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The breakout star of the regional subgenre known as Jersey club harnesses its familiar driving grooves and libidinal energy while pushing the style forward with new sounds and moods. | The breakout star of the regional subgenre known as Jersey club harnesses its familiar driving grooves and libidinal energy while pushing the style forward with new sounds and moods. | UNIIQU3: Heartbeats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/uniiqu3-heartbeats/ | Heartbeats | On the opening track of Heartbeats, Cherise Gary snarls, “I just want to fuck.” It’s exactly the sort of direct statement you’d expect from Jersey club, the “X-rated” dance music that Gary, aka UNIIQU3, first heard as a teenager in Newark, the city that birthed the genre. More than a decade later, she’s now the Jersey Club Queen, a title befitting an artist whose studio releases, DJ mixes, and live shows have cemented her as its most electrifying practitioner today.
While data suggest that women make up the majority of Jersey club’s audience, those behind the boards and mics have historically been male. Artists like UNIIQU3 and Cookie Kawaii are changing that. Case in point: That “I just want to fuck” line doesn’t solely exhibit the insatiably horny mentality—exhilarating as it is—that defines much of Jersey club, a genre whose recognizable kick pattern originates from a Baltimore club track called “Dikkontrol” and belongs to a lineage of other libidinal, male-dominated club music like ghetto house and ghettotech. Instead, it’s just a single element in “Shame on Me”’s overarching story, one involving the disappointment UNIIQU3 feels after a guy tries to “run games” on her. Read a different way, “I just want to fuck” could be sung from the perspective of the same man: cold, shameless, unfeeling.
UNIIQU3 has a penchant for maintaining the immediacy and exhilaration of top-shelf Jersey club while weaving in clear micro-narratives. On the melancholy “Unavailable,” squelching synths and vocal samples overlap with talk of an unrequited love, and the propulsive beat feels both lovelorn and determined to push through the heartbreak. She utilizes the dial tone and disconnected-phone message as witty and affecting elaborations on her mood, but she doesn’t rely on them—more evidence of her refusal to leave songs one-dimensional. Rather, disorientation is primarily felt in a textured swirl of varied sounds: pulsating synths, the classic Jersey club beat, her own exasperated vocals.
Despite the sorrow that defines a couple of Heartbeats’ tracks, UNIIQU3 still leaves room for the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. These songs are the EP’s most fun and funny, with “Drown” employing a regal horn overture to announce a “pussy so wet you’ll drown in it.” There’s confidence exuded in the trap beat, and an expansive atmosphere that amusingly embodies the lyrics. When a familiar sample of Trillville’s “Some Cut” is heard—originally a rocking chair, but understood by everyone to be a bed spring—its sudden rapid-speed edit channels a cartoonish, eyes-popping-out-of-sockets, “hummina hummina awooga!!!” silliness. More deliciously outrageous is “Touch,” whose flirty lyrics about waists and thighs are accompanied by such deep bass rumbles that the song feels like a literal assquake.
Heartbeats is UNIIQU3’s Double Cup moment: a release that pushes its respective genre forward and could only come from an artist who’s peerless in their field. Where her BITCHES IS OUTSIDE VOL 1 EP, from earlier this year, was Jersey club distilled to its purest elements and energies, Heartbeats is a gripping evolution where every second is perfectly manicured. It’s less raw in presentation, but don’t mistake it as selling out; this sanding down of edges is both refined and full-body invigorating. Sometimes this progress comes from looking to the past, as with the runway-ready hip-house scorcher “Microdosing.” Sometimes it arrives as a marriage of different ideas, with “What Chu Waiting For?” exemplifying this neatly. It’s an R&B song with Future-like coos, its growling low end matched by cocksure vocals. The pounding beat, the bed squeak, the kinetic drive—as with the rest of Heartbeats, it’s undeniably Jersey club, but something else altogether.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Local Action | October 22, 2021 | 7.8 | ed6b11db-50ba-4a92-b620-a906b8504870 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
This companion to Bruce Springsteen’s memoir traces his development as a songwriter and a person. Most notable is the inclusion of five previously unreleased songs from before he signed with Columbia. | This companion to Bruce Springsteen’s memoir traces his development as a songwriter and a person. Most notable is the inclusion of five previously unreleased songs from before he signed with Columbia. | Bruce Springsteen: Chapter and Verse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22409-chapter-and-verse/ | Chapter and Verse | Bruce Springsteen was a young man for the span of two albums. His twin releases from 1973, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, were populated by teenage tramps who skipped school, acted cool, stayed out all night, and, generally, felt all right. By the time Born to Run was released in the summer of 1975, Springsteen was starting to put his childish things away. “Maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” he sang on the opener “Thunder Road,” and he acted accordingly. From that point forward, Springsteen’s music was filled with more hardened characters: men with death in their eyes, women who were hated for just being born. Everything about his records, from his increasingly gruff vocals to his toughening physical appearance, seemed to signal a push toward maturity. “I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man,” he sang on 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, as if the authoritative chug of his band and his mean, clean-shaven mug on the cover didn’t say as much already.
The most immediate selling point of Chapter and Verse, a new compilation accompanying Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run, is that it extends Bruce’s on-record adolescence by five songs. In addition to the 13 album tracks he selected to represent his growth as a songwriter, the set also features, for the first time on an officially sanctioned Springsteen release, music predating his tenure on Columbia Records. For the most part, it’s clear why these tracks have never been a part of the larger Springsteen story, why he never felt the urge to pull a Mudcrutch. They mostly find Springsteen trying on different personas, looking for a sound that fits. The set opens with “Baby I,” a primitive cut from 1966 by his teenage crew the Castiles, and then we get the Townshend-worship garage rock of the following year’s “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover,” while 1970’s “He’s Guilty (The Judge Song),” by his early band Steel Mill, is a simple, Southern fried sing-a-long.
While none of these cuts will knock “Sad Eyes” out of your top 300, 1972’s “Ballad of Jesse James” is the set’s biggest revelation. Boasting a Levon Helm-worthy chorus (“Don’t you wanna be an outlaw, children?”) and introducing many of the musicians who remain a benchmark of Springsteen’s sound today, “Jesse James” showcases Springsteen’s already-arena-sized ambition at a time when he didn’t necessarily have anything important to say. It also feels like the first moment on the album where a recognizable Bruce emerges. The guitar solo forecasts the heavier work he’d do on Darkness, while the caterwaul at the end sounds a good deal like the one that would eventually close out “Backstreets.” Even the outlaw narrative is something Springsteen would return to again. Of the five new songs collected here, this is the one you might want to start preparing a sign for when the next E Street tour rolls around.
After that initial run, we’re left with a tidy run-through of Springsteen’s discography. The tie-in with the memoir means that we’re focusing largely on his more personal work. Gone from the set are the more character-based tracks that appeared on 2003’s comprehensive The Essential Bruce Springsteen and 1995’s chart-focussed Greatest Hits. In other words, no “Hungry Heart,” no “Atlantic City,” no “Glory Days.” He does, however, make room for 1995’s literally-based-on-a-fictional-character “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and 2002’s fireman’s lament “The Rising.” But these tracks speak to a crucial aspect of Springsteen’s work: Despite the long monologues he’s been known to deliver at shows, his music has never been all that autobiographical. A telling anecdote about Bruce involves his right-hand-man Steve Van Zandt berating him at the inclusion of the confessional “Ain’t Got You” on 1987’s Tunnel of Love. “Nobody gives a shit about your life,” the guitarist told him, “They need you for their lives. That’s your thing.” (We’ll see how Van Zandt responds when the sales reports for Bruce’s memoir come in.)
Whether Springsteen’s songs tell his story or our story, the tale is one for the ages. Much of Springsteen’s catalog was designed specifically to grow old with him (“If you wrote them well, they sustain,” Springsteen told a journalist this year when asked about touring 35-year-old songs.) Chapter and Verse arranges his work in a way that rings true to his journey. Following the opening string of songs, “Born to Run,” sounds here like the revelation that it was: a perfect distillation of the music he loved and a culmination of the work he had already done. Same goes for 1987’s “Brilliant Disguise,” a ballad sung with the urgency of an artist finally finding the words to express exactly what’s been on his mind. Other cuts like “Badlands” and “Born in the U.S.A.” help move his story along, illustrating the new vocabulary and sounds that defined the albums each track introduced.
The more recent selections are equally powerful. “Living Proof” from 1992 is a should-be classic that captures the rush of emotions accompanying new fatherhood. “Long Time Comin’,” a song penned in the ’90s but not released on a record until the mid 2000s, is another gem. During early performances of it, Springsteen introduced it as one of his rare “happy songs,” but its joyful tone got buried by the more morose material on Devils & Dust; here it feels utterly euphoric. “Wrecking Ball,” a divisive song about a sports complex penned in 2009 to commemorate the closing of Giants Stadium, also speaks to a lot more in this context. In six minutes, it refits “Born to Run”’s momentum to a less glamorous narrative, refining the heart of Springsteen’s muse into seven short words: “Hard times come, and hard times go.” That message is also reflected by the album’s flow, spanning from “Baby I”’s prepubescent power-pop through the ghostly “My Father’s House” and finally landing on a place of acceptance.
“I always picture it as a car,” Springsteen said of his career in a recent Vanity Fair interview. “All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?” The last few years have seen an uncharacteristic turn toward nostalgia for Springsteen that’s led from 2014’s Album Collection Vol. 1 to this year’s River Tour and the upcoming memoir. With the opening five songs, more than 60% of Chapter and Verse is pre-Born in the U.S.A., giving a heavy skew toward his early days. It’s clear that this wasn’t designed as a greatest hits set, or even a Springsteen-for-beginners mixtape. Hopefully, it proves to be an excuse to move forward and a way to leave the past behind. You can imagine any number of similarly structured compilations (maybe one of his love songs that opens with “For You” and peaks with “If I Should Fall Behind,” or a politically-charged one that draws a line from “Lost in the Flood” to “Matamoros Banks”). Chapter and Verse takes a relatively safe route, but it’s a beautiful ride: one where everyone in the car feels united and hellbent on making it out alive. | 2016-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 22, 2016 | 7.5 | ed6b1347-6512-4e58-b167-23677d750f0c | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Compared to 1979’s major punk releases, it’s not hard to see why Press Color didn’t make much of a dent in the U.S., UK, or even France. It’s a vivid curio and cool personality splatter rather than a cultural landmark. | Compared to 1979’s major punk releases, it’s not hard to see why Press Color didn’t make much of a dent in the U.S., UK, or even France. It’s a vivid curio and cool personality splatter rather than a cultural landmark. | Lizzy Mercier Descloux: Press Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20767-press-color/ | Press Color | In 1976, a couple of young French dreamers finagled their way into New York’s punk scene under the auspices of their newly minted magazine, Rock News. Lizzy Mercier Descloux and boyfriend Michel Esteban took full advantage of the Lower East Side’s perpetually open door, scooping ad hoc interviews with the likes of Patti Smith and Television, and became vivid regulars (and Descloux a regular heartbreaker) on the CBGBs circuit. Across the English Channel, they met with the Sex Pistols, and brought stories of nihilists and poets back to France. (France shrugged.) Just a year later, having appeared in Amos Poe and Ivan Kral’s Blank Generation, they had the audacity to declare punk dead, and closed the magazine. Sick of their stuffy city, they moved to New York, and roomed with Smith, Descloux’s Rimbaudian comrade, in a loft propped up by white columns.
As Descloux drifted between simultaneous relationships with Richard Hell and various other artists, she and Esteban split but maintained a close personal and creative bond. She acquired a Fender Jazzmaster, and formed Rosa Yemen with Esteban’s brother, Didier, just around the time of the legendary Artists Space noise series immortalized in Brian Eno’s No New York compilation. Following unhinged gigs at the Kitchen and the Mudd Club where Descloux would scream herself silly and wrap the mic cable around her throat, the duo (named in honor of European activists like Rosa Luxembourg and the Baader-Meinhof group) consecrated their fractious musical relationship in a 12-inch, Live in N.Y.C. July 1978. It became the fifth release on the nascent ZE Records, which Esteban had founded earlier that year with the British writer Michael Zilkha.
On that 12-inch, only "Decryptated" has any significant percussion, which sounds like it was slapped out on an empty bucket. The record is a clash between two guitars, the lead needling with the intensity of a polygraph test administered by a fascist regime, the loose rhythm taking its cues from dub. It’s beginners’ stuff, very much in the vein of Rosa Yemen’s destructive no wave peers, though the atmosphere is consummately terrifying, fraught with the danger of illicit negotiations on dark street corners. "Herpes Simplex" starts with the sound of gasping and frantic footsteps, and then Descloux comes in, yelping about the STI in fractured hysterics. She shudders the word "metabolisme!" like Dracula rising from his coffin.
There are probably dozens, or maybe even hundreds of records like Rosa Yemen Live in N.Y.C.—gripping if unexceptional also-rans that may find an audience as reissue culture has to dig deeper. Light In The Attic has appended these songs to the first in their Lizzy Mercier Descloux reissue series, which focuses on Press Color, the first album under her own name, and one that warrants the marquee billing. In February 1979, as Sid Vicious was being sprinkled on Nancy Spungen’s grave, Descloux, Didier Esteban, Erik Eliasson (from Marie et les Garçons) and Jimmy Young headed into the third room of Bob Blank’s Blank Tapes studio at 37 West 20th Street for 10 days of intense recording. It was still under construction at the time, but then so was Descloux. Where Parisian studios would have scoffed at this bunch of amateurs, Blank welcomed their naïve creative impulses.
Press Color was originally intended to be a group release, but ZE decided that Descloux’s name and face was a better selling point. At the time they were pushing their "mutant disco" aesthetic on their less fully formed artists. Cristina, Zilkha’s wife, had released "Disco Clone", which sent up the interchangeability of women within the scene. Descloux was working within the label’s prescribed sound, but she emerges here as a unique, instinctive voice, abandoning the harrowed yelps of Rosa Yemen to trill and jabber with glee. Uninterested in the conventions of rock, she pursued her guitar playing just the same way.
As a New York newcomer, the failed '60s dream didn’t oppress Descloux in the same way as it did her new peers: she rose early to browse the fish market, swam in Central Park’s Lasker Pool, and scaled rooftops for the views. Her peers and boyfriends recall her as the only person who wore bright colors in a monochromatic scene. And so Press Color is full of joy and possibility rather than psychic pain and bankruptcy, opening with a shimmying cover of Arthur Brown’s "Fire" that moves at the pace of an enervated woodpecker. Descloux’s strong French accent just adds to the charm: "You’ve been so blind! You fall be’ind!" she explodes amidst the glittering whirl.
There are more covers: a skeletal take on Lalo Shifrin’s "Mission Impossible" theme and "Jim on the Move", where Descloux seems to vocalize every twitch of her tongue. A strain of no wave malevolence lingers in "Torso Corso", "Wawa" (whose tumbling bassline deserves to be fully iconic), and the dubbed-out "Aya Mood", which show off the band’s nimble, minimalist interplay. Her shuffling, splayed redux of Peggy Lee’s "Fever" as "Tumor" has an obvious morbid humor, though it’s the original "No Golden Throat" where her disposition and tastes come through most strongly.
By all accounts, Descloux wasn’t into slogging away in the studio, and resisted Michel Esteban’s attempts to get her to sing properly. "Right now I’m not at all a writer of words," she told New York Rocker in the summer of 1980. "I’m using the words completely for what they sound like, how they fit with the rhythms… What’s beautiful is that I don’t speak perfect English but I can get lost in the dictionary and just discover the words." "Golden Throat" is her protest at being asked to fit any idiom: she repeats the line "I’ll never have a golden throat" a dozen different ways, seducing it, mocking it, playing her voicebox like a plastic slide whistle. Phonetic chatter litters the relaxed reggae guitar, prefiguring the direction she would pursue later in her career as she recorded in Nassau and apartheid-era Soweto. She never met the Slits, but they shared a love of reggae and silliness. European avant-garde artists are often self-serious, or considered to be, but Descloux and Ari Up (along with Palmolive and the Raincoats' Ana da Silva) brought a welcome playful streak to what could be an austere scene.
Compared to 1979’s major punk releases, it’s not hard to see why Press Color didn’t make much of a dent in the U.S., UK, or even France. Next to the likes of Fear of Music, Entertainment!, The B-52s, Tom Verlaine, The Raincoats, This Heat, Broken English, Metal Box, London Calling, Cut, and Y, it’s a vivid curio and cool personality splatter rather than a cultural landmark. Descloux would make those later (even if their recognition remains overdue). What Press Color does is distill our collective excitement and unceasing wonder at a scene that’s almost four decades old. New York's no wave and punk’s protagonists were down in the squalor, waging a brutal, draining fight against their city, their country, the commoditization of their sound. As an outsider, Descloux was able to soak up their energy and revolution and use it to fuel the discovery of her own cultural identity and purpose. Press Color isn’t wildly original, but it’s the making of one. | 2015-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Light in the Attic | August 10, 2015 | 8.2 | ed6f7f53-9e49-4f3f-af61-2571a61b3428 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
A patchwork of lethargic guitar riffs, dying-bulb synth glow, and generic disco beats, the Virginia band’s newest album feels strangely emotionally detached. | A patchwork of lethargic guitar riffs, dying-bulb synth glow, and generic disco beats, the Virginia band’s newest album feels strangely emotionally detached. | Turnover: Myself in the Way | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/turnover-myself-in-the-way/ | Myself in the Way | With each new album, Turnover have molted skins, shifting their sound in an effort to become more present. They’ve ironed gravelly guitars into silky melodies, supplanting pop-punk with their own softer style, full of saxophone flourishes and rivers of synths. Following the moody escapism of 2015’s Peripheral Vision, 2017’s Good Nature demonstrated a hopeful mentality, excising self-isolation and bad vibes by embracing psych-rock and easygoing grooves. In Turnover’s definition, maturity means aspiring toward level-headed cool. But they might have saged the studio too hard while making Myself in the Way, a patchwork of lethargic guitar riffs, dying-bulb synth glow, and generic disco beats.
The title track offers the album’s guiding philosophy: “Can’t put myself in the way of love again,” Austin Getz proclaims. Is it self-sabotage or fear of commitment that’s standing between him and the deepening relationship he describes as a “puzzle of dreams”? Unfortunately, this earnest line of questioning is watered down further by Tame Impala-lite instrumentation and Getz’s inability to sell his narrator as either determined or even fully willing to leap his emotional barricades. “I think I can do this forever, girl, if you will,” he sings awkwardly in Auto-Tune. A guest appearance from Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, a performer who can deliver corpse-reviving vocals from a mid-air leap, surfaces in the outro almost like an afterthought.
The guest vocalists, particularly Temple of Angels’ Bre Morell’s soulful appearance in “Ain’t Love Heavy,” underline the odd sense of emotional detachment across the rest of the album. “When you’re wrapped around me in your warm embrace/How can I control myself?” Getz chirps on “Pleasures Galore,” his voice again veiled in Auto-Tune. Yet he sounds eerily controlled, like a robot processing romantic pastiche. The lifeless attempt at Nile Rodgers-style guitar and the Muppet-esque synths do not add to his conviction. Love’s rapture is on full display on the lyrics sheet, but throughout Myself in the Way, the chemistry feels lab-sterilized. Whether he’s detailing a partner’s facial expression after a quarrel or the way the floorboards shake during sex, Getz’s delivery is boring and stale.
The album’s most striking moment is also its most bizarre. “Mountains Made of Clouds” is an ode to Sebastopol, California, where Gerz lived for five years before recently moving away. Some lyrics are wistful nods to the region’s natural beauty, while others outline a loose narrative: “Moving as fast as when I was/Spending my time running/From the lawman,” Getz sings. A lava lamp’s worth of wavy synth and viscous electric guitar make the music feel weightless, and by song’s end, the Pink Floyd melancholy fades into birdsong. There’s an intimate echo around Getz’s voice as he sings over raw acoustic strums: “Now my weary eyes/Won’t stop glancing at the door/I can hear the sirens outside.” Stripping the song naked, if for only a few seconds, is the closest Turnover get to making us feel those same emotions, right in the moment with them. | 2022-11-15T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-15T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | November 15, 2022 | 5.3 | ed7281cd-bd8d-466e-a1d1-82dbc46d3b9a | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Greg Fox’s second solo album is spiritually ecstatic. The once and future metal drummer finds new clarity in electronic, ambient, and even New Age sounds. | Greg Fox’s second solo album is spiritually ecstatic. The once and future metal drummer finds new clarity in electronic, ambient, and even New Age sounds. | Greg Fox: The Gradual Progression | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greg-fox-the-gradual-progression/ | The Gradual Progression | Greg Fox's career—both as a drummer in metal and jazz groups, and as a solo artist—has been leading to this moment. Not just to this album, but to the possibilities it affords him as an artist with unparalleled skill performing on the instrument in the back of the bandstand. Though he does have contributors on his second solo album The Gradual Progression, the sound of the album is Fox's alone. He transcends the idea of the solo percussion album as a limited offering to create something teeming with life and love.
The Gradual Progression comes just a few months after the release of the debut album by Ex Eye, Fox’s proggy quartet, where he more often pummels the drums rather than finding subtle ways to redefine what they can do. Before that, he was the drummer of New York black metal band Liturgy, where he found nirvana by playing impossibly fast and precise. Take a listen to either band—or watch one of the many internet videos of Fox performing drums solo—to truly get a sense of Fox’s chops. His jaw-dropping displays of drum aptitude, especially when used in full force, thrashing out textbook blast beats at hyper-speed, have an undeniable visceral pleasure. But these displays are like watching a slam dunk contest; the moves can awe, but they’re not exactly practical.
To broaden his range and create a world unto himself on The Gradual Progression, Fox has utilized new software called Sensory Percussion, which allows for individual parts of drum heads to have different samples mapped onto them. When he hits, you hear both the drum and an array of programmed sounds. How that translates to the final product is... not totally clear. Is that him alone triggering the sci-fi tinkles on “By Virtue of Emptiness,” or one of his album’s guests? Is the soft jazz saxophone recorded in overdubs or a real life collaboration? It’s better to close your eyes and let the music wash over you than try to figure out how it works. And if you must, good luck: The album’s songs have many layers of sound happening at once, and often not in congress.
For someone with such unbelievable skill, there are few moments on The Gradual Progression where you really feel like you are in the presence of a master. So when he does preen, he makes it count. On “My House of Equalizing Predecessors,” Fox dips in and out of blistering drum rolls and blast beats appropriate for his previous work as a metal musician. But the recording is dampened, so even when he approaches serious levels of shred, the drums are backgrounded behind jabs of keyboard and a wordless bit of chanting. It’s overwhelming but beautiful, like stepping inside a waterfall.
There are only six songs which, overall, can feel interchangeable as they all draw from a similarly spiritual vibe. Sometimes the album sounds like typewriters hammering away, sometimes like a child mindlessly poking a wind chime, but it all pulses with the same energy—the kind that powers the brightest ambient music, the most ecstatic jazz, the most serene New Age. The one exception to this overall serenity is “Catching an L,” which feels like a late ’70s funk cast off with weirdly farty synths and a meandering sax. Unless you’re a slap-bass diehard spending all your time wondering what modern-day Mahavishnu Orchestra B-sides might be like, skip it.
After listening closely to the album on headphones, I finally played it on a stereo one sunny morning. Unconfined, the music bloomed and, moment by moment, my house vibrated. It felt delightful and it felt new. “What else? What new places can we explore?” this record seems to ask. That Fox answers with such grace is what makes it so special. | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | September 13, 2017 | 7.7 | ed8d0e3c-dc6f-4ed3-80a2-050937e6b05f | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ | |
The Buzzcocks' newly reissued demo Time's Up is an invaluable document of punk snarls and yelps. Likewise, the more polished Spiral* Scratch* was at least as important to punk as the Sex Pistols’ rise. | The Buzzcocks' newly reissued demo Time's Up is an invaluable document of punk snarls and yelps. Likewise, the more polished Spiral* Scratch* was at least as important to punk as the Sex Pistols’ rise. | Buzzcocks: Time’s Up/Spiral Scratch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22944-times-upspiral-scratch/ | Time's Up/Spiral Scratch | In 1981, with disco medleys of former pop hits like “Stars on 45” climbing the charts around the world, a cluster of British punk rockers recorded their own medley of old favorites. The Friendly Hopefuls’ Tribute to the Punks of ’76 begins with the standard looped clap track and a slick, professional-sounding chorus singing: “Hey hey/Remember that day/In 1976/When the music scene was boring/Until along came—this!” And the guitar riff from the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom” kicks in.
Spiral Scratch—the four-song debut EP on which “Boredom” appeared—was a revelation. British punk rock was brand new at that point: when Spiral Scratch was released on January 29, 1977, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” was barely two months old, the Damned, the Vibrators, and the Stranglers had some singles out, and that was it. All those bands were signed to at-least-sort-of-legitimate record labels. Meanwhile, the Buzzcocks scraped together the funds to have 1000 copies of Spiral Scratch pressed themselves, and called their otherwise nonexistent label New Hormones.
The masterminds behind the band at that point—singer/guitarist Howard Devoto and guitarist Pete Shelley—weren’t Londoners like the earliest wave of UK punks. They were from unfashionable Manchester, a couple of hours’ train ride north. In the fall of 1975, Devoto and Shelley read about the Sex Pistols, traveled down to London to see them, and came back inspired to start a band of their own. The Buzzcocks’ first complete set was opening for the second of two legendary Pistols shows in Manchester during the summer of 1976.
Time’s Up—initially a bootleg in 1978, and officially released in 1991—is an invaluable document. It's the demo Buzzcocks recorded on October 18, 1976—all snarls, yelps, and distortion, while also sounding entirely joyful. They revel in rock bands’ newly-won right to present themselves as mean and aggressive and to say "fuck" out loud. Devoto sings as if Johnny Rotten is the only other vocalist he’s ever heard, and always seems about to break into giggles. “You tear me up, you bloody swine!” he yells with adenoidal delight. “Orgasm Addict,” which they’d re-record as a single a year later, isn’t quite fully formed yet, but Devoto’s rhymes about stained jeans, as well as his whining gasps, were genuinely transgressive for their moment.
The band is still finding its feet on Time’s Up, especially as teenage drummer John Maher slowed down the tempo every time he attempted to play a fill. Still, they worked out how to vigorously shove their songs forward. The two covers that were part of their live set at the time revealed a bit about where Buzzcocks were coming from: A sped-up version of the Troggs’ “I Can’t Control Myself” anticipates the love of popcraft that would shortly surface in their own songs and a heavily rewritten take on Captain Beefheart’s “I Love You, You Big Dummy” (which Devoto would take with him to his subsequent band Magazine) hints at the odder, artier side of their later records.
Two months after the Time’s Up demos, they re-recorded four of those songs with producer Martin Hannett as Spiral Scratch. A few more weeks of practice had done wonders for the Buzzcocks’ sound: now they were fast, strong and acrobatically tight. They powered through “Breakdown” in two minutes flat and started to sound more like themselves than like the Pistols or the Ramones. In fact, the Ramones would ape the two-note guitar solo gag in “Boredom” for their own on “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
The great joke of Devoto’s performance here is that, on the first record by a new band at the vanguard of a new musical movement, he presents himself as utterly over everything—including punk in general. “I’m already a has-been,” he sneers. “You know the scene is—very humdrum!” He wasn't kidding because less than a week after Spiral Scratch’s release, Devoto quit the Buzzcocks, and Shelley took his place as the band’s frontman.
By the time they stopped re-pressing the EP in the summer of 1977, Buzzcocks had sold 16,000 copies of it. In its way, Spiral Scratch was at least as important to punk as the Sex Pistols’ rise, because it was the first record of its kind to erase the axioms that the art and business of pop music were necessarily separate, and that a band could never be important until it signed to a “real” record label. Buzzcocks said fuck it and decided to just do it themselves. | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | March 14, 2017 | 8.2 | ed975561-2bbe-4d0d-b60f-ca2670a4fb14 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The Toronto quartet writes lilting, throwback jangle-pop for the isolated and the underemployed. | The Toronto quartet writes lilting, throwback jangle-pop for the isolated and the underemployed. | Ducks Ltd.: Get Bleak EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ducks-unlimited-get-bleak-ep/ | Get Bleak EP | On their debut EP, Get Bleak, Toronto jangle-pop band Ducks Unlimited write from a particular social stratum where everyone is in their twenties and nobody’s got their shit together. The very structure of life in this sphere is temporary. Folks searching for a change of scenery pack up their belongings and move apartments in much the way one might color their hair or obtain a regrettable tattoo. Everyone’s sleeping on a stiff, cheap IKEA mattress; nobody bothers to spring for a bed frame. None of your forks and knives match. You never see your friends anymore because they’ve moved to Hamilton or Perth.
If all this sounds depressing, rest assured, it is. Thankfully, Get Bleak doesn’t wallow in the grind. Instead, Ducks Unlimited put their malaise beneath a microscope and tease out little things to laugh about. They never sound especially bleak, either. In less capable hands, the effort to bring the bouncy aesthetic of bands like the Field Mice and Blueboy into the 21st century could have been twee and derivative, but these songs manage to sound modern.
“Get Bleak,” the EP’s opening track and its strongest song, is a tale of self-inflicted millennial isolation—“You’ll spend the afternoon deleting every number in your phone/Then you’ll spend the evening wondering why you’ll spend the night alone”—related in robust iambic pentameter. Ducks Unlimited sing in complete paragraphs with complex internal rhyme and assonance, elevating the petty struggles of ghosting and FOMO into poetic subjects. The strings in the mix are a compositional trick straight out of Blueboy’s “So Catch Him,” and evoke the same kind of quiet, lasting intimacy.
“Gleaming Spires” nods to both the ’80s pop group and the high-rise condos that have colonized downtown Toronto in recent years. It’s a double-edged appeal to nostalgia, for the upbeat music of childhood and for a version of the city where the architecture wasn’t quite so hostile. Little wonder that life in the city becomes increasingly joyless as rents rise. Still, there remains something vital and irresistible between the skyscrapers. In “Annie Forever,” the singer stays the night at a girl’s place and feels “like the colors were off”; it’s because, she tells him, “there were no city lights.” The EP’s only love song can’t help but chuckle at its own boundless optimism: “Annie forever/It’s so stupid, girl.”
Closer “Anhedonia” is the record’s lead single and its gloomiest moment. Mired in a young adulthood rife with resentment and dissociation, these songwriters aren’t searching for a way out as much as they’re looking for companionship. Like another Toronto band, PUP, Ducks Unlimited understand that dancing through misery is healthier than dancing around it. Their brand of lilting, throwback jangle-pop makes that seem like the easiest thing in the world to do. | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bobo Integral | December 2, 2019 | 7 | ed9d8492-b593-4721-b14b-f95d804e9e2b | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The California experimental indie pop quartet the Velvet Teen never quite fit into any trend or local scene. Featuring the urgent, kinetic, and unpredictable drumming of Casey Deitz and a refined vocal approach by Judah Nagler, their first LP in nine years finds them establishing a new identity. | The California experimental indie pop quartet the Velvet Teen never quite fit into any trend or local scene. Featuring the urgent, kinetic, and unpredictable drumming of Casey Deitz and a refined vocal approach by Judah Nagler, their first LP in nine years finds them establishing a new identity. | The Velvet Teen: All Is Illusory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20761-all-is-illusory/ | All Is Illusory | Though All Is Illusory is the Velvet Teen’s first LP in nine years and is being released on a trendsetting label, I’m not sure it could be accurately called "highly anticipated." The California quartet released a few solid records of experimental, mid-aughts indie pop that were easy to overlook because they never quite fit into any sort of trend or local scene. In fact, their biggest moment since 2006 was probably accidental: they may have been momentarily confused with the German band Velveteen, who generated a brief period of notoriety in 2008 by disguising their own album as a "leaked" advance copy of Death Cab For Cutie’s Narrow Stairs (the Velvet Teen’s debut Out of the Fierce Parade was produced by former Death Cab guitarist Chris Walla). But the lack of expectations actually can benefit All Is Illusory by allowing Velvet Teen to establish a new identity. Topshelf has relaunched the careers of certified emo O.G.s Braid and the Jazz June and introduced them to younger fans drawn in by the leaders of the new school. Does this mean the Velvet Teen have been grandfathered into the genre?
All Is Illusory suggests they have, but in an unexpected way—it might be the only record to ever fit into emo based solely on its drums. The Velvet Teen became a much more interesting band with the addition of Casey Deitz in 2006 and he’s been allowed the opportunity to serve as a de facto voice in addition to Judah Nagler. Deitz applies the spectacular technique of speed metal to everything you could learn from listening to Jawbox, Braid, the Promise Ring, and American Football records just for the rhythm sections—channeling the urgent, kinetic and unpredictable physicality that distinguished these bands from the more staid and slack "college rock" of the mid-to-late '90s.
To clarify, Nagler has proven quite adept at the spirited, unhinged singing of this style, though it appears he may have taking a few vocal lessons since the Velvet Teen's quietly released 2010 EP No Star. He’s still as much of a belter as he was on Cum Laude!, only now he removes the distorted mic filters and projects into Buckley-esque ululations, dusky mutters and, on "The Manifest", a vocoder. Taken out of context, Nagler now sounds like he could’ve fronted one of those "next Radiohead" Brit-rock bands that cropped up at the turn of the century. As it turns out, his unorthodox, Yorke-ish means of enunciation and pronunciation also tends to wad up lyrics which might actually be better off being misunderstood. Lean into what Nagler’s actually saying and finicky, self-impressed bon mots cut against the plaintive narrator: "Oh, finally a taste/ Words fall from my ellipses," "If you can take my chaos, baby/ I’ll map your terrain." That said, "I was made from dust/ Call me Macgyver," makes me think he appreciates Dipset deep cuts.
But this is Dietz’s album, and the emotional status of All Is Illusory is best demonstrated by actions rather than words. Deitz underlines the instability and wanderlust evoked by "Sonreo", as tricky fills and pivots allow him to keep pace with a player piano having a nervous breakdown. Erratic bursts of double time and pounded open hi-hats express the romantic hopelessness on "Eclipses", while the impulsive "You Were the First" is power pop played like a noise duo—it could pass for Vampire Weekend being covered by Lightning Bolt or vice versa. Either way, I'm not sure I've heard anything quite like it.
Otherwise, I can say I have heard All Is Illusory before and you likely have as well if you lived through the mid-2000s and owned a record or two released on Barsuk. "Pecos" and "Sonreo" take after Menomena’s idea of pop collage, big, whirling synth loops, cut-and-paste production, and chunky percussion that focus on the band’s process rather than persona. But All Is Illusory is too reliant on Deitz’s involvement, and it slumps whenever he has to play a supporting role rather than the lead. Oddly enough, this doesn’t occur during the nearly 11 minutes taken up by "Taken Over", where the insistent, patience-testing repetition of its doleful melody is the entire point. Instead, "The Giving In" and "Church or State" are typical "atmospheric" mid-album padding, Deitz assigned to swaying waltz time and staid rattle and hum while backing pealing, gleaming Edge guitars. For all of their upgraded production, instrumental technique, and influences, All Is Illusory sounds like a record that primes the Velvet Teen to succeed around the time Cum Laude! was released—but making the best "2006 indie rock" record of 2015 makes them stand out in a way that they hadn’t managed yet. | 2015-07-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | July 9, 2015 | 6.9 | ed9ef5db-ef61-4c44-a55b-176a1e5ed92f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the auspicious debut that sent a 23-year-old guitarist into the stratosphere. | 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 auspicious debut that sent a 23-year-old guitarist into the stratosphere. | John Mayer: Room for Squares | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-mayer-room-for-squares/ | Room for Squares | John Mayer has always been something of a critical bête noir. His gentle, mawkish songwriting juxtaposed against his caddish, clownish behavior has created a friction that is at best unappealing and at worst artistically dishonest. At the height of his fame in the mid- to late-’00s, as the guitar virtuoso and singer-songwriter was vacuuming up Grammys for harmless pablum like “Daughters” and “Say,” he became known for a notorious string of celebrity exes, from Jennifer Aniston to Jessica Simpson to Taylor Swift. Once a dependable source of amusing copy, he beat a forced retreat from the Hollywood media sphere after his increasingly incendiary interviews culminated in the use of a racial slur, followed by his tearful onstage apology during a February 2010 show in Nashville.
Yet since Mayer has stepped out of the spotlight, he has entered an unlikely career renaissance. His three solo albums since his self-induced purgatory have been understated, exploratory; his mind expanding according to the size of his hat. His work when he is not billed under his own name, especially, has been fascinating to behold. Mayer blazes an uncredited guitar solo on one of the best songs on one of the 2010s’ greatest albums, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, and since 2015, he has been touring, with Dead & Co., as the de facto leader for what remains of the Grateful Dead. To replace Jerry Garcia and be warmly accepted into the Deadhead community is not something you could have predicted from the guy who once donned a Borat-inspired lime-green “mankini” on a festival cruise ship called the Mayer Carrier.
But at the start of the millennium, Mayer was just a nobody with a website, exploiting his wide-eyed lyrical clarity and chopsy musicianship to capture a teen audience readied by the college-quad strums of Dave Matthews Band and David Gray. “Welcome to the real world,” he sings at the start of Room for Squares. The giveaway is that he’s attributing these words not to himself, but to an unspecified authority figure. His major-label debut, released when he was 23 but largely written when he was at least a couple of years younger, is not the real world. Its opening track, “No Such Thing,” denies that one even exists, “just a lie you have to rise above.”
Room for Squares offers a willfully innocent fantasy. Life can be as safe, as self-consciously cute, as broadly appealing as a really popular sitcom. The Crayola-bright soundtrack echoes the music of the protagonist’s childhood, particularly early MTV hits by the Police and Elvis Costello. He wins over audiences with sincerity and admitting his faults; the music is smooth because people are not. What Mayer describes on the album as a “quarter-life crisis” is also a privileged space, a temporary sanctuary from becoming an adult. This is a place where it’s OK to make yourself vulnerable as you figure out who you’re going to become.
As a kid in suburban Connecticut, Mayer wanted to play the guitar after watching Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. A neighbor passed him a tape by Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990, the year Mayer turned 13, and he grew worryingly obsessed. “Everyone else had Nirvana, and I was skipping class, reading the Buddy Guy biography Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, cutting out the pictures when I was done,” he has said. A few years later, when he was 17, Mayer told his mother and father—an English teacher and a high school principal, respectively—he wanted to skip college and become a musician. They did not react well. Mayer began to suffer from panic attacks. He dreaded landing in a mental hospital.
After graduating from high school in 1995, Mayer worked for two years at a gas station and played in blues clubs at night. When he realized that his “dreams of staying in Connecticut and becoming a star from home,” as he once put it, weren’t going to happen, he briefly enrolled in Boston’s Berklee School of Music. It wasn’t a fit, and, wanting to be “listenable,” he moved to Atlanta, where he and co-songwriter Clay Cook, later of the Zac Brown Band, won an open-mic contest as a short-lived duo, Lo-Fi Masters. Mayer self-released a coffeehouse-tinged solo EP, Inside Wants Out, in 1999. By the fall of 2000, anyone could hear early versions of several Room for Squares songs via his page on MP3.com, which acted like MySpace, SoundCloud, or Bandcamp for unknown artists right before the dotcom bust. In a nod toward the jam band scene, Mayer also encouraged fans to tape his live shows and circulate the recordings.
If Mayer initially gravitated toward the blues, he escaped whatever was on his trail through his accessibility and relentless eagerness to please. (You can picture the genre’s fabled hellhound walking away thinking, “What a nice young man.”) Room for Squares shares a producer, in John Alagia, with Dave Matthews Band, who came up a lot as a comparison for Mayer’s percussive acoustic guitar playing and slightly congested vocals. But the album feels more polished than that. “I was trying to make the most mature-sounding immature record in the world,” Mayer once said, adding later, “It’s almost a concept album about being really shamelessly melodic.” His ambitions leaned toward pop. The title, which happens to be flipped from jazz great Hank Mobley’s 1963 album No Room for Squares, is Mayer laying out a welcome mat. It’s as if to say: No prerequisites to your enjoyment here.
The most all-around shameless track on Room for Squares is its mid-tempo slow jam, “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” Squint hard enough, and you can almost see the sun peeking between dorm-room window curtains. Like everything on the album, it’s a bit much—“Your skin like porcelain” is an objectively bad lyric, and “bubblegum tongue” is just ridiculous. But if you grew up listening to ’90s R&B, it isn’t that much more ridiculous than Hi-Five smooching and telling on “I Like the Way (The Kissing Game),” or Shai asking to be your “Comforter.” Mayer himself quipped, during a video-streamed 2000 gig, that “Wonderland” should start with a husky spoken-word intro: “...And in the morning, girl, I’m gonna pour you a bowl of Count Chocula, and I’m gonna pull some of the oat pieces out so it tastes like there’s just more marshmallow.” As bubblegum-tongue afternoon delights go, it’s an endearingly silly ode, both tender and curious. If Lady Bird could rescue “Crash Into Me,” maybe there’s hope for “Wonderland” yet.
Mayer is at his most affecting here when he’s singing about feeling lost and scared. The soaring chorus of “Why Georgia” nails a particular youthful anxiety that’s quite different from what critics usually mean by “angst,” and maybe a bit more sheltered, too: “I wonder sometimes about the outcome of a still-verdictless life/Am I living it right?” On “Not Myself,” more like an early Coldplay song with its lyrical economy and sweeping, open chords, Mayer trusts a friend to wait him out if “I lose my worried mind”: “Suppose I said, you’re my saving grace,” he booms, as much as Mayer ever booms. When you’re in a crowd of people mouthing these words back alongside you, you might feel a little less lost and scared yourself.
He would soon be routinely touted as a “heartthrob,” but these are the songs of a young person who has spent a lot of solitary hours in their bedroom. On “83,” which makes plain the early MTV influence by shouting out the Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” Mayer longs “to be 6 again,” and the Peter Pan syndrome is intensely vivid: “That’s my plastic in the dirt,” he sings, a Lost Boy wryly alerting future homeowners to lost toys. “Great Indoors” uses blocks of electric guitar and more Mayer wordplay to empathize with a TV-gazing shut-in. “Love Song for No One” is one of those ditties you can’t believe hadn’t been written yet. Here, again, the perspective is curiously childlike: “I could’ve met you in a sandbox,” he claims. “Back to You” has a gentle groove distantly reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s “Everybody Here Wants You”—it struts, as much as Mayer here ever struts—but his lover is just a silhouette, who wouldn’t even smile in their final photo.
When Mayer steps out of the bedroom, he’s still awkward. On the bouncy “My Stupid Mouth,” with its goofy false ending, he’s as winsome about ruining a date as he is about engaging in foreplay on “Wonderland.” On “Neon,” the object of the narrator’s affection is out soaking up Atlanta’s nightlife, and why shouldn’t she be? Mayer was a non-punk straight-edge guy; the song is mainly a fine showcase for his irksomely giant-thumbed guitar flash. Mayer gets in more licks on “City Love,” a blues-drizzled love letter to New York romance where he unforgettably humblebrags, “She keeps her toothbrush at my place/As if I had the extra space.” Listening back, you can sort of sense his ego about to balloon.
Critics have long been averse to this record’s charms because, at its best, Room for Squares is an antidote to exclusion. It’s a coming-of-age album that refuses to pose as rebellious, a guilty pleasure that challenges the idea there should be guilt in pleasure. Arriving when assembly-line teen-pop and aggro nu-metal still ruled the airwaves, the album proved that pop could be delivered by the precocious boy with the guitar next door. The confident vulnerability of early Drake and the sharp-eyed clarity of early Taylor Swift, but also the man-child strums of Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, and the Jonas Brothers, all have precursors here. Teenagers screamed. Elton John raved.
Room for Squares is also a time capsule. Columbia issued the album a week after the attacks of September 11. Nostalgic reassurance was in high demand, and it’s possible that only children of sanitized ’80s America would recognize the music’s cozy solace. Mayer’s big-tent pop now feels like the last gasp of the old monoculture in the face of digital fragmentation, but it also reminds me of all those movies where the straight, white, middle-class, and (cis) male is presented as the default perspective; the fans were a diverse bunch (including the Roots’ Questlove), but the women in his songs are faceless. And while sincerity was Mayer’s stock-in-trade—he wields it “like a pitchfork,” Time’s Josh Tyrangiel later wrote—he has turned out to be more of a scoundrel, or perhaps an enigma, than some doe-eyed romantic. John Mayer is constantly performing “John Mayer,” whether he wants to or not.
I’m not sure the music we loved when we were younger becomes less valuable just because we no longer need what it has to offer. Over the years, I’ve adored plenty of albums that reflect the richly varied ways we are each different, individual, weird. I listened to Room for Squares the most when I wanted to feel normal. Not “normcore”: Just normal. A little less alone; a little more accepted. “You will know what all this time was for,” Mayer promises as “No Such Thing” rings to a conclusion. I just know that expressing what’s true, for yourself or for a group of people, can make a bigger difference than anyone realizes in the moment. Room for Squares, for all of its baggage, remains a little guitar-pop utopia where it’s OK to keep discovering ourselves as we go along. | 2019-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | October 6, 2019 | 7.8 | ed9fd252-c387-4cc0-9432-ef170def93b1 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Absurdity is the guiding principle of the new EP from the Australian post-punk band. This delightfully bizarre release distills Total Control’s gnashing, dazzling appeal. | Absurdity is the guiding principle of the new EP from the Australian post-punk band. This delightfully bizarre release distills Total Control’s gnashing, dazzling appeal. | Total Control: Laughing at the System EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/total-control-laughing-at-the-system-ep/ | Laughing at the System EP | In the face of this nauseating existence, there is a long history of pranksterism as an art form and survival mechanism. Who doesn’t like some mischief every now and again? Total Control see this, smirk at it, and invite us along. “Laughing at the system! Laughing at the system!” Dan Stewart, aka DX, endears repeatedly on the bizarre new EP from his surrealist Australian post-punk band. Among the delightful rattle of galactic synths and industrial clatter, DX punctuates each snarling syllable with the exactitude of a metronome. His cast-out sentiment is echoed on almost every track of Laughing at the System. “Laughing at the meat machine,” DX lackadaisically taunts on a later track. “Ha ha ha/As the threads come loose,” goes another.
Total Control began in 2008 after DX read Nietzsche for the first time and his “life fell apart.” With two excellent LPs—2011’s Henge Beat and 2014’s Typical System—and countless affiliated projects, Total Control have become a countercultural force of consequence for underground punk fans. On Laughing at the System, the five-piece continue to draw on the dour stylings of 1980s synth-pop and death rock with thrilling tactility and deft language: DX’s dystopian flair feels increasingly and despairingly salient. The band calls Laughing at the System a companion to Typical System in the vein of anarcho-punk originators Crass’ bonus disc to 1982’s Christ the Album. Like Crass, Total Control stare “systematic death” in the eye—and it would be impossible not to in 2017, a year that has unveiled systemic failures to the masses almost daily. Still, absurdity is Laughing at the System’s guiding principle. “We are a stupid band from a stupid country,” Total Control recently said, or as DX put it in 2015: “[Australians] are frying under a horrible sun on inhospitable land and we have a queen that lives on the other side of the world… It just doesn’t make sense. We need a great sense of humor.”
Not surprisingly for a group with hardcore roots, Total Control flourish in the context of a 21-minute, eight-song EP: Laughing at the System neatly distills their gnashing, dazzling appeal. Limitations can be freeing, and here Total Control sound sharper and more spirited than ever. A fitting bit of levity invigorates their typically dense productions, even as this EP makes gleefully bonkers gestures: mad-scientist clankering, antagonizing circus music, abrupt shifts abound. The title track appears twice, and a sample of an instructional for making cheese disrupts a tricked-out head-scratcher of a psychedelic pop tune (“Future Crème”) that might otherwise recall Beck. Adding to the humor is DX’s general commitment to an arched-brow vocal delivery.
With “Future Crème,” though, he muses chipperly on “the taste of silicon/Fresh as cream,” narrating the dangers of everyday life, the chemicals in food that slowly destroy us. It feels like a modern response to the twisted Captain Beefheart conceit Safe as Milk. On “Vanity,” DX chants, “You never think! You never think!” among a swarm of guitar noise and lopsided drums. (His rolled Rs and shout-out to “Woody Mellor” are subtle nods to punk history.) The droning “Vote Cops” sounds just as hollowed and void-like as it should with a sad name like that.
Even the aspects of this EP that initially seem ridiculous or out of place reveal themselves to be neither wrong nor misplaced. The penultimate “Cathie and Marg” is a lovely Expanding Universe-style drone reverie—a little something to comfort us, perhaps? Maybe Total Control have been listening to ambient master Laraaji and investigating his laughter meditation workshops. The sing-song “Luxury Vacuum” cheerily narrates the unraveling order of things. And then there is the maniacal carnival music of “Her Majesty, Budgie,” which sounds like a tormenting merry-go-round ride in hell or a very odd monologue for the stage: “Enchanting plagues/Disturbing vaccines/Hyper sedate/The nice machine.” The first time I heard “Her Majesty, Budgie,” I misheard the lyric “laughing at the meat machine” as “laughing at the meme machine” (it would be Psycho Jazz, of course). It felt an appropriate mistake. Total Control make an EP of curveballs sound puzzlingly coherent thanks in no small part to their fine craftsmanship.
Permutations of the phrase “laughing at the system” reprise so persistently throughout this EP that it comes to feel like a concept piece. Of the two versions of “Laughing at the System”—one at the beginning and one at the end, both with the same apocalyptic detail—the closing take is superior: sped-up, severe and brutalized, the trash-compactor thrasher you could imagine on a Killed by Death comp. It is perhaps what DX had in mind earlier this year, in an interview about his 13-year-old hardcore band Straightjacket Nation: “Ultimately, a band is a group of people with a common taste in songs, and maybe a song is just a way to get a bunch of instruments laughing at the system.” He called it “malicious, cruel laughter.”
Laughing at the System is a punk parable: a clangoring meditation on the illusion of safety, on consumerism, on authority and on death, the fraying seams of life on Earth. The economy of language guiding its title track(s) stacks up alongside similarly aphoristic punk philosophies—“No Future,” “What We Do Is Secret,” et al—and it is at once critical and refreshingly uncynical. Total Control take things seriously enough to know when we could use a joke. | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Alter | December 14, 2017 | 8 | eda4903f-5306-4992-92aa-5336877e7366 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
After fifty years and nearly twenty solo albums, the low-key guitar god finds new ways to renew old sentiments as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist on what may be his best album this century. | After fifty years and nearly twenty solo albums, the low-key guitar god finds new ways to renew old sentiments as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist on what may be his best album this century. | Richard Thompson: 13 Rivers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-thompson-13-rivers/ | 13 Rivers | Richard Thompson penned “Rattle Within” for the new 13 Rivers, but the song’s worries suggest it could just as easily have been written during the Black Plague as in our own plagued time. Over the racket of rattletrap percussion, Thompson excoriates the quackery of religious leaders, contemplates a dark self that’s “living right there inside your skin,” and poses this nervous question: “Who’s going to save you from the rattle within?” He then launches into a jagged and ominous solo, serrated as though he were unspooling barbed wire. Thompson’s playing retains a stomping folk-dance quality reminiscent of his innovations in Fairport Convention fifty years ago. By the end, though, he collapses into a din that has more in common with the punk rock he was already too old for by the late ’70s.
Talking about a guitar player’s chops feels odd and even old-fashioned in 2018, especially when that guitar player is an old white guy whose career predates Woodstock. But Thompson was a folk descendant, not a blues rocker, a lineage that sometimes excluded him from being cited as a guitar god or celebrated with the same reverence as his note-bending peers. But here he is, a half-century after debuting with Fairport, still making records of incisive originals while developing as a guitarist, undistracted by reunion rumors and holiday baubles. Now in his late sixties, he remains a distinctive singer with a low burr, as capable of a sly joke as a sincere prayer. He is a songwriter of remarkable insight who can burrow into a metaphor and renew a familiar sentiment. And he remains a deft and inventive instrumentalist who, even after nearly twenty solo records (not including his sterling decade with Linda), finds new ways to play the same notes.
If 13 Rivers is Thompson’s best album of the 2010s and perhaps his best of the 21st century, it’s not because he emphasizes those three elements equally. Rather, it’s because he puts those aspects into a strange, spirited conversation. For 13 Rivers, he assembled a tight, versatile rock combo—the rhythm section of bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome, along with guitarist Bobby Eichorn, who makes the most of a very redundant job. Pondering life and death, happiness and despair, movement and stagnation, Thompson writes as someone who knows he has more years behind him than ahead, though he sings with an arched eyebrow and an appreciation for the irony in trading youth for wisdom. On “O Cinderella,” he sounds as surprised as anybody else that he might want to settle down and don an apron: “I’m not very house-trained, it’s true/But I want to make cupcakes with you.” There’s something lusty and chagrined in the way he exclaims “cupcakes,” allowing the line to double as a good joke and sincere wish.
And then there is Thompson’s guitar, which rambles or cavorts through every song, underscoring some sentiments and undercutting others, jostling against the melodies like a gremlin in the mix. Thompson has been in acoustic mode for most of the 2010s, with two collections of new acoustic versions of old electric songs surrounding a mostly unplugged, Jeff Tweedy-helmed album. Thompson is an amazing acoustic player, but he’s even better when plugged in, where he toggles gracefully between rhythm and lead, texture and melody. “Bones of Gilead” opens with a mathematical staccato riff, as though mimicking the countdown clock to Armageddon; by the time he rolls into a rambling solo, there’s no dread, just a kind of gee-whiz excitement. During closer “Shaking the Gates,” he plays like he’s scoring a film, careful to stay out of the way while weaving notes around the melody. “I’m shaking, I’m shaking,” he sings, as though genuflecting before some deity. Then he amends the statement: “Im shaking the gates.” Thompson’s getting along in years, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to sound old. | 2018-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | New West | September 22, 2018 | 7.9 | edae321c-e984-4707-a38c-be620fe285cd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
These unruly British punks sound like hardcore kids playing pub rock, and their debut comes alive with liberating energy. | These unruly British punks sound like hardcore kids playing pub rock, and their debut comes alive with liberating energy. | Chubby and the Gang: Speed Kills | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chubby-and-the-gang-speed-kills/ | Speed Kills | The Jimmie Rodgers Snow speech that opens Chubby and the Gang’s Speed Kills is famous for its sanctimony, linking the liberating qualities of rock ‘n’ roll to juvenile delinquency: “I know the evil feeling that you feel when you sing it, I know the lost position that you get into,” he exhorts. But Snow, a legacy country singer who hobnobbed with famous musicians but walked away from a recording contract with RCA to preach the evils of rock ‘n’ roll, understood one thing about it better than most: Before a word is sung or a riff is strummed, it’s the beat that moves you.
And Charlie Manning-Walker, aka Charlie Fresh aka Chubby Charles, the decidedly not-chubby frontman of Chubby and the Gang, seems to have taken Snow’s words to heart. Speed Kills, the band’s debut LP, is infused with youthful energy, full of songs championing the very lawless chaos that Snow warned of. At its heart is a rhythm section that, from its first rumbling strokes, constantly feels half a beat away from tripping over itself but nonetheless keep rolling right along.
Chubby and the Gang emerged from a promising wave of early-’10s British hardcore; Charles himself did time with Crown Court, Arms Race, and Violent Reaction, and the gang’s other members—Ethan Stahl, Joe McMahon, and Luke Austin—have all played in Brighton’s Gutter Knife, among other bands. The record was produced by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco, and while it may be difficult to directly pinpoint his influence, he seems to understand their music on an intuitive level.
The album projects a firm sense of place, and it’s not just because Charles’ accent is prevalent whether he’s talking, singing, or shouting. This is an English band, with English influences singing about English places—specifically, London. And Chubby’s London is proudly debaucherous, evidenced by the record’s artwork, an R. Crumb-does-Steamboat Willie masterpiece by the artist Spoiler. Speed Kills leads a pub crawl through the seedy side of the English capital, traversing main thoroughfares (“All Along the Uxbridge Road”), avoiding Tottenham tough guys (“Bruce Grove Bullies”), and lamenting the tragic horror of government malfeasance (“Grenfell Forever”).
Much of Speed Kills sounds stuck in the late ’70s, channeling the crunchy lo-fi brattiness of the Kids and the Damned and the pummeling swiftness of early Motörhead. They sound like hardcore kids playing pub rock, with oi gang vocals that pair well with both sloshing pint glasses and mosh-pit spin kicks. But it also offers a welcome change of pace; smack in the middle of its whirlwind 26-minute runtime lies “Trouble,” a Hammond organ-driven Buddy Holly bop that effortlessly shifts between twinkling sock-hop guitar and mercilessly crashing cymbals.
In another hard left turn, Chubby and the Gang choose to end a record full of raucous rippers on a solemn note, an ode to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. “An odd light flickers in the tower blocks/The old man singing songs in the bottom of the glass,” Charles sings on “Grenfell Forever,” acknowledging the pub as not just a place for rowdy singalongs, but also somber reflection. Rather than killing the vibe, it deepens the mood, revealing traces of both Billy Bragg and Archy Marshall in their DNA.
Punk-band lifespans, like punk albums, tend to be short, and the unruly energy on display here rarely burns for long. If the rest of the scene that Chubby and the Gang emerged from is any indication, there’s no telling how long this particular gang stays together. Until then, you can likely find them in the pub, riffing and rioting and reminding everyone that rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be revitalizing and fun. | 2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Static Shock | January 29, 2020 | 8 | edafca58-18e5-4836-ab0f-e840bb77ae83 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Manchester quartet’s debut album fuses dance rhythms, corroded guitars, and seething vocals into a transfixing blend of violence and transcendence. | The Manchester quartet’s debut album fuses dance rhythms, corroded guitars, and seething vocals into a transfixing blend of violence and transcendence. | Mandy, Indiana: i’ve seen a way | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mandy-indiana-ive-seen-a-way/ | i’ve seen a way | Mandy, Indiana don’t make sense. Three Mancunians and a Parisian came together under a name inspired by Gary, Indiana—a Rust Belt symbol of post-industrial American decline—to make a sound that thrashes like an angry Hydra. Every time you think you have Mandy, Indiana cornered, they mutate again. You could call their music post-punk, electronic, or noise, but no single genre signifier satisfactorily conveys what they do. This is by design. Mandy, Indiana trade in chaos and severe contrasts. Their startling debut album, i’ve seen a way, is an unsettling catalog of societal ills that takes the form of a churning maelstrom.
Mandy, Indiana’s origins go back to 2016, when vocalist Valentine Caulfield and Mandy mastermind Scott Fair met at a Manchester club; the lineup is now rounded out by Simon Catling on synths and Alex Macdougall on drums. From the beginning—early singles like “Berlin,” or “Bottle Episode,” a standout from 2021’s … EP—their sound was a transfixing blend of violence and transcendence: dance rhythms knocked askew, corroded guitars and synths fed into the gears of malfunctioning machinery, Caulfield seething in her native French. i’ve seen a way partially aligns with the recent crop of adventurous guitar bands from England and Ireland, many of whom Mandy, Indiana have opened for, like Idles, Squid, and Gilla Band. (The latter’s Daniel Fox mixed half of i’ve seen a way, with Giant Swan’s Robin Stewart taking over the other.) Yet i’ve seen a way feels both more extreme and more accessible than some of their immediate progenitors.
Visual influences—Blade Runner 2049, the video game BioShock, the films of Leos Carax and Gaspar Noé—play an important role in the band’s music, and i’ve seen a way begins with a similarly filmic instrumental, “Love Theme (4K VHS),” a gorgeous piece of starlit arpeggiated synth. Like the best opening tracks, it feels like a curtain rising, but it isn’t long before the quartet sets up the first plot twist: The dreamlike song lures you into a nightmare world. At the very end of “Love Theme,” a beat gurgles to life, recalling the muffled reverberations you can hear while waiting to enter a club, and pivots into “Drag [Crashed],” a song that takes dancefloor catharsis and rewires it into an anxious hurtle headlong into crashing distortion and horror-movie drones.
Mandy, Indiana pull off similar tricks across the album, nodding to dance traditions but structuring rhythms too discomfiting for simple release. While the record’s underwater synths are often beguiling, its percussive backdrops are ferocious—between electronics and Macdougall’s drumming, songs like “Pinking Shears” clatter and heave as if trying to destroy everything in their path. “Injury Detail” flirts with a more direct groove, but it chokes and sputters. Within a single song, the band can seamlessly combine dissimilar moods and registers. “The Driving Rain (18)” is a neon-lit city cruise riding a robotic bassline, Caulfield rendered an Auto-Tuned alien above it, while “2 Stripe” uses haunting, distant screeches to bookend an emotive reprise of the “Love Theme” synths.
Across the album, Mandy, Indiana deploy terrifying, uneasy sounds—a palette they developed by utilizing field recordings and unusual approaches like tracking drums in a cave or capturing Caulfield’s screams in a Bristol shopping mall. “This is an album where heads butt and things clash,” Fair has said. “It’s supposed to be nasty, and to not work.”
And yet, it does. The various textures and shifts of i’ve seen a way are mesmerizing—down to the way that Caulfield presents herself more like another instrument than a typical frontwoman, leaning on her operatic training to produce vocals with an intensely textural heft. She sing-speaks, she murmurs, she hisses. Her approach often emphasizes the dichotomies of Mandy, Indiana’s music: “Peach Fuzz” is already a sideways, smeared take on dance music, and her punk yelps accentuate its visceral pulse.
You seldom need to know the actual content of Caulfield’s lyrics for them to resonate. Even if you don’t realize that “Drag [Crashed]” is about sexism and objectification, you can sense her fear and anger. Many of her lyrics deal with bleak themes—the climate crisis, or the West’s slide into fascism. Even a fairytale setting like “2 Stripe” looks toward revolution: The song’s final words translate to “Always remember/There are more of us than them.” In the end, on “Sensitivity Training,” the band gets there. While past songs like “Bottle Episode” used militaristic drums to depict oppression or war, the ragged march of “Sensitivity Training” ends the album with an uprising.
i’ve seen a way is a purposefully disorienting album: an idiosyncratic collision of familiar elements that blurs genres and defamiliarizes language. Yet it also settles into an unexpected balance. The music is abrasive, but in its most shocking moments, the band allows beauty to shine through the grime and static. In the album’s penultimate song, the whimsically named “(ノ>ω<)ノ :。・:*:・゚’★,。・:*:♪・゚’☆ (Crystal Aura Redux),” the rage and distortion fall away, allowing Caulfield’s voice and synths to peacefully float, as if ghosts were surveying the rubble left in their wake. i’ve seen a way might be the sound of someone sifting through ashes, but only in search of signs of a new world. | 2023-05-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Fire Talk | May 19, 2023 | 8.3 | edb119ce-bc6e-4ed9-80ed-e19c2b8dac8d | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
Former Sunny Day Real Estate leader shows a new taste for restraint on his latest solo album, which, like the recent Guillemots effort, is sophisticated adult pop with some prog kicking around the edges. | Former Sunny Day Real Estate leader shows a new taste for restraint on his latest solo album, which, like the recent Guillemots effort, is sophisticated adult pop with some prog kicking around the edges. | Jeremy Enigk: World Waits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9741-world-waits/ | World Waits | The grand gesture has always been a friend of Jeremy Enigk. His former band Sunny Day Real Estate squeezed every ounce of available drama into its songs and his vocals would push at the edge of their range as if hoping to find some other form of expression just on the other side. These days he seems more comfortable with restraint, and he sounds more in command when he hits the occasional John Anderson high note, but he still opens his second solo album (his first was almost 10 years ago, when SDRE were still a thing) with about as grand and dramatic a moment as he's ever committed to tape.
"A New Beginning" is just a minute-and-a-half intro track, but it's stuffed to the gills with strings, ringing bells, and cymbal crashes that make the title seem right. It certainly signals a break with his old band-- going back 14 years to the first SDRE album, it's an entirely different animal, a crashing, thudding rock album where this new one is basically sophisticated adult pop with some prog kicking around the edges.
That description is never truer than when he opens "City Tonight" by asking, "Am I late to the Kingdom of Love?" The song has a synth-pop undercurrent ballasting the verses, but it's all sweeping rock after the first few minutes, with Enigk multi-tracking himself and casting his voice into a well of reverb. Enigk's vocals get their biggest workout on "Damien Dreams", an interesting modal song full of hanging phrases that never feel resolved. He conjures up a hell of a growl in the middle of the song without sounding strained, but the track's most engaging moment comes when he provides a strange vocal harmony for himself on just one line-- an inventive technique to draw your attention to the lyric.
The orchestral grandeur of the album intro sloshes to the surface throughout the album, poking up most prominently in the drifting title track. "Dare a Smile" opens with an acoustic guitar playing a chord sequence you've heard in at least a couple of hundred songs, touched with a bit of mandolin, and as the string pads come in it starts to sound like some sort of alternate universe James Bond theme.
World Waits is a naturally big-sounding album from a guy who's spent a career trying different ways to make something this assured. It's an overwhelmingly agreeable record, if one that's not always gripping-- with few exceptions I feel like Enigk is performing with a net here, falling back on big production when the composition isn't all the way there. But this does mean he never really falls too flat, and the craft is certainly there in most of these songs. I get the sense from listening that it's exactly the record he wanted to make, and it's likely all of his old SDRE fans who graduated from their emo phases along with him will feel right at home. | 2007-01-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2007-01-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Reincarnate | January 10, 2007 | 7 | edbb3f02-df35-46ea-a19a-f24a63d1cfee | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On their second album, the Brooklyn post-hardcore band Big Ups place a greater emphasis on quiet moments, on gradual buildups. | On their second album, the Brooklyn post-hardcore band Big Ups place a greater emphasis on quiet moments, on gradual buildups. | Big Ups: Before a Million Universes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21642-before-a-million-universes/ | Before a Million Universes | Brooklyn quartet Big Ups have been referred as a post-hardcore band, an umbrella term meant to tell us that that they blend the pummel of straight-up hardcore with tension and seemingly bucolic moments. While this was a fair description of their discordant and vicious 2014 debut, Eighteen Hours of Static, each note feeling like it was being forced ruthlessly into the mosh pit typical at most Big Ups shows, it is even more accurate for their sophomore record Before a Million Universes. While these lapses into chaos are still very much present, Big Ups place a greater emphasis on quiet moments, on gradual buildups, which of course then allow the instrumental fits of Brendan Finn (drums), Amar Lal (guitar), and Carlos Salguero (bass) to feel even more explosive by contrast. Every phrase Galarraga screams, every phrase that he does not, every burst of noise within a track’s connective fiber are carefully calculated tabs on their audience’s emotional pulse.
Eighteen Hours of Static spent a lot of time deep in the thick of things, questioning and distrusting society with relentless fury ("Everybody says it’s getting better all the time / But it’s bad still bad"). Before a Million Universes focuses on "dissecting" their problems, as singer Joe Galarraga explained in an interview. Accordingly, they spend less time directly confronting bureaucratic bullshit (One glaring exception is the seething "Capitalized" with its sardonic query, "Tell me what you’re worth/Salary, two weeks off from work?/Call them benefits and perks") and instead focus on how the macrocosm affects the individual. "Why live in the moment/If the moment is broken? There could be hope for someone/If we fix it," Galarraga asks on "Hope for Someone."
Their political ideologies, meanwhile, have simmered below the surface of the music, expressing themselves in the song’s unpredictable dynamics. "Meet Where We Are" is largely muted, growing a little more manic for each repetition of the title and only releasing the tension at the end with an electric jolt. "Negative"’s moments of peace are designated for its brief intro before the chaos rolls in via sharp, punctuated shouts and rolling guitar s. "So Much You" hits hardest with its simplicity, its sullen comment that "I haven’t been with myself at all." None of these songs would have the same effect if rushed, which is what set Big Ups apart from many of their peers.
Before a Million Universes borrows its title from section 48 of Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass: "And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." Although the quote is never spoken verbatim on the record, Big Ups clearly understand their place within the cosmos. When their time to stand before a million universes arrives, they will approach the unknown with confidence and calmness, like the shadowy figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog."
Nowhere is this so apparent than on "National Parks," which lies unobtrusively in the later half of the record and is perhaps the standout track. The song is a meditation on the financial difficulties faced by a woman metaphorically meant to reflect Galarraga’s own upbringing. The song concludes with the subject and narrator traveling together: "We got on a plane and flew across the country/And saw the biggest trees /Bigger than the ones that lined her streets/Bigger than she'd ever seen/Bigger than one could think to exist/I think I saw her say to herself-/"This is everything I've missed." It is in this moment, with an aerial perspective of the vast world, that Big Ups open themselves to a million universes and accept the sublime. | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tough Love / Exploding in Sound / Brace Yourself | March 11, 2016 | 7.6 | edd1bd58-8698-4f43-b095-c2716c4eace8 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Rising Atlanta rapper and Migos affiliate Rich the Kid drops a bubbly, if not uninspired new tape with features from Young Thug, Desiigner, Migos, and Jeremih. | Rising Atlanta rapper and Migos affiliate Rich the Kid drops a bubbly, if not uninspired new tape with features from Young Thug, Desiigner, Migos, and Jeremih. | Rich the Kid: Keep Flexin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22480-keep-flexin/ | Keep Flexin | The afternoon before releasing Keep Flexin, Rich the Kid posted a video of himself dancing to the opening track, “I Don’t Care,” while puffing on a cigar and counting a stack of crisp hundred dollar bills. The video ends abruptly when a fire alarm goes off in the room—Rich freezes and drops his jaw with cartoonish flair before blurting, “Oh shit!” Staged or not, the video more or less sums up Rich the Kid’s playful charm: Here’s a guy who seems perpetually bemused by his own success even as he performs it.
Rich the Kid has been a prolific presence in Atlanta rap for a few years now; Keep Flexin marks his seventh solo mixtape since 2013 and that’s not counting his numerous collaborative tapes with Migos, Makonnen, and his Rich Forever label signees. His sound is fairly straightforward by contemporary standards, especially when compared to that of his more distinctive peers like Lil Yachty or Lil Uzi Vert. Still, he’s mastered the fundamentals of Atlanta rap: an ear for melody, a hook better than most, and triplets like he’s the fourth Migo.
In keeping with its title, Keep Flexin largely concerns itself with the trappings of wealth and stardom. Aesthetically speaking, Rich’s music can be called street rap, even if these songs feel far removed from the streets. These are light, bubbly anthems, befitting their shallow subject matter. “You hear that? That’s ice,” Rich explains at the outset of “Doors Up,” as he fidgets with his chains over a glimmering synth arpeggio. Airless lead single “Don’t Want Her” is nominally about the dispensability with which Rich views women (see the caustic refrain, “I throw out that bitch ‘cause she garbage”) but even here, he can’t help but boast, “Flexin’ I’m making them vomit/The rollie is water, it came out the faucet.” On “Liar Liar,” he jumps on the increasingly crowded bandwagon of Future impersonators, though as always, his outlook remains sunny (“I took a trip to the jeweler/I drop my wrist the in cooler”), in contrast to the song’s darker hue.
Keep Flexin boasts an impressive roster of guests and for the most part, Rich puts them to good use. Jeremih smooths out the jerky “Greedy” with his gooey hook while matching his host’s braggadocio (“I count paper, don’t read it/Call me Mister Big Shot”). “Dat Way” finds Migos in prime form (“Pick up the phone and call Kanye,” Quavo instructs, alluding to Migos’ recent management deal with G.O.O.D. Music) over a twitchy, string-heavy beat. “Going” is essentially just one big Desiigner hook—your mileage here will vary depending on your personal tolerance for unintelligible gurgling and “Brrrrrah!” ad-libs. Disappointingly, Young Thug sounds pretty unengaged on “Ran It Up,” coloring inside the melodic lines that Rich establishes. Still, Thug manages to offer a brief window into his life (“Recording on the back of the bus and I’m po’d up”), evoking a devastating image of his idol from the documentary film The Carter: drugged-out, working feverishly, very much alone.
This sort of tension is sorely missing from most of Keep Flexin, a record that’s happy to catalog the perks of being an ascendant rapper while turning a blind eye to the costs. While previous Rich the Kid releases like Trap Talk contrasted the street life that Rich had known with his current plush lifestyle, Keep Flexin offers few such juxtapositions. He does briefly acknowledge previous struggles on “Doors Up,” (“I was just hustling, I wanted a chance”) and on “Blessings,” he stops to take stock of how far he’s come: “I had to learn a lesson/Lose it all in a second/I made it here that’s a blessing/Get the money not stressing/You better count your blessings.” Rich the Kid certainly seems to live by that mantra, though he’ll need to dig deeper if he wants others to relate to his journey. | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | November 4, 2016 | 6.5 | edd975cf-084a-4650-82ef-51b6b3f87aad | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
First album in five years from the Japanese experimental pop eccentric isn't quite the departure that 2002's Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step. | First album in five years from the Japanese experimental pop eccentric isn't quite the departure that 2002's Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step. | Cornelius: Sensuous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10084-sensuous/ | Sensuous | The 1997 Matador release of the still-great Fantasma established Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) as the far-East posterboy for indie-rock globalization. As the most recognizable representative of downtown Tokyo's Shibuya-Kei movement (also responsible for Pizzicato Five, Buffalo Daughter and Fantastic Plastic Machine), Oyamada’s Beck-like star potential and wildly creative imagination led to a stateside buzz all-too-rare for Japanese musicians. But a release schedule that includes five-year windows between albums isn't the best way to maintain hype. It was 2002 before the follow-up Point boiled Fantasma down to its essence: a wonderful fusion of rubbery, acoustic micro-house rhythms. With another five years now having passed, Sensous represents yet another step forward for Oyamada’s unique headphone pop. It’s not quite the departure that Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step.
Sensuous opens with Oyamada revisiting one of Point's main techniques: composing songs with the individual sounds kept clearly separate. His fascination with the hi-fi stereophonic demonstration records of the 1950s and 60s-- the ones that presented the full range of the stereo spectrum through whirring, buzzing sound experiments-- finds its full and rewarding realization here, but in function more than form. Often on Sensous, as on Point, it often feels as though Oyamada starts by writing normal songs, but then inserts sounds into the places where there are none, erases the original melody, and keeps the music's negative.
The title track is a meditative series of plucked guitar strings-- not completely unlike something you'd hear on Four Tet's Rounds-- phased between the left and right channels. But this initial sense of serenity quickly gives way to the more recognizable bustle of "Fit Song". It replaces the sonorous acoustic with the muted, clipped strum of an electric guitar, which provides the rhythmic bed for the first minute of the song, as bass drums and hi-hats bounce around with Oyamada’s single-word incantations ("just," "fit," "click"). The song feels like a stylized metropolitan soundtrack, but its video (which is included on the disc) suggests a more modest milieu that reflects the song's senses of humor and wonder. Syncing the movements of typically inanimate objects to the music, the video, like the album, is indulgent and geometric: sugarcubes form steps for a pair of spoons to climb, toothbrushes dance in a circle, the contents of a coin purse form a floating infinity symbol.
"Fit" also marks the record's first appearance of Oyamada's favorite instrument of late (and, it should be noted, a point of friction for many listeners): a spacy, sonorant synthesizer that provides a soft and windy counterpoint to the skipping stones all around it. Later on the irresistable "Beep It", the synth serves a new-wavier rhythmic purpose, with Oyamada's monosyllabic mojo more resembling the sounds of a retro-futuristic aerobics class, and "Music" gradually introduces the instrument into its melange of chirping guitars and melismatic vocals, lending the song a fluffy, space-age buoyancy.
Sequenced after the copy-machine-sampling "Toner", "Watadori" feels like an extended fever-dream from a nap under an office desk. Multiple layers of soft-jazz guitar tick off and ascend higher and higher, coalescing into busy-but-gentle treble-buzz, the equivalent of twenty different CTI-label records played at the same time. Oyamada's newfound predilection for the oft-criticized and elevatored music is most fully realized on Breezin'", an inventive interpolation of the jazz-pop standard made famous by Gabor Szabo and later, George Benson. The song feels like perfect source material for Oyamada to work with, and while he thoroughly launders it of its core melodic structure, he manages to maintain its, well, breeziness. Like an installation piece on a constant loop, ascending three-note synth runs and chimes provide a chilly melodicism as the song works its way, over and over, to a surprisingly lilting payoff. Its doppelganger, "Gum", emerges later, with his vocals ping-ponging over a punk-metal guitar drone previously explored on Point's "I Hate Hate".
Sensuous ends with a second, even less-expected cover: a faithful update of the Rat Pack standard "Sleep Warm", on which Oyamada augments Frankie and Dean’s maudlin sentimentality with his own vocodered vocals and loud, trilling synth flourishes. While this version certainly would be tough to fall asleep to, its album-closing position makes it feel more like a film-closing credit roll, similar to The White Album’s "Good Night". Now, apparently, we just have to wait five more years for the sequel. | 2007-04-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-04-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Everloving | April 13, 2007 | 7.8 | eddfbb05-60c6-4d50-a403-a8cfccaacdbc | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
The third installment in an ongoing series of live recordings contains some of the krautrock titans’ most unbridled moments yet, but the whittled-down highlights preclude any sense of flow. | The third installment in an ongoing series of live recordings contains some of the krautrock titans’ most unbridled moments yet, but the whittled-down highlights preclude any sense of flow. | Can: Live in Cuxhaven 1976 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/can-live-in-cuxhaven-1976/ | Live in Cuxhaven 1976 | Can were the most flexible act of the so-called krautrock explosion, equally as mesmerizing in short, ecstatic art-rock bursts as they were in epic, sprawling, 20-minute jams. The Cologne-based group deftly matched the jammy psychedelic rock of Amon Düül, the hypnotic motorik of Neu!, and the electronic meditations of Tangerine Dream, and that’s before the mid 1970s, when the band infused its sound with funk and Afrobeat. For Can, capturing a specific sound was secondary to the idea of music as a kinetic expression of freedom.
Onstage, they were even more unbound, both in their confidence as psychic improvisers and in the knowledge that transfixed audiences would stick around for a second set if the first one honked. That much is apparent from the first two releases in the mid-’70s Can live series, Live in Stuttgart 1975 and Live in Brighton 1975. Recorded in the wake of Damo Suzuki’s departure two years earlier, both are expansive documents from the pioneering kosmische outfit just figuring shit out in real time, skronking the light fantastic, kicking ass and blowing minds across six LP sides.
Which makes it particularly puzzling that the third entry in the series, Live in Cuxhaven 1976, takes an approach so at odds with an actual Can live set. None of its four tracks—untitled and simply numbered, as before, in German—are longer than eight and a half minutes in length. The vast stretches of audacious, sometimes uncomfortable, interplay are absent. There’s no fat here, but that’s precisely what ardent carnivores insist makes the rib eye delicious.
It even begins in medias res, “Eins” fading in with Can mid-groove. The funky interplay between human metronome Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli, dispensing quick, chunky wah-wah strums, is a bridge to that year’s yet-to-be-recorded Flow Motion. That album, which introduced reggae and disco rhythms to a (mostly) unsatisfied cadre of critics and fans, is a clear departure, and here, it’s fascinating to witness the band shedding its skin. But without the context of what preceded this stretch of the show, it’s as if we’ve purchased a ticket with a partially obstructed view.
What’s most compelling about live Can recordings from this period is the way the band constructs an improvised jam from the ground up. On “Drei,” Can lays out a ragged framework of Soon Over Babaluma opener “Dizzy Dizzy,” even featuring rare (for this era) snippets of vocals from bassist Holger Czukay. As the rhythm section locks in, Karoli wails, droning and arpeggiating on his guitar before briefly dropping out, about three minutes in. He returns with fury, unfurling a demonic guitar from out of nowhere, which sends “Drei” spiraling into another dimension. Karoli spends the rest of the jam winding around the melody, approaching it from every angle: playfully funky riffs, proto-shoegaze walls of sound, squeaky jazz fusion runs. Satisfying as it is, “Drei” also gestures to the Can vault—filled, no doubt, with further explorations, unheard and thick with dust.
Moments like this are what inspired Can founder and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, credited as curator of the series, to structure the live albums as a selection of highlights from a given concert, rather than cobbling together choice bits from various dates. His reasoning, he told The New York Times last year, was to convey “how the flow was going, the feeling of a real concert.” On Live in Cuxhaven 1976, that feeling of flow is all too brief—like snapping awake from a vivid dream too soon.
It’s baffling, for this reason, that Schmidt—the only surviving member of the group from this period—allowed the show to be edited with a chainsaw. Perhaps it’s listener fatigue. Maybe the $50 price point for a triple album scared off all but the most devoted of motorik heads curious enough to see if the group will cross the 30-minute threshold on a “Bel Air” jam. Can called its stretched-out improvisations “Godzillas,” massive and Earth-shattering as they were. In the name of brevity and thriftiness, Live in Cuxhaven gives us a few sketches of Minilla, the kaiju’s juvenile son.
What’s here, across 30 minutes, is a worthy and incomplete document that contains some of the most unrestrained live Can moments yet available. What it’s missing are the doldrums, the drawn-out experiments, and that feeling that Schmidt hopes to convey: that we’re trapped in Lower Saxony with the mighty Can, spinning out of control for as long as it takes to reach our shared destination. | 2022-10-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mute | October 20, 2022 | 6.9 | ede42a78-e571-4ef7-8262-2a1a88fc76d2 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
The London drill rapper ventures beyond his chosen style in order to offer a fuller picture of what he’s gone through. | The London drill rapper ventures beyond his chosen style in order to offer a fuller picture of what he’s gone through. | Loski: A Drill Story: Music, Trial & Trauma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loski-a-drill-story-music-trial-and-trauma/ | A Drill Story: Music, Trial & Trauma | Surveillance is the backbone of drill, and this is doubly true of Loski’s music. His 2018 song “Drill” began with a reporter blaming social media for the rise of gang violence—a ludicrous suggestion that Loski followed with his version of events: “Let me tell you how my animals move/Step in the cut, designer shoes, done it in Canada Goose.” Real Gs move in geese fleece. Loski is hyper-aware of the commentary around drill; his music feels like meta-drill. On his latest, Music, Trial & Trauma: A Drill Story, he tells a common story in a monumental way: You make music about all the bad shit you’ve seen, you get targeted because of the bad shit, and then you go to jail for the bad shit, which leaves you with more trauma. To tell this fairly sprawling tale of the constant loop of Black experience, Loski leaves drill behind in order to give a fuller picture of what he’s gone through.
When it goes, there’s no substitute. Loski has never had to prove himself, and he runs laps around the almost unadorned beats on these albums, climbing their skeletal vibrations as if he was on an obstacle course. The verve of a typical drill song is the perfect trampoline for tossed-off lines where he bounces through his disaffection, popping off like he’s just been handed the aux. The hooks can be as simple as, “I got honeys on me/I got hunnies on me, couple hunnid on me,” on “On Me,” where he just swerves. The problem is that he’s taken on too much in trying to make Music, Trial & Trauma be more than just a collection of drill bangers. That’s fine; who said the Croydon rapper couldn’t be versatile? A song like “Forrest Gump” showed that Loski could make a party jam with a hook—no problem. Unfortunately, the album has the feeling of being focus-group-tested to the point of dilution. With the exception of “Flavour,” featuring Stormzy, the party songs seem tossed off, as if Loski knew he had to have a formless Afrobeat number (“Naija Man,” featuring Davido) and a dance track with two stars (Popcaan and Fredo guest on “Avengers”) in order to reach the new audiences some marketer was drooling over.
It didn’t have to be this way. The singles Loski put out this year have been flitting around the internet, racking up YouTube views with the force of their realness. The cavernous loosie “Allegedly” threw a middle finger up at all comers while making it clear that what we think we know about Loski is actually very little. “Anglo Saxon” proved that the rapper could be cocky, self-referential, and witty all at once. There are glimpses of that Loski here. He launches himself off the grimacing guitar and demented organ of “Captain Hook” and flies to the outer reaches of shit-talking (“Rap for the hood but we know he’s timid (Timid)/I don't wanna look like them/Whatever I do or say they mimic”).
On “Black,” the man gets personal. Here Loski’s sound is muted. The synthetic trumpets seem smaller, wafting through the wind. The looped sub-bass and ticking-clock snare provide the percussive backing for Loski’s tribulations. He talks about the death of his brother, mourning both him and the loss of childhood his passing entailed. Though it may be easy to laugh at a lyric about loving Black women the way he loves black Mercedes, that levity is what allows Loski to delve into the tragedy of his personal life (“Gang signs turn to prayer hands/When you're locked in a cell and can't leave”). The turn from violence to religion occurs with surprising swiftness, but that is the nature of oppression. Losing one’s freedom can turn a sinner to a saint in an instant.
Music, Trial & Trauma is several albums at once: drill bangers, party tunes, and a series of reflections on Black tragedy. It doesn’t always cohere, but the effect is still rather startling. Loski illuminates the darkened corners of his mind in order to reveal the society that gives power to the demons inside.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Since ’93 | November 24, 2020 | 6.7 | ede53ef7-d29d-4bb6-92b2-2ccf1f8e6fa9 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
A short but resonant compilation from the indie rock duo navigates life’s gray areas with gentle instrumentation and hard-earned serenity. | A short but resonant compilation from the indie rock duo navigates life’s gray areas with gentle instrumentation and hard-earned serenity. | Wye Oak: Every Day Like the Last | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wye-oak-every-day-like-the-last/ | Every Day Like the Last | When Jenn Wasner wrote “Every Day Like the Last,” she wanted the title to be open-ended: “[It] could mean every day like the day that came before, or it could mean every day like the last day that you get,” she explained. Lyrically, the song wrestles with accepting companionship: “It might be easier for me if not for you/I might be free/To live a life of some prolonged tranquility/Alone with my thoughts.” But as Wassner evokes the title in a final, gorgeous refrain, coasting upward on humid flashes of pedal steel, it’s unclear where she lands.
This song opens Wye Oak’s new collection, Every Day Like the Last, which compiles six standalone tracks from between 2019 and 2023 alongside three new songs. The process of releasing those singles soon after completion, with no aim for a larger project, resulted in a sense of creative liberation, and the music collected here speaks to Wasner and Andy Stack’s willingness to experiment with how they present their work. While the individual tracks were often striking and inventive, they fare better as a complete project: Every Day Like the Last hangs together not as a batch of unrelated loosies but effectively a new Wye Oak album, built by breadcrumb trail in the five years since their last proper full-length, The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs.
Wye Oak have long abandoned the volatile dynamics that were once their trademark, and these songs emerge from the same period in which Wasner rebooted her solo project Flock of Dimes with a more sparse, reflective sound. Like her masterful 2021 album, Head of Roses, Every Day Like the Last is subtle and steady-handed even in its most dramatic upheavals. Although it returns to a more guitar-oriented aesthetic after the groove-driven pivot that began with 2014’s Shriek, the band now works with a hard-earned serenity. Stack no longer wallops his drums but brushes and coaxes; Wasner’s guitar has descended from volcanic eruptions or skyward soars to flickering embers floating in the air. The gentler instrumentation allows Wasner’s voice, long the band’s secret weapon, to shine. Again and again—in the weaving melody of “TNT,” the gliding layers of “Evergreen,” or the cascading chorus in “Fear of Heights”—her melodies are mysterious and intoxicating, moving with the arc of a river.
Wye Oak spend as much time in gray areas as ever, cataloging moments of strife with restraint. The lyrics are personal and unspecific but mostly gesture towards wrestling with relationships, trying to locate acceptance in discomfort. A new song called “Repeat (If You Remind Me)” closes the album—a moment of relative peace in which Wasner resolves to find meaning in a fragile and fleeting existence. Wye Oak’s music has often been evocative for its malleability: Their songs could take place in spring or autumn, at rebirth or encroaching decay. As the duo navigates these in-between states—both in their personal lives and the trajectory of the band—Every Day Like the Last coheres into a short but resonant whole: a series of snapshots taken over a turbulent stretch of years. | 2023-06-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 26, 2023 | 7.6 | ee0002f9-af62-4fcb-82b1-c3186ecedb64 | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
The Compton rapper’s debut is smart, technically dazzling, and thoroughly sullen. | The Compton rapper’s debut is smart, technically dazzling, and thoroughly sullen. | Westside Boogie: Everything’s for Sale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boogie-everythings-for-sale/ | Everything’s for Sale | Boogie’s music always carries a sadness beneath the technically polished flows and glitzy, sullen beats. Life sucks, we suffer, the future is in trouble. He is rap’s Droopy, the eternally sad cartoon dog. This isn’t a slight because, yes, conscious rap deals with existential melancholy (cf. J. Cole) but it’s usually bookended with optimism through last-minute revelations or faith in the future. Not Boogie, and certainly not Everything’s for Sale, his debut album for Eminem’s Shady Records. It exists in a cloud of gloom that consumes the album. And yet, there’s something endearing about Boogie’s honesty, his commitment to the established mood, and his charming vocals to go along with his rap abilities.
Boogie doesn’t believe that people want to hear “that conscious shit.” That probably speaks to his feverish approach to introspection; there aren’t any lessons given or learned here, only what he’s thinking in his darkest hours and how those thoughts beget more darkness. On “Tired/Reflections” he raps, “I’m tired of working at myself, I want to be perfect already/I’m tired of the dating process, I want to know what’s certain already,” and you can hear forfeiture in his tone. He’s far from whining, he’s just exhausted. The track begins with a wish for death, then the police come to investigate and reporters crowd the scene. The death becomes just another event in the day’s schedule. Maybe that’s Boogie’s biggest fear, not mattering in the grand scheme of things.
Even though Everything’s for Sale is so gloomy, it sure does sound sexy. Its slow-churning, soulful hymns take the edge off the darker subjects. “Live 95” slinks along, its rich jazz atmosphere invites you to close your eyes and nod off while Boogie waxes about his insecurities. Elements of soul crop up throughout, culminating in the sultry closer, “Time.” What sounds like a hazy, sex-imbued dream is actually about a man confronted over his lack of commitment with a partner. Even when it sounds like it ends in something genuinely moving, Boogie dekes in the opposite direction.
Everything’s for Sale steps up the melodies, devoting the lion’s share of choruses and bars to what amounts to humming with words. It’s not quite Kid Cudi with the harmonies, but definitely not Bryson Tiller, either. This mix works because the pain in his voice creates a metallic hum that’s almost audible, like he’s either just cleared his throat or he needs to. “Time” showcases this wounded vocal marvelously, with his drawn-out lines simulating a man pleading for intimacy. Both “Skydive” and “Skydive II” devote their runtimes to Boogie’s melodic side as he sings about insecurities in love.
Boogie is at his worst when he deviates from the gloomy atmosphere. “Rainy Days” has the distinction of being the worst song on the album and having one of the most trying Eminem verses on it (“Like a shepherd havin’ sex with his sheep/Fuck what you heard,” goes one unforgettable line). The boilerplate trap beat makes Boogie sound lost. Similarly, “Self Destruction” tries to channel its darkness into a party record, but its mix of self-awareness and half-commitment just makes the whole idea land sideways. With an album this obsessed with pure sadness, Everything’s for Sale embraces that mood utterly. The few times it deviates from it, it crashes. It’s a project that sees Boogie working on the balance of comfort and experimentation, of seeing the world through more than the same dark tint. | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Shady | January 31, 2019 | 7.1 | ee09d22c-6303-4be7-a0dd-646fb8da6c6d | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
One-time dancepunk contenders ditch the DFA for Astralwerks to turn out one of the year's most humiliating misfires. | One-time dancepunk contenders ditch the DFA for Astralwerks to turn out one of the year's most humiliating misfires. | Radio 4: Stealing of a Nation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6651-stealing-of-a-nation/ | Stealing of a Nation | Brooklyn's Radio 4 seem to have stopped caring about music midway through the recording of 2002's Gotham!. Through 2000's debut, The New Song and Dance LP and 2001's "Dance to the Underground" 12-inch, Radio 4 followed their neo-Clash/Gang of Four tendencies into a more indie-danceable context, and it just about worked. Meshies dropped "Radio 4" in the same breath as The Rapture and !!!, and none of them were shocked when the band asked the DFA to produce their sophomore effort. The first half of Gotham! showcased the band's live energy with smart but spare embellishments, and preserved the grassroots vitriol that gave at least some credence to their incendiary political lyrics. The second half, however, felt like an afterthought: Its production is noticeably heavier on what are infinitely less compelling songs, as the DFA frantically lipstick and sunglass Bernie Lomax to conceal the album's rigor mortis.
Despite it all, Astralwerks signed the band in 2003. Most would think Radio 4 would use this budget upgrade to trudge up some fresh material-- by now it had been two years since the band recorded Gotham!-- but they still couldn't muster the energy. Instead, we got the Electrify EP, which included a barely distinctive re-recording of 2001's "Dance to the Underground", and 6 consistently awful remixes. Radio 4 had written itself in water: That quickly, they'd become has-beens, and from there, any headway made would go toward reclaiming lost ground.
Stealing of a Nation is the polar opposite of monumental. Its 12 songs brutally follow the modus operandi of Electrify, in that all are simply thinly disguised re-recordings of "Dance to the Underground"-- each more obscene than the next. What's worse, the band doesn't have the indie-dance acumen of James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy to fall back on anymore: Instead, there's Martin "Max" Heyes, whose dated Primal Screamisms drown out the band's already feeble melodies and political agenda. Radio 4 can be commended for at least trying to move past the purposeful lo-fi of Gotham! and into fresher territory, but there's no bell or whistle in the world that could energize the utterly impotent songs at the core of Stealing of a Nation.
While Radio 4 whine about bands moving to New York for the wrong reasons (The Scene!) on album single and opener "Party Crashers", the band crashes a party themselves-- the pilled 'n' thrilled, screamadelic one across the pond that's been shut down for 13 years. The change of direction is not at all accidental-- even the title Stealing of a Nation aligns the band with New Order (who recorded both "State of the Nation" and "Shame of the Nation") and all of Manchester's post-New Order antics-- but come on, does every song after "Party Crashers" have to rip Happy Mondays' "God's Cop" and Primal Scream's "Don't Fight It, Feel It", too?
Of course, the similarities between Radio 4 and producer Max Heyes' previous clients would be a less pressing issue if the band had any charisma whatsoever. It's difficult enough for frontman Anthony Roman to convincingly rally the troops against The Man and The Machine on "(Give Me All of Your) Money" and when his voice is swaddled in the purple robes of high-gloss production, but his lazy three-note melodies couldn't even start a lunchroom food fight. Meanwhile, guitarist Tommy Williams and keyboardist Gerard Garone trade equally malnourished riffs on 9/11-by-numbers "State of Alert", and Heyes' insistence on the drum machine on "Transmission" and "The Death of American Radio" keeps live drummer Greg Collins from contributing anything more than a credit in the liners.
Two songs that Radio 4 intended as clear homage to their influences only further indict Stealing of a Nation. "Nation", which the band openly modeled in sound, political agenda, and track placement (right in the middle) after The Clash's "Straight to Hell" on Combat Rock, neatly reiterates all of Stealing of a Nation's shortcomings, from Heyes' outmoded soundboards to Roman's unconvincing, merely observational politics to the entire band's inability to write remotely compelling melodies.
And then, right before the aptly titled closer "Coming Up Empty", Radio 4 dub-stomps with unusual swagger through "Dismiss the Sound" with unmistakable similarity to "Albatross" by Public Image, Ltd., from whose song ("Radio 4") the band takes its name. But of course, Roman hardly skims the depth of Johnny Lydon's conviction, and Radio 4 sells off PiL's atonal confession for glitzy and insubstantial chorus effects. Like the rest of the album, the song's slickly produced fancy face also becomes its muzzle, robbing Radio 4 of any bite it could have had. Stealing of a Nation truly has nothing to offer musically, nor does Radio 4 urge anything of note politically, sticking to the trite "America Is Fucked!" hogwash that any seventh grader with a blog and a dial-up could piss out in an afternoon. Never has a band been so undeserving of its own name. | 2004-09-13T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2004-09-13T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Astralwerks | September 13, 2004 | 2.1 | ee0b886f-bb2d-4509-a17a-fb98a7720366 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
More like a eulogy for what was lost than a new chapter, Allison Crutchfield and Kyle Gilbride reunite for songs that document their lives since their breakup—and possibly chart a path forward. | More like a eulogy for what was lost than a new chapter, Allison Crutchfield and Kyle Gilbride reunite for songs that document their lives since their breakup—and possibly chart a path forward. | Swearin’: Fall Into the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swearin-fall-into-the-sun/ | Fall Into the Sun | While promoting her solo debut, Tourist in This Town, last year, Allison Crutchfield predicted Swearin’ would never play another show. Although she and cofounder Kyle Gilbride had tried to keep their Philly band together after they ended their romantic relationship, they ultimately recognized the untenability of pretending nothing had changed. Tourist in This Town documented their souring status and her profound displacement after their collapse. “We’re pretty far away from Philadelphia, and that’s fine/’Cause I’m really starting to hate you and, anyways, I’m looking to move,” she sang. She soon made good on the threat, relocating to Los Angeles.
What a difference a little break can make. Swearin’ credits breathing room for allowing them to regroup for their third album, Fall Into the Sun, a candid record that plays less like a new chapter than a eulogy for what used to be. “We are both older now/But you still let the music determine how you feel any given night,” Crutchfield sings over blustery, Blue Album guitars on the opener “Big Change,” a song that doubles as her farewell to Philadelphia and the punk scene of her youth.
We already know bits and pieces of this story from Tourist in This Town, which previewed the diaristic, nakedly autobiographical songwriting approach Crutchfield wears like a glove here. The key difference is that, in Swearin’, she splits the lead with Gilbride. On Fall Into the Sun, they alternate tunes, pivoting perspectives from the one who left to the one who stayed and back again. While Crutchfield’s journey required a lot of distance and soul searching, Gilbride’s was more aimless. “By pure dumb luck, I’ve gotten where I’m going,” he sings on “Dogpile,” his dazed warble dwarfed by a hefty riff.
On the surface, Fall Into the Sun sounds like Swearin’ as you remember them—bright, hooky, lovable. After revisiting their earlier LPs, you hear how much has changed. The production is far cleaner, a hi-fi approximation of how lo-fi music feels. Even its fuzziest guitars have luster. Crutchfield and Gilbride’s styles have diverged, especially their pacing. The two used to mirror each other’s rhythms, but now Crutchfield’s songs dash like they have somewhere else to be, as if she’s still trying to put as many miles between herself and her subject as possible. Gilbride’s tunes wallow and amble.
The album requires sacrifice from both writers. Crutchfield has to dial back some of the range she demonstrated on Tourist in This Town, from radiant synths to teases of Americana. She’s so in her element over these roiling tempos, it seems like a fair trade. Only once does she deliver two consecutive tracks, but “Grow Into a Ghost” and “Margaret” are rippers, providing the album’s early peak. Gilbride, meanwhile, risks playing the supporting role to the rising star. (One can only imagine how he must rue comparisons to Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett). He’s not nearly as magnetic as Crutchfield, but he holds his own. His “Treading” and “Future Hell” are knockouts and personal bests. The chemistry between Crutchfield and Gilbride has changed, of course, but they still complement each other.
This story of separation and reconciliation is so vivid that it wouldn’t take much to rework it into a movie script. Despite the forgive-and-forget, time-heals-all-wounds outlook, the album falls short of a happy ending. Swearin’ has announced tour dates into 2019, but you have to wonder how much of a future the band really has once this album cycle ends. These songs suggest the baggage may be too heavy to cart around very long. “It never would have worked out, anyway,” Crutchfield concludes on her intimate final number. For an album cast as a fresh start, Fall Into the Sun mostly feels like closure. | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 10, 2018 | 7.4 | ee1c5045-ae38-4c84-baff-acbb7cdfdddf | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
An eccentric, vocoder-building electronic forefather gets the reissue treatment from the fanatics at Stones Throw. | An eccentric, vocoder-building electronic forefather gets the reissue treatment from the fanatics at Stones Throw. | Bruce Haack: Farad: The Electric Voice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14918-farad-the-electric-voice/ | Farad: The Electric Voice | Reissue releases usually oversell the now-clichéd story of a misunderstood musical genius. Farad, Stones Throw's retrospective of electronic music eccentric Bruce Haack, does peddle that tale to a certain degree, much like the 2004 documentary Haack: The King of Techno. But the real pleasure of the disc, covering music released during the later part of his career from 1970-82, is that it doesn't try too hard to define Haack's compositions and philosophy or spend extensive time wondering, "What if?" It instead exposes the raw components of his odd career, an improbable, colorful circuit board resembling the wiring to some Rube Goldberg device.
A musical prodigy from a Canadian mining town, Haack was all-encompassing in his approach. He had composed far-out children's music and pop songs, experimented with classical/synthesizer hybrids, and hand-crafted a studio's worth of electronic instruments (including a proto-vocoder, Farad, named after inventor Michael Faraday) by the end of the 60s. Few can claim to have demoed electronic instruments for Fred Rogers and written a song covered by Beck ("Funky Little Song", not included on this album). But his scattered biography goes a long way toward explaining the playful weirdness and the philosophical underpinnings that made Haack so refreshing. Even on his psychedelic excursions or the stone cold electro funk of "Stand Up Lazarus", there's a sense of wonder and play, and he doesn't stay perpetually plugged-in, letting folk and country twang find its way into his music.
The tone of his tracks veered from suspended, bubbly escapes ("Rain of Earth") and silly sing-alongs ("Maybe This Song") to a Kraftwerk-worthy electro jam with a pre-Def Jam Russell Simmons (1982's "Party Machine") or the Byrds-like tinge of "National Anthem to the Moon", one of a handful of tracks on the comp taken from his 1970 album The Electric Lucifer. Haack took to the vocoder like Jim Henson took to felt, imitating a guttural monster on "Noon Day Sun" and bending his voice into that of a cheesy lovelorn cyborg on "Rita". On the jaunty, "Electric to Me Turn", Haack gets philosophical over steam organ synths, declaring, "Electric to me turn this night/ Reflecting universal light/ All I knew that should be true/ Is reality in you." Hindsight may render some of these tracks a bit silly or indulgent, but this patchwork of music showcases a true believer and a talent that deserves recognition among his early synthesizer peers. | 2010-12-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-12-03T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Stones Throw | December 3, 2010 | 7.1 | ee279f83-1615-40c2-919e-61b08c250ef4 | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
PJ Harvey fans have waited a long time for this: a near-exhaustive collection of the singer’s non-album tracks and orphaned gems, many of which rival her classic album cuts. | PJ Harvey fans have waited a long time for this: a near-exhaustive collection of the singer’s non-album tracks and orphaned gems, many of which rival her classic album cuts. | PJ Harvey: B-Sides, Demos & Rarities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pj-harvey-b-sides-demos-and-rarities/ | B-Sides, Demos & Rarities | You used to have to work so hard to be a stan: joining fan clubs, tracking down early EPs, downloading suspicious Megaupload links from message-board threads. Rarities were called that for a reason; they weren’t just served to you on a streaming platter. PJ Harvey, who long shied away from compilations and career retrospectives, never made it easy. Some of her best, most bracing material was exiled from her studio albums, but unless you were scouring eBay for the “C’mon Billy” CD single or seeking out the limited-edition Is This Desire? bonus disc, how would you have known?
PJ Harvey fans have waited a long time for this: a centralized meeting point for the singer’s many non-album tracks and orphaned gems. Spanning from her early days, fiddling with a 4-track machine that mentor John Parish taught her to use, to her post-’90s reinventions as a pop-rock shapeshifter, antiwar provocateur-slash-autoharp connoisseur, and television composer, this remarkable, 59-song, six-LP compilation doubles as a shadow history of Harvey’s career, charting her metamorphoses through the songs that didn’t make the cut.
It also reveals the one constant—an unswerving intensity that distinguished Harvey from her imitators. On her early, blues-punk demos (there are just five Rid of Me demos here, presumably because the others already appeared on 1993’s 4-Track Demos), that intensity was channeled through Harvey’s voice, a searing, guttural moan of biblical proportions. Hear her weave in and out of falsetto on the wailing chorus of “Dry - Demo” or deadpan the sinister nursery-rhyme coda to “Man-Size - Demo,” and it’s clear that Harvey was a compelling solo artist well before her eponymous trio dissolved in 1993.
To Bring You My Love, Harvey’s extraordinary 1995 commercial breakthrough, was her first proper solo album. On its B-sides, you can hear the singer reveling in her new freedom and pushing to the outer limits of her sound. The hazily menacing “Lying in the Sun” and deeply eerie “Darling Be There” are studies in minimalism, pointing the way to Is This Desire? “Maniac,” meanwhile, plays like a “Down by the Water” understudy: theatrical and violent. Its distorted organ and drum loop represent one of Harvey’s first excursions into sheer groove, while its roaring vocal proves Harvey is the only Gen-X rocker who can yowl come-ons like “I neeeeeed a man/To make me moan/To make me bad” without the faintest wink of irony.
Around 1997, while demoing “My Beautiful Leah,” an exhausted Harvey recoiled in shock at the grotesque darkness of her own writing. She fell into crisis, and considered abandoning music to become a nurse. Instead, after seeking therapy, she completed 1998’s Is This Desire?, her most goth album, a masterpiece of mood if you approach it in the right space. On Desire, Harvey channeled her isolation into noirish trip-hop, ghostly minimalism, and third-person character studies; its paradox has always been that this is Harvey’s most character-driven work, an album populated by lost, broken women with names like Joy, Catherine, or Leah, and yet she has described it as being “about myself.”
Nocturnal and haunted, these B-sides rank among the most stunning of her career. “The Northwood” is a macabre vignette chiseled from warped, deliberately out-of-sync vocal takes, perhaps a nod to Harvey’s Captain Beefheart obsession. “Sweeter Than Anything” is yearning and nostalgic, a lost-love story whose details, like the flickering guitar layers, are an impressionistic blur of sadness.
Is This Desire? was a stark departure from Harvey’s prior work, but would have been even more so had the keening reverie “Nina in Ecstasy 2” made the cut (producer John Parish wishes it were track one). Sung in a girlish falsetto, with just the gentle hum of a Yamaha QY20 sequencer for accompaniment, the song both hints at Harvey’s White Chalk-era vocal shift and encapsulates the lonely desperation of Desire: “‘Nina in Ecstasy’ sounds like a porn film, maybe it was, but my Nina is also a lovely, sad, lost lady looking for her mum,” Harvey has explained.
If Is This Desire? left you (ahem) dry, chances are you found comfort in the lovestruck glamour of 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, probably the best New York album ever made by a Brit. On this widely hailed, platinum-selling release, the singer does not groan or shriek; she glides and floats, and swoons over the sensual pleasures of watching a lover undress. Harvey, now channeling Chrissie Hynde more than Captain Beefheart, never sounded happier, or more suited to your parents’ five-disc changer.
In this case, the B-sides complicate the popular narrative, revealing that the same sessions yielded plenty of depressive downers that Harvey discarded in pursuit of a (relatively) upbeat pop album. The ominous “This Wicked Tongue” is a slow-burning explosion, while “Memphis” is a stirring tribute to Jeff Buckley. Harvey had received a happy letter from the singer the week before his death and wrote the song in response to the tragic news: “Oh, what a way to go/I know that you’re smiling,” she sings hopefully.
Buckley was 30 when he died. Harvey was the same age when she recorded Stories, and penned a cryptic reflection in the form of “30.” If “Memphis” retains some of the lush production of Stories—jangling guitar, soaring backing vocals—the same cannot be said of “30,” which is brooding and spare; the song recalls the unsettled quiet of Is This Desire?, while “Kick It to the Ground” hearkens back to the bleeding, raw vocal takes of her early demos. You can understand why these tracks were orphaned from their parent album.
Harvey was uninterested in pandering to new fans wooed by Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea’s impression of a radio-friendly rock star. It would be nearly four years before a follow-up arrived; eventually, the singer emerged with Uh Huh Her, her most insular and haphazard record, and the only one she produced entirely herself. Though Harvey is mum about her private life, Uh Huh Her is also her most overt breakup album, journeying from bitterness (“The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth”) to melancholy acceptance (“The Darker Days of Me & Him”).
Once frustrated by its demo-like sketchiness, I’ve grown to love the album’s ragged intimacy and subtle shifts in mood. But the B-sides—previously collected on a limited-edition 2004 compilation—are considerably weaker, veering toward self-pity. “The Phone Song” and “Stone” particularly rank among Harvey’s most plodding and heavy-handed compositions, while demo versions of “Cat on the Wall” and “You Come Through” are too similar to their album equivalents to justify inclusion. On the bright side, we get the fuzzed-up “97º” (a reworking of the “Cat on the Wall” riff), the Dylan-quoting “Dance,” and the gnarled “Uh Huh Her.” Orphaned from the album of the same name, it became an incendiary standout on her 2004 tour, Harvey’s moans of “Reeee-jection!” snuffing out the last flickering embers of Stories’ infatuation.
That tour was the last hurrah for PJ Harvey, alt-rock queen. On 2007’s White Chalk—one of her most overlooked albums—she swore off electric guitar and yowling blues entirely. Ghostly and gothic, its spare sound centered around childlike piano figures, White Chalk divided fans. In retrospect, it’s the album that ushered in the fourth era of Harvey’s career, a period defined by nontraditional instrumentation, a high, keening vocal register, and lyrics that emphasize literary or sociopolitical concerns.
Even on this compilation, White Chalk is a kind of ghost: its presence sensed but unheard. That’s because the White Chalk era produced mysteriously few non-album tracks. Instead, Harvey issued long-stowed-away material from her earliest recording sessions: “Wait” (“one of my first songs ever written”) and “Heaven,” both recorded in 1988, when Harvey was a teenager in the group Automatic Dlamini. Both are pleasant, uncharacteristically chirpy English folk tunes, with little hint of the powerful erotic charge to come on Dry and Rid of Me. Their non-chronological inclusion here may bewilder fans who assume them to have been recorded circa 2007.
Yet a certain disregard for chronology suits Harvey. As the new century wore on, her muse seemed to drift almost a hundred years into the past, to World War I. As peers like Björk and Nick Cave embraced icy synths and ambient electronica, Harvey was drawn to autoharps and zithers, saxophones and trombones. Once again, she threw away her established tools. The result was 2011’s Let England Shake, one of the more peculiar antiwar albums, and a successful one, earning the singer her second Mercury Prize.
So distinctive is Let England Shake in sound and approach that “The Big Guns Called Me Back Again” and “The Nightingale” could have come from no other corner of Harvey’s discography. The odd, ringing thwack of the autoharp; the ambling rhythms; the communal tapestry of backing vocals—these are the giveaways. That, of course, and the lyrics, which contrast war’s pageantry with its brutality. In “The Nightingale,” Harvey embodies the naiveté of a soldier seduced by the glory of his mission and comforted by a nightingale’s call: “Every one of us will go to Paradise/He sang to the soldiers day and night.”
While Let England Shake surveyed the conflicts that shaped England in the 20th century, The Hope Six Demolition Project found Harvey—now working as a kind of journalist/poet—turning her gaze to the violence and unrest of the present. Drawing heavily on research trips to Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington, D.C., she created a travelogue album, pulling England’s eclectic instrumentation into a bluesy rock fusion. Often criticized for its noncommittal remove, the 2016 album is not one of Harvey’s best; songs like “The Community of Hope” enumerate notebook observations of poverty and economic neglect, but offer little in the way of conclusion or emotional catharsis. There’s an unshakeable “Ok, and?” quality to the writing.
Alas, as this compilation reveals, Harvey omitted some of her most purposeful protest songs from the album proper. The deceptively jaunty “Guilty” indicts the judgment of a drone operator squinting at suspects on a screen, all of whom “must be guilty,” Harvey repeats, as handclaps and saxophone blurts cheer on the spectacle of remote-controlled death. “The Camp,” a stirring 2017 collaboration with Egyptian singer Ramy Essam, is equally topical: an evocative plea for children displaced by the refugee crisis in Lebanon.
B-Sides, Demos & Rarities loses some of its urgency towards the end. Since 2017, Harvey has retreated from the album and touring cycle, focusing on scoring for television and stage and publishing a book-length poem called Orlam. The last five songs here chronicle her scoring work. There’s an eerie cover of the folk traditional “An Acre of Land”; several piano demos of songs Harvey wrote for the 2019 stage adaptation of All About Eve, which she scored; and, from the Peaky Blinders soundtrack, a surprisingly milquetoast cover of a certain song by Harvey’s most famous ex. All curiosities of interest to hardcore fans, but nothing that summons the fire or spikiness of her own records.
The box set ends here, but, happily, Harvey’s career does not. According to a Guardian interview, Harvey will release a new studio album—her first in seven years—in 2023. I can think of no presently active major-label artist whose fans have less of an idea what her new album will sound like or what dark obsessions it will entail. That may be a function of Harvey’s propensity for secrecy, but it also reflects how profoundly her career has been shaped by surprising left turns. When we speak of pop chameleons—David Bowie, Beck—why not PJ Harvey?
Harvey has never settled. She has never released a staid or unsurprising album in her life. She has always favored uncompromising gestures. Like the tormented narrator of “To Bring You My Love,” she has lain with the devil and cursed God above. And here, scattered across these six LPs, is a surplus of proof. | 2023-01-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | UMe / Island | January 7, 2023 | 8.5 | ee33afd8-07d1-4341-a5a0-65246692946f | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Harsh noise figurehead builds new tracks by sampling punk rock recordings-- crowd cheers, drum rolls, drumstick counts-- and inserting them on top and inside of his own. | Harsh noise figurehead builds new tracks by sampling punk rock recordings-- crowd cheers, drum rolls, drumstick counts-- and inserting them on top and inside of his own. | John Wiese: Soft Punk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10257-soft-punk/ | Soft Punk | Soft Punk is the first full-length album released by California harsh noise and parasympathetic drone aesthete John Wiese on New Jersey's Troubleman Unlimited, an eager imprint that's been treading the turbulent waters between sonic abstraction and punk aggression for a decade. Through TMU's small-batch/good-records approach, bands like Growing and Double Leopards share shelves with Meneguar and Panthers (not to mention Glass Candy, Tussle and The Walkmen), meeting somewhere near the fuck-all eruptions of Wolf Eyes and now in the careful and meticulous, feverish and intoxicating noise of Wiese. Recorded between 2002 and 2005, Soft Punk is a zenithal intersection of everything Wiese has done right for the past decade: Collagist tendencies meet drone hyper-abilities; assaulting glitches and glissandos come buried between near silence and hair-raising volume; beauty is refracted through sonic brutality.
The title Soft Punk seems to have two functions, then: Like its brilliant cover art by Kaz Oshiro-- three bright pink Marshall amplifiers that are, as the back cover shows, simply stretched-canvas, three-dimensional paintings of such fantasy gear-- Soft Punk suggests looking and listening again, of rethinking that ugly noise/punk divide. Just when you think you have a handle on Wiese, he's onto something else. There's always a next level here. No, this isn't punk, and it's not soft. But it's not simple sheets of harsh noise, either. Wiese's constant push and pull and his eventual acquiescence to let things build and burn are capable of rock's epiphany and articulation, even if it's "just a bunch of god damned noise" in the end.
Soft Punk is a statement of process, too. Under the name Sissy Spacek-- which he uses for both solo work and collaborations-- Wiese manipulates and processes his own recordings and spews them back as ultra-damaged, something-like-punk, more-like-noise spasms. Here, he's sampling his punk rock friends again, stacking those sounds-- crowd cheers, drum rolls, drumstick counts-- on top and inside of his own. During "Snow Pit", Wiese concentrates on snippets from Olympia trio Die Monitor Bats, using a live set's beginnings, ends, and screaming innards as heavy construction paper and bright crayons. He drops drumstick counts into the mix four times, sprinting in wildly different directions after each. It's either "One, two, three, four, NEAR SILENCE" or "One, two, three four, OH SHIT! LOUD!" Take your chances, sucker.
Much like Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda, Wiese excels in making clean, precise cuts between drastically different sounds, building a drop-dead dynamic capable of stepping from almost-absent rumbles and hums to furious noise bursts. This is apparent on "PS2", where Wiese uses bait-and-switch, build-and-kill mechanics as his chief compositional tool. He buries valleys into peaks and somehow finds peaks that are higher and more rugged with uncanny persistence. A machine-gun rhythm reverses into a glitchy spasm, then settles into a pressurized monotone before ducking into near-nothingness. None of these sounds lasts for more than three seconds, but such vacillations never seem rushed with Wiese. He's always in control, the master of a sonic domain that reaches far-and-wide, high-and-low with enthusiasm and magnetism. It's as though he collects a world of sound and spits it out piecemeal-- methodically, dramatically, emphatically-- through a morphing matrix designed for ricochets. Falling in love with a sliver of sound only to be slapped senselessly by something totally unrelated? It's as maddening as it is exhilarating.
But the proof is in Soft Punk's center: During a three-track, mid-album stretch, Wiese eases into a neon pink drone, a beautiful sound that he just won't leave alone. He bends and shocks it, reshapes it, piles drums on top of it, overdrives it, and eventually altogether destroys it. When the track expires with a blitz of malformed waves, Wiese builds a perfect, long-tone aubade reminiscent of Jason Lescalleet's work on "The Pilgrim". For those who haven't heard it, "The Pilgrim" was Lescalleet's gorgeous 74-minute farewell to his deceased father, all gentle tones fanfaring gradually into outer space. For three minutes, Wiese sings a similar sigh, perhaps letting the body of the punk rock he's setting on fire burn away at the midpoint. And then, as he should, Wiese thrusts all of his weight into "New Wave Dust", perhaps the album's most chaotic, relentless, damaging track.
Power electronics? Oh my. Punk rock? If only. | 2007-06-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-06-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Troubleman Unlimited | June 11, 2007 | 8 | ee38bcba-8e86-4dac-9b01-d8eb13a185e2 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
In 1998, Squarepusher Tom Jenkinson realized that his time-tested drill-n-bass\n\ formula wasn't cutting it anymore. \xB5-Ziq and the ... | In 1998, Squarepusher Tom Jenkinson realized that his time-tested drill-n-bass\n\ formula wasn't cutting it anymore. \xB5-Ziq and the ... | Squarepusher: Go Plastic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7447-go-plastic/ | Go Plastic | In 1998, Squarepusher Tom Jenkinson realized that his time-tested drill-n-bass formula wasn't cutting it anymore. \xB5-Ziq and the Ninja Tune roster had caught onto the brain-twisting beauty of unclockable bpms and soft melodic tones. He knew that to leave his mark on this world, he had to do something different. Something so different it would transcend the term "electronic" entirely, and endow him with the megastar status he knew he rightly deserved. So he recorded Music is Rotted One Note, a brilliant fusion-powered flashback that gave nods to both electric Miles and the dawn of the digital age.
After unanimous critical hallelujahs, the only challenge facing Jenkinson was how to follow such a tough act. The three EPs that followed, Budakhan Mindphone, Maximum Priest and Selection Sixteen, offered variations on the album's theme, but rarely equaled the sweet inspiration of Rotted One Note's fiery jam-sessions and dark discordance. Would he continue tracking the ghost of post-60's African spirituality or give birth to something even more abstract and outlandish?
The sad fact is, either of these options would have produced better results than the one he ultimately chose: rehashing. On Go Plastic, Jenkinson picks up where his Big Loada EP left off, almost as if Music is Rotted One Note had never existed. Go Plastic exhumes the corpse of stuttering, fast-paced percussion and arbitrary programming that was bled dry and buried in a time when the Y2K bug still signified economic collapse and nuclear meltdowns.
For what it's worth, Jenkinson does at least attempt to update the outdated. The problem is, he draws on all the wrong elements. Rather than resurrecting the elaborate analog melodies he once seemed to harvest off trees, he focuses on the goddamned breakbeats. Why? Aren't we past this? Electronic music has mutated so drastically over the past three years. It's currently some of the most creatively fertile soil the music world has to offer. Has he just not bothered to learn the new software?
These questions are unanswerable. Only Jenkinson knows why he reverted to such an exhausted form. But speculation says he's grown comfortable. After a hard day's work, nothing comes easier than lethargy, a curse all too apparent on the album's major offenders, "Go! Spastic" and "Greenways Trajectory." The appeal of complete randomness was limited even before Autechre broke the freshness seal; now it's just irritating.
Jenkinson does occasionally acknowledge Music is Rotted One Note, as on the sparse 2\xBD minutes that open "The Exploding Psychology," and the foreboding, reverb-laden "My Fucking Sound" (the title itself is a reference to One Note's standout, "My Sound"). But even these tracks would have been relegated to one of that record's numerous EPs and 12-inches.
Only a few tracks can justify Go Plastic's existence, and not surprisingly, they're the ones that sound the least like Jenkinson's past material. "Metteng Excuske v1.2" is a tense collage of dark ambience, punctuated by metallic bursts and digital manipulations of plucked piano strings that swells into rumbling electronic malfunctions and derailing train noises before ending with an abrupt, glassy ping. Sadly, the track lasts just over a minute from start to finish. "Tommib" suffers a similar fate-- a beautiful echo of the majestic synthtones and hopeful melodies of Big Loada, sans percussion, is given a runtime of 1:19.
The closing "Plaistow Flex Out" is Go Plastic's true triumph. It blends some of the jazzy weirdness of Rotted One Note with the eerie warehouse tension of Photek's Modus Operandi. 4-bit Pong blips reverberate under a relaxed hip-hop bass and snare. Sporadically, a keyboard riff pops up, so stretched and contorted that its original melody disappears completely, leaving only an oddly catchy series of slurred non-notes.
And of course, there's "My Red Hot Car," which has thankfully been slightly remixed from its single version. My feelings on this song are conflicted. On one hand, the tune is sweetly infectious; on the other, the sentiment is disturbing at best, and would be better suited for the master of electronic gross-out, Richard D. James. Regardless, you can't let this song deceive you. It stands out awkwardly, the only track of its kind, on an album of generic misfires and done-to-death jungle cliches.
Even assuming I fully enjoyed "My Red Hot Car" (which would be a terrible overstatement), it only adds up to 12 genuinely entertaining minutes on an album that nears the 50-minute mark. There is, as always, hope that he'll again equal, or maybe even surpass the timelessness of Music is Rotted One Note, but he's not going to get there by coasting. | 2001-06-26T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2001-06-26T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | June 26, 2001 | 5.1 | ee44d8f4-75c7-45ed-b17a-595bc1c5db56 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
The experimental duo have long embraced music’s anarchic potential. Their latest project, exploring the nuances of machine intelligence, might be their most confounding and ambitious. | The experimental duo have long embraced music’s anarchic potential. Their latest project, exploring the nuances of machine intelligence, might be their most confounding and ambitious. | Mouse on Mars: AAI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mouse-on-mars-aai/ | AAI | Mouse on Mars believe in the creative potential of chaos. “Music is a strong anarchic force,”Jan St. Werner, a member of the duo, told the New York Times in 2018, effusing about its propensity for mutation and cross-fertilization. In a genre often premised on the reliable pleasures of steady beats and familiar tropes, Mouse on Mars revel in the unpredictable. At the time of the interview, St. Werner and his bandmate Andi Toma were promoting their album Dimensional People, a lab experiment involving custom-built percussion robots, bespoke mobile apps, and three-dimensional sound spatialization, plus the voices of Amanda Blank, Spank Rock, and members of the National, Beirut, and Bon Iver, among dozens of others. A volatile mix, it made good on the group’s interest in music’s joyfully intractable nature.
St. Werner’s observation about music’s mutability might double as the mission statement for the group’s new album, AAI. The title stands for “anarchic artificial intelligence,” and it may be their most uncategorizable project yet, using AI as both form and content, structure and subject matter. On the surface, AAI sounds like a continuation of some of the ideas on Dimensional People. Longtime percussionist Dodo NKishi’s forceful polyrhythms drive the songs, which come wrapped in weird, shimmery textures that glisten like oil slicks. There are long, hypnotic drum jams and short, disorienting atonal bursts; at the center of it all is the voice of Louis Chude-Sokei, a Boston-based professor of African American studies. He contributes an accompanying essay—part theory, part speculative fiction—that lays out many of the album’s themes about machine intelligence, and some songs double as philosophical lectures. In the early track “Speech and Ambulation,” Chude-Sokei muses, “We reduced language to symbols and assumed that machines were merely the perfection of logic. We did not imagine them capable of desire…. What we still don’t know is what machines want. Now that they are no longer defined by computation, how will they talk?”
In a sense, the song is an answer to that very question. It turns out that the voice is not really Chude-Sokei’s, but rather that of an AI that has been trained to mimic his speech. If you listen closely, you can detect traces of this sleight of hand; there’s an occasional strangeness to the pronunciation, like a non-native speaker testing an unfamiliar word. But there is no gotcha moment, no big replicant reveal; Mouse on Mars have bypassed the easy drama of deep fakes to delve into the realm of synthetic essence. Where Dimensional People’s voices were often run through electronic processing until they sounded almost like synthesizers, here the voice is a synthesizer, in effect. Working with software tools designed by the Berlin AI agency Birds on Mars, among other technical collaborators, Mouse on Mars are able to “play” the AI’s voice as though it were a software instrument, changing its speed and pitch, glitching its enunciation, even altering intonation and emotional resonance.
Out of this manipulation come the album’s other voices: a chorus of weird, wraithlike sounds, part human and part machine. Constantly mutating, they assume all sorts of forms: stuttering beatboxing, silvery vocoder, glitched-out gobbledygook. These layered voices are chopped up and spun into a rich, mercurial fusion of rhythm and melody: basslines, arpeggios, drones, and even drums seem to have been fashioned out of scraps of the AI’s voice. On “Walking and Talking,” the effect is akin to some of Matthew Herbert’s madcap escapades in sampling, stretching the telltale sounds of speech into a teetering architecture of rhythm and tone; on “Go Tick,” chopped-up syllables take on the syncopated gait of DJ Rashad’s rolling footwork.
Chude-Sokei’s text raises provocative ideas, but it’s not always clear how they are meant to play out on a musical level. He writes of machines, long relegated to second-class status, clamoring for subjecthood. “What are the anarchic sounds we are hearing?” he asks. “Are tools again seeking recognition?” But it’s impossible to determine how much of the album is the product of machine intelligence. Is there really a ghost in the machine, or are Mouse on Mars simply nudging a digital Ouija board? But perhaps it doesn’t matter. For all their conceptual bent, Mouse on Mars have never let their concepts eclipse the music; part of the pleasure of the duo’s output is its very inscrutability. Decades later, I still have no idea what’s actually happening in an album like Instrumentals or Autoditacker; the soundsbeckon in their mystery.
That’s equally true here. And even a passing familiarity with AAI’s conceptual framework reveals a neat narrative flow embedded in the album. The record obliquely tells the story of an AI coming into being—pulling itself up by its boot disk, assuming something like autonomy. Early in the album, there’s a sense of nascence in the wordless humming and intricate drumming, as though the rhythms were the precondition for artificial life; halting, speech-like sounds gradually congeal within this musical equivalent of the primordial soup. Soon, the AI is babbling absent-mindedly away, proudly intoning, “I’m walking, I’m a walking machine/I’m walking, I’m a walking machine.” By the album’s midway point, “Artificial Authentic” has arrived at pure, ebullient pop. And with the record’s final stretch, the AI is off and running. It apes its “parents” on “Seven Months,” which recalls the curious sound of early albums like Radical Connector. It invents new languages on the cryptic “Paymig.” And on “New Definitions,” the album’s climax, drums and synthesized voice strut triumphantly into the future, a thrilling new breed of IDM.
Throughout their career, Mouse on Mars’ work has doubled as an interrogation into the nature of creative practice. Along those lines, perhaps AAI is not just an album about AI, but a way of suggesting that all art is a form of “artificial,” trans-human intelligence—a node, however minuscule, in an unfathomably vast neural net. After all, an artwork does not just mimic; it poses questions as well as answering them; it takes on a life of its own; it generates desires that only it can satisfy. (Machines “made new desires possible, some so powerful that only machines could satisfy them,” writes Chude-Sokei.) With a bit of luck, an artwork may even reproduce itself, if a smidgen of its DNA is passed along via sample, quotation, or simple inspiration.
The concept of an anarchic AI may seem counter-intuitive; isn’t the whole point of machine learning to make the world more efficient? But AAI, which St. Werner has described as “a dialogue with technology,” proposes a kind of thought experiment: What might it mean to grant machines agency, and even empathy? It is also an ethical proposition, a reminder that art can help shape a better world. As Chude-Sokei writes, “New life always announces itself through sound.” Listening for it, suggests Mouse on Mars, is on us.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | March 1, 2021 | 7.2 | ee46e5a9-941a-4ec8-8b10-3a63efb7ee4f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Drums continue to perfect their 1980s-inspired indie pop formula on their latest album, while adding some dark humor to the mix. | The Drums continue to perfect their 1980s-inspired indie pop formula on their latest album, while adding some dark humor to the mix. | The Drums: “Abysmal Thoughts” | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-drums-abysmal-thoughts/ | Abysmal Thoughts | Yes, that is “Abysmal Thoughts” in quotations—the Drums, those throwback-pop stalwarts, are using their fourth album’s title as an act of academic citation. It’s an unspoken truth that both indie pop and Western philosophy try to address the same fundamental questions: Why does love feel so good? Why does pretty much everything else blow? Though it’s unclear where frontman and songwriter Jonny Pierce picked up the titular phrase, it is found repeatedly in Nietzsche’s gift to alt-bros, his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s variously translated as “abyss-deep thoughts” and stands in for the awareness that the world is larger and more horrible than we can ever truly understand. To Nietzsche, this is an unavoidable part of being human, but so are art and lightness. The necessity of pairing happy and dark thoughts has always been a hallmark of Pierce’s work. The Drums’ 2010 debut single “Best Friend” captures that idea frankly: “You were my best friend, and then you died.” They keep up that duality on “Abysmal Thoughts,” but with a bit more seriousness and attention to detail than on previous albums.
Pierce has always been upfront about the influence the Drums have drawn from indie pop favorites the Wake and others from the Factory and Creation Records scenes in 1980s UK. And this album features plenty of the glittery guitars beloved by indie pop purists, most notably on the single “Blood Under My Belt,” which goes spelunking in a chord with a few different pedals. A common complaint about the Drums’ previous albums was that the production was fatally thin, their anthemic songs sounding a mile wide and an inch deep. It made them seem like they missed the point of why the Wake were so damn good—their magnum opus Here Comes Everybody is a work of gentle, crisp production, where the guitars are kaleidoscopically layered, and the drum machines have almost organic imperfections. Here, Pierce takes that legacy more seriously, and it’s most striking on the margins: the skittering snare on “Head of the Horse,” the sly saxophone on “Your Tenderness,” or the Chelsea Girls-evoking woodwinds on “If All We Share (Means Nothing).”
There are also the indelible markings of the Smiths all over, especially in the way the songs make room for more complicated basslines and slippery arpeggiated chords than your average rock band. That being said, there really isn’t any anxiety of influence on this album; Pierce is assured as a songwriter. From the beginning, his songs have featured frenetic rhythm sections and lyrics that split the difference between hyper-specific and utilitarian. (Looking back now, even his old band Elkland’s notable 2005 single “Apart” is recognizable as a Pierce song.) His unconventional bard’s spirit comes out on the upbeat and fuzzy “Shoot the Sun Down,” whose chorus consists mainly of the line “I put a blanket over my face” as a strangely universal way to describe a terrible hangover.
Like the best bands of the C86 era, the Drums craft these songs by taking a basic template and perfecting it. “Abysmal Thoughts” distinguishes itself by adding in a dark sense of humor. “Are U Fucked” essentially takes the chord progression from the Cure’s “Killing an Arab,” marries it to disco percussion, and really rides hard on the title in its refrain: “Are you feeling fucked, are you feeling fucked right now?” The result is a would-be a banger at a party that you don’t especially want to be invited to.
In drawing inspiration from cult bands, the Drums are starting to make records for an audience that is looking for something pretty specific—that particular balance of darkness and light, of guitar effects and tight songwriting. On “Abysmal Thoughts,” they do it exceptionally well. The title track is the last song, and it repeats that phrase again and again, Pierce’s voice in a gospel cadence, a cowbell and a slide whistle accenting it, letting a listener know the good will come back again. | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | June 21, 2017 | 7.4 | ee578eca-d605-45b3-9dc2-1863b305cd48 | Erin Vanderhoof | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-vanderhoof/ | null |
The Brooklyn art-rock band continues to be proudly over the top on its relentless and theatrical second album. | The Brooklyn art-rock band continues to be proudly over the top on its relentless and theatrical second album. | Godcaster: Godcaster | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/godcaster-godcaster/ | Godcaster | For Godcaster, everything has to be magnified or it’s not worth examining. Every aspect of the Brooklyn collective seems designed to overstimulate: their six eclectic members, their out-of-breath, cosmological lyrics, and their commitment to song titles no one has thought of before (example: “Tiger Surrogate Hunts the Praying Mantis”). They’re a band clothed in aureate imagery and dedicated to taking itself seriously. “We’re Godcaster and we’re the greatest band in the world,” vocalist Judson Kolk announced at a recent New York show, with a matter-of-fact calmness. After cutting their teeth in the Philadelphia DIY circuit, Godcaster have evolved to craft inventive art-rock on a monumental scale, powerful enough to lend credence to their confidence.
While their live show is a large part of the appeal, Godcaster also translate their furious, youthful energy into their studio recordings. Beating within their self-titled second album is the heartbeat of English art-punk band Cardiacs, combined with a mania like what would happen if Deerhoof started a cult. Godcaster is not background music: These songs feel like hot, hellish wastelands, and listening all the way through is an active exercise. “Didactic Flashing Antidote” is a relentless 10-minute journey that resounds in your chest. The dirge-like “Death’s Head Eyed Hawkmoth” could soundtrack a demented Western; Kolk’s voice meanders and pleads while the band remains impossibly steady, instilling hysteria and helplessness.
Godcaster’s early work—a spate of recorded-live EPs in their Philadelphia days and 2020’s Long-Haired Locusts—was looser and more capricious, like a band that formed in of Montreal message boards. But as they continue to mature, they’ve slipped into something that feels religious and hypnotic. Vocal duties rotate between members of the band, and their onstage delivery is reminiscent of a strange off-Broadway play. Elephant 6-esque lyrics like “I see lovers speak in tone/Smell anthurium’s pheromones” and “Ecstatic reaction/In fleshly contraption” are urgently cast against a background informed by Native American and Greco-Roman folklore. To Godcaster, the image of love is never anything less than exploding planets or weeping demigods.
There’s a relentlessness to Godcaster’s magnitude that occasionally verges on monotony. While their new, more focused sound is effective—they’re safely out of “elevated jam band” territory—by the time you reach the 11-minute-plus “Draw Breath Cry Out,” it feels like they might have dealt all their cards. But when flutist Von Lee sings on the stripped-down penultimate track “Pluto Shoots His Gaze Into the Sun,” her gossamer voice is arresting all by itself. “How beautiful/My heart is full,” she sings. It’s a vital breath at the end of Godcaster, a vibrant contrasting wash before you plunge back into the brutality of closer “Gut Sink Moan.” On Godcaster, the band maintains its characteristic mayhem and mythology while continuing to diversify: You can already hear how far they’ll keep pushing forward. | 2023-03-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Ramp Local | March 13, 2023 | 7.4 | ee596b57-58d8-493e-9343-a298c9bb5b49 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
The legendary 84-year old composer, accordionist, and electronic pioneer reaffirms her mastery at conjuring three-dimensional worlds from simple words on a page. | The legendary 84-year old composer, accordionist, and electronic pioneer reaffirms her mastery at conjuring three-dimensional worlds from simple words on a page. | Pauline Oliveros: Four Meditations / Sound Geometries | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22158-four-meditations-sound-geometries/ | Four Meditations / Sound Geometries | Pauline Oliveros is a virtuoso at creating environments for musicians to explore. The legendary 84-year old composer, accordionist, and electronic pioneer is perhaps best known for her tape experiments from the ’60s, but her musical scores are just as innovative. Most of them contain text rather than musical notation, and eschew hard-and-fast directions in favor of poetic guidelines to be interpreted. In other words, she doesn’t tell people what to play, but how to play—and just as importantly, how to listen. Given this creative freedom, her collaborators often respond with something that’s less like music to passively listen to than spaces your mind can enter and probe.
The two lengthy pieces on *Four Meditations / Sound Geometries *are prime examples of how Oliveros conjures three-dimensional worlds from simple words on a page. In the case of “Sound Geometries,” the music is literally 3-D, as Oliveros filters the sounds of Belgian ensemble Musique Nouvelles through her surround-sound based Expanded Instrument System. “Four Meditations” is wide and deep, too, due in part to the liberty she grants the musicians. As Oliveros puts it in her score, “Since there is no written part to watch, all the performers’ attention can be given to sound and invention.”
The main focus of attention for listeners of “Four Meditations” will likely be the voice of Ione, Oliveros’ long-time collaborator. Though her fellow musicians all make vital contributions, Ione’s vocals are like a bright star around which all other sounds orbit. She’s adept at glossolalia-like stretches of abstract sound, improvising in the same league as expert voice experimenters such as Yoko Ono and C. Spencer Yeh. But her use of literal language is just as important.
At one point Ione slowly intones “I am who I am,” then flips that into “I am who you are,” seeming to comment on music that inverts definitions and blurs boundaries. In fact, much of “Four Meditations” is about convergence and divergence, as the musicians continually connect and separate. In that sense, Oliveros’ guidelines for a section called “The Tuning Meditation”*—*where she gives musicians the option of “playing a pitch that no one else is playing,” “just listening,” or “tuning in unison”—pretty well characterizes the entirety of “Four Meditations.”
A similar dynamic marks “Sound Geometries,” but its effects are subtler. Compared to “Four Mediations,” it’s more familiar sounding, at times evoking a well-honed jazz group. All the rolling horns, pointillist piano, and moaning strings are continually inventive, though sometimes easy to lose track of (one movement bears the apt title “Arriving Anywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere”). But that just means you have to listen closely to discover the riches of “Sound Geometries,” something that Oliveros—who, after all, created an entire institute called Deep Listening—surely intended.
It’s rather stunning that work this open and free of constraint can sound so calm. Though the tension that comes from loud, energetic improv can be thrilling, there’s something equally compelling about music that applies pressure while maintaining patience. The best word for it is probably “hypnotic,” but that doesn’t do justice to the way Oliveros puts a spell on your ears. She draws you so far into the environment of *Four Meditations / Sound Geometries *that you might forget you don’t actually live there. | 2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Sub Rosa | July 22, 2016 | 7.4 | ee5c27ae-79e3-441d-99c3-3a7747da87d5 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The new album from Ellinor Olovsdotter, the Swedish one-woman outfit known as Elliphant, finds a happy middle ground that ditches the more hard-edged dancehall sound present on her early EPs for a sun-flecked, light reggae tone. Featuring guest spots from Azealia Banks, Twin Shadow, Skrillex, and others. | The new album from Ellinor Olovsdotter, the Swedish one-woman outfit known as Elliphant, finds a happy middle ground that ditches the more hard-edged dancehall sound present on her early EPs for a sun-flecked, light reggae tone. Featuring guest spots from Azealia Banks, Twin Shadow, Skrillex, and others. | Elliphant: Living Life Golden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21710-living-life-golden/ | Living Life Golden | Nailing a breakout record is a tricky beast. There are tried-and-true methods to assure that your latest record reaches new heights, both commercially and critically. Lock down some high profile collaborations, concoct a palatable, mainstream sound, maybe secure a promotional sync here and there. Think of artists like the Weeknd or Sia—five years ago, their present level of stardom would have seemed somewhat improbable. Living Life Golden, the new album from Ellinor Olovsdotter, the Swedish one-woman outfit known as Elliphant, is a mostly gratifying, albeit calculated, attempt at gaining that level of success.
In her short career (her 2013 debut album, A Good Idea, was released in Sweden only), Elliphant's sound has shifted schizophrenically from dancehall to reggae to synth-pop to EDM to Scandipop. It's easy to see where she has garnered comparisons to M.I.A. and Santigold, but until now lacked the consistency to rival those more established artists. Living Life Golden finds a happy middle ground where Elliphant ditches the more hard-edged dancehall sound present on her early EPs for a sun-flecked, light reggae tone. It flourishes, while still hammers home a more slickly-produced, pop structure. In a post-Iggy Azalea world, a Swedish woman rapping in a Jamaican-esque semi-patois has a broad potential to bristle, and it must be said, Elliphant has always walked that line rather dangerously. Luckily, on tracks like “Love Me Long,” a collaboration with Major Lazer and Jamaican reggae superstar Gyptian, she delivers her vocal with such acumen that it saves the songs from pastiche. “Love Me Long” is a relaxed, passionate duet laid on top of a glitchy, shuffling dancehall beat, and when Elliphant and Gyptian sing to each other, "Do you ever get lonely / Do you ever get stoned?" and “Do you ever feel lonely?/ Do you ever feel stoned?,” it's difficult to reproach either of them, because what is a reggae love song but that exact lyric?
“Everybody," an upbeat, off-kilter track featuring Azealia Banks is another highlight, and ironically, it could be Elliphant's low-key ticket to a new level of popularity. Banks' entire career could be described as rocky at the best of times, but recently she's found a much-needed second wind, which is reflected in her energetic verse. Matching Elliphant beat for beat, they sound like twin sisters word-battling during recess, and one could easily imagine them starring together in a bad girl, “Telephone”-style video. Another somewhat left-field feature on Living Life Golden is Twin Shadow, who lends his writing and wall of layered guitars to “Where Is Home,” which would fit as well into his discography as it does on this record. Like most of the album, it showcases the eclecticism that Elliphant has been trying to capture since she first started releasing music. In fact, the record's only true low point comes at the hands of frequent collaborator Skrillex, on a track called “Spoon Me” that is honestly so toneless it careens straight past mediocre into the realm of the bizarre. Over a light EDM beat Skrillex could have tapped out on his phone, Elliphant raves on about the merits of a good cuddle, somehow uttering the line: “Spoon me, baby, you can't spoon too tight/ Hands on my boobie yeah/ Dick on my booty now.” I'm laughing, but it's not funny.
Whether or not Living Life Golden will actually work as a breakout for Elliphant remains to be seen; it's not a home run. But it's enough of an evolution for her that it could finally open some new doors for an artist whose potential has been somewhat limited by her stabs at sonic diversity. With the absolute best aspects of her pop musicianship present, a little bit of luck could see her next record perfect her sound even further. | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Record Company TEN / Kemosabe | March 30, 2016 | 6.7 | ee5cb7e0-47be-4f66-b1fc-f61ae056356c | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
This remarkably consistent, 25-track collection of bits and bytes from assorted past Oval eras flies by in an easygoing blur, rendering sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor that's missing from even the project's classic records. | This remarkably consistent, 25-track collection of bits and bytes from assorted past Oval eras flies by in an easygoing blur, rendering sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor that's missing from even the project's classic records. | Oval: OvalDNA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16138-ovaldna/ | OvalDNA | Glitch is one of those microgenres that seemed to disappear halfway through the last decade. When the German outfit Oval-- early on reduced to founding member Markus Popp-- made its return in 2010 with O, it was hard to decide how to react. Especially since O was one of its most difficult and fussy efforts yet, and largely divorced from Oval's previously established and instantly recognizable aesthetic as heard on landmarks like 94 Diskont and Ovalcommers. With a palette based on the sound of live instruments, O lacked some of the algorithmic wizardry of Popp's best work and was a fatiguingly lengthy listen either way. You'd be forgiven for thinking that OvalDNA, coming just a year later and clocking in with another 25 tracks-- and this after the complementary 15-track 12" Oh-- is something like overkill.
Here's the surprise: OvalDNA is actually a collection of bits and bytes from assorted Oval eras past. The even bigger surprise? While it indeed sounds like the old Oval we know and love, there's nothing even remotely scatterbrained or assorted about this one. Not only is OvalDNA remarkably consistent and thematically sound, it's so well-sequenced that its 25 tracks fly by in a glorious, easygoing blur, a far cry from that fatal fragmentation that ate away at O. Its variety renders these sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor missing from even early records like Systemisch. In a way, it's the best of both Oval worlds. Included in the package is a DVD with ten bonus tracks, a music video, a documentary, and 2000 AIFF files of sounds and elements from the entirety of Popp's musical output "intended for music producers." Okay, so maybe it's a little overkill, but coming from an artist who made a public installation inviting people to render their own interpretations of his work (as part of 2000's Ovalprocess), it shouldn't really come as a surprise either.
Like so much of this music, sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not the decay and destruction that pries apart the layers is accidental or planned, but here the manipulation feels effortless, executed with a smart and steady hand. There are many varieties of Oval on offer, though it's most often a warm-hued, even honeyed sound palette rather than the acerbic distortion of, say, Ovalcommers. While some tracks like "Savvy" do focus on harsher, more challenging sounds, even these-- or the hushed, rushed thermal swooshing of "70 Kino" and its choked string section-- feel oddly accommodating. OvalDNA doesn't dip into the same well of asceticism as the conceptually driven sound-design experiments you'll find on labels like Mille Plateaux or Raster-Noton; instead, each stutter and skip feels melodically driven, each sample caught and clipped mid-moment like a key to some larger world of musical delights that we're given glimpses of but are never actually led to-- dig the teases at jungle on "Mare Fax"-- on account of the album's sprightly pace.
Even if it can be a tease, some moments on OvalDNA are downright welcoming: It's hard to think of anything from Oval since the legendary "Do While" as beautiful as "Australasia". One of the album's more compositionally complete tracks, it juggles jerkily plucked strings, organs that whir to life before being pulled apart into groaning rumbles, and drums that stutter across the stereo spectrum at random. That might sound like a mess, but the elements just slightly coalesce to form a stirring, heart-tugging refrain gently morphing over the track's three-and-a-half minutes, a chief example of the accidental alchemy of OvalDNA. "Octaeder 0.2", which formed the centerpiece to Oval's live contribution to the Henri Pousseur tribute 4 Parabolic Mixes, proves the emotional potential of these flurries of compressed ones and zeroes, while the more recent Oval material is at least coincidentally referenced with a number of tracks that make live-instrument samples their focus ("Credit Line"), stumbling on an odd hybrid of acoustic and computerized sounds in the process, like twang rendered with right angles.
Approachability is one thing, and OvalDNA has it in spades, but there's also the issue of relevance: Can a veteran act in a largely outmoded genre still command attention with an outtakes collection? Certainly, any fan of Oval (particularly those lapsed after O) will find a lot to love in OvalDNA's gentle reassurances, but even for a newcomer, these sounds are idiosyncratic and stimulating enough to get lost in. OvalDNA is curiously timeless, as if these tracks were encased in amber, still holding that intriguingly alien gleam and shine as back in Oval's halcyon days, even polished up a little nicer this time. It might not be something we knew we still needed, but at the least, OvalDNA is a solid addition to the canon of one of the most innovative electronic acts of the 1990s. | 2012-01-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Shitkatapult | January 12, 2012 | 8.3 | ee6009bd-dbe1-4417-b8dd-f505d55fbee1 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper leaves the candy-coated comfort zone of his previous mixtape and stands out in a competitive rap lane. | The Atlanta rapper leaves the candy-coated comfort zone of his previous mixtape and stands out in a competitive rap lane. | Tony Shhnow: Kill Streak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-shhnow-kill-streak/ | Kill Streak | If Tony Shhnow had been a part of the Atlanta rap scene over a decade ago, he probably would have been laying down verses in Zaytoven’s mother’s basement. The twenty-something-year-old raps as if he spent his teenage years immersed in the music of Southern trap stars like Gucci Mane, Bankroll Fresh, Young Scooter, and that era of Soulja Boy when he really liked Lex Luger beats. Regardless of the heavy inspiration, Tony doesn’t quite make music that fits neatly into any subgenre. On his 2020 mixtape Dis Should Hold U Over, he raps about the same hustles that have been at the core of his region’s most recognizable hip-hop for generations, though it sounds like it takes place in a fantasy of rainbows and unicorns because of bubbly Cashcache production. This juxtaposition has helped Tony carve out a lane for himself in the underground of arguably rap’s most competitive city.
But in an unexpected twist, Tony Shhnow abandons this candy-coated comfort zone on Kill Streak. The album is entirely produced by versatile New Jersey beatmaker GRiMM Doza, who laces Tony with brooding instrumentals that meet somewhere in the middle of Dilla-influenced beat loops and the East Coast flash of Dame Grease. It’s an extreme shift.
Before Kill Streak, Tony’s songs were more of a mood than anything else, and it was less about what he was saying and more about his slick delivery. But that’s not the case here; it’s almost like a long radio freestyle with a rotating selection of loops and DJ drops that resemble the devilish Evil Empire tags. The album also disregards regional rap barriers. It’s not often you hear of a rapper opting to drastically stray from production with local ties. (This is part of what made a collaboration like Migos and Alchemist feel like such a novelty.) But Tony’s switch-up feels earnest and not just for the sake of being unique. Most importantly, he seamlessly transfers his Southern flair to Doza’s chilly beats. “Pistol in my jeans, this bitch hold up my pants/I’m so in love with money in public, we hold hands,” says Tony on “SFX Room,” in a laid-back flow that would be just as effective on standard Atlanta fare as it is here.
On a few occasions, Tony sounds out of his element. Tracks like “Palm Reader” and “DOD,” on the backend of Kill Streak, feel as if they were originally a capellas and forcibly merged with the production. Nevertheless, Tony Shhnow and GRiMM Doza catch a groove. “I’m from the street, ain’t never had shit, don’t know how to treat the fans/I know how to bag work, flip money, and use my fuckin’ hands,” raps Tony on “Many Men,” flexing his wordplay on a Doza beat that sounds made to play in your earbuds through a brutal walk to the corner store in the Northeast winter. And “Waist Deep” shows how the pair are able to complement each other without having to temper their love for their respective regional influences: Doza’s gloomy beat would have ended up on Coke Wave in another timeline, and Tony rhymes like the student of Gucci he is. Collectively, the two embrace their roots, even as they venture into unfamiliar territory. | 2021-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 15, 2021 | 7.5 | ee743136-bf78-411d-b8ce-c20228daa60d | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
As a lifelong Midwesterner just back from my first trip to New York-- my mind all abuzz with comparisons, my ... | As a lifelong Midwesterner just back from my first trip to New York-- my mind all abuzz with comparisons, my ... | Jim O’Rourke: Insignificance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6040-insignificance/ | Insignificance | As a lifelong Midwesterner just back from my first trip to New York-- my mind all abuzz with comparisons, my heart torn between the city I know and love and the city I'd only just begun to discover-- the last thing I needed was to arrive back in Chicago to the news that Jim O'Rourke, one of the city's finest and most ubiquitous musicians was taking off for the Big Apple, leaving nothing but a string of bile-flavored words about the Windy City and its musicians in his wake.
And then along came the new album. From the very start, Insignificance comes across as yet another spit in the face, as O'Rourke's ever-steady voice intones the following: "Don't believe a word I say/ Never thought you would anyway/ I may be insincere/ But it's all downhill from here." Upon hearing this, I was furious. His initial comments-- which essentially left the city's music scene for long-dead-- were bad enough, but now he seemed to be asking me to ignore them, to write them off as, well, insignificant. What gall. This was where I drew the line.
Immediately I conjured an image of O'Rourke the Rock Star. It wasn't just the uncharacteristically loud electric guitar and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am drums that burst from the speakers the moment I popped in Insignificance and pressed play. It was the lyrics. I've always had a tremendous amount of respect for O'Rourke the musician, no matter my feelings about O'Rourke the media figure, and I've always been thankful that the two have never crossed paths. But Insignificance crosses that line again and again. "If I seem to you a bit remote/ You'll feel better if you call me a misanthrope/ Well, what ever floats your boat/ But as for me, I'd rather sink my own," he continues on the album opener, "All Downhill From Here," just as the feedback gives way to calm vibes and piano. While O'Rourke's lyrics typically revel in playful ambiguity, these come across as a dreadfully obvious response to his own less-than-favorable image. Frankly, I hadn't the patience.
While generally less envelope-pushing then his more difficult-to-find work, O'Rourke's string of Drag City releases have always served as an opportunity to try on an assortment of masks. Bad Timing was the John Fahey tribute; Eureka the ode to the lost days of grand Bacharachian orchestration; Halfway to a Threeway a short but pleasant acoustic interlude; and now-- judging from the opening moments of Insignificance-- we'd reached Jim O'Rourke's rock n' roll phase.
The lyrics on Insignifigance initially seemed to be those of a man overestimating his own importance, even as the album title suggests otherwise. Pleas to the public to "get off my case" may work for Thom Yorke, but Jim O'Rourke, talented as he might be, hardly carries the kind of cache for distressed-woe-is-me-rockstar-anthems. Maybe labeling the package Insignificance is intended as a signifier that O'Rourke is in on this joke. Maybe the title is intended to suggest that we've been taking the music, the lyrics, and the bold statements a bit too seriously. But, self-aware or not, lyrics like these come across as more than a bit self-indulgent, which makes the music, at times, that much more difficult to embrace.
Which is a shame, because Insignificance sounds good. Sure, the arrangements are simpler and more rock-based than any of his previous efforts, bearing a resemblance to his production work with Smog, but not to any of his own material. Yet, again, O'Rourke proves himself to be an apt musical chameleon, every bit as adept at Elvis Costello-style rock songs as he is at more left-field arrangements. These may be pop songs, but they're hardly missing the signature O'Rourke touch-- they may start with over-amplified guitars, but they all give way to something else, be it harrowing steel-pedal and harmonica, or a long blast of feedback. And of course, a back-up band that includes Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on guitar and harmonica, Chicago Underground's Rob Mazurek on cornet and Ken Vandermark on saxophone doesn't hurt O'Rourke's cause any.
And so, the musical arrangements refusing to leave the confines of my brain, I got to thinking. Ever since the international shit hit the fan a few months back, I've been marching about telling all manner of people to try to understand your enemy's point of view before you label them as "enemy." So, rather than take the label "hypocrite," I stepped back. I gave Insignificance another shot. And another. And after a while I realized that it isn't the smirking, well-calculated affront to me and my hometown that I'd originally thought it to be. Lurking behind these spiteful lyrics is an uncharacteristically human portrait of a man caught between his obligations to one city and the seemingly infinite possibilities offered by another. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could relate to Jim O'Rourke.
In its second half, Insignificance mellows out, suggesting a return to the relaxed vibe of Halfway to a Threeway. On the slow, acoustic number "Good Times," O'Rourke sings, "I'd like to raise the Titanic here/ Take a walk/ Down its molded streets/ And feel right at home/ 'Cause the dead don't talk," and the listener is left completely in the dark as to whether "home" refers to New York or Chicago.
On "Therefore I Am," O'Rourke sings, "Me, I've traveled 'round the world/ I've seen so many things/ Why'm I talking to you?" His voice is as calm and collected as voices come, writing off the insult as a joke, but the music-- built around a simple but forceful repeated guitar riff-- betrays him, threatening to call him on his bluff at any moment.
Jim O'Rourke may not always be likable, but Insignificance makes him real. And ultimately, this is far more important. I may still be irked at O'Rourke, and I still feel the sting when I hear lines like, "It's quite a gamble to speak out of place/ Those things'll kill ya/ And so could your face/ These things I say might seem kinda cruel/ So here's something from my heart to you/ Looking at you/ Reminds me of looking at the sun/ And how the blind are so damned lucky." But now that's all beyond the point. Jim and I don't agree on much, but Insignificance is catchy enough-- and real enough-- to make me look beyond all that.
So maybe in the end, the title Insignificance doesn't refer to O'Rourke's lyrics or to his boasts and claims. Instead, maybe it refers to a fragile man trying to fool himself into believing that uprooting himself after decades in one place is just that: insignificant. The result is a shockingly insightful and resonant look at the workings of a musician generally more given to hiding behind absurdly twisted turns of musical phrase than letting us in on the inner-workings of his mind. | 2001-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | November 27, 2001 | 8 | ee7c047a-a323-4f38-ac68-2c6444e0b690 | David M. Pecoraro | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-m. pecoraro/ | null |
The K-pop girl group’s enjoyable but weirdly dated EP offers a mishmash of EDM styles ahead of their big Coachella debut. | The K-pop girl group’s enjoyable but weirdly dated EP offers a mishmash of EDM styles ahead of their big Coachella debut. | BLACKPINK: Kill This Love EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blackpink-kill-this-love-ep/ | Kill This Love EP | Right now, BLACKPINK are the biggest K-pop girl group in the world. The rise of these four women has been precisely engineered by their label YG Entertainment—the South Korean entertainment conglomerate responsible for launching the careers of K-pop stars Big Bang, 2NE1, PSY, and many others—which cherry-picked a multicultural group to appeal to a worldwide audience. Only vocalist Jisoo was born and raised in Korea; vocalist Rosé was born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Korean-born rapper Jennie was raised in New Zealand (both are fluent in English), and main dancer and rapper Lisa lived in Bangkok until she was 15. The girls perform in Korean and English, then record Japanese versions of each of their songs to maximize accessibility in multiple markets.
It’s been said that the decades-long Hallyu wave of Korean pop-cultural exports (which includes K-pop and K-dramas) is a government-funded and endorsed agenda to boost the nation’s global soft power and economy. But between BLACKPINK’s English-language advantage and the current explosion of global pop music in the United States, there has never been a female idol group more readily primed to follow BTS’ footsteps and fully cross over in America.
Last June, BLACKPINK’s U.S. takeover began when their massive international hit “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du” peaked at No. 55 on the singles chart. And this weekend, they will be the first K-pop girl group to perform at Coachella, four women spreading the gospel of K-pop to a mass of drunken festival-goers and easily influenced Instagram clout-chasers through perfectly synchronized choreography and simple hooks. Their new EP is specifically timed to make sure that BLACKPINK is able to convert the maximum number of Americans into Blinks (what they call their fans) ahead of the festival and the North American leg of their world tour.
Kill This Love EP is a collection of five songs that exist largely to promote one massive single. The title track is the clear centerpiece, a trap-EDM banger with intense TNGHT horns and militant snares. Taking on a femme supervillain persona à la Taylor Swift‘s “Bad Blood,” the girls rap and sing about their determination to end a toxic relationship as if it’s a life-or-death situation, although without a catchy Swiftian hook. The song, like the rest of the songs here, is only half of the full BLACKPINK experience. The accompanying music video cranks up the drama, as the girls, clad in Tomb Raider and Suicide Squad-inspired outfits, whip out hip-hop moves in the middle of a giant bear trap. It’s such a confident and spectacular rehashing of pre-existing Western iconography that’s been popular in the past three or so years that BLACKPINK almost trick you into thinking that they’re presenting something completely brand new.
Though BLACKPINK can sing and dance with precision, the production of Kill This Love is also weirdly dated, like it was crafted earlier in the decade and then forgotten in a time capsule for five years. “Don’t Know What to Do” could have been a great pop song when EDM songs with acoustic guitar like Flo Rida’s “Whistle” were topping the charts or when that dolphin-flute synth sound was all the rage. Then, Kill This Love is confusingly rounded out by the country-tinged pop ballad “Hope Not,” which features heartfelt performances from all the members, but seems out of place within the rest of the project.
BLACKPINK’s core philosophy is rooted in mixing the hard and the soft, a concept fitting of their name. But because the sonic elements here are such polar opposites, it seems like another A&R tactic to ram in every genre, mood, and feeling to make the group marketable to the widest audience possible. Isolated from the visual components that complete the K-pop experience, listening to the EP feels like whiplash. This is further exacerbated by the fact that BLACKPINK is a rare K-pop idol group who doesn’t have a clear leader or front person. The individual talents and personality of each member are allowed to shine, encouraging fans to obsess over the specifics of their favorite member—even if it results in a bit of a genre mishmash.
Though BLACKPINK’s music isn’t groundbreaking or innovative or even that great, they’re still fulfilling YG Entertainment and South Korea’s larger mission to build a cultural presence in the rest of the world. To judge BLACKPINK solely as musicians would be like critiquing a United Nations ambassador for something as trivial as how well they can tie their shoe. They are specifically packaged to be representatives of South Korea and appeal to as many people as possible; they are edgy but not offensive, soft but not pushovers, and they were trained for years specifically so they could be flawless when they reach an American stage as big as Coachella. If their music isn’t changing the game, it’s on purpose. | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | YG Entertainment | April 11, 2019 | 6.2 | ee8064c5-d9b3-4bbd-8d11-6341ac7f0899 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
The Montreal ambient musician’s albums all resemble each other in their broad strokes and abiding stillness. They are beautiful, terrifying, and bittersweet all at once. | The Montreal ambient musician’s albums all resemble each other in their broad strokes and abiding stillness. They are beautiful, terrifying, and bittersweet all at once. | Kyle Bobby Dunn: From Here to Eternity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kyle-bobby-dunn-from-here-to-eternity/ | From Here to Eternity | Kyle Bobby Dunn’s music is often described as “ambient drone,” but where that style can be austere and even forbidding, the Montreal musician’s work is warm and welcoming; where drones are often static, Dunn’s music is powered by deep harmonic movements, as fundamental as the tides, and just as imperceptible. His albums, all of which resemble each other in their broad strokes and abiding stillness, sometimes feel like invitations to disappear into a mood, the precise nature of which might vary depending upon your own headspace: contemplative, beatific, serene, sorrowful, perhaps some sublime amalgam of all those things and more.
Or maybe they’re just invitations to disappear, period. An early album was called Music for Medication—glance quickly at the title and you might think of yoga or Zen, but no, that’s “medication” with a “c,” and the word is well suited to his blissfully horizontal pieces, their promise of both sweet release and its bitter, mortal kin. For all the obvious beauty of his work, with its gentle play of tension and resolution, there is also a terrifying finality implicit in pieces whose broad arc threatens to outlast us all.
Keyed to a time beyond time, Dunn’s recordings tend to go long: 2012’s Bring Me the Head of Kyle Bobby Dunn, an IV drip of liquid tones, meted out 15 tracks in the space of two hours; 2014’s equally drifting Kyle Bobby Dunn & the Infinite Sadness stretched slightly longer. From Here to Eternity, his first album in five years, runs almost three hours. The shortest piece is less than two minutes, the longest more than 23, but unless you’re really paying close attention, you will not notice these durations; all his tracks are but shadows of a single permanence.
It’s difficult if not impossible to say how he has made these pieces; the source material sounds acoustic, with the rich, buzzing resonance of strings, piano, oboe, and bowed metal, but smeared until there are no audible attacks, no evident origins whatsoever, just sounds that have always been there and always will be, moving like kelp or clouds. This is hardly a music without precedent—there are similarities to the work of Tim Hecker, the Caretaker, and, especially, Stars of the Lid and A Winged Victory for the Sullen—but something about the gracefulness of Dunn’s signature, as well as its inky intensity, is his alone.
What does become apparent over time is the range he manages, even with such broadly consistent materials and themes. Despite the uniformly glacial pace, it becomes clear that not all glaciers are alike: There are tracks that sound like the instant after a church bell has stopped ringing, stretched toward infinity; there are elegiac pieces reminiscent of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic; there are environments that build from darkness to blinding light, like the last moments of a life played out in slow motion. A few are deeply affecting for reasons I can’t pinpoint.
“Years Later Theme” and “La Stationnement de finders,” with their gently detuned layers and air of resignation, are two of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard.
Dunn’s approach has remained so consistent across his career that the difference between this album and its predecessors is one of degree, not type, but it’s safe to say that From Here to Eternity plumbs newfound depths: There is a coppery burnish that was not there before, a tendency to float just beyond the bounds of our usual limits of musical perception. There is a sense of presence here that’s hard to put your finger on—an undercurrent, a shadow, something felt but not heard. It’s particularly noticeable in the closing “Eternity, the Stars & You,” an 18-minute track that starts out sounding like an ambient remix of the Cocteau Twins or This Mortal Coil: Deep in the mix, way below the shimmer of what might be reeds or hurdy gurdy, rumbles something like the drone of a faraway airplane. The sound intensifies and the harmonic intervals of his chords collapse, become dissonant. There might be voices in there; they sound like angels wailing. It’s beautiful and terrifying all at once, and it just builds like that until, some invisible peak having been reached, it fades swiftly to blackness. To try to capture the infinite on tape is a fool’s errand; what is so rewarding—so honest—about Dunn’s attempt is his willingness to look beyond his majestic vistas and stare directly into the sun. | 2019-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Past Inside the Present | June 1, 2019 | 8 | ee83234d-951b-4511-ae44-a16eca5f716e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Philadelphia singer-songwriter Rosali Middleman constructs verdant, contemplative rock songs whose soft exteriors conceal a steely core of cool observations about heartache and vulnerability. | Philadelphia singer-songwriter Rosali Middleman constructs verdant, contemplative rock songs whose soft exteriors conceal a steely core of cool observations about heartache and vulnerability. | Rosali : Trouble Anyway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rosali-trouble-anyway/ | Trouble Anyway | Our world is divided into binaries, useful and otherwise: female and male, hot and cold, weak and strong, hard and soft. The structures they offer for organizing our thoughts and lives are simple, if reliably interrupted by reality. And sometimes we could all use a break from them. On her second album, Trouble Anyway, Philadelphia singer-songwriter Rosali Middleman rejects binary thinking with ease in a series of verdant, contemplative rock numbers. Within their soft exteriors, each of her songs has a steely core built from lyrics that examine heartache and vulnerability.
The central theme of Trouble Anyway is right there in the title: Middleman touches on trouble with love, with life, with figuring your way through the world. But she manages all of it with a sense of calm that ripples across the record, keeping her tone cool and even-keeled for the duration. Even a sighing line like, “The trouble I found lying in your arms is the trouble I’d be troubled with anyway,” from “The Trouble,” feels like a distant, clear-eyed assessment—Middleman doesn’t seem to regret her romantic ordeal. On “Who’s to Say,” she reclaims her power by challenging the roles foisted on her by an unnamed antagonist. She ends the song by coolly noting that she’s no longer lonely without his restrictive presence in her life.
But Middleman’s calm doesn’t stem from indifference. Rather, it feels like she’s laying her cards on the table in order to narrate her own game of emotional solitaire. Instead of conveying her feelings through grand gestures, Middleman reveals her heart in the granular details of her songs: She sings the title of “I Wanna Know” with the familiar tension of carefully tempered disappointment, acknowledging the nagging feelings of futility that accompany heartbreak in the lines, “Tears, they rolled away/Cried a lake/What am I today?/Cry a little longer.”
Middleman’s 2016 debut, Out of Love, was relaxed and mostly acoustic, save for unobtrusive electric guitar and light percussion. But for her Trouble Anyway backing band, she recruited a larger cohort of talented pals, including harpist Mary Lattimore, Nathan Bowles on banjo and drums, more drums from the War on Drugs’ Charlie Hall, and guitars courtesy of Purling Hiss’ Mike Pollize and Paul Sukeena of Spacin’. Collectively, they animate Middleman’s songs without overpowering them. On the eight-minute “Rise to Fall,” she benefits from the crew’s heady instrumental heft as she sings about uncertainty and alarm; the track’s jagged guitar lines, matched with flecks of harp and violin, capture an impressive range of nuanced emotion.
“If I Was Your Heart” is the album's glimmering jewel, striking a satisfying balance between lighthearted charm and profound sincerity. Lattimore’s sparkling harp touches make for a tasteful garnish atop the tune’s comfortable sway, and even as Middleman asks, “Who’s at fault for fading the lights?,” the music maintains a hopeful undercurrent. Middleman leaves the what-if of the titular refrain unanswered, and that lack of resolution feels refreshing—the song creates open-ended space for daydreaming rather than hammering for a hard answer.
Trouble Anyway only falters when tracks like “Who’s to Say” and “I Wanna Know” wander into extended outros that linger too long. But patience pays off, as Middleman leaves listeners room to contemplate their own tribulations throughout the record. Closing number “Maybe I’m Right” is its most stripped-down and succinct track, recalling Out of Love’s simplicity. It’s easy to share Middleman’s confidence, even on unsteady ground, as she offers a final mandate of sorts: “Starting to question the path of a line/Maybe I’m right.” She makes a convincing case. | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Scissor Tail / Spinster | July 14, 2018 | 7.2 | ee88cef3-d85a-4150-a898-2a48bd26f97c | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Back in early March, the New York group swelled to a septet for an intimate, unrehearsed gig at a Hudson Valley bar. Their intricately textured grooves have rarely sounded more dynamic. | Back in early March, the New York group swelled to a septet for an intimate, unrehearsed gig at a Hudson Valley bar. Their intricately textured grooves have rarely sounded more dynamic. | 75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band: Live at Tubby’s | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/75-dollar-bill-little-big-band-live-at-tubbys/ | Live at Tubby’s | There’s an anodyne moment on 75 Dollar Bill’s Live at Tubby’s that might’ve been scrubbed from the recording in another era. Before the final song, saxophonist Cheryl Kingan asks if anyone is headed after the show toward Catskill, about 30 miles up the Hudson River. A man in the audience offers her a ride; she sings back, “Amaaazing!” Then the band jumps into “WZN #3”—a nearly 25-minute journey that brushes up against the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” Henry Flynt’s drone work, and Pharoah Sanders’ playing on Ascension—as though her request was unremarkable.
Back then it was, at least for another few days. To end their 2020 tour of the Northeast, 75 Dollar Bill packed Tubby’s, a Hudson Valley bar and grill, to its 80-person capacity for an impromptu gig on March 7. Touring as a duo, guitarist Che Chen and drummer Rick Brown called some old friends to fill out the lineup, and without rehearsing, the septet, dubbed the 75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band, played a couple sets. This would be the last 75 Dollar Bill show for the foreseeable future.
Since forming in 2012, the New York band has typically emphasized texture over genre: Any given recording might encompass a dart thrown at the ECM catalog, a twister of fuzz guitar from the Western Sahara, a dispatch from Alice Coltrane’s ashram, or all of those combined. That texture is never richer for 75 Dollar Bill than it is on Live at Tubby’s, as the group expands infinitely within the boundaries of each composition.
It’s apparent early in the recording that there’s a special feeling in the room. Just as Brown and Chen are locked in, exploring space with the Little Big Band, the crowd is obviously thrilled to accompany the ensemble on its journey. Feeding off that communal energy, 75 Dollar Bill breathe new life into songs like “I’m Not Trying to Wake Up,” from 2016’s Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock. While the studio version is more polished—Live at Tubby’s is not the most professional live recording—the band’s performance is more dynamic here. Kingan accents Sue Garner’s basslines, creating a mud-thick effect, and Karen Waltuch’s improvised viola solos attack alongside Steve Maing and Chen’s ascending guitar runs. Brown, normally the lone rhythm section, thwacking hands and mallets into a plywood crate, is augmented by a live drummer. Together, they explode in a percussive blast near the end of the track, crescendoing into an Amon Düül-type acid-rock freakout. The studio version sounds like a dirge by comparison.
“Like Like Laundry” is a full 11 minutes shorter than the 33-minute studio version, but the live performance bursts at the seams as endless layers of improvisation unfold over a single mesmerizing riff. Chen’s masterful soloing is no longer the centerpiece, which is no knock on him. Instead, his guitar dances within Maing’s modal spirals as the dual percussionists build a swell of polyrhythms around them. It’s a dazzling, hypnotic effect, and the result is greater than the sum of its parts, evincing a palpable chemistry between the musicians, rehearsed or not.
Halfway through the record, Brown mentions that 75 Dollar Bill “isn’t really a covers band,” but nonetheless will play one in the spirit of the friends joining the duo onstage. “Friends and Neighbors” originally appeared on Ornette Coleman’s own impromptu live album Friends and Neighbors: Live at Prince Street, recorded at his downtown New York loft in 1970. It’s strange enough for Coleman, the architect of free jazz, to include vocals on a composition, and weirder still for the instrumental 75 Dollar Bill to pick precisely that track to cover live. But it’s perfect symmetry for a spontaneous jam session among friends almost exactly 50 years after Coleman’s recording. The band shouts in unison, over percussive stumbling: “Friends and neighbors, that’s where it’s at! Friends and neighbors, that’s a fact! Hand in hand, that's the goal! Hand in hand, that's the goal! All the world: soul, soul, soul!”
Today, that cover allows us, in our antiseptic bubbles, to imagine the beauty of human touch, saxophones spraying droplets, sharing a joint with a stranger. Live at Tubby’s is a time capsule that enables us to live in a world diametrically opposed to this one, back when kinship and proximity were inalienable and essential, and when hitching a ride with an audience member didn’t carry the implicit threat of contagion. Had the album been recorded a month earlier, perhaps it wouldn't have as powerful an effect as it does. It’s difficult to find serendipity in any of the last nine months, but Live at Tubby’s comes close. It’s a document from an archaic universe, a reminder of life before the plague year(s), and the promise of a rebuilt, but sadly distant, future.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Grapefruit | December 14, 2020 | 7.4 | ee8caf21-4d94-41aa-a6cd-9e435890e75a | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
On Peace Is the Mission, Major Lazer pierce out of their genre-blurring funk by cashing in and going full pop. Where Diplo and co.'s previous two full-lengths tried to mesh opposing forces, here they are finessed into no-nonsense stadium rattlers featuring the likes of Ellie Goulding, 2 Chainz, Pusha T, Travi$ Scott, and DJ Snake. | On Peace Is the Mission, Major Lazer pierce out of their genre-blurring funk by cashing in and going full pop. Where Diplo and co.'s previous two full-lengths tried to mesh opposing forces, here they are finessed into no-nonsense stadium rattlers featuring the likes of Ellie Goulding, 2 Chainz, Pusha T, Travi$ Scott, and DJ Snake. | Major Lazer: Peace Is the Mission | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20519-peace-is-the-mission/ | Peace Is the Mission | Major Lazer's image has always been a bit slippery. Having gone through a number of member and affiliate changes since UK producer Switch—one half of the founding production team, along with Diplo—jumped ship in 2011, their ever-evolving mission has been confusing, sloppy, and not entirely easy to nail down. Their debut album Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do was a singular artifact of Diplo's fascination with global dance music, for lack of a better catchall, for which he is often called out as an appropriator. Despite the fact that he and Switch worked on the album in Kingston and recruited dancehall bona fides for every track, from icons like Vybz Kartel and Mr. Vegas to up-and-comers like Brooklyn bashment luminary Ricky Blaze, it was still sticky with an undercurrent of tourism.
But with all of the pitfalls Major Lazer has faced since its inception—solo Diplo's hypeman Skerrit Bwoy's departure for religious pursuits; mismatched guests like Dirty Projectors' Amber Coffman and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend for sophomore album Free the Universe—Peace Is the Mission finds the group finally emerging from their cocoon. What helped to pierce them out of a murky, genre-blurring funk, it turns out, was the confidence (and perhaps the notoriety and resources) to cash in and go full pop.
Even though Diplo already had work with major pop stars on his CV (namely, Beyoncé's "Pon De Floor"-sampling "Run the World (Girls)" and on Madonna's recent Rebel Heart), it was Major Lazer's inclusion on the Lorde-curated soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 that truly marked this sea change. Their contribution, "All My Love" featuring Ariana Grande, maintained their penchant for dancehall-inflected festival dubstep and worked in a winky interpolation of "Lollipop (Candyman)" by Aqua (yes, the "Barbie Girl" group), all with a much slicker sheen. The song could have been just another paycheck, a chance to go for polish on a non-album project while staying esoteric with their own work, but lead single "Lean On", a collaboration with Danish upstart MØ and DJ Snake of "Turn Down for What" fame, indicated that they were sticking to this new refinement.
These tracks also illustrate what Major Lazer excel at: crafting intricate, innovative EDM for honey-voiced singers that pushes boundaries people like David Guetta and Calvin Harris seemingly refuse to touch. Album opener "Be Together" with Chicago sibling duo Wild Belle combines breathless yearning and skittering percussion in a way that sounds new, while the warbled soul of "Powerful", featuring vocals from Ellie Goulding and reggae artist Tarrus Riley, swoons in a way we don't expect from the production trio. With his performance, stripped of patois and giving every Top 40 pretty boy a run for his money, Riley offers the album's best example of Major Lazer's ability to synthesize their influences. Where the previous two full-lengths tried to mesh opposing forces, here, they are finessed into no-nonsense stadium rattlers. Riley can master an EDM power-ballad, while the menace of a rapper like Pusha T meets its match with dancehall vet Mad Cobra on "Night Riders". Even a refreshed "All My Love" benefits from additional vocals from soca singer Machel Montano.
"Lean On" and "Powerful" will likely end up the big hits of Peace, but tracks like "Too Original" with Jovi Rockwell and Swedish singer Elliphant, "Light It Up" featuring a guest appearance from R&B-reggae duo Brick and Lace's Nyla, and Chronixx-featuring "Blaze Up the Fire" also show a group locating its footing. They accomplish the, well, mission the group has trained its sights on since its genesis—and it's because they've linked with artists who also deal in fusion. They're not forcing it. There is no doubt Peace Is the Mission will suffer some criticism from dancehall purists, those exhausted by EDM and people who hate Diplo (a hate that he has certainly worked overtime to earn), but their maturation is palpable across the album's nine tracks. In the process, they've made a great pop record through uniting some of the globe's most exciting and celebrated pop artists. | 2015-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Mad Decent | June 3, 2015 | 7.4 | ee91eb8b-f96d-4aaa-9705-a63af6d8eb83 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | null |
Recorded on the humble Korg Volca FM during a vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii, this atmospheric, unobtrusive album lives somewhere between landscape sketch and spiritual sojourn. | Recorded on the humble Korg Volca FM during a vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii, this atmospheric, unobtrusive album lives somewhere between landscape sketch and spiritual sojourn. | M. Geddes Gengras: Hawaiki Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-geddes-gengras-hawaiki-tapes/ | Hawaiki Tapes | Synthesizers are often celebrated as instruments of infinite possibility, but many electronic musicians are more inspired by their machines’ limitations. A recent spate of experiments has found a number of artists making records with a single device. Nine Inch Nails’ Alessandro Cortini recorded his 2017 album Avanti using only an early-1970s EMS Synthi AKS. The same year, Dawn of Midi’s Qasim Naqvi made FILM entirely on a Moog Model D, an analog synthesizer of a similar vintage, while Vancouver’s Cloudface made the sedate, bleepy Variations on a 1980s Korg Mono/Poly. Those are all hallowed instruments, but some musicians have made do with much less: Benjamin Brunn’s wonderful Pieces From a Small Corner of Paradise was recorded on the humble Korg Poly-800 mkII, a plastic digital/analog hybrid from the mid-1980s that could be worn on a guitar strap.
M. Geddes Gengras embraces an even humbler instrument on Hawaiki Tapes, a modest album recorded while the longtime Angeleno vacationed on the Big Island of Hawaii. His machine of choice, the Korg Volca FM, fit easily in his handheld luggage: Part of the Japanese electronics maker’s recent line of affordable, back-to-basics grooveboxes, the Volca FM retails for around $140 and measures roughly 10'' by 6'' by 2''—smaller than a tablet computer and thinner than a hoagie. As its name indicates, the machine is dedicated to FM synthesis, an arcane method often associated with the Yamaha DX7, released in 1983, that’s easily recognizable for its bright, glassy sheen.
Gengras avails himself of those vivid timbral qualities across this atmospheric, unobtrusive album, conjuring chimes, bells, and flutes in majestically paced tracks that suggest crystal pyramids emerging from the mist. He worked at night, running his Volca directly into a handheld recorder, and that sense of quiet isolation looms large. Tempos are glacially paced, reverb stretches to the horizon, and harmonic development is practically nil: One-bar arpeggios spin in languid circles while Gengras slowly tweaks his synth’s parameters, brightening and burnishing its tone before sending it back into the shadows again. The music’s unpredictable movement is a little like the play of light as the moon passes behind patchy clouds.
The Volca FM can only play three notes at once, and it has no onboard effects besides chorus. To compensate, Gengras availed himself of two reverb and delay pedals, yielding results that are at once restrained and suggestively layered. (On three tracks, he also added Moog bass parts once he was back in his studio.) He wrings an impressive range of sounds out of his instrument, from singing-saw drones to sparkling new age fantasias that nod to gongs or wind chimes. One of the album’s best tracks, “Mauna Kea,” is strongly reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s canonical Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, with dewdrop synths creating accidental counterpoints as they run through ping-pong delay. Another highlight, “Mauna Loa,” benefits from the contrast between earthshaking sub-bass and a whimsical, flute-like melody. Even accounting for the strange, glitched-out textures of “Lō'ihi” and “Nāhuku,” though, Gengras only manages to stretch his instrument’s palette so far, and over the course of 68 minutes, one occasionally wishes for a little more variation.
While many tracks are named after the island’s geography—“Hilina Slump” refers to a landslide on the south flank of Kilauea, while “Kapoho” is a bay on the island’s southeast coast that recently made news after being inundated with lava—the album title references the mythological ancestral home of the Polynesian people. In sound and mood, Hawaiki Tapes lives somewhere between landscape sketch and spiritual sojourn, much like Electronic Recordings From Maui Jungle, a pair of albums by Anthony Child, better known as the UK techno artist Surgeon. Child’s compositions are similarly restrained, and though his Buchla modular synthesizer (which is orders of magnitude more expensive than the Volca) generates a wider range of sounds, he’s drawn to a similarly ethereal palette and a similarly meditative mood.
This can be tricky territory: the white tourist seeking transcendence in a colonized landscape. (Child, at least, calls one song “Colonisation,” though he has another perhaps less reflectively titled “The Chief.”) But Gengras wisely avoids tipping too far into unearned mysticism. Ultimately, his search focuses mostly on the depths of his small plastic box— and it yields an unexpectedly fruitful bounty for an experiment cooked up on a hotel-room desk in the dead of night. | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Umor Rex | June 27, 2018 | 6.9 | ee93194d-e0c1-4486-bd99-0ba0f107cac5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On her debut, the British-French experimentalist reckons with the body and the spirit in compositions so bright and ornate they feel like an inverted version of goth-pop. | On her debut, the British-French experimentalist reckons with the body and the spirit in compositions so bright and ornate they feel like an inverted version of goth-pop. | Lauren Auder : the infinite spine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lauren-auder-the-infinite-spine/ | the infinite spine | In the past decade, electronic artists have been fascinated with deconstructing the myth of the diva, reconfiguring its mold into strange, uncontainable new forms. Arca pulled apart the archetype’s entrails to find the machinery buzzing underneath. SOPHIE took a magnifying glass to its perfect skin, finding even more beauty to behold at the surface. And Yves Tumor has reveled in its haunted sexuality, plumbing its sinister lore in search of sick rock’n’roll pleasures. But amid all the bludgeoning club beats and mysterious dark magic, there’s hardly been room for anything resembling innocence. In a sea of uncanny angels, few have attempted to stare directly into the light.
On the infinite spine, Lauren Auder lets it in. Following a series of EPs on which the British-French producer blueprinted her iridescent orchestral pop, the infinite spine cracks her vision wide open. Deploying strings, horns, and choruses so dazzling they can take a second to adjust to, Auder crafts a kind of inverted goth pop, as if her gloomy songs have been shot through a photo negative, coming out impossibly bright. One can still hear the smudged, floating ethereality she brought to her early SoundCloud rap beats for the likes of Jeshi and Slowthai, but Auder centers her stark, hauntingly deep voice above everything else, boldly leading us through her tales of hard-won grace.
Throughout the infinite spine, Auder approaches her subjects as tenderly as a child cradling a porcelain doll. “118-madonna” takes flight amid pillowy woodwinds and French horns, though Auder subverts its life-affirming march with a knowing sense of tragedy. Evoking imagery of Britney Spears and JonBenét Ramsey, Auder casts a vignette of lost innocence against her own ongoing narrative of coming to terms with being trans. “Hell is a body in which I no longer can hide,” she sings, imbuing the song with a twofold frailty, its sweetness threatened to be consumed by darker forces.
Auder fills these tracks with references both biblical and historical, drawing particular inspiration from the Cathars, a medieval religious sect from her hometown of Albi, France that challenged the Catholic Church with its belief in the femininity of the divine. While the infinite spine’s lyricism may be dense, its songwriting is immediate: the hammering pianos of “city in a bottle” sweep Auder off her feet with a joyous theatricality, while the downbeat steel drums of “equus” contrast sumptuously against Auder’s twisting, ailed croon. Her confessions call to mind a history of bracingly direct queer singer-songwriters, with wisps of ANOHNI, Rufus Wainwright, and Perfume Genius percolating in her warbled baritone. She even embraces a degree of cheesy 2000s pop—when she breathily sings about “sitting in the back of a taxi car” on the sweeping “we2assume2many2roles,” you’d be forgiven for getting visions of Jack’s Mannequin and Vanessa Carlton.
Though Auder’s utilization of these nostalgic sounds could come off as calculated, she incorporates them with a natural ease, as if it were a perfectly logical next step for experimental music. Nothing on the infinite spine screams “hyperpop,” yet the album feels of a piece with its sensibilities; the sound of club music, pop, and all manner of 21st-century detritus commingling in a warm celebration of sincerity. The most blatant posturing comes in the more straightforwardly emo “the ripple,” whose chugging post-punk bass and Lil Peep-via-King Krule vocal barks strike the album’s least convincing note. Surrounded by so many moments that convey devastation with a wilted elegance, a loud wall of guitars just isn’t as powerful.
For all its fearlessly large pop moves, the infinite spine is surprisingly challenging. To truly appreciate its intense, earnest vulnerability requires a certain receptivity. But Auder’s songs have a way of burrowing in and flowering slowly, revealing their shimmering hooks and naked self-confrontation with a gentle, assured confidence. “Things have got pretty fucking bad in the public space for trans people,” she told NME last month. “We tried to integrate in a way that confirmed to cis expectations and that was clearly a failed mission.…[B]ut there’s hope in that. There’s a freeing notion in knowing that it was never about fitting in. It makes me want to double down on being true to myself because there’s no other way.” In its open-heartedness, the infinite spine emanates glowing self-acceptance—a light to nourish and protect. | 2023-08-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | True Panther | August 4, 2023 | 7.5 | eeaf82c1-ef90-472e-b5b5-b3e1ac8d9257 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s sixth album remains enigmatic, processing trauma and joy through the force of its unvarnished arrangements. | The singer-songwriter’s sixth album remains enigmatic, processing trauma and joy through the force of its unvarnished arrangements. | Laura Stevenson: Laura Stevenson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-stevenson-laura-stevenson/ | Laura Stevenson | Transparency is in vogue. From major pop releases such as Billie Eilish’s introspective new album Happier Than Ever to the self-effacing indie rock songs of boygenius, artists have gravitated toward devastatingly specific and personal lyrical detail. New York singer-songwriter Laura Stevenson once operated in that mode, too, exploring her experiences with depression, self-harm, and troubled family relationships on records like 2019’s The Big Freeze and 2015’s Cocksure. But on her self-titled sixth album, she shifts her songwriting to be more equivocal and finds solace in the opacity. “I’ve always been forthright, but with [Laura Stevenson], I’m pulling back a bit,” she explained in a recent interview.
The songs on Laura Stevenson revolve around a harrowing incident in which a loved one was nearly killed; to protect their privacy, and to honor her new approach, Stevenson hasn’t disclosed details about what transpired. But the myriad emotions surrounding the experience permeate the album, which explores the traumatic event and its aftermath through Stevenson’s own multifaceted perspective. Opening track “State” is a microcosm of the album’s sound, ranging from hushed murmurs to unabashed rage. It begins serenely before bursting into tempestuous percussion and Stevenson’s bitter delivery. “I’m in a state again, but I stay polite,” she sings, before unleashing a snarl: “It keeps me alive.” It’s a kind of vengeful mercilessness that we haven’t heard from her before.
Aided by producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile, Hop Along) and her former Bomb the Music Industry! bandmate Jeff Rosenstock, Stevenson finds a middle ground among her past projects. She evokes the folky touchstones of 2013’s Wheel on the acoustic-led “After Those Who Mean It” and closer “Children’s National Transfer” and conjures the 1990s-influenced Cocksure for “Sandstorm.” Much of this record’s emotional force lies in its arrangements, amplified by Agnello’s unvarnished production. “Don’t Think About Me” displays Stevenson’s impressive flair for melody, and “Moving Cars” lays everything bare with sparse guitar playing reminiscent of ’70s luminaries like Joni Mitchell.
It was during the making of this latest album that Stevenson discovered she was pregnant with her first child. Though these songs don’t directly reference motherhood, some feel infused with a protective, inquisitive urgency. On “Moving Cars,” she laments her inability to change what has already occurred: “I’m wide awake under supposed Perseid views/Could I stop before I let it get too far?” On the following track, “Continental Divide,” she reluctantly acknowledges that she won’t always be able to protect her loved ones from danger: “But what could I do right to keep you safe while you’re in flight/To keep the plane and all alight among its engines in the sky?”
Because these songs are so much more enigmatic than her previous output, they simultaneously foster a sense of universality and obscurity. It can occasionally be difficult to extract meaning from particular phrases: What does it mean when, on “Wretch,” she sings of “seizing in a parking lot, my eyes aglow with ballistic missiles and trials”? Still, she imbues her words with an intensity that compels you to lean closer. Laura Stevenson is often vague, but the emotion comes through.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | August 9, 2021 | 7.3 | eeb4c215-e1a8-4eca-8666-ae767ff501c3 | Grant Sharples | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grant-sharples/ | |
On their new record, the Chicago native fights the slow poison of the apocalypse with smooth R&B, galactic funk, and Afrofuturist fantasies. | On their new record, the Chicago native fights the slow poison of the apocalypse with smooth R&B, galactic funk, and Afrofuturist fantasies. | Dreamer Isioma: Princess Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dreamer-isioma-princess-forever/ | Princess Forever | Dreamer Isioma is always a lover, even in times of pure chaos. In their past work, the Chicago native has depicted the contours of queer love via a gorgeous blend of dream pop, hushed rap, and smooth R&B. Their most recent record, Princess Forever, expands upon their impressive range, melding high-stakes storytelling and Afrofuturist aesthetics to convey the joy and turbulence of finding love among decay.
While many of the songs on Princess Forever build on the soft R&B of their previous records, the strongest tracks here are more eclectic, incorporating elements of disco, Afrobeats, and indie rock. The standout “Gimmie a Chance” coalesces harp, airy synths, and a funky bassline into an effortlessly smooth and danceable love song. Elsewhere, on “Touch Your Soul,” the artist captures a spiritual connection so deep that physical touch becomes unnecessary. It doesn’t matter who else touches their lover’s body, Dreamer proclaims, “because I can touch your soul.”
Princess Forever showcases the artist’s most cohesive storytelling to date. The lyrics make near-constant references to surviving an apocalypse, as Dreamer chronicles a burning world, or people migrating to live on other planets. Finding intimacy amid this chaos, Isioma argues, is to experience high highs and low lows; there is nothing in between. Dreamer writes about the album’s recurring themes—life among decay, love amid the rot—with fervor; the passion here sets their storytelling apart from previous releases. “Z’s Lullaby” describes the intensity of love at first sight, while on reverb-heavy slow jam “Technicolor Love,” possession and adoration become one: “She fuckin’ hates me but she’s mine,” Isioma sings. This kind of love is not easy, nor is it even particularly healthy. It is ardent, chaotic, and all-consuming, yet they also crave the stability of a life partner. When everything around you feels as though it’s going up in smoke, that kind of devotion can feel like salvation.
Princess Forever seems to argue that the antidote to the slow poison of the apocalypse lies in Afrofuturism. One of Afrofuturism’s liberatory promises is that the end of the world as we know it could lead to a better one for Black people across the diaspora. The intergalactic soundscape Isioma builds here gestures toward the freedom that might exist beyond earthly realms. Rather than framing the journey to find that autonomy as merely an escape route, Isioma suggests it could lead to an emancipatory future. “Saying fuck the world brings me inner peace/It’s all gonna blow up anyway/We’re all gonna float to outer space,” they proclaim on “Fuck Tha World.” When this world ends, a brighter one may emerge.
Though Princess Forever shows immense growth, Dreamer’s storytelling feels more memorable than some of the beats here. The production on “Fuck Tha World” and “Technicolor Love” are nearly indistinguishable from each other, an anomaly on a record that is otherwise unafraid of experimentation. And while much of Dreamer’s Afrofuturist lyricism is innovative and intentional, at times, the celestial motifs can feel monotonous and repetitive.
Much of Afrofuturist art deals with life-or-death circumstances: People are fighting for survival, for inalienable rights, for the abolition of racism and colonialism. But Princess Forever shines brightest in its celebration of the little moments—in its insistence that a fight for a new world order is also a fight for more pleasure, more romance, and more peace. “They say the world’s on fire/I call that a life on Mars/When our worlds collide/All I see are stars going light speed,” the artist sings on “Starz.” In these flashes, Isioma reminds us that from the ashes of a doomed world, the spark of new love can rise. | 2023-04-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | April 24, 2023 | 6.8 | eec43841-e489-482c-865b-ec8f91a0b624 | Mary Retta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mary-retta/ | |
Collaborating with producer Hitmaka, the R&B artist abandons her concept-album ambitions for a free-flowing collage of simple, irresistible pleasures. | Collaborating with producer Hitmaka, the R&B artist abandons her concept-album ambitions for a free-flowing collage of simple, irresistible pleasures. | Tink: Pillow Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tink-pillow-talk/ | Pillow Talk | Last year, Tink stumbled into a revelation. The 27-year-old singer and rapper had tended to let her music marinate, meticulously poring over production details and lyrics before finalizing a project. But when she began working with producer and fellow Chicago-native Hitmaka, he challenged her to churn out songs at a faster clip. Within two months Tink completed an album: Heat of the Moment, a satin-smooth R&B record that instantly stood out as her freest and most sensual album in years. For a singer whose career had been burdened by out-of-pocket Aaliyah comparisons and unfortunate label drama, and whose work often arrived with clunky conceptual frameworks, this revised workflow felt like a healthy and exciting new direction for one of R&B’s most overlooked talents.
Tink’s latest offering, Pillow Talk, fine-tunes her collaborative chemistry with Hitmaka and further establishes the pair as one of R&B’s premier singer–producer teams. The album seamlessly flits between steamy slow jams and pristine pop songs, its architecture indebted to the opulence of ’90s R&B. Hitmaka’s glossy, pillowy production weaves trap and electronic elements into classic-sounding soul, giving Tink the ideal backdrop to flaunt her effortless, confident flows. She’s a nimble vocalist who blurs the line between singing and rapping; even when she’s crooning big ballads, there’s a sleek bite to her cadences, her vowels gliding so smoothly it’s like they’ve been greased. Pillow Talk is full of simple, irresistible pleasures: gorgeous beats and catchy hooks, reckless sexual escapades, melodies that glue themselves to your brain. Though occasionally overindulgent, Pillow Talk is undoubtedly a vibe, a record that balances the joys of intimacy with the unexpected consequences.
Across Tink’s catalog—eight mixtapes, two EPs, and three albums over 11 years—she’s experimented with a variety of narrative scaffolding to help give her projects shape. These have included voicemail interludes, diaristic preambles, and a misconceived talk therapy conceit, none of which played to her strengths as a raunchy, shit-talking hitmaker. Thankfully, on Pillow Talk, she abandons her concept-album ambitions and simply writes fun, dramatic songs about romance. There’s no arc, just a collage of emotive moments. In mid-album highlight “Mine,” Tink admonishes her man’s side chick for overstepping; “25 Reasons Interlude” is an unabashed love letter to monogamous bliss. Two of the strongest songs, “Switch” and “Opposite,” express skepticism about a guy’s credentials as a life-partner: “I’m hoping that God forbid/That you’re not a product of your past/We can have that shit that last,” she sings on “Opposite,” an edge etched in her voice. Mostly, though, Tink spends her time here burning up the sheets. On “Throwback,” which adds to the rich tradition of R&B songs about having sex to other R&B songs, Tink sounds totally liberated, while on “Drunk Text’n,” she seems devoured by desire.
Pillow Talk’s incessant hornieness can veer into unintentional comedy; two songs, for instance, have the word “cum” in the title. The most glaring hiccups, though, are when Tink leans too heavily on ’90s and 2000s R&B tropes. Take the clumsy 2 Chainz feature on “Cater,” which sounds like a check being cashed in real time, or the G Herbo-assisted “Ghetto Luv,” which recycles the played-out bad-boy-meets-bad-girl hip-hop/R&B crossover formula. These drawbacks, though, don’t meaningfully distract from Pillow Talk’s palatial glamor. Behind Hitmaka and company’s elegant production, Tink depicts the highs and lows of love with a swaggering nonchalance. Even when an old flame calls her up late at night, she’s not too proud to admit that she’s intrigued by the proposition. “Trying not to make it something/But I’ve been dealing with a lot,” she sings on “Goin Bad.” And who can blame her? She sounds like she’s finally having fun, letting her art follow wherever the night leads her. | 2022-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Winter’s Diary / Empire | August 25, 2022 | 7.2 | eec5d033-6765-45ff-9198-9011f13a1a95 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi—who front Brooklyn rockers the Men—are probably the last guys on Earth who need a side project. On their new album as Dream Police, Hypnotized, robotic rhythms, laser-beam synths, and industrialized guitar noise introduce welcome new dimensions to Perro and Chiericozzi’s sonic palette. | Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi—who front Brooklyn rockers the Men—are probably the last guys on Earth who need a side project. On their new album as Dream Police, Hypnotized, robotic rhythms, laser-beam synths, and industrialized guitar noise introduce welcome new dimensions to Perro and Chiericozzi’s sonic palette. | Dream Police: Hypnotized | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19865-dream-police-hypnotized/ | Hypnotized | Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi are probably the last guys on Earth who need a side project. Not only has the band they co-founded, the Men, maintained a prolific rate of production (with five albums and two EPs in the past five years), they’ve been able to bend its sound to satisfy their every passing whim, be it loogie-hocking scum-punk, wood-cabin country rock, atomic psychedelia, or old-school '80s indie. And yet, they’re not ones to spend their days off between tours getting caught up on "The Walking Dead". Much of their downtime since 2010 has been devoted to Dream Police, where, with the help of producer Kyle Keays-Hagerman and a trusty drum machine, they’ve been workshopping song ideas that exist on the peripheries of the Men’s elastic sound, but aren’t really suited to that band’s five-man attack.
While Perro and Chiericozzi have previously issued Dream Police material in limited-edition cassette runs, they couldn’t have picked a better time to release their first proper album for Sacred Bones. On last spring’s Tomorrow’s Hits, the Men sounded like they were settling into a cozy, classic-rock cul de sac, sanding down the edges of their punk and country influences into an easy-going boogie. Though it was a notable adjustment, it didn’t open up any unexplored avenues for the band. So the robotic rhythms, laser-beam synths, and industrialized guitar noise that form the foundation of Hypnotized introduce welcome new dimensions to Perro and Chiericozzi’s sonic palette, and encourage a renewed streak of irreverent experimentation for a couple of guys who appeared to be digging in their heels. But while Hypnotized nudges Perro and Chiericozzi out of their established comfort zone, it also has the effect of making you appreciate the tightened-up craft and finely curated song selection they exhibit with the Men.
Hypnotized proves be a far more eclectic affair than initially suggested by its title-track single, which is exactly the sort of electro-blooze stomp you’d expect from a couple of scruffy rockers tinkering around with synthetic beats. The spectrum here spans Teutonic post-punk to somber psych-folk (really, pretty much every subgenre of rock except the arena-ready power-pop suggested by Dream Police’s Cheap Trick-nodding name), but several songs simply stretch out a one-note idea until there’s nothing more to do: the bass-grooved "My Mama’s Dead" imagines "Hey Joe" being half-remembered by a megaphone-wielding Mark E. Smith; "John" is a repetitious blues swing akin to the Stooges’ "I Need Somebody", but sapped of the menacing desperation. And though Dream Police carry over the Men tradition of penning acoustic odes to girls, the downcast lysergic lullaby "Iris" (appended with what can only be described in 2014 as "beer-commercial guitar") and highlands-bound hymn "Sandy" (a church-bell-clanging duet between Chiericozzi and Brooklyn artist Holly Overton) feel more random and out of place in this mechanized context than they would on a Men record, suggesting Perro and Chiericozzi may need to start yet another, folk-focused project to accommodate their unplugged urges.
The most successful experiments here don’t simply add tech textures to Perro and Chiericozzi’s guitar grind, but use them to reshape it, and invest the duo’s muscular crunch with a more androgynous energy: "Pouring Rain" folds early-'80s skinny-tie standards like A Flock of Seagulls’ "I Ran (So Far Away)" or Martha and the Muffins’ "Echo Beach" into late-'80s post-hardcore screech, while "Let It Be" is a glorious Neu!-wave instrumental that reroutes the Autobahn through the American heartland, its synth-smoothed pave job nicked with countrified slide-guitar licks. Of course, it figures that a couple of studious rock historians like Perro and Chiericozzi would cop a title that their heroes the Replacements likewise stole from the Beatles. But in this case, the song is less an explicit tribute to the classics of yore than an embodiment of the title’s contented, live-and-let-live sentiment—and an indicator that Dream Police do their best work when roaming lawless fantasias. | 2014-11-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-11-10T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Sacred Bones | November 10, 2014 | 6.2 | eecb49a7-092d-4d61-b03f-b93ff9fc924b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Son Lux's new LP Lanterns isn't piecemeal beats or hastily assembled instrumental clutter, rather it begs to be heard as the lingua franca of the past and the future, something that connects the analog and digital realms. And sometimes it totally gets close. | Son Lux's new LP Lanterns isn't piecemeal beats or hastily assembled instrumental clutter, rather it begs to be heard as the lingua franca of the past and the future, something that connects the analog and digital realms. And sometimes it totally gets close. | Son Lux: Lanterns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18639-son-lux-lanterns/ | Lanterns | Somewhere unstuck in time is Son Lux, born Ryan Lott, still trying to navigate his way through relics of the past and curios of the future. At 34, he’s a consummate dilettante, moving seamlessly from, say, inventing instrumental patches used in the score of the time-traveling sci-fi movie Looper to producing beats for Anticon rapper Beans. That’s the heady hip hop label that put out his first official pop album, At War With Walls & Mazes, a collage of organic and electronic samples matted together under Lott’s completely breakable voice. It took Lott almost four years to compile his debut, a process that came together while he was composing music for TV ads, all in the spirit of accidental curiosity. And four years is an eternity compared to his follow-up, the far more dense electro-chamber pop album We Are Rising, which he wrote over just 28 days in 2011 at the behest of NPR.
In effect, Lanterns is the first Son Lux album made with an organic timeline and intention. It also happens to be a record of experimental music that strives to be something beyond just an experiment. Can flute trills actually live with an instrument built from Pro Tools? Can an arrhythmic baritone saxophone actually coexist with an 808 bass thump? For Son Lux, these aren't hypotheticals or theories scribbled into a notebook, these are the sounds of his native tongue and he wants to blend them all into a new language. Lanterns isn't piecemeal beats or hastily assembled clutter, rather it begs to be heard as the lingua franca of the past and the future, something spoken on a pseudo-spiritual plane that connects the analog and digital realms. And sometimes it totally gets close.
It's best to take in the wide-angle spirit of Lanterns, because Son Lux’s more than complex arrangements are always the highlight over his less than complex lyricism. When all his synapses are firing, he's conjuring something like "Lost It To Trying", the maximalist hybrid chamber pop masterpiece at the front of the album. The song tethers itself to a jittery flute/saxophone riff, first found at the end of every few measures, but midway through it starts to overtake the whole song. By the end, there are hundreds of jittery flute/saxophone riffs spinning beneath, blurring together into a whole society of sound while a few choir voices and a theremin sample float far above. If ever there can exist sound that is singularly Son Lux, this is the type of all-in songwriting to get there.
The other way to this sweet spot is minimalism, heard on Lanterns’ other peerless track, “Easy”. If “Lost It To Trying” was the sound of two whole worlds speaking at the same time, “Easy” is just a few delegates from each. The timbre of Lott’s frail voice has a default setting of I'm Definitely Crying Right Now, so a few digital effects layered on puts it to better use as another texture. He warbles, “Pull out your heart to make the being alone easy” and it just slithers inside you undetected like the rest of the song. These two contrasting moments make up the lifeforce of the album, and most of the remaining seven tracks are too often just the notes the staff: brilliant ideas that lose their brilliance when they come off the page.
Compare Lanterns to one of it's more well known contemporaries, Sufjan Stevens’ Age Of Adz. That's an album tuned to psychosis and schizophrenia, surreal dreams and outsider art. Its future/past dichotomy lives way out on the fringe and it drags you out there. Lanterns doesn’t have much in the way of surreality or gravity; instead it uses pat spirituality and repetitive hymnic platitudes as a cructh. It’s a pop album that doesn’t trust the simplicity of pop’s tenets. “No Crimes”, featuring a vocal turn by Peter Silberman of the Antlers, fixates upon a similar sprinting, orchestral framework as “Lost It”, only it’s all climax with no plot to support it. “Pyre”, like “Easy”, looks for success in sparsity, but more heaves its dead weight around than vibrates in an ethereal plane.
It feels like Son Lux resents this world. Lott writes about leaving the "wasting world behind" to be transported, or more likely resurrected, in "alternate worlds" and when you can practically picture him winged, robed, and wearing a halo—He sings on the final track, "I'll keep my lanterns lit." He's like a painter who doesn't always trust that what he has on the canvas is complete. He tweaks his muted beats, or adds players from indie orchestra ringers yMusic—who appear throughout, along with background vocals from Darren King (Mutemath), Ieva Berberian (Gem Club) and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond). All the many collaborators are always ready with a fleck of flute or a spot of violin or another layer of angelic choir to obfuscate something simple. Conversely, there's not enough danger or adventure when Lott brings out his love of Stravinsky or rap or electo-pop or maybe some weird amalgum of all three. It is hard to parse all that's disparate here, and in searching for its most personal form, Son Lux unwittingly dipped into the uncanny valley of digital music trying to become human—something a little too perfect to believe. | 2013-10-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-10-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | October 29, 2013 | 6.6 | eed62d84-2860-4c5d-8987-de0cafd5070e | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
It’s the irascible British duo’s most varied album to date. Just don’t expect anything to change. | It’s the irascible British duo’s most varied album to date. Just don’t expect anything to change. | Sleaford Mods: UK GRIM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleaford-mods-uk-grim/ | UK GRIM | Sleaford Mods don’t make music about how terrible things are in hopes that they will get better. Over the past decade, Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson have channeled public discontent and everyday malaise in the UK, scrutinizing their country’s faults as well as their own. And though they’ve found personal growth and commercial success, the Mods’ outlook hasn’t brightened. On their new album, UK GRIM, things are bad and only getting worse. Government is incompetent; hypocrisy is alive and well in the upper ranks of society; consumerist conformity is a plague and music can’t save you. All this probably sounds like your recent doom scroll, but UK GRIM is balanced by the mutating electro-punk of Fearn’s production and the absurdist humor with which Williamson seeds his diatribes.
Fearn has always thought less is more. “I think people try too hard and there’s too much turd polishing,” he once stated of the competition. His approach is uniquely austere—a steady kick drum paired with chirping birds or clanking iron, plus a prowling bass. On UK GRIM, a simple formula (“Get a really crap drum beat and play a bassline over it”) still leads to unexpected places. If the lyrics offer no sense of consolatory hope, there’s still the chameleonic vibrancy of the music, and the strongest tracks contain a shifting guitar flourish that feels like connective tissue between the boldface beats and cantankerous vocals. In “On the Ground,” Fearn transforms the zaps of retro Atari games into rubbery, panicked synth-punk. The album’s most bizarre highlight, “So Trendy,” casts Perry Farrell in the role of a selfie-obsessed gym bro who ponders getting a “mushroom haircut and a cross earring.” Synthetic bleeps and blurgs pop up like a Whac-A-Mole, balanced by an ascending distorted guitar melody that morphs into fevered surf rock.
In Williamson’s quasi-spoken social commentary, no one comes out clean: You’re either full of shit or busy dealing with someone else’s. “I got crisis stamina,” he spews on the title track. “Full marathon, four poo breaks.” Further still: “I can feel the shit from your crisis rays/Spray out my back.” Ridiculous reality calls for ridiculous rhetoric, and UK GRIM is an overflowing toilet. But Williamson balances the biting takedowns—of Britain’s conservative party on “Tory Kong” and try-hard punk wannabes on “D.I.Why”—with referential character vignettes and chaotic scenes that turn self-reflective. “Right Wing Beast” begins by attacking ignorant partisanship but lands on a revealing monologue about the psychic toll that opposing values can take on a relationship. “I thought about deleting you on socials,” he admits, breaking his sing-song tone. “Because you keep coming in with stuff and it’s winding me up to be honest. I never see ya. I don’t want to either.”
Sleaford Mods don’t wave a flag for any particular issues: They only document what they see. Their enemies wear Palm Angels, All Saints, and “Top Gun sunglasses.” During her guest appearance on “Force 10 From Navarone,” Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw rattles off this list of grievances: “Fucking viral fucking Batman video/You fucking moron.” Even if you don’t track all the references, Sleaford Mods’ sense of fatigued resignation resonates. UK GRIM is their most varied album to date, but they don’t want to dull the shitstorm’s stench—they’re just here to blow off the steam. | 2023-03-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | March 13, 2023 | 7.6 | eeda4b1a-fe98-4bd2-8e73-a94e22256cef | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Fusing post-punk touchstones with his heartland-rock heroes, a reinvigorated Timothy Showalter comes back to the light. | Fusing post-punk touchstones with his heartland-rock heroes, a reinvigorated Timothy Showalter comes back to the light. | Strand of Oaks: Eraserland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/strand-of-oaks-eraserland/ | Eraserland | Timothy Showalter’s decade-plus career as Strand of Oaks teeters on an empirical belief that maybe there are no lines between art and life at all. His towering, synth-infused rock anthems and solemn guitar-and-voice meditations relay his experience in plain language: his adolescence in the small Indiana town of Goshen, his musical heroes, his fears and self-loathing, the messy emotional goulash of love and marriage. His rocker’s distillation of Henry James’ position—that “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life”—fuses a bold shoegaze and heartland-rock aesthetic with the lyrical posture of modern confessionalists like Mount Eerie and Margo Price. The contrast reflects the dimensions of Showalter, alternately a contemplative and reclusive figure steeped in the craft and an unrepentant showman who can command a room with comedic bits and tales of late-night ragers.
New album Eraserland finds him at his breaking point. It was written in a cloud of depression and self-doubt, following years of touring on the success of breakthrough record HEAL, and the acknowledgment that its follow-up, Hard Love, didn’t quite land with fans the same way. By winter of 2017, feeling depleted, Showalter took a sabbatical to—of all places—the Jersey Shore. Alone, he walked the beaches and meditated on his favorite albums. Listening to Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, he’s said, almost literally saved his life.
At the height of Showalter’s existential crisis, My Morning Jacket guitarist Carl Broemel rallied bandmates Bo Koster (keyboards), Patrick Hallahan (drums), and Tom Blankenship (bass) to back Showalter on a new suite of songs, a vote of confidence that proved to be a potent motivator. Eraserland soars in both its booming and hushed moments, a testament to the skills of this lockstep outfit. These seasoned players navigate Showalter’s emotional cosmos with equal parts professionalism and empathy. Country star Jason Isbell lends his understated shredding, while singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emma Ruth Rundle adds elegant background vocals. Together they bring an easygoing quality to what could have been an overwrought extension of emotional turmoil.
Instead, Eraserland’s lyrical constellations shine in plain, profound confessions. “I don’t feel it anymore,” the first line of opener “Weird Ways,” is less a slacker’s excuse than a stinging admission of defeat. The song portends Eraserland’s emotional arc: Anguish and despondence cues philosophical probing and rebirth, relayed through stories about family, friends, idols, and dreams. Such disclosure leaves little room for interpretation and, in less capable hands, might feel naive. Here, each sentiment radiates through Showalter’s fibrous voice and road-worn phrasing. By the end, he’s found some light. “If you believe you can be loved, you'll outlive your past,” he promises on “Forever Chords,” the album’s conclusion.
All this unfolds in sober meditations and electrified anthems where synths fuse with glistening electric guitar and ringing cymbals. Showalter’s preference for blending the celestial touchstones of British post-punk with the sinewy qualities of his American heroes has never been better executed than it is here: “Final Fires” melds the synth and guitar tones of the Cure with the upcountry jangle of Tom Petty, while the title track swirls in a haze of My Bloody Valentine’s crescendos and Joy Division's negative space. “Moon Landing” references the vibey narration and guitar jam of Endless Boogie. Somehow this totem of influences works, stacked one atop another in a monument to the newly refocused Strand of Oaks. | 2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | March 26, 2019 | 7.4 | eee36c79-e1b9-4ecd-9c9a-16d9f9b62ae8 | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
On her second album as Wares, Cassia Hardy sings of rage, joy, and transformation on a dynamic and euphoric rock record. | On her second album as Wares, Cassia Hardy sings of rage, joy, and transformation on a dynamic and euphoric rock record. | Wares: Survival | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wares-survival/ | Survival | Survival means something very specific to Cassia Hardy. Her 2017 self-titled debut album as Wares chronicled her life as an artist and outsider in Alberta (aka Canada’s Texas, with all the oil money and conservative politicking that goes with it) and her conflicted relationship with her home city of Edmonton, ultimately concluding that its supportive music community makes it “a nice place, but I don’t want to die here.” Wares’ second album, however, homes in on a very specific part of that experience: her transition into a woman, and all the locker-room bullying, judgemental doctors’ visits, and self-doubt she endured along the way. The cover painting on Survival depicts a gender-ambiguous figure in a red dress lurching towards a radiant sun poking over the horizon, but still surrounded by a forest that seems to be pulling them back into the darkness. It’s the perfect visual distillation of an album that perpetually teeters between euphoric, new-day-rising affirmations and the inescapable specter of past traumas.
Hardy’s process of self-realization has run parallel to Wares’ transformation from an acoustic-guitar-slinging solo operation into a fiery indie-rock quartet with the fighting spirit of a young Titus Andronicus. On Survival, Hardy’s need for intimate connection is matched only by Wares’ desire to go over the top and burn it all down, rendering joy and rage as the same exorcising expression. Like a slingshot being pulled to its breaking point, the opening “Hands, Skin” ratchets up its tense atmosphere before blasting off into a double-timed punk sprint, its ecstatic, liberated energy undercut by Hardy’s grim account of a violent attack inflicted upon her. The album’s seismic centerpiece, “Surrender Into Waiting Arms,” presents the optimistic flipside to that narrative, of finding acceptance and possibly even love (“Jump for a chance at a better life/Give myself to one I desire!”). But the energy is equally unsettled, particularly when the song suddenly detours into a dramatic, doomy second act where Hardy’s amorous exclamations (“Kiss my lover in the sun/Feel their heart pressed between finger and thumb”) sound like they’re being shouted from the bottom of a well, suggesting that happiness is all just an unattainable fantasy.
Survival is Wares’ first release for venerable Vancouver imprint Mint Records, the label that introduced the world to the New Pornographers 20 years ago. There are echoes of that group’s maximalist power-pop in the steady motorik cruise of “Tether” and jubilant jangle of “Surface World,” but Wares are ultimately less concerned with craft than catharsis, no matter how messy it gets. Hardy’s irrepressible personality abounds even in the album’s more delicate moments, like the anti-capitalist dream-folk lullaby (and readymade COVID rent-strike anthem) “Jenny Says” and the devastating “Tall Girl,” which could pass for an early non-electro MGMT track, but with their hazy cosmic jive replaced by a regretful account of being too nervous and wary of strangers to chat up a potential soulmate.
By album’s end, Hardy has found enough strength and confidence in her identity to shift the lens away from her past and back onto the current state of her home province, where oil barons dominate with a blatant disregard for the environment and Indigenous land rights. “Fight like a dying species rejecting parasitic scum/Before everyone you love gets used up,” she screams with throat-ravaging desperation. By coming clean with her own struggles over the course of the record, Hardy shows that even the most formidable obstacles are surmountable. She’s alive; now it’s your turn. | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mint | May 27, 2020 | 7.7 | eee778c9-b172-487f-98a3-2ab403799b73 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Brood Ma, a London-based producer and recent signee to the label Tri Angle, joins forward-thinking artists like Rabit, Roly Porter, and Lotic. Rather than maintain a singular focus, the producer skips from idea to idea, uniting decades of club music under a singular industrial umbrella. | Brood Ma, a London-based producer and recent signee to the label Tri Angle, joins forward-thinking artists like Rabit, Roly Porter, and Lotic. Rather than maintain a singular focus, the producer skips from idea to idea, uniting decades of club music under a singular industrial umbrella. | Brood Ma: Daze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21533-daze/ | Daze | There was a time when you mostly knew what to expect from a Tri Angle release, even if the sound was notoriously hard to describe. But the New York/London label has evolved in the six years since its founding. Rather than gravitate toward artists whose music pours from speakers like molasses, Tri Angle is now just as likely to sign acts that mix bass music, techno, and noise in unpredictable ways (so long as the atmosphere mostly remains sufficiently chilly). "Everyone I choose to work with, all the records have to make sense as a whole," label founder Robin Carolan told the Huffington Post last year. "I don't expect them to make sense to everyone, but for me I can connect the dots." As its signees have been increasingly adopted by mainstream pop artists like Björk and Kanye West, new acts continue to deconstruct the genre from the inside out.
Brood Ma, a London-based producer and recent signee to the label, joins forward-thinking artists like Rabit, Roly Porter, and Lotic, who seem capable of piling endless genre touchstones into a single track. Daze is Brood Ma's third LP and first with Tri Angle, but the artist's aesthetic couldn't be more in line with the label's current penchant for postmodern experimentation. Over the course of the album's 13 tracks, only one exceeds three minutes, and seven are less than two. Rather than maintain a singular focus, the producer skips from idea to idea, uniting decades of club music under a singular industrial umbrella.
Opening track "Westerly Spawned Lamb" is reminiscent of the Haxan Cloak's analgesic soundscapes, while the record's political themes parallel Fatima Al Qadiri's net-art politicking. (Brood Ma has described the record as "a documentary of the military engagements played out amongst adults and children across worldwide server space and an attempted critique of the current obsession with survival playtime, played out through politically prosed pop references and narratives of fictional, future juvenilia"—which, OK, sure.) There are forays into trip-hop ("Sex Compressor") and noise ("Sex Contortion"), but rarely does any singular genre tag capture the uncanniness, or uncategorizable Brood Ma-ness, of the producer's industrial synths, grime-oriented beats, and ominous sub-bass.
Most interesting is how Brood Ma treats pastiche as an ideology. Before joining Tri Angle, the producer released music via the Untold-run Hemlock Recordings as well as Quantum Natives, a UK label/collective whose members embody the intersection of Internet provocation and underground rave culture. (The label's website is an unofficial Google map showing an alien planet that recalls StarCraft and drone surveillance photography; its Soundcloud description: "a battle for survival in the nightmare undercity (in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war)".) Like much of the artists released by his previous labels, this is music whose technocratic aesthetic is impossible to divorce from the listening process. The album cover may recall an occult bonfire, but Brood Ma is more Neuromancer than necromancer.
Part of the success of Daze is how fully Brood Ma commits to his sonic palette without committing to a singular musical style. "Molten Brownian Motion" pounds like hardcore (of the drum and bass variety) injected with Xenomorph DNA, while "Social Re-Entry" is apocalyptic bass music with a twisted vocal sample that's both something soulful and sinister. Many of the tracks have a sculptural feel to them, like you're hearing the visual equivalent to one of Louise Bourgeois' metal spiders. There's also a wry playfulness to the music: "Goldman Sax" is 13 seconds of arpeggiated freakout, but its title is unabashedly cheeky. There's also, perhaps surprisingly, actual hooks to be found when the tracks are given time to unfurl. "Sacrificial Youth" is danceable enough that it could use another three minutes attached to its runtime, which is both a compliment and a criticism: How often do you wish that a club track was 110% longer? Then again, this is the sort of intellectual party where we're supposed to think about how we got here rather than lose ourselves in the music. Daze is one last defiant middle finger emoji to a world crumbling in on itself—scarily contemporary, often caustic, but not without a sense of humor. | 2016-02-17T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-17T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Tri Angle | February 17, 2016 | 7.5 | ef02d4f4-33e6-4c5b-bbcc-5c3ec197a5b0 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Austrian producer and Mego labelhead Peter Rehberg is a pioneer of laptop music that's at turns abrasive and sublime. His first release as Pita since 2004 is defined by shifts in volume and intensity. | Austrian producer and Mego labelhead Peter Rehberg is a pioneer of laptop music that's at turns abrasive and sublime. His first release as Pita since 2004 is defined by shifts in volume and intensity. | Pita: Get In | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21820-get-in/ | Get In | Though he’s been making music since the mid-’90s, Peter Rehberg is still a bit of a cult figure. It’s not too hard to understand why. A pioneer of laptop-based music that was at turns abrasive and sublime, the Austrian producer’s early records could be a bit intimidating, even alongside the work of experimental-minded peers like Jim O’Rourke, Fennesz, and Kevin Drumm. And it also doesn’t help that the last album released under his most prolific alias, Pita, came out more than a decade ago. Yet, it’s hard to think of anybody whose work—both as an artist and a label owner—has remained more deeply embedded in the DNA of contemporary electronic and out-there music.
Founded in the mid-'90s, Rehberg’s label, Mego, released computer music that defied classification, existing outside of terms like “dance” or “ambient.” The label’s most enduring releases – Fennesz’s Endless Summer, O’Rourke’s I’m Happy and I’m Singing, Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma – made digitally mulched sounds register as dense and organic. That label’s Rehberg-run successor, Editions Mego, has proven equally influential, releasing records that helped establish American Kosmiche nobility like Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Keith Fullerton Whitman. And that’s not even counting Editions Mego’s multitude of artist-curated sub-labels, which include Spectrum Spools (Emeralds’ John Elliott), Recollection GRM (curated by François Bonnet and Daniel Teruggi), Ideologic Organ (Stephen O'Malley), and Old News (Jim O’Rourke). You can also hear traces of Rehberg’s gritty sound design in releases on edgier contemporary dance labels like Trilogy Tapes and PAN. He even beat Matmos to the household appliance thing by two decades.
Get In is Rehberg’s first release as Pita since 2004’s Get Off and it picks up more or less where its predecessor left off. The sound design is cleaner and richer in detail, but the same rules apply. It is a record defined by not-so-subtle shifts in volume and intensity. Serene drones give way to rubbery atonal squelch. Familiar tones are dissected and decimated. On “S200729” the burble of a TB-303 bassline – the defining sound of acid house – is digitally deconstructed from a warm analog burble into the kind of sound that could bust up asphalt.
Attitude was a key to Pita’s first records: They were loud and rude. The music might lull you into a false sense of security only to turn around and fry your eardrums. However, Get In is more gripping in its meditative moments. On “Line Angel” glimmering keyboard tones are periodically interrupted and skewed out of tune, dive-bombing from soothing to seasick. “Mfbk” is more earnest, ascending in volume to reveal generative melodies and cello-like tones that evoke Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. If you’re a long-time Pita listener, you might keep the volume low, just in case a shocking blast of fuzz is imminent. The punishment never comes, though.
The tools that are used in its creation define so much about electronic music – it’s utility, it’s time and place. Rehberg’s process has always been a bit mysterious, though. It’s the product of a set of programs, rather than a table full of boxes and knobs. In concert, the back of a laptop screen obscures his moves, and it’s harder to date his records as a result. Get In was recorded last year, but it sounds like it could have been made at any time over the intervening decade. There are no melodic clichés to give it away and no organized rhythms. The sounds are proto-human, primeval and timeless. | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Editions Mego | May 12, 2016 | 7.2 | ef07b506-2d48-453c-8c67-209bfc27c240 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
Marked by newfound sonic adventurousness and evocative dream-logic lyrics, the long-running UK band’s new double album is a bold quest into the vast unknown. | Marked by newfound sonic adventurousness and evocative dream-logic lyrics, the long-running UK band’s new double album is a bold quest into the vast unknown. | The Clientele: I Am Not There Anymore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-clientele-i-am-not-there-anymore/ | I Am Not There Anymore | The Clientele were once the discerning indie critics’ discerning indie band. The songs collected on the UK group’s debut album, 2000’s Suburban Light, were first delivered in the collectible, cult-building format of 7" singles. This daydreamy music made sense to ears attuned to not only the post-Beatles pop of Love, the Zombies, and the Left Banke, but also the impressionistic ache of Felt and the reverb-coated reveries of Galaxie 500. The Clientele were so sensitive to their critical impulses, their singer and guitarist, Alasdair MacLean, publicly rubbished Belle and Sebastian, whose fan base they would’ve been most likely to share. After releasing a spate of broadly similar-sounding albums with various subtle refinements, and even quitting their day jobs, they eventually took a break. On their most recent outing, 2017’s Music for the Age of Miracles, they sounded cozy and familiar, but also slightly diminished, like twilight passing into dark.
I Am Not There Anymore, just the Clientele’s second full-length album since 2009, draws much of its inspiration from what MacLean remembers about the early summer of 1997, and the lyrics allude frequently to the death of his mother during that period. On paper, the incorporation of spoken-word, field recordings, and piano instrumentals, along with horns and a string quartet, is in keeping with the lush expansiveness that has carried throughout the Clientele’s discography, from the steel and Spanish guitar of 2000’s The Violet Hour up to the last album’s Iranian instruments. The further addition of programmed drum and bass samples, similarly, is of a piece with MacLean’s longtime affinity for Boards of Canada. And yet the 19-track double LP feels like a step away from their characteristic sounds, embarking on a quest into the vast unknown. No wonder publicity stills for the album show the trio of MacLean, drummer Mark Keen, and bassist James Hornsey dressed up as knights in shining armor.
If the key difference for I Am Not There Anymore, as MacLean has observed, is the Clientele’s purchase of a computer, then, with all due respect: What took ’em so long? Album opener “Fables of the Silverlink” brings fractured electronic beats and haunting Spanish-language guest vocals to a bustling eight-and-a-half minutes’ worth of chamber pop, but that really undersells the album’s sonic adventurousness. “Garden Eye Mantra” glides like a dubwise Moon Safari with luxe strings and flickering “Dear Prudence” guitar lines. “Dying in May” ditches guitar altogether for a dizzying drone where French horn, cello, and Mellotron undulate amid clattering polyrhythms, equal parts flamenco and On the Corner. Minimalist piano-and-celeste instrumentals with titles like “Radial B” offer a meditative reprieve, keeping all this eventfulness from growing too overwhelming. More remarkable still is “My Childhood,” where Jessica Griffin of veteran indie-poppers Would-Be Goods recites eerie bricolage poetry over Psycho-worthy strings digitally transposed from field recordings of the wind; an abstracted reprise, “The Village Is Always on Fire,” swaps in backwards-sounding beats. From a band that once seemed destined to repeat themselves, it’s all enough to suggest a glimmer of Low-like reinvention.
A fresh sense of discovery also suffuses I Am Not There Anymore’s more straightforward songs. Lead single “Blue Over Blue” is a sumptuous, string-adorned psych-pop reflection on a moment’s unreality while lost in the woods, enlivened by hazy IDM beats and distortion that honks like a car horn. “Claire’s Not Real,” the song that contains the album’s evocative title lyric, starts off flirting with bossa nova and eventually settles into the sort of purplish, the Kinks-meet-Yo La Tengo mood piece the band has been futzing away with since Suburban Light’s classic “Reflections After Jane” and “We Could Walk Together.” Even the stately chamber-folk of “Hey Siobhan”—again, quintessential Clientele—leaves room for a gorgeous outro of voices layered in harmony over little more than a burbling bass line.
One of my favorite facts about the Clientele is that MacLean was working at a London publishing house in 1997, when he advised his bosses to reject the first Harry Potter novel. He considered it too watered down—“like Oasis” to the Beatles of the British authors of children’s fantasy he’d adored growing up. His own writing, like theirs, has always juxtaposed enchantment with the everyday. Proper names and an overweening Englishness make the Clientele’s lyrics feel personal and specific, but MacLean also paints in more widely resonant images, like three balloons in a white sky, sad green grass, or walking on a trampoline. On I Am Not There Anymore the lyrical style is as grandiloquent as the song structures and arrangements, tracing the emotional and geographic contours around the passing of MacLean’s mother through a kind of dream logic.
The first words on the album, from “Fables of the Silverlink,” are, delivered in MacLean’s ethereal sigh: “Blue sloes caught/In wet grass/Jarita lasya.” He soon follows this esoteric introduction with something devastatingly concrete: “I remember so well/She was dying in May.” Certain phrases and names recur across songs, like the rolling hatchbacks, glowing cigarettes, and mysterious “garden eye” that first appear on “Garden Eye Mantra” and return at the close of the penultimate track, “I Dreamed of You, Maria”—Maria, likewise, is a name that appears first on “Dying in May.” How all this fits together in a literal way can be unclear; perhaps, as MacLean sings amid the vintage Clientele poignance of “Lady Grey,” “All the beautiful things are opaque.” But a revelation comes near the end of “I Dreamed of You, Maria,” when MacLean sings, “And I knew that I would die.” Although a loving tribute to his mother, I Am Not There Anymore is ultimately a contemplation of our own mortality: a suburban-London book of the dead. | 2023-07-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | July 28, 2023 | 8 | ef0d4e33-b198-498a-8b0a-82efe966d3f6 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Tim Heidecker (of Tim & Eric) has released a slick rock record that is also a comedy album, and it is full of all the nervous laughs and queasy vibes of his surrealist comedy. | Tim Heidecker (of Tim & Eric) has released a slick rock record that is also a comedy album, and it is full of all the nervous laughs and queasy vibes of his surrealist comedy. | Tim Heidecker: In Glendale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21875-in-glendale/ | In Glendale | Tim Heidecker has built a thriving career in comedy, delighting a wide swath of teens, stoners, and other assorted weirdos with sketches that lean heavily on surreal absurdity. The comedian has dabbled in music already with his Tim & Eric co-conspirators Eric Wareheim and Davin Wood, but the new In Glendale is only his second under his own name (the other is 2011’s Cainthology: Songs in the Key of Cain, ten songs about former presidential candidate Herman Cain).
The ten-track LP arrives via Rado Records, a new Jagjaguwar imprint from Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado. In Glendale doesn’t quite have such a concrete unifying concept, but it does focus on “normcore” in all its glory—or, more accurately, its lack thereof. Heidecker declares his love for the suburb over anywhere else in America on the opening title track, and without knowing his résumé, it would be easy to mistake “In Glendale” for a painfully earnest tune written by a dad who still desperately wants to be cool. Late in the record, “I Saw Nicolas Cage” feels like a familiar version of the kind of thrilling celebrity non-encounter that one of your relatives recounts at every family gathering.
“Work From Home,” though, is a magnificent tribute to the days when you’re too sick (let’s be real: hungover) to function at work, so you promise to “work from home,” but you’re equally useless there. In Glendale isn’t a riff on the sort of rock that glorifies the difficult common-man endeavors of the American working class. Rather, it’s about the extremely boring real-life shit that most of us deal with every day—to which Heidecker offers a literal nod with “Cleaning Up The Dog Shit.”
But while all the songs are fun, there’s an occasional dark streak that elicits nervous laughter as much as anything else. Heidecker begins “Ghost in My Bed” with “I put your head in a plastic bag and I buried it under the Hollywood sign,” before detailing the thoughts of a killer who was probably just a regular guy having a good time before the whole murder situation happened. Likewise, “I Dare You To Watch Me Sleep” reads like a creepy letter from a stranger. They’re so at odds with their otherwise unassuming instrumentation, and fit in so neatly among their counterparts, that you can miss them on a casual first pass.
All jokes aside, In Glendale actually is a pretty slick rock record. From any other outfit, it would be a solid effort, with horns and keys providing muscle to every song. Even the piano-led coda of “Ocean’s Too Cold” sounds like it could’ve been lifted from any other polished indie rock record. Heidecker manages to sneak humor into the liner notes, too: every player is noted parenthetically as “other featured artist,” while Heidecker is noted as a “contracted featured artist.” Like the rest of his comedy oeuvre, Heidecker pulls no punches. In Glendale arrives as a fully formed beast, equal parts parody and confession of our universal lameness. Heidecker is definitely laughing at himself and most of us, too—whether you drop your self-importance is up to you. | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rado | May 20, 2016 | 6.5 | ef0f2f92-d7d2-42d8-9d46-b2ac8a158699 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
Mike Skinner follows two brave, brilliant records with an album chiefly about fame and its attendent trappings. The first two LPs found him clambering for closer contact with the people around him; this record takes place almost entirely in his own head, where he's either engaged in a struggle to stay on the right side of sanity (and possibly sobriety) or to keep his misanthropy contained. | Mike Skinner follows two brave, brilliant records with an album chiefly about fame and its attendent trappings. The first two LPs found him clambering for closer contact with the people around him; this record takes place almost entirely in his own head, where he's either engaged in a struggle to stay on the right side of sanity (and possibly sobriety) or to keep his misanthropy contained. | The Streets: The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7534-the-hardest-way-to-make-an-easy-living/ | The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living | I know, I know. We hate it when our friends become successful. That's Mike Skinner's built-in defense against anyone who doesn't receive this, his third full-length record, with the same unquestioning enthusiasm that greeted 2002's Original Pirate Material and 2004's A Grand Don't Come for Free. With the benefit of hindsight, those records feel markedly more different from each other than they did originally: the former a blunted jubilee of skits, stoned tangents, unrumpled beatmaking, and catalogued moodswings that was elegantly and instructively produced-- practically the chav Parklife; the latter a much darker record with braver production choices, denser verbiage, and a central narrative that only worked because Skinner had the charisma to see it through.
It is Skinner's ability to exponentially increase the on-paper value of an ordinary idea by garnishing it with the right details that is his main strength and the core component of what he does. That's why, despite the fact that the The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is devoted to one of the most tedious and overdone conceits in autobiographical storytelling-- that of fame and its attendent trappings-- most of us went into this third outing with good reason for hope, or at the least, cautious optimism.
So yeah, this is his blow-up record, the first music he's made knowing he's a truly bankable commodity, but instead of the celebratory club tracks to which he's entitled, we're tasked to sort through the dark insides of Skinner's post-fame headspace, which is fluctuating almost exclusively between yammering neuroses and smug self-aggrandizement. This is, by some distance, his most interior record. Where the first two found him clambering for closer contact with the people around him, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living takes place almost entirely in his own head, where's he either engaged in a struggle to stay on the right side of sanity (and possibly sobriety) or to keep his misanthropy contained.
In the case of the latter, he is largely unsuccessful-- one of the most unlikable and disappointing things about Skinner Mk 2006 is that he seems to regard nearly everyone in the ouside world as either his prey or his inferior. "War of the Sexes" has Skinner-- a man who once agonized over a hair twirl for a whole song-- sermonizing on the fine art of sarging a "hostile lamb" before unfunnily concluding with a reminder not to get too drunk, because "people who get hammered don't get to nail." In "Can't Con an Honest John", he smarmily reprises a classic grift: "Using this technique/ You're going to take all this man's money/ But you're not going to care/ Cause he's going to fucking deserve it." And over the farting keys of "Memento Mori", perhaps the smuggest and laziest thing he's ever released, Skinner flaunts his ignorance with a flip of the billfold: "Memento Mori, Memento Mori/ It's Latin and it says we must all die/ But I tried it for a while and it's a load of boring shite/ So I buy buy buy/ Bye bye."
Worse yet, the album's requisite feelgooders-- the sappy paean to fidelity, "All Goes Out the Window", and the strangely unmoving blues-gospel tribute to his deceased father, "Never Went to Church"-- register as lyrically barren and a little strained. In all these moments, he seems both alienated and alienating, miles removed from his former warmth. Even his jokes are uncharacteristically spotty; a few punchlines are so leaden you feel like you're being shouted into a corner by someone who's had about six lines too many.
But here's the rub. Not only are there scattered moments of lyrical brilliance on The Hardest Way, but from a producerly standpoint, it's probably Skinner's most accomplished and interesting record yet. Opener "Pranging Out" is a highlight in both columns-- over a punchy, full-bodied, and garage-touched beat, Skinner details with brutal candor the downswing of a particularly ugly drug binge: "Carelessly racking out prang just to handle the fear/ I do a line but then panic and feel a bit prangy/ So I glug Marlon from the bottle to ease off the panic/ Then when it starts wearing off I just feel a bit sad." On the baroque title track, Skinner outlines the machinations of the business side of stardom to dizzying effect; misunderstood lead single "When You Wasn't Famous" marries a spell of Page Six-rumormongering with a mesmerizing marching beat that crumbles and woozes with a virtuoso touch; and the genuinely funny "Two Nations" offers up a cockeyed chord progression and a tongue-in-cheek riposte to Brit-baiting Americans: "Two nations divided by common language/ And about two hundred years of new songs and dances/ But the differences in language are just the bits you got wrong/ Cause we were the ones who invented the language."
The album's frustrating push/pull is neatly articulated with the closing track, "Fake Streets Hats", which intersperses a few choice tour anecdotes with actual recording snippets of backstage exchanges. It's a tantalizing idea executed poorly, and Skinner ultimately ends the track (and hence the album) so abruptly you're left wondering if he doesn't have the odd moment where he regards his audience as potential con victims as well. Yes, there's certainly enough greatness here to preserve the listener's goodwill towards him for another album; the bigger and more interesting question is whether Skinner will be able to reciprocate. | 2006-04-10T02:00:59.000-04:00 | 2006-04-10T02:00:59.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Vice | April 10, 2006 | 7 | ef11a032-172c-45cc-91f7-3884e05e83a1 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The New York composer-- commissioned to create something special for Paris' all-night La Nuit Blanche festival-- crafts this three-part, larger-than-life sonic environment. | The New York composer-- commissioned to create something special for Paris' all-night La Nuit Blanche festival-- crafts this three-part, larger-than-life sonic environment. | Rhys Chatham: A Crimson Grail (For 400 Electric Guitars) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9883-a-crimson-grail-for-400-electric-guitars/ | A Crimson Grail (For 400 Electric Guitars) | In 2002, the master archivists at Table of the Elements made a crowning achievement: the beautiful An Angel Moves Too Fast To See box set by legendary New York composer Rhys Chatham. Holding three discs of guitar-orchestra masterpieces and a thick book of notes inside a heavy silver-and-white package, An Angel was dauntingly monumental, more fit to sit under museum glass than rub up against dusty jewel cases. But it also felt a bit like a coffin. After all, something this massive and career-defining-- it even ended with a new peak, the 100-guitar title piece-- seemed insurmountable. How could Chatham ever top it?
Apparently the answer lies in simple math. If 100 guitars could sound so great, shouldn't 400 sound even better? In 2005, Chatham set out to test this theorem. Commissioned by the City of Paris to compose something for their all-night La Nuit Blanche Festival, he wrote the ambitious "A Crimson Grail (Moves Too Fast To See)." Gathering 400 guitarists (along with longtime comrades Ernie Brooks on bass and Jonathan Kane on hi-hat) and four leaders listening to his directions through headphones, Chatham led a 12-hour sonic marathon. Starting on the steps of France's largest church, the Sacré-Cœur, the ensemble ended the show inside, beneath a 272-foot ceiling. Nearly 1000 people witnessed this mini-miracle, while thousands more watched on television throughout France.
Given the huge mass of bodies and sound, it would be unreasonable to expect the recording to replicate this spectacle. But audio limitations become a blessing on this album, which excerpts the performance in three 20-minute chunks. Slightly hissy and foggy, at times even claustrophobic, the record sounds like the abstracted essence of electric guitar. Sure, you can hear a chord here, a string pluck there, and the clicking of Kane's cymbal throughout "Part Two". But the lasting impression is that of a vibrant, shimmering sound-cloud. Chatham's ensemble creates an atmosphere that rises above individual technique, leaving concerns of who, what, and how far behind.
Given that engrossing tone, A Crimson Grail's three parts are surprisingly distinct. "Part One" is the most symphonic, as guitar waves alternately gather into peaks and cascade into near-silence. Uncannily, the guitars climb separately in small shifts, yet invariably meet at each apex. As the echoes lengthen, the piece evokes a huge frozen wave, full of dense overtones and hymn-like hums. The cinematic drift of the Kranky roster and the power-drones of Phill Niblock come to mind, but the glow of Chatham's guitar army has a singular warmth.
The outdoors play a role in "Part Two", as the sound of rainfall mixes with oscillating guitar tones. Once Kane's clicking beat enters, the piece becomes hypnotically metronomic, with two-chord guitars marching forward. Over that robotic lurch, dense sounds roll in like thunder clouds, adding a scary dissonance. The piece ends like a soundtrack to a horror-film directed by Stan Brakhage, filled with blurry shots that imply violence through abstract light and color.
"Part Three" is A Crimson Grail's most direct statement, a buzzing, slow-burning drone that never wavers. It's also the closest to what one might expect from 400 guitars: a thick, solid wall of sound. But imagination alone couldn't predict the piece's undulating textures, a result of the massed intonation techniques Chatham has honed for three decades.
At least the audience didn't seem to expect that, judging by their sharp, reflexive applause. Chatham responds with an encore of a darker drone that seems to create howls and screams. Whether those noises came from the guitars or the delirious onlookers is hard to tell, but one thing is for sure: This wasn't just a performance, it was a larger-than-life sonic environment. And A Crimson Grail offers the best panoramic snapshot one could hope for. | 2007-02-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2007-02-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Table of the Elements | February 19, 2007 | 8.7 | ef25b280-781e-4c74-8609-7f6eca4cfde1 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
A new box set collects the singer-songwriter’s 2001 debut alongside a set of live recordings from her early days in New York, showcasing the intimate performance style and vivid, theatrical lyrics that ignited her career. | A new box set collects the singer-songwriter’s 2001 debut alongside a set of live recordings from her early days in New York, showcasing the intimate performance style and vivid, theatrical lyrics that ignited her career. | Regina Spektor: 11:11 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/regina-spektor-11-11/ | 11:11 | Before Regina Spektor’s family emigrated from Russia in 1989, the 9-year-old pianist envisioned the United States as a sprawling safari where everyone owned lions and tigers as pets. Her family selected a tiny Bronx apartment for its proximity to the Jewish community, and she quickly learned that New York City is more urban jungle than forest preserve. Still, she was elated: “You know that thing that you see in immigrants sometimes where everything is new: What does this taste like? What does that say? What is that sound?” she recalled in 2004. “It was really exciting, especially to a kid, but my whole family had that. That’s a lucky way to be, you know?” That outlook came to define Spektor and her music. Upholding curiosity and playfulness as guiding principles, she began writing songs about mundanity and tragedy alike as if they were fairy tales. Once her music escaped her bedroom walls, her songs captured the hearts of the city and, in time, the world.
A new box set presents Spektor’s 2001 debut 11:11 alongside Papa’s Bootlegs, a collection of early live recordings. The majority of these songs were written during her teenage years and take on the style of cabaret performance: rousing but simple piano numbers with jazzy vocals. Although she claims she had “horrible self-discipline” learning piano as a child, Spektor fell in love with the instrument in Moscow, and she was gutted to part ways with both her classical teacher and the family’s beloved upright during their move. But when she discovered a dusty piano in the basement of her synagogue in New York, Spektor began sneaking away to practice. She ultimately landed free lessons from Sonia Vargas, a Manhattan School of Music professor, following a chance meeting on the subway between Vargas’ husband and Spektor’s father. On 11:11 and Papa’s Bootlegs, her piano studies take on colorful shapes, the rigidity of classical tutelage giving way to improvisation and willful flashes of personality.
When fans bought 11:11, originally released as a limited run of 1,000 CDs, they were greeted by “Love Affair,” a forlorn ode to heartsickness introduced by devious, staccato piano notes and a slinky upright bassline played by Chris Kuffner. More than 20 years later, the song’s bold opening still ushers you into Spektor’s world with an air of spontaneity. Spektor alternates between plodding and delicate piano melodies on the tracks that follow: “Back of a Truck,” an epic about a Mother Superior devouring everything within sight, sometimes literally, that devolves into semantic satiation; the moving “Buildings,” which follows an endlessly forgiving husband as alcoholism and suicidal ideation consume his wife; and “2.99¢ Blues,” which unites vignettes about a cozy ghost, a nightmare-riddled veteran, and an author peddling roadside stories. Tucked away throughout are clever turns of phrase—“carry-on luggage charms,” “an ambulance staking out the neighborhood,” “he was perfect except for the fact that he was an engineer”—that further establish her penchant for vivid imagery and character studies.
Spektor turned 21 the same year she self-released 11:11, but the seriousness of adulthood never sunk its claws into her. Back then, and arguably still, she anchored her outlook with a buoyant optimism and sense of wonder. During a semester abroad in London in the then-dreary neighborhood of Tottenham, she fawned over Argos catalogs and found comfort in the area’s similarities to the Bronx. The summer prior, she worked on a butterfly farm in a Wisconsin town called Luck, running through fields catching monarchs and painted ladies, an oversized net in hand, to be re-homed at botanical gardens. She wrote songs romanticizing life’s highs and lows because she was busy experiencing them firsthand, like a child pressing their face and palms against an airplane window in awe of everything below.
You can hear her embrace this outlook on 11:11 fan favorite “Pavlov’s Daughter.” At nearly eight minutes, it’s a theatrical production on piano that examines neighborly espionage verging on voyeurism, with lyrics that remain open to interpretation. (Is it a call-and-response to Suzanne Vega’s “Luka”? Or is Lucille actually Lucifer, with Regina playing God and Pavlov’s daughter representing humankind?) Most importantly, it’s Spektor’s earliest song that prompts the impulse to sing along dramatically. She molds words in her mouth to sound beautiful or ugly, their transformation dependent upon where in the song they fall rather than their definition: she repeats her name like hiccups (“Regin-AH! Regin-AH!“), drags the end of the word “garb-aaage” like it’s trailing on the ground behind her, and beats the word “quiet” back and forth violently until, on its 22nd utterance, it lays lifeless and still.
As she compiled era-appropriate photos to accompany the reissue of 11:11, Spektor received a USB drive from her father filled with footage of her earliest shows. Her initial instinct was to hide it out of embarrassment, but ultimately she compiled the recordings for the box set edition, handpicking 20 songs that capture her college years and ensuing entrance into New York City’s anti-folk scene. Before Spektor became a doyenne of the genre beside fellow luminaries Kimya Dawson, Jeffrey Lewis, and Diane Cluck, she was doing her part to squash the homogeneity of open-mic bars and cafes. Spanning her first-ever set in 1998 to shows promoting 11:11 in 2001, Papa’s Bootlegs preserves a storied era of her career that’s become difficult to revisit as 404 errors replace defunct fan blogs.
The joy of listening to Papa’s Bootlegs is the feeling of sitting in the crowd experiencing it first-hand: “This is my first-ever standing song!” Spektor declares ahead of “Wasteside.” She laughs shyly while performing the looping melody of “Rejazz,” asking herself and the audience, “How do we end this?” For every slightly off-key pitch or delayed keystroke, there are two belting, goosebump-raising notes. Spektor transposes the jazz and blues artists who inspired her in college—Nina Simone, Bessie Smith, Sidney Bechet—into her performance style, prefiguring her work to come. There’s the gorgeous chord progressions of “Amplifiers” that echo Begin to Hope, the solemn undercurrent of “Train Ballad” like a musical prelude to “Human of the Year,” and a whirlwind of piano runs on “Quarters” fit for Soviet Kitsch. You might imagine Spektor’s father, camcorder in hand, grinning with pride. Occasionally he caves and emits a small “Woo!” while the audience claps.
Barely two years after releasing 11:11, Spektor embarked on her first-ever nationwide tour opening for another New York act, the Strokes. Despite her intimate performance style and oddball songs, she quickly swept to international fame. That impending shift makes the intimacy of this box set all the more rewarding. Previously immortalized through digital file sharing after the CDs sold out, 11:11 is a portrait of an artist who appears too genuine to be human, too creative to be self-conscious, and too curious to be contained. Alongside Papa’s Bootlegs, it’s a time capsule for Spektor’s early days in New York City and a document of the spark that ignited her songwriting career. | 2022-08-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | August 30, 2022 | 7.7 | ef2c3897-6c4e-4503-918a-d21791c85b7e | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The Philadelphia-born, Berlin-based producer, a former GHE20G0TH1K affiliate, follows a run of incendiary mixtapes with a four-track EP of lacerating, irresistibly kink-positive techno. | The Philadelphia-born, Berlin-based producer, a former GHE20G0TH1K affiliate, follows a run of incendiary mixtapes with a four-track EP of lacerating, irresistibly kink-positive techno. | LSDXOXO: Dedicated 2 Disrespect EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lsdxoxo-dedicated-2-disrespect-ep/ | Dedicated 2 Disrespect EP | The past year has not been good for dancefloors, but it’s been an incredible year for dance music: Mining the rich histories of drum’n’bass, bitch and Baltimore house, juke, hardcore, and gabba, beat culture has been pushing so far and fast that listeners might be forgiven for not staying caught up. Berlin’s LSDXOXO is having a moment, too. A pivotal figure in the post-millennial NYC GHE20G0TH1K scene, which proved that rave, electroclash, and goth culture had both Black roots and futures, Philadelphia native LSDXOXO spent the last decade putting out a series of incendiary mixtapes (2013’s Softcore, 2015’s Sacanagem, 2018’s Body Mods, 2020’s Waiting 2 Exhale), each as brief and enticing as a well-cut jockstrap. In 2018, he left New York for Berlin to throw his own party, Floorgasm. Meanwhile, productions for VTSS and Shygirl let others try on his aesthetic, a flamboyant blend of high-tempo, high-camp techno, low-end bass, and pitch-shifted voices and samples. XL Recordings came calling with an invite to join up-and-comers including John FM and Overmono in its House Bag series, and LSDXOXO replied with Dedicated 2 Disrespect. A foursome of queer bangers, the EP foregrounds his own voice for the first time, with a ribald poise that makes one wonder why it took him so long.
Opener “The Devil” conjures a playground as infernal as Lil Nas X’s “Montero” but without all guilt. “I’ll make the Devil fuck me good,” LSDXOXO crows. “Sell my soul and my body.” His infectious delivery makes it clear the Devil would be lucky to have him; the rest of us would be lucky to shake our asses to the beat, a tough ride on the line between sleaze and wooze reminiscent of Green Velvet in his prime. “Baby” is a peak-time floor-filler that starts out sweet and ends up sour as its fluttering acid claps, bell tones, and vocal clucks and coos harden into a baroque demand for the return of a lover, or maybe a certain kind of high, or maybe the dancefloor itself—which, at the right time, “Baby” would destroy. It’s barely four minutes long, with kicks that sound so far in the red they’re positively black. It’s a lot, an almost-too-much that leaves you wanting more.
“Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” Divine once preached in Pink Flamingos, and lead single “Sick Bitch” could be her campaign anthem. The platform? The abject as erotic power. “I’m a sick bitch and I like freak sex,” LSDXOXO vows. “If you wanna test the limits of my gag reflex… you gotta make it hurt if you wanna make it squirt.” LSDXOXO knows that bragging about one’sability to find the pleasure in pain is, by now, populism—just ask anyone from the Stooges to Rihanna—and that the only thing that should be shocking anymore is the expectation we should care if someone’s shocked by our sex lives. With a scuzzy beat that’s equal parts Peaches and Sweet Pussy Pauline and a flow worthy of Lil’ Kim, “Sick Bitch” is the song of 2021’s slutty summer.
Closer “Mutant Exotic” takes a victory lap around a deep-house party, wearing a loop of Lyn Collins’ deathless “Think About It” like a laurel wreath and chanting “Mutant exotic/Homoerotic.” If Dedicated 2 Disrespect began with him seducing the Devil, it ends with him ascending to divinity. As horns toot and little hisses of percussion contract into hi-hats and expand into snares, as piano and organ chords warm the ground, LSDXOXO testifies. “I’m sending out my signal hoping that you understand it: Maybe I’m a goddess.” Maybe? He’s definitely a star.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | May 18, 2021 | 7.5 | ef355ee0-57f3-490d-9a2c-97eff28bef9b | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Guided by detailed coaching from Kanye West, the Chicago duo embrace an urge to restore a kind of lyrical conscious rap that has never been lost. | Guided by detailed coaching from Kanye West, the Chicago duo embrace an urge to restore a kind of lyrical conscious rap that has never been lost. | Abstract Mindstate: Dreams Still Inspire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/abstract-mindstate-dreams-still-inspire/ | Dreams Still Inspire | In 2018, as Kanye West helmed G.O.O.D. Music’s infamous Wyoming sessions, he also made time for undersung Chicago rappers E.P. da Hellcat and Olskool Ice-Gre. As Abstract Mindstate, the pair had worked with West on their first and second albums in the early 2000s, but a one-two punch of bad and worse luck derailed the duo’s career. In Wyoming, their fortune improved after one of their old mixtapes helped West overcome writer’s block. In return, he offered to reunite and produce them. Dreams Still Inspire captures the joy and bonhomie of this impromptu reunion, celebrating the pair’s legacy and their wayward path back to rap.
Abstract Mindstate recorded their album between their day jobs as a behavioral therapist (Hellcat) and an A&R for G.O.O.D. Music (Olskool). Sparks didn’t immediately fly—they hadn’t recorded together in years, and Hellcat’s creativity suffered in the interim. “Greg never stopped writing. It was like pulling teeth for me,” she told Rolling Stone. Some days I was in tears—[thinking about] all these dope rhymes I used to write, and now I can’t write a verse.” Guided by detailed coaching from West, the two embraced that urge to restore what had been lost.
The resulting record is decidedly nostalgic. Abstract Mindstate has always been a throwback group, from the “I Used to Love H.E.R.” theme of their early song “Rhythm” to the on-the-nose “Nostalgia,” which features, of course, Common. Here, that retro aesthetic persists and gestures toward a bygone golden era of clever wordplay and moral authority. “We speak clarity, never mumbled it,” Hellcat says on “Salutations (Intro),” drawing a line in the generational sand. In interviews, they’ve described their music as “adult contemporary hip-hop,” a shtick that’s too flimsy to take seriously. Between Quelle Chris, Jean Grae, Run the Jewels, and Armand Hammer, as well as other Chicagoans like Noname, Saba, and Open Mike Eagle, the kind of lyrical conscious rap Abstract Mindstate claims to be resuscitating with their return never even went into shock.
That white lie of revitalizing the art gives the pair confidence, though. Their performances, while a little rickety at times, brim with energy and catharsis. “I’m back with my first love/It feel like my first time/I’m back in the studio/This ain’t my first rhyme,” Olskool says on “I Feel Good,” his voice resonant. Hellcat echoes that sentiment on “Expository Mode,” rapping, “It’s a marvelous feeling being back in the booth/’Cause being back in the booth/Is like reliving my youth.” Her verse trails off at the end of the line as if she’s stunned by her own longevity. On opener “Salutations (Intro),” she calls West Mr. Glass, using “Through the Wire” as a timestamp.
West’s beats are tailored to this reminiscent mood. The samples are conspicuously homesick, incorporating bits from Abstract Mindstate songs, multiple snippets from G.O.O.D. Music 1.0’s hip-hop soul aesthetic, and interpolations of Brand Nubian (“I Know You”) and 2Pac (“The Brenda Song”). The drum programming is unfussy and neat, the low end vacant. And there are few maximalist suites or beat changes, mainstays of West’s production over the past decade. Throughout the album’s 31 minutes, there’s never any doubt that Old Kanye is at the console.
In 1994, when Abstract Mindstate was coming together, another Chicagoan, William Upski Wimsatt, coined “Chicago Syndrome” to describe the city’s overlooked status in the music industry. As record contracts went to New Yorkers and Angelenos, and Windy City rappers lamented the lack of opportunity, Wimsatt argued that the people “who get the most out of hip-hop are those who do it just for its own sake. The ones who work their butts off just because it makes them feel alive.” The quote is priggish, but it captures the sense of sustenance and rapture that animates Dreams Still Inspire. Most of us will never have our dead passion resurrected by the whims of a megastar, but for Abstract Mindstate, it happened, and they had the time of their lives.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Yeezy Sound | August 18, 2021 | 6.8 | ef3ec70c-f89a-482d-9f61-a12bc61fea99 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
With their unvarnished style, the music of Detroit electronic duo Drexciya was proudly DIY. On their newly reissued 2002 album, they turned their attention from the sea towards the cosmos. | With their unvarnished style, the music of Detroit electronic duo Drexciya was proudly DIY. On their newly reissued 2002 album, they turned their attention from the sea towards the cosmos. | Drexciya: Grava 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22951-drexciya-grava-4/ | Grava 4 | Over the decade-long stretch between 1992-2002 that Gerald Donald and James Stinson released electronic music as Drexciya, water was a constant fixation. It was as if the ocean was a third member of the band. Their name described the group’s vision of an underwater society built by the children of pregnant slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. EPs and albums bore titles like Neptune’s Lair, Hydro Doorways, and Digital Tsunami, and were littered with clues that outlined a byzantine afrofuturist mythology. “There are only two wavejumpers in existence today,” they creepily intoned on 1995’s riveting, white-knuckled “Wavejumper,” positioning themselves as the last representatives of a lost tribe. “A lot of things that come through water, all these different molecules—that’s the way I see the music we do,” Stinson once said in a rare interview. “It’s so endless.”
Each of Drexciya’s records—whether collaborating or going solo as Abstract Thought, Lab Rat XL, or Transllusion—had deeply considered conceptual and philosophical premises. Thankfully, Drexciya were never too forthcoming, offering far more questions than answers. Their final album, 2002’s newly-reissued Grava 4, continued to engage in this complex game of world building. It was originally released during a massively prolific 18-month period between 2001-2003, when the duo used various aliases to release seven albums, which they dubbed “storms,” a set of tantalizingly disparate works that hinted at strange new developments in the Drexciyan fable.
Grava 4 is an album of stark, brooding introspection, alternately expansive and oblique. It sees Drexciya turning their attention towards the cosmos, as song titles shifted from aquatic themes to “700 Million Light Years From Earth,” “Drexciyan Star Chamber,” and “Astronomical Guidepost.” A web of constellations was drawn on the cover. In the press surrounding Grava 4, the group claimed to have “finally discovered Utopia (Drexciya Home Universe),” and they allegedly named a star after themselves on this website.
Opener “Cascading Celestial Giants” casts a solemn, slow-motion tone. A churning rhythm sets a sluggish pace, while majestic choral pads suggest a reckoning with the infinite. (Close your eyes, and it’s not hard to imagine a pair of lonely travelers in a small spaceship drifting into the vast unknown.) This is followed up by the languid thrums of “Powers of the Deep,” which cruises at a melancholy clip and is ornamented with slithering, pinging effects. Though the group’s rugged electro drum programming remains intact, everything else sits back in a moody reserve, trading their terrestrial aggressions for something more contemplative.
Throughout their career, Drexciya could be by turns nimble, slamming, or willfully obtuse. The one constant was their live chemistry in the studio. Their records feel proudly DIY, with a raw, unvarnished sheen and track structures that could confound all but the most dedicated DJs. While Grava 4 skips the two-minute pipe bombs of their earlier EPs, the arrangements maintain this proud humanity. The gradual congealing and playful dubbing of “Drexciyan Star Chamber” feels too spontaneous to be the work of careful computer programming, with a sense of discovery and frenetic focus giving life to its spacious funk. “Gravity Waves,” meanwhile, has the tense, wiry urgency of a late-night jam.
Grava 4 is a grower, to be sure. There are no instant-classic, earworming anthems on the level of “Andreaen Sand Dunes” or “Black Sea” here (though the Kraftwerk-saluting “700 Million Light Years From Earth” comes close). Nor does the vulnerability Stinson showcased a year prior under the Other People Place moniker rub off on the duo. But Grava 4 opens up to those who give it space and attention.
Drexciya were pushing to the outer reaches of their sound on this album, and by the year’s end, Stinson would pass from heart complications. In this context, their final deluge of material was perhaps an attempt to sum up the totality of their vision before time ran out. (Stinson had spent his last months in Georgia “for health reasons,” and fans have interpreted his ’02 Transllusion title L.I.F.E. to stand for “life is fast ending.”) Album closer “Astronomical Guidepost” rides a bit of slippery funk, suggesting that space perhaps isn’t so different from the aquatic depths they spent 10 years exploring. Halfway through the track, the music drops out and a metallic voice comes in: “Use the star chart to fix a celestial navigation point. From there you should be able to plug your path back to Earth using rudimentary astronomical guideposts.” It’s a poignant bit of sci-fi ephemera. At the end of Drexciya’s journey, and of Stinson’s life, they’re leading listeners back home to begin the quest all over again. | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Clone Aqualung Series Holland | March 15, 2017 | 7.6 | ef3ee8ec-54b5-4513-98b8-4501336572d5 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
Cass McCombs's music joins the personal freedom of '60s counterculture with the reticence of late-'90s indie rock—cowboy music for people with a lot of library fines. A Folk Set Apart, a collection of B-sides and outtakes, is scattered by definition but still contains moments of his quiet confidence and casual rebellion. | Cass McCombs's music joins the personal freedom of '60s counterculture with the reticence of late-'90s indie rock—cowboy music for people with a lot of library fines. A Folk Set Apart, a collection of B-sides and outtakes, is scattered by definition but still contains moments of his quiet confidence and casual rebellion. | Cass McCombs: A Folk Set Apart: Rarities, B-Sides & Space Junk, ETC. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21289-a-folk-set-apart-rarities-b-sides-space-junk-etc/ | A Folk Set Apart: Rarities, B-Sides & Space Junk, ETC. | A friend once told me a story about the singer-songwriter Cass McCombs that I've always liked. One night, my friend was at a party in the Bay Area when McCombs showed up with a guest. It was a real punk-rock party. (My friend remembers overhearing someone insist that what people didn't understand about the American Revolution was that the American Revolution was still going on.) My friend was sitting on the porch when McCombs and his guest came out to leave. He said McCombs looked like he was about to cry. Not in a remarkable way, but like about-to-cry was his resting face. "Well," McCombs said to his guest, "we were just two sweaters at a sweatshirt party." They left without saying goodbye.
This was about 15 years ago, before McCombs had released his first album (the enigmatically titled A), but the sweater bit was prophetic. McCombs is one of those artists who looks out of place no matter where you put him. His biography says he was born in Concord, Calif., but it seems hard to say where he's from (in the metaphorical sense) or even where he lives (in the utility-bill one). He has no attachment to any particular scene, and though he has collaborated with a hundred unrelated artists over the last decade—including a producer for Vampire Weekend and Adele (Ariel Rechtshaid), the bass player from Phish (Mike Gordon), and an Academy Award–nominated actress (the late Karen Black)—he often appears to be totally alone, a tumbleweed drifting through the interior of nowhere. Characters in Cass McCombs songs are executioners, truck drivers, lifelong bachelors who treat liquor as their personal ticket to the moon and other people for whom being alone is not the product of bad luck but of religious election. At one point he only answered interview questions through the mail.
The style of McCombs' music differs from album to album but all shares a low-key American spirit that joins the personal freedom of '60s counterculture with the reticence of late-'90s indie rock—cowboy music for people with a lot of library fines. As a writer, he has a trickster's gift for resignation: He makes misery seem funny and his ability to control it seem smart. (This is why I tell the "sweater" story: Half because it presents McCombs as a loner, half because it presents him as someone with the ability to understand his solitude so well that he can turn it into a joke that connects with other people. )
His most recent album is a B-sides and outtakes collection called A Folk Set Apart. It covers 2003 to 2014, from A through the Wild West epic of Big Wheel and Others. On it you will hear songs that resemble garage-punk ("A.Y.D."), Neil Young ballads ("Bradley Manning"), nursery rhymes ("Three Men Sitting on a Hollow Log"), and stretches of recorded sound that people in the commuter pool would probably identify as non-music ("Texas").
One of my favorite things about listening to McCombs is that he seems unafraid to make some really bad decisions. This is a man who once orchestrated a three-minute outro that sounds like a dog sleeping in a clarinet ("Memory's Stain") and interrupted an otherwise beautiful song to ask what it was like to shit in space ("Morning Star"). A Folk Set Apart is scattered by nature but it has some of these moments, too—moments in which some line or turn that at first sounds unnatural becomes a signal both of McCombs' quiet confidence and of his casual rebellion against the idea of how songs are supposed to go. It's easy to understand why he was fascinated with someone like Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning, the trans woman dishonorably discharged from the Army and convicted of espionage for her relationship with WikiLeaks: Not only is Manning a modern variation on the American outlaw, but the turns in her life defy every extant script.
So start with Catacombs, or with the funereal WIT'S END or Dropping the Writ. Big Wheel is good, too. They all are in their idiosyncratic, prickly little ways. If pop's goal is to forge a path of identification between artist and listener, McCombs is defiantly un-pop, a singer continually trying to figure out how to outpace his audience's comfort levels without driving them out of the room. In modern parlance, Cass McCombs didn't come here to make friends. Which is good. There are plenty of sweatshirts in the hamper if you want them. | 2015-12-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | December 7, 2015 | 7 | ef40ef1c-dd2e-4a61-b945-a4bf4b441223 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
After six years, Max Tundra finally follows 2002's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, a record that is passionately, obsessively, and madly loved by quite a few music-geek types for its strikingly unique sound, what seems to be a whole other realm of pop music that exists mostly inside one guy's head. | After six years, Max Tundra finally follows 2002's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, a record that is passionately, obsessively, and madly loved by quite a few music-geek types for its strikingly unique sound, what seems to be a whole other realm of pop music that exists mostly inside one guy's head. | Max Tundra: Parallax Error Beheads You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12426-parallax-error-beheads-you/ | Parallax Error Beheads You | It probably bears mentioning that Max Tundra's second album, 2002's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, is passionately, obsessively, madly loved by quite a few music-geek and critic types, including yours truly. Yet none of us harbored any delusions that our love-- or the 9.3 rating from this site-- was ever going to make the record popular: The sound of his music is pretty evidently Not for Everyone, and that's precisely where the love comes from.
Painstakingly assembled by a Londoner named Ben Jacobs, the music of Max Tundra is strikingly unique, documenting a whole other realm of pop music that seems to exist mostly inside one guy's head. There are recognizable things within it: streaks of quaint English pop and soul, oddball programming of video-game synth sounds, a keyboard sensibility that ranges from lite funk to a kind of gleeful prog-rock musical theater, and a happy calm that vaguely recalls Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts music. It's tempting to describe it all using some outlandish metaphor: I imagine a reality show where XTC, Prince, Aphex Twin, and George Gershwin have to live together inside the sound chip of an aging Game Boy. But that makes Max Tundra sound cartoonish and scattershot, when the surprise of this stuff is how much it can all feel beautiful, simple, and coherent.
Now, after six years spent programming on archaic Amiga music software, Max Tundra gives us the follow-up, Parallax Error Beheads You. At first listen, this set of pop songs may seem more cluttered and frantic than its predecessor; much like the string of remixes Jacobs has done in the meantime, the music here is peppier and more tightly wound, and more melodically serpentine than ever. Give it a few listens, though, and you begin to feel like someone is sneaking in while you sleep and removing twists and turns from the songs, or straightening out the rhythms.
The old line about literature is that a good book teaches you how to read it; in this case, a record might be teaching you how to listen to it. What starts out tricky and overwhelming quickly organizes itself in your head and becomes a joy to follow, to the point where you can delight in all the detail Jacobs packs in: The way he lets harmonies unravel and then step neatly back into focus, or how he executes chord changes by shifting the whole song down a few steps, like someone putting a thumb on a spinning record. What programmer spends six years on 10 songs without making sure every one of those details works?
A good starting point is the record's least tricky song, "The Entertainment", a quaint and sunny piece that sounds something like trance music for children. Another is the track that's bound to be the album's great takeaway, "Which Song", with its pop-soul vocals and creamy synthesizers. The 10-minute closer, "Until We Die", sounds like Tundra's answer to side two of Abbey Road, but the one I can't stop playing is "Number Our Days", which plays out like some kind of amateur musical about the afterlife, with sinister synth-funk verses and angelic strumming through the choruses.
For those who've been following Jacobs, the big news on this record is entirely personal. On his last album, he explained the way his lyrics work ("I only sing about things that happen to me") and talked rather a lot about having stolen someone's girlfriend, which neatly explained the title of his debut (Some Best Friend You Turned Out to Be). Not long into the first track here, a bouncy pastoral piece called "Gum Chimes", we get an update: Jacobs and the girlfriend in question have split up. Many of the lyrics that follow are, simply put, a lonely geek's lament-- the frustrations of a guy who's always distracted by a "future wife," yet can't find a girl to bring home to the family. I really can't tell whether this is wonderfully human, slightly embarrassing, or just honest, but my sense of who Jacobs is has jumped way, way forward with this record.
Thinking back on his last conversation with that girlfriend, Jacobs sings, "a pint of chicken soup came falling from my eyes." The fact that he's now actually selling cans of his own homemade chicken soup is mostly a joke, but it's also a metaphor; if this joyfully hyperactive record is what comes of his troubles, we're all the luckier. It's packed with ideas, some of which work beautifully and some of which are just a joy to hear play out, but most of all, it's still a whole other world of pop music-- an absolutely unique, enchanting, and irreplaceable vision of how the stuff can work. | 2008-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Folk/Country | Domino | November 17, 2008 | 8.5 | ef48a43e-bc81-43c0-94c9-bf4af6f12c0e | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
As the Tokyo experimental musician’s work is finally made available digitally, this compilation offers an introduction to the artist’s critical perspective on capitalism, gender norms, trans identity, and more. | As the Tokyo experimental musician’s work is finally made available digitally, this compilation offers an introduction to the artist’s critical perspective on capitalism, gender norms, trans identity, and more. | Terre Thaemlitz: Comp x Comp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terre-thaemlitz-comp-x-comp/ | Comp x Comp | A commitment to non-essentialism is at the core of Terre Thaemlitz’s music and writing. Her work, positioned at the fringes of a cultural economy that trades in simplified forms and stable meanings, is imbued with a slippery oppositional quality. Even the sumptuous house music he makes as DJ Sprinkles doubles as a critique of dance music’s fraught history and corporate scaffolding. (Thaemlitz, who identifies as transgender, prefers alternating pronouns, in the argument that “gender is never neutral under patriarchy.”)
Thaemlitz is outspoken about the ways that capitalism structures cultural forms (particularly as both link back to gender and sexual politics). This interest has manifested in reflections on digital media and shifting methods of distribution—see the 32-hour 2012 release Soulnessless, the “world’s longest album in history & world’s first full-length mp3 album”—as well as in personal business practices. Since 1993, Thaemlitz has released the bulk of her music on his own label, Comatonse, and keeps tight control over how it circulates online. With the exception of remixes, her music has not been available for streaming or digital download. “Terre wishes to keep ‘queer’ audio and media functioning queerly, contextually, and with smallness,” reads a disclaimer on the artist’s website. “Populist social media engines that blast media ‘globally’ to as many people as possible may be appropriate for corporate pop music, but they function contrary to everything Terre believes about cultivating and protecting the hyper-specificities of 'underground' and minor situations. Indiscriminate file sharing, YouTube and SoundCloud grant too much exposure with too little precision.”
So it’s of some interest that, at the beginning of this year, Thaemlitz made a Bandcamp page for the first time, uploading a selection of releases dating back to the mid-19990s for streaming and digital download. Among these is Comp x Comp, which collects his contributions to assorted compilations from the ’90s and 2000s, most of which were released on CD and are now out of circulation. This rangy collection stretches into to the outer limits of what we might today call “ambient music,” encompassing electroacoustic pieces, sample-driven tracks that variously incorporate pop music and spoken language, installation soundtracks, and conceptual experiments. While album-length releases under Thaemlitz’s own name tend to take shape around a particular (if rarely stable) thematic or formal inquiry, this compilation—briefly annotated on the Bandcamp page—gives an introduction to a handful of the threads that have carried her ideas over the last several decades.
Those threads are presented in no particular order, and it’s the conceptual outliers, very much of their early-aughts time, that first jump out. Of the 76-song tracklist, 45 of those tracks are silent and just a second long. (The 46th track in the same series, three seconds long, contains a barely perceptible wisp of melody). Those are a sequence taken from a 2001 compilation paying tribute to the inventor of the CD, James T. Russell; they originally filled in the extra data space left on the compact disc, one second being the shortest length possible for a track on a CD. The ten tracks that make up “Mille Glaces.000”–“.009,” from 2003, involve first a digital mix of one thousand layers of audio from the catalogue of the iconic German label Mille Plateaux, and then subsequent recordings of Thaemlitz’s computer going haywire while he plays the files all at once.
Richer, though, are the ambient collages of sound and vocal samples that best characterize Thaemlitz’s output. Here the in-betweenness she espouses in his writings is embodied in sound in various ways, sometimes difficult and often beautiful. On “Genrecide (I Wish Tricky’d Die Any Way I Hope),” we are given an intimate set of slow melodies, set in a dim fuzz. But the stitching is always audible, a feature of Thaemlitz’s music that keeps the listener on edge: The lull of a synthesizer melody seems to take place far away, while the less inviting dry, machinic crackle is foregrounded and a conversational voice repeats: “I wish Tricky’d die…” Tracks like “Schizophonalysis,” originally released under the alias Aunty Eddie’s Pussy, and “What Is Between Is Missing,” which includes a recording of a debate over the “social problem” of being transgendered, follow a similarly indeterminate, glitchy aesthetic that provides a landscape for their respective meditations on transness.
The sound can also be much crisper and harmonious, developing into full soundscapes: “Sex on a Real Train,” or a dropped cut from Thaemlitz’s 1995 album Soil, “Get in and Drive,” which the artist refers to as “a failed attempt” to sound like late ambient producer Pete Namlook. And it can be screwball in its citations (“genrecide,” indeed): “Untitled (AV/M 8)” pastes James Taylor’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” in full over a cold, tense computer-sound loop. Thaemlitz constructs her own worlds, but also reaches into the void that is the already-extant world of pop, of corporate populism.
I want to say that the unevenness of the compilation is beside the point, but maybe it is the point—at least, it’s a fitting quality for a partial document of the output of a challenging artist whose contributions have been underthought, especially in developing conversations around algorithmic listening practices and artists’ agency in a streaming-dominated music industry. Mark Richardson’s 2003 review of Thaemlitz’s Lovebomb—one of the releases, alongside projects like Soil and Interstices, that interested listeners might be compelled to visit after a listen to Comp x Comp—noted that the essays contained in that album’s liner notes “bring more questions than answers.” But aren’t the questions more interesting? This collection poses many; as a listener, I’m grateful for all Thaemlitz refuses to resolve. | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Comatonse | February 1, 2019 | 7 | ef49972d-f9dc-4df0-b577-df8d30db26f9 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
For their droll, minimal collaboration, Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales turn their attention towards a famous hotel but end up with a more philosophical examination of these transient spaces. | For their droll, minimal collaboration, Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales turn their attention towards a famous hotel but end up with a more philosophical examination of these transient spaces. | Chilly Gonzales / Jarvis Cocker: Room 29 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22968-room-29/ | Room 29 | “Do you check into a hotel? Or does the hotel condition check into you?” writes Wayne Koestenbaum in Hotel Theory, a collection positioning the hotel room as a space for possibility. Consider it a companion piece to Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales’ Room 29, a meditation on the relationship between hotel and guest, comprised of piano, voice, bits of strings from the Kaiser Quartett, and sound effects. Of course, these seemingly blank slates still hold memories and emotions, and that’s where this collaboration gets interesting. Sorting through metaphorical traces left behind, Cocker asks on the title track, “Is there anything sadder than a hotel room that hasn't been fucked in?”
Some of the real-life stories from the Chateau Marmont, the infamous Los Angeles hotel where this room 29 is located (with a grand piano, no less), are indeed quite sad. In one of *Room 29’*s several tabloid tales, Cocker speak-sings of dear “Clara,” the pianist daughter of Mark Twain, who attempted to rouse the spirit of her dead husband at the Chateau. Memories of old Hollywood types haunt the record just as they do the hotel, like the only slightly veiled allusion to Jean Harlow in Bombshell. If one wishes to know all the references, the immediate concordance machine that is the internet will provide all the easter eggs for interested listeners.
For as mysterious a backdrop the Chateau can be, what’s more intriguing here is how Cocker’s lyrics edge into analytical territory while trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that people do in hotel rooms. Do they figure out relationships? Pretend like everything is okay? Perhaps take comfort in the free breakfast anyway? Lope about the lobby in a state of surreal emptiness while listening to cinematic numbers like “A Trick of the Light”? The music and the tone of voice seem to suggest this melancholy state. But combined with often laugh-out-loud funny lyrics—“You don’t need a girlfriend, you need a social worker,” Cocker quips on “Tearjerker”—the clanging rhymes can end up somewhere near a gaudy Tin Pan Alley standard.
It’s no surprise that this album (if you can call it that) will be performed at the Barbican in London, given that it’s all about bringing listeners into the room. But as much as this is supposed to be an experimental and theatrical tour of Room 29, both Cocker and Gonzales have way too much pop-song mastery for this to be just a fussy one-time stay. Cocker brings his wry Pulp persona to bear on Gonzales’ elegant piano and film-score approach and deep pop tune understanding. A few tracks are infectious enough to merit standalone listens. | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Deutsche Grammophon | March 25, 2017 | 7.2 | ef6115ba-679e-4cdc-91f3-f5e6fcee8c32 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
The Y2K-era bubblegum-pop duo team up with Max Tundra for a fun, ambitious, downright bizarre comeback album, their first LP since 2000. | The Y2K-era bubblegum-pop duo team up with Max Tundra for a fun, ambitious, downright bizarre comeback album, their first LP since 2000. | Daphne & Celeste: Daphne & Celeste Save The World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daphne-and-celeste-daphne-and-celeste-save-the-world/ | Daphne & Celeste Save The World | In 2015, Daphne & Celeste—the bubblegum-pop duo behind such Y2K-era schoolyard hits as “Ooh Stick You!” and “U.G.L.Y.”—released their first piece of music in more than a decade: an uncharacteristically low-key song called “You & I Alone.” It was a comeback that came completely out of left field. Though technically American in origin, Daphne & Celeste were part of a long-forgotten Europop wave known primarily for its extreme cheesiness. Even at the time, they were almost comically reviled by the UK press and many listeners, to the point that they were forced off stage by bottle-hurling fans during what was supposed to be a harmless novelty slot at the Reading Festival. Soon after that incident, Daphne & Celeste were dropped by their label, with just one album, 2000’s We Didn’t Say That!, to their name. Their music was a candy commercial, way too sugary and primarily aimed at children, and the high didn’t last long.
The biggest surprise about their new single, then, was that it actually wasn’t bad. This was bewildering to anyone who remembered, with varying degrees of fondness, Daphne & Celeste’s initial run. Built around an effervescent bassline and a simple, bleating keyboard part, “You & I Alone” stripped away the over-the-top theatrics that launched their careers, instead offering a dreamily subdued love song.
The upgraded sound came from the cult-favorite British synth auteur Ben Jacobs, a.k.a. Max Tundra, who knows a thing or two about long sabbaticals (his last full-length, Parallax Error Beheads You, came out in 2008). Three years after “You & I Alone,” he has returned to write, produce, and release Daphne & Celeste’s second-ever LP, the fun, ambitious, and sometimes downright bizarre Daphne & Celeste Save the World. Tundra hasn’t lost any of the innovative flair and technical prowess that made his previous records touchstones in the 2000s electronic scene, and on Save the World he manages to compress a dazzling range of pop genres into 13 tracks—from electro-pop to dream-pop to J-pop to the sort of ultra-commercial, high gloss Top 40 pop that made Daphne & Celeste famous in the first place.
The track that connects most clearly to the dubiously jocular days of We Didn’t Say That! is the single “BB,” which, it is revealed, stands for “Basic Busker.” Opening with a spoken-word segment where Daphne & Celeste bemoan the popularity of a terrible folk song—”This is the first thing you figure out when you get a guitar!” “Do people dig this?”—the track is an effective jab at the likes of Ed Sheeran, though his name is never mentioned. “Sonic simplicity is considerably over-represented/And sub-Dylan balladry was OK before the Fairlight was invented,” Daphne & Celeste sing at the song’s coda, taking a very funny (and unexpectedly highbrow) shot at the artists who have replaced them as maligned chart-toppers. Here as elsewhere, their upbeat sing-talk style rises to the challenge of Tundra’s technically dense production.
Mostly, though, Tundra reins in the duo’s silliness. “Alarms”, for example, seems more interested in deconstructing mainstream pop than in mocking it. The song, which recalls Saint Etienne’s recent output, begins as mid-tempo, spaced-out electro-pop, with Daphne & Celeste’s vocals run through layers of vocoders and supported by lush synths, before subtly shifting into a proper dancefloor banger with a disco backbeat and staccato strings. “A.L.T.O.” makes prominent use of steel drums, a tropical pop trope that has become all but synonymous with unimaginative club tracks over the past decade—but here it sounds like a deliberate choice to repurpose that cliché into something organic and alive.
Saves the World is full of clever production decisions like this, which are what make the project worthwhile. By working with Daphne & Celeste’s notoriety and, it turns out, actual charm, Tundra is able to project his idea of what pop should sound like in 2018 onto an essentially blank slate. Instead of a tired pastiche, the three musicians have created one of the most weirdly compelling pop collaborations in recent memory. | 2018-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Balatonic | April 4, 2018 | 7 | ef6962d6-7a58-49f6-b7fd-7200cdb7d6a0 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
Despite a limited Internet presence, Doughboyz Cashout are currently the biggest street rappers in Detroit, and the best rap group in the Midwest. Their latest, BYLUG World (short for "Boss Yo Life Up Gang"), is a relatively minor release in the group's nearly decade-long career. | Despite a limited Internet presence, Doughboyz Cashout are currently the biggest street rappers in Detroit, and the best rap group in the Midwest. Their latest, BYLUG World (short for "Boss Yo Life Up Gang"), is a relatively minor release in the group's nearly decade-long career. | Doughboyz Cashout: BYLUG World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21202-bylug-world/ | BYLUG World | To succeed in rap in 2015, you have to be good with the Internet—or prolifically bad, at bare minimum. It helps if you can meme-ify your personal brand, through Vine dance sensation or hashtaggable one-liner. The West Detroit supergroup Doughboyz Cashout, meanwhile, have not used their Twitter account in nearly two years. They don't have a Wikipedia page. They're signed to Jeezy's CTE World imprint, but haven't released an official single on the label since 2013's "Mob Life" remix, to say nothing of a full-length project. But the Doughboyz—whose membership has ranged from four to eight members since the group's 2006 inception—are currently the biggest street rappers in Detroit, and the best rap group in the Midwest.
Doughboyz' latest, BYLUG World (short for "Boss Yo Life Up Gang"), is a relatively minor release in the group's nearly decade-long career. It's not as consistent as last year's excellent We Run The City 4 tape, and lacks the immediate hits of 2012's Free Roc, their best work. There's nothing resembling a crossover play in the vein of "My Young Niggaz", a DJ Mustard-produced collaboration with Jeezy and YG; in fact, label boss Jeezy shows up exactly zero times here. But for longtime fans and those nostalgic for turn-of-the-century Cash Money and No Limit, there's a lot to love.
To the uninitiated, BYLUG World may sound anachronistic: the stabby piano, the rubber-band bass, and bounce are pure Mannie Fresh worship. Most of BYLUG World's production is handled by Payroll Giovanni, who doubles as Doughboyz' most popular solo rapper; you can hear the eerie ricochet of Fresh in most of his tracks here, from menacing opener "BYLUG Baby" to the stripped-down murder piano of "OVL". But like Fresh's best work, the production leaps out while providing space for the tape's rotating cast of rappers. And ultimately, storytelling is at the heart of Doughboyz' appeal. BYLUG's sole time-stamped moment, "Netflix", should be a goofy throwaway about Netflix and chill, but its novelty is redeemed by Payroll's deft but unshowy bars: "She was intimidated when I pulled up, for example/ She couldn't find the coupe door handles."
The tape's blunt edges are softened by the occasional warbling melody from Clay Baby—the closest thing Detroit has to a Nate Dogg, who delivers the tape's best hook on "Fell Off"—and a handful of smooth, contemplative synth-scapes from former Taylor Gang producer Cardo. On YG-featuring "Day Ones", he evokes a screwed-up, waterlogged AraabMuzik, and on his G-funk-leaning "Street Heaven", Payroll offers a coolly specific narrative that recalls Curren$y: "Meanwhile, I'm cracking smiles at Mr. Chow's/ Out in Cali, would I like another drink?/ Yes, gladly." But the celebration is shaded by struggle and countered with knowing paranoia: "Lately I been having dreams of trucks and 7s/ And nightmares of the Feds wanting me in their possession." This tightrope walk of aspiration and consequence is the Doughboyz' formula stripped down to its essence. Even at its core, it hits as hard as ever. | 2015-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 14, 2015 | 6.8 | ef6d9938-9a0c-47b1-9561-c30d5cd83550 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The Leeds band’s mouthy and acerbic take on Brexit-era post-punk has the humor, polish, and storytelling of classic Britpop. | The Leeds band’s mouthy and acerbic take on Brexit-era post-punk has the humor, polish, and storytelling of classic Britpop. | Yard Act: The Overload | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yard-act-the-overload/ | The Overload | There’s no shortage of comparisons for Yard Act’s Brexit-era post-punk. It’s hard to resist all these groups channeling post-punk history to convey the tension of a fractured Britain while making noisy political music safe enough for Edgar Wright and FIFA soundtracks. But how many of these bands met Cillian Murphy on the set of Peaky Blinders years before releasing their debut? In a crowded field, the Leeds supergroup of Post War Glamour Girls’ James Smith, Menace Beach’s Ryan Needham, Sam Shjipstone, and Jay Russell just feels a little slicker and more fashionable than the competition. Their Coachella-safe take on The Fall—clever, jittery, and unapologetically British—has the humor, polish, and character-driven storytelling of classic Britpop. What they’d really like is for you to compare them to Pulp.
It’s not unwarranted. On the strength of 2021’s Dark Days EP—which, one year later, sounds like a concept album about “Remember when Johnny Marr was in Modest Mouse?”—Yard Act signed to Island, the same label that released Pulp’s major-label debut. Elton John became a fan. So did notable post-punk scholar Ed Sheeran. Cue the up-and-comer appearances in NME and DIY, on the BBC and Jools Holland. Smith, a frontperson who values a good narrative, seems to encourage the Britpop comparisons in interviews just so he can laugh them off (and shout out Orange Juice and Postcard Records instead). How you feel that he shares the same last name as Mark E. Smith—fun happenstance, insufferable media bait, a shrug—will probably tell you how much you’ll enjoy what Yard Act is selling.
But in a lean 37 minutes, The Overload earns its hype. It’s a confident debut LP from a young band seizing its moment and cutting the tension with a chuckle. They’re clearly aiming for something big. The ambition doesn’t always work, and the attempt to manifest a Yard Act extended universe yields mixed results. But it’s easy to root for a band whose failure to write a new “Common People” lands closer to “Darts of Pleasure.”
Dark Days had Smith rushing to spit out all his words as the band flexed their post-punk chops and Leeds-specific sense of rhythm and groove (see contemporaries like Galaxians and Big Softy). The Overload is still, indeed, wiry and angular. But now Smith (who’s credited with 50 percent of songwriting, alongside Needham and Shjipstone) and producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, Algiers) turn down the band’s fury to make room for Smith to perform a classic post-punk archetype: the despondent, overcoat-wearing sloganeer who mocks his peers and uses privilege to attack privilege. He’s too educated to start a riot, but young enough to support one. What we lose in velocity, we gain in clarity.
Smith has hinted that his outlandish characters recur across different songs, but it’s inconsequential whether the insufferable “Could he be a Leaver?” narrator from Dark Days’ “Fixer Upper” is the same insufferable narrator of this album’s title track. The fun is in the one-liners, like when Smith screams, “If you don’t challenge me on anything, you’ll find that I’m actually very nice. Are you listening? I’m actually very fucking nice!” On “The Incident,” he plays a white-collar crook who says, “I’m hellbent on expanding my heaven-sent empire, ethically,” like he’s ordering a latte. He’s having a grand time on “Rich,” picking on the anti-capitalist who comes into some capital and immediately changes the narrative to justify their own advancement. Even when the lyrics don’t work, like in the obvious England metaphor “Dead Horse,” the band tries to make the ranting sound compelling.
The Overload’s best moment might be its most restrained. While IDLES’ signature village song is full of racist idiots, “Tall Poppies” zooms in on one villager: a promising and handsome football captain who, for reasons unclear, never leaves home and trades his athletic gifts for a career in real estate. In comes a promotion, a mortgage, a marriage, a dog, children, and a vacation home in Costa del Sol. He can still play football on the side (he knows he’s still got it), and hey, his town now has an authentic Italian restaurant. The lyrics convey happy compromise. The music implies restlessness, growing looser and more uneasy as the footballer moves through marriage counseling, grandchildren, and an increasingly frightening feeling: Is this all there is? The whole village comes to his funeral. Smith then reveals himself to be the late footballer’s friend, viewing the deceased’s life as a question: Is the goal to live so that after we die, nobody speaks ill of us? Is it better to lead a small yet safe life involved in our communities, or to live big and in constant awareness of our insignificance? Does it matter?
The success of “Tall Poppies”—and the best moments on The Overload—is that it’s up to the listener to decide if these characters are sad sacks falling short of their full potential or decent human beings feeling thankful for their small existences. It’s a short-story delivery worthy of Jarvis Cocker, and the nuance and empathy that dares to ask these questions in a post-punk song make Yard Act the real deal. | 2022-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | January 21, 2022 | 7.4 | ef6e35f6-28c9-425a-8c3e-9dff59e8e388 | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
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 Eve’s 1999 debut, a hard-bodied and self-determined showcase. | 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 Eve’s 1999 debut, a hard-bodied and self-determined showcase. | Eve: Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders’ First Lady | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eve-let-there-be-everuff-ryders-first-lady/ | Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders’ First Lady | Back in 1997, Eve’s promising career was almost derailed by a snarky, pill-popping, bleach-blond white boy from Detroit. She’d started messing around with music as a teen, but only began pursuing it in good faith after a chance encounter with Mase at the Bronx strip club where she briefly sojourned. “That night, he drove me around and we rapped all night until the sun came up,” she recalled recently. “And I never went back in the club.” After another fortuitous meeting, this one with an executive at Dr. Dre’s Aftermath records, Eve delivered an audition, flew to Los Angeles, and was signed pretty much on the spot. Eight months into the collaboration, Dre met Eminem, and Eve was sent packing to Philly.
But as with all the best origin stories, that failure gave Eve Jihan Jeffers resolve. An opportunity presented itself in the form of Ruff Ryders, a New York crew which, in the late ’90s, had made the transition from management company to label. Eve stood out with her platinum-blonde baldie and a pair of selectively-deployed paw prints on her chest. Her rap skills would soon become just as striking. “They made me write and recite, write and recite,” she said. “It was like boot camp. You had to prove yourself to them, and that’s what made me a better MC.”
In 1998, the same year Ruff Ryders’ principal rapper DMX released two platinum-selling albums, Eve got to work. By that point, the only credit to her name was a loosie on the Bulworth soundtrack, released as Eve of Destruction. But in 1999, she appeared (although uncredited) alongside Erykah Badu on the Roots’ breakout “You Got Me” and joined Blackstreet, Janet Jackson, and Ja Rule on the pastel “Girlfriend/Boyfriend.” She employed a different style on all of them: sly, seductive incense-rap here, no-nonsense wit there. Eve’s first proper release, the vaguely salsa-inspired “What Ya Want,” featuring Nokio of Dru Hill, was built around a rudimentary Latin preset on an E-MU synth, but it soon cracked the Top 40.
That fall, amid Y2K mania and vague collective fears about an uncertain future, Eve officially claimed her spot as Ruff Ryders’ self-described “pitbull in a skirt” and released Let There Be Eve…Ruff Ryders’ First Lady. It became the third rap album by a woman to crest the Billboard 200. She was 21, one of a handful of women who served in the token but compulsory role as the “first lady” of any given ascendant rap crew. Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Mia X, and Rah Digga, among others who had achieved name recognition within the genre, all had their own styles. And of course there was Lauryn Hill, who had managed to escape the tyranny of Wyclef and the Fugees to release an album that set records still standing today.
Like Eve, many of these women were more charismatic and skilled than their male counterparts, but often had less creative control of their own projects. You can hear that tension all over Let There Be Eve; across its 14 songs and four skits, the domineering energy of Ruff Ryders is palpable and weaselly. Eve isn’t even the first voice you hear on her own debut album, or the second, or third. The intro track, “First Lady,” is the equivalent of a red carpet being unfurled, a call-and-response chant delivered by Swizz Beatz and an anonymous male chorus: “When I say E-VAY, y’all say E/When I say RU-UFF, y’all say RYDERS.” The next track, the steel-tipped “Let’s Talk About,” opens with ad-libs from Ruff Ryders’ associate Drag-On. When Eve finally appears, a couple seconds in, it feels like the relief of a sunbeam.
Still, it’s very much a family affair throughout. Even when it feels like her ideas are retrofitted to preexisting, Swizz-produced morsels—on the frosty posse cut “Scenario 2000,” featuring DMX, Drag-On, and the Lox, for example, Swizz samples himself—Eve establishes breathing room for herself. One track, the chest-thumping skit “My Bitches,” is a direct response to DMX’s “My Niggas,” but is awesomely appropriated to act like something of a thesis statement for the entire project: “My bitches, my bitches that take care of they kids/My bitches, my bitches that you don’t respect/My bitches, my bitches that you always neglect/Y’all niggas ain’t real, y’all niggas ain’t shit.” Eve’s lyrics often appear simple in transcription, but they land with the heart and urgency Philly rap is celebrated for.
Despite the Ruff Ryders’ attempts at co-opting Let There Be Eve, it winds up being an album of self-determination, where she effortlessly bests the guys at what they think is their own game. There is little experimentation on the album—that would come later, with her blockbuster Scorpion album—but Eve bobs and weaves with dexterity, skillfully overcoming Swizz Beatz’s anemic production. At the time, collaborators and critics often attributed Eve’s success to her ability to hang with the guys without sacrificing her conventional femininity; the critic Touré, in a Rolling Stone review of the album, described her as “a thug with curves.” Her maneuvering required a kind of gender code-switching in which she had to be the “pitbull in a skirt,” years before the concept of the Cool Girl would become solidified in pop culture. It was an oppressive and offensive framework, mirrored across genres of all kinds, and Eve challenged it in part by using hardcore, “masculine” rap to sculpt her own power.
She defined herself boldly, a feminist former stripper who loved her all-male crew but reserved a unique allegiance for her girlfriends. The album’s primary singles were expressions of loyalty to both. The plucky, buoyant “Gotta Man,” is a ride-or-die anthem, featuring bail money happily paid and secrets kept. As a teen, I cried often to “Love Is Blind,” the semi-biographical single in which Eve recounts her best friend’s abuse at the hands of a partner, and dreams up a revenge fantasy: “I don’t even know you and I’d kill you myself/You played with her like a doll and put her back on the shelf/Wouldn’t let her go to school and better herself/She had a baby by your ass and you ain’t giving no help.” Elsewhere in 1999, Destiny’s Child and TLC were demanding accountability from men, across songs like “Bills, Bills, Bills” and “No Scrubs,” which unfairly lumped them together as man-hating feminists. Eve joined the chorus, but grounded that ethos in concrete, high-stakes realities—good riddance to men who ran up your phone bill, sure, but also men who didn’t take care of their children, who abused their partners, who made life materially harder for the women around them. The message stuck.
In 2000, Eve appeared on an episode of “The Queen Latifah Show” alongside the friend in question on “Love Is Blind,” offering personal experience as PSA. The song, whose hook features an uncharacteristically somber Faith Evans, was very far from my personal experience, but as a young woman approaching adolescence, it felt like it was within the realm of some shitty hypothetical future. In the ’90s, women like Salt-N-Pepa and Lil’ Kim forced hip-hop into something resembling hospitality to sex-positive feminism. Eve took it a step further, rapping about sex (“You make me cum, I might flood the block/Wet up ya socks”) in between complex narratives that got as gritty as life is. She was a welcome counterbalance to the glossy fantasies at the top of the charts, like watching a hard-hitting documentary after time spent bingeing Disney fairytales.
But after the album’s release, Eve fell into what she describes as a depression. She found herself submerged by the sudden, swift change in her professional life, and how it warped her every day. “I was 21,” she told Ebony in 2001, “and there was nobody who I felt like I could really talk to, who really understood what I was going through. I was going through a growth process, definitely changing from a young woman to a woman.”
She emerged from it by plucking some creative control from Ruff Ryders and making Scorpion, a more pop-minded album that featured “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” the inaugural winner of the Grammys Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category; she had traded in Drag-On and Swizz Beatz for Gwen Stefani and Dr. Dre. In doing that, she expanded the territory claimed by women rappers. Her peers, like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, were finding desirability as It Girls in fashion, but Eve had her ambitions set higher than appearing in advertisements for luxury brands. “Some of y’all ain’t writing well, too concerned with fashion,” she rapped, a little smugly. And yet she soon launched her own clothing line, the beloved but short-lived Fetish by Eve. All the while, she had prophesied an early retirement for herself, telling a reporter she didn’t think she’d keep making music after 25. She wanted to act or direct or get into philanthropy. In the 18 years since Scorpion, appeared in a handful of big-budget studio films but released just two albums. She kept her promise. | 2019-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / Ruff Ryders | March 17, 2019 | 8.1 | ef7223b3-4b86-44f3-b981-782a8e91fcf9 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Steve Earle continues his run of conceptually inspired records with a Texas blues album, an homage to the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Johnson, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. | Steve Earle continues his run of conceptually inspired records with a Texas blues album, an homage to the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Johnson, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. | Steve Earle & the Dukes: Terraplane | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20282-terraplane/ | Terraplane | Steve Earle has learned to compartmentalize. In the twenty-first century he has released an album of Townes Van Zandt covers, a few collections of agit-Americana, and another inspired by the immigrant sounds of New York City—each one so laser-focused musically and thematically that they sound like concept albums. On one hand, the approach gives each record its own distinctive identity within his catalog. When his overarching subject was the idiocy of the Bush Administration he hit paydirt: Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts… Now had a hardscrabble righteousness only intensified by the fact that few other singer-songwriters were tackling that particular subject matter at that particular time. Both have aged more gracefully than their topicality would have suggested.
On the other hand, that urge to cordon off genres and ideas seems particularly odd for an artist who changed the course of country music in the 1980s by insisting that everything could be commingled freely. His 1986 debut Guitar Town and 1988's Copperhead Road melded rock guitars and country songwriting, honkytonk rowdiness and folky gentleness, as if to rebuke the timid conservatism of the Nashville mainstream. Even in the 1990s, he emerged from a four-year stint in the clink with a string of adventurous records that made forays into doo-wop, Beatlesque pop, Civil War storytelling, and twangy psychedelica. That eclecticism was—and still is—rousing, yet nowadays each of those creative impulses would get its own neat album.
Earle's latest is also his most specific: Terraplane is his Texas blues album, an homage to the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Robert Johnson and Stevie Ray Vaughn, Freddy King and ZZ Top. There are no cheeseball Blueshammer theatrics, which often accompany blues records made by non-blues artists. Earle's more interested in craft than ostentation, and his touring band the Dukes keep things raw and wiry, as though everything was caught in one take during Shiner runs. Only on "Baby's Just as Mean as Me", a he said/she said duet with Eleanor Whitmore, do Earle's blues sound less than casually persuasive.
To his credit, Earle understands that Texas is a big place and therefore Texas blues is a broad term that encompasses various sounds and song forms. Terraplane volleys from acoustic to electric, from solo delivery to full-band performances, from pop melodies to spoken-word verses. He conjures some fire and brimstone on a talking blues called "The Tennessee Kid", which would be one of the best songs here if it didn't so readily buy into some of the persistent myths orbiting the blues: reaching the crossroads, meeting the devil, selling your soul. These seem like tired tropes, equivalent to naming your album after a Robert Johnson song, yet Earle brings so much grit and wiliness to the song that you almost don't roll your eyes when he name-drops "Bob Johnson."
The blues is often mischaracterized as uniformly worried and woeful, as though a hellhound were on every strummer's trail, yet that is only one facet of the form. It can also be funny, or randy, and it's this last trait that Earle taps into most eagerly, as Terraplane is his lustiest album in a long while. Sex is the major theme, and Earle beholds his hard-on with a self-effacing chuckle. The first song is called "Baby Baby Baby (Baby)", and that parenthetical aside is not only his best punchline but a winking nod to the ridiculousness of it all. Casting him as the leering oldie, "Go-Go Boots Are Back" may be his most frivolous song yet, but its lack of gravity is freeing, even funny. Nevertheless, the concept framing Terraplane also reduces its scope and limits its impact. It's good for what it is—better than it needs to be, in fact—yet what it is is only a fraction of what it could be, if only Earle would stop trying to tidy up his inspirations. | 2015-02-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-02-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | New West | February 25, 2015 | 6.3 | ef72dc55-5212-47cf-8781-3f20b73e9ea5 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Chicks. I mean, what's up with them? There's one outside my window right now, down on the concrete ... | Chicks. I mean, what's up with them? There's one outside my window right now, down on the concrete ... | Mercury Rev: All Is Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5236-all-is-dream/ | All Is Dream | Chicks. I mean, what's up with them? There's one outside my window right now, down on the concrete, in the arms of some big, oily brute, passive and seemingly content. But the thing with me and chicks isn't just that they're virtually always down there when I'm up here. The thing that gets me is that the guy she's with doesn't know any better than I do what's going on inside her head. As much as he smiles and nods along when she moves her mouth, no male will ever truly understand what females are ultimately up to. I can only guess that she stopped out there because she was drawn to the sweet pop music dripping from my stereo like an ant stuck in a puddle of honey.
At least, this is how frustrated hetero males have been thinking for as long as the thoughts of frustrated hetero males have been recorded. Inked on papyrus, set in type, expressed in terms of humors, temperatures, and tides, and eventually grooved onto vinyl, it's a piggish sentiment backed by libido and ignorance (and more than a little unfair to women). It's also, oddly enough, a sentiment that's been the motivating force behind a great deal of beauty, most notably in pop music (possibly the greatest repository for male frustration ever created). Much of the time, male pop is trying to both seduce and explain the opposite sex in the same instant, knowing all the while that one of these objectives is a lost cause.
Mercury Rev's All Is Dream claims its share of pop brilliance by taking up this position with enormous reserves of intelligence, grace, and emotion. As long-time Rev flautist Suzanne Thorpe-- who's been with the band since their sprawling psych-noise days-- has been demoted to the orchestra pit for this release, the band is now all-male. With Dave Fridmann mainly taking the role of expert producer (and making contributions on bass and mellotron) and Jimy Chambers passing the sticks on to new drummer Jeff Mercel, the core group is possibly the most stripped-down line-up in Mercury Rev's 10-year recording history. Though their approach hasn't changed from the radically orchestral turn of 1998's Deserter's Songs, these songs are far more personal than their last set.
Even when bathed in Jonathan Donahue's constant wash of fever-dream lyrics, it's clear that these are Mercury Rev's first real (though predictably odd) love songs. "If God moves across the water/ Then the girl moves in other ways/ And I'm losing sight of either," he sings in "Nite And Fog," his collapsing love story gently suspended above its lyrical melancholy by the song's flowing strings and Fridmann's buoyant bassline. Throughout the album, Donahue takes the concept of woman as the proverbial "other" to an almost illogical extreme, funneling oceans of uncertainty into a female form and turning these emotions out again into uncomfortable reflections on death, fate, and all of those other nasty things.
"Tides of the Moon" takes a typical image of femininity and transforms it into a meditation on loss and powerlessness ("The threads that run through your life/ Hang from your sleeve/ Wind through your soul/ The kind you can't control/ But wish you could break"), only to come back to the now-unsettling romantic sentiment, "It ties you to me." But even during all this, the band refuses to simply wallow in emotion, instead confronting their connections to pop lyricism smartly.
On "A Drop in Time," Donahue quips, "Her words profane, her mouth divine/ I tried to sympathize with both sides/ But I was caught, like a floating thought/ Stuck inside of Leonard Cohen's mind." As playful as they can occasionally be, though, Donahue's words are always rooted in nagging doubts and creeping riddles like those voiced by his creaky falsetto in "Lincoln's Eyes" ("What is dark like a birthmark/ Pulls like a magnet/ Male and female/ And covets like a dragon?").
The music, of course, is by no means as unstable as the lyrics. Where the band seemed a bit more easygoing and loose in their explorations of the orchestral-pop form on Deserter's Songs, All is Dream takes the band's newfound preoccupations in a definite direction. This makes the music sound a bit overdetermined at times (most notably, the opening track's calculated symphonic swells), but for the most part, their grasp of the sound has improved. The dark, driving rocker "Chains" cuts out at exactly the right moment, and bangs out a few cathartic Beethoven string hits before again steamrolling ahead. A soprano voice that sobs out the soft prelude to "Lincoln's Eyes" returns as a banshee-wail in the song's brink-of-chaos midsection, and the song returns obliquely to this sound in its gorgeous bowed-saws outro. "Little Rhymes" makes the most from its beautiful pedal steel lines, accentuating Donahue's melody without obscuring it.
Of course, Mercury Rev don't need all this fancy instrumentation to get their point across. "Spiders and Flies," a relatively simple piano ballad, stands as the most affecting song on the album. As Mercel caresses the keys, Donahue quietly unravels, confessing fears of death and disconnection from the unnamed female who's been flitting around the edges of the album the whole time. And, with shocking ease, the band shifts from these depths into the exultantly dreamy final track, "Hercules." As the song's percussive glee swells alongside guitarist Grasshopper's transcendently melodic noise solo, it becomes oddly clear that Mercury Rev has, in some way, come to love this uncertainty-- just as the pop protagonist can't stay away from the inscrutable object of his affections, and the pop fan can find a place in its heart for the erratic motions of a band as in love with music as this one. | 2001-09-11T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2001-09-11T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 | September 11, 2001 | 8.5 | ef7c4dd7-41cd-4cbf-b4c2-6221486344c3 | Brendan Reid | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brendan-reid/ | null |
Orlando-born singer and synth manipulator Emily Reo's first album for Elestial Sounds, the Gainesville record label/collective behind Hundred Waters, finds her sharpening her older lo-fi material and sweeping away the tape-deck dust to reveal a palette of bright colors. | Orlando-born singer and synth manipulator Emily Reo's first album for Elestial Sounds, the Gainesville record label/collective behind Hundred Waters, finds her sharpening her older lo-fi material and sweeping away the tape-deck dust to reveal a palette of bright colors. | Emily Reo: Olive Juice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18551-emily-reo-olive-juice/ | Olive Juice | Emily Reo takes things slow. In 2009 she put out Minha Gatinha, an album of narcotized dream-pop that sounded like she'd been on a steady diet of Neil Young’s honey slides (she also covered “On the Beach”, capturing and translating the song's despair for a bedroom recording generation that spent the last three years stuck on Beach House). In the years following, the Orlando-born singer and synth manipulator’s output came to a standstill as she moved from Florida to New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Olive Juice, Reo’s first official release in several years-- even though five of the album’s eight songs have already been around for awhile in different form-- shows she’s gone a long way musically as well. Though her vinyl debut and sophomore record still moves along at a resting heart rate, she's shed the heavy-lidded haze that swaddled these songs the first time around.
Olive Juice is Reo’s first album for Elestial Sounds, the Gainesville-based record label and collective behind Hundred Waters and Levek. It’s the perfect platform for Reo, who also belongs to FMLY, a “DIT” (do it together) assemblage of visual artists, musicians, and other creatives. That nurturing community has always been an important part of Reo’s work-- when she covered Built to Spill’s “Car” at FMLY Fest last year, by the end of the song at least one audience member was cradled in another’s lap, which is kind of what her music makes one feel like doing. On Minha Gatinha, that manifested itself as lo-fi murmurs suitable for times when drifting off to sleep starts to sound more appealing than being awake, like rainy afternoons or staying up late enough to watch the sun rise. That warm and fuzzy feeling doesn't come through quite as strongly on Olive Juice, whose comparatively crystal-clear production value can take some time to get used to. But the songs sound much better now that you can actually hear them.
“Car” is a pretty good example, especially since the lyrics “I want specifics/ On a general idea” may as well be about Olive Juice. Like “On the Beach”, Reo's 2010 version of the cover nearly drowns out her voice in reverb, and the volume is turned way up on the original’s buzzing organs. With different tools at her disposal this time-- namely, a recording studio-- she sharpens the focus, leaving room for harder-hitting drums and a more coherent structure. More importantly, Reo’s voice is now front and center, loaded and plaintive like Doug Martsch’s and kaleidoscopic with her own echoes. Those same edits hold true for her other re-released songs: titles have been tightened (“Wind Can’t Hear You” is now “Wind”, “Metal on Your Skin” became “Metal”, etc.), rhythms made more pronounced, and tape-deck dust swept away to reveal a palette of bright synth colors. The keyboard warbles at the beginning of “Wind” aren’t unlike those at the beginning of the Postal Service’s “Clark Gable,” and Reo’s multi-tracked vocals nod to Imogen Heap’s harmonies on “Hide and Seek”.
A new album of mostly reissues that’s not billed as a re-release might seem like cheating, but Reo has said she views Minha Gatinha as a collection of demos made while she was still learning how to write and record songs, which makes sense. Olive Juice, then, is a natural artistic progression, even more so now that her old songs fit like puzzle pieces with the new ones. Such consistent aesthetics might prove limiting as Reo writes more new material, but until she sets her sights on something grander, they’re perfectly lovely. | 2013-09-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-09-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Elestial Sound | September 10, 2013 | 7 | ef8003d2-e2ba-4873-9232-444c5755a13a | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
On their new album, the duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore continue channeling the retro warmth of ’70s pop. But their lyrics can drip with sarcastic self-effacement, adding bite to their sound. | On their new album, the duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore continue channeling the retro warmth of ’70s pop. But their lyrics can drip with sarcastic self-effacement, adding bite to their sound. | Tennis: Yours Conditionally | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22969-yours-conditionally/ | Yours Conditionally | If you know just one thing about the duo Tennis, it’s probably that they were born at sea. Their craft is called Swift Ranger, it’s 30 feet from stem to stern, and it inspired Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore’s first album, 2011’s Cape Dory. For their latest, Yours Conditionally, Tennis clambered back onto the boat for an ocean jaunt—from San Diego to the Sea of Cortez—and, they hoped, for artistic rejuvenation.
But whether they are landlocked or bobbing at sea, Tennis remain devoted to a specific span of musical history, drawing on the beautifully rendered tunes that emerged between pop’s Wall of Sound era and the eruption of punk’s unkempt energies, give or take a few years. Think along the lines of Evie Sands’ “I Can’t Let Go,” a stringless version of the Carpenters’ “They Long to Be (Close to You),” Dusty Springfield’s “Easy Evil,” and the “Angel” side of Fleetwood Mac’s catalog. These are unimpeachable reference points—plenty of other acts would do well to study similar benchmarks—but they also pose a forbiddingly high bar.
On 2014’s Ritual in Repeat, Tennis rose above pastiche and wrote a few sturdy tunes that stood apart from the history they channelled. The group achieves this again two or three times on Yours Conditionally, displaying a keen appreciation for harmony, balmy keyboards, and analog-sounding bass. When the guitar doubles and then embellishes the primary progression on the outro of “Baby Don’t Believe,” or when Moore arcs her singing downward without warning on “Modern Woman,” the band lifts off.
Lyrically, the album seesaws between portraits of perfect love and something decidedly more ambivalent. “My Emotions Are Blinding” drips with sarcastic self-effacement: “If the night goes exactly as planned,” Moore sings, “I’ll be giving all my attention/To the world’s most interesting man.” She delivers sweet nothings in the next song, “Fields of Blue”—“I really love you, I cannot help myself”—milking the contrast between tone and message.
“Ladies Don't Play Guitar” is more pointed. Here, Moore offers a send-up of female-as-male-muse, adding bite and an incisiveness that feels new for this band. “Ladies don’t play guitar/ Ladies don’t get down down to the sound of it,” she sings. “Maybe we can play pretend?” Moore, of course, does play guitar; on Yours Conditionally, she also contributes keys, piano, and some percussion. As she presents a caricature of a woman on the sidelines supporting her rock-star-lover’s dreams—“Ladies just need your love... I can be the archetype of whatever you’re feeling”—she undermines it immediately with her presence in the song.
Despite the lyrical punch, Yours Conditionally is hamstrung by Tennis’ drums. The keys and bass on the album are unfailingly warm, but the shabby percussion is one-note, almost the work of a different band. This feels like an eyesore amid an otherwise splendid view, an indie affectation that causes the duo to fall just short of their tasteful influences. It’s a shame, because Tennis’ return to Swift Ranger furnished them with some of their best material yet. | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mutually Detrimental | March 13, 2017 | 6.4 | ef82b48e-d45c-42d3-97a3-e76d6ed03acb | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
Ohio rapper Trippie Redd’s second mixtape this year is all hooks, all emotion, but features poorly designed songs that lack the spark of his previous mixtape. | Ohio rapper Trippie Redd’s second mixtape this year is all hooks, all emotion, but features poorly designed songs that lack the spark of his previous mixtape. | Trippie Redd: A Love Letter to You 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trippie-redd-a-love-letter-to-you-2/ | A Love Letter to You 2 | Trippie Redd arrived just in time for the emo rap moment, as if summoned by the seance that is “XO TOUR Llif3.” The 18-year-old Canton, Ohio native treats Marilyn Manson as a guiding light, and he started out making what he describes as “alt rock” songs before he deleted them. Trippie cites melody-friendly rappers like Lil Wayne and Ja Rule as inspirations and has a fascination with KISS, Slipknot, and K-pop boy band Big Bang’s G-Dragon. Sometimes his songs channel melodic hardcore, and other times they’re indebted to the growls of Chief Keef. Trippie got the words “love scars” tattooed on his face and then made the tat a song title for what became his big viral hit. “Love Scars” is a gripping tune that makes plain the ache and (seemingly) life-or-death seriousness of teenage romance: “You used to say you in love/I used to say that shit back/Taking that shit from the heart/Now look where the fuck where we at.” After building a huge following on SoundCloud, Trippie shared his second mixtape of 2017, A Love Letter To You 2. The tape doesn’t fully realize the promise of “Love Scars,” but there are signs of a melody savvy MC working out kinks.
Trippie’s breakout mixtape, A Love Letter to You, earned its title, mixing scrawled bawler raps in with tortured ballads. There were songs like “Deeply Scared” and “Romeo & Juliet” that depended largely on melodramatic turns: “Shawty on fire, and she really blazin’/Flames Armageddon, yelling Jesus save me/I’ma take her soul, if she try to play me/‘Cause that’s all mine, that’s my lil baby,” he barked, as if he were truly being consumed by hellfire. The sequel isn’t as interested in twisted romance, though there are flashes of that same energy—on “Feel Good” and “Overdose on L1fe,” especially. He’s more interesting in that space, where he’s forced to think about someone other than himself. Here, we mostly get random jawing. His POV as a flex rapper requires too much colorless navel-gazing, and it doesn’t help that he has little feel for songcraft.
Unconventional song structures are all the rage among the SoundCloud elite, who either live on hooks, distract listeners with constant motion, or deafen them by cranking the decibels way up. Trippie Redd is all hooks, and he likes to mix and match parts, with mixed success. Few songs on A Love Letter to You 2 have more than one Trippie verse. There are songs where he only sings the chorus. Those hooks are usually just echoes, the same word, phrase, or basic idea repeated or reiterated. “I Know How to Self Destruct <3” is mostly just him howling “I know,” as if into the void, taking the song’s title a bit too literally. When there are verses, the lengths vary from absurdly brief to seemingly endless. Sometimes there are choruses longer than verses. He’s a rambler, so stanzas can come out circuitous (as on “Today”), hysteric, or downright incoherent; they’d be digressions if his songs went anywhere. Still, nearly every Trippie song can be enjoyable on the condition you don’t pay too close attention.
Trippie Redd is often compared to Lil Uzi Vert, and there are similarities in tone and technique. (Calling a song “Woah Woah Woah” certainly doesn’t help dispel the notion.) Trippie isn’t the charmer Uzi is, and his phrases are less earwormy, but he really commits to many of the performances; his showings rely heavily on execution and histrionics. Because of this, the songs play up a nearly biblical struggle—sin, wickedness, greed, lust, hell, heaven, and unholiness. His scenes are like the circles in SoundCloud rap’s Inferno: Sipping Actavis, lusting after women, relentlessly chasing blue-faced hundreds, trapped in a savage lifestyle. “Dangerous” weighs the hazards of this cycle—the money, the drugs, the people. He navigates darkness in “Hellboy,” where Canton, which has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country, is a literal hellscape he’s escaping from, into a rap paradise of his own making. “Deadman’s Wonderland” is like a dread-filled note to self: “You gotta get this fuckin’ bread, man/‘Cause if you don’t then you’s a dead man.” The last words uttered on ALLTY2 are “Don’t bring me down, bring me closer to God.” If Trippie could see any one of these ideas to their conclusion, it’d be deeply satisfying.
A Love Letter to You 2 never fully realizes any of the concepts it sets in motion, and the tape doesn’t match the fire or flair of its predecessor, but Trippie Redd does show signs of untapped potential. There’s value in the explosiveness of his voice and his ability to segue, how effortlessly he transitions from a mush-mouthed delivery to bellowed, impassioned pleas. And his ad-libs can take on lives of their own, expanding into full-blown croons in the middle distance. On “Overweight,” he pauses abruptly just before the end of each bar as the beat ripples beneath him, eventually building into a complete wail. Alongside Cydnee with a C, he erupts into full-throated howls for “Back of My Mind”; her pristine vocals balance his hollers. While keys beam on opener “Bust Down,” he excitedly gloats in a nasally whine. As he breaks down the levels of his savagery—taught to him by his mama, the streets, and now the industry—Trippie Redd sets his default mode. But on A Love Letter to You 2, his wildman enthusiasm isn’t enough to sate. | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Capitol | October 16, 2017 | 6.4 | ef8b2de5-0825-4cbe-9033-2ed9a9fafc4e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The singer-songwriter brings a more considered levity to her full-length debut, striking a balance between heartache and resolve. | The singer-songwriter brings a more considered levity to her full-length debut, striking a balance between heartache and resolve. | Jensen McRae: Are You Happy Now? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jensen-mcrae-are-you-happy-now/ | Are You Happy Now? | The comparisons may have been inevitable given her voice—a brassy alto powered with throaty projection—but Jensen McRae wears Tracy Chapman’s influence on her sleeve. The 24-year-old’s stark folk songs center on lone guitars, with bluesy grooves and linear narratives delivered in second person. Yet the most striking similarity is the way McRae enunciates, mumbling through verses with a shy aloofness, embellishing odd vowels and images before belting choruses with glaring urgency. These punctuations can be startling, but they rarely feel gratuitous in light of McRae’s allusive subject matter: Her earliest singles confronted abuse and degradation, filtering brazen candor through an allegorical lens.
If Chapman’s earnestness is at odds with the meme-fluent, smart-aleck tone of folk-pop’s Zennial set, McRae has toed the line somewhat. In early 2021, she gained Phoebe Bridgers’s attention with a parody song imagining a breakup at a mass vaccination site, then repurposed the track for her June EP Who Hurt You?. The impulse to balance the EP’s heavier themes with self-referential winks was understandable, but it was also a bit superfluous given how well the record’s melodrama worked at face value. Five of the Who Hurt You? tracks reappear on McRae’s full-length debut, Are You Happy Now?, although new material supplants the EP’s irreverent moments with a more considered levity.
The best of the Who Hurt You? holdovers comprise the new album’s emotional backbone. “Starting to Get to You” maintains the melancholy of its opening chords, yet the song’s economy is masterful. Volleying between fluttery falsetto and a forceful lower register, McRae intersperses hard facts (“You l-l-loved me for a second there”) with harsher realizations (“Loving you is habit-forming”); the pre-chorus and chorus stretch 12 bars, lingering like an unspoken thought. Sequenced in the album’s second half, “White Boy” and “Wolves” play like companion pieces contrasting strains of male predators. The former accretes into an orchestral manifesto; the latter chronicles a loss of innocence with barely any melody at all.
These understated arrangements ensure that McRae’s vocals are the focal point, but the co-star of Are You Happy Now? is Rahki, a quietly accomplished hip-hop producer whose mid-2010s output peaked with Kendrick Lamar’s “i.” The album’s sonics are distinguished by an open-mic spareness, bestowing the songs with well-earned breathing room. Rahki’s synthetic percussion is particularly brilliant, drawing attention to small flourishes like the breezy rimshots on “Good Legs” and foregrounded cleves on “Take It Easy.” Animated backing vocals accentuate the melodic pivots of “With the Lights On”; on “Starting to Get to You,” a descending bassline punctuates the final chorus like an exclamation point.
The chamber-pop instrumentals of “Machines” and “Adam’s Ribs” are slightly overwrought, if only because McRae’s modulated performances speak for themselves. Are You Happy Now? is an album about failing to meet expectations, or not wanting to, which means striking a balance between heartache and resolve. “Happy Girl” splits the difference with plainspoken lyrics and a delightfully moody chorus. “Good Legs” and “Take It Easy” border on easy-listening, but McRae shines in the upbeat framework, leaning into the big hooks and sticky imagery.
Her ballads might still benefit from additional sharpening—the lumpy title of “My Ego Dies at the End” is shoehorned into the song’s chorus—yet it’s hard to find fault with McRae’s instincts. Her remarkable voice is deployed in service of ambitious statements, and even the detached metaphors of “Wolves” and “Dead Girl Walking” are purposeful. People have a natural tendency to shrug off vulnerable moments, but McRae knows better. | 2022-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Human Re Sources | March 19, 2022 | 7.7 | ef8cd62d-b9db-41e3-9bed-b48e7218f16b | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The prolific Detroit rapper continues his dazzling run with yet another album of detail-rich, tightly-constructed street rap. | The prolific Detroit rapper continues his dazzling run with yet another album of detail-rich, tightly-constructed street rap. | Boldy James / Real Bad Man: Killing Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boldy-james-real-bad-man-killing-nothing/ | Killing Nothing | Call it what you will–rappity-rap, boom-bap, or “real” hip-hop–but it’s clear that back-to-basics street rap is enjoying something of a renaissance, thanks in large part to the ascension of Griselda Records. Of course, this style of music never really went away—rappers like Boldy James have been carrying the torch in the underground all the while. Now that he’s finally catching some limelight thanks to his association with Griselda, James is enjoying his own career renaissance; few rappers this decade can claim to have better balanced quality and quantity. The secret to his longevity seems to be his craftsman-like approach, one that prizes consistency and continuous refinement above all. On Killing Nothing, he continues to narrate stories of street life in the gruff, seen-it-all monotone that’s become his trademark. But James never runs out of clever, funny, and menacing new ways to weave these yarns about the drug trade—the strength of his writing and rapping prevents the music from ever feeling stale.
Like 2020’s Real Bad Boldy, Killing Nothing is produced entirely by the Los Angeles clothing and production collective Real Bad Man. While they might not have the profile of some of the producers James has worked with in recent years, they know the rapper’s tastes well. Across these 13 tracks, they do a convincing job of approximating the musically-omnivorous, sample-based beats that made living legends out of Madlib and frequent James collaborator the Alchemist. As usual, James doesn’t waste an inch of the canvas, packing each song with tightly-constructed bars. Given the pace at which he’s been working these last few years, it’s remarkable how focused Killing Nothing feels: there’s no fat to speak of across the record’s 43 minutes.
Take the opening track “Water Under the Bridge,” whose ringing piano keys recall DJ Premier’s “N.Y. State of Mind” beat. Less than a minute into the album, James is reminding you of how long he’s been in the streets and how far back his grudges go: “But back in grade school, you was running for student council/Now you a killer and a shooter but we doubt you.” As if to underline the point, he later raps, “hundred-fifty rounder, that’s a rumble pack,” nodding at anyone old enough to have once found a Nintendo 64 under their Christmas tree. This is a trick that James employs frequently: tacking on an eye-level reference to make even the wildest street tales feel accessible. This sort of thing might feel like pandering in the hands of a lesser rapper but every detail in these songs bears the texture of a real memory.
However, James isn’t always concerned with making his songs feel relatable. On “Cash Transactions,” he engages in a common boast over a dusty loop: “I’ll probably never love this rap shit more than these cash transactions/I got a passion for selling drugs.” He stretches out that last word—”druuugs”—and it sounds like he’s sneering at rappers who overstate their proximity to the streets. On “All the Way Out,” he skates over a rolling bassline, tossing out judgements (“None of your niggas killers, they just got attempts”) and compares his footwork during a gunfight to the “Hokey Pokey.” “Game Time” is genuinely gutting when, over a bed of steely synths, James admits, “Mama gave up on me early, damn near called it quits/Seemed like I never stood a chance until I caught a brick.”
In the ongoing barrage of Boldy James’ releases, Killing Nothing is likely to get overlooked: it lacks the prismatic production of Bo Jackson or the high-profile guests of The Price of Tea in China. And sure, even James die-hards might not be clamoring for more music at this point. That said, it’s hard to deny how good Killing Nothing is when taken on its own terms. The sheer variety of Real Bad Man’s production goes a long way toward keeping things fresh; James raps over a circular guitar arpeggio on “Sawyer,” a jangly afro-pop sample on “Killing Nothing,” and spaceship sounds on “Hundred Ninety Bands.” All the while he sounds like a guy who has learned how to rap so effortlessly, he doesn’t know how to stop. | 2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Real Bad Man | May 23, 2022 | 7.3 | ef8d682c-a5db-4759-998e-f4871e1176d1 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
Visible Cloaks’ hard-to-classify ambient music is a fascinating mix of organic and synthetic, past and future. | Visible Cloaks’ hard-to-classify ambient music is a fascinating mix of organic and synthetic, past and future. | Visible Cloaks: Reassemblage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22874-reassemblage/ | Reassemblage | So far, Spencer Doran’s mixtapes have overshadowed his actual albums. In 2010, the Portland, Oregon, producer posted Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo—Fourth-World Japan, Years 1980–1986, a stunning collection of early-’80s Japanese synthesizer music by artists like Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto. While not a party-starting DJ set, it was in its own meticulous, contemplative way, influential; you can hear its sensibility course through later works by the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Neon Indian, Motion Graphics, and the entire vaporwave contingency. A second volume followed, as did another series, Music Interiors, cementing Doran’s status as an innovative curator of now-obscure sounds.
But despite the bubbling ambience and generally high quality of Doran and partner Ryan Carlile’s 2015 debut album as Visible Cloaks, the initial full-length was overshadowed by the earlier mixes. On their second album, Reassemblage, however, the duo fully absorb these far-flung influences, weaving the strands into something delicate yet decidedly original. Lullaby-like though compositionally rigorous, serene but slightly unsettled, organic and synthetic, Reassemblage strikes an intriguing balance between extremes.
Like Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, and Laurel Halo did during the short reign of Hippos in Tanks at the start of the decade, Visible Cloaks scrutinize the once-novel digital sounds that now riddle modern pop and envelop us in our everyday lives. Just don’t call Visible Cloaks “vaporwave”—if anything, Reassemblage is the antithesis of that trend. While on the surface there is a shared obsession with the cleanliness of early digital music and the Japanese pop culture that helped usher it in the early ‘80s, what Doran and Carlile do with the raw material stands apart.
Scroll through the Discogs page for vaporwave and almost any title bears either a visual wink or track title that mimics Japanese script. As an Esquire piece proclaiming that vaporwave was dead posited last year, the genre itself was a “musical parody of pop consciousness… [a] sarcastic take on the unachieved utopias of previous decades.” But as Fairlights, Mallets, and Bamboo showed, there was a deeper investigation into the music beyond a mocking appropriation of a cool surface. The title itself comes from Vietnamese filmmaker/theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha's 1982 film Reassemblage, a documentary filmed in Senegal that doubles as a tacit admission that one can never fully decipher another culture. While never able to fully grasp the Japanese sounds they adore, Visible Cloaks nevertheless have created an album along the axis of Fennesz’s Endless Summer and OPN’s Replica, an abstract electronic album that’s readily accessible and an immersive listen.
Visible Cloaks specialize in blurring boundaries, as they collapse organic sounds into precisely machined new shapes. “Mask” works from a palette closest to those Root Strata mixes, as gamelan bowls, bird calls, and vocodered hums are stretched and processed like a Fennesz track. “Terrazzo” has Doran and Carlile team up with Motion Graphics’ Joe Williams, taking his flute and elongating it until it more closely resembles a shakuhachi bamboo version. Around this timbre, the duo stir a marsh of small blips, twinkling crystals, and koto strings, a strange sensation of natural ambience and glitching electronics blending into an alien landscape.
Even when working with thoroughly synthetic tones, Cloaks tease them out so that they clench and exhale, emerging as digital blips that seem as natural as breath. Water sounds gush out of “Screen,” but rather than replicate new age nature sounds, the frequencies become high and crinkled, like the baldly fake cellophane sea of Frederico Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On. “Valve” continues with that gentle pacing, this time featuring the crystalline vocals of Miyako Koda, one-half of Japanese elegant ’80s group Dip in the Pool. Curiously, the group didn’t factor into any of Doran’s mixes, but “Valve” sounds like a lost Bamboo selection with its deliberate mallets and misty chords. Koda is the perfect fit here and the duo shadows her already gossamer voice with what might be puffs of steam on glass rods.
Water, glass, cellophane, crystals, glass—these metaphors suggest sound that can at once seem transparent and featureless. But Visible Cloaks take pains to pivot their compositions every so often, so that light catches off the sleek edges and a full spectrum of color suddenly appears. And as the album glides along, Cloaks moves away from the easy Hosono and Sakamoto comparisons. “Circle”—with its slivers of voices, strings, and woodwinds—sounds exacting in its every gesture, bringing to mind modern composition rather than laptop mincing. “Neume”—named for an early form of musical notation—finds the Cloaks collaborating with fellow Portlander Matt Carlson. They Auto-Tune his voice, but also warp it until he starts to resemble the polyphonic chants of a medieval organum. It’s one of Reassemblage’s loveliest moments and reveals Visible Cloaks’ essential appeal, not where East meets West so much as where ancient music anticipates its digital future. | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | February 20, 2017 | 8.7 | ef92f461-274e-4fd5-99fe-fe34a2038f72 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Massachusetts songwriter’s ragged, tormented indie rock puts a surreal spin on the grim realities of life. | The Massachusetts songwriter’s ragged, tormented indie rock puts a surreal spin on the grim realities of life. | Prewn: Through the Window | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prewn-through-the-window/ | Through the Window | Izzy Hagerup isn’t afraid to get uncomfortable. On Through the Window, her debut album as Prewn, upsetting realities of human grief and greed live alongside scenes of nightmarish surrealism: Houses burn, bodies wither, and children’s blood fuels the megalomaniac fantasies of a billionaire. In one song, Hagerup’s narrator describes in grotesque detail her plan to gut, fry, and eat every fish in the ocean—then wash them down with wine and smack her lips. Each track has the suspense and revelation of a slow-building horror film, the kind that stirs you awake and makes you see your surroundings in a new light.
Hagerup has been working towards this debut for years, but it wasn’t until lockdown that she gave these songs undivided attention. Finding a middle ground between perturbed garage rock and ragged freak folk, the production is equally scrappy and spooky. Guitars howl, grunt, and anxiously squiggle. But there are whimsical sparkles—eerie strings or a spunky, rudimentary Casio beat—that demonstrate Hagerup and collaborator Kevin McMahon’s taste for the unexpected. Hagerup’s voice, feisty and tremulous, steers this ship through sinister waters. It can be dangerous like barbed wire, or miraculous like a bouquet of wildflowers.
Album opener “Machine,” the most pared-down song, quickly builds the tension. At first, a steadily plucked guitar treads alongside Hagerup’s aching vocals, and all seems calm. But there’s a gathering cloud of unease, evident in the way her voice begins to crack as the narrative spirals. Within a minute, Hagerup’s story careens from an unsteady late night drive—“Drive home with my sunken eyes wide/Try so hard, I flip the car/And wake up in a gurney”—into an oscillating trip between heaven and the depths of the ocean. The experience is disorienting, like waking up and trying to remember what’s reality and what’s a dream.
Hagerup is adept at writing from alternate perspectives, and on the jaunty “Perfect World,” she takes up the point of view of a sociopathic plutocrat. “It’s a beautiful land/And I plan to expand,” she sings, stealing words from the mouths of historic conquerors and dictators. Then the quest for domination takes even more a disturbing turn: “It’s a perfect world and I’m murdering my children… My skin is glowing from this baby’s blood,” she sings. As violently frightening as this is, the most striking track on Through the Window adopts the perspective of Hagerup’s father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. On “But I Want More,” Hagerup evokes the despair of experiencing physical decline while the soul languishes. But the song is a stubborn expression of will, and by the end, the man who Hagerup first described as vulnerable and bedridden is running “till they catch me falling,” headed for the casino to win his life back.
As in a horror film, Through the Window’s most horrific and fantastic images represent a sincere attempt to reckon with the monstrous weight of fear and grief in real life. On “Woman,” Hagerup describes a more direct revelation prompted by the imminent death of her grandmother: “Woman, I don’t know a thing about your life/I don’t know how I could ever make it right.” Her eerie coos turn sharply into aching howls, and the song morphs into sinister psych-garage as she confronts the thought that “my day will come.” It’s another striking example of Hagerup’s ability to sit with ugliness—and her refusal to let it swallow her whole. | 2023-09-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | September 7, 2023 | 7.4 | ef9e2c23-88ed-4acc-bb23-ec9a31059d65 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Making peace with the passing of their late drummer, the South Korean indie rockers lean into their gentler side as they channel noise-pop greats of yore. | Making peace with the passing of their late drummer, the South Korean indie rockers lean into their gentler side as they channel noise-pop greats of yore. | Say Sue Me : The Last Thing Left | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/say-sue-me-the-last-thing-left/ | The Last Thing Left | Despite the sweetness of their sound, Say Sue Me are an unstoppable force. The South Korean indie rockers wrote and recorded half of their international breakout, 2018’s When We Were Together, while their original drummer, Kang Semin, was in a coma; they called in another drummer to help finish the album, and the songs they recorded with him took on a wistful remembrance for their ailing friend. Right before the band’s first North American tour was set to kick off, around the end of 2019, Semin passed away. Still, they soldiered on. When the pandemic put a halt to their touring, the band kept working. With time to reflect on the whiplash of sudden success accompanied by the loss of a friend, they retreated to their Busan studio to work it all out. The band’s third LP, The Last Thing Left, is the result of their soul searching.
A sentimental shift is immediately palpable; the rough-and-tumble fight songs of past releases have all but disappeared as the band leans fully into a gentler side. Rather than seeking the comfort you can find at the bottom of a bottle—the theme underpinning much of When We Were Together—they choose to face their demons head on, extending an open hand instead of a closed fist. “We want to deliver bright energy rather than sadness and complaints,” singer and lyricist Sumi Choi tells Rolling Stone. “Now that I’m done with what I have to/I’ve gotta find what I wanna do,” Choi sings on “Still Here,” signaling equal parts trepidation and optimism. Toward the end, guitarist and primary songwriter Byungkyu Kim glides in with one of Say Sue Me’s trademark surfy riffs, lifting the track heavenward alongside charming vocal harmonies. It feels like letting go; the same jangly sound they once used to project anger they’re now using to make their peace.
Though Say Sue Me have narrowed their focus, their reverence for the indie-rock lexicon remains broad. The soaring guitar of the high-flying “No Real Place” evokes Dinosaur Jr., while the sing-songy “Around You” wouldn't sound out of place alongside Rose Melberg in the pantheon of indie-pop royalty. Some of the styles they play with highlight their strengths more effectively than others. The acoustic slow-burner “Now I Say” would have benefited from the oomph of at least one hard-hitting expressive element. Similarly melancholy but more successful, “The Last Thing Left” uses mournful guitar and snappy percussion to drive it forward.
“To Dream” is the album’s crown jewel, synthesizing the group’s strengths into an all-out assault. Choi sings in Korean for the first and only time on the record—something she does sparingly, she says, because singing in a language she’s less familiar with creates an emotional buffer that makes her feel less exposed. That moment of extreme vulnerability is well spent, as fuzzed-out guitar and atonal howling from jazz saxophonist Kim Oki swirl together into a raging whirlpool. It’s the one moment of real tension on the album, making the intensity of its release feel particularly satisfying.
The band ends on a note of thanks with “George & Janice,” written as a wedding gift for the heads of their label, Damnably. The syrupy sweet twee anthem thumps along like a triumphant march, a celebration not only of the eponymous pair, but of how far the band has come. A musical friendship brought the group together, and it kept them together through a turbulent few years. It’s been a common refrain that Say Sue Me wear their influences on their sleeve—on The Last Thing Left, they’re holding them close to their hearts. | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Damnably | May 13, 2022 | 7.3 | efa4fdad-28c3-4cd1-bf18-b803c4afea47 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
More than two decades into its career, the band formerly known as British Sea Power sounds newly energized, eagerly plotting new routes to familiar emotional peaks. | More than two decades into its career, the band formerly known as British Sea Power sounds newly energized, eagerly plotting new routes to familiar emotional peaks. | Sea Power: Everything Was Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sea-power-everything-was-forever/ | Everything Was Forever | “Another day, another age,” declares Scott Wilkinson (aka Jan) during his first turn at the mic on Everything Was Forever, neatly summarizing his band’s current condition in four words. Since 2001, Jan has fronted one of the most reliably ambitious groups in UK indie, and their seventh album is another testament to their consistency. But Everything Was Forever does indeed mark the dawn of a new age—after two decades of flying the flag as British Sea Power, Jan and co. have staged a reverse Brexit. From here on out, they’re continuing their course simply as Sea Power. The name change is a means of distancing themselves from the nationalist implications of their original handle and all its troublesome connotations at a time when patriotism so easily curdles into xenophobia.
The name British Sea Power was always a bit of a lark—far from celebrating England’s militaristic might, the band was more concerned with the failures of elites, the fragility of masculinity, and the fear of being forgotten. This is a group whose very first single opened with a petrified cry of “Jesus fucking Christ, oh god no,” and whose second led with the question, “Do you worry about your health?” The shift to Sea Power has done nothing to change that mission: As ever, Everything Was Forever finds Jan and his brother Neil (aka Hamilton) pondering the precarity of existence and the faded totems of a bygone Blighty. But the rebranding does bring with it a sense of renewal. Sea Power haven’t sounded this fired up since the days when their concerts would routinely descend into chaos and/or piggy-back rides. But they also sound eager to plot new routes to familiar emotional peaks.
For much of the band’s existence, it’s been easier to define Sea Power by what they weren’t: too epically scaled to fit into the early-’00s post-punk revival; too unruly to ride the Arcade Fire wave; too idiosyncratic and arcane to reach the largest-font tier on the festival poster. But Everything Was Forever captures a group that, after so many years together, knows it has complete ownership of its lane and delights in flouting local traffic ordinances. On “Transmitter,” Sea Power envision a Joy Division that survived long enough to become an ’80s arena-rock act, with equal parts motorik momentum and heartland expanse. The following “Two Fingers” sounds like it was tracked atop the same propulsive rhythm, but it scales even grander heights, resulting in a new national anthem for a divided country where the hand sign for victory and “fuck off” are almost the same. In its gradual transformation from wiry rocker to ambient, synth-smeared chorale, the song is a worthy sequel to the group’s definitive 2003 single, “Carrion.”
The abiding sense of nostalgia goes beyond mere musical echoes of Sea Power’s past. Since the release of their last album, 2017’s Let the Dancers Inherit the Party, the Wilkinson brothers lost both parents a few years apart, and though no song here directly addresses their passings, wistful childhood memories permeate the lyrics like benevolent ghosts. Beyond its obvious hand-gesture interpretations, the aforementioned “Two Fingers” was also inspired by their dad’s favored method of measuring out his booze, while Hamilton’s “Lakeland Echo,” a symphonic reverie suffused with soft-focus melancholy, is named for the community periodical the brothers delivered as kids growing up in the Lake District. But as the song embarks on its slow-motion surge toward the white light, “Lakeland Echo” starts to feel less like a paean to the local paper than a ceremonial invocation of a past that can never be revisited.
Traditionally the calm counterpoint to Jan’s impassioned presence, Hamilton practically wafts through this record as an apparition, undercutting Sea Power’s signature grandeur with hazy-headed balladry (“Scaring at the Sky”) and answering Jan’s valorous calls to action with eerie displays of creeping paranoia (“Fear Eats the Soul”). And yet as much as Everything Was Forever consolidates the band’s strengths, it also blurs the traditional contrast between Sea Power’s principal songwriters. Jan delivers one of the album’s most gorgeously subdued moments with “Fire Escape in the Sea,” a lush serenade set to a brittle drum-machine beat, while Hamilton pads out the group’s repertoire of arms-aloft anthems with “Folly,” which sets its oddly reassuring apocalyptic premonitions (“And if it makes you feel better/The creeps are all gonna cook/Along with the rest of us”) to a New Order-worthy synth-pop stomp.
Comparisons to such ’80s alt-rock giants have been a running theme throughout Sea Power’s history, always carrying the implicit suggestion that this group was born in the wrong era. But the idea that Sea Power could be the biggest band in Britain no longer requires an overactive imagination or parallel-universe portal: Days after its February 18 release, Everything Was Forever was on course to take the top spot on the UK album chart. And in light of that somewhat shocking development, the album’s tsunami-sized closer, “We Only Want to Make You Happy,” feels less like a plea for acceptance from a veteran band still grinding it out and more like an affirmation of mission accomplished. “Why aren’t you with us tonight?” Jan asks, and it’s here that the inclusive impetus behind Sea Power’s name change finds its clearest articulation: Even if you’ve missed the boat over the past 20 years, Everything Was Forever is an open invitation to hop onboard. | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Golden Chariot | February 23, 2022 | 7.4 | efabbd86-b4fb-4da0-8e46-cea4f1ee691f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Boris' third album of 2011 finds the band, originally known for doom metal and fuzzed-out rock, swinging toward pop structures with decidedly mixed results. | Boris' third album of 2011 finds the band, originally known for doom metal and fuzzed-out rock, swinging toward pop structures with decidedly mixed results. | Boris: New Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16068-new-album/ | New Album | In recent years, Boris' self-mythologizing has been the most interesting part of their project. They've thrown plenty of curve balls since forming in 1992, but after 2005's Pink, they sped up the shifts and got weirder. The trio is also more willing to revisit its past and recontextualize its output with new styles and approaches. (It can often feel like an archival project, or like you're spying on someone else's déjà vu.)
Atsuo (drums/vocals), Wata (guitar/vocals), and Takeshi (bass/vocals) were quiet after 2008's forgettable grab-bag Smile, but they've made up for the silence with three 2011 releases, Attention Please, Heavy Rocks (which echoes the 2002 release of the same name), and New Album, a generically titled collection that reinterprets tracks from those other records: "Party Boy", "Hope", "Spoon", and "Les Paul Custom '86" from AP; "Jackson Head" and "Tu, La La" from HR II. The 10-song collection, first released in Japan this past March before this rearranged/remastered version, is their most unabashed pop experiment; offering a dollop of sugary atmospherics and dewy hooks. The band insists on labeling this new angle "extreme," though only because it's an extreme shift by a group best known for its doom metal and fuzzed-out rock. (It makes more sense than you might want to assume that they recently toured with New York City dream-pop group Asobi Seksu.)
Conceptually, they were inspired by the use of Vocaloid software in Japanese pop music: the program takes typed lyrics and turns them into a song sung by "an imaginary anime character vocalist." New Album does have the feel of sumptuous, otherworldly animation. The band usually self-produces its records but brought on mainstream dance/pop arranger and producer Shinobu Narita, and the guy has a way with Candy Land gloss. All of the Attention Please and Heavy Rocks tracks sound better here-- chewier, more refined nuggets. But in most cases, it's more a comment on the quality of the other records than a heap of praise for this one.
When the formula does succeed, the results do dazzle. "Spoon" offers a swirl of shoegaze detailed with chimes, synthesizers, atmospheric female vocals, and various bright, shiny things. In this case, as with NA's other best moments, Boris leave remnants of their usual sound within the gentler field: Bigger-than-twee drums, flanged feedback, and a heavy bass hold the elements together. You also get this in the shredding, cascading guitars of the amped "Tu, La La" and the mellower closer, "Looprider", a new track that comes off like Boris doing Yo La Tengo (via Sonic Youth). The best song, though, is "Luna", a rush of gurgling, humming dynamics that continues to hectically spiral upward for its eight minutes and change, creating soaring, stringed, crunchy goodness. (The original appeared on Adult Swim's Metal Swim compilation.) The other real standout-- kinetic, sunburst opener "Flare"-- didn't appear elsewhere before New Album.
But not everything works so well. Drummer/vocalist Atsuo told Rolling Stone the two albums that provided much of the source material were put together from "one abandoned record." You don't often see Boris short on ideas, largely because they can't seem to let them go-- even if they're running them into the ground. Here, the experiments too often come off as empty or forced: Decadent on the surface, hollow at the core. The slow, stoned bedroom-psych of the new song "Pardon?" bores. The sketchy, dorky techno pop of Attention Please's "Les Paul Custom '86" and Heavy Rocks' Jackson Head" annoy (Boris as 8-Bit Muse?). During these stretches, you can hear the band struggling to write songs from outside their area of expertise. A pop song can look like a pop song, but that doesn't mean it is one. And as pretty as it can be, New Album is another minor Boris album in a string of minor Boris albums. | 2011-11-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-11-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Sargent House | November 22, 2011 | 6.5 | efc4eec9-b1e5-4b0b-9217-a5fff5520ffd | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
This best-of collection democratically gathers tracks from every facet of the band's career along with two newly recorded songs, and it acts as sort of a last laugh for a group unfairly maligned throughout much of the 1990s. | This best-of collection democratically gathers tracks from every facet of the band's career along with two newly recorded songs, and it acts as sort of a last laugh for a group unfairly maligned throughout much of the 1990s. | The Afghan Whigs: Unbreakable (A Retrospective) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10270-unbreakable-a-retrospective/ | Unbreakable (A Retrospective) | There's about eight years between the first and second tracks on Unbreakable (A Retrospective), immediately revealing how much the Afghan Whigs developed over a decade, what was gained in the process, and what was lost. Opener "Retarded", from 1990's Up In It, a lo-fi maelstrom of raw, threatening guitars, introduces the band's defining elements: the knife-fight between guitar players Greg Dulli and Rick McCollum, soul and funk melodies ratcheted to aggressive tempos, and Dulli's in-character performance ("Motherfucker lied to you," he snarls), which detractors would label "posturing" throughout the 1990s. Following "Retarded" is "Crazy", from the band's 1998 swan song 1965; it's slicker and more controlled, dialing down its tempo and filling its empty spaces with "Soul Finger"-style party chatter, yet sacrificing not one iota of menace.
Unbreakable, a best-of collection that democratically gathers tracks from every facet of the band's career, along with two newly recorded songs, is a sort of last laugh. Despite their stature today (there's a 33 1/3 book on Gentlemen in the works), the band-- and especially Dulli-- were largely neglected during the 1990s, relegated to second-tier status behind alt- bands such as Live, Alice in Chains, and Candlebox. Formed in Cincinnati in 1986 and defunct by 2001, the Afghan Whigs were one of the few alt- bands to flourish on a major label, where greater control and bigger budgets allowed them to indulge every sinister urge. While alternative rock radio still sported untucked flannel, the Whigs looked dapper in all black or tailored suits. When popular music was at its most studiously PC, the Whigs emphasized the sexual, and Dulli played power-struggle games that many read as misogynist.
While their peers could barely see past the Who, the Whigs were digging through the Stax Records catalog and covering the Supremes ("Come See About Me" is included here). Even on their early tracks, the band found a way to integrate African-American sounds and influences into their white rock: "Turn on the Water", from 1991's Congregation (whose album cover infamously features a nude black woman holding a white baby, no less) uses Isaac Hayes' wakka-chikka guitars as a punk accessory, and its jumpy guitar riffs instill these songs with a sense of motion that suggests amped-up r&b. Black Love, the band's 1996 blaxploitation-rock epic, should have been the culmination of this trend, but in 1996 it sounded overdone and obvious. Unbreakable, however, reveals Black Love to be a closet singles album, fitting three still-visceral songs into the tracklist but making "Blame Etc." and "Honky's Ladder" the most glaring omissions.
With more dry wit and intelligent frustration than was often recognized, Dulli's lyrics were also intensely personal in their intimate sadomasochism, to the extent that he invited Scrawl's Marcy Mays to sing "My Curse" on Gentlemen because he couldn't bring himself to do it (nor could the producers include it here). Taken at face value, though, Dulli's songs made him out to be an asshole, so that's what people assumed he was. And he likely played that up, too. But on Unbreakable, the hyperbolic tension of his lyrics plays as an amplification of his own angst, not as a one-to-one projection. He wasn't necessarily the people he sang about, but they were certainly part of him. The leering threats of "Be Sweet" and "66" might best be read as useful exaggerations. And yet, Dulli's voice wavers on the quieter, slower numbers. He misses notes on "Faded", muddles his phrasing on the new track "Magazine", but never self-censors. He lets the moment stand, powerful in its imperfection, the sound of someone trying to convey overwhelming inner conflict. At a time when many bands strained to project anguish, Dulli kept his performances as raw as the hurt he's singing about.
The two newly recorded tracks-- the band's first since their break-up in 2001-- are surprisingly strong, picking up pretty much where 1965 left off. It's nice to hear McCollum's guitar slicing at Dulli again and Curley's bass trying to break them up. After the military grunts that count off "I'm a Soldier", the band launches into a massive gospel assault that prominently features Memphis vocalist Susan Marshall (who also appeared on 1965), as if they had the audacity to rewrite "Gimme Shelter" with a three-note chorus and cagier lyrics. Written shortly before the band split six years ago, "Magazine" begins as a slow ballad, but builds into something more angular, lacking a hook but still intriguing.
Rather than presenting these songs chronologically-- starting with their earliest Sub Pop singles and ending with their newly recorded tracks-- Unbreakable is sequenced more organically and intuitively, mixing together songs from each phase of their career so that they comment on one another. Ultimately, the tracklist comprises a larger, self-mythologizing narrative-- culminating in the sweeping drama of "Crime Scene Part One" and "Faded", both from Black Love-- that fits well with the Whigs' album-as-song-cycle approach. Unbreakable is one of those rare career compilations that shows its subject in a new and immensely flattering light, with the potential to clear up past misperceptions and to reveal vast complexities that were previously overlooked. | 2007-05-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | May 30, 2007 | 8.8 | efc87867-d80d-4291-a27f-9ed97e0ef238 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
A set of intimate, in-studio performances from Matthew Houck’s creative breakthrough in the early 2010s reveals new meaning and intensity in his tough-hearted songs. | A set of intimate, in-studio performances from Matthew Houck’s creative breakthrough in the early 2010s reveals new meaning and intensity in his tough-hearted songs. | Phosphorescent: The BBC Sessions EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phosphorescent-the-bbc-sessions-ep/ | The BBC Sessions EP | The albums Matthew Houck released in the late 2000s and early 2010s were gregarious affairs. In addition to streamlining his songwriting and scouting out a scuffed-up brand of outlaw country, he shifted the focus away from Phosphorescent as a solo project. On his early albums he’d been the main player, and often the only one, introducing himself as a weirdo hermit fashioning clanging contraptions from old sounds. By comparison, 2010’s Here’s to Taking It Easy and 2013’s Muchacho, with their volleys of horns and dust clouds of guitars, sound almost like a party, one that grew wilder as Houck took an unruly, purposefully unrehearsed band on tour with him. Surprisingly, their presence only made his songwriting sound more haggard and world-weary, as though all those players were a buttress against the “new terror in the canyons, the new terror in our chests,” as he sings on “Terror in the Canyon (The Wounded Master).”
It is a revelation, then, to hear five songs from this era stripped back to their barest bones, unguarded and unshielded. The BBC Sessions was recorded during two stops in England in 2011 and 2013, with Houck accompanying himself on electric guitar. Jo Schornikow provides some impressionistic piano and backing vocals, but such is the sensitivity of her performance that she actually reinforces the solitude of this EP. Houck stands alone, vulnerable. If on the originals he came across like a man who’d been through the shit and landed on safe shores, then these more austere versions suggest he’ll never get a safe distance away from the heartache and horror. “At Death A Proclamation,” off 2007’s Pride, is transformed: there’s no drumline, no crashing guitars, no big choruses, just Houck quietly testifying and playing his guitar like he’s revving a motorcycle for a quick getaway. There’s no romance, just regret: “One day I tarried too far, and I never came home,” he sings, and the sentiment sounds heavier for having so much space and silence around the notes.
Even when he sings about racing on the desert plains all night on “Song for Zula,” which remains one of the most tough-hearted love songs of the 2010s, the impression isn’t of a man sowing his wild oats but of someone running himself ragged, if not to death. “Love is a caging thing,” he muses, although freedom might be even more dangerous. In interviews from this era, Houck seemed aware that the hard-touring life of an indie rock musician was grinding him down, that he had been racing too far and too fast. His albums were a way to shout down his demons and reflect on his own worst impulses; they carry the weight of brutal self-reflection. The EP, however, has different stakes. These songs sound like missives from the road, and that treacherous terrain gives the performances a palpable sense of desperation.
What did it take to perform “Terror in the Canyon (The Wounded Master)” every night for months on end? The BBC version chucks the two-step country beat that civilized his original along with the smeared pedal steel that colors the version on 2015’s Live at the Music Hall. Houck sounds wrung out, nearly feral, especially when he gets to the lines, “I was a bleeding actor, and I was the stage.” Houck draws out that last word as long as his voice can bear it, then pushes it a little more. He sings the “g” in “stage” like he’s digging a bullet out of his shoulder. It sounds painful. Perhaps that maimed quality would feel less potent if he’d set these sessions loose seven or eight years ago, and splitting the songs up as B-sides or bonus tracks would surely have sapped them of their power. Disconnected from any round-number album anniversary or reissue campaign, the EP becomes more than a mere footnote to Phosphorescent’s creative breakthrough. Instead, it’s a release that potentially changes how we hear those records. These new versions don’t aim to supplant the originals but they distill and hopefully disarm the terror that inspired them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | June 22, 2021 | 7.5 | efce6225-eda1-4423-9207-175eaf6a093c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
London group's debut, produced by Matthew Herbert, is a chaotic mess that also happens to be one of the freshest things to come along so far in 2009. | London group's debut, produced by Matthew Herbert, is a chaotic mess that also happens to be one of the freshest things to come along so far in 2009. | Micachu and the Shapes: Jewellery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12922-jewellery/ | Jewellery | The first sound on Micachu and the Shapes' debut album is an acoustic guitar, so what else is new. But what Mica Levi is playing isn't a chord anyone's heard before-- it's a dry, gnashingly dissonant cluster, and she's hammering away at it very intentionally. A few seconds into "Vulture", she's joined by the other two members of the band, drummer Marc Pell and keyboardist Raisa Khan, who act as if Levi's actually just playing some kind of giddy surf riff. By the time the song skids to a halt, less than three minutes later, it's made a few hairpin turns into and back out of grime/carousel-music fusion while Levi's been chanting and whooping lyrics about her inedibility in a proud, largely indecipherable LDN accent. On a first listening, it's maddening noise; by the fourth or so, it's as catchy as a jingle.
Jewellery is a chaotic record, and an enormous mess. It's also, pretty much, the freshest thing to come along so far in 2009. Levi belongs to the generation that's grown up with the total availability of every kind of music ever, and she wants to play it all at the same time as she's text-messaging, so it's a good thing that pop plus anything equals pop. She's got highbrow compositional bonafides ("influences" listed on the band's MySpace page: "harry partch, and all those other guys"); she's got some U.K. hip-hop cred (her mixtape Filthy Friends is even more of a pileup); she's a little bit rock'n'roll (the fuse that ignites the album's best song, "Calculator", is the guitar riff from "Tequila"). "Sweetheart" is a high-tech, neon-butterfly take on the hardcore punk two-step. At least one song prominently features a vacuum cleaner. Nothing stays in place for more than a few seconds, but very often her avant-gardist and party-time impulses snap together, as when the scrape-and-tweak that opens "Lips" abruptly congeals into a wiry bhangra groove. It's not clear, though, how much the insanely clever arrangements are the band's and how much they're producer Matthew Herbert's.
At the center of this cyclone of jujubes and sandpaper is Levi's tart, snaggy voice, which occasionally recalls Lora Logic's dizzy trill but more often ducks down into the mix and clings to no more than a couple of notes. (It's probably perverse to wonder how awesome it would be if the group collaborated with a really good R&B singer.) Levi is one of the most androgynous-sounding woman vocalists I've heard in years-- pitch her down a percent or two and she could pass for Mike Skinner-- but her persona isn't quite post-sex: while most of her rare intelligible lyrics concern the romantic conundrum, they're generally brushing it off metaphorically ("I could eat your heart", she yodels) or literally ("I won't have sex 'cause of S.T.D.s").
Mostly, though, Jewellery is a vehicle to show off the band's hoard of shiny new sounds-- although they haven't yet figured out how to sort out the gemstones they've got in abundance from their ice chips and broken glass. It's not a record built for staying power, despite the thrilling moments in almost every song. But its failures mostly have to do with idea-overload and short attention span, which are very promising problems to have on one's first album. Levi and her band sound more like the future than the past, at a moment when we desperately need some more future, and as much as I've come to dig this album's awkward, brash cacophony, I want to hear what they do next even more. | 2009-04-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Rough Trade | April 15, 2009 | 7.9 | efce804f-5b0f-49ef-af89-c4280529af51 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The debut from pop-punk band Fits is full of sharp turns, heavy lyrics, and bursts of righteous anger. A fierce will to survive animates these lean, scrappy songs. | The debut from pop-punk band Fits is full of sharp turns, heavy lyrics, and bursts of righteous anger. A fierce will to survive animates these lean, scrappy songs. | Fits: All Belief Is Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fits-all-belief-is-paradise/ | All Belief Is Paradise | Across its many iterations, punk maintains a steadfast tradition of running: away from suffocating hometowns, toward unknown horizons, into reckless relationships, out of trainwreck breakups. The galloping tempos reinforce the hasty decisions, and often it doesn’t matter where a song is going so long as it’s going there fast. On their debut LP All Belief Is Paradise, Brooklyn pop-punk band Fits embrace a frantic songwriting ethos in line with Plan-it-X’s early 2000s roster (think Spoonboy with extra amps and a drum kit) or fellow New York quartet LVL UP’s early records. Of the album’s 12 songs, none breaks the three-minute mark, and many clock in right around a minute. But this is no pool they’re building; if Fits shake their hooks out at a freewheeling churn, it’s only because every line has to be sung right this second or never.
Fits began as a songwriting exercise by de facto bandleader Nicholas Cummins, who scratched out bass and vocal demos into their phone before linking up with members of Big Ups and gobbinjr to flesh out the songs as a full rock band. Cummins tends to bury their heavy lyrical themes underneath bursts of righteous anger. There aren’t really happy songs on All Belief Is Paradise, but there are plenty of sharp turns and playful, surprising gestures. From the nose-diving guitar riffs on “Admission Day” to the spritzes of auxiliary percussion scattered throughout the album, Fits never let their feet drag.
Cummins edges their often double-tracked vocals with a compelling smirk, and the hyperbolic, inventive vernacular they employ in their lyrics adds to the sense of desperation propelling each song forward. “What we had was dead/But now it’s super dead,” they sing on “Superdead,” lamenting the end of a relationship that somehow broke even more after it had already broken up. At the end of “All the Time,” Cummins transforms a whole season into a verb: “I want you to be gone so I can summertime.” They drag an extra syllable out of that last word, folding a whine into the demand right before asking for its opposite. “I want you all the time,” Cummins concludes, sparking up both contradictory desires with equal fervor.
A lot of desires crop up on All Belief Is Paradise, and they often seem to be pulling Cummins in opposite directions at once. On “Running Out,” they take off toward the horizon with an eye cast over their shoulder, yearning for the past and future in the same breath while a clamor of tambourines and power chords spurs them on. “The Ground,” meanwhile, adopts a comparatively leisurely tempo while Cummins muses on an “old town” they’ve visited in the past. They repeat the phrase “you went away” on loop in the background, as if haunted by the decision to leave a place that will never really leave them. The running away and the not wanting to have run away compete for space here, stranding Cummins in the tortured middle ground between them.
More than desire and more than hurt, a fierce will to survive animates these lean, scrappy songs. Cummins’ lyrics can often be tricky to make out amid all the cymbals and distortion, but in the tone of their voice, they insist on being heard. The partially redacted narrative tends to draw you in deeper than wordy storytelling might. Instead of laying it all out, Cummins leaves it up to you to fill in the gaps between their oblique words, which makes Fits’ songs more spacious and flexible. There’s plenty to latch onto, and plenty to keep you on your toes. | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter | November 27, 2017 | 7.3 | efd12dbd-31dd-416a-815d-2443508f79de | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The Memphis rapper offers hard truths and effortless swagger on his uncompromising new mixtape. | The Memphis rapper offers hard truths and effortless swagger on his uncompromising new mixtape. | Key Glock: Yellow Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/key-glock-yellow-tape/ | Yellow Tape | Forged in the fires of South Memphis, Markeyvius Cathey (aka Key Glock) was brought up by his grandmother and great-grandmother; his father was mostly not around, and his mother spent much of his childhood in prison. “It has been times where she in jail and I’m not, I’m in jail and she not,” he once told The Fader with a candor that’s becoming his calling card. His latest mixtape, Yellow Tape, is a street-rap saga peppered with such trenchant insights, narrating the lonely world of a 22-year-old who has been through more bad times than any 22-year-old deserves.
This chronicle begins with Key Glock’s birth. “I came in this world flexin’,” he says on opener “1997” before detailing his reckless existence in what he calls the “trenches.” Over the mournful piano keys and guitar riffs of “What Goes Around Comes Around,” Glock links life lessons from his elders to his dedication to rapping: “My granny told me what’s done in the dark must come to light/I recorded every night, now I got hella ice.” Detailing your come-up is pretty standard street-rap fare, but Glock’s rich use of language and slyly spiritual edge distinguish him.
To be sure, Yellow Tape is a brutal record, lyrically and musically. You won’t find a viral hit or lame commercial compromise; there are zero guest rappers diluting Glock’s energy. Even “Amen,” the album’s most obvious reference to faith, finds Glock calling on God not for moral guidance, but to give thanks for his expensive chains, cars and the strength to turn the blocks where his enemies roam into “a morgue.” This autobiography has no sentimental moments.
Production is mostly handled by a group of rising beatmakers who serve up moody instrumentals rippling with muscle. Sledgren’s horror-movie orchestration scores a drug-slinging tale on “Mr. Glock”; traditionalists will delight in hearing the young rapper reference old Snoop Dogg bars over BANDPLAY’s hard-hitting drums and swampy bassline on “Dough.” On “Crash,” Glock teams up with seasoned pro Southside, using vocal processing effects to render his voice dank and spectral. As a rapper, Glock’s accent is identifiably Memphis, if not quite the thick drawl of regional forefathers Three 6 Mafia. But like Juicy J, he can be a walking hook machine, coating every bar on songs like “Flyest Highest Coolest Smoothest” with swagger.
Glock does have some growing up to do. It’s fair to say that there are occasions when his similes can sound off the shelf—there’s countless references to not letting a woman get between him and his money. But these are small grumbles in a grand scheme. A focused vision of what Glock is capable of, Yellow Tape is a work of wicked truths and unfiltered confidence, a book of genesis that feels like a post-mortem. | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Paper Route Empire | February 10, 2020 | 7.4 | efd308ff-7e55-4d9a-a9c7-d5abda522adc | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Wild Beasts bid fans farewell by revisiting their catalog in a collection of live studio takes. It’s not an entirely satisfying goodbye, but it’s a faithful snapshot of a band always in motion. | Wild Beasts bid fans farewell by revisiting their catalog in a collection of live studio takes. It’s not an entirely satisfying goodbye, but it’s a faithful snapshot of a band always in motion. | Wild Beasts: Last Night All My Dreams Came True | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-beasts-last-night-all-my-dreams-came-true/ | Last Night All My Dreams Came True | From the beginning, Wild Beasts’ music has been a story of two voices. At the forefront was Hayden Thorpe, with a falsetto that sounded like a punchline, swerving between low, horny grunts and operatic trills. In 2009, when he described a scene “equally elegant and ugly” in a song called “Hooting and Howling,” it was easy to hear it as winking self-diagnosis. Thorpe’s foil was Tom Fleming, the band’s second vocalist, whose earnest, fluttering baritone felt like a comedown from Thorpe’s high drama. If an animated movie were to be made out of Wild Beasts’ songs, it might involve a mischievous hyena and a bear cub teaming up to escape from depraved, Dickensian Britain.
As the band evolved, they learned more tricks. Their rhythm section, originally comprising Fleming and drummer Chris Talbot, became one of the strongest in indie rock. Songs like “Wanderlust” and “All the King’s Men” strut and gallop, turn sexy and menacing, find weird grooves and never sit still. And once they outgrew their theater-kid antics, Wild Beasts refined their sound with a synthy, sophisticated grace that seemed to come second nature to them. No group has evolved from Franz Ferdinand comparisons to Spirit of Eden so seamlessly.
Their last album, 2016’s Boy King, was supposed to be a triumph merging the youthful libido of their first records and the ambient pop of their latter ones, but it fell flat. For the first time, their ideas felt more interesting than their music. Last Night All My Dreams Came True is a live-in-the-studio collection that’s designed to be their closing statement after they announced their breakup last fall. Disappointingly, the tracklist skews heavily toward Boy King and offers an unflattering survey of their work. Listening to it, you could mistake Wild Beasts for a decent band with a couple of extraordinary songs, as opposed to an extraordinary band with one sub-par album.
It’s not uncommon for artists to revisit their lesser work, and trading the studio for a semi-live context is a good instinct. But the problem with Boy King was not John Congleton’s slick production (at its best, it sounded like Oneohtrix Point Never scoring Fifty Shades of Grey). The problem was the songs, and, without an audience to receive them, these renditions only highlight their flaws. “2BU” still feels underwritten, with Fleming addressing toxic masculinity through cliche (“I’m the type of man who wants to watch the world burn”) and cheap cop-outs (“You know that I’m the worst!”). The album’s lead single, “Get My Bang,” sung by Thorpe, unfortunately still resembles the Lonely Island featuring Wild Beasts.
The songs that fare best are the ones they’ve road-tested for years. Tracks from Two Dancers—the 2009 album that served as their pivot point—remain brilliantly romantic and grotesque, suggesting that maybe the conceit of Boy King was something they’d already accomplished. Their masterpiece, 2011’s Smother, is sadly underrepresented (“End Come Too Soon” would have been appropriate), as is 2014’s Present Tense. That album provides some surprising highlights, like when Thorpe weaves a few lyrics from “Palace” into “The Devil’s Crayon,” one of Fleming’s first great songs, from their debut.
Both Present Tense and this set open with “Wanderlust,” the dazzling fight song that calls out the legions of British acts who emerged around Wild Beasts and swiftly lost their identity. In this performance, a role reversal is at play within the band, as Thorpe breathes his lyrics in a delicate sigh and Fleming attacks the harmony with explosive intensity. Both that song and “The Devil’s Palace” suggest a collection that could change how Wild Beasts operate, a promise that the rest of the set retreats from. While it might not be a satisfying goodbye, Last Night All My Dreams Came True is—like all of Wild Beasts’ albums—an artfully rendered snapshot of a band always in motion. | 2018-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino Documents | February 21, 2018 | 6.6 | efd863d6-c01a-4b9a-bae7-4456f9b9a4f7 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Mental Illness is Aimee Mann’s quintessential statement, tempering the discord of life with elegant chamber folk. Mann fills her songs with ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of pain. | Mental Illness is Aimee Mann’s quintessential statement, tempering the discord of life with elegant chamber folk. Mann fills her songs with ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of pain. | Aimee Mann: Mental Illness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22971-mental-illness/ | Mental Illness | Aimee Mann doing an album called Mental Illness is a concept so fitting it took her a lifetime to find it. Having already delivered a new wave smash, scored an Academy Award nomination, recorded eight stylistically diverse solo records as well a fiesty collaboration with punk’s Ted Leo, Mann is rightfully pissed that she’s nevertheless pigeonholed as a dreary fabricator of slow, sad-sack songs. So she’s answered her critics with her slowest, sad-sack-iest album yet, one populated by ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of existential pain at odds with their humdrum lives.
Mann has long been an expert of articulating this tension. Originally written about her attraction to a woman on the down low, her 1985 ‘Til Tuesday single “Voices Carry” found its defining shape when record company meddling forced Mann to recast it as a heterosexual melodrama that became a feminist anthem about overcoming male dominance. Yet no one would’ve predicted then that Mann would rank among the few new wave survivors who’d achieve both consistent sales and artistic credibility well into the 21st century. She continually finds peers among younger artists, like Father John Misty and Lana Del Rey, who recreate the smooth sounds and mild moods that defined the ’70s singer-songwriters of Mann’s childhood even as they lyrically upend them.
That’s the era and aesthetic she explores on Mental Illness. A rocker at heart if not always in practice, Mann has sometimes been muted but never mellow; her new wave training and constitutional angst haven’t allowed it. To prepare for her latest, she studied the gentle craftsmanship of Bread, Dan Fogelberg, and other unhip smoothies that punk tossed on the anti-establishment bonfire with Yes and ELP. Mental Illness is accordingly made of skeletal strings, coolly regulated commentary, and minimal drums. Juxtaposing elegant chamber folk against the discord of lives out of balance, it’s musically more delicate than even her soft rock models.
All this is telegraphed by the opening cymbal tinkle of “Goose Snow Cone,” a snapshot of homesickness that encapsulates how succinct she’s grown as a chronicler of lived-in unease. “Gotta keep it together when your friends come by,” she sings in that resigned, yet tight-jawed sigh that’s been her dominant mode of vocal expression since her millennial Magnolia/Bachelor No. 2 breakthrough, one that suits these sedate arrangements better than anything she’s attempted since. “Even birds of a feather find it hard to fly.” Mann holds so much back that when she gives just a smidgen via a couple extra notes, it feels as though she’s baring her country soul, even though she’s long lost her accent. As a Richmond, VA native who fled to Boston in her teens and settled into L.A. as a solo artist, Mann is only C&W by birth. Hers are blue state blues.
So she doesn’t waltz through “Stuck in the Past,” a waltz about nostalgia’s dead end. Her clipped delivery retains its reserve, even when hammering out the title’s rat-a-tat-tat against her instrumentation’s triplets. And though folky signifiers moan and murmur around her like ghosts of Laurel Canyon’s storied past, her wordless choirs are more Laurie Anderson than Joni Mitchell. True to her post-punk roots, she’s still in conflict with her world, even as she renders it tenderly. Pitting her anxiety against a style typically free from distress, the resulting rift suits her swimmingly as it spins the source material into ominous whirlpools. Mann is droll, even when dead serious, and although her perspective on depression is rendered with all the nuance of firsthand experience, her survival skills also sound steely. Although her wordplay is at times cryptic, perhaps to protect the guilty, she’ll abruptly go the other route, as sudden collisions of abstraction and plain speak coil and unravel like snakes slithering and snapping across her psyche.
Juxtapositions continue and compound—the adrenalin addict rendered with a calming berceuse (“Rollercoasters”), the scam artist conjured with foolproof folk (“Lies of Summer”), the upwardly mobile rube who meets a comeuppance camouflaged by the album’s sunniest melody (“Patient Zero”). Then she drops the album’s easy listening masterstroke, “Good for Me.” There’s nothing but a sole keyboard and Mann for over half its length, but it’s obvious from the first portentous chord that her good thing is destined to go bad. She’s defenseless against this hustle because it gives her what she needs, or at least what temporarily satisfies, and so she sustains her metaphors to the end, never revealing if she’s singing about a deceptive lover, a misleading consumer product, or a lying politician. She flubs a note here and there, as if cracking under the strain of her own willingness to be duped. Orchestration enters to underscore a moment of truth that hits as her composition’s bridge slides into unsettling harmonic territory: “And in the searchlight I can see/The rotors kicking up debris/The cloud, the dust, the blades are me.” The strings get appropriately stormy, sawing up and down their scales as if accompanying the twister that blew Dorothy and Toto straight out of Kansas before settling back down. Then the rhythm section finally enters, as if to suggest she’s found her footing while hitting rock bottom.
The rest sustains what came before. “Poor Judge,” the other prominent piano cut, even returns to the deception theme. “And I can see your light on/Calling me back to make the same mistake again,” she sings at the album’s tail end, self-aware but unable to fight the inevitable con. Like Mann herself, her fall guys and gals love too much, or the wrong person, for reasons they’re unwilling to unravel. They can’t get off the Ferris wheel because they like the ascension so much they forget the coming down.
Mental Illness harkens back to “Wise Up,” Mann’s secular, high-pitched hymn about finding the truth within. It slipped out 21 years ago on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack, but Paul Thomas Anderson gave the song its rightful place in film history by directing each of his solitary Magnolia characters to sing along to it in a sequence that still thrills and flummoxes. Here, Mann similarly shifts between observer and participant—too knowing to play the heroine, too trusting for the femme fatale—as she ramps up the emotional friction while dabbing her barbed tunes with baby oil and talcum powder. This is her quintessential statement, a wake-up call delivered as a lullaby. | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Superego | April 1, 2017 | 7.8 | efe4aaa8-acf7-4b92-b25c-29f030faf4aa | Barry Walters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/barry-walters/ | null |
Though still suited for delirious outdoor parties, the 19-year-old Tanzanian musician’s take on singeli is as much about the spiritual connection between producer and laptop as it is the dancefloor. | Though still suited for delirious outdoor parties, the 19-year-old Tanzanian musician’s take on singeli is as much about the spiritual connection between producer and laptop as it is the dancefloor. | DJ Travella: Mr Mixondo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-travella-mr-mixondo/ | Mr Mixondo | It’s been almost five years since Nyege Nyege Tapes released its Sounds of Sisso compilation, a document of Tanzania’s flourishing singeli scene that proved instrumental in putting the genre on the international stage. The album spotlighted the movement’s sheer velocity, regularly pushing past 200 beats per minute while pitching synth loops and sampled soukous music up to unrecognizable heights. Though Western audiences likely associate such tempos with fringe techno offshoots like gabber, the singeli variants featured on that compilation—even the raw, DIY brand emerging from the record’s titular Sisso studio— were marked by their pop inclinations. Anchoring a sugar rush of hyperactive melodies and dense electronic percussion, Auto-Tuned rap verses offered a welcome sense of familiarity, despite their haste. If you lost your place in the maelstrom of snares and MIDI horns, a catchy chorus was never far away, extending a friendly hand to grab onto.
The complete absence of vocals on Mr Mixondo, the debut album by 19-year-old producer DJ Travella, is a striking departure from the style of singeli that Nyege Nyege diehards are likely accustomed to, especially since the label’s last compilation of Tanzanian music specifically highlighted MCs. The label bills Travella as a herald of singeli’s “new wave,” creating personal, instrumental work shaped by far-reaching influences. Though still suited for delirious outdoor dance parties, his music is as much about the spiritual connection between producer and laptop as it is the dancefloor. Singeli has long flirted with a cyberpunk aesthetic, with MCs adopting pseudonyms inspired by antivirus software and memory cards, but Travella’s take on the genre is especially entrenched in the digital world.
His previous work existed only on YouTube in the form of live screen recordings, revealing his semi-improvised creative process in real time. In each video, he loads a large deck of samples into VirtualDJ software, shuffling them in and out to create hypnotic, perpetually transforming beats. Mr Mixondo is the end result of this intense, cross-sectional study of singeli itself, breaking and rewriting the rules of a style that’s already challenging to the uninitiated.
His compositions are dense and tightly wound, braiding loops that draw from Atlanta hip-hop and R&B into tortuous patterns, phrases disappearing from the mix as quickly as they slide in. But it’s the record’s miniature breakdowns, in which a track’s samples and synths slough off their skeletal beat, that set up its most cathartic bursts of energy. On “Crazy Beat Umeme 2,” he hits the kill switch on the track’s frenzy without so much as a fade-out, deploying breakbeats that abruptly peel away from the time signature in effect. It’s an Aphex-ian prank that’s apt to trip up dancers and headphone listeners alike—diffusing the tension for a brief period before careening back into Travella’s solid wall of sound. On “21212,” he recklessly adjusts the pitch of a woodblock percussion sample, coercing melody from an instrument that rarely serves a purpose beyond fleshing out rhythm. Backed by eerie, snaking synth leads, this track is also punctuated by brusque starts and stops, glitching like a buffering video.
There are a few tracks that forego Travella’s experimental mixing to dial in on pure gratification. “London Bandcamp” is a blown-out, bass-heavy fusion of dembow and festival trap pulsing with adrenaline and featuring an electrifying lead riff that repeats ad nauseam atop lurching bass. It’s a crowd-pleasing respite from the record’s overarching eccentricity, rewarding those with enough fortitude to traverse Mr Mixondo’s thornier bits.
Occasionally, Travella’s curiosity comes at his own expense. “Tambasana,” which opens with a beautifully chopped vocal sample in the vein of Clams Casino, sours when an off-key piano enters the mix, creating a nightmarish dissonance that doesn’t quite evoke the foreboding atmosphere he’s going for. There’s a fine line between controlled chaos and outright disorder in his work, and the rare moments leaning toward the latter should have been left on the cutting-room floor. With more polish and experience, Travella may be able to fully conjure the Bosch-like rave inferno suggested by his most sinister impulses, but he hasn’t caught up to these ambitions just yet.
Like some IDM producers or the folks behind SoundCloud’s nascent “sigilkore” movement, Travella approaches composition from a provocateur’s perspective, striving to create as disorienting a sound as possible while logging his findings along the way. As artists in the UK and Japan have begun to incorporate the ideas of Nyege Nyege’s initial releases into their own work, he raises the stakes, slamming the genre’s accelerator until it spins out of control. Mr Mixondo feels like raw material for its successors to mold: a stark, mercurial record that subverts singeli’s conventions at each turn. | 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Nyege Nyege Tapes | April 5, 2022 | 7.3 | efecc3dd-2e37-4e99-9ca7-9f8f9c8bd8cf | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
If their new EP is any indication, bass duo Sepalcure, which includes Travis Stewart of Machinedrum, are less about growth and more about refinement. Mixing hard-hitting rhythms with pastoral touches and pink-cloud ambience, Sepalcure are still deadly serious about having a good time. | If their new EP is any indication, bass duo Sepalcure, which includes Travis Stewart of Machinedrum, are less about growth and more about refinement. Mixing hard-hitting rhythms with pastoral touches and pink-cloud ambience, Sepalcure are still deadly serious about having a good time. | Sepalcure: Make You EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17899-sepalcure-make-you-ep/ | Make You EP | Dance producers have a reputation for taking themselves very seriously (case in point) but Sepalcure are different. When I interviewed Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma previous to the release of 2011's self-titled debut, the duo knocked back cocktails in the mid-afternoon while riffing on embarrassing screen names, potentially pornographic horror films, and, yes, the dance community's staunch seriousness. "You got to have fun up there, man," Sharma sighed after Stewart mentioned a negative review the pair received for "trying too hard" while opening for Jamie xx.
Indeed, while their level of on-stage enthusiasm may not be at the level of, say, Girl Talk, Sepalcure's sense of self-presentation differs from many in the bass music scene they're associated with, as they mouth along energetically to their own songs and frequently address the crowd (which very few DJs, for better or worse, care to do). Just before this past New Year's Eve, they ditched their originals-heavy set at a Manhattan gig for a solid hour-plus of euphoric house music; a year previous, the energy (and potential for clumsiness) at a performance at Brooklyn's Cameo Gallery was at a level that, for a minute, their sound system shut down, prompting some sheepishly enthusiastic apologies from the duo before things whirred back to life.
Sepalcure do very well with nightlife crowds of varying pretension, but their debut album's greatest selling point was how well it translated to the home-listening set. Sharma and Stewart inhaled a few different sub-genres of dance and expelled a romantic sound that approached pop (for bass music, anyway), fulfilling the promise of their early singles to create music that fused hard-hitting rhythms with pastoral touches and pink-cloud ambience. Their aesthetic had arrived confidently and fully realized, the work of two decade-plus veterans who, individually, finally found a distinctive sound by joining forces.
Last year, Sepalcure released a single for album cut "Eternally Yrs" that featured a new song along with a smattering of remixes, but Stewart and Sharma have suggested that, since the duo is separated by an ocean (Sharma's New York-based, while the somewhat nomadic Stewart currently lives in Berlin), there's no guarantee of the project becoming a long-term fixation. New EP Make You, then, is a welcome treat in existence alone, suggesting that, despite Stewart's relatively high profile due to work with Harlem pop-rapper Azealia Banks as well as his recent signing to electronic mainstay Ninja Tune, Sepalcure are still very much alive.
In addition to re-asserting their presence, Make You confirms that, at this point, Sepalcure aren't as concerned with growth as they are with refinement. The title track is a summation of what they do very well, as deep, belly-rumbling bass, a fragile percussive backbone, and evocative vocal samples coalesce perfectly before a fingerpicked acoustic guitar figure drifts into the mix. "The Water's Fine" elaborates on Sepalcure's slight fascination with juke's hypnotic stutter, as woozy synths and a pile of tangled vocal cries are washed in static and hung out to dry. "The Water's Fine" also stands as one of a few examples on Make You where Sharma and Stewart subtly expand their sound-- not in style, but in scope, as they allow plenty of space between the track's elements and make for one of their most emptily dense works yet.
If "The Water's Fine" represents Sepalcure dialing back their soft-focus tendencies in favor of something more sparse and direct, then "He Said No" finds the duo reaching total sensory overload, with dreamy keyboards and a twinkling sense of optimism resembling a hi-fi, bass-friendly version of Balam Acab (whose "See Birds" stood as the odd man out on Sepalcure's otherwise club-ready XLR8R mix from 2010). "Rumours" is something else entirely, as a whiplashed vocal sample gets chopped up and buried by atmospheric pressure before bubbling up to the surface again. Then, things change halfway through the tune, as the structure takes on a beguiling new shape with dark, piping tones and a percolating rhythmic bed swathed in ambient hiss.
By the time a few synths and manipulated vocal samples meander in, "Rumours" has completely changed, highlighting Sepalcure's undervalued ability to take listeners on a journey, regardless of whether they're on their feet. Similar to Sepalcure, Make You closes with contemplative ambience-- the fingerpicked guitar and dotted horns of "DMD"-- and although the EP's cohesive potency is can't match its predecessor's, the attempt to fashion a narrative underlines the duo's attention to detail. (One wishes that Stewart's Machinedrum, with its steady stream of ephemera, possessed this much quality control.) Sepalcure are still intent on having a good time, but as Make You's elegant expansiveness suggests, they're dead serious, too. | 2013-04-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hotflush | April 9, 2013 | 7.6 | eff574ee-ebb3-4790-92b3-29605414635e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | 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 final album of Patsy Cline’s lifetime, a record that helped define country-pop. | 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 final album of Patsy Cline’s lifetime, a record that helped define country-pop. | Patsy Cline: Sentimentally Yours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patsy-cline-sentimentally-yours/ | Sentimentally Yours | Hank Cochran probably didn’t think too much about the word “or” when he wrote “She’s Got You” in 1961. He probably didn’t give it much thought when he had a demo made, or even when he drove that demo over to Patsy Cline’s home in Madison, Tennessee, to play it for her personally.
But Cline made that “or” the song’s emotional hinge. “She’s Got You,” which opens Sentimentally Yours, the final full-length she released during her lifetime, is about the souvenirs of a romance that ended abruptly; Patsy has his class ring, his photograph, all the physical objects that typically signify love and commitment. But she doesn’t have the man himself. He’s someone else’s now. “I’ve got your memory,” she sings, sounding as though this alone might sustain her. Then she backtracks: “Or…. has it got me?”
The way Cline sings “or” isn’t a sigh or a sob. It’s more like a deflation. She might have convinced herself that there was comfort to be found in those old objects, but that “or” obliterates any such hope. With that aching note, Cline reaches out of the song, out of the past, and right into the present moment.
“She’s Got You” was another major hit for Cline, one in a series of country-pop smashes that signaled a comeback after several years in the wilderness and established her as one of the most successful crossover artists in Nashville. In the studio and on the stage, Cline did not initially walk those lines confidently: Preferring the cowgirl outfits her mother Hilda sewed for her and the yodeling country and western numbers she cut her teeth singing in Virginia, Cline initially fought against attempts to change her repertoire and gussy up her image.
She didn’t want to record her 1957 hit “Walkin’ After Midnight”; she thought it portrayed her as a prostitute, and she certainly didn’t want to perform it on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a popular singing show on CBS—sort of a black-and-white version of American Idol. Her opinion softened considerably when she won the competition and the song quickly ascended the pop and country charts. It should have been a career-maker, but the horrible contract she signed with 4 Star Records severely limited her material and left her more financially strapped than she had been before her breakout.
Within her small catalog of recordings, however—and especially on her third album, 1962’s Sentimentally Yours—Cline sounds like she has no misgivings whatsoever. She makes pop-country sound natural, inevitable: a reassurance that country music could survive the onslaught of rock’n’roll that threatened to render it obsolete. More crucially, the album marked the culmination of her own development as a vocalist and interpreter. She hit her stride at a crucial moment in Nashville history, when a wave of talented songwriters were redefining the genre’s conventions. Cline was a favorite of Cochran, Willie Nelson (who wrote her hit “Crazy”), and Harlan Howard (“I Fall to Pieces”). She essentially rewrote their songs simply by singing them, elevating their words and wringing every one of their rhymes for maximum dramatic potential.
Cline similarly became identified with what had been dubbed the Nashville Sound—later referred to as countrypolitan. After the explosion of rock’n’roll in the mid-1950s, country music saw its market shrink and its influence wane. Established artists were playing to half-empty venues and suffering significant sales slumps. The Nashville Sound was perhaps a desperate attempt to reach new audiences by essentially de-twanging country music. Fiddles and banjos were replaced by lush string arrangements, high lonesome harmonies with smooth backing vocals. Two-steps and honky-tonk beats gave way to more urbane rhythms.
Working with Owen Bradley (considered one of the primary architects of the Nashville Sound) and a stable of ace session players locally known as the A-Team, Cline suppressed the heavy twang that had defined some of her earliest recordings, backed away from belting, and cut yodeling from her act entirely. The transformation extended to her wardrobe, as she traded fringed jackets for cocktail dresses and cowboy boots for high heels. She was by no means the first artist to popularize the Nashville Sound, but she was shaping up to be one of its biggest stars.
Cline shouldn’t have lived long enough to enjoy this career resurgence. In June 1961, she was involved in a head-on collision on Old Hickory Boulevard in Nashville, not far from where the Grand Ole Opry is today. She was thrown through the windshield and suffered a dislocated hip and broken ribs, and a cut that resulted in a scar running the length of her face. Bloodied by the side of the road, the still-conscious Cline demanded that paramedics treat the other driver first. Almost as soon as she was released from the hospital, she was back on the road and in the studio. She made an appearance at the Opry in a wheelchair, and she performed all over the Midwest on crutches. Reportedly, it took her nearly four hours to apply makeup to hide her scar.
It’s difficult to gauge the effect of that accident on her craft. Recording at Bradley’s famous Quonset Hut Studio in downtown Nashville, Cline found that her tender ribs prevented her from singing as forcefully as she once did, and she had to cut some sessions short due to fatigue and intense headaches. This brought a new restraint to her performances, as she created more space for nuance and imagination. Remarkably, there is no sense in her recordings from the early 1960s of an artist re-learning her instrument. She’s not coming into her own as an artist; she’s already there.
The fact that she was even recording long-players like Sentimentally Yours reveals the faith her new record label Decca had in her as a commercial force: Most country artists were recording singles, which appealed to a younger demographic, namely teenage girls who could scrounge together change for an inexpensive single. That audience was a growing presence at Cline’s concerts; a full album catered to the adult crowd as well, suggesting Cline was uniting demographics as well as genres.
Sentimentally Yours shows how Cline navigated a compelling middle ground between the demands of country tunes and pop standards. The chipper “Heartaches” had been a hit decades earlier for bandleader Guy Lombardo. Cline’s version retains that swinging momentum, allowing her to bounce over the melody like a stone skipping across a lake. “That’s My Desire” was a song most closely associated with Frankie Laine, who had a hit with it in 1946, but no one could muster the mature sexuality that Cline invests in a line like, “I’ll gaze into your eyes divine.” Perhaps the most stunning transformation is “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It),” most popular as a song Judy Garland sang to a photograph of Clark Gable in the film Broadway Melody of 1938. What had been an ode to starstruck puppy love here becomes something much graver and darker.
As for country, Sentimentally Yours includes her versions of “Lonely Street” (a hit for Carl Belew and Kitty Wells) and Eddy Arnold’s “Anytime,” as well as not one or two, but three songs associated with Hank Williams. This version of “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a favorite from earlier in her career, gets a more cosmopolitan arrangement that crackles with guitar and piano, and she responds by drawing out the last syllables of every line, as though unwilling to cede the spotlight to her backup singers, the Jordanaires. At times Sentimentally Yours plays like a commentary on the history of Nashville crossovers and Cline’s place within that trend. “Half As Much” had already been covered by pop artists like Rosemary Clooney (with Percy Faith & His Orchestra, no less), and Cline strikes a compelling balance between the weighty emotions of Williams’ original with the bouncy cadence of Clooney’s pop cover.
Sentimentally Yours reinforces Cline’s persona: She is always the lonely one, the heartbroken, the one who suffers so that another woman can thrive. Love is a zero-sum game. This is the province of country music starting with the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and codified by Hank Williams at the century’s midpoint. But few artists have managed to find so many facets of despair or to express them so carefully, so precisely, and she was digging even deeper into heartaches on the singles that followed this album. “If you’ve got leavin’ on your mind,” she sings on 1963’s “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” “hurt me now. Get it over.”
“Leavin’ on Your Mind” was Cline’s last single released during her lifetime, before the plane crash that killed her on March 5, 1963. Cline truly did have leavin’ on her own mind; she told close friends, including Loretta Lynn and June Carter, that she didn’t expect to see 30. Her death at that age cemented her reputation. But her star corroded over time, especially in the late 1970s, when country outlaws, new traditionalists, and southern rockers rejected attempts to polish or de-twang country music. Cline was dismissed as an oldie, the figurehead of an earlier era with questionable aims and outmoded sounds. Her crossover success became a burden to her legacy: proof of some inherent inauthenticity.
In the 1980s, however, Cline’s tragically small catalog was reappraised, first with the 1985 feature film Sweet Dreams (a horrendous biopic that’s mostly interested in her ne’er-do-well second husband) and later with compilations like 12 Greatest Hits (a fine starting place for newcomers) and the box set The Patsy Cline Collection (which arranged her catalog chronologically for the first time). Ken Burns devotes a hefty chunk of his new documentary Country Music to her story and her influence in Nashville, and Lifetime has a new biopic that examines the close friendship between Cline and Lynn. Her legacy extends to subsequent generations of young country artists who experiment with pop sounds and vocal stylings without the same hand-wringing that accompanied Cline’s innovations.
Well beyond the loss of life and artistic possibility, her early death remains a central aspect of her legacy, threatening to overshadow the stylistic innovations she made at a pivotal moment in country music history. She defined herself with songs about heartache and yearning, and her voice—simultaneously emotive and restrained—made her deeply sympathetic and endlessly relatable. And yet, that plane crash means we never got to see that suffering abate. We never got to see her expand her repertoire to songs that elaborated on that sadness or countered it with contentment. Patsy Cline never even got a chance for a happy ending. | 2019-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Decca | September 15, 2019 | 8.9 | eff59ba3-67f4-4f94-81c6-3676c56006bc | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Channeling an eerily affecting cyborg tenderness, the Austrian producer and digital nomad writes post-club anthems that sound like pop hits from a parallel universe. | Channeling an eerily affecting cyborg tenderness, the Austrian producer and digital nomad writes post-club anthems that sound like pop hits from a parallel universe. | Zora Jones: Ten Billion Angels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zora-jones-ten-billion-angels/ | Ten Billion Angels | In a scene that typically moves at a relentless pace, Zora Jones is an artist of slow, microscopic precision. Before the pandemic shuttered nightclubs around the world, the Austrian-born DJ, producer, and visual artist was living a nomadic lifestyle with her partner and collaborator Sinjin Hawke, with whom she runs the audiovisual platform and label Fractal Fantasy. Like many touring electronic musicians, Jones writes tracks on her laptop while out on the road, taking advantage of downtime in between parties. Unlike many of her peers, however, Jones is notoriously strict about quality control. After first beginning to produce in 2010, she set herself the task of creating 100 original tracks before ever releasing one. This led to her debut EP, 100 Ladies, in 2015; five years (and a smattering of collaborative releases) later, those 100 ladies have evolved into Ten Billion Angels.
Ten Billion Angels builds on themes that Jones has been meticulously sculpting throughout those years—in particular, the combination of human emotion with futuristic, sci-fi stylings. This cyborg tenderness is reflected not only in pitch-shifted melodies and gut-punch kick drums but also in the LP’s accompanying artwork, which was inspired by CGI tentacle porn. Jones claims she was first drawn to 3D tentacle erotica because of “how obsessive the creators were”—perhaps she saw reflected in them a kind of perfectionism that she also applies to her music. But in addition to its intricate detail, the artwork mirrors the music in other ways: its glossy surfaces, its fluidity, and its seamless combination of the primal and the otherworldly.
Jones’ own voice forms the backbone of the record, spliced and contorted in a way she notes was inspired by AraabMuzik’s 2011 opus Electronic Dream. Jones is a master of wringing ten billion inflections out of a single sound (notably on her recent bootleg of Selena Gomez’ “Look at Her Now,” which amplifies the heartache of the original while erasing almost every lyric other than the word “down”). On lead single “Paranoid,” Jones repeats the titular refrain—“Paranoid, think I’m paranoid”—inside synth flourishes and tightly coiled drums that circle her like vultures, while on the vast “Sister’s Blade,” a single line of melody is repeated over and over, starting out as defiant and silky over scattergun synths before sinking slowly into a lower, more elegiac register.
That emotional double entendre is the strength of this LP, where numerous synonyms for “woman” pepper the tracklist: A “sister” on one track becomes a “bitch” on another and a “princess” on the next. While “Sister’s Blade” teeters ambiguously between aggressive and mournful, “Revenge of the Bitch” is Jones’ most explicit do-not-fuck-with-me moment, all sparse and serious drums. Elsewhere, the fearsome “Low Orbit Ion Cannon”—named for a kind of cyber attack—draws most explicitly on Jones’ love of footwork (she learned from the late, great DJ Rashad and has collaborated with Gary, Ind., experimentalist Jlin), building into a stream of controlled chaos at 160 beats per minute.
While these powerful outbursts are the most high-adrenaline moments, they’re in the minority on this record. Some tracks feel like alien ballads: “Come Home,” the Björk-adjacent closer, is a spectral chorus of voices, and “I Wanna Lose You” twists a would-be R&B hook into a ghostly smokescreen of SFX. Some of these sleepier compositions, particularly towards the end of the record, lose their impact, but others are so richly embodied that they feel like pop hits from a parallel universe. “Melancholy Princess” is a kind of duet between Jones and a bassline, her voice tremulous and sweet as she croons, “I want to feel you,” over the muscular instrumental. There’s a power play between her pitched-up vocal and the brutality of the track, just as there is within the bait-and-switch lyrics (“I’ll make you mine/ Have your way with me”) and even on the cover, where it’s hard to tell whether the female form is dominating or being dominated by the shapeshifting metallic liquid engulfing her. A similar dynamic echoes across the whole LP, as delicate melodies wrestle against chaotic production.
The beauty of Ten Billion Angels lies in its embrace of liminality and refusal to conform to one idea. This double sidedness fits into the broader context of Jones and Hawke’s self-described “post-genre” work together under the Fractal Fantasy banner, where dystopias can be utopian and club music can exist and expand far beyond the physical club. They recently debuted Virtua, their virtual reimagining of a club space which you can “tour” online. It’s an immersive, empty space with 3D projections beaming from every wall, built with no bar, the better to “foster potent communal experiences.” Walking virtually through it feels poignant, as the rooms seem to wait for the sweaty, messy reality of a dancing crowd. There’s both a sadness and a hopefulness in its vacancy. In Virtua as in Ten Billion Angels, even the darkest moment contains the potential for optimism—and there are endless new possibilities dancing on every elaborate, lovingly crafted surface.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fractal Fantasy | September 9, 2020 | 8 | effced8c-925d-4489-b095-00e868bbdc33 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Pagans in Vegas is Metric's slinkiest, slickest album to date. It deepens the new-wave dalliances of its predecessor (2012's Synthetica), exploring the binary between authenticity and artificiality with zero subtlety. | Pagans in Vegas is Metric's slinkiest, slickest album to date. It deepens the new-wave dalliances of its predecessor (2012's Synthetica), exploring the binary between authenticity and artificiality with zero subtlety. | Metric: Pagans In Vegas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21006-pagans-in-vegas/ | Pagans In Vegas | Over the past decade, Broken Social Scene alumna Emily Haines has played the role of post-Internet philosopher, struggling to retain her individuality in a world growing more developed and technologically dependent by the day. The binary between authenticity and artificiality has remained a perennial interest for the Toronto-based musician, and it comes up yet again on her band Metric's latest album Pagans In Vegas with zero subtlety. In one corner waits the natural, manifested in dressed-down guitars and Haines’ lilting soprano. In the other, the machines state their case through forays into disco drudgery, stiff synths and Siri singalongs. Over the course of 13 tracks, these two forces collide, with the latter ultimately winning out.
Pagans in Vegas deepens the new-wave dalliances of its predecessor (2012's Synthetica) with their slinkiest, slickest palette to date. Depeche Mode’s influence is impossible to ignore – opening track "Lie Lie Lie" and mid-album highlight "Too Bad, So Sad" take their rhythmic cues from the bluesy strut of "Personal Jesus", while "For Kicks" channels the nocturnal throb of "Precious". The cartoonish 8-bit bleep-bloops adorning tracks like "The Shade", meanwhile, belie a quirkier, '80s-arcade inspiration.
This gives listeners the chance to experience Metric in an unprecedentedly cheery context, but in the case of "The Shade", it comes at the cost of stirring up traumatic memories of Adam Sandler’s god-awful video game movie Pixels. Fortunately, the group make up for it with lead single "Cascades", a glitched-out dance track that casts Haines as some type of forlorn, sleep-deprived android, whispering against the percussionists’ paranoid, thumping percussion. It’s the perfect synthesis of Fantasies’ meaty fretwork and Live It Out's glossy electronics, as well as a rare moment of stylistic equilibrium.
As with past albums, Haines continues to seek lyrical inspiration from everyday Sisyphean struggles. On "Too Bad, So Sad", she finds herself in a restless transit "back and forth between the desert and the sea", qualifying it with a shrug: "who I was and I will always be". Love proves an equally futile endeavor; on "For Kicks", Haines offers the least-comforting parting words imaginable to a former interest, cooing that she’d stay true "if it was easy" (par for the course in the Tinder age). "I want it all!" she crows on "The Shade", and as the album progresses, Haines’ self-awareness emerges as the most intriguing aspect of the album's character.
In a recent interview with SPIN, Haines revealed that Metric have already prepared an answer to Pagans In Vegas: a follow-up album recorded entirely with all analog instruments. Up to this point, the band’s maintained a long-lasting marriage to the zeroes and ones, but that appears to be changing. The shift would be more compelling if it didn't feel so literal. In Pagans in Vegas, humans and machines exist in a binary relationship. The reality is both more nuanced and fertile than that. | 2015-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | MMI / Crystal Math Music | September 15, 2015 | 6 | f0043601-1ce0-4e57-b485-472b01305ed9 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Australian musician better known as Francis Inferno Orchestra trades his habitual house and disco for lo-fi indie that plays like a love letter to the eccentric records John Peel championed. | The Australian musician better known as Francis Inferno Orchestra trades his habitual house and disco for lo-fi indie that plays like a love letter to the eccentric records John Peel championed. | Sans Merit: Early Grave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sans-merit-early-grave/ | Early Grave | Griffin James might seem an unlikely auteur of lo-fi indie rock. Better known as Francis Inferno Orchestra, the Melbourne-born house and disco producer was being hailed as “one of the saviors of Australian dance music” in the early 2010s, while still barely in his twenties; James’s career as a globe-trotting DJ moved him first to London and then Berlin. But his inclinations have long ranged beyond the dance floor, from a 2017 ambient and new-age album under the name Veranda Culture to the psychedelic expanse of a 2021 collaborative EP with Canadian DJ and producer Yu Su. Now based in Los Angeles, James has a monthly Dublab radio show where he rummages pretty deep into the underground rock stacks: Here, have Fennesz’s Junior Boys remix, as a treat.
Early Grave, James’s debut as Sans Merit, plays like an intoxicating love letter to the types of scrappy, eccentric records that the late BBC radio DJ John Peel might have championed. Recorded with live instruments and budget gear, sometimes in bedrooms and closets, the 13-track, 43-minute set rifles expertly through murky post-punk, glistening dream pop, and scruffy indie rock, with touches of sample-happy musique concrète. For all the potential pitfalls that come with such well-trodden territory, it appears that James’ far-flung musical background has served him well. Arriving with little press push via Zen 2000, a small L.A. label co-founded by one of the creative forces behind Brooklyn dance imprint Let’s Play House, the album is also a potent exercise in mystique. Lyrics, when present, are often cryptic or undecipherable; lonesome, fragmentary hooks pile up and then dissolve into unpredictable between-song transitions. But the shadows fall in all the right places. This is ramshackle gloom that carries the rousing charge of personal epiphany.
Whatever James’ self-imposed analog restrictions, he brings an immersive level of detail to these enigmatic sketches. His vocals, at this point, are still as gawky as they are gothy, but the tape hiss, bird calls, and synth pads on album opener “Friends Won’t Kick” suggest an ambient track in jangle-pop clothing. Another round of ethereal synths meets chintzy beats, ominous bass, gossamer lead-guitar tendrils, chugging strums, and other unidentifiable noises on the next track, “Human in Age,” creating an atmosphere that’s far seedier than the Modern Lovers’ Route 128 when James moans about “drivin’ round with my radio on.” The first video, for “Weathered Men,” folds together eight-bit bleeps, celestial sighs, and multiple layers of frosty guitars as James hints at the inevitability of decay in low, stentorian tones over martial drums: “I forget it again and again,” he sings, but all together it’s askew enough to stick with you. Much of what James intones on later track “Heaven’s Gate” is lost in a dense shoegaze fog that could rival Deerhunter or Yo La Tengo.
Early Grave is equally beguiling when James steps away from the mic. “Pill Nye” is triumphant, synth-kissed indie rock that just happens to be instrumental. The crumbling space-station architecture of “Rasslin” gives way to a delicate keyboard melody that you could imagine Damon Albarn crooning his eyes out over on Blur’s 13. Especially intriguing is “Gentle, Caring (& The Murmurings of Geoffrey Baron),” where spoken-word snippets—alternately menacing and serene—float amid a soundscape that’s half hellfire, half choir of angels; this one ultimately lands somewhere between the nonlinear explorations of L’Rain and Spirit of the Beehive’s paranoid pastiche. Wordless finale “Third Wicket” posits what it might be like if the Durutti Column soundtracked a spaghetti Western.
Obviously, there’s plenty of precedent for this stuff, and Early Grave could easily be written off as record-collector rock without much of its own to say. And Avalon Emerson has already made the year’s best pivot from left-field beatmaker to dream-pop frontperson. But the highs are so many, and so high—see also when James gamely shouts a “hey!” as the new-wave swell of “Maniac” crests—that this inaugural outing from Sans Merit feels like a keeper. For all the comparisons to be made, it’ll likely remind you most of your own cherished lesser-knowns: the short, bright flames that tend to get left out when forming a consensus on decade lists or squinting at A-listers’ album credits. For me, here, that’s the shoestring melancholy of American Wrestlers, or the hazy introspection of Shocking Pinks. Whatever you might think of when you imagine a DJ going rock, this ain’t it: Australia’s dance-music savior gives one hell of a toast to the might-have-beens and never-weres. | 2023-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Zen 2000 | June 5, 2023 | 7.6 | f016bfc3-2b39-4893-be9d-c89bb4091e30 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Recorded at roughly the same time as last year's Rehearsing My Choir, the latest from the Freidberger siblings is free of conceptual trappings, and is another carefully considered, sonically rich release. | Recorded at roughly the same time as last year's Rehearsing My Choir, the latest from the Freidberger siblings is free of conceptual trappings, and is another carefully considered, sonically rich release. | The Fiery Furnaces: Bitter Tea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3275-bitter-tea/ | Bitter Tea | Seven months after the story-songs of Rehearsing My Choir comes the companion album, recorded around the same time with just the grandkids on the mic. The earlier record's "difficulty" is debatable; Rehearsing My Choir failed for many (including me), but not because it was too opaque or complicated. Taken as a whole, the lyrics were probably the most accessible the band has written so far. But the lead voice and format, both of which were chosen with a reasonable expectation of the intended effect, were never going to work for everybody. It was a specialty item.
Bitter Tea is a very different record: no Olga Sarantos; no overriding narrative; not as much in the way of recurring musical themes. But it's cut from the same cloth, and its "meaning," or the meaning of individual songs, is surely even harder to grasp. This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments. We'll get to those in a sec.
What comes to mind during early listens is how odd this record sounds, and how often the production on Fiery Furnaces' records is overlooked. Some of the distinctiveness is up to Eleanor Friedberger's voice, with her English major's diction and her ability to make the dozen or so notes in her natural range do all kinds of work. Her brother understands her strengths, writing for her crisp lines that draw attention to the grammatical construction. "To see: could there one for me be?" from this record's "Waiting to Know You", for example. But Bitter Tea as a sonic experience, in terms of the instruments used and the effects used on them, is even more exceptional.
For starters, this makes two albums in a row where a tinny upright piano dragged from a the lounge of a depression-era bordello functions as the signature instrument, stitching together the patchwork songs with Matt Friedberger's speedy little trills. Before it seemed to reference a radio play; here it serves as a reminder that we inhabit the world of one band and one band only. Other interesting choices abound: squelchy Moog that references neither the instrument's classic era nor its 90s update; distorted percussion meant to be disorienting instead of forceful; a disco beat that gyrates in place with quotation marks standing in for the mirror ball.
Then there's the regular stream of backward vocals, the record's most pressing recurring motif. On tracks like "In My Little Thatched Hut", "The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry", and "Nevers", the words move backward but the melody still fits the chords. The technique may allude to a wrinkle in time or some sort of aphasia, but it also points up how little comprehension of the actual lyrics matters to the enjoyment of Fiery Furnaces' music. I consider myself a curious person but I couldn't care less what's actually being said on the backward bits.
Puzzling over meanings and allusions seems a worthwhile project, though, and I've no doubt that on some level the words can bear such scrutiny. Some amount of detective word might transform some of the less musically engaging tracks into something enjoyable. I can't find much in "I'm In No Mood", "The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry", or "Whistle Rhapsody" to draw me back again; to my ears they serve mostly as reminders of Bitter Tea's gassy bloat (72 minutes, though two tracks repeat at the end in different mixes). The album seems to drag in its final third, but really the lesser tracks are spread evenly throughout. It's more a cumulative weariness than any sort of front-loading.
Which is unfortunate since Bitter Tea contains some of Fiery Furnaces' best songs. "Teach Me Sweetheart" is unfailingly gorgeous, a perfect melding of experimental production ideas that match perfectly the mood and the sweet, undeniable melody. "Waiting to Know You" is almost as good with its prom night slow dance chord progression, and bizarre mix; there's no logical reason why this song needs an absurdly fat Moog bass, but hey, turns out it does. "Police Sweater Blood Vow" seems like a quirky leftfield pop hit; in another time it might have been this band's "Birdhouse in Your Soul", And "Benton Harbor Blues", particular in its second mix, which omits a meandering two-minute intro, shows how effortlessly Matt Friedberger can come up with a simple, breezy, and likeable pop tune when so inclined. If Fiery Furnaces wanted a shortcut to a larger audience, this track points the way.
But such a path probably doesn't interest these two. Fiery Furnaces have other things in mind, and so far the project seems in part to be about finding a way to challenge themselves and stay interested when writing good, catchy songs comes so easy. Fiery Furnaces is the work of thought and calculation rather than instinct. This imparts a chilly remove to the records but I don't think that's a criticism. There's no shortage of direct and heartfelt indie rock that talks about the passion, but nothing else going sounds like the Fiery Furnaces' carefully considered babble. | 2006-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 17, 2006 | 7.6 | f01f2117-dd3e-4a6b-878c-410148f05ee5 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Known for her improvisational aplomb, the pedal steel guitarist and singer returns with her second and most complex batch of composed songs, subversive and rich documents of love and lust. | Known for her improvisational aplomb, the pedal steel guitarist and singer returns with her second and most complex batch of composed songs, subversive and rich documents of love and lust. | Heather Leigh: Throne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heather-leigh-throne/ | Throne | For more than 20 years, the improvisational music of Heather Leigh has traveled a clear throughline. From her early 2000s work in Charalambides and her many solo releases since 2002 to more recent collaborations with like-minded experimenters Chris Corsano, Jandek, and Peter Brötzmann, her way of improvising with voice and pedal steel guitar has been distinct. She’s equally skilled at creating subtle, folk-leaning tones or dense, aggressive noise.
But recently, Leigh has forged a kind of rebirth. In 2015, she wrote proper songs for her album I Abused Animal rather than fully improvising them, subsequently recording them during a day in a proper studio. For Throne, she’s ventured even further down that path, spending a week in the studio to make structured, interconnected tunes that are her idiosyncratic versions of pop. She’s made this turn with typical conviction, so the compelling qualities of her previous work remain intact. Even so, Throne feels like a breakthrough.
Leigh’s lyrics come off as sincere but subversive love songs. She cleverly plays with familiar tropes like intimacy, infatuation, and disillusionment. Opener “Prelude to Goddess” expresses the entranced adoration of a teen ballad: “You’re so interesting… You’re the kind of girl I’d like to meet.” But its starry sentiments are undercut by oversharing (“The way you dance makes me cream”) and ghostly vocals that suggest a mind questioning itself. Likewise, the words of “Days Without You” exude bliss—”Why worry about tomorrow, on such a beautiful day?”—while the tense guitar is as ominous as footsteps down a dim path.
And Leigh grippingly extends the themes of oppression explored on I Abused Animal during “Lena,” detailing sexual abuse in a hymn-like tune. The scene she paints is vivid: In verses, a daughter hazily recalls her father (“Been sleeping all night in daddy’s garage again”), while the father reenacts his violations in the chorus (“Oh Lena/Come and sit on my lap/...And lift up your skirt”). Leigh heightens tension with rising hums and guitar plucks. Additions to Leigh’s palette boost such complexity throughout Throne, including drum machine, synths, and backing by John Hannon on violin and her husband, David Keenan, on bass. This layered music feels simple but echoes deeply.
The most complex song on Throne is also its longest. The 17-minute “Gold Teeth” is less a love song than an abstract poem, as Leigh repeats simple phrases to conjure new meanings. Lines like “into the sea” and “it’s the wind” emerge over and over, forming a hypnotic hall of mirrors. A middle section of guitar noise darkens the piece, but Leigh’s lyrical images emerge from the chaos stronger than before.
That may sound heady, and Throne is not easy-listening, even if it is Leigh’s most song-oriented album yet. Leigh, after all, calls her music a personal religion, and it often feels like a series of spiritual explorations and epiphanies. But Throne is also quite sensual, reveling in bodies and the environments through which they move. The album’s back cover shows a posterior, presumably Leigh’s, pointing to her hope “that listeners can connect with the seriousness of the work on one level while shaking their ass to a total fucking banger at the same time.” Throne might not get butts on the dance floor, but its sense of movement—both within its songs and within the arc of Leigh’s evolution—is profound. | 2018-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | December 7, 2018 | 7.7 | f01f7de5-ce33-4594-9c3f-7571d72fee46 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
On Antenna to the Afterworld, Sonny Smith marries an extensive narrative about outer space and alien life with ruminations on the deaths of two close friends. It's a spiritual, cosmic collection with the alien synthesizers and acid-soaked psychedelic vocals to match. | On Antenna to the Afterworld, Sonny Smith marries an extensive narrative about outer space and alien life with ruminations on the deaths of two close friends. It's a spiritual, cosmic collection with the alien synthesizers and acid-soaked psychedelic vocals to match. | Sonny and the Sunsets: Antenna to the Afterworld | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18109-sonny-the-sunsets-antenna-to-the-afterworld/ | Antenna to the Afterworld | The title Antenna to the Afterworld seems like an intentional bit of ambiguity from Sonny and the Sunsets. On one hand, the album plays up an extensive narrative about outer space and alien life, which is reinforced by the band's frequent use of synthesizers. In "Green Blood", Sonny Smith professes his love for an alien android, and maybe the antenna in question is pointing us to a distant planet. But then there's "afterworld." When he made this album, Smith had death on his mind-- a close friend of his had been murdered. Then, Smith visited a psychic, who gave him a message from another recently deceased friend named Nancy. "Through the psychic, Nancy told me not to get too comfortable with loneliness, as she had done, to go out and live," he said. "This could be what many psychics say, I have no idea, and I don’t care really." He began to think about "the afterworld" quite a bit, and on the album, he cuts straight to the point when he folds that encounter into one of his lyrics: "I had a visit from a dead friend/ She told me not to wallow in this loneliness." And where does space come into play? Well, that song is called "Path of Orbit".
As it turns out, the album's title is an umbrella that covers most things spiritual and cosmic-- all the reasons why we stare upward and wonder what's out there or what's next. Smith doesn't get hung up on the specifics-- he accepts every possibility. "I believe in everything," he said. "I always have. Ghosts, afterlife, reincarnation, ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, mystics, shamans, psychics, miracles, the force, aliens. I believe it all." That all-encompassing belief system is the heart and soul of Antenna to the Afterworld. Smith's acceptance of the fantastical is implied in his nonchalant lyrical approach. (On "Primitive": "I love the moon/ I don't know why.") Really, though the paranormal and supernatural make several appearances in the LP's 11 tracks, they're never the center of attention in Smith's songs about love and the banal. His inherent belief in palmistry, for example, makes it so the titular "Palmreader" plays second fiddle to Sonny's scab- and glue-covered hands.
In the past two years, Smith and the band have been genre-jumping shapeshifters. Smith's 100 Records series had him going from reggae to R&B to folk to garage. Last year, on Longtime Companion, Smith took the band country. This time, they've made something that's very much its own creature. When the synthesizers come in, they understatedly float over some soft, warm guitar pop. On "Natural Acts", the country influence has carried over in their guitars, though they're layered alongside synthesizers and the occasional acid-soaked psychedelic vocal stab. Later, on "Void", Smith and the gang have some garage rock fun. Smith whoops like an ape, claps his hands to match his vocals, and then a delighted Tahlia Harbour playfully sings along with the instrumental outro. Both musically and lyrically, the album presents some of the Sunsets' best work yet.
Though Antenna will probably be viewed as Sonny's "space and synthesizers album," it's also full of doe-eyed and fragile moments. Over the jangling melody of "Girl on the Street", he pines over someone he's never spoken to, but who he stares at from a distance. In "Mutilator", he sings an awed love song about a sword swallower. (She's also the girl attached to the knife thrower's spinning wheel.) But as surreal ballads go, nothing beats "Green Blood". His android lover is shot by her scorned cyborg husband, but that isn't the end of the story. She lives, and they try to make it work. So the song gets the same kind of quietly sad ending from most breakup stories-- they just drift away. When Harbour asks if she went back to her cyborg husband, Sonny's reply is dejected and unsure. "I don't even know. But I miss her, you know? I really miss her." Antenna to the Afterworld may have all the dressings of science fiction and fantasy, but like many great works in those genres, it's a strong, emotive character study. He might've replaced the cowboy hat with a spaceman's helmet, but Sonny Smith still writes like a country balladeer. | 2013-06-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-06-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 21, 2013 | 7.7 | f029ae8a-ec45-447b-91b3-e95bb599ce53 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Guitarist and bandleader Ellen Kempner’s third record breaks down the walls around her wiry, anxious riffs, opening space for levity and the thrill of new love. | Guitarist and bandleader Ellen Kempner’s third record breaks down the walls around her wiry, anxious riffs, opening space for levity and the thrill of new love. | Palehound: Black Friday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palehound-black-friday/ | Black Friday | A lot of Palehound's last album, 2017’s A Place I'll Always Go, took place indoors. Bandleader Ellen Kempner set her scenes in bedrooms and in grocery stores, singing tightly wound vocal melodies over wiry, anxious guitar riffs. On the Boston band's third album, Kempner breaks down the walls. Black Friday reaches far toward the hazy horizon, letting the nervous energy of Palehound's first two LPs mount and unspool.
Kempner wrote many of the songs on A Place I’ll Always Go during a period of grief after a close friend passed away. That weight lifts on Black Friday, which bubbles around the thrill of new love, and also reckons with the stress that falling deeply for someone can bring. Love, both romantic and platonic, can erase self-consciousness in the moment, but it can also heighten self-scrutiny later. Opening yourself up to another person can drive you to ask all sorts of uncomfortable questions about yourself: Am I enough? Can I be enough? What can I do to be enough?
Palehound wade through this space with a skillful grip on their newly expanded rock toolkit. A couple of synthesizers and drum machines bookended A Place I'll Always Go; here, those accents get fleshed out, woven in alongside long, languid, reverb-heavy guitar lines. The stunning “Killer,” a menacing Western number about taking cold-blooded revenge on a male abuser, punctuates its chorus with sprinkles of saloon piano. “I wanna be the one who kills the man who hurt you, darlin’,” Kempner sings, perfectly poised, as if her shotgun’s already slung over her shoulder. She barely raises her voice above a stage whisper, which only adds to the song’s chill. It’s not a geyser of white-hot rage, but a cold, calculated expression of venom toward a deserving target. It’s also a brilliant reclamation of the sounds of the Western, a film genre whose women don’t always make it out alive.
“Killer” brings Palehound to some of their darkest places yet, but Black Friday also opens space for moments of levity. With their quick-strummed acoustic guitar and playful vocal melodies, “Urban Drip” and “Stick N Poke” could almost be Sheryl Crow singles from the early aughts. “I think I’m due for a shitty tattoo,” Kempner proclaims at the chorus of the latter, which is such a spectacular way to say “fuck it” that it sounds like she’s running barefoot through summer grass.
But nothing else on the album, or in the rest of Palehound's discography, quite compares to the joy of “Aaron,” a song Kempner wrote for her partner as he navigated a gender transition. “My friend, if you want me to/I’ll call you Aaron/I can, I can, I can, I can," she sings a little breathlessly. The “I can” becomes a refrain, sometimes morphing into “I will,” an urgent, excited affirmation. The instrumentation—nimble guitars and big, booming percussion—keeps building and ebbing away until finally, in the song’s final seconds, it erupts, a little like the climax of Perfume Genius’ 2012 stunner “Hood.” The moment’s ecstatic, a rush of affection where uncertainty gives way to unconditional acceptance, and it cements “Aaron” as one of the best love songs you're likely to hear in a while.
Kempner has excelled at tracing anxiety, fear, and shame through expertly crafted rock songs, and there’s still plenty of those emotions throughout Black Friday—the title track and “Worthy” both tackle the feelings of inadequacy that can attend even the most uncomplicated love. But on her third record, she also allows herself to experience pure joy, and what a treat it is to feel that euphoria along with her. | 2019-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 11, 2019 | 7.4 | f02cf80a-f604-4097-8ad9-0eeeb608cf7c | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The Toronto four-piece Dilly Dally's debut oozes with female desire. In almost every song, Katie Monk unleashes a dive-bombing scream that drops like a flare down a well, her band reinforcing the squalor of her voice with a heavy swagger redolent of some of the best ever alt-rock. | The Toronto four-piece Dilly Dally's debut oozes with female desire. In almost every song, Katie Monk unleashes a dive-bombing scream that drops like a flare down a well, her band reinforcing the squalor of her voice with a heavy swagger redolent of some of the best ever alt-rock. | Dilly Dally: Sore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21085-sore/ | Sore | When moves to defund Planned Parenthood attempt to confine female desire, there's something so satisfying about the way Toronto four-piece Dilly Dally's debut just oozes with it. Singer/guitarist Katie Monks' voice is filthy and fleshy, as if the sodden voicebox of Shane McGowan or Pete Doherty had been transplanted into her own healthy 20-something throat. In almost every song, she unleashes a dive-bombing scream that drops like a flare down a well, illuminating the absurdity of mythologizing women's sexuality while also making plain how it feels to carry that burden.
Guitarists Monks and Liz Ball started Dilly Dally as school friends six years ago, immediately confident that they were the best band in town. With maturity came a little humility, but Sore—written and recorded with new bassist Jimmy Tony and drummer Ben Reinhartz—makes good on their early ambitions. The band reinforces the natural squalor of Monks' voice with heavy swagger redolent of some of the best ever alt-rock—the Pixies' malevolent rumble, Hole's poisoned hard candy, and SST-style bile. Monks and Ball's guitar parts are full of personality, making Dilly Dally's dirges distinct and sticky whether they're scaling triumphal peaks like their their countrymen Japandroids, carving out idle, loping riffs—or flitting nimbly between modes in a single song.
No matter what, the record sounds tumescent, like it's throbbing with blood and might spill over. Blood rushes to Monks' head amidst the skidding guitars and angelic coos of "Desire", a spellbound rave about some heavenly girl whose inner fire she's powerless to resist: "Desire is coming at me lately," she sings, as if standing in the path of a runaway truck. On "The Touch", she describes a woman's healing hands, using enraptured language that mocks the cultural tendency to treat female sexuality as some kind of magic. "Snake Head" explores the dark side of that exoticizing. As blood leaks from between her legs, she jokes that she's turning into Medusa, and her bonehead so-called friends agree: "Man, this bitch is goin' crazy/ She'll make you turn to stone."
Despite all this, Sore enshrines Monks' persistent faith in the transformative power of sex and love. There's a Celtic, Pogues-ish tinge to "Green", where a brief moment of lust ("I want you naked in my kitchen, making me breakfast") gives way to a prayer of renewal, and the record's loveliest lyric: "I need food and I need light, and darling I need you/ Just because my heart is clean doesn't mean it's new/ I scrub it up with love anthems written for teens, like by the Libertines." "Next Gold" is festive celebration rock, as Monks swears she'll "stay chasing dreams tied to the road," spurred by the lingering taste of a car makeout session on her lips. She knows, though, that you can't outrun human nature. "I wanna change," she bawls on the piercing "Purple Rage". "You can put it on my grave."
Sore has a definite gothic sensibility, but it's rarely self-serious—only closer "Burned By the Cold", a chilly piano torch song about feeling alienated by the place you grew up, comes off a little grandiose. Like Speedy Ortiz or Parquet Courts, Dilly Dally's music is rich with their own weird humor that puts it a cut above. Monks could be doing a Kraken impression almost all the time, and the band play with the toxic sugar rush of kids on a Halloween rampage. Dilly Dally always sound like they're being crushed throughout Sore, in a good way: They inhabit the dank space beneath dead weight, the place where the good stuff festers. | 2015-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | October 9, 2015 | 8 | f02f4f18-4b5a-4023-b805-9c5ca8bac81e | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The Philly band takes influence from the earnest, unfashionable alt-rock of the 1990s on a moving set about sobriety and freedom. | The Philly band takes influence from the earnest, unfashionable alt-rock of the 1990s on a moving set about sobriety and freedom. | Caracara: New Preoccupations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caracara-new-preoccupations/ | New Preoccupations | One perk of emo is the genre’s indifference to traditional notions of cool, which frees bands to run with some truly unfashionable muses. Few albums have tested that freedom quite like New Preoccupations, the second album by Philly band Caracara, which draws inspiration from some of the least celebrated alt-rock of the 1990s: the minivan post-grunge of bands like Matchbox Twenty and the Wallflowers, with their supple vocals, shampooed guitars, and all. God bless emo labels like Will Yip’s Memory Music, because it’s hard to imagine the Rough Trades of the world pressing a record that sounds this much like the back half of a late-’90s Now That’s What I Call Music compilation.
Perhaps emo was already heading in this direction. This is, after all, a scene that can easily wrangle enough bands to fill a Third Eye Blind covers compilation. But most of those bands are drawn to the scrappier edges of Third Eye Blind—the misfit energy, the “can I graduate?” shoutiness. Caracara can go loud, too, and it’s always exciting when they do, but New Preoccupations is never more transfixing than when it embraces the tame. At times, the album is almost radical in its docility: With its bleary “One Headlight” tempo, “Nocturnalia” is so earnest that singer Will Lindsay never stops to worry that maybe he’s begun to sound like the guy from Semisonic.
Mellow restraint is a new look for this band. Between its creaky arrangements and gothic brooding, Caracara’s 2017 debut Summer Megalith was all exposed nerve, every movement played for maximum drama. Some of those theatrical impulses periodically trickle through New Preoccupations. The mournful, disembodied strings accompanying the broken heartland rock of opener “My Thousand Eyes” kick off the album on a note of quivering sorrow. But the band has grown more selective about going for the jugular, and they’ve gotten better at conveying emotion without leaning on edge. “Colorglut” and “Harsh Light” coast on gentle drum loops right out of a Primitive Radio Gods record. Their guitars churn but have no bite.
The album’s kinder, softer makeover would be audacious if it weren’t all so genuine. Over the last 15 years, indie acts have dabbled in all kinds of outdated or maligned genres, sometimes out of genuine love for misunderstood music and sometimes seemingly just for the challenge, but the results rarely feel as natural as New Preoccupations. Lindsay wrote the record while recovering from alcohol and substance abuse, and in the smooth contours and earnest ache of ‘90s alt-pop, his lyrics find an apt symmetry: clean sounds for depictions of clean living. On the sun-brightened “Strange Interactions in the Night,” Lindsay likens his sobriety to resurrection as he surveys a city scarred by the opioid epidemic: “Under the overpass we found/Evidence of exodus and needles on the ground,” he sings.
Despite his tendency toward biblical analogies, Lindsay avoids moralizing on New Preoccupations. Sobriety may be a gift, but so too, he contends, are some of his memories of using. Tinged with romance, “Colorglut” blissfully recounts a night spent gazing out of the windows of a Volvo and listening to Dirty Projectors. Are those experiences invalidated because they involved drugs? Even during upbeat songs, Lindsay grieves a lost sense of self as he ponders how to fill the void left by recovery.
It’s only on the closer “Monoculture” that the band fully indulges that kind of roaring, go-for-broke catharsis the rest of the album so creatively suppresses. “I’m finally free to let go,” Lindsay screams over crashing, post-rock swells and crescendoing strings. It’s less an epiphany than a lament. That freedom is beautiful, these songs testify, but it’s also a burden all its own. | 2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Memory Music | March 28, 2022 | 7.6 | f039b362-ad69-4bef-973b-730c4baa96c9 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On his 1981 debut album, the composer and percussionist channels the Fourth World spirit of his collaborator Jon Hassell, to spellbinding effect. | On his 1981 debut album, the composer and percussionist channels the Fourth World spirit of his collaborator Jon Hassell, to spellbinding effect. | Richard Horowitz: Eros in Arabia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-horowitz-eros-in-arabia/ | Eros in Arabia | When it came time for percussionist and composer Richard Horowitz to release his debut solo album, Eros in Arabia, he opted for a title that hinted at the unknown. He was no secret, though: He had already worked with jazz heavyweights like Anthony Braxton, John Lewis, Steve Lacy, and Alan Silva as well as being mentored by Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles. So when his album first briefly surfaced in 1981, it was credited instead to one Drahcir Ztiworoh. The album disappeared almost immediately, though Horowitz soon became an integral part of Jon Hassell’s group as they codified the sound of “Fourth World”—an attempt to filter ancient mysticism through high technology. Horowitz also wound up as a soundtrack composer in Hollywood; his most prominent credit has been for Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday.
Nearly 40 years later, Horowitz’s debut returns in this sterling remastered edition from Freedom to Spend (a reissue sub-label of RVNG Intl. founded by noise musician Pete Swanson and record-shop owner Jed Bindeman). It testifies that beyond his contribution to Hassell’s 1980s zenith, Horowitz himself created a singular iteration of Fourth World music. Earthy and alien at once, the eight compositions on Eros in Arabia conjure an imaginary geographical space where divergent cultures converge. Channeling Ituri forest chants, Javanese gamelan, Bedouin plaints, Rajasthani folk, and European electronic music, Horowitz dances around borders and eras to spellbinding effect.
“Bandit Nrah Master of Rajasthan” sets the album’s mood, twinkling like ambient music. Horowitz carefully overlays synthesizer and ney, the end-blown flute predominant throughout Middle Eastern music. (As the notes accompanying the album explain, the ney is associated both with North African sacred music and the sound of bandits.) That the flurry of notes recalls Zamfir is not a surprise, since both the Romanian pan flute and ney are closely related, but Horowitz combines newfangled ’80s electronics and old instrumentation in such a way that seems to suspend time altogether.
A Moroccan frame drum echoes and distorts on “Eros Never Stops Dreaming.” The processed ney recalls the odd sanza songs that Cameroon musician Francis Bebey was crafting around the same time, while the churning bass figure suggests the cavernous interiors of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. A giddiness underpins the electronic textures of “Baby Elephant Magic,” which glimmers like a recording of a gamelan played back at double speed, full of high frequencies that flutter like fruit flies in the stereo field.
From there, the album moves into coarser terrain, taking sandpaper to the magical spells of the opening tracks. The eddying voices and chants of “Queen of Saba” sound like something lifted from a Smithsonian Folkways field recording, while the clanging din of “Never Tech No Foreign Answer” is raw enough to slot into an early Sublime Frequencies compilation of street music. The buzzing, rattling prepared piano of “23/8 For Conlon Nancarrow” name-checks the composer famous for writing compositions that only a player piano could handle, but its keyboard feels like an outlier compared to all the woozy, globe-trotting sounds that come before it.
The second side of the record is mostly taken by the twenty-plus minutes of “Elephant Dance.” It’s one of the deepest wades into the mysterious Fourth World sound you’ll find, as immersive an atmosphere as Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s similarly side-long “Charm (Over ‘Burundi Cloud’).” Utilizing only a Prophet 5 synthesizer and the ney, it creates a state of suspension in 7/4 time. The notes in the upper register of the piece dance like angels on the head of a pin, both as placid as new age music and as amok as a children’s lullaby spun at 78 rpm. Fittingly, for an album whose title suggests the Greek god of love crossing the Mediterranean Sea to ancient Arabia, Horowitz’s music seeks a space in between and finds something magical there. | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Freedom to Spend | October 14, 2017 | 7.8 | f039c019-4239-47fe-84c6-d5d4e136501e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ |
Subsets and Splits