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In 2009, a dance imprint located in Uruguay began issuing a string of mysterious, uncredited singles, each treading the ground between downtempo and nu-disco. Most were later revealed to be the work of labelhead Mark Barrott, who recently released the third installment of his Sketches From An Island series and the two-song "Bush Society" single. | In 2009, a dance imprint located in Uruguay began issuing a string of mysterious, uncredited singles, each treading the ground between downtempo and nu-disco. Most were later revealed to be the work of labelhead Mark Barrott, who recently released the third installment of his Sketches From An Island series and the two-song "Bush Society" single. | Mark Barrott: Sketches From An Island 3 / Bush Society | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20849-sketches-from-an-island-3-bush-society/ | Sketches From An Island 3 / Bush Society | In 2009, a new dance imprint located in Uruguay and called International Feel began issuing a string of mysterious, uncredited singles. Soon followed a parade of artists with names like Rocha, Efeel, the Sonic Aesthetic, Bepu N’Gali, Parada 88, Boys From Patagonia, and Young Gentlemen’s Adventure Society, each treading the squishy ground between downtempo and nu-disco, favoring the sorts of sounds that Europeans on holiday would recognize as "Balearic." A few years on, the imprint up and relocated to the island of Ibiza and soon after, most of these works were revealed to be the work of labelhead Mark Barrott, who went with his own name for last year’s breezy Sketches From An Island, which compiled two earlier EPs.
Recently, Barrott announced the release of the third installment of his Sketches From An Island series via the Drip subscription service, explaining the digital fan club thus: "For me, my ‘moments of joy’ come from making music in a studio and then attempting to reach out with that music and communicate with like minded souls to form a connection." The four-song EP, which is now getting a physical release via International Feel, continues along the same trajectory as the previous album, to the point where the library funk of opener "Right 4 Me" brings to mind SFAI’s opener "Baby Come Home", right down to the melody being conveyed via a flute plug-in. Charming as the ditty is, it feels like a retread.
Titlewise, "The Mysterious Island of Dr. Nimm" scans as a sequel to the prior album track "Dr Nimm's Garden of Intrigue & Delight". But while the latter is taken at a leisurely pace, this EP track features darker bass and layers of clattering percussion, bamboo flutes, chimes, and bird calls, reminiscent of jungle foliage. The other two tracks favor the kind of polyrhythmic pulses that bring to mind Music for 18 Musicians as rendered at a luau, gentle as a sea breeze, or on closer "Der Stern, Der Nie Vergeht", Cluster had they lived in Ibiza rather than in rural Germany. While the EP is pleasant enough, it doesn’t stake out much in the way of new terrain.
If anything, it’s a slight step back after Barrott released a two-track "Bush Society" single earlier this spring. Although most of its components are light and buoyant, "Saviours or Savages?" carefully builds tension, its percolating rhythms never quite releasing. The 10-minute "Bush Society" is the most ambitious and successful of Barrott’s tracks to date. Like many of his songs, it begins with ambient bird calls and a distant thunderstorm, then adds rattles and hand percussion. It suggests the brightness of a Brazilian track (think Airto) but the bass synth growls that lurk beneath the percussion give it a sinister edge. Between a vocal sample evocative of the Mbuti Pygmy chants from the Ituri Rainforest and the menacing acid underpinnings, "Bush Society" sounds light and dark at once. Its 10 minutes bring to mind island life itself, in that time feels both suspended and passing far too fast. | 2015-07-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | July 30, 2015 | 6.9 | f30081f1-ed1c-4d9b-aa4b-d4f1c6d9563d | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Dave Longstreth is on a madcap quest for personal and political salvation on his latest album, reviving a more hopeful, chipper kind of songwriting of his past. | Dave Longstreth is on a madcap quest for personal and political salvation on his latest album, reviving a more hopeful, chipper kind of songwriting of his past. | Dirty Projectors: Lamp Lit Prose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dirty-projectors-lamp-lit-prose/ | Lamp Lit Prose | Last year, the least visceral artist in indie rock slung his guts on the table. Dirty Projectors cataloged the shrapnel of Dave Longstreth’s breakup, enshrining his memories in indie-rock, hip-hop, and whatever other styles took root. What came out was a record so calculating and emotionally ugly that Longstreth found it impossible to tour behind. Instead, he tinkered with a follow-up, Lamp Lit Prose, which backgrounds first-person narratives and revives a more hopeful, chipper kind of songwriting.
Whether it’s a convincing renaissance isn’t quite the right question, because, as ever, Longstreth is firing in every direction at once. Political specters loom—“The sky has darkened/Earth turned to hell,” the album begins—and in their shadow, the redeeming possibilities of music and love overlap until the chorus of tragedy, defiance, and relief resolves into triumph. On opener “Right Now,” flanked by cavalry brass, Longstreth wails, “There was silence in my heart/But now I’m striking up the band!” It’s a dual statement of purpose, reintroducing live instruments to his core setup and, more broadly, rebuilding the ruins of his collapsed group, love life, and nation.
It’s a bold project, this madcap quest for personal and political salvation. But when Longstreth throws caution to the wind, Lamp Lit Prose is wonderful. “Ask now, I’m in love for the first time ever,” he chirps on “I Found It in U,” a lyric just naive enough to transmit the dumb sparkle of lust. After a few verses hopping between radio-rock guitars and assault-course percussion, he alights upon another beautiful lyric: “All the painful dreams I failed to extinguish/Were the footlights down dark aisles I’ve taken/Now they’ve led me to you.”
How remarkable, then, that such an adroit student of romance could also have written “Break-Thru,” a lead single that heaps superlatives on a “deadpan, unimpressed” character who Longstreth apparently covets for her inscrutability alone. She’s a “breakthrough,” an “epiphany,” and “no one can lock her down,” he sermonizes, landing somewhere between the language of love and a tech symposium. Paired with nods to Archimedes and Julian Casablancas, this is perhaps Longstreth’s idea of a grand narrative, splicing old and new culture to suggest that love, in its first flush, feels epochal—historic as much as personal. But it’s hard to sympathize with a narrator who spends so much time concocting romantic riddles and so little articulating the selfless magic of devotion.
To his credit, there are no such problems elsewhere. While deeply impressionistic, Lamp Lit Prose inverts its predecessor’s emotional black hole, largely thanks to its revival of airy Bitte Orca-style compositions and a pick’n’mix guest list. Perfect harmonies congregate in dark corners: Empress Of lends primal headbanger “Zombie Conqueror” a supernatural gravity; Syd calmly anchors “Right Now”’s wildfire optimism; an imploring Haim leaven “That’s a Lifestyle”—a catchy lament for the crumbling empire—and Robin Pecknold and Rostam gather around for some open-heart balladry on “You’re the One.” “We wholly depend on our hope and love, received and sent,” Longstreth sings, sincerely, on “I Feel Energy,” and the philosophy bears out in the record’s spirit of collaboration.
For all its grandiose anxiety, the most rewarding moments here boil down to a simple reprieve: love and art can empower the meek to stare down the apocalypse. “Soon the Earth may dissolve like snow/We’ll meet again in the air, all bound to glow,” Longstreth sings under a pirouetting 12-string riff on “Right Now,” a blue-sky vision of nuclear armageddon. The recently heartbroken have a tendency to overstate the transformative power of love, not least in times of crisis. But it’s infectious to hear Longstreth on this strange honeymoon, persevering until lust or terror wins out. | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | July 16, 2018 | 7.4 | f3075789-3f1c-4bbc-82ae-35141aa8f32f | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
After a 2021 debut that used deconstructed club music as an autobiographical frame, the London-based producer’s rhythmically focused new EP feels less revealing—but just as disorienting. | After a 2021 debut that used deconstructed club music as an autobiographical frame, the London-based producer’s rhythmically focused new EP feels less revealing—but just as disorienting. | aya: Lip Flip EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aya-lip-flip-ep/ | Lip Flip EP | aya’s music is a dizzying tunnel system of itchy scratches, whispered desires, fried zaps, and unsettling sounds so tactile they seem to almost puncture your eardrum. At times, the London-based experimental producer’s debut, im hole, resembled gothic ASMR, or an open-heart dissection of a DAW, using tiny scalpels to pull apart, pinch, and rearrange sound layers. aya’s first solo release in over two years, Lip Flip, is a fundraiser for her facial feminization surgery, but it’s also a celebration. Where aya’s early tunes reimagined future-pop like SOPHIE as music for dissociation rather than dancing, this EP sounds built for a disorienting club night.
There’s a screwy buoyancy to these songs that makes Lip Flip feel like a fusion of im hole and her more adrenalized 2023 collab EP with BFTT, the co-founder of their label YCO. aya’s ingredients often feel so characterful and carefully chosen as to seem anthropomorphic: bright dings that seem to smile, metallic synths winking like they’re playing patty cake. On “Essente!,” Ugandan rapper Ecko Bazz somersaults between flows and languages, his fierce energy transforming aya’s spasming beat into a neon playground. The title track, which features her alter ego LOFT, ratchets up tension with the tight pulse of a Two Shell song and then explodes into a barrage of abrasive yet groovy low end primed to jolt dancers into off-kilter movement.
The biggest change on this EP is the near-absence of aya’s voice, which acted as a kind of phantom tour guide through im hole’s haunted manor house of deconstructed club. Lacking her characteristically surreal imagery and slurred rhymes, these tracks feel slightly more anonymous, as though any oddball with a knack for madcap sound structures could’ve patched them together. There’s also less of the negative space that made the hypnotically menacingsongs built around her creaky vocals and industrial bleeps sound like spoken-word poetry for a scary game score. Without any sort of narrative to cohere around, Lip Flip sometimes hits like a faceless flood of wonky sound shards—chipmunk gurgles and kawaii-ified chants on “Leftenant Keith,” clipped breaths and thudding drums on the title cut.
But even with its frenetically pristine sheen, the music is still cheekily weird, the rhythm always shifting. Like the ’80s British band it’s named after, “Dexxy Is a Midnight Runner” is a tribute to an ADHD medication: lisdexamfetamine (commonly known as Vyvanse, apparently a favorite on the club circuit in Australia, where hard drugs are difficult to obtain). But its lattices of paranoid plinks and progressively eerier cut-up vocals are practically the inverse of Dexys’ passion pop. The final section’s fusillade of rubbery percussion makes me picture a single tiny pill sprinting at cartoonish speed like Crazy Frog. Whether the music is demented or danceable, aya’s killer ear for tone and texture makes every fragment sound hyperreal. | 2024-03-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | March 5, 2024 | 7 | f30ce167-faa0-4ef2-8627-b3c3b847b27f | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
Audion is the minimal-techno guise of Matthew Dear, and often a vent for his most antic impulses. Alpha jettisons the wilder stuff for a sleek, toned-down, crisper affair. | Audion is the minimal-techno guise of Matthew Dear, and often a vent for his most antic impulses. Alpha jettisons the wilder stuff for a sleek, toned-down, crisper affair. | Audion: Alpha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21991-alpha/ | Alpha | Over his long, evolving career, Matthew Dear has distinguished himself from America’s indie-electronic world through his outsized, wry personality and absolute open-mindedness to pop, whether under his own name, or as Audion, his louche techno guise. Starting with his very first single (“Hands Up for Detroit,” co-written by the late Disco D) through his first taste of “crossover” success (his inaugural vocal turn on 2003’s “Dog Days”), he’s never been afraid to make music that’s both artful and catchy.
Since relocating from Ann Arbor to the New York area in the mid-’00s, the music Dear’s made has increasingly unshackled itself from genre, embracing wider ideas of song and rhythm, ending up somewhere in the Bowie/Talking Heads/late-period Depeche Mode territory—as “electronic” as it is “industrial” and “post-punk” and “goth,” but really only adjacent to all of these. At the same time, he’s never pretended to abandon dance-music, and Audion has often served as the release of Dear’s techno Id. In the dozen or so years he’s been banging out lascivious and catchy tracks under that moniker, Dear has used it as a playground where hooks interact with techno’s progressive sonic ideologies.
Contradictory though it might at-first seem, “fun-first minimalism” has been Audion’s modus operandi from the get-go. The keeper on the 2004 EP Kisses is called “Titty Fuck,” seven minutes of filters and percussion patterns piled upon a two-part skeletal hook that’s driven into the ground until everyone in earshot’s gone mental. Much of Audion’s ensuing catalog turned that example into gospel (and set a tone for labels like Dirtybird): hard, repetitive dance tracks with a dirty-ish mind, a grimy sonic gleam attractive to both newbie ravers and veterans, more funky earworms and hookup stimulants than philosophical tracts. Even Audion’s release formats spoke to notions of pop immediacy, with the 2005 album debut Suckfish followed only by an army of singles (many not even pressed to vinyl for optimal legacy quotient), all featuring Will Calcutt’s hypnotic designs.
Another of Calcutt’s trademark patterns adorns the cover of Alpha, but besides that, few things around Audion’s long-gestating second album seem familiar—not its soft-focus darkness, not its pensiveness, not the minimalism with the negligible payoff. Instead, Alpha sounds like the character that once recorded a nice throbbing jack entitled “Just Fucking” has curtailed his libido and dragged out his Jeff Mills records for inspiration. (The most instantly magnetic one here, “Destroyer,” even has a title harkening back to one of Mills’ classic Underground Resistance co-productions.) This is a wonderful conceit but not the reason people come to Audion in the first place, and leaves the album fighting a catalog’s worth of pre-conceptions.
Yet if Alpha means to reposition Audion’s place in the world, it undersells this new perspective. The opener, “Dem,” downplays its beat in favor of a dank, echo-laden horrorcore, excellently setting up a downcast tone, but then instantly veers into a conveyor belt of stripped-d0wn bangers. They are crisp and marvelously engineered, but the catchy bits are nowhere to be found. Tracks such as “There Was a Button” and “Traanc” are acceptable as minimal-house DJ tools, but as greater parts of a long-playing whole, they seem lost for a broader context—a context Dear previously had no trouble offering.
Only at Alpha’s tail end does Audion’s (and Dear’s) personality assert itself. The hook of “Zunk Synth” is a grey-noise gurgle EQ’d in and out of the fog, as synth-pads and a percussive varietal built on tambourines and hi-hats puddle around playfully. And “Sicko” uses the album’s brightest keyboard line, plus a 909 bass punch, to build-up to the album’s biggest payoff, akin to the sound of an old-school disco dub. Unlike anything else from the prior hour, it closes the proceedings in wonderful style, Dear’s sound of Audion remembered. One just wonders: Why did it take so long? | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | June 17, 2016 | 6.1 | f31151fe-52b8-4564-9e02-07c6c9a20100 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | null |
Oh, Elliott. Are things really that bad? We've been listening to this grizzled old bastard's miseries since his ... | Oh, Elliott. Are things really that bad? We've been listening to this grizzled old bastard's miseries since his ... | Elliott Smith: Figure 8 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7267-figure-8/ | Figure 8 | Oh, Elliott. Are things really that bad? We've been listening to this grizzled old bastard's miseries since his self-titled, indier-than-Mary Lou Lord 1995 debut on Kill Rock Stars. And what has it gotten us? Well, those of us addicted to Smith's plug-and-play hooks got it in the ass-- we've invested well over $50 on his entire catalog. Ah, but it's a value, I guess. After all, it's a pretty rare event when we find someone this effortlessly capable of crafting whole albums of instantly accessible pop.
When we last left Elliott Smith, his Dreamworks debut, XO, was being called the best album of 1998 by all your dad's periodicals. His songwriting had clearly advanced since the release of his heralded indie classic, Either/Or, and songs like "Bottle Up and Explode", "Tomorrow Tomorrow", and "Pitseleh" featured far more intelligent lyrics and melodies than the songs off its predecessor. But Smith's long-time followers-- Olympia indie punks and emo kids-- saw a problem. XO's multi-layered vocal harmonies, syrup-drenched string sections, polished effects and warm atmospheres detracted from the intimacy of his semi-confessional earlier work. It also didn't help that, from out of nowhere, he was nominated for a very un-punk Academy Award for his song "Miss Misery", which was featured prominently in the also very un-punk Good Will Hunting.
A minor indie backlash ensued shortly after the record's release, but the songs spoke for themselves, and despite the record's overwhelming studio sheen, XO still holds up today as a damn fine record. The new album, of course, will be a major determining factor in the course of his career. It could break new ground in the genre, taking a hammer to conventional pop rules and re-writing music history (don't count on it), or it could establish him as the new king of adult contemporary radio, virtually erasing his name from punk's history books. Of course, it comes out somewhere between the two. Figure 8, ultimately, isn't as good a record as XO or Either/Or, though the man's not out of the picture yet.
Punk fans will be pleased to know that Figure 8 is a bit more raw than XO, though the same production team-- Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf-- was called in again. The album accomplishes more with less saccharine perfection. But sadly, Smith still goes a little overboard here and there. The throwaway toy-piano honky tonk of "In the Lost and Found (Honky Bach)" is a giant, airy studio disaster complete with high-treble piano, a rambling, go-nowhere melody, and a glistening chamber hall effect that sounds like someone dropped a reverb bomb by the mic. "Wouldn't Mama Be Proud" is a grasp for the VH-1 ring that puts Reef to shame. And the first single, "Son of Sam", hasn't got a damn thing on "Sweet Adeline" or "Speed Trials", Smith's previous album openers-- it's one of the least infectious songs this guy's written since Roman Candle.
But while Elliott Smith includes some of his least inspired music of all time on Figure 8, he also surprisingly pulls out some of his best to date. The simple, jerky, acoustic melodrama of "Somebody That I Used to Know" proves that Smith can sing in other tones than his standard shy whisper. "Everything Means Nothing to Me" harbors an unpredictable, evolving, vaguely psychedelic tune, and uses the album's massive major label budget to its advantage by incorporating creative, unique ideas and not overdoing it with the Neil Diamond Orchestra. "I Better Be Quiet Now" serves as the most affecting ballad here with its acoustic intimacy, gentle guitar strum, and Smith's lyrical honesty: "If I didn't know the difference/ Living alone would probably be okay/ It wouldn't be lonely/ I got a long way to go/ I'm getting further away."
But "Pretty Mary K" sums up Figure 8 most ably. It carries the burden of that "wall of Schnapf" reverb overdrive, and is a shining example of Smith's sometimes lumbering songwriting which, in its attempts to remain original, can become unbearably random-sounding-- a problem that plagues this record from start to finish. Yet, it also pulls some of the album's most impressive twists, and most clearly recalls the Beatles of any of these songs.
16 Elliott Smith songs is a lot to plow through, though-- even 16 of his greatest tracks would be a task. The question here is: is it worth wading through the filler to get to the good stuff? In some cases, as with "Color Bars" and "Everything Reminds Me of Her", it can be. But how much "Honky Bach" can one person stand? Figure 8 is, without a doubt, another step down from XO in terms of songwriting, even if its production has taken a step in the right direction (that is, away from Michael Penn's house). In the grand scheme of things, however, you only need to hear so much Elliott Smith before you get the point. | 2000-03-31T01:00:12.000-05:00 | 2000-03-31T01:00:12.000-05:00 | Rock | DreamWorks | March 31, 2000 | 6.9 | f3128e18-f20d-47e5-b43c-6256264b4a71 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
The Michigan band’s debut defaults to the moody rumble of 1990s shoegaze, but sounds best when it plows through the guardrails. | The Michigan band’s debut defaults to the moody rumble of 1990s shoegaze, but sounds best when it plows through the guardrails. | Big Vic: Girl, Buried | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-vic-girl-buried/ | Girl, Buried | Ann Arbor, Michigan quartet Big Vic recognize the undeniable correlation between loud music and emotional expulsion. Singer, main songwriter, and lead guitarist Victoria Rinaldi is quite comfortable tearing up her strings on the band’s debut Girl, Buried—yet her voice rarely rises above a whisper. Rather than shout, Rinaldi hangs back from the mic and shreds, hiding pithy observations within the heady squall of her bandmates: guitarist Geoff Brown, bassist Ines Hidalgo, and drummer Joe Fortino.
The four friends met at the University of Michigan, where Rinaldi studied multi-disciplinary visual art. She’d begun writing songs in high school, and as an Asian American, she was disheartened by the lack of diversity she saw within heavier music scenes. The success of rock artists like Mitski helped inspire her to shift the balance. Big Vic is her first proper band, and the nine-track Girl, Buried is powered by the moody rumble of 1990s shoegaze—a default setting that sometimes holds the album back. The band’s reverence for groups like Slowdive and Sonic Youth is earnest and precisely rendered, but Big Vic sound best when they get lost in their own clamor.
Lyrically, Girl, Buried is lean. Rinaldi isn’t the type of frontperson who occupies a large, ego-driven space, and her voice never pulls you away from the energy of her band. On “Broken Car,” her languor serves a narrative about depression and inertia: “Spent the last three weeks in bed/Haven’t left this house in days,” she murmurs. When she finally gathers the strength to leave town, her car won’t start. She doesn’t shout or bang her fist on the dashboard; she simply climbs out of the driver’s seat and wanders off, sounding more exhausted than ever. As the drums and bass fall away, she scrapes the length of her fretboard. Its descending metallic croak is the only indication of catharsis.
Rinaldi often downplays her voice, allowing her instrument and those of the band to land the emotional punch. On the frenzied late album track “Worms,” technically her most verbose entry, Rinaldi’s words are so buried in the mix that they’re largely indecipherable. When the occasional phrase emerges (“Her eyes turned red, the anger bubbling up”), it’s effectively smothered by Fortino’s big plastic toms and Hidalgo’s rubbery bass. The layers of sound—grimy distortion, shrieking feedback—pile on top of Rinaldi’s vocal like heaps of earth. By the end of the song, the noise engulfs her. She’s slightly more audible on the sprawling closer “Anymore,” but she pares her lyrics back to just two lines: “I don’t really care if you come down anymore,” she sings. “Truth is, I don’t love you or miss you anymore.” She mouths the words softly at first, gradually cutting deeper as she dials up the volume. The shift is incremental and then exponential: The song culminates with a shouting fit rivaled only by the screech of her guitar.
Big Vic are measured, steering carefully between softness and sonic heft. The balance lends their music dimension, but they sound best when they plow through the guardrails. They’re delightfully unhinged on “Gun Girl,” a clipped, two-and-a-half minute track propelled by sharp, uneven planes of guitar and Rinaldi’s wry delivery, not unlike Kim Gordon’s trademark snarl. “I feel his unwelcome eyes all the time,” she deadpans. “More and more I want to see his insides.” As she mumbles that unnerving line, she rips into a shrill, blood-curdling solo, disemboweling the creep with her instrument. A squawking saxophone, perhaps the best surprise on the album, leaps in at the last minute to join the action. Big Vic thrive in this kind of chaos—like a swirl of limbs in a Looney Tunes brawl, it is simultaneously joyful and ferocious.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Acrobat Unstable | October 5, 2021 | 6.8 | f312a24f-e58d-465e-ad49-d65c9188b552 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
California singer-songwriter Jessie Jones left the garage-rock quintet Feeding People to pursue her visions of radiant pop grandeur. On her debut LP, she spins intoxicating tales over exuberant and sugary pop, splattered with bipolar stylistic change-ups. | California singer-songwriter Jessie Jones left the garage-rock quintet Feeding People to pursue her visions of radiant pop grandeur. On her debut LP, she spins intoxicating tales over exuberant and sugary pop, splattered with bipolar stylistic change-ups. | Jessie Jones: Jessie Jones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20883-jessie-jones/ | Jessie Jones | On her debut LP, California singer-songwriter Jessie Jones advises her listeners "And all the mystery is over a fear that by letting/ Go of love it'll feel like an ending/ Give it away/ It'll come back when you're ready." This sanguine, if-you-love-something-let-it-go philosophy is in line with her career. She's traded in leading the charge for garage-rock quintet Feeding People to actualize her visions of radiant pop grandeur. It's a smooth transition for Jones, whose versatility as a vocalist alone is enough to warrant her place in the spotlight.
On her solo release, she comes across as the best advocate you could have for not taking shit from anyone. But she also spins intoxicating tales that reveal her spiritual perspective on life. Her hippie-influenced outlook is partially why her name has been mentioned in the same breath as Janis Joplin, but her syrupy mew is closer in sound to indie-pop peer Alex Winston. Opener "Sugar-Coated" recalls a King Con-era Winston, as Jones builds the sprightly pop song with her deceivingly innocent voice before skyrocketing to carry the anthemic chorus. She plays with tension and release vocally on the rapturous "Lady La De Da".
Mottled with giddy tambourines and spattering drum fills, the album is a little bipolar in its approach to instrumentation, but it isn't messy. "Quicksilver Screen" is anchored by jangly riffs, letting a squealing synth lead drop into deeper, wonkier ones that bob up and down with resilience. Jones flirts with brassier proclivities on "Twelve Hour Man", as rollicking horns steal the show, racing jazzy percussion and fluttering piano chords to the finish line. Closer "Mental Illness" is the album's biggest outlier but also one of its biggest successes. Suddenly we're placed in Jones' bedroom, as she nearly whispers in your ear, "My mental illness/ There's nothing wrong with it/ Sick of my feelings, tired of faking it/ Crying so hard, I can't explain it." She repeats this over a few bare riffs until her singing smudges into echoes. It's a stark jump from the up-to-mid-tempo psych-pop that precedes it, but it's a self-titled record for a reason. Jones wants to give her all, even if her moment of vulnerability is only a brief glance.
"La Loba" is another anomaly, though a less severe one. It's a flamenco song that feels like an ancient fable put to music. Jones' voice snakes luxuriously around a few low, slick chords, a violin weeping. She grows increasingly desperate and unrelenting as the track builds, howling across zipping guitar lines, the pressure bubbling over like a pot of boiling water. It's a testament to the formidable range she never got a chance to fully realize during her time in Feeding People.
Jessie Jones is a well-rounded introduction, one that holds little back. When asked about her personal philosophy, Jones is frank. "Love yourself and speak your truth. I believe in individualism, I'm not anything but who I am is only something I live with." This album's inconsistencies are deliberate. Without them, she would be presenting a false identity, an incomplete version of herself. With them, we can more fully work toward understanding Jessie Jones, the individual. | 2015-08-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Burger | August 10, 2015 | 6.9 | f3133f10-2bd5-46d3-a6ae-c69e9eb14c81 | Tess Duncan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tess-duncan/ | null |
Paul McCartney resurrects his long-dormant alter ego, teams with producer Youth, and makes an album that can honestly be called "Beatleseque." | Paul McCartney resurrects his long-dormant alter ego, teams with producer Youth, and makes an album that can honestly be called "Beatleseque." | The Fireman: Electric Arguments | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12465-electric-arguments/ | Electric Arguments | With the possible exception of the Starbucks employees forced to listen to it on repeat, Paul McCartney's 2007 release, Memory Almost Full was his most warmly received album in years, debuting in the Billboard top five and selling more than a million copies in the U.S.-- his first stateside platinum disc in nearly a quarter century. The album didn't transcend McCartney's notoriously sentimental tendencies, but it provided enough evidence that his sense of adventure hadn't vanshed. But then, Memory Almost Full's success was arguably less a product of content as circumstance: It was preceded by the sympathies he gained from a nasty divorce and a much-publicized move from EMI to Starbucks' Hear Music label, making him a rock dinosaur fearlessly adapting to an ever-changing music industry.
Fast forward a year and Starbucks is struggling to move frappuccinos let alone CDs, and the coffee conglomerate put Hear Music on ice this past summer. That an artist of McCartney's stature would quickly find another label home (ATO in the U.S.; One Little Indian in the UK) is no surprise; that he's using the occasion to resurrect his long-dormant alter ego the Fireman-- a sporadic recording collaboration with producer/ex-Killing Jokester Youth-- constitutes an unexpected, brow-raising move for an artist known for his play-it-safe crowd-pleasing. And where the Fireman's two prior records-- 1993's Strawberries Oceans Ships Forests and 1998's Rushes-- were anonymous collections of post-Orb ambient instrumentals, Electric Arguments is a work of full-blooded (and fully voiced) anthemic pop music that's being actively promoted by the duo. But even with this newfound populist intent, Electric Arguments holds onto an original Fireman ideal: to make Paul McCartney sound less like Paul McCartney. That it does so within more traditional pop-song presentations-- while steering clear of McCartney's usual preferences for piano-pounded rockers and string-sweetened ballads-- is the ultimate testament to its success.
Electric Arguments presents not so much an abrupt break from typical McCartneyisms as a gradual drift away from them. The album actually picks up right where Memory Almost Full's blooze-explosive closer "Nod Your Head" left off, with McCartney adopting a comically over-the-top growl for the Zep-heavy "Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight". Rather than set a blustery tone for the rest of the album, the song effectively wipes the slate clean for the more meditative music to come-- it's immediately followed by "Two Magpies", whose lo-fi acoustic ambience and brushed-snare beat harkens back to the homespun charm of 1971's classic Ram.
But it's third track "Sing the Changes" where the album's identity comes into focus: McCartney opts for a higher register, while Youth imports some of the Big Music expanse he's lent to recordings by the Verve and U2; the fact both verse and chorus share the same ascendant melody only enhances the song's buoyant, new-day-rising feel. "Dance 'Til We're High" works a similarly widescreen formula to even more rousing effect, with exuberant violin sweeps and a church bell-punctuated chorus. Collectively, these songs imagine an alternate 1980s for McCartney, had he more eagerly answered the challenge laid down by the new generation of British pop stars (instead of churning out anodyne, adult-contemporary pap like Pipes of Peace and writing jingles for Rupert the Bear).
Throughout Electric Arguments, you can hear McCartney make great efforts to obscure his voice by playing to its extremities, whether adopting a deep, wizardly tone for prog-folk odyssey "Traveling Light" or double-tracking his falsetto and growl on the cheeky country-gospel workout "Light From Your Lighthouse". Or, on the album's two complementary centerpieces-- "Lifelong Passion (Sail Away)" and "Is This Love?"-- he sublimates his voice to the textural haze around him. As the titles indicate, these are love songs, but ones devoid of the usual McCartneyian romanticism. Rather, with their highlands-bound stomps, synthesized bagpipe reels, and floating flute lines, they present love as the messy, mysterious head-trip that it is-- and when McCartney repeats the line "be my lifelong passion," the quiet desperation in his voice betrays the fact that he once lost his.
Following these emotional peaks, Electric Arguments loses it way in the home stretch: With its faux-gothic ambience, "Lovers in a Dream" hews too close to Enigma-level chill-out cheese, and the would-be climactic rock-out "Universal Here, Everlasting Now" is undermined by a dated, "Miami Vice" chase-theme quality. But given McCartney's long-standing efforts to assert that he-- not John-- was the most avant-garde Beatle, the Fireman thus serves a purpose analogous to Nick Cave's similarly named, equally deconstructive Grinderman project: To get its primary songwriter back to where he once belonged. | 2008-11-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | One Little Indian | November 24, 2008 | 7.3 | f3157ebe-a40b-488d-9bbd-81b05c26dd29 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Portishead's Geoff Barrow unveils an odd, menacing, and even potentially alienating work that sounds more like 1971 than 2009. | Portishead's Geoff Barrow unveils an odd, menacing, and even potentially alienating work that sounds more like 1971 than 2009. | Beak>: Beak> | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13602-beak/ | Beak> | What a defiantly strange album Portishead's Geoff Barrow has made here. Beak> sounds like almost nothing else going around in 2009, though admittedly some of it sounds an awful lot like 1971. It's menacing and even potentially alienating. It's a work of loving pastiche with none of the deadening, touchy-feely hesitancy you can get when musicians attempt to wrestle with their heroes and wind up embarrassed by their own hubris halfway through the process.
Beak> is off the cuff in the best sense, a burst of itchy inspiration. Many of the same influences colored Portishead's Third, but Beak> unshackle them from singer and song structure, gaining intensity for what it loses in memorability. There's a ruthlessness to Barrow's writing here, especially in regards to rhythm. Barrow understands the appeal of Can in full-tilt flow-motion far better than the average band who earns the comparison because they swipe a Jaki Liebezeit drum pattern every now again
But while the stamp of Cologne's finest is all over Beak>-- mixed with a little Neu! on "Iron Action"-- Barrow's more interested in figuring out what gave Can's records their vibe, rather than Xeroxing their jams. "Pill" evokes that classic krautrock feeling of wandering clammy castle halls, getting dripped on by condensation as you try to find the band you could swear you heard jamming on one fierce, hypnotic note. All the vocals on Beak> seem to emanate from the far end of one of those hallways, like the mumbly moans of "I Know", vocals that don't suggest dread or terror so much as a low-grade but fully saturated eeriness. There's something plain off about Beak's tense vibe -- a creepy hollowing-out of rock's usual boundless energy.
In one sense it's a vibe not so far removed from Portishead proper, minus Beth Gibbons' drama-queening. But it's hard to imagine Portishead ever writing "Ham Green", which noodles for a while before dropping the boom with 1970s doom metal's "let's drink Cisco by the train tracks and call it a seance" camp menace, funny and coarse in a way you just don't associate with the trio that made Barrow famous. Of course, Beak> don't have Portishead's moments of mannered majesty, either. There's certainly nothing as emotionally overwhelming as "The Rip" on Beak>, and compared to Third, this is obviously the "lesser" work.
But that looseness and liberating inconsequentiality is kind of the point. You're getting Barrow's obsessions here, unfiltered, and Beak> is as full of odd, compulsive energy as you'd expect from something cranked out in two weeks, made by a guy who probably had creative fuel to burn, considering that his day job took 11 years between their second and third albums. This is Barrow off the leash and free to chase the beat. | 2009-10-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-10-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Ipecac / Invada | October 30, 2009 | 6.9 | f31aa772-a35f-465f-b35a-5f3943fb0818 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Filled with gut punch hooks, the Tallahassee band’s second album is carried by their battle-tested friendship and irrepressible chemistry. | Filled with gut punch hooks, the Tallahassee band’s second album is carried by their battle-tested friendship and irrepressible chemistry. | Pool Kids: Pool Kids | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pool-kids-pool-kids/ | Pool Kids | While Pool Kids have made their name in Florida’s vibrant DIY emo scene, their second LP works in the musically agnostic style of “breakup album.” All of those tried-and-true narrative beats—devastation, resilience, reconciliation, catharsis, probably in that order—have coalesced into a genre of their own, drawing in people who might not otherwise be interested in someone slumped over their piano or acoustic guitar or sampler. Pool Kids announces its intentions from the jump with “Conscious Uncoupling,” its Goop-pilled title at hilarious odds with the realities of an aimless, twentysomething relationship collapsing and taking everything down with it: “I’m probably never gonna clean this house again/I’m probably never gonna see your mom again.” But from that shellshocked opening, vocalist and guitarist Christine Goodwyne mashes a 47-minute song cycle into a supercut that scrambles the typical breakup album timeline: One second she’s spitefully yelling that she’s not acting out of spite; the next she’s softening her tone and wanting nothing more than to look back and laugh. By the end of the song, she’s back on that stupid couch again, unaware that she’s going to do the same thing again 11 more times.
Of all the razzle dazzle of Pool Kids, the most diabolical trick is its first: faking like it could be mistaken for any of the sad bop-type beats clogging your feed. It lasts less than a minute before Pool Kids bring back everything that made their’ 2018 debut, Music to Have Safe Sex To, as adorable as it was invigorating: double-kick drums and harmonized, tapped-guitar leads betraying their roots in Florida hardcore and emo revival, and Goodwyne shouting at the rafters even though they’re only a foot above her head. The two most popular songs on Music were titled “Overly Verbose Email Series, Pt. III” and “$5 Subtweet,” and Goodwyne continues to explore how the tone and cadence of Twitter discourse spills over into real life, because really, what’s the difference anymore?
Yet the most rewarding parts of Pool Kids come during its numerous moments of respite. As he did on exquisite sounding LPs from Special Explosion and Great Grandpa, Seattle-based producer Mike Vernon Davis uses Transatlanticism as the gold standard for formerly scrappy indie rock bands making albums that sound rich but not expensive, a veritable lookbook of emo textures—the soft scratchiness of worn furniture, the heavy haze of a hangover stubbornly lasting until lunch time. Pool Kids isn’t a required headphones listen, but it’s filled with so much tactile, subtle post-production that even a decent set of AirPods turn it into a deluxe version of itself. The dualities of Pool Kids—instrumental exuberance and lyrical devastation, the pine-scented breeze of the Pacific Northwest and Florida’s elliptical rhythms and gut punch hooks—play out like tennis aces locked in a tiebreaker, the mesmerizing builds punctuated by knee-buckling, angular shifts.
These moments are likely what caused Hayley Williams to liken Pool Kids to an earlier, much rawer version of her own band; or at least what Paramore could have sounded like if they aspired to play Fest or ArcTanGent rather than Warped Tour. It was the most consequential cosign in this realm since Mark Hoppus discovered Hop Along’s “Tibetan Pop Stars,” a pop-punk icon showing admiration for a knottier, more humbly charming band that could be big, if not MTV big. The biggest hooks on Pool Kids—“You wanna start a fight! You wanna start a fight! You wanna start a fight!” or “I’m telling what I/Telling you what I need”—are exorcisms of obsession and frustration, even when they sound like triumph.
“I’ll bet you didn't think we'd make it this far/But we’ve made do,” Goodwyne sighs on the gorgeous, moody centerpiece “Comes in Waves,” maybe at an ex-partner or online troll, but probably at herself. Pool Kids have been through a little of everything since Music. (Drummer Caden Clinton’s mother died in an accident prior to the recording of Pool Kids, and towards the end, the band’s gear was destroyed in a flood.) The closing “Pathetic” samples footage they took of the destruction: “What can we make of this?” It’s the album’s final line, though it retroactively echoes through every previous song that asks how can anyone move on, whether stuck in their own head or on their phone. The solution apparently has something to do with leaping out of a plane, Pool Kids filmed themselves skydiving for the video of “Arm’s Length,” a song whose first line complains about the energy it takes just to get out of bed. But Pool Kids power through with an unshakeable belief that their battle-tested friendship and irrepressible musical chemistry can get them through anything. | 2022-08-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Skeletal Lightning | August 1, 2022 | 7.5 | f31bf78f-6404-417b-987f-b73710284cae | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
In his final completed film score, the late composer and experimental musician revels in extreme sounds, delving into black metal, menacing ambient, doom drone, and piercing orchestrations. | In his final completed film score, the late composer and experimental musician revels in extreme sounds, delving into black metal, menacing ambient, doom drone, and piercing orchestrations. | Jóhann Jóhannsson: Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johann-johannsson-mandy-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Mandy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Film composers don’t always get to decide what their final score will be, whether it will constitute a career-capping classic or just another paycheck. While Bernard Herrmann finished the mournful saxophone score for Taxi Driver just hours before his death, the last entry in Henry Mancini’s mighty filmography is the best-forgotten Son of Pink Panther. The tragic passing, earlier this year, of the 48-year-old Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who seemed sure to have a long and distinguished career ahead of him, was a blow to both cinematic and experimental music. Fans who followed Jóhannsson’s career from his exquisite debut album, Englabörn, to his Oscar-nominated scores for The Theory of Everything and Sicario—and who agonized over what his aborted score for Blade Runner 2049 might have sounded like—can only wonder what might have come next.
To learn that Jóhannsson’s final completed score was for a Nicolas Cage horror movie could give one pause (or make one scream: “Not the bees!”). But Mandy isn’t just any Nicolas Cage horror movie; it’s the second film from Panos Cosmatos, the director responsible for 2010’s hallucinatory Beyond the Black Rainbow. And in Jóhannsson, he had a composer willing to forge ahead to the most extreme sounds possible. “Jóhann went above and beyond, and I suspect to the limits of his sanity, to make the music for this movie,” Cosmatos says in the soundtrack’s liner notes. It’s a visceral thrill to hear Jóhannsson leave the demands of Hollywood orchestral scores behind and move wholly into his element, pushing toward harrowing new sounds. Mandy revels in black metal, menacing ambient, doom drone, and piercing orchestrations in the mode of Italian experimental composer Giacinto Scelsi.
Darkness and despair infuse nearly every moment of Jóhannsson’s score, its atmosphere conjured in part by co-producer Randall Dunn, with Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley on guitar. The heaviness native to their work is palpable from the tectonic bass rumble and low chords of “Seeker of the Serpent’s Eye” to the dread-inducing brass smears of “Starling.” Even the film’s love theme is forlorn, all solemn guitar swells. Mandy bears some resemblance to Dunn and O’Malley’s work with Oren Ambarchi on 2014’s Shade Themes From Kairos, except that the album’s side-long immersions are split into smaller, but no less intense, chunks. This harshness reaches a breaking point with the fierce, lashing noise of “Black Skulls,” its metal scrapes and queasy low frequencies pushing the entire track into the red.
But one of Jóhannsson’s great gifts was his sense of sonic balance: He could make icy, spare soundscapes drip with warmth and locate the human element amid big machinations. Just as Mandy strikes a nerve with nihilistic noise, he sweeps back to a gorgeous, heart-rending theme, like “Death and Ashes.” Similarly, the ambient anxiety that suffuses the early part of the score also gives a rhythmic element to its back half, with the sludgy thuds of “Dive-Bomb Blues” and “Waste” evoking Melvins’ early-’90s run.
Mandy also ventures into some entirely new terrain for Jóhannsson. The glassy ’80s electronic tones of “Children of the New Dawn” evoke the Italians Do It Better roster as well as the work of French house producer Kavinsky; though the piece is an outlier on the soundtrack, it might well have opened up a new sonic world for the composer to explore. It’s tragic that we will never know just what lay ahead for Jóhannsson, but Mandy hints at a future both bright and bleak. | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Lakeshore / Invada | September 18, 2018 | 7.7 | f3226770-216d-4e1d-a23c-794b83796edd | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The singer-songwriter-superproducer teams with the Vermont jazz musician Chris Weisman for an invigorating collaborative album that’s whimsical and wistful in surprising ways. | The singer-songwriter-superproducer teams with the Vermont jazz musician Chris Weisman for an invigorating collaborative album that’s whimsical and wistful in surprising ways. | Blake Mills: Jelly Road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blake-mills-jelly-road/ | Jelly Road | In 2019, Blake Mills and Chris Weisman were tasked with recording new music that sounded like it was 50 years old. They basically wrote an album’s worth of songs as a made-up band for the television adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones & the Six, inspired loosely by the soft-rock drama of Fleetwood Mac. Energized by their introduction, the two continued working on new music that sounds like Jelly Road, with rich layers of guitars, vintage keyboards, and an assortment of woodwinds. In these 12 songs, they wrap surreal imagery in otherworldly melodies that feel blissful, seamless, and eerily suspended out of time.
Jelly Road feels of a piece with Notes With Attachments, Mills’ 2021 album with bassist Pino Palladino, another spirited collaboration between studio heads. Mills has used his solo output to develop his reflective songwriting and immersive production style; as a producer and accompanist with Bob Dylan, John Legend, Phoebe Bridgers, and plenty more, he’s become a formidable presence who nonetheless functions as support for somebody else’s project. Mills’ two album-length alliances have allowed him to bring both practices to the fore, and in contrast to the spiky jazz slant of Notes With Attachments, Jelly Road is smooth and satisfying from start to finish. The opening guitar tumbles of “Suchlike Horses” are a tantalizing introduction, rippling outward into a pool of wavering synth lines that sounds like a wayward trombone.
Weisman sketched out some of the shapes of Jelly Road on an iPad mini, emailing fragments to Mills late at night on borrowed Wi-Fi while he stood outside a local library branch in his hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont. Keeping a lower profile as a jazz-forward improviser, Weisman has admitted that he’s “always done only what the fuck I want to do, and skipped the stuff that irritated me” with regards his own work. In the same 10-year span that Mills has established himself as an in-demand producer, guitarist, and songwriter, Weisman has self-released more than 30 records of electroacoustic adventures, which range from longform deliberations to pocket-size petit fours.
Weisman told Fretboard Journal that he wanted to encourage Mills’ virtuosity as a guitar player, which manifests in the meaty guitar solo at the end of “Skeleton Is Walking.” It returns in “Breakthrough Moon,” which has a solo passage that settles in like a layer of strong incense amid a loose layer of percussion. There’s a quicksilver streak of sleaze to Mills’ twists and turns, outlining the sort of seedy lounge scene that might play host to the creatures of Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.”
Jelly Road is populated with Hammond C3s, a Roland Juno-106, and a celeste, which Mills and Weisman alternate between an assortment of acoustic, fretless, and electric guitars and basses. Sam Gendel steers the Electronic Wind Controller on “Unsingable,” later picking up the more familiar saxophone for “Without an Ending.” On “Wendy Melvoin” and “There Is No Now,” he plays a massive contrabass recorder, adding a woody texture that feels both earthy and extraterrestrial. In “Highway Bright,” Weisman and Mills offer independent bass parts on each side of the mix, a detail that leaps out in close listens.
The bewitching air of the instrumental “Wendy Melvoin”—named after the guitarist and vocalist from Prince’s band the Revolution and Wendy & Lisa—makes it one of the album’s strongest moments, and the woman herself joins Weisman and Mills on multiple tracks. Accompanying Prince, Melvoin was indispensable to the Revolution’s high-power sound; here, she expands the duo’s adventures with more subdued flourishes. In “Press My Luck,” her off-kilter wah-wah guitar additions sketch a loose figure, and the electronic interference that crackles through creates a picture that echoes the jumpy, colorful abstraction of scrambled cable.
Though Jelly Road is an invigorating listen, at times, it feels like a case study in hauntology: its squishy production and armory of vintage gear evoke a warmth toward the past, while its lyrics and gently off-kilter melodies hint at wariness toward some vague future. Time is short and littered with empty material rewards in “The Light Is Long,” but it fully dissolves in “There Is No Now,” where Mills croons, “Time unfolding is a trick.” The soft piano and resonant percussion of “Unsingable” pads the reflexive approach, with Mills wondering aloud about the existential qualities of making music: “What can make a song unsingable? What can make a song feel lost?”
In Jelly Road’s title track, Mills’ layered vocals breeze around percussive cloudbursts, its lyrics populated by once-happy dinosaurs and the cozy storybook kings Frog and Toad. It feels like spiritual kin to the kooky Jerry Garcia-David Grisman take on “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” with a more wistful undercurrent that speaks to lost pleasures. “And though we’ve had some good times/This is what we chose/Tell me it again/About the Jelly Road,” Mills sings, with an air of melancholy that such a place exists only in fantasia. Though clouds of doubt hang in the eaves of Jelly Road, Mills presents a straightforward perspective in “Press My Luck,” where he offers, “Things start getting clearer when they’re fucked.” The path forward may be paved with crumbling bricks, but, as Jelly Road suggests, there might be unknown delights left to discover along the way. | 2023-07-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | New Deal / Verve | July 14, 2023 | 8 | f328fb10-a917-4878-9343-138f9e97e033 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld is a career-long touring and recording member of Arcade Fire. Her second solo album of compositions The Ridge feels less exploratory than Neufield’s previous work, but it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing. | Composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld is a career-long touring and recording member of Arcade Fire. Her second solo album of compositions The Ridge feels less exploratory than Neufield’s previous work, but it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing. | Sarah Neufeld: The Ridge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21569-the-ridge/ | The Ridge | The level of pure athleticism required to play the violin reveals the pained rock faces of the classic rock axe-slingers to be a dramatic ruse. The touch it takes to make an electric guitar sing is unbelievably light, and there’s a strap to hold it in place. Violinists (and violists and string bassists, for that matter) not only must hold a not-insignificantly heavy wooden body up for an extended period of time, they also have to maintain a steady bowing arm and pivot carefully to maintain control of the sound. Composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld — a career-long touring and recording member of Arcade Fire — delivers her fair share of grimaces in the band’s energetic live show, and she’s clearly earning them.
In her compositions as a solo artist, the relentless physicality of her technique is part of the listening experience, and immediately central to its appeal. In the short pieces that make up Neufeld’s latest album The Ridge, the sound of her bow moving frenetically back and forth across the bridge of her violin often settles into a blur. There is a sharp contradiction between the gossamer blocks of sound we hear, and the limber, near-constant motion that makes them possible. Neufeld presses down on the strings to create a whistle-like harmonic that surges in between notes and chords; it’s the violin equivalent of the otherworldly-sounding tones her comrade-in-arms Colin Stetson (who appears here playing lyricon) favors in his sax playing. Reverb and delay effects enhance the atmospheric effect of Neufeld’s playing, creating moments where sound seems to be coming from another room.
While Neufeld’s previous solo outing Hero Brother daringly explored the overlap between classical minimalism and regional American fiddling techniques, The Ridge’s musical vocabulary is more familiar and less transportive. It starts unconvincingly with the title track, a piece of high-dramatic "chamber rock" which recalls the Arcade Fire-related instrumental unit Bell Orchestre in which Neufeld participated in during the '00s. Wringing out a few unsurprising chords for maximal self-importance, it’s a propulsive, amelodic piece which seems like it could work better on traditional rock instruments, or with a denser ensemble.
Neufeld largely avoids linear melodies — her feathery, very intermittent vocals add little in this regard — in favor of rhythmic cells in the Philip Glass tradition. Often, with the help of effects, these are reduced to synthetic-sounding pulsations. Like a good several-times-removed disciple of the minimalists, her writing is best when it revels in contradictory rhythms overlaid on top of each other -- when complexity is more of a focal point. The appealing, fractured Afrobeat cadence of "We’ve Got a Lot" gradually falls together like gears locking into place, and the explosive pizzicato of "The Glow" experiment with unsteady meter changes.
Though compositionally The Ridge feels less exploratory than Neufield’s previous work, it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing. It’s hard to make strings-based, indie-rock-tinged instrumental music in this vein sound fresh. But as in her past work, Neufeld’s focused, restless recordings invite the listener to share in the intensity of her ritual as a performer, creating a necessary and refreshing air of intimacy. | 2016-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Paper Bag | March 4, 2016 | 6.9 | f32a8310-0ef4-4b1e-91e5-53ad6c254fdc | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
If Merchandise weren't a rock band before, they certainly are now. They've gotten a little more earnest and shoot for a bigger sound. It's a mixed bag, but it's hard to hate them for it. | If Merchandise weren't a rock band before, they certainly are now. They've gotten a little more earnest and shoot for a bigger sound. It's a mixed bag, but it's hard to hate them for it. | Merchandise: A Corpse Wired for Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22422-a-corpse-wired-for-sound/ | A Corpse Wired for Sound | If you were up and around a TV set in Tampa on Tuesday, sometime after 10 a.m., you might have tripped into a surreal scene. On WFTS, Merchandise made an appearance on the local channel’s morning show, “Tampa Bay’s Morning Blend.” The disposition the show is supposed to render is sunny, cheerful, the perfect complement to a complete breakfast. The band was there to play a song from their new album *A Corpse Wired for Sound, *but not before an interview. When asked to describe Merchandise’s sound Carson Cox joked, “We play both kinds, we play country and western,” before getting at least slightly serious. “It sort of mutates all the time... When we started I feel like we were really snarly and aggressive. And now we’ve matured a lot.” Then they play, giving the early birds an unvarnished but romantic rendition of album highlight, “Lonesome Sound.” The performance is unencumbered and affecting, and runs in interesting contrast to the album version: a swaggering and distorted ballad. For those up at the hour, it must’ve been a strange scene. For Merchandise fans, it was a pleasantly confusing one as well.
The band for a long time has maintained a strict policy of home recording, though what they've conjured up in their last five records has never sounded grainy, but ambitiously wrought. *A Corpse Wired for Sound *signifies the first time Merchandise has stepped into a studio (in Rosà, Italy) to record an album, and the majority of the material was written after Cox left Tampa, living between New York and Berlin. His bandmate and writing partner Dave Vassalotti stayed in Florida, though he moved to Sarasota. Their face time was limited, and the professionalized air and transient process imbued something uncharacteristic to Merchandise. The album almost feels buttoned up.
Their sonic influences have widened, with dub especially playing into the band’s changing sound. Even though Cox has said in the past, “genres are not for us,” in their latest, the hair-sprayed guitars and general geniality paint them more as rock band than ever. The songs in A Corpse Wired for Song have gotten considerably shorter in length than previous albums (under five minutes for the most part), and they seem more spacious, or at the very least much louder, as if recorded with large rooms in mind. Yet, when you return to Tampa morning TV, a certain unifying thread runs from that unadorned live experience and the recorded one: a sentimental resonance. In the time between records, Cox and Vassalotti have gotten sweeter, softer, and better at writing straightforward love songs. “It wasn’t love/She was putting me on/I went further down,” Cox sings on “Lonesome Sound.”
By no means is their sixth studio album perfect. It's an uneven experience all together, but by and large Cox’s admittance of maturity rings through in this record. Even if the luxuriant guitars in a song like “Lonesome Sound,” are almost cheesy, it makes A Corpse Wired for Sound more anthemic. In a way, Merchandise’s uncoolness has always been what’s refreshing about them. This is present from the opening moments of the record, in “Flower of Sex,” where they give their eccentric approximation of stadium rock. If anything, the big room ambition comes off almost goofy and funky in construction and effect. Take for example the jaunty slinking synth chords that begin “Right Back to the Start.” Cox’s voice follows in like, pitch shifting and wiggling its way through the song’s surrealist lyrics (“My grandfather’s eyes flash against the wall/I stay up all night expecting his call”).
Corpse overcomes its moments, due in part to concision and earnest songwriting. This is true especially of the the penultimate track, “I Will Not Sleep Here,” filled with syrupy acoustic guitars, a splatter of electronic noise, and Cox’s near cracking voice guiding the song. Lines like “Blood is thicker than water/But both can go down the same drain” teeter on hokey, but they’re sold by virtue of how genuine the performance feels. Past the voluminous catalog of influences they say went into the writing of the record (the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Burroughs’ cut-up-technique, etc), *A Corpse Wired for Sound *is their least obscured record. It contains a feeling of strange optimism, as if each song was written for closing credits, or sunsets on a horizon that need driving towards. Even if unintended, the embrace of normality that seemed evident in their television appearance earlier this week points to a band more comfortable in its own skin: happy to sing songs about love. | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | September 26, 2016 | 7.4 | f3393289-3d7f-4c17-98e4-86ec39d8a6ad | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Started as the soundtrack for Pete Travis' forthcoming Judge Dredd adaptation, Portishead's Geoff Barrow teamed with Emmy-nominated composer Ben Salisbury for this tribute to the fictional setting of the comic book series. | Started as the soundtrack for Pete Travis' forthcoming Judge Dredd adaptation, Portishead's Geoff Barrow teamed with Emmy-nominated composer Ben Salisbury for this tribute to the fictional setting of the comic book series. | Geoff Barrow / Ben Salisbury: DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega-City One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16600-drokk-music-inspired-by-mega-city-one/ | DROKK: Music Inspired by Mega-City One | The fictional Mega-City One is the ultimate impure vision of the future. Apartment blocks shoot toward the heavens, spilling over with bored and persecuted citizens. Unemployment rates are high. The crime rate is even higher. Forget about buying coffee-- it's been outlawed as an illegal stimulant. Patrolling the streets are a series of fascistic Judges, employed to keep the peace by any means necessary. It makes the Blade Runner universe look like Disneyland. At least, that's how the makers of popular Brit comic 2000 AD imagine it, as told through the eyes of their most famous character, the granite-jawed Judge Dredd. Portishead's Geoff Barrow was a kid who, like me, grew up devouring this world, buying 2000 AD week after week to see which perp was going to end up on the business end of Dredd's lawgiver. DROKK is Barrow's tribute to Mega-City One, coming out of a series of sessions with Emmy-nominated composer Ben Salisbury.
Dredd is the kind of character who continues to leave a vivid imprint on the minds of successive generations of comic book fans, but he's been remarkably ill-served when removed from the confines of 2000 AD. The Fink Brothers' musical tribute to Mega-City One, and Sylvester Stallone's hacky 1995 interpretation of Dredd, are best forgotten. Despite this, hopes for Pete Travis' forthcoming big-budget adaptation, simply titled Dredd, are reasonably high. Even Barrow, who began this project with Salisbury to provide the soundtrack to Travis' film, only to find their work left on the cutting room floor, said he thought the feature was going to be "fucking brilliant." But Dredd will feel less foreboding without their music. Armed with three vintage Oberheim two-voice synths, the pair reaches into the grubby, blackened heart of Mega-City One, via a soundtrack flooded with the kind of trepidation that classic 2000 AD artists like Brian Bolland so often conjured up.
DROKK reveals Barrow's comic book fandom, but it also highlights his taste in soundtracks. There's no escaping the specter of John Carpenter hanging over these tracks, especially his drone-heavy Assault on Precinct 13 score. But there's a relentless darkness at work here that even Carpenter might shy away from dipping into. The Escape From New York theme had a sanguine beauty to it, but Barrow and Salisbury lock into an obdurate form of austerity early on ("Lawmaster/Pursuit", "Helmet Theme") and never let the tension drop. Mostly, the atmosphere is meat-locker cold ("Scope the Block", "Clone Gunman"), and while it never reaches the extremities of Whitehouse or Throbbing Gristle, it bears a similar kind of ornery undertow. Occasionally they work in pure drones, adding a portentous type of beauty to tracks like "Exhale" and "Iso Hymn", making it feel like all the air just got sucked out of the room.
Elsewhere, it's not hard to hear traces of Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner and the work Tangerine Dream carried out for Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark. Like those albums, the music on DROKK provides a definite sense of journey, a feeling that we're being tangled up in plot twists that unravel, conclude, and maybe leave a few questions open at the end. Soundtracks that work well often create a strong sense of narrative when isolated from the visuals they're representing, and DROKK functions in much the same manner. It's even easy to picture the credits scrolling over "End Theme". Sadly, we'll never see Dredd gliding through the city on his Lawmaster while the pummeling "Titan Bound" echoes through a multiplex. But maybe it's better that way. Instead, this album provides Dredd fans with a chance to fix this music to their own favorite stories, giving the unrelenting decay and despair of Mega-City One the ferociously solemn musical backdrop it's always deserved. | 2012-05-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-05-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Invada | May 11, 2012 | 6.7 | f33fa267-1828-4e22-9d13-13a979711b0a | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The experimental troupe gathers Patti Smith, Philip Glass, and Mulatu Astatke for a sometimes-glorious, sometimes-chaotic attempt at attaining spiritual rapture. | The experimental troupe gathers Patti Smith, Philip Glass, and Mulatu Astatke for a sometimes-glorious, sometimes-chaotic attempt at attaining spiritual rapture. | Soundwalk Collective / Patti Smith: Mummer Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soundwalk-collective-patti-smith-mummer-love/ | Mummer Love | To the uninitiated, Sufi mysticism can seem vaguely new age-y. It’s a misguided but not unreasonable thought—like voguish strains of body healing therapy, meditation, or most dance music, its raison d'être is that of psychic obliteration. Arch and ascetic, the Sufi aims to dropkick their consciousness into a state of dizzy ecstasy in the name of reaching God’s warm, annihilating glow.
The methods of getting there, however, are myriad, and passageways steeply sloped. The Sufi tradition— various as it may be—believes that man is the middle slice in a Venn diagram that junctures divine command and divine creation, and access to either side of the model is earned through sweaty rite. A famous faction of Istanbuli Sufis whirl while chanting, reaching somatic exhaustion by exhaling Quaranic verses as they spin in white linen skirts and tall hats—which, en masse and from a distance, appears like a human-scale vision of whipped meringue—whereas some Syrian, Iraqi, and Ethiopian divisions pray and recite passages for marathon hours to reach what in Arabic is referred to as a state of tawajjuh, or “orientation.” A meeting with the limits of a mind is the only path to egoic liquidation; worthiness, in other words, granted through discipline and self-erasure, is the key to becoming one with something greater.
A troupe known as Soundwalk Collective has explored a version of this idea since their conception in 2000. Over the past nineteen years, their belief in the primacy of raw, unmediated connection to a higher source has led them to a series of magpie collaborations in pursuit of the unknowable. There have been elegant payoffs in the past, some more tasteful than others. Now, they’ve assembled a colossus—Philip Glass, a titan of minimalism; Mulatu Astatke, creator of the term ‘Ethio-jazz,’; Patti Smith, polymathic punk ad-libber; and the Sufi group of Sheikh Ibrahim, whose muscular voices suggest the love of God incarnate. Together, they’ve produced Mummer Love, a large, baroque gesture toward the act of what it means to purposefully lose oneself.
The second in a triptych the Soundwalk team has termed “Perfect Vision,” Mummer Love summons the usual Sufistic tropes of memory, imagination, hallucination, and desire via incantatory repetition. Recorded onsite in the holy city of Harar, Ethiopia—an epicenter of Sufism in Africa—the field recordings and ambient pickups bear the faint whiff of travelers visiting a foreign place in active quest of truths not found in the usual metropolitan studio.
This is not necessarily a bad quality. It’s easy to be caught in the spirit of the squad’s spiral toward rapture. The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud—whose work scans “Oriental Sufi” in spirit—serves as a conduit for their explorations. Rimbaud’s relationship to what he referred to as his “beloved Harar,” and the traces he left there, refract through the voice of Patti Smith, who riffs hard with his words as source text and prayer.
At times, it feels as if control is ceded entirely to Smith. Like the title of her praise poem to the poet, the track at the core of the work, and the source of the album’s namesake, the record is a genuinely tender performance of “Mummer Love.” (Mummering, per an old Newfoundlandian tradition, is a wintertime custom that involves participants dressing in disguise, visiting neighboring villages, and imploring strangers to guess their identities.) For decades, Smith has been a perma-mummer of Rimbaud’s, taking elements of his literary and physical corpus—the wide, lambent eyes, the haystack hair, the love of a bestial turn of phrase —and inhabiting them all like a comfortably cut suit.
The throughline between them here is direct, and the fit perfect. These are expressions of the same Smith who, early on, traded her muse in Bob Dylan for the French enfant terrible (and, lest one forgets, the title of her indelible “Piss Factory” is an oblique paean to the poet after she earned a swirly for reading a copy of his first collection, Illuminations, on the shift at work); the very Smith who still finds ways to incorporate urine, her favorite abject fascination, as a connective to the man she calls her sage (in the title track: “I will piss in the urinal you pissed in, a young man cursing existence, [...] piss and tears and urine”); the exact Smith whose eccentricities are always controlled, whose metaphors remain clipped and brutish, whose voice still sounds like the tumbling of stone and soil. (Her, again, on rain: “the piss of the angels.”)
Smith’s gleam also highlights, perhaps unintentionally, the detachment within the team, who operate less as one, and more like distinct actors in a multi-act theatre performance. The wild pile-up in, say, “Bad Blood,” breeds chaos, not singularity: identifiably, there’s Glass, the Sufi troupe, Astatke’s touch, Smith’s voice, but they never truly merge, only exist in parallel. In some moments, the super-groupy nature of the entire outfit feels precisely like what it is: the sum of its parts. It frankly works best when the Sufi team stand on their own—take the hugely reverential “Aw Abadir”—but there is something of the plurality within the all-hands performances that feels like ideas swarming, not swimming.
An oft-used metaphor in Sufi poetry is one of a raindrop falling into the ocean as an accurate portrait of proper submission to God: once the drop joins water, it cedes its identity as droplet and becomes annihilated into the sea. The mystic’s goal is to surrender the “I,” and instead become one with divine glory. The “I”— or, rather, Smith’s “I,” Collective’s “I”—throughout “Mummer Love” never fully submerges, but remains afloat. Despite the earnestness of their chase for transcendence, it remains a chase. They are too there to dispossess themselves of themselves; too present to yield to something bigger.
There are glimmers of this idea, though. “La Maison de Rimbaud” is perhaps the most consummate attempt at spiritual capitulation, as recordings of the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) bubble alongside Philip Glass on the keys, quiet, airy and sacred. There are sparrows, footfalls, murmurings, ambient chatter, hallucinations of Harar at dusk. “Suddenly,” as Rimbaud may have put it, “dyeing the blueness, delirium, were slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight.” | 2019-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Bella Union | November 14, 2019 | 7 | f34171ae-bf8f-4129-9a4d-06c6eb3cffed | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
On their quietly commanding darkwave record, songwriter Noah Anthony and poet Elaine Kahn use harsh noise and power electronics to show it’s possible to care for chaos. | On their quietly commanding darkwave record, songwriter Noah Anthony and poet Elaine Kahn use harsh noise and power electronics to show it’s possible to care for chaos. | Profligate : Somewhere Else | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/profligate-somewhere-else/ | Somewhere Else | Formerly working as Night Burger, Social Junk, and Form a Log (with Ren Schofield of Container), Profligate’s Noah Anthony arises from the polluted underground stream where noise, techno, and industrial music flow together. The title track of his new record, Somewhere Else—a collaboration with the poet Elaine Kahn—is rife with horror-movie menace in its opening moments: predatory bass, the sizzling curl of a downed power line, the creaks of treading through snow. But then, instead of growing more claustrophobic and intense, it grows more spacious and alluring. There’s a little song inside this black hole, a trace of dream-pop guitar and a voice that sometimes sounds like Panda Bear’s evil twin.
Lure them with danger then stun them with beauty—throughout Somewhere Else, that is Profligate’s game. Anthony uses the tropes of harsh noise and power electronics in a more subdued fashion as if he’s cooling them in baths of synthesizers. Hardware beats ripple around like massive sea serpents, unseen but outlined in the music they displace. The result is a quietly commanding darkwave record that blends ripped and lustrous textures, conjuring visions of Coil covering Cold Cave or Prurient doused in Depeche Mode.
Take “A Circle Of,” a taut roll of percussion scoured with breaths and beeps promises mayhem to come. But rather than boring down into carnage, it turns out to be the spine for a colossus of revolving chords and pretty, affectless vocal harmonies. Nor is the record entirely chained to an industrial sound: Some tracks bring in an 8-bit boss-battle feel, like “Enlist” and the granulated “Black Plate,” where Anthony flexes his technical skills, Edward Scissorhandsing a leafy synthesizer theme into a kind of unsettling topiary.
For a collaboration with a poet, Somewhere Else has a smartly understated way with words, which are often delivered so slowly or mutedly they serve a function more sonorous than conceptual. Only “Lose a Little” clears away at the end for an untrammeled exhibit of Kahn’s tender nihilism. Otherwise, her tuneful monotone blends well with Anthony’s slumberous croon and the music’s convulsions. By the time the penultimate track “Jet Black (King of the World)” rolls around, the composition thins out into something more linear and sparse, more like countless ephemeral tapes whose hardware jams Somewhere Else draws upon. The record leaves a lingering impression of how to care for chaos and the good intentions of violent impulses. | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Wharf Cat | January 18, 2018 | 6.8 | f34d0059-b76f-4067-8c84-d41b14d016ea | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The follow-up to 2007's manga soundtrack Afro Samurai, Resurrection finds RZA working with many of his Wu-Tang cohorts. | The follow-up to 2007's manga soundtrack Afro Samurai, Resurrection finds RZA working with many of his Wu-Tang cohorts. | RZA: Afro Samurai Resurrection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12651-afro-samurai-resurrection/ | Afro Samurai Resurrection | When RZA oversaw the Ghost Dog OST, it had the perfect kind of soundtrack symbiosis-- between lyrical themes, helpful bits of dialogue, and the Wu mythology, you could listen to the music and have a good idea what its parent film was about. But you didn't need to actually see the Forest Whitaker movie to know the record knocked something serious. Due to RZA never really breaking character when choosing alter-egos/side projects, I expected something similar from Afro Samurai Resurrection, the follow-up to 2007's manga soundtrack Afro Samurai. However, if I'm to take the music as face value indicative of its inspiration, the two things I'd figure about Afro is that 1) He derives his power from some sort of headband, and 2) He was a lot better at doing what he does about 15 years ago.
This whole "return of the 90s!" thing could be mashed into a fine paste before it reaches outside of internet writing circles, but the main problem hip-hop isn't sharing with, say, Slumberland and noise-pop redos is that most of the artists trying to revive Clinton-era styles actually recorded during that time. And really, RZA's too busy chopping it up at Guitar Center tech displays and on set with Russell Crowe to realistically compete with his past. Sonically, it's not far from anything he did on Digi Snacks or Birth of a Prince-- simultaneously too slick and digital to work towards his strengths, but not plush enough to suggest he could have anything but a Rik Cordero video treatment without Afro's attendant Kill Bill meets Boondocks animation.
We've heard these elements before-- Shaolin hand-block snare, steamy funk guitar, bass that hits like a depth charge of The Chronic. But where RZA would weave each together into backdrops as bloody and vibrant as a freshly opened vein, here he's content to chop a sample and let it repeat every four bars, if not even more often than that, and it's hard to imagine anyone fighting to get the first crack. There are a couple of ripe exceptions, notably "Dead Birds", which has System of a Down (well, the bassist at least) helping conjure an El-P-style dystopia, but you just spend three minutes wishing it was an actual El-P track. "Girl Samurai Lullaby" could pass for some touristy Reggae Sunsplash shit from the softest day in Shabba Ranks' 1992; "Nappy Afro" is a throwback to a time when trying to rip off She'kspeare was the quickest way to radio rotation.
Things really aren't that much better on the mic-- god bless RZA, but at this point, he's all but ignoring meter completely, flowing like a three-legged race. Sixteen years after Method Man expounded on the genesis of Inspectah Deck's name, we can only sit back and watch him play himself: "I'm looking for some get back/ I'm quick to push your wig back/ You shouldn't have did that." Fortunately, we get some much-needed career resuscitation from Rah Digga (though neither beat does her justice) and "Whar", the strongest track and the one that has the least to do with the plot. And yet, even as Kool G Rap (sounding a lot like Jim Jones now that he's ad-libbing) and Ghostface kick nice punchlines about Al Capone's syphilis and Abe Lincoln's beard, it's still somewhat by-the-numbers.
But after the initial burst of brand recognition, we're left with the same Wu affiliate filler that most of us have been wisely ignoring for the better part of two decades. Killah Bees don't die, they multiply and spit martial raps full of discipline and bereft of any iota of personality that could distinguish between Wu-Tang Name Generator figments like Prodigal Sunn, Rugged Monk, and Moe Roc. The Black Knights stand out by matter of (relative) familiarity, and if you happen to be a blood relative of someone on "Take The Sword Pt. III", you might be able to make it through all 10 minutes.
Look, it's no fun either way-- to plow through Afro Samurai Resurrection, or to bitch and moan about back in the day, a fate that befalls something like 99% of all mainstream releases. But at least the video game looks tight, which is something you can't say about Wu's output in that market back in the rec-room era. In this economy, that's just choosing your battles wisely. | 2009-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Wu Music Group | February 9, 2009 | 4.2 | f35dcb8a-a412-493a-8ddb-de5118ac68b6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Colombian musician sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with. It’s philosophically daring, technically ambitious, and a joy to experience. | The Colombian musician sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with. It’s philosophically daring, technically ambitious, and a joy to experience. | Lucrecia Dalt: ¡Ay! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucrecia-dalt-ay/ | ¡Ay! | Lucrecia Dalt is gleefully cerebral. Over the last decade, the Colombian artist has used her oblique experimental music to ponder metaphysical phenomena and the nature of human consciousness. Dalt has a fondness for philosophical contemplation, and concepts from her training as a geotechnical engineer often creep into her work. On her new album ¡Ay!, she reprises this erudite mode. This time around, the story centers on Preta, an extraterrestrial entity that arrives on our planet and confronts earthly conceptions of temporality, embodiment, and love for the first time. Across 10 tracks, Dalt sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with, traced with ambling congas, jazzy double bass, and quivering tides of distortion. Unspooling the rhythmic threads of these styles, she weaves them with strands of opacity and dissonance. Through it all, Dalt poses questions about the rhizomatic essence of time, skillfully using texture and acoustics to make good on the promise of narrative-driven experimental music.
¡Ay! isn’t just technically masterful; it’s also an audacious statement on cultural identity. In the Western world, traditional or folkloric genres from Latin America, especially ones with African and/or Indigenous origins, are seen as static and creatively stale. These are presumed to be relics of the past, styles that few experimental musicians would touch. But on ¡Ay!, Dalt spurns that kind of colonial thinking. Instead of dismissing the genres of her youth, she transforms and stretches them, demonstrating how capacious they really are. The result is an invitation to broaden narrow interpretations of Latin American music and identity, embracing multiplicity and idiosyncrasy in the process.
All this context might sound heady, but ¡Ay! doesn’t require you to fully comprehend the details of its narrative, or even study its underlying sources. The music is poignant and meticulously arranged, and all you have to do is surrender to it. It helps that the engineering of ¡Ay! is pristine, often evoking a smoky, afterhours lounge, the kind you might find in a spy film from the 1940s. At times, it is so vivid and immersive that it feels as if Dalt is singing directly in your ear—perhaps a byproduct of her recent ventures as a film and TV composer.
Take the standout “El Galatzó.” A somber double bass vibrates, a flute flutters in the air, and galactic synths linger like a UFO hanging in the sky. The warm, open tapping of bongos, played here with wooden sticks, converges with metallic synth stabs, allowing the rhythmic silhouette of a bolero to appear. Dalt assumes the perspective of Preta, keeping her voice low and close to the mic. She enunciates her words with intention, each fricative consonant arriving with controlled, breathy precision. The track unfolds at a slower tempo than bolero and son are typically played, giving it a spellbinding and serpentine touch. By the time the final verse arrives, it no longer feels like Preta is describing her experience of the tangible world; it almost resembles a manifesto, as if Dalt herself refuses to conform to restrictive ideas of identity and genre. “No obedezco a tu verdad lineal,” Dalt sings, high-pitched strings crescendoing in the background: “Romperé tu narrativa/Y alteraré tu paisaje aplanado.” (“I don’t obey to your linear truth…/I’ll disrupt your narrative/And alter your flattened landscape.”)
“Atemporal,” “Bochinche,” and “La desmesura” perfectly capture the genre-crushing force of this record. On “La desmesura,” forlorn clarinets and trumpets resemble a cartoon character tiptoeing into a quiet room. There’s a wistful call-and-response chorus, the kind you might find in a Cuban son of the 1930s. But the song slowly progresses into industrial decay; by its end, mechanical whirring and a strutting double bass collide. “Bochinche” contains similar moments of artful incongruence: Snare drums pitter-pat steadily alongside dapples of cosmic synths, and Dalt briefly retreats into the feeling of a classic Latin American love song, delivering romantic, nostalgic lyrics. But before long, the freakiness returns—she drops phrases like “Cripsis plástica bípeda” (“Bipedal plastic crypsis”). Her style is so hypnotic, you barely register that her words are esoteric references to animal life.
¡Ay! often feels like it’s suspended in time, but somewhere in a faraway galaxy, thousands of years in the future. On the penultimate track, “Enviada,” synths tremble into serrated laser beams and fuzzy waves of distortion descend like cryptic transmissions from space, all over a doleful clarinet and the percussive echoes of bolero. The effect is disorienting and anachronistic, but it also points to the album’s foremost gift, one that transcends even its intellectual and technical ambition. Dalt inverts tradition and forces us into the unknown, unsettling any rigid assumptions about spaces that music of the Latin American diaspora is supposed to occupy. | 2022-10-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | October 13, 2022 | 8.6 | f35f9b38-f720-4a2a-9fc0-4283f77e9d8d | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
In the wake of Main Pop Girl 2019, Jaime Brooks delivers a patchwork of dense, often cartoonish reimaginings of those songs, exploring pop’s fluidity with a deft, funny, and heartfelt touch. | In the wake of Main Pop Girl 2019, Jaime Brooks delivers a patchwork of dense, often cartoonish reimaginings of those songs, exploring pop’s fluidity with a deft, funny, and heartfelt touch. | Default Genders: Pain Mop Girl 2020 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/default-genders-pain-mop-girl-2020/ | Pain Mop Girl 2020 | In a 2019 Q&A, Default Genders’ Jaime Brooks likened her artistic practice to fanfiction, and to cumulative video game modding. “Modding communities in gaming are just like fanfiction communities,” she writes. “People pouring tons of time and heart and effort into an IP someone else owns for pure love of the thing. That’s what motivates the best and coolest ideas. That’s how this stuff is supposed to work.” This is the conceit of Pain Mop Girl 2020—both a showcase for Brooks’ bold, fractured songwriting, and a convincing argument for this strain of digital democratic thinking. Restless art invites restless interpretation.
Brooks knows this well: last year’s Main Pop Girl 2019 was a masterclass in conceptual splatter, with reference points as far-reaching as Dylan, jungle, and the indie electronic sounds of the early 2010s. The music is humid, gestural—constantly shifting under its own weight and without a foothold in any particular style or framework. That Brooks’ clubby, nightcore-adjacent cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” fits as well as it does is a testament to the record’s perpetual motion: Having to square the Boss with a DIY rave only sucks you further into the relentless flow.
That sense of whiplash makes Main Pop Girl 2019 well-suited to the project of a remix album. And Pain Mop Girl 2020 is that, more or less: a patchwork of dense, often cartoonish reimaginings from similarly-minded internet futurists, as well as two entirely new tracks, “cascadia subduction zone” and “am i gonna die?” On the latter, shuffling percussion and a half-slurred vocal delivery are proxies for self-doubt. “If I survive is it just/Because some paperwork got lost?” Brooks asks, collapsing the distance between the bureaucratic and the existential in a turn of phrase. The aesthetic palette is muted, but the lyrics remain sharp and searching.
And though much of Pain Mop Girl 2020 is similarly attuned to questions of life, death, and material reproduction, there’s no single throughline. Canadian electronic tinkerer Drainpuppet’s take on “pharmacoma” ditches the frenetic drum programming of the original in favor of low-fi alt-rock, serrated pop melodies, and vocal processing that feels of a piece with big-tent EDM. The Tom Waits-referencing “christmas card from a scammer in minneapolis (live)” benefits from the addition of piano and a newly uncluttered ambient backing; the fact that it wasn’t actually recorded live itself points back to Waits, whose faux-live Nighthawks at the Diner is also set in an imagined lounge. It’s a flirtation with a certain kind of computer-controlled humanity that permeates the entire collection.
The album’s most revealing rework is “sophie (wren dove lark edit),” which appears here in its third incarnation. Originally written for Magical Pessimism 2014, the track was transformed on Main Pop Girl 2019 from a fairly straightforward slow-burner into something slick and free, with pitched-up vocals as an anchor for lyrics about grappling with gender identity. The Pain Mop Girl 2020 version is her first under the name Jaime, and with new pronouns; singer-songwriter Wren Dove Lark’s rerecorded vocals, strained and ecstatic, speak to the universality of the writing, and to changeability as a guiding ethos in both content and form. No take is definitive because the music is fundamentally iterative, and nothing is ever finished.
Even on the closer, the second and more inspired of the album’s two “checking in with the old gang” remixes, there’s a hint of continuity. In the hands of GLITCHLETTE, a self-described emo and synthpop musician based out of Washington, the track becomes an ethereal duet. Its central refrain is restructured as call-and-response between two voices: “Do you feel it?/Do these tired old lies feel true?/Well I used to believe them/But I’m not sure I still do.” There’s renewed pathos in the experience of an answered question, but an encroaching wave of guitars keeps a tinge of darkness in the mix.And at the end, just before it all fades out, there’s a crucial bit of barely-audible studio banter: “That was just extra, for fun. OK, let’s do it again.” Brooks and her collaborators suggest that all the fun’s in fluidity—not exactly in recursion, but in homage, references, covers, and antecedents, explicit or otherwise. | 2020-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | April 30, 2020 | 7.7 | f35fab6a-7f04-4b9f-8f74-cccd39888506 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
On her debut LP, the Portland songwriter turns her incisive gaze inward, writing from the feelings in her heart and the visions in her head. | On her debut LP, the Portland songwriter turns her incisive gaze inward, writing from the feelings in her heart and the visions in her head. | Haley Heynderickx: I Need to Start a Garden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haley-heynderickx-i-need-to-start-a-garden/ | I Need to Start a Garden | That Haley Heynderickx’s debut album exists at all is a testament to her tenacity. The singer-songwriter’s initial attempts to record a full-length, following the modest success of her 2016 Fish Eyes EP, collapsed. First, sessions in a cold barn just outside her adopted hometown of Portland sapped her energy and confidence. Then, a self-funded effort sapped her bank account. Even her third attempt, which ultimately yielded I Need to Start a Garden, was fraught with obstacles: Routine technical difficulties in the studio made for endless false starts and do-overs.
Eight songs ultimately made their way to tape, and Heynderickx’s mettle shows through in all of them. I Need to Start a Garden carves paths through loneliness and confesses long-harbored uncertainty, doing both with the acuity of someone comfortable enough to be honest about her doubts. Though the album is supported by a number of other musicians, Heynderickx’s craft feels solitary. In many passages, she accompanies herself on just acoustic or electric guitar, using a fingerpicking technique adapted from the style she practiced as a kid taking lessons from a local bluegrass player. Often, she pulls delicate, melodic tendrils and driving bass rhythms from her instrument simultaneously. “I’m just a sucker for little details—and a loner at times—so I have to become my own bass player,” she recently said.
Loner that she is, Heynderickx tends to turn her incisive gaze inward, writing from the feelings in her heart and the visions in her head. When other people do surface in her songs, they appear almost as faceless silhouettes—like in the aptly titled “No Face,” where an aloof partner leaves Heynderickx to wonder what about her is so wrong. “Jo” names its subject, but captures her in uncertain terms, with only the tense of the lyrics suggesting that she’s no longer around. Heynderickx demurs when it comes to the specifics, instead using metaphorical language to capture Jo through the fuzzy, romantic lens of memory: Her kindness was “like honeycomb holding the bee in the folds.”
More animate are the characters Heynderickx invents to keep herself company. In her “Untitled God Song,” she imagines her creator as a vision in knockoff Coach, conjuring sunsets when she forgets to shut off her headlights. Heynderickx writes here with an expansive, inclusive understanding of feminine perfection that feels uplifting, even if the theism that frames it is inaccessible to some listeners. The specimens that populate “The Bug Collector” are among her most imaginative: a vindictive centipede, a priest reincarnated as a praying mantis, and a grumpy millipede, personified by brass voices that banter with Heynderickx’s spry guitar as she tries to remove them from her home, lest they ruin her loved one’s “perfect morning.”
It’s hard to imagine Heynderickx singing about anthropomorphic insects with a straight face, and indeed, well-timed levity is a crux of her songwriting. She’s inclined to break up moments of intense emotional candor with spurts of humor. No song does this more effectively than the album’s lead single, “Oom Sha La La.” Here, Heynderickx likens her mental state to the decaying contents of her fridge, admits to being “doubtful of all that [she has] dreamed of,” and then launches into a chorus of gleefully delivered nonsense syllables. It’s a song about embracing the absurdity of the everyday when the big picture is hidden from view; she ends it by frantically shouting the declaration that titles the album. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of young people today, their gardens, and the perennial effort to combat existential doubt by cultivating something beautiful. Haley Heynderickx may not have a garden just yet, but if beauty can cure uncertainty, this album should be enough for now. | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mama Bird | March 12, 2018 | 7.3 | f36269d6-82be-401d-b999-a672d6be423e | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Touring the gritty underbelly of Ahmedabad, India to the sounds of swaggering synth and G-funk, the 25-year-old rapper’s debut makes an auteur’s plea for authenticity in a transactional world. | Touring the gritty underbelly of Ahmedabad, India to the sounds of swaggering synth and G-funk, the 25-year-old rapper’s debut makes an auteur’s plea for authenticity in a transactional world. | Dhanji: RUAB | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dhanji-ruab/ | RUAB | Dhanji has spent the past four years working feverishly to probe the limits of his genre-blending iconoclasm and restless, larger-than-life imagination. The seven mixtapes he’s dropped since 2019—five in 2020 alone—are all over the map, setting his off-kilter, multi-lingual flow over everything from stoner boom-bap (The Dhaniya Tape) and cinematic trap (Drive-In Cinema) to drug-addled industrial music (Zorba collab DZs Control) and spectral flips of old Bollywood classics (Lab Rats). His trend-dodging alt-rap has won over a small legion of fans captivated by the emotional resonance of his voice and the fragmented unpredictability of his bars, delivered in a loopy, lean-laced Ahmedabadi street patois. But it all felt a little rough around the edges, like lab experiments that broke containment before they were fully formed: Dhanji was still looking for a sound to fit his outsized ambitions.
Not anymore. All he needed was some funk. On his debut full-length, RUAB, the 25-year-old rapper borrows heavily from the genre’s various incarnations—the raucous hard funk of James Brown, the smooth, portamento synth leads of West Coast G-funk, even the mongrel psych-funk of iconic Bollywood composers Kalyanji-Anandji and R.D. Burman—to create the perfect cinematic backdrop to his absurd, off-the-rails rhymes. Propulsive basslines slouch and swagger in lockstep with tightly syncopated drums and bright horns spar with keening synths, all filtered through the dusty, sepia-toned lens of 1970s Indian parallel cinema. RUAB sounds like the background score for a Blaxploitation-meets-Hindi-film-noir movie, with Dhanji and his hometown of Ahmedabad as the main protagonists.
Samples from a 1988 CNN interview with James Brown and the 1954 Bollywood classic Taxi Driver are littered across the record, along with plenty of pop culture references ranging from Bill Burr to Kishore Kumar. The Taxi Driver reference is particularly telling. In the film, Dev Anand plays a cabbie nicknamed “Hero,” an everyman do-gooder who hangs out in seedy nightclubs and gets entangled in a love triangle with two struggling entertainers. At its heart, Taxi Driver is a love letter to Mumbai, as seen through the windshield of Hero’s 1947 Chevrolet Fleetmaster. On RUAB, Dhanji—a self-described cinephile—gives the same treatment to his hometown of Ahmedabad, or as he likes to call it, “Amdavad.”
But it’s not the Ahmedabad of contemporary national imagination that he wants to celebrate, with its prohibition-state social conservatism, its neighborhoods segregated by faith (a legacy of the 2002 pogroms that killed thousands), and its new hyper-capitalist icons (the city is home to at least 49 of India’s 170-odd billionaires). Dhanji’s Amdavad is a grimier place, full of struggling petit-bourgeois traders, chain-smoking gangsters, and corrupt, power-hungry police. It’s a city of narrow-laned pols and dimly lit highway underpasses, where delinquent teenagers hide from the cops as they get drunk on illicit liquor. Dhanji and his pan-India crew of producers and collaborators—including Circle Tone, MLHVR, EBE, and unfuckman—invoke funk’s sleazy vitality as an antidote to the chrome-and-glass sterility the city’s development-obsessed leaders seek to impose on his Amdavad.
Walking—or maybe driving—down these streets, Dhanji is RUAB’s quirky everyman “hero,” alternately amused and perplexed by the contradictions of creating art within the constraints of contemporary capitalism. Blending autobiography with narrative fiction (and a generous helping of gleefully juvenile humor), he prods at the tension between external value—as denoted by sales receipts and streaming numbers—and the artist’s intrinsic worth. There are other concerns too: class and mental health on the lovesick synth-funk of “Magaj Ka Bimari,” meditations on contemporary masculinity on the sparse, darkly hued “Mulaqat” (which features a starkly introspective verse from Mumbai MC Gravity). But the album’s best moments arise from its central thematic conflict, between ruab (usually translated as “panache,” or maybe “swag”) and abru (a Dhanji neologism for externally derived value). The title track’s pulsing bassline and hypnotic drum grooves set the scene as Dhanji blends rap braggadocio with existential doubt, a nihilist philosopher with a penchant for loony ad-libs. His stream-of-consciousness rhymes jump from messianic flex to identity crisis to knowingly cringe visual puns, all delivered in an idiosyncratic, beat-switching flow that sounds like Lil Wayne channeling Javed Jaffrey’s performance on “Mumbhai.”
Over the languid skulk of “In Event of Change, Money & Notoriety,” Dhanji grapples with the corrupting influence of fame and cash, fusing pathos with goofy piss-takes on “struggling artist” clichés. Posse cut “What Would the Credit Department Do?” brings in a coterie of underground rappers from across the country—Bagi Munda, Faizan, Arpit Bala, Lit Trust, and Siyaahi—to run roughshod over PSV’s constantly shifting drum grooves, with multilingual lyrics that shine a spotlight on the transactional nature of a music industry that consistently undervalues them. There’s more than a hint of punk rock’s influence on this one, from its Devo-style demystification of music industry glamour to the stomping menace of the guest features. “Fuck a corporation,” Dhanji snarls over a reverb-drenched drum fill. “But it all wouldn’t have been possible/Without a corporation/Par kab tak? (But for how long?)”
The album’s emotional and thematic center is the eight-minute-long “1 Khabri / 2 Numbari.” The first half of the track sticks to the blueprint, all lilting keys and chromatic bass, as Dhanji once again focuses his attention on the interplay between class, social capital, and self-identity, riding the beat like a leaned-out Gujju Danny Brown. Then the keys give way to jagged industrial synths and cavernous sub-bass. Dhanji finally drops the sneer he’s been holding up as a shield and opens up about the personal trauma he’s been hinting at throughout the record: an alcoholic father’s repeated trips to jail, his mother’s suicidal ideation, poverty’s corrosive action on the human spirit. Coming hot on the heels of the insalubrious bounce and cartoonish menace of the rest of the album, this sudden swerve into true darkness hits like a masterfully disguised suckerpunch.
Not all of Dhanji’s left-field experiments are as successful. The classical piano-led lounge-funk of “Put That on Wax” sounds like it belongs in a luxury cruise commercial rather than an experimental rap album. When the producers stray from funk-as-world-building into straight tribute—as Circle Tone does on the P-Funk indebted “Thaltej Blues”—the result can sound flat and unconvincing. Even with these missteps, RUAB is a refreshingly unique and rewarding debut from an artist making a strong claim as Indian rap’s most innovative auteur. | 2023-08-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Thaltej | August 10, 2023 | 7.8 | f36d5ecd-6440-4293-b5d0-3afe7f8d0b37 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
The indie-pop veterans mix together classics, rarities, some new songs, and instrumentals for the original film soundtrack. | The indie-pop veterans mix together classics, rarities, some new songs, and instrumentals for the original film soundtrack. | Belle and Sebastian: Days of the Bagnold Summer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belle-and-sebastian-days-of-the-bagnold-summer-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Days of the Bagnold Summer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Belle and Sebastian have soundtracked so many real-life depressed teenagerhoods that they practically invented the genre of “songs to stare out car windows to.” This is probably why, in their 23-year tenure as indie-pop royalty, so many movies and TV shows have relied on their songs, from Juno to High Fidelity to “The O.C.” and “Gilmore Girls” and beyond.
Their original film soundtrack Days of the Bagnold Summer will feel familiar to anyone who’s heard the band underscore a dreamy montage sequence. The film, an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name from rookie director and Inbetweeners star Simon Bird, stars Earl Cave (son of Nick Cave) as a teen equally obsessed with metal and moping in the bathtub. His ennui is only heightened when plans to visit his father in the U.S. are canceled and he’s forced to spend summer vacation alone with his mum.
The soundtrack consists of 11 new Belle and Sebastian songs and some instrumentals, along with “I Know Where the Summer Goes,” from the 1998 This Is Just a Modern Rock Song EP, and “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” off of 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister. Also on the album is the ancient and excellent “Safety Valve,” a paean to codependency Stuart Murdoch wrote before Belle and Sebastian formed but had never released. “It’s maybe 25 years old,” he wrote in a press release. “The only time I can remember ever playing it was in a coffee shop with a friend of mine and people scratching their heads.”
Perhaps we live in a time more accustomed to anxiety and excessive emotional dependence on friends, because there’s no need for head-scratching now: The lyrics (“’Cause sometimes I just need a pal/Thanks for being my safety valve… Hey, I’ve been there before/I’ll save you, it’s a serious bore”) nail the feeling of knowing you’re emotionally overburdening a friend but doing it anyway.
Days of the Bagnold Summer’s instrumentals, which comprise the score of the film, are actually are some of the album’s best moments. “We Were Never Glorious,” a greensleeves-y fiddle track, nails the delicate balance of “hopeful yet totally melancholic” and is just the kind of music suited to walking around pretending you’re in a movie.
The new songs, meanwhile, feature a return to form for Belle and Sebastian, whose more recent releases have ventured away from their trademark style of “puckishly depressed” and into explorations of the dancy, the jazzy, and, occasionally, the kinda bad. No one can blame them for wanting to experiment, but it’s good to see they’ve shelved the synths for this album. When you have Belle and Sebastian soundtrack your film, there’s likely a particular sound you’re after, and the band doesn’t disappoint.
Some numbers, like the excellent “Sister Buddha,” seem like “Classic Belle and Sebastian”—vivid storytelling conveyed through pithy lyrics and sprinkled with empathy. “Step across the lonely threshold of your selfish mind,” Murdoch instructs “Sister Buddha,” “and embrace the loving goodness of your human kind.” Okay! Good advice.
Others, however, sound like “Belle and Sebastian doing an impression of Belle and Sebastian.” “Did the Day Go Just Like You Wanted?” seems a bit like an older outfit trying to recapture the tone they’d perfected in a younger iteration. Lyrics like “When the tears roll down on your cheek/You know you’re alive/Let the rain pour down/Let the winter come” feel on the nose in a way they’ve never been before.
Perhaps it’s the lyrical complexity of the “oldies” on the album that throw this particularly into focus, making the newer songs seem relatively facile. Which isn’t to say those songs aren’t good—just, it’s hard to beat the champs, even when you are the champs. “Nobody writes them like they used to,” Stuart Murdoch sings on the re-recording of “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” “so it may as well be me.” Good point.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 14, 2019 | 6.8 | f371c76d-fbd1-4772-a96f-a7fa1f437d34 | Zoe Dubno | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-dubno/ | |
Crafted in tandem with the Gost Zvuk affiliate Flaty, the Moscow producer’s second album balances streamlined electro pop with a hint of rave mayhem. | Crafted in tandem with the Gost Zvuk affiliate Flaty, the Moscow producer’s second album balances streamlined electro pop with a hint of rave mayhem. | Kedr Livanskiy: Your Need | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kedr-livanskiy-your-need/ | Your Need | The Moscow producer Yana Kedrina put out two EPs and a full-length in the span of three years, but she hit a wall after 2017’s murky hardware outing, Ariadna. “I was a lot more closed off, and I saw myself like a romantic hero who is always alone," the artist also known as Kedr Livanskiy said recently. “I reconstructed my view of the world, my own mind and how to better connect with people.” She’s not alone. The past few years have seen a number of formerly solo producers, like Laurel Halo, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Holly Herndon, moving beyond the parameters of the self and opening up their processes to collaborators.
On Your Need, Livanskiy works in tandem with the Gost Zvuk-affiliated producer Flaty, whose beats add musculature and crispness where in the past she often cloaked her productions in a lo-fi haze. The songs are tighter, too. Unlike Ariadna and January Sun, nothing on Your Need exceeds the four-minute mark, landing the album squarely in the electro-pop zone rather than the Russian underground dance scene.
Such directness leads to Kedr Livanskiy’s catchiest album to date, even if it means that the best tracks are over too soon. Despite the airy vocal hook and 1990s-inspired breakbeat of a standout like “Sky Kisses,” it tantalizes and then starts to fade away. “Why Love” opens like a classic New Order production, with its ghostly minor-key synth melody and throbbing drum programming, while Livanskiy’s wordless harmonies impart acute heartache.
At times, that terseness can go against a track’s strengths. The frenetic “Bounce 2” combines synth bass, Kedrina’s slivered voice, and a dizzying beat that clocks nearly 150 bpm. But it doesn’t last long enough to truly evoke a sense of delirium on the dancefloor. And the thrilling use of dub space on “Lugovoy (November Dub)” would be well worth lingering in for a tad longer. The skin-prickling “Kiska” (perfectly matched to its body horror video) strikes the perfect balance, its primitive production and creepy, childlike vocals just eerie enough to leave you wanting more.
Named for the Russian holiday surrounding the summer solstice (and shortest night of the year), closer “Ivan Kupala” is a party anthem in the making. Flaty and Kedrina craft a celebratory track worthy of Exit Planet Dust, full of caffeinated snare rolls, DJ backspins, and shaking tambourine. When it all gives way to Kedrina’s voice and a plaintive keyboard melody, it seems destined to raise hands in dingy clubs from St. Petersburg to London. Like any sweaty bash, it’ll make you wish it never had to end. | 2019-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 2MR | May 6, 2019 | 7.2 | f384ca17-06fd-40ca-9b0b-15d0e9f4d214 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The debut LP from this young Florida band is first and foremost a great guitar album packed with sing-along hooks, but there's more going on beneath the surface. | The debut LP from this young Florida band is first and foremost a great guitar album packed with sing-along hooks, but there's more going on beneath the surface. | Surfer Blood: Astro Coast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13844-astro-coast/ | Astro Coast | There's plenty to like about Astro Coast, the debut LP from the youthful Floridians in Surfer Blood, but first and foremost it's a great guitar album. So what exactly does that mean these days? Often, it's a reference to either a display of astounding technical chops or innovative use of tone and texture, qualities which, to be quite honest, aren't particularly present here. This is a great guitar album in the way Weezer's Blue Album, Built to Spill's Keep It Like a Secret, or, more recently, Japandroids' Post-Nothing are: six-strings serve as a multiplier for hooks, making it every bit as easy and fun to air guitar with as it is to sing along to.
Nowhere is this more true than on their breakout single "Swim", which spent the second half of last year generating so much praise that it threatened to make any future album unnecessary or future hype redundant. But even after so many listens, its snowblind-ish reverb is still disorienting-- especially contrasted with its crisp, power-chord hook. It may sound like they're hitting you with their best shot, but after an impassioned "oh oh oh!" from singer John Paul Pitts, Surfer Blood explodes into an even bigger chorus and "Swim" becomes almost overpoweringly fist-pumping.
While "Swim" might just remind you of any number of Buzz Bin one-offs now stocking whatever's left of the used-CD store racket, Astro Coast has a strong supporting cast. Throughout, even the titles remark upon how each could've evolved from a killer guitar part into a full-on song-- "Floating Vibes", "Harmonix", "Neighbour Riffs". "Floating Vibes" lumbers with a chest-puffing, two-chord stomp that could evoke either Angus Young or Stephen Malkmus, before the guitars dovetail-- one chiming and light, the other a vocal-leading riff that makes Pitts' handling of the melodic contours sound effortless. The melodic intuitiveness of Astro Coast is in large part due to the interplay heard on "Floating Vibes"-- if every riff is stand-alone hummable, then the vocals take care of themselves.
Surfer Blood know from a good hook, but perhaps what's more promising is how most of their compositions build to their rewards. "Take It Easy" does the opposite at its outset, but by its midpoint the fidgety rhythms cool to a mesmerizing motorik that's continued on "Harmonix". "Slow Jabroni" is lonesome and crowded, distorted acoustics serving as a dusty backdrop for Pitts' Isaac Brock-ian carny barking. The riff that introduces "Anchorage" is as blunt as its sentiments ("I don't want to spin my wheels/ I don't got no wheels to spin"), but its second half unfurls a major-key riff that evokes the roomier compositions of Dinosaur Jr. Putting the record's two longest songs back-to-back might not be the canniest bit of sequencing, but it shows the confidence Surfer Blood have in their ability to escape the confines of three-minute power-pop.
Though they hail from West Palm Beach and come at the tail-end of 2009's indie feel-good beach party, for all of the oceanic imagery that the band name, album title, and cover art convey, Astro Coast is lyrically landlocked and lonely. Pitts is straightforward when he's not being shrouded by the springy reverb favored by the Shins' James Mercer, and at points, he reads pointedly early-00s emo. Topics of concern include confusion about romance, confusion about friendship, confusion about the future, confusion about religion. It's hard not to think that most of Astro Coast was borne of a relationship dissolved by distance, especially if we're to take the otherwise chipper "Twin Peaks" at face value: Pitts travels to Syracuse, watches David Lynch films, and wrenches out lyrics of sexual frustration that suggest most of the drive was spent listening to Pinkerton.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Surfer Blood spent the latter part of 2009 touring with Japandroids, who, along with BOAT and Cymbals Eat Guitars align in a faux-genre some of us have jokingly referred to as "alt-bro"-- guitar-heavy indie rock that's probably influenced by Pavement, likely about girls, and almost certainly made by people who at first blush sound more fun to get a beer with than, say, Dirty Projectors. But it's unfair to think of Astro Coast as reactionary in some way to the more overtly ambitious indie stars of last year-- there are no chamber sections, no pocket harmonies, no integration of West African rhythms (ok, there's some of that). But ambition can just as easily manifest itself as a desire to create a relentlessly catchy, "classic indie" album in your own dorm room, and if that's what Surfer Blood set out to do, Astro Coast succeeds wildly. | 2010-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Kanine | January 21, 2010 | 8.2 | f384f39b-6902-4d10-80cc-af6853b5d9bf | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A psychogeographic survey of the Himalayan region of Ladakh rendered in ambient drones and harsh noise, Fatima doubles as an uneasy chronicle of capitalist exploitation and generational trauma. | A psychogeographic survey of the Himalayan region of Ladakh rendered in ambient drones and harsh noise, Fatima doubles as an uneasy chronicle of capitalist exploitation and generational trauma. | Ruhail Qaisar: Fatima | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ruhail-qaisar-fatima/ | Fatima | Fear, anger, and alienation have long been the dominant emotions in Ruhail Qaisar’s music. His early solo releases and live sets—under the now defunct moniker SISTER—married the blackened death metal of his short-lived band Vajravarah with power electronics, no wave, and post-industrial noise. A guitar-and-laptop-toting techno shaman harnessing the forces of cosmic chaos for a shock-and-awe assault on the sensibilities of Mumbai and Delhi hipster elites, Qaisar crafted music so brain-pulverizingly visceral that it drowned out all thought. A friend once called it a palate cleanser for the soul.
Qaisar, however, had higher ambitions than crafting sonic mind-wipes, and sometime in 2016 he shifted gears. On that year’s Ltalam EP, he pared back the redlining noise in favor of tense, eldritch atmospheres and mutated found sounds—spectral transmissions from a pre-modern Ladakh, the geographically isolated and geopolitically contested Himalayan region that is Qaisar’s home. He also started experimenting with analog photography and film, drawing these disparate endeavors into an overarching project of hauntological excavation meant to tease the phantoms of Ladakh’s past out from their hiding places in its late-capitalist, tourist-economy present. He carries that work forward on his debut album, Fatima, an uneasy chronicle of personal and generational trauma, and a psychogeographic survey of his homeland’s windswept granite peaks and shrubland valleys.
The Ladakh that Qaisar mourns on Fatima isn’t the mystical and isolated “last Shangri-La” of European imagination, nor is it the tokenized Himalayan fantasy of contemporary Indian tourists. Instead it is the hybrid culture of a polity set on the crossroads of the Silk Route, a land where Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and remnants of pre-Buddhist religion rubbed shoulders with each other—a society whose inhabitants, according to anthropologist Martin A. Mills, once saw themselves as part of a complex cosmology of spirits, protectors and itinerant demons. It’s a world of chthonic rituals, exorcisms, and possessions, of regular communion with the supernatural.
It’s also a Ladakh that is rapidly disappearing—its borders redrawn by 20th-century nationalism, the phasphun system of inter-religious harmony shredded by politics of communalism, its few remaining totems crumbling under the pressures of rapid technological change and what Qaisar calls the “soft-power subjugation of the tourism industry.”
Fatima is an elegy for this Ladakh, and for the futures it could not realize. The album’s discordant drones and atonal shrieks are inscribed with the trauma of recent history—both the external violence of colonialism and militarization and the psychic violence of industrialization and late capitalism. As we traverse this ruined, decaying landscape, we stumble upon echoes of the past—bucolic vistas of serene beauty, revenants of cosmological horror—that Qaisar has painstakingly resurrected through field recordings and experimental transmutations of traditional Ladakhi music and lore.
Ponderous bass pulses in the background of “Fatima’s Poplar” as an alien skittering noise dominates the foreground while a voice reads an excerpt from English philosopher Nick Land’s Circuitries with theatrical flourish. Halfway in, gothic performance gives way to a slab of distorted noise, its edges keening like a chainsaw cutting through rusty metal. But while Land and his accelerationist contemporaries embraced capitalism’s creative destruction with revolutionary ecstasy, Qaisar’s invocation is more ambivalent, suffused with dread of the promised singularity.
On “Sachu Melung,” a high-pitched synth whistles in and out, like the wind through Ladakh’s craggy valleys. Disembodied voices trill and murmur in pre-lingual syllables on anti-tourism meditation “Abandoned Hotels of Zangsti” and post-rockish “Seventh Dream (Ramazan’s Wedding),” suggesting the ghostly whisperings of insurgent spirits hiding out in the vast Ladakhi dominion of rock and scrubland. That sense of menace crystallizes into primordial horror on the brooding, atmospheric “Painter Man,” its throbbing basslines and Dis Fig’s spectral whisper eventually giving way to a Lynchian cacophony of horns and gongs.
Elsewhere, Qaisar grapples more directly with recent history. “Partition (From Astore to Leh)” explores the psychological scars of Britain’s hasty exit from the subcontinent through the lens of Ladakhi experience. The historiography of Partition is dominated by the paroxysms of communal violence and mass displacement that engulfed Punjab and Bengal, and the decades-long conflict that is still simmering in Kashmir. Ladakh’s wounds were less visible but no less profound. Qaisar’s invocation of Astore and Leh—two cities with a long shared history—is a nod to that geopolitically enforced separation, a split evoked in the mournful interplay between two achingly serene chords. In the distance, you can hear rumbling thunder: the war drums of nationalism and modernity.
Fatima reaches its sepulchral apotheosis on closer “The Fanged Poet.” Qaisar’s distortion-drenched guitar unfurls with stoner-doom gravitas over a ritualistic drum beat, while Rohit Gupta’s trumpet squalls in increasingly tortured agony. Delay-soaked field recordings lurk beneath the sludge, occasionally surfacing as half-formed snatches of barely heard conversation, lending a further sense of surreality. The guitar and drums build to a slow-burn crescendo before fading away, leaving only the death throes of Gupta’s trumpet before it, too, retreats into silence. It’s a hypnotic eulogy for a world that has passed, leaving behind only its ghosts and its scars. | 2023-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Danse Noire | January 30, 2023 | 7.8 | f3898956-f4ae-4ec8-b3b1-145d761319d9 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
Of a piece with last year’s Lady Wood, the Swedish pop singer’s new album chronicles the death of a doomed, passionate love affair. It makes a powerful statement about female sexuality in the process. | Of a piece with last year’s Lady Wood, the Swedish pop singer’s new album chronicles the death of a doomed, passionate love affair. It makes a powerful statement about female sexuality in the process. | Tove Lo: Blue Lips | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tove-lo-blue-lips/ | Blue Lips | Tove Lo doesn’t do coy. On “bitches,” an ode to bisexual liberation smack dab in the middle of the Swedish pop singer’s new album, she pummels through the first verse without an ounce of irony. “Let me be your guide when you eat my pussy out/’Cause I’ve had one or two, even a few/Yeah, more than you,” she asserts, as laser beam keyboards sputter around her. Even without the healthy levels of Lil’ Kim-grade raunch, “bitches” is a red-hot, gut punching song by an artist who is not afraid to resoundingly state what she wants, when she wants it. “Bitches, I don’t trust ’em/But they give me what I want for the night,” she sings in the chorus, succinctly illustrating the core philosophy behind Blue Lips, and its predecessor, 2016’s Lady Wood: gone are the days when sexual dominance was the realm of men alone.
Blue Lips is subtitled [lady wood phase II], and it comprises parts three and four of Lo’s pair of concept albums. Both albums chronicle the birth and death of a tumultuous love affair, doomed by an all-consuming, self-destructive passion. Although sex is absolutely the lens through which Lo explores this relationship, it never feels as if she’s performing for the male gaze, and although she flirts with camp, it’s in a self-aware way that conveys a certain seriousness.
The first half of Blue Lips, titled “LIGHT BEAMS,” begins with the lead single, an uptempo dance track called “disco tits.” It blends 1970s disco, 1990s house, and Lo’s penchant for humor and entendre all into one neat package dripping with erotic mirth. The musical apex of Tove Lo’s career thus far, “disco tits” uses clever structural elements—like a single-bar a capella pre-chorus that ramps up the track’s energy before the stinging pulse of the refrain—to create something that is slinky, cool, and relentlessly driving. “I’m wet through all my clothes/I’m fully charged, nipples are hard/Ready to go,” she sings, almost deadpan, once again presenting herself as the central focus of her lust. The track is the quintessential example of the effect Lo wishes to achieve—songs about the complexity of female sexuality that make their point through the irreverence of pop music. Case in point: in the “disco tits” video, Lo drives a convertible down a desert highway, while receiving road head from a furry yellow puppet.
Lo wears her influences on her sleeve here. “disco sits” is an homage to shimmering ’70s dance pop, calling to mind Andrea True, the late disco diva whose 1976 hit “More, More, More” brought second-wave sex-positive feminism to light-up dancefloors across the country. Blue Lips is not a straight-up disco record, but Lo uses that genre’s soft focus sheen to recall an era grown from the sexual liberation of the ’60s, while sheltered from the excesses of the ’80s. Coupled with her evocative songwriting skills, Blue Lips elicits an air of fantasy, a defined context in which the most potent desires can be explored and examined.
“LIGHT BEAMS” is the more upbeat side of Blue Lips, the final climax before the comedown. “stranger,” another highlight from this half of the album, is built around a funky, mock-Prince guitar lick, supported by echoing snare drums and some of Lo’s most powerful vocals to date. It’s the part of the narrative where, with her relationship already in shambles, Lo goes on the prowl for a one-night stand—and the yearning in her voice, almost cracking, is the deepest point of the record.
It sets the stage for “PITCH BLACK,” the final Lady Wood suite, where Lo winds down and bottoms out after her debaucherous journey. While its stark contrast to “LIGHT BEAMS” works conceptually, the transition is a little rough. Tracks like “romantics,” with its trendy trap beats and distorted vocals, pale slightly next to the wild ride of the album’s first half. “struggle” indulges in Lo’s puzzling love for millennial slang (“The struggle is real,” she sings on the song’s hook), but it also sees Lo at her most introspective and vulnerable. If Rihanna and her army of copycats popularized tropical pop in the past few years, this is a tropical depression, its bubbly demeanor completely tempered by an encroaching darkness. “Fuck, fuck, fuck some sense into me,” Lo pleads, definitely more of a supplication than a come-on.
With Lady Wood, it seemed like Tove Lo had found a way to separate herself from the ever-growing crowd of Scandi-pop artists, expanding on real, human themes instead of by-the-numbers love ditties washed over with icy synth production. Blue Lips continues in this direction, an explicit testament to Lo’s chaotic love life, an unashamedly sexual and emotionally impactful piece of work. Lo ends up baring much more of her soul than her body. | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | November 29, 2017 | 7.1 | f3909a31-db5b-4c5c-99c2-dd19e7841b58 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
On her fifth solo album, the Irish singer finds a new role as a dancefloor truth-teller, infusing house and disco epics with thrilling expressions of desire, regret, and self-knowledge. | On her fifth solo album, the Irish singer finds a new role as a dancefloor truth-teller, infusing house and disco epics with thrilling expressions of desire, regret, and self-knowledge. | Róisín Murphy: Róisín Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roisin-murphy-roisin-machine/ | Róisín Machine | Over the course of the last 30 years, Róisín Murphy has made enough classics to fill up the Top 40 of a more fabulous world. To paraphrase the one-time announcer of this awful world’s pop countdown, Murphy has kept her couture-shod feet on the ground and kept reaching for the stars—though her idea of a star is more Cosey Fanni Tutti dancing to Sylvester than your average pop idol. The Irish singer-songwriter’s fifth solo album, Róisín Machine, might seem in some ways like the same old song and dance. But it’s done with such impeccable elan that she has turned the old nightlife songbook into a book of revelations.
In Moloko, Murphy’s turn-of-the-century duo of bedroom fiddlers who ended up filling arenas, Murphy distilled awkward hedonism into intoxicants like “Sing It Back” and “Forever More.” Her subsequent solo albums, brilliant as they often were, sometimes felt more like mere representations of charisma, or deployments of charm, than, say, a confession on a dancefloor or finding love in a hopeless place or something you can’t get out of your head. In proper dance-music style, her best tracks often existed only on 12"s, like her 2014 collaboration with Freeform Five, “Leviathan,” a fierce and forthright anthem which should be played instead whenever someone requests “Titanium.” Or the series she made with boompty savant Maurice Fulton, which often sounded like house classics overheard while trapped in an adjacent rubber room.
Machine fills out a recent clutch of 12"s with new tracks, all made with Sheffield legend Parrot, whose work as Sweet Exorcist (with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk) helped form the character of early Warp records. Here, he raises the electro-industrial psychedelia of Throbbing Gristle and the deeply considered thump of Larrys Levan and Heard into impeccable feats of sonic engineering that wisely never dare to upstage the star of the show.
After a brief prologue to set the stakes—“I will make my own happy ending,” she announces over an opening curtain of strings—the album moves psychogeographically through various dance terrains. It begins, with “Simulation,” at the beginning: the breath (layers of Murphy’s exhalations, pluming like a fog machine) and the beat. (For club kids, a heartbeat isn’t a double thump, it’s a kick and a hi-hat.) “This is a simulation,” she lilts. “This is a lonely illusion/This is my only delusion.” Disco, invented by people whose existence was uncertain, was a way to turn fantasy into fact. Here, Murphy is part Oscar Wilde, praising the artificial as a mask that tells the truth, and part Willy Wonka, all conflicted beckoning. Part riot grrrl, too: “If it’s all on my veins/It’s all in my mind/You don’t get to be unkind!” she declares, like a clarion cry of “Girls to the front!” The dancefloor is a body, Murphy’s own, and she’s too busy blissing to entertain male notions of authenticity, or the dangers their egos might engender.
“Simulation” ends with one of the album’s great builds, which on a good pair of headphones sounds like liftoff and on a behemoth of a soundsystem—at, let’s say, a busy moment of a particularly adult’s-only corner of a queer dancefloor—feels like poppers. Murphy has talked about sequencing Machine as a kind of DJ mix; a traditional one would take off even further from here. Perversely, “Kingdom of Ends” follows, a beatless heater with stacked funk-operatic vocals calling back to The ArchAndroid and P-Funk before it. The chants amass above an ooze of trance, putting to shame the thousands of so-called “deconstructed club” blobs currently clogging up Bandcamp. “This is easier than I expected,” Murphy sneers.
Only then, with an absolute stormer of a disco strut called “Something More,” is the Machine up and running at full steam. “Maybe this could be the last time I feel the strain/Of what it’s like to own everyone and everything/Life just keeps me wanting,” she announces, as if reading out loud, for the first time, a diagnosis of her own condition. The song is a masterclass of ambivalence, with a yearning bridge that settles into the chorus, once aching and now resigned.
The baggy “We Got Together” ricochets Murphy’s hoots and hollers across booming fields, a simple celebration of how tough it can be to maintain a connection. With “Game Changer,” she loosens her grip. It’s a humid pulse, that moment in a DJ set designed for a quick trip to the bar. This is Roísín Murphy, though, so it’s not that easy. The track is somehow in freefall and motionless. Her voice flashes through the air like tableaus caught in mid-strobe: “I thought I knew the way…”; “This is about to get realer….” Words smear. Just as with a slightly inappropriate outfit, or a too-intimate (or intoxicated) conversation, what holds it all together is wit.
“Incapable” is brittle, its Eurodisco rhythm sharpened into snaps and claps. Murphy unloads a history of emotional distance. She knows all about that warm Moroder/Summer swoon: “I get that there’s a sensation/Though I don’t know what it means.” She can’t feel love. “I should try and play my part,” she reproves herself, but alas, all she’s ever felt is a feverish chill. And this is what it sounds like, percussion prickling like goosebumps, when your damage hardens into a visage. She falls through a trapdoor into full disco fever. “Narcissus” marries Greek myth and a dance beat better than Xanadu ever did: Its pools of rippling strings evaporate into prance music for chatterbox Echo and selfie-obsessed Narcissus, characters familiar to anyone who’s ever waited in line for a nightclub powder room.
Disco fuels another gem: “Murphy’s Law,” a shimmering ode to a lack of self-control that she sings in a register as deep as the groove. The song is not a cover of Cheri’s insouciant 1982 boogie standard of the same name, and it is also not “Bad Girls,” though it definitely shares some DNA, but it is as good as either of them. The nerve! And one more: “Jealousy,” shorn of more than half its original 12" length, starts in thrall to that destructive emotion and stays there. “Jealousy!” she chants, as if demanding her own humanity, while the track surmounts a second great buildup, bookending “Simulation” as if to say the real drama is always human. After all the triumphs and tragedies of trying to connect to herself and other people in the dark, she finds a role she was born to play: succinct dancefloor truth-teller, a character smart enough to see the worst about herself and clever enough to make it irresistible. Róisín Murphy aims her tracks at the stars. With Róisín Machine, she’s become one.
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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. | 2020-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Skint / BMG | October 5, 2020 | 8 | f394223e-2970-4bb7-9a62-4f2e512119e2 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On their nimble new LP, the Polish quartet Trupa Trupa bring some poetry and subtlety to psychedelic rock. | On their nimble new LP, the Polish quartet Trupa Trupa bring some poetry and subtlety to psychedelic rock. | Trupa Trupa: Jolly New Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trupa-trupa-jolly-new-songs/ | Jolly New Songs | Though few of the genre’s songwriters would admit as much, lyrics tend to be an afterthought in psych-rock. They are more like a formality, setting a place for the sonic theatrics and flamboyant guitars that many bands of this sort take far more pleasure in. For the Polish psych quartet Trupa Trupa, however, lyrics are a delicacy. Frontman Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has several books of poetry to his name. And although he limits his words on Trupa Trupa’s nimble new LP Jolly New Songs, rationing them like shaved truffles, he brings a poet’s love of language to the ones he does deploy, lingering on them, repeating them, embellishing them, and savoring the space between them.
Of course, the band’s respect for language doesn’t preclude them from having a little fun at its expense. Trupa roughly translates to “corpse,” a word that presumably carries the same balance of morbidity and whimsy in Polish as it does in English, and their band name says everything you need to know about their gallows humor. Throughout Jolly New Songs, Kwiatkowski laughs in the face of defeat, mining joy from the macabre. “Think I am wounded and wounded now/Think I am wounded,” Kwiatkowski sputters like a shaken cola can on “Falling,” too delighted by the phonetic pleasures of the word “woooounded” to focus on the more pressing concern. “Lying with you/Without a move/The coffin so smooth,” he croons suavely on “Coffin,” a song that opens with a leisurely swagger before it pivots into a downpour of drone.
Trupa Trupa pack the record with those kinds of twist endings and fake-outs. “Jolly New Song,” which isn’t conventionally jolly but does initially carry a certain pep, eventually wilts into a rotted wreck of noise before it ends with the same abrupt cut to black as Dinosaur Jr.’s “Just Like Heaven” cover. Opener “Against Breaking Heart of a Breaking Heart Beauty” abandons its steady tempo to dizzy itself with a finale of seasick circus organs. In the hands of a heavier band, these disruption tactics might be played for maximum punishment, but here they feel more like mischief, an outlet for the group’s prankster energy.
Jolly New Songs blurs the lines between the wry and the genuinely unsettling so effectively that it’s rarely entirely clear when, or if, the band is joking. When Kwiatkowski’s voice takes on a bit of a punk sneer on “Never Forget,” a track with tantalizing shades of Unwound’s autumnal masterpiece Leaves Turn Inside You, he can sound a bit like Howard Devoto of Magazine, a flicked switchblade with an unclear target. “We never, we never forget humiliation,” Kwiatkowski sings, implicitly promising retribution. Even the songs that aren’t overtly nihilistic carry an ominous gloom, with bass lines that nip like a late-November frost.
The tradeoff for all that mood setting is that Jolly New Songs falls a little short in the fireworks department, especially compared to the work of showier psych bands like Dungen or Thee Oh Sees. Psych fans who seek out this music mostly for the knockout, “holy fuck!” moments aren’t going to find many here, but what they will find is a record that lingers longer than most, one that derives its power less by skirting conventions than by veiling its intentions. | 2017-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Blue Tapes / X-Ray / Ici d’ailleurs | November 3, 2017 | 6.7 | f3963cb0-3342-4eb7-bc08-18162af462aa | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The new !!! album finds them working with a slew of guest singers, exploring twitchy R&B, queasy dub-disco, romantic house, and more. As ever, their dance music is both celebratory and unsentimental. | The new !!! album finds them working with a slew of guest singers, exploring twitchy R&B, queasy dub-disco, romantic house, and more. As ever, their dance music is both celebratory and unsentimental. | !!!: Shake the Shudder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23257-shake-the-shudder/ | Shake the Shudder | It’s either a highly fortuitous coincidence or extremely unfortunate timing that !!! should drop its seventh album right when LCD Soundsystem have issued their first proper new music in seven years. Now that the usual 20-year nostalgia cycle has officially shrunk to 15, and now that there’s a whole bunch of new reasons to despise Rudy Giuliani, certainly the conditions seem ripe for a post-millennial New York post-punk revival. But while the comeback narrative—and the attendant skepticism toward it—dovetail nicely with the legacy of LCD Soundsystem (whose most resonant music grapples with the impossibility of reliving the past), such associations arguably do !!! a disservice.
Sure, the two bands share common origin stories (former hardcore kids reborn as slaves to the rhythm), influences, and, at one point, even personnel (bassist Tyler Pope). But for two decades now, !!! have never stopped and never looked back, and through subtle album-to-album evolutions, the band barely resemble their 2002 selves. In that time, !!! have gone from making punk more danceable to making dance music more punk: they’ve thoroughly internalized disco’s socio-political history, embracing the idea of the club as a safe haven for misfits, and promoting the philosophy of dancing as an act of defiance. That frontman Nic Offer’s bratty sneer and profane patter so often chafe against the band’s rubbery grooves is precisely the point: you don’t need to be a seasoned diva to join this party; just speak your mind and your ass will follow.
Where James Murphy’s personality and neuroses have become increasingly entrenched in the LCD sound, Offer has become evermore willing to cede the spotlight, as if to put disco’s spirit of inclusivity into action. More than any other !!! record before it, Shake the Shudder finds Offer riffing off a rotating cast of guest vocalists. And they provide the band with multiple pivot points to explore different directions. Opening track “The One 2” is a tense, twitchy R&B showdown with singer Lea Lea that taps a more sensitive nerve than this attitude-heavy band usually allows. “Throttle Service” features a jubilant, choir-like chorus led by former Out Hud bandmate Molly Schnick over warm organ tones and a huge wrecking ball of a bassline. And on the queasy dub-disco freakout “What R U Up 2Day,” the creepily warped, Grimes-like incantations are provided by Lea Lea and multi-instrumentalist Rafael Cohen’s young daughter.
Even on the tracks where Offer takes the lead, he often doesn’t sound like his usual self. In a nod to the intertwined histories of club and drag culture, “Dancing Is the Best Revenge” finds him pitching his voice up to create a feminine alter ego, Nicole Fayu, in the tradition of Prince’s Camille. But he’s careful not to teeter into camp caricature: over a steely bass groove, he pithily dismisses the niceties of nostalgia (“The old days ain’t coming back/Ain’t coming back no more/They might as well be tied up in a sack on the ocean floor/With cement blocks”) with all the icy nonchalance of someone flicking a cigarette butt in your face.
As “Dancing Is the Best Revenge” illustrates, !!! are at their best when making dance music that’s both unabashedly celebratory and stridently unsentimental. (Even better is the hard-house banger “NRGQ,” which honors the !!! tradition of putting terrible dad-joke puns to terrific use.) When the band veer into more typically romantic house terrain (“Our Love (U Can Get)”) and starry-eyed electro-rock (“Throw Yourself in the River”), their peculiar, provocateur personality is muted.
But even if they’re more liable to greet the world with a warm embrace instead of a middle finger these days, !!! haven’t lost their flair for infusing peak-hour hysterics with sobering morning-after rumination. Atop the robust P-Funk strut of “Five Companies,” Offer laments the homogenizing effects of unchecked capitalism (“Five companies/Running everything I see around me”), but ultimately decides he’s not going to worry about worrying: “Nothing grabs attention like the latest fear/Blah blah blah, the end is near/Everyone predicts it every single year.” At first, it seems like an oddly resigned response to our current political tumult, especially when you consider Offer thought nothing of telling the previous Republican president to “suck my fucking dick.” But in light of !!!’s long history of agit-funk activism, it’s actually a form of reassurance: we’ve danced our way through the dark times before, and we’ll do it again. | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | May 24, 2017 | 7.3 | f39c79e8-86fa-4ab3-9dc6-668754b6cb0a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Bronx rapper’s latest project reveals little about his persona other than his approach to rapping, which is blunt and functional. | The Bronx rapper’s latest project reveals little about his persona other than his approach to rapping, which is blunt and functional. | Don Q: Don Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/don-q-don-talk/ | Don Talk | One of the odd ironies of Don Q’s breakthrough mixtape, Corner Stories, was that it lacked both corners and stories. Don Q gestured at, alluded to, and cited a hardscrabble Bronx upbringing, but his throaty, accented rasp tended to be the only lasting impression. Everything else was lost in transit: narratives smoldered inside dry boasts, images withered on vines of florid internal rhymes, punchlines were oversold or undercooked. Don Q channeled fire but blew smoke.
Don Talk trades scene setting for character building and is just as feckless. The main problem is that Don Q isn’t a memorable character. His approach to rapping is blunt and functional. His raps work like conveyor belts, shuffling rhymes from here to there. He rarely relishes or harnesses words. Elaborate rhyme schemes are set up like hurdles and then dashed through mechanically. Every verse is a blitz, every feature is a flex. His idea of a personality is constant pantomime: the grandiosity of Rick Ross, the mise-en-scene of JAY-Z, the bounce of A Boogie, his fellow Bronxer and labelmate. Don Q knows the right signifiers but fails to channel their significance, for himself or the listener.
The beats drive home Don Q’s identity crisis. He favors exactly two production styles: lush, pensive lounge joints and booming, trap-tinged slappers. Functionally, this means that he’s either going deep or going in and he excels at neither. When he goes deep, he raps slower and emphasizes his husky voice. The twinkly arpeggios and looped strings on “Words of Wisdom” are Maybach Music kitsch. Title track “Don Talk” is built from the same template, and on it Don Q goes full paranoiac, questioning the loyalty of friends as he evokes cinematic opulence. When Don Q goes in, he pirates ad-libs and traffics in tropes. “True Or Not” is peppered with the growled overdubs of Young Dolph; “Puddle of Water” cribs multiple Future yelps; “Trap Phone” recruits 2016 Desiigner. Riffs and modulations of established styles have sparked some of rap’s most exciting turns, but Don Q is neither charting new territories nor deconstructing sounds. He’s just... here.
Don Q is a diminutive of Donald Quilio, but Don Q is clearly both a nickname and an ambition. The Don Q of Don Talk strives for boss-hood and respect; he wants to be a capo but a more interesting journey might have been self-discovery. Don Talk posits Don Q as self-made and weary from his come-up, but his music has no arc. There’s no real sense of what he’s been made from or into, where he’s come from, where he wants to go, or where he is. A decade’s worth of assorted rap battles and lo-fi home videos show a scrappy guy using rap to assert himself and goof off. There’s no guarantee that that guy is any more intriguing than the dull Don Q of Don Talk, but there was personality in his blemishes. What’s his corner story? | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Highbridge The Label | March 29, 2018 | 5.2 | f39fad50-e103-4881-9ba6-26addc180d34 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The enigmatic Liverpool band returns with an album heavy on Suicide-like groove and open-ended jams. The choice of Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never as mixer adds an additional element of experimentation. | The enigmatic Liverpool band returns with an album heavy on Suicide-like groove and open-ended jams. The choice of Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never as mixer adds an additional element of experimentation. | Clinic: Free Reign | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17291-free-reign/ | Free Reign | Now 15 years into their career, Clinic have left their surgical masks on longer than KISS initially kept on their make-up, and this rigid visual motif makes it easy to overlook the Liverpool art-rock quartet's evolution. We've grown accustomed to conflating an artist's musical progression with their changing appearances-- like when they go through a beardo phase, or get ill-advised new-wave haircuts, or start wearing guyliner. But Clinic always look like Clinic, which reinforces the idea that they always sound like Clinic. Even when the band embraced soft-pop melody and open-hearted lyricism on 2010's knowingly titled Bubblegum, it seemed to only amplify this band's inherent, ineffable strangeness.
Those masks aren't just a gimmicky extension of Clinic's name; they're also a visual manifestation of the band's meticulous approach, as they've taken a scalpel to music from the 1960s and 70s-- the Monks, Sparks, Joe Meek, krautrock-- and stitched their favorite bits into new, mutant forms. But compared to the concise structures of their six previous albums, on Free Reign, the band behaves less like surgeons and more like scientists who favor exploration and patience. The game plan this time is to switch their analog synths to the "Suicide" setting and see where the drones take them.
The more open-ended ethos also extends to the band's choice of mixer: Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Lopatin's avant-electronic soundscaping has little in common with Clinic's compact collage-rock, but his influence seems less about sound than spirit. Clinic show a greater willingness to let these songs unfurl according to their own logic and pace: The slow-percolating opener, "Misty", doesn't reveal its chiming, churchly Spiritualized-like keyboard hook until a good two minutes in, which is usually the point when Clinic are wrapping a song up. It's also the first of four songs here to crack the five-minute mark, heretofore uncharted territory in the Clinic canon.
But as Free Reign shows, when Clinic take their time, they can build up a bewitching groove. The album's twin highlights, "Miss You" and "You", are similarly titled, similarly structured, and similarly libidinous exercises in disco-Can decadence; while a touch too slow for dancefloor traction, they both get impressively freakier and funkier the longer they stretch out. "Seamless Boogie Woofie BBC2 10" works the same trick in more abbreviated form, while proving that even a chorus of "you're beautiful" can sound creepily sinister when coming from ever-enigmatic vocalist Ade Blackburn.
But if Free Reign posits Clinic as unlikely heirs to the LCD Soundsystem legacy of post-punky electro-rock, it also reveals the mess they made along the way. "See Saw" practically kills the album's momentum before it even gets going, with a maddeningly repetitious caveman stomp that sounds like a practice-space goof. "Cosmic Radiation" and "Sun and the Moon" meanwhile, offer glimpses of Clinic as jam band, with Blackburn's omnipresent melodica squawking over the former's aimless, wah-wah'ed jazz-funk rhythm, while the latter's loose blues ramble imagines the late-era Doors gone dub.
But in between Free Reign's two extremes-- of taut groove and directionless doodle-- Clinic also add to their deepening catalog of disarmingly affecting ballads with "For the Season", a wistful whisper of a song that inspires scenes of slow dances in empty ballrooms. It may be the most atypical track here, but on an album that so doggedly documents the process of experimentation, it's a welcome moment where Clinic can let down the mask and enjoy a breather. | 2012-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Domino | November 7, 2012 | 7.1 | f39fe421-6281-4afb-a8a8-7885db94399f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
By blending everyday stories with spacey beats, the Savannah rapper makes the mundane unexpectedly entrancing. | By blending everyday stories with spacey beats, the Savannah rapper makes the mundane unexpectedly entrancing. | Duwap Kaine: After the Storm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duwap-kaine-after-the-storm/ | After the Storm | Duwap Kaine is a bored teenager raised on a steady diet of memes, cartoons, Atlanta street rap, and the warbles and slurred words of Almighty So era Chief Keef, maybe the weirdest of the Chicago drill forefather’s first wave. Now 19, he was barely old enough to attend high school when his AutoTune drenched loosies first took off on SoundCloud. His 2018 mixtape Underdog is foundational to anyone immersed in airy SoundCloud rap—Lil Tecca, SoFaygo, and more consider him an influence—despite the fact that it’s a continuous stream of disjointed thoughts. He comes from Savannah, Georgia, but his music doesn’t have a particular setting. On spacey and blown-out beats, he goes over his everyday hobbies: driving his whip over the speed limit, buying new designer jeans, and securing and smoking weed like it’s a basic necessity.
If you were to listen to a single Duwap Kaine song, it might just sound like a tone deaf dude in a broom closet delivering a bunch of half-assed punchlines. He infamously said, “Family Guy I’m Peter,” on “Outside,” and 12 months later not a single person knows what it means. But the best way to experience Duwap Kaine is to click play on his SoundCloud page; eventually, it’ll unexpectedly put you into a trance like a weed edible.
His latest mixtape After the Storm should be digested similarly—you just let it run and mark the timestamps of your favorite moments. I would note the first minute of “Ludacris,” where Duwap coos (with way too much reverb), “Dance wit’ me,” over an instrumental that sounds like being slingshotted through a portal or when he picks the most petty reason to be annoyed by the girl he’s with on “25 Dollar Fanta”: “Hate this bitch she keep askin’ what my sign is.” There’s also the entirety of “The Benjamin Franklin Love Story,” a heart melting love ballad to 100 dollar bills made up of AutoTune wails cranked up to chaotic levels. It’s a tactic he picked up from Keef who embraced his lack of traditional melodic ability by emphasizing missed notes and messiness.
A few of After the Storm’s production choices can snap you out of the daze. The back to back run of drill influenced beats on “Backseat” and “No AutoTune 3” doesn’t quite work, and the hypnotic lull of the mixtape can also drag. When he’s being less playful with AutoTune, it might even put you to sleep, especially if he isn’t saying anything interesting.
Yet the more you listen to the mixtape, those punchlines and lyrics that you previously thought were insignificant begin to stick in your brain. On “Circus,” he conversationally raps, “Baby, let’s chill and watch this Netflix episode/Have you ever seen the movie Dope? I think it’s cool, lеt’s put it on,” and you’ll probably breeze right by it on your first listen. But the further you plunge into the Duwap Kaine experience, mundane moments like this somehow become hilarious in their uneventfulness.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Kaine | June 24, 2021 | 7.7 | f3a8d184-8d74-414b-985a-a0d158f59754 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A cult-favorite Portuguese electronic album from the early ’90s with a pleasantly disorienting blend of instruments and textures. | A cult-favorite Portuguese electronic album from the early ’90s with a pleasantly disorienting blend of instruments and textures. | Carlos Maria Trindade / Nuno Canavarro: Mr. Wollogallu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carlos-maria-trindade-nuno-canavarro-mr-wollogallu/ | Mr. Wollogallu | Demand for the weird, wonderful and fabulously obscure has become so acute among record collectors that mythical lost albums now turn up on our shelves with a suspicious frequency. Mr. Wollogallu, freshly reissued by Barcelona label Urpa i Musell, ticks most of the boxes for this type of release—scarcity, exclusivity and a small but rabid fan base ready to talk up the record’s significance on Discogs. Better still, the album comes with a compelling lightning-in-a-bottle backstory: Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro were staples of the 1980s Portuguese rock scene who came together in 1990 to record this, their only collaboration.
And the music? Mr. Wollogallu doesn’t necessarily deliver the lightbulb-popping feeling of revelation that many Anglo-American listeners seek in reissues of, say, 1970s Brazilian electronic music or Japanese ambient sounds. In fact, its combination of globally disparate instruments—everything from an Okinawa flute to an African mbira—with vintage electronic production techniques fits squarely into the “Fourth World” aesthetic that Jon Hassell pioneered in the early ’80s on celebrated albums like Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics.
Luckily, Trindade and Canavarro also share Hassell’s compositional and melodic gifts. The chord patterns on many of the album’s 13 songs toy with the listeners’ feelings like kittens and string, plunging us from light into dark (as on “Guiar,” where an overly jaunty guitar riff takes a swift, melancholic tumble) or teasing the light at the end of an emotional tunnel. At times, notably on “Ven 5” and “Segredos M.,” these changes have a wonderfully dramatic feel, reminiscent of the most accomplished soundtrack music.
Dig a little deeper, and it is Mr. Wollogallu’s subtle textures that linger. Aside from the solo piano piece “West,” each song is packed with distinct, contrasting elements. Opener “The Truth,” for example, uses marimba, strings, vibraphone, trombone, organ, vocal samples and Okinawa flute to evoke a serene excursion to—where, exactly? The song feels geographically baffling in the most rewarding way, like waking up jet-lagged and clueless in a new country. Mia Brown, a friend of the duo who was present during the album’s recording process, says in the reissue’s sleeve notes that mixing Mr. Wollogallu was a painstaking procedure, and you can hear that care in the music’s warm and perfectly balanced timbre.
Allied to this are a series of brilliant production touches that trigger a faint, lingering unease, preventing Mr. Wollogallu from becoming too self-satisfied. “Plan” features a haunting vocal effect, somewhere between a wistful sigh and a dying gasp of air, that floats around half-hidden in the song’s latter stages; “Aelux” marries a proto-Air organ melody to an unsettling vocal collage. Recording the album at their own pace, away from record company constraints, Trindade and Canavarro experimented with techniques such as sound “resampling,” “tape cutting” and “computer-controlled event reversing”—yielding the alien organ tones that introduce “S. Louise,” or the way “Em Bou-Saada” dissolves into an entirely new song in its closing moment, like a sonic mirage.
Ultimately, Mr. Wollogallu’s faults mean it's not quite a classic, lost or otherwise—the seven-minute “Blu Terra” is an atmosphere looking for a melody, and “West” is far too straight-laced to take off. But the record’s haunting grace is such that it’s easy to understand why a group of devoted listeners remain fixed on its charms, nearly three decades on. | 2018-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Urpa i musell | January 12, 2018 | 7 | f3ad5680-25d8-4f35-8f0e-74a86cde3e5a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Damon Albarn, former Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea are the core of this album of West African-style funk and psychedelia. | Damon Albarn, former Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea are the core of this album of West African-style funk and psychedelia. | Rocket Juice & the Moon: Rocket Juice and the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16365-rocket-juice-the-moon/ | Rocket Juice and the Moon | Rocket Juice & the Moon is one of three albums steered by former Blur frontman Damon Albarn scheduled for release before this summer. For a presumably rich man, he keeps busy. He also understands the value of what I like to call the "container." The container is a set of limitations, an acknowledgement that on any given project there's no feasible way to have it all, and attempting to have it all is one of the first steps to failure. This is why the idea of "fusion" food may seem exhausting to you, or why art that professes to "defy genre" tends to end up "sucking."
Blur's most celebrated album, Parklife, was basically a series of vignettes written in different styles, and Albarn's career since has taken the same tack on an album-to-album and band-to-band scale: The sneaker-store electro of Gorillaz, the African blues of Mali Music, the moody dub-folk of The Good, the Bad & the Queen. He's worked on four film soundtracks and a couple of operas. His approach to his art has been more like a film director's than a musician's, marked by collaboration, variety, and the attitude that it's the overall trajectory of his career-- rather than any one album-- that will define him.
The core of Rocket Juice-- an album of West African-style funk and psychedelia-- is Albarn, former Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. As someone who has always appreciated RHCP's clean sound as temporary relief from the muddy, red-state testicle rock generally favored by my gym's sound system, Flea's involvement here is a plus. Like Allen, he is a precise, powerful player but also a nimble one, and it's their back-and-forth that defines the album's feel: Light, skipping, controlled, but slightly off-balance, the sound of a wind-up toy tottering along the sidewalk.
Twelve of RJ's 18 tracks are under three minutes long, and most function as groove capsules, sketches, ditties, many of them anchored by funny sound effects and synthesizer noises, many without a central lyric or melody. While bands are free to break the mold whenever they like, my sense is that there's an internal friction between this group's loose, jammy approach and the lengths of the tracks, which don't really have time to work up to anything. Parts of the album feel like a continuous segue with no point of arrival. There are exceptions. Erykah Badu guests on "Hey Shooter", and Albarn enlists a handful of African rappers and singers, including a few from the Africa Express exchange program: Ghana's M.anifest and M3nsa, and Mali's Fatoumata Diawara. But RJ is, as far as I can tell, designed to sound loose and off-the-cuff, sort of like a party-- and like a party, it's more concerned with collective atmosphere than any single performance. The result is that the lesser-known performers here end up sounding more like placeholders than specific people: male rapper, female crooner.
It's when Albarn sings that the album seems to break its own mold. Despite the variety of styles he's worked in over the years, there is an easy 80-minute CD-R waiting to be made of pretty, dog-eared, rainy-day songs like "Poison", starting with Parklife's "Badhead", moving through The Great Escape's "Yuko and Hiro", and stopping at just about every one of his projects up through Gorillaz's 2010 single "On Melancholy Hill". What to make of songs like "Poison" in this context, though, I'm not sure: It's one of the album's more singular, coherent moments, but it's also when RJ's container starts to feel leaky.
RJ takes its cues from Fela Kuti, Funkadelic, Sun Ra, and scads of African artists-- most of them from Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries on the western coast-- compiled or reissued over the past 15 years. Good. Okay then-- the album knows what it's doing. But as someone who confesses to having a hard time getting through hour after hour of open-ended funk jams, someone who has always been suspicious of the idea that I need to listen more patiently to every second of every Sun Ra or Funkadelic or Fela album in order to really feel the full cosmic power of the grooves, Rocket Juice & the Moon feels like a decent record, but an unfocused, meandering one-- an album, ironically, contained by its lack of containers. | 2012-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Honest Jon’s | March 13, 2012 | 6.1 | f3b31008-3272-4a47-a3f1-34fbb2be71f8 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On Jamie Teasdale’s third solo album, the UK musician balances razor-sharp bass music with beatless electronic sketches that could double as science-fiction soundtracks. | On Jamie Teasdale’s third solo album, the UK musician balances razor-sharp bass music with beatless electronic sketches that could double as science-fiction soundtracks. | Kuedo: Infinite Window | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kuedo-infinite-window/ | Infinite Window | Kuedo’s decade-plus as dubstep’s most devoted Vangelis fan paid off when the English producer was hired, along with Flying Lotus, to soundtrack the anime short Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 in 2017. It’s tantalizing to wonder what he might have done for the actual sequel to 1982’s Blade Runner, 2017’s Denis Villeneuve-directed Blade Runner 2049. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score did the job it was supposed to do, but what might the movie have sounded like if Villeneuve and collaborators had tapped the wealth of contemporary electronic artists capable of summoning the mood of the original’s rain-soaked robo-jazz dirges?
The three albums that Jamie Teasdale has put out as Kuedo since leaving the considerably gnarlier dubstep duo Vex’d all follow the basic formula of throwing drums on top of synths inspired by the throbbing scores that were Vangelis and Tangerine Dream’s métier in the ’80s. His third album, Infinite Window, sounds even more like a soundtrack than its predecessors. While “Harlequin Hallway,” “Time Glides,” and “Shadow Dance” are razor-sharp UK-bass bangers with snares that glint like katana steel, most of the rhythmic legwork is done by sequencers, basslines, and assorted synthesized palpitations that build a tremendous sense of anticipation without necessarily going anywhere. Teasdale has always included short ambient interludes on his records, but this is the first time that purely atmospheric, dancefloor-agnostic music has played such a central role. The record’s second half is almost entirely drumless except for short bursts of “Infinite Window” and “Skybleed Magic,” and Teasdale bleeds the tracks together enough for it to feel almost like a “The Long One”- or “The Ninth Wave”-style second-side suite.
A lot of the tracks are short and simple, with two or three sharply drawn sounds playing off each other. Sometimes this approach is effective, as on “Encounter (Vanish),” whose melody is just a little too prickly to be reassuring, and “Cracked Panel Glass,” which visualizes a horrifying death in space through a magnificent blast of static interference. On the slighter side are “Slipping Through Our Fingers,” on which a circling sequencer is finally joined by a rudimentary melody and a beat, and the glassy rumination “Paradise Water.” It’s clear that Teasdale has chosen to use his pro-level acumen for sound design to make everything appear crisp and sharp rather than to create sounds humans have never heard before. This was also true of his previous music, but with fewer drums to play off and less time for these ideas to develop, there’s not as much for these sounds to do, and they don’t always add up to more than the sum of their parts.
This is Kuedo’s shortest album, with the fewest tracks—11 in 39 minutes. Though the titles suggest a preoccupation with time (“Slipping Through Our Fingers,” “Time Dances,” “Never (Para Sempre)”), Infinite Window might have benefited from being longer, allowing more time for the listener to luxuriate in its washes of astral sound. It feels a bit like a collection of sketches, and indeed, a good chunk of Infinite Window was culled from an earlier, uncompleted Kuedo album. As much as Infinite Window approximates the beauty and brilliance of the Blade Runner soundtrack at its best, it’s also a reminder that that soundtrack has never been released in full; even the 25th anniversary edition failed to include the unedited title theme. Even the best soundtracks tend to be a bit jerky when heard front to back, with classics like A Charlie Brown Christmas and Superfly including “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “Junkie Chase” alongside some of the most wonderful music you’ll ever hear. Infinite Window evokes that same whiplash. | 2022-08-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | August 1, 2022 | 6.9 | f3c039ba-921a-45b8-9a5a-915a94bb233f | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Talking Heads’ most approachable album embraced love, family, and pop music, celebrating the same simple joys they’d once approached with a sense of fear and alienation. | Talking Heads’ most approachable album embraced love, family, and pop music, celebrating the same simple joys they’d once approached with a sense of fear and alienation. | Talking Heads: Little Creatures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talking-heads-little-creatures/ | Little Creatures | Early in their career, Talking Heads seemed to be a manifestation of frontman David Byrne’s physiology: lean, angular, and severe. Journalists loved to point out his resemblance to Psycho’s clean-cut villain Norman Bates, especially when writing about their enduring first hit “Psycho Killer.” It was far too easy an observation, and one Byrne resented.
Having sprouted at Rhode Island School of Design and relocated to New York in the mid-’70s, Talking Heads were wedged between two worlds: They were artsy outliers of the punk community too clean-cut and high-minded to really blend in at CBGB, yet too odd for listeners accustomed to a steady diet of Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. A few early singles like “Psycho Killer” and “Life During Wartime” snuck onto the charts by the end of the ’70s, buried under glossy hits by ABBA, Bee Gees, and Michael Jackson. Listening to their early catalog now, it’s clear their sense of melody didn’t get enough credit. Byrne didn’t have the easy star appeal of Barry Gibb, but by 1985, when Talking Heads released their sixth studio album Little Creatures, they’d become more melodic, more relatable: They’d made a pop album.
“It’s so much fun to be able to relax and just play without feeling you have to be avant-garde all the time,” bassist Tina Weymouth told The New York Times’ Ken Emerson in May 1985, one month before the album’s release. “We spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know what original is anymore.” Readers wouldn’t completely understand what she meant until July, when Little Creatures reached No. 20 on the Billboard 200. After a decade in which they’d produced five pivotal LPs, each more unexpected than the last, Talking Heads had laid down their most approachable album ever.
Little Creatures is a triumphant pop document that celebrates life’s simple joys, the exact thing Talking Heads once weaponized. By this point, the band had already run the gamut of creative endeavors. In addition to their hugely influential discography, they’d worked extensively with Brian Eno, recorded an expansive live album (1982’s The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads), and collaborated with director Jonathan Demme on the groundbreaking and now-classic concert film Stop Making Sense. Critics keenly traced the arc of their success from RISD art obsessives to downtown punk affiliates to a 10-piece band of Afrobeat enthusiasts. Talking Heads’ love of funk and Afrobeat is alive and well on this album, evident in Weymouth’s walloping basslines and a smattering of hand drums; they also experiment with country western pedal steel (on “Creatures of Love”), bubbling synths (“Walk It Down”), and drumline snare (“Road to Nowhere”). But Little Creatures was about a lot more than a new batch of instruments in the studio.
In a 1985 review, Rolling Stone insisted that Little Creatures was “the sound of David Byrne falling in love with normalcy.” Normalcy existed throughout Talking Heads’ catalog (what could be more normal than “buildings” and “food”?), but Little Creatures is their first album to examine one of normalcy’s most complicated and significant corners: Procreative sex and parental love. Such milestones in Byrne’s own life—marriage with his then-girlfriend, artist Adelle Lutz, and the birth of their daughter, Malu—were still a few years away. Meanwhile, Talking Heads’ wedded rhythm section, Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, had a little creature of their own: Their son Robin arrived in 1982. Byrne didn’t immediately rush to write a song about him. “David’s so funny,” Frantz told Rolling Stone’s Christopher Connelly in 1983. “He sort of wants to hold the baby, but he’ll never say, ‘Can I hold the baby?’ We just say, ‘David, would you like to hold the baby?’ And David gets all stiff, like, ‘Am I doing it right?’”
By 1985, Byrne had caught the baby bug. Little Creatures is a celebration of love, procreation, and all the normal things Byrne used to treat with a sense of fear and alienation (this is a man who once sang: “They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time”). In a brief documentary from 1979, Byrne sits, half in shadow, criticizing other rock’n’rollers for singing about everyday life in “rather mythic terms.” “People get very emotional about these, sort of, very mundane things,” Byrne says. “Grand events very rarely happen.” By the time Talking Heads wrote Little Creatures, grand events were happening every day—every second, even. On the calm and clean “Creatures of Love,” Bryne does nothing but marvel at the mundane. “Well, I’ve seen sex and I think it’s alright/It makes those little creatures come to life,” he sings. “Little creatures of love/With two arms and two legs/From a moment of passion/Now they cover the bed.” Looking outside of himself, Byrne found beauty in Frantz and Weymouth’s little family.
Mid-album romp “Stay Up Late” is a far more jarring display of Byrne’s sudden fascination with toddlers. Driven by Jerry Harrison’s punching keyboard and big stadium drums, it’s the goofiest entry in Talking Heads’ catalog to date. Byrne demolishes any remaining scrap of stoicism: “Cute. Cute. Little baby/Little pee pee. Little toes,” he babbles. The song was a hit, parking on the charts for a full 10 weeks thanks to its fun, bouncing form: simple, rubbery bass, a lyrical nod to the Temptations, and a sing-along chorus. Perhaps Byrne’s paternal affections made him a more approachable frontman than the paranoid beanpole of yore. Still, no amount of artistic brilliance can justify the lyrics “little pee pee.”
“Stay Up Late” is the album’s most literal song. Little Creatures functions best when Byrne speaks in relatable abstractions, allowing the band to translate them into expansive and buoyant pop songs. Opener “And She Was” and “The Lady Don’t Mind” are prime examples. They seem driven by Byrne’s unique approach to love, affectionate but not possessive. Amid the prickly guitar riffs, brass accents, and woodblock of “And She Was,” he observes a woman at her “pleasant elevation,” in awe of her ability to just be. On “The Lady Don’t Mind,” he calmly watches her travel from place to place, admiring her autonomy from afar. The verses are slithering and mysterious, flecked with hand percussion and winding guitar licks, perhaps a nod to this woman’s independent nature. But when the chorus bursts open, Byrne is ecstatic: “I like this curious feeling!” he sings. This is the sound of Talking Heads when their leader is hopelessly in love.
In 1985, Little Creatures sounded like nothing Talking Heads had ever done before, and its staggering closer, “Road to Nowhere,” could be called their first proper anthem. It is simply enormous, with a gospel choir lead-in, Frantz’s one-man marching band, and an accordion slinking all over the place. It’s a vast, victorious ballad that builds and builds. Its titular road feels particularly significant: It is a device Byrne had once derided as just another way rock music made banality sound melodramatic. “Every trip down the highway was a huge experience,” he quipped in 1979, explaining his desire to treat such stimuli with realistic proportions. Just a few years later, he took his own trip, a metaphor for our journey through the great unknown.
Little Creatures went on to sell over 2 million copies in the United States, becoming Talking Heads’ most successful studio album. Many critics attributed their aptitude for arena-sized pop songs to Frantz and Weymouth’s disco-tinged side project Tom Tom Club, but in retrospect, the band’s fate was sealed from the beginning. Tangled in the barbs of early albums like Talking Heads 77 and Fear of Music were jagged pop songs made all the more interesting by their lack of sheen and manipulation of convention. On Little Creatures, Talking Heads polished every surface of their sound. It wasn’t so much a step in the right direction as an inevitable conclusion for a band who, like everyone, must embrace adulthood at some point. Little Creatures is not Talking Heads’ best album, but it is their case for aging gracefully, and with great fondness for life. | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | April 23, 2020 | 8 | f3c41d79-2052-40d7-a571-e82adb33390f | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The glitch legend puts his past in context on lush, unabashedly beautiful pieces created with painstaking sample processing. | The glitch legend puts his past in context on lush, unabashedly beautiful pieces created with painstaking sample processing. | Oval: Romantiq | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oval-romantiq/ | Romantiq | If you’re worried about the fate of your favorite musicians in the face of AI, consider the case study that is Markus Popp. In the early 1990s, recording under the name Oval, Popp became synonymous with the concept of glitch: electronic music featuring prominent elements stuttering and repeating like a worn compact disc that had been dropped too many times.
Oval started off as a group and condensed until it was just Popp, all on his texturally fractured lonesome. As time passed, that delirious ambient glitch style—Oval’s signature, even if employed by other musicians—was beset by a plight more dire than mere ubiquity. Glitch became easily available to the least self-motivated producers through a growing assortment of push-button software plug-ins, as well as through hardware emulation. And it’s only gotten easier to achieve; today’s tools promise “glitches and stutters similar to a scratched CD” and “steady rhythmic glitching reminiscent of a skipping CD player.” Sometimes the revolution isn’t televised; it’s productized.
Popp took a lengthy break from releasing music, almost a full decade, following 2001’s Ovalcommers, which came out the same year that Björk’s Vespertine sampled Oval’s 1994 album Systemisch. When Popp returned in 2010, he largely jettisoned glitch in favor of a deep engagement with the very technique that had rendered him easily mimicked: software emulation. This revival began with the one-two punch of an EP (Oh) and double LP (O), and has proceeded through a cascade of releases, culminating this year with Romantiq, perhaps the most beautiful album Popp has produced in this second phase of his career.
What’s helpful to understand about Oval’s instrumentation is that it is the result not merely of sampling, in the cut-and-paste sense, but of the highly precise reworking and simulation of musical instruments: the ability to craft what can seem real but are, at their core, digital implements. Oval pushes these playable software simulacra from the realm of the ordinary into the hyperreal, submitting them to demanding sequences and processing them beyond the physics of everyday reality, in turn weakening the wall between digital and tactile. “Rytmy,” Romantiq’s second track, is built atop a repetitive piano part that would challenge even indefatigable minimalists like Nils Frahm and Hania Rani. It then layers in an addictively funky organ bit. “Okno,” Romantiq’s most expansive entry, animates a full orchestra as if through a continuously shifting and fogging lens. It’s a blurry cybernetic fantasia, all dream-sequence weirdness.
Romantiq doesn’t dispose of the past. It just situates old habits amid a more vibrant and fully realized present. The record opens, in fact, with the same sounds that filled Oval’s post-hiatus Oh back in 2010: sharp, bright, impossibly perfect pizzicato. These digitized plectrum elements—each intricate in its extreme three-dimensionality—have the quality of brittle, tightly wound guitar strings. They crackle and spark at Popp’s command, teeming in swarms of rigorously delicate effervescence. Whereas on Oh they became the focus of experimental miniatures, here they get subsumed by lush ambient beds. Likewise, if you’re truly hungry for old-school glitch, in addition to the opening trembling of “Okno” there is “Amethyst,” which whirls and falters like it’s 1999.
The album’s cover is a still image from video work by artist Robert Seidel, with whom Popp collaborated on an early version of Romantiq as an audio-visual projection for the opening of the German Romanticism Museum in Frankfurt—hence, no doubt, the symphonic semblance of “Okno” and the highly distorted opera singer sampled to gaseous effect on the opening track, “Zauberwort,” not to mention the horn piping through “Wildwasser” and the flute (or “flute”) in “Glockenton.” The latter deserves a close listen to how the flute frays and transmogrifies as the piece unfolds. While the composition isn’t the album’s best work, the effect is a testament to Popp’s prowess. And despite the title’s appeal to human connection, Romantiq largely disposes with recognizable singing (in contrast with 2021’s Ovidono and 2013’s Calidostópia!), opting for light touches, like the sublimated vocoder quality of “Cresta.”
It’s been 30 years since Oval debuted in 1993 with Wohnton, which included glimpses of the glitch yet to come. What Popp has managed, in the ensuing decades, is to develop such a profound approach to digital music-making that it has relegated his earlier work to a footnote, just one tool in his programmable toolbox. | 2023-05-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Thrill Jockey | May 16, 2023 | 7.4 | f3c7bd1f-b019-455e-825e-26d69e9140fc | Marc Weidenbaum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-weidenbaum / | |
Label woes finally resolved, the Catalonian quartet gets its frustrations off its chest on its third album, showcasing a newfound maturity of songcraft without sacrificing youthful energy. | Label woes finally resolved, the Catalonian quartet gets its frustrations off its chest on its third album, showcasing a newfound maturity of songcraft without sacrificing youthful energy. | Mourn: Sorpresa Familia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mourn-sorpresa-familia/ | Sorpresa Familia | Mourn’s third full-length, Sorpresa Familia, arrives at the tail end of a professional rough patch for the Catalonian indie quartet. A year before the release of 2016’s stark Ha, Ha, He., the band went public with allegations of mismanagement on the part of their Spanish label, Sones, which Mourn accused of non-payment of income and holding the released album “hostage.” Since then, both parties have parted ways. Sorpresa Familia (which translates to “Surprise Family” in Spanish) is the resulting chronicle of the group’s frustration and eventual resolution.
Amid the lyrics’ allusions to lost investments, tour mishaps, and divorce, Sorpresa Familia conveys the kind of angry passion that comes with working through your shit. The album—unquestionably Mourn’s tightest and strongest release to date—is the latest and most aggressive progression in sound for these four very young people (co-vocalists and guitarists Carla Pérez Vas and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno, the band’s oldest members, were born in 1996). Their 2015 self-titled debut possessed a dark swagger, and Ha, Ha, He. moved Mourn’s sound into the colder territory of post-punk, but Sorpresa Familia cuts a distinctly punkish figure, the brisk pace bolstered by Antonio Postius’ ferocious drumming. There’s a level of unbothered confidence on display, which often comes from getting older and realizing your true strengths.
Mourn have previously shown that they know their way around a melody or two, but even by those standards Sorpresa Familia bursts with color. There’s a greater emphasis on melodic intricacy and detail, from the wistful, winding guitar lines of “Epilogue” to the rolling harmonies on “Candle Man,” which builds to the band’s biggest chorus to date. Even the stop-start lurch of “Doing It Right,” which in its closing seconds thrashes in a way recalling Danish punk heroes Iceage, is cut with guitar hooks that dart and weave like scrambling fighter jets. In their short careers thus far, Mourn have already proved that they can make urgent, punk-infused indie practically in their sleep. Sorpresa Familia’s strongest moments showcase a maturity of songcraft without sacrificing their youthful intensity.
The sole breather on Sorpresa Familia is the brief, haunting centerpiece “Orange,” a sub-two-minute cut that features just a few silvery guitars, Vas and Rodriguez’s distant vocals, and some controlled percussive explosions from Postius. It’s a lovely curveball that shows a different side of Mourn, and also recalls the similar versatility of 2000s Brighton rockers Electrelane. Throughout that band’s decade-long career, they continually refined their punk-meets-post-rock sound and consistently moved with ease between loud chaos and contemplative quiet. The songwriting on Sorpresa Familia suggests a similar trajectory for Mourn. If they could survive label hell to make a record like this, who knows what they’ll be capable of next time around. | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | June 21, 2018 | 7.7 | f3cbae1d-e998-40d2-98a9-d8ee98d71a84 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Vivian Girls' third LP, recorded at the home studio of Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, finds them experimenting with self-referential songwriting and guitar solos. | Vivian Girls' third LP, recorded at the home studio of Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, finds them experimenting with self-referential songwriting and guitar solos. | Vivian Girls: Share the Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15233-share-the-joy/ | Share the Joy | Good ol' brevity-- the soul of wit and arguably the Vivian Girls' greatest asset on their 2008 debut LP. That record honored some obvious predecessors-- C86, Slumberland, and K Records to name a few-- but just as importantly, it realized that those scenes had a thing for collector's items and myth-making. Starting off with a 22-minute-long LP that was originally limited to 500 copies, Vivian Girls seemed like the kind of band that would nail it the first time, flame out, and then disappear forever. Except they didn't. Everything Goes Wrong wasn't a huge drop-off, but the reception to it was muted, suggesting that they may have started to outstay their welcome. Lo-fi was quickly becoming cliché (again) and with their seemingly endless array of guest spots, side projects, and offshoots, Vivian Girls were adding to the glut of bands doing something very similar.
I'd say they're acknowledging this situation on Share the Joy by trading brevity for novelty: Opener "The Other Girls" clocks in at six and a half minutes, over two of which are filled up with guitar soloing. It's certainly an audacious move for a band that had previously constructed a song with just one word ("No") and drew battle lines about whether technical competency-- let alone proficiency-- mattered in indie rock. But is it a good song? Not really. It never really builds toward much of anything, and Cassie Ramone isn't even noodling-- her fretboard runs are flat and stiff as dry spaghetti. But it's a fitting introduction to Share the Joy, an album that's more admirable for its willingness to stretch than its execution.
It's a record saddled with contradictions-- though it's their most uneven in terms of songwriting, the diversity oddly gives it more potential replay value than their prior records. Recorded at the home studio of Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, Share the Joy borrows that band's ambling tempos, rustic instrumentation, and frazzled guitar lines. But the breathing room often puts Vivian Girls in an unflattering mid-fi space, one neither slick enough to polish their imperfect pitch or buzzy enough to hide it.
Occasionally, Vivian Girls make discussions about songwriting and instrumental ability beside the point. Placing the chippy sock-hop sing-along "Dance (If You Wanna)" back-to-back with the brooding and sinister "Lake House" makes a good case for the band's range, while "Trying to Pretend" melds the Woodsist psychedelia and galloping punk attempted on Share the Joy's epics in half the time. And whether or not "Take It as It Comes" is the best song here, it's certainly a high point that sheds light on how they probably don't take themselves as seriously as their deadpan pose might indicate. Taking the piss out of the tattered girl-group pop mode they helped re-popularize, they pull out all the stops-- they fawn over a boy named Johnny, throw in ridiculous intra-band commentary ("Cassie-- you're always right"), and offer clichéd hooks so time-honored, they make Best Coast look obtuse by comparison. I don't know if they've got beef with ex-drummer Ali Koehler's gig with Best Coast, but "Take It as It Comes" could be seen as a winking parody by upping their boy-needy desperation to hyperbolic absurdity.
So Share the Joy is an uneven third LP, and uneven third LPs usually come from bands at the crossroads. I'm not sure that much is at stake here: Vivian Girls have managed to infiltrate a hive of likeminded and supportive artistic peers, which gives them some momentum and also what looks to an outsider like an understandable whiff of back-patting scenestership. But whether it's old band members like Koehler and Frankie Rose and the Outs or more stylized successors like Dum Dum Girls, there are an increasing number of bands beating Vivian Girls at their own game. It's easy to see Share the Joy's place in the Vivian Girls discography, but their place in indie rock as a whole is becoming less clear. | 2011-04-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-04-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 11, 2011 | 5.9 | f3d7b068-7ce3-4d03-b9b0-d37fcbf2f6aa | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
In two performances spanning nearly 15 years, the avant-garde French composer and the cellist Charles Curtis investigate the allegedly unmusical sound of the wolf tone. | In two performances spanning nearly 15 years, the avant-garde French composer and the cellist Charles Curtis investigate the allegedly unmusical sound of the wolf tone. | Éliane Radigue: Naldjorlak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eliane-radigue-naldjorlak/ | Naldjorlak | Éliane Radigue is drawn to the sound you cannot control. The French composer’s early pieces worked with electronic feedback; more recently, her Occam Ocean series has featured drone-like acoustic vibrations. In all her compositions, she observes how long-held tones waver and evolve, inviting us to tune into nearly imperceptible changes. Naldjorlak, composed with cellist Charles Curtis in 2005, was her first piece to be written for an acoustic instrument. Here, Radigue explores the cello’s wolf tone, a volatile note that’s very close to the resonant frequency of the instrument’s wooden body. A new release presents two versions of Naldjorlak—one recorded in Paris in 2006, and another in Los Angeles in 2020. In bringing these recordings together, the album presents the composition as a living, breathing document, illustrating how Radigue’s music embraces time’s unpredictability in both structure and performance.
The composition of Naldjorlak was a closely collaborative effort. In an essay that accompanies the album, Curtis recalls spending time with Radigue in Paris, where the two developed a routine of music making together. Like much of Radigue’s work, the piece isn’t notated; instead, it’s fluid, growing from a set of parameters that anticipate and respond to an unforeseeable future. To play the piece, Curtis tunes his cello to its wolf tone and pulls his bow across different parts of the instrument, giving every pitch a hazy shroud. The wolf tone occurs naturally in the cello, but like electronic feedback at an amplified performance, it’s typically considered ugly or flawed. “Tuning to the wolf tone inverts the conventional function of tuning, which is to link an individual instrument to a social norm—concert pitch,” Curtis writes. “The search for self-sameness reveals a unit of distance we would not have discovered without having attempted to bridge it.”
While the motion of each note is unpredictable, the piece moves in broad sections that explore different patterns and textures. At first, a distant grumble grows into a full, beating resonance; later, trilling hums and shrieks burst out of the instrument’s highest reaches. These phrases emerge from quiet pauses and crescendo into swarms, but their movement is so delicate that a drastic shift may go unnoticed until it’s already gone. Peer closer and those shifts establish a sense of presence: guideposts that point the way through the wavery drones.
Though each of the album’s featured recordings present this general structure, the two performances take on different moods and act as companions to one another. The 2006 recording feels eerie and dark, woven from low, faraway rumbles and chilly hums. It occupies a nervous headspace, building an anxiety that’s never quite released. The 2020 recording feels like an answer to that tension—it sounds more assured and resolute, the cello’s wolf tone taking a richer, more resonant stance. It also feels more patient: Curtis’ bowings sigh like exhales. By the end, his cello whistles and floats with breezy ease, marking a departure from the 2006 recording, in which the ending evokes the howl from which the wolf tone takes its name.
When Radigue was creating her early feedback pieces, she often wondered how to control the sound, or if it could be controlled at all. With Naldjorlak, Curtis and Radigue yield to the cello’s wolf tone, a note with an inherent instability that many players would seek to avoid or correct. Instead of working around the wolf tone, Naldjorlak celebrates it—the music pays close attention to its every aspect, placing it front and center yet allowing it to roam. In a 2009 essay titled “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” Radigue wrote: “This long journey through uncertain lands also enabled me to simply recognize what was already there, buried, hidden.” Naldjorlak serves as a reminder that if we listen closely enough, any sound can be music—and music, like all things, is changed in the current of time. | 2023-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Saltern | May 9, 2023 | 7.9 | f3e63a38-2592-4854-b3f1-e686e914e85a | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
On her debut album, the playful Canadian rapper is bossed up, horny, or lonely as she searches for a sound to match her shrugged-off swagger. | On her debut album, the playful Canadian rapper is bossed up, horny, or lonely as she searches for a sound to match her shrugged-off swagger. | Tommy Genesis : Tommy Genesis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tommy-genesis-tommy-genesis/ | Tommy Genesis | Vancouver rapper Tommy Genesis refers to her music as “fetish rap,” a pat description that doesn’t make it any less accurate. Genesis’ bars are almost exclusively hypersexual flexes on both men and women, as when she bragged of having to “take my mind off your dick” with “some yogurt covered pretzels and a pound of a clit,” from 2015’s “Angelina.” Her matching music videos often find her clad in Britney-riffing schoolgirl uniforms. As she told an interviewer in 2016 about the sort-of-joking tag, “I didn’t know how else to say, ‘You think I’m rapping, but I just sex talk.’”
Despite her charmingly bawdy personality, Genesis has never found a style strong enough to match her shrugged-off raps. As if in search of one, she has worked her way through several niche hip-hop scenes during the past few years, including Father’s delightfully crude Awful Records crew and a gothy underground rap trio called baby.daddi. With her self-titled debut album, she aims to fix that. Bolstered by seamless transitions and a handful of stomping pop-trap highlights, Tommy Genesis is a focused, brief, occasionally heavy-handed record packed with self-empowered bangers and ballads that define her musical persona more clearly than ever.
Genesis cycles through four moods here: She’s bossed up, horny, lonely, or some hellbent combination thereof. On the pugnacious “Tommy,” Genesis shoots off cocky one-liners with ease: “She drive a Ford, Tommy/She can’t afford Tommy.” The dance-oriented energizers “Bad Boy” and “Play With It” adopt a similarly aggro-yet-playful tone. With its elastic electro-pop backdrop and hard-hitting drums via producers Charlie Heat and Darnell Got It, “Play With It” has Top 40 flair and a deliciously in-your-face chorus: “Play wit’ the pussy, wanna play wit’ the pussy/Come get a hooky, baby, come get a hooky.” The same applies to the Charli XCX remix of “100 Bad,” another Heat production that finds Charli trying on a Genesis-like flow to invoke pool houses and purple Lambos.
The album’s early momentum comes from snappy transitions. Most of these songs are clipped at the end, so they flow into each other, giving the sequence a thrilling sense of speed. This trick spurs the rap-oriented songs along; sliding from minute-long opener “God Sent” into the twinkling pop-rap of “Rainbow” feels like moving from one raucous room at a party to the next. When Tommy Genesis tapers into guitar-driven, trap-lite ballads, that momentum falters. You forget the fingerpicked “Drive” as soon as the sing-song cadences of “It’s Ok” arrive. With diaphanous background vocals from Empress Of, “Naughty” laments a fuckboy catch-22: “I like this boy/He’s full of shit.” But with its repetitive “naughty/not enough” wordplay, the song hits a holding pattern long before its three minutes are up. Several of these tunes feel like sketches stretched to fill space.
Genesis has clearly grown into her strengths, though, dialing in a murmuring flow perfectly suited to bass-heavy beats and a brash persona unafraid of boasts. Tommy Genesis is a fun, wisely brief ride. You can now imagine Genesis landing one well-placed feature on a big-ticket song and tipping over into the mainstream. More concerned with the here and now, that’s not what she seems to want. Her invitation on the breezy, poppy closer “Miami” renders that mission plainly: “I’m living my best life/Come inside.” | 2018-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Downtown | December 1, 2018 | 7.3 | f3e6d1aa-7be3-4ae0-9ccc-da37eca9f2dc | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Dark, ominous, but still marching forth with that same bar-rock passion, the Hold Steady feel more unified, making a place for each member within their music’s newfound sprawl. | Dark, ominous, but still marching forth with that same bar-rock passion, the Hold Steady feel more unified, making a place for each member within their music’s newfound sprawl. | The Hold Steady: Open Door Policy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-hold-steady-open-door-policy/ | Open Door Policy | Like the down-and-out characters in their songs, the Hold Steady have endured some rough years. After building one of the most ardent fanbases in modern rock, the group parted ways with their keyboardist Franz Nicolay in 2010, who claimed he felt like a “fox in a hedgehog band.” While the rest of the Hold Steady come off as rock purists who love double-necked guitars, beer-and-shot specials, and Major League Baseball, Nicolay is a classically-trained polymath who writes essays about Wagner, has an MFA in fiction, and uses an Isaiah Berlin reference to explain how it feels to be in the Hold Steady. The tension between him and the hedgehogs is palpable, the way it was between the gruff genius of Pete Townshend and the pretty face of Roger Daltrey, or the prickly politics of John Lennon and the homespun warmth of Paul McCartney: These mismatches are the secret weapon of great rock‘n’roll bands.
Without their keyboardist, the Hold Steady lost, well, their foxiness. After their initial run of great albums in the 2000s, they released the middling Heaven Is Whenever (2010) and the Hüsker Dü-aping Teeth Dreams (2014). These collections felt like a crash, not a comedown, leaving their fans with no new singalong songs to become their scriptures.
When Franz returned in 2016, so did the band’s cleverness and immediacy. Frontman Craig Finn had rediscovered what the Hold Steady do so well—soaring anthems, pocked with hilarious, devastating lyrics—while pursuing his increasingly excellent solo career, and the group became a sextet for 2019’s thrilling Thrashing Thru the Passion. Their rejuvenated second act continues with Open Door Policy, an ornate record that incorporates Nicolay’s ambitious compositions as an integral part of the band’s songwriting. Passion had them recognizing, to quote a lyric, “It doesn’t have to be perfect/Just sort of has to be worth it.” On Open Door Policy, they reach for something larger: if not perfection, then music with a baroqueness we haven’t quite heard from them before.
A lot of credit should go to producer Josh Kaufman, who also helped craft the luxurious, elder statesman arrangements on Finn’s last few solo albums. Accented by female backing vocals worthy of Leonard Cohen, opener “The Feelers” guides us through a narrative about ascending a mountain to visit the glitter-dusted son of a dead plutocrat with a collection of bottled ships and a fortune “he’d amassed from being ruthless yet polite.” When some palm-muted rhythm guitar enters, Finn seems to switch narrators, and his tight, tense story slips into abstraction, as the band continues layering parts: By the end, we’re left wondering what winding mountain path led us here.
Big moments appear in surprising places on Open Door Policy. The mammoth chorus of “Spices” lands after the band winds us up with an extra verse. The Hold Steady have always shown a flair for killer codas, but with multiple guitarists and a keyboardist, the contrasts are even more dynamic. On the record’s centerpiece, “Unpleasant Breakfast,” for example, riffs from guitarists Steve Selvidge and Tad Kubler set up a rollicking, piano-led send-off that shows off Nicolay’s skill for wide-ranging pastiche.
The person who sometimes takes a backseat, surprisingly, is Finn. Among the most engrossing, poignant lyricists of the 21st century, he’s strayed gradually from the specifics of the Hold Steady’s breakout concept album, 2005’s Separation Sunday. Here, his writing varies, from the blurry impressions of “The Prior Procedure” to the taut, almost Chekhovian tale of a doomed love affair on “Me and Magdalena.” What Finn has left behind is the sense that he’s clamoring for our attention with each joke and clever observation, and instead, he seems to think more consciously about how the band’s detailed playing might fill in the gaps in his sing-speaking. He spikes classic Hold Steady imagery with contemporary unease—a “crucifixion tattoo” covers “some hardline thunder/All dressed in the red, white and blue.” There are a few references to Finn’s latest geographical fixation—Scranton, Pennsylvania where a couple of the record’s characters hail from—and a newfound fascination with the West Coast, a dream for people who are “stuck out in the middle” and “figure that there’s something you’re missing.”
The true innovation on Open Door Policy, though, is one of the Hold Steady as a whole: how they play together, and what they coax out of the material by drawing our attention to musical textures as much as they do lyrical motifs. However often the band has been saddled with being “earnest,” their way of contrasting rock‘n’roll catharsis with personal devastation is also inherently ironic. This sense is more obvious than ever on Open Door Policy, in which descriptions of a woman “throwing up” and then covering it “with sawdust” are overlaid with a chorus of “Woo!,” and songs usually peak at the moment when characters are making their worst decisions. Finn’s people are software developers doubting the ethics of their jobs, aging small-towners dreaming of escape while remembering that “the doctor said he only wants to help me make more healthy decisions.” Meanwhile, a soundtrack of blisteringly happy guitar music plays in the background, their feelings totally out of sync with the grim realities of their lives.
Just before Nicolay left and the Hold Steady entered their difficult early 2010s, Kubler became ill with a case of alcohol-induced pancreatitis and was forced to sober up. “It can be really hard,” the guitarist, who writes much of the Hold Steady’s music, told Pitchfork in 2014. “When the rest of the band is six drinks into the evening and you’re not.” Years later, their lifestyles may be more far-flung than ever—a few have kids, one opened a bar in Brooklyn for fans of Minnesota sports teams—yet the Hold Steady also feel more unified, making a place for each member within their music’s newfound sprawl. If only the band’s characters could learn the qualities that are letting these rock survivors plow on as they all reach the middle-most regions of middle age—their empathy, their sanguine resolve, and their ability to work as a collective: to part ways, and then to come together, with no love lost.
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. | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers | February 24, 2021 | 7.6 | f3ed4687-a098-4344-a090-02b7583359cb | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The godfather of grime’s back-to-basics swan song isn’t just a celebration of his 20 year career—it’s a victory lap for grime at large. | The godfather of grime’s back-to-basics swan song isn’t just a celebration of his 20 year career—it’s a victory lap for grime at large. | Wiley: Godfather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22815-godfather/ | Godfather | To the casual listener, grime might seem like a once-dormant genre in the midst of a revival. But truth be told, the hybrid of hip-hop and UK garage never went anywhere—the only thing that changed was the genre’s visibility. Ever since grime’s emergence on British pirate radio at the turn of the millennium, the UK mainstream (not to mention American listeners) has tended to pay attention to the genre only when it produces a charismatic star. Wiley knows this better than most. He was a chief architect of grime’s early sound (his tracks were among the first to be labeled “grime”), assembled the seminal Roll Deep crew, helped his protégé Dizzee Rascal become grime’s first breakout artist and later, pushed the genre even deeper into the mainstream with a string of successful club-pop singles. He’s somehow managed to weather the interest of a fickle public for two full decades, though he has plenty of scars to show for it. In response to allegations of selling out, he’s spent a good deal of his career apologizing for and actively disowning any attempts he’s made to court a wider audience, though his frequent course-corrections have sometimes felt more like self-sabotage. He’s a survivor, if not a particularly triumphant one.
Given this history, you’d think Wiley would be frustrated to find that the latest wave of grime artists have arrived at success far more easily and on their own terms: for today’s emcees, staying true to grime’s sound and topping the charts are hardly mutually exclusive. Instead, Wiley seems reinvigorated by his peers' achievements, especially those of Skepta, the latest of his mentees to follow in Dizzee’s footsteps, Mercury Prize and all. Supposedly his parting gift to the culture he helped birth, Godfather finds Wiley attempting to pull off the same trick that Skepta did with Konnichiwa: a lifer goes back to his roots and channels the energy of a hungry upstart. It’s a tall order for a rapper pushing 40 but Godfather largely delivers, feeling at once like a return to form for Wiley and a celebration of grime’s foundational sound.
Part of the album’s success stems from its single-minded focus. Unlike many of Wiley's albums, Godfather tends to cut to the chase, that being manic, double-time rapping over chirpy 140 bpm beats. Production has always been Wiley’s primary strength but on Godfather, he mostly absolves himself of those duties, turning over the boards to young upstarts like Preditah and Swifta Beater, as well as seasoned vets like Rude Kid. Still, each of these collaborators works in service of the overarching mission: songs that update Wiley’s blocky “eskibeat” sound using modern production techniques.
Wiley has never been a great rapper per se, but on every song here he shows up with a surplus of energy, confidence and charisma. On the frantic “Bait Face,” he goes bar-for-bar with his old crewmate Scratchy without breaking a sweat. He sounds right at home on the torch-passing posse cut “Name Brand,” which brings together Roll Deep member J2K with Jme and Frisco from Boy Better Know. On tracks like “Birds N Bars” and “Can’t Go Wrong,” he borrows Skepta’s breathless flow but cuts it with a halting, staccato delivery. There are, of course, a few corny one-liners scattered throughout the record (“I stand out like one break light,” “Fresh out the oven like a Sunday roast,” “You’re plain, I’m the loaded nachos”) and even an entire song dedicated to his MacBook Pro (“Laptop”). However, at this point in Wiley’s career, it’s hard for this stuff to read as anything but endearingly goofy, more like dad jokes than genuine missteps.
Ultimately, Godfather is a thoroughly enjoyable record, one that manages to leverage grime’s elemental sounds in a way that feels vital and forward-looking. Sure, its peaks might not be quite as high as those of Konnichiwa, the record that it’s bound to be measured against (Skepta’s mastery of the massive, shout-along hook continues to give him an edge). But for anyone who’s ever rooted for Wiley, it’s a deeply satisfying listen. After all, until recently, Wiley disowned not just the “godfather of grime” nickname but the term “grime” altogether. And here he is, unapologetically owning his influence, toasting to his peers’ successes and claiming his rightful place as grime’s elder statesman. Who knows if Godfather is actually Wiley’s final solo album—we’ve certainly heard that one from him before. But if it is, he can step away knowing that his legacy has been secured. | 2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | CTA | January 31, 2017 | 7.4 | f3fbfdf9-6827-4f34-b07c-ebb0effbf4e7 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Second album from two members of defunct slowcore outfit Duster contains a wider range of emotions than its predecessor, showcasing surprisingly sharp (but sedated) pop chops carefully preserved in amber. | Second album from two members of defunct slowcore outfit Duster contains a wider range of emotions than its predecessor, showcasing surprisingly sharp (but sedated) pop chops carefully preserved in amber. | Helvetia: The Acrobats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11526-the-acrobats/ | The Acrobats | Not much changes in the space station Jason Albertini and Canaan Dove Amber call home. After a decade of producing celestial music unperturbed by outside stimuli, the duo's heavenly stare remains unwavering, their minds still blown by how, like, huge the universe is, man. But while their former band Duster felt content to drift through the universe in near suspended animation, Albertini and Amber are willing to make spin-off project Helvetia sweat for its cosmic bliss. Their 2006 debut The Clever North Wind barely had a pulse, but the uneasy psych leanings and dark moods made the album anything but a stroll through the galaxy. Building off that, The Acrobats culls an even wider range of emotions from the band's combined sigh, showcasing surprisingly sharp (but sedated) pop chops carefully preserved in amber.
It's no secret that scintillating guitar parts provide the fuel for Helvetia's space odyssey. On Acrobats, they're not afraid to set their axes to warp speed, even if it means sacrificing some of the lo-fi minimalism they're loved for. With guest appearances from veteran jamsters like Built to Spill's Brett Nelson and ex-Dinosaur Jr. bassist Mike Johnson, they're more than capable of pulling off densely layered gems like "Blasting Carolina", a kaleidoscopic epic traversing folk, glam, and sunny psych-pop. Standout track "Old New Bicycle" may carry the requisite stoner vibe associated with these guys, but it's more white soul than jam band. "Honest Gods" and "Summer" carry a similarly geeky libido, sounding too mathematical to be legitimately cool but, like equally stiff-postured acts the Walkmen or Kings of Convenience, pulling off the pop hooks all the same.
So where does all this fretboard brio leave the vocals? Well, for the most part, buried six feet under the mix. When there isn't a nifty effect like the tube radio crooning on "The Fever" or "Honest Gods"'s chipmunk-pitched harmonies, the melodies unfold pretty inconspicuously. Fortunately a three-note range goes a long way in Helvetia's brand of molasses pop, but when some of these songs do feel like boiling over (and yes, some actually do), the vocals aren't up to the task. That said, Acrobats proves a surprisingly engaging album from musicians who by all respects could be switching on autopilot at this point in their careers. Instead, they produce their catchiest piece of work to date while still keeping their riffs plentiful and their altitude at a steady 500,000 feet. | 2008-06-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-06-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Static Cult | June 3, 2008 | 6.7 | f40bb591-15ea-4530-965f-c576b4842df0 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
The Swedish singer and producer Thea Gustafsson’s latest EP creates a singular, cosmopolitan pop mood that is at once stylish and vulnerable. | The Swedish singer and producer Thea Gustafsson’s latest EP creates a singular, cosmopolitan pop mood that is at once stylish and vulnerable. | Becky and the Birds: Trasslig EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/becky-and-the-birds-trasslig/ | Trasslig EP | Under the name Becky and the Birds, Swedish singer and producer Thea Gustafsson makes gossamer-light music threaded with R&B beats and her acrobatic, piercing falsetto. She studied at the prestigious Swedish songwriting academy Musikmakarna—even interning under EDM wunderkind Avicii—but Gustafsson resisted the formulaic pop training. Instead, she drew on the jazz and soul records of her youth to create her own stylish take, introduced on a brief 2018 self-titled EP. Embroidered with spacious beats, spoken-word segments, and slippery vocal modulations, her music adopts a lightly cinematic style to backdrop her soaring voice. On Trasslig, Gustafsson’s follow-up EP, she maintains a similar mood but brightens it up with strummed guitar and mid-tempo beats, evoking a breezy temperament that belies lyrics that explore aching vulnerability.
Gustafsson builds momentum best through her gliding melodies. Where whistle tones and other vocal feats were used more as scenery on her home-recorded debut, here she leans further into them as dramatic linchpins. On “Wondering,” she dances around a deep-pitched looped vocal and teases out vowels between words as she ponders the afterlife in an ascending melody: “Wondering where you are?/What’s it gonna be without you?” She wrote the song after her late grandmother, an inspiration she translates into a wistfulness that feels weightless and soothing. A similar sense of nostalgia colors “Pass Me By,” on which she succumbs to the “sweet surrender” of a summer romance over gentle multi-tracked vocals and a sample of Hiromasa Suzuki’s 1976 song “High-Flying.” The song graciously takes its time to unwind, extending over a minute and a half before drums roll in behind and loft it into a panoramic highlight.
Trasslig’s more earnest ballads fall flat without the same sense of movement, but Gustafsson’s risky production leaves room for surprises. The heartbroken “Paris” conjures up the sparse, acoustic moments on Frank Ocean’s Blonde, especially with Gustafsson’s voice suddenly pitched up to a high-pitched replica of Ocean’s over an organ-like synth. But when she adopts the same modulation on “Do U Miss Me,” the EP’s closing ballad, Gustafsson eventually flips the affected vocal into a backup to her own unaltered voice, melding them together in powerful harmony. Those bespoke details across Trasslig add up to their own distinct world, rendering a contemplative and tranquil look at all the complexities that come when you allow yourself to be vulnerable to your own emotions.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | July 29, 2020 | 6.9 | f40c627e-ce27-4c27-8c86-22f225ac148e | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Their fourth album revealed the band to be unparalleled pop architects. They were brilliant in the studio, crafting groovy, socialist call-to-actions with a sound from out of time and place. | Their fourth album revealed the band to be unparalleled pop architects. They were brilliant in the studio, crafting groovy, socialist call-to-actions with a sound from out of time and place. | Stereolab: Emperor Tomato Ketchup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-emperor-tomato-ketchup/ | Emperor Tomato Ketchup | Shuji Terayama’s 1971 film Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei was an abject and poetic satire of utopianism, a kind of Lord of the Flies meets Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló, in which children enslave their parents and create new world order of ritualized sex and violence. It begins with a perhaps tongue-in-cheek quote attributed to Karl Marx, a rough translation of which would be: “A focus on accumulating pleasure, not wealth, will bring capitalism down.”
By the time Stereolab took the title of the film for their 1996 album, they’d accumulated an astonishing amount of pleasure, if not wealth. While lyricist Lætitia Sadier was more of a socialist than a Marxist, the earworms like “Ping Pong” and “Peng! 33” she and polymath guitarist Tim Gane cultivated were philosophical tracts as pop tracks, deconstructing economics with pithy verse-chorus-verse structures. Since forming in 1991, Stereolab had stocked shelves with three albums, two compilations, two mini-albums, eight EPs, and thirteen singles, each beautifully packaged, uniformly excellent, and on offer in various limited editions of colored vinyl. Were the lyrics critiquing their own delivery system? Was the medium the message?
Emperor Tomato Ketchup is a close as the Lab would ever get to a definitive answer. It documents a premillennial moment in which people—jazzbos in Chicago and red mods doing the Mashed Potato in Washington, D.C., riot grrrls in the Northwest, bass cadets in Sheffield, and the chic set in Paris and the retro-futurists in Birmingham, and especially crate-diggers in Tokyo and London and New York—wondered if record collecting and community organizing might be the same thing. Yes and no, Stereolab replies. They made dialectics you can dance to, and that was revolution enough.
While their previous work explored motorik’s horizontal momentum and the aspirational levitation of exotica, ETK was something different. Like Talking Heads’ Remain in Light or LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut or Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War, the album consolidated international movements into people-pleasing new forms of funk. Its 13 tracks matched polyrhythms to political slogans with results as electrifying as the needle-on-the-record/tornado-on-the-horizon cover art the Groop nicked from a 1964 Béla Bartók LP cover.
That’s not all they nicked. Opener “Metronomic Underground” utilizes bits of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and Yoko Ono’s “Mindtrain” and Don Cherry’s “Mali Doussn’Gouni” for a jam that morphs from amiable to anxious. Live, the track became a roiling headfuck of an epic that panned around the stage’s P.A. as it doubled or tripled its recorded size. “We have about five organs lying around, all plugged in and ready to go,” Tim Gane told the LA Times when the album came out, and on “Metronomic,” they all seemed to gurgle and bubble and scream at once. Singer-guitarist Mary Hansen chants “Crazy/Sturdy/A torpedo” and Sadier intones, “Untie the tangles to be vacuous, to be infinite.” The song proved that having access to everything only works if you can get it into the groove, and that marching can be dancing if you do it right.
And vice versa: First single “Cybele’s Reverie” is named for an Anatolian goddess who inspired self-castrating male devotees to hold ecstatic raves in her honor. But this reverie isn’t much of a crowd-mover; instead, it’s wistful, like a breeze over ruins with string arrangements courtesy of new Lab technician Sean O’Hagan. “What to do when we have done everything/All read, all drunk, all eaten…when we shouted on all roofs,” Sadier asks in French. Go back to the start, Hansen suggests, her pre-verbal “ba-da-bas” and “oooohs” a kind of onomatopoeic palliative.
For every rebuke of Western imperialism (“What’s society built on?” earning the chanted answer, “Blood!”), there are more personal confrontations. “Percolator” starts out urbane but quickly goes ballistic, its sophisticated point-counterpoint of organ and bass spiraling into squall as Sadier insists, “I’m very scared, that’s for sure.” Her reputation for hauteur is completely demolished by “The Noise of Carpet,” a Farfisa-driven takedown of sad-sack cynics. “I hate your state of hopelessness,” she snarls, “and that vain articulateness/You’re a loser-type wreck wannabe.” Two women, Sadier and Hanson, exorcise self-doubt with such panache in styles that alternate between egging each other on, singing different songs together, and rounding verses like ancient madrigals.
Sometimes keyboardist Morgan Lhote would join in along while the rest of the band, including a rhythm section for the ages in bassist Duncan Brown and drummer Andy Ramsay. The unit kept things moving beneath the stereo-separated guitar strums mortared together by warm organ drones, the amalgamations of electro and lovers rock, the splashes of LaBelle and Reich. This pluralism-in-practice was the point: liner notes list all the instruments used, then all the people who played them, singling out only special guests like Tortoise’s John McEntire, who co-produced and played the vibraphone on a few songs as if, should you have a unique talent or two, you might be invited next.
“You and me are molded by some things well beyond our acknowledgment,” Sadier sings on the closing “Anonymous Collective,” again and again, her register ascending beyond rocky waves of bass and bells and tumbles of drums. For a band sometimes dismissed as merely the sum of their influences, pilfered “record-collector rock,” the album that proved they could do anything ends by offering a new way forward. It’s an invocation that honors the definitional power of pleasure yet insists on its mystery. Shuji Terayama’s tiny fascists in Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei might have fallen victim to their self-indulgence, but Stereolab had higher hopes. Pleasure might not bring capitalism down, but it can definitely lift us up. | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Duophonic | July 18, 2019 | 9.4 | f40dfd87-556c-49ac-80cf-4f5f133d2e16 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On the eve of a new full-length, the D.C. rapper releases an EP featuring reworked cuts by Bon Iver, Metronomy, Marvin Gaye, and k-os. They're remixes in the loose sense, but Oddisee treats them like duets. | On the eve of a new full-length, the D.C. rapper releases an EP featuring reworked cuts by Bon Iver, Metronomy, Marvin Gaye, and k-os. They're remixes in the loose sense, but Oddisee treats them like duets. | Oddisee: Odd Renditions Vol. 001 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16782-odd-renditions-vol-001-ep/ | Odd Renditions Vol. 001 EP | If rap is really having its big independent moment, then it stands to reason that lesser-known MCs outside of big cities and fashionable cliques will start to get some shine. One of the guys who deserves such attention is Oddisee, a producer and rapper from Washington, D.C., known for an eclectic take on soulful boom-bap. Oddisee, real name Amir Mohammed el Khalifa, has been creating compelling work outside the label system for some time now. His best release so far was last year's Rock Creek Park, a mostly instrumental ode to the District public space that crackled with warmth and nostalgia and has stayed lodged in my rotation ever since it came out.
Next up for Oddisee is the full-length People Hear What They See, but prior to that he's given away this EP featuring reworked cuts by Bon Iver, Metronomy, Marvin Gaye, and the reggae rapper k-os. They're remixes in the loose sense, but Oddisee treats them like duets, keeping the original vocals basically intact but redoing the arrangement and adding a verse or two. I like this approach because it feels more like he's building off the source material rather than chopping it up and repurposing it. In the case of "Paralyzed", which uses Bon Iver's "Re: Stacks" as its blueprint, Oddisee swaps out the guitar for a shuffling piano-jazz beat. His rhymes play off the song's lovelorn theme, and its spirit is similar, but the character is totally different.
It seems like Oddisee's a producer first but throughout the EP his lyrics are solid, alternately conscious and self-conscious without getting too didactic. He's conversational and loose and hints at bigger themes in a casual, offhand way. "Paralyzed"'s "Been a lot of places, rumors of racists/ But I can't lie, they was nice to me" is one of those good tip-of-the-iceberg lines. The EP's best cut, though, is the one where he lets the original singer do most of the talking. "Ain't That Peculiar", an update of the 1965 Marvin Gaye track of the same name, expertly blends old and new. Stripping away everything but Gaye's somber croon, Oddisee substitutes a heavy beat clap and synths-- there's a great tension between the sounds, an "Otis"-type feeling but cleaner and more reverential.
Not everything here is that good. The k-os rework "Man I Use to Be" is the limpest of the batch, and at just four songs one dud can do significant damage. Odd Renditions does accomplish a few key things, though. Certainly it's a cool teaser for Oddisee's upcoming LP, but it also emphasizes his wide sonic range and healthy approach to genre. Also, between instrumental fare like Rock Creek Park, more straightforward hip-hop stuff, and these diverse remixes, he's starting to build a well-rounded and idiosyncratic discography. Further proof that this a guy who should definitely be on your radar. | 2012-06-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-06-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 4, 2012 | 6.8 | f4113efd-26c9-4ca6-813a-ca2971bd37cf | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
Connecting Kansas City and Melbourne, Picnic’s debut full-length is rounded out by a more than an hour’s worth of remixes by artists like Huerco S. and Dntel—a celebration of ambient music as a social phenomenon. | Connecting Kansas City and Melbourne, Picnic’s debut full-length is rounded out by a more than an hour’s worth of remixes by artists like Huerco S. and Dntel—a celebration of ambient music as a social phenomenon. | Picnic: Picnic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/picnic-picnic/ | Picnic | The last decade has seen the rise of a loose clique of ambient musicians enamored by barely there beats, vaporous pads, and big, dubby bass subductions. Many of them are Midwestern, including Huerco S. and Mister Water Wet, whose short-lived Secret Musik party at Kansas City’s Niche club in 2011 and 2012 focused on unreleased remixes and edits from their own circle of friends. Though the crew has expanded to encompass artists like Michigan’s uon and Philadelphia’s Pontiac Streator and Ulla Straus, it’s maintained a remarkable level of insularity and sonic uniformity. Combine that with the cryptic monikers of some of its participants (uon, mdo, tcs, Pil) and you might wonder at first if these people aren’t all the same person.
Picnic is the first full-length collaboration between Kansas City’s Ryan Loecker (aka mdo, co-founder of the C Minus label) and Melbourne, Australia’s Justin Cantrell (aka ju ca, founder of the Daisart label). Loecker came a little late to the Midwestern scene, releasing his first music in 2016 and forming C Minus in 2017. But the communal spirit of Secret Musik lives on in Picnic, which doubles as an international ambient summit welcoming Australia’s Daisart into the fold. Heavy on guest features and bundled with more than 80 minutes of remixes, both on the digital album and the limited-edition Bonus CD, Picnic is a celebration of ambient music as a social phenomenon.
The vinyl version of Picnic runs eight tracks and 41 minutes, including a remix of C Minus co-founder Pil’s “Plush Hooves.” Cantrell’s solo output is typically heavier on percussion than Loecker’s, and the two artists’ music can be thought of respectively in terms of solids and liquids (or gases). But Picnic delights in the way these materials interact. “Bunnyville” is built around what sounds like a bundle of necklaces being untangled, around which all manner of soupy effects slosh and swish. “Drops in the Water,” a collaboration with Detroit artist Theodore Cale Schafer, is permeated with fiery crackles that emerge from a deep, droning house chord. There’s an appealing sense of grit throughout Picnic, suggesting sediment flowing downstream or embers leaping from a bonfire.
Picnic offers few moments of uninterrupted ambient pleasure. When there’s a melody, it’s tentative, like the pearls of guitar on “Dewey” or the clarinet on “Elkhorn,” played by Daisart signee Haji K. Synth pads simmer evilly at the bottom of the mix rather than swooping through the stereo field. The bulk of Picnic’s real estate is taken up by percussion, which means both actual percussion instruments and the digital clicks and cuts that saturate nearly every inch of the record. Picnic deserves credit for managing such a rough and organic sound without being too hard on the ears, but it’s tough to just sink back into this stuff and relax, and ambient fans who like their music a little more amniotic might find the terrain too rugged for their liking.
That’s where the remixes come in. Many of them are by lesser-known Midwestern or Australian artists, with Huerco S. and the Postal Service’s Dntel the only names a casual fan will be likely to recognize. The remixers invariably guide these tracks in either a clubbier or more ambient direction, and Bonus is by far the more accessible of the two discs. But this second disc feels less like a correction to Picnic than a demonstration of another way ambient music can be played, perceived, and enjoyed. If Picnic is like walking barefoot across the rocky bank of a river, Bonus is a plunge into the deep end.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Daisart | June 9, 2021 | 6.9 | f4119a57-e9bb-416c-8176-0c163e9019fd | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Roman Flügel's second album under his own name builds on the principles he set out in 2011's Fatty Folders in playful and sometimes surprising ways. If the techno producer's last album reflected a newfound sense of focus in his work, the new one widens its scope without forsaking any of its cohesion. | Roman Flügel's second album under his own name builds on the principles he set out in 2011's Fatty Folders in playful and sometimes surprising ways. If the techno producer's last album reflected a newfound sense of focus in his work, the new one widens its scope without forsaking any of its cohesion. | Roman Flügel: Happiness Is Happening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19618-roman-flugel-happiness-is-happening/ | Happiness Is Happening | Few dance music producers have established a voice quite as singular as Roman Flügel's. That's ironic, because in his two decades as a solo artist, he's recorded gritty acid fugues, limpid deep house, knotty breakbeat hardcore, and clean-lined minimal techno, among other styles, both pure and hybrid. His cheeky 2004 single "Geht's Noch?" was an unwitting midwife to a squawking strain of big-room EDM; the following year, he teamed up with the vibraphonist Christopher Dell for Superstructure, a collection of diffuse, freeform techno-jazz. (For most club music producers, a release like the latter would be the outlier in his or her catalog, but in Flügel's case, it's the populist, over-the-top club jam that remains the exception.)
But Flügel's signature remains legible in pretty much whatever he does, despite the stylistic diversity of his catalog. (That range is one reason he's used so many aliases over the years, including Roman IV, Soylent Green, ro70, and Eight Miles High, in addition to his and Jörn Elling Wuttke's shifting collective identity as Alter Ego, Acid Jesus, Holy Garage, et al.) He's got a way with rippling, wriggling drum patterns, and his knack for daubing on tonal elements proves him to be a skilled pointillist. His ear for nuance and his feel for balance let him take the most shopworn sounds—an unadorned drum machine, a crackling breakbeat, a wily TB-303—and make them sound, if not exactly new, indisputably his.
That's truer than ever on Happiness Is Happening, which builds on the principles he set out in 2011's Fatty Folders in playful and sometimes surprising ways. Reflecting a newfound sense of focus in his work, the latter was his first album released under his own name; the new one widens its scope without forsaking any of its cohesion. At its core, the record foregrounds a strain of house music that's wispy but wiry, favoring all his usual trademarks: scratchy analog drum machines, lush pads, quirky little quasi-melodies, and glassy FM synthesizers with the sour clang of oil-drums half-submerged in water.
A few of the tracks easily could have fit on Fatty Folders or any of the club-oriented EPs he's released between then and now on labels like Dial and Live at Robert Johnson. "Stuffy", sounding anything but, is classic Flügel: a percussive, energetic workout marked by brittle drums and a colorful, pinging melody. The expressive way that the track's cymbals twitch and flare confirm him as one of our most talented hi-hat programmers. "Your War Is Over" plays with similar ideas, as kalimba-inspired synthesizers pluck against watery chords; though nominally four-to-the-floor, the kick drum is little more than a shadow of itself, which aids the track's weightless drift. "We Have a Nice Life" plays with dance-floor convention in similar ways, opening with two minutes of beatless drones before pulling itself up by its bootstraps—well, its arpeggios, anyway—and morphing into a jaunty set of variations on an Italo-house theme, all whispery shakers and laser zaps. (There are only about four elements in play, yet no two bars of the song are the same, proof of Flügel's commitment to composition as a process of perpetual mutation.) And the slower "Tense Times" stretches those same Italo influences, like rubbery bass arpeggios and rich, major chords, into a dubby fantasia that sounds like the Orb gone disco. It's muscular but dreamy, the kind of contradiction that Flügel savors.
But a goodly portion of Happiness Is Happening finds Flügel stretching out and trying out new styles—or styles new to his catalog, anyway. The delightful "Friendship Song" borrows the chord changes from Grimes' "Oblivion" and turns it into a Depeche Mode song circa Speak & Spell, and "Wilkie", similarly springy and similarly naïve, strikes up a dialogue with the New Order of Power, Corruption & Lies. (That might sound to you like a wholly unnecessary exercise, but once you hear the way he handles the subject matter—gentle but authoritative, and also a little awestruck—you will agree that it is not.) "Parade" twists up the canon yet again, this time by fusing the snap and crackle of early '80s electro with the apocalyptic klaxon blasts of early '90s rave music, like a hybrid of Kraftwerk's "Numbers" and Second Phase's "Mentasm."
Two songs in particular show what a versatile producer he can be. The opening "Connecting the Ghost" explores a slow-fast "motorik" pulse, its stately, chugging beat a foil for Flügel to indulge in creamy textures and squealing oscillators; the quick-stepping "Occult Levitation" offers little more than a steady patter of lawn-sprinkler hi-hats and rosy sunrise glow. Both, in their way, are genre studies—Krautrock and techno, respectively—but more than that, they're examples of Flügel's unique sensibility, deft touch, and expressive, unmistakable voice. | 2014-09-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-09-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dial | September 5, 2014 | 8.1 | f415e607-dd3b-4b7d-a122-0a8e2b2c55e5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Brockhampton leader embraces a grungy, guitar-centric new sound on his first solo album since the dissolution of his rap collective. | The Brockhampton leader embraces a grungy, guitar-centric new sound on his first solo album since the dissolution of his rap collective. | Kevin Abstract: Blanket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-abstract-blanket/ | Blanket | For some Brockhampton fans, the band’s farewell album felt like a fakeout, if not a betrayal. The form-breaking rap collective’s previous full lengths had been defined by both their abundance and their communal spirit—each was an unruly pileup of voices, personalities, and perspectives. But the group’s 2022 curtain call, The Family, released seven months after they announced their indefinite hiatus at Coachella, turned out to be less an actual Brockhampton album than a Kevin Abstract solo album about Brockhampton, with the project’s founder ruminating on the group in their absence. It was a fundamental contradiction: a one-sided Brockhampton record.
If The Family was Abstract’s eulogy for Brockhampton, his new solo album, Blanket, is his fresh start. In September, Abstract debuted this material at a short-notice live show in Hollywood, with a band that played up the heavy, grungy direction of this new material, all brooding fuzz, dropped tunings, and loud/soft whiplash. Abstract has flirted with rock music before, both with Brockhampton and on solo albums like 2016’s American Boyfriend, yet Blanket commits so completely that it feels like a true makeover. Where modernist rappers like Kenny Mason and Jim Legxacy dabble in guitars as part of a wider, rotating menu of styles, on Blanket, Abstract embraces them to the near total exclusion of rap.
It isn’t always a natural fit. With his whispery lower register, Abstract isn’t much of a rock singer, and he’s not much of a screamer either (his “woos!” on the title track are unsure and truncated, like a basketball fan realizing mid-yelp he’s cheering for the wrong team’s dunk). And too often he mistakes rawness for inspiration. Opener “When the Rope Post 2 Break” aims for Nirvana but plays more like a half-finished demo. Abstract pounded out the record relatively quickly, over just a few months, and he doesn’t disguise when he’s winging it.
What Abstract does bring to the table, though, is an ear for sticky, misshapen melodies and a rap producer’s sense of pacing, which keeps Blanket moving so briskly that its periodic clumsiness doesn’t bog it down much. When he sweetens the nervier edges of ’90s alternative with a strong shot of R&B, the results can be sublime: “Scream” charts an unlikely middle ground between Blonde and Surfer Rosa, while “Voyager” conjures the blistering passion of a Prince rock ballad.
As heavy as the album can be, with its raw-nerved surveys of alienation and rejection, Abstract knows when to lighten the mood. Whenever Blanket threatens to succumb to wallowing, he breaks things up with a peppy, Mac DeMarco/Alex G-style indie-rock tune like “Running Out” or “What Should I Do.” By the record’s final stretch, much of its initial angst has burned off, freeing Abstract to indulge the sweeter, poppier styles that come to him more naturally. On the exuberant “Real 2 Me,” he pines for a crush with puppy-dog longing (“When you signed my cast, I wish I broke both arms,” he gushes).
For the closer “My Friend,” featuring some understated vocal accompaniments from indie breakouts MJ Lenderman and Kara Jackson, Abstract captures the more painful flip side of infatuation, dwelling on the sting of unrequited romantic feelings. With its acoustic guitars and wistful twang, the track is Abstract’s biggest sonic departure yet from Brockhampton. Yet in another sense, it’s the song that feels most of a piece with his old group, simply by the presence of other voices. That’s the challenge that looms over his solo career: As compelling as Abstract can be on his own, he still sounds best when he has some company. | 2023-11-08T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-08T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Video Store / RCA | November 8, 2023 | 6.7 | f42f443c-d869-47e1-af30-e2201c07aaff | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The sixth album from the Iowa metal mainstays has more to offer than expected and is still sometimes frustratingly short-sighted. | The sixth album from the Iowa metal mainstays has more to offer than expected and is still sometimes frustratingly short-sighted. | Slipknot: We Are Not Your Kind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slipknot-we-are-not-your-kind/ | We Are Not Your Kind | Slipknot have no shortage of rallying cries, but nothing defines them quite like when lead singer Corey Taylor yells, “I’m all fucked up and I make it look good” on their sixth album, We Are Not Your Kind. They’ve made anguish look appealing throughout their two-decade career, finding worldwide success channeling unwieldy, messy anger. Though this is the first record without long-time percussionist Chris Fehn, it’s not as dramatic of a shift in personnel as 2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter, which was marked by the death of bassist and founding member Paul Gray and the departure of powerhouse drummer Joey Jordison. For better or for worse, Kind is a Slipknot record, one that has more to offer than expected and is still sometimes frustratingly short-sighted.
“Unsainted” is their signature angst-pop-rock in the vein of their hits “Wait and Bleed” and “Duality,” centered around Taylor’s melodic choruses. He’s aided by a choir, turning it into a reboot of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” fueled by Midwest desolation. Its richness, part of Kind’s more detailed production, doesn’t dilute the angst Slipknot traffic in. “Birth of the Cruel” draws upon tension from industrial drum banging and tense guitar; the song’s explosion proves that they haven’t lost their unifying malaise. Though hampered by Taylor’s awkward spoken-word intro, “Solway Firth” takes that energy even further on perhaps the most intense track of their career.
It’s part of the secret of their success from early on: Longtime guitarists Mick Thomson and Jim Root distilled underground death and black metal for suburban kids sacrificing their allowances to Sam Goody and too young for tape trading and MTV’s“Headbangers’ Ball,” forgoing intricacy for gut-bashing immediacy. (Listen to their self-titled record again if it’s been a while: You’ll pick up bits and pieces of Obituary, Morbid Angel, even a little Cradle of Filth.) They’re not the heretics that underground metal dudes (or even the band themselves) claim to be, they just made the underground more palatable. “Orphan”’s speed, fueled in part by drummer Jay Weinberg’s (son of Bruce Springsteen drummer Max) relentless bashing, alone should nip any metal G checks in the bud—they’re capable of totally unloading. Besides, Thomson has an Immolation tattoo, are you really gonna call him a poser?
Slipknot know what works for them and they exploit it to a fault, but they’re also more wide-eyed than they’re given credit for. “My Pain” and “Not Long for This World” are both hazy and cavernous, the former’s dreamy electronics moving into the latter’s breathiness, like Portishead performing at the Iowa State Fair. Slipknot also try out some post-metal with “A Liar’s Funeral,” which focuses more on panned guitars, volume swells, and moodier drums. “Spiders” is the only flop in their experimentation, with its cabaret piano too hokey for a band that is essentially a macabre traveling carnival. It’s a painful reminder that they used to try a little too hard to be the zany heavy metal equivalent of Mr. Bungle in their early days. For arena-sized metal acts, even fewer and far between now, you could do much, much worse.
The most curious mainstay are those turntable scratches, and while they flow nicely on the record, they do cast a harsh light on Slipknot’s missed opportunity to take advantage of metal and rap’s stronger alliance in 2019. Take for instance Ho99o9, an intense act who can square up against the hardest of any genre; Richmond’s Lil Ugly Mane is a gifted rapper who mainly plays to hardcore audiences because he grew up a hardcore kid. New York duo City Morgue play “Wait and Bleed” at their shows, which Taylor is aware of, and their aggression signals that they wore out a couple of copies of Slipknot’s landmark 2001 album Iowa at minimum. For all their experimentation, it’s disappointing Slipknot ignored hip-hop’s fruitful coexistence with heavy guitar music.
It’s not as though Slipknot haven’t kept up with their audience. They’re pushing their own brand of whiskey, with full knowledge that “getting really into craft booze” is a typical path for aging metalheads. And their anger may not always rise above entry-level, but even that is hardly out of fashion. There’s something to be said for keeping that base rage with you, and it’s not an impediment on maturity: Taylor is a thoughtful frontman who recognizes his fanbases as a mish-mash of misfits, and he’s always appealed to their shared disenfranchisement. Even as masters of fan-service, they don’t condescend to their audience. For as much as they give, there’s an underlying feeling that they could be giving more, that the synthesis that made them ultimately limits where they go next.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | August 14, 2019 | 6.7 | f4338bc7-e8e3-4e94-86a9-81503d192147 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, Swans swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil. | In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, Swans swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil. | Swans: White Light from the Mouth of Infinity / Love of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21259-white-light-from-the-mouth-of-infinity-love-of-life/ | White Light from the Mouth of Infinity / Love of Life | In the half-decade since Swans reformed, they have hammered away at a monolithic, all-consuming sound with unwavering focus. The three albums they've released since Michael Gira resurrected the project—2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, 2012's The Seer, and 2014's To Be Kind—taken together with contemporaneous tours and live albums, all feel like variations upon a single theme, expressions of an essential Swans-ness.
For a while, though, they were the most mutable of bands. In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, they swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil.
The two albums have long been treated as minor works in Swans' discography: out of print for years, they were cherry-picked (alongside selections from 1989's major-label fiasco The Burning World and the Gira/Jarboe side project the World of Skin) for 1999's inauspiciously titled Various Failures 1988-1992. "I'm ambivalent about much of it, but then what do I know????" Gira has written of the music on that anthology. "Some of it is genuinely good I think. Anyway, I was learning (how to write a song) as I went."
It's true that the period marked a shift from pummeling mantras to something more "musical," with singing instead of shouting and cascading chords instead of just drop-tuned gut-punches. That said, even here, Gira's concept of "songwriting" remains idiosyncratic: there's little in the way of verse/chorus structures, mainly just mantra-like incantations and chords wreathed around gleaming pedal tones surrounded by wide-open expanse. Drummers Anton Fier (White Light) and Vincent Signorelli and Ted Parson (Love of Life) lay into their snares with military gusto, driving the music forward in surging tattoos, and their nonstop rattle contributes to a sensation of overwhelming excess. Close your eyes, and you can practically see the sounds exploding like fireworks against the darkness of your lids.
The textures and tone colors are well suited to Gira's favorite themes, like love, death, and the sublime. Where early Swans lyrics were notable largely for their grueling power dynamics and limitless abjection—see "Raping a Slave", "Filth", "Cop", etc.—here Gira explores a more nuanced perspective. It's hardly all kittens and rainbows; both albums are littered with ugliness, from the dirge-like "Better Than You" ("So glad I'm better than you," he sings, in the world's most dead-eyed Dear John letter) to the claustrophobic "Amnesia", where he tells us "sex is a void filled with plastic" and "everything human's necessarily wrong." Gira has rarely wallowed as beautifully as he does on "Failure", one of the great nadirs—in the best way possible—of the band's catalog. Over bluesy acoustic guitar and frigid digital synthesizers, his preacher's drawl drips like blood from a stone; it would be hard to imagine a voice with more gravitas.
But Gira has never met a dichotomy he could resist—he eats love and hate, sprinkled with a bit of good and evil, for breakfast—and here we can see the pendulum beginning to tip from darkness back to daylight. "Her" wraps clanging, Children of God-style thunderbolts around one of the tenderest love songs Gira has ever written, and "Song for the Sun", "Love of Life", and "The Sound of Freedom" all stretch their arms wide to embrace the limitless possibility of the universe, anticipating the way that love and spiritual ecstasy will return to the fore in the group's post-reunion work, particularly on 2014's To Be Kind.
A bonus disc accompanying the reissues is mostly anticlimax. It features a handful of alternate takes and mixes from both albums, along with a Burning World-era B-side, selections from the World of Skin's Ten Songs for Another World, and a few live songs from Omniscience and Anonymous Bodies in an Empty Room, plus another live cut, "The Unknown", that doesn't seem to have been released before but probably could have stayed that way. There's a fair amount of overlap with Various Failures, and the sequencing is haphazard, zigzagging from release to release without much rhyme or reason.
But it's never a bad thing to be reacquainted with Jarboe's harrowing rendition of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog", and her a cappella rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes", a centuries-old popular English song, is a welcome addition. (Both are from the World of Skin's 1990 album Ten Songs for Another World.) That the bonus disc leaves off "God Damn the Sun", The Burning World's heartbroken highlight, seems like a missed opportunity. In fact, at this point, a full Burning World reissue (along, perhaps, with both the band's 1988 "Love Will Tear Us Apart" covers) is long overdue, no matter how much Gira professes to regret making that album. Who knows, maybe he'll eventually come around. But for now, for anyone who wants to understand Swans' path from atonal self-flagellators to beatific supplicants of the sublime, these two reissues light the way, blindingly. | 2015-12-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 2, 2015 | 7.9 | f437ee58-0f24-4a82-b633-553846924cff | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Tame Impala bassist Cameron Avery veers away from psych-rock with an album of throwback ballads, a modern twist on the tried and true songwriting of crooners from the ’40s and ’50s. | Tame Impala bassist Cameron Avery veers away from psych-rock with an album of throwback ballads, a modern twist on the tried and true songwriting of crooners from the ’40s and ’50s. | Cameron Avery: Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23046-ripe-dreams-pipe-dreams/ | Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams | Not all albums must strive for greater meaning. Plenty attempt and fall short. A great many seek a comforting adequacy—and even those don’t always pan out. On his solo debut, Tame Impala bassist Cameron Avery veers away from psych-rock cosmic revelations in search of a pure musical greatness of times past. Upon the record’s announcement, he made clear his inspirations: Elvis, Sinatra, Etta James, “the big band stuff with less metaphorical lyrics,” as he put it. From the gentle guitar plucks of “A Time and Place,” Avery’s greatest pursuit is beauty over all else, which he achieves often throughout Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams.
Avery is best when ruminating on loves lost, found, and desired. The album’s limited musical and thematic palette, however, means the burden for excellence falls on Avery’s songwriting, which ranges from subtle, self-aware inversions of machismo to overt chauvinism, and in its worst moments, it’s just bland. Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams is a deliberately pleasant album that occasionally soars but at a relatively low ceiling.
In making an album that revels in classicalism, Avery reconciles with the old-timey mores of society. On “Disposable,” the record’s jauntiest track, he sees himself as the most ordinary bane of humanity: a dude. It’s effective in its extreme self-deprecation, as he sings happily about being “just as shit as any other brand,” and making a soaring hook out of “I’m disposable.” Avery sees the haplessness of the male pursuit, that of the bumbling fool who sings to the mountaintops about why he just can’t find the right gal. He achieves the endeavor best on “Wasted on Fidelity,” a track where he is in love, yet is unable to resign himself to the domesticity. On these songs, Avery breathes new life into the male pop figure as someone who sees his flaws but cannot help but do the wrong thing anyway.
He runs into trouble when he loses the self-awareness of it all. The subversion is absent on “Big Town Girl,” with lines like, “You know I’ve never had the time to wait around for a dame/But if I knew that we could make it, I’d wait around for Jane,” as if trying on a terrible-looking fedora. Platitudes like, “You know she’s a lady,” also highlight this lounge singer mode, but the song is far too conventional for his affectations to land with any honesty. Similarly, his take on Elvis in “Watch Me Take It Away” offers little nuance, only chintzy cock rock.
Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams finds its true comfort zone when it is simply sweet. The opening tracks “A Time and Place” and “Do You Know Me by Heart,” as well as the closing “C’est Toi (Extended)” are tried and true love songs that take their time. They fully embrace the majesty of the American songbook without jamming in any rock’n’roll, winkingly or otherwise. His smoky baritone does the songs justice, though he's still more of an imitator of the past than he is a student of the past. Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam’s 2016 collaboration, for contrast, added excitement and contemporary sounds to revive bygone trends. Making an album like this, an album of ancient ballads requires subtle innovation. Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams is a focused record with several wonderful songs. It’s not novel, nor does it attempt to be, just like those old 45s it so fondly recalls. | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | March 25, 2017 | 6.5 | f43c5855-3a24-4240-ba6d-024636dc398d | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
The Brooklyn band’s debut is one of the most confidently executed emo debuts of recent vintage, a bracing fusion of brutality and elegance. | The Brooklyn band’s debut is one of the most confidently executed emo debuts of recent vintage, a bracing fusion of brutality and elegance. | Stay Inside: Viewing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stay-inside-viewing/ | Viewing | Let’s just get this out of the way: Stay Inside would have been just as timely of a band name at any point in the Brooklyn group’s short existence. On their bracing debut Viewing, bassist/vocalist Bryn Nieboer reckons with what she calls “the worst thing that happened to me in my life,” framing her personal trauma within the generational traumas of the last four years. Viewing is the work of a band formed amidst ongoing biological and political disasters, and the songs explore end-times questions: What is the purpose of creation in a state of perpetual impermanence? What is the meaning of forgiveness and hope when the arc of the moral universe is irreversibly off course?
Stay Inside’s music shares the physique of Travis Bickle or Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, if not their regressive nihilism—they sound gaunt and wiry, the songs’ shredded musculature meant to frighten more than impress, developed in isolation as a defense mechanism to New York’s daily interpersonal cruelties. Viewing moves at a dyspeptic churn, its melodies alternately soaring and sour, their imagery borne of a lonesome, crowded Brooklyn, full of corrosives and irritants. Stay Inside earmark their arrangements with reminders of abject and vivid squalor that pop up like roaches—a recurring burst of feedback used to segue between tracks, the burrowing one-note riff of “Revisionist,” the chords of “Veil” slowly denaturing into atonality.
“The picture’s weak/Everything’s a copy that I’m copying,” guitarist and vocalist Chris Johns sings on the opening “Revisionist,” in Viewing’s predominant pose: a snarl and a shrug. Having gotten a bombastically titled EP out of their system (2018’s The Sea Engulfs Us and the Light Goes Out), Stay Inside here commit to clarity, reducing the past two decades of emo and post-hardcore’s most serious variants into its most potent concentrate, stripped of pretensions. Each track hones its essence into urgent, mononym titles, with nothing in the arrangements to detract from their focused messages. A visit to the spacious, twinkling skies of Midwestern emo is pointedly called “Divide,” Viewing’s sole and fleeting beacon of light before Side B plunges towards the abyss. At their most anthemic (“Ivy,” “Monument”), Stay Inside fuse screamo brutality with post-punk elegance, suggesting an alternate history where Interpol recorded Turn on the Bright Lights with the guy from seminal screamo band Saetia still on drums.
Viewing is one of the most confidently executed emo debuts of recent vintage, and it’s poignant to wonder what the live show would be like. Emo albums are usually made with sweaty, crowded, all-ages shout-alongs in mind, the kind of experience quarantine has rendered impossible. But unlike, say, Dogleg’s transcendent Melee, Viewing doesn’t feel designed as group therapy meant to foster togetherness. True to the name, Stay Inside finds purpose and nobility in doing push ups in a stuffy apartment, sublimating anger into action, working through shit in isolation before rejoining society—an aim that will make it just as relevant when the next disaster strikes. | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | No Sleep | April 20, 2020 | 7.7 | f4492483-13c8-4a54-8f66-74cee27d9609 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Sub Pop noise group returns with another collection of tracks exploring the cycle of tension and release. | The Sub Pop noise group returns with another collection of tracks exploring the cycle of tension and release. | Wolf Eyes: Human Animal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9432-human-animal/ | Human Animal | The cycle of tension and release is a well-worn musical ploy, but Michigan's Wolf Eyes have somehow managed to find new ideas in that technique's cracked façade. The band's best shows are an orgiastic symphony of hypnotic build-up and cathartic discharge. Every Wolf Eyes fan knows what to expect from the latter-- distorted, decaying beats, slashing noise from John Olson and Mike Connelly, and lung-killing rants from Nate Young-- and when to pump fists and jerk heads accordingly. The more abstract sections in between are trickier. Sometimes the trio's gnarled drift stops too abruptly, other times it out-meanders its welcome. But when these scientists hit on the right formula of slow-burning anticipation, the bombast that follows has the profundity of a drug-induced epiphany.
Previous Wolf Eyes records have struck that magic balance during individual songs or sides, but none have stretched it over an album's length like Human Animal. Here the group's pre-climactic swells seem coated with extra allure, such that the first three tracks can spend 15 minutes gradually gathering density without losing momentum. It's partially due to a patient restraint that makes the clanging "A Million Years" oddly quiet, similar to Sightings' shadowy retreat on Arrived in Gold; partially due to Olson's snake-charming sax (something he's perfected with his dirt-jazz trio Graveyards) on the war-torn "Rationed Rot"; and very much due to the way even a purely textural piece like "Lake of Roaches" throbs with insistent pulse, mimicking time's relentless march.
Whatever the reason, this dark, transfixing three-part suite makes the subsequent peak of the title track pretty staggering. "Rusted Mange" extends the climax with rhythms that overlap like competing fireworks. Mixed with more Young vocal screech and Olson sax whine, the piece splits the difference between didactic pound and inscrutable cacophony, delivering the promise of the preceding simmer.
The trio's tension-release loop gets lathered, rinsed, and repeated on Human Animal's final three tracks, this time in a quicker, sharper rotation. The six-minute "Leper War" detonates windy bombs over a smoldering static terrain, fading into the rippling march of "The Driller", whose deadened pound sprouts into a hummable lurch. As Young's moans rhyme with the surrounding din, the track actually becomes more like music than noise.
Which makes "Noise Not Music" a logical closer. Here instead of noise made from pure abstraction, we get music beaten until it shatters into noise, with what sounds like 100 simultaneous punk songs piled into endless climax. The song's chanted title may be a brutal manifesto, and Wolf Eyes' metronomic swing can sometimes be fascistically either/or. But Human Animal is far from black and white; it's more like its melted-face cover painting, a dripping swirl of different shades of gray. | 2006-09-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-09-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sub Pop | September 21, 2006 | 8.2 | f44a51f7-fa9e-4a14-967e-e88bb58a909f | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Jay Rock is the member of Top Dawg Entertainment best known for spitting bars on Kendrick Lamar's "Money Trees", but his major-label career dates back to 2005. Where his 2011 debut felt like a formalist relic, his sophomore effort is weirder and more daring, with free-ranging production giving Rock space to dazzle with limber diction and stunning, cinematic imagery. | Jay Rock is the member of Top Dawg Entertainment best known for spitting bars on Kendrick Lamar's "Money Trees", but his major-label career dates back to 2005. Where his 2011 debut felt like a formalist relic, his sophomore effort is weirder and more daring, with free-ranging production giving Rock space to dazzle with limber diction and stunning, cinematic imagery. | Jay Rock: 90059 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21094-90059/ | 90059 | Top Dawg Entertainment first signed Jay Rock in 2005, in the wake of the Game's The Documentary. At the time, the Dr. Dre-sanctioned multiplatinum album seemed to promise a resurgence for Cali gangsta rap, which might reclaim the throne it abdicated in the mid-'90s after the death of 2Pac. Instead, Game’s Shady/Aftermath/G-Unit connection combusted spectacularly with the record still fresh in stores and L.A.’s stronghold broke, as Snoop became a ward of the Neptunes, Dre tinkered with a third album we’ve only just come to hear this summer, and everyone else fought nobly but ultimately lost footing in the mainstream for good.
This was the climate that Jay Rock found himself facing when he geared up to release his debut studio album Follow Me Home*.* The album's singles stalled, its release date languished, and it only saw release in 2011, when it sounded like a formalist relic amid the then-just-emerging DJ Mustard, YG, Ty Dolla $ign and Tyga. It stalled at retail, quietly matched for sales (but surpassed in acclaim) by Kendrick Lamar’s insular, world-weary Section.80, released the same month.
Four years later, Kendrick is the sun around which more than just TDE revolves: his gold and platinum successes have bushwhacked a space for young poetic everymen to coexist at radio. Jay Rock might not ever be top dog at his label again, but the lessons of his first failure to launch – that a magnetic persona and perspective outstrip shiny celebrity cosigns and cookie cutter image constructs every time – are crucial to the success of the TDE machine. Jay Rock’s taken the message to heart on his sophomore album 90059, which dramatically shifts the focus of his studio work from making him look tough and cool to illuminating the human struggles beneath.
good kid, m.A.A.d city’s “Money Trees” introduce a lot of listeners unfamiliar with Jay Rock’s history to his talents, so it’s fitting that the pre-album single to 90059 is a sequel: "Money Trees Deuce." The song is an excellent point of entry into the new album’s mood; its panoramic view of West Coast street life is more nuanced than old Jay Rock records, and the production freely traverses styles. The jazz rap of “Money Trees Deuce”, Dilla homage of “Fly on the Wall”, post-Dre Cali thump of “Necessary”, Southernplayalistic future soul of “Wanna Ride”, and Shaolin swordplay of “90059” collide, each a little bit of seasoning in this gumbo, as Rock notes on track three.
90059’s expanded palette allows the rapper to stretch out too, and he dazzles with limber diction and stunning, cinematic imagery. Opener “Necessary” unfurls the story of a drunken drive-by in lurid detail: “On Forgiato rim tire, automatics spit fire/ Yack in the black canister, look at this bastard go/ It don’t take much to aim, fingers be snatching souls”. Later, “Telegram (Going Krazy)” uses an almost imperceptible hairpin slight of tongue (“I see the telegram goin’ crazy/ I tell the ‘Gram I’m goin’ crazy”) to trip off the story of a couple drifting apart because one is freer with her emotions on social media than she is in close quarters with her lover.
Jay Rock’s concepts are braver and weirder here, his words more arresting and illustrative, but the major reinvention of 90059 is his delivery. On “Easy Bake”, Rock hovers around the high end of his register to counteract Kendrick’s deeper, richer tone. He’s singing a lot now, too, and not in the gruff gangster-on-Easter-Sunday mode of Follow Me Home. The melodic turns on 90059’s “Telegram (Going Krazy)” and “Money Trees Deuce” are unfussed and soulful, while the title track has a drunken Ol’ Dirty Bastard energy completely unfamiliar to Rock's catalog. The album’s bolder vocal turns are credited to a “Lance Skiiiwalker”, but Lance is about as distinguishable from Rock as T.I. was from T.I.P. or Biggie from bizarro Biggie on “Gimme the Loot.” Cuts like “Gumbo” and “The Ways” juggle all of these tricks to showcase a lyricist gracefully in control of his instrument. It's a heartening showcase, and a reminder of just how much vitality there is in TDE's orbit. | 2015-10-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment | October 1, 2015 | 8 | f4592835-c32e-42dc-8114-2842b077de07 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Made in L.A. under the influence of colossal amounts of cocaine, the heavy metal legends’ fourth album, recently reissued, made room for both light and shade and featured several of their signature songs. | Made in L.A. under the influence of colossal amounts of cocaine, the heavy metal legends’ fourth album, recently reissued, made room for both light and shade and featured several of their signature songs. | Black Sabbath: Vol. 4 (Super Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-sabbath-vol-4-super-deluxe/ | Vol. 4 (Super Deluxe) | It would be misleading to argue that Vol. 4 is the work of Black Sabbath at the peak of their powers. When you’re the band that recorded “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” and “Paranoid,” and you put them all on the same album, congratulations, that’s the peak of your powers. But *Vol. 4—*recently reissued with a full haul of outtakes, false starts, and live versions—is a close second. The sense of scale, the lyrical directness, and the sheer riff-crunching power that mark the band at their best are all here, along with several signature Sabbath tunes. Paranoid might top the list, but Vol. 4 is indispensable metal in its own right.
Having previously recorded exclusively in England with producer Rodger Bain, Sabbath opted to self-produce their fourth outing, recording it in sunny Los Angeles. If you’re guessing that their new locale exposed these four suddenly rich blue-collar kids from Birmingham to heretofore unprecedented Hollywood excess, you guessed right: By all accounts, the band consumed absolutely Olympian quantities of cocaine during Vol. 4’s recording, with guitarist Tony Iommi claiming to have had the stuff flown in on a private plane and bassist Geezer Butler recently joking (or is he?!?) that the coke bill exceeded the cost of actually, you know, recording the album.
You can glean all that information from interviews and behind-the-scenes accounts, or you can simply listen to “Snowblind,” the album’s centerpiece. (In fact, its riff is similar enough to album opener “Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener” that it almost serves as a reprise.) As Ozzy Osbourne lays down a blizzard of snowy metaphors for his drug of choice—at one point he whispers “cocaine,” in case the subject matter isn’t clear—Iommi and Butler serve up a riff that feels four feet deep, while Bill Ward’s drums skitter and thud in equal measure. (Ward’s unpredictability behind the kit has always been one aspect of Sabbath that their many heirs and imitators have failed to reproduce.) At times, the lyrics are so evocative (“Let the winter sun shine on/Let me feel the frost of dawn”) that they seem to anticipate the snowbound Viking saga of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter,” released a year later. At others, they depict the welcoming embrace of drug dependence with unexpected pathos: “This is where I feel I belong,” Ozzy sings in the song’s breakdown—a rough but relatable sentence for anyone who’s struggled with addiction, or loved someone who has.
Rejection of square society is the order of the day across several of the set’s songs. “Tomorrow’s Dream” is about leaving your problems behind by any available means, with the contrast between the grim present and glorious future encapsulated by the break between the verses’ steamrolling riff and the soaring guitars of the chorus. “Cornucopia” condescends to the normies, with their “matchbox cars and mortgaged joys…frozen food in a concrete maze.” For a band that has a bad rap for Satanic worship—you’ll find the devil all over the place in their body of work, but he’s invariably the bad guy—“Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes” sure is a blistering kiss-off to “Jesus freaks” and “preacher[s] telling me about the god in the sky.”
Two of Vol. 4’s ten tracks have found enduring second lives as storied covers by other acts. The rollicking, science-fictional “Supernaut”—like an inverse “Iron Man,” it’s about a voyager through space and time who’s actually enjoying the trip—received a thrashing industrial makeover at the hands of a dubiously named Ministry side project dubbed 1,000 Homo DJs by Jim Nash, the (gay) head of their record label WaxTrax!. (Hold out for the version with vocals by Trent Reznor, which wound up suppressed by his old record label for years.) On the other end of the sonic spectrum, the moving piano ballad “Changes” was converted into a gut-wrenching soul scorcher by singer Charles Bradley, who transmuted its lyrics about a dissolved romantic relationship into a lament for his late mother. Blessed with one of Iommi’s wickedest riffs and Osbourne’s most vulnerable vocal performances, respectively, the original versions of both songs can stand next to these excellent reinterpretations without being eclipsed; Ward’s carnival-like percussion breakdown in “Supernaut” in particular feels like finding a prize in the song’s otherwise thunderous Cracker Jack box.
And no, Sabbath isn’t afraid to show off their softer side. In addition to the untouchable “Changes,” there’s a perfectly lovely guitar instrumental inspired by the California coast in the form of Iommi’s “Laguna Sunrise” (admittedly a bit hard to take seriously once you’ve heard the poetic piss-take the Who’s Keith Moon recorded over it), while “St. Vitus Dance,” a race of a song that clocks in at under two minutes and thirty seconds, encourages a buddy to patch things up with his girl à la the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” an Osbourne favorite. The Sabbath may be Black indeed, but there’s room for both light and shade, and Vol. 4 is a masterful evocation of both by the band that did it better than anyone.
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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. | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | BMG | March 4, 2021 | 9 | f46095f8-99b2-40d2-8773-d4b05a14606e | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
The British group’s sixth album is a love note to aging indie idealism and to those who’ve reveled in their careening pop-punk singalongs, scathing neuroses, and charmingly specific soccer references. | The British group’s sixth album is a love note to aging indie idealism and to those who’ve reveled in their careening pop-punk singalongs, scathing neuroses, and charmingly specific soccer references. | Los Campesinos!: Sick Scenes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22926-sick-scenes/ | Sick Scenes | Gareth Campesinos! is our bard of throwing up. For a decade, nearly every word that has come out of the Los Campesinos! singer’s mouth has presented itself with rash inelegance, candidness, and the need to be ejected from his body this very second. But sometimes, as anyone who’s stared down the depths of a toilet bowl knows, vomit is just vomit. Like that time he sang of an awkward hookup that was blown when a girl upchucked all over his rented tuxedo; or when he recounted that early heartbreak when he got wasted, ate too many potato chips, and then deposited the greasy snack right back onto a soccer field. For Gareth, such trials are the punchline to humanity’s cruel joke. They are essential experiences, embarrassments that turn into collective elation once they hit open air. Because, for all its indecency, throwing up makes us feel better.
Sick Scenes, the British group’s sixth album, plays like a love letter to aging indie idealism; to the fans who have reveled in this band’s careening pop-punk singalongs, scathing neuroses, and charmingly specific soccer references. There is yet another ode to semi-digestion here when Gareth advises: “Save your epiphanies… for chucking up in your own hands.” It’s unconventional wisdom from a man who would know, and the line hints at a weathered sageness that lingers throughout. On the prescription ode “5 Flucloxacillin,” the drums drop out to spotlight the singer’s oh-so-specific stasis as he laments, “Another blister pack pops, but I still feel much the same—31 and depression is a young man’s game.” At that, stalwart musical leader Tom Campesinos! peals off a 15-second guitar solo to lift spirits enough for the next verse.
Given the financial gauntlet nearly every independent band must face in 2017, it seems like a minor miracle that Los Campesinos! still exist at all. And nobody knows this more than Los Campesinos! A large part of their enduring appeal—remember, they began as a MySpace band—has to do with the fact that they were never especially trendy. Too sugary for the emo diehards, too tart for the indie bandwagoners, too emo for the cool kids. Their target audience could be as particular as one of Gareth’s excruciating tales of broken romance, but also just as passionate; strength in small numbers.
To fund the making of Sick Scenes, the band sold about a thousand soccer jerseys with the word “DOOMED” scrawled across the chest. Their message could not be clearer: This is a team, and you are part of it. The idea plays out in one of the record’s most touching moments, near the end of manic-panic crack up “I Broke Up In Amarante,” when Gareth starts a hook on his own, but soon stalls out. “I’m going to need you to help me out here,” he mutters, and a full chorus of voices enter to winningly finish a song about the inevitability of defeat.
Recorded amid the harsh realities of Brexit, Sick Scenes faintly opens up its miserabilia to bring in the wider world. These are not anthems of woke-ness, but Gareth’s disappointment and anger don't sound quite as rash; he’s been around long enough to reflect upon many sad cycles. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “The Fall of Home,” this band’s most beautifully heart-crushing song to date. Backed by little more than a cello, a violin, and some plinking piano notes, Gareth gets to the core of Western society’s current cultural divides: between rural and urban, parents and children, those moving ahead and those staying behind. “Left your hometown for somewhere new/Don’t be surprised now it’s leaving you,” he sings. It’s a eulogy to youth that zeroes in with precision, each detail more wrenching than the last: “funeral for a family pup” and “battery dies on your monthly call” and, finally, “gave the fascists a thousand ticks.” But this song isn’t a simple slam on the generalized “small-town mentality,” considering Gareth essentially still lives in the same small English town he grew up in. Instead, “The Fall of Home” comes off like a sympathetic plea from someone familiar with both sides, who disagrees with the nationalist impulse but can fathom its root. And in its understanding, there is a glimmer of hope.
A strange positivity can also be found on an ambling track called “A Slow, Slow Death” that concludes with the lines: “There’s a slow, slow death if you want it/Yeah, I want it.” Instead of glorifying death or poking fun at it, though, this is a statement of stubborn resilience, of life. Especially in the streamed today/trashed tomorrow world of modern music, the possibility of a slow death can seem revolutionary. Los Campesinos! will never be the biggest, the best-looking, the most loved. But when their time comes, they will be able to look back, content. | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wichita | March 1, 2017 | 7.6 | f4626de4-160f-4bef-9210-c49c4f781c3f | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
It’s thrilling to hear them again, but once the glow wears off, there’s a hollowness to this posthumous project, cobbled together from unreleased Guru vocal takes. | It’s thrilling to hear them again, but once the glow wears off, there’s a hollowness to this posthumous project, cobbled together from unreleased Guru vocal takes. | Gang Starr: One of the Best Yet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gang-starr-one-of-the-best-yet/ | One of the Best Yet | There wasn’t supposed to be another Gang Starr album. From 2006 until his death, Guru was adamant that the group was over and that there wouldn’t be a comeback, even calling DJ Premier his “Ex-DJ.” He seemed to be longing to recreate himself, to put distance between himself and his legendary partner. He was growing edgy about being asked questions about Premier all the time, and even refused to answer them. He had started a new label with a new DJ named Solar, with whom he seemed conjoined at the hip, and his death only further complicated the matter. Controversy surrounded a note allegedly written by Guru on his deathbed disassociating himself with Premier specifically and praising Solar. An oncologist testified that Guru never woke up from his coma and couldn’t have written a letter, so Solar was forced to forfeit everything pertaining to Guru’s estate. Solar later sold 30 unreleased Guru recordings to Premier—“Some of them had two verses, some of them had a verse, some of them just had a hook and then faded,” Premier told the New York Times. The producer molded them into One of the Best Yet.
While the circumstances of the album’s creation remain a point of contention, it’s undeniably awesome to hear the two artists together again. On the intro to One of the Best Yet, the first Gang Starr album since 2003’s The Ownerz, Premier turns an interpolation of “DYWCK” into a sample tour of the group’s storied catalog—“Mass Appeal,” “Work,” “Code of the Streets,” and “Full Clip,” among others—as a little reminder of all they accomplished. The diehards who have dreamt of this throwback will salivate over “Hit-Man,” a Q-Tip-assisted cut that approximates vintage Gang Starr, wherein Guru plays rap assassin and Premier adds a touch of menace, and “From a Distance,” with Guru and Jeru the Damaja barring out over a swelling Premier sample. There are Foundation members at nearly every turn, and they sound very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of another Gang Starr project. There are other things to be grateful for, too: the second Guru verse of closer “Bless the Mic,” the J. Cole appearance on “Family and Loyalty,” a series of carefully devised beats designed to salvage Guru’s afterimage.
Once the initial thrill of the reunion wears off, though the album starts coming apart. Gang Starr was all about balance; Guru’s feel for how best to wade through Premier’s vandalizing, resourceful, and visionary sample work was stunningly natural. With Premier trying to reverse-engineer that process, much of the intuition and congruence is lost. In his prime, Guru was a rapper of singular monotonic charisma. He was so calm and clear and collected that his raps were a balm, and his rhymes themselves felt like proverbs. Bigger names rapped over Premier beats, but no one was better at finding their place in them, navigating their moving parts precisely. There isn’t the same effortless proficiency in these songs. Premier does his best to make sure they don’t sound like a hastily cut-together craft project of scraps, but they are missing a soul. On “What’s Real,” an in-form Royce da 5’9’, who has become DJ Premier’s new partner in recent years, displays just how hollowed-out many of these Guru verses sound.
If there is a theme to be gleaned from these leftovers, it’s that Guru had clearly grown disillusioned with the industry and was sounding its death knell. Gang Starr has always been about rap purism and outing sellouts; a song like “Mass Appeal,” its joke aimed squarely at radio, commercial interests, and posers, set a standard for such meta-mainstream rap crit. But that wasn’t the only thing on their minds then, and their claims were bolstered best by the quality of songs they were making. Here, there are mostly gripes about how fucked up the game has gotten, swipes at lesser rappers, and curmudgeonly grousing about how nobody really raps anymore. “Word to God, if Big and Pac were still here/Some of these weirdos wouldn’t act so cavalier/We all know that the game has changed/It’s crazy out here and rap’s got a bad name,” Guru raps on “Bad Name,” and that’s the hook. “Think about it, what if bling never happened/And the true artists were gettin’ rich from rappin’?/Word to God, some should give/Let’s delete the politics so real hip-hop can live.” Where these moments were once radical, renegades challenging the status quo, they now just sound like old, out-of-touch men yelling at kids to get off their lawn.
There are moments when it’s hard to imagine that at least some of Guru’s ire wasn’t aimed at Premier, a man he’d sworn off working with in life but now gets the final word on his legacy in death. It’s no secret that Guru felt betrayed by the machine that devoured the genre he loved, and came to see Premier as part of that machine, but there’s little disputing that his music is better off in Premier’s hands than Solar’s, either. Through all of this chaotic history, DJ Premier is trying to patch together an album that will pass the smell-test, and he does a decent job. Anyone who held out this long for a Gang Starr album will likely be pleased with the results: Premier meets his standards for sampling and scratching, and it’s just close enough to not feel wrong. Still, doing a tag-team album when your partner can’t consent feels like the kind of breach of trust that ended Gang Starr in the first place. This isn’t exactly a hologram tour, but it reasserts an imbalance. A secondhand Gang Starr album may be better than none, but it’s far less than the sum of its parts, and even less than the late Guru deserves. | 2019-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Gang Starr Enterprises LLC | November 11, 2019 | 6.3 | f46a036b-0791-47fe-9ccc-a73c845ad178 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The debut collaborative project suffers from a lack of chemistry, as Pi’erre Bourne struggles to stand out within Juicy J’s signature gothic sound. | The debut collaborative project suffers from a lack of chemistry, as Pi’erre Bourne struggles to stand out within Juicy J’s signature gothic sound. | Juicy J / Pi’erre Bourne: Space Age Pimpin’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juicy-j-pierre-bourne-space-age-pimpin/ | Space Age Pimpin’ | Juicy J and Pi’erre Bourne may be nearly two decades apart in age, but they have a lot more in common than you might think. They’re both rapper-producers with distinctive sounds who use straightforward metaphors and flex bars to create atmospheric funhouses of sound. And even though Bourne was one-and-a-half years old when Juicy’s group Three 6 Mafia released their influential 1995 debut Mystic Stylez, both men are trailblazers who molded their respective eras of rap in their own images—Juicy with his menacing Memphis swing, Pi’erre with his candy-colored take on contemporary trap music.
Unfortunately, their debut collaborative project Space Age Pimpin proves that Juicy and Pi’erre—who raps on every song—are an awkward match. Lyrically, they’re at the same eye level—smoking copious amounts of weed, lounging with women all over the world, stiff-arming people trying to mess with their money. But it’s hard to ignore that the album’s stylistic trappings heavily cater to Juicy’s sound over Pi’erre’s. Atmosphere is a big element in both men’s music, and while Juicy has slotted himself into Pi’erre’s hard-hitting dreamscapes neatly before, Pi’erre struggles to stand out over the gothic bounce that dominates this album.
Juicy’s been playing with hi-hats, claps, bass drum, ominous samples, and MIDI instruments for decades, and here they appear on nearly every track. Songs like lead single “This Fronto” and “Uhh Huh” are expansive and gritty, with bass deep enough to power blast the grime off a dirty car. Juicy is in his comfort zone—which isn’t surprising, considering he’s the album’s executive producer—and he floats stories of gun-running and silly sex puns (“She a good girl so before she eat this dick, she gon’ say grace”) across these beats on autopilot.
On the other hand, Pi’erre’s airy melodies and pun-heavy bars don’t fit over this kind of production. Take “Smokin’ Out,” which opens with pitched-down Juicy vocals barreling through synths and a punishing low-end. Pi’erre’s croons are quickly swallowed by the drums, crumpling like a used candy bar wrapper. The melodies he chooses often match the the beat exactly (“Uhh Huh”) or, like on “Who Get High,” they attempt to harmonize and meander aimlessly through verses. There’s a handful of moments where his voice assimilates to the track, including his verses on “BBL” and closer “Unsolved Mystery” but for the most part, his presence is bizarre and distracting. Sometimes, it even sounds like his vocals were ripped from a different project entirely and retrofitted onto leftovers from Juicy’s The Hustle Continues.
This is especially strange since Pi’erre and Juicy share production credits on every song. It’s a shame that one of the most influential producers of this generation has little presence behind the boards here, because the zany pop of Pi’erre’s solo and production work is nonexistent on Pimpin. Whether this was by design or coincidence is beside the point. Juicy J and Pi’erre Bourne clearly had a great time making this project, but Space Age Pimpin falls short of the 8Ball & MJG song for which it’s named. Unlike that duo, Juicy and Pi’erre’s chemistry is off at a base level. They’re left dangling in the wind like mismatched car dice, two colorful halves that are part of a different set. | 2022-06-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Trippy Music | June 29, 2022 | 5.9 | f4833015-eb89-446c-97cc-98ff7418f17d | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Following 2013’s Change Becomes Us, which re-worked early 1980s song sketches into full songs, Wire feels at first almost strangely normal. Colin Newman does most of the vocals in his gentler speak/sing mode, and the feeling generally is calmly inviting. | Following 2013’s Change Becomes Us, which re-worked early 1980s song sketches into full songs, Wire feels at first almost strangely normal. Colin Newman does most of the vocals in his gentler speak/sing mode, and the feeling generally is calmly inviting. | Wire: Wire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20472-wire/ | Wire | In the discography included with England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage’s 1991 study of UK punk’s origins, the entry for Wire simply reads, "the jokers in the pack." Nearly 40 years into their career, Wire remain unpredictable, going through aesthetic phases, reincarnations, breakups, and re-assemblings while dealing with final departures and new members. Yet in spite of it all, they’re still themselves, somehow. With no clear model for being elder statesman in rock, there’s room to do whatever one wants. Given Wire’s long history, it must be tempting for them to create "just" another album. But there’s never been "just" another Wire album, really—their career has always produced as much brow-furrowing and head-scratching as immediate love. Then all those inclined end up loving it anyway, and then, another album.
Following 2013’s Change Becomes Us, which re-worked early 1980s song sketches into full songs, Wire feels at first almost strangely normal. Lewis is credited with most of the lyrics, Newman does most of the vocals in his gentler speak/sing mode, and the feeling generally is calmly inviting. Cryptic song titles have been replaced with more prosaic tags like "In Manchester", "High", "Swallow"—even "Blogging", the name of the acoustic-led opener, at once moody, drily observational, and tense. Given that the term "post-punk" has reached a signifying-nothing-at-all stage (matching suits? a certain kind of haircut?), hearing a band who was actually there take their sound to a particular place few can truly reach is refreshing.
As lyrics like "fucking by proxy…selling on eBay" from "Blogging" show, Wire remain situated in a timeless retrofuture, simultaneously engaged and removed, which has always been their unique gift. The unease with the self, with the band as a fixed organizational point, that sense of relentless questioning and observation, continues. "In Manchester", for instance, could almost sound like something from early Factory Records days, except that the lyrics are about a song called "In Manchester" that has nothing to do with the place aside from that title. And it’s still a lovely singalong.
At points, you can hear Wire nodding to themselves, something not necessarily inevitable but still perfectly understandable—a guitar break on "Shifting" sounding like an echo from Chairs Missing, the brisk chug of "Joust & Jostle" and the even more thrilling "Split Your Ends" show once again how they can create a clean, brisk, stop-and-start energy. They’re not just nodding to themselves, either—the rumbling slow punch of the album’s centerpiece track, "Sleep-Walking", calls to mind the feeling of tense dread from the Comsat Angels’ "Dark Parade" off their early masterwork Sleep No More. But comparing Wire to another band never really works; nobody quite sounds like this.
Wire, forever the jokers, still never quite got their deserved deal out of the deck, and it won’t happen in the current fragmented musical landscape. They could have just said "FINE" and done a 154 album tour or the like for a lot more money and attention. A song here like "Swallow", perhaps the album’s most accessible-as-such number, the closest track to the platonic ideal of Wire’s pop song form, won’t even get the chance to just miss out on today’s equivalent to "Top of the Pops", whatever that might be. For those new to the band, Wire’s pleasures lie waiting, ready for those who want to take a chance on a daunting discography and a heck of a backstory that still keeps being added to. "There’s always someone who thinks they’ve got a plan," sings Newman here on "Octopus"; thank goodness for a band that had no plan but continues, as they choose, to succeed far more than many who did. | 2015-04-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-04-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | April 21, 2015 | 7 | f4870d54-b3ca-4c8e-a883-7f10fa102f11 | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
On her second album as Air Waves, Nicole Schneit jettisons some of the twang that marked her 2010 debut, opting for urban chug over playful Americana. And though she brings on collaborators like Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Ava Luna’s Felicia Douglass, she winds up streamlining her sound instead of expanding it. | On her second album as Air Waves, Nicole Schneit jettisons some of the twang that marked her 2010 debut, opting for urban chug over playful Americana. And though she brings on collaborators like Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Ava Luna’s Felicia Douglass, she winds up streamlining her sound instead of expanding it. | Air Waves: Parting Glances | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21011-parting-glances/ | Parting Glances | For all the characters Nicole Schneit slips into on Parting Glances, all the lives she touches upon and then runs from, she can never seem to sing her way out of her own head. The Brooklyn songwriter’s second record as Air Waves jettisons some of the twang that marked 2010’s Dungeon Dots, opting for urban chug over playful Americana but still holding fast to the guitar as a nucleus for her songwriting. And though she brings on collaborators like Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Ava Luna’s Felicia Douglass, Schneit winds up streamlining her sound instead of expanding it. Parting Glances hones in on her laconic delivery and dry touch on the fretboard, never losing its poise but rarely getting too visceral, either.
As a lead vocalist, Schneit also keeps her cool. Her sandy, stoic timbre mingles easily with the treble- and cymbal-heavy orchestrations she wraps around it with her three bandmates. When she sings over Hunter’s low harmonies on opener "Horse Race" and centerpiece "Thunder", it’s like we’re hearing two sides of the same artist. The voices twin each other, leaving just enough space to cast shadow in the valley between them, and lending an extra slice of depth to a sound field that tends to skew flat.
The lyrics on Parting Glances err toward the simple, too, but even the most well-worn lines work when folded into their surroundings. When Schneit sings "Someone take this pain away from me" in the first few measures of "Fantasy", she cracks the last word into two syllables, two notes, like the pain itself can’t be contained inside the words she uses to alleviate it. "I’m not sure what it’s about/ 'Cause the meaning never came," she sings, and she doesn’t plumb further. Her pain and its weight never resolve themselves; they just circulate in an endless four-chord progression while she sings like she’s trying to keep her head above water.
"I’m a bad man for coming around/ But you invited me here," Schneit proclaims on the enigmatic "Frank", one of many songs where she traces only the shadow of a character and lets us do the work of filling in the rest. Most of Parting Glances works invisibly like that—the album won’t stand out for its depth or its guts, but finds its stride in its smarts, in Schneit's knack for elliptical storytelling. These aren’t the richest stories you’ll ever hear, but they're enough to hook you along for the ride. | 2015-09-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | September 15, 2015 | 6.7 | f497f992-bc93-4567-a548-747e97f889cc | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The 22-year-old Instagram stuntman turned TikTok sensation has been minorly famous for only a few months, but he already sounds washed up. | The 22-year-old Instagram stuntman turned TikTok sensation has been minorly famous for only a few months, but he already sounds washed up. | Sueco the Child: MISCREANT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sueco-the-child-miscreant/ | MISCREANT | Somewhere in a museum of the most outrageous sex lyrics—between 2 Chainz’s “Dos Cadenas … you can suck my penis” and JAY-Z’s “your breasteses is my breakfast”—is a bawdy declaration from Pasadena rapper Sueco the Child. “Put my D in her V got her singin’ a C note,” he brags in his grungy trap single “fast.” Sueco uploaded “fast” to SoundCloud in April. Then, when a viral TikTok challenge vaulted Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” to the top of the charts, he saw an opportunity. He asked Lukas Daley, a 16-year-old skateboard personality and TikTok star, to share a video featuring “fast.” The song became an immediate sensation, inspiring over 3 million TikToks. Shortly afterward, Sueco inked a record deal with Atlantic and dropped a remix featuring Offset and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie.
Sueco was primed for virality: Before “fast” blew up, the 22-year-old born William Schultz had already accumulated more than a hundred thousand Instagram followers by filming musical stunts with a friend, skateboarder Lamont Holt. He made beats blindfolded; he made beats out of condoms; he made beats out of a girl’s butt. It helps that he looks like the illegitimate child of Dwight Schrute and a blue raspberry Jolly Rancher, and yells things like, “I fucking wish I was an industry plant” in a trollish deadpan. “fast” is Sueco’s autobiography—a sleazy account of selling weed, making beats, and “whiskey dicking,” delivered in a croak-whisper reminiscent of the way Justin Bieber once said “chilling by the fire while we eating fondue.” Buoyed by an infectious siren wail and a beat that stomps like a teenager on a DDR machine, it was an easy fit for dance challenges and outfit transformation videos. It didn’t necessarily work beyond the 15-second sound bite: The longer you listened, the more Sueco’s sluggish delivery and monotonous instrumentals started to drag. But like many memes, “fast” could be devilishly fun.
The same can’t be said for the other seven tracks on Sueco’s debut, MISCREANT. The rest of the album is both gross and soppy, like a drunk man who vomits on your shoes, and then, too hammered to realize what’s happening, groans “I love you.” “Put it her mouth have her drink it up like Danimals,” he growls in the album’s second single, “dork,” one of many songs preoccupied with the fact that a girl has touched his nuts. His goofy sex descriptions (“Hit it from the blind side/Sandra Bullock”) could be irreverent and ridiculous, if only the instrumentals weren’t so nauseatingly sentimental. “dork”’s starry-eyed gurgles recall nothing more than Owl City. The emo laptop-twinkles on “cayman” sound similarly trapped in a T-Mobile commercial. “I take a vegan bitch and I give her protein,” Sueco whispers, a pairing of style and subject matter as jarring as an ASMR dub of a “Real Housewives” fight.
TikTok—that Wild West of incest sketches, country throwdowns, and emo kids pretending to choke themselves—can be so vertigo-inducing that “brilliantly terrible” and “terribly brilliant” begin to mean the same thing. But MISCREANT isn’t impish or unique enough to succeed, even on meme terms. Much of it is memorable not for what it is, but for who it rips off. “novacane:)” is taxidermied Green Day, and “no sleep in my body” and “sober” are generic imitations of Juice WRLD. “Call me when it’s over, I can’t function sober,” Sueco whimpers, a line that could’ve come from any codeined SoundCloud rapper. Sueco doesn’t have enough punkish nihilism to imbue the subject with much urgency, anyway. As sad white boys go, he lacks the big hooks and raspy, soulful howl of someone like Post Malone.
Sueco’s been minorly famous for only a few months, but he sounds washed up, bragging about his glory days to a room that’s quickly emptying. His callbacks to “fast”—the reference to “400 on the dashy” in “dork,” a shoutout to “Cashville” in “626/305*”—make it sound as if he’s already run out of material. “I make a bitch sing pitch perfect,” he raps on “dork,” serving up a limp imitation of the joke he made on his first single. TikTok shaved two and a half minutes of “fast” down to mere seconds. It takes a particular kind of hubris to expect one viral moment to last 23 minutes straight. | 2019-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | September 25, 2019 | 3.5 | f4a2122c-1687-4dd0-9509-18f6910c5bc6 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
The long-running rap supergroup’s comic book-inspired boom-bap is formulaic fun. | The long-running rap supergroup’s comic book-inspired boom-bap is formulaic fun. | Czarface: Czartificial Intelligence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/czarface-czartificial-intelligence/ | Czartificial Intelligence | Whether you prefer the pulpy sci-fi yarns of Deltron 3030, the razor-sharp horrorcore of the Gravediggaz, the Atlanta stomp of Bankroll Mafia, or the moody indie-rap bliss of Madvillain, supergroups used to dominate many corners of rap. They aren’t exactly en vogue at the moment, but Czarface, made up of Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck and the Massachusetts duo 7L & Esoteric, persists. Since 2013, the trio has defined itself through mutual loyalty to old-school hip-hop and Silver and Bronze Age comic books. Czarface make hard-nosed, slightly goofy boom-bap for people who can identify Cella Dwellaz deep cuts as readily as the difference between John Romita and Steve Ditko’s work on Spider-Man.
Super What?, their 2021 collaboration with the late MF DOOM, was a high-water mark animated by the presence of rap’s greatest supervillain. Czarface’s latest, Czartificial Intelligence, plays out more like a Guardians of the Galaxy-style buddy action-dramedy. This is nerdy dad rap projected through a cel-shaded lens, a batch of average-to-pretty-good songs that don’t take many risks. Over 7L’s samples and dusty drums, Deck and Esoteric’s raps range from clever to lazy. Deck is known for his direct language, an approach that works best when he’s in storytelling mode: On the dark and heartfelt “Sirens,” he awakens to a tragic morning-after and “thugs crying.” That curt style doesn’t translate as well to his punchlines. Half-assed bars like “Taking ’em to class like I’m driving a school bus” (“You Know My Style”) or “It’s Ray’s pizzeria how I serve it to ’em pronto” (“Blast Off”) pale beside his once-earthshaking bars.
Esoteric takes bigger lyrical swings and gets wilder results. His style is lighter and his references are more specific, using Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry’s mouthguard and motion-capture actor Andy Serkis to big up his rap skills—or shame others’. He isn’t immune to groaners—if I never hear another of his “czar” puns again, it’ll be too soon—but he at least doesn’t take himself too seriously. “Rivalries is short-lived, like dwarves is,” he says on “You Know My Style” before immediately hanging a lampshade on his words: “I take that line back/They couldn’t get it off the track with forklifts.”
That keen wit comes in handy on “Mama’s Basement,” a solo track that examines the root of his comic book obsession. Over a steady drum loop and sparkling synths, Esoteric interpolates A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” as he explains how his love of superheroes endured through a strained relationship with his mother. In the third verse, when he shows up at her place to collect his old back issues, she reminds him that he sold the books years ago and tells him to let go of the past. A Czarface album isn’t usually the place for unpacking trauma, but “Mama’s Basement” fleshes out Esoteric’s personal lore in a novel, even soulful, way.
Fresh spins like this are the exception on Czartificial Intelligence: The trio’s routine is solid but formulaic. “Gatecrasher,” which dramatizes a fake beef with fellow rap dweeb Logic and his supervillain alter ego Doc D, feels like an interlude dragged laboriously to feature length. But even when one or both flounder on the mic, Esoteric and Deck complement each other well: an indie-rap mainstay bouncing off the stoicism of a true-school legend. Take “All That for a Drop of Blood,” one of a handful of tracks where every element locks in perfectly. 7L’s beat sounds like an amped-up version of the original PlayStation startup music, Deck reflects sagely on his come-up, and Esoteric fends off biters like he’s fighting his way through The Last of Us. Czarface may be a nostalgia camp with occasional modern flair, but it’s easy to get swept up in the heroics. | 2024-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Silver Age | January 3, 2024 | 6.5 | f4a25ddd-b117-4242-bee9-ef46a771d519 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On their fifth album, the UK band enlist Nigel Godrich and Kenny Beats for a smoother, softer rock record that still fires its love songs from a cannon. | On their fifth album, the UK band enlist Nigel Godrich and Kenny Beats for a smoother, softer rock record that still fires its love songs from a cannon. | Idles: TANGK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/idles-tangk/ | TANGK | Joe Talbot treats love like a four-letter word—meant to be shouted, loudly, like a bludgeon to the head. “Look at the card I bought/It says ‘I love you,’” the Idles frontman barked on 2018’s Joy as an Act of Resistance. In the intervening years, his own life experience—the birth of a child, a divorce, a new relationship—has only intensified the word’s meaning and laid bare the power it has over our relationships. While he claims that every Idles song is ultimately about love, leading up to the Bristol band’s fifth album, TANGK, Talbot honed his focus on the subject, reading bell hooks’ powerful 2000 treatise All About Love. But where hooks writes, “To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice,” Talbot approaches the topic with a typically broad sense of authority and indignation. On TANGK, Idles smooth their rougher edges as they explore love in all of its facets—it would be their warmest and most melodic record to date, if only Talbot could get out of his own way.
Writing about Idles’ most recent record, 2021’s Crawler, for this website, Stuart Berman wondered if, after a few false starts on an otherwise dark and driving record, they could go “full Kid A” and make the ambitious leap to a more experimental sound. The band seems to have taken his suggestion literally, re-engaging studio wizard Nigel Godrich to co-produce TANGK along with Kenny Beats, who formed an unlikely partnership with the band on their 2020 record Ultra Mono, and Idles guitarist Mark Bowen. The combined influences of each collaborator—Kenny Beats’ taut programmed drums, Godrich’s emphasis on melody and analog tape loops—mesh surprisingly well considering the producers’ disparate backgrounds. On “Gift Horse,” a thrumming bassline gives way to a kick drum that matches the elegant, muscular pacing of its equestrian subject, finding a phosphorescent midpoint between steely electronica and post-punk. “Grace” layers reverberating synths atop familiar drum and bass arrangements, lending a spectral, almost intangible quality to the song that Talbot echoes as he reaches for a thin falsetto. Lest you think Idles are not self-aware of this softer mode, the video for “Grace” is a shot-for-shot remake of Coldplay’s “Yellow” featuring a deep-faked Chris Martin.
In Idles, Godrich saw a band he could mold, gently, in his image: “I thought it would be interesting to see how they would translate if he was a little bit more musical, if he sang more,” he said in a recent interview. Indeed, the record opens with a piano, padded drums, and Talbot’s textured croon, which does bring to mind Chris Martin. Perhaps counterintuitively for a frontman known for gnarled roars, it’s the most expressive he’s sounded. On “A Gospel,” a song that originally began as an iPhone demo from Bowen, featherlight piano and fluttering strings accompany Talbot’s wispy vocals, finding a softness just as emotionally potent as his fiercest howl. Closer “Monolith” oozes to life with a murky synth and a thin, trembling vocal from Talbot. But here, as his voice melts into a crackling saxophone, we’re left with an impressionistic glance, one that lingers after Talbot’s final note. It’s a welcome pared-back approach after a discography full of kitchen-sink catchphrase soup.
Still, even Godrich’s influence couldn’t shake the band of its worst habits. The veteran producer was “astounded and disarmed” to discover Talbot’s unorthodox writing style, closer to a rap cypher than a rock frontman, of coming to the studio without any lyrics, instead preferring to riff live on the mic. Talbot considered writing ahead of their sessions, but decided that it was “bullshit”; as a result, the record must work around his more bombastic improvisations. There’s his interjections of “Fuck the king” at the end of “Gift Horse,” the awkward rhyming scheme of “Freudenfreude” (a German word that’s the opposite of schadenfreude, essentially feeling joy at the success of others) with “joy on joy,” on “Pop Pop Pop,” and most glaringly, the clumsy refrain on “Hall & Oates,” an ode to lasting friendship (don’t check how the real Hall & Oates are doing) that rivals Drake’s son Adonis’ breakout single in its repetition of “My man.” Additional vocals from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang on “Dancer” are drowned out by Talbot’s crude bleats of “cheek to cheek,” evoking a bullfight more than a ballroom.
Talbot could stand to take a note from another one of his inspirations for the record, Aesop’s fable of The North Wind and The Sun. Rather than beating listeners into submission, like Aesop’s personified Wind, Idles works best when the band builds radiant warmth around Talbot’s softer vocals. There’s a subtlety to writing about love that Talbot misses on this record—it’s a topic that’s often best gestured at, rather than bossed around. Press materials note that the word “love” appears 29 times throughout the record, and yet the songs that speak to the feelings undergirding that powerful emotion—the exhilaration of romantic attraction, the fear of abandonment—don’t mention the topic directly at all. On TANGK, Idles seem poised to let down their ironclad armor and reveal a far more interesting and nuanced band, just as soon as Talbot is ready to relinquish his stubborn and self-defeating grasp. | 2024-02-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Partisan | February 16, 2024 | 6.7 | f4a62d9e-cb53-467f-99e5-8edb898b5645 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
On their second record, the Columbus, Ohio quartet play away the pain. | On their second record, the Columbus, Ohio quartet play away the pain. | didi: Like Memory Foam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/didi-like-memory-foam/ | Like Memory Foam | There’s a fine line between growing weary of the world and giving up on it. The latter marks a political and emotional dead end, but the former can open the door to constructive thought. Growing tired of something grants space for dreaming up its replacement. In the ’90s, guitar bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth managed to funnel their weariness into restive stews of noise that approached political quandaries from an oblique angle. When Kim Gordon asked, on “Kool Thing,” “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?,” she already knew the reply. It’s the asking that counts, even if you’re already sick of the answer.
Following this sly template, the Columbus, Ohio band didi eschew the blunt force of punk, investing their political frustrations instead in the more subtle vessel of melody-rich noise pop. Their second album, Like Memory Foam, darts in and out of the personal and political. Breakup songs mingle with calls for the obliteration of the old guard, and didi treat both subjects with the same swirling mix of gravitas and irreverence. Interpersonal frustrations and political oppressions both cause suffering, after all; the body buckles in the same way no matter the source of the pain.
The band makes space for three vocalists, and the playful juxtaposition of their voices leavens the weighty subject matter. Kevin Bilapka-Arbelaez alternates between offhand clean singing and a corrosive yelp; Meg Zakany offers up a mean deadpan; Leslie Shimizu lets her vocals float airily above the rest of the mix. Their distinct personalities lend dimension to an otherwise familiar sound, and deflate the myth of rock band as delivery system for a bandleader’s interior monologue. The band’s strength lies in its internal variety, and the decentralized power structure of its arrangements.
On “Muerde,” Bilapka-Arbelaez sings in Spanish of a spider biting him during the night and flooding his dreams with poison, making use of the language's abundant internal rhymes. “Una araña en la sombra/Me araña el hombro mientras duermo,” he sings, playing on “araña’s” dual use as a verb (sting) and a noun (spider). At the chorus, against a bubbly staccato bassline, he switches to English to bemoan a communication breakdown: “All I ever want to hear/Is what you never want to say.” The clipped, brittle words contrast with the musicality of the Spanish; Spanish works better for singing about the slow death of a dream, while English is better suited to throwing up your hands in exasperation.
With multiple vocalists singing in multiple languages, Like Memory Foam resists boredom even in the songs about boredom, though the band finds its groove in the tracks barbed with rage. “Dead Tongues” threads together a slouchy three-chord guitar progression to rail against “corpses in suits with outdated ideas/who refuse to relinquish their powers.” Bilapka-Arbelaez sings the words so lightly that it’s easy to miss the frustration behind them, but an earworm often goes down more smoothly than a diatribe. Besides, a guitar song so buoyant it approaches surf rock is easier to hold and return to; in music, like in other media, comedic timing can help drive in a salient complaint about the state of the world. didi serve up their snarls with a grin, flipping off the status quo and running away laughing.
On “Haru,” didi trace a similar riff to Dinosaur Jr.’s “Feel the Pain,” chugging away on an insistent note. The duality that J Mascis probed on that song—“I feel the pain of everyone/Then I feel nothing”—resonates more than two decades later, where the most readily available emotional states seem to be deep, exhausting compassion for all the earth's suffering, or bitter, deadened irony. But unlike “Feel the Pain,” which contracts to a single note, the riff on “Haru” branches outward, as if the band were resisting the urge to fall into cynicism at the last minute, as if they had decided to keep feeling the pain. They know a third option lies beyond depression and numbness: laughter. On Like Memory Foam, they play away the pain, sitting in the middle of hell on earth without staying still long enough for it to sink into their bones. | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Damnably | December 3, 2018 | 7.1 | f4ab6d3f-d655-4736-b17d-027080429f33 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Following last year’s debut album, the Dutch-Iranian singer continues to mine trip-hop for inspiration, with a voice that evokes the genre’s greats. | Following last year’s debut album, the Dutch-Iranian singer continues to mine trip-hop for inspiration, with a voice that evokes the genre’s greats. | Sevdaliza: The Calling EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sevdaliza-the-calling-ep/ | The Calling EP | ISON, the debut album by the Dutch-Iranian vocalist Sevdaliza, was one of last year’s quiet standouts, in part because almost no one’s doing anything like it. For almost a decade now, artists have flirted with the (unfairly) maligned trip-hop genre, a bit embarrassedly and usually in the guise of something else: FKA twigs filtering breathy vocals and loops through alt-R&B, the Weeknd working with Esthero’s producer to bring out the genre’s seedier side, artists like Flume adapting downtempo arrangements for an EDM-accustomed world. But ISON, co-produced by Mucky and featuring lush strings by Mihai Puscoiu, leaned fully into the genre, in its The Blue God-era Martina Topley-Bird incarnation: all its breakbeats, all its unabashedly cinematic instrumentation, and all its heady introspection.
The Calling isn’t a departure from ISON so much as a distillation in both sound and in genre. The two pejoratives for trip-hop, the coffeeshop and the bedroom, suggest shallow, half-hearted connections with other people, which was always strange for a genre that, at its best, is about extensive self-reflection. And The Calling certainly has that, occasionally to excess. There’s a fair amount of woo to get past, starting in interviews and peaking in “Human Nature” with a sotto voce spoken-word quotation of the guru Osho, whose more salacious teachings are the subject of Netflix’s cult doc “Wild Wild Country.” Once you do, though, the music is well worth it.
Sevdaliza’s voice evokes the best bits of the genre’s greats—Tracey Thorn’s richness, Nicola Hitchcock’s tremolo—while adding distinctive melisma evoking her Iranian roots. Mucky hones his sound further here. Like Arca, his productions often dwell on empty space, and just how far it can expand; “Soothsayer,” in particular, has moments that spool out slowly, very much like parts of Björk’s Arca-produced Vulnicura. The Calling takes the best part of ISON—the strings—and makes them even more abundant and central.
“Human Nature” has a tough task—building a serious song on a refrain, “touched by an angel,” that shares its lyrics with the title of an unsalvageably glurge-y CBS show—but manages pathos anyway, and a sense of alienation. Sevdaliza’s freestyled vocal is Auto-Tuned and vocoded into the uncanny. The track’s a companion piece to the single “Soul Syncable,” the most traditionally trip-hop piece here. It circles a moody, voiceless refrain, over and over, without resolution: “I’m on codeine,” she sings, “you can’t escape, patterns keep you going.”
The Calling suffers, at times, where ISON did: in structure. The EP is more concise than ISON, yet each track still has enough surprises to fill an EP of its own. “Voodoov” weaves spooky cyberpunk sound effects throughout the mix. “Energ1” is built around a glitch-and-strings bridge reminiscent, in a great way, of the McCarricks (string players who have collaborated with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gary Numan, and Kristin Hersh). And “Observer” is something quite different, the only thing on the EP that can be called “pop”—an insistent bass synth, a nudge up in tempo, and a bit of ironic contrast: The poppiest, most upbeat track on the album is about being an observer, an outsider. But these moments are scattered throughout often sprawling arrangements. Nevertheless, the highs are high, the lows barely exist, and the rest is finely crafted: the work of a mind that has styled its interior down to the most immaculate detail. | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Twisted Elegance | April 2, 2018 | 7 | f4aeece4-6a3b-4ee4-ac40-dc1a20762522 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Written in the wake of a divorce and while working toward a PhD in musicology, the Los Angeles musician’s first album in four years is a breakup record stripped to its most elemental parts. | Written in the wake of a divorce and while working toward a PhD in musicology, the Los Angeles musician’s first album in four years is a breakup record stripped to its most elemental parts. | Nite Jewel: No Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nite-jewel-no-sun/ | No Sun | In ancient Greece, mourners performed ritual laments at funerals as a way of grappling with the turbulent emotions that accompany grieving. A chorus of women would overwhelm mourners with collective vocalizing, channeling their fear of the unknown and allowing for a cathartic purging of emotion. No Sun, the latest album from Nite Jewel, aka Los Angeles singer-songwriter and producer Ramona Gonzalez, seeks to replicate the formidable vulnerability of those ritual laments by way of expressive, low-lit electronic pop centered on her own heartache. Written in the wake of the dissolution of her 12-year marriage and while working toward a PhD in musicology, No Sun is a breakup record stripped to its most elemental parts. Lonely synth lines that beep like EKG machines and stretches of silence guide Gonzalez’s sleek blend of electronic, pop, and jazz music. The album is her most accomplished, arresting work yet.
Gonzalez’s music transports you to a dreamy otherworld, with scuffed backdrops and oblique, guarded lyrics. On earlier Nite Jewel albums, her airy voice was a swooning medium for nostalgic electro-pop filtered through funk and R&B. Her voice was often more a texture than a focal point, which some critics have been quick to charge as a weakness, but on No Sun she changes strategies. Gonzalez’s vocals are front and center, to emphasize the grief in her lyrics, especially on the standout, seven-minute opener “Anymore.” An oscillating synth beats in the background as Gonzalez sings about losing her sense of self in the aftermath of her breakup. “I wonder if I took over your life/Because it seems you took over mine,” she sings plaintively, her voice growing more delicate as it arrives at a revelation: “It’s no use now to cry/You have yours and I have mine.”
Gonzalez returned to her own independent imprint, Gloriette, in 2016, following a spate of label troubles, and since then, her music as Nite Jewel has taken on more riveting forms, a shift that was clearest on 2017’s buoyant Real High. With rubbery basslines and melodies that recalled Janet Jackson at her most featherlight, Real High opened up a more lyrically straightforward side that No Sun continues. The ballads “Before I Go” and “This Time” present her pain in cut-and-dried terms. “I won’t talk about my feelings if you come around,” she sings in the former over a glimmering synth; “Mm, what’s it about?/You hesitate to touch the water but I’m swimming out.” She lets her words linger afterward, the silence around them like a vacuum.
Even at its most desolate, No Sun allows light through the cracks. “To Feel It” uses bright keys, jittery synths, and a staggered beat to zero in on how even the most monotonous tasks—getting out of bed in the morning, picking a pen for work—can be loaded with memories of a past life. “I can try and distract my thoughts by getting close to another,” Gonzalez sings in a hopscotching voice. “The thing is there’s nothing like the one who’s your lover.” The songs on No Sun are musically syncretic, joining together sparse, varied sounds with ease; in the album credits, brown paper bags and ceiling fans appear alongside drum machines and string arrangements. Even the instrumental “#14,” with long, ambient stretches of Rhodes, bass, and synths, feels in tune with the album’s inward, thoughtful intention.
“Thought I saw something, or was it a warning?” Gonzalez asks on the late-album highlight “No Escape.” It’s one of many songs on No Sun that lean into passages of silence, a shuffling, stop-and-start synth-pop song that takes its time and allows a way to grieve what’s lost while looking ahead. Cymbals clatter in the background as synths quake, just as Gonzalez comes to a breaking point. “I don’t know where to run,” she admits, “This one you can’t run from.” The song doesn’t find her totally at peace—“there’s no escape,” she reminds us—but in its murmuring melodies and sighing relief, it’s certainly close.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Gloriette | August 26, 2021 | 7.7 | f4bd0137-c19b-456f-8624-3ea34ac039b8 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Presented as a companion piece to last year’s Screen Memories, the John Maus’ latest captures the avant-garde artist at his most irreverent and unguarded. | Presented as a companion piece to last year’s Screen Memories, the John Maus’ latest captures the avant-garde artist at his most irreverent and unguarded. | John Maus: Addendum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-maus-addendum/ | Addendum | John Maus doesn’t want you to mistake his smarts for being pretentious. Sure, the cultishly adored synth-pop performer holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy and he isn’t afraid to expound on subjects like Freud, the Enlightenment, and Michel Foucault’s Theatrum Philosophicum in interviews that often read like thesis excerpts. But he also loves cartoons, preaches his admiration for pop music in its most accessible forms, and once explained, unsatisfyingly, that he unwittingly participated in an alt-right Adult Swim program because its creators also hated TED Talks. He’s weary of coming across as the Niles Crane of avant-garde music. For his last album, 2017’s Screen Memories he built his own modular synthesizers—the act of a truly devoted audiophile—only to dismiss the exercise as a waste, later on admitting that only “about half a dozen of only the most discerning ears would make out the difference.”
Screen Memories caught Maus in an even dourer mood than usual, playing up the gloom in his deadpan voice with songs about battlefields, executions, and societal rot. It was as odd and indelible, even though it was a commonplace totem of 2017: the Trumpian despair album. It turns out that record’s apocalyptic imagery and stark mood didn’t capture the totality of Maus’ headspace at the time. Recorded during the same sessions as Screen Memories, and on those same homemade synths, its companion piece Addendum captures Maus at his most irreverent and unguarded. Artists of Maus’ intellect aren’t supposed to just fuck around—it’s assumed their work must contain layer after impenetrable layer of meaning. But as often as not on Addendum, it kinda feels like he’s just fucking around.
The bleaker the album’s subject matter, the more overt the comedy. Where Screen Memories had a song about dead pets, Addendum counters with a robotically funky one about dumpster babies (“Take that baby to the dump/To the dump!”) that plays like the imagined soundtrack to a demented Atari game. His surly baritone sounds less Ian Curtis and more the guy from Right Said Fred, and throughout Addendum he plays it for maximum absurdity. “They don’t know shit about outer space” he huffs over neon-hued keys on the opener “Outer Space,” a cross between the sensibilities of Inside Llewyn Davis’ “Please Mr. Kennedy” and Max Headroom. With its treadmill pace and chants of “Run! Run! Run!,” the manic “Running Man” seems to exist mostly so listeners can picture the dance that might accompany it onstage.
By nature of its title and packaging—the album is being pressed only as part of a career-spanning box set ahead of a digital release—Addendum risks being classified as a second-tier Maus record. Maybe that’s by design, but Maus has saved some of his best work for a rarity collection before, and leftovers or not, this material stands on its own. Only “Privacy,” a smoldering buzz-killer written by Ariel Pink, feels like a draft of a song that never quite jells into the pop spectacle it wants to be. But a pair of closing songs written back in 2003 are two of the album’s most spirited. With its feverish drum claps and revved-up synths, “1987” plays like Maus’ curmudgeonly response to the party-starting dance-punk of the early 2000s—his disdainful recitation of the word “sexy” during its breakdown ranks among his all-time great line readings. Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness. | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ribbon Music | April 20, 2018 | 7.4 | f4ca8c83-b720-41ce-b9bb-5095e484b192 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Continuing in the vein of January’s Antidawn EP, Burial’s latest three-tracker dispenses with the drums entirely, instead exploring an ambient expanse of choir and strings. | Continuing in the vein of January’s Antidawn EP, Burial’s latest three-tracker dispenses with the drums entirely, instead exploring an ambient expanse of choir and strings. | Burial: Streetlands EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burial-streetlands-ep/ | Streetlands EP | While Burial’s music may be famous for its foggy atmospheres and occasional ambient interludes, its off-grid kicks and resampled snares are what make it tick. As a schoolboy, he’d get kicked out of class for drumming on the desk. His self-titled debut album and 2007 follow-up, Untrue, were suffused with the swinging rhythms of jungle and garage. Later output revealed his love of trance music, with its chuggy, thudding kicks, while collaborations with Four Tet and Thom Yorke introduced a wafty house patter to his grayscale textures. Late in 2020, “Chemz” pinned eyelids back with acid stabs and crushed breakbeats. This obsession with percussion made January’s five-track Antidawn EP all the more surprising for its lack of drums—or, really, any rhythm at all.
Streetlands, which arrived unannounced last week, tugs at that same thread, proceeding beatless for three tracks totaling more than half an hour. His trademark re-pitched R&B hooks are also gone. Stripped of the textures that ground Burial’s music however obliquely in clubs or on South London night buses, Streetlands is more evocative of the digital, imagined lands that leak into his music via Metal Gear Solid, StarCraft and Silent Hill samples.
Where Burial’s early records could be interpreted as capturing his corner of London through a lens of sci-fi and soundsystem culture (music critic Simon Reynolds has drawn parallels between Burial and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World), Streetlands is less grounded in concrete and the contained chaos of the city. Instead it drifts, generatively, like rolling vistas in a video game, into untrodden environments of its own making—less future dystopia and more unexplored present possibility. Here, the familiar shrinkwrap of hisses, pops, and crackles is about all that ties the music to his habitually claustrophobic world; instead, Streetlands offers open plains of stretched choir and luminescent strings.
Chimes hang in vaulted ceilings. The Flatliners sample—“There’s something out there”—that opens “Streetlands” is shorn of the fearful sense the same words carried on “Loner,” imbued here with something more hopeful, merely tinged with trepidation. “Hospital Chapel” builds on a swelling choral loop, like whale song, that reveals more at every turn. A reversed, tightly wound vocal on the title track takes on an alien quality, not just in its indecipherability but because for how loudly and starkly it pierces the mix, streaking in like a call intercepted from another galaxy—or, in more traditional Burial lore, a pirate radio station cutting through the frequencies. The overall effect is immersive and uncanny, but ultimately lacks the emotional hooks required to pull you all the way in.
In 2014, the once-anonymous producer broke cover with a selfie and a note posted to the Hyperdub website. He thanked “anyone out there who liked my burial tunes & supported me over the years” and shared plans to release more music. But he couldn’t promise anything, due to the impending release of Dark Souls II—an immersive, gothic role-playing game notorious for its extreme difficulty, and infamous for the apparent cruelty with which it strips players down just as they get going. “I need to play that game a lot,” Burial wrote. Burial’s song structures, almost always sprawling, have a similarly masochistic appeal on Streetlands. “Exokind”—amid panpipes and panicked primate calls—is stuffed all the way up to its closing seconds with fragmented riffs that Overmono or Bicep would kill for, teasing the arrival of a drum break that’ll never come. Ten minutes into “Streetlands” you get a chord progression that, with a billowing breakbeat, could soundtrack an arms-aloft sundown on a hilly field. But still no drums. The balance swings between exhilaration and frustration.
The one thing that remains utterly fixed about Burial’s music is how evocative it is, especially of place. In early interviews, he would reference sci-fi movies like Alien and The Terminator in the same breath as underpass jungle raves. Too young to experience either firsthand, he lived vicariously through his brother: ingesting the atmosphere from decaying tape packs, obsessing over the movie motifs and sound effects—motion trackers, dropships, sentry guns—that conjured whole worlds in his imagination and, later, his music. When he names a track “Hospital Chapel,” he’s putting you in the room, where you eavesdrop on last rites or watch rushed marriages in front of the faux stained glass. The spareness with which the song builds signals perhaps his most accomplished piece of pure ambient to date. The rest of Streetlands pumps this world-building with bolder, more fantastical ambition; on the title track and “Exokind” he comes close to bringing the listener all the way with him. But the lines just don’t quite join up, and instead you’re left to hang—unsettled—in the liminal space. | 2022-10-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 27, 2022 | 6.9 | f4cbd072-13fb-4306-8c9e-8cd2111d1407 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Depeche Mode singer issues a Pro-Tooled set of dark rock grooves and electronic buzzing that, although lacking any element of surprise, finds his songwriting assured and competent. | Depeche Mode singer issues a Pro-Tooled set of dark rock grooves and electronic buzzing that, although lacking any element of surprise, finds his songwriting assured and competent. | Dave Gahan: Hourglass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10827-hourglass/ | Hourglass | This has presumably been a strange and exciting decade to be a member of Depeche Mode: Seven years during which dark, blustery electro-pop has come back as a mainstream force, especially in their native UK, and sometimes in exactly the terms they were supplying it 15 or 20 years ago. They've noticed this, surely. Perhaps it's why, after sidetracking into a minimal, techy sound on 2001's Exciter, they ran right back to blaring, grainy bombast on 2005's Playing the Angel. And perhaps it's why, after a solo debut that differentiated itself from DM by putting a guitar up front, singer Dave Gahan has veered back toward the drama you expect of him.
The problem is that while Hourglass has Gahan sounding a lot more assured and competent as a songwriter, it's also too much what you'd expect of him. Holed up in a New York studio with Depeche Mode's touring drummer and guitar player, he's constructed a Pro-Tooled set of dark rock grooves and electronic buzzing that won't shock anyone who's heard him or his band since, say, Songs of Faith and Devotion-- it's tasteful, professional, and as sophisticated as you'd expect from veterans. But it's also the kind of rote music that has very little purpose on its own. It's the kind that needs a very good singer-- and a very good songwriter-- to give it a reason to exist.
Gahan isn't that guy right now, and his presence here seems as rote as the music. He's addicted to the grand, prophetic register he's been singing in for years now, but he's not so good these days at making it seem like there's a reason for him to stay in that place. Lyrics about religion and self-doubt may be Depeche Mode's stock in trade, but none of them necessarily support the sinister breathing and chest-beating drama Gahan goes for-- drama that seems awfully routine here, like a product he's manufacturing.
It's a feeling that infects a lot of the tracks here, among which even the better ones can be too transparently professional, faultless but inessential. "Endless" looks to recapture the 00s with a minimized glam beat, the same T Rex shuffle that's put acts like Goldfrapp on the charts-- but Gahan seems to be copping his hook from Depeche Mode's "I Feel You", and all the sensual atmosphere he's pumping out feels more like branding than substance. The single, "Kingdom", sounds limp and listless, a big melody in a song that feels like it came out of a box. The tracks here that actually surprise-- the ones that take risks, jump out of the realm of expectations, or at least push Gahan's usual persona to the point of self-parody-- just wind up underlining the lack of spark in the songs around them. "Deeper and Deeper" is great precisely because it's so potentially embarrassing: Gahan is growling, play-acting a little monster, anteing up and putting something in the game. It's too rare of an occurrence here, and a little more of it would have provided much better context for the tracks-- "Down", "Miracles", "Saw Something"-- where Gahan does what Gahan does perfectly well.
It's possible to give albums like this a sense of risk and vigor, as proven just a couple months back by another 80s-alternative mainstay, someone Gahan has surely sat next to in a whole lot of record collections: Siouxsie Sioux burst out with exactly the same kind of deep, dark, guitars-and-electro solo pop record, and it was packed with all the verve this one's missing. I don't doubt that those who have followed Gahan and Depeche Mode for years will find things to like in Hourglass and enjoy hearing him continue to struggle with the topics he and his lyrics always do; he's eloquent and interesting, and I have no doubt that he's feeling every word and note here. But I'm guessing that for most, on this record, hearing Gahan feel it will be as exciting as watching any other professional perform the task he's a pro at, whether it's chopping down trees or rebuilding car engines. | 2007-10-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-10-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute / Virgin | October 25, 2007 | 5.7 | f4e6462e-24c1-4b0a-90f3-3946175df3e9 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Sunn O))), an incidental history:
1955: "Louie Louie" is penned and originally performed by Richard Berry, songwriter and frontman for ... | Sunn O))), an incidental history:
1955: "Louie Louie" is penned and originally performed by Richard Berry, songwriter and frontman for ... | Sunn O))): Flight of the Behemoth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7578-flight-of-the-behemoth/ | Flight of the Behemoth | Sunn O))), an incidental history:
1955: "Louie Louie" is penned and originally performed by Richard Berry, songwriter and frontman for R&B; outfit Richard Berry and the Dreamers.
1963: "Louie Louie," as interpreted by Portland, Oregon garage-band the Kingsmen, causes a sensation, due in no small part to the unintelligible lyrical rendition by lead singer Jack Ely. While on the road, bassist Norm Sundholm, appalled by the lack of volume available from his bass cabinet, contacts brother Conrad Sundholm to help him with a solution.
1964: While the state of Indiana bans the Kingsmens' hit "Louie Louie" from the radio, citing suspected obscenities in the aforementioned "unintelligible lyrical rendition" (a case which FBI head J. Edgar Hoover himself would take up and not drop until 1965), Conrad Sundholm creates the world's first high-powered concert bass amplifier.
1965: An increased interest in the amplifiers leads to increased orders from guitarists and bassists alike, prompting Conrad to move the operation out of his Father's garage. The Sunn amplifier company is born.
1969: Sunn amplifiers are used for the famed monstrous sound system at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in upstate New York.
"The SUNNO))) mission is to create trance like soundscapes with the ultimate low end/bottom frequencies intended to massage the listeners intestines into an act of defecation."
Before forming this band in honor of Earth, the powerful drone/doom outfit who somehow released four albums on Sub Pop while maintaining a higher doom:drone ration than any other band from the Northwest, Steve O'Malley and Greg Anderson did time in Burning Witch and Goatsnake, respectively. But SUNNO))) is a different beast entirely, a dual homage to the two things that count: bravado and volume.
Flight of the Behemoth is fifty minutes of well-calculated doomdrone that, in one swift take, manages to sound slower than Sleep, more hypnotic than Sabbath, and ten times more powerful than any early 60s NYC drone music (John Cale, Tony Conrad, etc.), and for one simple reason: it's based on metal.
The opening track, "Death Becomes You," does not fade in. It kicks the fucking door open and does not stop riffing every so slightly until the end of its thirteen minutes when it crackles out with the sound of a chorus of crackling, speakerkilling malfunctions. "Mocking Solemnity" follows, employing similar tactics, save for some extra feedback and a bit more high-end.
"SunnO)))BOW 1" and "SunnO)))BOW 2" are extremely well-fortified remixes of SUNN O))) tracks by Masami Akita, who you might know better by his alias, Merzbow. Merzbow steps in on top of these tracks, and, his match met the by low-end sludgemasters present in the mix, decides to liven the tracks up with some plunking piano in the left channel, accompanied by signature high-end noise bursts in the right. The second remix ends in a terrifying swirl of noise and bass which comes pretty close to the SUNNO))) mission referenced above. Needless to say, the addition of Merzbow to these tracks is very welcome.
The final track, entitled "FWTBT: (I dream of Lars Ulrich being thrown the bus window instead of my master Mystikall Kliff Burton)," starts out with what sounds like a detuned 808 kickdrum hit, before it melts savagely into a furious and panting repetition of the previous track's nicely executed M.O. Add some faint drumming and some overtly breathy "singing" and you have what sounds like a Sabbath song with all the tricks focused in one place, stretched out over ten minutes, without the imagery necessary to propel you straight downward.
When I first heard Sleep's "Jerusalem," I thought that the ultimate in slowness and deliberation had been reached, that it would not be possible to transcend the completely stoned realm of Nazareth that the hour-long concept album champions. Obviously, I wasn't looking hard enough.
This album sounds like it could have been recorded ten miles away from Woodstock while it was happening, with special microphones buried ten miles below the surface of the earth to only catch the vibrations of the bass on stage and the pounding of all those hippies doing whatever the hell it was they were doing. The trajectory that begins with Richard Berry and ends with Merzbow leaves me wondering what J. Edgar Hoover would have thought of this album. And then I remember that he was a crossdresser. | 2002-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2002-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal | Southern Lord | March 4, 2002 | 8.5 | f4e8b622-5fe6-4f47-a48e-2ad49a480557 | Pitchfork | null |
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The Baltimore ambient musician uses sitar and synthesizers to investigate folkloric narratives from around the world. | The Baltimore ambient musician uses sitar and synthesizers to investigate folkloric narratives from around the world. | Ami Dang: Parted Plains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ami-dang-parted-plains/ | Parted Plains | Near the end of her life, the great Jungian analyst and folklorist Marie-Louise von Franz declared that civilization requires myth in order to survive. She believed that the Christian myth on which Western civilization is founded had degenerated; in its place, she repped for alchemy, a pet obsession of her former mentor, which has yet to catch on. But her larger point resonates. We need stories to make sense of our lives and to propel us into the future; if the myths we live by have brought us to the brink of global collapse, might a change be in order?
Baltimore’s Ami Dang doesn’t attempt anything quite so bold as a global consciousness reset on Parted Plains, her new album for Leaving Records. But she does dive into the shadowy, archetypal waters of the fairy tale, weaving impressions of ancient stories with modern sounds. The album purports to sketch a fresh take on something as old as language, soundtracking “a yet-to-be written folktale that is neither Eastern nor Western, not traditional or contemporary—but somewhere in between.” She does this by blending sitar explorations with thick ambient synth backdrops, often bypassing new age’s cheap fusion cliches for something uneasy and darkly moody.
Parted Plains is a mixed bag, but it’s also a grower. The stories Dang uses as a jump-off point can be pored over as coded maps of the psyche, their every detail and twist passed down through the generations precisely because of a deep spiritual resonance. Her compositions feel more like cues for a movie we don’t get to see. Still, they have a vibe. The sound design can be compelling, with synths gurgling and writhing, haunting reverb trailing her sitar, and paranoid sub bass keeping the hippies at bay. “Make Enquiry” uses slurry metallic noises reminiscent of early grime, while “Stockholm Syndrome” recreates the psychological shift observed in victims of its 1973 hostage situation namesake (which has itself ascended to the rank of modern folklore): The first minute basks in clammy subterranean dread before abruptly pivoting to a serenely bucolic chill.
But the pieces rarely get off the ground, and then too often wrap up by dispersing into nothing, like a dandelion blown into the summer breeze. “Bopoluchi,” named after a Little Red Riding Hood-type character from India, coasts for a bit, abruptly changes course, and then stops dead in its tracks. The source text tells of a young woman’s journey far from home and deep into the woods, where animals speak a secret language and a battle of the wits must be fought with a bandit and his witch co-conspirator. How the music relates to this tale of danger and redemption is anyone’s guess.
Dang spends a lot of the LP soloing, but the best moments are when her instruments gel. On “Sohni,” she layers her sitar in delay to build a shower of plucky cries over a mournful synth harmony. It’s a poignant exhale which skips the noodling that pervades many of her other tracks. The closing “Souterrain” goes the opposite route, opening with an unaccompanied solo which is answered, one minute in, by urgent arpeggiations and spacious groans. In those suspended moments, you feel Dang’s conviction coming through. At its strongest, Parted Plains feels intimate; at its weakest it seems private to the point of opacity. One wishes Dang had committed more to the timelessness of her folklore inspirations, and less to the East-meets-West mashup. After all, something that’s neither Eastern, Western, new, or old might be something just diffuse enough to be nothing much at all.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Leaving | August 6, 2019 | 6.3 | f4f13843-bf29-405f-b309-fcb0f9229ba6 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Drawing on the archives of Radio Mogadishu, Analog Africa’s latest archival compilation tells a story of openness that is at stark odds with the past few decades of Somalia’s history. | Drawing on the archives of Radio Mogadishu, Analog Africa’s latest archival compilation tells a story of openness that is at stark odds with the past few decades of Somalia’s history. | Various Artists: Mogadisco - Dancing Mogadishu (Somalia 1972–1991) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-mogadisco-dancing-mogadishu-somalia-19721991/ | Mogadisco - Dancing Mogadishu (Somalia 1972–1991) | For years, Samy Ben Redjeb has been traveling across Africa and Latin America in search of forgotten sounds: vintage funk and myriad hybrids, offshoots, and variants that proliferated in the post-colonial era. Since 2006, his label, Analog Africa, has turned up dusty recordings from Benin, Togo, Ghana, Angola, Burkina Faso, Congo, Senegal, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Brazil—many of them rarely, if ever, heard outside of the communities that produced them. But it’s likely that Mogadisco - Dancing Mogadishu (Somalia 1972-1991) represents his most ambitious project to date, given Somalia’s woes. A former colony of the UK and Italy, Somalia endured a 22-year military dictatorship throughout the 1970s and ’80s, followed, in 1991, by a civil war that continues today. Though civil life in Mogadishu has rebounded since a new government was formed in 2012, the Al Qaeda-linked militant group Al Shabab remains a threat: In late December, terrorists plowed a truck laden with explosives into a busy intersection in the capital, killing at least 79.
Amid such persistent security threats, a city once described as “the pearl of the Indian Ocean” is widely considered a danger zone for travelers—Ben Redjef was accompanied by armed security escorts—which only makes his archival efforts there that much more valuable. Analog Africa previously explored Somali music via a reissued pair of LPs by the Dur-Dur Band, a legendary Mogadishu group and long-time house band at the city’s Jubba Hotel, who blended funk, soul, and disco with styles like daantho, a northern Somali rhythm resembling reggae’s relaxed cadence, and saar, a trance-inducing ritual style, into a rich, intoxicating fusion at once familiar and strange. But Mogadisco represents a far more extensive look at the country’s recent musical past.
In 2016, equipped with little more than the names of a few Somali acts gleaned from diggers’ lore and dubbed cassettes, Ben Redjeb turned up in the port city and finagled an introduction at Radio Mogadishu, whose archives house decades’ worth of the country’s musical history. He spent weeks going through stacks of aging reel-to-reel tapes and digitizing the most enticing finds; he spent years more tracking down surviving musicians, many now living in exile, and interviewing them. As is typical for Analog Africa’s releases, the liner notes here constitute a vital complement to the music, illuminating the stories both personal and societal—a young shepherd who found fame thanks to a singing contest in the big city; a beloved bandleader electrocuted on stage by faulty wiring—that lend meaning and emotional resonance to unfamiliar sounds and opaque cultural cues.
Ben Redjeb’s tastes run toward the heavy and mind-bending—as one might guess from a release like African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds from Benin & Togo 70s—and Mogadisco follows suit. (The liner notes document an amusing exchange with Omar Shooli, who is displeased that Ben Redjeb has chosen the echo-soaked, reggae-inspired “Hab Isii,” never a hit in its day, over one of Shooli’s “nice” songs, the ones he performed at weddings and important ceremonial occasions.) The best material here sounds unlike anything else. Shimaali & Killer’s “Hoobeya” runs lilting call-and-response vocals through tinny reverb and wraps them up in reggae guitar and slinky drum machine; Iftin Band’s “Sirmaqabe” pairs spacey synthesizers with spaghetti-western twang and horse-clop drumming. Both songs make a strong argument that dividing lines, whether geographical or musical, are purely notional. It is a sad irony that musicians so opposed to the fixity of borders would have their fates determined by the whims of mapmakers: All three Dur-Dur songs here were recorded abroad, while the band was exiled in Ethiopia and Djibouti; Shimaali and Killer fled to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where Killer died in 2008.
On some songs, a kind of uncanny-valley effect takes hold: Omar Shooli’s “Hab Isii” sounds almost like 1960s ska—at least, until the organs and singing come in, twining around each other in a strange modal embrace. Fans of Ethiopian jazz will find plenty to love, particularly in the lilting sax and organ riffing of Dur-Dur Band’s “Daradaa Muxibo”; throughout the album, pentatonic scales and keening vocal performances lend an eerie, melancholy undertone to up-tempo funk jams—a bewitching contrast. The musicianship, too, is stellar. From their three songs included here, it’s easy to see why Dur-Dur Band became legendary: Their intuitive grasp of funk’s elastic pocket, combined with the way they play with empty space and sonic textures, would stand out in any context. But the backstories of these songs make some of them even more remarkable. The title of Bakaka Band’s “Geeisyada Halgamayow,” a side-winding, Hammond-led funk burner marked by all manner of twists and turns, translates as “Brave Fighters”: The government-sponsored group was tasked with inspiring troops on the front lines of Somalia’s war with Ethiopia.
There’s a narrative implicit in the histories being told, one familiar from other Analog Africa compilations, and much of it comes down to the importance of radio. Radio Mogadishu, a government station, played a unifying role, helping draw people to the capital from remote corners of the nation. They brought with them the musical styles of their towns and villages and, in the city, blended those with cosmopolitan styles—rock, disco, reggae—carried on the airwaves from even farther away. It is a story of openness that is at stark odds with the past few decades of Somalia’s history.
The booklet includes an interview with Abshir Hashi Ali, the aging caretaker of Radio Mogadishu. A former police colonel, he was tasked with protecting its archives—an estimated 100,000 songs—when violence broke out in the early ’90s and Mogadishu was divided into clan-controlled enclaves. Over the years, he has seen the station targeted by Al Shabab, bombarded by Americans, and ransacked by looters; in one confrontation, he threw himself upon a grenade-toting thief who was determined to gain control of the building. “I… told him that we would both die before he took the keys from me,” Ali recalls. “I wasn’t joking and he understood that. So he left.” It’s in moments like these that the real importance of a project like this becomes clear. It’s easy to view a compilation like Mogadisco as yet another crate-digger’s search for funk’s holy grail—or, more cynically, to read the references to armed guards and suicide bombings as a kind of adventurism. But the music contained within constitutes the story of a people, a story currently in danger of vanishing, as Radio Mogadishu races to digitize its vast store of disintegrating tapes. “I have dedicated my life to this place,” says Ali. “I’m doing this so it can get to the next generation; so that the culture, the heritage and the songs of Somalia don’t disappear.” Mogadisco is one small but essential step toward reclaiming that legacy for a global listenership.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Analog Africa | January 15, 2020 | 7.6 | f504dcbc-b1f1-4a23-915a-a0dba2534a83 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Bay Area rapper continues to make waves with an album of pop ‘n’ snap party records bookended by two more heartfelt cuts. | The Bay Area rapper continues to make waves with an album of pop ‘n’ snap party records bookended by two more heartfelt cuts. | Nef the Pharaoh: The Big Chang Theory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nef-the-pharaoh-the-big-chang-theory/ | The Big Chang Theory | Nef the Pharaoh takes the weight of his hometown on his shoulders and struts like he’s not got a care in the world. Here’s a rising star who makes Vallejo street rap that pays homage to regional deities like Mac Dre and E-40 while simultaneously honoring Michael Jackson. Braggadocio is Neffy’s first language. He’ll drop silky raps for love interests on one song, nod 1990s-era Cash Money Records on the next, and can carry a hook that really sticks. He makes music for hedonists and lyrical purists alike, a creative writer who almost exclusively deals in music that could set off the club at any time.
Nef inked a deal with E-40’s Sick Wid It label a couple years back, solidifying what has become a very fruitful mentor-student relationship. Under 40’s guidance, Nef’s ethos was fully crystallized on last year’s The Chang Project and carries over here on The Big Chang Theory. The album begins with the heartfelt “Victim,” a surprise shot to the solar plexus and a highlight of art created in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Nef’s words and delivery are hopeless as he shakes his head at police brutality while admitting he’ll raise his son to hate cops with equal vigor. “Baby we got melanin, that’s why they hunt you,” he tells his kid. You’ll hear more trenchant analyses on race relations, but few will be as moving as hearing that the system has eroded a 23-year-old man to beyond repair—and that the cycle will likely impact his son, too.
Positioning “Victim” as the opening track gives it maximum impact, but Nef brings back personal issues again at the other end of the record. Rapping over the kind of piano chords 2Pac used to when he wanted to say something deep, closer “That Was God” offers a prayer. He gives thanks that no friends have been killed in 24-hours—such stark gratitude, but the melody of the hook is so simplistic, it captures the wide-eyed appreciation of faith that’s within Nef’s chest.
In between these moments of reflection are a grip of Bay Area party records, the kind of pop ‘n’ snap beats that the region has leaned on for decades without ever feeling worn out. “Boostin” updates JAY-Z’s “Girls Girls Girls” with Nef paying tribute to women in different area codes. “Big Boss Chang” is a Rick Ross-style declaration of his kingpin status, but Nef approaches the trope in his own way. Unlike Ross, he acknowledges the hyperreality of the claim (”This shit sound like a motherfuckin’ movie, goddamn”) before calling himself a young Evel Knievel (because he stunts so hard), and referring to knives as “Wesley Snipes” (Blade, you see). When it comes to trash-talking, there are few modern rappers that are better.
The only slight disappointment here is that The Big Chang Theory isn’t quite as strong as last year’s The Chang Project. That record felt like wall-to-wall potential singles. Even The Big Chang Theory’s flagship cut “86” isn’t quite as fluid and catchy as some of Neffy’s most bouncing moments. Culling the penultimate track “Totally Different” and its soft hook and wishy-washy beat would have helped the project’s batting average. But across both albums, Nef is the rare rapper who whose music feels free—free of narrative cohesion, outside interference, or any sense of pressure. | 2018-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | KILFMB / Sick Wid It / Empire | August 28, 2018 | 7.3 | f50b3263-a7cb-4a42-8d86-5339c77fdd0b | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites, the Sun Kil Moon singer offers piano-and-voice interpretations of songs ranging from Modest Mouse's “Float On” to “Send in the Clowns.” | On Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites, the Sun Kil Moon singer offers piano-and-voice interpretations of songs ranging from Modest Mouse's “Float On” to “Send in the Clowns.” | Mark Kozelek: Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21944-mark-kozelek-sings-favorites/ | Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites | Cover songs have long been a crucial part of Mark Kozelek’s work. In the days of Red House Painters, Kozelek recorded devastating interpretations of songs by Kiss, Paul McCartney, and even Francis Scott Key to prove just how widely applicable his brand of melancholy was. His selection of covers—often picked straight from the classic-rock songbook—drew a clear line from his sepia-toned shoegaze to golden-era '70s radio, culminating in his curation of a John Denver tribute album at the turn of the millennium and his ensuing move toward more straight-ahead singer-songwriter material under the Sun Kil Moon moniker. In the first decade of the '00s, as Kozelek’s music found him less focussed on emotional extremes and more on the gray areas in between, he recorded subtle, gorgeous versions of songs by contemporaries like Low, Will Oldham, and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Up until his recent turn toward diaristic, autobiographical songwriting, these covers were some of his most revealing work: songs that felt as much a part of his legacy as any he had written.
In that sense, Kozelek’s latest collection of covers, Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites is his most classically Kozelekian release since 2010’s Admiral Fell Promises, the solo guitar mood piece that served as the finale for one season of his career, before 2012’s Among the Leaves ushered in a prolific era of controversies and absurdly big lyric sheets. Like Admiral Fell Promises, Mark Kozelek Sings Favorites features some material that will be familiar to longtime followers. Tracks like Bob Seger’s “Mainstreet” and the traditional folk song “Get Along Home Cindy” have appeared in his live sets for years. Meanwhile, a superior rendition of “Send in the Clowns” first showed up on his 2008 odds-and-ends collection The Finally LP, and “Float On” marks the twelfth Modest Mouse cover Kozelek has put to tape. As such, the title of this collection feels as much a means of drawing a tenuous thematic link between the material as it is a way of admitting, “These are just some songs that Mark Kozelek already knew the words to.” As with the previous release in this series (Sings Christmas Carols), you will probably know whether or not you want to hear it based on the title alone.
Still, it’s 2016 and it wouldn’t be a new Kozelek release without a few surprises. The most obvious change here is the fact that the sole accompaniment on the album is piano, an instrument used sparingly but effectively throughout his work. And while these performances are a far cry from, say, “Shadows”—the stirring piano ballad highlight from 1995’s Ocean Beach—Favorites has a few fine moments. “Float On,” a song whose tragic afterlife has found it Kidz Bopped and even worse, finally gets a rendition it deserves. Stripped of its iconic guitar hook, Kozelek’s rendition places the focus on the complex vocal climax at the end, made even more powerful by the understated piano part. Elsewhere, in a loving rendition of David Bowie’s “Win,” Chris Connolly's piano is the perfect accompaniment, alternating between jazzy, downtempo verses and bold choruses.
Other songs lack these dynamics, like the pleasant but unimaginative redos of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Roy Harper's “Another Day,” and the aforementioned Seger cover. Although the latter’s lyrics are a perfect fit for Kozelek’s recent turn toward rambling recollection, the performance feels characterless. While the best of Kozelek’s cover songs found him refitting the songs to suit his particular guitar tunings and vocal style, the arrangements here are mostly identical to their originals. Who would have listened to his AC/DC covers album if he had just strummed power chords and hummed along? On Favorites, it’s as if Kozelek just wandered into a piano bar, handed over a stack of sheet music, and hit record.
At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums. And while Kozelek’s weary, grumbly voice has helped to give a sense of depraved intensity to his last few releases, it sounds prettier here than it has in a while, thanks in part to the inherent melodicism of the songs he picked for the project. Still, for an artist whose cover songs used to reveal multitudes about the performer, Favorites mostly feels self-serving. Maybe that’s why he chose to start the set off with “Send in the Clowns,” a wry song of wasted love and regret. Coming from a 49-year-old guy who, with every new release, seems increasingly uninterested in pleasing anyone but himself, it also plays as a sort of non-apology. “My fault, I fear,” Kozelek sings, “I thought that you wanted what I wanted—sorry my dear.” What follows is a collection of songs that is unlikely to become anybody’s favorite: just more proof that Mark Kozelek Sings Whatever the Hell He Wants. | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde | June 1, 2016 | 5.5 | f50c0085-f62f-4f12-ab79-e09a7a690364 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Unmasked in 2017 as Ghost’s mastermind, Tobias Forge trades in his papal regalia for a new persona on a darkly comic album that is lots of fun despite its flaws. | Unmasked in 2017 as Ghost’s mastermind, Tobias Forge trades in his papal regalia for a new persona on a darkly comic album that is lots of fun despite its flaws. | Ghost: Prequelle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghost-prequelle/ | Prequelle | Call it the Daft Punk Principle: No matter how far they go to keep their true identities under wraps, a band of pseudonymous alter egos will eventually get unmasked—by the press, by their fans, or even by their own volition. So it has gone with Ghost. The Swedish rockers’ Catholic-inspired cosplay shtick finally unraveled in the courts last year, amid a royalties dispute between the group’s zombie-pope figurehead, Papa Emeritus (né Tobias Forge), and his band of chrome-masked sidemen, known as “Nameless Ghouls.” The biggest bombshell fell out of court, when Forge revealed to Radio Metal that he and the Ghouls had never been a group in the traditional sense. He went on to compare Ghost to pioneering black-metal act Bathory, who performed as a band but were essentially a solo outlet for multi-instrumentalist Tomas Börje “Quorthon” Forsberg.
His identity as Ghost’s architect revealed, Forge stood at the same crossroads where Kiss once found themselves. Would he stick to the outlandish personas and sepulchral faux communions for which he was known? Or would he prioritize songwriting over theatrics, ditching his papal roleplaying for a more straightforward sacrament? On Ghost’s explosive fourth album, Prequelle, the Swede straddles both paths, spiking the band’s old ornate style with youthful vigor.
Rather than reprising his role as Papa Emeritus, Forge has stepped into the Sunday shoes of one Cardinal Copia, a sprightly, pale-faced clergyman who rolls his R’s like Spanish royalty and carries a boombox wherever he goes. His gleeful, “Thriller”-esque choreography in the music video for “Rats,” Prequelle’s fist-pumping first single, epitomizes the record and the paradigm shift it heralds: As Forge pirouettes his way through the burning, rodent-infested streets like a vampiric Gene Kelly, Ghost’s old solemnity fades away, revealing an easily accessible dark comedy that proves immensely fun despite its flaws.
A concept album loosely centered around the Black Plague, Prequelle bridges the classic rock of Ghost’s most recent full-length—2015’s Grammy-winning Meliora—and the disco flirtations of 2016’s Popestar, an EP of covers that reinterpreted non-metal songs by Eurythmics, Echo and the Bunnymen, and more. But the second style predominates, with producer Tom Dalgety shoving proggy keyboard lines to the fore on songs like the ELO-tinged instrumental “Miasma” and “Pro Memoria,” a soaring reflection on mortality undercut by some of Ghost’s laziest lyrics to date (“Don’t you forget about dying/Don’t you forget about your friend death/Don’t you forget that you will die”). With its ham-fisted wordplay (“I wanna be/Wanna bewitch you in the moonlight,” goes the chorus) and four-on-the-floor rhythms, the album’s ABBA-worshiping centerpiece “Dance Macabre” is even goofy by Ghost’s standards—but it’s damn hard not to nod along with it.
Prequelle is not entirely devoid of raw power. “Rats” and “Witch Image” get their strength from smoldering licks and stacked harmonies plucked from the Ozzy Osbourne playbook, providing metalheads with a welcome break from all the mid-tempo durdling. Given the unremarkable tracks that follow it—particularly “Helvetesfönster,” an ostentatious, baroque instrumental reminiscent of Medieval Times muzak—the latter might as well be the record’s closer.
The real keeper, though, is “Faith,” a glam-rock stomper engineered for maximum impact, from the interwoven vocal arrangement (Forge’s demonic growls on the penultimate chorus deserve a shout-out of their own) down to the sidewinding solo. The unmasked Ghost’s revised approaches to dramaturgy and group dynamics don’t always sync on Prequelle, but when they do, the performance is nothing short of showstopping. | 2018-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Loma Vista | June 7, 2018 | 6.1 | f51bb51b-c7c1-4501-bd6b-e77693a59474 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
The Harlem rapper’s latest project merges mainstream and underground rap flows while combating the perils of newfound success. | The Harlem rapper’s latest project merges mainstream and underground rap flows while combating the perils of newfound success. | Dave East: Paranoia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-east-paranoia/ | Paranoia | A menacing production swallows the start of his new EP, Paranoia: A True Story, and Dave East gets straight to the point. The 808 Mafia crafts a beat fit for a phantom, tangled with warped violins and darting hi-hats. “Paranoia gettin’ the best of me/I don’t want nobody next to me,” he admits. For East, he’s assessing how far he’s come while scanning how far he has to go. With one foot on fame’s doorstep, and another rooted firmly in Harlem’s fast life, East doesn’t know who to trust—and for good reason.
After seven years of releasing mixtapes, the Harlem rapper’s buzz is growing beyond the streets. Channeling the spirit of Styles P and Jadakiss, East spews the narratives of his transformation from a Division 1 basketball player to an underground rapper. His mentor Nas signed him to Mass Appeal and he snagged a partnership with Def Jam. These two milestones alone seemed like a ticket out of the housing projects where he recorded hustler’s music like No Regrets and Gemini. But, with the recent murders of two of his cousins, it’s difficult for East to rest easy under fame’s spotlight.
A year ago, he was rapping, “Everybody keep telling me make a club record/You ain’t trappin’ no more, stop doing drug records.” This year, Paranoia attempts to merge the two. At times, East is introspective, mourning the losses of his cousin and aunt. Other times, he’s superficial, with a daily appetite for Philippe Chow. But even on his more polished efforts, he accentuates every bar, similar to the ’90s rappers he echoes. “I might have that ’dated’ flow, but I’m among all this young, wild turn up. I got the same energy,” says East, an alum of XXL’s 2016 Freshman Class alongside acts like Lil Yachty and Lil Uzi Vert. On Paranoia, East is a contortionist—flaunting his urge to be flexible, an ethos that challenges the notion that New York rap has to be all boom-bap beats.
East meets old acquaintances in the opening skit who say “I love you, boy” to his face and “Let’s get this nigga...,” once he leaves. With cynicism wrapping itself around East’s throaty delivery, paranoia courses through songs like “Wanna Be Me” and “Found a Way.” He’s seen friends turn on each other in “The Hated,” and is dodging schemers on “My Dirty Little Secret.” But the bottom of the album reveals why he’s become more paranoid over the last year and a half: his daughter Kairi Chanel. “Stash tucked away for my daughter in case them people find me,” he raps on the soulful “Have You Ever.” His unease is just a glimpse of vulnerability in a landscape where male fragility is an anomaly in street-centric rap.
Though East is in limbo, teetering between the fast pace of both worlds, his attempts at a more mainstream sound aren’t lost in translation. “Perfect,” a slow-burner with Chris Brown on the chorus, is a softer track that breaks his hardcore optics. Producer Harry Fraud lends his hand to “Maneuver,” crafting a similar horn-driven sound reminiscent of his work with French Montana’s breakout hit, “Shot Caller.” East pays homage to his mentor in its opening line, “I’m out for dead presidents to represent me,” and he and French dip and dodge on the flashy record.
True to its name, the project certainly feels like East is looking over his shoulder, but Paranoia feels a bit disjointed. The skits and interludes are drawn out and do little to drive the concept forward, and Nas’ “feature” is nothing more than him talking on the track. East has described this project as an “appetizer” for his debut album. With the machine of Def Jam behind him, East has the ability to deliver a stronger debut album. He’s made a conscious effort to withhold some stories from his come up, not just hood tales but stories of class divisions in America, told not as a gimmick on record but as reality without a mic. And judging from his work this year, he’s not running out of bars. | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | August 28, 2017 | 7 | f51c9473-29ad-4343-9cd9-9e011403c309 | Kristin Corry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kristin-corry/ | null |
Ancient Warfare are a quartet from Lexington, Ky. that trades in cinematic Americana. Their debut is coolly understated and compelling, a vision of America laying somewhere between concrete and dreamscape and containing echoes of numerous previous decades. | Ancient Warfare are a quartet from Lexington, Ky. that trades in cinematic Americana. Their debut is coolly understated and compelling, a vision of America laying somewhere between concrete and dreamscape and containing echoes of numerous previous decades. | Ancient Warfare: The Pale Horse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20988-the-pale-horse/ | The Pale Horse | The band name and album title for Ancient Warfare's The Pale Horse suggests metal—something blackened, possibly from somewhere Scandinavian. But the band turns out to be a quartet based in Lexington, Ky. that trades in cinematic Americana. Focused around the songwriting, singing, and guitar playing of Echo Wilcox, Ancient Warfare take a well-worn form and invest it with some of the mystery of its best practitioners. From the start of the album, where a low guitar reverb effect leads to a quick pause before Wilcox simply sings the title word of the opening track, "Darlin'", there's a heavy-lidded mood at play the kind of slow intensity that can be terribly boring in the wrong hands, but The Pale Horse is immediately compelling. In the first song alone, there are quiet touches that emerge with time—how the violin part floats upward, the extra guitar notes picked out towards the conclusion—testifying to the quiet power of a carefully detailed performance.
Wilcox began Ancient Warfare as a solo project in 2010, with the encouragement of Shangri-La Productions' Duane Lundy, who serves as this record's producer and engineer. By now, she has assembled a powerful lineup: the muffled, reverbed punch of Emily Hagihara's drumming on "Dreamcatcher" loosely evokes "Be My Baby", while Wilcox intones "dream" like a woozy afterecho of the Everly Brothers, even as the arrangement gets noisier. Hagihara also contributes piano, bass, and vocals on nearly every track, while Rachael Yanarella's violin work serves as both melodic counterpoint and ghostly atmosphere.
But Wilcox remains the center of the band, exuding a cool confidence in her singing and playing. Hers is the kind of rich voice that blends beautifully into the arrangements even while you yearn to hear more of it on it's own. The entire album is a mood piece to some degree, but it never simply repeats itself: Sometimes it's as simple as a quiet key change or a shift from lyrics to wordless tones, as near the conclusion of "Tusk and Mouth". Never once does she sound like she is straining to get across.
Lyrically, her voice is still emerging, but even with slightly forced lines like "Kentucky's shades of grace," from "Lickin' Lies", she sells it with her detached cool. The less graceful turns of phrase are still of a piece with the impressionistic stories she weaves. Her vision of America is understated, laying somewhere between concrete and dreamscape and containing echoes of numerous previous decades. Depending on your angle of approach, you could hear Lee Hazlewood, Emmylou Harris's riffs on cosmic American music, the Walkabouts, Mazzy Star, Mojave 3. (The bandmembers themselves have namechecked figures like Aimee Mann, Patti Smith, Karen O, and the Pixies.) But despite all these other voices informing theirs, Ancient Warfare have hit upon a singular lonesome-highway energy, the kind that you can study but cannot fake. | 2015-08-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Alias | August 19, 2015 | 7.3 | f5204dd5-99b6-436e-94f9-700d68387c92 | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
Matthew E. White's debut shares a number of traits with his hero Randy Newman's Good Old Boys: it's southern, definitely other, and full of tales about painfully human creatures yearning for transcendence, and finding that their flawed flesh-and-blood selves get in the way. | Matthew E. White's debut shares a number of traits with his hero Randy Newman's Good Old Boys: it's southern, definitely other, and full of tales about painfully human creatures yearning for transcendence, and finding that their flawed flesh-and-blood selves get in the way. | Matthew E. White: Big Inner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16963-big-inner/ | Big Inner | Years before he became known to younger generations as a grinning, gray-haired fixture at the Academy Awards, perpetually nominated for life-affirming musical contributions to whatever Pixar blockbuster came out the year before, Randy Newman created tangible three-dimensional worlds in the space of two-minute songs. Matthew E. White was among those who got lost in those worlds, rubbing shoulders with the funny and fucked-up characters that Newman created out of a singular mix of spite and empathy. White became so obsessed with Newman that he eventually tracked down the 60-something singer-songwriter at his Los Angeles home, and handed him his own CDs. It was, in a way, a passing-of-the-torch in reverse.
In White's mind, his debut album, Big Inner, might very well be an attempt to re-create Newman's 1974 concept album about southern otherness, Good Old Boys. Inner is certainly southern, it's definitely other, and the songs collectively tell the kind of story that always appealed to Newman, about painfully human creatures yearning for spiritual transcendence and finding that their own flawed, flesh-and-blood selves always seem to get in the way. But where Newman was among the most literary of the late-60s/early-70s post-Dylan generation of singer-songwriters, White's primary mode of expression on Inner is musical. With his background in jazz arranging and natural grasp of American roots music, the native Virginian has positioned himself at the head of a corps of young and veteran musicians-- including Bon Iver's Reggie Pace, Phil Cook of Megafaun, and David Hood-- determined to revive long-lost record-making traditions in the service of re-imagining psychedelic music as gospel hymns.
Big Inner is the first product of Spacebomb, a production entity and record label with a house band composed of White, bassist Cameron Ralston, and drummer Pinson Chanselle at its core. (There is also a sizeable horn and string section, and a choir.) The idea is to bring artists to White's Richmond, Virginia, headquarters-- essentially the attic of a house on the west side of town-- and arrange their songs in the mold of velvety 70s soul, laidback New Orleans funk, and cosmic country-rock, with a special emphasis on vintage-sounding instrumentation and sweaty intimacy.
White introduces Spacebomb as a fully realized aesthetic right away on Inner's opening track "One of These Days", which has the pulse of Willie Mitchell's productions for Al Green's magical run of early-70s LPs. White and his band play softly but not without purpose; their grip on the central groove remains steadfast even as a procession of ghostly funeral horns enter the picture to send the song in a pleasantly disorienting direction.
He revisits this subtle uneasiness between beauty and chaos throughout Big Inner, as the songs lyrically explore the ecstasy and agony of religion, and how it can explain away the mysteries of the universe, but never permanently. The stately gospel number "Gone Away" is mired in death, with the lord's mysterious ways offering little in the way of consolation. White sings in a pained murmur about how "we cling to the cross with tremblin' and fear," because we know the end will inevitably come. If "Gone Away" pulls you into the darkness, the sinewy bass line in "Big Love" implores you to dance away the knowledge of impending mortality. "Let's begin to spiral," White says, and-- as gospel music is intended to do-- he makes that universal "sinking into the unknown" feeling seem uplifting.
Randy Newman's gift was making his snapshots of racist rednecks and drunken asshole romantics seem like actual people, rather than the creations of a wise-ass Angeleno preoccupied by southern culture on the skids. White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul. The final song on Big Inner, the nearly 10-minute "Brazos", wraps with White and his choir repeating a mantra about how Jesus is our friend and can deliver us from "life's crushing blow." Whether that's truth or fiction is irrelevant; in the magical moments that White creates, it's the wonderment that matters. | 2012-08-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-08-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Hometapes / Spacebomb | August 17, 2012 | 8.1 | f520fbdd-1d24-4709-8b08-4845d0f0ecd4 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The prolific songwriter’s latest is an acoustic detour, a quiet soundtrack for overcast days. | The prolific songwriter’s latest is an acoustic detour, a quiet soundtrack for overcast days. | Ty Segall: “Hello, Hi” | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ty-segall-hello-hi/ | “Hello, Hi” | The key to Ty Segall’s appeal is his sheer volume—not in terms of decibels but rather his creative output. “Hello, Hi” is his 14th proper solo album but that number balloons if his collaborations, cassette-only releases, cover albums, live records, and other miscellanea get added to the mix. Constant motion doesn't leave much time for reflection and, fittingly, there isn’t much room to breathe within Segall’s music: It’s a flurry of fuzz tones and frenzied, frenetic rhythms, all tied together with trippy melodies.
Some gnarly guitars rear their ugly heads on “Hello, Hi”, but it’s mostly a departure for Segall, bringing the 35-year-old songwriter to quieter environs where he can pick an acoustic guitar and harmonize with himself. The shift might be attributed to the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the second full album he has released since the coronavirus outbreak, preceded by cloistered noise of 2021’s Harmonizer.
“Hello, Hi” shares a basic origin story with Harmonizer. Both albums were recorded at Harmonizer Studios, a workspace Segall installed in his home in Topanga, California. On Harmonizer, he waded through thick smears of synths and guitar grime. Here, he’s weaving plucked and strummed acoustic instruments guitars into tapestries accentuated by layers of harmonies and the occasional noisy squall. It’s like a photo negative of a typical Ty Segall record; every familiar component is in place, they’re just presented in a different shade that makes it clear what colorful elements are missing.
Sudden movements, clattering rhythms, and Segall’s devilish sense of humor may be absent, but the calmer surroundings focus attention on the candied harmonies and sweeter melodies. It's a soundtrack for overcast days, not sunny carefree afternoons. Often, Segall's reedy warble resembles the elfin trill of Marc Bolan, particularly on the soft, spartan settings of “Blue” and “Don’t Lie.” For a musician as steeped in glam and garage as Ty Segall, such T. Rex allusions are certainly deliberate, and while they’re pleasant, even charming, these nods wind up highlighting how so much of his work stems from this formative influence: He's finally worked his way back to the ’60s and delivered his own Tyrannosaurus Rex record.
There are certainly pleasures in such fan worship. Ty Segall is an expert craftsman, sequencing albums so the gaps of silence—such as the slow crawl that acts like a fanfare on “Good Morning”—have as much impact as the burly guitars on the title track. This graceful ebb and flow is evident on individual cuts like “Looking at You,” where a gentle folky guitar phrase expands and contracts with increasingly forceful overdriven guitars. And yet, it’s best appreciated holistically. The dead space and repetition are what give the album its momentum, and the ambling detours have an idiosyncratic charm that belongs entirely to Segall. | 2022-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | July 23, 2022 | 7.2 | f5218408-2af7-4351-98b1-a70760bc8e25 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Swedish psych band the Amazing's new album is one of the rare rock records of recent vintage drawing discernible inspiration from Led Zeppelin. Picture You is elemental rock—earthy, molten, aquatic, but using each of their qualities to soothe rather than destroy. | Swedish psych band the Amazing's new album is one of the rare rock records of recent vintage drawing discernible inspiration from Led Zeppelin. Picture You is elemental rock—earthy, molten, aquatic, but using each of their qualities to soothe rather than destroy. | The Amazing: Picture You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20095-picture-you/ | Picture You | The Amazing’s Christoffer Gunrup would probably make fast friends with Mark Kozelek. At least to the extent you can predict anyone would. Not only is Picture You one of the surprisingly rare rock records of recent vintage drawing legitimate, discernible inspiration from Led Zeppelin, Gunrup just so happens to be influenced by the same exact songs Kozelek namechecked on his spellbinding autobiography "I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’". There’s the Fender Rhodes hum of "No Quarter", as well as the capability to touch on jazz and prog-rock without being "jazzy" or "proggy". The Amazing spend vast stretches of time strolling the verdant expanses of "Rain Song", as well as basking in the glimmering acoustic sunrises of "Bron-Yr-Aur". And Gunrup’s vocals are that of a very melancholy kid mesmerized by everything, one who did see Zep as gods, but benevolent and nurturing ones—more Pan and Demeter than Dionysus.
The end result is a record that reverently draws from a dazzling array of past masters only to short-circuit critical capacity. Discussion of Picture You can only end up with slack-jawed remarks about how goddamn pretty it is. Stranger still is how the adverbs you’d feel tempted to latch onto that superlative somehow makes that seem like a bad thing: "obscenely pretty," "ridiculously beautiful," etc. But the Amazing specialize in a beauty that isn’t airbrushed or slick or antiseptic, the kind captured by lad mags or Trevor Horn, everything exaggerated to emphasize its status as eye or ear candy. Nor is it smudged or vaporous like shoegaze. It doesn’t even make a full attempt at an au naturel realism of folk or the otherworldliness of psych-rock, though it does touch on those aspects. Picture You is elemental rock—earthy, molten, aquatic, but using each of their qualities to soothe rather than destroy or intimidate.
Opener "Broken" is the Amazing at their most grand, but not grandiose—the guitars dip in the same deep water as the Cure's Disintegration, while Moussa Fadera plays his drums with the activity of Keith Moon or John Bonham. Yet, the guitars merely come off as being coated with morning dew, every cymbal splash sounds like it’s releasing a light ocean spray. Even when "Safe Island" ends with nearly three minutes of blistering harmonic feedback, it’s never meant to overwhelm, it’s more the encroaching low heat of a sweat lodge. This part is notably absent from the "single" version.
The Amazing’s previous album was called Gentle Stream and very much earned that title; this one is more like a lazy river—you know, the weekend summer outing where an inner tube with a cooler of beer drags behind, long stretches of a calming buzz that evolves into some serious disorientation only after you figure out where you’ve been the past six minutes. This is pretty much the whole point of "To Keep It Going", where Gunrup repeats the title and only the title for its five-minute duration. Picture You doesn’t jam or meander, it drifts knowing its final destination is preordained—“Fryshusfunk” and the title track take a few minutes to commit to basic song structures before getting into vast stretches of lead guitar interplay that never quite becomes soloing. The Amazing can be concise, though prototypical psych-folk fusions like "Tell Them You Can’t Leave" turn out to be the parts where Picture You feels like it loses focus.
There is focus here, though it's hard to elucidate: While the Amazing could certainly find themselves winning over the same festival crowds swooning to Tame Impala’s Lonerism and the War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream, what Picture You lacks compared to those albums is, well, a frame. Or at least the knowledge of who "you" is. Gunrup doesn’t commit his lyrics to the credits, and he even admits this on the band's website: "I have no idea how to describe the songs. If you theorize about the songs, it ruins the tension and passion. Just shut the fuck up and play, but play good."
In other words, he might have no better idea than I do about what these songs are actually about. And I certainly have no idea. "The Headless Boy" is the drumless acoustic ballad where the lyrics are most audible and it’s as slippery as the song called "Fryshusfunk". But during the Meddle-esque "Circles", Dunrup mentions watching Beverly Hills Cop II, whose soundtrack contains songs such as "I Want Your Sex" and Bob Seger’s "Shakedown", which exist in a completely different solar system than the one occupied by "Circles". But the impression given by Gunrup is that the same headspace that would lead someone to watching Beverly Hills Cop II in its entirety is similar to the one that’s amenable to Picture You—a fugue state where you somehow manage to be happily committed to your own incapacitation. | 2015-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-02-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Partisan | February 16, 2015 | 7.5 | f523ea4e-b757-407a-8385-0910f168b377 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
*Life Without Sound *is the most contemplative Cloud Nothings album yet. | *Life Without Sound *is the most contemplative Cloud Nothings album yet. | Cloud Nothings: Life Without Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22799-life-without-sound/ | Life Without Sound | With every album, Cloud Nothings have bailed on their past and re-shaped themselves into something more vital. Over their first three albums, Cleveland native Dylan Baldi seemed to be flooring the pedal in search of inspiration, from the lo-fi indie of singles collection Turning On to the pop-punk indebted self-titled debut to the increasingly serrated and howling peaks of Attack on Memory and Here and Nowhere Else. Somewhere in the long-gestating creation of their new album, however, Baldi stopped sprinting and briefly stalled out. Unsatisfactory demos piled up. Unproductive recording sessions and frustrations mounted, and a year of recording stretched on, the longest time Baldi had ever spent making one record. (Here and Nowhere Else was written after slamming some bad coffee and writing songs the day before.) Finally he broke through, and Life Without Sound, the result, is the most contemplative Cloud Nothings album yet.
This time, instead of becoming faster or more volatile, they pump the brakes and smooth out some of their more coarse edges. Baldi was inspired by the chaotic, freeform improvisations of New York composer Malcolm Goldstein, and the album boasts an open-ended, impressionist feel that’s new for them. The quiet, almost mournful piano solo of “Up to the Surface” opens the album, and when Baldi’s voice appears, his singing is subtle and restrained. Displaced, disoriented, and alone, he paints a portrait of fire on the horizon and a planet frozen over. The narrator of Life Without Sound has a lot of this kind of stuff in his back pocket—poetry about isolation, desperation, self-evaluation, and trying to find a place in the world. The drama is rich, so when the lyrics temporarily fall away and the sound suddenly becomes massive, the payoff feels huge.
Producer John Goodmanson (whose pedigree includes records by Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Death Cab, and Unwound) recorded the band for three weeks, and in that time, he helped build moments like the climax of “Up to the Surface”—a big whorl of sound where TJ Duke’s bass lines become massive, threatening to eclipse Jayson Gerycz’s point-perfect drum fills and some dependably catchy riff work from Baldi. The album regularly oscillates between calm and upheaval, and with Goodmanson’s help, Cloud Nothings ride valleys into peaks effortlessly.
Baldi’s vocals were the final element to be recorded on the album, and he delivers his most emotionally complex performance to date. There’s a bruised quality to his delivery on “Surface” and an assertive resolve when he sings about moving on (and looking back) on “Enter Entirely.” You can hear both confidence and fragility on “Modern Act.” He’s always been good, but the album provides the best showcase for Baldi’s voice yet.
The biggest knock against Life Without Sound is that it comes up short on hooks. Historically, the most powerful Cloud Nothings tracks bob and weave in search of new melodies, turning up new earworms to replace the ones from moments earlier. Look at “I’m Not Part of Me” (maybe their best song)—each new hook somehow manages to dunk on the one that came before until the chorus reaches a shout-along fever pitch. There are scattered examples of this songwriting on Life Without Sound, but some songs just spin in place. “Darkened Rings” begins with momentum, but beyond its initial rush, it’s short on ideas. “Realize My Fate” becomes repetitive and stagnant even when the band turns the screws on the tension. Screams, massive guitar tone, and a muscular performance, it turns out, can only go so far.
Baldi has called Life Without Sound the band’s version of new age music. (Warning: Do not attempt to meditate to this loud guitar music.) The songs come with uplifting mantras (“feel right, feel lighter”) and encourage reflection in tumultuous times (“I knew peace in the terror of the mind”). Baldi declares his intentions to move past the heaviness, though he knows full well that’s easier said than done. “Moving on but I still feel it/You’re just a light in me now,” he sings, repeatedly, on “Enter Entirely.” It’s a powerful message, but it takes more than words to make this kind of music feel inspirational. They’ve eased back from their most breakneck inclinations, and while Life Without Sound isn’t their strongest work, it’s got the seeds that could lead to their next definitive statement. History shows, anyway, that Baldi’s not going to make the same record twice. | 2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wichita / Carpark | January 26, 2017 | 7 | f5257651-b815-47ca-b2db-3fad03dc3e27 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
On his debut album, the 20-year-old Florida rapper offers a dead-eyed approximation of the SoundCloud rap zeitgeist; it’s an album full of undirected transgressions, less thrilling than numbing. | On his debut album, the 20-year-old Florida rapper offers a dead-eyed approximation of the SoundCloud rap zeitgeist; it’s an album full of undirected transgressions, less thrilling than numbing. | Smokepurpp: DEADSTAR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smokepurpp-deadstar/ | DEADSTAR | Smokepurpp’s DEADSTAR is an album that captures the sound of the moment. That’s neither a criticism nor a compliment. Its tempered-aggro style has a certain rawness to it, and it would be difficult to call it calculated. But it’s also not apt to surprise. His debut promises and delivers about what one could expect from a 20-year-old rapper in the right place (Florida) at the right time (now) stumbling dead-eyed over the zeitgeist. DEADSTAR is a consistent exercise in competence, of interest mainly for its proximity to the energy of this exact second.
Smokepurpp rose up from SoundCloud’s drug-addled underground, elevated in part thanks to his friendship with star, collaborator, and half-meme/half-man Lil Pump. Lil Pump short-circuits lots of things that make rap interesting, suggesting that the parodic repetition of tropes is really all the music needs to be about. Occasionally, he’s momentarily convincing. But Smokepurpp doesn’t convey the same sense of embodying a living exaggeration, and his personality feels slight, by contrast.
Nonetheless, the album’s greatest strengths are the novelty of its sound and Purpp’s ability to fit himself to that template without rocking the boat. Producer Ronny J, a New Jersey-born beatmaker who produces almost half of the album, is largely responsible for the former. His beats split the difference between the subtler, more musically adroit compositions of producer Pierre Bourne and the aggressive, bass-shredding bombast of XXXTentacion’s scene breakthrough “Look At Me!” That song serves as a blueprint for records like Smokepurpp’s “Audi,” for which Ronny J serves up a slab of thundering bass and harsh distortion.
With a beefier sound than Bourne, and an ear for rough-edged timbral and textural choices, Ronny J understands how best to complement the edgy, rock-inflected style of this new wave. The beats have a swaggering, macho affect, and the bass is mixed as if the speakers themselves can’t hold it. Songs by other producers reflect a similar tone; on the Ice Bream-produced “Bless Yo Trap,” each bar is punctuated with a red-alert siren and an echoing shot that slowly decays in the acrid atmosphere. (The occasional nursery-rhyme hook or carousel-like cadence can overlay whimsy atop this ominous canvas, giving songs a demented tint.) Though Ronny’s beats are sophisticated in some respects, the effect is the opposite: a bludgeoning, percussive, atmosphere-rending sound that aims to unsettle. It takes a sleeker, strip-club-oriented template and scuffs it, letting the wear and tear show.
This fits the entire rebellious pose of the movement; DEADSTAR’s cover is an homage to the funeral of semi-renowned shock-rock artist GG Allin, whose transgressive reputation (if not his music) has recently taken on portentous significance in hip-hop’s collective Pinterest mood board. The content throughout the album reflects Smokepurpp’s stated M.O.: “ignorance,” which feels like a headlong, punk-rock embrace of aimless self destruction, shaped by the shock-realism of the drill wave: “Off the lean, like a kickstand, can’t feel anything/Got a full clip I’m busting everything.” There’s lots of drugs, and guns, and sex, and cash. Its an album of undirected transgressions, and the effect is less thrilling than numbing. It’s tough to determine when that is a purposeful tonal choice or a default stance driven by a lack of imagination.
Smokepurpp’s style of rapping is straightforward, under-stylized, and unencumbered by the obligations of artistic self-consciousness. Why should he be, when the most successful streaming rap artist of the moment—Post Malone—is a massive, scalable triumph simply by repeating a series of unbelievable rap cliches? Similarly, Purpp’s lyrics seldom escape overfamiliar generality. It’s not that he’s not believable; it’s that each line takes a well-worn path, offering little to hang onto, little to distinguish it from earlier artists’ truths: novelty, principles, humor. In the second half of DEADSTAR, Smokepurpp’s sound begins to open up a bit, showing more musical range as the melodies creep in. It’s a smart move, to keep him from being painted into a corner by the of-the-moment sound that has defined him so far, particularly when there are bigger stars in that lane.
Yet rather than a developing a melodic approach, it’s his rapping (and writing) that could offer the greatest opportunity to redefine his sound in the wake of the Florida/SoundCloud rap takeover. This album offers little beyond its surface, though that surface is crafted with capable efficiency. What’s missing are those idiosyncrasies which suggest an artist honing his voice, pushing himself into more uncomfortable places, channeling his curiosity in the pursuit of a new creative path, or simply broadening his range by experimenting with the genre’s wide toolkit. These come with experience and applied passion. He’s a new artist, young and unproven, but he’s built a large audience. Optimistically, this is an opportunity for Smokepurpp, a ramp which will lead to a deepening of his stylistic acumen. Or it won’t. | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | October 11, 2017 | 6.2 | f5310b7b-dc99-4a3e-92e5-da9f5bbf4fe5 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | |
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 k.d. lang’s landmark 1992 album, an emotive and daring reinvention for the former country singer. | 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 k.d. lang’s landmark 1992 album, an emotive and daring reinvention for the former country singer. | k.d. lang: Ingénue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kd-lang-ingenue/ | Ingénue | k.d. lang’s career started with a round of open-heart surgery. In 1983, the woman born Kathryn Dawn was involved in a 12-hour performance art piece in which she and her peers in Edmonton, Canada, re-enacted the first artificial heart transplant, using pickled carrots and beets for the organ. There are no surviving reports of the audience’s response, but lang recalled that the players came away dazed.
A year later, she took her career in a more conventional direction, albeit marginally. lang was an androgyne from rural Canada who considered herself to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, convinced she was born to be a country star. Even in outlaw terms, she was a long shot in conservative Nashville, a city nonetheless seduced by her punky verve and saucy rambunctiousness, a hay-bale alternative to the genre’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism. She was accepted, to a degree—her vegetarianism and PETA allegiance notwithstanding—but lang knew that acceptance was creative death. By the early ’90s, she felt that she had exploited country’s full creative potential. Now was time to develop her own romantic language.
That’s a challenge for any artist—how to create an original expression of love or heartbreak when those emotions have been so comprehensively codified by decades of pop music? lang’s circumstances were very particular. She was irrevocably in love with a married woman, and there was nothing she could do, no cooling-off period she could wait out, to get what she desired. The crush was a lost cause, and despite heavy rumors about her sexuality and a much-remarked upon lesbian contingent in her fanbase, lang was also not yet officially out. It was the early 1990s: Ellen DeGeneres wouldn’t come out for five years, AIDS-related deaths wouldn’t peak for another four, and President George H. W. Bush was renouncing his earlier support for gay marriage in a shameless attempt to maintain power. And yet, lang wanted to convey the specificity of her pain to as broad an audience as possible.
She was also perturbed by how pop was starting to crowd out the singing parts with the rhythm parts. Seeking a vehicle worthy of her voice, lang decided to hark back to the age of Peggy Lee, Julie London, and Rosemary Clooney, the adult contemporary sound of her parents’ generation. The gulf between her artistic whims and mainstream potential could hardly have seemed wider. But lang, who had sewn plastic farm animals to her gingham skirt in her earliest, kitschiest phase as a country star, was skilled at subverting what seemed anachronistic, even if the growing queercore scenes in Olympia and London wrote her off as a mopey blight on their cause. That is the beauty of 1992’s Ingénue, which looks however you want it to look depending on the light—radical queer ur-text or MOR reverie—and lets lang shapeshift accordingly. It was her first all-original album for a reason, allowing her to create modes of tragedy, defeat, and roleplay as she tried to distill the truest essence of her own heartbreak, a state that makes subjugated clichés of us all.
Ingénue is irresistibly seductive, so much so that it drives home just how unavailable lang’s crush was: How could she resist this? lang described the sound of Ingénue as “post-nuclear cabaret” and “nouveau easy listening”: Opener “Save Me” soothes the room like a bath filling up, making the light swim and the temperature rise. From there, lang and stalwart collaborator Ben Mink conjure a sense of intimacy so acute it feels like a confrontation. Their obsessive “sonic cleanliness” heightens the atmosphere to a peak of sensitivity: The tapering bass of “Wash Me Clean,” a song that is otherwise pure, sustained glow, might as well be a finger running down the inside of your wrist. Long before the term ASMR was coined, lang knew how to simulate the sensations of heartbreak: the obsessively lovelorn can trigger the memory (or fantasy) of connection until it’s wrung dry, the spark drained.
But lang also threw in showpieces that showed exactly how dizzying heartbreak can be. Sometimes she vaulted between the two impulses in one song: “Season of Hollow Soul” starts with tense bass, brushed rattles, and clipped hi-hats, lang singing about her pain with the coyness of a detective surveying a crime scene but knowing better than to leave any trace. Then a skirt-ruffling, timpani-bashing chorus rushes in, a manic celebration of love’s capriciousness—“Fate must have a reason!” lang booms—familiar to anyone who has ever grasped for rationale in the pit of despair. lang upped the drama with nods to klezmer music and other European traditions, as well as the work of Kurt Weill and George Gershwin. The insistent dulcimer strings that herald “Still Thrives This Love” and the accordion that plumps the chorus of “So It Shall Be” set Ingénue further out of time, and heighten its underrated playfulness.
Obviously, nowhere is this clearer than on “Miss Chatelaine,” which earned its high camp credentials even before the lang accompanied it with a video where she wore the high-bouffanted, ballgown-clad drag of femininity, the lesbian Liberace. Here, lang is perplexed at how unrequited love has reduced her to this quivering parody, but also evidently delighted by it. You could read a little internalized misogyny into this—the song was named for a Canadian home-keeping magazine—but that would be boring, and miss the point. She takes the mickey out of herself: “Every time your eyes meet mine/Clouds of qualm burst into sunshine!” is not a lyric that found a second life on a Valentine’s Day card. And “Miss Chatelaine” is a towering millefeuille of accordion, frisky percussion and strings, a succession of audible exclamation points—a song with so many ornate moving parts that it’s easier to imagine its blueprint as a cuckoo clock than a black and white musical staff.
Ingénue—an album named for the roles ascribed to young women, and one that early screen stars wilfully exploited for professional reward—often finds lang questioning who she has become in the wilds of heartbreak. “The Mind of Love” comes from a similarly comic school to “Miss Chatelaine,” a pillowy torch song where she considers her plight with tender impatience. “Talking to myself/Causing great concern for my health,” she declares, with operatic boldness, only to circle in on the joke and ask, “Where is your head, Kathryn?” in an all-time great example of a star singing their own name. But lang also plays it dejected, a mode that can seem to weigh heavy given her evident spryness.
“Tears of Love’s Recall” is, at least technically, the album’s least interesting song—lang’s usual pin-drop vocal delivery is flattened to a series of unengaging sustained notes, and its cinematic air feels rote compared to the creativity elsewhere. And the lyrics are oblique, even tortured, like bad Shakespeare: “Love, thing of might and dread, stays the savior and poison to all of heart and head,” she sings over a pattering dirge. But what feels like emotion held at arm’s length spoke specifically to the elusive experience of queerness at the time. Reflecting on Ingénue for its 25th anniversary, lang remarked that its sometimes obtuse nature felt like a form of protection: “It was our own prison that we were trying to break out of, but it was also our comfort zone.”
On Ingénue, you hear lang brushing against the limits of internal experience. It’s an album about purgatory, a place where you work out who you are. But then there’s the lonely, self-flagellating hermitage of it. There is the private fantasy of a self, a side that lang makes genuinely sexy: “I can exist being caught by your kiss,” she belts on “So It Shall Be,” a moment of subjugation that soon melts away. “Outside Myself,” Ingénue’s most beautifully written song, explicitly evokes that dislocation: “I’ve been outside myself for so long,” she heaves, answering the earlier question from “The Mind of Love. It’s a great, rueful sigh of realization that obsession is as much self-neglect as self-indulgence.
Ingénue’s final track, “Constant Craving,” is lang’s conclusion to all this, a brilliant song about how yearning runs deep within us all, yet one that feels tacked on, in sound and in spirit. It’s brisker than everything that came before it, as if her label had asked lang to come up with a potential hit, although its plaintive accordion and melodramatic vocal tumbles probably weren’t going to shake Kriss Kross and Sir Mix-a-Lot from the top of the Billboard charts. And lang’s sanguine takeaway was another depersonalized construction—“Constant craving has always been.” She had sewed up the wound.
That it was this song that became a hit (No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100; later peaking at No. 15 in the UK) probably protected her. She released Ingénue in March 1992. Three months later, k.d. lang came out in an interview to The Advocate magazine, and her heartbreak had to bear the weight of a massive socio-cultural shift. Suddenly, Madonna was likening her to Elvis and seeing the potential in letting rumors about a dalliance spread; Cindy Crawford was sensually shaving her face on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, the best magazine cover of all time. lang enjoyed the performance of stardom for a little while before retreating again. She knew it wasn’t her. | 2019-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sire / Warner Bros. | September 8, 2019 | 9 | f5311263-1b99-4bfa-84bd-39ad8a77fbf7 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
As a musical companion EP to 2016's HOPELESSNES, Anohni makes explicit the connections between gender and ecocide, and asks herself and her audience to recognize complicity and take action. | As a musical companion EP to 2016's HOPELESSNES, Anohni makes explicit the connections between gender and ecocide, and asks herself and her audience to recognize complicity and take action. | ANOHNI: Paradise EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22993-paradise-ep/ | Paradise EP | In May 2016, just a few weeks after releasing her powerful record HOPELESSNESS, Anohni debuted an accompanying live performance at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. The cavernous drill hall amplified her thunderous production to prophetic heights, but the presentation was less a showcase of artistry than it was a persuasive address. Anohni herself stood shrouded in a veiled habit beneath a towering screen that showed an assortment of women mouthing along to her songs. Never once was she, nor her collaborators Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, and Christopher Elms, the center of attention. The point was clear: the words coming out of her mouth are so universal and enduring that they are greater than one individual.
Nine of the artists, poets, and activists featured in the Armory show reappear on the cover of Anohni’s newest seven-song EP, Paradise. They are shown weeping, drenched in blood, faces weary with pain. These are the people whose concerns Anohni works to vocalize, those who understand that womanhood and the Earth from which we subsist are deeply intertwined. “Only an intervention by women around the world,” Anohni writes in an accompanying piece, “With their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy, and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species’ desperate course.” The singer has spoken extensively about gender and ecocide as a member of the Future Feminism collective, but never before has she been so explicit about their cause-and-effect relationship. “My mother’s love/Her gentle touch/My father’s hand/Rest on my throat,” she sings on the title track, contrasting the feminine Earth with those who wish her harm. More than simply tossing around blame on Paradise, Anohni takes responsibility herself and urges her audience to do so as well.
Once again reunited with her production crew of Lopatin and Hudson Mohawke, Paradise comes off as a HOPELESSNESS companion piece rather than a stand-alone album. Even as her music grows increasingly industrial, the organic remains a constant presence, a subtle reminder that we carry the earth within us. Like a biodome filled with an assortment of ecosystems, Paradise jumps from rocky and volcanic to chirping and tropical with just the slightest change of beat, while each song sticks closely to its appointed terrain. On the furious title track, skittering percussion and booming production support Anohni as she describes apocalyptic loss and turmoil. “Staring at myself/I feel giant and trapped/Seemingly/Without escape,” she observes, inferring that the Earth’s destruction incites mortal dysmorphia. “I’m here, not here.”
The abrasive “Jesus Will Kill You” picks up where HOPELESSNESS’ “Obama” left off, a mournful interrogation of those who use their power to destroy the earth and its inhabitants. “Ricochet,” on the other hand, is a joyful, bouncing promise to “curse” and “hate” the creator for the state of existence. Both songs’ invocation of a punitive deity may seem sudden since Anohni tends to explore corporeal matters rather than the spiritual. But in the year since HOPELESSNESS, her rage and pain have transcended human action.
The final track, “She Doesn’t Mourn Her Loss,” also closed out the Armory show and was the most powerful moment of the evening. The song itself is a pleading ballad about how the Earth holds her tears and simply accepts change. “Who will remember her? If not her children,” Anohni asks. As it was at the Armory, the rhetorical question is again raised by a speech Aboriginal artist Ngalangka Nola Taylor originally presented at the World Economic Forum. “We are wondering what is happening to the world. Everything is change, changing,” she asks in broken English. “How are we going to stop and work on it and work together and make the world a better place to live for all of us?” Anohni provided one solution just days before the release of Paradise.
She revealed on Facebook that the EP contains a seventh bonus track called “I Never Stopped Loving You” that is available for a small price: “a gesture of anonymous vulnerability” communicated over email. By asking her audience to connect intimately in exchange for a piece of herself, Anohni presents a reminder that there is a human behind the materials we consume, just like there is an Earth from which we were born and from which we harm without thought. Paradise challenges its listeners to emotionally engage with their surroundings in hopes that they develop a conscious understanding that there are consequences to our daily conveniences. As Anohni continues her resistance, she recognizes the battle is impossible to win without an open heart. | 2017-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Secretly Canadian | March 17, 2017 | 7.7 | f5319643-b745-4161-aabe-7c6d36d798b2 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
The black metal firebrands achieve a rapturous synthesis of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophical pontifications and musical obsessions. | The black metal firebrands achieve a rapturous synthesis of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophical pontifications and musical obsessions. | Liturgy: Origin of the Alimonies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liturgy-origin-of-the-alimonies/ | Origin of the Alimonies | Liturgy have never opted for the path of least resistance or readiest acceptance. When they burst from Brooklyn nearly a dozen years ago, they were an exhilarating addition to an already promising U.S. black metal scene, aggressive enough to command and strange enough to captivate. They could have made a fine career in that image; instead, their firebrand inclinations prevailed. Founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix raised hackles with a high-minded black metal manifesto. Aesthethica burrowed deeper into theology with post-rock muscle, while The Ark Work confounded through mystical chants that recalled Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Philip Glass. Last year’s H.A.Q.Q., made with a new lineup after an extended hiatus, went wild with symphonic flourishes and brittle electronic edits. Such provocation could sometimes feel glib and hollow, as though the wholly serious Hunt-Hendrix were tickling black metal just to see if it would flinch. Liturgy became troll bait, a punchline.
But Origin of the Alimonies, Liturgy’s second album in as many years, is as believable as it is provocative, as obvious as it is obscure. A rapturous synthesis of Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophical pontifications and musical enthusiasms, Origin finds a balance that has long proven elusive for Liturgy. Like Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady almost 60 years earlier, Origin of the Alimonies wrestles with ideas that can seem too grand for music to contain; throughout these seven tracks, it sounds as if Hunt-Hendrix were fighting to hold the reins enough to make the point once and for all. On Liturgy’s most compelling album in a decade, and arguably ever, she does.
Liturgy’s black metal core, built around Hunt-Hendrix’s time-stretching “burst beats,” remains intact, thanks to the return of the athletic quartet that debuted on H.A.Q.Q. But a gaggle of marquee New York improvisers—trumpeter Nate Wooley, flautist Eve Essex, bassist James Ilgenfritz, and so on—broaden Liturgy’s textures and techniques. Scraped violin strings chatter with tremolo guitars. Pounded piano figures complicate splenetic rhythms. At one point, during “The Fall of SIHEYMEN,” Liturgy sound like a symphony being led by John Zorn toward the Naked City.
This mix may seem off-putting at first. Despite the transgressive audacity of each previous Liturgy release, none has been so full of distinct ideas or different idioms. The record begins and ends with alternately tense or tender chamber-ensemble miniatures, delicate passages that suggest infinite ellipses. Between them, there are spans of yearning black metal, gyrating electroacoustic improvisation, and strutting electronic meters, all splintered, shaved, and spliced into uncanny mosaics. Origin—meticulously arranged, concisely edited for maximum impact—is by far the shortest Liturgy album. This brevity can feel disorienting, like watching a television that shuffles among several channels every few seconds.
“Apparition of the Eternal Church,” the record’s 14-minute climax, is an interpretation of Olivier Messiaen’s Apparition de l'eglise eternelle for a black metal band and pulsing piano. Messiaen’s piece is a beautiful but foreboding masterwork about the shock of encountering God for roaring organ. Liturgy’s version is equal parts ecstasy and terror. Hunt-Hendrix and Bernard Gann divide the melody between their guitars and a string section, a combination that foretells a glorious crescendo and a horrible calamity. Neither arrives. Instead, Liturgy collapse, as if falling prostrate before God in an overdue moment of acceptance and release.
Musical twists and spasms aside, Origin is the most approachable Liturgy album yet. It is, as billed, an origin story, an allegorical narrative for the mechanisms of our universe. The specifics get arcane, so start with this simplification: Light and dark want to coexist. In its pure form, light overpowers and destroys the dark. When light transforms into “ideas” and dark into “matter,” they not only interact but reproduce, birthing music, drama, and philosophy. In broader terms, it’s a high-stakes drama about wanting something you can’t have until you figure out how to evolve.
In May, Hunt-Hendrix announced she was transgender, a fact she had spent a lifetime fighting. “I am a woman. I’ve always been one,” Hunt-Hendrix wrote. “Through a long-developing process, I’ve finally broken free from some kind of compromise.” In the months since, Hunt-Hendrix has started hormone therapy and “watch[-ed] my body evolve into what it is supposed to be.” She has less shame and more empathy, she said in a recent statement, and years of suicidal thoughts have abated. A year ago, while explaining the indulgent H.A.Q.Q., Hunt-Hendrix seemed burdened by the need to make people understand; this year, explaining Origin as an opera, she was occasionally playful, intent for you to know her philosophical framework isn’t intended for everyone.
Origin of the Alimonies radiates this sense of liberation, the feeling that Hunt-Hendrix has found the other side. These songs affirm the rebirth pondered in Anohni’s “Another World,” a hymn that acknowledges personal frailty and collective folly while longing for some place more nurturing. Hunt-Hendrix doesn’t stop with a wish: She imagines the process that might produce another world and the promise it holds should we make it together. So long as we’re willing to understand what we can become, Hunt-Hendrix suggests, that other world might not be so far out of reach.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | YLYLCYN | December 10, 2020 | 7.8 | f536f999-262f-4bc4-9ce8-826099c79230 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
After an all-star pop album, SMD regroup with a 2xCD record of tech-house instrumentals based around slow builds, minimal melodies, and negative space. | After an all-star pop album, SMD regroup with a 2xCD record of tech-house instrumentals based around slow builds, minimal melodies, and negative space. | Simian Mobile Disco: Delicacies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14896-delicacies/ | Delicacies | There's changes of artistic direction, and then there's Simian Mobile Disco. Go back to last year's bloated, all-star sophomore slump Temporary Pleasure, and you're confronted by a production team that sounded like they were squandering their indie-dance crossover cred, scraping together a pop-skewing record that tried to please everybody and disappointed half of them. So what do they do for a follow-up? An album of tech-house instrumentals based around slow builds, minimal melodies, and wide-open, between-beat negative spaces that sounds almost completely alienating outside a dancefloor context-- as well as a second disc of the tracks mixed together. And every song is named after an exotic gastronomical oddity, at least one of which has made Gordon Ramsay throw up. So much for compromise.
That titular premise of Delicacies is by design: The intent was to produce songs that, like the bizarre foodstuffs they were named after, appeal only to a select few with adventurous palates. The main idea at play here seems to be the way they approach the buildup, the moment in dance music that crests to something approaching euphoria-- only in this case, they replace that high with something more evocative of anxiety and dread. The longest track is a near 10-minute controlled spasm of palpitating kicks, itchy snares, rusty bass, and hissing swells; not for nothing is it titled "Nerve Salad". Most of the album follows that uneasy path, playing up the sparseness and austerity of the drum sounds and the low end so that any appearance by a non-percussive element feels a bit like uncomfortable jolts. Not that there are a lot of non-percussive elements to start-- melodic hooks, or what pass for them, splinter off into deliberate rhythmic counterpoints or beat-accenting stings more than they actually provide an easy riff to cling to.
And even if some of Delicacies starts to sound a bit samey to ears more attuned to the less minimalistic strains of house, the distinct moments have character to spare. "Hákarl", named after the fermented shark dish that defeated Ramsay's gag reflex, sweats out an acid-inflected strain of suspenseful, quick-stepping techno that evokes a sort of nauseous tension, especially during the jaw-clenching drone that seizes the track up at the midway point. Leadoff track "Aspic" is maybe the most immediately danceable, shuddering through a deliriously twitchy future funk reminiscent of Juan Atkins' classic Model 500 track "Off to Battle". And "Ortolan", named after a bird prepared, served, and eaten bones-and-all, stirs up a dueling pair of basslines and lets a synthesized chime tone sink deep into them, congealing into a halfway-Krautrock groove that provides one of the album's few moments of lightness.
Most of Delicacies is collected from a series of singles that debuted on SMD's label of the same name, a sort of field-test project where they'd assemble a track with a limited, self-imposed deadline and a quick turnaround time, then drop it on club crowds to gauge the reception. That they succeeded on these terms says something about how easily they threw themselves into such an adventurous idea. And if the results aren't necessarily the kind of up-front and accessible electro that would appeal to their "Hustler"-adoring base, it's definitely an interesting shot at regrouping and concocting a few rapidly refined ideas. | 2010-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Delicacies | December 2, 2010 | 7.4 | f539a37b-cf21-4ab6-8240-7e2cdc9b62f8 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The ’90s alt-rockers’ first new album in more than 20 years has the vibe of a beloved record that was, for whatever reason, sitting on a shelf. | The ’90s alt-rockers’ first new album in more than 20 years has the vibe of a beloved record that was, for whatever reason, sitting on a shelf. | that dog.: Old LP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/that-dog-old/ | Old LP | In their ’90s heyday, that dog. existed in between two major pillars of alt-rock: Grungy, bemusedly annoyed rock and zingy, precisely detailed alt-pop. An L.A. band whose pedigree included music-biz royalty—lead singer and songwriter Anna Waronker is the daughter of label exec Lenny Waronker, while sisters Rachel and Petra Haden, who provided backing vocals and instrumentals, are children of jazz bassist Charlie Haden—they developed a fierce following from the periphery of alt-rock radio, which had already begun to sideline fun (and female voices) in favor of self-pity by the time the group broke up in 1997.
that dog. got back together in 2011 as a four-piece, along with drummer Tony Maxwell. Playing their songs—particularly those that they hadn’t played live before—energized Waronker, whose hiatus years included a rock opera co-written with Go-Go Charlotte Caffey, music for TV, and two solo albums, to return to the spiky, elegant mode of her onetime band.
What’s remarkable about Old LP, that dog.’s first album since their split and their first as a trio (Petra left after the reunion shows), is how little time seems to have elapsed. The harmonies still have gooey centers; the fuzzed-out guitars and precisely arranged strings still bounce off each other like highly attuned dancers. Compact and thoughtful—the band worked on the album for years—Old LP has the vibe of a beloved record that was, for whatever reason, sitting on a shelf.
The album opens with “Your Machine,” a showcase for Waronker’s plaintive vocals that crests into a full-on power-pop starburst, as distortion-heavy riffs rise up to counter her pleas for notice. “I am incomplete/Impatiently/Awaiting your receipt/And graciously/Eating crumbs thrown at my feet,” goes one lyric, a poetic echo of the “thanks for your support!” messages issued by artists in the era of online patronage. When the noise eventually recedes, allowing Waronker and the harmonies behind her to rise up, it’s a moment of pop triumph.
From there, that dog. balance beauty and muck, with marshmallow-sweet vocals and careening strings adding tension to the breakneck chorus of “Just the Way” and the weepy violins of “Drip Drops” filling out the lyrics’ minimalistic portrayal of heartbreak. “If You Just Didn’t Do It” sounds excavated from a lost volume of DGC Rarities, with a shimmying beat and defiant, closing string flourish that offer a subtle update of ’90s alt-rock’s satisfying bite.
Like much of the best 2019 music from still-at-it ’90s alt-rockers—Juliana Hatfield, Versus, Team Dresch—Old LP works because its growth doesn’t pander to modern notions of “cool.” But the way the band re-balances the grime-vs.-grandiosity equation with each song demonstrates that when it comes to musical math, the proof matters as much as the outcome. The title track, which closes the album, isn’t just a sweet elegy to music’s power to conjure bittersweet memories. “I never wanted you to leave/I hate that there’s no choice/That I can’t hear your voice/Unless it’s on an old LP,” go the lyrics, which were written after a memorial service for Charlie Haden. It’s the first time Waronker and Rachel Haden have sung a duet on record, their voices darting in and out of each other while cymbals crash and strings swoon. Looking back, which Old LP does with gentleness and honesty, doesn’t have to be a nostalgia trap.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe | October 10, 2019 | 7.4 | f53b5677-b49b-4298-bb39-1e7fd96aa602 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
Raury is a genre migrant who exists adjacent to the rap world without sounding much like it, and All We Need isn't the transcendent project that’s been foreshadowed since he became a blog darling. Much like his last album, Indigo Child, it's an exhibition for a young creative still figuring out the true extent of his genius. | Raury is a genre migrant who exists adjacent to the rap world without sounding much like it, and All We Need isn't the transcendent project that’s been foreshadowed since he became a blog darling. Much like his last album, Indigo Child, it's an exhibition for a young creative still figuring out the true extent of his genius. | Raury: All We Need | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21172-all-we-need/ | All We Need | Raury made his big debut in 2014 with the folk-leaning EP Indigo Child, which was anchored by its single and centerpiece "God’s Whisper". That EP was a daring first statement with soulful alternative rock jams supercut with real, recorded fights he had with his mother. It was stuffed with big ideas, but it often had trouble wrangling them. Still, it effectively established Raury as this sort of genre migrant who existed adjacent to the rap world without sounding much like it. The singer-songwriter has a real sense for composition and a knack for ambiguity, and he, like his stylistic forebear André 3000, remains at arm's length from hip-hop, never quite a full-fledged rapper but certainly draped in the tropes of the genre, reaping the benefits of everything cool and useful that comes from identifying with it. He is literally indie rap, and his debut album, All We Need, searches further for perfect balance.
All We Need isn't the transcendent Raury project that’s been foreshadowed since he became a blog darling, the one that reconciles genre distinctions and renders them obsolete. It isn't ahead of its time or magnificent in scope. Instead, much like Indigo Child, it's merely an exhibition for a young creative still figuring out the true extent of his genius with as many hiccups. The wrinkles haven't been ironed out yet; his genre-mashing can be scatterbrained and even hollow. Sometimes, like on the RZA-featuring "CPU", it works well and sometimes, like on Big K.R.I.T.-featuring "Forbidden Knowledge", it completely misses the mark. Raury emerged with a fully formed aesthetic, but his sound, albeit fascinating, still needs time to incubate.
From start to finish, All We Need scans as Indigo Child Redux with similar pacing and nearly identical tropes. This one is anchored by its single, "Devil’s Whisper", which puts a slightly darker tint on the hand-clapping-around-the-campfire folk of its predecessor. The album is mostly a reprise of his boho hippie rap tunes, wandering in and out of folk territory with lots of stringy acoustic riffs, hedging toward rock with hip-hop spirit, casually blending influences like a Tumblr kid that grew up in a post-Napster world. The writing is angst-y and centric to a wide-eyed, teenage worldview: chasing girls and soothing parents and saving the Earth. On the opening title track, he sets the tone for his flower child vibes: "Don’t hate, my brother/ God is our friend/ I walked for miles and/ I see no end/ To the hate."
Many of the songs call for unity and love with several mentions of an impending Armageddon, and Raury tackles these huge topics with ambitious arrangements. On "Revolution", he pleads for divine intervention over strum-heavy riffs, throbbing 808 bass, hand drums, and vocal chops. On the slow-moving "Peace Prevail", which has a tempering rhythm and melting bass, he borrows André 3000's flow to rap about being a rap outlier ("Been by myself since the White T’s/ Been by myself since Dem Franchize Boyz did that dance on that hoe in the white tee") before praying for peace with a chorus of voices at his back. There’s significantly more rapping here than on his last release, and while dextrous rapping isn’t exactly his forte, there are moments where he finds his flow. It doesn't feel like he's gotten that much better at what he does, but he seems to be figuring it out. He's got people like Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello and underground Atlanta rapper Key! on the album to help him. With an album replete with Spanish guitar jams, wide-eyed hip-hop, and psychedelic rock k-holes, there isn't much ground left for Raury to cover. Now, he must figure out how to do it all just a little bit better. | 2015-10-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | October 16, 2015 | 6.8 | f540a697-145c-44ca-a23b-d979451531c9 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The Manchester band are attuned to the absurdity of our times. The hyperactive synthpop of their fourth LP is full of surreal vignettes evoking our increasingly nightmarish world. | The Manchester band are attuned to the absurdity of our times. The hyperactive synthpop of their fourth LP is full of surreal vignettes evoking our increasingly nightmarish world. | Everything Everything: A Fever Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/everything-everything-a-fever-dream/ | A Fever Dream | Since emerging in 2010, Everything Everything have written songs uniquely concerned with the modern human condition and its miserable roots in how we live. Like almost none of their indie-rock peers, the Manchester-based four-piece are attuned to the absurdity of the times: Tangled up in their hyperactive synth-pop are surreal vignettes about scoring dates during an airstrike (“My Kz, Ur Bf”), verses juxtaposing celebrity worship and drone warfare (“Undrowned”), and, in 2015’s “Fortune 500,” an empathetic account of an extremist driven to regicide. At their wittiest, the band’s volcanic melodies, pop culture zigzags, and swirling tongue-twisters can pop open your brain like a champagne cork. Everything Everything make coherent art from the shrapnel of rolling news.
On A Fever Dream, their fourth album, the melodramatically-inclined group confront an increasingly melodramatic and nightmarish world. Brexit is one named scourge, though beyond lamenting xenophobia on songs like “Put Me Together,” their targets are usually implied rather than stated. Luckily, unknotting Jonathan Higgs’ allusive lyrics makes for rewarding work. On “Big Game,” he sizes up an individual with dishonest intentions, an inflated sense of authority, and tinier-than-average hands (“Wrinkled little boxing glove”). In the end, the vaguest insult hits hardest: “I’m tired,” Higgs soothes over twinkling guitar, “And you are ridiculous.” On an album cast in the shadows of evil, it’s a welcome sort of rallying cry for the exhausted.
As their themes come into sharper focus, Everything Everything are planing down the fanciful arrangements that made their first records alien and thrilling. The band always managed to make haywire rhythms sound intuitive, but like 2015’s Get to Heaven, A Fever Dream is easier to digest yet somehow harder to love. Still, they’re sharp enough to pull off straight songs. Lead single “Can’t Do,” which sounds like SOPHIE’s “Bipp” after a glass of hot cocoa, observes a concerned citizen waking up to some nebulous threat: “That was the future on the phone/He says it’s up to me,” Higgs sings urgently. The narrator soon becomes defensive—“I can’t do the thing you want!”—and, absolved of guilt, slides back into hedonistic complacency. In the age of political extremes and ecological doom, the harried “reasonable man” is an archetype. Here, Higgs exorcizes his culpability and calls for collective responsibility.
In tackling generational anxieties, pop music tends to concern itself with the tip of the iceberg—the observable symptoms rather than the disease. For its part, A Fever Dream is at least conscious of the iceberg’s body, and never threatens to plow into it. Faint praise, maybe, but consider the perilous waters they inhabit: “Ivory Tower” opens with the harrowing scene of privileged racists dancing around a gallows in blackface, a dicey satire that would fail without Higgs’ nimble touch. Few of Everything Everything’s radio-refined peers bother trying to tap into present-day concerns, and fewer still could pull off the black humor of “Night of the Long Knives,” an end-of-days anthem whose diabolical synths sound like an air-raid siren performed with festival horns. As “the bomb” drops, Higgs’ narrator, unsure whether to be transfixed or terrified, glibly soothes his victims: “Shame about your neighborhood.” It’s a chilling brush-off, the familiar tone of official indifference when blood appears on the hands of the state.
When his punches land, Higgs is piercing enough to spar with Keston Sutherland, the fast-tongued British poet who intertwines the horrors of Iraq and Guantanamo with requiems to fast food and washing-machine product codes. Like Sutherland, Higgs’ dispassionate writing style conceals latent political outrage—at war, colonialism, and the economic system that demands their survival. Unlike Sutherland, Higgs’ words glimmer with sorrow: Everything Everything’s music feels emotionally open, despite lyrics that will scan as bewildering, vague, cryptic, or poetic, depending on your patience. Of present concerns, Higgs says he’s writing to tackle our mistrust of the media, police, and politicians, and “to tap into ideas of neighbours and communities.” That might sound facile—what use is community when the neighbors want to deport you?—but in practice, Everything Everything are nothing if not savvy craftsmen. A rare example of indie-rock insurrection in Britain, A Fever Dream—darkly glamorous, flamboyantly appalled—is a fine monument to the nation’s despair. | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | August 18, 2017 | 7.1 | f5539fe4-0c6b-4ee0-a201-9a85cd4b3a63 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The DFA stalwart delivers a set of psychedelic, late-night club cuts that invoke the dancefloor at its most immersive. | The DFA stalwart delivers a set of psychedelic, late-night club cuts that invoke the dancefloor at its most immersive. | The Juan MacLean: I Can’t Explain EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-juan-maclean-i-cant-explain-ep/ | I Can’t Explain EP | Had the notion of acid house not been comprehensively explored at the tail end of the 1980s, we might have minted the term to describe the Juan Maclean’s I Can’t Explain, which is inspired by mind-expanding drugs and old-school house music. John Maclean—operating solo here, rather than in the company of Nancy Whang—says that he created the EP’s tracks “after weekends of head down dancing in dark clubs,” fine-tuning them across months and years of club play; just as significantly, he produced each track under the influence of psychedelics, “mostly LSD.”
House music plus hallucinogens is not a new idea, but it is a surprisingly rare combination, given how well the two elements compensate for each other’s weaknesses. Much psychedelic music is long-winded and diffuse, while house music is too often wedded to efficiency, and it is the push and pull between these contrasting ideas—the groove and the ramble, the strait-laced and the psychotropic—that drives this excellent EP.
Rather than the tweaking 303s and rough drum programming of classic acid house—which today sounds closer to proto-techno than it does the smooth thread count of modern house music—I Can’t Explain offers disco loops filtered into abstraction, with the cumulative effect like a DJ Sneak or Cassius record glimpsed through a narcotic fog. (A rather erratic 303 line does turn up towards the end of “City Life Disco,” but this is a rare moment of rough and tumble among the sweet kaleidoscopic soup.)
The EP’s four tracks (joined by a rather superfluous remix by Berlin-based producer Alinka) are maddeningly simple on the surface: just drums, bass, and a couple of brief samples. The brain-bending effects of this rather dogmatic mix arise in the EP’s production, where the sources are treated to a world of echo, phase, and dissociative effects. The beat on “City Life Disco” is so bathed in springy reverb it seems to almost double up on itself, like a rhythm that has bounced free from a passing King Tubby record.
Having so little to play with means Maclean’s production has to be perfectly calibrated: sufficiently repetitive to establish a rolling groove but with enough difference to sustain interest. Maclean expertly uses subtle variations in rhythm, tone, volume and effect to create shifting sonic sands over the four lengthy songs. The EP’s title track is based around one brief vocal sample which floats in and out of focus like a kiss in a daydream. Listening to this hypnotic composite feels being spun around and down a brightly colored helter skelter, a whirl of gentle adventure.
“Leave Me When You Can,” meanwhile, connects a slightly muffled disco drum loop, a snippet of vocals, and an exquisite production effect that sounds like wind rushing past a penthouse window. You can imagine Maclean fiddling with the song’s ingredients as his buzz intensifies, channeling the music’s warm lysergic rush. Despite the chemical distractions, though, Maclean is savvy enough to introduce an enchanting wrinkle, allowing a few bars of hi-hat to slip delicately out of time before bringing the elements back into line.
Whether it was the drugs or the power of old-school house, Maclean appears to have squared a circle on I Can’t Explain, as the dancefloor-friendly Juan MacLean of “Happy House” meets the hallucinogenic adventurer behind 2021’s Ritual Device—a record of drones intended for “psychedelic journeying”—and getting along famously. A lot of truly terrible music has been made under the influence of psychedelics, but Maclean’s gambit turns out to be both mind-expanding and pulse-quickening.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Me Me Me | April 28, 2021 | 7.3 | f556db74-5321-4c65-8c09-c1bfb9699bc6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The avant-pop group offers a comprehensive if inessential career overview on what may be the final edition of its long-running compilation series. | The avant-pop group offers a comprehensive if inessential career overview on what may be the final edition of its long-running compilation series. | Stereolab: Pulse of the Early Brain (Switched On, Vol. 5) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-pulse-of-the-early-brain-switched-on-vol-5/ | Pulse of the Early Brain (Switched On, Vol. 5) | When Stereolab announced the release of Pulse of the Early Brain, the fifth installment in the avant-pop ensemble’s Switched On compilations gathering up material not found on their proper LPs, they noted that it was “possibly the final edition.” The use of “possibly” does leave the door open to the band finding more rarities tucked away on a forgotten hard drive or making new music together, but it’s hard not to see this collection as the band’s concluding statement. Pulse of the Early Brain collects every remaining leftover from Stereolab’s substantial discography—rare EPs, singles, and stray comp tracks—that had yet to be included on any previous Switched Ons or as bonus tracks on their recent run of album reissues. Thirty years after the release of the first Switched On comp, their known archives appear to be empty.
The breadth of the material included on Vol. 5 also has the unintended effect of serving as a far-ranging career overview for Stereolab. Though it isn’t sequenced in chronological order, Pulse hits on every stage of Stereolab’s sonic evolution. The earliest tracks date from 1992, the year that founding members Lætitia Sadier and Tim Gane were joined by their longest-standing collaborators, vocalist Mary Hansen and drummer Andy Ramsay. The most recent tunes were released in 2008, right before the group announced their hiatus. Even though the 3xLP/2xCD set jumps backward and forward in Stereolab’s timeline, the result is a fairly comprehensive portrait of their development from their initial motorik nihilist assault to the pop molecules of their later work.
Representing the heady roar of the group’s earliest recordings are the four tracks from Low Fi, an EP originally released in 1992 via Too Pure. In each one, Sadier and Hansen coat their sugar-sweet harmonies with layers of chugging guitar and overdriven Farfisa and Moog. The material from the mid-to-late ’90s continues the dense, melodic height of albums like Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, as Stereolab worked to get as far afield from their usual sound as possible with more elaborate arrangements and danceable rhythms. “Robot Riot,” a previously unreleased track written for a Charles Long art exhibition, has a jangly momentum, while “Symbolic Logic of Now!,” originally found on a 1998 split 7” with one-and-done post-rock group Soi-Disant, explodes the concepts of Dots and Loops into dizzying dub exotica.
Also included is a quartet of songs that came from the prolific recording sessions that produced Stereolab’s final full-lengths, 2008’s Chemical Chords and 2010’s Not Music. And like those two albums, the striding funk groove of “Spool of Collusion” and the tickling fizz of “The Nth Degrees” expands the group’s pop palette with more luminous synth tones and a digital patina.
The downside to this final sweeping up of stray tracks is that, for the first time in this series, Pulse of the Early Brain is bogged down with a good deal of inessential material. One of the likely attractions for longtime fans is the inclusion of 1997’s Simple Headphone Mind, the long out-of-print second collaboration between the group and Nurse With Wound, the long-standing experimental project led by Steven Stapleton. The two tracks are pleasant enough, with Gane’s chiming guitar clashing nicely with the more proggy tones of NWW member David Kenny over an insistent drum machine pulse. But with the absence of Sadier and Hansen’s voices or Stapleton’s noisier antics—both of which feature prominently on the artists’ previous meet-up, 1993’s Crumb Duck—the songs feel skeletal and unfinished.
The same can be said for the various short tracks scattered throughout Pulse of the Early Brain, like a demo version of “Ronco Symphony” from 1993’s The Groop Played “Space Age Batchelor Pad Music” and a pair of minor tunes previously found on short-run flexi discs. Their inclusion is necessary, in order to make the series feel comprehensive, but they don’t add much substance to the overall story of the band—a tale may be coming to an end soon. Though tour dates are scheduled through December, there has been no indication from anyone involved with Stereolab that they will continue beyond that. But if that “possibly” mentioned above presages future music from the group, Pulse of the Early Brain has emptied out the closet and left them free to pack it full with new ideas once more. | 2022-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp / Duophonic UHF Disks | September 3, 2022 | 6.6 | f566d528-e13d-4be2-bb28-aa40b9b27632 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
When 37-year-old rapper the Jacka was killed earlier this year in East Oakland, he'd been on the verge of a modest resurgence. Drought Season 3, his first posthumous release and the third in his series of collaborative albums with fellow Bay Area rapper Berner, proves there was plenty of gas left in the tank when his life was tragically cut short. | When 37-year-old rapper the Jacka was killed earlier this year in East Oakland, he'd been on the verge of a modest resurgence. Drought Season 3, his first posthumous release and the third in his series of collaborative albums with fellow Bay Area rapper Berner, proves there was plenty of gas left in the tank when his life was tragically cut short. | Berner / The Jacka: Drought Season 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20844-drought-season-3/ | Drought Season 3 | When 37-year-old rapper the Jacka was killed earlier this year in East Oakland, he'd been on the verge of a modest resurgence. The initial arc of his solo career, which began with 2001's Jacka of the Mob Figaz and peaked eight years later with 2009's Tear Gas, was one of the most prolific auteurs of the 2000s. A peerless writer with a distinct sound, a gift for vivid prose, and a powerful moral conscience, his best material received little attention at his apex. (At least on a national level—within the Bay Area and its satellite cities, he's on his way to matching Mac Dre as a regional legend.) After a fallow period in the early 2010s, Jacka released his official Tear Gas follow-up, What Happened to the World, in 2014. Though his momentum had slowed, his writing was as strong as it had ever been. Drought Season 3, his first posthumous release and the third in his series of collaborative albums with fellow Bay Area rapper Berner, proves this was no fluke; there was plenty of gas left in the tank when Jacka's life was tragically cut short this past February.
This tape's prequel, Drought Season 2, was one of the last great albums of the Jacka's initial creative run. But at a time when his career should have been peaking commercially, the internet was wreaking havoc. Album sales were at their nadir, and popular regional stars like Jacka suddenly sat in the shadow of viral sensations like Lil B, whose prescient understanding of meme-marketing gave him a leg up outside his native Bay Area. And while Jacka had long sustained himself by charging for features, the Internet's clear-glass window into the Bay Area scene made it so bootlegs and guest verses buried his official catalog amidst a nebulous cloud of unofficial material.
At the same time, he began to nurse a codeine addiction. Initially, he appreciated syrup's effect on his vocal style, but as time wore on, it began to detach his words and flow from the groove. By the time Drought Season 3 was recorded, his voice no longer felt as present. Its wispier texture seems seconds from evaporating. On the album, this weightlessness detracts only when the Jacka aims for menace, as on the overdriven guitars of "45"; his reflective moments remain convincing, ghosted vocals camouflaging complex emotions and hard-earned wisdom in a dreamlike reverie. Despite this effervescence, his writing is sharp enough to cut glass. It's not just that he doesn't waste words; each statement is saturated with meaning, each deceptively simple lyric charged with purpose, its wider implications left to echo over each successive line.
His passing looms over the proceedings; lyrics recorded before his death take on portentous connotations. On "One Sound", he laments the catch-22 of success: "I just want to make you proud/ But you'd rather see me gunned down." It's a sentiment echoed by Husalah's chorus on "Win": "When you start gettin' money and these suckers start hating/ Sometimes when you win you lose." The Jacka's take on street rap is an urgent one charged by violence, anchored by realism that could verge on the despondent. Underlying it all is a struggle to stay sane in a fallen world, one marked by betrayal ("'Cause niggas got rich and ain't show us how") that is unsparing in its indictment of the wider world's complicity ("Where killing made it safe for y'all to walk around"). A stance of perpetual resistance in the face of the world's cruelty—a cruelty in which he is complicit and compromised—is his eternal subject. That he doesn't fold under its weight, even as the drugs numbed his pain, is a reflection of his abiding Muslim faith, a radicalized race consciousness ("Everywhere I've ever been they treat the blacks, unfair"), and confidence in his art—a trust in truth as a liberating force.
On its musical surface, Drought Season 3 is one of the smoothest rap releases of the year—appropriate for a collaboration with Berner, who has membership in Wiz Khalifa's more commercially-relevant Taylor Gang. The production is lush, colorful, and the dominant rap style throughout its guest-heavy tracklist—give or take Freeway's urgent mania—is one of half-lidded nonchalance. For the uninitiated, this sleek, subtle mood music belies its depth. Expensive-sounding production has long been the m.o. of the Drought Season series. After all, these were the tapes that made Berner's name, an (ostensible) weed-dealing kingpin buying his way into hip-hop with impeccable taste in collaborators and production. But for his part, Berner is no longer the cipher he once was. His flow, which previously relied upon a halting cadence that sounded As If He Were Rapping In Title Case, now rolls off his tongue in a more effortless legato. His lyrics have also deepened in both his attraction to arresting imagery ("I can see my stones glowing in the limousine tint") to an emotional potency that seems, well, Jacka-inspired in its multiplicity of meaning: "We die young but this here forever/ Leave my daughter a letter, don't believe what they tell you."
But while Berner's lyrical contributions here mark a substantial step forward, he's taken a step back in shaping the album's sound, which owes more to Jacka's camp than usual. It's most evident glancing at the record's guest list, which suggests an emotional send-off from his closest friends. For an independent artist working outside the major label system, Jacka's extended crew was built upon strategic alliances, but sustained due to stronger bonds: Ampichino, an Akron, Ohio-based rapper who collaborated with Jacka on two albums as the Devilz Rejects and frequently brought him to perform in the Midwest; Rydah J. Klyde and Husalah, the most active members of Jacka's group the Mob Figaz; Freeway, the sympatico former Roc-A-Fella rapper who bonded with the Jacka over their shared identity as Muslims.
The guests pay their respects in varied ways. On "Drought Season", Joe Blow, the most accomplished artist on Jacka's The Artist record label, unleashes a flurry of syllables in a controlled, laconic style that celebrates Jacka's legacy through breathless formal architecture. "Die Young", a remake of Cormega's street classic "They Forced My Hand", features Oakland legend Richie Rich, a rapper who was signed to Def Jam in the mid-1990s. He addresses his time in the spotlight in a way that could as easily speak to Jacka's own ambivalence to the industry: "I ate with Russell Simmons, so how could I be local?/ But a lot of that bullshit, I just couldn't go for." Cormega appears on "Whole Thang", his understated prose taking on deeper implications: "I was one amongst many, few remain." But it's Jacka's longtime partner Husalah who captures the album's purposeful spirit, on "Win": "As little kids took an oath to this criminal movement/ Hoping this song redeem our souls and wake you up like a rooster." Or perhaps that honor belongs to Jacka himself, who raps on the title track: "I try to end this with who I began with."
Indeed, it's the Jacka's purposeful ideology—scattered jewels throughout the tape which imprint themselves upon the psyche long after the song ends—that makes this a nourishing listen. The album's most revelatory moment comes on the hidden bonus track, "So Much Pain". With a beat that sounds like sun breaking through storm clouds, it opens with an affecting turn from Berner ("Thinking 'bout my mother, I'm screaming 'fuck cancer'") before jumping to one of the most compelling verses of Jacka's career. His truest skill as an artist was the ability to compress a world and worldview onto the head of a pin, and this song is a platonic ideal: opening with a scene of betrayal, he slips to tormented guilt, an indictment of the system, and an affirmation of religious faith that remains as vivid as his street stories: "I know I'm blessed the way you manifest a hopeless mind, into an open eye/ Never seen a god in the open sky, but I read the signs so I know you are, right there, unseen like the air you feel/ On your skin, unseen like the evil djinn, you know I kneel."
His verse ends in what may as well be his career's statement of purpose ("All I try to do is make it pop, somewhere/ All my fallen soldiers, dead or locked, you'll live again"). The effect is overwhelming, a moment of crystalline clarity, a flash of light. And as suddenly the light recedes, as Carey Stacks, a Seattle protege, returns to the here-and-now, to his immediate vicinity, to the concrete threats of the world in front of him: "Two feet on the ground, both eyes open." | 2015-08-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | The Artist / Bern One | August 18, 2015 | 7.3 | f5672b9d-50ad-4dc3-9ca2-a2a97d82ec22 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
On their second full-length in a decade, the despondent witch house pioneers return with an alluring invitation to join them in the depths. | On their second full-length in a decade, the despondent witch house pioneers return with an alluring invitation to join them in the depths. | Salem: Fires in Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/salem-fires-in-heaven/ | Fires in Heaven | When the trio of Midwest malcontents in SALEM released their first EPs over a decade ago, they, like many young people in America, were staring down a dead end. As the critic Larry Fitzmaurice pointed out last year in an essay reflecting on the legacy of chillwave, much of the music that arrived in the early ’10s was implicitly engaged with the turbulence of the era. Still dealing with the hangover of two interminable wars, and with economic prospects decimated by the long wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it was hard for many to feel hopeful.
Part of the appeal of SALEM at the time was in how their early EPs and their 2010 album King Night reflected this societal despondency. Largely composed of oozy, unsettling electronic music that burbled in the middle-ground between shoegaze and DJ Screw tapes, their songs were desperate, longing, and lonely. SALEM stared dispassionately into the eyes of a dying world and then, suddenly, they went dark. Over the ten years since King Night, the band has been quiet. They released a companion EP the following year, but since then they’ve only emerged for a handful of remixes and one member’s unexpected production credit on Kanye West’s Yeezus.
Now a duo after the departure of founding vocalist Heather Marlatt, principal members Jack Donoghue and John Holland haven’t said much about the timing of their return, but it seems no accident that their second full-length Fires in Heaven arrives as the world is yet again in turmoil, facing down ecological disasters and social unrest, not to mention the economic uncertainty and the global health crisis brought on by the mismanagement of an unprecedented pandemic. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t changed for the better in the last decade, which seems to be the mindset with which that SALEM approach this record. Everything is still pretty depressing, and so is their music.
On the morose opening track “Capulets,” they nod to the fact that they’re emotionally in more or less the same place they were ten years ago. Sighing over a twisted sample from the Prokofiev ballet Romeo and Juliet, Donoghue murmurs about the mundanity of existence: “Ask me what i’m doing with my life / Ain’t shit to tell y’all.” It’s the same kind of stretched-out, dejected song they’ve made since their inception. Some of Fires in Heaven takes this mentality to extreme places. “DieWithMe,” for example, is grayscale and gothic, dreaming of the release of the afterlife underneath an instrumental that sounds like an ’80s 4AD release tape at half-speed.
The record’s closer “Not Much of a Life” is one of the more hopeful sounding moments, looping a dreamy vocal effect and snowblind synths in a disorienting swirl that feels a little like Slowdive’s electronic experiments. But even that track is gloomy at its heart, its title echoing menacingly like the intrusive internal monologue that greets you on sleepless nights: “It’s not much of a life you’re living.”
This sort of bleakness is familiar territory for the duo, but Fires in Heaven shows a newfound clarity in their expression. Mixed by Shlohmo—a fellow traveler in downcast beatwork—and mastered by frequent Kanye collaborator Mike Dean, this record finds SALEM excising a lot of the murk and mire from their previous compositions. They still occasionally bury vocals in a haze of effects, but their instrumentals are crushing now by design, their synth lines starker, the distortion more piercing. They’ve always been capable of expressing harsh feelings, but they seem now more able than ever to echo such sentiments in their music. Fires in Heaven is a more alluring invitation than ever to join them down in the depths.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Metal | self-released | November 4, 2020 | 7 | f56c17c2-ad34-4d7c-8785-c3416b85ee54 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Trae Tha Truth is one of the most distinctive voices in Houston rap, even if he never broke through to the degree of his class-of-2005 contemporaries. His latest album features J. Cole, Dej Loaf, Future, and others. | Trae Tha Truth is one of the most distinctive voices in Houston rap, even if he never broke through to the degree of his class-of-2005 contemporaries. His latest album features J. Cole, Dej Loaf, Future, and others. | Trae tha Truth: Tha Truth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20882-tha-truth/ | Tha Truth | There's a run on great rap voices in Houston—Bun B's crisp baritone, Z-Ro's bluesy bounce, Scarface's bellow. But Trae tha Truth's might be the most unique—a rasp carrying so much weight he might be Houston's version of Big Rube, if Rube decided to rhyme. He's also never really broke all the way through like his contemporaries from the class of 2005, or escaped the local hub of the Screwed Up Click. There is a darkness to his music that might put off outsiders. Sometimes he even discomfits his own city: He was banned by Houston's most-recognizable hip-hop station for a sustained period of time because of an inane allegation he incited violence via his annual Trae Day, a local, charitable holiday (officially recognized by the mayor!). In other words, his art is so gut-level effective it nearly blacklisted him from a city he has represented tirelessly for over a decade. No one's realer than Trae.
However, true to Houston form, he can't quite sustain a full-length album. Between a solo run and his work with ABN, Trae's established a personal canon, but you'll be hard-pressed to hear a song of his after Fat Pat's "Tops Drop" and Chamillionaire's "Ridin'" during a best-of-Houston playlist: he's so prolific that in recent years he's spread his catalog thin. That there's no strong Houston presence on Tha Truth, Trae's first record in four years, is not a surprise, because he's always been the odd-man-out of the nationally-recognized Houston crew, and his affiliation with T.I.'s Hustle Gang makes some locals bristle. But it unfortunately lends a major-label-rap sameness to Tha Truth, his seventh official studio album, that is kryptonite to someone as unique as Trae.
Some moments work better than others, but the album feels shuffled rather than sequenced. Problem, a good rapper, is sorely mismatched with Lil Boss, one of the few features (and only local one) to leave a mark, on solid first single "Yeah Hoe." Trae lets DeJ Loaf get the last word on this record, on the excellent closer "Realigion," and the fit makes sense: DeJ works the same anti-social angle Trae has trafficked in for years. Surprisingly, the J. Cole collaboration is the most affecting song. Cole's strained gravitas works in small doses, and it does on "Children of Men," a soulful lament that runs through familiar themes of violence and poverty but manages to twist them afresh in Trae's husky presence.
When not basking in the highs of "Children of Men" or the lows of ill-advised sex jam "Late Night King" (with a badly Auto-Tuned Jeremih on the hook), Tha Truth just hovers in the Houston-street-rap middle. On the intro, Lil Duval insists, "ain't no music out here for the struggle right now...that's what the people need." And Trae stays to true to his word. "Why" is a somber reflection on gang violence, but it doesn't resonate after it's over. "Tricken Every Car I Get" with Future and Boosie, is a good single, but it's mostly telling for how hungry Boosie sounds: "Spray that thing candy but might wreck the whip the next day/Peanut butter insides covered up in plastic/stash spots everywhere, ride fly everywhere." These are fun lines that stick in your head on first listen, and they capture more vitality in a few seconds than Trae does for the entire record.
Showmanship has never been Trae's trademark, and that can be an issue. He's still rapping well enough over good beats, and he earns points for not shoehorning a Kirko Bangz hook or Travis Scott verse in somewhere. Yet Tha Truth doesn't feel vital, and, at his peak, Trae was arguably the most vital Houston rapper—anchoring a scene that featured the antics of Mike Jones and Paul Wall, he was the lyricist's lyricist, the conscience of the underground. Trae doesn't have to prove to anyone he's a necessary voice in hip-hop, but between Slim Thug's surprisingly solid twin Hogg Life records from this year, or the consistently mellow output from fellow ABN member Z-Ro, for now anyway, he's been outpaced. | 2015-08-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Grand Hustle | August 4, 2015 | 6.7 | f57744ba-9677-4359-80b9-4950efe5d41b | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Seventeen months since his release from prison, Gucci Mane delivers one of his most consistent and accessible releases in years, and a prime showcase for his renewed charisma. | Seventeen months since his release from prison, Gucci Mane delivers one of his most consistent and accessible releases in years, and a prime showcase for his renewed charisma. | Gucci Mane: Mr. Davis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gucci-mane-mr-davis/ | Mr. Davis | Since emerging from prison fit, sober, and self-actualized, Gucci Mane has savored every moment of his endless goodwill tour, happily fielding collaboration offers, penning a New York Times best seller, and generally charming the hell out of the media. Even a year and a half after his release, his transformation doesn’t seem any less remarkable. Between his megawatt smile, improbable six-pack, and impeccably tailored new wardrobe, he now looks like the conventional star he never was even during his commercial window in the late 2000s, that confused era when labels were slotting him into Mariah Carey and Black Eyed Peas remixes.
For the most part, Gucci’s “young, active and attractive” makeover hasn’t impacted his music much. He’s less bitter now, he’s landing more jokes, and he no longer raps like a “before” example in a Mucinex commercial, but he’s continued releasing the same steady stream of low-stakes albums and mixtapes as before (and even during) his prison sentence. He’s done his big comeback event album, a couple return-to-the-streets albums, and a few of his usual collaboration albums. All of those were more or less expected. Released on the heels of his highest-charting single ever, the sticky Migos collaboration “I Get the Bag,” Mr. Davis is something that few would have predicted just two years ago, however: a Gucci Mane album with actual commercial expectations.
The industry’s fingerprints are all over the record, from its guest roster of A-listers like Nicki Minaj and A$AP Rocky to its perfectionist mastering job and that telltale sign of label interference, a delayed release date. Atlantic’s sudden interest in the veteran rapper is bittersweet, since Gucci’s usually at his best when he’s left to his own devices, and the album inevitably succumbs to a few test-marketed misfires—particularly “Curve,” a miserabilist Weeknd feature, and “We Ride,” a hollow victory anthem built entirely from circa-2011 radio tropes. The considerable upshot, though, is that there’s a level of quality control here that’s rare for any Gucci Mane project. Mr. Davis is his most consistent and accessible release in years, and a prime showcase for his renewed charisma.
What a blast it is to hear this guy when he’s locked in. Opposite Chris Brown on “Tone It Down,” Gucci barely disguises his smirk while riffing on his greatest and most ridiculous muse, his jewelry: “Big gold boulders in my Rollie/Look like Fred Flintstone when he pick a stone up.” On one of the album’s least chart-minded tracks, “Stunting Ain’t Nuthin,” Gucci revels in the chance to roll around in the gutter with Slim Jxmmi (the half of Rae Sremmurd who isn’t a clear lock for solo stardom) and perennial collaborator Young Dolph, both of whom have rarely sounded hungrier. And even on “Changed,” a leisurely Big Sean number that pretty much pilots itself, Gucci channels his old dazzle, stringing together zinger after zinger into one of those surrealist soliloquies that he used to do better than anybody: “I know my Granny probably looking down at me now/They used to look down at me but now look around/My house so big, my pool so motherfucking deep/So plushed out I don’t really like to leave.”
Gucci Mane issues music at such an unrelenting clip that it can be difficult to make the case for any given project, especially when the two or three before it were more or less as good. Even diehards could be excused for occasionally taking a pass on some of them. But for casual listeners who understandably tuned out after Gucci’s first couple good-not-great comeback albums, now’s as good a time as any to check back in. Between this spring’s cold, uncompromising Droptopwop and the personable crossover stab of Mr. Davis, Gucci Mane is making his most engaging music since his Trap Back/Trap God resurgence. Most artists are lucky to have one legacy-defining hot streak. Gucci Mane is now well into his third. | 2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | October 19, 2017 | 7.4 | f577c966-04b6-45fe-b187-a581fe96a196 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles cultivates an arch air of high drama in his solo LPs. The songs on Call By Night touch on the exhilaration that sometimes accompanies sadness and uncertainty. | Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles cultivates an arch air of high drama in his solo LPs. The songs on Call By Night touch on the exhilaration that sometimes accompanies sadness and uncertainty. | Wymond Miles: Call by Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22123-call-by-night/ | Call by Night | The Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles cultivates an arch air of high drama in his solo songwriting. On releases like 2012’s Under the Pale Moon* *and 2013’s Cut Yourself Free, he combined baroque compositional tics and faux-English intonations, suggesting a muted Robert Smith backed by the world’s most chilled-out post-punk band. His best songs cultivate a perfect and patient balance between darkness and buoyancy, and the insinuating aftertaste lingers.
The songs on* Call by Night* evince the gentle intimacy of the instrument upon which they were written: the piano. If his prior material befit festival stages, this album’s austerity cries out for tiny venues so cramped that you watch beads of condensation form upon and streak down the performers’ water bottles. Some of them have the quality of madrigals: “Protection” establishes Night’s aesthetic: pronounced, theatrical talk-singing; vocals wreathed in echo. Undulating acoustic strums, tom toms, and slicing strings accompany the oblique advice he doles out on the title track, which borders on the avuncular. On the sloshing, epic “Divided In Two,” Miles sets fire to family trees. The staggering Americana gem “Rear View Mirror” and stately anti-ballad “Stand Before Me” very nearly justify coining the phrase “post-Malkmus drinking song.” Elsewhere, lumbering kiss-off “Summer Rains” makes a hopeful, widescreen case for new beginnings.
Despite its traditionalist instrumentation, its slightly retro reference points, *Call by Night *is an album striving to stand apart, to take deeper root. It’s a statement of intent that serves to elevate Miles above his back catalogue. In these modest-seeming songs, he touches on the strange exhilaration we occasionally feel in moments of sadness and uncertainty. It's a feeling we’ve become increasingly familiar with in society, and from his modest perch, Miles brings it to brilliant, stinging life. | 2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | July 23, 2016 | 7.5 | f57b8e92-3824-4b6d-a746-5cad74d3c5fb | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
Chillwave fixture releases an album of airy electronics, late-1960s psychedelia, and slow-burn rhythms. | Chillwave fixture releases an album of airy electronics, late-1960s psychedelia, and slow-burn rhythms. | Julian Lynch: Orange You Glad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13439-orange-you-glad/ | Orange You Glad | "How patient are you?" It's not a very encouraging question when talking pop records, let alone a bedroom-psych pop record from the mind of a guy going for his Master's in ethnomusicology. But those of us who still consider patience to be a virtue will find that Julian Lynch's debut full-length Orange You Glad is full of great little moments that gradually (and successfully) cultivate songs brimming with hushed wonder. What really saves these four-track recordings from relying too heavily on aimless atmospherics is a profound interest in late-1960s psychedelia-- I'm guessing that spending most of your time writing lengthy papers about native Tunisian music is either going to heavily influence the record you are making, or drive you deep into the garage, back to a stack of Love LPs.
Most of us already familiar with Lynch probably are so as a result of his work with the Underwater Peoples label and their associates (he frequently plays in and with Ducktails, his "Banana Jam Pt. 1" was a highlight on this summer's Underwater Peoples Records Showcase sampler). But Lynch might soon have a niche all of his own thanks to the various improvisations on Orange, all anchored by uniformed suites of airy electronics, slow-burn rhythms, and his garbled coos and whines. Even the most patient (i.e., stoned) listener probably wouldn't come back for seconds if this was all there was to absorb, but Lynch interjects these weird little set pieces on almost every song-- that crazy low-budget Jimi Hendrix lick on opener "Venom", that quirky-cool bird-call synth blip on the too-short highlight "Rancher"-- that gives these pieces real character on an album that could have could have lazily revisited the same tones and ideas in an effort to over-establish "feel".
"Winterer One" nicely encapsulates a lot of the stronger points on Orange. "I saw witchcraft tonight," sings Lynch (it's one of the few discernable lyrics on the whole album, but one helpfully indicative of the moods explored here) over muffled tambourines and a bleary acoustic guitar line that gorgeously melts into a set of buttery-soft synth tones. It's a quiet victory with the ethereal sadness of a Nebraska cut, oddly welcoming and calming. "Mercury" would be a big time throw-away if it weren't for Lynch's elusive clarinet carrying the whole thing, weaving in and out of those aquatic guitar textures like a fish through an anemone. And the fractured psych of "Andaza", it's violent wah-wah pedals screaming in the face of melancholic ho-hummery all make for wonderfully contrasted pop pieces that make the patience so virtuous.
Of course there is the obligatory 11-minute droner "The Flood" smack dab in the middle of the thing, a tedious rumination that plays like a very drugged-out seance for a snake charmer, only not a pinch as awesome as that might sound. You can't help but feel a little exhausted after it, leaving "Winterer Two" to stand as an unnecessary epilogue and rendering the syrupy far-outness of "Seed" a little bland. Moments like these curry some favor with those worried that Orange might not be much more than a welcome addition to your "Sleep" playlist, but that application seems somewhat backwards with such wide-eyed intrigue being so delicately stoked time and again. So if you do doze off with such brightly inviting ideas and sounds this hard at work, consider your REM cycle pleasantly soundtracked. | 2009-09-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-09-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Olde English Spelling Bee | September 14, 2009 | 6.8 | f5896d14-d558-4780-b1cd-72bdfa5cf69d | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
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