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When a rosy-faced tot tumbles off a seesaw, whacking his precious head on the playground turf, each\n\ subsequent moment ... | When a rosy-faced tot tumbles off a seesaw, whacking his precious head on the playground turf, each\n\ subsequent moment ... | stellastarr*: Stellastarr | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7715-stellastarr/ | Stellastarr | When a rosy-faced tot tumbles off a seesaw, whacking his precious head on the playground turf, each subsequent moment is heavy with the threat of total apocalypse: his face will start to crumple, tiny pink mouth stretching open, eyes fluttering and nostrils rearing, sticky fingers clamping down on blades of grass. Onlookers will pause in thick silence, uneasy, leaning forward just a bit, waiting to see if what follows is a spit-riddled giggle or a belly-flipping scream. Stellastarr frontman Shawn Christensen's voice has come to exist in that exact same purgatory, his deep, gut-borne howl flitting effortlessly from cautious whisper to full-on bellow, sometimes sinister, sometimes loving, always pulsing with the threat of complete breakdown. The unpredictability of the situation is what makes it impossible; the prickly volatility is what makes it riveting.
Stellastarr is the Brooklyn-born band's first full-length (duly preceded by 2002's three-song Somewhere Across Forever EP) and, with a dressed-in-black swagger reminiscent of fellow New York based art-punks Television and vocals reminiscent of 70s David Byrne, it's an apt portrait of what New York City has always been stupidly good at generating: thorny post-punk guitars, wild, undulating vocals, and plenty of cigarette-enhanced Lou Reed sneers. Boston enters the picture as well: The Pixies serve as one of Stellastarr's more obvious parent figures; the hollow boy/girl vocal exchanges on "Jenny" are classic Francis/Deal. Add this to the fact that this record was produced by Boston-based producer Tim O'Heir, who manned the decks for so many of the city's alterna-rock icons (Morphine, Juliana Hatfield, Dinosaur Jr.), and it's not too difficult to see how that early 90s college-rock aura could have seeped into these songs.
The band is young, though, and this being their debut album, they have some growing to do. Their most noticeable weakness is the blatancy of their influences-- an easily acquitted misgiving, considering the disc's strengths. In backing up Christensen's caterwauling, bassist Amanda Tannen, guitarist Michael Jurin, and drummer/keyboardist Arthur Kremer nobly transcend most art-school clichés (admirable, with three Pratt alumni present), pushing out dark, danceable new-wave that wiggles-in-neon like it's 1985. Opener "In the Walls" opens harmlessly enough, teaming pulsing video-game synths with Christensen's blank, creepy chanting; seconds later, the band kicks up and Christensen releases his open-mouthed howl, soaking the room with huge, dramatic screams.
The breathless, guitar-driven "Jenny" is the perfect opportunity to holler "Jenny!" as much as you ever wanted, a sinister homage to being screwed and screwed-up that showcases Christensen's peaceable-one-second, crackers-the-next vocal stylings (dude says "motherfucker" like he really means it!). The bouncing, elastic "My Coco" is tough to follow, and Stellastarr starts to sag a bit in the middle before winding down, unceremoniously, with "Pulp Song", a track that-- cleverly?-- sounds kinda like a Pulp song. Stellastarr's bold, cinematic sprawl demands a certain kind of tolerance, and might require a few listens before you're able to fully adjust to its dramatics, but Christensen is, in the end, an oddly convincing leader, and, if nothing else, you'll at least be stuck to your headphones trying to guess his next move. | 2003-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | RCA | October 12, 2003 | 7.4 | 2976c143-82c8-4f95-ab07-8e1c9d8cf146 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Now best known as a reality star from "Love & Hip Hop," K. Michelle proves on her new release she's more than just two dimensional. More Issues Than Vogue is contemporary R&B at its best. | Now best known as a reality star from "Love & Hip Hop," K. Michelle proves on her new release she's more than just two dimensional. More Issues Than Vogue is contemporary R&B at its best. | K. Michelle: More Issues Than Vogue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21803-more-issues-than-vogue/ | More Issues Than Vogue | K. Michelle always entertains through the surprising experimentations in her music, promising something else is up her sleeve. On More Issues Than Vogue, Michelle's third album, the performer and musician delivers her most affecting, skillful, and innovative record yet. Diving deep into the best elements of traditional R&B, sing-song pop, rap, and further out sounds, Michelle makes the best argument for herself as artist, and she succeeds. The first few moments of standout track “If It Ain’t Love,” are, interestingly, K. Michelle’s attempt at country. This wouldn’t be her first turn in the genre. Originally hailing from Memphis, she has performed covers of country hits like Carrie Underwood’s “I Know You Won’t.” In early March, Michelle told Essence she’s currently pursuing her own country EP.
“My ultimate goal is to be completely free and have freedom, which I think I’ve achieved,” she explained. “I’ve thought about ‘Oh, this will be my last album,’ but I really want to do the country EP.” Listeners also heard glimmers of this on 2014’s instantly memorable “God I Get It,” from Anybody Wanna Buy a Heart? and this trend continues on her latest.
On “If It Ain’t Love,” she gives listeners a classic, addictive throwback love song filled with that country twang (in both the guitar and in Michelle’s peculiar intonation) that sounds immediately familiar upon the first listen. “It’s crazy, amazing, we fucked it up/ If it ain’t love, I don’t know what is,” she sings in the chorus. Laced with her signature fire, it is a moment that begs to be sung at the top of one’s lungs. Songs like “If It Ain’t Love,” effectively serve as a litmus test. Fueled with a beautiful melody, cinematic strings and chewable, universal lyrics, the track should (and hopefully) does translate to audiences who might not have heard of K. Michelle outside of "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta" and "Love & Hip Hop: New York," or even at all. It is that good.
Like on “If It Ain’t it Love,” Michelle surprises again on “Mindful.” Featuring T-Pain, the track is a too-short and perfect groove (it clocks in under two minutes) featuring the vocalist flexing her rap skills. “Who the fuck told y’all hoes to open up … I’m coming straight from the gut,” she spits, and that same rapid fire confidence pierces the track.
It's a definitive statement both for the song and for Michelle as a performer. That "freedom" she spoke about earlier this year is here and real. Unafraid to push herself beyond the limitations and expectations of her as a creative, Michelle shines. She no longer asks that you take her seriously. Instead she demands it and rightfully so. It's now a matter as to whether or not audiences will come onboard. Hopefully they will. | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | April 11, 2016 | 7.9 | 297aa1ae-050d-4fbe-8940-6a2ac986bdce | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
Forgoing the scrappy charm of Psychic Chasms, Alan Palomo's sophomore album-- recorded mostly alone in Finland in the dead of winter-- chronicles the Texas-raised musician's solitary longing and heartsickness with a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft. | Forgoing the scrappy charm of Psychic Chasms, Alan Palomo's sophomore album-- recorded mostly alone in Finland in the dead of winter-- chronicles the Texas-raised musician's solitary longing and heartsickness with a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft. | Neon Indian: Era Extraña | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15817-era-extrana/ | Era Extraña | Some people laugh at chillwave precisely because so many of its practitioners lack a sense of humor. But Alan Palomo is an exception. In 2009, the Texas-raised musician's Neon Indian project debuted with the excellent Psychic Chasms. Like a lot of young musicians, the then-21-year-old Palomo was inspired by Ariel Pink, and he certainly shared that art-pop oddball's sense of irreverence. Below the static and sneakily intricate synth patterns, Psychic Chasms was a funny, playful record, with goofy, drugged-out moments exemplified by song titles like "Laughing Gas".
As the buzz around Psychic Chasms increased, the narrative shifted. Neon Indian attained a surprising level of popularity that was bolstered by a rocking, party-ready live show, drawing in fans of populist acts like Passion Pit and MGMT. After that raised profile, Neon Indian's second album, Era Extraña, shows a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft and appeal. The production value is at a higher level, with additional mixing by big-name studio guy Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, MGMT), who forgoes his usual noise-bombing style for a more subtle approach. Those drawn to Psychic Chasms' warped view of pop or outré work like the difficult, abstract EP with the Flaming Lips last year may be disappointed; Era Extraña instead builds on Neon Indian's one-off single with Green Label Sound last year, the straightforward "Sleep Paralysist".
Reflecting the shift, there's an increased focus on streamlined melodies; the vocal gasps and moans that streaked previous highs like "Terminally Chill" are still here, just not as suffocating. The wordless chorus of "Hex Girlfriend" is all but set to rock a festival stage or two, while "Halogen (I Could Be a Shadow)" is a rush of life-affirming, upwards-moving melodic optimism. The music itself is intricate and accomplished, with dizzying layers of synth arrangements and stray sounds crammed into even the most big-tent cuts-- we're talking rocket-ship noises, phone conversations, lasers, and visceral video-game samples. Despite the kitchen-sink arrangements, the results are taut and defined. Palomo is anything but sloppy and he seems focused on the album as a unified whole: one of his finest songs yet, the melancholy, remix-ready "Arcade Blues", was given bonus-track status because he felt it didn't fit in with Era Extraña's overriding themes.
Era Extraña is partly about love. It may not be "breakup album," in the strictest sense, but the record sounds romantic and lovesick and looks toward sounds that bring these feelings to mind, from the sugary crunch of Isn't Anything-era My Bloody Valentine ("The Blindside Kiss") to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark ("Fallout"). The feel of Era Extraña is expansive and lonely, like someone staring at the night sky in solitude (he recorded the bulk of it solo in Helsinki, Finland during the dead of winter, where, according to a recent Pitchfork interview, he was often on the verge of losing his shit mentally.)
Another topic touched on in that interview was the album's sense of longing, and "Future Sick" conveys the feeling of growing older in a world that's growing faster than you are. Palomo bemoans having to look towards past the present under seasick synths, singing mid-volume under his own creation's drunken abstraction and promising to "wake when things start to get peculiar".
Palomo feels more comfortable when looking to the past than turning his gaze to the uncertain future. While Era Extraña still contains the familiar warm glow of old television sets and half-remembered memories of the 1980s, Palomo is more than adept when utilizing short-term memory to evoke some of modern indie's more memorable 2000s-era fashions. The insistent pulse of "Suns Irrupt" is reminiscent of LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great", "Halogen (I Could Be a Shadow)" is the near-double of M83's teenage epic "Kim and Jessie", and the sweetly lackadaisical verse structure of "Polish Girl" recalls the similarly unspooling inner monologue that runs through Stars' "Reunion". Coincidentally, those three songs of the not-so-distant past all deal with the loss of something-- a friend, youth, and irresponsible love, respectively. Amidst the bleepy synths and swooning melodies, Palomo's simply attempting not to lose himself, as he sighs through processed vocal effects on "Suns Irrupt": "Gone/ But I'm waiting to be someone." Two albums in, he remains a compelling songwriter. The scrappy charm of Psychic Chasms was hugely appealing from the jump and its brilliant initial flash faded just slightly over time. This is a far more serious record than its predecessor, but Palomo isn't always as assured in rendering the darker material. | 2011-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mom+Pop / Static Tongues | September 15, 2011 | 7.9 | 297bf54a-eb19-4e07-818e-303d9c7ba03c | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The eleventh album from prolific ambient artist Scott Morgan maps a more human, and less quantifiable, concept: life’s resistance to dark and destructive forces. | The eleventh album from prolific ambient artist Scott Morgan maps a more human, and less quantifiable, concept: life’s resistance to dark and destructive forces. | Loscil: Monument Builders | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22563-monument-builders/ | Monument Builders | Scott Morgan’s trajectory as Loscil, the moniker under which he produces his solo work, seems more befitting of a biologist than an ambient music veteran. Over the past sixteen years, Morgan has shaped his electronic sound around subjects like subatomic particles (Triple Point), shadowy ocean depths (Submers), shore life (First Narrows), and the traits of airborne substances (Plume). Even the intention behind his free-flowing arrangements is scientific, as Morgan has often acknowledged his aim to recreate the properties of water in music. But where his previous albums have aspired, almost methodically, to map the movement and texture of wave energy, Monument Builders, Morgan’s eleventh album, maps a more human, and less quantifiable, concept: life’s resistance to dark and destructive forces.
Extending the notions of community that were brought to a head on his recent EP for Greta—a charity album to raise money for a friend's child diagnosed with bone cancer—Morgan now charts the progression of life from the arid wasteland of “Drained Lake” to the first tiny sprouts of growth in “Weeds.” Monument Builders is a highly visual album, a mosaic of images depicting construction, erasure, devastation, redemption, and transformation. The sounds of micro-cassette recorders, decrepit samples, and grinding chains of percussion evoke a strong sense of place, the same way fuzz on a vintage videotape evokes age. “Red Tide,” with its layered percussive onslaught and brass like steaming train whistles, announces the rising of the sea, just as the cascading pianos of “Deceiver” very nearly resembles rain falling after a thunderstorm.
As is typical in his work, Morgan uses the first four songs of the album to mount tension. Darkness lingers in the title track, which builds around a single quivering note. The anticipation culminates in “Straw Dogs,” a menacing track with screeching horns, named in honor of anti-humanist philosopher John Gray’s book of the same name, which speaks to the dangers of placing humanity at the center of the universe. The ominous edge behind the compositions would seem to indicate that Morgan subscribes to Gray’s ideas about our own propensity for geological and social destruction. But the album’s three remaining songs suggest something slightly more optimistic.
“Deceiver,” with its weepy, penitent piano, eventually gives way to a high-pitch wailing that expresses acute feelings of grief. Gray’s philosophy seems to appear again in “Anthropocene”—the name for our current geological epoch, marked by harmful human centrality—and the song’s pulsating, intense bass line drives our guilt and grief through moments of self-reflection, mourning, and change. By the time we arrive at “Weeds,” the album’s final song, we are ready to confront punishment. Only we discover, from a murmur-like flicker of synth notes, that what awaits us are the sounds of human voices crying out from the dark. Among our distress and destruction, Morgan concludes, hopefully, that life persists.
In this way, Monument Builders is oddly reminiscent of “Directive,” one of Robert Frost’s last poems, which also advances ideas of survival and endurance. Much like with Builders, in “Directive” we follow a guide through a place of decay and dissolution. At the end of our journey, our guide says to us, “Here are your waters and your watering place./Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” Scott Morgan has made a career of showing us waters and watering places. With Monument Builders, we are finally invited to drink. | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kranky | November 14, 2016 | 7.4 | 2980ee30-c9af-43ad-b4af-d75af3564a26 | Brian Burlage | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-burlage/ | null |
The Brooklyn-based pop polymath writes, performs, records, mixes, and engineers her most ambitious and electrifying collection of songs to date. | The Brooklyn-based pop polymath writes, performs, records, mixes, and engineers her most ambitious and electrifying collection of songs to date. | Emily Reo: Only You Can See It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emily-reo-only-you-can-see-it/ | Only You Can See It | Emily Reo’s 2009 debut Minha Gatinha may have been lo-fi, but it didn’t obscure the Brooklyn artist's keen sense for contagious hooks. Her 2013 LP Olive Juice found Reo peeking out from behind the fog of reverb; her intentions as a songwriter seemed more defined, but there was still the sense of something eager to burst through. On her new album Only You Can See It, Reo has shattered all inhibitions. Here she paints in bright and bold brushstrokes, presenting her most ambitious and electrifying collection of songs to date.
Only You Can See It is a massive, far-reaching body of work that has all of the dimensions and sparkle of a finely cut diamond. “Strawberry” is an undeniable rallying cry for any woman who’s had to put up with pedantic male naysayers (spoiler alert: all of us).“Your eyes close when you talk about champagne,” she sneers, a precise putdown that brings to mind Rob Lowe’s sleazy TV producer “educating” Cassandra on the fraudulence of sparkling white wine in Wayne's World. We’ve all met that guy. “My eyes roll back so far I see my brain/And there is so much you try to explain that I don’t wanna know,” Reo groans.
Reo is masterful at rendering an entire scene with just a few words, a skill she likely honed as a visual artist. Her phrasing is brief but evocative, allowing us to taste “cinnamon cherry” Septembers and experience the physical manifestations of anxiety: “Braiding silk on my spine/Face burned in flickering light.” And then there’s “Charlie,” the most devastating song ever written about a cat. Reo lost the titular kitty a few summers ago to a rare disease, and the images she’s summoned from his ashes are truly haunting. She sings about “hair on the carpet” and “healing old scratches,” depicting the physical presence that often outlives the ones we lose. “When the bulb burns out the glass stays warm,” Reo laments. I’m not crying. You’re crying.
What is perhaps most gratifying about Only You Can See It is that it is Reo’s vision in toto. She wrote, produced, mixed, engineered, and recorded the album, and she performed a number of the instruments credited. What results is a record in the spirit of Grimes’ Art Angels—a sprawling opus from a pop polymath. It couldn’t be more fitting that the image of a butterfly surfaces on Reo’s song “Fleur,” as her evolution has very much mirrored one. | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Carpark | April 13, 2019 | 7.8 | 298496e7-eb73-4370-a12d-043102db61e3 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On his debut solo album, the Linkin Park rapper and producer mourns the death of his bandmate Chester Bennington but never translates that grief into candid lyrics or inspired songwriting. | On his debut solo album, the Linkin Park rapper and producer mourns the death of his bandmate Chester Bennington but never translates that grief into candid lyrics or inspired songwriting. | Mike Shinoda: Post Traumatic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-shinoda-post-traumatic/ | Post Traumatic | On October 27, 2017, three months after the suicide of their bandmate Chester Bennington, the surviving members of Linkin Park played a tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Backed by a slew of musicians, the group marched through its catalog with trademark fury, angst, and earnestness. The live-streamed recording of the show flits between shots of the performers, the crowd, and an unused mic stand dedicated to Bennington, but it’s hard not to focus on rapper and producer Mike Shinoda. His cues seem to lead every song, his voice introduces most guests, his smile cuts through the tragedy underlying the event. In Bennington’s absence, Shinoda had become the de facto leader of Linkin Park.
“Looking for an Answer,” a grief-stricken song he debuted at that show, wrestles with that sudden responsibility. “There’s an emptiness tonight/A hole that wasn’t there before,” he murmured to the hushed crowd while playing glum piano chords alone on stage. It was a vulnerable moment within an otherwise steely showcase, with Shinoda suspending the night’s this-wouldn’t-be-possible-without-you tone to briefly just be a broken human. That grief animates Post Traumatic. Stepping away from Linkin Park for the first time since his mid-2000s rap project Fort Minor, Shinoda emerges as a solo act. “At its core, grief is a personal, intimate experience. As such, this is not Linkin Park, nor is it Fort Minor—it’s just me,” he wrote on the release date of Post Traumatic EP, the album’s three-song embryo. This glum backdrop gives Shinoda an opportunity to bare his soul, to detail what’s crawling in his skin for once. It never happens.
Post Traumatic is impersonal and distant. “Somebody else defined me/Cannot put the past behind me/Do I even have a decision?/Feeling like I’m living in a story already written,” Shinoda laments on “Place to Start.” He is likely dredging up ugly but real resentment about the long shadow Bennington’s well-known struggles with depression and anxiety cast over the group—and his own role in shaping that reputation. But these clumsy lyrics could also be referring to a label exec or another bandmate or his wedding photographer. The subject feels obvious, but as Shinoda slips into even vaguer self-loathing (“Pointing fingers at villains, but I’m a villain myself”), his sullen noodling grows ever less substantive, an issue compounded by his static vocals. He struggles to speak candidly.
“Over Again,” which revisits the tribute concert, is slightly more concrete. In a rare sharp moment, Shinoda describes the catch-22 of practicing songs that he co-wrote with the person he’s mourning: “We rehearsed it for a month/I’m not worried ’bout the set/I get tackled by the grief at times that I would least expect,” he raps. It’s a frank and bleak admission: Bennington’s voice is the fulcrum of Linkin Park’s music. Every run-through, every bridge, every song is now marred by his absence. But the refrain—“You say goodbye over and over and over again”—makes the sentiment thuddingly redundant. And “Over Again” still suffers from coyness: Before he settles on the peril of rehearsals, Shinoda skips over the likely difficult discussions that led him and his four remaining bandmates, whose grief remains nebulous on Post Traumatic, to hold the tribute.
The allusions on “Ghosts” are similarly indistinct. “This is not about you and me/I can’t bring back what it used to be,” Shinoda sings, continuing his long tradition of overreliance on pronouns (see: “They point the finger at me again”). Attempting to fill in the blanks grows frustrating. Shinoda’s misery is all silhouettes, shadows, and darkness, with no characters, no people.
When his words aren’t failing him, Shinoda is betrayed by his ear. With few exceptions, Post Traumatic’s default sound bed is bottomless caverns of bass and snares. In contrast to the busyness of his Linkin Park production, the aesthetic here is spare and frictionless, full of scuzzy synths and dawdling keys that echo into the abyss. So little else happens that you can keep count of the few variations: “Promises I Cant Keep” and “Watching as I Fall” feature some dubby flourishes; “I.O.U.” has a siren; an electric guitar chugs along on “Make It Up as I Go.”
The product of all this stasis is an endless supply of dead air, a problem Shinoda tries to address by frequently adopting Auto-Tune and other vocal effects to texturize his voice. That is an exercise in futility, too: His clunky flex raps and flat crooning remain lifeless. “You’re the opposite of stars, like rats spelled backwards,” he raps on “Lift Off.” I don’t think that’s how opposites work.
It’s jarring to hear Shinoda struggle with such fundamental elements of songwriting. In their heyday, Linkin Park were a triumph of both economy and excess. A turntablist, a rapper, a bassist, a drummer, a guitarist, and a rager should have been the setup to a glorious bar joke, but they found a way to harmonize. And although they became a punchline, for Linkin Park’s fans, the joke was on the people who were too stiff to embrace the band’s schlocky but fun pageantry.
Throughout Post Traumatic, you can sense how unmoored Shinoda is without that spectacle. His chest doesn’t puff out as far as it did on Fort Minor. His compositions don’t detonate like his best work for Linkin Park. His bandmates aren’t there to lift him up when he falls short. He sounds abandoned. | 2018-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | June 23, 2018 | 3.8 | 29853312-2a91-498e-9922-12fd451ed6a5 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Queens rapper’s ninth album is full of the dizzyingly technical wordplay he’s made his trademark. | The Queens rapper’s ninth album is full of the dizzyingly technical wordplay he’s made his trademark. | Homeboy Sandman: Dusty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/homeboy-sandman-dusty/ | Dusty | To hear Homeboy Sandman tell it, he’s in a great place now, contented and spinning raps for the pure joy of it. The Queens-bred rapper’s ninth album, Dusty, is his first on Mello Music Group since parting with Stones Throw, and he’s said that it is his most uninhibited release, one in which he allows parts of himself he’s kept in check to “flourish and surface.” But what mostly comes through on Dusty is what he’s already communicated, over and over again—he’s a technically accomplished rapper, and...well, that’s about it. If you’re looking for someone who will cram words like “hypotenuse” into verses, this is the album for you.
It must be mentioned as a baseline: Homeboy Sandman is good at rapping. But it’s the kind of good that treats words as a means to an end; that end being proving he’s good at rapping. It’s an empty loop, exacerbated by the fact that he isn’t rapping about much of anything else in particular, save for the weaklings who aren’t measuring up the standards he’s setting. “I don’t wanna be associated with these dudes/Take a peek inside the dossier of a recluse/Who ain’t gonna pretend a serving size is a teaspoon,” he raps on “Far Out,” without going any further out. He’s far from done clearing his throat: “The difference between you and me/Could fill the sun and earth, moon and sea,” he spits on “Live and Breathe.”
His only other discernible interest is sex, and on “Pussy” he turns his pursuit of it into a Seussian rhyme: “I love it more than rapping or eating/I love it more than napping or reading.” “Wondering Why,” which is just a string of rapped hypothetical questions, was executed more effectively by Jadakiss in 2004. One question Sandman never asks himself, but should’ve: What, exactly, is the point of all this?
On any of Sandman’s songs, there are moments that can make you marvel at the wit of his wordplay or the detailed arrangement of his raps themselves, their sequence and structure. Every now and then, he’ll articulate an idea perfectly: “I deal in the absolutes/Exact as a science/One synapse at a time’s how I spend my whole life/It’s a spirit thing/It’s in here/It keeps me from hearing things” (“Always”). Or he’ll strike a nice balance between his left and right brain: “Greatest look since dinosaurs and the protozoa/Greatest hooks since southpaw Rocky Balboa,” he raps on “Yes Iyah.” Over a diverse selection of traditionalist beats by longtime collaborator Mono En Stereo (formerly El RTNC), Sandman is always engaged, but he’s rarely engaging.
Sandman clearly thinks of himself as a peerless writer and rapper. But as pure-bars showcases go, it is less personal than Young M.A’s Herstory in the Making, less colorful than super-producer team-ups from Danny Brown and Freddie Gibbs. He’s not as thoughtful as MIKE or MAVI. His more immediate peers, guys like Quelle Chris (who appears on this album) and billy woods (who he’s taking on tour), use their lyrical acumen to put finer points on big ideas, and don’t sacrifice any of their outsider cachet doing so. Rap albums don’t need overarching concepts, but they do need ideas, and it’s unclear if Sandman has any of his own worth sharing on Dusty. | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | October 23, 2019 | 6.1 | 29859460-cdd9-416c-b55e-da205fac3805 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Tink’s first release since leaving Timbaland’s label is a declaration of freedom that leans away from the personal touch of her best work. | Tink’s first release since leaving Timbaland’s label is a declaration of freedom that leans away from the personal touch of her best work. | Tink: Pain & Pleasure EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tink-pain-and-pleasure-ep/ | Pain & Pleasure EP | Two years ago, Tink opened the fourth edition of her flagship Winter’s Diary mixtape series with a sketch in which a fictional therapist discussed her case: “Client seems very disturbed, extremely emotional at times/Seems to be a lot of pressure/A lot of pressure on her shoulders.” It had only been a year at that point since the Chicago rapper and singer’s debut album, Think Tink, was delayed for the first time, but the tape suggested deeper anxieties than the frustratingly common Nevruary 31st release dates that affect many promising new artists.
Think Tink never arrived, of course, and her alliance with Timbaland, who had once anointed her as the second coming of Aaliyah, turned out to be a doomed one. There is an unmistakable disconnect between the slick hybrids of pop, R&B, and hip-hop on Tink’s earlier, self-released work and the two singles she put out after signing with Epic Records via the producer’s Mosley Music Group imprint in 2014 (the hokey “Ratchet Commandments” and the Aaliyah-sampling “Million”). When she was finally released from that deal late last year, she posted a selfie on Instagram with the caption #FreeAtLast.
The question on Pain & Pleasure, Tink’s first release since then, is what she wants to do with that freedom. In a way, she has always been free: Her well-curated, confessional sound is her own, and she has been pushing it independently since she was a teenager. Pain & Pleasure deals in familiar textures, but there are no rap tracks, and the lyrics lean away from the personal. Opener “On to the Next One” has a title that perhaps hints at her exodus from the major-label system, but it’s about a dude. The same goes for “M.I.a.,” which is not about her 2017 break from music and social media, but instead is a slippery ode to vacation sex.
Without the deeply personal touch of Tink’s best work, some of the lyrics on the track, and elsewhere on the EP, are a bit clumsy. “Housekeeping saying keep it down/Going at it and we hella loud” is prosaic, while a line like “I’ma let him beat it like a gun charge” is just awkward. “Signs” is likewise lyrically uneven, as Tink lists the bad qualities a guy takes from each of the 12 star signs, awkwardly cobbling together “What’s your sign?” taxonomy with the red flags (or signs) that someone is bad for you. Worst of all is the moment when she sings that a guy’s bedroom aptitude is so good it “feels like a paycheck” on “Get You Home.”
The departures Tink takes on Pain & Pleasure aren’t necessarily terribly worrisome: In January, she released the breathy, skittering single “Breakin’ Me,” which plays well to her traditional strengths. With Winter’s Diary 5 on the way, she’s going to need to do more of that, and less hiding in plain sight. | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Machine Entertainment Group / Winter’s Diary | April 7, 2018 | 6.3 | 2985d689-a657-47d1-a519-1c95f2c03a30 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
They may still be stuck in their apartments, false nostalgia, or dead-end service gigs, but the upstart Seattle emo band’s revelation of a second album goes places. | They may still be stuck in their apartments, false nostalgia, or dead-end service gigs, but the upstart Seattle emo band’s revelation of a second album goes places. | Floral Tattoo: You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/floral-tattoo-you-can-never-have-a-long-enough-head-start/ | You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start | “I haven’t left this room in 14 days,” goes the key line in Floral Tattoo’s most popular song to date. “14 Days” was also the most uplifting song on the Seattle band’s 2018 debut, Approaching Bearable, which should give you an idea of its overall emotional tenor. At least frontperson Alex Anderson was willing to entertain the possibility of breaking free from the feedback loop—the one where the only relief from memories of childhood bullying, the confusion of gender transition, and a demoralizing job at McDonald’s (“Death by Minimum Wage”) was filling up a journal with unflinchingly miserable lyrics. “I wanna write songs that evoke feelings of adventure! I want to write songs that make you want to fall in love!” Anderson cried, while their diaristic lyrics underscored a subtle, purposeful belief that they themselves were too far gone for any of that.
Two years later, Anderson and co-songwriter Gwen Power are still stuck in their apartments, false nostalgia, or dead-end service gigs, but Floral Tattoo’s revelation of a second album goes places: a Minneapolis punk flophouse filled with Twin/Tone vinyl, a college radio station in 1980s Boston or Athens, an mp3 blog in 2008, a five-band Philly gig in 2009 capped by a 10-minute Snowing set. They call their work “music for sad trans people who grew up at the dawn of the digital age,” but You Can Never Have a Long Enough Head Start is willing to conceive of real moments of happiness, albeit only attainable off the grid. The album opens with “(foreward),” a manifesto for queer revolution, and twice invokes Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as anti-capitalist antiheroes, Floral Tattoo’s own Bonnie and Clyde. “She” is every bit as exclamatory as a Los Campesinos!/Against Me! hybrid should be, while the surging acoustic strums of “Leaving” evoke the Cure singles that counterbalanced their monolithic despair with fleeting exuberance. Likewise, as soon we catch a glimpse of Power and Anderson laughing and whooping over the possibility of ditching their possessions and living in a bus headed nowhere, they follow it with a one-minute burst of folk-punk nihilism called “Don’t Try Things.”
In a less fraught moment, this conceptual scope and post-emo shape-shifting might have resulted in something along the lines of Harmlessness or Goodness, albums whose utopian aspirations can feel sadly naive in light of Floral Tattoo’s 2020 reality. They’re a band with big ideas, coloring their feel-bad rainbow with bells, spoken word, melodica, euphonium, and an interpolation of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” But they’re still recording in their apartment, and the lo-fi production that covers everything in a gritty, gray vapor takes on metaphorical heft. With a bigger budget, “Oar House” could’ve fully actualized a majestic rising tide of Pacific Northwest dreamo. But would that really serve a song that commiserates about cleaning toilets? The pixelated distortion of “Oar House” gives it a properly sickly pallor, as if staring through stifled tears at the Puget Sound or driving a shitty car to work with a hangover.
It would be nice to say that Anderson and Power have transmuted their substantial and justifiable anguish into transcendance, and while You Can Never Get Too Much of a Head Start is already one of the year’s first word-of-mouth successes, it’d be a lie to call it a triumph. “The Art of Moving On” and “(my life fell apart this year)” end the album with a rousing, shitfaced salvo of no-fi pub-punk, a rare instance of modern emo that aspires more to The Airing of Grievances than The Monitor. But Floral Tattoo are never subtle, and the titles say it all: If this sounds euphoric, it’s the euphoria of truly hitting bottom, of finding freedom in the knowledge that things can only get better because they can’t get any worse. | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | January 17, 2020 | 7.5 | 2987aff4-7e82-455c-987d-535e77ebb09a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets has a very promising new solo project and he's out of the gate with two fine EPs. | Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets has a very promising new solo project and he's out of the gate with two fine EPs. | Shabazz Palaces: Of Light / Shabazz Palaces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14286-of-light-shabazz-palaces/ | Of Light / Shabazz Palaces | The most shocking thing about Pitchfork staff writer Tom Breihan's interview with Palaceer Lazaro, the otherwise press-evasive figurehead of Seattle outré-rap project Shabazz Palaces, wasn't that the interview actually took place-- it was that Lazaro still wanted to operate under a shroud of mystery. An unnecessary shroud, at that; Lazaro is actually Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler of the 1990's Native Tongues-leaning collective Digable Planets-- and, later, of the more pessimistically inclined group Cherrywine.
Lazaro's approach is a refreshing change-- leading with your work instead of your persona; asking fans to interpret it rather than provide them answers. It's clear that he wants his art to be taken seriously, and based on his output so far it certainly will. Shabazz Palaces' first two mini-albums, Of Light and its self-titled follow-up, are almost as paradoxical as the project's identity politics. Lazaro occasionally spits conscious verses about struggling and corruption, but he's also not afraid to go all hardhead and talk tough. His lyrical subjects can be quotidian, frequently focusing on food and hanging out; his song titles, however, are frequently so long-winded that including all of them in full here would break any sensible editor's word count. The beats are dense and, at times, haunted; at the same time, this shit would sound great booming out of passing car windows.
That is especially true of Shabazz Palaces, which acts as a dark, challenging foil to Of Light's relative playfulness. The beats here take equal cues from the blown-out sci-fi dystopia of Company Flow, the harsh static antagonism of Anti-Pop Consortium and Dälek, and Los Angeles' Brainfeeder collective's head-swimming ganja burn. Impeccable reference points-- and the way they're synthesized is impressive-- but these abstract beats have never been easy to convincingly rap over. But Lazaro handles it with intensity on every track here, moving with the rhythm no matter how irregular it may be.
The chameleonic role Lazaro plays within these compositions is aided by his grizzled, gruff voice, which sounds worlds away from the smoother vocals he displayed with Digable Planets or Cherrywine. It could be assumed that this noticeable change was brought on by years of toiling under the radar of hip-hop's fickle hype machine. It's easy to compare Ishmael Butler's artistic transformation into Palaceer Lazaro to Zev Love X's transformation to MF Doom: Both started out in earnest-talking early 90s collectives, and once the optimism ran dry, they laid low before reemerging as wizened, idiosyncratic, and enigmatic.
Of course, reemergence doesn't always guarantee eternal success, as Doom's ever-unspooling narrative shows. Hopefully, Palaceer Lazaro-- oh, fuck it, call him Ishmael-- takes full and careful advantage of the second chance he's been offered (after all, they do come rare in the hip-hop world). Right now, though, this is his moment, and he's owning it. | 2010-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | May 26, 2010 | 8 | 298bf22f-bea8-460a-9e83-35774a19e69e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Teen Suicide is the old band of Sam Ray, whose other projects include Ricky Eat Acid and Julia Brown. He resurrected the band for a 26-track blowout of an album that is constantly absorbing and equal parts astonishing and frustrating. | Teen Suicide is the old band of Sam Ray, whose other projects include Ricky Eat Acid and Julia Brown. He resurrected the band for a 26-track blowout of an album that is constantly absorbing and equal parts astonishing and frustrating. | Teen Suicide: It's the Big Joyous Celebration | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21728-its-the-big-joyous-celebration/ | It's the Big Joyous Celebration | If you couldn't tell from the title or its 26 tracks or 69-minute length, It's the Big Joyous Celebration, Let's Stir the Honeypot is A) a glorious communal blowout and B) goddamn mess. Its intentions are messy: Sam Ray resurrected his old band by popular demand (vis-à-vis his other projects Ricky Eat Acid and Julia Brown) and will be touring throughout the spring, yet they are also calling it their last will and testament. Its presentation signifies wild ambition, but Ray appears more interested in capturing fleeting bits of casual brilliance than making good on grandiose designs. The ugliest song is called "Beauty," one of the prettiest is "Neighborhood Drug Dealer." It's constantly absorbing and equal parts astonishing and frustrating. It's a party you can hear from down the block and yet still requires a password at the door.
Ray's ascent as an indie/DIY auteur has been propelled by his prolificity and his equally active desire to circumvent any barrier between him and his listeners. This personality (or persona) is as crucial to full appreciation of Celebration as the music. As he shows with his projects outside of Teen Suicide, Ray is direct, omnivorous and unpredictable: Celebration feints at stop-start post-punk, patches in some nifty acoustic progressions on loan from Alex G's Beach Music, flirts with psychedelia and throws out some jazz noodling as well. And this is just the first song.
At their core, Teen Suicide is the most "indie rock" of Ray's projects and in that form, they write poignant song-sketches that can traffic in sarcasm ("it's not art unless you laugh, one of these days I'm gonna laugh") and have a poignant sweetness ("Falling Out of Love With Me"). But the lo-fi recording quality serving as Celebration's binding agent has a far greater effect the further Teen Suicide get away from guitars. The resplendent piano rolls of "I Don't Think It's Too Late" and "The Stomach of the Earth" are slightly scuffed and distorted, like a tear-stained take on the Range's recent emotronica. "My Little World" touches on Aphex Twin's early ambient work, while the crackle surrounding the harps and strings on "V.I.P." carry the haunted-house eeriness of the Caretaker's Victrola memory experiments. It's hard to think of any album, probably ever, that managed to sound like these three and Sparklehorse in the same hour.
His use of tape manipulation and sampled orchestral bric-a-brac dutifully marked in the treasure map-like credits (Girlpool, Elvis Depressedly, Alex G, Porches, Owen Pallett and more) put him in the lineage of Elephant 6, Microphones or early Saddle Creek. But Teen Suicide's crucial novelty lies in how they connect modern forms of communication and dissemination—it's a celebration of how Bandcamp and Soundcloud can allow songs to be released in an instant while constantly mutating (this was not invented by The Life of Pablo) and, of course, any form of social media.
Most of the lyrics appear to be trimmed to fit for maximum impact within a character limit and even if they're not necessarily about him, Ray takes advantage of the presumption that songwriting is an autobiographical mode. As a result, the listener is inclined to relate to the person going through the harrowing narratives here. They all read like casual conversations, but the kind you can only have when the speaker has a total lack of a filter and a complete trust in the person on the other end. Some of his best lines are brazen provocations ("depression is a construct"); many sound like jokes but are devastating insights about drug abuse and suicidal ideation. Most importantly, they're very, very quotable. Witness the best of the lot: "Pavement were an OK band/but you don't gotta sound like them."
This isn’t some kind of Kill Yr Idols mission statement—Celebration has enough ’90s indie rock in its genes to suggest that Ray thinks Pavement were at least OK. But most of Ray’s colleagues in Orchid Tapes or Run For Cover or any of the leading figures in post-emo are developing intensely dedicated, often young fanbases without the previously established means of generating sustainable indie rock success or the previously established canonical influences. The bands they sometimes remind me of—Bright Eyes circa Fevers & Mirrors, for instance—won only begrudging respect from older listeners at the time it was released. The directness with which it speaks to its audience makes it easy to imagine Celebration inspiring a lot of its younger listeners to start a band. For anyone else, it’s just an inspiring testament to indie rock’s continued vitality.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article erroneously referred to another Sam Ray project as Julian Brown. That band is in fact named Julia Brown. | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | April 6, 2016 | 7.8 | 298f6245-ad80-469e-b13f-fb29b9fbb578 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Charli’s best full-length project since Pop 2 is a canny embrace of modern and vintage pop styles by one of its most sincere students. | Charli’s best full-length project since Pop 2 is a canny embrace of modern and vintage pop styles by one of its most sincere students. | Charli XCX: Crash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charli-xcx-crash/ | Crash | In 2022, Charli XCX is bigger and brasher, styled like a vixen from an old Russ Meyer flick, snarling and mashing her foot into the floor on Saturday Night Live, singing hooks that slap you with fistfuls of neon goo. On the album art for Crash, she hangs on a windshield as if she leaped there from the road, cut and bleeding and ready to fight. “I’m high voltage, self-destructive, end it all so legendary,” she sings on the album opener, charging up over a new jack swing beat and a distorted guitar with vocals that could whip up a small tornado. It’s cute to be a baddie, but it’s really fun to be bad.
Crash marks the end of a five-album deal Charli signed with Atlantic when she was 16, a 13-year engagement that has often seemed more trouble than it was worth; she says the label has delayed her releases and tried to manipulate her image. (“If you want a puppet, just go and get yourself a puppet,” she once recalled telling her bosses.) Crash has a serious point to make about how ruthlessly major labels can treat the young, female stars that line their shareholders’ pockets. But in the album’s visuals, Charli spectacularizes her personal struggles with a knowing wink and more than a little camp, like Lady Gaga bleeding out at the VMAs while flashbulbs click.
So forget the idea of a lackluster project to close out contractual obligations—Charli makes every second of Crash count. The album has the range of a greatest-hits compilation, with kinetic pop-funk and textured dream-pop as well as banging Eurodance and post-internet glitch, but the new sounds she explores are built on a focused distillation of her own music’s wild pendulum swings. It’s as if the goth-in-training of True Romance, hell-raising brat of Sucker, fembot of Pop 2, and unfiltered sharer of how i’m feeling now got together for one last blowout.
Charli’s collaboration-focused mixtapes proved she was among the best curators in modern pop. On Crash, she cashes in the chips she acquired as a Top 40 songwriter, mobilizing a cast of the industry’s most reliable hitmakers and circling back to past collaborators who she was early to spotlight. A bid for pop excellence doesn’t get much better than calling up Rami Yacoub, the co-producer of “…Baby One More Time,” who co-wrote the phenomenal, Cameo-inspired “Lightning.” Producer Ariel Rechtshaid brings the song to life with flamenco-inspired nylon guitar noodling and the most delightfully ’80s thing of all, orchestra hits. “Tell me what you want and I’ma give it to ya/Like lightning,” Charli sings, a cheeky nod to the stereotype of pop stars as factory workers churning out radio fodder, in a pummeling chorus scientifically designed to destroy your favorite Friday night footwear.
Like her late collaborator SOPHIE, who famously licensed “Lemonade” to McDonald’s, Charli is fascinated with pop as product. “I’m interested in the concept of selling out,” she tweeted in 2020. Take her snark with a pinch of salt—she has executive-produced all her projects since 2014’s Sucker—but on Crash she draws freely from commercial hits, with sly references to a sweet escape and the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” a song Charli covered in early live shows, as well as audacious samples. “Used to Know Me” is a hair-tossing Pride party anthem that interpolates Robin S., while the Rina Sawayama collaboration “Beg for You” flagrantly rips September’s much-memed “Cry for You,” and thanks to an airy post-chorus, as well as harp plucks that recall both millennium-era Darkchild productions and Erika de Casier, feels as in tune with the textures of today’s forward-thinking pop as much as it is a love letter to the classics.
That duality is what makes Crash so effective. Charli has said she wanted to make a major label record, to serve “main pop girl.” But her music has too many sharp edges for many of Crash’s songs to frictionlessly fit on to Top 40 playlists, and the album is all the better for it. “Baby” is a retro-futuristic dance-pop confection that imagines the sound of Yaz making a city pop record in 1983, while “Every Rule,” produced by A. G. Cook and Oneohtrix Point Never, is an unexpectedly tender swan song to a snuffed-out love affair, where bright synths scuttle like a beetle through safety-orange paint. When Charli does experiment with radio-friendly styles, it’s with a wry twist. “Yuck” is a cynical older sister to “Kiss Me More”—a song that itself incorporated elements of Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”—in which Charli nods to pop’s sensual side but is repulsed by storybook seduction. “All these butterflies make me sick,” she sneers of some mushy would-be Casanova over strutting pop-funk. As the ’90s teen queen she played in “Fancy” might say: Ugh, as if!
Charli’s previous music created fissures and disruptions within pop, but Crash’s best moments come close to perfecting it. “Constant Repeat” is a carefree trancey soufflé that catches flight with pitch-shifting vocals that swoop through different layers of the atmosphere. Produced by Lotus IV, it’s as addictive as his and Charli’s previous link-up, “Gone,” and then some. “Got me on repeat,” Charli sings as the song closes, her voice surrounded with coos and glittering fragments of chatter, adding an intoxicating sparkle to a song that already appears lit from within.
Joyful moments feel particularly victorious given that Charli has recently spoken of feeling disillusioned and burned out. If she seemed, for a time, to be stuck on the hyperpop color wheel of doom, Crash is how it feels to take a sledgehammer to the screen and look around with eyes wide open. Despite a couple of slightly weaker moments (oddly, the album’s lead singles), Crash is Charli’s best full-length project since Pop 2, a canny embrace of modern and vintage pop styles by one of its most sincere students. It sets a bar for creative mainstream pop: the ruthless, intoxicating dream factory that can chew you up and spit you out and leave you coming back for more. | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | March 17, 2022 | 8 | 298fa8aa-7f65-47ee-872f-cdf2ba9619ac | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
The three most recent Led Zeppelin reissues, comprising Led Zeppelin IV, Houses of the Holy, and Physical Graffiti, find the band at the height of their imperial phase. | The three most recent Led Zeppelin reissues, comprising Led Zeppelin IV, Houses of the Holy, and Physical Graffiti, find the band at the height of their imperial phase. | Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV/Houses of the Holy/Physical Graffiti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19834-led-zeppelin-ivhouses-of-the-holyphysical-graffiti/ | Led Zeppelin IV/Houses of the Holy/Physical Graffiti | With Led Zeppelin, there was no break-in period, no "early phase" where they figured out what kind of band they wanted to be. They were fully formed from the first repetition of the "Good Times Bad Times" riff, and they powered along through their first half-dozen albums crushing everything in their path. Zep never had their Sgt. Pepper's, their Exile, their Who's Next, because every album was more or less that good—for a while, anyway. This was a band that knew the music it wanted to make and executed it with ruthless precision. The second trio of Led Zeppelin reissues (the fourth album and Houses of the Holy came out last fall, Physical Graffiti this week) found the band inhabiting what Neil Tennant once described (and Tom Ewing fleshed out) as their "imperial phase." Riding on their massive initial success, and pushed even further by the game-changing success of "Stairway to Heaven", everything they tried during these years somehow worked.
If you grew up on classic rock radio, you sometimes felt like you were listening to Led Zeppelin's fourth album on shuffle. It has eight songs, all of them are huge, and one, "Stairway to Heaven", frequently lingers near the top of lists of the Greatest Rock Songs of All Time. Given its place in culture, IV can seem like an album of moments more than songs. Individual parts have been selected, cropped, amplified, and dropped into both songs by other artists and into our collective unconscious. Every song has two or three sections that are instantly identifiable and always seem to be playing somewhere nearby. The circular guitar figure in "Black Dog"; the chiming mandolin in "Going to California"; Bonham's cymbal bashing on "Rock and Roll". It's hard to hear "When the Levee Breaks", by now, and not think of hip-hop. If Led Zeppelin's music formed the DNA of anything that could remotely be called "hard rock," IV is a petri dish overflowing with stem cells. The debut was darker and moodier, II was heavier, and III was prettier, but the fourth album is a triumph of form meeting function.
"Stairway to Heaven" is so ubiquitous that it cycles through phases of deep reverence and self-parody, and the movement between these two poles is so rapid it all becomes a blur. This happens both for individual listeners (I'm going to guess the very young still discover this song and have their idea of what a rock song can be expanded considerably) and on the level of mass culture. It's both a marker of religion and an instant punchline, a singularity that sucks in a world of experience and observation and jeering laughter and sincere tears and compacts it all into an infinitely dense point. Like many who both love it and hate it, I pretty much never need to hear it again. But "Stairway" aside, IV is their least weird album. It's basically their stab at perfection, and they get there, but this band was always at its most interesting at the margins, when they had the possibility of failure.
By 1973, Zeppelin's only competition for Biggest Band in the World was the Stones, who were losing their hunger. Later that year, the Stones would put out Goat's Head Soup, beginning a period of drift they wouldn't return from until 1978's Some Girls. The field was clear, with the '60s starting to recede in the rearview, but punk was still a couple of years away, Zeppelin didn't waste the opportunity. Houses of the Holy, their fifth album in four years, takes the most powerful moments of the fourth album and amplifies them, and also adds some oddball experiments that flesh out the Led Zeppelin story.
They are most in the zone on "Over the Hills and Far Away", which is on a very short list of best songs Zep ever wrote, which is to say that it's among the best rock songs ever written. Everything they ever did well—pastoral beauty, crunchy riffs, stop/start changes, monster drum grooves—could be found on this single track. "The Ocean" features what could be Jimmy Page's single greatest riff. "The Rain Song" is a masterful study in the power of guitar tone, both for its full acoustic strumming and the electric guitar work that has always evoked the weather of its title. John Paul Jones' gorgeous Mellotron passage is one of the definitive uses of that strange instrument. And "No Quarter" is a disorienting bad-vibes epic, archetypal of the '70s, capturing the bleak interiority of a certain kind of drug experience.
Houses of the Holy is a perfectly reasonable choice for best Zeppelin LP, even if it had signs that the band couldn't last forever. "The Song Remains the Same" is the first sign of Robert Plant using a more pinched sound for his upper register, adapting to that gradually disappearing top octave by contorting his vocals into a strange squeal. By the last two Zeppelin records this would be his default approach when singing in this range. "The Crunge" is a sour version of funk, a weirdly fascinating half-song complete with a groaner of a James Brown joke. John Bonham supposedly disliked "D'yer Mak'er" so much he refused to write an interesting drum part, sticking instead with the first shuffle beat that came to mind. It was Zeppelin's stab at reggae, and though they never try to breathe any space or light into the mix, it's impossible to dismiss the song's easy catchiness, its affection for doo-wop melody, the motion of Page's spindly guitar.
Houses of the Holy might be Zeppelin's most impressive album on a purely sonic level, and this particular remaster reinforces that notion. The best remastering jobs always offer a subtle improvement—a touch of EQing here, a bit more volume there without overdoing it. Taken together, they hopefully offer more detail, and these versions make the grade. The bonus discs, however, continue to be disappointing. From one angle, there's actually something admirable about how little Led Zeppelin left in the vaults. It was a testament to their brutal efficiency as a rock machine. But aside from the live set released with the debut, the bonus discs so far have been the definition of "fans only."
They are mostly filled with "alternate mixes," which is a strange concept. Mixes freeze in time a single moment that is the end result of many individual decisions; they document fader settings. Alternate mixes showing what could have happened are literally infinite; all these mixes are said to have been created while the album was being mixed, and there is no reason to doubt that, but the truth is Page could just as easily make an "alternate mix" of any one of these songs this morning and no one would know the difference. The fact that a mandolin was briefly considered to be slightly louder for a given sound is basically a stray fact and nothing more. All it provides is a chance to hear familiar performances in familiar songs in a way that sounds slightly unfamiliar.
Among the first six records, aside from III, Physical Graffiti suffers least from overfamiliarity. It's Led Zeppelin's White Album, the one they made when they were at their creative peak and had a million ideas, but were also under a tremendous amount of strain and saw the end starting to come into focus. It's also, to my ears, their best album, even if it's not as unified or complete as some of what had come before. Why their best? First of all, there's more of it. The previous two albums were awesome, but each had just eight songs; Physical Graffiti has 15. It's math—when you are talking about songs from this period of the band, that makes it roughly twice as good.
But Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination. In some senses it was literally so, since its tracks had been recorded over the course of the previous few years and, in some cases, were leftovers from the previous few records. (The best of the new material was still too much for a single record, so they went back to unreleased songs and decided to flesh out a full 2xLP. The songs are all over the place, but the band makes it all work together.)
Iconic riffs abound—"Custard Pie", "The Wanton Song", and "Houses of the Holy" alone have more hooks than most rock bands manage in a career—but here they are just the beginning of the story. "In My Time of Dying" is Zeppelin's ultimate blues deconstruction, mixing the open-chord slide of acoustic Delta blues with electric heaviness and extending the whole thing past 11 minutes. Pastoral instrumentals had been in the mix for Zeppelin since the first album's "Black Mountainside", but Page never managed another one as beautiful as "Bron-Yr-Aur", a crushingly brief two minutes of guitar bliss that every rock kid who picked up an acoustic guitar in the next 10 years dreamed of playing. And their non-Western dabbling crested with "Kashmir". But Physical Graffiti's greatest strength is its looseness and general sense of playfulness. Here and there, Zeppelin showed comfort with pop. The bounce of "Trampled Under Foot" owes everything to Stevie Wonder; "Down By the Seaside" has an easeful lilt; and "Night Flight" twinkles with a bright optimism.
The song I returned to most here is also the simplest—"Boogie With Stu", an interpolation of Ritchie Valens' "Ooh My Head" (his mother gets a songwriting credit). It makes me think of what blues and early rock'n'roll meant to a certain generation of young men growing up in England during the 1950s and '60s. You hear one story after another about lives being changed by a rock'n'roll record. In a famous quote, John Lennon summed up his musical taste to Jann Wenner in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview: "Sounds like 'Wop Bop a Loo Bop'. I like rock and roll, man, I don't like much else."
When the members of Led Zeppelin get together with famed session pianist/long-time pal Ian Stewart on "Boogie With Stu", you can hear five people who speak the same language. It's drunk on the joy of the discovery. Whatever else they have going on in their lives, they can sit down and play a chugging 12-bar song and have a fucking ball, because they remember when they first heard a song like this as kids and realized that song was a portal to another world. On Physical Graffiti, the end point of Led Zeppelin's incomparable initial run, they are living deep inside that new world, still finding new things to discover, taking it all in. | 2015-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 24, 2015 | 9.1 | 29947e7d-6cef-4bf8-8a97-164d07788fb1 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On a new EP, the Texas indie-pop duo refines its approach with striking details and emotional tension. | On a new EP, the Texas indie-pop duo refines its approach with striking details and emotional tension. | Hovvdy: Billboard for My Feelings EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hovvdy-billboard-for-my-feelings-ep/ | Billboard for My Feelings EP | Hovvdy’s music has a mysterious depth. On the surface, the Texas duo makes cheery folk-pop with acoustic guitars, grand piano, crackling drums, and vocal melodies as soothing as a weighted blanket. Charlie Martin and Will Taylor’s early work veered toward nostalgia-bait minimalism, remnant of Duster or a lo-fi Weezer, with lyrics that latched onto love and longing and letting go of the past because they were, regrettably, growing up. On last year’s True Love, they embraced their emergence into adulthood by reflecting on parenting, marriage, and memory. As immaculate as the music sounded, and as earnest as the lyrics were, their “Life Is Good” ethos wore thin. Could it all really be so pleasant?
Their new four-song EP, Billboard for My Feelings, adds new wrinkles to their work, building upon the template of True Love and homing in on their deceptively sophisticated sound. It’s not that they’re taking bigger risks or straying from their preferred themes. Instead, they’ve refined their approach by leaning into their most playful inclinations, prioritizing texture and melody over narrative stability, broadening their simple yet spacious arrangements with small, striking details: a guitar pluck here, a string stab there, a wide-bodied backing vocal that bleeds into a bit-crushed tom. Like walking through the woods and finding a creek just deep enough to swim, their music is filled with unexpected moments that encourage you to stop moving, sit back, and take it all in.
Reunited with producer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) and multi-instrumentalist Bennett Littlejohn, Hovvdy expand their compositions with strings and keys and the occasional banjo, the tension rising and falling with the subtle addition or subtraction of an instrument. “Everything” opens with a reversed string loop before paring back to chugging acoustic guitar and Taylor’s gentle crooning. Amid the twinkling arrangement, he senses that certain doors have closed in his life: “Before the sun leaves/Go outside and dream/About the places that I’ve heard of/I won’t live to see.” There’s an optimism to his words, a realization that the world in this moment may be as expansive as it ever will be.
Emotional incongruities weave throughout the EP, imbuing each song with an unresolvable tension. “Hide,” a mesmerizing highlight whose syrupy cadence and tempo sound like little else in Hovvdy’s discography, describes sleepless nights and self-doubt, little devastations that arise despite our best efforts to guard against them. And even though Hovvdy still aim for good times and deep connection, they now acknowledge that sorrow and uncertainty can creep into even the most joyful experiences. On True Love, the duo seemed intent on shutting out these thoughts, holding greater space for gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness. But the emotional ambiguity of Billboard for My Feelings gives way to a richer, more complicated set of perspectives, communicating through melody what’s too elusive to say otherwise. | 2022-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Grand Jury | May 31, 2022 | 7.4 | 299cdece-5eb7-43e4-8d4f-5cc494fdf95b | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
One of the decade's best metal and post-hardcore bands finish the 2000s with one of its best records. | One of the decade's best metal and post-hardcore bands finish the 2000s with one of its best records. | Converge: Axe to Fall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13625-axe-to-fall/ | Axe to Fall | Converge are this generation's Black Flag. This generation might not remember Black Flag, so here's a refresher. In the early 1980s, Black Flag and peers like Bad Brains and Minor Threat took punk beyond "three chords and the truth." The result was hardcore punk. It was deliberately ugly and harsh; Clash-fetishizing critics have mostly ignored it. Black Flag epitomized DIY-- they booked their own shows, handed out their own flyers, rehearsed with military discipline, and put out records on guitarist Greg Ginn's label, SST. Despite shifting lineups, their mission never wavered: to destroy.
Destruction isn't Converge's agenda. They differ from Black Flag in that aspect: They build things up, not tear them down. But they can do so because of Black Flag's groundwork. Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself. The band was both explosive and implosive. It was destined to end.
Converge have learned from Black Flag's mistakes. They work as a team and have taken DIY to new levels. Singer Jacob Bannon runs the Deathwish, Inc. label and does artwork for Converge and other bands. Guitarist Kurt Ballou runs a recording studio and has become this generation's Steve Albini. Bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller have made waves with other bands like Doomriders and Cave In. Together, they whip up a catharsis matched by few. They play hard and wear their hearts on their sleeves. As a result, kids in droves wear Converge on their sleeves. (The band's Twitter handle is "convergecult.") No other current punk band's imagery is as iconic. The face on the cover of 2001's Jane Doe, the hand on the cover of 2004's You Fail Me-- they are the Black Flag bars of today.
The band wasn't always so potent. It took a few albums to work through a wiry hybrid of mathcore and metal. Jane Doe was Converge's watershed, honing their sound to a lean, abrasive essence. Over You Fail Me and 2006's No Heroes, it expanded to include slower, abstract sludge. Black Flag went through a similar transformation. Their landmark album My War was equal parts lightning and Black Sabbath. Axe to Fall is Converge's My War.
The album is, to quote The Exorcist and Pantera, a vulgar display of power. Bannon's howl is exfoliating. His lyrics aren't hard to parse: "I need to learn to love me"; "No longer feel anyone/ No longer fear anything." Basic stuff, but it reaches deep and pulls no punches. Ballou's guitar dials up the crackle of Metallica's Kill 'Em All. It gallops, shoots electric arcs, dives down to subterranean depths. Ballou mines the upper register more than ever before, turning leads into leitmotifs. The frenzied pull-offs in "Dark Horse" are pure Kirk Hammett; the supercharged chug of "Reap What You Sow" recalls the fire of early Megadeth. Ballou isn't really playing metal-- his band is too short-haired and quirky for that-- but he's out-metalling 99% of metal bands today. The title track rotates through thrash beats, blastbeats, and d-beats like a race car driver shifting gears. It's fast, greasy, and loud as a motherfucker.
Axe to Fall isn't all axes, though. It's also anvils and stone pillows and beds of fallen leaves. The record is perfectly sequenced. It starts with three seamless barnburners, then settles into smooth toggling between slow and fast. The slow numbers likely won't get live airing-- kids prefer speed-- but they're amazing constructions of texture and friction. Near the end, piano and glockenspiel make like Tom Waits and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They're elegiac and haunting, an inversion of the napalm death that preceded them. A huge array of guests help out, representing acts like Disfear, 108, Genghis Tron, and Neurosis. They are too many to list, but the bottom line is, they work. Whether they're yelling, singing, or laying down leads, they fit their songs. And that in itself is fitting. | 2009-10-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Epitaph | October 29, 2009 | 8.5 | 299dc7f2-3656-43d8-9809-6c227618246b | Cosmo Lee | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cosmo-lee/ | null |
With the *Fan-Tas-Tic: A Jay-Dee Production *box set, we're given the most concise and thorough presentation ever of the formative years of Slum Village, the group that counted J Dilla in its ranks. | With the *Fan-Tas-Tic: A Jay-Dee Production *box set, we're given the most concise and thorough presentation ever of the formative years of Slum Village, the group that counted J Dilla in its ranks. | Slum Village: The Fan-Tas-Tic Box Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21904-the-fan-tas-tic-box-set/ | The Fan-Tas-Tic Box Set | Slum Village is a rap nerd's dream—cult figures with a drama- and death-filled story that's tied into the genesis of a nigh-mythical figure, a man who was still redirecting the path of the genre while he lay on his deathbed. The group's lineup was constantly churning, and because it included producer J Dilla—one of hip-hop's most revered saints—in its ranks, they've become peculiar cult figures: frequently referenced, yet largely unknown. The group now consists of sole original surviving member T3 and longtime SV producer Young RJ, but it has variously boasted the presence of Detroit wordsmith Elzhi and J Dilla's younger brother, Illa J and gone through name changes (weeks after their official debut was released in 2000, they released quasi-album Best Kept Secret as J-88). But there is one combination—the OG trio of T3, Baatin, and Jay Dee (as Dilla was primarily known then)—that stands as the Supremes with Diana Ross, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes featuring Teddy Pendergrass. And with the *Fan-Tas-Tic: A Jay-Dee Production *box set, we're given the most concise and thorough presentation of the group's formative years ever released.
The *Fan-Tas-Tic *box set is sourced mostly from the the group's two most widely lauded efforts—Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1 and *Fantastic, Vol. 2. Both *achieved holy-grail status in part due to their scarcity, in the days when music was passed hand-to-hand and dubs of dubs were of ever-decreasing quality. The majority of people who heard the first two Slum Village records in the early days were hearing corrupted versions full of hiss and distortion that actually aided Dilla's warm grooves and the rappers' frayed and imperfect vocal performances. All of the songs were recorded in Dilla's basement on a DAT machine, which meant that the group had to do their songs in one take. They only had two mics—even ad-libs and hooks were done in real time. Furthermore, the entire debut album was made over the course of a week, sandwiched in between Dilla's growing responsibilities and rising renown as a producer for acts like the Pharcyde and A Tribe Called Quest. This imbued their early recording with a genuine garage-band quality—and even after they signed to A&M Records for their second project, they still recorded from the same location, bringing acts from the both coasts to in Dilla's Conant Gardens basement.
In hindsight, Dilla was the star of Slum Village, but that message was never broadcast through the releases—and it's great to hear Dilla's music outside of the idol worship that has sprung up around him following his 2006 death. Hearing full swaths of Dilla productions where his music is foundational but not central is almost unthinkable today. Even though this set is subtitled A Jay-Dee Production, it skips the heavy-handed approach of 2012's Rebirth of Detroit tribute or of his many reissued digital artifacts, which tend to get weighed down by their own sense of of historical importance. On *Fan-Tas-Tic, *the stars are aligned equally—Baatin's squiggly esoteric weirdness, T3's rhyming with a chip on his shoulder, the celestial backdrops of Dilla's expansive, smooth-yet-rugged palette of soul samples. Everyone was locked in for these records, and the focus is on no single part, but the sum of Slum Village.
There's a beauty in how local these records are—not in terms of landmarks or civic pride (though that is palpable too), but in the sound of young artists trying to break away from a crowded pack of competition. T3 and Baatin experiment with bar formation, wordplay and vocal inflection—most notably on Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1, which is more or less a collection of semi-polished demos chronicling their real-time progression from collaborators to actual group. On this debut, the rappers stutter as if trying figure out how to navigate over Dilla's low-end theories—the producer's tracks were incredibly articulate, full of intelligent bass grooves, cushioned and hidden drum patterns that spoke to a shyness, and an offbeat smattering of snaps, snares, ticks and claps that felt like nervous tension or socially awkward conversations full of pauses and repeated non-sequiturs. It's all there on Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1's opening number, “Fantastic” which features a nearly-eerie but wholly-soothing track hosting laughable sex advice: “All you gotta do is grip your meat/ Laugh at her, massage her/ Take a bath with her/ Devour her.”
Foreshadowing his final evolution with Donuts, some of Dilla's tracks were lyrical enough to not require much rapping, and the group was smart enough to let some of his music breath, playing loose with their presence. For “Look of Love (Remix)” they laid back and mimicked Slick Rick; on “Hoc N Pucky” they free-styled over-the-top grunts and growls and sound effects; and on numbers like “Fantastic 2,” “Fantastic 3,” and “Fantastic 4,” they retreated to simply chanting hooks, treating alternate takes as half-song interludes.
If the song titles (and history) get confusing, it's understandable. Slum Village wasn't necessarily focused on being easily accessible or readily formatted. Songs, themes and concepts were constantly treated as serials, reduxed, remixed, and reprised; the average song length on the debut is about two-and-half minutes, with almost half of them clocking out before the 90-second mark. Amazingly, they all come off as complete ideas. There's never the impression that the crew ran out of ideas, or had too many to share—rather, it feels as if they said what they had to say and when they had no more to say, they stopped.
By the time *Fantastic, Vol. 2 *was released in 2000, Dilla had worked closely with A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, Common, The Pharcyde and others—all of whom found new rhyme pockets in his work. T3 and Baatin obviously cribbed from these greats, but it wasn't just the rappers who felt emboldened by Jay's advancement. One boon of his prodigious career is that—despite its brevity—Dilla's work had mini-phases and periods, like truncated versions of Picasso's Blue Period or Miles Davis' forays into fusion or funk. On Vol. 2 he's no longer condensed, adding a sense of comfort and ease to all his prior antics. Despite all of the (deserved) accolades given to Donuts, *Vol. 2—*with warm shimmers like “Get Dis Money,” “Fall In Love” and “Climax (Girl Shit);” throbbing excursions like “Eyes Up” and “Go Ladies”; and pulsing moments like “Conant Gardens” and “Raise It Up” —makes one of the strongest cases for Dilla's greatness.
The album featured Busta Rhymes, Kurupt, D'Angelo, Pete Rock, and—perhaps most notably—Q-Tip affirming the end of A Tribe Called Quest and anointing SV and flame keepers on “Hold Tight”: “Hold tight, this is the last time you hear me/ I'm out now, this is the last time to cheer me," he rapped. “I'ma leave it in the hands of the Slum now.” Q-Tip's declaration didn't help the album's fortunes much; Vol. 2 was shelved and left in purgatory for two years before being shipped off to another label. And by the end of that year, the Slum Village of Jay Dee, T3, and Baatin (who passed away in 2009) was no more.
*Fan-Tas-Tic: A Jay-Dee Production *also comes through with a comprehensive history of Slum Village (the A Fan-Tas-Tic story booklet), as well as full disc of instrumentals (which may or may not yield even more Dilla tributes), and a smattering of worthy remixes and further instrumentals from Pete Rock, Madlib and Dilla himself. Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1 and *Fantastic, Vol. 2 *themselves are slightly re-worked and extended, but mainly kept intact and made to sound crisper without losing their original basement charm. The five included pieces of 7” vinyl seem gratuitous (their content is duplicated on the discs), but for the Dilla faithful and hardcore collectors, they're admirably fetishistic. Some of the packaging seems thoughtless—the records, discs, and booklet are just in a box with too much space for them; they just sit and shift and will likely be damaged under less than the most careful handling. But the draw here should always be the music. And Dilla comes through on both of these projects, but he's not the only one. On the re-released version of Vol. 2's “We Be Dem #1” (and “#2,” both a reworking of the Vol. 1's “Beej N Dem”) Baatin raps: “You say looking for them niggas, yeah, we be them/This shit remind me of some old EPM/ D shit,” before going on to shout out the Roots, Detroit's House Shoes, and his rhyme partner, but never Dilla. It may be sacrilege to many, but hearing Dilla without hearing rappers talk about Dilla is the best way to hear Dilla. | 2016-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ne’Astra Music Group | June 4, 2016 | 8.5 | 299e2f12-bd82-4de9-acdc-31f6745c25b0 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
L.A. musician Eddie Ruscha’s new synth-music project draws on Balearic beat and ambient pop for a concise, easygoing listen. | L.A. musician Eddie Ruscha’s new synth-music project draws on Balearic beat and ambient pop for a concise, easygoing listen. | E Ruscha V: Who Are You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/e-ruscha-v-who-are-you/ | Who Are You | Anyone who has spent much time around synthesizers knows that each one is unique. Eddie Ruscha certainly does. The Los Angeles musician has been collecting synths for decades, and he describes them in terms usually reserved for woodland critters, deities, or psychoactive substances. One has a “wiggly” character, and another is distinguished by its “seeping snail trails and grit fits.” In one digital synth of recent vintage he hears the “hallucinogenic” specter of people chanting, “or possibly alien choirs.” On Who Are You, all those voices get the chance to be heard. Drawing inspiration from Balearic beat and ambient pop, it’s a concise, easy-on-the-ears listen whose surface simplicity leaves ample room for his instruments to reveal their quirks.
This is Ruscha’s first album under his E Ruscha V alias, but he’s no newcomer. He’s been producing and playing in bands for nearly 30 years. (He’s also the son, if you were wondering, of Ed Ruscha, the pop and conceptual artist.) In the early 1990s, he played in Medicine, a fuzz-besotted shoegaze act, and in the 2000s, he had a dub project called Future Pigeon; in recent years, both solo (as Secret Circuit) and in a variety of configurations with peers like Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft) and Rub N Tug’s Thomas Bullock, he’s been making left-field dance music indebted to cosmic disco, Italo, and primitive house. Who Are You is less club-focused than a lot of his recent output: The tempos are slower, the textures softer. It’s a lot less shaggy, too. If Secret Circuit’s Tactile Galactics, his last album for Beats in Space, suggested a spiked-punch basement party, Who Are You is geared for the breakfast table and the back porch.
Just 35 minutes long, the album is a mix of downbeat mood pieces, more fully fleshed-out songs, and effervescent ambient miniatures. The opening track, “The Hostess,” is one of the latter. The sparkling melody is reminiscent of music boxes; the gliding guitar melody is evocative of vintage exotica. The balmy mood thus set, “Who Are You” plunges us gently into Ruscha’s relaxed world, where the water is apparently 80 degrees year-round. It begins tentatively, with bubbly keys over halting drum-machine hits, and it gradually grows into a porous weave of synths and guitars with a decidedly tropical feel. There are hints of African guitar, Hawaiian slack key, and Caribbean steel drums, and behind that, chimes, birdsong, and wordless sighs, all bouncing like the animated molecules in a chemistry-class film. “Gravity Waves” is darker and dubbier, and “Lights Passing By” is a watery étude in the style of Harold Budd, with detuned piano swimming in an aquamarine tremolo haze. What all these songs share is an unusually vivid sense of detail. Ruscha is no minimalist, but he knows how to use empty space to let his sounds breathe. There’s a cartoon agreeability to his major-key changes, but there’s absolutely no clutter, and if you listen closely, the dynamic contours of his waveforms come alive, as vividly detailed as leaves under a microscope.
His stylistic cues are in keeping with the ongoing mellow-music revival: You can detect traces of Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s lilting chamber pop, Wally Badarou’s tropical funk, and Gigi Masin’s Mediterranean noonday calm; his guitar flourishes occasionally recall the Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. On the penultimate song, “Endless Sunday”—one of a pair of late-album highlights—Ruscha flips the script and indulges in smooth-jazz bass, shimmering bar chimes, and a silky G-funk synth lead, all overlaid with the warmest vocoder this side of Boards of Canada’s “In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country.” Even here, at his most gonzo, what is striking is how restrained his hand is. He has a way of using instruments so that they seem much more present than they actually are, soaking up silence like sponges. In the tranquil “In the Woods,” a clarinet plays just four notes before falling silent again, but its presence lingers. “Mainly I look for an instrument to speak to me and involve me—to bring me into its world,” Ruscha said in a recent interview. On Who Are You, he’s the most easygoing tour guide you could ask for. | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Beats in Space | March 5, 2018 | 7.7 | 299eb1fc-101b-4b7f-85e1-31d494980298 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Gonno is a Japanese producer with ties to the eclectic and sunset-friendly Ibiza Balearic scene. His debut LP extends his emotive, exploratory approach to album length, treating his music not as a series of singles but as an extended session that unfolds like a meal among friends at dusk. | Gonno is a Japanese producer with ties to the eclectic and sunset-friendly Ibiza Balearic scene. His debut LP extends his emotive, exploratory approach to album length, treating his music not as a series of singles but as an extended session that unfolds like a meal among friends at dusk. | Gonno: Remember the Life Is Beautiful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20873-remember-the-life-is-beautiful/ | Remember the Life Is Beautiful | The opening song on Gonno's debut album, Remember the Life Is Beautiful, is called "Hippies". I don't know what the attitude towards hippies is in Gonno's native Japan, but there's no doubt in my mind that the song is meant sympathetically. Its backmasked guitars waft like dandelion tufts across an open field, and its bass tone is as reassuringly heavy as a hand-me-down blanket. It's ambient techno the way it's meant to be made, fleshed out with acid lines and updated with live drums, and the way it develops is so effortless—building to a softly rounded climax and then rolling back downhill—that it feels less like a work of art than a product of nature.
One place the hippie ideology has continued to flourish in dance culture is in the so-called Balearic scene, the fuzzily defined style of music that grew out of Ibiza's discotheques in the 1980s, when DJs like Alfredo and Jose Padilla bricolaged together an eclectic, sunset-friendly style out of ambient, dub, yacht rock, krautrock, acid house, and anything else that fit the mood. Gonno's Balearic bona fides are solid. After years of making relatively rugged, stripped-down techno, he took an abrupt turn in 2011 and wound up on Ibiza's very own International Feel, ground zero for the current decade's Balearic revival. On Remember the Life Is Beautiful, he extends his emotive, exploratory approach to album length, the optimal way to engage with it—not as a series of singles but in an extended session that unfolds like a meal among friends at dusk.
Remember isn't strictly a "dance" album, although warm-up DJs will find plenty of copacetic material here, and a few tracks are relatively peak-time in their energy. "Stop", with its ragged hi-hats and triplet bass, might be a vintage Border Community track, and "Revoked", with its chimes, arpeggios, and chugging groove, is part DFA and part Carl Craig. Four Tet and Caribou's hybridized live drums and machine beats inform a few tracks here, as do their photosensitive quirks and generally wistful air.
The uptempo cuts are the exceptions; most songs are stolidly midtempo, if not outright sluggish. In "The Worst Day Ever", which creeps along at 100 beats per minute, small plucked sounds pile up into a shimmering whole that verges on sensory overload; the equally dreamy "Confusion", a hair faster, affects a majestically relaxed groove. The sonic balance he achieves, between ethereal vibes and physical modeling, is tricky enough; few artists can project a sense of chill that's so convincing. Fittingly, some of the most powerful songs do without drums entirely. "Beasts in Your Mind" runs Göttsching's arpeggios through the Cocteaus' delay pedals, while "Already Almost" goes for a midnight swim in Harold Budd's blue lagoon. And on "The Island I've Never Been", he swaps out the drums for clanking ship's bells, climaxing with a green flash of arpeggiated synths before succumbing to dusk again. It's a wonderful summation of the album's strengths. Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit. | 2015-08-17T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-08-17T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Endless Flight | August 17, 2015 | 7.6 | 299f400b-3685-4789-9205-a468c7b22494 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Baton Rouge rapper is still a fearsome MC in his prime. His latest mixtape cuts the distance between his singsongy, hook-driven punches and his cold, levelheaded lessons. | The Baton Rouge rapper is still a fearsome MC in his prime. His latest mixtape cuts the distance between his singsongy, hook-driven punches and his cold, levelheaded lessons. | Kevin Gates: By Any Means 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-gates-by-any-means-2/ | By Any Means 2 | Just as Kevin Gates became rap’s most unlikely star, his reality caught up to him. From October to March, Gates served 180 days for battery after kicking a woman in the audience at a Florida show. As authorities were processing his release, they discovered a pending weapons charge, and he was sentenced to another 30 months for felony gun possession. Gates has never been shy about being crude or obscene, and he seems to value publicly reconciling with the uglier aspects of his life. Songs wrestle with his limitations and see perseverance as its own form of progress. In a recent letter from prison, he seemed to suggest as much: “A great person is measured by all of the great tests they can undergo and still remain true to who they are. With that being said ‘I’m Him.’” What greater test is there than staying relevant out of sight, in a climate where people think and consume at the speed of Twitter? His message is clear: Not even prison can stifle his workflow.
The new Kevin Gates mixtape, a sequel to 2014’s By Any Means, is a reminder that the Baton Rouge rapper is still a fearsome MC in his prime, and that his voice still rings out even from behind bars. Compiled by his wife and manager Dreka with his blessings, the tape scans the entire Kevin Gates gamut, from plunges into melody to crisp scene-setting and bittersweet storytelling.
By Any Means 2 cuts the distance between his singsongy, hook-driven punches and his cold, levelheaded lessons (“These scriptures what I’m telling Khaza/Don’t let nobody know that you a monster/Keep it on the tuck and then surprise ‘em”). But perhaps because Dreka curated the project, there is a focus on softer moments and sex jams. There aren’t any songs as visceral and gripping as something like “4:30 AM,” and that feels like a conscious choice. The tape trades in these graphic episodes for several worthwhile surprises: the Joan Osborne -interpolating “What If” turns “One of Us” into a modern rap delight. The R&B crawl on “Fucking Right” pushes his raspy croon to its limits. “D U Down” is a playful bedroom romp. “In here layin’ in my chest/Teeth twinkle in the dark/She asleep and I’m awake/And I’m reminiscin’ in my thoughts,” he raps, relishing all the little details, showing off the intuition that makes him unique.
There are some flashes that seem like reflections of Gates’ current situation, particularly the opening passage on “Attention”: “Walk without an entourage in which I won’t discuss/Killers in New York in the clink, they know enough/My celly spit in the sink, one blink, I’m sheddin’ blood/If we was in the street, one squeeze would wet him up/Acceptin’ no disrespect, wait, who am I to budge?” References to prison stints are hidden throughout, as a nod to this term. Then there’s “Came Up,” which tracks his arc. “Gotta write Gucci, tell him hold his head,” he raps ironically, given their current role reversal. “Received no fundin’ from the label/Two strikes against me, no room for flakin’.” Every inflection enriches his tale, which rings true in the present context.
Proximity is crucial to the way Gates views the world. He’s constantly thinking about people, places, and things in terms of distance, both in relation to him and to others, and these juxtapositions add layers to his flashbacks. On “Jus Wanna,” he explores the mythos of “Plug Daughter,” recounting how a childhood learning to make and sell coke in Colombia led to his earliest romance. What seems like a second verse digression slowly weaves back into the main trafficking narrative, adding a nostalgic tint.
This is all a valiant effort to avoid being forgotten on the inside. By Any Means 2 seems to build around “Imagine That,” a heartfelt remembrance of humble beginnings. The video features home footage of Dreka, their daughter Islah, and their son Khaza. In the open, Gates tells Islah he’s going to miss her birthday. It ends with a hopeful shot of the rapper’s family standing under a “Welcome Home” banner. His kids rap along with his voice. These snapshots raise the stakes; they’re reminders that his world never stops turning, even when he’s not here to live in it. | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bread Winners’ Association | September 28, 2017 | 7.5 | 29a819e1-0f11-44e7-b5a9-0e4fb979c827 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
With limitlessly innovative songwriting and production, the cinema of twigs’ music has never been more affecting. Magdalene is not just on the vanguard of pop, it’s in a breathtaking class of its own. | With limitlessly innovative songwriting and production, the cinema of twigs’ music has never been more affecting. Magdalene is not just on the vanguard of pop, it’s in a breathtaking class of its own. | FKA twigs: Magdalene | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fka-twigs-magdalene/ | Magdalene | From her first video, 2012’s mesmerizing “Hide,” the singular focus of her vision was apparent, a holistic project that rendered FKA twigs’ operatic approach to club beats inextricable from her astounding art direction. In the seven years since, she has made her art into a kind of theatrical multimedia experience, crafting elaborate shows and videos that intertwine and smudge the lines of classicism and the avant-garde. She is astonishing, ambitious, and seemingly good at everything, singing over her own ticker-tape beats, self-directing wildly conceptual videos, and ravenously hoovering up dance disciplines (apparently up to and including Chinese sword fighting) until she masters them.
Yet in spite of twigs’ distinctive soprano (spectral and often papery) and her experimental production (stunning and often bellicose), her music has resonated best as a part of a whole, a piece that propels her full-blown artistry but does not totally comprise it. Chalk this up to twigs’ innovation in the Eyeballs Epoch, but even 2015’s incredible M3LL155X EP—a brooding and serrated read on genres like industrial, ballroom house, and triple-time rap—centered adventurousness over melody. It let the fullness of her art bring the beats along with it—weird bangers meant to challenge patrons of the most interesting nightclubs—but was probably best experienced while watching French artist and polymath Michèle Lamy rendered as a deep-sea anglerfish. The gesamtkunstwerk of twigs sometimes overshadowed the music itself, in part because so much of twigs’ presence is her world-class athleticism as a dancer. She imbues voguing and lyrical ballet with such grace and sensuality that the emotion of her music emanates directly from her body.
Magdalene, then, is a fucking revelation. FKA twigs’ first album in four years, and her best work by far, is as introspective as anything she’s written, but more obviously centers her voice as a conduit for plain emotion. Written during a publicly scrutinized relationship with a famously reluctant vampire, as well as a more private recovery from the removal of fibroids from her uterus, she has said she found solace and inspiration in the story of Mary Magdalene, among the New Testament’s most reviled and misunderstood character, whose complexities were rewritten by centuries of chauvinist churchmen into a fallen-woman side note in Jesus’ story. By locating herself in Magdalene’s lineage, twigs, a Catholic school alumnus, explores the ways deeply conservative expectations trammel women; in doing so, she locates a version of herself within these ancient and oppressive archetypes, upending and transcending them through the power of her songwriting and the sheer magnetic pull of her presence.
“Thousand Eyes” opens Magdalene with twigs singing in the austere polyphony of Medieval church music, a meditation on the moment before a permanent departure (“If I walk out the door it starts our last goodbye”) that, with repetition, reveals itself as a hymn. It’s a prologue for an album whose songs are produced like narratives, with a beginning, climax, and denouement. She grapples with survival—psychic and physical survival—the way a woman who lives to move might respond to being laid out by tumors on an organ that facilitates birth. She is furious in parts, attacking tracks like the sweet “Home With You” and snarling standout “Fallen Alien” with virility and self-preservation. Even if shit went south, she refuses to saddle herself with the burden: “I’m a fallen alien, I never thought that you would be the one to tie me down,” she seethes. “But you did in this age of Satan/I’m searching for a light to take me home and guide me out.”
Magdalene is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“Holy Terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint. “Sad Day,” one of Magdalene’s most astonishing tracks, finds twigs properly genuflecting at the altar of Kate Bush, clearly having learned from her ability to translate inner sanctum into cinematic, Shelleyan alt-pop. The production by twigs, Nicolás Jaar, Skrillex, and benny blanco is utterly sublime: Skittering toms build onto an oscillating space-synth, the beats a proscenium for twigs’ voice and, especially, her lover’s desperation. Even if “Sad Day” doesn’t tell an explicit narrative in its lyrics, its production and twigs’ delivery tell an emotional one, that of the last desperate grasps at love in a power imbalance; we’re at the center where the story turns, teetering towards its inevitable end.
That the album stands alone is not to say the totality of her vision is truncated; twigs has already released three videos to accompany its nine songs. The first, “Cellophane,” set the tone for the project, showcasing her pole-dancing skills to a dissonantly sorrowful ballad. (That she apparently finds it funny is a testament to her character—serious artists who can’t laugh at themselves are the worst.) The armchair interpretation of “Cellophane” is as a meditation on the virulent racism that disgusting British tabloids and the worst of Twilight stans lobbed at twigs during her relationship with Robert Pattinson, but it’s equally a mournful reflection on the insecurities that dog any inequitable relationship. The imagery twigs has associated with “Cellophane”—pole dancing, a feat of physical strength set perpendicular to the emotional strength she sings about lacking—calls up the idea of performing for others’ pleasure. It’s a sad solo dance by someone both fully present in herself and aware that she’s toeing the line between agency and subjugation. As the final track on this deeply thought, deeply felt album, “Cellophane” acts as a rejoinder to “Thousand Eyes”—how sickening it must be, a woman artist constantly watched by bigoted tabloids interested in tearing you down from the man you love, how they did Mary M. and Jesus—and underscores the sorrow woven through Magdalene. The fact that sorrow spurred a musical growth this formidable, though, is evidence enough that twigs will always find her way back home. | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Young Turks | November 8, 2019 | 9.4 | 29aa1bc3-61cf-4155-bfab-f9723bade2d1 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
Though he rose to early acclaim as a fingerstyle guitarist, the singer/songwriter is steadily developing into a poignant lyricist, now chronicling the places and people he hopes to understand. | Though he rose to early acclaim as a fingerstyle guitarist, the singer/songwriter is steadily developing into a poignant lyricist, now chronicling the places and people he hopes to understand. | Steve Gunn: The Unseen in Between | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-gunn-the-unseen-in-between/ | The Unseen in Between | “Stonehurst Cowboy” sounds like a new kind of song for Steve Gunn. A gifted guitarist who happens to be developing into an even more gifted songwriter, the Philly-born, Brooklyn-based musician has written often about motion and travel: the life of the observer rather than the participant, viewing the world through the windshield. But “Stonehurst Cowboy,” an early beauty from Gunn’s The Unseen in Between, is more about the destination than the journey, and that destination is his late father’s former neighborhood in West Philadelphia. “Dear house near 69th/Old street looks the same,” he sings over a spiky, finger-picked theme. “Trees are strong, faces are gone/Background is still the same.” He sketches out his father’s tough time there, the stolen cars and hard drugs, but there’s no pity to Gunn’s voice. Instead, the song conveys a quiet wonder that the kid became such a good father, with wise counsel: “Call his name,” Gunn offers with a pause in the chorus. “He knows best.”
Gunn’s father and namesake died in 2016, two weeks after Gunn released Eyes on the Lines, a biographical note that instills “Stonehurst Cowboy” with a sense of reckoning. The tune doesn’t reveal much about him, especially compared to what his son has disclosed in recent interviews—like the one he did with Ryley Walker, where he talked about how his dad would smuggle booze into Eagles game or the one with NPR which explains how he was drafted but never sent to Vietnam. These are compelling details, but they’re purposefully omitted from “Stonehurst Cowboy.” It’s about everything the son didn’t get about his father. Gunn knows that it’s what we don’t know about our loved ones—their inner turmoils, those dark pockets—that tug at our imagination. This is where the dead live, in that unseen in-between.
He is just one of many complicated, mysterious characters on The Unseen in Between. Inspired by Agnes Varda’s film of the same name, “Vagabond” paints vivid, sympathetic portraits of characters Gunn might have met out on the road. He sings like he’s scrolling through old photos on his phone, looking at the faces of people he’ll never see again. Still, The Unseen in Between may be his most stationary album, with as many songs about being somewhere as getting somewhere, as with the old haunts of the “Stonehurst Cowboy.” Likewise, “Luciano” is a tender acoustic portrait of a bodega owner and his cat. “New Familiar” takes in the city around Gunn, its bustle of people, its flurry of noises, conveying awe at how the place can change constantly yet remain the same.
His playing on “New Familiar” is streamlined, indulging a subtle flurry of grace notes; the impression is one of elegant concision, an almost ascetic approach to the guitar. As an instrumentalist, Gunn often packs light: just the notes he needs and little more, the least ostentatious guitar hero imaginable. Yet, his playing on The Unseen in Between never fails to evoke that sense of expected movement, so it occasionally sounds like this traveler is simply staying in his lane. Even closer “Paranoid,” with its churchly piano and distorted rumbles, sounds naggingly familiar, as if we have been here before. “A hand-drawn map provides the facts,” he sings in what may be the quintessential Steve Gunn line. Maybe that’s the peril of songwriters who sings about journeys: The more you move, the more you can’t help but learn where all those back roads lead. | 2019-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Matador | January 25, 2019 | 7.2 | 29ab9c59-b5d8-4b45-8d21-087eae010606 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Nika Roza Danilova’s sixth record is more collaborative, widening the scope of her music and taking big leaps while retaining its primal, gothic spirit. | Nika Roza Danilova’s sixth record is more collaborative, widening the scope of her music and taking big leaps while retaining its primal, gothic spirit. | Zola Jesus: Arkhon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zola-jesus-arkhon/ | Arkhon | Nika Roza Danilova has spent over a decade crafting an auteurist vision of experimental pop. Over that time, her music has evolved dramatically even as its central tenets have remained steadfast: pitch black tone, the force of Danilova’s voice, a preoccupation with death on both a quotidian scale and a cosmic one. Her music, the vast majority of it self-produced, is the result of a dogged pursuit of a specific vision.
In the years following the release of her fifth album Okovi, Danilova began to question that line of thinking entirely. Spurred by a growing socialist consciousness—as evidenced on her Twitter account, which she uses to criticize and question the growing influence of big tech in the music industry—Danilova began to wonder whether her once individual process was just another manifestation of capitalism’s atomizing and isolating nature. “There’s so much exploitation and subjugation that is keeping humanity from collaborating and living in a more holistic way,” she said earlier this month. “[The industry] is siloing musicians through this auteurism where we’re all supposed to be these individual islands of artistic genius. So we’re not being encouraged to collaborate.”
On Arkhon, Danilova’s sixth record, she actively tries to counter the ethos that guided her earlier work, bringing in Sunn O)))’s Randall Dunn and session drummer Matt Chamberlain to bring a collaborative spirit to a once-hermetically sealed project. The resulting album widens the scope of her music while retaining its primal, gothic spirit. Deeply concerned with the nature of artmaking itself—and, specifically, how to do it freely without naturally absorbing the impositions of a cruelly alienating world—it’s a pleasantly shapeless record, an album of experiments and small upheavals that bring new, occasionally mismatched, textures into her world.
Arkhon foregrounds its concerns from its opener “Lost,” where Danilova laments about how corporate structures continue to disenfranchise artists. “Everyone I know is lost,” she sings, her voice deep and droning, shrouded in echo. The song progresses like an incantation or fairytale, Chamberlain’s tom-heavy drumming urgent and harrowing. “Lost” introduces Arkhon as an album about Danilova’s journey towards spiritual rebirth: over the course of the record, she is “crossing the abyss into something new,” stepping into a body of water that will “give you all you want,” walking eyes-closed into a forest. Oceans and forests have always provided a fertile metaphor for Danilova—her 2014 record was called Taiga, after the kinds of harsh, expansive forests commonly found in Russia—but these instances feel more portentous, more linked to some kind of urge to return to a more organic, naturalistic way of life.
True to its transitory nature, Arkhon feels like Danilova’s first record with permeable boundaries. For the first time since 2009’s The Spoils, this album feels in conversation with broader musical culture, with Danilova seemingly more content to reference and borrow from pop music at large. Certain moments in “Undertow” obliquely interpolate Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”—perhaps the greatest pop song ever written about the corrupting lust for power—while the final third of “Into the Wild,” a slow lament set to mournful piano and abstracted percussion, feels like Danilova’s answer to FKA twigs’ “Cellophane.” “Lost” initially begins with a beat made from a sampled breath, and it plays a little like a riff on a 2-step beat, redone in Danilova’s house style. And “Desire,” the album’s thundering centerpiece, comes off as the Zola Jesus version of an Adele ballad, the gale-force of her voice imparting the song with a bracing sense of catharsis.
Not all of these moments work—the FKA twigs-y section of “Into the Wild” is so similar to “Cellophane” that it feels galling—but on the whole, they do a lot to crack the surface of a project that could once feel cool to the touch. In fact, many of Danilova’s most significant experiments do fail: Chamberlain’s drumming, in particular, feels largely misused here, with the booming kit employed on “The Fall” and “Efemra” totally obliterating any nuance. In these moments, Danilova feels totally anonymous, like another stadium-aspirant star unable to compete with the production around her. It’s a shame, as some of the songs that suffer most from this heavy-handedness are also Arkhon’s most promising: The lyrics of “Do That Anymore,” written about the despair Danilova felt after Joe Biden beat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, contain a wistful, world-weary quality that is hard to find in the music itself.
“Do That Anymore” evokes a kind of hopelessness that’s rare on Arkhon. Danilova’s lyrics here have a punky nihilism to them: “Chalk it up, we can’t change anything in this damn place,” she sings, resigned to a future of unhearing and uncaring liberalism. It’s the album’s closing track, but it’s almost like a prequel to the truths Danilova unearths across the rest of the album: Perhaps there’s a better life to be found among the wreckage big tech has brought upon the world. On “Sewn,” she offers nine words that feel like a mantra to recite on the way forward: “Carry on/Get wrong/Set it all on fire.” It’s a small but enduring flicker of hope. | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | June 27, 2022 | 7.1 | 29ad1719-10e7-4e6f-8011-60e07833e851 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
They may owe their roots to hardcore, but on their second album, Toronto-based six-piece Fucked Up reinvent themselves with power chords, rich overtones, and anthemic, arm-swingng choruses to create one of the year's most ambitious and uniting hard rock records. | They may owe their roots to hardcore, but on their second album, Toronto-based six-piece Fucked Up reinvent themselves with power chords, rich overtones, and anthemic, arm-swingng choruses to create one of the year's most ambitious and uniting hard rock records. | Fucked Up: The Chemistry of Common Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12320-the-chemistry-of-common-life/ | The Chemistry of Common Life | Whether it's their second release or their 60th (no one's even pretending to be sure), Fucked Up's The Chemistry of Common Life is really easy to get excited about. A lot's been made about how it could possibly revitalize hardcore, although framing it within genre terms tends to lead to the wrong questions: Is it too melodic and instrumentally diverse to qualify as hardcore? Maybe. Is it heavy and chaotic enough to satisfy fans of the debut, even while it dramatically broadens their fanbase? Possibly. Can a band as destructive as Fucked Up really carry an entire scene on their sweaty, unshaven backs? Stranger things have happened.
It might seem counterintuitive to call Chemistry a grower: From the first listen, it's both pummeling and riveting. When frontman Pink Eyes (Damien Abraham) makes his grand entrance 1.5 minutes into the massive album opener "Son the Father", he channels G.G. Allin by way of Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington, delivering fiercely intelligent lyrics in a singing voice presumably treated by years of guzzling Canadian Club and then eating the bottles.
That said, The Chemistry of Common Life is a guitarist's album: 10,000 Marbles (Mike Haliechuk) and producer Jon Drew balance classic rock force with shimmering overdubs, at times recalling the Smashing Pumpkins, while at others echoing the layered, chiming guitars and famed loud/quiet dynamics of Bossanova-era Pixies. First single "No Epiphany" has 18 overdubs alone. Fractured harmonies bring "Crooked Head" to its cruising altitude, while breakneck opener "Son the Father" is almost tactile in its texture, with power chords and rich overtones busting into an arm-swingng chorus that doubles as the record's thesis: "It's hard enough being born in the first place/ Who would ever want to be born again?"
It's a hell of a pace to sustain, particularly after the bongo-laced battering ram "Magic Word", but Fucked Up get plenty of help: Chemistry is an "it takes a nation of millions" endeavor, born out of a sense of community and the determination to create something huge. According to the band, something along the lines of 70 tracks of instruments went into the making, as well as guest vocals from Vivian Girls and Sebastian Grainger (formerly from Death From Above 1979). It's not a situation where Fucked Up are seeking credit merely for beginning the album with a flute or other decidedly non-hardcore instruments. These touches often provide the most memorable moments: The gorgeous curtain-raise of female voices that open "No Epiphany"; "Twice Born" and its shout-along chorus ("Hands up if you think you're the only one denied!"); the mystic Black Mountain-style duet on "Royal Swan".
Along with a sense of community, the album also offers a refreshing take on religion. Fucked Up's spiritual bent is something richer than believers being targeted by secularists aiming to make them look stupid (there's your Religulous spoiler-- save the $10): Chemistry is questioning but rarely cynical, the album's midsection testing faith in the face of reason and science, and finding meaning in the actual search for answers ("Days of Last", "No Epiphany").
Chemistry doesn't sit still, and perhaps paradoxically, its most palatable track might be its most divisive-- judging from the ringing open-chords and insistent drum beat of "Black Albino Bones", you might get the idea that this is actually an indie rock album (oh yeah, it is on Matador), a forgotten Husker Du track, or god forbid, pop-punk. Were it given a more conventional vocalist, it could easily sidle into MTV with more ease than this performance of "Twice Born". But while "Black Albino Blues" marks the album's most melodically uplifting track, it might be the most lyrically melancholy, furthering the message of the title track that the magic in our lives is still often a result of nature. "It's the little things that get us through life," barks Pink Eyes before Dallas Green sweetens up with "I need a little escape." This still being Fucked Up, it's a song about sex and drugs, but if they happened to leave something out of that eternal triad, it's only because The Chemistry of Common Life kicks enough ass to demand inclusion on its own terms. | 2008-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | Matador | October 16, 2008 | 8.8 | 29ad8224-888d-40cf-9347-adabbddd5053 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Japanese sludge trio unleash their most melodic, conventionally structured, and aggressively addictive LP to date: Flirting with shoegaze and ambient, Pink is a 47-minute frenzy that welcomes 2006 with open arms, bludgeoning fists, and a call to arms against MOR complacency. | Japanese sludge trio unleash their most melodic, conventionally structured, and aggressively addictive LP to date: Flirting with shoegaze and ambient, Pink is a 47-minute frenzy that welcomes 2006 with open arms, bludgeoning fists, and a call to arms against MOR complacency. | Boris: Pink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1185-pink/ | Pink | In underground metal years, Boris are senior citizens: Their self-released debut full-length, Absolutego, dates back to 1996, and compilations were hosting their material two years prior to that. But as invigorating as some of their earlier records are, the band didn't begin to gain a substantial following outside the metal world until 2003's outstanding Akuma No Uta-- parodying the artwork of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter-- struck a chord with independent music fans seeking an antidote to the more polite pop sounds of the Shins, Sufjan, and Death Cab for Cutie. Now, following more than a decade of hard labor and a swarm of 2005 releases, the trio gives their ever-expanding audience something to chew on: Pink is their best album yet, and by some distance the most accessible of their career to date.
The past 12 months have been increasingly kind to louder and more challenging artists, but even if Sunn0))) hadn't droned onto discerning hipsters' iPods, it's not difficult to imagine the awesomeness of Pink-- a supremely well-paced rock'n'roll album that's quickly winning over even long-suffering metalphobes-- helping these Japanese veterans leap-frog indie kids into a New York Times Arts & Leisure mention. If you don't believe me, sneak a listen to the spaced-out seven-minute opener, which manages to combine the best elements of classic British shoegaze and Sigur Rós with bliss-out metal faves Jesu and Isis. Just don't bank on the rest of the album to follow in its footsteps. After all, the three folks behind it-- guitarist Wata, bassist/vocalist Takeshi, and drumming vocalist Atsuo-- are the same atom-smashers who nicked their named from a Melvins song, operate the Walmart-friendly Fangs Anal Satan record label, and downshift from blown-out Motörhead to Earth on a dime. They've collaborated thrice with Merzbow, worshipped amplifiers with multitasking experimental rock legend Keiji Haino, and chilled with noise legend Masonna. Put simply, they're too restless (and ambitious) to fixate on a single style.
So, after allowing the opener to evaporate, Boris jump-cut to the album's title cut-- a full-throttle psych riot. Track three's high-octane guitars circle Atsuo's "yeah"'s and "ooh"'s until treating us to a magnificent feedback'n'drum finale. Track four ups the fuel intake, sporting Pink's highest in-the-red ratio, while track five sweeps aside its predecessors with a pile of industrial Melvins sludge topped with sheering Blade Runner delay, six-string atmospherics, and angstful, wailed vocals. Then, as that brief respite passes, "Electric" cranks the cowbell for two minutes of instrumental boogie, replete with tiny post-punk guitar daggers closing out the song. And there's still more distorted head space to follow, all of it well-stitched and feral. To keep it brief, key moments include: 1) the rising/falling near-pop vocals and final wall of fuzz on track seven; 2) stoner handclaps and Olivia Tremor Control studio effects on track eight; and 3) the textural shift of track nine, where bone-dry, gutteral drums and crashing junk-shard cymbals overtake the bass fuzz and vocals completely.
Enter the finale. Ten seconds of silence introduces the gentle strum and softly brushed drums of the penultimate "My Machine". Its mood hearkens back to the opening song, briefly reprising its blissed-out tone, but two minutes later, reveals itself instead as a forward-looking antidotal preface to Pink's final 10-minute juggernaut and standout track. The closer delivers an absolutely massive wallop, overlapping entropic vocal lines with furious ambient spillage. I used to think that, of everyone in the punk realm, Unwound or Drive Like Jehu had the best control over their feedback flutters, but this thing's gonzo in its perfectly dense acrobatics. And best of all, its unshakably addictive refrain, blistering, scorched-out guitars, thunderous, supercharged rock, and countless change-ups not only warrant its extended length, but make it feel about half as long as it actually is, and keep the listener fully engaged throughout its entire runtime.
As their timeline suggests-- or, to be more accurate, as their history makes it impossible to guess-- Boris could follow Pink with an hour of fried electro-acoustic guitar, powerbook, and piano glitches. Or they could soundtrack a short film in braille. Then, of course, there's Altar, their much-anticipated upcoming collaboration with Sunn0))). But for now, basking in Pink's riptide, Wata, Takeshi, and Atsuo are 2006's balls-out riff-makers to beat. The bar's been raised high and early, rockers-- don't bump your head when you try to sneak under it. | 2006-01-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-01-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Diwphalanx | January 9, 2006 | 8.7 | 29aed577-3dff-416d-8895-50cbea2aeaf2 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The Black Keys’ singer’s solo album bears little relation to his past efforts, yet nonetheless exudes his signature retro-soul fetishism. It’s casual in execution and intricate in construction. | The Black Keys’ singer’s solo album bears little relation to his past efforts, yet nonetheless exudes his signature retro-soul fetishism. It’s casual in execution and intricate in construction. | Dan Auerbach: Waiting on a Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23276-waiting-on-a-song/ | Waiting on a Song | On the opening title track of his new solo album, Dan Auerbach sings a song about wanting to write a song—before invoking the age-old myth that it’s often best to just stop trying and let the tune find you. “Songs don’t grow on trees/You gotta pick ’em out of the breeze,” he sings on “Waiting on a Song,” a twinkly hit of countrified pop that, as the album cover suggests, sounds very much like it came wafting in as Auerbach reclined on a pile of leaves. But the end result is ultimately a testament to the great paradox of songwriting: it takes a lot of heavy lifting to make something that sounds so effortless.
Auerbach moved from his native Akron, Ohio to Nashville back in 2010, where he has since overseen the Black Keys become one of the biggest, busiest rock bands in America (and by extension, became an in-demand producer for everyone from Dr. John to Lana Del Rey.) Now, comfortably entrenched in his Easy Eye Sound studio, Auerbach’s approach for Waiting on a Song was a lot more like Planning for a Song. The album assembles a roots-rock dream team that includes famous names like John Prine, Duane Eddy, and Mark Knopfler, but also seasoned Nashville tunesmiths like Luke Dick, Michael Heeney, and David Ferguson. As per Music City tradition, songwriting for the album was treated like the job that it is, with tunes developed and recorded on a set weekly schedule.
The result is an album that both bears very little relation to Auerbach’s past efforts, yet nonetheless exudes his signature retro-soul fetishism. Whether it was his 2009 solo debut Keep It Hid or his 2015 foray with the Arcs, Auerbach’s outside pursuits have had the Keys’ muddy footprints all over them. But Waiting on a Song could be his first record without a drop of the blues in the mix, with Auerbach favoring the less gruff, more melodic register in his voice atop a studio-smoothed concoction of country, soul, folk, and power pop.
With “Livin’ in Sin” and shuffling “Shine on Me” (powered by Knopfler’s unmistakable thumb-pickin’ tone), the album essentially functions as Auerbach’s less-democratic version of the Traveling Wilburys, like one of those ’70s-focused satellite radio stations where hit songs from different genres are grouped together by virtue of their common decade and blur into one another. The symphonic soul of “Malibu Man” crosswires the grooves of Al Green with the glittery choruses of T. Rex; “King of a One Horse Town” comes on like Neil Young’s “Down by the River” played on acoustic guitar and produced by John Barry.
While Waiting on a Song is casual in execution, it’s extremely intricate in construction, with each disco-string sweep, brass-section stab, and razor-sharp acoustic strum deployed with push-button precision. At times, the album feels less like a traditional singer/songwriter affair than a business card for Auerbach’s studio. Alas, Waiting on a Song also betrays the limitations of its song-factory set-up, in that the consummate craftsmanship renders the lyrics a secondary, impersonal concern.
Even if he isn’t explicitly singing the blues here, Auerbach still peddles its well-worn witchy-woman cliches. The undercooked folk-funk of “Cherrybomb” spins a gold-digger caricature about a girl who’s “sweeter than an apple pie” but bolts “as soon as my money went away.” And though the banjo-plucked “Stand by My Girl” initially sounds like a pledge of commitment, it’s delivered by a back-door man who’s afraid “she’ll kill me if I don’t.” They’re the sort of eye-rolling lines that are more easily digested within the Black Keys, but are left hung out to dry by this album’s pristine production and light-hearted approach. For all of Auerbach’s eagerness to deliver the Music Row-worthy songwriting goods, Waiting on a Song can you leave you wishing he had waited a little longer. | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Easy Eye Sound | June 1, 2017 | 6.7 | 29af1ad2-e375-4ab3-85dd-dd4ec084a5c6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Scott Walker's third album in the last 17 years features drums and guitars and other passing references to rock music, but its deepest roots are in the dissonant, turn-of-the century compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. | Scott Walker's third album in the last 17 years features drums and guitars and other passing references to rock music, but its deepest roots are in the dissonant, turn-of-the century compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. | Scott Walker: Bish Bosch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17387-bish-bosch/ | Bish Bosch | Bish Bosch starts with 30 seconds of what sounds like a jackhammer and ends with a funereal rendition of "Jingle Bells" for solo xylophone. In-between, there are tense silences, horror-movie strings, and 20-minute songs without verses or choruses. At the center of it all is an old man wailing about cutting off his own balls and feeding them to someone. The man seems to think this is some kind of opera. He is Scott Walker, and he puts the situation to us like this: "I've severed my reeking gonads/ Fed them to your shrunken face."
"Gonads" and "sever" are good indications of the vocabulary and subject matter at work here. Like Walker's last two albums-- 1995's Tilt and 2006's The Drift-- Bish Bosch is austere, high-minded music about a dirty world where people always seem to be getting castrated or mutilated by something or another. It features drums and guitars and other passing references to rock music, but its deepest roots are in the dissonant, turn-of-the century compositions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg-- music that divided its early audiences between applause, hissing, and laughter. More than anything Walker's latter-day albums sound like a parody of what people probably think of when they think of "avant-garde." No scene captures them better than video footage taken during the recording of The Drift, in which Walker-- a friendly looking man in a baseball hat-- instructs a percussionist on exactly how he would like him to punch a side of beef.
The story of Walker's career is a strange and amazing one. He grew up in Ohio but spent most of his life in England and Europe. He was cover-boy famous by his early 20s and a has-been by 30. Between 1967 and 1969 he released a series of orchestral pop albums whose stories about Joseph Stalin and childhood prostitution contrasted-- sometimes beautifully, sometimes just cynically-- with their high-gloss arrangements. No man has ever sung the word "gonorrhea" with more poise.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, he effectively disappeared, putting out a few sub-mediocre country albums, a few new songs with his former group the Walker Brothers (including "The Electrician", which is really the starting point for the music he's making now), and 1984's Climate of Hunter. The output of his unexpected second act-- Tilt, The Drift, and now Bish Bosch-- have taken 20 years to record. Scarcity creates demand-- this is basic economics. With an artist like Walker, though, long waiting times between albums serve mostly to reinforce the idea that he is careful and deliberate, and in turn, the idea that his music is not just product, but that purest of things which cannot be rushed: Art.
Besides the appropriately exhausting 20-minute sweep of "SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", the best songs on Bish Bosch-- "'See You Don't Bump His Head'", "Corps De Blah", and "Epizootics!"-- are also the most immediate. Walker's approach here, especially compared to Tilt and The Drift, is almost cartoonish: Big, bouncy saxophones, bright trumpet fanfares and, on "Corps", what sounds like a small dog barking. These songs work for one simple reason: In the midst of all Walker's void-courting experimentation, they give listeners something vaguely familiar to hang on to.
Here and there, the contrast between the brainy and the base is so deliberate it sounds like pandering. When Walker sings “If shit were music, you'd be a brass band!" on "Zercon", for example, he's probably trying to remind people that this is all supposed to be on some level funny, which makes it instantly less funny-- not to mention less tragic-- than the Walker who sang lines like "I've become a giant, I fill every street/ I dwarf the rooftops, I hunchback the moon, stars dance at my feet" in a song about an overworked husband whose only liberation in life comes from whores.
As much as it can sound like it stands alone, Bish Bosch is part of a tradition of music that tried to find new ways to articulate that same old misery. Wagner operas, Mahler symphonies, the brutal cabaret of Jacques Brel (who Walker covered extensively in the 1960s), David Bowie, Diamanda Galás, the aggressive anti-music of no wave, even early Swans: this is music that doesn't sound exactly like Scott Walker but makes Walker's bleakness and theatricality sound that much more familiar. Bish Bosch is difficult music that was intended to sound difficult and be enjoyed primarily by people who enjoy difficult experiences. The irony is that it is difficult in conventional ways.
Walker's career has always been surrounded with the whispery, romantic myth of genius, and we need myths like that-- myths about people who seem to forge their own path into the wilderness of their art, slowly and alone. The danger is to pretend that the music exists somewhere above us, or, like a carnival ride, is something we have to be This Smart to understand.
Like the movie director David Lynch, Walker is an artist that people-- fans and non-fans-- seem bent on "getting," as though there was anything to "get" in the first place. Let's pretend there isn't. Let's pretend that when Walker tells a "you're so fat" joke halfway through "Zercon", it's not a metaphor for anything, but an insult about fat people.
A few minutes later, he breaks down and starts screaming, "Did you ever throw your own mother's food back at her? Did you ever tell her 'Take this junk away'? What kind of an unnatural son would do that to his own mother?" Let's pretend that the moment has nothing to do with 5th-century Moorish history or the astronomy behind brown dwarf stars. Let's pretend it's simpler than that. Behind all its obscure references and theatrics, Bish Bosch is a catalog of basic human cruelty-- a subject no footnote could ever make any easier to understand. | 2012-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | December 3, 2012 | 8 | 29af5038-b150-45eb-8d5c-b8ac9d8dfd07 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The Horse Lords saxophonist uses overdubbing to recast his instrument as a virtual organ. The quest of its making is as much part of the appeal as the music itself. | The Horse Lords saxophonist uses overdubbing to recast his instrument as a virtual organ. The quest of its making is as much part of the appeal as the music itself. | Andrew Bernstein: a presentation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrew-bernstein-a-presentation/ | a presentation | If you have any preconception of what a saxophone is supposed to do in experimental music, leave it at the door before entering Andrew Bernstein’s a presentation. The sax wasn’t even designed to do the things Bernstein makes it do; as a monophonic instrument subject to the finite resource of the player’s breath, it’s inherently averse to polyphonic, longform drone pieces like the three that comprise a presentation. But by overdubbing layers of saxophone into dense chords, Bernstein has recast his instrument as a sort of reed organ. Instead of the Coltrane-Sanders-Ayler continuum Bernstein tapped on 2018’s An Exploded View of Time and in his work with Baltimore’s Horse Lords, you might instead think of the pipe-organ music of Sarah Davachi and Kali Malone, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Pauline Oliveros’ Accordion & Voice, or maybe Homer Simpson passing out on the horn of his car on the way to Duff Gardens.
a presentation sounds like a lot of things other than a solo saxophone album, and yet it never seems to make a big deal out of the fact that it’s entirely made on saxophone. Aside from the breath control required to sustain the notes, this slow, simple music isn’t particularly conducive to virtuosity, and he’s not trying to coax any sounds from the instrument that no one has ever thought to coax before. The album hinges on a simple, rather brilliant idea: Why not use this instrument to make this music? There’s no reason it couldn’t have been performed on a polyphonic instrument, and that’s kind of the point. The irrational quest of its making is as much part of the appeal as the music itself.
It also suits the stubbornness, obstinacy, and immovability of these three pieces: the nearly half-hour “in flux” and two shorter tracks that set Bernstein’s saxophone against electronic drone tones. If you get a twinge of awe looking at the Pyramids of Giza or the Three Gorges Dam or the Merchandise Mart, you’ll find something to like in this music. This is blank, featureless stuff, devoid of rhythm, melody, or texture beyond the light grit in Bernstein’s tone or occasional phasing between two layers of vibrato. The brain starts thinking architecturally, and the individual layers of saxophone start to resemble logs in a cabin or posts in a fence. a presentation fires the brain up for the same reason an isolation tank does: In the absence of anything to latch onto, it starts to fill in the blanks.
Even if it’s up your alley, this isn’t the kind of thing you’ll want to listen to every day. It’s trebly, austere, and dissonant, thanks to Bernstein’s use of just intonation rather than the equal temperament most common in Western music. But as a testament to the human capacity for ingenuity, it’s kind of awesome. Reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey and discussing the scene in which the proto-humans discover the monolith, Roger Ebert speculated that “the smooth artificial surfaces and right angles of the monolith, which was obviously made by intelligent beings, triggered the realization in an ape brain that intelligence could be used to shape the objects of the world.” Eons of evolution later, such a vast and finely wrought object as a presentation can still induce the same awe. | 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | June 1, 2022 | 7 | 29b74747-eb04-4a56-a1a8-7d46cb5078b1 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Following the loss of her voice while out on tour, the Chicago singer-songwriter turned to her synthesizers as she recuperated, building loops out of glowing, meditative tones. | Following the loss of her voice while out on tour, the Chicago singer-songwriter turned to her synthesizers as she recuperated, building loops out of glowing, meditative tones. | Gia Margaret: Mia Gargaret | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gia-margaret-mia-gargaret/ | Mia Gargaret | The voice is a singer’s portal into an audience’s heart. It can inspire recognition, empathy, the feeling that you aren’t alone in your sadness or joy. “The listener’s inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her own throat, she exposes the listener’s interior,” the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum wrote in his book The Queen’s Throat. So how does a singer communicate when their voice suddenly vanishes?
This was the predicament facing the dream-folk songwriter Gia Margaret after her voice disappeared while touring her 2018 debut, There’s Always Glimmer. As she recuperated at home in Chicago, Margaret took to puttering around on a synthesizer, building loops of glowing, meditative tones. These ambient experiments form the basis of her second record, a collection of 11 gentle songs titled Mia Gargaret.
On There’s Always Glimmer, Margaret invoked nature in words, through images of mist and moons spilling through windows, embers burning, stones sinking into water. Without her usual tools of communication, she turns to field recordings to expand her world: Church bells, footsteps, and bird calls are sprinkled throughout. Pensive opener “Apathy” ends with a clip of her vocal exercises, with a therapist cheerily encouraging Margaret to feel “free in your body and let things come out the way they want.” After several songs of dissonant synths, “Lakes” pairs samples of crashing waves against the delicate pickings of an acoustic guitar.
Early on “barely there,” Margaret uses her own speaking voice—marking its first significant appearance on the album—to reflect on anxiety. “Do you ever feel like you’re living your life but you’re also barely there?” she asks. “The conversations you can’t remember because when you had them your mind was just trying to make it to the next sentence.” Mia Gargaret’s patient pace and contemplative tone encapsulate these questions of existence, dissociation, and introspection. The aptly titled “sadballad” pairs a melancholic piano melody with elongated synth notes. Suspended in a state of calming lethargy, “3 movements” nods to Margaret’s classical piano training.
“Body” samples a lecture titled “Overcome Social Anxiety” by the British philosopher Alan Watts, whose work also inspired Buchla wizard Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith on her 2017 record The Kid. “‘My body is a burden to me.’ To whom? To whom? That’s the question,” Watts says over Margaret’s twinkling synthesizer. “When there is no body left for whom the body can be a burden, then the body isn’t a burden. But so long as you fight it, it is.” On the final track, “lesson,” Margaret’s singing voice materializes for the first and only time. Featuring contributions from Oakland singer-songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, “lesson” harks back to Margaret’s debut while pointing to a new future that incorporates the lessons learned on Mia Gargaret. The song both suggests the healing of her vocal cords and seems to confirm Watts’ words: When given time to rest and regenerate, the body is capable of small wonders. | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | June 25, 2020 | 7 | 29bba6af-dce0-495f-bd92-70f64efad63a | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
MINUTES FROM THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM SOCIETY
As I'm sure you are all aware, 2002 ... | MINUTES FROM THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM SOCIETY
As I'm sure you are all aware, 2002 ... | The Mountain Goats: Tallahassee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5450-tallahassee/ | Tallahassee | MINUTES FROM THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM SOCIETY
As I'm sure you are all aware, 2002 has been a fantastic year for the concept album, quite possibly one of the best since our heyday at the turn of the 1970s. While major-label artists resisted the rock opera urge (which is perhaps for the best; let us not forget MACHINA and Chris Gaines), acts below the mainstream radar took up the slack nicely. John Vanderslice, Black Heart Procession, Pedro the Lion... hip-hop even gave us a concept record that, shockingly, was not a science fiction gimmick: Mr. Lif's I Phantom.
Soon, we'll be voting on final nominees for our honorary Pete Townshend Concept Album of the Year award. But before you cast your ballot, some members have requested that we address a late entry to this year's competition: The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee. Since his full-length cassette debut in 1991, John Darnielle has threaded the sagas of flawed relationships through his albums, generally told in one-song installments. Now, for the first time in 81 albums (okay, 16... or something, it's confusing), Darnielle has expanded these tragic stories into an entire LP, set in the diamond city of Florida's panhandle.
The idea is enticing: Darnielle, known for crafting two-minute biographies like "Fall of the Star High School Running Back" richer in detail than a 700-page novel, is given greater room to flesh out his stories. His talent for depicting the rises and falls of a relationship in singular, tiny details (fighting over the car radio, for example) makes him ideal for the task of an indie-folk Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
The result is the pleasant musical equivalent of a slow, deliberate character study, rich with symbols like circling crows and a house in disrepair, more concerned with in-depth observation of the protagonists than with narrative movement. Unfortunately, this pace makes for a less than successful concept album, with song topics tracing an endless I Love You/I Love You Not oscillation, from the cautious happiness of the title track and "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" to the for-the-throat attacks of "No Children" or "Have to Explode".
The music is distracted by another concept, as well-- a meta-concept, if you will, with Tallahassee touted as the first Mountain Goats release to be recorded with a full, traditionally-instrumented rock band. Darnielle spends most of the album teasing the listener with this promise, adding a bass here, some minimal drums there, perhaps a harmonica, before (gotcha!) we arrive back at a Darnielle solo arrangement. When we finally come to a song with an actual, honest-to-God rhythm section ("See America Right") it sounds disappointingly like... Cake?!
The majority of Tallahassee, recorded with Darnielle's Extra Glenns cohort Franklin Bruno, is, like the Extra Glenns' Martial Arts Weekend, typically stripped-down Goats fare with an occasional minimal embellishment. And as has been the case whenever Darnielle has chosen a studio over his trusty Panasonic boombox, the end result sounds somewhat thin-- especially considering the more delicate strum-style he's been developing of late. A few exceptions are pleasant, like the Casio-fed "Southwood Plantation Road" or the bright piano line that runs through "No Children" before the delightfully/horrifically bitter singalong chorus, but songs like "Peacock" and "Idylls of the King" are over-wispy. Johnny Goat's usual lyrical acuity also comes slightly short of his usual track record, as he unveils one of the best entries from his notebook of "Love is like..." similes (in this case, it's like "the border between Greece and Albania") only to later drop the dud, "People say friends don't destroy one another/ What do they know about friends?"
These transgressions are somewhat forgiven, however, by "Oceanographer's Choice", Tallahassee's only song to truly come through with the full-band promise, and a breathtaking portrait of the usual relationship violence becoming physical. With drums and ominous organ that finally add some urgency to the story, and sad, sliding electric guitar swooping in and out like symbolic crows, the music finally measures up to the emotional intensity of Darnielle's imagery. When the band drops out, the scene freezes, and the characters fully realize the consequences of their meltdown: "What will I do when I don't have you?"
Suffice to say, if the rest of Tallahassee lived up to the standard set by "Oceanographer's Choice", we'd have a surefire candidate here for Concept Album of the Year. However, Tallahassee is not even 2002's second best song cycle about disintegrating love (it's succeeded by Pedro the Lion's Control and Black Heart Procession's Amore del Tropico). While Tallahassee, as literature, is richly detailed, even stunning on occasion, Darnielle's apparent phobia for full-band arrangements prevents the music from keeping pace with the storylines. It's an admirable experiment, but not one that will likely find its way to the podium come election time. | 2002-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | December 15, 2002 | 6.7 | 29bbabf8-d267-4851-a8fa-ba1be87d6c85 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The new Mastodon EP is an eclectic, psychedelic journey that sees guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds picking up a Sho-Bud 13-string pedal steel guitar. His mastery of the instrument is quickly clear. | The new Mastodon EP is an eclectic, psychedelic journey that sees guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds picking up a Sho-Bud 13-string pedal steel guitar. His mastery of the instrument is quickly clear. | Mastodon: Cold Dark Place EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mastodon-cold-dark-place-ep/ | Cold Dark Place EP | Across their catalog, Mastodon scream about walking trees and assassinated czars; giant sharks and steam-breathers; sex in space and sleep undersea. But despite their predilections towards heavy-metal high fantasy, the Atlanta band have been, and always will be, peddlers of the cold, hard, extremely loud truth. “We tend to channel any and all emotions through this art that we call Mastodon,” bassist Troy Sanders said in an interview last Spring in anticipation of Emperor of Sand, a collectively-written account of cancer struggle masquerading as a prog-metal-spiked Arabian Nights. (Three members of Mastodon had family members battling the disease.) By expressing their present personal pain in terms of mythic beings, deadly monsters, and wrecking-ball riffs, the band don’t just own their anguish; they make a cosmic spectacle of it, typically a top-notch one at that.
Mastodon’s new EP, Cold Dark Place, is primarily sourced from a single tormented soul: Brent Hinds, the band’s fleet-fingered, sludgy-throated, erstwhile-penis-statue-carving axeman/vocalist. Originally conceived and composed as a solo album, this four-track effort—the contents of which originated during the sessions for their last two albums—eventually blossomed into a de facto Mastodon record. The final product, while technically credited to the full band, is distinctly Hinds’ own, all daredevil guitar stunts and quaking, crooned refrains: a satisfying, if nonessential, dose of latter-day Mastodon, not to mention a compelling self-portrait.
Where Emperor of Sand found its creators self-immolating in a far-off desert, Cold Dark Place hits closer to home. The band’s southern roots are on full display here thanks to Hinds’ latest weapon of choice: a 1954 Sho-Bud 13-string pedal steel guitar he acquired several years ago, fully outfitted with knee and foot-benders. Texturally alluring and technically intimidating, the Sho-Bud comes with a steep learning curve; most axemen spend their whole careers trying to reap its atmospheric rewards. Not so for Hinds, whose mastery of the instrument is clear within seconds of six-minute opener “North Side Star.” As his dulcet wails and arpeggios drift around the cavernous sonic space like phantasms in the night, the Sho-Bud transmogrifies and warps, a bluegrass instrument on a terrifying acid trip. Halfway through their psychedelic journey, the spell breaks, giving way to a southern-fried boogie that reeks of funk, but mostly dread.
This game of stylistic hopscotch, as with most of Mastodon’s records, is the EP’s M.O. “Blue Walsh,” a holdover from the days of 2014’s Once More ’Round the Sun led by drummer Brann Dailor, snakes between prickly psych-pop à la Pinback and the usual syncopated sludge. Lead single “Toe to Toes,” meanwhile, pits Hinds’ arena-friendly choruses against his bandmates’ bruising breakdowns. The EP’s mercurial sprawl, coupled with its lack of overarching narrative, occasionally makes the band susceptible to slog, primarily on the concluding title track: a downtempo ballad similarly dominated by Hinds’ Sho-budding and singing. It spends far too much time flopping around in the muck, rendering a painstakingly-crafted finale dynamically dull; Hinds’ uncharacteristically muffled vocals, which sound as though they were recorded through a microphone filled with cotton balls, don’t make things any easier.
Near the end of “Toe to Toes,” though, Hinds sheds light on his life as a raconteur rock star. “I played the fool/I played the sinner/I played the part of me that no one wanted to see,” bleats the face-tatted southerner, in a rare show of intimacy. Therein lies the record’s central conceit: the real cold dark place is the heart of the man who made it. Hinds said so himself in a recent interview with Loudwire, going on to reveal the EP’s big takeaway as “the concept of living and how much it hurts to fucking be alive.” And yet, however thematically mired in misery, Cold Dark Place plays out as a triumphant march into the darkness: one man’s pain, collectively conjured and conquered. | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Reprise | September 25, 2017 | 7 | 29c9a6ed-49e0-433d-8500-80da1cc75cb6 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
If last year's Syro was a masterful summation of the sound Richard D. James pioneered on his classic 1990s Aphex Twin releases, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a very good reminder that there was also experimentation going on alongside the canonical LPs. | If last year's Syro was a masterful summation of the sound Richard D. James pioneered on his classic 1990s Aphex Twin releases, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a very good reminder that there was also experimentation going on alongside the canonical LPs. | Aphex Twin: Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20156-computer-controlled-acoustic-instruments-pt2-ep/ | Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP | You had a feeling this was going to happen. After returning last year from more than a decade of light activity, Richard D. James is back with his second Aphex Twin record in four months. If Syro was a masterful summation of the sound James pioneered on his classic 1990s releases, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a reminder that there was always a lot of low-profile experimentation going on alongside the canonical LPs. Rather than cobble together Syro leftovers (it’s fair to assume there are many of these), James draws from a different aesthetic altogether. It’s all there in the title: whatever the process for actually assembling these tracks, the individual sounds do indeed seem to be physical objects vibrating in space, as if James had marshaled a battalion of robots to realize his latest compositions.
Texturally, the music bears some similarity to bits found on Drukqs, specifically the prepared piano tracks that contrasted with that album's more frenetic breakbeat excursions. "Jynweythek Ylow", "Strotha Tynhe", and "Penty Harmomium" are clear antecedents to the music found here, but Acoustic Instruments takes those ideas further. Piano, prepared and otherwise, features heavily, but so do various drums and wood and metal percussion instruments. And where James used to offer his electro-acoustic pieces as a showcase for lyrical melodies, about half the music here consists of crisply arranged beats, with loping drum lines that occasionally veer toward funk.
The most striking thing about Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 (the title is a typical James puzzle—no word of where Pt 1 may be) is how directly his musical concerns can be mapped on to another context. The grooves, the de-tuned melodies, the bridges, the way rhythms can lag a split second behind the beat—all are signatures of his electronic work and all are found here intact. A good point of comparison demonstrating how difficult this must be is Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin, an album from a decade ago that found the new music ensemble tackling some of James’ better-known compositions. The skeleton of tunes like "4" and "Meltphace 6" was there, but the sense of movement was way off. Here, we can hear the person and the sensibility behind the sounds.
On some tracks, you can almost hear their electronic counterparts. "diskhat1" features clipped drums with a steady hi-hat and a prepared piano riff that sounds dissonant to the point of seeming alien. "hat5c 0001 rec–4" is constructed with similar tools but uses a piano motif from the bass clef to give it the anxious feel of a tightly-sequenced synth. "piano un10 it happened" can be filed with James’ most delicate and beautiful pieces, one of those effortless melodies that vanishes into the air right around the time you start thinking about the Windham Hill catalog. Indeed, brevity is key: Acoustic Instruments is the perfect length—28 minutes long, 13 tracks, with about half fully fleshed out and the others serving as sketches—for this sort of treatment. James has a handful of ideas, he comes in and executes them perfectly, and then he gets out.
If Syro was a re-introduction for James, a way to put his music in front of people who didn’t know or follow along with his earlier work, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a release for established fans, people who want to know what his pieces would sound like in an altogether different setting. So while the EP feels like it can be connected to other music (it’s easy to draw lines to gamelan music and kinetic film scores), the greatest pleasure comes in knowing where it came from and how it came to be. It’s an Aphex Twin EP more than just an EP, and as those go it’s very good. | 2015-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | January 27, 2015 | 8.3 | 29d1077c-4e58-4286-88d3-a86dc5521264 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After the post-punk atmospheres of last year’s Love What Survives, Mount Kimbie return to dance music with a DJ set that proves them to be both adventurous selectors and cagey mixers. | After the post-punk atmospheres of last year’s Love What Survives, Mount Kimbie return to dance music with a DJ set that proves them to be both adventurous selectors and cagey mixers. | Mount Kimbie: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-kimbie-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | For some artists, it can take some effort to get out from under the shadow of the scene they came up in. Consider Mount Kimbie, who got lumped into the “post-dubstep” bucket alongside James Blake (whose post-2010 output has put considerable distance between himself and that descriptor). Last year’s spiky Love What Survives found the duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos more inclined to draw on post-punk and German kosmische rather than dance music. True, they kept up a sideline DJing bass music and grime, but they consider themselves a band first and foremost, telling Resident Advisor, “We weren’t as massively into club culture as a lot of people… We never intended to DJ at all.”
With post-dubstep fading in the rearview, Mount Kimbie provide the latest entry in the long-running DJ-Kicks series. Despite their alleged intention not to be DJs, the mix proves them to be not only adventurous selectors but cagey mixers as well. They embrace both mellow, metallic-tinged rhythms and full-on roaring techno, moving swiftly between the two poles with a set that breathlessly cycles through over 20 tracks in just under 50 minutes. It’s restless yet steadfast in its direction. The mix ramps up quickly, moving from the watery abstractions of vocoder composer Madalyn Merkey to the shimmering electro of Via App’s “Baby K Interaction” and the distorted flicker of early-’80s Australian industrialists Severed Heads. The latter two artists both set the mood of the mix and also make return appearances.
Barely five minutes in, the mysterious gamelan ensemble De Leon and their measured metallophone cadences emerge. Such clangs hark back to the driving pulses behind Love What Survives (think of the mbira-like plinks on “Marilyn” and “SP12 Beat”)—a burnished timbre that the mix returns to often, from the spark-spraying whiplashes of Object Blue’s “Even in You” to the subway-construction echoes of Mount Kimbie’s own contribution, “Southgate.”
What might initially scan as detours—like the experimental chirrups of cellist Oliver Coates and the tumbling percussion and electronics from the duo of Beatrice Dillon & Rupert Clervaux—all fold into Kimbie’s undeterred trajectory. Same goes with the hardier dance tracks. Whether in the pinging Berlin minimalism Efdemin’s “America (Terrence Dixon Minimal Detroit Mix)” or the deeper strains of N.Y. House’n Authority’s late-’80s classic “APT. 2B,” Mount Kimbie tease out and highlight each track’s experimental qualities. When the smeared, muffled vocals and squawking signals of Severed Heads’ “Lamborghini” drop into the Abstract Eye’s well-deep techno, it shows the duo’s knack for taking each new sonic element and feeding it right back into the relentless pace of the mix.
The velocity ticks upwards with Marco Bernardi’s glowering electro and the bewildering pings of Aleksi Perälä’s “UK74R1512110”; the latter turns twinkling as Nina Kraviz’s pounding techno reduction of Mount Kimbie’s own “Blue Train Lines” takes over. Kraviz atomizes King Krule’s howl, but just when it seems like the song’s cut-brakes techno climax will careen over the cliff’s edge, they land on a groggy closer in “Obviously.” Credited to the seemingly obscure duo of Taz & Meeks, it turns out to be the handiwork of Tirzah and Mica Levi: a groggy, chopped-up hybrid of R&B and 2-step that you might even call “post-dubstep.” | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | September 28, 2018 | 7.5 | 29d1d439-a533-49b7-896b-69317d56470b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The debut album from UK indie pop artist Hannah Rodgers, aka Pixx, is forlorn, agitated, and at times infectious. She sings critically of her doubt and discontent with our times. | The debut album from UK indie pop artist Hannah Rodgers, aka Pixx, is forlorn, agitated, and at times infectious. She sings critically of her doubt and discontent with our times. | Pixx: The Age of Anxiety | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23346-the-age-of-anxiety/ | The Age of Anxiety | “The great vice of our age,” W.H. Auden lamented in a letter to his friend Theodore Spencer after the publication of his final book-length poem, The Age of Anxiety, “is that we are all not only ‘actors’ but know that we are. It is only at moments, in spite of ourselves, and when we least expect it that our real feelings break through.” Auden felt we had been paralyzed by our own self-awareness—that the more we reflected on our place in the world, the more entrenched we became. For Auden, the examined life only made it harder to live.
The Age of Anxiety was published in 1947, and it has been continually reimagined. The poem was adapted by Leonard Bernstein as the Symphony No. 2 for piano and orchestra in 1949, by Jerome Robbins as a ballet (set to Bernstein’s music) in 1950, by the Living Theater Studio in New York as a play in 1954, and again by students at Princeton in 1960. And now it arrives as an album by UK indie pop artist Pixx—sort of. Surrey-born Hannah Rodgers, 21 years old and a new signee to 4AD, found her debut album’s suggestive title scrawled in a notebook handed down by her brother. This record is not an adaptation of the poem so much as it was inspired by that phrase’s enduring intrigue.
Still, Pixx’s Anxiety and Auden’s share much in common. Both seem forlorn, agitated, sick with ennui. Both bristle at the anguish and malaise of the age. “Toes,” an erratic, hazy synth-pop number reminiscent of a pre-Visions Grimes, lambasts the demands of a life broadcast on-screen for likes and follows: “The longest hair/The bluest eyes/The whitest teeth/The fakest smile,” Rodgers recites flatly, before concluding with a simple droll order: “Let’s go out/Let’s go outside.” Elsewhere she addresses the tension between vanity and social consciousness—both on the rise. “Everyone is in a rush to have some fun but times are tough,” she sings on the buoyant “Waterslides.” “There must be something here for me/I’m terrified by what I see.”
At times this disaffection feels too broad, even adolescent. Lead single “I Bow Down” is monotonous and overproduced, leaden with a repetitive vocal melody and scuzzy, muddled electric guitar; its lyrics muse vaguely on Auden’s “age of anxiety,” but amount to little more than nondescript platitudes (“to put a weight on it/would be to mold the answer/deceivingly”). “Everything is Weird in America,” the album’s most straightforward bid for pop triumph, is as trite as its title suggests. “But be aware it’s not all it seems/A vision built on movie screens,” Rodgers intones. “Hear me, hear me cry out/Everything is weird in America.” That the latter refrain proves so infectious makes the hollow sentiment all the harder to shake.
Pixx is at her sharpest when her doubt and discontent are animated by something more acute. In the case of “Romance,” the album’s best track by far, it’s resentment, rancor, and rage—familiar emotions to pop singers the world over. “You don’t care as long as you leave in a pair,” Rodgers snarls, positively vicious, as waves of synth boil around her. “You’ll be fine as long as you keep up the flair.” The similarly harsh “The Girls” is vitalized by its own insecurity. It suffers from one of Rodger’s most unfortunate rhymes—“I hope they read about the boys/Who are no good, treat them like toys”—but its rich vein of sorrow is tapped to great effect. “I wish that I could dance like the rest of the girls,” Rodgers croons, movingly. It’s the statement of an artist who, in Auden’s phrase, not only feels but is critically conscious of her emotions. | 2017-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | June 12, 2017 | 6.5 | 29dcf88d-a341-4ced-92c6-1e96a4c71865 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | null |
After last year's tiresome Paralytic Stalks, Kevin Barnes regroups for what is arguably the best—not to mention the funniest, prickliest, most purple, and least fastidious—Of Montreal effort since 2007's *Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? * | After last year's tiresome Paralytic Stalks, Kevin Barnes regroups for what is arguably the best—not to mention the funniest, prickliest, most purple, and least fastidious—Of Montreal effort since 2007's *Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? * | Of Montreal: lousy with sylvanbriar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18606-of-montreal-lousy-with-sylvanbriar/ | lousy with sylvanbriar | Credit Kevin Barnes for knowing when he’s testing your patience. After last year’s Paralytic Stalks, where his flamboyance came across as ho-hum and even his self-absorption sounded strangely obligatory, Barnes changed up his process for Of Montreal’s 12th album. He left Athens, Georgia, and decamped to San Francisco to write. Instead of recording by himself, as he has done on almost every Of Montreal album, he assembled a small band of sympathetic performers. Together, they eschewed computers and lofty conceptualizing, favoring in-the-moment energy over down-the-rabbit-hole perfectionism. Relative to his usual dictatorial working method, it was positively democratic.
Especially after Stalks, Lousy is bracing. It’s arguably the best—not to mention the funniest, prickliest, most purple, and least fastidious—Of Montreal album since Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Barnes sounds more focused and straightforward, perhaps newly aware that his listeners won’t follow him just anywhere. The songs here boast clearly defined choruses and verses and bridges, even if his digressions within melodies lend the music an intriguing volatility. If he was channeling Prince and Faust and the fictional glam-funk avatar Georgie Fruit on previous records, on Lousy with Sylvianbriar his spirit guides seem to be Donovan and Dylan. The album’s softer moments tweak the former’s pastoral folk and spiritually declarative lyrics, and when this iteration of the group cuts loose, they sound like they’re racing down Highway 61 en route to Plato’s Retreat. On “Belle Glade Missionaries” Barnes adopts Dylan’s long-winded phrasing, rushed delivery, and heavily coded lyricism, but the performance never descends into impersonation.
Dylan has been an evergreen influence on generations of musicians, but Barnes seems intent on puncturing the Bob mythos a bit, which means Lousy is never lousy with hero worship. Is that album cover a cheeky allusion to Bob’s infamous motorcycle accident, after which he retreated from public scrutiny for a few years? “Hegira Émigré” could be a sly parody of Dylanophilia, suggesting how ill-suited the old forms of protest music are to the post-Occupy world: “My baby’s meditating to stop the war, but I’ve got myself a rifle 'cause I ain't gonna get walked on anymore,” Barnes sings, as the band stomps around like the Band ca. ’66.
Barnes' songwriting has always thrived on petty feuds and lacerated relationships, stoking low-level, long-simmering interpersonal conflicts for inspiration. At his best, he teases out the tensile connections between humans, giving voice to the darker thoughts and casual prejudices that cloud every mind. Witness “Colossus” : “Your mother hung herself in the National Theater, when she was four months pregnant with your sister,” Barnes sings, setting the scene for someone else’s grim family drama. “Maybe your family, they are just losers.” The statement reads as harsh, but its poignant and commiserative, somehow, heightened by the band’s curiously delicate arrangement. It’s the most empathy Barnes has mustered in ages, even if the sentiment is barbed.
Barnes writes in in his own language, a peculiar and personal mix of purple prose poetry, exhausting academic-speak, prescription-medication warnings, and plainspoken pronouncement. So perhaps Dylan is an even more apt model for Barnes than Prince ever was. Like Dylan, he asks you to decode, to dissect, to discuss. Also like Dylan, Barnes seems playfully aware that his lyrics are Gordian knots, impossible for even the most devoted Of Montreal fan (including, possibly, himself) to untangle completely. And yet there are moments of clarity on Lousy with Sylvianbriar that prove Barnes is both his own harshest judge and most lenient jury. Or, as he sings on “Triumph of Disintegration”: “I had to make myself a monster just to feel something ugly enough to be true.” | 2013-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | October 11, 2013 | 7.4 | 29e464f8-574a-4bfc-9cd9-b7ff563539f0 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The second landmark album this year from Big Thief is raw, tactile, and essential. The intimate songs zoom in on a band that feels, at this moment, totally invincible. | The second landmark album this year from Big Thief is raw, tactile, and essential. The intimate songs zoom in on a band that feels, at this moment, totally invincible. | Big Thief: Two Hands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-thief-two-hands/ | Two Hands | Coming from a band who, just five months ago, materialized somewhere deep in a forest with a mystical set of songs wrapped in a vast, alien cosmos—a band who, in order to summon the perfect squall of noise, claimed to have suspended an electric guitar from the ceiling of a barn and batted it around like a piñata in a circle of amplifiers—Two Hands is jarringly earthbound. For their latest album, the Brooklyn quartet Big Thief invites you to join them live and unadorned in the studio for the span of 10 songs. “Hand me that cable/Plug into anything,” Adrianne Lenker sings, moments after issuing a more basic instruction: “Cry with me/Cry with me.”
Nearly every song overflows with tears and blood, bared teeth and broken tongues; living, killing, dying. There are few overdubs, and sometimes you hear the band members instructing each other when to step back or take a solo, like they’re just rehearsing for the actual performance. It makes for a specific kind of rock record: an attempt to capture a band’s imperfect, raw essence, to show what happens when they simply count to four and take off. The approach is best known for accentuating a tough, ragged cohesion, like Neil Young records in the ’70s, but this record goes somewhere different. The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound.
It’s a trick that these musicians have spent their careers perfecting. Since their 2016 debut, Masterpiece, each successive album has felt like a breakthrough geared for larger spaces. But their own interpersonal dynamic has followed an inverse trajectory. “At this point we’re basically touching each other,” guitarist Buck Meek recently observed about their magnetic live shows, a connection made literal on the new album cover. After the spacious odes to the natural world on U.F.O.F, Two Hands is a record defined by these collisions—a reminder that intimacy isn’t just about the comfort we bring to each other but also the proximity to our sickness and pain, blood and guts.
The record proceeds along a bell-curve, with the heavier moments at the center reverberating through the quieter points on either end. The focus is on the patient interplay between Lenker’s guitar—rhythmic and physical, like a slot machine with infinite outcomes—and James Krivchenia’s drumming, as patient and instinctive as it’s ever sounded. The accompaniment from Meek and bassist Max Oleartchik, who plays a few solos in “Those Girls,” is more understated but just as crucial. In sparer, creeping moments like “The Toy” and “Cut My Hair,” you can sense the band listening to each other, responding with reassuring hums and nods. And when they do cut loose, you feel the thrashing.
Variations on the word “crying” appear in half these songs, and each time Lenker sings it, she tells a different story. Occasionally her lonesome, quivering voice feels like an outsider descendent of country-folk singers like Kath Bloom or Iris DeMent, particularly in “Replaced,” a co-write with Meek. Other times, she sounds like someone clawing at her own skin, trying to escape. In “Forgotten Eyes,” a heartland rocker whose lyrics might be about homelessness, she trembles uneasily toward the final chorus, holding out the “ng” of “tongue” until it makes a phlegmy, growling noise in the back of her throat. Big Thief were built for moments like these, where sound merges with meaning, where the floating voice in your headphones finds its body.
As a lyricist, Lenker has become newly adept at telling stories through her absences. She’s written songs in the past that dazzle with poetry (“Mary”) and others that are memoiristic in their precision (“Mythological Beauty”), but these are pared down to just the most crucial bits of dialogue and wisdom. “Everybody needs a home and deserves protection,” she sings in “Forgotten Eyes,” her voice breaking at the word “needs.” “Talk to the boy in me/He’s there,” she begs in the closing “Cut My Hair” as the music cuts out from underneath her. Best of all is “Not,” a fiery exorcism that merges some of her most explosive imagery with a climactic guitar solo; the desperation in her playing feels like a string of cries interrupted by shallow, gasping breaths.
“Not” sits at the heart of the record with “Shoulders,” a stunner that’s been in the band’s live repertoire for years. Like a dark analog to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land” or the Mountain Goats’ “This Year,” it gains power from its folk simplicity: a plaintive melody and a chorus that snowballs with a momentum that seems physical—part promise, part prayer. Lenker, who once noted that she is often both the attacker and prey in her own songwriting, finds its gospel not by rising above her circumstances but through succumbing to her complicity. “The blood of the man who’s killing our mother with his hands is in me,” she sings. “It’s in me/In my veins.” Her voice sounds genuinely desperate, anguished, like she would rid herself of it if she could.
The version of “Shoulders” on Two Hands is the definitive take, though you can see its spirit in every live performance. During one particularly great video from Philadelphia’s Johnny Brenda’s in 2017, Lenker’s guitar cuts out during the first chorus. She takes it off and, for the rest of the song, is just a singer: pulling the microphone from the stand, closing her eyes, and doubling over as if in pain to deliver the second verse. Instead of picking up her guitar part, Lenker’s bandmates only highlight her absence, drawing your attention to the new void at the song’s core. By the end, all that’s left is Krivchenia’s steady drumbeat and Lenker front and center, sort of jogging in place, as everyone in the room holds their breath. It’s a random technical issue but it’s also a chance for Big Thief to pose their favorite kinds of challenges. How much can we strip away without losing our essence? What happens when our most basic modes of expression fail us? How will we carry on together? On Two Hands, they are unstoppable. | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | October 11, 2019 | 9 | 29efc4bd-d39e-4c06-bd3e-7347c83b5cbd | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Chicago bassist’s solo debut—featuring guests including Makaya McCraven, Isaiah Spencer, and Tomeka Reid—ranges widely, from free jazz to post-bop to meditative tone poems. | The Chicago bassist’s solo debut—featuring guests including Makaya McCraven, Isaiah Spencer, and Tomeka Reid—ranges widely, from free jazz to post-bop to meditative tone poems. | Junius Paul: Ism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/junius-paul-ism/ | Ism | Like the mighty jazz bassists that preceded him (Jimmy Garrison, Ron Carter, Peter Kowald, and Buster Williams immediately spring to mind), Junius Paul often makes himself felt before he’s actually heard. That’s him, buoyant and deep, shadowing Makaya McCraven, the perfect complement to the drummer’s rhythms—that is, when he’s not bending, wobbling, and prodding McCraven and group into new terrain. Paul also supports the likes of reedman Ernest Dawkins, Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, where his bass work is as sturdy, supportive, and invisible as rebar. So when the Chicago musician steps to the fore on his massive, sprawling debut, Ism, it’s a thrill to feel and hear every contour, throb, and spontaneous spark across two pieces of wax.
Not just an opener, “You Are Free to Choose” serves as a mission statement from Paul and his assembled cohorts, some 14 in all; they leave no rhythmic idea unturned. The chase is everything. The frenetic, skittering rhythms suggest the volatile mix to follow, fully embracing that freedom to not choose, roving from free jazz to post-bop, meditative tone poems to hip-hop thumps (or “badoop” as McCraven put it recently, describing his bandmate’s sound). Recorded over a four-year span in various clubs and studios throughout Chicago, Ism reflects its many homes and the many sounds that feed into the music of the Windy City. Which might sound restless, except Paul exudes such confidence that no matter the session, his bass makes it all hang together.
“Bow Hit,” which follows, features Paul’s droning bow work, Isaiah Spencer’s rumbling kit, high tones from Jim Baker’s Arp, and a contemplative solo from saxophonist Rajiv Halim. It approaches stillness only to swan dive into “Baker’s Dozen,” a slippery mix of avant-jazz shot through with head-knocking drums and G-funk frequencies. “The One Who Endures” flips back into charging hard bop, Paul’s upright a flurry of quick-fingered runs.
It all leads to “Spocky Chainsey Has Re-Emerged,” a sidelong exploration from a quartet that toggles from modal jazz to fusion, like Bitches Brew set to boil rather than low simmer. About 13 minutes in, Paul lowers the temperature and space opens up for organ and trumpet to cool out. Just when you think it might drift off, turbulence enters, a Sun Ra-like dissonance curls around the edges, and Paul guides the band back up to speed again.
“Paris” is the other expansive piece, this time featuring a trio—one of three pieces where Paul is back in step with McCraven. The rhythm section slowly winds around trumpeter Marquis Hill’s unhurried lines, but there’s a tactile thrill when Paul’s stalwart bass coheres into a hummable figure and locks in. McCraven’s snare cracks and the piece achieves liftoff, the three moving at an inspired pace. Yet there’s still another point in the piece when Paul’s bass runs quicken again, somehow finding another plane for everyone else to vibrate on.
The last side of the album finds Paul in a more ruminative mode. His strings are in sweet conversation with cellist Tomeka Reid on “Fred Anderson and a Half,” as they pay tribute to the late tenor saxophonist, a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and owner of the Velvet Lounge, where Paul honed his chops weekly. It segues into the most hushed piece on the album, “Ma and Dad,” full of the kind of reverentially small sounds that the Art Ensemble of Chicago plied a half century ago. Listen closely and a strange rumble arises. Is it Paul’s bass? No, just a motorcycle engine idling in the distance before roaring away. But it speaks to Paul’s conjured atmosphere that such an intrusion slots into Ism perfectly.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | December 12, 2019 | 8 | 29f1f21a-8e76-4d6e-8202-a58d55150d65 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Messing with Miles Davis music is a dangerous proposition. It was necessary for Don Cheadle's biopic Miles Ahead, and with help from Robert Glasper, it's sometimes a successful endeavor. | Messing with Miles Davis music is a dangerous proposition. It was necessary for Don Cheadle's biopic Miles Ahead, and with help from Robert Glasper, it's sometimes a successful endeavor. | Robert Glasper / Miles Davis: Everything's Beautiful / Miles Ahead OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21821-everythings-beautiful-miles-ahead-ost/ | Everything's Beautiful / Miles Ahead OST | In cinephile circles, biopics are notorious for being underwhelming. Nitpicking can come from multiple directions—with one camp deriding a central lack of tension in the telling of an icon’s familiar story, and another wailing over any dramatic liberty taken with the historical record. Director and actor Don Cheadle’s new film about Miles Davis plunges consciously and energetically into this fraught zone, not least because it dares to call itself Miles Ahead (aka the title of one of Davis’ great big band LPs). That titling move amounts to an open invitation to jazz whiners and/or experts everywhere.
As an actor, Cheadle looks and sounds the part. His styling is immaculate, and his voice channels Davis’ famous rasp. But at a level of sound, the two recordings that spring from Cheadle’s project face an even steeper challenge—simply because any re-appropriation of Davis’ music is a more precarious enterprise than acting out the life story. In this light, reporting that the original sounds created for (or inspired by) Cheadle’s film do not immediately register as embarrassments is a form of high praise.
The bulk of this film’s single-disc “original motion picture soundtrack” is built from brief dialogue snippets from the film (which are fine), select Davis cuts presented in full (“So What,” from Kind of Blue, naturally) and a few edits of classic Davis recordings (which should be avoided on general principle). Shaving down clips of Miles is a necessity of cinematic sound-design convention, and isn’t a mark against the film itself. But once you’re listening to a recording, outside the theater, I doubt even the filmmakers behind Miles Ahead would argue that it isn’t more important to seek out a complete, originally issued take. The soundtrack’s most interesting custom songs come toward the end of the album, where the film’s musical supervisor, keyboardist Robert Glasper, has the chance to offer four original pieces inspired by Davis’ protean example. And he makes each opportunity count.
“Junior’s Jam” has a spare funk indebted to Miles’ Jack Johnson sessions (and fortunately the playing of Glasper, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, and trumpeter Keyon Harrold doesn’t sound overly imitative). The chill of “Francessence” sounds equally inspired by In a Silent Way as well as latter-day film score work by the likes of Terence Blanchard. There’s a group rave-up meant to connote an active club feel (“What’s Wrong With That?”), and it includes some fiery soprano saxophone playing from onetime Davis band member Wayne Shorter. And album-closer “Gone 2015” features joyously triumphant rhyming from the too-often overlooked Pharoahe Monch.
Working on the film seems to have given Glasper more ideas than could be included on the original soundtrack. So, with the permission of the Davis estate, he’s also created another full-length release that frequently uses the trumpeter’s recorded legacy as point of departure. More than a “remix” album, Everything’s Beautiful shows off Glasper’s skills with sampling, and his talent for creating original work. The pinnacle of the set comes on “Maiysha (So Long),” when Erykah Badu delivers original lyrics over Glasper’s playing and a sample of a Davis performance found on the album Get Up With It. And the keyboardist’s cover of “Milestones” proves that he doesn’t need access to the trumpeter’s tape-vault in order to create valid interpretations.
Glasper’s supporting cast draws from the range of talents he’s also employed on his reliably enjoyable Black Radio series of jazz-meets-R&B fusion recordings. So in addition to Badu’s star turn, we get Phonte rapping over a 9th Wonder production (during “Violets”), as well as the presence of vocalists like Bilal—whose phrasing and register-leaps animate the strut of “Ghetto Walkin’” (built from a groove Davis cut in 1969). The melisma and occasional grit of Ledisi’s voice drives “I’m Leaving You,” a song which also puts the spotlight on the guitar work of latter-day Davis collaborator John Scofield.
A trio of cuts toward the middle of Everything’s Beautiful suffers from feeling less robustly reimagined than the rest of the set—placing a slight drag on momentum. But there’s an easy fix: To experience the full range of the pianist’s Davis-derived thinking, just add Glasper’s contributions from the Miles Ahead soundtrack to Everything’s Beautiful. By being respectful of the artist’s legacy while also making some smart, contemporary production choices, Glasper’s best work proves an an ideal vehicle for paying tribute to an artist who had a firm feel for tradition, but who never stayed fixed in one place for very long. | 2016-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | null | May 28, 2016 | 6.2 | 29f4a961-b386-4a2d-889c-354ecd3d085c | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Brunhild Ferrari, the longtime partner of Luc Ferrari, is a powerful creative force in her own right. Jim O’Rourke assists on two new realizations of her work, interpreting them with rare sensitivity. | Brunhild Ferrari, the longtime partner of Luc Ferrari, is a powerful creative force in her own right. Jim O’Rourke assists on two new realizations of her work, interpreting them with rare sensitivity. | Brunhild Ferrari / Jim O’Rourke: Le Piano Englouti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brunhild-ferrari-jim-orourke-le-piano-englouti/ | Le Piano Englouti | A number of thrilling things happen throughout “Tranquilles Impatiences” (or “Quiet Impatiences”), the second piece on Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), an album of realizations of work by the composer Brunhild Ferrari. A jittery, nerve-jangling scrum of tones underpins “Tranquilles Impatiences,” a tense chorus of high-pitched sounds that acts as a constant destabilizing force. Their “imperturbable wriggling,” as Ferrari describes it, scratches an arc over more peaceable, low-end drones that fold together like a fabric at the core of the piece. The tension that builds throughout—not so much between these two core elements as because of their parallel co-existence—makes for something of a white-knuckle ride. Shorter than previous realizations, this version of “Tranquilles Impatiences” has raw impact.
Brunhild Ferrari composed “Tranquilles Impatiences” using material by her husband, the late French-Italian composer Luc Ferrari—specifically, five of the seven tapes he created for 1977’s Exercices d’improvisation. In that context, they existed as sequences of electronic music, the grounding force for improvisations by up to eight musicians. They serve a different purpose here, yet there is something in their dynamics, their strange playfulness, that reflects both Luc Ferrari’s humor and thoughtfulness and Brunhild Ferrari’s sensitivity and compositional acumen. If the spotlight has, until recently, been trained predominantly on Luc, it’s worth noting that the couple collaborated intensively over more than 40 years together, with Brunhild first helping out with paperwork and administration before Luc encouraged her to record and compose.
Between them, Luc and Brunhild Ferrari created a unique musical world, one where sounds were porous and active, and where an interest in the sonic aspects of everyday life met an engagement with the cinematic possibilities of organizing sound. Luc Ferrari’s approach to composition was multifaceted—playful and witty, sensuous and seductive, rigorous yet never alienating—and Brunhild increasingly took part as an editor and recordist, a collector of sounds, and a voice on some of Luc’s recordings. (A 2013 quadruple-CD set on Shiiin, Contes Sentimentaux, featured a series of 11 radio dramas broadcast between 1989 and 1994, consisting of dialogues between Luc and Brunhild about Luc’s work, set over corresponding Ferrari compositions.) Over the decades, Brunhild Ferrari would be a significant interlocutor in her partner’s work, and a powerful creative force in her own right.
Jim O’Rourke’s role on Le Piano Eglouti is as co-interpreter, assisting in performing the pieces on synth, tapes, and electronics at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo in October 2014, and subsequently revising and remixing them in 2019. He’s a perfect choice: A serious student of electroacoustic composition, he’s long been vocal in his support of the work of Luc Ferrari. Recalling his first meeting with Ferrari in Paris, he told The Wire’s Rob Young, “I actually bit right through my lip when he walked past me. I was so fanatically worshipful, I was terrified to meet him.” His deep understanding of both electroacoustic composition in general, and the Ferraris’ work in particular, is brought to bear on his performances here, interpreting Brunhild’s compositions with rare sensitivity. You can hear lingering traces of the experience, perhaps, on his recent four-hour album To Magnetise Money and Catch a Roving Eye, which shares a similar compositional surety.
In the same discussion with Young, O’Rourke made a perceptive observation about what set Luc Ferrari apart from other musique concrète and electroacoustic composers, including those he worked alongside at the pioneering music institute INA-GRM: “[He] was the only one that I felt paid attention to what the sounds were.” This is something that Brunhild Ferrari continues to do; you can hear it in “Le Piano Englouti,” where she is particularly aware of the interwoven possibilities of the raw material at her disposal. As she writes in her liner notes, the sounds for the piece were recorded “in 1996, at a Greek island almost swallowed by its noisy Aegean Sea, and in 2010, at a very isolated and silent Japanese island.” In her narrative of the piece, the noise of the sea and the pachinko parlor “end up swallowing a foolish piano.” Though perhaps not as immediately successful as “Tranquilles Impatiences,” it is compelling in its own way, weaving recordings of everyday phenomena within washes of electronic disturbance. The piano advances and then recedes, swamped or overturned by other sounds, a slow-building push-me-pull-you between the various elements. Episodic and deliberate, “Le Piano Englouti” is a focused drift of possibility. | 2020-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Black Truffle | January 14, 2020 | 7.5 | 29f4bc25-43b6-4c53-90da-8861829af47f | Jon Dale | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jon-dale/ | |
Ever since detaching from Roc-A-Fella, the Philadelphia rapper has felt a bit like a town crier with no square. On his fourth album, his first for Babygrande, he positions himself as a reliable alternative to the mainstream. | Ever since detaching from Roc-A-Fella, the Philadelphia rapper has felt a bit like a town crier with no square. On his fourth album, his first for Babygrande, he positions himself as a reliable alternative to the mainstream. | Freeway: Diamond In The Ruff | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17299-diamond-in-the-ruff/ | Diamond In The Ruff | Leslie Pridgen, the Philadelphia rapper better known as Freeway, cannot suck. It is categorically impossible. The man with the broken-glass screech will always have a spot in our ears, if only for his inextinguishable white-hot ferocity. Life-or-death urgency is Freeway's stock in trade: he hurls every word at you like a man who's just arrived on foot from a murder scene. Anyone who treats his craft this deadly seriously cannot and will never truly suck, ever.
However, ever since detaching for good from the Roc-A-Fella roster, Freeway has been slamming up against a different wall: Steadily diminishing returns. He's been a free-spraying firehouse in search of a burning building, a town crier with no square. His talent is the kind that needs traction and guidance to reach any sort of target, and while Free has admirably maintained his intensity and productivity through shifting, uncertain years, it's hard not to feel that the context around him has slowly leaked away. Under Jay-Z's wing, as a studio instrument wielded by Just Blaze, Freeway was unstoppable, a force of nature. On Diamond in the Ruff, he sounds more than ever like he’s the ultimate good soldier, one desperately in need of a general.
Freeway sounds good here. He always sounds good. His feel for tension is unparalleled. He's internalized Pac's ability to make every verse feel like a hail of body blows, switching up his flows constantly and pouncing hard on syllables you can never anticipate. He has picked a sterling row of soul-rap instrumentals to rap over. But all of this praise doubles as diagnosis; nothing has changed in Free's attack for years, and it's starting to lose its impact. Deja-vu is setting in: "Dream Big" is a tepidly jazzy reworking of "Still Got Love", which would be bad enough, but album closer "Lil' Mama" is built on a near-identical loop. "Greatness" feels suspiciously close to "Throw Your Hands Up" from The Stimulus Package. He's repeating himself, and more blatantly than usual.
There are a few moments here that reach outside of Free's well-worn soul-rap groove. One is "Wonder Tape", which suggests an indie-rap recasting of the smeary-headlight melancholy of "I'm on One". There's "No Doubt", which strands a single hiccuping vocal sample over a cavern of empty space. And there’s "True", which feels closer to trance-rap than anything Free's done since "Lights Get Low", his duet with pre-greatness Rick Ross. They are the brightest spots on the album by virtue of suggesting there might still be unexplored stylistic avenues for Freeway.
More upsetting, there are lyrics issues as well. Free's always been a cadence-first, words-later rapper; even his most immortal lines are more memorable for their delivery than what they contain. But on Diamond, his rhyme patterns mangle his sense so often it grows distracting: "Even the Grim Reaper is only job doing," he growls on "Right Back". "Flow raw as vagina with penis entering," he says on "The Thirst". That second lyric points to a second distressing problem-- an abundance of corny, half-baked lines, like "I'm the last Flow bender like Ang" ("All the Hoods"); "Vegetarian, I go in with the lettuce" ("Money is My Medicine"); or "She just played karaoke on my pokey" ("Early"), which just felt so embarrassing to type that I simply cannot imagine how it feels to shout it.
Ever adapable, Freeway has been positioning himself, post-major label fallout as a "real hip-hop," reliable alternative to the mainstream kind of guy. It makes sense as a career move, but Diamond sees him growing a little too comfortable in his out-of-time role: On "Sweet Temptations" he makes fun of rappers with "tight slacks" and ponders "buy[ing] a plane ticket to Africa" and moving back. On "Right Back", he drops the Abe Simpson-worthy "Fab say he the best that ever twitted/ Well, I'm the hottest spitter that ever Googled," which is doubly unforgivable for not even knowing how to pronounce the word "tweet." None of this stuff is deal-breaking on its own. Freeway is still nowhere near close to sucking. But he's well on his way to not mattering. | 2012-11-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-11-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Babygrande | November 15, 2012 | 5.3 | 2a021eb4-b00e-40e6-a5c8-1c2bdbc66541 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
As Surgeon, UK producer Anthony Child composes an aggressive, peculiar mix of techno, industrial music, and noise. His three best albums, 1997's Basictonalvocabulary, 1998's Balance, and 1999's Force + Form, are seeing re-release at a time when his influence has become apparent in a new generation of misfits. | As Surgeon, UK producer Anthony Child composes an aggressive, peculiar mix of techno, industrial music, and noise. His three best albums, 1997's Basictonalvocabulary, 1998's Balance, and 1999's Force + Form, are seeing re-release at a time when his influence has become apparent in a new generation of misfits. | Surgeon: Basictonalvocabulary / Balance / Force + Form | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20625-basictonalvocabulary-balance-force-form/ | Basictonalvocabulary / Balance / Force + Form | In the annals of underground musicians rubbing shoulders with the mainstream, Surgeon's opening sets for Lady Gaga late last year stand out. They do so less for what they portend—"I don’t think it’s the beginning of any connection between pop and techno," Surgeon (UK producer Anthony Child) said in an interview about the dates—than for how they highlight the enduring allure of Child's aggressive, peculiar mix of techno, industrial, and noise music. The gigs, which saw Child—bookish, dutiful—fiddling with his modular synthesizer in packed arenas, were the result of Gaga collaborator/opening act Lady Starlight praising him during a gig in Birmingham, near his hometown. His presence on two subsequent ArtRave tour stops proves there are very different methods of honoring that concatenation.
Then again, Child's profile has always seemed somewhat outsized for a noisy techno artist from a Midlands town. He's probably been labelled "techno don" or "techno kingpin" more than any other artist: There's something authoritative and presidential about his work, which seems to appease both the jocks (hedonistic party children) and the nerds (noiseniks and gadget fiddlers). His three best albums, as well as a spate of early singles, are seeing re-release at a time when his influence has once again become apparent. Over the last three or so years Child has helped usher in a new generation of clamorous British techno, serving as an inspiration to labels like Perc Trax and Avian, and to artists like Untold, Truss, and Blawan (with whom Child collaborates as Trade).
Child released his early work on the venerable Birmingham label Downwards, the archetype for all grimy, industrial-leaning British dance music. His music—and that of peers like Female and label boss Regis—steered itself far from rave's chirpy maximalism. Nor did it feature jungle's dizzying fusion: this was music from the hinterlands, far removed from London's electric unions.
Child's music took inspiration from nuanced, brave sources—noisy innovators like Throbbing Gristle, electronic body music extremists like Skinny Puppy—and channeled them into hammer-on-nail immediacy. While the music of Child and Downwards couldn't have existed without Detroit pioneers Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, it also represents a philosophical break from them. The Detroit producers, with their lofty artistic rhetoric and sci-fi imagery, sought escape; what Child et al. offered was simple, punishing release, most likely from boredom. Detroit trusted that the music would take them higher; Birmingham didn't trust shit.
But the music—pounding, abrasive, gritty—sounded great in dingy little clubs, and, when Europe turned those clubs into giant concrete halls, it sounded great there, too. Legendary Berlin label Tresor snatched up Child, and it's for them that he released his three best albums: Basictonalvocabulary, Balance, and Force + Form. Child excelled at the full-length album the way few of his peers did, using them to stretch his compositional legs while injecting weird little interludes and noise passages; it's on these records that his reverence for artists like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle really shows.
Berlin is where the Detroit techno sound calcified, and it's only in the light of the unadorned, brutalist music the city embraced that an album like 1997's Basictonalvocabulary can sound so festooned and enthusiastic. On first listen, Basictonalvocabulary is so hurried that it's almost stressful to listen to. Songs open with quick little riffs like they've been released out of the starting gate. Several of them, such as the influence-betraying "Krautrock", sound like Robert Hood's carnivalesque "Unix" run through an un-synced delay pedal, with the sounds doubling back and crashing into one another. Only after a few listens do you get comfortable with all the interlocking pieces of a song like "9 Hours into the Future", or "Rotunda"'s breach of the four-on-the-floor cage.
Balance, from 1998 and somewhat ironically, is the album where Child can't quite resolve all his interests. It doesn't push quite as hard, or as playfully, as Basictonalvocabulary, sounding muddied as it loses itself in too-long, formless sketches like "Dialogue". On 1999's Force + Form—two concepts close to Child's heart—his craft caught up with his vision. Comprising four long, evolving tracks (the shortest is nearly nine minutes), Force + Form flutters and jabs before throwing its punches, earning its noisy, formless codas only after extended bouts of aggression. The final track, "At the Heart of It All", is probably the most euphoric piece Child has ever put to tape, and the effect is a great gasp of air after a long period below surface. It's as immersive and structurally thrilling as longform techno gets.
Child has been continuously active (a singles overview is long overdue) since Force + Form, his last album for Tresor, but he's mostly backed away from the LP format. As he primes for what seems like a period of renewed creativity it's instructive to revisit these albums, especially as a new generation of British misfits discover techno can be a fertile ground for exploring disparate styles (dubstep, drum & bass, ambient, noise). Child is an unlikely shepherd, but then the strength of his music has been thrusting him to unexpected places for more than two decades. | 2015-06-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-06-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | June 12, 2015 | 8.1 | 2a05d26e-8df8-4c2a-9788-3936e7c1970d | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On his new collection, the German minimalist techno producer Thomas Brinkmann makes painstakingly sumptuous music that's minimalist, but isn't techno. Ambient’s not the right word either, because the songs are too alien-sounding to settle into the scenery. | On his new collection, the German minimalist techno producer Thomas Brinkmann makes painstakingly sumptuous music that's minimalist, but isn't techno. Ambient’s not the right word either, because the songs are too alien-sounding to settle into the scenery. | Thomas Brinkmann: What You Hear (Is What You Hear) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20553-what-you-hear-is-what-you-hear/ | What You Hear (Is What You Hear) | Spend too much time listening closely to music and you may find yourself obsessed with tones, ignoring the melody and rhythm that give songs meaning to most people. It’s a common affliction in recording studios, where one minute you can be doing something relatively mundane like figuring out the right placement for a hi-hat in the mix and the next thing you know you’re hours deep into microscopically tweaking an array of equalizers and compressors, feverishly searching for some sort of tonal nirvana.
Usually this is a sign of studio madness, but some musicians and producers have made it a viable way of working. On What You Hear (Is What You Hear), German minimalist techno producer Thomas Brinkmann has gone deliriously over that particular edge.
Minimal techno, a genre that revolves around compulsive sonic fastidiousness, is a breeding ground for tonal obsession—the picky ears of its makers and audience have played a major role in keeping pure analog synthesis alive and evolving during the periods when it wasn’t in style. Even within this context, Brinkmann stands out as an especially exacting engineer, and his recordings offer a sense of painstaking sumptuousness that stand apart from the rest of the minimal techno crowd.
What You Hear (Is What You Hear) is minimalist, but it’s not techno. Each track consists of a single tone held for anywhere between two and 11 minutes, with minimal modulation and no significant changes in dynamics or pitch. Rhythm is only occasionally a factor, and only emerges as a byproduct of the sustained sound’s internal pulses, never as a separate track. Ambient’s not the right word for it either, because the songs are too alien-sounding to settle into the scenery.
The static quality of the compositions don’t make for what’s traditionally considered an exciting listen, but anyone who enjoys dissecting what comes into their ears will find a lot of pleasure in What You Hear. It rewards listeners who take an active role in the listening, those willing to dig deeper, analyzing the elements in the sounds one at a time and teasing apart their structures.
But the record’s not just for obsessive audio freaks. If you engage with the songs on their own terms they’re fascinatingly evocative. "Ziegelrot" (which means "brick-red") is a recursive, juddering howl that sounds like the first feedback-saturated seconds of a cheaply recorded hardcore song extended to the length of an entire 7" side. "Mitisgrün" begins as something like the comforting white-noise pulse of a distant air conditioner unit and ramps up to a throbbing grind so slowly and subtly you’re likely to miss the point where it tips over from soothing to anxiety-inducing.
Brinkmann’s experiment in pure tonality is the inverse of the works where he’s effectively removed it from his compositions entirely, producing music that’s pure rhythm. In the incredible video of a performance at Tokyo’s Taico Club, he skillfully etches lines in blank vinyl on eight turntables and constructs a fully rave-able techno song out of the staticky pops the gashes produce. The only apparent direction he has left is to make a record that doesn’t have any musical elements at all. It’ll probably sound great. | 2015-05-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Editions Mego | May 27, 2015 | 6.9 | 2a0a5f57-53ea-4aed-8b3f-1a3c1f99b24a | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The Minnesota rapper’s blurry, distorted tracks conceal downhearted emotion, half-told stories, and irreverent humor. | The Minnesota rapper’s blurry, distorted tracks conceal downhearted emotion, half-told stories, and irreverent humor. | Lerado Khalil : Dog Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lerado-khalil-dog-days/ | Dog Days | In case you haven’t heard, things have been really noisy in rap’s underground lately. The beats are full of distortion and clipping 808s, the vocals submerged in gunk—it’s music that can often sound like you have the volume cranked up in multiple tabs at the same time. This isn’t anything new for Lerado Khalil. For a few years now—especially since dropping the deep-fried EP CDQ in 2020—the St. Paul, Minnesota artist has been experimenting with a bugged-out, trancey style that feels like being sucked down a wormhole in slow motion. It isn’t just chaos for chaos’ sake: All the fuzz and blurriness collides with a monotone delivery that falls somewhere between the exploratory ambling of Black Kray and the inner monologuing of IDLSIDGO Earl to create droopy mood pieces like his latest album, Dog Days.
Dog Days sounds like one of those manga panels splattered with thwacks and cracks, though what’s actually happening inside the character’s head is a lot quieter. On the intro, Lerado and Virginia producer GAWD generate overpowering, blown-out rhythms that could shake stone, while his raps are buried underneath. Behind a bonkers 14 Golds beat on “Thats a Set,” Lerado doesn’t quite sound sad as he stitches together murky, pitched-down thoughts—just a little humdrum and gloomy. Even so, it’s not that serious. On the madhouse “Whatsapp,” he interpolates Kreayshawn’s time capsule “Gucci Gucci” and makes the anthemic “One big room full of bad bitches” sound so droll. I would listen to an entire mixtape of his dazed spins on nostalgic internet hits.
Lerado’s own lyrics are intentionally difficult to decipher, when they’re possible to decipher at all. That’s not necessarily a problem, because his music is much more about the feeling than the words, but in some cases it’s not enough. “Mission” is heavily distorted but generic, missing that fine coat of dust that makes the rest of the songs feel like they’ve been ripped from a cassette. And “White Lie” loses touch with the album’s sense of internal soul-searching because it feels more like guest Harto Falión’s song than Lerado’s.
When Dog Days works, more often than not it reminds me of listening to MIKE’s slice-of-life raps, or early, coming-of-age Lucki: rappers who make it feel like you know them better than people you speak to in real life. It’s just a lot noisier. Think of “Fine Line”: Lerado’s flow is bleary and muffled and Savedher and Jacob Rochester’s instrumental contains it like a lid over a pot of boiling water, yet the melancholy and regret feels clear. Midway through “Bandcamp,” the beat (by Osyris Israel) starts flickering like a dead lighter and it only heightens Lerado’s scatterbrained headspace. And every now and then, a bar will pierce through the mess, like the repetition of “Sent a text when I should’ve called” on “Can’t Come Back.” It’s only a few words, but set your imagination loose and it turns into an entire story. | 2024-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 11, 2024 | 7.4 | 2a0b3207-9cf5-41b2-8a80-0e8203efed56 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Ruins is Grouper's "unplugged" record, essentially, as much as that might sound odd for a musician who has always put acoustic guitar and piano and voice at the core of her work. Here she foreswears the looping pedals and the innumerable layers of fuzz, and what we're left with is achingly beautiful. | Ruins is Grouper's "unplugged" record, essentially, as much as that might sound odd for a musician who has always put acoustic guitar and piano and voice at the core of her work. Here she foreswears the looping pedals and the innumerable layers of fuzz, and what we're left with is achingly beautiful. | Grouper: Ruins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19820-grouper-ruins/ | Ruins | What happens in the margins of the music Liz Harris makes as Grouper is often as important as the music itself. In a performance at Krakow's Unsound Festival earlier this month, the rattle of a film projector added a layer of instant nostalgia to her murky swirls of voice and guitar. Much of the time, Grouper's music is so diffuse that there's no longer any distinction between center and margin anyway, no difference between foreground and background.
That is not the case on Ruins, the first album from the Portland, Oregon, musician since last year's The Man Who Died in His Boat. Here, the incidental noises—crickets, croaking frogs, thunder and rain, and, at one point, the unmistakable beep of a microwave oven that fired up after a blackout in the house where she was recording—serve primarily to underscore how stark the music is, unadorned and pocked with vast silences. Ruins is Grouper's "unplugged" record, essentially, as much as that might sound odd for a musician who has always put acoustic guitar and piano and voice at the core of her work. Here, however, she foreswears the looping pedals and the innumerable layers of fuzz that are just as essential to her aesthetic. What we're left with is achingly beautiful and, given the intensely private nature of most of Grouper's work—on stage, she often plays sitting down, crouched over in order to manipulate her effects pedals, her face hidden in shadow—almost unnervingly direct.
The emotional core of the album is the four melancholy songs for piano and voice, which are complemented by two instrumentals of a similar mood. Rarely have Harris' lyrics been so clearly audible, and rarely, if ever, has love been so plainly the focus of her songwriting. "I hear you calling and I wanna go/ Run straight into the valleys of your arms," she sings on "Holding", her multitracked close harmonies reminiscent of Low circa The Curtain Hits the Cast. On the devastating "Clearing", she sings, "Every time I see you/ I have to pretend I don't"; on "Call Across Rooms", she has a change of heart: "I have a present to give you/ When we finally figure it out." ("The song is on one level very plain and literal, about a letter I wrote for someone I loved and could not get along with," she told Vogue.)
Not everything is so explicit. In "Clearing", she keeps her vocal range between the notes of her piano chords, as though she were seeking refuge there, and her wispy voice frequently dissolves into indecipherability, like cold breath passing through a beam of sunlight. Her phrasing is tentative and guarded; even without recourse to her trusty loops, she finds ways to muddy the atmosphere. Multitracking offers a way of hiding behind her own shadow, and her foot rarely leaves the piano's sustain pedal, even on the instrumental numbers.
Only two songs on the album don't quite fit the mold. The opening "Made of Metal", essentially a means of clearing the air, is just a slow, ritualistic drumbeat wreathed in the sound of distant frogs. And the closing "Made of Air" returns us to the drifting ambient world of Grouper that we're most familiar with. The latter dates back to 2004, and it's of a piece with other material from that period, like her 2005 album Way Their Crept, where looping tones of uncertain provenance—Voice? Guitar? Keyboard?—swirled into a jellied haze. It doesn't necessarily fit with what's come before it, but it's a welcome addendum to the album, if only for its familiarity.
Ruins has a vivid sense of place. Harris recorded the album in 2011 during an artistic residency in Aljezur, Portugal—a tiny coastal town tucked inside a nature preserve on the southwestern corner of the country. In a press release, she describes the pleasures of recording simply, hiking to the beach, and getting lost in her head, working out "a lot of political anger and emotional garbage… The album is a document. A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love." Even without knowing the particulars of the album's backstory, the naked recording means that you can practically picture the room in which it was made—the worn floorboards, or maybe ceramic tiles, dusted with sand; the stucco walls, slightly damp; the steam rising from a cup of tea near the upright piano. Even the microwave that made the tea, which beeps once towards the end of "Labyrinth", an accidental noise allowed to remain in the final cut. From the hushed mood and half-enunciated vocals of it all, you get the feeling she didn't speak to many people during that time of focused creativity. Lucky for us. | 2014-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky | October 28, 2014 | 8.8 | 2a104668-7b64-435e-8ef4-8548e5a86f36 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Ten years after its release and subsequent appearance on so many soundtracks and commercials, the influential debut album by the synth-pop project of Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello has been reissued. The deluxe set includes remixes and covers by Matthew Dear, the Shins, and others. | Ten years after its release and subsequent appearance on so many soundtracks and commercials, the influential debut album by the synth-pop project of Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello has been reissued. The deluxe set includes remixes and covers by Matthew Dear, the Shins, and others. | The Postal Service: Give Up (Deluxe 10th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17853-the-postal-service-give-up/ | Give Up (Deluxe 10th Anniversary Edition) | Five episodes into its first season in 2004, Veronica Mars makes sure you hear and appreciate “Such Great Heights.” Veronica and her totally-wrong-for-her boyfriend Troy are driving around looking for his stolen car when the Postal Service comes on the radio. “I dig this song,” he tells her. “Yeah, me too,” she replies. They let it play out for a few more measures of beeps and beats before launching back into their conversation. The song plays again during the closing scene, when the girl detective is listening to a weird, round, portable contraption meant to play compact music discs. The scene is quiet and poignant, not only playing the band’s wistful pop in the foreground but contrasting it with the character’s recent glimpses of the compromised adult world. “Such Great Heights” is a way for Veronica to hang on to childhood for another four minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
Just a few weeks after Veronica Mars did the unthinkable and funded a feature-length movie via Kickstarter-- raising $2 million in eleven hours-- Sub Pop is reissuing the Postal Service’s platinum-selling Give Up in a deluxe, 2xCD set. This pair of pop culture artifacts point to a growing nostalgia for the golden age of prematurely canceled TV shows (see also: the fourth season of Arrested Development) and indie pop as cult soundtrack. The Postal Service's lone album has proved surprisingly influential, casting a long shadow over the 2000s. Not only did it show up in films and on television-- Garden State, Grey’s Anatomy, *D.E.B.S.-- * but its songs were covered regularly by a wide range of artists, from Ben Folds to metal act Confide to a ska act called Tip the Van. In commercials for Kaiser Permanente, UPS, and (for legal reasons) the actual United States Postal Service, Jimmy Tamborello’s bloops and beeps conveyed the idea of ideas: synapses firing, synergy synergizing, connectivities connecting. For better or for worse, for a little while, the Postal Service made laptops the new guitar.
Not bad for a side project. Tamborello and Ben Gibbard first collaborated on “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” for Dntel’s 2001 album Life Is Full of Possibilities. Apparently, they worked so well together that they kept at it, even corralling Jenny Lewis, Jen Wood, and Chris Walla to play on their songs. In the days before Dropbox and YouSendIt, they had to snail-mail tracks back and forth, so they called themselves the Postal Service. Released in 2003, their debut was a slow grower, but it had a long life and was still producing singles in 2005. What began as a side project… well, stayed a side project, but Give Up looms large in both men’s careers. Tamborello failed to capture that sense of evocative purpose on either of Dntel’s subsequent albums, although he has become a key member of the L.A. blip scene that includes Baths and Flying Lotus. Gibbard has released seven full-lengths with his day-job band Death Cab for Cutie, but many of his best and most beloved tunes are all on Give Up. Which, by the way, is Sub Pop’s second highest selling album of all time, besting the Shins’ Oh Inverted World.
Even in 2013, when those perfectly aligned freckles have faded, it’s not hard to hear why Give Up would be a hit. The album’s highs represent a perfect marriage between Tamborello’s synths, which sound like the first rays of dawn hitting a Mister Bulky, and Gibbard’s gee-whiz lyrics, which possess a mussed-hair whimsy. The best songs here-- not just “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” and “We Will Become Silhouettes” but also “Recycled Air” and “Nothing Better”-- evoke innocence and imagination in equal measure, a sense of the fantastical that persists as a defense mechanism against the terrible or the simply mundane. No wonder it appealed to Veronica Mars and seemingly every other teenager who heard it: Give Up allowed them to see their worlds differently. “Silhouettes” turned heartbreak into nuclear holocaust without sounding over the top, because who hasn’t felt like the last person on Earth? “Such Great Heights” made freckles more than something to be insecure about; instead, they became the stars that crossed lovers. Thanks to Gibbard’s twee imagery as well as his persistent use of second-person pronouns, Give Up reinforces each listener’s individuality.
By not recording a follow-up, the Postal Service never had to strike that impossible balance again-- they left it up to Owl City, Hellogoodbye, and too many other imitators to carry the synthpop banner. The Postal Service's dubious legacy often obscures the fact that Give Up is only a good album, not a great one. Those quirky lyrics curdle into something unbearable on “Sleeping In”, as Gibbard recounts a dream about JFK’s assassination and the environmental apocalypse. “Clark Gable” is a tortuously meta love song, although that might actually be the point. Sequencing is an issue as well: the album is so frontloaded that the second half drops off a cliff. How many people actually made it to “Natural Anthem”? But the highs are high enough to offset the lows, and I imagine listeners may have spent the last 10 years mentally re-editing the album so that only the good parts remain.
Despite the surprising success and durability of Give Up, Tamborello and Gibbard gave up on the collaboration. Sub Pop released an EP of covers and remixes in 2005, but it seemed more like a gesture of apology than of renewal. As a result, the band’s catalog doesn’t sprawl messily across album after album. Instead it’s neat, compact, containable-- which means this reissue doubles as a celebration of the album and as a definitive history of the band itself. The remixes-- by Matthew Dear and John Tejada, among others-- don’t add much to the originals besides length, but do underscore what precise editors Tamborello and Gibbard (and co-producer Chris Walla) were. Their mixes of the Flaming Lips, Nina Simone, and Feist, however, are missing, as is “(This Is) The Dream of Evan & Chan”, which isn’t rare but does serve as the root of all of every Postal Service song.
The duo covered frequently just as they were frequently covered, so the tracks by the Shins and Iron & Wine at least work as time capsule. The former’s deadpan take on “We Will Become Silhouettes” makes the apocalypse sound jangly and grim again, while the latter’s whispery “Such Great Heights” recalls that moment in the previous decade where folkies were slowing down fast pop songs. On the other hand, the Postal Service’s cover of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” is awkward in both conception and execution. And finally, there are two new tracks, the bleak “A Tattered Line of String” and the undercooked “Turn Around” (which is, sadly, not a Bonnie Tyler cover). They’re fine showcases for Tamborello’s sophisticated beats and Gibbard’s heightened melodies; the production is crisp, the hooks catchy, but these tunes lack any sense of newness or discovery or connection. More crucially, it’s off-putting to hear the Postal Service re-create that 2003 sound in 2013. That’s the burden of any album that so completely defined its time: Give Up remains anchored in its heyday, and like all those canceled TV shows, it only reminds us how far we’ve moved away from that particular moment. | 2013-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sub Pop | April 11, 2013 | 8 | 2a16dc4d-282e-49a6-9dba-e20b7f58f331 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The G.O.O.D. Music signee sets out to explore desire and sexuality, but her downcast songs rarely venture much past mood lighting. | The G.O.O.D. Music signee sets out to explore desire and sexuality, but her downcast songs rarely venture much past mood lighting. | Kacy Hill: Like a Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kacy-hill-like-a-woman/ | Like a Woman | Before Kacy Hill signed with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music, she was a backup dancer on West’s Yeezus Tour. The women “dancing” on that tour were primarily clad in skintight bodysuits, with stockings over their faces. This might sound a little bit dehumanizing for Hill, but her pre-tour CV touts her modeling for American Apparel, whose softcore ads are not unlike Hill’s debut album, Like a Woman, in one important respect: Its overt sexuality obscures the fact that it isn’t selling anything original. At least AA’s rainbow-hued basics and hoodies were functional; Hill’s album is more muted, full of inscrutable lyrics buried under piano-ballad drama. It’s a strangely retrograde look for an artist affiliated with such an ostensibly forward-thinking crew.
In the video for “Like a Woman,” Hill can be found masturbating on the back of a public bus and touching herself in bed, oiled up and dressed in flesh-colored vinyl lingerie. The song is about trying to deny someone affection despite the carnal feelings they inspire in her. “I’m sayin’ things I thought that I wouldn’t/And now you caught me, remind me of my beatin’ heart,” she sings in the chorus. Juxtaposing lyrics about forbidden desires with a video full of self-love would be clever if it hadn’t already been done first, and better, by so many other pop musicians (see, for instance, Hailee Steinfeld’s girl-power confection “Love Myself” and Tove Lo’s entire album Lady Wood).
Production on the minimalist piano ballad was handled by DJDS, Terrace Martin, and DJ Mustard, whose presence barely registers beyond a few finger snaps and inorganic bass notes. This is the mood of the entire album: Futuristic and exploratory sensuality is buried underneath maudlin brooding. You can hear it on the Florence Welch-pantomiming “Hard to Love,” as well as “Say You’re Wrong,” which is full of subdued, dubstep-adjacent bass. The music wants to exist in Kanye’s experimentalist playground, but it’s constrained by an adult-contemporary sheath that simply isn’t sexy, no matter how hard it tries to be.
One wonders what exactly inspired this moodiness. If Hill were a fan of someone like Tori Amos, the foggy drama of her voice and the melancholy backdrops she sings over might make sense. Instead, she’s cited ’90s rock radio titans like Third-Eye Blind, Semisonic, Tonic, and the Cranberries as her inspirations. “There’s almost this melancholy element to all of those kind of songwriters,” she told The FADER in 2015. “There’s a dark element to the pop songs, too. There are songs that you can dance to, but then it’s, like, a really depressing song! Or, just very introspective.” But you can’t dance to anything on “Like a Woman,” and if you’re looking for introspection, the lyrics don’t reveal much of that, either: “Stripped down from all that’s holy, with narcoleptic hoping/It’s okay to look straight without naive impulsions,” she sings in the chorus of the ironically titled “Clarity.” In order to stand out in the overpopulated world of brooding, downcast pop, Hill will need to be more inventive: Competing with artists like Banks, who makes genuinely interesting visual choices, and Bishop Briggs, one of the style’s most powerful new voices, she hasn’t set herself apart from the pack.
The album still manages some interesting moments. The Swedish producer and Giorgio Moroder collaborator Oskar Sikow adds perky flourishes to “Cruel” and The Life of Pablo collaborator DJDS’s woozy production on “Keep Me Sane,” “Static,” and “Interlude” facilitates some of her finest performances on the record. Her voice rarely ventures beyond a drama-club lilt, but you can hear her having a little bit more fun here. One wishes that Hill had benefitted from a slew of producers from the Kanye Brain Trust instead of just one; alternately, DJDS could have helped her navigate the whole ride—thus avoiding pitfalls like the bland synth detailing on tracks helmed by Madonna and Pet Shop Boys producer Stuart Price. Hill has said she’s using the album to explore her sexuality, but the music would benefit if she also considered sound as worthy a subject of investigation. She certainly has the mentor to help her do it. | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam | July 10, 2017 | 5.1 | 2a2077c5-8424-4802-be60-3b7a7474f401 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | null |
The grunge stalwarts’ sixth album revisits their Seattle roots, with a sound harkening back to the early ’90s, when they were swept up in a wave of Pacific Northwest acts achieving international fame. | The grunge stalwarts’ sixth album revisits their Seattle roots, with a sound harkening back to the early ’90s, when they were swept up in a wave of Pacific Northwest acts achieving international fame. | Alice in Chains: Rainier Fog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-in-chains-rainier-fog/ | Rainier Fog | Early promotional efforts surrounding the release of Rainier Fog, the sixth studio album from Alice in Chains, centered around the group’s birthplace of Seattle. The quartet played an acoustic set atop the Space Needle, as well as a secret show at the Crocodile, the local venue co-owned by drummer Sean Kinney. To cap it off, the Seattle Mariners held an “Alice in Chains Night,” during which guitarist and vocalist Jerry Cantrell threw out the ceremonial first pitch as the band’s 1992 hit “Would?” played over Safeco Field’s PA system.
This campaign makes sense for an album named after the volcano that looms over the Seattle skyline. But it’s also a fitting reflection of a record that feels like an attempt to trace the group’s musical roots, with a sound harkening back three decades to the time when they were swept along with the wave of bands from their area code achieving international stardom.
Some of Alice in Chains’ efforts to this end are essentially sentimental. They laid down the basic tracks for Rainier Fog at Studio X, the Seattle studio formerly known as Bad Animals, where they recorded their self-titled album from 1995. There’s also a guest appearance, on the abrasive blues track “Drone,” by Chris DeGarmo, the co-founder of prog-metal titans Queensrÿche, who served as Cantrell’s touring guitarist in 1998. But the core of Rainier Fog melds the grimy, glammy elements of their 1990 debut Facelift with the thicker doom-metal approach that has dominated the group’s last few studio albums.
Unfortunately, recapturing their heyday was always going to be an impossible feat, because Alice in Chains have changed dramatically since their first LP. Gone are the key elements of their most successful era: the sinister growl of vocalist Layne Staley, who died of an overdose in 2002, and the fluid yet tensile basslines of Mike Starr, who left the band in 1993, long before his own death in 2011. As capable as their respective replacements, William DuVall and Mike Inez, are, these new members’ styles have effectively turned Alice in Chains into a different band.
DuVall, who joined the fold in 2006, had a particularly notable impact on their sound. Like Staley, he has a voice that blends well with Cantrell’s, but his singing for Alice in Chains is far less distinctive, endowed with neither his predecessor’s bluesy edge nor the soulful sting DuVall brings to his his other band, Comes With the Fall. On Rainier Fog, he only occasionally drifts to the surface, on the growling title track as well as the songs that bookend the album, “The One You Know” and the slowly decaying finale, “All I Am.”
Where Alice in Chains do succeed in bringing themselves full circle, it’s by cutting down on the acoustic elements and pop influences that surfaced on their 1992 EP Sap. Rainier Fog often acts like a cudgel, pounding DuVall and Cantrell’s sludgy guitars and the hip-swiveling grind of the rhythm section directly into the listener’s temporal lobe. This leads to some spectacular moments, like the downward-spinning chorus of “So Far Under,” the sputtering downstrokes on “The One You Know,” and the undulating waves of guitar on anti-Trump anthem “Red Giant.”
Still, for all its volume and bursts of power, Rainier Fog feels like an unnecessary regression. Alice in Chains were showing signs of growth on their previous DuVall-era albums, 2009’s Black Gives Way to Blue and 2013’s The Devil Put the Dinosaurs Here, whose jumps between heavier tunes and gentler fare were abrupt but at least attempted to strike a balance. Here, with the exception of the lighters-in-the-sky power balladry of “Fly,” the more melodious passages on tracks like “Maybe” and “All I Am” are still countered by blunt-force guitars and blaring volume.
It’s hard to fault the band for trying to recapture a bit of their past grunge-era glory. No matter how far away its members move from their old stomping grounds (Cantrell and Inez both live in California now, while DuVall resides in Atlanta), they will always be thought of as a Seattle band. And they’ve been called back to the city frequently over the past 20 years, to reckon with the deaths of their bandmates and, more recently, their friend Chris Cornell. Those experiences only serve to pull those bonds tighter. But just as the city that birthed them has changed dramatically in the years since their first album hit the Billboard charts, so have Alice in Chains. They’re no longer the same band they once were, and that evolution is something to be extended, not erased. | 2018-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | September 1, 2018 | 5.7 | 2a259301-17bd-42c5-8191-72669abd1fd1 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
The Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer performed this hypnotic, four-song, two-and-a-half-hour set less than a year after being released from prison, and his pointed, usually funny monologues about that wrongful imprisonment are a large part of this 3xCD collection's charm. | The Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer performed this hypnotic, four-song, two-and-a-half-hour set less than a year after being released from prison, and his pointed, usually funny monologues about that wrongful imprisonment are a large part of this 3xCD collection's charm. | Fela Kuti: Live in Detroit 1986 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16562-live-in-detroit-1986/ | Live in Detroit 1986 | When he rolled into Detroit's historic Fox Theater in November, 1986, Fela Kuti had been out of prison less than a year. He never should have been in prison in the first place; he'd been jailed in 1984 by the government of coup leader Major-General Muhammadu Buhari on trumped-up currency charges. Fela was an outspoken opponent of Buhari, as he had been of Nigeria's other coup-installed dictators before, and his imprisonment was an attempt to silence him. It backfired. Amnesty International launched a worldwide campaign for Fela's release, and then Buhari himself was overthrown by another coup, this one led by Ibrahim Babangida. Babangida pardoned Fela and actually brought Kuti's older brother, Beko, into his administration as Health Minister.
Fela opens the concert captured on Live in Detroit 1986 with a short monologue that directly references his wrongful imprisonment. "In my country," he says, "Things happen just like that…You go your own way, mind your own business, next thing I know I'm in prison, man, just like that." It's part of a nicely rhythmic build-up to the song "Just Like That", a song that continues the litany of arbitrary ills that Fela laments can befall an average Nigerian (he generalizes it to all of Africa, too), wrapping them in recollections of Nigeria's devastating 1967-1970 Civil War.
This version of "Just Like That" is half an hour long, which makes it by some distance the shortest workout on this set, which was taped by Bob Teagan at the Fox and is just now seeing release. The set is only four songs long, but it sprawls for nearly two and a half hours spread over three discs. Honestly, it could have fit on two discs without changing the running order, so I'm not sure why there are three. Fela's last band, Egypt 80, was a pretty different animal from Africa 70, which is the band most people are familiar with from its funky, forceful, and relatively compact masterpieces "Zombie", "Water No Get Enemy", "Expensive Shit", and "Roforofo Fight", among others. Egypt 80 emphasized jazz over funk, for one thing, and indulged in long, spacy jams built around hypnotic grooves.
The performance flows very freely through the four songs, each of which is introduced with a pointed, and usually pretty funny, monologue from Fela, whose facility with sarcasm was just about unparalleled in his day. Kuti engages his audience, teaching them short Yoruban phrases for call-and-response passages (and admonishing them to pronounce Yoruban words like Africans-- "We Africans talk with our whole mouths"), and these sections of long tracks make for good contrasts with the rhythm section's coolly funky vamping and the lead instrumentalists' winding solos.
It is a mostly great show, though not all dynamite. "Confusion Break Bones" wanders through one section so bizarrely discordant that it almost sounds like each instrument in the rhythm section is playing a different song at the same tempo, but it's a few minutes out of 40, and works in its own kind of freaky way. One of the show's highlights comes near its end, as "Beast of No Nation" thumps out of a big, full-band crescendo and settles on this amazing, bass-led rhythm that's so compelling on its own no one bothers to play anything over it. It gets the audience, already obviously engaged and even familiar with some of the material, really pumped. Listening to it off a very well-recorded audience tape is of course different from being there, and as a listening experience, this show is perhaps best taken a disc at a time. Still, whether heard whole or in pieces, it captures one of Fela's less appreciated phases and finds him still brimming with piss and vinegar two trying decades into his crusading career. | 2012-05-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-05-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Global | Knitting Factory / Strut | May 3, 2012 | 7.9 | 2a25aaf0-8264-4198-9fa5-f753b467ded0 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Brooklyn musician, a member of Palberta and the duo Lily and Horn Horse, crafts whimsical, minimalist indie pop with a slippery lyrical sensibility. | The Brooklyn musician, a member of Palberta and the duo Lily and Horn Horse, crafts whimsical, minimalist indie pop with a slippery lyrical sensibility. | Lily Konigsberg: It’s Just Like All the Clouds EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lily-konigsberg-its-just-like-all-the-clouds-ep/ | It’s Just Like All the Clouds EP | At the center of a Venn diagram containing haunted dolls, Arthur Russell, and Ariana Grande sits Lily Konigsberg. The idiosyncratic, shape-shifting Brooklyn musician’s boundless creativity animates a range of projects: the jagged experimental trio Palberta, the avant-pop duo Lily and Horn Horse, and a wide array of collaborations and solo releases under her own name. Konigsberg’s latest solo release, It’s Just Like All the Clouds, is a brief but charming EP of stripped-down indie rock. In four songs recorded by Paco Cathcart (The Cradle), she leans into her bubbliest impulses, enlivening well-worn sounds with earnest playfulness.
In all of Konigsberg’s releases, even her most abstract, there is an implicit pop backbone. It’s Just Like All the Clouds takes that tendency and strips it to its essence, resulting in short, infectious songs with punchy hooks. Opener “At Best” dabbles in indie pop, thanks to Konigsberg’s cheery guitar and peppy drums performed by her Palberta bandmate Nina Ryser. “When I find it hard to relax/I fix myself and then/I’m okay/And then I punch my brother/I have a better day,” she sings blithely. Konigsberg has name-dropped Liz Phair as an influence, and the jangly warmth of “I Said” feels especially indebted to the indie-rock legend. “Crushing all the bugs that I find in my hairbrush/Crusty but harmless guys clustering in a circle,” she murmurs sweetly, her honeyed voice veiling the decay beneath.
The EP’s title track, on the other hand, is a whimsical burst of Auto-Tune that’s closer to Lily and Horn Horse. It’s a small song that expands kaleidoscopically with zippy whimsy. Lyrically, Konigsberg leans toward minimalism, often relying on the repetition of simple observations. In this case, the message is vague but firm: “Now that you don’t want me I don’t need your time/I’m bound to stay away.” The freewheeling, flitting melodies underline the precision of Konigsberg’s songwriting: She knows what she wants to say and she is methodical about how much to reveal.
It’s Just Like All the Clouds closes with the wistful “Summer in the City,” where Konigsberg is joined by frequent collaborators Andre Schiavelli on keys and Charlie Dore-Young on bass and backing vocals. It is an understated vision of nostalgia: As Matt Norman’s pensive horn weaves through the background, Konigsberg captures an elusive longing, letting the melody speak for her. Though the whole EP is over in seven and a half minutes, the warmth Konigsberg generates extends long after the record ends. | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | March 25, 2020 | 7.8 | 2a268171-45ea-4536-a272-470aa173577e | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Just 18 months after the effervescent electro-pop of Junior, Röyksopp return with an all-instrumental follow-up. | Just 18 months after the effervescent electro-pop of Junior, Röyksopp return with an all-instrumental follow-up. | Röyksopp: Senior | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14624-senior/ | Senior | Röyksopp's career arc to date has seen the Norwegian duo steadily developing into exquisite pop architects. Beginning with the comparatively muted Melody A.M. in 2001 and continuing through to 2005's brighter, bolder The Understanding, Röyksopp fully blossomed into electro-pop impresarios with last year's Junior, sculpting alternately effervescent and melancholic synthesized soundscapes to accompany an expressive cadre of female singers. Looser than Air or Zero 7 yet less all-over-the-map than Basement Jaxx, Röyksopp seemed to have found their niche and hit their stride, crafting danceable, emotionally satisfying techno-pop that's neither too tasteful nor too garish.
It took Röyksopp, always busy remixing other artists, nearly four years to follow up Melody A.M. with The Understanding and another four to unveil Junior, so the release of Senior after a scant 18 months already suggests it's a different sort of beast. Following three albums of increasingly accessible pop, Senior is an entirely instrumental effort, and a moody, slowly unfurling one at that. Taken as a resolutely minor work, it yields a favorable amount of correspondingly minor charms, but there's also no mistaking that it neutralizes much of the momentum Röyksopp have gradually been building up over the past several years.
Röyksopp's previous albums have all been peppered with instrumental cuts, typically serving as palate cleansers or interstitial tissue to subtly strengthen the album's effect as a whole. Yet a whole LP of interstitials isn't the sort of thing that can stand on its own. The kind of downtempo stuff that makes up the majority of Röyksopp's vocal-less compositions just doesn't hold up to concentrated, repeated listens like many other forms of instrumental electronic music (techno, post-disco, wonky, etc.). Its ruminative nature is at odds with rhythmic propulsion and rarely delivers much of a "wow" factor. At the same time, it also lacks the precise, engrossing intricacy Four Tet or Caribou exhibit in their oft-contemplative efforts.
What we get instead is largely an album of langorous, meditative cuts, the best of which-- "The Alcoholic", "Senior Living", "Forsaken Cowboy", "Coming Home"-- succeed by sending fragile, melancholic synth and guitar melodies loping across lush, atmospheric sonic floors. Unfortunately, over a third of the record's running time is wasted on the meandering "The Drug", ponderous "The Fear" and a pointless instrumental redux of Junior's "Tricky Tricky". It can't be said that Senior fails to meet its modest wallpaper-ish aims, yet it hardly represents the best Röyksopp has to offer. | 2010-09-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Wall of Sound | September 13, 2010 | 6 | 2a2bebfe-2715-4348-bc65-fd6fae9ef816 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
While few are responding to The Passion with the same intensity that New York Times columnist Frank Rich did a… | While few are responding to The Passion with the same intensity that New York Times columnist Frank Rich did a… | Sufjan Stevens: Seven Swans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7512-seven-swans/ | Seven Swans | While few are responding to The Passion with the same intensity that New York Times columnist Frank Rich did a week ago—for starters, Rich titled his harangue “Mel Gibson Forgives Us for His Sins”—it’s fair to say that, recently, the American public finds itself thinking more deeply about the tensions that can surface when religion and art intersect so explosively. Yet, from an art-historical perspective, it’s the dissociation of the two, not the intersection, that has always been most curious: Relatively speaking, only recently have religion and high art not been commonly joined at the hip. Religion has always served as an inspiration and benefactor of art, a fact which has made it all the more amusing when people criticize The Passion as an awful film purely because of its religious content—they might as well pass over, among others, the Laocoon statue, the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s St. Matthaus Passion, and practically every Dostoevesky or Joyce novel.
That said, skepticism still greets the release of Seven Swans, Sufjan Stevens’ sparse and intimate fourth album, in which the Detroit-raised Brooklynite deals with the stories of his Christian faith most directly. Which is not to say that Michigan and its tales of personal grief and acceptance of one’s suffering were any less Christian in ethos, just that Seven Swans is so topically concerned with Christianity that a few wrong steps could easily have been a disaster. Religious content, by its very faith-based nature, is passionate and fantastical, and, if not fashioned with a commensurate degree of care and artifice, the emotion exceeds the form, throwing the listener headlong into the realm of melodrama and self-parody (confer all “Christian rock” bands).
Frank Rich himself talks of The Passion’s unbridled over-the-toppity, the film “constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie.” Where The Passion fails artistically for Rich is not in its highly charged subject matter, but in its crudely considered execution. On similar grounds, Seven Swans partly succeeds for me because Sufjan rarely steps foot in the excess of pedantic preaching, despite the openly Christian nature of his lyrics here. At their melodic cores, the songs on Seven Swans are equally as potent as those on Michigan, though perhaps a little rougher around the edges and generally more sparsely arranged. The raw simplicity, coupled with the stripped-down, banjo-led instrumentation, lends Seven Swans a particularly high degree of sincerity: Even if we’re not taken by the subject matter, we’re taken by how beautifully and personally Sufjan is taken by it.
On songs like “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands” and “To Be Alone With You,” Sufjan does well to collapse the distinction between divine- and human-directed affections—his “You” could apply to God and loved one alike. Especially in the former song, which opens Seven Swans, Sufjan showcases his curious ability to change a song’s grief-stricken tenor to a hopeful one on the flash. The opening moments prove this eloquently: As Sufjan sings, “If I am alive this time next year,” his weary banjo accompaniment slowly imbues the line with convincing optimism, a progression that continues throughout the song with similar effect as Sufjan is joined by a breathy background chorus from Elin and Megan Smith and drummer David Smith’s labored tympanics.
Because Sufjan commits himself so rigorously to this sparse, acoustic compositions, those few moments when electric instruments are used are particularly powerful. The first comes in “The Dress Looks Nice on You,” in which tandem plucks and sweeps of guitar and banjo are suddenly contraposed midway against a quirky Casio keyboard breakdown. A second comes during the vaguely alt-country lullaby “Sister,” which positions a light, nondescript jangle behind a screaming electric guitar that arises from the swell to become even more lively and expansive as the song builds on its repeated anthem.
“Abraham,” “Seven Swans,” and “The Transfiguration” confront religion most directly, and to varying success. In “Abraham,” Sufjan briefly recounts the Old Testament story in the Book of Genesis when Abraham, ordered by God as a test of faith to sacrifice his son Isaac (“Take up on the wood/Put it on your son”), leads Isaac up a mountain and prepares to kill him as commanded before God sends an angel to intervene. (See also: Leonard Cohen’s beautiful “Story of Isaac.”) Musically, the song marks the low point of Seven Swans: Sufjan’s vocal melody is well-delivered but somewhat impotent, and the backup chorus seems incongruous given the subject matter.
As the last two songs on the album, “Seven Swans” and “The Transfiguration” seem to work as a pair. Both are of relatively epic lengths and movement-like constructions, and as equal statements of faith—the fear-inspiring “My father burned into coal,” and the comforting “Have no fear! We draw near!”—they dovetail perfectly. First, “Seven Swans” is a dark, brooding anticipation of the Apocalypse in which Sufjan begins with a foreboding banjo line, only to be swept up in crashing storms of resonant piano and a terrifying octave-jumping chorus of “He is the Lord!,” easily one of Seven Swans’ most memorable moments. “The Transfiguration” follows immediately on the bittersweet note of Jesus’ requisite suffering, the song performatively ebbing back and forth from major to minor chords as new melodies and instruments are stuffed into the mix.
Given Sufjan’s ability to handle such dangerously effusive material as his own religion so well, it’s no wonder that he aligns himself with the similarly concerned writer Flannery O’Connor, whose short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find is recast here from the perspective of O’Connor’s Mephistophelic character, the Misfit. O’Connor, as the late Yale professor Robert Dubbin noted, is unusually capable of masking the Christian mechanisms at work in her stories without cheapening them—she effectively crafts Christian revelatory experiences into ones of universal enormity and applicability. The same comment could very well apply to Sufjan Stevens on Michigan and Seven Swans alike: A gifted musician to begin with, Sufjan invites not our religious conversions, but our innate human compassion. | 2004-03-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-03-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sounds Familyre | March 16, 2004 | 8.1 | 2a2fab2a-ea0a-4c2d-b951-48340e9b5005 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | |
null | About 10 years ago, I put a copy of Morton Subotnick's *Silver Apples of the Moon* on hold at a used record store in New Jersey. I've avoided picking it up mostly because I like the idea of it still being nestled away somewhere, forgotten by everyone. Devendra Banhart's title *Golden Apples of the Sun* neatly references the final line from W.B. Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Angus", where it's paired with those silver moon apples. ("And pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon/ The golden apples of the sun.") It's also an album | Various Artists: Golden Apples of the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/549-golden-apples-of-the-sun-compilation/ | Golden Apples of the Sun | About 10 years ago, I put a copy of Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon on hold at a used record store in New Jersey. I've avoided picking it up mostly because I like the idea of it still being nestled away somewhere, forgotten by everyone. Devendra Banhart's title Golden Apples of the Sun neatly references the final line from W.B. Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Angus", where it's paired with those silver moon apples. ("And pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon/ The golden apples of the sun.") It's also an album by Judy Collins, a collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, and a low-budget 1971 film about violence and hippies. But perhaps Banhart chose the title to contrast directly with Subotnick's famously chilly modulations, because even while this compilation functions as a kind of now-sound capsule of the contemporary neo-folk scene, its best artists share an anachronistic, misfiled air with Subotnick's dusty gem, patiently awaiting discovery.
Whatever the title's derivation, as head curator, Banhart assumes the tricky role of scene definer. I can't imagine the man behind "This Beard Is for Siobhan" subscribing to locked-door scenesterism, but Golden Apples of the Sun draws a clean line in the sand. Unlike Brian Eno, who kept his No New York sampler to just four acts, the bearded bard here musters a generous spread of 20 diverse freakfolk acts to serve as representatives of the various facets of the underground's most recent (and most promising) pigeonhole. Not intended to flood the market, Golden Apples of the Sun is limited to 1,000 copies and can only be had through Arthur magazine, which released the disc on its newly founded Bastet imprint.
For this disc, Banhart wisely pairs spankin' new tracks with a number of previously released ones. In an interesting change of pace from most compilations, however, the non-exclusive cuts are the real draw here, and they greatly benefit from both Banhart's careful sequencing and separation from their original full-lengths. Saddled between two downcast instrumentals, Little Wings' "Look at What the Light Did Now" absolutely sparkles. Kyle Field owns a preternaturally heartbreaking (and charmingly off-key) voice even at his happiest, and here, outside the context of his spotty K Records albums, his syllables are remarkably affecting. Viking Moses also kicks it Little Wings-style; his "Crosses" (from the album of the same name) displays a pawnshop sweetness: "Without love, life is gone/ Without life, love goes on and on."
Golden Apples' shifts in gradation keeps the narrative from stalling-out: Espers' "Byss & Abyss" balances boy/girl contrast with just the right amount of Philly opiate haziness; six-stringer Jack Rose ups the finger-picking ante with the careening notes of "White Mule" from his Red Horse, White Mule; Iron & Wine beautifully represent for soft strums with "Fever Dream" from their hugely popular Our Endless Numbered Days; and Banhart himself shows up dueting with folk legend Vashti Bunyan on the title track of his recent masterstroke, Rejoicing in the Hands.
Anti-folk singer/songwriter and nutritionist Diane Cluck's "Heat from Every Corner" (from Macy's Day Bird) comes complete with ambient footsteps and a click of the off switch, and sounds as though it was placed on tape by Chan Marshall 40 years ago. Current 93 collaborator and one of NYC's most compelling voices, Antony, closes out the disc in style with a musical interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Lake", featuring his signature heart-rending, androgynous operatics and mesmerizing piano. (If you're unfamiliar with his work, check out the I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy EP and be blown away by the brilliant camp heartache.)
Displacement breathes life into Currituck Co.'s "The Tropics of Cancer", a smiling but subdued acoustic instrumental from the often enjoyable Ghost Man on First, while Vetiver turn in "Angel's Share", a collaboration with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval that marked the standout on their self-titled debut. White Magic's "Don't Need" isn't the most riveting track from the Brooklyn trio's Drag City debut, but this meandering twanger makes more sense in the compilation's context than any of Through the Sun Door's witchier tracks.
Meanwhile, inherently strong numbers continue to shine: Joanna Newsom's "Bridges and Balloons" feels just as triumphant torn from The Milk-Eyed Mender. It functions as a lead-in for Six Organs of Admittance's "Hazy SF", a wee ditty that swims in the suave-dude realm of Compathia rather than the gorgeous spaciousness of the recently reissued gem For Octavio Paz.
The real treats, however, come courtesy of two lesser-known acts. Chicago's Josephine Foster (of Born Heller and The Children's Hour) rustles backwoods memories amid banjo, flute, and the indescribable air of English romanticism on the unreleased home recording "Little Life". It's a stunning fragment: Shirley Collins collides with and bows gently within the cleansing mud of a rocky stream. Likewise, ex-Matty & Mossy vocalist Jana Hunter blows the roof off the barn with "Farm, CA", a section of hauntingly whispered lo-fi dreaminess.
Not everything here achieves the understated power of these aforementioned tracks, but Golden Apples of the Sun's sprawling landscape presents a persuasive case for the depth of a scene that seemingly sprung up (like mushrooms) overnight. It's impossible to pick apart intentions, but this music feels far more sincere than other recent buzzes, and even if these artists are pulling the wool over our eyes (which seems unlikely), it would appear that perhaps a few of these players will outlast the current critical harvesting. To see if I'm right, hide this disc in your bedroom after one listen and wait a decade before that second date. | 2004-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Bastet | July 7, 2004 | 8.6 | 2a30a939-fafa-4404-b0cb-b5d35be45ccb | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Neneh Cherry’s explosive pop debut, Raw Like Sushi. | 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 Neneh Cherry’s explosive pop debut, Raw Like Sushi. | Neneh Cherry: Raw Like Sushi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neneh-cherry-raw-like-sushi/ | Raw Like Sushi | When Neneh Cherry’s brash “Buffalo Stance” crash-landed into pop in late 1988, the landscape had been primed. J.J. Fad’s fast-talking “Supersonic” and Salt-N-Pepa’s winking “Push It” had proven Top 40 radio’s remit, while still hesitant toward rap, was at least able to handle female MCs. Production outfits like the hip-hop/freestyle masterminds Full Force and M/A/R/R/S flipped rare samples into gold and platinum records. And the big-tent sound of the ’80s could properly accommodate the rappers’ bravado and the producers’ bone-shaking beats. Precarious as it was, the framework was there.
Still, “Buffalo Stance” exploded it all. The Swedish singer provided something familiar yet vital that sounded both of the moment and of the future. It’s a nearly six-minute collision of synths and skronk, scratching and squealing, presided over by Cherry, whose streetwise rebukes to a gigolo looking for a new sucker were balanced out by the sugar-spun alto she used on its dreamy, yet mean-mugging chorus. She dreamed of sweetness, comforted by the way that her crew of London bohemians, the titular “Buffalo” throwing down their stance, was standing right behind her.
What makes “Buffalo Stance” more remarkable is its origin: The sophisti-pop duo Morgan/McVey’s 1987 song “Looking Good Diving.” You can hear the nuts and bolts of the song in its background, especially the victorious synth-sweep on the chorus. When the single was to be released out, it needed a B-side, so she decided to go with a remix featuring Bristol-based proto-hip-hop crew the Wild Bunch. That remix scooped arpeggiated synths out of the song’s glossed-up chorus put Cherry—then a model, albeit one who had been a member of the agit-punk crew Rip Rig + Panic—on the mic. Her vocal is tentative at first, but after she drops the Cockney-tinged “wot is he loyyyyyke?” she becomes more emboldened, leaning into the track’s bridge and setting a bar for the streetwise ebullience of its successor.
But it was Tim Simenon—who, as Bomb the Bass, had released the manic collagist hit “Beat Dis” in 1988—that reworked “Looking Good Diving” into a single for Cherry. His cut-and-paste approach transformed the musical bed into something that resembled a city, all heat action and unexpected sounds whooshing into earshot. “Tim kept coming up with these samples and it would lead you into a different section,” co-producer Mark Saunders told Sound on Sound in 2017. “If we’d have been thinking properly about how to make a hit record, I don’t think we would’ve had anywhere near as many different parts to it.” Cherry rose to the challenge, upping the ante with a shouted-out vocal and asides like “Bomb the Bass… rock this place!” that would give the song extra yell-along juice in the clubs and on the playgrounds.
“Without rejecting anything, I’m on purpose rejecting formats,” Cherry told The Guardian in early 1989, as “Buffalo Stance” was climbing the Hot 100. Raw Like Sushi built on that promise with gusto, using influences from all over the pop landscape to craft a singular statement on womanhood in the late ’80s. Instead of placing songs in boxes, Cherry and her producers let them breathe and grow, seeing where they might go—and often they’re taken to exciting places. “Inna City Mamma” is loose-limbed, its percussive pianos give its strut swing even as it’s wistful about the ways urban life can chew up a person inside and out; the verses of “Heart” summon strength from Cherry’s manic flow and a playground-taunt verse, with skittering synths retreating from view once the New Jack Swing chorus kicks in.
It’s very much a maternal record, too; two decades before M.I.A. went onstage at the Grammys while on the verge of giving birth, Cherry triumphantly mimed “Buffalo Stance” on the UK chart show “Top of the Pops” while clad in maternity Lycra and a bronze bustier-blazer combo. At its best moments, Raw Like Sushi mixes its nurturing spirit with an audacious optimism, a hopeful foresight that mirrors Cherry’s vision of a genre-agnostic pop landscape.The coming-of-age tale “Kisses on the Wind” pairs squalling guitars and malfunctioning electronics with lyrics about how puberty makes girls feel awkward, with Cherry serving as the omnisciently tender narrator of a young woman’s journey toward her next self; “The Next Generation” is a stoop conversation about politics on a sweaty day turned into a stretched-out brass jam, its clashing of musical styles coming together create a cacophonous, hopeful centerpiece. There’s raunch to be had, too, with the album’s final track, “So Here I Come,” ending with the campy declaration “I came already!”
Another mother loomed in the background as well, as Cherry’s up-from-the-underground take on pop and style inspired more than a few critics at the time to fire off Madonna comparisons. (USA Today compared the “light, pop-friendly” side of her voice to the Material Girl’s, while The New York Times reviewed Sushi against the backdrop of Madonna’s push into pop confessionalism Like a Prayer.) While the underground clubs where both drew their inspiration were spiritually simpatico, the music they released had key differences. Madonna knew how to draw within pop’s lines the way Cherry simply couldn’t, for reasons involving radio, race, and the still-strict lines between formats: “We went over [to America] with our funny little posse from London,” Cherry told Pitchfork in 2014. “And in the black department, [”Buffalo Stance”] wasn’t black enough, and in the white department it was too black. So it was this weird middle satellite, floating around.”
“Manchild,” the second track on the album, is probably the best example of Raw Like Sushi’s widescreen view; it reunites Cherry with Wild Bunch member Robert “3D” Del Naja, who by then had formed trip-hop collective Massive Attack. Anyone expecting something like “Buffalo Stance II” to be Sushi’s second single was probably surprised. Its shape-shifting, woozy synths, which floated in and out of keys, led and were led by Cherry’s soulful yet pointed vocal. She’s acting as the prodding yet sympathetic sage to a flailing other, rapping about “R-E-S-P-E and C-T” while chords quiver and hover.
Audacity was what made Raw Like Sushi such a thrilling album three decades ago, and it’s also a big part of why today it looms large, both as an example of musical possibility and as a totem of womanhood. The front of Raw Like Sushi shows Cherry in full-on Buffalo stance, her arms crossed, her gaze set, her pout square. Its back cover, however, shows Cherry in flight and lost in the music, her curls midair, her arms splayed—realizing the joy in pure possibility, and dancing along with it as fast as she can. | 2018-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin | April 1, 2018 | 8 | 2a315924-5c38-48f0-abc6-47b8192d10c3 | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
Kelsey Lu recorded her debut EP live in a Brooklyn church with a loop pedal and Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly co-producing. The music lingers and haunts, rich with sadness and unease. | Kelsey Lu recorded her debut EP live in a Brooklyn church with a loop pedal and Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly co-producing. The music lingers and haunts, rich with sadness and unease. | Kelsey Lu: Church EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22097-church-ep/ | Church EP | Kelsey Lu remembers her first encounter with the cello. She knew she would take it home, if she stared hard enough, and if Sarah, her teacher, sensed her urgency (which she knew she would). Despite Lu’s 17-year mastery of the instrument, it’s as if that primal scene—the regal, mysterious, child-sized wooden figure lurking in the corner—continues to inform her skeletal, mournful take on folk. Her debut release, the solo-cello EP Church, has histrionic moments that betray her lofty patronage (support slots with Florence, collaborations with Dev Hynes) as well as displays of incredible composure. But there are ghosts in its shadows. The music is characterized by eerie moments like the closing passage of “Liar.” Just when the song might erupt, a balletic solo glides in, pirouettes, and collapses in the spotlight. When it leaves the stage, it’s as if a dark curtain is drawn, but for two more minutes, the cello groans and whispers. It’s magnificent enough to simply exist, knowing we’ll calmly submerge ourselves in its reverberations.
Church’s six songs comprise a minimal, intensely introspective suite, but one with an elevated sense of drama. For effect, Lu recorded the EP live—with help from a loop pedal and, on co-production, Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly—at a church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Given her upbringing, it’s a curious choice of venue. Raised strictly Jehovah’s Witness, she’d visit church only when attending non-believers’ funerals. For a religious tearaway like Lu, who fled her devout family at 18, the church can be nostalgic, a reminder of those early communal engagements. But it’s a strange place to be alone.
Alone is how Lu performs, and how you feel listening in. The key to the recording is its vast reservoir of space. Rather than intimacy, the ambience imposes austerity on the music. A complicated silence lurks behind the tunes, like a latent threat—church echoes, feedback groans, bow scrapes, sliding fingertips. The effect is jarring: You accept it to be part of the set, without quite managing to forget it’s there. It makes listening to Church a self-conscious experience. At times it’s as if, sitting front row for a small play, you’ve been pinned back by the gaze of an actor reciting a fierce monologue.
But Church, like a furtive Kranky gem, somehow hypnotizes through the tension, and Lu sings as beautifully as she plays. In sleepier passages, like the four-minute “Dreams” intro, her strings seem to mourn the silence they replace. The reverence with which she treats each note engenders a tone of quiet rapture. On “Liar,” as a patient, three-chord twang spills light across the cavern walls, her voice becomes interchangeable with her instrument. Vowels slide over her tongue, vibrating like strings against the bow.
Across the EP, the gravity of Lu’s voice and repetitive lyrics transform stark sentiments into rootless syllables that linger and haunt. “Everybody knows/The feelings that you feel/Aren’t real” is a cutting line on “Time,” perhaps addressing her mother, who banned secular friends, or the abusive ex who showed her New York before she showed him the door. But Lu’s elegant tone smoothes even the most razor-sharp jibes. In contrast, “I feel you in my dreams” is an utterance so mawkish it ought to disintegrate in air, yet in the world she creates, it’s the only kind of mantra that makes sense—impassioned yet passive, with a gentle power. It’s as if, self-trained to master engulfing forces, she has learnt to hold communion solo. Singing about heartbreak and overcoming, Lu taps into a state often reserved for spiritual musicians: that of being utterly alone without the fear of loneliness. | 2016-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | True Panther | July 12, 2016 | 7.6 | 2a37ccbc-caf3-4887-916f-b85834e9614c | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The mesmerizing Brooklyn rapper's latest release finds him disappearing further into his singular style: gritty samples, low-key rhymes, no real hooks. | The mesmerizing Brooklyn rapper's latest release finds him disappearing further into his singular style: gritty samples, low-key rhymes, no real hooks. | Medhane: Full Circle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/medhane-full-circle/ | Full Circle | Medhane’s writing leans on the value of blood bonds and forged friendships. “With my fam,’ on the grind, going to the sky/Putting pain in, tell a story like a painting,” he raps on “Dan Freeman,” the opening track from his new project Full Circle. Street rap narratives often involve a come-up, but this NYC laureate of dread raps like a young man living moment-to-moment, day-to-day, check-to-check. With no expectation that music will deliver riches, the only sense of purpose he derives is from the people who surround him.
This darkness is palpable in Medhane’s uncompromising aesthetics. It’s fair to say the Brooklynite arrived in the shadow of Earl Sweatshirt, but the comparisons no longer serve him. At eight tracks and just 15 minutes, Full Circle feels lower-stakes than last year’s debut album Own Pace, but it finds Medhane further disappearing into his singular style: gritty samples, low-key rhymes, and no real hooks.
Medhane’s bars have always been economical, and here they feel shorter and more clipped than ever before. You can picture him paging through his rhymes with a red pen, crossing out unnecessary words. Or perhaps his scattered wordplay just reflects a stream-of-consciousness thought process. Take the 82-second “Big38” (one of six songs that come in under two minutes): With no wasted motions, Medhane declares his love for his kin, muses on astrology, and asserts he has “sent the hurt away” with the forlornness of someone just pretending to be ok. While his flow in the past felt spectral, Medhane has modified his voice into something more forceful. Rather than letting his rhymes gently float through the mix, he now regularly thumps out his syllables, sounding more confident on the mic than earlier recordings.
There are other surprises on Full Circle. The screwed sample and militant tone of “I Was Just In the Mara” resembles Kanye West’s Wyoming sessions work, and rising rapper maassai almost steals the spotlight as she viscerally describes “running from hearses” as “cardio.” “4Evafaded” closes the album with an old soul loop that would instantly turn the head of Griselda Gang, prompting Medhane to sign off with some positivity: “Why relish the hurt?” he asks, taking a nostalgic beat to remember his grandmother palming him some cash and advising that he save rather than spend it.
Mostly, though, Medhane traverses a chilly version of New York. On “No More Tequila,” he recalls a three-day bender; the pensive “Redline” details a winter’s day in the life as he moves through the city with friends, jumping subway turnstiles, buying weed, and facing wind and rain in just a grey hoodie. Medhane exists in this realm not on his own, but alongside compatriots MIKE, Adé Hakim (formerly known as Sixpress), Caleb Giles, and Slauson Malone. Together, they are creating a new ripple of the New York rap canon, offering a murky and ghostlike vision of one of rap’s most well-painted cities.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misquoted a lyric. The lyric has since been removed for clarity. | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 27, 2020 | 7.1 | 2a38420b-61a7-4753-bf58-7f93f282e433 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The newly independent singer’s latest project is designed to make her stand out in a crowded R&B field but falls short of any singular, defining moments. | The newly independent singer’s latest project is designed to make her stand out in a crowded R&B field but falls short of any singular, defining moments. | Justine Skye: Space & Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/justine-skye-space-and-time/ | Space & Time | Justine Skye first garnered fame on Tumblr, where she released a series of originals and covers that helped land her a deal with Atlantic Records in 2013. Three years later, she moved to Roc Nation and dropped her debut album Ultraviolet. Between label switches and multiple EPs, Skye has built a consistent R&B catalog: seven projects in eight years. Now, as an independent artist—a decision she said freed her from the confines of major-label creative control—her latest project attempts to cement her as a prominent R&B force and not just a model and influencer.
Space and Time has the futuristic sound of its executive producer Timbaland’s greatest hits, with robotic tempos and slap-bass melodies; it’s a pairing that works well in theory but relies heavily on mimicking artists of the past. Skye is aware of her middling status in the R&B world—she referred to it in a tweet as “all that talk”—and she recognizes the stain of former public relationships with fellow artists Goldlink, Travis Scott, and Sheck Wes, who Skye accused of abuse in 2019. As a result, there is a unique sense of urgency and directness on Space and Time, setting the album up as a chance for her to dig deeper into the industry baggage that made her step out on her own. But if the project is designed to make her stand out in a crowded field, it falls short of defining moments.
Among a generation of singers like Summer Walker and SZA known for airy, whispered vocals, Skye has a notably deeper tone but never pushes her range. On “It’s About Time,” Timbaland introduces her by name as if it’s the year 2000, and with tracks like “Innocent,” he plays into his predictable narrative of creating protégés like Aaliyah. The song samples “If Your Girl Only Knew,” with a Justin Timberlake feature that, rather than revitalizing the original, plays like a phoned-in collaboration. A snippet of Timberlake’s “Holy Grail” hook (co-written and produced by Timbaland) on another heartbreak tune, “We,” fits Skye’s breakup theme— “Just stop hurting me/It’s all in agony” she sings. “Pray, but my heart is weak, yeah/It’s all monotony.” But the song feels like an attempt to again relive an old Timberlake/Timbaland feature on a project that’s meant to re-center Skye.
Forced nostalgia aside, Space and Time is Skye’s chance to lay bare her journey of coping with heartache and self-doubt. Opening track “Conscious” repeats the question “Where have you been?/How did you get in?” setting the scene like the protagonist of a sci-fi film frantically searching for familiar surroundings. The video for “Twisted Fantasy,” an Afropop ditty featuring Rema, shows Skye traveling through a mirror into multiple realms before entering an alternate universe where the two have a face-to-face showdown at a dimly lit bar. The album’s standout is “In My Bag,” which is on-brand in the arsenal of TikTok-savvy hot girl summer anthems, with lyrics that champion women and getting to the money. The song ends with a call-and-response as if the DJ held the beat for all the ladies to huddle and perform their last twerk. It may very well birth a viral dance moment but not quite a star-making one.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nynetineth | July 6, 2021 | 6 | 2a39c249-8bd4-40ec-8c77-53dd9f8df062 | Veracia Ankrah | https://pitchfork.com/staff/veracia-ankrah/ | |
On this three-track album from Sam Ray’s electronic project, originally recorded in 2014, samples are absent and stillness is the move. | On this three-track album from Sam Ray’s electronic project, originally recorded in 2014, samples are absent and stillness is the move. | Ricky Eat Acid: am i happy, singing_ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ricky-eat-acid-am-i-happy-singing-/ | am i happy, singing_ | Playlist culture suggests that we take our music with a side of multitasking—or perhaps, the other way around. Spotify, for instance, perpetuates this idea with its “Genres & Moods” section, featuring efficiently labeled playlists for a range of daily activities: “Workout,” “Sleep,” “Dinner.” Listening to am i happy, singing_, Sam Ray’s latest release under his electronic alias Ricky Eat Acid, it’s reassuring to discover that none of its songs come remotely close to any of those categories.
Originally written and recorded as a rough draft in 2014, am i happy was laid down in just three days. Ray has said he considered releasing the album immediately, but was advised to spend more time with it, later devoting months to retouching and re-tooling the work in a manner he likens to “reshaping a lump of clay, or chipping away at a hunk o’ marble to make a better statue.” In the four years since that initial recording, the Maryland composer/producer has developed a reputation as an eclectic, oddball bedroom-pop auteur as fans have discovered Ricky Eat Acid releases like 2014’s Three Love Songs and 2016’s Talk to You Soon, as well as full-lengths from his low-fi folk project Julia Brown and his indie rock band American Pleasure Club (FKA Teen Suicide).
am i happy marks a sharp detour from the sample-heavy approach that has united much of Ray’s previous work. Three Love Songs memorably repurposed a cover of a Drake and Rihanna duet, a fire and brimstone radio sermon, and countless collaged vocals; American Pleasure Club’s recent A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This flips Frank Ocean’s version of “At Your Best (You Are Love).” Every note of am i happy, however, is original—the only samples present are those borrowing from Ray’s own compositions. Like an audio magpie, he has been amassing these sound scraps for years, hoarding excerpts from string quartets and cataloging every plink of piano. With a slow and steady hand, Ray stitched these varied elements together. The result is a collection of arresting sonics that resist passive listening, instead commanding undivided attention.
Opening track “‘sitting in a diner’” is one of the most difficult pieces Ray has released to date, but in this case “difficult” and “beautiful” are not mutually exclusive terms. The song doesn’t so much begin as erupt, bursting like a glitter cannon loaded with shards of broken mirror. An early listen caused me to wonder if my speakers were shorting out, but the patchwork of noise is fragmented by design. It is a gorgeous assault on the eardrums, intercutting complete silence with 808 chirps that sound like Mario leaping through a row of coins.
His use of homegrown samples throughout am i happy, and the months he spent finessing the record, illustrate heightened discipline for someone who’d already churned out dozens of Bandcamp albums by the time he recorded it. That discipline pays off: am i happy is among Ray’s most cohesive recordings, playing like a linear triptych rather than a scrapbook. Thematically, too, it represents a development. Works like Three Love Songs and Talk to You Soon conveyed a narrative sense of place, memory, and motion. Cuts like “Driving alone past roadwork at night” and “Spinning About Under the Bright Light in Bliss” evoked filmic tableaus filtered through the grainy glow of nostalgia—one could easily imagine taking a midnight road trip, or making out in a drunken stupor.
am i happy, on the other hand, requires absolute stillness. It’s too jarring to score mundane activities, and too interesting to be relegated to playlists like “Hanging Out and Relaxing” or “Wine & Dine.” “two_beautiful ways of moving_your_hands” may be fabricated with gorgeous strings, but their incomplete, looped phrases arouse an intense yearning for them to fully bloom. It is a sensation I can only liken to the blushing tension between a “good night” and a first kiss. The anticipation escalates when the audio cuts out for a full four seconds, an eternity in song time. As a listener, you are hanging on every note, or lack thereof.
The album’s final, 17-minute movement, “am i happy, singing_,” is some of the lushest music Ray has ever made. Harmonica-like wails stretch across lambent synths, and static surges under minimalist piano like a hissing river. A halo of birdsong drifts around the perimeter. It is the record’s most musical and naturalistic offering, and feels particularly well-earned given the prior turbulence. By the time we reach its closing minutes, am i happy, singing_ has migrated miles from its initial commotion. Even in stillness, we are still moving. | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | April 23, 2018 | 7.9 | 2a3e9070-b2b9-4c8f-b7dc-dcb10735bb81 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
London-based quartet's latest record is confident, menacing, and equally indebted to shoegaze and synthpop. | London-based quartet's latest record is confident, menacing, and equally indebted to shoegaze and synthpop. | Ladytron: The Witching Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4635-the-witching-hour/ | The Witching Hour | Even though the warm breath of October has made it easier (here in Toronto, anyway) to pretend we're still in July, the spell is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. From the browning leaves to the scarves in the windows of the downtown department stores, it's understood that we're just playing in injury time now, and that any prickly chill might signal autumn's speed trials on the way to another interminable winter.
Beyond the first snowfall, I am not a finds-comfort-in-December kind of person, which is probably why my treasured winter albums mean a lot more to me than the summer ones. There's something to be said for all records that lend themselves to certain seasons; the really good ones have this strange ability to extrapolate themselves across time. When Björk's Vespertine came out in 2001, I knew it wasn't just going to be a record I listened to a lot that winter, but in every one after it. It's instant, like a mirror-in-mirror hallway, folding out into the future for God knows how long, always as much a mystery as it is a comfort.
This year, for reasons I haven't figured out yet, I'm feeling like perhaps the good winter records are going to be even more important than usual. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, and the mirrors are getting smaller. Or maybe it's just going to be that much harder to fend off the creeping feeling of end days without the benefit of summer's attendant glories.
I won't lie: I didn't expect this to be one of those records. In fact, with the exception of a handful of singles, the best of which still felt brittle and two-dimensional, I never cared much for Ladytron. Granted, the whole electroclash thing getting levied against them seemed kind of unfair (the takeaway: keyboard basslines and polygonal haircuts are a gateway drug to dumb press), but for a type of music that was supposed to be emblematic of, if not a stand-in for, mountains of cocaine, Ladytron always seemed kind of enfeebled, their glassy tick-tock a weak substitute for anything properly muscular.
If they lacked the horsepower before, the year plus they spent touring behind 2002's Light & Magic put the meat on their bones. Despite being delayed for nearly a year thanks to the collapse of their UK label Telstar and the emergency room administration required for their still-dormant U.S. label Emperor Norton, The Witching Hour is the most urgent and immediate of their career. The earlier records were sort of toylike and plastic; this not only has a pulse, it has chilled blood in its veins.
Every quantum leap record has a quantum leap single, and in this case, it's "Destroy Everything You Touch". With a charging chorus and shivery production that sounds as equally indebted to shoegaze as it does synthpop, this is probably the most confident and menacing thing they've ever done. Almost as good is "International Dateline", which marries a pogo punk rhythm and a post-punky guitar lead with a keening vocal hook. With nothing but a transparent wash of synths and a simple minor-key vocal melody, closer "All the Way" demonstrates that Ladytron's advancement owes as much to their songwriting as it does to their increased production prowess. And, for better or worse, the barely concealed cocaine metaphor of "Sugar" ("If I get the sugar, will you get me/ Something elusive and temporary") proves they could go there if they wanted to.
But perhaps the most surprising thing about The Witching Hour is how affecting it is. Beyond the crumbling synths and the uneasy washes of white noise are lyrics that move between sounding commanding and hopelessly lost; where vocalists Mira Aroyo and Helena Marnie once sang about things like movie theatres and Commodore computers from about four steps back from mic, they're right between your ears now, their lungs fighting with the wheezing synths for airspace. That's as good an illustration as any of how far they've come in these last three years: if Ladytron of old was a truckful of ice, this one's a winter storm, bundled up people and all. | 2005-10-04T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-10-04T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ryko | October 4, 2005 | 8.3 | 2a4168e8-d130-468a-9939-25f3a5b45d38 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Chief Keef's major label debut stays true to the mixtapes that got him noticed, and proves that the young Chicago rapper has more potential than his detractors might have hoped. | Chief Keef's major label debut stays true to the mixtapes that got him noticed, and proves that the young Chicago rapper has more potential than his detractors might have hoped. | Chief Keef: Finally Rich | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17477-finally-rich/ | Finally Rich | Finally Rich is Chief Keef's major-label debut, but truthfully, there's not a whole lot to distinguish it from the free mixtapes he made while on house arrest at his grandmother's place in Chicago's Washington Park neighborhood. Those tapes, first passed around among southside high-schoolers, were what landed the now-17-year-old rapper his Interscope deal, and apart from a few random A&R'ed guest spots, the label appears to have stayed out of his way.
That's a good thing. Chief Keef's music sparked a lot of arguments this year. His youth, his rapid rise, and his association with Chicago's epidemic of gun violence made him 2012’s flashpoint for discussions about what was wrong with hip-hop. But he established a simple sound that proved powerfully effective and addictive, and he also showed that it was a sturdy enough blueprint to support multiple songs. If Waka Flocka Flame woke up tomorrow utterly drained of the will to live, he might sound like Chief Keef -- all the unilateral forward motion and aggression, none of the audible joy. Young Chop's crisp snares and hi-hats mimic Lex Luger's (minus the tricky syncopation) while Keef mutters through a thick wall of processing.
There's nothing to add or subtract to this sound that could substantially improve it. Fellow Chicagoan Kanye West found that out the hard way when his Michigan Avenue makeover of "I Don't Like" was given a public dressing-down by Young Chop the day after it hit the web. Finally Rich benefits from some professional tweaks in the mix, but otherwise leaves Keef's sound untouched. And in addition to succeeding on its own terms, it proves that Keef has a lot of potential-- much more than his detractors might have hoped.
Based on a simple four-note earworm, the hook on album opener "Love Sosa" has the feel of something sung under the breath, and after hearing it once or twice, you'll probably find yourself doing just that. There's an unquantifiable line separating the maddeningly catchy from the simply maddening, and Keef has a natural knack for walking it. "Hallelujah", also produced by Young Chop, is one the album's more involved productions: Its blaring horns gesture towards Waka's "O Let's Do It" over Hammond organ licks that feel smuggled out of Houston rap. "Diamonds" has a similar feel, with gunfire, horn and string stabs, and a manic carnival-ride synth line all rolling out like evenly spaced 8-bit Donkey Kong barrels.
"Hate Bein' Sober", the album’s forthcoming single, is the catchiest moment and perhaps the most pop-focused song Keef’s ever made. It features 50 Cent, who sounds at home for the first time on a pop-rap hit since "I Get Money". Out of the handful of big names on Finally Rich, 50's appearance makes the most intuitive sense: Keef built his mystique, in part, on the idea that he was back from the dead, and 50 was the first rapper to overtly sell himself as an unkillable Terminator-like figure. His patented sing-song sloganeering sounds current again here, maybe because Get Rich or Die Tryin' came out when Keef was in elementary school and is part of his basic musical vocabulary.
Speaking of which: Chief Keef isn’t a lyricist. At all. His lyrics on Finally Rich are almost entirely composed of rudimentary gangsta-rap boilerplate, which he treats more like a graffiti bomber than a rapper, tagging his beats with slogans meant for maximum impact and minimal scrutiny. If there’s anything the odd jumble of industry rappers who show up on Finally Rich share, it’s this casual approach to lyrics. French Montana, who pops up on "Diamonds", is most famous thus far for literally inventing a word he didn't even say. And Wiz Khalifa fails to make an impression (as usual) when he drops in on "Hate Bein' Sober".
Some of the material filling out Finally Rich is already a year old, including the ubiquitous "I Don't Like" and another of Keef's earliest YouTube hits, "3Hunna", which now sports a Rick Ross feature. The album feels, promisingly, like a progress report on Keef's developing voice rather than a forced "arrival." This has downsides, as there are amateurish moments where some intervention might have been welcome: "No Tomorrow"'s vocals barely match up with the beat, while "Laughin to the Bank" takes a bassy "HAWH HAWH HAWH" vocal hook and flogs you into submission with it. It feels specifically designed to make older rap fans massage their temples.
But there are also hints of where Keef’s sound could go next: "Kay Kay", produced by K.E. On The Track, is gentle and pretty, built from rolling piano and airy synths. And "Citgo" is as close to an uplifting song as Keef’s ever written. Produced by Young Ravisu, it floats on new age synths while Keef sings a warm, sweet melody. The lyrics are still riddled with violence, but the ugliness of the sentiments don't survive the sunlight of song's major key. It's not a redemptive moment, exactly, but it is a transformative one. "[My sister] thought I was going to be some kind of motherfuckin' screw-up or something," Keef says on the intro to "Ballin", in a clip taken from an interview. "They thought I was going to be like, bad all my life…I gotta job now, I gotta daughter too." On an album single-mindedly devoted to painting Keef as pitiless and cold, it’s a brief glint of the dimensions this ruthlessly effective album barely touches on. | 2012-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope | December 14, 2012 | 7.5 | 2a42e84a-8d6e-47ad-a807-9f2090712e1f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The pop-punk stalwarts resist political commentary in lieu of making the most convincingly carefree Green Day record of the new millennium. | The pop-punk stalwarts resist political commentary in lieu of making the most convincingly carefree Green Day record of the new millennium. | Green Day: Father of All... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/green-day-father-of-all/ | Father of All... | Green Day have spent the last decade trying to shake the burden of importance. The trio’s 2004 smash American Idiot didn’t just reinvigorate their career, it elevated them from fading ’90s alt-rock holdovers to a big-tent attraction with voice-of-their-generation prestige. Sixteen years later, it’s still astounding to think that Green Day somehow recorded one of the defining rock albums of the George W. Bush era. But that critical breakthrough also created stifling expectations for the records that followed. Rock-opera grandeur and solemn political protest were never the most natural fit for a pop-punk act whose breakout hit was about masturbating out of sheer boredom.
Save for 2009’s spiritual sequel 21st Century Breakdown, everything Green Day has recorded since has been an attempt to reclaim some of their former irreverence, starting with their low-stakes 2012 trilogy ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, and ¡TRÉ! and continuing with 2016’s tepid Revolution Radio. Each of those records attempted a leaner, meaner reboot of the band, yet they all stopped well short of Father of All Motherfuckers, the most convincingly carefree Green Day record of the new millennium. At just 26 minutes, it’s the band’s briefest album ever—a full five minutes shorter than even 39/Smooth—and it pointedly resists political commentary on the times, as prime for comment as the times may be. It’s as if the band imagined what shape an American Idiot: Trump Edition might take, then made the exact opposite of it.
In its early stretch, Father of All... is sometimes barely even recognizable as Green Day. On the title track, a bluesy retro-stomper in the Black Keys mold, Billie Joe Armstrong trades his lippy sneer for a Jack White falsetto, while the Hives-esque “Fire, Ready, Aim” imagines the kind of rock-revival makeover Green Day might have attempted in the mid-’00s if their rock-opera muse never struck.
From the candied guitar compression of Dookie to the Blu-Ray clarity of American Idiot, top-dollar production has always been Green Day’s secret weapon, and here, as ever, they aren’t shy about deploying it. “Oh Yeah” plays directly to hockey arenas (it can’t be a coincidence that the band just inked a two-year partnership with the NHL). But Father of All... really comes to life when it stops giving its throwback rock the beer commercial treatment and just plays it for straightforward kicks. Lots of bands channel Big Star and the Replacements, but few do it with the verve of “Meet Me On The Roof” and “I Was a Teenage Teenager,” Green Day’s most fetching and youthful songs in ages. The trio sounds reinvigorated, more like hungry newcomers staking their claim than a band a quarter-century removed from their major-label debut.
It’s a genuine blast hearing Green Day lock-in with music this peppy and spirited, at least for a little while. The album aims for instant gratification and achieves it so efficiently that it can’t help but burn fast. They band have no secrets to share; they reveal them all upfront, and its most eager hooks can begin to grate after just a few spins. But there are worse things than a record that doesn’t play the long game. Father of All Motherfuckers asks for almost none of your time and makes good on it. Who knew Green Day had a record this humble left in them?
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise / Warner | February 6, 2020 | 6.7 | 2a46cfc3-d101-4427-8fb9-3873b831e98d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
With loose, psych-pop grooves and empathetic lyrics about growing up, Greta Kline and her band enter a phase of tenured inquisitiveness. | With loose, psych-pop grooves and empathetic lyrics about growing up, Greta Kline and her band enter a phase of tenured inquisitiveness. | Frankie Cosmos: Inner World Peace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frankie-cosmos-inner-world-peace/ | Inner World Peace | Despite being meek in sound, Frankie Cosmos songs frequently capture the emotional rush of viewing something larger than life firsthand: the triptych of reds, yellows, and greens atop a mountain range; the explosive joy and laughter of friends reuniting for the first time in years; the realization that you’re a cog in the machine, but that however trivial your role may seem, there’s beauty in carrying it to fruition. The band draws out these ruminations with stripped-back indie rock and lyrics sung barely above a whisper. On Inner World Peace, Frankie Cosmos’ fifth studio album, singer-guitarist Greta Kline turns that sense of wonder inward, viewing herself with a newfound sense of empathy that comes with age.
If she was once heralded as a teenage wunderkind who viewed songwriting as her version of microdosing, then Kline is now entering a phase of tenured inquisitiveness, where no stone goes unturned in the search to understand why she is who she is. After years of dodging the perceived formalities of adulthood—9-to-5 desk jobs, owning a car, looking forward to showering—Kline opens herself up to the unavoidable truths of your late 20s. “I’m regressing at light speed/I don’t still play the guitar every day,” she confesses. “I had a magnetic personality once/But I got too tired to keep it up.” As unfamiliar as this transition feels, it’s entirely normal; adjusting is the hard part.
Throughout Inner World Peace, Kline questions what it means to grow up and how to know if you’re doing it correctly. As she susses out in “One Year Stand,” no matter what your maturation process looks like or how many faults you fix, you can’t escape former iterations of yourself. She likens this sensation to being a cast-iron pan: Even if you try new meals and take on new flavors, seasonings from years prior will always be embedded into you. Kline puts her own spin on these signs of growing up, imbuing innocence and wonder into the framing. On “Wayne,” she relaxes her face to prevent wrinkles, only to break out crow’s feet while smiling around her crush. Throughout “Prolonging Babyhood,” she mocks her resistance to responsibilities, from feeding herself mashed-up broccoli to thinking about the future in any capacity. By stamping her feet down one last time in jest, Kline bids adieu to the stubbornness of her early traits and commits to bringing only the best parts forward with her.
Inner World Peace benefits from that introspection in its ability to groove. These songs bend and stretch like they’re toying with psych pop, even though the music is still delivered through Frankie Cosmos’ now-trademark minimalism. It’s that Stereolab-esque refrain repeating at the end of “A Work Call,” Alex Bailey’s roving bass and guitar parts straight out of the ‘60s in “Fragments,” Lauren Martin’s airy synth warbling like a ripple of smoke in “Fruit Stand.” The better you begin to understand yourself, the easier it becomes to move about the world. That looseness is at the heart of Inner World Peace, both in music and lyrics. “Aftershook” encapsulates it best; Kline sings about balancing emotional awareness and hopefulness while reconciling with her past. Around her, Bailey, Martin, and drummer Luke Pyenson lay down jazz-influenced psych-rock more fit for Crumb, but they snap back into their classic sound with each chorus. It’s like watching the band grapple with two versions of itself—the established, demure teenagers and the nebulous adults—to decipher the healthiest combination.
At the start of this year, Frankie Cosmos invited fans to enter the “FC Universe” with a project called How Do You Feel About Making the Song, a Tumblr devoted to interviews with bandmates, collaborators, and friends. Kline conducts each entry like a child attending a Take Your Kid to Work Day, asking about the fundamentals of their jobs with a genuine desire to learn. Extra emphasis is placed on the way fate and change have affected their careers. Inner World Peace seems like another attempt to navigate these turning points, dotted with uncertainty. By the end of the album, Kline is left to reflect on what she’s learned. “I am doing my best,” she sings quietly, as if resigned to the fact. That’s when she asks the evergreen question: “Will it always be like this?” The answer, as always, is up to time. | 2022-10-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 24, 2022 | 7.6 | 2a49371d-d03e-46a5-b773-c4677da44dc9 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Danielle Bregoli’s leap from meme to rapper continues with her debut mixtape that leans heavily on mimicry and trails dreadfully behind the current sound of hip-hop. | Danielle Bregoli’s leap from meme to rapper continues with her debut mixtape that leans heavily on mimicry and trails dreadfully behind the current sound of hip-hop. | Bhad Bhabie: 15 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bhad-bhabie-15/ | 15 | When Danielle Bregoli went viral as the “Cash Me Outside” girl in early 2017, few people expected, much less wanted her to stick around. Memes, by their nature, are supposed to be disposable. But music executive Adam Kluger saw a way to capitalize on the widespread attention surrounding the unruly Floridian teenager, even if she had more haters than fans. He took on the role of Bregoli’s manager with a vision. “The initial idea was to brand her,” he says in an interview with The New York Times. “To take this villain—relentless, crazy-attitude kid—and just brand her as this supervillain.”
In August 2017, Bregoli uploaded her debut single, “These Heaux,” as the rapper Bhad Bhabie. And with it, Bregoli became the youngest female rap artist to break the Billboard 100 chart. Only a few days later, she inked a multi-album recording deal with major label Atlantic Records. Kluger’s strategy had worked. As a meme, Bregoli’s prickly personality was easy to dismiss—people loved to make a punchline out of the 13-year-old white girl who flirted with delinquency and said that she got her accent from “the streets.” But everything that made her so cringe-worthy on “Dr. Phil” actually made her a more marketable rapper. On “These Heaux,” her loud, confrontational personality translates seamlessly into a no-fucks-given rap persona, as she fires off bars about “dick-riding” hoes. It’s a tale as old as the American music industry: Labels are quick to pour money into white artists because they’ll be more “palatable” for a mainstream white audience. Bhad Bhabie gets to be a supervillain: she’s bad and is celebrated for it. She gets to leave Boynton Beach, Florida, put a down payment on her own house, and pay off mom’s mortgage. Meanwhile, black girls with brash attitudes and big mouths don’t get viral off of “Dr. Phil”—and they certainly don’t get million-dollar record deals.
On 15, her first mixtape as Bhad Bhabie, Bregoli doesn’t show much versatility past her well-established tough-girl character. She’s successful in imitating the sound of today’s rap hits; most of the songs on 15 come across like they’re specifically engineered to be placed onto Spotify’s “RapCaviar” playlist. The beats are glossy “type beats” programmed by no-names to sound exactly like something prominent producers Tay Keith and Metro Boomin would make. And through her major-label resources, established rappers like YG and Lil Yachty are paid to bolster Bregoli’s credibility, while buzz-worthy up-and-comers like Dallas’ Asian Doll, Atlanta’s Lil Baby, and Miami duo City Girls make it seem like she’s hip by association. And Ty Dolla $ign, the most on-demand crooner of 2018, contributes another one of his magical hooks on the syrupy R&B tune “Trust Me.” The resulting tracks are catchy but formulaic, trailing behind the current sound of hip-hop.
She raps like how she talks, with a ridiculous accent that’s informed from AAVE, her South Florida upbringing, and her Brooklyn-raised mom. On the Lil Yachty-featuring “Gucci Flip Flops,” Bregoli cranks up her theatrical “blaccent.” “Fuck it, hit your bitch in my socks/This a big watch, diamonds drippin’ off of the clock,” she drawls, overemphasizing each consonant and morphing vowels like she’s trying to lap peanut butter off the roof of her mouth. Her unconventional pronunciation is the most interesting thing about the song. But it’s not so much a testament to her originality, as it is an extension of her knack for imitation.
In her essay “Who Really Owns the ‘Blaccent,’” critic Lauren Michele Jackson suggests that blaccents used in comedy (like Awkwafina’s Peik Lin in Crazy Rich Asians or Ilana Glazer’s “Yas Kween” in “Broad City”) is not so much an “evocation of blackness” as it is other factors like “power, imperialism, commerce, the digital age.” She asserts, “There are blaccents built from blaccents, but maybe not from blackness itself.” The same could be said for Bregoli’s delivery, which isn’t interesting simply because she necessarily sounds black. It’s notable because it’s a mimicry and exaggeration of what she thinks a rapper, a hood rat, or a bad bitch would sound like. She intensifies her accent for performances and switches it off for interviews. But in terms of rap technique, Bregoli doesn’t have much to offer besides borrowed flows.
In a refreshing moment of vulnerability, Bregoli finally gets real about her life in the nearly seven-minute closing track, “Bhad Bhabie Story.” It recalls a more quiet section of the original “Cash Me Outside” interview, where Dr. Phil asks Bregoli about her father Ira Peskowitz, a deputy sheriff for the Palm Beach Police Department who left her and her mom when Bregoli was only 2 years old. Bregoli fires back one-word answers, avoiding eye contact with a steely gaze and pretending like she’s unaffected by the questions. But when Dr. Phil asks, “Does he have another family?” Bregoli’s eyebrows scrunch together and she nods without a word, looking like she’s fighting back tears. She finally illustrates her current relationship with her dad in the opening lines of “Bhad Bhabie Story” as she raps: “Reached out to my dad/We met at the mall on some other shit/Pissed off by his tattoos ’cause they had the names of his other kids/Like fuck me, I don’t exist?” It’s one of the rare instances on 15 that she reveals that she has real emotions underneath her hard exterior—and it’s fascinating.
Looking further into Danielle Bregoli’s story, it becomes more clear why she acts like she’s invincible. On top of the estranged relationship with her father, Bregoli’s mom Barbara Ann was diagnosed with cancer in 2007. Bregoli was only 4 years old when she started helping take care of her mom. Although Barbara Ann is in remission now, the cancer came back several times throughout the years. “I think the second time I had it she was 11, and she was real mad,” Barbara Ann says in an interview with Dazed. “To be honest with you, that’s when all the craziness started.” The hostile, loud-mouth Bhad Bhabie is like protective armor for Danielle Bregoli, a teenage girl who’s been hurt, dejected, and had to grow up fast. But 15 only offers glimpses of the real Bregoli, while the Bhad Bhabie on display is one-dimensional, painfully predictable, and derivative of what a rapper is expected to be like. | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | September 26, 2018 | 5.5 | 2a499fa4-b66b-46a1-9ce2-0ac0af1ff7fb | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
The Chinese-born, Vancouver-based electronic musician’s debut album fuses disparate moods, styles, and experiences into a varied set of songs that touch on ambient dub, synth pop, and left-field house. | The Chinese-born, Vancouver-based electronic musician’s debut album fuses disparate moods, styles, and experiences into a varied set of songs that touch on ambient dub, synth pop, and left-field house. | Yu Su: Yellow River Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yu-su-yellow-river-blue/ | Yellow River Blue | Yu Su’s Yellow River Blue nods to China’s famous Yellow River, which flows alongside her hometown of Keifang, in the country’s Henan province. The album was inspired by a 2019 tour across China that took the Chinese-born, Vancouver-based electronic musician from the country’s coast to the Tibetan Plateau, and it’s easy to envision that river’s meandering journey while listening to Yu Su’s little worlds of sound. Her music is a network of stylistic tributaries that unfolds with elegance, never too busy yet still containing an abundance of striking sounds. Yu Su’s work shapeshifts gradually over time, widening and opening itself to new elements: the classical piano she studied as a child, the textures of ambient, the punchy beats of dance music, and instruments from her homeland.
Yu Su’s work is evocative of the dancefloor but exists apart from it, or maybe even beyond it. Tempos and moods lean toward downtempo; she blends overtly synthetic textures with stringed instruments and soft piano, stretching out stuttering textures with dub delay. In the years since she discovered electronic music at a Floating Points concert in Vancouver, Su has made music for both clubs and art galleries. “When I DJ or make music and when I make sound installations it’s completely different stuff,” she has said, “so I wanted to combine those things and blur the lines between those codes that were designed to separate people.” Yellow River Blue reflects a range of potential moods and spaces. The big drums of “Melaleuca (At Night),” with shades of left-field ’80s pop like Yellow Magic Orchestra, sound like they might have been crafted for slow-motion dancefloors; “Klein” could be the soundtrack to a mist-filled installation; while a track like “Dusty” seems designed for listeners to drift inside their own minds.
There’s occasionally an almost vaporwave-like tenor to Yu Su’s sound, like the heavenly waiting-room music of “Touch-Me-Not,” or the grimy, vaguely chopped-and-screwed “Klein,” whose clanging percussion and trippy whirlpools are right out of a deep cut by Dean Blunt or Actress. While Yu Su’s debut EP strolled casually along, “Xiu” aggressively jump-starts the album with pounding drums and intensifying rhythms, though it remains grounded in the calm of her fluttering voice. The mixture of naturalistic sounds and electronic textures lends an energy reminiscent of trip-hop or the ambient psychedelia of artists like Future Sound of London.
The passage of time is a central element of Yu Su’s work. Sounds start out clear and gradually become distressed until the point of disintegration. On “Touch-Me-Not,” a full choir of synths begins to stutter before slowing to a static-ridden crawl. For all the quieting ambience of her music, Yu Su’s compositions can leave you feeling slightly on edge, unsure of how the beats might morph or the tempo might subtly adjust. But at times her music can be unexpectedly bright, almost cheerful. Closing cut “Melaleuca (At Night)” bounces atop glittery keyboard riffs and crisp snaps; “Dusty” builds from gentle nighttime chirps into a slow-motion breakbeat anthem. Dub is a steady presence, particularly on “Futuro,” which recalls the buoyant cadences of vintage Seefeel.
In addition to the titular reference to the landscape of her childhood, Yu Su also frequently draws on timbres, instrumentation, and pentatonic scales traditional to Chinese music, further rooting the album in a sense of place. Throughout Yellow River Blue, you can clearly hear Yu Su joining together different parts of her life, and that fusion of disparate styles is part of what makes Yellow River Blue so inviting. Created with an exacting sense of compositional precision, it nevertheless wanders like a slow-moving river, offering a new discovery around every bend.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Beijing Cultural Communication Co. | February 5, 2021 | 7.6 | 2a4ed650-0360-41e6-b409-1cfeca804c44 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The infamous Beta Band frontman could have lingered in the shadow of his cult-figure fandom; instead, on his fourth solo album, he sings directly about the long process of growing up. | The infamous Beta Band frontman could have lingered in the shadow of his cult-figure fandom; instead, on his fourth solo album, he sings directly about the long process of growing up. | Steve Mason: About the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-mason-about-the-light/ | About the Light | Following the Beta Band’s unceremonious end in the mid-2000s, lead singer Steve Mason seemed destined to exist as a cult figure; like many shadowy eccentrics, his outré musical achievements had become intertwined with a history of mental-health struggles. But since releasing his 2010 solo debut, Boys Outside, Mason has upended the stereotype with increasing emotional clarity and political bluntness, suggesting a sincere desire to connect where his former band confounded. In the middle of writing his 2016 release, Meet the Humans, Mason relocated from his isolated outpost in the Scotland woods of Fife to Brighton. He’s since found a partner and become a dad. Back then, Mason quipped his next record would be his “Brighton Album,” reflecting his newfound stability. With About the Light, he keeps that promise, delivering the sort of ebullient late-1990s Britpop record that his former band famously avoided.
Recorded with the Smiths and Blur producer Stephen Street, About the Light forsakes the genre-blurring experimentation and mad-scientist tinkering that was a cornerstone of the Beta Band and has somewhat lingered in Mason’s increasingly accessible solo releases. Instead, Mason delivers his signature folkie-Floyd musings with the creative input of his touring band, who keep the songs tight, confining them to the southern-soul terrain of the Stones at their most spiritual and the Primal Scream songs that followed the lead. It’s a warm, welcoming sound, emphasizing how Mason’s songwriting ethos hasn’t really changed since he first strummed “Dry the Rain” over two decades ago, ultimately transforming that casual acoustic stroll into a ticker-tape parade.
Where such tunes were once the Beta Band’s springboards into a vast sonic universe, they are an end on About the Light, with nearly every song becoming a waiting game for the moment when the horns and gospel-style backing singers come charging in. Even songs that seem destined for the outer limits find their way back to earth. The romantic reverie “Rocket,” for instance, begins as a minimalist, melodica-spiked dub skitter, but you know it’s only a matter of time before its four-chord progression balloons into a colossus. As the song explodes into guitar-solo fireworks, you get a glimpse of an alternate universe where the Beta Band kept their shit together and became perennial summer-festival headliners .
About the Light isn’t wholly fixated on domestic bliss. “America Is Your Boyfriend” opens the record with a seething indictment of the devastating Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, envisioning the death of capitalism as a New Orleans funeral march. And with the dub-side-of-the-moon drift of “Fox on the Rooftop,” Mason blurs the line between dreamlike serenity and nightmarish anxiety. But on the whole, this is the breeziest, cheekiest record of Mason’s career, at times exceedingly so. While the call-and-response motion of “Walking Away From Love” stakes the common ground between the juke joint and the church, mid-tempo soul-pop trifles like “Stars Around My Heart” and “Spanish Brigade” threaten to steer into the MOR cul-de-sac.
As a portrait of happiness, About the Light strikes its deepest chords when Mason acknowledges the long road he took to find it. During the title track, he dutifully refers to the campfire-funk template of “Dry the Rain,” only this time the climax it reaches is more emotional than musical. “Found a piece of bad luck lying by the side of the road,” Mason sings. “I had a chance to put it in my pocket/But I’m wiser, now I’m getting old.” They’re telling words from a guy who, 20 years ago, famously deflated the hype surrounding the most anticipated album of his career by deeming it “fucking awful.” (He is admittedly still unlearning the habit of self-sabotage, judging by the recent fallout from a mean tweet about British pop star Sophie Ellis Bextor.) It’s a reminder that bliss isn’t some final promised land, but a work in progress. And in sobering moments like these, About the Light delineates the big difference between simply making happy music and making music about happiness. | 2019-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Double Six | January 17, 2019 | 6.8 | 2a4ee28a-10b2-484a-a87c-4e86cca4faa3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The South London singer Jessie Ware is a devout realist making the most of her pop-star dreams. Her commitment to both sides of that equation is what turns her debut album into a uniquely soulful masterclass. | The South London singer Jessie Ware is a devout realist making the most of her pop-star dreams. Her commitment to both sides of that equation is what turns her debut album into a uniquely soulful masterclass. | Jessie Ware: Devotion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16938-devotion/ | Devotion | To begin to understand where Jessie Ware is coming from, let's look at her stuck between an acoustic guitarist and an MPC beat pusher in the back of a London taxi. As part of the simple, self-explanatory "Black Cab Sessions" web series, the 27-year-old British singer recently took her place in the middle seat and proceeded to offer a nuanced live take on "Wildest Moments", a slyly epic ballad from her debut album, Devotion. In such tight quarters, she's not quite sure where to look-- at her bandmates, outside to the street, or directly into the camera-- her head on a controlled swivel. She's capable of blasting the back window out with her voice, which consistently strikes blue notes somewhere between Sade and Whitney, but she holds back, well-aware of her unplugged environment. The performance is seriously moving, and yet Ware lets loose a few brief grins and a slight laugh, as if to say, "All this is quite ridiculous, don't you think?" And that's Jessie Ware: a devout realist making the most of her pop-star dreams-- and her commitment to both sides of that equation turns Devotion into a uniquely soulful masterclass.
If you've half-slept through just one episode of a reality-television singing competition over the last decade, you're probably somewhat privy to Ware's trajectory. The one-time theater kid started out as a backup singer before nearly giving up her musical aspirations to be a journalist. But then, thanks to a montage-ready twist of fate, she ended up singing lead on melodic bass producer SBTRKT's 2010 single "Nervous", which led to a solo label deal, which led to Ware being forced to take the spotlight. But oftentimes backup singers are off to the side for a reason, and the hard truth is that's where they will be most productive; there are only so many lead roles in the world of pop. Considering her self-described "boringly sensible" outlook and the doubt pinging around her brain ("I had to get past the idea of, like, 'Who gives a shit about what I'm gonna fucking write a song about?'"), Ware sounds more like a supporting player on paper. But then you hear her voice, and any and all limits start to fade into the distance.
Singing over futuristic electronic tracks like "Nervous" and dubstep producer Joker's "The Vision", Ware sounded strong, but also somewhat overshadowed by the showy bleeps scurrying around her. Devotion, however, marries her natural gift with throbbing instrumentation that breathes life into every single turn of phrase or sensitive vocal embellishment. The tempos bounce lightly, the drama escalates, the synth-laden ambience cascades like so many postcard waterfalls. This is smoldering music, its smoke bewitching enough to make the original fire more or less irrelevant.
The record was largely produced by three men-- Dave Okumu of UK art rockers the Invisible, Bristol electronic upstart Julio Bashmore, and singer-songwriter Kid Harpoon, who co-wrote songs on Florence and the Machine's Ceremonials-- each leaving his distinct mark without distracting from the whole. Okumu's tracks, especially opener "Devotion", are dark and dense, hinting at passion's underbelly with each deep bass hit; Bashmore's are more airy and upbeat, primed for classy dancefloors worldwide; Kid Harpoon offers the most festival-ready songs-- big hooks, bigger drums-- like "Wildest Moments". Tying the disparate sounds together are Okumu, who co-produced and played many instruments on nearly every track, and of course Ware herself, who co-wrote all but one song. Her voice is a marvel throughout, often gaining power by holding back or briefly teasing its scope while staying faithful to melody over melisma. Her words are in tune with this refinement as they chronicle the in-betweenness of love, dismissing easy pleasures for feelings that are more hard-won, confusing, and frightening.
Take the most classically "pop" song here: the weightless "Sweet Talk", which modernizes Whitney Houston's late-80s effervescence à la Beyoncé's "Love on Top". On its face, the track is all endless dimples and mesmerizing lips, but then the verses sink in: "Don't keep me with the kisses, there's never any there when I need," pleads Ware. She knows she's going to fall for the smooth nothings once again, though, and lets the keys try to cover the inevitable regret, which plays out on "Running", where Ware starts, "Your words alone could drive me to a thousand tears." The title track, with its foreboding murk, gives whiffs of a seance as Ware asks, "Ready to love but do you want it enough?/ Can we find a way to bring it back again?" Given the track's perfectly rendered storm clouds, you get the impression she already knows the answers. The idea of running comes up often on Devotion, and it's clear that Ware isn't interested in the sprints-- when it comes to love, she's angling for a marathon. And she knows marathons can be really fucking tough.
Talking about her childhood aspirations earlier this year, Ware told me, "It's so unattainable to be a singer. I'd watch 'Top of the Pops' and think I could never do that. And I didn't look like a pop star compared to the people I used to watch on MTV like J.Lo or Destiny's Child." As a middle-class Jewish girl from South London who's closer to 30 than 20, she's still nothing close to a cookie-cutter R&B breakout. Her success thus far-- and its likely continuation thanks to Devotion-- is a testament to both her talent and budding songwriting skills, as well as the wide-open field that is modern R&B, where a sensitive soul like Frank Ocean can make a star-in-a-box like Chris Brown look about as relevant as a dial-up modem. "I'm just having fun and trying to pretend I'm a pop star," said Ware, talking about her high-style videos. And while embellishment and theatricality is still a coveted and worthwhile pursuit within the pop realm, the beautiful thing is that, in 2012, Jessie Ware doesn't need to pretend more than anyone else. | 2012-08-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Universal Island / PMR | August 17, 2012 | 8.5 | 2a53a2e0-7f71-4ff8-9bcf-2ac4b95834fc | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Brooklyn-based duo of harp and violin make ambient music that’s eerie, beckoning, and tinged with horror. | The Brooklyn-based duo of harp and violin make ambient music that’s eerie, beckoning, and tinged with horror. | LEYA: Flood Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leya-flood-dream/ | Flood Dream | LEYA, the Brooklyn-based duo of harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist Adam Markiewicz, make purposefully ambiguous music and place themselves in an ambiguous context. The duo traverses the art world and DIY noise scenes, and their music revels in the tension between elegance and disquiet, subverting the stereotypes associated with their chosen instruments. It can sound equally gorgeous or unsettling, depending on mindset and circumstance; it asks more questions than it answers.
LEYA’s second album, Flood Dream, is a refinement of the approach they introduced on their debut cassette, The Fool, in 2018. At its center is a tenuous relationship with beauty, highlighting the shifting, subjective nature of the concept itself. The duo renders beauty as it’s depicted in horror films—something that reveals a deep layer of foreboding, that foreshadows its own inevitable demise. Donovan’s harp, which she detunes at inconsistent intervals, places dissonance at the heart of every song on the album, even as Markiewicz traces long, aching melodies with his voice and violin. Each pluck of a string subtly destabilizes the song’s tonal center. The effect is visceral, like being tucked into soft bedding only to feel a spider slowly crawling up your leg.
Though their music is rooted in classical traditions, at times sounding like a fractured half-remembrance of pre-Baroque chamber music, Flood Dream is structured like popular music. These are three- to four-minute songs, not extended compositions, with Markiewicz’s voice providing melody and momentum. He cites Cocteau Twins, specifically Elizabeth Fraser’s impressionistic, purely ornamental lyrical approach, as a key influence. The focus is on the sound of his voice, its tone and emotive qualities, rather than what he’s actually saying, adding to the album’s ambiguous nature.
The harp and violin have heavy poetic associations, the harp especially symbolizing purity, grace, and refinement. Donovan’s approach to the instrument undermines those implications not only by introducing imperfection through microtonal dissonance, but also through the often-grave manner in which she plays and the way many of her phrases dissipate unresolved. “Mariah,” appearing near the end of the album, opens with Donovan’s harp surrounded by empty space as she slowly repeats four tone clusters, giving space for the wavering pulses of disharmony to reveal themselves. Album closer “Mary” ends as she traces an arpeggio upwards, leaving it hanging in the air without the final return to the root. LEYA’s work on the 2018 PornHub exclusive I Love You, directed by Brooke Candy, points to the fact that they have little interest in traditional notions of purity.
Flood Dream is bewildering, and even after many times through, listening to it can still feel disorienting. By putting beauty and discomfort on equal footing, LEYA allows for transgressive perceptions of ecstasy to emerge. This is not inviting music, but it is remarkably open, like a door left ajar to a ravaged house, eerie and beckoning.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | March 7, 2020 | 8 | 2a54217b-f7f8-41bf-af5a-cbba944f14ed | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
After the unlearned pop bent of Hot Fuss and the clichéd strained seriousness of Sam's Town, the Killers return with a third album that aims to split the difference between its predecessors. | After the unlearned pop bent of Hot Fuss and the clichéd strained seriousness of Sam's Town, the Killers return with a third album that aims to split the difference between its predecessors. | The Killers: Day & Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12505-day-age/ | Day & Age | "Are we human or are we dancer?" That is the question. Well, that is a question. And Brandon Flowers' grammatically dubious query gets to the heart of the Killers Dilemma. Emotion or libido? Imperfect or impervious? Vegas losers or comped penthouse playboys? On "Mr. Brightside", they didn't have to worry about such binaries. Fresh, young and hammy, one of the strengths of the Killers' 2004 debut, Hot Fuss, was its unlearned pop bent. It was fizzy and silly, and there were no apologies. Then Sam's Town checked off almost every big time follow-up cliché there is: horn arrangements in place of songs, concept in place of lyrics, seriousness in place of nonchalance. If the makers of "Gossip Girl" created an HBO mini-series chronicling Dust Bowl despair, it would look like what Sam's Town sounds like.
Album number three tries to split the difference. There are funk basslines that recall 1980s Bowie and producer Stuart Price (Jacques Lu Cont)-- who helmed Madonna's return-to-dance record Hung Up-- was brought in. But the songs still take on sweeping, Springsteen-ian stakes, and first single "Human", with its high-gloss finish, is one of only a few tracks any flesh and blood being would consider dancing to. Which brings us back to that initial question: human or dancer? According to Day & Age, the answer may be neither.
Across the album, Flowers keeps himself above the fray, never wallowing too much in his own drama. There's the self-reflexive detachment of "Human", the holier-than-thou scoffing on opener "Losing Touch" ("I'm in no hurry, you go run and tell your friends I'm losing touch"), and, on "Spaceman", he actually leaves our planet for a spell with the help of an alien. The pose suggests a newfound sophistication-- no longer shall he be a slave to the petty desires of mere earthlings. Most traces of humanness on Day & Age come off oddly second-hand, as if Flowers uploaded Springsteen's or Bowie's catalogue to his internal memory and spat out a working simulacrum. This isn't all bad.
On both "Losing Touch" and "Spaceman" Flowers pulls off fine recreations of Pompadour- and Ziggy-era Bowie, respectively. But something like "A Dustland Fairytale" is the nonsensical result of a Big Rock magnetic poetry kit. "Out where the dreams are high, out where the wind don't blow/ Out here, the good girls die and the sky won't snow," sings Flowers, signifying everything but saying nothing. Similarly, "This Is Your Life" attempts to conflate stories from a couple Springsteen tunes-- take the title character of "Candy's Room" and put her out on the savage "Jungleland" streets-- and comes off like a half-hearted tribute. With his long distance relationship with down-to-earth emotions and his previous penchant for fake-looking facial hair, Flowers can be reminiscent of a latter-day Rivers Cuomo-- a weirdo trying to please himself and his audience at the same time but constantly coming up a little short on at least half of that equation.
The other three guys in the Killers have taken all that Sam's Town criticism to heart more than their lead singer. On Day & Age, the experimentalism is more scattered and more rewarding. Instead of just pressing the "huge and bombastic" button ad nauseum, they diversify: so there's the comically Caribbean "Joyride" (with full-on touristy sax solo), the Strokes-gone-samba of "I Can't Stay" and the impressively brooding (and Björk-ish!) closer, "Goodnight, Travel Well". They're aiming to please some of the time, and they do. Less radical change-ups "Losing Touch" and "Spaceman" are the most obvious contenders for the inevitably incredible greatest hits compilation. "Losing Touch", in particular, is like a best of the Killers mashup: there's the crash cymbal chorus for fist-raising, the horn-strut verse for hip sliding, the "Guitar Hero"-ready solo from underused ax man Dave Keuning.
There's no central concept here-- even the album's title is as vaguely all-encompassing as possible. This is the Killers' spitball album, the one where they try everything and see what works while Flowers grasps for a relatable tone. "When your chips are down, when your highs are low: joyride!" he sings on the so-dizzy-it's-amazing "Joyride". It's the Killers at their most carefree-- the brooding behind them, they're ready to set out with the top down and the schmaltzy sax way, way up. Frivolity suits them, why shy away from it? | 2008-12-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-12-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | December 5, 2008 | 5.9 | 2a5642e8-9bf5-48a0-b91a-9911755b99af | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Fronted by Corrina Repp and Joe Haege (Menomena, 31 Knots), the Portland quartet creates darkly lovely music-- and actual songs-- on its second LP. | Fronted by Corrina Repp and Joe Haege (Menomena, 31 Knots), the Portland quartet creates darkly lovely music-- and actual songs-- on its second LP. | Tu Fawning: A Monument | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16779-a-monument/ | A Monument | In the rocky chasm between lust and love, it's often the non-events, the not-quite-happenings, that gain emotional weight. These are the concerns of A Monument, the second LP by Portland's Tu Fawning. "If my skin had scales and colorful details/ We'd travel the roads and never go home," Corrina Repp laments on opener "Anchor". It seems possible she is a woman who literally desires to be reptilian; trailed by a dry shaker rattle, her voice slinks and coils over big drums and arid, rolling guitar, as if already propelled by a hundred tiny bones. But that wish is also the album's main hangup taken to an extreme: You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you can make some dense and darkly lovely music about it.
It may seem funny to talk about this band in terms of its lyrical themes. Tu Fawning were originally formed as some experimental woodshed for Portland musicians Repp and Joe Haege (she of a long-running solo folk career, he of trios Menomena and 31 Knots). Their 2008 debut EP, Secession, and their first proper record, 2010's Hearts on Hold, seemed like sonic moodboards more than anything else-- scraps of 1920s nightclub jazz, baroque piano flourishes, and the kind of stark percussion that's referred to as "tribal" all basted together into patchworks only generally suggestive of coherence, purpose, or an emotional core. (An exception was "Apples and Oranges", a piano-heavy, painfully frank song about trying to discern the origins of a basket of fruit but also about reconciling friendship and kindness with the soul-stealing tendencies of crippling depression.) On those first releases, strands of "oohs" and "aahs" threatened to outstrip all instances of the English language, and the words that were there were often buoyed off and away by waves of sound that rolled and arced endlessly and switched back upon themselves.
But something happened over the past few years: Tu Fawning became really good at writing honest-to-goodness songs. "Wager", the album's clear triumph, is the closest the band allowed itself to a pop single, with the giddy guitar crunch of the pre-chorus leaping straight into the wide-open arms of the big, hopeful chorus: "There'll be no confusion with this one, I'm certain." Overall, A Monument inverts the group's earlier approach, allowing the atmospherics to act in service of the songs rather than necessitating the whole endeavor. "It was another arcane soiree/ Of debutantes and men with sway," Haege sings on "To Break Into" over a swell of menacing horns and interlaced ripples of electric guitar; Repp later echoes the same verse before Haege returns with those horns again, and some eerily plaintive piano, all padded out by a crush of guitar, his voice close to a desperate growl, hers cool and smooth. "Bones", the album's final track, calls up the hallmarks of both Afro-pop and woozy, golden-era Black Sabbath, then spills into an ethereal, tempo-shifting closer, at the end of which it's not difficult to imagine Repp ascending into some bank of sun-ringed clouds, platinum-haired and beatific.
Stylistically, A Monument is no less of a jumble than anything else the band has done-- Repp and Haege and co. are just better at managing the mess than they were before. Sometimes it seems as if Tu Fawning watched the world watching Florence and the Machine (and/or Beach House, perhaps more analagous in terms of sound and general scope) and thought, "Time to step it up." Or perhaps they're just slowly becoming a better band, which is this funny thing that can happen when artists are given space and time and not crushed under the weight of popular expectation before they have a chance to know their own minds. There's a sense throughout A Monument, like the fugues and false starts that tangle at its heart, that Tu Fawning are on the edge of something-- pressed against it, blood pounding-- but, for now, remain suspended in judgement. There's something waiting for them beyond this moment, but there's beauty here, too. | 2012-05-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-05-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | City Slang | May 30, 2012 | 7 | 2a5a452b-c999-4cfd-9828-3c6e1aa84741 | Rachael Maddux | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachael-maddux/ | null |
Latest in a line of goth-pop artists-- think Bat for Lashes or Zola Jesus-- to emerge in recent years issues a promising Domino debut. | Latest in a line of goth-pop artists-- think Bat for Lashes or Zola Jesus-- to emerge in recent years issues a promising Domino debut. | Austra: Feel It Break | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15434-feel-it-break/ | Feel It Break | On her own and under her own name, Katie Stelmanis used to record synthetic art-pop. This was tense and jarring music, music that jumped around and demanded attention. Austra, Stelmanis' new band, makes just as much use of her stretched-out yip and her theatrical instincts, but the music is a lot warmer and more comfortable. Austra play a warm, hazy sort of electro-goth. It's synthetic and repetitive, and there's plenty of Giorgio Moroder in its DNA, but it's not dance music. Instead, it's music for a planetarium, or maybe for a mid-1980s PBS science documentary. Austra's synth riffs don't pound or undulate; they flutter and envelop. And Stelmanis doesn't sing over the top of their tracks; she emits sound from somewhere in the thick of it.
Feel It Break, Austra's debut album, is essentially made up of 11 minor variations on a single sound-- no complaint, since they're good at that one sound. It's tough to talk about Stelmanis' icy, high-pitched deadpan delivery without mentioning Kate Bush. By that same token, it's tough to talk about the band's music without mentioning Witching Hour-era Ladytron, or maybe Bat for Lashes. This is pretty and heady music, music that can subtly change the air in the room where it's playing. Drums lightly percolate rather than thud, and synth riffs hide inside each other like Russian nesting dolls, gradually revealing themselves over the course of entire songs. And the group builds these things patiently. Often, it holds back on introducing vocals or drums for more than a full minute, letting the songs' feel develop before making any radical changes.
These songs aren't entirely alike. First single "Beat and the Pulse" has a telescoping sort of push-pull to it; it's the closest the band ever comes to genuine dance music, and even it doesn't come that close. On "Lose It", Stelmanis gets a chance to stretch her huge, tremulous voice over some minimally invasive synth backing, and she sounds titanic: "Don't wanna loooooose ya." The bouncy art-pop piano on "Shoot the Water" has a certain twitchiness, bringing Stelmanis partway back to her solo days. And closing tracks "The Noise" and "The Beast" do away with percussion entirely, letting Stelmanis sing over miasmic synth fog on the former and floridly ghostly piano on the latter.
Even with those variations, though, Feel It Break still works as a monochromatic album, one content to stick with the same shade of glimmering darkness. Onstage at SXSW a couple of months ago, Austra cut a stark figure-- Stelmanis backed by two stunning, harmonizing twins, the rest of the band half-hidden at the back of the stage. Even playing in the middle of an absurdly sunny day, the band seemed to exist in some vague state of perpetual glamorous nighttime; that could've been them, not Bauhaus, serenading David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve during the great opening scene of Tony Scott's otherwise bullshit vampire movie, The Hunger. On Feel It Break, they've got that creeping cinematic synth-psych style down cold. Moving forward, I'm curious to hear what else they can do. | 2011-05-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-05-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino / Paper Bag | May 16, 2011 | 7.3 | 2a5a9f66-e9f0-4f71-be1f-f9af51bf0341 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s tribute to the late Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller is a meditation on the meeting of music and film. | Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s tribute to the late Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller is a meditation on the meeting of music and film. | Sqürl: Some Music for Robby Müller | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squrl-some-music-for-robby-muller/ | Some Music for Robby Müller | It would be easy to understand SQÜRL, a collaboration between Carter Logan and the director Jim Jarmusch, as the musical pet project of a famous filmmaker. The duo formed a decade ago, to score Jarmusch’s movie The Limits of Control, and now SQÜRL market themselves as an “enthusiastically marginal band from New York City,” an image so coy it might make you want to bang your head on the limits of pretension. Yet music is not a new passion for Jarmusch, whose pedigree reaches back to his days manning the synths for the enthusiastically marginal Del-Byzanteens in the early 1980s—when everyone in New York had a band, as he once told The Washington Post. Like Jarmusch’s recent films, among them Only Lovers Left Alive and Paterson, his music’s ease and self-assuredness question why the knee-jerk reaction of our time is to treat earnest cultural voraciousness with cynicism.
Jarmusch, after all, is nothing if not earnest. Even the focus on material objects that pervades his recent features is less a social commentary than a reflection of its creator. SQÜRL’s new album, Some Music for Robby Müller, was developed as the score to Claire Pijman’s 2018 documentary Living the Light – Robby Müller, about the titular Dutch cinematographer; one scene features Jarmusch at a guitar store in Bushwick, searching for an instrument that “relates to Robby in some way.” (He settles on a mid-1960s Teisco Spectrum IV with a Bigsby vibrato, used on the album.) Trying to capture a person’s essence with a new guitar seems the province of an advertisement, not a filmmaker, but such is the ambiguity of Jarmusch’s recent universe: Music, film, objects, human beings, and cities all exist on the same plane, equalized by his conviction in the eternality of beautifully made things.
He conjures Müller, a friend and frequent collaborator, by using a warm guitar tone, often laden with reverb. Some Music consists of a series of sun-kissed instrumentals, bound by a song called “Robby’s Theme” and a single variation. Müller was resourceful, hated excess, and loved natural, minimal lighting sources; appropriately, Some Music is a spare record based on a few precise shifts in atmosphere.
The album is SQÜRL’s prettiest, and because of its surprising simplicity, among their best. Jarmusch and Logan strip their arrangements of all past accoutrements—gone are Jozef van Wissem’s powerful lute playing, the crunch and feedback of heavy distortion, the glass harmonica, bass guitar, and Jarmusch’s buried, punkish vocals. What’s left is a sound so direct and meditative that you can hear SQÜRL considering light’s filmic properties while they make music. Logan’s drums appear only once, on “In a Lonely Place,” their tom-heavy menace a well-chosen contrast to the album’s Americana-drenched hues. “While Vermeer Was Sleeping” evokes a lonesome mood that echoes Müller’s life—many of his movies, including the ones he made with Jarmusch, were shot on the road in the United States, fixated on the simultaneous dislocation and enchantment of the itinerant traveler.
It’s been a long time since Jarmusch sounded dislocated, on either record or film. Müller died in 2018, and maybe this album captures a feeling they once shared, or perhaps it’s a sign of what’s next for Jarmusch and SQÜRL. More than a band, SQÜRL are an idea about how music and film interact, and their enthusiasm for both mediums is as palpable as a vintage instrument. Inside the brief 30 minutes of Some Music for Robby Müller are real feelings that will outlast the fame of its creators, and all of the guitars, pedals, and vibratos that went into its creation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | February 6, 2020 | 7.4 | 2a5e32af-67cc-4b6a-b254-70d5c16696b2 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Avonmore, a lush album of mostly new songs, is a fine addition to Bryan Ferry’s oeuvre, if not necessarily a terribly challenging one. Guests include Todd Terje, Nile Rodgers, Johnny Marr, Flea, Ronnie Spector, and more. | Avonmore, a lush album of mostly new songs, is a fine addition to Bryan Ferry’s oeuvre, if not necessarily a terribly challenging one. Guests include Todd Terje, Nile Rodgers, Johnny Marr, Flea, Ronnie Spector, and more. | Bryan Ferry: Avonmore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19981-avonmore/ | Avonmore | Throughout his post-Roxy Music solo career, Bryan Ferry has rarely stood still. Aside from an ill-advised collection of Dylan covers in 2007, his recorded output generally represents a series of assured steps forward. His last record, 2013’s The Jazz Age, allowed Ferry to play around with big band takes on his expansive back catalog, a project that could have potentially been dismal (and unnecessary), but instead came off as both fun and surprisingly inspired. Now, nearly a year later, Ferry releases Avonmore—his 15th solo album and his first collection of new songs in nearly four years.
On Avonmore, Ferry enlists the help of an all-star cast of players and producers—Todd Terje, Nile Rodgers, Johnny Marr, Flea, Ronnie Spector, Mark Knopfler, and Maceo Parker. With the exception of Rodgers (whose graceful guitar work pops up all over the record) and Terje, most of the special guests are all but invisible on Avonmore, their presence muted by Ferry’s unmistakable voice and the lush production. As Ferry has become known increasingly for his impeccable covers, it’s refreshing that Avonmore is comprised almost exclusively of original material, most of which hearkens back to his most classic sounds.
Some of the tracks could have drifted off of one of Ferry’s mid-'80s solo records. "Loop de Li" and "Midnight Train" come complete with tastefully employed chimes and a smattering of low key horns. Both are dark and romantic with the kind of breathless quality that only Ferry can offer. Going even further, "A Special Kind of Guy" is so intensely Ferry-ish that it borders on parody, as he croons "When you’re with me every problem seems to disappear/ Fields of roses burst into flower and everyone a tear." Almost no one else could get away with this, but Ferry manages to sell it perfectly almost every time.
Avonmore flounders when the music, which routinely flirts with a kind of adult contemporary smoothness, leans over into blandness. Co-written by Johnny Marr, "Soldier of Fortune" would be forgettable were it not for Ferry’s tremulous voice, which manages to make a line like "Girl stop rockin, you’re driving me insane" sound more compelling than it actually is. "Driving Me Wild" and "Lost", while not terrible, lack the surging mystique of the record’s better songs, while "One Night Stand" mines '80s tropes in the worst possible way—honking sax, a chorus of sassed up backup singers, and an un-funky Ferry going on about tiger skin rugs. It nearly negates all the amorous glamour that makes the rest of the record such a delicious swoon.
The two covers on Avonmore provide some of the weirdest surprises. Stephen Sondheim’s "Send in the Clowns" could have been rendered as a bit of grandly devastating melodrama, but instead gets mostly buried under a load of damp electronica. While it’s admirable that Ferry might give the venerable bit of camp a modern spin, the end result is something limp and mostly drama-free. He has more success with his cover of Robert Palmer’s "Johnny and Mary"—a collaboration with Norwegian producer Todd Terje that first appeared on Terje’s excellent It’s Album Time earlier this year. It’s one of the album’s most gorgeous moments, a melancholic ode to romantic ennui that actually allows Ferry to sound his age.
Ultimately, Avonmore is a fine addition to Bryan Ferry’s oeuvre, if not necessarily a terribly challenging one. At this point, Ferry’s well-documented good taste is both an asset and possibly a curse. While this new record is slick and often quite lovely—recalling '80’s masterworks like Boys and Girls or Bête Noire—one can’t help but wish that Ferry might go spend a little more time in the studio with someone like Terje. His voice remains one of the most singular and finely-honed sounds in popular music, it would just be nice to hear it dropped into new settings more often. | 2014-11-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-11-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | BMG | November 19, 2014 | 6.7 | 2a642098-d25d-44eb-9d3a-d285ba9d77c1 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
A mammoth, 14-CD box set released to accompany Martin Scorcese’s documentary captures the 1975 tour in all its ragged glory. | A mammoth, 14-CD box set released to accompany Martin Scorcese’s documentary captures the 1975 tour in all its ragged glory. | Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan: Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-bob-dylan-rolling-thunder-revue-the-1975-live-recordings/ | Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings | Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue didn’t last long. From its conception to its dissolution, it spanned just under a year, not long for a career that’s about to enter its seventh decade. Maybe that’s why Dylan professes ignorance about the inspiration for his roving carnival in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a lengthily titled documentary that recently premiered on Netflix. In one of the new interviews for the film, the singer-songwriter claims, “I’m trying to get to the core of what this Rolling Thunder thing is all about, and I don’t have a clue because it’s about nothing! It’s just something that happened 40 years [ago]—and that’s the truth of it.”
Other people remember a lot about Rolling Thunder, though. Since the waning months of 1975—when Dylan roamed New England with a ragged band of musicians, playing small venues at the drop of a hat—the revue has been the thing of legend among Dylan conoscenti. Much of its mystique lies in the way the superior first incarnation of the tour only lasted about as long as a torrid summer squall. A second leg followed in 1976, but by all accounts Dylan was ornery and withdrawn—a contention supported by Hard Rain, a ’76 live set that was the only official document of Rolling Thunder until selections from the 1975 shows were compiled, in 2002, as the fifth volume of Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series.
Certainly, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5 is easier to digest than The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings, a 14-CD box released to accompany the Scorsese film. Containing Dylan’s sets from the five professionally recorded Rolling Thunder concerts, along with three discs of rehearsals and a disc of oddities taken from the tour, the box assumes a high level of interest from the listener: A set that runs for ten and a half hours is not for dabblers. This ungainly sprawl suits the Rolling Thunder Revue, which was meant not as a mere evening of entertainment but rather an immersive theatrical experience.
Much of that heightened sense of drama diminishes on record, but it can still be felt, and the big box occasionally does an excellent job of suggesting the circus taking place both on and off stage. All those rehearsals help build the atmosphere. Here, Dylan and his band of old folkies, new rockers, and unknowns get acquainted, playing folk chestnuts and songs he’d just cut for Desire, which wouldn’t be released until after the first leg of the tour wrapped up. Harmonies are ragged and tempos tentative, but the bonhomie is palpable. What’s also evident is the nature of Dylan’s singing: open-hearted, bold, and clear, qualities decidedly lacking on Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of his 1974 return to the stage.
The concerts excerpted on Before the Flood were intended to be a spectacle. Dylan had rarely played live since his motorcycle accident in 1966, and he was supported by the Band, who had made the transition from his backing band to stars in their own right. Although the ’74 tour was a wild success, Dylan grew tired of playing arenas, and that boredom, combined with personal unrest, was the catalyst for his attempt to re-create his coffeehouse roots via the Rolling Thunder Revue. Surrounding himself with figures from his past—his old advocate and paramour Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth, and Roger McGuinn—Dylan also roped in new blood. He wound up having a drink with Mick Ronson, late of David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars, so he invited the guitarist to become part of the unruly band that would eventually become known as Guam. He saw Scarlet Rivera wandering the streets of New York with her violin in hand, so she brought her into the fold. Most importantly, he happened to stumble upon Jacques Levy, the director of 1969’s Off-Broadway hit Oh! Calcutta!, and the pair hit it off so well, they wrote most of Desire together and decided it was time to put on a show.
Levy staged the Rolling Thunder Revue as an old-fashioned circus, encouraging Dylan to indulge his theatrical side—the singer often performed in a face caked with white makeup—and that sensibility trickled through the entire production. Thanks to its ever-expanding cast of characters and guerrilla marketing—the troupe often arrived in town without warning and without its star attraction mentioned by name—the Rolling Thunder Revue gave off the suggestion that anything might happen. Like all theater, that was an illusion. Particulars may have changed on a given night, but the skeleton of the show was immutable, something that this big box—which boils four-hour extravaganzas down to only the sets involving Bob Dylan—makes plain.
Each night, Dylan appeared at three specific times during the show: strolling onstage unannounced to sing “When I Paint My Masterpiece” with the band, playing a duet set with Baez, then closing the show on his own. For each of the three phases of the Revue, he stuck to a largely static setlist. Departures from the norm were rare, and many are featured on the final disc, which is ragged enough to live up to Rolling Thunder’s reputation. Some of these tracks were captured at odd locations—a lean, almost rollicking version of “Simple Twist of Fate” was performed at a Massachusetts mah-jongg parlor, an empathetic cover of Peter La Farge’s “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” given at a Native American reservation—while others provide a variation on a familiar tune, such as a slow churning “Isis” in which the band seems on the verge of collapse. In this context, a nearly whispered hotel-room take on Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” and a rampaging version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” featuring Robbie Robertson on guitar, act as revelatory grace notes, showing how heartbreaking and galvanizing the Rolling Thunder Revue could be.
Still, the heart of the box sets lies in those five full concerts, all sharing the same basic momentum, all distinguished by passion. The vigor doesn’t belong to Dylan alone. The Guam band is unwieldy and enthusiastic, taking the time to let all their disparate voices mesh. Rivera’s careening gypsy violin lends an earthy wildness to the proceedings, while Ronson’s guitar pulls the music back into focus whenever it threatens to get too folky. Dylan matches Ronson for electrifying verve, singing with a jovial bravado and untrammeled freedom that’s distinctly different from the primal howl he used during his fabled 1966 tour with the Band. Despite this kinetic kick, the Rolling Thunder Revue is at its core a hootenanny, a down-home bash that’s equally earnest and corny. Its folkie heart is evident by Joan Baez’s role as Dylan’s co-star and foil. Baez helped bring Dylan to stardom during the peak of the folk boom in the early 1960s, and here she’s determined to let the audience know that they’re on equal footing, harmonizing and sometimes dominating Dylan during their duets.
However briefly it happens, hearing Dylan happily share the spotlight underscores the charms of the Rolling Thunder Revue, specifically how he sought solace in a communal setting. If the tour was solely about reconnection, it would’ve been little more than a footnote in Dylan’s history, but the nostalgia act was strictly surface-level; the form may have been familiar, but the individual performances were thoroughly, thrillingly of the moment. Dylan plays with a wild-eyed fervor that’s partially inspired and partially shtick, and he’s surrounded not by sycophants but old friends who acknowledge his bullshit and find it amusing. Why else would they sign up to play in the Rolling Thunder Revue? By design, the tour erased the barrier separating ruse and reality, and that deliberate, wicked conflation is as quintessentially Dylanesque as the fact that it lasted for a matter of weeks and then disappeared, its vibrant spirit never again conjured by its maker. | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / Legacy | June 13, 2019 | 8.7 | 2a682b48-37a1-470e-882b-0023d2498cd2 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Protean future-funk production steals the show on this collaboration between two veterans of the Bay Area hip-hop scene. | Protean future-funk production steals the show on this collaboration between two veterans of the Bay Area hip-hop scene. | Del the Funky Homosapien / Amp Live : Gate 13 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/del-the-funky-homosapien-amp-live-gate-13/ | Gate 13 | When a rapper and a producer collaborate on an album, it’s usually the beat maker who is working in service of the MC, humbly delivering a metronomic base tailored to the rhymes. This isn’t the case for Gate 13, which teams up two Bay Area fixtures, rapper Del the Funky Homosapien and producer Amp Live (formerly of the crew Zion I), and adjusts the formula so that Amp Live’s funk-forward beats dominate the listening experience.
Del’s cartoonish brogue remains one of the warmest, most likable voices in hip-hop. Throughout the album, he raps more economically than he has in the past, and this concise style allows his imagery to shine. Over the powerful snares of “Run Free,” he recounts a caper that finds the narrator chasing his foes onto a fire escape. “They tried to climb down to the fourth floor,” he raps at the story’s climax. “My posse shoot ’em down, now they skydiving.” On “Wheel of Fortune,” he takes out inferior MCs like he's playing a video game: “I know some kung fu/Tiger style, crane style, they gonna get pummeled/Down, down, left, left, punch/That shit’s fire all around.”
But it’s Amp Live’s production that makes Gate 13 distinctive. The short opener, “Attention (Intro),” is like an overture: Deep, squelching bass tones, melodic keys, and spacey ambient effects set a future-funk mood for the album. Clipped snares and sci-fi synths follow on “Wheel of Fortune”—but after a minute of bubbling into a groove, the song slows to a reggae tempo for a short instrumental passage before seamlessly transitioning back to its original sound. Del’s voice is present, but it’s the instrumental soundscape that dictates the shifts in mood.
The album is full of inspired hip-hop production like this, with beats that transform throughout individual tracks, rather than just locking into a trusty boom-bap rhythm. “Run Free” showcases bass tones and drum patterns that recall, at various moments, Run-D.M.C.’s “Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse),” Dead Prez's “Hip-Hop,” and N.W.A.'s “Dopeman,” without plagiarizing them. Amp Live subtly adds and removes hi-hats throughout the melancholic “The Glow,” building and then slowing the track’s momentum. The introduction of a squiggly synth riff heightens the drama of Del and guest rapper Eligh’s most braggadocious lines in “On the Ball,” in which Del warns sucker MCs, “It’s easy to catch a rat/Just put some cheese on the trap/Shipwrecked, they wanna raft/’Bout to take a piranha bath.”
It seems appropriate that Amp Live gets the final word on Gate 13, with “Lateral Thinking,” an instrumental track that begins with monstrous, noisy wobble bass tones straight out of a free-jazz jam, then lets celestial synths smooth the way to mellow guitar lines and a rolling 808 beat. When the album closes by fading to static, it’s as if the beat maker is pulling the plug on his own dynamic creation. Del may be the MC in this duo, but Amp Live’s production speaks just as loudly as the rhymes. | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Gate13 | April 28, 2018 | 7.4 | 2a6bd40c-31fa-4a40-8f75-fe1d9fa0ac17 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The Brooklyn band’s latest is one of their best, a shifting and teasing kind of electro-funk that exists on their own plane of gravity. | The Brooklyn band’s latest is one of their best, a shifting and teasing kind of electro-funk that exists on their own plane of gravity. | Ava Luna: Moon 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ava-luna-moon-2/ | Moon 2 | Ava Luna have always moved by rapidly and with an independent time signature, but Moon 2 is the band’s most propulsive album and maybe their best. It follows 2015’s clash-clang Infinite House, 2014’s bluesy needy Electric Balloon, and a few years of shifting roles within the ensemble. Carlos Hernandez has leaned out of his leadership position; on hiatus are his commanding screams as well. Felicia Douglass is on a new job doing slippery percussion and samples as well as synth and vocals; Julian Fader found an excellent place on the synths in addition to drums. And Rebecca Kauffman has written her first song for the band, the otherworldly “On Its Side the Fallen Fire” that echoes with a Laurie Anderson state of spare stateliness.
The band’s sixth album, Moon 2 could be a sonic map of a moon, if earth had a moon that was cooler than the one we have now. The Brooklyn band digs into their namesake to gives us a tour of this planetary body’s rowdy, turbulent noisy landscape. It’s a teasing electro-funk that plays on a gravity plane where everything is a different weight, sounds melt more deeply and float off more easily.
Moon 2 is almost invitational. The band welcomes us at a distance, like they are supplying a visa for studying abroad. There are glimpses of joyful everyday errands in the side-step bounce of “Deli Run.” The velocity is unexpected, sometimes giving the feeling it has rushed you into a fraught highway merge, as in “Walking With an Enemy,” which has alien purrs from imagined fauna and an extraterrestrial stream of eerie-ass whooshes. You hear snippets from noisy parties out of apartment windows, gossip on sidewalks, grooves out of car windows, the rumble of your own engine, the screech of a scary run-in. The title song crystallizes the stomach-lurching, emotional K-turn that happens when you bump into a dangerous crush. The reggae languor of the bass wants you to swing your torso right back home, a Kraftwerk synth sympathizes with your alarm, and a panicked excuse: “Turn around, I left the oven on.”
There is spookiness on Moon 2. The shifts in mood, mercurial beats, and noncommittal melody don’t let you hang out for very long on one thing. Even though they slink by fast, the sounds are full and realized; you have the sense you’re just moving through a world that exists without you. Conversations interrupt each other and fade out, Doppler-style: Kauffman’s cavernous, clear voice runs across Douglass’ springy velvet harmonizing, and Hernandez has fun with his deep, almost militaristic authority. Sometimes, like in “Centerline,” the band is explicitly interested in position and perspective and where everyone is standing. One person lands hard back to reality (“After our lavish vacation/Charges from the mini bar/I can get you back, I mean it”) and the other is slowly thinking about how it’s impossible to know one another (“Thaw the iceberg, you will see/Your original reflection staring back at me”).
The touchstone sample for this album was a warped tape of a ’90s women’s group singing neo-pagan ritual chants that Kauffman found at a yard sale. This sense of the collective is infused into Moon 2. The band wrote and recorded the album on two cold-season trips, up to Vermont and during a blizzard on the Massachusetts shoreline. They set up a studio in the basement and ventured down solo or in small groups to work on what the people before had left behind. It was written by picking up what the others were putting down.
Ava Luna is seduced by group dynamics and interactive creativity as a theme: who goes on the deli run, who sits out, who throws in, who pays it forward, who promises. They have never shied from commixing independent sounds. In Moon 2, they have captured this utopian sort of jostling, where two people banging into each other make a great noise, and there’s a productive coincidence around each turn. They commingle, like the best neighborhoods, in the most alive cities, on way more exciting, alternative moons. | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | September 14, 2018 | 7.7 | 2a6e38e5-3a26-4198-8583-879d64472fde | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
On the Berkeley rapper’s second album, he struggles with depression in stark, evocative terms, confirming his stature as one of the most intensely cathartic narrators out there. | On the Berkeley rapper’s second album, he struggles with depression in stark, evocative terms, confirming his stature as one of the most intensely cathartic narrators out there. | Koran Streets: Late 20s | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koran-streets-late-20s/ | Late 20s | Koran Streets is in mourning. His close collaborator and big-brother figure J.B. the Legend died a few years ago, and he’s still looking up to him, and for him. He sounds broken and also obviously onto something with his music—all the worse that he can’t share the epiphany. But therein lies his power. There’s a protective numbness to depression that Koran Streets avoids; when he’s emotionally collapsed he’s tender and self-aware, which he translates well as a rapper. His play-by-plays can be both detached and self-attuned.
Late 20s is the Berkeley rapper’s first long-player since his debut a couple years ago, and he remains saddled with the inertia of depression and the paralyzing effects of poverty. There’s a now-or-never urgency in his rapping, especially now that he’s had a glimpse of buzz and possible stability. Part of the appeal of Koran Streets’ hardly noticed debut, You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album), was his ability to boil down his pain. Late 20s doesn’t share that economy, but it continues Koran Streets’ streak as one of the most intensely cathartic narrators in rap.
That streak starts with his story, which is both tragic—as a child his body was horribly burned and many of his fingers amputated following a horrible accident—and inspiring: After spending most of his life as an actor, Koran Streets recently landed a pair of meaningful, well-received indie roles. He has also been to jail and back too many times. Not long ago his brother was shot during a carjacking. An ex-girlfriend had a miscarriage. A breakup left him struggling to pay the rent. He’s been making promises to his mother. Direly, he’s in his late 20s and playing catch-up.
So Late 20s feels pressing, even if it runs a bit too long and is full of distractions. The bulk of the album services diary-like brushstrokes with depressing commentary (“They say I’m dope but they don’t know that I sleep on the floor”) or inward, self-affirming nudges about self-doubt and staying motivated. The sense that Koran Streets is working on himself is present almost everywhere, even if it’s in the form of grasping for straws.
Koran Streets has been a Bay Area rapper since a child, but his recent tear has seen him back off his jumpy, rattling sound of a few years ago in favor of something slinkier. The production on tracks like “Return of the Mack” and “Rock the Party” is laid-back and funky, uplifting in both its breezy pace and sense of nostalgia. Most of the beats are languid and wistful, matching the mood. As a stylist Koran Streets has a shouty, chatty way of rapping. At his most emotional he sometimes crams too many syllables into a breathless line (the affective “Sincerely Yours”), but he’s usually punchy and sometimes locks into a mesmerizing purr of a flow (the first verse on “Fallin’ & Ballin’”).
Koran Streets also does something few rappers manage: He raps about rap without making it corny. He makes homage sound heartfelt, and he internalizes the music so completely that he can step outside of it and talk about it effectively. “Sucka MC’s” does little more than list Koran Streets’ favorite rappers with an admiring gaze and occasional note about their practicality: “Here comes the brand new flava in ya ear!/And when I heard that I thought I was Craig Mack/But late nights selling crack we would play that Jack.” 2Pac also looms large over his style—like when Koran Streets suddenly upshifts on “Fallin’ & Ballin’,” his rapping a sustained crescendo from his belly—as well as in his general raw-nerve oversharing.
Koran Streets doesn’t withhold anything, but there’s a moment early on that makes the listener complicit in the act of demanding more of him. “They say I never talk about these burns/Like what you want me to say?/You see my face?” he shouts, cutting off the conversation. But then he doubles down and tells the story in literal and emotional detail as if he had no choice. Late 20s leans on radical vulnerability, and sometimes that’s a meaningful end in itself. | 2018-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | YOU.KNOW.I.GOT.IT Entertainment | August 11, 2018 | 7.5 | 2a6f2a56-7289-4370-935d-69152a622bb8 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
On its fourth album, the Scottish trio steps back from the grandest pop aspirations and embraces a horror-movie concept without losing its signature brightness and sense of joy. | On its fourth album, the Scottish trio steps back from the grandest pop aspirations and embraces a horror-movie concept without losing its signature brightness and sense of joy. | Chvrches: Screen Violence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chvrches-screen-violence/ | Screen Violence | Once the horror starts, you’re there until whatever end is in store for you. Maybe your phone is dead and the roads closed. Maybe you’re trapped somewhere: a haunted house, a derelict mall, a sinister academy. Maybe you’re just trapped inside your own life; perhaps you’re a band existing in a brutal industry, where failure is common and death threats are just another thing in your inbox. It’s surprising more artists don’t make horror-themed albums. It’s even more surprising when they come from groups like Chvrches, better known for their joyful anthems—and when they find joy there regardless.
Ironically, Screen Violence outshines their last few years of deliberately “happy” music, even if it’s inspired by slashers and failures and the screen-mediated deadness of post-pandemic life. (The title, though, predates COVID-19 by almost a decade; the trio considered it as a band name.) Love Is Dead, the group’s intermittently fun third album, enlisted Adele’s producers to blow their sound up to megafestival size. Then they wrote a song even songwriter Lauren Mayberry called “tacky pop crap” for EDM mascot Marshmello. The machine shows little discernment, and the next vocalist down Marshmello’s conveyor belt was disgraced Chris Brown; when the band spoke out against his replatforming, the death threats began again.
Besides a guest spot by the Cure’s Robert Smith, the new album is written, produced, and performed by just the core trio. But it’s not merely a safe return to form. The group could have delivered 10 variations on “Clearest Blue” and made (relative) bank. Instead, they let their influences sprawl widely. The breakbeats throughout “Violent Delights” and gentle strings on “Lullabies” are homages to, respectively, the Prodigy and the Blue Nile. The bridge in “Nightmares,” which submerges guttural spoken word beneath synth murk, was inspired by Kate Bush’s “Waking the Witch.” Album closer “Better If You Don’t” is a low-key rock track on which Mayberry sounds startlingly like Harriet Wheeler.
Better yet, they finally build on the darker parts of 2013’s The Bones of What You Believe as they excavate their own career. The album is full of nightmare imagery, alluding to sleep paralysis, drowning, gutting, and the “final girl”: the plucky, virginal hero in a slasher cast whose saintliness is rewarded with trauma. Granted, this is all Intro to Film Studies stuff; Carol J. Clover coined the term in 1992, and by the 2010s it was already thoroughly listicled, TV Troped, and spoofed. Fortunately, on Screen Violence, the horror concept is mostly an excuse to bring on John Carpenter for a remix and for the group to write about their experience in metaphorical rather than literal terms—in Mayberry’s words, “running for a horizon that you don’t really need, but you have to keep running for it.”
By now Chvrches have endured as many waves of harassment as they’ve released albums, and repeatedly expressed frustration at people reading unintended messages into their music. Perhaps that’s why the two most traditionally poppy songs here are the most pointed: so as to leave no room for misunderstanding. Single “He Said She Said” recounts a man’s gendered demands and mixed messages, e.g. “Look good—but don’t be obsessed.” It’s hardly subtle, and the rhyme scheme contorts certain lyrics past plausibility, but the songwriting works. The “he said”s are loud and double-tracked; almost all the “she said”s are subdued, either dissolved in Auto-Tune or replaced by a muffled lead synth. The one exception arrives with the drop: Mayberry pierces through with “I feel like I’m losing my mind!” and the chorus surges like self-assurance. “Good Girls” is a deceptively simple piece of pop clockwork with lyrics you could probably autocomplete off the phrase “good girls ____,” which makes it all the more rewarding when Mayberry busts the melody and rhythm with “but I don’t!”
These moments of clarity are rare. The album’s opening and closing tracks are sugary comfort-food pop about confusion and loss. “Violent Delights” is a fever dream of over-bright production with the comforting lyrics of a love song (“I’ll never sleep alone again”) and bleak realizations about fame (“If I disappear, they’ll say I killed myself”), both delivered as if in a daze. “Final Girl” is caught between nonchalance and fear and has two choruses: one a pop-rock sugar cube, one an escalating bit of dread in which Mayberry stares down two potential futures, girlboss and body bag.
The two best tracks are also counterparts: “California” and “How Not to Drown.” “No one ever warns you/You’ll die in California,” Mayberry sings on the former, a breakup song to Hollywood and a love song to graceful failure, so sincere that they even get away with the Rae Dunnism of “God bless this mess” on the bridge. “How Not to Drown” tells the same story—both songs dwell on fame bringing death and end with being pulled down—in an unrelentingly bleak key. Mayberry and Robert Smith sing at their most impassioned against a production that pummels and swallows them whole: “We’ll never escape this town; I wasn’t dead when they found me.” Which version of the story is true: the waking up or the nightmare? Some people find the final-girl trope to be empowering. Others, like Mayberry, just ask why she isn’t screaming.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin | September 2, 2021 | 7.2 | 2a6fbc7d-8842-4797-aef1-8e538ae78351 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The Meat Puppets’ 15th album mirrors the Kirkwood brothers’ ethos: earthy and out of time, casual and familiar, and wholly at ease with itself. | The Meat Puppets’ 15th album mirrors the Kirkwood brothers’ ethos: earthy and out of time, casual and familiar, and wholly at ease with itself. | Meat Puppets: Dusty Notes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meat-puppets-dusty-notes/ | Dusty Notes | One distinct advantage Meat Puppets have over many of their ‘80s and ‘90s-vintage peers still making a go of it after more three decades is that they always kind of sounded like they were 55. There is no collectively imprinted youth to risk failing to recapture. By 1984’s immortal Meat Puppets II, they were already perfectly weathered and weird and an anathema to punk orthodoxy, finding the bridge between the Dead and the Dead Kennedys long before it was fashionable. The band was easy enough to classify as psychedelic—not in an indulgent or Day-Glo way, but in a way that suggested guzzling buckets of homemade drugs and happening upon musical instruments which they then played at whatever speed and volume felt sustainable in the moment. Their zeitgeist moment as guests of honor on 1994’s Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York delivered Curt and Cris Kirkwood to the masses as old souls whose songs had earned pride of place alongside Bowie and Leadbelly.
The Meat Puppets’ 15th album in 37 years—their first with original drummer Derrick Bostrum since 1995, fifth since bassist Cris rejoined following fraught years of addiction and legal troubles, and third with Curt’s son Elmo playing guitar—serves as a defense of that thesis. Twenty-five long years later, the Kirkwood brothers have grown into their grizzledness. They now look like the sun-stroked prospectors they have always channeled, and Dusty Notes does what it says on the tin: It’s earthy and out of time, casual and familiar, and wholly at ease with itself. They aren’t trying to make an argument that punk and country can coexist or share DNA or an outlaw spirit; they aren’t trying to argue about anything much at all.
The loud rawk guitars that were still dominant as of their previous album, 2013’s Rat Farm, are largely confined to the background here. Of the 10 tracks, only one, the prog-metal mini-opus “Vampyr’s Winged Fantasy,” even attempts to broach raucousness or racket. The other nine, including a spirited cover of Don Gibson’s “Sea of Heartbreak” (perhaps best known via Johnny Cash’s 1996 American-recorded version and come to think of it, it’s kind of wild that Rick Rubin never fed Cash “Lake of Fire” to try out during any of those sessions, that would have been perfect, but anyway), rest comfortably on the reserved, honky-tonk side of the spectrum, some distance from their youthful shredding and shrieking or their Too High To Die-era 120 minutes of fame.
Opening track “Warranty” positively bounces thanks to its octave-jumping bassline, while banjo and mariachi horns anchor “Nine Pins” and the title track, respectively; “On” and “The Great Awakening” are mid-tempo piano-based ballads. In aggregate, none of this feels like a departure—it’s somehow a step backward and forward at the same time, mining roots as a way to age gracefully. | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Megaforce | March 11, 2019 | 7.2 | 2a70d638-4712-4546-9bef-f87a82e11f63 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
San Francisco duo Dodos' fifth album is their most subdued and solemn. The autumnal Carrier was inspired by the passing of guitarist Christopher Reimer, who joined Dodos for a brief period between his departure from Women and his death at the age of 26 in 2012. | San Francisco duo Dodos' fifth album is their most subdued and solemn. The autumnal Carrier was inspired by the passing of guitarist Christopher Reimer, who joined Dodos for a brief period between his departure from Women and his death at the age of 26 in 2012. | The Dodos: Carrier | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18384-the-dodos-carrier/ | Carrier | The titles of the previous three Dodos records-- Visiter, Time to Die, No Color-- provide an unfortunate and eerie foreshadowing for the band’s fifth LP Carrier. It’s the San Francisco duo’s most subdued and solemn album, inspired by the passing of guitarist Christopher Reimer, who joined Dodos for a brief period between his departure from Women and his death at the age of 26 in 2012. Though Reimer doesn’t play on Carrier, he’s a spiritual and musical inspiration that guides Meric Long and Logan Kroeber throughout, an incorporeal third member that still holds the most influence over the record’s direction. The short time in Reimer’s presence has shaken the band to its core and, understandably, Carrier isn’t always steady. But while it’s Dodos least immediate work, it lingers and resonates in ways that give it a unique place in their discography, a promising path forward rather than what can initially be heard as a return to Time to Die’s soft-focus indie pop.
The most noticeable superficial difference on Carrier is that Long has switched almost entirely to playing electric guitar. Surprising, but not sacrilege-- though Dodos broke out on Visiter as an acoustic-and-drums duo and returned to that format on No Color, they’re not wedded to that setup, having incorporated electric guitars in a live setting and even a full-time vibraphonist on Time to Die. The strange thing is that they might be the first band to ever plug in for the sole purpose of rocking less. On prior singles such as “Fools”, “Fables”, and “Black Night”, Long played his acoustic with force and resourcefulness, utilizing the resonance in alternate tunings, inverted chords and string buzz and sending the signal through looping and distortion pedals. He’s not as focused on multiplicity here, neatly lacing together pinging, high notes rather than chords or riffs. You can sense a tentativeness in the shift towards a gentler minimalism-- both the first song (“Transformer”) and the first single (“Confidence”) begin as calm and quiet meditations, Long singing in a hushed, lower range over sprightly fingerpicking before giving way to the kind of percussive jams that we’ve come to expect. But those sections end up feeling mismatched and you sense that while Dodos were ready to do away with their old habits, they couldn’t quite figure out how to replace them.
Wedged in between those songs are rewarding mergers of their new approach with their old skills. The crisp production and autumnal glow of Carrier is a world away from Women’s meat-locker severity, though Reimer’s stylistic tics as a guitarist manifests in tangible ways. There’s a dissonant, deconstructive edge to the gnarled riff and fractious rhythms driving “Substance”, and the momentum makes for a seamless transition towards the tumbling chorus and a surprising brass section. “Stranger” similarly aligns Long’s tuneful folk-pop harmonies with tensile post-punk arrangements, as silvery palm-muted loops, pitch-shifted guitars and Kroeber’s unorthodox percussive clatter encase the delicate melodic core in steely armor.
The instrumental pyrotechnics of “Stranger” are a rare pleasure here and the combustion can be missed, as the energy exerted by Long and Kroeber as instrumentalists often was the hook on past records, rather than a certain melody or lyric. It’s an understandable loss, as the songwriting process has been completely inverted. Whereas previous records evolved out of instrumental jams, the lyrics on Carrier came first. But much like the six-string switch-up, it has the exact opposite effect of you might expect. Long hasn’t become a wordier or more poetic lyricist, in fact, Carrier is Dodos’ most plainspoken album. There seems to be a “first thought, best thought” approach as he asks cosmic, open-ended questions that strike to the heart of the human experience or sensible, legible fragments that can fleshed out over equally inquisitive music.
“What does a song hold?/ Was it love?,” Long asks to open the record and there’s no impatience or pedantry in it. Carrier instead has a quiet fortitude, searching for “substance, out of reach,” to use a phrase that pops up on two separate songs. To get there, Long occasionally reaches into the past, as on the station wagon reminiscence “Family”. More often, he’s just trying to be a better actor in the present. He’s a concerned father at the beginning of the heart-welling "Relief", and a consolate husband at the end-- "So I sit with my wife/ thinking of nothing much when we fight/ and I squeeze till we dry." Carrier’s final stretch gets a bit too wispy, but not before the suitably titled “The Current” delivers the lyric that feels like the record’s valedictory address: “If this love comes unto me/ I’m with it.”
So despite the role Reimer’s passing played in the creation of Carrier, it’s not Dodos’ answer to Tonight’s the Night-- it never feels haunted or wracked with morbid reflection, even the supposedly blunt “Death” is imbued with a sense of gratitude, seeing the natural order of things. Though Long claimed “we put our backs into this one” in an email to fans, it doesn't convey that force and struggle on the listener, subtly getting under your skin by pairing Dodos' slightest music with their heaviest emotions. A key lyric here is from “Substance”, where Long shouts “you will forget and I will remember,” and summarizes the wistful effect of Carrier when faced with the passage of time and the fragility of memory*--* it’s the kind of record for the times when you’re lost in thought about someone you might’ve known for a little while, wondering where they are and if they ever think about you. | 2013-08-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-08-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | August 27, 2013 | 6.8 | 2a7fdccb-1242-4744-a6c4-57ee73539ac5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The latest from the Melbourne electronic duo is a dawdler’s paradise, a daydream mapped to MIDI. | The latest from the Melbourne electronic duo is a dawdler’s paradise, a daydream mapped to MIDI. | Wilson Tanner: II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilson-tanner-ii/ | II | For their debut album, Melbourne’s Andrew Wilson and John Tanner came up with a relatively simple proposition: What if Balearic music—a catch-all style with ambient undertones popularized in Ibiza in the 1980s—were transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere? Claiming to have recorded their album on the West Coast of Australia, where the Swan River meets the Indian Ocean, the two musicians dove into Balearic’s deepest pools, where aquamarine strains of ambient music swirled with new age at its most beatific. Limpid synthesizers, nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, and the occasional keening clarinet solo pooled together as effortlessly as the ice melting in a Campari glass.
As Andras Fox, Wilson had previously been known for Larry Heard-inspired deep house, while Tanner’s Eleventeen Eston project had put a lo-fi spin on big-budget 1980s pop, sounding like he’d dug up a sun-baked cassette of Tears for Fears’ demo instrumentals. But as Wilson Tanner, they achieved a newfound purity. On II, they continue with their debut album’s line of investigation but add a twist to the thought experiment: What if a cold front descended upon their Antipodean paradise?
The elements of II have not much changed—their synthesizers remain fluid, their tempos bob pleasantly along, and the maritime conceit is borne out in the sound of actual waves against the prow. (The two say they wrote and recorded the new album aboard a 1950s riverboat in Melbourne’s Port Philipp Bay, utilizing “a resourceful array of weatherproof electronic instruments and a long extension lead,” which, sure!) It’s a dawdler’s paradise, a daydream mapped to MIDI. A few songs could have worked just as well on the duo’s debut: The faux-flute melody of “Loch and Key” sways lazily; “All Hands Bury the Dead” sinks into a mind-clearing keyboard refrain that’s accompanied by the sounds of birdcalls and splashing oars.
But there’s a noticeable chill in the air. “Perishable” wraps up melancholy flute and guitar in tendrils of analog delay, suggesting a kind of dubbed-out death folk.“Killcord Pts I-III” fires up churning arpeggios, drizzles in dissolving marimbas, and stews in its own juices for 12 uneasy minutes. The darkest and most adventurous of all is “Idle,” where acid-like bass tones bubble and squelch against lurching electronic rhythms and an almost inaudible layer of feedback. It’s not far from something that Aphex Twin might have put out on his label Rephlex in the early 1990s, and it makes for a provocative new dimension to the duo’s sound. After all, with sea levels rising and coastlines disappearing, blissful drifting only gets you so far. | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Efficient Space | July 12, 2019 | 6.8 | 2a80ebf0-09d5-4ffe-b2db-c5d2d3cd2bad | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Japanese-British pop singer’s debut is a Y2K flashback that’s as reverent of Evanescence and Korn as it is of Britney and Christina. | The Japanese-British pop singer’s debut is a Y2K flashback that’s as reverent of Evanescence and Korn as it is of Britney and Christina. | Rina Sawayama: SAWAYAMA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rina-sawayama-sawayama/ | SAWAYAMA | The scene: TRL, 1999. The tweens: legion, transforming Times Square into a cheer section and breaking the dial-up internet voting for their video faves. Those videos: Backstreet Boys, Britney, and Korn’s “Freak on a Leash.” The nu-metal hit was No. 1 on TRL about 10 times—it probably would have topped the charts longer had MTV not pulled it after Columbine—and shared space with Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and other decidedly un-bubblegum bands. Of course, these days nu-metal is considered—to put it kindly—fairly uncool. But nobody relayed the genre’s future uncoolness to the tweenage millennials who imprinted on it: Grimes, Poppy, and now Japanese-British artist Rina Sawayama, who “kind of [likes] making really uncool things cool.”
SAWAYAMA, her debut album after years of retromaniac singles, does for Y2K pop what Hulu’s PEN15 did for Y2K middle school: recreates it to the tiniest detail. Many of us would like to escape to 2000 these days, and musicians more than anyone; in the span of a few months in 2018 we got songs called “1999” and “2002,” both of which interpolate the same Britney lyric, neither of which quite capture the year. But SAWAYAMA sounds like actual 1999 and 2002, when they had producers other than Max Martin, bands other than the boy variety, and arrangements so overproduced that now, in this time of endless chill, they’re almost refreshing. The album’s other big reference points are Timbaland and the Neptunes—particularly Exodus, the Timbaland-assisted album by J-pop star and Sawayama’s childhood idol Utada Hikaru—and “heavier Britney stuff.” Her audience is people who know exactly which songs she means.
The Korn-iest song on SAWAYAMA is lead single “STFU!”, in which Sawayama summons the genre’s aggression and redirects it against casual racists; in the video, they’re embodied by a composite of every white sadsack on Hinge, who serenades his date with actual shit Sawayama heard from label execs. But her take on nu-metal bypasses bros entirely, beginning with Garbage—at times Sawayama sounds eerily like Shirley Manson, or maybe Tori Amos if her Slayer cover was actual Slayer—and pivoting on the chorus to singsong bubblegum pop. So when she finally really lets loose, with a howling last note and roaring crescendo, the eruption’s been primed.
“STFU!” is also a bit of a red herring. Most of Sawayama’s nu-metal influence appears either in snippets, like the riffs that intermittently “flare up like an underlying zit” beneath “XS,” in translation, like the guitars that blend into new jack swing “Love Me 4 Me” by being so canned they’re shelf-stable, or in absence: the album’s gentlest, most contemplative song, which is called “Fuck This World.” Often, the artists to whom Sawayama pays homage are those who already blended the genres. “Dynasty” is an obvious take on Evanescence (“a little pocket of culture that people are maybe too scared [to reference],” she called the band) and is more like nu-melodrama: an intro with an airhorn but also strings, butt-rock but also church bells, a showy guitar solo but also a soprano vocal tracing it. “Who’s Gonna Save U Now?” is like the lost third sibling to Britney’s “Stronger” and Christina’s “Fighter,” and the song, complete with cheering fans and call-and-response, captures arena heroics in these arenaless times.
The production of SAWAYAMA is so immaculate that when she attempts to satirize pop music, she plays the part too well. “XS” (pronounced “excess”) matches style to subject, luxuriating in the rhymes of “Tesla Xs” with “Calabasas.” It could be a lost Cora Corman track from Music and Lyrics—which is to say, only satire in context. The slinky “Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)” mashes together “I Feel Love,” Christine and the Queens’ “Girlfriend,” a thwacking house beat, and Madonna-esque backing vocals into something supposedly about Beto O’Rourke. But even if you didn’t pick up on that, it still sounds like hitting yourself in the head with a silk scarf wrapped around your fist.
Most of the album, though, is absolutely irony-free, and better for it. The chorus of “Bad Friend,” the rare friend-breakup song by the guilty party, cloaks Sawayama’s voice in a thick cloak of vocoder that falls away at the last “friend”: a sudden pang of sincerity, when it’s too late. “Chosen Family” pairs a Nickelodeon-sweet melody with Danny L Harle production, and the sugar content would overwhelm almost any topic but this: the “chosen family” of LGBTQ friends, which hasn’t often received the specific affirmation of pop ballads. “Paradisin’” begins with a video-game blip like it’s zapping you back to teenagerdom and runs on the manic, buzzing-out-of-your skin energy of being 15 and damning all consequences.
Best of all, at the end, is “Snakeskin.” The track begins like a torch song or an aria, Sawayama’s voice heavy and ominous. She goes into a sinuous vocal coil—the corresponding “heavier Britney song” is probably “Over to You Now”—then lets it build to a hissing drop (maybe more 2013 than 2003, but who’s counting?). Even if it didn’t interpolate the Final Fantasy fanfare, it would still sound like defeating the world. That’s what sets Sawayama apart: A neural network could add Papa Roach to its aughties pastiche. What’s harder to fake is the desperate, pulsing emotion beneath the songs, the kind that demands listeners pour in their own emotion until the song overflows. | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | April 20, 2020 | 7.7 | 2a850d07-ed6f-46f4-9c43-6dad7f54c426 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Embracing the Y2K R&B of her youth, Erika de Casier molds the silvery avant-gardism of artists like Aaliyah and Janet Jackson into an ultra-stylish throwback for the era of ASMR. | Embracing the Y2K R&B of her youth, Erika de Casier molds the silvery avant-gardism of artists like Aaliyah and Janet Jackson into an ultra-stylish throwback for the era of ASMR. | Erika de Casier: Still | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erika-de-casier-still/ | Still | The best era of pop music is the one that you grew up with—a truism that feels like fact if, like Erika de Casier and this writer, music television was your oxygen in the year 2000. Recently the conveyor belt of retromania has returned the sparkly, silvery aesthetic of Aaliyah, TLC, and Jennifer Lopez to relevancy, but Y2K revivalism finds its most meticulous acolyte in de Casier, whose third album is a faithful evocation of a very specific moment in Black American music—a time when pop domination and electronic avant-gardism were two sides of the same coin.
On her previous albums, the Copenhagen singer and producer combed through ’90s and ’00s UK garage and glimmers of IDM as well as the strain of juddering future-R&B separatism led by Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Aaliyah. The turn-of-the-millennium styling of 2021’s Sensational elevated de Casier to critical darling, but her biggest commercial success has come through collaboration with the K-pop outfit NewJeans, translating Jersey club bounce into two stratospheric singles, “Super Shy” and “Cool With You.”
On Still—the title references both J.Lo and Dr. Dre—de Casier narrows her focus, sticking mostly to a palette of sweet, head-register vocals in the lineage of Janet, Mýa, and Ashanti; plucked strings and stuttering rhythms à la Darkchild and Timbaland; and an air of restraint that feels purposely adult, as outlined by Sade and Maxwell. The Proustian madeleine tastes good. Slippery, sensual “ooh” is a testament to Aaliyah and Tim’s greatest hits, a jerking boudoir grind that throws in a line from Ice Cube and Ms. Toi’s raunch anthem “You Can Do It.” There are fourth-wall-breaking ad-libs straight from the postmodern ’90s—some of them in Danish—like the “Stop!” that brings “Ice” to a halt. On that track, which grounds the album’s flawlessly catchy middle third, de Casier brings in Tampa rap duo They Hate Change for a sweet-and-sour duet like they used to do ’em—accusations are thrown, someone’s “on freezer mode” and Copenhagen’s giving the boys “frosty soles.”
The rise of Aaliyah in the middle of the ’90s called time on the big-haired belters of the previous generation and ushered in an intimate, heady style that remains the blueprint for countless young singers, including today’s close-mic stylists Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. De Casier pushes this technique to fascinating extremes, her vocals set so far back in the mix they’re practically in reverse. Her performance on “The Princess,” a feminist reckoning with desire (“Is it wrong of me to want all the things I was shown all my life?”), is like sandpaper meeting velvet, showcasing her absolute control on a minute, ASMR-like scale.
De Casier’s subject matter is still mostly romantic, still riddled with modern problems—typically mediated through her phone. (The techno-pessimists of millennial R&B were some of the first to point out the romantic dangers of text and email.) Sometimes de Casier is the one making the booty call, like on “Home Alone,” where pillow talk is punctuated by sweat droplets and wisps of accordion. Other times she projects her tech anxieties onto an ex: “When your phone rings do you wish it was me? With my cute face that showed up on your screen?” On “My Day Off,” she draws her digital boundaries for the umpteenth time: “You can send me an email with all of your shit,” she sighs, “I need to do laundry, ’cause it doesn’t do itself.” Welcome to the boring dystopia.
From a wide angle it all adds up to a modern R&B version of “record collection rock”—in which the meticulous reproduction of vintage attributes becomes self-congratulatory catnip for the nerdiest listeners, and/or fans who remember it from the first time round. Indeed, I like it a lot. But the closer you get to Still, the more its anachronisms stand out. Most obvious from a production perspective are the languid, Afrobeats-shaped grooves of “Test It” and “Home Alone,” which hold up a mirror to the globalized pop world of the 2020s. For neophiles hungry for glimmers of the real future, not the old one, these slow-burners might be the most interesting ideas on the album, proposing de Casier as the princess of a new, borderless quiet storm. The present also bursts in on barely-there break-up ballad “Twice,” as pop traveler Blood Orange reminds us of his London accent in a wistful spoken verse: “You know my walls are tainted and nothing ever looks the same/I pass your flat on the night bus.”
De Casier, who turns 34 in March, has talked about being glued to MTV when she was a kid, finding solace in the visibility of Black pop icons as a mixed-race girl in a white country. But Aaliyah and Janet weren’t the only role models available on MTV Nordic—coincidentally, the same channel I was watching in those years. She might have idolized Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, Toni Braxton. Why this sound, and not anything else from the riches of millennial R&B?
Maybe it’s about control, to borrow a term from Janet. With their silver suits and cutting-edge CGI, Tim and Missy offered an Afrofuturist vision of Blackness aligned with technology—and with it, perhaps, the opportunity to design yourself anew. De Casier’s songwriting often returns to demands for autonomy and order, whether chastising an “indecisive” lover or admitting she’s scared of showing her feelings. On “Busy,” from her last album, she lists off her morning routine—vitamins, meditation, skincare—in the impossible search for perfection. She even invented a raven-haired alter ego, Bianka, as a vessel to safely explore her diva-ish tendencies, though it seems Bianka is no longer necessary: On the cover of Still, encased in a black leather trench coat and bug-eye sunglasses, de Casier becomes the ice princess of her own dreams.
Like the superhero’s cape, costumes are powerful and pretend at the same time. Still imparts a similarly paradoxical thought. For all its finesse, it can obviously never replicate the futurism that defined its biggest inspirations; these classy reproductions only highlight the chasm between us and that halcyon moment. On the closing ballad “Someone,” de Casier inadvertently grapples with the same problem: “Someone once told me, ‘Just be yourself,’” she whispers—but as we all know, it’s not that easy. “Forgive me if I can’t do that, right now I’m just trying to be someone.” | 2024-02-26T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-26T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | February 26, 2024 | 7.4 | 2a86c0fa-74f1-4997-a1bb-9559bdf62bf6 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The reissue of his 1989 collaboration with Elvis Costello reveals the art underneath its schlocky gloss. It is also the rarest of things: a McCartney record where you can sense his need to be loved. | The reissue of his 1989 collaboration with Elvis Costello reveals the art underneath its schlocky gloss. It is also the rarest of things: a McCartney record where you can sense his need to be loved. | Paul McCartney: Flowers in the Dirt [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22999-flowers-in-the-dirt/ | Flowers in the Dirt [Deluxe Edition] | Paul McCartney wasn’t exactly in the commercial doldrums in 1989, but he certainly understood ignominy was within his grasp. Press to Play, his 1986 album, generated no real hits to speak of. George Harrison—the young kid he brought into the Beatles back in 1958—bested Paul in 1987 with Cloud Nine, an album that contained the number one smash “Got My Mind Set on You” and a lesser hit called “When We Was Fab,” an affectionate nod to his time as a Moptop that played right into the lingering nostalgia from the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band* *in ’87.
Savvy as ever, McCartney decided it was time to strengthen his ties to his Beatles past on Flowers in the Dirt, the 1989 record that effectively opens the third act in his monumental career. McCartney designed Flowers in the Dirt to be taken out on the road in his first international tour in over a decade and while that in itself would’ve been a noteworthy event, he realized he should have a record to peddle as well. He’d been working on new songs but the project came into focus when his management suggested it might be a good idea to team with Elvis Costello, the former punk who had been a card-carrying member of the Beatles fan club since he was a kid.
Most of the contemporary press regarding Flowers in the Dirt highlighted the collaboration between Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello, positioning Costello as the salt to McCartney’s sugar. Comparisons to John Lennon were encouraged, as the publicity team pushed the idea that the songwriters composed “eyeball to eyeball,” just like the two Beatles did at the start of their career. Costello encouraged McCartney to dig out his iconic Höfner bass—he hadn’t used it since the Beatles—and the two wrote enough material to constitute a full record. But after initial sessions with Costello as a producer didn’t go as expected, Paul sought out other options, bringing in a bevy of producers (Micthell Froom, David Foster, Steve Lipson, and Trevor Horn) to help cast as wide of a net as possible with these songs. With McCartney also behind the boards, there was no shortage of cooks in the kitchen.
So it’s no wonder that things rarely cohere. “My Brave Face,” one of the four McCartney/Costello compositions (“Où Est le Soleil?,” originally a bonus track on the cassette and CD versions, is now officially canon), opens the album with a melodic punch. Any momentum it provides is crushed by the stiff synth-funk of “Rough Ride,” a Lipson/Horn production that should’ve been relegated to a B-side but instead exists as the worst second track ever released on an album. From there, Flowers in the Dirt proceeds in fits and starts, sometimes achieving a small measure of grace. McCartney always excelled in familial love, so “We Got Married” and the valentine to his son “Put It There” pull on the heartstrings. But the deliberate proto-digital gloss flattens the album, softening the edges of the Costello collaborations and disguising the loveliness of such sweet miniatures as “Distractions.”
It is the rarest of things: a Paul McCartney record where you can sense his need to be loved. Maybe if McCartney’s confidence hadn’t been shaken by Press to Play’s commercial underperformance—and if his competitiveness hadn’t been stoked by Harrison’s success—he would’ve settled on a single collaborator. But the parade of producers on Flowers in the Dirt suggests he’s trying every style in hopes of a hit. Maybe the hit could arrive on adult contemporary radio, so he has David Foster—the architect of Chicago’s ’80s comeback—polish “We Got Married.” Maybe he could squeak out an MTV hit with the help of Trevor Horn, or perhaps Costello could give him an assist on college radio, or maybe stoke some memories of the Beatles. McCartney decided to cover his bets, and he wound up with a record that feels constrained and insecure.
All of this calculation makes the Archive Collection—both in the slim double-disc and the absurdly overstuffed box—so revelatory. Both variations are built upon the demos McCartney recorded with Costello, both containing the spare guitar-and-voice renditions that recall the Everly Brothers more than Lennon/McCartney. These nine songs were recorded in the autumn of 1987 and they crackle with energy. They’re ragged and right, feeling more alive and cohesive than the album that came later. Some of the songs would show up on later records by both—“So Like Candy” is a centerpiece on Mighty Like a Rose and “The Lovers That Never Were” performed a similar role on Off the Ground—but the songs are best heard as a piece. Costello was too verbose and florid to be Lennon, but his melodic gifts and sarcasm challenged McCartney, who never relied on easy turns of phrase here. That’s why it’s better to have the songs heard as a collective: They’re stronger when played together.
The recently released Super Deluxe Edition contains full-band demos from 1988, which may have been the full-band renditions that McCartney decided were unsatisfactory. They’re livelier than Flowers in the Dirt, with “The Lovers That Never Were” suggesting the intricate melodicism of Costello’s Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory and “Playboy To a Man” riding an organ groove straight out of the Attractions. While some of the B-sides and mixes are entertaining—“Back on My Feet,” the flip of the UK-only hit “Once Upon A Long Ago” is an amiably anonymous ’80s adult contemporary cut and the highlight of the bunch—they wind up bolstering the slightly desperate nature of McCartney in 1989. The demos, however, offer a different story. Here, McCartney isn’t concerned with commerce, he’s just thrilled to be working with a musician who could be his equal as a writer and a performer. That’s the divide between the initial release of Flowers in the Dirt and the reissue: the 1989 LP is made for a mass audience, while the reissue reveals the art lurking underneath the gloss. | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol / UMe / MPL | March 28, 2017 | 7.3 | 2a8afe46-1828-4b90-b4b9-a835b24ffb51 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
The Denver death-metal quartet’s wordless, old-school, analog synth music flips the genre’s atmospheric interstitials into towering showstoppers that invite deep concentration. | The Denver death-metal quartet’s wordless, old-school, analog synth music flips the genre’s atmospheric interstitials into towering showstoppers that invite deep concentration. | Blood Incantation: Timewave Zero | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blood-incantation-timewave-zero/ | Timewave Zero | Last weekend, the members of Blood Incantation performed at Denver’s Gothic Theater, where they stood motionless behind racks of synthesizers on a stage lit by candles and decorated with a few carefully placed orbs and obelisks. The only guitar in sight was an acoustic, tucked away in the corner. The very setup meant that, even if they wanted to (say, for a surprise encore), the Colorado death-metal quartet would not be performing any recognizable version of the music that first won them an audience—initially in the metal underground, and then, with 2019’s breakthrough sophomore album Hidden History of the Human Race, far beyond its borders.
In place of those explosive, riff-heavy epics, Blood Incantation used this one-off show to debut Timewave Zero, a stormy and muted new ambient project. The way that guitarist and vocalist Paul Riedl describes it, he and his bandmates charted this trajectory as early as their first rehearsal. Back then, they decided their signature sound would be a cosmic blend of death metal chestnuts (Death, Morbid Angel, Gorguts); their sophomore album would veer toward psychedelic, neon green landscapes; and their third would consist entirely of ambient music, focusing on a single element of their work.
In the context of their discography, Timewave Zero isn’t exactly a radical shift. More than the soothing, mystical new age they shout out in interviews (Reidl remains death metal’s most dedicated Enya fan), the atmosphere recalls a period in the early 1970s when progressive rock bands started incorporating synthesizers, using the era’s state-of-the-art equipment to push beyond the standard textures of rock music. These artists, who aspired toward the intricate compositions and sweeping movements of classical music, had high ambitions, and so do Blood Incantation, even if, half a century later, those same sounds might scan as more vintage than visionary.
It will likely only take a few minutes into Timewave Zero before you decide whether or not you need it in your collection. To some, these longform compositions might feel interesting only in theory: a cerebral exercise to cross off the to-do list before pure inspiration strikes again. And yet, like all of their music, Timewave Zero rewards an open mind and close listening, rising above gearhead hero worship into daring, unexpected places. “To contact Blood Incantation, CONCENTRATE,” reads a message included with each of their albums. More than anything they’ve attempted before, this wordless, old-school, analog synth music recasts that instruction as an open invitation.
The most immediate aspects of Timewave Zero are the groovy, pulsing melodies lurking in the depths of both compositions—the first titled “Io,” the second “Ea.” Both pieces take a similar journey through four movements and roughly 20 minutes. They both begin with a low, wind-chiming rumble, which evolves into a laser-show crescendo before hushing back to a burbling roar. At their peak in the second movements, both songs spotlight a cycle of notes on the synthesizer—motifs that, if transposed for a down-tuned electric guitar, you might call “riffs”—that make Timewave Zero more distinctive and intense than the planetarium mood music Reidl has occasionally described it as.
In both compositions, the most compelling parts are the in-between phases, which just so happen to be in the third movements. This is when Morris Kolontyrsky enters with acoustic guitar, a pacifying texture amid the dark swirl of synths. The third movement of “Ea,” in particular, makes brilliant use of these dynamics. Kolontyrsky fingerpicks a minor chord over what sounds like a Mellotron, building to a mournful swell that suggests the shadow of a string section. It comprises the most beautiful five minutes on any Blood Incantation record and recalls the pastoral opulence of early King Crimson—the quiet moments that helped amplify the devilish outbursts surrounding them.
Building from those early prog records, the use of momentary ambience as the calm before the storm has long been foundational in metal. From Tony Iommi’s classical guitar pieces in Black Sabbath to Chuck Schuldiner’s spacey interludes in Death, it’s a way of snapping the audience back to attention, making the hard stuff hit harder and shading in the spooky outskirts of a band’s sound. In some ways, Timewave Zero is a loving tribute to this particular aspect of metal, repositioning those ominous, interstitial pieces as towering showstoppers and highlighting innovators like Tangerine Dream as crucial influences as opposed to outlying figureheads.
At the same time, the record itself can feel like a kind of interlude: a well-earned breather before the next full-on attack. Reidl has confirmed the band’s follow-up will be a return to metal, more subtly incorporating these songs’ lessons in composition and restraint (as well as those learned from Reidl’s ambient solo albums, both under his own name and as Hoverkraft). Listening to Timewave Zero, you can sense the band proudly embracing its transitional nature, rarely attempting to push beyond its self-imposed boundaries—a triumph by existence alone, an itch they had to scratch. And if it’s not necessarily the music that Blood Incantation will be remembered for, it is precisely the kind of risk that shows why they’ll be remembered. | 2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Century Media | March 3, 2022 | 7.5 | 2a9550c9-96ff-4467-a6f7-715d1434993e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Sydney punks comb through society’s sludge on a deadpan collection of mosh pit anthems and glistening new wave synthesizers. | The Sydney punks comb through society’s sludge on a deadpan collection of mosh pit anthems and glistening new wave synthesizers. | Low Life: Downer Edn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/low-life-downer-edn/ | Downer Edn | Sydney’s Mitch Tolman might not be a fan of the meathead bros he grew up around, but they’re clearly his muse. It was evident on Low Life’s debut 2014 album Dogging—the lyrics from the band’s burly and brooding post-punk songs owe quite a bit to Australian lad culture. Tolman’s got a gift for turning entitled toxic masculine bullshit into absurdist satire. “Tryin’ to be a good man, to be a good bloke/But I love gettin’ off and I’m fuckin’ stoked,” he deadpanned on Dogging ripper “DNA.” In the field of recent post-punk bands, Low Life occupy a deeply specific zone. They make muscular pit music that glistens with new wave synthesizers, and meanwhile, a dispassionate Australian voice is up front taking the piss out of sexist and homophobic dinguses. It’s a riveting mixture.
On their second album Downer Edn (pronounced “Downer Edition”), Low Life continue to comb through society’s sludge. Tolman still puts together elaborate depictions of dirtbags, like his portrait of the titular “Warrior”—a “golden orange tan” dude who eats KFC while watching UFC. Those kinds of details are good for a laugh or two, but Tolman’s stiff delivery and his bandmates’ brusque gang vocals highlight the darkness behind this caricature of strongman politics and domestic violence. Their song “92,” which alludes to child abuse, peers even further into the void. “Small boys grow into bad men, battered boys become very bad men” is the song’s horrific mantra.
While Downer Edn bursts with punk vitality—fuzz, volume, speed, a bunch of dudes shouting in unison—it’s their work with feedback and texture that makes it special. Beyond the clipped churn of power chords on “Lad Life,” a shimmering, gauzy guitar tone presides. It’s a sweet-and-salty combination that’s been in place since Dogging, but the new album finds the band sounding more streamlined and sophisticated than ever. It’s tempting to credit their new collaborators for the upgrade, namely co-producer Mickey Grossman and new guitarist and synth player Dizzy Daldal. Daldal is also a member of Orion, a Sydney band whose overlooked self-titled 2017 album was a sparkling document of Factory Records-indebted post-punk.
It’s not just dreamy guitars or bleak humor that elevate Downer Edn: They’ve also got a bona fide anthem in “RBB.” The title is an abbreviation for the Red and Black Bloc, the official fan group for the Western Sydney Wanderers Football Club. (Tolman is an outspoken soccer fan.) Drummer Greg Alfaro builds momentum for their mission statement: “You know who the fuck we are/We are Western Sydney,” they chant. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are—if Low Life are in your town, you’re probably going to scream the band’s Sydney soccer anthem back at them. Hell, it even happened at a recent Melbourne show.
In an interview, Low Life discussed the guiding question behind their creative process: “What can we do easiest that can work the best?” Downer Edn is an album-length expression of that philosophy, with an emphasis on repetition and subdued vocals. Sometimes it works and they pull off a major coup (“RBB”), and elsewhere, songs are prone to going stale or petering out (“Rave Slave”). They’ve put together a record that’s consistently captivating. There’s darkness and there are laughs, scream-along anthems for shoving and dreamy near-ballads. The first and last song on the album are variations on the same melody, so as album closer “Crash” ends, it feels effortless to flip the record and revisit “The Pitts.” It’s a tongue-in-cheek song where they essentially declare that you, the listener, are now their disciple. It’s a self-aware joke, but maybe wait to laugh until you’ve stopped running the album back. | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Goner / Alter / Cool Death | March 16, 2019 | 7.3 | 2a97641d-b5a1-4106-ba06-1b272ad7868d | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
Vivifying scenes from her debut novel, the Inuk experimentalist and throat-singer marries fiery condemnations of oppression with tender words of protection for future generations. | Vivifying scenes from her debut novel, the Inuk experimentalist and throat-singer marries fiery condemnations of oppression with tender words of protection for future generations. | Tanya Tagaq: Tongues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tanya-tagaq-tongues/ | Tongues | In Tanya Tagaq’s 2018 book Split Tooth, she describes a girl, perhaps herself, who leaves her body. From the remove of a dark, blank space, this girl watches a house party unfurl—and senses the presence of another being there, with her, watching. “It was a human once,” she writes. “It is huge and sinuous, a jumble of muscle and gristle.” It is ravenous; it wants to kill. And if the girl doesn’t make it back to her own body in time, this thing will take it from her by force.
On Tongues, Tagaq’s fifth studio album, which borrows many of its lyrics from Split Tooth, the line between woman and monster is gossamer-thin. Tagaq is a maestro of Inuit throat-singing. To outside listeners, the guttural tone of throat-singing can sound otherworldly. In Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune, the director cast a throat singer to preside over a grisly bloodletting and prepare an army for extraterrestrial slaughter. This is a far cry from traditional Inuit throat-singing, which is usually performed in friendly competition by two women, each trying to outlast the other. On Tongues, Tagaq is her own duet partner, by turns warm and wrathful. Her low growl holds the power to terrify, but often, it is her pronouncements in plain, spoken English that most chill the blood.
Last year, Canadian authorities discovered the unmarked mass graves of nearly 1,400 Indigenous children on the grounds of five former residential schools. Tagaq, now 46, recalls leaving home at 15 to attend one such school. Throughout her career, and long before last year’s reckoning, she has advocated for herself and other victims of the system. “You can’t take our tongues,” she says, on the album’s title track. “You can’t take our blood.” And then, dipping into her guttural register, she sings, “Inuuvunga/Tukisivunga”—I am an Inuk; I understand. She soothes her sisters, then turns, once more, to condemn the complicit.
The latter category includes this critic, along with many of the parties who have acclaimed Tagaq and awarded her some of Canada’s highest honors. A recipient of the Polaris Prize, multiple Juno Awards, and the Order of Canada, Tagaq boldly uses her place in the country’s cultural firmament to challenge its very foundation. When she vocalizes in English, she speaks and sings with open hostility to her audience. “Colonizer” emerges from her throat as an epithet, in a rasp, deep and low and sibilant. She cries, “You’re guilty,” and repeats the line, again and again, a broad indictment, a blunt instrument.
Yet her songs also point at very specific targets. Opening track “In Me” is a celebration of Indigenous hunting practices, and a middle finger to “moralizing” white vegans. “I Forgive Me” takes aim at rapists, promising swift justice: “I do not forgive and forget/I protect and prevent/Make them eat shame and repent.” The album’s best track, “Teeth Agape,” is also its vividly bloodiest, a dual condemnation of residential schools and modern foster care. Over a menacing industrial swirl, Tagaq speaks of sharpening her claws and baring her fangs. “Touch my children,” she says, “and my teeth welcome your windpipe.”
In these songs, that ravenous, sinuous jumble of muscle and gristle swells within Tagaq’s body. It is a fearful presence, but a righteous one. It speaks with a strength that the young girl at that long-ago house party did not yet know how to wield. The violence this being threatens is the protective kind.
But there is room, too, for tenderness. In the latter half of Tongues, Tagaq turns to her Indigenous listeners, especially women and girls, and faces them the way an Inuk throat-singer faces her partner. “Do Not Fear Love” originated as free verse in the pages of Split Tooth. It is reformed on Tongues as a meditation, replete with instructions to inhale, exhale, and observe one’s anxious thoughts. “Thank them for trying to protect you,” Tagaq says, of such “small fears,” reciting the words above low synths, steady drums, and the hollow swell of an organ. She wrote the album’s closing track, “Earth Monster,” for her daughter, Naia, on the child’s sixth birthday. Reveling in Naia’s breath, her smile, “her voice, her earnest voice,” she rotates between pet names: “my small one,” “my truly mine,” “my earth monster.” Here, “monster” is as delivered as sweetly as any other nothing a mother might murmur to a beloved daughter. It is an encouragement of anger, of tears, of sharp teeth and glittering claws.
Both girl and monster, Tagaq seems to say, can share the same body. They can nurture one another. They can make the world safer for the next girl born into it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Six Shooter | January 26, 2022 | 7.7 | 2a97e008-3353-4327-8204-7f880c777e94 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Sun Araw's muggy psych-trance is given space and time to stretch out, simmer, deepen, and the results move from mesmeric to narcotic. | Sun Araw's muggy psych-trance is given space and time to stretch out, simmer, deepen, and the results move from mesmeric to narcotic. | Sun Araw: On Patrol | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14480-on-patrol/ | On Patrol | Sun Araw sound a bit like a lava lamp. Or like minute 45 of "Dark Star". Or maybe Fela Kuti slowed down to a crawl, rolled out, and spread into infinity. Cameron Stallones-- also of Magic Lantern-- has been tinkering with his amniotic dub for a few albums now, but nothing he's done yet has quite matched the inward-gazing expanse of On Patrol. Here, Stallones' muggy psych-trance is given space and time-- almost 75 minutes-- to stretch out, simmer, deepen. The results are panoramic, dizzyingly huge.
Most of Stallones' compositions consist of a circular, undulating guitar line, repeated over a sweltering backdrop, with the occasional chanty, muffled vocal rising out of the ether. A Californian himself, Stallones' music is heavily informed by music from warm climes-- dub, desert rock of both the African and SoCal varietals, raga, the aforementioned Afrobeat. As the name Sun Araw suggests, free jazz plays a role too, although Stallones' elastic tunes are more collective consciousness than collective improvisation. These songs, long as they get, never feel less than carefully considered, even as they round the bend on minute 15. And On Patrol is truly psychedelic, an otherwordly, bleary around the edges, unusually transfixing at its core, journey-through-the-self kind of deal. It's never jarring, but it sure does get heavy.
On Patrol is better the deeper it gets, its rippling, gurgling landscapes and Stallones' snaky guitar intertwining over as many minutes as it takes: with time it grows more vivid, moving from mesmeric to narcotic. Textures change, but tempos rarely do; you don't so much listen to On Patrol as get ensconced in it, and while it does sit nicely in the background, its chemtrail churn is difficult to ignore for too long. 75 minutes of cascading ambient psych is a commitment, to be sure, but despite its length and leisurely pace, On Patrol manages to keep shapeshifting, from the bleeding synths of "Deep Cover" to the k-hole Hendrix of "Dimension Alley" and the Godzilla ripple of "The Stakeout". Stallones continues to prove himself an unusually gifted sonic architect, and the songs that comprise On Patrol are his most evocative, elaborate structures yet. | 2010-07-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-07-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Not Not Fun | July 26, 2010 | 8.1 | 2a981f07-3fa0-4072-8aa0-d2046facc92f | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Emily Sprague’s folk music turns solitude into an evocation of spirits. Her latest album as Florist grapples with change, death, and uncertainty with some of the most arresting songwriting of the year. | Emily Sprague’s folk music turns solitude into an evocation of spirits. Her latest album as Florist grapples with change, death, and uncertainty with some of the most arresting songwriting of the year. | Florist: Emily Alone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florist-emily-alone/ | Emily Alone | On her third album, Emily Sprague is sitting by the ocean, taking walks, tending to her plants, daydreaming. She’s feeling peaceful and existential and acutely aware of every source of light in the house. The previous two albums from her indie-pop outfit Florist were full-band affairs, but in these 12 songs, Sprague steps away from her collaborators for a spell, tasked with filling time alone. It’s a familiar reprieve for the Los Angeles–based artist, who has also released several excellent ambient collections under her own name. But while those long-form compositions have evoked solitude and the natural world using modular synthesizers, Emily Alone is built from simpler tools: double-tracked vocals, acoustic guitar, and the occasional birdsong leaking in from an open window.
If Sprague’s ambient compositions are a wash of concrete images and color, then folk music is where she grapples with uncertainty. Her cool, sighing voice lends itself to repeated motifs, rising at the end of each line like a question, even during two interstitial passages of spoken-word poetry. Her guitar playing is similarly inquisitive. Most of her songs alternate between just two chords: bittersweet pivots that draw your attention less to a melody than to the motion, a gentle tide beneath her words. Sprague plays folk music in the traditional sense, but the atmosphere she creates is more like new age—practiced as a meditation, leading toward small breakthroughs.
With such simple arrangements, Sprague’s writing can sound like an intimate conversation, with larger context left unsaid. A recurring, fragmented lyric throughout the album, “I could have the reasons why,” alludes to several major changes in her life—particularly, a move across the country and the death of her mother in 2017. As with recent albums by Jeff Tweedy and Bill Callahan, Sprague considers the loss of a parent from an almost cosmic perspective: “Some things last a hundred lives,” she sings, her voice dewy. “You were not your final form.” In “Shadow Bloom,” she imagines how she’d spend her days if she knew precisely how it would all end; in her vision, she lies down for a minute, makes some tea, and eats a tangerine. Her point: Life goes on and then it doesn’t. The reasons why are none of our business.
A word that pops up over and over again in these songs is “now.” Repetition of the word is Sprague’s quiet way of addressing the suddenness of life, the abrupt shifts and lost connections that mark time. Her songwriting on Emily Alone exists as a document of all her passing nows: a slow rainy season where her mind remains in constant flux. This dissonance between herself and her surroundings becomes the record’s primary tension. “I believe in things we cannot see,” she sings in “M.” She accompanies herself softly on piano, flickering like dim candlelight: deeply felt but only half-understood, the sound of un-transcribable emotions dissolving in warm air.
The more directly she composes her thoughts, the fuller the music becomes. “Time Is a Dark Feeling” might be a cathartic singalong if adapted by a full band, with a climactic second verse that seems to gesture over the whole record. “Silence never did it for me,” she sings before letting her words avalanche and fill the room with light. In “Today I’ll Have You Around,” she swerves between call-and-response verses and a simple, persistent chorus. It’s a reminder of how we carry other people with us; by the time it fades out, you can actually sense their presence. Emily Alone proceeds this way—a strangely uplifting summoning of ghosts. Sprague makes her point most plainly in the opening song: “Emily, just know that you’re not as alone as you feel in the dark,” she sings. Then, she repeats those last six words a few more times, ensuring that each syllable is accepted and understood before she continues with her wandering thoughts, talking to herself but singing for many. | 2019-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Double Double Whammy | July 29, 2019 | 8.4 | 2a98a4e8-4097-4126-aac6-c3d6451e0222 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
While peers like DJ Rashad have gotten wider audiences, RP Boo remains one of Chicago footwork's pioneers. His tracks have a weightless, labyrinthine feel, and his productions seem largely driven by the desire to continually impress footwork dancers that, at this point, think they've heard it all. | While peers like DJ Rashad have gotten wider audiences, RP Boo remains one of Chicago footwork's pioneers. His tracks have a weightless, labyrinthine feel, and his productions seem largely driven by the desire to continually impress footwork dancers that, at this point, think they've heard it all. | RP Boo: Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20782-rp-boo-fingers-bank-pads-shoe-prints/ | Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints | If RP Boo, Traxman, and DJ Rashad constitute the John Coltrane (father), Pharoah Sanders (son), and Albert Ayler (holy ghost) of Chicago footwork, then Boo, aka Kavain Space, probably gets to be Trane. Others might have traveled further, but he was, arguably, the first. The son of a former Prince bassist, Space's work has a deferential sense of groove; while his peers Rashad, Jlin, and DJ Spinn take footwork outside of itself and draw in outside inspirations, Space seems largely driven by the desire to inspire footwork dancers. His productions lack the polish and lushness of Rashad's later work, which flourished and matured as influences like J Dilla were subsumed—it's no surprise that Rashad's work found a wider audience. But RP Boo's provincialism and focus have resulted in the kind of cleverness needed to continually impress dancers that, at this point, probably think they've heard it all.
Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints, like 2013's incredible Legacy, comprises a mix of new productions and selections from his 15-year-plus production history. Space relies heavily on interwoven vocal samples and, relative to his peers, less on rattling percussion. This gives his tracks a weightless, labyrinthine feel, as exultations for the dancers hold conversations with wailing soul samples and various grunts and shouts. On the manic opener "1-2D-20'2" all of this happens over a tangled electro sequence as an unnamed barker shouts out names of locals and...venues? Moves? Crews? You could probably unwind some of the references with Internet searches and a helpful Chicagoan, but I find it equally exciting to just let the syllables pile up into little structures, and revel in how strange and consonant the phrase "Crackaplaya Boo" sounds amidst the bustle.
"Freezaburn" is similarly satisfying, as samples unspool over snares that arrive at odd intervals; I wouldn't recommend trying to nod along, but the sense that Space remains in control of all this provides comfort. Regardless of the lip service paid to making this music strictly for the dancers, there are moments of strangeness and oddity strewn throughout Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints, and they serve to remind how an artist like Space can end up on a label, Planet Mu, still largely associated with IDM and outre electronics. I would like to hear Space explain what utility the chirping, alien voices that underpin the entirety of "Heat From Us" provide a battling footworker.
It's easier to follow the contortions of "Finish Line D'jayz", whose refrain—"Mothafuck your favorite DJ"—hands the battle DJs a weapon to toss back at the dancers, or to trace the street names called out during "Bang'n On King Dr.", easily the most conventional rhythm on the album. The horrorshow samples that drive "I'm Laughing"—a detuned Tony Sunshine repeating "I'm laughing at you now," a villainous cackle, and a lot of whistles—are easy to understand in the context of competition, but it's still strange, uncomfortable music seemingly incongruous with a bunch of people partying.
Footwork's sound has expanded, from the fevered soul of Rashad and Spinn to Jlin's noisy, coal-black intensity. Space's work is fairly traditional in comparison—its stitches-showing madness feels, at this point, somewhat familiar—so Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints is a nice reminder that footwork's version of classic rock still overflows with bizarre juxtapositions and high-wire pileups. That anyone wants to dance to this music provides an architecture for all this peculiarity, and Space is no less adventurous or inventive for clinging to it. | 2015-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 7, 2015 | 8 | 2a9be0d2-f5fb-4682-9b84-103afb172566 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
We hoped Bloc Party's last record, A Weekend in the City, would be the group's version of U2's October-- an endearingly awkward transition between a bracing debut and a masterpiece every bit as outsized as the ambitions of its creators. Sadly, album number three is less War than Evil Urges. | We hoped Bloc Party's last record, A Weekend in the City, would be the group's version of U2's October-- an endearingly awkward transition between a bracing debut and a masterpiece every bit as outsized as the ambitions of its creators. Sadly, album number three is less War than Evil Urges. | Bloc Party: Intimacy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12130-intimacy/ | Intimacy | If it wasn't the name of this record, there's almost no way I'd use the word "intimacy" in relation to Bloc Party. Producers Paul Epworth and Jackknife Lee put their own distinctive sonic marks on the band's first two studio albums, but both made big, universal sounds rather than personal ones: Epworth's work on Silent Alarm introduced the group as cold and harsh, while Lee's A Weekend in the City was brash and flourescent-- a better fit for the band, even as singer Kele Okereke's increased candor has saddled his songs with clumsy, self-pitying lyrics. Still, thanks to the enduring goodwill they earned with that first album and their super-serious attention to craft, it wasn't unthinkable to view Weekend as their October, an endearingly awkward transition between a bracing debut and a masterpiece every bit as outsized as the ambitions of its creators. Sadly, album number three is less War than Evil Urges.
In a recent interview with Pitchfork, bassist Gordon Moakes admitted that Bloc Party haven't toured much of the album yet, and as a result, much of Intimacy feels overthought and underwritten, its jack-in-the-box studio effects attempting to cover for a lack of substance. Where "Like Eating Glass" and "Pioneers" steadily built towards barely controlled chaos with unpredictability and positive tension, "Ares" engages in all-out sonic warfare: Russell Lissack's guitar blares like a air raid siren, Okereke's vocals gets processed into Cheez Whiz, and if the rhythm section was in the studio at any point during the recording, you'd need surveillance videos to prove it. The same goes for the garish lead single "Mercury", which at least sticks due to the nagging repetition of its pie-eyed hook.
Though Lee and Epworth share production credits, it's obvious who Bloc Party is casting their lot with; maybe it's the quick turnaround or a desire to see Intimacy in a better light, but it's easy to judge this as Another Weekend in the City: The B-Sides. With its lulling arpeggios and hushed chorus, "Biko" (not a Peter Gabriel cover) feels like an unfinished demo of the band's own "Uniform"-- precisely the point where their last record went south. Where Lissack and Okereke's guitars once pierced with precision, the riffs of "Halo" and "One Month Off" haphazardly stack sixteenth-notes in search of the right angle. And while Okereke isn't as stuck on the minutiae of his hangovers, his romanticism still often results in clunky poetry-- the live-wire fritz of "Trojan Horse" is immediately short-circuited by bad Robert Smith karaoke ("You used to take your watch off before we made love/ You didn't want to share our time with anyone").
Another issue lies in the sequencing, as the record's second half shows more promise: "Better Than Heaven" hurtles through a steely echo chamber into Intimacy's only satisfying rockout, while the endless headrush of "Ion Sphere" proves the band can be epic without dozens of guitar overdubs-- a lesson lost on "Zephyrus", which hides Bloc Party's weakest tune yet under drum machine clatter. And like some sort of fever dream from 2005, "Signs" dreamily offers sweet nothings over a combination of Illinois interstitials and an ebullient synth pulse. It's gorgeous, but with all those bells and chimes, how could it not be? Even as the highlight of Intimacy, it's still evidence of an overarching problem plaguing the band, going from the implied, tightly coiled menace of the prophetically titled Silent Alarm to Protected-by-Viper obviousness.
While Okereke has described Intimacy as a break-up album, it feels like more of a document of a band disconnected from itself. Bloc Party's area of expertise as of late seems to be gloopy love songs, and their increased willingness to leave behind the spiky post-punk of Silent Alarm should conceivably only help them. But it's almost like they're embarrassed about it, or at least regretful that they've paved a path that can only allow them to get bigger. Rather than exploring depth, detail, and texture, the band puts their willingness to experiment in the hands of Lee, a rock producer, and like his charges of the past (Snow Patrol, R.E.M., U2), Bloc Party is encouraged to delve into electronic music in only the most arena-ready terms possible. Credit the band with being too restless to just rewrite "Price of Gas" 12 times-- we're just hoping they're bold enough to realize that songs like "Ion Sphere" and "Signs" prove they're now closer to next making Adore than War. | 2008-08-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-08-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | August 26, 2008 | 5.8 | 2aa33019-8cb2-4428-84e4-618293e765ea | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Four albums into their career, the Finnish quintet Oranssi Pazuzu may have at last sidestepped the confines of the tag “black metal." Their latest 69-minute opus folds in Krautrock, electric Miles Davs, stoner, thrash and more, finding the band lost—wonderfully, strangely—somewhere between heaven and hell. | Four albums into their career, the Finnish quintet Oranssi Pazuzu may have at last sidestepped the confines of the tag “black metal." Their latest 69-minute opus folds in Krautrock, electric Miles Davs, stoner, thrash and more, finding the band lost—wonderfully, strangely—somewhere between heaven and hell. | Oranssi Pazuzu: Värähtelijä | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21610-varahtelija/ | Värähtelijä | Four albums into their career, the Finnish quintet Oranssi Pazuzu may have at last sidestepped the confines of the tag "black metal." During the last decade, the adventurous band has explored the astral infinity of extreme psychedelia and the grim oblivion of extreme metal. As the name Oranssi Pazuzu (essentially "orange demon") suggests, the band’s sound was often an even split, with the two pieces of their musical personality meant to fit like complementary puzzle pieces. Even so, they were often referred to as a metal band, albeit one with some extracurricular interests, Värähtelijä, a 69-minute escapist escapade, should finally, fundamentally correct that misperception.
Heavy metal hasn’t disappeared from their sound. "Havuluu," for instance, folds great, big, back-of-the-throat yells into its fuzz and, about halfway in, pivots on a blast beat and a ghastly scream that suggest Darkthrone. "Lahja" is powered by a Deep Purple proto-metal riff, and "Hypnotisoitu Viharukous" somehow fits stoner and thrash nods into the same five-minute span. More than ever, though, those roots lurk beneath the surface, acting as the foundation for a much more open-ended approach. Tilt your ears slightly, and the title track’s gray glow seems less like funeral doom with an accelerated pulse and more like narcotized Krautrock; imagine Harmonia succumbing to seasonal affective disorder. "Lahja" suggests a snippet of a grueling Swans marathon, with barked imprecations and martial drums pitted against sparkling vibraphone and guitars so free and bright they recall Sonny Sharrock. With Värähtelijä, Oranssi Pazuzu’s music has become a refraction of sorts, so that what you hear depends on your perspective—how you listen, what you bring to it, what you expect from it.
On 2013’s very good Valonielu, Oranssi Pazuzu seemed to strive to orchestrate its opposing impulses, to make them work together through relatively concise songs with discrete structures. You could almost imagine those tunes coming through the speakers of some large outdoor festival, like the aggressive Finnish answer to Sweden’s Dungen. Here, though, Oranssi Pazuzu show no such concern for restraint or expectation. The 17-minute "Vasemman Käden Hierarkia" feels like an album unto itself, brilliantly twisting between noise-rock outbursts and electric Miles allusions, distorted doom passages and sinister soundtrack references.
Typically, when bands dig themselves out of black metal pigeonholes (or, really, metal pigeonholes at large) and fold their ideas inside other, more accessible styles, worlds of possibility and popularity can open up. See, for instance, Tribulation’s own turn out of death metal basics during the last two years or Deafheaven’s climb toward the light across its own half-decade. Oranssi Pazuza’s step out of metal, though, finds them burrowing deeper into a world of their own creation. Värähtelijä is a weird, grotesque record, where genres are superimposed on one another and where eccentric choices are the rule and not the exception. Yes, Oranssi Pazuzu is out of the old black metal box and lost—wonderfully, strangely—somewhere between heaven and hell. | 2016-03-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-03-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | March 3, 2016 | 7.9 | 2aa40192-9b1e-4d96-80df-2f6bcc103593 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Following last year’s duo album with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, pianist Vijay Iyer debuts a powerhouse sextet lineup to tackle some of his strongest, most varied writing yet. | Following last year’s duo album with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, pianist Vijay Iyer debuts a powerhouse sextet lineup to tackle some of his strongest, most varied writing yet. | Vijay Iyer Sextet: Far From Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vijay-iyer-sextet-far-from-over/ | Far From Over | Listeners are often introduced to Vijay Iyer through his acoustic jazz trio, a powerful and innovative group that can cover pop artists and progressive jazz icons with equal aplomb. But since the pianist rarely tills the same ground two releases in a row, new fans are soon invited to grapple with wider-reaching projects like Iyer’s string quartet writing, an oratorio about veterans of color from recent American wars, or swinging ensembles that incorporate elements of Indian classical music. When you zoom out, the diversity of his catalog is undeniable. Still, several of his albums have tended to pick one organizing principle and stick closely to it, delving deeply into the expressive possibilities offered by a given theme or a particular set of collaborators.
Iyer’s duo album with veteran trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, released on ECM in 2016, had that grandly unified feel. On Far From Over, he’s debuting yet another lineup: a sextet populated by contemporary-jazz all-stars like alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. But Iyer’s compositional range here is even more notable than this latest permutation of personnel. The 10-track, nearly hour-long album offers one of the bandleader’s strongest and most varied programs—one in which feverish ensemble writing hangs together with groove-oriented tracks and sparer experimental textures.
The chill, minimalist hook that introduces “Poles” recalls some of Iyer’s suave writing for his trio. One minute later, quickly shifting figures for the brass and reeds lend a nervy feel while Iyer’s piano syncopates and gathers steam. After a burning solo from alto saxophonist Steve Lehman, Iyer switches from acoustic piano to a Fender Rhodes keyboard, touching on some of the fusion jazz tapestries first fashioned by Miles Davis. These changes all occur in a five-minute span. But since the switches in the composition flow just as easily as the band plays, none of it feels forced.
The album is also paced to thrill. The celebratory energy of the title track leads into the head-nodding opus “Nope,” which shows off Sorey as a virtuoso of funk and hip-hop-influenced jazz rhythm. Then Iyer slots in “End of the Tunnel,” an electro-acoustic piece. At first, it sounds like another Miles tribute, until it slides into the realm of chamber-music experimentalism.
Hard-driving, post-bop energy and a stirring Sorey solo fuel “Down to the Wire.” “For Amiri Baraka” twists from its somber, elegiac opening into something more forceful—a tribute to the late writer’s polemical style. “Good on the Ground” presents a thrashing profile, while “Threnody” gives Lehman the opportunity to close the album with some stirring alto sax cries. All of the soloists can blow your hair back, but they also work together with grace. (Listen for the elegant sense of balance the two sax players foster when sharing the stage on “Nope.”)
Along with bassist Stephan Crump, both Lehman and Sorey have worked extensively in some of Iyer's previous groups. It makes sense that they'd sound comfortable in the composer's dense and memorable pieces, though this ensemble's compatibility isn't an end in itself. The union of players and material inspires a new synthesis: the sound of Iyer consolidating strengths and discovering some new ones as he settles into the vibe created by his most potent band yet. | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | August 24, 2017 | 7.7 | 2aa7ca65-d6ce-4e7b-ac62-408b7c4cb2a0 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Friedberger sibs consolidate some of their strengths on a record placed firmly in the 1970s, one that finds them veering between ramming through ersatz Led Zeppelin riffs on bass and keyboards and coaxing soft-rock and soul arrangements out of a wheezy Chamberlin organ. | The Friedberger sibs consolidate some of their strengths on a record placed firmly in the 1970s, one that finds them veering between ramming through ersatz Led Zeppelin riffs on bass and keyboards and coaxing soft-rock and soul arrangements out of a wheezy Chamberlin organ. | The Fiery Furnaces: Widow City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10756-widow-city/ | Widow City | First things first: No radical shifts on this new Fiery Furnaces album. After a few years of watching the band veer off through fascinating tangents and "difficult" tactical shifts, I'm guessing most people will tell you this record feels like the one where they've rounded all the bases and go coasting in toward home-- melding together all their established habits and slamming through them with extra vigor, more weight, fuller body. Which either raises or answers a strange question: Why is it that some of the biggest Furnace-lovers I know are telling me that they're...not so much feeling this one?
I mean, the Friedberger siblings are both in decent form here. In between playing fun production tricks with their live drummer (cool stereo imaging!), Matthew spends his time melding opposite ends of the 1970s, this album's mental home: One minute he's ramming through ersatz Led Zeppelin riffs on bass and keyboards; the next he's coaxing soft-rock and soul arrangements out of the string and woodwind settings on a wheezy Chamberlin organ, a terrific addition to their sound. And Eleanor still acts the part of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with an unhappy marriage, a fixation on 20th-century American history, and a lot of miles on her car, lurking outside the nearest museum with some crazy letters and a skewed impression of the judicial powers of a grand jury. The best song here has a middle-aged woman posting arcane Xeroxes around the University of Chicago campus-- as Fiery Furnace-like a place as you can imagine-- while consulting a 6,000-page book of hieroglyphs.
It all sounds cleaner and more accessible than anything they've done in the past, but that might actually be part of the problem. These two are notorious for their tangents-- tearing through disjointed medleys, changing gears at the slightest provocation-- but on their previous records, that habit still sounded charged and chaotic: They felt genuinely unpredictable, crashing from one place to another like they were discovering ground along the way. The full, clean sound of Widow City tends to break the spell, and a lot of the spliced-together song structures just sound mannered, dutiful, and perfunctory, like bad habits or busy work. The seven-minute opener might spend half its running time slinking and strutting through a great pop tune, but the back end just reiterates its few melodies in various arrangements-- Chamberlin flute, hard rock, prog-bass tick-tock-- that offer seriously diminishing returns, if not visions of Matthew holding up Wile E. Coyote signs: "HOLD ON, I'M THINKING UP THE POINT."
Those obligatory splices are frustrating, surrounded as they are by evidence that this band probably doesn't need them. The most endlessly replayable thing on here turns out not to be some knotty, jigsaw-puzzled epic, but a song called "My Egyptian Grammar", which lets its slow groove breathe in fresh air for a good three-and-a-half minutes-- a steady bass stroll shot through with harp filigrees and canned Romantic strings. Yes, it sounds a lot like this band's own "Evergreen", but there are songs both good and interesting buried throughout Widow City; what's odd is that the Fiery Furnaces have reached the point where their signature scattershot pacing clutters up those gems as often as it gives them spark.
Not that Furnace-lovers won't still get plenty of worthwhile jigsaw puzzles to play with-- or flashbacks to the hearty, more traditional pop of their early days. The lyrics here are a little less opaque than they've been in the past, grounding themselves in a world of edge-city duplexes, rotten old husbands, and self-help seminars. During the second half, Matthew drops the full-bodied pop of the opening and gets raucous: Following some serious riffs on "Navy Nurse", the songs offer tightly scripted collages that cop sounds from scattershot prog and free-jazz, in and around funk interludes, flute-y soft-rock idylls, jacked-up percussion fills, and patchworks of sampled noises.
And they get back some of that old, rambling energy-- but is that even what you want anymore? Widow City offers the biggest peek yet into how well these two could operate-- and how fascinating and idiosycratic they'd still sound-- if they followed their sounds through, creating breathing, full-bodied human beings with stories to tell, as opposed to lurching, half-animate, ADHD Frankensteins that speak in ransom-note cut-ups. It's a strange thing to criticize, but the goodness of that stuff is actually beginning to make their old fun tricks seem like something to outgrow-- and suggests their compromises between arch pop and dutiful rambling are far from the most interesting places they could wind up. | 2007-10-10T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-10T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | October 10, 2007 | 7.4 | 2aaee207-e66b-4d66-b266-cf27c350a550 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Led by the charismatic Dave Le’aupepe, the stadium rock quintet’s wildly ambitious third album is intimate in its details but rarely anything other than IMAX-sized in its proportions. | Led by the charismatic Dave Le’aupepe, the stadium rock quintet’s wildly ambitious third album is intimate in its details but rarely anything other than IMAX-sized in its proportions. | Gang of Youths: angel in realtime. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gang-of-youths-angel-in-realtime/ | Angel in Realtime | Gang of Youths’ best songs are odes to life itself: its irrepressibility, its weird flaws and unpredictable contours. Formed in Sydney and now based in London, the five-piece rock band broke out in Australia with “Magnolia,” an unlikely rabble-rouser about the night frontman Dave Le’aupepe survived a suicide attempt. Their second album, 2017’s Go Farther in Lightness, landed somewhere between Japandroids-style festival punk and the National-adjacent indie rock, chronicling both Le’aupepe’s persistent self-laceration and his dogged attempts to find hope. Even the titles of its most resonant songs—“Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane” and “Say Yes to Life”—served as affirmations in themselves. And whenever Le’aupepe’s whole “secular preacher” thing threatened to get a little too Bono, he slipped in a pearler of a gag, like the punchline at the crescendo of the earnest, effusive “Let Me Down Easy”: “If it’s late, you’re drunk, and you want a reason/Some reason to live/I always say just put on some Whitesnake.”
That song, which went double-platinum and cemented their status as a stadium act in Australia, tells you a lot about Gang of Youths. The band—composed of Le’aupepe, bassist Max Dunn, drummer Donnie Borzestowski, guitarist and keyboardist Jung Kim, and multi-instrumentalist Tom Hobden—are often far smarter, weirder, and more compelling than the Funeral tribute act they might seem like on paper. They can get a little cartoonish—see Le’aupepe flexing his bicep when performing a song called “The Heart Is a Muscle”—but that’s part of the fun. As with the 1975, another self-referential, deeply earnest band with a charismatic, self-mythologizing frontperson, Gang of Youths can be a perplexing mix of incredibly cerebral and incredibly dumb, totally ridiculous in one moment and devastatingly serious in the next. Initial skepticism is warranted; all the better to win you over.
Their third record, angel in realtime., is typically overstuffed, crushingly intimate in its details but rarely anything other than IMAX-sized in its proportions. And while that might sound exhausting, it’s actually pretty endearing, all written and performed with such vigor and charm that it’s hard not to get swept up in it. Inspired by the illness and death of Le’aupepe’s father, and the family secrets unearthed in the wake of his passing, the music attempts to honor the complexity of his life while making sense of the confusion he left behind. It’s rendered with a care that sometimes verges on fussiness—the mark of someone trying to create a perfect tribute to a complicated person.
Le’aupepe has spoken often about his father in interviews, noting how he passed down a love of classical music that inspired the band’s frequent use of string arrangements. According to Le’aupepe, his father lived for beauty, and the palette of angel in realtime. is lush and rich. Each song introduces some dazzling new sound, like the showtune-style cheers on “returner” or the samples of traditional Cook Islander hymns that appear on “the man himself.” These experiments build toward “brothers,” a staggeringly raw highlight where the band strips everything away, leaving just Le’aupepe and a piano. With piercing clarity, he recounts the secrets that his late father never revealed to him, among them the fact that Le’aupepe has two brothers in New Zealand who believed their father to be already dead. It’s a devastating, knotty moment, and it feels like the raison d’être for the entire album: a way for Le’aupepe to reckon with his father’s legacy without getting lost in either idolatry or vilification.
When Le’aupepe attempts to make sense not only of his father’s passing but also of his life, he hits his stride. On “tend the garden,” he inhabits his father’s perspective as he moved from Samoa to New Zealand to Australia. “I hope that one day if they find my sons/They’ll tell ’em everything that I’ve become,” he sings, underscored with soulful, Avalanches-style electronic pop. It’s a successful experiment and a rare display of restraint: Unlike some songs, which feel like overstuffed suitcases waiting to burst the minute they hit the baggage carousel, there’s an ease and spaciousness here. Go Farther in Lightness often sounded like a melange of influences done well, but the highlights on angel in realtime. zero in on Gang of Youths’ own territory. That so many songs reference electronic music is smart: Le’aupepe has always moved like a dancer on stage, and he imbues many of his performances here with that graceful quality.
As on Go Farther in Lightness, the sound is occasionally so dense that it’s hard to listen to, with layers of interesting ideas compounded to something impenetrable. Although angel in realtime. is 10 minutes shorter than its predecessor, it’s still 67 minutes long, and it can be hard to take in one sitting. Many of the songs are interconnected and self-referential, an experience not unlike hearing a Broadway soundtrack without having seen the production. But whenever the music threatens to overwhelm, Le’aupepe offers a lifeline. No longer bearing the punky growl of Go Farther in Lightness, he stretches his voice to gorgeous new places, extending the word “truth” into soulful melisma on “goal of the century” and jumping into a falsetto as he exclaims, “Lord, I pray!” on “tend the garden.” His lyrics, too, are as sharp and weird as ever, often at their best at their most outrageous. (Hear him swerve from the hubris of footballers to the struggles of capitalism to the admittedly wobbly hit-or-miss ratio of his own output in “returner.”) For every drum’n’bass beat and skronking horn, he writes a lyric that’s equally ostentatious, and often he seems game for the challenge of matching the high stakes of the music. At its best, angel in realtime. so convincingly sells his grand vision of the world that it’s easy to accept the grandiose production, too. The whole gambit is so outsized that, even when it only kind of works, it feels like a victory.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2022-02-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner | February 26, 2022 | 6.8 | 2ab6d366-95f4-45e6-bf6b-3339f5d64af5 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Reuniting after a decade, ex-Abe Vigoda members Michael Vidal and Juan Velasquez make a welcome return to sighing, swirling guitar and dusky post-punk ambiance. | Reuniting after a decade, ex-Abe Vigoda members Michael Vidal and Juan Velasquez make a welcome return to sighing, swirling guitar and dusky post-punk ambiance. | Cupid & Psyche: Romantic Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cupid-and-psyche-romantic-music/ | Romantic Music | In 2010, the scrappy Chino punks in Abe Vigoda shared a producer with Beach House, tour dates with Vampire Weekend, and a cinematic ’80s revivalism with the year’s buzziest bands. With its hyperkinetic “tropical punk” draped in Pretty in Pink pastels, Crush was the most commercially appealing album to emerge from Los Angeles DIY venue the Smell and, therefore, the biggest challenge to its egalitarian philosophy. But whether Abe Vigoda were truly going for the gold was a moot point: They quietly disbanded a year later and Crush remained a hidden gem that sounded like nothing else. At least until now, as Michael Vidal and Juan Velasquez reunite as Cupid & Psyche on the alluring Romantic Music, sounding like “the next Abe Vigoda album” but with a sober, measured perspective that required another decade to access.
While Vidal and Velasquez are still mining the more populist sounds of Thatcher-era post-punk, Romantic Music isn’t going to be confused for “sophisti-pop.” The duo’s musical complexity feels born more of intuition than finicky craft, one sighing guitar line weaving into another, leaving just enough space for Vidal’s unorthodox, diffuse vocal melodies to braid through. With the exception of the engrossing chorus of lead single “Angels on the Phone,” the hooks don’t arrive through seismic dynamics or a belted melody, but rather slight nudges that lift the curtain on the uniformly dusky mood; witness the piquant chord changes in “Anxiety’s Rainbow,” or a slight shuffle in the rhythms of “Datura Sketch.” Romantic Music is at its best when its core sound inches into the ’90s and decks itself out in greyscale paisley, as if the Cure revisited their Faith-era gloom while trying to reckon with the melon-twisting rhythms of Madchester.
The reliance on drum machines lends Romantic Music a more era-specific sound than Crush, though also one that’s less distinctive. Whether it’s the nature of the project as a pandemic-born jam session or the just the inevitable result of starting over without a rhythm section, Romantic Music lacks the feverish momentum of infatuation or devastation, too often locked into a muted, narrow range of timbre and tempo.
While Abe Vigoda’s tropical punk roots invigorated this often ossified aesthetic, Cupid & Psyche do so from a more subtle and lyrical standpoint. Vidal’s actual vocal range is somewhat limited, but his voice is an emotionally expressive instrument: Every longing note carries a yearning for a new world and the promise of a glimpse of it, the very dynamic that has drawn American audiences to this style of music for the past 40 years. Yet Romantic Music has practical aspirations for tangible and spiritual connection in the present. The somber production underpins the foundational contrast of light and dark energies—anxiety is a rainbow, serenity a pit—though the synths and reverb tend to gloss over Vidal’s more touching turns of phrase, scrutinizing the false allure of the internet or empty nostalgia. On the opening title track, some of that scrutiny appears directed at Abe Vigoda itself. “It takes time but you’ll get over/Reasons why we won’t make it,” Vidal croons, perhaps skewering a past version of himself, one that truly believed “I’m gonna change your life with my music.” Instead, from its word and deed, Romantic Music is the exact thing its humble origins promised, a labor of true love. | 2023-10-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Felte | October 25, 2023 | 7 | 2abbcc5a-e264-4750-8fd3-fd36efdaca46 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Part of the Beatle’s charm lies in his vacillation between the banal and the profound, sometimes within a single song. Despite its dark moments, his 17th solo album is firmly within this tradition. | Part of the Beatle’s charm lies in his vacillation between the banal and the profound, sometimes within a single song. Despite its dark moments, his 17th solo album is firmly within this tradition. | Paul McCartney: Egypt Station | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-mccartney-egypt-station/ | Egypt Station | Facades are second nature to Paul McCartney. A superstar since age 21, McCartney perfected the art of affectation while the Beatles were still touring the globe, and decades of public controversies and tragedies have only hardened his shell.
McCartney’s gift of glib is so deeply ingrained in his persona that it’s disarming to hear him sing “I got crows at my windows/Dogs at my door/I don’t think I can take anymore” at the outset of Egypt Station, his 17th solo studio album. Paul’s candid admission of fear and depression would be startling in any context, but what stings most is the tacit acknowledgment that 76-year-old McCartney realizes he’s nearing the end of his long, winding road.
Nostalgia is catnip to McCartney—as it has been for all of his fellow Beatles, each of whom wrote songs about how great it was to be in the Beatles—but his fondness for the past is countered by a gnawing sense that he should participate in the current pop conversation. If anything has driven him throughout his career, it’s the idea that his next Top 10 hit is just around the corner. This certainty served him well back in the ’70s, when he slyly dusted the propulsive “Jet” in layers of glitter, and as late as the dawn of MTV, when he (with the assistance of George Martin could create a facsimile of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that sounded as if Quincy Jones produced it himself.)
Paul’s golden touch tarnished as he settled into his 40s, leading him to collaborate with any star who would have him—which is to say, just about all of them. Yet hit singles remained elusive. In 1989, his Elvis Costello collaboration “My Brave Face” went to 25 on the Billboard charts, but it took another quarter-century for McCartney to break into the Top 10, with 2015’s “FourFiveSeconds.” Caught between 2013's splashy, Giles Martin-produced New and Egypt Station, the single is an outlier in every regard: A collaboration between McCartney, Rihanna, and Kanye West, it rode the younger artists’ coattails up the charts, not his. His very appearance on the track made him seem thirsty in a way that is unbecoming of a Beatle.
“Fuh You,” the second single from Egypt Station, trumps “FourFiveSeconds” by making McCartney seem full-on desperate—for either a hit or a fuck, but preferably both. Where “FourFiveSeconds” benefitted from minimalism, “Fuh You” is a maximalist jumble of modernist nonsense in which producer Ryan Tedder forces Paul to follow his playbook. McCartney admitted to Mojo that he was so irritated by Tedder’s method, he decided to rewrite the lyric “I'm a lover for you” as “I just wanna fuh you.” Perhaps that was a nifty way to twist the knife in the producer, but it also represents a bit of self-sabotage that is entirely in character for McCartney.
“I’ve got a career where I’ve been involved with songs that have meaning, and this doesn't amount to anything,” he apparently told Tedder. “Y'know—I wrote ‘Eleanor Rigby’!” Which is true! But McCartney also wrote “Bip Bop,” “Move Over Busker,” “Biker Like an Icon,” and many other flights of fancy that are either cute or irritating depending on your mood or tolerance for fluff. A large part of his charm lies in the way he vacillates between the banal and the profound, sometimes within the course of a single song.
Egypt Station is firmly within this tradition. “Fuh You” aside, the album is fairly handsome, if not quite restrained. Credit for its modulated modern sheen goes to Greg Kurstin, one producer behind Adele’s Grammy-winning 25, along with recent records by Sia, Beck, and Chvrches. Kurstin is a clever producer who knows how to spin retro sounds so they feel fresh, even if the record’s structure is classically McCartney. All of the Beatle’s signatures are here: the silly love songs, to be sure, but also mini-suites (“Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link”), polite political protests (“People Want Peace”), and old-fashioned rockers (“Who Cares”). These familiar constructions make the moments where Paul attempts something slightly new seem all the more apparent.
Such is the case with the moody “I Don’t Know,” which opens the album (after the brief instrumental intro “Opening Station”) with those foreboding images of crows, dogs, and rain. Though its bleakness is almost unprecedented in McCartney’s catalog, the song has companions throughout Egypt Station, like the wistful “Confidante” (another in the long line of songs that can be read as tributes to John Lennon, and “Happy With You,” whose very title captures how Paul still feels compelled to pull his punches. At first, it appears as if he’s finally letting himself be seen unguarded, offering confessions of overindulgence and bad behavior. But, ultimately, all of these apparent regrets are justified by the redemptive power of love.
The album as a whole plays out in a similar fashion, offering peeks of an unvarnished McCartney before retreating to familiar territory. Once the initial shock of its melancholy moments—not to mention “Fuh You”—subsides, Egypt Station reveals itself to be another well-crafted collection of confections, reminiscent of nothing so much as McCartney’s oft-maligned 1986 release Press to Play, another burnished recording pitched between modern and retro, where Paul couldn’t resist indulging in shiny new sounds or dirty jokes. | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | September 11, 2018 | 5.8 | 2ac4998b-557e-4bde-9f72-296b5e255dbe | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Soul Jazz’s Punk 45 series has made it its mission to chart the forgotten corners of punk rock, and the latest version explores what happened when punk landed in mainland Europe. | Soul Jazz’s Punk 45 series has made it its mission to chart the forgotten corners of punk rock, and the latest version explores what happened when punk landed in mainland Europe. | Various Artists: Punk45: Les Punks: The French Connection (The First Wave of French Punk 1977-80) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22665-punk45-les-punks-the-french-connection-the-first-wave-of-french-punk-1977-80/ | Punk45: Les Punks: The French Connection (The First Wave of French Punk 1977-80) | Soul Jazz’s Punk 45 series has made it its mission to chart the forgotten corners of punk rock, one seven-inch record at a time, training its magnifying glass on the obscure groups or regional scenes that familiar histories overlook. In particular, its more localized iterations suggest that how punk sounded depended very much on where its seeds fell. A Los Angeles installment turned up the decadent nihilism of the Germs and the snotty proto-hardcore of the Middle Class, while last year’s Akron, Ohio disc focused on the likes of Devo and the Rubber City Rebels, freak prophets of a curdled futurism that echoed industrial America’s decline. Now, Les Punks takes Punk 45 back across the Atlantic to chart what happened when punk landed in mainland Europe.
Punk rock was born in New York and London, but France provided much of the genre’s intellectual and aesthetic grounding. Les Punks’ sleeve notes trace punk’s currents back to a number of sources in France’s rich countercultural history: to writers like Rimbaud and Voltaire, the vanguard art movements of Dada and surrealism, the erotic provocations of Serge Gainsbourg, and the leftist sedition of chief Situationist Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle provided intellectual ballast for the student riots of 1968, and from there found its way to the Sex Pistols via manager Malcolm McLaren and designer Jamie Reid. Unquestionably too, the French have always had an ear for the cool shit. Les Punks also spotlights the role of figures like Paris-based Marc Zermati, whose label Skydog fostered early links with New York and London scenes, and even released a seminal punk-before-punk document in the shape of Iggy and the Stooges’ chaotic live album Metallic KO.
But in 1976, France had no pioneering rock‘n’roll tradition of its own, and a fair bit of Les Punks veers towards the imitative. The French groups clearly adored the dandyish side of New York punk—and man, did they dig Iggy. Angel Face’s “Wolf City Blues” is pure Stooges yowl and growl, with lashings of Ron Asheton-style wah-wah, while Fantomes’ cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is too straight—a slavish, puppy-dog take on the original rather than a rabid leg-humper in its own right. Meanwhile, Dogs’ “Here Comes My Baby” and a couple of singles by Marie Et Les Garçons ably channel the more rocking NYC groups—the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, the Modern Lovers—with lots of enthusiasm but not much in the way of innovation.
Elsewhere, though, there’s evidence of young French groups carving out a distinctive local sound. Perhaps the quintessential French punk group is Métal Urbain, who made the bold move of swapping out live bass and drums for a synthesizer and drum machine. 1977’s “Paris Maquis” —which holds the honor of being the very first single ever to be released on Rough Trade Records—is a blast of caustic guitar and teeth-grinding rhythm box clatter that set a blueprint for future synth-punk groups (notably, Steve Albini’s Big Black). Unlike many of their peers, Métal Urbain sang in French—“So the Americans can’t understand us,” they told Search and Destroy in 1977. But even without much of a grasp of the language, you can get the gist of “Paris Maquis,” a tribute to the French Resistance fighters of World War 2: “La ville resiste terroriste… Fasciste!”
Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that French punk was post-punk at its inception—modish, intellectual, already finding ways to rewire punk’s familiar formulas. Charles De Goal, the solo project of one Patrick Blaine, contributes “Dance Le Labyrinthe,” an early example of the emergent cold wave sound powered by clip-clopping drum machines, spasms of electronic noise and vocals pitched at the brink of hysteria. “Mind,” by Nancy duo KaS Product, is turbulent electro-punk with a bravura performance from vocalist Mona Soyoc. Its take on mental instability and stifling social conformity may have been inspired by synth player Spatsz’s day job as a psychiatric nurse. And there’s a curiosity in the shape of the torrid, sexual “Sally,” by Gazoline—a band fronted by one Alain Kan, an androgynous, outwardly queer artist and addict who performed alongside Gainsbourg at the Alcazar Club before turning to punk rock. An enigma, he was last seen in 1990, taking a ride on the Paris Metro. His fate is unknown.
It’s worth giving another shout to Les Punks’ sleeve notes, a fat 50 pages of essays and interviews that supply precious context, plus extensive illustration from Bazooka—a “graphic commando” cell of radical French illustrators who, if you believe the rumors, boasted ties to the Baader-Meinhof gang. Track for track, there are compilations that cover French punk and post-punk with a better hit rate. The two volumes of Born Bad’s Des Jeunes Gens Mödernes lean further into the France’s homegrown coldwave and synthwave sound, and are better for it. But a snapshot of French punk’s first flush, Les Punks stands up. It’s the sort of time capsule that’s not quite ready to become a museum piece: loud and arrogant and ready to create a spectacle. | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Soul Jazz | January 2, 2017 | 6.6 | 2ac52b30-f3ea-4a93-b169-025d5dbd0900 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
For a rock band who excels at high-intensity drama, their latest is set of mid-tempo snoozers that are over-refined, hermetically sealed, and safe. | For a rock band who excels at high-intensity drama, their latest is set of mid-tempo snoozers that are over-refined, hermetically sealed, and safe. | Silversun Pickups: Widow’s Weeds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silversun-pickups-widows-weeds/ | Widow’s Weeds | Silversun Pickups’ greatest strength has always been turning crippling anxiety into consumable, cathartic alternative rock. Forged at the turn of the millennium in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake scene—a subculture commonly tossed aside as hipster runoff despite giving us Beck, Rilo Kiley, and Elliott Smith—the band successfully recast “California cool” as a kind of shoegaze-tinged sun poisoning. Their songs were just subversive enough to net them indie appeal, but also mainstream recognition.
Their two best-known tracks, “Lazy Eye” (from 2006’s Carnavas) and “Panic Switch” (from 2009’s Swoon) split the difference between understated seething and incendiary angst, sometimes within the span of a single verse, for a listening experience that makes panic attacks sound thrilling. Were these two firestarters sufficient to stave off their career-long Smashing Pumpkins comparisons, or their frequent write-offs as a garden-variety ’90s throwback band? Probably not—but over a decade later, the staying-power of those two songs has yet to be depleted, thanks to their legendary histrionics.
No such luck on Widows Weeds, a set of mid-tempo snoozers Silversun Pickups may well have penned after a long nap. Rather than reprise synths and sparseness, the band, together with producer Butch Vig, have catapulted themselves “into the deep end of all things warm and wooden,” or so frontman Brian Aubert says. His description dissolves into a disappointing half-truth. Several arrangements skew earthy, yes. The violin-spiked “Simpatico” weaves a bit of bluegrass into their bar-rock balladry, and lead single “It Doesn't Matter Why” fills out a minimal post-punk stomper—propelled by a hummable, sticky-fingered arpeggio from bassist Nikki Monninger—with orchestral sighs and steady woodblock plunks. But they're also over-refined, hermetically sealed, and worst of all, safe.
That album opener “Neon Wound” lacks even a microgram of the menace implied by its title is partially due to its lack of dynamic friction and wasted sonic space, but mostly because it could pass for a track off Neck of the Woods, 2012's half-baked dalliance into Metric-style electro-pop. Songs like “Songbirds” and “Straw Man” aren’t all that different from the plastic-packed fruit one finds at the grocery store; the sticker might say “organic,” but the telegraphed melodic arcs, vacuum-sealed pianos, and predictably-polished drumming suggest the opposite.
Their penchant for melodrama, too, remains well-intact on Widows Weeds. Most of it comes through in the aforementioned string sections strewn across the record, superfluous strands of tinsel, masquerading as expansive textural accoutrements. Consider the epically awkward chorus of “Freakazoid,” which pairs earnestly sung elementary prose from Aubert (”I believe you’re trying/To keep us all from dying/I believe you’re crying/To keep this whole thing flying”) with a self-serious orchestral motif made all the more stagy by the plaintive piano plinks. Or “Straw Man,” a would-be “Tonight, Tonight” weighed down by needlessly-overcrowded hooks and uninspired simpering.
Accordingly, the album’s best moments are those where Silversun Pickups shake off their malaise, drop the Grand Guignol act, and get real. After spending so much of the record banging out anonymous motoriks (“Doesn’t Matter Why”), slackened snare taps (“Simpatico”), and standard 4/4 patterns performed as if on autopilot (“Bag of Bones”) drummer Christopher Guanlao—whose frenetic, deliriously out-of-pocket fills made him the band’s secret weapon on Carnavas and Swoon—brings some much-needed chaos to the forefront on closer “We Are Chameleons”; his staccato bursts perforate the surrounding, warped grungescape like vampire fangs, giddily feeding off his bandmates’ energy so as to sublimate it into something bigger. “Don’t Know Yet” abandons its warbling electronics partway through to make way for arena-sized choruses, wailing guitars, and a serviceable guitar solo redolent of Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper,” the album’s sole believable feint.
“Being open and vulnerable is something I’ll always have to struggle with,” Aubert admitted recently, likening his songwriting process to the classic board game Operation: “You’re just completely naked, and at any moment, something will zap.” But Widows’ Weeds contains little in the way of electrifying suspense or carefully-hidden, internalized trinkets—only empty gestures and lazy execution. Nearly 20 years into Silversun Pickups’ existence, we see them for what they are: a little big, a little brooding, but mostly boring. “You think about us all the time—don't,” Aubert instructs us on “Doesn’t Matter Why.” Sound advice, if you ask me. | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New Machine | June 10, 2019 | 4.9 | 2ac57198-eae0-4306-bed6-bce5f4dc4002 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
Dialing the music back and the intensity down, the Hold Steady frontman's first solo album feels like the culmination of the softened edges and blunted urgency of his band's more recent trajectory. | Dialing the music back and the intensity down, the Hold Steady frontman's first solo album feels like the culmination of the softened edges and blunted urgency of his band's more recent trajectory. | Craig Finn: Clear Heart Full Eyes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16201-clear-heart-full-eyes/ | Clear Heart Full Eyes | "Good ol' Freddie Mercury is the only guy that advises me," Craig Finn sings on "No Future", from his first solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes. Later in the same song, he calls out another 1970s rock icon: "The best advice I've ever gotten was from good ol' Johnny Rotten," he confesses, before launching into a few lines from "God Save the Queen". As rock touchstones go, Queen and the Sex Pistols aren't too far off the beaten path; he could have quoted Alex Chilton or Damo Suzuki or even Elvis Costello, but that would miss the point. Finn is after the artists and music that try to make rock a communal rather than a private experience. So he's an unlikely hero for the cloistered and segmented indie rock crowd, which we're told prizes obscurity over accessibility. Ironically for a band whose lyrics depicted geographically specific subsubcultures, Finn's day-job group the Hold Steady brought a bar-band approach back into the indie rock world. They strove for broad appeal, which circa 2005's Separation Sunday sharpened their guitar attack and made them sound almost dangerous.
Over time, however, that same populism softened the Hold Steady's edges and blunted their urgency, and Finn's solo album, whose title is cribbed and scrambled from "Friday Night Lights", may be the culmination of that particular trajectory. If most solo albums at least make an effort to distinguish themselves from the artist's main outlet-- to justify their very existence-- Finn's chief tactic on these songs is to play everything close to the chest, to dial the music back and the intensity down. That's fine for songs such as "Western Pier" and closer "Not Much Left of Us", but deadly for "When No One's Watching" and "Honolulu Blues", which sound like he's consciously trying to avoid sounding like his main band. The guitars rarely venture toward riff or melody; instead, they provide atmosphere and mood. But so much of Clear Heart Full Eyes cries out for louder guitars, Springsteen-like drama, and the kind of precise sloppiness the Hold Steady did so well in the late 2000s.
The album works best when it sounds freshest and furthest away from the music we typically associate with Finn. "Terrified Eyes" shuffles around on a laidback beat and a rangy, almost alt-country guitar, as he takes the conspiratorial tone of a tour guide pointing out the sites of crimes and scandals. "New Friend Jesus" rambles acoustically, although Finn makes the title character sound like a punchline. That's odd considering how much of the album is given over to some of his most blatantly Catholic (or is that catholic?) lyrics. If Separation Sunday rewrote the rules and rituals of religion as street-level spirituality, Clear Heart Full Eyes mostly plays it straight.
Like some of the best Hold Steady albums, these songs are all interconnected, full of recurring characters and settings, so that even when the tempos lag and the guitars noodle, Clear Heart is pulled along by pure narrative momentum, giving it an immersive power that it doesn't necessarily earn. But that's Finn's main appeal: He's a born storyteller who's chosen rock as his medium. On Clear Heart he creates a new world with unique characters and rules, which are concrete, specific, and evocative. While it pales alongside some of the Hold Steady's best albums, these songs are so entangled with those people and places-- with those Holly and Charlemagne mythologies-- that they never grow tedious or ignorable. So perhaps Finn is turning into someone like Mercury or Rotten, acting as adviser to a new generation of listeners. Like them, he came on like a man on a mission, but now that it's been accomplished, he sounds like a man trying to figure out what comes next. Clear Heart is just good enough to keep us listening. | 2012-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Vagrant | January 24, 2012 | 6 | 2ac9dc76-4a00-4dfc-a559-d6f6958ac2f4 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
It’s a good effort to try and retrieve Future from the Pluto of his own imagination, but too often his collaboration with the 19-year-old Chicago rapper plays to neither of their strengths. | It’s a good effort to try and retrieve Future from the Pluto of his own imagination, but too often his collaboration with the 19-year-old Chicago rapper plays to neither of their strengths. | Future / Juice WRLD: WRLD on Drugs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-juice-wrld-wrld-on-drugs/ | WRLD on Drugs | Future plays a narcissist who wants nothing more than to be hypnotized by the hues of his iridescent scumbaggery. This seems less a journey of self-discovery than a drugged state in which loved ones, lurking at the hazy edges of his consciousness, beg him to return from his benzodiazepine space station. It’s the depths of his inner outer-space that make him so fascinating on his own, and also why he’s never made a great album with another rapper. Free Bricks with Gucci Mane is a minor entry in their respective canons; Drake briefly co-opted him for the forgettable What a Time to Be Alive, and Super Slimey with Young Thug failed to fulfill the promise of their scintillating collab on “Relationship.” With WRLD on Drugs, Juice WRLD is attempting what only Zaytoven has consistently managed to do: retrieve Future from the Pluto of his own imagination.
The logic underpinning each of Future’s collaborative albums is absent on WRLD on Drugs. Beyond their affinity for prescription drugs and joyless sexual conquest, Juice WRLD and Future don’t appear to have much in common. (If anhedonia and substance abuse were enough to form strong artistic bonds, there’d be more than one classic Flying Burrito Brothers album.) Their voices tell the story: Future, the elder by 15 years, has a tectonic voice, gutbucket rumble that belongs in a barrelhouse; Juice WRLD, a 19-year old Chicagoan whose delivery is borrowed in equal parts from Chief Keef and Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, has a voice that belongs in a schoolhouse. Future sounds like the final, desperate sips of a bacchanal; Juice WRLD sounds like an over-enthusiastic early-arriver.
There are moments where the contrast between sodden and sprightly lands nicely. Future and Juice WRLD are acutely melodic and instinctive hook writers and, when they evenly divide the labors of songcraft, the results are pretty damn good. But balanced duets like “Jet Lag,” “Realer N Realer,” “Hard Work Pays Off,” and the titular “WRLD on Drugs” are too rare. Rather than performing in sync, the duo frequently sounds like in they’re standing in line, waiting for their turns to rap bromides about casual drug use and sex. When, on “7 A.M. Freestyle,” Juice WRLD listlessly mumbles, “I’m getting money, power, hoes, clothes, nigga, et cetera,” he sounds like he’d rather be getting a good night’s sleep.
Too often, WRLD on Drugs caters to neither Future nor Juice WRLD’s strengths. The teenager became a star not with gnashing street rap but earnestly sung (if naively written) anthems about rejection and endlessly malicious women. These lightweight pop-punk sensibilities are muted in service of his collaborator’s preferred grim, dark palette. Juice WRLD’s a game understudy but, when paired with experienced hedonists like Future, Lil Wayne (“Oxy”), and Young Thug (“Red Bentley”), he’s cowed and timid like a teen at his first strip club.
For Future, the issue is a matter of focus. He can record an album’s worth of druggy trap raps without once emerging from a chemically-induced fugue. But the work is inessential. What makes him a fascinating artist is the depth of depravity and self-loathing he’s capable of mining. Only when the facade of sex and drugs is removed can he kneel before his reflection and see how truly bloodshot his eyeballs have become. | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | October 25, 2018 | 6.3 | 2ad9f3d9-4b8d-4729-aa8c-fca4b1bb0645 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
On their third album as a group, country singer-songwriters Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley offer full-blooded portraits of women who struggle, get revenge, and soldier on. | On their third album as a group, country singer-songwriters Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley offer full-blooded portraits of women who struggle, get revenge, and soldier on. | Pistol Annies: Interstate Gospel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pistol-annies-interstate-gospel/ | Interstate Gospel | Whenever I think about Pistol Annies, I think, invariably, of something Ashley Monroe told an interviewer shortly after the trio formed in 2011. Talking about her nickname within the group—“Hippie Annie”—Monroe explained, “I always said I was a hillbilly hippie. I want everybody to be fine; I want everybody to be calm and love each other, and the world to be bright and pretty. But I’ll do yoga while I’m watching ‘Cops,’ because I’m a redneck, too.”
Like the band’s music, the quote is funny, honest, and liable to give you just a little bit of whiplash; “Cops”—not squirrel gravy or making your own clothes or some other rural fetish on which one could hang a medal of authenticity, but a reality TV show about trashy people in the heat of some really bad luck.
Though often framed as a rebuttal to the polish of modern country, the band never seemed like they were trying to stop time or return to an imaginary place of roots. If anything, what makes them stand out is the suggestion that these old, unvarnished sounds—honky-tonk, southern rock, tinges of bluegrass—are compatible not only with modern attitudes but with the concision of pop. In the world of Pistol Annies, “daddy” is less the weatherworn figure of self-sacrifice than the guy talking conspiracy theories over Christmas turkey, and the proverbial bottle—country’s totem of personal decline—isn’t filled with whiskey, but prescription pills. Their songs’ protagonists—women, always women—are either sacking up or breaking down, “third-generation bartenders” with bumper stickers that read Honk If You’re Horny limping toward the next car payment. For them, the good old days is just a corny idea you might use to sell country music.
Plenty has happened in the five years since their last album, Annie Up. Monroe and Angaleena Presley, both of whom were primarily songwriters-for-hire when the band began, have become successful solo artists, releasing some of the better country-adjacent albums of the decade (Monroe’s Like a Rose and Presley’s Wrangled, among others). Miranda Lambert, already a platinum-selling artist when the Annies started out, solidified herself as the most visible—and bankable—feminist in country, and one of the sharper living songwriters in general. As for their personal lives, I defer to Lambert, who in a recent interview described the passage from Annie Up to Interstate Gospel by saying, “We have stats. We have two ex-husbands [Presley, Lambert], two husbands [Presley, Monroe], two kids [Presley, Monroe], one on the way [Presley], and 25 animals.” In a video of the interview, you can see Lambert ticking these markers off with her finger like battle scars, then turning to the DJ and smiling—with full teeth—a tight smile that seems to say that that’s the last any of them have to say about that.
Co-produced by longtime collaborator Frank Liddell, Interstate Gospel is earthier than Annie Up, and a little more poised than their 2011 debut, Hell on Heels. There are flashes of bluegrass (“Interstate Gospel”) and New Orleans funk (“Sugar Daddy”) and big-sky psychedelic rock (“Commissary”)—sounds that frame the band not as industry veterans but as outlaws and mountain mamas. The album’s cover pictures them barefoot, and the sound follows.
Like a lot of great country music, the songs here are staked not on novelty but on convention, on familiar stereotypes captured in unfamiliar depth. Take “Cheyenne,” the bad girl with the trashy tattoos set in motion by sadness so powerful it almost looks like freedom. Or the small-town housewife of “Milkman,” who passes into old age satisfied with the delusion that she kept her regrets a secret. Or the new divorcee of “Got My Name Changed Back,” who comes on like a paradigm of self-sufficiency before confessing—with a bitterness I have almost never heard outside a rap record—that at least she got the fucker’s money. As always, the premium remains on real talk, which the band dispenses with the unsparing resolve of someone who’s been listening the whole time but has not been paid attention to until now.
These are attractive characters, and repellent ones; women you either want to be or talk shit about. The most nuanced of them—on “Best Years of My Life,” “Milkman,” and the haunting “Commissary”—seem animated not by anger but by guilt so deep-seated it has become chromosomal. Like the polar bear sent into an existential tailspin because he feels cold, the women on Interstate Gospel seem not at odds with themselves so much as the roles to which they’ve been assigned.
Listening to Interstate Gospel, I felt a reservoir of sympathy for my mother. Thrice married and thrice divorced, survivor of domestic abuse, holder of a dozen careers, well-educated but as foolish as any of us, nobody has taught me more about the transformational power of loss. And still, I have watched her laugh and watched her be happy; watched her, hours after signing the papers on her second divorce, standing at the blender with a margarita in hand telling my kid brother to tell his teachers she couldn’t help him with his homework because, in her words, “Mom got drunk.” (He did; the school called.) Stubborn, funny, occasionally regretful, and proudly proud, she soldiers on.
These songs—the hot mess of “Stop Drop and Roll One,” the numbed reckoning of “Best Years of My Life,” the regrets of “Milkman” and the redemption of “Interstate Gospel”: These are my mother; these are what I know of mothers; these are what I think of when I think of strong women. And yes, women, and not men, who mask their pettiness with justification and their regret with self-pity. I remember the day when my mother called me from the steps of the courthouse, happy as could be that she had once again reclaimed the name with which she was born. Hopped-up, bittersweet, twice bitten, and unshy, it sounded a little like this. | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | RCA Records Nashville | November 5, 2018 | 8 | 2ada6546-d65c-431e-a5e6-51e0c336792b | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | |
Veteran studio rat Sarah Tudzin steps out from behind the boards on a debut album that uses the timeless conventions of indie-pop to capture the experience of being a young adult in 2018. | Veteran studio rat Sarah Tudzin steps out from behind the boards on a debut album that uses the timeless conventions of indie-pop to capture the experience of being a young adult in 2018. | Illuminati Hotties: Kiss Yr Frenemies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/illuminati-hotties-kiss-yr-frenemies/ | Kiss Yr Frenemies | When it comes to volume, Sarah Tudzin likes to keep listeners on their toes. Kiss Yr Frenemies, her debut album as Illuminati Hotties, playfully leaps between a variety of decibel-dictated sonic moods from the indie-pop canon. Hushed acoustic reveries give way to knife-sharp stabs of guitar; contemplative, finger-picked tranquility crescendos to giant slabs of post-rock feedback and trumpet fanfare. “You only like me when I’m sad,” she sweetly sings during a quiet interlude on “Pressed 2 Death,” an otherwise boisterous rambler that’s dotted with kiss-offs and opens with a fart noise.
Tudzin—who is technically Illuminati Hotties’ sole permanent member, although she records with a full band—is a veteran studio rat, and it shows in the album’s dynamic sounds. In addition to working as a production and engineering assistant to big-time indie producer Chris Coady (Beach House, TV on the Radio), she’s logged studio time with acts ranging from Porches to Macklemore and worked on the sound design for the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton. Her expertise gives her own tracks a funhouse-like quality, with an eruption of noise, six-stringed squeal, or purposely lo-fi effect around every corner. Even without knowing that additional vocals on the album are credited to “Everyone at Jesse’s Party,” you get the sense that she had fun making this record.
Tudzin describes the sound of Illuminati Hotties as “tenderpunk,” and that feels right. Every emotional abrasion and pang of longing on Kiss Yr Frenemies is conveyed with just the right mix of sadness and acerbity. On the single “(You’re Better) Than Ever,” she confesses, “All the baddest words I knew came pouring out/When I heard you feel better/Better than ever.” Along with stylistic forebears Los Campesinos!, Tudzin’s sound sometimes recalls indie-pop lifer Rose Melberg’s many projects, as well as 1990s Vancouver punks Cub—all acts that have regularly challenged the common notion that indie pop is all cloying sentiments and bookishly restrained instrumentation.
Kiss Yr Frenemies also shares with those artists a sharp sense of humor, as Tudzin strikes a balance between digging deep for emotional resonance and making comedic hay out of the quotidian details of life and love in 2018. Just before detailing all-night benders and battles with self-doubt against the stuttering drum machines and ambient drones of “Cuff,” she dives into the beery sorta-romance of “Shape of My Hands,” recounting how she blew the her savings at 7/11 and heard a potential paramour quote her lyrics back to her. Money is a frequent concern in Tudzin’s cash-strapped universe. On “Paying Off the Happiness," she admits, “I could probably use a fourth job,” over kicky drum beats that bring to mind Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey.”
As that lyric suggests, plenty of listeners are sure to find Kiss Yr Frenemies deeply relatable. Beyond her PayPal namechecks and asides about encrypted text messages, the many feelings—love, uncertainty, heartbreak, FOMO, contemplativeness, empathy—Tudzin juggles throughout the album come together to capture the emotional complexity of being a young adult in the current decade. Amid these timely observations, it’s the indie-pop songwriting conventions she lovingly and expertly invokes that make Illuminati Hotties’ confident debut feel timeless. | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | May 15, 2018 | 7.3 | 2aecd698-f4ff-451f-9abc-73d17e42664e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ |
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