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On walks around Manhattan, even on sun-scorched days, mysterious precipitation falls on your head. Whether this comes from urinating birds ... | On walks around Manhattan, even on sun-scorched days, mysterious precipitation falls on your head. Whether this comes from urinating birds ... | Beastie Boys: To the 5 Boroughs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/608-to-the-5-boroughs/ | To the 5 Boroughs | On walks around Manhattan, even on sun-scorched days, mysterious precipitation falls on your head. Whether this comes from urinating birds, air conditioning condensation, observation deck spitting, or suicide jumpers breaking down into their constituent beads of bloody moisture over the long 145-story leaps from skyscrapers, I've yet to determine. The Times Square subway station has been under construction for at least four years. The majority of Village eateries I frequent do not accept credit cards. The city tobacconists all spell the first letters of "Smoke Shop" with two pipes, making the storefront signs look more like "Jmoke Jhop." Garbage is laid out on the sidewalks, as real estate shortages allow for no alleys. The Mormon Temple across from the Lincoln Center has fantastic free peanut butter cookies, if you sit through one of their thinly veiled brainwashing video tours.
None of these elements of New York, which I find more indicative of the town, are mentioned on the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs. Instead, Adrock, MCA and Mike D offer obvious demographic and transit information on their "Open Letter to NYC". "Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin/ Black, White, New York/ You make it happen," they croon together on the chorus to the centerpiece of their sixth album. "Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten/ From the Battery to the top of Manhattan," they read like a free hotel map. What, nothing rhymed with Inwood? The song makes fantastic use of a Dead Boys sample (who were from Cleveland), but fumbles the execution with their Up With People chants.
Lyrically, the Beastie Boys fail to make a convincing justification for their hometown pride beyond slogans that could fit on a t-shirt. The answering machine message of Paul's Boutique conveyed more giddy pride in the nuances and uniqueness of the metropolis. In a trademark (or typical, or tired, depending on your perspective) deep pop culture reference, Adrock mentions Gnip Gnop, a 1970s Parker Brothers game that was like a cross of Pong and Hungry Hungry Hippos. "Jmoke Jhop" would have rhymed perfectly. In their attempt to point out the details of their city, the Beastie Boys offer little more than the view from the top of a sawn-off double-decker tour bus.
At this point in time, no measure of analysis regarding cadence, meter or goofy references will sway the pros and cons of the Beastie Boys' lyrics. They do what they do, and even my mother knows their M.O. What To the 5 Boroughs offers, contrary to naysayers who mock aging bands, are three voices showing intriguing texture from wear and experience. MCA sounds like the Harry Nilsson of hip-hop after a lost weekend. Adrock, especially, shows greater range in style. From his leisured easy-speaking on "Crawlspace" to the Eminem-like syllable play on "Hey Fuck You", he puffs his chest with laid-back economy and moves away from the stereotypical nasal whine of their younger days.
Where the true influence of New York exerts itself on To the 5 Boroughs is in the stark rhythms, which filter the cold continental-sampling breaks of rap pioneers like Jimmy Spicer and The Treacherous Three through Apple processors. The streamlined foundations both pay tribute to the crews that influenced the Beastie Boys to put down their Bad Brains and Reagan Youth aspirations and lays a hard digital direction for the Bush Youth to follow.
Unlike all previous Beastie Boys albums (with the possible exception of Licensed to Ill), To The 5 Boroughs sounds homogenous and singular in purpose-- dark, steel, and dirty like that incomplete Times Square station. Ill Communication and Hello Nasty reveled in genre-dipping, from hardcore and salsa to dub and disco. Their decision to settle into a focused hip-hop direction here seems like a sage move. The album succeeds in its seeming spontaneity. "Seeming" in that they possibly spent years making it. But whatever length of gestation, the album's easy air speaks to veteran, nothing-to-lose attitude of both the city and the group.
Still, my interaction with music goes well beyond simple, academic analysis of sound. Nostalgia, emotional context, the continued story and history behind the artist, the packaging, and everything else matters in my love and fascination with music. This is why writing for Pitchfork, which prides itself on discovering unknown underground artists, means so little to me anymore. Listening to music as some form of continued, insular experiment with recording driven by faceless, MP3-based rock bands bores me. I was immediately prepared to love To the 5 Boroughs from my history with the band-- from listening to Ill while playing Atari with Andy Eberhardt, to mowing neighborhood lawns with Gregg Bernstein and Paul's Boutique in a walkman, to holding my portable CD player off the front cushion of my Buick Century to keep Check Your Head from skipping as I passed over the speed bumps in the Marist parking lot every day after my Junior year, to shooting bottle rockets from poster tubes at passing trucks on 400 off the roof of the AMC multiplex I worked at when Ill Communication came out. It is not mentally possibly for me to switch on apathy towards the group.
When all is said and done, I have spun To the 5 Boroughs at least 30 times while working on some of the most rewarding and enjoyable creative work of my life in the past couple weeks, while visiting a city I love, and seeing people I missed. The album has become intrinsically linked to these experiences-- from my movie premiere this week to the surreal tour of the Manhattan Mormon Temple last week. The little number at the top of this piece reflects little of personal relation to the record. It's an arbitrary guide to how I would expect people to gauge the intent of this review. I will listen to this album for years to come. You might. Or not. It depends on your own complex web of past interaction with the Beastie Boys, linked memories to the music, or preconceived notion of how hip or not it is to listen to them in 2004.
Though I would fail to quantify the comparative "quality" of such albums, as I said before, I love Carl & The Passions as much as Pet Sounds. Divorcing the lives and backstory from the recorded product of a musical artist equates to making movies without characters. The sixth Beastie Boys album holds much more intrigue than some young dudes with bedhead thinking they're going to evolve rock and roll. I've ended up listening to it more than any other release this year.
This process has become unexciting and routine, which is why I bid the world of music writing farewell. Explaining why I love a record in the confines of its production, lyrics and instrumental "tightness" without detailing the first time I heard the band's song drifting from bowling alley in Poland or whatever confounds me. More power to those who discover new music from this site. I've figured out where I stand at this point, as have the readers. Like the Beastie Boys, I could continue to crank out divisive pieces of writing here until I go gray. I have more interesting stories to tell. | 2004-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Capitol | June 14, 2004 | 7.9 | eae3cf26-8b92-4748-9ef2-c620ee32bb06 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
The UK rock band’s debut is a prime example of what happens when you grow up on Bikini Kill and the Slits. | The UK rock band’s debut is a prime example of what happens when you grow up on Bikini Kill and the Slits. | Dream Wife: Dream Wife | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dream-wife-dream-wife/ | Dream Wife | The London-based rock band Dream Wife didn’t mean to be taken seriously when they formed. In 2014, guitarist Alice Go, bassist Bella Podpadec, and Iceland-born vocalist Rakel Mjöll started the group as an art project while studying at Brighton University; it was only later that what began with a This Is Spinal Tap-esque documentary evolved into an outlet for, in Podpadec’s words, “meditating on dreaming big and being a woman.” Despite that backstory, the subjects Dream Wife tackle on their self-titled debut—leering catcalls, ageist stereotypes, and what it means to be in control of your identity—are anything but jokes. At its best, Dream Wife is a prime example of what happens when you grow up on Bikini Kill and the Slits. A rebellious fire lights in your stomach, and you try to bite off more misogyny than you can chew just to prove that your teeth are sharp.
This is an album that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve. Along with those clear punk forebears, the band’s members have cited artists like Be Your Own Pet, Sleigh Bells, and Le Tigre, a traceable lineage if you listen closely. But some of the most revealing parallels come from New York City’s early-2000s rock revival. The unhinged shrieks in “Let’s Make Out” and “Hey Heartbreaker” reflect Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ sneering intensity, while Mjöll’s hushed singing voice on “Love Without Reason” channels the other side of Karen O. Countless clean guitar melodies pay homage to the Strokes, particularly on “Kids” and “Fire,” and Podpadec, who played bass for the first time during the band’s college years, steers the songs with the same quiet confidence as Nikolai Fraiture. Dream Wife made a name for themselves by performing intense live shows across Europe; you can hear how they’ve studied their idols’ delivery to translate that sound to the studio.
The most invigorating moments on Dream Wife come when Dream Wife bring personal anecdotes to the fore. On stand-out track “Somebody,” the trio confront rape culture by employing a perspective-shifting dialogue. “You were a cute girl standing backstage/It was bound to happen,” Mjöll sings before flipping to first person: “I took on heaven to find peace/I took on the world to find me again.” The song’s chorus—“I am not my body/I am somebody”—summarizes the double bind of feeling like you’re the sum of your body while simultaneously being stripped of ownership of it. It’s an affirmation they want to loan to listeners.
The counterpart to that narrative is “F.U.U.,” a post-punk tirade where Dream Wife sound eager to rip a person who wronged them to shreds. “I’m gonna fuck you up/Gonna cut you up,” Mjöll yells, hurling the words at a wall. Her voice sounds like it’s going to bleed from screaming itself raw, and Icelandic rapper Fever Dream whips through a laconic guest verse to back her up. It’s a menacing moment of someone deciding she won’t take your shit anymore, and hearing that intense feeling caught on tape recalls the music that put Karen O and Kathleen Hanna on the map years back.
Yet those two songs are outliers on this album. Elsewhere, Dream Wife too often stick to widely-known truths, like not letting age define your character (“Act My Age”) or the thrill of a new kiss (“Taste”). Shove those tame lyrics into the band’s repetitive formula of controlled verses into explosive choruses, and the effect can be dull. If their debut fails to offer a consistent, forceful message the way their riot grrrl heroes once did, they have at least figured out how to capture some of those predecessors’ energy. For now, Dream Wife leaves you revved up and ready to go with nowhere suggested. | 2018-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Lucky Number | February 8, 2018 | 6.7 | eaeaa5d6-cf29-43db-a9e7-58c092957e50 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Stepping away from his habitual trap beats and claustrophobic atmospheres, the New Orleans producer goes in search of wide-open vistas and melancholy maximalism. | Stepping away from his habitual trap beats and claustrophobic atmospheres, the New Orleans producer goes in search of wide-open vistas and melancholy maximalism. | Suicideyear: Hate Songs EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suicideyear-hate-songs-ep/ | Hate Songs EP | The drive north from New Orleans up to Hammond, La., takes about an hour on the I-55, a lakeside route that offers the optimal listening experience for Hate Songs, according to local driver James Prudhomme. Take the trip for yourself with the help of Google Street View, and the wide-open waterscape of the bayou feels a world away from the Southern city streets that birthed trap, the style most closely associated with Prudhomme’s bass-heavy Suicideyear project. But if the tranquil backdrop seems at odds with his blown-out productions, it nevertheless chimes perfectly with Prudhomme’s melancholy introspection. And seeing as Southern hip-hop has always been optimized for the automobile, with window-rattling subwoofers adding to the 808’s visceral punch, it follows that we’d eventually find this solitary producer enjoying a drive outside the city limits.
The NOLA resident, formerly of Baton Rouge, made his name with two albums of gloomy, trap-derived beats released when he was still a teen. They stood out from the SoundCloud masses thanks to their woozy intensity and grandly baroque melodies, a combination that appealed as much to outsider rappers like Swedish sad boy Yung Lean and “Weird Atlanta” representative Rome Fortune as it did to cerebral electronic producers like Oneohtrix Point Never, whose Software label put out Prudhomme’s 2014 EP Remembrance. In the years since, Prudhomme has toured the U.S. and Europe and found himself absorbing influences—house, grime, and regional club styles—that have nudged his productions further towards the dancefloor. (Helpfully, he has also finally turned 21.)
The Hate Songs EP appears on the Scottish label LuckyMe, home to the trap-EDM chimeras of TNGHT, and Baauer, and the change of scene has injected a fresh energy into his work. These six songs were made between 2014 and 2015, when Prudhomme was relocating from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and finding his feet as a touring artist. Where previous Suicideyear records felt like the handiwork of a bedroom-bound stoner raised on DatPiff and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, on Hate Songs there’s a whiff of fresh air and a sense of widening horizons. “Summer Hate,” one of four tracks named for the seasons, finds his standard-issue, blown-out 808s brightened by tinkling keys, while trap-style hi-hats are smothered in grainy, heavily delayed synths.
“Mosh Mosh (Julie’s Song)” rolls along on clanging bells and a hint of Southern Gothic melodrama until the whole thing falls apart midway through, stuttering to a crawl before a soothing organ melody appears in the mist and the beat evolves into a half-time serenade. On “Flood (Autumn Hate),” written about Hurricane Isaac, a blown-out blast of reedy melody crumbles over trap drums, sounding like one of William Basinski’s disintegration loops. Prudhomme understands how to squeeze that little extra drop of emotion from familiar elements; back on the Street View cruise up I-55, clicking my way along a highway built on concrete stilts, his melancholy maximalism offers a different perspective of the view, just as the water below reflects the open sky.
Much of the EP deals in these satisfying twists on a tried-and-tested concept, but the most impressive track is also the most daring. “Spent Days Watching Horses Die” is a violent, monstrous hybrid—blown-to-bits bass overlaid with shredded, piercing synths that connect the tacky euphoria of trance with the vicious club mechanics of Kamixlo or Amnesia Scanner—while the crackly 2-step drums underfoot acknowledge Prudhomme’s newfound UK influences. It’s here at the edge of the familiar, in the greyish territory where new mutations both stimulate and irritate, where Prudhomme’s vision feels most vital. Hate Songs sounds like a set of markers on his route out of town and away from a sound he’s done much to develop, perfect, and effectively complete; there are strong signs this will be a journey worth following. | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | July 28, 2017 | 7.3 | eaf24e7c-bc96-4261-a8bc-86c9fd5c448b | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | null |
Will Oldham's new EP suggests that his formidable catalog may be weighing heavily on him. Although it's hard to parse the intention behind Now Here's My Plan, less than reverential takes on Oldham classics would seem to suggest as much. | Will Oldham's new EP suggests that his formidable catalog may be weighing heavily on him. Although it's hard to parse the intention behind Now Here's My Plan, less than reverential takes on Oldham classics would seem to suggest as much. | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Now Here's My Plan EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16855-now-heres-my-plan-ep/ | Now Here's My Plan EP | Will Oldham may go by many different names and, in doing so, affect a wary distance from his audiences as if perpetually squaring off against his listener, but the man knows himself. He may be the most self-possessed artist working today, shifting and feinting and dodging to his own rhythm, his own sensibility. It may not always be apparent to outsiders or even to fans; in fact, his 20-year career is peppered with question marks and odd course changes, suggesting an aloofness that can be as fascinating as it is alienating. What is apparent, however, is that it all makes sense to him, such that even his most obscure asides carry the force of self-determination.
His latest headscratcher is an EP-- as Bonnie "Prince" Billy-- of new takes on old songs, titled Now Here's My Plan, presumably borrowed from this Shel Silverstein book. Perhaps the book's subtitle-- "A Book of Futilities"-- says more than the title itself: The weight of Oldham's catalog may be weighing on him, an inescapable burden that even this most mercurial artist cannot shake. Rather than crumple under so many songs, Oldham finds opportunity by redefining them, as he has done in the past. In 2004, a scant five years after introducing his Bonnie "Prince" Billy moniker, Oldham reassessed his back catalog on Bonnie "Prince" Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, on which he reconfigured some of his earliest material in a self-consciously C&W style. Perhaps it was a sly parody of the greatest hits package that often seems obligatory once artists notch a certain number of releases. Or perhaps he was just bored.
If there's any sort of parodic sensibility guiding Now Here's My Plan, Oldham's playing it awfully close to the chest. Backed by his tour band, he circles through six old cuts ranging from 1999 through 2009, offering new arrangements and in some cases dramatically different interpretations. The band is good, road-tested, and sympathetic to Oldham's most harebrained schemes. Emmett Kelly's guitar functions like a good movie score: It sets a tone while never intruding on the action, and while it might not always foreground the songs, he's always doing something intriguing. And Angel Olsen may be his best duet partner, with that seen-it-all break in her voice. The musicians-- including Ben Boye, Van Campbell, and Danny Kiely-- have variously appeared on recent Bonnie "Prince" Billy albums, including Wolfroy Goes to Town and Beware.
The band is so prominent on the EP that it takes on the feel of a tour souvenir, suggesting new arrangements worked out onstage. As such, despite the gravity of Oldham's lyrics and the solemnity of these performances, it sounds less weighty than their previous efforts. Few have written about the desperation that attends love and sex and companionship as evocatively as Oldham has done, so songs like "Beast for Thee" and "No Gold Digger" are welcome exhumations and strong showcases for Oldham's singing. Over the years his voice has grown a bit mushier with age, exhibiting a soft grain evocative of time and wear. He sounds more human, which lends this droning version of "Three Questions" in particular a directness not necessarily present in the original.
It's one thing to reset deep album cuts, another thing entirely to manhandle your biggest hit-- if "hit" can describe any Will Oldham song. "I See a Darkness" is most certainly his most well-known song: Not only does it anchor his best album, but it's also the one upon which Johnny Cash bestowed the status of modern country standard. On the new version, drummer Van Campbell quickens the pulse of the song with an insistent kickdrum tattoo, and Oldham's performance is spirited but less solemn. It's less an intimation of evil or tragedy and more like a reminder: "Guys, I completely forgot to mention-- I see a darkness, yonder!"
Essentially, Oldham has taken his weightiest song and rendered it inconsequential. It's neither a piss-take nor a stunt, but it does turn a career highlight into another deep cut. His brazen attitude toward his back catalog, which would be so easy to revere, is commendable, even refreshing. Whether Now Here's My Plan succeeds in its obscure goal is almost beside the point. Whether you'll listen to it more than once is another matter entirely. | 2012-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino/Drag City | August 7, 2012 | 6.8 | eb0752b4-187a-4ab8-8bd9-e5eb49b38456 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On their third album, the Spanish garage rockers swing for the fences with a big, arena-friendly new sound. | On their third album, the Spanish garage rockers swing for the fences with a big, arena-friendly new sound. | Hinds: The Prettiest Curse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hinds-the-prettiest-curse/ | The Prettiest Curse | The Spanish garage-rock group Hinds built their first two albums on girl-group harmonies and tight melodic songcraft recalling the Strokes or Black Lips. So what did Carlotta Cosials, one of the band’s frontwomen, mean when she recently told NME, “We’d been afraid of pop music for a lot of years”? Maybe she was thinking of drum machines and synthesizers, Diplo and David Guetta. Whatever the case, the trappings of lo-fi garage rock haven’t done much to disguise her band’s own popular appeal.
Now, though, Hinds are claiming to have shed their fear, and the band is billing its third album, The Prettiest Curse, as a turn to pop. What that means in practice is an expanded arsenal of instruments and a reduced sense of musical identity. The Prettiest Curse is glossier than 2018’s I Don’t Run, higher-fidelity in places, and sprinkled with synthesizers. At its best, the album is able to build on Hinds’ previous approach. But it’s less consistent than their last two albums, and fans may not be able to shake the feeling that an extraordinarily efficient machine has been upgraded for a slicker model that doesn’t work all that much better.
First single “Riding Solo” signals the band’s new ambitions with an arena-sized drum pound and a whistling synth. The chorus takes the band’s usual singalong and multiplies the backing vocals to give it the feeling of a live performance—or at least an ’80s-style hair-metal concert video. It’s hugely catchy and successful, and it sounds bigger than anything the band’s done before.
The issues with the album spring not so much from what’s missing as from what’s present—the songs are just too busy. The band worked with the producer Jenn Decilveo (Albert Hammond Jr., Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan) and whether it was her decision or someone else’s, the mixes here are more cluttered than they need to be. On “Waiting for You,” which turns what might be a complaint about a flaky boyfriend into a call for solidarity, that amplifying effect on the backing vocals shows up again, and this time it disguises the chemistry between Cosials and co-frontwoman Ana Perrote, whose back-and-forth vocals are the best thing the band has going.
Still, there’s plenty of worthwhile material here. “Boy” is as raucous, obstinate and fun as anything Hinds has released. It provides an ideal synthesis of the “rock” Hinds and the “pop” Hinds, and while your reaction depends on how you feel about shoutalong choruses and arena-friendly pop-punk, coming from this band it certainly sounds fresh.
The Spanish lyrics are another welcome development, which show up for the first time in their music, starting with the thumping, neon opener “Good Bad Times.” There’s something encouraging about the presence of the band’s native language. Whereas the traditional “turn to pop” often feels forced, as if demanded by an out-of-touch record label exec, the Spanish here speaks to their growing comfort in trying new things. They may have slightly diluted their sound this time around, but at least they’re struggling on their own terms. The highlights suggest there is an arena-friendly Hinds out there, still waiting to emerge in full.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | June 9, 2020 | 7.2 | eb0a36b0-7a49-45d6-8662-736cb53da752 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson's reimagining of the famous symphony by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki comes close to something by Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. | Avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson's reimagining of the famous symphony by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki comes close to something by Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. | Colin Stetson: Sorrow - A Reimagining of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21680-sorrow-a-reimagining-of-goreckis-3rd-symphony/ | Sorrow - A Reimagining of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony | The story of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (often called "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs") is one of a runaway success nobody, even its composer, understood. Why did a 1992 recording of a work written 16 years earlier by a previously unknown Polish composer suddenly sell a million copies? Other modern Polish composers’ works weren’t exactly leaping off shelves. No one knew why, but critics, who by and large weren’t fans, offered theories; the piece was the lucky beneficiary of the early compact-disc boom, for instance. It was bathetic music, pandering to the worst and easiest film-score ideas that the general populace had about orchestral music. It sounded good at dinner parties. It was, in other words, a fluke, a misfire in the central nervous system of the collective unconscious.
As the years have accumulated, and the piece has maintained its grip on the public imagination, generating tributes and new recordings and finding use in multiple films, a simpler explanation gently suggests itself: this piece pierced something in us, gave us something we decided we needed badly. The timing of it will always be mysterious, but the basic fact seems plain: Music listeners have decided we need Gorecki’s piece, and we have made a permanent place for it in our lives. It has also, famously, saved some lives—in an NPR interview from 1995, Gorecki read aloud a letter from a 14-year-old girl, a burn victim, who told Gorecki that the music was the only thing keeping her alive.
It’s a simple piece, at least in a harmonic sense. Works in this vein, in which songful lines move slowly against each other (Barber's Adagio for Strings comes to mind), tend to require a brisk interpretive hand—all the pathos the music needs is in the notes, and to wring any extra juice from them is to watch the whole thing curdle. What is most surprising about avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson’s Sorrow - A Reimagining of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony is how fully it embraces the music’s inherent sweep. Stetson’s often known for bracing music, and his fans might have expected him to cut this big souffle with quinine. But from the first movement’s opening canon, with Stetson blowing long, low notes mimicking the orchestra’s double basses, it’s pretty obvious: Whatever this piece has meant to decades of listeners, it has meant something similar to Stetson. He clearly loves it, and his recreation is nothing it not a personal act of love.
He’s assembled a small force of about twelve musicians here, including violinist Sarah Neufeld, with whom he recorded last year’s Never Were the Way She Was. Stetson arranged and produced the recording himself, playing multiple instruments, and the soprano lament is sung by his sister, Megan. Greg Fox, the virtuoso drummer behind Liturgy and Guardian Alien, fills the background with splashes of cymbal color and produces a steady thrum of double kicks. Two guitarists play high, insistent tremolos, and as the first movement reaches its peak, I was startled to realize how similar this version sounded to something by a post-rock band like Explosions or Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Gorecki’s symphony, with its deliberately simple and clear framework and soaring themes, has a lot of the same emotional appeal as those bands. But Stetson’s arrangements give that correlation a meaningful nudge, and suddenly Gorecki’s work feel less like a distant cousin to post-rock and more like a direct blueprint. This is instrumental music that embraces its undying capacity for uplift, that shakes off distinctions between bathos and pathos, between mawkish and grave, as it blasts upward. The best moments in Godspeed and Explosions songs go for the emotional jugular without caring if you squawk in protest, and so it is with Gorecki's Third Symphony.
Gorecki was no sentimentalist by nature. His earlier works were mostly in the serial and twelve tone-based tradition, and they haven't exactly been embraced by a fanatical general populace. But in the folk-song laments that inspired his Third Symphony, he found something that touched his heart, and he trusted it. In his work, Stetson and his collaborators have found something similar, and they trust him, too. | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 52Hz | April 15, 2016 | 7.8 | eb0ea422-fce5-4be5-8b30-438d375e38da | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The influential hip-hop producer's debut album, 32 Levels, has two distinct sides: a uniformly strong rap side and a pop side that’s not nearly as engaging or distinctive. | The influential hip-hop producer's debut album, 32 Levels, has two distinct sides: a uniformly strong rap side and a pop side that’s not nearly as engaging or distinctive. | Clams Casino: 32 Levels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22101-32-levels/ | 32 Levels | “The mind is so complex when you’re based/32 levels/Welcome to my world,” Lil B ad-libbed on “I’m God.” Upon it’s release in 2009, “I’m God” was largely received as an internet curio, its submerged Imogen Heap sample, unhurried beat and Lil B’s impressionistic, stream of consciousness rapping cutting a contrast against the crisper sounds of rap’s mainstream. Seven years later, the Clams Casino-produced track sounds more like a blueprint for modern rap production rather than an outlier. It’s hard to imagine the aesthetics of artists like A$AP Rocky, Vince Staples, and the Weeknd without the New Jersey producer’s murky, atmospheric beats, which made a beeline toward rap’s center following the release of “I’m God.” Following years of high-profile production work and a series of three well-regarded beat tapes, Clams has unveiled his debut album, 32 Levels, on which he stakes a claim to his now much-imitated sound.
32 Levels has very distinct A and B-sides, which split cleanly among the album’s 12 tracks. The A-side consists of six satisfying rap songs, each of which leverage different facets of Clams’ sound. Essentially, the first half of the record feels like a Lil B/Clams Casino album: the BasedGod graces four of these six tracks and the album opens with his signature “yessssss” ad lib. Clams Casino and Lil B were instrumental in each others’ rise, and these songs serve as a reminder that both artists still do their best work together. Here Lil B gets to test-drive the latest generation of Clams Casino beats: tracks that are more structurally robust if just as foggy on the surface. Lil B rises to the occasion, showing up in a way we don’t often get to hear. He tightens up his improvisational style to suit the mood, while staying loose enough to sink into the open spaces where Clams’ instrumentals exhale.
Like Clams, Lil B has exerted an outsized influence on his peers, and “Be Somebody” feels like an acknowledgement of that fact. Here, the far-more-famous A$AP Rocky shares space with Lil B over a lurching instrumental constructed from chopped-up vocal fragments, explosion sound effects, and breathy synths. “Witness,” meanwhile, is a darker, more-muscular update to “I’m God”; the song finds Lil B wandering through a funhouse of warped tones, slipping on his hardened, street persona for the occasion. Rounding out the A side are the instrumental “Skull”—a pan flute and piano-heavy slice of Temple of Doom trap—as well as the Vince Staples-featuring “All Nite.” While its creation pre-dates Summertime ’06, “All Nite” suits that album’s swampy, claustrophobic sound even better than the two Clams beats that made the cut. Here Clams crafts a foreboding sonic canopy—echoing bird chirps, hollow synths, a menacing low-end that bubbles up from below the track—while Staples delivers a string of threats with characteristically breathless abandon, looking beyond Long Beach with lines like, “My people ready for war.” It’s no wonder the pair continued working together, given that “All Nite" stands among the best songs of either artists' career.
While 32 Levels' A side is consistently stacked, side B is more of a mixed bag. Here, Clams shifts his focus to pop and R&B, inviting in a cast of guest vocalists to help push in a brighter, more radio-friendly direction. “Thanks to You,” featuring Sam Dew, is one of the more successful songs on the latter half: all gated synths and aqueous tones, it almost sounds like an outtake from Caribou’s Swim. “Back to You” is another highlight, a melancholy pop number that’s haunted by echo-laden shamisen plucks and spectral vocals. These songs are certainly serviceable, though not nearly as ambitious as the expansive tracks Clams produced for FKA twigs and the Weeknd, both of which drew from the same gloomy palette as his rap work.
Elsewhere on side B, the producer strays even further from his strengths. “Into the Fire,” a collaboration with Mikky Ekko, dispenses with the airy sonics of the pair’s previous collaborations in favor of a generic, synth-heavy pop sound. Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring brings his gravelly baritone to “Ghost In A Kiss,” which feels a bit like Tom Waits singing over a skittering trap beat—not exactly the most harmonious pairing. Clams chooses to ride out on a high note with the instrumental “Blast,” a vocal sample-driven track that would have felt at home on any of his beat tapes and which rappers will be itching to jump on.
If 32 Levels makes one thing clear, it’s how much Clams Casino has grown as a producer and songwriter since his early days as a bedroom hobbyist. The biggest question that he now faces is what distinguishes him as an artist—not just from the "cloud rap” beatmakers who followed in his footsteps, but from big-name producers like Noah “40” Shebib and Metro Boomin who mine similar terrain. On 32 Levels, Clams approaches the question from two different angles. On the A side, we hear him staying in his lane and refining his craft, cutting back on samples in favor of instrumental recordings, denser arrangements and tighter compositions. On the B side, Clams looks beyond his comfort zone, pushing toward mainstream pop with mixed results. Versatility, it turns out, may not be Clams’ strong suit, though that’s hardly a problem; as the first half of 32 Levels demonstrates, there’s still plenty of room left for Clams Casino to grow into his own sound. | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | July 18, 2016 | 6.9 | eb1e93a7-5df2-4f1c-aa86-4ee1ce1b2f39 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Embracing cosmic empathy and some welcome collaborations, the Nashville songwriter’s fourth album bursts with easy confidence and kind, stoic wisdom. | Embracing cosmic empathy and some welcome collaborations, the Nashville songwriter’s fourth album bursts with easy confidence and kind, stoic wisdom. | Margo Price: Strays | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margo-price-strays/ | Strays | Chris Martin claims that taking mushrooms taught him about the meaning of the universe; Harry Styles’ psilocybin track is a dull vibe piece about a woman who “lives in daydreams with me.” Celebrated Nashville striver Margo Price, thankfully, is keeping the burgeoning microgenre of songwriters on hallucinogenic detours at least a little zany. She and her husband and collaborator, Jeremy Ivey, went on an extended mushroom trip to write much of her fourth album, Strays, and less than three minutes in, she’s screaming: “Do you ever walk down the street and do you think to yourself… Am I being watched, man!?”
Price is no stranger to mythmaking: Only one of her albums has touched the upper half of the Billboard 200, and she’s already published her first memoir. But as that delightfully paranoid line on “Been to the Mountain” suggests, she’s not particularly prone to American dream fantasia. Although it may be a mushrooms record, Strays is less about stopping to look at the rainbows than finding a cosmic sense of empathy. Where Price once actively wrestled with her past and the fraught political landscape around her, she now assumes the role of wise, weary passerby, watching the wreckage of the world from afar as she keeps on cruising.
In the place of protest songs or personal exorcisms, Strays bursts with easy confidence and kind, stoic pearls of wisdom. “Though the picture’s always changing/You can’t change how the story goes,” she sings on “Landfill,” as she contemplates the regrets and false starts of her life. The lyric offers something like a mission statement for Strays. Price quit drinking between records and she’s said that she’s “feeling [her] emotions more deeply” than before. True to that process, this album mostly eschews personal specifics in favor of songs that try to capture the openness and freedom of forging forward sans baggage.
After 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started buried her idiosyncrasies under manicured production that felt overly reverential to ’70s classic rock, Price and producer Jonathan Wilson work to open up her sound. Here, she brings in collaborators slightly outside her wheelhouse (Sharon Van Etten) and others very much within (indie-pop duo Lucius, the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell), nodding to both the loose unspooling of psych rock and the clean minimalism of synth pop. “Radio,” a collaboration with Van Etten, begins with little more than a minimalist drum pattern before bursting into a sweeping, Springsteenish road anthem that could be a sequel to Van Etten’s own “Mistakes”: “People try to push me around/Change my face and change my sound,” Price sings. “But I can’t hear them, I tuned them out.”
A song later, on “Change of Heart,” she contends with her own checkered, well-documented history over an incessant, rollicking blues riff, singing, “I quit trying to change the past/I had a change of heart.” Price’s backstory has been welded to her music since the beginning—her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, was basically bildungsroman in the form of wrenching country-folk—and on these songs, she sings about letting go.
As opposed to the tightly laced, high-shine Rumors, Strays feels warm and permeable, and small moments—like the drum machine on “Radio,” or the xylophone that wanders through “Time Machine”—remove the feeling that Price is recreating for recreation’s sake. She still has her pet musical fixations, and they sometimes feel a little familiar, even within the context of her own catalog: On “County Road” she slips into a chugging, wistful groove that evokes Fleetwood Mac, and the Lucius collaboration “Anytime You Call” splits the difference between her beloved Tom Petty and the soul influences of her past two albums.
That’s not to say Strays doesn’t find new territory for Price as a songwriter. On “County Road,” she sings to someone who died in a car crash. But the lives of both narrator and subject are watery and dreamlike; most of their shared memories are flashes of “listening to Warren Zevon” and playing dice. Across the track, Price writes twinned narratives of one life cut short and another stuck in a loop of the same roads, the same bars, and the same drinks. It’s one of two character studies on the album; the other, “Lydia,” is a grizzled and grueling ballad about a woman seeking an abortion, unable to raise a baby without health insurance. “Just make a decision, Lydia,” Price sings, her voice raw and papery, a sobering contrast to the rest of Strays. These two highlights typify Price’s new outlook: While she’s writing less about the details of her own experience, her music still speaks to life’s murky specifics. | 2023-01-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Loma Vista | January 13, 2023 | 7.4 | eb2151c0-1908-4901-8242-9f6541f41e2a | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Madonna, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and a bizarre remix of the Who are all part of a soundtrack that speaks to the usual critiques of the frothy, summertime sci-fi tale. | Madonna, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and a bizarre remix of the Who are all part of a soundtrack that speaks to the usual critiques of the frothy, summertime sci-fi tale. | Various Artists: Stranger Things: Soundtrack From the Netflix Original Series, Season 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-stranger-things-soundtrack-from-the-netflix-original-series-season-3/ | Stranger Things: Soundtrack From the Netflix Original Series, Season 3 | Late in the third season of “Stranger Things,” two minor characters attend a Fourth of July fair. One of them, an American, tells the other that all the games are rigged, a way for the rich to line their pockets. His companion decides to try his luck anyway. With a crowd watching, he wins the grand prize in a dart throwing competition. See, the game wasn’t rigged after all! Then, he’s shot in the abdomen.
It’s a confused parable that speaks to the Duffer Brothers’ usual sledgehammer-approach to symbolism. Like their viewers, the show's creators are keen to celebrate an America they know isn’t real, and never was. Every so often, it behooves them to pretend they’re jaded. The soundtrack to this season, too, plants itself firmly between veneration and cynicism, allowing the show to celebrate the blockbuster era of Spielberg, Hughes, and Heckerling while winking at their viewers: We know you’ve seen this before.
The opening song here is a remix of the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” from Confidential Music, a Los Angeles based duo that churns out music for movie trailers. (The mix appeared in the preview for this season). It’s a chop-job, Pete Townshend’s strained teenage angst cut with the show’s signature synthesizers and molded into a conventional trailer score with a climax big enough to push you straight into an all-night binge. Americana, but a little uneasy. Get it?
Other music choices echo the half-steppin’ the show is fond of. There’s something charming about the obviousness of “Material Girl” as the backdrop to a mall montage early in the season in which Millie Bobbie Brown and Sadie Sink bond through shopping and the male teens of the cast bond through fear of women’s sexuality. It’s a perfect fit: the Madonna song is another undeniable piece of pop art that implies a critique without exactly getting there.
Another scene from the same episode finds “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “My Bologna,” which came out in 1979, standing in for actual character development. The boys’ science teacher has played a purely instrumental role; he’s Velma, but he never gets to tag along in the Mystery Machine. Because he’s a depthless weirdo, he does random science stuff while listening to “Weird Al” in the background (instead of the Knack’s original.) In a scene featuring Joe Keery (Steve) or Dacre Montgomery (Billy), the Knack would otherwise fit in perfectly well with other classic rock chestnuts like Foreigner's “Cold As Ice,” John Mellencamp’s “R.O.C.K. In the U.S.A.” and REO Speedwagon “Can’t Fight This Feeling.”
It’s a tell that the best episodes from this season—four, five and six—lean less on radio hits of the ’80s and more on the assured work of Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of S U R V I V E, who have conveyed the mood of the show since the beginning. The two pop songs from these episodes are some of the best on the album: The Pointer Sisters classic “Neutron Dance,” which of course has memorably showed up onscreen before and Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” the old-timey camp artificiality of which is perfectly suited to one of the show’s patented cliffhangers.
There are great musical moments in this season that didn’t appear on this soundtrack. Yello, the Swiss duo who found their way into Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, have a cameo in the finale in the form of their great “Goldrush II.” That doesn’t make the cut. Neither does any of Dixon and Stein’s typically excellent synth work, which has previously been featured on the show’s official “soundtracks.” (This time it appears on a separate score.) The Danny Elfman and Philip Glass compositions that lend drama to the show are also absent. These missing tracks make this soundtrack less substantive than the show, which, despite its familiar plot points, distinguishes itself through smart pacing, nice action set pieces, strong performances from most of its core cast, and yes, its instrumental score.
It’s a shame that a shallow collection of songs like this exposes the otherwise moving and enjoyable “Stranger Things” to the most obvious critiques. This soundtrack makes it clear what we’re all doing when we indulge in this cutting-edge summer escapism. I can’t even pretend to be thinking too hard when I watch this lightly remixed tale of good and evil where the evil isn’t all that threatening. Sure, things are bad, a monster lurks, and an army of people has been possessed by an inexplicable and evil energy. But the good guys will win. They always do. Right? Right?
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sony | July 13, 2019 | 4.8 | eb2376f3-a8a2-4e14-995e-6cd96121efee | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Myths 001 is the first of a planned series of collaborative EPs on Mexican Summer intended to pair "mutual admirers and kindred spirits." The first pairs Dev Hynes of Blood Orange with lo-fi singer/songwriter Connan Mockasin. There’s enough here to demonstrate that Hynes and Mockasin have some chemistry, but not enough to fully show it off. | Myths 001 is the first of a planned series of collaborative EPs on Mexican Summer intended to pair "mutual admirers and kindred spirits." The first pairs Dev Hynes of Blood Orange with lo-fi singer/songwriter Connan Mockasin. There’s enough here to demonstrate that Hynes and Mockasin have some chemistry, but not enough to fully show it off. | Connan Mockasin / Devonté Hynes: Myths 001: Collaborative Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21267-myths-001-collaborative-recordings/ | Myths 001: Collaborative Recordings | Myths 001 is the first of a planned series of collaborative EPs on Mexican Summer intended to pair "mutual admirers and kindred spirits," and the label will be hard pressed to find spirits more kindred than the two it landed for this inaugural installment. On his 2013 breakthrough as Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe, Devonté Hynes conjured vapory, psychedelic R&B that played like a bizarro soundtrack to water-warped VHS recordings of early Cinemax After Dark broadcasts—the same aesthetic New Zealand's Connan Mockasin shot for on his own LP from that year, Carmel. Like this year's No Life for Me from Wavves and Cloud Nothings, the EP gathers two like minds whose tastes and skill sets overlap so fully that partnering them almost seems redundant.
There's enough variation in how Hynes and Mockasin approach their leftfield pop to create some interesting contrasts, though. Hynes is the more polished and more versatile of the pair, an industry songwriter-for-hire who, for all his iconoclastic tendencies, has long been tempted by Top 40's allure. Mockasin's recent process has been more hermetic: He recorded Carmel entirely alone in a hotel room in a foreign city, and next to the open-armed vulnerability of Cupid Deluxe, it sounds rogueish and distant. Mockasin doesn't necessarily shy from heartfelt expressions, but he often cloaks them behind a smirk.
So the two make good foils, and Myths 001 is never more amusing than when it plays Hynes' sincerity against Mockasin's oddball falsetto. The duo recorded the EP in Texas over about a week during the Marfa Myths festival this spring with little planning, but all that feels rushed is its 11-minute runtime. The production is nearly as luscious as Cupid Deluxe, all soft-rock decadence and red-light ambiance, and two of its three tracks, while not quite knockouts, are distinctively peculiar. "La Fat Fur" opens the EP with a gust of trembling post-punk, imagining what Wire might have sounded like if they'd gone through a Prince phase in the '80s. "Feelin' Lovely" similarly has some fun scribbling across genre boundaries, piling bluesy riffs and jazz-fusion keyboards and saxophones over an unusually funky quiet storm groove, playing like a funhouse homage to Marvin Gaye's Midnight Love.
The slow-burn closer "Big Distant Crush" could use a little bit of that eccentricity. It's the EP's most earnest number, but also its most meandering, five minutes of aimless heartache that can't help but feel like an attempt to pad an otherwise skimpy EP. There's enough here to demonstrate that Hynes and Mockasin have some chemistry, but not enough to fully show it off. This is probably to be expected from an EP whipped up from scratch in just a week, but whichever artists end up on Myths 002 might do well to consider reserving a few extra days in the studio in case they hit it off. | 2015-11-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Mexican Summer | November 10, 2015 | 6 | eb41f243-29c9-4022-b87b-9944d1d8f1e3 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
L’Rain, Jlin, Kelsey Lu, Jason Moran, and more join the sculptor and sound artist for a meditation on the complex histories evoked by the antique cotton gin at the center of his 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition. | L’Rain, Jlin, Kelsey Lu, Jason Moran, and more join the sculptor and sound artist for a meditation on the complex histories evoked by the antique cotton gin at the center of his 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition. | Kevin Beasley: A View of a Landscape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-beasley-a-view-of-a-landscape/ | A View of a Landscape | Kevin Beasley is barefoot in the Museum of Modern Art. He’s seated on the ground, perched over three turntables, a mixer, and a laptop connected to a stereo system that fills the museum’s atrium with disembodied voices. Specifically, they’re the voices of dead rappers from the ’90s, like the Notorious B.I.G., whose song “Long Kiss Goodnight” gives the performance piece, I Want My Spot Back, its name. Another iteration of the performance included clips from the 1962 Malcolm X speech “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?” and the 2011 Theo Parrish track “Black Music,” as well as the voice of a witness to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “Say he had his hands up and everything. Still shot him,” the voice says. “The man laying in the street, dead as a motherfucker.”
The piece is stark and abrasive, erupting into noisy chaos that leaves the walls shaking and at least a few listeners in distress. It also asks guests to sit with complex feelings and process grief in a social setting, which some may have been unprepared for. “I wish I could have answered, ‘You should spend more time with it’; or ‘Maybe we should talk’; or ‘You should hear it again’; or something,” Beasley later said of the letters he received in response to the piece. “I feel that there is something missed in those letters. I can’t expect everyone to feel the same way, or to even have the same response.”
Beasley is a visual artist by trade, primarily producing sculptures and installations. He uses ordinary materials like T-shirts, durags, and house dresses to create pieces defined by absence, dwelling in the negative spaces his artifacts afford. This approach extends to his engagements with sound; works like I Want My Spot Back and Strange Fruit—a series of sculptures involving dangling pairs of Nike Air Jordans rigged with microphones and speakers to produce harmonic tones from the surrounding air—introduce a temporal dimension to this Cartesian relation in repose, rising and falling with an intensity rooted in each piece’s source materials.
In 2012, Beasley purchased a one-ton electric induction cotton gin motor on eBay with the intention of using it in his practice, and the artifact became the centerpiece of A View of a Landscape, his 2018 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Beasley installed the fully functional motor inside a soundproof glass vitrine on the museum’s top floor, surrounding the roaring engine with microphones that piped its output into a nearby listening room. Slightly removed from the engine itself, the artist filtered the audio through a mixer and various Eurorack synth modules, sculpting the raw material into a time-based work that meditates on the violent and intertwined histories of slavery and industrialism. He also hosted a live performance series at the Whitney, inviting experimental acts like Jlin, Eli Keszler, and Taja Cheek to perform with him and the cotton gin.
Four years later, Beasley continues to explore the installation’s collaborative possibilities. His debut album, a double LP also titled A View of a Landscape, brings together artists from his initial Whitney performances, as well as a sprawling network of poets, musicians, and performers that includes L’Rain, Laurel Halo, Kelsey Lu, Moor Mother, and Jason Moran. “I wanted all the artists to consider the questions surrounding the sound of the motor, its history, and how one could generate a sonic experience with it,” he wrote in a statement. Paired with a 300-page monograph containing essays, photos, and other documentation, the multimedia project is both a retrospective look at Beasley’s career to date and a conscious effort to reframe his practice in terms of the community it’s fostered.
The album opens softly with a ringing metallic drone, followed by the voice of Fred Moten. The poet, critic, and theorist has devoted decades to writing about the lingering traumas of history, and here, Moten returns to a piece that also appeared on his 2022 jazz album with bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver, placing the existing poem in dialogue with Beasley’s work. “All that blood is the engine,” he says. “Is that gin a computer?” By bringing Moten/López/Cleaver’s closing track to the front of his own album, Beasley suggests a continuity between the two projects that runs deeper than thematic overlap. About two minutes in, a barren kick drum enters at the pace of a slow heartbeat as the noisy mechanical drone intensifies and rattling loops of industrial percussion fall in and out of sync. The piece sets the stage for a series of collaborations that situate Beasley’s source material in new environments, wading further into the harrowing soundscapes that define his artistic practice with rigor and grace.
Much of the album is subdued and instrumental, with soothing ambient patches punctuated by moments of focused tension. On “Resin,” the composer and producer Laurel Halo considers the textural qualities of simple synth and organ tones, uncoupling each element from the originating instrument to build an organic assemblage reminiscent of her 2018 album Raw Silk Uncut Wood. Pieces from L’Rain and Kelsey Lu layer looped keyboards over rumbling noise likely taken from Beasley’s installation, bending and pitch-shifting the audio like any other sound on the album. Toward the end of Lu’s “Lines,” thumping kicks and synth chirps are overtaken by a knotted string arrangement that leads into “Face the Rock,” the sole contribution from composer and jazz pianist Jason Moran. High-pitched noise peeks out from behind a wall of carefully arranged piano lines that take cues from Minimalism, impressionistic film composition, and free jazz. It’s a standout moment in which the churning mechanical rhythm present across the album feels not only atmospheric, but as essential as any other element.
For all of its guest collaborators, the album adopts a clear structural arc that moves from experimental performance to deconstructed dance music in the second half. Sparse electronic percussion gives way to furious outrage on “Oil Rivers,” where Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa shouts about labor, death, and the environment. Less outwardly distressed, Eli Keszler’s “In a Landscape” is jagged and atonal, combining his kinetic drumming with strident samples that flatten into gentle soundscapes. Piercing hi-hats and siren-like synths cut through the mix in the abrupt transition to Jlin’s “Vernacular,” as the album falls back onto ringing, ambient hues that evolve into lurching Jersey club with SCRAAATCH’s “Save ur flesh, Captured Dancer.”
A View of a Landscape feels more like a mixtape than a pointed statement from a single artist: While every piece started with recordings captured from the engine, the album prioritizes the ongoing creative practices of its guests over a clear authorial gesture from Beasley. Yet from his curatorial instincts a community emerges—one that extends to the audience through their engagement with the unspeakably difficult histories the album presents. On “by,” Beasley is joined by choreographer and curator Ralph Lemon, who originally brought I Want My Spot Back to the MoMA as part of his Some sweet day performance series, and vocalist Okwui Okpokwasili, who sings about the challenges of bringing a project like this one to fruition. “Try to tell the story with terrible earnestness/Try to tell it anyway,” she says. It’s an impossible topic to speak about comprehensively, and the album ultimately isn’t interested in didactic explanations. Instead, there’s catharsis, collectivity, and a desire to build something new. | 2023-03-10T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-10T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Renaissance Society | March 10, 2023 | 7.7 | eb42b8bd-e25f-4f9b-8ca0-cfbdb851c078 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
Featuring members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, J.R. Robinson's chamber-doom project coheres beautifully into a meditation on the banality of evil. | Featuring members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, J.R. Robinson's chamber-doom project coheres beautifully into a meditation on the banality of evil. | Wrekmeister Harmonies: Light Falls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22379-light-falls/ | Light Falls | Given the abundance of heavy music that addresses theatrical horror, it’s a shame how only a tiny fraction of it confronts the real-life horror that lurks under our noses. With Light Falls, Wrekmeister Harmonies help offset this imbalance for the third album in a row, as bandleader J.R. Robinson continues to hone-in on the mundane roots of evil. Along with likeminded acts such as SubRosa, Wrekmeister Harmonies weave chamber elements into metal-based forms. Like their previous album Night of Your Ascension, Light Falls presents new angles on the doom sub-genre. But where Ascension’s long stretches of choral chanting and plodding, monolithic doom sections gave the music an impenetrable facade, here Robinson finally achieves the seamless integration he’s been pursuing since launching the project in 2006.
A large part of Robinson’s success comes from a less heavy-handed approach. Yes, Godspeed You! Black Emperor drummer Timothy Herzog plays big and bombastic, sometimes openly emulating Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham’s signature kick-drum pedal work. But Herzog swings more than Robinson’s previous guest drummers, and the drums on Light Falls occupy a more discreet position in the mix. Robinson also carves out more space for the arrangements, giving even the heaviest of the new material a vintage texture unlike the wall of distortion that characterized Ascension. Core member Esther Shaw is joined by Sophie Trudeau (also of Godspeed) who both use the increased space as an opportunity to steal the show.
With both playing piano and violin, Shaw and Trudeau shine on the album’s gentler tunes, “Light Falls I: The Mantra,” “Where Have You Been My Lovely Son,” and “My Lovely Son Reprise.” Most remarkably, though, their violin work also mesmerizes on the crashing “Some Were Saved Some Drowned,” an invigorating example of how Wrekmeister Harmonies are locating flexibility within the rigid patterns of doom metal. Shaw and Trudeau don’t merely hold their own but threaten to engulf the guitars the whole way. Not only does the song highlight the significant progression between the last album and this one, but it also brings into communion all of the musical and thematic qualities that set Wrekmeister Harmonies apart.
Wrekmeister Harmonies’ body of work makes it clear that, as an artist, Robinson is driven to reconcile with our most disturbing impulses. At the same time, his music attempts to illuminate the humanity at the heart of our darkness. “Some Were Saved Some Were Drowned” derives its title from Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s book, The Drowned and the Saved, which according to fellow author and essayist Tim Parks “must rank as one of the most powerful and upsetting attempts at moral analysis ever undertaken.” As Parks points out, Levi’s writing hardly spares the concentration camp prisoners it documents. In fact, one of its biggest takeaways is that the victims at Auschwitz could succumb to as much cruelty as their torturers.
Taken together, Night of Ascension and Light Falls work as a triptych portrayal of human depravity. Ascension first deals with one individual's act of double murder, then escalates in scope to address the Catholic Church’s institutional complicity in its molestation scandal. On Light Falls, Robinson ups the ante yet again by turning his gaze on the Holocaust. Because Robinson tends not to overplay his lyrical hand (Wrekmeister Harmonies albums contain only a sprinkling of vocals), it’s not like you can listen to Light Falls and walk away with a better understanding of what drives human beings to commit unimaginable acts of violence.
But understanding isn’t the point here. The mysteries that Robinson can’t seem to turn away from might elude our understanding forever. With Light Falls, though, he makes a most convincing case to go toward them rather than try and evade or ignore them. He also turns that case into an immensely rewarding listen that takes both his band—and the hybrid genre he’s helping invent—to new heights. | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | September 15, 2016 | 7.7 | eb496907-238a-4017-8828-f36b5c167b48 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On what feels like a companion to Time Skiffs, Animal Collective explore some surprisingly traditional psych-rock modes, but without abandoning their essential trickster spirit. | On what feels like a companion to Time Skiffs, Animal Collective explore some surprisingly traditional psych-rock modes, but without abandoning their essential trickster spirit. | Animal Collective: Isn’t It Now? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/animal-collective-isnt-it-now/ | Isn’t It Now? | For nearly as long as Animal Collective have been a band, they have reserved some of their best material for follow-up EPs. They may have originated as leftovers, but each stands on its own as a body of work. Isn’t It Now? is a full-length—in fact, at 65 minutes, it’s the longest album they’ve ever made—but it seems of a piece with those compact and giftlike interstitial releases. It arrives a year and a half after the late-career triumph Time Skiffs and features material from the same batch of songs, composed just before the pandemic, that populated that record. Two decades into a career full of left turns, it is perhaps the Animal Collective album that sounds the most like the one before it. But if anyone has earned the right to settle into a particular lane for a while, it’s Animal Collective. Isn’t It Now? demonstrates that they needn’t constantly reinvent themselves in order to make deep and rewarding music.
On Isn’t It Now?, as on Time Skiffs, Animal Collective present themselves as something like a rock band. There are guitars, electric bass, and a full drum kit, rather than a ragtag assemblage of floor toms and sampler pads. For the first time since Feels or so, piano plays a central role, and not a piano that’s been distorted beyond recognition or looped infinitely through a delay pedal, but a regular old piano. The songs have adult concerns: “Defeat” and “Stride Rite” are odes to acceptance and perseverance; “Gem & I” namechecks simple pleasures like seeing the sun and cracking another beer; “Magicians From Baltimore” is about a hometown you love but had to leave. Accordingly, the band has toned down its most antic musical impulses. No screams, no sudden explosions of noise. The crescendos, when they happen, are subtle and patient. The tempos, like the volume level, are easygoing.
Within that limited dynamic range, Animal Collective remain a spectacularly creative band. This mellower zone suits them: On albums like Centipede Hz and Painting With, the overstimulation that characterized their groundbreaking earlier work was showing signs of wear; in this most recent period, it’s as if they’d challenged themselves to reach listeners without relying on that playbook. Sometimes, that means making use of idioms outside the insular Animal Collective world. “Stride Rite,” for instance, is a contender for the most straight-up normal song in their catalog. Elegant and candlelit, featuring a rare Deakin lead vocal, it reminds me of something you’d hear on a singer-songwriter album from the twilight of the hippie era, where the protagonist is trying to piece together a meaningful story about what’s next after the utopian dream has fizzled out. “Let’s invite all the songs that we wrote so we’d know/And let them go,” he sings, with a melodic leap at the end that sounds like some combination of regret and hopeful anticipation. Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s songs tend to be so wrapped up in their respective idiosyncrasies as writers and singers that it’s difficult to imagine other people delivering them convincingly. If Deakin’s sensibility is a little more traditional, it’s also a little more universal: “Stride Rite” feels like it could belong to anyone, including you.
But Isn’t It Now? also retains the band’s knack for defamiliarizing their influences, in the same way that Sung Tongs could make you feel like you were hearing a guy strumming an acoustic guitar for the first time in your life. “Gem & I” has a rhythmic basis in Jamaican music, a longstanding area of interest for the band, and perhaps some inspiration from contemporary Top 40 in a structure that unfolds as a series of ever-escalating hooks. Avey Tare’s backing vocals and a massive synth bassline both stab crosswise against Panda Bear’s lead vocal in a manner that’s so satisfying that it’s easy to overlook how unusual it is. The song rivals anything on Merriweather Post Pavilion in its combination of sonic inventiveness and pop appeal. The high point of the nine-minute “Magicians From Baltimore” comes when Deakin plays a piano riff like a looped fragment of a Scott Joplin rag while Panda Bear accompanies him with a variation of the Purdie shuffle. In any other indie-rock band’s hands, this would be a recipe for horrible fake jazz. By committing to the strict repetition of this single idea—and heroically resisting the temptation to noodle or show off—Animal Collective make it ecstatic and uncanny.
“Magicians From Baltimore” isn’t the longest song on Isn’t It Now?; that designation belongs to the 22-minute “Defeat.” It has a curious structure for an epic: halfway between an atmosphere to explore and a narrative to follow. A climactic upbeat section in the middle is almost perversely brief compared to the rest of the parts, which are uniformly slow, sparse, and drifting. The song both challenges and rewards your patience; it’s just that most of its payoffs are extremely subtle. The most moving details are in the margins: a tapped cymbal, a quietly churning violin figure, a scraping sound like a pick against the low strings of a guitar. It’s an audacious move to stick something like this right in the middle of Isn’t It Now?, an album otherwise filled with immediate and obvious pleasures. Which is to say it’s typical for a band that has never tempered its own eccentricity in favor of wider appeal.
One part of Animal Collective’s early mystique lay in a certain amateurism, which I don’t mean pejoratively, but only as a way of describing their apparently innocent disregard for the way other people played their instruments or put songs together. Through some mix of deliberate cultivation and genuine outsiderness, they made you feel like they could only make the strange music they were making. This most recent period involves a certain demystification on that front, by showing just how proficient they are with more commonly legible forms of musical technique. The rhythm section, in particular, finds deeper and funkier pockets in the songs of Isn’t It Now? than we have any right to expect from the guys who made Danse Manatee.
But they’re still contorting and combining these methods in ways that no other band could pull off. Take “Genie’s Open,” which at first is reminiscent of the proggy Canterbury bands of the late ’60s and early ’70s—psychedelic in the sense of fungal overgrowth rather than good vibes and tie-dye, with a series of dank minor-key harmonies that seem to twist in on themselves as the song progresses. Then, on a dime, they switch to an airy two-chord vamp so simple they could play it in their sleep, ornamenting it with the sort of cascading vocal layers that have provided connective tissue for almost all of their otherwise divergent work. Even the sound of Animal Collective themselves, at this point, is an idiom with diffusely observable parameters, attempted but never paralleled by the legions of bands that arose to imitate them at their peak of popularity. This moment is the purest expression of that Animal Collective house style on Isn’t It Now?, and it’s also one of the album’s most thrilling highs. If they’ve stopped putting so much emphasis on reinvention from album to album, maybe it’s because they’re still so good at being themselves. | 2023-09-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | September 29, 2023 | 8 | eb517d48-2e4f-4188-bb6e-6f0703434f07 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
After contemplating retirement, Mitski returns with a new album that’s warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe. | After contemplating retirement, Mitski returns with a new album that’s warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe. | Mitski: The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mitski-the-land-is-inhospitable-and-so-are-we/ | The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We | The tiny desert town of Valentine, Texas got its name after railroad workers laying tracks east from El Paso first reached it on February 14, 1882. Or maybe its namesake is John Valentine, the American expressman who supervised transit routes out west before becoming the inaugural president of Wells Fargo. Whichever the true origin story, it’s where Mitski gazed at her first dust devils on a trek across America—thinking about the whirling forces of love and commerce, how to insulate her passion for music from an extractive industry.
These heavy thoughts guided “Valentine, Texas,” a 2022 song off Laurel Hell on which Mitski cast her inner turmoil onto the natural world: observing clouds that resembled mountains, then visualizing those mountains drifting off, wishing for her burdens to dissipate like vapor. It introduced a chilly, fatalistic album that hinted at commercial pop ambition while anticipating the end of her career—a sense of doomed finality reinforced by its title, an Appalachian folk term for rhododendron thickets where wanderers die after getting stuck. But after Laurel Hell’s release, Mitski wrestled forward: “I renegotiated my contract with my label, and decided to keep making records,” she announced. Now “Valentine, Texas” appears like a guidepost along a long, winding road to the wide expanses of her seventh album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We.
Here, the alchemical imagination that turns cumuli into sierras meets fireflies that hurtle like cars and freight trains that clomp like wild cattle. Mitski conjures scenes of stark and spectral beauty, backed by sweeping orchestral arrangements written by Drew Erickson, the man behind the Old Hollywood grandeur of Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20st Century and the cosmic bloom of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. Gone is the claustrophobic synth-pop that landed Mitski her first Billboard hit, the tense sound of the big city; now the blinding lights of the stage seem to appear only as a memory. The result is a warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding record that foregrounds her evocative songwriting. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe.
As always with Mitski’s albums, loneliness is an inescapable feature of the geography: “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings to empty space on “The Frost,” realizing that she’s alone in her grief. Her steely, vigilant stance—so prevalent on 2018’s Be the Cowboy and Laurel Hell—has softened, the starch dissolving from her personality. So even when connection seems impossible, she reaches for company. She sends love to a benevolent moon, hoping it will pass on the sentiment after she fades to dust. She pours herself another glass, because “sometimes a drink feels like family”—and over solitary, minimal guitar strums, a chorus of voices swell up behind her like a cruel hallucination: “FAMILY.”
This wilderness might seem like a godless place, but Mitski finds scattered signs of divinity: in the body of a drowned insect contaminating the last sips of Jameson, a corpse that from a different vantage looks like an angel. Or the blind, nameless mutt who “shits where she’s supposed to” and embodies hope in breathing, primal form. Strange creatures prowl throughout The Land Is Inhospitable like deities, delivering flashes of frightening insight. An oracular bird mockingly reminds Mitski of her spiritual imprisonment on “The Deal” after she bargains away her soul: “Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” A pack of dogs executes a kind of Biblical punishment on “I’m Your Man,” yapping as cicadas chirp, a toad shrieks, and angels harmonize from above. “I’m sorry I’m the one you love,” Mitski laments to a partner, “I’ll meet judgment by the hounds.”
These are among some of the most surreal, existential, and fascinating songs of Mitski’s career, zooming out from the exigencies of her vocation to probe the essence of the human condition and our place in the cosmos. The album still offers portraits of routine suffering, like on “I Don’t Like My Mind,” on which Mitski plays a self-loathing workaholic who only rests on “an inconvenient Christmas,” gorging herself on cake only to vomit it back up. But the broader universe seeps into even the most mundane settings, intimate moments charged with otherworldly significance. “Heaven” is a tableaux of domestic bliss in which Mitski becomes one with the environment, comparing herself to murmuring brooks and bending willows as she luxuriates in private moments with her lover: “I sip on the rest of the coffee you left/A kiss left of you/Heaven, heaven, heaven.” The misty orchestral swirls at the song’s end make it feel like we too have ascended.
From up above, what do we see? Tiny individuals hubristically trying to make something of ourselves, to push ahead, while knowing that one day the culmination of all that effort will disappear. Evidence of alienation and brutality, but also of softness and beauty. On “Star,” Mitski sings an elegy to a lost love from the other side of isolation, using the galaxy as evidence of a greater hope. The land may be inhospitable, but pan out and you’ll recognize what she does—hardship and pleasure, the choice to embrace love, and the belief that in the end it will have been worth it. | 2023-09-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | September 15, 2023 | 8.1 | eb5460ed-ec66-44bf-bc51-2b887a4d21c3 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Stuart Howard’s third album veers off into the abstract, somewhere between a classical and post-electro mindset. Its many guests are never spotlit and yet its textures never lack a human soul. | Stuart Howard’s third album veers off into the abstract, somewhere between a classical and post-electro mindset. Its many guests are never spotlit and yet its textures never lack a human soul. | Lapalux: Ruinism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lapalux-ruinism/ | Ruinism | Until now, the music that Stuart Howard has put out as Lapalux has masked his tendency to labor over details until he’s achieved perfection. The London producer built his previous two full-lengths and four EPs on a solid foundation of beats and melodies. On Ruinism, his third full-length, Howard abandons his trademark emphasis on grooves, vocals, R&B, hip hop, and jazz in favor of a less immediately listener-friendly blend of abstract sounds. This move isn’t as drastic as, say, Amon Tobin’s like-minded shift from jazz breaks to Foley-based sound sources on his 2007 album The Foley Room. Still, Lapalux fans will likely be scratching their heads wondering where the meat of his sound went.
Whether or not those fans take a shine to Ruinism, Howard’s determination should be applauded. Lapalux’s debut full-length, 2013’s Nostalchic, and preceding EP, 2012’s When You’re Gone, also drew from Foley sources and field recordings, but they weren’t the main focus. Howard appeared content to make sultry, soulful songs that owed a great debt to groups like Zero 7 and Morcheeba. Lapalux’s mix of tentativeness and a strong pulse made it the ideal soundtrack for that headspace when you’re either getting ready to go out clubbing or just coming back—this decade’s answer to chillout with a kick of adrenaline.
The time, the mood shifts dramatically. Howard’s last album, 2015’s Lustmore, gets a jump-start from singer Andreya Triana right off the bat, her smoky voice as full-bodied and looming as a pipe organ resounding in a church. By contrast, the first sounds to take center stage on Ruinism track opener “Reverence” are a repeating loop (a kind of digital version of a railway station bell) and a bouquet of strings. The strings increase in tension and come to a near-boil, but the track simply dissipates, never developing into a hook or even a form.
Singer GABI makes an entrance at the outset of the next track, “Data Demon,” her wordless, operatic chants blending with strings to mimic the sound of a theremin or musical saw. GABI’s voice soars to the uppermost reaches of the human register (at least it sounds that way), but again no hook emerges. And when Howard adds some bass drops, he does so as a harsh counterpoint, a kind of punching-bag effect in the middle of a classical concert hall.
By this point, it becomes obvious that Howard isn’t making a pop record here. Several of the new tunes feature guest vocalists—JFDR, Louisahhh, Talvi, Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Camella Lobo, and Szjerdene Mulcare all appear—but few of them supply a conventional “lead” vocal. Similarly, Howard’s beats don’t ever quite cohere into grooves, while the overwhelming majority of the album pushes the fabric of its sounds in front of everything else. Other than the Talvi feature “4EVA,” it’s even fair to say that Ruinism doesn’t actually consist of songs. Which leaves little left but Howard’s attention to detail, now strikingly and undeniably apparent from start to finish.
Following "4EVA," Howard’s dance side tentatively returns on the holographic house groove of “Essex Is Burning.” From there, the album features beats more prominently. But even then, Ruinism lingers in a state somewhere between classical and a kind of post-electro mindset characterized by non-functional beat-making, as if the stuttering pulse of the songs were emanating from broken pieces of machinery. It is to Howard’s enormous credit that he is able to make this music flow given the secondary role that rhythm, harmony, and structure take.
Though far less accessible than his previous material, Ruinism isn’t the clinical listen it could have turned into. Its performers are never spotlit and yet its textures never lack a human soul. It is the kind of album that tends to frustrate a fanbase while cementing its maker as an artist for that very willingness to alienate the faithful. You could say that Ruinism is Howard’s coming-out party as a composer, but even that incorrectly implies an adherence to tradition. With Ruinism, Howard sets out on a whole new path to conceiving his music. | 2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | July 5, 2017 | 7.2 | eb560979-737f-4669-b3f7-3a83e2e38bac | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On her second album, the kaleidoscopic future-folk sounds of Odetta Hartman are brought into immaculate focus. | On her second album, the kaleidoscopic future-folk sounds of Odetta Hartman are brought into immaculate focus. | Odetta Hartman: Old Rockhounds Never Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/odetta-hartman-old-rockhounds-never-die/ | Old Rockhounds Never Die | In 1935, a 20-year-old Alan Lomax traveled south with author Zora Neale Hurston and folklorist Mary Elizabeth Barnicle to conduct a series of field recordings documenting traditional African-American music in Georgia and Florida, and folk songs of Haiti and the Bahamas. Over 200 discs of music detail a trip that was, by all means, unconventional: A white kid traveling with two 44-year-old women, one black and one white, sharing rooms and meals in a segregated environment where such mingling elicited withering side eye at best. It also marked an early use of a new Presto recording device, which captured sound instantaneously to blank discs. Lomax celebrated the past by embracing the future, in the equipment he used and the company he kept.
This bit of history is key when distilling the beautifully moonstruck, virtuosic future-folk of Odetta Hartman. Seemingly born for a folk singer’s life, she was named for icon Odetta Holmes, and the Lomax trip was a focus of her thesis at Bard College. In turn, such presentations of traditional sounds via modern technology forms the basis of her newest work, Old Rockhounds Never Die. It also speaks to her working relationship with partner and producer Jack Inslee, a studied technician who stitches throbbing low-end with her violin squeals, and 808 taps with her plucky banjo, with the precision and grace of a fine tailor. The whole thing is born of a DIY ethos—Hartman plays all of the instruments herself, and Inslee created most of the beats in their home. You’d never know that, though, given the album’s rich quality of sound.
The act of field recording is as much an extension of Hartman as her striking voice, which lives somewhere between the countrified jazz singer realm of Jolie Holland and the breathy incantations of Cat Power’s Chan Marshall. She and Inslee carry a Zoom H4N Handy Recorder everywhere they go, from the streets of New York to the medinas of Morocco, on the chance they’ll encounter some lightning bolt worth bottling. When paired with the autodidactic banjo playing, violin, electric guitar, and bass of Old Rock Hounds Never Die, Icelandic birds, D.C. thunderstorms, and New Orleans frogs become essential players in an unlikely and utterly magical symphony.
Like a cowboy on acid, Hartman whispers, warbles, and howls tales of California train travel, gunfights, and lost lovers—marvelous, rattling, and bit different each time they’re experienced. Album standout “Sweet Teeth” is as bitter a love song as anything that’s crossed Lucinda Williams’ lips, guided by Inslee’s guttural vibrations and Hartman’s frenetic banjo. “I got a sweet man/He’s trapped in my claws,” she proclaims. These things that should not go together, in fact, do, with an elegance and energy that belies a dissection of its parts.
“Misery” flips the script on the murder ballad. Throbbing beats, plucky banjo, and blood-curdling yowls reclaim the legions of female bodies killed and commodified for the sake of a song. It raises the heart rate at a sprinter’s pace, no-doubt mimicking the internal pounding of the woman who holds the gun. Terrifying as the song becomes, there’s comfort in such defiance: A woman who is reclaiming tradition with a man who is happy to assist.
All of the auxiliary percussion on the album is foley: Snare sounds were made from a running faucet; the glockenspiel heard on “Freedom” is stainless steel mixing bowls; there are pepper grinders and keys on a radiator, all recorded at home. In a musical ecosystem where singular is overused and haunting is all but nauseating, Hartman and Inslee’s work here is deserving of such accolades. There is nothing quite else that ties together such imaginative incongruence with ease, a quilt of scraps that cannot be replicated. What should be a hot mess is a marvel, a constellation of sounds shining bright and mysterious. | 2018-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Memphis Industries / Northern Spy | August 20, 2018 | 8 | eb6024dc-eaad-4547-956f-2fddff1be5f9 | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
The rising road-rap talent has built his name on a mixture of sinister detachment and bristling ambition. Yet despite his aloof, exacting style, he stretches himself thin on this 28-track mixtape. | The rising road-rap talent has built his name on a mixture of sinister detachment and bristling ambition. Yet despite his aloof, exacting style, he stretches himself thin on this 28-track mixtape. | Clavish: *Rap Game Awful * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clavish-rap-game-awful/ | Rap Game Awful | In the creative doldrums following UK drill’s ascent to the mainstream, that style’s musical forebear, road rap—the cruddy sound spearheaded by Giggs and co. back in the early 2000s—is getting some shine, with a new generation of rappers swapping VHS grit for VVS glint. Chief among the reemergent scene’s new talents is North Londoner Clavish, whose cold precision and pugilistic wordplay have gained him a cult fan base among both aging UK rap fans and newer followers discovering a taste for slower beats and greater introspection than pop-leaning drill can offer.
Clavish first captured imaginations back in 2018 with a 40-second clip of a louche freestyle delivered from the back seat of a hatchback; he followed up with an eight-minute monologue of sharp, guarded storytelling. Since then, he’s kept his output to a trickle, using the scarcity of his releases to heighten their impact. His character recalls The Wire’s Marlo Stanfield, sharing the clean-cut antagonist’s mixture of sinister, sunken-eyed detachment and bristling ambition. A lazy observer might call his demeanor effortlessly cool (which, yes, it sort of is); but the more studied critique is that paradox is central to almost everything Clavish does.
Clavish is witty—“The streets aren’t for everyone, that’s why they made the curbs,” offers “No Interview”—yet unswervingly humorless, too. He cuts music checks to free himself from a street lifestyle he holds in contempt, but, like Pacino in the Godfather, forever flirts with being pulled back in. He seems to relish the obvious contradiction of rapping immaculately for minutes on end while reiterating that he’s not trying or doesn’t care for recognition. “This mixtape's just for everyone to know I'm hard/Don't care about being in the charts,” he sighs on breezy highlight “That’s Silly,” as if waiting to be tested on his claims. It’s puckish, and enticing. However, the unignorable inconsistency at the heart of Rap Game Awful is that despite his aloof, exacting style, Clavish has turned in a debut album that is, inexplicably, 28 tracks long. Stretched out like this, the few holes in his game—namely a dearth of stories that stretch beyond his immediate North London environs, and a limited selection of flows—are at risk of crowding out his shows of genuine excellence.
Rap Game Awful checks a full NC-17 bingo card of drugs, sex, and violence, all peppered, like a movie premiere’s red-carpet backdrop, with an endless spool of designer brand names. “When I’m upset I fly Sloane Street, Louis Vuitton, and Prada,” he spits on the midnight glide of “1 More Than 6.” But splashing cash can only offer so much succor, which leads him to pleasures of a more carnal kind; jewels and intimate violence provide the rest. His lyrics, for the most part unanchored from any discernible choruses, flit between these topics in a kaleidoscopic melee both entrancing and unsettling, conjuring patterns from shapes that simply shouldn’t fit. It’s an experience to gorge on.
That is, until it’s not. The uniformity of each song’s contents, and the inevitable return to each familiar theme—fucking, fighting, flexing—ends up spotlighting where Clavish hits and where he misses: He sounds untouchable as he glides a hopscotch flow over hotel lounge piano on “That’s Silly,” but then he stutters on the inapposite “Eleanor Rigby”/“Thong Song” strings of “Traumatised.” The chorus on “I Told You So” sounds half-baked, but on “FR” he’s soaring. The intro and outro tracks offer narrative bones to pick over, along with glimpses of the man behind the designer garments; on “22 Missed Calls,” he experiments with more conceptual song structures, with promising results—but moments like these risk being lost amid a wash of sameness.
Like the clip that kickstarted Clavish’s career, Rap Game Awful leaves you wanting more—just not in terms of quantity. There’s an album’s worth of tracks here that put Clavish head and shoulders above his peers, which only makes the other album’s worth of misfires more disappointing for their inclusion. What you want more of, really, is what you suspect Clavish could do, not what you already know he can. | 2023-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Polydor | January 25, 2023 | 6.6 | eb604602-95f3-44ab-bf9c-2086e1331a52 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
On her second full-length album, the Baltimore rapper indulges in the time-honored queer tradition of plotting a great escape from it all. | On her second full-length album, the Baltimore rapper indulges in the time-honored queer tradition of plotting a great escape from it all. | Lor Choc: Love Is Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lor-choc-love-is-love/ | Love Is Love | Lor Choc sings, “What if you and I/Can get away together/Right now?” as her voice intermittently curdles with Auto-Tune. The song, “Get Away,” joins Bronski Beat’s synthpop voyage “Smalltown Boy” and Tracy Chapman’s folk-pop hit “Fast Car” in a lineage of forlorn runaways. In all three, the speaker’s home is little more than an oppressive shell they must break out of on their way to freedom, acceptance, peace. “You and I can both get jobs/And finally see what it means to be living,” Chapman postulates in her earthy alto. Choc’s vision is more tempered: “It’s whatever/I’m just trying to live better.”
The idea that real life hides somewhere just beyond the horizon is not constrained to queer music, but it takes on extra urgency there. Softer and more wistful than Lor Choc’s 2016 debut tape Worth the Wait, Love Is Love finds the artist caught in the liminal space between where she is and where she’s going, between her allegiance to her hometown and the suspicion that somewhere better lies in wait. These love songs come with disclaimers. “I got a girl that really love me/But I’m too caught up in this money/I’m too caught up in these streets,” she muses on “Love Me.” On “Wrong Rights,” she saddles a cliché with additional poignancy: “If loving you is wrong/Then I don’t wanna be right,” she murmurs against a spat of ultra-compressed synth strings. Because she’s singing to another woman, the tired couplet wakes up. If the world stamps her love as morally wrong, then fuck the world, let’s find a better one.
Compared to the exuberant mosaic of Worth the Wait, Love Is Love’s production rings a little sedate. Hi-hats fall like snowflakes, and synth riffs chirp tinny and thin. Choc steps in to fill the space that’s been left open, proving herself a versatile and charismatic presence behind the mic. She can play tender, as on the gently tuneful “Vibe,” and she can wail up a storm like she does on “How I Feel.” Whether she’s nursing a crush or self-soothing after a bad breakup, she doesn’t hesitate to push her voice to its natural breaking point, often rippling it with filters for additional emphasis.
In the years leading up to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage across the United States, “all love is equal” was used as one of many slogans in support of LGBTQ rights. After the 2016 mass shooting at the Orlando gay club Pulse, Lin-Manuel Miranda read a sonnet at the Tony Awards that condensed the sentiment to “love is love.” It’s legal now to marry anyone, but such a law hardly ensures the safety of queer folks figuring out how to negotiate a deeply heteronormative world. Laws don’t tell stories, and there are still yawning gaps in the ongoing history of queer storytelling. There’s no hard script for relationships that diverge from straight coupling, which is both confusing and exciting: It means you get to write your own. Lor Choc, a young artist with a sharp curiosity around her craft, sets out to do just that — to turn the relative vacancy around her experience into an opportunity for forging something new.
In Choc’s vision, the intimacies of female friendship coalesce into a romantic bond between equals. “They be mad cause we be fussin’/And we still be clique-tight,” she raps on “Ride.” “Don’t be scared to tell me nothing/Secret’s safe on this side.” They’re sharing secrets, close like best friends, and they’re also in love like girls aren’t supposed to be. “Tell me you’ll never leave me,” Choc sings at the hook. It’s not possessiveness; it’s a wild, gleaming hope. | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | TSO | February 22, 2019 | 7.2 | eb60485e-2ccb-4ec2-b8c4-d14630119e74 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The breakout NY rapper’s emotionally affecting, piano-heavy street tales start to run together at 17 tracks. | The breakout NY rapper’s emotionally affecting, piano-heavy street tales start to run together at 17 tracks. | Lil Tjay: True 2 Myself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-tjay-true-2-myself/ | True 2 Myself | Three years ago, a 15-year-old Lil Tjay was sentenced to a year in a juvenile detention center for a robbery. In late 2017, he was released back into the Bronx’s Fordham Heights neighborhood, with a promise to his mother that things would be different. At first, he fell back into his old ways, skipping school to run the Bronx streets. Then, he stepped into a studio for the first time and recorded his breakout single “Resume.”
On “Resume,” Lil Tjay sing-raps in a soft voice about his crushes with the charm of a mischievous early 2010s teen R&B star (think Prodigy of Mindless Behavior). At the same time, he reflects on the drug addicts he passes on his block everyday and the friends he’s lost while incarcerated. He perfectly captures the feeling of being a kid in a New York environment that rapidly forces you to mature. That conflict only becomes more profound on the singles that followed “Resume,” which he began uploading to YouTube every month or so. “Long Time” is a bittersweet ode to all of the friends he’s lost; “Goat” reflects on the low points he’s overcome; “Brothers” dredges up the past he’s still trying to distance himself from. By the end of summer 2018, Tjay’s melodic sense was refined and his stories tapped into an emotional honesty that made him a relatable breakout star in New York.
Lil Tjay’s music was always suited for singles. There’s nothing wrong with that; so much of rap is consumed through playlists and YouTube videos. But when stretched across a 17-track album, like his debut, True 2 Myself, issues that were irrelevant before begin to surface: uniform vocals, half-cooked production, and writing that pulls from the same stories.
True 2 Myself is more like a compilation than an album. On “F.N,” Tjay’s vivid reflections are given life by lush piano. “I was stuck up in the streets, but I had a brain/I ain’t have no money, we was looking for a nigga chain,” he raps, while keeping a steady melody. The album’s intro, “One Take,” is Tjay at his sharpest; every line over the sparkly keys has a purpose, especially when he addresses comparisons to fellow Bronx crooner A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie: “They said I’m the new A Boogie, relax/I ain’t never tried to copy his swag.” Each of these songs is just as good, maybe better, than early tracks like “Goat” and “Brothers”—both land on the album—but lose some of their luster when they’re all run together, and padded out with blander versions of the same piano-heavy street tales (“Dream That I Had,” “Post To Be”).
The album format gives Tjay a little room to stretch, something that’s nearly impossible when he’s only releasing one single a month. Some experiments work, like the traditional R&B ballad “Mixed Emotions.” The “BET Uncut” slow jam “Sex Sounds,” meanwhile, is way too much: Hearing him sing “The way you kiss me when I’m stroking deep inside” is like finding porn in your little brother’s internet history.
Lil Tjay wants to grow up, and an album feels like part of that process. But Tjay didn’t need an album; he notched a Billboard Top 15 single and became one of the rappers leading New York’s melody-driven scene without one. True 2 Myself is a playlist of soon-to-be singles grouped under the industry-formality heading of an “album.” Inevitably, one of these brooding piano ballads will catch on, followed by another, and Tjay, just like he did less than two years ago, will go on another run. | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | October 14, 2019 | 6.5 | eb6a348e-07b7-4a41-942c-3e0304f8cbc3 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The indie rock band made two filler-free albums full of primal thrills and then disappeared. This reissue feels more like a reintroduction than a reassessment. | The indie rock band made two filler-free albums full of primal thrills and then disappeared. This reissue feels more like a reintroduction than a reassessment. | Chavez: Gone Glimmering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chavez-gone-glimmering/ | Gone Glimmering | Chavez were a perfect comet of a band: At the height of the mid-’90s indie boom in New York, they made two filler-free albums in two years that sounded like each other but not like anything else, then didn’t break up so much as quietly stop existing. They never made a Difficult Third Album; they didn’t fade away because there wasn’t really anything to fade from. They were great and then they were gone.
Their 1995 full-length debut Gone Glimmering and 1996’s Ride the Fader feature interstitial snippets of people gawping in delight at fireworks displays and roller coasters, and the songs that surround them aspire to that mood and that level of entertainment—primal thrills that are simple to understand but complicated to deliver. Chavez were Coney Island’s rickety, beloved Cyclone; you can hear the parts grinding and the danger of collapse is part of the fun.
Chavez began life as a supergroup of sorts, at least by an extremely 1995 metric. Lead singer and guitarist Matt Sweeney had been in Skunk, who put out two albums on Twin/Tone that sounded like New Jersey’s answer to old Twin/Tone Soul Asylum. (This is a compliment.) Guitarist Clay Tarver had been in Boston’s Bullet LaVolta, which put out a couple of albums of East Coast grunge before breaking up in 1992. Chavez was (significantly) greater than the sum of these parts.
Reveling in deeply unfashionable, doomy ’70s prog and proto-metal—titles like “Wakeman’s Air” and “The Flaming Gong” are signposts even if the dressed-down Lower East Side vibe isn’t—the nine songs on Gone Glimmering, built around Sweeney and Tarver’s call-and-response guitars and getaway-car squeals, all feel of a piece. You could listen to this album steadily over the course of 25 years and still not clock the exact moment when opener “Nailed to the Blank Spot” turns into “Break Up Your Band.” “Laugh Track” and “Ghost By the Sea” might be the perfect distillation of the band’s innate, almost symphonic sense of quiet-loud-quiet drama, and jittery closer “Relaxed Fit” bakes the ethos right into the title. Meanwhile “Pentagram Ring” is what happens when they trade that dynamic for an actual groove.
They were tagged with the quixotic “math rock” label, signifying a bookish intent that the band’s influences and underlying hesher vibe couldn’t quite support. They were highly skilled musicians—drummer James Lo in particular—which almost seemed beside the point. An exhaustive, charmingly geeky video interview between Tarver, Sweeney, and Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13 pegged to the Gone Glimmering 25th anniversary reissue goes deep into the weeds about tunings and approach, ultimately exposing the band’s signature assault as a series of happy accidents, a point Sweeney is adamant about. “I cannot play a single guitar part that Clay does in Chavez and he doesn’t know what I’m doing,” he told FRONTRUNNER in May 2020. “But those two guitar parts would work together well.”
Compared to other recent Class of ‘95 reissues like Yo La Tengo’s Electr-O-Pura, Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, and Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes, Matador’s anniversary reissue feels less about nostalgia or a valedictory salute than a re-introduction. The 1995 Pentagram Ring EP fills out this deluxe edition, with four tracks that feel in turns sludgier and more rudimentary than what wound up on the album proper. “The Nerve” is a heaping slab of “Custard Pie,” and “You Faded” is as straightforward and tuneful as they get.
Once Chavez wound down, owing mainly to members getting grown-up jobs and a general lack of popular deterrent from doing so, Sweeney began his rise as alt-rock’s own Waddy Wachtel, playing with everyone from Billy Corgan, Guided by Voices, and Will Oldham to Neil Diamond, Adele, and posthumously, Johnny Cash. Tarver was an executive producer on Silicon Valley while bassist Scott Marshall (son of Garry, nephew of Penny) dove into the family business. Chavez regrouped for a handful of shows and a three-song EP in 2017, and while all this has helped burnish the band’s legacy, it hasn’t added any artificial weight or import to Gone Glimmering. The album hasn’t retroactively become a touchstone for a new generation of rock bands nor does it feel tied to its era as some indie artifact. But it may stand as a model of how to present a fully realized vision from moment one and then get out before anyone has a chance to fuck it up. Break up your band.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal / Rock | Matador | November 13, 2020 | 8.6 | eb776a8c-9c37-4b36-8319-dade85df912c | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
The latest from Kurt Wagner’s shapeshifting group is its darkest yet: a haunting ode to everyday American pain and the small ways we make it through. | The latest from Kurt Wagner’s shapeshifting group is its darkest yet: a haunting ode to everyday American pain and the small ways we make it through. | Lambchop: The Bible | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lambchop-the-bible/ | The Bible | “The room is warmer than it should be,” Kurt Wagner sings in the opening line of The Bible, instantly capturing an air of unease in the kind of unassumingly mundane way that has practically become Lambchop’s signature. Recounting a visit with his father as he nears the end of his life, Wagner’s low voice droops over a bed of empty, ringing piano keys: “Now these days are measured by the number/Thirty summers from today.” As Wagner mulls over the increasingly meaningless distance between his father’s age and his own, a miniature orchestra of electronics joins in—the chintzy harps and weeping strings give an unearthly effect, like watching a funeral service through a low-resolution livestream. But just when it seems like the uncomfortable emotion might be too much to bear, Wagner pulls the rug from under us once more. “It should get easier with time,” he contemplates, before following it up with a wisecrack: “No one’s edgier than I.”
After over 30 years as the ringleader of “Nashville’s most fucked up country band,” the sheepishly subversive songwriter has broken down and rebuilt American music time and time again, albeit much more subtly than most iconoclasts. Wagner’s world operates on a smaller scale: He writes songs that feel suffused with importance despite being about lonely house dogs, or stopping for donuts on the drive home. For Wagner, wiping the slate clean on his band’s sound is less about testing out new genres than it is about gently revealing more wrinkles to his worldview. Though he’s always freely tinkered with oddball electronics, in recent years he’s pushed his sounds even further into the ether, shrouding his own voice in Vocoder and breaking down his music into a ghostly haze. For an artist who’s always thrived on a certain level of modest obscurity, Wagner’s later years have been a steady process of vanishing almost completely into thin air.
The Bible is easily Lambchop’s darkest work. Now 62 years old, Wagner spends its songs wrestling with death, confronting the passage of time with the same amused eccentricity that’s always been the lifeblood of his music. Stylistically, the band sounds freer than it’s ever been, as Wagner, pianist Andrew Broder, and producer Ryan Olson concoct a shapeshifting cocktail of Bacharach-ian baroque pop, off kilter digi-funk, glitched out gospel, and deconstructed chamber music. It is to Lambchop what Goodbye to Language was to Godard: the kind of bold late-period triumph that could have only come from an old master playfully grappling with the tools of our uncanny present moment.
There’s a disembodied quality to the songs on The Bible, and even the most ornate orchestral arrangements have the eeriness of a hologram. Each individual song feels as if it could be undone at any moment. “Whatever, Mortal” cruises on a sly smooth jazz build, the bridge slowly climbing to a dreamy swirl of brass and electronics before, out of nowhere, the stock sound of a gun clocking snaps us back to the chorus. Even more jarring is “Daisy,” a touching barroom ballad with all the wry wit of a Randy Newman weeper, where, after a minute and a half, Wagner’s gentle singing is suddenly interrupted by a loud “HEY!” straight out of an Ableton crunk sample pack. It might very well be Lambchop’s equivalent of the Grouper microwave beep, instantly collapsing the reality of the song and thrusting us back into the absurd technological fabric of the world around us.
For all its cold electronic effects, however, The Bible emanates compassion and warmth. As “edgy” as he may be, Wagner’s ultimate weapon is his softness: an ability to command silence like just another instrument at his disposal. It’s in the little moments, such as on the Angelo Badalamenti-like “So There,” where a tremble in his voice flutters out as he sings, “My eyes are open like a screen door to your heartbeat,” imbuing the song with a hushed, elegiac intimacy. In “A Major Minor Drag,” Wagner meditates on the death of Gift of Gab, surrounding his own Auto-Tuned voice in a choir of shimmering bells. “I’m at war now with the obvious,” he croons as the song reaches a triumphant climax, swelling like a solemn tribute to a fallen soldier. Surreal as his approach may be, Wagner never lets his songs’ peculiarities stand above their vulnerability.
The Bible is a willfully abstract record, but for its many experiments, Wagner and company bring an intense focus to these songs. Wagner sounds urgent, even pleading, on tracks like “Little Black Boxes” and “Police Dog Blues,” navigating their twisting and unsettled grooves as if he were trying to reveal some kind of logic in their disorder. The latter song was inspired by the George Floyd riots, and it takes its name from an old Blind Blake song that just so happens to have been released the year Wagner’s father was born. As random as these fragments may seem, Wagner connects them into something unified: a haunting ode to everyday American pain and the small ways we make it through. | 2022-10-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 3, 2022 | 8.1 | eb7d5c73-9c0d-4323-bdac-112c7da84871 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Toronto trio Odonis Odonis forgo their rowdy surf/garage mix for a pulsating, John Carpenter-esque goth palette, while their lyrics explore the dire consequences of unchecked technological progress. | Toronto trio Odonis Odonis forgo their rowdy surf/garage mix for a pulsating, John Carpenter-esque goth palette, while their lyrics explore the dire consequences of unchecked technological progress. | Odonis Odonis: Post Plague | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22012-post-plague/ | Post Plague | On its 2011 debut full-length Hollandaze, Toronto trio Odonis Odonis crafted a rowdy blend of surf/garage and noise, only to dial-down the surf and crank up the noise on the 2014 follow-up Hard Boiled Soft Boiled. At that point it became apparent that Odonis Odonis had a penchant for sweeping change from album to album. But with Post Plague Odonis Odonis take an even more radical step in a new direction, dropping the noise element almost entirely and a re-fashioning themselves as a goth/industrial-styled synth outfit.
If your town has a goth hotspot where people like to twirl to classics by Dead Can Dance, Depeche Mode, etc, you’ll immediately have a sense for the era this album’s insistent synth gurgles and throbbing beats come from. The pulsating, John Carpenter-esque synth pattern that opens the song “Needs” recalls Carpenter’s score for his iconic 1981 film *Escape from New York—*a motif that has by now been mined to death by other bands. Odonis Odonis, however, aren’t invoking sci-fi as kitsch B-grade entertainment but as a dire reminder of the downside of unchecked technological progress. An official statement from the band implores the audience to “take stock of ourselves before we lose something profound, [which] may be necessary to ward off a pending anthropogenic apocalypse.”
Of course, sci-fi has a long history as an expression of collective anxieties about humanity’s future vis-a-vis technological advancement. But Post Plague's authoritative tone makes it resonate more profoundly than superficially similar music by Odonis Odonis' more fashion-conscious peers. Vocalist/synth player Constantin (Dean) Tzenos sings with the conviction of someone who's absolutely certain the world is on the brink of upheaval, but even when he's screaming he foregoes hysteria.
At times, such as on “Nervous,” he chooses to couch his message in reassurance and breathy sex appeal. Tzenos' reserved cool makes for a taut contrast between the music and the lyrics and actually heightens the urgency of the subject matter. He also wrings meaning out of terse, almost monosyllabic lines: “Now fear is cultured from within,” he sings on album opener “Fearless,” whose chorus is built on repetition of a basic two-word line: “Barely conscious/Barely conscious/We’re fearless.” Here and elsewhere, Tzenos says quite a lot with very little, and the implications of these ideas—in this case, emotional suppression and self-narcotizing through media—belie the simplicity of his word construction.
Unsurprisingly, traces of the band’s taste for noise linger. Staccato bursts of Ministry-style guitar/drums strafe across the otherwise hypnotically subdued synth lines on “Nervous,” for example. But, like most of the album, the song teeters at the edge of an eruption but pulls back before going over the edge. Here and throughout Post Plague, the band shows that it has learned the power of holding back. “Nervous” ends with a central synth figure getting the last word with the steady insistence of a vital signs monitor—a fitting metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit in spite of everything we’ve done to dehumanize ourselves. The music suggests over and overthat that resilience is on shaky ground, which sets Post Plague apart from its influences. We could once enjoy dystopian fantasy from a distance; Post-Plague isn't fantasy at all, and its themes are very much rooted in the now.
Occasionally, the band hints at its true range. Post Plague, in fact, falls within prescribed boundaries not because of limitations but by choice. Deeper into the track listing, the spartan, decidedly modern indie rock of “Pencils,” with its splashes of color and guest vocals courtesy of New Pornographers member Kathryn Calder, shows that, creatively speaking, even though this band might like to visit goth night from time to time, it wears no allegiance on its sleeve. Given Odonis Odonis’ track record, Post Plague is just another stop on an increasingly adventurous course through the genre map. | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Telephone Explosion / Felte | June 24, 2016 | 7.9 | eb8a13b2-b2a5-4aec-acf9-51dbcd19f6a9 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Stepping confidently into her “rock era,” Miley offers a genuinely pleasing, though sometimes hamfisted record that staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums. | Stepping confidently into her “rock era,” Miley offers a genuinely pleasing, though sometimes hamfisted record that staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums. | Miley Cyrus: Plastic Hearts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miley-cyrus-plastic-hearts/ | Plastic Hearts | For the better part of a decade, Miley Cyrus has been an avatar for entertainment capitalism’s most insidious processes. She is a living embodiment of the child-star-to-tabloid-fixture pipeline, and typifies the music industry’s fondness for adopting the aesthetics of rap music as a way of courting clicks as much as she does its tendency to disavow the genre as “materialist” as a way of virtue-signaling. Her music is inexorable from social media, both in the frenetic, real-time updates of its visual style and its tendency to spark loud, mindless discourse. She has been canceled and revived more than pretty much any other star, save, perhaps, Justin Bieber. Provocative, talented but directionless, passionate but confused in her politics, she is a star for whom headlines have almost always outweighed output.
Although Cyrus’ various musical projects have rarely been good, a few have been, at the very least, historically significant. Focus exclusively on the drama and it’d be easy to forget that the three-year period of Cyrus’ output that yielded 2013’s Mike WiLL Made-It-produced Bangerz and 2015’s Flaming Lips collaboration Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz was one of the most intriguingly bizarre pop eras of the past decade, throwing a spanner into a fairly staid, Max Martin-run commercial landscape and making discourse around thoughtless co-opting of Black art accessible and understandable to a new generation of pop fans.
In the years since, Cyrus has attempted to outrun that glittery, twerk-heavy chapter of her career. In 2017, she pivoted to back-to-basics country-pop with the painfully dull Younger Now, before, with little explanation or contrition, returning to the rap sound that had defined her Bangerz era on the 2019 EP She Is Coming, the first installment of a planned trilogy that replaced the former record’s freewheeling joy with a cursory nod to GothBoiClique-style emo rap and a typically inane guest verse from RuPaul. Both projects were relative commercial failures, attempts at image rehabilitation that instead removed a once-inescapable star from the conversation entirely.
Before Cyrus could release the sequels to She Is Coming, her life was upended, the vast majority of her new album destroyed in the Woolsey wildfire, and her decade-long relationship with actor Liam Hemsworth ending in a messy, highly-publicized divorce. In the wake of the split, Cyrus reset, scrapping her two unreleased EPs and pursuing a darker, classic rock-indebted sound. In August of this year, she released “Midnight Sky,” a cocaine-dusted disco track that addressed her divorce and subsequent high-profile flings in a surprisingly mature way. In the months following “Midnight Sky”’s release, Cyrus attempted to back up her newly conjured goodwill not through the release of more singles, but through heartbroken covers of Blondie, the Cranberries, and more. The writing on the wall was clear: Miley’s “rock era” had begun.
Plastic Hearts is not without precedent: Cyrus has been playing covers of the Smiths and Bob Dylan for unsuspecting audiences since her Bangerz tour, and, although a little reverential, her recent run of covers was enjoyable and endearing, a transparent attempt at proving her classic rock bona fides. Cyrus’ covers of “Heart of Glass” and “Zombie” are tacked on to the end of some versions of the record, almost like a gesture of goodwill, but there was little need: Plastic Hearts is a genuinely pleasing pop-rock record that, through a handful of canny stylistic and lyrical choices, staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums.
Although the album artwork—shot by famed rock photog Mick Rock—and the “Heart of Glass” cover would seem to point towards a certain strain of classic rock revival, Plastic Hearts is a stylistic grab bag. Running the gamut from modern radio rock to industrial pop to new wave, Plastic Hearts is unified not by Cyrus’ commitment to any particular era, but to her cosplay as a kind of iconic rock siren lost to the annals of time: Were the production a little less clean, you might be able to pass this off as the greatest hits of a Top of the Pops-era rock diva.
Cyrus’ voice, lower and more guttural than it had ever sounded, was the focal point of those covers, and Plastic Hearts makes clear why: her sandpapery alto has never sounded more natural. Try as she might, Cyrus can’t really rap, and Younger Now made it abundantly clear that Nashville isn’t her calling. Here, she tries on a handful of different styles, and each one works immaculately: Her rasp induces chills on the stadium ballads “Angels Like You” and “Never Be Me,” out-Billy Idols Billy Idol on the “White Wedding” remake “Night Crawling,” and pays homage to “Edge of Seventeen” without cowering in its shadow on “Midnight Sky.” The bulk of the melodies here are gilded and soaring, and she’s never forced to work her tongue around a clunky, focus-tested quasi-rap lyric like “Hallelujah, I’m a freak/I’m a freak, hallelujah/Every week I’mma do ya.”
Lyrically, Plastic Hearts is still vintage Miley, albeit with the edges sharpened: songs about fame and love and being a little too fucked up, whether chemically or emotionally. There’s a thread of unfiltered honesty that positions the album as an emotional twin to Bangerz; that record, beyond the twerking, was largely about Cyrus’ devotion to Hemsworth, opening with what was essentially a marriage proposal and ending with a recitation of Corinthians 13:4, exploring the stresses and caveats of eternal love throughout. A couple of songs here play as if in direct conversation with songs from that record, an older, divorced Cyrus more eloquently echoing realizations she was only beginning to acknowledge seven years ago.
Those only dipping into the beginning of the record will be stung by some of the album’s most hamfisted cuts. “WTF Do I Know,” with its confused provocations (“I’m the type to drive a pickup through your mansion”) and clean, propulsive 2000s rock chorus, plays more P!nk than Pink Floyd, while the staccato hook and showtune-y bounce of “Plastic Hearts” unearth repressed memories of Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High. A lot of these songs sound like the canned, Muzak versions of rock songs thanks to the production by Louis Bell and Watt, hitmakers generally associated with top-tier pop artists like Camila Cabello and Post Malone. Still, the various successes of Plastic Hearts make you wonder what Cyrus would sound like if paired with someone like Jonathan Rado—who has helmed classic-sounding records by the Killers and Tim Heidecker, as well as past albums by Weyes Blood and Whitney—or Ariel Rechtshaid, who produced Haim’s Women In Music, Pt. III with Danielle Haim and Rostam. More than anything, Plastic Hearts raises questions like this, in the process highlighting a potential future career path: What if Miley Cyrus became an actual rock star?
When Cyrus reunites with past collaborators Mark Ronson—with whom she made the 2018 country-disco stomper “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart”—and Andrew Wyatt, the results are thoughtful and surprising. The country-adjacent ballad “High,” one of a handful of future karaoke classics on the album, contains some of Cyrus’ most beautiful lyrics: “You, like a rolling stone, always building cities on the hearts you broke,” she sings, the crags in her voice given space to resonate, rather than erased. A line like “I don’t miss you, but I think of you and don’t know why” might seem simple, but it’s honest and heartbreaking. Best of all is “Bad Karma,” a raucous slow-build of a song featuring Joan Jett on vocals and Angel Olsen on guitar. Snot-nosed and silly, it’s a high-camp panto of ’80s hard rock, finding Cyrus and Jett trading one-liners—“I’ve always picked a giver ’cause I’ve always been the taker,” goes the delirious chorus—over one of the record’s few live drum tracks. It’s strange, outsized fun, and a glorious example of what Cyrus can do when she lightly plays with her own self-image.
The most interesting, and most complicated moment is saved for last. On “Golden G String” Cyrus attempts to show some kind of contrition for her mid-2010s antics:
I was tryin’ to own my power
Still I’m tryin’ to work it out
And at least it gives the paper somethin’ they can write about
And oh, that’s just the world that we’re livin’ in
The old boys hold all the cards, and they ain’t playin’ gin
It’s an intriguing idea that doesn’t really land. An “I did it for the patriarchy” apologia doesn’t quite address the layers of privilege and capital that have been involved with Cyrus’ most egregious missteps. Still, there’s a refreshing openness to a simple lyric like “There are layers to this body/Primal sex and primal shame/They told me I should cover it/So I went the other way”, which does more to explain Cyrus’ thought processes than any number of foot-in-mouth interviews. Explanations, though, are beside the point—“Golden G String” is a warm, inviting ballad, one of Cyrus’ most deeply-felt in years. Ultimately, that’s Plastic Hearts’ greatest success: for the first time in a long time, a Miley Cyrus record is music first, headlines second.
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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. | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | December 2, 2020 | 6.4 | eb8e5285-6bb5-4211-be44-3d9458b56b8e | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The Canadian singer and songwriter’s fourth album is an ambitious collage of ’90s R&B and orchestral dramatics, welded together by her versatile, gossamer voice. | The Canadian singer and songwriter’s fourth album is an ambitious collage of ’90s R&B and orchestral dramatics, welded together by her versatile, gossamer voice. | Lydia Ainsworth: Sparkles & Debris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lydia-ainsworth-sparkles-and-debris/ | Sparkles & Debris | Lydia Ainsworth songs are spectral but aching, like the feeling of being watched in an empty room. Her music is often concerned with monsters and make-believe, setting them against sheets of synth and harmony. And since the glitchy art pop of her 2014 debut, Right From Real, she has blended genres with increasing gusto, indulging in richer, more complex composition and linking her music to a spiritual practice of magic. Her latest album, Sparkles & Debris, is a showcase of this progression, a candy jar of orchestral R&B that asks you to believe, too.
At first pass, Sparkles & Debris feels like a continuation of the synth-assisted R&B from Ainsworth’s 2019 album Phantom Forest, with more groove and less shiver than her first two albums. Songs that start off with one expectation—a silky drum beat out of a ’90s ballad, a celestial synth layered like whipped cream—soon dissolve into something different. “Cosmic Dust” begins with a floaty synth pad and promptly sways into a TLC-type beat. Then, a harp comes in. The collaged nature of these songs can exhilarate, like on “Amaryllis,” where foreboding, gnawing strings give way to a plinky electronic melody. The unexpected elements feed off each other rather than competing, building like papier-mâché.
But although intriguing within themselves, these songs don’t always work alongside each other. The sparse and shadowy Chic cover “Good Times” feels confusing following an art rock song like “Halo of Fire,” and Ainsworth’s more Celtic, voice-led melodies in the second half of the album are a difficult transition from the smooth, rhythmic ’90s pop sound of the first half. Sparkles & Debris is Ainsworth’s most enthusiastically genre-bending album to date, and it’s as occasionally fractured as that distinction would suggest. But Ainsworth’s distinct, gossamer voice welds it together: Regardless of production style, she is always at the front, weaving, tying down airy vocal runs with low whispers, pushing things to feel softer and more rare.
The way the album’s genres and concepts bleed together feels like a watercolor dream. The odd-fruit production makes a perfect home for the lyrics, which tell stories of girls walking to the “fairy place” and crying “liquid fire,” or deploy specifics in the way that a fairytale witch might, like when Ainsworth requests that a blackbird “speak thy name three times.” Like magic, pop songs ask you to harness your ambition, to seek to create a world that’s brighter, more full of love, sex, or in Ainsworth’s case, imagination. Sparkles & Debris is concerned with possibility—everything that shifts and changes and hopes to catch up.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Zombie Cat | May 22, 2021 | 7.3 | eb8f9770-1b85-472f-8a9f-0a88b146a4c9 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
The experimental musician’s radiant new album explores love’s rapture within the confines of more traditional pop structures. | The experimental musician’s radiant new album explores love’s rapture within the confines of more traditional pop structures. | Eartheater: Powders | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eartheater-powders/ | Powders | Eartheater songs, which reference chrysalises, diamonds, and other natural symbols of metamorphosis, sound like they emerge from an analogous process of transformation. Alexandra Drewchin takes amorphous elements and alters them into something rare and precious, incorporating grinding digital noise and austere beats into works of ornate avant-pop. Over the years she has steadily centered her voice as her primary instrument, the centrifugal force pulling together the dissonant pieces of her tracks. On her sixth album Powders, the first of twin records, she gets the closest she has to mainstream pop, exploring more traditional song structures and less adorned production.
When Drewchin approached pop in the past, it was typically in the form of absurd meditations on attraction; she told a partner to “grow gills, bring a snorkel” on 2019’s “Supersoaker.” On Powders, Drewchin aims to capture the transformative power of love. Flute arpeggios shoot out from under trembling synths as she details total rapture on opener “Sugarcane Switch”: “Put the sun to sleep, he’s tired/And I’m awake and inspired.” The lovestruck mood continues onto “Crushing,” an ambling trip-hop ballad composed of a series of interlocking lyrics, the end of each line becoming the beginning of the next. “You’re the fuse that detonates my body/You’re the body that blows my mind,” she sings. It’s a song that could reasonably keep going until language runs out. The two tracks are some of Drewchin’s best work as Eartheater, showcasing her skill for guiding surreal beauty out of sprawling, fluid arrangements.
Drewchin’s voice—sometimes multi-layered and distorted, other times untouched—has been her anchor since her solo debut Metalepsis in 2015. On Powders, it takes on a more prominent role, less processed than on previous records. While her performance is often impressive, her voice can feel trapped within the album’s more structured writing. On “Mona Lisa Moan” and “Pure Smile Snake Venom,” two of the most by-the-book songs Drewchin has ever released, her delivery sounds dulled, especially in contrast to the album’s radiant beginning.
In exploring her primary interest, a person’s capacity for change, Drewchin routinely evokes violence. It’s present in her monstrous stage name and was central to her last album, 2020’s Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin. It’s present in System Of A Down’s nu-metal classic “Chop Suey!,” which she covers halfway through Powders, singing of “self-righteous suicide” and dying angels. But instead of staying true to the original, Drewchin drains the song of its aggression, pairing her quiet voice with a simple guitar melody before the song blooms with percussion and piano. Transformation can be brutal, she seems to imply, but the most radical change can also be lovely and gentle. | 2023-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Chemical X | September 27, 2023 | 7.5 | eb9f7b76-5277-442c-9391-b218d412fca9 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
Across her latest album, the pop star’s high-octane, inoffensive dance-pop plays it way too safe and never really finds a point of view. | Across her latest album, the pop star’s high-octane, inoffensive dance-pop plays it way too safe and never really finds a point of view. | Kim Petras: Feed the Beast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kim-petras-feed-the-beast/ | Feed the Beast | Tacked right onto the end of Feed the Beast, Kim Petras’ so-called debut album, is “Unholy,” the German-born pop singer’s collaboration with Sam Smith. Released last year as a single from Smith’s fourth album Gloria, the track quickly became a source of internet ire for its curiously family-friendly attempt at transgressive, sex-positive pop. It also quickly shot to No. 1 on the Hot 100, thereby becoming the track that finally, after six years of striving, pulled Petras from IYKYK fame into the mainstream.
As a business decision, it’s a savvy move: “Unholy” has over a billion streams on Spotify alone, and remains a staple of pop radio; it will likely, by sheer proximity, make Feed the Beast look like a huge success. As a creative decision, it’s questionable. For all its theatrical faux-transgression—and for all the theatrical performativity with which it was promoted—“Unholy” was genuinely eclectic, an earworm with Gregorian chants and diet-SOPHIE synths. It arrives after 14 songs that largely sound like Teenage Dream rejects, a painful reminder that to become the kind of magnetic, world-beating pop star that the 30-year-old Petras is supposedly such a keen student of, you have to take real risks. And for about 40 minutes, Petras does little more than play it safe.
Petras took the title of Feed the Beast from an executive at Republic, who advised her to keep churning out music for the label to market. It’s unclear if there is any irony there: This is, for the most part, high-octane, inoffensive dance-pop that will sound great in Sephora and adequately pad out the playlist at your nearest shipping container bar. But it’s more than a little depressing, conceptually: A great pop star might make a melodramatic Faustian bargain part of her art, inviting you to watch on Instagram Live as she sells her soul in hope of being the next Madonna. A lesser pop star might deliver a song like the title track—“Throw you my heart, like eat me please,” Petras sings—which is more like a slot machine to be rung again and again, in hope that the three dollar signs will eventually line up. On Feed the Beast, she is rarely doing anything other than pure recreation, her posture of self-awareness hiding music that has no real point of view.
Petras has been spending a long time trying to perfect her sound. This is her third full-length album, after 2019’s trend-hopping debut Clarity and Halloween-themed mixtape Turn Off the Light. (She also scrapped a whole record, Problématique, after the majority of it was leaked online, and released last year’s Slut Pop EP that she said was intended to champion sex workers but only contained one line—“OnlyFans kind of shit”—about sex work). The enthusiasm and sheer love of pop history that Petras displayed on Clarity is replaced with a mercenary neutrality. Although songs like “King of Hearts,” a pummeling Eurodance stomper, or “Castle in the Sky,” another pummeling Eurodance stomper, might allude to urgency in their lyrics and music, they still feel totally anemic and bereft of passion. Petras is at her best on “Coconuts,” a winking, frothy disco-pop single about her boobs that went gay-Twitter-viral in 2021 and is included here. But the remarkable density of clichés on the rest of Feed the Beast just drags everything down: “You gon keep on playing till you go too far”; “When you touch my body, I hear the angels sing”; “Hold me tight for one more minute.” Petras has spent years proving that she is smarter than this kind of lowest-common-denominator pop. Though Petras has always dealt in purely mainstream sounds, she’s never sounded so listless.
Even “Sex Talk,” a synth-funk bridge between the aggressive ribaldry of Slut Pop and the starry-eyed positivity of an early banger like “Heart to Break,” feels uninspired: “I like sex talk/Can you make my bed rock?” she asks, her voice carrying all the enthusiasm of a 2 p.m. Grindr thread. Petras has a knack for transmuting simple, stupid turns of phrase into pop gold—“Before you break my heart/Can you hit it from the back?” she sings on “Hit It From the Back,” the album’s best track—but she seems to have lost this particular skill here.
If Feed the Beast had a more defined personality—fizzy and extravagant like Clarity, or dumb to the point of genius like Slut Pop—it might be worth mentioning that half its songs were co-written by the infamous Dr. Luke. But Feed the Beast doesn’t need such a wrinkle: It is unlistenable on its own merits, a torrent of pure mid. Why doesn’t it possess the same sparkle as Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More” or Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream or Kesha’s Animal or, indeed, any of the other great songs he’s written with Petras over the past few years?
It’s hard to square Feed the Beast with the kind of musician Petras appears to be. Even on the songs she released as a teenager, such as the Timbaland-meets-nightcored-Beach-House oddity “Die For You,” she seemed hungry and brazen, going for broke in her avowed quest to be a pop star. Online and in interviews, she is funny and smart, clearly a master of the subtle irony that stan Twitter adores. But there is such a thing, perhaps, as wanting mainstream fame too much—so much so that you let all your edge get sanded away. | 2023-06-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic / Amigo | June 23, 2023 | 4.3 | eba693ba-ebd0-4a7e-9a87-5243413a2e6f | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the sleek pop, British nationalism, and commercial girl power of the Spice Girls’ debut. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the sleek pop, British nationalism, and commercial girl power of the Spice Girls’ debut. | Spice Girls: Spice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spice-girls-spice/ | Spice | During a frantic television interview in 1997, the Spice Girls, at the very height of their global fame, are laughing raucously and slapping one another on the arms. They have a magnetic energy, half engaging the interviewer's questions, half conspiratorially chattering their own side-conversations. The host asks a question about whether the band feels that they are risking over-saturation in the media. Geri Halliwell says: “If you wanna call it over-exposure, or just mass media attention, I think that’s just the way society is: When you like strawberry ice cream, you eat loads of it.”
The Spice Girls had materialized suddenly, seemingly fully formed, with their debut single “Wannabe” in June of 1996. It remains the biggest-selling single ever released by an all-female group in the UK. Complete with a one-take video in which they raised hell in a fancy London hotel, the song was bratty, with a ridiculous strutting drum track and a made-up refrain of “zig-ah-zig ahh.” It caught like wildfire.
A succession of No. 1s followed, quickly leading to the September release of the debut album Spice, which sold two million copies in its first two weeks, and went on to go multi-platinum in 27 countries. Not only did the Spice Girls' numbers dwarf the blockbuster releases of the modern era, they introduced a new model of pop success. They dispelled the tired mythology that people weren’t interested in all-women pop groups; they pioneered shameless musician-brand partnerships; they made music and videos that directly targeted children—Melody Maker labeled them a “teenypop act”—and, launching their music in Asia first, they always set their sights on going global.
It’s generally believed that the Spice Girls were the product of a master plan by their manager, Simon Fuller. It would be more accurate to describe them as the result of a plan that went completely wrong. The group was in fact created by a talent management agency, but it wasn’t Fuller—it was father-and-son team Bob and Chris Herbert, otherwise known as Heart Management. They were the ones who placed an ad in showbiz magazine The Stage in early 1994, looking for “streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated” under-23 women for an “all-female pop act.” Through rigorous auditions, the hundreds of applicants were narrowed down to Halliwell, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm, Melanie Brown, and Victoria Adams. Later, the UK press would rename them Ginger, Baby, Sporty, Scary, and Posh.
Unfortunately, the Herberts chose too well, and the five young women (aged between 18 and 22) turned out to have more ambition than their management. In David Sinclair’s whirlwind biography of the group, Wannabe, he tells the story of their heist: After becoming frustrated with a protracted development period and no contract with Heart Management, Geri, Mel C, and Mel B paid a visit to Heart’s offices, where they absconded with the master recordings of demos they had written so far (including “Wannabe”), met up with the rest of the Spice Girls at the side of a road, and drove up north.
From there, the five booked their own sessions with songwriters and negotiated a new management deal with Fuller. It’s true that Fuller was crucial to the success that came next: He assisted them in auditioning for every major label in the UK and Los Angeles, eventually signing with Virgin. Spice was completed in early 1996, long before “Wannabe” was released, so that the Girls could dedicate their time 100 percent to promotion when they launched.
Having the privilege to record an entire debut album before anyone has even heard your name is all but unimaginable in today’s music industry, where viral success usually precedes the record deal. But creating Spice this way meant that by the time “Wannabe” was an international hit, the group already had a cache of pop songs ready to go. The record can be broadly split into two modes: Its backbone is the brassy, attitude-filled, Northern soul-styled singles like “Wannabe,” “Say You’ll Be There,” and the madcap disco of “Who Do You Think You Are.” Then, there’s the softer-edged R&B-influenced ballads like “Mama,” “2 Become 1,” and “Naked.”
The album was a meticulously crafted pop product, front-loaded with surefire radio hits, a genre pastiche to suit every taste. But their gimmick also spoke to what made the Spice Girls so likeable, their infectious “have a go” ethos. Five women in a band together, sharing songwriting credit and vocal duties equally, was a new concept in British pop in 1996; the Spice Girls were all about making everyone feel included, even if that resulted in Geri awkwardly rapping in a coquettish faux-American accent on “Last Time Lover,” or the paper-thin verses that aim for a register that’s just slightly out of reach on the sentimental “Mama.”
Reviewing a Spice Girls song was like trying to review a can of Pepsi. In a music landscape saturated by Oasis on one side of the ocean and Alanis Morrisette on the other, “authentic singer-songwriter” was the dominant archetype of the day—by comparison, the jingle-like “Wannabe” was a freakishly polished commodity. And like brands that become too ubiquitous, subsumed into language and separated from their identity, the Spice Girls seemed to be taken less seriously the more successful they became. (Rolling Stone panned Spice, saying the Spice Girls had commercialized the riot grrrl movement, and their lyrics “made Alanis Morissette’s sound like Patti Smith’s.”) But Spice is endearingly unrefined. Even if nobody else was taking the music seriously, they were: Auto-Tune wouldn’t be introduced to pop for another two years (with Cher’s “Believe”), and the Girls—none of them trained musicians—spent hours in the booth trying to nail their takes. Just as you see Halliwell wobbling on her gargantuan heels in “Wannabe,” you can occasionally hear the straining and goofing in the voices on the album.
Spice has its dorky and amateurish moments, but if nothing else, that should prove that the Girls had a claim to authenticity themselves. Rather than just a savvy way to get a cut of publishing royalties, the Girls had a songwriting credit on every song on Spice because Stannard & Rowe and Absolute—the two production teams responsible for the majority of the record—worked closely with them to craft each one. Andy Watkins, one half of Absolute, told Sinclair: “None of them are musicians... But the thing about all of them at that point was they worked so incredibly hard at it. They knew their shortcomings. And the drive—it was unreal.”
This was at odds with a press and public who largely characterized the group as a product to whom the music was secondary (a 1997 Guardian review of their second album began: “Anyone idealistic enough to think the Spice Girls are in it for the Girl Power, or even the music…”). On the nascent internet, surrealist, hate-filled webpages sprang up to accuse the Girls of being, as the Miami New Times put it, “talentless hacks.” Despite the vitriol, there are real moments of weird magic in the production: most notably the cocktail party chatter that sits underneath the G-funk-inspired melody of “Say You’ll Be There,” the synth squeals throughout “Who Do You Think You Are,” and the sample of Digital Underground on “If U Can’t Dance.” But the heart of the record is in the relentless optimism and tight friendship of the five voices at its core. It’s an album designed for karaoke with your best friends: silly, easily memorable chants like “swing it, shake it, move it, make it” sit alongside repeated cries that romantic love is no comparison to having a best mate.
That optimism was the tip of a cultural iceberg at that time in the UK. It was a year before Tony Blair would stride into Downing Street to a soundtrack of D:ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better.” Blair led the left-wing Labour party to its first victory in nearly two decades, representing a mood of political hope that Britain hasn’t felt since. Simultaneously, with Oasis and Blur flooding the international music market, Newsweek declared the mid-’90s the era of “Cool Britannia”—a label that was sealed in pop history when Halliwell performed at the 1997 BRIT Awards in an instantly iconic Union Jack dress. Writing in The Independent in 1996, Emma Forrest claimed that the Spice Girls “could only have come about after 17 years of Tory rule... The message is ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And then pull everyone else up with you.’ Spice Girls are New Labour.”
The Spice Girls themselves didn’t subscribe to this analogy. In an infamous interview with the right-wing Spectator magazine shortly after the release of Spice, when asked about Conservative ex-prime minister and evil incarnate Margaret Thatcher, Ginger proudly announced: “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites.” Posh chipped in: “We met Tony Blair... His hair’s all right, but we don’t agree with his tax policies.” (While much was made of the Spice Girls being Tories at the time, it should be mentioned that Baby’s only contribution to the interview was to ask who Conservative magnate Sir James Goldsmith was, and Sporty later clarified in a different interview: “I think Thatcher is a complete prick.”)
The Spice Girls were emblems of a time when—in mainstream culture at least—it was cool to be proud to be British. It’s bittersweet to reflect on this now, as they return for a reunion tour (without Posh) in the same year that Britain is staring down the barrel of the greatest political crisis it has faced in the 21st century. Now a decade into cruel Conservative austerity which has slashed public services, we’re waiting to see what further damage Brexit will do to our economy. In pop culture, our biggest stars have a much more scathing approach to the establishment than they did in the ’90s. Northampton rapper slowthai just released his debut album Nothing Great About Britain, and MC Stormzy made the most impactful BRITs performance since Halliwell’s dress when he used the stage to ask Prime Minister Theresa May why the government had so spectacularly failed to help the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire.
But while the Spice Girls’ nationalist tendencies look garish in a more divided, pessimistic UK, there was nevertheless a keen sense of social mobility to their success. Outside of rap and grime, in the mainstream UK music industry today, you’ll struggle to find a rising artist who didn’t attend either private school or the BRIT school. As poet and novelist Kathy Acker put it when she interviewed the Spice Girls for the Guardian in 1997, “The Spice Girls, and girls like them, and the girls who like them, resemble their American counterparts in two ways: they are sexually curious, certainly pro-sex, and they do not feel that they are stupid or that they should not be heard because they did not attend the right universities.”
This praise was valuable, at a time when the divide between highbrow and lowbrow culture was much starker than it is now. In today’s critical landscape, we have gone some way further towards recognizing the agency of female pop songwriters, and in the melting pot of the internet, memes sit in conversation with masterpieces. We would—hopefully—recognize detractions of the loud, rude, young working-class women who made up the Spice Girls as something perhaps rooted in snobbery. Their own brand of “girl power” was based on some flimsy feminist ideas, but Spice remains an audacious achievement. Like the “Wannabe” video, it snuck five Girls who were not on the guest list inside the establishment, causing chaos for a brief, surreal moment. | 2019-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin | May 19, 2019 | 6.8 | ebb4d80a-4122-47dc-b2ee-4a5abd92b61d | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
A new project from the Chicago vaporwave maven eases off the aggression of her Fire-Toolz alias, finding new inspiration in the clash of new age, smooth jazz, prog rock, and video-game soundtracks. | A new project from the Chicago vaporwave maven eases off the aggression of her Fire-Toolz alias, finding new inspiration in the clash of new age, smooth jazz, prog rock, and video-game soundtracks. | Nonlocal Forecast: Bubble Universe! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nonlocal-forecast-bubble-universe/ | Bubble Universe! | Chicago multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid has become one of vaporwave's most fearless daredevils, merging seemingly incompatible sounds into mutant fusions that push the genre to new places while maintaining its taste-eradicating post-internet power. She did this first under a gang of pseudonyms, often on her pioneering labels Rainbow Bridge and Swamp Circle, but hit a bullseye with Fire-Toolz, a potent cocktail of dazed Muzak, noise, and happy hardcore spiced with the occasional hissed black-metal vocal. After refining that project with two albums on Hausu Mountain, another Chicago haven for the weird and wonderful, Marcloid returns as Nonlocal Forecast with Bubble Universe!, a new project inverting Fire-Toolz’s crackling aggression with the help of aquatic new-age synths, smooth jazz, and prog rock.
As Fire-Toolz, Marcloid made her knack for impossible genre combinations feel like a rollercoaster, but Nonlocal Forecast subtly accomplishes a harder task. It flies through ideas but builds track by track with purposeful progression, and it only gets better once the initial thrills wear off and you learn its trajectory. With Bubble Universe!, Marcloid spreads her ideas out like a rainbow, encapsulating everything in a seamless spectrum from hot to cool. It’s a perfect introduction to what already feels like her best project.
Bubble Universe! explodes with gleefully clashing ideas from the start, opening with dramatic synth flourishes and dizzying drum patterns on “Celestial Nervous System,” a tightrope walk between jazzy prog and proggy jazz. Though Marcloid is programming drums on a computer rather than playing live, her background as a prog-rock drummer translates to fills that feel both spontaneous and mathematically dazzling. The result hijacks the soothing soundtrack of the Weather Channel and charges it with metal’s cathartic energy, a combination that only grows on the following “Planck Lengths,” which echoes the ornate MIDI symphonies of James Ferraro’s vaporwave blueprint Far Side Virtual before a sprawling drum solo takes it to light speed.
By the third song, the brightly emotive burst of “Cloud-Hidden,” Bubble Universe! has crystallized this sound so fully that it feels natural when Marcloid largely leaves it behind for the rest of the album. “The Direct Path” slams the brakes with a spacious synth melody and a luxurious guitar solo that only grows softer and sweeter as it lands on delicate percussion far removed from the opening tracks’ energy. On “Triangle Format,” Marcloid’s Fire-Toolz moniker makes a featured appearance, but here she eschews that project’s metal vocals in favor of a rush of synths and distant coos that carry Nonlocal Forecast into its contrasting second half.
Drifting further from the metal influences sparking the album’s early tracks, “The Evolutionary Game” and “Classical Information” shine like some of the most distinct video-game music of the 1990s. The former rides a simple 4/4 beat with twinkling synths and a middle section that nods to David Wise’s naturalistic soundscapes in Donkey Kong Country, while the latter’s jazzy MIDI lines and funky bass synths create a kind of synesthestic accompaniment for imaginary Sonic the Hedgehog levels. It all leads to a closing trio of tracks as soothing and ambient as the beginning was kinetic. They make a powerful bookend for Bubble Universe!’s impressive range and focus, as well as a welcome invitation to hit replay and start the game all over again. | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hausu Mountain | March 20, 2019 | 7.8 | ebbbd43a-e25d-455b-b6ff-9694e63189ef | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
The busy German producer Nils Frahm returns with a film score. Though he uses additional instruments and sound effects, the album conjures a mood that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time with Frahm's solo piano albums. | The busy German producer Nils Frahm returns with a film score. Though he uses additional instruments and sound effects, the album conjures a mood that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time with Frahm's solo piano albums. | Nils Frahm: Victoria OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20671-victoria-ost/ | Victoria OST | Victoria is a German movie, filmed in one long shot. It observes the night of a young couple who meet, flirt, and stumble their way improbably into a violent heist. In the film's charged, uncertain atmosphere, the glow of anticipation from meeting someone new and the tingle of dread right before something awful happens both occur along one unbroken continuum: When life gets better, it is also one hair’s breadth away from getting worse.
The German producer Nils Frahm composed the film's score, and if you listened to it and tried to imagine the film he was working on, you'd probably arrive at a very different movie—something sweet-toned and modest, slightly grave, and above all, muted. Maybe a family drama where none of the members can quite muster the strength to say exactly what they're feeling. It is a mood that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time with Frahm's solo piano albums, the most recent of which (Solo) he released for free just in April.
The Victoria OST marshals more instruments than his solo piano works, but not many more—each new sound, whether it's a husky-throated cello on "Our Own Roof" or the subcutaneous hum of organ keys on "The Bank", tiptoes in carefully and gingerly. Frahm’s score works along Brian Eno's fabled ignorable/interesting divide: You can soak in the long, receding tones like you would sit in the sun beneath a big window, or you can fixate on surgically tiny details, like the way you can nearly hear the felt of the piano hammers being brushed into individual fibers on "A Stolen Car", or the rustle of whatever foreign objects he’s placed on the strings to make them generate extra noises. Frahm strikes little "off" notes in the interstices of that piece's simple major chords, so that when they ring, they don’t ring "clean"—there is a tendril of sour air in them, seemingly acknowledging the turmoil that plays out on the screen.
Moments like this in Frahm’s score are furtive and quiet: There is a foreboding drone piece called "In the Parking Garage", full of room tone and tiny, human-sounding scrapes, that hits your ear the way a parking garage's sodium lighting assaults your eye. And the album opens with a DJ Koze edit called "Burn With Me", in which a dry techno thump meets a dull knock and some nauseated synths. Frahm’s aesthetic shares something in common with Koze, whose touch suggests someone who would prefer to cover all exposed hard edges with blankets so no one gets hurt. Frahm's awareness seems repeatedly drawn to glowing spaces where notes ring out after they've been struck. These spaces mimic the way a memorable event lingers in our minds, acquiring new shades of meaning and slowly receding into the morass of our lived experience. In echo-rich, contemplative music like this, the event itself doesn’t matter nearly as much as its aftereffects, the way it changes over time and the way it changes you. | 2015-06-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Erased Tapes | June 19, 2015 | 7.2 | ebbd0b03-d793-48ce-8397-4b641b467320 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Light in the Attic’s latest batch of Lee Hazlewood releases draws from an era when the producer/singer/songwriter was at the peak of his industry success. The MGM deal he inked after the success of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" gave him the leverage to do something very different, making tracks that sounded as big or even bigger than even the hits he’d produced for others. | Light in the Attic’s latest batch of Lee Hazlewood releases draws from an era when the producer/singer/songwriter was at the peak of his industry success. The MGM deal he inked after the success of "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" gave him the leverage to do something very different, making tracks that sounded as big or even bigger than even the hits he’d produced for others. | Lee Hazlewood: The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood / Lee Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure / Something Special | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21461-the-very-special-world-of-lee-hazlewood-lee-hazlewoodism-its-cause-and-cure-something-special/ | The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood / Lee Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure / Something Special | Light in the Attic’s latest batch of Lee Hazlewood releases draws from an era when the producer/singer/songwriter was at the peak of his industry success. After moving to California in the early 1960s and making some interesting records with subpar musicians, Hazlewood scored big in 1966 with Nancy Sinatra’s feminist flip of a song he wrote called "These Boots are Made for Walkin'." In those days, hit-making songwriters and producers for other artists were rewarded for their hard work by getting to make albums themselves—see Carole King, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, and Hazlewood’s own collaborator Jack Nitzsche. So though Hazlewood was still recording with Frank Sinatra’s fledgling label Reprise, MGM offered him a deal following the release of "Boots" to put out some "writer’s records" of his own, even though his previous solo outings had sold next to nothing. Prior to his stint at MGM in 1966 and 1967, his own recordings had been modestly arranged, acoustic-guitar-based recordings in the pop-country vein. The MGM deal gave him the leverage to do something very different, making tracks that sounded as big or even bigger than the hits he’d produced for others.
Though these albums were recorded in the space of less than two years, they sounded very different from each other. The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, one of the most straightforward albums in his career, serves as a primer on his style and showcases all of his contradictory impulses. It’s Hazlewood at his most maximalist, building a wall of sound to rival Phil Spector’s. Most of the tracks on The Very Special World feature full orchestras passing ideas back and forth in flowery counterpoint, choirs instead of backup singers, and contributions from the in-demand studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew.
Of all the MGM recordings, the songwriting on The Very Special World is by far the most consistent, and features a handful of the most subtle and sensitive songs Hazlewood ever wrote. "I’m Not the Lovin' Kind" is a beautiful bossa nova with unusually sensitive singing, a triumphant string and horns call-and-response from arranger Billy Strange that manages to anchor just off the coast of faux-Jobim parody while retaining its humor. "I Move Around" is a travelogue Lee would re-record several times later in his career, most notably on his 1972 classic 13. Here, in a simple folk arrangement, it explodes into the kind of sweeping, cinematic climax Hazlewood seemed unable to talk himself down from during this time. His vocal performance is controlled and wistful instead of bitter and stoic—as his renditions of so many songs would become when left to his own devices. But the album’s most important contribution to the Hazlewood songbook is the lethargic, lounge ballad "My Autumn’s Done Come," which embodies his ethos as well as any standalone recording ever has. With its hypnotic pacing, odd chord changes, and dreamy but crystalline production, it’s easy to see how it would influence Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham, who sang the song’s particular praises in a 2015 interview.
The kitschy experimentation at the sidelines of The Very Special World comes fully to the fore on its follow-up, 1967’s Lee Hazlewoodism: Its Cause and Cure, a record that finds Hazlewood backing away from traditional songwriting while still widening his musical palette. The first half of record, featuring a series of character sketches, is one of the weirder sides in a discography chock full of them. Two of its biggest production numbers are tragic narrative recitation songs that are very much products of another time, shaped by particularly elaborate and exotic charts from Strange. "José," the Flamenco-styled story of a poor Mexican boy who develops a life-enveloping passion for bullfighting ("He lived for one thing and nothing more/ He had to be the very best matador") and "The Nights," steeped in the percussion of Blaine and insistent interjections from a wraithlike studio choir, tells the picaresque story of a white woman who runs off with a Native American who lives a "hard" life hunting buffalo in the Dakotas. Despite the dated storytelling, these arrangements are indicative of the almost comically expansive vision Hazlewood and Strange had for these sessions. The ethos is borne out further in the bonus tracks: recordings billed to "Lee Hazlewood’s Woodchucks" that read like a bid on the part of Lee and Strange to get their foot in the door in the mood instrumentals market.
Hazlewood productions never got bigger than on the aggressively disparate Hazlewoodism; even the most half-assed of these songs—say "Suzi Jane Is Back in Town," a gag-filled novelty record that would have fit right in on the Dr. Demento show—has five to six Wrecking Crew guitars stacked on it. Though it frequently feels like Hazlewood sent ideas to Strange to be charted before he had more than a sketch, Hazlewoodism nonetheless adds a handful of excellent entries into the Hazlewood canon. The most essential track is its biggest outlier: "After Six," a stripped-down, two-chord showcase for the guitar playing of his frequent collaborator Al Casey that’s also an alcoholic’s rant to the bartender in the vein of the Sinatra (Frank) "One for My Baby." It’s Hazlewood’s dry, dark humor and conversational phrasing at its best ("I’ll give you my shoes for a glass of booze/ If you won’t tell that they don’t smell/ No better than I do after six").
The irreverent small-combo approach showcased on "After Six" would be the entire focus of Something Special, the one Hazlewood MGM album that sounds like a demo, and the most patently uncommercial of the lot. The songs on the miniature record were all done with the same septet: guitars, upright bass, drums, and Hollywood jazzer Don Randi’s invasive hard-bop piano and—yes—throaty scatting. The sessions were done in just two months in 1967 and they had a distinctly live, sloppy sound. Multiple songs have the air of partially-improvised lyrics, the most patent example being "Stone Cold Blues," a five-minute goof which ends up with the verse: "If Martoni’s is such a good place to eat and drink and be good/ Why do they call the steak Sinatra, and the hamburger Hazlewood?" The whiskey-soaked atmosphere was indicative of the looser, more sentimental direction Lee was to take on his later records, when he was answering to no one but himself. Songs like "Fort Worth" take in a more wistful, sad-sack quality: "Don’t know if I can forget you/ Don’t know I’m even gonna try/ But you’re gone and I let you/ Guess I’m not much of a guy." The reissue improves this head-scratcher of an album: Bonus tracks "Moochie Ladeux" and the hilarious "The Lone Ranger Ain’t My Friend" are among the most carefully wrought and unusual songs on the record.
This group of albums, along with his final Reprise album, 1968’s Love and Other Crimes, would prove to be Hazlewood’s long farewell to the major studio system. He was already making moves to broaden his eccentric empire with his own LHI label. In a way, everything after this was Hazlewood sliding slowly toward the full-on retirement he had been contemplating before "Boots," while making some of the greatest music of his career along the way (see Requiem for an Almost Lady and Cowboy in Sweden).
With music like this, the question always looms: To what extent do we become enamored of it based on its cultural novelty alone? Becoming a diehard Hazlewoodian requires romanticizing this hectic time, when major corporations were gladly funding unabashed insanity in music and film. But Hazlewood’s personality is too overbearing to make this the type of music one loves simply because it was allowed to exist. Whether he’s fulfilling a bar-room, surrealist-Johnny-Cash raconteur role, or embodying the consummate professional and pop craftsman, Lee Hazlewood never sounded like he was posturing or overreaching. The capriciousness of these albums feels like a direct reflection of a split, contradictory consciousness: He was resistant and sometimes openly defamatory toward hippie rock'n'roll, yet always at pains to not fall behind, clad in floral shirts and flamboyant suits. But his music never sounded like Hazlewood doing what he thought others wanted him to do. | 2016-01-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | null | January 28, 2016 | 8.4 | ebcb7a13-8a7a-4511-bfa3-3ed091babceb | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The rappers deliver an album filled with serpentine, enigmatic stories and gloomy beats. It doesn’t have the gloss and pomp of their best work, but it highlights the pair’s complementary gifts. | The rappers deliver an album filled with serpentine, enigmatic stories and gloomy beats. It doesn’t have the gloss and pomp of their best work, but it highlights the pair’s complementary gifts. | Mach-Hommy / Tha God Fahim: Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mach-hommy-tha-god-fahim-notorious-dump-legends-volume-2/ | Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2 | Mach-Hommy isn’t just looking to control his narrative; he keeps it under lock and key. Very little about the Haitian-American rapper’s life is public knowledge, and whatever specifics he offers in songs and interviews usually produce more questions than answers. Still, there’s a meticulousness to his antics. He sells his own albums for $444; he uses lyrics about the importance of a Gore-Tex jacket to convey particular eras of time; he offers piecemeal details about his past in magazine cover stories. His grip has loosened slightly since he’s done more press and released a good chunk of his discography on streaming platforms, but he still relishes the distance afforded to him by his mask and microphone. “We doin’ donuts with somebody A6/Don’t none of this shit belong in Page Six,” he says with cheeky disdain on “Bad Hands,” the second track from his latest album, Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2. It doesn’t have the gloss or pomp of 2021’s Pray for Haiti or Balens Cho (Hot Candles), but Mach’s mystique and lyrical skill keep the music unpredictable.
Like the 2018 release that kicked off the Notorious Dump Legends series, the second volume is a team-up with Atlanta rapper-producer and frequent collaborator Tha God Fahim, who appears on all but one song. On a technical level, their forms complement each other well. Mach is a Swiss Army knife, capable of switching flows and languages on the fly while busting out lyrics both tuneful and blunt (“Two L’s make a dub in this cold milk” on “Cold Milk” or “Heard none of you niggas’ weed plates” on “Pissy Hästens”). Fahim is the grounding voice who arrives with straight punchlines and life advice, adhering strictly to the beat. On “Pissy Hästens,” an agitated Mach’s voice slowly turns into a growl, embodying the frustration he experiences when people mispronounce his name. Through it all, Fahim’s workmanlike rhymes anchor the Jersey rapper’s erratic thoughts. Occasionally, Fahim matches Mach’s energy and the two enter a sparring contest; “Olajuwan” and “Everybody (Source Codes)” contain two of Fahim’s most energetic verses ever, his voice briefly rising above his usual nasal monotone. When they rap together, Mach and Fahim adapt to each other’s changing tides like a constantly morphing yin-yang.
Despite the reciprocity, this is ultimately Mach’s show. He has the more exciting vocal turns, the more slippery flows, and his bars have the highest stakes. You can hear it in his croons about the “Sour Patch Kids writing pieces on me daily”; in his stories of seeing enemies relax on the same beach as him; or in the way he transitions from English to Patois and Kreyòl mid-song, as if he’s swiping between apps on a phone. It’s hard not to get caught up in the mythmaking at the end of “Olajuwan,” as Mach clears his throat in grand fashion: “His last shit became public domain as soon as he spit it/He a wizard, his name is Mach-Hommy, he the illest.” For all his cultured poeticism, Mach loves a good flex as much as any rapper. Volume 2 doesn’t stray far from that sensibility, another excuse for him to reflect on his life and good fortune—and for him and Fahim to burrow deeper into their own legends.
To continue the Dump Legends tradition of shadowy, creaky beats, the duo enlists a handful of usual suspects from the contemporary underground. Philadelphia’s SadhuGold expands his range with the wonky horn and drum loop that gives “From Vailsburg to Vaudeville” its warped aesthetic, as well as the hazy string plucks and somber drum march that rumble in the background of “Olajuwan.” New York’s Fortes and Detroit’s Denmark Vessey stand out with two of the fullest arrangements on “Niggas Sooooo Good” and “Nan Dezo,” respectively. Shimmering pianos and hand drums establish the foundation of the former, while the chimes, violin strings, and breathy tongue clicks of the latter convey an aura of Gothic horror. They’re nothing revolutionary, but they’re atmospheric enough to give Mach and Fahim a more chilling presence.
In the third of a series of recent cover stories for The FADER, Mach was asked what he would rap about if he were a billionaire. He responded in the most Mach-Hommy way possible, using the third person: “He wouldn’t.” He’s reached a point in his career where he’s selling mystery vinyl packages for a thousand dollars and impressing Jay Electronica and Beyoncé in the booth. For the time being, he seems content to rap circles around the competition, just because he can. Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2 captures enough of the verve and strategically enigmatic storytelling that make up Mach’s best work—adding another patch to the vast and layered collage of his music. | 2023-03-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mach-Hommy | March 13, 2023 | 7.3 | ebd1cdc0-1c97-4345-98be-f0a28bc34320 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Written in the remote coastal town of Yachats, Oregon, the duo’s latest EP refashions its gloomy guitar pop as ecstatic shoegaze, complete with a cameo from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. | Written in the remote coastal town of Yachats, Oregon, the duo’s latest EP refashions its gloomy guitar pop as ecstatic shoegaze, complete with a cameo from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. | Drab Majesty: An Object in Motion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drab-majesty-an-object-in-motion/ | An Object in Motion | Drab Majesty have always reached for other worlds. The title of their 2012 debut EP, Unarian Dances, was a reference to a cult of UFO obsessives who broadcast bizarre films on public access TV in Los Angeles. In interviews, the duo’s Deb DeMure (aka Andrew Clinco, formerly of Marriages) and Mona D (Alex Nicolau) have said that their pseudonymous personas and unsettling makeup are an effort to leave “no human trace” in their art. They’re straining for something beyond the everyday.
Their songs have largely lived up to this promise. Surreal and strange, yet nevertheless deliriously emotional, Drab Majesty’s records have often emulated guitar music’s most abstract emoters—Slowdive, Vini Reilly, and Felt among them—but their new EP An Object in Motion pushes further into the unknown. Written while DeMure was living in a restored A-frame in the small coastal town of Yachats, Oregon, the record is a document of isolation and introspection; it captures a time spent pulling at the seams of Drab Majesty’s gloomy guitar pop in an attempt to reveal its glowing core. What they emerged with is familiar in sound—delicately wavering guitar lines, wispy vocals that bear a debt to decades of goth’s great dramatists—but the songs stretch and twist into newly abstracted forms.
The 15-minute song “Yield to Force” is the clearest example of Drab Majesty’s newfound commitment to dreamlike structures and heavy-lidded ambience. Tensile guitar arpeggios knot into thick tangles and then slowly unfurl, like a ball of yarn floating in low gravity. Structurally, it’s a departure for their music: loose, impressionistic, and entirely wordless. Yet it’s still propelled by the sense of drama that has been the project’s signature for over a decade. Centrifuged down to its parts and reassembled into dizzying new arrangements, the composition represents a bold new direction, more unearthly and unsettled than they’ve ever attempted before.
This predilection for weightlessness also holds on the more pop-oriented songs. “The Skin and the Glove” shows another left turn, drawing on the MDMA-mangled haze of Madchester for an ecstatic yet cryptic song about the passage of time. It’s the record’s most straightforward pop moment, but it still shows Drab Majesty trying out new sounds, wringing emotion out of dream pop’s outer realms.
In the EP’s other vocal-led track, “Vanity,” Drab Majesty are at their most expansive, cushioning a meditation on misery in pillowy guitar lines and feather-light vocals from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. It’s an especially spacious and labyrinthine take on the duo’s shoegaze-esque style. As a latticework of guitar lines and reverb-smeared vocals builds toward a blurry cacophony, the border between DeMure and Goswell’s vocals and the noise around them smudges and swirls. Chaotic and unsettling but strangely beautiful, it’s the record’s most affecting moment, and a reminder that An Object in Motion is like little else that Drab Majesty have released, a version of gothic guitar music divined from the static of deep space radiation. | 2023-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dais | August 28, 2023 | 7.2 | ebd534f2-9c20-4cb5-96e6-323405b9f931 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
It's all fine and dandy for a musician to dabble in widely divergent styles,\n\ combining and rearranging until ... | It's all fine and dandy for a musician to dabble in widely divergent styles,\n\ combining and rearranging until ... | Sufjan Stevens: Enjoy Your Rabbit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7511-enjoy-your-rabbit/ | Enjoy Your Rabbit | It's all fine and dandy for a musician to dabble in widely divergent styles, combining and rearranging until something new in born. But there's a fine line between that and cashing in on a trend and letting market research be your guide. Unless your name is Serge Gainsbourg (who jumped in headfirst wherever his muse happened to lead him, bending whole genres to his will and overpowering them with his personality), it's best to not force it, and let things happen naturally.
Given his first album was a collection of folky, singer-songwriterly musings and Sebadoh-inspired, bedroom-recorded alternative rockers, I was a little dubious at first of this second effort from Michigan-gone-New York composer/multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens (who sometimes sits in with the Danielson Famile during their live shows). Enjoy Your Rabbit is a collection of electronic compositions, so my first impression was that it was the work of someone who just happened to have access to high-end software, some extra time on his hands, and a desire to see if he could stir up some TV commercial work-- all of which might be correct, but all questions of authenticity and motivations faded from memory about two minutes into the album. Such concerns are rendered trivial when confronted with such a fully realized piece of work.
An IDM song-cycle based on Chinese astrological symbols-- or as the liner notes put it, "programmatic songs for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac"-- Enjoy Your Rabbit explores a wide palette of electronic textures using few external samples.
After a brief introductory track, we're hit with "Year of the Monkey," which uses what sounds like a hyper-modified Atari battling a supped-up Colecovision in a chess match/battle royal. Microchips fly everywhere as a thunderous, crashing piledriver of a beat smashes them both to bits. Like its namesake, it's playfully mischievous, with a hint of violence always lurking nearby.
"Year of the Rat" follows, starting like a classic Eno piece before squalling feedback undercuts the theme while the song turns into background music for the next Toy Story movie and returns to its introductory theme. "Year of the Boar" is frantic with its pin-sharp wind-chime notes scattering across an organic bongo beat, and ending in an ascending faux-guitar solo coda. With "Year of the Tiger," a human voice pops up for the first time atop the sound of circuitry covering the earth like kudzu, ending in an aggressive death rattle. By contrast, "Year of the Snake" is almost hymnal with its organ drone, but for the recoiling flashes of short-circuitry and sing-songy bells near the end.
The standout track comes with "Year of the Dragon." At 9\xBD minutes, Stevens gives himself some room to stretch out. If the other songs have a fault, it's that they cram to much into such small containers. Here, Stevens allows a marching beat to hang around long enough for him to weave in a subtle, yet soaring soundscape. "Enjoy Your Rabbit" (replacing the expected title of "Year of the Rabbit") is the most conventionally song-oriented track, with a distorted guitar melody line leading much of the way, and even what could be called a recurrent riff. Elsewhere, the rubbery and fluid "Year of the Dog" sounds inspired by 70s Stevie Wonder and other bouncy funk; "Year of the Horse" rounds out the zodiac with a long piano-driven romp through futuristic gothic architecture; and the album final track, "Year of Our Lord," closes the record with ambient meditation.
Taken in one lump dose, Enjoy Your Rabbit can be a bit intimidating as it's almost 80 minutes long, and at times it does sound like electronica-for-entry-level-listeners due to its sheer breadth of styles. But Sufjan Stevens proves himself adept of both long and short forms; downtempo and high BPM; glitches, scratches and ambient drones; blips, bleeps and bloops. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes from here. | 2001-10-23T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-10-23T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | October 23, 2001 | 7.7 | ebe41d23-a392-4653-a729-4e719c251962 | Jason Nickey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-nickey/ | null |
Moving away from the abstracted electronica of earlier releases, the Scottish producer embraces streamlined rhythms and a newfound sense of clarity. | Moving away from the abstracted electronica of earlier releases, the Scottish producer embraces streamlined rhythms and a newfound sense of clarity. | Konx-om-Pax: Refresher EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/konx-om-pax-refresher-ep/ | Refresher EP | Just as some master chefs have turned their backs on exotic ingredients for the reliable joys of locally sourced product, there has been a recent tendency in the more outré genres of electronic music for producers to direct their skills toward the simpler delights of house and techno. The Scottish producer and graphic designer Konx-om-Pax (aka Tom Scholefield), best known for abstract electronica and refracted rave memories, is the latest producer to follow Joy Orbison, Pangaea, et al into the welcoming embrace of the four-to-the-floor kick. This pivot toward clarity has helped to surface previously submerged melodic skills: His four-song Refresher EP features two of the most immediately rewarding tracks he has committed to computer memory in “Cascada” and “Species With Amnesia.”
“Cascada,” in particular, is a joyful banger, the kind of half-dreamy, half-strident tune that has become a hallmark of the misty-eyed rave revival. It’s a pretty simple set up: a scratchy melodic riff that clambers up the rhythmic framework like a Shakespearean lover ascending his betrothed’s balcony, whispered vocal hooks, and a hands-in-the-air second act that brings to mind Orbital at Glastonbury 1994. This nod to ‘90s dance culture is not without precedent. Caramel, Konx-om-Pax’s most recent album, was also based on rave throwbacks, but whereas those tracks were faded, woozy, and indistinct—Scholefield called them “photocopies of photocopies of rave tracks, where the drums have dissolved”—here the memory is pulled into sharp rhythmic and melodic focus, revealing a gift for a nagging hook that was not immediately obvious before. The central riff on “Cascada” may sound simplistic among Konx-om-Pax’s more nuanced recordings but, like “Wild Thing” amidst a world of Sgt. Pepper’s, it just works.
“Species With Amnesia” is similarly forthright, riding a raucous kick and an Italo bass riff that wouldn’t sound out of place in a mainstream techno club. Above this, the song’s musical surface is warped and dangerous, like a record left out in the sun that you can’t bring yourself to throw out. The effect is malevolent yet energetic, suggesting the dark satanic mills of Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi gone inappropriately disco. The third track on the EP, a subtle yet effective re-rub of Caramel’s title track from µ-Ziq (aka Planet Mu label boss Mike Paradinas), makes a similar point about the rewards of pulling Scholefield’s music into focus. Paradinas’ “Caramello Mix” stabilizes and sweetens up the wobbliness of the original track, and the added polish helps the song’s lo-fi melody to shine without betraying its crumbling romanticism.
The EP closes with Huerco S.’s take on another Caramel track, “Beatrice's Visit,” which stretches and spaces the original out into 11 gloriously airy minutes. The remixer’s customary sprawl means that focus, admittedly, is slightly lacking, but he leaves the consciously rough sound of the original track immaculate and sparkling. As “Beatrice's Visit” drifts to its elegant end it becomes apparent that the Refresher EP is well named. This seemingly rather odds-and-ends release doesn’t just highlight Scholefield’s production skills; it also cleanses the listener’s palate, resetting our expectations of the Konx-om-Pax sound. Ultimately, Refresher may prove an outlier in Scholefield’s catalogue. But let’s hope not: scraping away the grot and fuzz to expose the melodies underneath can be an unsettlingly naked moment for an experimental producer, yet Refresher proves that it can pay harmonious dividend. | 2017-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | August 7, 2017 | 7.3 | ebe734e5-085f-452c-8b53-abe565799171 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | null |
The latest project from the Bronx rapper enlists musicians from across the globe for an attempted cross-cultural exchange of Afrobeat, dancehall, and reggaeton to mixed effect. | The latest project from the Bronx rapper enlists musicians from across the globe for an attempted cross-cultural exchange of Afrobeat, dancehall, and reggaeton to mixed effect. | A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie: International Artist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-boogie-wit-da-hoodie-international-artist/ | International Artist | Bronx rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie has become an under-the-radar star. His debut album, last year’s The Bigger Artist, was sold and streamed more in its first week than Playboi Carti’s or Lil Yachty’s and it was certified gold in March. The album produced the biggest of his four platinum singles, “Drowning,” a minor-key celebration of being flooded with ice. His success, the product of a sing-songy style that’s closer to what’s coming out of the South than what’s happening in his borough, has ironically added him to the short (and constantly changing) list of rappers out to restore New York City to its former glory as a rap mecca. But A Boogie’s sophomore album, International Artist, expands his ambitions beyond being king of his backyard. Here, in his role as Bronx ambassador, A Boogie organizes an intercultural bloc, striving to integrate his tuned hip-hop moans with sounds from across the African and Latin diasporas.
A Boogie, born Artist Dubose, grew up in the same Highbridge neighborhood that produced Cardi B, but while she’s placed herself in the genealogy of epic NYC punchers, he has remained reliant on his whined melodies indebted to out-of-towners. His writing isn’t as vivid as those that have come before him (or his contemporaries, for that matter), but he is distinctive and honest, both to his city and his story. Though his music doesn’t embody the New York of rap’s past, he has brought a much-needed fresh take as a prominent figure on the city’s vanguard. (It’s telling that he was tapped to open for Drake at three sold out Madison Square Garden shows in 2016, since he is a noted acolyte of the post-Drake rap-sung half-ballad.) This has made him more amenable to ideas of what New York can, or should, sound like—“[New York’s] like a vibe, it’s a hit song, it’s a song that you could listen to in five years and still like,” he told Interview magazine—and should, in theory, make him an ideal candidate to explore world music through a rap lens. But through much of International Artist he loses the perspective that made his songs interesting.
Where The Bigger Artist felt like a homegrown personal statement, International Artist enlists musicians from across the globe for an attempted cross-cultural exchange: Afrobeat torchbearer Davido from Nigeria, dancehall deejay Alkaline from Jamaica, reggaeton revivalist J Alvarez from Puerto Rico, Afro-swing hybrid Kojo Funds from London, and Torontonians Tory Lanez, Nav, and Jessie Reyez. The objective is fairly obvious: bridge the gaps between them with A Boogie serving as the link. His crooned raps are usually malleable enough to suit any and all of his personal rap needs. But the Bronx rapper doesn’t have the finesse necessary to negotiate these multinational transactions.
As a performer with an unmistakable sound and an underrated knack for songcraft and execution, A Boogie is a talented soloist, but he goes as his guests do on International Artist. Since the idea is to bring the sounds of black and Latin music together under one umbrella, he often plays on their turf or their terms, letting them dictate. This is occasionally for the best, but A Boogie loses himself trying to accommodate them; his writing is blander here than it has ever been, and even his sandpapered vocals, which can polish down the edges on all manner of synths, get worn down. Some attempts to meet guests halfway, as on the Alkaline-featuring “Nonchalant” and the Jessie Reyez duet “Pretending,” misfire because of a chemical imbalance. When paired with sham heartthrobs Tory Lanez and Nav, he becomes just as vapid as they are.
That doesn’t mean A Boogie lacks congeniality; International Artist is most gratifying when it throws itself full-on into its concept with purpose, when he extends his reach beyond his borders and finds the harmony he was searching for. Davido takes charge on “Way Too Fly,” guiding A Boogie through the hip-swaying Afrobeat rhythms. On the bilingual “Deja Vu,” A Boogie and J Alvarez find common ground in Auto-Tune, the latter’s slick, silvery delivery countering the former’s rawer one nicely. The best song comes at the album’s close: The remix of “Check” with Kojo Funds and RAYE reworks Craig David’s “7 Days” into an Afro-swinging rap jam; A Boogie’s raps stagger into the pockets created by GA the Producer’s elastic chop. In these moments, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s vision of a unified world through sound are momentarily realized. But for the most part, on International Artist, he never becomes the envoy he sought to be. | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Highbridge The Label / Atlantic | June 26, 2018 | 6.3 | ebe965b9-12d8-4e5e-82e8-cb165d4e2ba1 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Akira Sakata, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese noise-electronics eminence Merzbow form the core of this experimental jazz group. But instead of upping the cacophony, the addition of Merzbow results in a surprisingly spare and considered work. | Akira Sakata, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese noise-electronics eminence Merzbow form the core of this experimental jazz group. But instead of upping the cacophony, the addition of Merzbow results in a surprisingly spare and considered work. | Merzbow / Jim O’Rourke / Akira Sakata / Chikamorachi: Flying Basket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21007-flying-basket/ | Flying Basket | Akira Sakata is a longtime student of multiple avant-jazz traditions. The piercing intensity of his alto saxophone and clarinet playing occasionally harkens back to the mid- and late-'60s work of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Albert Ayler. But the Japanese musician's simultaneous attention to psych rock and some of the more meditative aspects of global free improv has helped him build a catalog of improvised music that sounds beholden to no school. (He even funked it up with Miles Davis' great fusion-era guitarist, Pete Cosey, on the unmissable 2001 album Fisherman's.com.) His skill as a synthesist is so great that it can sometimes feel self-effacing, with Sakata often appearing more concerned with a given group's success than individual heroics.
Given this, it's only fitting that Sakata wound up collaborating with Jim O'Rourke, the unassuming experimental magus responsible for this year's Simple Songs (as well as, in large part, Sonic Youth's late-period renaissance). Their first recorded collaboration—a generally frenetic, double-live 2011 set titled and that's the story of Jazz…—placed O'Rourke's guitar and Sakata's reeds alongside the free-time pulse of drummer Chris Corsano and bassist Darin Gray (the duo known as Chikamorachi). This time, they've added Japanese noise-electronics eminence Merzbow to the mix, but instead of upping the cacophony, the addition results in a frequently spare and considered work.
Presented as a 71-minute jam cut in Tokyo, Flying Basket begins quietly, with Sakata lingering over a few notes and phrases. O'Rourke also avoids heading straight for the shredding post-punk that dominated his playing on this ensemble's last recording. Merzbow, too, starts softly; nearly a tenth of the album has passed before his prickly shards pervade the album. This slow, muted intro helps lend weight to the explosions that pop up throughout.
The piece tenses and slackens, passing through fits of raw soloing and quiet drones and extended technique texture. The overall feel is graceful; during one passage that finds Sakata on clarinet, he manages the trick of grouping some pinched notes into phrases that sound like charming exclamations. The interplay here, just before the record's midpoint, is so nuanced and powerful that the "everyone go fully nuts" ending seems somewhat less impressive than it otherwise might. Still, Flying Basket is another valuable document of a vital, contemporary avant-team-up. Anyone who has been following O'Rourke's varied activity since moving to Japan should want to hear this—along with more of Sakata's own discography. | 2015-09-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Family Vineyard | September 16, 2015 | 7.1 | ebec11b2-3169-447f-90e5-b76bcff7f1a7 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
On his Sub Pop debut, deranged psych-pop bedroom auteur Morgan Delt cleans up his sound considerably. | On his Sub Pop debut, deranged psych-pop bedroom auteur Morgan Delt cleans up his sound considerably. | Morgan Delt: Phase Zero | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22242-phase-zero/ | Phase Zero | Morgan Delt’s 2014 self-titled record was an unexpected melange of power pop and druggy, psychedelic experimentation—a rougher, more unhinged successor to the beloved, defunct ’60s loving Elephant 6 outfits Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory System. It wasn’t a perfect record and had a number of rough stretches, but it delivered a powerful and pleasant weirdness. Phase Zero, Delt’s second album, seems like an appropriate title, because while he’s not exactly starting over, he appears to be doing a bit of an identity reset. Having jumped from Trouble in Mind to the larger and better-serviced Sub Pop, he’s jettisoned that strangeness, and in its place is a more well-realized psych-pop album, with perhaps better songwriting but less charm.
In terms of resetting expectations, Phase Zero begins with its most extreme case. Opener “I Don’t Wanna See What’s Happening Outside” is so clean and pokey that it's almost jarring. Gone are the fuzzy sound channels bleeding into one another, as well as the strange samples, jumpstart pacing, and in place is a tight and hygenic pop song with clearly audible vocals. Delt still sings in a hushed, enigmatic tone, but in comparison to his debut it’s remarkably tame.
Thankfully, the record loosens up a bit from there. “Another Person” offers a better example of “clean” Morgan Delt, spiffed-up but not sanitized. “Sun Powers” and “Mssr. Monster” maintain the wild tempo and volume shifts of his earlier work, as well as some of the sound burbles Delt would use to line the edges. Album closer “Some Sunsick Day” is an excellent '60s pop song, one that showcases Delt’s attention to craft without erasing his personality. Sometimes what seems like a forward move turns out to be a lateral one, and right now it's an open question whether Delt’s more professional environs were preferable to his messy charm. | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 22, 2016 | 6.8 | ebf20560-0b7a-4fd5-96ba-8ba7a7f03eb1 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
On their long-awaited debut, the Swedish duo flits between the sound of Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and trashy Europop, while delighting in emotional precipices and tremendous, history-making passions. | On their long-awaited debut, the Swedish duo flits between the sound of Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and trashy Europop, while delighting in emotional precipices and tremendous, history-making passions. | Niki and the Dove: Instinct | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16758-instinct/ | Instinct | It's a universal pop truth that songs about the thrill of the club rarely live up to the urgent abandon induced by a night's hard dancing. Two years ago, Swedish duo Niki and the Dove-- aka Malin Dahlström and Gustaf Karlöf-- struck a rare and peculiar seam with the release of their debut single, "DJ, Ease My Mind", on British indie label Moshi Moshi. Over militaristic clattering drums and swathes of pristine synthesizers (think the Knife's precision blown up to Eurovision Song Contest size), Dahlström pleads, "I want to forget, I want lights to blind me... I want to disappear," imploring the DJ to let calm flood her soul by playing a jam that takes her back to a time laced with romantic triumphs. "DJ…" is spectacular because it doesn't just feel like a song made for your own euphoric moments in the wee hours; rather, it's a force that bolts your heart to Malin's and forces it to pulse along with hers. Two years in the making, Niki and the Dove's debut album, Instinct, has a borderline greedy hit-rate where all 12 of its songs (not counting the two bonus numbers on the U.S. release) manage to be equally arresting, flitting between the sound of Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and trashy Europop, while delighting in tiny but pivotal moments, sites of emotional precipices and tremendous, history-making passions.
Quality aside, there's a reason why all these songs feel so immediate: Two years is a long time to wait to release a debut album (particularly when Dahlström and Karlöf have been working together in various guises for over a decade), and 11 of these 12 songs have already been given away for free online, or released in EP form. Only the dramatic oriental strut of "Love to the Test" is truly new (though new versions of previously heard songs are present), a full-bodied seduction where Dahlström catches a guy's eye across the room, sasses him into giving her his number along with the time, then calls "Touchdown!" asking, "Are you ready for this woman?" hand undoubtedly on hip. The lack of new material does make Instinct feel like a consolidation effort, perhaps aimed at grasping for the continued attentions of newer fans, but that's certainly not a complaint. If anything, it's a justification of sorts for the sea of Björk comparisons that's followed the duo since the beginning. Although invoking the Icelandic innovator is usually ham-fisted shorthand for "kooky woman pop," there are plenty of experimental leanings here-- and in Niki and the Dove's live show-- that suggest a weirder future for the pair, in similar fashion to how Björk began her solo career in the mid 1990s.
There's not quite an "It's Oh So Quiet" on Instinct, but there are plenty of enormous, joyous moments that come close enough to that sensation, with plenty more going on than in your common or garden banger. The victorious "Tomorrow" opens the LP, followed by "The Drummer", where a high-pitched sonar blip needles through thundering synthesizer sashays, Dahlström's drum-like heart powering her assault across a topography of nerves and difficult decisions. "The Fox" jabs like a razor-sharp ballet, bloody cello chopping beneath gloaming synthesizers as Dahlström asks a four-legged beast to bury to bury her fears so that she might sleep. The dark grind of "Under the Bridges" transports her back to a dark and dangerous zone on a city's edge where a friend confesses a secret that remains untold. It doesn't matter what it is-- there's something about the visceral, elemental nature of Niki and the Dove's production that takes you right there, shivering and pulling the collar of your coat close as wind whips under the viaduct.
They pull you into the back of the cab on "Last Night", too, where you're a gooseberry gamely drawing hearts in the window condensation as the protagonists get "married in a taxi," Dahlström steeling her heart against getting too attached by invoking the scorn of Stevie Nicks circa Bella Donna. It's not difficult to spot the fact that the situations described in most of Niki and the Dove's songs take place at night, which is rarely a zone of abject fear for the characters within, but a canvas against which to conquer anxieties and triumph romantically. On the soft, Prince-like stroke of "In Our Eyes", Dahlström sings, "I'm the night now, but I will shelter you," as if she's a wise sage offering protection. If the night is an embrace in which to seek succor and work out complex thoughts, then the nightclub of Niki and the Dove's breakout hit seems by default a kind of transcendental, heavenly zone where the most intense and vital decisions get their hearing. It's fitting, then, that they've made an album against which it's easy to imagine having similar experiences. | 2012-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sub Pop | August 10, 2012 | 7.9 | ebf6c2bb-084e-4bc3-a3f1-bd7a54c7f45c | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
For an electronic music culture increasingly bloated, glitzy, and insufferable, the British duo Paranoid London is a refreshing punch to the nuts. They emulate the shoddy, shady days of early Chicago house: The mad whinnying squeals, the 303s, the deadpan vocals—all of it is here, and it hits with visceral force. | For an electronic music culture increasingly bloated, glitzy, and insufferable, the British duo Paranoid London is a refreshing punch to the nuts. They emulate the shoddy, shady days of early Chicago house: The mad whinnying squeals, the 303s, the deadpan vocals—all of it is here, and it hits with visceral force. | Paranoid London: Paranoid London | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21288-paranoid-london/ | Paranoid London | Since its inception, acid house was received far more enthusiastically in the UK than in the U.S. Writing about his favorite tracks for Fact, Ed DMX said: "Even though nearly all the best records were made in Chicago, the music took off in a big way over here, [where] it was massively popular, much imitated." The UK top 100 for 1989 boasts the likes of Inner City's "Good Life", Lil Louis's "French Kiss", and British early adopter A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray" while the U.S. charts bear out that we all but ignored our homegrown sound (though we charted Marshall Jefferson's “Move Your Body” as blanched by the Belgian act Technotronic as "Pump up the Jam"). No historian or music critic would ever categorize 1989 as Chicago's "second summer of love".
Beginning in 2007, singles began emanating from a British label and act known as Paranoid London. The duo of Gerardo Delgado and Quinn Whalley, flashed an unfettered enthusiasm for—and emulation of—the mad whinnying frequencies of the 303, but coupled it to an ethos that in the 21st century might more closely align with punk. They didn't do any press, didn't promo their music, didn't upload mixes to Soundcloud to build buzz, and when they released their debut album at the end of December 2014, there was no digital version. While the group were much discussed in Europe and the UK, there was nary a ripple nor mention made stateside.
A year on, the ten track album is now readily available digitally and on CD. For an electronic music culture increasingly bloated, glitzy, and insufferable, Paranoid London is a refreshing punch to the nuts. The tracks that Delgado and Whalley craft are simple as a prison shiv, not adding layers of gloss or paint to its acid-house, but stripping it back to its basics. Almost every track is erected from the same blocks: handclaps bright as tin foil, dry snares, sharp hi-hats, concussive kicks, all of it buoyed by queasy undulations of bass. They emulate Trax and those shoddy, shady days of Chicago pressings to the point that you expect a chunk of rubber to be embedded in the records themselves.
There are spot-on acid house bangers like "Headtrack" and "Paris Dub 3" that evoke peak Junior Boy's Own releases as well as late-'80s Chicago. On the latter, the duo collaborate with Paris Brightledge, a vocalist on early tracks by Sterling Void and Joe Smooth. The coup de grace is the deadpan intonation of Mutato Pintado; on the wet cardboard thud of "Transmission 5", he switches out words that range from the inane to the lurid: "skin on my shoes...feeling good...lipstick...hair in my hand...late night..." and at one point, he croons about "playing by the rules" then suppresses a small chuckle.
Playing by the rules of making classic acid house while also laughing at them, setting up expectations and then undercutting them: It's what Paranoid London does best. “Lovin U (Ahh Shit)” is a love song but the title sends mixed signals, approximating the cross purposes of hook-up culture. "You've got the green light/ right past the stop sign" DJ Genesis sings in her monotone, juxtaposing "forever loving you/ just a little bit." Its sentimental in a way that works with the group’s decidedly cheeky unsentimental manner.
Earlier this summer I got to see Paranoid London play live as part of Amsterdam’s Dekmantel festival. They were sandwiched between two legends: DJ Harvey and Derrick May. But after a weekend of DJs coolly manipulating laptops, turntables and drum machines, there was something visceral about PL's live set, less clinical, more chaotic. The crowd churned like a mosh pit rather than a dance floor and rather than throw cake into the crowd, Mutato Pintado brandished a bottle of vodka lifted from backstage and began to pour full cups of it, passing it out to the crowd. | 2015-11-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Decks | November 30, 2015 | 8.2 | ebfa4e52-fbb5-4123-ab47-0526e48d91e7 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper still has an ear and charisma on his latest album, but the songs are more like templates than novel creations. For the first time, he sounds predictable. | The Atlanta rapper still has an ear and charisma on his latest album, but the songs are more like templates than novel creations. For the first time, he sounds predictable. | 2 Chainz: Dope Don’t Sell Itself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2-chainz-dope-dont-sell-itself/ | Dope Don’t Sell Itself | Ten years ago, a 34-year-old rapper formerly known as Tity Boi released his long-awaited debut album. All of it felt improbable. After resuscitating a flagging career through an omnipresent campaign of high-profile, show-stealing features, 2 Chainz completed his reinvention with Based on a T.R.U. Story, which established him as a certified, bankable star. Yet beyond the ridiculous one-liners and big-name collaborations, he revealed himself to be a rapper with a savvy artistic vision that extended far beyond 15 seconds of fame. Over the next five years, 2 Chainz morphed into an album artist, releasing concept projects anchored by unconventional production and careful art direction, a process that peaked with 2017’s Pretty Girls Love Trap Music. For the past decade, he’s kept us on our toes.
Fast forward to 2022, and 2 Chainz is now playing catch up. Dope Don’t Sell Itself, his seventh studio album, is the first one that feels predictable. A brisk 12 songs, it plays more like a mixtape of throwaways, a collection of forgettable, though occasionally great, bangers with of-the-moment features and total disregard for cohesion or risk. Now in his 40s, posting more on Instagram about his family than the club, 2 Chainz is at a creative and commercial crossroads. His last hit came in 2017 (“It’s a Vibe”), and 2020’s So Help Me God!, despite features with everyone from Kanye West to Lil Uzi Vert, produced the lowest sales of his career. Dope Don’t Sell Itself feels like a half-hearted attempt to return to basics—but, as 2 Chainz should know, shifting the culture is a Herculean task, and it sounds like he doesn’t have the strength or hunger to do it anymore.
The songs here are serviceable, thanks to 2 Chainz’s ear and charisma. But they’re more like templates than novel creations, far from his days of sampling Hall & Oates or trading verses with Kendrick Lamar over a Pharrell beat seemingly constructed from cutlery and trash cans. “Pop Music,” featuring Moneybagg Yo, is boilerplate strip club fodder, while the buoyant but just passable Roddy Ricch feature “Outstanding” could appear on anyone’s album. There’s a rote stop-the-violence track (complete with a chorus from Lil Durk, who probably shouldn’t be the one singing about the senselessness of rappers dying), and a run-of-the-mill sex song featuring Jacquees that’s inexplicably the album’s closer. Missing in all of this is anything memorable from 2 Chainz himself, just recycled lines on dope dealing and big cars, with little of the astounding zaniness or trenchant political awareness and introspection that make his verses feel essential.
There are a few bright spots: lead single “Million Dollars Worth of Game,” a perfect team-up with 42 Dugg, and featuring a beat that sounds like a tea kettle about to explode, is pure 2 Chainz gold: “I sold green, sold white, sold lyrics/Courtside, watching the Hawks play the Pistons!” His horn-filled collaboration with the embattled YoungBoy Never Broke Again, “10 Bracelets,” is triumphant and anthemic. And “Neighbors Know My Name” contains a flip of D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” that’s so brilliant, it’s inconceivable that no one had done it before. Longstanding Atlanta stalwart FKi 1st turns the first two, saccharine bounces into a thundering brew of 808s and distorted synths; 2 Chainz’s chorus is a nursery rhyme-like earworm, and yet it’s baffling that the song stops at a minute and a half. Like much of Dope Don’t Sell Itself, it feels like an unfinished sketch.
The most relevant guests on the album—Moneybagg Yo, Lil Baby, YoungBoy, Lil Durk—became stars on the prolific features-and-mixtapes formula that 2 Chainz perfected over a decade ago. Their urgency is palpable when they perform alongside him here; they each possess, in their own way, the snarling, underdog motivation that initially took 2 Chainz to the top. But on Dope Don’t Sell Itself, he seems like his heart isn’t as in it anymore, or, at the least, his priorities have shifted. “Except for the ones I love, I ain’t never pick the phone up,” he huffs on “10 Bracelets.” For a 44-year-old father of three, that’s exactly how he should feel. | 2022-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | February 4, 2022 | 6.4 | ec00cf28-8446-4996-bff4-d646a7068531 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
I'd pretty much written the Smashing Pumpkins off after their severely disappointing fifth (and assumed to be final) album ... | I'd pretty much written the Smashing Pumpkins off after their severely disappointing fifth (and assumed to be final) album ... | The Smashing Pumpkins: MACHINA II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11828-machina-iithe-friends-and-enemies-of-modern-music/ | MACHINA II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music | I'd pretty much written the Smashing Pumpkins off after their severely disappointing fifth (and assumed to be final) album, MACHINA/The Machines of God. The laughable attempt at storyline, the terrible songs, and the ungodly production flourishes glued the final sequin on Billy Corgan's velvet-lined coffin.
Though I'd been a fan for many years, even through 1998's unfairly maligned Adore, I didn't bat an eye when Corgan announced the band's imminent breakup. Then comes this new, hastily issued "final album." Rejected by their label, the band printed 25 copies (consisting of three ten-inch EPs and a 2xLP set) on their own imprint, gave them to 25 people, and instructed those people to distribute it digitally. This was their best option to get the material out, since Virgin would have blocked any attempt to release it on another label.
It would be extremely easy to dismiss this album as Billy simply taking out the accumulated garbage of the past couple years. It would be easy, that is, if it didn't almost redeem the Pumpkins. You certainly can't accuse them of trying to make a buck, as they've probably lost at least a couple hundred printing up the source copies of this Internet-distributed release. And it's all the more frustrating that this album features an abundance of tracks that throw the deficiencies of their previous record into even sharper relief.
Within the first three songs, I'm immediately reminded of everything I ever loved about the Smashing Pumpkins: perfect examples of the dream-pop/arena-rock hybrid they forged back in 1993. The performances are, for the most part, raw and mostly live sounding, with some tracks actually recalling the glory days they spent in Butch Vig's basement. Basically, you get the one thing missing on MACHINA I: the sound of a band playing.
But there's plenty of filler in this set, too, and it's not really sequenced to be played as a continuous album. Several songs are unnecessarily repeated. And did we really need a "demo" version of the still-awful "Heavy Metal Machine"? Probably not. But all these faults aside, within this collection resides an album that would have been infinitely superior to The Machines of God. The high points are high enough to erase any bad taste left by that album.
Songs like "Dross" and "Glass' Theme" could have provided the "return to rock" that MACHINA I failed to deliver. The long-standing live favorite "Let Me Give the World to You" could have been the hit single the group never managed to score. "Here's to the Atom Bomb" sounds like an answer to "1979". "Vanity" and "Home" are simply gorgeous, songs only the old Pumpkins could have made.
There isn't really any new ground broken here, but the band revisits nearly every style they've adopted over the years. Throughout, they sound energized and at a creative peak. Jimmy Chamberlin's muscular, fluid drumming provides the backbeat missing from the Pumpkins' music for the last couple years. James Iha has developed from a merely competent rhythm guitarist into a creative lead player, providing a spacy ambience to Corgan's power-riffing. And as easy as it's been to dismiss Corgan as a fame-hungry self-aggrandizing egomaniac over the years, this set proves that he's also a songwriter of considerable talent.
So take this as a proper farewell to the Smashing Pumpkins-- it's a nice album to remember them by. Believe me, it's the last album I expected to enjoy this year. And the icing: it's free. | 2000-03-31T01:00:08.000-05:00 | 2000-03-31T01:00:08.000-05:00 | Rock | Constantinople | March 31, 2000 | 7.7 | ec0f3671-ca82-461c-85a5-6b0cf471c0ab | D. Erik Kempke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/d.-erik kempke/ | null |
On his latest album, a luminary of the Los Angeles beat scene remembers how to come back down from the astral plane and hits the dance floor running. | On his latest album, a luminary of the Los Angeles beat scene remembers how to come back down from the astral plane and hits the dance floor running. | Matthewdavid: Time Flying Beats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matthewdavid-time-flying-beats/ | Time Flying Beats | During the late-2000s heyday of the Los Angeles beat scene, artists pushed sound in ways that frequently suggested hyperbolic visions of distance: We were somehow traveling into space and exploring new dimensions when we listened to Flying Lotus or Nosaj Thing. Yet despite his origins in that circle, Matthew David McQueen, who makes music as Matthewdavid, has always preferred to operate on a more intimate, subconscious level, bathing his audience in hallucinatory collages instead of presenting defined set pieces.
His discography zigzags between experimental instrumentals (his 2011 debut, Outmind), semi-traditional R&B throwbacks (2014’s middling In My World), and weightless new age, all generally tied together by a coating of ambient gloss. Matthewdavid fully dove into that aesthetic with 2016’s Trust the Guide and Glide, a 90-minute Om of an album. Time Flying Beats is yet another left turn, stripping away the clouds that surrounded much of his past work in favor of lucid, brisk production. For an artist whose best ideas too often feel like they’ve been diluted, it’s a welcome switch-up.
There’s a twisted familiarity to much of this album, like finding your family covered in ectoplasm. The first full track “Time Flying” stretches Roland Orzabal’s lovelorn croon from “Head Over Heels” into a drowned howl, meshing it with footwork drum twitches. “Flow With the Go” is a star-stepping fete that sounds like it’s emerged from Flying Lotus’ Cosmogramma asterism, while the clean, summery guitars on “Yearns Out” gesture toward a reality where Matthewdavid is a reliable pop producer. For all his headiness, Matthewdavid reminds us throughout the album that he’s adroit at composing missives for the body.
His most beat-driven work can make it feel like he’s moving too fast to bother smoothly threading his influences together. Instead, they bleed into each other, at times colliding in ways that blur the difference between a progressive experiment and a rough draft. A majority of the tracks on Time Flying Beats end within two minutes, with stop-and-reset transitions that make the tracklist all but interchangeable. The anthemic “Ode to Low End,” which takes its name from the Wednesday club night in L.A. where Matthewdavid and his beat scene contemporaries flourished, is followed suddenly by the bleary “Millennial Midnight.” The tracks are lean enough to give his ideas an accessible clarity, and they keep the album’s pacing off-balance enough to maintain Matthewdavid’s psychedelic edge.
This fragmented approach can make for exciting listening, even if Time Flying Beats doesn’t commit to it all the way through. The album’s momentum downshifts abruptly with “Into the Night,” which submerges the sampled cries of the Eagles’ Timothy B. Schmit, from an obscure solo cut of the same name, within a malfunctioning key riff. “Desert Moon” is a disorienting mix of percussive stomps and bells that never bothers to develop into a listenable song, and the nearly seven-minute “Secret Rooms of Tokyo” settles into a melody that runs about five minutes too long, even when an accelerated drum-and-bass rhythm intrudes. Even so, these relatively minor missteps don’t undo the preceding thrills yielded by Matthewdavid’s move to de-emphasize the third eye. Out-of-body trips are fun, but sometimes, the tangible hits just as hard. | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Leaving | January 20, 2018 | 7.1 | ec2b7fb8-e655-48e6-be23-8c65318332b4 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
On Restarter, their Relapse debut, Torche are as harsh, heavy and mean as they have been in nearly a decade. The result is their most compelling record since 2008's Meanderthal. | On Restarter, their Relapse debut, Torche are as harsh, heavy and mean as they have been in nearly a decade. The result is their most compelling record since 2008's Meanderthal. | Torche: Restarter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20046-restarter/ | Restarter | Torche leave very little room for misinterpretation as Restarter, their fourth album, begins. On vicious opener "Annihilation Affair", the quartet wallops a short, simple theme, in unison, at mid-tempo and very high volume. Frontman Steve Brooks barks his words, delivering them like marching orders as an enemy approaches: "Know it, build it, grow it, blow it," he shouts, the band surging behind him. The action eventually grinds to a dissonant halt, the guitars feeding back and screaming against the beat like a long train trying to brake before slipping into hell. After seeming so eager to capitalize on their pop underpinnings in recent years, Torche arrive on Restarter, their Relapse debut, as harsh, heavy and mean as they have been in nearly a decade.
Since the release of the head-turning 2008 shout-along Meanderthal, and the subsequent dismissal of guitarist Juan Montoya, Torche have not been shy about their melodic enthusiasm. Recorded as a trio, the eight-track Songs for Singles aimed to cram captivating hooks into rock tunes that ran anywhere from 52 seconds to more than six minutes. After adding guitarist Andrew Elstner, they cut Harmonicraft, a record whose cover of furry beasts holding chocolate-chip cookies and puking rainbows portended their most brisk and ebullient batch of songs yet. Torche were still plenty demanding, but the harmonies were brighter and the guitars both quicker and slicker. The metal at their core had started to melt; the big refrains and the bigger sound began to collapse into one another, producing diminishing tension. Harmonicraft felt transitional, putting Torche perhaps one album away from a package tour with retro-rock hawkers like Free Energy or Wolfmother.
But Restarter push Torche back toward the more punishing pole of its sound. The brief "Undone", for instance, counts as one of the heaviest pieces in Torche's catalog. Brooks leads multiple marching sections, but when he pauses, they slip into the sort of down-tuned, instrumental slogs that consumed multi-minute chunks of their early records. This allows Torche to be brutal while still moving, a trick they've rarely mastered. This doesn't mean they've suddenly slid into doom or sludge metal. These 10 songs are actually no less memorable than those on Harmonicraft; "Minions", "Blasted", and "Undone" rank as new shoo-ins for any hypothetical best-of-Torche collection.
This time, though, Torche achieve magnetism as a band that lumbers and roars in unison, instead of manic, flashy guitars or songs that seem in a hurry to reach an end. Bassist Jonathan Nuñez and drummer Rick Smith are essential like never before. They trace Brooks and Elstner closely, fortifying every melody and movement with powerful, unselfish playing. Brooks' seesaw singing during "Annihilation Affair", for instance, sticks because of how the bass and drums reinforce every note. Like the best songs from Meanderthal, "Loose Men" is agile but strong, lovable but aggressive. Its rhythm section is a juggernaut, but it moves gracefully around a guitar solo, like an elephant tap-dancing in a small room. During "Minions", incisive guitar lines and Brooks' monotone singing crisscross like a game of cat's cradle; Nuñez and Smith pulse behind the action, offering the equivalent of a house beat, pushing you along with the song. "Blasted" is one of Restarter's quickest songs, its racing tempo and vocals recalling Harmonicraft. But the rhythm section remains the bulwark beneath it, not making room for the band's pop-rock maneuvers so much as forcing them to fight for space and attention. Brooks sings of lascivious men and scenes that seem stolen from The Fast and the Furious. The band pushes you along for the ride.
Restarter is Torche's first album since Brooks reunited Floor, the band's predecessor in terms of style and personnel. It seems as if, in rebooting that old act, he remembered the root of the formula for both: Write catchy songs and play them at undeniable volumes, no gimmicks or flourishes necessary. On Restarter, that precept again takes the lead, and Torche have made their most compelling record since Meanderthal. | 2015-02-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-02-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | February 23, 2015 | 7.9 | ec2b8d3f-f6cc-46ba-af61-3bcc951f0d80 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The former Youth Lagoon songwriter’s second album under his own name is almost wordless, a quest for ego death that explores the beauty of the natural world with a lingering disquiet. | The former Youth Lagoon songwriter’s second album under his own name is almost wordless, a quest for ego death that explores the beauty of the natural world with a lingering disquiet. | Trevor Powers: Capricorn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trevor-powers-capricorn/ | Capricorn | In 2016, after six years performing under the name Youth Lagoon, Trevor Powers said goodbye. He sought greater artistic freedom: After finding success making intimate bedroom pop about anxiety and isolation, Powers felt his vision had become constricted. “It’s odd to realize that something you’ve created can have the power of wrapping a leash around your neck & holding you hostage,” he wrote in a note to fans at the time.
But freedom is an illusion we all learn to concede to in one way or another. After a severe panic attack, Powers decamped to a cabin with a piano located at the foot of Idaho’s Sawtooth mountain range to reset. Accompanied by his instruments, a computer, and recording gear, Powers encapsulated this time in an album he titled Capricorn. While 2018’s Mulberry Violence—Powers’ first foray into making music under his own name—leaned into discord as a means of self-obliteration, Capricorn is a measured, expressive experiment in erasure.
Minus a few distorted samples, Capricorn removes Powers’ voice from the equation and allows his skills as a sculptor of sound to shine. While Powers’ early work is sometimes lumped in with the tail end of chillwave, his sense of depth and texture was always more ambitious, characteristics on full display here. Like a heavily tattooed modern-day Thoreau, he sprinkles the record with recordings of raindrops, streams, and thunderstorms, reminders of the symphony that the natural world offers us for free. But for the most part Powers distorts these details until they lose their organic quality, the way a cricket chirping in slow motion sounds more like a computer than an insect.
Capricorn unfolds slowly, creating a surface calm. Nothing here feels rushed, nor overly polished. “Earth to Earth” emits a haze of textured synths and bird calls, while “The Riverine” contains tinges of pedal steel, evoking rolling hills misted with dew. The spectral beginnings of “A New Name” slowly give way to a warped sample of a voice seemingly repeating the word “body.” The mind is encouraged to wander.
But there’s an undercurrent of eeriness to Capricorn, as if at any moment the tranquility could slip to reveal a nightmare. Sometimes these lines are obvious, as on “The Riverine” and “Blue Savior,” each briefly punctured by mournful, bluesy horns. The serene opener “First Rain” is suddenly interrupted by a garbled voice and a chiming bell that sounds like a train barreling through the night; the song picks up again like nothing happened, but the sensation lingers.
A pair of ominous closing tracks do little to inspire a sense of resolve. “Pest” begins with a symphonic array of woodwinds that suddenly burst into sharp, menacing squawks. The song builds on the sense of unease, ratcheting up tension until it could soundtrack some poor soul’s untimely demise. “2166” is unsettling in a different way, pairing a fuzzy, melancholic piano melody with a noirish sax drone. Musically, Powers appears to be on a quest towards ego death, willing to tear everything apart in order to rebuild. Capricorn invites us to disappear with him.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | Fat Possum | July 29, 2020 | 7.6 | ec2caa2d-7cc3-4651-ac5e-478df190f7ae | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
An endurance of idealism threads together these 13 reimagined protest songs, collected from four decades of albums. But their tempered presentation reveals a profound generational disconnect. | An endurance of idealism threads together these 13 reimagined protest songs, collected from four decades of albums. But their tempered presentation reveals a profound generational disconnect. | Yoko Ono: Warzone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-warzone/ | null | “People of America, when will we learn?” Yoko Ono asked over a briskly strummed acoustic guitar on her 1973 album, Approximately Infinite Universe. “It’s now or never: There’s no time to lose.” She sings those same words on Warzone, a collection of 13 songs from her back catalog that she re-recorded with their original lyrics and somber new synthesizer underpinnings. It’s been 45 years since she first urged her adoptive home to dream of a reality unblighted by violence. The words ring sadder now; the people of the United States ostensibly chose “never.”
A ferocious optimism animates Ono’s half-century career. Her early performance pieces and her 1964 book of creative prompts, Grapefruit, worked from the assumption that art was play, an inborn human faculty. She carried that humanism into the music she made, on her own and with husband John Lennon, throughout the 1970s. Impassioned, erratic vocals tore at long-held conventions of what women behind microphones should sound like. Her liberating irreverence reverberated throughout New Wave in bands like the B-52s and the Talking Heads, as well as underground experimentalists like Meredith Monk. That her legacy as a creative force was so deeply subsumed by the myth of the Beatles speaks to a slowly lifting rockist misogyny, not the quality of her work.
Warzone collects a handful of songs from Ono’s seminal ’70s records alongside tracks from 1985’s Starpeace and 1995’s Rising, plus an interlude from 2009’s Between My Head and the Sky. Most songs tell the same story: Humanity will one day achieve enlightenment and relinquish war in favor of love and unity. The unity of the message speaks to the endurance of the Ono’s idealism. While the original recordings offer a glimpse at the sheer variety of Ono’s discography—her work houses dub beats and thrash metal riffs and acid freakouts—the re-recorded versions drain each track of historical and musical specificity. Most have been slowed to a funereal tempo, which makes lyrics that once brimmed with hope sound like a concession to the ubiquitous cruelty of the present. Ono sings a 20th-century dream for a 21st-century utopia that never came to pass.
When Ono strangled the word “why” during the 1970 song of the same name, she pronounced the question like it had an answer that she could find if she screamed hard enough. She was spurring herself into action. But the 2018 “Why” loses the original’s rock instrumentation and shelves Ono’s feral vibrato. Instead, over wolf howls, trumpeting elephants, and ambient synthesizers, she wails the word as if in mourning. One “Why” looks out onto a course that has yet to be set; the other looks back onto irreversible wreckage.
“Woman Power,” from 1973’s Feeling the Space, loses its sense of spontaneous play. Roaring electric guitars and a commanding drumbeat once gave the track urgency, as if Ono really were singing on the cusp of gender liberation, as if she could sing it into being. The re-recorded take might be the track here closest to its source material, as the guitar riff and drum pattern survive for the song’s first half. But the instruments hide under Ono’s voice; rather than raw and vital, they sound spectral and faded. They soon fall away entirely, replaced by strings arranged by New York composer Nico Muhly. When the band crashes back in and guitarist Marc Ribot tears through a rote solo, it feels as though two visions of the future are competing: one in which women have already seized the power afforded to men, and one in which Ono mourns that power’s lack.
Warzone’s liner notes include a 1972 essay by Ono originally published in The New York Times. “The Feminization of Society” articulates an enduring tenet of feminism: that masculinist ideals have failed the world, and only by means of feminine survival strategies can the world be saved. She argues that women cannot compromise their liberation or achieve it within existing masculine frameworks. Women must rewrite reality by force. Some of Ono’s writing has aged well. On the other hand, she flippantly claims that black people have already achieved liberation and women must do the same, at once seemingly forgetting the existence of black women and glossing over the United States’ enduring racism. A year later, she’d release an album with Lennon that printed a racist slur on its cover. On “I Love All of Me,” originally released on Starpeace, she again uses black people as a rhetorical peg, claiming, “I’m a black man who’s come to terms with his anger.” A line no doubt meant as a bid for compassion undermines her vision of universal love, conflating black masculinity with anger without interrogating that association’s roots in white supremacy.
These moments pin Ono’s radicalism to a vision of liberation that ignores the way racism and misogyny structure the world in tandem. They feel dated and draining in a political climate where a majority of white women voted for a candidate serially accused of sexual assault, opting to safeguard the benefits of whiteness by aligning themselves with a violently misogynist party. That Ono never thought to rewrite these lyrics or the included essay while rearranging the songs themselves highlights a disconnect between the hippie utopianism of the 20th century and the current bitter fight for survival of so many.
Because its overt politics now feel so inadequate, Warzone works best as a melancholy gesture, a long look back at a time when dreaming of a better world felt invigorating rather than exhausting. Its peak comes on its last track: a recording of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Nearly a decade after releasing the song, Lennon admitted that Ono deserved partial songwriting credit, because he had penned the lyrics around one of Grapefruit’s prompts. Here, Ono reclaims a song long offered as proof of her late husband’s towering genius.
Ono works against its engraved expectations. Her rendition is melancholy and moving; she sings tentatively against sparse electronic drone, as if reckoning with the weight of all that has been lost in the decades since Lennon sang the same words. She strains a little to hit the high notes before the chorus, the playful vocal flourish so idiosyncratic to the late Beatle. Her voice considers his absence as she pronounces some of his most famous lines: “You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one.” She’s right, of course, and the world she envisions here—no possessions, no nations, no want—still describes the world young radicals are fighting for against late capitalism’s heavy inertia. It’s a beautiful idea, this paradise of which she sings. It just takes more than dreams to get there. | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Chimera | October 23, 2018 | 6.3 | ec2fd3c2-c89d-44e1-807e-fcdd69ef27c6 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Tehran-via-London artist Ashkan Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. | Tehran-via-London artist Ashkan Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. | Ash Koosha: I AKA I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21766-i-aka-i/ | I AKA I | Tehran-via-London artist Ashkan Kooshanejad offers up harsh, detailed compositions that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve using physical synthesizers and samplers. Kooshanejad in particular stands out amongst peers like Arca and Actress because he's not framing his work as a deconstruction of dance music, nor does his knowledge of Persian classical music figure heavily in his work. The digital world, and the software that engenders it—the way it allow users to re-scale, re-orient, and and re-produce sound—is the only apparent framework for Kooshanejad's work.
I AKA I is Kooshanejad's second album under his Ash Koosha alias, following last year's GUUD. He's a multimedia artist, dabbling in film as well as expressing an interest in virtual reality. "At some point in my life I thought it was good to specialize, but now I think it’s good to build a bigger product than just music," he told Philip Sherburne last year; he's diversified, in other words. But I AKA I is a complex sonic statement, one where sound qua sound is the order of the day. Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. There is the sense that any individual noise could be one locus on a larger waveform, any melodic line or rhythmic figure a patchwork of them.
This leads to a lot of exciting moments that occur outside of traditional structures. Rhythms slur and slow down; melodies coagulate and dissipate. It's exciting or directionless depending on your mood. For this reason I prefer I AKA I when vestiges of Kooshanejad's music studies show up, such as on the stately melody that underpins "Eluded," trading space with a halting, insidiously catchy melody. Or on "Make It Fast," a lumpen hip-hop beat that contains trace elements of non-Western melodic modes ("Shah" offers a similar experience). "Biutiful" owns its title, a nod to late-90s Warp acts that prized both grace and oddity.
Tracks like these offer windows with which to view Kooshanejad's work; how necessary the windows are will depend on your preferences. He's capable of being abstract ("Growl") and obtuse ("In Line") but while the album can be difficult it isn't exactly alien or otherworldly. From the jarring opening moments of "Ote" we know exactly what world this hails from: the digital, where it has been zoomed and cropped and clipped and reversed and shuffled. If anything, I AKA I is a reminder of how normal these concepts are becoming. | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | April 6, 2016 | 7.5 | ec34cd48-9d91-4488-94b5-c1acff15a47b | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Colombian producer’s galaxy-sized rave tracks are unsettling and exhilarating. This 21-minute EP is an essential record for the vanguard of dance music. | The Colombian producer’s galaxy-sized rave tracks are unsettling and exhilarating. This 21-minute EP is an essential record for the vanguard of dance music. | Verraco: Breathe... Godspeed EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/verraco-breathe-godspeed-ep/ | Breathe... Godspeed EP | Verraco and his peers in Medellín, Colombia once presented themselves as rave revolutionaries: guerillas rising up to topple a hegemonic club culture and wrest electronic music from the Global North’s death grip. They called their label Insurgentes; its inaugural release, Verraco’s debut EP, was titled Resistir. But over the past seven years, Verraco (aka JP López) and his crew have grown from upstarts into some of the most feted names in the underground, kingpins of a scene that onlookers have dubbed—somewhat problematically—“Latin club.”
Yet Verraco has never been one to be pigeonholed. True, he deployed cumbia rhythms on the 2020 song “Breaking Hegemonies” and sampled the iconic Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos on “Hasta morir si es preciso.” Releases on his label TraTraTrax, a successor to Insurgentes, are awash in Caribbean dembow, Venezuelan raptor house, Mexican tribal techno, and other sounds from across Latin America and the diaspora. But TraTraTrax refuses to be pinned to any identity but the one that the community has invented for itself: The label described 2022’s no pare, sigue sigue—the closest thing the scene has had to a manifesto—as a “popurrí,” a mixture of “everything and nothing, just sudaca bangers loaded with flavour and resentment, but above all, resentment, because we don’t want our wounds to heal.”
Verraco’s music is equally informed by the brain-bending sounds of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and other UK electronic pioneers, along with the psychedelia of artists like James Holden and the darkside electro of Rotterdam and The Hague. This is also a kind of resistance, a way of reminding worldwide audiences that López has as much claim to the Euro-American techno canon as any white kid in Ohio or Heidelberg. After the relative abstraction of his 2020 album Grial, Verraco dropped his heaviest, most triumphantly unbridled work yet with last year’s storming and altogether unorthodox Escándaloo, a double-barreled shot across club music’s bow; now, on Breathe… Godspeed, he breaks out even bigger guns. The four tracks bear some relationship to other contemporary Latin club anthems in their chugging rhythms and severe sonics, but in their sheer, intransigent weirdness, they sound little like anything else—from anywhere at all.
Rather than any given style, Verraco’s work is defined by its intensity—overdriven synths, distorted percussion, violently gyrating oscillators—and the epic scale of his arrangements, which often sound less like club tracks than galactic battle-march hymns. Both qualities are in ample supply on these four tracks, which feel like a single overarching suite. They share a palette of muscular drums, digitally abraded textures, and wildly disorienting sound design. Nothing is what it seems: Basslines growl like cyborg beasts, while processed voices—jabbering and chattering indecipherably—might be mischievous aliens. The mood is exhilarating but unsettling; both the intricate patterning and ambiguous air of malice remind me of the geometric landscapes and “machine elves” described by many DMT users. Verraco’s tracks report from an alternate dimension of club music, where even the most familiar trope is made thrillingly strange.
Breathe… Godspeed’s four tracks also share a resistance to doing anything you might expect them to do. On the opening “0∞,” Verraco withholds the bass for more than two minutes, stoking tension with a succession of high, squealy frequencies; then, halfway through, a plunging breakdown suggests shades of garish 2011 dubstep crossed with the harsh, fuck-off sonics of underground noise music. Only toward the end does a 4/4 beat claw the track back from the edge of chaos. “Godspeed >” turns the same elements into a relentless percussive assault; “Climaxing | Breathe” drops the tempo to a grueling 85 BPM, dials up the dissonance, and wraps around an ascending glissando that sounds like a Shepard-Risset tone from hell. Just when you expect the beat to drop, the whole track just fizzles out. It’s an audacious way to thwart an anticipated climax; you can practically hear Verraco cackling to himself in the studio.
Nowhere is Verraco more unpredictable than on the closing track, “Sí, idealízame.” It’s the EP’s emotional heart, fueled by a surprisingly melodic bass progression and festooned with gleaming accents. Like “Climaxing | Breathe,” it moves with a feeling of perpetual ascent; every time you expect the beat to kick in full-force, one or more elements pull back, withholding the satisfaction of the drop. The groove moves so swiftly and forcefully that it might take a while to realize that there are almost no drums, just an understated kick and hi-hats dissolved into a fine mist. But there are no snares, no congas, no cowbells—none of the stereotypical attributes of Latin club. The title translates as something like “yes, idealize me,” or “sure, fetishize me.” I read it as a provocation: Try to put Verraco in a box if you like—he’s got other plans. | 2024-06-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Timedance | June 11, 2024 | 8.2 | ec420110-5a42-4c05-8611-762d8afccc5f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their first album in over 20 years, Tanya Donelly and her band conjure the same potent mix of grace and force that fueled their 1990s output. | On their first album in over 20 years, Tanya Donelly and her band conjure the same potent mix of grace and force that fueled their 1990s output. | Belly: DOVE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belly-dove/ | DOVE | Like Stevie Nicks, Tanya Donelly has devoted decades of craft to describing what it feels like to be on the edge of 17. The difference between the two songwriters is that Donelly stays safe on terra firma. She’s passionate but grounded—an adult filtering the ardor of youth through art. As a singer and guitarist in Throwing Muses (and later the Breeders), she crafted feminine archetypes whose complicated internal lives felt inseparable from the band’s woven guitar threads, along with snarling rockers like “Not Too Soon.” In her debut as a bandleader, on Belly’s 1993 album Star, Donnelly became a master of lurching rhythms and vertiginous swoops. Her timbre coaxed the feral out of the winsome. “I’d like to see you naked, I’d like to see you take it,” she roared on the title track of 1995’s King.
The excellent Dove, Belly’s first album since the Clinton administration, picks up where their ‘90s output left off, yielding not a millimeter to notions of propriety. Donelly and her bandmates were adults in the ‘90s, too, not the delicate flowers many of the contemporaneous reviews suggested, and Dove’s 11 tunes reintroduce an act whose division of labor was always a model of gender parity: Donelly was flanked by male co-guitarist Tom Gorman, his brother Chris on drums, and Gail Greenwood on bass. In Donelly’s songs, men and women reckoned with each other, bemused by their cycles of interdependency: “And when you breathe/You breathe for two,” she sang on 1995’s “Seal My Fate.”
Now she returns to those familiar tropes, perhaps reinvigorated by how well Belly’s catalog has held up since they returned to gigging in 2016. Dove’s punchy ruefulness benefits from sparkling production by Tom Gorman and Paul Q. Kolderie, with whom Donelly has been working since her time in Throwing Muses. “I see the truth break over your face like a bad egg,” she declares on “Army of Clay,” buoyed by bass and drums; when Tom does a pitch-bend on his guitar, it’s just like old times.
Donelly’s fusion of grace and force is Dove’s most compelling achievement. “Artifact” mines the same country-rock vein as Star’s title track, conjuring a sound that’s heavy and comforting at once. “Faceless” opens with an acoustic fake-out before shifting into a rocker. On “Stars Align,” Donelly proclaims, “You’re gonna give someone a heart attack,” and then the song becomes a pretty love anthem whose clichés only confirm Belly’s impressive self-confidence. What’s adulthood for if you can’t do a Corona-fueled dance to the bar band and not give a damn?
Look in vain, though, for another “Feed the Tree,” the spring ’93 modern rock hit that was propelled to radio playlists by the Nirvana Phenomenon. To their considerable credit, Belly show no interest in recapturing the cultural moment that made Star a gold record. Hell, that cultural moment was gone in 1995, after Rolling Stone put her band on the cover and the marvelous King stiffed anyway. Belly never stopped recording awesome songs—audiences just stopped caring. Here’s hoping Dove gets them listening again. | 2018-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Belly Touring | May 8, 2018 | 7.2 | ec455c59-673f-4ef8-beb1-74666ff0acbb | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The Chicago four-piece’s debut oscillates between beauty and dissonance with masterful subtlety, finding new shades of delicacy within math rock. | The Chicago four-piece’s debut oscillates between beauty and dissonance with masterful subtlety, finding new shades of delicacy within math rock. | Floatie: Voyage Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/floatie-voyage-out/ | Voyage Out | On their debut album, Voyage Out, Floatie locate untapped delicacy, tranquility, and serendipity inside math rock. The Chicago four-piece have spent the past few years honing their skills as a tight live band in the city’s DIY scene. Although their minimalist approach and jazz-indebted playing style is more akin to Real Estate than Tera Melos, Floatie are also well-versed in the tricks of math rock—uncommon time signatures, gratuitously technical guitar, maze-like song structures. The proof is in Voyage Out, an album like an M. C. Escher painting, revealing its gravity-bending tricks the longer you look at it.
Voyage Out oscillates between beauty and dissonance with masterful subtlety. That kind of intuition and control can only be built over time, with a deep sense of connection between players. Although Floatie formed in 2018, all four members—singer-guitarist Sam Bern, singer-bassist Joe Olson, guitarist-synth player Will Wisniewski, and drummer Luc Schutz—have been friends for nearly a decade. That bond lends Floatie an effortless precision, which allows tiny explosions of garage fuzz to jump out of the otherwise buttoned-up “Lookfar,” or the time-signature twists in “Water Recipe” to give the deceptively smooth song a delightful, hiccuping rhythm.
Like their labelmates Krill, who dissected individualism and teleology through nature metaphors and BDSM scenarios, Floatie boil down the complexities of similarly academic issues into conversational lyrics. On “Catch a Good Worm,” Bern sings about a “pretty worm” that’s confused by the sight of its own reflection. The song gradually becomes a metaphor for the false binary of gender identity: “You hear the words, but tell yourself/That you deserve what you’re dealt,” sings Bern. “But something’s in the way of feeling great.” Elsewhere on Voyage Out, Bern wades through self-determination, gender expression, and social acceptance. For a band that quietly wants to educate listeners about decolonization and libertarian socialism, Floatie hit their stride when using personal struggles to illuminate universalities in their songs.
Floatie fuse all of this together into an endless helix, looping back to verses in inconspicuous yet seemingly unending ways. Meanwhile, Bern sings so gently that their lyrics occasionally seem to dissolve into the arrangement. Floatie immediately submerge listeners in this experience with album opener “Shiny.” After a few beguiling riffs criss cross in the introduction, the song shifts gears into a world of impossibly soft hi-hat taps, dreamy guitar chord slides, and whammy bar sighs. It’s here that Bern matches their falsetto refrain (“Other ways to get to the other side”) to the song’s rise-and-fall melody, as if the very phrase is climbing over a fence to the aforementioned location. It’s the type of trick that lures you back to figure out how it’s done, and in moments like this, Voyage Out is as hypnotic to pick apart and puzzle over as it is to close your eyes and get lost in.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | March 25, 2021 | 7.5 | ec481494-9d67-4875-97bc-a9b51dbbcbf0 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The Los Angeles rapper’s debut charts his development as he settles into a style that’s funny, winkingly formal, and rich in commercial potential. | The Los Angeles rapper’s debut charts his development as he settles into a style that’s funny, winkingly formal, and rich in commercial potential. | Remble: It’s Remble | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/remble-its-remble/ | It’s Remble | When Remble started uploading music three years ago, he was exactly in tune with the scene that was codifying around him. Then a teenager, the San Pedro native rapped with a flat affect in cadences that careened past the ends of bars, his ghoulish threats and outré jokes ping-ponging across beats that sounded digitally processed and almost knowingly cheap. From his earliest efforts he was uniquely magnetic, though he was not alone: Los Angeles County was and is littered with disciples of the sound that rappers like Frostydasnowmann, Drakeo the Ruler, and Almighty Suspect began molding a few years prior. But over the past 10 months or so, Remble has tweaked the dials on this formula and settled on a new variant. He now raps with hyper-clear diction and a winking formality, as if he’s auditioning for the Broadway adaptation of his own life story.
This can have a chilling effect. The first verse on his debut record, It’s Remble, ends with him describing the aftermath of a shooting: “Bodies holding bodies/It was as if they were cuddling,” the as if giving the line an uncomfortably wistful air. But it also serves to make the new sound of L.A. rap more legible to a mass audience, both literally—unlike Drakeo’s, Remble’s vocals never dissolve into a growl or mumble—and by mostly excising the more inscrutable bits of slang and gang politics. (Neither are absent from Remble’s work, but they appear as asides rather than rabbit holes to fall down.) This March’s “Ted Talk,” for example, walks a fine tonal line, both lightly parodying and sincerely functioning as one of those post-Meek Mill intro, motivational thesis songs. It’s earnest and not; Remble is joking (“I might just sign a deal with a major—what’s independent?”) until he isn’t (“Remember when I wasn’t anything but a co-defendant”).
While It’s Remble, which is out on Warner, certainly argues for the rapper’s significant commercial potential, it also traces his vocal development. About half of its 13 songs are new, the others having been released in scattered drops dating back to January 2020. This makes it a telling document of an artist who’s burrowed into and now stands apart from a burgeoning scene, though it occasionally disserves the earlier records. See the way the oldest song included here, the deadpan “Watch How You Talk 2 Me,” is made to sound inchoate when placed next to “Audible,” where Remble’s sneer is fully realized as he cackles about someone getting booked and singing to the cops “like you were Jodeci.”
Remble is reliably funny—few rappers can go bar-for-bar with the BlueBucksClan guys, as he does here on “Book Bag”—and this sense of humor gives him the latitude to revisit the same jokes and threats over and over again, their effectiveness simply compounding. (This man really, really does not respect that you still wear True Religion.) So even as he bends this new style into potent near-pop, the most essential songs on It’s Remble are the two freestyles that radically expanded his audience in L.A.: last December’s “Ruth’s Chris Freestyle,” which pairs him with Drakeo, and this February’s “Gordon Ramsay Freestyle,” where he somehow makes the fact of his father’s life sentence tonally agree with the 2002 movie Juwanna Mann. And while “Ruth’s Chris” confirms Drakeo as the scene’s sharpest writer—“I beat life twice, I’m a two-timer/Shoe shiner/Flick of the wrist—Look! I bought new diamonds”—Remble’s calm, deliberate opening verse clearly identifies him as its most likely star.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner | July 22, 2021 | 7.6 | ec50aa66-8c6f-4132-910c-bd9a1655674b | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Refining her approach, the Japanese musician shifts from singer-songwriter confessionalism to open-ended abstraction on this textured, ambient record. | Refining her approach, the Japanese musician shifts from singer-songwriter confessionalism to open-ended abstraction on this textured, ambient record. | Satomimagae: Hanazono | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/satomimagae-hanazono/ | Hanazono | Satomi Magae recognizes that memory is as bound up in the body as it is in the surroundings. Since her 2012 debut, awa, the guitarist and vocalist has seen reflections of herself in the world around her, using empty streets, vacant apartments, and barbed-wire-wrapped watchtowers as conduits for somber meditations on the passage of time. With soft, acoustic arrangements that barely rise above a whisper, Magae’s work splits the difference between narrative songwriting and ambient composition, combining aspects of each style into a greater whole. Her fourth studio album and first with the American experimental imprint RVNG (in partnership with Amsterdam-based Japanese label Guruguru Brain), Hanazono, draws Magae’s sparse, textural approach into a mode of taut and refined composition that doesn’t abandon the inner brilliance of her earlier material.
Magae adopted the Satomimagae moniker—a combination of her first and last names—as a university student in Tokyo, where she studied molecular biology. The moniker, which to English speakers might appear to contain the word “image,” became a fitting title for the project as Magae shifted away from singer-songwriter confessionalism toward something more impressionistic, using her hushed, delicate voice as a singular texture within an intricate ambient landscape. Early standouts like “Koki” and “Mouf” placed her voice alongside dusty field recordings and skittering electronics, rising through the mix only to retreat beneath gentle layers of white noise. Others, like “Bokusou” and “Hono,” stayed closer to Magae’s folk music roots, using guitar, voice, and an occasional droning sample to showcase her versatility as a songwriter.
These delicate home recordings eventually caught the ear of Kranky-affiliated producer Chihei Hatakeyama, whose label White Paddy Mountain went on to release Magae’s second and third albums. On 2014’s Koko and 2017’s Kremi, she returned to narrative songwriting with newfound precision, enhancing the spare arrangements with the lush, natural reverb of the space around her. The albums share a certain affinity with Liz Harris’ early recordings as Grouper in their oblique approach to acoustic guitar, detaching the instrument from its associations with the singer-songwriter tradition only to reassert its utility in new ways.
Magae’s latest album, Hanazono, builds on contours long present in her work, refining the tone of her songwriting in ways that feel uniquely cohesive within her catalog. On “Hebisan,” the songwriter returns to a familiar headspace, layering sparse guitar and vocal lines over distant field recordings. Abandoning the Japanese lyrics of her earliest material in favor of English-language imagism, Magae describes a wide-eyed snake tightening its grip around the speaker’s body, inducing comfort and security where some might expect fear. Despite the inescapable presence of this narrative, Magae’s off-kilter arrangement favors her heartbreaking vocals over the lyrics, which function more as poetic scaffolding than traditional narrative.
Hanazono is the Japanese word for “flower garden,” and while Magae includes numerous natural images within the album’s lyrics, she is much more interested in language as an acoustic texture. On “Suiheisen,” a smoldering, low-end field recording gives way to a meditative singing bowl and finger-picked acoustic guitar as the songwriter constructs a dense wall of spectral, reverb-drenched harmonies. While the lyrics describe a scenic moment catching insects before sunset, Magae’s soft and staggered vocal phrasing renders them nearly indecipherable, punctuating the mix with occasional images that seem otherwise content to drift artfully in the background.
It’s tempting to view ambient music in terms of a general arc built on moments of tension and resolution, and as much as Hanazono might adhere to this tradition on the surface, it feels more committed to refining earlier iterations of the project in pursuit of a new polish. About 45 seconds into “Uzu,” a steady guitar riff gives way to one of the more singular moments on the album, as Magae’s voice recedes into a soothing hum accompanied by changing chords. It’s the kind of sentiment that could have easily gone unnoticed on any of the songwriter’s earlier releases, but here it arrives with the sobering weight of a breakthrough. The fact that Magae is still exploring new ideas nearly a decade into her career feels like an achievement in itself.
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. | 2021-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | May 3, 2021 | 7.6 | ec5c560a-888c-480f-b619-7485731f0145 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
The music is a highlight of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, an undeniable, oft-disquieting mixtape of golden-age rock’n’roll, radio DJ patter, and period-specific commercials. | The music is a highlight of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, an undeniable, oft-disquieting mixtape of golden-age rock’n’roll, radio DJ patter, and period-specific commercials. | Various Artists: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | In the 1960s, Paul Revere & the Raiders were a goofy garage-rock band popular with well-behaved tweens. Calling the band square doesn’t go far enough; they were altogether edgeless. Among the Raiders’ many sins was a habit of dressing in full Revolutionary War regalia, tri-corner hats and all. In Quentin Tarantino’s ninth movie, the actress Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) teases an ex about enjoying the Raiders and, moments later, there’s a shot of Charles Manson leaving the area. The music grows ominous. The message is loud and clear: The Raiders may have been cheesy, but when compared with a countercultural menace, those tri-corner hats start to look pretty good.
Since K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ’70s closed out the opening scene of 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, music has played an outsized role in Tarantino’s films. Some songs take star turns, as with Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” at Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction or the Coasters’ lapdance scene in Death Proof. But given Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood’s Los Angeles setting and the density of its references, and given that it’s the first of Tarantino’s “history” pictures to be set in the pop music era, this soundtrack has more resonance than any before it.
Essentially a buddy comedy featuring Leonard DiCaprio as an aging actor and Brad Pitt as his stunt double who pal around on the periphery of the Manson murders of 1969, the movie is pretty, pretty, pretty (especially when cars and Brad Pitt are involved); its politics, however, are ugly, ugly, ugly: violently reactionary in their treatment of the late ’60s counterculture and its concomitant burnout. The music that connects the fictional and non-fictional worlds of the movie is a soft-serve swirl, pretty even when it’s ugly, an undeniable, oft-disquieting mixtape of golden-age rock’n’roll, radio DJ patter, and period-specific commercials.
Like the Raiders, the groups here evoke the mythic surf-rock ’60s, good timin’ before the vibes went bad. Deep Purple, the prog and metal pioneers, offer two songs from 1968, the year in which the movie begins, the year before the band went feral. One of those songs is a cover of Neil Diamond’s “Kentucky Woman,” and Diamond’s oddball “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” is on the soundtrack, too. It’s either a celebration or a parody of gospel music; evangelicals didn’t know in early 1969, and it may be that Diamond didn’t either.
The rest of the offerings are from minor groups of the mid- and late-’60s, like the Buchanan Brothers, Roy Head and the Traits, the Box Tops, and (the better-known) Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. These songs bleed tension from the film; it’s hard not to smile at the ringing harmonies on Los Bravos’ “Bring a Little Lovin’” or Dee Clark’s syrupy croon on “Hey Little Girl.” Frequently, they accompany shots of Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, cruising around town. But it’s all unimpeachable car music, propulsive and melodic, a playlist assembled by a know-it-all who’d be unbearable were it not for the fact that he knows a lot.
When less obscure, the music is flagrant in its allusions. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” shows up briefly (The Graduate was released in December ’67) to whisper of transgression. “Paxton Quigley’s Had the Course,” by the British duo Chad and Jeremy, is a song with a rock’n’roll introduction that, two minutes in, shifts to a gorgeous keyboard interlude. It’s a formal playfulness worthy of the Beatles and it’s exciting to hear minor moptops playing similar games.
There are other familiar songs here, handholds to guide the listener through the obscurities. A cover of Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” by Buffy Sainte-Marie accompanies a scene of Sharon Tate driving through Hollywood. Mitchell’s original is nostalgic, but Sainte-Marie trills of daffy innocence, forever-youth unmarred by darkness. The carousel imagery is particularly poignant given that so much of Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood deals with westerns and painted ponies; with color, motion, and distraction. Sainte-Marie speeds up when she sings, “We can’t return/We can only look,” as if to race right by it.
Other, less cheerful lyrics are lent emphasis by their presence in the film. “Treat Her Right” stresses chivalry only as a means to an end, while the chorus of “Son of a Lovin’ Man” makes a singalong of a genetic predisposition for lechery: “I’m the son of a lovin’ man/My daddy told me get you all the lovin’ you can.” Phrases like these are vestiges of the period, but given the way the movie valorizes old-fashioned men—drinking, watching television, hitting others in the face—they stand out all the same.
The DJ patter we hear coming out of the movie’s radios, introducing songs and leading out of commercials, seems more intentional. The ads hawk perfume and cologne and cars and tanning butter, an explosion of superficiality that, Tarantino indicates, was overripe and turning rotten. But they were so funny. So weird. So beautiful. Those are the qualities the director’s fantastical, ultra-nostalgic film means to celebrate. The dream of the ’60s is alive, eternal. We’re urged to ignore the lame cultural context of Paul Revere & the Raiders because you can have fun dancing to their song “Good Thing.” This kind of fun is what makes the movie provocative. It’s a dare: Come on, those hippies are murderers, you have to admit you’re enjoying this. And maybe you’re not. But that’s less of a risk with this soundtrack, which, despite its countless references, doesn’t want you to think too hard. It wants you to push down the pedal and drive. | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Columbia | July 31, 2019 | 7.7 | ec5eacf8-facb-4358-be48-d048b0b85825 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Senegal’s Arouna Kane and Sweden’s Karl Jonas Winqvist, plus a host of musicians on two continents, spin improv sessions and long-distance overdubs into airy, dreamlike music as generous as it is joyous. | Senegal’s Arouna Kane and Sweden’s Karl Jonas Winqvist, plus a host of musicians on two continents, spin improv sessions and long-distance overdubs into airy, dreamlike music as generous as it is joyous. | Wau Wau Collectif: Yaral Sa Doom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wau-wau-collectif-yaral-sa-doom/ | Yaral Sa Doom | It takes less than a minute for Yaral Sa Doom to begin levitating. Multi-instrumentalist Arouna Kane and producer Karl Jonas Winqvist ground their collaborative effort in the playing of Kane’s Senegalese countrymen and contributions from Winqvist’s fellow Swedes, but in their production, the duo massage guitar, hand drums, sax, and flute until each is pliable, soft, and almost putty-like, molding the instrumentation to tissue-thin synths and richly reverbed vocals. Everything is so light, so wispy, it sometimes seems like a decent wind—or just a little mild cynicism—might blow the whole thing away. Instead, Yaral Sa Doom holds its ground, its extreme sweetness balanced by Winqvist and Kane’s exploratory ethos.
The project came together when Winqvist made a trip to Toubab Dialaw, a former fishing village an hour down the coast from Dakar that’s now home to a thriving arts community. Over the course of several weeks, he befriended local musicians, including Kane, and recorded a few improv sessions. Back home in Sweden, Winqvist enlisted friends to augment the tapes with sax, keys, and more, then passed the files back and forth over WhatsApp with Kane, and the two men refashioned the pieces into a fluid fugue of a set. Their dub-like edits—sliding a track’s levels around the bass, winding up a spoken vocal with reverb and delay—unify two very different styles of music; neither the Senegalese nor the Swedes ever seem to be in total control of the record, but instead their contributions work off of one another. This sense of cooperation elicits what is at times an almost childlike joy in these songs, and ensures that, for all its starry-eyed wonder, Yaral Sa Doom stays on the right side of naivete.
Of course, if the notion of a white European parachuting into Africa and emerging with a sample pack to manipulate and peddle gives you pause—well, it should. The history of the Western music industry’s engagement with African musicians is littered with appropriation, extreme economic exploitation, and general confusion, even among well-meaning artists. Sahel Sounds, which in addition to Yaral Sa Doom is responsible for bringing Mdou Moctar and Les Filles de Illighadad to North American and European audiences, has distinguished itself by forfeiting exclusive rights to the music it releases and splitting the take 50/50 with artists. Wau Wau Collectif seem to slice up the aesthetic pie in a similar way: All of the artists who appear on this album are credited by name, as are the songwriters, while Winqvist and Kane’s exchanges ensured that Senegalese hands helped to form the album’s overall shape. These are crucial details to consider any time a European or North American artist brings a microphone to Africa, but they feel especially pertinent in Yaral Sa Doom’s case, where inequity could easily be masked by the overwhelming kindness that characterizes the album.
Indeed, generosity is Yaral Sa Doom’s guiding virtue, even as its singers address Senegal’s social ills (the album’s title is a Wolof phrase that means “educate the young”). The songs here seem to drift into existence, emerging from mists of synth and stepping into a rosy sunrise hush. Album standout “Thiante” foregrounds Jango Diabaté’s bejeweled xalam, surrounding it with sympathetic puffs of flute as it nestles into a Naugahyde keyboard line that echoes the Cure’s “Close to Me.” Winqvist divebombs the beach jazz of “Si Tu Savais Juste” with a toy synth while Ndongo Faye’s steady drumming chops Henry Moore Selder’s organ line into Bitches Brew hash. Elsewhere, when Winqvist’s Omnichord gasps with delight at Kane’s gentle vocals, you don’t need to know the song is called “Salamaleikoum” to feel welcomed by it.
That hospitality is also evident in Kane and Winqvist’s attention to texture. The Swede chants us into the album, whispering chk-chk percussion like he’s singing a ska lullaby, and Andreas Söderström’s ukulele is mic’d so close, the sound of the pick hitting the strings is louder than the strings themselves. These little sounds draw you in, so when the song breaks into a wider vista, you can’t help but be awestruck by the view. Winqvist and Kane drown what sounds like a guitar in hiss in “Mouhamodou Lo and His Children,” making the song feel like it’s set in a sunken Polynesia. Even the way the rippling tone of Kane’s voice is treated with delay in the opening moments of “Riddim Rek Ya Niouy Mom” puts the focus on its grain as much as the words he’s saying.
The album’s inverted priorities—mood over structure, micro over macro—make it feel more like a collection of contemplations than proper songs, which is to its abundant credit. At times the construction of Yaral Sa Doom resembles that of Theseus’ ship, with new elements replacing what’s already been established as we coast through time. It’s a trick whose effects are often genuinely moving, as when Ousmane Ba’s flute and Kane’s bass fall into sync on closer “Legui Legui,” only to be sent away while Annarella Sörlin’s own flute and Lars Fredrik Swahn’s piano trace one another’s lines from across the stage. When Ba leads the ensemble back into the center of the circle, they emerge with the grace of an aging star being ushered out for one last curtain call.
The music that Winqvist, Kane, Ba, Diabaté, and the others made in their Toubab Dialaw improvisations is uniformly gorgeous and brimming with mutual pleasure, and Yaral Sa Doom’s production frames those sessions as a beautiful dream. The gleeful disbelief, the happy hunch that things are not as they usually are, dizzies up the record just a bit, pulling it slightly out of time and space—all while staying close enough to terra firma to not lose sight of where it came from.
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. | 2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Sahel Sounds | March 17, 2021 | 7.7 | ec6263df-0a77-4b17-b151-0f88c160c653 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The Japanese footwork producer largely steps away from the genre on this five-track EP, exploring an illusion of motion through a woozy sense of space and stillness. | The Japanese footwork producer largely steps away from the genre on this five-track EP, exploring an illusion of motion through a woozy sense of space and stillness. | Foodman: Moriyama EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foodman-moriyama-ep/ | Moriyama EP | In the most frenetic footwork tracks, a curious thing happens: Despite the breakneck tempo, the music seems to slow down, even freezing in midair. It’s a disorienting version of motion, like catching a glimpse of spinning chrome hubcaps from a moving car. For a long time, the Japanese producer Foodman strove for that illusion by stripping away most of the genre’s percussive hallmarks. You could hear the effect in “Oyaji Voice,” where all the elements seemed to bob in space, nearly untethered from the downbeat. Of late, though, he has been intentionally slowing his music; on the five-track EP, Moriyama, Foodman largely leaves footwork and its tempos behind, using a broader range to explore an even woozier sense of space and stillness.
The opening “Mizuboro” shows how he’s honed his hyperkinetic style. His technique remains as pointillistic as ever, daubing on tiny blots of tone that are more fanciful than functional: canned congas, horn blats, laser bursts, water splashes. But where his drip-drop assemblages once verged upon chaos, now the steady pulse—a three-against-four cadence folded into a polyrhythmic pretzel—shapes a multi-dimensional matrix reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, with brilliant points of light fanning out in all directions. While he used to work in miniature, dipping in and out of his jittery compositions in a minute or two, “Mizuboro” unspools across six minutes, strengthening its hypnotic pull as it goes.
“Kishimen” has more in common with the herky-jerky antics of his previous records, though this time the playful palette splays out over a four-to-the-floor kick drum. It’s what house music would sound like in the hands of someone who grew up in the back room of a novelty store full of noise-making gewgaws. If you’ve ever sat at a cheap Casio keyboard with a young child, you’ll recognize that the fundamental impulse at work within this parade of ridiculous sounds is its very incongruity. “Soudesu” employs similar inspirations for more atmospheric ends; between its dog barks, Woody Woodpecker woodblocks, and laugh-like loops, it feels like an ambient remix of Saturday cartoons.
But two tracks suggest more radical departures, as well as avenues for further exploration. “Nanika” is as provocative a collage as he’s ever fashioned, roping together Detroit-techno chords, cut-up sax bleats, free-jazz flute, and other sampled textures reminiscent of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica. Despite the way snapped guitar strings and rolling percussion jostle the track, the energy remains meditative. “Tokai Desu” is even dreamier. It saunters along leisurely, an absent-minded melody floating above calming synth chords. Flutes pipe up like the sparkling eyes of forest creatures; woodblocks, chimes, and cowbell carve out crisp, high-definition shapes against the misty backdrop. It’s the most tranquil thing in Foodman’s catalog, but it doesn’t sacrifice any of the inventiveness of his earlier music. It simply makes the dream of floating on air seem closer than ever. | 2018-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Palto Flats | November 27, 2018 | 7.5 | ec63d70a-604b-4ffc-855a-9d3437ec67aa | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
This 4xCD/1xDVD set comes packaged in a wooden container with popcorn-bag-style sleeves, postcard tracklists, and even a pewter medallion. Oh, the music: It culls tracks from the four recording sessions that fed Jason Molina's 2006 album, Fading Trails, and yet, these generous odds and ends make for a better listening experience than the release for which they were intended. | This 4xCD/1xDVD set comes packaged in a wooden container with popcorn-bag-style sleeves, postcard tracklists, and even a pewter medallion. Oh, the music: It culls tracks from the four recording sessions that fed Jason Molina's 2006 album, Fading Trails, and yet, these generous odds and ends make for a better listening experience than the release for which they were intended. | Magnolia Electric Co.: Sojourner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10516-sojourner/ | Sojourner | Names don't seem to be terribly important to Jason Molina. He began recording under various guises during the mid-1990s and released his first album as Songs: Ohia in 1997. Earlier this decade, he unceremoniously changed the band's name to the Magnolia Electric Company (such that Songs: Ohia's final album, called The Magnolia Electric Company, is often filed under both S and M). Recently, whether by choice or by common usage, both the The and the mpany have been dropped, leaving only Magnolia Electric Co. It's not as drastic as the moniker-shifting of Will Oldham, but it is interesting considering that Molina (who also releases under his own name) is the sole long-term member of Magnolia Electric Co.
That most recent incarnation of the name appears on every piece of the Sojourner box set-- the wooden container, the five discs, their popcorn-bag-style sleeves, the postcard tracklists, even the pewter medallion. Only the fold-out map of the stars carries no insignia, which seems vaguely appropriate. This branding implies a more rooted identity, but Molina apparently knows that names changes as easily and as quickly as the scenery, and one assumes that for him it's never the same from one day to the next. It's difficult to tell whether his nomadic lifestyle (he tours nearly constantly) is the impetus behind his music, which obsesses over displacement through lunar and celestial imagery, as if he's constantly navigating by the stars. Or perhaps it's the other way around: Maybe his musical fascinations demand displacement and rootlessness. Like Isaac Brock in the 1990s, Molina is concerned with constant motion through an American landscape. His albums, and especially Sojourner, are postmillennial road-trip art-rock, albeit in a very traditionalist, rather than an existential, vein.
Molina's view of the country has more in common with Dust Bowl itinerants or even nineteenth-century landscape painters than with most current touring acts. Sojourner is his largest canvas yet, and perhaps his most detailed and deliberate. The 4xCD/1xDVD set culls tracks from the four recording sessions that fed his 2006 album, Fading Trails, and yet, these generous odds and ends make for a better listening experience than the release for which they were intended. Perhaps it's the length: Molina's musings sound like products of long drives spent looking at barren scenery, and it often seems like that's how they're best consumed and considered. Sojourner will get you pretty far.
So let's start in Memphis: Sun Sessions is the shortest disc in the set, with only four patiently paced songs forming a solid EP. With its full sound that plays into the local mood without trying to re-create Bluff City sounds, "Talk to Me Devil, Again" goes down to the crossroads, but "Hold on Magnolia" and the traditional "Trouble in Mind" extol the virtues of strength, perseverance, and hard-won hope-- the last a rarity for Molina. "I won't be blue always," he sings on "Trouble in Mind", finding solace in the century-old words. "You know the sun is going to shine in my backdoor someday."
Not everything is so rosy: "Everything in its place," Molina sings on "Steady Now", the opening track on Shohola. "The world does have to end in pain." Featuring Molina accompanied only by his guitar and the roomy hiss of the recorder, Shohola is lonely and quiet like his 2006 vinyl-only album Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, although never quite as intense. It's a perfect setting for his off-kilter vocals, which are often compared to Neil Young despite not sounding very much like that grizzled Canadian. On "Spanish Moon Fall and Rise" and "The Lamb's Song" he sounds just barely on key, with a steeliness in his voice that is often mistaken for detachment. But here even his breaths are audible as he tentatively picks his way through "Night Country" and "Shiloh Temple Bell", as if driving down some dark road.
Nashville Moon and The Black Ram both return Molina to a full-band setting. The former, produced by Steve Albini, emphasizes his classic-rock chops on "Lonesome Valley" and "Texas 71", allowing for jammy passages, short guitar solos, and underlinable declarations like "I make my mistakes on my own time." The band is especially solid, most notably Mark Rice's drums and Mike "Slo-Mo" Brenner's stately pedal and lap steel, but there's an almost self-consciously workmanlike spirit to these dozen road hymns, as if Albini is highlighting a blue-collar ethos in Molina's words. The straightforward arrangements on "Hammer Down" and "Don't Fade on Me" strengthen their impact, however, and the clear, clean melodic lines tie all the songs together, almost too neatly.
Black Ram is something weirder altogether, and the most satisfying disc in the set. David Lowery's production highlights the odd and the atmospheric in Molina's music, creating a weary travelogue that strives to pinpoint the epic in the everyday. The title track clamors dramatically, the guitars on "What's Broken Becomes Better" churn tensely, and "Will-O-the-Wisp" sounds like a Morricone soundtrack for some unfilmed Western. It's a long drive for someone with too much to think about.
The DVD, titled The Road Becomes What You Leave, wraps all these disparate approaches together as Molina and his road band travel through cold, rural Canada and play a few of these compositions. But it only points out how different these four discs are and how multifaceted and expandable Molina's seemingly limited artistry can be. Spanning multiple styles and states as it maps out both a personal and a national landscape, the set is perhaps accidentally one of the strongest releases of his career, despite its catch-all organization. Molina still sounds rootless and displaced, but Sojourner triangulates a place that's as close to home as he ever seems to get. | 2007-08-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 8, 2007 | 7.7 | ec656e17-5a25-498a-80e4-9238ab511495 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The pop star’s first live album is a collage of Miley’s various eras and personas, not all of which have aged well or translate coherently to a live setting. | The pop star’s first live album is a collage of Miley’s various eras and personas, not all of which have aged well or translate coherently to a live setting. | Miley Cyrus: Attention: Miley Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miley-cyrus-attention-miley-live/ | Attention: Miley Live | Miley Cyrus built a brand as a Disney Channel pop star and then spent the rest of her career setting fire to it, contorting through one highly-stylized phase after another in order to announce herself as anyone other than Hannah Montana. Sometimes, it seemed like she was actively trying to confuse her audience. Every album cycle brought something wholly different: She zigzagged through the foam-fingered, twerk-to-tweet pipeline of 2013’s Bangerz, the Flaming Lips acid trip that churns through 2015’s Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz, the country twang of 2017’s Younger Now, and the leather jackets and platinum mullet that ushered in her most recent studio album, 2020’s Plastic Hearts.
The longer this has gone on, the more she’s defined herself by her ability to transform. Like Taylor Swift perching on a pile of her past selves, Miley likes to wink at the caricatures she’s created over the years. She commemorated the tenth anniversary of the leaked TMZ video that lost her a Walmart deal by posting, “Happy 10-year anniversary to the groundbreaking video of a teenager smoking a bong & saying dumb shit to their friends,” on her Instagram. A decade after she had to issue an “apology” for posing for a Vanity Fair cover that showed her bare back, she tweeted a New York Post headline from the time that read MILEY’S SHAME. “IM NOT SORRY,” she wrote in all caps. “Fuck YOU.” These slot easily into the wave of maligned female artists reclaiming their media narrative, and with every new declaration, she seems intent on articulating her legacy.
Midway through Attention, her first live album outside of the Hannah Montana concert recordings, Cyrus bellows to the crowd, “People, when they think about me, they think of someone…that’s been a million different things… A lot of different identities.” Over the 80-minute set, she toggles between poses, seemingly arguing that all these shards of Cyrus can coalesce into a cohesive musical identity—that she can compel a crowd not in spite of, but because, this disjointedness.
Attention captures parts of Cyrus’ November 2021 set from the Super Bowl Music Fest, where she opened for Green Day at what is now called the Crypto.com arena. Fans allegedly curated the live album setlist, and only two of the 20 tracks here are new, including the abrasive title track where she repeats the word “attention” over blares of faux-metal guitar before the layers of distorted shouting—“You’ve got questions? I NEED ANSWERS!”—kick in. It’s play-acted performance art, confused and unironic—and by the fourth time you’ve heard Cyrus screech “WRONG ANSWERS ONLY!” you wonder who this is for, or what it’s supposed to signify.
“You,” the other new offering here, fares better. It’s a throaty ballad, as Cyrus pleads for a specific vision of love: someone to get thrown out of bars with, someone to flip off her exes with. She interrupts the song’s charm when she chirps about a “horsey and carriage” in the chorus, but the baby voice becomes more tolerable when she soars out of it and starts to belt. That’s the allure of a Miley Cyrus live album: stripped from all the spectacle and scandal, the butter costumes and the prosthetic penises, you just get to hear her sing.
The strength of that voice—a guttural alto that’s raw and robust and gleaming—has made Cyrus uniquely gifted as a cover artist, imbuing motion and meaning into any track she touches. It’s telling that, on this album of fan favorites, seven songs are either entirely or partially covers. On some, Cyrus mashes her tracks into classic staples. She slips “Nothing Compares to You” into the middle of a slower, more ragged “Wrecking Ball.” Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang” fades right into the thump and throb of “See You Again,” a jarring pairing that works because Cyrus’s voice can make a song she sang on the Disney Channel sound menacing. She shines on a ragged, stomping cover of her godmother Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”—“I cannot compete with you,” she spits, the hurt clear in her voice. “Jolene” bleeds right into “High,” a stunning one-two punch that highlights one of the best tracks Cyrus has ever written. The lyrics are sparse and shameless and acute—“In my head, I did my very best saying bye/And I don’t miss you, but I think of you and don’t know why I still feel high.”
It’s not just disconcerting, then, but disappointing to flashback to the more grating songs in her catalog. On the live album, it’s clear just how little irony there is in some of her notoriously nonsensical lyrics. “We run things/Things don’t run we,” she trills on “We Can’t Stop,” in the same tone she uses to belt the motivational speaker fodder, “The Climb.” “Driving so fast ‘bout to piss on myself,” she coos on “4x4,” nonchalant and unfussed. It would be unfair to expect Cyrus to edit her set down to only her strongest songs, but she seems hesitant to acknowledge the absurdity in her past music. Cyrus’ speech about her disparate identities comes at the end of the nearly nine-minute long version of “23,” one of a slew of Mike WILL-Made It collaborations that anchored her through the Bangerz era. “I’m in the club/High on perc/With my shades on,” she bleats in the chorus, her vowels clipped and staccato. Cyrus sounds limp, drowned out by the constantly swirling siren that underpins the song. It’s jarring to hear these songs now, and the appropriation baked into their legacy. For years, Cyrus clung to hip hop stylings and aesthetics, creating controversy after controversy, but here, she sounds barely committed to the Bangerz stretch of songs.
“When people hear my music, they hear a fragment of a time,” she told Vanity Fair in 2019. Attention gives a lot of fragments, but Cyrus can’t pull them together convincingly. All we have are snapshots of an artist who still can’t tell us what any of them mean. | 2022-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | April 14, 2022 | 5.6 | ec7486ea-7d04-4720-befc-bf70b3beb977 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The Los Angeles-based producer and composer adds singing to his repertoire, setting snapshots of past romances against warm, nostalgic production. | The Los Angeles-based producer and composer adds singing to his repertoire, setting snapshots of past romances against warm, nostalgic production. | Taylor McFerrin: Love’s Last Chance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-mcferrin-loves-last-chance/ | Love’s Last Chance | Taylor McFerrin released his 2014 debut, Early Riser, on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label. Channeling McFerrin’s jazz chops through a spacey, synth-heavy lens, Early Riser fit snugly into the forward-thinking Brainfeeder vault. But its reliance on guest singers—including McFerrin’s father, the gifted improv vocalist Bobby McFerrin—made the album feel more like a collage of influences than the arrival of a sharply defined new voice. Five years on, McFerrin’s second album redresses that issue: The Los Angeles-based producer and composer adds singing to his repertoire, and emotes nostalgic feelings over self-produced backdrops with the detectable influence of late-’80s UK soul. Love’s Last Chance intends to establish McFerrin’s talents as a lyricist, rather than simply a production foil for other vocalists.
The album’s vintage synthesizers bring a warm quality to the songs, complimenting McFerrin’s romantic lyrics. Lush string samples on instrumental opener “Her Entrance,” played by composer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, roll into the wistful “All I See Is You,” where McFerrin’s steady but funky drum programming brings to mind the sultry snap of ’80s British R&B troupe Loose Ends. The song retells a familiar scene: Two people in separate relationships catch one another’s desirous eye. The glance prompts McFerrin to muse, “Either you’ll be love or trouble.”
McFerrin frames songs around such tiny moments, restraining his language to avoid overcomplicating his sentiments. Like a dusty box of photos or an abandoned social media account, Love’s Last Chance collects snapshots of past romances. On “Memory Digital,” a stuttering bass-powered track shot through with slivers of Fender Rhodes, McFerrin marks the end of a tryst in thoroughly modern fashion: “All that I have left of you are pictures on my phone.” The vintage sound of the production beds his words in fuzzy texture, at times conveying the same moodiness as Dev Hynes’ Blood Orange.
The sumptuous production peaks in the album’s first half, where gently pulsing bass lines and mid-tempo drum patterns create a seamless groove. But the sepia tint begins to fade in the home stretch. With flute by Elena Pinderhughes and a samba-inspired rhythm, the perky instrumental “As You Are” abruptly breaks the seductive atmosphere. It’s followed by “I Can’t Give Your Time Back,” a melodramatic ballad infused with sullen electric bass and guitar. But when McFerrin trills, “You should leave me, baby, before I leave you,” the threat sounds toothless and whiny. After that, the would-be redemption of closer “So Cold in the Summer” feels hard to believe.
The uneven second half of Love’s Last Chance fails to match the charms of the first. But by trimming the guest list and writing lyrics inspired by personal experience, McFerrin has found a clearer sense of purpose. Having the confidence to vocalize his own feelings suits him well. It isn’t quite a complete realization of his songwriting voice—McFerrin is more convincing when he’s introducing standalone scenarios than attempting to draw fulfilling conclusions—but on Love’s Last Chance, he sounds comfortable as the main attraction. | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | August 21, 2019 | 6.9 | ec756356-c0a2-4c4c-ad4a-0e890e4d5ba7 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
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 a career-defining jazz masterpiece, collecting two hours of improvised solo performances from the piano virtuoso. | 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 a career-defining jazz masterpiece, collecting two hours of improvised solo performances from the piano virtuoso. | Keith Jarrett: Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keith-jarrett-solo-concerts-bremen-lausanne/ | Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne | “My first experience composing was adding a note to the last chord of a Mozart concerto,” Keith Jarrett told Down Beat Magazine. “I’d play it right at the teacher’s house and the other way at home.” It’s a quintessential anecdote from the pianist, confirming his early years as a prodigy and an innate belief that he might improve upon the work of the composer that many consider the greatest who ever lived. For Jarrett, a boy growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania in the 1950s, who so loved his piano he wished to sleep underneath it at night, a single note, placed perfectly, could make all the difference. And he never underestimated his own talent. One imagines that in his mind, he was maybe the only person who could find that note and place it precisely where it belonged.
In 1973, a couple of decades after that youthful foray into composition, Jarrett was touring Europe, playing solo piano concerts, and traveling with his friend, the producer and founder of the ECM label, Manfred Eicher. Together they were embarking on and recording a new idea for a live album—evening-length shows in concert halls where classical pieces are typically presented, in which a pianist plays no predetermined material, but rather improvises for 60 to 80 minutes. Two of those gigs—Lausanne, Switzerland on March 20, and Bremen, Germany, on July 12—would be gathered in a 3xLP box set called Solo-Concerts on ECM in November. This release, which Down Beat named Jazz Album of the Year in 1974, fully established Jarrett as the kind of musician who is both admired by his peers and also has great appeal to the general public, many of whom were not especially familiar with jazz.
Jarrett was already 10 years into his classical studies by the time he discovered jazz around age 14. He graduated high school early and was accepted at Berklee College of Music in Boston, though he didn’t finish his degree. After moving to New York, he sat in briefly at the Village Vanguard one night, and drummer Art Blakey was in the audience. He joined the Jazz Messengers shortly after and eventually connected with saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who invited him to play with his group in 1966.
The pianist’s three years with Lloyd, in a quartet that also included young drummer Jack DeJohnette, put him on the jazz world’s map. The group was a major live draw, one that won over enthusiastic crowds in rock venues such as the Fillmore in San Francisco. Lloyd was a charismatic figure who firmly embraced the budding new age spiritualism of the hippie movement. In a time when many jazz artists would still show up on stage in a coat and tie, Lloyd’s quartet wore colorful shorts and beaded necklaces, and their albums had names like The Flowering (1971) and Love-In (1967). They also threw the occasional Beatles cover into their live sets.
Lloyd recognized Jarrett’s talent and was shrewd enough to know he needed to indulge the young pianist’s creative whims to keep him in the group. He gave Jarrett ample space to build solos live, and the band played a handful of his compositions alongside Lloyd’s. On Jarrett pieces like the buoyant gospel jam “Sunday Morning” from Love-In, distinctive elements that would crop up regularly in his solo work in the decade after—funky left-hand grooves paired with ringing, melodic, and instantly memorable right-hand leads—are easily identifiable.
Lloyd, who would later become a devotee of transcendental meditation, also made an impression on Jarrett’s spirituality, turning him on to the work of early 20th-century mystic George Gurdjieff. Besides his writing, Gurdjieff composed hymns for piano, and Jarrett would eventually cut an album’s worth of them for release by ECM in 1980. By that time, recordings of his solo concerts, especially 1975’s The Köln Concert, which went gold, had been so wildly successful he could record whatever he wanted.
But that was later. While Jarrett was still working with Lloyd, both he and DeJohnette caught the ear of Miles Davis, who was riding a wave of adulation and controversy following Bitches Brew and was putting together a band to take his new vision of jazz on the road. Jarrett was resistant to the idea of electric instruments, but after playing with the band in 1969, he quickly changed his tune, and he and DeJohnette were in the group and on record by the time of October 1970’s Miles Davis at Fillmore. While Jarrett was in Davis’ group, Eicher wrote asking if he would record for his new label, ECM. Where Miles was experimenting with density—more keyboards, more percussion, more electrification—Eichner’s label, as embodied by its famous motto, had a different ethos: “the most beautiful sound next to silence.”
Jazz was changing rapidly in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and by some measures it was in trouble. Rock and soul were ascendant in youth culture, jazz labels were struggling, and clubs were closing down. To adapt, many artists, following Davis’ lead, were incorporating rock rhythms and instrumentation into their music, and fusion would develop a healthy audience in the first half of the ’70s.
But labels also adapted to market pressures by issuing records that only made sense in a jazz context. The post-free-jazz avant-garde was well-established and flourished on smaller imprints and in communities like the loft scene in New York. It even made inroads with the majors, as with releases by the likes of Anthony Braxton, the Revolutionary Ensemble, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago on Arista, the A&M offshoot Horizon, and Atlantic.
Jazz as “art music” was a point of differentiation, and solo albums were on the rise. Braxton’s For Alto (1971) and Lee Konitz’s Lone-Lee (1975) were two of many records, featuring a single horn that required a very particular kind of listening to resonate. Along with Facing You, other highly regarded solo piano ECM releases were Chick Corea’s Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 (1971) and Paul Bley’s Open, to Love (1972). In 1973 and ’74, the Newport Jazz Festival hosted for the first time concert showcases for solo pianists specifically, including performances by Jarrett and McCoy Tyner.
In this milieu, with the audience changing and the market scrambled between jazz as a “serious” art form and jazz that returns to its populist roots, Jarrett was positioned to make an impact. His musical interests ranged widely between folk tunes you could hum, Western classical forms, the mystical end of spiritual jazz informed by non-Western music, and jazz proper of every kind. In the coming years, he’d write pieces that could be seamlessly incorporated into pop (see “Long as I Know You’re Living Yours,” which Steely Dan lifted wholesale for “Gaucho”) and music that captured a soothing mood so well it was absorbed into new age (“pipe in a little Keith Jarrett” was an important component of Tony Blundetto’s plan to open a massage studio in season 5 of The Sopranos). And with his solo piano concerts, these developments were brought to bear in a spontaneous expression. Each night, as first heard on these European tours, he would sit down with no idea what he would play, and the music would come out of him.
When you first encounter Jarrett’s solo work, it feels a little like a trick. Did he really not know what was going to happen ahead of time? Did it really come to him at the moment? In one sense, what he does could be considered “free improvisation,” because there are no pre-set restrictions on where a piece might lead, no fixed tempo or harmonic structure that determines its shape. But free improvisation is not the same as non-idiomatic improvisation. At the piano, Jarrett is steeped in idiom, and after many years of listening to them you think, “Here’s the funky groove section,” “Here’s the nod to Harlem stride,” “Here’s the atonal passage,” and so on. Rather than tuning into someone inventing something from nothing, we’re hearing a musician who has absorbed a great deal from across genres, who assembles what he’s borrowed into something new and all his own.
In 1970, psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi introduced the concept of the “flow state,” and it easily maps onto our perception of what Jarrett is doing (at least one dissertation connects the psychologist’s ideas to the latter’s playing). Csíkszentmihályi’s 1990 mass-market book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, was popular in part because its central idea seemed so obvious: We all know what it’s like to be so immersed in an activity that we lose track of time, where a certain amount of our conscious awareness falls away and we’re operating from a more instinctive place. And if you’ve known and identified this state, it might inform how you hear an album like Solo-Concerts. At its best, this album is the flow state on wax, an auditory expression of how it feels to be deep in the zone, where one’s relationship to time shifts or dissolves altogether.
Part of the Jarrett legend is that important solo works are created under less-than-ideal conditions. For The Köln Concert, it was lack of sleep from touring paired with a substandard piano. Here, his health was the problem. Though both evenings on Solo-Concerts have extended passages of serenity, during this period, he often found himself in excruciating pain because of a nagging back injury that had never fully healed. At the Bremen show, in particular, he wore a brace and was in such rough shape it was unclear if the show could happen at all. He was on a regimen of painkillers, and at each new stop on the tour, he followed a careful routine of bedrest and minimal exertion until showtime.
Because of his presence on the piano bench and his own constitution, music has always been hard on Jarrett’s body. That would be true of anyone playing an instrument at this level of frequency and intensity, but he had some quirks that exacerbated his problems. The way he sat and his penchant for rising, falling, twisting, and contorting his frame when he plays is part of that. Watch videos of Jarrett performing when he’s feeling the music—he scrunches his face, shakes his head, stands up. He’s dancing, more or less.
The structural coherence of these lengthy improvisations across two one-hour sets is astonishing. Jarrett and the audience agreed to share the space for 64 minutes, and his role, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, was to take this fixed unit of time and decorate it. There are sections that channel the array of genres and idioms mentioned above, but almost everything flows as if it’s been carefully mapped out in advance. A melodic motif that’s hinted at may not fully blossom until 10 or 15 minutes later, and when it finally arrives it feels inevitable, as if this were the only possible outcome of the seed planted earlier.
Where Jarrett’s improvisational skill and talent might suggest music described as “effortless,” some of the beauty of his solo piano work is that you can hear the exertion. It “flows,” yes, but you hear the guiding hand of the maker, and sometimes he has to give the music a push to set it off in a new direction. “Bremen, Pt. 1” opens with a tender ballad section that at first seems like a rendition of some barely remembered standard, and it has a melody clear enough to imagine that it was once sung. It’s so gentle, it’s an invitation to lean in a little, maybe turn the volume up a touch, to better share in this period of time. After about four minutes, Jarrett picks up the pace and dynamics with his left hand and shifts the harmonic structure from something song-like to a repeating cycle, but the rhythmic drive grows and decays, like he’s climbing a hill and pauses periodically to rest.
As “Pt. 1” gains strength, Jarrett throws in some high-speed trills and lets the dissonance build with his left hand. The bass clef of a piano played with the sustain pedal down has always conveyed the feeling of meteorological systems—a crashing chord low on the keyboard thunders, and the harmonics that gather and multiply and dissipate are often described as “clouds.” Such are the weather patterns of “Pt. 1,” where the pianist zigzags between light and darkness.
The early passages of “Pt. 2” are a fascinating exploration of thick, earthy gospel chords, every one of which seems to involve all 10 of Jarrett’s fingers extending the root notes up to heaven. Where he typically uses such material as the basis for a rhythmic vamp, in the first few minutes here he sounds as if he’s trying to wrestle them into shape, discovering their harmonic contours and then figuring out how to craft it into a new song. Eventually, the chords congeal into a syncopated beat, which he wallows in while exploring how he can subvert the bounce with a pretty melodic digression. Here and there, this passage, like many of Jarrett’s blues/gospel vamps, makes me think of Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy,” the primordial banger that so many children internalized before they had ever heard the word “jazz.” And there’s a childlike delight in bopping your head and moving your body, twisting it into the kinds of shapes that we imagine him adopting as well as those colorful two-dimensional figures we absorbed from the television.
About 16 minutes in, Jarrett locks into a drone-heavy pattern that recalls Philip Glass, with a steady-state left-hand pulse whose repetition makes it sound like electronic music in the vein of Tangerine Dream. It’s a heady passage that makes you think of the physical properties of the matter that surrounds us, the mathematics behind shapes and angles and the gravity holding everything together, and then he explodes this digression with a deeply funky boogie-woogie section halfway through. From there, he moves through a neo-classical section redolent of a Chopin nocturne and then another pulsing minimalist piece that feels more orchestral in scale. When that builds and then crashes down, he offers a brief encore built around a folky tune, something you could imagine in a Cat Stevens song, bringing the evening back to the easeful melodicism where it began.
The mix of styles from Bremen—boogie-woogie, gospel, folk, funk, impressionistic classical ranging from the regal prettiness of Chopin to the humid romanticism of Debussy to the quaking rupture of Brahms, tinkly balladry, modal drone—are also present to varying degrees in Lausanne. And there are some additional wrinkles exclusive to this set, including discordant free playing and a passage where Jarrett explores the sound of the piano beyond the keyboard.
The latter begins after a brief pause almost exactly halfway through. Jarrett wrapped up the first half with a twitchy drone passage that ran for several minutes, filled with pockets of melody that seem to explode periodically as if they’re escaping from the stranglehold of the throbbing left-hand chord. After a rest and a few seconds of applause, he picks up by beating out a rhythm on the piano’s body while simultaneously plucking the strings inside the instrument while holding down the sustain pedal. He’d been using variations of this technique since the Charles Lloyd days, and his fiddling around with the guts of the thing produces a feeling of delight and a sense of possibility. From there, Jarrett might be showing off as he jumps between a catchy gospel/R&B motif and then back to the atonal strumming and banging, as if to demonstrate that whatever sound he imagines when he’s in the presence of a suitable Steinway he can bring to life.
To my ear, the concert from Switzerland—perhaps because it was re-edited in the digital era into a single piece—has a stronger thread stitching the various sections together. The breadth of styles on display recalls John Fahey, another solo instrumentalist from the time who was hard to classify and who absorbed music from everywhere and distilled it to a highly personal and expressive style. But Fahey was not primarily an improviser, and the structure of Lausanne, though it has integrity, is also marked by a feeling of uncertainty and unpredictability. Once in a while, you might even find yourself bored, and that’s all right. The album, and each individual concert, are ultimately about the experience of time, of the listener sharing their own perception of how it unfolds with that of the person onstage. And to give yourself over to this temporal experiment is to allow yourself to move through a wide range of feelings, even those that might scan as unpleasant.
As much as I enjoy hearing Lausanne as one uninterrupted hour, the story of Solo-Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne is also a story of consumer formats. Much was made of the album’s success despite it being presented in a package, a 3xLP box, that seemed for an artist relatively early in his career to be slightly indulgent (a release recorded three years later, Sun Bear Concerts, would up the ante considerably with 10 LPs). But Solo-Concerts unexpectedly sold well, eventually moving hundreds of thousands of copies. And the LP format ultimately makes it a little easier to digest, at least initially. The 20-or-so minute LP side is a good way to take in what Jarrett’s doing on the occasions when you don’t have an hour or two of time for focused listening to spare.
I mention the 3xLP version of the set, too, because the finale of Lausanne, comprising the closing 22 minutes and 35 seconds of the concert, is an album-side of sublime beauty that works as a standalone experience, especially once you’ve internalized the concert in its totality. It begins with a simple and lovely folk-like melody, and then it pauses, curls in on itself, and turns into a slightly spooky meditation on a minor chord. Jarrett is in drone mode now, seeing how much he can squeeze from a narrow range of keys played quietly. His notes seem like they are shifting with the wind, and then, so slowly you almost can’t hear the change, he increases the tempo and the density until the piece becomes a kind of march.
His pounding major chord moves up the keyboard, adding a feeling of delicacy and vulnerability with each octave—at points the sheer gorgeousness of it all is almost hard to bear. And then in the last couple of minutes, the piece begins to break apart, as if we’re seeing a time-lapse film of life withering away. As Jarrett plays them, the notes in the piano’s highest register, the ones you bang on as a child when you first encounter the instrument to hear how they ring like tiny bells, seem to tumble upward, as if shedding the unseeable force that binds them together. The tones then get quieter, there’s a pause, and then there’s one final note, the highest C: Jarrett plays it so softly that if his touch were just slightly lighter, it would make no sound at all, the hammer would fail to strike the strings. But we hear the faintest ping, like a final breath. It’s a poignant ending to his hour at the keyboard—one note, almost lost but perfect, that lands exactly where it’s supposed to. | 2023-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | August 13, 2023 | 9.2 | ec7ac942-e3fd-47b8-a950-f174ed2ed2b3 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
New Brunswick's Long Beard makes romantically restless dream pop with shades of Azure Ray and Galaxie 500. It might be a little unpolished, but Long Beard is good at making music that sounds best played in a lit bedroom, late at night, on a suburban street when everyone else is snoozing in their beds. | New Brunswick's Long Beard makes romantically restless dream pop with shades of Azure Ray and Galaxie 500. It might be a little unpolished, but Long Beard is good at making music that sounds best played in a lit bedroom, late at night, on a suburban street when everyone else is snoozing in their beds. | Long Beard: Sleepwalker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21206-sleepwalker/ | Sleepwalker | Sleepwalker, the debut by New Brunswick's Long Beard, is a romantically restless record, but in an inward, idle way. Their reverb-laden dream-pop calls to mind Azure Ray, Yo La Tengo, and Galaxie 500, and it conceals an antsy yearning. "You'd hide out for hours, dreaming of other rooms to lie in," lead singer Leslie Bear sings on "Dream".
When Bear asks questions in her songs, as she often does, her inquiries seem more directed to the silence of her brain than to someone in front of her. "If I ask politely, will you ask me the question of: who do you love?" she sings on "Porch", repeating her question again and again. If there is a drama played out on Sleepwalker, it’s the sort being played out to a mirror, or a diary, or to a love interest’s face imagined in the ceiling above one’s bed.
Sometimes the album meanders, shuffling around noncommittally before finding its footing. "Turkeys", "Dream", and "Morning Ghost" sound nearly made up on the spot, with their minimalist set-up of noodling electric guitars and pitter-patter percussion not quite synchronized. And on "Moths", Bear’s voice is obscured by scratchy, layered guitar and the watery echoes of her own already-breathy vocals.
They sound like a band not trying to find their voice, but to project the one they have with confidence. Bear's voice is a literal manifestation of that hesitance: She’ll draw out words until they’re so high-pitched and thin that they seem to evaporate into the rest of the track mid-song, becoming hard to decipher. "Alone in the dark, is it more alone, than alone in the light," she sings on "Hates the Party", every word spoken firmly as if they exist alone on the page, until "light," heightened in her sing-song and suddenly like another instrument.
Sleepwalker is a very cozy record, full of porch-sitting, moth-watching, sunset-watching. It even ends with a warped rendition of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Bear said in an interview that she ended up writing most of these songs "very late when everyone else was asleep," which is exactly when you should be listening to this album. Sleepwalker doesn’t quite feel polished, or take many risks, but Long Beard is good at making the music that sounds best played in a lit bedroom, late at night, on a suburban street when everyone else is snoozing in their beds. | 2015-10-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Team Love | October 26, 2015 | 6.6 | ec7aca56-e5db-4d0e-9dd5-d4ea521aaeea | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
Montreal band follows its underrated 2008 Laurel Canyon-like debut Parc Avenue with a more plugged-in, boisterous record. | Montreal band follows its underrated 2008 Laurel Canyon-like debut Parc Avenue with a more plugged-in, boisterous record. | Plants and Animals: La La Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14123-la-la-land/ | La La Land | La La Land, the second album from Montreal-based trio Plants and Animals, should be excellent. Their woefully overlooked 2008 debut full-length, Parc Avenue, was ripe to be expanded upon. Full of spacious, mostly acoustic almost-folk sounds, it spackled rich, otherworldly harmonies and honeyed, finger-picked guitar lines over rambling epics. On Parc Avenue, P&A drew a direct line between the bearded Laurel Canyon folk-rockers of the 1970s and the modern psychedelia of bands like Animal Collective. But La La Land, unfortunately, is more concerned with plugging in and cranking up the volume than it is with the subtleties that colored its predecessor.
As its title suggest, La La Land sounds very much like the glitzy, tough L.A. It's not just song titles like "Tom Cruz", "American Idol", and "Kon Tiki" (named for a tacky L.A. hotel) that recall the entertainment capital, but also the album's fuzzed-out Sunset Strip guitar tones, kinetic, urban rhythms, and glossy production makeover. Yet while there is laudable roughness and robustness to these harder charging tracks, no amount of energy or amplification can obscure a song's bloat or lack of memorable hooks. Plants and Animals' strong suit was never the sing-along chorus or the earworm melody, but this new album's aggressiveness-- which plays in stark contrast to the casual, country-stoner pace of its precursor-- combined with the punch of its guitar sound, makes you long for tight pop hooks that never come.
However, amid the album's overstuffed and more conventionally paced tracks, some beautifully strange gems can be unearthed. Unsurprisingly, the album's best moments most closely resemble the meandering songs of Parc Avenue. Songs like "Game Show" and "Undone Melody", which hinge on gritty acoustic foundations and climax with uplifting harmonies, represent the band's most logical progressions from Parc Avenue. The best use of their new plugged-in sound is "American Idol", which, with the rhythmic patter of its vocals and the percussive groove of its riffs, sounds more like Talking Heads than Plants and Animals. So while La La Land may not be the stellar follow-up that Parc Avenue deserved, it does offer something for fans willing to look beyond its tarted-up exterior. | 2010-04-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-04-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Secret City | April 19, 2010 | 6.1 | ec7e26e6-f8f7-49bc-9b92-f6def543253e | Pitchfork | null |
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The Gallic duo aim to dust off the disappointment of Pocket Symphony with their first LP to be written and recorded without a major outside producer. | The Gallic duo aim to dust off the disappointment of Pocket Symphony with their first LP to be written and recorded without a major outside producer. | Air: Love 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13503-love-2/ | Love 2 | There are a few things I'm impressed with Air for doing: resuscitating crusty, decades-old Moog blorps amidst the frenzy of millennial techno-utopian futurism, turning a new generation on to a certain vintage Gallic notion of jet-set sophistication, and getting indie- and punk-dominated college rock stations to play what essentially amounted to lounge prog. Most of all, there's the way they composed their music as an unapologetically frothy sort of cheese-pop without letting it get dominated by snorting insincerity or self-conscious hokeyness. You could still hear the kitsch, but it wasn't the driving force, and they had a sneaky way of lulling you into forgetting you weren't "supposed" to like this kind of thing. Hell, lots of people actually had sex to Moon Safari, which is about as unironic as you can get. (At least I hope they were being unironic.)
A half-decade of Balearic/glo-fi/'lude-house has since refined that mellow aesthetic to the point where taste-conscious end-runs around potential irony have become increasingly unnecessary. But while that refinement applied readily to the subtle songcraft of Talkie Walkie and Pocket Symphony, both of which provided ample evidence of Air's vintage pop smarts, they've somehow stumbled their way into a pit of lite-FM treacle on their new album. Love 2-- as titles go, a bad pun disguised as a sequel nobody needed-- is a dopey little slice of not-much that feels like a noodly rendering of yacht-pop weightlessness. Much has been made about Air's new independence in the process of making this album; it's the first one to come out of their new recording studio, Atlas, and the first to be written and recorded without the input of any major outside producers (though they still brought in Moon Safari engineer Stephane "Alf" Briat to tinker behind the boards). Far be it from me to accuse Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of being a couple empty vessels who need a Nigel Godrich to whip them into shape, but maybe they could've used someone looking over their shoulders to warn them away from indulging in some bad ideas.
Bad ideas like, say, "Tropical Disease". This song is the album's longest, worst, and most emblematic of Love 2's problems, nearly seven minutes of malaise that bookends a preciously chipper, tin whistle-punctuated slab of Playskool krautrock with two movements of plastic surgeon's waiting-office Muzak. It's laughably oily when its Econolodge-noir sax oozes in crotch-first, and even more uncomfortable in its second half when Dunckel's pitched-up voice chirps, "Woman/ Make me feel... warm inside." God, it's awkward. That empty yet still uncomfortable theme of louche, inarticulate romance is all over the record's ill-advised vocal tracks: pining over a walking (albeit softly walking) cliché in "So Light Is Her Footfall"; trying to milk intrigue out of the lifeless phrase, "there is something going on between us," in "You Can Tell It to Everybody"; murmuring about love in "Love" (lyrics: "Love/ Love/ Love/ Love/ Love"). The lyrics read less like the work of someone who didn't grow up speaking English than someone who knows it well and thinks it's kind of a stupid, pointless language. That'd explain the empty, tense-based babble-talk in "Sing Sang Sung", at least.
Maybe they've always been perpetrators of petty crimes against lyrical songwriting and it's only now that their music's been weak enough to avoid hiding it. The exoticism that made their instantly recognizable brand of music compelling-- the outmoded technology, the unexpected world-music left turns, the almost detached baroqueness-- has been diluted to the point where all their old tricks sound listless. Leadoff track "Do the Joy" is maybe the least-botched attempt at doing something new, though its fuzzed-out slo-motion strut is quickly rendered absurd by a "spooky" B-movie synthesizer melody. Most everything else runs a diverse gamut of uninspiring retreads: uptempo krautpunk that sounds a bit like The Virgin Suicides standout "Dead Bodies" without the intensity ("Be a Bee"), lightheaded, minimalist tweaks of hotel-lounge disco ("Love", which scans like George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" in a coma), mid-80s David Bowie with gastrointestinal discomfort ("Missing the Light of the Day"), a half-baked instrumental caricature of Blondie-sans-Debby ("Eat My Beat"), and a couple of pretty unconvincing attempts to incorporate Afrobeat ("Night Hunter") and township music ("African Velvet"-- I wish I were making up that title).
Thing is, it still sounds entirely like an Air album-- just a remarkably bland one. The complementary piano/synth lines that Dunckel and Godin made their stock in trade still dredge up a few legitimately nice melodies, though they typically prove fleeting. And session drummer-turned-auxiliary member Joey Waronker, well, he tries; he's one of the better motorik beat-deployment specialists going, and even he can't jostle much excitement into the proceedings, especially when his job most of the time is to tap out minimalist beats in one of the many tracks that pushes downtempo rhythms into complete stasis. Love 2 exhibits the band's style by just about every familiar metric, except the one that made them fascinating in the first place-- that uncanny ability to make schlock sound beautiful. In its place is a strange reversal: beauty rendered schlock, pop melodies and space-age wonder curdled by damaged whimsy. | 2009-10-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | October 5, 2009 | 4 | ec8500e4-15b8-423c-908d-241e567cc691 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Niki and the Dove's Malin Dahlström has one of the most fantastic voices in pop, and on their new LP she whirls herself into a frenzy to nip malignant growths like heartache and hate in the bud. | Niki and the Dove's Malin Dahlström has one of the most fantastic voices in pop, and on their new LP she whirls herself into a frenzy to nip malignant growths like heartache and hate in the bud. | Niki and the Dove: Everybody's Heart Is Broken Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21688-everybodys-heart-is-broken-now/ | Everybody's Heart Is Broken Now | Niki and the Dove's Malin Dahlström has one of the most fantastic voices in pop. The Gothenburg native has that slightly wry, raspy delivery that distinguishes all the best Scandi singers, as well as Stevie Nicks' pout, Prince's faith, and a way of selling her lyrics as if she's working through her dramas in real time. Skrillex recognized these qualities when he sampled her vocals from Niki's debut single "DJ, Ease My Mind" on his 2014 album Recess, which could have primed the Swedish duo (completed by Gustaf Karlöf) for a move into the EDM big leagues. Their 2012 debut Instinct was halfway there already, as massive as the mountains Dahlström sang about. But on the long-awaited follow-up, they've gone in the opposite direction, filing down the piercing sharp edges of their debut in favor of luscious synths, aqueous funk basslines, and gated drums.
It's a painfully familiar pop trope in 2016, but Niki and the Dove aren't shooting for muted cool or ’80s sparkle—instead, they have a consummate, melancholic soulful touch, reminiscent of Patrice Rushen or Evelyn "Champagne" King, and a superb way with melody. Dahlström's lyrics are also full of sumptuous details that make their songs feel like living things rather than period pieces—the guy with a soul like a Wolf-Rayet star, the "sea fire" of the city, "African violet and neon blue" skies, and in the gorgeous dancehall lilt of "Coconut Kiss," a tropical hideaway so vivid you can practically feel the sea breeze wafting your pineapple-print kaftan. (It's important to note that she's not just the singer, but writes and produces with Karlöf, too.)
Everybody's Heart Is Broken Now is essentially a record about heartbreak, but in-keeping with the vast scope of Niki's debut, they're thinking on a global scale. As Dahlström told MTV News, "We wanted to write about this greater sense of … a loss of caring. You know, it's pretty tough times in the world right now." They've previously mentioned the rise of racism in Sweden as an influence on the record, but thankfully, they tackle these issues in spirit rather than manifestos.
"Play It on My Radio" is the only vague acknowledgement of that societal shift, where Dahlström yearns for a song that you never hear anymore: "People looked so different then/ Because they were smiling," she sings tenderly over drowsy Balearic synths and a light flickering beat. Across the record, she recognizes how cruelty can fill the void made by sadness or fear—she's "an empty shell," fighting the "poison that sucks the root," and the sorrow that's found a home inside her. "I'm not the same/ Can I change it back again?" she asks on the very Stevie-circa-Tusk "Lost UB."
The solution, natch, is dancing on her own, whirling herself into a frenzy to nip malignant growths like heartache and hate in the bud. "Strangers, move away/ I'm a volcano and I'm about to blow you away," she commands on the strutting "You Stole My Heart Away." As on Instinct, her conviction that redemption can be found in the depth of the night is unyielding, and totally convincing. The songs themselves fill space with the same zeal—every song is flooded with pearly, dazzling synths. There are a few straight-up bangers, like "So Much It Hurts," or the enjoyably silly "Shark City (Tropico X)," with its cartoony Tom Tom Club vibe, and the euphoric, hopeful "Pretty Babies." But often, Niki favor the slow build, where a flash of emotion in Dahlström's voice prompts the song to ascend somewhere else entirely, like the massive gospel chorus that emerges from "Scar for Love," or "Everybody Wants to Be You," which starts off quiet before striding through three massive crescendos and screaming key changes. When so much ’80s-indebted pop slurps the silliness out of the era, their occasional embrace of excess is a tonic (even if the record runs a bit long as a whole). They always sound nostalgic, but the immediacy of Dahlström's vocals yanks all the warm, communal feelings associated with that sound into a present where they're in short supply. | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | April 13, 2016 | 7.8 | ec917d22-5aa9-47a6-a653-619c84d5a618 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The Dutch songwriter follows behind-the-scenes work with Rex Orange County, The Free Nationals, and others with a breezy new solo record. Featuring collaborations with Mac Demarco and Emily King, the album does a good job distilling his charms into a single package. | The Dutch songwriter follows behind-the-scenes work with Rex Orange County, The Free Nationals, and others with a breezy new solo record. Featuring collaborations with Mac Demarco and Emily King, the album does a good job distilling his charms into a single package. | Benny Sings: Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benny-sings-music/ | Music | The Dutch songwriter Benny Sings whittles his chipper songs down to their foundations. “I’m not a very adventurous music maker,” he told an interviewer a couple years ago. “If the chords work,” he added, “what do you need more than just a kick and a bass and a vocal?” Benny, whose real name is Tim van Berkestijn, has made a study and a production line out of that approach. In his hands the album format is pure vessel: Here’s a song. Here’s another one. And then here’s eight more. That’s an album.
Benny’s eighth studio album Music is his second for the Stones Throw label. He’s spent a career simplifying his songs, and his current crossover from Amsterdam onto the American indie pop scene feels as much like a pitch for Benny the songwriter as Benny the performer. Coming after recent behind-the-scenes collaborations with artists like Rex Orange County, PJ Morton, and The Free Nationals, Music prominently features Mac Demarco, Emily King, and Tom Misch on the tracklist. All of Benny’s albums read more like songwriter exercises than grand statements, but Music does a good job distilling his charms into a single package.
Music gravitates towards blue-eyed soul and yacht rock, and if you’ve heard anything about Benny Sings before it’s probably that he makes happy, breezy music. Taken at face value, that sunshine-on-your-face vibe belies the sturdiness of Benny’s songs. The boxy simplicity of the production hints at his affinity for hip-hop beats, and most of his songs chunk cleanly into verse-chorus-verse formations. “Here It Comes” and “Sunny Afternoon” are both slinky pop-soul numbers with a boom-bap framework, and Benny’s voice has a sweet, barely-there quality.
Lyrically, the songs on Music can trend a bit too safe, which often works in Benny’s favor but sometimes makes a track feel generic. Benny has a knack for writing an opening line that sets a song immediately into motion: “There you are, right out of bed” he sings on “Rolled Out,” like he was nudging the track awake. But since so many of Benny’s songs are about love, sometimes the innocuousness of his lyrics can make a refrain sound obvious or preprogrammed, like it was a placeholder that made its way into the final draft. Some songs come off quaint, even twee as a result. “Lost Again” would be a saccharine even as an instrumental, and so a handclap-punctuated line like “I’m lost again/All these different ways to get inside your heart” pushes it over the top. It's hard to imagine this wasn’t a nebulous soundtrack assignment from a Disney executive to write a post-credits anthem.
At its best, Music brings other artists full of their own personality into the fold and highlights Benny’s songwriting. The slouchy guitar groove of “Rolled Up” sounds like it came fully formed from a Mac Demarco album, until Benny’s voice comes in and it feels at home here. They sing in entirely different registers, but both Mac and Benny wistfully sigh their lyrics, and Benny settles easily into Demarco’s slacker-cool vibe. The spunky,Emily King-featuring “Miracles,” meanwhile, is a gospel-tinged love song railing against the concept of one true love. “I don’t believe in miracles...but I believe you’re beautiful, let us just start there,” he sings. It’s clearly a song meant for and written in the image of King though, who brings it home with her breathy weightlessness. It’s not the only time a guest brings his ideas all the way to life. Benny’s voice has a gentle purity, but he uses it almost like a scratch track—just enough to get the idea across. There might be some irony baked into his stage name: Benny Writes is truer, but doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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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. | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | April 13, 2021 | 6.7 | ec939939-d4b6-4f8f-a865-dfc78cb1e566 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger captures the band clicking on all cylinders. The album sustains a level of focus, cohesion, and intensity that the band’s later, more varied albums lack. | Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger captures the band clicking on all cylinders. The album sustains a level of focus, cohesion, and intensity that the band’s later, more varied albums lack. | Soundgarden: Badmotorfinger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22631-badmotorfinger/ | Badmotorfinger | With their detuned guitars, plodding tempos, permanently downcast expressions, and hardware-store dress code, Soundgarden looked every bit the “grunge” part, at least on first glance. If your first introduction came, for instance, via the image of frontman Chris Cornell baring his chest on a dimly lit soundstage in the video for “Loud Love,” you could easily mistake Soundgarden for a bunch of oafs wading in the same tarpit where the brontosaur remains of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin lay fossilized. In fact, at points on their 1989 sophomore album/major-label debut Louder Than Love, Soundgarden came off as a ham-fisted Zep/Sabbath mashup.
Clearly, the band underwent a period of profound growth sometime prior to recording Badmotorfinger, the 1991 follow-up that captures the band clicking on all cylinders. In its breadth and execution, Badmotorfinger dramatically surpasses the band's previous work. (Just don’t judge by the even more oafish video for leadoff single “Outshined”). The album also sustains a level of focus, cohesion, and intensity that the band’s later, more varied albums lack. It is also the moment where Soundgarden’s unique four-way interplay comes into alignment in earnest, along with their collective sense of songcraft and ability to create atmosphere.
In the oversized coffee table booklet that accompanies the seven-disc “super deluxe” version of this reissue, three dozen musicians offer their recollections, including Henry Rollins, Les Claypool, Vernon Reid, Kirk Hammett, Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover, Krist Novoselic, Tom Morello, Steve Von Till, etc, etc. High praise even comes from ancestral giants like Zeppelin leader Jimmy Page, Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, and Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson. The mental image of Lifeson cranking Badmotorfinger with his kids, as suggested by his notes, is probably the most endearing. Sadly, though, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm doesn't re-tell the story of how, on hearing the final mix for the first time, he sent the band a postcard with the disparaging note: “Fuck, you guys sound like Rush now.”
Though Louder Than Love cemented the band’s appeal with metal audiences, Soundgarden had first struck a national chord among college radio deejays who were keyed-in on the band’s underground pedigree. After working with the iconic independent label Sup Pop on their debut EP Screaming Life in 1987, Soundgarden initially turned down major label offers to release their debut full-length, 1988’s Ultramega OK, on SST, the venerated indie imprint founded by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn. Those two releases in particular reflected the band’s affinity for underground/post-punk acts like Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, and Sonic Youth.
In the new Badmotorfinger liners, Jello Biafra likens Soundgarden to a cross between Zeppelin and Killing Joke. But it’s not like the post-punk influences jump out at you on Badmotorfinger. That’s because, by that point, Chris Cornell and lead guitarist Kim Thayil had combined their individual guitar approaches into a complex latticework that remains somewhat inscrutable even as it grips you. For every Badmotorfinger passage that makes you want to bust into a fit of air guitar—the unevenly metered, Sherman tank trudge that closes “Rusty Cage,” the blues-metal crunch of “Drawing Flies,” the quasi-thrash gallop of “Jesus Christ Pose,” etc.—the music is rife with ten times as many intangibles. To choose just one, then there’s the high-end ambient buzz that permeates the album from start to finish, imbuing it with a static charge not unlike the electricity one feels in the air when entire sky darkens under a massive storm cloud.
Indeed, much of Badmotorfinger’s power resides in its suggestion of a violence that rarely erupts and offers little catharsis when it does. The best example can be found on “Slaves and Bulldozers,” a seething seven-minute crawl where Thayil spends most of the time strangulating his guitar strings for spasms of noise that almost seem to emanate from an inhuman source. If you've ever been rendered speechless by the sight of the ocean, stars, volcanic activity—anything that suddenly makes you aware of your minuscule place in the order of life—Thayil’s “leads” (if they can even be called that) surge with the same coldly neutral ferocity.
Meanwhile, even when Cornell unleashes his famous throat-scraping roar on the line “now I know why you’ve been shaking,” the enormity of the music feels choked back rather than triumphant. In sharp contrast to other heavy music—which is mostly designed to take frustration out on external targets—Soundgarden's signature rumble doesn’t give you an athletic rush. All of that gnashing turmoil on “Slaves and Bulldozers” actually points inward, collecting in your muscle tissue as a kind of seismic potential energy. And when the entire band pulls back for Cornell to switch to a bluesy murmur before the song’s wailing climax, Soundgarden show a command of dynamics they simply hadn’t been capable of before.
As you listen more closely, it becomes increasingly apparent that none of the songs lend themselves to primary hues like “angry,” “sad,” or even “rocking.” In its most rousing moments, Badmotorfinger is anchored by a pensiveness that fosters daydreaming as much if not more than it gives you reason to bang your head. Fittingly, the album’s lyrics venture well beyond heavy rock’s typical purview: Where other bands would choose to emote more directly from the gut (or elsewhere), Soundgarden temper the attack of the music with painterly images Cornell delivers with Beatnik flair. On “Room a Thousand Years Wide,” Thayil’s refrain of “tomorrow begat tomorrow” extends the song’s ambiguously woebegone perspective over timeless eons. And though bassist Ben Shepherd’s “Somewhere” doesn’t quite disclose itself as a love song, the sense of romance is undeniable in lines like “From the likes of her/To the time of me/Like the moon to earth/Or the sky to sea./Only we’re no longer/Allowed to be.”
Badmotorfinger is also anchored by drummer Matt Cameron’s inimitable way of dragging the beat back while also smoothing-out Cornell and Thayil’s preference for uneven time signatures. Even on punkish uptempo bangers like “Rusty Cage” and “Face Pollution,” Soundgarden never simply barrel forward, switching gears on a dime and moving sideways with the dexterity of a prog act. (Hence Mark Arm’s Rush comparison.)
With all four members stretching more than ever before, at several points the music verges on the transportive, head-trip vibe of space rock or psychedelia. On the dreamlike “Searching with My Good Eye Closed” swirls of guitar twine around Cornell’s voice, heavily draped in reverb to give it the weight of a mystical presence speaking through clouds. When playing together in a room, the band tended to lumber through the song—evidenced painfully by the bonus concert and demo versions included in the deluxe package.
Speaking of which: The studio outtakes here may be interesting from a forensic point of view, but they’re basically glorified demos that lack the agility of the finished songs. And while the version of “Black Rain”—with lyrics that would later be refitted for the Superunknown hit “Fell on Black Days”—works as a curio, the song selection could have gone deeper to include the early version of “No Attention,” a tune the band attempted during the Badmotorfinger sessions before settling on a later version for 1996’s Down on the Upside.
In its definitive form, though, “Searching with My Good Eye Closed” is the most dramatic example of Soundgarden’s ability to touch the otherworldly. If you listen very closely to the fade out, you can hear the last wisp of Cornell’s voice trailing off: It’s barely audible and lasts for just half a second before it's smothered out of the frame by the leaden trudge of “Room a Thousand Years Wide.” The same thing essentially happened with the band’s career two years later, when Soundgarden went on to sell five million and became alterna-rock household names with their next album, 1994’s Superunknown. Much like when a director known for working in black and white switches to color, the obvious change in palette is initially what dazzles about Superunknown.
But as both albums have aged, you could make a case that Soundgarden actually accomplished more with the comparatively limited shading of Badmotorfinger. Listening back now it’s an album that would have sounded fresh and vital released at any time over the past quarter century. The band didn’t do the music any favors with that dreadfully dated “Outshined” video, but it doesn’t take long for Badmotorfinger to reveal itself as something far greater than a relic of its time. | 2016-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | A&M / UMe | December 8, 2016 | 8.3 | ec9b0c13-586f-4660-80b9-c6caf3fce810 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the arrival of Sean Paul, who brought dancehall with all its complexity to the masses. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the arrival of Sean Paul, who brought dancehall with all its complexity to the masses. | Sean Paul: Dutty Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sean-paul-dutty-rock/ | Dutty Rock | Showbiz always comes for the teeth. Early in Sean Paul’s career, at the start of the millennium—nearly two decades before Cardi B rapped about aspirational dental surgery on “Bodak Yellow”—the Jamaican musician embarked on a global debut with cornrows in his hair and braces on his teeth. The intended effect of the makeover? To align Paul with the big-budget hip-hop and R&B stars of American urban radio in the early aughts.
In order to cross over and become successful beyond the confines of dancehall, a genre then in the shadow of Bob Marley posters plastered on college dorm walls, Sean Paul would first have to go pop. Dutty Rock fits the template of how global pop breaks today: take an indigenous sound, affix it to a pop template, and attach a legible ambassador to the project (orthodontics may be required). This is the price of access to a monolithic industry. But now, after dancehall has once again gone mainstream, the stakes of crossing over are higher. Audiences are more open to genre, but they also have shifting and conflicting values and are more vocal about equity issues within pop culture, such as representation and cultural appropriation.
But before all of this, in the late ’90s, Paul was a bald-shaved, baby-faced loverboy proselytizing the hollowed-out cadence and bark of dancehall OGs like Super Cat and Shabba Ranks. Me and my friends drove around listening to flea market-sourced riddim mixtapes and hitting repeat on tracks like “Baby Girl,” “Infiltrate,” and “Deport Them.” The bass made our bodies vibrate and Paul’s boy-ish chat felt less intimidating than the grown-up raunchiness of other artists we loved, like Mr. Vegas and Elephant Man. Before he conquered the world, Paul’s club-ready dancehall was a kind of guide to our suburban adolescent mating rituals.
His first album, Stage One, barely hit the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop 100 in 2000. A majority of the music on Stage One, including now-classic tunes like “Deport Dem,” and “Hot Gal Today,” had been floating around on riddim tracks for a couple of years before the release. But its lackluster commercial performance might also be indicative of incompatible listening cultures, or: conversational, informally distributed riddims versus the individualist, heavily categorized and marketed nature of modern LP making. “Riddims were an economic thing,” Sean Paul told me in 2016. “The tape could hold a certain amount of tracks, so there’s one producer and he has many artists on [the riddim]. That struck such a vibe in Jamaica because it was cool to hear different perspectives. You could have one guy singing about a girl with a fat ass, and another person singing something more conscious—and it’s on the same riddim.”
Thematically, dancehall is seeded in the thorny social morass left behind by colonialism. From its origins in the late 1970s to the present day, the music has often chronicled, “the gritty realities of Kingston’s ghettos...sharing crude truths about the conditions of Kingston’s poor, their connections to Jah (Rastafari for “God”), the medicinal and recreational benefits of smoking weed.” Paul was an uptown kid with an artist mom and an incarcerated father, who grew up playing competitive water polo. “A lot of my first songs were really conscious,” Paul said. “A couple of songs I wrote for my demo were talking about the ghetto story—I was drawing comparisons between uptown, where I’m from, and downtown.” But it was the gyalis tunes about chasing, watching, and dancing with women, that would become his niche.
In 2002, Sean Paul’s second album, Dutty Rock, hit big. By then he’d “gone international” after guesting on “Money Jane,” a posse cut by Toronto’s Baby Blue Soundcrew, which became an unexpected success on Canadian commercial radio. By the time Dutty Rock dropped, its first single “Gimme The Light” had already warmed up the clubs and streets via the Buzz riddim, a crackling, suspenseful loop that sounds like a tiny string section trapped in the digital chaos of a video game. It peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Top 100—and then “Get Busy” leap-frogged it to reach No. 1 with a raucous music video in tow. Filmed in an unfinished basement in the suburbs of Toronto, the video by Director X prominently featured kinetic dance crews performing the latest dancehall moves and captured the innovative energy of a culture in diasporic translation.
The videos from Dutty Rock immortalized trends originating in Kingston dance halls, with help from Director X and perceptive choreography by Tanisha Scott. The visuals were also in conversation with what was happening on BET and MTV. In the video for “Like Glue,” Paul’s brother gets on the mic, calling out dance moves as a crew performs on stage: “row the boat,“ “signal the plane,” “parachute.” Just the year before, in 2001, everyone—from Diddy to a bunch of kid dancers—was doing the Harlem Shake in G. Dep’s videos for “Let’s Get It” and “Special Delivery,” and the decade would go on to birth the Dougie, Stanky Leg, Crank Dat, and more.
Dutty Rock also gave mainstream audiences a glimpse at the emotional complexity of dancehall. Scott’s choreography is precise, dramatic, and intimate, (her Kate Bush-meets-Patra work for Drake’s “Hotline Bling” captures this dynamic!). In the video for Dutty Rock’s third single, a cover of Alton Ellis’ twinkling 1967 track “I’m Still In Love With You” featuring Sasha, the waist-to-waist ballet reveals the promise of affection that keeps people on the floor until late. It’s tenderness between friends and (heterosexual) lovers: girlfriends, getting ready to go out and circling their hips to the beat in a bedroom mirror, and the charged delight of two strangers finding a rhythm within the competitive silo of the club.
Some dancehall fans consider the ’90s and early aughts a kind of golden era when production was precocious, raw, and experimental. Dutty Rock was a success because Paul’s tectonic hooks and uncanny pop melodies brought out new undertones to the gritty and ingenious riddims that are a staple of Jamaican production. The harpsichord intro to “Can You Do The Work,” on Jeremy Harding’s Liquid riddim conjures the odd pageantry of monarchical period dramas, but it’s Lenky’s clappy Diwali riddim, on which Sean Paul recorded “Get Busy,” that is totemic. It is peak creativity, a deceptively simple loop that conjures movement like a snake charmer’s horn. There’s a sample of the folksy syncopated handclaps that power the traditional Punjabi giddha dance, a hollow and steady bass drum to keep pace with a racing heart, gasping vox synth patches, and a sensual otherworldly whining noise, among others whimsical effects. It fit right in with the mass appeal, shiny suited, post-9/11 Orientalist hip-hop of the time, of which Timbaland and Missy Elliott were chief architects. Although Paul has noted that tracks like “Get Busy” and “Gimme The Light” were polished “by foreign mixers from America so that it could sound as big as whatever Justin Timberlake song was playing on the radio in the States.”
Lenky said that around 2001, "No one wanted [Diwali Riddim] because no one knew what it was. I was trying to give it to [vocalists] and they say it was too ‘noisy-sounding,’ so I put it back in my drawer." By 2002 it took off, and a collaboration with Paul was sorted. “Get Busy” went on to become their first U.S. No. 1 song, and that win paved the way for arguably the best song on the riddim: Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go.” That track was also a Billboard smash, as was Lumidee’s take, the charmingly off-key teen anthem “Never You Leave (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh).” Lenky’s ingenious production spent multiple years on the globals charts, and Paul’s place as the world’s translator of Jamaican pop music was secured.
And then came “Baby Boy,” the Scott Storch-produced Beyoncé duet that was included in the international re-release of Dutty Rock. It’s probably Sean Paul’s most profitable single: 17 years after release, Beyoncé still performs it as part of her live show. For the singer’s Homecoming performances at Coachella 2018, she played “Baby Boy” as a medley, cut with interpolations of Tony Matterhorn’s frenetic “Dutty Wine,” the staccato dembow of the Fever Pitch riddim, and Dawn Penn’s blissfully lovelorn “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No).” Years before Beyoncé became an arbiter of Black diasporic pop, she was looking to the Caribbean, and Paul was the gateway.
There has always been a bit of pushback to Paul from some dancehall fans because he’s a light-skinned, racially ambiguous artist from the relatively affluent “uptown” Kingston. Moving conversations about equity and appropriation forward requires consideration about the kinds of artists often received as innovators within genres, like dancehall, that long functioned independently of the commercial industry. A globalized music industry churns on the fracking of flourishing Black musical and aesthetic traditions, for consumption (and interpretation) by outsiders: from Snow to Apache Indian to Paul Simon to Justin Timberlake... to the entire K-Pop industry. Artists like Diplo, Bad Gyal, Ramriddlz, and Drake populate the current iteration of this debate as it pertains to dancehall.
Given that he was born and raised in Jamaica, Paul’s worldwide success might seem more comparably equitable. But the price of international stardom, or crossover success, remains legibility. Does crossover success empower anyone other than the artist in question? What could counter “appropriation” in a way that doesn’t rely on a neocolonial institution like the music industry? An AllMusic.com review from the time described Dutty Rock as “almost revolutionary.” If we were to revisit that statement today, it might be important to ask: revolutionary for who? | 2019-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | August 25, 2019 | 7.8 | eca30ec1-9516-4ab5-aba0-a2349ad6813c | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | |
The Chinese-American multi-instrumentalist's works are sensuous and lively but evoke a vast loneliness. | The Chinese-American multi-instrumentalist's works are sensuous and lively but evoke a vast loneliness. | Li Daiguo: Xiao Gong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/li-daiguo-xiao-gong/ | Xiao Gong | Take a minute to scan Li Daiguo’s discography and you’ll find tracklists full of evocative titles. “A steady heartbeat is the sound of death” is one such chin-scratcher, but there are others that rival the length and bemusing dramatics of Keiji Haino’s inscriptions. Li’s dedication to the poetic form mirrors the deceptive simplicity and lingering beauty of his music: he mixes instrumentation—both Western and Eastern, traditional and contemporary—in a manner that’s uncomplicated yet thoughtful, his works always grander than their discrete elements suggest.
Insatiable curiosity is foundational to Li’s music. While he attended college in California for violin performance, much time was spent exploring other instruments. The liner notes for his latest album, Xiao Gong, assert as much: more than a dozen instruments are listed, including the pipa, guzheng, mbira, Moroccan flute, and cello. But for the Chinese-American multi-instrumentalist, maximalism isn’t as important as maximal impact. On the opening track, “I just want to find someone to love again, I haven’t really done it yet,” he uses abstracted electronics to mimic wheezing train whistles before summoning his own makeshift train-like rhythm with a booming drum. These instances of intra-track shapeshifting bear witness to an inquisitive nature that invites you to sense every textural juxtaposition, to relish every sonic throughline.
To be certain, Li has never offered such a rich tapestry in his solo music before. While his collaborative albums with Kink Gong and Rick Parker were busy, their syntheses of disparate elements were inelegant. Li is fully committed to maintaining cohesive atmospheres here: late-album highlight “I need to work hard to make it seem like I’m living a good life” blends disorienting blips, spiraling whirrs, and the lone plucks of strings—the disenchantment that informs its song title is never far away.
The meaning of Xiao Gong itself also hints at the drabness of modern living and the unrewarding paths taken in search of happiness: Xiao translates to “smile” or “laughter” while Gong connotes an achievement attained through virtuous work. Each track provides an opportunity to feel this hollowness and grief more deeply. The album’s fourth song, “I can’t stand it myself,” circles around a noisy, despondent vortex of strings, while the incessant electronic pulses and soaring flute melodies of album closer “I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’ll let it be for now” make the track as vast as it is lonely. Elsewhere, “These things must be bought, in the future” offers charm in its unexpected beatbox interludes, but these moments are fleeting and quickly dissipate—any resulting joy is squashed in favor of elegiac piano.
Music that captures listlessness without the aid of lyrics is often tedious, so it’s no small feat that Xiao Gong is so sensuous and lively. This is largely because Li’s compositional approach involves using electronics to instill energy. “I was interested in playing with electricity like an element of nature, like fire, that doesn’t really care about what you want once it is born,” he said in a recent interview. You can sense that in the woozy album centerpiece “Why is everything done well, but nothing is done well,” wherein electronic filigrees meander until they vanish into silence. For those in a similar position—wandering aimlessly through life until death swallows them whole—Xiao Gong feels like a damning, distressing mirror. Li doesn’t offer any solutions; instead, there’s only the familiar desire to escape anhedonia, something most succinctly relayed in Xiao Gong’s third track title: “I want to find a hobby or sense of meaning at any cost.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | WV Sorcerer Productions | March 17, 2021 | 7.6 | eca3e648-8675-4546-ac17-70ae958ca578 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Curated by London DJs Shannen SP and Joe Cotch, this 17-track compilation takes the pulse of the quickly evolving South African genre built around log-drum grooves, bright synths, and jazz-inflected keys. | Curated by London DJs Shannen SP and Joe Cotch, this 17-track compilation takes the pulse of the quickly evolving South African genre built around log-drum grooves, bright synths, and jazz-inflected keys. | Various Artists: Amapiano Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-amapiano-now/ | Amapiano Now | In South Africa, dance music has always been intrinsically linked to the country’s enduring inequality, its sounds born of the struggle and hope of township life. From the lo-fi synth pop of bubblegum to the slowed-down house beats and deep basslines of kwaito, the DIY approach of diBacardi and the dark atmospheres of gqom, music has been a way for young Black South Africans to express their frustrations, create new narratives, and form their own identity.
Amapiano is the youngest in this musical genealogy, borrowing elements from its predecessors while very much looking to the future. Along with its signature log-drum sounds (the warm tones produced by traditional hollowed out instruments also known as slit drums), bright synths, and jazz-inflected keys—the “piano” in amapiano—its different styles may be infused with the melodies of kwaito or the thumping beats of techno. Having emerged in the townships of Pretoria and Johannesburg, in Gauteng province, this music captures the duality of life in the hood: It is rooted in the pain of living in a racially and economically divided society while also soundtracking the euphoria of Gauteng’s nightlife, offering revelers a glimmer of brighter days ahead. Over the past year, amapiano has burst onto the mainstream, but like the genres that preceded it, it works outside of the usual channels: Music is shared through WhatsApp, file-sharing apps, or YouTube, bypassing traditional industry gatekeepers. It thrived in taxis and local clubs long before commercial radio stations caught on. This placed the power directly in the hands of the artists and led to a scene so dynamic that it can be hard for the uninitiated to grasp what’s going on.
Amapiano Now, a 17-track collection put together by London DJ Shannen SP and Cotch International founder Joe Cotch in collaboration with NTS, offers a deeper look into this scene. The compilation of unreleased music places the genre's veterans, like Vigro Deep, Mr JazziQ, Caltonic SA, and Gaba Cannal, alongside rising stars like Kamo Mphela, and Teno Afrika, prioritizing underground sounds over mainstream hits. Since developing as a mostly instrumental style, amapiano has branched into several different varieties. The percussion-heavy sound of “dust” amapiano dominates the compilation, while the sunnier pop vocals and brass-led instrumentals of mainstream amapiano are less prominent, in favor of more avant-garde sounds influenced by Afro-tech and deep house.
Instrumentals driven by hardcore drum patterns and heavy basslines sit next to soulful tracks peppered with lilting keys and sax solos. King Jazz’ “Lockdown” is relatively laid back, with playful piano keys that seem lifted straight out of a Sunday church service; it’s followed by Teno Afrika’s “Power Station”, which blends relentless log drums and breakbeats in an adventurous percussive experiment. Although there are brooding atmospheres and gritty beats throughout, the jazzy chord progressions and layered drums have a propulsive effect, creating anticipation, tension, and release.
Despite the almost complete eradication of clubbing over this past year and a half, artists have never stopped producing formidable tracks in anticipation of the reopening. Amapiano Now is full of them: CaltonicSA’s “Super Star,” with its heavy bass and jagged beats, recalls the producer’s gqom beginnings but leaves ample space for Thabz le Madonga’s stirring vocals; on DBN Gogo’s “Possible,” signature shakers slowly build anticipation, with bright vocals creating a transportive, feel-good atmosphere; the bouncy rhythms and bright synths on lead single “Shona Le” promise a world unburdened by the struggles of the present. At times, the percussive patterns and crescendoing synths take on an almost spiritual dimension. Rather than hedonism, the mood conjures memories of carefree moments, whether dancing in a sweaty club or driving with the windows open as the light turns golden.
Thanks to its innovative young producers, amapiano is always on the move, giving birth to new subgenres and dance trends, and quickly bleeding into other styles and dancefloors all over the world. As artist manager David Ngoma says in the documentary SHAYA!, amapiano is a sound that “comes from the hood and goes out everywhere else.” The compilation doesn’t quite work as a cohesive album, but that might not be the point. Instead, it’s a look at amapiano right now—a snapshot of a dynamic style whose joyful spirit feels more necessary than ever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | NTS | July 29, 2021 | 7.2 | eca661e0-f87a-452f-9f69-90dec7000928 | Megan Iacobini de Fazio | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-iacobini de fazio/ | |
Identity can be a tricky quality to evaluate. Often, it's hard to tell who is the actual "owner" of ... | Identity can be a tricky quality to evaluate. Often, it's hard to tell who is the actual "owner" of ... | Luomo: The Present Lover | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4928-the-present-lover/ | The Present Lover | Identity can be a tricky quality to evaluate. Often, it's hard to tell who is the actual "owner" of the qualities in question. Example: if a jazz drummer with an interest in abstract, improvisational electronic music suddenly starts turning out smooth vocal house records then perhaps there's an expectation that he would be criticized. Is this an expectation of the audience? Of the artist to play down his own work? Of the "critics"? Maybe there's a question of the artist's intent or sincerity. Maybe the identifiable relationship the record has with all of the players in question supercedes the need to find links to the tried and true critical vices. Finland's Luomo is that artist who would be the focus of an identity crisis.
Luomo (aka Vladislav Delay) offers very few easy answers. Having taken an interest in jazz (particularly the sprawling eccentricity of Miles Davis) from a very early age, he began his musical career attempting to make a go as a jazz drummer. Though still in his teens, he soon realized he wasn't going to make his real statement (or a living) in jazz, and gravitated to electronics. His first recordings retain the adventurous, improvised spirit of jazz, but come out like rather dry, experimental ambient. If he was well on the way to becoming a full-fledged IDM technician, it would be another one who would de-emphasize the 'D' quotient.
All the stranger, then, that he should make a startlingly adept transition to house on 2001's Vocalcity (his first release under the Luomo moniker). Stranger still that it was received with open arms from most anyone in the vicinity. Vocalcity's strange brew of clicks, cuts and ultra-suave female cooing was an impressive accomplishment for someone admittedly unfamiliar with the genre. What's more, it was the mark of someone apparently oblivious to what he was "supposed" to be doing, and the result is warm, (com)passionate music.
The Present Lover continues the experiment, and in general improves on it. Luomo, in typically modest fashion, speaks of the "panic" he went through recording the vocals on Vocalcity, having never featured any on previous releases. It's a safe bet he isn't panicking now, as the singing here (both female and male) is as smooth as it comes. However, it's also reminiscent of thousands of faceless lounge and downtempo compilations featuring "soulful divas" and androgynous emoting-- and if that's a problem for you (you know who you are), The Present Lover might come on a tad strong. Still, it fits the cosmopolitan, deeply European tracks to a tee. Even if you've never set foot in a club, the lengthy, passive strains of tunes like "Could Be Like This" or the title track work just as well as pure trance (not the dance kind, er, though you could dance to it).
From the beginning of the album, things don't unfold as they should. "Visitor" is a lush, beatless piece of pop impressionism. If I didn't know better, I'd say Luomo was doing a pretty good job of presenting the over-reported sound of Scandinavia, what with its glacial momentum and tendency to replace all the rough edges with icy consonance. The low-key chorus of female vocals proclaims, "I doubt you wanna make me burn," and it is clearly more of a plea than a prediction.
Throughout The Present Lover, passiveness and submission seem like attributes rather than easy targets. Likewise, on "Cold Lately", the female narrator (longtime Vladislav Delay collaborator AGF) inquires "what makes you so cold at home?" over near-glitch slow-jam and deep, percolating bass as if the mere fact that she cared to ask would make everything better. As the tune progresses, her vocal is overrun by a series of computer-generated cuts and pops, but it hardly loses its vulnerability (and notice that oozing synth cluster in the background never went away).
Several tracks are clearly suited for club play, and would probably work wonders for your party as it approaches its final hour. "Talk in Danger" plays up its midtempo, hi-hat intensive groove while AGF continually reassures you that she isn't trying to disappoint you, and goes on a lengthy tangent about how "talking in danger" helps her find her ability to trust. This kind of freeform narrative doesn't seem like it would work in any music related to pop, but Luomo's perpetually engaging track makes it seem perfectly natural. The title track features male vocals (likely provided by Delay himself), and a punchier beat. Where it aligns itself more closely to straight-ahead house via repetitive hooks and bouncy four-on-the-floor, it also manages to slip in non-sequiturs like the bizarre, slinky synth solo about three minutes in.
"Shelter" furthers the energetic feel, but again lapses into strangely formless structure as the vocal floats in and out of the mix, sometimes not seeming a part of the song at all. The by-now familiar female chorus offers something like a hook, but Delay's background in improvisation colors The Present Lover in unexpected ways. There are no resounding resolutions or triumphant cymbal swells here. There are no recapitulations of a verse or concessions to an obvious form. Just like a modern free music ensemble, Luomo makes his mark via an impact delivered over time and through the interaction (albeit self-imposed) and modification of the sounds at his disposal.
There is a decent chance you'll glide right past this record if you've often found yourself at odds with house music. I certainly wasn't terribly enamored of the stuff coming into The Present Lover. But this is an easy album to recommend, largely due to it having an impact far beyond the dancefloor. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to hang onto old biases, and for now, I'm perfectly willing to leave this on repeat if you are. | 2003-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | BMG | July 2, 2003 | 8 | eca73667-2c0b-4ec7-a8b3-22bf9d27565e | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
With spacious live takes and poetic lyricism, the North Carolina songwriter’s second album brings order to the chaos of the day. Step inside Eno Axis and things immediately fall into place. | With spacious live takes and poetic lyricism, the North Carolina songwriter’s second album brings order to the chaos of the day. Step inside Eno Axis and things immediately fall into place. | H.C. McEntire: Eno Axis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hc-mcentire-eno-axis/ | Eno Axis | Back in March, when the world screeched to a monstrous halt, H.C. McEntire was already sitting still. The alt-Americana artist had decided to head back to her home state of North Carolina a few months earlier, after spending the better part of the last two years as a touring backup singer for Angel Olsen. To reorient herself, McEntire settled into a farmhouse on the wooded edge of the Eno River in Durham and started doing what most folks do each day: the laundry. The daily tasks of rural life and McEntire’s meaningful devotion to them define Eno Axis, the sophisticated yet relaxed follow-up to 2018’s all-consuming Lionheart.
Step inside Eno Axis and things immediately fall into place. On album opener “Hands for the Harvest,” a simple suggestion—“Early rise, start the fire, till the rows, pass the tithes”—hung across a sweet gospel waltz sets the pace. All that needs to get done today are the dishes, the song suggests. The stakes remain comfortingly low throughout Eno Axis. Stress only creeps in through the album’s weaker tracks. Thematically, “One Eye Open” is an outlier. Though the subject of white supremacy remains as upsettingly relevant as ever, its placement here is jarring. The song would’ve been better suited for Lionheart, where McEntire reckoned with her own history growing up as a closeted tomboy among a Southern Baptist family in a small town at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
In addition to being a songwriter, McEntire is a skilled poet, and the poet’s devotion to both meaning and clarity comes through in many of these songs. You don’t have to wrestle with lines like “closer than a shadow cast,” because you know what it means. Her clever and clear wordplay recalls the style of another great queer poet, Mary Oliver. “She will leave like she appeared, eager-winged hummingbird,” sings McEntire on “River’s Jaw.” “I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly,” writes Mary Oliver in “I Know Someone.”
The peaceful assurances that Eno Axis offers come in part from McEntire’s selective deployment of imagery and metaphor. A love that lasts “longer than a good night’s rest,” and is as “certain as the horse’s stare,” is a very nice thing to think about. But pretty verses alone could not soothe a sore the way this album does. McEntire’s musicianship works equally hard and just as effectively. She challenged herself to write in open tunings, giving a song like the gorgeous instrumental interlude “Sunday Morning” space to roam within itself, individual instruments gently bouncing off one another like the giant balloons at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. A recording process that prioritized live takes and involved few overdubs also contributes to the album’s spontaneous and spacious atmosphere. The gentle, rolling drumbeat on “Footman’s Coat” and the rich, warm tones that McEntire and band member Luke Norton evoke from their instruments create a full sound that avoids the cloying style of Nashville country.
Restricted by a more confined, less spontaneous structure, the songs of Eno Axis would surely lose their healing powers. Their simplicity gives them strength and McEntire’s unfussy treatment makes for music that doesn’t distract from chaos but teaches us instead how to move through it. Eno Axis is both a wonderful album and a handy instruction manual for our times: Follow the simple suggestions tucked within McEntire’s songs and you may just feel your weariness begin to lift like morning mist burning off a river.
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. | 2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 26, 2020 | 8.1 | ecac8727-cfda-45c5-b2a6-225e3798ce00 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
Stricken by a disease that left her unable to sing, the British songwriter recruits a cast of guest vocalists for a set of songs that toy with assumptions about authorship and interpretation. | Stricken by a disease that left her unable to sing, the British songwriter recruits a cast of guest vocalists for a set of songs that toy with assumptions about authorship and interpretation. | Linda Thompson: Proxy Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/linda-thompson-proxy-music/ | Proxy Music | Linda Thompson is best known as a singer and interpreter of someone else’s songs. A specific someone else: Richard Thompson, her ex-husband, with whom she made a few of the greatest British folk-rock albums ever as a duo in the 1970s and early ’80s, lending dignified poise to his tales of suffering and strife. Linda made one album after they broke up, then began struggling with a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which causes involuntary contractions of the larynx that can make it difficult to sing or speak. She focused on family life and released no new music until the early 2000s, when treatment with Botox relaxed her vocal cords enough for her to make a careful comeback. The three albums she’s released since then are remarkable not only for the renewed power of her voice, but also for her emergence as a songwriter, a craft she honed when it seemed like she might never sing again.
Thompson’s dysphonia has since worsened. Proxy Music, as its title cheekily suggests, is a collection of songs she wrote for other people to sing, inverting the composer-performer dynamic of her best-known work. With a few exceptions, the music, largely co-written with her and Richard’s son Teddy Thompson, could fit onto any of those classic ’70s records, with stately acoustic instrumentation and melodies that wind patiently without flashy pop hooks. Her sensibility as a lyricist is informed by the folk tradition, and she writes often about the sort of heartbreak and regret that also characterized her songs with Richard.
But she’s also funny—sharper and daffier than she ever got to be as her ex’s melancholy mouthpiece. In “Or Nothing at All,” a piano ballad about unrequited affection performed tenderly by Martha Wainwright, Thompson describes true love’s deliverance not in terms of high passion, but absurd clinical precision: “A hundred men in their white coats/Would check you with their stethoscopes/And hand you straight to me.” “Shores of America,” sung by Dori Freeman from the perspective of a pioneer woman leaving a lousy partner behind in the old world, contains a zinger so good it’s hard to believe no one’s gotten to it before: “And if it’s true/That only the good die young/Lucky old you/’Cause you’ll be around until kingdom come.”
Perhaps inspired by the unusual rotating-singer format or her years spent inflecting someone else’s words and melodies with her own personality, Thompson is playful and probing with notions of authorship and authenticity of voice that many other songwriters take for granted. She is especially attuned to the gradations of difference in perspective between a song’s writer, its singer, and the constructed character of its narrator. Proxy Music opens with “The Solitary Traveler,” an emotionally complex waltz whose lyrics, about a “wicked” woman who has lost her voice and the love of her child’s father, seem drawn from Thompson’s biography. But they also gesture in the direction of a folk-song stock role she was occasionally asked to play earlier in her career: the fallen woman, undone by her own bad choices, an object of both pity and scorn. By the end of the song, Thompson has turned this misogynistic archetype on its head. “I’m alone now, you’d think I’d be sad,” sings Kami Thompson, Linda and Richard’s daughter, brassy and assured. “No voice, no son, no man to be had/You’re wrong as can be boys, I’m solvent and free boys/All my troubles are gone.”
“John Grant,” delivered by former Czars frontman John Grant, has a narrator whose heart has been stolen by a man named John Grant. It is both a Being John Malkovich-style metafictional hall of mirrors and a sweet portrait of the mutual quirks that develop in long relationships. “A moment on the lips/A lifetime on the hips” is how Thompson recounts the couple’s shared love of sweets. Later, we learn that they’re tree-huggers, an identity they take literally. “It chafes the arms a bit,” Grant sings with a sort of auditory suppressed smile, “And we don’t know if they’re into it.” He also contributes some pleasantly noodly electronic keyboard lines, sounding a bit like Jerry Garcia when he used MIDI to turn his guitar into a synth in the late ’80s and ’90s. It’s a strange incursion on an album otherwise committed to rustic instrumental textures, but a welcome one, heightening the uncanny aspect of the song’s premise.
Proxy Music’s other experiments with relatively contemporary accents aren’t always as successful. The reverb-enhanced stomps, shouts, and claps of “That’s the Way the Polka Goes” serve to make its asymmetrical rhythm seem much more generic than it actually is, bringing an otherwise fine song dangerously close to Lumineers territory. “Three Shaky Ships” also has too much reverb, its cathedral-sized echoes and Rachel Unthank’s quietly portentous delivery evoking another mid-2010s musical cliche: It sounds like one of those spooky covers of famous pop songs you used to hear all the time in trailers for blockbuster movies.
The album’s stunning closer is “Those Damn Roches,” a tribute to the titular singing sisters and various other famous musical clans, with lead vocals from Teddy Thompson. The delicate arcs of lead guitar sound a lot like Richard’s own, which may not be coincidental. The guitarist is Zak Hobbs, Richard and Linda’s grandson, son of their eldest daughter, Muna. Richard himself, who has contributed in various ways to all but one of Linda’s post-comeback albums, sings backup. (He also plays guitar on “I Used to Be So Pretty” and co-wrote “Three Shaky Ships.”) Inevitably, the subject turns to their own family in the final verse. “Faraway Thompsons tug at my heart/Can’t get along ’cept when we’re apart,” Teddy sings. “Is it life, or is it art?/One and the same.”
Life and art have long been entwined with unusual intensity for Thompson. Shoot Out the Lights, her final album as a duo with Richard, was filled with songs about bitterly dissolving relationships, many of them apparently written while things were still happy between them, and released just as their real-life breakup was bringing their collaboration to an end. Proxy Music entwines them again. Turning Linda’s absence as a singer into a flickering subject of the music, rather than just an unfortunate circumstance of its creation, it is a strange and sometimes brilliant album—one that only Linda Thompson could have made, whether or not you can hear her singing. | 2024-06-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | StorySound | June 26, 2024 | 7.5 | ecad09b5-cc1d-4f7c-a1b7-a45a7be78e47 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
DFA vets Shit Robot return, and make their case as the label's long-underrated house band. Featuring guest spots from Alex Taylor, Nancy Whang, and the Juan Maclean. | DFA vets Shit Robot return, and make their case as the label's long-underrated house band. Featuring guest spots from Alex Taylor, Nancy Whang, and the Juan Maclean. | Shit Robot: What Follows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21919-what-follows/ | What Follows | This past weekend was Electric Daisy Carnival, a yearly festival for neon-clad EDM ravers that takes place in NYC, among other cities. While perusing the throngs of revelers from the safe distance of EDC's sponsored Snapchat feed, I was struck by the gigantic array of DJs spinning to vast seas of people, each act with their own specific, trademark gimmick. Swedish duo Dada Life throw huge inflatable bananas into the crowd. There's an artist named Marshmello who wears a giant white light-up square over his face. It seemed like elaborate costuming and props were almost a prerequisite, and while hordes of teens dance their worries away, watching them made me long for the old-school showmanship of rave and acid house—no less gimmicky, surely, but grittier, more sardonic, weirder. The last time I saw Irish house and techno producer Marcus Lambkin, aka Shit Robot, perform, he too plugged in a crazy-looking LED helmet when he hit the stage, but it felt like a throwback to house's underground days, and not a ploy for more Instagram likes. He also proceeded to spin his homegrown brand of techno well into the night, striving to create that perfect, lost-in-abandon dancefloor moment—which he achieved, several times.
Shit Robot's third album, What Follows, also tries to recreate that experience, and while it's not always on the mark, it manages to deliver an enjoyable hour-long headtrip. As on his previous LPs, Shit Robot makes impeccable use of his label mates: Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, Nancy Whang of LCD, Museum of Love, and the Juan Maclean all lend their talents, and their camaraderie with Lambkin is evident. On opener “In Love,” Taylor's lilting vocals come in and out of the mix, soaked in piercing 808 synths and stuttering bass sequencers, while Lambkin's production sets the tone for the record: one, big giant swell from start to finish.
The lead single on What Follows is “Lose Control”, cowritten with Nancy Whang and Juan Maclean, where Whang speak-sings a icy directive: “I can't fight this feeling/Lose control.” The song makes good use of Shit Robot's dash of humor, the place where his appreciation of '80s and '90s rave culture comes through the most. It's a theme further explored in “Is There No End,” a rambling five minutes of shuffling techno where a spoken-word vocal describes a man's stream-of-consciousness journey to the club, only to get kicked out at the party's peak. It's like an exact counter to the surly doorman in Kick Like A Mule's 1992 acid house classic “The Bouncer,” but recast as the druggy clubber trying his best to follow the music to its peak.
That peak, the climax forever chased by ravers everywhere, never really comes to fruition on What Follows, with a majority of the album blending into one never-ending rise that doesn't quite launch itself over the edge. It's certainly purposeful, but nonetheless it lacks for something meatier, for the sonic equivalent of a huge green robot face lighting up the sweaty night. With DFA intricately woven into his DNA and a near lifetime of ironclad production skills, Shit Robot will no doubt continue honing his sound, inching ever closer to that perfect, life-changing beat. | 2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | May 18, 2016 | 6.7 | ecbcf9bf-f01e-4d26-a772-b24bffb0bb04 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
The pioneering second album from the avant-pop artist is a darkly nuanced look at identity and technology, where personal disasters occur at the same scale as the actual apocalypse. | The pioneering second album from the avant-pop artist is a darkly nuanced look at identity and technology, where personal disasters occur at the same scale as the actual apocalypse. | yeule: Glitch Princess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeule-glitch-princess/ | Glitch Princess | One so-called Coachella Key NFT gives you and a guest access to the festival for one weekend a year, along with any and all virtual productions, forever. It’s a venture in line with artists’ recent investment in virtual reality as a result of the pandemic and companies’ efforts to stake their claim in the prospective riches of the metaverse. Each Coachella token sold for over $40,000, twisting the idea of an event pass intertwined with the holder’s life, death, and the in-between of virtual existence into techno-capitalist grotesquerie. Less interested in remedying the problems of the world we live in, we’re squeezing every drop of its resources to build a new one with the same failing structures, where we can escape to attend a concert in Fortnite or Minecraft while it withers.
In this sense, yeule is a kind of escape artist. The music of the Singapore-raised artist born Nat Ćmiel addresses how the promising idea of digital life can be just as stifling as real life. On their 2019 debut, Serotonin II, their songs billowed out of synth lines that droned like faraway planes, their beauty so complete that you could miss the terror of their own mind creeping in. Like Enya or Grimes circa Visions, yeule tested the power of a disembodied voice to both spook and seduce, singing alongside interludes that sounded like a hovering UFO or wind sweeping over nothingness. Every now and then the same beat resurfaced to remind you of their capability as a pop artist as opposed to just the creator of whispery and ambient digicore experiments. Its hypnotic, steady pulse distracted you from the fact that they sang about wanting to die.
That overactive death drive persists on yeule’s second album, Glitch Princess, elevating relationship troubles into Shakespearean psycho-dramas backed by soundscapes massive enough to contain them. Layers of limping synths compete with pitched-up vocals that evoke a time that sounds like a technological cataclysm. They’ve mastered the language of self-erasure they practiced on Serotonin II, where bits of narrative implied “micro-deaths,” like a screen shutting off or spending a few hours anesthetized on drugs. Annihilation is a more desperate and unambiguous goal now: yeule details a physical desire to “burn out” of their body on “Eyes,” imagines themself hit by a train on “Friendly Machine,” and throughout the record considers being totally subsumed into someone else. They project their pain onto the vastness of cyberspace as if seeking advice from an oracle and listen back to the static of its reply, hopeful it can illuminate why life is so hard to live.
Despite all their references to wanting to be gone from the world, yeule the person is very present on Glitch Princess. The title of the opening track erases the line between their stage name, taken from the Final Fantasy video game series, and their given name: “My Name is Nat Ćmiel.” With their voice wavering like an A.I. attempting speech, they state their age (22) and a list of things they like: “I like pretty textures in sound, I like the way some music makes me feel, I like making up my own worlds.” A slow synthetic melody plays behind their words, hesitant and twinkling, as if to soundtrack a character that’s just coming to life. But even after presenting their most essential traits, yeule shows that merely knowing your own name is not necessarily enough to tether you to reality.
Press materials for Glitch Princess describe yeule as a cyborg. Though that idea isn’t explicit in the lyrics, it’s present in the way they fashion themself as if they’re not fully autonomous, as if their identity is the responsibility of some external creator. “Always want but never need/I don’t have an identity I can feed,” they sing on “Friendly Machine.” To begin to understand what’s going on inside their mind, yeule treats their existence as something veritably strange. They rhyme “amphetamine,” a stimulant, with “amitriptyline,” an antidepressant, curious about the ways we can manipulate our bodies though we’ll never be able to fully control them. Modern medicine is full of “couplings between organism and machine” wrote Donna Haraway in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a challenge for feminism to move away from the rigidity of identity politics. That sense of otherness is central to Yeule’s conception of cyborg-hood; it provides them access to their most core sense of humanity.
On “Bites on My Neck” they sing: “I had to walk into the fire to know how to feel,” simultaneously invoking a resurrection through pain and the flame-licked birth of Frankenstein’s monster. By holding themself at a remove from the rest of humanity, yeule seems to explore basic experiences as if for the first time. “Electric” considers the touch of another as a rapturous event. The song cracks open with an inhuman wail that recalls the esoteric birdsong on Björk’s Utopia—a hook whose strangeness magnifies the song’s wide-eyed, pleading admission that “you’re the only one who knows me.” It’s the voice of a being whose suffering and salvation feel beyond their control—a perspective at odds with other musical cyborgs, like Holly Herndon or Charli XCX, whose art addresses the ways that technology can expand notions of empathy, community, and pleasure.
They give themself a short reprieve from despair on “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty,” an emo-leaning acoustic confession that arrives like a solar flare at the album’s midpoint. The song opens in media res: “Currently,” they sing in a sharp coo, “the sullen look on your face tells me you see something in me more pure than this dirty.” The strumming guitar keeps pace with yeule’s tumbling stream of lyrics, as if slowing down might extinguish this rare good feeling. Their words are tinged with hope but are still no rebuke to the self-hatred that saturates the record; the moment they step away from the person they’re singing to, yeule returns to their own “tainted flesh.”
Personal disaster occurs at the same scale as actual apocalypse on Glitch Princess. Where yeule once favored synthetic harp swells and breathy vocal harmonies, there’s now industrial booms, throbbing audio feedback, and synths like thousands of bottle rockets whistling off into the sky at once. The enormity of the sounds make mundane actions—bleeding, eating, having sex—feel precipitous. yeule sings about leaving their “real” body, suggesting there’s somewhere else for consciousness to go. Maybe there will be soon, and we’ll indeed have to re-learn those essential behaviors as if from the beginning. For all their pessimism, yeule offers one consolation: When contemplating the body’s destruction, needs that might have otherwise been hidden can unselfconsciously emerge, like to be seen or known or loved completely.
Buy: Rough Trade
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to yeule’s place of residence. The reference has been removed. | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Bayonet | February 15, 2022 | 8.3 | ecbf1edc-dd7d-4b0e-af35-974e5b575ecf | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
Few producers have made the recent transition from underground bass music enigma to pop-adjacent craftsman as seamlessly and effectively as Brooklyn's Kingdom. On his new Vertical XL EP, he's closer than ever to perfectly balancing the two things in his music that've always stood out: heavy pulses and airy spaces. | Few producers have made the recent transition from underground bass music enigma to pop-adjacent craftsman as seamlessly and effectively as Brooklyn's Kingdom. On his new Vertical XL EP, he's closer than ever to perfectly balancing the two things in his music that've always stood out: heavy pulses and airy spaces. | Kingdom: Vertical XL EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18043-kingdom-vertical-xl-ep/ | Vertical XL EP | Few producers have made the recent transition from underground bass music enigma to pop-adjacent craftsman as seamlessly and effectively as Kingdom. It shouldn't be much of a surprise, even if 2010's bracingly pounding That Mystic EP and its fun-through-overload atmosphere provided a strong first impression. His 2011 EP Dreama proved as much: here's a man who could use all that stomping bass of his to boost up some genuinely romantic-sounding R&B crossover that didn't just drop in nods to “Like a Prayer” ironically. He didn't lose force or energy in the process-- he just turned up the contrast and opened the blinds. Now he's closer than ever to perfectly balancing the two things in his music that've always stood out: heavy pulses and airy spaces.
Vertical XL is even more soulful and warm than his Dreama material, the kind of beats that would work wonders under a Chance the Rapper verse or a Katy B performance. Not to fantasy-book collaborators or anything, but it really does fit the moment, and leadoff cut “Bank Head” rises to the occasion. Its appearance as an instrumental on Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 was a red herring: there were plenty of icily glowing synthpop homages to carry it, but it feels more like a complete piece now that the final version adds vocals that complement its tense austerity. Singer Kelela, an Angeleno with an upcoming mixtape on Kingdom's Night Slugs sister label Fade to Mind, pulls off a name-making performance as the initially delicate, increasingly impassioned voice that draws out, complements, and then drastically expands on the longing frustration of the track.
Maybe it's the strong impression that “Bank Head” makes, but from there on out the rest of the EP's alt-pop, hip-hop and R&B tendencies jump to the forefront. The pull between deep percussive bass and the beats he doesn't drop continue to give his work a simultaneously heavy and aerodynamic sparseness, a groove too clean to be chaotic but too forceful to really be minimal. And that approach-- intricacy in the service of simplicity-- is a good environment for his hookier tendencies to emerge. Even when things get moody, they don't need a lot of coaxing to get danceable: the chain-clanking, plinking-water darkness that sets off “Corpse” is overwhelmed by machine-gun kicks and synths that toe the line between foreboding and intimate, and the minor-chord moan of “Viper Lash” has enough hopped-up percussive interplay piercing the surface to make it more thrilling than gloomy.
When it's at its most explicitly future-pop stylized, the music takes on some of Kingdom's best tendencies. The sparse, heavy-foot loping “OG Master” isn't exactly a good-mood pool-party soundtrack on its own, but the speaker-rattling resemblance to some of the more iconoclastic space-rap beats to emerge from grime-savvy Southern and West Coast underground producers works in its favor. And even through all the characteristically dense drum programming and intense forward motion, the heart of “Viper XL” is a juxtaposition of synthpop and old-school house that lets him construct some of his most euphoric melodies yet. Kingdom's still a relatively low-profile entity-- for now, at least-- but he does what pop musicians should do: build, reinterpret, transform, and revel in the possibilities of a long lineage of dance music. That he does so with only one vocal track makes it clear that his own voice is just getting stronger. | 2013-05-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-05-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fade to Mind | May 28, 2013 | 8.2 | ecc77177-1005-42c3-b32f-4bc3ad990ade | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
After producing for Joey Purp and Vic Mensa and singing on Chance the Rapper’s “All Night,” Chicago’s Kevin Rhomberg steps up with his breezy debut album. It crystallizes his peculiar pop appeal. | After producing for Joey Purp and Vic Mensa and singing on Chance the Rapper’s “All Night,” Chicago’s Kevin Rhomberg steps up with his breezy debut album. It crystallizes his peculiar pop appeal. | Knox Fortune: Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knox-fortune-paradise/ | Paradise | Until recently, Kevin Rhomberg was a relatively behind-the-scenes force on the Chicago indie hip-hop scene. As Knox Fortune, Rhomberg has produced for Joey Purp, Vic Mensa, and Towkio, but it wasn’t until last year with an outright feature on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book that his name began to hold enough weight to crack a headline. Now that he’s just released his debut, Paradise, a round of high-profile interviewers have been forcing the rotely burning question: “What was it like to work with Chance the Rapper?” they all ask.
Rhomberg’s voice on “All Night”—that happy, jukey Chance the Rapper dance track he featured on and won a Grammy for in 2016—was peculiar enough to immediately wonder, “Who is this guy?” And Paradise crystallizes his peculiar pop appeal. The album squirms from indie rock to synth pop and back. Without recognizing his name, a lot of new fans wrongly assumed Rhomberg’s gender from the pitch of his voice. It’s not just the almost-alto range of his singing that lends Rhomberg a slightly bizarre quality; the thin plainness of his timbre can make him sound downright boyish. There’s no gravity to his voice to anchor a song, and so no matter the style, Paradise seems to constantly buzz around in a summery daze.
Despite his previous production and Chicago affiliations, Paradise is anything but rap. Instead, the album dances around a core of quaint, shimmering synth-pop and indie rock, stances that present Rhomberg as a playful and unbothered lead. Standout single “Lil Thing” is the best consolidation of his charm. An earworm with a blurry mix, it’s subtly funky, but like the rest of the record, it never bogs down in technical austerity. That the lyrics are so cooly quippy extends the effect. On the stuttering “Help Myself” a slinky bassline misdirects from the dainty guitar riff that peeks over the top of the mix. “I think she wants it, but doesn’t know how to say it/She squeeze my hand in the car when I slam on the breaks,” Rhomberg sings, letting that familiar moment of tense inertia explain a new couple’s burgeoning intimacy. He conjures up little scenes like this throughout Paradise without coddling them in context. If you’ve ever driven a car with a loved one in the passenger seat, you know exactly what he means.
On “24 Hours,” a jumpy R&B pop track that sounds like a recycled Robin Thicke reference, Rhomberg feigns some pop star arrogance before disarming it away. “Accentuate my ego, yeah I’m the man,” he sings, trying to convince himself as much as his lover. Later he admits, “I’m a man to my mother, but afraid of the dark.” It’s not the only lyric on Paradise that might elicit an “aww.”
“I Don’t Wanna Talk About It” is the closest thing to Rhomberg leaning into the mic, and it sounds like he’s jumping around a garage trying out a psych-rock rendition with his friends. “Keep You Close” seems like the most forward crossover attempt. It’s a happy banger with a hint of edge and radio-friendly production: a theme-song worthy piano riff plods over a snappy drum break. “I need you to love me when I won’t/The one thing I’ll stress the most is/I’ll keep you close,” Rhomberg sings, turning his self-doubt into a love story.
All of this seems to come easily to Rhomberg. Never do you get the sense that he’s trying too hard or stretching his limits. Of course, there’s a potential downside to that light-footedness, and it’s fair to wonder what he might sound like as an aggressive auteur. But that Rhomberg doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously is his greatest asset. Much bigger pop stars strain to sound so passionately breezy. Even when he’s not trying anything new, Rhomberg just sounds like himself. | 2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | September 29, 2017 | 7.1 | ecc96be0-7429-4af1-af84-0eec7e86bb48 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The Kyoto punk quartet unleashes a tornado of defiance at the prospect of romance, monotonous office work, and people who feel entitled to women’s time. | The Kyoto punk quartet unleashes a tornado of defiance at the prospect of romance, monotonous office work, and people who feel entitled to women’s time. | Otoboke Beaver: Itekoma Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/otoboke-beaver-itekoma-hits/ | Itekoma Hits | Kyoto, Japan-based punk quartet Otoboke Beaver make anti-love songs with no time for sadness or longing. Instead, they are fueled by a rage so ferocious it’s thrilling to behold, like watching an exhausted athlete dig deep to overtake the frontrunner in the final 200 meters. The band’s latest release, Itekoma Hits, is an album of unwavering “no”s shrieked over gnarly guitar riffs and frantic drums, a tornado of defiance at the prospect of romance, monotonous office work, and people who feel entitled to women’s time. Hurtling through 14 songs in 27 minutes, it burns like a sore throat and blazes like a brittle tree doused in kerosene.
The album’s songs are less narratives than slivers of raw fury directed at hyper-specific situations. The title of one demands, “Introduce Me to Your Family,” while the 18-second closer simply asks, “What time did you say you’d come back today?! Mean.” Otoboke Beaver’s lyrics make heavy use of repetition, sometimes reiterating a line four or five times in a row. Nowhere is this more pointed than on “I’m Tired of Your Repeating Story,” where the repetitious form and frenetic guitar evoke the mind-scrambling agitation of listening to someone launch into an anecdote for the umpteenth time: “Bored receptionist like a corpse/My ears are bleeding/My ears are bleeding.” Similarly, “6 Day Work Week Is a Pain” employs repetition to simulate the tedium of an unfulfilling desk job, ending on a series of facetious “thank you”s followed by a snarled, “Fuck you!”
As a band, Otoboke Beaver work together seamlessly, building tension with lead vocalist Accorinrin’s winding solos and releasing it in teeth-gnashing group vocals. Album opener “datsu.hikage no onna” begins with Accorinrin’s croons of “I hate you” as she laments being a “woman in the shadows.” When the rest of the band joins in, the sentiment is unified and powerful, as if bolstered by an army of women who have all felt this way. These more melodic vocals, though rarer and rougher around the edges, are expertly deployed. On highlight “Bad Luck,” lyrics sung in rounds depict the blossoming of new love with cynical suspense, knowing nothing can stay sweet for long.
Itekoma Hits’ most vivid imagery centers around food and eating. On “S’il vous plait,” “pork bits” is slang for male genitalia. Elsewhere, a wife’s home-cooked meal becomes a symbol of unattainable love and respect in the eyes of her husband’s scorned mistress. And on “Binge Eating Binge Drinking Bulimia,” Otoboke Beaver sing about an emotional reaction to unrequited love that balances frustration and shock value, toeing the line between bold and messy. In the rare moments when the band loses focus, their brazen energy can slip into overwhelming commotion. At times, the spontaneity that defines their songs feels like it isn’t building to any final revelation.
Still, their music evokes a deep sense of joy. Otoboke Beaver have said that they are not feminists, telling The Japan Times last year, “We don’t try to sing about women’s rights or women’s issues in our music, we’ve never talked about it.” But intention is not always the same as impact; even if their music is not explicitly feminist, there is power in hearing a group of four Asian women say exactly what they want. Listening to these songs, it is simply assumed that we have the confidence, security, freedom, and poise to confront those who have wronged us, to turn down love and sex that doesn’t fully satisfy us, and to demand better. In Otoboke Beaver’s world, loneliness is holy and anger is a beautiful, terrifying spectacle. | 2019-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Damnably | April 29, 2019 | 7.7 | eccd7d8a-74c0-490b-83c0-a354e67e688b | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Near the end of his life, Jimi Hendrix recorded two concerts in Hawaii for an ill-fated film. A new reissue reveals him elevating above an earthly debacle to offer a glimpse of transcendence. | Near the end of his life, Jimi Hendrix recorded two concerts in Hawaii for an ill-fated film. A new reissue reveals him elevating above an earthly debacle to offer a glimpse of transcendence. | The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live in Maui | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-jimi-hendrix-experience-live-in-maui/ | Live in Maui | In early spring of 1970, Jimi Hendrix’s manager Michael Jefferey convinced Warner Bros. executives to dump $1 million into his client’s name. Half of it went to finish Hendrix’s state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios. And half went to Jefferey himself, intended to kickstart his new career as a film producer with Hendrix providing the soundtrack. That half-million was thrown into the money pit that was Rainbow Bridge, a piece of hippie drivel by Warhol acolyte Chuck Wein that glommed onto surfing and tai chi, casting a bunch of amateurs and Hawaiian locals.
As the film production spun out of control, Jefferey pitched an overburdened Hendrix on Hawaii: two weeks of relaxation and two shows tacked onto the end of his Cry of Love Tour. It would be a ”vibratory color sound experiment,” as Wein spun it, with the audience segmented by astrological sign. Hendrix wanted no part of the debacle, but nevertheless found himself on a stage hastily erected near the Haleakalā volcano on a ranch in Olinda. It made for a stunning tableaux, but gale-force winds left the band struggling to stand upright, much less hear themselves onstage. It would also be Hendrix’s penultimate concert in the United States. Six weeks later, he was dead.
While the two concerts were filmed and recorded for Rainbow Bridge, the finished product, so dependent on his presence, only featured a baffling 17 minutes of footage of Hendrix, and the album of the same name featured none of the audio. Thanks to those winds, drummer Mitch Mitchell had to re-record all of his parts in the studio. Live in Maui presents both concerts for the first time, along with an accompanying documentary. For a posthumous discography that has seen numerous recordings from that final tour officially reissued (Berkeley, Atlanta, Isle of Wight), Live in Maui has Hendrix performing the near-miracle of elevating above an earthly debacle to offer a glimpse of transcendence.
That last tour—and Maui in particular—captures the myriad forces pulling at the guitar god during what Robert Christgau called “the excited, spiritual, bummed-out sprawl of his final year.” A headlining rock act constantly dealing with slapdash festival sound while also trying to build a studio to his exacting standards and finish a new album, Hendrix was pushing towards weaving in more Black musical strands while bogged down by his primarily white audiences’ expectations. They wanted “Purple Haze,” “Fire,” and “Foxy Lady” for the thousandth time, while Hendrix was seeking beyond those increasingly threadbare numbers towards something funky, if not yet fully formed. The band reflected that divide, a hybrid Experience of longtime English drummer Mitchell and Hendrix’s fellow Chitlin’ Circuit survivor and Band of Gypsys bassist Billy Cox. Together, the trio were working through those not-yet-settled new songs in real time. Incandescent blues numbers and hurried run-throughs of the hits sit alongside very loose jams that stumble about, shuffle, nearly dissolve, and then suddenly shoot skyward.
The first set boasts slightly better clarity, the second set coming across more muffled. But the wider canvas of these two sets offers him a freedom he didn’t always have on that tour. Rather than frontload the hits, the trio gets to take their time, folding in a dozen new songs that had yet to appear on any album. Maybe that extended time in Maui eased Hendrix’s mind. So the set opens with “Hey Baby (New Rising Sun),” rather than close with it, as they often had on previous dates. What might have been the title track of the next Jimi Hendrix record blooms with a gorgeous, iridescent guitar tone like a sentient waterfall.
Effortless guitar heroics abound, from the chopped “Sunshine of Your Love” chords sprinkled into “Fire” to the “Star Spangled Banner” quote teased in the last moments of “Purple Haze.” When it seems like the rarely performed “Villanova Junction” is about to dissolve into silence, it pivots into a storming take on “Ezy Rider.” Even on the big hits duly rendered here, Hendrix at some point in each song hits a frequency akin to a serotonin release, reminding you why his music is equivocated to the euphoric highs of drugs or sex. Or just go near the two-minute mark of Maui’s version of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” when his guitar seems to be shooting down from a mile above the stage. “I kept thinking a spaceship was landing,” remembers one film cast member in the documentary, and it doesn’t sound like stoner hyperbole.
The seeds of Afrofuturism reside in this gravity-defying tone, yet Jimi was equally profound and transcendent burning through a slow blues. “Red House” appears here in a peculiarly short but still potent version. But it’s Hendrix’s lashing of “Hear My Train A-Comin’” that staggers: sorrowful, unbowed, and pissed, his guitar obliterating all in its path.
Blame the messiness of his estate in the wake of his tragic death, or confounding number of posthumous compilations and concert recordings, but is there an icon of the boomer era who has been needlessly diminished like Hendrix in the 21st century? “Jimi Hendrix looms large among those lapses in our collective consciousness,” cultural critic Greg Tate writes. “His absence from a general celebration of African American heroes is both absurd and symptomatic of a more widespread problem: cultural and political amnesia...Hendrix [remains] one of the most misunderstood and misapprehended.”
A Black genius plying a once wholly Black music before a now peculiarly white world of rock (the footage of a crowd composed primarily of blissed-out blond flower children before the man himself appears seems even more absurd in the present), Hendrix paved the way for every subsequent and successful Black visionary to follow in his wake—think Stevie, George, Marvin, Prince. Live in Maui sees the man pushing beyond the boundaries of rock towards something new and untenable. Maybe it was right to call it “a vibratory color sound experiment.”
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Experience Hendrix / Legacy | November 28, 2020 | 8.4 | ecce2921-0080-425b-89f6-a6ff093f1722 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Canadian country singer immerses himself in a bygone era on this spacious and dynamic full-band set. | The Canadian country singer immerses himself in a bygone era on this spacious and dynamic full-band set. | Colter Wall: Little Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colter-wall-little-songs/ | Little Songs | Across his recent albums, Colter Wall has turned the vistas of his native Saskatchewan into old-timey slideshows full of hardscrabble folk heroes roaming the land, weary cowboys trading campfire tales, and couples two-steppin’ across the worn, wooden floors of an old barn. While the imagery has been consistent, the soundtrack has evolved. After working with producer Dave Cobb on 2018’s stark Songs of the Plains, Wall self-produced his follow-up, 2020’s Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, and incorporated his longtime touring band to capture a more bountiful sound. With his fourth album, Little Songs, he further saturates the picture with a focus on original fare that feels less like homage and more like habitation.
The sense of confidence can be credited to Wall’s creative partnership with bandmate Patrick Lyons, who co-produced Little Songs. They no longer simply nod to the past and its looming figures—Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, and of course, Johnny Cash—but immerse themselves in the era completely. Compared to contemporaries like Charley Crockett, Wall doesn’t seem interested in modernizing his music or playing with form. “Well I don’t care what’s cool or where it’s at,” he sings on “Honky Tonk Nighthawk.” The fiddle-heavy arrangement evokes the warm press of an audience swirling in tandem, and it sits alongside a blustering cover of Canadian singer-songwriter Ian Tyson’s “The Coyote & the Cowboy,” where Wall’s sings in a gruff growl that thickens the song’s wit like a roux.
Listening to Little Songs can feel like dropping a coin into the local nickelodeon and watching the past flicker to life, and much of that movement comes from Wall’s band. Their radiant performances flesh out the record long after Wall’s voice, all wood-grained weft and warble, has quieted. You can hear their magic in the sashaying, doubled electric guitar solo on “Honky Tonk Nighthawk” and in Lyons’ twinkling pedal steel lacing around “Prairie Evening/Sagebrush Waltz” like the most delicately stitched trim. When Wall’s narrator spies a woman “shaming the glow of the moon” at a local dance on “Prairie Evening,” the song blossoms into a summery waltz, the bass harmonica and fiddle rippling against one another.
Given the space to play, there are times when the band overshadows Wall’s lyrics. The disjointed “Standing Here” details a moment of pause that leads to a few meandering reflections: about the country, about people these days, about the music industry. But Wall falls short of larger poignancy, and the band fills that gap with a lively do-si-do jam. He fares better in “Corralling the Blues,” as close to a confessional as he has dared. In a land where “the sky seems to end 50 feet up,” as author James Welch writes in Winter in the Blood, the blues don’t seem to hang heavy the way they do in more harried locales. Yet, Wall divulges over brooding acoustic guitar that he’s battled an affliction since “before I was grown.” A ruminative harmonica from Jake Groves flutters and suggests a daydream yearning for a mind less weighted.
When faced with the vast emptiness of prairie life, work can keep an agitated mind busy for only so long; it takes something bigger to beat the blues. With its pacing title track, Little Songs offers a sentimental theory for one possible remedy. “You won’t get much on mountain time/Except older and a thicker hide,” Wall sings with a wink. “You got to fill the big empty/With little songs.” He delivers these lines like a seasoned storyteller, reminding himself of the timeless feelings that drive us to keep the music playing, whether it’s old or new. | 2023-07-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | La Honda / RCA | July 17, 2023 | 7.1 | eccfdf26-2024-4f17-b376-9410c3ea5d5e | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
On his latest set of releases, the new age composer Laraaji delivers divine works full of drifting ambience. He offers sage advice and highlights the transformative power of ancient gong tones. | On his latest set of releases, the new age composer Laraaji delivers divine works full of drifting ambience. He offers sage advice and highlights the transformative power of ancient gong tones. | Laraaji: Sun Gong / Bring on the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laraaji-sun-gong-bring-on-the-sun/ | Sun Gong / Bring on the Sun | Laraaji has spent the past 40 years trying to ease the world’s stress. He creates soothing ambient music, and across several releases, Laraaji’s done his best to make you forget he’s even there. For his splendid new pair of releases, Sun Gong and Bring on the Sun, the new age musician and foremost purveyor of laughter meditation compiles another reflective set, full of the drifting ambience and life affirmations you’d expect from Laraaji.
The musician is probably best known for his 1980 album Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, which was produced by preeminent ambient composer Brian Eno (who discovered Laraaji playing in Washington Square Park and asked him to record an album as part of Eno’s famed “ambient” album series). Much like Laraaji’s previous work, Sun Gong and Bring on the Sun entice a deep state of rest. The idea for Sun Gong, Laraaji said recently, was to construct an immersive listen that highlights the transformative power of ancient gong tones. For centuries, the gong has been used as a calming device in yoga and meditational therapy. In holistic medicine, it helps resolve emotional and physical dissonance, bringing the body and spirit to one accord. When coupled with light music, gong meditation has also been known to heal physical ailments.
Sun Gong consists of two extended compositions, “Sun Gong No. 1” and “Sun Gong No. 2.” It is a monotonous drone of wafting cymbals, chimes, and penetrating bass—a mix of dark acoustic and electronic sounds that slowly become brighter. The music’s subdued hum brings to mind Eno as well as contemporary artists like Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never, except the mood feels divine in an almost undefinable way. It’s minimalistic and trance-like, made for headphone listening and intimate spaces, but in no way does it fade into the background.
Laraaji filters his instrument through various electronic effects, crafting massive waves of metallic sound. Near the eight-minute mark of “Sun Gong No. 1,” the musician pares down his main device, allowing the synths to breathe. Around the 12-minute mark, a celestial chant comes into play, giving a ghostly resonance to the piece. A similar chant arises near the end of “Sun Gong No. 2,” a far more radiant work that transitions Sun Gong to the complimentary Bring on the Sun.
Dubbed a “magical mixtape,” Laraaji brings a broader array of compositions to the eccentric Bring on the Sun. Where Sun Gong is dark and improvised, Bring on the Sun is made of weightless hypnotic loops (one is called “Laraajazzi”) and contemplative vocal tracks with standard song structures. If Sun Gong aims to relax its listeners, Bring on the Sun finds Laraaji connecting with them in more direct ways. On “Reborn in Virginia,” for instance, Laraaji openly recounts his upbringing “in the backwoods” using a bouncy blend of harp, tabla, and tambura. On the folk-influenced “Change,” he offers sage advice through a weathered baritone. “If you can boogie with life,” Laraaji asserts, “then you can boogie with change.”
In a world of mounting pressure, Sun Gong and Bring on the Sun are a collective, not-so-subtle nudge to turn down for a bit, continuing the same message Laraaji has touted for years. Yet in the current political and social climate, it seems the musician’s art is more relevant than ever. At this year’s Moogfest, for instance, Laraaji performed an overnight “sleep concert” that featured eight hours of faint echoes, zither, and light bells, all tailored to help participants fade into slumber. That makes Laraaji’s reemergence all the more fascinating: with stadium-sized pop dominating the electronic lexicon, the 73-year-old has come back into view by taking his same, exact opposite approach. Once the party is over, you need to get some rest. | 2017-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | September 26, 2017 | 7.3 | ecd95795-686c-4c1d-b9bc-2c377f731579 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
On their first new album in six years, the folk troubadours balance out-of-time balladry with a mature sensibility that’s attuned to melancholy and mortality in the present. | On their first new album in six years, the folk troubadours balance out-of-time balladry with a mature sensibility that’s attuned to melancholy and mortality in the present. | The Decemberists: As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-decemberists-as-it-ever-was-so-it-will-be-again/ | As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again | Once a figure of ridicule and derision, the nerd defined the first decades of the 21st century even more than the hipster or the bro. This seemed like a promising development, before it soured into misogynistic gaming culture and The Big Bang Theory. The Decemberists, named after an obscure Russian revolution (which they winkingly misspelled), represented a more benevolent side of geekdom: They were smart, of course, but also very passionate about arcana. They fussed over prog-folk epics, sea shanties, and Shirley Collins the way other nerds nitpicked D&D campaigns or Star Wars canon. We knew the terrain of frontman Colin Meloy’s inner emotional life not through confessional lyrics but through his obsessions.
The Decemberists weren’t rock nerds, though, which may be why actual rock nerds dismissed them in their heyday. Instead, they were theater nerds—a wildly intense phylum of geek. Meloy wrote songs like playlets, constantly implying a proscenium, and the band performed them like a troupe of thespians, occasionally even reenacting Tolkien battles onstage. There was an element of playacting in every song, which made them seem like the nerdiest band around (even Barenaked Ladies’ theme songs never went that deep). That dramaturgical proclivity festooned quote marks around certain songs (“The Mariner’s Revenge Song”) and even entire albums (The Hazards of Love), but their music always seemed to spring from a benign fixation with the historic and the folkloric.
With their ninth studio album, the Decemberists have done something that few 21st-century nerds even consider: They’ve matured in their relationship with their obsessions. They’ve grown up. Not a lot, but enough. The archaic syntax of the title As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again suggests a “return to form” or at the very least a career retrospective. But the album is nothing quite so lofty: The Decemberists are dressing up in yesteryear’s costumery—the character-driven songs of Picaresque, the jangle rock of The King Is Dead, the shaky political engagement of I’ll Be Your Girl—but there are no quote marks around these songs. It’s more a personal reckoning with their own past: a rummage sale of dusty enthusiasms.
So there’s an unexpected melancholy to these new story-songs, a poignancy that wouldn’t have been possible 15 or 20 years ago. Meloy understands we obsess differently in our dotage, with a new sense of impermanence and a more acute understanding of mortality. He has sung about death many times before, but it sounds a little more immediate on opener “Burial Ground.” There’s an easy charm in Meloy’s gashlycrumb wit and in the band’s ability to combine various influences so that the familiar—’60s folk melodies and pop arrangements—sounds slightly unplaceable. Is it more Beach Boys outtake or more pre-Days of Future Passed Moody Blues? “Burial Ground” operates not unlike Fairport Convention’s “Come All Ye”: It’s an invocation, an invitation to the graveyard, and the Decemberists know we’re all headed in that direction anyway.
That’s how they start the album, and every song that follows—from the “Hell”-acious “Oh No!” to the bittersweet love song “All I Want Is You”—ponders the inevitable end of every story. The long white veil in “Long White Veil” hides not a bride’s face but a corpse’s frozen countenance (gesturing toward the Lefty Frizzell hit “The Long Black Veil”), and “Don’t Go to the Woods” is nothing but dread and caution: a preamble to “The Black Maria,” the dark heart of this album. That title might refer to arcane slang for a paddy wagon, or it might be the Beasts Pirates in One Piece, but Meloy is writing his own canon here. Death is a walking shadow, never glimpsed by the living but known by its heavy footfalls in the hallway. “Turn out your lantern light, set your affairs to right,” Meloy sings over a strummed acoustic guitar and a lone funereal horn. “The Black Maria comes for us all.”
As fanciful as these songs can be, the Decemberists can’t help but ground them in the very real, very horrifying present. That’s never been their strongest subject, but they at least try to meet our current moment with the capitalist allegory of “The Reapers” and even “William Fitzwilliam” (which is haunted by the ghost of John Prine’s “Paradise”). The angriest song here, “America Made Me,” might be twice as powerful if it was half as clever, but there is something to be said for soundtracking dissent with jaunty piano and party horns. It’s a tack they’ve been deploying since “16 Military Wives,” although here the sentiment is more potent in its outrage and disgust.
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again ends as you might expect: with a nearly 20-minute epic called “Joan in the Garden.” Its winding length and multi-part structure gesture toward The Tain and its spawn The Hazards of Love, but it might align more closely with “I Was Meant for the Stage,” their creative exegesis from Her Majesty. It’s a song about what the Decemberists do and why they do it, a meditation on art as a weapon against death—but, in this case, not their own. Joan is literally in the garden, deep in the soil, but Meloy can resurrect her with words: “Make her 10 miles tall, make her arms cleave mountains… write a line, erase a line.” After a five-minute folk passage and a five-minute prog section, the Decemberists give over nearly 10 minutes more to ambient noises, stray rhythms, plunked strings, errant synths. It sounds like they’re striking the set and clearing the stage—a softer kind of death—and it’s weirdly moving. They might have stopped there rather than append a dramatic coda, but they never could resist a big finish. As it ever was. | 2024-06-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Thirty Tigers | June 20, 2024 | 7.2 | ece346ff-bbd4-4df5-95b5-4c6a05d9403c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The singer’s first full concert in 22 years was a joyous surprise, a moment of wonder. Led by Brandi Carlile, the live recording of the star-studded fête crowds Joni out. | The singer’s first full concert in 22 years was a joyous surprise, a moment of wonder. Led by Brandi Carlile, the live recording of the star-studded fête crowds Joni out. | Joni Mitchell: Joni Mitchell at Newport | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joni-mitchell-at-newport/ | Joni Mitchell at Newport | Joni Mitchell’s unannounced set at the Newport Folk Festival late last July was pure social media manna. Just minutes after the most sophisticated singer-songwriter ever associated with “folk-rock” returned to the stage for her first full show in nearly a quarter-century, shaky videos and sunlit photos flooded sleepy Sunday timelines. There was Mitchell, 78, on a stage again, bejeweled and beaming, as if laughing at life’s absurd odds. It felt impossible not to consume every clip, the sacrament of some new miracle.
After surviving childhood polio, devastating post-polio syndrome in the ’90s, and a 2015 brain aneurysm, Mitchell had learned to sing and play some guitar again through a series of loose living-room hootenannies in her Southern California home. Her younger friends dubbed them “Joni Jams.” And now, with a dozen or so of those apostles, she had brought that party to a blazing but joyous Sunday afternoon in seaside Rhode Island. Her appearance was our world’s truly rarest commodity—a complete surprise, thrilling and affirming because it so long seemed impossible.
For all that day’s rapture and wonder, Mitchell’s unexpected appearance never really seemed the setting for a proper live album. (And she has made two, both staggering.) Consider how high passions were onstage, after all, with the acolytes—Brandi Carlile, Blake Mills, Lucius, Allison Russell, Marcus Mumford, and so on—there to assist in Mitchell’s resurrection as her sprawling, spirited band. On most of the songs, the kids took the lead, Mitchell supplying backup for her own songs; on occasion, she took charge, while they offered awestruck accompaniment. You can hear, appreciate, and even admire their ecstasy during At Newport, the hour-long edit of Mitchell’s day in the sun. It’s audible in the onstage squeals after she sings the second half of “A Case of You” or when Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith stammers “That’s my hero right there” like some smitten schoolboy after he leads “Amelia.”
Such unrestrained fervor, though, makes for an album so frustrating that it actually complicates that memory’s innocent delight. Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.
Carlile’s role in helping Mitchell return to stage cannot be overstated. During a single decade, she went from a stylistic disciple to the advocate who covered Blue in full to one of the few true believers who held out hope Mitchell might still make music. Mitchell, in turn, used the star-studded and ultimately empowering private Joni Jams that Carlile facilitated as a Jacob’s ladder, unsteadily climbing toward an updated version of her singular voice. “Just watch… Joni’s back,” Mills remembered Carlile telling him after Mitchell sang several songs during a Joni Jam in September 2021. “[Brandi] recognized that moment,” Mills later said in a Mojo interview, “and she could see the future.”
But onstage in Newport, Carlile—to borrow a coveted Mitchell barb—“made some value judgments in a self-important voice,” having checked any ostensible self-awareness backstage. That much even seemed clear simply from early images of the day, where Carlile matched Mitchell, seating herself on an ostentatious Victorian throne and singing into a gilded microphone. (This happened again this June, at a second public Joni Jam.) It is the sort of undeserved equivalence that, even before hearing a note, at least made me wonder how Carlile, who can be a wonderfully boisterous singer, would work with Mitchell, not just around her.
Now on tape, Carlile’s approach to the songs borders on suffocation. At best, she offers serviceable readings of standards, over-singing “Carey” and “Shine” with church-camp gusto and letting Mitchell get in a harmony edgewise. At her worst, though, she distracts from and even drowns out Mitchell, with a maddening insistence on having a say during every track. Her Mariah-lite melisma at the end of “A Case of You,” her unnecessary edict to “Kick ass, Joni Mitchell” before an astounding instrumental of “Just Like a Train,” her incessant humming and whispered phrases during the back half of an otherwise sublime “Both Sides Now”: Carlile is constantly reminding the audience that she’s here, that she’s partially responsible for this. She is such an insistent and pandering presence throughout these songs that, when Mitchell begins Gershwin’s “Summertime” like she’s slinking through some smoky jazz lounge, you half-expect the sidekick to answer “Bradley’s on the microphone with Ras M.G.” (Later, Carlile settles for “Tell ’em what time it is, Joni.”)
This overzealousness pervades the entire performance. The motley troupe’s righteous energy during opener “Big Yellow Taxi” or the choral finale of “The Circle Game” never truly wanes, even during the relatively quiet tunes. Goldsmith, for instance, does an admirable job fronting “Amelia” and “Come in From the Cold,” a perspicacious 1991 single that’s thankfully been salvaged here. His tone is plain and kind, as if offering Mitchell an open invitation to meet near the middle. She accepts it haltingly on “Amelia” but then readily on “Come in From the Cold,” their voices interweaving with an uncertainty tailor-made for the song’s senses of self-discovery and doubt. It is one of At Newport’s few examples of clear vulnerability and risk.
As with Celisse Henderson’s bold interpretation of “Help Me,” even that moment is soon overrun with other voices and instruments, Carlile’s army of Lucius, Mumford, and the like coming down to clutter the clearing. The results subsume the eccentricity, elegance, and innovation of Mitchell’s work, applying a kind of conventional Disney gloss that is the most elementary musical takeaway of the entire Laurel Canyon scene. At Newport is like a selfie snapped from some overwhelming vista, where the faces of the subjects accidentally crowd out the actual sight they’re there to behold. That subsequent Joni Jam this June corrected some of these issues, but here, on tape, they glare and grate.
At Newport does get one thing exactly right, a sometimes-neglected aspect of Mitchell’s career: her humor or, more exactly, her laughter. Even as she has mapped the darkest recesses of our hearts, Mitchell wrote with wit so incisive it was frequently overlooked or even ignored by those who saw her as only lachrymose. But on stage, she’s always been engaged and disarming, constantly ready with a howl or a bon mot. Just listen to the way she cracks during Miles of Aisles when a fan yells “Joni, you have more class than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon, or Gomer Pyle combined.” Without a word, she obviates every aloof image.
Her laughter is the first thing you hear after the chords of “Big Yellow Taxi” are strummed, the last sound of “Summertime,” and the ellipsis she lets hang following “The Circle Game,” one of the sharpest songs about aging and the perfect exit here. That deep, assuring laugh feels like a better testament to her continued vitality than the album itself. “So fun,” she says when it’s all over. It is one of the very few bits of At Newport that gets better the more times you hear it, the more times you try to relive this surprise. | 2023-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | July 29, 2023 | 6 | ece3c5fc-5dbb-4c28-b1bd-5d8c77935b29 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Help me out here, people. It's time we all put our minds together and came up\n\ with a ... | Help me out here, people. It's time we all put our minds together and came up\n\ with a ... | 90 Day Men: To Everybody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5806-to-everybody/ | To Everybody | Help me out here, people. It's time we all put our minds together and came up with a new name for the genre known as "post-rock." Now, genre labels are never very descriptive, and usually serve merely as a crutch for writers and a denial target for musicians ("We're not emo!" a thousand bespectacled bands cry). But they do serve some purpose as a sort of critical shorthand-- I tell you a band is new-wave synth-pop, and your brain instantly dials up an approximate framework for the music at hand.
Post-rock is an especially faulty term, however, since it says almost nothing about a band's sound, other than it being somehow "after rock." It's sort of like describing an especially tasty dinner as being post-lunch. What else can we call it then? One could go back to the genre's obvious roots in King Crimson-style complexity and call it neo-prog, or something more futuristic, like prog-o-tron. If it's important to tip a hat to the music's German origins, Ameri-Kraut might catch on. Or we could all just tell it like it is and label it pretentious-core. I'm open to suggestions.
All this semantics-wrassling is provoked by 90 Day Men, an act that many would most likely lump into post-rock or math-rock circles. On To Everybody, their second album, the St. Louis quartet may possibly be addressing this problem of classification by naming a track, "We Blame Chicago," indicting the geographic center of post-rock with charges of beating the genre into clichédom. That's just a wild guess, and only the 90 Day Men know the real story behind the title, but To Everybody comes across as just such a challenge to the scene.
The first three minutes of the opening track, "I've Got Designs on You," led me to think that the album had little in store, with Dianogah's melodic bass, Don Caballero's gymnastic drumming and an irritating pinched whine for vocals. However, after eight minutes of bobsled run twists and turns (sorry, too much Olympics), I was hooked. What happened? Well, the addition of Brian Case's textured guitars and more restrained counterpoint vocals didn't hurt. But the real kicker is Andy Lansangan's piano, which slowly enters the fray before taking control and allowing the composition to achieve liftoff.
Piano, you say? Big frickin' deal, you say. I'm gonna go see what else Pitchfork reviewed today, you say. Shut up and sit down, I say. While the piano might not be the most advanced of instruments, Lansangan uses it to great effect on To Everybody, adding much-needed warmth and melody to 90 Day Men's sound. Where the band's previous effort, 1999's (It (Is) It) Critical Band, occasionally sank into the sludge of an overly busy rhythm section, Lansangan's inventive playing has the band in a much more balanced state instrumentally.
No one song showcases their new strengths like the aforementioned "We Blame Chicago," a piano and wah-wah-driven piece that swoops and darts through two tuneful movements, disintegrates into noise, then returns triumphantly to the original theme. 90 Day Men function like a musical assembly line, with each member playing simple phrases that add up to a cohesive and complex whole. While many bands that take this approach sound overly choreographed and rigid, Lansangan's jazzy style keeps things loose, giving off at least the appearance of improvisational energy.
"St. Theresa in Ecstasy" and "A National Car Crash" follow a stretched out version of the same blueprint, slowly assembling an intricate pyramid of sound before destroying it all like an angry toddler, only to rebuild it even higher. While the former says less than it probably should over its near nine-minute length, the latter closes the album with a fiery display of tension-release dynamics.
If 90 Day Men have a weakpoint, it's in their vocals, which are predominantly used as just another color of yarn to knit into their musical scarf. That most singing gets buried in the mix is perhaps a wise decision, as only the brief, aerobic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" reaches minimum singalong-ability. When the vocals are too prominently displayed they distract from the music beneath, or at worst, are wincingly melodramatic ("Alligator," where the band's prog side gets the best of them).
90 Day Men are also smart enough to know that listeners can only handle so much of their dense, sinister sound in one sitting, and keep the album at a lean, mean forty-minute length. And despite a few missteps, To Everybody indicates that the 90 Day Men are a band to watch in the Ameri-Kraut arena, using familiar ingredients but to greater effect. It may even end up being one of the better prog-o-tron releases of 2002. What do you think, are they catching on? | 2002-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Southern | February 26, 2002 | 7.8 | ece67319-563d-4c59-93d0-2c4843a4d6d1 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Before they were Black Mountain, Stephen McBean and crew recorded this LP, which mines similar sounds and themes. | Before they were Black Mountain, Stephen McBean and crew recorded this LP, which mines similar sounds and themes. | Pink Mountaintops: Pink Mountaintops | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6566-pink-mountaintops/ | Pink Mountaintops | Let's wax reverse chronological: Pink Mountaintops' self-titled debut was issued last year, but the album has been drawing increasingly more attention since the January release of the self-titled debut from the band's evil vinyl-schooled twin, Black Mountain. Besides sharing personnel, the albums have a lot in common. With Vancouver polymath Stephen McBean at the helm, both are notable not merely for their rootsy rock influences, but the specificity of their stylistic appropriations. In a field where bands often consolidate entire decades to achieve a generic "retro" sound, McBean's geological formations hew away at something smaller and more ornately detailed.
Clearly, this is the way to go. Why settle for a mass-produced replica when you can have the hand-stitched real thing? Of course, no CD comes caked in John Bonham's dried sweat, but then, bands don't stand a chance of becoming deities themselves unless they hone in, internalize their forebears' achievements and conceive something new(ish) from the recycled matter. When it's done well, retro isn't biting; it's a novel and economical use of widely available ingredients.
Perhaps Pink Mountaintops haven't been as warmly received as their more ominous-sounding counterparts because their influences are more abstract and toyed-with. On "Modern Music", Black Mountain came right out said it-- they "can't stand all your modern music"-- and proceeded to ride Ozzy's headless bat all up in our grill. Here, McBean and his associates are more reserved. "Bad Boogie Ballin'" surpasses the composite weirdness of Black Mountain in its first four bars alone: A grimly metallic beat teams with a gas-huffing accordion to provide a backdrop for McBean's swarthy blues-trimmed vocal. The song seethes with tension, awaiting the melody that never shows up.
"Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy" is creepy and hollow. Soft solo guitar and meditative female back-up hums nuzzle up to the Doors as McBean delivers a harrowing vocal, revealing his most sexually-frustrated dream-wishes: "I came all over myself/ Wish I came all over your blouse." "I [fuck] Mountains", despite its titular filthiness, is actually the album's smoothest cut, letting nothing disrupt the flow of its hand drums and wafting-smoke guitars.
In general, Pink Mountaintops' music is more provocative when it isn't noisy. Among the louder numbers, only the chipper, almost Kinks-y "Sweet '69", which finds McBean's head buried deep in the feathered glory of his Summer of Love fantasies, truly succeeds. Elsewhere, "Tourist In Your Town" and "Atmosphere" take the Velvet Underground's band-of-gypsies plod into the sunset a little too far, failing to achieve the aimed-for catharsis of "Heroin". It's a flawed ending to a promising debut, but I wouldn't call it a letdown: Pink Mountaintops still aren't your dad's rock anachronism, because chances are they know the terrain better than the old man himself. | 2005-03-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-03-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | March 2, 2005 | 7 | ece739d9-b08d-4933-b545-9236ff62efe8 | Pitchfork | null |
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The San Antonio musician’s longform ambient compositions honor the timeworn strategy of soundtracking imaginary films, but their cinematic expanses have the raw immediacy of status updates. | The San Antonio musician’s longform ambient compositions honor the timeworn strategy of soundtracking imaginary films, but their cinematic expanses have the raw immediacy of status updates. | claire rousay: everything perfect is already here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-rousay-everything-perfect-is-already-here/ | everything perfect is already here | There’s something in the air each time new work by San Antonio-based composer claire rousay arrives, something like “the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air” in Robert Ashley’s uncanny opera Private Parts: thoughtful, self-referential, beautiful, supplemental. Lately, it happens all the time, as her Bandcamp offers dozens of releases from just the past few years. She tries on various styles, including in-joke odes to mall punk and hyperpop, but the best of them show off her extraordinary ability to coax, and craft, multitudes from minute gestures. Her sounds—which might resemble scratches on a drumhead, soft plunks of piano, room-tone-tinged murmurs in a room different from the one you are in now, or the flick of a lighter—are straight out of experimental music’s central casting. Yet they come together in what feel like unique sample packs. Her arrangements, which tend toward the side-long, honor the old ambient strategy of serving as soundtracks for imaginary films, but their cinematic expanses have the immediacy of status updates.
rousay calls her latest everything perfect is already here, and what’s here, along with her usual ear-ticklers, are some offerings from collaborators that hint at composition. A voice begins: Um, um, I think, uh um, my um…, the words stumbling like the symphony Le Tigre made of women swallowing their own tongues, and also like a conductor tapping her baton. There are strings: Allies Alex Cunningham and Mari Maurice open their violins while Theodore Cale Schafer tickles the ivories. Deep in the mix, someone mentions “sadness and melancholy” as the performers buttress rousay’s itchy percussion with scraps of melody. Marilu Donovan plucks a harp. The mood is a cat lazing in a sunbeam, or the revelation that surviving trauma is a matter of staying present. About eight minutes in, big puffs of new age-y chords hover above something ticking. Calm comes in time.
The title track falls deeper into the kind of spell that a few people can cast in concert. rousay and company embark on a drone with facets that gradually reveal themselves. Here comes a bow against steel, then the depth of a machine humming to itself. Still, though, rustles and color from someone else fill the corners of the mix, as if whatever is happening among the players isn’t it. There’s always something or someone left outside. A bit of digital-ish noise pops by, striking in its beauty. The pleasure of the glitch. It’s generous, and accompanied by a rustling and cracking that, to me, sounded like notebook paper crumpling into balls for the trashcan, sort of funny. Then everything drops out and there’s just a recorder capturing an empty room. The void is deafening. Someone says, faintly, “I will always fight for and laugh with and care for and have them care for you. It’s really reassuring and lovely to have that person.” There’s a temper tantrum of banging on things, wind on a mic head. Someone laughs and says, but this can’t be right, “Whitney Houston.” Drones and wheezy rattling return.
Perhaps what sets rousay apart from the hundreds of field-recordings-and-drone workers out there is the mystery of her organization. Her tracks might be improvised or labored upon. They feel both sui generis and tossed off. You can hear her hand, and it makes you wonder, and in that way her recordings are empathy machines. They warm and flatter as they fill the air around you, silk scarves just out of reach. | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Shelter Press | April 26, 2022 | 7.5 | ecec3e97-b274-4003-8073-a5780a369f4d | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
A new reissue resurfaces the music of a cult-favorite songwriter from 1980s Baltimore who drew on ambient and British pop influences. | A new reissue resurfaces the music of a cult-favorite songwriter from 1980s Baltimore who drew on ambient and British pop influences. | Mark Renner: Few Traces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mark-renner-few-traces/ | Few Traces | The name Mark Renner has been on the lips of the Baltimore fringes for decades. In the early 2000s, I heard whispers of a lone wolf artist from the county who made music like Ultravox and Cocteau Twins circulating through at least one Charm City house party. Awareness of his existence was a sort of cred calling card that distinguished a true Baltimore deep head from the flocks of fashionable Maryland Institute College of Art students and surly punk-scene townies in Charles Village, Mount Royal, Remington, Hampden and other enclaves of alternative culture.
It was a fertile environment for a legend of this kind. Interpol’s neo-post-punk sound had reignited interest in Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and lesser-known bands from the crannies of British indie. Kids were rabid for shimmering guitars and driving drum machines. The savviest among them had a cassette rip of Renner’s 1986 full-length debut, All Walks of This Life, an album whose a-side of Harold Budd-esque instrumental meditations led into a b-side of glittering pop.
After purchasing a sealed copy of the LP from a record dealer at a Philadelphia flea market a few years back, RVNG Intl. label head Matt Werth understood what the Baltimore deep heads already knew: Renner’s music deserves to be mentioned alongside those 1980s UK tastemakers, and it almost certainly would have had a more visible profile had their fans gotten hold of the album in its day. Instead, Renner became a UPS driver and a humanitarian worker, traveling to Ethiopia with his church to help locals struggling with AIDS in the early 2000s. All the while, he continued to make music and art on the side. And now Werth and crew have assembled this collection of nine tracks from All Walks of This Life, along with a handful of rarities, in hopes of bringing Renner’s music to a wider public.
A committed and prolific visual artist, Renner explains in the album notes (written by Pitchfork contributor Brandon Soderberg) that he doesn’t really consider himself a musician. “My approach to recording has often been as a painter—only with sound instead of color,” he says. It’s a very Eno-type declarative. This ethos reveals itself most clearly in the instrumental pieces that comprise the bulk of this reissue, some from the 1986 LP and others culled from even lesser-known works. This mood music brings to mind acts like Cluster, whose deceptively complex arrangements, like Renner’s, permeate one’s consciousness fluidly. Renner says that these recordings were often meant as companion pieces to his paintings, and it’s unfortunate that this package doesn’t include renderings of those visual works for comparison.
That said, his unforgettable pop songwriting is the highlight of this reissue. “Half a Heart,” a jangly standout from All Walks of This Life, could have been a hit. Indeed, it was inspired by a friend who’d go on to tread in such waters. How Renner became penpals with Stuart Adamson of the Skids and Big Country in the early Eighties isn’t explained, but after about a year and a half of correspondence, he traveled to Scotland, met up with Adamson, and cut a series of demos in a London studio with his guidance, “Half a Heart” among them. Other vocal tracks, like “Saints and Sages,” “The Wild House,” and “More or Less,” also showcase Renner’s hushed baritone and poet’s lyrical sensibility. He’s musical and thoughtful, exemplary of the era and yet unique. These vocal compositions are where Renner really shines, and it’s a shame there aren’t even more of them.
Taken as a collection of songs, Few Traces is a mostly great comp showcasing an outsider’s celestial pairing of ambient and British pop influences. Only a few tracks from the ’90s, like “A Fountain in the Cloister” and “James Cowie (The Portrait Group),” stand as outliers to an otherwise fluid sequence. But as a reissue package, the lack of visual context and outside perspectives in the narrative leave something to be desired. What could Baltimore studio technician John Grant, who engineered most of Renner’s original albums, have said of the work? Or Ed Meyers, Renner’s bandmate in his early groups Boys in the River and the Favorite Game? Or Renner’s brother, whose copies of Hermann Hesse’s writing had a profound effect on the young artist? Forget music: How about a gallerist who believed in Renner’s visual artwork?
The label has provided a caveat for this release: “Few Traces collects Mark Renner’s early music but strives not to simplify or reframe it.” The aim of presenting Renner’s work in a straightforward manner is admirable, but the omission of essential context leaves the listener wanting. Despite this shortcoming, the good news is that his music now has an opportunity to transcend the limited reach of the Baltimore fringe-culture cognoscenti, through this release and via a forthcoming documentary by Baltimore resident Maia Stern. The warmth of such renewed possibility is often the sweet spot of reissue culture, what makes the hard work worth it. Three decades later, Renner’s humble dedication to his art is certainly deserving of our attention. | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | February 17, 2018 | 7.7 | ecf91a40-7a6d-4c43-99ec-9889c0336e93 | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
A new reissue of the Stockholm multi-instrumentalist’s 2020 album highlights his knack for making a studio sound like a lightly psychedelic, breezy early-evening DJ set. | A new reissue of the Stockholm multi-instrumentalist’s 2020 album highlights his knack for making a studio sound like a lightly psychedelic, breezy early-evening DJ set. | Daniel Ögren: Fastingen-92 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-ogren-fastingen-92/ | Fastingen-92 | It seems fitting that some listeners will first encounter Fastingen-92 as a reissue, even if only three years after its original release. Each track on this album from Stockholm multi-instrumentalist and studio wiz Daniel Ögren has the air of a record collector’s prized find, rescued from obscurity and turned into a cult favorite. After a limited-run release in 2020, it received a wider audience this year via the long-running UK label Mr Bongo, whose catalog is filled with reissues of the sort of crate-digger classics of global dance music that Ögren’s work clearly channels.
Though Ögren played, recorded, and mixed nearly everything on these primarily instrumental pieces himself, together they feel like a breezy early-evening DJ set, traversing styles, eras, and continents from one selection to the next: a dembow rhythm that could have been lifted from a dancehall record, a live drummer expertly emulating the sampled breakbeats of ‘90s rap, percussion loops that hiss and wheeze like the early drum machines Sly Stone used to use. Atop these funky rhythms, Ögren arranges all manner of guitars, synths, and keyboards, most of them sweetened with vintage-sounding echo effects—psychedelic, but in the sense of a microdose to go along with your orange wine or mezcal negroni: a gentle heightening of buzzy sensation, not a disorienting head trip. The grooves are too buoyant, the melodies too insistent, for anyone to stray too far into the portals of their mind. You could dance to it, but it’s probably best suited for the moments just before full-on revelry breaks out, when people start to wiggle on their bar stools as they lean forward to order the next round.
Though Ögren’s apparent influences are far-flung, the music on Fastingen-92 is also rooted in his particular Stockholm milieu. The way he combines dreamy psych-pop textures with hip-hop-inflected drums, and emphasizes midrangey analog warmth rather than the booming lows and tactile highs of digital-era pop, suggests an affinity for Dungen. (By extension, that means Fastingen-92 sometimes also recalls the heavily Dungen-indebted early records of Tame Impala.) And like his sometime collaborator Sven Wunder, Ögren seems to have a fondness for library music: records created in the mid-20th century for the express purpose of licensing to movies, advertisements, and the like, whose composers-for-hire were often more adventurous in soundtracking these scenes not-yet-imagined than the job strictly required.
The best tracks on Festingen -92 occupy a similarly rich middle ground between specific detail and evocative elision, giving you just enough to invent your own settings for them. “Picasso,” with its romantic acoustic guitar melody and clattering percussion, suggests tropical humidity and ferns parting to reveal a tableau you can’t quite glimpse in full. “Maj (For Tintin)” has the relentless pulse of a rave anthem, but without any low-end heft; its vaporous sonics give the feeling of a bustling nightlife scene viewed from the clouds far above it. Though Ögren takes elements from existing styles, the sonic locales he dreams up are only loosely rooted in real-world geography: the main thing is that they’re very far away from wherever you are right now.
Like those library music composers, Ögren is capable of rising above the call of duty. Though Fastingen-92 could get by well enough on groove and tasteful atmosphere alone, it also has hooks that will stick with you long after the party winds down. A couple of them are almost too familiar: one melodic tidbit from the joyous “Hjälmarsfjorden” might as well have been flown in directly from Shuggie Otis’s psych-soul totem “Strawberry Letter 23.” The verses of “Idag,” the album’s lone vocal-led pop song, sound uncannily like a stylish Swedish-language trip-hop remix of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” Intentional or not, these flickers of recognition don’t take away from the experience of Fastingen-92. If anything, they heighten the sense of a skillful DJ controlling the decks, mixing a few bars of a crowd-pleaser in with the deep cuts.
But Ögren’s vibe-centric approach to composition does have its limits. His focus on sustaining a single mood for the length of a given track leaves little room for surprise. Most toggle back and forth between two or three sections repeatedly; with rare exceptions, if you’ve heard the first minute and a half or so, you know how the rest will go. That’s not a knock, exactly: sitting alone at home and feeling the emotional tug of some unexpected chord change isn’t really what this music is for.
DJs and sampling producers are attracted to library records and other dusty obscurities for a reason. They have a certain blankness for the listener, whether baked intentionally into music for soundtracking visuals, or arising like a phantasm in recordings now far removed from the social and cultural contexts in which they were created. And within that blankness lies the possibility for all sorts of new resonances that the original musicians could never have foreseen. Like the old records that inspired it, the tracks of Fastingen-92 might find new life through recontextualization. In other words, they would sound great in someone else’s DJ set. | 2023-12-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sing a Song Fighter | December 15, 2023 | 7.3 | ecfe00ca-811a-45a9-83f3-734c3b57f866 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The latest from Copenhagen’s Loke Rahbek—a collaboration with multimedia artist Frederik Valentin—is a set of wistful sketches for synthesizer and piano that gracefully sway. | The latest from Copenhagen’s Loke Rahbek—a collaboration with multimedia artist Frederik Valentin—is a set of wistful sketches for synthesizer and piano that gracefully sway. | Loke Rahbek / Frederik Valentin: Buy Corals Online | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buy-corals-online/ | Buy Corals Online | Posh Isolation got its start as an outlet for power electronics, industrial, and post-punk; it was born of provocation. But lately the Danish label’s output is just as likely to reflect a softer, gentler sensibility. Take label cofounder Loke Rahbek: For years, his work in the duo Damien Dubrovnik was dedicated to the most caustic, eviscerating strains of noise. Their synths had the reek of burning plastic; extreme distortion disfigured their vocals like blisters on burned skin. But their sound has opened up. Parts of the band’s 2017 album Great Many Arrows recall Tim Hecker’s pastel reveries, while Rahbek’s Croatian Amor project has evolved from what he once termed “bubblegum industrial” into a velvety variant of pop-ambient. Buy Corals Online, a collaboration with the Copenhagen multimedia artist Frederik Valentin, is among the most unreservedly lyrical and elegiac music to come from Rahbek yet: a set of wistful sketches for synthesizer and piano that sway as gracefully as kelp beds in a turquoise sea.
Valentin, like Rahbek, seems to have mellowed over the years. Recently he’s been involved with the Posh Isolation project Kyo, a duo with Lust for Youth’s Hannes Norrvide; their most recent album, 2017’s I Musik, is an uneasy swirl of synths and found sounds that’s as elegant as a still life. But Valentin’s past is spottier. In the 2000s, he played with grunge-inspired dirtbags Hard Rock Power Spray, whose repertoire included songs like “Ride on Me,” “We Belong in Bed,” and “Much More Music for You to Be Fucking on Drugs To”; then came the more polished Vomit Supreme and the druggy space-rock project Complicated Universal Cum. If you think that name is tasteless, wait ‘til you get a load of his video for “Everything Is Drugs Pt. One,” which turns out to be not the only time he thought that wearing a swastika was a good idea; to follow Valentin’s artistic evolution is to slip uncomfortably down a rabbit hole of druggy, post-ironic nihilism.
Buy Corals Online, on the other hand, is a thing of striking, immediate beauty. Across eight tracks and 32 minutes, it explores plangent synthesizer pads and sentimental piano interwoven with lean arpeggios and thickets of Reichian minimalism. “Garden Tattoo,” the album’s shortest track, is a pulsing steel-drum fugue, while “A Woman Without” touches upon Debussy and Sonic Youth’s “Providence” before dissolving into harmonica-soaked ambient blues.
The mood is foggily absent-minded, like a lover lost in thought. “You Come With” opens with quiet, meandering organ notes; after a couple of minutes, a pulsing arpeggio lends a sense of direction before muted sheets of noise rise up from the mix and all the song’s layers seem to bunch up, like fabric tangled in a sewing machine. In “A Million Coloured Fish,” keyboard clusters shiver in place, as though huddling together for warmth; a strange clattering noise might be someone walking around a hardwood-floored apartment, banging into the furniture. Balanced between song and ambient sketch, the album proposes an unusual hybrid, one that feels as though it could pull apart at any moment: composed enough not to seem too haphazard, yet abstract enough to tip into full sentimentalism.
Buy Corals Online is supposedly inspired by “the floating world,” a decadent aesthetic from Japan’s Edo period, though the press release’s Wikipedia-cribbed description might suggest that the theme doesn’t run much deeper than the music’s aquatic qualities. More telling might be that title. It’s the kind of phrase you might come across in a piece of email spam or a block of internet chum. Its flat, quotidian ring masks levels of unease (not the least of which is an uncomfortable reminder that the world’s reefs are dying); it offers a tantalizing glimpse of the ocean, only to land face-first right back in the distancing and deadening properties of the internet. You come seeking seaside solitude, but you wind up staring at a screen. As with everything the Posh Isolation crew does, even their melancholy is complicated. | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | December 8, 2017 | 7.2 | ed05c1e4-8712-42e0-9792-8ab6da79540e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The latest project from the alt-rap Misery Club member showcases his dynamic voice and features a grip of collaborators from Clams Casino to Alice Glass that often overshadow Zubin’s personality. | The latest project from the alt-rap Misery Club member showcases his dynamic voice and features a grip of collaborators from Clams Casino to Alice Glass that often overshadow Zubin’s personality. | Zubin: Heavy Down Pour EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zubin-heavy-down-pour-ep/ | Heavy Down Pour EP | Zubin doesn’t really sound like anyone else in the emo-tinged world of alternative rap. For listeners, there are often two options: whiny songs emphasized by whiny voices, or songs about being down in the dumps that sound gravelly and guttural. Instead, this North Philadelphia native dwells in a high, thin range of wilting malaise. Zubin’s voice is uncommonly pretty and clear, and his vibrato is his unmistakable signature: quivering and unnerving, like a terrified puppy.
Perhaps, at 29, Zubin has a different frame of nostalgia than his younger vocalist peers, who are mostly reworking pop-punk and post-hardcore sounds they weren’t so lucky to live through the first time. Six years ago, he began his career in the dancey soft-pop trio Worshyper, playing keys and producing but never singing lead. He was making bloopy mashups of Disclosure and Destiny’s Child when he was discovered by the production collective Working on Dying, who invited him to start singing on their dark rap songs. It’s different, but his trajectory is part what makes his presence so vital: In a scene that can now feel homogeneous, or, worse, redundant, Zubin adds much-needed complexity — maybe even a feeling of hope.
Heavy Down Pour is a testament to his draw. Comparable to iLoveMakonnen’s self-titled 2014 EP—which elevated the idiosyncratic rapper’s status for the simple existence of songs with Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital—Zubin’s latest project attracts an elite cast of collaborators. The enigmatic producer Suicideyear, emo-rap forebear Clams Casino, and current leading light Nedarb Nagrom all contribute beats. There are five guest vocalists across six songs, including a particularly inspired appearance by Alice Glass, alongside Gothboiclique members Wicca Phase Springs Eternal and Fish Narc. Zubin is clearly a favorite among people who worked with Lil Peep, even though—or perhaps partly because—they sound nothing alike.
In both emotion and pitch, Zubin has an unfortunately narrow range, a weakness that’s exaggerated here. The constellation of collaborators gives Heavy Down Pour special weight, but sometimes its leader can feel like a guest on his own project. Earlier this year, Zubin and Nedarb released a superior and mostly feature-less EP called Misery, which gave him far more space to stretch his legs, shaping and reshaping his uneasiness until the hooks sounded like pop songs. Here, the most impactful and ambitious tracks, “Sinking” and “Dark Alley,” both feature two guests. These are high-level posse cuts, but it’s none of the singers' best work: While their different voices are made more distinct, they’re also reduced to archetypes
Where Zubin shines is how he conveys his feeling. Heavy Down Pour is an unrelenting breakup album. On “Sidelines,” self-produced over simple guitar, his voice is layered and interlocking, with a soft melody and texture almost evoking early Bon Iver. Other producers push him closer to his limits. “Stay Down” pits Zubin against a monstrous synth that might have knocked him flat, yet he conveys fragility while somehow sounding ten feet tall. It’s a bit artificial, with AutoTune honing his notes and dialing up the shakiness in his voice. But Zubin is a melodramatic singer: it’s only fitting that over-the-top lines like “I tried to look on the bright side and my eyes started bleeding” are rendered even more superhuman. You don’t need to shout when your whispers can turn into earthquakes. | 2018-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Misery Club | December 6, 2018 | 6.9 | ed07b5d9-616b-4327-bafa-a76f31daa834 | Duncan Cooper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/duncan-cooper/ | |
Wale's third official album is his most sonically daring yet, pushing a classic soul and gospel sound inspired by the likes of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. What he doesn't have, however, is their knack for writing lyrics to rattle anyone's whole worldview. | Wale's third official album is his most sonically daring yet, pushing a classic soul and gospel sound inspired by the likes of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. What he doesn't have, however, is their knack for writing lyrics to rattle anyone's whole worldview. | Wale: The Gifted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18215-wale-the-gifted/ | The Gifted | Wale’s third official album, The Gifted, had the bad luck to come out a week after Kanye’s Yeezus. It’s terrible timing for any pop album; for the former backpack rapper who found unexpected mainstream pop success who went into the studio to attempt a singular, definitive artistic statement, it's bound to set up some unfair comparisons. There’s also a vaguely beefy line in “Heaven’s Afternoon” about how Wale wears Givenchy but doesn’t wear kilts that doesn’t help the situation.
That said, the fact that Wale’s decided to release such a left-field pop rap record at this point in his career is respectably daring. In fact, it’s probably the most daring thing about The Gifted. For all its differences from Wale's closest chart competitors, the music here (at least on the first half of the record) follows a path that was cleared as far back as the 90s: using the warm and lushly organic sound of peak-era Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder to reconnect hip-hop with a soulful revolutionary legacy that it turned away from when MCs started going in over 808 beats. It's not original, but it's a good path to follow. (Chicago rapper Tree recently used a similar approach on his mixtape, Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out, probably one of the best rap records that’ll be released this year.)
The music on The Gifted sounds fantastic, with intricately arranged keys and strings, stacks of soul and gospel-inspired backup vocals, and deep, rubbery bass lines. The problem is that Wale and his team made a really decent soul rap album without a rapper soulful enough to carry it. He’s a capable, sometimes personable MC, but he’s not an especially compelling one. His approach to the album’s more explicitly soul-oriented tracks is to intersperse his library of 2013 rap cliches about his personal struggle to success with the occasional line about social injustice. The combination is a jumbled, awkward mess, capped by a wasted guest appearance by Jerry Seinfeld on an excruciatingly unfunny dialogue with Wale on The Gifted's outro. He’s attempting to tap into the magic that Marvin and Stevie created back then, but his understanding of what they did is bafflingly shallow. Wale seems to think that those records succeeded by their string arrangements and keyboard tones, and with accurate enough reproductions of those at his fingertips, he breezes past the part about writing lyrics that resonate with an audience enough to rattle their whole worldview. After days of listening to The Gifted on nearly constant rotation I can’t remember a single line from it.
In the cruelest of ironies, the album only really starts to come together when Wale abandons the high concept conscious stuff and goes straight for the pop jugular. “Clappers”, the strongest track here, is a big, club-shaking bass anthem about girls with big butts. It’s absolutely ignorant as fuck, but at least it’s fun and, more vital, straight to the point. Wale may not be a great thinker, but he’s an accomplished entertainer who seems to have inherited some of the unabashed “anything to please the crowd” attitude from go-go groups in his hometown of Washington, D.C. When he hits his stride here you can almost see him on stage, gleefully controlling a packed audience.
What seems to be the main purpose of the record is to elevate Wale beyond the level of Rick Ross’ reliable second-stringer, a guy who’s capable of dropping the occasional strip club anthem in between a steady string of unremarkable features on pop songs. “Clappers” proves that when he embraces that job he’s actually really good at it. But if he wants to be taken as a serious artist like the ones he spends most of the record emulating, he’s going to have to start taking some real chances and get real far out of the box, out to place where people are known to wear kilts. | 2013-06-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Maybach | June 27, 2013 | 5.1 | ed0a0791-2350-4b7b-8bee-1b2c0a8eb646 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The New York psych-folk band makes a welcome return to form with a dreamy, unsettling, Mellotron-filled album that feels especially appropriate right now. | The New York psych-folk band makes a welcome return to form with a dreamy, unsettling, Mellotron-filled album that feels especially appropriate right now. | Woods: Strange to Explain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/woods-strange-to-explain/ | Strange to Explain | Dread has been an important ingredient in Jeremy Earl’s best music. Earl, the bandleader of Woods, has a dreamy falsetto that’s offset beautifully by unsettling songs, the type that appeared all over 2009’s Songs of Shame and 2010’s At Echo Lake. Those two albums were Woods’ best, with Earl’s darker reveries nurtured by the band’s remarkably coherent music: warm, comforting psychedelic folk tinged with sadness, confusion, and mystery. Woods’ newest album, Strange to Explain, arrives almost exactly a decade after At Echo Lake and, happily, sounds very much like it, evoking a familiar Woods feeling: that of a blazing campfire surrounded by darkness. The record represents a roaring comeback for the band at a moment to which their sound is particularly well-suited.
Earl was set back on his heels after the 2016 presidential election and the band’s rushed response, 2017’s Love Is Love, was insipid and gooey. At times, its saccharine lyrics could feel like parody, something written by conservatives imagining the taste of liberal tears: “How can we love if this won’t go away? How can we love with this kind of hate?” Strange to Explain doesn’t gesture helplessly in the direction of bad feeling, but leans right into it. And in acknowledging the ubiquity of pain, the album offers to help banish it.
Even the lesser tracks here are not what they seem. The two-minute instrumental “The Void” opens like a standard guitar jam (with some vibraphone mixed in) and arrives at a melodic hook within 30 seconds. But the song remains in motion, running from one neighborhood to the next, with new melodies coming into view every 30 seconds or so until its climax is revealed: not that initial hook but a brass refrain that undergirds the entire thing. It’s fully realized and then it’s gone, a feeling as wistful and complex as arriving at the edge of a waterfront.
If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that many of the strongest songs here sound as if they could have come out years ago. But album highlight “Can’t Get Out,” an anthemic song that combines garage-rock rumble with Dire Straits Americana (courtesy of the Mellotron that’s all over the album), sounds wholly new and remarkably cathartic. It’s a full-throated jam that describes the feeling of suffocation even as it rejects it. The sound is muddier than Woods’ usual, and Earl is belting: “Can’t get back/Can’t get out/Can’t take a breath/Leave me be.”
Woods’ lyrics have always been impressionistic, but even as the quality of the songs here ranges, certain motifs recur: night, void, dreams, immersive experiences that make sense only in the light of day, if they ever do. The spooky title track has the most interesting lyrics, with Earl asserting that “you can reinvent yourself so you don’t slip away,” suggesting, basically, that the way to avoid death is to continually kill off versions of yourself. Yet the ghosts of past selves pile up, resulting in a déjà vu that gives the song, and the record, its name. Naturally, because the subject matter is so unsettling, it’s one of the prettiest tracks on the record.
It’s tempting to hear this album as an elegy for David Berman, for whom Woods served as a backing band in the months leading up to his suicide. But Strange to Explain was written and recorded before that collaboration came to full fruition. Berman’s demons may have informed Earl’s, as a recent New York Times profile about their collaboration suggested, but Woods are perfectly capable of turning their own nightmares into compelling music. Late in the album, on “Light of Day,” Earl turns his attention outward. As with “The Void,” the song takes its time revealing itself, with a bridge that feels like a hook preceding the actual chorus. The lyrics are angry, as Earl sings, “You can fill your void with an empty cup/It might tear you apart, almost every night.” His voice couldn’t sound any sweeter.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | May 27, 2020 | 7.5 | ed0d5acf-c187-4cfb-9c00-529821a7e073 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Newly remastered by Jimmy Page, the three-disc set featuring recordings from ’69-’71 captures a vibrant and liminal phase of the band's career that shows who they once were and who they would become. | Newly remastered by Jimmy Page, the three-disc set featuring recordings from ’69-’71 captures a vibrant and liminal phase of the band's career that shows who they once were and who they would become. | Led Zeppelin: The Complete BBC Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22402-the-complete-bbc-sessions/ | The Complete BBC Sessions | Maybe you’re the person who hasn’t quite made up their mind up about Led Zeppelin. That’s fine but fair warning, the band is the apotheosis of overstuffed arena rock, from private jets to strong-arming managers to personal excess in every musical, sexual, and philosophical front. Lester Bangs wanted to chuck pies at them in defense of Truth and/or Iggy Pop. Hammer of the Gods depicted them as decadent goons and tried to make that seem admirable. Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” video, without even needing to name them, reduced their lyrical and aesthetic sensibilities to an interest in “where the hobbits dwell.” If you’re a young music head who shuns rockism, appropriation, and womanizing as loathsome retrograde traits to be avoided, being into Zep means your faves don’t come more problematic.
Still, rock dorks were tangling with this issue long before any of us, and in the context of reckoning with Led Zeppelin—especially as an oft-bootlegged yet still elusive live-band document—the official two-disc release of *BBC Sessions *in 1997 felt like a moment of clarity. Rhino’s 2016 reissue of the *BBC Sessions *is also a big important musical-legacy package deal, and justifiably so: Jimmy Page supervised a new remaster in the spirit of the studio album reissues that commenced two years ago, there’s an additional third disc that includes an unearthed performance that hadn’t been heard since its original 1969 broadcast, Dave Lewis’ contextual liner notes are informative and revelatory, and if you just love black-and-white photos of arcane recording gear and empty performance halls, you’re in luck. But above all that, it’s an exhaustive look at the lengths Led Zeppelin would go to for a chance to make it big through sheer force of music, and it’s borne out by witnessing the band in the process their own self-creation.
Aside from Jimi Hendrix, a few jazzy UK prog bands, and the artists in the orbit of Miles Davis’ electric period, nobody working at deconstructing rock‘n’roll took such advantage of the possibilities of improvisation. To know Zeppelin as musicians puts that into focus: Jimmy Page flourished as an ex-session guitarist who still wanted to try any style as his own. John Bonham was so in the pocket even the fractions between the one and the two sounded deep. John Paul Jones strode with purpose along the border between groove’s backbone and a nomadic soloist whether on bass or keys. And Robert Plant’s voice could wring a Valhallan catharsis out of reading the cooking instructions on a box of macaroni. In isolation they were great; as an ensemble they were supernatural. It’s not that they were merely shredding or otherwise showing off: Led Zeppelin wanted to find out where those sounds they built, borrowed, and stole could really go.
The first disc of *BBC Sessions *covers a stretch from early March to early August of 1969, a couple months after the release of their self-titled debut and a few before they dropped Led Zeppelin II. It seems wrong to call such a short stretch of time between first and second albums a “transitional period,” but that's what these sessions capture. The churning, riff-splintering heavy blues-rock of their debut is already shoving against the confines of what they’d already put to tape. They do their damnedest to wring new vistas from old Willie Dixon numbers on “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and there are moments where everything converges in waves of virtuosity that hint at picking up where the soon-to-disband Cream left off in the blues-rock supergroup sweepstakes. It’s when they stretch their legs on “Dazed and Confused”—still roughly album-length thanks to time constraints, and not yet the leviathan 20-minute concert centerpiece it was growing into—that their signature interplay starts to set them apart as their own entity, impossible to reproduce because they couldn’t stop moving.
The in-progress nature of their 1969 material brings out some unpredictable sides. Hearing them hammer through live-set favorite “Somethin’ Else” in rockabilly mode is borderline surreal, especially with Plant rampaging through a vocal diametrically opposed to Eddie Cochran’s. And the third disc’s unearthing of a three-song session once feared lost is a fine addition—as well as the first time anyone born after 1969 can hear the piano-driven, harmonica-blasting “Sunshine Woman,” a B.B./Albert/Freddie King-simpatico cut which is perhaps their shortest line to electric blues as contemporary style rather than a mythical predecessor. (The sound is not great here. After the masters were erased, these cuts had to be sourced from a recording off of AM radio, but they’re an exception on a collection with otherwise pristine fidelity.)
The most crucial detail of their ’69 sets is how nearly every BBC performance at the time included some variation of “Communication Breakdown.” You’d think it was their signature hit, or at least a cut that’d give them more critical affinity to the MC5 than Uriah Heep. It’s always the springboard for something new, from a revelation of how many ways Page could either slice or bulldoze his way through his solo to a hint at their engagement with funk that wouldn’t be heard so clearly again until The Song Remains the Same four years later.
If the 1969 sessions were Zeppelin figuring out who they were, the 1971 sessions were Led Zeppelin figuring out who they weren’t. Broadcast on BBC Radio One’s “In Concert” on April 4, 1971, and famously featuring the first-ever version of “Stairway to Heaven” eight months before the release of Led Zeppelin IV, the second disc features the band stepping into the vast musical expanse they had laid before themselves. III was released the previous October and was their first shot at pushing beyond their “blooze” rep to more vivid folk influences. There’s still a medley that builds off “Whole Lotta Love” to skulk through foundational classics by John Lee Hooker (“Boogie Chillun”), Bukka White (“Fixin’ to Die Blues”), Arthur Crudup (“That’s Alright Mama”), and Elvis Presley (“A Mess of Blues”), but this chops-fest belies how hard the press mocked them for coming from a place the band would rather live in than visit as tourists__.__ And the peak-blues “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is where they finally figured out how to use their explosive power sparingly. Page’s solo and Plant’s wails pierce so deeply because they emerge from one of their most contemplative arrangements.
But their confidence and their chafing at being pigeonholed made for a creatively lucrative combination and the period between the releases of *III *and *IV *was the best time to capture that. So we get the heavy metal equivalent of a chromed-god Jack Kirby *Thor *drawing in “Immigrant Song,” the careening time signature of a power-trio version of “Black Dog,” and the acoustic Joni Mitchell-fueled heartbreak of “Going to California.” Of course there’s “Dazed and Confused” snatched from its blues-rock cradle and transformed into the Kubrick *2001 *psychedelic stargate sequence of their live set, bowed guitar and everything. And if overexposure hasn’t dulled your senses to “Stairway to Heaven,” you can hear it as it first sounded before it was played approximately two billion times on the radio—even if the last Page solo hadn’t yet found its footing.
From a present-day perspective, where big-time arena-filling rock has settled on Muse, Foo Fighters, and 5 Seconds of Summer, diving headlong into the ’69/’71 timeframe of the band that most necessitated the obnoxious yet fitting phrase “Rock Gods” might otherwise feel like history homework. But *BBC Sessions *captures an actual excitement, a document of a moment in an oft-told story of a band that isn’t excessively beholden to it. No *Song Remains the Same *audio-visual stoner-movie overkill, no excess studio futzing, no sense that their peak was either already there or just in the rearview. It’s just a meticulous document of a band whose hedonism kept them from restraining their absurd level of mastery. So here: have Zep as they both wanted to be and eventually were. | 2016-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Rhino | September 20, 2016 | 8.2 | ed34d915-5403-4dfb-ba0a-c257d788131b | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The British-born producer Mark Barrott played a big role in establishing the Balearic sound. Sketches from an Island 2 is the rare sequel that improves on the original. | The British-born producer Mark Barrott played a big role in establishing the Balearic sound. Sketches from an Island 2 is the rare sequel that improves on the original. | Mark Barrott: Sketches from an Island 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22062-sketches-from-an-island-2/ | Sketches from an Island 2 | It’s easy to equate Mark Barrott’s music with the “Balearic” ideal of Ibiza. Even when the British-born producer still resided in Uruguay, his imprint International Feel released electronic music that venerated the sound of that Mediterranean isle, which Philip Sherburne described last year in assessing the Balearic revival as a “fusion of synth pop, yacht rock, acid house, faux reggae, and ambient music.” And when Barrott himself relocated to Ibiza in 2012 he aligned himself with Balearic explicitly with a series of EPs that culminated in the full-length Sketches From An Island.
While affiliating himself with Ibiza and naming his second full-length for it once more, Barrott moves into a more rarefied space on Sketches From An Island 2, an example of a sequel surpassing the original. Some moments of the album hearken back to the eclectic catalog of genres that define “Balearic”: opener “Brunch With Suki” has the stiff swing of library music and the gentle guitars of “Driving To Cap Negret” touch on island favorites like Chris Rea and Andreas Vollenweider. Yet Barrott isn’t keen to just replicate these island-friendly timbres, opting for Ableton and a few plug-ins to achieve a sound that would otherwise require an entire room of exotic instrumentation.
But as the album moves deeper, such earmarks start to fall away, and rather than think about what Ibiza means in the 21st century, SFAI2 starts to reflect the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape in its beautiful, spare melodicism. “Over at Dieter’s Place” does not reference Cluster member Dieter Moebius, but the track suggests the bucolic miniatures that the group once rendered, with Barrott weaving together small bits of pedal steel, woodwind, mbira, birdcall and the rhythms of a hand drum into a sparkling miniature.
“Distant Storms At Sea” is somber and dramatic, blurring together thumb piano, a processed horn line that brings to mind Jon Hassell, a guitar line from collaborator Jordan Humber and booming percussion that –like the actual thunderstorm on the track—looms over all without ever bursting. Throughout, the drums that Barrott adds are subliminal rather than foregrounded, making the album less of a tool for a DJ set and more for providing a fitting conclusion to a night out. The last two songs are Barrott’s most evocative to date, “Forgotten Island” a minor-key rumination that gives pause, and closer “One Slow Thought” which offers the sort of mindful cleansing that Barrott suggested in a recent interview.
The album peaks with “Cirrus & Cumulus” and “Der Stern, Der Nie Vergeht.” The former is a gentle polyrhythmic blend of birdcalls and shimmering African percussion that suggests Music for 18 Musicians, while the latter mixes talking drum, fretless bass and a plug-in that mimics an old analog synthesizer, its melody drifting higher and higher. The title translates as “the star that never fades” and seeing as four of the album’s nine tracks bear titles evoking the skies above, Sketches From An Island 2 sounds like something increasingly unmoored from Ibiza and the notion of “Balearic,” floating instead towards a more heavenly sound. | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | International Feel | July 16, 2016 | 8 | ed37aff8-dd6b-42d2-9e11-b3ced0f2599d | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On his fourth album, Justin Vernon reassembles the familiar Bon Iver elements like a cubist collage, with his voice fearlessly front and center. The result is his most honest and forthright music ever. | On his fourth album, Justin Vernon reassembles the familiar Bon Iver elements like a cubist collage, with his voice fearlessly front and center. The result is his most honest and forthright music ever. | Bon Iver: i,i | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bon-iver-ii/ | i,i | Bon Iver has always been Justin Vernon’s escape route. After retreating to the woods of Wisconsin to record For Emma, Forever Ago, he drew a surrealist roadmap of the United States on Bon Iver, depicting a fantastical world where the lived, the dreamed, and desired coexisted. When this invented land felt oppressive and the anxiety of facing it too overwhelming, Vernon retreated again and burrowed within himself, pulverizing his voice with machines to create 22, A Million, a record that dramatized the fracturing of the self.
There’s no more hiding on i,i. Justin Vernon takes the Bon Iver sound and reassembles it like a cubist collage, with his voice right out front. All the familiar elements are here—impressionist swells of sound, impenetrable-yet-tender lyrics, mesmerizing studio tricks—and they are buoyed by Vernon’s supple baritone, the instrument he knows how to manipulate best. Acoustic guitar, horns, and piano return to prominence alongside the jittery electronics and synths that Vernon has lately favored. But the mood he conjures with these elements feels new. These songs don’t swallow you whole with grandeur; they look outward, leaving some room for the rest of the world.
The lyrics find Vernon locating peace within the ordinary and everyday. “I like you/And that ain’t nothing new,” he sings simply on “iMi.” Later, on “RABi,” he observes, “Well, it’s all just scared of dying.” These things don’t always merit saying out loud, but Vernon seems to be singing them to rediscover their meaning, and the music feels equally straightforward and searching. Songs like “Marion” and “Holyfields,” are uncharacteristically unadorned, even compared to the For Emma and Blood Bank era, when Vernon was at least joined by his own echoes. Here, he sounds completely exposed.
Still, there are plenty of invited guests to provide cover, or at least offer their company. James Blake, Moses Sumney, and Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, among others, pop up throughout. Even Young Thug collaborator Wheezy has composing and production credits. Vernon sampled the voices of others on 22, A Million, but in that context they felt more like dolls he’d animated than human beings. The guests on i,i, meanwhile, are allowed to breathe. Bruce Hornsby might sing only one line on the single “U (Man Like),” but his presence is enlivening. It’s less lonely to have friends nearby.
Vernon himself sings with more texture and conviction than ever before. He’s shifted fully from vessel to commander, steering the music instead of seeping into it. A song like “Naeem” is filled with production flourishes—a soft backing choir, faint samples, the sort of military drums favored on Bon Iver’s “Perth”—yet it all serves to highlight the booming sound of Vernon’s voice, bellowing in his natural range. The lyrics to “Naeem” are dizzying and, at points, indecipherable (“I fall off a bass boat/And the concrete’s very slow”), but he isn’t hiding behind them. It’s more like Vernon is suggesting that only feeling can offer truth. On “Naeem,” he sings, “Tell them I’ll be passing on/Tell them we’re young mastodons,” dragging his words in the second line until you can almost hear him choking up. Like all the best moments in his catalog, it is inexplicably touching.
i,i is often about trying to reconnect with some idea of a true self, even as you move forward. Vernon writes of scars and things lost: “You were young when you were gave it,” he sings on “We,” a line that speaks to his ability to summon powerful elegiac feelings with a few simple words. “Hey, Ma,” immediately one of the best songs in the Bon Iver catalog, is rousing and explicitly sentimental. “Full time you talk your money up/While it’s living in a coal mine,” Vernon belts, but his voice is too earthy to sound hateful. Instead, it’s like he’s offering absolution, promising that something as simple as a call to your mom is enough to make up for avarice or bluster.
At first glance, the tracklist for i,i is as bewildering as the symbol-laden 22, A Million. Upon listening, though, you realize that many of these are probably mondegreens and homonyms, cheeky nods to how hard it is to understand Bon Iver’s lyrics. “Jelmore,” for instance, is a fragment of what it sounds like when Vernon sings, “Well angel morning sivanna.” And the title for the closing “RABi” comes from the couplet, “I could prophet/I could rob I, however.” There are plenty of interpretive possibilities available in those words, but none of them are as enticing as their sheer sound. The music is also not as mysterious as the songs’ monikers suggest. There’s an overwhelming calmness and pleasantness to i,i, and “RABi” is one of the most easygoing of the bunch. “Sunlight feels good now don’t it,” Vernon sings. There’s no great symbolism in the track, no yearning, no enveloping echoes. What emerges is a solace that has eluded Vernon on past Bon Iver releases. “I don’t have a leaving plan,” he sings, maybe because there’s nowhere else he needs to go.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | August 9, 2019 | 8.8 | ed3b047c-b4fc-4e91-a2c5-d9cec4132ad7 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
With 13 albums under their belt, the Norwegian experimentalists continue to haunt the dark, underexplored basements of electro-improvisational music. | With 13 albums under their belt, the Norwegian experimentalists continue to haunt the dark, underexplored basements of electro-improvisational music. | Supersilent: 13 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22459-13/ | 13 | Supersilent's music exists beyond any normal human activity, any comprehensible emotion. It's hard to imagine partying, housecleaning, or commuting with it, as its screeches, melted horn riffs, and creep-show keyboards bombard the edge of reason. Its rhythms hint at continuity and then peel off in whatever direction, perversely arbitrary, shunting the flow. Imagine straining to hear a rustling through the keyhole of a door that might burst open to unleash a terrible racket at any moment—that's 13. When you listen to it, you can't really do anything but listen to it. That's an advantage if you consider it as a sign of vividness, but perhaps a limitation if you think about how often you sit by yourself and do nothing but listen intently to music.
The precise numbering of Supersilent's recordings almost humorously belies their spontaneous nature—every album is improvised. On 13, the trio moves from Rune Grammofon to Oslo's other leading electronic jazz label, Smalltown Supersound, but the sequence and the style are unbroken. The group's distant roots are in free jazz, which they still stitch into abstract patchworks of ambient music and arrhythmic noise. Roughly, Arve Henriksen coaxes strange tones from trumpets and woodwinds; Ståle Storløkken pounds vintage keyboards; and Helge Sten, who also makes dark ambient music as Deathprod, at once encases and engages the improvisations with rich electro-acoustic atmospheres. 13 was performed over a PA system in a shared space, and it benefits from a sense of presence even at its most daunting.
Though Supersilent has gone without a drummer since 2009, they remain a highly percussive outfit because of the pops and crackles of the electronics and the extended techniques used by the players. 13's opening track is described as "Indonesian ritual music heard from a Scandinavian mountaintop," but you couldn't be blamed for imagining a rhythm section falling down the stairs into a basement full of broken computers instead. "13.1" lands on just the right side of the line between exploring and getting lost. Not every track does. These improvisers are good enough to bend something as unruly as "13.3" into an arc, but it's still a gruelingly disjunctive go at it. And on the bumptious "13.5," we remember, as we wholly forget during the most captivating passages, that this is essentially just some dudes getting together and jamming.
Luckily, "13.5" is followed by one those velvety, far-off, lyrical trumpet solos familiar from Henriksen's wonderful solo albums, and there are other songs like it here—smaller, shorter, and more subtle. Not a one is unwelcome. Aptly for such extreme music, 13 is most potent when Supersilent either goes inward, as on "13.6," or goes all out, staying well clear of the noncommittal region in between. "13.7" might take this dictum a tad far; a screaming fireball that takes six minutes to strike spends six more wreaking almost unlistenable havoc. "13.9" is just as big and twice as perfect, rewarding anyone who's made it to the end with a cool-toned, hard-won, and not at all unnecessary refresher course on what music is and why people like it. That's the fascination and the frustration of Supersilent: it's like they keep destroying the lineaments of form just for the pleasure of vouchsafing them to us again. | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Smalltown Supersound | October 5, 2016 | 7 | ed3cd22c-f113-40f7-ad83-95d14d26462f | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
It\x92s rough times for these bluesy guy-girl garage duos, I tell ya. I mean, sure, if you're the ... | It\x92s rough times for these bluesy guy-girl garage duos, I tell ya. I mean, sure, if you're the ... | The Kills: Keep On Your Mean Side | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4424-keep-on-your-mean-side/ | Keep On Your Mean Side | It's rough times for these bluesy guy-girl garage duos, I tell ya. I mean, sure, if you're the least bit talented you've got a massive hype machine working for you-- which isn't a bad thing-- but you'll never shake those comparisons to the band that built the boat you're sailing. I promise not to mention of the W\x97S\x97 , maybe as a favor to The Kills, but mostly because the two bands sound nothing alike.
Regardless, the Kills won't need to fish for complimentary comparisons; suckers are jumping out of the water. I'll be damned if vocalist VV (nee Alison Mosshart) doesn't have a picture of PJ Harvey at her bedside, and the same goes double for instrumentalist Hotel (Londoner Jamie Hince) re: Neil Hagerty. These influences aren't as disparate as they seem: while Harvey and the Royal Trux worked on different sides of the fidelity line, they were both attempting expansive, ambitious modern updates of the blues. The Kills' aim is just about the opposite; despite the stylistic similarities, they're trying to return the pillaged form to its simpler roots.
Though their minimalism might sometimes sound like straight distillation, the tunes still hit, and hurt. On the second track, \x93Cat's Claw\x94, the raised hackles of V.V.'s voice roughly brush up against Hotel's descending string of power chords, and the \x93Got it, I want it\x94 chorus sinks its rusty sing-along hooks into your lips with stoned rapacity. On this song-- and as a rule-- The Kills offer strictly verse/chorus stuff, with a few careening bars of guitar skree passing for a bridge. Oddly, this is what makes the song great, just as the Jesus and Mary Chain distortion of the record's opener lines a wordlessly yowled chorus like lace on an exquisite corpse's casket, pulling the song beyond the confines of a boxy garage, out into the dark streets.
The band knows when-- and more importantly how-- to augment their simplicity, but it's a shame they don't use this gift more often. It's not that any of these songs fail, at least in the rock and roll or blues departments, but there's a point where minimalism can easily turn hollow. The lockstep lyric and riff repetition of \x93Black Rooster\x94 wears itself out quickly, begging for variation about three minutes in, but the band keeps pushing straight ahead. And no matter how much enthusiasm the band pours into it, the titular mantra of \x93Fuck the People\x94 still sounds like nothing more than a predicate pose. Like their pseudonyms, the band's shove-it adherence to a few glib phrases and riffs is going stale; it's still good, but once in a while, you catch a whiff of lazy, empty self-mythologizing.
But even a hollow brick can knock you out cold: there's enough hypnotic arm-wrestling in the slippery back-and-forth rhythm of \x93Hitched\x94 to drop a cruiserweight critic, and-- despite the minimalist posture-- there's enough thematic variation to make things interesting. \x93Kissy Kissy\x94, for instance, starts with a ringing guitar figure that almost sounds more at home in the Ganges Delta than the Mississippi, before following its thudding drums into doomsville. Though few and far between, the numbers where the band slows down and eases back on the attitude are things of beauty; \x93Wait\x94, the album's longest and most repetitive track, makes perfect use of the yearning core of V.V.'s tough, stripped voice, stretching seductive curiosity into two-chord cosmic foreplay. The final track, \x93Gypsy Death and You\x94, is in a similar vein, V.V. and Hotel using only voice, acoustic guitar, and insistent, reverbed drum hits to sketch their own halfway-to-sober version of ramshackle folk.
If they should break through to the mainstream, The Kills probably deserve it more than most. Their poses are balanced with enough genuine emotion to approach the sum of their influences; they play with more style and flair than almost any band in a scene where the former is usually all that matters. Still, it's a bitter reality: they'd never be getting this kind of attention if it weren't for the White Stri-- fuck! | 2003-03-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-03-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | March 31, 2003 | 7.8 | ed41f8a3-7d53-41e2-a4d8-2fc89ea9f7f9 | Brendan Reid | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brendan-reid/ | null |
The New York psych-pop quartet returns with an album that finds compelling new ways to make mini-dramas of the mundane. | The New York psych-pop quartet returns with an album that finds compelling new ways to make mini-dramas of the mundane. | Crumb: AMAMA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crumb-amama/ | AMAMA | Midway through Crumb’s new album, there’s a transitory, 49-second track called “Nightly News.” It’s groggy-sounding, a hazy sampler of cable-news synths and this-just-in swells; you get the sense that you’ve just woken up on the couch, and the TV is taunting you with whatever happened this time. Millions of cockroaches accidentally released from nearby research facility? Serial slasher last seen purchasing potato chips at local mini-mart? Nothing, it turns out: The song ends before revealing what the news actually is. It feels particularly apt for the New York band, who’ve spent the past near-decade churning out hypnotic epics with a sinister edge. In 2019, frontwoman Lila Ramani told Pitchfork that she wouldn’t “chill” to her group’s output. Dreamy as it is, their music is a wake-up call.
Crumb aren’t the types to get eight hours of sleep. Their first two albums, 2019’s Jinx and 2021’s Ice Melt, seemed to revel in the space between 2 a.m. and daylight—not only because of their shared sound, a slightly unnerving take on psychedelia, but also the ideas that informed that sound, the sorts of things you have to dream up. If you asked them about Ice Melt’s underwater-y vocal mixes, they wouldn’t tell you about Ableton effects or post-session knob adjustments; they’d tell you how they put condoms on microphones and dunked them in buckets of water. Ramani sang of transient thoughts, fleeting curiosities about strawberry seeds (“BNR”) or dates with dark spirits (“Jinx”). AMAMA, the band’s third album, gets more playful and candid than ever, without sacrificing their signature red-eyed experimentation. It’s a sleeker, riskier, and more rewarding iteration of Crumb’s approach: proof that as their footprint has expanded, their palette has, too.
Crumb take a microscope to foggy memories, gathering the ephemera of years spent staring through windows. They have roots in the New York scene—Ramani is an alum of Brooklyn ensemble Standing on the Corner; bassist Jesse Brotter appears on early tracks by MIKE—but their inventive jazz-psych invokes a wider set of peers, including Toronto’s BADBADNOTGOOD and Melbourne’s Hiatus Kaiyote. On “The Bug,” a hypnotic paean to caught flies and caught feelings, Ramani’s poetry is undergirded by a winding rhythm section that crawls like an insect. “Side by Side,” like the best Crumb songs, melds romance with vague mourning; when Ramani sings of “trying to run away” and the descending chord progression gives way to a feverish instrumental break, you get the sense that you’re running, too, but toward something—a seismic, supernatural encounter. Crumb’s music supplies a cinematic score for Ramani’s off-kilter scripts, slow-burn psychological thrillers that make you look over your shoulder, then at the world around you.
When Crumb are in the director’s chair, humdrum reality is a spectacle that co-stars everybody. Ramani has a knack for ending songs on unfinished sentences, a quirk that presents serpentine tracks as verbal ouroboroi. In “AMAMA”’s enchanting denouement, damning repetitions of “But you coulda never known my name” dissolve into a less-damning “But you coulda,” the “coulda” hanging like an open hand. On “Crushxd,” the band pays tribute to a turtle flattened by its tour van—“Forgive me for this sin, killing a living thing, you were as small as a pin”—and outdoes the typical funeral dirge with circular, foot-tapping bass-keyboard interplay. In the final minute, swirling pitch shifts carry the track into a trance and “I’ll never see you here again” melts into a naked “Never see you”: both a farewell and a release of guilt.
Crumb was conceived, in the mid-2010s, as a means of fully realizing songs Ramani had written years prior. They’ve come a long way since. The music doesn’t sound like an appendage or a backdrop anymore: It meanders where it used to lounge, screams where it used to whisper. Midway through “(Alone in) Brussels,” where the narrative is as winding as the instrumentation, a trip-hop break bathes Ramani’s high-pitched singsong in reverb and flanging, an amorphous deluge of liquid vowels, streaky keys, and bass notes that stagger like size-18 shoes. As a guitarist, Ramani rarely solos loudly; she’s more content using the strings as stilts, surveying the song with gangly, spiderish strides. At several moments, as on “Genie,” the words stop, and the guitar emerges as another voice, speaking a strange tongue synonymous with whatever she was saying before.
AMAMA was produced by Johnscott Sanford and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado (the latter also oversaw the recording of Ice Melt). If Crumb’s first two full-lengths squeezed worlds into safety-sized containers, this record is as authoritative as they’ve ever sounded. It sprawls in the vein of psych-pop genre-benders King Krule and Toro y Moi, but also manages to feel singular, a standalone statement of their ever-evolving identity. Like the best experimentalists, Crumb are their most potent when disparate elements interlock: a lucid dream you remember scene by scene, fragment by fragment. | 2024-05-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crumb | May 20, 2024 | 8.1 | ed43b80d-e70a-4ffd-bac3-61828441dcfa | Samuel Hyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/ | |
Fashioned from an archival recording of an aeolian harp in the Alaskan wilds, the environmental composer’s shimmering, wind-driven drones telegraph both majesty and dread. | Fashioned from an archival recording of an aeolian harp in the Alaskan wilds, the environmental composer’s shimmering, wind-driven drones telegraph both majesty and dread. | John Luther Adams: Houses of the Wind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-luther-adams-houses-of-the-wind/ | Houses of the Wind | Living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, John Luther Adams liked to walk around and listen to the birds, making recordings of the squawks and chirps he found the loveliest. The acclaimed environmental activist and composer had just finished studying music composition at CalArts, but those walks were as influential as his formal education. “The birds became my teacher after James Tenney,” he told an interviewer in 2014. He would write the birds’ calls into his music, but instead of meticulously attempting perfect notations of their songs, he wanted to find “what gets lost in translation.”
Adams later moved to Alaska, where he continued to search for music across the state’s vast tundras, forests, and mountains; the expanse of the Arctic still inspires much of his work. His Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral piece Become Ocean is an abstract rendition of Alaska’s roiling ocean that captures the immensity of the wide-open seas with surging melodies. Like his early bird-call explorations, the music is an interpretation, an attempt to offer an impression of how nature sounds and makes us feel.
Adams frequently works with orchestra, chamber ensemble, or percussion, but on Houses of the Wind, he turns to field recordings. The album is based on a 10-and-a-half-minute recording of an aeolian harp—a string instrument that’s played by the wind—that Adams made in Alaska in 1989. He’s explored the sound of the instrument before on pieces like The Wind in High Places, in which a string quartet emulates the air-driven device. But here, Adam works with the ethereal instrument itself, creating pieces that teeter between serenity, mourning, and hope.
The aeolian harp’s gentle hum is a vehicle for nostalgia; the way the wind streams through its strings creates a feathery sound that carries with it a feeling of wistfulness. Much of the wafting music on Houses of the Wind grows from the distance into full view, like climbing a mountain and reaching its apex. Opener “Catabatic Wind” defines this structure by starting with a distant, high-pitched twinkle. Gradually, deeper and more resonant tones take over, turning the atmosphere from wondrous to ominous. Other tracks, like “Mountain Wind,” start with sonorous, sinister rumbles that blossom into a radiant spectrum of pitches.
Just as the gossamer, shapeshifting hum of the aeolian harp is driven by the ways that wind interacts with the instrument, Adams follows that organic motion in sculpting his compositions. Closer “Anabatic Wind” makes the most compelling use of the natural ebb and flow of the air through the harp’s strings, sounding like a mellowed-out windchime. Different pitches glow and fade, climbing and falling with ease. It’s vibrant and pulsing, venturing from dark tones into a final shimmer of hope.
While the same field recording is the source for each of these pieces, the end results vary considerably. Subtle contradictions connect them: They’re in constant motion yet feel suspended in mid-air, tranquil yet uneasy, warm yet icy. Sometimes, these differences coexist and suggest a feeling of serenity, while at other points, the music feels wispy and slightly unsettling. But that unease often dissipates, once again finding balance between moments of optimism and despair, richness and translucence.
Adams has often mused about the ways music and activism relate to each other. To him, they’re inseparable—writing music is his way of advocating for the Earth. Given its direct link to the elements, Houses of the Wind feels like an overt statement about the relationship between music and the environment. Yet as in all his work, the result is impressionistic, not didactic. Amorphous as they are, these renderings are a powerful reminder that the planet is alive around us. | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cold Blue | June 21, 2022 | 7.8 | ed43e0cf-b4f8-4287-bff9-6ac0ee05f796 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Frankie Cosmos is the low-key indie pop project of Greta Kline. Her greatest talent is her ability to transform short songs into experiences that resemble hours of impressionistic conversation. | Frankie Cosmos is the low-key indie pop project of Greta Kline. Her greatest talent is her ability to transform short songs into experiences that resemble hours of impressionistic conversation. | Frankie Cosmos: Next Thing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21765-next-thing/ | Next Thing | Most of the time, lyric sheets to albums are utilitarian; you turn to them to make sure what you're hearing is right. But the lyric sheet to Frankie Cosmos' Next Thing reads like book of poems on its own. It runs seven pages long, comprising 15 stanzas (1 for each of its songs) and it totals 1570 words, all of which are slyly idiosyncratic, bordering on perfectly arranged. As I listened, I felt compelled to print them out, staple the pages together, and read along, fearful I would miss something important. As I did, I became thoroughly convinced that Greta Kline is quietly writing herself into a vaunted place, one where she will eventually deserve mention alongside poets like Lydia Davis, Wayne Koestenbaum, or Maggie Nelson—anyone who can puncture your heart in the span of a sentence.
The sound on her sophomore album is mature, fully-fleshed, but never loses the unique immediacy of her Bandcamp work. Like those albums, the music on Next Thing is mostly built on unvarnished synths and sweet, understated guitars. The difference is in the clarity of her vision: Two years ago when Lindsay Zoladz named Zentropy the year's number one pop album in New York Magazine, she concluded that Kline penned a "melodic reminder that the wisest, wittiest person in the room is rarely the loudest one but instead that unassuming girl in the corner, grinning contentedly at her untied shoes." In Next Thing, she's looked up from her laces, meeting your eyes and delivering observations that are by turns strange, self-possessed, and dizzyingly multitudinous.
On these songs, those observational powers are at their height. Her greatest talent remains her ability to transform minute-long songs into experiences that resemble hours of intimate and impressionistic conversation. In the first minute of album opener "Floated In," Kline sings: "Now it would be bedtime if/I could close off my mind/It just flops onto you/Wet and soppy glue...You know I'd love to/Rummage through your silky pink space cap." It's an uncanny description of two drowsy minds splattering thoughts on each other, hoping something sticks, but the words gently pass by before you've even internalized how weird and salient they are. Even when she paints scenes that ostensibly are filled with private meaning, something universal resonates. In "Fool" for example, when she sings "Your name is a triangle, your heart is a square," the funky cubist formulation gets closer to the uncomfortable feeling of naming the one you love than straight description ever would.
As a singer, she's perfected an inimitable vocal delivery that is willfully off-center, out-of-focus, and matter-of-fact. She uses enjambment in her writing and in the long pauses of her singing so well that it reminds me of an idea from Maggie Nelson, that some people who tend bonsai trees plant them askew or aslant to leave space for God. The gaps in Sappho's poetry have been called "a free space of imaginal adventure," and it is an apt description for Kline's music: In the momentary disjunctions of Kline's singing, the hiccup between words, a whole life passes by. On "Outside with the Cuties," she savors the nanoseconds that come between words, asking ordinary-seeming questions ("I haven't written this part yet/will you help me write it?") that invite radical participation from a listener. Even though the song may end after two and a half minutes, it never really ends.
Her work has a continuity to it that invites deep diving, as if she is formulating and reformulating the same few thoughts, waiting for their perfect expressions. Many of the songs ("Embody," "On the Lips," "Too Dark" and "Sleep Song") on the album have appeared in acoustic permutations in past work, and they make the leap seamlessly. Each are marvelously well-wrought trains of thought, cramming existential questions into the banality of everyday moments and finding something beatific even in the plainest of things. "Embody" finds Kline singing about a day where friendship is everything holy in the world, "It's Sunday night/and my friends are friends with my friends/it shows me they embody all the grace and lightness." It's a feeling that helps her move past her self-perceived inability to access this feeling herself ("someday in bravery/I'll embody all the grace and lightness). In Catholicism, past the fog of guilt, there's an incredible idea that light, love, and all that's holy can be transferable from one person to the next. It usually happens in ritual, the eating of a wafer of bread and a sip of wine. In Greta Kline's pocket universe, all you need to get closer to heaven is a night with friends. | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bayonet | April 1, 2016 | 8.5 | ed48aea3-c50c-477c-9084-c10c9fd4d4f0 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Houston rap icon Z-Ro's gorgeous, languid baritone frequently lapses into singing. His latest album paints with just a few colors, but he continually finds new ways to blend them. | Houston rap icon Z-Ro's gorgeous, languid baritone frequently lapses into singing. His latest album paints with just a few colors, but he continually finds new ways to blend them. | Z-Ro: Drankin’ & Drivin’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22121-drankin-drivin/ | Drankin’ & Drivin’ | In a recent interview with Rap Radar’s Brian Miller and Elliot Wilson, Houston rap icon Z-Ro copped to having seven unreleased albums on his phone. There’s Legendary, designed to make you feel legendary. There’s Ghetto Gospel, designed to make you feel like you’re at church on the street corner. (I wonder how previous albums Angel Dust, Cocaine, and Meth were supposed to make you feel.) And, now, there’s Drankin’ & Drivin’, an album you’re supposed to put on when you’re lost in the sauce, stuck in the mud, slowed down by any mixture of lean, alcohol, or some other vice, caught in your feelings.
Z-Ro, legally known as Joseph McVey, sometimes calls himself “Rother Vandross,” and it’s more than a pun: Ro’s gorgeous, languid baritone frequently lapses into singing, and his best music has featured a hard-hitting hook sung by the man himself. My favorite version of Ro has been the guy who turned “I hate you bitch” into a gentle, reflective, melodic lyric.
This is Drankin’ & Drivin’s strongest suit—Ro delivers a few knockout hooks, addresses his haters, and it’s onto the next song. It would be tempting to suggest Ro’s material mostly sticks to a few topics to his detriment—haters, baby-mama drama, disloyal members of his crew (sometimes these people overlap)—but what has separated Ro’s music from more traditional street rap, even among fellow introspective Houston contemporaries like Trae tha Truth and Scarface, has been his uncanny knack for taking just about any phrase and building a sweeping hook with it. He embellishes the feeling, less the storytelling.
Lead single “Women Men” (which cops a beat from 50 Cent’s “Many Men [Wish Death]”) hits all the best Z-Ro targets: He talks shit, he sings, and the mood floats between celebratory and menacing, without one eclipsing the other. This is another great little strength of Ro’s—while he paints with just a few colors, he continually finds new ways to blend them. He admits his albums are more mood rings than song-cycles; they’re something you put on when you want to feel a certain way. Considering the sound most associated with Houston rap was created literally as an accessory to taking drugs, the laconic Drankin’ & Drivin’ feels all too appropriate.
A self-professed fan of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, the only guest Z-Ro invites into his insular world is Krayzie Bone, who appears on “Since We Lost Y’all.” Bone Thugs’ rhythmic, supple mix of rapping and singing is another key to understanding Z-Ro. He often sounds comfortable, but never complacent: for every song like “Baby Momma Blues,” elsewhere he hits subtle notes like comparing himself to Isiah Carey, a local news anchor (“I tell it like it is/Not the way it might be”) and touches on political/cultural touchstones that resonate heavily in Texas (on “He Hoes” he says, “Representing for Sandra Bland/My attitude is fuck the law”). Z-Ro sounds like what Houston feels like—hot, inviting, intimidating if you take a wrong turn, but redemptive if you stick around long enough.
He connects with local producers Beanz & Kornbread, who craft a soulful sex jam with “Hostage” that has more in common with the song of the same name on Maxwell’s recent blackSUMMERS’night than whatever comes to mind when you think of Ro. Another great Houston-based producer, June James, creates a lush, stirring beat on the album’s penultimate statement, “Successful,” solemn when the rest of the album can be thorny. Z-Ro accomplished his goal, then—the album is like hearing the innermost thoughts from someone who’s had a little bit to drink, but not too much—the kind of buzz that convinces someone they’re OK behind the wheel, until, of course, they crash. | 2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Deep Entertainment | July 22, 2016 | 7.2 | ed497e78-0554-4e03-9e29-7361b604974a | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Tunji Ige, a 20-year-old Philadelphian son of Nigerian parents, makes appealingly low-stakes rap that accomplishes a lot with a little. | Tunji Ige, a 20-year-old Philadelphian son of Nigerian parents, makes appealingly low-stakes rap that accomplishes a lot with a little. | Tunji Ige: Missed Calls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21824-missed-calls/ | Missed Calls | Tunji Ige is a very current sounding rapper. "Sometimes I’m like… Oh my god, this sounds too much like [Kid] Cudi," the then-sophomore in college jokingly worried in an interview with Fader around the time he released his first project in 2014. A couple years later, on Ige’s new EP, Missed Calls, the comparison holds, and he more obviously channels Kanye West and Drake throughout, trying on their flows and crafting quiet homages out of beats. On one song he brags: "This is post-backpack, post-swag rap, the end of trap, and it’s not wack." It’s kind of a corny line, and Ige is actually at his best melding these hip-hop sub-movements he’s hoping to push past, but it’s also an emotionally honest survey of the land for an in-between generation.
Missed Calls is the product of a collaboration between Ige, a 20-year-old Philadelphian son of Nigerian parents, and Noah Breakfast, an increasingly important behind-the-scenes force in the same city. Breakfast previously made up the production half of the college hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang under the name Xaphoon Jones and has more recently clocked work for acts like Jeremih, Rome Fortune, and Baauer. Ige is an inventive, minimalist producer on his own, and Breakfast’s touch articulates his ideas, sculpting rough drafts into finely-tuned productions. The result is a noticeably well-mixed record, and while Ige has an undeniable imitative propensity, Missed Calls also sounds contained and consistent, like it belongs entirely to him alone.
Generally, the EP leans warmly electronic with sounds that swell instead of crackle. Album opener "Change That" splays ambient synths on top of snappy drums while Ige waxes about his come-up. Ige isn’t a flashy lyricist and some of his raps are overly predictable, but his restraint and smart approach to song structure are his best skills, assets that make him more valuable as a hopeful hitmaker than as a cypher cameo. More importantly, he’s got an ear for catchiness and is a capable enough singer to carry his own hooks.
On "War," the only song produced solely by Breakfast, Ige delivers a mumbling and monotonous sing-song, but it works for the sparse, subdued vibe. On "22," a dramatic, self-serious reflection on being an ascendant 20 year-old rapper, Ige is at his most intimate, but remains a vague and low-stakes writer. "The only road I see is by your side / And know I really could be that guy," he sings affectionately. The song sandwiches a 32-bar verse between strategic bridges and a chanting hook. Like the rest of Missed Calls, you might not double back on a single verse or particular turn of phrase, but Ige’s talent is in pushing a song forward and fleshing it out completely.
The best songs on the album are in the middle and in succession. "On My Grind," the EP’s spacey trap lead single, is rightfully Ige’s biggest hit to date and packages his most accomplished burst of rapping into a pair of verses, the first of which bundles a succession of oddball but obvious similes ("She Bollywood dance like Punjabi / Slum Dog nigga eating Mahi," he raps). The minimalist production interlocks entirely, leaving no open space until a breaking point liberates the hook. "Bring Yo Friends" is an earworm with a simple, bassy foundation and ad-libs—a persistent "Yeah!" tacked onto the end of each line—that nod affectionately to Juvenile’s late-’90s bounce smash "Back That Azz Up." "You should bring your friends yeah, bring your friends yeah!" Ige chants. It’s carefree and simple, inspirational and party-worthy. There’s no narrative ambitions to bog things down, it’s just an obvious hit about having fun. It’s Ige at his best, accomplishing a lot with a little. | 2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bad Habit / BrainBandits | April 18, 2016 | 6.8 | ed60df01-5335-4084-a7f4-f9bc8fb86ec3 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
On his first solo album in 10 years, Lindsey Buckingham’s insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible. | On his first solo album in 10 years, Lindsey Buckingham’s insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible. | Lindsey Buckingham: Lindsey Buckingham | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lindsey-buckingham-lindsey-buckingham/ | Lindsey Buckingham | In the blissful exile of the recording studio, Lindsey Buckingham dreams of a dozen music boxes tinkling beautifully in various keys without cease. His melodies yield to other singers with extreme reluctance; they and he need coaxing out of their often truculent self-reliance. Yet for three decades fans could count on Buckingham donating tunes to Fleetwood Mac from a mysterious solo album he was tinkering with on the side, or to release this album himself, confident he’d gotten the bug out of his system.
Not this time. Buckingham quit Fleetwood Mac in 1987, then came back a decade later to film The Dance and play in its subsequent world tour. In 2018, band manager Irving Azoff informed him that, according to Buckingham, Stevie Nicks had fired him (Nicks disagrees). It took Crowded House’s Neil Finn and no less than Mike Campbell to replace him in the band’s lineup; meanwhile, Buckingham returned to an album he’d completed before that year’s tour. He’s settled on an eponymous title for his first post-Mac album—a declaration of independence and defiance. Yet Lindsey Buckingham manages to be his best solo effort since 1992’s Out of the Cradle. No dilution of his composing or his production sorcery here: Buckingham, all by his lonesome, has recorded an album whose insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible.
Where once his furiously strummed guitars, multi-tracked harmonies, and plickety-plockety programmed rhythms toughened the one-dimensional plaints, the lyrics and music of Lindsey Buckingham are in congruence, terms settled like a prenup agreement. Nicks and Christine McVie’s contributions to his Mac material added impassioned and rueful complements, respectively; now he coughs up the ambiguities on his own. “If you’re playing a part/I’ve got to understand,” he coos on “Blind Love.” Lest there be a doubt, he offers the following on “Power Down”: “Lies, lies are the only thing that keeps us alive.” On “Santa Rosa,” he repeats “if you go” not as a request so much as a conditional, singing of a “you” who wants to “leave it behind” as his guitar summons the essence of Sonoma County with a couple dulcet tones. The Buckingham of Law and Order (1981) and Go Insane (1984) would’ve kept howling and shredding, but here the prettiness of the tune suggests he’s made peace with the separation.
Reliant on a tension between his need to confess a sense of hurt through psychobabble and the way his tunes eddy in place before surging forward, Buckingham has often come off as a producer stuck with the unforgiving mode of the pop song, instead of a singer-songwriter meeting his audience: The surly punk-influenced tunelets on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk (1979), the undulant electronic suite on Go Insane, and the hermetic, forbidding grace of Gift of Screws (2011) use verbal tags as excuses for sonic experiments. But on the new album, Buckingham sharpens the familiar modes; its sheen is its own attraction. “I Don’t Mind,” with its touch-activated pitch experiments he mastered on Tango in the Night’s “Big Love,” is second nature to him. Because he’s Lindsey Buckingham, he includes a foil: the spare “Dancing,” in which he breathes the title cushioned by his own oohs, as delectable as a similarly arranged cover of the Rolling Stones’ “I Am Waiting” from 2006’s Seeds We Sow.
To weave exquisite aural curtains protecting his private life has been Buckingham’s métier since the late ’70s; he has presented himself as an artist who shuns the world and its messes. For too long, veneration of his studio mastery resulted in underrating, if not condescending to, McVie and Nicks—longtime Mac fans grew up reading accounts of Buckingham saving their material. So besotted as a culture do we remain with the Solitary Male Genius that we breeze past credible accusations of abuse. Fans endure defensive psychobabble. The reward? In its poise, Lindsey Buckingham is an offensive gesture: nothing seemingly at stake, no fleshed-out objects of desire to trouble daylong studio sessions. It is an austere, beautiful, cruel album, a polished sword.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | September 14, 2021 | 7 | ed626052-3e5a-4b97-a790-ba30ad72de1a | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ |
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