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Steeped in multiple layers of nostalgia, the Norwegian musician’s sixth album spins his habitual vintage space disco into an enveloping fusion of dewy uplift and nocturnal danger. | Steeped in multiple layers of nostalgia, the Norwegian musician’s sixth album spins his habitual vintage space disco into an enveloping fusion of dewy uplift and nocturnal danger. | Lindstrøm: Everyone Else Is a Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lindstrom-everyone-else-is-a-stranger/ | Everyone Else Is a Stranger | In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the original Star Wars trilogy’s grip on popular culture extended well into the discotheque. There were the overt cash-ins, like Meco’s tawny Italo version of John Williams’ famous theme. But sci-fi concepts and a futuristic sound—analog synths oscillated and arpeggiated into burbling, goading, robotic funk—were also proliferating more generally, from Cerrone to Dee D. Jackson to, yes, Space. Like a bridge sentried by Moog and Moroder, this brief span in the history of popular music, and music technology, floated in the void between the terra firma of instrument-based disco and the ethereal frontier of pure electronics.
Two decades later, the second Star Wars trilogy… also gripped popular culture, if a bit more restively, and once again—whether coincidentally or otherwise—space disco trailed it like a comet’s tail. This time, the music had embryonic digital tools to augment its now-antique hardware and the internet to spread itself through. It was more likely to evoke the cosmic than to describe it, trading kitschy vocoders for a chic, chilly, almost philosophical grandeur: a dance music of the mind. Its harbinger was Norway’s Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, who first made his name with a 2006 compilation of tracks from his label, Feedelity. But he really took his place in the crossover firmament with Where You Go I Go Too, an epic mash note to John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream that, spun through Lindstrøm’s own brand of pensive euphoria, played well at indie festivals alongside M83 and Cut Copy.
Now another 20 years have passed, and Lindstrøm has become a double throwback, first to the forward-looking music of four decades ago, then to the early days of Web 2.0, when a sense that genre walls were falling and horizons rapidly expanding found implicit expression in his interplanetary stride. That excitement still flares from his sixth studio LP, his first in four years.
Everyone Else Is a Stranger is all that an old fan could want. The four songs are long, expressive strings of supple lines and curves, twisting like silvery roller-coaster tracks. Bounding basses pick out jaunty melodies, hopping on one rubbery note per bar. The drums merrily foam along, winking with accented guitars. The spray of the synths churns inside and across the measures, in contrast to their perpetual forward motion. Chord progressions worked through at great length will suddenly pause, gasp, then do some marvelous new thing—turn inside out or start to glow or burst into four-dimensional colors. The music gives the impression of being etched in a high place, as high as a person could reach, and then reaches higher.
“Syreen” is the daytime concert anthem, while “Nightswim”—well, you’ve guessed it. “The Rind” has the tastiest, bendiest groove, while the title track is the most involving composition, a sort of monastic bass algorithm with winding, haunting chambers of instrumental writing. The record favors Lindstrøm’s live side, congregating cymbals, triangles, congas, timbales, flutes, cello, and violin with his trusty Solina String Ensemble, though any difference between the virtual and the real has evaporated in his gleaming, shadowless hyperreality.
Lindstrøm’s practical genius and popularity (he’s won multiple Norwegian Grammys) lie in his ability to be many things to many people—a custodian of vintage synths and reverbs to gearheads, a solid floor-mover for club dwellers, or, for indie kids, a comfortingly songful dance-music concierge bobbing in a bucket hat. Like Star Wars and so much else these days, when everything tends to repeat with variations instead of making way for something new, Lindstrøm has become a reliable fixture: a consistent, technically adept stylizer of dewy uplift and nocturnal danger that—with or without nostalgia’s rosy glow—he keeps feeling fresh and fun. | 2023-07-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | July 20, 2023 | 7 | f03df4e6-e420-4e91-9fab-c66bf0002722 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
On what he’s called a “prelude” to his next album, the Chicago rapper sets aside the big themes of previous records and luxuriates in letting his mind wander. | On what he’s called a “prelude” to his next album, the Chicago rapper sets aside the big themes of previous records and luxuriates in letting his mind wander. | Mick Jenkins: The Circus EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mick-jenkins-the-circus-ep/ | The Circus EP | The world is like a circus, reckons Mick Jenkins—hence the title of his latest EP. But the record doesn’t really feel like one. The big-top experience is about chaos and sensory overload—the visceral sensation of the unpredictable that causes hearts to jackhammer. In contrast, Jenkins’ The Circus is measured, soothing, and a suitable accompaniment to brandy and a cigar in a comfortable chair.
Never accuse Jenkins of being unambitious. The Healing Component was a concept album about love that somehow found fresh angles on the well-worn subject, while Pieces of a Man borrowed its title and tone from Gil Scott Heron. At seven tracks, The Circus narrows Jenkins’ scope. Following such epic tomes, there are shades of Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered. in the EP’s “just a bunch of good tracks” layout that will please casual listeners who find Jenkins’ albums difficult to penetrate. The circus concept might be a wash, but we still get a sense of his sonic philosophy—in Chicago’s pluralistic rap scene, Jenkins’ soulful style is closely aligned to that of Saba, Chance the Rapper, Noname, and Vic Mensa’s Innanetape. The booming bass and grueling keys of the Hit-Boy produced opener “Same Ol” aside, Jenkins sits calmly in the pocket, letting the soul-noir beats wash over him, softly reading from his book of rhymes.
Without a strong sense of direction guiding his every move, Jenkins’ mind is free to wander. An artist whose work has dovetailed with the Black Lives Matters movement, he reasserts the message over the neo-soul sounds of “Carefree,” a pushback to racial profiling carried out by law enforcement. “If you living carefree then you probably don't look like us,” he spits before walking through a couple of oppressive interactions with cops. There’s a belligerency to “Flaunt,” meanwhile, with Jenkins grumbling, “Niggas wanna see me stunt, huh?” in a protesting tone. Despite references to his $3,000 watch and dim-sum lunches, the track feels more like a pushback to those who would box him into common hip-hop tropes—like spitting braggadocio about your bank balance—than pride at the ice on his wrist.
Mick has plenty of fun, though. He displays instinct for a solid bar on “I’m Convinced,” where he rhymes “Cappadonna” with “Black Madonna” while referencing the pop legend’s erotic photoshoot with Naomi Campbell and Big Daddy Kane. Then there is the gentle orchestration of EarthGang collaboration “The Light,” which encapsulates the breezy side that defines The Circus musically. So while this feels like minor release—a “prelude to my forthcoming album,” the rapper has called it—Jenkins proves that even his strayest thoughts are worth sharing. | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cinematic | January 16, 2020 | 6.7 | f03f44d4-dffc-4991-999c-d6a7156804d0 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Bonobo’s early records were slightly hazy and indistinct, but Migration is the most sophisticated effort of his career. | Bonobo’s early records were slightly hazy and indistinct, but Migration is the most sophisticated effort of his career. | Bonobo: Migration | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22710-migration/ | Migration | It’s been a long road for Simon Green, aka Bonobo, since his 2000 debut Animal Magic. Back then, he was seeking a bridge between downtempo electronica and the more playful and experimental artists on his soon-to-be-label home Ninja Tune; he came off as a bit too fuzzy for the former and not quite adventurous enough for the latter. Over the years, Green has honed his craft, shedding his early Amon Tobin Lite image and taking downtempo more seriously as a genre. On this way, he’s discovered late-breaking success: His last album, The North Borders, became a mainstream hit across Europe in 2013. On Migration, Green makes his most sophisticated record yet.
Green’s songwriting on The North Borders failed to match the sophistication of his production, and the album’s persistent moodiness grew wearisome. On Migration, Green has jettisoned the tepid slow-build dynamics: The nearly-eight minute colossus “Outlier” and its shuffling gallop of a beat leave downtempo in the dust, taking the listener on a journey that’s part Burial, part Rival Consoles. The song’s breakdown and slowly disintegrating comedown suggests Four Tet at his most delicate. These aren’t typical reference points for Bonobo, and show an artist still willing to seek new ideas. The piano of opener “Migration” is pulled from the playbook of post-classicists like Ólafur Arnalds or Peter Broderick and an “Amen”-esque drum break midway that amplifies the song’s sense of longing. The triumphant “Ontario” is the closest thing this relatively forward-looking record gets to nostalgia, with a booming beat and sitar that hearkens back to Animal Magic and other turn-of-the-millennium Ninja Tune releases.
Green continues his periodic use of vocalists to transform his ideas into full-fledged pop songs. The results in the past have been hit-or-miss, but he finds his stride here. “Break Apart,” featuring the graceful genderless contralto of Rhye’s Milosh over a sampled harp, is exquisite; “Surface,” featuring Hundred Waters’ Nicole Miglis, is even better. Nick Murphy’s (fka Chet Faker) “No Reason” is less interesting, though it’s easy to imagine how it (or “Surface” for that matter) could become a club hit in either current or remixed form.
All told, Migration is an impressive improvement over The North Borders, and easily the most listenable record of Bonobo’s fifteen-plus year career. It’s a record with equal appeal for electronic music fans and general listeners, something you could put on anywhere. Essentially, it recasts downtempo as a genre with more potential than party music on the Bosphorus. | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Ninja Tune | January 14, 2017 | 7.3 | f0409d96-2ce2-4cf8-b283-5d212cef81af | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
A modernist spin on the ’70s singer-songwriter album, Harlequin often seems torn between its ambition and its nonchalance, a mix of perplexing quirks and disarming heart. | A modernist spin on the ’70s singer-songwriter album, Harlequin often seems torn between its ambition and its nonchalance, a mix of perplexing quirks and disarming heart. | Alex Izenberg: Harlequin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22676-harlequin/ | Harlequin | Los Angeles songwriter Alex Izenberg describes his debut album as the culmination of five years of writing and recording, which is a long time for a record that feels like the product of a few casual studio sessions. A modernist spin on the ’70s singer-songwriter album, grounded in the same evergreen themes of longing and heartache, Harlequin often seems torn between its ambition and its nonchalance. At times Izenberg shows flashes of Van Dyke Parks’ compositional bravado, but just as often he handicaps himself with Dollar Store chamber-pop accompaniments. He can’t commit to going big, but he doesn’t want to go too small, either.
Mostly, it seems, Harlequin just wants to sound different, and on that front it succeeds. Following in the freak-folk tradition, it never goes too long without an idiosyncrasy: train horns, found sounds, long pauses, blank spaces, and other apparent studio mistakes that are almost certainly more deliberate than they pretend to be. The tropes themselves aren’t especially new, but the way they’re all shuffled together is, and Izenberg is confident enough in the originality of his final product that he directly credits his influences. Instead of downplaying his debt to Grizzly Bear on waltzier pieces like “Archer” and “Changes,” Izenberg leans into it, adopting Daniel Rossen’s top hat-doffing swoon as a kind of homage.
Elsewhere, Lou Reed gets a nod on the choppy cabaret number “To Move on” when Izenberg borrows his “Rock & Roll” phrasing to describe dancing to that “fine, fine music,” although it’s Reed’s Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale who looms even larger over the record. Austere violas and cellos lend an undercurrent of doom to a series of stormy, impressionistic pieces like “Libra” and “The Farm,” which tease the full-scale orchestral album Izenberg might have made instead.
Listening to Harlequin, it’s hard not to wonder if the record would have been better off if Izenberg had gone all in on those arrangements, since the album always stops just short of genuinely wowing. Where Parks, Rossen, and Cage never disguise how much effort they’ve spent meticulously piecing their components into intricate works, Izenberg would rather give the appearance that he just poured a jigsaw puzzle box onto the table and accepted the patterns that formed. That approach sometimes scans as insecurity: Harlequin often feels like a pretentious album afraid of being called pretentious.
The record’s best numbers are those rare ones when the adornments take a back seat to the songs themselves. On the early highlight “Grace,” Izenberg laments losing himself in a misguided crush, and lands one of the better forehead-slap lyrics this side of Rivers Cuomo’s “I’m dumb, she’s a lesbian”: “Darkness had taken over me,” he sings, “Once I’d seen her engagement ring.” And on “Changes,” his struggles as both a romantic and a songwriter converge when he confesses, “It’s getting real hard to talk about her to anyone.” The album could use a few more moments like that, lines where Izenberg comes across like the kind of relatable guy you might want to trade tales of heartbreak with over a beer. Yet for a record so guarded, it’s almost always personable—even its most difficult songs, like the avant sound collage “A Bird Came Down,” have a gracious, likable quality (it helps that he keeps them short). Harlequin is an odd album with perplexing priorities and a conflicted sense of scale, but just enough sweetness and heart to make you want to give it the benefit of the doubt anyway. | 2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | December 7, 2016 | 6.3 | f0427863-7e1a-4435-a7f5-babca2318c86 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Based on improvisation and collage, the trio’s excellent debut incorporates strands of new age, ambient, electronic, and jazz for an illusory, hypnotic experience. | Based on improvisation and collage, the trio’s excellent debut incorporates strands of new age, ambient, electronic, and jazz for an illusory, hypnotic experience. | Ariel Kalma / Jeremiah Chiu / Marta Sofia Honer: The Closest Thing to Silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariel-kalma-jeremiah-chiu-and-marta-sofia-honer-the-closest-thing-to-silence/ | The Closest Thing to Silence | In textile art, when two bolts of silk are dampened and pressed together, a wavy, water-like pattern emerges known as moiré. This is because the gridded threads of one piece of fabric inevitably misalign with the other, such that the repeated differences in positive and negative space (the threads and the pockets of air between them) give rise to something entirely new. As a kind of illusion, moiré shows up everywhere: in physics, in graphics, and, as with The Closest Thing to Silence, in music.
The Closest Thing to Silence is a collaboration between the seasoned French ambient composer Ariel Kalma and L.A.-based experimental duo Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. The trio first teamed up in 2022, when Kalma tapped Chiu and Honer to work on a session for BBC 3’s experimental Late Junction series. They hit it off and then went on to create The Closest Thing to Silence, with Honer on viola, Kalma on woodwinds, Chiu on drum machine/samplers, and all three contributing synth work. Based on improvisation and collage, the album collates superimposed lines and images, found sound, and space in ways that feel simultaneously organic yet precise.
On the title track, the trio creates a Penrose staircase of ascending and descending patterns. Over sustained saxophone tones, a synth motif climbs gently upward before falling back and starting over again. Textured cabasa keeps time alongside a pendular staccato figure that eventually loops back on itself and begins to phase shift. Hypnotic, offset rhythmic phrases like this recur throughout the album. “Écoute Au Loin,” for instance, displaces one sax line against another in a way that recalls the pulsing interference patterns of Terry Riley’s “In C.” Midway through, everything but a dotted figure drops out, and Kalma’s voice enters in three overlapping waves, repeating, “So I’m going to play today/And see/If you are interested/To make layers.”
Layering and exploration are perhaps the animating forces behind the entire project. This is especially clear in “Dizzy Ditty,” which recalls Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia, or a pleasant mushroom trip through an 8-bit forest. A dotted, marimba-like synth totters about; flutes trill and meander like birdsong; strings vibrate like light. It is at once pointillistic and impressionistic. Similarly, “Stay Centered” sounds like it could be an educational ’90s VHS tape about plant cell biology. Little tintinnabulations bookend the track as if announcing the beginning and end of a stretch of active synth mitosis. “New Air,” by contrast, plays less in the light and more in the shadows. Raindrop sounds and fuzzy atmospherics recall the eléctrica selvática music of artists like Chancha Via Circuito and Nicola Cruz.
In many ways, The Closest Thing to Silence is an exercise in the manipulation of breath and space as meditation. The title itself comes from Kalma’s view of music: “Music, for me, is the closest thing to silence. Once you take the words out, once you take the mind out, and you leave everything inside…that is music.” The instincts and considered calculations of Kalma, Chiu, and Honer converge on the record, creating a separate, fourth “inside.” It is a four-dimensional space—one in which old recordings Kalma made in the ’70s (like the drum machine and synth on “Stack Attack”) meet Honer’s present-day improvisations, where a field recording Chiu made in a New York café scores a voice note Kalma made at home in Australia. The fluid yet methodical collapsing, stacking, and stretching of these spaces and silences are what define this record.
Visually, this can be seen in Chiu’s video animation for “A Treasure Chest.” Around two-thirds of the way through, three striped circles of different sizes rotate one on top of another. As they spin at different speeds and in different directions, previously hidden shapes emerge. Thickened lines coalesce and dissipate; dark and light geometric shapes tessellate outward. Layered misalignments create large-scale optical illusions that would otherwise lay dormant—were it not for the three figures animating it. | 2024-02-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | International Anthem | February 13, 2024 | 8 | f0479c09-1974-4d64-9738-1eb0d160278e | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | |
Enthusiastic, meticulous, and decidedly analog, Clouds of Joy is AM radio music for a late ’70s moment that may only exist in bandleader Max Turnbull’s imagination. | Enthusiastic, meticulous, and decidedly analog, Clouds of Joy is AM radio music for a late ’70s moment that may only exist in bandleader Max Turnbull’s imagination. | Badge Époque Ensemble: Clouds of Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/badge-epoque-ensemble-clouds-of-joy/ | Clouds of Joy | Since his days as Slim Twig, Max Turnbull has demonstrated a compositional freedom that splits the differences between wildly different roles—producer, songwriter, rocker, abstract instrumentalist, glitchy troubadour. Both laid-back and restless, Turnbull reminds us that music can keep us on our toes while relaxing our minds. His current group, the loosely defined, easy-come, easy-go collective Badge Époque Ensemble, is always a screeching solo away from spiritual jazz. But their songs, however lush and layered, never worry over pain long enough to emit a Pharoah Sanders-esque wail, or a devotional worthy of Alice Coltrane; palatable, ceaselessly breezy, the ensemble’s sound is more oriented toward self-care.
Such an anesthetic alchemy feels very now, to a sometimes tired degree. The low-key sprawl of their 2021 album Scroll, recorded under the name Badge Epoch, evoked serene genre-straddler Sam Gendel, yet their new album Clouds of Joy stands out by reaching for the past. Gone is Scroll’s smash-cut editing, as though Turnbull were toggling through 75 open tabs in his browser. Enthusiastic, meticulous, and decidedly analog, Clouds of Joy is AM radio music for a late-’70s moment that may only exist in his imagination: These nine tracks are fun, full of pacifying flutes and disco congas, but also progressive in the purest sense of the word. Despite the gooey new-age sloganeering of Turnbull’s lyrics, the ensemble’s shifting, consonant arrangements push past his mischievous comfort zone and into profound terrain.
The difference is largely an increasing skill at writing for voice. Staggering opener “Conspiring With Nature” floats along on four-part harmonies sung by Dorothea Paas, Alex Samaras, Robin Dann, and Alanna Stuart, forecasting the song’s surprisingly sewn-together parts—a veritable Frankenstein, if the monster had been built with elegance and invisible stitches. The quartet returns on “Let Breath Be the Sum,” which hinges on a lyric as instructive as a good yoga class. “Let breath be the sum/Of consciousness,” they practically chant, while singers drop out of the main melody and slip in at a distant, lower register. Their singing not only teaches us how to breathe—it reminds us of the parts that form the titular sum.
On the page, Badge Époque Ensemble’s spirituality can seem trite. “The world is a bowl/Pouring light unto bowls/Light flows from bowl to bowl,” the four vocalists sing on “Joy Flows.” But their reverberant harmonies inhale these meanings and expel them as something more pulmonary than literal. We notice that “sum” extends into an evocative, meditative hum, the rounded, full tones of the a capella track “The Greatest Joy.” The one solo vocal feature is on “Zodiac,” when Toronto ballroom stalwart James Baley plays off the funk backbeat of Jay Anderson’s drums, Gio Rosati’s bass, and Chris Bezant’s wah-wah guitar. A number of songs were written collectively, and after sitting out Scroll, Bezant and saxophonist Karen Ng make a welcome return. Turnbull is a font of ideas, yet Badge Époque’s crystallization into a true ensemble elevates Clouds of Joy into their most robust, consistent collection yet.
Relinquishing his piano, the bandleader reimagines his own role as that of musical director and sonic mastermind, like Walter Becker’s in latter-day Steely Dan. The songs themselves, though, suggest lesser-known ’70s-originating acts Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra and “Blue” Gene Tyranny, both of whom eschewed compositional convention, merging California sunniness with New York archness. While Badge Époque Ensemble hail from Toronto—a plenty arch, not exactly light-drenched city—Clouds of Joy is beatific, with a puckish quality that bleeds through in brief snatches. Slowed a few dozen BPMs, the title track’s catchy flute hook could soundtrack a long hold on an 800 number. The whole album works so well not because it draws with occasional cheek from the late 20th century—a lot of today’s artists use the past with more obvious internet-age irony—but because it sounds so thoroughly composed. Exhaustively arranged and too tightly wound to permit extended stretches of improvisation, Clouds of Joy is a spiral of great instrumental performances you might miss on a first or even fifth listen. It advertises its traditional aspects, and also hides them in our assumption that such happy, pre-punk-sounding music must in some way be making fun of itself.
A faulty assumption, no doubt, and surely a lack of self-awareness has its benefits. On Clouds of Joy, the hooks shimmer and gleam, landing in a dizzying, relentless succession. The compositions spread out with a comfortable, unhurried sense of purpose. For the first time, Badge Époque Ensemble don’t sound like they’re trying to reclaim Muzak or any other maligned genre of the past—except just a tiny bit. The present itself must be good enough, Turnbull tells us, and his band plays with confidence in the fact that these sounds emerge from the brilliance of their collective voice. | 2022-09-09T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-09T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Telephone Explosion | September 9, 2022 | 7.4 | f0501b47-a27f-4f1b-8752-8d59aa3a88d6 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Working with a team of hit-making collaborators, the country-pop icon returns with a bland collection of optimistic affirmations and pumping electro-pop rhythms. | Working with a team of hit-making collaborators, the country-pop icon returns with a bland collection of optimistic affirmations and pumping electro-pop rhythms. | Shania Twain: Queen of Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shania-twain-queen-of-me/ | Queen of Me | By the time the new millennium rolled over, Shania Twain’s legacy was secure. With her 1997 blockbuster Come On Over, the Canadian singer established a fresh mold for modern women in country and pop music, inspiring the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris, and Taylor Swift to make their own way. She’s beloved by everybody from Harry Styles to Haim, Orville Peck to Post Malone, and her songs have become staples of weddings, karaoke nights, and any band looking for a crowd-pleasing cover.
After a decade that brought a son, a divorce, and a life-altering autoimmune illness, Twain mounted a formal “comeback” in 2017 that shifted her closer to typical pop arrangements. At the time, she told Rolling Stone that she wanted to make music that was as far away as possible from what she’d made with Robert “Mutt” Lange, her acrimoniously departed ex-husband and the producer of her most commercially successful work. She accomplished that with Now, which drew more heavily on rock and Top 40 pop textures while keeping a relatively even keel. She goes even further on Queen of Me, where she serves up a dozen tracks of optimistic affirmations and pumping electro-pop rhythms. This latest chapter, however, is a case of diminishing returns.
Twain’s team of co-writers and producers have past credits with Halsey, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Fred again.., and Iggy Azalea, and too often the material they’ve assembled for Twain feels like third-tier scraps intended for other clients. Queen of Me’s bland and plasticine arrangements are a far cry from the energy and sizzle of hits like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.” The cheers of “Queen!” in the title track sound half-hearted at best, hitched to a plodding rhythm that proceeds with all the pizazz of a conveyor belt. First, though, you’ll have to get past the stilted opening lines, where Twain insists that she is neither girl nor boy, baby nor toy: She is, in fact, a queen.
She’s still got some of that country flavor, but instead of a seamless crossover, it makes for an awkward combo. The album’s fist-pumping introduction “Giddy Up!” nods at her twangy bona fides with a peppy acoustic guitar melody and lyrics about heading out west from Ohio—never mind that she’s lived in Switzerland for more than 20 years—and a rhythmic, disco-lite bridge soon indicates that she’s not planning to stick around the ranch. “Got litty in the cup,” she bleats, as though that is a perfectly natural turn of phrase for a 57-year-old white woman. Twain peppers other songs with awkward, forcibly modern idioms, like when she sings “I deleted our history” on “Brand New.”
Lyme disease nearly destroyed Twain’s ability to sing, but corrective surgery allowed her to reclaim it in a different timbre. That her voice sounds different from how it did 20 years ago is immaterial; her handful of producers most often fail to deliver material that meets the star where she sings now, instead masking her voice with synthetic effects. The chorus of “Brand New” pushes her into an uncomfortable register, and despite the song’s earnest reclamation of self, her once-steady voice sounds warped and pinched.
Queen of Me warms up when Twain relaxes and stops trying to convince everyone to have a good time, as with “The Hardest Stone” or “Last Day of Summer.” But even these charms scan as impersonal, and more often than not, the album simply doesn’t connect. “I Got It Good” feels like an underbaked counterpart to Twain’s 2002 single “I’m Gonna Getcha Good!,” with none of its thrill. Though it’s co-written with Twain’s son, Eja, “Number One” feels anonymous, something that could’ve been cut by any number of midlevel singers looking to claim a foothold in the waiting-room market. “Pretty Liar” aims to be an explosive indictment of an unworthy man, but it pales by comparison to the Chicks’ incendiary 2020 comeback single “Gaslighter.” (At least Jack Antonoff had enough sense not to get in the way of the Chicks being themselves.)
A hard pivot into pop, or even a general creative reset, isn’t impossible for artists who have made a career out of crossing stylistic lines. Emmylou Harris and Loretta Lynn both issued their share of pivotal late-career LPs; Aretha Franklin was 56 when Lauryn Hill made her a hit that sampled Edie Brickell; Cher was 52 when she released “Believe.” But Twain doesn’t seem to have the right stewards to get her there. Her music once set the standard for pop-country crossovers, but Queen of Me tries so hard to capture current trends that it already sounds behind the times. | 2023-02-03T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-03T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Republic Nashville | February 3, 2023 | 5.2 | f051be5f-df0e-4971-b479-f9cdc589da2e | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
His voice deeper and his aim truer, Pavement’s Scott Kannberg is at his most confident and mellow as he navigates middle age’s ups and downs. | His voice deeper and his aim truer, Pavement’s Scott Kannberg is at his most confident and mellow as he navigates middle age’s ups and downs. | Spiral Stairs: Doris and the Daggers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22966-doris-and-the-daggers/ | Doris and the Daggers | Former Pavement guitarist/vocalist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg’s solo career has doubled as an ongoing battle for self-definition—a quest to find space for himself in the firmament of American indie rock. Results have varied. There were guest spots on Kevin Drew and Broken Social Scene LPs. There was his label Amazing Grease Records, home to San Francisco’s late, great Oranger. Then there was the trio he helmed, Preston School of Industry. At its most memorable, Preston doubled down on the wilder-card songwriting role Kannberg played during Pavement’s decade-long, indie-rock reign (the spazzy, elastic “The Spaces in Between”) or probed fuzzed-out, country-fried drift (the downbeat “Whalebones”). Too often, though, the music floated by, not leaving behind much of an impression. With 2009’s The Real Feel—his first LP as Spiral Stairs—he gear-shifted, leaning convincingly and promisingly into folk, blues, and the Clean. Then, without warning, Kannberg effectively went silent.
Eight years later, Doris and the Daggers cracks the equation. His voice deeper and his aim truer, Kannberg is at his most confident and mellow here. Backed by members of the National, Broken Social Scene, Oranger, and singer/songwriter Kelley Stoltz, the album patiently navigates middle age’s ups and downs, setting aside sprawl and fantasia aside to focus on succinctness and autobiography. The players lend a patient, casual calm to proceedings mid-tempo, sober, and pedal-steel soaked; these are indie-rock lite tunes playing a long game, in no rush to peak, freak, or wipe out.
With “The Unconditional,” an ode to a growing daughter, Kannberg capitalizes on the song’s elastic nest of guitars, horns, and organs, stretching and savoring each verse. You can feel him fully inhabit this song in a way he never has before; when he confides that the “little girl’s getting older/she’s not telling me what to do,” the prevailing emotion is a rueful sense of wonder. Needled with riffs and horn squibs, “Dance (Cry Wolf)” locates its swing and bounce in lonesomeness. “AWM” might be the most chipper, hummable divorce song this decade; its violins and pianos smartly deployed, its vocal outro more reflective than bitter. Less affecting is the goofy golf-trip remembrance “Dundee Man” featuring a synthesizer line part of a wan, jangling whole. Though the album’s stakes may not be very high at all, it’s nice to hear Kannberg’s increasing facility for arrangements.
This isn’t a record you crank in traffic en route to an across-town meeting; it’s a record to unwind with later that night on your second glass of Syrah—a sturdy shrug to cap off the day. Throughout Doris, a very tricky balancing act is at work: the maintenance of a rangey, ragged looseness, without any sense of over-rehearsal. That Kannberg and company are able to sustain this standard throughout—even for synth-funk wonder “No Comparison” and the chanted, semi-punk head rush of “Doris and the Daggers”—is a small triumph. | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino / Nine Mile / Coolin’ by Sound | March 20, 2017 | 6.4 | f054b162-a360-42e6-9bc6-88e998b02519 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
The New Jersey indie-folk singer’s debut is a refreshingly modern take on classic themes of displacement, devolution, and love, of course. | The New Jersey indie-folk singer’s debut is a refreshingly modern take on classic themes of displacement, devolution, and love, of course. | quinnie: flounder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/qunnie-flounder/ | flounder | Wales, the Anglo-Saxon name for England’s first colony, loosely translates to the “place of the others.” When the world refers to you as a foreigner on your own land, it’s difficult not to adopt this lens. This identity crisis is the ontological dilemma of the Welsh. It’s the reason that the term hiraeth—an ache for a home you’ve never experienced and can’t return to—originated from this coastal region. quinnie, the New Jersey indie-folk singer, excavates this feeling—more gnawing than homesickness and more haunting than nostalgia—on her debut album Flounder.
A song about gentle men and pleasurable oral sex, “Touch Tank,” garnered her an audience on TikTok in 2022, but the 21-year-old tackles contemporary discourse without making it feel like you’re scrolling through social media. Opener “Man” calls out abusers who co-opt femininity to disarm their victims: “No amount of nail polish could paint you a good man.” Even when she includes terms like “soft boy” and “iPod Touch,” Jake Weinberg’s cinematically homespun production means that the medieval acoustics and twinkling pianos sound timeless. Wind chimes, running water, and sounds of children playing paint scenes of youthful summers spent sneaking out bedroom windows for a stolen moment of tenderness. Disney movies teach you to wait for Prince Charming. Time exposes the men you date as dickheads disguised in Prince Charming cosplay. quinnie doesn’t lean on shock value, psychiatry, or somber pianos to carry the emotional weight. Moments of snark ease you into brutal truths: “You stole more of me than I’d care to admit.”
Abusive relationships are disorienting. They can make you unrecognizable to yourself—a stranger in your own body. When quinnie wants to remember that old self who eagerly pursued love, she taps the rewind button on her cassette player between songs. “I can’t fucking wait till the day that I finally get to kiss you,” she sings on “itch,” yearning for a romantic connection to give her life meaning again. The rush is short-lived, like attention spans trained on dating apps engineered to resemble video games: “Would I die satisfied knowing that it could always get better than this?” It’s nearly impossible to surrender to the all-encompassing flame while third-degree scabs linger.
Listening to quinnie cuss feels like watching a toddler walk for the first time. You get the sense that rage is an emotion that’s been denied, which could explain why she delivers somber lines in a gossamer falsetto that almost reaches a twangy yodel. In the rock-inflected “Get What You Get,” her voice is almost smothered by deafening drums. The drums, like her unpleasant emotions that have been pushed down for so long, demand your attention. Popular music and media are admittedly a bit oversaturated with healing-your-inner-child discourse at the moment. With its nostalgic summer camp energy in songs like “Popcorn and Juice” and “Itch,” Flounder does risk entering Camp Rock soundtrack territory. Still, her lyrics are rich with vivid imagery: “An artifact of human existence/Is fossilized inside of me.”
Childlike wonder is its own character on this album. It motivates her to approach the world with “despites.” Despite being mistreated, she’ll hold the door open for a stranger and savor the brief moment of warmth as their body brushes past hers. Despite the soulless digitization and mind-numbing online discourse, she’s gonna croon about vast bodies of water and ocean animals. Quintessential bedroom-pop “Touch Tank” compares an invasive hook-up culture to the experience of captive starfish and manta rays ogled and prodded by aquarium visitors. A loving partnership frees her from purgatory and on the penultimate, Celtic-inspired “Flounder,” she emerges with renewed vigor and an uninhibited voice: “Money talks but I can scream/Look at all this blue and green.”
In an interview with Vulture, when asked how she felt about receiving comparisons to fictional beings like fairies and elves, Caroline Polachek replied: “As a woman artist, it’s always a struggle to be thought of as human.” We’re so anthropocentric as a species and categorically cruel to other beings that association with non-humans carries the whiff of insult. While quinnie explores the theme of negative dehumanization in romantic relationships, she also reclaims it as escapism.
How glorious would it be if we could somehow turn back the hands of time to prevent our fish ancestors from growing legs and inhabiting the land? There’d be no taxes or credit scores, no need to be embarrassed by failing your road test three times, no understanding of sugar babies or alpha-male podcasts. Perhaps we could “devolve a bit,” as quinnie puts it: “Learn to love the simple shit.” None of us have experienced a world untouched by climate decay and profiteering tech companies. Flounder submerges us in baptismal primordial soup. The Industrial Revolution and Machiavellian men are artifacts of a cruel past. God has graciously unleashed the floods. Maybe we’ll get it right this time. | 2023-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | February 28, 2023 | 7.6 | f06485e5-0144-4dbb-bba7-627624289d34 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
The jazz supergroup of free-improvising heavyweights—Patrick Shiroishi, Jessica Ackerley, Chris Williams, Luke Stewart, and Jason Nazary—veers between frenetic roar and microscopic textures. | The jazz supergroup of free-improvising heavyweights—Patrick Shiroishi, Jessica Ackerley, Chris Williams, Luke Stewart, and Jason Nazary—veers between frenetic roar and microscopic textures. | SSWAN: Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sswan-invisibility-is-an-unnatural-disaster/ | Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster | A primordial tempest of rhythm—delivered in the form of a tumbling wave of drums and a soaring guitar solo—introduces SSWAN, a jazz supergroup composed of a few of the brightest stars in the loose constellation of U.S.-based free improvisers. Its members—saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, guitarist Jessica Ackerley, trumpeter Chris Williams, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Jason Nazary—have collaborated in various capacities for quite some time. Shiroishi has recorded duo outings with three of the other members, and Nazary mixed Williams’ album Live earlier this year. On Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster, they harness their collective histories to deliver a gripping debut, building fantastic forms that capture each of their unique textural viewpoints.
The record’s title track serves as SSWAN’s slow-building roll call. Nazary and Ackerley’s opening duet absorbs Shiroishi effortlessly; his dense flurry of notes pairs up in dizzy harmony with the guitarist’s chordal slashing. Williams and Stewart enter together, then split apart. Williams winds out slowly, seasick and searching. Stewart bellows groaning punctuation. You can hear the accumulated years of understanding between the players kicking in as they disconnect and reassemble, each taking delicate care to preserve the others’ finely honed voices before the cacophony swells and dissipates, ending in a parabolic mirror image of the beginning. Nazary taps out shimmering cymbal splashes and Ackerley crawls gently over the fretboard.
The anxious thrill of the title track’s frayed attack settles into grounded stillness on “Pattern Phases.” The next scene in Invisibility’s triptych, it brings out each player’s well-documented capacity for tactile ambient sprawl. Taken at a simmer, SSWAN engage in a game of shadow puppetry at the acoustic limits of their instruments, leaving pitch by the wayside and painting with their timbral outlines. Saxophone and trumpet swirl with breath; pick-scraped guitar strings clang like a detuned telephone. One member—it’s impossible to tell who—drops their instrument entirely and offers up a hissing noise similar to one you’d use to lure in a wary cat. It's a spellbinding, adventurous 11 minutes that coaxes you ever deeper into your headphones.
The opener’s frenetic roar and the second track’s patient, near-electronic rebuttal document a group working to break out of their established sonic relationships by jamming in two distinct narrative modes: While they work steadily toward a blended identity, they frequently veer off into a series of fascinating side conversations.
The album’s closer, “A Miracle’s Worth,” parlays the experiments of the first two acts into a 17-minute exhale that buzzes with a spiritual hum. The last five minutes are a perfectly paced six-legged race toward the horizon. Stewart’s bowed bass grinds out a sturdy foundation, with Ackerley’s billowing chords boosting the horns and drums into spiraling ecstasy. Williams shines most of all, his flowing leads guiding the quintet onward like a battle cry. Recorded in 2020, Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster is a now-distant scratching of the surface from a quintet that has yet to reconvene, an anthropological dig preserved on the tantalizing cusp of a scientific breakthrough. As the sun sets on this first recording, the glow of their shared eureka moment burns bright. | 2022-09-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | 577 | September 12, 2022 | 7.3 | f070cf5c-1d48-46eb-a860-15bf2e0e0ff0 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
Multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin was a binding agent for Kendrick Lamar's last two releases; Velvet Portraits pulls in R&B and G-funk while paying homage to his native L.A. | Multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin was a binding agent for Kendrick Lamar's last two releases; Velvet Portraits pulls in R&B and G-funk while paying homage to his native L.A. | Terrace Martin: Velvet Portraits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21767-velvet-portraits/ | Velvet Portraits | You know the story by now: Kendrick Lamar paired up with a few jazz musicians and created some game-changing rap music. The results were To Pimp a Butterfly and untitled and unmastered., both expansive and intricate, scanning the vast spectrum of Black art. Multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin was a binding agent for both albums: He co-produced what might be untitled’s best track—“untitled 05”—playing saxophone and keys, and his name appeared several times in Butterfly’s liner notes, credited for producing “For Free? (Interlude)” and adding elements to many other album tracks. (He produced “Real” on Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city as well.) Along with Sounwave, bassist Thundercat, keyboardist Robert Glasper and saxophonist Kamasi Washington, Martin played a big role in shaping Butterfly’s atmospheric approach, the way it spread out in different directions without losing focus. Though it addressed societal despair and Lamar’s own angst, Butterfly was also a love letter to Compton and the West Coast in general, its wide-open funk and soul a direct reflection of Cali’s pastoral grooves.
Martin takes a similar path on Velvet Portraits, which pulls in R&B and G-funk while paying homage to his native Los Angeles. The multifaceted ethos has become useful for the composer, whose music never stays in the same place for too long, while maintaining its breezy spirit. Martin has crafted instrumentals for Snoop, Kurupt and Murs over the years, and his debut studio album, 2013’s 3ChordFold, mixed live instruments and studio beats with refreshing results. In an interview with The Fader, Martin said Velvet Portraits was headed a different way until a mix of family emergencies encouraged him to take another tack. “We went through all these things and it made me want to pull closer with myself, and it really made me want to pull closer with God,” he said at the time. That’s why Velvet feels remarkably scenic, moving methodically and conjuring pastoral scenes. Technically, this is jazz, but the tag is almost a disservice here: Sure it has some of the genre’s traditional aspects—the improvised nature of “Curly Martin” and the Sérgio Mendes aesthetic of “Bromali” are examples—but the album registers as something deeper without a clear definition. This is jazz the way Glasper is jazz, the way Bitches Brew is a jazz record: Martin mixes pieces of the genre with others, setting a vibe that’s uniquely his.
Velvet Portraits is full of subtle shifts that make the album tough to pin down, even if the individual tracks are easily deciphered at first glance. Songs like “Push” and “Patiently Waiting” have pronounced gospel influences—the former an upbeat revival tune; the latter reminiscent of the church-soul hybrids Ray Charles used to make. Velvet Portraits is decidedly nostalgic in that regard, and as it plays, you sense Martin’s allegiance to old-school music and the way it made him feel. It’s in the trunk-rattling bounce of “Turkey Taco” and the Quiet Storm ambience of “Never Enough.” On “Think of You,” especially, singer Rose Gold salutes soul icons Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye while Kamasi’s sax simmers in the background.
In many ways, Velvet Portraits is Butterfly’s companion piece, harboring the same voluminous reach while conveying uplifting messages of love and inclusiveness, resting in the heart of southern California. Where Martin’s previous work was more energetic, Velvet seems far more relaxed, as if he’s found a creative lane and is fully comfortable in it. The album doesn’t hit as hard as the producer’s other offerings, but on purpose, Velvet Portraits is a soft touch that slowly unfolds over time, best heard under bright skies, on spring and summer evenings with the car windows down. It all culminates on "Mortal Man," the album's epic closer, which takes from Butterfly's closer of the same name. Sprawling almost 12 minutes, Martin's version is theatrical, full of synthesized vocals and sporadic horns. Light keys bubble to the surface, bringing the LP to a radiant conclusion. It doesn’t get more L.A. than that. | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ropeadope / Sounds of Crenshaw | April 8, 2016 | 7.8 | f0776072-18b4-4d37-acb2-1097239abfdb | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The South Florida native’s second album is a tribute to the regional raves of her youth, filtered through the wide array of global club styles that defines her style as a DJ. | The South Florida native’s second album is a tribute to the regional raves of her youth, filtered through the wide array of global club styles that defines her style as a DJ. | Jubilee: Call for Location | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jubilee-call-for-location/ | Call for Location | The cover of Jubilee’s Call for Location may be adorned with an illustration of a gecko—a salute to the South Florida native’s tropical upbringing—but perhaps a chameleon would be more appropriate. Jubilee (Jessica Gentile) has largely built her name in the DJ booth, adhering to an old-school approach and adapting her sets to the requirements of the room. Dancehall, hip-hop, UK bass, electro, hip-hop, R&B, Miami bass, grime, reggaeton—it’s all in her crate, which might help explain why she’s just as comfortable playing an Opening Ceremony fashion event as she is a Fool’s Gold hip-hop party or a Mixpak bashment rave during London’s Notting Hill Carnival. While her music (and her gig calendar) may be varied, there are two constants in her work: fun and a serious love of bass.
The Mixpak label crew, Jubilee’s primary affiliation, is a perfect home for her genre-hopping sensibilities. Headed up by Dre Skull, a producer who’s worked with Popcaan, Vybz Kartel, WizKid, Burna Boy, Future, Santigold, and numerous others, Mixpak has been at the forefront of bringing the dancefloor sounds of the Caribbean and the global South into the larger international pop sphere. Jubilee has been releasing music with the label since 2012, and her first album, After Hours, dropped in 2016. A largely instrumental affair, the LP pulled heavily from the bouncy electro, breaks, and Miami bass that soundtracked Gentile’s youth, while also offering some woozy trap cuts and a delightful bit of dancehall pop (“Wine Up”) voiced by Bronx MC Hoodcelebrityy.
Three years later, Jubilee has returned with Call for Location, a title that flashes back to the hotlines that once guided her along many late nights out as a teenage raver in South Florida. Musically, the album occasionally nods in that direction, particularly on “Disconnected,” a thundering bass-techno hybrid that pairs its relentless low end with a cascade of synth stabs that could have been lifted straight off a 1990s UK hardcore record. The nostalgia is palpable, but the track’s beefy construction is more than suitable for a modern dancefloor.
Echoes of Miami appear elsewhere on the album, most notably in the snapping breakbeats of LP closer “Let Go,” the churning rhythms of “I Don’t Think So,” and the buoyant, pastel sounds of “Call for Location,” which sounds like an ideal soundtrack for cruising down Collins Avenue in a white Cabriolet with the top down. “Speed Limit” opens with a drum pattern that could have kickstarted an old freestyle record, but then suddenly shifts gears with a sinister bassline and a series of warbling, drawn-out synth melodies that wouldn’t be out of place on a Dorian Concept or Jacques Greene production.
These kinds of hybrids help make Call for Location not just an enjoyable listen but also a stronger album than After Hours. At this stage in her career, Jubilee has learned to harness the best bits of her influences, but she also knows how to transcend them, bringing in other sounds and genres that she’s encountered during her many years in the DJ booth: grime, dancehall, hip-hop, breaks, ambient, synth-pop, and countless flavors of electronic music, some of which are a total surprise. “Liquid Liner” is a stompy, industrial-leaning techno romp whose dark and crunchy EBM rhythms have got pretty much zero to do with South Beach.
More impressive still are the LP’s three singles, all of which feature guest vocalists and return to the same sort of pop (or at least pop-adjacent) territory Jubilee traversed on “Wine Up.” While many dance producers struggle to work with MCs and singers, Gentile understands that success with these kinds of collaborations often requires stripping things back, laying a sturdy foundation, and then largely getting out of the way. “Shots,” a dreamy, heads-down tune excellently voiced by South London grime MC P Money, might be the best of the bunch, but the bubbling pop dancehall of “Fulla Curve” is similarly excellent, with UK artist IQ sing-rapping over the song’s warmly sashaying riddim. “Mami” also has a bit of a dancehall feel, albeit with a more rigid, electronic strut and a healthy dose of fierce bilingual sass from Bronx vocalist Maluca.
As a DJ, Jubilee has long been fusing seemingly disparate genres into single, cohesive statements, but on Call for Location she applies that same skill in the studio, often within the context of a single track. Whether or not she heads further down the pop production path—and with her Mixpak connections, one would assume that door is open—Jubilee has already focused and sharpened her work without having to cut loose any of the elements that make her a special talent. | 2019-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mixpak | November 9, 2019 | 7.6 | f078d082-eff5-481b-a9a1-a16fe45f6025 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Celebrated with an elaborate new box set, their 1967 pop-art experiment remains the band’s dark-horse favorite, when they were scrappy enough to laugh at themselves but strong enough to write the music that would define their career. | Celebrated with an elaborate new box set, their 1967 pop-art experiment remains the band’s dark-horse favorite, when they were scrappy enough to laugh at themselves but strong enough to write the music that would define their career. | The Who: The Who Sell Out (Super Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-who-the-who-sell-out-super-deluxe/ | The Who Sell Out (Super Deluxe) | The Who’s early catalog offers a crash course in what to look for in any worthy classic rock discography: the cinematic song cycle, the tour-de-force live album, the music-as-healing-force-of-the-universe masterpiece, the mythologically overambitious lost album, the rarities comp that rivals the greatest hits set. It is a fitting legacy for Pete Townshend, their guitarist and primary songwriter, who was not only making up the rules as he went along but also coining the terminology, from “power-pop” to “rock opera.” From the beginning, he was one of the genre’s first practitioners-slash-scholars, a self-aware believer in his own myth.
He was also among the first artists to strike gold from a total lack of inspiration. Exhausted and frazzled from a tour with Herman’s Hermits in summer 1967, he surveyed the material that he and his bandmates—drummer Keith Moon, vocalist Roger Daltrey, and bassist John Entwistle—had amassed while the label grew increasingly impatient awaiting their third album. There was “Pictures of Lily,” a recent single he considered placing as the centerpiece. (He even had the title to go with it: Who’s Lily.) There was “I Can See for Miles,” a sweeping anthem he imagined would be their next big hit. And then there was… some other stuff: a cover of “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” an instrumental called “Sodding About,” a story-song that slowly revealed itself to be a deodorant ad...
Rewind the tape—that’s it! Pad out the tracklist with a few radio jingles, arrange some product placements for the cover art, and we’ll call it The Who Sell Out. Cobbled together by their manager Kit Lambert, the pop-art experiment was released in December 1967, just months after the BBC introduced Radio One to replace pirate stations like Radio London. As a result, the concept also worked as a loving tribute to the institutions where the Who first found an audience. Even if the radio-broadcast structure mostly crumbles after side one, the songs form another landmark in the Who’s catalog: the moment before 1969’s Tommy solidified their place in rock history, when they were scrappy enough to laugh at themselves but strong enough to write the music that would define their career.
The dark-horse favorite in their catalog, The Who Sell Out is the latest recipient of a Super Deluxe Edition, spanning five discs, two 7" singles, and a book of essays and ephemera. The first two discs are your basic mono and stereo versions of the album, tacked with familiar addendum from previous reissues. The third disc is a collection of related studio material: outtakes, alternate versions, isolated elements. The fourth set guides us through the music that arrived as they began working on the record that would become Tommy. The 17-month gap between these albums was fruitful, and some of the material here, written before Tommy’s narrative was developed, was actually due for release on its own (working title: Who’s for Tennis?). The best and most essential part is the fifth disc: Townshend’s solo demos, scratchy and awkward, like a novelty private press album by someone with far too many ideas to capture on tape, on his own.
The good news is that it all holds up. Minus the eternal “I Can See for Miles,” none of these songs found a permanent home on classic rock radio and so they belong entirely to this album, unburdened by decades of overplay. Maybe that is why The Who Sell Out remains such a charming, even surprising, record: It is the one that feels most relevant to the Who’s influence on ’90s indie rock—bands like Yo La Tengo and Guided by Voices who learned from its collage-like flow, classic songcraft, and smart, surrealist humor. From the psychedelic opener “Armenia City in the Sky” to the operatic mini-suite “Rael,” the Who would never again sound so lighthearted and playful.
As evidenced by the bonus material—attempts at hit singles next to earnest anti-smoking ads, repeated efforts to capture the ringing chaos of their live show alongside in-joke studio concoctions—the Who were desperately searching for their next move. Even the album proper is something of a mixed bag, with Townshend taking an uncharacteristic amount of lead vocals, and guest writer Speedy Keen singing alongside Daltrey in “Armenia City in the Sky.” In other words, they were a band in transition. And while songs like “Dogs” and “Faith in Something Bigger” on the post-Sell Out disc suggest more ambitious work to come, Townshend’s original demos offer the clearest insight: His solo arrangement of the harmonies in “I Can See for Miles” and the frantic jangle of his guitar in “Glow Girl” showcase a musician coming into focus, testing the limits of his equipment, pushing toward the future.
In his liner notes, Townshend is humble about this period in the band’s history, describing the Sell Out concept as a gimmick to distract from a “rather pathetic selection of tracks.” This box sometimes affirms his position: Mostly comprising recordings that fans have known for ages (a live set would have been appreciated, even if most of these songs never became staples of their set), it results in multiple takes of the same song sequenced beside each other, sometimes giving the feeling of a data dump more than a carefully curated listening experience. Of course, the jokes about cashing in have always been part of The Who Sell Out, even when these guys were in their early 20s, already seeming burnt out and older. The magic is that they were able to flip their exhaustion into something so full of life. When Townshend first heard the album front-to-back, he remembers laughing out loud, “partly with joy, partly in awe.” Separated into its core elements, more than half a century later, it can still elicit the same response.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe / Polydor | April 22, 2021 | 8.5 | f07aee45-a73a-4625-983b-1bdba2391f65 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Wrekmeister Harmonies' newest collection of sacred choral music, experimental ambient, and doom finds J.R. Robinson taking a developmental leap forward in all three arenas. It features contributions from Marissa Nadler and members of Einstürzende Neubauten, the Body, Indian, Anatomy of Habit, Come, and Twilight, among others. | Wrekmeister Harmonies' newest collection of sacred choral music, experimental ambient, and doom finds J.R. Robinson taking a developmental leap forward in all three arenas. It features contributions from Marissa Nadler and members of Einstürzende Neubauten, the Body, Indian, Anatomy of Habit, Come, and Twilight, among others. | Wrekmeister Harmonies: Night of Your Ascension | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21208-night-of-your-ascension/ | Night of Your Ascension | We don't always recognize it, but the ability to hold back until precisely the right moment is crucial to the act of making even the most concise or chaotic forms of music. As listeners, we both expect music to adhere to familiar formulae while also teasing our ears with traces of the unexpected. And, as with foreplay, certain artists are just more skilled at extending climaxes into exquisite torture.
On Night of Your Ascension, it takes a full 15 minutes of guest vocalist Marissa Nadler's chanting within a funereal 16th-century/Renaissance-styled organ/string/choral arrangement before elephantine guitar chords and drums come crashing through the mist. Even if you listened to this album without any context, you would get a sense that it was building up to something. And if you're aware of the backstory or personnel going into it, you'll no doubt wonder when the metallic element is going to rear its head. Either way, Ascension tests your patience in the best possible sense.
Like Wrekmeister Harmonies' two previous albums, Night of Your Ascension consists of madrigal/sacred choral music, experimental ambient music, and doom. This time around (thanks to help from arrangers Eric Chaleff, Cooper Crain, and Sanford Parker), J.R. Robinson takes a developmental leap forward in all three arenas, but it isn't until the beginning motif of the second track "Run Priest Run" where all these disparate elements actually blend together, in a passage that lasts in excess of 8 minutes and could easily have appeared on Hundred Waters' last album. Before being gradually overtaken by electric guitars à la the title track, "Run Priest Run" initially fulfills the potential that Wrekmeister Harmonies show on paper as a 30-plus member ensemble drawing on musicians from metal, rock, and new music circles.
Alongside Nadler, harpist Mary Lattimore, electro-acoustic sound artist-composer Olivia Block, and Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, the album features members of the Body, Cave, Indian, Bloodiest, Anatomy of Habit, Come, Twilight, and Mind Over Mirrors. Robinson leans heavily on these musicians to flesh out his compositions and give Ascension its shape and character. For the title track, Robinson nods to 16-century Neopolitan composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, whose experimental approach to madrigals pre-dated widespread use by a good 300 years.
Gesualdo is also infamous for murdering his wife and her lover. Robinson bases the first half of the title track on Gesualdo's techniques which, incidentally, influenced Igor Stravinsky and inspired author Aldous Huxley to describe Gesualdo's work as "a kind of musical no-man's land." The juxtaposition between the tune's classical and doom modes is clearly meant to invoke a sense of the friction between Gesualdo's towering creative presence and the internal torment that drove him to commit murder. Likewise, for "Run Priest Run" Robinson looked to the case of Boston Catholic priest Father John Geoghan, who was accused of sexually abusing over 130 boys, convicted, and murdered in prison in 2003 while serving a life sentence.
Once aware of these narrative backdrops, the atmosphere on Night of Your Ascension (and in particular the black metal-styled vocal screeching on "Run Priest Run") becomes charged with a dread that elevates this music above the ho-hum gestural negativity of other doom outfits who sound like they're reaching for something to frown over. Robinson draws from real-life tragedy and sexual pathology and does his earnest best to honor the nuances of each case. At the same time, this album's obvious equation of heaviness to violence and psychological despair comes off as heavy-handed.
Nevertheless, Night of Your Ascension faces rote themes like killing, death, and despair from a fresh perspective that aspires to be illuminating. It's also, strangely enough, an album listeners can use to make new friends. Given the way Robinson disposed of musical boundaries to put this music together, it spurs the audience to do the same practically by default. If you're into experimental rock or metal, Night of Your Ascension naturally incites curiosity about madrigals and Renaissance composition. The same applies in reverse. If your tastes fall in any of those areas, you can use this album as a bridge to another world by walking up to someone across the aisle and asking "Have you heard this? What's your take?" It's bound to be a lengthy, engaging conversation, not unlike the album itself. | 2015-11-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-25T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | November 25, 2015 | 7.8 | f083a0b5-34cb-47a2-9586-daf91b8f163e | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Get open or go for the dance floor? That's the big question for so many producers when it comes time to produce a full length. Cooly G has made music in both directions. This EP is back to her more OG roots as a post-dubstep producer, but it's mixed with the personality of her newer, quieter releases. | Get open or go for the dance floor? That's the big question for so many producers when it comes time to produce a full length. Cooly G has made music in both directions. This EP is back to her more OG roots as a post-dubstep producer, but it's mixed with the personality of her newer, quieter releases. | Cooly G: Armz House EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21113-armz-house-ep/ | Armz House EP | When given the opportunity to craft their first solo full-length, some electronic producers veer from the sounds and the scenes that first made them popular. Consider Maya Jane Coles, who first rose in the electronic scene making deep house. Her 2013 solo debut effort, Comfort, retreated from standard, four-on-the-floor, bringing in moody, rousing elements of trip hop and dubstep. George Fitzgerald made a similar departure with his debut Fading Love earlier this year, foregoing the instant likability of early singles "I Can Tell (By the Way You Move)," or the addictive depths of "Magnetic" for a more smoothed-over mood.
Cooly G (born Merrisa Campbell) seems to have fallen into this impulse as a delayed reaction. Her first two solo albums, the beautiful, righteous Playin' Me and the eerie and sensual Wait 'Til Night, were singer-songwriter experiments, ones in which Campbell used music as an outlet for and compliment to her sexual reawakening. Blending icy-cold synths with vulnerable lyrics, she speaks profoundly to women within the electronic music scene, evoking the simultaneous terror and power of long nights, either alone or in the comforting arms of a lover. It felt uncomfortable but necessary, the kind of sound you can’t immediately turn away from even if its complicated internal wiring is difficult to comprehend.
That is why it was frustrating to find Campbell pulling back the reins on herself – her openness, that now-signature rawness – while listening to the Armz House EP. This is the club-ready Cooly G of old. She told the Quietus recently that she wanted to find a way to work her vocals back into her club sets, and her solutions seems to treat them like another tool, mechanically inserted into the mix rather than front and center. Most times, her voice is barely perceptible: Her whispery coos appear for only a handful of seconds on "Tippin B" before they are overwhelmed by her pointed use of synths and drums.
Most of the time, this restraint pays off. The addictive tension of album closer "Horrors in the Dance" sounds like the pushing and tearing of strong muscles. Both Playin' Me and Wait Til Night were the sort of records one sits with alone rather than dances to, but Armz House, from its first few seconds, aims hard at dancing crowds while keeping the sensuality of her previous records. "Booboo" is a cheeky and energetic club banger featuring at least three vocal samples, echoing the energy and nimbleness of "Horrors in the Dance". If you arrive at Armz House expecting a journal of her emotions, you will be disappointed, but Campbell displays a mastery of her form here that's impossible not to admire. She pushes her songs to their limits and then pushes them a bit more, making complicated tracks sound and feel simple. Even if the results aren't as showy or bombastic as her peers, she still manages to ultimately make music that is, while not perfect, very fun. For dance music in 2015, that has become an increasingly rare feat. | 2015-10-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Hyperdub | October 12, 2015 | 7.4 | f0866a4c-9823-4160-a09a-791479f935b9 | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
On a sleek and subdued new album, A.C. Newman takes the lead and reflects on the isolation of modern life. | On a sleek and subdued new album, A.C. Newman takes the lead and reflects on the isolation of modern life. | The New Pornographers: Continue as a Guest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-new-pornographers-continue-as-a-guest/ | Continue as a Guest | After 20 years, it’s hard to stop calling the New Pornographers a power-pop supergroup, even if neither is really true at this point. Dan Bejar and Neko Case have ceded creative control almost entirely to A.C. Newman, now the sole songwriter and house producer. The music itself has tamped down the unruly exuberance of their peak for an amplified version of the wry, singer-songwriter fare typical of Newman’s solo work. But for the first three minutes of Continue as a Guest, it’s a new New Pornographers, hitting like a ton of feathers. The uplift of “Really Really Light” takes after its title, radiant and buoyant, yet its origin story pops the balloon: Newman admits it was salvaged from a Bejar hook left over from 2014’s Brill Bruisers, the last album from their classic three-headed monster lineup.
Bejar made it a hot line—Newman made it a hot song. As he has for most of the past decade, Newman treats pop as an artisanal pursuit on Continue as a Guest, writing for connoisseurs who appreciate the science of bubblegum as much as the flavor. Even the most immediate moments bear the assumed weight of countless revisions and tweaks, the original emotional core of each lyric meant to be puzzled out like a crossword clue. Newman’s fastidious, occasionally fussy writing ensures a level of quality control as he tinkers around the margins, even if his bandmates never quite catch the spark. Where recent records showed a cursory curiosity toward Brill Building pop and krautrock, the most notable upgrades here can’t help but reiterate Bejar’s absence. Whether it’s the guitar-free sophisti-pop of “Cat and Mouse With the Light,” the title track’s oily bass leads, Newman’s sly lower register on “Last and Beautiful,” or the featured role of saxophonist Zach Djanikian, the New Pornographers have never sounded this much like Destroyer.
The upside is that Newman’s benevolent autocracy allows a single, discernible perspective to emerge—a personality that runs deeper than “power-pop supergroup.” Though the songs rarely say it outright, there’s a general sense that Newman has many thoughts on the Way We’ve Lived since the group’s last release in 2019. “On three, we burst through the Overton window/And fall through the kaleidoscope of your mentions,” Case sings on the fizzy “Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies,” thankfully the only time Newman’s cerebral writing goes full Twitter brain. Besides, it doesn’t get its point across as effectively as the album’s understated title. The existential quandary of “continue as a guest” resonates for anyone resigned to participate in the online world without fully surrendering your identity to it.
The creative process mirrored a familiar work-from-home hybrid, with Newman workshopping arrangements in isolation and collaborating in unconventional ways—exhuming scraps from a decade ago, a “pen-pal” style co-write with Sadie Dupuis on “Firework in the Falling Snow.” In a generous mood, the subdued and synthetic sound of Continue as a Guest suits the subject matter. “Bottle Episodes” tips its hand in being a meta exercise on lockdown living, spending nearly four minutes trapped inside a single melody. But the monotony of the more ambitiously conceived “Marie and the Undersea” and “Wish Automatic Suite” doesn’t come off as intentional: You keep waiting for something other than the same old group harmonies or buzzy keyboards to cut through the clutter and express how anyone actually feels.
The New Pornographers never needed to rely on confession or candor to achieve that end. “Sing Me Spanish Techno” remains perhaps their definitive anthem, a testament to the power of music to transcend language, effectively replicating the transformative ecstasy of its namesake without sounding anything like it. But even if it’s judged against “These Are the Fables” or “The Fake Headlines” or whatever your platonic ideal for a wistful New Pornographers ballad, Continue as a Guest exposes in absentia how they once tapped into the big, sloppy emotions of pop music without succumbing to its obviousness. They achieved it through the second-hand thrill of seeing songwriters at the peak of their powers in friendly competition. There was also the force of drummer Kurt Dahle, who always kept New Pornographers in the physical realm when things threatened to get too heady. For all the lyrical meditations on emptiness and isolation throughout Continue as a Guest, what’s no longer present speaks loud and clear. | 2023-04-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | April 5, 2023 | 6.8 | f08ad2d6-9912-4233-89ee-e90ccaad8954 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Atlanta singer-songwriter’s latest record taps into freewheeling acoustic jam-session vibes. It’s ostensibly a breakup album, but rather than spilling her guts, she sounds more reserved than ever. | The Atlanta singer-songwriter’s latest record taps into freewheeling acoustic jam-session vibes. It’s ostensibly a breakup album, but rather than spilling her guts, she sounds more reserved than ever. | Faye Webster: Underdressed at the Symphony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/faye-webster-underdressed-at-the-symphony/ | Underdressed at the Symphony | Don’t ask Faye Webster about her dog. She will only reveal his breed off the record, and she’s suspicious that locals in her town have already learned too much. “My neighbors know his name/Thought that was weird but I’m over it,” she sings halfway through her fifth album, through a vocoder’s digital mask. Her protective impulses extend beyond her beloved pet. The Atlanta singer-songwriter finds ways to experience music away from the public eye, dropping in unannounced as the bassist for local punks Upchuck and ducking into the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at the last minute; the latter habit inspired the title of her latest record. On Underdressed at the Symphony, she frequently steps back from the mic and allows her band, or occasionally just silence, to fill in the empty space. It’s a record about hiding—from heartbreak, from fame—that, whether through vocal processing or omission, fittingly obscures Webster from view.
Webster began building a richer sound around her wispy, honeyed vocals on her 2022 EP Car Therapy Sessions, where she brought in a 20-piece orchestra to cover songs from her previous two albums. For Webster, the EP was a chance to lose herself in the music swirling around her confessional songs: “I would just forget lyrics or forget where I am because I was listening to [the orchestra] play,” she said. But where that album accentuated the ethereal qualities of her songs, Underdressed at the Symphony emphasizes the naturalism of her songwriting, building melodies with a grand piano, a drum kit, and an electric guitar.
Gone are the sweeping synths that provided a cushion for her diaristic musing; this time, Webster leans into the acoustic sounds of a freewheeling jam session. Her backing players—many of whom have been performing with her since her early days—take steps into the foreground. On “Wanna Quit All the Time,” where she admits that “it’s the attention that freaks me out,” yawning pedal steel and sparkling Fender Rhodes seem to speak in her stead. Here, as on the similarly impressionistic “He Loves Me Yeah!,” she brings in a new voice to help further obscure her own: the sound of Wilco’s Nels Cline on the guitar, plucking out elegant solos where another verse might otherwise go. “Lifetime” stretches the repetition of a single phrase—“in a lifetime”—into something like jazz, Charles Garner’s drumming keeping a loose pace as Nick Rosen’s piano carries the song to its quiet conclusion. As Webster tells it, she didn’t want the song to end, so she asked Rosen to keep it going through subtle chord changes. The extended coda lets her linger in the shadow of his piano a little longer, an audience to her own private symphony.
This is loosely a breakup album, but Webster is loath to discuss the dirty details, either in lyrics or interviews. The quips and pithy one-liners that captured her tangled views on love and friendship on previous records are largely absent here, replaced by simple phrases or single syllables, repeated endlessly. Her longest songs—“Lifetime” and “Thinking About You”—reveal the least, their lyrics like set dressing for the band to take center stage. When she’s at her most verbose, guest features and the dense distortion of a vocoder serve as a shield. “Lego Ring,” featuring Webster’s childhood friend Lil Yachty, offers relief from the somber themes across the rest of the record, as she leans into the playfulness of Yachty’s processed vocals. On “Feeling Good Today,” Webster buries her anxieties about fame behind electronic manipulation. The closest we get to a glimpse into her relationship is “But Not Kiss,” an “anti-love” song that uses a single word—“Yeah”—as its chorus. “I want to sleep in your arms,” she croons before the second half of the sentence delivers the blow: “But not kiss.” Sparsely written yet powerfully delivered, commanding in its patience, it’s a signpost for where Webster's music might go next, one that uses her voice as another instrument in an ever-growing orchestra, rather than the conductor at its center.
If you previously came to Webster’s music for her lyrics, this album might seem like a retreat. But if you, like Webster, feel most at home in the warm glow of a band in the pocket of a groove, Underdressed at the Symphony delivers just under 40 minutes of gentle melodies and extended jams, a soft landing pad after the end of a romance. It’s understandable that the vulnerability that accompanies a breakup might have encouraged Webster, already averse to fame, to take a step back from the spotlight. But there are also moments where her voice is sorely missed; it’s hard to not dream of a world where these rich arrangements made a home for her sharp writing, as they did on her orchestral EP. Here, Webster isn’t so much underdressed as overshadowed by her own symphony, but that might be by design: On Underdressed at the Symphony, Webster seems most comfortable singing in silhouette. | 2024-03-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Secretly Canadian | March 1, 2024 | 7.5 | f095a9e9-b280-438a-b9e9-cc99a26d9fb5 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Ryan Adams' latest pair of releases show off the duality of the artist—the straightforward singer/songwriter, and the rascally punk, that is. His self-titled LP offers a nice, 1980s-imbued twist on the singer/songwriter mode; the 1984 EP plays like a super-obscure hardcore EP that you might find in a crate at the back of an ancient record store. | Ryan Adams' latest pair of releases show off the duality of the artist—the straightforward singer/songwriter, and the rascally punk, that is. His self-titled LP offers a nice, 1980s-imbued twist on the singer/songwriter mode; the 1984 EP plays like a super-obscure hardcore EP that you might find in a crate at the back of an ancient record store. | Ryan Adams: Ryan Adams/1984 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19778-ryan-adams-ryan-adams1984-ep/ | Ryan Adams/1984 EP | There are two versions of Ryan Adams out there in the world jostling for your attention. There’s the singer/songwriter who plays it straight and, on some level, tries to appeal to a mainstream audience that still buys records—that’s the Ryan Adams who duets with Sheryl Crow and records albums like Gold and Easy Tiger, which are so precisely and tastefully wrought that they come off as almost lifeless. And then there’s the unreformed punk who loudly broadcasts his love of hardcore and black metal, who impulsively announces he’s quitting music just weeks before he releases another EP, who records a theme song for his website. This Ryan Adams releases one-offs like the Finger’s We Are Fuck You / Punk’s Dead Let’s Fuck and the metal sci-fi concept album Orion—most of which are funny-ha-ha for one or two listens, then are forever shelved.
Because they both fit a bit too perfectly into our preconceptions of selling out and keeping it real—concepts so old-fashioned in 2014 that they’re difficult to even type with a straight face—superficially, these two doppelgangers ought to exist in direct and even deadly opposition to one another. It’s not hard to imagine Ryan Adams the punk gobbing on Ryan Adams the serious singer/songwriter, and who wouldn’t buy tickets to see that? But the reality is, thankfully, much more complicated. Each Ryan Adams needs the other in order to survive in the music business; soundtrack placements, after all, bankroll hardcore EPs, which in turn provide a creative outlet for the kind of aggression and humor that aren’t typically prized by the roots-rock crowd.
These two Ryans duke it out on two of his new releases. The aptly titled Ryan Adams is a Ryan Adams album, not too far removed from his last few LPs even if it jettisons the twangy Americana for a different, darker, but no less historically grounded sound. The EP 1984 is the first in his Pax-Am Singles Series (which are essentially 7-inch billboards for his Hollywood studio) and lives up to its name by evoking the hardcore punk of the mid ‘80s. While these two releases seem to represent very different sides of the notoriously multi-faceted artist, they actually have a great deal in common. Both mine the past for inspiration and allow that inspiration to determine more of how the music sounds than it should, and both prove that there are no fine lines separating the various Ryan Adamses.
Released as a limited-edition 7” that quickly sold out in roughly an hour, 1984 wants to play like a super-obscure hardcore EP that you might find in a crate at the back of an ancient record store, stuck with bubblegum to the back of Negative Approach’s Tied Down. The playing is fast and furious, the tone predictably nostalgic, as Adams indulges his taste for musical extremes. Yet, for all its aggression and speed, the EP ultimately sounds like a bunch of catchy Ryan Adams songs played at twice the normal speed and truncated before they hit the two-minute mark. Slow them down, drag them out, and you’ve got a Cardinals album.
But the hardcore milieu imposes an intriguing set of restrictions on Adams, who played all the instruments himself. He knows the genre allots a very short amount of time to get his point across, so he arranges these songs to grab your attention quickly, either with a sharp guitar riff or an exaggerated vocal melody. He hits the first note of “What If You Were Wrong” almost before the song even starts, and he sings like he’s trying to outrun the scissoring guitars. "Change Your Mind" is all hook, condensed and concentrated, and “Rats in the Wall” flails wildly, barely holding together, until it explodes in a sample of broken glass. 1984 sounds like an exercise, a test to see if he can pare his songwriting down to its barest essentials: a straightforward lyrical sentiment, a catchy melody, and an off-the-cuff performance. Even though the EP ends up sounding repetitive and therefore much longer than its 15 minutes, Adams emerges as a careful craftsman with clear affection and reverence for the genre.
If that seat-of-his-pants release reveals Adams the punk as a serious artist, then this carefully planned self-titled album undercuts any self-seriousness he might possess as a singer/songwriter. On the cover of Ryan Adams, he looks perfectly stoned or possibly lobotomized, his hair exploding in the kind of bedhead bouffant that requires a lot of time and product. Even the title is delivered with a wink. Is that font Bryan Adams Serif Bold? Adams is too much of a rock nerd for that to be an accident, so it’s possible he’s trolling with a deliberately “bad” album cover for an album of well-crafted and well-behaved tunes released on Norah Jones’ label.
If the packaging is suspicious, the music itself offers a nice twist on the singer/songwriter mode. This time around, he’s less interested in the blah folk rock of the 2011 LP Ashes & Fire. In fact, with its murky production and throwback guitar sound, Ryan Adams sounds like it could have been recorded at any time between 1979 and 1987. There are period-specific nods to deep-cut Bryan Adams, Kenny Loggins, even Robbie Nevil and Richard fucking Marx. “Stay With Me” could be a synth-era Tom Petty tune, its snappy guitar theme recalling the Heartbreakers’ jangly dynamic, and “I Just Might” rustles up a rough guitar lick to conjure the Springsteen of "Brilliant Disguise". “Don’t wanna loose control, baby, I just might,” Adams sings in his best Bruce, but the song is so laden with specific references that it’s clear he’ll never have the chance to get too wild.
There aren’t your obvious touchstones, at least not for a guy sporting an Emperor backpatch on his denim jacket. Most of the time, Adams gets the sound just right without being too obvious about it, but some of these songs—specifically “Shadows” and “Let Go”—sound like they were written to fit this particular triangulation of influences. As a result, the rock-historical allusion rather than the music becomes an end in itself. On the other hand, Ryan Adams is a persuasively dark album, one defined by themes of struggle, instability, isolation, and regret. He sings like a man who knows something bad is going to interrupt each song. Adams may spend most of “Am I Safe” telling us that he’s having thoughts instead of telling us what those thoughts actually are, but that clipped acoustic strum conveys a potently jittery paranoia that says a lot more than the lyrics. On “Tired of Giving Up”, he admits that he’s “tired of giving up” and “tired of fighting,” as though this particular crisis offers no other options.
It seems impossible that Adams has never written a song called “My Wrecking Ball” before now, but that tune may be the best song on Ryan Adams, its austere arrangement conjuring the mood of a late-night drive to nowhere in particular. Musically, it recalls the directness and eloquence of Heartbreaker updated for 2014. “Hey, you’re my wrecking ball,” he sings, “won’t you come and maybe knock me down?” Perhaps he relishes the idea of romantic obliteration, perhaps he dreads it. But the song’s world-weariness is so intense that such destruction might actually revitalize him by giving him a chance to start over, build from the ground up, write, sing, and record with no preconceptions from himself, his fans, or anybody else. Ryan Adams may shed the confessional impulse in Adams' songwriting, but “My Wrecking Ball” plays like a deeply personal expression of creative paralysis and renewal. | 2014-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 15, 2014 | 6 | f0a0e2b8-a41a-4a76-bab5-32856ceec9db | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On its debut album, the New York band’s expertly contained noise-rock din is the perfect foil to frontman Cole Haden’s white-hot charisma. | On its debut album, the New York band’s expertly contained noise-rock din is the perfect foil to frontman Cole Haden’s white-hot charisma. | Model/Actriz: Dogsbody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/model-actriz-dogsbody/ | Dogsbody | In Model/Actriz’s music, sex is everywhere and might sound like anything—a meltdown in a crowded train, a terrible fight heard through the wall, the crunch and squeal of two colliding cars—but never, at any point, does it sound like very much fun. Lead vocalist Cole Haden howls about bodily desire as if it were a loathsome, all-consuming affliction: “With a body count/Higher than a mosquito,” he wails on “Mosquito,” the album’s first single and statement of intent. Lust as contagion, as predation, as Biblical plague: Both as performer and writer, Haden aims to make a harrowing, provocative, often hilarious mess of all of it, and succeeds wildly.
Although Dogsbody marks their debut full-length, recorded largely during the pandemic and released via True Panther last week, Model/Actriz have been stunning small New York audiences since their formation in 2016. Live, Haden prowls the stage and wanders into the crowd to confront audience members, while behind him, the band unleashes an unholy but expertly contained clatter and blare, Ruben Radlauer’s drums and guitarist Jack Wetmore’s sculpted shrieks merging into a single sensory assault. “Everything is a drum,” said bassist Aaron Shapiro succinctly when asked about the band’s approach.
On the surface, their sound recalls early-’00s New York dance-punk bands like Liars, but Model/Actriz are a touch too haunted to slot neatly into the ongoing “indie sleaze” movement. The lyrics sheet writhes with clenched palms, bit lips, shut eyes, ragged breaths, trickling fluids—sex scene as slasher film, as Grand Guignol. Haden has told interviewers that he started writing their “sex positive” material while still a virgin, and the lyrics ring with the wide-eyed terror and religious ecstasy of recent initiation.
Haden doesn’t sing, exactly. He declaims, his delivery landing somewhere between impassioned moan and battlefield soldier’s dying grunt. “Delicious/And everything’s gushing/Ripe and crimson,” he mutters on “Mosquito.” “All night/Me and my wretched device,” he shrieks in “Donkey Show.” Some of the lines are so ripe they feel ready to drop off a tree: “Doric colonnades leading up the drive/Staring down the verdigris covered faces of the divine.” If there was a wink in his delivery, the whole thing would collapse into giggles, but Haden’s devotion to his chosen aesthetic is unblinking and fearless. He’s the perfect host, a magnetic and unlikely blend of Joel Grey from Cabaret and the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow.
Haden has cited the musical Cats as lifelong inspiration and said the album is meant to “feel like my life, as a cabaret: a very earnest, kind of ridiculous, melodramatic, homespun opera.” In the album’s most charged moments—on the subdued “Divers,” for instance, when he whispers the line “I seem to find it/But not within myself”—he sounds earnest, even operatic. But it’s a measure of the band’s swagger and confidence that the word “ridiculous” never once suggests itself.
The players’ precision attack and Haden’s white-hot charisma help explain how a band so devoted to stirring up bad neurochemicals winds up offering such a tremendously good time. Any exploration of hedonism’s rot and underbelly ought to contain a fair helping of hedonism itself, and Dogsbody is a party, no matter how panicky and wild-eyed. The songs are sequenced like an extended mix, with some tracks fading directly into each other—the final line of “Crossing Guard” (“Oh it feels like/Oh it feels like…”) segues directly into the first words of “Slate” (“...Like pressure”). At the teeth-grinding climax of “Crossing Guard,” Haden invokes Gwen Stefani and Lady Gaga (“Germanotta”) asking for them to “pull the weight from under me.” It’s a spiritual callback, maybe, to the “Greta Garbo and Monroe” bit from Madonna’s “Vogue,” a roll call of pop-cultural saints. Haden has called the album “a violent ode to the explosive joy of being alive,” and in moments like these, you feel the will toward communion rearing its head in even the darkest and ugliest of corners. | 2023-03-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Electronic | True Panther | March 2, 2023 | 8.2 | f0ab1f25-c4a8-4338-8842-9b755ab92f11 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
In the big leagues now, one of the architects of lo-fi house tries to class up his goofy name with a four-track EP and a high-def vision. | In the big leagues now, one of the architects of lo-fi house tries to class up his goofy name with a four-track EP and a high-def vision. | Ross From Friends: Aphelion EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ross-from-friends-aphelion-ep/ | Aphelion EP | Dance music loves a tempest in a teapot, and few have whistled louder over the last few years than the dust-up over lo-fi house. The term popped up around 2015 to describe a wave of producers like DJ Boring, DJ Seinfeld, and Ross From Friends, who lacquered moody vocal house in tape hiss and racked up millions of plays practically overnight. Their memetic nostalgia attracted the kind of extremely online fans who were probably commenting “a e s t h e t i c” on Chuck Person videos six months prior, and rankled the usual suspects, who picked up a whiff of ironic detachment.
A little fun never hurt anyone, but purists had a point when they argued that this scene seemed more like an exercise in re-branding familiar house tropes for Gen Z audiences than a truly fresh sound. In fact, lo-fi offered a fascinating case study of how songs that fuse several common genre elements—say, house beats and nostalgic R&B samples—receive an advantage from the machine learning algorithms that drive music discovery on streaming platforms. That’s why Ross from Friends’ “Talk To Me You’ll Understand” pops up so often in your recommended tab on YouTube.
Despite their initial struggle to be taken seriously, the lo-fi producers’ schtick masked real ambition. “I think my name is very far down on my list of ‘things that are important about my music,’” Ross wrote during one climactic battle (read: Twitter spat with a blogger) in the lo-fi wars. In fact, his real name is Felix Weatherall, and he’s from Colchester, UK, but he’s right that this is beside the point. Arguments about whether he and his peers “really mean it” have faded over the last 18 months, as they’ve released a stream of solid tracks on crucial labels and emerged as genuine stars on the club circuit. Weatherall, for his part, recently signed to Brainfeeder and played live at Berghain’s hallowed Panorama Bar.
He’s in the big leagues now, and the four-track Aphelion EP feels like an attempt to class up his goofy moniker with la-di-da cover art and a Greek non sequitur. (An aphelion is “the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid, or comet at which it is furthest from the sun,” FYI.) The effect is of a self-conscious bro trying on his dad’s itchy tweed blazer before an intimidating date. That’s fine—artists deserve the chance to reposition their brand upmarket, as long as they have the tunes to back it up.
Weatherall’s older material used sepia-toned tape hiss to gesture at nostalgia. Yet the simplistic compositions never seemed to pin down what exactly he was nostalgic for, beyond a blurry idea of “the ’90s, man.” On Aphelion, he wipes the fog off his lens and a widescreen vision blossoms into focus. Keys drip with detail. Synths shimmer. Kicks and snares land with a 4K thwack.
Lead single “John Cage” is a holdover from an old hip-hop project that Weatherall started with a friend named Guy. The song’s moving parts unfold with a patient logic. A sample from a daffy guided meditation exercise introduces billowing new age textures. Pitch-shifted vocals, via Guy, warble a jazzy lullaby. Seagulls squawk in the background. Synth streaks accent the mix with oversaturated hues familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a psychedelic afternoon at the beach, staring at the sky.
The most forgettable track is the one most indebted to lo-fi tropes. “There’s a Hole In My Heart” has a sweet, yearning vocal, but its 4/4 shuffle never really goes anywhere, and Weatherall falls back on drowsy chords you’ll recognize from a zillion Soundcloud mixes. I prefer the limpid electro bauble “March,” which is basically a DJ Stingray tune in relaxed-fit sweatpants. Some may be partial to electro with more gas in the tank, but in Weatherall’s hands a little syncopation goes a long way.
Best of all is “Don’t Wake Dad.” The beat flirts with R&B; in fact, it sounds like a friendly ghost that’s crawled into the warm hollow of a memory-foam mattress only recently vacated by N.E.R.D.’s 2010 masterpiece “Hypnotize U.” I couldn’t stop humming “touch it girl, touch it girl, touch it girl, ahhh” when the break comes in.
Then, just when you think you’ve got it figured out, Weatherall unleashes a blast of beatific sax. It’s schmaltzy and totally disarming, like something you’d hear at a rave thrown by the Life Is Good™ stick figures. Here we have the clearest picture yet of what a Ross From Friends track should sound like: hands in the air, tongue in cheek, heart pulsing on its sleeve. | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | April 18, 2018 | 7.1 | f0b79595-667f-4ba8-b8f5-9878b86c3e5d | Ezra Marcus | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ezra-marcus/ | |
This thoroughly modern folk singer continues his stunning recreations of classic folk, with help from Ben Frost, Nico Muhly, and Beth Orton. | This thoroughly modern folk singer continues his stunning recreations of classic folk, with help from Ben Frost, Nico Muhly, and Beth Orton. | Sam Amidon: I See the Sign | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14149-i-see-the-sign/ | I See the Sign | Sam Amidon's idea of recomposition-- of excavating Appalachian folksongs; rearranging, repurposing, and creating a dissociation that feels uniquely contemporary-- isn't exactly unprecedented. Musicians-- like A.P. Carter, who scrambled up and down Clinch Mountain in the late 1920s, collecting local songs for the Carter Family's repertoire-- have been reinventing folk songs since before we knew to call them folk songs. That's part of what folk music is, and does. What separates Amidon from the scrum of revivalists and archivists is how modern these renditions are. I See the Sign, Amidon's third folk LP, doesn't contain any original tracks, but his interpretations are so singular that it stops mattering how (or if) these songs existed before-- all that matters is how they exist now.
Amidon grew up singing folk music in Brattleboro, Vermont; his parents were members of the Word of Mouth chorus, a community choir which performed sacred harp hymns in the 1970s. Culturally, folk music is inextricably linked to the south (and Appalachia in particular), but rural Vermont has birthed its fair share of traditional strummers (pick up Margaret MacArthur's Folksongs of Vermont for an impeccable primer). Amidon inhabits these songs comfortably, with an ease that belies a childhood spent with a fiddle in one hand and a banjo in the other.
Much of I See the Sign's success can be chalked up to its arrangements, which are fractured and frequently off-kilter; Amidon and his cabal of collaborators-- Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Shahzad Ismaily-- have been merging chamber music with indie rock for awhile now (see also: Sufjan Stevens, Thomas Bartlett, Owen Pallett, Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National), and their touch is nuanced and, on occasion, delightfully odd. Bits of percussion, distorted bursts of Moog, and hits of celesta pop up and recede, snapping into place like puzzle pieces. The arrangements are never bombastic (unlike what happens when, say, a pop artist gets paired with a philharmonic)-- instead, they're violent (the stabbing bass and scuttling percussion of opener "Here Come That Blood") or stiff and lonely (the restrained electric guitar and puffs of strings on "I See the Sign"). On "You Better Mind", Amidon, harmonizing with Beth Orton, gets backup from threatening squeals of strings: "You've got to give an account of the judgment, you better mind," they caution. Their voices are grave, concerned.
As a vocalist, Amidon is preternaturally calm, and his flat repetition of certain couplets ("Found my lost sheep," "Loose horse in the valley") feels mesmeric and mantra-like. He's poised, but never cold, and I See the Sign can play like a gospel record, with all the attendant modes and lessons. These are songs to live by (or in), and these iterations-- despite their sophistication, despite his stoicism-- never feel like museum pieces or anything less than functional.
The only non-traditional track here is a cover of R. Kelly's "Relief". On paper, the choice feels a little like a trap (R. Kelly fills an odd role for overeducated indie rockers), or at least a posture-- and while it could be didactic or a lame grasp at irony, Amidon's rendition is stunning. "What a relief to know that/ The war is over," he and Orton sing, their voices earnest and tough, rising over the album's thickest, most optimistic swells. When Amidon finds an affirmation of faith-- "What a relief to know that/ There's an angel in the sky," he sings, grateful-- it's hard not to feel that liberation deep down in your gut. | 2010-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bedroom Community | April 21, 2010 | 8.1 | f0bba702-f5d3-4671-9afa-f80609e663f6 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
On their debut album No Passion All Technique, Detroit's Protomartyr excelled at crafting a post-punk onslaught that was thrillingly breakneck and oppressive, showcasing a new band capable of stomping, shredding, and obliterating. On their follow-up, they've cleaned up their sound a bit and sanded down a few of their rough edges without becoming tepid or tame. | On their debut album No Passion All Technique, Detroit's Protomartyr excelled at crafting a post-punk onslaught that was thrillingly breakneck and oppressive, showcasing a new band capable of stomping, shredding, and obliterating. On their follow-up, they've cleaned up their sound a bit and sanded down a few of their rough edges without becoming tepid or tame. | Protomartyr: Under Color of Official Right | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19150-protomartyr-under-color-of-official-right/ | Under Color of Official Right | On their debut album No Passion All Technique, Detroit's Protomartyr excelled at crafting a post-punk onslaught that was thrillingly breakneck and oppressive, showcasing a new band capable of stomping, shredding, and obliterating. The songs ranged from anthemic and rafter-reaching to churning and bleak, grounded by frontman Joe Casey's deep, looming vocals that moved seamlessly from a croon to a deranged bark. It was an impressive showing of both mastery and versatility.
On their follow-up, Under Color of Official Right, they've cleaned up their sound a bit and sanded down a few of their rough edges without becoming tepid or tame. This time around, the band's embraced a consistent ebb and flow, continually shifting back and forth from simmer to full-boil. For listeners well-versed in No Passion's steadfast ferocity, this new one may appear comparatively declawed, but the more subtle approach comes with more tonal and emotional nuance. Greg Ahee's ringing, hollow guitar clack on "Bad Advice" gives weight and urgency to a narrative about Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, while the tenderness of Scott Davidson's slow-burning bass intro on "What the Wall Said" is a perfect counterbalance to an imminent and overwhelming barrage of guitars. "Come & See" begins with guitar chords that are given space to ring before being enveloped by huge, oppressive waves of guitars, and the effect is oddly uplifting. The hooks are diverse in mood—dark, subtle, playful—but just as cohesive and powerful as they were on their first outing.
As they did with No Passion, Protomartyr seal the deal with Casey's lyrics. Often inspired by books and news stories and filtered through the band's deadpan abstractions, they don't always make perfect sense right away. Album opener "Maidenhead" is directly influenced by Patrick Hamilton's black comedy novel Hangover Square. It's about George Harvey Bone, a lonely alcoholic who suffers from spells where he feels no pleasure or pain. Casey sings about a "clack" in his brain, which triggers "dead moods". At the chorus, drummer Alex Leonard and Ahee ramp up their attack, and when things cool down again, Casey sings, "Maidenhead, here I come," referring to the happy place where Bone longs to return—where he can finally find respite from the darkness. "I have arrived."
But here's the hitch: When Bone reaches Maidenhead in the book, he isn't peaceful there—he's just as tortured as he always was. And as Protomartyr push out into the rest of their album, they're still mired in darkness. They outline betrayal, treason, extortion, corruption, bad dads, insufferable randos, and of course, violence. It's tempting to comb through the album to find clues that reveal Casey's initial inspirations, but going line by line and decoding its "secrets" is about as arbitrary a practice as naming every sample on a Girl Talk album: it's nice to know the details, but look at the big picture instead. The overall strength of Under Color of Official Right doesn't come from its big words, Detroit cred, or works-cited page; it's from lyrics that, while fraught with symbolism, feel emotionally resonant and, sometimes, viscerally unpleasant. If you listen carefully to Casey's voice, this stuff can hit hard.
Perhaps it's the seething, self-assured vocals, but the album's most bleak phrases are also some of its most memorable. "Stumbling around for a hand in the dark/ Slapping you down, choking you out," he casually croons on "What the Wall Said". A vengeful son kills off a pack of barfly dads in "Scum, Rise!", while Davidson locks into a rollicking groove during "Tarpeian Rock", named for the Ancient Roman cliff where murderers and traitors were flung for their crimes. Casey lists the different sorts of people who should meet their demise—emotional cripples, internet personas, rich crusties, adults dressed as children, and so on—while his swirling, primal vocals insist, "THROW THEM FROM THE ROCK".
Amid all the chaos and fuzz, the album's crown jewel might be "Violent"—the most calm, spare track of the bunch. It's a bedtime story with multiple layers: a bandit about to kill a man for snoring too loud, a dark shape in the water that's about to sink a boat, a husband poisoning his wife, cats hunting mice, dogs eating their young. "If it's violent, it's understood," sings Casey, and that's the reality they present throughout Under Color of Official Right: no matter where you look—in books, at your loved ones, at your pets, at the sports bar—there's violence and death and destruction. It's a bummer, but at least Protomartyr wrote and recorded an impressive album around that idea. | 2014-04-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | April 7, 2014 | 8.1 | f0bc7ceb-5d5d-4b9d-a49a-d0adbf6cdecd | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The Memphis rapper takes a well-earned victory lap on the latest edition of his Cocaine Muzik series, a consistent double album filled with reliable raps and familiar beats. | The Memphis rapper takes a well-earned victory lap on the latest edition of his Cocaine Muzik series, a consistent double album filled with reliable raps and familiar beats. | Yo Gotti: CM10: Free Game | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-gotti-cm10-free-game/ | CM10: Free Game | Yo Gotti has been rapping reliably about selling drugs in Memphis since at least George W. Bush’s first inauguration. He’s an old-line model gangster rapper, wedded to language and sounds codified in the 2000s, maintaining high levels of street cred without ever fully breaking from those lingering Jeezy comparisons. CM10: Free Game, the tenth edition of his long-running Cocaine Muzik series, is short on innovation, but as a concentrated dose of the Yo Gotti formula, it finds a main vein.
In old times, CM10: Free Game would simply be a double album. Instead, it dropped to streaming services in two halves. The cover of Side A features a topless Gotti wearing sagging pants and a clean hat and kicks. On the artwork accompanying Side B, he’s kitted out in some of his sharpest formal wear. This suggests a duality to the two sets, but any thematic disparity is basically undetectable. Gotti’s still live from the kitchen, cooking bricks over a stove, “making that pot go do the beatbox.” There’s little tension because CM10: Free Game swerves colder portraits of a dealer’s life, keeping the viewfinder firmly on the benefits.
So you get a song like “Palm Trees in Memphis,” where Gotti recalls memories of childhood poverty over a sumptuous soul sample from producer STREETRUNNER. But his brooding is brief, and he quickly moves to an accounting of the pleasures that make up his present opulence: Dior threads, a house that feels like a hotel, a garage comparable to a stable with “a lot of horses.” Gotti’s modus operandi is to pepper listeners with surface-level references to hustling and wealth. It would be nice if he delved deeper, if only a little more often. When he drops a line like, “Mama pray for me, help me with this anger,” in the middle of “Palm Trees in Memphis,” I want him to pull at that thread further and put more of himself in the song.
If the narratives are familiar, so are the beats: There are creeping, bass-heavy trap rattlers and soul loops that owe a debt to Just Blaze and early Kanye West. But it would be wrong to say that CM10: Free Game plays like a 2008 record that fell through a crack in time and landed in modern day. Principally, Gotti can’t hide that he’s getting older. On “Crypto,” the 40-year-old sounds half intrigued, half baffled by digital currencies and other new tech (and this is the guy, by the way, who knows the benefits of a slick DM slide). Gotti describes seeing dealers getting paid via money apps and being pulled into meetings about the metaverse. “I’d sell a brick and put blues in my pocket/Now they talking digital money and wallets,” he says, sounding like he’s talking to a friend after being pitched in his label office by 20-year-old tech bros.
Fortunately, Gotti doesn’t flow like an old guy. He’s still not the nimblest rapper in the game—at his laziest, he can sound sedate and pensive, his wheezy voice gasping for breath—but he’s evolved from a Jeezy soundalike to something more eerie. On “For The Record,” his rapping is low-rumbling and intense as he describes friends stealing his money and his baby’s mother leaving him. Yet that weathered, guttural rasp can also be turned to something more triumphant: see “Recession Proof,” present as a bonus track, where his stunt-to-camera boasts have the appropriate swagger.
The most gripping song here is “Rap Check.” Gotti sets his voice to a dry, grainy drawl to give a revealing depiction of his earliest interactions with Cash Money Records, Jeezy, Dr. Dre, and others. “I was right there with Wayne, back Carter 1/He had a Cash Money chain, shit, I wanted one.” It's a biographical detail that lays out just how many times Gotti has been around the hip-hop block. Yet he’s still here. Yo Gotti will never do reinvention, nor should he. CM10: Free Game isn’t his most vital album, but he’s entitled to a victory lap. | 2022-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | CMG | February 22, 2022 | 6.8 | f0c067cb-3170-428f-9fd6-dff5d7ba12d6 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Rooted in demos made early in the pandemic, Avey Tare’s fourth solo album is unusual and slightly disarming: a head-over-heels-in-love album that’s also prickly and claustrophobic. | Rooted in demos made early in the pandemic, Avey Tare’s fourth solo album is unusual and slightly disarming: a head-over-heels-in-love album that’s also prickly and claustrophobic. | Avey Tare: 7s | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/avey-tare-7s/ | 7s | Avey Tare’s solo records have always sounded like opportunities to break away from whatever Animal Collective was doing at the time. Co-founder Panda Bear’s solo work has roughly followed the group’s trajectory, morphing from folksy and melancholy to expansive and dubwise to shroomy and feral on a parallel path. Avey, meanwhile, released a willfully frustrating album meant to be played backwards just as his band was becoming the toast of American indie rock; got swampy and personal on Down There just as Merriweather Post Pavilion pushed them into bigger venues; made the sprawling and sparse Eucalyptus a year after AnCo’s hyperkinetic Painting With; then embraced dance music on Cows on Hourglass Pond just as his main band was starting to make music that… sounded like Eucalyptus.
Now, as Animal Collective rides the success of last year’s rhythm-driven road odyssey Time Skiffs, regaining some of the goodwill lost in their long 2010s wilderness period (one worth revisiting now that it no longer exists in Merriweather’s monumental shadow), here’s an Avey Tare album in the long tradition of baroque-pop hermits hunched over keyboards and consoles, a showcase for studio trickery that sounds the most out of any Avey Tare solo work like the great psychedelic Beatles and Beach Boys albums to which AnCo’s early music was frequently compared.
7s is rooted in demos Avey made early in the pandemic while living with his girlfriend Madelyn and working remotely with AnCo on Time Skiffs. This situation accounts for its unusual, slightly disarming tone: It’s a head-over-heels-in-love album, full of invitations to come and do whimsical things, but it’s also prickly and insular. If the influence of house and techno led Cows on Hourglass Pond to feel extroverted, 7s is a vision of a world where the clubs are shuttered and the walls are closing in. It’s not Avey’s shortest album (that would be Down There, at 34:44), but it feels the smallest, in part because it has the fewest tracks (seven) and in part because it continually retreats towards its own center.
Avey is blessed with an excellent scream. You will not hear it on 7s. His vocals are uncharacteristically reserved throughout, thinning to a whisper on the sickly-sounding “Cloud Stop Rest Start” and at the end of “Lips at Night.” At 43, his voice has grown huskier and deeper, and he’s developed a lisp that’s also audible on Time Skiffs. As is common in his work, his vocals squirm through effects that make them sound oily and slightly nauseous, but unlike on Cows and Eucalyptus, this has the effect of making them less comprehensible. Even on a focused listen, you’ll probably only understand about 50 percent of the words.
This turns out to be a blessing. 7s does not benefit from reading the lyrics, which are crammed with grammatically bizarre turns of phrase (“Your corporeal tube doesn’t seek me out from the fishies/I relish a homemade cast”) and pseudo-deep platitudes that make “Stairway to Heaven” sound profound (“Too often we are our villains and our heroes/Save ourselves and then we dig ourselves a fresh tomb”). The psychedelic pop tradition is conducive to nonsense, from the sly non-sequiturs of the Beatles to the impossibly evocative scenes conjured by Van Dyke Parks and Robert Hunter. But there’s good nonsense and bad nonsense, and 7s unfortunately errs on the wrong side.
The album’s strongest lyrics tend to be the simplest and most direct, especially on “The Musical,” a song about Avey’s two decades in the music biz. “Is your audience the trees, or do you crave to be a professional?” he asks aspiring musicians. It’s an expression of hard-won road-warrior knowledge that still shines with gratitude and amazement. “I remember T&C and I’ll surely remember your hand in mine,” Avey sings to Madelyn on “Lips at Night.” Listeners are unlikely to understand what he’s saying in the first half of the line, let alone what it means, but as his voice crests in the second half, the brain fog parts, and the declaration of love shines through.
7s works best seen as a whole, as a triumph of love and empathy over adversity. It’s hard to know who Avey Tare is singing about on “Invisible Darlings,” though some of the language echoes early-pandemic sentiment towards essential workers, but the sense of opening one’s heart to the world is unmistakable. “Lips at Night” plays like gibberish until all of a sudden Avey says something like “we kissed,” and then it becomes a love song. Like the B-movie horror films that Avey loves, it’s better if you don’t nitpick the script. And though 7s is a step down in scale and inspiration from Cows on Hourglass Pond, the triumph of Time Skiffs means it’s hardly a worrying sign for his career. It’s actually kind of exciting. I can’t wait to see if the next AnCo album sounds like 7s—and how far opposite from it Avey can get.
Correction: Lyric quotes in this review have been updated. | 2023-03-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Domino | March 1, 2023 | 6.7 | f0c10986-edf0-42a6-8970-1855acb68271 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
On an exhilarating but exhausting new EP, the Indonesian rapper strives for maturity but remains at his best when he’s at his silliest. | On an exhilarating but exhausting new EP, the Indonesian rapper strives for maturity but remains at his best when he’s at his silliest. | Rich Brian: Brightside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rich-brian-brightside/ | Brightside | Rich Brian’s music is a breakneck odyssey through one man’s encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, careening from one reference to the next. Per usual, the 22-year-old Indonesian rapper and viral sensation’s latest EP, Brightside, resists even the gentlest tap on the brakes. “I wanted to remind people that I still love to rap,” Brian said in a press release. And remind us he does, switching up beats and flows with merciless speed, often several times over the course of a single track. It’s exhilarating at times and exhausting at others. Though the EP runs less than 13 minutes, by the end of the fourth and final song, you might feel like you’ve been busting through wall after wall like the Kool-Aid Man, strapped into the passenger seat of a Tesla that never seems to die.
The beats on Brightside are clean and seemingly meant to denote seriousness, both in style and aspiration. The menacing piano riffs that blossom into lo-fi sadboy chords on “New Tooth” evoke the production favored by Tyler, the Creator, while “Lagoon” and standout “Getcho Mans” take on the hysteria of a Denzel Curry song. “Lagoon,” however, taps into that style for only about 45 seconds before slacking into a moodier beat. It’s a shame, because the feverish first half is one of Brian’s most arresting maneuvers to date. His drawl plods on the second half as he debates the relative merits of Porsches, Lambos, and “Tess-uh-lah”s (which “ain’t got no guns but the wheels automatic”). Though Brightside checks off more mainstream-rap-hit boxes than ever, Brian’s greatest strengths have always been his embrace of absurdity and his penchant for quip-slinging and provocation—lines like “pussy bald like Joe Rogan.” This brand of silliness is far more believable than his stabs at profundity, as on the blatantly 88rising-manufactured depression-core anthem “Sunny,” which opens right on the nose with, “Going through some shit.”
Despite the superficiality of his lyrics and the exaggerated vocal affectations, these songs are well-produced and still kind of a riot. Collaborators Diamond Pistols and Powers Pleasant are heavy hitters, embellishing the music with a darker and more frenetic pulse than Brian’s previous work. Still, there’s a reason that “Getcho Mans,” featuring fellow Indonesian rapper Warren Hue, is Brightside’s best track, and it’s not just Powers Pleasant pulling weight: It’s that both rappers seem more interested in having a good time than making something marketable. More than his musings on the pitfalls of fame, the laid-back absurdism of the song’s lyrics (“Man, I’m only joking,” he admits at one point) renders his music compelling in spite of its flaws. We get to enjoy Brian at his best—when he’s least concerned with being taken seriously.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 88rising / Warner | January 27, 2022 | 5.5 | f0d0228c-0ef8-4c50-81d8-e5bff20b0529 | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
Stephen Steinbrink has been bouncing around the West Coast indie underground for over a decade now. The singer/songwriter's new album is his best, with winsome shades of Elliott Smith's XO. | Stephen Steinbrink has been bouncing around the West Coast indie underground for over a decade now. The singer/songwriter's new album is his best, with winsome shades of Elliott Smith's XO. | Stephen Steinbrink: Anagrams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22056-anagrams/ | Anagrams | Born and raised in Phoenix, Stephen Steinbrink has been bouncing around the West Coast indie underground for over a decade now, releasing numerous records of bittersweet, folk-inflected pop on a handful of tiny labels. While the 27-year-old songwriter is a dedicated nomad as a performer—he’s been touring off and on since his teens—Steinbrink’s music is a deeply intimate affair, a series of bedroom obsessions brought to life.
Steinbrink’s last album, 2014’s excellent, wide-ranging *Arranged Waves, *garnered some attention outside his close-knit DIY circles. And *Anagrams *is sure to boost Steinbrink’s profile further. Recorded over two years in a de-sanctified church on the northern coast of Washington state, *Anagrams *is Steinbrink’s most fully realized vision yet—an album of compulsively well-crafted, yet warmly inviting guitar-pop that calls to mind the Beach Boys, early Beatles, and Fleetwood Mac without losing an iota of Steinbrink’s quirky charm. Arrangements that felt loose or tossed off on past records have been tightened here; vocal lines that once wandered now sparkle and shine. There is nary a note out of place.
Anagrams is a close sonic cousin to Elliott Smith’s later work, particularly XO. Both Steinbrink’s record and XO use classic pop songwriting tools and organic, fine-grained production to uncover (or in some cases mask) some very dark stuff: depression, alienation, drug addiction, relationships in decline. On “Impossible Hand,” Steinbrink recounts a love grown cold over an urbane mix of shimmering acoustic guitar, twinkling piano and perky bass. On “Shine a Light on Him,” Steinbrink imagines himself coming to after blacking out in the middle of a car crash (or a night of heavy substance abuse; it’s not clear). “It’s easy to forget what you can’t remember,” he sings over soft fingerpicked guitar.
But *Anagrams *is no secondhand Elliott Smith record; Steinbrink is far too idiosyncratic for imitation. In fact, Anagrams’ best songs break the singer-songwriter mold entirely. The eerily hypnotic “Building Machines” nods to Death Cab for Cutie and early post-rock, as its chiming guitars march head-on into a wall of vicious feedback. The breezy title track, meanwhile, is an irresistible slice of mid-’80s indie rock—all bitter heartbreak and R.E.M. jangle.
Steinbrink is clearly the type of guy who’s always living in his head, in his studio, or both. He’s also hyper self-aware and hyper-articulate. All of which means that his music can sometimes turn precious and claustrophobic, reveling in the minutia of this or that memory or this or that worry. “Creosote,” from 2011’s *Rennet *EP, is about staying at home and doing laundry. 2013’s I Drew a Picture is essentially a concept album about Phoenix’s water-shortage crisis. * *
With a few minor exceptions, Steinbrink avoids these traps on *Anagrams *by pulling away from himself and his hometown—writing abstract songs about his late-20s malaise with a more universal appeal—and by improving his craft, layering sharper melodies over increasingly sophisticated arrangements. Steinbrink’s music—so often insular, gorgeous in its way yet tentative—has grown up, becoming wiser and more confidently strange, ready to embrace the world outside his bedroom window. | 2016-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Melodic | July 5, 2016 | 7 | f0d38da5-3a3e-4eaf-93b0-262dbae6f25f | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
The St. Louis metalpunks put their politics at the forefront of their music—except they’ve also got riffs, and they can write the hell out of a catchy, confrontational punk song. | The St. Louis metalpunks put their politics at the forefront of their music—except they’ve also got riffs, and they can write the hell out of a catchy, confrontational punk song. | Redbait: Cages | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/redbait-cages/ | Cages | Punk has a long tradition of political soapboxing, whether an anti-Reagan screed or a howling demand for trans rights thinly cloaked behind a veil of distortion and d-beats. St. Louis metalpunk outfit Redbait, however, put their politics at the forefront of their music. They approach every note and syllable with unwavering intention, down to their self-identification as “proletarian crust” and the name “Redbait” itself—a thumbed nose to the right wing’s long history of smearing leftists.
The idea for Redbait germinated not at a basement show or a bar, like so many other notable punk acts, but as their press materials note, at the “healthcare rallies, vegan potlucks, and protests against police brutality” where these six musicians initially got acquainted. The band’s members—vocalists Rebecca Redbait and Madeline B., guitarists Will J. and B., bassist Nicholas J., and drummer Cody A.—came up in the St. Louis activist community, and they apply that knowledge and praxis to their music. In a way, Redbait follow the lo-fi Crass model of politics—except they’ve also got riffs, and they can write the hell out of a catchy, confrontational punk song.
Their latest EP, Cages, rails against racism, white supremacy, capitalism, wage slavery, factory farming, and, on the pummeling title track, the Trump administration’s brutal ongoing campaign to rip migrant children from their parents and pen them in concentration camps. “They use power to divide/Power to imprison/In a country so free it incarcerates children,” comes the song’s snarling climax, delivered in a duet of guttural roar and ragged shriek. The EP is stuffed with disparate influences and palpable rage, serving up five distinct and ambitious tracks in a blistering 13 minutes. Less is often more when it comes to punk, and despite Redbait’s obvious allegiance to the more metal (and historically more indulgent) side of the aisle, their commitment to brevity is admirable.
Thanks to a brutally sludgy mid-song break, “Cages” is also the band’s most metal track, while on “Bred for the Knife,” a furious diatribe against the cruelties of factory farming, they soar to their breathless, Tragedy-referencing best. Redbait’s self-identification as “proletarian crust” works on multiple levels: Not only is Cages grounded in radical working-class politics, it’s also alive with the clang of machinery, the screech of grinding metal, and the smell of blood on the factory floor.
Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it opener “Capital Gains” is more straightforward: The minute-and-change track rails against capitalist exploitation while charging along to the tune of mid-2000s thrash and swinging its knuckles like a mid-2000s pit boss (undoubtedly the only kind of boss Redbait recognize). The most personal track, “Forever Ends Now,” opens on a maudlin melodic note, its first stanza cleanly sung before a bolt of chaos kicks in to close out the EP. Elsewhere, the potent crust of “Our Town” offers an uptempo hometown anthem with teeth, skewering racist NIMBYs and name-dropping nearby Ferguson, Missouri: “Talk back to a cop/And you can lose your life/Shut it down!”
Every generation of young punks needs its Dead Kennedys, its Crass, or its Anti-Flag; with any luck, Redbait might be this one’s. | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | New Age | June 18, 2019 | 7.5 | f0dc5c60-7e5e-4da3-ad78-2a69c3a2fc0a | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
On the follow-up to 2011's Digital Lows, Memphis rapper Cities Aviv submerges his natural tendencies beneath a strong post-punk influence, making for a bold collection that works with regard to his wordplay, but not always on the production. | On the follow-up to 2011's Digital Lows, Memphis rapper Cities Aviv submerges his natural tendencies beneath a strong post-punk influence, making for a bold collection that works with regard to his wordplay, but not always on the production. | Cities Aviv: Black Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17456-black-pleasure/ | Black Pleasure | For all the talk about how iPods and Megaupload have exponentially advanced listener curiosity, post-punk and rap have long coexisted in the collections of anyone who simply likes great music. Still, those two genres have rarely mixed in the time since-- you could point to off-the-grid acts like Dälek, while Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury has as much clangor, negative space, and nihilism as Metal Box, but the influence of post-punk on hip-hop has been mostly relegated to the theoretical realm. At least until now. Memphis rapper Cities Aviv definitely displayed an iconoclastic streak on 2011's Digital Lows, in which serious Three 6 Mafia homage and a straight-up "People Are People" sample found equal footing. On Black Pleasure, he goes all in with one of the first rap albums that sounds it's angling for a deal with Pendu Sounds or Captured Tracks. It's bold and possibly forward thinking. What's less certain is whether he actually made a good record.
He does have the voice for it. While an adept wordsmith, Aviv's vocals have a stiff and shouty cadence. At the outset, it's surprisingly effective. The militant kick drums that power "Forever" are the domain of no-fi coldwave revivalists like the Soft Moon and Black Marble, while Aviv's vocals are initially lost in impenetrable, well-bottom reverb. By the time he emerges to rap clearly intelligible words, you mostly catch the punchline where his insecurities have him "hanging like I'm Ian Curtis." It's something of a "shock tactic," not so much in its allusion to a man's suicide, but one that can be cynically viewed as an easy "in" for indie listeners. But you can't really doubt his commitment, as later on he and his girlfriend are making love to Joy Division and Psychic TV, while porn star Mary Carey and Debbie Harry also get namechecked in succession.
Fortunately, Black Pleasure isn't a half hour of Cities Aviv trying to score cred points; there's plenty of material here that would fit within the confines of the searching and introspective Digital Lows were it not for the severity of the production. Aviv remains a relatable and personable rapper who's mostly falling in or out of love during Black Pleasure, while taking stock of his own situation and those of his peers. The most instantly ear-turning quotables come to the fore on "Simulation", which takes shots at e-rappers ("you thuggin' but you only sendin' shots over Gmail") and pretty much all internet-based interaction ("with 30,000 user names which is the real you?") over distended production from Green Ova Undergrounds associate L.W.H..
"Simulation" is one of the few tracks where the words take precedence, and that's a problem. It isn't about the compatibility of Cities Aviv's influences so much as the actual mix, the way Black Pleasure sounds coming out of speakers and headphones. Nearly every production tactic that makes Black Pleasure so distinct ends up working against the strengths of its creator. The blown-out reverb and aluminum aftertaste won't be too unfamiliar, but while most rock bands using these tricks consider lyrics to be a non-entity or the vocals another sonic layer, Cities Aviv is a talented rapper who conceivably wants his words to be heard. The moaning sample that punctuates every bar of "Escorts" completely dominates the sonic field and the lack of definition on "Remynd" makes the appearance of Maria Minerva a complete non-event. Perhaps it's meant more as a consumptive, textural experience than as a beats and rhymes record, but if that's the case, Black Pleasure forfeits its main selling point; so much of the production relies on the acidic, warping qualities of distortion that without Cities Aviv's instructions on how he wants Black Pleasure to be heard, you could just as easily assume he was catching up with chillwave or cloud-rap.
At the very least, you have to admit there isn't anyone else making music like this right now, but it's debatable whether Cities Aviv is in his own lane here because others consciously chose to avoid it. And while there's no such thing as a "free" mixtape, since time and creativity are limited resources, you could argue that unlike, say, 808s and Heartbreak or even Rebirth, this lacks the stakes of Cities Aviv putting his money where his mouth is. Maybe thats the real issue with Black Pleasure-- it feels more laudable for its ethics and process than the actual product; even if it isn't felt, it can certainly be discussed, and talking points are probably more valuable than actual hits at this point in Cites Aviv's trajectory. But I'm more interested in hearing what Cities Aviv is capable of when he doesn't surround himself in so much figurative and literal noise. | 2012-11-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-11-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rap | Мишка | November 26, 2012 | 6.1 | f0dfe57a-5254-4935-b8ea-197468fe605b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Following Yeah Yeah Yeahs' overstuffed LP Mosquito, Karen O's debut solo album—culled from recordings made between 2006 and 2010—feels like an extension of her soundtrack work for Where the Wild Things Are and Her. | Following Yeah Yeah Yeahs' overstuffed LP Mosquito, Karen O's debut solo album—culled from recordings made between 2006 and 2010—feels like an extension of her soundtrack work for Where the Wild Things Are and Her. | Karen O: Crush Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19794-karen-o-crush-songs/ | Crush Songs | Karen O opens “NYC Baby”, a minute-long track off her solo debut, with a quiet “One… two… ready go…” She whispers the words carefully, as though she’s less interested in establishing a tempo than she is in not waking a sleeping child. Featuring only acoustic guitar and hushed vocals, the song sounds like a nursery rhyme set to a wisp of a melody, building on obvious rhymes (city/pity) and worrying a single sentiment (she misses someone) until it’s threadbare. It’s not a song so much as it is the memory of one, something hummed while doing housework or waiting for the subway. Crush Songs is an album full of count-offs, flubbed notes, and background noises, each one signaling an unrehearsed quality to the music. Karen O sings and plays like she wants as little time as possible separating the idea for a song from its execution. Some even sound like she’s writing them as she sings them.
That these fourteen tracks sound like demos rather than fleshed-out tunes is the whole point. A crush is a fleeting emotion, a moment of intense affection rather than the drawn-out ups and downs of love or obsession. “When I was 27 I crushed a lot,” O writes in the liners, underlining for emphasis. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again. These songs were written and recorded in private around this time.” It’s clear she wanted to get them down on tape before their respective crushes dissipated, and the album culls recordings made from 2006 through 2010. Mostly it’s just O strumming her guitar and singing softly, although occasionally she adds a drum loop, backing vocals, and what sounds like a harpsichord.
It’s an intentionally modest album, perhaps a reaction to the overstuffed Mosquito or to the KO at Home demo leak. It certainly sounds like an extension of her soundtrack work for Where the Wild Things Are and Her, but perhaps it’s too modest: these are all very short songs, with only three out of fourteen surpassing two minutes, and the whole thing runs a short twenty-six minutes, barely registering as a full album. That such brevity is thematically appropriate doesn’t make it any more musically satisfying. Most songs, including first single “Rapt” and even the Doors cover “Indian Summer”, fade out quickly before they’ve even established much in the way of melody or stakes. Only a few sound complete in this lo-fi state: A paean to Michael Jackson, “King” conveys a perfectly apt sense of childlike innocence through both its running time and its playful imagery: “Is he walking on the moon? I hope I don’t find out too soon.” The spoken-word part on closer “Sing Along” heralds some of the album’s most emphatic vocals on the album, yet just as it’s getting interesting, the song stumbles to an abrupt and unceremonious stop.
In its off-the-cuff aesthetic, Crush Songs isn’t too far removed from Karen O’s early work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, except that the shrieks of “Art Star” and “Black Tongue” have been replaced by acoustic strums and falsetto notes. For the past decade or so, she has proved herself one of the most surprising and in-the-moment performers of the young century, through not only her vocals but her entire self-presentation: the smears of lipstick, the pre-Gaga outlandishness of her outfits, the unlikely balance of confrontation and communalism she projects from the stage. Even when seemingly every band out of New York was landing a record deal, Karen O lent her band a colorful volatility that their peers couldn’t be bothered to muster. While others played it painfully cool, she put herself as far out there as she could.
So it’s all the more disappointing that, despite the rawness of these recordings and the private nature of their creation, O sounds weirdly noncommittal on Crush Songs, as though the sparse demo arrangements were a form of holding back. It’s no coincidence that the album sounds best when there are several ideas and instruments in play at once, as with the drum loop and harpsichord on “Visits”. But how much better would “Body” sound with even a rudimentary band behind her? How easily might the Yeah Yeah Yeahs turn that half-hearted hook on “Rapt” into a show-closing punk anthem? In the end, very little is gained from the austerity of the presentation on Crush Songs, and we can only imagine what is lost. | 2014-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cult | September 10, 2014 | 5.8 | f0e32a36-8e20-4913-b203-4b385de2c4b6 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Produced in her home studio in Los Angeles, Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album embraces the complications of the past two years. It is her most epic record, yet lyrically it is her most insular. | Produced in her home studio in Los Angeles, Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album embraces the complications of the past two years. It is her most epic record, yet lyrically it is her most insular. | Sharon Van Etten: We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sharon-van-etten-weve-been-going-about-this-all-wrong/ | We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong | All through “Darkish,” a song toward the end of Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album, birds twitter away in the background. It’s the sparest track on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, which Van Etten produced in her new home studio in Los Angeles: just open-ended chords of inquiry on her acoustic guitar, buoying a similar openness to her steady but inconclusive meditation on what it takes to nurture the home you always yearned for. There is a thread between “Darkish” and Van Etten’s earliest CD-R recordings, a set of similarly intimate vignettes on which you could often hear a train rattling past the window of her tiny New York apartment. The changing ambience plots the material distance she has traveled in 14 years, from her DIY beginnings as a young woman fleeing an abusive relationship and claiming a space of her own, to a mother, partner, and beloved songwriter. What has remained constant—and compelling—is her instinct to use music to both shape and challenge her domestic environment.
The idea of a “pandemic record” already seems passé to many musicians apparently determined to avoid the association. Yet Van Etten has enthusiastically characterized We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong as one, and despite its declarative title, she embraces the complications of the past two years: how this rupture has affected her relationships, her priorities and responsibilities, and her capacity for hope. It’s her most epic record; her tenaciously beautiful voice is streaked like burning embers through the terrible black wildfire smoke she watched creep toward her new family home. But it’s also lyrically one of her most insular. She morphs between disembodied texture—as she sings about craving destruction, she becomes just another weightless shade of oblivion amid the cosmic winds of “Born”—and stinging, bewildered focus. “Been writing on the dust,” she all but roars over the uneasy martial rumble of “Darkness Fades,” a reference to the wildfire ashes that caked her car in the driveway. Here, in the confrontation between fatalism and futility, she captures the absurdity and anxiety of having one’s small life buffeted by dramatic external forces.
With every record, Van Etten has managed the difficult feat of expanding her sound without smothering her appeal: After 2014’s fluid Are We There, her 2019 album Remind Me Tomorrow embraced distortion and damned atmospherics. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is a raging bonfire, and although its scale is monumental, it boasts a revealing depth of field, every dramatic arc finely detailed. The tension doesn’t break until the third song, “I’ll Try,” when a hard, sharp drum roll lets loose a staticky ooze and a crescendo that sparkles with a little new-wave glitter; meanwhile, she considers helplessness in the face of fear with sincerity and a sneer. The album’s choruses are fierce, primal pleas, though Van Etten knows that want is never that straightforward, and surrounds them with verses mired in distance and confusion. “You come home to me,” she yearns on “Home to Me,” a future message for her young son that anticipates him resenting her professional commitments, and confronts the reality of who needs who more.
As beast-sized as it is, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is also a destabilizing record. Remind Me Tomorrow opened with Van Etten telling someone that she almost died, but she didn’t tell us how—a pointed non-disclosure from an artist whose early work detailed the emotional violence she sustained from a partner, and who came to feel the weight of that association as a public figure. Here, her lyrics are more fragmented and opaque than ever, keyed to an internal logic (often they take place at night, and contour conversations between lovers) and sometimes feeling almost unfinished, or purposefully restrained: “It was something like a window, and I wanted to break free,” she soars on “Born.” Fans of Van Etten’s sharp songcraft could find that frustrating, but her impressionistic approach builds a more effective picture of fear and human insufficiency than simply stumbling to articulate the ineffable might. “You love him by the stove light in your arms,” she sings in a tremor amid the tumult of “Anything,” a rare, tangible moment of safety.
Many of these songs invite you to drift in their tidal lurch, which gives the few moments of directness their prickle. Van Etten saves her most corrosive textures for the most intimate song: “Headspace” is a declaration of need set to a dangerous, industrial throb that’s strewn with sonic detritus—a powerful evocation of how sex can become conflicted territory in a long-term relationship. “Pull my hips, remind you, see/Ten-year-old white cotton briefs want play,” she pleads with disarming awkwardness, before finding indignation and vulnerability: “Baby, don’t turn your back to me,” she sings in a towering refrain. It’s followed by “Come Back,” a blast of Van Etten at her most classic and clarion, a reliable lighthouse illuminating a path to safety.
When romantic realignment comes, it brings humor and us-against-the-world swagger. “Even when I make a mistake, mistake, mistake/It’s much better than that!” Van Etten sings triumphantly on “Mistakes.” It’s the biggest pop song she’s ever written, a terse disco beat grounding her alluringly cool and close vocals. “I dance like Elaine,” she admits, “but my baby takes me to the floor/Says ‘More, more.’” Sparks fly, restoring her confidence for the length of a song. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong isn’t the sort of album to offer instructions on how we might make things right. But having faith in one another, and ourselves, Van Etten hints convincingly, might be a good set of foundations to build from. | 2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 9, 2022 | 7.8 | f0e94026-1ff0-4140-b569-0945df69fbf2 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The Atlanta singer’s subdued new EP is less interested in reliving drama than finding peace. | The Atlanta singer’s subdued new EP is less interested in reliving drama than finding peace. | Summer Walker: Clear 2: Soft Life EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/summer-walker-clear-2-soft-life-ep/ | Clear 2: Soft Life EP | There are few things more emotionally gutting than being abandoned by a romantic partner during your first pregnancy. Well, maybe the women he cheated on you with gloating about it on social media. On 2021’s Still Over It, Summer Walker aired her dirty laundry, calling out her ex for being a liar, clout chaser, and deadbeat, sometimes over his own production. “I wanna start with your momma, she should’ve whooped your ass,” she sang. Now, some boyfriends and babies later, she’s less interested in writing about life resembling an episode of Love & Hip-Hop. She’s finding serenity.
Navigating romantic love is a hellscape for Black women; degradation and fetishization seem pre-programmed into your life script. It’s why artists like Megan Thee Stallion and City Girls adopt confrontational, borderline misandrist personas as suits of armor. Walker knows that maintaining a tough exterior gets exhausting, and the title of her latest EP, Clear 2: Soft Life, aspires to comfort and ease. On the wearied neo-soul of “Hardlife,” she longs for someone to provide for her, jealous of women “with they feet kicked up/And they glass in hand.” Black men were a source of animus in her earlier discography, but on the slow-grooving opener, collaborator J. Cole offers flattery and gratitude: “I’m sendin’ you, SZA, and Ari my love/Y’all holdin’ us down, y’all holdin’ the crowns,” he says in an “audio hug,” a bare minimum gesture that models Walker’s current bar for the men in her life.
Progress isn’t linear; Walker still indulges in some thrilling dysfunction on “New Type,” where Childish Gambino plays a lover who can barely afford dinner at McDonald’s yet still finds a way to criticize her body and choices. You can tell there’s something about a fixer-upper that she finds irresistible, but when she invokes another infamously good-for-nothing man, the one on Erykah Badu’s “Tyrone,” it’s because this time she has the wisdom to distinguish between a worthy partner and a time-waster. She is naturally hilarious, an undeniably compelling orator. She feigns apathy to get a man to chase after her on “Pull Up”—“Stop touchin’ me, I’m gettin’ out”—but is unable to conceal that she’s a giggly romantic at heart: “You funny, I love you too.”
Trudging through her messy personal life and emerging on the other side, Walker models growth for the people who saw themselves in the jilted narrator of Still Over It. “We’re going to evolve mentally, spiritually, physically, financially, um, emotionally,” she resolves on the spoken-word closer “Agayu’s Revelation,” backed by twinkling pianos and light woodwinds courtesy of Solange, Steve Lacy, and John Caroll Kirby. For Walker, the “soft life” isn’t just poolside wine spritzers: It’s learning from your mistakes and developing self-compassion. Don’t try to spin the block on her until you’ve got clear chakras and a heavily annotated copy of all about love. | 2023-05-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | LVRN / Interscope | May 26, 2023 | 7.1 | f0f3bd80-dc8f-48b2-8f3c-bf0b742befdb | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
A taster before their new LP arrives, Youth Code's A Place to Stand EP, is comprised of four original tracks and remixes of four earlier cuts by the likes of Sanford Parker, clipping., God Module, and Silent Servant. The new EP boils down the grittiness of their early material and the more polished EBM of last year's *Youth Code *to their common denominators: namely, punk, tempered with an understated pop sensibility. | A taster before their new LP arrives, Youth Code's A Place to Stand EP, is comprised of four original tracks and remixes of four earlier cuts by the likes of Sanford Parker, clipping., God Module, and Silent Servant. The new EP boils down the grittiness of their early material and the more polished EBM of last year's *Youth Code *to their common denominators: namely, punk, tempered with an understated pop sensibility. | Youth Code: A Place to Stand EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19826-youth-code-a-place-to-stand-ep/ | A Place to Stand EP | Angry as they may seem, the driving hearts behind Los Angeles duo Youth Code are madly in love. It all started three years ago, when Ryan George—a veteran punk who cut his teeth playing with straight-edge band Carry On—met heavy metal roadie Sara Taylor at a mutual friend’s gig at a club in their native Los Angeles. As the two’s relationship blossomed, they discovered a mutual adoration of aggressive music: hardcore punk, speed metal, and curiously, minimal electronica. Early on, the duo's dates consisted of long strolls-turned-jam sessions conducted in the LA backstreets, searching for any scrap of metal capable of producing a beat, eager to milk music from even the rustiest old machines. Their low-fi, high-volume vision rapidly expanded, though, resulting in a crushing 2012 demo and last year's glossier (but nonetheless crushing) self-titled debut. These days, Youth Code's idea of a date night resembles a political rally for the Wax Trax! crowd: against a backdrop of riot footage and snarling dogs, Taylor thrashes around onstage, pounding her chest with her fist and unleashing glitch-ridden screams as George plugs away at the ancient keyboards in the corner. They’re two gears operating separately, and yet they share the same cog.
A taster before their new LP arrives, their latest set of tunes, the A Place to Stand EP, is comprised of four original tracks and remixes of four earlier cuts by the likes of Sanford Parker, clipping., God Module, and Silent Servant. The new EP boils down the grittiness of their early material and the more polished EBM of last year's *Youth Code *to their common denominators: namely, punk, tempered with an understated pop sensibility. Associations with the former genre have been reiterated by the band numerous times in interviews, both with regards to their musical upbringing (“We’re these shitty punk kids making industrial,” Ryan shrugged in response to the band’s vociferous reception) and their steadfast devotion to D.I.Y. craftsmanship. But despite Taylor’s recent declaration that her band was “not going to write a fucking pop record”, there’s no questioning the influence of styles well-removed from the hostile terrain Youth Code calls home.
As a result, these songs strike a curious paradox: they're aggressive, noise-ridden, angst-ridden and forlorn, but the soundscapes shouldn’t put off anyone who’s heard a lick of Godflesh or tour mates Skinny Puppy. Sure, Taylor's snarls on opener “Consuming Guilt” sound like her vocal cords were rubbed with steel wool, and the clattering factory noise on the chorus will definitely prove aural candy for the Ministry set; but within the context of the song’s steady four-count, verse-chorus-verse blueprint, the song's melodic flourishes (the mournful keyboards on the chorus, the dark-wavey driving hook) belie a popper construction that solders surprisingly well to Youth Code’s punk worldview. Mechanical ambience and surly new wave make for compelling bedfellows on “For I Am Cursed”, with Taylor’s vocal glitches punctuating George’s piston-pumping beats at odd intervals. “To Burn Your World”, meanwhile, could have been a cut on the soundtrack to some hellish arcade game: the whooshing crescendoes that echo her vocals sound like some sinister power-up.
Given Youth Code’s roots (along with their penchant using for propaganda footage in their stage shows), it’s unsurprising that their personal politics stretch beyond a musical context. These concerns are laid out in detail on the last new track on the EP, an airing of grievances fittingly titled “A Litany (A Place to Stand)”. As the drum kit totters wildly in the background, a steady stream of sixteenth-notes alternated with quick bass jabs, Taylor warns of all toxic baggage that will be entrusted to the next generation: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and above all, hatred. Her diction is blunt and arresting—"The time has come where we stop mandating what rights others do with their free bodies, where we stop looking upon other as if they were just bags of discarded, unworthy flesh”—but as the beat rages on in the background, with nary a dynamic shift or noise blast in sight, the track begins to sound like a soapbox postscript without a working compass. This transience overshadows A Place to Stand as well, making it less a unified statement and more along of a sounding board for the musical and political concerns with which the band continues to grapple. Youth Code have handled things pretty well by themselves up to this point—and as any self-taught engineers know, sometimes the instruments of destruction just need a closer inspection. | 2014-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Metal | Dais Records | September 19, 2014 | 6.8 | f0f63f9d-aad3-43d8-9af7-b95d980144f3 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
This latest reissue from the legendary soul singer features some of the greatest love songs ever made. It also reminds us of a tall and tarnished legacy left behind. | This latest reissue from the legendary soul singer features some of the greatest love songs ever made. It also reminds us of a tall and tarnished legacy left behind. | Bobby Womack: The Poet / The Poet II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bobby-womack-the-poet-the-poet-ii/ | The Poet / The Poet II | This review contains mentions of sexual assault.
Bobby Womack’s music would have been a soothing ointment for the year we all lived, forced to be apart from loved ones and giving eulogies while thousands of miles from the final resting place. But it’s become harder to listen to Bobby Womack. His ministry of love, with its testimonial delivery carried by a gravel tone that’s one-part rock star, one-part blues-bar regular, has taken a darker pallor through the decades.
In 1981, he released The Poet, a beautiful interrogation of love, lovemaking, desire, and despair. Three years later, he would release The Poet II, completing his dual dissertation of the one emotion we can’t live without but have never been quite able to figure out. With his star finally reaching the heights that had eluded him, stories of alleged sexual assault fell to the wayside or became salacious industry gossip rehashed only to outline that Womack was wild. Hardly ever was it to inquire on the welfare of the women involved, particularly Barbara Womack, the musician’s wife, who’d been previously married to soul legend and Womack’s mentor Sam Cooke.
In 1964, after Cooke was shot, Womack married the still-grieving widow and took in Cooke’s 11-year-old daughter, Linda. Five years later, Barbara would catch him in bed with his now 17-year old stepdaughter. Recalling that moment, Bobby said, “I’m lying there kissing Linda and the light comes on—‘You dirty fucking bastard. What are you doing with my daughter?’ It was Barbara.” Numerous publications called it an affair, Bobby escaped with a bullet graze, and Barbara packed up her bags and left. “If You Think You’re Lonely Now,” a standout track from The Poet, has brought millions of listeners to the pinnacle of romantic bliss tinged with regret. But listening to it—a perennial favorite—compels me again to consider what it means to examine the brutal histories of men. What do we do with the deeply personal emotions brought to the surface by work that allowed us to cry and encouraged us to love?
On a scale of artistic inventiveness and an engagement with violence against women, the former has borne greater importance when it comes to taking stock of a public figure’s legacy. Marking the 40th anniversary since its release, The Poet will soon be reissued accompanied by The Poet II, and both are notable for putting Womack on the map in a definitive way. In the ’60s and ’70s heyday of soul’s reinvention, with a little help from R&B, it was no secret that Womack had a musical gift, having supported acts such as Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones both vocally and with his gold-churning pen. But true fame never quite lasted, and someone else’s light always seemed to burn a little brighter. That is, until 1981. In less than 40 minutes on The Poet, Womack delivers beautiful range, both in his lyrics and melodies. “Lay Your Lovin’ On Me,” “Stand Up,” and “So Many Sides of You” are funky, disco-inflected jams perfect for the roller rink with friends and the one you could love. The latter could seamlessly blend as a more mature pop hit, written by Womack alongside Jim Ford, a prolific songwriter who knew how to meld emerging genres with the standard forms that still brought fans to the record store.
Six years before the album’s release, Womack’s brother Harry was stabbed to death by his girlfriend, and it’s that life-shifting loss that bleeds through “Just My Imagination.” While the lyrics speak of romantic love, the melody is somber and funereal, the chorus almost gospel-like in its acknowledgment of incomparable grief. The sadness feels like one you can’t quite come out and say, so you use a lesser tragedy to address the one that’s too painful to share out loud. It’s a tender projection of the shades of grief: the memories of joy, the waves of loss, the stages of healing.
“Secrets” sneaks up on you. It’s a ballad dedicated to an alluring lover and filled with the familiar labels of “mystery” when the answer is usually more straightforward: sensuality and sex come when you feel safe. This idea has evaded even the best of music’s crooners, content to chalk it up to an inexplicable cause. The song made me think of Barbara and how she might have felt around Bobby as his intentions for her welfare and her daughter changed. When she left, Linda married Bobby’s brother Cecil and wrote several songs for Bobby, including “I Wish I Had Someone to Go Home To,” from The Poet II. A successful singer-songwriter in her own right, Linda never addressed that experience with Bobby, its impact on her relationship with her mother, or the ensuing years that found her collaborating with someone who had most likely taken advantage of her when she was still a teenager.
It’s the women who shine on the second album; Linda’s pen and the Godmother of Soul, Patti LaBelle, who is an effervescent presence on “Love Has Finally Come At Last” and “Through the Eyes of a Child.” Her appearance on the former arguably led to Bobby receiving his first top-10 R&B hit since 1981. LaBelle was ascending as a solo star in 1984, and Womack hitched a ride. In a 1996 interview, LaBelle recounted in painstaking detail being sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend when she was 12, and again by singer Jackie Wilson and his assistant at a Brooklyn theater in the early ’60s. “It was like my schoolteacher or somebody, someone you look up to is trying to take advantage of you,” she said. “I was saying, I can’t believe this is Jackie Wilson.”
Linda Womack and Patti LaBelle are two women who experienced sexual violence in their lives. While they were able to heal and move forward, one can only imagine what we would have lost had their voices been silenced by the men who harmed them. “Where Do We Go From Here” is the final song on The Poet, and in more ways than one, that is the question, isn’t it? What do we do with Bobby Womack and his music? Not because of “cancel culture,” but because violence against women has been so normalized that acknowledgment and accountability are seen as solely punitive moves to discard a person and their contributions instead of protecting future generations.
The Poet and The Poet II are good albums that exist because opportunity and space were made for them. It’s their range that illustrates our capacity to exist alongside multiple truths, possessing the emotional bandwidth to address each with the required amount of compassion and care. Womack was an impressive artist. His music touched millions of souls. We should have the ability to listen and hear the women the same way we listen to ourselves. The inner conflict can be private, but the listening should be public and universal.
Buy: The Poet / The Poet II
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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. | 2021-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Rock | null | March 20, 2021 | 7.5 | f102dd17-eddb-4cba-b65f-1d4c1ec433f0 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
Presented as an hour-long Untold mix with a few new, unmixed extras tacked on, Hemlock Recordings Chapter One tells a chronological story of the label as it stands now. | Presented as an hour-long Untold mix with a few new, unmixed extras tacked on, Hemlock Recordings Chapter One tells a chronological story of the label as it stands now. | Various Artists: Hemlock Recordings: Chapter One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17302-hemlock-recordings-chapter-one/ | Hemlock Recordings: Chapter One | When London label Hemlock started in 2008, the term "dubstep" meant something different than it does now: There was no such thing as Skrillex or Taylor Swift songs with vaguely dubstep-influenced choruses. Dubstep was not used to market cereal. The music had started out as another step in a continuum leading from Jamaican reggae through British techno; the most mainstream versions of it now function more or less like arena rock, with hot guitar solos replaced by "heavy, dirty, filthy" bass drops. This isn't a eulogy for what dubstep was or a criticism of what it became, just a statement of fact: times change, things trend, and what was once essentially just a genre of underground dance music having awkward brushes with popular culture is now a brightly colored Hot Topic t-shirt declaring, finally, SEX, DRUGS & DUBSTEP.
The role labels like Hemlock played in this transformation is pretty negligible. Even before dubstep's more widescale commercialization, they represented a boutique alternative whose releases were more diverse and usually less immediate than more iconically dubstep artists like Digital Mystikz, folding in house, electro, minimal and other sounds from outside the sphere.
The label's cofounder, Jack Dunning-- who records as Untold-- makes violent, corrosive little sound sculptures that resemble people trying desperately to catch their breath or the clang-on-clang of demolition sites. In a quote that stands as one of my favorite statements of artistic purpose, he once told Resident Advisor that, "I want to make people screwface, shout, dance weird." Hemlock put out James Blake's phenomenally great first single and remix, which sound like gospel if gospel were designed to terrify you instead of make you feel safe; they've also put out singles by magpies like Ramadanman and Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Presented as an hour-long Untold mix with a few new, unmixed extras tacked on, Hemlock Recordings Chapter One tries to tell a story of the label as it stands now. Almost 20 minutes of the mix is new material, including the tacked-on songs. "The tracks I play these days are basically house or electro, but made by producers who came through dubstep," Dunning said in an interview last year. "People are writing stuff that sounds like minimal techno, grime, juke etc, but it has a twist, an edge that carries through some of the trademarks of the original dubstep sound-- sub bass, darkness, space and unpredictability."
As evidence of his own argument, Dunning's mix moves in roughly chronological order, from the label's stuttering, lopsided first singles to its firm, house-influenced recent output. The change isn't just rhythmic, either: Hemlock's early tracks sounded hard, flat and airless, like the music had been vacuum-packed, while a lot of the mid-mix material-- especially Guy Andrew's "Resistivity" and Sei A's "Hyphen"-- sounds like its playing from inside a fog bank. (For a visual metaphor, try a Piet Mondrian next to a Gerhardt Richter.)
For a celebration of the past, it's a progressive and unsentimental attitude to take, but Dunning has always seemed like an admirably progressive and unsentimental artist-- he knows that all these familiar oldies were once new, too. But the format has its drawbacks. Some of the best older tracks have clever, winding structures that make them more interesting as start-to-finish pieces of music than raw materials to chop up and use in a mix. There's also something a little inbred about hearing an hour of tracks coming from the same place, even when a third of them are new. More than anything, the mix just seems like a formality-- the thing that techno labels do because other techno labels do it.
What it reveals about Hemlock is, again, what Dunning wants it to reveal: They never had a single exclusive sound to begin with. The affiliations between the artists here have less to do with dubstep and more to do with a misfit love of nasty sounds probably best exemplified by Dunning himself. He has said that his own pseudo-scientifically titled Change in a Dynamic Environment EPs from this year were attempts to use dance music's tendency toward short releases to capture small shifts in personal style, as well as evidence of his almost compulsive predisposition toward the new.
There's something sentimental about a commemorative release for a label that has only been around for four years. At least with Dunning you can take comfort in the knowledge that if they ever do this again, the sound will have changed just as much, if not more. | 2012-11-29T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-11-29T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Hemlock | November 29, 2012 | 7 | f1036a43-d653-4d24-8002-932eed2f9066 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Cuzznz is an album-length collaboration between Snoop Dogg and Daz Dillinger, real-life cousins who have never stopped recording together despite Daz's lower profile. Several songs on the album are produced by Dâm-Funk. | Cuzznz is an album-length collaboration between Snoop Dogg and Daz Dillinger, real-life cousins who have never stopped recording together despite Daz's lower profile. Several songs on the album are produced by Dâm-Funk. | Snoop Dogg / Daz Dillinger: Cuzznz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21440-cuzznz/ | Cuzznz | For the better part of the last decade, Snoop Dogg has trafficked in clicks and views more than in listens. He's capitalized on his celebrity as well as any veteran rapper: He’s just recently spun a web-series into a legitimate TV talk show, he’s still nursing and launching on-brand marijuana industry investments, he makes headlines ranting to Bill Gates about Xbox on Instagram. But his music felt like a listless afterthought (remember Bush?). Daz Dillinger, Snoop’s cousin, has kept a lower profile: Despite producing for 2Pac on albums like All Eyez on Me, his biggest headlines of recent years are probably from him trying desperately to get a Dogg Pound biopic off the ground. Still, the two have never stopped recording music together.
Cuzznz, a full-length collaboration between Daz and Snoop, was announced with the October release of a new Dâm-Funk-produced song called "Sho You Right." Another new single, "Best Friend," followed, but the album is primarily an outgrowth of years-old mixtape material repurposed as album filler. New songs pepper the tracklist instead of providing its substance, and several of the recycled tracks were throwaways to begin. Adding to the album's "what is this thing?" quality: A limited hard-copy version was supposedly released last fall, but it’s just recently become available digitally. Cuzznz was also released by a record label apparently operated by Daz Dillinger himself, and, a handful of new songs aside, it seems entirely possible that Snoop isn’t aware that his cousin has compiled this effort.
Of the 14 songs on Cuzznz, around three are exclusive to the album. The newer songs, including previously released tracks from an EP last year, offer the only continuity here, largely attributable to Dâm-Funk. Dâm's’s production on the album, the type of low-stakes but infectious funk boogie he mined for 7 Days of Funk, is the sustained highlight. "It’s Not a Secret," an Auto-Tune-laced glider, brings the best out of Snoop’s lazily conversational delivery. "Have U Eva" accomplishes the same trick, and Daz’s contrastingly shouty verse here might be his best on the project. "N My System" is an off-kilter spin on the same sound; the track is chunkier and a looped up cowbell lends an unexpected flair to the beat.
By contrast, the oldest song here, "Keep’a N***a High," dates back to 2012 and was a sparsely produced dud back then too. A couple of other older songs, like "Happy Birthday" and "Phenomenon," come off like failed experiments, and neither neither rapper escapes looking awkward. The generic reggae hip-hop beat of "Six N’Da Morning" offers Snoop a chance to revisit the unfortunate, forced Jamaican patois of his 2013 Snoop Lion persona. The song also highlights the type of clunky bars Snoop has stretched thin for years: "We headed to the hookah bar/ Man, I’m chilling like a superstar," he says, only half-rapping. The same delivery might work over different production, but here it snags: These days Snoop can’t reliably carry a beat so much as slip into it.
At its best, Cuzznz is breezy and digestible, a funky outlet for the type of relaxed rapping that both artists can still spew out endlessly. Unfortunately, the album’s low points are the most memorable, not only because the music is sloppy and dated, but because the songs feel so awkwardly cobbled together from previous projects. Especially for a pair of accomplished veterans, the album functions primarily as unnecessary compilation. If anything, Cuzznz might leave a fan wanting less instead of more. | 2016-01-21T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-21T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Felder / Dilly Recordz | January 21, 2016 | 6.1 | f107cb3c-b055-448e-a3bf-c5a6da874ea3 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The 1960s French pop star Françoise Hardy was one of the few of her era to cross over, inspiring rock stars like Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. She wrote most of her own material, setting her far apart from her peers, and her songs have resonated with romantic loners everyone. | The 1960s French pop star Françoise Hardy was one of the few of her era to cross over, inspiring rock stars like Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. She wrote most of her own material, setting her far apart from her peers, and her songs have resonated with romantic loners everyone. | Françoise Hardy: Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles / Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour / Mon Amie La Rose / L’Amitié / La Maison Ou J’Ai Grandi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21098-tous-les-garcons-et-les-filles-le-premier-bonheur-du-jour-mon-amie-la-rose-lamitie-la-maison-ou-jai-grandi/ | Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles / Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour / Mon Amie La Rose / L’Amitié / La Maison Ou J’Ai Grandi | In the 1960s, French yé-yé pop stars had a particular shtick. They were teenage girls, dressed up in bows and baby doll dresses, singing flirty songs about love and adolescence penned typically by adult male songwriters. France Gall sang of swallowing "lollipops", Chantal Kelly sang of telling an older lover she’s only 15, Clothilde was forced to sing bloody fables. When the songs weren’t sexually charged jokes, they were melodramatic pop ballads about youth, from Chantal Goya’s unpredictable heartache to Sylvie Vartan’s simple dance-driven desires.
And then there was Françoise Hardy. She wasn’t quite a black sheep of the genre, but she certainly complicated the formula. The Parisian singer auditioned for Vogue Records at 18 and went on to top charts with her very first release, a 1962 self-titled record now known as Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles based on its hit song. From there, the infamously timid Hardy became one of the few French pop stars of the era to cross over, jetting from England to France to record, serving as a muse to designers like Yves Saint Laurent, and inspiring Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.
That debut showcases Hardy at her simplest, wringing rockabilly-tinged pop magic from modest jazz percussion and steel guitar. Hardy wrote most of her own material, setting her far apart from her peers, and on her debut she penned every song but two. Her lyrics would never hew this close to yé-yé traditions again: See the "whoa-oh-oh" echoing on tracks like "Il Est Tout Pour Moi" and her cover of Bobby Lee Trammell’s "Oh Oh Chéri". The title track "Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles" remains an iconic vision of Hardy's aesthetic: frank music for romantic wallflowers. "They walk in love without fear of tomorrow," she sings in French of the young couples she watches on the street. "Yes but me, I’m single with a tormented soul, yes but me, I’m single because nobody loves me."
The five albums that make up Hardy’s reissues are really compilations of four-track, seven-inch singles. Because of this, some of these records feel disjointed, a side effect from compiling songs that weren’t initially made to sit next to each other. Such is the case for her next three records, Le Premiere Bonheur Du Jour, Mon Amie La Rose, and L’Amitié. Still, each has a different story to tell about Hardy’s musical influences at the time. Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour pulls from American girl groups, echoing the Crystals and the Ronettes on "L’Amour D’Un Garçon", "Nous Tous", and "On Dit De Lui". Elsewhere, the record boasts electric organ arrangements on snappy jazz-inspired tracks like "L’Amour Ne Dure Pas Toujours" and "Comment Tant D’Autres".
On Mon Amie La Rose she explores a Morricone influence that was inchoate on Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles. "Mon Amie La Rose", based on the poem by Cecile Caulker and Jacques Lacome, and "La Nuit Est Sur La Ville" are terrifically spooky and cinematic, the latter depicting Hardy wrestling with cheating with a man on a lonely dark night. Elsewhere, she dips her toes in plucky Western country-rock on "Pas Gentille" and "Tu Ne Dis Rien". But with L’Amitié she zigzags between all these references: She’s the cowgirl guitar-heroine on her cover of "Non Ce N’est Pas Un Rêve", a dreamy wall-of-sound pop charmer on "Le Temps De Souvenirs", and folk singer on "L’Amitié".
No matter her inspiration, Hardy’s music is bound together by her point of view, which is part of what makes her fascinating. Her songwriting is profoundly lonely, frequently insecure. Observers have emphasized Hardy’s anti-social nature as a celebrity, but you can hear it even in her music. Like all introverts, she seems most alone when surrounded by others, her insecurities ricocheting off those around her. On Tous Les Garçon Et Les Filles' "La Fille Avec Toi" she reaches out to an ex only to see him with another girl, bemoaning how beautiful she is. "I dream of losing myself, if only I can lose myself with you," she sings on L’Amitié’s "Tu Peux Bien". On Mon Amie La Rose’s underrated star track "Tu N’As Qu’Un Mot A Dire", she pines for an old lover, singing the verse in hushed tones like someone hugging the sidelines before rushing desperately to the forefront for the chorus, filled with shrill, swooning violins: "You just have to say the word and I’ll return," she cries, breathing urgency into a word as simple as "toi."
It wasn’t until her fifth record La Maison Où J'Ai Grandi that Hardy grew into a more grown-up, baroque sound, one that matched the depth of her sorrow and its complexities. It was her most well-produced, well-written record to date, cohesive in sound and subject matter. Over harpsichord and Hardy’s own Spanish guitar, she echoes the previous four albums' worth of lip-quivering romantic longing, reflecting on what it means to lose love once you find it, or when it doesn’t live up to your fantasies. On "Si C’est Ça", her whispery voice and hushed guitar playing operate on the same frequency. "Maybe this is the moment I prefer, the moment, despite it all, where everything could suddenly switch, where life could change at last," she sings to a lover who is leaving her on "Surtout Ne Vous Retournez Pas". "So I say nothing." The girl whose greatest fantasy was once having a hand to hold now wishes to let it go.
What always made Hardy’s music stand out from her yé-yé peers is how it tackled adolescent desire: Hardy was often consumed with romantic extremes. She reveled in chest-clutching longing, but her adorations came from a place entirely her own. Her obsession with love was devoid of older, male sexualization or control, a privilege not many others of her era enjoyed.
Hardy’s songs feel timeless in how they emphasize a universal dream for pure love. Is this music antique in its sound? Surely. In its sentiment? Hardly. Aside from a few anachronisms ("I’m fine with the movies, for rock, the twist and the cha-cha," she sings on her first album’s track "Je Suis D’Accord") this is '60s pop devoid of vintage signifiers; nobody goes steady, nobody sings of dying an old maid, there is no cutesy, wink-filled posturing. Sometimes, especially in Hardy's choice to cover male singers, her music feels almost devoid of gender. For a genre so tethered to young women of a certain time period, this is a feat.
On Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour’s quick little track "Le Sais-Tu?", Hardy finally sings directly to the object of her affections, but she’s forgotten what she yearned to express. She keeps stopping to sing, "did you know?" as if stuttering: "I so dreaded, did you know, this second, which made me think of the end of the world ... One in which you’re there, holding in your hands without maybe even realizing it: my destiny." There’s a reason her music crossed so many country and language barriers, and it wasn’t just because she looked like a model and hung out with the Rolling Stones. These songs map a sort of adoration that derives its intensity from youth but lingers with us for the rest of our lives. Not many pop stars sing about that these days. To the joy of romantic loners everywhere, Françoise Hardy built her career on it. | 2015-10-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | October 21, 2015 | 8.6 | f112def6-b79b-4f63-8eb9-de2a782e21ae | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
On a remastered and remixed edition, the brilliant third record by the Champaign, Illinois band represents the platonic ideal for what Midwest emo has to offer. | On a remastered and remixed edition, the brilliant third record by the Champaign, Illinois band represents the platonic ideal for what Midwest emo has to offer. | Braid: Frame & Canvas (25th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/braid-frame-and-canvas-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Frame & Canvas (25th Anniversary Edition) | Don’t take it personally if the literal meanings within Frame & Canvas remain elusive after a quarter century: Braid themselves aren’t entirely sure what it’s about either. Five years ago, upon the 20th anniversary of their brilliant third album, singer/guitarist Chris Broach admitted he couldn’t make heads or tails of “Ariel,” while co-frontman Bob Nanna favored a kind of physical impressionism, the actual lyrics bearing little resemblance to the points of inspiration captured in its tail-chasing melody. The most narrow reading of Frame & Canvas plays up its importance by taking its title at face value, rendering it a snapshot of a very specific milieu: 1998 graduating class at the University of Illinois. The most accurate reading is what everyone outside of the world recognizes in its fitful dynamics and irrepressible exuberance: “a dream for the teens and in-betweens, and twenties yet unseen,” making “the leap” not to level up or climb the ladder, but rather to fly blindly into whatever comes next.
It’s that last quality which makes Frame & Canvas the platonic ideal for what Midwest emo has to offer. The music is cerebral and introspective yet subject to unpredictable physical impulse; the musicianship is acrobatic but too jittery to reveal its virtuosity; the lyrics embody a sense of wanting to experience everything the world has to offer while trying not to be paralyzed by the fear of missing out on any of it. Frame & Canvas begins on an airplane, ends in a tour van, and spends its entirety in motion. The center of “The New Nathan Detroits” only holds if all four members charge at equal and opposite speeds. The chorus of “Collect From Clark Kent” sticks a seemingly impossible landing after consecutive backflips, emo’s equivalent to a Biles II. “I drink too much and you sing too much,” Nanna hyperventilates on a song called “Breathe In.” There are prettier songs, but no ballads: “Never Will Come For Us” and “I Keep a Diary” twinkle and sigh as the wheels keep spinning, Nanna watching vast stretches of anonymous America pass by, “as slow as Rapid City.”
Even Nanna’s lyrics refuse to stay in one place, words constantly nudging themselves into new shapes, the product of a fidgety mind forced to entertain itself through hours of idle time: “A cast of kittens, the cats we’ve been kissing,” “If deception is fine, then this is divine/Define divine,” “You’re moving like a movie.” All the while, outsiders try to alter the trajectory. Parents beg for a moment of reflection to consider the future, not just what lies ahead in the next week or the next college town. “When the boys want in/Boys will be boys/Boys will be poison boys,” Nanna warns on the prophetic “Urbana’s Too Dark,” the title alluding to a movement at the U of I to install more street lights as a prevention measure against sexual assaults. Friends urge them to ignore punk’s self-defeating ideals (“Let’s not settle for satisfaction/We are women and men of action/Let’s stop clapping, let’s start doing”), as there will be plenty of time to paint floors after we’re done naming the stars. “Collect From Clark Kent” memorably compares long distance romance to Superman getting trapped in a phone booth. The most memorable hook doubles as Braid’s modus operandi: Go!
These strengths were all loudly apparent in 1998 and every year leading up to this one. Upon this remixed and remastered 25th anniversary reissue, Frame & Canvas is not a Numero Group-style excavation nor is Braid experiencing an unexpected uptick in relevance aside from an obvious anniversary. Though the reputation of emo as a whole has fluctuated wildly since Braid first broke up in 1999, Frame & Canvas has been held in fairly constant esteem, perhaps more so than any album of its era other than Diary. So it’s fair to ask a question that should accompany any reissue that arrives without a wealth of unheard material: Why?
Though Braid had compiled a dozen indelible songs before they entered a studio, they were short on technical know-how and shorter on funds. This is exactly the kind of situation that led aspirational emo bands to work with J. Robbins during this era, but I’d argue his impact as a producer was more symbolic in 1998. Getting out of town to record in Virginia’s Inner Ear studios lent Frame & Canvas a legitimacy that their previous albums, Frankie Welfare Boy Age 5 and The Age of Octeen, lacked, putting Braid in conversation with Texas Is the Reason, the Promise Ring, and, of course, Jawbox. Between the playfully orchestrated combat of Nanna and Broach’s vocals and the cruel swing of new drummer Damon Atkinson, what were Braid if not a Dischord band without the hang-ups towards emo’s melody and sentimentality?
I’m not gonna lie and say I’ve compared the sound waves side by side; listen to the intro from both versions of “Killing a Camera” back to back and in the remaster, the drums are punchier, the bass louder, the sort of things I’d guess would happen if I simply raised the volume on the original. But throughout Frame & Canvas, there’s greater sense of space in the mix, more pronounced dynamics, more texture in Atkinson’s kinetic drumming, more opportunities to hear Broach creeping around the margins of any given verse before he barges in for the chorus.
If Braid seems like a band that carries more respect than influence, then Frame & Canvas argues that this is largely a result of their inimitability; it’s not easy to sing like Jeremy Enigk or come up with an American Football guitar harmony, but at least you know what to shoot for. Have you ever tried to play a Braid song on a solo acoustic? The more each individual member of Braid gets isolated on the remix, the more clear it becomes how inseparable they are from the whole. Their 2014 album No Coast—still the finest of the “revival”-era reunions—is perhaps the best evidence of this, as streamlined and immediate as anything from Hey Mercedes, but unmistakably more propulsive and vital. You can’t just chalk it up to Broach returning to the fold; 16 years after Frame & Canvas, he wasn’t even screaming anymore.
On the album’s first lyric, Nanna yelps, “1998 looked great on plain white paper,” rightfully assuming that their future was unwritten in spite of their best plans. Frame & Canvas was an unequivocal triumph, not just for Braid, but also for the Champaign-based upstart Polyvinyl Records and thus, the entire concept of Midwest emo. They subsequently toured with ascendant peers in Compound Red and the Get Up Kids and, later, Warped Tour icons All and Less Than Jake. Braid eventually made it to Japan and Hawaii by April 1999 and then broke up months later. “It’s pointless to play if you don’t get paid,” Nanna snarls on “The New Nathan Detroits,” and if touring wasn’t exactly pointless by 1999, it wasn’t sustainable either, mostly for the usual reasons—creative differences that would spawn Hey Mercedes and the Firebird Band, arguments about money and accommodations, regrets about putting relationships and education second. Yet, knowing how the story ends doesn’t mean the optimism and confidence of Frame & Canvas rings false. As much as it’s about Champaign or emo in 1998 or sleeping on floors, it’s an enduring testament to college grads recognizing the terrifying prospects of adulthood and still believing they can power through anything with the momentum of blind faith. | 2023-04-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 14, 2023 | 8.6 | f119af4e-7814-4620-90b7-fc5bfb9df0dc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Released for charity, this star-studded covers album celebrates music from the state of Georgia. It is a joyful affair with sadness lurking in the shadows. | Released for charity, this star-studded covers album celebrates music from the state of Georgia. It is a joyful affair with sadness lurking in the shadows. | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Georgia Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jason-isbell-and-the-400-unit-georgia-blue/ | Georgia Blue | Jason Isbell floated the idea of Georgia Blue just after Election Day 2020. As the country anxiously awaited the results, Isbell tweeted, “If Biden wins Georgia, I’m gonna make a charity covers album of my favorite Georgia songs.” As it happens, Isbell had been toying around with the idea for a while, long enough to create a rough setlist. After Biden took the state, thereby clinching his path to the presidency, that initial clutch of songs was fleshed out by friends and colleagues who were eager to participate: Brandi Carlile, for one, tweeted that she wanted to record the Indigo Girls’ “Kid Fears,” and John Paul White of the Civil Wars quickly offered his services. While other prospective pairings didn’t materialize, Isbell wound up with a rich cast of guests, ranging from legends like bluegrass picker Béla Fleck to emerging stars like singer-songwriter Brittney Spencer.
All of the cameos give Georgia Blue the slight air of an old-fashioned tribute album, the kind that blossomed during alternative rock’s peak in the 1990s. During that decade, tribute albums showcasing a songwriter, style, or trend for edification, entertainment, or charity were so commonplace they almost formed their own subgenre. The artists covered on Georgia Blue also strengthen the connection to alternative rock’s glory days. The album is bookended with two songs by R.E.M., the pride of Athens, Georgia, who also provided college rock’s moral compass during the ’80s and ’90s. R.E.M. is a center of gravity on Georgia Blue, too, as Isbell covers tunes by Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, Vic Chesnutt, and Now It’s Overhead, every one of them a former tourmate, peer, or associate of the band. Even the Black Crowes—whose rousing “Sometimes Salvation” is performed with the Crowes’ original drummer Steve Gorman—are part of R.E.M.’s orbit, as Chris and Rich Robinson, along with Gorman, cite them as a primary influence.
Threaded through the alt-rock covers are songs that feel closer to the traditional definition of Southern music: blues, R&B, soul, and Southern rock. Here, the 400 Unit get to flex their muscles, sounding equally at ease with soulful grooves and jazz-inflected jams. Generally, the older the song, the closer they stick to the original arrangement—but that's not a detriment. Guest vocalist Brittney Spencer enlivens both Gladys Knight & the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” and James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” adding new vibrancy to these familiar oldies. Similarly, keyboardist Peter Levin helps give the lengthy version of the Allman Brothers Band’s “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” a lively, limber swing, so that it never grows dull over the course of 12 minutes.
As good as these renditions are, the emotional heart of Georgia Blue lies in those alternative rock covers, songs where Isbell and the 400 Unit allow themselves some freedom of interpretation. With assistance from Béla Fleck and Chris Thile, Isbell warms and softens R.E.M.’s stark “Nightswimming,” pulling off a similar trick with “Driver 8,” this time with John Paul White. Isbell’s wife and bandmate Amanda Shires gives Cat Power’s “Cross Bones Style” a steely strength, while Isbell milks all the melodrama out of Chesnutt’s “I’m Through” and Brandi Carlile and Julien Baker turn the melancholic undertow of “Kid Fears" into catharsis.
Such emotional bloodletting doesn't necessarily sit easily next to either the roaring “Honeysuckle Blue,” a Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ standard here sung by Sadler Vaden, a former member of the band who is now a guitarist in the 400 Unit, or the easy ramble of Adia Victoria’s version of Precious Bryant’s “The Truth.” Yet the shifts in tone and style on Georgia Blue reflect a wide range of human feeling. At its heart, Georgia Blue is a joyful affair but there's sadness lurking in the shadows. Somehow, that's appropriate for an album conceived as a celebration during a time of crisis.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Southeastern | October 18, 2021 | 7 | f11a027d-aa90-4f6d-890c-35643c7fb750 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Kompakt star and former Closer Musik member returns with a record of maximal oddity, an album far from his minimal roots. | Kompakt star and former Closer Musik member returns with a record of maximal oddity, an album far from his minimal roots. | Matias Aguayo: Ay Ay Ay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13664-ay-ay-ay/ | Ay Ay Ay | This review was going to write itself: "Matias Aguayo killed minimal dead," it would read, this on the heels of Aguayo's 2008 star turn, "Minimal", in which he convicted his home genre of growing stale. It was an easy plotline: The man who helped popularize and expand minimal-- a seminal contributor, as one half of Closer Musik, to Kompakt's early discography, and author of 2005's still-underheard Are You Really Lost-- would, with Ay Ay Ay, re-order our expectations for minimal's future. Ay Ay Ay explodes that meme, however, with an album so far removed from Aguayo's past-- it's a record of maximal, fermented oddity-- that it borders on the bizarre.
Ay Ay Ay is an album composed mostly of the human voice, continuing Aguayo's penchant for silly/sexy singspeak but filling out the rest of the compositions with throaty squelches, triple-tracked a cappella nonsense, and sampled chants. More than simply "that techno guy who sings," Aguayo seems to have developed a childlike fascination with the human voice on par with Timbaland, Rahzel, or (frequent collaborator) DJ Koze. Because of its sparse percussion, preponderance of voices-- chatting, yelling, singing-- and Chilean-born Aguayo's tendency to sing in Spanish, Ay Ay Ay often feels like world music, though less in a 1980s-Borders-Books-and-Music-endcap sense and more because it sounds well-traveled and totally foreign.
Foreign as in unfamiliar: Ay Ay Ay sounds like no other album this year, and it's no stretch to say it's one of the most out-of-character releases ever for Kompakt. Any discussion of musical influence almost seems superfluous, however, as Aguayo spends much of Ay Ay Ay proving his credentials as an inspired goofball. Lead track "Menta Latte", which barrels out of the gate with whumping bass voices, sounds like a group of skilled six year-olds putting Saturday morning to song. "Koro Koro" is Soweto-style pop undercut by compressed, clacking beats. The title track is stepping tropic pop. The clingy "Rollerskate" is disarmingly coherent in its form and presumed function: it sounds like rollerskating.
"Rollerskate" is easily the most parse-able jam; I don't speak Spanish, but Aguayo's history indicates that the rest of the lyrics are husky shit-talk and/or crappy come-ons. It's hard to wonder what else would fit into the hum-hum-grind of "Desde Rusia" or the Talking-Heads-on-E of "Ritmo Tres".
If Aguayo's electronic background rears its head, it does so abstractly, as long stretches of the hour-long Ay Ay Ay can dissolve into prattling sound-soups, the clicks and thumps of the producer's previous work replaced with tongue-snaps and party favor whoops ("Mucho Viento"). Despite the expectations for the record, Ay Ay Ay doesn't redraw the lines of minimal electronic music. Naturally, it's not trying to. It does reroute our conception of Aguayo, however. Ay Ay Ay is a sticky-sweet, unbounded mess, but only the priggish and unimaginative will hold that against it. | 2009-11-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-11-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | November 5, 2009 | 7.2 | f11d90bc-d217-4797-96c2-afdf5b8824f4 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On their first album in 15 years, the Long Island post-hardcore band Glassjaw picks up right where they left off. But their heaviest material yet is, at times, lacking in dynamics and atmosphere. | On their first album in 15 years, the Long Island post-hardcore band Glassjaw picks up right where they left off. But their heaviest material yet is, at times, lacking in dynamics and atmosphere. | Glassjaw: Material Control | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glassjaw-material-control/ | Material Control | Material Control wouldn’t exist if Daryl Palumbo didn’t believe it was “the most Glassjaw-sounding music we could be making at this point.” There is no doubting the purity of their vision, as lead single “New White Extremity” is Glassjaw as hell. Its aggression and abrasive, abstract skronk tie together New York hardcore and no wave, mixed with astringent third-wave emo melody and the CGI’d musculature of nu-metal production—all with Palumbo doing his ocean-sized roar over it all like Long Island’s answer to Perry Farrell. In 2015, the band released “New White Extremity” as a one-off, assumed to lead up to this very moment, where it serves as the opener for the first Glassjaw album in 15 years. If there was any doubt whether Glassjaw can pick up where they left off, Material Control answers it as immediately and literally as possible.
Whether or not they were doubted, Glassjaw were going to act as if they were. They’re a band that’s thrived in a state of constant conflict. Fan favorites from their 2000 debut Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence include “Pretty Lush” and “Ry-Ry’s Song,” chief exhibits among the evidence of their scene’s ingrained misogyny. These were scorched-earth responses to romantic betrayal performed with such energy that they sound like an endorsement. With their 2002 album Worship and Tribute, Glassjaw were positioned as post-hardcore’s Next Big Thing, forged under the pressure of Warner Bros. execs, the Twin Towers of nu-metal (producer Ross Robinson, mixer Chris Lord-Alge), and the band’s own outsized ambitions. It didn’t have the impact of, say, Relationship of Command, but like At the Drive In, Glassjaw followed their frenzied, fraught breakthrough by taking the next decade off.
While creating Material Control, multi-instrumentalist Justin Beck (he and Palumbo constitute the core of Glassjaw) asked a rhetorical question: “Yo, if we were 14 again and recording with Martin Bisi and could just be the illest, grimiest band in New York, what would the environment be like?” This is a smart approach, especially in the wake of recent albums from post-hardcore greats like At the Drive In, Refused, and Quicksand. Think of the fan who found those other albums to be hella soft, who wrongly assumed that Palumbo would remain too committed to the pop ambitions of his regrettably-named electronica outfits Head Automatica and Colour Film—Material Control is for that person.
Material Control certainly can lay claim to being Glassjaw’s heaviest or most aggro album. And though most of Palumbo’s lyrics are too circumspect to get much across beyond their titles (“My Conscience Weighs a Ton,” “Bibleland 6”), he says it’s political in a “George Carlin way.” “New White Extremity” surveys the demographics of a new Brooklyn, which Beck describes as “white people from Kansas.” Despite their multimedia affinity for gruff, hardscrabble NYC cynicism, Material Control lives in the now, one of constant physical and mental confrontation and claustrophobia. Like their hardcore heroes, Glassjaw want you to feel the experience of getting constantly elbowed on the street and the subway, only now it also happens while staring at an iPhone and getting constantly prodded by bad opinions.
Nearly every second of Material Control is meant to duplicate this sensory overload. Beck, in particular, puts forth a performance of remarkable endurance and dexterity, neck-snap riffs constantly battling his textural playing in the right channel, intended as field recordings from the concrete jungle—circular saws meeting sheet metal, the blare of car horns, jammed traffic. Without Dillinger Escape Plan to use as an outlet anymore, drummer Billy Rymer pushes his new band to their most feral extremes, shuttling from groove-metal, d-beat insanity, free-form dub, and tabla-spiked drone in consecutive tracks.
But Glassjaw are so intent on proving they can still Glassjaw that they leave no space to build, to create dynamics or generate atmosphere. They really leave no space for Palumbo, and while there are distinct choruses, there are no hooks. There are more memorable basslines than vocal melodies. If Glassjaw was expected to top their forebears like Orange 9mm and Mind Over Matter as a commercial proposition, though, it was due to Palumbo—a “Jeff Buckley-in-hell post-hardcore,” an unusually magnetic presence for this grotty realm. But he can’t work within these arrangements so much as over or under them. Palumbo elongates vowels while improvising pitch and hoping for the best. Elsewhere, he’s almost completely submerged in a mix created without nuance or mercy.
If you can withstand the initial onslaught of Material Control, it can be plucked for stems: the cooed harmonies on “Shira,” the warm bass countermelodies from “Golgotha,” any of the individual elements of “Pretty Hell.” The latter serves as the kind of U-turn into amniotic balladry that has sustained the midsections of Deftones albums for the past 20 years. Despite its studied dub production, “Pretty Hell” is a mess that wastes the strongest chorus on an arrangement where no instrument appears to be aware of the other’s existence. There are points where Glassjaw can work towards a satisfying payoff rather than going all in at once, like the raga experiment “Bastille Day” and the title track, which both aspire to the symphonic grandeur of major-label Trail of Dead.
To Palumbo’s credit, he recognizes the potency of being that angry, impulsive 14-year-old hardcore kid—though he’s now channeling his adolescent rage towards more worthy targets. On an immediate level, Material Control is a record that simply feels good to have, specifically at the end of 2017—a time when everyone’s coming together to praise the year’s most agreeable rock records, when every day brings further proof that the arc of the moral universe has gone way the fuck off course, when you just want to scream into the void. Think of Material Control as a post-hardcore Long Island tea: it’ll take you back to being a teen when you could care less what was in it and how it was mixed together. The only thing that mattered was whether you got knocked on your ass. | 2017-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Globochem | December 6, 2017 | 6.6 | f12d223c-b748-4e3d-b057-f079a407c3ee | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Featuring Simon & Garfunkel’s studious folk and the easy listening of Dave Grusin, a new vinyl reissue attests that what makes a fascinating artifact does not always make for an especially good listen. | Featuring Simon & Garfunkel’s studious folk and the easy listening of Dave Grusin, a new vinyl reissue attests that what makes a fascinating artifact does not always make for an especially good listen. | Simon & Garfunkel / Dave Grusin: The Graduate (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/simon-and-garfunkel-dave-grusin-the-graduate-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | The Graduate (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Like any good tale of generational conflict, The Graduate will mean different things to different people at different times in their lives. When I first watched Mike Nichols’ film as a college student, roughly the same age as its disaffected anti-hero Benjamin Braddock, I saw it as a coming-of-age tale about the exploitation of youth by an older generation and as a righteous upheaval of middle- and upper-class norms. A lifetime later, when I was closer to the age of Mrs. Robinson, I understood The Graduate to be a horror story about an older woman who, like her young paramour, is searching for meaning but ultimately must endure endless indignities and the ingratitude of the youth.
Neither interpretation is any more wrong or right than the other, but the skirmishes between children and parents and between the young and the old in the middle/late 1960s spills over onto the film’s soundtrack, a hastily organized collection commonly credited to Simon & Garfunkel but featuring just as much—if not more—music by jazz pianist Dave Grusin. It’s not a collaboration between them, more like a war reenactment, with the folk duo representing youth culture and the composer giving voice to their older nemeses with a series of lushly orchestrated easy-listening tunes. Throughout the soundtrack’s short duration, these very different songs and sounds butt heads, sparking some unusual musical juxtapositions as well as some jagged transitions. As this new vinyl reissue attests, what makes the record a fascinating artifact does not always make it an especially good listen.
The Graduate was perfectly timed for Simon & Garfunkel, who by 1967 had released three albums of studious folk music but were nevertheless losing ground to harder rock acts and grittier folkies like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. “One of the duo’s biggest ’sins,’” writes Robert Hilburn in his new biography Paul Simon: The Life, “was that much of its music could appeal to both young people and their parents.” The very things that led many to dismiss the duo—being too bookish, too New York, too self-serious—made them ideal for Nichols’ project. Their gentle harmonies and especially Paul Simon’s lyrics helped him shape the character of Benjamin, who I always assumed had discovered Simon & Garfunkel at whatever East Coast university his parents sent him to and imported them to sunny California. Their music speaks to an intensity of youthful emotion that doesn’t always have a ready or dignified outlet for expression.
Nichols used three songs as placeholders during production: “The Sound of Silence,” their biggest hit to date; “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” their cover of a centuries-old ballad that subtly doubles as an anti-war anthem; and “April Come She Will,” a short, plaintive B-side about the changing of seasons and moods. Together, they form something like Benjamin’s internal monologue, the quiet space in his head where he retreats from the din of the adult world. But they also put him in a very particular place culturally: Simon & Garfunkel may have dabbled in hippie ideas but they were far from countercultural. Nichols’ film arrived the same year as Forever Changes, Are You Experienced?, and Surrealistic Pillow, among other psychedelic touchstones. By comparison, the duo’s austere folk songs would have sounded square and safe, but that only made them more relatable to the young moviegoers who made The Graduate the top-grossing film of 1967. Likewise, Benjamin isn’t meant to be part of the counterculture nor is he part of the establishment, but adrift between the two.
Simon wrote new songs for the film, but Nichols rejected all but one, a rough scrap called “Mrs. Roosevelt” that was little more than a chugging melody and a chorus that namedrops Jesus and Joe DiMaggio. Catchy and evocative, commenting only obliquely on Benjamin’s predicament, it shows up in the film and on the soundtrack in its unfinished form, practically an acoustic demo that hints at the popular version to come. Simon & Garfunkel completed it only after the release of The Graduate, so the film’s most popular song doesn’t even appear on its soundtrack or on this reissue. Released as a single, it became the duo’s second No. 1, the first rock song to win the Grammy for Record of the Year, and arguably their most enduring hit. So here’s to you, “Mrs. Robinson,” for redefining the duo in the public eye and transforming them from folkie squares into establishment hitmakers who could reach the youth audience.
The Graduate pits Simon & Garfunkel against an older, moneyed generation represented by Dave Grusin’s composition, which are grounded in the florid easy-listening and middle-brow exotica of the era—artists like Mantovani, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Henry Mancini, and Bert Kaempfert, and others would play on her expensive hi-fi. He writes and arranges with a knowing wink that plays up the comedic spirit of Nichols’ film, whether it’s “The Singleman Party Foxtrot” dancing around the social improprieties that Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are about to break or the bounce of “A Great Effect” turning sex into a lurid spectacle. Grusin is obviously having a lot more fun on this soundtrack than Simon & Garfunkel.
When I first watched The Graduate, I laughed at these garish pop confections, as though they were themselves the film’s best punchlines. With age and perspective, however, I’ve grown to love their goofy opulence and to realize their grave implications. Just as “The Sound of Silence” voices Benjamin’s vague fears about his future, even a song as frivolous as “Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha” reveals Mrs. Robinson’s deep sadness. She hides all her regrets and pain behind those candyfloss flutes and taffy strings, the jet-setting horns and exotic percussion. With its jarring transitions from one style to another, the soundtrack never quite reconciles these two generations or the music they used to define themselves, and perhaps for that reason, it works less as an album and more as a souvenir from an era when American culture teetered on the edge of enormous change. | 2018-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Jazz | Sony Legacy | June 16, 2018 | 6.2 | f138c074-c986-4903-b9f9-6404369dc4b6 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Punjabi rapper-producer’s genre-hopping second album paints a richly detailed picture of a psyche buffeted by turmoil. Wildly ambitious in sound and scope, it raises the bar for India’s hip-hop vanguard. | The Punjabi rapper-producer’s genre-hopping second album paints a richly detailed picture of a psyche buffeted by turmoil. Wildly ambitious in sound and scope, it raises the bar for India’s hip-hop vanguard. | Prabh Deep: Tabia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prabh-deep-tabia/ | Tabia | On a warm spring evening in 2019, rapper-producer Prabh Deep trooped into a New Delhi rehearsal studio with a group of some of the city’s most impressive instrumentalists. Their goal was to take the Punjabi rapper’s critically acclaimed 2017 debut album, Class-Sikh, and rewrite it for a live band. It was an ambitious undertaking. Producer Sez on the Beat had created a gritty, trap-tinged soundscape for Class-Sikh—skittering 808s, aggro bass synths, loads of samples—that reflected Prabh’s grim sketches of life in a crumbing West Delhi neighborhood, filled with families (including his) that were violently displaced by the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Over five rehearsals, Prabh and the band crafted a radically different sound for the project, incorporating breezy sax solos, chunky alt-rock guitar riffs, and funk rhythms into a fairly impressive rap-rock hybrid.
The One Eight Project—named after his neighborhood zip code—only performed once, headlining a local music festival. But it was during those hasty jam sessions that Prabh began sketching out the basics for his new sound, first showcased on 2019 EP K I N G and now perfected on sophomore LP Tabia (both released on indie hip-hop label Azadi Records). Trap beats and triplets were out, as (mostly) was the militant persona he’d so carefully built up. In its place, Prabh brought in a lush, organic sound that drew inspiration from the Brainfeeder gang and Sounwave’s recent work with Kendrick Lamar. Dreamy synths set the stage, melodies swirling and swooping with languid purpose. The basslines became almost liquid, engaged in a sensual waltz with the shuffling percussion. And tying it all together was a pristine pop sensibility that Prabh had only hinted at in his earlier work.
This left-field turn came at a fortuitous time. Indian hip-hop pioneers such as Mumbai rappers Naezy and Divine, Sez on the Beat, and Prabh himself had spent the preceding few years crafting a new archetype for the nascent Indian hip-hop scene. Details differed according to city and language, but the broad brush strokes aligned: The Indian rapper came from the streets, had a passing relationship with criminality, was strongly rooted in their community, and had a socially conscious edge. This archetype found its most successful form in the gully rap popularized by Naezy and Divine’s “Mere Gully Mein” (produced by Sez), a 2015 track that became such a surprise hit that it inspired an award-winning feature film by Zoya Akhtar, imaginatively titled Gully Boy. The gully rap phenomenon (named after a Hindi term for “street”) generated so much hype that it eventually led to Mass Appeal launching an Indian imprint, with Divine as its marquee signing.
But the attention that Gully Boy brought to Indian hip-hop was a double-edged sword. With millions of rupees flooding into the scene, largely from brands and major labels that had no real understanding of the subculture, commercial airwaves were suddenly flooded with scores of gully rap bandwagoners. The corporate feeding frenzy was intense enough to warrant comparisons to the grunge gold rush. Inevitably, Indian rappers—especially those not in Mumbai, where the boom was largely focused—have pushed back against co-optation by dropping what I call the “poetics of identity” and pushing into bolder, more experimental directions. With Tabia, Prabh has produced the first meisterwerk of this alternative hip-hop vanguard.
Taking its title from the Arabic word for the opening moves in a chess game, Tabia is a concept album that charts the 27-year-old’s search for ever-lasting happiness, detailing all the hedonistic dead ends, lost opportunities, and near-misses along the way. Over the course of 15 tracks and 55 minutes, Prabh explores the tensions between the materialism that’s almost hard-coded into hip-hop and the Buddha-esque self-actualisation that he’s now straining for. The record is a guided tour of his psyche, offering a richly detailed innerworld buffeted by turmoil—successes soured by regret, temptations resisted in vain, hard-earned equanimity lost in moments of madness.
The euphoric synths and Turkish percussion samples of the titular opening track invite the listener into a meticulously crafted dreamscape, offering a brief moment of meditative tranquility before “Qafir” (“Nonbeliever”) drags you into the murky depths of hip-hop excess. Sultry synths sashay suggestively over arpeggiated guitar lines as Prabh paints a familiar scene—an artist caught up in the trappings of early success, believing in their own self-created myths. “Paapi” (“Sinner”) moves deeper into confessional territory. “Oh jad tak mainu pyaar na kre, mai te theek va” (“As long as she doesn’t love me, I’m all good”), he sings on the hook. Combining R&B vocal stylings with the earthy vocal textures of Punjabi folk, “Paapi” sounds like the quintessential fuckboi anthem, until you read between the lines and see a man so deeply uncomfortable with vulnerability that he’s made a virtue of being emotionally unavailable.
A breezy little ditty about the importance of love, “Preet” (co-produced by 15-year-old newcomer Lambo Drive) offers a brief ray of sunshine before the clouds darken again on “Taqat.” One of the record’s few throwbacks to the Class-Sikh sound, “Taqat” chronicles a Prabh drunk on his success, an almost comical portrait of the artist as a young gangster. Most of the song is a power fantasy propelled by co-producer IDEK’s minor keys and overdriven bass lines (there’s more than a hint of Kendrick here). But in the last 30 seconds, the rug is pulled out from under Prabh as he comes face to face with an actual gangster, who quickly strips him of his valuables along with any pretensions about how powerful he really is. “Te hun tu lalae hisaab/Ki bacheya tere kol gyani?” (“Now you take stock/What do you have left, genius?”), asks his tormentor. “Zindagi” (“Life”), comes the cheeky response.
The middle third of the album centers on the two-track suite of “Antar” and “Abaad.” The former showcases a deeply conflicted Prabh veering between unhinged aggression and smell-the-roses serenity at the drop of a hat (the working title for the track was “Bipolar Disorder”). Richard Craker’s production perfectly mirrors the track’s emotional confusion, alternating between hard-edged belligerence and spaced-out dream pop. The first inklings of enlightenment emerge on “Abaad,” a collaboration with SYPS that repurposes an Egyptian afterlife myth—Anubis weighing the heart of the recently deceased against the feather of Ma’at—as a mantra for self-love (“Won’t you trade your heavy heart for happiness”).
By now, Prabh is heady with this first brush with self-knowledge. Lambo Drive’s improvised electro-jazz on “Qaabu” gives way to the lo-fi house of “Huqum,” which segues into the rushing drum’n’bass of “Babur.” There’s more to this genre-hopping than Prabh showing off the range of his influences and songwriting skills. The tempo jumps closely mirror the stop-start ramp-up that accompanies an ecstatic experience (psychedelics/religious ecstasy/oxygen deprivation, take your pick). Meanwhile, the lyrics take on an increasingly messianic tone, peaking with “Huqum”’s cheesy refrain, “Follow me, I know the way.”
Lead single “Waqaf” is the record’s Ten Commandments, a spent but elated Prabh dropping nuggets of hard-won wisdom. “Je tainu lagda tu vada ve boht” (“If you think you’re a big shot”), he raps, “vekh asmaan ch” (“then look at the sky”). Synths swell and wane with lofty dignity, as Prabh’s vocals channel the mysticism of Punjab’s rich Sufi tradition. Richard and Prabh trade in the synths for acoustic guitar and percussion on “Gyani” and “Sthir,” respectively, as reality—and its attendant doubts and self-recriminations—creep back in. By the time closer “Safar” rolls in, you’re already dreading the inevitable. “Yadash chali gayi/Hatha di lakeera badal gayia” (“I lost my memory/The lines of fate on my hands have changed”), raps a mournful Prabh. The track’s chopped-up vocal samples and downtempo keys evoke the fuzzy disorientation of the comedown, as the secrets to life, the universe, and everything slowly slip away like sand running through your fingers. It’s a clever trick, immediately recasting the narrative arc of the album in a new light and tempting you into hitting repeat.
Not that you’d need the encouragement. Despite its grand ambitions and lengthy runtime, the record never feels flabby or self-indulgent. Apart from a handful of stumbles—“Alope” (feat. Zan Twoshades) never really gets going, while the formal experimentation of “Huqum” and “Babur isn’t quite as accomplished as Prabh would perhaps like—Tabia is a meticulously crafted record that pulls you in with the first note and doesn’t let go. When the horns blare out their last morose lament, it’s like a spell has been lifted. You emerge dazed and emotionally battered, sure, but also reinvigorated. In an ideal world, Tabia would be the crossover record that Indian rappers have dreamed of for years, the one that finally makes the world sit up and take notice of Indian hip-hop. Sadly, just making fantastic music isn’t enough when you’re an artist from the global South. For now, Prabh will just have to be content with having created one of the best rap records to come out of South Asia. As far as consolation prizes go, that’s not too bad.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Azadi | April 9, 2021 | 7.3 | f13be5fb-8aea-4d62-b591-8ad3d07c82e4 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
The Canadian punk band’s fifth and final album is a softer, more family-oriented affair, with reflections on motherhood and loss set to metallic riffs. | The Canadian punk band’s fifth and final album is a softer, more family-oriented affair, with reflections on motherhood and loss set to metallic riffs. | White Lung: Premonition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/white-lung-premonition/ | Premonition | Remember when White Lung seemed poised to soundtrack the revolution? Between 2010 and 2016—years that neatly aligned with the liberal complacency of the Obama era—these Vancouver-formed punks unleashed four hard-charging, sub-half-hour dispatches of fury. On career-defining records like 2014’s Deep Fantasy and 2016’s Paradise, you could almost feel the spittle hitting the microphone as singer Mish Barber-Way snarled about body dysmorphia and rape culture while drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou and guitarist Kenneth William absorbed punk melodies into a gnashing, metallic maw.
Then, during the Trump years, White Lung disappeared. Barber-Way took a high-profile job as executive editor of Penthouse, and the band’s reputation was tarnished after the frontwoman, a self-described “equity feminist,” began promoting prominent right-wing voices in the magazine and on social media. Meanwhile, the band started work on their next album. In 2018, Barber-Way was in the studio when she learned she was pregnant with her first child. The album was postponed, then postponed again, and—well, it’s almost 2023, and White Lung’s fifth and purportedly final album has arrived.
Everything has changed for White Lung in the last six years, but on a superficial level, once Premonition revs up, not too much has changed. The singer’s wail is still intact, though more restrained, on songs like “Date Night,” a high-octane standout about a nightmarish date with God, who turns out to be a thrill-seeking, chain-smoking nihilist. William still plays pummeling riffs, this time with a more pronounced thrash-metal influence; on “Hysteric,” he shreds up and down the fretboard hard enough to keep guitar-tutorial YouTubers in business.
Such gestures belie the album’s softer, family-oriented hue. As in any thirtysomething’s Instagram feed, babies are an overarching theme. In interviews, Barber-Way, who now has two young children, has described how impending motherhood changed her approach to songwriting. “It was like this baby inside me was taking up everything I had,” she told author Melissa Broder. “I was consumed. I became fixated on that feeling, so the album is about the transition to motherhood, pregnancy, and the massive life change that I embarked on during the lull between our last album.”
When Scott Stapp learned he was to become a father, he welcomed his child with arms, and music video budgets, wide open. Like a pop-punk answer to the Creed staple, “Bird” addresses Barber-Way’s unborn baby and envisions the awe of finally meeting him: “I want to know you/We are forever/Where are you hiding?” she wails in one of White Lung’s most melodic and anthemic choruses. “Girl” is framed as advice to a future daughter, though neither the faceless melody nor rhymes like “I must confess/You’ll get depressed” match the poignancy of the subject. More affecting is “If You’re Gone,” a metal-tinged lament about suicide and the grieving children it leaves behind.
When a punk band that thrives on raw immediacy spends five years making an album, some skepticism is warranted. The songs sound tight and punchy, filling out their arrangements with glistening synths, but the careening intensity of White Lung’s earlier work is absent. Overdubs don’t help; on tracks like “Girl” and “One Day,” Barber-Way’s vocals are layered in multitrack harmonies that flatten the vigor of her voice. The album’s songs were tracked in a piecemeal fashion—“We’ve never played them all in a room together,” the frontwoman said recently—and it shows.
Back in 2014, Deep Fantasy captured the ferocity of an absurdly tight band playing together in a room, thrashing against the walls and playing off each other’s anger. That ferocity has faded. By contrast, Premonition sounds like talented professionals working remotely. Fitting, perhaps, for an album that’s largely about leaving the punk lifestyle behind and finding joy in family instead. | 2022-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | December 19, 2022 | 6.6 | f14034d7-a598-409d-b205-68d019cc7af7 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Rummaging through glam, teen-pop, and garage-punk, this Chicago band exudes an earnestness almost as pure as its recording levels are deafening. | Rummaging through glam, teen-pop, and garage-punk, this Chicago band exudes an earnestness almost as pure as its recording levels are deafening. | Smith Westerns: The Smith Westerns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13358-smith-westerns/ | The Smith Westerns | Girls know what boys want. But a little subterfuge can still go a long way. On his hit single, 22-year-old singer/rapper Drake insists, "This one's for you," then cops some "gray sweatpants, no makeup" sweet talk en route to envisioning himself "all up in your slot." He recently admitted to MTV that "it's not the most heartfelt song." Where Drake talks dirty and sounds Auto-Tune clean, the Smith Westerns take the opposite approach. Like the Beatles, though, these four Chicago teenagers don't want to hold your hand-- they want to do more.
Don't let the Fab Four mention throw you: From this young Windy City group, retro-rock doesn't feel like a history class. Rummaging through 1970s glam, Phil Spector teen-pop, and Nuggets garage-punk with the youthful abandon of kids finding new toys in the attic, the Smith Westerns' self-titled debut exudes an earnestness almost as pure as its recording levels are deafening. Their simple, sweet choruses about boys and girls in love could spike the punch at a 1970s TV show (OK, "Freaks & Geeks"/"That '70s Show") school dance. Parent chaperones would be none the wiser.
When singing guitarist Cullen Omori, his bassist brother Cameron, second guitarist Max Kakacek, and a drummer known to Google only as Hal have the tunes to make themselves heard over their vintage aesthetic, The Smith Westerns' teenage kicks are hard to beat. Take string-swept glam ballad "Be My Girl", which softly punctuates one of the year's most wrenchingly innocent hooks with somewhat pervier pick-up lines. There's less lyrical subtext, but no less raunchy production, on the glam-rock boogie of "Girl in Love", a come-on cursorily addressing the fleetingness of youth. It's only fitting that in a year-old YouTube video featuring scratchy sockhop swooner "Tonight", the Smith Westerns both look and sound like the Black Lips' good-bad not-evil twins.
These guys are sort of literally true to their school-- garage-rocker Miss Alex White is a fellow Northside College Prep magnet-school alum-- and their time on the road with the likes of Jay Reatard and Nobunny is evident on fine 60s-style frat-rocker "Gimme Some Time". With fuzzed-out xylophone, frenetic opener "Dreams" suggests the group's most recent tour with Girls and Los Campesinos! might serve them better for a follow-up. "Diamond Boys" almost earns its piano on the strength of its adolescent grandiosity, but "We Stay Out" lets lo-fi become the end rather than the means, with a guitar line that sounds like a bee buzzing underwater.
Japandroids, another loud punkish group concerned with youth and girls, ask a cathartic question on Post-Nothing's "The Boys Are Leaving Town". DFA signees Free Energy channel Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town" on their recent "Dream City" single. The Smith Westerns turn to lighthearted psych-folk for their own declaration: "Boys Are Fine". Then, on blithely woo-oohing fuzz-popper "The Glam Goddess", they actually go and say it: "I wanna hold your hand." Boys will be boys. | 2009-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-08-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | HoZac | August 7, 2009 | 7.7 | f1461ee3-50aa-4adc-b7d4-fc9d3cd8cba0 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | 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 Mercury Rev’s 1991 debut, a heroic dose of psychedelic rock that is equal parts nerve-wracking and awe-inspiring. | 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 Mercury Rev’s 1991 debut, a heroic dose of psychedelic rock that is equal parts nerve-wracking and awe-inspiring. | Mercury Rev: Yerself Is Steam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mercury-rev-yerself-is-steam/ | Yerself Is Steam | Sure, you could look at the birth of Lollapalooza in 1991 as the tipping point when American counterculture turned into big business. But you can’t deny, on those early tours, a lot of insane shit went down. To date, it remains the only festival where you could watch Flea drink Jim Rose’s bile, Eddie Vedder dangle precariously from 30-foot-high scaffolding, and Rage Against the Machine exercise a less-rock/more-cock policy. Ultimately, there were limits to this lawlessness—as one band discovered, it was, in fact, possible to be too weird for Lollapalooza.
On June 26, 1993, Mercury Rev appeared on Lolla’s second stage at the Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in Greenwood Village, Colorado, slotted between “a guy juggling chainsaws” and Tool. Like most of their sets from that era, their performance climaxed with an extended jam on “Very Sleepy Rivers,” the sinister, psychedelic hallucination that closes their 1991 debut album, Yerself Is Steam. But where the song normally provided the band with an opportunity to zone out and surrender to the squall for 15 minutes, on this day, their noise bath was rudely interrupted: After their onstage volume level suddenly dipped, the band noticed their soundman being violently pulled away from the board by security, bringing the set to an abrupt end.
As it turns out, the mayor of Denver was strolling the Lollapalooza grounds and stumbled upon Mercury Rev’s set. He was so sufficiently traumatized by what he heard, he demanded an immediate shutdown. In his estimation, the band sounded “like a bus idling out of control,” and unbeknownst to him, the mayor was actually offering up an astute piece of music criticism. In their formative years, Mercury Rev really did sound like a careening bus headed towards a fiery crash—one where half the people on board were frantically fighting each other for control of the wheel, and the other half were in the back obliviously singing nursery rhymes as the whole bucket of bolts went up in flames.
Hindsight positions Mercury Rev as rare American entrants in the early-’90s shoegaze fuzzbox wars, a claim supported by UK tours with Ride and My Bloody Valentine. But if shoegaze was a collision of melody and noise, both of those elements were generally tuned to the same psychedelic frequency. What Mercury Rev captured on Yerself Is Steam was less a melding of disparate sounds than a battle royale of oppositional ideologies: order and anarchy, ecstasy and terror, purity and perversion.
While Mercury Rev would later become synonymous with the bucolic Catskills area, their saga begins a couple hundred miles west in Buffalo. When the band formed in the late-’80s, the city had become another hollowed-out notch on America’s Rust Belt, ravaged by an all-too-familiar recessionary cocktail of shrinking manufacturing industries, mass unemployment, and population decline, not to mention punishing winters and an inordinate amount of fires. (For a certain generation, no day was complete without hearing Irv Weinstein of Eyewitness News announce another five-alarm blaze in Cheektowaga.) Whatever local bands achieved any degree of national renown at the time—be it the trashy early iteration of the Goo Goo Dolls or fledgling death-metal deities Cannibal Corpse—reflected the city’s reputation as a harsh, unforgiving place to exist.
For much of the 1980s, the future members of Mercury Rev seemed headed down a similar path. In the first half of the decade, a teenaged Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak played drums in local punk band the People’s Front, whose peak achievement (according to a fan site) was having their cassette reviewed by Maximum RockNRoll. By 1987, Mackowiak was a media studies major at SUNY Buffalo and playing bass alongside a quartet of fellow students in Shady Crady, the sort of weirdo indie-rock band that would fill the first-of-three local-opener slot when Sonic Youth rolled through Buffalo—though the fact they featured a flautist (Suzanne Thorpe) and a lead singer (David Baker) who messed around on a Casio SK-1 suggested a certain willingness to subvert punk orthodoxy.
Playing guitar in Shady Crady was Mackowiak’s close friend Jonathan Donahue, whose side hustle booking gigs for SUNY’s student union put him in the orbit of Oklahoma psych-rock misfits the Flaming Lips, who opened for Throwing Muses at SUNY in 1987. After dropping out to serve as their roadie for a few years—which, in the Lips’ case, largely meant operating their smoke and bubble machines—Donahue became the band’s full-fledged second guitarist in time for 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance, the album that dramatically transformed the Lips from acid-punk pranksters into cosmic-pop craftsmen.
As a child growing up in the Catskills, Donahue wasn’t exposed to the record-collector canon; his parents raised him on a steady diet of classical music, Broadway soundtracks, and variety-show country tunes. “I never listened to Pet Sounds,” he admitted to Magnet’s Corey DuBrowa in 2015, “but I liked Sons of the Pioneers.” That music’s sense of wonder and grandeur would stay with Donahue even as he cut his teeth in the grimy late-’80s American underground. Lips leader Wayne Coyne has largely attributed Priest’s artistic breakthroughs to Donahue’s kid-brother energy, and his ability to dream big on a low budget. “He had this little cassette 4-track,” Coyne recalled to Rolling Stone, “and we bought some crappy little microphones and used our guitar effects to experiment with how we would record. He brought that whole thing into it… If Jonathan hadn’t jumped in and encouraged us and added his abilities to ours, I think little by little we would have been frustrated.”
In a Priest Driven Ambulance was also the first album to feature the words “Produced by Dave Fridmann” in the credits, long before that phrase became a shorthand for orchestral-indie extravagance and platinum-plated alt-rock. At the time, Fridmann was studying music production at SUNY Fredonia, about an hour south of Buffalo. A childhood friend of Shady Crady drummer Mike Huber, Fridmann had helped produce a demo for that band at the campus’ studio in 1988, and though that tape never yielded a record deal, the connection would ripple out in the years to come. Around the same time that Donahue was welcoming Fridmann into the Lips’ circle, he was also, he was also enlisting the producer for a new project he was developing with fellow Shady Crady exiles Mackowiak, Baker, and Thorpe.
A lot of experimental music is described as bands making soundtracks for movies that don’t exist. Yerself Is Steam began as soundtracks to actual movies, composed by a band that didn’t really exist. The nascent Mercury Rev started making music together less with the intent of playing gigs than concocting musical scores, be it for student films showing in local galleries, or the nature documentaries they’d put on the TV while they improvised. Limited access to resources and equipment meant they had to get extra-industrious. As recounted to Magnet, Donahue played his guitar through a jury-rigged TV-set speaker; songs were recorded onto answering machine cassettes.
While recording with the Lips, Donahue workshopped some embryonic versions of future Mercury Rev songs, and it was already clear to Coyne and co. that their new guitarist would inevitably need to focus on his own project. (Donahue’s tenure in the Lips would last for just one more record, 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head.) In Mercury Rev’s case, the term “project” could be applied in the literal academic sense: Fridmann agreed to produce their recordings as part of his course-work, allowing Donahue and co. to access the SUNY Fredonia studios in off-hours at bargain-basement rates. Fridmann eventually contributed enough bass parts—and household-appliance sound effects—to become an official member of the group, while drummer Jimy Chambers joined late in the process to effectively serve as the frame around Mercury Rev’s musical splatter. (As Chambers told Magnet: “What you hear is me not knowing what to do and being really uncomfortable.”)
Where the Lips were clearly a product of classic rock, psychedelic, and punk traditions, Mercury Rev were built atop a philosophical foundation more than a musical one. At SUNY, Donahue studied under Robert Creeley, the celebrated post-modernist poet whose minimalist, evocative work often embraced the non-linear logic of jazz. Mackowiak studied under avant-garde filmmaker Paul Sharits and composer Tony Conrad, whose early-’60s drone explorations would lay the groundwork for the Velvet Underground, and whose classroom teachings instilled Mercury Rev with new perspectives on creating art. “One of the first assignments he had the class do was to pick a film or piece of music that we personally strongly disliked, and write about it in a very positive way,” Mackowiak would reminisce to NPR following Conrad’s 2016 passing. “Then the next week, we were to do the opposite, pick something we liked and totally trash it. That was an amazing exercise in opening the mind up to questioning: ‘What is high-brow? What is low-brow? What is good art and what is bad art?’… the distinctions between folk art/folk music and the ‘classics’ were erased.” Baker, meanwhile, didn’t even think in musical terms at all. “It’s more emotion that influences us than music,” he would tell the L.A. Times in 1993. “An influence could be a car backfiring, chocolate, sex, or deprivation of sex.”
In eight songs, Yerself Is Steam uncorks a flood of sounds and sensations, resulting in an awe-inspiring, nerve-racking experience, floating in the liminal space between childhood innocence and adult anxieties. That volatility is reflected in the dynamic between the group’s two vocalists: In Baker, you had a singer who sounded like a malfunctioning tape recorder, randomly pitch-shifting between voice-cracking glee and gothic gloom, sometimes in the span of a single line; in Donahue, you had a stoner crooner who could chase the dark clouds away with his starry-eyed serenades, while tapping deep veins of sorrow. When their voices appear together, they’re not so much playing off each other as fronting two completely different bands in their minds, making a song like “Syringe Mouth” sound like a kindergarten circle-time sing-along being held in the middle of a Butthole Surfers concert.
Given the group’s piecemeal origins, the members of Mercury Rev were always quick to downplay any grand design on their part. Speaking about the band’s creative process to the L.A. Times, Baker said, “We’re not trying to make radio-friendly hits and if there are those song structures there, well, it’s not intentional.” No song advertised that anti-pop manifesto as proudly as “Very Sleepy Rivers,” where Baker freestyles madcap Dr. Seuss-like couplets (“I sensed a new scent, so innocent and bent/I sense a new scent that's innocent and spent”) in his creepiest register, while the band’s seasick groove oozes and churns for over 12 unsettling minutes. But even at its most confrontational, Yerself Is Steam is ultimately a testament to Mercury Rev’s innate melodic fortitude.
The album’s totemic opening track, “Chasing a Bee,” is a study of contrasts upon contrasts: its acoustic refrain suggests a certain campfire tranquility, yet Baker recites the verses as if they were koans: (“It’s not as easy as it may seem/Remember that yerself is steam”) with the queasy discomfort of someone who really needs to get to the bathroom. But when Donahue steps in to deliver the chorus, his blissed-out vocal is answered by a punishing blast of distortion—and even that can’t prepare you for what occurs at the 3:07 mark, when he and Mackowiak unleash a discombobulating shock of feedback that feels like Earth splitting open. (That sudden intrusion is reflective of the album’s combative tug-of-war mixing process, where the final product was often determined by which band member got their fingers on the faders last.) And yet the song’s calming choral hook ultimately sticks the landing, with Thorpe’s flute melody serving as the safety cushion.
Where many shoegaze bands used noise to corrupt or outright obliterate their pop sensibilities, Mercury Rev seemed to treat each song like a laboratory test to see what their core melodies could withstand. The nine-minute fuzz-covered stunner “Frittering” sounds like a mid-’70s Neil Young ballad slowly fading out of broadcast range on a late-night drive. But rather than obscure its emotional intent, the static-soaked production amplifies the song’s melancholy and strung-out confusion. And even the album’s unwieldy, cardiac-arresting centerpiece, “Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell T’ Center of Yer Heart,” demonstrates a fine balance of chaos and craft, by reimagining Sonic Youth’s “Expressway to Yr Skull” as a Wagnerian symphony. If Mercury Rev weren’t yet at the point where they could afford a string section, they could certainly approximate the thunderous power and cavernous sound of a live orchestra.
As far out as Mercury Rev ventured sonically, their music was always anchored by a strong sense of place. The album’s most compact (and Lips-like) psych-pop statement, “Coney Island Cyclone,” is the first entry in what would become a long-standing Mercury Rev tradition of incorporating New York State scenery. And while “Blue and Black” makes no explicit reference to its setting, it is undoubtedly the most vivid song ever made about surviving a Buffalo winter. “It’s so cold outside,” Baker intones in an impossibly low voice, while the huff and puff of a percolating coffee machine animates each frost-covered breath. But the introduction of a glistening piano melody, dreamy guitar swirls, and blood-pumping percussion magically transforms this greyscale scene into a Technicolor fantasia, crystallizing that moment when you peek out from your parka and notice just how beautiful all the snow looks in the moonlight.
Mercury Rev could afford to be hyper-local in their approach because there was never any expectation that these songs would find an audience beyond upstate New York. But the band found a sympathetic ear in the UK micro-indie label Mint, who released the album in May 1991 and was able to get it in the hands of British music-press tastemakers like Simon Reynolds and Chris Roberts. Six months before Nirvana’s Nevermind turned the underground upside down, the UK hype machine was trumpeting Mercury Rev as American indie rock’s next great saviors. And that’s not because they saw them as potential rock stars, but as the “alternative to the alternative”—torch-bearers for a transgressive aesthetic that seemed to be dissipating as leading freak-scene luminaries like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Butthole Surfers were trading up to major labels and streamlining their sound. In a move that seems unfathomable in today’s depressed music-media economy, Melody Maker actually flew Roberts to Fredonia to see Mercury Rev perform—despite the fact the band had yet to perform a single show, and therefore had to swiftly arrange a local bar gig for their British visitor.
By summer, the overseas buzz around the band was loud enough to earn them a place at the Reading Festival for just their third-ever gig. (Improbably, their fourth gig was an opening slot for Bob Dylan at Yale University.) On stage, Mercury Rev were even more unhinged than they were on record; both physically and behaviorally, Baker was the antithesis of the typical rock frontman, a convulsive human conduit for the band’s live-wire energy. But once the post-Nevermind hysteria overwhelmed the music industry in early ’92, major labels could look at a band this strange with dollar signs in their eyes. After their first North American distributor, Rough Trade, went belly up, Mercury Rev signed a deal with Columbia to properly release Yerself Is Steam in the U.S., where CD editions came appended with the bonus non-album single “Car Wash Hair,” an atypical orchestral-pop delight that let a radiant dose of summery sunshine into Mercury Rev’s forbidding Buffalo-spawned sound-world.
With its chirpy trumpets and beautifully sundazed melody, “Car Wash Hair” pointed to a bright future for Mercury Rev—but it would take them many years to get there. Despite all the rave reviews and Peel Session invites, Mercury Rev’s sound was ultimately too proggy in scope and too violent in execution to put up Nirvana numbers. Extensive touring behind Yerself Is Steam and its equally frazzled and bedazzled 1993 follow-up, Boces, took a heavy psychological toll on a group that never intended to play together outside the studio, leading to some infamously acrimonious incidents that rival Oasis and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. The tale of Baker trying to gouge out Mackowiak’s eyes with a spoon on a transatlantic flight—leading to a ban from Virgin Airways—may not be entirely true, yet it was easy enough to believe it was. As Donahue is fond of saying, “We’re like the Doors biography, in reverse—all of our weirdness happened first, and then we got sorted out and found some kind of sense in it.”
As such, the Mercury Rev story tends to be divided into two chapters, the first of which came to a close in 1993, when a dissatisfied Baker left the group—a move that effectively cleared the cloud of chaos surrounding both the band and their music. After steering Mercury Rev’s out-of-control bus onto more stable terrain with 1995’s commercially ignored See You on the Other Side, Donahue and Mackowiak checked out of the alt-rock rat race and retreated into the Catskills, and deeper into their imaginations. And when no one was looking, they came up with 1998’s critically adored cosmic-Americana classic, Deserter’s Songs, the album that turned this once-precarious entity into an art-rock institution, inspired a young Coldplay to reach for the stars, and granted Mercury Rev entry into the kid-flick canon. In Baker’s absence, Donahue’s croon became the focal point, while the music around him blossomed into a fantastical swirl of regal orchestration and sepia-toned atmosphere, ushering in an era where every ambitious indie-rocker of note was calling up Fridmann for some production pixie dust.
However, this reading suggests the Baker-era recordings represent the grueling growing pains that Mercury Rev had to endure before realizing their true potential. And that does a great disservice to Yerself Is Steam, an album with a formidable legacy of its own—you can draw a direct line from here to the mountainous crescendos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the otherworldly expanse of Sigur Rós, and the lysergic melodies of Animal Collective. In contrast to 1991’s other art-of-noise masterwork—My Bloody Valentine’s transcendental Loveless—Yerself Is Steam is an unrelentingly visceral experience that you feel not just in your blown-out eardrums, but in your accelerating heart and butterfly-filled stomach, reminding you that joy and panic often present themselves with the same symptoms. Ten years later, Mercury Rev would go on to release an album whose title perfectly summed up their contented latter-day philosophy: All Is Dream. But on Yerself Is Steam, all is real—this is an album as mystifying, terrifying, and unexpectedly beautiful as life itself.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2024-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mint Films | February 11, 2024 | 9.3 | f14b0ac5-88fa-431e-a65b-646646dacef2 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The last band standing playing primarily dramatic loud/soft instrumental post-rock returns with an LP of loud/soft instrumental post-rock. | The last band standing playing primarily dramatic loud/soft instrumental post-rock returns with an LP of loud/soft instrumental post-rock. | Explosions in the Sky: Take Care, Take Care, Take Care | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15327-take-care-take-care-take-care/ | Take Care, Take Care, Take Care | Four years ago, Explosions in the Sky ended their last album with a short (for them) song called "So Long, Lonesome". It was pretty and melancholy, not so unlike a lot of their other music, really, but as its title suggests, it had the feel of a goodbye. It seemed so final. But no, the Austin quartet is not done. Take Care, Take Care, Take Care finds the band returning with a renewed focus on its most basic sound: multiple guitars with drums and a bit of bass. The piano that helped lend "So Long, Lonesome" its sense of cold finality is gone, and the band sounds confident getting back to the setup on which they built their reputation.
The band famously doesn't consider itself post-rock, but if we're being honest, today they may be the last true exponent of turn-of-the-century post-rock-- unlike Mogwai, they never wandered away from drifting instrumentals constructed around loud-soft dynamics and the contrast between soft guitar tones and pounding drums. Most of their other contemporaries from the period are gone or found dub or electronics or something else. But Explosions in the Sky are sticking to their guns-- Take Care is less ragged than Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, but it's otherwise a very similar album.
So whether or not you dive into Take Care will largely depend on your appetite for loud/soft instrumental post-rock. If your appetite for it is boundless, you will be very pleased by this album, and probably also its elaborate artwork, which can be folded several ways to make the interior or exterior of a building. At its best, Take Care is ruled by drummer Chris Hrasky. The guitars tend to hang on particular figures or throw up an e-bowed haze, and Hrasky is the one who can cut through that. On "Trembling Hands" his drum kit is the lead instrument as he unleashes Keith Moon-worthy torrents of snare, tom, and cymbal, throwing himself at the guitars as though they were a wall to break through.
One could argue that the music here is predictable and even a bit old-hat. We've lived with this sound for well over a decade now, and we have classics to compare it to, including Explosions in the Sky's own work. And that argument holds some water. But the simple fact is that Explosions in the Sky are very good at this particular thing, and it seems as though no matter how many crescendos and diminuendos they play, there remains a certain amount of cathartic power to their music. The emotion in it is ambiguous, and you can read whatever you want into it-- the soundtrack to your rainy day might be the soundtrack to someone else's overwhelming joy, and that too is important to its appeal. | 2011-04-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | April 25, 2011 | 7.2 | f15800d9-5cf3-4d5f-8b0c-fd2298443f08 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On his first solo album since his 2016 collaboration with Jan Jelinek, the experimental vibraphonist blurs the edges of his instrument in compositions both abstract and warmly sentimental. | On his first solo album since his 2016 collaboration with Jan Jelinek, the experimental vibraphonist blurs the edges of his instrument in compositions both abstract and warmly sentimental. | Masayoshi Fujita: Book of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/masayoshi-fujita-book-of-life/ | Book of Life | “Before the solid-body electric guitar, the vibraphone was the ultimate modernist instrument, [a] technology of struck metal and vibrating air, percussion and melody,” writes David Toop in his 1999 musical survey Exotica, which traces “the art of ruins” through everyone from Martin Denny to the Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.. Developed in the late 1920s, the vibraphone became a staple of exotica and cool jazz after the war, its timbre hovering in a fuzzy space between rhythm and ambience, “primitive” and sophisticated. While there have been some titans on the vibes, like Bobby Hutcherson and Roy Ayers, it’s generally perceived as an accompanying rather than lead instrument.
Over the course of a decade—spanning a series of solo albums and a long-standing collaboration with experimental producer Jan Jelinek—the Berlin-based vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita has strived to make his instrument the primary focus, even as he blurs its edges. Fujita uses all manner of manipulation to make it sound like anything but a vibraphone, from electronics to bowing the bars to preparing his pipes with kitchen foil or a string of beads. For Book of Life, he doesn’t need so many tactics. Instead, he emphasizes his heart-stirring melodic gifts, often pairing mallets with violin, cello, flute, and voice. Fujita calls it his most “human” release, but considering the organic, woozy, at times alien atmospheres that arose from his previous efforts, such warmth feels slightly less idiosyncratic than before.
On the stirring opener “Snowy Night Tale,” his instrument glows softly as strings swirl, conjuring the wistfulness and intimacy of the title. And if the cello-and-vibraphone elegance of “It’s Magical” doesn’t lead to Fujita fielding calls for soundtrack work in the near future (perhaps for the next Hayao Miyazaki film), it will be cinema’s loss. Achingly poignant, it soon gives way to more anxious tones, conveying an unusually complex emotional state in the span of just a few minutes. But every once in a while, Fujita and cohorts get uncomfortably close to the mawkish, as on the precious “Mountain Deer.”
It’s when Fujita moves unaccompanied that he ascends to a more contemplative and numinous realm. Despite the relative straightforwardness of their titles, “Fog” and “Sadness” reveal the spacious terrain that Fujita can traverse with only vibraphone. The slow-blooming resonance of his instrument imparts an uncanny sense of both depth and weightlessness as Fujita allows enough space for each overtone to expand, spiral upwards, and decay before the next note arises.
On the gorgeous “Harp,” Fujita seems to mimic the peaceful, unpredictable flow of a body of water, moving this way and then drifting in another direction, his playing evoking flower petals landing on a pond, rippling outwards. If Milt Jackson or Bobby Hutcherson ever had the chance to step away from the jazz idiom to record a new-age album, it would sound as blissful as this. As Fujita moves through closer “Cloud of Light,” his touch is so light that the sound of mallet on metal starts to give way. The piece grows more hushed until it seems that, rather than playing vibraphone, Fujita is simply vibrating the air. | 2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | August 2, 2018 | 7.6 | f15bb302-83c7-4eed-a083-d8a36835aaec | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On his second album, the Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based producer interweaves industrial-strength techno and Asian instruments into a potent expression of rage and anxiety. | On his second album, the Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based producer interweaves industrial-strength techno and Asian instruments into a potent expression of rage and anxiety. | Tzusing: 绿帽 Green Hat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tsuzing-green-hat/ | 绿帽 Green Hat | “Let’s get physical,” a phrase originally made famous by Olivia Newton-John and recently repurposed by Dua Lipa, could serve as the implicit throughline of Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based DJ Tzusing’s sophomore album, Green Hat. It’s not the physicality of polyester-clad hips and pointed fingers, nor of canoodling under a disco ball’s plasticine shimmer; it’s the heart-pounding rhythm of primal instinct, the near-eruptive thump of blood through every vessel, the adrenaline that somehow propels you those few key steps beyond hunters in pursuit. It’s the physicality that arises when words will no longer serve you: when you finally realize that you may not, in fact, have this dance.
To call Green Hat a techno album would be a disservice to the L.I.E.S. affiliate, who disavows purism. And while he may be able to directly name his influences, which range from EBM and Chicago house to the wuxia action genre, he interweaves them into a bass-driven industrial sound, along with his characteristic string instrumentation, that somehow thumps evocatively, even cinematically, rather than being defined by genres or any flouting of them. “I think about the feeling first,” he once said of his production style. And more often than not, the feeling is explosive: “You can feel like you’ve broken someone’s face without actually breaking someone’s face. Isn’t that swell?”
If you were curious about Green Hat’s title, the opening track, “Introduction,” will immediately explain: “Wearing a green hat is a Chinese symbol of a cuckold,” chirps a robotic female voice. Building on themes of cultural standards that he explored on his debut album, 2017’s Invincible East, Tzusing uses Green Hat as a vehicle to barrel straight through questions about fragile masculinity and gendered expectations. Rather than answer them directly, he simply conjures those underlying feelings of anxiety and rage, allowing them to boil over the album’s frenetic breakbeats and walloping four-to-the-floor in waspish synths, screams and growls, and clip-emptying drums. In “Take Advantage,” he even samples Daniel Plainview’s infamous “I drink your milkshake” speech from There Will Be Blood, a winkingly on-the-nose expression of destruction via machismo. Where Tzusing’s A Name Out of Place EPs and 東方不敗 (Invincible East) respectively veered more industrial and more melodic, Green Hat synthesizes these directions into a chaotic, sprawling sound; acid-inflected drum’n’bass grows satisfyingly hellish in “Exascale” before the unexpectedly ambient, Aphex Twin-esque strain of “Wear Green Hat” catches you off guard.
Here, Tzusing’s classic combination of sheet-metal drums and shapeshifting strings becomes its lushest, most dynamic, and most frightening. On lead single “Filial Endure Ruthless,” an opening twang sharpens into razor-edged synths by the song’s end. Not even an LMFAO-style “Woo!” can cut through the menace of “Interlude,” where buzzsaw bass slithers beneath a minimal, germinating synth arrangement. Despite being one of the least texturally discordant tracks, “Clout Tunnel,” featuring Suda, maintains the album’s infernal chaos: Richly layered with viscous drums, cringing squeals, and background sirens that sound enveloped in smoke, it’s like a five-alarm fire set to tape. And let’s not forget the animalistic touches—the growling, hysterical wailing, and straight-up barking that add tangible flesh and blood to steel-boned production.
Though Tzusing’s use of Asian sounds is relatively unique within techno and undeniably central to his style, it would be irresponsible to define his discography simply by its cultural context. His work is frequently discussed as an expression of“dislocation,” as if the geographical distance of his sample packs’ origins from many of the clubs he plays them in were somehow irreconcilable. And this reductive perception seems to loom: “Otherness has often been used in gimmicky ways,” he’s noted, “but then, the Westerners are now looking to Asian stuff. They want that ching-chong shit.” Tzusing’s distinctive timbres and textures aren’t just ornamental or situative, though; they’re part of a deliberate soundscape that illustrates the magnitude of feeling, rather than just explaining its cause. Green Hat is an album that urges you to let it all out, more than anything: drums that punch, strings that rend, screams that pierce because they have to, as naturally as one has to breathe. It’s not about the dislocation, or the patriarchy, or whatever million other structures make you feel like shit, but about feeling like shit in the first place, the need to scream at the top of your lungs, the urge to run away until your legs give out. No matter where those samples came from, they’re just supposed to be heard. | 2023-04-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | April 3, 2023 | 7.6 | f15c60d5-dffd-486f-8fa7-9e93fec3662c | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
The London producer Nathan Jenkins, who once successfully combined Pet Sounds and the music of J Dilla, offers a frequently vocal-led EP of five original tracks and a Robert Wyatt cover. | The London producer Nathan Jenkins, who once successfully combined Pet Sounds and the music of J Dilla, offers a frequently vocal-led EP of five original tracks and a Robert Wyatt cover. | Bullion: Love Me Oh Please Love Me EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16673-love-me-oh-please-love-me/ | Love Me Oh Please Love Me EP | The fact that Bullion-- aka west London producer Nathan Jenkins-- is able to throw a curveball shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, he's the man who combined Pet Sounds and the music of J Dilla to entirely non-terrible effect. Four-and-a-half years after his first material appeared, though, he still hasn't put out a proper debut album, instead darting around releasing unpredictable EPs and the odd single on different carefully curated labels. The Canterbury Mix, which preceded the 2010 EP You Drive Me to Plastic, contained psych-folk strains from the likes of Caravan, Gong, and Robert Wyatt, which didn't particularly manifest itself on the release it heralded. On the Love Me Oh Please Love Me EP, however, Jenkins includes a stringed, aridly dubby cover of Wyatt's "The Age of Self", which curiously lends the collection a modern sentiment: "There's people doing frightfully well, there's others on the shelf/ But never mind the second kind, this is the age of self." It's basically as detached a sneer at the 1% as it's possible to muster.
That's really the only point at which Jenkins' voice rises above the parapet, even on a frequently vocal-led EP. You could allude to a sense of hopelessness in the repetitive refrains of "It's All in Sound", a reserved drone with a Caribou-like itch that spirals into a spectacular saxophone solo. However, Jenkins' templated vocals are one of the EP's weaker links. Here, the pattern is "Thinking up and thinking down/ Whichever way around, it's all in sound/ Walk back and sideways too/ Whichever way you like." The Badalamenti-heavy pads and chipping woodblocks of "Collision" couch awkward verses ("I feel het up/ There is no let up") that slowly accelerate towards a more graceful rhyme: "My vision/ And your vision/ It's a collision." "Keep a Document" urges capturing moments in order to "Watch mum smile again/ She's a child again/ Times are wild again." These blocky verses unnecessarily affect a false and mildly contrived style in what's largely a very fluid EP.
The beginning of the penultimate song, "Family", feels like an Atlas Sound track getting suffocated not by digital crackle, the way that Bradford Cox's material under that moniker often goes, but by taut, ephemeral 1980s synth pop. It's an odd combination that somehow works, the two strains looming over each other throughout until they combine into a luscious harp bounce woven through by bursts of harmonica. "Save Your Lubb" starts off sounding like the rhythm section from Kelis' "Millionaire", and winds from being a light beach-side frolic to a kind of space-age prairie trek, all heavy crevices, strange lunar washes, and widescreen haunt. Unsurprisingly, Jenkins has a knack of leading the listener on a peculiar trajectory, although it often turns out to be a fun wild goose chase. As a whole, Love Me Oh Please Love Me slows from an agitated funk to a dry, Oriental-inflected slump over the course of its six songs, and aside from the odd foreboding draught of reverb, it lacks the freakiness of You Drive Me to Plastic. In that sense, Love Me feels no closer to elucidating what might go on when Bullion finally releases an LP, but it tantalizingly adds to the pot. | 2012-06-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-06-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Deek | June 11, 2012 | 6.8 | f1644975-d5c9-40a3-9543-2638e08ada46 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The London producer’s new instrumental EP is off-kilter, mercurial, and playful, at once a logical extension and a radical departure from his previous work. | The London producer’s new instrumental EP is off-kilter, mercurial, and playful, at once a logical extension and a radical departure from his previous work. | Kwes: Songs for Midi EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kwes-songs-for-midi-ep/ | Songs for Midi EP | Kwes’ music banks heavily on atmosphere. His debut EP, 2010’s No Need to Run, wrapped sketch-like beats in layers of synth swaddling and dub delay, and in 2012, his Meantime EP, the British musician’s breakthrough as a singer, arrived like a small, semi-precious object bundled between pillows of air. His debut album, ilp, presented an even blurrier kind of cherry-colored funk.
But the emphasis there remained on his songwriting and his voice, which snaked through all that digital processing like a serpent in wavy grass. Songs for Midi, on the other hand, is all instrumental, and its six tracks account for the most ethereal music the London producer has made yet. It sounds at once like a logical extension of his previous methods and a radical departure from them, as though he had leapfrogged whatever the natural next step after ilp might have been and leapt boldly into the unknown.
The record is meant as a tribute to his 2-year-old niece, Midori (the title’s a reference not to MIDI cables but to her nickname, Midi), and it feels appropriately childlike—full of playful melodies, music-box pings, and even sounds sampled from the toys of Kwes’ little cousin Connor. Those are presumably the playthings rattling about in the closing “Blox/Connor,” an unpredictable excursion through stuttering chord samples and skittering trap beats that begins whimsically enough but, like many a play date, finishes up in full-on meltdown mode.
Anyone who has ever spent much time with a toddler may recognize something of their psychology in these mercurial tracks, which don’t develop at all in the way you might expect. There’s something of SOPHIE’s balloon-squeak sonics in the EP’s hesitant plunks and zaps, but these songs bear little resemblance to the PC Music school of pop subversion. “Trike” begins with a lyrical plucked string fantasia reminiscent of Arthur Russell before pivoting to a buzzing synth melody that vibrates like a screen door; from there it just keeps moving outward, through squalls of pitch-bent synths, the feeble clicks of a dying wind-up toy, and finally, a climax of dub delay run amok. In the back of your mind, you keep expecting it to return to something resembling an A/B structure, and the song’s refusal to do so leaves you feeling slightly off balance. The other shoe never drops; instead, it morphs into a CGI butterfly and flutters away.
The whole EP is held together by the relatively consonant sounds of the opening “Midori,” in which softly pinwheeling arpeggios fuel a gently meandering path through woodwind-like synths, sparkling chimes, and the wow-and-flutter warble of disintegrating magnetic tape. It’s here, balancing the lyrical impulses of his previous records with the mind-bending sonics of his current interests, that Kwes’ adventurous vision shines brightest. | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | April 14, 2018 | 7.5 | f16ca5e2-32e6-41c4-b87e-8d7ade639011 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
After the simultaneous crescendo and crash of 2011’s Simple Math, Manchester Orchestra's fourth album is 11 bullshit-free rock songs about getting past the bullshit in your life. They sound like Band of Horses at their major-label crossroads, with none of that band's sweep and expanse. | After the simultaneous crescendo and crash of 2011’s Simple Math, Manchester Orchestra's fourth album is 11 bullshit-free rock songs about getting past the bullshit in your life. They sound like Band of Horses at their major-label crossroads, with none of that band's sweep and expanse. | Manchester Orchestra: Cope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19145-manchester-orchestra-cope/ | Cope | If you’re stoked that indie rock no longer has to remotely resemble “rock”, Manchester Orchestra’s fourth LP, Cope, is probably like nothing else you’ve heard all year. "Top Notch" sets the tone immediately and it's that of a fire alarm*—*the drums loudly stutter-stomp, the guitars strain in harmony at an even higher volume, and Andy Hull’s rebel yell is even louder. This is the sort of thing that used to be called “alternative rock” out of habit, and in 2014, it’s actually earned that name.
And yet, Cope once again finds Manchester Orchestra in the netherworld they’ve long occupied: not quite as cerebral as they aspire to be, nowhere near as lunkheaded as they could allow themselves to be, making radio-friendly rock too leaden and static to make reciprocity a foregone conclusion. That’s a shame, since Hull’s clearly an ambitious guy, demonstrated by his leave-it-all-on-the-floor live performances—but the ever-escalating arms race with himself resulted in the simultaneous crescendo and crash of 2011’s Simple Math, where Manchester Orchestra took the latter part of their name to heart and burdened their sturdy, workmanlike rock with Michael Kamen-level bombast.
Cope doesn’t frame Simple Math as a misstep-in-hindsight, although it doesn't try to top it, either; this time around, it's 11 bullshit-free rock songs about getting past the bullshit in your life. Essentially, this is Band of Horses at their major-label crossroads and choosing not to hightail it into the heart of Dixie, alternating between pedal-to-the-floor howlers and bluesy bluster with little else in between. For fans of Cease to Begin, the potential that comparison carries is pretty awesome, except Manchester Orchestra lack any of the aforementioned’s sweep and expanse.
Even if Cope never manages the undeniable wallop of Manchester Orchestra's S&M-friendly “Virgin”, it’s still every bit as exhausting and overproduced. The strings are gone, but there’s not a single yielding surface on any of these songs, and the only respite you get from the roaring, textureless guitars is a palm-muted guitar. Even the high, lonesome harmonies, clearly meant to imbue some kind of human element, sound like digital clipping. Hull also fails to muster warmth and empathy, and despite his promise of Cope being “unrelenting and unapologetic”, he mostly flips “one good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain”: these are loud songs that strike with the blunt force of a Nerf bat, as Hull emotes his heart out without really copping to anything. His lyrics have become tougher to parse, filled with parable and metaphor about relapse, religion and redemption, which makes the lost-soul clichés stick out even more than they previously did.
Look, if you’re anything like me and strive to find at least five real-deal alt-rock bangers per calendar year, it’s easy to pull for these guys*—*they are underdogs within an extremely unique context. Because this stuff can be potent in three-minute shifts, there’s an undeniable thrill in the way “Top Notch” thrashes in place, similar to watching the fight scenes from Iron Man 3 and knowing you’re not going to get that from an arthouse flick. And even if the verses rarely check out, the choruses are pretty fun to yell, and if you can open your heart to yet another imperial rock song called “The Ocean”, well, it’s the most fun of the lot here. And besides, if you think you can just dial this stuff up by turning on your local “alt-rock” station, well, there goes the Neighbourhood. But four albums in, it's becoming pretty clear that the genre in which Manchester Orchestra resides has more untapped potential than the band itself. | 2014-04-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-04-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista / Republic | April 1, 2014 | 5.6 | f17d07cc-367d-4a0f-bf0f-1be049fdea25 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Like its predecessor, the second volume of Night Slugs' label compilation ties together highlights from the roster's most visible and pivotal members including Girl Unit, Egyptrixx, Kingdom, and L-Vis 1990. | Like its predecessor, the second volume of Night Slugs' label compilation ties together highlights from the roster's most visible and pivotal members including Girl Unit, Egyptrixx, Kingdom, and L-Vis 1990. | Various Artists: Night Slugs: Allstars Volume 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17572-night-slugs-allstars-volume-2/ | Night Slugs: Allstars Volume 2 | If you want a sense of where things are headed in bass music through the near future, it's always a good idea to keep tabs on the Night Slugs label-- not because it adheres to or forecasts any specific scenes and movements, but because it doesn't. Its identity in a post-Soundcloud world hinges on extending the UK bass diaspora far outside the confines of Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990's London-- all the way to Los Angeles (Kingdom), Toronto (Egyptrixx), even Savannah, Georgia (Helix), and Lawrence, Kansas (MORRI$). And the Night Slugs sound, such as it is, isn't merely compatible with but hotly anticipates so many potential directions for underground and aboveground club music, all while revealing a deep and adventurous postmodern enthusiasm for its decades of heritage. Run though their three-year catalogue and you'll hear adventurous integrations of boogie funk and electro, deep house, Second Summer of Love rave, first-gen two-step, pirate-radio grime, and white-label dubstep. The label's sonic commonalities mostly extend to a garage-inflected sensibility, a thing for feverishly intricate yet danceable drum tracks, and an intangible mood of refined hyperactivity-- enough to make for a trustworthy imprint, while still keeping its style fairly unconstricted.
Like the first volume of the Night Slugs Allstars series, Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 ties together highlights from the roster's most visible and pivotal members. Its label-sampler format draws off a lot of previously released material, though there are just as many potentially overlooked deep cuts as there are top-tier favorites. It's practically a given that this is a collection for people who've already checked out Volume 1, whether it was their introduction to the label or a culmination of everything they'd already grown to appreciate about it. But it also reveals subtler pleasures at work under the label's purview. There's nothing on here with the instant gravitational pull of Volume 1's appearance by Girl Unit's go-berserk "Wut", the breakthrough single that cranked up the label's early buzz 2 1/2 years ago. But Volume 2 does a lot to show just how much ground one label can really cover.
The handful of new and/or unheard tracks are enough to bolster the ranks and give the diehards something to look forward to, but they're not the kinds of afterthoughts that come across as fans-only barrel-scrapings. L-Vis 1990 delivers "Not Mad", a twitchy stomp of a cut that pits an off-kilter shuffle-beat bassline against nervous chuckles, xylophone rolls, and 85 pop-funk synthesizers. Girl Unit's "Double Take Part II" reconfigures the last minute or so of the Club Rez original so that the shivery slow-jam R&B coda stands alone as its own song-- becoming his most accessibly moving track to date. The East Coast contingent turns in a couple gems, too. The all-tension/no-release drift of Kingdom's "Bank Head" is the most provocative track on the compilation, constructing a whole track off the kind of anticipatory clap-drummed, sweeping chord build that usually prefigures some kind of big sonic epiphany that never actually arrives. (It should work wonders as a DJ set opener.) Egyptrixx's "Adult" is a bit more intense-- there's something to it that feels like the austere future-noir drum and bass of late 90s Photek wrapped around a post-dubstep chassis-- but its ebb and flow pumps laser-cut chords and all-caps bass over an efficiently propulsive rhythm track that lets a lot of air in between the beats.
The rest of the collection is filled out by singles, b-sides, remixes, and deep EP tracks that point towards a more crossover-friendly direction for the label-- one that's trimmed away some of the over-the-top bombast while still prioritizing a sense of rhythmic intricacy. It's a smartly selected cross section that covers a lot of bases: Kingdom's tense horror-flick homage "Stalker Ha", the glowing, prismatic techno of Jam City's "How We Relate to the Body", the luxuriant longing of L-Vis 1990's Javeon McCarthy deep house feature "Lost in Love (Night Slugs Street Mix)", and Helix's frenetic, understatedly titled kick/snare apocalypse "Drum Track". Novel without being gimmicky, body-moving without being overbearing, these are all selections that point towards a rewarding future for one of the most exciting labels in bass music. Whether or not they're pointing the way for some scene or another, the artists of Night Slugs definitely know where they want to go themselves. | 2013-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Night Slugs | February 13, 2013 | 8 | f18d1012-a382-4979-ab35-6bf5eecad29a | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Built around his new custom synthesizer, the latest from the electronic musician and Nine Inch Nails member showcases the vast potential of both the instrument and the artist behind it. | Built around his new custom synthesizer, the latest from the electronic musician and Nine Inch Nails member showcases the vast potential of both the instrument and the artist behind it. | Alessandro Cortini: SCURO CHIARO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alessandro-cortini-scuro-chiaro/ | SCURO CHIARO | Alessandro Cortini, a rock guitarist turned synthesizer expert, is best known as a longtime member of alt-rock mainstays Nine Inch Nails. While this gig surely keeps him busy, he has also developed a reputation for collaborating with luminaries from the dimmer worlds of ambient, drone, and noise—artists such as Lawrence English, Daniel Avery, and Merzbow. These collaborations have helped inform the signature sound on Cortini’s solo albums, pitched somewhere between purgatory and the planetarium.
A lover of rare and vintage modular synths and drum machines, Cortini is well equipped to deploy all the glassy drones, upwelling noise, and electronic pulses he can imagine on releases such as last year’s Illusion of Time (with Avery) and 2019’s VOLUME MASSIMO. And just as his 2017 record Avanti focused on an early-1970s synthesizer made famous by Brian Eno, the palette of his latest album, SCURO CHIARO, centers on one specific instrument. The difference is this time Cortini created the instrument himself, and it catalyzes his lush, lean music into one of his liveliest albums yet.
As Pitchfork reported, the black hole at the heart of SCURO CHIARO’s dark galaxy is the Strega, a semi-modular synth and effects box scrawled with stylish but inscrutable runes. (“Strega” is Italian for “witch.”) Working with the boutique-synth builders at Make Noise, Cortini integrated his favorite features from various cult-legendary modular rigs into one small unit. In other words, he uploaded his musical consciousness into this machine and subjugated it to his will—and if science fiction tells us anything, it will soon rise up and destroy him. In the meantime, SCURO CHIARO succeeds in showing off the unit’s smoky yet lustrous range.
In addition to illustrating the vast potential of the Strega, the album is a showpiece for Cortini. The sound often resembles a tonier Ben Frost, and it has a striking internal consistency: a focus on the infinite fluctuations of limited palettes, a fine way of hanging harmonic flesh on sinewy rhythms, and an urge to slowly explode minute pulses into capacious sound worlds. Each track offers something new: The music of “ECCO” sounds like a huge, heavenly harmonium, while the papery, mechanical whoosh and wheeze of “CORRI” suggests a steampunk Xerox machine run amok. “CHIAROSCURO” spatters plaintive stars on a bassy dome, recalling the cosmic idylls of ’70s groups like Harmonia, before a radiant bolt of noise ignites its sense of peace.
Several highlights suggest the influence of classical composition as much as gearhead exploration. “SEMPRE” prestos an alien rave into an almost symphonic climax, while the music of Steve Reich looms over “NESSUNO,” as bass, percussive treble, and a flute-like whisper relay an inexorable momentum. With all these possibilities at his fingertips, Cortini can seem like a minotaur who built his own maze. Throughout SCURO CHIARO, he stalks his twisting signal paths with confidence and vitality, eager to turn each corner, each knob, and see where it might lead. Blending expertise and extemporization, his work consistently manages to thrill and surprise.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mute | June 10, 2021 | 7.3 | f18e4503-54c4-49af-934d-e22488ea6761 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The motor-mouthed rapper’s latest album reboots him as an heir to the early-’00s pop-punk canon, with Travis Barker producing and playing drums. | The motor-mouthed rapper’s latest album reboots him as an heir to the early-’00s pop-punk canon, with Travis Barker producing and playing drums. | Machine Gun Kelly: Tickets to My Downfall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/machine-gun-kelly-tickets-to-my-downfall/ | Tickets to My Downfall | With his roguish blue-collar image and Hot Topic wardrobe, Machine Gun Kelly always seemed more lightweight than his self-serious rap music suggested. Over the course of four full-lengths and two EPs on Sean Combs’s Bad Boy Records, his audience didn’t grow up with him so much as shuffle listlessly alongside him, waiting for something interesting to happen. Despite flirtations with a more pop-driven sound, he always reverted to moody persecution narratives; he seemed neither aware of nor particularly interested in his place as a white rap star, save for the opportunity it afforded him to squabble with Eminem and make eyes at the elder rapper’s then-teenaged daughter. The motor-mouthed flow which once made Kelly a fixture at Apollo showcases was never in question, but—save for isolated guilty pleasures on 2015’s overblown General Admission and 2017’s schlocky bloom—he never had much to show for it.
Turns out, all he ever needed was Travis Barker in his corner. Tickets to My Downfall reboots MGK as an heir to the early-’00s pop-punk canon, with Barker producing and playing drums. Barker’s fingerprints are everywhere: most of the songs clock in under three minutes, replete with three-chord melodies, big hooks, and breakdown bridges, nestled within the same 85-to-110 bpm sweet spot as blink-182’s singles catalog. “concert for aliens” is the most faithful Enema of the State homage, with its extraterrestrial theme, pulsing Hoppus-ian bass track, and four-note guitar solo. MGK’s singing voice, which tended toward reedy when it wasn’t slathered in bloom’s vocal effects, brandishes a snarl that faintly recalls Deryck Whibley’s SoCal-by-way-of-MTV lilt.
Even the sugariest pop-punk confections occupy a lineage, one which can’t be donned as easily as a studded belt. But the authenticity equation on a record shaped by turn-of-the-century suburban mall soundtracks is different than the one Kelly’s used to as a rapper. In the way that blink’s smirking skate-punk insolence perfectly captured Clinton-era insouciance, Kelly’s mopier navel-gazing is suggestive of a generational attitude—had he arrived a few years later, it’s easy to imagine him finding his footing in the emo-rap explosion on Soundcloud. Unlike blink’s most recent effort NINE, which tried on a modern, synthetic sound in largely halfhearted fashion, Tickets to My Downfall embraces its source material without hedging its bets. “drunk face” chronicles the same cycle of drugs and heartbreak MGK’s been singing about for years, but in the context of a downtempo earworm it echoes American Hi-Fi more than Hopsin. To his everlasting credit, Kelly finally found both a genre and a producer as brazenly allergic to subtlety as he is.
Tickets to My Downfall is a genuine throwback to the post-9/11 gauze of TRL countdowns and Tony Hawk multiplayer. Halsey’s vocals soar on the angsty breakup jam “forget me too,” which might work as a show tune if it didn’t rock so hard. “bloody valentine” is a winningly bittersweet ballad anchored by a sober bassline, whereas the title track is practically operatic—following a dramatic acoustic intro, Barker’s drums lurch between a blistering pre-chorus and a half-time hook. The Iann Dior and blackbear collaborations are laced with light trap drums, making for minor deviations from the template.
The blackbear track “my ex’s best friend” is particularly instructive in terms of the fate MGK avoided with his well-timed pivot. A similarly brooding, tattooed Instagram ex-boyfriend, blackbear writes wallowing R&B from the perspective of the perpetually jilted lover; his vengefulness (“Look at this damage you did to me!” he wails on “my ex’s best friend”) makes him a deeply unsympathetic narrator. As recently as last summer’s “FLOOR 13,” Kelly elicited a comparable you’ll-miss-me-when-I’m-gone spite, taunting “Don’t cry at my funeral” like a sophomore who just coughed up his lunch money. Tickets to My Downfall’s finale “play this when i’m gone” shows the same fatalism, but MGK’s concern—crucially—lies with prospective survivors instead of his rivals. “You’re gonna cry, and baby, that’s all right,” Kelly sings over melancholic guitar strums. It’s more theatrical and more compassionate than his barbed journey-into-the-mind rap records: a win-win.
In a certain sense, Kelly’s rebirth as a pop-punk revivalist might be the ultimate form of fan service—the aesthetic is far more suitable for his diaristic instincts and Warped Tour following. Thematically, Tickets to My Downfall is hardly a departure from MGK’s past work, but the new surroundings lightens his music up considerably even amidst the hormones and histrionics. With Travis Barker on his side, he might win over skeptics accusing him of trend-hopping, but the best part of Downfall is that he doesn’t take the whole endeavor too seriously.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | September 30, 2020 | 6.7 | f193398a-8e3b-4834-8724-0af07b71463c | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Fugazi's third album arrived in 1993 when the underground began seeping into the mainstream. The D.C. band stayed raw and visceral, growing their fanbase while keeping their famous DIY ethics intact. | Fugazi's third album arrived in 1993 when the underground began seeping into the mainstream. The D.C. band stayed raw and visceral, growing their fanbase while keeping their famous DIY ethics intact. | Fugazi: In on the Kill Taker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23209-in-on-the-kill-taker/ | In on the Kill Taker | If 1991 was The Year Punk Broke, and 1993 was when the underground had fully bubbled to the surface, between that, the world got Cliff Poncier, the singer of the band Citizen Dick in Cameron Crowe's 1992 movie *Singles. *Cliff (played by Matt Dillon) is a musician in a band with Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, and has an album out on an independent label. To a large swath of America that was still getting used to Kurt Cobain’s face and R.E.M. winning Grammys, Cliff was the fictional bridge into the world of indie artists. He’s “like a renaissance man” we’re told, but it’s obvious he wants to make it big. Everybody wanted that, right?
Alt was the new normal. Things had gone from “Our band could be your life” to stadium concerts opening up for rock legends and poisonous major label contracts. Nirvana followed up Nevermind with the Steve Albini-produced In Utero, former SST bands Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and the Meat Puppets enjoyed radio and MTV airtime, countless kids got copies of the No Alternative compilation, and grunge was officially a runway style thanks to Marc Jacobs. Fugazi’s independent scene had become a global phenomenon, funded, largely, by corporate money.
Fugazi—reluctantly—turned into one of the last bands standing from the old guard of American punks. They became a band that mainstream kids and college radio stations wanted to check out at the perfect time in their career. Fugazi’s nonstop touring made their music more accessible to a wider audience than ever before. They had an organic buzz that led to better distribution deals, which allowed them to remain fiercely independent. To kids straddling the Generation X and Millennial borders, Fugazi were a touchstone, an introduction into the DIY mindset. Their ability to get people excited without a team of advertisers, big hit song, or anything besides word of mouth is, at this point, the stuff of legend.
And while their hardcore contemporaries were chasing big contracts and slots on the Lollapalooza tour, Fugazi teamed with groups like Positive Force—a Washington D.C. youth activist collective that took on poverty and George H.W. Bush’s war in the Middle East. Fugazi wanted to let you know they stood for things, and that maybe you should, too. Punk was more than just not knowing how to play an instrument but having something to say—it was about starting a zine, doing distribution, or going to a protest to fight inequality in all its forms. They were champions of the utopian freedom of the 1960s filtered through the busted amps of punk. If there was any environment for Fugazi to put out the biggest record of their career, this was it.
Since the band considered live shows to be their most natural setting, Fugazi toured relentlessly between albums. One look at the band’s show archives finds them playing the Palladium in New York City to 3,000 people on a spring night in 1992, Father Hayes Gym Bar in Portland, ME to 750 people a few nights later, then wrapping up an East Coast tour at City Gardens in New Jersey to a hair under 1,000 before embarking on a tour of Europe two weeks later. At some point during 1992, even though none of the band’s 73 shows were played anywhere near the Midwest, they found time to go to Chicago to record with Steve Albini. Self-producing their second LP Steady Diet of Nothing left the band “pretty disappointed at the end of the day with that record,” as Ian MacKaye would later say. Bassist Joe Lally found the experience “weird,” and that going to Chicago to record new songs was less about getting a new album out of the sessions, “it was more about working with Steve.”
The resulting demos were not what the band or producer wanted. The song “Public Witness Program” had the same buzzsaw guitar and sped-up tempo of what you’d expect from one of Albini’s own Shellac songs. “Great Cop,” sounded much more like a raging hardcore song than the band may have wanted. The sessions, which float around file sharing sites and YouTube, would end up being simply a footnote in American indie history; titans from the 1980s underground getting together to mess around. In the end, after they made it back home to D.C., the band received a fax from Albini saying, “I think we dropped the ball.”
The band just couldn’t beat the sound they created in their hometown, so they entered Inner Ear Studios with Don Zientara and Ted Niceley in the autumn of 1992. When they finally emerged playing their first show on February 4, 1993, at the Peppermint Beach Club in Virginia Beach, the 1,200-person crowd got a set filled with almost all new material, peppered with older songs like “Suggestion” and “Repeater.” The band went on an American tour that stretched over 60 shows. In on the Kill Taker was released on June 30, sold around 200,000 copies in its first week alone, and Fugazi cracked the Billboard Top 200. Later in August, they played a show in front of the Washington Monument to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Five thousand people crowded the outdoor Sylvan Theater and this time, when they played their new songs, the crowd knew every word.
Like the albums that came before it, In on the Kill Taker begins small and grows into something larger. Maybe it’s a metaphor for how Fugazi sees the world, or at least the one they helped to build: “Facet Squared” opens with a few seconds of near-silence that builds into feedback, then some guitar mimicking a heartbeat checks in at the 15-second mark, joined in by the rest of the band who work together building up what sounds like it will be a slow jam with no real leader. The guitars, along with Joe Lally’s bass and Brendan Canty’s drums, all work together like a machine. MacKaye’s guitar takes over for a few seconds, signaling the next level the song is about to take. That buildup leads to one of MacKaye’s most furious deliveries as a singer, opening by claiming, “Pride no longer has definition,” with the kind of energy and anger he channeled in his younger days with Minor Threat. The song ends and cuts right into Canty pounding away to start the Guy Picciotto-fronted “Public Witness Program.” Complete with handclaps, a ringing chorus, and Picciotto yelling, “Can I get a witness,” like a punk preacher; it showcases the band at their most driving. This is the closest you get to a polished Fugazi record, but by no means is it slick.
MacKaye, in an interview for Brandon Gentry’s book Capitol Contingency: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, and Noise Pop in Washington, D.C., 1991-1999, believed that little bit of shine was intentional, the result of producer Ted Niceley reacting to what he heard from the popular bands with the same DNA as Fugazi that were getting heavy airplay. “It’s that consciousness of radio,” MacKaye said, “that puts me off a little bit,” while also railing against the producer’s “total fixation on detail.” Yet it’s exactly that consciousness of radio and fixation to details that give In on the Kill Taker its real edge. It’s hard to imagine a song like “Cassavetes,” with Picciotto conjuring up the ghost of the dead director, screaming, “Shut up! This is my last picture,” being sandwiched between the Smashing Pumpkins and Candlebox on a radio station’s playlist. The extra lacquer on top only makes it more scathing and visceral.
There’s no single on In on the Kill Taker. Besides “Waiting Room” somehow becoming one of the defining Gen X anthems, Fugazi never set out to make any one song hold any more importance over the others to try and get radio program directors to pay attention. In fact, on their third album, they threw all curve balls, going from fast and hard to slow to mathy and instrumental. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Picciotto and MacKaye had helped lay the foundation for the hardcore and emo scenes in the ’80s with Rites of Spring and Minor Threat, respectively. The roots of Fugazi were blooming out into hundreds of subgenres and taking hold in regional scenes across the country. Fugazi appealed to such a vast swath of people, something a lot of punk, hardcore or indie bands couldn’t claim in 1993, and In on the Kill Taker had something for everyone.
A song like “Smallpox Champion,” again with that slow start that builds, blows up into Picciotto delivering a sermon, railing against America being a country founded on genocide, “The end of the future and all that you own.” While “23 Beats Off” sounds like a song from Wire’s early years literally stretched and pulled out to nearly seven minutes, MacKaye goes from singing (as best he can) to screaming about a man who was once “at the center of some ticker tape parade,” who turns into “a household name with HIV.” You get a dose of the past, present, and future listening to these 12 tracks.
Lyrically, it’s also one of the more ambitious albums from the era. While burying any meaning beneath a pile of words like Cobain or bands like Pavement were so fond of doing was certainly du jour, Fugazi liked to mix things up. Picciotto flexed that English degree he got from Georgetown, while MacKaye’s muses were Marx and issues of The Nation. The band blends political with poetic, while sometimes erring on the side of the latter. If there’s any deeper meaning behind “Walken’s Syndrome,” besides being an ode to Christopher Walken’s character in Annie Hall, it’s difficult to tell what that is. “Facet Squared,” with MacKaye singing about how “flags are such ugly things,” could either be about nationalism or the facades people wear when they go out in public, you pick. Maybe that’s what they wanted the listener to do.
Fugazi were so unbelievably popular that it was more so the idea of Fugazi had caught on like it was just another adjective like goth or grunge. Even with their famous anti-merchandise stance, an entire small economy of bootleg shirts popped up, including the infamous “This Is Not A Fugazi T-Shirt” t-shirt. The press also took even more notice. Rolling Stone, in a positive review, said Fugazi had inherited the title of “The only band that matters” from the Clash, while Spin wasn’t so hot on it, calling the members “radical middle-class white boys” and the album “rigid, predictable.” The food critic Jonathan Gold, whose music writing tends to be overlooked when discussing his oeuvre, gave it three out of four stars in his LA Times review. In on the Kill Taker wasn’t hailed as a masterpiece or an album that was changing the game, but everybody needed to weigh in on Fugazi.
And as a profile that came out in the Washington Post a month after the album’s release showed, everybody wanted to be associated with them. The article mentions fans like Eddie Vedder, “rock’s couple of the moment” Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and Michael Stipe, who shows up to one of the band’s shows in Los Angeles: “He dances the hokey-pokey in the street in front of the Capitol Theatre with Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty,” in a very 1990s moment. In on the Kill Taker isn’t brought up until somewhere near the bottom of the piece. It was almost like saying that you liked or knew them was like a badge of honor, it absolved you of your own sins. The music was eclipsed by the message.
Mainstream interest in Fugazi was never as strong as it was during the period surrounding their third album. Two years later, when they released Red Medicine, the spotlight had shifted to pop-punk bands like Green Day and the Offspring. Fugazi continued to put out albums and pack shows that usually cost around five dollars, but the press was less interested in figuring out this crazy band with their wild set of ideals.
Many of the people who did pay attention to Fugazi, however, reacted. Like Brian Eno said of the initial 10,000 or so people who heard the Velvet Underground when their first album came out, the hundreds of thousands of people who bought In on the Kill Taker or saw the band as they trekked across America, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, that year and beyond, were impacted in some way. Maybe it was one kid out of 1,200 in attendance on September 27, 1993 who saw them in Philly with the Spinanes and Rancid, or another of the 100 who saw them in Kyoto, Japan. Maybe a 15-year-old girl read about them in a magazine, this band that everybody was talking about, and decided to start her own band. Maybe it was a kid in El Paso, or a kid in Iowa City, or Greensboro. Maybe they inspired another kid to start a zine, which led them to realize they wanted to be a writer. Maybe 10,000 teens were so moved by Fugazi in 1993 that the ideas the band lived and worked by were ingrained into how those people have tried to go out and face the world. | 2017-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dischord | April 30, 2017 | 8.6 | f1a1d80f-9f22-4ca3-9473-2ac14695780b | Jason Diamond | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-diamond/ | null |
The Edmonton-born, Métis singer-songwriter’s debut album is a complex study of webs of interpersonal hurt, and a celebration of emotional survival. | The Edmonton-born, Métis singer-songwriter’s debut album is a complex study of webs of interpersonal hurt, and a celebration of emotional survival. | Sister Ray: Communion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sister-ray-communion/ | Communion | Growing up, Sister Ray’s Ella Coyes never spoke Michif, the language of their Métis heritage. Through colonization and devaluation, the language and many Métis traditions are endangered now. But what Coyes did have to link them to their culture was music. The Métis fiddle tradition and its accompanying jigs, passed down through generations, were the earliest musical expressions that Coyes ever felt connected to. In a 2018 interview, they said it taught them to value music as a communal celebration rather than a place of authority. In writing their own music, a style of indie folk more comparable to Big Thief than to traditional fiddle music, they explained, “That I didn’t feel silenced [is a celebration]. It gave me a lot of power that I had lost.”
That power underpins their debut album, Communion. It’s a complex study of webs of interpersonal hurt, one that attempts honesty without blame and resilience without toughness. Most of these songs explore the blood and guts of a breakup. That’s often visceral: An ex smells like death and lager on “Violence,” and the narrator dreams of reaching “deep inside for your tonsils” on “I Want to Be Your Man”; whether they’re talking about a kiss or an act of gory violence isn’t clear.
Sister Ray’s songs describe moments devoid of safety. There are many references to fire and death. Lust is a creeping, foreboding force, keeping a corpse animated when it should have been buried. Not everything is metaphor; they numbly narrate the mundanities of a breakup, from splitting up the furniture to staring at glow-in-the-dark stars on the bedroom ceiling as the end draws near. Coyes doesn’t airbrush their own behavior; by the end of the record they’ve described themself as selfish, sardonic, and inconsiderate. On “Jackie in the Kitchen,” they recount a time they almost kissed someone else with their partner in the next room. And “Justice” interrogates a larger guilt, that of complicity in both personal and global disaster: “Do I seek justice or merely my own comfort?”
Still, they make room for humor—I smirked to hear them crib a lyric from Eurodance act Cascada on “Reputations,” sounding as if it was a winking improvisation designed to make someone in the crowd laugh. That’s bolstered by Coyes’ vocals, which are conversational and deadpan, often dipping like they’re cracking a joke when they’re really saying something heavy (“Death is all around,” they matter-of-factly lilt on “Good News”). Meanwhile, the musical backing (performed alongside Coyes by Joe Manzoli and Jon Nellen of Ginla, who also produced the album) spotlights that distinctive voice. Only the essential instruments—clean-tone guitar, bass, drums—are mixed up front; the flourishes, like slide guitar and synths, are ghostly echoes in the background, boosting the music’s interior, confessional feel. That said, there’s a slight sag toward the finish line, where a little more variety might have given the album a boost in stamina.
On “Reputations,” Coyes asks, “You always said you’d give me something to sing about; was that a promise or a threat?” With a bitter sense of humor, the question points to the crux of cathartic lyrics like Sister Ray’s: In an ideal world, these songs wouldn’t exist. But in writing them, and navigating old harms, they create the conditions for a sense of safety that eluded the artist in moments of turmoil. Coyes takes control of the things they can and finds grace for those they can’t. It’s not a question of winning or losing, but a matter of their own emotional survival. The most important lesson is right there in the title, Communion: In sharing this survival, they celebrate it. | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Royal Mountain | May 19, 2022 | 7 | f1a6b553-198d-4b7e-bb5a-7874caa21a21 | Mia Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/ | |
The Pitchfork Global Positioning System Satellite tells me that most of you are in the northern hemisphere. As such, it ... | The Pitchfork Global Positioning System Satellite tells me that most of you are in the northern hemisphere. As such, it ... | Converge: Jane Doe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1594-jane-doe/ | Jane Doe | The Pitchfork Global Positioning System Satellite tells me that most of you are in the northern hemisphere. As such, it's summer, and you need a good metal album. Jane Doe wasn't released this year, but sometimes you've got to pay dues when they're owed. And Converge might not exactly be heavy metal, either. They got their start in their hometown of Boston in the early nineties, playing covers of their favorite punk and hardcore songs. The blistering fusion unit they've evolved into has been called many things-- hardcore metal, math metal, metalcore-- but they could be ultra-core for all I care. Let's ignore the niceties. Converge is a smart, aggressive, brutal quintet, and Jane Doe will kick your ass repeatedly until it leaves its long imprint in your flabby buttflesh.
The album opens in a throttling surge of bass and drums courtesy of "Concubine." If you're not familiar with this kind of music you might be blown back by the apocalyptic screech of frontman Jacob Bannon's vocals. It's clear with each gritty blast that the guy is screaming out his lungs for you. Naturally, you can't follow a single word but the vox bleed into the furious guitars and it's all acidic corrosion. With the emphasis lately on Fennesz and the pixilated laptop set, it's easy to forget that there's whole realms of sound to be found in the lethal decay of metal guitar's radioactive isotopes. In less than a minute-and-a-half, this song churns from a murderously fast-paced midsection to a slow stomp and back to a breakneck pace.
"Fault and Fracture" picks up seamlessly where the last left off. Once again, the instruments lose their origins, blending in sonic onslaught. Ben Koller's harsh yet amazingly nuanced drumming ties it all together, and the one standout are these hilarious metal trills that peal out from the guitar. Until you reach "Distance and Meaning," it's not clear where the hardcore influence lies. The band slows the pace just enough so you can understand Bannon snarling, "That's where they die, that's where they suicide," amongst the lines wrought by the wiry rhythm. Jane Doe weaves different weights of heavy music together like this, careful to keep the listener interested.
As the album moves on, you realize that Converge aren't just showing off their impressive stylistic range; they're telling a story. "Homewrecker" reaches an awesome peak as Bannon's "No love! No hope!" chorus transmutes to a howl so searing that even veteran scenehounds will be looking for a pit to flail around in. But it's during the tug-of-war vocal trades on "The Broken Vow" that the tale solidifies, one of missed phone calls, old bridges being burned, and lost love. The narrative builds up again and climaxes with "Phoenix in Flight," which begins as a mournful dirge but soon sweeps up through a series of blazing guitar lines that make the elegy even more powerful. You get the sense that the mysterious female mentioned in the lyrics reaches apotheosis with "Phoenix in Flames," an absolute cataclysm of noise that sounds like contact mics were stuffed in a bass drum and tossed down the side of a mountain.
At the end you think back, scratch your head and wonder what the hell it was you listened to. Ultimately, Converge resists easy taxonomy; they're not going to play into that guy's game of "Who's Metal?" As it is, the artwork is strangely concerned with women. A series of faces arise out of stippled dots, all black-ringed eyes and pouty lips vamping from behind the cover of lyric text printed across the page. Is the message that this woman is just like any other, now that she's lost to him? The archetype is unsettling, but no more so than applauding as success the picture of a woman removing her burqa in a country still overrun by thugs and warlords. At least anonymity won't curse Converge for long with an album like this so full of intelligence, skill and intensity that it's simply masterful. Otherwise, I don't know what to call it. That's probably a good thing. | 2002-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Equal Vision | July 2, 2002 | 7.7 | f1a9a669-91c7-4dd2-b7a3-2c339e491d1f | Christopher Dare | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christopher-dare/ | null |
The Swedish band, which mixes psychedelia, prog, and extreme metal, reissues three ambitious studio albums and a live DVD from the early years of the millennium, records that found it transitioning from death growls to cleanly sung acoustic compositions. | The Swedish band, which mixes psychedelia, prog, and extreme metal, reissues three ambitious studio albums and a live DVD from the early years of the millennium, records that found it transitioning from death growls to cleanly sung acoustic compositions. | Opeth: Blackwater Park [Legacy Edition] / Deliverance [Reissue] / Damnation [Reissue] / Lamentations [Reissue] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16524-blackwater-park-legacy-edition-deliverance-reissue-damnation-reissue-lamentations-reissue/ | Blackwater Park [Legacy Edition] / Deliverance [Reissue] / Damnation [Reissue] / Lamentations [Reissue] | Opeth are one of those bands who are great for starting arguments simply because they exist and do what they do. Not that they planned on it, presumably, but when you have people getting into endless flamewars about exactly what kind of metal the Swedish act performs-- or even if they're metal at all, thanks especially to last year's release of Heritage-- then they've done what any reasonable band should by not caring what they're called so long as it's out there. Doubtless bandleader/mastermind Mikael Åkerfeldt loves that fact, even as he's on the road now on tour with Mastodon, probably hip-deep in comparing notes on King Crimson bootlegs with Brann Dailor.
That Åkerfeldt says, in the liner notes to Blackwater Park, that he's "reluctant to do reissues for no reason whatsoever" might explain why this particular clutch of rereleases-- three studio albums and a live DVD, Lamentations, from the early years of the millennium-- is essentially no more than a basic repackaging of what Sony had already done a couple of years previously in Europe, given that the original domestic issues here had already fallen out of print. (Lamentations provides a little bonus in that a separately released full CD version of the same show is now included with the DVD.) But perversely the time may be right for this kind of past focus where 10 years ago it was next to impossible to see bands like Opeth discussed outside of metal-centric circles to start with.
The reissues do reconfirm that Åkerfeldt and the band's then line-up-- currently only bassist Martín Méndez also remains, guitarist Peter Lindgren and drummer Martin Lopez having departed in recent years-- were perfect products of their death-metal-obsessed time and place regardless, with guttural singing and powerful riffing and more besides at work. The band had been going in one form or another for a decade when 2001's Blackwater Park came together, thanks in large part to a mutual admiration society with Porcupine Tree's leader Steven Wilson. His production help and encouragement teased out the band's explorations of acoustic-led arrangements as much as electric ones while further showcasing Åkerfeldt's sweet, clear singing as much as the roars on songs like "The Leper Affinity" and the title track.
In turn, the follow-up was even more ambitious, with Deliverance and Damnation originally planned as two halves of a big release then split into two albums that appeared in 2002 and 2003 respectively-- the first a "heavy" release, but following the same general blend as Blackwater Park, the second, also co-produced by Wilson, a thoroughly moody but never explosive album that ditched any expected death-metal touches entirely. Hearing songs like "Closure" and "In My Time of Need" from the latter is pretty well designed to make you think of contemplative classic rock melancholy rather than anything close to blast beats, while the title song of Deliverance showcases how skilled the band was at perfecting where calmer drift evolves into a full band crunch ridiculously well. The concluding half of that song is probably more monstrously memorable than anything on Blackwater Park.
The fact that the band covered Iron Maiden a couple of years before this run is as much of a sign as anything-- like the UK stalwarts and its guiding figure Steve Harris, not to mention his own contemporary Wilson, Åkerfeldt is openly enthralled with that era of the 1960s into the 1970s when it seemed like all kinds of riffage would rule the earth, often in tandem with whatever reflective, dazed, sorrowful, or just plain stoned routes progressive rock was creating. He's a stone-cold fanboy and doesn't hide it at all-- Blackwater Park takes it name from an obscure German band, Deliverance's "For Absent Friends" borrows the title from a Genesis song from Nursery Cryme, and so forth-- and he is serious, at times painfully so, about it.
Throughout all three albums, Opeth are about explicit formalism as stirring power via the rock gods-- the goal is far from new, but it's done so expertly that it's hard not to be impressed. Given just how equally formal and specific Porcupine Tree have become over the years, Wilson's influence on these albums is evident throughout, even on Deliverance where he only guests rather than also producing. Åkerfeldt says as much in the Blackwater Park notes, but you get a sense that a sheer level of obsessiveness on Åkerfeldt's part would have always been there, a desire to make everything sound just absolutely correct, huge and momentous when needed, controlled and calm otherwise.
Opeth's saving grace in this regard is that no one song on any album quite sounds like anything else on it-- there's certainly a defined range that's being explored intensely, but Blackwater Park has the reputation it does in large part because none of the songs follow the same songwriting formula, instead looking toward variations within general themes that all build to a dramatic conclusion in the title track. Yet Damnation may simply be the clearest statement of intent as well as the most surprising and entertaining album just because it flat-out goes for it-- hints of nearly everything on it can be heard on the two albums preceding it, but by eschewing the formalities of death metal entirely it also clearly demonstrates the abilities of all four players plus the constantly guesting Wilson as accomplished performers in general.
That album may not be the metal that longtime fans had expected or wanted perhaps, then or now-- but again, what matters so long as the results work? Given that in recent years Åkerfeldt has invoked albums like Scott Walker's glowering masterpiece The Drift as inspirations, he's keeping his ears open more than even he might have guessed. | 2012-04-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | null | April 20, 2012 | 9 | f1ad7ea4-a464-4909-a7f9-115e941eea79 | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
Cleaned up and newly remastered, these demos are bright and captivating, a rare look at the iconic emo band's sketchbook. | Cleaned up and newly remastered, these demos are bright and captivating, a rare look at the iconic emo band's sketchbook. | American Football: Year One Demos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/american-football-year-one-demos/ | Year One Demos | While digging through old belongings, American Football drummer Steve Lamos came across a 1/4" master tape swaddled in brown paper. The tape—still wrapped neatly around a clear plastic reel—was recorded in his childhood basement back in May of 1997, barely four months after American Football formed. His father “engineered” the session by plopping two vocal microphones in the band’s general direction, adjusting the levels, and pressing record. Only four songs were marked on the tracklist: one from their 1998 self-titled EP, two from their 1999 self-titled full-length, and one mystery track, “Song #1/Song #2 (Demo),” whose lack of an identifier left Lamos stumped. When he gave the tape a listen, he didn’t recognize the first section of the two-part track. Neither did guitarist Steve Holmes or singer-guitarist Mike Kinsella. Was this a forgotten American Football song?
As a band whose discography is painstakingly archived by fans, the decision American Football should make was obvious: release the tapes. But those with eagle eyes know the demos are already within reach; CD and cassette versions of this same audio allegedly surfaced on eBay two years ago, were bought, and promptly uploaded online. In those versions, the sound quality is crunchy and muddled — likely the result of audio being re-recorded from one medium to another. Cleaned up and newly mastered, the Year One Demos versions are bright and captivating, a rare look at American Football’s sketchbook before the drawing was colored in.
The one thing demos succeed at where finished recordings fail is their ability to convey the warmth of an idea’s spark. Year One Demos digs up the very roots of American Football’s linear songwriting. These demos feature no singing or lyrics at any point — unsurprising, given American Football was conceived as an instrumental band. Enamored with Music for 18 Musicians and In a Silent Way, they built sprawling guitar patterns that interlocked on “Five Silent Miles,” repeating in cyclical motions until the smallest modal movement felt like a major chord resolution. Here, “The Summer Ends” creates space to get lost in its own thoughts without the defining trumpet part from the studio album version.
Without debate, the prized gem of Year One Demos is “Song #1 / Song #2 (Demo).” Like American Football’s biggest hit, it begins with a faraway count-off. Hesitant guitars chatter back and forth while Lamos taps patiently on a hi-hat. Soon, the guitars find their comfort zone, pick up the pace, and get consumed by the muted roar of an electronic bow that spits them out into open-ended math rock inspired by Weather Report’s 1971 self-titled debut. What follows is better known as “Untitled #2,” from the deluxe reissue of their debut album. Over the songs’ combined runtime of nearly seven minutes, American Football churn through a seven-part instrumental that’s more complex and melodically surprising than some of their official music. Unfortunately, they cut the song from their proper recording sessions to keep their tracklist diverse — “The One With the Tambourine” already used the EBow effect and it had space for lyrics.
“This recording represents our first attempt at a proper demo,” writes Holmes in the liner notes for Year One Demos. “We played through each song live once or twice in one afternoon and called it quits.” Perhaps that’s why the occasional flubs are noticeable: a flat trumpet note, a missed guitar hammer-on, an extra bass drum kick. No matter how cultivated the songs were from inception, Year One Demos is still a photograph of a band about to grow into themselves. Unlike a traditional demo where missed notes and delayed downbeats point towards inexperience, though, American Football’s occasional errors sound like a student jotting down a complex equation before they forget it and discovering the answer in the process. The finished product is correct even if the handwriting got smudged along the way.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | December 28, 2019 | 7.6 | f1afbe57-e685-4f57-9017-ca267b3280fd | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Completed before the death of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, this tribute to the band’s most celebrated album takes a relaxed, occasionally unconventional approach. | Completed before the death of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, this tribute to the band’s most celebrated album takes a relaxed, occasionally unconventional approach. | Various Artists: Tiny Changes: A Celebration of Frightened Rabbit’s ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-tiny-changes-a-celebration-of-frightened-rabbits-the-midnight-organ-fight/ | Tiny Changes: A Celebration of Frightened Rabbit’s ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’ | Tiny Changes was not meant to be a posthumous tribute album. Completed before Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison took his own life in May 2018, the compilation was intended as a celebration of the band’s 2008 album The Midnight Organ Fight, not a eulogy for its primary songwriter. As a result, the compilation (which shares its name with a tribute concert and a mental health charity; a portion of proceeds will support the latter) feels oddly low-stakes. No one among this collection of old friends and more recent fans thought they would have to honor a legacy when they recorded these covers, and the relative lack of pressure allowed for a relaxed, occasionally unconventional approach.
Covering Organ Fight, a breakup album with the sort of insight that arises only from uncomfortably intimate storytelling, would be challenging under any circumstances. Hearing these intensely personal songs sung by others was always going to be jarring; anything too similar would pale in comparison. The weakest songs on the compilation are those that do the least: Mid-2000s Sub Pop signees Oxford Collapse, who reunited for the occasion, deliver a near-exact recreation of “I Feel Better,” while the off-key vocals and piercing cymbals of Right on Dynamite’s “Fast Blood” resemble an unpolished demo rather than a fresh take. While not soulless, these versions fall short of the originals’ force.
The riskier these covers get, the better they demonstrate what made Frightened Rabbit’s music compelling. Josh Ritter’s goofy bluegrass “Old Old Fashioned” recognizes that Hutchison’s charm was just as significant as his more harrowing material. The Philistines Jr., the band of Organ Fight producer Peter Katis, clash cheap-sounding synths against heavy snares and processed acoustic guitars on “Bright Pink Bookmark,” connecting Frightened Rabbit’s roots with the polish that defined their later studio output. Meanwhile, the prolific Canadian group Wintersleep’s version of “The Twist” is quirkier and denser than the original, but holds its own with beefier drums and a plainspoken but affecting performance from frontman Paul Murphy.
Not every reinvention works; Ben Gibbard’s “Keep Yourself Warm” is too soft-spoken to carry the blunt titular line (“It takes more than fucking someone you don’t know...”), and if Gibbard eventually conjures a beauty of his own, it can’t match the catharsis of the original. Scottish rockers Biffy Clyro’s entertainingly frantic take on album opener “The Modern Leper” ultimately overflows with too many ideas to register. Julien Baker’s version of the same song works much better, her voice wringing out the desperation beneath the gallows humor and bombast. According to the band, who approved all these covers early last year, Baker’s contribution was Hutchison’s personal favorite.
Out of everyone, Baker best captures the specific kind of deep depression that Hutchison was known for articulating. Had an album like this been recorded after his death, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to cover “Floating in the Forth,” with its eery foreshadowing lyrics and the grim new context of the closing line, “I’ll think I’ll save suicide for another year.” The Twilight Sad are virtually the only band that could, given the close friendship between Hutchison and frontman James Graham. Their claustrophobic version renders the melody nearly unrecognizable, but not the emotion; Graham repeats that last line until it starts to feel as hopeful as it once did.
The timing alone makes Tiny Changes a difficult listen, a last glimpse of when fans and musicians could celebrate Frightened Rabbit without the complication of tragedy. It’s far from a perfect set of guests or covers, but it wasn’t supposed to be. A different kind of tribute, less focused on the band’s longtime supporters, might have featured newer musicians inspired by Hutchison; it might have illustrated his band’s influence and introduced their cult following to a younger generation. But those involved in Tiny Changes had no intention of looking to the future—they were merely celebrating how far they had all come.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Atlantic | July 20, 2019 | 6.8 | f1cf85de-c289-43ea-a83e-cecdfffe9ce3 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Acoustic guitarist Dan Knishkowy is joined by an improvisational quartet for an album of autumnal instrumental folk that meditates on self-knowledge and change. | Acoustic guitarist Dan Knishkowy is joined by an improvisational quartet for an album of autumnal instrumental folk that meditates on self-knowledge and change. | Adeline Hotel: Hot Fruit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adeline-hotel-hot-fruit/ | Hot Fruit | Dan Knishkowy has spent much of his career as Adeline Hotel exploring the breadth of his acoustic guitar, from the minimalist blues of 2016’s It’s Alright, Just the Same to the reflective folk of 2021’s Good Timing. But after writing seven solo guitar songs for his new record Hot Fruit, he couldn’t shake the thought that something was missing. So he reached out to friends to add their own improvisational touches, tapping electric guitarist Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Q. Rothwell, drummer Jason Burger of the Brooklyn jazz trio Scree, and Office Culture’s Winston Cook-Wilson on piano. Each finished song feels like a guided journey, and the way in which these orchestral collaborations blossom along the edges ushers in a new era of spontaneity for Adeline Hotel.
Knishkowy long aspired to write from a place of intuition; this time, that instinct finally comes across naturally. Drawing a blend of sweetness and sharpness out of his guitar, he summons the conflicted emotions of outgrowing one’s former self. His finger-plucking alternates gracefully between loud notes played with confidence and notes that hesitate to ring out until the last second, as if quelling their nerves. El-Solh, Rothwell, Burger, and Cook-Wilson read his cues like any good friend would; they play in unison with certain guitar sections to further highlight Adeline Hotel’s original strengths (“Big Al”), and during other parts spiral off to emphasize the freeform shapes he’s building (“Little Chili”). The finished arrangements simmer into a rich nectar of orchestral folk as affecting as Nick Drake’s pastoral classics or William Tyler’s wordless portraits.
In the best moments on Hot Fruit, all four guest musicians integrate their ideas with Knishkowy’s at once, their colorful improvisations lacing around his nimble guitarwork like ribbons threaded into a bird’s nest. On opener “Beksul,” each addition fades into the frame: the calm scratching of a shaker that grows louder, individual piano notes that transform into heartfelt chords, plucks of upright bass that turn dewy and soulful. The beauty of this collaboration reaches its peak with the three-part suite “Seeing Yourself Seen.” Pedal steel lends the song a gentle sway as clarinet, flute, and strings—all arranged by El-Solh—trickle over Knishkowy’s autumnal acoustic guitar lines. The ease and unpredictability of the swells evoke the kinds of small, quotidian human interactions that inspire gratitude for life.
On previous records, like 2021’s piano-driven The Cherries Are Speaking, Knishkowy sang in a soft timbre about devotion and isolation. There’s no singing on Hot Fruit, but what we lose in words, we gain in sound as themes of self-concept and change take shape in probing melodies. It all stems from the intimate way Knishkowy wields his guitar: deft fingers and a light touch, with an understanding for how space and silence bolsters the music. The rhythmic hook and twinkling trill of the title track relays the magic of curiosity; the slight shift into a downtrodden chord on “White Sands” alludes to a moment of doubt yet forges onward. The clarity of these guitar parts sets Hot Fruit apart from Adeline Hotel’s previous work. It’s one thing to set out to follow your intuition; it’s another to illustrate it so lucidly in song that fellow musicians can tap in and improvise along. | 2023-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Ruination | October 9, 2023 | 7.2 | f1d30ed3-0a87-4d33-b767-5bcdf191ea18 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
On this new album, Simeon Coxe rewires 1960s underground space poppers Silver Apples (again) and makes far-out sounds and sweet left-field songs. | On this new album, Simeon Coxe rewires 1960s underground space poppers Silver Apples (again) and makes far-out sounds and sweet left-field songs. | Silver Apples: Clinging to a Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22365-clinging-to-a-dream/ | Clinging to a Dream | In terms of homemade instruments, Silver Apples’ oscillator-synth contraption, known as “the Simeon,” remains undersung. It has never gotten as much attention as the theremin, Harry Partch’s ensembles, Os Mutantes’ fuzz pedal, or Glenn Branca’s third bridge guitars. Operated by telegraph keys and foot pedals, the Simeon was more an ad hoc construction of weirdly humming parts than a functioning instrument. Its vibrating chrome shadow blended perfectly into the pop elation of Silver Apples’ recordings. Unplayable by anybody besides its namesake inventor, it disappeared into the lunar mists when the band dissolved in the early ’70s.
Heard now, the band’s two ’60s albums don’t channel psychedelia as much as the hard-wired promise of the space age. Undeniably pop, inventor and songwriter Simeon Coxe’s songs were playful and soulful and cosmic, and—outside the New York underground—fairly sunken on their original release. Somehow unrelated to rock‘n’roll, “I Have Known Love” and others were more like open-hearted show-stoppers arranged for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Returning to the Simeon in 1996, Coxe revived the Silver Apples for a few years of albums and collaborations and tours. During one of the latter, Coxe broke his neck in a van accident, rethinking and stripping down the Simeon upon his recovery.
Now 78, Coxe (professionally, just “Simeon”) and the spirit of his invention return for Clinging to a Dream, the first Silver Apples LP since the instrument and its creator’s reconstructions. At the core of the album, Coxe pilots his electronics towards beautiful and strange-colored waters. The opener “The Edge of Wonder” floats on omniscient myth-chants not dissimilar to Brian Eno’s Another Green World. At its best, Coxe pairs a wide-eyed sweetness with far-out electronics, as on “Fractal Flow,” where a nearly Vaudevillian melody keeps the space age alive and twinkling. Other pieces, like “Colors,” are rich and overt tone poems.
On “Susie,” a bouncing portal to a parallel universe of Radiophonic pop, Simeon finds an all-new future, like an algorithm-generated number for a food-obsessed A.I. pop star. But elsewhere, the future sounds a little too much like the present. On the bubbling “Concerto for Monkey and Oscillator,” the new-fangled beats overwhelm its tender oddity, sounding like an avatar-less Soundcloud account pumping synth jams into the ether (and probably with some Silver Apples elsewhere on its playlists).
Despite Silver Apples’ hiatus, Coxe hasn’t been inactive, most lately releasing 2013’s Amphibian Lark, a self-titled debut by a new duo. When he performs solo, Coxe’s new set-up finds him returning, at times, to the mysterious place that made the band’s original albums so appealing. But much of Clinging to a Dream finds him exploring sounds beyond the means of his original unwieldy oscillators. The results aren’t always as compelling, but one can sense the liberation in his new means of expression. Clinging to a Dream is a Silver Apples album in every way, but it rarely achieves the fully enveloping richness of some of the band’s ’90s work, which included 1999’s Spectrum collaboration A Lake of Teardrops as well as 1998’s *Decatur—*a full 42-minutes of oscillators and, in retrospect, an accidental requiem for the Simeon itself.
While Simeon and original drummer Danny Taylor once soundtracked the Moon landing during a giant free concert in Central Park, the Silver Apples of the 21st century are making music in a very different future. The new model Apples don’t always achieve liftoff, but Simeon still possesses the coordinates for dazzling new places. | 2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Magic Theatre Music | September 16, 2016 | 7.1 | f1dbe324-76c1-45b7-bf92-a0051383228f | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The O.C. hardcore band level up their sound on their second album but remain gruff, guttural, and ferocious. | The O.C. hardcore band level up their sound on their second album but remain gruff, guttural, and ferocious. | Fury: Failed Entertainment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fury-failed-entertainment/ | Failed Entertainment | Fury have reached that level of success where they’ve been given the opportunity to make something other than a hardcore album. You know the drill: sign with a bigger punk or metal-leaning label, get a bigger-name producer, and throw in some more populist gestures so the newfound exposure outside of the literal and figurative hardcore fanbase can lead to backhanded compliments about how it “transcends the genre.” This is all true of Orange County, California band’s Run For Cover debut Failed Entertainment, the long-awaited follow up to 2016’s Paramount that includes grunge legend Jack Endino and Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage as collaborators. But Fury are more intent on upholding traditional structures rather than deconstructing them—on Failed Entertainment, they’re a rowdy yet welcoming host.
Fury don’t let their ambitions get in the way of what’s worked for their punk and hardcore heroes: They know why palm-muting during the verse makes the nasty riff more satisfying (“Angels Over Berlin”), when to bring back the nasty riff, but slower and also when to go into double time, what words sound best as gang vocals (“America,” obviously) and which ones work best as call-and-response (“Vacation”). But now that they’re past the point of having to prove themselves within a 15-minute set among five other bands, Fury have earned the right to add an extra bridge, to play at a tempo closer to groove metal, and bring out a latent allegiance to 90s Brit-rock, like a tambourine and nasal backup vocals on “Crazy Horses Run Free” or the booming drum intro in “Birds of Paradise.”
Jeremy Stith’s lyrical style has been Fury’s defining characteristic from the jump and similar to the equally ruminative post-hardcore exegesis from their new labelmates Self Defense Family’s Have You Considered Punk Music?, Failed Entertainment alludes to the inadequacies of his chosen medium right there in its title. In a recent column that named Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard as patron saints of Failed Entertainment, Stith makes only one brief mention of a fellow musician—“Now with hardcore, almost every decision a band faces comes with the question, ‘What would Ian MacKaye do?’” as in, how can Fury be intentional about their ethics and the meaning of their art as humanly possible?
MacKaye once sang “America is a word, but I use it,” and Fury likewise know how to weaponize it—for a hardcore band, there are few better nuclear options than actually making a song called “America” (“Innocence isn’t my America”) and later on in “Birds of Paradise,” Stith shouts “U.S. of A., just an idea to me.” This is one of the few lyrics on Failed Entertainment he feels necessary to use twice.
Otherwise, Fury sound like they could’ve been peers of Fugazi and probably would’ve avoided their firm stance against major labels or festivals. While Failed Entertainment is less flashy than last year’s big hardcore breakthrough—the genre-agnostic nu-metal splatter of Turnstile’s Time & Space—there’s a similar spirit of the flush ’90s at a time when the industry’s been inverted for rock bands. Nirvana once led major labels to throw money at any loud, grim band with even a modicum of melody: Helmet were the subjects of a seven-figure bidding war, NYC shitkickers Orange 9mm and CIV were stuffed into the same Buzz Bin as Nada Surf and Cake, Unsane crashed MTV with a skate blooper reel.
These are the acts that Fury evoke here, gruff, guttural and with a generally grim disposition —what people in southern California consider to be an “East Coast sensibility.” But if Failed Entertainment doesn’t have the brash bluster of the typical hardcore “level up,” it’s because Stith sees those levels as illusory, still focused on surviving the artistic, mental, and political purgatories in which we exist. “The grey is clear/But too cold to continue/No, not there/Here,” he shouts on the album’s first line, an unsubtle reminder of Fury’s enduring challenge to the absolutist thinking that makes hardcore so seductive and escapist in the first place. “Peace lies inside the grey,” Stith assures later on and while this world is grim, it’s all we got. | 2019-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | May 11, 2019 | 7.6 | f1dc271e-00f8-499e-b906-9ec7e92e8633 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a buried treasure, the 1989 experimental new age solo album from the R&B legend, a Black queer epic where technology mediates tenderness. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a buried treasure, the 1989 experimental new age solo album from the R&B legend, a Black queer epic where technology mediates tenderness. | Nona Hendryx: SkinDiver | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nona-hendryx-skindiver/ | SkinDiver | Sheathed in reverb, forged in the heat of an artist combusting her prodigious talent, Nona Hendryx proclaims: “Women who dream don’t stay too long.” It’s a faceted message, sung by a bisexual Black woman in her mid-40s who’d already been in the game for some 25 years. By the time “Women Who Fly,” the first and only single from her 1989 album SkinDiver arrived, Hendryx had an unrivaled list of accomplishments as an innovator of ’60s girl groups, a crucial member of ’70s Afrofuturistic soul force Labelle, and a firebrand of ’80s funk-rock. But she was shamefully under-heralded, and women, especially Black women, who didn’t make hits didn’t stay too long in the music business.
Someone else might have called it a day, or become a nostalgia act. Instead, she took up with an ex-Tangerine Dream synth whiz and made an album that amalgamates new age and adult-contemporary strategies into a song cycle of machines and mindfulness. At the end of the 1980s, Hendryx heard the sound of a new world, one in which technology mediates tenderness. Modern electronics and ancient drums and the timeless demand to love directly, and to be loved in return, have their place here. SkinDiver is a Black queer epic on a human scale.
Hendryx was born in New Jersey in 1944. “I came from a ghetto, a real one—Trenton. I lived hard and I can’t forget it,” she later told Essence. “Yes I wrote poetry even then, but I was on the street.” She was also in the church. A young Hendryx was singing in a choir when a member of a visiting choir, Sarah Dash, first heard her roar. As detailed in Adele Bertei’s laudatory Why Labelle Matters, Dash asked Hendryx to join her a cappella group, the Del Capris; in 1961, that group’s manager signed another group, the Ordettes, featuring a young but already mighty Patsy Holte. In the long tradition of managers mixing and matching Black voices and faces, the manager would soon recast the groups into the trio of Dash, Hendryx, and Holt, along with a fourth member, Cindy Birdsong. Now known as the Bluebelles, the group were the face of, but not the singers on, a hit song called “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.” The original singers found out, the Bluebelles re-recorded the track, Patsy Holt was rechristened Patti LaBelle, Hendryx dropped out of high school, and the act hit the Chitlin’ Circuit, the Black DIY network of venues that, under Jim Crow, were as safe as spaces could get.
Such shape-shifting would be a constant for Hendryx. While superstardom eluded Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, they put out some exemplary records and toured with the Rolling Stones. By the end of the decade, though, Birdsong defected to become one of the Supremes, whose style felt a bit recherché to the trio. In London, the three women met Vicki Wickham, producer of the influential BBC rock show Ready Steady Go!, who became their manager and hipped them to the city’s gay underground. They refashioned a fascination with Sun Ra and the right-on funk-rock of Sly and the Family Stone into a new life as Labelle and opened for the Who and Laura Nyro, with whom they made a revelatory record of sexuality and solidarity, 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle. They made a quintet of out-of-this-world albums, and Hendryx wrote a lot of the songs on them, starting with their political and percolating 1973 album Pressure Cookin’. Onstage, decked out in space-age silver lamé and feathers, they were a riot: Parliament-Funkadelic may have lifted a spaceship into orbit at their shows, but Hendryx descended on wires to stalk audiences with a whip.
The gay singer-songwriter Bob Crewe, with writing partner Kenny Nolan, would pen their biggest hit, 1974’s sex worker paean “Lady Marmalade,” but Labelle surely are equally responsible for bringing it to life. Its strident and bilingual bawdiness, not to mention their record label’s perplexing inability to promote follow-up singles into the hits they should have been, led to irreparable fractures within the group. By 1976, Labelle fizzled. Their too-muchness had at last become too much. Sarah Dash recorded some ferocious hi-NRG records with Patrick Cowley and Sylvester. Patti became, of course, Ms. Patti LaBelle. Wickham managed Dusty Springfield, Marc Almond, and Morrissey and remains Hendryx’s long-time partner in work and love. Labelle reunited a few times. Dash died suddenly in 2021.
Hendryx went her own way. In 1977, she released a glammy self-titled debut that didn’t take flight. She joined Talking Heads, lending her voice and, let’s just say it, authority to their Remain in Light album and tour. (“The Great Curve” without her? Flatline.) As the ’80s arrived, she worked with everyone: Bill Laswell’s Material, on the disco-not-disco classic “Bustin’ Out”; Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the Compass Point Studio geniuses. Prince wrote a song for her. Four albums came and went, including 1985’s hard rocking The Heat and 1987’s guitar-heavy/proto-new jack swing Female Trouble. “People still have this difficulty categorizing me,” she told NME. Black women had played rock’n’roll since its birth by Big Mama Thornton in 1952, but Nona’s seat at the table was suspect to the white music establishment. In the Village Voice, Robert Christgau first objected to her “insatiable desire to make rock records”; a year later, his take was that “she just isn’t as talented as you wish she was.” In 1987, the Los Angeles Times went further, grossly dehumanizing her as “a pedigreed workhorse, bred and groomed to fill conglomerate coffers.” Her labels kept dropping her. “I don’t want anyone to be like me,” she told NME, “but I want them to see the possibilities.” What was left to show?
An answer came in Female Trouble’s Peter Gabriel duet “Winds of Change (Mandela to Mandela).” The earnest tribute to the South African anti-apartheid revolutionary culminated in an ascension to a sparkling paradise of clear, tolling bells. It echoed the kind of twinkling arpeggios Tangerine Dream coaxed out of their machines—and, indeed, its founder Peter Baumann did the song’s sound production. Baumann had launched his label Private Music in the early ’80s to release landmark experimental-ambient albums by Suzanne Ciani, and also Yanni. The indie label would become a sympathetic venue for the hypnotic grooves she’d been programming on the computer in her New York City apartment. In the announcement of her new album, 1989’s SkinDiver, she called her home “a cubicle in a mass of metal,” and its songs sounded like that, soft private spaces to work in a hard world.
Like all of us, Hendryx longs to connect. SkinDiver maps out the ways. There is sex, and intimacy, its sometime companion. “Off the Coast of Love” swells in with electronic patterns of flutes and drums that paddle and struggle like feet against the tide. “Love would wash me ashore!” she bellows, as tom-toms thunderclap and lightning-bright orchestral stabs flash around her. But she remains unquenched. On the title track, a mid-tempo heater that throws off rumpled harmonies and folds of rhythm like sheets from a well-made bed, Hendryx details her failings. She’s negging herself in the service of seduction, or confessing just what a lover might get into with her. She needs more control, to be less controlling. She lays out a come-on: “I’d like to feel how you feel…I imagine it’s a thrill…I’m a skin-diver/So into you.” It’s a trip under the covers and into someone else, an escape through penetration.
For a moment, anyway. Much of SkinDiver happens in the moments where being in your body feels unbearable. “Women Who Fly” soars with rueful glory. There’s a bit of the Blue Nile’s synth-pop and a bit of Annie Lennox’s mask-that-tells-the-truth in the way Hendryx promises that “I’m most dangerous when the skin that I’m in isn’t mine.” But as a Black woman in her 40s, a queer person in the AIDS crisis, a legacy artist whose past hasn’t earned back—for Hendryx, the stakes are much higher. She’s about to blow. On “No Emotion,” she and Carole Pope, of the hugely-underrated Torontonian queer rock band Rough Trade, chant, “No emotion we must show,” while guitars worthy of Kevin Shields squall and cymbals worthy of Budgie throw tantrums. It’s an ironic catharsis that burns itself out, too hot to handle.
Hendryx can do the regal machismo of Grace Jones with abandon, but elsewhere the ice queen is melting. “Love Is Kind” is all thaw, her keys dripping over caresses of fretless bass. In a voice shadowed with echoes that extend in strange directions, she promises to take care of herself, even if that means humbling herself before a world that doesn’t deserve it. She’ll stop overthinking. She will feel love. And yet, like the endless arpeggios on a keyboard, the old patterns continue. In “Tears,” a heartbeat of a drum machine cradles blankets of organs. “My heart,” she says. “My head.” It’s Descartes as dream pop. Because it’s 1989, dolphins chirp. (They might be whales. Or Drexcyians.) “Who am I?” she cries out. The words reverb into nothingness.
SkinDiver can hypnotize on its way to oblivion. But Hendryx will not let alienation win. To really be embodied, one must acknowledge the terms of this world. Sampling both Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, threading images of mediated violence like an uncynical version of Cabaret Voltaire into a showstopping belter from a cynical Céline Dion, “Through the Wire” is a blistering power ballad about power. Yet this is not the only power. In the audacious “Interior Voices,” structured like a clapping game, and also like future Vespertine-era Björk, Hendryx finds other sources. “The past and the present live as twins,” she sings simply. “God and the devil, fear and dreams/Pass from mother to child, an unbroken stream.” The Great Communicator is the umbilical cord; the coming World Wide Web is an amniotic sack. Drumrolls rustle like feathers. A children’s choir coos. It’s stunning, a bit camp like Kraftwerk were, a dazzling and generative kind of Woman Machine.
The album’s peak refuses all the old power structures. “6th Sense” reincarnates her old friend Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude” into a new age anthem. Deep in thickets of wood blocks and pan flutes, Hendryx muses on superstition. She chants down those who’d deny her intuition. Unlike Patti, she hasn’t tidied up her point of view: “I believe in déjà vu, ancient dreams, and primal screams that run beneath the conscious stream,” she declares. But isolation threatens enlightenment. “Is anyone listening?” she hollers, again and again. “Can anybody feel me? Does…anybody…care?” There is more to this world, and more to herself, than one might believe.
SkinDiver comes to rest in the afterglow. For “New Desire,” fingers tickle out a melody, and bells linger like embraces. She’s plummeting back to earth, and a bass glides to find the landing spot. There’s a subtle ticking noise in the distance. Hendryx has been on the trip of a lifetime, all alienation and love sensation, finding and losing her place in the world and making of it what she will. Her voice gathers force for one last lesson. “Love is the door through doubt and distance,” she says. And she’s right. “I surrender,” she says. But not to what you think. SkinDiver begins with Hendryx needing to hold someone; it ends with a call to arms around her. She’s yielding not to desire but to being desired. She’s learning to be loved in a world that mostly won’t. “Touch me,” she sings. “I’m waiting.”
Hendryx waited for people to catch up to SkinDiver. “I’d like it to be discovered rather than sold to people like the latest fashion,” she told Billboard in 1989. In 2007, she turned SkinDiver into a sci-fi multimedia rock musical at NYC’s downtown demimonde HQ Joe’s Pub. In the 2010s, she made a few fab house collaborations with Soul Clap, and in 2017 released a revelatory collection of Captain Beefheart covers with Gary Lucas. For the bridge of “Women Who Fly,” Hendryx warns all who can hear her: “Don’t give me wings and take away my sky!” It’s hard to imagine someone strong enough to clip her ambition. Her work keeps expanding. Almost 35 years later, SkinDiver remains a vista to gaze in wonder at, and wonder what else is on the horizon.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.\ | 2022-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Private Music | September 25, 2022 | 9 | f1ddc95f-12e5-4a32-aab9-28f9db7709b9 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The unflinching and brutal new record from the Melbourne-based singer-songwriter is so direct that it demands your full attention for every single second. | The unflinching and brutal new record from the Melbourne-based singer-songwriter is so direct that it demands your full attention for every single second. | Sarah Mary Chadwick: Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-mary-chadwick-me-and-ennui-are-friends-baby/ | Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby | In 1985, the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle suffered a heartbreak so devastating that she waited almost 20 years and then turned her grief into a book. That book, Exquisite Pain, is split into two halves. The first retells the days leading up to the moment where her boyfriend leaves her for another woman, and in the second half, Calle asks dozens of friends and strangers to answer the question “When did you suffer most?” There are pages and pages of stories about the kinds of breakups that slice you open and leave you raw, of deaths in the family, of stillborn births. The book was meant to be an exorcism, for Calle to finally rid herself of pain in the most public way imaginable. Melbourne-based Sarah Mary Chadwick’s latest record, Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby, is a Sophie Calle-style public release of grief. Unflinching and brutal, the record documents the death of Chadwick’s father and a close friend, her own suicide attempt, the dissolution of a long-term partnership, and the all-consuming mountains of sadness that followed.
Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby is so direct that it demands your full attention for every single second. It’s not at all fun to listen to, nor is it meant to. It feels bad, and you can’t turn away from it, not even to check a text on your phone, not even to rummage through your fridge for a beer. The record, which is just piano and vocals, feels claustrophobic at times—like you’re a mouse stuck beneath one of the piano’s pedals, struggling to get free. At points, Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby resembles a chapbook set to a piano more than music, perhaps like one of those letters people often write to an ex-partner after a bad breakup that they never send. Opening with the line “Mothers never love me/Baby that’s why you should,” her lyrics tend to focus on being loved badly, by men, by her mother, and by herself.
Chadwick is prone to exploring her own self-destructive behavior. “At Your Leisure” is about giving a married man head at a traffic light. “Every Loser Needs A Mother” is about sleeping with a man simply to give life to her father’s memory. “Always Falling” is about falling for aloof and distant people. Chadwick’s voice on these songs is singular—meaty, heaving, laden with bravado. She almost never resorts to flowery language or hides behind metaphor and simile. When she sings about a suicide attempt on the album’s title track, it’s not a figure of speech—it’s a violent memory petrified like a scorpion in amber. “On the way to stay alive I asked the guy his job/He said, ‘a Paramedic,’” she sings, her voice shaking like a tree in a hurricane, her piano vivid and clear.
There are other records like this one, but they’re few and far between. Its closest analog would be the “barely music” of Phil Elverum’s Mount Eerie; a more fitting description would be if Adele decided to record an album of Daniel Johnston covers. It is incredibly difficult to pull off, and Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby can feel so unrelenting you’d maybe feel inclined to turn it off and huddle up in a ball. Chadwick welcomes this reading of her music, and she has a sense of humor about it. When asked what kind of occasions she thinks her music is suited for, she cites a quote from a friend’s father: “You wouldn’t put it on at a fucking dinner party, would you?”
“Full Mood” exists on a different plane from the rest of the album. Instead of tapping into the well of grief, it comes from a place of warmth and hope. It is a perfect song about being profoundly in love with someone else. Her piano unspools softly, and her voice cracks like a smile does when you’re about to tear up a little bit. “You don’t think you’re very bright/God, you’re shining like a star,” she sings. She sings about this love like the cherished memory we hold onto when everything else is too hard to handle. So much of Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby can feel like a freefall into hell, like a complete encapsulation of a year that is terrible beyond words. “Full Mood” is a reminder that you can still access beauty even in the pits of despair. The song asks something of us far more heartbreaking than Sophie Calle’s suffering question in Exquisite Pain. It asks: what did it feel like to be loved? Did it make you feel beautiful?
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Ba Da Bing | February 9, 2021 | 7.8 | f1e57d49-5e20-441d-8ca0-f556f0b5f736 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Philadelphia instrumentalists Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler have become indispensible facilitators for other people’s music. Slant of Light represents the duo’s cautious move into their own distinct territory, consisting of four improvisations that are surprisingly broad in focus given the duo’s limited, idiosyncratic instrumentation. | Philadelphia instrumentalists Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler have become indispensible facilitators for other people’s music. Slant of Light represents the duo’s cautious move into their own distinct territory, consisting of four improvisations that are surprisingly broad in focus given the duo’s limited, idiosyncratic instrumentation. | Mary Lattimore / Jeff Zeigler: Slant of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19621-mary-lattimore-jeff-zeigler-slant-of-light/ | Slant of Light | Unless you’re a liner notes sleuth with a propensity for a certain strain of East Coast indie rock or abstruse folk exploration, the names Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler may not be familiar. In the last five years, the Philadelphia instrumentalists have become indispensible facilitators for other people’s music—the multi-instrumentalist Ziegler as a producer and touring sound engineer for bands like the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile and the Violators, and Purling Hiss, the harpist Lattimore as accompanist for and improviser with a litany of rock musicians such as Thurston Moore, Sharon Van Etten, and Meg Baird. Their individual orbits have often overlapped, too: Lattimore, for instance, played on Smoke Ring for My Halo, the Vile album that Zeigler, in part, recorded. They’ve also led their own respective recording projects, with Zeigler even helming the sessions for Lattimore’s splendid 2013 solo debut, The Withdrawing Room.
Still, Lattimore and Zeigler have built their principal reputations as members of supporting casts—necessary, if not necessarily noticed—but Slant of Light represents the duo’s cautious move into their own distinct territory. Lattimore plucks, scrapes, and slaps her harp, running its sounds through a loop station that not only repeats her patterns but occasionally gives them a prismatic kind of echo, as though you’re watching a picture fade one color at the time. Zeigler routes an assortment of synthesizers, guitars, and melodicas through a small army of effect pedals. Inspired by their work on a live score for the 1968 French film Le Révélateur in Texas’ Marfa Ballroom, Slant of Light consists of four improvisations that are surprisingly broad in focus given the duo’s limited, idiosyncratic instrumentation. They shift between new age gloamings and atonal excursions, phosphorescent crescendos and needlepoint delicacy. “Echo Sounder”, the record’s moment of complete triumph, funnels all of those approaches into one beautiful climb. Zeigler shapes an enormous, swelling hum that still leaves room for Lattimore at the top; she plays patterns and pauses, allowing his electronic whirrs to slip through the rests like a warm breeze. It’s light but not thin, distant but not unfamiliar, engrossing but not all-consuming.
To that last end, Slant of Light benefits from Lattimore and Zeigler’s respective pasts, as their ancillary work seems to have fostered a degree of modesty in their step toward the spotlight. Slant of Light is a slight record, its four tracks just breaking the 30-minute mark; each piece suggests a single statement, meant to express one idea before moving on to the next one. Lattimore’s Lyon and Healy harp has 47 strings, but there's never the sense that she’s trying to show you that she knows what to do with them or the pedals they power. “The White Balloon” is a duet between Lattimore’s high-floating harp melody and Zeigler’s more mid-range guitar, which acts as a terrestrial tether to the bed of electric noise at the bottom of the track. For three minutes, they float with one another, dipping and diving through a ballet just above the din—and then they fade away, adding allure through brevity rather than overstaying their welcome.
Even the album's 12-minute finale, “Tomorrow is a Million”, feels brief. Together, Lattimore and Ziegler twist through beds of soft noise, with scraped and popped harp strings and splintered guitar notes clustering into alien whorls of anti-melodies. The pair’s playing is busy but not restless, moving more in mutual sympathy than selfishness. By track’s end, it’s hard not to wish it didn’t keep going, so you could see where all these quick runs and instant redirections might go if there were no limit. Slant of Light, then, succeeds on the level of the best improvisations. These pieces pry the audience’s eyes off the clock without taking advantage of that surrender, and perhaps that’s the valuable side effect of spending so much time learning how the music of others work—what’s too much, what’s too little, what’s just right. Slant of Light is a short, humble offering of the latter. | 2014-09-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-09-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | September 23, 2014 | 7.5 | f1e61c6a-b93d-4dda-843b-9cd1de7dca02 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
After the grand farewell of 2016's You Want It Darker, Cohen's son gathers his father's scraps and unfinished ideas and lovingly fleshes them out with help from collaborators like Beck, The National's Bryce Dessner and Feist. | After the grand farewell of 2016's You Want It Darker, Cohen's son gathers his father's scraps and unfinished ideas and lovingly fleshes them out with help from collaborators like Beck, The National's Bryce Dessner and Feist. | Leonard Cohen: Thanks for the Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leonard-cohen-thanks-for-the-dance/ | Thanks for the Dance | Leonard Cohen could always wrangle a good song from a grim situation. Just one example: In 1966, he and a lover stayed in a squalid room at New York’s Penn Terminal Hotel. Everything was broken—the windows, the radiators, the taps, their relationship—but the miserable experience at least yielded “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.” Yet not even someone with Cohen’s wry humor would have guessed that, 50 years later, far bleaker circumstances would spur him into saying the most perfect goodbye imaginable. He was living with cancer when working on 2016’s You Want It Darker, and the shadow of mortality made his 14th studio album resemble a last testament. 19 days later, he fell in his home and passed away, aged 82.
Few records have sounded so heavy with finality. So it’s initially hard to know what remains to be said on Thanks For The Dance, a collection of bare-bones ideas and vocals lovingly fleshed out into finished tracks by Cohen’s son, Adam, with contributions from admirers including Beck, Feist, and The National’s Bryce Dessner. That’s not to say Cohen’s powers had waned: the elegant reckoning of the opening “Happens to the Heart” finds him still trying to untie the messy knot of sex, love, spirituality, and death with winking self-deprecation, saucy innuendo and rich religious symbolism, before finishing with a disquieting image that lingers like gun smoke: “I was handy with a rifle/ My father’s 0.303/ I fought for something final/ Not the right to disagree.” The fact that his crumbs would be most people’s banquets, though, can’t turn all the sketches into compelling songs.
This project was teased with a somber, reworked version of Cohen’s 1998 poem “The Goal” which suggested that, like … Darker, it would be dominated by his awareness of the dying light around him. “Settling at last/Accounts of the soul,” he sighs, finally putting his many affairs in order. In truth, while the other stories here are also full of old ghosts and reflections, they rarely play out as explicit confrontations with Cohen’s fate. Instead, the lead song’s soft, tinkling-glass piano and gentle acoustic guitar are more indicative of the supporting players’ penchant for classy restraint: they employ the light hands of musicians at an intimate soiree, allowing the guest of honor’s ravaged growl to hold court.
At times it works brilliantly, not least on “The Goal” itself, which is spun with the delicacy of a spiderweb. On other occasions there’s a sense of drift, a tendency for pristine arrangements to tip-toe around Cohen’s words as if fearful of intruding: although the mournful mandolin of “Moving On” makes for a pretty backdrop, it’s not the only track that’s essentially a poem recited over decorous orchestration. And while Cohen’s favorite flourishes are everywhere—the sweet, sad lilt of Javier Mas’s Spanish laud on the title cut, the Jew’s harp Beck plays on the moonlit rumble of “The Night Of Santiago”—they don’t always cut through or drive the compositions.
The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention. Some of Cohen’s greatest triumphs were risks, the result of him pairing his ever-sootier voice with different sounds: the cheap Casio keyboards that sparked his ‘80s renaissance, the haunting strings and choirs of the Adam-helmed … Darker.
Unsurprisingly, the best efforts here get closer to a similar alchemy. A mist of eerie piano and ghostly synths fogs “It’s Torn,” creating a quietly menacing score for Cohen’s vision of an unraveling world where the center cannot hold: “The opposites falter/The spirals reverse.” The jaded soul-searching of “The Hills,” meanwhile, is leavened with dry wit and the stately hum of horns and organ, as a pill-popping Cohen tries to make peace with the fact that his slog inside the Tower of Song is nearly at an end. “I know she is coming,” he insists, as his backing singers arrive to soothe his tired croak.
When everything clicks with that kind of harmony, the album becomes more than just a graceful, inessential postscript. Most startling is “Puppets,” which starts with the horrors of the Holocaust and grows into a black reflection on human nature, helplessness and inescapable cycles of violence. Rather than raging, the music is a heavenly balm—bells chime, angelic voices sing, ethereal electronics thrum with strange celestial wonder—and the effect is like seeing a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape on a stained-glass window. If Thanks For The Dance can’t one-up … Darker’s grand farewell, moments like that at least make it a worthwhile addition to his legacy. | 2019-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Legacy | November 21, 2019 | 6.9 | f1eb94bc-d84d-4913-87f2-48f6b559361f | Ben Hewitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-hewitt/ | |
The new LP from Brooklyn’s Aye Nako introduces the songwriting of guitarist/singer Jade Payne. It presents two equal voices with their own takes on the queer black American experience. | The new LP from Brooklyn’s Aye Nako introduces the songwriting of guitarist/singer Jade Payne. It presents two equal voices with their own takes on the queer black American experience. | Aye Nako: Silver Haze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23023-silver-haze/ | Silver Haze | Aye Nako has always been direct about the subjects of their music: “sad punk songs about being queer, trans, and black.” It’s listed right there on their Facebook page. You don’t need to know that to rock out to their fuzzy take on emo, but these words are their existence. When you’re black, queer, and trans, a forceful statement of identity is itself a political act.
Identity has been the focus of much of Aye Nako’s recorded output. And while their earliest compositions stayed mostly within the sonic boundaries of ’90s pop-punk, their growth and maturation has been inspiring. Their 2015 The Blackest Eye EP served up complex and poetic examinations of abuse, exclusion, and the multifaceted stigma of blackness. But from the first track of their new LP Silver Haze, it’s clear they’re not the same band. “We’re Different Now” is a tape collage of guitarist and singer Mars Dixon as a kid playing with a friend, augmented by a sparse drum-and-guitar backing track. As the last line echoes “We’re different now/Different now/Different now…” it hints that those changes are more than skin deep.
Aye Nako’s story is one of transition, including Dixon’s own. But even as testosterone treatments changed his singing—and subsequently, his approach to writing on guitar—Dixon was also welcoming another voice into the mix in guitarist Jade Payne. Payne wasn’t on Aye Nako’s debut LP, 2013’s Unleash Yourself, and while her guitar and background vocals added a new dynamic to the sound of The Blackest Eye, the songs were still Dixon’s. Silver Haze, then, represents a new era for the young Brooklynites—one with two equal voices. It’s an assertion backed up by the cover image, of the two songwriters sitting side-by-side, bonded by shared experience, each with their own take on the queer black American identity.
Payne’s songs are often just as sad, but they are occasionally imbued with righteous indignation—“When you’ve said your empty amens/Shed the skin of a dead sentiment,” she sings on “Arrow Island”—that complements Dixon’s resignation. Payne has also spent some time of late moonlighting on guitar for Sadie Dupuis’ Sad13 project; the influence of Dupuis’ other band, Speedy Ortiz, is particularly prominent in Payne’s songs on Silver Haze, from the vocal inflections to the guitar tone.
Dixon has developed a stronger grasp on dynamic vocal range, confidently moving from whispers to whines to wails, incorporating more complex chord structures. Aye Nako still sound like a band that grew up obsessed with Superchunk, but now their output has less in common with Drive-Thru’s catalog than it does, say, Jade Tree’s. Payne, who works as a sound engineer at Brooklyn’s Silent Barn collective, recorded their last EP, but for Silver Haze the band worked with Joe Rogers at Room 17. His influence is especially felt on lead single “Particle Mace,” a pop song washed in fuzz with vocal tracks that shine through the noise.
The lyrics on Silver Haze maintain a relative obliqueness, which makes these intensely personal portraits relatable to anyone who has ever been on the outside looking in, or struggled with bodily self-reflection. If you’ve seen a Maybelline ad, you might guess that “Maybe She’s Bored With It” was about makeup—but the line “Caffeinated dreams/At the dawn of another work week/That’s the routine” cuts to the heart of the working class experience, drawn from Dixon’s time working in a makeup factory. His deadpan drawl of “Getting lost in the industrial noise” feels earned, an emotional resonance impossible to fake. Because as much as they may have matured, Silver Haze still feels like the best of Aye Nako—songs that clawed their way out of their writers, thoughts and ideas that would have eaten them alive if they didn’t get out. | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | April 6, 2017 | 7.9 | f1f26f24-74a7-4e01-91e1-4f21d45d2492 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
On their fourth LP Earth, the Chicago sludge crew enlist Hum’s Matt Talbot and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. Where other heavy bands would rather barrel down the cliffside first and ask questions later, Sweet Cobra regard the speedometer with a careful, cumulative eye, with occasionally poppy results. | On their fourth LP Earth, the Chicago sludge crew enlist Hum’s Matt Talbot and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. Where other heavy bands would rather barrel down the cliffside first and ask questions later, Sweet Cobra regard the speedometer with a careful, cumulative eye, with occasionally poppy results. | Sweet Cobra: Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20836-earth/ | Earth | Sweet Cobra have spent the past decade, plus change, doing two things: pumping out noise, and pissing off genre purists. Steeped in Illinois' mid-'90s alternative rock boom—Local H, the Jesus Lizard, et al.—the trio gave off a grungy first impression, only to dash it by incorporating out-of-town touches: a hint of New York hardcore, a tinge of post-hardcore á la Unwound, and on their most recent outing (2010’s Mercy), some splashes of Savannah sludge.
On their fourth LP Earth, the Chicago crew push their sound even futher, aided by Hum’s Matt Talbot and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou on co-production duties. Cuts like "Old Haunts" and "Complaints" pack enough firepower to compete with peers like Torche and Doomriders; but where the aforementioned bands would rather barrel down the cliffside first and ask questions later, Sweet Cobra regard the speedometer with a careful, cumulative eye, with occasionally poppy results: "Repo" sounds like a Snow Patrol song on steroids.
One of the most underrated tools in Sweet Cobra’s arsenal is their sharpened sense of restraint: a necessary, and yet frequently overlooked, step in building a proper sludge assault. "Future Ghosts" guides a soft-spoken melody down a gurgling, muddied undertow of a bassline. The anxious post-punk of "Sunburned Sons" provides a master class in momentum, and the album’s warm, six-minute closer "Walls" feels concise and organic.
Earth isn’t perfect, and Sweet Cobra’s charisma and compositional prowess don’t except them from the occasional flat note. Without a clear dynamic arc, "He Tall He", the album’s puffed-up ode to self-loathing and being "[sent] down the river with... shit ideas," stumbles and buckles under its exaggerated weight. Meanwhile, lead vocalist Botchy Vasquez’s supple tenor lacks the substance to make glammier, radio-ready cuts like "Flight Risk" and "Stiff Fits" really shine. Despite his bad habit of tacking on unnecessary sharp notes to the end of his phrases, the guy's one of the most underrated vocalists in his niche, eschewing the throaty styles of Torche’s Steve Brooks or Baroness’ John Dyer Baizley for a headier approach that, in turn, makes the music feel less stifling. A little breathing room goes a long way, and in an atypical move for swampy albums of its ilk, Earth succeeds because it doesn’t attempt to downright bury the listener—it’s a slow, sweet smothering. | 2015-07-29T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-07-29T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Magic Bullet | July 29, 2015 | 6.7 | f1ff9da4-5341-44b1-8b94-8163e7fb0a54 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The third solo album from Thom Yorke is the first one that feels complete without his band behind him. It floats through the uneasy space between societal turmoil and internal monologue. | The third solo album from Thom Yorke is the first one that feels complete without his band behind him. It floats through the uneasy space between societal turmoil and internal monologue. | Thom Yorke: ANIMA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thom-yorke-anima/ | ANIMA | Earlier this month, a strange advertisement for ANIMA Technologies appeared inside London’s Tube. The company purported to have built something called a “Dream Camera,” a device capable of capturing the world of the unconscious: “Just call or text the number and we’ll get your dreams back,” the copy promised. But curious callers were treated to a cryptic voice message, a jumble of stilted legalese read in a thin, unctuous voice, that apparently rendered the Dream Camera’s promise moot: something about a cease and desist from the High Court, an admission of “serious and flagrant unlawful activities.”
There were only ever two things this ad could be: Some exhausting promo for the worst “Black Mirror” episode yet or an oblique tease of Thom Yorke’s third solo album, ANIMA. Dreams and a healthy distrust of a techno-dystopia have long been pillars of Radiohead and Yorke’s songwriting. The wires of the brain and the wires of the world are forever being crossed: Fake plastic trees, paranoid androids, mobiles chirping, low-flying panic attacks. So of course the man who has sung about the narcotized rhythms of urban life would want to snap commuters out of their reveries with a once-in-a-lifetime promise. Dreams, nightmares, and sleepwalking haunt the songs of ANIMA, Yorke’s most ambitious and assured solo album yet. It is the darkest and tenderest music he has released outside of Radiohead, floating uneasily through the space between societal turmoil and internal monologue.
ANIMA is the product of what Yorke has described as an extended period of anxiety, and it sounds like it, full of wraithlike frequencies and fibrillating pulses. That’s not a huge surprise: Yorke’s solo material has always sounded anxious, sometimes to its detriment. Where The Eraser, his solo debut, largely succeeded in channeling the decade’s post-millennium tension into compellingly moody electronic abstractions, 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes too often felt claustrophobic, morose, enervated. In contrast, ANIMA’s tone throughout is meaty, full-blooded, often a little menacing. Yorke’s melancholy has grown teeth.
Yorke has long been a fan of left-of-center dance music; remixes commissioned for The Eraser and The King of Limbs constituted a who’s who of the European club vanguard. But this is the first of his own productions where it feels like he and longtime production partner Nigel Godrich really get it, where their beatmaking strides beyond contemporary fashion. The influence of James Holden and his Border Community label, an avant-techno touchstone, is all over ANIMA’s burly bass synths and jabbing pulses. Syncopated, spring-loaded grooves are reminiscent of Four Tet and Floating Points; the blippy “Not the News” channels Zomby and Actress. Yet for all the music’s heavy electronic bent, it isn’t obviously mapped to a rhythmic grid: It slips and slides all over the place, wheezy synths surging in waves, feeling restless and hungry. Yorke treats climaxes with a boxer’s strategy—feinting, falling back, changing the angle of his attack.
Critics have sometimes complained—understandably, if not always correctly—that Yorke’s solo work has felt incomplete. As frontman and linchpin of one of the world’s most dynamic rock bands, Yorke has had to work doubly hard to convince listeners that his late nights in front of a laptop are equally worthy of their attention. But ANIMA proves how much he and Godrich are capable of on their own. His bandmates’ influence colored The Eraser; on the more unmoored Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, their absence loomed large. But here he and Godrich have perfected a sound of their own, one that doesn’t take Radiohead’s achievements as its primary unit of measurement.
Track after track, Yorke proves the importance of stripping back. It’s remarkable how much he can make out of so little: The best songs here get by on the strength of just one or two synthesizer patches, a handful of electronic drum sounds—mostly just scraped white noise, plus the occasional booming kick drum—and his voice, processed and layered as often as is needed. “Impossible Knots” rides a propulsive electric bassline that lands somewhere between Afrobeat and Fugazi; the closing “Runwayaway” makes trance-like use of Tuareg-inspired desert blues guitar. There’s not much else. Every element practically dares you to so much as ask for any further accompaniment.
There are a few outright topical songs—“The Axe” (“Goddamned machinery, why don’t you speak to me?/One day I am gonna take an axe to you”) will resonate with anyone who suspects technological progress is moving in the wrong direction—but for the most part, Yorke’s lyrics remain imagistic, non-specific, as intractable as eye floaters. Fragmentary lines play out like pages ripped from a journal on the nightstand. Sometimes he seems to be muttering to himself; elsewhere his voice is chopped into a jumble of words dangled teasingly near the outer limits of meaning. “Twist” ends with an incantation that might be straight from a horror film: “A boy on a bike who is running away/An empty car in the woods, the motor left running.” We’re whipped back into the hypnopompic logic of Yorke’s tangled thoughts, the fogged film of ANIMA’s Dream Camera.
A short film by Paul Thomas Anderson for Netflix accompanies the album, sequencing “Not the News,” “Traffic,” and “Dawn Chorus” into a single audiovisual suite. Its opening shots—a subway car full of commuters in drab colors, their exaggerated movements a herky-jerky pantomime of restless slumber—explicitly link back to those ANIMA Technologies subway ads, playfully smudging the edges of the album’s world and our own. Exquisitely choreographed by Damien Jalet, the film takes the form of a dream sequence, following Yorke as he follows a woman (played by his partner, Dajana Roncione) along a labyrinthine subterranean course.
Both the album and the film hinge upon “Dawn Chorus,” one of the simplest, most beautiful songs in Yorke’s catalog. It is a reverential song about loss, nostalgia, and regret; a farewell to the departed and a celebration of second chances. Over patient synthesizer harmonies, Yorke mulls over ghosts of a past life, shadows of what might have been: “If you could do it all again,” he muses, each line trailing off into non sequitur, each stanza a stack of stray puzzle pieces. At the song’s apex, the synthesizers pause and crescendo softly, modulating as Yorke sings, his voice hushed:
In the middle of the vortex
The wind picked up
Shook up the soot
From the chimney pot
Into spiral patterns
Of you my love
If there’s a more perfect image of absence than these ashes dancing in midair, I don’t know it. Anderson’s film ends with Yorke awakening on the train, his face bathed in the light of daybreak as “Dawn Chorus” winds down. A moment before, he and Roncione have been locked in an intimate embrace, but as he opens his eyes, it is clear that he is alone. The song’s title has been a part of Radiohead lore for years now; only they know what other forms it might have taken, other meanings it might have accrued. But here, on a song starkly unadorned, Yorke expands his already vast catalog with a perfect, unforgettable song, an elegy for the dreams that cannot be retrieved.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | XL | June 27, 2019 | 8.3 | f202d56a-8085-407b-a4d9-af1ac914f7a3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Erykah Badu’s curated tour of the Afrobeat giant’s sprawling discography showcases the headier aspects of the legendary bandleader’s work, even as it grapples head-on with his life’s contradictions. | Erykah Badu’s curated tour of the Afrobeat giant’s sprawling discography showcases the headier aspects of the legendary bandleader’s work, even as it grapples head-on with his life’s contradictions. | Fela Kuti: Fela Kuti Box Set #4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fela-kuti-fela-kuti-box-set-4/ | Fela Kuti Box Set #4 | Fela Kuti’s oeuvre is so uniquely suited to the vinyl box set that, had the format not already existed, his music might very well have forced us to invent it. In an earlier era, when “serious” listening automatically implied a focus on either jazz or Western classical, the state of vinyl technology constrained runtime to two short-ish compositions—a poor substitute for a night at the opera or a bebop quintet playing in a smoke-filled lounge. The album was invented when this shortcoming was addressed by binding multiple discs together into a book-like form—hence “album”—compiled around an organizing theme. Only later did microgroove technology allow these thematic sets to fit on one LP, or “long-player.”
In the 1970s Fela took all that extra runtime and slurped it right up with what you might call macro-grooves. His seemingly endless songs pushed willfully against the limits of the vinyl format, forcing open enough room for the sprawling, polyrhythmic, polyamorous Afrobeat machine that was his band Afrika ’70 to assemble itself bit by bit, just as it did onstage. Accordingly, Fela long-players usually comprised only two songs, or even one song split in two. The approach gives a unique shape to the body of work he left us upon his passing in 1997. If anything makes Fela’s work “difficult,” it’s not the lack of entry points; it’s the length and depth of the passages they lead to. On such passages, it’s nice to have a guide, someone who’s traveled the road and can point out guideposts within his prolific discography.
For those lucky enough to see him perform during his lifetime, Fela himself was that guide. Each serpentine groove (even longer outside the studio, his now-famous concert in Detroit covering just four songs in its two and a half hours) was tamed by his ease in the roles of shaman, emcee, and raconteur as well as singer and bandleader: talking and joking with his audience, cussing the corrupt politicians and systems that were his constant nemesis. With the release of Knitting Factory and Partisan Records’ Fela Kuti Box Set #4, Erykah Badu ably takes on all of these roles, picking up the torch carried by Questlove, Brian Eno, and sometime Fela collaborator Ginger Baker on past editions.
Badu proves to be a sure-footed guide. On one hand this is not surprising at all, given that the artist sometimes known as Badoula Oblongata seems to excel in almost every medium in which she tries her hand. She has also performed live with Fela’s eldest son, Femi, at the revamped Shrine venue in Lagos and collaborated with his pioneering drummer Tony Allen within the Damon Albarn-led supergroup Rocket Juice & the Moon (experiences recounted in her liner notes for the new release). But it’s safe to say that most of her fans would consider those tangents to her career, and of the four curators named, Badu is perhaps least recognized as a Fela expert.
This, it turns out, might be a very good thing, as it frees Badu to chart a more eclectic course through the Knitting Factory’s Afro-funk archive. The seven pieces she has collected here comprise neither an all-time “essentials” list nor represent any particular side of Fela. Instead they follow certain threads across all phases of his evolution to create a playlist that is personalized, highly listenable, and in places revelatory, even to longtime fans.
Badu’s choose-your-own-Fela adventure leans heavily on the discs from the classic Afrika ’70 lineup that included Allen’s frenetic, virtuoso drumwork—particularly those that broadcast Fela’s fondness for a James Brown groove. (Most of the recordings are paired in their original A/B sides.) The rhythm guitar work that establishes the key of “Yellow Fever” and “No Agreement” is practically slick with chicken grease. But Badu also explores lesser-known avenues, following those threads right up into his mostly overlooked 1992 release Underground System.
This makes for winding, hypnotic listening, drawing out specific facets that would be lost in any other shuffle of the Fela deck. There is, for instance, a preponderance of great Fela solos on keys and squonky saxophone, side trips that are by turns noodly and whimsical or plonky and dissonant (see the extended Phantom of the Opera organ freakout that occurs roughly 11 minutes into “Army Arrangement Pt. 2”). This is less because great solos are absent elsewhere in his work than because Badu’s ear seems to have settled on tracks with particularly raw mixdowns, emphasizing the head-music dynamic of Fela’s playing over the grooves more conventionally suited to the dancefloor.
There are still plenty of the big brass arrangements and fast, shekere-anchored marches that have inspired DJs to seek out Fela’s music again and again in the last few decades. But far more often Badu has honed in on a particular strain of Afrobeat rhythm which marries the endlessly repetitive with the off-kilter (“No Agreement,” “Pansa Pansa”) in way that can be compared to almost nothing else outside of the krautrock mind-jams of Can. An overall loose and lo-fi feel pervades the selections, amplified by the inclusion of songs which were actually recorded live, whether abroad (“V.I.P.”) or in Fela’s Lagos stronghold, the Kalakuta Republic (“Johnny Just Drop”)—a quality which, amazingly, prevents the three-odd hours of music from ever dragging its feet or overwhelming.
In fact, the juxtaposition of tracks tends to enliven even the familiar ones (“Yellow Fever” b/w “Na Poi ’75” is the only disc which repeats from the previous three box sets, but inevitably one or two selections will already be on the shelves of ardent Fela fans). The listener is more likely to note the way a Rhodes keyboard’s overmodulated and fuzzy tone cracks through the mix with the force of an electric guitar, while elsewhere Fela drums on the keys in a way that recalls melodic percussion of John Cage’s prepared piano—or how his sax plays in a register so fat and low over the worryingly fast beat of “J.J.D.” that it could be easily be mistaken for a tuba.
There is another, more cerebral, reason to love viewing Fela through Badu’s mirror shades, and that is the way in which her mind—as expressed in the box set’s extensive liner notes—reinvigorates and recontextualize his politics as powerfully as her ear does the music. An unavoidable paradox of Fela’s appeal lies in the way his resolutely Afrocentric challenge to colonialism and political corruption—which at times extended to risking beatings, imprisonment, and even death while standing toe-to-toe with Nigeria’s military dictatorship—was undercut by a trenchant chauvinism. This tension is subtly but powerfully present in the music of Box Set #4. On “V.I.P.” the live Berlin performance is augmented by audible challenges from women in the audience who attended specifically to protest Fela’s retrograde vision for The African Woman. But “Coffin for Heads of State” pays tribute to his martyred mother—thrown from a window during an Army raid on Fela’s compound, resulting in fatal injuries—by recording the moment when Fela invited yet another beating by marching up to the quarters of outgoing President General Obasanjo and laying a coffin in front of his residence, shaming the man he held personally responsible for his mother’s death.
Badu never shies away from addressing these contradictions head-on. While there are places where her liner notes feel a bit like homework that has been reluctantly, if creatively, phoned in (“My brain is tired of writing… I think I have some sort of disorder. This is only the fourth one… and I feel like I am being punished. What kind of mind sits up and writes all day? On a timer?”), overall they add volumes by sharing the ways in which Fela’s rebellious spirit fit into her own life, contradictions and all.
In the notes accompanying “J.J.D.,” a diatribe against Nigerians who adopt a superior attitude after returning from abroad, she finds a counterintuitive point of entry into her own reception when, after her freshman year at Grambling State, she returned to Dallas in the mode of a self-appointed “religious dogmatic fact checker, pork intake monitor and sentence structure correctional officer.” Elsewhere she provides a refreshingly non-didactic take on the pairing of “Yellow Fever” and “Na Poi ’75,” songs which address the dangers of skin bleaching and sexual repression, respectively. Letting Afrobeat historian Chris May provide the more encyclopedic context for each track, Badu explores her personal connection to Fela’s themes in terms so stream-of-consciousness insightful they could almost be Funkadelic lyrics: “For an African to escape the cruels of inferiority complexes due to Colonialism unharmed, is like sucking on a big, thick juicy mango without its nectar slowly dripping down your wrist. You just can’t do it without getting physically sticky or psychologically penetrated.”
Ultimately, Badu’s reimagining of Fela succeeds better than any of the previous box sets by making his music feel both very much alive and very much her own. Her curation pulls together a sonically and thematically coherent experience that comes close to being the macro-album these album-length macro-grooves seem to demand. | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | Knitting Factory | December 15, 2017 | 8.5 | f203d42f-7673-43c3-8742-f27edbc0314a | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5a2866de460fd81ab41fc8d8/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/Fela%20Kuti-%20Fela%20Kuti%20Box%20Set%20#4%20.jpg |
Beth Ditto and co.-- already stars in the UK-- now take on the U.S. with their Rick Rubin-produced major-label debut. | Beth Ditto and co.-- already stars in the UK-- now take on the U.S. with their Rick Rubin-produced major-label debut. | Gossip: Music For Men | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13113-music-for-men/ | Music For Men | Thank heavens for Beth Ditto. In a world of manufactured, auto-tuned pop stars and wispy-voiced indie-chanteuse pinups it's nice to see an honest-to-god female rock star who is provocative, strong, and sexy with the muscular vocal chops to match. Since the release of 2005's Standing in the Way of Control, Ditto has become a superstar in the UK, hobnobbing with Karl Lagerfeld and Kate Moss and proudly splashing her naked body across the covers of British magazines. But at home in America, the Oregon-by-way-of-Arkansas singer is still a niche artist. That is supposed to change with Music For Men, her band's first studio album for Columbia. It represents Gossip's major-label coming out party, an achievement shepherded by bearded superproducer Rick Rubin.
The result is a good Gossip album, one that could soundtrack sweaty summer dance parties, but it also isn't drastically different from their last one. They may now have major-label money and famous friends, but their bluesy-voiced dance-punk remains unchanged-- a fact that is especially surprising given the waning popularity of that genre over the last four years. Ditto may be the "personality" of the band, its loud-mouthed, outrageously attired public face, but the power of its sound is anchored by Hannah Blilie's thundering, precise drumming and Brace Paine's choppy, Chic riffs. And on Music For Men these "sidemen" are in rare form with drums so taut they sound almost mechanical and pulsing, staccato basslines that call to mind Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen" (as on "Heavy Cross") and the "Knight Rider" theme song (as on "Vertical Rhythm"). But fret not, Ditto-worshippers; the arrangements are meticulous but spare, leaving plenty of sonic space for her vocal pyrotechnics. In fact, it is her florid, soulful voice that gives these crisply percussive tracks their melodic kick.
With a lean three-person lineup and a crack rhythm section, Gossip have never really been driven by their melodies. They built their reputation on unforgiving rhythmic relentlessness and Ditto's raw, limber warble instead of on singalong anthems or hooky choruses. But there are moments on Music For Men that represent some of the most memorably melodic of their career. In many cases, that's because Ditto has interpolated snippets of classic hits into her throttling garage-disco tunes. "Love Long Distance", for instance, quotes "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"'s "not much longer would you be my baby" line, and "Men in Love", this album's answer to the last record's gay-rights anthem of a title track, features a "Chain of Fools"-like "shame, shame, shame" refrain. It makes sense that Ditto would be influenced by such soul classics, given the vintage bent of her wail, but the band also pays homage to their disco and hard-rock influences on "2012", a standout track that flips Kiss' "I Was Made For Lovin' You" into a handclap-studded disco-punk anthem that instead announces, "My heart may never beat again, baby/ Have you got the best of me?"
Though longtime fans of the band may worry that they have left their DIY-punk-scene roots behind for Paris Fashion Week and pictures on Perez Hilton, Music For Men should assuage their fears-- not because it's not a glamorous or glitzy collection (it is), but because it sounds so much like its predecessor. Being caught between the mainstream and the underground may have changed the band's visibility, but it hasn't changed their music much. That is both a relief and little bit of a disappointment. As a musical statement of intent to the throngs of the newly interested, Music For Men shows a clear picture of who Gossip want to be-- a New Millennial Madonna for whom Danceteria never closes. But for those who have been following Gossip's career, waiting with bated breath to see how the band will evolve, this new record may feel a little too much like they are still Standing in the Way of Control. | 2009-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | June 24, 2009 | 6.4 | f20a305b-1273-4294-bccc-13a990bdded8 | Pitchfork | null |
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Featuring dual saxophones, synthesizers, voice, and drums, the new group led by Montreal composer John Hollenbeck analyzes pop songcraft through a jazz lens. | Featuring dual saxophones, synthesizers, voice, and drums, the new group led by Montreal composer John Hollenbeck analyzes pop songcraft through a jazz lens. | George: Letters to George | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-letters-to-george/ | Letters to George | John Hollenbeck likes to blur the distinctions between the knotty virtuosity of jazz and the broad appeal of pop. Formed in the 1990s, his best-known project, the Claudia Quintet, emulates certain tenets of rock bands—the ensemble’s lineup has remained the same since its inception—and draws from the more accessible side of chamber jazz, eschewing harsh textures while indulging rhythmic weirdness. More recently, his Songs I Like a Lot / Songs We Like a Lot / Songs You Like a Lot trilogy placed hits like “Wichita Lineman” and “How Deep Is Your Love” under the microscope of big-band music, stretching pop songs out into sprawling 10-minute epics.
Though it still aims for that same populist appeal, Hollenbeck’s new quartet GEORGE marks an eccentric departure from his previous work: Its debut album is a whimsical effort largely guided by the diverse tastes of its members. Rounded out by multi-instrumentalists Anna Webber (saxophone/flute), Aurora Nealand (saxophone/voice), and Chiquitamagic (keyboards/voice), the band formed and practiced remotely during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the four players would not meet in person for the first time until January 2022, when they assembled to record Letters to George. They seem to have embraced the strange set of circumstances that led to this initial session, emerging with a scrambled grab bag of tracks united in their disarray.
Bogotá-via-Toronto musician Chiquitamagic’s background is steeped in synthesizers and drum machines, and her club-tinged sensibility steers GEORGE into its most inspired territory, challenging her collaborators to fit their improvisation with her electronic aesthetic. On opening track “Earthworker,” her squelching bass synth lurches in step with Hollenbeck’s jerky percussion, setting up a hypnotic juxtaposition against velvety microtonal keys. This looped chord progression creeps along in small increments, rolling out a level plane for Webber and Nealand to build upon. Dual saxophones engage in warm, intimate conversation, and wordless vocals enter the mix, briefly matching a wayfaring keyboard melody note for note in the tune’s final stretch. “Earthworker” sets a high standard for what follows, tapping into each member’s full arsenal of experience and skills while maintaining a smooth exchange of ideas. Though their arrangements may seem perplexing, GEORGE’s music is quite listenable, emphasizing harmonic interplay and quirky energy.
On “Can You Imagine This,” initially composed to test the viability of the band’s remote practice sessions, their obvious chemistry yields Letters to George’s most emotionally dynamic showing. Chiquitamagic’s odd chord voicings take a commanding role once again, creating a subtle sense of unease. Webber and Nealand have even more room to improvise here, concocting chromatic phrases that sound intriguingly tangy, but not quite sour. Like the aforementioned “Earthworker,” the song peaks near the end with an almost artificial vocal performance. This time, as Webber switches from saxophone to flute, Nealand chirps and stutters like a buffering video, weaving in and out of alignment with the woodwind. The band teeters on the edge of collapse, each improviser prodding at the edges of a sustained chord until Webber and Nealand stick their landings in unaccompanied tandem. It’s not the smoothest ride, but it’s never boring.
GEORGE’s two cracks at cover songs don’t work as well as the adaptations on Songs I Like a Lot. Their rendition of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” struggles to gel around fractured drum fills and 808 pulses. A sparse backdrop of hushed saxophone and the occasional wash of digital strings create a sense of foreboding, but nothing emerges from the shadowy corners of the group improvisation. Their ambient reconstruction of Cyril Tawney’s sea shanty “Grey Funnel Line” is quite pretty, though, buoyed by impressionistic playing that results in some of Letters to George’s most melodic moments.
Compared to the intricately composed, sometimes symphonic works Hollenbeck is best known for, GEORGE’s debut is an exercise in leaving things up to fate. The performances are impulsive and fun, augmented by sounds more associated with dance music and alt-pop than free jazz. The ideas don’t always coalesce cleanly, but when the band nails down its unique blend of vintage funk and futuristic electronica on tracks like “Washington Carver” and “Iceman,” GEORGE’s energy is as infectious as a perfect pop tune. | 2023-01-31T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-31T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Out of Your Head | January 31, 2023 | 7 | f21293b8-ccf8-4166-861b-b76f85a6d052 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
On their first new album since 2015, the onetime Brooklyn indie darlings turn definitively toward dad rock. | On their first new album since 2015, the onetime Brooklyn indie darlings turn definitively toward dad rock. | Tanlines: The Big Mess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tanlines-the-big-mess/ | The Big Mess | When they were young, Tanlines made a couple EPs and an album that, at the time and still today, sum up a specific place and time. In their case, it was Brooklyn in 2012; but it was also the sound of at least half a dozen middle-class urban enclaves around the world, where, for a brief moment, straight white dudes got it up and started dancing. Tanlines did it with rare efficiency. It was good fun, which is harder than it sounds, and they made it sound easy.
And then time passed, which, if you’re lucky, it tends to do. Their next album sounded like more of the same, only less. They flailed a bit, soundtracking Lena Dunham’s therapy session and covering “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” They seemed to give it up.
This winter, they returned with “Outer Banks,” a song about failing to launch that itself fails to ascend, stuck in a mid-tempo shuffle that, despite a glittering bridge, isn’t likely to get anyone onto a dancefloor. Tanlines’ youthful glow has gone gray. This is mid-life crisis music. Lead songwriter and singer Eric Emm made some announcements: He’d moved to Connecticut during the hiatus and continued to make music in his basement. Longtime bandmate Jesse Cohen had stayed in the city, hosting musicians like Perfume Genius and Waxahatchee on his No Effects podcast, and finally reunited with Emm to record what became The Big Mess.
Another single followed “Outer Banks,” less catchy and more of a character study. But who’s the dude playing blues-y guitar licks in “Burns Effect” and why are we paying attention to him? “I get surreal sometimes,” he croons, without evidence. “It cuts like a knife.” Men making fun of self-important men (a timeless pastime) doesn’t happen enough anymore, but it’s not happening enough in “Burns Effect,” either. The target is blurry and the satire is as flaccid as the groove.
Emm had said that he wrote The Big Mess while thinking about “introspective masculinity.” Those hoping for, say, Lindsey Buckingham’s unnerving odes to creeps will find some of his clinquant guitar tones but little of his brutal psychology. Bruce Springsteen’s manly nostalgia-as-humblebrag is another touchstone, particularly the golden-hour dustups of his Tunnel of Love period. But mostly, these songs don’t interrogate their subjects. They empathize without explanation. “New Reality” chugs along amiably: “I just can’t disguise what I feel inside,” Emm declares. “I’m just trying to be me.” What’s stopping him? The narrator of “Arm’s Length Away” complains about the sensory overload of modern life, with its “electric motor cars” and “limited this and that,” then throws it all away for the pleasures of small-town life. “I got there and I looked around,” he sings. With admirable nerve, he takes on indie rock’s masterpiece of alienation, asking himself, “How did I get here?” A tambourine rattles, some echoes carefully bounce around the stereo field. “Well,” he says, finally, “I don’t mind at all.”
As an album, The Big Mess isn’t really declarative, or sizable, or wrecked. It aims for something complicated and settles for complacency: a working definition of modern masculinity. If Tanlines once sounded effortless, now little sounds like it’s worth the effort. The title track features rumbling drums by John McEntire of Tortoise and the Sea and Cake, who knows how to plumb the depths of surfaces that seem initially placid; longtime National collaborator Peter Katis conjures some melodrama at the mixing desk. The song swells, fades. Emm keeps saying there was a big mess but doesn’t say what it was.
The album’s best track shakes off the vague nostalgia. “Clouds” floats soft melodies atop a tale of characters who are convincing in their specificity. Like an upstate pair of Dorian Grays, they live with a portrait that could tell them who they are—could make them strip, could make them fuck, could even maybe make them dance. Emm doesn’t confirm if any of this actually happens, but here ambiguity is a sexy possibility. There’s a great percussive detail that sounds like two corduroy’d thighs rubbing together. Guitar and synth licks melt like ice. Finally some drama: The couple “rise out of the clouds/shaking in the sun,” caught up in natural forces larger than themselves. In a brief moment, Tanlines rediscover their inner glow. | 2023-05-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Merge | May 22, 2023 | 6.5 | f213dee9-5381-462a-9291-3fc97d4bcfc5 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
This set of ramshackle folk songs did as much to create the slacker ethos as Beck's more well-known 1994 release, Mellow Gold. It's also almost as good. | This set of ramshackle folk songs did as much to create the slacker ethos as Beck's more well-known 1994 release, Mellow Gold. It's also almost as good. | Beck: One Foot in the Grave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12936-one-foot-in-the-grave/ | One Foot in the Grave | The year "Loser" charted at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 (1994, probably hoisted up by cassingle-crazy prepubescents like me), Beck actually released three full-length albums: the canonical Mellow Gold; the messy, skit-heavy Stereopathetic Soul Manure; and One Foot in the Grave, a set of ramshackle folk songs about, roughly, the apocalypse.
He was 24. He was cute. He was smart, funny, and tender. Like a lot of great songwriters-- or writers, period-- he was as critical of his surroundings as he was enamored of them. He was also an entertainer, and it helped (from a marketing perspective) that his lines describing just how nigh the end is-- "Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare/ Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber"-- doubled as the kind of kooky shit that casual, young radio listeners are powerless against. In the year of Kurt Cobain's suicide and the popular awakening of bands as indescribably bad as the Stone Temple Pilots, Beck wasn't just our "consolation prize" (as Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music later called him)-- he was our escape hatch.
One Foot in the Grave, out of print between 2005 and last week's merciful deluxe reissue, is a good companion to Mellow Gold, if not as essential on its own. Originally recorded for Olympia, Wash.'s stringently indie K Records (which spent the 80s tearing down the received image of the punk rockers and replacing it with research librarians and men who love embroidering), One Foot is Beck striking his most lo-effort, DIY pose-- one that fit not only into K's roster, but into an indie-music world where foot shufflers like Palace, Smog, and Pavement were getting traction. But it's also his personal take on Americana-- opener "He's a Mighty Good Leader" is a Skip James cover; the slide-guitar blues of "Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods" just sounds like one; and the folksy stasis of "Sleeping Bag" has more in common with Leonard Cohen than anything happening in the indie world. This is Beck, rustic. The guitars are not entirely in tune. His voice, removed from the matrix of samples and syncopations, sounds nasal and naïve.
But his worldview-- really, what made him something much bigger than a novelty act-- is beautifully articulated. While Beck's commonly cited forebears are the Beastie Boys and Bob Dylan, his real lineage was from sculptors like Robert Rauschenberg or Claes Oldenburg: guys who turned the unusable spillover of mass production-- "trash," to the trash collector-- into art. If Warhol's soup cans had a crisp, almost optimistic feel, Oldenburg's hamburger was a downer-- an unappetizing convenience that will, eventually, kill us. And One Foot in the Grave is the moment after we surrender to it: Tract homes and strip malls, a Midwest that the Hold Steady hadn't yet romanticized, the edges of Los Angeles County that money didn't whitewash-- all crushed, half-empty, a mess. It's just the trash and the couch and me and you.
What's seductive about this particular doomsday scenario-- i.e., what's not depressing or urgent, or even meaningful-- is that Beck sounds relaxed. (If nobody advanced the idea in 1994, when the word was inescapable, I submit that being a slacker-- if being a slacker means "not caring about what's going on around me"-- is a form of peace, self-preservation, or maybe even enlightenment.) Every other song on One Foot juxtaposes a world burning down (or burned out) with sitting on one's ass. I could quote forever in support, but because this isn't a book report, I'll offer one line, my favorite, from "I've Seen the Land Beyond": "There's no telling who'll be dead/ When the pale horse is turning red/ And the tongues will burn in vain/ And everything will feel the same."
About half these jeremiads double as love songs, a form Beck didn't revisit in earnest again until 2002's Sea Change. While SC was unimaginatively billed as his "mature" album, I'm not sure that he was actually any more mature in 2002 than he was in 1994. True, the obvious "relationship" songs here-- "Asshole" (as in "She'll do anything to make you feel like an") and "Girl Dreams" (as in the ones that "never come true")-- lean on familiar (if funny) self-deprecation. But songs like "Painted Eyelids", "It's All in Your Mind", and "Teenage Wastebasket" (the latter two among the album's 16 bonus tracks) are careful, adoring, and sympathetic. ("Teenage Wastebasket", of which we get two versions, plays like a dull slap in Neutral Milk Hotel's face: "She is a teenage wastebasket/ Paddling up the river in a casket/ Trying to experience everything at least once/ Her life is a commercial for being fucked up.")
I'm not sure that remastering an album that was already lo-fi has done much good, and I'm not sure that the bonus material here is a revelation as much as, well, just a nice bonus. The best outtake, "It's All in Your Mind", was actually rerecorded for Sea Change, and it's obvious why the rest of the songs didn't make the final round. What is good is that One Foot ended up back in print. Mellow Gold eclipsed it (and Stereopathetic) entirely. In a sense, that's fine-- Mellow Gold was the best of the three. But I remember eagerly buying all three at once, and realizing later that what saved Beck from being a novelty artist was not only life after "Loser", but the life he'd already made around it. | 2009-04-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-04-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / Iliad | April 23, 2009 | 7.8 | f21e9ee7-68b7-420f-b696-4802a8a53912 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
David Berman’s first new music in over a decade is a marvelous collection of heartbreak, grief, and bitterness. His careful writing has never sounded so exacting or direct. | David Berman’s first new music in over a decade is a marvelous collection of heartbreak, grief, and bitterness. His careful writing has never sounded so exacting or direct. | Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/purple-mountains-purple-mountains/ | Purple Mountains | In 2009, David Berman quit music because he’s not a careerist; because he feared that he might start sucking; because, as he posited in an essay called “My Father, My Attack Dog,” his work as a songwriter could never offset the damage done to the world by his notorious corporate lobbyist father, Richard Berman, known as “Dr. Evil.” When HBO approached him during the hiatus to participate in a docuseries about his father Berman backed out, fearing it would end up being a sympathetic Tony Soprano–style portrait. But of all the reasons David Berman has given for abandoning his recording project, Silver Jews, the most pressing one was also the simplest: He wanted more time to read.
And so, Berman spent his forties at home in Nashville, surrounded by books—an experience that he recently described as being “kind of my childhood dream.” It’s an easy image to conjure for anybody acquainted with his body of work, an insular, quotable universe that spans six great-to-extraordinary studio albums, a collection of poetry, a book of cartoons, a documentary, a few EPs, and a compilation. Through it all, Berman maintained the role of the quiet outsider, someone proudly allergic to trends and devoted with scholarly intensity to things uncommon even in the individualist community of lo-fi indie rock: religion, country music, sobriety, an insistence on attributing deep significance to every word he sang and each interview he granted.
On 2008’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the final Silver Jews album, Berman pared down his MFA-backed control of language for simple, allegorical writing. Throughout the record, his mood seemed light, as he sang words of love and perseverance, accompanied by his wife Cassie, the bassist and vocalist of his always-changing band (which has included, at various points, Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Will Oldham, and William Tyler).
Having kicked a nearly fatal drug addiction and devoted himself to Judaism, Berman seemed to be in a good place back then. And while he’s always been one for fabrication—he has given several contradicting explanations for the “Silver Jews” band name through the years—he’s never been one for pure obfuscation. It was easy to believe him when he said he was done with music for good. There were a few appearances following his early retirement; you can find YouTube videos of him, clean-cut and suave, at a poetry reading and a Harmony Korine screening. But there was also a lot of quiet. You never really imagined a Silver Jews comeback, even after rumors started spilling about band practices and new songs with titles like “Wacky Package Eyes.” “No I don’t really want to die,” he sang a long time ago. “I only want to die in your eyes.” And so he did.
The way Berman tells it, he picked up a guitar again after his mother’s death. “I think it was like meditation, but it was also like a massage,” he said of that familiar exercise, the wooden body vibrating against his chest. His strumming eventually spiraled into “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son,” a gentle highlight from his new comeback album under the name Purple Mountains. Lyrically bereaved but musically at peace, it sets the tone for the record as a whole. These are plainspoken songs of heartbreak, grief, and bitterness. One ballad, “Nights That Won’t Happen,” can be heard as a pros-and-cons list of just being alive. Backed by members of the Brooklyn psych-folk band Woods, however, Berman’s writing has never sounded so exacting or direct. These songs offer a solid introduction to all the beautiful contradictions that have always made his work so comforting and complex—a rare feat for a comeback album.
As warm and immediate as the record sounds—heartland harmonica, cantina horns, and pedal steel all guide his words—Berman’s lyrics reveal all the reading that has inspired him. The singalong chorus of “Margaritas at the Mall” alludes to a philosophical text on the capitalist origins of purgatory; a line about treating the world as a “roadside inn” in “Nights That Won’t Happen” echoes a teaching by the second-century Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. And the jaunty “Storyline Fever” continues his tradition of whimsical penultimate tracks by considering the span of life as a long narrative with an infinite number of possible outcomes—it reads a lot like an anxiety attack but sounds a little like the Kinks. That Berman has scrounged a college syllabus’ worth of texts for their most human uses is a testament to the enduring, tragic empathy of his writing. Few writers are so willing to submit to their lowest depths to make you feel less alone.
While Purple Mountains is remarkable for affirming what we missed in Berman’s songwriting, it’s equally affecting for what it’s missing. He alludes to crises of faith in both “That’s Just the Way I Feel” and “Margaritas at the Mall,” a song that finds him at his wit’s end looking for answers from “such a subtle God.” His separation from Cassie after two decades of marriage casts a heavy shadow through nearly every song, a thematic and musical absence that gives the album an unsettling starkness. His voice has never been strong, but there’s a new helplessness to his delivery. “The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting,” he sings weakly in the opening track. “If no one’s fond of fuckin’ me, maybe no one’s fuckin’ fond of me,” he grumbles in the last. These are the kinds of characters he once observed with self-aware distance; nowadays, he just sounds spent.
The subject matter of Purple Mountains is grim, but he’s still David Berman, and he can still dazzle with the sheer beauty of his writing or wink at the camera to lighten the mood when necessary. Back when he first gained prominence in the ’90s, he was called a slacker, suggesting his unpolished delivery was either an affect or an ethos. Over time, he insisted just the opposite—that it was the striving that was important; that even if you couldn’t hold a note, it was worth showing the effort; that a song was something you spend a lifetime learning to sing right. | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | July 12, 2019 | 8.5 | f232c364-99fa-4cbf-a529-4e0c973f01d6 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s second solo album brings the haze of a previous life into focus, making a methodical survey of the vagaries of memory. | The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s second solo album brings the haze of a previous life into focus, making a methodical survey of the vagaries of memory. | Winston C.W.: Good Guess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/winston-cw-good-guess/ | Good Guess | Good Guess, the second album of original songs from Brooklyn singer-songwriter Winston C.W., surveys the varied topography of human memory, finding hills and valleys in territory that feels both familiar and foreign. A song might arrive through rose-tinted glass, or as a self-critical reflection that casts the past in a single hue. But whatever the initial observation, it paves the way for more nuanced understanding, shedding light on previously overlooked intricacies of relationships both platonic and romantic—though, by the time all’s been said and sung, even these conclusions feel debatable.
This even-handed analysis is old hat for Cook-Wilson, who, as the frontman of New York sophisti-pop quartet Office Culture, detailed the highs and lows of city living on 2019’s A Life of Crime, an album full of characters finding joy and disappointment in equal measure in bars and backrooms. (Full disclosure: Cook-Wilson is also an occasional contributor to Pitchfork.) Good Guess localizes the drama, applying Cook-Wilson’s hyper-analytical introspection to the mind’s eye. With the hindsight that comes from months spent indoors, the haze of a previous life comes into focus, enabling more impartial evaluation of a time not so long ago that already feels distant.
Even with a clearer understanding of the past, doubt lies just beyond the frame. Uncertainty arrives in lockstep with each vignette, affecting every turn of phrase and chord progression. It oozes into the record’s central monologue, making for songwriting that’s rarely authoritative and keenly aware of its limitations, yet doing its best to describe things as they were. As Cook-Wilson sings on “Safety,” “That guilt will find you, no matter where you summer/No matter how long you hang your head.”
Offset by Cook-Wilson’s procession of muted piano chords, Carmen Rothwell’s bowed upright bass and Ryan Beckley’s hazy electric guitar heighten the miasmic, self-effacing verses of “Safety” and “Broken Drum.” Gradually, however, the players shift towards harmonic unison, and tense, dissonant performances eventually congeal into moments of warm melody. Simultaneously, Cook-Wilson’s songwriting becomes grounded and cogent, emerging from dazed ruminations with new wisdom on personal failings, whether it’s an awareness of life’s repetitive nature (“Broken Drum”) or an acknowledgment of how deeply the present is beholden to the past (“Safety”).
Beyond serving as backdrop for Good Guess’ ambiguous narration, this instrumentation propels the record’s most self-assured moments forward. The introductory instrumental of opener “Cakewalk” provides a sense of motion, its recollections of time spent with an ex-flame transitioning to a metaphor-laden exposition on the entire relationship as a meandering solo piano gives way to the full ensemble. Likewise, on “Birds,” the album’s most lighthearted tune, Cook-Wilson employs melodic vamps evocative of Randy Newman to playfully rib himself for his own past self-aggrandizing attitudes. It’s a spark of joy on an album that is otherwise serious and methodical in its approach to memory.
Experimental segues are abundant on Good Guess, but they sometimes feel isolated and nebulous. The instrumental “Swing Time” and its disparate, untethered instruments come off as indulgent, softening the momentum built over the record’s first four tracks. The winding lyricism and about-face turns from harmony towards a dirge-like procession on “No Regrets” are similarly contrarian, breaking from the album’s characteristic warm interplay. But in line with the record’s penchant for exploration, these suites are short-lived, as fleeting as the memories they soundtrack.
There’s no Rosebud in sight by the time Cook-Wilson arrives at the album’s titular conclusion, no final ruling as the mental evidence begins to pile up. “I look at your picture, squint ’til it bends/The eaves start rustling and I’m numb again,” he croons, encased by rumbling pianos and dissonant electric guitar, his vocals sounding spent as the album reaches its max volume before quickly fading to an outro of dampened pianos, quiet as it began. Nonetheless, it offers some closure; while the past remains unknowable, Good Guess illuminates the recesses of the psyche. There’s no real truth to be found back there, either—but eventually, you’ll have to turn around and come out.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Jazz | Whatever’s Clever / Ruination | December 29, 2020 | 7.5 | f2347283-f9e4-4429-b7f0-d3c65e970fb9 | Connor Beckett McInerney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/connor-beckett mcinerney/ | |
Sensuous, funny, and smartly produced, the London artist’s full-length debut transforms dusky electronic beats and trending pop sounds into a singular celebration of sexual agency. | Sensuous, funny, and smartly produced, the London artist’s full-length debut transforms dusky electronic beats and trending pop sounds into a singular celebration of sexual agency. | Shygirl : Nymph | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shygirl-nymph/ | Nymph | Midway through “Shlut,” a sultry entry from Shygirl’s full-length debut, the singer poses a simple question over skittering trap beats: “Is it so bad to just like to be touched?” Sexuality, especially female sexuality, is often seen as frivolous, fleeting, and tempestuous, something that by nature can’t be defined or qualified. Across Nymph, in both the content of the songs and the eclectic nature of their instrumentation, the artist born Blane Muise challenges that notion by giving full breadth to her fantasies and desires. What does it mean to be “bad”? What does it mean to want? With futuristic neo-club anthems like “Freak,” “Nasty,” and “Gush,” Shygirl has long worn her sexuality on her sleeve. On Nymph, her siren song lures us deeper into the forest, past the dank dancefloors of her early discography and toward somewhere brighter and more introspective.
To achieve this feat, she assembled a coterie of co-writers and co-producers, including longtime collaborator Sega Bodega, Mura Masa, Arca, and underground pop denizens Danny L Harle, BloodPop, and Vegyn. Each is known for a unique sound, but from track to track, they never clash. To her immense credit, Shygirl maintains the thread throughout, her barely-there falsetto and never-faltering bravado keeping everything laser-focused. On “Shlut,” she, BloodPop, and Bodega distill aspects of classic Y2K pop, like Darkchild-esque plucked acoustic guitars and a staticky looping sample, and mesh them seamlessly with the hip-hop and electronic influences you’d expect from a Shygirl track. The sound transcends nostaglia, evoking the low-rise jeans, belly tees, and brazen sex appeal of the early 2000s without resorting to mimicry.
Elsewhere on Nymph, Shygirl and her cohorts achieve the opposite effect—taking a very contemporary sound and reverse-engineering it so that it resembles the genre from which it evolved. While Shygirl has never been a hyperpop artist, her creative development has coincided with the genre’s rise. It’s an easy first reference for “Firefly,” where she, Fade to Mind producer Kingdom, and Bodega marry a bouncy, glitchy synth melody with a wispy electro beat and downpitched vocals. But instead of summoning an (increasingly stale, if we’re being honest) hyperpop sound, a satisfying UK garage track bubbles forth. Shygirl’s understanding of how these musical elements interact and inform one another feels alchemical.
That’s not to say Nymph is all heady production values and technical minutiae; it’s also a showcase for Shygirl’s whimsical and carnal humor. Call me juvenile, but I have yet to get through the intro to “Coochie (a bedtime story)” without a hearty chuckle: “Hello?” Shygirl breathes down the phone, “Is there anyone there? It’s the coochie calling.” She sounds like the grime Betty Boop. Even that image gets subverted, though, because as the song kicks in, we realize it’s not Shygirl’s coochie that is doing the calling; rather, she’s on the receiving end of the request. “Anytime that coochie calls/I’ll be on my way,” she sings, once again using her sexuality to underline the point that she has the agency to fuck, or be fucked, by whomever she pleases.
Like “Coochie,” every track on Nymph reveals some new aspect of Shygirl’s persona, musicality, or, most often, both. “Poison” is as much four-on-the-floor club fare as it is ’90s Europop fantasia. “Nike” is a tongue-in-cheek minimal dance track built around a flickering melody that sounds like a Nokia ringtone from 2005. Even when the pace slows in the final third, Nymph remains everything you’d want from a debut album: a definitive collection of songs that builds upon what already makes the artist remarkable. The only thing that doesn’t quite fit is Shygirl’s chosen pseudonym; coy, maybe, sly, definitely, but Shygirl? There’s nothing reserved, nothing toned-down about this record. Though she seldom sings above her speaking register, it’s the proverbial strength of Shygirl’s voice that gives Nymph its undeniable power. | 2022-10-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Because Music | October 6, 2022 | 8 | f2437b3d-283b-4cdc-8ce3-708ba9af2b96 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
This compilation of rarities shows the beloved emo band growing into their status as a generational voice. | This compilation of rarities shows the beloved emo band growing into their status as a generational voice. | The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Assorted Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-world-is-a-beautiful-place-and-i-am-no-assorted-works/ | Assorted Works | The emo revival was largely a humble, underground phenomenon when The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die got started in 2009, but everything about them—their name, what seemed like a dozen people on stage trying to keep six-minute songs called “Eyjafjallajokull Dance” from collapsing on themselves—was too audacious and absurd to be ignored. It was clear they’d either be a generational voice or they might implode after one album, if they even get to that point. Maybe both. Even before their seismic proper debut Whenever, If Ever, TWIABP owed this reputation to the daunting and diffuse array of splits, singles, EPs and alternates that are collected for Assorted Works—a compilation that functions as a capstone for a bygone version of TWIABP, an entire scene, and an entire decade.
Scour r/emo, Midwest Emoposting or any other similarly minded community, and “Best Of” mixes of this material likely already exist, the band’s shadow history distilled into an unofficial TWIABP LP4. So Assorted Works might not actually be meant for the hardcore TWIABP fan—it’s a work of convenience rather than curation, 20 tracks in semi-chronological order over the span of nearly 80 minutes. And really, it’s far more fun to explore these songs in their original contexts, where TWIABP’s evolution can be traced from a confounding curiosity to a band that stuck around long enough to be a formative influence.
The first four tracks are taken from Are Here to Help You, a split with New Hampshire’s sorely underappreciated Deer Leap. “Beverly Wyatt,” which shows them beginning to refine and weaponize their burst-and-bloom dynamics, is also a treasured artifact from a crucial period: a few months before the release of Whenever, If Ever. On its original 4-way split, “Beverly Wyatt” served as the binding agent between the dour indie-pop of Tigers Jaw, the misanthropy of Self Defense Family, and metalcore innovators Code Orange, who were about five years away from realizing their full potential as WWE entrance music.
Though TWIABP already felt unruly and grandiose, they were still clearly a product of their local emo scene—probably the only reason they weren’t immediately hailed as maximalist indie rock standard-bearers like Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene. Most of the notable bands of that time had an off-key yelper and an off-key hardcore guy on the mic. TWIABP had both: Tom Diaz and a guy named “Shitty Greg,” who’s credited with inventing the term “twinkle daddy,” which could refer to the two dominant modes of guitar in early TWIABP—the ringing, exploratory harmonies of American Football or the stardust trails of Explosions in the Sky.
It took time for TWIABP to make sense of everything, but from Are Here to Help You, it already was clear what they were about. Diaz was the singer for a band that conscientiously lacked a frontperson, writing almost entirely in plural pronouns about building community, reinforcing the meta, world-building quality of the band. The first half of Assorted Works introduced melodic motifs and homespun images (cars parked on the lawn, climbing trees) that would be revisited on their later albums, while “Mega Steve” is the first in a trilogy of TWIABP songs honoring drummer Steven Buttery, the only person to appear on all 20 tracks. Fuss with the sequencing of Assorted Works’ first half and there’s an alternate vision for Whenever, If Ever that similarly juggles propulsive pop-punk (“Be Neon With Me”), scratchy folk (“To the Janitor, to the King”) and their preeminent mode, which conflated emo’s anxious energy with post-rock’s grandeur. As is, they justify the hype that turned Whenever, If Ever into the emo revival’s first phenomenon—anticipation was so fervent that the label had to move it up due to leaks, and it even managed to scratch the outer edges of the Billboard 200.
Oddly enough, Whenever, If Ever is the source for the one true rarity on Assorted Works. “Gig Life” is the most plainspoken song Diaz wrote for the band, a vivid account of going from college town to college town, sustained by Sheetz and mewithoutYou albums. The take here, sourced from a lathe-cut single, cuts off before reaching the orchestral crescendo of the Whenever, If Ever version, and its incompleteness is even more poignant as his last vocal feature on Assorted Works—Diaz left the band prior to the release of Whenever, If Ever and died at the age of 32 in 2018.
Diaz’s role was absorbed by David Bello, whose vocals were similar enough on Whenever, if Ever that the two were easy to confuse. But Diaz never had a chance to guide something like “Fat Heaven,” the morose, feedback-scarred track that immediately follows “Gig Life,” and leads into the most antagonistic work of TWIABP’s catalog. “A Note From the Author February 1st to the Author January 1st” introduces the borderline-parodic spoken-word readings of Chris Zizzamia, whose presence lent an intriguing, unstable element to the band’s live shows. It’s followed by “We Carry Knives,” six minutes of harsh noise that appeared on tour-only single The Distance. In retrospect, those one-offs are the sound of TWIABP testing their outer limits before their transcendent sophomore album Harmlessness, a work so fantastically realized that it inevitably siphons some magic off of what surrounds it. The Assorted Works cut from this period are almost uniformly strong and occasionally sublime—the murderous double-kick drum outro of “Katamari Duquette” is a highlight, as is “Smoke & Felt,” featuring call-and-response vocals between Bello and Katie Dvorak.
Assorted Works cuts off on “Body Without Organs,” a song that didn’t quite mesh with the generous spirituality of Harmlessness and was released as an ACLU benefit in November 2016. There’s nothing here made by the lineup responsible for 2017’s Always Foreign, nor have TWIABP produced any new music in the time since—a significant decline in momentum two years after an album that was primed to be a breakthrough. Always Foreign featured TWIABP’s catchiest songs and also their most relevant, as Bello drew on his experience as a person of color for timely invective against rising anti-immigration rhetoric, proving TWIABP was not a band bound by their utopian idealism.
There has been a lot of turmoil in the band’s lineup since then. The only remaining original member is Buttery; “Shitty Greg” left for good in 2015 and is now a booking agent for a lot of bands you’ve probably seen if you liked TWIABP. The remaining members of TWIABP are working on their next album with “probably the strongest core we have yet,” and maybe it will just as strong as everything else they’ve released. But they look downright normal now, promoting a collection that remembers when they could’ve been anything in the world.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | November 2, 2019 | 7.7 | f249da8e-a56d-41b6-a7c2-bdbfb7754347 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
If a soundtrack to a troubled movie that features half Sia songs and half Scott Walker compositions sounds at the very least interesting, rest assured, it is not. | If a soundtrack to a troubled movie that features half Sia songs and half Scott Walker compositions sounds at the very least interesting, rest assured, it is not. | Scott Walker / Sia: Vox Lux OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scott-walker-sia-vox-lux-ost/ | Vox Lux OST | “That’s what I love about pop music. I don’t want people to think too hard. I just want them to feel good.” That sentiment is uttered early on in Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux by the film’s protagonist, Celeste, a school-shooting survivor whose moment in the national spotlight turns into a decades-long ascent to pop stardom. It’s an old cliché about pop’s role in society that demands some ideological sharpening, but Corbet’s second feature doesn’t possess half the amount of focus required to develop the well-worn idea into something more insightful and holistic.
As young Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) survives an unbelievable tragedy that’s become all-too-believable while her older self (Natalie Portman) is trapped in a cycle of self-loathing and trauma, Vox Lux attempts to tilt at a few thematic windmills—the American culture of violence, how said culture intersects with pop iconography, the pressure we place on public figures to behave in a way that reflects our own assumed system of belief—without fully committing to any one beat. As a meditation about the daily horror of mass shootings in America and the accidental stardom that can accompany becoming the face of tragedy, it’s purely anachronistic; the assertion that Celeste’s elegiac post-shooting song “Wrapped Up” could go viral in the early 2000s anticipates the normalcy of regular violence and instant fame in a way that betrays the pre-viral time period. As target practice for the target-rich machinations of pop music itself, Vox Lux feels as forced as Portman’s Staten Island accent.
Amid these grasps for meaning, the clearest aspect of Vox Lux becomes its general disregard for the music itself. Written and produced by Sia and ubiquitous pop guy Greg Kurstin (Adele, Halsey), most of the ten Cassidy-and-Portman-performed songs the duo composed for the film are jammed into subpar concert footage that closes out the film’s last 20 minutes. For viewers looking to engage more fully with the music, there’s the soundtrack itself, which tacks on 10 instrumental score cues composed by legendary avant-garde figure Scott Walker (who also handled scoring on Corbet’s previous feature, the fascist-focused 2015 The Childhood of a Leader). Divorced from the screen, the Vox Lux soundtrack literally represents a split release between two of the pop machine’s most capable tinkerers and one of the most offbeat musicians of the last 40 years—a prospect as enticing as it is wholly representative of the film’s own thoughtless framework.
Sadly, neither of the soundtrack’s halves provide much to sink one’s teeth into. Walker’s scoring gets the job done in the truest sense, to the point where much of his music feels incidental when removed from the images it accompanies; his “Opening Credits” theme stands out the most here, with piping, eerie vocals and unsettling ambience only matched by the horrifying, hollowed-out center of “Terrorist.” Otherwise, Walker’s orchestral compositions—which provide a solid, melodramatic foil to Corbet’s onscreen pretension—largely lose their effectiveness in a home-listening environment, a fans-only experience far removed from the obtuse high art of his solo material and collaborations with Sunn O))).
If Walker’s contributions simply fade into the scenery, then Sia and Kurstin’s work represents the opposite. Her days as lead vocalist for British chillout group Zero 7 aside, Sia’s never really been much for subtlety; listening to her strongest and most effective singles can provide the emotional uplift of hang-gliding to the top of a mountain with fireworks timed to explode the moment you reach the peak. She makes big-sounding music with Kurstin frequently at her side, but through writing songs for Celeste’s fictional oeuvre, their sweeping approach takes the form of an obnoxious blare.
“I’m a private girl/ In a public world,” Portman sings competently on “Private Girl” through thickets of vocal processing that are practically tactile in their over-application; the sentiment lands with a dull thud of obviousness that suffocates the music as well as the film it’s attached to. Sure, pop music retains an effectiveness when not asking too much of its listeners—but Vox Lux and its insipid attempts at creating a fictional pop world functions as a cautionary tale in the face of such a banal truism: Treating your audience as if they’re stupid tends to reflect poorly on everyone except the audience themselves. | 2018-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Columbia / Three Six Zero | December 21, 2018 | 4.5 | f24a57da-faac-4dd5-b47e-206d361c6fd8 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid have traveled far in the six years since their debut ... | Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid have traveled far in the six years since their debut ... | Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7476-the-tired-sounds-of/ | The Tired Sounds of... | Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid have traveled far in the six years since their debut, 1995's Music for Nitrous Oxide. But. They. Continue. To. Move. Very. Slowly. That promising first record combined crude guitar feedback with some snippets of religious radio programming that the band captured in their home state of Texas. It was all likely laid down on a four-track in some living room arranged around a double-barreled bong. Music for Nitrous Oxide was a noble and affecting work of home recording, showing that the DIY aesthetic could be incorporated into experimental drone music just as easily as guitar-based pop.
But The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid finds these guys fully harnessing the power of the studio, with striking results. Strings and horns are all over this record, and the richer palate gives the drones added weight and depth. In 1989, new music pioneer Pauline Oliveros recorded an amazing album called Deep Listening inside a 2,000,000-gallon steel tank, and the feel of The Tired Sounds is similar. Like the Oliveros record, the listener is meant to focus attention on the subtle build and decay inside these layered drones. Slight breaks in harmony between a violin and a shard of guitar feedback carry serious emotional weight. The half-second decay of a breathless French horn resonates like a perfect chord change. Silence becomes another instrument.
The Tired Sounds is an exceptionally long album-- two CDs or three LPs-- with six multi-part suites over the course of about two hours. If this were the latest collection of 2Pac rarities, we'd be talking serious sonic overkill, but music that evolves this slowly needs plenty of time to stretch out. Hence, nothing about this lengthy album feels at all bloated or extraneous.
The first three-part piece bears the jaunty title "Requiem for Dying Mothers," and the music itself is fitting. Thick cello harmonies weave between guitar drones that have a bright, almost Celtic quality. Changes are paid out slowly over the course of close to seven minutes, until the track opens up in its second part, introducing periods of silence and deep, foreboding bass pedals. Eventually, the band's penchant for field recording rears its head, as the 20-minute "Requiem" transforms into a gothic piece, with spare piano and unnamable radio transmissions.
"Austin Texas Mental Hospital" keeps the party going over the next 20 minutes, as guitar feedback and a larger orchestra modulate between two chords, rocking back and forth slowly like a self-stimming resident of the facility that gives the piece its name. The second part of the track reminds me of the Peter Gabriel soundtrack to Birdy, with hints of mechanical breathing interspersed with throbbing bass tones and a hanging drone in the middle register.
The second disc has a relatively lighter tone, with more space around the instruments, more keyboards, and less guitar feedback. "Mullholland" seems like it could be an audition tape for the forthcoming David Lynch film of a similar name, glowing with menace like a freshly waxed, cherry-red vanity ride. "Piano Aquieu," though, is the real find on this disc-- a minimal piece for treated keyboards, piano and organ, with a yearning melody and a half-hearted promise of redemption.
The strings return in force on "Fac 21," joining in a thick, Youngian drone. The piano-based "Ballad of Distances" recalls Labradford as heard through the ventilation shaft at Alcatraz, and the three-part "A Lovesong (For Cubs)" incorporates horns and cellos for a more conventional, but no less affecting sound.
With each record, Stars of the Lid seem to assess what tools are at their disposal and then set about seeing how they can maximize the result. Their continued explorations into more varied instrumentation and richer sonics are a smashing success. Still, in their crowded field, it's hard to say exactly what makes Stars of the Lid so special. It comes to mind that their relentless commitment to subtlety sets them apart, as does their masterful hand with tone. Throughout The Tired Sounds, dissonance is doled out in small portions, perfectly coloring the sculpted fields of sound. | 2001-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2001-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | September 24, 2001 | 8.6 | f259e871-61c1-426f-aaeb-e27311ebc8cb | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | 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 explore the political soul of Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 album Super Fly. | 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 explore the political soul of Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 album Super Fly. | Curtis Mayfield: Super Fly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/curtis-mayfield-super-fly/ | Super Fly | The success of an album like Super Fly goes against all conventional wisdom. Nothing this raw, this ghetto, this funky, soulful, and political is supposed to sell five million copies. At least, to my understanding, nothing before the dawn of hip-hop, and even then you had to sacrifice some of those elements for commercial success. That’s what all the “conscious” rappers were telling me around the time I discovered Curtis Mayfield’s album some 15 years ago. It was around the time when George W. Bush was trying to convince the country that there were definitely WMDs in Iraq and even if there weren’t, he was still justified in leading us into another war with no information, no goals, and no end in sight. And yet the only protest music to really penetrate the charts was Green Day’s (decent) “American Idiot” and Jadakiss’ (less decent) “Why.”
The worst political music sounds like political music. It tends to be didactic, sure, but that’s an understandable and almost forgivable sin; it is difficult to condense any meaningful and convincing political message into the space of a few verses and a chorus. But when political music is truly awful—here, think of something like John Lennon’s “Imagine”—it is because the artist has made the same mistake as the politician: they have treated the message as more important than the people it is being delivered to. The best political music doesn’t necessarily announce itself as political because it is concerned first and foremost with the people for whom the politics matter the most.
That’s Super Fly. As Mayfield’s third studio album as a solo artist, Super Fly perfectly encapsulates the post-Civil Rights/early Black Power feel of black America struggling to survive the social and political consequences of the nation’s conservative backlash. This is the backdrop of all of the so-called blaxploitation era of film in the early ’70s, though Super Fly (directed by Gordon Parks Jr.) is the most explicit. The 1972 film follows Youngblood Priest, disillusioned by the drug trade that brought him riches beyond his imagination, as he seeks to set up one final score before leaving the game for good. The soundtrack became the most cohesive and poignant of Mayfield’s albums because it unfolds around this story of the dispossessed, forgotten strivers. The film’s star, the classically trained Ron O’Neal, said in an interview: “Super Fly is about people who don’t believe in the American Dream at all.”
As such, Mayfield opens the album with “Little Child Runnin’ Wild,” a song that was in the works before he got the Super Fly assignment, which balances both the frenetic pace and precarious circumstances of ghetto life. The string section is ominous, while the horns feel like a further warning of the dangers Mayfield describes in the lyrics. But when he wails:
Didn’t have to be here
You didn’t have to love for me
While I was just a nothin’ child
Why couldn’t they just let me be
You can feel the pain coursing through his falsetto as it gives way to resigned, desperate moan on the last “let me be.” You cry for the nameless, faceless child who runs with no escape.
Then, when the percussion kicks in on “Pusherman,” you’re ready to groove. The drums are brought to the fore, giving us a percussive melody foreign to pop music but which hit the definition of funky. It would have been easy to let the tune carry on to the dancefloor with some lighter lyrics, but Mayfield didn’t let listeners off the hook, dropping us into the life of this “man of odd circumstance/A victim of ghetto demands.” He enjoys all the spoils you expect to come from a life of dealing drugs: money, sex, clothes, cars, envy. But Mayfield’s chorus provides us with an important insight into who and what is embodied in the “Pusherman”:
I’m your mama, I’m your daddy
I’m that nigga in the alley
I’m your doctor, when in need
Want some coke, have some weed
You know me, I’m your friend
Your main boy, thick and thin
I’m your pusherman
It’s not simply that the pusherman becomes this singular figure that replaces every important relationship in the addict’s life, but rather that the pusherman could be any one of these people. Black America faced an uncertain world in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the election of President Richard Nixon. Politicians were promising to restore “law and order” after years of urban rebellions frightened white folks who had long fled to the suburbs. Steady divestment from black communities, along with increasing levels of violent policing, right at the moment where black people were supposedly free to enjoy the rights of American citizenship, put black neighborhoods at economic depression levels. The drug trade offered the best sense of escape. No one, as Mayfield pointed out, was exempt from the temptation. He had intimate knowledge of this world. Mayfield was a son of Chicago, having been raised in the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects. The lyrics were as much his personal reflection on ghetto life as they were based on the characters of the film.
The soundtrack’s biggest hit, “Freddie’s Dead,” is the tragic tale of one of the film’s characters, Fat Freddie, an addict that Youngblood Priest exploits in his plot to make his last big score. Mayfield employs the wah-wah guitar to place some funk underneath the mournful orchestra while warning us against Freddie’s life choices. The most interesting lyrical couplet, though, is: “We can deal with rockets and dreams/But reality, what does it mean.” It’s reminiscent of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” lamenting the ability of mankind to explore the stars but not provide for people suffering right here on earth. The album and Mayfield’s politics were aligned in being concerned, above all else, about how we care for one another.
The back half of the soundtrack includes the sensual “Give Me Your Love” which accompanies the film’s iconic bathtub scene where Youngblood Priest and his lover, Georgia, make love in the bubbles. The scene itself is maybe not as smooth as the music, but at the time, seeing black bodies be sensual and sexual with one another was so rare in film that it had to feel more revolutionary than Parks Jr.’s camera made it look. Still, the machismo and misogyny of the film can’t be overlooked, as so much of the blaxploitation era leaned on sexist tropes to carry their narratives, turning the women of their films into ancillary characters who only bolstered the male protagonist’s claim to manhood and vitality. “Give Me Your Love” isn’t so much a love song as a command song. It manages not to veer too far into the territory of aggression, maintaining a romantic assertiveness, but the line is bit blurry.
The cheesiest of the album’s nine tracks is “No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)” which feels thrown in to satisfy Mayfield’s desire to ensure that he didn’t glorify drug use, as the film tended to do. But even with his overly cautious, hall-monitor lyrics (“You don’t have to be no junkie”), he never leaves the groove behind, opting this time for something a bit more triumphant and celebratory. He closes it out with “Superfly,” a clear attempt at mimicking the boisterous superhero anthem that Isaac Hayes provided for Shaft the year before. Hayes’ song may be the single most popular track of the blaxploitation genre, but that has as much to do with its being peppered with easily parodied, overtly ’70s slang as it does with the quality of the song (it helped Hayes become the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song). “Superfly” aspires to be as big, musically, as “Theme from Shaft,” but it doesn’t sacrifice on the thematic continuity. This is still about hustling, surviving, poverty, blackness, and pain. It is, as Mayfield’s highest falsetto intones at the end of the song, about “Tryin’ ta get over.”
Super Fly inspired imitations in the blaxploitation soundtrack genre, such as Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street, James Brown’s Black Caesar, and Willie Hutch’s The Mack (not bad imitations, but imitations nonetheless) that didn’t quite capture the tension, despair, and astute political analysis that make Super Fly stand out. Mayfield created the perfect film soundtrack; certainly the best of the blaxploitation genre, and perhaps, outside of Prince’s Purple Rain, the best of any soundtrack written and produced by a single artist.
And while he sang sweetly on record, Mayfield had entanglements with the real women in his life that were much more harsh. According to the Curtis Mayfield biography, Traveling Soul, co-written by his son Todd Mayfield and Travis Atria, around the time of Super Fly’s success, Curtis was abusive toward the woman he lived with, identified only as Toni, and referred as his “spiritual wife.” Todd writes: “On vacation in Nassau in October [1972], right around Super Fly’s ascendance to the top of the pops, he and Toni got into a late-night argument as [his daughters] Tracy, Sharon, and I slept in another room. When the commotion startled me awake, I walked out to find policemen hulking in the doorway and Toni with a black eye. Dad never did these things in front of us, but we’d see the aftermath.”
There is a tendency to celebrate male artist in such an uncomplicated way that obscures, and even rationalizes, some truly abhorrent behavior. This is especially true when it comes to violence against women committed by musicians we celebrate for their political contributions. We have to be willing to complicate the legacies of the men responsible for these acts. Entangled within Mayfield’s life is Super Fly, the ghetto, funky, soulful, political album that was disseminated across America. Maybe the conscious rappers of my youth were right. If Super Fly needed to accomplish all of that to become popular, it’s the exception that proves the rule. It was a moment of fortune. | 2018-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Curtom | June 17, 2018 | 9.1 | f25b8ee4-0213-4a46-b358-7c6ab290927c | Mychal Denzel Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mychal-denzel smith/ | |
Few post-punk outfits deliver their most accomplished album 36 years after putting out a debut single. Yet the story of Philadelphia’s Notekillers has rarely been a typical one. | Few post-punk outfits deliver their most accomplished album 36 years after putting out a debut single. Yet the story of Philadelphia’s Notekillers has rarely been a typical one. | Notekillers: Songs and Jams Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22154-songs-and-jams-vol-1/ | Songs and Jams Vol. 1 | Few post-punk outfits deliver their most accomplished album 36 years after putting out a debut single. Yet the story of the Philadelphia’s Notekillers has rarely been a typical one. After an initial five-year run in the late 1970s and early ’80s, members of this instrumental trio shelved their jagged no-wave arrangements and called it quits. Guitarist David First moved to New York and launched a career in the city’s Downtown new-classical scene. And while this short-lived band didn’t make most of the histories of the American underground (understandably), it did turn out to have some big fans in Sonic Youth.
Once Thurston Moore let on that he, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo had all been influenced by Notekillers’ only single—and after Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! imprint released a 2004 collection of vintage recordings—the band resumed work and put out a solid reunion set.
It was a feel-good underground rock story. (Resolved: only cranks dislike seeing relatively unknown artists get a bit of overdue recognition.) But it was also possible to survey the band’s embryonic provocations and post-hiatus polish and sense a potential yet to be fulfilled. The early tracks have undeniable energy—that single made an impression on Sonic Youth’s three singer-songwriters for a reason—though the originally unissued material from that era could be thin on development. And while the songs on 2010’s We’re Here to Help showed greater complexity, several of the compositions worked hard at touching on everything the group could do: a strategy that, when repeated, paradoxically gave the full album a uniform air.
Songs and Jams Vol. 1 may bear a casual title, but it’s the most conceptually varied release of this band’s strange career. Side A provides a stretch of distinct, catchy no-wave—as well as production sonics that have been smartly updated with just the right amount of electronic overdubbing. (And for the first time, a Notekillers song even features a guest vocalist.) Side B is devoted to a pair of exploratory, improv-dominated noise-rock opuses (long a feature of Notekillers’ live gigs, but not a side of the group previously documented in a studio). Over the album’s 38 minutes, there isn’t a lick that isn’t memorable, or that seems out of place.
And for all that refinement, it still snarls with invention. Opening track “Foster” begins with quick pivots between two riffs—as a hurtling, ascending line in the guitar and bass switches off frequently with a more melodic passage. Just when this back and forth threatens to become predictable, First overdubs a woozy, whammy-bar solo while the rhythm section locks onto a single-chord grind. First’s alternate career as a composer of avant-classical music is hinted at in “Ants,” courtesy of an ululating drone that joins the power trio in the early going (and which points toward the song’s anxious, climactic alarm). And the introduction of percussive, minimalist bell patterns, at the close of the majestic “Crash,” is another compositional surprise that works.
The band is joined by another veteran of New York’s post-punk scene on the anthem “Missilebones.” Singer Shelley Hirsch has, like First, worked in New York’s alt-classical venues—using her extended-technique vocal skills in performance-art operas as well as in improvisatory rock contexts. In addition to her own albums, she’s been featured as a guest on a variety of recordings issued by John Zorn’s Tzadik label. But her appearance on this Notekillers track is one of her best guest features.
Her vibrato seems impossibly wide, at times, though it’s always clearly under her control. You can hear the training, even when she’s pushing a line into desperate squeals and strangled yodels. The edge of her performance also seems to let the members of Notekillers relax into one of the sunniest pop choruses of their catalog—during which Hirsch provides some conventional background harmony. I’d listen to a full album of songs from this collaboration.
The two longer tracks—“Ring Mod 2” and “Trem 7”—are what the band calls “free-rock jams.” And while this music is often noisier than the band’s focused no-wave compositions, this sequence of music manages to feel like a respite, too. The patience with which both improvisations play out has a calming effect, even when the overall sound is in the red.
Creating a meditative peace through complex microtonal movement is a goal of some classical work by First, so it’s not a surprise that this thrashing music could have a similarly blissed out quality. Though credit is also due to the entire band: in these closing tracks, both bassist Stephen Bilenky and drummer Barry Halkin show a vibrant range of performance possibilities that don’t fit easily inside band’s shorter, more urgent songs. Since it advances the avant-rock forms these musicians helped invent, this Notekillers album is more than a victory lap. It’s a thing to cherish. Bring on Volume 2. | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | American Bushmen | July 25, 2016 | 8.2 | f26f9ad2-f997-446d-8af2-55ba10b767ee | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
A breakdown that led BADBADNOTGOOD keyboardist Matty Tavares to move in with his parents also resulted in this breezy, psychedelic soft-rock album recorded with sought-after sample maker Frank Dukes. | A breakdown that led BADBADNOTGOOD keyboardist Matty Tavares to move in with his parents also resulted in this breezy, psychedelic soft-rock album recorded with sought-after sample maker Frank Dukes. | Matty: Déjàvu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matty-dejavu/ | Déjàvu | Matty Tavares got burned out. The keyboardist’s band, Toronto jazz combo BADBADNOTGOOD, had achieved a remarkable degree of success collaborating with A-list rappers like Ghostface, Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, and Kendrick Lamar. That increased profile led to touring—which, for Tavares, soon led to anxiety and depression. He became frustrated with the band, experienced what he has called a “mental breakdown,” and moved in with his parents. While living with them, Tavares returned to making the psychedelic soft rock that he’d dabbled in since he was 16 years old, working with a close friend, producer and ubiquitous sample source Frank Dukes.
It was a therapeutic period for Tavares, who has since rejoined BBNG, but also a productive one. The result is Déjàvu, a breezy, pleasant nine-song record whose parkland harmonies and AM-radio fuzziness recall the gentle, mid-period work of Woods and Ariel Pink. Its music is simple, soothing, and often lovely, betraying little of the friction that generally accompanies a period of self-examination like the one Tavares underwent. But the lyrics are so nakedly vulnerable that they can feel, paradoxically, as if they’re not revealing much at all. Often, instead of stories or scenarios, Tavares presents emotions so undistilled that they can be easier to ignore than to engage with.
As a member of BBNG, the keyboardist contributes to a group that has long since set genre orthodoxy aside. The band gained a following by covering hip-hop instrumentals and tends to shift its tone from record to record. Tavares’ versatility has been key to this evolution: Compare his anxious contributions to 2014’s IIIwith the triumphant tenor of his chords on the title track of 2016’s IV, and you’ll have a sense of how his talents help BBNG to change colors as needed. He comes across as a hugely supportive musician, so maybe it’s no wonder that he needed a break from the demanding intimacy of the group.
On Déjàvu, his generosity manifests in the music’s consistent richness. “Clear” is laden with falsetto harmonies and soft, humming keys—yet another green world shot through with sunlight. Opening track “Embarrassed” is chillwave redux, its cushiony bass and synths transporting the listener directly back to the summer of 2009. The lyrics also convey Tavares’ real-life generosity, albeit in a less compelling way, as he describes how his aversion to conflict keeps him from confronting others: “I’m embarrassed to know you at all,” he sings. “That’s why I keep the conversations small.” The disparity between the comforting tone of the music and the needling disquiet of the words makes it tempting to tune out the latter. A similar emotion suffuses “I’ll Gladly Place Myself Below You,” as Tavares describes the self-loathing that compels us to put others’ needs before our own. Although it doesn’t read as self-pitying, the song stops at acknowledging the feeling’s existence rather than examining what caused it.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the record is its lack of memorable melodies, given Tavares’ and Dukes’ respective pedigrees. There are exceptions: “How Can He Be” is an uptempo pop track with a jaunty bass anchor and Beatles-esque harmonies on the chorus, while “Nothing, Yet” is a Tame Impala-style jam that has the catchiest verses of any song on the album. But even those cuts fail to distinguish themselves beyond the visceral pleasure of the music. On “Nothing, Yet,” Tavares doesn’t seem to have worked out exactly what to do with the chorus, which makes the song’s highlights play like wasted opportunities—they’re beautiful bridges to mild disappointment.
The most damning indictment of the songwriting on Déjàvu is also the record’s most impressive offering: its closer, the title track. Although it’s an instrumental, the eight-and-a-half-minute piece has a narrative arc that the rest of the album largely lacks. With its poise, its knowing shifts in momentum, and its comfort with the longer format, it sounds a lot like BADBADNOTGOOD—and, in that sense, it makes a neat coda to Tavares’s crisis. The transition from jazz to pop may not entirely suit him, but in releasing Déjàvu, he has shared some very pretty music and made public a private project that helped him work through deeply personal issues. Most importantly, the album documents the process that led him back to the role in which he seems most at home. | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matty Unlimited | June 21, 2018 | 6.6 | f2720757-896e-435d-8bd7-0e7e19c11ccc | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The appeal of DuFlocka Rant 2 can be compared to certain strains of extreme metal, where the gratification comes from surrendering to the onslaught. If Waka Flocka Flame has lowered the standards for writing in the rap world, he's also introduced a new level of catharsis. | The appeal of DuFlocka Rant 2 can be compared to certain strains of extreme metal, where the gratification comes from surrendering to the onslaught. If Waka Flocka Flame has lowered the standards for writing in the rap world, he's also introduced a new level of catharsis. | Waka Flocka Flame: DuFlocka Rant 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17760-waka-flocka-flame-duflocka-rant-2/ | DuFlocka Rant 2 | Here’s a fun challenge: Cue up DuFlocka Rant 2 through headphones at a reasonable volume and while listening to it try to accomplish anything that requires even a modicum of concentration. Read a magazine article. Write a blog post. Shop for cat food. The average person will find even simple tasks like these considerably more difficult than usual, if not flat-out impossible. Waka Flocka Flame is the most attention-starved character in hip-hop, and he’s not satisfied with simply grabbing your attention; he needs to dominate it, to the exclusion of everything else. Waka Flocka Flame does not want you multitasking while he’s on.
Hence the throat-shredding scream-raps (sometimes layered two or three deep) suspended in a matrix of frame-rattling bass, flickering hi-hats, and anxiety-inducing one-bar synth loops that form the foundation of Flocka’s aesthetic. Each track on DuFlocka Rant 2 fills every available nook and cranny of the audible spectrum with noise and chaos. Trying to ignore it in any way is hopeless.
This kind of insistence upon your attention is normally a turnoff, but Flocka makes a compelling case for letting him dominate your senses. The pleasure that I take in listening to DuFlocka Rant 2 is less like what I get from the usual mixtape and more like why I love certain strains of extreme metal, where the gratification comes from surrendering to the onslaught, and letting yourself be obliterated as it passes over you and through you.
On DR2’s spoken word intro Flocka boasts, among other things, that when he dropped Flockaveli back in 2010 that “hip-hop changed,” and it’s hard to argue with him. That album not only made him a star, but also made teen production wizard Lex Luger one as well, and helped solidify the modern trap sound’s stranglehold on mainstream hip-hop. It also, as many of his critics complained, dealt a considerable blow to the notion of that good rappers need to be good writers, which had already been weakened by a generation of Southern rappers who were less interested in competing with Northerners lyrically than economically. Flocka’s admission early on that he rapped primarily for the checks and not because he considered himself an artist sent up howls from hip-hop’s more serious corners.
But if Waka Flocka Flame has lowered the standards for writing in the rap world-- and the wave of poetry-averse Flockaveli fans that make up the Chicago drill scene, for instance, suggests that he has-- he’s made up for it by introducing a level of catharsis that it had rarely achieved before. Records like DR2 aren’t just distractions, they’re sonic power washers blasting out whatever psychic residue you have gunking up the corners of your brain. If you’re in the market for a moment of mental ablation you might want to try the larynx-ruining primal scream that Flocka emits in the middle of “Hood Rich”.
The qualities of its screaming chaos aside, does DuFlocka Rant 2 offer up anything that you can’t find on the original DuFlocka Rant or any of his other mixtapes? Sure. “Can’t Do Golds” has one of the most straightforward pop hooks that he’s delivered yet. “Tax Money” has an intriguing instrumental track (produced by Purps on the Beat) based around low orchestral horns that suggests that more rap producers should be ripping off the score to Inception. And overall there’s just more of a tightness, a strong feeling that the manic combustibility of his first few records is now being concentrated and refined into a weapons-grade explosiveness, and that whenever Flockaveli 2 drops it’s going to leave a crater on the rap landscape. | 2013-02-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-02-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | 1017 Brick Squad | February 21, 2013 | 7.1 | f299e327-7dd3-4718-a7b9-5a9da90a1075 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The latest posthumous album from the groundbreaking artist feels like one of his truest, 19 “demos” that reveal his elegant songwriting, his disregard for genre, and his boundless mind. | The latest posthumous album from the groundbreaking artist feels like one of his truest, 19 “demos” that reveal his elegant songwriting, his disregard for genre, and his boundless mind. | Arthur Russell: Iowa Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arthur-russell-iowa-dream/ | Iowa Dream | Arthur Russell came from the cornfields of Oskaloosa, Iowa, a quiet kid who checked out library books on minimalism and psychedelics before running away to a San Francisco commune with his cello and his curiosity. In New York City during the 1970s and ’80s, Russell became a kaleidoscope of Downtown: a prism through which to see almost every fascinating corner of music there illuminated anew. His shyness became a strength, the source of his exquisite introspection, as he created serene music—lovelorn folk-pop, post-disco, classical, power pop—in accordance with his Buddhist logic, borderless.
Russell was a dance-music innovator who sang of “losing my taste for the nightlife.” He used his cello to create a wall-of-sound equally ecstatic and depressive; those who knew him said he quoted ABBA lyrics like romantic poetry. He was Allen Ginsberg’s accompanist; he is believed, by biographer Tim Lawrence, to have played the spiritual music of Alice Coltrane in her touring band. Russell suggested punk could be art and pop could be minimalism. He foresaw the contemporary notion that we need not subscribe to the tyrannies of genre. Through it all, Russell has become a talismanic shorthand for a superpower across time: His name means a way to persevere in accordance with a misfit’s heart and a boundless mind. “Being sad is not a crime,” Russell sang on “Love Comes Back.” His life makes it believable.
Iowa Dream is the latest posthumous Russell release, and it feels in some ways like one of the truest. Unlike the understated beats and pop deconstructions of Calling Out of Context, or the plainspoken country-pop of Love Is Overtaking Me, the 19 tracks of Iowa Dream are presented as demos. But like those warm records, Iowa Dream finds Russell in his singularly comforting singer-songwriter mode: a collection of teardrop piano ballads, sunstruck acoustic songs, and delightfully bewildering studio excursions. As ever, it’s Russell’s voice—clear, graceful, often conversational, with a kind of humility—that makes his music feel like a potential source of enlightenment, no matter the style. He sounds like someone you might know, a friend speaking to you, which is perhaps why so many listeners seem to think they do, sure their personal Russell connection is special. Russell’s vocal turns on “Follow You” are almost painfully gorgeous, as if embodying the “place in the sun [...] a sailboat on the sea” he sings of.
In a recent memoir of their brief affair, the late poet Kevin Killian said Russell’s lyrics were “written right on the very edge of English,” which resonates through Iowa Dream’s quotidian images: riding bikes, driving cars, laying in the grass. Russell’s words here are mostly cut from the same untreated cloth as classics like “Nobody Wants a Lonely Heart” and “This Time Dad You’re Wrong”—testifying to Russell’s belief that everyday English could be elevated in pop. Songs like “Just Regular People” and “I Felt” seem pulled from a childhood diary, reflecting on his parents’ normalcy and feeling “empty” at school. On the moving “I Wish I Had a Brother” he reflects on a fantasy of basketball games on the playground.
Four Iowa Dream songs are from a doomed 1974 session with famed Columbia producer John Hammond, who once said, “When they write my legacy, they’re going to say ‘John Hammond discovered Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, George Benson, and then Dylan, Springsteen, and Arthur Russell.’” The stark tearjerker “In Love With You for the Last Time” is anguished but calmly resigned, an almost cheekily despondent rock-bottom: “When I start to think, that’s when I start to sink [...] Now you’ve rejected me for the last time/It’s the last time I’ll sit on this fence for you.” Hammond wanted another lone-genius record, but Russell employed a collaborative exchange in his music: Iowa Dream variously features Rhys Chatham on flute and Henry Flynt on violin. The off-kilter dazzle of “Wonder Boy”—“vibes” are credited to Dave Van Tieghem, a future collaborator on Robert Ashley’s avant opera Perfect Lives—is a stunning statement of self. It captures Russell’s inquisitiveness and self-defeat, hope and melancholy, in such an unassuming manner you could nearly miss it: “I’m a wonder boy/I can’t do nothing/The poster was nailed to a tree/And somebody tore it down/Bits of paper nailed to a tree/That’s all I found.” “Wonder Boy” recalls Ginsberg’s description of Russell as Williams Carlos Williams as a singer—poetic and humble at the same time, as Russell’s music so often is.
Many of these songs contain Russell’s wry humor: “I never get lonesome/Especially in the night when you are gone,” he insists through the lightly rollicking “I Never Get Lonesome.” Iowa Dream includes the edges of Russell’s edges, some of his most delightfully odd experiments—like the psych-rock jammer of a title track or “Barefoot in New York,” a Ginsbergian ensemble beat-rap with brilliant full sentences like, “The question is whether or not this kind of music is going to hypnotize you” and “I’ve always disliked the Rolling Stones since I found out what they were up to.” It’s part music-critical essay, part bohemian cartoon. Perhaps this all is what lead the record exec Michael Ostin to once write, on a comment slip now included with Russell’s archives at the New York Public Library: “Who knows what this guy is up to.”
The influence of Buddhism abounds in Russell’s music, but especially on the songs culled from early California tapes, like the luminous “Sharp Eyes” and “Come to Life.” The intimate melody of “Words of Love” channels the emotional candor of Joni Mitchell, but with disarmingly beautiful lines of queer yearning: “Soft as a cherry, round as a peach/Into your pocket my slow hands can reach/To see what you carry up close to your thighs/Reaching and looking right into your eyes.” Russell’s friend and collaborator Steven Hall once said that his and Russell’s radical position as queer artists in the Downtown scene meant that “[p]resenting our lifestyle in our work was our political activity.” “Words of Love” is a glimmer of that fact, a sweet prayer for the power of language when speech must be enough.
In March 1977, Russell laid out some of his personal pop-music philosophies to Soho Weekly News. It was the dawn of punk, but the 25-year-old Russell was describing how he came to see pop as profound, not merely the sound of jocks and commoners in high school. “In bubblegum music, the notion of pure sound is not a philosophy but rather a reality,” Russell said. “In this respect, bubblegum preceded the avant-garde.” He was erasing hierarchies; he saw music and life as inextricable. “If you misuse your capacities as a musician, you’re misusing your capacities as a human being,” Russell explained, “and you’re taking humanity in the wrong direction.” Each new Russell release makes an effort towards the opposite, as his work did, towards more humanity.
One of many Iowa Dream highlights, “You Did It Yourself” was featured in Matt Wolf’s 2008 documentary about Russell, Wild Combination. Russell is seen playing the song in grainy live footage with an acoustic guitar, though here, the song has a lusher, deeper production. In “You Did It Yourself,” Russell seems to be experiencing yet another moment of endearing self-sabotage (“You did it yourself/It keeps you down”) and also reflecting on a “thrilling” film he saw “last night”: “Understood all of it very well/I didn’t like the ending though/Maybe I’m crazy but it just seemed tacked on.” The pieces of his sung critique stream by like a river. Russell was prone to the unresolvable, to the nonlinear, to atmosphere over concrete. The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world. | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Audika | November 19, 2019 | 8.4 | f29d69e4-9c3b-48f9-b18b-d1bc17744b8f | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Decades after its release, the industrial innovators’ newly reissued masterpiece sounds as terrifying as ever—and claims its place in history as a bridge between generations of avant-garde art. | Decades after its release, the industrial innovators’ newly reissued masterpiece sounds as terrifying as ever—and claims its place in history as a bridge between generations of avant-garde art. | Nurse With Wound: Homotopy to Marie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nurse-with-wound-homotopy-to-marie/ | Homotopy to Marie | Among the old gods of industrial music, Nurse With Wound reign over the dreamworld. While Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse often bludgeoned listeners with lyrics that captured real-life horrors, Steve Stapleton’s haunted tape-loop collages infect the subconscious before dissolving like nightmares. A painter first, Stapleton’s greatest inspirations are Dada and surrealism. Like Dalí, he draws directly from dreams, and his ability to sublimate an everyday object into a new form is reminiscent of Magritte’s hypnotically impossible images and Duchamp’s absurd readymade sculptures. In England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan’s essential profile of the UK avant-garde, Stapleton makes the connection explicit: “Nurse music is surrealist music.”
Though it has likely inspired plenty of nightmares, Nurse With Wound’s cavernous, newly reissued 1982 masterpiece Homotopy to Marie feels more like sleep paralysis, the hallucinatory, locked-in state in which the mind wakes up before the body. Everyday sounds—barking dogs, TV transmissions, children’s toys, and the wooden creaks and metallic clangs that can sound so alarming in the middle of the night—stretch to form monstrous shapes, while conceptions of time become painfully distorted. The album pummels and manipulates and even laughs at you. It’s the rare record that plays the listener.
Marie is technically Nurse With Wound’s fifth album, but many (including Stapleton) have called it their debut. Formed in 1978 as a trio, the group originally included Heman Pathak and John Fothergill, friends who shared Stapleton’s love for the krautrock of Can and Amon Düül II, the noise freakouts of the Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa’s studio trickery. When he met an engineer who wanted to record experimental acts, Stapleton claimed to have a band. Despite the fact that they did not play, or even own, instruments, Nurse With Wound were soon recording their first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. Every subsequent project until Marie was a product of chaos. Both of Stapleton’s bandmates would quit by 1980, leaving him alone to record Nurse With Wound’s third album, Merzbild Schwet. Insect and Individual Silenced followed, with contributions from J.G. Thirlwell, but Stapleton hated it so much, he burned the masters.
Marie marks the first time Stapleton sounds confident alone in the studio—and in his extramusical approach to music-making. Newly free of intra-band tension, he took his time, booking overnight sessions at London’s IPS Studios every Friday for a year and sometimes inviting friends and collaborators to stop by. Stapleton has described this period as “the happiest time I ever had in the studio.”
Long gone is the krauty guitar work on Chance Meeting, but Stapleton makes no effort to fill his former bandmates’ empty space. Album opener “I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs Are Laughing and I Am Blind” begins with metallic crackling and later erupts into hellish screams, but the track is wrapped in stillness and space. Stapleton’s mastery of both extremes far outweighs any typical quiet/loud dynamics. The silence makes you feel hunted. For a record so influential to noise music, Marie is just as effective at making you scan its soundless void for textures and threats. Sometimes apparitions approach; occasionally they attack. The most disturbing moments on “I Cannot Feel You” aren’t the agonized screams but the gentle sounds placed before and after them: a heavy sigh that suggests you’re not alone and then soft yet decidedly animalistic chewing.
Each of Marie’s lengthy passages offers grim imagery steeped in sex and violence. The title track crafts a disturbing exchange between a young girl’s abstract, yet increasingly threatened, statements and a matriarchal voice repeating the same gaslighting command: “Don’t be naive, darling.” “The Schmürz” begins with a hypnotic, looping male chant, evoking fascist images in a way that is uncomfortably soothing.
The highlight of the reissue is its centerpiece, “Astral Dustbin Dirge,” which was removed from vinyl editions due to time constraints and now appears on wax for the first time. The track is a symphony of ghoulish moans, slowed down enough to distort any hint of humanity before splintered screams cut through like a Todd Edwards house vocal edited in hell. Sex subsumes violence as the moans speed up to resemble orgasmic, feminine gasps. Such transfigurations occur throughout the album: On brief closer “The Tumultuous Upsurge (Of Lasting Hatred),” a choked death rattle becomes a chorus of children’s toys laughing maniacally into the silence.
Nurse With Wound’s history is clearly tied to surrealists and experimentalists of the past; the list of influences included on Chance Meeting has become a sacred text of noise music. But this essential reissue demonstrates how Stapleton’s legacy persists into the present—and not just in the foundational mark his albums left on noise acts as different as Whitehouse, Wolf Eyes, and Death Grips.
Marie’s patchwork construction, pieced together through multiple studio sessions, is echoed in labors of love such as Talk Talk’s Laughing Stockand even Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (a comparison that sounds less crazy when you consider that producer Jim O’Rourke both worked on the latter album and collaborated with Nurse With Wound). Nurse With Wound described their work early on as “sound sculpture” rather than as music, a term that has since stuck to Oneohtrix Point Never. And the ghostly power that Stapleton conjures through manipulating voices on tape, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland summoned with the obscure internet videos they sampled as Hype Williams. It all reframes Homotopy to Marie as not just one of industrial music’s most important documents, but a bridge between two generations of the avant-garde. Once heard, the album’s nightmarish power and suffocating atmospheres can never be forgotten. Consider that a warning. | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rotorelief | July 19, 2018 | 8.5 | f2b55a40-f7d0-42ae-b417-e0ab650bf2a1 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
On their first record in five years, Ty Segall’s proto-metal power trio dig into the fundamentals of their sound, captured in crisp audio-verité style by Steve Albini. | On their first record in five years, Ty Segall’s proto-metal power trio dig into the fundamentals of their sound, captured in crisp audio-verité style by Steve Albini. | Fuzz: III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fuzz-iii/ | III | Barring any late-season surprises, 2020 will pass without a new Ty Segall album, something that’s only happened in one other year since his 2008 debut. Of course, even an off year for the industrious California rocker still requires periodic updates of his Discogs page: Segall kicked off 2020 by unveiling a new noise project, Wasted Shirt, with Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale, and he killed some quarantine time by recording an EP of skewed Harry Nilsson covers. Now, in lieu of a proper Segall record, we have the next best thing: a new album from Fuzz, the psych-metal power trio he formed in 2011 with longtime accomplice Charles Moothart. After dropping two albums in quick succession mid-decade, Fuzz seemed to go the way of so many Segall side projects, in that it took the backseat to yet more side projects, like GØGGS and the C.I.A. But Fuzz’s return after a half-decade hiatus is fortuitously timed: After Segall swore off making guitar-based music with 2019’s bouzouki ’n’ koto-speckled First Taste, Fuzz marks his return to raw, guitar-powered rock music (technically, anyway—in Fuzz, he plays the drums while Moothart does the heavy six-string lifting).
With III, Fuzz hit the reset button. On their 2015 double album II, Segall, Moothart, and bassist Chad Ubovich stretched the parameters of their proto-metal sound in all directions like a game of Cat’s Cradle played with a rubber band, but on III, everything snaps back into its original shape. There are no Eastern psychedelic flourishes, no string arrangements, no extended space-jazz odysseys, and no lead-vocal turns from Moothart or Ubovich. The focus is squarely on the trio’s elemental strengths: brontosaurus-sized riffs, maximal choogle, and Segall’s acidic melodies, which suggest John Lennon if he had spent the early ’70s hanging with Tony Iommi and Bobby Liebling instead of Elton John and Harry Nilsson. Essentially, what you get here is a Ty Segall album with a beefier bottom end, as the grungy Big Star strut of “Spit” and Thin Lizzied fuzz-punk blitz of “Mirror” snugly sidle up alongside recent Segall rippers like “Break a Guitar” and “She” at the unrulier end of his catalog.
As such, III feels more like a sequel to Segall’s sludgetastic 2019 live set Deforming Lobes than Fuzz’s II. And as Deforming Lobes proved, when it comes to documenting a band in its most natural, primal state, there’s no one better to have on hand than Steve Albini, who captures the action here in a crisp audio-verité style that brings this group’s insolent personality to the fore. Even though Fuzz revel in amped-up aggression and bone-crushing heft, their energy is ultimately less macho than mischievous: The marauding opener “Returning” is both as comforting as a wood-paneled rec room and as complicated as a calculus quiz, frequently locking into a stuttering break as if the song were being tazed. On “Nothing People,” the trio send a propulsive Can rhythm crashing headlong into an oncoming Grand Funk boogie, but drop in an uncanny “oooh oooh oooh” hook to soothe the impact. And even when Fuzz veer perilously close to lapsing into blues-rock convention—as in the noodly opening tract of the two-part “Time Collapse”—the musicians seem hyper-aware of their transgression, and deploy everything in their arsenal (be it Segall’s glammy vocal exultations, Ubovich’s restless rhythms, or Moothart’s increasingly outré noise textures) to shake it off.
Albini’s live-off-the-floor, overdub-resistant recordings really bring a visceral punch to III’s jammier passages, ensuring that the moments where Moothart peels off for a solo are just as much a showcase for the rhythm section rumbling underneath. And where II’s 13-minute title-track closer saw Fuzz drifting aimlessly out into the unknown, III rallies for a satisfying full-circle finale with “End Returning,” which, over its seven-minute span, cycles through doomy Sabbath lurches, fleet-fingered proggy convulsions, and explosive hardcore outbursts, before climaxing with a triumphant bookending quote of the opening “Returning.” Rather than serve some grand conceptual function, the reprise feels like the sort of callback that a band might drop during an encore medley to cap its live show. But in this case, the most salient sentiment of “Returning” is worth repeating: “There is no sum greater than one,” Segall exclaims, a blood-pact reaffirmation from a long-dormant band whose whole remains greater than its parts.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | October 29, 2020 | 7.5 | f2bc33e1-5fa1-406a-8b07-4e2fe2846cad | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Houston rapper reprises his Sauce Ghetto Gospel series, bringing his booming baritone to diaristic confessions and slick songs of celebration. | The Houston rapper reprises his Sauce Ghetto Gospel series, bringing his booming baritone to diaristic confessions and slick songs of celebration. | Sauce Walka: Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sauce-walka-sauce-ghetto-gospel-3/ | Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3 | Most Sauce Walka songs adhere to the same basic blueprint, regardless of their themes. The Houston rapper’s voice starts out at conversational levels—well, the type of conversation you have with your loudest friend at a moderately turnt party—and usually ends with every bar landing at full force, like a preacher booming from a pulpit of fire and candy paint. Walka (born Albert Mondane) has used that template since he began spitting under that name in 2014—a framework that he’s applied to a dizzying array of beats, from trap and Miami bass to early aughts New York boom-bap. But he’s also had a fascination with soul and gospel samples that stretches back to his very beginnings as A-Walk in the late 2000s. 2018’s Sauce Ghetto Gospel was the first time he devoted an entire project to rhyming over gospel samples. It’s undeniable that his powerful vocals, slick wordplay, and storytelling shines over these sounds, and the third entry in the Sauce Ghetto Gospel series proves he’s as potent as ever.
Walka is a singular presence on the mic, but a bold voice and bravado can only take you so far. Luckily, he matches that intensity with storytelling that builds on big emotions and tearful confessions, finding a middle ground between vintage Boosie and younger bleeding hearts, like YoungBoy Never Broke Again. There are moments where he imagines never seeing his children or feeling sunshine on his skin again (“First Testament”), and others where he calls out rappers for faking lean addictions, only to descend through the memories of his own paralyzing addiction (“I Dropped It”).
His attention to emotion and detail is further magnified on songs like “Brothers Story,” where a drug deal gone bad leads to squeezed triggers and rivers of blood. At first, the track seems to chronicle someone else’s narrative, with Walka rapping in the second person. But the scope widens gradually to reveal Walka is referring to his own brother’s death, as he self-administers a tongue-lashing: “This ain’t [Grand Theft Auto:] San Andreas/You got your lil’ brother murdered tryna get some head/And on top of that, you tried to finesse him like he was gettin’ bread.”
Lyrically, the Sauce Ghetto Gospel series is designed to purge demons, but there are a handful of lighter moments to ease the pressure. Walka brings the same conviction to “Slab Holiday,” a thunderous celebration of Houston car culture, and the blow-a-bag-on-your-shawty anthem “Good Coochie.” Songs grind to a halt when Walka becomes a little too relaxed; occasionally, he falls back on ill-informed hot takes and boorish language that goes from absurd to offensive. It’s unfortunate to hear Walka delve into the struggles of people hardworking people in the first half of “GG3 Intro,” only to default to boneheaded theories on Black-on-Black crime and then claim that Kanye West was “crucified” by the media. He puts his foot in his mouth often enough for it to leave a bitter taste, but not often enough to fully derail the album; they are awkward bumps on an otherwise smooth ride.
Walka has proven time and time again that he can rap over anything, but there’s a reason that he’s committed to the Sauce Ghetto Gospel series enough to pump out three volumes. His words land with more purpose over these beats; the flows become more unpredictable, and, for a while, his perspective is the only one that matters. Much like the Daringer-produced beat he rapped over during his spotlight appearance on YouTube freestyle series From the Block last year, Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3’s best songs are intoxicating because they draw from the well that inspired Walka to rap in the first place—of all the beats he’s tamed, these are where he’s most willing to bleach the bones of his past and cruise around in souped-up cars for the pure joy of it. It’s hardly revolutionary, but Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3 is a reminder of just how satisfying the bread and butter can be. | 2023-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | The Sauce Familia / Empire | January 12, 2023 | 7.5 | f2c2e12b-a918-49a6-9874-0a4c3e37b392 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
These reissues from the Feelies train a new lens on the band's late middle period, when they honed their caffeinated energy, settling gracefully into their signature sound. | These reissues from the Feelies train a new lens on the band's late middle period, when they honed their caffeinated energy, settling gracefully into their signature sound. | The Feelies: Only Life/Time For A Witness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21666-only-lifetime-for-a-witness/ | Only Life/Time For A Witness | It's still difficult to imagine the Feelies in the rising fury of late '80s alt-mania. They never quite fit in, the boys and girl with perpetual nervousness from Haledon, New Jersey who'd influenced members of R.E.M. and Yo La Tengo in the late '70s before dissolving into a blaze of homespun spinoffs. But new reissues from Bar/None of 1988's Only Life and 1991's Time For A Witness train a new lens on the band's late middle period, after their 1986 Good Earth return and before their two-decade dissolution. As part of the second generation of CBGB bands, they first became known for their caffeinated energy, but these two albums found the now-stable quintet coming into stylistic maturity, settling gracefully into their signature sound: reliable Velvet Underground chug, rust-burning solos, occasional acoustic guitar, and their distinct double-drummer rhythm section featuring Dave Weckerman on a smaller second percussion set-up.
Even 28 years later, this combination of Weckerman and kit drummer Stan Demeski continues to distinguish the Feelies from the jingle-jangle velvet rockers they'd influenced via R.E.M.. Stripping extraneous cymbal crashes and replacing them with any number of other colorations, sometimes not immediately obvious, the two make inventive frames for chief songwriter Glenn Mercer's increasingly monosyllabic rumination and fat-toned lead guitar. The band's obsessive percussive roots can be heard most clearly on *Only Life'*s "The Undertow": Beginning with a drum/woodblock polyrhythm and a slow guitar fade-in, the insistent layers turn together like jittering clockwork, a meticulously arranged through-line to the band's pepped-up Crazy Rhythms-era minimalism featuring former Pere Ubu drummer Anton Fier. The effect is cathartic, neuroses drowned in motion.
The wild Feelies beat can be heard clearly, too, on the earlier album's "Away," Mercer's slide guitar surfing cooly on Demeski's brilliantly metronomic snare. A Jonathan Demme-directed video for the song was filmed at Maxwell's in Hoboken, home to Coyote Records, the indie label belonging to club owner Steve Fallon, who'd released 1986's The Good Earth. The two albums capture a band consolidating the wild fun of Crazy Rhythms and the living room-epiphanies of their earlier iteration as the Trypes into a cohesive musical vision that didn't require total deconstruction between each album.
Unlike Nirvana or Dinosaur Jr. or many other up and coming guitar-wielders on the club circuit, the Feelies remained grounded in the un-scorched earth of a pre-metal/pre-hardcore world. Despite this, there is a surprisingly grunge-like angst coiled inside Mercer's songs. Arranged for a different rhythm section and pumped up by Andy Wallace, the repetitive half-sentences of "What She Said" could be a Kurt Cobain lyric (and even slightly anticipate Nirvana's "Breed," released later that year). Live, the Feelies' rhythms might've engendered moshing in the go-go '90s, but even when they tag a cover of the Stooges' "Real Cool Time" to Time For A Witness, Mercer's invitation still seems considerably more chill than Iggy's bare-chested crowd-surfing come-on. The Feelies rock hard, but they rock for themselves, on a course of their own.
"I don't talk much 'cause it gets in the way, don't let it get in the way," Mercer sang quite articulately on "Crazy Rhythms," an early signature song. By the time of Time For A Witness, Mercer's songwriting persona spoke less and less, too, chiseling his lyrics down to phrases that traded between terse, profound, and nearly generic recombinations drawn from rock's lingua franca. Sometimes, it serves the band well, as on "Doin' It Again," perhaps the closest they ever veered to pop. With only one couplet about a party on a lawn, Mercer transforms the otherwise-vague lyrics of "Invitation" into a specific memory of a long-ago evening. But in many other places, the songs feel less like individual expressions and more like convenient platform for the Feelies to lock into their now-signature groove.
The eight digital bonus tracks split between the Only Life and Time For A Witness reissues are all from the band's third and most recent period, live and acoustic versions of songs from the two 1988 and 1991 albums plus a few covers recorded since their 2008 reunion. And while the new studio renderings of *Only Life'*s wisdom-dispensing title track and 1991's "Find A Way" are fairly exquisite, and the live tracks are good fun, the absence of contemporary supplementary material is a little bit of a bummer. One show from the period available on BitTorrent sites finds the Feelies in France in 1989, recorded on a well-mixed soundboard, Glenn Mercer's guitar achieving a gorgeous and barely-contained bell-clear tone, recalling Another Green World-era Robert Fripp, a voice all but missing from the two studio albums. A fierce live band, their personal intensity transmuted into collective joy, songs from the two albums returned to the Feelies' repertoire when they returned, hardly a band to revert only to their acknowledged classics, but unfussily recovering their unacknowledged classics, too.
Correction (3/16 8:45 a.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the lyric, "I don't talk much 'cause it gets in the way, don't let it get in the way," came from "The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness." It was in fact from "Crazy Rhythms." | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | March 16, 2016 | 7.6 | f2cbe77e-e0f4-4933-b136-6de73c31c5e8 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
PWR BTTM is a queer-identified garage punk duo of guitarist Ben Hopkins and drummer Liv Bruce. Formed after the two met at Bard College in upstate New York, the duo make very loud and occasionally very messy music that makes complicated statements on what it means to be young and queer and confused and somehow othered. | PWR BTTM is a queer-identified garage punk duo of guitarist Ben Hopkins and drummer Liv Bruce. Formed after the two met at Bard College in upstate New York, the duo make very loud and occasionally very messy music that makes complicated statements on what it means to be young and queer and confused and somehow othered. | PWR BTTM: Ugly Cherries | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20829-ugly-cherries/ | Ugly Cherries | For those of us queer music lovers who came of age in the 1990s seeing Pansy Division—one of the few visible gay punk bands of that era—opening for Green Day on 1994’s Dookie tour was a kind of surreal, watershed moment. Though it seemed crazy at the time, it actually wasn’t the world’s most unusual pairing—both bands had at one point shared a label and each made pop punk songs that were equal parts snotty and catchy—but Pansy Division were an overtly and aggressively gay band with a cult following, while Green Day were riding high on their mainstream major label breakthrough. Even though Green Day's audience seemed flummoxed by Pansy Division—I remember people around me asking ‘Are they serious?’—the fact that it was happening at all felt pretty revolutionary. Indie rock was still mostly the unwelcoming domain of straight white dudes. With the occasional exception of seeing Pansy Division, God Is My Co-Pilot, or the mighty Team Dresch, being an openly queer person at a mainstream rock show still felt like an open invitation to getting your ass kicked.
It’s hard not to think about Pansy Division when listening to PWR BTTM—the gloriously queer garage punk duo of guitarist Ben Hopkins and drummer Liv Bruce. Formed after the two met at Bard College in upstate New York, queer-identified PWR BTTM make very loud and occasionally very messy music without ever adopting some kind of faux masculine posturing. In fact, that band pretty much eviscerates said posturing with their live sets, in which the two loudly rip through their arsenal of pop-punk missives while flaunting a very rudimentary kind of drag—thrifted dresses, globs of glitter, and kabuki smears of makeup. What saves the whole enterprise from just being a well-played bit of cultural commentary is PWR BTTM's music—they write really catchy songs and they play the shit out of them.
The eleven tracks on Ugly Cherries, PWR BTTM’s full-length debut, mostly vacillate between two-minute rave-ups about boys ("I Wanna Boi", "All the Boys") and two-minute ruminations on the lack thereof ("West Texas", "C U Around"). On "I Wanna Boi" Bruce recites a list of needs for potential partners ("I want a boy who thinks it’s sexy when my lipstick bleeds/ I want a boy who can go all night without stopping/ I want a boy knows exactly what he needs") against a stomping guitar/drum track that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early White Stripes record. He even goes as far as to share his email address just in case any qualified applicants want to get in touch. The song, like much of the rest of Ugly Cherries, is certainly funny, but it isn’t a joke.
In fact, the record is hearteningly earnest. The band’s best songs are about articulating the goofy, anything-goes joy of being young and open, quite literally, to anything. And while the basic guitar/drum setup doesn’t allow for much subtlety, Hopkins and Bruce manage to wring impressively dynamic tunes out of the most basic power riffing. "We can do our makeup in the parking lot/ We can get so famous that we both get shot," Bruce sings on "Dairy Queen" as the song morphs into a loud/quiet/LOUD jam. On "1994"—a track that, not coincidentally, sounds like it could have been recorded in 1994—Hopkins sings that "These days it pays to be so strange and I’m like nothing" before the song cracks open into a series of falsetto’d "ooohs," handclaps, and arena-size guitar shreds.
And though it all seems simple and sweet enough at first, Ugly Cherries’ real strength lies in the way it addresses the fears and foibles of the young and queer-identified, both for better and for worse. While the glee expressed on the record feels like a middle finger aimed directly at the hetero establishment, there is an endearing vulnerability at work as well—an understanding that the world is not always your friend. On "Serving Goffman" the duo celebrate the merits of being unafraid to make a fool of oneself in the name of making art and finding love, while acknowledging that it comes at a cost. "I held my breath in a suit and a tie because I didn’t know I could fight back," sings Bruce, "I wanna put the whole world in drag but I’m starting to realize it’s already like that." Elsewhere he notes that "I found out people aren’t that mean but it still feels like they're laughing at me/ When they're just saying hello." The world has certainly changed, but there is still always a price to be paid for simply being yourself. Their songs aren’t just a prolonged wink and a nod, but rather complicated statements on what it means to be young and queer and confused and somehow othered.
"Why are you so handsome, gaymazing, and nice?" asks Hopkins of a lover on the record’s closing track. It’s the kind of question that might have been impossible to ask in a non-ironic way back in 1994 and it’s exactly the kind of thing that makes Ugly Cherries such a special listen. The record is not only catchy as all hell, but it’s also sweet and openhearted and not one bit cynical. It’s a queer record to be sure, but mostly it’s just a really fun rock record—and one would hope that at this point in time, those two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. | 2015-09-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter / Miscreant | September 11, 2015 | 7.5 | f2d23094-42a7-4e6b-9a2b-10f2f0c5f4dc | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
In just over a decade of work, French Montana has gone from hanger-on to something more vital and far more interesting. MC4 is a reminder of why he’s been able to survive a couple sea changes in rap. | In just over a decade of work, French Montana has gone from hanger-on to something more vital and far more interesting. MC4 is a reminder of why he’s been able to survive a couple sea changes in rap. | French Montana: MC4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22612-mc4/ | MC4 | Exactly halfway through MC4, “Lockjaw” hits, and you start to think of French Montana as a rap star. Kodak Black, the preternaturally talented teenager from South Florida, does lots of the heavy lifting, but the song is too potent to simply be the product of good A&R work, or lucky proximity. In just over a decade of work, French has gone from hanger-on to something more vital and far more interesting; on this February’s superb Wave Gods, he reimagined the world at large as an extension of his knottiest late-’00s mixtapes. It had all the stunt casting you’d expect from a rapper of French’s social stature, but it was a genre experiment. MC4 was supposed to be the capital-A album to solidify him as a mainstream force.
Instead, an August release date came and went, the record pushed back for “sample clearance issues” that were later unmasked as low pre-order numbers. All this despite a Drake-assisted single (“No Shopping”), a cameo on Fat Joe and Remy Ma’s colossal “All the Way Up,” and despite “Lockjaw” entering the stratosphere. Three months later, it surfaced on the internet with little ceremony and even less promotion.
Where are all the French Montana fans? There’s a chance that the anemic promo run kept MC4 from cutting through the election-year din, that French Montana album cuts never make it to the right years. But his debut album, 2013’s Excuse My French, flopped painfully despite an eye-popping guest lineup and a genuine hit. It also wasn’t his best showing: it had little of the woozy imagination he’d shown in the half-decade prior, and he hadn’t yet learned how to translate those interesting threads to a bigger stage.
MC4 falls short of Wave Gods, but is a leaps-and-bounds improvement over Excuse My French. That it doesn’t appear to be the commercial breakthrough he needs is not the problem, per se—the thing that hampers the record at points is the impulse to shoot for a middle and shore up the base. The Miguel-assisted “Xplicit” crosses itself up from the jump, trying to marry a sleepy sex jam to something more Gothic and getting lost on the way. “Play Yaself” is closer to French’s wheelhouse, but the vocals and his writing are more or less anonymous. And even with best intentions, “Check Come” ends up less experimental than it is malformed.
But the highs are a joy. “Brick Road” catches French in not one, but two of his best roles: somber-but-still-witty formalist on the front half, Autotune-guzzling serpent on the hook and on the back end. “2 Times” is an update on the Coke Wave DNA; “I’m Heated” is a bizarre and nearly-brilliant blend of Gotham rap styles from the Giuliani and Dinkins eras. “No Shopping” is an obvious hit that holds onto a bit of menace. “Have Mercy” enlists Jadakiss, Styles P, and Beanie Sigel for a preposterously fun posse cut that—thankfully—sounds distinctly like a French song. When MC4 succeeds, it does so like a bulk of his best work: with minor keys and big beats that let some air seep into the crevices.
MC4 does struggle to develop an atmosphere of its own; “Lockjaw” and the Kanye- and Nas-featuring “Figure It Out,” both holdovers from Wave Gods, are two of the three strongest songs. So maybe the (mostly arbitrary) “mixtape” distinction will serve the record well, allowing it to live as a loose collection of component parts. It’s not going to build the sort of fervent fan bases that his collaborators enjoy, but it should remind his core audience of why he’s been able to survive a couple of sea changes in rap.
And then there’s “Max & Chinx / Paid For.” The first half of the nine-minute, two-part closer is interspersed by phone calls from Max B and by a prayer that French shares with Max’s mother. French raps about Max’s son, about praying for mercy from God and from circuit court judges, about the 75-year-sentence that hung over Max’s head for years of incarceration. Max’s verse on the second half, “Paid For,” was one of the last he recorded before reporting to serve his sentence; Max’s engineer played it for French for the first time just last year. It’s followed by a turn from Chinx, who was murdered in 2015. French invokes Stack Bundles’s name—another fallen friend. He raps about depression, about bouts of insomnia and impromptu mosque visits. If the sorrow is tempered by anything, it’s Max’s voice:
“You're blessed, you know I'm saying? And all you gotta do when you feel like that: Look at my situation. You know I'm saying? Think of my situation, n*gga.”
If that still seems hopeless, well, think of his situation. Two months ago—between MC4’s announced release date and the time it actually surfaced—French shared the news that Max’s sentence has been reduced, and that he should be home in two to six years. A father and son will be home decades before anyone could have reasonably expected. It’s a hollow victory, but a victory nonetheless. And so French Montana keeps his head down and keeps working. | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic / Bad Boy / Coke Boys | November 15, 2016 | 7 | f2d5f9ab-f884-421a-808a-5a258f62ac41 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
This four-disc set recorded just before Cheap Trick’s ascent to stardom captures the power-pop icons at their most manic and muscular, sounding more like hungry punks than arena-ready heartthrobs. | This four-disc set recorded just before Cheap Trick’s ascent to stardom captures the power-pop icons at their most manic and muscular, sounding more like hungry punks than arena-ready heartthrobs. | Cheap Trick: Live at The Whisky 1977 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cheap-trick-live-at-the-whisky-1977/ | Live at The Whisky 1977 | Cheap Trick built their legend on a live recording: 1978’s At Budokan, a single-LP distillation of two Tokyo performances that transformed the Rockford, Illinois, quartet from power-pop pranksters into classic-rock icons. Originally intended as a limited-edition promo souvenir, At Budokan sparked a shockwave of Japanese adulation that reverberated all the way back to America, where an official release eventually racked up triple-platinum sales. But the snapshot of Cheap Trick that At Budokan captured was highly selective, if not a little misleading: Its taut 10-song tracklist presents a showbiz-savvy act complete with their own readymade entrance theme and rollicking old-time rock ‘n’ roll covers to complement a bounty of crowd-pleasing pop singles. The truth is Cheap Trick was also the strangest and surliest band to sneak its way into the ‘70s arena-rock pantheon. The new four-disc box set Live at the Whisky 1977 highlights the freaky flipside of their split personality, making the case that these FM-radio heroes were more like a nihilistic punk-rock band in ’70s-heartthrob clothing.
Two years before At Budokan lodged them in the Billboard Top 10, Cheap Trick were upstart Epic Records signees with one commercially underperforming album under their belt, but enough word-of-mouth clout to land the opening slot on KISS’ 1977 summer tour. To get into road-warrior shape—and to test-drive songs from their next two studio albums, In Color and Heaven Tonight—the band booked five shows over a single June weekend at L.A.’s fabled Whisky-a-Go-Go, four of which were recorded on a mobile studio provided by the Record Plant. But the tapes were put on the back burner once At Budokan blew up.
Though some of these recordings have already turned up on a 1996 box set and a 2020 Record Store Day release, Live at the Whisky 1977 is the first set to reproduce the residency almost entirely, complete with wildly varying setlists, guitarist Rick Nielsen’s peculiar stage banter (sample: “This is a real sad song about a friend of ours who killed the shit out himself”) and repeated drunken audience requests for first-album favorite “He’s a Whore.” Short of a time machine or costly VR headset, these ferocious recordings offer the most vivid experience of what it might have been like to stand directly in front of a PA speaker while Cheap Trick laid waste to a small venue in 1977.
Cheap Trick would introduce refinements like piano and harpsichord on their next studio albums, but the band onstage at the Whisky was still running on electric-guitar malevolence and adrenaline, prioritizing bravado and intensity over proficiency. Even as they were testing out certain setlist strategies that would soon become permanent features of their playbook—like combining the swaggering “Hello There” and the swooning ”Come On Come On” into a one-two opening hit of anarchy and ecstasy—they were still figuring out how the songs actually go. On its journey to power-pop immortality, the latter tune soars skyward only to briefly nosedive with a flubbed first chorus. If the Cheap Trick heard on At Budokan was a well-oiled machine, this version of the band ran so hot, they frequently overheated the engine: Each of the Whisky shows is dotted with extended between-song pauses that are long enough to necessitate their own track designations.
But these sorts of gaffes are small prices to pay for the illicit thrill of hearing the Trick in their primordial prime, rampaging through the darkest and most deranged songs in their repertoire: the psycho-glam boot-stomper “ELO Kiddies,” the paranoid lonely-boy blues of “Ballad of TV Violence,” the perverse suicide-encouragement anthem “Auf Wiedersehen.” Recorded before the radio-friendly likes of “I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender” made their way into the repertoire, the Whisky sets capture a band forging the missing link between the scathing satire of Sparks and the gnarly essence of the Sex Pistols. None of the band’s studio recordings truly capture the muscular menace that bassist Tom Petersson and drummer Bun E. Carlos display here. Occasionally, they even teeter on the brink of post-punk: Where the album version of “You’re All Talk” is steeped in southern-rock boogie, the frenetic versions heard here have a serrated disco edge that’s closer in spirit to ESG than ZZ Top.
At the same time, Live at the Whisky also highlights the qualities that kept Cheap Trick at a remove from their punk spiritual kin: namely, a genuine appreciation for old-school rock ‘n’ roll showmanship and craft. While Cheap Trick’s original songs depict a post-hippie generation of teens stoned on television and corrupted into degeneracy, their cover selections betray a nostalgic reverence that defied punk’s nihilist year-zero ethos. Certainly, a group eager to jam on songs by Fats Domino (future Budokan centerpiece “Ain’t That a Shame”), Dylan-via-Manfred Mann (“Please Mrs. Henry”), and Jeff Lynne’s pre-ELO psych-pop combo the Move (“Down on the Bay”) weren’t all that concerned about scoring cool points with the CBGB set.
And even in those moments when the Whisky sets threaten to fly off the rails into noisy chaos, frontman Robin Zander activates his inner McCartney like an emergency brake: amid the sludgy spasms and theatrical vocal contortions of “Daddy Should’ve Stayed in High School,” his melodious “ooohs” instantly soothe. Likewise, the sugar-coated pre-chorus hook he drops into the pugilistic “He’s a Whore” is almost enough to make the song’s contemptuous sleaze-bag protagonist seem sympathetic. More than a decade after these recordings were made, Cheap Trick’s effortless fusion of classic pop melodies and roughed-up hard rock would make them heroes to grunge titans like Nirvana and Melvins. After listening to Live at the Whisky 1977, the distance between ’60s Liverpool and ’90s Seattle has never seemed shorter. | 2022-12-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Real Gone | December 26, 2022 | 7.6 | f2dc82f6-4384-48d5-aa4f-00854757e913 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Brazilian DJ-producer translates the livewire energy of his viral videos into an album of impish, wildly unpredictable baile funk. | The Brazilian DJ-producer translates the livewire energy of his viral videos into an album of impish, wildly unpredictable baile funk. | DJ Ramon Sucesso: Sexta dos Crias | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-ramon-sucesso-sexta-dos-crias/ | Sexta dos Crias | Rio de Janeiro-born producer DJ Ramon Sucesso has evangelized experimental music fans around the world to baile funk with frenetic viral videos in which he pounds away at MIDI pads and distorts turntable scratches into banshee wails. Each Sucesso video has a signature visual touch: When the bass hits, the camera vibrates in an uncontrollable fit, almost like you’re smack dab inside the pounding heart of a subwoofer. There is no baile funk without the raucous underground bailes that gave birth to the sound, and these gonzo clips capture the genre’s aliveness better than any conventional album could.
The 21-year-old DJ’s official catalog is pretty slim. He has produced a few more straightforward funk tracks, including on his fairly subdued collaborative EP Contenção with vocalist MC Torugo, which mixes Latin trap beats with sparse conga drums. As evidenced by the success of his videos, Successo’s real strength is not creating sounds from scratch, but manipulating existing sounds until they become new. His new 12-inch Sexta dos Crias—a dubplate mix with two 15-minute cutting and chopping frenzies on either side—highlights not just the gymnastic dexterity of Sucesso’s fingers, but the possibilities of the DJ controller as an instrument unto itself.
“Sexta dos Crias” is the slightly more restrained half, but it’s still wildly unpredictable, full of cartoonish Fruity Loops effects, jagged samples, and kick drums that chirp like a chorus of frogs. One of Successo’s trademarks is the “beat bolha,” or “bubble beat,” a squishy drum effect that sounds like he’s mashing buttons made of slime. Voices are chopped into staccato chants while he drags the tempo knob up and down on his controller, manipulating the speed of the beat and your body like a gleeful puppetmaster. Sucesso’s own trigger-happy style is influenced by Brazilian mixmasters like DJ Zullu, who bring turntablist Olympics into the era of MIDI pads and Serato controllers.
The B-side—“Distorcendo a Realidade,” which literally translates to “Distorting Reality”—is a blur of pure sensation. Successo throws you off balance, always impishly toying with the pitch or introducing a chaotic new element into the mix—wailing horns, chiptune blasts, and pounding bass—until sounds are felt more than heard. Distorted voices laced with a dubby tinge of echo chatter over one another, competing for your attention. Words are reduced to percussive syllables, as Sucesso twists guttural voices into beatboxers in his distorted orchestra. When he spins the turntable, it doesn’t sound like a scratch, but a squeal or even a scream, as tracks dissolve one to another with a forceful squeegee wipe.
But no matter how distorted the sound gets, Suceso never forgets his crucial role as a party conductor; his own voice is what keeps us grounded, with boisterous shout-outs and amped-up crowdwork. Sexta dos Crias emphasizes baile funk as a living and energetic music; much like the hip-hop pioneers who reverse engineered their parents’ turntables, or Jamaican dub pirates constructing ziggurats out of speakers, the defiantly experimental new wave of baile funk artists like Ramon Suceso expand the possibilities of the DJ controller, transforming a musical playback device into a generative instrument all its own. | 2023-12-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Lugar Alto | December 6, 2023 | 7.7 | f2e04a34-d8af-45cf-8a04-2561adc9e2f7 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward return with an album of covers. Unsurprisingly, they are faithful to the source material and they keep the focus squarely on love songs, tucking a wide range of romantic ups and downs into this starry-eyed and glamorous little record. | Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward return with an album of covers. Unsurprisingly, they are faithful to the source material and they keep the focus squarely on love songs, tucking a wide range of romantic ups and downs into this starry-eyed and glamorous little record. | She & Him: Classics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20033-she-him-classics/ | Classics | She & Him might need a time machine. After three albums and a Christmas record, the duo’s pretty, uncomplicated pop songs keep harkening back to decades they were too young to experience first-hand; a bit of 1960s Loretta Lynn country here, a bit of '70s Carpenters’ sunny pop there. So it was hardly surprising when M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel announced that their next release would be Classics, a cover album of 13 of their favorite old-school songs.
So, what makes a classic song? For She & Him, classic songs find their roots in country, soul, and jazz orthodoxy, and they’re culled from the eras in which these genres were arguably the most golden—the '30s, the '50s, the '70s. Clearly, a classic song is a love song. From Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s flirtatious duet "Would You Like to Take a Walk?" to Johnny Mathis’ sadly hopeful "It's Not for Me to Say", She & Him tuck a wide range of romantic ups and downs into this starry-eyed and glamorous little record.
She & Him aren’t trying to surprise anyone with these covers; there’s no off-the wall instrumental experimentation, no dramatic shift in lyrics. Instead, Classics is charming and sleepy in a '60s samba sort of way, filled with whispering percussion, light electric guitar solos, and string arrangements worthy of the silver screen. "This Girl’s in Love With You", a slight twist on Herb Alpert’s "This Guy’s in Love With You", is highly reminiscent of the original, with a retro brass and woodwind arrangement. It would make delightful title music if Deschanel ever wants to star in a version of "New Girl" set in the mid-'70s.
Even when She & Him push their sonic boundaries a little, the effect is still subtle and sophisticated. On "Teach Me Tonight", they manage to move the 1954 classic further into the past, painting the soulful tune with a sped-up '30s flare, layering back-up "oohs" and "aahs" under Deschanel’s lead vocals into a Boswell Sisters-worthy harmony. They take "Unchained Melody" to an absolutely haunting place, featuring just Deschanel and Ward’s guitar, her words echoed by a ghostly ensemble choir.
A cinematic quality reverberates throughout Classics, and songs like "She", "Unchained Melody", and "We’ll Meet Again" were featured in or made for series or films. The songs themselves play like romantic mini-dramas, with pleas for lovers to stay and odes to loneliness. That said, some narratives call for a singer with more force. While Maxine Brown and Aretha Franklin belt the chorus of "Oh No, Not My Baby" in a gesture of soulful refusal, Deschanel opts for tender restraint, so that the song’s metaphoric head-shaking suddenly becomes a limply apathetic shrug. And Dusty Springfield’s jangling "Stay Awhile" is muted considerably in She & Him’s rendition, as Deschanel’s voice takes a somber turn.
Even though they're working with dated lyricism by 2014’s standards, saccharine lines like "When you’re strolling through the wherezis, you need a whozis to lean upon" don’t sound contrived or silly in She & Him's hands. "Funny, each time I fall in love," Deschanel sings on Bing Crosby’s hit, "It’s always you." If Classics proves anything, it’s that these songs stick around for a reason. | 2014-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-12-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | December 2, 2014 | 6.6 | f2e591bd-d9c3-4343-87c4-e9ee6416c1a9 | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
The Japanese experimental musician’s score for the lauded new film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi possesses a cool remove, mirroring the film’s glacial profundity with organic nuance and contemplative improvisation. | The Japanese experimental musician’s score for the lauded new film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi possesses a cool remove, mirroring the film’s glacial profundity with organic nuance and contemplative improvisation. | Eiko Ishibashi: Drive My Car - Original Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eiko-ishibashi-drive-my-car-original-soundtrack/ | Drive My Car - Original Soundtrack | Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a staggering exploration of grief, betrayal, and acceptance. The loose adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short-story follows Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a stage actor and director, as he mourns the deaths of his young daughter and his screenwriter wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima). Two years after Oto’s death, Yusuke relocates to Hiroshima where he will direct a production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” Upon arrival, he is assigned a quiet female driver named Misaki (Toko Miura). Throughout many long drives in Yusuke’s vintage Red Saab, the two gradually open up about their individual sorrow.
Now nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best International Film, Drive My Car is a profound masterpiece made all the more entrancing by its score, written by Eiko Ishibashi. The Japanese multi-instrumentalist and composer is best known for her experimental solo work, which ranges from jazz fusion to the imaginative dream pop heard on a recent tribute to a Law & Order character. Like the film’s protagonist, Ishibashi’s score possesses a cool remove and, alongside an ensemble that includes her frequent collaborator Jim O’Rourke, Ishibashi creates a soundtrack that is as moving as the film itself.
In the film, Yusuke’s theatrical method requires his cast to internalize the play’s text by running through the script without emotion before they are allowed to begin acting. (Yusuke rehearses his own lines by driving in his car and listening to cassettes of Oto reciting the other characters’ dialogue.) This emphasis on close listening and organic nuance is reflected in Ishibashi’s score, which is structured around variations of two themes, “Drive My Car” and “We’ll Live Through the Long, Long Days, and Through the Long Nights.” The eponymous core theme is set in motion by an opening burst of percussion and tumbling keys imbued with a certain thoughtfulness. This soon evolves into an upbeat and idyllic melody featuring yearning strings and the synthetic squawk of a melodion. However, this whimsical track is not the first piece of music heard by the audience. That would be “We’ll Live Through the Long, Long Days… (Oto),” a ghostly ambient track that abandons the score’s melodicism in favor of stillness, the falling of rain, and the muffled whooshing of passing cars.
In the same way that Yusuke suggests that a good driver allows their passenger to relax, Ishibashi’s score, even removed from the context of the film, allows the listener to sit back and enjoy the ride. Some of Ishibashi’s contributions suggest the transportive effect of driving in a concrete way. “Drive My Car (Cassette)” opens with a tape being inserted in a deck and the sounds of ambient traffic before it drifts into a pensive piano reverie. Meanwhile, Yusuke’s theme, “Drive My Car (Kafuku),” opens with the squeak of a seat being lowered before spiraling into rumination. “Drive My Car (Misaki)” also begins with an automobile sound as the titular character opens the Saab’s creaky front door and turns on the Saab’s ignition. This interpretation of the theme incorporates tumbling piano notes, brushed drums, and the steady thump of an electric bass; that such a reserved character is bestowed a warm theme underlines the idea that her wall of ice will someday melt, given the correct conditions.
Drive My Car’s second theme, “We’ll Live Through the Long, Long Days, and Through the Long Nights,” is more contemplative than its companion. There is an initial melancholy inflicted by strings so sorrowful that each note wavers like a dying breath. The “... (Saab 900)” version of the theme is the closest the score gets to a car crash: Percussionist Tatsuhisa Yamamoto’s fast and furious playing is layered atop the original theme’s piano melody with interjections of droning electric guitar and crashing cymbals. The arrangement is dusted, again, by vehicular ambience: the beep of a locked car, the slam of a door, and the click of a seatbelt. If the score’s other tracks capture a character or existential statement, “... (Saab 900)” is the titular car’s inner monologue as it drifts, and at one point, narrowly avoids getting side-swiped. “…(And When Our Last Hour Comes We’ll Go Quietly),” whose title is pulled from a soliloquy that arrives at the end of “Uncle Vanya,” features guitar work from O’Rourke that changes lanes from downcast meditation to hypnotic climax smoothly, as if there’s not a single bump in the road. And in its last moments, after a few final piano notes, Ishibashi’s glorious Drive My Car score goes quiet. | 2022-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Newhere / Space Shower | February 14, 2022 | 8 | f2e6af29-dab0-4acc-ac7b-e910be3e1cf9 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
On his new solo mixtape, the Flatbush rapper spits with the kind of ease and flash that starts block parties. | On his new solo mixtape, the Flatbush rapper spits with the kind of ease and flash that starts block parties. | Sleepy Hallow: Sleepy for President | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleepy-hallow-sleepy-for-president/ | Sleepy For President | Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G, Brooklyn’s best rap duo, may have both grown up in Flatbush, may be known to wear matching Puma sweatsuits, and may have both dropped Great John-produced 2019 solo mixtapes that feel like an extension of each other—but they aren’t the same rapper. Sheff G, with his thunderous voice that sounds like a bowling ball hitting the ground, is the technician. On his May mixtape, One and Only, there’s not a pocket he can’t catch or a verse he doesn’t rap with life-or-death intensity. Sleepy Hallow is not as fine-tuned, on his new solo mixtape, Sleepy for President, whether he’s reflecting on his trauma and paranoia or puffing out his chest, he spits with the kind ease and flash that starts block parties.
Listen to Sleepy Hallow’s early 2020 single “Deep End Freestyle,” and it’s straightforward: a single verse, no hook, the beat a simple looped vocal sample. But the song, clocking in at under two minutes, is perfect for endless replays, and has become the viral soundtrack for TikTok dance videos, a treasure chest of New York quotables (“My body different”) and the biggest Brooklyn drill song not made by Pop Smoke. Sleepy Hallow shines when he keeps it minimal like this.
The Brooklyn-raised twenty something has a refreshing style. Like Polo G—though not nearly as melancholy or polished—he blends the rushed cadence of traditional drill rapping with a rugged singing voice. On the gloomy “Anxiety Freestyle” he delivers his bars with an appealing looseness that makes pain sound like a good time: “Pop a perc now I’m back to life.” On “All In,” he tackles a flip of Weldon Irvine’s “Morning Sunrise” that has been done better before—Just Blaze’s iconic “Dear Summer” beat comes to mind—but his vocals are sharp and infectious. On the introspective “Bad Luck,” Sleepy smoothly delivers evergreen reflections about living in fear of death, “Demons at my door say ‘they just wanna come inside’/Shots fired, opps shot, another opp died/Cops shot another black guy”—lyrics that resonate harder than usual as the current wave of protests against police brutality continue.
But Sleepy’s sound is so bare that one misstep derails the entire track. Typically it’s because of New Jersey producer Great John, whose acoustic guitar-sampling beats—“6 AM in NY” and “Bankrolls”—lack the country soul of similar production behind Deep South singing rappers like Rod Wave and Rylo Rodriguez. Sleepy’s forced duets with Fivio Foreign and Jay Critch, pale in comparison to the tape’s three collaborations with Sheff G. The duo complement each other perfectly: their seamless back-and-forth “Water” and “Molly” should be spilling out of Flatbush car windows in no time. Then, there’s “Don’t Panic,” which follows in the fiery and relentless footsteps of the four previous songs in their “Panic” series—each Brooklyn drill essentials in their own right. Right now it’s clear that what needs to happen is the inevitable Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G joint mixtape. But until then, *Sleepy f
or President* will keep their celebration going just fine. | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Winners Circle / Empire | June 10, 2020 | 7.2 | f2e7ab56-8f2a-4264-bccf-d0e1ea94708c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Stevie Wonder capped off his classic era with the ecstatic 1980 album Hotter Than July, a tour of summer sounds that encompasses all the meanings of heat. | Stevie Wonder capped off his classic era with the ecstatic 1980 album Hotter Than July, a tour of summer sounds that encompasses all the meanings of heat. | Stevie Wonder: Hotter Than July | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stevie-wonder-hotter-than-july/ | Hotter Than July | I find that summer—particularly summer vacation—is what’s truly wasted on the young. Even in the summers where I worked 20 or 30 hours a week at some fast-food spot or convenience store, I still took the relative freedom of the days for granted. I still got to wake up late, stay out later, fuck around for most of my waking hours, and do it all again. Stripped of what I now appreciate as that exhilarating freedom, summer on the other side of adulthood can leave much to be desired. I don’t so much mind the increase in responsibilities, or the earlier alarm, or the more-constant temptation of sleep. But, like so much nostalgic longing, there’s a feeling that I can’t as easily access. Yet I know that even as you read this, you know that feeling, or something like it, even if our definitions of the feeling aren’t the same. It can be unearthed, sometimes, in a scene: a sunset, the taste of a drink, a waning bonfire, and yes, a song. Something to interrupt what otherwise might as well be a long series of hot days that keep getting hotter by the year.
I like the word heat far more than I like the feeling of it. I like the word because I’m from a place where it holds multiple definitions, more than any four letters should. So many that it swells at the seams. In 1980, Stevie Wonder was, perhaps, feeling a few of those definitions hovering over his career, most notably the definition of heat as a type of immovable pressure. What Stevie Wonder accomplished between 1972 and 1977 is astonishing. Baffling to the point of near-impossibility if there weren’t the touchable material to inform a listener that they did not dream it. And with impossible triumph comes impossible expectations. I won’t dwell on 1979’s sprawling Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants here but to say that it is an album that, in quality, nearly matches its overwhelming ambition. But needless to say, after one of the greatest runs of albums there has ever been, Secret Life of Plants fell relatively flat. Motown didn’t promote the record with the same ferocity as Wonder’s previous albums. Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts, in part due to Wonder’s immense hold on the commercial landscape at the time, but only one of its singles made a mark, and reviews were mixed.
What can’t be undersold about Secret Life of Plants, amid its somewhat forgotten history, is that it was one of the first albums to be digitally recorded, which opened up a new window for Stevie Wonder, always the tinkerer, always seeking the newest and greatest tools to add to his expansive toolbox. Wonder spent 1979 and early 1980 holed up in the studio, toying with new digital recording equipment from Sony, locked in with engineers helping him navigate the technology to best suit his needs. He had purchased an old Hollywood radio studio—the C.P. MacGregor Studio—which was so old that it predated home television, so old it even predated magnetic tape. It had been abandoned for years, but Wonder had an ear for the acoustics of the place, and a feel for its history. Because there was no real recording infrastructure, Wonder had to also purchase a remote recording truck, and have cables run from the truck to the inside of the building. It was, once again, Wonder attempting to find the perfect intersection point between innovation and ambition. Reinventing himself by dragging the past into the future, at any cost.
To speak of heat in the most literal sense, it must be said that it was, indeed, hot in the summer of 1980, in the months right before Stevie Wonder released Hotter Than July, the album that he’d been working on as a career re-shaping step into the new decade. Not hot in the sense of overly romantic summer nostalgia: The 1980 Heat Wave had its most vicious impacts in the Midwest and through the Great Plains. The heatwave began in June and didn’t relent in many areas until September. It was reported to have claimed at least 1,700 lives. There were droughts and agricultural damage. In Kansas City, temperatures were over 100 degrees for 17 days straight. In early August, there was a brief reprieve, only due to a hurricane.
The heatwave made its exit in mid-September, just a week or so before Hotter Than July made its entry. The album’s title—which comes from the opening lyric of the first single, “Master Blaster (Jammin’)”—aligned with the month that the heatwave reached its peak. On the cover of the album, Stevie Wonder is made to look as if he’s survived the heat (that most literal definition, again) that others didn’t. His mouth is half-open somewhere between awe, exhaustion, and pleasure. There is a glint on the edge of his red-rimmed sunglasses which might suggest that he’s turned towards the sun—a suggestion that feels more on-point when one clocks the beads of sweat cascading down his face, towards his neck and bare shoulders. It is an image that gives off a humidity, and the relief that comes with escaping it, even briefly.
There are many ways for a song, or an album, to feel like summer, and Hotter Than July encompasses a small series of examples. Its (highly underappreciated) opening track, “Did I Hear You Say You Love Me,” begins with a slow buildup of voice, a shout that originates from a far-off elsewhere before fighting its way to the front of the sonic line, a slow and steady “…ahhhhHHHHHHHHHHHOUUUUU” and before the music hits, the feeling hits. This is what I mean: There is a buildup and then a release. Confronted with the pleasure and excitement of whatever newfound freedoms (small or large) that summer might offer you, what is there to do but shout something loud and indecipherable to everyone but you. The shout kicks open the door for a slow-trickling groove of guitar and bass interplay and then, through the gaps, come the bursts of horns, steady as sunlight through a cracked curtain of sound. “As If You Read My Mind” is lush, danceable pop, so fluorescent that it might bury the lyrics if not for its infectious chorus that demands to be sung breathlessly, mid-movement. “Do Like You” is a showcase of Wonder’s greatest vocal ability, to bend a single word until it feels like it is unraveling into several words, and to pursue lyrical repetition not for the sake of repetition, but to reach for something greater, more urgent with each rotation of language, so that by the end of the song, when he is fully committed to the circular presentation of the words “show me how to do like you,” there are pauses and ad-libs where you think he might be done before he jumps right back in. The lyrics become first an earnest question, and then one dripping with envy or ferocity, before they circle back to a type of awe.
In these moments, the greatness of Hotter Than July is in how relentlessly Stevie Wonder reaches for the ecstatic—a shift after releasing a high-concept encyclopedia of an album right before this one. At times, Hotter Than July feels like running into a sweltering day; at times it feels like drinking a glass of something cold after coming inside while still smelling like outside; and at times it feels like the slowness that falls over a summer day as it winds down.
For that latter feeling, there is “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” which served as the album’s first single. During Wonder’s creative exploration in the ’70s, he had become friends with Bob Marley, playing live shows with him throughout the latter half of the decade. Reggae had begun to make its way into his sound bank. “Master Blaster” is a slow-swaying ode to Marley, even shouting out the legend in the lyrics. It also uses Marley’s 1977 song “Jamming” as a musical template, taking the sparse guitar and percussion that ran through the original’s backbone and aligning it with Wonder’s expanded imagination, adding layers and pace, but not giving up the song’s feeling of ease. “Master Blaster” signaled a return to Wonder’s status as a hitmaker, staying atop the Billboard R&B charts for seven weeks, and peaking at No. 5 on the pop singles chart.
Hotter Than July is also an album that holds two distinct movements within it. Its final two songs, “Lately” and “Happy Birthday,” work almost as an encore; not entirely separate from the album’s overarching thematic and sonic concerns, but slightly wandering into different territories of emotional purpose and mission, and also robust enough to feel like they are carrying their own weight. The former is a classic Wonder ballad, the artist and piano and a palpable sense of longing (forgettable to me, but only because of Wonder’s singular ability to pull this type of song off in various ways throughout his career).
And then, there is “Happy Birthday.” If you have the record of Hotter Than July, and you unfold all of the gates of the album, that, too, presents an exercise in duality. Directly opposite the cover of Wonder appearing breathless and sweating out the ecstatic pleasures of the sun, there is an image of a piano on fire, in the same color landscape as the cover itself. The two panels on the bottom half are in black and white.
On one side, there is a large portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. against a black background. Above the photo, the date of King’s birth and the date of his death are printed in white lettering. On the opposite side of the sleeve, there are five photos: across the top, a photo of a city divided by a six-lane highway, both sides of that highway encased in smoke, touched by the aftermath of a riot. Across the bottom, a photo of white police officers with white helmets and weapons at the ready, appearing to advance on Black protesters standing in nonviolent defiance. In a photo to the left, there is a Black boy being pulled by the limbs. Two police officers on each arm, and one on his leg. In a photo to the right, a Black man is in a pool of his own blood outside of a store. Another Black man is crouched against the wall, looking away in agony. In the foreground, a police officer in a white helmet stands with a hand on his hip.
The photo in the center is of Martin Luther King Jr., leading a march. The link between the center photo and the surrounding photos is vital, particularly within the American imagination that has limited King to palatable quotes and vague concepts around unity. This photo, surrounded by the other photos, gives context to the engine that pushed King towards his work, and gives context to a society that wanted him gone then, and would still want him gone now. While I have gratitude for the words of King, I have little interest in a framing of him that relies solely on those words—which have, by now, been manipulated and defanged in too many ways, by too many bad-faith actors and institutions. Instead, I desire this kind of presentation: one that shows him in solidarity with other Black people, at the center of America’s chorus of chaos, and Black people’s fight to both survive within it, and tear it apart.
Accompanying this layout is a small message from Wonder, urging the public to join him in pushing for the national recognition of King’s birthday. To those efforts, the song “Happy Birthday” arrives as the landing point for Hotter Than July. In a run of tunes already overflowing with exuberance, it is the album’s longest and most exuberant track. To first note that I don’t necessarily believe that “corny” is a pejorative, one great miracle of “Happy Birthday” is that it survives the somewhat corny pleading of its verses due to the everlasting and constantly refreshing pleasure of the chorus. The verses are, understandably, individualized in a way that makes clear the song’s mission statement. In the verses, there is a very specific you that is being spoken of, but when the chorus is extracted, the you becomes anyone in a room surrounded by people who love them, people in the mood for celebrating.
To exit here as we entered—considering the many modes and energies that encompass the feeling of a “youthful” summer, fleeting for some of us wandering the endless caverns of adulthood. I often return to a story from the summer of 2020. What stands out most in my memory about the uprisings in and around my city is how exhausted people were by the end of each day. With the exhaustion came some sense of gratitude for not having been swept away in a cop car, or having survived the gas sprayed into crowds, or whatever other violence the police decided to inflict on those gathered in the streets. The balm for this exhaustion, often, was someone dragging a speaker into the middle of a road at night, well after the cops decided they were done for the day, when the streets belonged to whoever still had it in them to celebrate getting through the hot, chaotic, rage-filled hours.
These were my favorite times, largely for how they unlocked that elusive myth of youthful freedom—nowhere to be, nothing to do except take advantage of space and a clock that felt slowed down. Someone would play songs, and Black folks would dance, and laugh, shout lyrics, and fall into each other. One day in August, someone was celebrating a birthday, which I only remember because when it came time to sing “Happy Birthday,” no one asked which version would be sung. Not many Black folks I have been around ever ask such a foolish question. The answer is already known. From out of the speakers came Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” and when the chorus hit, the singing was loud enough to echo several blocks in every direction, carried on the backs of clapping hands, as it often is.
This moment, on the streets after protest, was merely one of the latest in a wide range of moments defined and earmarked by Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday,” and—more broadly—by Hotter Than July. The reality is that, had Stevie Wonder never made another album after Secret Life of Plants, what he’d already given the world would have been generous enough. A bounty to last several lifetimes. It is narrow and erroneous to consider Hotter Than July as only a “comeback” album, or a response to skeptical critics. It doesn’t come across, to me, as an album obsessed with proving worth, or even all that obsessed with showcasing the individual talents of the artist. For all that can be said of Hotter Than July’s legacy, what stands out the most is that it is an album of seemingly endless abundance. An album that asks not only “How do you want to feel?” but also, “How do you want to survive?” and then turns us towards the expansive forest of ever-shifting answers. | 2022-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Tamla | February 27, 2022 | 9.4 | f2ee8c75-e860-43d6-85c1-eedc3caba6d1 | Hanif Abdurraqib | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hanif-abdurraqib/ | |
The Parisian pop experimentalist Camille sounds awed by language as a brilliant, living thing on her latest album. Inspired by the psychedelia of motherhood, she doubles down on her sharp playfulness. | The Parisian pop experimentalist Camille sounds awed by language as a brilliant, living thing on her latest album. Inspired by the psychedelia of motherhood, she doubles down on her sharp playfulness. | Camille: OUÏ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camille-oui/ | OUÏ | Camille Dalmais doesn’t so much wear her intelligence lightly as fashion it into excellent costumes. The 39-year-old Parisian graduated from the prestigious university that produced a majority of the last eight French presidents, and at least the latter four of her five albums have been both wildly experimental and genuinely entertaining. She’s played around with vocal drones and beatboxing, with a cappella singing and feral shrieks; she once challenged Mariah to a falsetto duel. On 2011’s Ilo Veyou, she invited a scammer to a banquet where his ex-lovers would dine on his “tiny, erect dart” in a “single and languorous mouthful.” (The invitation sounds more appealing in the original French.) If Dalmais has a recurring theme amid all this mischief, it’s the body. Ilo Veyou and now OUÏ were both inspired by her experiences of birth and motherhood—psychedelic, transformative states that she explores by doubling down on her sharp playfulness rather than submitting to anything as boring as maturity.
Admittedly, Ilo Veyou was fustier than her previous records, drawing on traditional medieval arrangements that may have stalled some listeners at the gate. But OUÏ—implying both yes (oui) and hearing (l’ouïe)—is more inviting, both outlandish and intimate. As with 2005’s brilliant Le Fil, which was threaded by a low vocal tone, a sub-bass heartbeat runs through every song, interwoven with deep Moog accents and minimalist drumming. Dalmais plays both lead singer and loopy backing choir, her panoply of voices leaping like water jets in some rococo fountain. Initially she intended to make a political album about the recent tragedies that have struck France, but instead, she decided to pursue something more rooted in openness and fluidity of sound and spirit. Even if you can’t understand a word of the lyrics, the idea resonates in her voice and its slippery language, which makes puns and double entendres of French’s elegant homonyms. Most importantly, the underlying concept rarely strangles the pop potential of OUÏ’s 11 songs.
There’s plenty of pure pleasure hits for non-Francophones. “Twix” pits Dalmais’ plosive skittishness against a rhythm of jumpy, sampled voices. The nervous energy mounts and explodes in a tirade of tortured vocal splatter and crude bass, recalling the manic highs of Le Fil’s “Ta Douleur.” Not that aggressive outbursts always serve Dalmais well. “Les Loups” (“The Wolves”) turns an old folk rhythm into a discordant clatter, hooked around a voice that appears to be imitating a barking didgeridoo. “Lasso” is more dynamic and better for it, and could be Dalmais’ own contribution to the folk canon with its syncopated claps, sweeping gait, and concerned voices singing in the round.
It’s a shame there’s no such thing as a subtitled listening experience because OUÏ is rich with brilliant, funny ideas about conception, nurture, and identity. Lead single “Fontaine de Lait” puns on how Dalmais’ child-bearing body transformed sperm into milk, filled with frothy, comic imagery. “And now I make/A fountain of him,” Dalmais sings (in French), “And here I am/A fountain of milk.” A flirty, wobbling woodwind sound and a soft, sandy beat map the path of these intricate biological processes, a choir of backing vocals cooing in awe. “Piscine” is just as playful and surreal, Dalmais impersonating a lonely swimming pool that longs to break free and reconnect with the ocean. The beat is surreptitious and sneaky, as if plotting its escape, and a choir calls out to the water. “Aller à la mer,” she sings—“I want to go to the sea”—or is it “aller à la mère,” mapping her path to motherhood? The potential meanings are just as fun as the sound.
Dalmais’ love of linguistic elasticity finds a bolder purpose in “Je Ne Mâche Pas Mes Mots” (“I Don’t Chew My Words”). She pairs two traditional French styles, yearning chanson and shuffling rap, bringing a sense of urgency to goofy lyrics about how good words taste in her mouth—like apple jelly, honey, artichoke, and strawberry coulis. By marrying tradition and first-generation innovation, and turning a notoriously rigid language upside down, she makes a subtle statement about free speech, and kicks back at prescribed definitions of French identity. OUÏ ends with “Langue,” and Dalmais chanting a word that could mean language or tongue, finding sing-songy sweetness in the slight tweaks of pronunciation. She sounds self-possessed, as awed by language as a brilliant, living thing as by her body’s transformative potential. | 2017-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Because Music | June 20, 2017 | 7.6 | f2f4051d-5e73-4038-8601-f399859bb365 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
A frequent collaborator of ambient musicians like Laraaji and his brother Brian Eno, the British composer presents a collection of wistful solo piano pieces shaded by strings. | A frequent collaborator of ambient musicians like Laraaji and his brother Brian Eno, the British composer presents a collection of wistful solo piano pieces shaded by strings. | Roger Eno: The Turning Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roger-eno-the-turning-year/ | The Turning Year | Roger Eno creates pastoral landscapes in sound, letting each simple melody unfold with patience. In a career stretching back decades, the British composer has collaborated with a number of prominent ambient artists, including his older brother Brian Eno and new-age multi-instrumentalist Laraaji. On The Turning Year, he steps out solo, showcasing a keen sense for delicate, unornamented melodies that serve as vehicles for reflection.
The Turning Year features compositions both new and old, each illuminating Eno’s knack for creating sweeping palettes. Every piece follows a similar pattern: Lush strings played by Score Berlin swirl around simple, melancholic piano melodies reminiscent of one of Eno’s favorite composers, Erik Satie. It’s cinematic music, driven by sprawling harmonies and fluid motion. Rather than dreaming of the future, these nostalgic pieces feel as if they’re looking back at the past, taking in a bird’s eye view of the change that occurs throughout life.
Much of The Turning Year builds from short, looping piano phrases that become enveloped by warm strings. Opener “A Place We Once Walked” is emblematic of this style: It begins with a pensive melody that slowly tumbles and repeats, each time with a little more emphasis than the last. Gradually, the piano melds with vivid strings that add richness and glow to its stark, introverted melodies. Eno utilizes a similar tactic throughout, but it works best on the radiant "The Turning Year," where the bright keyboard melody and deep, full-bodied strings combine in a particularly bold, resonant way.
But the instruments come unglued at other points, leading to a sense of restraint, even hesitancy. In these moments of disconnection, Eno’s overarching structure falters. “Something Made Out of Nothing” grows from a slow piano melody full of pauses and echoes, while strings appear like a wispy cloud around it, soft but far too thin. It feels as if none of the performers are sure what comes next. This uneasiness comes through elsewhere, too, like “On the Horizon,” which introduces a clarinet in stilted conversation with the piano. In its uncertainty, the piece lacks the slowed-down, reflective feeling that makes Eno’s music compelling.
In the moments where each element clicks together, though, Eno succeeds at grasping the way that music can mimic memory’s fluidity. As though attempting to color in recollections that have grown fuzzy, his nostalgic compositions and suspended motion often emulate the feeling of trying to recall memories that have lost their shape. His drifting waves of sound gloss over details, blurring the mechanics of his melodies and leaving us only with their wistful spirit. | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | April 22, 2022 | 6.5 | f2fddb59-4495-463d-9746-42e36699dfbb | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ |
Subsets and Splits