asking you to crack the glass with a teaspoon.
Her songs often deal with the sort of first love that feels devastating in its purity—the kind that leaves you crying on the couch not because anything bad happened but because one day the joy will dissipate. It is a profoundly early-twentysomething experience, and Bouchegnies writes about it without cliché. “Please keep reading your book out loud/I like to hear your voice/I like to see your mouth,” she sings on “Faced With Fire.” Her voice quivers as she considers “time’s relentless melt,” and behind her an upright bass lurches like a rocking chair on an uneven porch.
“Cave In,” is the EP’s most spectacular moment, shifting from low, nervous verses into a thicker, darker chorus, strings and fuzzed-out bass thudding into each other. The arrangement keeps building, each new sound adding to the track’s chattering momentum and amplifying the force of the chorus. The song feels like a first kiss, like drinking a beer at a party too fast because you’re anxious. But “Cave In” is not about collapsing under pressure and feeling small, like the song’s title suggests. It’s a declaration of power. “Lay down/This your final offer,” repeats Bouchegnies in the song’s chorus. More Brilliant is the Hand That Throws the Coin is just that: a statement of serious self possession, a record of huge songs written by a young person with an unnerving degree of precision and command. | 2019-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Massif | November 21, 2019 | 7.8 | eaaf336e-d380-4c65-a924-4ff22d55ae0f | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Slay-Z, Azealia Banks' latest EP, features production from the likes of Kaytranada and collaborations with Rick Ross and Nina Sky. It is not as hard-hitting as her debut Broke With Expensive Taste, but it still shimmers with her undeniable skill and personality. | Slay-Z, Azealia Banks' latest EP, features production from the likes of Kaytranada and collaborations with Rick Ross and Nina Sky. It is not as hard-hitting as her debut Broke With Expensive Taste, but it still shimmers with her undeniable skill and personality. | Azealia Banks: Slay-Z | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21790-slay-z/ | Slay-Z | By now, the world understands that Azealia Banks is not perfect. She's offered us plenty of evidence on that score. But she remains uniquely human, and that messy humanity — raw and real and sometimes wrong — is on display as much in her statements to the media and on her Twitter page as in her music. Audiences heard bits and pieces of this on her initial singles and EPs like 1991, but it moved to the forefront on Broke with Expensive Taste, her sharp, poignant and infectious debut album. Released outside of the typical label structure, BWET was a triumph, however short-lived, from an unclassifiable artist of the new millennium. As danceable as it was affecting, the record embodied the sort of charms that we recognized in Banks’ music from the start.
Slay-Z, her latest mixtape featuring production from the likes of Kaytranada and collaborations with Rick Ross and Nina Sky, is not as hard-hitting as BWET, but it still shimmers with Banks’ skill and personality. Banks continues to move further into new territories in her work: "Big Talk" is a hard-hitting and directly trap-influenced slow builder featuring Rick Ross. It's a new sound for Banks, who has distinguished herself both as a vocalist and as a rapper by repurposing a variety of different genres across the decades, most notably the sing-song pop appeal of '90s house. Despite this diversion, Banks is able to make it work, her deft voice snapping and stretching like a rubber band to match the beat and production rather than fight against it.
Still, she continues to double down on her love of ’90s NY house. "The Big Big Beat," one of the best songs on the record, sounds less like a homage to the bright, Top 40 version of the genre and more deeply rooted in the real stuff. It is an underground anthem, one that bubbles under the surface instead of hitting you over the head like "212," but it has the staying power of all her best music.
That is the thing about Azealia Banks: she still puts out consistent work, and each release feels like a well-timed reminder of how good she can be. For all of her questionable tweets or political affiliations, her music still touches on feelings that other artists rarely touch: Consider the sly vulnerability of Broke with Expensive Taste's "Soda," a song that became something of an anthem for misunderstood, creative, emotionally unfulfilled young black women navigating a world that continues to disregard our deepest desires and emotions.
And it is the sort of thing that makes people willing to give her artistic chances. There were very few gut punches as memorable as listening to Broke with Expensive Taste for the first time. And on Slay-Z, there are hints of that power. They don’t shine nearly as bright as her almost flawless debut record, but they keep us watching and listening. | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 31, 2016 | 7.4 | eac5a704-a4d4-4266-b187-6488450789c7 | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
On the minimalist companion to 2020’s NO, the Japanese trio lands a delicate balance of dream pop and drone. It feels like a sanctuary. | On the minimalist companion to 2020’s NO, the Japanese trio lands a delicate balance of dream pop and drone. It feels like a sanctuary. | Boris: W | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boris-w/ | W | For 30 years, Boris have made room for orchestrated chaos and calm. From amp-blown classics like 2005’s Pink to the subdued dream pop of 2011’s New Album, the Japanese trio has leapt with peerless authority between brilliant light and brutal darkness. A companion to 2020’s trouncing NO, their latest album, W, rounds off what band members Atsuo, Takeshi, and Wata have called “a continuous circle of harshness and healing.” The result is a muted weave of exploratory minimalism: It’s the most their music has felt like sanctuary in years.
While the leveling punk of NO packed in the fresh unrest of life in lockdown, W breathes deep and plots anew. Marking Boris’ debut on indie label Sacred Bones, the music feels like a rebirth. Incorporating talc-soft textures that they’ve hinted at but never explored so fully, opener “I Want to Go to the Side Where You Can Touch…” swiftly suggests change. Folding sub-bass and a choir of sine waves with widescreen ambience evoking Slowdive’s Pygmalion, it is a perfect ratio of stacked drone and sugar-spun dream pop.
The trio has long grasped the distinction between density and mass. Like icecaps suspended above the ocean, the hulking drones on albums like Flood and Amplifier Worship seem buoyant despite obvious weight. It’s an auditory sleight of hand, drawn out in space and time. On W, this delicate balance is fine-tuned on the centerpiece, “You Will Know (Ohayo Version).” Among the most beatific songs Boris have committed to tape, thick squalls of feedback hug slinking phrases that sound teased from some alien cello-fretless bass hybrid. Across nine minutes, little separates its feelings of bliss and ill-boding.
The gossamer lead vocals of guitarist Wata, which debuted on 2011’s majestic Attention Please, have never sounded so assured. Take the Björkian “Icelina,” where syllables softly hover above globules of bass and thrifty synths, or “Drowning by Numbers,” a sinister yet vaguely seductive single that weds writhing bass with scorched guitar textures that nod to Cocteau Twins circa Garlands. Much like Kotao Tomozawa’s cover art of some eel-like tangle, Wata’s delivery is eldritch yet inviting. Even when she’s simply counting to 10 in a hushed, ASMR-like tone, the tenor of her voice is enough to dominate the band’s dusky, infernal funk.
Despite being billed as interlinked statements, and the fact that their titles combine to spell “NOW,” the through-line between NO and W is gold foil thin. From a less seasoned group of changelings, the wide berth—and narrow window—between the former’s thundering hardcore and the dusky drone pop of W might seem jarring. With Boris’ tact and loyalty to low-end, however, both albums manage to play to their strengths. On W, the bludgeoning “The Fallen” revisits their indignant brand of sludge. Conjuring Pink highlight “Blackout”—not to mention the band’s noted reverence of the Melvins—it lands a purgative curveball midway through the record. Aided by fellow Tokyo musician suGar yoshinaga on production, both this song and the down-tuned portent at the close of “Old Projector” pleasantly jolt rather than completely blindside.
“The world will keep changing,” Takeshi said in a 2020 interview. “Like a reflecting mirror, Boris will keep evolving.” As with Low’s metamorphosis on Hey What—another benchmark release from a band of indie lifers who never stop moving—Takeshi, Atsuo, and Wata have reflected abstract magic on W. Like a port in a storm, the foundations may occasionally shake, but, for the duration of the record, it feels like the safest place to hide. Whether through doom, drone, shoegaze, or beyond, Boris’ music has a restorative, unifying source: the pursuit—and occasional discovery—of something akin to pure peace.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Sacred Bones | February 11, 2022 | 7.8 | eac6fab4-6a18-4afa-85e6-8ed95cb7cf2f | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
The Detroit scam rapper doesn’t overthink his music: This is just 13 funky instrumentals punched up with funny pop-culture references. | The Detroit scam rapper doesn’t overthink his music: This is just 13 funky instrumentals punched up with funny pop-culture references. | BabyTron: Bin Reaper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shittyboyz-babytron-bin-reaper/ | Bin Reaper | In the last three months, the Detroit rap trio BabyTron, StanWill, and TrDee (collectively known as The Shittyboyz) have emerged with punchline-heavy, ahead-of-the-beat raps in which they send their girlfriends into department stores with stolen credit cards and ruin the credit of grannies so they can punch themselves a gift from Saks Fifth. The production should be classified as “breakdancing on cardboard type beats”; their producers flip ’80s dance pop reminiscent of the Beverly Hills Cop theme song into typical funky Detroit instrumentals.
The most polished of the trio is ShittyBoyz BabyTron, a 19-year-old that rocks a bowl haircut like a Disney Channel star, wears throwback NBA jerseys like a frat boy at a music festival, and raps confidently about the scams that have supported him since the days when he used to keep a credit-card chip reader in his high school gym locker room.
In August, the ShittyBoyz stumbled into a small but fervent following. The trio were beneficiaries of the rise of the 18-year-old Teejayx6, who made Detroit the epicenter for raps about IP strength and stolen social security numbers this past summer. BabyTron’s debut solo mixtape, Bin Reaper, arrives at a moment that’ll decide if the ShittyBoyz gimmick has legs or if it’s bound to get lost in the internet cycle.
Bin Reaper is simple, and BabyTron doesn’t overthink the situation: 13 songs of pop culture-referencing punchlines and ’80s video game arcade beats. Sometimes he’ll compare his credit card punching to an anime like One Punch Man; he’ll rap over a sample of Undertaker’s WWE theme song. At one point, he compares his criminal record, which probably has him on a government watch list, to NBA players like Zion Williamson, Clint Capela, and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Detroit superproducer Helluva laces BabyTron with grooves that sound direct from a Richard Simmons workout video. “Jesus Shuttlesworth” and “Scampire” are maybe the mixtape’s two best tracks; unsurprisingly, they’re both just BabyTron shit-talk and funky Helluva flips. BabyTron even holds his own when he tackles a more typical Detroit beat. “Now I punch shit like Jean-Claude Van Damme,” he brags on “Pro Surfers,” going toe-toe with Michigan punchline savant Rio Da Yung OG.
By the time Bin Reaper reaches its final track, some of the flips are tired, especially when left in less capable hands than Helluva’s (See: “Special Thanks” and “Top Ten”). But the appeal of BabyTron’s music, like so much of Detroit rap, is that it feels like it was made in a bubble. Take any song on Bin Reaper, adjust the pop-culture references, and tell somebody unfamiliar with the ShittyBoyz that it was made in 2000, or 2010, or 2019, they would believe you. BabyTron has a gimmick and he’s aware of it. But it’s a good gimmick, and sometimes in rap, that’s all you need. | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | The Hip Hop Lab | November 6, 2019 | 7.1 | eacb12be-7ea6-4495-a36a-bc094e8b3863 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On his fifth solo album, Big Sean gets personal, leans on a slate of high-profile guests to provide most of the entertainment, and struggles to deliver anything that isn’t fundamentally embarrassing. | On his fifth solo album, Big Sean gets personal, leans on a slate of high-profile guests to provide most of the entertainment, and struggles to deliver anything that isn’t fundamentally embarrassing. | Big Sean: Detroit 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-sean-detroit-2/ | Detroit 2 | In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Big Sean was like a streetwear Tumblr come to life, able to rap like Gucci Mane’s kid brother in one song, only to shift gears and drop a pretty serviceable Consequence impression in the next. The Detroit rapper’s manic energy and corny punchlines recalled Quagmire from Family Guy, a comparison that Sean himself stoked on his 2011 track “I Do It,” when he spent a few lines rhyming things with “giggity-giggity” and then rapped, “I’m Quagmire.” His “Marvin & Chardonnay” fit like a glove within the dizzying heights of Rustie’s transcendent 2012 Essential Mix, while the Nicki Minaj collaboration “Dance (A$$)” yielded both a pitch-perfect homage to the ghettotech of his hometown as well as perhaps the decade’s finest song about butts. Before too long, he’d carved out a niche for himself as a squeaky-voiced goofball, a fast-rapping Fabolous soundalike who was a welcome addition to any posse cut, able to parachute into songs provide some high-energy levity, and tastefully bow out before you had a chance to think too hard about what the hell an ass-state is.
The problem, though, is what happens when you’re stuck with a whole album’s worth of Big Sean. He doesn’t make bad records per se—this is a guy who releases music under the imprimatur of Kanye West, so there’s a certain level of grim competence to each of his full-lengths—it’s just that every time Big Sean attempts to reveal a deeper side of himself, he can’t help but come across as a woefully unpleasant person.
On Detroit 2, the rapper’s fifth solo album and the ostensible sequel to his 2012 mixtape, Big Sean positions himself as an enlightened despot. He rules over a kingdom in which wisdom is gained by woo-woo self-help books, relationships are transactional (“I can’t waste the sex on you and give you everything you can’t give me back”), and cancel culture is an existential threat to your brand (“It only takes one time to fuck up your whole Wikipedia.”) Between that stuff, the multiple judgments he renders on people’s “vibes,” and the ayahuasca reference on “FEED,” it seems like Big Sean has spent the past few years internalizing the hyper-capitalism of the early-’70s New Age movement. Sure, at least it’s an ethos, but the places it takes Big Sean to feel incongruous with our current moment.
Take “Lucky Me,” the album’s second track. Over a shaggy soul beat from Hit-Boy and DJ Dahi, Sean reflects on the fact that he has dated numerous famous women, building up to the line, “It’s a living nightmare when your dream girl has to get canceled.” It’s a sentiment that feels vapid on its face, and becomes borderline sociopathic when you recall that earlier this summer, Big Sean’s ex-girlfriend, the actress Naya Rivera, died in a boating accident while saving her son’s life. Even if the line is meant to be about another woman, Big Sean’s insistence that someone’s personal struggles might specifically be a problem for him is, well, jarring. Things take a turn for the even more bizarre just moments later in “Lucky Me,” when Sean starts rapping about how he was diagnosed with a heart condition at 19, only for a naturopath to cure it with magnesium. “That’s how I know that Western medicine weak,” he concludes, the rare hint of bass in his voice. Which, fine, but also, we are currently experiencing the biggest public health crisis in a hundred years. He doesn’t have a moral duty or anything to not rap stuff like this—or, for that matter, “No sir, I don’t even do flu shots” from the otherwise pretty-great “Harder Than My Demons”—but it does make listening to Big Sean during a pandemic feel more pointless than it usually does.
Unfortunately, on many of the songs where Big Sean leaves his personal feelings about Western medicine to the side, he falls into the trap of assuming the style of a particular trend or artist but never quite selling the pose. Instead, he remains almost entirely anonymous. He sounds kinda like Young Thug on the song that Young Thug is on, kinda like Travis Scott on the song that Travis Scott is on, kinda like Wale on the song that Wale is on, and kinda like Lil Wayne on the song that Lil Wayne is on. And whenever he’s not employing a double-time flow, he gives the listener enough time to consider the absolute vapidity of lyrics like, “Laser focus, AOL, been had AIM,” or, “Full circle like exactly what the fuck karma is,” or, “My third eye and fourth eye open… damn.”
There are moments on Detroit 2 that feel special, but Big Sean himself rarely has anything to do with them. Dave Chappelle, Erykah Badu, and Stevie Wonder each pop up on interludes to tell delightful little stories that don’t necessarily involve Big Sean himself. (Chappelle’s, for instance, is about smoking weed with Danny Brown and then meeting Big Sean’s dad.) Eight of the record’s beats were handled by Hit-Boy, who transposes his stadium-sized sensibilities onto even the most sedate instrumentals in ways that are never not thrilling. On “The Baddest,” No I.D. takes a crack at flipping the same Godzilla-theme sample from Pharoahe Monch’s “Simon Says,” ends up recreating the track he’s paying homage to but with skittering trap drums, and it sounds so good that not even Big Sean can fuck it up. Lil Wayne absolutely tears into the loop of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” that undergirds “Don Life,” blowing his host out of the water and momentarily sketching out an alternate universe where the best beats on the album found their way into Wayne’s hands.
By far the best and most ambitious track on the album is “Friday Night Cypher,” which stitches together the past, present, and future of Detroit’s hip-hop scene. Over the course of nine and a half minutes, Sean invites a cast ranging from Tee Grizzley to Payroll Giovanni to Kash Doll to Boldy James to Eminem himself to showcase what makes them great, with ambient cheering and a contiguous, constantly shifting beat helping recreate the hazy vibe of a late-evening cut-up session in the studio. Sean’s tucked into the middle of the track and is absolutely in his element, touching on the Based God’s Curse(s), Meek Mill’s “Tony Story” story-raps, and browsing Zillow for kicks and giggles. It’s fun, effortless nonsense—in other words, the Platonic ideal of a Big Sean verse. And the best part? When his verse is over, Big Sean simply fades into the background, having made his mark and, for once on Detroit 2, not overstaying his welcome.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Good / Def Jam | September 10, 2020 | 5.2 | ead05886-7842-440c-a1a7-5c23b395f1d4 | Drew Millard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-millard/ | |
Chicago multi-instrumentalist Nick Levine’s solo debut will feel familiar to Pinegrove fans but struggles to expand on the band’s formula. | Chicago multi-instrumentalist Nick Levine’s solo debut will feel familiar to Pinegrove fans but struggles to expand on the band’s formula. | Jodi: Blue Heron | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jodi-blue-heron/ | Blue Heron | When Nick Levine released 2017’s Karaoke EP, the first project under their alter ego Jodi, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist had already spent five years in the background of indie rock. An on-and-off guitarist for Pinegrove since their Meridian days, Levine provided the marvelous pedal steel duet with Evan Stephens Hall’s vocals on “Light On” and the composed banjo that buoyed the surface of “New Friends.” Karaoke was a lush, introspective six-song trip, pairing Levine’s reticent lyricism with the bedroom acoustic licks of past Pinegrove projects. Conceptualized at a cabin in the Catskills and recorded at Lazybones Audio in Silsbee, Texas, their follow-up, Blue Heron, stretches an EP worth of material into a sparse, sometimes unsatisfying debut LP.
As a backing musician, Levine has bolstered Pinegrove songs with the supple flair required to keep the pacing steady; their lead arrangements on 2016’s Cardinal were crucial to defining the band’s sound. But Blue Heron struggles to find its pace, striving to be in many places at once by refusing ever to linger. Each song stumbles into the next, blurring scenes together rather than settling into their landscapes. The frequent migrations bring an unwelcome sense of urgency, particularly near the end of the album, with a pair of minute-plus tracks (“Water” and “River Rocks”) that could have been left on the cutting-room floor. “Hawks” parallels the record’s wider ambiance: a promising build-up, a long middle, and a pretty back half interrupted by needless filler.
The biggest fault lines appear in the instrumentals roaming beneath the vocals. The melodies on a song like “Slug Night” are tender and faint, especially weak when Levine’s voice demands grander accompaniment. Throughout Blue Heron, Levine evokes lovely imagery—wild birds, flora, swimming holes, the moments of joy hiding within anxiety—in a monotone warble, taking few risks with their voice and instruments. The final effect feels stringy and unfinished.
Blue Heron’s brightest points ditch the strained poetics for specific language. On “Buddy,” a wintertime ode to missing friends who’ve departed on tour, Levine sings, “I’m counting on something to/Come alive/So I don’t come out alone.” On “Softy,” a patient ballad of undefined love and affectionate touch, they sing, “I’m your biggest fan/Hear the show of hands.” Both tracks are standouts, balancing the twang of Levine’s underutilized pedal steel against the drawl of their lead guitar. These songs echo Karaoke’s lyrical strengths, drawing clear distinctions between two thematic tropes—self-reflection and romantic longing—that Blue Heron often conflates.
This album certainly sounds like a Pinegrove side project: off-kilter indie folk fused with language-arts rock and East Coast emo, draped in self-loathing melancholia. It’s a familiar sound that deserves a fresh approach, but Levine’s songwriting is conservative, never deviating too far from the formula. Though their work is attuned to the human condition—recognizing the way our surroundings impact our psyches, especially in the presence of those we love—on Blue Heron, this delicate rebalancing of emotional ballast often feels like a one-sided conversation. Full of vague, faceless characters who act as anonymous plot devices in their own stories, the album leaves the burden of self-absorption and ambiguity in its wake.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sooper | July 21, 2021 | 5.8 | ead15f0c-54b9-4091-aa68-01a136fb90bd | Matt Mitchell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-mitchell/ |
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