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After the labyrinthine twists and turns of 2018’s Sorpresa Familia, the Catalan quartet tightens up its songwriting and sharpens its pop-punk attack. | After the labyrinthine twists and turns of 2018’s Sorpresa Familia, the Catalan quartet tightens up its songwriting and sharpens its pop-punk attack. | Mourn: Self Worth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mourn-self-worth/ | Self Worth | Mourn have always had a slightly antagonistic approach to rhyme. The English-language lyrics to the first song on the Catalan indie-rock band’s promising 2015 debut were intriguingly, ever so slightly askew: Singer and guitarist Jazz Rodríguez Bueno rhymed “candy” with “rancid,” drawing out the vowels of both words as if to stress her indifference to the imperfection. The remainder of “Your Brain Is Made of Candy” had a few more similarly tenuous near-rhymes, and they haven’t gotten much nearer since then. Already four albums deep, Rodríguez and her co-frontwoman and co-lyricist Carla Pérez Vaz now seem convinced that any time spent choosing words that don’t immediately communicate their frustration loudly and clearly—and they sound as frustrated as ever on Self Worth—is time wasted.
At its best, Self Worth doesn’t waste a second. Songs are tighter, reversing the contortionism of their labyrinthine 2018 album Sorpresa Familia, whose melodies and structures surprise-shifted like the architectural features of the famously incohesive Barcelona basilica that it referenced by name. Escapist imagery, meanwhile, goes almost entirely out the window here, making room for cogency. Lines like “I don’t wanna be a failure and disappoint my parents” are sung with dead sincerity. If the band’s early work channeled PJ Harvey with a faithfulness made all the more impressive by the fact that they were teenagers, Self Worth skews more pop-punk, airing feelings of self-doubt that tend to be associated with adolescence but linger well beyond it. This also happens to be their most polished recording, which suits its straight-shooting songs well. If you had been waiting for the Mourn studio album that went all in on “studio,” Self Worth delivers.
Mourn are no longer writing about eating brains, but taking care of them. In just a few years, the band has already weathered its fair share of crises. There was the tension with their Spanish label, Sones, which nearly derailed them around the time of their sophomore album, Ha, Ha, He. And now, their first lineup change: Former drummer Antonio Postius Echeverría left the group on some apparently rough terms before writing began on Self Worth, which plays like an exorcism of all the spirits haunting what should be a young band succeeding on its own merits. Their straightforwardness sharpens the songs, and the thrill that they get from it is palpable in highlights like the incandescent second half of “Men,” in which the line “I don’t really trust men” kicks off a dramatic exchange between Pérez and Rodríguez’s long and high shouts over new drummer Victor Álvarez Ridao’s speed-bag drumming.
Mourn’s newfound clarity of voice propels Self Worth, which flies from the get-go, opening on a five-song tear and closing with four straight heavy hitters, hampered only by a middle stretch that wilts a bit in comparison. On the rare occasions when Mourn don’t sound totally sure of what a song should be, they fall back onto breakneck intensity instead of exploring more varied dynamics. Self Worth is a relentless album that never really pulls back, but maybe that’s a function of survival for Mourn, who will probably always write songs with teeth bared. They’ve straightened and polished them on Self Worth, but their bite remains formidable.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | January 12, 2021 | 7.2 | 1a8fc4c1-8c84-4abf-ad84-ee9936dfe73d | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Constructed around archival NASA recordings, the latest from Wilco’s Mikael Jorgensen’s features meticulous, pop-molded instrumentals that feel just a little incomplete without a vocal narrative. | Constructed around archival NASA recordings, the latest from Wilco’s Mikael Jorgensen’s features meticulous, pop-molded instrumentals that feel just a little incomplete without a vocal narrative. | Quindar: Hip Mobility | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quindar-hip-mobility/ | Hip Mobility | As a full-time member of Wilco, Mikael Jorgensen’s ideas are always a part, and never the whole of bandleader Jeff Tweedy’s songs. There’s a case to be made for Jorgensen’s prowess as a singer-songwriter in his own right, but he’s made it difficult in the past. Quindar, his new space-themed project with musician/art historian James Merle Thomas, paints a picture of a songwriter again stopping just short of the sublime, even as he gets within inches.
The one album where Jorgensen showcased his innate touch with a hook—2009’s All Is Golden, released under the name Pronto—flew almost completely under the radar. Pronto isn’t even listed among the numerous projects that get the spotlight on Jorgensen’s website. All Is Golden’s droll AM-inspired indie rock remains lost in the shuffle, along with the compositional acumen that went into its making.
In 2013, Jorgensen and partner Greg O’Keeffe released their self-titled album, on which Jorgensen replaced his original guitar and piano parts with synths. Even that decision didn’t cover up the inherent tunefulness of the tracks, but they sounded incomplete, as if Jorgensen were building them up into songs and simply neglected to sing over them. It’s not that Jorgensen’s music necessarily needs singing—he has a knack for giving his keyboard parts the kind of heartfelt drama that’s typically reserved for lead vocals. But on songs like “Where to Begin” and “Precious Like a Sneer,” Jorgenson’s charmingly off-kilter voice synergizes with the other instruments for the kind of power he should be pursuing more.
No such luck on Quindar’s debut Hip Mobility, which frustrates as much as it entices, even more so than the Mikael Jorgensen & Greg O’Keeffe album, its older spiritual twin. Constructed around archival NASA recordings, Hip Mobility contains no singing at all—which is quite unfortunate because this time Jorgensen outdoes himself, sustaining a level of majesty with his sounds from the very first note. At times, he doesn’t even wait for the middle-end section of a track to deliver the climax, either with a sweeping key change or with layers of sounds that open up onto breathtaking aural vistas. Literally, every single track contains an example of this in some form.
So what’s the problem with an instrumental album that tips its hat, as the liner notes explain, to three visual artists from the ’60s and ’70s who satirized the space program? Well, for one, Jorgensen and Thomas (whose doctoral dissertation “explores abstract art, experimental architecture, and radical design of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde, as related to NASA”) didn’t actually make an ambient album laced with found sounds. Had they done so, the music would match the conceptual intent laid out thusly in the liners:
Strewn across corporate history offices and government filing cabinets throughout the country, the archival recordings are grounded in the minutiae of a given historical moment, yet tempered by our interest in separating that data point from its context[...] deciding in some cases to go so far as to fully obscure the original piece of archival audio with which we began.
To their credit, Jorgensen and Thomas actually achieved their goal: only the first and final tracks on the album contain obvious space-program samples in the form of spoken radio communication. (The rest of the source sounds consist of the radio signal tones from which the album draws its title.) But as much as their explanation reads like an over-baked artist statement for a college art project, the duo structured the music in a standard pop mold. For the third album in a row, Jorgensen has proven himself to be masterful at carving arrangements so that all the parts work in tandem in a perfect balance between form and function, not a skill to be taken lightly or under-utilized.
Tunes like “Wembley,” “Choco Hilton,” pivot along on a sturdy backbone of electronic beats that recall early-period Amon Tobin, etc, while the acoustic guitar strumming on “Italian Conversation” lands close to pop-leaning electro-organic hybrids like Tycho and the Album Leaf. “Oranganus” even recreates the club-friendly thump of house music. Jorgensen and Thomas have done such a thorough job of carving out a pocket that your ear immediately points to the space where vocals would go. They’ve recently said that the samples are supposed to “take the place” of lyrics, but with the NASA samples mostly obscured from center stage, Hip Mobility plays like the “TV mix” of an album whose vocals have been removed so the songs can appear on TV and in film.
The son of recording engineer Joe Jorgensen and a longtime staffer at John McEntire’s SOMA studio, it seems only natural for Mikael Jorgensen to prioritize sounds over songs. Indeed, he wears the tinkerer-eccentric hat with a great deal of flair. But Hip Mobility barely conceals the inner songwriter that’s been straining to come forward for his entire discography. It’s about time he wore that hat too. | 2017-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Butterscotch | July 26, 2017 | 6.8 | 1a9de144-507b-4775-a41a-6c00e4ffaa5b | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Released in 1979, the R&B group Edge of Daybreak’s Eyes of Love was recorded in one take at the Powhatan Correctional Center in State Farm, Va. The band members were all inmates, incarcerated for armed robbery and assault, with sentences ranging from six to 60 years. Thematically, the collection is about a group of guys making the best of a tough situation. | Released in 1979, the R&B group Edge of Daybreak’s Eyes of Love was recorded in one take at the Powhatan Correctional Center in State Farm, Va. The band members were all inmates, incarcerated for armed robbery and assault, with sentences ranging from six to 60 years. Thematically, the collection is about a group of guys making the best of a tough situation. | The Edge of Daybreak: Eyes of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21013-eyes-of-love/ | Eyes of Love | There’s a moment near the end of the Edge of Daybreak’s Eyes of Love where the LP’s structured soul gives way to a brief, fluid jam session. It happens on "Your Destiny", and it’s the freest moment of a recording made in five hours in a Virginia federal prison.
Released in 1979, Eyes of Love was recorded in one take on a $3,000 budget at the Powhatan Correctional Center in State Farm, Va. The band members were all inmates, incarcerated for armed robbery and assault, with sentences ranging from six to 60 years. The musicians, some of whom played in other bands before they were locked up, were allowed to play instruments at the prison complex. They covered songs by the Isley Brothers, Slave, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Jamal Jahal Nubi, the Edge of Daybreak’s lead singer and drummer, entered the Virginia prison in 1976 and established another group called Cosmic Conception with Edward Tucker and William Crawley. He’d later form Edge of Daybreak with fellow prisoners Harry Coleman on additional vocals, James Carrington on keys, Cornelius Cade on guitar, McEvoy Robinson on bass, and Willie Williams on percussion. The band didn't have equipment to overdub, so they brought in backup musicians to play instruments when the regulars had to sing.
A few local media outlets covered Eyes of Love upon its release. Only 1,000 copies were pressed. "PM Magazine", a now-defunct television news show, produced a segment called "Cellblock Rock" that aired footage of Edge of Daybreak’s recording. The album arrived as the outside world was moving away from brassier sounds for the likes of disco and nu-wave. Up the road in Washington, D.C., musicians like Chuck Brown and Trouble Funk were putting their own unique twist on black music. Their blend was called go-go, a percussive strain of funk designed to keep the beat going without breaks.
In a way, the Edge of Daybreak seemed influenced by the homegrown genre, and at certain points on Eyes of Love, you sense the band’s urge to break away from the literal and figurative structures that contained them. Given their circumstances, it would’ve been easy for the group to create something sullen. Yet on Eyes of Love, it’s as if the band wanted to uplift themselves through song, and to forget their living arrangements if only for a few hours. These songs are optimistic, touching on the brilliance of love and glorifying romance in all its sugary splendor. Songs like "Let Us" and "Let’s Be Friends" recall the 1960s doo-wop era, while "Edge of Daybreak" and "I Wanna Dance With You" are extensive dance grooves.
Thematically, Eyes of Love is about a group of guys making the best of a tough situation. That a collection of inmates even recorded an album is a testament, and the fact that it’s so well done is a plus. The inmates couldn’t just go to the studio. Prison personnel required Alpha Audio—in nearby Richmond—to record the band at the Powhatan complex. They had to sing and play their instruments simultaneously, and get everything right the first time. The album’s last song, "Our Love", was recorded as prison guards told the band to wrap up recording. The group members were taken back to their cells as soon as the last song finished. Despite the duress, there aren’t any noticeable hiccups on the LP, making me wonder what could’ve been if the band had more time to perfect it.
By the fall of 1980, keyboardist Carrington was transferred to another prison. Then vocalist Coleman. Then Cade, who was moved to Powhatan’s North Housing Unit, essentially breaking up the Edge of Daybreak. There were talks of a sophomore album, but with the musicians in separate prison facilities, it was impossible to rehearse. In the end, Eyes of Love would be the group’s swan song. Thirty-six years later, it’s still a living testament to what can be done in tumultuous conditions. It’s a push to make a way, and to persevere, even when the light is dim. | 2015-10-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Numero Group | October 15, 2015 | 7.3 | 1a9df915-0a6c-4734-a031-0f01c43d47f4 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
A previously unknown recording from a small Seattle club in 1965 documents one of the saxophonist’s signature works—spiritual, searching, unstoppable—as never heard before. | A previously unknown recording from a small Seattle club in 1965 documents one of the saxophonist’s signature works—spiritual, searching, unstoppable—as never heard before. | John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-coltrane-a-love-supreme-live-in-seattle/ | A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle | A quote attributed to jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy touches on the ephemeral nature of sound: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.” He was talking about live music in the moment, and, since Dolphy died in 1964, he was speaking to us from a very different world. In his day, unless a recording of a gig was arranged ahead of time, the music did indeed vanish after the instant in which it was heard. There’s an intrinsic “now-ness” to improvised music in particular—for touring jazz musicians, what’s created every night is distinctive, offering a novel experience available only to those there in the room. John Coltrane, who brought Dolphy into his band during one of his many astonishing bursts of creativity in the early 1960s, was writing and recording an enormous amount of music during that decade, along with his steady live gigs. And while the vast majority of what he produced on the bandstand is gone, it’s remarkable just how much if it survives. More than 50 years after his death, revelatory unheard music from Coltrane is still making its way into the world.
The latest example is a previously unissued version of Coltrane’s signature suite, “A Love Supreme,” recorded in Seattle in October 1965. In the past few years, numerous “lost albums” by Coltrane have come to light; that there are still-unheard sessions out there is not all that surprising, given how often he visited the recording studio during his time on the Impulse! label. But “A Love Supreme” isn’t an ordinary Coltrane composition, and uncovering a new rendition of it is no small thing. He wrote the piece in tribute to God, to thank the creator for Coltrane’s own religious awakening. The suite sits at the center of his recorded work and has become instantly identifiable shorthand for the expression of spirituality in jazz.
Coltrane was moving fast in 1965—A Love Supreme was released in January—and he was always on to the next thing. His own sound on his instruments was constantly changing, and his band was in a state of flux. So while A Love Supreme was an immediate hit and recognized as a jazz landmark, Coltrane was too busy with new music to linger over it for long. For decades, Coltrane’s only known recorded performance of the suite happened in Antibes, France, in July 1965; that set has been issued in various forms over the years, including on the 2013 collection A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters.
The Antibes version is excellent but this set is more compelling, both because of the personnel and how Coltrane extends the composition. On Antibes, the band adheres closely to the piece’s essential form, improvising and embellishing but retaining its shape. Here, the players are free to explore new territory when the spirit moves them. It’s striking just how low-key the whole occasion was. While the July run-through was recorded at the International Jazz Festival and has an announcer setting the scene, this night in Seattle came as just one stop on a long tour, with no advance billing and nothing written about the show after the performance. As famous as Coltrane was by then, on this evening he was playing to a 275-cap room, The Penthouse. Saxophonist and teacher Joe Brazil taped it through the club’s two-channel recording system, and he held on to the reels.
Through most of 1965, Coltrane was working with the “classic quartet” that laid down the album version of “A Love Supreme”—Coltrane on tenor sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums—but here the band is augmented with three additional musicians. Pharoah Sanders plays tenor, multi-instrumentalist Donald Garrett plays second bass, and Carlos Ward, a member of Brazil’s band, who played a set earlier the same day this was recorded, sat in on alto sax. Both Sanders and Coltrane are also credited with percussion. The addition of another bass and extra layer of percussion turns the larger band into a roaring polyrhythmic machine.
Compared to the two complete versions of “A Love Supreme” we know, this one is stretched out further and played with more intensity. It lasts for 75 minutes, more than twice the length of the studio recording, though some of that extra runtime is because of lengthy solos noted on the tracklist as “Interludes.” That said, the ensemble pieces are also significantly longer—the opening “Acknowledgement” represents the most drastic expansion, extending to 22 minutes from the studio version’s eight.
“A Love Supreme” is a hypnotic and enveloping piece, and the added length allows the listener to slip deeper into the music. Once you’ve heard the first few notes of Coltrane’s opening fanfare, it’s hard to resist the pull of the rest, no matter how long the record is. Varied in tone, mood, timbre, and tempo, it’s never less than thrilling. The lengthy interludes will be trying for some—there are three bass solos and another extended showcase for Jones—but they’re gripping in the context of the whole, mixing passages of heightened focus with moments of calm.
Despite the fact that it comes from a private recording, the sound quality is very good. The left microphone is quite close to Jones, and the drums are louder than anything else on the record. But if you’re wired to hear the quartet a certain way, that’s not a downside. Jones is playing at an absurdly high level, bringing every technique he’d developed during his years with Coltrane to bear. If you focus on just one part of what Jones is doing, it's hard to connect it to a specific pulse or fixed sense of time. But when his kick drum, hi-hat, snare, toms, ride, and crash are considered together, his grooves reveal themselves to be both deeply complex and also strikingly coherent. And here, his drum kit almost functions as the lead instrument.
Coltrane’s solo on “Acknowledgement” puts the piece in a radically different territory than any we’ve heard before—he’s overblowing with an energy far beyond that of the studio recording, and sometimes it sounds as though his horn might break apart. Coltrane's solos throughout are just as blistering as Sanders’, but he still lands on notes; there’s a clear logic to his choices that stops just short of abandon, while Sanders is always ready to cross that line. The younger player’s most prominent showcase comes on “Pt. II - Resolution,” on which he delivers a flurry of smeared tones and growls—he sounds possessed, tearing his way through the piece with little regard to what had come before. Sanders’ ecstatic sound points firmly to where Coltrane was headed—and, on some nights, where he already was—but it’s fascinating to hear it here, in the context of the refrains and chord progressions we know so well from the original record.
Coltrane’s shrieking on the suite’s third part, “Pursuance,” is bone-chilling, and then a fleet and beautiful solo from Tyner follows, juxtaposing high-speed Bud Powell-like melody lines and hard, percussive chords with his left hand. After an almost 11-minute bass solo in two parts, the set ends with “Pt. IV - Psalm,” a slow and impressionistic lament on which Coltrane conveys through his horn the rhythm and phrasing of a poem he’d written about his religious epiphany. It’s alternately haunting and exhilarating. Jones brings the percussive thunder and Tyner plays harp-like tones on the piano, evoking the heavens. And then it ends. We hear clapping and then quiet. One bassist plucks away and you can hear a few voices chatting in the distance. Soon the musicians will pack up and move to the next town. What a journey this music has had, from almost entirely unknown to forgotten and unheard, and now, here for all of us. The only possible response is gratitude.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | October 27, 2021 | 9.4 | 1a9e4cef-1afc-4c38-ab67-a3a22bffeb51 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Ryan Hemsworth has been prolific and populist over the course of his brief career, releasing high-profile mixes, finely-tuned pop remixes, and playing genre-mashing, crowd-moving live sets. But the title of this free, more intimate EP says it all, showcasing an omnivorous producer who stays up after everybody else has gone to bed. | Ryan Hemsworth has been prolific and populist over the course of his brief career, releasing high-profile mixes, finely-tuned pop remixes, and playing genre-mashing, crowd-moving live sets. But the title of this free, more intimate EP says it all, showcasing an omnivorous producer who stays up after everybody else has gone to bed. | Ryan Hemsworth: Still Awake EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18152-ryan-hemsworth-still-awake-ep/ | Still Awake EP | Halifax producer Ryan Hemsworth, he of the narcotized pop instrumentals and nostalgic radio bootlegs, has been prolific and populist for the entirety of his brief career. His new EP, Still Awake (released out of nowhere for free last week) comes on the heels of three major mixes-- one for Diplo and Friends, one for Fader, and one for Rinse FM-- a host of loose singles, and a couple of the finely-tuned pop remixes which got him noticed in the first place. But Still Awake finds Hemsworth eschewing his usual stew of radio-friendly samples for a sound both more intimate and more insular. There’s no lingering question behind the title of this EP: it’s a showcase for an omnivorous producer who stays up after everybody else has gone to bed, tasked only with entertaining himself.
Gone are the Juicy J and Waka hooks, trap drums and associated tomfoolery. Hemsworth’s hip-hop leanings are still present, but they’re put in the service of making elegant miniatures like “(｡◕‿◕｡) (or, I Want to Stare at Your Face Until I Die)”. Dumb name, but it’s a track on which Hemsworth manages to shrink desire down to pocket-size, yearning and plaintive synths all resounding with the same kind of Gameboy fervor.
Still Awake feels more well-blended than anything Hemsworth has done, as if his rap, pop, and indie influences are now completely internalized. The samples are deftly woven-- it's not immediately obvious that there’s a lonesome dude moaning below the surface in the first minute of “Empty Thoughts Over a Shallow Ocean”. If the biggest problem with last year’s Last Words was a lack of cohesion between one track and the next, then consider Still Awake the solution, one on which all songs present are recognizably part of the same project. Even the remix of “Perfectly” that ends the EP-- repurposed as a dyspeptic party jam by the Japanese producer Taquwami-- sounds like Hemsworth giving one of his own tracks his patented remix treatment.
So Hemsworth has found his voice, more evidence of which can be found here in the inclusion of the video game sonics that he loves so much. Earlier this year he contributed a track to a compilation meant to honor the video game composer Yasunori Mitsuda, and he can often be found on Twitter referencing the sounds of "Pokémon", "Zelda" and "Street Fighter". “Perfectly”, the strongest track on the EP, uses that arcade sound as a foundation-- a loop of merry provincial chimes keep it grounded as samples flutter by. But all of the tracks on Still Awake use that small sense of scale to great effect. This is bite-sized music with serious emotional punch.
Hemsworth is omnipresent: in the music he releases, his constant touring (he’s on the road with Baauer and R.L. Grime this summer), and loudmouth social media presence. But his own tracks are often wedged into the middle of mixes populated with more famous faces, and live, he’s prone to crowd-pleasing drops and well-mixed, next-level mash-ups, only airing out his latest bedroom craftwork for a minute or so before quickly switching gears. Still Awake shows the flip side of that coin, revealing an introversion that powers the sinking dolor of “track 5 (crashed)” and the intimacy of the understated “All Our Thoughts Are Physical”.
That reticence speaks to the kinds of personalities that inhabit this purple beat scene. Producers like Hemsworth and his close contemporary Shlohmo didn’t start making music to be stars, and while both have an affinity for crowd-moving rap and R&B, they shine most when left to their own devices, working with a sensitivity that a fun Backstreet Boys flip only hints at. With his remixes, Hemsworth has shown himself to have a developed understanding of what makes pop music tick. But his database of knowledge and constant musical curiosity is better served when he’s refashioning it into delightful little originals like those found on Still Awake. | 2013-06-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | June 6, 2013 | 7.9 | 1aa40a8c-70f3-43a0-b17e-133f4669220e | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The consistent Memphis rapper continues his workmanlike grind to the top. | The consistent Memphis rapper continues his workmanlike grind to the top. | Moneybagg Yo: 43VA HEARTLESS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moneybagg-yo-43va-heartless/ | 43VA HEARTLESS | Who listens to Moneybagg Yo? The question is a Beckett play for the streaming era: An extremely solid rapper with no discernible standout qualities regularly racks up charting numbers off of mixtapes, puts out collaborative albums with NBA Youngboy, and has Future roll through to hop on the occasional track. It’s hard to figure out who, exactly listens to Moneybagg, and if there’s such a thing as the diehard Moneybagg Yo fan. But here he is with 43VA HEARTLESS, another very good record that refuses to make a case for or against his role in rap’s hierarchy.
One look at the 43VA HEARTLESS tracklist betrays Moneybagg’s secret-star status. Gunna, Offset, Lil Durk, and Kevin Gates appear, as do upstarts City Girls. 2018’s Reset—his eighth for Yo Gotti’s Interscope subsidiary CMG—features J. Cole, Future (twice), Kodak Black, Kevin Gates (again), Jeremih, and YG. That’s a star-studded cast, showcasing the pull and attraction of rap’s quietest elite member. Despite the support, the emcee born Demario DeWayne White Jr. is at his best when he’s solo and cold-blooded, going after heads of rivals with a nonchalance that borders on sociopathy.
Stylistically, the influence of Gotti and the various stars he entertains on 43VA HEARTLESS is there, but Moneybagg’s flow most resembles that of Gucci Mane. The rhyme patterns, the schemes and style all recall the East Atlanta Santa, and rather than run away from this comparison, Moneybagg tweaks it to great effects. It can be a bit distracting—sometimes he sounds too much like Gucci—but White is able to highlight Gucci’s greatest strengths and make them his own. He has that same casual menace, the laughing delivery that masks something much more sinister. You can almost see the blank stare in Moneybagg’s eyes as he spells out the ruthlessness it took to become a star: “Got no heart/Just a black hole on my soul,” he raps on the Lil Durk-featuring “On My Soul.”
The best songs on HEARTLESS dig deep into a fractured psyche. On the DrumGod produced “Toxic” he’s not necessarily heartbroken—he would never admit to that—but he’s tired and depleted from a ruined romance. He sounds hurt, and it’s the first time on the album that Moneybagg’s vulnerability leads a song instead of his confidence. “Didn't wanna seem like I left you for dead/I knew you would let that shit go to your head/And say that I changed for the bread,” he raps. The little moments—his girl scrolling and posting after he falls asleep—are the ones that elevate 43VA HEARTLESS.
Moneybagg’s strength is in his versatility, with no aspect of his style standing above the rest. The hooks are solid, and his songwriting never falls beneath a certain quality standard. In an era of inconsistency and 15-minute fame, perhaps what makes Demario White stand out is the guaranteed commodity. You know what you’re getting with a Moneybagg Yo record, and it’s always very good. Moneybagg Yo is the reliable drop, and as such, we’re always ready for more. | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | N-Less / Interscope | May 31, 2019 | 7.5 | 1aa41441-7fcc-40d2-bb24-f4c163ab058f | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
The debut LP from Odd Future DJ Syd tha Kid and her OFWGKTA cohort Matt Martians mixes neo-soul, experimental jazz, and funk but lacks the collective's usual take-no-prisoners confidence. | The debut LP from Odd Future DJ Syd tha Kid and her OFWGKTA cohort Matt Martians mixes neo-soul, experimental jazz, and funk but lacks the collective's usual take-no-prisoners confidence. | The Internet: Purple Naked Ladies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16145-purple-naked-ladies/ | Purple Naked Ladies | "When I first started really fucking with Odd Future heavy, my dad was like, 'Really? They talk about some crazy shit and as a female, you're slapping a lot of other females in the face.' I'm like, 'That's what I do. I slap bitches, Dad.'" That's Sydney Bennett talking from the backseat of a van during an MTV interview. Bennett, whose stage name is Syd tha Kyd, comes up often from Odd Future defenders. As the only female member of the otherwise testosterone-fueled OFWGKTA and one of the few openly gay figures in the hip-hop community, she's often cited as proof that the collective can't possibly be as hateful in practice as all that anti-gay, anti-female lyrical violence portends.
Syd maintains a low-profile but powerful role within the collective, producing beats and offering up her parents' home for the boys to record in. Though she stands tranquilly behind the decks during the group's live gigs, her presence is commanding-- try watching her as she menacingly nods along to the beat and slowly raises her middle finger over her head without getting chills. But as a side act dubbed the Internet, alongside Odd Future member Matt Martians, that take-no-prisoners, "I slap bitches, Dad" confidence is absent. On one hand, that's the logical result of a bona fide badass showing her soft side, dipping her toes into sounds gentler than anything else in the Odd Future catalog. But Purple Naked Ladies is frustratingly flat regardless of Syd and her cohort's reputations-- it comes off as a demo reel of an act that's still fiddling with what sounds right and what doesn't.
Think "Odd Future R&B side project" and you're bound to imagine the velvety slink of Frank Ocean's "Novacane". But Purple Naked Ladies leans more heavily toward neo-soul, experimental jazz, and funk than anything else. At its brief best-- during its final three songs-- the album recalls Baduizm-era Erykah, soulful and patient and poetically narrative-driven. "Fastlane", for example, pairs a steady boom-bap backdrop with Syd's featherlight singing voice as she creates a four-minute metaphor out of love and car traffic.
The album's backend is a welcome respite from the awkward instrumental clutter that bogs down too much of the record. Too much here demands fast-forwarding, from the hollow instrumental opener "Violent Nude Women" to "C*nt", which strikes an ear-perkingly rich note for all of a few seconds before dissolving into an overcrowded mess. Lacking in songwriting muscle, many of these songs sound simultaneously thin and cluttered. As debuts go, it's primarily a failure of editing-- an EP of tightened versions of the record's best cuts would have packed a stronger first punch.
Purple Naked Ladies isn't going to do much for you if you closely follow the genres it dabbles in. Like many spinoffs from the Odd Future machine, it's a small piece of a larger puzzle, useful for obsessives concerned with keeping their catalogs up to date. In that sense, it's also a reminder that Odd Future is about strength in numbers, functioning best as a gaggle of goony characters instead of individual breakout stars in the making (excepting Tyler, of course). That's okay for now-- those boys would be hard-pressed to fill Syd's spot if she took off on her own. | 2012-01-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Odd Future | January 4, 2012 | 6 | 1aa9ddf2-77bd-480f-92db-81c5650028c9 | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
With the boiled-down quality of a good short story collection, the debut album from the Texas songwriter is cryptic, bewildering, and daringly simple. | With the boiled-down quality of a good short story collection, the debut album from the Texas songwriter is cryptic, bewildering, and daringly simple. | Jana Horn: Optimism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jana-horn-optimism/ | Optimism | Jana Horn recorded a solo debut before Optimism that she scrapped because it sounded too good. “It didn’t reflect me very much,” she told The Guardian. The Texan post-grad fiction writer and teacher recruited some members of the band Knife on the Water and made another album, from scratch, that she liked better. The music was daringly simple this time, and in that space, something sprouted and proliferated: her writer’s mind, which snaked into the cracks left by the arrangements.
That album, now being given proper release by Philadelphia’s No Quarter, reveals its quizzical heart in its opening seconds. Horn plays the beginning of “Friends Again” on two acoustic guitar strings with two fingers. Absent a few chord changes, the song is intriguingly close to something you could write and play with no guitar knowledge whatsoever. A trumpet eventually chimes in with some whole notes, but otherwise, the action is confined to Horn’s words, which trace the circumference of a psychic wound over and over. “You didn’t just push me out, you dug me out, deep,” she sings airily, adding dripping-faucet repetitions of the word “deep,” as if each time might bring her closer to the injury’s root.
From there, the album blossoms into a muted country sway, the turnaround licks and shuffles and cymbal hits all played sotto voce. The dry peculiarity in Horn’s delivery recalls Phil Elverum, just as the chilly serenity of the music sometimes evokes Mount Eerie. Filigree—a soft Hammond organ, like a raised eyebrow, on the title track; an electric guitar glinting in the corners of “Time Machine”—warms the edges. If Elverum’s mood is solitary reverie, Horn’s is more tender and intimate: many lyrics read like eavesdropped conversations between partners.
In her unusually entertaining press bio (“a grad professor once told me that masturbation is writing, as long as you’re looking out a window”), Horn cites Raymond Carver, and her best songs have the bewildering, boiled-down quality of one of Carver’s miniatures. As in Carver’s stories, or Amy Hempel’s, you’re not always sure what the narrator is revealing, or to whom, and the story feels broken off from some larger, ongoing narrative. Take “changing lines,” which opens with one character confessing they woke up “down in my brain” to another. The second character delivers a curious rebuttal: “In certain ways we just won’t relate, and that’s where sympathy can be, and is, enough... down to the molecule, opposites exist, and to exist depend on their opposites (what God is not, he is).” Is that clear? No? The song ends there.
The album feels about five times larger with the inclusion of “Jordan,” its first single. Whereas the rest of the record sounds homey, “Jordan” surveys alien territory. The bass thrums simple eighth notes, accompanied by nothing except atmospheric swirls and Horn’s lyrics, which detail a dreamlike scenario full of the willfully Biblical symbols and cryptic exchanges that characterize Leonard Cohen songs. She sing-speaks calmly in flowing meter, and as the song swirls and darkens, nothing is clear except for its riveting portent. She’s mentioned it was the last song she wrote for the record, and it has the feel of a transmission from some other place—maybe where Jana Horn goes next.
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. | 2022-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | January 21, 2022 | 7.5 | 1aab0366-ac7b-4d1e-a958-59914dc39cba | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
In the late 70s, Craig Leon produced crucial albums that defined the punk and new wave landscape for future generations. For his own debut Nommos, released in 1981, one can hear how the punks rubbed off on him, imbuing his primitive electronic music with a striking rawness. | In the late 70s, Craig Leon produced crucial albums that defined the punk and new wave landscape for future generations. For his own debut Nommos, released in 1981, one can hear how the punks rubbed off on him, imbuing his primitive electronic music with a striking rawness. | Craig Leon: Nommos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18553-craig-leon-nommos/ | Nommos | The name Craig Leon won’t be familiar to most music fans, but take away the albums he recorded and our Top Albums of the 1970s list would look very different indeed. In the late 70s, Leon produced crucial albums that defined the punk and new wave landscape for future generations, ranging from the recorded debuts of Suicide and Blondie to the Ramones’ self-titled and Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ Blank Generation EP (as well as the early singles from DMZ, Weirdoes and Zeros records released on Greg Shaw’s mighty Bomp! imprint). It’s easy to imagine that Leon brought a certain level of professionalism to these earliest punk sessions-- these days, Leon mostly produces classical recordings for the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, the London Symphony Orchestra and Joshua Bell-- but for his own debut album, Nommos, one can hear how the punks rubbed off on him.
Originally released on John Fahey’s Takoma imprint in 1981, Leon’s debut album joined ranks alongside such glorious catalog oddities as The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, Joesph Byrd’s Yankee Transcendoodle and Basho Sings!, not to mention Fahey himself, prone to play guitar atop audio collages of Tibetan monks and Nazi marches. And since Takoma is also regarded as the birthplace of placid New Age guitar, releasing early albums from George Winston and Will Ackerman, one can only imagine how Nommos made a certain type of music listener’s teeth grind, to where the album stands alone as the most audacious and “punk” effort ever released on that label.
So it makes sense that it's remained out of print for 30 years. Since then, it’s found favor with Fall fans (Leon produced three early 90s Fall albums), fans of industrial and primitive electronic music, techno enthusiasts as well as the recent spate of noise artists like Pete Swanson and Andy Stott who pair bracing noise to 4/4 pummel, to where the album fetches ludicrous sums online. Booted in the past few years, it now sees a more legitimate release. Opener “Ring With Three Concentric Discs” sets the album’s tone in a slightly schizophrenic manner. There’s a nerve-rattling metallic loop not unlike a broken fan belt thwacking aluminum siding but before long, a gorgeous warbling synth melody drifts over the noise, just smoothing down the sharp edges so that it might find good company alongside Cluster & Eno or Harald Grosskopf.
It then leads into the polyrhythmic tock of “Donkeys Bearing Cups", which sounds like every hi-hat, handclap, snare, rattle and thump was triggered by one of Kraftwerk’s showroom dummies: stiff yet strangely funky. About a minute in, Leon introduces some unidentifiable noise that does its best anticipation of My Bloody Valentine, at once blinding and body-melting. The title track again strikes a balance between skeletal beat and juxtaposed synth line that with its sense of strange negative space seems to be a subconscious template for the sorts of beats the Neptunes would craft two decades later for Hell Hath No Fury.
The eleven-minute “Four Eyes To See The Afterlife” and seven-minute robotic rhumba of closer “She Wears A Hemispherical Skull Cap” comprise Nommos’s second half. And it’s here that the sparseness of Leon’s evocative metallic throbs slowly but surely steer the album away from merely being strange electronic music to drop into an adventurous DJ set into a more rarefied and unsettling space. “Afterlife” slowly develops from a near-empty clang to something approaching hypnosis. And when a female wail arises midway through the piece, it turns into this anxious slice of early 80s electronic minimalism that has few peers. It’s a strain of minimal, nearly New Age music that-- rather than dissolve your anxieties away-- gives you the night creeps. | 2013-09-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-09-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Superior Viaduct | September 20, 2013 | 8 | 1aab7266-2876-4717-99f4-7219a0001775 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Sung mostly in French, Gainsbourg’s gripping new album finds her in the tangles of grief. It is at once scorchingly intimate and fantastically oversized. | Sung mostly in French, Gainsbourg’s gripping new album finds her in the tangles of grief. It is at once scorchingly intimate and fantastically oversized. | Charlotte Gainsbourg: Rest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-gainsbourg-rest/ | Rest | In Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic 2011 film, Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a woman struggling to pull her sister from the throes of mental illness. Her performance is raw, devastating, and revealing of the singer/actress’ artistic fascination with darkness. There’s also a grim sort of prescience to the role—Gainsbourg’s own half-sister, the photographer Kate Barry, died in late 2013, after falling from a window. Her death was presumed to be a suicide.
As it has for so many artists—like Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on this year’s A Crow Looked At Me, or Sufjan Stevens on 2015’s Carrie & Lowell—Gainsbourg’s grief took up residence in her music. The groundwork for an album, her follow-up to 2009’s IRM, had already been laid when tragedy struck; in its aftermath, the project recentered around reckoning with loss. Gainsbourg decamped to New York to escape the ghosts that trailed her in Paris (where she also lost her father, famed singer Serge Gainsbourg, in 1991). There, producer SebastiAn, known for his work with Frank Ocean, joined her for a year’s worth of writing and recording sessions during which, he reports, she “wanted to make something with all this sadness she had.”
Gainsbourg, though, showed little interest in delivering ecclesiastical murmurs like Stevens’, or a heart-wrenching catalog of detail like Elverum’s. The album that emerged from these sessions, Rest, is at once scorchingly intimate and fantastically oversized. Gainsbourg mourns by leaning into her cinematic sensibilities, cushioning her pain with orchestral swells and dramatic synth. With SebastiAn, she’s dreamt up a sonic palette that wouldn’t feel out of place in a horror film—take, for instance, “I’m a Lie,” which pairs a vaguely Halloween-like synth hook with French lyrics about the distressing physiological effects of desire. On the six-minute epic “Deadly Valentine,” Gainsbourg interpolates wedding vows in an unnerving, half-whispered vocal performance supported by sweeping strings that heighten the drama of the demented nuptials. One poster for Melancholia, that haunting image of Kirsten Dunst floating through murky water in full bridal regalia, seems like a fitting visual aid for the song. Gainsbourg’s grief is vast, and she’s writing accordingly.
For non-Francophones, it might be tempting to brush past the French lyrics that appear on this record, and certainly, there’s a hushed urgency in Gainsbourg’s delivery that maps out her tone. But the songs on Rest are some of the first whose lyrics Gainsbourg has penned on her own, and every word craves attention. She pulls off stunning bilingual wordplay on the album’s title track, co-written and produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo—the English title, “Rest,” evokes eternal rest, while the French variant that Gainsbourg sings, “reste,” means “stay.” Of all the songs on the album, this one was written in closest proximity to Barry’s passing; it sees Gainsbourg simultaneously laying her sister to rest and imploring her to come back (“Reste avec moi s’il te plaît” translates to “Stay with me please”). The all-French elegy “Kate” makes a similar plea: “On d’vait vieillir ensemble,” meaning “We should grow old together.”
Of course, writing through grief doesn’t have to mean writing about grief. Tragedy doesn’t erase human complexity, so even as sadness is central to this album, notes of twisted romance, familial love, and fervent restlessness fill out its songs. “Sylvia Says,” a perplexingly funky but delightful homage to “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” builds a Revolution-worthy bass groove into Sylvia Plath’s lovesick verse from 1953. In the lush, string-fueled “Dans Vos Airs” (“In Your Expressions”), Gainsbourg reflects on motherhood. “Songbird in a Cage,” the only song of the set that she had no hand in writing, was given to her by Paul McCartney (who takes a guest turn on piano, drums, and guitar); it lays listless phrases, alternately spoken with cool detachment and sung in quiet earnestness, over a stuttering beat and guitar hiccups.
Songs like these affirm life, even in the face of death. They transform personal suffering into public spectacle. Few things are more terrifying than exposing our bruises to others, knowing that they could misunderstand, or prey on our vulnerability. On Rest, Gainsbourg doesn’t just reveal her pain, but monumentalizes it, lays out a red carpet, and invites people to watch. Her refusal to be sequestered by grief is, quite literally, a death-defying feat. | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Because | November 17, 2017 | 8.7 | 1aabfefa-cce5-4561-99fe-ebd80e9968c1 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Upping the ante from her 2009 debut, Merrill Garbus fuses acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own. | Upping the ante from her 2009 debut, Merrill Garbus fuses acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own. | Tune-Yards: w h o k i l l | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15321-w-h-o-k-i-l-l/ | w h o k i l l | The stylization of the name tUnE-yArDs in print is a bit off-putting, but it at least gives people fair warning: This is not an act with any interest in politely conforming to expectations. tUnE-yArDs is the music project of Merrill Garbus, a songwriter, vocalist, percussionist, and ukulele player who has fused elements of acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own. Garbus is blessed with an extraordinary voice, and she wields it with great confidence, always coming off in total control of her phrasing while seeming totally uninhibited in her expression. There's an authoritative quality to her voice-- she often sings with a commanding, full-bodied boldness, but even at her softest, Garbus sounds assertive and forthright.
w h o k i l l, Garbus' second album as tUnE-yArDs, delivers on the promise of her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs. Unlike that album, which she recorded almost entirely on her own using a digital voice recorder and the sound editing program Audacity, w h o k i l l was mostly made in traditional studios in collaboration with bassist Nate Brenner, engineer Eli Crews, and a handful of other musicians. The music benefits from the increased professionalism, but Garbus has not abandoned her lo-fi aesthetic. As on BiRd-BrAiNs, Garbus layers sound to create a patchwork of contrasting textures. This time around, the greater clarity allows for more exaggerated dynamics. This is most apparent in "Gangsta", a carefully arranged track that evokes danger and fear with bluntly abbreviated blasts of horn noise and sounds that cut in and out erratically like a set of headphones with a busted wire or a cell phone that can't hold its signal. On the opposite end of the spectrum, she creates an almost unsettling intimacy on "Wooly Wolly Gong" by mixing the ambient hum of room sound with closely mic'd arpeggiated chords and vocals.
Brenner's presence on bass is the biggest difference between w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs. His style is loose and jazzy, with fluid, melodic lines that add dimension to Garbus' compositions. She sounded so isolated on BiRd-BrAiNs, but suddenly her music is like a conversation, with Brenner's parts bouncing off her voice and rhythms like thoughtful banter. He brings a janky funk to "Es-so", a zippy groove to "Bizness", and a delicate weight to the airy "Doorstep". On "Powa", his lead lines slink around Garbus' slo-mo rock riff as if in a subliminal duet with her expressive vocal performance. That song builds steadily over the course of five minutes until it reaches a stunning climax in which Brenner's bass bounces gently as Garbus hits a glorious high note like a feral Mariah Carey.
Throughout w h o k i l l, Garbus confronts thorny issues of race, gender, body image, and privilege in ways that are pointed but nuanced. She mostly sticks to personal narratives, suggesting big ideas and complex tensions in her subtext while emphasizing the urgency of small moments and concrete details. She's most direct in the opening cut "My Country", in which she wrestles with guilt over her own privilege, but she's more thought-provoking when in murkier, more ambiguous territory, like when she sings about a sexual fantasy involving the brutal cop who arrested her brother in "Riotriot" or when she wonders aloud why she does not have more black male friends at the end of "Killa". Garbus is particularly fascinated by violence; most of the tracks on w h o k i l l deal with power struggles that arise from inequity and lead to further cruelty and injustice. Her lighter moments are still quite complicated-- she playfully wrestles with negative body image in "Es-so", while that same lingering disgust and self-doubt brings a moving subtext to "Powa", an ode to a lover who can get her to momentarily let go of stress and insecurities.
Back in 1983 Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon wrote an essay for Art Forum that suggested that when we go to rock performances, we pay to see other people believe in themselves. A lot of what makes w h o k i l l and tUnE-yArDs' excellent live performances so compelling is the degree to which Garbus commits to her ideas and displays a total conviction in her personal, idiosyncratic, high-stakes music. This, in and of itself, is very inspiring and empowering. This unguarded, individualistic expression encourages strong identification in listeners, so don't be surprised if this record earns Garbus a very earnest and intense cult following. | 2011-04-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | April 18, 2011 | 8.8 | 1ab494b6-84fa-4d2e-8d4b-94b17e2c71ca | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
The metal band’s latest album retains the sludgy ferocity of their best work while opening up to include elements of shoegaze and dream-pop, to mixed success. | The metal band’s latest album retains the sludgy ferocity of their best work while opening up to include elements of shoegaze and dream-pop, to mixed success. | Torche: Admission | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/torche-admission/ | Admission | Torche’s business is heaviness. The Miami metal band specializes in the kind of formidable, down-tuned riffs you’d expect to hear from the most menacing-looking customer at your local Guitar Center. The twist is that guitarist/singer Steve Brooks grew up obsessing over the Melvins instead of Metallica (he once said that the former band’s 1991 album Bullhead “ruined metal for me”), which helps explain the band’s sludgy sensibility. A great Torche track, like 2015’s “Minions,” doesn’t wow you with speed or exhaust you with unchecked aggression. It bludgeons you slowly and patiently, giving you time to marvel at its punishing repetition before you succumb.
This basic strategy has served Torche across 15 years, numerous line-up changes, five labels, and at least one intraband fistfight. The group perfected the approach on 2008’s subversively melodic Meanderthal, while refining it and enlarging its following on 2012’s Harmonicraft and 2015’s Restarter. Admission, Torche’s new album and first in more than four years, retains the sludgy ferocity of their best work while broadening their sound to include elements of shoegaze and dream pop, to mixed success.
The most striking departure here is the title track, an uncharacteristically dreamy meditation on self-induced isolation. If you’re a shoegaze nut, the song’s introductory siren of guitar might strike you as familiar—it is startlingly similar to the main riff in Ride’s 1990 gem “Dreams Burn Down.” That’s not a reference point that would have applied to Torche’s previous albums, but it does indicate the band’s growing interest in using lead guitar as an engine of atmospheric grandeur. (Admission is the first Torche album that finds longtime bassist Jonathan Nuñez switching over to guitar duties.) On “Slide,” this results in a slippery, reverb-tinted solo that lacks the agility and laser precision of the Meanderthal solos.
Torche aren’t growing soft. From the sputtering machine-gun power chords that open the record (“From Here”) to the chugging doom of “On the Wire,” Admission doesn’t skimp on the band’s well-established propensity for brutalizing riffs. The latter is a highlight of teeth-gnashing sludge, as is “Infierno,” which uses discordant rumbles of low-end guitar noise to illustrate its vision of fiery devastation: As Brooks repeats the words “on fire,” the amp sounds as though it’s literally overheating. That song locks into a thunderous groove before Torche close out the album by dialing up their melodic sensibilities on “Changes Come,” which boasts faint echoes of a synth line and the album’s only trace of an optimistic lyric (“I’m alright/The kid isn’t gone”). Brooks is the rare metal vocalist who sings more than he shouts, here especially so.
Those moments are impressive. But for the most part, Admission doesn’t amount to Torche’s most compelling songwriting, especially when you consider the four-and-a-half-year wait between albums. “Times Missing” is another dalliance with shoegaze wall-of-sound density, but the song plods around for five minutes in search of a central idea. “Reminder,” with its staccato jolts of electricity, makes an admirable racket but never quite locks into a groove. And the record’s two punkish interludes, “From Here” and “What Was,” feel as truncated and perfunctory as their titles. Neither pass the 90-second mark. That should still be enough time to produce a hook.
Pop-metal, stoner rock, doom metal—whatever amalgam of buzzwords you favor, on Admission, Torche remain a reliable supplier of grizzled riffs to test the low end on your stereo. The stylistic guises don’t always fit, but that’s a function of the group’s creative restlessness.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | July 16, 2019 | 6.4 | 1ab65e2a-0ebb-4f9a-bf12-e98e3bd47eca | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Once lost in the major label trend-chasing of the ’90s, the soft, slow, and sad trio gets its rightful due in an essential box set that reissues all of their studio albums. | Once lost in the major label trend-chasing of the ’90s, the soft, slow, and sad trio gets its rightful due in an essential box set that reissues all of their studio albums. | Acetone: I’m still waiting. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/acetone-im-still-waiting/ | I’m still waiting. | For a band whose touchstone would soon become obdurate slowness, Acetone certainly began on the record industry’s fast track. In the early ’90s, when music executives were quick with cash, the unproven trio of California students inked a deal with a nascent Virgin imprint on a demo alone. On the prowl for the next alt-rock crossover phenomenon, Vernon Yard—named for the English enclave where Virgin began two decades earlier—offered Acetone $400,000 (nearly a million today), making them the inaugural act on a roster that would soon include the Verve, Low, and David Gray.
There were promotional budgets, tours with Oasis and Garbage, and the growing realization that their pained, gorgeous, and patient records could never actually recoup those kinds of post-Nirvana costs. This was not music for MTV but instead for a meditative and melancholy cloister, folks with the time and temperament to sit still with these graceful testaments to existential ache. After Vernon Yard dropped Acetone into a legacy of penury, they made two of indie rock’s most exquisite albums for Neil Young’s new Vapor label. Still, those didn’t take. And in 2001, at 34, bassist Richie Lee—whose twilit voice and heroin woes had been Acetone’s angel and devil—died by suicide. Ever since, Acetone have continued their descent into cultish obscurity, their records long out of print and mostly not streaming, a band on the fast track to the record industry’s wasteland.
At last, I’m still waiting. puts Acetone on their proper pedestal as one of their generation’s most hypnotic acts. They are like Bedhead without the morning-time stiffness or Mojave 3 with more earworm ease, a band wrongly forgotten among contemporaries they often bested. A titanic 11xLP box set that collects almost all of Acetone’s recorded work, I’m still waiting. doubles as a love letter for three kids—Lee, drummer Steve Hadley, and guitarist Mark Lightcap—who were lured inside a vicious system that did not know what to do with their muted wonder except write it off as a loss. For the first time ever, their four LPs will be available at once (as a set and as standalone records) and eventually on streaming, having outlived both Vernon Yard and Vapor in aptly tragic fashion. Three decades after Acetone accepted that $400,000 check, their music still radiates a hangdog sort of hope, holding on even as the idea of letting go beckons.
Amid the big-game hunt for the next Nirvana, Acetone looked and sort of sounded the part—Lee’s dirty grunge curls, the beautiful Hadley’s thousand-yard stare, Lightcap’s steely glower. Their Acetone EP, released in 1993, is a fiery baptism of distortion and dynamics, the first three songs grinding through Big Muff riffs and splenetic solos but pausing for uncanny spans of pillowed harmony. “D.F.B.,” a four-minute excoriation of a dead asshole, called “next” during a Stone Temple Pilots/White Zombie Rock Block. But then there’s closer “Cindy,” an imaginative and enigmatic eight-minute devotional about virginity or black-widow-like sacrifice or narcotized oblivion. The song is a seesaw, rising into heavy outbursts before falling repeatedly into quiet passages so vulnerable and delicate that they suggest rehearsal tapes, at least until you notice how intentional the playing is. No faint note is out of place, no twinge of dissonance accidental.
Acetone’s next eight years—that is, nearly their entire oeuvre—unspool from that locus, on four albums that descend toward low-volume silence before rising again for one last outburst. In fact, “Cindy” became such a touchstone that they named their 1993 full-length debut for it without including the track itself. Blistering bits of rock speckled Cindy’s 55 minutes, like the tube-screaming “Pinch” or the space-rock ascendance of “Endless Summer.” But they are mere blisters, aberrations on a surface so wide and smooth it’s easy to get lost there. A plea to a lover set on leaving, “Louise,” moves with doo-wop grace, subdued until it twinkles as faintly as a distant star. Low would not release I Could Live in Hope for another year, so “No Need Swim” gets to their paradigm—gentle but insistent harmonies that dovetail so well they sound like one voice and its shadow, over a rhythm that hides inside that heat—first. “I’m a molecule of water, flying over Niagara Falls,” they sing, masterfully framing existence as a free fall into someone else’s inescapable reality.
Indeed, they did soon descend into the merciless pit of the music industry and its endless grind for commercial attention. Hadley and Lee surrendered to heroin, perhaps informing the astral gaze and icy pace of what was becoming their best work but not necessarily helpful for writing more of it. Decamping to a modest Nashville studio for an extended stay, they managed only to make parts of two records. The results were, artistically, worth the expense: I Guess I Would, a brilliant country covers EP, relaxes into the work of George Jones and John Prine like a featherbed, indulging in these little tragedies. A setting of William Blake’s “How Sweet I Roam’d from Field to Field,” earlier attempted by the Fugs, is so hazy it feels like ascending heavenward through clouds, life itself just a memory.
They revel in that languid state for 1995’s If You Only Knew, having finally accepted how they wanted to sound. The distortion and vim of just two years earlier appears here only as aberrations, little ripples on a seemingly placid pool where the real drama lurks beneath the veneer. A song so still its melodic motion barely registers, “Esque” is pure heartbreak, a confession from an addict who can’t quite register some bad thing that might have happened yesterday. “When You’re Gone” is another transmission from the edge of confusion, now turned toward a future Lee isn’t sure he has. Guitar and bass lock into a slow-motion death waltz. This is Acetone at the lip of an abyss, where the view is grand but the stakes are grander still.
Turmoil soon ensued between Acetone and Vernon Yard, then entangled in a lawsuit from Verve Records about the use of the name the Verve, just as that band became Vernon Yard’s star. Lee accused the label of not working hard enough to promote the band’s record, not pushing it into enough stores. On the other hand, what was Vernon Yard to do with a big investment who had gone so quiet they’d barely be audible through a car’s FM receiver? Lee rightly rejected grunge as Acetone’s scene and got flustered when folks called him the next Gram Parsons or suggested Acetone were “the new kings of the No Depression movement,” a coronation that vastly overestimated the stylistic boundaries of that scene. What were Acetone trying to be, anyway? Vernon Yard didn’t stick around to find out, cutting them loose after If You Only Knew spiraled toward the cutout bin.
And so, as though in retribution, they made their masterpiece for Neil Young. The 12-track Acetone is focused and intentional in a way the band had never been, sorting through the suffering of survival with tenderness and intensity. “All You Know” is a warped country nightmare, slide guitar and smeared notes underscoring lines about going onward even as everything goes badly. Vaguely threatening and entirely enchanting, “Might as Well” deploys the notion that no one really cares about anyone else as a strange romantic lure. It’s an invitation to disappear completely into being unknown.
All of the record goes on in this way: a quiet quest for the silver linings that come with continuing, in spite of the struggles. This is the last record Acetone would self-produce, and the lessons of their Vernon Yard tenure serve them well. Everything is mic’d so closely that it often feels as if you’re resting your head on Hadley’s snare or Lightcap’s amplifier, that they’re whispering to you as Lee sorts through notebooks of soft blue feelings. Acetone chafed at subgenres, “slowcore” in particular. But Acetone is both apogee and access point for the form, its effortless sense of melody turning its shuffles and sways into vortices.
It is tempting to reduce Acetone’s end and even existence to Lee’s suicide—“to [overwrite] creative and contingent decisions with a fatal trajectory that seems both inescapable and unverifiable,” Drew Daniel of Matmos writes in this set’s empathetic and incisive liner notes. But Acetone’s final album, 2000’s York Blvd., suggests that they had already reached their cruising altitude, that they were now gilding a wonderfully gray lily. (Prime Cuts, a newly compiled potpourri of demos, lost tracks, and live recordings, confirms that sense.) Vapor enlisted Eric Sarafin, who had previously mixed several Ben Harper records, to helm the sessions, while Acetone brought in Jason Yates to add subtle organ lines. Lightcap even plays trumpet. Much of that old crunch returns alongside a dash of outright soul, both marketing hooks in waiting. But the best songs, like “Stray” or “One Drop,” are archetypal Acetone: methodical drifts toward a future that may not even exist.
York Blvd. begins with “Things Are Gonna Be Alright,” a sunnily titled song for a country still lingering in the afterglow of “You Get What You Give.” But it was a feint for a tune that, like Acetone’s music at large, soon went quiet and dark. “You may try and try again/Not to be unsatisfied, just squeezing by one more time,” they sing as the riff ricochets repeatedly, vaguely peppy despite what’s coming. “But how long do you go on/Believing things are gonna be alright?”
As with most things Acetone ever made, it is simultaneously disarming and unsettling, a balm for the ears that also registers as a lump in the throat. Hearing Lightcap and Lee sing those lines now, it’s hard not to grieve the way it all went down for Acetone, their striking music lost to the shuffle of major labels and ephemeral trends. At least you can hear it now, in this box of absolute treasure salvaged from the collective cultural jetsam of the ’90s. | 2023-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 18, 2023 | 9 | 1ab717d5-6a54-4c30-9aec-60f90d09473e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On the third album he made with his biggest band, Glenn Danzig lived up to his larger-than-life metal-god myth in ways he’s rarely done since. | On the third album he made with his biggest band, Glenn Danzig lived up to his larger-than-life metal-god myth in ways he’s rarely done since. | Danzig: Danzig III: How the Gods Kill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/danzig-danzig-iii-how-the-gods-kill/ | Danzig III: How the Gods Kill | Glenn Danzig’s career is a case study in the unsustainability of rock mythologizing. Given the way he built himself up in his first decade of public life, he was bound to fall sooner or later: Danzig presented himself as a smooth-voiced demon, a guy with a library of occult tomes and an endless supply of primal lust—the very stuff of Parental Advisory label hysteria and banned MTV videos. His music was tight and muscular, and he made sure he and his band appeared that way, too, particularly after he moved from New Jersey to L.A. But this macho posturing had its limits. In time, many fans went from exalting “Tired of Being Alive,” the down-and-out rallying cry from 1990’s Danzig II: Lucifuge, to actually being tired of his conspiracy-minded nonsense and questionable art direction. No metal god is truly immortal, infallible, or devoid of humanity, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to find by the mid-’90s that Danzig, at his core, is the sort of guy who gets bummed that kids didn’t trick-or-treat at his house. Before all that, though, there was one album that lived up to the mighty image he’d built: 1992’s Danzig III: How the Gods Kill, where the classic lineup of his solo band in its prime found an emotional maturity unmatched by any record he made before or after. It’s Danzig at his most sinister, yet also his most human.
Danzig’s voice has always carried a hint of tenderness, and in How the Gods Kill’s slower tracks, that quality comes to the fore. The title track poses a heavy question in a soft tone: “If you feel alive/If you’ve got no fear/Do you know the name/Of the one you seek?” The implication is clear: Are you ready for power you may not be able to comprehend? Are you ready to go to the next level? He and his bandmates surely were. Throughout the album, Danzig, guitarist John Christ, bassist Eerie Von, and drummer Chuck Biscuits achieve a bigger, denser sound than they’d previously had. Danzig’s subtle croon only intensifies the effect of the blaze—stoked by desperate longing, he sounds that much more demonic. The nickname “Evil Elvis” had been lobbed at him ever since his 1988 solo debut, largely due to the way he packaged ferocious energy in accessible charm and his deep, roaring vocal delivery. But Roy Orbison is a more important spiritual influence on Danzig’s style, at least on this album, even if “Evil Roy” doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Orbison was goth before goth, draping himself with darkness not just in his black-on-black look, but in his lovelorn voice and his tales of sorrow. You can hear his music echoed clearly in “Sistinas,” a sincerely romantic love song where vibrato guitar and delicate strings back Danzig’s somber words (“I lost my soul, deep inside/Oh, and it’s so black and cold”). Orbison’s shadow is there, too, on “Anything,” a sweet ballad that ripens into a rager. On Gods, Danzig isn’t the shape-shifting, demonic wolfman of his earlier records. He’s a devil who feels, thinking about the one that got away while he sits on a throne of skulls.
Elsewhere, the bluesier tracks get even more juiced up than usual, largely a result of Danzig taking on an increased production role alongside Rick Rubin. The slyly seductive 1988 track “Mother,” which would become a hit after being remixed a year after this album’s release, remains Danzig’s calling card, but “Dirty Black Summer” is the song that perfects the form. Despite its name, it’s an elevated dirtbag rocker for all seasons, with Christ channeling every beer-soaked ’70s guitar hero into one of his most jubilant riffs; “Summer” swings faster, burns harder, and revs up to a hallucinatory peak.
Christ’s guitar playing was easily the most irreplaceable aspect of this era of the band. On Gods, he was in sync with the early 1990s’ disdain for flash, yet far closer to a raw blues tradition than, say, the industrial crunch of White Zombie’s Jay Yuenger or Prong’s Tommy Victor (who would go on to play with Danzig starting in 1996 and join the band permanently in 2008). A lot of his style at the time had to do with Danzig‘s interest in pre-rock blues and pop music—Christ has said that his personal taste is more driven by classical and jazz—but he’s still a crucial reason why Danzig’s first four albums, especially Gods, are revered today. Lately, even Danzig himself seems to have come around to appreciating Christ’s contributions to his sound: His two most recent albums, 2015’s Skeletons and this year’s Black Laden Crown, both sounded as though Victor was aiming to recreate Christ’s looser approach (with some success, particularly on Crown). All of this only makes it more obvious how important Christ was circa Gods. He shouldn’t have to settle for teaching gigs and weddings in Maryland—and it’s worth noting that he seems amenable to playing with Danzig again.
Gods marks the moment when Danzig transcended his punk origins and staked out a deeper place in the modern music canon, patching together the influences of Dixon, Orbison, and Howlin’ Wolf into something grand. It’s a record about confronting your inner strength, testing if it’s enough to endure heartbreak and uncontrollable lust; it’s about feeling that God is failing you, and wanting the power of a god all the same. Danzig himself would never again be able to seek higher truth in his music quite like this without devolving into trite spirituality. By 1995, the classic lineup of his band had collapsed. Various hardcore sidekicks came and went in Danzig’s ranks in the years that followed, and while that kept him on the road, the gleam in his eye circa Gods was often missing. A quarter-century after this watershed album, he’s still at it, even if recreating the howls of “Bodies” and “Dirty Black Summer” is more labor-intensive these days. Will someone show him how the gods kill again? | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Def American | October 31, 2017 | 8.7 | 1abaf57b-8a6b-46b4-9f81-29904b7d240a | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Twenty years on, Radiohead revisit their 1997 masterpiece with a deluxe reissue. The bonus material includes familiar B-sides and a few previously unheard recordings that hint at an intriguing road not taken. | Twenty years on, Radiohead revisit their 1997 masterpiece with a deluxe reissue. The bonus material includes familiar B-sides and a few previously unheard recordings that hint at an intriguing road not taken. | Radiohead: OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/radiohead-ok-computer-oknotok-1997-2017/ | OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017 | As they regrouped to figure out what their third album might be, Radiohead faced, if not a crossroads, then an unusually open stretch of road. They had toured with Alanis Morissette in support of their second LP, 1995's The Bends. They had appeared, pale and blinking, before tanned and greased hordes on “MTV Spring Break,” wailing the chorus to a massive runaway hit that was now fading in their rearview. On their first two records, they had worked with two different conventional rock producers, and now they itched to cut tether from professional studios altogether. They had earned the freedom to thrash around, to spend some record label money and burn some of the industry goodwill they’d accumulated pursuing whatever they wanted. So what would that be?
It’s still funny to think, two decades later, that Thom Yorke’s first answer to that question was to create Radiohead’s first “positive” album. No more iron lungs, or songs inspired by brutal gun rampages, he swore: This time, he told NME, “I’m deliberately writing down all the positive things I hear or see.”
It’s unclear what happened to that album. OK Computer obviously wasn’t it. But there has always been a tantalizing alternate-history version of Radiohead’s third LP lurking behind the finished product. Their sessions weren’t exactly a deep-dive into hell, despite the record’s now-concrete reputation as a piece of digital-age prophecy. For every dour “Paranoid Android” thunderclap, there was a shimmering, lighter “Melatonin” as its B-side. More than 20 songs were winnowed down to 12, in fact, and the narrative the discarded tracks suggest has been kept under quite deliberate lock and key by the band. But now, years on, they are cracking open its vaults, perhaps to slyly underscore the point that they were always more human, and connected to good old hoary rock music, than their reputation suggests.
OKNOTOK is something a little more interesting than a remaster with tacked-on B-sides and rarities, even if that’s technically what it is. The “rarities” included here have never been all that rare, and many of the songs included on this set (“How I Made My Millions,” “Polyethylene”) live in readily accessible digital eternity on Spotify and have been performed live for more than a decade. Radiohead have always treated these songs, the ones that came before OK Computer truly took shape, with a wry sort of kid-brother affection: The storied B-side “Lift,” which finally sees inclusion here, was once seen as a “bog-shite B-side,” in the words of Ed O’Brien. It’s a lovely, weightless strummer of a song, and watching them send it shimmering out over a field of blissed-out stadium concertgoers in 1996 is the clearest mental picture you can get of this alternate history come to life.
But “Lift’s” reputation for positivity might be a little confused; in the song’s lyrics, the title is a noun, not a verb. The protagonist is stuck in an elevator, a piece of mundane modern technology that has suddenly halted and trapped us inside it. That lilting chorus of “Today is the first day of the rest of your days” isn’t a promise; it’s a death sentence, and the hapless soul inside it is doomed to expire soundlessly in the intestines of some soulless corporate edifice. The song doesn’t land all that far away from the chiming lullaby “No Surprises,” then, with its job that slowly kills you and the bruises that won’t heal.
The most fun to be had with OKNOTOK is in these line-blurring moments, hearing how the lost material informs the original album. After The Bends, Radiohead were briefly lumped in with the other bands in the “Britpop” scene, an association they never relished. If “Palo Alto” had seen official release, it would have stamped them with the brand for life; with the lava-lamp psychedelia of its winding central guitar riff, it is very nearly a Kula Shaker song, and it also happens to be the song that gave OK Computer its name. The same goes for “Pearly,” in which Yorke leers about “vanilla milkshakes” and moans “use me, darling, use me” over a nearly-Led Zeppelin III-sized stomp with an arpeggiated coda straight out of “House of the Rising Sun.” It was “a dirty song for people who use sex for dirty things,” Yorke used to joke when introducing the song in concert.
This fondness for camp and schlock has always been latent in Radiohead’s music, and teasing it out doesn’t take too much detective work. The original “Paranoid Android” closed with a wild, straight-outta-Deep Purple keyboard solo that, Jonny Greenwood joked to Rolling Stone recently for an oral history, is hard to get through “without clutching your sofa for support.” Alongside the earliest live versions of songs like “No Surprises” and “Let Down,” they often treated audiences to a plaintive, reverent cover of Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” the AM-radio theme to the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.
The ghost of Bond followed them once they decamped from their self-built studio Canned Applause to set up shop in a 16th-century Bath mansion owned by Jane Seymour—she played a Bond girl in Live and Let Die. And it has followed them ever since: It’s worth remembering that Radiohead were tapped to write a Bond theme for Spectre, and obliged, only to have their offering vetoed. The lyric “Kill me Sarah/Kill me again/With love” (“Lucky”) feels tailor-made for a suggestive title sequence full of undulating silhouettes. Many songs on the original OK Computer feel written for a desk-drone, earthbound version of England’s most famous fictional spy, the sort of soul who whistles “bring down the government, they don't speak for us” while dutifully hitting “Zoom” on government surveillance footage. “In an interstellar burst/I am back to save the universe !!” Yorke sang, ironically, on “Airbag,” a line that could be mocking or hopeful or just wistful—like Pink Floyd, the classic rock band often mentioned as an aesthetic forebear to OK Computer, Radiohead succeeded in part by writing superhero themes for introverts.
Radiohead have been at least as brilliant at packaging and positioning themselves, step by step, as they have been in making and sequencing albums. They have always been studious draftsmen who seem to intuit on a cellular level when a song is “ready,” both as a compositional and a brick in their narrative. This is how their catalog ends up with ghosts hovering over it: When “Nude” finally appeared on 2007’s In Rainbows, Radiohead superfans felt the gratifying chill of recognition—this was the classic “Big Ideas,” played for years at gigs, finally given flesh.
Now that they have arrived at an autumnal, valedictory stage in their career arc, they are mining drama from gestures of release and resignation. “True Love Waits,” Yorke’s most unguarded song, finally appeared as the closer to their sumptuous, open-hearted ninth album A Moon Shaped Pool. And they have restored “I Promise,” a pure beam of sunlight that had no room on either The Bends or OK Computer, to this edition, another note in an ongoing song about throwing open doors and embracing surrender. “I won’t run away no more/I promise” Yorke sings on the song, the dewy, angelic falsetto of his ’90s years miraculously restored. Years removed from its source, its impact is multiplied tenfold. In 1996, it was a path towards adult-contemporary pop radio; today, it’s an exquisitely faded Polaroid. | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | June 22, 2017 | 10 | 1ac0caa7-50d1-4ac2-8996-06a84f04a629 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
RJ’s music comes from the heart of Los Angeles, and his latest for YG’s and DJ Mustard’s label bumps and snaps like summer in a way only West Coast artists can portray. | RJ’s music comes from the heart of Los Angeles, and his latest for YG’s and DJ Mustard’s label bumps and snaps like summer in a way only West Coast artists can portray. | RJMrLA: MrLA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23297-mrla/ | MrLA | Regionalism in hip-hop is one of its greatest achievements. These sounds and signifiers tie together generational experiences like time capsules of micro-cultures contained within a larger unique one. Though the homogenized internet has rendered some regional (mostly southern) sounds ubiquitous, West Coast hip-hop hasn’t wavered. From L.A. to the Bay, their respective styles, both characterized by funky lowrider basslines, have outlasted commercial assimilation without getting swallowed up and regurgitated ad nauseam. It is in this lane, along this open stretch of California highway, where RJ shines.
The Los Angeles rapper first captured his city with a slew of local hits—the biggest being his 2015 single “Get Rich”—that proved his mettle without a major label or blog cosigns. Now, with steady assists from his 400 Summers label heads YG and DJ Mustard he uses MrLA to expand his sound, replacing some of the street-acclaimed grittiness of his O.M.M.I.O. mixtapes with radio-ready selections. He’s aiming for clubs far beyond Cali when he declares he “came a long way to ball in your section” on lead single “Brackin.”
*MrLA *feels like summer in a way only West Coast artists can portray. It’s spacious and carefree but never far removed from the season’s more sinister side. It opens with a FaceTime call inviting him to the set with the promise of dice games and other festivities. As RJ heads out of the house, a souped up car starts as “Blammer” morphs into the soundtrack of rolling through the hood, windows down, the sun beaming. The single-note piano and stripped down g-funk courtesy of DJ Mustard and frequent collaborator Authentic coupled with RJ’s cautionary melodies set the perfect scene—at once laid back and urgent.
Authenticity bleeds through RJ’s lyrics, never betraying the truth of his own tangled existence for better and worse. On “Want Me Broke,” he confesses being “stuck swinging in between unity and egos,” a recurring theme throughout. He isn’t encouraging trouble, but he’s prepared for it nevertheless, always one foot in and one foot out. It’s fitting for an artist who, in a 2015 interview with L.A. Weekly, acknowledged the potential for stereotyping. “People have different moods and do different things in a regular day, so why judge them in only one light?” he said. “I’m not just a gangsta rapper. I go through different moods, and the music reflects that.”
MrLA resists the urge to stay in only one pocket. The Ty Dolla $ign-assisted “Is It Mine” ventures towards the breezy pop lands Ty and Mustard are already familiar with. “Blindfold,” which shares half of its real estate with Migos’ Quavo, finds RJ dabbling in dirty south swagger he undoubtedly picked up from his time in Atlanta. Unsurprisingly, he’s at his best when’s basking in hometown pride. The “Gin and Juice” sample and Schoolboy Q feature on “Hennebeeto” are shameless in its dignified L.A. rap roots to create one of the album’s more memorable tracks. The sturdy production of RJ mainstays Larry Jayy and Swish, the latter who also anchored YG’s Still Brazy in Mustard’s absence, also help give the album continuity.
The bittersweet quality of regional rap is knowing that no matter how loud you play it or how hard it rattles the speakers—or, worse, earbuds outside of car-centric cities—it’s not hitting the way it does at home. RJ’s music, like that of his predecessors, is an esoteric experience, a vehicle thrusting listeners into a world not their own but just accessible enough to enjoy. Fleeting as the summer, MrLA is over quickly—the details become fuzzy and only standout moments remain as nostalgia sets in. Fortunately, in this case, a 270-day wait isn’t required to run it back. | 2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 400 Summers | May 30, 2017 | 7.5 | 1ac132e0-2b11-4612-bdf0-7afe7687f167 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
On their first non-soundtrack album in seven years, original member Daddy G returns and Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval, and Elbow's Guy Garvey guest. | On their first non-soundtrack album in seven years, original member Daddy G returns and Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval, and Elbow's Guy Garvey guest. | Massive Attack: Heligoland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13864-heligoland/ | Heligoland | For their first three albums, you could count on Massive Attack to make music that was as intense as it was graceful. As the moods of their albums gradually transitioned from refined soul to grimy abrasion on Blue Lines, Protection, and Mezzanine, they used that balance to toy with the emotional structure of their sound. The result was some of the decade's most haunting, forward-thinking music. Depending on how and when you listen, the same Massive Attack song can creep you out, fill you with sorrow, or send you into a deep reverie. The best ones do it all at once.
Many fans consider what little music Massive Attack released since Mezzanine to be a retreat of sorts, and it's true that they may have lost something with each original member that split off-- namely the hip-hop sensibility of Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles and the frigid snarl of Grant "Daddy G" Marshall. Their next release, 2003's 100th Window, seemed like a creative holding pattern brought on by the group's personnel situation, but it did have a few moments of sinister beauty. Heligoland-- the first non-soundtrack Massive Attack album in seven years and the first with Daddy G back on board in 12-- misses that quality. The undercurrent of menace and sadness that defined Massive Attack's best music is largely absent, replaced with a drowsy, half-formed gloom that, if anything, suggests resignation instead of dread.
Last fall's Splitting the Atom EP offered a couple of warning signs that reappear on this album. "Pray for Rain" is a woozy, overlong dirge redeemed only by Tunde Adebimpe's rich voice, the only instrument that bothers with anything approaching dynamics. And the EP's title track, which reunited the voices of Daddy G, Horace Andy, and Robert "3D" Del Naja over achy-kneed downtempo electro, just blithely rotates in place alongside a dead-eyed organ riff like a beat-to-shit merry-go-round. The potential of both these tracks-- strong vocalists carrying a sense of weariness over bleak ambiance-- is sabotaged by the music's unwillingness to rise, crest, and fall, to shift momentum or volume, to do anything more than sulk in the background with its hands in its pockets, kicking at the ground.
That problem becomes more obvious throughout the rest of the album, especially when you're hit with one of its exceptions. "Girl I Love You" is a bracing embodiment of everything that made those classic Horace Andy-fronted Massive Attack tracks so great: a half-Reznor, half-Gaye backbeat; ghostly filtered guitars and snarling blasts of brass; that exceptional voice transfusing vintage lover's rock into harrowing cries for help. It completely annihilates nearly everything else on the album: the watery, choppy acoustic guitar loops that underpin Martina Topley-Bird on "Psyche", which sound like something Dan Deacon would come up with if he was scared of being abrasive; the listless half-skank of Hope Sandoval spotlight "Paradise Circus"; the Damon Albarn-feels-sad moment "Saturday Come Slow", which sounds kind of like Blur's "Sweet Song" with all the hope drained out.
And note those names, 90s icons all-- they're a quick and easy shorthand if you need to point out how little Heligoland engages with current music. Since 100th Window, the post-hip-hop landscape of bass music has extrapolated into an endlessly creative nebula of dubstep, wonky, UK funky, Balearic, and other rich veins of style. And how does this album engage with it? By closing out with a track, "Atlas Air", that sounds kind of like Aeroplane bliss-disco trying to be as creepy as the Knife. Elsewhere, we get a flimsy New Order pastiche ("Rush Minute") and glitchy quasi-jungle ("Babel") to show for it. Burial's been given these tracks for a potential No Protection treatment, so there's that, at least, but it's a shame to think that it'll take an outside producer to salvage this stuff rather than simply reinterpret it.
So what does an album this defeatist-sounding have to say? It just so happens to come at a time where defeatism feels pretty natural, and ironically that makes these songs feel even harder to relate to. When Daddy G mutters despairingly how there's "No hope without dope/ The jobless return/ The bankers have bailed" on "Splitting the Atom" or Elbow's Guy Garvey moans fearfully about home insecurity on "Flat of the Blade", it feels of-the-moment-- but part of a moment you want to break out of because the malaise feels suffocating. Anxiety is one thing, hopelessness is another entirely. And when your whole world can feel, in the words of "Pray for Rain", like a "dull residue of what once was," it's probably better to wait for an album that can't be described the same way. | 2010-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Virgin | February 9, 2010 | 5 | 1ac2fdf6-1151-4696-99af-62a67caed576 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The debut from k.d. lang, Neko Case, and Laura Veirs isn’t a springboard or a resting place for any of these vets. It's an exquisite tribute to connection and reflection on the things that bind us. | The debut from k.d. lang, Neko Case, and Laura Veirs isn’t a springboard or a resting place for any of these vets. It's an exquisite tribute to connection and reflection on the things that bind us. | case/lang/veirs: case/lang/veirs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22024-caselangveirs/ | case/lang/veirs | “Supergroup” is a flawed term, implying a Justice League of musicians banding together to use their powers for good. Most newly minted collaborations shy away from its grandiose implications (and perhaps you'd be right to suspect the motives of any who didn't). In reality, these projects often start from much smaller stakes: a chance to escape your natural creative instincts, and ultimately better understand them.
The debut album by k.d. lang, Neko Case, and Laura Veirs has been compared to Trio, the 1987 effort from Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris, and the parallel makes sense in a way—there are few precedents for female solo artists banding together, and Americana is the black sheep on country’s family tree. But the titular Trio were at the height of their commercial powers in the late 1980s. Although titans in their respective fields, case/lang/veirs aren't really capitalizing on anything here. lang met Case and Veirs after she moved to Portland, and thought they’d be perfect for the punky girl group she wanted to form. She emailed them, simply stating, “I think we should make a record.” Within half an hour, they had both replied saying yes.
Rather than bring finished songs to the studio, they honored the spirit of collaboration, with Veirs and lang taking the bulk of the work, and Case, who lives primarily in Vermont, joining them when she could. These are three of the strongest voices in their field—lang the full-voiced seductress, Case the hurricane, and Veirs the wry storyteller—so things could easily have become overcrowded. Instead, they give each other space to take the lead on group-authored material, which wound up veering from lang’s original punk Ronettes template in favor of dusky songs about devotion, heartache, and awe at the simple power of human connection and creativity—the kind that underpins a project like this. “I Want to Be Here” is one of a few songs written by all three musicians, and finds them praising a misfit artist friend who “lost a front tooth, can’t keep a job,” Veirs sings, reassuring them, “but the things you make are so beautiful / They bring me joy / Don’t you ever stop.” Singing as a meditative campfire choir, they avow that “the hungry fools who rule the world can’t catch us / Surely they can’t ruin everything.”
case/lang/veirs makes a few subtle political statements about the human cost of being an artist. “Our life savings aren’t enough / Have to love you hard and make it up, make it up,” Case sings on realist heartbreaker “Supermoon,” where strings and the odd rumble of thunder lend forlorn drama to a heavily thumbed acoustic guitar. Veirs’ “Song for Judee” gives dignity to the late singer-songwriter Judee Sill, elucidating the harsh realities of her life with empathy and warmth. They dismiss preconceptions about youth determining the value of women artists on “Atomic Number,” dividing the opening lines into a three-part sunrise. “I’m not the freckled maid / I’m not the fair-haired girl / I’m not a pail of milk for you to spoil,” they declare, as pattering percussion pushes their elegy for innocence into a golden chorus. “Why are the wholesome things the ones we make obscene?” Case asks later on.
Although lang has said they didn’t start with a theme, much of case/lang/veirs stems from this idea of relationships as wholesome forces. More than once, the presence of someone else is a revivifying power, peeling whoever’s singing away from the ledge, up off the rug. And despite each artist’s unique individual approach, they share a sensory approach to singing about these intimacies that’s completely intoxicating and oftentimes driven by natural imagery (like much of Case's best work). “Why does the heart of the flame burn blue? / Why do January cherries bloom? / Why do blue fires burn in me, yet not in you?” lang croons over tumbling jazz piano on “Blue Fires.” Case’s “Delirium” takes place in bed, her sleeping lover’s skin smelling like fireworks. The “Greens of June” flood in and make Veirs “want to live like I never have before,” while “laundry on the line, truckers passing on the right” remind Case of all the beauty there is to live for, driving “Down I-5” with her shoulder burning in the window.
Loveliest of all is lang’s “Honey and Smoke,” where she watches other people fawning over her lover—“I watch as they pour honey in your ear”—with confident devotion. It’s a dreamy western slow dance, until lang too is overcome by infatuation. “Unaware of just how beautiful you are from within / Uncontainable / Exquisite to the detail / It hypnotizes people / Robs them of their social graces / Swarming to your glow / Fanning with phrases,” she sings with rapt intensity, losing her cool for a moment and showing her hand. Even when they sing about being emotionally closed-off, on “Behind the Armory,” they can’t help but make it beautiful: “Flies in amber / Sand in soap / Air trapped in the glass,” Case yearns.
The sweetness of their gaze only makes the melodies on case/lang/veirs seem more familiar, resonating deep within some distant memory while still sounding fresh. The hooks are mostly vocal-led, but producer Tucker Martine and the small band of players (including Glenn Kotche on percussion) color them perfectly. In “Best Kept Secret,” Veirs calls on a friend in California to lighten her mood, accompanied by a gold-rush fanfare of horns and guitars. Woodwind tentatively dots the edges of “1000 Miles Away,” where lang anguishes about the distance between her and the woman standing right next to her. “Why Do We Fight” finds elegance in defeat, lang questioning the point of “spit and punches” amid streams of pedal steel and soft piano. The attention to detail is just as evident in the small production touches—the subtle plucks and scrapes that make these songs feel lived-in and alive, like the barely perceptible mechanical glimmer that gilds the edge of the steady fingerpicked pulse in “I Want to Be Here,” or the muted line of firecrackers that skitters down the chorus of “Honey and Smoke.”
What are the stakes with a collaborative record like this? It probably won’t yield a follow-up, but it’d be a gift if it did. None of the participants had suffered a lapse in her powers and needed reviving, though the newsworthiness of the collaboration should hopefully introduce a generation of listeners to their respective deep catalogues (particularly lang's). case/lang/veirs isn’t a springboard or a resting place—it's a tribute to connection, communion, and reflection on the things that bind us. And it feels particularly significant and sanctuary-like for the fractured times that we live in. “I just want, I wanna be here with you,” they sing in unison. “Not bracing for what comes next.” | 2016-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | June 18, 2016 | 8.2 | 1ac3abad-ee94-4e82-af92-bb27255bc9d8 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Norwegian songwriter and producer's excellent, Smalltown Supersound-issued debut is crisp, bright, airy, and shot through with light. | Norwegian songwriter and producer's excellent, Smalltown Supersound-issued debut is crisp, bright, airy, and shot through with light. | Bjørn Torske: Feil Knapp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10458-feil-knapp/ | Feil Knapp | Oslo's Smalltown Supersound recently released a lovely and (so far) overlooked label sampler/mix CD called Sunkissed. In addition to tracks from Pitchfork favorites like Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh, the set features two tracks from Bergen, Norway's Bjørn Torske, both of which can be found here on his first full-length album since 2003's Trobbel. Of all the possible names for a compilation on which to find Torske, it'd be hard to think of one better than Sunkissed; though he has range as a producer and works in a fair number of different moods, everything here is crisp, bright, airy, and shot through with light.
Torske is obviously in love with dub, and has a fondness for understatement. His music is often danceable and clubby, but there's never a sense of menace and it never seems like a soundtrack to hedonism. Instead, throughout Feil Knapp, Torske seem concerned with spaciness and warmth, and, above all, on creating a subtle but palpable sense of uplift. There's also a consistently engaging and playful sense of musical humor at work. "Spelunker" begins with some squeals and blips from a vaguely familiar video game-- 8-bits, maybe not even-- and then uses the sound effects to build a melody for deep, bottom-heavy, but still nimble dub. It's goofy but also terrific fun, as he essentially uses the game noises as high-pitched focus place of, say, Augustus Pablo's melodica. "Kapteinens Skjegg" is another dub excursion, but more driven and heavier, its insistent 1-3 upstrokes providing the foundation for all manner of echo and flange-laden percussion fills. Torske's palette retains roots reggae's earthiness while remaining happily unconcerned with any sense of authenticity.
When Torske ups the speed, he keeps the dubby bass out front but adds jazzy chords and all manner of organic percussion untethered to the 4/4 grid. The snappy "Tur I Maskinparken" almost has a post-rock cast-- like a TNT-era Tortoise remix, say-- the way it blends elements like a quickly tapping drum machine with electric piano vamping. "Loe Bar" is much more danceable, as easy on the ears as mellow retail-ready house but far more engaging, incorporating drama with some yearning new wave synth chords and combining a hypnotic bounce with a striking tunefulness. The eight-minute "God Kveld", which was also on Sunkissed in abbreviated form, has a Miami-to-Brooklyn electro feel, with a synth melody ready to drive a Jan Hammer instrumental wedded to congas, acidic bass, and loose, rubbery drum percussion with the timbre of hand-claps. The breakdown in the song's middle is wonderfully odd and unpredictable, as Torske (or his digital proxy) seems content to bang on things just for the joy of hearing them make noise.
A little while ago we highlighted "Møljekalas", the relaxed mid-tempo cut here that is both uncommonly blissful and clear-headed. On days when the sun is bright but the mercury is still reasonable and the humidity remains in check, not a whole lot from this year sounds better. Feil Knapp is a sense an easy record to overlook, since it contains little grit, zero angst, and next to no dark shading. It is, then, the perfect album for a certain kind of mood, a mood one hopes to find oneself in now and then as July turns to August here in the Northern Hemisphere. | 2007-07-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-07-26T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | July 26, 2007 | 7.9 | 1ac44ae0-21fb-4433-b2e9-47550987ad0e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
White Lung's newest is more outspoken, more anthemic than 2014's Deep Fantasy, and frontwoman Mish Barber-Way offers provocative challenges to the idea of what it means to be a Good Feminist. | White Lung's newest is more outspoken, more anthemic than 2014's Deep Fantasy, and frontwoman Mish Barber-Way offers provocative challenges to the idea of what it means to be a Good Feminist. | White Lung: Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21849-paradise/ | Paradise | Although White Lung sprung from the Vancouver underground, they've never been shy about their ambition. "We'll celebrate breaking even after every single [self-booked] tour," frontwoman Mish Barber-Way wrote prior to the release of their second album, 2012's Sorry. "And that's totally okay with me." With Paradise, their fourth, they've talked about exploring a new pop sensibility, versus "this really stupid attitude that only punks have where it's somehow uncool to become a better songwriter." Barber-Way took singing lessons; they embraced "accessible." None of which, thankfully, has pared down Kenneth William's tar-spitting guitars, Anne-Marie Vassiliou's breakneck drumming, or their powerslide dynamic.
If anything, there's more of a spotlight on those things now. Over time, the Canadian thrashers have increasingly allowed space to let the pop potential of their songs shine through. After the sparking Catherine wheel sound of their last album, 2014's excellent Deep Fantasy, and its predecessors, the production on Paradise is roomy by comparison; convincingly stadium-sized, and billowing with dry ice, a touch indebted to pop's cavernous post-Steve Lillywhite moment. Having ruined her voice on the Deep Fantasy tour, Barber-Way now sings at a gothy remove rather than a throat-mangling shred. "Narcoleptic" chimes with dark, glassy synth-like guitars, and in "Hungry" and "Below," they've written two genuinely affecting power ballads that don't scrimp on attack or scream-'til-it-hurts hooks.
On Deep Fantasy, Barber-Way tackled body dysmorphia and addiction, and wrote bracing indictments of rape culture and the violent and insidious ways it affects society, from outright assault ("I Believe You") to the ongoing fear of getting your drink spiked in a club ("Down It Goes"). Unsurprisingly, it was often labeled a "feminist punk record." Which it was—and an important one, too—but however many years on we are from feminism's big mainstream moment, the term has become a suffocating expectation of art made by women: that honoring the sisterhood must surely be their only intention, that their politics are their identity, rather than the other way around, and should they make any move deemed *un-*feminist, they better line up at the nearest Twitter stake post-haste. White Lung are never a band to follow expectations, and Barber-Way has always expressed disdain for the concept of a singular feminism. As if to celebrate that, on Paradise, she follows the lead of an artist who initially confounded her own ideas of female power and agency.
In 2014, Barber-Way grappled with her appreciation of Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence in a review for the Talkhouse. At first, she wrote, she had to separate the "Video Games" singer from her art because she found her "annoying." But over repeated listens, Barber-Way arrived at a revelation: "LDR is always searching for herself through someone else and sometimes she hits the mark and embodies the character perfectly." On Paradise (coincidentally or not*,* also the name of an EP by LDR), Barber-Way, who is now based in Los Angeles, shifts between her own perspective and various other female points of view, all of which offer provocative challenges to the idea of what it means to be a Good Feminist.
In one sense, it's a writing exercise: As a journalist in her own right, she's often written about marrying a "motorcycle-riding, Southern-born hick from Arkansas," and that she'd like little more than to abandon her career and escape to the country with him. It's a prospect she says is considered "grossly basic" in her punk peer group—and a happy one that "doesn't make for the best songwriting." But the one spot on Paradise where she tries it explicitly is awesome: It's the subject of the title track, a ride-or-die pounder with a killer chorus where she yearns for her husband to "ride south with me now." She sneers, "I'm all about you/You're all about me too," before asking anyone who cares to challenge her dream, "Oh, is that oppressive? No." A couple of songs seem to deal with getting over the addictions that she's mentioned in the past; what is Paradise if not exerting control over a totally personal environment?
Among Barber-Way's characters are two real-life serial killers. On "Sister," she sings as Karla Homolka, the wife of Paul Bernardo, who at the end of the 1980s became known as the "Ken and Barbie killers" thanks to a spree of murders in Scarborough, Canada—including Homolka's sister, Tammy. "You'll burn a bit/My little sister," Barber-Way sings, over intricate, trebly guitar. On "Demented" Barber-Way imagines a fight between British serial killers Rosemary and Fred West over their mutually assured destruction, echoed by what sounds like a wall of death race around the tip of a volcano. These songs are schlocky, but they serve as part of a deeper inquiry into how we perceive and attribute female desire and agency—female serial killers get shorter sentences than their male equivalents, because it's harder for anyone to believe they'd do it.
Barber-Way has called the sharp-edged "Kiss Me When I Bleed," whose chorus feels like mudsliding through a ring of fire, her riches-to-rags white-trash fairytale. "I will give birth in a trailer," she whines with stubborn pride, singing as a girl caught up with what her family think is the wrong kinda guy. This isn't about bullshit "choice feminism" or "empowerment," but offers a demanding characterization of the battles Barber-Way waged with herself over her own decisions, and one that asks that we examine our own responses: Do we sneer? Why?
Barber-Way wastes no time dismantling the traditional yardsticks of female worth, the rigged games of beauty ("Below") and fame ("Hungry"), and the Republican-endorsed concept of female bodies as pliant reproductive vessels. "Spare your good seed," she laments in a layered, robotic yowl on the hyper-speed "Dead Weight," "I'm getting bored and old." Deep Fantasy screamed itself black and blue fighting back against a culture of oppression. On Paradise, Barber-Way steps outside of her own body and the assaults it sustains, and creates a searing portrait of what it can look like to love without fear, even when that love doesn't resemble the fantasy we've been sold. | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | May 6, 2016 | 8.4 | 1ac6720d-627d-4a41-ae3c-56812c22f1bb | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Have Fun With God is Bill Callahan and his mixer Brian Beattie's dub version of last year's excellent Dream River. It feels like a live, real-time dub, and in addition to this sense of spontaneity, the arrangements lend themselves well to the treatment. | Have Fun With God is Bill Callahan and his mixer Brian Beattie's dub version of last year's excellent Dream River. It feels like a live, real-time dub, and in addition to this sense of spontaneity, the arrangements lend themselves well to the treatment. | Bill Callahan: Have Fun With God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18866-bill-callahan-have-fun-with-god/ | Have Fun With God | The last decade or so of Bill Callahan’s music has been a steady process of refinement, stripping away extraneous words and instrumentation and leaving only what’s essential. While this trend doesn’t run in a straight line—2006’s Neil Hagerty-produced Woke on a Whaleheart has a comparatively heavy production touch—he’s mostly done away with reverb, distortion, and processing; his music tends to consist of basic instrumentation presented without adornment, reflecting a confidence that the songs are strong enough to do the work. Last year’s Dream River was no exception, so it was on one hand a surprise that an advance track prior to the record’s release was a "dub" version of "Javelin Unlanding" called "Expanding Dub". Dub essentially involves using mixing and effects as a form of expression; the song matters far less than what’s done to it, which initially seemed an odd way to hear Callahan’s spare music. More surprising still was word that Callahan and his mixer Brian Beattie would extend the idea to the entirety of Dream River, creating a dub version of the record, a la Mad Professor’s re-working of Massive Attack’s second album, Protection.
Initial surprise aside, Callahan’s interest in the form makes sense. Classic Jamaican dub from 1970s and 80s is music of great focus and discipline; mixers like King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Scientist often created instrument dubs for the B-sides of 7" singles in a single take, re-working the track and adding effects live while the tape of the original song rolled. So once everything was in place, dubbing a four-minute single would take four minutes, with all of the echo, drop-outs, flanging, and various other effects added in real-time. This approach stands in sharp contrast to today’s standard approach to remixing, which uses non-linear digital editing to allow for endless copying, pasting, looping, and processing. A classic dub doesn’t involve any extending of specific sections—the bones of the song are set and the mixer’s job is to shine light on different elements, foregrounding, backgrounding, and transforming, warping time without changing it. Given that, creating dubs using the tools at hand in Jamaica in the 1970s—often four-track tape machines—required a lot of practice and a tremendous amount of discipline. And the best dub can also feel like a celebration of the individual instrument, as parts fall away and you zoom in on the texture created by a simple bassline.
All that squares with Callahan’s approach to sound, and, however it was actually made, Have Fun With God feels like a live, real-time dub. The tape rolls, and the essential arc of each song is unchanged. In addition to the sense of spontaneity, the arrangements of this record lend themselves well to the treatment. Hand drums, flute, and clean guitar lines all lend sound rich in isolation, and light touches of echo, and Callahan’s voice, so front-and-center on his recordings, works well when single words or even syllables are called out and given light touches of effects. It’s also pleasingly disorienting to hear the music of this word-focused artist transformed in such a way that the words don’t really matter—here they mostly become sounds. With a couple of exceptions, where the tracks playfully focus on a key moment in a song (like the call-out of "beer" in the opening "Thank Dub"), there’s no attempt to pay the lyrics any particular attention or amplify the song’s "meaning." The approach also underscores the fact that there are some nicely tricky little rhythms pulsing under these mid-tempo songs.
So at its best, Have Fun With God works well as an experiment and as a listening puzzle to work through. If you know Dream River well—and it’s hard to imagine anyone else being interested in this record—you’ll hear new things in it after giving this record a couple of spins. It also seems safe to say that, despite its charms and left-field nature, Have Fun With God will be a minor entry in the Callahan catalogue, remembered about as well as his low-key 2010 live album Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, which is not to say I’m not glad both exist. | 2014-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | January 23, 2014 | 7.3 | 1ac8cde0-e296-471f-9041-0ac7d7fd8883 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Chicago rapper reflects on a bleak personal year and starts to recapture the optimism of his earlier music. | The Chicago rapper reflects on a bleak personal year and starts to recapture the optimism of his earlier music. | Lucki: Days B4 III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucki-days-b4-iii/ | Days B4 III | If you begin to notice an uptick in melodramatic and emotional social media posts, that usually means new Lucki music is in the air. Earlier this year, the Chicago rapper released Freewave 3, a bleak project that detailed his heartbreak and the drugs that lead to that heartbreak. At times, the album is an uncomfortable listen, as Lucki narrates low points that typically would be reserved for a therapist: On the album’s centerpiece “Peach Dream,” his mother googles the effects of lean and sends him articles about the impact the drug will have on his kidneys.
With the 23-year-old’s second project of the year, Days B4 III, Lucki is in a better place. If Freewave 3 was rock bottom, then Days B4 III is the climb back up. He reflects on his last year, getting everything off of his chest before he can finally move on and recapture the optimism that laced his music when he was a teenager.
Lucki’s music works so well in large part due to his ear for production, plodding hi-hats that make it feel like your brain is stuck in quicksand, and his eerie, doomsday melodies. On Days B4 III, Lucki works with a team of producers that help him create that downcast sound: From a homegrown Chicago producer like DJ Eway to SoundCloud pillars like 16yrold and Brent Rambo. The twinkly and dreamy “Geeked,” produced by Condo, best defines Lucki’s blurry world. “Codeine never get bored of me,” he says, reflecting on times when he was most dependent on drugs. Even when Lucki tackles brighter production, like the spacy 16yrold-produced “Way 2 Rare,” he still fears spiraling back into that isolation: “Left me all alone, I hope there’s two of me,” he murmurs.
Lucki can portray his self-destructiveness with the clarity of Future, like when his son asks why his water is pink on “TBT.” He wears the influence of Chief Keef on his sleeve, both in the Almighty So-inspired cover art and the way he pairs a narcotized delivery with a choir of ad-libs like on the cryptic Working On Dying-produced “Left 4 Dead.” And like a throwback New York storyteller, a city that he has spent a lot of time in, he can piece together coherent and lively tales when he wants to.
His best story is the bitter finale “Last Time Mentioning (Good Riddance),” as he bitterly recaps the friends, girlfriends, and opportunities that drugs have driven away in the last year or so. But, just like the song title hints, he wants to put it behind him. When Days B4 III ends, the dark clouds separate and the sun peeks through. It’s a suggestion that maybe he’s through with the story he’s been telling and adding to since he was 17, and now he’s ready to begin a new one. | 2019-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire | October 30, 2019 | 8 | 1acc9191-81a4-4328-b476-8cb26cb41f89 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Carey Mercer and co. follow 2007's triumphant Tears of the Valedictorian with another record of ambitious, high-wire indie rock. | Carey Mercer and co. follow 2007's triumphant Tears of the Valedictorian with another record of ambitious, high-wire indie rock. | Frog Eyes: Paul's Tomb: A Triumph | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14172-pauls-tomb-a-triumph/ | Paul's Tomb: A Triumph | Indie rock can sometimes seem like a figure skating competition, where those who can't make their vocals the prettiest instead aim for the highest degree of difficulty. Certain artists-- the Dirty Projectors, Joanna Newsom-- stretch the limits of the seven-note scale, crafting melodies that take longer to resolve than sentences in a German philosophy text. Others go for extremity of tone: the glass-shattering falsetto of Passion Pit, or the chest-rumbling baritone of the National. Frog Eyes' Carey Mercer grafts a combination of these approaches into his own voice, a slippery beast that sounds like it gargles with wax in the morning. And while some bands might settle for those vocal contortions as their only exotic feature, Frog Eyes' arrangements are every bit as unpredictable as Mercer's catalog of shouts, groans, and other odd emphases. At full flight, the band's lengthy epics trace impossibly complex patterns that can be briefly stunning in the rare cases where they improbably collide.
When we last heard from Frog Eyes-- before the weird-vocal derby really got fired up-- they left us with their best example of that spectacle: the serpentine, cathartic "Bushels". That song appears, at first, to have passed its baton to Paul's Tomb: A Triumph, which opens with the sprawling "A Flower in a Glove" and then winds its way through three more six-minute-plus journeys. But a disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.
That lack of endurance doesn't hurt the shorter songs on Paul's Tomb, which are powered by a claustrophobic energy of guitar screech, stop/start rhythms, and Mercer's strange, over-enunciated vocabulary. "Rebel Horns" packs several minutes' worth of multi-stage composition into an economical four-minute package. The similarly brief "Odetta's War" and "Lear's in Love" (in which Mercer tries to set the world record for most syllables in the stock lyric "I kissed a girl") both possess the kind of compressed, ferocious intensity that so often becomes diluted during the noodly excursions of the lengthier tunes.
All the same, it's clear that Frog Eyes like long songs. I like long songs, too. But the less focused, super-sized tracks on Paul's Tomb: A Triumph, especially compared to 2007's outstanding Tears of the Valedictorian, can't help but look like a hole shaped suspiciously like Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown's Spencer Krug, a former roommate and bandmate of Mercer's who doesn't appear here. Even in Krug's absence, cues could have been taken from him, or from Frog Eyes' other famous BFF, Destroyer's Dan Bejar, both of whom have recently charted long songs that stray far from their starting point, but nevertheless reach satisfying conclusions. As both of those artists understand well, even the flashiest skating requires a graceful finish. | 2010-04-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-04-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | April 30, 2010 | 6.4 | 1accb57e-a06b-42a3-ae68-7d458c8aa27d | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
This split LP from Blut Aus Nord and Ævangelist explores black metal’s capacity to accommodate an array of sounds and moods, not just grimness. | This split LP from Blut Aus Nord and Ævangelist explores black metal’s capacity to accommodate an array of sounds and moods, not just grimness. | Blut Aus Nord / Ævangelist: Codex Obscura Nomina | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22041-codex-obscura-nomina/ | Codex Obscura Nomina | If you were to pluck OG black metal fans from the past and drop them in the present, they might be horrified to hear what the genre has been turned into by artists who just don’t care to play by the rules. This split LP from Blut Aus Nord and Ævangelist, two acts who warp the parameters of black metal almost beyond recognition, drives that point home vividly. With their previous records, both bands have demonstrated that it’s possible to present myriad new shades of grimness. Here, each group elevates its craft to another level.
The first half of Codex Obscura Nomina consists of four pieces by Blut Aus Nord that fall under the title “Spectral Sonic Waves (The Sound Is an Organic Matter).” The long-running French quartet (whose name translates roughly as “blood from the north”) makes no bones about its disregard for black metal purism, flat-out declaring its intention to “erase all preconceived ideas of black metal— and extreme music in general.” It’s hard to find any reason to argue that these four songs don’t succeed in that mission. If you’re coming at this release from the band’s most recent work, 2014’s Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry, be prepared to have your expectations shattered.
Drawing far more heavily from avant-garde, classical, and industrial influences this time, Blut Aus Nord bend pitch to such a degree that they almost manage to erase all preconceived notions of harmony too. At times, you might get the impression that the entire mix was run through into a harmonizer effect—but close inspection reveals that this band pays far too much attention to detail to rely on sheer sonic overload. And, in dramatic counterpoint to the last album, bandleader Vindsval, electronics player W.D. Field, and drummer Thorns eschew traditional black metal drumming, leaving far more space to hear every microtonal nuance in the meshwork of sounds.
By the same token, the band (which also includes bassist GhÖst) has taken great care to manipulate the instruments so that it’s hard to tell the difference between guitar, bass, keyboards, ambient samples, or voices run through effects. And the results are delightfully queasy from start to finish, landing in an ambiguous emotional space that feels like new territory for black metal. “Infra-Voices Ensemble,” the final track of Blut Aus Nord’s side of this album, goes even further than the previous three. With its programmed beats and half-discernible melodic keyboard progression buried in a snowstorm of effects, “Infra-Voices Ensemble” sounds like the band imagined My Bloody Valentine remixed into a dance track by Justin Broadrick.
Consisting of a single 22-minute track titled “Threshold of the Miraculous,” the Ævangelist half of this album contains more traditional black metal elements than Blut Aus Nord’s half. But that doesn’t mean that Ævangelist, an American duo that’s been around for way less time than Blut Aus Nord, isn’t being ambitious in its own way. In terms of scope, “Threshold of the Miraculous” takes an obvious step forward from the band’s most recent album, last year’s Enthrall to the Void of Bliss. This time, the band stretches its trademark blast beats, double bass drum volleys, miasmic clouds of keyboard and guitar, and monstrous growling into through-composed symphony. At times, the music veers off onto lengthy tangents with spoken-word vocals. During the second spoken section, frontman Ascaris delivers his vocals in a near-rap. “Eternity depends on this!” he declares over a hissing avant-industrial beat and Prong/Godflesh-style bassline as upward-pitching ambient swells threaten to engulf all the other instruments.
Just like other side of this split, the effect is queasy, but more forcefully so. (It’s probably not the best idea to listen to this tune with a hangover.) Clearly, Ævangelist meant to intertwine these disparate threads into a larger whole, but the majority of “Threshold” covers much of the same ground as “Meditation of Transcendental Evil,” the 14-minute piece that closes Enthrall. And compared to the sonic unification of the Blut Aus Nord songs, “Threshold” tends to meander. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, this split sets the high water mark for black metal’s capacity to accommodate an infinite array of sounds. | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Debemur Morti | June 28, 2016 | 7.4 | 1acf546b-ead5-4a39-a9be-5525b5458e3b | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Featuring Mitski, David Byrne, Moses Sumney, and Randy Newman, the synth-rock trio’s score for the sprawling action film embraces chaos with an audacious range and unremitting sincerity. | Featuring Mitski, David Byrne, Moses Sumney, and Randy Newman, the synth-rock trio’s score for the sprawling action film embraces chaos with an audacious range and unremitting sincerity. | Son Lux: Everything Everywhere All at Once | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/son-lux-everything-everywhere-all-at-once/ | Everything Everywhere All at Once | The sounds of Son Lux almost feel primordial. Somewhere in the cosmic gesturing of their music is the blurring of finality: Beginnings and ends erupt into flames as bright synths and apocalyptic broodiness collide. While initially a solo act, Son Lux grew into a trio when Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang joined Lott for 2015’s Bones. Their following albums, a sequentially numbered trilogy called Tomorrows, elevated the existential cyclicality of their work into something new and anarchic. These records seem to connect what would otherwise seem disparate: Ethereality becomes haunting, anger becomes plaintive, and sounds portend the infinite.
Their sonic location, somewhere between creation and destruction, renders Son Lux fitting to score the swelling Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film by the Daniels—the duo of directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—that, too, disavows the conventional limits of creativity. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is a middle-aged woman who is tired of her life: her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) scorns her, her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is readying a divorce, and the IRS is on her ass. Evelyn is tired of watching laundry tumble, of filing her taxes, of a path that has seemingly spun her in circles. Explosively kinetic, Everything Everywhere All At Once seeks a dynamic score able to match its ferocity. Son Lux delivers. Their soundtrack becomes our conduit across the multiverse, transcending and melding worlds otherwise alien to each other: sci-fi and kung-fu, hot dog hands and Debussy, slapstick and sincerity, mothers and daughters.
The thrill of Son Lux’s score is in its audacious range. As Everything Everywhere All At Once snaps between zaniness, hilarity, darkness, and hope, so too does its soundtrack. The dreamy piano theme of "Wang Family Portrait" foregrounds the film’s saccharine core, emerging in gentler moments: Evelyn’s family together, nostalgic gazes into the past, and visions of lives that could have been, in another universe. On the contrary, blustering tracks like “The Fanny Pack” are brash reminders that you’re watching a true action blockbuster, as strings tinged with adrenaline and held by an addictive bassline bring comic bravado to a fight scene set in an IRS office. Eeriness is also afoot in the score; Son Lux, better than most, knows how to make you shudder. Just listen to “I Have Been Watching”—Nina Moffitt’s vocals, so bare against saturated strings, are startling.
Despite running an hour and 54 minutes, the score doesn’t lose coherence. It repeats and reworks the same few themes: “Clair de Lune,” for instance, can be heard in “Deirdre Fight” and “My Life Without You,” in addition to its eponymous track on the score. “Come Recover (Empathy Fight)” is the expanded version of “Come Recover” on Tomorrows III. The score is a total achievement of ingenuity. Speaking to Slash Film, Bhatia, Chang, and Lott divulged that this score took years to compose. They had to learn new instruments, like the Chinese paigu drums, and also learn new ways to fuck with the old, like the violin (which were “played with crazy things,” said Lott), and the trumpet, played by director Kwan, who—no virtuoso himself—deliberately butchers it. Son Lux are also joined by a wonderfully odd cast of collaborators: Mitski and David Byrne, who duet on “This Is a Life”; Moses Sumney, for whom Chang drums; André 3000, improvising with the Mayan flute he’s been learning in private; and Randy Newman, offering his voice to both “Now We’re Cookin’” and an anthropomorphic raccoon in the film.
“This Is a Life” closes Everything Everywhere All At Once, and it endearingly captures its heart with unremitting sincerity. “This is a life/Free from destiny,” Mitski sings, and then with Byrne: “I choose you/And you choose me.” Both Everything Everywhere All At Once and Son Lux’s broader artistic ethos are rooted in the imperative of creation, so sprawling in its possibilities as to span an entire multiverse. Life, like music, is meant to be created. We can choose to fester in the bleakness of our unerringly chaotic world, or—like the Daniels and Son Lux—we can see chaos for what it is: an art of its own. | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | A24 Music | April 21, 2022 | 7.5 | 1acfecf4-f9d8-43b2-88a7-02508cb6dcd0 | Annie Geng | https://pitchfork.com/staff/annie-geng/ | |
After a string of misfires, the UK musician’s 14th album translates unimaginable loss into some of his most darkly moving music in years. | After a string of misfires, the UK musician’s 14th album translates unimaginable loss into some of his most darkly moving music in years. | Tricky: Fall to Pieces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tricky-fall-to-pieces/ | Fall to Pieces | Tricky has always worn his bruised heart on his sleeve. His brilliantly desolate debut album, Maxinquaye, was inspired by his mother, who died when he was four years old, and a song like “Strugglin’” laid bare in excruciating detail his experiences of pain, darkness, and toil. Fall to Pieces, which contains some of the most darkly moving music that Tricky has produced since that debut album, was produced in the shadow of tragedy. Tricky’s daughter Mazy died in 2019 as he was beginning work on a new record. Here, on his 14th studio album, he translates that unimaginable loss into moments of nauseatingly raw emotion.
“Hate This Pain,” one of the first songs Tricky worked on after his daughter’s death, channels the sickening depth of his loss into music of visceral simplicity. Tricky’s production, particularly in his early years, was enveloped in a dank, psychedelic murk that seemed to ooze out of the grooves. “Hate This Pain,” however, is unusually and agonizingly clean, its surfaces exposed like a fresh wound, a pristine MTV Unplugged in New York to Maxinquaye’s Nevermind. The song centers on a blues piano trill and tiny dabs of cello, trumpet, and slide guitar, over which Tricky and new vocal partner Marta Złakowska trade lyrics of deepest despair. It’s his best song in decades but almost exhaustingly moving, with unvarnished lines like “What a fucking game/I hate this fucking pain” delivered with agonising intensity. “Vietnam,” in which Tricky and Złakowska share a whispered duet over a detuned guitar riff, and “Take Me Shopping” have a similarly barren simplicity, reminiscent of the bleakly beautiful English West Country blues that PJ Harvey pulled from the stone on Dry.
However personal the burden of Tricky’s grief, his collaborators have played a significant role in shaping the sound and feel of the album. Marta Złakowska, who Tricky discovered in a Krakow bar after a singer dropped out of his Polish tour, has the perfect voice for a Tricky vocal foil, her spectral tones the wisp of smoke to his cigarette-end mutter, while Marie-Claire Schlameus’s cello and Kristof Hahn’s slide guitar creep around the arrangements with the finesse of art thieves. It’s a shame that some of the album’s electronic touches—the minimal drum pattern on “Thinking Of” or the cheap-sounding bassline on “I’m in the Doorway”—feel rudimentary in comparison to the band’s graceful touch. But electronic experimentation does play a major role in two of the record’s most intriguingly unorthodox productions. ‘‘Running Off,” with a prominent sample from Croatian musician Đuka Čaić, is a kind of Eastern European electro blues, while “Fall Please,” with its stuttering synth riff and percussive nods to D.C. go-go , is almost upbeat in its outlook.
Tricky calls “Fall Please” “the closest I’ve got to making pop,” which may overlook the pop nous of songs like Maxinquaye’s “Black Steel” (and overestimate mainstream taste for skeletal go-go production). But “Fall Please”—like Fall to Pieces as a whole—does share the laser-sharp emotional focus and melodic efficiency of the best pop music. Bar the rare moments of clunky electronics, almost every sound, touch, and shade on Fall to Pieces feels like it had to be there, in blessed contrast to the rambling dead ends, failed experiments, and misjudged covers of Tricky’s recent records. Fall to Pieces is an audacious cri de coeur that ultimately finds strength in adversity where others might fall apart.
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. | 2020-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | False Idols | September 5, 2020 | 7.6 | 1ad2ae11-9bf4-41d8-a49c-df5439aef05e | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
It's sometimes easy to forget why Billy Corgan is famous, but these reissues of Smashing Pumpkins' first two albums underscore what made them so vital at the dawn of the 90s and why their influence is still felt today. | It's sometimes easy to forget why Billy Corgan is famous, but these reissues of Smashing Pumpkins' first two albums underscore what made them so vital at the dawn of the 90s and why their influence is still felt today. | The Smashing Pumpkins: Gish [Deluxe Edition] / Siamese Dream [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16059-gish-deluxe-edition-siamese-dream-deluxe-edition/ | Gish [Deluxe Edition] / Siamese Dream [Deluxe Edition] | I remember reading a desert-island-albums list by Billy Corgan in 1993 that was so scarily like my own musical arc-- pop/prog/metal nerd discovers goth, Jane's Addiction, and My Bloody Valentine-- that I couldn't have been more designed for Smashing Pumpkins hyperfandom if I tried. Like no one before him, Corgan made those influences work. As Canadian writer Jennifer Nine once put it in Melody Maker, you got a sense that he was the kind of guy who worked out every last transcription from Guitar Player in the 1980s and then actually did something with it. It helped that the rest of the band had their own skills, especially in the case of Jimmy Chamberlin, a jazz/hard-rock drum freak let loose on alt-rock radio.
Alt-rock radio, at its height of commercial trendsetting, enabled the Pumpkins to not merely survive but thrive. There, Corgan could have his cake and eat it too, daring people to get annoyed at his starlust and reacting in kind while further building up his ambitions. He got his band signed to a major label and used the fig leaf of a corporate indie release for Gish, scored a prime spot on the Seattle-focused Singles soundtrack with "Drown", essentially went "Haters gonna hate" with Siamese Dream's first single "Cherub Rock", and got petulant when any other acts or writers accused him of protesting too much. And not just Pavement, either: "You hurt me deeply in my heart," he once infamously pouted to Kim Thayil before a 1994 Australian concert, following which the Pumpkins went on "to play the best set anybody has ever heard them play."
All of which goes some distance toward explaining why both reissues of Gish and Siamese Dream-- appropriately loaded with rarities, DVD bonuses, fancy packaging, and often-impressionistic song-for-song liner notes by Corgan-- remain remarkable though unequal listens. Even in 1991, Gish felt like something that started off well with songs like "Siva" and "Rhinoceros" but meandered a bit toward the end. Corgan's voice never sounded as lost in his music as it does here, and most of the emphasis is on the band's collective performance: Chamberlin's powerful, fluid drumming, Darcy Wretzky's strong basslines, and that thick, chunky glaze of guitars.
The rarities disc contains a few never-before-heard numbers, a few that have long circulated among fanatics (the Corgan-sung version of "Daydream" is a keeper), and a handful of remixed selections (including their best full-on rock epic, "Starla") that first surfaced on a full-length release via the odds-and-ends release Pisces Iscariot. These tracks do a better job of showcasing the band's various sonic sides than Gish itself. The DVD, a multi-camera cut from a live show at the Metro in Chicago almost a year prior to Gish's release, shows that the band already had their exact arrangements pretty well down, as well as a worshipping fanbase. The highlights include Corgan and James Iha's heavily long hair, curious fashion choices all around, and set-closing covers of Steppenwolf and Blue Öyster Cult; the video quality is pretty good and the sound mix, if heavily favoring the vocals, beats out most bootlegs of the time.
In contrast to Gish's steady flow, Siamese Dream crashes out of the gate. "Cherub Rock" remains an absolutely stellar opener with a sense of pure sonic melodrama, thanks to Chamberlin's circus-act drum introduction, a tight clip of guitars quickly matched by equally nimble bass, a volcanic blast of a guitar lead, and then a shift to a woozy, still-building sprawl. And all this before the first verse even starts. Throw in everything that followed-- the overt MBV worship of "Hummer", the country-rock-tinged wanderlust of "Mayonaise", "Soma"'s update of Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" for a new decade, and inevitably the MTV/radio hits "Today", "Disarm", and "Rocket"-- and no matter your take on its mastermind or his divisive whining/sighing vocals, it's an embarrassment of musical riches.
There's also the fact that the album's studio personnel was as essentially stripped down as the White Stripes; Corgan, frantically taking charge in the midst of band dysfunction, recorded nearly everything himself aside from the drums, and he'd probably have handled those too if he could. Siamese Dream's songs don't blend into each other, but some transitions exist; each stands out in a brilliant sequence, forming perhaps the best concept album they ever made.
One of the main things people complained about was exactly what made the band click even further. If Corgan's early lyrics were classic self-centered/self-righteous/self-pitying teenagerdom run amock, he always had an ear for hooks, metaphors, and deft summaries (thus, on "Mayonaise": "Fool enough to almost be it/ Cool enough to not quite see it"). It's catnip for when you have it bad, no matter how minuscule your problems might really be, and any number of later bands (My Chemical Romance most obviously, and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart most recently) took plenty of notice.
As for the many rarities, more Pisces Iscariot remixes and other demos and alternate versions take a bow, including a six-minute version of "Siamese Dream" itself (the original B-side version was a shorter and murkier take that ran under three minutes) and twin instrumentals "U.S.A." and "U.S.S.R.". The DVD is the most worthwhile addition of either reissue; taken from another Metro show a couple of weeks after Siamese Dream's release, it vividly illustrates how far the band had come in the three years since Gish: It showcases their more varied sound, Corgan's keener sense for playing to the crowd (there are flashes of his and Iha's underrated sense of humor), a killer setlist drawing on both albums (plus "Starla" and "Drown"), and brilliant sound and performances throughout. If Corgan's voice shows strain at many points, the crowd shots are especially entertaining, with endless moshpits and crowdsurfers during most of the loud points and plenty of the slow ones.
The full story of the band's existence has plenty of ups and downs to go through, and there are more reissues to come to spell this out, even as the current version of the band moves along according to Corgan's own cryptic impulses. Yet these two releases still resonate, as both a nostalgia fix underscoring how it was so easy to fall for Smashing Pumpkins in the first place, and as the best introductions to their music any newcomer could want. | 2011-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 28, 2011 | 8.3 | 1ad7e5d4-4e47-45a0-886a-7817b1d5beac | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
The workmanlike renditions of hits he hadn’t played in years don’t rank among his best live takes, but there’s still a thrill in revisiting this curious point in the shape-shifting star’s career. | The workmanlike renditions of hits he hadn’t played in years don’t rank among his best live takes, but there’s still a thrill in revisiting this curious point in the shape-shifting star’s career. | David Bowie: Glastonbury 2000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-bowie-glastonbury-2000/ | Glastonbury 2000 | According to many British music publications, David Bowie’s headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000 is the greatest performance in the history of the legendary event. (NME, ever effusive, called it “the best headline slot at any festival ever.”) But it’s greatest that’s doing the work here, not performance. It’s not individual highlights that make the set so fondly remembered, but the overall gestalt. Like the old saw about climbing Everest, Bowie’s Glasto set mattered because it was there.
By the time he took to the Pyramid Stage, Bowie had spent 15-odd years in the mainstream-music wilderness—first, post-Let’s Dance, making milquetoast megapop no one particularly liked, then rebuilding his reputation with experiments in everything from Pixies-inspired garage rock (Tin Machine) to concept-album Eno-industrial (Outside) to a Nine Inch Nails/Goldie hybrid version of drum ’n’ bass (Earthling). Different people liked these experiments at different times and in different amounts, though never at the level of his 1970s and early-1980s output. (Earthling rules, for what it’s worth.) During much of that period, his greatest hits were largely retired from service in his live sets.
But now, with a generosity of spirit as lush and flowing as his hair—which hadn’t been that long since Hunky Dory—Bowie was back! Resplendently coiffed and backed by a familiar band of musicians (including pianist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and guitarists Mark Plati and Earl Slick, all of whom worked with the star for years), the once and future king of art pop was welcomed by the sprawling home-country crowd like Arthur Pendragon returning from Avalon.
The resulting set is an ebullient greatest-hits package anyone who was ever a fan is sure to enjoy, almost automatically. Actually, make that mostly automatically. How Bowie performed songs like “China Girl,” “Changes,” “Golden Years,” “Ashes to Ashes” (which he misremembers aloud as being the most recently recorded song in the set at that point, though he’d already sung “Absolute Beginners”), “Let’s Dance,” and so on is much less important, both historically and to the festival audience, than the fact he was playing them at all. And sure enough, none of these hits—not even the surefire crowd-pleaser “Under Pressure,” which he’d dueted on so memorably with Annie Lennox at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert a decade earlier—do anything more special in this performance than exist.
The band works much better when the material allows it to lean into its sleazy, session-pro sound. “Fame,” the John Lennon lost-weekend plastic-funk collab that seems to leave a trail of slime across eardrums whenever it’s played, sounds as dashing and debauched as ever. Recorded when Bowie was just a few months deeper into both 1975 and cocaine psychosis, the teutonic-occult behemoth “Station to Station” is another standout. Both the off-kilter groove of its main section and the barreling braukeller climax, with its guitar squalls and yelps of “It’s too late!,” feel made for massive crowds. (Which, as far as the Thin White Duke persona of that period is concerned, was sort of the point.) Moreover, hearing Bowie croon Kabbalistic jargon like “one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” to said massive crowd serves as a helpful reminder that he remained, even then, one of the weirdest people ever to achieve festival-headlining success.
The anthems also fare comparatively well. Sterling Campbell’s drums and Mark Plati’s guitars on “Ziggy Stardust,” for example, hit each downbeat in the song’s legendary glam hook so hard that it’s like they’re trying to beat the doomed pop-star character’s crazed fans back down off the stage. It’s immediately followed by another of Bowie’s career-defining hits, “‘Heroes’,” which has achieved an iconic second life of its own in the “David Bowie Is…” museum exhibit and Julien Temple’s Glastonbury documentary. Bowie and company ease into this one, downplaying the desperate romance and holding the soaring Robert Fripp guitars back until after the second chorus; by the time Bowie scream-sings “I, I will be king/And you, you will be myyyy queen”—adding the possessive pronoun to deepen the connection between himself and the audience, to whom he reaches an outstretched arm on the DVD—they’ve taken to the skies and don’t set down again until the song ends.
Occasionally, intimacy works in his favor, which is no mean feat in front of a 150,000-person festival crowd. The set opens with his Station to Station cover of the Johnny Mathis ballad “Wild Is the Wind,” a terrific way to throw people who want to rock the fuck out off balance. After regaling the audience with a plea to sing for him should his recent bout of laryngitis prevent him from finishing—a charming bit of openly bogus self-effacement, given the brassy late-career warble he’d already deployed for four songs—Bowie drastically rearranges the vocal line on “Life on Mars?” to suit his aged range. Listeners inured to the song’s grandeur by decades of repetition now have to hang on to every word and note to see where it’s headed. It’s a brilliant maneuver by one of rock’s canniest communicators.
But more often, such shifts weaken the songs’ power. The rip-roaring disco/hard-rock hybrid “Stay” comes across like a soundcheck in its too-quiet chorus, and “Under Pressure” is underplayed to its detriment. Understandably, Bowie fares better in the set’s happily confrontational closer, “I’m Afraid of Americans,” which makes his lower range sinister and sneering—a far cry from the back-to-back bangers “Rebel Rebel” and “Little Wonder,” recorded nearly 25 years apart, neither of which bang much at all as presented here.
Whatever its historical import, Glastonbury 2000 is primarily a pleasant run-through of beloved songs for a gigantic, besotted crowd—a signal to people who were dying to love David again that, yes, he wanted to be adored. The DVD that accompanies the CD package conveys both the awe-inspiring size of that crowd and the excitement they and the artist shared about being there that night, making it almost certainly the proper way to experience the set. But compared to other official live Bowie releases, from the coke-addled craziness of the Diamond Dogs-era David Live to the far more muscular A Reality Tour set recorded a few years after Glastonbury… Well, as an album, this makes a helluva souvenir. It’s a chronicle of a particular moment in time, not a revealing glimpse of movement in a mercurial artist’s storied career. You kinda had to be there. | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Parlophone | December 5, 2018 | 7 | 1ad851e5-b512-455d-be57-97132152eaf2 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
On its second album of 2023, the London trio looks to enliven its bookish, deadpan indie rock formula. | On its second album of 2023, the London trio looks to enliven its bookish, deadpan indie rock formula. | Bar Italia: The Twits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bar-italia-the-twits/ | The Twits | Three years ago, when London trio Bar Italia emerged as signees to Dean Blunt’s mysterious World Music label, they curried niche intrigue among devotees ravaged by their foggy mystique. The world is much bigger, though, which meant that the music needed to be convincing enough to transcend online chatter—troubling, perhaps, for a group whose shadowy aesthetics tended to bleed into just-as-shadowy songs. Over the murky first months of their existence, two interpretations of Bar Italia’s sound seemed apt: tongue-in-cheek provocation akin to their World Music peers, or earnest slacker rock that only felt vapid because you weren’t listening for the right things.
During their initial stint with World Music, the group released Quarrel and bedhead, a one-two punch of LPs whose stark arrangements and compact lengths left people wanting more. Earlier this year, they signed to indie powerhouse Matador. Tracey Denim, their first album for the label, took tangible steps towards establishing an identity, as opposed to languidly tip-toeing around one. They were honing a sound—a deadpan, cut-and-dried effort shared between (very) amateur vocalists and lightly fuzzed guitars—that left a blurry trace of larger ambitions. Not only could they stand alone, but they were also willing to give it a try that lasted longer than 20 minutes.
Five months later, they’re back with The Twits, an attempt to expand on a tried-and-true formula. It’s bookish, looking-out-the-window music: foot-tappy and slightly unnerving, best consumed through faulty earbuds you have to hold at precisely the right angle to operate. The group echoes the same moody UK rock influences they always have (The Cure, Slowdive), but with a willingness to experiment that suggests they’ve grown bored of mere imitation. The result is a slackish near-hour of aspirant dorm-room rock, augmented with nerdy undertones and a teeny—dare I say too teeny—pep in their step. “You don’t realize it, hardly recognize it,” their voices tease in the record’s final minute, disembodied shouts riding eerie guitar feedback. It sounds like what the Shining twins might create with secondhand Stratocasters in a makeshift studio at the Overlook Hotel: music so unsettling, and so serpentine, that it almost feels as if it’s laughing at us.
This is still pretty angsty stuff, and per usual, the group favors themes of isolation and jilted romance. For all its crypticism, Bar Italia’s early music was rife with coming-of-age signifiers—breakup mantras, pleas for escapism, and fledgling musicality to represent fledgling adulthood. On The Twits, they sound refreshingly ready to add color where they once left tracks barren. “worlds greatest emoter,” which packs arena-sized riffage into a pint container, feels surprisingly danceable, as opposed to the pensive half-sway the group’s output usually encourages. The other singles are strong, too: Where they used to fester in heartbreak, a steely new determinism peeks through the cracks. “Keep playing with my receiving hand,” Nina Cristante goads in “my little tony,” “’Cause you know you lost the game.”
But these swings at more memorable songs are still underwhelming, and the minimalist sound remains prone to monotony. It isn’t as big of a problem here as it has been on previous releases, but at points, the trio’s gestures feel more suggestive of a hazy past than any potential future. “que surprise” is a sluggish slow-burner whose lazy guitars stumble into one another as if drunk. The reverb-heavy guitar work on “Shoo” sounds faintly like Murray Street-era Sonic Youth, which is cool, but where Sonic Youth rode those grooves into hypnotic epics full of tension and release, this song stays in one place. Talking about Bar Italia still mostly involves talking about other acts: You may hear tinges of the Velvet Underground in their folkish fuzz-punk, see shadows of Dean Blunt in their elusive personae. At their most effective, they speak loudest to our inner music geek: Come for what they remind you of, stay for what they’re learning to bring to the table for themselves. | 2023-11-07T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-07T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | November 7, 2023 | 6.9 | 1ad8e6a8-20e5-4c29-86fa-5ac16590cb14 | Samuel Hyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/ | |
Recorded in Anacortes, Washington, the stark original version of the songwriter’s 2019 album All Mirrors makes the experience of solitude sound metaphysical. The songs are spare, but still feel electric. | Recorded in Anacortes, Washington, the stark original version of the songwriter’s 2019 album All Mirrors makes the experience of solitude sound metaphysical. The songs are spare, but still feel electric. | Angel Olsen: Whole New Mess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-olsen-whole-new-mess/ | Whole New Mess | Before opening her songs to other people, Angel Olsen collaborated with loneliness. Whole New Mess was her blistering original vision for 2019’s epic All Mirrors: a stark acoustic album that she recorded the previous fall at church studio The Unknown in Anacortes, Washington, while still processing the wounds of a breakup. It was months later that the second version—All Mirrors—began to emerge, recreating the emotional catastrophe with dazzling strings and synthesizers, a baroque pop maelstrom. And yet, despite the ornate arrangements of All Mirrors, swarming and towering into the red, Olsen’s colossal voice always played the starring role. The sweep of the MGM strings matched it.
With Olsen’s many-hued warble at the center—at times sounding like a Joan of Arc for crackling emotional resilience—the raw Whole New Mess recordings embody their theme of inner strength. It’s tempting to say that Whole New Mess calls back to Olsen’s other more minimal works, like her exquisitely distant first EP, 2010’s Strange Cacti (“Your thoughts exist in someone else’s head,” she assured us); or the fevered eloquence of 2012’s Half Way Home; or the cassette where she once covered Dolly Parton and Skeeter Davis. But Whole New Mess has a singular power. The songs are spare but still feel electric, and despite their lower volume compared to All Mirrors, you couldn’t necessarily call them quiet. Their slow-strummed chords and finger-picked patterns are at times deliberately brittle and blown out. Whole New Mess amplifies a different source of loudness.
These unvarnished songs sound in harmony with the elements of their atmosphere: the vapor in the air, the dew at twilight. If the sun’s radiance can enter the frame of a piece of music then “Waving, Smiling” is proof. If the night itself could be a component of a song then you might sense it on “Tonight (Without You).” Whole New Mess makes the experience of solitude sound metaphysical: Olsen sings of stretching her bones out on the floor, waving her hand at no one, watching the thoughts inside her head come clear, like an introvert’s prayer. “I like the life I lead without you,” she sings on “Tonight,” as it glows. This is the lonesome sound, where in lieu of studio-made fireworks you simply hear everything, as orchestrated by one person. “It’s every season, where it is I’m going,” Olsen croons on the title track, a new song and among her best ever, about weathering the storm of really changing, of recalibrating the heart by way of the body and mind. She sings with the depth and candor of Patsy Cline, but her guitar chords are choppy, unpolished, underscoring the point: Life requires messes.
Whole New Mess cycles through these phases and shows their seams. “Too Easy (Bigger Than Us)” is the sound of love beginning, of obsession incarnate, and while the All Mirrors cut exists in a soft hallucinatory haze, this one is desperate and haunting. “Some things happen for a reason/Cancel all these plans/I’m dreaming,” Olsen sings in a high-pitched teardrop that wells like Hank Williams. “(New Love) Cassette” previously evoked smitten AM pop reborn in Broadcast, but here it sounds like no one but Olsen and the scratchy surfaces of her guitar strings, suspended in time. The song is like cellophane, voicing a desire to be someone’s “strength” and “breath.” These illusions soon unfurl. The brooding, wearied ballad “(Summer Song)” tells a tale of enduring hell to find “the weight of all the world came rushing through.”
On All Mirrors, the title track and “Lark” scaled staggering heights. What’s clear on Whole New Mess is that those songs—retitled as “(We Are All Mirrors)” and “Lark Song”—are also the most searching and inquisitive, moving by their own inexhaustible logic. Olsen said she wrote “Lark” about the verbal abuse she has endured in relationships; when she sings, “The way you scream like something else is a matter,” the scream is literal. On both albums, “Lark” is fittingly monumental in response. Olsen sings of “hiding out inside my head” with tidal force, staking out a fortress above the turbulence, a place to protect her dreams. Within them, “(We Are All Mirrors)” borrows one of Surrealism’s most potent images, the mirror, as a reminder that every surface is a possible site of recognition or distortion. Its thick layers of reverb, clangor, and busted organ drones reflect as much. Even the parentheses-filled track titles evoke a mutability.
The transformation that these piercing songs undergo between All Mirrors and Whole New Mess echoes a fact of Olsen’s work that grows truer with each release: she has become a voice of possibility, one ever in flux. The candlelit torch song “Chance (Forever Love),” the penultimate track of Whole New Mess, is a scene of falling action with no clear conclusion, recalling the wonder of Judy Garland if revisited through the supreme melancholy of Sandy Denny. Olsen aches in her conviction, “leaving once again, making my own plan,” “not looking for the answer, or anything that lasts,” wandering with her disillusionment and her glint of hope. “All that space in between where we stand/Could be our chance,” Olsen sings. “It’s hard to say forever love.” If the ending is messy, complicated and unresolved, that’s just right.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | September 1, 2020 | 8 | 1adc0162-39f3-4a4d-9fa4-f5e29245a4e5 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
On her fourth album, the Nashville singer-songwriter moves beyond the unadorned Americana of previous albums to arrive at new sounds, moods, and emotions. | On her fourth album, the Nashville singer-songwriter moves beyond the unadorned Americana of previous albums to arrive at new sounds, moods, and emotions. | Lilly Hiatt: Walking Proof | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lilly-hiatt-walking-proof/ | Walking Proof | There’s a moment on “Rae,” Walking Proof’s opening cut, where roots rocker Lilly Hiatt’s plaintive strumming and quivering voice are consumed by a Technicolor wave of sound that pulls the song in an unexpected direction. That moment is Walking Proof in microcosm: The album pushes Hiatt out of her comfort zone, widening her palette and deepening her emotional reach, transforming music that was once starkly black and white into vivid, saturated hues.
Hiatt spent the past decade carving out a reputation on the Americana circuit, laying the groundwork with her hard-edged 2012 debut, Let Down, and sharpening her focus with 2015’s Royal Blue. Her real breakthrough arrived in 2017 with Trinity Place, where she plumbed the depths of a painful breakup. Produced by Michael Trent of Shovels & Rope, it was flintier than its predecessors but still adhered to the conventional contours of Americana; at its core, the songs were rootsy and the productions were unadorned.
Walking Proof, her fourth album, may be rooted in country and rock traditions, but the album can’t be called spare: Even at its hushed moments, it’s bright and dense with detail. Some of this lushness is due to Hiatt’s decision to work with Lincoln Parish, a producer who previously was part of Bowling Green, Kentucky’s premier alt-rock pastiche outfit, Cage the Elephant. Parish coaxes a considerable amount of color out of Hiatt’s songs, playing supplementary guitar and keyboards while weaving in instrumental cameos from guitarist Aaron Lee Tasjan (“Little Believer”), violinist Amanda Shires (“Walking Proof”), and pedal-steel player Luke Schneider (“Move”). All these contributions enhance Hiatt’s road band (guitarist John Condit and bassist Robert Hudson return from Trinity Place, while drummer Kate Haldrup is a new addition). A lean and lithe combo, as capable at delivering nuance as noise, they follow their leader whenever she raves, wails, or sighs.
Some melancholy undercurrents flow through Walking Proof—there are missed connections and misconstrued intentions, pleas to friends and lovers to think better of themselves—but it’s not as explicitly confessional as Trinity Place, reflecting Hiatt’s decision to write about a shifting set of characters and emotions. She also adds some breathing space to the record, placing the bright, cheerful “Little Believer” and the riotous “Never Play Guitar” in the middle of their two respective album sides, a sequencing trick that quickens the album’s pace and lets songs like “Some Kind of Drug” linger in the air. Hiatt wrote “Some Kind of Drug” after accompanying her sister Rae on a mission to help Nashville’s homeless, winding up with a portrait of a city whose gentrification threatens to swallow up its underlying humanity.
Hiatt’s empathy shines through on “Some Kind of Drug,” but most of Walking Proof is written on a smaller scale, focused squarely on interpersonal relationships. She recounts a miserable trip to Portland with a sly grin on “P-Town,” gently but defiantly asserts her independence on “Candy Lunch,” and pledges her unwavering devotion to her sister on “Rae,” a lovely portrait of complex familial love. The existence of “Rae” slightly undercuts Hiatt’s contention that Walking Proof isn’t as autobiographical as Trinity Place, but the song also helps illustrate the differences between the two albums. Trinity Place hits hard and strong, while Walking Proof winds through moments of incandescent joy, gentleness, cathartic noise, and even unease (“Scream” ends the hopeful album with an eerie crawl). It’s as if Hiatt has emerged from a dark, uncertain period as a stronger, bolder artist, winding up with an album that encompasses a full spectrum of feeling as it rocks with abandon. | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | New West | March 31, 2020 | 7.6 | 1ae004a2-4e49-4bc6-ba55-3592ac743d7b | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
With confessional writing and immersive beats, the Seattle rapper-singer’s latest album is a more tender take on the player-with-a-cold-heart blueprint. | With confessional writing and immersive beats, the Seattle rapper-singer’s latest album is a more tender take on the player-with-a-cold-heart blueprint. | Highway: Monochrome | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/highway-monochrome/ | Monochrome | Seattle-raised vocalist Highway is the kind of rapper-producer who understands that well-curated vibes are their own art form. He orbits the same universe as many other somber rap-crooners, but he’s not as emotionally distant as Dro Kenji or joony, and not as aloof as Destroy Lonely or Ken Carson. Though he often follows in the same cold-hearted player blueprint as the rest, if you dig deeper, you’ll find that his songs skew disarmingly romantic, tackling missed connections and intense affairs. Imagine if Future walled himself off in his codeine palace for a few months and listened to nothing but Blxst and SahBabii albums, and you’ll be close to grasping the duality that Highway represents—a puppy-dog lover roleplaying as a svengali. That eclecticism amplifies his latest album Monochrome, a project as steamy and enveloping as a post-workout sauna session.
As a rapper, Highway typically eschews clever witticisms, instead opting for confessional writing that wrings pathos and humor out of his lifestyle. On “Don’t Lie,” he admits to showing up early to a date’s house and nervously smoking a dozen blunts before peppering his lover with sweet nothings. It’s just enough for the ending—the most sexually charged weed cypher this side of Lil’ Kim’s “Drugs”—to shake the table. One song later, on “Show Goes On,” he’s hooking up with twins and dropping puns that would make Chow Lee (Long Island’s horny drill impresario) blush. You never know which version of Highway you’ll get song-to-song, but it’s always entertaining, because he knows how to squeeze the most mileage out of his bars in any given situation.
He accomplishes this feat by switching up his flows, singing and rapping, and leveraging his pristine ear for beats. His staccato, Playboi Carti-esque delivery on “Show Goes On” flies, while the balladry of “All U Needed” and “Sin City” drips with a syrupy glaze. Meanwhile, “Jet” and “on dat shit” settle into bouncy swag rap. Highway’s melodic style translates well to just about every form he takes, whether he’s talking about ghosting one-night stands or falling hard for one.
The beats keep up with this shifting template. Highway is an accomplished producer in his own right—he’s worked with Chief Keef and co-produced his last handful of projects—but mostly backs off the boards here. Many of the songs here boast at least two beatmakers, making for a gaggle of collaborators that offers up variations on synth and 808 arrangements. Two names that consistently show out are Houston producer and longtime creative partner xjay, as well as jetsonmade, the South Carolina musician who played a pivotal role in defining DaBaby’s sound in the late 2010s. They each work well enough by themselves: jetson’s synthetic horns and bass give “Sin City” a sultry wiggle, and xjay’s blown-out drums on “on dat shit” crackle like rock candy. But their two link-ups on “B & W” and “Let Up” are among the album’s most effortless, creating a bedrock that allows Highway to gloat and flaunt his way to the top.
Monochrome is an album where the beats feel bleached but deeply textured, where the emotions and motivations of its protagonist simultaneously oppose and complement each other like a yin-yang symbol. The lane of moody sing-rappers is more crowded than ever, but Highway’s variety and command keep him from drowning in the mix. Unlike his peers, there’s an organic sepia tone to his words and affect—not surprising for an artist who hails from grunge’s birthplace—that never devolves into pastiche. Whether he’s planning a perfect night or reminiscing on a regrettable one, the vibes will always be immaculate. | 2023-05-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Geffen | May 17, 2023 | 7 | 1ae5004a-1219-4845-ae13-cd47612f66ec | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Hudson Mohawke's gleaming soundtrack to the open-world action-adventure game Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2 makes a surprisingly strong followup to his last proper full-length, last year's Lantern. | Hudson Mohawke's gleaming soundtrack to the open-world action-adventure game Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2 makes a surprisingly strong followup to his last proper full-length, last year's Lantern. | Hudson Mohawke: Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2 (OST) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22609-ded-sec-watch-dogs-2-ost/ | Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2 (OST) | Hudson Mohawke does drama better than most. His drums move with the heft of a cruiserweight boxer—powerful but lithe, kicks and snares leaving dents where they land. His rhythms come from trap, but his atmospheres couldn't be further than that genre’s grimy, boarded-up noir: His music positively glistens with chimes and arpeggios, and his monumental horn fanfare suggests armor-plated legions battering down castle doors, or angels raving at the pearly gates.
Those contradictions have made him one of the most interesting producers in pop music. His beats stud songs by Kanye, Drake, and Pusha T like luxurious expanses of diamond pavé, brilliant yet still rough to the touch. And working alongside Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, he provided Anohni’s HOPELESSNESS with a harrowing fusion of liturgical gravitas and Hollywood blockbuster. (Despite having been labeled a maximalist, he knows when to get the hell out of the way, and the restraint he brings to Anohni’s album only serves to highlight her own larger-than-life presence.)
There’s no lack of drama in his soundtrack to Ded Sec - Watch Dogs 2, which is good: It is, after all, an action-adventure open-world video game about hackers and global corruption, in which spectacular acts of anti-establishment violence play out against the backdrop of San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. HudMo’s music is a natural fit, and he brings his most effective tricks to the table: heart-in-mouth trombone blasts, blindingly bright synthesizer melodies, bruising drums. His customary sound set—a mixture of obviously synthesized brass with simulacral acoustic instruments like harpsichord and piano—complements the uncanny valley of the game world, a painstaking recreation of various Bay Area neighborhoods. If anything, he frequently upends expectations for video-game soundtracks by tilting away from purely electronic textures. Elegiac piano, strings, and choir give the opening “Shanghaied” a feel like John Williams gone trap. Loping Afro-Cuban percussion rounds out the giddily maximalist “Play N Go,” and the symphonic percussion of the regal “Haum Sweet Haum” is faintly reminiscent of Hans Zimmer’s score for Inception.
Ded Sec probably shouldn’t be considered a proper follow-up to last year’s Lantern, but it actually holds up favorably in that regard. With a mixture of full-length tracks and minute-long sketches, it’s nicely varied. The short, shimmering ambient study “W4tched (Cinema)” suggests that the producer may have picked up a trick or two from Oneohtrix Point Never during their time together working on Anohni’s album, and OPN’s influence also hangs over the gorgeous, light-speed “Cyber Driver,” with its R2D2 chirps and space-elevator arps. “Amethyst” pairs dial-tone synths and horror-movie organs with scissor-handed snare-and-hi-hat acrobatics in a way that makes even the most hackneyed trap tropes feel vibrant—no easy task. And on the short, kinetic “Balance,” he continually keeps you guessing as to where the downbeat will land; his tricky programming, playing triplets off constantly shifting syncopations, reveals him as one of the most rhythmically interesting producers out there right now.
In fact, despite the omnipresence of his customary blare, what might be most interesting here are the nuances that he brings to the table. In “Eye for an Eye (Reprise),” a quiet sketch for FM synths, he strips away the drums to let us see just how dexterous his timbral touch is, every note a jewel-toned liquid explosion. Before “Watch Dogs Theme” builds to its expected climax, with buzzing chords firing like illuminated jets of water, he rolls out a curious, elliptical drum pattern that seems to be pulling itself apart at the seams. Like many of the most interesting moments on Ded Sec, the real action is happening just beneath the surface of all those shiny things. It’s enough to make you wonder what a shadowier, more minimalist Hudson Mohawke might sound like. We’ve basked in the glow of his rockets’ red glare; what would it be like to taste their acrid soot? | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 11, 2016 | 7.2 | 1ae603ef-6691-46c6-9d5a-216cecaf9a6d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Psych-rock band King Gizzard is giving its fourth album of the year away as a free download. The immersive Polygondwanaland is the farthest the seven-piece has strayed from its psych sci-fi roots. | Psych-rock band King Gizzard is giving its fourth album of the year away as a free download. The immersive Polygondwanaland is the farthest the seven-piece has strayed from its psych sci-fi roots. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Polygondwanaland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-polygondwanaland/ | Polygondwanaland | The psych rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard chose to release its fourth album of the year—with a fifth supposedly en route—as a free digital download, encouraging fans to create as many copies as they please. “Make tapes, make CD’s, make records,” reads a note accompanying the album’s release. “Ever wanted to start your own record label? GO for it! Employ your mates, press wax, pack boxes. We do not own this record. You do. Go forth, share, enjoy.” Whether they're trying to scale back record expenses, or it’s an altruistic transfer of power to fans, King Gizzard’s decision to surrender control over this album’s physical reach is a comical one. Polygondwanaland is the farthest the seven-piece has strayed from their usual psych sci-fi roots. The band still employ lyrical nerdiness and wigged-out guitar in the album, but whereas King Gizzard’s last records got knee deep in prog rock, Polygondwanaland slinks into those waters until it’s waist high and loses the usual gnarly riffs.
Like its mouthful of a title, Polygondwanaland delivers a 10-course meal without dividers between its dishes. Songs seep into one another for an immersive listen. The stirring, quiet percussion of “Inner Cell” tiptoes into “Loyalty” for a slow buildup, before it splashes into the punctuated vocals of “Horology,” a sea of guitar tapping and rich, warm woodwinds. As usual, transitions are key in King Gizzard’s work, but they add a smoothness to Polygondwanaland that makes it particularly digestible, so that every vocal sigh and gaudy synth acts as a complementary flavor.
Like the euphoric peaks of 1970s-era Yes or the melodic sections of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s discography, a solid first impression and a memorable farewell make these type of dense records impactful. King Gizzard put the majority of their stock in this. Polygondwanaland opens with 10 minutes of painstakingly recorded instrumentation on “Crumbling Castle.” Syncopated drumming and clean guitar scales part ways for bandleader Stu Mackenzie and his gentle voice. The song’s vague rumination on sickness and fragility parallels the instruments gently blowing behind him: backing guitars harmonize with one another, a flute solo fades in, and barely-discernable keyboards whirr in the distance. Then, in the song’s final minute, the band trades that for a wall of stoner-metal sludge. Closing track “The Fourth Colour” opts for the same dazzling effect. After endless, bright guitar trills and a rhythmic drone, a risible drum fill prompts the band to wreak havoc in the song's final minute, exploding with the psych rock frenzy of Flying Microtonal Banana or I’m in Your Mind Fuzz.
King Gizzard tend to get roped up in the flourishes on Polygondwanaland, before giving way to an instinctive simplicity. At times, it works to their advantage, like when they moderate the dynamics of a feverish tempo on “Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet.” Elsewhere, the band dulls itself by overthinking a section and losing their knack for natural flow. King Gizzard try their hand at hocketing—a technique where multiple singers share a single melody, alternating delivery across multiple notes—near the end of the album, but the focus on how they deliver the syllables loses the spark of the technique’s erratic feel. If there's nowhere left to push their envelope of indie rock ridiculousness, then prying into a genre rarely savored, nevertheless understood, in the 21st century is a bold step. Had they indulged in the campiness, it could have sharpened their own voice within the genre.
At the very least, King Gizzard’s decision to give listeners control over the record’s physical production reflects the album’s musical shift. Prog rock is a genre known for disregarding traditional structures and often failing to land perfectly, so King Gizzard drag it out of the basement and into broad daylight with Polygondwanaland to make every triumph and flaw visible. Even if they don’t complete it in time, releasing five albums in a year is cheeky and fun, and they’re smart for giving listeners a way to participate. The album positions King Gizzard as a band more concerned with experimenting openly than with clearing the goal without getting scratched, which any adrenaline-seeker would tell you is the whole point. “P.s. If u wanna make cassettes I don’t really know what you would do,” the end of their note reads. “Be creative. We did it once but it sounded really shit.” | 2017-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | December 1, 2017 | 7.2 | 1ae8da2b-ebeb-4394-b789-a013c5387703 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford channel ESG, Liquid Liquid, and New Order but surpass mere genre mimicry on a debut album that captures the feeling as well as the sounds of classic dance music. | Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford channel ESG, Liquid Liquid, and New Order but surpass mere genre mimicry on a debut album that captures the feeling as well as the sounds of classic dance music. | Sink Ya Teeth: Sink Ya Teeth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sink-ya-teeth-sink-ya-teeth/ | Sink Ya Teeth | If you have even a passing interest in the last 40 years of dance culture, Norwich duo Sink Ya Teeth’s debut is sure to sound familiar—and that's the point. Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford’s self-titled album is a veritable archive of au courant reference points: the rubbery basslines of Liquid Liquid, ESG’s call-and-response dance-punk, the alluring menace of dark disco, New Order’s synthetic ecstasy, the cold atmospherics of electro. These sounds have been revived before, notably during the 2000s, as the retro-futurist electroclash movement and the side-long revelries of early DFA gave way to bloghouse, a microgenre that played fast and loose with dance music’s past. Now, nostalgia for ’80s club music also calls back to that period.
But Sink Ya Teeth surpasses mere genre mimicry, as Uzor and Cullingford channel the feeling as well as the sounds of classic dance music. Style is easy to copy, but attitude is hard to fake, and Sink Ya Teeth have plenty of the latter. “I feel a little depressed/A little melancholy at best,” they intone in deadpan unison on breakout single “If You See Me,” their disaffection a perfect match for the dry beat and rubbery bass. In an interview with M magazine, Uzor described the squiggly track “Pushin’” as channeling a “frenzied and almost sexualized addiction to religion and salvation.” When she sings, “And when the sermon begins/She feels the tears of a thousand years of sin/But he keeps pushin’,” it evokes dance music's long relationship with carnality and guilt, from Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” to the opening of LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33.
As UK music industry veterans—Uzor previously made hazy psych-folk as Girl in a Thunderbolt, while Cullingford played bass in early-2000s indie act Kaito—Sink Ya Teeth know their way around a recording studio. At its best, the album’s clean, glassy sheen reflects that expertise. These high-fidelity songs demand to be heard as FLAC files; every element in the mix sounds flawlessly isolated but meshes seamlessly with its surroundings. As the duo’s influences suggest, this is music-nerd music made by music nerds: In the winking intro of opener “Freak 4 the Kick,” a single kick drum (get it?) gives way to a leather-jacket synth line and Uzor and Cullingford’s floaty vocals. Modern dance music of all stripes tends to bear the mark of its wholly computerized creation, but Sink Ya Teeth sounds distinctly human, the work of flesh and blood and pure ability.
For all their talent, the pair has yet to establish a distinctive musical personality. Throughout their self-titled album, Sink Ya Teeth prove they can convincingly handle a plethora of styles—but it remains to be seen whether there’s more to their retro-modern aesthetic than capable replication. Their debut is enough to spark curiosity about where they’ll take their sound next, though, and that’s no small accomplishment. In the 21st century, dance and indie music have been so littered with nostalgic variations on old sounds that it’s become hard to get excited about any artist who crafts songs by thumbing through the history books (or thrice-ripped YouTube clips). But Sink Ya Teeth are primed to make the past new again. | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hey Buffalo | June 30, 2018 | 7 | 1aed6049-ee64-4c7c-9fc5-b57979de1686 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
On his debut for the 4AD label, the UK producer releases his strangest, most low-key, and least dance-friendly record. | On his debut for the 4AD label, the UK producer releases his strangest, most low-key, and least dance-friendly record. | Zomby: Dedication | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15617-dedication/ | Dedication | Zomby's early records weren't always aggressive, but they were never really demure, either. When his first Hyperdub singles began to attract notice in 2008, he was part of a wave of post-dubstep producers who drew as much from synth-driven 1980s film scores, 8-bit era video game soundtracks, and electro as they did from Jamaica, hip-hop, or UK garage. True, his output wasn't as garish and noisy and abrasive as those made by some of his more intractable collaborators and remixers, and he used the EP format to experiment with tracks more ambient-leaning than club-ready. But they still had distorted riffs, the kind of low-end that makes you adjust your stereo settings to avoid frying your speakers, and hooks more Capcom than Kraftwerk.
His first proper album, 2009's Where Were U in '92?, even ditched dubstep entirely to recreate the unruly spirit of the genre's ancestor, hardcore rave. The album sounded far more fine-tuned-- and far less cheap-- than most of the hardcore tunes it paid homage to. But it also suggested Zomby wanted nothing to do with the kind of listener who throws on an electronic album as unobtrusive background noise. If his not-quite-dubstep peer Lone brings the pacific and beatific side of early rave into modern UK beat culture, Zomby brings in the roughness, the menace, the boldness. Even when he goes for almost-beatless psychedelic beauty-- check "Mercury's Rainbow"-- the results have a disorienting intensity, like John Carpenter incidental music on fast-forward and with the bass at +8.
Although it's barely longer than some of his EPs, Dedication is being sold as Zomby's second album, and it's also the strangest, most low-key, and least dance-friendly record he's released yet. It's hard to say to whom Dedication is aimed-- certainly not hardcore dubstep fanatics-- and that's part of its perverse charm, especially since everyone was likely expecting a cohesive, scene-summarizing statement given that this is Zomby's debut for big-time indie label 4AD. It's too jittery and restless and rhythmic to work as comfy ambient music. But while it's very obviously designed to be listened to rather than politely ignored, its choppy transitions and abrupt shifts in mood means it doesn't always flow the way we expect of albums or even home-listening DJ sets. In a way it reminds me of the same hermetic and stuck-between-worlds sound Boards of Canada were mining circa Geogaddi, alternating crunchy beat experiments with ethereal sound-washes and sometimes blurring the two modes together. Dedication never quite reaches (or aims for) the same scope or grandeur as BOC; it's a weirdly personal record, the kind made by a studio loner stringing together little oddities. So maybe call it Zomby's private reels made public, an audio sketchbook filled up with haunted miniatures, something to marvel over if never quite immerse yourself in.
It's certainly the most stylistically wide-ranging record he's released yet. It's got some of what Zomby fans have come to love, those icy arcade game sound effects stamped into brief club tracks ("Digital Rain"), but just as often the album chases unexpected directions. For a guy not known for his love of atmospheric murk or soulful smoothness, the blurred vocals on "Natalia's Song" evoke the downcast vibe of Burial with just a hint of the Art of Noise circa the sensuous "Moments in Love". For a guy not known for working with singers, on "Things Fall Apart" Zomby drafts Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox as left-field diva, re-imagining the droning repetitions of Tomboy as techno for kids who grew up reading Nintendo Power. But throughout Dedication you're struck by how assured Zomby is with textures outside of "game cartridge kitsch," how he refuses to be slotted into an already-dated subgenre for marketing purposes. "Haunted" is like a computer-assisted take on the pensive soundtrack-jazz of DJ Shadow circa Endtroducing... with the vinyl crackle cleaned off. When the beats drop away entirely here, you're more likely to somber acoustic piano ("Basquiat") than glossy, unnatural keyboards.
Barring a few exceptions, Dedication lacks the wobbly jump-up energy of Zomby's best-loved early singles and the rave-y mania of Where Were U in '92. He's more inventive with rhythm than ever; they're just not the kind of rhythms you might have expected. With their finger-snap drums and bass ooze and queasy synths, "Witch Hunt" and "Lucifer" have the sluggish gravity of Southern hip-hop and grime, outdoing acts like Salem in approximately one-third the time and with no sketchy rapping to dull their creepy pleasures. An entire album of tracks like that might have made for an easy hit, given Zomby's profile and the buzz around similarly druggy instrumental rap from producers like Clams Casino and the wonky trip-hop of the Brainfeeder crew, but Zomby won't make it that easy on himself. Though it doesn't sound like the work of a show-off, Dedication is in many ways the work of a producer pushing himself to see how hard and how far he can push his music into new places. Some might lament the fact that so many tracks feel like teasers pointing toward something longer and more developed, with most of these two- or three-minute ideas fading out as soon as they get a good, eerie groove going. If so, you can take comfort that he's given himself so many possibilities for album number three. Just don't expect a producer this perverse to follow up on any of them, let alone all of them. | 2011-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 4AD | July 12, 2011 | 7.6 | 1af10104-540a-4ac9-b683-44bcc64c5c93 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Maine-based songwriter Liza Victoria’s proper debut album is a work of intimate beauty—a self-contained world that feels like a long song cycle rather than a collection of various pieces. | Maine-based songwriter Liza Victoria’s proper debut album is a work of intimate beauty—a self-contained world that feels like a long song cycle rather than a collection of various pieces. | Lisa/Liza: Deserts of Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22380-lisaliza-deserts-of-youth/ | Deserts of Youth | To listen to Deserts of Youth, Liza Victoria’s proper debut album, is to eavesdrop on moments of quiet intensity. Devoid of reverb or overt production effects—a radical choice, in the age of atmospheric GarageBand records—Deserts’ seven songs are comforting yet arresting, effortless while intricate. At times, the Maine-based songwriter’s feathery falsetto is barely audible, a wisp of wind blowing through a deserted street; other times, it’s powerful and clear. Her lyrics, when you can decipher them, feel mostly like conduits for her unusual vocal patterns, less a means of communicating thoughts than establishing setting and mood. Throughout, Victoria seems most keen on satisfying herself; after all, as she sang in an early recording, “I am the friend that I need the most.”
In line with her 2014 release, The First Museum, Deserts of Youth begins as a light, psychedelic affair. The jazzy “Century Woods” opens the record with a lilting breeziness. On the ghostly “Another Window,” she counts to four without falling into a steady rhythm, speeding up and slowing down as she recounts observations literal (“Your keys are lying on the floor/At the bottom of the bed”) and abstract (“It’s the shadow of the morning… Watch the light breathe where the shadows began”). Although Deserts retains the simple guitar-and-vocal structure of Victoria’s early work, it is a sizeable step forward in songwriting and vision, a haunting, emotional experience that’s most effective as a whole.
The album’s scope is captured neatly in its stunning centerpiece, “Lady Day of the Radio.” Although all the songs on Deserts hover around the five-minute mark, “Lady Day” feels especially epic. It boasts Victoria’s most evocative guitar playing yet as she shifts between sad, broken fingerpicking and a stirring climax, the closest she has tread yet to a genuine guitar solo. Situated right in the middle of the album, “Lady Day” is a song so commanding that it seems to dictate the record’s structure; the opening tracks builds up to it, and the closing numbers slowly resolves its cathartic rush.
The self-contained world of Deserts of Youth makes the album feel more like a long song cycle than a collection of various pieces—a quality aided by Victoria’s penchant for ending songs abruptly in the middle of lines and writing familiar variations on her melodies. In “Wander,” a stirring ballad that plays like a heartbreaking coda to “Lady Day,” Victoria’s aimless narrator mirrors the music’s meandering quality. “We walk around the old part of town,” she sighs, before reaching one of the album’s most memorable refrains: “I never know where to go with new love.” A moment later, she amends the lyric to address “old love” as well, tying them together into a single entity, removed from time. It’s the record’s purest attempt at a singalong chorus and a lyric that’s emblematic of the album as a whole: a daring new work of strange, intimate beauty that already feels like an old favorite. | 2016-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Orindal | September 10, 2016 | 8 | 1af3acda-999f-4045-a286-48539717fd31 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
On their second full-length, the Portland duo of multi-instrumentalist/producer Jacob Portrait (also of Unknown Mortal Orchestra) and vocalist Charlie Hilton make a conscious push to distance themselves from their electro-tinged beginnings. But Blouse's guitar-driven make-over hasn't rendered them unrecognizable. | On their second full-length, the Portland duo of multi-instrumentalist/producer Jacob Portrait (also of Unknown Mortal Orchestra) and vocalist Charlie Hilton make a conscious push to distance themselves from their electro-tinged beginnings. But Blouse's guitar-driven make-over hasn't rendered them unrecognizable. | Blouse: Imperium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18495-blouse-imperium/ | Imperium | In the fall of 2011, the last thing the world needed was a song called "Videotapes" that sounded a little bit like a lost Human League hit dubbed onto an old, worn-out cassette. This kind of idea wasn't exactly novel: Chillwave had broken and crested, VHS nostalgia was inescapable, and bands claiming the tag "dream pop" were cropping up like dandelions in springtime-- was it really possible that none of them had already written something called "Videotapes"?
It's a testament to Portland's Blouse, then, that the murky earworm bearing that particular name managed to stand out even among the crowded crop of hypnagogic pop. Maybe that's because, like "Videotapes", all the songs on their unexpectedly fresh self-titled debut were driven by the tension of opposing forces, as the heat generated from radiant, sun-bursting synths collided with the airy cool of Charlie Hilton's vocals. Blouse found a balance between texture and melody: here was a band that clearly cared about atmosphere, but never at the expense of a solid, Top Gun soundtrack-worthy hook.
With their second full-length Imperium, though, the band is making a conscious push to distance itself from those electro-tinged beginnings. Blouse have nixed the synths and drum machines: Multi-instrumentalist and producer Jacob Portrait (who also plays bass in Unknown Mortal Orchestra) proudly announces in the press release that the record was made entirely with "instruments that don't plug into the wall." Sure, selling your proverbial turntables to buy guitars is enough of a sophomore album cliché to get a mention in LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge", but luckily Blouse's guitar-driven make-over hasn't rendered them unrecognizable. That much is clear from the jump: Bouncy opener "Imperium" takes some of the familiar elements of Blouse's best tunes-- namely sweeping strums and lurching, rubbery basslines-- and blends them into a gloomy swirl. "Are you one of us?/ Are you one of us?" Hilton chants as the song winds down, in a haunting monotone that's half Hope Sandoval, half creepily malfunctioning automaton. Though Hilton's out in front, Portrait is Blouse's secret weapon, concocting the immersive textures that give Imperium its distinct atmosphere. The driving "Eyesite" sounds like it was recorded in the frigid but sparkling depths of an icy cave, while the up-tempo ripper "Arrested" has the loose, unvarnished feel of a band jamming in a the garage-- albeit one equipped with an enviable pedal board.
And yet, there's a lack of variety in Imperium's marble-cool tone that makes it feel more one-note than Blouse's debut. It's laudable for a band to push itself out of its comfort zone on its second album-- there are artists out there who lay such a lazily trendy coating of synthesizers over their songs that the electricity in their practice spaces should be cut just to stir creativity. But Blouse weren’t one of those bands. Their debut showed the promise of growth, and their “no synth” policy may have hemmed them in unnecessarily. When Blouse headlined one of Captured Tracks' 5 year anniversary shows earlier this month, the contrast was clear: The new, thoughtfully structured songs showcased the band’s ear for sticky hooks, but only when Portrait plugged in his tower of synths to play older track like "Time Travel" and "Into Black" did the music bloom. | 2013-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | September 25, 2013 | 7 | 1af555d4-cc25-4662-b6cb-704f83b3a5f9 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Simon Jeffes’ Penguin Cafe Orchestra were charming and baffling in late ’70s UK music, mixing ambient, Balearic, drone, and more. Now Jeffes’ son is using the name with members of Gorillaz and Suede. | Simon Jeffes’ Penguin Cafe Orchestra were charming and baffling in late ’70s UK music, mixing ambient, Balearic, drone, and more. Now Jeffes’ son is using the name with members of Gorillaz and Suede. | Penguin Cafe: The Imperfect Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23229-the-imperfect-sea/ | The Imperfect Sea | Laid up in the south of France after ingesting some bad shellfish back in 1972, British guitarist and composer Simon Jeffes experienced fever dreams of a world “of ordered desolation… a place which had no heart.” In the days after, Jeffes dreamt of its cure, wherein “the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing.” Jeffes also had a surreal poem pop into his head about being proprietor of the Penguin Cafe—and by 1976, he had established the Penguin Cafe Orchestra bearing such properties. They were one of the eras more charming and baffling entities, daydreaming between ambient, Balearic, drone, Irish folk, pop, world, classical, all of their output exquisite and slightly aslant. Which is perhaps to be expected from the man who was game enough to couch Sid Vicious in orchestral strings for “My Way.”
The Orchestra disbanded only when Jeffes passed away from an inoperable brain tumor in 1997, and since a Royal Albert Hall concert in 2009, his son Arthur has released three albums in the new century, carrying the torch. Or at least carrying the name, as his Penguin Cafe features no members of the original ensemble, instead compiling contributions from members of Gorillaz, Suede, and Florence and the Machine. (Some of the old Penguin Orchestra continue to perform this music as the Anteaters and the Orchestra That Fell to Earth). Arthur has the pedigree, if not the history, for this 21st century Penguin Cafe.
Their website states that since their audience is more attuned to dance music, the group is a corrective in replacing “electronic layers with real instruments: pads with real string sections, synths with heavily-effected pianos.” Fair enough, though such self-seriousness replaces the prevailing whimsy of the original and assumes that electronic music fans can’t also chill with Stars of the Lid, Alarm Will Sound, or even the Williams Fairey Brass Band. “Ricercar” most closely resembles the Orchestra of old, stately and bouncy in equal measure, the strings nimble like some Renaissance-era dance while the percussion comes from world music. But “Cantorum” has all the drama of an indie documentary soundtrack, tugging at heartstrings via bowed strings, a move now easily replicated by dozens of other composers.
The slow-moving “Control 1 (Interlude)” creates a sustained mood of careful piano notes that drop like melting icicles and humming strings, though it also most closely resembles the gorgeous minimalism of Bing & Ruth. The twinkling lyricism of “Half Certainty” and “Protection” align them with their Erased Tapes’ labelmates, meaning the pleasant and polite—if at times ignorable—aspects of ambient music.
Three covers are interspersed throughout the album. The most charming is a version of Kraftwerk’s “Franz Schubert,” a knowing wink to the original group’s own history—Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s first major show was opening for the Germans back in 1976. They play up the lullaby-like aspect of the original and, in a clever twist, close mic the sound of salt swirling around in a bowl in a manner that replicates the crackly shellac of an old 78, putting the futurists into a bygone time. There’s also a version of the original group’s “Now Nothing,” expanding the track by two minutes but reducing the original’s blend of strings and voice to just piano.
It leads into the closer “Wheels Within Wheels,” a cover of Simian Mobile Disco. But instead of a big build, the beats are replaced with rattles and cycling piano that create plenty of drama and tension before slowly peeling away. The notes describe making the four on the floor from “floorboards in the old Penguin studio,” which seems like a rather circuitous route to take to get to a thud that barely registers. In the years between the two iterations of Penguin Cafe, all manner of composers and ensembles have tackled the likes of Aphex Twin; the novelty of mixing electronic and acoustic has long since worn off. Coming as Penguin Cafe Orchestra did amid the clashes of punk and progressive rock—on a roster featuring meticulous new composers like Harold Budd and Gavin Bryars—the elder Jeffes’ playfulness was refreshing. Three albums in, it’s yet to be determined just where the younger Jeffes aims to take the group, but there’s a rigidity to The Imperfect Sea that approaches ordered desolation. | 2017-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | May 11, 2017 | 6.4 | 1af581d3-3dfc-42f6-8b44-f049622f8c25 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Haley Bonar’s Impossible Dream is a brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot. | Haley Bonar’s Impossible Dream is a brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot. | Haley Bonar: Impossible Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22187-impossible-dream/ | Impossible Dream | Haley Bonar is only in her early 30s, yet to hear her tell it on Impossible Dream, you’d think her best days are long behind her. She sings about herself—or her surrogate selves in her songs, not that she makes much of a distinction—as if she’s washed up and permanently faded. On the record’s stickiest line, she manages to take a two-fer dig at both her past and present selves: “I was impossible when I was beautiful.” It’s familiar territory for the Minnesota songwriter, whose lyrics often read like tragi-comic bumper-sticker slogans. “I wish I could date my former self,” she quipped on her last record, 2014’s Last War, “She’d be a fun girlfriend.”
That record was a reinvention of sorts, even if it’s unlikely that an artist as down-to-earth as Bonar would use a term as pretentious as “reinvention.” After several albums of personable if not always especially distinguished indie folk, Last War dialed up the tempos and the volume and set fire to whatever lingering idealism she’d been clinging to. Impossible Dream is a true sequel, another brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot.
There’s some irony in the album title, in that the dreams Bonar details really aren’t all that impossible: a family, a satisfying career, the respect of those close to her, a general sense of stability. But Bonar is mostly preoccupied with the forces that prevent us from realizing those dreams, be they the burden of outside expectations, the passage of time, and, in particular, the long shadow that our upbringings cast over us. “Hometown” opens the record with a failed attempt to escape that shadow, with an image of Bonar fleeing her small town, watching it burn as it shrinks in her rearview mirror. It should be a moment of triumph, but, she sings, “The further that I get, the deeper my regrets/Hometown goes wherever you go.” A song later, as everything goes to shit, she can’t escape a nagging thought: “Your mom was right/She’s always right.”
In spite of her fatalistic world view, Bonar largely keeps things light, singing over catchy new wave accompaniments in a punky Gwen Stefani pout. The record turns somber, though, when Bonar questions her own career path. For years each Bonar album came packaged with the same origin story: After being discovered by Low’s Alan Sparhawk, she impulsively dropped out of college to join the band on tour, and has dedicated her life to music ever since. Sure, it was just the guy from Low, and no, she didn’t go on to become Taylor Swift or anything, but there’s still a real element of fantasy in that story—every artist dreams of being discovered, and Bonar was.
It truly stings, then, to hear her poke holes in her own modest fairy tale. “Jealous Girls” is ostensibly about a woman rendered miserable by her own trust issues, yet its sympathies lie more with her philandering partner, a troubadour stuck touring through grim bars in unglamorous towns, presumably not unlike the one Bonar herself left behind. Who could blame an unfilled artist for finding reassurance in the company of women on the road? After all, Bonar sings, “They’re reminding you that you’ve still got youth.”
And that’s what Bonar’s songs always come down to: youth, that most fleeting of resources. The desire to make up for lost time is the driving force behind her songs, and it may also explain her own rock ’n’ roll makeover, which not coincidentally began around the time she became a parent. She also moonlights with a no-stakes dance-punk band on the side, Gramma’s Boyfriend, where she hits the same themes (“I live my broken dreams,” she sang on that group’s last release). From a less self-aware songwriter, these songs could scan as sour grapes, the grumblings of an artist bitter she never quite achieved the success and recognition that her early press seemed to promise was in reach, but they're filled with so much mischief and humor that they never feel truly bitter. For an album about things that haven’t worked out as she hoped, Impossible Dream finds her in mighty good spirits. | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Gndwire | August 4, 2016 | 6.8 | 1af5d063-da8d-405c-955c-7442d2fa6930 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Former Isis frontman Aaron Turner’s minimal-leaning metal trio takes on a new challenge: Keeping up with Japanese avant-garde pioneer Keiji Haino. | Former Isis frontman Aaron Turner’s minimal-leaning metal trio takes on a new challenge: Keeping up with Japanese avant-garde pioneer Keiji Haino. | Keiji Haino / Sumac: American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous to Look At Face on | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keiji-haino-sumac-american-dollar-bill-keep-facing-sideways-youre-too-hideous-to-look-at-face-on/ | American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous to Look At Face on | On their second album, 2016's What One Becomes, Sumac—the trio led by Hydra Head Records founder and former Isis frontman Aaron Turner—were heading towards a minimalist style that tested doom metal’s spatial limits. By teaming up with Japanese avant-garde pioneer Keiji Haino for American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous To Look at Face on, their first collaboration and Sumac’s third record, they’ve taken on a different kind of challenge. Haino is an outsize presence; with his visceral overdrive on guitar, vocals, or any instrument he picks up, he naturally takes over any project he’s on. On this five-track set, that means Sumac primarily functions as a rhythm section, a role in which they excel.
Sumac were already playing slow and loose with structures before, and Haino obliterates any sense of form. His orthodoxy is that there are no orthodoxies, and so Sumac’s lumbering doom becomes an endless outburst of wahs and scrapes. “What Have I Done?...”—a track whose full title runs to 43 words, and which gets split into two parts on opposite ends of this album—has some of the band’s most volatile clusters, rife with overlapping guitar freak-outs and escalating drums. The sound falls in line with Fushitsusha, Haino’s long-running free-rock band, at their most chaotic, and it also recalls the noisy, disassembled grindcore of Sissy Spacek and Burmese.
If Haino is Hendrix caterwauling through the multiverse, Sumac are the Experience bringing him back into our atmosphere, burning without disintegrating. And while Haino and Turner are the marquee names, it’s drummer Nick Yacyshyn who holds it all down. Sumac lets him break free from the steady d-beat hand needed for his other band, Vancouver hardcore group Baptists, loosening up without compromising intensity. That’s even more true on American Dollar Bill, where Yacyshyn has mastered the art of making what could be a complete mess come off as composed and intentional. He doesn’t fall apart, even when you wonder if he’s about to collapse from constant explosion.
For all his influence, Haino hasn’t completely remade Sumac in his image. Both parts of “I’m Over 137% a Love Junkie and Still It’s Not Enough” resemble Sumac’s more tranquil breaks, where Turner punctures lucid drones with squeaks and squalls. Over Haino’s spaced-out twang, they finally simmer. Of course, Haino doesn’t allow for too much peace, letting forth some of his most piercing shrieks when the rest of the band gets quiet. “A Love Junkie” is this collaboration at its most dreamy, yet even the heavier tone of most of the album has its own hazy, disorienting quality. Sumac’s other works have had definite ends and beginnings; American Dollar Bill’s all-enveloping calamity can drift in and out if you’re not listening intently. You don’t go to Haino—or Sumac, for that matter—for easy listening, anyhow.
Haino isn’t new to playing with metal bands: He’s recorded with Boris and plays with metal’s avant emissary, Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, in Nazoranai. His career has taken a parallel path to many metal groups, exploring new directions in loud, wailing guitars without adhering to rock structures, standards, or attitudes. Even as metal has come closer to the experimental world, he still feels quite far from them. American Dollar Bill bridges that gap, travelling through several extreme languages and still coming out with Haino’s iconoclastic touch. | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal | Thrill Jockey | March 6, 2018 | 7.3 | 1aface1d-186d-41f6-ab1a-b6119a87c6bc | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The Stockholm-based composer is best known for her pipe-organ compositions, but here, she uses trombone, bass clarinet, and ARP 2500 to explore the strange radiance of just intonation. | The Stockholm-based composer is best known for her pipe-organ compositions, but here, she uses trombone, bass clarinet, and ARP 2500 to explore the strange radiance of just intonation. | Kali Malone: Living Torch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kali-malone-living-torch/ | Living Torch | The pipe-organ purr that seems to open Living Torch, the absorbing new album by 28-year-old long-tone apostle Kali Malone, is a feint—a sly way of acknowledging her past, only to sidestep it. In the decade since Malone left the United States for Stockholm, she has amassed a staggeringly diverse résumé: bewitching shoegaze with rock trio Swap Babies, stately guitar hazes alongside friends Ellen Arkbro and Caterina Barbieri, and buzzing percussion-ensemble hypnosis on 2017’s Velocity of Sleep. Still, the magisterial pipe organ has been her most recognizable calling card, her trusted tool for exploring the strange radiance of just intonation.
When the first few notes of Living Torch rise, as if wafting beneath a cathedral’s towering spires, Malone seems to be picking up the meditative thread of her breakthrough pipe-organ epic, 2019’s The Sacrificial Code. But after a dozen seconds, the signal doubles, spreading like a drop of ink in water, until it recedes and returns, suddenly augmented by the muted refulgence of a sighing trombone. There is actually no pipe organ on Living Torch, which becomes clear enough during the subsequent 33 minutes of glowing, hissing, and crackling electronics and stunted brass fanfares.
The deceptive start is a reminder of Malone’s pivotal role in a vibrant if small scene that’s freeing the mighty pipe organ from its religious vows. But as Malone sculpts the sound of an electroacoustic ensemble into a piece that feels like a singular hymn to life and its end, the bulk of the sublime Living Torch is a testament to her music’s expressiveness and accessibility, no matter the instruments at hand. With happiness and sadness coiled in the same nebulous zone, this is the most charged and engrossing piece of her career.
Malone composed and recorded Living Torch during a two-year span at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA GRM), Paris’ foundational hub for the development of electronic music over the past seven decades. It was conceived for GRM’s iconic Acousmonium, an “orchestra” of dozens of articulated loudspeakers meant to surround listeners in meticulous sound, and premiered there in October 2021. The production process was byzantine, but the piece’s success rests on its complicated foundation. Malone wrote Living Torch in 11-odd limit just intonation, meaning every pitch is a ratio with a number that’s a multiple of 11. To get those sounds right, trombonist Mats Äleklint and bass clarinetist Isak Hedtjärn recorded their parts one note at a time, meticulously tuning each one to a computer-generated sawtooth sound wave.
Malone then stitched those bits into an extended tape piece threaded together by a variety of deeply textured drones. She indulged in the whisper and roar of the legendary ARP 2500 modular synthesizer—and not just any ARP 2500, but the unit belonging to Éliane Radigue, the nonagenarian composer who recently made her own titanic organ debut. She added the glittery hum of the Boîte à Bourdons, a newfangled French counterpart to the hurdy-gurdy and the Indian Shruti box. And, finally, Malone used a panoply of other approaches to synthesis, including one that invokes the gloom of a slowly plucked blues guitar, to shape the unexpected strata that give Living Torch such depth.
As inscrutable as Malone’s approach may seem, the results sound effortless, taking an uncommon route into familiar terrain: In Living Torch’s two movements, I hear a score for trying to hold yourself together in spite of life’s daily hardships and an ultimate awareness of your own mortality. The first side of Living Torch works like a quest for steady breath, to find and hold the center when it would be simpler to spin out. All those sounds—moaning horns, murmuring Boîte à Bourdons, hovering electronics—move independently, so that one element seems to be inhaling just as another is exhaling. Both total comfort and complete anxiety seem just one step away. The specific intervals linger between Western expectations of a major and minor chord; listening is like tottering on a scale counterbalanced by despair and delight.
That scale tilts unequivocally toward darkness during Living Torch’s second half, a 15-minute descent into the abyss. Malone uses the synthesized sound of a single guitar string to provide a rhythm, but its hangdog tone—imagine an unamplified bass, plucked with endless resignation—conjures a countdown to death. The surrounding harmonies suddenly become brittle, once-smooth tones covered in a thousand creases; the electronic hum that once purred now howls, as if screaming down any notion of survival. The sense of breathing, so central to the piece, slows until it vanishes. The final moments are like watching time-lapse footage of some beautiful flower, all soft greens and pinks and grays, lose its petals and wither into nothing.
Living Torch is the first release on either Recollection GRM or Portraits GRM since the death of the twin labels’ founder, Peter Rehberg, the musician and auteur whose Editions Mego imprint helped shape the course of modern electronic music. In 2012, Rehberg launched Recollection to dig through GRM’s archives and excavate its overlooked gems. Nearly a decade later, he started Portraits to give new generations of acolytes—Jim O’Rourke, Florian Hecker, and Okkyung Lee among them—access to the studio’s enormous resources. After Rehberg died from a heart attack at home in Berlin in July 2021, his crucial work seemed at risk. But the great French label Shelter Press agreed to give both series a new home closer to GRM’s Parisian headquarters, some 200 miles west in Rennes. Living Torch is a fitting and crucial next step, as Malone fulfills and expands the promise of her self-made early works.
Malone was only three months away from premiering Living Torch when Rehberg died, but it is hard not to hear it as an apt but unintentional eulogy. Even at its most dramatic and discordant, the music flickers doggedly with life, resisting the temptation to give in to dread. Malone has talked about how the quantitative restraints of just intonation can curb sentimental interpretations; in fact, she likes the buffer they provide. Living Torch, though, feels like a soft-hearted but honest testament to carrying on despite knowing how this all inevitably ends—one last roar, then a final slide into silence. | 2022-07-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Portraits GRM | July 12, 2022 | 8 | 1afcbf41-fa65-46fb-abae-5245ebffbf23 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
In the ’80s and ’90s, Alice Coltrane recorded and released an exquisite catalog of ashram music. These devotionals tell a story of womanhood and spirituality through the lens of a peerless composer. | In the ’80s and ’90s, Alice Coltrane recorded and released an exquisite catalog of ashram music. These devotionals tell a story of womanhood and spirituality through the lens of a peerless composer. | Alice Coltrane: World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23135-world-spirituality-classics-1-the-ecstatic-music-of-alice-coltrane-turiyasangitananda/ | World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda | Ashrams, physically speaking, are not easy to reach. Traditionally set at some remove, they are expanses of nature and silence and deliberate living that involve meditation, yoga, and communal meals. They instill a pleasant buzz. To visit the Sai Anantam Ashram, which Alice Coltrane founded and directed from 1983 until her death a decade ago, required a winding and mountainous Southern California drive; one could easily miss the gate. When you approached the entrance, as Franya J. Berkman wrote in her 2010 book Monument Eternal, the music of Coltrane and her devotees floated up from speakers set beside the dirt driveway.
Coltrane’s rare ashram tapes have long been mythical. In the mid-1970s—after a rich musical life steeped in Detroit churches and bebop piano, as an accompanist to her husband John and over a decade composing her own visionary cosmic jazz—Coltrane began to retreat from public and secular life. The pain of John’s sudden death from liver cancer in 1967 set this path. “I.H.S.,” from her album Huntington Ashram Monastery, stood for “I have suffered.” Coltrane—harpist, mother of four, Black girl Virgo, a woman who conferred with Stravinsky in her meditations—had shared a life with heaven incarnate. When heaven went away, she created heaven on Earth.
In 1969, Coltrane’s life was irrevocably changed when she heard the guru Swami Satchidananda speak at a New York church. Not long after, she moved her family from suburban Long Island to San Francisco and then finally Agoura Hills, Calif. There, she founded the ashram, wrote diffuse spiritual texts, appeared on public access television, and made four collections of exquisitely singular devotional music. Coltrane producer Ed Michel, in a 2002 feature for Wire magazine, recalled how she flummoxed her major label: “When Alice wanted to record the things which were essentially chanting by her students, the Warner Brothers project supervisor would say, ‘What’s this about? Why are you doing this to me?’ I’d reply, ‘I’m not doing this to you. We’re dealing with an artist who has a will of tungsten.’”
Coltrane self-released the songs on cassette, producing only a few hundred copies of each for ashram members: 1982’s Turiya Sings, 1987’s Divine Songs, 1990’s Infinite Chants, and 1995’s Glorious Chants. Turiya Sings—the finest among them, with appealingly distant strings, as if Coltrane were mystically levitating above her lo-fi arrangements—marked the first time she sang on tape (because, she said, God had asked her to). Made with the humble intentions of nourishing her community, Coltrane’s ashram music was naturally lost in time.
With the Luaka Bop label’s Ecstatic Music compilation, selections from the tapes are widely available at last. These sublime ensemble recordings reflect not just the result but the process of deep enlightenment. Coltrane, performing with ashram members, illuminates Hindu devotionals with meditative Indian instrumentation, a sparkling Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer, droning Wurlitzer lines, and full-bodied singing evoking the Detroit church choirs of her youth. This was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century bringing a completely unusual confluence of experience (classical training, Baptist church playing, jazz, improv) to prayer songs worshipping Krishna and Rama. With their widened musical scope, they feel more like prayers for humanity.
As Berkman wrote in Monument Eternal, “[Coltrane’s songs] are at once African American and South Asian. Their histories can be traced to religious revivals spanning India’s medieval period, as well as to cultural formations that coalesced in the New World among the descendants of African slaves.” Coltrane’s spiritual fusion music reflects the borderlessness that is manifest in her open religious philosophy of Universal Consciousness. It all made for sacred music that was as exacting as it was exalted. The songs are shaped with astonishing melodic nuance, precise rhythms, and irresistible harmonies, creating a new genre for her new consciousness. You might call it “ananda gospel.”
Hers is a voice that you want to believe could heal the entire world one person at a time. Its considerable power gets at the great consequence of this music. Coltrane sings over a dense cloud of sitar and drones on “Rama Rama” and over the majesty of her dazzling harp on “Er Ra.” Listening to “Om Shanti” is nothing less than an act of self-care. Once a deep cut from Divine Songs, it’s the anchor of this comp. Coltrane’s low, lucid voice—a mix of serenity and strength that is life-giving to behold—bursts as if pouring through clouds. According to the Vedas, “om” is the sound the universe made when it was created, and it continues on humming in our ever-expanding world today. Coltrane takes this primordial “om” and makes its reverberations feel visceral. This is music that will make you feel the air clarifying in your lungs, that will sweeten your breath.
Not unlike a meditation practice, the idea with chanting is to still the mind. You repeat lines of Sanskrit together to embody rhythms and create vibrations. Several tracks—“Om Rama,” “Rama Guru,” “Hari Narayan”—place Ecstatic Music into this collectivist context, performed by a large group, clapping and shaking bells, working into a forceful trance. Like any music deploying repetition to euphoric effect—hardcore, techno, minimalism, doom metal—chanting is transcendent and endless. The recordings here elucidate the magnetic pull of these utopian ashram environments; they are the opposite of the void. Even the nearly 11-minute “Journey in Satchidananda,” which bears little resemblance to Coltrane’s similarly-titled astral jazz masterpiece, contains a peculiar release despite its funereal atmosphere and operatic drama.
There is a man named Krishna Das who was once a member of the Blue Öyster Cult. Since the ’90s, he has been considered the greatest star of spiritual music like this in the West; in 2012, he was nominated for the Best New Age Album Grammy for Live Ananda, similarly recorded with seekers at an upstate New York ashram. That collection, while gripping and lovely, underscores what is so enrapturing about Coltrane’s. The Das album is a devout performance. Coltrane, however, is not reenacting the sacred. She is searching within and pushing a personal sacred out of herself, twisting it into new shapes with audacity, conviction, and grace. Refracting the music through the complexities of her past, Coltrane’s sacred songs contain the story of a woman who suffered and survived, who led avant-garde ensembles and towering epiphanies, whose curiosity never left her.
I wonder about the people on these recordings with Coltrane. What led them to the ashram? What were they seeking? How long had they been looking? In the course of a human life, the search is never-ending. But here, in one hour, is the sound of a woman’s realized higher purpose. Ecstatic Music is her corporeal joy, and clarifies what the rest of her catalog suggests: Alice Coltrane is religion. Once you’ve felt it, the ashram is in you. | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Luaka Bop | May 10, 2017 | 8.8 | 1b00631d-0f6d-44cd-921d-89c72fbe33f8 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The Bay Area turntablist and producer delivers a mammoth double album—half instrumentals, half rap collaborations—aimed at the decade’s widespread feeling of creeping dread. | The Bay Area turntablist and producer delivers a mammoth double album—half instrumentals, half rap collaborations—aimed at the decade’s widespread feeling of creeping dread. | DJ Shadow: Our Pathetic Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-shadow-our-pathetic-age/ | Our Pathetic Age | DJ Shadow has long been obsessed with dystopian landscapes, and since the late 1990s, the Bay Area turntablist and hip-hop producer (aka Josh Davis) has released plenty of electronic music grounded in apocalyptic themes. But his ambitious new album Our Pathetic Age isn’t rooted in science fiction; it’s intended as a reflection of the now.
When announcing the record back in September, Davis spoke of a wide-ranging concept reflecting a world plagued by “rampant homelessness” and “generational poverty.” Citing institutional failure, widespread feelings of anger and confusion, and an entertainment culture grounded in distraction, he offered his mammoth double album—the first half all instrumental, the second dedicated to rap collaborations—as an attempt to find “light in darkness” and bring it to a generation seemingly glued to their devices.
The album’s opener, “Nature Always Wins,” appears to represent the sheer noise of social media, with Davis stirring up wave upon wave of gloomy sounds—maybe synths, maybe metal guitars—that conjure visions of electrodes flickering up a fiber-optic cable. The mood is ominous and sometimes chaotic: “Slingblade” attacks minor-key synths with stabbing snares, and “Intersectionality” whips new-wave arpeggios into a frenzy, capturing the ferocious back-and-forth energy of a fiery online debate.
As promised, the music flips between darkness and light: The funkier, euphoric bursts of bass driving the much more colorful “Rosie” and “Beauty, Power, Motion, Life, Work, Chaos, Law” prove that Davis hasn’t completely lost his optimism. But it’s a shame these lighter moments aren’t more frequent. The music really soars only when Davis stops trying to channel the paralyzing bleakness of the surveillance state and allows a bit more spring into his step.
The shifts in tone on the second disc are frequent. On the weeded-out summertime gem “Taxin’,” Dave East warmly reflects on climbing out of the “gutter,” while Run the Jewels’ El-P and Killer Mike endearingly pay tribute to their mothers on the strong “Kings & Queens,” a lush, soulful shot of nostalgia. But on “C.O.N.F.O.R.M,” Shadow’s old Quannum associates Gift of Gab and Lateef the Truth Speaker, along with relative newcomer Infamous Taz, compare life online to The Matrix (yawn), lament that no one memorizes phone numbers anymore, and rail against internet grocery stores. And “Rain on Snow,” featuring Wu-Tang philosophers Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, and Raekwon reflecting on the modern world, boasts a beat so dated—its distorted bass and turbo-charged synths are a sound Shadow has been recycling since UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction—that you find yourself waiting for one of them to start rapping about the Y2K bug.
Shadow deserves credit for spotlighting so many enigmatic underground characters, something he has done throughout his career, but the overabundance of ideas and conflicting styles quickly becomes jarring. Our Pathetic Age reflects the way much of Shadow’s post-Endtroducing material has lacked structure, with the producer happy to throw ideas at the page, even if many of them don’t stick. It’s ironic that the album’s scrambled nature might also be a casualty of the information overload of the always-online world that DJ Shadow set out to critique. Perhaps that’s the point, but it means this album, a whopping 91 minutes long, can be a real slog to sit through. After a while, it’s hard to resist the urge to simply log off.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mass Appeal | November 25, 2019 | 6.1 | 1b03688f-1497-4b4c-a09f-45fbb237619c | Thomas Hobbs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thomas-hobbs/ | |
Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman's new EP White Sands combines Sandman's scalpel-wielding deadpan with the production of Paul White (Danny Brown's Old). White Sands is a self-contained universe with a lot to explore. | Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman's new EP White Sands combines Sandman's scalpel-wielding deadpan with the production of Paul White (Danny Brown's Old). White Sands is a self-contained universe with a lot to explore. | Homeboy Sandman: White Sands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19034-homeboy-sandman-white-sands/ | White Sands | If indie-rap heads weren't sure what to make of Homeboy Sandman as the calendar flipped over to 2012, they've had so many opportunities to figure him out that anybody still left behind has just about lost. We're talking six releases of note in just over 24 months—Subject: Matter, Chimera, First of a Living Breed, Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent, and All That I Hold Dear all dropped through 2013, with White Sands, his first release of 2014, making it half a dozen. If you've ever tried to commit yourself to getting into Sandman's dryly incisive style—all scalpel-wielding deadpan and internally knotted wit and ha-ha-wait one-liners—there're more fresh entry points than Sonny Corleone post-tollbooth.
But if you're not converted yet, why not go for the EP produced by the man who helped get Danny Brown's “Wonderbread” permanently lodged in countless listener's brains? Paul White's contributions to Old authoritatively put White on the radar, but his years' worth of previous work included a couple collaborations with Homeboy Sandman that already set a positive precedent. Sandman's White collabs on the Chimera EP breathed vividly through minor-key Michael Mann glow (“Look Out”) and VHS-fidelity late-summer soul murk (“They Can't Hang (Word to the Mother)”). And his spot the next year waxing anxious over a stargazing shuffle beat on White's Watch the Ants endcap “Find a Way” made it clear they had a mutually beneficial set of styles going.
Hence *White Sands—*even the title's slick wordplay makes this team-up seem preordained. Sandman's clear-eyed, clinical yet humane dissection of daily experience benefits from a similarly subdued production that holds just a few ripples of detectable tension beneath. White's sound here is the kind of thing worth conjuring up when attempting to figure out if there's such a thing as a Stones Throw house style: you get obscuro-soul beats filtered through quaver and hiss on some old-cassette shit, sawn-off basslines and snares that sound like baseball bats against padded walls, and vocals pitched up until they sound just the right side of bewildered. That, plus there's a goofy streak somewhere in there. I'm sure there are slower fadeouts than the dying-battery nod-off of “Fat Belly", but none I can think of that're accompanied by enthusiastic food crunching noises.
Granted, those crunching noises come after a bunch of verses relating to Sandman's vegan/organic/health food diet, which reclaims almond milk and lentils from hippie-dippie yuppie-shopper punchline status and flips it through his own eat-right lens in the tradition of A Tribe Called Quest's “Ham 'n' Eggs”. From there on out there's ample proof that Sandman's blend of straight-up rhyming, conceptual thrust, and worldbuilding storytelling is yet again on point. In doses of little interconnected one-liner details, unspooling over “I Saw a World” or “Bad Meaning Good", his negative-space-heavy hard-stop flow lets the snapshots come into focus. Bigger-picture stories feel like they could go on for another half-dozen verses—there's devastating depth to the broken woman depicted at the core of “Echoes” (“Her mother once beside herself with worry/ Now she wander right beside her none the wiser/ She didn't recognize her”). Sure, White Sands is something of a self-contained universe, another one-producer release in the tradition of "EL RNTC" collab Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent and the M. Slago-helmed All That I Hold Dear. But it's a universe with a lot to explore. | 2014-02-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-02-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | February 25, 2014 | 7.3 | 1b0e7d8d-a298-4f5e-8963-81f3a9ac1193 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
One half of Clipse, and the only guy remotely resembling a street rapper at Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music imprint, offers his first commercially released solo album, a collection of ruthlessly professional rap music. | One half of Clipse, and the only guy remotely resembling a street rapper at Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music imprint, offers his first commercially released solo album, a collection of ruthlessly professional rap music. | Pusha T: Fear of God II: Let Us Pray | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16010-fear-of-god-ii/ | Fear of God II: Let Us Pray | As a solo artist, Pusha-T has a home in popular rap, but that doesn't mean he also isn't out of place. After an infamously torturous decade or so in the industry, Pusha now resides comfortably at G.O.O.D. Music, the imprint run by Kanye West that most notably houses guys like Common, Kid Cudi, and Big Sean. Pusha is the only guy remotely resembling a street rapper at the label, and though it's hard to figure out exactly what role he plays in the context of the label or even the genre writ large, it's a marriage that probably makes more sense than not. The days of Pusha, Drug Kingpin are long gone and have been for a while.
Maybe the rapper that Pusha most resembles now is Rick Ross. Though Pusha's cocaine-dealing past is bona fide (or close enough that no one bothers to question it), his identity as a drug dealer is now merely an imagined idea, a cachet that he rides but one that's far back in the rearview. The act of selling drugs, and the burdens and spoils that come with it, rarely enters his music anymore, and when it does, it rings as hollow as Ross' claims that you can call him up right now on his iPhone and score some dope. But of course it doesn't really matter if Pusha and Ross slip into personas either old or imagined, because a lack of proper reality or authenticity in rap has never dragged down music that was good in the first place. Where the Pusha of old was a witty and smart street hawk, the Pusha of the last five years or so has mirrored Kanye's and Ross' obsessions with luxury. If anything, it's in his ability to bridge the gap between those two rappers that Pusha finds his identity; he is as comfortable rapping about a yacht that a drug dealer might own as he is rapping about a scarf that a fashion designer might own.
But as Pusha has inched his way into the elite of rap, his music (including the material he recorded with his brother as Clipse after their 2006 album Hell Hath No Fury) has become exponentially less vital. He raps about luxury because he's a rich and famous rapper, and that's what rich and famous rappers do, and while there's nothing inherently wrong with that move, it's decidedly dulled the impact of his writing. Pusha has always carried himself with the bravado and ego of a star, and that was galvanizing when in his early years he played the role of a dealer-turned-rapper. But as a regular rapper who pops bottles in penthouses with a bunch of other rappers, that egotism has become commonplace, if not off-putting.
Yet here's the funny thing about Fear of God II, his first commercially released solo album: It proffers that, well, maybe none of that even matters. Pusha's rapping still noticeably pales in comparison to his peak years, and it would be hard to argue that there is any justification for the album's existence beyond Pusha needing to do something-- yet the stakes are so low that the sheer listenability of the album can sneak up on you. Its quality is mostly a testament to Pusha's connections and his ear for beats, but the rapping is sufficiently competent enough that the album never drags, which is less of a backhanded compliment than it might read.
It doesn't seem like much thought was put into sequencing (French Montana shows up on two straight tracks) or thematic cohesion ("Feeling Myself", the album's one slick R&B song, is followed up by the metallic jitter of the HHNF throwback "Raid"), but that strangely only intensifies the strength of the album, which is that Pusha collected seven or eight great tracks and then mostly got the hell out of the way. The process of releasing a rap album through a major label is so arduous now that albums often arrive in stores pushing 20 total songs with almost the same number of guests. Fear of God II's brevity is both refreshing and crucial to its success, and it likely speaks to Pusha's self-confidence that he felt comfortable clipping the tracklist at 12.
This is ruthlessly professional rap music, and though that might seem like the baseline for releasing a major-label rap album, 2011 has been an awful year so far big-box releases. Pusha may be a fish out of water performing on a weepy Kanye ballad or being in a crew with John Legend, but releasing a major-label album with consistent rapping, great beats, a rational guest list, and a sane running time qualifies as a minor miracle right now. | 2011-11-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Decon / Re-Up / G.O.O.D. Music | November 8, 2011 | 7.1 | 1b1f2b3a-09f9-49e9-a21f-47242d2c25fc | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The Toronto band returns with a supremely hooky, slightly more polished album about harnessing dread to make music to harness dread to. | The Toronto band returns with a supremely hooky, slightly more polished album about harnessing dread to make music to harness dread to. | PUP: THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pup-the-unraveling-of-puptheband/ | THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND | There’s a visual gag in A Mighty Wind, the 2003 Christopher Guest mockumentary, that charts the career downturn of Mitch Cohen, a fictitious ’60s folkie played by Eugene Levy. As a talking head recounts Mitch’s breakdown following the dissolution of his folk duo, images of his troubled solo records flash onscreen. Their bleak titles and artwork succinctly capture the songwriter’s deteriorating mental state: Cry for Help, followed by Calling It Quits.
Look at PUP’s titles in quick succession—The Dream Is Over, Morbid Stuff, This Place Sucks Ass—and the effect is similar: a portrait of a band spiraling into exhaustion and despair, except with a cathartic grin that lights up during their shout-along gang vocals. No other punk band has taken so much glee in forecasting their own demise. Just as prestige filmmakers love making films about the anguish of making films, PUP is a band that revels in playing songs about the sheer misery of being in a band. Now, half a decade after starting their breakthrough album with a joyful ditty about wanting to murder your bandmate, the Toronto band brings us a supremely hooky, slightly more polished album about harnessing dread to make music to harness dread to.
As usual, the title says it all: THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND. With its jokey piano interludes that satirize a squabbling band’s “board of directors,” the record plays like a concept album about the mental and social deterioration wrought by a decade spent in a moderately successful punk band.
Frontman Stefan Babcock is in his mid-thirties now—“too old for teen angst, too young to be washed,” as he shouts over the grinding, post-hardcore riffage of a song called “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy.” He lashes out at friends who haven’t listened to new music since college (“Four Chords”), feels overwhelmed by stage anxiety (“Relentless”), and is so consumed by self-doubt that he projects it onto an inanimate object. Witness “Matilda,” which Babcock wrote from the perspective of a once-beloved, now-neglected guitar that he used to play at every PUP show. “I thought we had more time/I thought I could make it up somehow,” he sings. It’s a goofy premise, and yet Babcock can’t help but imbue the track’s jangly melodicism with a sincere sense of rejection and pain. This is quintessential PUP: Everything’s a joke, until it isn’t.
THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is PUP’s most expensive-sounding album to date—instead of the basement where they made Morbid Stuff, they recorded in a mansion belonging to indie superproducer Peter Katis—but it doesn’t compromise their perennial underdog status. You might miss the four-dudes-in-a-room stomp of The Dream Is Over, but there are some worthy expansions of the PUP sound here. The group successfully harnesses 808 beats for “Robot Writes a Love Song” and flirts with skittering synthpop on the unabashedly tuneful “Habit”; “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy” recalls Nation of Ulysses with its anarchic saxophone solo. Those piano interludes grow tiresome, like a mid-2000s rap skit whose joke wears thin on repeat listens, but they are mercifully brief.
And when THE UNRAVELING goes hard, it goes hard. PUP’s business is still making feel-bad vibes feel good, and it seems fair to say that business is booming. “Totally Fine” manages to contort “Lately I’ve started to feel/Like I’m slowly dying!” into one of the year’s most screamable hooks, replete with disturbingly joyous backing harmonies. “Waiting” vacillates between metallic riffs worthy of Evil Empire and a chorus that overflows with pop-punk euphoria.
These songs capture a big part of PUP’s talent: making music that captures the sentiment of depression yet never succumbs to its lethargy or listlessness. This has always been one of the animating paradoxes of PUP’s songwriting. As Babcock put it in a recent band bio, “There’s only so many times you can write a song about how much you hate yourself before you write a song about how fucking good you are at hating yourself.”
And Babcock really is good at it. As ever, PUP’s songs tend to summon emotions that begin with the word “self” followed by a hyphen: self-hatred, self-doubt, self-deprecation, self-destruction. On the darkly funny anti-anthem “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy,” he mocks an ex-musician who took a job selling insurance before leaning into the gut-punch of a kicker: "Give me two more years/Let me know if they're hiring.”
Still, Babcock knows he can’t quit this. During a surprisingly tender lull in the song’s aggression, he admits, “There’s no place I’d rather be instead/Even though everybody here is fucked in the head.” Broken and exhausted, PUP arrives at some central truth: The only thing more miserable than a life in music is a life without it. | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Little Dipper / Rise | April 4, 2022 | 7.8 | 1b26945e-76a7-4cbc-9445-1829fdee9356 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Both naggingly familiar and singularly odd, Zomby’s previously unreleased 2008 album finds him putting his own quixotic stamp on grime’s classic eskibeat sound. | Both naggingly familiar and singularly odd, Zomby’s previously unreleased 2008 album finds him putting his own quixotic stamp on grime’s classic eskibeat sound. | Zomby: Mercury’s Rainbow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zomby-mercurys-rainbow/ | Mercury’s Rainbow | The London producer Zomby may have one eye trained firmly on the future, but he has never been one to neglect the past. His 2008 debut album, Where Were U In ’92?, was one of rave revivalism’s first major statements. Mercury’s Rainbow, an album recorded “over an intense couple of weeks” somewhere around the release of his debut (but only now seeing the light of day), finds Zomby revisiting another of his musical touchstones: the glacial eskibeat sound that Wiley pioneered in the early 2000s on tracks like “Eskimo,” “Ice Rink,” and “Ground Zero,” which drained UK garage of all its warmth, replacing heat with minimal synth melodies, corporeal bass, and sparse percussive touches.
Zomby has made no secret of his admiration for Wiley, with whom he eventually worked, in 2015, on “Step 2001.” It is tempting to see Mercury’s Rainbow as a simple homage to eskibeat, a reverent cousin to Where Were U In ’92?’s throwback rave. Wiley used a limited (if hugely distinctive) sonic palette on his eski recordings, leaning heavily on the Korg Triton’s Gliding Squares preset along with percussive clicks, clinks, and stomps that were rumoured to be taken from a Nintendo “Ice Hockey” game (but which FACT later located on E-mu’s Planet Phatt unit). Zomby avails himself of many of these sounds on Mercury’s Rainbow, with the “ice puck” clicks on tracks like “Choke” and “Static” enough to send most early-2000s ravers into Proustian revery. The vast open spaces and minimal makeup, with drum sounds replaced by a rhythmic array of thuds, taps, and clicks, are clearly indebted to Wiley. And throughout, Zomby uses the eski formula of simple bass-synth riffs that continuously evolve, jumping up and down octaves or shifting in tone.
But there is far more to Mercury’s Rainbow than mere imitation. While Zomby may borrow elements from classic eski, he also throws in new sounds, creating his own distinctive sonic palette, from the strident “yaw” vocal sample that lends percussive weight to 15 songs (Zomby calls it “a primal chant”) to the echoing splash on “Poison,” “Waterfall of Ice,” and “Patina.” Reusing the same sounds might be anathema to some electronic-music producers, but here it helps draw the album together, making for an intense, immersive listen. The celestial electronic experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop also feel like an influence: the astral synth effects on tracks like “Delvaux” and “Horizon” could easily have soundtracked “Dr. Who”’s excursions into the icy darkness of outer space.
In 2008, Zomby had only been on the scene for a short while, and here he introduces some of the production quirks that would mark his later output. The brief, unexpected variation he makes on a riff in “Choke,” some 47 seconds in, pulls the rug out from underneath the unsuspecting listener—a trick he he would later employ at length on 2011 mini album Nothing. This is music that feels handmade, not machine-painted, loose rather than quantized, and the effect is head-spinning, full of shifting themes that fracture, dissolve, and remold like ice sculptures refreezing in new and unsettling shapes. When an idea has run its course Zomby simply stops, and the 16 tracks on Mercury’s Rainbow rattle by in just over 38 minutes.
Despite its minimalism, Mercury’s Rainbow sees Zomby give full reign to his considerable melodic skills, constructing both nagging riffs that elevate the song (as on the title track, “Atoms,” and “Silver Ocean”) and frequently beautiful melodies, such as the ethereal violin sound in the background of “Tet5uo” that teases the song’s sliding synth riff. These elements come together on the wonderful “Waterfall of Ice,” which combines an eerily beautiful, proto-“Stranger Things” melody with a moody descending bass riff, “ice puck” clicks, and a lone, angry hi-hat hiss.
Mercury’s Rainbow is both naggingly familiar and singularly odd. Had it been released in 2009, it might have been celebrated as a companion piece to Where Were U In ’92?; had it come out in 2014, it would have sat well with the emerging “weightless” sound of Mumdance and Logos. In 2018 it feels strangely out of time: a decade-old work by a forward-thinking producer paying homage to a musical genre that he has long since abandoned. But maybe this incongruity is appropriate. Zomby has long followed his own path, one occasionally out of step with musical fashion. Mercury’s Rainbow is both a fascinating example of British dance music’s ability to regurgitate its past and a telling work of Zomby’s singular talent. | 2018-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Modern Love | January 2, 2018 | 7.7 | 1b296bf0-1542-4a05-8c73-bf9e9d40176e | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The French-Canadian DJ Philippe Aubin-Dionne debuts his long-overdue love letter to the dance floor. | The French-Canadian DJ Philippe Aubin-Dionne debuts his long-overdue love letter to the dance floor. | Jacques Greene: Feel Infinite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23010-feel-infinite/ | Feel Infinite | Feel Infinite may be the debut Jacques Greene album, but it’s hardly the first we’ve heard from the project’s 27-year-old mastermind, Philippe Aubin-Dionne. Since his breakout single on the 2010 Night Slugs Allstars compilation, the French-Canadian DJ and producer has graduated from throwing parties in his native Montreal to touring the world with a steady stream of singles and EPs on indie dance labels.
It might seem odd to release your debut LP seven years into an ascendant career. However, for a working club DJ, most money is made on the live circuit and most fans are accustomed to getting all their music for free, so it’s considered a luxury to have the time and resources to produce a full-length. Aubin-Dionne’s contemporaries Kaytranada and Kingdom followed this route, making late, full narratives reflective of their identities.
On Jacques Greene’s first LP, the narrative is of an introvert who’s found human connections in the club; he’s found an escape not from reality, but from loneliness. It’s very much of the Montreal scene that birthed his career, one that was inclusive geographically. The Turbo Crunk parties he threw with Rob Squire, Hadji Baraka, and other dance peers were defined by border-busting beats build on Southern bounce, Bay Area hyphy, and Missy Elliott, all laced with a cappella rapping.
The songs on Feel Infinite are colorful and melodic, built on simple structures. He uses a minimalist palette—often just a drum track, synthesizer, and vocal sample. Seemingly rooted in house and techno, and punctuated with R&B vocals, the album plays with the building blocks of UK bass music and gives it his own spin. Feel Infinite is the work of an internet autodidact, one who’s culled his collection from peer-to-peer filesharing and admits it freely; he’s a music nerd who follows rabbit holes on Wikipedia and taught himself modular synthesizers by reading message boards. His crate-digging goes down online, from sampling random strangers’ tunes on YouTube to recording an exotic dancer’s vocals on her smartphone, and those samples are at the heart of Feel Infinite.
From the first deep breaths of opener “Fall” to the warbled wobble of “Afterglow,” voices set the emotional tone for the entire album. Aubin-Dionne is gifted at chopping up R&B vocals on top of dancefloor thumpers, and more than ever, he seems to be aware of its emotional impact. Feel Infinite is an openly tender album, meant to evoke the liberation of sharing music in a communal space even as you listen at home, alone, with headphones. It’s his 11-song love letter to the club, the place he spent his formative years.
Though it’s no longer the premier sales unit it once was—and for dance music DJs, maybe it never was—the full-length album still holds enough cache for Aubin-Dionne to put his touring schedule on hold to hunker down and record it. He tried once before, with the sessions that would ultimately become Phantom Vibrate, but it felt forced, like he was trying too hard to make something serious. That EP felt cold and isolated, most evident in its distant, hollow vocals. He’s escaped that trap by focusing on the self-contained universes in which he’s grown into an adult: the club. Feel Infinite is warm and inviting, a taut mix of R&B love songs to finding your true self on the floor. | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | March 27, 2017 | 7.6 | 1b355bde-44d4-40ef-bce4-7951f7ecbaea | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
The Norwegian producer's latest album, prophetically inspired by Japanese nuclear power plants, is his best since 1997 ambient milestone Substrata. | The Norwegian producer's latest album, prophetically inspired by Japanese nuclear power plants, is his best since 1997 ambient milestone Substrata. | Biosphere: N-Plants | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15626-n-plants/ | N-Plants | In early February, Biosphere's Geir Jenssen made an album inspired by the architecture and potential instability of Japan's nuclear power plants. A month later, a huge earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. It's healthy to be skeptical about such claims to prescience, but dissembling isn't Jenssen's style: Clearly stated intentions and ideas are a defining feature of the Norwegian ambient-house producer's decades-long career. Plus, N-Plants' sleek contours and foreboding atmosphere easily bear out his theme. Having noted the eerie coincidence, we can dispense with it and let the best Biosphere album since 1997's definitive Substrata stand on its own.
Widely regarded as an ambient milestone, Substrata represented a thoughtful dilettante hitting the reset switch. A period of fertile miscellany followed, from the processed Debussy loops of Shenzhou to the long-tone sci-fi marathon Autour de la Lune. Like Substrata, N-Plants is both a consummation and a palate-cleanser. Fully in ambient-house mode, Jenssen fashions together hazy drones, filtered synthesizers, microhouse percussion, and haunting vocal samples over classically plumb lines. Like Kate Simko's 2009 soundtrack for The Atom Smashers, the album can evoke particles of energy swarming through elegant, hulking metal curves. But this one-time archaeology student has never given up his field's patient curiosity and long view, and N-Plants can't be fully constrained by modern context. Ages of ice and stone drift through it, and the Arctic Circle is a looming presence.
Each process on N-Plants, be it a glinting synthesizer motif or a low-scudding bass line, logically catalyzes the next. Where Substrata delved deeper and deeper, N-Plants glides over level, endlessly scrolling surfaces. The tracks don't essentially change. At most, they metastasize, as on "Sendai-1", where a synthesizer plays iridescently through an aquatic atmosphere; at minimum, cycles of loops perpetually revolve, as on "Genkai-1". Either way, blissful hypnosis ensues. N-Plants is a master craftsman's reaffirmation of a fundamental but lapsed tenet of electronic ambient: You set up a conversation between the machines, and then you step out of the way. | 2011-07-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Touch | July 13, 2011 | 8 | 1b390797-4f0d-4f2a-8236-41e0b61f8873 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Logic’s latest mixtape is blessedly lighter on its toes and more entertaining than his overambitious albums, doing far more with far less. | Logic’s latest mixtape is blessedly lighter on its toes and more entertaining than his overambitious albums, doing far more with far less. | Logic: Bobby Tarantino II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logic-bobby-tarantino-ii/ | Bobby Tarantino II | If Logic could get out of his head, he’d be doing a victory lap right now. Last year, the Maryland rapper landed the biggest hit of his career with “1-800-273-8255,” an anti-suicide No. 1 hit that quite likely saved lives, considering the National Suicide Prevention Hotline reported that calls spiked after its release. The song was PSA-pop at its most critic-proof—limp art that did tangible good.
But Logic also recognizes the danger in being typecast as the “suicide song” guy. So, on his boisterous, concertedly fun mixtape Bobby Tarantino II, Logic is out to prove he’s so more than just an advocate for entirely uncontroversial causes. On the mixtape’s opening sketch, Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty make a distinction between “Mixtape Logic” and “Album Logic,” while poking some light fun at the rapper’s more sanctimonious tendencies. “I’m not in the mood for a message about how I can be whatever I want or, like, oooohhh, equality,” Rick rants. “I want some shit I can turn up.” It’s a wise moment of self-effacement that cleans the slate for Logic to actually get a little loose.
Bobby Tarantino II follows in the long tradition of a mixtape as a branding exercise, where artists try to shore up the love of die-hard fans and atone for the A&R-directed sins of their commercial albums, be they treacly R&B features or awkward EDM crossovers. Yet while Logic is far from the first rapper to have it both ways—and far from the first rapper to put out a “mixtape” on a major label and have it available on all streaming platforms—his task is a particularly tall order. Once you’ve gone full Macklemore, you can’t walk all that sanctimony back. Especially for those who only know Logic from his PG singles, it’s deeply weird hearing the “I don’t wanna die” guy rap about crucifying pussy in that same innocent, puppy-dog voice.
He’s good at this stuff, though—much better at it than he is at preachy message rap. He stacks the tape with polished, dramatic productions and understands how to use his voice against them. On “Contra,” he tames a ferocious trap beat, and he parries his way through “44 More” with a capable impression of beast-mode Kendrick. He closes the chest-beating “Yuck” with the mixtape’s greatest flex, a voicemail from Elton John, who calls to propose a collaboration. The entire tape is magnitudes fleeter, lighter on its toes, and more entertaining than any of his bloated, overambitious albums have been. Logic carries his weight on every track, even peppering the potentially sleepy Wiz Khalifa feature “Indica Badu” with some flashy double-time flourishes.
Is it cynical to pack albums with shameless pablum and then save the heat for a project like this? To his credit, Logic buys in so completely on Bobby Tarantino II that it doesn’t cross the mind much. Sure, the mixtape often feels like a pop&b genre exercise, and even at his best, Logic never shakes the sense that he’s playing on somebody else’s terrain—on tracks like “Midnight” and “BoomTrap Protocol” his writing process seems to boil down to closing his eyes and asking, “What would Drake do?” But as parrots go, Logic is a skilled one, and Bobby Tarantino II makes the case that he’d be better off putting his world-saving ambitions in check more often. The less he’s trying to do, the better he sounds doing it. | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | March 15, 2018 | 6.7 | 1b3efcc7-d29d-4889-a2c4-a8ba7e2528c5 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Made up of acoustic instrumentation and primitive electronics, the Montreal-based psych-folk auteur’s latest navigates a world of discord with wide-eyed optimism and withering wit. | Made up of acoustic instrumentation and primitive electronics, the Montreal-based psych-folk auteur’s latest navigates a world of discord with wide-eyed optimism and withering wit. | Yves Jarvis: The Zug | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yves-jarvis-the-zug/ | The Zug | The evolution of Jean-Sébastien Audet—the artist formerly known as Un Blonde and currently answering to Yves Jarvis—has been governed by a curious contradiction. As the Montreal-based psych-folk auteur has reined in the crazy-quilt sprawl of earlier releases for more compact, half-hour statements, his songs have become more gloriously overstuffed. Like his previous solo effort, 2020’s Sundry Rock Song Stock, The Zug presents itself as a conventionally scaled rock album of robust two-minute tunes that push Jarvis further away from the days when he would dish out 30-second avant-gospel field recordings or linger in a Tropicália oasis for eight minutes. But he’s not so much editing ideas out as folding them into one another, compacting his beautiful mess of thoughts and sounds into tidy little boxes until they’re liable to burst.
Throughout The Zug, Audet imagines your favorite ’60s psych-rock artists going on their ashram retreats and never coming back, liberating themselves from all sense of pop song logic and crowd-pleasing obligation. He delights in transmuting the familiar into the foreign: propelled by tense acoustic strums and his double-tracked vocals, “At the Whims” could almost pass for a vintage CSNY cut—at least until the song is infected by electronic squelches, looming waves of feedback, and a jazzy guitar solo that sounds like it’s being played on a backwards loop. Audet’s melodies are bubblegum in the truest sense of the word, their defined shapes gradually mangled and stretched into infinite directions. Though “Prism Through Which I Perceive” may only clock in at a minute, it remolds itself on a line-by-line basis. While its opening salvo suggests a cosmic classic-rock hymn, it quickly downshifts into a quirky prog waltz and back again, like two different songs battling for squatter’s rights of the same vinyl groove.
Though it draws from a familiar palette of acoustic instrumentation and primitive electronics, The Zug is greatly distinguished from Audet’s previous work by its restless sense of rhythm, which lends even the album’s most scatterbrained moments—like the loopy organ doodle “Gestalt” and stuttering kitchen-sink jam “Thrust”—a frantic forward momentum. But where songs like “Projection” effortlessly fuse meditative folk and hyperactive funk like a campfire Can, “What?” sees Audet gesture toward the dancefloor, melding frisky grooves, ecstatic harmonies, and lysergic guitar solos like a pawn-shop Prince.
For all of its shape-shifting musical abandon, The Zug finds Audet delivering his philosophical musings with an ever-enhanced focus. At this point, he’s become the anti-Kurt Vile: While both artists use self-referential meta-songwriting to stake out their zen state in a volatile world, Audet forsakes zoned-out hypno-jams for bursts of quiet chaos that starkly illuminate the fine line between inner peace and external turmoil. “We’re out on the fringe/Making the best of this flight,” he sings at the start of “At the Whims,” and over the course of the record, he deftly navigates a world of disinformation and discord with a combination of wide-eyed optimism and withering wit. “Endless Tube” is a string-sweetened ode to both the wonders and horrors of the internet, while “On the Line” uses gospel aesthetics to skewer puritans whose conception of freedom doesn’t go beyond the right to be unrepentant assholes.
But while The Zug tilts toward topicality, its most fertile subject remains Audet himself. The album’s greatest moment of clarity comes with “Bootstrap Jubilee,” a breezy origin-story anthem that both celebrates Audet’s work ethic, while acknowledging the family, friends, musical communities, and privilege that abetted his ascent. Audet may be the archetypal home-recording hermit operating in splendid isolation, but his music is ultimately a vehicle for connection, inviting you to savor the people and places that keep you sane. | 2022-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | May 23, 2022 | 7.6 | 1b3f81a1-b67f-435e-9b4d-b2827dd3dd8e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was the Twin Peaks of its time. Just as\n\ viewers in 1990 ... | Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was the Twin Peaks of its time. Just as\n\ viewers in 1990 ... | Bobbie Gentry: Chickasaw County Child: The Artistry of Bobbie Gentry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3422-chickasaw-county-child-the-artistry-of-bobbie-gentry/ | Chickasaw County Child: The Artistry of Bobbie Gentry | Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was the Twin Peaks of its time. Just as viewers in 1990 asked who killed Laura Palmer, listeners in 1967 debated what the narrator and Billie Joe McAllister dropped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Was it a stillborn baby? A murder weapon? Drug paraphernalia? Was it her doll, as the 1976 movie version claimed? Or was it, as writer Ron Carlson theorized in The Oxford American, our collective loss of innocence as the Vietnam War raged and a counterculture surged? Originally intended as a B-side to "Mississippi Delta", "Ode to Billie Joe" was an unlikely hit: With a decidedly Southern Gothic atmosphere, the song unfolds mostly at a dinner table, builds a mystery around the narrator's unspecified relationship with Billie Joe, and touches on suicide, home cooking, and the plight of rural farmers, as Gentry's guitar and Jimmie Haskell's strings swirl around the words like eddies in swampy southern creeks.
"Ode to Billy Joe" wasn't Gentry's only hit-- just the one that's still popular today, canonized by K-Tel and various cover versions both blatantly ironic and boringly sincere. Shout! Factory's new collection, Chickasaw County Child: The Artistry of Bobbie Gentry, seeks to erase that one-hit-wonder stigma by emphasizing her dusky and dramatic voice, confident interpretation, and geographically and culturally specific songwriting, all of which combined to create a unique Deep South style. By portraying her as a true artist and a legitimate contemporary of Dusty Springfield, Jessi Coulter, and even FraxE7oise Hardy, this collection intends to introduce Gentry to a new generation of listeners more familiar with the Black Lodge than Choctaw Ridge.
As a testament to her woodwind coo, Chickasaw County Child succeeds effortlessly: Deep and expressive, down-home yet sophisticated, Gentry's voice transcends the country label, which she earned in the late 60s, by incorporating a range of styles to put her songs across, from blues and folk to pop and rock and even a little mariachi on "Beverly". However, as a collection of songs meant to showcase that voice, this collection proves more complicated and not quite revelatory. Often, her vocal performance so far surpasses the material that the effect is unintentionally comical, like watching a great actor spout wooden lines. Sometimes her songwriting veers too close to precious ("Bugs") or Vegas smooth ("Marigolds and Tangerines") or just plain weird ("Refractions"), and in retrospect, many of the songs here sound dated, their production too gimmicky and, by now, kitschy. In other words, too many of the songs on Chickasaw County Child sound more like artifacts of the 70s than timeless art.
Discounting Gentry as outdated, however, is dangerous: Credited with all but two of the nearly two dozen tracks on Chickasaw County Child, she proves herself a smart, intuitive songwriter with a distinctive voice that incorporated childhood reminiscence to conceal rather than convey her autobiography. There's a lot more of her life in these songs than the lyrics suggest-- and the lyrics suggest plenty.
Obviously, "Mississippi Delta" and "Papa, Won't You Let Me Go to Town With You?" draw from her childhood spent on her grandparents' rural farm, a nostalgia that lent her a marketable wholesomeness (despite the implied indiscretions of "Ode to Billie Joe"). As her celebrity grew with her early success, Gentry eventually turned her attention from Southern youth to a less geographically centered adulthood. Consequently, her songs became less overtly autobiographical, although she still plays the lead. She may not be the title character of "Fancy", a poor girl who has no qualms about how she earned that "Georgia mansion and an elegant New York flat," but she certainly identifies with her tough-mindedness.
Following her contribution to the 1974 movie Macon County Line, Gentry retired completely and (so far) permanently from performing, refusing to give concerts or interviews and declining offers to record or collaborate. On the amazing "Lookin' In", the penultimate track on Chickasaw County Child, she describes her hectic routine: "Laying in my hotel room wantin' to be alone/ Needin' the time to rest my mind/ But they bring in another stack of papers to sign/ And L.A.'s a-waitin' on the other line." The song contains all the information we need to understand her self-imposed exile, but just like "Ode to Billie Joe", the answers it gives only draw more questions. Gentry promises confession in these songs, but she remains unknowable and irresolvable. As Chickasaw County Child makes clear, her true artistry lies not in what she revealed through words and music, but what she kept hidden-- and what her songs continue to guard so closely today. | 2004-05-06T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-05-06T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Shout! Factory | May 6, 2004 | 8 | 1b4401d3-5117-4a26-b994-e97aafce6190 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The New York City rapper heads upstate for a steely Westside Gunn production with all the hallmarks of a Griselda blockbuster. | The New York City rapper heads upstate for a steely Westside Gunn production with all the hallmarks of a Griselda blockbuster. | Rome Streetz: Kiss the Ring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rome-streetz-kiss-the-ring/ | Kiss the Ring | Spend enough time with Rome Streetz’s catalog and you’ll find yourself thinking about infrastructure collapse. A 36-year-old rapper raised in eastern Queens, he’s the best bar-for-bar rhymer to come out of New York City in a half-decade; a resident of the Bed-Stuy neighborhood immortalized by the Notorious B.I.G. and JAY-Z, he boasts comparable expertise in the narcotics trade. In a more bountiful era, he’d have been a fixture on BET countdowns and Hot 97 drive-time blocks, back when their frequencies were beamed into every set-top box and Ford Explorer in the tri-state. Now? He delivers polished albums and white-knuckled mixtapes enjoyed by small audiences, fingers crossed that one of his breakneck sixteens will go viral.
Fortunately he’s secured a benefactor in Westside Gunn, the executive producer and “curator” of Streetz’s Griselda debut, Kiss the Ring. Where Streetz’s projects usually spotlight individual collaborators—just in 2021, he released full-lengths with DJ Muggs, Ankhlejohn, Ransom, and Futurewave—Kiss the Ring is a full immersion into Griselda’s murky waters. Gunn’s in-house producers share humble origins: Buffalo natives Daringer and Camoflauge Monk are associates from Griselda’s early days; Conductor Williams and Denny Laflare were plucked from internet obscurity. By now, they’re an assembly line engineering claustrophobic samples heedless of key signatures and equalizer settings. On “In Too Deep” and “Soulja Boy,” Conductor’s compressed loops veer offkey. It’s a steely, found-elements approach, but the effect is rather maddening—each bar sounds like it might go somewhere interesting until the inevitable reset.
By ratcheting up the difficulty levels, the producers enjoin Streetz to flex his considerable muscle. The man can rap over anything. On “Heart on Froze,” Streetz unleashes an avalanche of blistering couplets over a snare’s drumroll, his verses lending framework to the distorted bassline. “Ugly Balenciaga’s” is positively avant-garde, a tepid soup of vocal bites and squawking saxophone. In contrast, Streetz is composure personified, his impeccably patterned rhymes (“Made a nice profit pushing paraphernelia/Switched, now it’s only audio dope that I’ll sell ya/Fuck the police, never friendly with those that jail ya/Tryin’ to fuck with me results in failure”) belying a pugnacious bite.
A preternatural technician from the school of Big L and Big Pun, Streetz’s flow sheathes painstaking rhyme schemes, his inflection bestowing an off-kilter chattiness. While he favors an instinctive, punchline-centric writing style, he’s a formalist at ease with multisyllabic patterns and melodic hooks. His sensibility is best suited to Kiss the Ring’s sturdier arrangements. While the somber themes of “Long Story Short” ring familiar, the third-person narrative allows for pithy asides (“They flipped his residence, found a phone and overwhelming evidence/Karma’s a bitch, a kiss, a blessing, or it’s venomous”). The standout “Tyson Beckford” recalls Muggs’ work on Streetz’s 2021 opus Death & the Magician, sparse percussion accentuating the animated chorus and wordplay.
Kiss the Ring bears all the hallmarks of a Griselda blockbuster: dissonant instrumentals, abstract interludes, wacky ad-libs and beat tags, songs named after B-list celebrities. Like Diddy and Master P before him, Westside Gunn is a networker and financier with a knack for corralling talent. When he imparts his vision on established artists, the results can be hit-or-miss. Mach-Hommy’s vibrant Pray for Haiti bore a similar conceit to Kiss the Ring, a decorated genre master tiptoeing into Griselda’s house of mirrors, and the producers and guests reflected Mach’s idiosyncrasies back at him. By comparison, Streetz is a dour raconteur and a less mercurial presence—all of which contributed to the eerie tension of Death & the Magician. Kiss the Ring is most reminiscent of Gunn’s own freewheeling mixtapes, but the routine is a bit paint-by-numbers given Streetz’s subtler acrobatics.
The Armani Caesar duet “Armed & Dangerous,” a crass Bonnie-and-Clyde dialogue formatted like an early-2000s thug-love ballad, feels like a missed opportunity. The G-Unit era is as ripe for homage as any, but even G-Unit could poke fun at their hokey crossovers, whereas Streetz and Caesar opt to play it straight. There’s ample room for irony between their characters—Streetz as a beats-and-bars purist, Caesar as an underground sex symbol—but to cast them as infatuated lovers beggars belief. A record like Kiss the Ring has zero crossover potential in 2022. Why bother?
This lack of purpose beleaguers the album’s lesser moments, even if Kiss the Ring is one of the best pound-for-pound rap outings of the year. In days past, a rapper like Streetz—a lightning talent from the cradle of hip-hop—would have incited a major-label bidding war. Today, he’s bankrolled by a cult artist and would-be mogul intent on molding stars in his image. It’s like Snoop Dogg signing with No Limit, or Kevin Durant joining the Warriors. Streetz has executed masterworks of his own; he’s never needed a lift. | 2022-10-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | October 7, 2022 | 7.3 | 1b45bce6-36c1-486e-a480-7161eab3a12c | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the collectivism of the Band’s 1969 self-titled album. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the collectivism of the Band’s 1969 self-titled album. | The Band: The Band | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-band-the-band/ | The Band | The Band’s second album might have been called America. Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm were both partial to that grandiose moniker—years later, it was one of the only things they still agreed on. Harvest was also considered, as the record was conceived as a concept album about the South that begins with the promise of spring and ends with the make-or-break finality of the fall, when a farmer pleads for deliverance from financial ruin in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” As it turned out, the Band left Harvest behind for friend Neil Young, who used it for his commercial breakthrough nearly three years later.
The Band surely is a record obsessed with America, made by a mostly Canadian quintet who explored this country’s roots right as the U.S. became politically and culturally unmoored in the late 1960s. Harvest would have worked as well, given Robertson’s burgeoning literary pretensions. But ultimately, this record needed to be called The Band because it’s about the Band—how these men worked together, the way their personalities intersected and completed each other, the very architecture of their friendship. The album dispels all of the assumptions we carry about how bands are supposed to work—the songwriter is all-powerful, the rhythm section is the supporting cast, hierarchies are inevitable. The Band instead operates on a paradigm in which the power comes from the bottom up and authority is dispersed evenly among compatriots.
Maybe all of the players in a band can be on equal footing, and not merely back up the resident genius. Perhaps the singers, who inspire the songwriter and transform his lyrics into colloquial truths with salt-of-the-earth nonchalance, are paramount. And what if that “resident genius” archetype is a myth anyway, compared with the reality of musicians who work together in obscurity for years until their collective telepathy makes them stars? The Band was once treasured as a communal hippie fantasy, the epitome of the era’s anti-consumerist back-to-the-land proselytizing. Except, for a while, the members of the Band truly excelled in a utopian, all-for-one, one-for-all setting. Their signature album is the closest that classic rock comes to pure socialism.
This selflessness doesn’t come at the expense of each member’s individuality. On the contrary, the five figures staring out from The Band’s brown and sepia album cover are as recognizable as the cast members of your favorite movie or TV show. From left to right, there’s Richard Manuel, the broken-hearted piano player; Helm, the indomitable drummer; Rick Danko, the affable bassist; Garth Hudson, organist and mad-scientist multi-instrumentalist; and Robertson, the guitarist, songwriter, and self-appointed orchestrator. That album cover is arguably just as influential as the music on The Band. For years afterward, wannabes would don mustaches and bowler hats inside countless bars and juke joints as an attempt to replicate what the original articles came by honestly, back when nobody cared and all these five guys had was each other.
The idea was to rent a house in the Hollywood Hills and find a happy medium between the homespun naturalism of the unreleased “basement tapes” recorded in upstate New York with Bob Dylan in 1967, and the austere slickness of the Band’s 1968 debut, Music From Big Pink, which was made at top-flight studios in Manhattan and Los Angeles. The guys wanted to get back to the informality of the Dylan sessions, so they looked for a place to create their own world free of industry professionals and “engineers and union people,” Danko later told Band biographer Barney Hoskyns. “We’d be thinking Harveyburgers, and they’d be thinking caviar.”
The Band chose a scenic mansion that had once been owned by Sammy Davis Jr., and spent a month setting up a recording studio in the pool house in the backyard. (It was a far cry from the backwoods fantasia the album evokes, the guys really wanted to get out of New York for the winter.) Meanwhile, they lived together in the main house, drawing straws to see who would get which room—egalitarianism pervaded every aspect of the Band. After an 8-track console and other equipment Capitol Records shipped over were installed, they crammed two months of work into the remaining four weeks. Each day started at around 7 p.m. when the musicians assembled to rehearse and work on getting the sounds right. Then they would eat a good meal, after which they finally began recording at around midnight, working until dawn. At Manuel’s request, producer John Simon procured amphetamines from a neurosurgeon pal up in San Francisco to keep the band’s energy up.
A photo in the album’s liner notes shows how the Band was set up in their makeshift studio—Hudson and Manuel sit at their keyboards on the perimeter while Robertson, Danko, and Helm hold the middle. The guys stare up at the camera like it’s a stranger who has suddenly intruded on a private moment. They were children hanging out in the world’s coolest treehouse, best pals who spent weeks trading jokes and shooting pool, and then imbuing their freewheeling spirit into the ultimate “hang out” album that they happened to make in the process. That sense of togetherness, and the possibility of a counter-culture in which each person is crucial and valued as such, is what makes The Band so seductive. You want to crawl up inside of this record and bathe in the warmth of the enviable bond at its core.
It’s not always clear who’s singing or playing what. Take “Rag Mama Rag”: The drummer sings and plays mandolin, the pianist is on drums, the bassist plays fiddle, the organist plays piano, and the album’s producer is on tuba, supplying the song’s de facto bassline. There’s “Rockin’ Chair,” in which the Band’s three singers—Manuel, Helm, and Danko—weave their voices in and out of conventional harmony, typical of a conversational vocal style referencing the call-and-response cadence of gospel as well as back-porch mountain music and countless barroom sing-alongs.
The brotherhood vibe carried over to subsequent recording sessions in New York City. “Jemima Surrender,” a rare co-write for Robertson and Helm, rides a loose and swinging groove supplied by Manuel, once again subbing on drums. Compare the driving yet carefree “Jemima” to the absolutely lethal “Up on Cripple Creek,” recorded at the same session, in which Helm’s lascivious vocal—and Hudson’s pre-”Superstition” clavinet riff—plays against Helm’s relentlessly funky half-time backbeat, later sampled in the early ’90s by Gang Starr. And yet, no matter where each person happened to fall in a particular song, The Band always performed as a family unit, with everyone pitching in to accomplish the task at hand, often in subtle ways that wouldn’t be apparent to anyone else.
Unlike virtually every other major rock act of its time, the Band did not live and die by guitar heroics, even though Robertson had proven on Dylan’s 1966 world tour with the Hawks that he was more than capable of quicksilver blues leads, like B.B. King having early premonitions of Eddie Van Halen. But on record, he aspired to the velvety restraint of Curtis Mayfield, always laying back, allowing only occasional solos, like on “The Unfaithful Servant,” when he felt compelled to pick some acoustic lines after being so moved by Danko’s stunning first-take vocal.
Years later, when Helm publicly feuded with Robertson over songwriting royalties, the irascible drummer couldn’t dispute that his estranged guitar player had, in most instances, indeed set pen to paper by himself while his bandmates were likely off carousing somewhere. Helm’s argument was more nuanced, positing the relative value of writing versus execution. Robertson might have done the former, but Helm was responsible for the latter. He took Robertson’s songs and turned them into living history.
This complementary dynamic is on display in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” about a Confederate soldier named Virgil Cane who’s resigned to a downtrodden life as a poor farmer after the Civil War. It is one of the songs on which Robertson based his reputation as a budding Serious Rock Songwriter—he aped ancient American folk forms like his mentor Dylan, and successfully composed a new tune that felt like it was already 100 years old, while also commenting obliquely on the class and regional divides that are seemingly eternal in this country.
Today, “Dixie” and the empathy it has for defenders of Southern slavery makes it a thorny listen. But the tenderness and pain in Helm’s voice stand apart from Robertson’s words as an eloquent expression of profound sorrow, the type of immutable loss that’s passed down from generation to generation, as both birthright and original sin. It’s possible to both question whether a song like this needs to exist, and appreciate how Helm’s naked hurt transcends it.
Robertson is less the mastermind of The Band than a director and screenwriter, tailoring roles that play to the strengths of his of three leading men. For the sweet, humble Danko, Robertson (with an assist from Manuel) wrote the album’s most charming song, “When You Awake,” a romantic callback to the Big Pink days, which makes Danko’s wised-up turn in “The Unfaithful Servant” later in the album all the more affecting.
Manuel was the most versatile singer in the Band. On “Across the Great Divide” and “Jawbone,” he plays the captivating rogue. (Manuel’s yelping delivery of the chorus of “Jawbone”—“I’m a thief, and I dig it!”—is the album’s single best line reading, both hilarious and heroic.) But Manuel was more often typecast in the Band as the forsaken wanderer. On “Whispering Pines,” the emotional black hole at the center of The Band, which Robertson co-wrote with Manuel, his quivering tenor captured the sound of utter, near-hopeless desolation.
“If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream/Inside my lonely room, there is no in-between,” Manuel sings. Hudson’s organ trails him like a concerned friend, and Helm calls out desperately during the chorus. But Manuel’s sense of isolation is impenetrable. That he expresses such extreme alienation from within the confines of this perfectly balanced ensemble, rounded out by some of his oldest and dearest confidants, makes “Whispering Pines” almost unbearably melancholy.
Manuel later died, by himself, inside of a hotel room, giving “Whispering Pines” a thoroughly dispiriting subtext. And the Band eventually devolved into acrimony, addiction, petty jealousies, low-rent one-night stands in nowhere-towns, and more premature deaths. Now, when people think about the Band, the most common reference point is The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s iconic concert film about the group’s would-be farewell show in 1976, in which Robertson is placed at the center and Manuel is barely visible. Hierarchy had finally been imposed.
And yet the power of the Band’s second record is such that it can make you forget all of that for about 40 minutes. If all things must pass, even iconic bands and intractable friendships, that just makes those brief, glorious moments long ago when five singular spirits became one all the more precious. | 2018-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 10, 2018 | 10 | 1b496cb0-79c5-4c8e-b89e-35050adc98c9 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | |
*WALLS *mostly finds Kings of Leon back in that mode of offering up fast-food “whoa-oh” singalongs and guitars that chime as distinctly as wallpaper. | *WALLS *mostly finds Kings of Leon back in that mode of offering up fast-food “whoa-oh” singalongs and guitars that chime as distinctly as wallpaper. | Kings of Leon: WALLS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22521-walls/ | WALLS | Say what you will about Kings of Leon: They are probably one of the last groups we’ll watch go from scrappy garage-rock origins to scoring mainstream radio hits and headlining arenas and festivals with the old-school battle-stance of two guitars, a bass, and a drumkit. They are more of an actual rock band than contemporaries like the National, or St. Vincent, or Arcade Fire—those indie titans that too transitioned from the small rooms to the big fields. You know the narrative by now: sheltered Southern kids raised on religion, finding rock ‘n’ roll and sin, then sobering up and settling down. It’s a classic narrative, one that's almost too perfect in its adherence to tropes. There were all the cringe-worthy lyrics about dangerous women and the bandmembers’ own profligacy. There were also, at one point, songs that were invigorated and scuzzy and endearing enough to swat away concerns about a doofy band playing into all manner of classic bad-boy rock archetypes—the types of rock songs few others have been swinging for in the 21st century.
Those are the things about Kings of Leon that come across as real enough. But as they sold their souls over again—this time not for boozy Southern rock, but for schlocky corporate-music refrains—all sorts of questions popped up. What even is this band? “Southern Strokes turned Southern U2” is the oft-cited transition, but over time both comparisons began to feel overly generous. Instead, the Followill crew’s arena-conquering material lumped them closer to mewling radio-rock bands than the indie sphere with which they'd flirted. When it was just “Use Somebody” and Come Around Sundown, it was still easy to hope that Kings of Leon would reclaim some of the roughened charm of their earlier work. “Supersoaker,” the lead single from their 2013 album Mechanical Bull, had even hinted at a return-to-form; it had the earworm ease of the best Aha Shake Heartbreak cuts, but conveyed it with a little more clarity and control. And while the songwriting across that record proved unsteady, it was at least a turn in the right direction. It offered an image of Kings of Leon as grizzled almost-veterans, no longer forcing choruses to soar when they could be more evocative as they rumbled.
Well, then they made WALLS. It’s their seventh full-length, and it too marks a return-to-form, but this time the form they're revisiting is the soulless would-be transcendence of all the worst stuff on Only by the Night and Come Around Sundown. This is, uh, not the form they should return to. WALLS mostly finds Kings of Leon back in that mode of offering up fast-food “whoa-oh” singalongs and guitars that chime as distinctly as wallpaper.
If you’re amenable to that version of Kings of Leon, you’re in luck. “Reverend” and “Waste a Moment” join a growing lineage of songs the group has offered up in the last eight or so years, a lineage in which the names and melodies are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish from one another. Sure, these songs get stuck in your head, but they’re not exactly welcome there. The catchiness of these songs is like a party guest who is trying too hard; the choruses and big, glistening guitars have an irritating tenacity. Name almost any song on WALLS: “Around the World,” “Over,” “Eyes on You,” “Wild”—any of them could slot in as third-tier answers to “Sex on Fire” and “Radioactive” and “Use Somebody.”
There are glimmers of something else, hints of why this band has been likable to many over the years, hints of other places they could've gone. The jangling guitars and light moodiness of “Find Me” conjure a style of twilit early ’80s highway-rock that could suit Kings of Leon well as thirtysomething journeymen. And “Muchacho” is an evocative barroom lament, the kind of thing that has you picturing aged faux-outlaws refusing to cry into their whiskey in some distant desert saloon. There's more grit and gravity in frontman Caleb Followill’s delivery here than anywhere else on the album; it makes you wonder if there was more where this came from. It makes you wish for a latter-day Kings of Leon album that was more rugged. One where you can feel the miles they’ve traveled, rather than the ticket sales of the festivals they’ve headlined and no doubt hope to headline once more. Sadly, they seem content for the kind of mediocrity that designates you as the headliner Firefly and Bonnaroo call when someone else isn’t available. | 2016-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | October 20, 2016 | 4.5 | 1b4c02d9-d1d8-43b2-b70c-3a7f5f2f5c3a | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | null |
Like Wavves and Times New Viking, this band uses lo-fi as a filter for pop sensibilities, though its approach is friendlier and less abrasive than those acts. | Like Wavves and Times New Viking, this band uses lo-fi as a filter for pop sensibilities, though its approach is friendlier and less abrasive than those acts. | The Love Language: The Love Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12850-the-love-language/ | The Love Language | A lo-fi approach to recording obscures many things-- instrumental interplay, subtle shifts in vocal tone, lyrics-- but one thing it never masks is enthusiasm. In fact, lo-fi almost always accentuates it, which is why even the most financially solvent of bands have been known to purposefully muddy or smear their sound, sacrificing clarity for intensity and choosing mystery over transparency. If you read much music criticism you'll know (and I'm as guilty as anyone) that some of the gravest pejoratives are "tasteful," "mannered," and "polite." And of course, it's damn near impossible to sound tasteful or polite when your songs are coming through layers of hiss, distortion, and fuzz.
Embracing a lo-fi aesthetic is certainly an acceptable and useful tool for communicating your music, but ideally the tunes themselves should be strong enough to stand on their own. It would be unfair to say an album like the Love Language's self-titled debut is a failure unless you can imagine the songs would've sounded just as good had they been recorded squeakily clean. Still, it's almost invariably the case that hooks and melodies (which The Love Language luckily has in spades), and not technique, are what keeps a listener returning over and over again.
As a touring entity, the Love Language are a seven-piece band currently based in Raleigh, N.C., yet their eponymous first LP was written and recorded solely by frontman Stuart McLamb. Like recent indie breakthroughs Wavves and Times New Viking, McLamb uses lo-fi as a filter for his keen pop sensibilities, though his approach is far friendlier and less abrasive than either of those acts. Over the brief 29-minute course of the album, McLamb cycles through a wide range of indie-rock, country, and early-pop styles, all delivered with shouty charm and in-the-red verve, roughly approximating a sock-hop-era Arcade Fire. Particularly effervescent are "Lalita", which rides a bold fuzzed-out guitar line and equally demonstrative drums to somehow convey shambling joy in spite of its embittered lyrics, and "Sparxxx", which sounds like a great lost Nugget from a band of forgotten garage moptops, making endearing use of a xylophone. Suffice to say, instruments bleed into each other pretty liberally here, creating a boisterous racket McLamb only emphasizes with his heavy reliance on tambourine, most generously deployed on the punch-drunk, waltzing "Nocturne" (which is also outfitted with a neat little surf guitar lick) and the closing "Graycourt".
Lyrically this is a record undeniably tinged with romantic strife, yet, unlike lovelorn former Raleigh denizen Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, McLamb's songs are largely energetic and sprightly. Even the spare and clearly aggrieved opener, "Two Rabbits" exudes McCartney-ish charms, while the country-tinged moper "Stars" musically exudes such a bygone innocence that it's hard to evince any real emotional peril. Of course, a cringe-worthy line like "little girls tell the biggest lies" certainly doesn't help, but blessedly it's soon subsumed, like everything else, beneath sweetly obfuscating blankets. | 2009-04-10T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-04-10T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Bladen County | April 10, 2009 | 7.3 | 1b4ceb74-06d7-4a98-b8da-b0f12f883c9d | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The iconic London nightclub celebrates two decades with 20 tracks that survey the house, techno, and bass-music styles synonymous with the venue, with mixed results. | The iconic London nightclub celebrates two decades with 20 tracks that survey the house, techno, and bass-music styles synonymous with the venue, with mixed results. | Various Artists: 20 Years of Fabric | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-20-years-of-fabric/ | 20 Years of Fabric | When London club Fabric opened in October 1999, dubstep was barely a twinkle in 2-step’s eye, Daft Punk were just a promising French house duo, and nu-skool breaks was all the rage. 20 Years of Fabric, released to celebrate two decades of the club, isn’t a comprehensive guide to Fabric’s adventures since then. There’s no grime, little dubstep, and no Ricardo Villalobos, who seemed to be permanently stuck into an eight-hour set whenever I visited in the 2000s.
Then again, there’s simply no way of jamming two decades of London clubbing into 20 tracks, however well curated, and those oversights shouldn’t detract from what is a worthy—if occasionally dull—attempt to make sense of the decades of sleepless nights and millions of electronic beats that have gone into making Fabric such an enduring institution. 20 Years of Fabric (the album) says a great deal about the past 20 years of Fabric (the club); it also offers insight into a British club culture that balances reverence for the past with an eye for the future, and where commercialism and experimentalism go hand in hand.
The club has invited 20 artists who helped shape its sound to contribute new tracks to this compilation. Uncharitably, you might group them into those representing Fabric’s past (Sasha, UNKLE and Groove Armada), present (Anastasia Kristensen, Nina Kraviz, Daniel Avery, et al), and future (new residents IMOGEN and Mantra). The imperial march of house and techno dominates, as it does Saturday nights all over Britain; the genres’ reliability is a vaguely comforting disappointment. Tracks from Call Super, Margaret Dygas, and Kraviz suggest an alternative avenue for the 4/4 sound that is giddy, hypnotic, and laced with psychedelia, but they risk getting bogged down in the methodical efficiency of contributions from Marcel Dettmann, Sasha, and IMOGEN.
Drum’n’bass, which has played a crucial role in the history of both Fabric and British nightlife, fares better. The three artists here—Special Request, Source Direct, and J. Majik—may sail closer to the ’90s tradition of chopped “Amen” breaks and rave-induced paranoia than to the precision-engineered sonics of modern drum’n’bass. But there is a serotonin-loosening rush of nostalgic futurism to their cold-blooded atmospherics (Source Direct’s “Vigilante”), melodic sub bass (J. Majik’s “The Lost Tribe”) and borderline ridiculous rave cosplay (Special Request’s “Codename Turbo Nutter”) that reminds you how vibrant the genre was in its heyday.
From here on in, things get murkier. Shackleton’s “Drawn and Quartered” has the rambling mysticism, polyrhythmic ceremony, and live feel of his Tunes of Negation project, while Pinch & Trim’s “That Wasn’t It” rides a screwball rhythm and melancholic piano chords; the two songs’ utter indifference to the drop is a reminder of how far most dubstep pioneers have moved from the genre’s gothic bass pressure. Mantra’s “Embers” is equally uncanny, if slightly more danceable. The song’s stuttering breaks and rumbling bass suggest an experimental drum’n’bass track pitched down to -8, where it connects with the bubbling synth rush and euphoric vocal loop of an ’80s rave anthem.
It is a shame that the album then descends into the moribund closing duo of Groove Armada’s “Wesley Nightshade” and UNKLE’s painfully earnest “Catch Me When I Fall (Fabric Club Mix)”: Their dual blandness splashes ketchup all over 20 Years’ increasingly spicy second half. The club has been many things over the years, not all of them successful, but rarely is it as boring as these songs suggest.
Ultimately, if you want to experience the thrills of Fabric at 20, go to the club; if you want to explore Fabric’s historical significance, your first port of call should be the Fabric and Fabriclive mix CDs, whose monthly installments were essential in mapping out the electronic music landscape of the 2000s. But if you want a warts-and-all snapshot of modern British clubbing, jammed somewhere tedium and brilliance, 20 Years of Fabric will do you right. | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Fabric | December 6, 2019 | 6.2 | 1b4dda1f-17db-4c28-aeae-eb1be9424b8c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The latest from the gothic avant-rock band sees the four-piece loosen up and let slip the forces begging for release since their debut. | The latest from the gothic avant-rock band sees the four-piece loosen up and let slip the forces begging for release since their debut. | Suuns: Felt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suuns-felt/ | Felt | The Montreal four-piece Suuns write smoldering music that’s painstakingly assembled. They are philosopher-musicians, schooled in free jazz, no wave, IDM, and German motorik, and their records are studies in contrasts: Confrontationally limp, seductively bleak, synthetically punk. They are puritanical Dionysians, filling the air with gyrating, charcoal-dim fever dreams built by technocrats—perhaps they even smoked cigarettes before their peers and carried tattered copies of Camus from cafes to rehearsal spaces in the gothic Quebec twilight. This image is an absurd grab for context, sure, but the band’s fixations feel of a piece with it: Suuns (pronounced “soons”) are careful synthesists who, since 2007, have cultivated a sound that’s existential and sinister yet resonantly human.
If there’s a case to be made that subversion and dystopia can still fuel great left-of-center rock, Suuns make a damn convincing one. Felt, the band’s fourth full-length, is the first Suuns record to be unburdened by self-seriousness. Its predecessor, Hold/Still, gestured at the kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors they’d come to design, but the record was difficult to metabolize as a whole. Felt, however, sees Suuns loosen up and let slip the forces begging for release since their debut Zeroes QC. They showcase a swath of experimental guitar- and synth-based styles strewn through what’s become Suuns’ very particular lens: Soft-focus abrasion, wound tight and set free by the versatile producer John Congleton. This has been Suuns’ thesis since the beginning—cultivating “the sublime alchemy of idealism and conflict”—and they’ve finally struck a satisfying balance.
“X-Alt,” “Watch You, Watch Me,” and “Baseline,” a trifecta of future feeling at the front of Felt, encapsulates Suuns’ new mission best: Scorched techno-punk blurs to smiley-faced synth workout blurs to narcotic psych comedown. Nothing is what it seems, and no one musical element is in total command. Low-pitched synths flower and undulate and evaporate like storm clouds in spring. Drums rustle and tumble as single guitar notes drone in slinky repetition, smeared with cotton-light manipulation. Ben Shemie’s slack voice drifts beneath and above the fray, parched yet mellifluous. The effect works whether Suuns play slow or fast, as with shoegaze, and they are constantly searching for any place to inseam a groove.
On “Make It Real” and “Materials,” Suuns channel the German electronic composer Apparat, embracing a kind of blue-hued openness. They commune with the astral slackers Autolux, using only what’s necessary to generate a perennial bloom. Suuns’ synth hand and “default musical director” Max Henry says that Frank Ocean’s “use of space” was an inspiration, which is no strange thing, yet it grabbed me nonetheless: Until now Suuns seemed to wall themselves off as a matter of habit. Ocean’s no extrovert, but he’s an intersection for a wide array of listeners, and Felt exhibits a porousness that could also attract new and more varied fans of Suuns. Perhaps, in the end, we’ll all want it weird. | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | March 3, 2018 | 7.4 | 1b53bf0f-f502-44be-9edd-acd5e2c435b1 | Ryan Burleson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-burleson/ | |
A new EP of four songs recorded during sessions for last year’s Big Time forms a bridge between the singer-songwriter’s past and present. | A new EP of four songs recorded during sessions for last year’s Big Time forms a bridge between the singer-songwriter’s past and present. | Angel Olsen: Forever Means EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-olsen-forever-means-ep/ | Forever Means EP | After a few years of sweeping grandeur and synthy ’80s covers, Angel Olsen began a new chapter with last year’s Big Time. She gestured at Muscle Shoals warmth with flashing horns and embraced the pedal-steel twang of her beloved ’70s country stars. She also reckoned with massive changes in her personal life: coming out as queer, losing both of her parents in a matter of a few weeks, and falling in love.
When she completed the album, Olsen was left with a few recordings that didn’t make the final cut. She’s released them now as Forever Means, a four-song EP that bridges the Asheville singer-songwriter’s past and present. The arrangements swing between stark reflections that recall the best of her early material, and the full-band backdrops that have invigorated her more recent work. The former suits the open spirit of Big Time, but the busier arrangements occasionally crowd her newfound lucidity.
Olsen sounds most like her old self on “Forever Means,” which echoes the wistful introspection of Burn Your Fire for No Witness’s “Unfucktheworld.” But where the earlier song dipped into mournful solitude, Olsen savors permanent bonds here. “Forever in your eyes/I see when you shine,” she sings. Separated by nearly a decade, the songs bookend an extended period of growth and upheaval, charting what Olsen has learned about what’s worth keeping and what’s worth letting go.
“Nothing’s Free,” meanwhile, builds from a slow and sumptuous piano foundation. “I’ll never feel more sure of anything,” Olsen sings with a smoky glow, coaxing her addressee out of a cell “you thought had kept you safe.” Though Olsen offers reassurance in her lyrics, the piano melody gives the song a bittersweet twist. As the drums kick in and a brooding sax solo gives way to a howling electric organ, “Nothing Free” feels like a direct link between the high glamor of 2019’s All Mirrors and the rootsier sensibilities of Big Time.
Lavish instrumental arrangements brought panoramic scope to All Mirrors and My Woman, but “Time Bandits” and “Holding On” falter under similar flourishes. The drums on “Time Bandits” clash with the old-school atmosphere, and a tinny trumpet interlude feels out of place, as if the player had wandered over from another session. On “Holding On,” the flashy, high-register guitar solos are a magpie-like distraction from the tangled string section. Olsen’s flustered yelp burns with unfulfilled desire, but her vocal melody never quite matches her lyrics’ search for deliverance.
The varied styles of Olsen’s recent work—dramatic, delicate, raw—have reflected her own process of growth, leading to the revelation that “you can wake up one day and really be a very different person.” As a result, she embraced a “freer, more straightforward” experience while making Big Time: a sense of relief you could hear reverberating through the music. With these outtakes, Olsen zooms out and reveals some of the rockier steps along her journey toward self-discovery. | 2023-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 15, 2023 | 7 | 1b56eb6c-e040-43cc-8e5a-85225b2c4d34 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The Canadian band's sixth album proves a return to form after the disappointing run of recent years. The North conjures the ghosts of past glories without sounding forced, unspooling pleasantly and unhurriedly. | The Canadian band's sixth album proves a return to form after the disappointing run of recent years. The North conjures the ghosts of past glories without sounding forced, unspooling pleasantly and unhurriedly. | Stars: The North | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16975-the-north/ | The North | Stars have always written about love, but they're equally fixated on time-- how it passes, how we wish we could slow it, how the past and present relate to each other, and how it marches on towards infinity. On "Reunion", a highlight from 2004's career high Set Yourself on Fire, Torquil Campbell's pitiful narrator looks back at his teenage years and pleads for the chance to return to those days to fix a broken relationship (but, primarily and somewhat selfishly, "to be young and wild and free"). "Ageless Beauty" from the same album attempts to bottle eternity as Amy Millan steadily consoles, "Time will hold its promise/ We will always be a light."
Words like "today" and "tonight" are thrown around liberally in the band's lyrics, but The North is steeped in nostalgia. This time, they seem to be looking back on the first half of their career, which found them upping the ante with every album (2001's electro-cosmopolitan Nightsongs, 2003's sentimental Heart, the sweeping bombast of Set Yourself on Fire) before overstuffing themselves with haughty pretension (2007's In Our Bedroom After the War) and getting lost in their own half-formed ideas (2010's The Five Ghosts).
The opener, "Theory of Relativity", announces itself with the same type of crackly, sampled audio that so memorably kicked off "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead". The album's closer, "Walls", features a bit about how "We were children/ We danced to 'Hand in Glove'", a not-so-subtle reminder that the band has ably covered not one, but two Smiths songs over the years. Stars apparently want to return to a headier, more naive time. But what's remarkable about The North is how unforced it sounds while conjuring the ghosts of past glories. It unspools pleasantly and unhurriedly, possessing the sort of sparkly glow that often comes with rejuvenation.
One of the main problems with In Our Bedroom After the War was how ham-handed its conceptual narrative was (Torquil Campbell, after all, has had quite a bit of success as a stage actor too, and he will never, ever let you forget it). Despite Campbell's worrying claims that The North is a vaguely political album-- one only has to throw on "He Lied About Death" to remind oneself how irrefutably shitty he is at writing "political" songs-- there's really not a noticeable grand theme here. But then, Stars are a band that have been capable of solid songcraft even at their lowest moments.
The album's sense of purpose means that there's plenty of room for the band to experiment, and the sonic playfulness on The North makes for an engrossing, repeatable listen. At first, the title track's shuffling duet is well-worn territory, right down to the lyrics about sleep being "my friend/ And my rival"-- and then, a bunch of soft, woozy synths slowly roll in, adding a slight layer of disorientation to the song's steady axis. "Do You Want to Die Together?"'s push-and-pull 1950s rock motif is a textbook example of how tension should function in songwriting (not to mention the latest submission for what should be one hell of a Greatest Hits for these guys), while "The 400" takes Death Cab for Cutie's "Transatlanticism", shrinks it down, and fills the surrounding space with sparse guitar noise. As with The Five Ghosts, it's Millan who grabs the real highlights here, with the "Ageless Beauty"-in-reverse "Backlines" (which, at points, smacks of UK boy band One Direction's giddy head-rush "What Makes You Beautiful") and the brittle, winding tartness of "Progress".
The Five Ghosts was Stars' dullest and most unfocused work, an album so weak you had to wonder if Stars were done. But with The North, they've exceeded expectations. They may never achieve the youthful immortality they so often sing about, but it's nice to know that they're not dead just yet, either. | 2012-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | ATO / Soft Revolution | September 4, 2012 | 6.7 | 1b570119-44f0-452c-a727-75844376f865 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
On their sophomore album, the crestfallen Brooklyn duo deepen their blend of mariachi, spaghetti western soundtracks, and 90s sad-rock. | On their sophomore album, the crestfallen Brooklyn duo deepen their blend of mariachi, spaghetti western soundtracks, and 90s sad-rock. | Widowspeak: Almanac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17551-almanac/ | Almanac | A few months ago, the Brooklyn label Captured Tracks asked how Molly Hamilton would describe her band Widowspeak's second album to someone who's deaf. "Almanac is like moving into a big old house in the woods with sheets covering all the furniture, and then taking all the sheets off." The languidly-voiced singer may have been referring to the group's actual experience recording in an old barn in the Hudson River Valley, but the description works on a more intrinsic level as well. The crackling of a fire that begins opener "Perennials" burns off the home-recording dust that has been trailing them since their debut October Tape EP, clarifying the song's ringing guitar line and sharpening the indefinable edges of Hamilton's croon. You can practically hear the snap of the sheets as Widowspeak unveil their new sound, expanding upon the hazy, "Gun Shy"-slinging pop Americana that encouraged them to move from the Pacific Northwest to New York in the first place.
With Widowspeak, Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas settled into uncovered ground between Ennio Morricone, Cowboy Junkies, and Neil Young. The interplay between Hamilton's lilting melodies and Thomas' stiff-legged, articulate riffs gave definition to what in lesser hands would just be sepia-toned retrospectives. Songs like the skeletal "Limbs", with haunting background vocals crawling through the wreckage of a violin, were refreshingly familiar but also shocking; like a lost photograph of a childhood memory from a different angle. More than their contemporaries and immediate predecessors trafficking in similar themes, Widowspeak were filtering everything through a more self-aware light, perfecting Amanda Petrusich's idea that Instagram makes you to feel "nostalgic for a time you never actually knew." (Even Almanac's album cover is a self-proclaimed homage to Wings, Sound of Silence, and the Carpenters LPs, with Hamilton coyly looking up at Thomas in a vintage dress undoubtedly gleaned from an overpriced Williamsburg rack.)
With a traditional framework capable of supporting layers added by co-producers Kevin McMahon and Thomas, on Almanac they further pursue Widowspeak's lines of inquiry into mariachi, spaghetti western soundtracks, and 90s sad-rock, to a certain extent abandoning their original goal to "hang back as much as possible." They coalesce the darker elements that hung around Widowspeak like an ether into something more tangible. Growling, they stalk through the album, bringing "Rhiannon"-like undertones to "Dyed In the Wool" and a sense of inevitable malevolence to the psych-leaning "Locusts". A new focus on low-range brings out even more of the "creepy Disney soundtrack folk group"-- Hamilton's original idea for a band called Widow's Peak-- behind the spidery banjo and baroque accordions in "Thick as Thieves".
Hamilton's interest in eschatology also influenced the record, which she wanted to record before the forecasted Mayan apocalypse: on the churning "The Dark Age", she preaches, "We have ourselves to blame/ We had our years to play.../ It's getting kind of late/ Don't know what you're waiting for." It's an electric song, with Thomas' guitar solo bursting to the surface like a churchgoer being released from possession by Hamilton's priest. "Ballad of the Golden Hour" turns on another epic shift, segueing seamlessly but suddenly from a slide guitar's anthemic strumming to something more sinister. Before the bridge, Thomas starts climbing up and down the scale with predatory guitar licks until Hamilton slows down the song's verse and rhythm. Her use of indelibly associated phrases like "as the crow flies," "as good as gold," and "long in the teeth" punctuate the song with almost cinematographic vividness, although it's a pity they come at the expense of subtler lyrical moments elsewhere like the double entendre "We made the bed/ And built our legs."
Those moments of instrumental and idiomatic grandeur suggest that Widowspeak is almost mythologizing itself, especially during Almanac's more experimental second half, in which each song renders genre staples so effectively they listen like remastered B-sides. "Minnewaska" sways between Hamilton's soothing background sighs and samples of crickets, and she breathes over the ethereal torpidity of "Storm King" in the vein of Nancy Sinatra's version of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)". Even "Sore Eyes", which comes the closest to Widowspeak's tumbleweed romanticism, intimates the band's expanded representation of itself, not unlike a cover. This is Almanac's greatest strength and also its weakness. Widowspeak is moving forward in its evolution as a band with promising conviction, but at this point they're exploring a lot of different paths. Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest. Now that the end of the world is behind us, however, Widowspeak can focus more precisely on how they'd like to be remembered. | 2013-01-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-01-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | January 17, 2013 | 7.3 | 1b59831e-6046-4d4b-9a6f-cba47543a50d | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
With their vicious debut LP, Austin quartet Expander ascend to the Texas thrash pantheon, evoking familiar metal-punk sounds as well as dystopian sci-fi themes. | With their vicious debut LP, Austin quartet Expander ascend to the Texas thrash pantheon, evoking familiar metal-punk sounds as well as dystopian sci-fi themes. | Expander: Endless Computer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/expander-endless-computer/ | Endless Computer | Describing themselves as “timezapped neuropunks,” Austin thrash quartet Expander take on the image of space pirates who have seen the future and left it behind. They draw upon Voivod’s dystopian science fiction themes and the metal-punk of fellow Austin band Impalers, as well as the punkier side of West Coast metal polymaths VHÖL. With their Kurt Ballou-produced debut full-length Endless Computer, they have ascended to the Texas thrash pantheon alongside Iron Age and Power Trip. Expander forge a new path from familiar thrash elements and present them in an alienated context that is as hard-charging as it bewildered and contemplative.
“Biochron Space Suit,” the opening track, is pretty much everything you want from a thrash track in 2017. There’s General Ham’s rabid snarl alongside Ballou’s feedback frays, tipping guitarist Guzzler’s razor-pointed riffing over the edge. Drummer Keymaster—the one clad in a cyborg bodysuit here—bashes away with hardcore ethos and learned finesse. “Biochron” is conscious of its ripping, and it makes no bones about proving its case to you. “R-Type 2 Civilization,” with a noise-rock flair from Swirly’s bass that is equal parts Motörhead boogie and Repulsion racket, is just as furious. In all their portrayal of humans subjected to machinery, Expander prove to be quite flexible and nimble. With that, Endless Computer recalls classic death metal’s cerebral attitude despite having little death metal influence, tearing through a psychedelic hellspawn without frill. Its progressive undertones are much less stated than something like Master of Puppets or Rust in Peace, with Guzzler opting for subtler tics that don’t get swallowed up in Endless Computer’s unrelenting fury.
Many great metal records in this decade honor metal tradition with small tweaks, subtle subversions, and homages of spirit. Expander presents the future as the past reconfigured, the same shell with a new, deadlier heart. Every Tom G. Warrior “UGH!” that General Ham yells is a tribute—yet they also sound like a human gazing, in awe, into a cold, mechanized world. Guzzler, meanwhile, unleashes loads of catchy crossover riffs. He’s an efficient guitarist who presents a linear path to the pit—it’s just there are many of these paths, and they’re going by at a blinding pace.
Expander can be difficult to keep up with. “Cold Orbit” is constantly heading toward self-destruction, and “Timezapped” is so hectic that a lurching wah-wah towards the end doesn’t stop it from barreling recklessly ahead. Even the title track, with a bouncy central riff that also draws from early Voivod and Motörhead, feels trapped in a whirlwind purgatory, with General Ham sounding at his most pained, only dreaming of running free. “Authority Spire” takes that torture and amplifies it, centering more on Guzzler’s black metal tremolo explorations that sprout throughout the record. Pain for pleasure is integral to metal; Expander puts a technological existentialism to it, pumping you with enough riff information to give you too much of everything you want.
Ballou consistently gets the heaviest tones from bands, and here, he gets Expander to think bigger, to derive unity from chaos. This is a stark contrast to most of the lo-fi black metal and esoteric death metal released on label Nuclear War Now!, a sugar shock that has no sweetness. Power Trip’s Nightmare Logic isn’t the only thrash record or Texas record that functions as a broad State of Metal this year: Endless Computer is just as vicious and forward-thinking, and it’s got an even bleaker look at the future. It suggests that our technology will become too much to bear, and we will be the ones to cause that. But despite its overarching despair, Endless Computer contains a tinge of optimism in presenting Expander as one of the best young metal bands to emerge this year. | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Nuclear War Now! | December 4, 2017 | 7.8 | 1b5a07be-eef0-46a6-91ca-5dcf49e404e5 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
null | Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence "Turkeytime" Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show. But guess what? On Halloween she showed up in Philadelphia for her *Fader* gig, sat herself under a big fucking Christmas tree, and dished out free copies of *Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1*, the mixtape masterpiece she and Diplo Hollertronix had spent | Diplo / M.I.A.: Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5617-piracy-funds-terrorism-vol-1/ | Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 | Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence "Turkeytime" Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show. But guess what? On Halloween she showed up in Philadelphia for her Fader gig, sat herself under a big fucking Christmas tree, and dished out free copies of Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1, the mixtape masterpiece she and Diplo Hollertronix had spent the 10 previous days putting together in his apartment. Batteries included!
So a large portion of her forthcoming debut, Arular, has willfully gone leaky boat here. Many of her tracks sound similar to one another: A 505 Groovebox queefs out splatty, farty beats and M.I.A. shouts lyrics of varying snark over them, sometimes even singing them. (Sometimes.) She's been irresistible in single land, but M.I.A.'s full-length runs the risk of seeming limited and discrediting her misleading but awesome "female Dizzee Rascal" tag, replacing that description with "Neneh Cherry, Mk. II"-- a label that has likely dawned on anyone who has seen the "Buffalo Stance"-like "Galang" video.
That is why this mixtape kills: The format fits M.I.A. perfectly. Her songs benefit greatly from Diplo's recent baile funk fetish (confer his recent Favela On Blast tape), some choice dub and American hip-hop cuts to break up the blaze to blaze and razorblades, and some flat-out brilliant mashups.
On the upstroke, "Galang" goes reggaeton; on the down, Diplo cops the song a Lil Vicious beat and a lil keyboard hook, and it's so whoa you'll have to punch yourself in the face to stop smiling. "Fire Fire" goes bam bam then walks like an Egyptian in a telling Bangles mashup-- the two songs play so nicely together they could be siamese, until Diplo misdemeans "Pass That Dutch" with M.I.A.'s snakey music box schwarma. M.I.A.'s "Amazon" coupled with Ciara's radio-friendly microcrunk squelch is an early highlight, though that squirmy synth on Clipse's "Definition of a Roller" makes for good freak, too, packing just enough snaggletooth funk to forgive those recent Neptunes missteps.
For a tape whose initial appeal was the instant and gratifying relief it brought to everyone waiting for M.I.A.'s full-length, Diplo ironically saves M.I.A.'s best cuts for last. "URAQT" is a jittery mess of flirting, territory-marking, and text-messaging (!): "You fuckin with my man and you text him all the time/ You mighta had him once but I have him all the time," and later, "U-R-A-Q-T/ Is your daddy dealer, cause you're dope to me!" For dessert, Diplo brings "Big Pimpin'" out of retirement to back M.I.A.'s raspy "Bingo": "Do you know what is on? Do you know what is on? Do you know how this beat is made in fucking Lon-d-d-don?" The song's obviously great, but between M.I.A.'s fierce deliveries and the braggart beat, it sounds weird and ominous, a black-hole closer to an album brimming with life.
Last week, Sasha Frere-Jones profiled M.I.A. in The New Yorker, spraypainting her as a consummate and naturally "world" artist. M.I.A. is silly, dancey, cheap, expensive, truthful, and utterly serious all at once-- just like the world (!). She's not exactly rags-to-riches (yet), but her pop carries unwittingly significant weight, and to potentially far more people than just a few hundred ecstatic MP3 blog readers. It's one thing for M.I.A. to be a "world" pop star; it will be another thing for her to release an album that reflects that backstory. For now, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 takes that burden off of Arular: Diplo has actualized our hopes for M.I.A. qua world pop star, and we didn't even have to leave him cookies. | 2004-11-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-11-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Global / Pop/R&B | Hollertronix | November 21, 2004 | 8.5 | 1b5c51ca-90f6-477d-871e-c7ccea1e3e73 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Rick Ross’ sixth studio album Mastermind arrives following a rough year for the Maybach Music empire. The collection shines when guest raps from the likes of Kanye West, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne, and Jay Z light a fire under his ass. | Rick Ross’ sixth studio album Mastermind arrives following a rough year for the Maybach Music empire. The collection shines when guest raps from the likes of Kanye West, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne, and Jay Z light a fire under his ass. | Rick Ross: Mastermind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19097-rick-ross-mastermind/ | Mastermind | Think back on all we’ve learned about Rick Ross since his 2006 debut album Port of Miami. He sells dope off the iPhone. His girls look like money bags. He wakes up to lobster bisque and reclines to the finest crab meats. Ross has pushed pomp at the expense of disclosure ever since he teased a serviceable personal style out of the paint-by-numbers Miami-Dade pimp chronicles of his early career. But what kept these impersonal missives afloat was a theatrical kingpin flair that seemed to expand in relation to attacks on his dominance. In 2009, when 50 Cent unearthed evidence of Ross’ history as a corrections officer, he brushed it off and struck back with the deliciously plush and cartoonishly prideful Deeper Than Rap and Teflon Don. After a health scare on an airplane in 2011, he puffed his plume further with the Miami Vice villainy of 2012’s Rich Forever and God Forgives, I Don’t. Ross has spent much of his career running defense against claims he’s lost his touch, even as his kingly seafood diet has been usurped by diced pineapples, but he’s had a tougher time than usual in the past year, as threats from gangs, show cancellations, and a drive-by after a birthday celebration raised salient concerns about his wellbeing. A flippant line about spiking a girl’s drink on trap baron Rocko’s hit “U.O.E.N.O.” reportedly cost him a lucrative promotional deal with Reebok. His Maybach Music Group’s Self Made Vol. 3 struggled to connect with a national audience, while a series of fiery solo singles skirted the Billboard Hot 100 entirely. A proposed release date for his sixth studio album Mastermind came and went this past December, and while Ross assured fans he was just “putting final touches on the album,” it looked like the untouchable Maybach Music empire had hit a rough patch.
Mastermind finally lands this week tasked with saving face after a bad year. But God Forgives rode fans’ willful suspension of disbelief raw as Ross anointed himself a pirate, a king, and a president over an album adorned in the gaudiest of embellishments. It doesn’t help that Mastermind finds him slipping from character into caricature. Many of the song concepts here are wan, and much of the wordplay is spent. On “Sanctified”, he’s the “fresh David Koresh,” soliciting grilled cheeses and fellatio from concubines. “BLK & WHT” houses Ross’ third joke about the George Zimmerman trial (“Trayvon Martin, I’m never missing my target”), and the same song’s chorus drably quips that “a nigga black but he sellin’ white.” “Walking on Air” is fashioned entirely out of biblical airballs like “I’m into fashion, nigga, John the Baptist” (whose signature outfit is said to be the hair of whatever wilderness animal he managed to skin) and “Half you niggas Judas, I’m the son of Moses” (whose progeny were passed up as his successors in the priesthood in favor of his nephews). When he’s not falling flat on bad puns, he’s busy hawking his Wingstop restaurants’ lemon pepper chicken wings.
With Ross’ hammy tendencies fading from strength to liability, it’s up to label money and collaborators to save this thing, and bless them all, they tried. Mastermind shines when guest raps from Ross regulars Meek Mill, Lil Wayne, and Jay-Z light a fire under his ass. Wayne and Jay’s great chemistry with Ross proves mutually inspiring for both; “The Devil Is a Lie” nets a better Jay verse than can be found on the majority of Magna Carta Holy Grail, and Wayne’s attack closer “Thug Cry” delivers an intensity recent releases have lacked. Kanye rolls a fixation on Chicago drill and Atlanta swag rap cadences, a rousing vocal from soul great Betty Wright, spectral synths and sinewy lows from ratchet maestro DJ Mustard, and Ross’ trademark overindulgence into the regal pomp of “Sanctified” for the album’s high watermark. “Sanctified” is an outstanding entry into Ross and Kanye’s catalogue of stunners, but it never feels like Ross’ song. The same can be said for deep cut “In Vein”, where Ross cedes the reins to the Weeknd’s promethazine noir, showing face more than halfway in and skating after a quick verse like a guest on his own record. Similarly, “War Ready”’s bloodless, overlong summit with erstwhile Rozay nemesis Jeezy only takes off when the snowman touches the mic.
When Mastermind’s not clinging to famous friends, it’s thrashing at 90s classics for direction. Early on, following a skit playing 911 call audio from the scene of Ross’ shooting, “Nobody” remakes the Notorious B.I.G.’s unsettlingly fatalistic “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)”. Given a shot at breaking kayfabe and speaking on the incident, Ross largely opts out, spitting street rap boilerplate in a Biggie cadence he can never quite pull off. “What a Shame” references both Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame on a Nigga” and Camp Lo’s “Luchini (AKA This Is It)” but brings little to the table beyond French Montana’s bratty “Hanh!” ad lib. “Thug Cry” fares better employing the Billy Cobham sample that provided the backdrop for NorCal alt-rap veterans Souls of Mischief’s “‘93 til Infinity” but damn near drowns under a melodramatic sung hook and more lemon pepper wing talk. Mastermind’s sporadic 90s flair feels cursory, but it actually saves the album from a glut of productions all too often beholden to the bleating synths of mid-2000s DJ Toomp and the moody, intricate sounds of Mannie Fresh. The album could’ve used a few more J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League burners and a trap house brawler or two to lift up the sluggish pace. It wraps in just over an hour, but you’ll feel like you’ve been through much more, listening from end to end.
Mastermind finds Rick Ross in the same predicament his mortal enemy 50 Cent experienced when they squared off in 2009. He’s badly in need of reinvention after running out of recipes for his gangster shtick, but he’s too set in his ways to change direction six albums in. Mastermind gestures at Ross inviting us inside his thought process on “Nobody”, where he intimates that he sends a decoy tour bus around the on tour while traveling via private jet, and “Rich Is Gangsta”, which doubles down on the story that his stint as a corrections officer was an intentional ruse. But the moments where Mastermind gives us William Roberts the man instead of Rick Ross the gangster flick composite character with the borrowed name are scarce, and he remains committed to dialing in good life platitudes that increasingly ring hollow. Mastermind finds Ross at a Truman Show moment: his character’s reached the logical end of its universe. Going forward, he can either break out or keep up a jig he knows that we know is way past expired. | 2014-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Maybach | March 6, 2014 | 5.8 | 1b5dd9d9-feb0-4cdc-93ce-8f893e5466e3 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
On her debut, the breakout Houston rapper is determined to complicate her tough-talking persona. Not every stylistic swing connects, but it’s a blast to hear her growing into her talent. | On her debut, the breakout Houston rapper is determined to complicate her tough-talking persona. Not every stylistic swing connects, but it’s a blast to hear her growing into her talent. | Monaleo: Where the Flowers Don’t Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/monaleo-where-the-flowers-dont-die/ | Where the Flowers Don’t Die | At just 22, Monaleo has already been through it. Before the Houston musician became a viral sensation and Ivy Park ambassador, expectant mother and rising rap royalty, she was a young girl from Missouri City dealing with suicidal ideation as young as fourth grade, surviving intimate partner violence, and coping by developing a “fascination” with death so matter-of-fact that she once studied mortuary science. So even though she’s spent the past two years enjoying the deserved popularity of her gloved-up-fighter singles—especially “Beating Down Yo Block,” the 2021 banger begging to be blasted from a lowrider truck—success has made her somewhat circumspect, too. On her debut album, Where the Flowers Don’t Die, she aims to fill out the contours of an ascendant star, determined to complicate her tough-talking persona and detail everything she went through to get here.
From the top, Where the Flowers Don’t Die signals that Monaleo is serious. On “Sober Mind,” a slow boom-bap textured with piano chords, she raps about clear-headedness and vanquishing her darker impulses: “This little mind of my mine it take time/If I ever get to thinking too much I take five/I be damned if I let a bad thought take mine.” Her pensiveness is surprisingly traditional, hewing to the rap classicism that tends to intrigue old heads; here it’s about the timeless musicality of her words and the lilt of her sentiment. Monaleo replicates the approach on the deceptively lovely breakup flamethrower “Return of the P” as well as “Ridgemont Baby,” a gutting memoir over a Tom Brock sample in which she transforms a diss into a plaintive family portrait. “You bitches grew up with family dogs in a two-story/So in other words bitch you don’t know the half,” she admonishes her bougier enemies, and then: “What you know ’bout boiling hot water just to take a bath/We was four deep in a one-bedroom, you do the math.” It gets rougher and more resilient from there; she’s really been through it.
These tracks provide personal context and a deep backdrop for her punchier numbers, including “Beating Down Yo Block” and the Southern bad bitch anthem “Ass Kickin.” When she tells an eager but marginally useful man that “you gon’ pay for what Kirk did to Rasheeda” on the latter track, she raps with the same cutting cadence as the iconic Atlanta rapper she namechecks: succinct, consonant-forward, voice low and bubbling like pavement tar, elucidating the finer points of a cunnilingus pump-and-dump strategy. (Its video depicts Monaleo’s pregnant posse administering beatdowns at the OB-GYN, and cross-cuts to a fetus breakdancing in the womb.) Monaleo can be funny and tough, emotional and direct, broadly versatile in tenor and style with a distinctly Texan flair, and it’s a blast to hear her growing into her talent.
Flowers starts to swerve into the median somewhere around “Goddess,” featuring Flo Milli on a melodic, Kewpie doll flow—a pop play in the mold of Doja Cat that wouldn’t feel totally prefab if only a feckless engineer had accidentally deleted the acoustic guitar. It’s prettified by an ethereal cascade of synths and the theme, that God has to be a woman because dudes are so trifling, is relatable though well-trod. It also establishes that Monaleo has a beautiful singing voice, and her church choir skills are there to call upon for album closer “Cosmic Love,” where she declares she’d fly into “space with no spacesuit/If it means that I won’t get to face you again.” There’s that professed morbidity! (Memo to the queasy: Do not Google what happens to the human body while rawdogging space.)
And then—a Swiftian adult-contemporary song called “Miss Understood” pops up like promoted Instagram poetry. It’s meant to illustrate that Monaleo is “hard on the outside, soft in the middle,” as she sings, but going straight from beating down hoes to walking on sunshine is quite the jarring switch. The hardass tracks may be a front for a woman who’s seen some shit, but Monaleo has already established her complexities; a rote guitar ballad that invokes songwriting clichés about a hurt little girl feels like its own, different kind of mask. Particularly when that’s followed by an interlude called “Sauvage,” which transitions into “Cologne Song,” where our heroine wonders sweetly, “What kinda cologne are you wearing?” (This also evokes sour memories of Johnny Depp’s creepy Dior campaign, probably not what she was going for.) On their own, the undeniably great layered harmonies on “Cologne Song” gesture at innocent, early ’90s R&B—Shanice singing about loving your smile was schmaltzy, too, yet remains one of the best love songs of that era. But “Cologne Song” betrays Monaleo’s impulse towards surface-level lyricism when she can obviously go much deeper.
You could see this track sequence as a statement of Monaleo’s clear versatility, but it’s a better case for a sharper edit. So just when you’re contemplating her untroubled attraction to a man’s alluring scent (“I know it ain’t Axe”), she’s back with the gloves on, rapping ferociously that she’s a “thug ass gangsta bitch come get ya wig split” (“Wig Splitter”). Monaleo’s got a compelling story to tell—of her climb from the couch to become a “young rich bitch” with a shoulder chip, hardened by her experiences but as vulnerable as any of us when she lets the defensive pose drop. The instinct to flex her range is a good one, particularly at the outset of an already thriving career. Now it’s just a matter of finding the balance between boldness and platitudes, chutzpah and chaos. | 2023-05-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stomp Down | May 26, 2023 | 6.7 | 1b64ca49-20ab-40bb-931f-bea12179aedb | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
Eight years after releasing his first UK bass single, London’s Arthur Cayzer offers a debut LP of ambient music whose invocation of canonical tropes plays like a love letter to the resurgent genre. | Eight years after releasing his first UK bass single, London’s Arthur Cayzer offers a debut LP of ambient music whose invocation of canonical tropes plays like a love letter to the resurgent genre. | Pariah: Here From Where We Are | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pariah-here-from-where-we-are/ | Here From Where We Are | News of a revival—of a particular sound, style, or trend forgotten by the mainstream—usually means only that the news-bearer hasn’t been paying attention. Adherents know better. Most of the time, these tastes have been thriving out of sight for years. But as much as die-hard fans may scoff at recent talk of an ambient revival, it’s hard to deny that contemplative, beatless strains of electronic music have become more active, and are enjoying more widespread appeal, in recent years. Pariah’s Here From Where We Are is just the latest indicator that the gentle genre is in rude health.
Pariah (London’s Arthur Cayzer) emerged in 2009, bearing a sleek and soulful variant of the UK bass that was then bubbling up in the work of artists like Burial and James Blake. Following the one-two punch of his debut single, “Detroit Falls,” and its follow-up EP, Safehouses, he surmised that he would begin work on his debut album “in the next year or so.” But what he described as “pretty bad writer’s block” must have been worse than he imagined, because that debut long-player ended up taking eight years. In the intervening span, he was productive, but not prolific. There was a quick run of EPs, all for R&S, between 2010 and 2012; from 2011 through 2014, he and Blawan, a fellow Brit known for his brutalist techno, put out three EPs under their collaborative alias Karenn.
Cayzer’s debut solo LP finds him sounding like a different artist entirely. That’s good: In the early years, even at his best, there was little in his music that sounded truly original. You could hear him working through his influences, striving to create something true to himself, but not quite breaking free from the pull of his forebears and peers. In his defense, there was a lot of that at the time; UK bass exerted a powerful gravitational force. He finds more freedom in ambient music.
Not that Here From Where We Are sounds radically original; Cayzer is working with well-worn ideas. But ambient has been around long enough that originality feels less important in that tradition than it does in a supposedly cutting-edge sound like UK bass. In its invocation of canonical tropes, the album often feels like a love letter to the genre. The bright and triumphant opening track, “Log Jam,” is evocative of Oneohtrix Point Never covering Philip Glass, and from there Pariah surveys new-age drift, field recordings, the chillout-room languor of Global Communication, the wide-eyed chord progressions of Boards of Canada. “Rain Soup,” with its swirl of wind chimes and precipitation, sounds keyed to the current vogue for sound baths. The title track, with its major-key chords and veiled shimmer, carries the faintest hint of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.
Cayzer’s keen ear and judicious touch are crucial to the album’s success. Ambient music, particularly when it’s this pretty, risks falling into a formless goop, but Pariah is good at creating tension. After “Log Jam” builds to a shuddering climax—the album hits its energetic peak just four minutes into its 40-odd minute run—its segue into the regal organ drones of “Pith” feels like leaping off a cliff and then hang gliding in lazy circles above verdant fields. “Linnaea” begins with slow, underwater strings and then moves in fits and starts toward the light, like Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking of the Titanic,” but in reverse, with interlocking triplet and eighth-note patterns that gradually assume sharp, crystalline outlines as they play off one another. (If Boards of Canada make music inspired by the warbly, film-stock look and feel of vintage nature documentaries, “Linnaea” would make an excellent soundtrack for one of today’s hi-def explorations of the mysteries of the deep.)
It’s the interplay between those arpeggios that makes the song so quietly gripping: By almost imperceptibly shifting emphasis across his narrow set of elements—now it’s the triplets you notice, now the eighth notes, now a naïve, flute-like melody—Cayzer creates an almost narrative sensibility, never mind that the music doesn’t actually do that much beyond simply cycling in place. The same could be said for most of Here From Where We Are. Like all agreeable ambient music, it burbles away in the background, invisible right up until the moment you notice it—a little like the ambient revival itself. | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | July 25, 2018 | 7.2 | 1b65adf5-a6fe-4d7c-82d1-910b523d1241 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Brittany Bosco’s latest project elevates smooth R&B and Afrofuturism from off the streets of Atlanta with an emotional, bop-heavy set of songs. | Brittany Bosco’s latest project elevates smooth R&B and Afrofuturism from off the streets of Atlanta with an emotional, bop-heavy set of songs. | BOSCO: b. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bosco-b/ | b. | The Savannah-born, Atlanta-based singer BOSCO is the kind of chameleonic artist who finds comfort in any arrangement. A product of the left-of-trap movement responsible for acts like Hollyweerd, the Pheels, Kona, and Janelle Monáe’s Wondaland collective, her sound is a linchpin that bridges all gaps in the local music scene—a storehouse of ingenuity eclipsed by rap titans who rule the roost with swagged-out turn-up anthems. Their omnipresence limits the popular narrative about the city’s output to slab music, amphetamine-positive dope-boy anthems, and their bubblegum derivatives. Inclusive of that culture but not ruled by it, BOSCO is the hybrid of modern Atlanta’s most important musical movements with the chops to elevate a different side of the south to a global stage.
First catapulted by the 2008 Spectrum EP, Brittany Bosco nurtured a national following with a sound influenced by Sarah Vaughn, Gnarls Barkley, TLC, and Janis Joplin. She arrived as a multilingual artist fluent in every modern chapter of popular music with an appropriately emotive vocal talent. Propelled by the single “Gold Ghost,” BOSCO floated gracefully above the tick of the trap on the 2015 BOY EP, channeling “Rock the Boat”-era Aaliyah and proving her capacity for the same kind of ambient around-the-way ballads that catapulted Ty Dolla $ign. She followed with 2016’s Girls in the Yard, co-produced with DJ Speakerfoxxx. Referencing house, stadium pop, and dancehall riddims, they created a body-moving dance-party opus that feted Missy Elliott. The direct lyricism, rhythmic alchemy, and experimental production that took shape across the preceding releases are perfected on b.
Recorded in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Los Angeles and described as an “ongoing art project,” the eight-track b. is a snapshot of BOSCO’s personal life driven by love, lust, and self-discovery. After the whimsical but forgettable opener “Adrenaline,” BOSCO sets the bar with the sickening breakup fanfare “Castles.” Delicate vocals collide with staccato piano and wobbling bass as BOSCO proclaims her freedom. Anna Wise joins her on “We Cool ” and their playful harmonies channel Hadley Street-era Solange as BOSCO muses about where she stands in the arena of love. Ditching the rose-colored lenses by “Cruel,” BOSCO applies a cold, satin tone to the aftermath of a love affair, leveling “So why do we cry, when we both know it’s the end?”
The project is a chronicle of her missteps and imperfections that finds BOSCO fully settled into womanhood and eager to take greater ownership of her life and work. By abandoning the “Milkshake” frivolity of Girls in the Yard and the brooding affect of BOY, BOSCO leaves herself room to embrace and explore womanhood in an environment that edifies the musical moments that reared her. Where the material is noticeably weak, a breathy, “too cool for school” timbre is to blame. She is adept at channeling Brandy’s smoky, understated runs and the disaffected charm of alt-rock, but missing is a more nuanced range—a shame, but it’s something that exists all over her previous work.
Nevertheless, BOSCO originates from the space where black music breaks away from the “urban” monolith. Underground and mainstream ideals coexist within each arrangement on b. because she, herself, has never chosen a side. She is crucial to the musical arc of Atlanta and the evolution of black music precisely because of this. Standing at the intersection of the old Atlanta and the Afro-future, BOSCO is the author of an avant iteration of the A-Town sound and b. positions herself to be the city’s title contender instead of just your fave’s fave. | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fool’s Gold | August 17, 2017 | 7.4 | 1b664550-e62f-46d0-bf27-ac071ace5187 | Karas Lamb | https://pitchfork.com/staff/karas-lamb/ | null |
On stage, the Bristol quartet combines a DJ’s instinct for pacing with a rock band’s penchant for volume. The group’s debut LP strikes a trickier balance between control and abandon. | On stage, the Bristol quartet combines a DJ’s instinct for pacing with a rock band’s penchant for volume. The group’s debut LP strikes a trickier balance between control and abandon. | SCALPING: Void | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scalping-void/ | Void | A good DJ is a conductor of limbs. With the twist of a knob from their podium, they can sculpt the arrangement of bodies on the dancefloor like a theremin player plucking melodies from thin air. Bristol quartet SCALPING are in many respects a rock group, but they approach their concerts like nightclub overlords, designing their blistering sets like extended trance pieces. Self-described as “a live band playing industrial techno,” SCALPING combine the traditional tools of rock music with electronic processing to craft dimensional, steely sound circuits. Their method evokes the mechanics of a Transformer—an intricate machine springing from a mundane hunk of metal. On Void, their debut full-length, SCALPING channel a sense of precision into their songwriting, but they lose some of the intensity that makes their live shows so electrifying.
In the attempt to erase the boundaries between hard rock and techno, SCALPING detach their music from corporeal appearances. When they play, each member is visible only in silhouette. Guitarist Jamie Thomas, bassist James Rushforth, drummer Isaac Jones, and electronics mastermind Alex Hill are obscured on the dark stage, backlit by a screen flashing with visual artist Jason Baker’s cyborgian digital renderings. The faceless musicians disappear into their nonstop concerts, which they arrange as meticulously as DJ sets. SCALPING gradually build the tempo from 80 bpm to 140, then drop back down to 70 to achieve maximum kinetic response from the heaving crowd. As composers and, indirectly, choreographers, SCALPING are extremely calculated. “Nothing’s an accident,” the band has said, admitting that, like Rivers Cuomo, they write songs on spreadsheets.
SCALPING are devoted to minutiae, but more than anything, they want their music to be “extreme.” There are moments on Void that rattle and scorch—the glitchy, robotic pulse of “Over the Walls,” the blown-out bass on “Cloak & Dagger”—but the album often feels reined in. This is possibly due to the fact that SCALPING, a band so invested in their live sound, recorded the entire LP remotely during lockdown. Even they seem to have realized the limitations of that approach: “I don’t think we’ll ever make a record in this way again, without being in the same room at all,” Jones recently told NME.
Void’s tamest stretches, the loping “Desire” and the nu-metal indebted “Tether,” can be partly cured with volume; in fact the entire album should be played at full blast. But at moderate levels, “Desire”—a rigid network of sequenced bleeps, processed guitar, and subdued percussion—feels like a discarded theme from Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy score. It is competent but not particularly innovative or extreme. With its searing guitars and pummeling beat, “Tether” is heftier, but the vocals from Oakland-based artist Daemon feel tacked on. His dreary, conversational delivery has a dampening effect, like a hand absorbing the clang from a crash cybmal. Rather than engulf the singer with their own grit and squall, SCALPING take the backseat on their own track, while Daemon sounds like he wandered over from another band.
If SCALPING craft their live shows as continuous arcs of noise, it makes you wonder why they didn’t replicate that tactic on Void. Some songs bleed into each other, but the album also has gaps between many of its tracks, making it feel like a more traditional rock album than an experiment in fusing genres. Two of its best cuts together feel like one evolving piece. Openers “Blood Club” and “Caller Unknown” are cinematic in their detail—buzzsaw guitars, dubbed-out drums, and metallic synths plunge you into a grimy tech noir, evoking the neon-lit back alleys of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The two songs are wired together by souped-up screeching, one of the album’s most powerful, ear-shredding effects.
SCALPING snap back to this voltage on closer “Remain in Stasis,” which features Bristol’s Grove. Unlike Daemon’s dull, glued-on flow, Grove’s vocals are embedded in the mix like shining flecks in granite. Their voice glides through SCALPING’s gauntlet, dissolving under sizzling distortion and yielding to punishing, rubbery arpeggios. Here, SCALPING achieve perfect synergy between intensity and precision. With rigorous control, they choreograph chaos. | 2022-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Houndstooth | May 2, 2022 | 6.8 | 1b6f9ac5-5165-41ad-a286-6d16dbdf5673 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
With stripped-down, ambient eeriness, the debut LP from this dubstep/dancehall crossover is like a mirror image of the Bug's London Zoo. | With stripped-down, ambient eeriness, the debut LP from this dubstep/dancehall crossover is like a mirror image of the Bug's London Zoo. | King Midas Sound: Waiting For You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13616-waiting-for-you/ | Waiting For You | The Bug's London Zoo aged well over the past year: It still stands as one of the more exciting albums of 2008, a roots-heavy dubstep/dancehall crossover with rib-cracking rhythms and an amazing guest roster of singers and toasters that stands as a remarkably distinctive collection of voices. But there was a surprise harbinger in that album, a song that my original review actually completely overlooked due to-- or maybe despite-- a stripped-down, ambient eeriness that offset the rest of the album's aggro-beat feel. That song was "You & Me", a strikingly delicate yet powerful collaboration with the soft-voiced singer/poet Roger Robinson. And about three months after London Zoo dropped, the creative partnership of Robinson and producer Kevin Martin brought forth a deservedly lauded single under the name King Midas Sound: the ghostly "Cool Out", which rivaled the best of Burial when it came to the more desolate corners of dubstep.
One year later, "Cool Out" has reemerged as the lead track off the first King Midas Sound full-length, and it's retained its impact-- assuming you can refer to the feeling of becoming slowly enveloped in abandoned-high-rise ambiance and serenaded by quivering, sweetly voiced murmurs as an impact. It also stands as one of the highlights of Waiting for You, or at least one of the most chilling moments; the fact that this album can conflate the two is a sure sign of where it's coming from. Every strength this record holds draws off the symbiotic relationship between Martin's beats and Robinson's voice, which adapt to each other in a way that the last two people in a barren environment might. This is dub production rendered as the final reverberations of a deserted cityscape, infused with a crumbling low-end that does for bass what a single fluorescent tube in an underground concrete tunnel does for light. And the voice decorates it like a spiderweb-- fragile in appearance, but structurally resilient enough to hold strong against the rhythm.
Robinson's singing sells his idea of zero-gravity lovers' rock like a champ, filling in the evocative cracks that his mostly straightforward lyrics don't do much to cover. The title track's lovesick sentiments are familiar, but there's this pang to his voice-- a bit disbelieving, bitter, hopeful and agonized all at once-- that holds the deeper meaning. And he's just as powerful on the other songs where he's called upon to invoke that lonely brooding atmosphere-- "One Ting" (sonically bleaker than the nano-orchestral lavishness of Dabrye's remix from the "Cool Out" 12"); the misty-eyed take-me-back begging of "Darlin'"; "Meltdown" and its heavy-sighing pleads for intimacy. Robinson does have an intriguing vocal counterpart on a few tracks in the person of Dokkeki Q member Kiki Hitomi, at her ethereally malicious best on "Goodbye Girl" delivering spiteful reprimands and Elvis Costello quotes with a scalpel's agility ("I wish you pain 'til you can't ever feel joy/ I wish you luck with a capital F, boy"). But the more remote and abandoned Robinson's aching voice sounds, the heavier it hits.
Not all of Waiting for You has that same ambiance, though it rarely rises above the level of a soft rumble. Martin's production forgoes the stereotypical dubstep war of bassbin attrition to let the beats glow instead of flash, and even when it approaches an actual heavy knock-- like the underwater dancehall bump of "Outta Space" or the smothered Mantronix boom-clap of "I Man"-- it still resembles the starker moments of *Mezzanine-*era Massive Attack more than it does something along the lines of Bug tracks like "Skeng" or "Warning". Still, a little something is lost when things digress from the cutting isolation that made "Cool Out" work, especially when Robinson breaks from his singing to issue scoffing spoken-word holistic reprimands on "Earth a Kill Ya"-- a decent bit of preaching with a heavy scowl of a beat beneath, but oddly harsh and self-assured on a record that thrives on sounding vulnerable. | 2009-11-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-11-13T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hyperdub | November 13, 2009 | 7.6 | 1b74bd74-47c6-4039-98bd-237491a1e2e2 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
On her first album in five years, the singer-songwriter meditates on love, grief, and motherhood with vibrant melodies and newfound perspective. | On her first album in five years, the singer-songwriter meditates on love, grief, and motherhood with vibrant melodies and newfound perspective. | Martha Wainwright: Love Will Be Reborn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martha-wainwright-love-will-be-reborn/ | Love Will Be Reborn | Martha Wainwright has referred to Love Will Be Reborn as her “middle coming-of-age” album, and it’s easy to see why: It’s the 45-year-old songwriter’s first record in five years, and the songs are heavy with acceptance and farewells, most notably to a decade-long marriage. It’s also Wainwright’s only album to make no overt mention of her illustrious parents or brother—songwriters Loudon Wainwright III, the late Kate McGarrigle, and Rufus Wainwright—and the many conversations she’s had with them through her own work. Love Will Be Reborn feels at once bigger and smaller than her previous material, with each quiet rumination leading her toward grander musings on love, grief, and motherhood.
Despite these departures, Wainwright revisits many familiar themes: her instinctive desire to be a good person (“I want to do right”) and the fatigue in her heart (“I know I’ll never believe in you again”). This time, she’s mostly alone, arriving at these thoughts through monologues to the air, to God, and to the redemptive power of rock’n’roll. There’s less storytelling, a turn from the accusatory tone she favored in the past, which she recently characterized with typical self-deprecation: “‘Oh, you did this [expletive], how could you?’ da da da.” Personal grievances give way to a more existential perspective, while Wainwright’s raw, growling vocals assure us she hasn’t lost her bite; she’s simply found new ways to channel it.
In the past, Wainwright’s fiery excoriations were never simple indictments; they doubled as acts of self-empowerment that defined who she is in relation to the people she isn’t and doesn’t want to be. (Wainwright once called her father a “bloody mother fucking asshole” in a song that cathartically asserted her own presence among the “guys with guitars.”) On Love Will Be Reborn, she swears only once: “Don’t fuck with my kids,” she hisses on “Body and Soul,” amid harrowing descriptions of an abusive relationship. It’s a stirring climax, a turn to the offensive on a record that largely softens her abrasive impulses.
Wainwright’s reflections on motherhood also inform the most desolate scenes on the album—and in her songbook—to date. In “Report Card,” the longest track she’s ever released, Wainwright’s voice is mostly a cappella as she laments the absence of her children in the wake of her divorce, packing their “empty clothes into an empty bin.” In other moments, her voice is paired with echoing hi-hats that hang like drawn-out sighs, moving her forward as if by force.
Yet light spills in through the cracks. The lovely trickles of piano midway through “Report Card” resonate like a note of hope. In “Hole in My Heart,” with ecstatic, spacey synth blasts and a title borrowed from Cyndi Lauper, Wainwright pays tribute to love’s ability to touch even the most hardened hearts. And while catchy hooks have never been her focus, the vibrant melodies shine, buoyed by a wider, more adventurous palette courtesy of new producer Pierre Marchand. The rock opera switch-up in “Rainbow,” with its introduction of electric guitar, lights the stage.
“Why do I have to go on?,” Wainwright asks bluntly on “Rainbow.” “For the kids and the neighbors/For love and for song.” It is a stark realization, a direct response to a similar thought she shared some 15 years ago, in a song called “Far Away”: “I have no reason to be alive/Oh, give me one.” Traversing her work and her life in this self-referential way, Love Will Be Reborn answers old questions and carries her somewhere new. It’s not a place without struggle, but Wainwright dusts herself off with grace. “I sing my little songs of love and pain,” she announces early in the album. It makes everything just a little more bearable.
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. | 2021-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cooking Vinyl | August 30, 2021 | 7.6 | 1b76c907-200a-4929-8fcc-4de72c10fdef | Kelly Liu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kelly-liu/ | |
The rarities set rkives is a full-sounding collection that reads like a long-lost Rilo Kiley album from the early-2000s, a fact that will satisfy the many fans maddened by their late-career stab at the mainstream, Under the Blacklight. | The rarities set rkives is a full-sounding collection that reads like a long-lost Rilo Kiley album from the early-2000s, a fact that will satisfy the many fans maddened by their late-career stab at the mainstream, Under the Blacklight. | Rilo Kiley: rkives | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17827-rilo-kiley-rkives/ | rkives | There was a time not so long ago when social-media platforms didn’t track their members’ every move and stow the information in a steel lock-box for all of eternity. The proto-blog platform Livejournal, for instance, is a ghost town today. Try to revisit a deleted past life there and you’ll likely be confronted with a crying goat informing you that the account, and all of its entries, have been capital-P purged. Never to be recovered. Resurrecting those pages would mean unearthing legions of fans of the Los Angeles indie-folk band Rilo Kiley, whose final album was released in 2007. Rilo Kiley's frontwoman and former child star Jenny Lewis was, to my memory, a spiritual guide for one subset of the Livejournal community, who'd plaster her lyrics on their entries and profile pages with Belieber-like devotion. I think of Rilo Kiley and Livejournal the way some people think of Tila Tequila and MySpace.
Traces of that intense Rilo Kiley fandom pop up in unexpected places today. Like the arm of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, which is inked with the glum charcoal drawing found on the cover of the band’s 2002 album The Execution of All Things. “I’ve listened to that record so many times. [Jenny Lewis] was a perfect influence then,” Crutchfield said in a recent interview. “Rilo Kiley is obviously an indie rock band, but she sings like a real singer, which is how I always tried to sing, too.” Rilo Kiley stopped making music in 2007, and the memory of their heyday has faded to a dull flicker. But Jenny Lewis can be found in the DNA of many millennial musicians-- women in particular-- making confessional indie-rock today. When Crutchfield sings: “I don’t care if I’m too young to be unhappy,” you might think of the former child star, who told the world at age 25: “You say I choose sadness/ That it never once has chosen me/ Maybe you’re right.” Exploring old-but-new Rilo Kiley material can feel like connecting vital dots in recent history.
There is no shortage of unheard Rilo Kiley material out there: Sennett and Lewis reportedly wrote 60 songs together in the late 90s, before they even formed a band or a romantic relationship. rkives is a full-sounding collection that reads like a long-lost Rilo Kiley album from the early-2000s, a fact that will satisfy the many fans maddened by their late-career stab at the mainstream, Under the Blacklight. The archive, which is out on bassist Pierre de Reeder’s tiny label, tells a story of the group before Lewis got an expensive haircut, before their music played in scenes of “Gossip Girl” and “Grey’s Anatomy”, before they signed to Warner Bros., before Ben Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel broke up (or even met). Before we collectively shuttered our Livejournals. The only thing that jolts you back into present-day is rapper Too $hort’s voice on a remix of the strident dance-pop track “Dejalo”, from Under the Blacklight. It's an outlier, and a reminder that newly recorded Rilo Kiley music is exciting in theory but would probably be peculiar and unlistenable in practice.
The majority of the 16 tracks have never been heard before, but their tone will feel familiar. “All the trips that take you there/ All the little white pills that you take will get you there/ All the compliments that you take, they will get you there,” Lewis reels off (she often narrates her woes in lists) on “It’ll Get You There”, a song that could very well serve as the companion piece to the beloved 2002 depressive anthem “A Better Son/Daughter”. There’s enough screaming and argyle-sweater sadness to date Rilo Kiley as an occasional emo band, but plenty of twang to reinforce the bridge they built to indie-folk land. There are uneasy love letters to Los Angeles that sound like they were composed in Nashville, and housewifely misery of Betty Draper proportions (“No one escapes their liiii-iiiifffee!”, small children chant on “American Wife”.) There is Jenny Lewis, just as you remember her.
And there is Blake Sennett, guitarist and subject of many of Lewis’s doleful lyrics, just as you remember him. Lewis told SPIN in 2007 that after the pair split six years earlier, she’d thought to herself: "I’m going to get him with these lyrics, and he’s not going to know. It will be a little secret every night on the road." Sennett eventually took on a reputation-- unfairly, perhaps-- as a wet blanket of a sideman, preoccupied with his own creative ambitions and bitter about the division of attention among the band’s members. He eventually pulled the plug on the group after their ill-fated final record, explaining later in an interview that he’d "felt like there was a lot of deception, disloyalty, greed”... things he “didn’t want to submit himself to.” Lewis’ (albeit minor) success as a solo artist likely salted the wound. “She’s meteoric and I’m... mediocre?” Sennett once confessed. He wasn’t wrong.
That whimpering persona translates especially harshly on rkives, which features a handful of tracks he sung. It's almost as though those songs, like the limp relationship post-mortem “Well, You Left”, were added to the collection to show how uniquely appealing Lewis was, to underscore her role as the heart and soul of the project. His voice is deeply, painfully unlikeable. In many ways, the gulf between Lewis and Sennett has become the gulf between Lewis and many of her most adored indie-folk classmates, whose music can sound meek or stale in retrospect. Next to Sennett’s crude whine, Colin Meloy’s overwrought attempts at poeticism, Ben Gibbard’s pallidness or Conor Oberst’s drunken antics, Lewis’ pain sounds downright lovely, her despair dignified.
Lewis’ pain and despair have always been unique forces, packaged in cunning ways. Six years removed from the band’s last proper studio album, rkives is a lens that magnifies the darkness of Rilo Kiley’s catalogue. Like their debut Take Offs and Landings and its follow-up The Execution of All Things, the collection relies on deceptively precious instrumentation and cutesy pop-folk hues to mask-- but ultimately, to highlight-- the sinister core of the lyrics. “The Frug”, a beloved early recording that appeared in a Christina Ricci movie, is perhaps the most darling Rilo Kiley have ever sounded-- but it’s a depressive tale masquerading as a cutesy dance diddy. “I can take my clothes off/ I cannot fall in love/ You’ll never see my eyes,” she says, once again with the lists. “I cannot do the smurf/ I cannot fall in love/ I’ll never fall in love.” Rilo Kiley songs are often like Edward Gorey stories-- they’re aesthetically dainty enough for children, but someone always dies tragically or has her heart broken at the end of the day. It's an appealing dichotomy that carved out a special niche for the band: Jenny Lewis proved that you can be a female singer-songwriter in the brutal, self-lacerating tradition of Liz Phair or Fiona Apple and an avatar for the arts-and-crafty Urban Outfitters set at the same time.
Sound familiar? Today the burden of that dichotomy sits most squarely on the shoulders of Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, an artist openly indebted to the music of Rilo Kiley. When Best Coast's music began to circulate in 2009 and 2010, it sounded uncannily familar-- like the lovelorn Los Angeles ballads of a girl whose music I'd learned about through Livejournal. It turned out I'd been listening to Cosentino since our respective high school days, when she'd upload acoustic tracks under the name Bethany Sharayah. I liked it because it sounded like Rilo Kiley. "When I grow up I know that I will be something special/ And the people will know my face/ And call me by my legal name," she sung on one called "The War of Copy", mapping out her own trajectory. Cosentino, I learned, never deleted her Livejournal page, even once she became one of the biggest names in popular indie music, worked with Jon Brion or launched a campaign for Urban Outfitters. There she is, still with a bio that reads, "It's hard to celebrate with a headache", still a member of a Rilo Kiley fan community. | 2013-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Little Record Company | April 4, 2013 | 7.4 | 1b812d38-b9a8-41d4-8a79-dbaedb7ceeef | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
Songwriter Mark Kozelek's 130-minute epic is indeed daring and self-reflective, but too often he prides long stretches of bitter humor and anger over the subtlety of his previous work. | Songwriter Mark Kozelek's 130-minute epic is indeed daring and self-reflective, but too often he prides long stretches of bitter humor and anger over the subtlety of his previous work. | Sun Kil Moon: Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22924-common-as-light-and-love-are-red-valleys-of-blood/ | Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood | In retrospect, Sun Kil Moon’s 2014 milestone Benji was less of a breakthrough than a breakdown just before Mark Kozelek became definitively mean and petty. Even with Benji’s life-flashing-before-your-eyes earnestness (the repentance! the forgiveness! the laughs! the tears!), its lessons seem to have gone unabsorbed. Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood comes in at 130 minutes. This is after two Sun Kil Moon albums—2015’s Universal Themes, 2016’s Jesu/Sun Kil Moon—that left no one thinking, “I wish these were twice as long.” Kozelek knows that Common as Light isn’t an easy sell. In a particularly forgettable number called “Seventies TV Show Theme Song,” he admits, “All I know is this reminds me of the theme to ‘Barney Miller’/It wasn’t intentional, just adding a song on the record for filler.” It’s not the only lyric on here that simply describes what the music sounds like, or dares you to stop listening. These are by-and-large the most confrontational songs Kozelek has ever put out, but strangely they’re also some of the more exciting ones he’s written since developing his post-Benji spoken word style.
While recent records have found Kozelek lambasting his vinyl-collecting fans and putting the fear of God in the minds of bloggers who miss his Red House Painters days, here Kozelek directs his fury more broadly. He makes three things absolutely clear: he hates iPhones, he hates Twitter, and he hates the twentysomethings who read Twitter on their iPhones. If there’s a theme to this record (the way that, you know, acting in a Paolo Sorrentino film was the theme of the previous Sun Kil Moon LP), it’s that the world is fucked, man, so get off your phone and respect your elders (especially Mark Kozelek). Many songs attempt to reflect Kozelek’s anger following mass shootings to varying degrees of profundity. The awkwardly chipper music in “Bastille Day” creates an effect not dissimilar to Smash Mouth playing the intro to “All Star” on loop while their singer threatens the audience. This mode, as one might imagine, doesn’t add up to a particularly moving collection of songs.
It does, however, make for some surprisingly great moments. In “Philadelphia Cop,” which slowly evolves into a eulogy for David Bowie, Kozelek lands a bitter jab: “If you’re a man in charge claiming you’re a staunch feminist, then give a woman your job or shut the fuck up, Queen Bitch.” In the well-meaning “Lone Star,” he helps save a suicidal woman’s life and tries to convince North Carolina officials to amend their transphobic bathroom laws. The slow, ominous “Sarah Lawrence College Song” finds him performing a small gig for a group of college students, which obviously leads to him berating them for how much their parents pay for tuition. He replies, “That’s what Walmart pays me to use my music in commercials,” but quickly changes his tone: “Maybe I can go to their school one day too, ‘cause they all seem like really nice people.”
Many of these songs follow similar patterns: Kozelek snaps and sympathizes in the same breath. When he jokes with his colorblind building manager that he wants his tiles “gray… like your hair, man,” he comments just a second later, “Hey, I got a little gray too, I’m not picking on you.” The reason why similarly quotidian story-songs like “Gustavo” or “Jim Wise” hit so hard was because they resulted in double portraits: You learned more about Kozelek through his observations of others. On Common as Light, Kozelek fills the whole frame, increasing the humor and anger, but sacrificing the subtlety. If the diaristic style he developed on his last few releases has been generously compared to novelists like Karl Ove Knausgård or James Joyce, then these songs feel more like Larry David or, at their most vulgar, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
Curiously, Kozelek plays a ton of synth here—a foreign sound for any Sun Kil Moon record. “I’ve found that when you put an instrument in someone’s hands that they aren’t used to playing, interesting things happen,” he noticed in a recent interview. A lot of this does sound new, which is becoming more difficult as he becomes more prolific and the world catches up with him. Phil Elverum cited him as an influence for his upcoming Mount Eerie album, and you can hear pieces of “Carissa” in “Ravens,” just like you can hear “Sunshine in Chicago” in “Okkervil River R.I.P.,” or “I Watched the Film the Song Remains the Same” in Father John Misty’s “Leaving L.A.” Kozelek’s work continues to ripple outward, even as he retreats further and further into himself.
Just last year, a pitch-perfect parody made the rounds, mimicking Kozelek’s style to the point of tricking a few people into thinking a new EP of his had surfaced. The irony is that those pensive, guitar-based songs already sound completely outdated—representative of a different Mark Kozelek from a different time. Such is the nature of his work. Kozelek has always been his own most restless listener, and part of his motivation is simply to keep himself interested in making art, whether that means changing his band name, starting his own record label, or turning his own songwriting process into his muse. “Maybe you’ll hear it and think, ‘I prefer your older songs,’” he sings in “Seventies TV Show Theme,” “Well, maybe the world has changed and I’m not that songwriter anymore.” In spirit, Common as Light resembles his classic work more than he’s willing to admit. After all, his previous epics Rollercoaster and April were emotionally exhausting listens, unfolding with the intensity of a man trying to pack everything he knows into one record. As disorienting and overwhelming as any of Kozelek’s defining albums, Common as Light patiently reveals more of the artist to anyone who’s still paying attention. | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Rough Trade / Caldo Verde | February 28, 2017 | 6.5 | 1b814c24-1928-45e6-a78f-187fcee4c910 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Crucial marks the debut solo release from Bryndon Cook, a guitarist who's toured with Solange, Dev Hynes, Chairlift and Kindness. He's a student of pop history and a skilled musician, though not yet a great songwriter. | Crucial marks the debut solo release from Bryndon Cook, a guitarist who's toured with Solange, Dev Hynes, Chairlift and Kindness. He's a student of pop history and a skilled musician, though not yet a great songwriter. | Starchild & the New Romantic: Crucial EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21615-crucial-ep/ | Crucial EP | Twenty-three year old Bryndon Cook isn't a child of the '70s or '80s, but you'd never guess that by listening to his work as Starchild & The New Romantic. He carries himself with the air of someone who's studiously thumbed through his parents' record collection. He cites Prince and Sade as primary influences, and his stage name references P-Funk mythology. That said, Cook also has a foot planted firmly in the current moment. His resumé as a touring guitarist reads like a who's who of forward-thinking R&B and electro-pop: Solange, Dev Hynes, Chairlift, Kindness. He's equal parts laptop producer and pop classicist, a singer who sits comfortably among the mostly electronic roster of Ghostly International.
On his debut EP, Crucial, Cook (a former Pitchfork intern) traffics in woozy R&B numbers built atop dense, keyboard-driven instrumentals. Take "Relax," which opens with the surface noise of a dusty record that gives way to squelchy synths, a steady click-clack beat and Cook's layered vocals, pleading "I wanna get to where you are/ Where you are." "Slammin' Mannequin" throws a handful of '80s cultural touchstones in a blender—a Grandmaster Flash-esque beat, the romantic comedy Mannequin, a guitar solo and compact synth chords that recall Prince—and hits purée. It's one of Crucial's most successful songs, even if its chorus lands with a disempowering thud ("You can be my slammin' mannequin/ Rock the greatest fashions and let it in/ Who's to say that you're not falling in love with me?").
Speaking of Prince, the Purple One looms large over many of the EP's songs—hardly surprising, given that Crucial borrows its title from a bootleg of studio outtakes that's been apocryphally credited to Prince and Miles Davis. "New Romantic" is built around a funk-indebted, rubbery bassline; its climax finds Cook cooing over a weepy guitar solo. On "Love Interlude," he backs up his vocals with a soaring falsetto, singing, "You can't stop lovers like us/Run from daybreak to dusk." "Woman's Dress" asks some very Princely questions ("Will I ever be enough for you?") but delivers them with the sort of muted sorrow that's become Frank Ocean's calling card.
Crucial is remarkably dense for a self-recorded album, though it has a tactile, analog feel that belies its origins as laptop music. While the musicianship on display is impressive, Cook's songwriting could certainly be sharper. None of these songs have strong enough hooks to encourage repeat listening or stand out from the rest of the EP. As a personality, Cook also tends to get lost in all that texture. His vocals sit fairly low in the mix, and his words often get swallowed up by the backing tracks. His stage name and cover art hint at a compelling narrative—one imagines a sort of retro-afro-futurist Man Who Fell to Earth—but Starchild never really emerges as a character on Crucial, beyond a mouthpiece for mundane pop tropes. Bryndon Cook shows a lot of potential in synthesizing the sounds of his idols, but even so, Crucial remains a largely earthbound affair. | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ghostly International | March 23, 2016 | 5.9 | 1b827089-6018-4379-93f5-52d5c3529cb2 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The octet’s latest group album, full of vibrant theatrics and polished posse cuts, is at times representative of Dreamville Records’ reductive homages. | The octet’s latest group album, full of vibrant theatrics and polished posse cuts, is at times representative of Dreamville Records’ reductive homages. | Spillage Village: Spilligion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spillage-village-spilligion/ | Spilligion | Familiarity is both a blessing and a crutch for Spillage Village, a collective of vocalists and producers steeped in the folklore of Atlanta’s most prestigious rap acts. Their latest album Spilligion is a polished record full of rumbling basslines, posse cuts, and gospel interludes, with songs assuming loose themes of love, faith, family, and weed. The rappers spin yarns of fellowship and strife, like wayfarers commiserating around a campfire—a style reminiscent of Goodie Mob, OutKast, and blues stretching back some 200 years. Still, at times, the familiarity functions as shorthand; their success is hinged largely on whether devotees of Aquemini and Still Standing feel like making room in their disc-changers for a crew of next-gen disciples.
Spillage Village seems to understand what makes Dungeon Family transcendent, that their essence can’t be condensed to a vibe. But viewed through the prism of a Dreamville Records project, Spilligion can be representative of the label’s reductive homages. J. Cole has bankrolled a slew of underappreciated revival acts, including Spillage members EarthGang and J.I.D—both of whom released strong full-lengths upon signing to the label in 2017. That fall, Charlotte rapper Lute, another adherent of Dungeon Family’s blunted rumination, delivered the excellent West 1996 Pt. 2 to little fanfare. While Spilligion adheres to Dreamville’s reverent aesthetic, Cole’s long-running attempts to compress the most intricate elements of hip-hop’s turn-of-the-century blockbusters are evident in his protégés’ work.
Ambiance does most of Spilligion’s heavy lifting. Most of the tracks have multiple production credits, usually a combination of in-house producers Hollywood JB, Christo, Olu, and Benji. Their subterranean rhythms, bright guitar chords, and funky digressions recall Organized Noize not only in the abstract but also in their structural subtleties. On “Mecca,” the high percussion assumes the foreground, the background instrumentals slinking left to right in stereo. The danceable groove of “Cupid” ends with a jazzy keyboard outro, the programmed drums nimbly switched out for a live set. Big Rube, the spoken-word standby of Dungeon Family projects since Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, appears not once but twice on Spilligion.
“PsalmSing” and “Shiva” have hooks that take advantage of Spillage’s varied personnel, who each chime in with enveloping harmonies. Mereba, a prodigious neo-soul singer who also raps with icy precision, is Spilligion’s breakout star, her voice threaded through the soaring choruses. The album’s most jaw-dropping moment—and there are several—is the outro “Jupiter,” on which the assembled believers make merry in spite of an uncertain future: “So hold my hands and dance with me tonight/You know they say we’re all about to die.” It’s a moment of rapturous if fleeting contentment.
Still, there’s a tonal indistinctness that dulls the highs on an album that’s nominally about religion. Contrasted with Dungeon Family’s backwoods mysticism, Spilligion’s down-home Christianity limits its depth and thematic heft, and the verses can feel a bit paint-by-numbers when bookended by such sharp hooks. On “Ea’alah (Family),” which advocates interspersing prayer with smoke breaks, J.I.D bursts with gratitude: “Let me look into the sun, ’cause I don’t got no occupation/You can say I came from nothin’ but I found my destination.” Later in the song, Olu tackles the coronavirus pandemic: “I don’t mean to bother you, well yeah, I kinda do/See, we’ve been wrestlin’ with this nasty plague that’s kinda like the flu.” (It isn’t.) The brightness isn’t offputting, but it’s a long way from, say, Soul Food, an album about four young men surveying their earthly lots and invoking a God who didn’t always seem to love them back. Once you’re convinced of your own absolution, you don’t need to wander the desert looking for it.
Longtime Spillage member J.I.D is one of rap’s feel-good stories, an industrious veteran who transformed himself into a technical marvel through sheer will. A master of breath control and syllable placement, his erratically pitched vocals embolden his rhyme schemes, and Spilligion shows he’s equally adept at carrying a tune. He’s still coming into his own: his verse on “Baptize” (“She said it’s cold inside, that water made her nipples hard/That’s that liquor talkin’, sippin’ gin and readin’ the book of Genesis just before”) reflects the lustiness and overtaxed semantics of a J. Cole tangent, and at times his inflection is indistinguishable from Kendrick Lamar’s.
EarthGang’s Olu and WowGr8, for their part, have worked to avoid the fate of Nappy Roots and Big K.R.I.T.—genre artists who recognized their market position and rapped prolifically about grits and Eldorados over banjos and harmonicas. Rapping in animated fusillades, EarthGang’s deviation between conversational deliveries and idiosyncratic singing evokes Stankonia-era André 3000, and their scope has increased as they’ve refined their mechanics. For all its strengths, though, Spilligion sounds telegraphed in comparison to 2019’s Mirrorland, their elaborate world-building diminished by the big-group setting. When J.I.D and the other Spillagers assume frontman duties, as on “Judas,” the project’s vibrant theatrics and space-age symbolism are most conspicuously absent.
If there’s one thing the extended Spillage family shares, it’s an intense devotion to craft, which makes Spilligion an achievement. The absorbing full-length is a testament to the octet’s infectious spirit and remarkable technique. But even if no one expects Spillage to replicate “Inshallah” or “7th Floor/The Serengetti,” the miracle of Dungeon Family lay in their audacity to journey without a map. Like any camp revival, Spilligion offers a raucous, affirming experience that leaves you craving a deliverance you’d already sought.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Dreamville / SinceThe80s / Interscope | December 3, 2020 | 6.9 | 1b83e79f-b2f0-436e-83c3-30c556798b7f | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
A fixture of the minimalist canon, these two singular psych-classical compositions snuck into '60s counterculture at just the right time. | A fixture of the minimalist canon, these two singular psych-classical compositions snuck into '60s counterculture at just the right time. | Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22212-a-rainbow-in-curved-air/ | A Rainbow in Curved Air | The hippies inspired a wholesale revision of marketplace calculations. Out-there experiments, previously indulged as pet projects, suddenly drew greater interest in certain media boardrooms. And that was before Woodstock demonstrated the scale of American youth culture to the country at large. After that long weekend, not every proposal needed to make complete sense to the entire executive suite. As Dennis Hopper’s 1969 directorial debut Easy Rider developed into a smash, actor Peter Fonda observed that film bosses stopped “shaking their heads in incomprehension,” the better to start nodding their heads with incomprehension. This same new taste for the unexpected also secured some leeway for avant-gardists laboring inside the major label system.
In 1965, composer David Behrman began working as a tape editor for CBS’s Columbia imprint. By 1967, his bosses trusted his taste enough to let him curate a series of albums that documented the American experimental scene. The first Behrman-produced LP included Steve Reich’s “Come Out,” as well as electronic works by Pauline Oliveros and Richard Maxfield. Half a decade later, Columbia’s “Music of Our Time” series would be defunct. (A similar fate awaited Hopper’s directorial career, after 1971’s astonishing and truly bewildering The Last Movie.) But in the operational time they had, Behrman and his colleagues at Columbia’s classical division introduced an impressive variety of artists to the label’s catalog, as well as to the record-buying public.
Terry Riley benefited the most from this small window of mainstream exposure. By the time Behrman discovered the artist performing in a small New York apartment, the slender Californian had the receding hairline and shoulder-length locks of an underground elder. Already in his thirties, Riley had fashioned a personal sound from an unusual collection of influences. As a young man, he made money playing barroom jazz piano. When simultaneously working toward a composition degree at Berkeley, Riley became entranced by the music of La Monte Young—a fellow student who scandalized the faculty in 1958 with a nearly hour-long string trio that contained just 83 notes. Young’s use of sustained tones in his Trio for Strings offended those classmates who were conditioned to expect speed and complexity in any ambitious piece of contemporary classical music. Riley, though, was galvanized by Young’s few, long notes.
When completing his degree, Riley responded to Young’s pioneering work with string compositions that also employed sustained tones. But he ventured new methods for their use, too. While Young’s Trio held fast to an atonal method of organization prized by European composers, Riley’s String Trio of 1961 reasserted the role of conventional tonality. His focus on quick modal repetition didn’t merely help distinguish his sound from Young’s inside the canon of music that would eventually be called “minimalism.” It also primed Riley to make unique use of the fast-developing field of tape manipulation.
By spooling tape through two machines—the first to record, the second to play back—Riley arrived at an early form of live-performance sampling that he would incorporate into scores for theatrical and dance performances. To create the pieces collected on the album Music for the Gift, Riley recorded each instrumentalist in Chet Baker’s band, as they played Miles Davis’ “So What,” then sampled and looped each musical layer to a point that made recognition of the source material impossible.
Later that decade, when the CBS producer drifted into the composer’s New York apartment, he encountered Riley’s mature form of improvising along with these self-sampling, “lag time” tape loops. Behrman remembered seeing Riley’s reel-to-reel recorder: “And he was performing saxophone with two Revoxes, with the tape running from one to the other. It just blew me away, I’d never heard anything like it; it was just amazing.”
Behrman’s first CBS recording of Riley’s music was devoted to *In C, *perhaps the most famous minimalist composition of all (which Riley wrote in 1964). Though because the core triumph of In C resides in the way its charms can survive the structure’s openness, the piece has been more influential as a score that invites multiple approaches than as a fixed-media recording. It was Behrman's second LP of Riley’s music that would have a greater impact as a stand-alone album.
Your ambitious, local chamber orchestra might put on a shattering version of In C, but no one has ever played A Rainbow in Curved Air with anything close to the composer’s authority. By capturing Riley as both a conceptualist and as a virtuoso performer, this 1969 LP revealed a suppleness that stands in contrast to the baggage associated with “minimalism.” The range displayed over its two sides reaches out to the world (and, yes, the cosmos) rather than sitting inside any restrictive aesthetic field. As a result, the album can simultaneously suggest a feel of hurtling liftoff as well as one of peaceable calm.
Side A’s heavily overdubbed title track features the composer on a range of keys: electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord (also a favorite of Sun Ra’s), as well as two percussion items (dumbec and tambourine). Once the fast, opening pattern of “Rainbow” has been established, a series of placid chords superimposes a sense of ease. And then comes an explosion, a procession of right-hand lines that flutter and pirouette over the over the pulsing rhythmic patterns. That this powerful influx of energy doesn’t make the music feel cluttered or harsh is one of Riley’s compositional achievements.
Though Riley’s drug-assisted “all night flight” concerts of the period might focus on this piece for hours at a clip, the 19-minute LP iteration has a traditional, fast-slow-fast feel. A generally mellower second movement focuses on shorter high-register lines that syncopate with the modal base. And after a repetition of those delay-strewn chords—this time voiced with a searing edge—the final section of “Rainbow” accelerates again, thanks to Riley’s use of the dumbec, informed by his appreciation of Indian classical music.
Riley has always talked openly about his use of marijuana and LSD during early performances of this album, but there’s no mistaking his final results for being haphazard or sops to the drug-fashions of that era. After opening with a few minutes of saxophone drones, the loops that form the basis of Side B’s “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band” cut out—a choice that initially seems as disruptive as the first jump cut in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Like the filmmaker, Riley builds this technique into its own language. Once your ear is trained to recognize it, continued interruption of the drone feels like a vamp all on its own. The possibility of an unexpected, violent edit then hovers over the gorgeous, sustained-tone melody that “Nogood” develops after the opening drone-field disappears.
The composer’s integration of avant-garde editing techniques within a jazz-influenced style helps communicate this album’s roving, idealistic feel. The original LP’s jacket art featured a short poem by Riley that envisioned the Pentagon “turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green within a plainly psychedelic environment.” Some back covers of CD reissues have done without this supplement. The erasure could be mere oversight—or it might have been a conscious decision made to help the record avoid seeming dated by any suggestion of Vietnam-era protest.
Unlike “head” movies and other cultural artifacts produced in the late-sixties, both sides of A Rainbow in Curved Air have long had an irony-free claim on contemporary tastes. The frantic but joyful electric keyboard texture of “Rainbow” was adopted by Pete Townshend on “Baba O’Riley” (the title of which gives due credit to its inspiration), and its psychedelic patterns were still modern-sounding enough to work as as “chill out” music in “Grand Theft Auto IV.” The artisanal brewers at Grimm Ales recently named one of their beers after this album. (When I told Riley this, during an interview, he sounded delighted: “They should send me some!”)
These cosigns in popular culture would likely be enough to commend the album to successive generations, at least as a footnote. But another signal of A Rainbow in Curved Air’s lasting importance is the way in which Riley’s innovations as a performer-composer changed American classical music. The composer-led ensembles centered around Steve Reich and Philip Glass are hard to imagine without Riley’s example (as well as that of Young’s). In his autobiography, the composer John Adams—one of the most frequently performed American composers of the present-day—recalls first encountering the “congenial hippie spirit” of Riley’s music. Along with the rest of the early-minimalist catalog, the simple fact of this aesthetic’s existence suggested to Adams that “the pleasure principle had been invited back into the listening experience.”
None of this was an accident. Nor was it the product of a cynical attempt to get in good with the Summer of Love crowd. This still-new language in American classical music has not always enjoyed the support of major labels. But the musical minimalism that Riley helped originate has nonetheless been a permanently joyous fixture in the American landscape, in part because of the feeling that Riley credited to his focus on modal playing: “My own spirit felt happy with it. I could do it for a long time and still feel good, still feel balanced and centered.”
Midway through Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson’s character notes that “it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace.” A few minutes later, he’s beaten to death. The explosive conclusion of Hopper’s film can be read as a self-aware commentary on the unsustainable nature of some hedonistic paths. By contrast, Riley’s “balanced and centered” approach to psychedelia consumes a wild energy without the chaser of destruction.
Once the hippie phenomenon ran its pop-culture course, and after Columbia lost interest in modern composition altogether, Riley self-published his own music for several decades. And he never burned out as a creative force. Now 81, Riley still composes for string quartets and orchestras with an intuitive, form-breaking glee. His live piano improvisations are still mesmerizing. The musical structures heard at these concerts—and on A Rainbow in Curved Air—are the product of his unique understanding of chance and design. The rebellious pleasure-seekers of Easy Rider may have “blown it” in the end, but Riley’s musical revolution has proved spiritually and artistically sustaining. | 2016-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Columbia / CBS | September 4, 2016 | 9.1 | 1b869ffb-1290-4073-9fe3-1d981965213d | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Seeking empathy for a younger self, Rina Sawayama’s second album pirouettes through pop-punk and power ballads, trance and stadium rock. It’s ambitious in the same way as putting on all the clothes in your closet. | Seeking empathy for a younger self, Rina Sawayama’s second album pirouettes through pop-punk and power ballads, trance and stadium rock. It’s ambitious in the same way as putting on all the clothes in your closet. | Rina Sawayama: Hold the Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rina-sawayama-hold-the-girl/ | Hold the Girl | Rina Sawayama’s 2020 debut reckoned sincerely with friendship falling-outs and familial wounds, but on its best song, the pop singer pretended to be a rich girl dripping in Cartier and cruising in Teslas. “XS” was intended as arch anti-capitalist critique in an age of climate crisis, but its luxe vision was a better sell for being the rich, not eating them; Sawayama whispered “excess” as if it were the name of a designer perfume, the scent of “more” intoxicating. Intention aside, a fabulous pop persona goes a long way. Even if Sawayama became the type of star who stinks up the Earth with her private jet, as long as she delivers fun hooks, haute looks, and damn good live performances, she’ll have people obsessing: “Bestie, what’s the skincare routine?”
Lately, though, the 32-year-old artist has been reading self-help books and having revelations in therapy—so her second album, Hold the Girl, is decidedly more earnest and weighty. Sawayama has framed the album as part of a process of “reparenting” herself, and the emphasis on one’s “inner child” may explain why the record’s imagery leans elementary: Blue skies and storms, villains and heroes, the feeling of being imprisoned inside one’s bedroom. She knows other queer people have also had complicated upbringings, so she nobly strives to create belonging: “If I can heal someone around me or someone that I don’t know with the songs I write … why wouldn’t I take it?” she reasons. The spiritual predecessor to Hold the Girl is not the blithe, stylish “XS” but the kindly, saccharine “Chosen Family.”
Another way to think about Hold the Girl is that it’s an attempt to merge the full-throated spectacle of Born This Way with the surviving-through-trauma emotionality of Chromatica. But there are plenty of other touchstones beyond Gaga, and Sawayama wears them on her sleeve: the dreamy contralto of Karen Carpenter, the puckered pop-rock of Avril Lavigne, the rousing, motivational tenor of Katy Perry. Sawayama’s tagline for single “Catch Me in the Air” is essentially “the Corrs if pitched to Gwen Stefani,” which doesn’t even get at the half of it. She opens the heartfelt tribute to her single mother with moony new age woodwinds straight from Céline Dion, then switches to Kelly Clarkson guitar strums: “Catch me in the air-eee air-eee air-eee airrr,” she sings in the chorus, as if yodeling while strapped into a rollercoaster.
Almost every song strives to be Sawayama’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with genre mash-ups and key changes galore. The title track brings 8-bit video game flourishes to a 2-step breakdown, but there’s also the abrupt flare of strings, a country gallop to the verses, and a thunderous choral finale. Follow-up “This Hell” interpolates ABBA, tips its hat to Shania Twain and Paris Hilton, and indulges in pop feminist sloganeering (“Fuck what they did to Britney/To Lady Di and Whitney”). Even then, she can’t help herself, so the song climaxes on a gnarly hair metal guitar solo. Hold the Girl is ambitious in the way that putting on all the clothes in your closet is ambitious. It’s as if Sawayama heard the adage “kill your darlings” and decided it wasn’t slay enough.
SAWAYAMA could be overwhelming too, but it stuck mostly to a novel mix of turn-of-the-millennium pop and nu-metal. On Hold the Girl, the singer fulfills a promise to “mine even more left-field references from decades past,” going for pop-punk and power ballads, trance and stadium rock. A militant digital beat supersedes the plucks of what sounds like a Punjabi tumbi on “Your Age,” an age-gap relationship accounting akin to Demi Lovato’s “29.” The pairing is like grapes and fish sauce, and in the chorus Sawayama swings for Nine Inch Nails but lands closer to the shout-rebellion of GAYLE. (Rhyming “social suicide” with “a jail personified” does not help the cause.) It comes as a relief when you get to the chrome-plated “Frankenstein,” one of the record’s most focused, and thus best, songs. Sawayama leans into the dark theatrics of Fall Out Boy or the Veronicas, nervy guitars grounding the mania as she compares herself to one of literature’s most famous freaks.
The album fares much better in small increments—that way, you can better absorb the ketamine freakout on “Imagining,” the swooning harmonies on “Phantom,” the blinding club stomp on “Holy (Til You Let Me Go).” Sawayama’s 2000s pop-rock numbers are just the right amount of sentimental, like rewatching your favorite Disney Channel original movie. (This is true even when the lyrics are sometimes baffling: “So I create a storm and bury it deep, hiding the key/In plain sight, just in case I need help, help!” she sings on “Hurricane.”) In time the twists will feel less jarring. But repeated listens don’t open up the album’s logic—the simplest explanation for its aesthetic choices seems to be that Sawayama made them because she could.
Hold the Girl’s constant pivots make it hard to track its central concept: revisiting and empathizing with a younger self. Opener “Minor Feelings” sets the stage for a grand emotional reckoning, nodding to Cathy Park Hong’s landmark essay collection about petty, racialized feelings that never quite escalate into catharsis: “The more I keep them inside/The more they bury me alive,” Sawayama announces. But the pensive mood deflates as Hold the Girl immediately veers to dancier, more involved songs—and the album’s broad-brush lyrics leave little to hold onto anyway, despite Sawayama’s intention to emulate the evocative storytelling of folklore. The main exception is “Send My Love to John,” a dusky country ballad written from the perspective of a gay friend’s conservative mom. The story humanizes immigrant parents and revels in making progress toward better familial relationships—a rare subject in pop songs. But the incongruousness of its placement threatens to overshadow its touching message. The album’s only acoustic track swerves in just as Hold the Girl is about to close.
Like a classic overachiever, Sawayama wants to do so much in her music: The Cambridge graduate wants to speak to the political climate and flaunt her keen study of pop history. She wants to assuage the pain of others but also be carefree and fun. She wants to honor her own queer, Asian, first-generation British identity yet keep things relatable to a universal audience. What’s left is an album with an excess of initiative but not enough follow-through, a record that takes on so much it risks burning out. In the end, the little girl at the center of the album gets swallowed by her own vision. | 2022-09-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | September 16, 2022 | 6.5 | 1b874aed-0e77-4b19-9419-b4472676e915 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Using inscrutable digital techniques—randomization, automation, perhaps a little black magic—the Bay Area artist makes bewitchingly skewed techno full of tangled loops and mismatched time signatures. | Using inscrutable digital techniques—randomization, automation, perhaps a little black magic—the Bay Area artist makes bewitchingly skewed techno full of tangled loops and mismatched time signatures. | James Devane: Searching | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-devane-searching/ | Searching | In the 14 years between his first and second solo albums, James Devane completely retooled both his sound and the methods he used to achive it. Where 2008’s s/t built up swirling drones from looped guitar, his 2022 follow-up, Beauty Is Useless paired dense, soupy synth strokes with techno’s taut rhythms. With the much swifter sequel Searching, it’s starting to look like Devane makes a habit of reinventing his approach on every release. Exactly how he made the music is unclear; the label vaguely notes hours of source material (presumably the artist’s own) run through custom software, and fashioned into tracks that play fast and loose with musical key, tempo, and rhythm. All that complexity appears to lie beneath an unusually simple interface: in Devane’s words, “a search button and a save button.”
When an artist hands the reins to software—hardly an unusual practice in 2024—it’s not always clear where the technology ends and human creativity begins. Yet similarities between Beauty Is Useless and Searching—which Devane frames as a companion piece to its predecessor—help locate the person within the process. On both records, a smoky, clandestine quality clings to the synths and murky rhythmic elements, recalling gloaming air that permeates the work of Kassem Mosse and other artists on Germany’s Workshop label.
If Beauty Is Useless was largely guided by an even-tempered 4/4 pulse, Searching jettisons that framework in favor of a much more disruptive listening experience. The more fully formed tracks have a meandering, structureless quality interrupted by abrupt endings and brief sketches —alarming 10-second blasts of noise that sound like the digital equivalent of scrubbing through recorded tape as quickly as possible. It’s a playful analogy that foregrounds Devane’s conceptual process, with its apparent emphasis on cycling through found sounds.
Even in the cyclical ambiguity of techno, a lack of formal structure can be risky, and Devane leans into the chaos. On Searching, crispy percussive sequences play against each other in mismatched time signatures, yielding a kind of mutant funk. Yet the forced looping of these contrary musical elements—especially noticeable on "One Place”—harness even the most disjointed rhythms into surprisingly fluid grooves. Aided by the woozy comfort of the machine-soul synth blooms, stubborn loops are seductive, in their own weird way, even without the comfort of a conventional toe-tapping pulse or journeying narrative.
The jarring effect of the rhythmic disturbances has its own charm, but the more stable moments on the record are easier to sink into. The mesmerizing melancholy of “No More No Less” recalls the yearning, misty-eyed quality of Actress’ breakthrough albums; similarities with Darren Cunningham’s off-center vision of techno abound in Devane’s crooked thump and low-res aliasing.
Devane’s slanted approach sits comfortably alongside other curious operators unbound by dancefloor expectations. Austin Cesear’s records from the early 2010s spring to mind, as do Kit Clayton’s charmingly skewed West Coast dub-techno variations from the decade before. In its heavy-lidded, dreamlike atmosphere you might draw a line to the nu-ambient scene around labels like 3XL and West Mineral Ltd., but that crew’s cavalier YouTube-flipping spirit feels distinct from Devane’s intentional, closed-loop practice.
What these reference points do share with Searching is an enduring warmth that transcends any odd angles. The tactile lope of electric piano at the center of “Last Strut,” the blown-out tape cascades on “Lights Down Low”—beneath the technology driving the record lies an inescapable emotional intelligence that no piece of software could ever replace. | 2024-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Umeboshi | May 28, 2024 | 7.7 | 1b877a17-24dd-424c-8e6d-e8a77616de19 | Oli Warwick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/oli-warwick/ | |
Ten years after its release, legendary vocalist Jeff Buckley's only proper full-length is given the expanded treatment. Like the similar edition of The Clash's London Calling reviewed earlier this week, it's been extravagantly repackaged and appended with two additional discs-- one an audio disc collecting non-album tracks, the other a DVD documentary spotlighting the recordings sessions. | Ten years after its release, legendary vocalist Jeff Buckley's only proper full-length is given the expanded treatment. Like the similar edition of The Clash's London Calling reviewed earlier this week, it's been extravagantly repackaged and appended with two additional discs-- one an audio disc collecting non-album tracks, the other a DVD documentary spotlighting the recordings sessions. | Jeff Buckley: Grace: Legacy Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/995-grace-legacy-edition/ | Grace: Legacy Edition | Jeff Buckley was a diva. And a particularly fanciful one at that. I remember reading about the late soprano Maria Callas and Buckley fave Edith Piaf, the fragility of their demeanors, and the notion they were more precious, tender than the world around them; that every moment within earshot of their voices was like hearing the song of the most rare and beautiful bird in the world. In fact, Piaf as the "Little Sparrow" was the most obvious blueprint for Buckley's flighty, unabashedly emotional expression; in both cases, whether your reaction was to adore or abhor the often raw (but never adolescent) bouts of melo- and other kinds of drama, no one could say they held their hearts in check. Consequently, they needed lots of maintenance. In Buckley's case, it was a steady stream of collaborators, girls, gigs and an impressive reserve of torch songs from way back when. He really wasn't built for the strand of rock music borne of rebellion or release; he was a songbird, like the kind that used to receive roses and blown kisses from the debutantes in the balcony after performances.
Unlike Callas and Piaf, Buckley grew up in an age when the chanteuse didn't need an orchestra or a symphony hall to get their message across. After having cut his musical teeth in Los Angeles, he came to New York in 1991 and soon hooked up with guitarist Gary Lucas, eventually joining his band Gods & Monsters. Lucas and Buckley established a partnership that produced some very good songs (including "Mojo Pin" and Grace's title track) in a very short time, but before they had a chance to make it out of the city, Buckley quit the band over a disagreement regarding his future loyalty. Afterwards, he played solo gigs, sometimes incorporating friend and bassist Mick Grondhal, and assisted by a growing legion of nighthawk fans, was soon signed by Columbia as a solo artist.
1993's Live at Sin-e EP gives the best idea of what Columbia's A&R; rep must have seen in Buckley at the time. At shows, he was the picture of a high diva: sprawling, boundless and with more than a pinch of self-conscious glitter. However, as he revealed in The Making of Grace, the behind-the-scenes feature that leads off the third disc DVD in Columbia's new "Legacy" edition reissue of his debut full-length, he needed a band. He already had Grondhal, met drummer Matt Johnson through Grace executive producer Steve Berkowitz, and, midway through recording the album, brought in guitarist Michael Tighe (who eventually contributed "So Real", to which Buckley added a chorus and put on the record in place of the bluesy "Forget Her"). Producer Andy Wallace speaks on the documentary about his concerns over how much of the record should reflect Buckley's solo performances, but true to form, the singer wanted it all.
Somehow, despite an overflow of ideas-- they needed three different band setups available at all times to accommodate Buckley's various moods-- the record got done. And it was released. And thousands of open-heart romantics heard their ship come in. As it happened, Grace was received with mixed feelings from critics who probably thought they were getting the next great alt-rock savior, and instead felt they'd received dinner theater for the moody crowd. They had a point: For all its swells of emotion and midnight dynamics, Grace was not a record to rally the post-grunge alternation. It made a jazz noise where a rock one was expected and a classical one where a pop one might have sold more records. MTV snagged "Last Goodbye", Grace's most radio-friendly song by a considerable margin, but Buckley was predestined for a cult stardom.
Grace's strengths have been well-documented over the years: The flawless choice of cover songs, including the definitive reading of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" (that we learn on the documentary was actually chosen based on John Cale's 1991 version from the Cohen tribute I'm Your Fan); the mystic, blue textures of "Mojo Pin", "So Real" and "Dream Brother" that seemed as related to Led Zeppelin as to Scott Walker as to Buckley's father; Wallace's sympathetic, intimate production and the band's equally sensitive following of Buckley's lead. And of course, he sang the hell out of those songs. His voice turned upward songs that naturally leaned inward; his reading of Nina Simone's "Lilac Wine" transformed from misty cocktail lament into transcendental experience, and the unlikely recasting of English composer Benjamin Britten's "Corpus Christi Carol" into ambient lullaby.
And, as this reissue proves, for every bit of lightning trapped in a jar, Buckley was willing to try his hand at many songs with which he held a weaker grasp. Firstly, he fancied himself a rock star, and the second disc of this set includes endearing, but ultimately inessential readings of the MC5's "Kick Out the Jams", a pretty silly Screamin' Jay Hawkins impersonation on Leiber & Stoller's "Alligator Wine", and a speed-metal take on "Eternal Life". His version of Big Star's "Kanga-Roo" nails its weary grandeur, but goes overboard on the ensuing 11-minute jam session, effectively transforming it from intimidating wall of drone into a meandering, albeit unfinished and tentative giant. He sounds best interpreting songs like Bukka White's "Parchman Farm Blues", Simone's "The Other Woman", and Bob Dylan's "Mama, You Been On My Mind", though his own take on the blues-- the previously unreleased "Forget Her"-- sounds comparatively pedestrian.
So, the question becomes how frustrated you are willing to be with Buckley. His posthumous releases suggest what Grace did: that he was one of the most talented musicians of his generation, while also being one of the most impulsive and, often, maddeningly inconsistent. Is he really being served by the uncovering of outtakes, B-sides and live performances? Fans certainly think so, but I won't cop to listening very beyond his lone completed record these days. And it bears emphasizing that its rewards have lost nothing in 10 years. Grace remains one of the most engaging, inspired records ever made, and its 10 original songs serve as the best possible portrait of Buckley as a diva, songwriter and artist. | 2004-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 22, 2004 | 9 | 1b88e90c-7ddf-4f44-a74a-dd93a97a0474 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
After years spent trading on a bulletproof back catalog and eccentric persona, the Jamaican titan teams up with UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood for a welcome return to form. | After years spent trading on a bulletproof back catalog and eccentric persona, the Jamaican titan teams up with UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood for a welcome return to form. | Lee “Scratch” Perry: Rainford | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-scratch-perry-rainford/ | Rainford | Lee “Scratch” Perry is the living embodiment of the notion that history would, on the whole, prefer its musical heroes to stop making music. If Perry had packed it in toward the end of the 1970s, leaving his 1977 collaboration with the Clash on “Complete Control” as his parting gift, he would be enshrined in legend as the man who helped invent dub reggae, pioneered the idea of the studio as instrument, and recorded Bob Marley. And he is remembered for all that. But as Perry continued to pump out the tunes—he has more than 50 albums to his name since 1980—he gradually mutated into a cartoonish character best known for his Delphic proclamations and penchant for wearing mirrors. Fans today come to him for his classic recordings and eccentric persona, but not so much his recent catalog.
In this, Perry resembles a pre-American Recordings Johnny Cash, another artist whose continued output in the 1980s did little good for his reputation. And if Rainford, Perry’s new album, isn’t quite the Cash-esque late-period renaissance that producer Adrian Sherwood has compared it to, it is at least somewhere in the same ballpark, thanks to the album’s sympathetic contemporary production and personal appeal.
You can best hear this newfound clarity on album standout “Autobiography of the Upsetter.” While recent Perry tracks, like Orb collaboration “Ball of Fire,” could be a lot of fun, you’d be hard pressed to divine what his rambling vocal lines were actually about. On “Autobiography of the Upsetter,” Perry plays things relatively straight, narrating his life story from childhood in 1930s Jamaica to his burgeoning musical career, only occasionally veering into the kind of free-associative babble that litters his more recent work. Perry’s vocal may not be particularly melodic, but there is something profoundly moving about hearing a musical legend who often seems at odds with the modern world relate tales of Bob Marley and his mythical Black Ark studio in a tone of guttural gravitas, while backing vocals lilt around him in a tender embrace.
Rainford is helped along by the instinctive production of longtime Perry collaborator and British dub pioneer Adrian Sherwood, whose work here balances classic reggae tropes—off-beat guitar chops, cavernous bass lines, and one-drop drums—with modern production touches and idiosyncratic effects, doing much of the melodic lifting along the way. “Cricket on the Moon” combines classic reggae lurch with an occasional digital stutter; “Let It Rain” offsets a dancehall beat with a string section that is slurred yet elegant; and “Makumba Rock” introduces Brazilian instrumentation to a rolling bassline.
For all Sherwood’s musical nous, though, the strength of the album is in collaboration, with Perry’s iconic vocal tone—a mixture of phlegmy rasp, biblical command, and childish wonder—giving life to Sherwood’s lolloping grooves, much as Johnny Cash’s funereal baritone anchored Rick Rubin’s minimalist production on American Recordings. The brilliance of “African Starship” lies in the interplay between the song’s rusting metallic skank and Perry’s sky-gazing humanity, while Perry’s melodic vocal is not enough to rescue the rather drab production on “Run Evil Spirit,” a song that outstays its welcome two minutes in.
Rainford is unlikely to rejuvenate Lee “Scratch” Perry’s career in the way American Recordings did for Johnny Cash. The songwriting is too inconsistent, and there are too many moments of musical flab. It’s also possible that Perry hasn’t fallen quite as far in the popular imagination as Cash had; his groundbreaking early work casts a long shadow that his more unfocused later years have’t dimmed. But Rainford marks a welcome return for an artist who for far too long had been rendered all but invisible behind his abstruse wit, esoteric demeanor, and all those mirrors. | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | On-U Sound | May 31, 2019 | 7 | 1b8bae26-bf94-44a1-a65d-06651e35f4d2 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Sam Cook-Parrott returns to his beginnings as a solo artist, an experiment that yields playful piano compositions and introspective lyricism. | Sam Cook-Parrott returns to his beginnings as a solo artist, an experiment that yields playful piano compositions and introspective lyricism. | Radiator Hospital: Sings Music for Daydreaming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/radiator-hospital-sings-music-for-daydreaming/ | Sings Music for Daydreaming | From his bedroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sam Cook-Parrott has grown Radiator Hospital into a fully fledged four-piece, a project that culminated in 2017’s dense, noisy Play the Songs You Like. Over power chords and raucous drum fills, he sang about one-horse towns, unrequited love, and existential dread; it turns out an energetic backing band can mask even the most despondent lyricism. On Sings Music for Daydreaming, Cook-Parrott returns to his beginnings as a solo artist, an experiment that yields playful piano compositions and introspective lyricism. While he’s eschewed harsher sounds in favor of a folksier aesthetic, Sings Music for Daydreaming finds him no more optimistic.
A dependable hallmark of recent Radiator Hospital albums was guitar—played fast and wired through fuzz pedals, it set a textured, vibrational backdrop for the band’s lilting vocalists. By contrast, Sings Music for Daydreaming opens with a few deceptively chipper piano chords, dulled by Cook-Parrott’s sleepy singing. He eventually adds a sparse, fingerpicked guitar and layered vocals, which circle into a round as he sings an inversion on Jim Morrison: “You don’t light my fire.” The song ends even quieter than it began, his voice trailing off until it blends into the next track. Percussion, as a general rule, is either muted or out of the picture.
Writing slow songs is no crime for a bedroom pop act. But with 14 tracks that easily bleed together, the record seems to creep; though it’s only 35 minutes, it can feel twice as long. “Alright Again” moves at a glacial pace, as if the ennui of Cook-Parrott’s lyrics had spread to his fingertips. “Personal Truth” and “Dark Sound” feel like riffs on the same tune, with the respective additions of a reverb pedal and bluesy piano, but even these flourishes can’t prevent them from fading into the background. As a result, the bright spots feel hidden behind a hazy facade. At their brightest, as on “Weird Little Idea” and “For Daydreamers Only,” they showcase Radiator Hospital as a jangly folk band, one that pairs hand-clap rhythms and tambourine shakes with warm major chords plucked out on piano and guitar.
With production from Philadelphia stalwart Jeff Zeigler, who also worked on Play the Songs You Like, the instrumentation feels polished and robust. “I Never Dreamed,” buried 12 songs in, injects a welcome bolt of energy, with jumpy rhythms and a creaky, off-kilter vocal harmony. It is a notable exception to the rule, and it’s followed by “Hot Mess,” where drowsy vocals are mixed so low in the background, it’s as if Cook-Parrott is singing from two rooms over.
Cook-Parrott’s lyricism is at its sharpest when it aims for specifics. Most songs on the record miss that mark, landing instead on general memories of young love: “I wanna hold your hand again,” or “I never dreamed I’d get caught in the tangled web you spin.” “Corner Booth,” a dramatic confessional set at a diner, sketches a clearer picture. “It’s the deepest, darkest thing inside me. I could never spit it out,” he mumbles, outlining a tragic narrative that sneaks up on you after the song ends: “Then I say a thing I can’t take back, and open up my eyes to see you react.” There is a world of small stories inside Radiator Hospital, but you might drift off before you catch a glimpse. | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Salinas | May 16, 2019 | 6.2 | 1b8c0890-9cb7-4caa-b44b-357b5972a063 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
When Nina Nastasia's latest record groans into view, it sets you up to expect the gloomiest entry in an ... | When Nina Nastasia's latest record groans into view, it sets you up to expect the gloomiest entry in an ... | Nina Nastasia: Run to Ruin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5712-run-to-ruin/ | Run to Ruin | When Nina Nastasia's latest record groans into view, it sets you up to expect the gloomiest entry in an already dark catalog: the mourning strings and her opening line00 "We never talk about the things we witnessed"-- suggest an album detailing the rural nightmare so many (urban) art-folk songwriters dwell in, where the men are monsters, the women are widows and the graveyards are above average.
But just when the album's ready to fall prey to clichés, it turns into something far more intimate and complex-- moodier, yet more subtle than her previous outings. On last year's excellent The Blackened Air, Nastasia-- an acclaimed New York singer/songwriter in a world that thought it had too many-- wrote songs that were cool and dusty. Her lyrics confined her as a spectator, or at best, the victim of longings; the action kept happening to other people-- her dad chased a man down the highway, her dog was the one dying violently, and it was always someone else buried in that graveyard. But on Run to Ruin, the distance dissolves: Nastasia inhabits these songs and slowly surrenders to the material, as the graceful arrangements of her last album become messy and passionate.
As before, Nastasia matches her acoustic guitar with a striking chamber string section and odd folk instruments like dulcimer, accordion, and no more than twenty notes twinkled on a piano. The strings grind and weave through "We Never Talked" and angrily swell across "I Say That I Will Do", while Jim White of Dirty Three-- a perfect drummer for this group-- intuitively balances timekeeping with colors that sputter like rain on soil.
The emotions flare and subside, and so do the styles that Nastasia switches between: this is far more exotic than the straighter folk and country stylings of her earlier work, and she's writing longer songs with more room to breathe and swell. The meaty, gypsy melody of "On Teasing", the accordion weaving around the swarthy strings, is as unexpected as the tiny singing and almost too-precious arpeggios on "The Body".
But the most striking improvement is her singing. She's a stronger vocalist, her almost-plain tone rising into higher registers, and her usual range has grown more earthily gorgeous. But more than anything, she demonstrates a new expressiveness: her singing at an even keel, but around the edges you can hear her start to let go. Like an anti-diva, Nastasia inches through her feelings instead of flaunting them.
She can sound cutting and ironic, like the dry hatred in "You Her And Me", a song whose flat lyrics come to life in a delivery that resembles the smartest loner from high school. And she's gripping at her most vulnerable: the album's strongest track, "Superstar", at first sounds like a reasonable Cowboy Junkies-like ballad, until she draws us in with how lost and helpless she sounds. She sings the key line "I'm a superstar" in a voice that's almost delirious with fatigue, repeating it again and again in weakly ecstatic surrender.
As with her two other records, Nastasia recorded Run to Ruin with Steve Albini. Once again he claims he "documented" the record instead of producing it, and although it's expectedly close-miked and sonically flawless, Albini gets credit for capturing what happened, then backing off. It would be too easy, say, to shine up the handful of perfectly sentimental piano notes on "The Body", but Albini lets them speak for themselves. He leaves Nastasia's beautifully arranged ensemble to make its own mood: the dynamic extremes aren't smoothed over, and nobody polishes the mood or smudges this into a genre. More importantly, nobody tries to be Nastasia's drama coach-- nobody dictated how she should open up on these songs. While her voice was just a part of the tapestry on her last albums, she has finally become the emotional core, and half the attraction of this record is hearing her stretch out and make these discoveries while we listen. | 2003-07-08T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-07-08T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Touch and Go | July 8, 2003 | 8 | 1b8db531-64d1-49d8-997d-bf9214086852 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
On his first Entrance LP in a decade, Guy Blakeslee’s songs are newly exposed and intimate, telling a story of love and loss with folk, pop, and echoes of Laurel Canyon. | On his first Entrance LP in a decade, Guy Blakeslee’s songs are newly exposed and intimate, telling a story of love and loss with folk, pop, and echoes of Laurel Canyon. | Entrance: Book of Changes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22919-book-of-changes/ | Book of Changes | Guy Blakeslee’s career has drawn no straight stylistic lines. After breaking from the knotty psych rock of his Baltimore band the Convocation Of… in 2002, Blakeslee reemerged in the early ’00s with a series of warped records and a new identity: a haunted Delta blues conjurer called Entrance. In the years since, he staggered and sometimes stumbled through brooding stoner rock with the Entrance Band and, more recently, alternated phases of anemic indie and instrumental escapism under his given name. He has seemed, through it all, inquisitive and impressionable, responding in real time to sounds that piqued his interest as a listener first and a musician second. But Book of Changes, his first full album in a decade under the Entrance moniker, is one of the most inviting sets of songs he’s ever made.
At its best, Book of Changes feels like a natural resting point for a songwriter who has spent the better part of two decades searching restlessly for the perfect sound. Somewhat surprisingly, it is a rather conventional distillation of folk, pop, and rock, dipping its toes into the echoes of Laurel Canyon and occasionally lifting its head to the narcotic heights of Roky Erickson or Love. There are traces of Phil Spector’s trademark Wall of Sound, Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s anxious romantic kismet, and the Zombies’ subtle psychedelia, all wrapped around songs that share the windfalls and pratfalls of a year lost to love, presented in chronological order. “Time will pass if you laugh or if you cry,” Blakeslee sings in full vibrato during “The Avenue,” the album’s pop-symphonic centerpiece of emotional uncertainty. “And the best of friends have to part sometimes/So why not you and I?” Turns out, Blakeslee traveled a long way just to ask old questions in unexpectedly simple ways.
Book of Changes is quite the production, though. It was recorded over a year and in nearly a dozen different studios on two continents with the help of some high-profile friends. There’s Pixie Paz Lenchantin and producer and engineer David Vandervelde—who cut a series of sterling albums a decade ago that align with Blakeslee’s ramshackle, anthemic aims here. There are passels of drummers, backup singers, and string players.
But Blakeslee is clearly in control, playing as many as a half-dozen instruments on some songs. That’s him with the perfectly pealing xylophone-and-piano lines during “Always the Right Time” and the mystic autoharp during the exasperated “Leaving California.” More importantly, he foregrounds his own love-and-loss story, dividing it into 10 acts of wide-eyed enthusiasm, waiting-by-the-phone unease, severe depression, and hopeful perseverance. He shares those feelings most effectively when the songs become a sort of pop music pulpit, a place for him to relay his story in open, verse-chorus-verse splendor. That happens during “Always the Right Time,” “Winter Lady,” and “Revolution Eyes,” the three songs that do the emotional heavy lifting and share the saturated sounds of Spector’s successes. “Revolution Eyes” even borders on heartland rock, like John Mellencamp forced into the studio with the War on Drugs. It is direct and disarmed in a way that Blakeslee’s music has rarely been.
Book of Changes is a good record built with occasionally great songs, especially that suite of Spector-like pop, but it ends with the same vexing questions about Blakeslee that have marked his entire career: Who is he? And will his output ever be more than a series of sometimes-marvelous conjurings, where he channels the ghosts of his influences (whether they be Neu! or Harry Nilsson) for an album or two? After all, even on this set, he slips into bolero camouflage (“I’d Be a Fool”), ambient musings (“Warm and Wild”), and western cover (“Molly”). At least these guises now feel like part of something bigger. Book of Changes is refreshingly exposed and intimate, as if Blakeslee has found a lingua franca for writing when it really matters. Perhaps Book of Changes is the start of Entrance in earnest, the beginning of a career that feels like more than a string of confidently executed echoes. | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | February 28, 2017 | 7.4 | 1b9022f1-bd7f-4d2d-ba07-737e43845ce3 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On the Olympia death/doom band’s unrelenting second album, everything sounds beefier. This music grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you to attention. | On the Olympia death/doom band’s unrelenting second album, everything sounds beefier. This music grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you to attention. | Mortiferum: Preserved in Torment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mortiferum-preserved-in-torment/ | Preserved in Torment | Mortiferum’s music exists in near-total darkness. The Olympia death/doom quartet builds labyrinths out of suffocating atmosphere, pounding drums, and churning squalls of detuned guitar. Only when your eyes adjust can you see an occasional sunbeam penetrating the gloom—a snaking, melodic lead or a clatter of cymbals that interrupts the slow march and sends the band into a headlong hurtle. Preserved in Torment, Mortiferum’s second album, is like one of Rothko’s Black-Form paintings. Its inky brushstrokes seem impenetrable at first, but entire universes lurk in the depths.
Mortiferum belong to a musical lineage that started in Finland in the early 1990s. The bands in that scene blurred the lines between death and doom metal with abandon, wringing deep emotions from elemental riffs and dragging stately melodies down into the catacombs. On Preserved in Torment, you can hear traces of the demented death metal of Rippikoulu and Demigod, as well as the more graceful strains of funeral doom acts like Thergothon and Skepticism. Mortiferum stick close to their influences, but what they lack in innovation they make up for in sheer heaviness. “We want it to sound murky and disgusting, and low and fucking gross,” vocalist and guitarist Max Bowman told Decibel earlier this year.
The murky and disgusting sound of Preserved in Torment is one of several areas where Mortiferum have improved on their debut album, 2019’s Disgorged From Psychotic Depths. The production on that record occasionally felt thin, like the mixing board was struggling to keep up with the seismic weight of the band’s playing. Everything is beefier on Preserved in Torment. You feel the rumble of the bass in the pit of your stomach, the punch of the multi-layered guitars in your chest. Even Bowman’s agonized vocals, though still mostly indecipherable, are brought forward in the mix. The denser sound helps emphasize the brutish physicality of the music. The feeling that the walls are closing in isn’t accidental; the band is pushing them in on you.
The melodic guitar passages that punctuate the oppressive atmosphere fit one of two profiles: aching, minor-key runs anchored in the fundamentals of doom; or frantic death metal solos that send the band off into wild paroxysms. Most songs include both. A little less than two minutes into opener “Eternal Procession,” a mournful lead edges out the main riff, underpinning a moaned vocal part. A minute later, it’s replaced by a frenzied, Incantation-style guitar solo. When the song returns to the crushing wall of riffs, it feels like it’s gone through a whole journey. Mortiferum deploy their biggest melodies sparingly, but when they do, it’s in service of elevating the drama. Considered along with their flawlessly executed tempo shifts—jumping from funeral doom crawl to midtempo lurch to breakneck gallop in the space of just a minute or two—it’s clear that the band strives to create songs with narrative arcs.
The first sound we hear when the needle hits wax on Preserved in Torment is a death growl, and the closing track, “Mephitis of Disease,” ends abruptly, almost mid-riff, as though we’ve dropped in on the band in medias res and there’s music at the periphery we don’t get to hear. Thoughtful choices like these help Preserved in Torment feel thrillingly present. Even the most competent atmospheric death/doom can sometimes fade into the background, but Mortiferum wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you to attention.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | November 8, 2021 | 7.5 | 1b90d7e0-02a2-4715-8a6a-16a80ec219e4 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
I rented the film Ravenous last weekend. I'm not going to mention any\n\ spoilers, but it told a ... | I rented the film Ravenous last weekend. I'm not going to mention any\n\ spoilers, but it told a ... | Cannibal Ox: The Cold Vein | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1284-the-cold-vein/ | The Cold Vein | I rented the film Ravenous last weekend. I'm not going to mention any spoilers, but it told a good tale. The transition from period-piece to straight-up action flick was disappointing, though, because I liked the occasional attempts to address the historical context. Soon after one character talks about the relentless American drive for westward expansion in the 19th century, a stereotypical chase scene occurs, as a merry banjo instrumental plays in the background. I couldn't figure out what they were trying to achieve-- each time the track popped up, it ruined an otherwise visceral clarity.
Cannibal Ox don't have that problem with their debut LP on Def Jux Records, The Cold Vein. "Iron Galaxy," which originally appeared in 2000 on a split EP with Company Flow, begins the album. Vast Aire and Vordul rap an abstract refrain, "My shell, mechanical found ghost/ But my ghetto is animal found toast," a taste of the tortured environment they document in their hometown New York City. Vordul grabs the mic and busts for 2\xBD minutes, beginning with the end of life and ending with a near-hopeless call for peace. Vast Aire then takes a microscope to the street, descending into prose so dense and depraved that the stomach lurches. I don't want to ruin the surprises lurking around every corner in this verse, but imagine the sonic background, served up by Company Flow CEO El-P, who's taken the duo underneath his wing and produced the album: looped beats remain discrete while UNKLE-like synth chords bubble upwards, colliding with an old-school video game sample that accelerates until the last few seconds of the song sound like a Richie Hawtin rave-up.
"Ox Out the Cage" brings a more trad rap feel, complete with the "I'd like to introduce... " narrative. But both MC's strive to pronounce flows in incredible salvos, rarely using chorus lines. Prose is the game here, and Vordul deals in rapid-fire verses that skip every other break to rhyme with the next-- Wu-inspired, but who isn't? Vast prefers a slightly slower pace, all the better to fight the war in his brain between concrete detail and mastermind abstraction. He delivers verses with a rising inflection that recalls RBX's self-impressed swagger, but this doesn't distract from lines like, "I grab the mic like Are You Experienced/ But I don't play the guitar, I play my cadence." Power chords accent the mix, but this ain't some crossover cock-rock revival. The rhythm here is aggressive; it turns caddy-slacking P-funk samples into hors d'oeuvres, shoves aside all those Jeep-ish Timbaland hi-hats and snare drums and devours the RZA's sinister string lines. The Cold Vein is like a musical negative, an inverse reflection of hip-hop history, full of everything DJ's cast aside, from Sega sound effects to electro-industrialism, gear-work grooves malfunctioning, synthesizers belching, a menagerie of digitalia.
The group has more facets than their brutality, though. Don't flinch when "Battle for Asgard" betrays its epic title by breaking up each verse with an interlude that sounds like circus music. There's room for humorous self-criticism in this relentless debut, but it works best in "Raspberry Fields," where Vast Aire cuts his flow short with, "Oh shit, I said a word twice," and starts again from the beginning. Eventually, all but the most hardcore heads will appreciate a break from the intensity. Two of the best tracks on The Cold Vein ease up just enough to show some humanity beneath the tough skin. In "A B-Boys Alpha," Vast Aire narrates a personal account of his life, from Freudian birthing trauma to the streets where "my first fight was me versus five boroughs." A booming choir of distortion wells in the background, strangely conjuring up reminiscence. "The F-Word" cools it down just enough to tell the story of a b-boy reluctant to fall in love; El-P keeps it real gritty with an urban melody that recalls Method Man's "All I Need."
Ultimately, Cannibal Ox inherit the mantle of the Wu-Tang Clan: you can polish your rhetorical teeth endlessly, but when your appetite is for violence you stay mired in the muck you rose from. At times you can't tell whether they want to break conventions or heads, or whether it's an either/or proposition. But witness the transition from disgust to critique here: "With beats that have to be registered as sex offenders before presented to the public/ I'll exfoliate your face with the acid inside my stomach/ Binge and purge/ We live in thirty-second blurbs/ And if consumers stop existing we forget how to use words/ Just fuckin' eat each other 'til the next ice age occurs. " Here's to Cannibal Ox transcending the Wu's paranoid conspiracy theories and truly dropping critical science. But enough of the bullshit, The Cold Vein is going to be on everybody's year-end list of the best underground hip-hop. Consume it, just watch it doesn't consume you. | 2001-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2001-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | May 15, 2001 | 8.3 | 1b93bbb0-6b63-4572-ad55-25d8b6c15f44 | Christopher Dare | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christopher-dare/ | null |
The dynamic Atlanta rapper Trouble’s year-in-review mixtape is a smart flex, featuring collaborations with Young Thug, Fetty Wap, Quavo, and others. | The dynamic Atlanta rapper Trouble’s year-in-review mixtape is a smart flex, featuring collaborations with Young Thug, Fetty Wap, Quavo, and others. | Trouble: Year in 2016 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22813-year-in-2016/ | Year in 2016 | The Atlanta rapper Mariel Semonte Orr, aka Trouble, released his first mixtape in 2011, aligning himself with the nascent locals of Duct Tape Entertainment, a label founded by rappers from the same Edgewood Court section of East Atlanta. DTE hasn’t launched a full-fledged star from its roster, but over the last couple years, Trouble’s name has been popping up a bit more conspicuously. Trouble now seems like the imprint’s best chance at a resurgence; he has been earning the attention with some of the most interesting music of his career. His latest mixtape, Year in 2016, is a hasty year-in-review project, and functions as a fan-service document as well as an open invitation to catch up.
In 2015, Trouble made the best of an appearance on Young Thug’s Slime Season 2 mixtape: He slunk into bar-trading stride with one of hip-hop’s squirrelliest vocalists and helped to slur out the “Thief in the Night” hook, which propelled that banger in the first place. The appearance wasn’t an exhaustive come-up, but it suddenly cast Trouble in a newly capable, vital light. Trouble has been nurturing that collaborative spirit for years, and he’s become an increasingly reliable Atlanta team-player. Accordingly, Year in 2016 hosts enough Atlanta rappers to scan like a local studio sampler. The posse cut “Watchu Doin,” one of several here culled from Trouble’s 2016 mixtape Skoobzilla, corners him with Quavo, Young Thug, and Skippa Da Flippa. Quavo and Trouble co-pilot a tumbling, charged-up hook; on a busy beat with some big personalities, Trouble sounds indispensable, never like an add-on. It’s not an isolated occurrence: Trouble holds his own through a handful of other crowded tracks here, too.
More than ever, Trouble has opened up as a rapper, having long since retired the slow-talk flow he barked out on clunky early songs. Trouble is now more likely to channel the audacity and emotion of his bars in snappier ways. There’s still something endearingly awkward about the way he ladles his voice: sometimes shouty and yelping, others mumbling or singing a slur.
Lyrically, “Ahh Man” may be Trouble’s most depressing banger ever, in which he sours a piano loop with downright gloom. He moans about not wanting to answer his phone, justifies drinking because of his father’s health, and cops to copping pills for his grandmother in legitimate need. (“I guess the system just ain’t showing no love/I got her a pack off the street though,” he fesses.) He contemplates his uncertainties: “Sometimes I be blaming myself/For the doubt I brought down on myself.”
On “She in Love Wit Trouble,” another solo track with some wonky trap synths dancing in the background, Semonte plays the boastful homewrecker; he flips his own name into an easy pun for a playful melody. If there’s a lasting effect of this tape, and Trouble’s recent success, it’s that he’s become an increasingly adept hook slinger—prone to staying in pocket melodically, but versatile and daring in every other sense.
Not all the songs on Year in 2016 originally belonged to the headliner, but when Trouble plays the featured artist, he’s dynamic enough to make an impression. Still, a pair of Fetty Wap collaborations fall flat, not for lack of chemistry so much as a missed mark to begin with. And only one of Young Thug’s three appearances marks a return to their banger’s duet style. That track, the Goose-produced “Respect,” stands out early in the tape: Thug’s no-filler second verse might be the attention grabber, but the song belongs to Trouble from the moment he lists his bonafides in the hook.
Year in 2016 rounds up the best of Trouble’s best year yet, but it presses too much into a single compilation for a gratifying continuous listen. Still, an overloaded comp feels like a smart flex for Trouble, ample proof that he’s suddenly, quietly launched an urgent second act. If you haven’t been keeping up, Trouble is the type to remind you he’s been here all along. | 2017-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | DTE | January 24, 2017 | 6.9 | 1b947555-002c-4379-8aaf-1ca865c822a7 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Recording as Alex G, Pennsylvania native Alex Giannascoli's gnarled, wobbly, unfailingly melodic guitar pop evokes Big Star, Elliott Smith, and Built to Spill, as well as more recent low-key breakouts like Youth Lagoon and Jackson Scott. His new album DSU is worthy of its moment, a 13-song set of warped, idiosyncratic sketches, each capable of wending its way to a distinct place into the hearts of anyone who ever warmed to the idea of "indie rock". | Recording as Alex G, Pennsylvania native Alex Giannascoli's gnarled, wobbly, unfailingly melodic guitar pop evokes Big Star, Elliott Smith, and Built to Spill, as well as more recent low-key breakouts like Youth Lagoon and Jackson Scott. His new album DSU is worthy of its moment, a 13-song set of warped, idiosyncratic sketches, each capable of wending its way to a distinct place into the hearts of anyone who ever warmed to the idea of "indie rock". | Alex G: DSU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19462-alex-g-dsu/ | DSU | An unspoken ideal behind the quest for below-the-radar music is that somewhere out there, a random stranger might be churning out homemade songs that're better than the ones you can find through more established channels. The methods of discovery, the sub-genre descriptors, and the artist names change, but that faith in some undiscovered loner who defies the odds and draws a diehard following (at least somewhat) independently has remained constant. In 2014, one of the most enticing of these bedroom singer/songwriters is Alex Giannascoli, a Temple University student who has built up an audience through putting material out there on the internet.
Recording as Alex G, the Pennsylvania native's gnarled, wobbly, unfailingly melodic guitar pop evokes Big Star, Elliott Smith, and Built to Spill, as well as more recent low-key breakouts like Youth Lagoon and Jackson Scott. His first-ever mastered full-length, DSU, also happens to be one of the first vinyl releases for Brooklyn's fledgling Orchid Tapes, which already this year has offered the emotion-wracked electronic dreamscapes of Ricky Eat Acid's Three Love Songs, along with the label comp Boring Ecstasy. DSU is worthy of its moment, a 13-song set of warped, idiosyncratic sketches each capable of wending its way to a distinct place into the hearts of anyone who ever warmed to the idea of "indie rock".
The elements here are fairly limited, with spidery electric guitar, shambling acoustic guitar, and a smattering of watery keys joining rudimentary bass and drums to frame Giannascoli's sometimes pitch-shifted, fragile coo as he delivers sparse, impressionistic lyrics about the mundane. But what's impressive is the array of potent songs Alex G wrings from those basics, his self-recorded stone soup. There's the strummy innocence (and ambivalence about success) of "Harvey", the feedback-streaked pleading of "Black Hair" ("It's not what you are/ It's just what you did"), the barbed howls of "Axesteel". But there's also the PBR-spilling post-chillwave groove of "Promise", the frosty regret of "Sorry", and the stair-spiraling guitar anti-heroics of "Serpent Is Lord".
Giannascoli's voice is definitely of his do-it-yourself idiom; a comparison that strikes me is Joan of Arc member Bobby Burg's Love of Everything project, so the arguably superfluous chipmunk'd effects on songs like the cavernous "Icehead" will probably be one of the record's more divisive decisions. But it's heartening that Alex G's willing to make off-kilter choices like that one, especially when he veers off into the oddball crackle at the end of "Rejoyce". Even the songs that are closer to fragments have memorable turns, like the wordless harmonies of "Skipper" or the piano goofing of "Tripper".
The most powerfully appealing song on DSU doesn't arrive until the end. "Boy" is one of the album's gentler tracks, a stray-dog reflection centered around piano and acoustic guitars; you could almost imagine it as some forgotten post-Beatles remnant that might've appeared on an early Wes Anderson soundtrack. "I am not the boy you knew," Giannascoli insists. Fact is, he's another in a long line of young people who've found their own weird way to (only slightly) left-of-center acclaim. But his project, like the guy himself, has clearly reached, if not maturity, drinking age at the least. If Alex G keeps it up at this rate, the next round'll be on him. | 2014-06-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-06-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Orchid Tapes | June 18, 2014 | 7.9 | 1b952295-a3a1-4be1-b9b2-cbc6489bc8e8 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On their collaborative record, Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan and harpist Mary Lattimore lead each other through misty, evocative improvisations. | On their collaborative record, Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan and harpist Mary Lattimore lead each other through misty, evocative improvisations. | Mary Lattimore / Mac McCaughan: New Rain Duets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-lattimore-mac-mccaughan-new-rain-duets/ | New Rain Duets | Mac McCaughan has made an ambient album. It sounds unthinkable based on the restive pop and punk the indie icon has made with Superchunk for so long. It’s like someone tried to tell you Paul Banks from Interpol had a hip-hop side proj—oh, shit. That actually happened. But McCaughan’s excursion into pop-ambient is a much classier, more compelling affair than Banks’ basement beats, as he follows a dauntless guide, the experimental harpist Mary Lattimore, off into the electro-acoustic wilderness.
Lattimore, who lives in Los Angeles, composes and improvises on a concert grand with loops and delays, as captured on spellbinding albums like Hundreds of Days and Ghost Forests with Meg Baird. Lattimore has deep connections to McCaughan’s home base, North Carolina: raised in the state’s western mountains, she worked at McCaughan’s label, Merge Records, in the nineties. Now, N.C. label Three Lobed Recordings, which previously released a live Lattimore recording from Raleigh, is putting out their mist-shrouded harp-and-electronics record, which does not stint on the promised rain.
New Rain Duets is a structured improvisation recorded live at the McColl Center in Charlotte, N.C., in 2017, though its polish and variety could easily pass as studio work. In four lengthy movements, the music courses and ripples like rain sheeting down a windowpane. Circuitous but purposeful, the first track meanders through space rock, ambient pastoral, and electro-baroque modes. Lattimore scouts the trail, finding long, thoughtful routes through both the harmonic landscape and exploiting her instrument’s broad expressive capacity, from glimmering hums to full-bodied sweeps. McCaughan follows alertly, exploiting the many voices of his vintage and repro analog synths, adding textures and shading to the harp and sometimes drawing the scattered harmonic material together in catchy melodic scraps that remind us he’s a pop musician.
After the atmospheric first track, the second shifts toward modern classical, centering on an uncertain harp theme that develops as McCaughan gusts in low, faintly jazzy harmonies. The third movement descends into a tense, quiet dark-ambient realm: as synth tones curl up like scraped metal and animalistic noises whisper from the darkness, harp notes drop and ring like silver pins. And in the last movement, a psych-rock interlude inflates to epic proportions.
This is all home territory for Lattimore, but it’s new ground for McCaughan, whose prior excursions beyond pop-rock and punk have been easier to account for than this, even when they got a little weird. (Remember Portastatic, from when all the cool indie rockers were sort of into elevator music?) This adds an element of surprise to the familiar electro-acoustic pleasures of New Rain Duets, an interesting cultural frame through which to hear it. It’s wise that McCaughan doesn’t sing on it, not because he’s a bad singer, but because his vocal timbre might be the least-ambient sound imaginable—and, most important, because he’s too intent on listening. | 2019-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Three Lobed | March 28, 2019 | 7 | 1b9747a3-077b-42a7-9774-70ba818931a6 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Following a sinister, hallucinatory handful of one-off tracks, the charismatic N.Y. poet and performance artist Michael Quattlebaum's first Mykki Blanco full-length is a grab-bag of experimentation tailored to 2012's increasingly blurry rap landscape. | Following a sinister, hallucinatory handful of one-off tracks, the charismatic N.Y. poet and performance artist Michael Quattlebaum's first Mykki Blanco full-length is a grab-bag of experimentation tailored to 2012's increasingly blurry rap landscape. | Mykki Blanco: Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17350-cosmic-angel-the-illuminati-princess/ | Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss | Early this year when I interviewed Michael Quattlebaum, the New York poet and performance artist who raps as Mykki Blanco, he explained: "I would rather be famous like Insane Clown Posse than like A$AP Rocky". He spoke of his childhood adoration of Eminem and his preferred "shock-rock" tactics in approaching art and rap music-- an ideology that synced up nicely with the sinister, hallucinatory handful of Mykki Blanco tracks that had been posted on SoundCloud. But shocking listeners is a tall order in 2012, and adopting a Lolita-doll rap persona and snarling verses about doing mushrooms and "white boys with them yarmulkas/ Model chicks with a million followers" will earn a glowing profile in the New York Times Style section sooner than it will drop jaws. So it follows that Cosmic Angel: Illuminati Prince/ss, Mykki Blanco's first full-length release, is a grab-bag of experimentation tailored to today's blurry rap landscape and transgression is only part of the mix.
Like many of her contemporaries have in recent months, Blanco employs a host of electronic producers who usually work without rappers, sometimes to striking effect. Upstart underground names like Brenmar, Gatekeeper, and Sinden offer up a broad, scrappy palate of beats crafted to get people moving. The Brenmar-produced "Wavvy", for instance, is a clear standout, weaving Mykki at her clearest and most urgent through an infectious slice of tropicalia. Sinden and Matrixxman's sinister "Haze.Boogie.Life" beat invokes the image of gooey liquid dripping through industrial pipes, mimicking the sorts of basement-performance settings that brought the rapper to life over the last couple of years, but made brighter and shinier and more danceable.
That's not to say she's only well-served by more straightforward hooks-- the second half of the album pulls heavily from Mykki's lo-fi early days, when the performance-art aspect of the project dominated. On the Katy Perry-referencing "TeenageDream" she's murderous and imaginative, hissing: "Eighteen/ Mykki Blanco, teenage dream/ Homecoming queen, stroking woodies/ Toy Story/Denying me the black card?/ Oh, now it's statutory" like she's at a poetry reading hosted in a grimy underworld. It's that sort of psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness flow looped through cartoonishly girly vocal filters that brought Mykki Blanco character to life initially, the character she described as having "two sides: cute and criminally insane." When both personas bubble out of Blanco in fierce equal measure in a verse, it's gut-punching. Somewhere, Roman and Martha Zolanski are furious.
Where Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss falls short is in the bloated middle ground between club and camp. There are a handful of downbeat tracks here that meander aimlessly, and some of the mixtape is rickety, as though it would crumble to dust under a little bit of pressure. Here you can hear Blanco's raps occasionally grow fumbling and flat, like on the washed-out drum-and-bass/metallic lighter-flick beat of "Squanto": If you make it to the end of the song's four minutes, you can pick out rhymes of "solution" and "resolution" through the mumblings, but there's little to make you want to rewind and decipher a meaning. You'd probably just as soon skip forward and revisit "Betty Rubble", one of Blanco's earliest tracks. There she raps, "You think I was a mink the way these dogs was sniffin'/ You'd think my name was Homer Simpson to these Peter Griffins/ They hangin' off my angry word/ Damn these fucking Angry Birds"-- a raw reminder of how thrilling her character can be at its unfiltered peak. | 2012-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | UNO | November 16, 2012 | 6.8 | 1b9bb7d8-e4d3-4311-bca4-1f7c8a243754 | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
The New York City songwriter meets the hardest of feelings with uncommon compassion. Their second album’s singsong ditties and openhearted ballads play like new standards. | The New York City songwriter meets the hardest of feelings with uncommon compassion. Their second album’s singsong ditties and openhearted ballads play like new standards. | Joanna Sternberg: I’ve Got Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joanna-sternberg-ive-got-me/ | I’ve Got Me | Joanna Sternberg’s music often sounds as though they’re performing a one-person show to an audience of plushies and bedroom clutter. They possess a humble loneliness that is utterly without charm, which of course, somehow, makes their songs helplessly charming. On I’ve Got Me, their second album and their first as a drummer and string arranger, Sternberg balances unvarnished emotion with meticulous craftsmanship. They never offer advice, just a little space for emotion and self-reflection.
They favor kindness and directness over bravura, constructing a musical world of unapologetic idiosyncrasy and tenderness. “When I look back, look back on the years/I see all of the time that I wasted on tears,” they lament on “Mountains High,” pitching the notes like they’re singing in a lo-fi Broadway musical. Sternberg’s deep compassion radiates across I’ve Got Me. By album’s end, they come to feel like a friend—one who’s trying their best not to repeat the same mistakes, but still texts you from their ex’s place in the middle of the night.
Sternberg’s 2019 debut, Then I Try Some More, drew from a stark palette of pain and pity, bordering on self-annihilation. I’ve Got Me—true to its title—is a project of self-reclamation. Almost all of its songs are written in a major key. If on their debut Sternberg surrendered themself wholeheartedly to bad people and destructive relationships, here, they try to unpack those inclinations with quietly defiant insight. “I’m so glad I met you/You helped me see/Just how very much I hate me,” they sing on “People Are Toys to You,” a withering takedown of a former friend. “You said you stayed ’cause you felt bad for me/How sweet of you to call me charity.”
Resilience and overcoming are sometimes equated with artistic merit—but that’s not what’s happening here. On I’ve Got Me, Sternberg culls from a broader emotional range and an expanded musical vocabulary. From the percussive jangle of “People Are Toys to You” to the lovelorn ballad “Right Here,” their compositions are steady scaffolds built from warm acoustic guitar, Brill Building- and bluegrass-inspired string flourishes, and reassuring plucks of upright bass. Whether the combination of piano in unison with steel guitar on “She Dreams,” the electric guitar vamp on “Human Magnet,” or the spare strums of “Stockholm Syndrome” and “The Song,” I’ve Got Me doesn’t sound hushed or intimate. It’s just there, present, as if something obvious suddenly revealed itself to you.
Sternberg’s songs, so frank and free of pretense, may recall the Magnetic Fields, or the anti-folk of Kimya Dawson or Jeffrey Lewis. Unlike those artists, though, Sternberg writes unmediated by neurotic or self-aware humor; this is pain and joy without a punchline. Think of this album like an oblong version of Carole King’s landmark 1971 album Tapestry: Sternberg is presenting a new canon of inverted love songs, each one so sturdy and true that they could withstand being covered by the lowliest of bands and still sound like gifts. Their words are both the dark voice in the back of your head and the friendly one urging you to buck up. “All my faults and flaws and lies/Are no one’s fault but mine,” they sing on the title track, a song that climbs up and down the scales, mirroring the ambivalence of a phrase like “I’ve got me.” Yes, it’s true: We have to live our entire lives with ourselves. At least we’ve got company. | 2023-06-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fat Possum | June 30, 2023 | 8.6 | 1b9c78b9-a428-44dc-b78a-245ffd1d3de4 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The moody debut album from the Chicago-born producer is a layered, lo-fi set that ripples with ambient terror. | The moody debut album from the Chicago-born producer is a layered, lo-fi set that ripples with ambient terror. | Honour: Àlááfíà | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/honour-alaafia/ | Àlááfíà | Honour’s sisters were frightened when they first heard his music. “They said it was dark,” the anonymous producer recalled in a recent interview with Crack Magazine. “But it could get a lot darker.” Throughout Àlááfíà, his moody debut album, the PAN-signee parses the loss of his grandmother as well as their shared cultural heritage and spirituality. At times sounding like a series of warbled and crackling FM dispatches, Àlááfíà dips and weaves between jazz, gospel, trip-hop, and subdued rap production. The inclusion of field recordings, burrowed deep into gritty and impressionistic electronic sequences, give a sense of memories smudged by grief.
As he puts it, Honour didn’t just record Àlááfíà: He “built and destroyed” it via a time-consuming method that spanned three cities—London, Lagos, and New York. Using a demo version of Ableton, Honour was unable to revisit songs after he initially tracked them. “I’d have to screen-record it then take it back in,” he told Crack. Though arduous, the process yielded a layered, lo-fi effect that leaves the listener in a constant state of anticipation, as if these simmering tracks will boil over at any point.
The fluctuating levels and grainy finish of Àlááfíà recall hypnotically dialing between radio stations, likely a nod to Honour’s grandmother, who had one of the first radio shows discussing Itsekiri culture on the Western Nigerian station WNTV. The static that ripples and swells across the album does so like the memory of lost loved ones. But aside from this familial homage, a sense of ambient terror creeps through the core. It manifests in the echoed cackle and motorcycle revs on “Hosanna (Greeting2MYPPL)...” and a loop of kids singing “Ring Around the Rosie” emerging in the middle of “First Born (Redeemed).”
The latter song is disrupted by gunfire, a cue for a sudden U-turn; what begins as a shadowy collage of found sounds liquifies and warps into splattered drum fills and pitched-up vocal bursts. The payoff is sublime—if short-lived. A number of songs on Àlááfíà don’t make it past the two-minute mark, but considering their eerie and mournful melodies, it can feel like just the right dosage. “Pistol Poem (Lead Belly)” is a kind of grit-smeared rap that sounds as if it’s been submerged in earth and gravel for a decade. But curving around its rough edges are a weeping sax sample and falsetto coos that could trace their shape across a chapel ceiling.
Tracks like “Whip Appeal V6 (PIPN8EZ)” and “U&Me (decemberseventeen),” both built on trappy, trip-hop loops of synth, samples, and percussion, have their own gut-clutching melody at the center. Honour has a knack for these gorgeous, liquid vocal passages, but he contrasts them with sharp, tinny percussion and distortion instead of playing them straight, striking a balance between impressions of beauty, violence, and decay. Àlááfíà is full of field recordings, snippets of sped-up conversations, and references to an artistic pantheon that includes bell hooks, Sun Ra, DMX, Robert Johnson, and Richard Pryor. In a way, Honour tries to examine these themes as an emotional archivist. Collecting life in great, messy heaps, he sifts through the debris and arranges new shapes with the few shining things that can be salvaged. | 2023-12-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rap | Pan | December 29, 2023 | 7.6 | 1ba262b4-3c9f-4812-a5ce-8148fc116df1 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
After breakout beats for Kendrick and Earl, the New York producer flexes his range on a new mixtape stacked with lesser-known talent. | After breakout beats for Kendrick and Earl, the New York producer flexes his range on a new mixtape stacked with lesser-known talent. | Evilgiane: #HEAVENSGATE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/evilgiane-heavensgate/ | #HEAVENSGATE | Before Evilgiane ever made music, he was a skater. It’s how the producer’s New York-based collective Surf Gang got started: linking up under the Manhattan Bridge and sharing trick videos set to vaporwave. Since 2018, the crew has fractured and morphed, and their profile soared when Giane scored beat placements for Earl Sweatshirt and Kendrick Lamar that represented both rappers’ best releases of last year. But on his new mixtape, #HEAVENSGATE VOL. 1, he still flourishes within a posse, inviting hyper-regional talent to slide over a collection of exquisitely fine-tuned beats that position him as a superproducer in the making.
Giane is used to staying focused with plenty of producers in the studio. Surf Gang’s 2021 release SGV1 packed a more robust iteration of the group onto a tape bursting with ideas while remaining loyal to a discernible vision—pattering polyrhythms held down by 808s so sleek they hit like a high diver entering the water, no splash. But he hasn’t yet tested himself on this scale, recalibrating his signature technique to a features roster the size of a summer camp soccer team. It’s a lofty task and he mostly nails it.
None of the vocalists here have the name recognition of a Kendrick or an Earl, so Giane’s delicate touch is a vote of confidence. When it’s Massachusetts singer-songwriter Lucy on the track, clipped synth flares and a racing hi-hat match his chatty delivery. Atlanta’s K$upreme tests Young Thug-style ad-libs over what must be a lost Twilight Zone theme on “Lil Wayne”; Harto Falión’s dreamy laments on “Ugly Pretty” float over synth melodies that could’ve come out on Leaving Records. “Informants” casts Georgia shape-shifter and character aficionado Slimesito in a rainy nighttime neo-noir via trilling drill snares and an undulating synth like a string section bowing a mile underwater.
Sometimes, Giane makes these brief, poised compositions out of extremely raw material. When Atlanta’s Bear1Boss—recognizable, in some circles, as the young man who shouted out God for booking him in the same jail as Playboi Carti in a viral clip—takes the mic on “IDK Nun,” it’s not a standout verse. But Giane’s gossamer net of chimes catches him every time he falters, draping around Bear’s yelps and whispers and bringing to mind the exquisite open space that closes another early Giane production highlight, Babyxsosa’s “Who You Love.” He doesn’t steamroll Bear’s point of view, but he doesn’t leave him out to dry among more experienced stylists either. As lovely as they get, Giane beats make good armor too.
Giane isn’t actually the traveling pants of producers, and he’s occasionally out of step. The 03 Greedo-featuring “Sip Sip” has some appealingly drippy synths but it’s unmemorable overall. “40” with xaviersobased and Nettspend deserves credit for onboarding some older heads to New York’s newest underground heroes, but the beat could’ve played more on Xav’s own out-there party style. And Rochester’s Rx Papi, perhaps the least suited to Giane’s vibe despite the great thing he’s got going with similarly nimble producer Gud, overwhelms the stormy “Pap Shiesty” instrumental with his fierce bark.
Giane needs an artist who can bounce off his taut and sharply referenced tracks, like Milwaukee-indebted rapper Durkalini on album closer “Glamorous.” A synth that sounds like a cartoon duck discussing its day draws out a loop over spacious 808 claps and bass on the Woesum-assisted beat. Durkalini’s honeyed one-liners lead into the most soulful interpolation of Fergie’s “Glamorous”—and sure, that bar is low. But Durkalini finds understated ecstasy in his falsetto “flossy,” a from-the-chest moment that feels as casual as karaoke (and revisits Giane’s impish habit of proudly sample-snitching in track titles). This is exactly the juice that had Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem clowning their way around Dodger Stadium into a Grammy nomination. Giane follows his instincts to music that pulses with untapped kinetic energy, always teetering at the lip of the bowl. | 2024-01-30T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-30T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Surf Gang | January 30, 2024 | 7.3 | 1ba892b0-c9f3-4a1b-87dc-dbf3c076d2bd | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
These are the only known recordings of the legendary improvising guitarist and the celebrated jazz drummer. Though wildly abstract, their playing also feels like a conversation between friends. | These are the only known recordings of the legendary improvising guitarist and the celebrated jazz drummer. Though wildly abstract, their playing also feels like a conversation between friends. | Derek Bailey / Paul Motian: Duo in Concert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/derek-bailey-paul-motian-duo-in-concert/ | Duo in Concert | In 2002, three years before his death, Derek Bailey explained his secret to a life of sustained creative practice. “It’s through other people,” he said. “There are improvisers who like to work regularly over decades with the same people. I’m not one of them.” The simplicity of the English guitarist’s answer belied the depth and intensity of his discipline. Bailey started improvising with other musicians in the early 1950s, and performed with bassist Gavin Bryars and drummer Tony Oxley during the 1960s. But during the first half of the next decade, he spent much of his time playing alone. The move was intentional: He believed that with a foundation in solo improvisation, he could play with anyone. During this exploratory phase, he traced the outer limits of his instrument, searching for “a language that would be literally disjointed” and “more open to manipulation.” The goal, as he stated in his 1980 book Improvisation, was “perpetual variation.”
He held steadfast to that objective. Drop into any album from his gargantuan catalog and something new comes to light. On 1988’s Cyro, Bailey’s guitar frolics with bells, shakers, and friction drums, highlighting the percussive range of his every pluck and scrape. In 1981’s Views from 6 Windows, Christine Jeffrey’s extended vocal techniques subtly oscillate between textural utterances and something more melodic—a mirror to Bailey’s own traversal of the guitar’s expressive and austere registers. He’d even play along with pirate radio stations, enticed by the speed of jungle tracks; at their best, these exercises reveal the thrill in spontaneity underlining all his works, regardless of tempo. The new release Duo in Concert unveils even more. It contains the only shows pairing Bailey and American drummer Paul Motian: one in Groningen, the Netherlands, and the other in New York City. Recorded in the early 1990s, these performances capture two improvisational titans at the height of their powers, their collaboration a conduit for novel modes of artistic expression.
At the beginning of their 35-minute concert in Groningen, the two seem to be feeling out their instruments. Bailey lets chords ring out before darting around with spangled melodies, and Motian taps a cymbal before employing drum rolls that fade into one another. It’d feel like a scrappy soundcheck if they weren’t obviously riffing with each other. Their chemistry is immediate, and it makes sense: When Bailey was in his trio with Bryars and Oxley, they’d listen to the Bill Evans Trio, which counted Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro as members. On a song like “All of You,” Motian’s brushwork provides the backbone for piano and bass to zigzag across the landscape. That happens in this show too, but at the micro level: For about 50 seconds, early on, he offers a similarly quiet and propulsive beat while Bailey matches its pace, stumbles out of it, and then strums chords with charming nonchalance. They’re in complete concentration here, but the music feels like a loping conversation between longtime friends.
Motian once reflected that when performing in the Bill Evans Trio, he was “more in the supportive role rather than one-third of the voice.” That’s never the case here; he and Bailey are in a constant, impressionistic dialogue. Three minutes in, he taps on an opening hi-hat and hints at something of a swinging groove, but it glides into something harder to pin down. His erratic strikes make way for Bailey’s own agitated chords, and the two work in tandem to come out of this clanging with balletic grace.
Their synchronicity embodies two key ideas that excited Bailey for decades: a love for silence, and “an impatience with the gruesomely predictable.” Bailey and Motian treat silence, ultimately, as a third instrument. After 10 minutes, Bailey hits a series of circuitous melodies that Motian pounds his toms alongside, but then they play at a much lower volume. With Motian’s soft ride cymbal and Bailey’s squirming guitar, our ears are attuned to the relative quietude—the way it takes up the space and makes the instruments feel subordinate to its presence. That attention to dynamics has an uncanny parallel with the underground rock music of its time. One can draw a straight line from the duo’s poetic noodling to records from Jackie-O Motherfucker and Storm & Stress. A lot of it can be chalked up to Motian’s jazz-inflected drumming, but it’s also the result of the even-keeled, genre-agnostic atmosphere.
Duo in Concert also features a second gig that took place in New York. It is only on the digital version of the record, and perhaps understandably so, given its low fidelity. Its appeal isn’t far from Bailey’s Music and Dance, where one is confronted with not just the space that the artists are in, but the distance between listener and performance, as mediated by subpar recording equipment. In these 46 minutes, the room tone looms, the mixing is unbalanced, but an evocative intimacy pokes through. The two still play with thoughtfulness and verve, but everything is draped in an everyday veneer, like you’re hearing them from a bar at the other end of a venue. It paints the recording not as a Holy Grail, but as an extension of their normal practices. “I do the same thing more or less every day,” Bailey once remarked. “And sometimes I go out and do it in public.”
When “Duo in Concert (New York)” ends, it does so without any big climax. There’s a moment of pause before people clap, and it’s presumably so people can be sure the set is actually complete. That moment of uncertainty speaks to Bailey’s modus operandi, as he saw improvisation as a “segment of a continuous process.” He even declared that playing the end of any piece made him feel disgusted. It’s a dramatic proclamation, but one that speaks to Bailey’s and Motian’s lives as artists—their animating force is their ongoing commitment. Duo in Concert is consequently phenomenal not just because the music itself is great, but because every second constitutes a moment of instinctive, instantaneous decision-making—a lifetime of improvisation distilled into every measure. | 2023-11-27T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-27T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz / Rock | Frozen Reeds | November 27, 2023 | 7.8 | 1bab65e2-8ca1-432c-98dd-8c8c8b1b5526 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Blur's Damon Albarn and artist and designer Jamie Hewlett, having teamed for two top-selling albums as Gorillaz, have now adapted a 16th century Chinese novel into a modern opera. This album, in which they've re-arranged and re-articulated the production's music, is much better than the description would lead you to believe. | Blur's Damon Albarn and artist and designer Jamie Hewlett, having teamed for two top-selling albums as Gorillaz, have now adapted a 16th century Chinese novel into a modern opera. This album, in which they've re-arranged and re-articulated the production's music, is much better than the description would lead you to believe. | Monkey: Journey to the West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12262-journey-to-the-west/ | Journey to the West | After two top-selling albums created under the guise of a cartoon band, artist and designer Jamie Hewlett and Blur's Damon Albarn followed Gorillaz with, no shit, Monkey. The simian in question is the lead character in Journey to the West, one of China's oldest and most endearing stories, a tale originally written in the late 16th century that's considered one of the country's four great novels. Oh and, with the help of director Checn Shi-Zeng, Albarn and Hewlett adapted it into a modern opera.
On paper these ideas-- audacious, uncommercial, completely uncool-- should bomb. But Albarn has always had a conceptual bent to his projects, and after successfully acting as a conduit between African and Western music, heading a supergroup that actually worked, and the shock success of Gorillaz, it might be time to stop underestimating him. Albarn's detractors, granted, have plenty of ammunition-- after years of tabloid celebrity at home, he's aimed to turn himself into a panglobal everyman, a process that raises specters of cultural tourism and inauthenticity. Yet even if one were to sniff at his musical output, it's difficult to locate the mercenary or imagistic motivations in issuing low-key compilations of African music on his Honest Jon's label or attempting to tackle Chinese opera-- where's the superficial reward there?
And yet despite being relatively leftfield to the British public, this collection of Anglo-Sino music, Journey to the West, debuted in the UK top five. With African music en vogue throughout the West, and with the possibility China could dominate this century, Albarn's cultural eye seems more prophetic than exploitative. In any event, one listen to Journey-- a record that, even by Hewlett's admission you might only want to listen to once a year-- should dispel the notions that this is some sort of token nod.
Wisely choosing not to release a soundtrack of their actual opera, Albarn and Hewlett (in conjunction with the UK Chinese Music Ensemble) have instead re-arranged and re-articulated the production's music for this CD release. The project still has the feel of an accompanying piece, with titles referencing the dramatization of the Chinese story and plenty of incidental music, but it also works on a satisfying level as an experimental work or as art-pop. Written in the rigid five-note pentatonic scale that dominates many ancient folk musics (including China's), the record is inherently offkilter to those accustomed to more backbeat-oriented rock. Albarn leans heavily on electronic tones, giving the record an agile sound even at its darkest.
It's also surprisingly easy to locate Albarn's melodic gifts within these songs, whether in the more passive tracks or underneath both the guttural vocalizations of "Confessions of a Pig" or the languid tones of "The Living Sea". Some of the more interstitial tracks bear more obvious Albarn touches-- the panoramic "Sandy the River Demon" or the electro-noir of "O Mi to Fu" could fit on a Gorillaz record, while "I Love Buddha" lightly recalls the knees-up oomp-pa instrumentals that colored Blur's Britpop-era work. The set works best, however, when it hews closest to Western pop-- the stirring "Heavenly Peach Banquet" could actually be a blog hit, and "Monkey Bee" bears the fingerprints of many of the modern art-rock bands we champion.
This ability to weave his stylistic tics into his now heavily collaborative projects functions almost as breadcrumbs for those still willing to follow Albarn from record to record. Rather than writing from the perspective of a band-- or a brand name, as he arguably did with Blur-- his more exploratory instincts and nimbleness have lately come to the fore. In a sense, Blur threatened at one point to run headlong into self-parody and it seemed at the time (and still does) that it was guitarist Graham Coxon who most deftly steered them away from that dead end. If so, perhaps it was a lesson Albarn absorbed, and relatively outside of the public eye-- either by hiding behind the mask of Gorillaz or working with others, he now seems more free to carve a musical identity rather than a celebrity one. (Ironically, this was a frequent complaint I heard about The Good, the Bad & the Queen project-- a record that, to my mind, remains sorely underappreciated because its tones, pace, and tenor was closer to an Albarn solo record than the work of its creators.)
Albarn wound up moving from articulating the decay of Great Britain on GBQ to exploring the roots of an ascendent cultural and political force, and the resulting album is often difficult, completely unexpected, and at time precious; with increased spins, it becomes a rather settled, even comfortable, listen. "If you don't know it now, then you will do," Albarn warned on GBQ's "History Song", and one gets the same feeling from Monkey-- that while this is likely to be an introduction to the unfamiliar for many of those who buy it, we'll all become much more versed in Chinese culture over the next two or three decades. | 2008-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | September 25, 2008 | 7.8 | 1bb05e42-5db3-41fc-b1e1-d6bcfb36c421 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The Lawrence brothers’ third album of glossy yet gritty disco pop suggests that their true lineage is the Y2K chart-house sound once ubiquitous on UK airwaves. | The Lawrence brothers’ third album of glossy yet gritty disco pop suggests that their true lineage is the Y2K chart-house sound once ubiquitous on UK airwaves. | Disclosure: ENERGY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/disclosure-energy/ | ENERGY | Guy and Howard Lawrence make the kind of songs you can take anywhere: meticulously crafted and comfortably danceable, ready to serve the biggest festival slots and uppermost playlist spots with instant, PG-rated thrills. When their debut album made these two fresh-faced English brothers world famous, dance snobs sneered, as dance snobs must, yet the songs were undeniable. So when their slowed-down, R&B-glossed second album failed to ignite, the Lawrences must have been left scratching their heads. As the all-caps title suggests, ENERGY is a manic attempt to relight the fire, as well as a confetti-strewn soundtrack for a world tour that never was.
Parts of the duo’s original, world-beating formula remain unchanged. ENERGY is powered by a massive array of high-wattage guests, from veterans like Kelis and Common to newer voices like Channel Tres and Kehlani. It starts promisingly enough, with several moments in the first half that deserve the full smoke-and-lasers treatment. “My High” is Disclosure at their concentrated best: full-fat bassline, rackety garage-house drums, and sleazy rapping by Aminé through a distorted mic, resembling vintage Timberlake. The track can’t even be spoiled by a guest verse from British rapper slowthai, who’s been on a time-out since disgracing himself at an awards show in February.
Also on the future-sex tip, Channel Tres brings his purring monotone to “Lavender,” a hip-house-meets-filter-disco romp that touches on the glitz of Daft Punk and the Neptunes. Kelis avoids our gaze in the club as she dances over a stretchy bassline on “Watch Your Step”; again the distorted mic, again a Neptunes connection. All these tracks, the best on the album, seem rooted in a kind of glossy yet gritty, post-millennial disco pop—a sound that would have made sense at any time in the past 20 years. When the Lawrences reconvene with Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara for the gentle grooves and generous filter sweeps of “Douha (Mali Mali),” it’s a further twist to a successful recipe, recalling UK chart hits of the early ’00s from once ubiquitous names like Modjo, Room 5, and the Shapeshifters. That Y2K sound—a jumble of vintage vocals, scuffed breakbeats, and sweeping disco lights—is Disclosure’s true lineage. Perhaps this is what “timeless” really means for British millennials?
Unfortunately, ENERGY peters out in the second half. The title track reunites Disclosure with the NBA’s favourite motivational speaker, Eric Thomas, whose booming voice appeared on 2013’s “When a Fire Starts to Burn.” This time they slap his inspirational flimflam over a noisy samba band sample and a burst of silvery chords—effective enough, but it feels like reheated glories. Despite having written more than 200 songs for ENERGY before whittling down the final tracklist, they reserve two of the album’s 11 tracks for “interludes,” as they’ve titled them. “Fractal” is innocuous boom-bap and “Thinking Bout You” is a dreamy, post-Donuts flip of an obscure ’70s soul single, Lady’s “You’re Still the One.” Both are pleasant, but it’s hard to believe there wasn’t something punchier among the 190-odd tracks on the cutting room floor.
Kehlani and Syd get together on “Birthday,” a twinkling slow jam that sounds like something those two would write with no one else around; the brothers start to fade into the scenery. “Ce n’est pas” curls into wallpaper, missing an opportunity to forge a catchy hook out of Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy’s vocal. “Reverie,” finally, is a damp sign-off that has nothing to do with the preceding 40 minutes, leaving Common to deal out lines as forgettable as lockdown’s unchanging days (“When freedom calls, we gotta listen”) over an undercooked soul loop. Rather than inviting the rap elder into their world, the brothers try, unsuccessfully, to recreate his—as if they’re happy being assistants on their own production. Seven years after their precocious debut album, one that set the standard for a whole wave of mid-’10s dance pop, Disclosure seem only slightly closer to working out what it was they got so right the first time round.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Capitol | August 31, 2020 | 6.5 | 1bb19f9d-64bf-449e-b39d-a22a199286ec | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The session musician and leader of Nat Turner goes big on his first official LP, creating a spiritually rich and soulful autobiographical story. | The session musician and leader of Nat Turner goes big on his first official LP, creating a spiritually rich and soulful autobiographical story. | Aaron Abernathy: Monologue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22447-monologue/ | Monologue | The Cleveland-born and D.C.-based musician Aaron Abernathy is best known for his work as a session musician and the leader of Black Milk’s live band Nat Turner, the band that played behind Milk's recent jazz-rap album The Rebellion Sessions. Now standing center stage, Abernathy goes solo on his new LP aptly titled Monologue, which blends the weathered tropes of soul with his own formative life experiences. It’s a big, autobiographical conversation that also allows listeners to identify themselves in Ab’s life story.
The album tells the true tale of Abernathy’s teenage summer love affair just before to his freshman year at Howard University. As with many first loves, it consumes everything in Ab’s life, which leads to the album’s most significant theme of isolation. Ab notes at the start of the album that he’s the “Son of Larry” and that his mother is his “Favorite Girl,” but, like many post-high school kids, he’s conflicted between his parents and his friends who he may never see again. Furthermore, he’s confronted with choosing between his old friends, his new girlfriend, and his piano lessons. As he sequesters himself over 11 tracks, he discovers another weathered soul trope: love, music, and expressing his appreciation of both in song creates the greatest strength and most significant creative power.
The album’s DNA is largely comprised of three iconic moments in soul music. Just take the soaring guitar solo on Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times* *slow-jam “Adore,” the organic acoustic soul of early *’*70s singer-songwriters like Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, and André 3000’s most earnest and lovelorn moments on his half Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and the table is set. The lead single “I See You” handles the Prince component with an interplay between Abernathy’s own squawking falsetto, the chopped synths, and soaring lead guitar moments that rise from the mix. Abernathy himself notes that this song is supposed to create a sense of “crushing on someone.” However, there’s so much honest sensuality here that the song gently cascades over the edge into something much more erotic in nature.
Phonte and Abernathy’s frequent collaborator Black Milk appear on “Bachelorette,” which alongside “I See You” perfectly articulate the quasi-romantic victory of wooing a girl into your father’s car to drive her home from the mall. That it takes roughly nine minutes and 30 seconds is maybe a bit problematic. On The Love Below, André 3000 does what Abernathy attempts in roughly half the time with “Spread,” and the “Where Are My Panties?” skit, which unlike Abernathy’s album, adds some humor to balance the serious sexuality. Abernathy mimicking Andre’s ability to know exactly at which heartstring to aim his stylings is impressive, but he hasn’t quite figured out the right tone or pacing.
The moment that best encapsulates the album’s emotional core lay within the acoustic guitars and thick organic drum breaks that drive “I Need to Know.” Abernathy lays his soul bare and the lyrics’ spiritual essence animate in your mind’s eye. There’s no synths, no Prince-fetishization, and no early 2000s neo-soul to be found. Rather, there’s just Ab delivering what teenage life at the confluence of heartbreak, depression, and a slight fear of the unknown feels like.
On an album that oftentimes veers into overwrought sentimentality for the purposes of hammering home Abernathy’s desire to spiritually connect with the listener, “I Need to Know’” is brilliantly simple in composition. It leaves enough space for the listener to feel Abernathy’s questioning delivery of lyrics like, “Am I running a race that I can’t win?” Of late, from Miguel to Bryson Tiller, there have been many soul albums released that inspire love-making. In veering towards sex but staying well-rooted in the ultra-emotional moments of discovering love (or heartbreak, we never quite find out), Aaron Abernathy has grounded himself in a lane that feels familiar but still carries you to new places. | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Aaron Abernathy Music | October 4, 2016 | 7.2 | 1bb5d122-1ad6-498b-a143-b00f7e172585 | Marcus K. Dowling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-k. dowling/ | null |
On the Baltimore duo’s fourth album, Ed Schrader and Devlin Rice trade their formerly frenetic energy for ’80s sounds and danceable beats. | On the Baltimore duo’s fourth album, Ed Schrader and Devlin Rice trade their formerly frenetic energy for ’80s sounds and danceable beats. | Ed Schrader’s Music Beat: Nightclub Daydreaming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ed-schraders-music-beat-nightclub-daydreaming/ | Nightclub Daydreaming | Abrasive post-punk was once the modus operandi for Ed Schrader’s Music Beat. On early releases such as 2012’s Jazz Mind and 2014’s Party Jail, the Baltimore duo created bite-sized vignettes rather than full-blown songs. Tracks such as “Televan” and “When I’m in a Car” burst like fireworks, evaporating into the air not long after the fuse was lit. With the Dan Deacon-produced Riddles, however, those serrated edges had softened, and Ed Schrader’s Music Beat expanded their sound. Four years later, vocalist Ed Schrader and bassist Devlin Rice have returned with their fourth studio album, Nightclub Daydreaming, and they have mostly relinquished aggressive post-punk for sleeker, more danceable sounds.
Rice has said that their intention for the album was to craft a collection of “sunny disco bangers.” Although the album sounds more akin to Suicide than Donna Summer, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat take a subtle turn toward the dancefloor. Punchy tracks such as “Eutaw Strut” and “Echo Base” evoke classic new-wave acts like the B-52’s and Talking Heads but with their own Music Beat twist. Propelled by a driving bassline and motorik drums, “This Thirst” is among the most ebullient in the duo’s catalog. Schrader’s echo-soaked vocals, meanwhile, often summon the gloomiest aspects of the ’80s, recalling groups like the Sisters of Mercy.
In a recent Instagram post addressing their gender identity, Schrader announced, “I’ve decided to give you the full me… the me I’ve been repressing in hopes of not making other people feel uncomfortable.” They added, “In your art, you can’t lie. That’s why I have always chosen riddles and cryptic lyrics.” Their writing remains as mysterious as ever, packed with dense imagery and mythic resonance, and laced with references to coded meanings, “buried steps,” and a switched-out lock and key. But there are glimpses of Schrader’s search for their identity: In “Black Pearl,” they sing, “I’m a foreigner even home now/I shut in vaults to heal you,” tracing the lower limits of their register. Their guttural delivery brings their former tourmates Future Islands to mind, and the chorus strikes a cathartic moment on a record that could benefit from more of them. It’s one of their best songs to date. On the following track, “Echo Base,” modulated, Disintegration-esque guitars give way to a slightly monotonous, repetitive hook with little payoff. The drums are so busy that they ultimately distract from the otherwise hazy aura.
The band’s earlier records were nicely varied, with caustic songs broken up by downtempo intermissions, but Nightclub Daydreaming, aside from the centerpiece ballad, “Hamburg,” often sounds homogenous. Regardless, it’s refreshing to hear Schrader and Rice attempt something new a decade into their career when many artists would want to stick with what already works. While they’ve shed the frenetic energy that once defined them, they bring a refined sense of intensity even to their newly unburdened beats. It was difficult to imagine dancing to Ed Schrader’s Music Beat back in 2012, but with Nightclub Daydreaming, that notion is no longer so far-fetched. | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | March 25, 2022 | 6.8 | 1bb62862-bd73-43d3-9e9d-9714f0f6e383 | Grant Sharples | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grant-sharples/ | |
In the 1990s, Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltze and Brian McBride were making druggy and internally-focused drone music. On the East Austin, Tex., duo's sophomore album, reissued here on remastered vinyl, they did away with voices and followed their drones to a place where words have no meaning. | In the 1990s, Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltze and Brian McBride were making druggy and internally-focused drone music. On the East Austin, Tex., duo's sophomore album, reissued here on remastered vinyl, they did away with voices and followed their drones to a place where words have no meaning. | Stars of the Lid: The Ballasted Orchestra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17508-the-ballasted-orchestra/ | The Ballasted Orchestra | In the 1990s there were a few artists tucked into out-of-the-way corners of the United States making music defined by its vastness. In Richmond, Va., were Labradford, whose slow-moving and cinematic pieces showed how much could be wrung from simplicity and repetition. Up in Dearborn, Mich., Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren were making sensual drone music inspired both by the endless held tones of Lamonte Young and the textural romanticism of 4AD. And down in East Austin, Tex., there were Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride, who made druggy and internally-focused drone music as Stars of the Lid.
Stars of the Lid's 1995 debut was called Music for Nitrous Oxide and it had a track called "Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy"; those two phrases offer a serviceable definition of what SOTL's early music was all about. Working at home and recording on their Yamaha MT-120 and Tascam Portastudio 424, Wiltzie and McBride were patiently mapping a new terrain for experimental music. Along with groups like the previously mentioned Windy & Carl in the United States and UK groups like Flying Saucer Attack and Amp, they were taking the tools of D.I.Y. culture (recording at home, getting the word out through print zines, releasing music on smaller, specialized labels, demonstrating a fondness for cheap and easy cassettes) and using them to make abstract music for deeply immersive listening. Music For Nitrous Oxide mixed metallic drones and feedback with the sounds of strange voices; the effect was something like tuning into two radio stations at once, hearing strange disembodied phrases mixed with weird music that floated across the plains. For their third album, 1997's The Ballasted Orchestra, which has been out of print for some time and has now been reissued on vinyl by Kranky, they did away with the voices and followed their drones to a place where words have no meaning.
The Ballasted Orchestra is four sides of shifting guitar-based drone, with textures that range from thick and menacing to thin and ethereal. For those more familiar with SOTL's work from the last decade (ambient music classics And Their Refinement of the Decline and The Tired Sounds of...) what's most striking about Ballasted is how raw and ragged it sounds, in the best possible way. As the the SOTL project matured, the music grew more pristine, incorporating strings and horns and drawing inspiration from carefully composed music by artists like Arvo Part. In 1997, when these tracks were recorded, Wiltzie and McBride were firmly committed to seeing how much feeling they could wring from guitars and effects pedals.
Turns out it was quite a lot. Some psychedelic drone music seems like it's designed to soundtrack a trip through the cosmos; Stars of the Lid invites you to close your eyes and explore your own mind. And the range of sensations and moods is surprisingly wide. The disorienting "Sun Drugs" mixes thin tendrils of wavering drone with trebly guitar notes that feel random like wind chimes. "Taphead" is closer to the airy drift of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois' Apollo while "Fucked Up (3:57 AM)" is tensely cinematic, with overlapping chords that are finally interrupted with a cavernous bass that sounds like a tuba blast echoing through an empty gym.
But the highlight and centerpiece is the side-long "Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30", which is split into two parts. David Lynch's television series ended its two-season run with episode #29, so the clever title (and Stars of the Lid have always had good ones) affirms that they're using their imaginations to soundtrack a fictional world. And while the work of frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti's work has been an inspiration to Wiltzie and McBride (see "Mullholland" on The Tired Sounds of), at this point the connection was more thematic than sonic. If anything, the piece is more likely to bring to mind the industrial soundscaping of Lynch's sound design partner Alan Splet. But SOTL's speculative soundtrack is absolutely masterful, a drawn-out throb of drone that feels vividly alive. At high volume it taps into the oceanic quality of shoegaze, dissolving boundaries between the listener and the listened-to.
The "Twin Peaks" nod helps explain why Stars of the Lid still feel so relevant and why this music, while deeply connected to the wide-open world of 90s tape-based psychedelia, still feels so current. We'll never stop soundtracking our space and creating virtual worlds. It might happen with a YouTube or an installation but in 1997 there were 4-track tapes recorded by friends in dark rooms that somehow found their way to other people who understood the transmission. | 2013-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kranky | January 10, 2013 | 8.5 | 1bbbdc39-e4e7-49ba-a679-877a0c5a64f6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
This reissue of the electronic composer’s first album, made in his early 20s, rings thin and hollow compared to the dark genius of his later work. | This reissue of the electronic composer’s first album, made in his early 20s, rings thin and hollow compared to the dark genius of his later work. | Jon Hopkins: Opalescent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22325-opalescent/ | Opalescent | After completing his A-levels and graduating from secondary school at 17, Jon Hopkins joined Imogen Heap’s band as a keyboard player. He played with them for about a year and was on his way to becoming a bit of a nomad, moving from project to project, slowly developing his voice. He garnered pockets of attention in the latter half of the ’00s for his work in film, particularly with Brian Eno on Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, but his solo work was second to that of his film scores. It took him four albums before he hit the mark with Immunity**, a relentlessly brooding and stark collection of songs. *Immunity *invented a visceral electronic world, decidedly claustrophobic and blindingly loud. His music took years to find this sensibility, and in his debut *Opalescent, *he was prone to mistakes that seem rather curious in the light of his recent work. He released *Opalescent *in 2001 when he was barely 22 years old, and it remains a strange record of Hopkins’ own youthful dalliances. To commemorate the long, circuitous journey Hopkins took to prominence, Just Music has reissued the album to celebrate its 15th anniversary.
*Opalescent *was generally well-received at the time of its release. User reviews from Amazon dating back to 2001 tell a small story of ecstatic reception. One reviewer said they became obsessed with one of the tracks after hearing it on a new age sampler, which should give you a sense of where the album could be categorized. It’s classic chill-out music, the kind of stuff that came free with Windows XP, perfectly wrought for early visualizer technology. *Opalescent *is quite forcefully an extremely milquetoast album of vibes, filled with cheesy guitars and saccharine synthesizer flourishes. Other than the amount of time since its initial release, it is a bizarre choice for a deluxe reissue that hardly speaks to Hopkin’s current aesthetic sensibility. Why reissue this album in the first place?
Standing at almost an hour, *Opalescent *is a bit of a slog. It starts inauspiciously with “Elegiac,” a mishmash of acoustic guitar plucks and computer start-up chimes. It sets the tone for the album—a tone similar to that heard in American malls circa 2001 during the heyday of Sharper Image. Hopkins’ songs are sleek, smooth, but lifeless—essentially simulations of emotional and meditative experience as opposed to something actually trance-inducing. “Halcyon” is shudderingly cheesy, a mess of mellow electric guitar and synth that brings up all the polite snark of a Dyson vacuum cleaner commercial. “Apparition” contains looped piano chords and ambient sputter that are so bland as to be anonymous. “Cold Out There,” one of the album’s highlights, is at least hesitant, impressionistic, and works on some fundamental level. Yet it’s not like you forget that you’re listening to music, it’s that it feels like that you've been on hold with a customer service representative for an entire hour. The album, while well-produced, becomes akin to muzak.
Songs from Opalescent were also featured heavily in the last season of “Sex and the City.” Incidentally, the final season of the show is also the one that has aged the most poorly. Is it any surprise that prominence of *Opalescent *in late “Sex and the City” soundtracks coincided with the emergence of one of the shows more maligned and ridiculous characters: the cheesy artist, Aleksandr Petrovsky? Hopkins’ music was used during several key dramatic sequences during the last season: “Halcyon” appeared in “Let There Be Light” to introduce Carrie and Aleksander’s blooming relationship, “Cold Out There” soundtracked their breakup in the series finale. The early-career “Sex and the City” bump helped fund his later and better work, and it is a strangely appropriate footnote for the album. It became a means to an end, more than an actual piece of art Hopkins might think fondly of now.
In an interview with Red Bull a few years ago, Hopkins said of the album, “I like about half of it now … I wish I could remove them from history. I was young and the best thing that came from it was that it managed to set me up to write the second one, because I earned a bit of money.” And that would seem to be that. A decade later, he would become a permanent fixture in electronic music. But in *Opalescent *we can see that rough drafts, even the one’s we let the world see, are blind to the future. Why *Opalescent is getting a reissue if Hopkins himself said he would literally like to remove it from history is a confounding question. *If anything, it offers a more coherent and detailed portrait of Hopkins’ progression. It is a moment of youthful fallibility, but one of the most extreme proofs of artistic growth. | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Just Music | August 31, 2016 | 5.6 | 1bbe3372-cdef-4a68-9adb-78d9e379595c | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
About 10 years ago, already well into a flourishing career, the bluster and self-evisceration of the early records Slug made with producer Ant as Atmosphere suddenly bored him. So he started penning compassionate character sketches while Ant warmed and loosened up their sound with live instruments. Southsiders extends the "quietly durable" phase of the Minneapolis duo's lifespan. | About 10 years ago, already well into a flourishing career, the bluster and self-evisceration of the early records Slug made with producer Ant as Atmosphere suddenly bored him. So he started penning compassionate character sketches while Ant warmed and loosened up their sound with live instruments. Southsiders extends the "quietly durable" phase of the Minneapolis duo's lifespan. | Atmosphere: Southsiders | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19320-atmosphere-southsiders/ | Southsiders | About 10 years ago, already well into a flourishing career, Sean Michael Daley decided to start moving the furniture around inside of his music. The bluster and self-evisceration of the early records Daley (aka Slug) made with producer Ant as Atmosphere suddenly bored him, so he set it aside and started penning compassionate character sketches while Ant warmed and loosened up their sound with live instruments. The results strayed from rap towards gently rambling spoken-word territory, but miraculously, the duo didn't lose their audience: 2008's resonant When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold sold the most of any Atmosphere release and marked an unlikely new chapter in an already-unlikely career.
Southsiders extends the "quietly durable" phase of the Minneapolis duo's lifespan. The 2011 album The Family Sign, which featured the upraised fist of Daley's newborn second child on its cover, told stories that were close to his home while not being strictly about him—there were upsetting and finely detailed narratives of spousal abuse and breakups, but few first-person pronouns. Southsiders dials in closer: opening track "Camera Thief" finds him in his kitchen with his children. "I still kick it with angels, the only difference is/ Instead of the bar, I'm at my kitchen table," he raps. The line obliquely references "Angelface", a track from 2005's landmark You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having that detailed tour conquests with self-loathing and relish. It establishes the creative challenge of Southsiders. Daley has two children, a kitchen table, and a domestic existence of sorts, and he's trying to figure out how to make an Atmosphere record about that.
The awkward, uninspired construction of that line hints at the creeping problem: Contentment is damnably hard to write about. For most of us, contentment is a gift, a welcome reason to rev down the whirring of our mental engines. We analyze our bad feelings because we're trying to figure out how to banish them, but we simply enjoy our good feelings. Daley is smart and self-aware enough to diagnose this problem on "Camera Thief": "I don't need my defensiveness/ I keep to myself, my family and friendships/ I got enough people I could disappoint/ If you disagree, I think you missed the point," he raps, defensively. But pointing to the problem doesn't dissolve it, and when he follows up with ""Now pull up a chair/ Let me tell you about the last few years," it's hard to muster a lot of excitement.
More distressingly, a spare tire of flab has developed around Slug's usually chisel-sharp writing. "Gotta be a model civilian/ And get your name printed on a bottle full of pills, and/ Spill your guts into a Dixie cup/ Give no fucks, kiss no butts," from "The World Might Not Live Through the Night", is a stretch that would never have made it onto an earlier Atmosphere record. "If everybody on the comet agreed/ We could set the clock to whenever we wanted it to be" is a nice sentiment, but not a terribly incisive thought, and when he throws it out on the gently bumping "Fortunate," it's hard not to flinch a little bit.
But even working at half-capacity, Daley hits some powerful nerve clusters. On "Arthur's Song," there are freeze-in-place images to savor like "Train tracks underneath the faceless moon" and some of his trademark writerly details: "Been a few years since the last cigarette, but if you put your finger inside the flask, it's still wet." "Time flew/ Like it's designed to do", from "Star-Shaped Heart," has a lovely, jewel-like simplicity.
There are a few moments where Slug revisits earlier versions of himself. On the curiously titled single "Kanye West", he revisits some well-trod codependency-addiction territory ("She said she want somebody she could take care of/ And right then is when we paired up"), and on the title track he throws out goofy battle raps ("Show me a player who's mad at this/ And I'll show you a hater and a masochist") like it's still 2005. The pinched fury of that era is long gone from Slug's voice, and the song feels downright affectionate, like a high-school picture, a fond look back at his "Whoever put out album must've needed write-offs" era. They foreground the album's lack of focus: For the first time in Atmosphere's long career, the stakes feel low, and Southsiders feels both pleasant and noncommittal, like it isn't even convinced of its own right to exist. | 2014-05-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | May 9, 2014 | 6.3 | 1bc74c51-071e-4934-8d6d-799b77e6515f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
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