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The mega-selling grunge band's recent reunion has a par-for-the-course, procedural air: Soundgarden are back together and making new music because, well, that's what dormant alt-rock institutions are supposed to do now, right? | The mega-selling grunge band's recent reunion has a par-for-the-course, procedural air: Soundgarden are back together and making new music because, well, that's what dormant alt-rock institutions are supposed to do now, right? | Soundgarden: King Animal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17300-king-animal/ | King Animal | Of all the grunge bands that went multi-platinum in the 1990s, Soundgarden pulled it off with the least amount of drama or fall-out. No antagonistic relationships with the media, no publicized addictions, no scandals, no suicides. Their legacy is instead one of hard work, perseverance, and pragmatism; after all, Soundgarden had already embraced the benefits of signing to a major label several years before Kurt Cobain had developed a self-loathing attitude about doing the same. Even the band's dissolution in 1997 was less of a bombshell than a simple product of boredom with the biz.
So it follows that the band's recent reunion has a par-for-the-course, procedural air: Soundgarden are back together and making new music because, well, that's what dormant alt-rock institutions are supposed to do now, right? Even the band's would-be comeback coronation, King Animal's "Been Away Too Long", is less a statement of celebration than obligation, the titular declaration undercut by Chris Cornell's admission that "I never really wanted to stay."
Still, the return of Soundgarden is something to get excited about, if only because it momentarily delays the release of another Cornell solo album. And fortunately, the singer's interim attempts to reinvent himself -- as a Jeff Buckley-esque crooner, Timbaland's favorite mobile-phone pitchman, and wet-blanket warbler for a squandered hard-rock supergroup opportunity-- have little bearing on the outcome of King Animal. However, your enthusiasm for this album will ultimately depend on how often you return to 1996's Down on the Upside, an album that scored the band another platinum disc to hang in their bathrooms but felt like a holding pattern after the impressive four-album progression charted from 1988's sludgy Ultramega OK to 1994's steely Superunknown.
On the latter album, Soundgarden got their formula of muscular hard rock, brooding, psychedelic power ballads, and acoustic mysticism down to an exact science, and Upside simply repeated those same moves to slightly diminished returns. (Consider how the surreal, bad-trip Beatleisms of Superunknown's "Black Hole Sun" got processed into the melodramatic and obvious "Blow Up the Outside World.") Now, imagine that same formula rehashed and diluted even more and you've got King Animal.
The result is all the more disappointing given a strong start that showcases the band's regained command of rhythm and ballast. "Non-State Actor" grooves menacingly like a funkier "Spoonman", while the album's hands-down standout, "By Crooked Steps", reminds us that Soundgarden is at its best when making Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron's stuttering time signatures, Kim Thayil's contorted riffage, and Cornell's glass-shattering wail sound like perfectly natural FM-radio fodder.
From there, the band simmer down into moodier, mid-tempo realms-- minus the skyscraping, MTV-baiting hooks that once allowed them to mellow out without boring the mosh pit. And after a while, you get the sense that Soundgarden are checking boxes off on a list: "Bones of Birds" is the "Black Hole"-sized psychedelic centerpiece that boasts an affective, downcast riff from Thayil, but is bogged down by an undercooked, overwrought chorus. And there are two attempts -- back-to-back, no less -- at a congenial, acoustic-strummed exercise a la "Burden in My Hand" ("Black Saturday" and "Halfway There"), but without the anthemic refrains to put them over the top. Likewise, the rare excursions outside their classic-rockin' comfort zone lead to dead ends, as when the dubby outro on "Worse Dreams" shoots for trippy, free-form chaos but winds up an aimless, uneventful mess. The autopilot nature of King Animal's second half is perfectly summed up by the repeated chain-gang chant of the closing "Rowing": "Don't know where I'm going/ I just keep on rowing/ I just keep on pulling/ Gotta row."
King Animal makes for a respectable display of Soundgarden's proficiency, but lacks their once-imposing majesty. Listening to the record, it's easy to forget what a disorienting, brutalizing effect songs like "Rusty Cage" and "Jesus Christ Pose" had on the early-90s rock landscape, even after Nirvana had nudged post-hardcore-schooled noise to the right of the dial. And in the decade and a half that Soundgarden were out of commission, there have been many art-metal aspirants-- from the Deftones and Queens of the Stone Age to Mastodon and Boris-- who've aimed for a similar balance of brains and brawn. The best hope for King Animal was that Soundgarden would be inspired enough by their spiritual successors to want to outdo them, and set a new benchmark for ambitious aggression. Instead, the group's first album since 1996 just sounds like the one they would've churned out in 1998. | 2012-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Republic / Seven Four | November 16, 2012 | 5.9 | 4952023c-f0a6-4006-93d3-c3a7d11a494e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Returning to familiar sounds of vintage girl groups and rock’n’roll, Ezra Furman writes trans pride and existential fear into an album that feels like her most complete picture yet. | Returning to familiar sounds of vintage girl groups and rock’n’roll, Ezra Furman writes trans pride and existential fear into an album that feels like her most complete picture yet. | Ezra Furman: All of Us Flames | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ezra-furman-all-of-us-flames/ | All of Us Flames | As she’s cycled through album-length homages to doo-wop and conceptual projects about falling for an angel, Ezra Furman has traced how she sees herself in real time. On 2019’s raucous, political Twelve Nudes, Furman most clearly linked her themes of rebellion and transgression with her personal journey. On the ballad “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” she let her guard down entirely, musing about changing her name and reconfiguring personal desire. In the years since, she came out as a trans woman, scored Netflix’s Sex Education, and became a mother. Her latest album, All of Us Flames, feels like the most complete picture yet of Ezra Furman as a songwriter: genres fluidly co-existing with one another, projecting a fearless image while struggling with her own internal fearfulness.
Furman has long drawn on older forms of rock and folk music, revitalizing traditional song forms by inserting queer narratives deserving of the same canonization. The bluesy chord progression of opener “Train Comes Through” enters into folk’s long tradition of train songs, but Furman’s lyrics advocate for those written out of history: “It’s not written in your Bibles/It’s a verse behind the verse/Only visible to an obsessive detail-oriented heathen Jew.” In the absence of a sacred text, she resolves to write her own in “Book of Our Names,” continuing a parallel from her past music between trans oppression and Jewish Exodus. Not every song is so heavy: “Forever in Sunset” pays homage to early Bruce Springsteen, recontextualizing his escapist yearning for a pandemic-damaged world: “Do you remember when you thought the world was ending?/Seems funny now.” For once, there’s a way out, or at least a momentary reprieve as Furman turns to queer love as salvation: “You’ve got me in your arms/Maybe that’s all we need for warmth.”
In producer John Congleton (who also mixed Twelve Nudes), Furman’s found a collaborator equally interested in pushing conventional rock tropes to their limits. Congleton’s proclivity for raw, distorted recordings can sometimes overwhelm, but Furman meets it with equal intensity. The surreal dynamic shifts and lush synths of “Lilac and Black” maximize Furman’s anthemic songwriting, while the girl-group homage “Dressed in Black” blows out the drums and vocals until they sound like they’re playing from worn-down vinyl. “Poor Girl a Long Way From Heaven” shifts away from acoustic instrumentation, winding up at an unexpected combination of Future Islands’ yacht-pop and Perfume Genius’ art rock; somehow, that naturally suits Furman’s tenor vocals as well as punk rock and doo-wop.
Yet the focus remains Furman’s characteristically verbose lyrics, and beneath her growing confidence lie new layers of paranoia. On “Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club,” Furman tackles the phenomenon known as “gender envy,” yearning to become the person she watches on VHS: “I watch her flicker on my TV/The teenage girl I never got to be.” (The unspoken punchline: Sheedy’s Breakfast Club character, Allison, ultimately gets the kind of feminine makeover demanded by the same systems Furman wishes to dismantle.) The out-of-character warble in Furman’s voice on “I Saw the Truth Undressing” suggests another repressed desire: She watches, frozen, as the object of her affection disrobes, but because trans desire is so pathologized, Furman’s narrator is afraid to indulge the voyeurism. When she rallies a “queer girl gang” against the epic build of “Lilac and Black,” the call to solidarity is shadowed by the warning that “we might not make it back.”
Even when she lets listeners in on her internal questioning, Furman’s music sounds confident because it has to be. As passionately as All of Us Flames dreams of escape, it’s bound to a dystopian reality, where even the dreamiest, most abstract songs aren’t immune from fear. The closest thing to a found utopia comes on “Temple of Broken Dreams,” where Furman again ties her Jewish faith to her trans identity, two “tribes of travelers scattered across the map” and hungry for connection. The characters on “Dreams” are too traumatized to reach that better world, only “a collection of the shards that you can save,” but they keep trying anyway. | 2022-08-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | August 26, 2022 | 7.5 | 495802b2-3ea4-448b-b1e0-d2ebe5eda910 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Chris Clark, a.k.a. Clark, composed the score for a moody British TV serial called The Last Panthers. Here, he shapes this incidental music into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of a story as the show itself. | Chris Clark, a.k.a. Clark, composed the score for a moody British TV serial called The Last Panthers. Here, he shapes this incidental music into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of a story as the show itself. | Clark: The Last Panthers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21668-the-last-panthers/ | The Last Panthers | When the announcement hit last fall that David Bowie had recorded the theme to a British crime serial called The Last Panthers, a smaller piece of news got drowned out in the hubbub*:* Chris Clark, aka Clark of Warp Records, was tasked with composing the sound and music for the show itself. It was a surprising connection to many, but becomes perhaps less so when you realize that The Last Panthers show is produced by Warp Films, a burgeoning offshoot of the venerated electronic label. As they did with Broadcast for the studio’s indie horror film Berberian Sound Studio, Warp have decided to release Clark's work as a standalone effort.
It’s worth noting that Clark and Warp have chosen to present The Last Panthers as another chapter in Clark’s discography rather than as an "Original Soundtrack" or a "Music From..." Clark's catalog is deep and well-respected, and The Last Panthers is kind of a curious entry. It presents itself with two separate tests to pass: 1) Is it an effective soundtrack to a show? 2) Does it stand up on its own, without visual context?
To the first question, the answer is a resounding yes (U.S. viewers will get the chance to judge for themselves later this year, when the show is released Stateside). The dark, rain-soaked impressionism of the cinematography, coupled with the quiet, low-key dialogue, spoken in a variety of languages, creates a cold, gray and glassy world which the viewer feels they can observe at a distance but never penetrate. Clark’s work plays as much of a role in shaping this world as the visuals, making his cues not just appropriate but intrinsic to the show.
Answering the second question, how well The Last Panthers stands on its own, is a bit trickier. Clark has always been a stylistically varied artist, working in a range of tempos and textures, but The Last Panthers is most notable for the total absence of the faster, louder numbers, or the incredible low-end beats for which he is known, like 2003’s "Early Moss" or "Banjo" from 2014's Clark. He’s basically constructed an entire record of miniatures like "Ship is Flooding" and "Strength Through Fragility" (both also from Clark), or "Pleen 1930s" (the first track from his very first record in 2001)--tracks that typically ran short on his records and often felt more like interludes than compositions.
Coincidentally or not, many pieces feel reminiscent of the spindly instrumentals populating the back halves of Bowie's Heroes and Low. "Panther Bass Plock" and "Chloroform Sauna" practically channel "Neuköln" from Heroes at the altar, particularly the low-end sea burbles underneath the rising synths. Tim Hecker is evoked throughout, especially with the gently ebbing waves of "Upward Evaporation," while "Serbian Daffodil"’s warbling reverb-heavy synths recall Boards of Canada interludes and "Omni Vignette" is Erik Satie by way of Drukqs-era Aphex’s plaintive sustained piano.
But "sounds likes…" aside, what is most impressive about The Last Panthers is the way in which Clark has taken all of this incidental music and shaped it into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of an imagined visual story as The Last Panthers show itself. Due to the subdued nature of the proceedings along with short track times and a smattering of dreamily repeated theme refrains throughout, the listening experience doesn’t lend itself to tracks standing out on their own. Exceptions, however, are the awesomely titled "Strangled to Death in a Public Toilet," with its beautiful dead-angel chorus reminiscent of Gavin Bryar’s "The Sinking of the Titanic"; "Diamonds Aren’t Forever" and it's follow-up "II," which both break down midway through fogs of noisy synth to reveal plaintive repeated piano and violin; and album closer "Hide On the Treads 3", whose ascending and pumping glockenspiel arpeggios provide the closest thing to sunshine on this otherwise completely gray sound collage. It's been suggested before that Clark is writing the soundtrack to the end of the world; if so, The Last Panthers feels like the lonely soundtrack for whatever's left after that. | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 14, 2016 | 7.1 | 495d7b05-85f9-47d5-8b63-d1efe522d0fe | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
On this EP recorded with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the group shows that their capacity for new ideas and reinvention has yet to fail them. | On this EP recorded with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the group shows that their capacity for new ideas and reinvention has yet to fail them. | Wye Oak: No Horizon EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wye-oak-no-horizon-ep/ | No Horizon EP | At some point over the last decade, impermanence became Wye Oak’s muse. The duo’s early projects were defined by Jenn Wasner’s guitars, whose eruptions gave their otherwise-dreamy indie rock a volatile edge. There were keyboards, too, but they were mostly limited to whatever drummer Andy Stack could play with his free hand. Since Wasner issued a temporary moratorium on those signature guitars on 2014’s Shriek, however, every album has been, if not quite a reinvention, then a reconsideration of their core sound, a study in how a band can evolve when they refuse the most obvious path forward. Their sound has been digitized and de-digitized, built up and stripped back, with no suggestion that any iteration was anything more than a pit stop.
Until recently, the lone constant of the group had been their two-piece lineup, but even that’s been open to amendment. Before their most recent tour was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, the duo had expanded to a five-piece, where they performed material not only from Wye Oak but from the respective side projects to which Wasner and Stack have increasingly dedicated more of their time. And on Wye Oak’s new No Horizon EP—which, true to the band’s malleable nature, sounds little like the tantalizing standalone tracks the band has been dropping over the last year or two—they’re joined by a different set of temporary contributors. The EP was recorded with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, a mammoth choir that lends a shot of instant grandiosity to everything they touch, including recent tracks by The National and Bon Iver.
It’s incredible how the notion of an indie-rock choir has expanded since the mid ’00s, when Saddle Creek artists might invite whoever happened to be near the studio over for what amounted to a campfire sing-along. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus doesn’t do informality. Their arrangements are as ornate and stately as chapel glass, every interweaving vocal meticulously plotted for maximum orchestral impact. They don’t merely augment the songs on No Horizon; they drive them. Opener “AEIOU” dazzles with layer upon layer of kaleidoscopic refractions of voice. On “No Place,” the choir subsumes Wasner’s dusky vocals almost completely; here, she’s just one singer among dozens.
An air of secrecy once shrouded Wye Oak’s records, a fog that loomed over the production like a Do Not Enter sign, but in recent years they’ve let their sound grow more direct and open. On 2011’s Civilian, Wasner’s murmur swallowed key lyrics whole, as if protecting them from the world. Now she has a choir belting them. “When the world is just a concept, everything has hidden meaning,” they chime on “Sky Witness,” a line that’s as perfect a thesis statement for Wasner’s songwriting as any.
For all its wow factor, No Horizon has less replay value than most Wye Oak releases. Because of those choral arrangements, it burns bright but fast—a little bit of coloratura goes a long way, and these songs don’t skimp on it. A full album of this would be overkill, so the EP’s small-plate portion works in its favor. So, too, does the unlikelihood that they’ll ever make another like it. Wye Oak is the rare band that grows less defined with each project, but their capacity for new ideas has yet to fail them.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 3, 2020 | 7.4 | 496dafc6-2483-4190-85ba-35f84aa4c15a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The prolific British pianist-keyboardist-composer’s work is centered on place, partnership, and circumstance. Mostly abandoning jazz, he crafts an idiosyncratic, pastoral opus. | The prolific British pianist-keyboardist-composer’s work is centered on place, partnership, and circumstance. Mostly abandoning jazz, he crafts an idiosyncratic, pastoral opus. | Greg Foat: Symphonie Pacifique | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greg-foat-symphonie-pacifique/ | Symphonie Pacifique | British pianist-keyboardist-composer Greg Foat has long been pigeonholed as a jazz musician, yet he fits the tradition sideways, at best. Though he studied with UK jazz luminaries like pianist Gordon Beck, and his Greg Foat Group came to renown by tapping into Britain’s late-’60s jazz-rock heyday of bands like Soft Machine and Nucleus, his work’s preoccupation with texture, melody, and narrative had long placed him outside that music’s jam-oriented solo expressions. Since 2017, when Foat committed himself to a way of working more centered on place, partnership and circumstance than predetermined style, the peculiarities in his music have become more pronounced, and his creative output has mushroomed. It’s hard not to hear Symphony Pacifique, Foat’s ninth album in the past four years, as a summation of this period.
Symphonie Pacifique also speaks to another reconsideration of the genre-nonspecific, mixed-use sound space where, for over 60 years, improvisation, composition, and sonic investigation have blended to no uncertain purpose. The album echoes this artful testing ground for recordings—a tradition-free mix of film scores, radiophonic library sounds, percussion records, hi-fi experimentalism, space-age pop, and far beyond. Heady, outwardly beautiful, aesthetically lush, and self-aware enough to avoid devolving into pap, it fits in with music often championed for its wealth of taste and knowledge—and just as often dismissed for its middlebrow pretension. Yet such experiments can also be a well for mental and creative resets—which is how they have seemingly served Foat.
While the Greg Foat Group (2009-2016) was based in electric jazz-meets-rock playing, it was primarily a vehicle for Foat’s dreamy pieces, often reflecting fantasy narratives (2011’s Dark Is the Sun is based on a Philip José Farmer sci-fi novel, 2015’s The Dancers at the Edge of Time on one of Michael Moorcock’s) and filled with an array of synthesizers and studio-centric arrangements. More than a glimmer of Britain’s prog-rock heritage and accompanying largess was on display, though Foat’s tunes also regularly served a soft and pastoral solitude, reflecting the rural and naturalist influences of the Isle of Wight, where he’s lived since boyhood.
In 2017, Foat and Warren Hampshire, another Isle resident and multi-instrumentalist with indie-psych-funk group A Band of Bees, released Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, a new-age-folk meditation about tides. Like a dam bursting, Galaxies heralded not only a new way of working and a flood of recordings, but a diversity in Foat’s music he’d mostly kept in check. Ensuing collaborations—with Hampshire, with studio engineer and Isle resident James Thorpe, with Edinburgh deep house producer Linkwood—were interspersed with “solo” albums featuring Isle locals, old Group members (bassist Phil Achille, conguero Eric Young), low-key Brit jazz legends (saxophonist Art Themen, drummer Clark Tracey), and a set of prodigious boldface players (saxophonist Binker Golding, Kooks guitarist Hugh Harris, drummer Moses Boyd). The records were united not by a specific sound but by an immediacy, a project-to-project fluency, and the sense that, as each moved from groove to texture to rumination, the musicians were there to serve the ensemble.
Symphonie Pacifique spotlights those elements magnificently. It’s not incorrect to generalize the album as a soul-jazz session full of symphonic and studio-built asides—a smaller-scale take on, say, David Axelrod’s kaleidoscopic fantasias that spotlights the personalities of Foat’s compositions and his broad cast of players. Occasionally Symphonie does get reductive, the too-bright tone of Foat’s Steinway driving its more linear pieces from the front, and the album can sound smooth and lightweight, a facile version of the music Foat has mostly abandoned. Yet these moments rarely last long. The handful of string interludes hint at grander ambitions, and the plethora of balearic fusions repeatedly return Pacifique towards a more complex light.
Fusions like “Anticipation,” built on dubbed keyboard chords straight out of Underworld’s rave smash “Born Slippy,” a sweeping mix of strings, synths and wordless choir, Boyd’s rolling drums, and dueling saxophones, which sounds like an update on a Mizell Brothers/Donald Byrd collaboration. Or “Man Vs. Machine,” featuring Young’s percussion elbowing into Foat and Boyd’s analog synth-drums duet, and robo-funking like Kraftwerkian commentary. Co-written with Hampshire and spotlighting a trio of Foat’s piano, Heather Wrighton’s harp, and Achille’s bass, “After the Storm” has the environmental new age majesty of a Steve Roach piece—and is narratively book-ended by Thomas Frank’s almost-solo “Meditation on a Pedal Steel,” which soundtracks its last drops. An epilogue titled “Three Tenors,” featuring the unaccompanied yet effects-laden (and psychedelically mixed) conversation between Themen, David Bitelli, and Rob Mach’s saxophones, is Pacifique’s capstone, simultaneously referencing multiple directions in sound—beatless free jazz, dub, ambient—while choosing none.
Importantly, Greg Foat is nowhere to be heard on “Three Tenors,” yet philosophically he is still in command from the production room, letting the players he put in place magnify its roar. Such low-key involvement marks the best parts of Symphonie Pacifique, and the bright recent chapter of his long career: unencumbered by rules and definitions, in love with the freedoms of sound, guiding from the back. A leading jazz player has abandoned ambition for more unexpected, idiosyncratic visions.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Strut | July 9, 2020 | 7.3 | 496ec96e-d632-43bd-b4fe-fe880cf712bf | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
Lapalux stands out as one of the more accessible producers on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label. On his debut album Nostalchic, Stuart Howard moves from deconstructed pop to a more relaxed brand of R&B and soul, both genres that complement his consistent interest in texture. | Lapalux stands out as one of the more accessible producers on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label. On his debut album Nostalchic, Stuart Howard moves from deconstructed pop to a more relaxed brand of R&B and soul, both genres that complement his consistent interest in texture. | Lapalux: Nostalchic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17795-lapalux-nostalchic/ | Nostalchic | Lapalux stands out as one of the more accessible producers on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label, making music that skews closer to pop than much of the hybridized production the label is known for. The Essex native, born Stuart Howard, showed himself to be a savvy deconstructionist on a pair of 2012 EPs. He took the raw ingredients of offbeat pop songs--melodic backbone, diaphonous vocals, clattering drumlines-- and shuffled them to create IDM tracks that felt inventive and accessible. He's using similar tricks on his debut album Nostalchic, while moving from deconstructed pop to a more relaxed brand of R&B and soul, both genres that complement Howard's consistent interest in texture.
On Lapalux’s first two Brainfeeder projects, When You’re Gone and Some Other Time, you could hear the 25-year old producer cautiously experimenting with new ideas, working within traditional structures even as he experimented with outré sounds. He’s more confident on Nostalchic, walking the line between chaos and stability to create a sound that resembles a jittery, discombobulated version of chillwave. Brainfeeder's Hip-Hop Beats N' Bass blueprint is still present, but it isn't the focus on the album. Instead, on tracks like the back-to-back standouts "Flower" and "Swallowing Smoke", Howard's working with a hundred little slivers of the same core melody, rearranging them again and again by attaching them to different portions of the beat until, by the end of the song, they fit together smoothly. It's sampling as fine art-- as precise and painstaking as a mosaic.
With all these separate elements floating around, it's possible for things to get a little too messy. "Kelly Brook" is muddled and unpleasant, shot through with sounds that don't make sense with each other. It's as if the pieces of several different songs were never properly separated and it’s one of the few moments on the album where Howard doesn’t appear to be in total control.
Vocalists appear throughout Nostalchic, serving as amplified versions of their sampled counterparts from the guest-free tracks. Though Jenna Andrews has a strong showing on the languorous “One Thing” and Kerry Leatham’s distorted voice adds depth to the standout “Without You”, Lapalux is actually his own most reliable performer. On “Walking Words” he's familiar enough with the beat to insert what sounds like his own murmurs and distortion directly into the spaces available and his vocal ends up mimicking the track's motion perfectly.
With a name like Nostalchic, you might assume that Howard is trying to conjure something from the past, to produce the sonic equivalent of immaculate vintage clothing. The sentiments expressed on the album are in keeping with that concept: the lyrics, where they exist, tend to keep things simple with messages like “Do you want to dance?” and “I want to make love.” But, keeping solidly in line with the Brainfeeder tradition, Nostalchic is a forward-looking album, warm and comfortable but never obvious. | 2013-03-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-03-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | March 28, 2013 | 7.4 | 497136bf-dedd-4785-a6d4-664cb35b3ca3 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Fuzz is the San Francisco hard rock trio featuring Ty Segall on drums and vocals, but Charles Moothart's riffs and guitar solos are the main event. That said, this album finds strength in the loud, jam-centric prowess of all three dudes playing together. | Fuzz is the San Francisco hard rock trio featuring Ty Segall on drums and vocals, but Charles Moothart's riffs and guitar solos are the main event. That said, this album finds strength in the loud, jam-centric prowess of all three dudes playing together. | Fuzz: Fuzz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18570-fuzz-fuzz/ | Fuzz | In recent years, even when he's sharing the spotlight, Ty Segall has been the central focus of his endeavors: Ty Segall and White Fence, Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, Ty Segall Band. With Fuzz, even though he's stepped back to the drumset, he's still the singer, he's still helping to write the songs, and he's really good at drumming. Segall's records come with that inevitable "prolific songwriter" baggage, and that might be why Fuzz tried to stay anonymous when they released their first single. Maybe the trio were trying to sidestep the Segall conversation altogether. Of course, it didn't work. It was always pretty easy to figure out who was singing those songs, and it didn't help when they outed themselves as Fuzz to Spin before even releasing a Fuzz record. Once again, at least in their press coverage, Segall receives top billing.
But with an almost startlingly generic band name (that has been used a few times already), it feels clear that the attention was never meant to be solely Ty's this time. Fuzz is a power trio—a united front of longhairs who work together to build a hard rock soundscape. It's not about the people, it's about the fuzz, man. Segall's vocals pack the cartoon menace of early Sabbath Ozzy, and his drumming is precise-yet-loose, powerful, thrilling. Roland Cosio helms a steady, groove-ready low end. Then there's Charles Moothart, the quiet guitarist who helped create the obliterating guitar sound of Slaughterhouse. He's also the band's riff writer—he'd set up a riff, Segall would help him finish it and add lyrics. You don't have to live with Fuzz for very long before it's clear that the riffs and guitar solos are the main event. Moothart deserves just as much limelight as Segall.
Take the opening moments of "Sleigh Ride", "Raise", and "Loose Sutures"—all are kicked off by a meaty and catchy guitar line. One minute, Moothart's busting an enormous guitar solo on "Loose Sutures", the next he's doing some delicate, somber work in "Hazemaze". He even gets to step out front on "Raise", contributing a rare vocal turn where his assertive baritone takes a cynical look at the existance of God. And his voice sounds really good over this proto-metal guitar rock. In a vocals-specific analogy comparing Ty Segall Band to the Who, Segall is Daltrey (the electric frontman vocalist), Mikal Cronin is Townshend (the tenor who can scream real good), and apparently, Charles Moothart is Entwistle (the traditionally quieter one who could totally be the lead singer if he wanted to).
But again, while everybody gets their individual moment to shine, it'd be short-sighted to pick an MVP in Fuzz. This album finds strength in the loud, jam-centric prowess of all three dudes playing together. As a unit, they achieve power, drive, and soul. They've got the same chutzpah the MC5 had on Kick Out the Jams, but Fuzz don't sing about revolution. They sing about burning, bleeding, and burials. They're like a murder-obsessed Blue Cheer. On "Sleigh Ride", belting in a goblin voice and spitting out every consonant as hard as he can, Segall sings, "Isolation,/ Isolation,/ Feel the stiffness of isolation." Meanwhile, the band establishes vicious, galloping pace—intimidation all around, nowhere to hide.
Like Slaughterhouse before it, Fuzz is an album that depends heavily on power. But while the trio keep muscle and intimidation in play throughout the album, they also leave room to calm down and breathe. Stuff like "I Bought My Eyes" stacked power upon power for an entire track, inviting you to speed across the highway or sprint to the finish of a particularly difficult run or lift an impossibly heavy object. "Loose Sutures" comes to a full stop in the middle, leaving only the persistent hiss of feedback. For two minutes, there's no adrenaline rush—it forces you to be patient while Cosio rides out a bass solo and while Ty offers up a few drum fills. And then, a slow build of drums into a full, loud, utterly satisfying wall of sound that crashes through to the finish. It's a similar technique to the one Sabbath implemented on Paranoid by placing the mellow "Planet Caravan" between "Paranoid" and "Iron Man". "Loose Sutures" has sweet harmonies, feedback-coated quiet, noise, and a searing guitar solo—it's definitely a well-crafted hard rock song.
Ultimately, it's an album that would benefit from a few more sonically diverse moments like that one or the quiet sprawl of Fuzz's opening stretch. The band is obviously very good at delivering infectious hooks with muscle and soul, but those moments only pop if there's a control in place to offset the heavier stuff. Otherwise, the record becomes one big mass of fuzzy low-end guitars and occasional solos. Fuzz consistently run the risk of noodling for a bit too long or pushing one idea a little too far. It's tricky to balance loud and quiet, and Fuzz are still finding their footing. They thrive when they're locked into a sturdy, well-constructed groove like "Fuzz's Fourth Dream" (which, as a stand-alone 7", is the band's best release to date). But in Fuzz's 36 minutes, Segall, Moothart, and Cosio find several satisfyingly stoned, overwhelmingly powerful hooks. That's a good place to start. | 2013-09-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | September 30, 2013 | 7.3 | 497254a4-ab09-40ef-9c23-327f736c1aaf | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The latest from the Odd Future member pairs him with producer and Eminem collaborator the Alchemist for a more assured album that focuses on his solid rapping. | The latest from the Odd Future member pairs him with producer and Eminem collaborator the Alchemist for a more assured album that focuses on his solid rapping. | Domo Genesis / The Alchemist: No Idols | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16957-no-idols/ | No Idols | Back when Domo Genesis released his first album, not a lot was known about Odd Future. This was in August 2010, and his Rolling Papers was for many listeners the first introduction to the crew's disorienting, insular world. It also raised a simple question: What is all the fuss about? The album was low-key and low-ambition-- it was, after all, called Rolling Papers. It showed that Domo lacked Tyler, the Creator's force of personality or Earl Sweatshirt's prodigious wordplay, and its influences (MF Doom, Wiz Khalifa) were obvious. It's also a fairly agreeable record, and that too cut against the rapidly growing narrative of Odd Future's divisiveness.
Now, of course, things are much clearer. As the members of Odd Future continue to splinter off for individual projects, it's easier to see where they fit into the puzzle. Domo is still low-key-- as a rapper he seems to have little interest in the type of controversy Tyler craves-- but it would be hard to call him low-ambition anymore. If there's one thing that stood out about the crew's OF Tape Vol. 2 from March, it was the force with which Domo is now rapping. Contrary to what we heard on Rolling Papers, Domo Genesis is taking rapping seriously.
That increased professionalism is carried over to No Idols, Domo's new collaborative album with producer the Alchemist. Being serious about the art of rapping is far from a virtue in and of itself (as, say, Slaughterhouse proves). But with Domo it coincides with his evolution into a surprisingly good technical rapper. He's no star, but No Idols is a very solid record. It's the sort of thing Curren$y has made a career out of.
It's refreshing to hear Domo carry his own record, but the masterstroke of No Idols is his pairing with the Alchemist, whose beats fit the shift in Domo's career. Where Rolling Papers leaned hard on bright, airy keyboards, the Alchemist's productions are strictly in the lineage of the sort of East Coast lyricism that Domo is now nodding to. His beats here are strong in their own right, but never try to compete with the rappers. That stands in stark contrast to the jarring melodicism that peppers Tyler's production work on Rolling Papers. Alchemist's beats are dark and noirish, but not in a way that intends to convey malice. The tones are almost soft to the touch, with a vibe of relaxation and playfulness that keeps things from feeling too serious. One example is "All Alone", which features a cooing female vocal sample rubbing up against some grunting likely taken from a kung-fu film. But there's also the weed tribute "Me and My Bitch", which is built on undulating keyboards that paw at your face.
Domo still gets outshined here when Earl or Action Bronson show up, but he's not out of his league. His type of internal rhyming ("Oh so cocky, you can't stop me in this ol' Versace") also isn't spectacular, but it's certainly above workmanlike. There's also a powerful exuberance in his voice that feels fresh and invigorating, and it's crucially far from the snide and aggrieved shit-talking you often hear from contemporary rappers who work within the same frame. Domo is probably never going to be the standout member of Odd Future, but No Idols is a better album than the amateurish Rolling Papers indicated could be in store. His decision to team up with the Alchemist shows a judicious, deft touch, and that alone is encouraging. | 2012-08-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Odd Future | August 8, 2012 | 7.4 | 49730478-8f78-4141-be87-0a651ebe35db | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
North Carolina MC Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay continue their partnership with an unexpected left-turn, crafting a surprisingly strong full-on R&B record with almost no rapping. | North Carolina MC Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay continue their partnership with an unexpected left-turn, crafting a surprisingly strong full-on R&B record with almost no rapping. | The Foreign Exchange: Leave It All Behind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12630-leave-it-all-behind/ | Leave It All Behind | The 2004 album Connected by the Foreign Exchange (North Carolina rapper Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay) was a record of unusual warmth and vibrancy. And yet, one bum line from Phonte still threatens to derail it with every listen-- "Applied for the job of rap nigga/ But I was overqualified." For better or (mostly) worse, this sort of mindset has boxed in just about everything he's done since with Little Brother, his project with rapper Big Pooh. Though obviously in pursuit of commercial adulation and positioning himself as a vanguard of thinking man's hip-hop, Phonte too often casts those who are more successful in simple and condescending terms while offering a one-step solution to all hip-hop's ills-- increased sales of Little Brother records. A slew of missed opportunities and disillusion with the game have resulted in a whole lot of disappointing Phonte projects. But knowing this can't prepare you for just how closely Leave It All Behind hews to its title, as Phonte opts out of hip-hop with a nearly full-on R&B record with exactly two rapped verses. And there's really no way of preparing for how good it actually turned out.
I mean, Phonte's never shied away from doing hooks, but who knew he wanted to go all-out like this? But go straight long enough from the grid of the mainstream and you'll end up where you were-- word is that rapper-ternt-sanger is a pretty big with the kids these days. But while Leave It All Behind can certainly be judged in a different light post-808s and Heartbreak, it actually has more in common with Yo La Tengo's *And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-*Out, a similarly muted, lovely, and humane take on adult relationships worth working for (which makes it the complete opposite of the often embarrassingly juvenile petulance of 808s). Grown and maybe not-so sexy, but certainly lived-in. "All or Nothing/Coming Home to You" begins with the always-charming intro where its narrator arguing with a woman you can't see or hear. But when Phonte mutters, "That's cool-- I wanted to play Xbox on the big TV anyways" after being shuttled off to the couch, it's reminiscent of the kind of knowing detail Mike Skinner used to master in before coke and zen fucked up his brain.
Phonte's voice isn't really suited for heavy lifting, but he's hardly alone on Leave It All Behind, getting contributions from Nicolay's more unheralded collaborators and making it rightfully feel like a conversation. Darien Brockington's easygoing lilt raises "Take Off Your Blues" out of a dangerously Love Below sentiment, while Musinah and Yahzarah give earthy counterpoint to the siesta soundscapes of "Daykeeper" and "If She Breaks Your Heart."
And musically, Nicolay's in his comfort zone, making the sort of album he'd been more or less heading towards since Connected, an album that, while certainly rooted in hip-hop, knocked like a pillow fight. It's characteristically consistent, melodic, but rarely cloying, owing its dominant sound to ghost-white sheets of Rhodes and Stevie Wonder chord leaps that terms like "milky" do no justice. Opening track "Daykeeper" successfully applies the opaque synths of "Kid A" to a completely opposite exploration of bedsit contentment. Likewise, it's tempting to see the title of "House of Cards" as bait for curious Radiohead fans, but the liftoff it achieves during its hook is stunning on its own terms, live drums and guitar glimmers twisting in the wind.
Wisely, Nicolay manages to steer clear of boilerplate neo-soul, or at least the interesting parts do. Leave It All Behind is mostly butter, but occasionally lapses into cheese. After "If This Is Love" pleasingly recalls Total's "Trippin'" with a simple but effective late-90's electronica touch, "Something to Behold" is the sort of crossover loverman rap that Little Brother would probably limply parody on The Minstrel Show. Meanwhile, some pretty terrible lyrics are hiding in plain sight amidst borderline easy listening. The closing title track tucks the kids in to bed while hoping they "dream of lullabies and clowns," and I dunno-- clowns singing lullabies tend to freak most discerning kids the fuck out.
And above all, there's the possibility that it can be tagged as a great R&B album that spans the late hours and early morning...if you're into that sort of thing. And really, as with Connected, it would be a shame if Leave It All Behind were merely lauded for how it stood in opposition to more commercially dominant hip-hop trends or derided for the same reason. It's difficult to figure how to address these qualms without the whole Foreign Exchange franchise folding altogether. For guys who haven't spent a whole lot of time together, Phonte and Nicolay get lots of mileage out of the idea of their music being handcrafted as if they were actually were hanging out in the studio. Would Leave It All Behind be a better album if Phonte didn't admittedly sound something like Maxwell with weaker lungs so often? Would it be better if Phonte rapped more? Probably not-- these sorts of projects too often inspire catcalls to keep a day job, but the Foreign Exchange may have just earned an unexpected promotion. | 2009-02-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2009-02-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Nicolay Music | February 5, 2009 | 7.5 | 497602a1-a714-41cc-be10-79f72ae2b5e5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On Parquet Courts' third and best album of whip-smart rock revivalism, the Brooklyn quartet continue to expand their musical horizons. The impeccably structured Sunbathing Animal calls back to their Texan roots, its wide-open sprawl freed of the band's explicitly urban trappings. | On Parquet Courts' third and best album of whip-smart rock revivalism, the Brooklyn quartet continue to expand their musical horizons. The impeccably structured Sunbathing Animal calls back to their Texan roots, its wide-open sprawl freed of the band's explicitly urban trappings. | Parquet Courts: Sunbathing Animal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19403-parquet-courts-sunbathing-animal/ | Sunbathing Animal | Andrew Savage is, above all, a stylist. Before he came to be known as the yawpy mouthpiece co-fronting Brooklyn indie rock outfit Parquet Courts, he was one-half of Denton, Tx. duo Fergus & Geronimo, where he and bandmate Jason Kelly made the type of reference-heavy experimental rock that was practically designed to catch the ears of rock nerds as much as it was bound to confound casual passersby. Their sense of humor and slavish devotion to past sounds was reminiscent of Ween, if Ween wrote songs about parasitic music writers and trust-fund hippies. 2011's Unlearn opened with a song called "Girls With English Accents" (try and guess what it was about); the following year's Funky Was the State of Affairs kicked off with Savage and Kelly doing the best "'Allo, guv'nor" affectations they could muster. Funky was a sorta-concept album that carried thematic allusions to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain while sometimes resembling if Gang of Four covered "Peter Gunn" in double time.
It only took two albums for the delightfully, inscrutably weird Fergus & Geronimo to sound like they were running out of steam, and by the time Funky Was the State of Affairs saw release, Savage had put up roots in New York City and was wielding the influences of his new home in Parquet Courts. The band's debut release, the 2011 cassette American Specialties, featured cover art ripped from the light-box Chinese restaurant menus that are ubiquitous throughout the city; the following year's Light Up Gold paired musings about pushy street-team clipboard-brandishers and being stoned in Queens over music smacking of the literate, nervy rock music that emerged after punk's first wave burned out in the late 1970s.
In interviews, Savage hasn't been shy about his aspirations to claim a place in NYC's considerable rock lineage. Inarguably, the city hasn't seen a unified, geographically-defining scene emerge since the days of Julian and Karen, so Parquet Courts sound less like a "New York band" than they resemble a band that carries qualities that people have associated with New York bands of years past—structural slackness paired with paranoid energy, topped off with a sense of wit that exudes book-smarts as much as it smacks of smart-assedness.
On their third and best album, Sunbathing Animal, they continue to expand their musical horizons by offering more of their own takes on older sounds: there are sonic nods to the spiky energy of Wire circa Pink Flag, the Velvet Underground's relentless chug, Television's more straightforward moments of elegance, Bob Dylan's braying ramble, surf rock's angular riffs filtered through amphetamine-poisoned blood. Most surprisingly, the loping "Dear Ramona" comes off as a post-collegiate update of frat-rock luminaries Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket", swapping the latter's shiny fingernails and cupholder armrests for black coffee and moleskine notebooks.
Above all, the spectre of sly-smile indie-rock kings Pavement looms over Sunbathing Animal, more so in execution than in explicit resemblance. If Light Up Gold carried the dashed-off basement charm of Slanted and Enchanted, then Sunbathing Animal is Parquet Courts' Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, a record that focuses more on structure as the band deploys melodic tricks with greater subtlety and precision. Crooked Rain still stands as the Stockton-hailing Pavement's most West Coast-sounding album, and the humidity of Sunbathing Animal similarly calls back to Parquet Courts' Texan roots, its wide-open sprawl sounding freed of the band's explicitly urban trappings.
Recorded over the course of three days, the propulsive energy of Light Up Gold sometimes resembled a quartet of short-distance runners about to collide into each other, limbs akimbo, while reaching the finish line. Sunbathing Animal, then, sounds like the work of long-distance pavement-pounders who have learned when to store up energy, and when to release it. As an album, it's impeccably structured, with the slow-burn cuts placed in just the right places to break up the band's steady crunch; Parquet Courts' newfound sense of control works in miniature, too, as evidenced by the coiled guitar breakdowns on opener "Bodies Made Of" and the back half of "Black & White", where the band's scraping choogle spins out into freewheeling zonked-out noise before pulling back to reveal a shimmying rhythmic duckwalk, anchored by hand claps.
The increased focus of pacing on Sunbathing Animal means that, at first blush, it's a less immediate album than its predecessor; at 46 minutes, it's a little less than a quarter-hour longer than Light Up Gold, and there's a few extended jams—the molasses-tumble of "She's Rolling" and "Instant Disassembly"'s folksy ramble both go beyond the six-minute mark—that take cues from the anti-anthem "He's Seeing Paths", from last year's Tally All the Things That You Broke EP. The hooks are stronger and more distinct, though, in the sense that Sunbathing Animal registers as 13 separate songs, a change from Light Up Gold's energizing blur. The guitar work, courtesy of co-frontmen Savage and Austin Brown, is clever and accomplished without being too showy; in their hands, the instruments squeak, saunter, and roar, sometimes simultaneously. On the title track and the album's most aggressive cut, the duo merge to create an impenetrable wall of strings, soloing recklessly underneath each other as drummer Max Savage (brother to Andrew) bashes away in a manner reminiscent of a specific, not-always-sunbathing animal.
"Sunbathing Animal" is four minutes of impassioned fury that doubles as a solid punk tune and as a speed-addled take on pre-Beatles rock'n'roll—but forget the video, all you need is the lyric sheet to tell that Savage is singing from the perspective of a housecat. "I want to flee/ But I can only stare," he laments furiously, one of many times that he and Brown get lyrically weird on Sunbathing Animal. The sloganeering and sneering found on Light Up Gold is gone, along with most notions of straightforwardness, as the closest either singer gets to clarity is on the back-from-touring grievance-list "Always Back in Town". Otherwise, the lyrics are stranger, more elliptical, less "Stoned and Starving" and more just plain stoned. "What color is blood?/ Still the same that it was?," Savage yells over the ascending strut of "What Color Is Blood", taking on the bug-eyed paranoia of David Byrne circa More Songs About Buildings and Food; on "Instant Disassembly", he conflates love, anxiety, and protection before admitting that the firmament containing those virtues is in serious decay: "There's nothing left to dismantle/ The house it just collapsed on itself."
Yet again recalling Pavement in their glory days, Parquet Courts remain inscrutable even as their talents grow, a band less willing to show their hand as they are interested in describing why hands are such weird body parts to begin with. The closest thing Savage offers as far as a lyrical clue to the band's general mindset is buried in the middle of "Instant Disassembly": "Turn on the white noise murmur of the AM band/ And the last classic rock band's last solid record creeps in." The couplet could, in a way, be a joke about the permanence of musical obsolescence—but it doubles as a mission statement, too, as Parquet Courts are a band using the past to write their own version of the present. If you're looking for something "new," you aren't going to find it here, and that's totally okay: Sunbathing Animal's considered, whip-smart rock revivalism is a work of substantial growth from a band that already did "simple" quite well, placing Parquet Courts in their own distinct weight class. | 2014-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | What's Your Rupture? / Mom+Pop | June 4, 2014 | 8.6 | 49771628-26eb-4ee5-8b1e-b13e35dce1c2 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Following 2011's CoCo Beware, the N.Y. five-piece Caveman have tweaked their folksy template, embracing the spacey expanses and mournful, low-key melodies only hinted at on their debut. | Following 2011's CoCo Beware, the N.Y. five-piece Caveman have tweaked their folksy template, embracing the spacey expanses and mournful, low-key melodies only hinted at on their debut. | Caveman: Caveman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17901-caveman-caveman/ | Caveman | Since forming in 2010, the New York five-piece Caveman have been slowly garnering attention for their loose, deceptively expansive indie-folk rock. Their music carries both a professional air and world-weary rasp, an impression that’s borne out of the group’s credentials, and overlapping lives, as journeyman veterans of NYC’s massive music scene for the better part a decade. The genesis for Caveman was catalyzed by the almost synchronized dissolutions of its member’s former bands, remembered now only with ghostly MySpace portals: The Subjects (lead singer/multi-instrumentalist Matthew Iwanusa and guitarist Jimmy “Cobra” Carbonetti), White Clam (keyboardist Sam Hopkins), The End of the World (drummer Stefan Marolachakis), and Elefant (bassist Jeff Berrall).
They watched their former musical projects run their course and run out of steam, and slowly drifted toward each other as friends hanging out in Carbonetti’s custom guitar shop in the East Village, eventually realizing they wanted to get on with it as a band. They self-released their debut CoCo Beware in 2011 and toured behind an album of competent indie folk with weird proggy flourishes and surprisingly tight four-part harmonies. It was tentative in some instances and looser in others; more of an early blueprint than anything else. CoCo was then snatched up by Fat Possum, and when the band found themselves ready to put together their self-titled sophomore release, they were armed with the chemistry built from sharing a stage for two straight years.
Holed up in Iwanusa’s grandmother’s New Hampshire barnhouse, they began to work through ideas in long jam sessions, cultivating and tweaking a folksy post-rock template that’s reliant on nuanced interplay between the band members. The result is Caveman, a sophomore album that embraces the spacey expanses and mournful, low-key melodies only hinted at on their debut. Gone is the straightforward thump of songs like “My Time” or the placid alt-country of “Old Friend”, replaced by stranger, more confident experiments like the lurching, ethereal “Over My Head” or the Nebraska-echoing “I See You”.
The group hasn’t rebuilt their aesthetic completely, but they are changing the way they communicate it, and the way they communicate with each other from song to song. Their rich, Brian Wilson harmonies are deployed in unexpected places, and are more haunting and reserved than uplifting. “Where’s the Time”, a bass line gurgling, syncopated slow burn that eventually blossoms into a cacophony of ambient textures and a psyched-up guitar solo, uses those harmonies to underline a chorus that’s oddly selfish and detached: “Where’s the time to waste on someone else’s life.” The fragile, atmospheric folk of opener “Strange to Suffer”, and it’s album closing counterpart “Strange”, has the group harmonizing with almost-falsettos in a way that resembles chanting monks attempting a seance, repeating the song’s only line just twice: “Strange to suffer, why do these people turn away.”
But for all those instances of heady explorations, there’s a lingering feeling that they are still hesitant to really kick down the doors of their songwriting confinements. A track like “Pricey", with that incredible, stalking guitar riff that could have been teleported here from Pink Floyd’s Meddle, tries to be a dark, prog-inflected opus, but lurches around listlessly with pedestrian vocal parts from the usually stellar Iwanusa. Likewise, the brightly colored neon of more widely used synthesizers doesn’t always gel effectively with band’s usually sterling, rock-based musicianship, propelling some tracks to the stratosphere-- the gliding luxury of “In the City”, for example-- while leaving others with a garish accent mark (“The Big Push”) on an already drab composition.
Regardless, Caveman isn’t short on efforts to move the band’s sound into uncharted territories. It's the first release for the band as an “all in” musical endeavor and it definitely feels that way. In an age where so many group’s are driven by a sole songwriter/creative force, it’s exhilarating to hear an album that’s almost stubbornly democratic, the confidence that the members of Caveman possess in one another being their most prized asset. | 2013-04-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-04-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 5, 2013 | 7 | 497b9e9a-6e9d-4670-a9f7-8fa7599f5137 | Patrick Bowman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-bowman/ | null |
Formed after the suicide of the bassist from their previous group, Texas duo Pinkish Black have emerged with their grimmest and most triumphant album yet. Despite all the despair and misanthropy written into these words, these songs often feel like conquests. | Formed after the suicide of the bassist from their previous group, Texas duo Pinkish Black have emerged with their grimmest and most triumphant album yet. Despite all the despair and misanthropy written into these words, these songs often feel like conquests. | Pinkish Black: Bottom of the Morning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21276-bottom-of-the-morning/ | Bottom of the Morning | On the same October day Pinkish Black released their third and best LP to date through Relapse Records, the label also issued the final recordings of the members' earlier act, a process stalled for five years by tragedy. Pinkish Black's anchors—the theatric singer and florid keyboardist Daron Beck and athletic drummer Jon Teague—formed The Great Tyrant a decade ago with bassist Tommy Atkins. A young, exploratory and vaguely metallic outfit interested in doom and goth, industrial and krautrock, The Great Tyrant was working on The Trouble with Being Born when Atkins killed himself in 2010. Beck and Teague scrapped the sessions and started a new band, taking the color of the blood-splattered walls where Atkins had died—that is, pinkish-black—as a lurid tribute to the missing member. It's fitting, then, that The Great Tyrant emptied its archives on the same day Pinkish Black offered its latest, greatest work to date, Bottom of the Morning. As a duo, Beck and Teague have finally found the sound and strength for which they've long searched. Fighting through a half-decade of despair, the results on Bottom of the Morning almost feel heroic.
Pinkish Black's previous two albums were hesitant and uncertain, as though Teague and Beck were trying to define their shared aesthetic while teasing out a new duo chemistry, too. Their fine 2012 debut packed in some excellent ideas and alluring sounds, but the band—particularly Teague's voice—was obscured in effects. Though more forthright, the subsequent Razed to the Ground found the duo again trying to do too much, as they moved from slow-motion dirges to extravagant, pulse-pounding doom.
But Bottom of the Morning is, at last, the first unified, unabashed Pinkish Black album. These songs are unveiled, a message that's as clear with the hook-heavy, march-like opener "Brown Rainbow" as it is with the beautifully brutal instrumental closer "The Master is Away". On these seven tracks, Beck and Teague amplify the grandiosity, directness and intensity of what they do. The keyboards can be as rich as a Tangerine Dream or Goblin record, the melodies as creepy and contagious as John Carpenter. And Teague emerges as a powerhouse capable of summoning John Bonham, Klaus Dinger and Billy Cobham. But the real coup here comes through Beck's voice. Even on The Great Tyrant's LPs, especially the now-unearthed The Trouble with Being Born, it was clear how capable he was, though he wasn't yet quite in command of his talent. Here, however, his mix of near-monastic chants, witchy incantations and operatic verses—now, not crowded by manipulation or undercut with noise—serves as the record's compulsory core. You lean in close to hear what he's saying.
It should come as little surprise that a band named for a friend's suicide embraces dark lyrics. Indeed, these songs approach the nihilistic. "Special Dark" is little more than a string of negative participles and adjectives—"withered, fractured … bleaker, starker"—intoned in a dour murmur over blown-out bass and busy drums. At the start of "Bottom of the Morning", Beck whispers and sings about wasting life and wasting time; at track's end, he howls about endless cycles of false promises and futile attempts at self-improvement. "Everyday's the same again," he sings, his voice stentorian but graceful, like a latter-day Scott Walker. "Everyday it's growing thin." Since Atkins' death in 2010, they've survived the death of several family members and severe sickness; the weight and worry of the world are central to these songs.
But somehow, those qualities are boons, not burdens. Despite all the despair and misanthropy written into these words, these songs often feel like conquests. The album itself is triumphant, like a survivalist manifesto offered at the close of a markedly tough spell. Behind the grim declarations of "Bottom of the Morning", for instance, the twinkle of the organ, the groove of the left hand's bassline and the dance of the drums suggest Miles Davis' On the Corner, perhaps even Weather Report. And though "Burn My Body" is as lyrically macabre as the title implies, bright synthesizer arpeggios and the back-and-forth motion of the drums offer the relief and release endemic to the narrator's final request. As the song ends, the synthesizers and drums intimate a skyward ascension, a last will finally honored. On Bottom of the Morning, Beck and Teague have effectively stepped beyond the ghosts of the past, landing in a present where the results are now as compelling as the backstory. | 2015-11-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2015-11-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | Relapse | November 12, 2015 | 7.9 | 498df313-c255-49bc-aba6-2b567e622337 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Lana Del Rey’s sixth album dials back the grandiosity in favor of smaller, more intimate moments. It carries a roaming spirit of folk and Americana without losing the romantic melodrama of her best work. | Lana Del Rey’s sixth album dials back the grandiosity in favor of smaller, more intimate moments. It carries a roaming spirit of folk and Americana without losing the romantic melodrama of her best work. | Lana Del Rey: Chemtrails Over the Country Club | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lana-del-rey-chemtrails-over-the-country-club/ | Chemtrails Over the Country Club | On the morning of January 11th, as she ate a popsicle for breakfast with a newly broken arm, Lana Del Rey tumbled into nearly 40 somersaulting minutes of free-associative responses to questions from BBC Radio 1 presenter Annie Mac. On live radio, the pop star parkoured from thoughts on Trump’s presidency to going to the farmer’s market barefoot to how she’d characterize at least half of her friends as jerks. Finally, her frisson found a foothold in the psychology behind the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had taken place six days earlier. Partway through clarifying how she felt Trump’s “sociopathy” may have unintentionally inspired the deadly siege, she cleared her throat to show her conviction. “I actually think this is the most important thing I’ll say in this interview,” she underscored. “For people who stormed the Capitol, it’s dissociated rage. They want to wild out somewhere! It’s like, we don’t know how to find the ways to be wild in our world….and at the same time, the world is so wild.”
In or out of context, this is an entirely fair analysis. With rare exception, the strange tradition of having celebrities act like talking heads on matters of national politics or domestic terrorism is both a largely pointless and joyless spectacle. But Lana’s monologue about the neuroses plaguing the United States was genuinely fascinating—for two reasons.
The first is that, for the past decade, Lana has been an exceptional hunter-gatherer of white American arcana. In 2011, she emerged as an aesthetic howitzer, exploding a broad but deeply personal index of iconography into her own nation of death-driven kitsch. It was Xanadu, built from a blissful, degenerate, high-femme sort of jingoism. Geographies—the Hollywood sign, the tri-state, California writ large—became mythological playgrounds for her to languor around and smoke Parliaments on. Marilyn Monroe, men in training yards, cherry pies, a Pleasantville middle-class, Coachella, violence-as-romance and romance-as-violence: she offered us a canon of heritage markers recast in ’10s-era drama and became the rare sort of talent that was able to congeal past and present into seductively conceptual cinema. With time and refinement, Lana Del Rey had mushroomed into what we called the next best American songwriter—emphasis on American.
The second reason was more obvious. The original purpose of the BBC interview was to promote her newly released single titled “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” and the album that shares its name. Whether meant to be tongue-in-cheek, a joke, or not one at all, the title’s flawless alignment with the mood and mien of that moment—the conspiracy-mindedness, the radiant gloom, the fragility, and the suggestion of the type of person associated with the words “country club”—was an act of poetry. It was remarkable to hear the bard of white American malaise suggest which delusion was gripping the nation.
Two months later, Miss America’s latest text has emerged, and Chemtrails Over the Country Club is definitely both wild and incredibly American, the twin tenets of her empire. In 2017, Lana told Pitchfork that the American flag was no longer going to be a part of her live performances for fear of indicating national pride during the Trump era, but there was still one billowing on the cover of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, and there may as well be one on the front of Chemtrails as well. (There actually is a flag hidden on the back.) She can’t help it: No muse speaks louder to Lana than the promised land, where cities are metaphors, its dead are its gods, and she, its glamorous Orpheus.
Like most labeled among the “greatest” of their realm, Lana Del Rey is focused on conquest. Here I mean that literally, in terms of acreage: Where her previous albums were rooted mostly on the coasts, her sixth record reaches prominently toward the center of the nation, warmed by the yeasty heat of the heartland. She goes to Arkansas and Nebraska and Oklahoma, narrates life as a waitress, lauds Jesus erotically, and affects a little twang. It is her most rangy album—her folksiest, her singer-songwriter-iest—and takes us physically further and deeper into her crystal vision of the country. If Norman Fucking Rockwell! was broadly interpreted as her “obituary for America,” this one might be her purest paean to it.
Depending on your mileage with her mythos, there are a few different entry points into Chemtrails. Likely because this is an album with a jumble of at least a few former-outtakes and entirely new cuts, Chemtrails is generous inasmuch as each song seems to work like a point on a timeline, correlating toward a version of Lana from periods past or present. Despite how often her body of work seems to loop back on itself into one slowly-growing Möbius of intertext—Bob Dylan lyrics, Elton John lyrics, countless mentions of California, jewels, the price of fame, roses, thorns—placing these tracks along her continuum is rewarding.
For those who found solace in Norman Fucking Rockwell’s sincerity—that quality that made her less of a fabulist and more of a protagonist—“Wild at Heart” represents the Lana myth at its most hard-boiled. The song begins on Sunset Boulevard. The melody is as if “How to Disappear” and “Love Song”—two of NFR’s most plaintive ballads—were put into a blender. The references are Lynchian, but only at a slant: There is nothing of Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage’s skull-crushing vim from the auteur’s movie by the same name, but the soapy storyline does smack of the film’s strangely glib tenderness. There is a lot of cigarette smoking, peripatetic wandering, and firm declarations of being seductively fucked-up. “If you love me, you love me,” she assures, “because I’m wild at heart.” Welcome back to Lanaland.
What Proust did for scent, Lana does for American spaces. She wanders through cities, breathes in the air just to get a sense of it, then drifts on. She travels east from L.A. to “Yosemite.” The opener “White Dress” introduces some adult alternative radio digestibility into the sound, a little bit of Jewel in the sparse drumming and the uniquely squeezed, head-voice heroics that we’ve not heard from her before. But she’s in Orlando then, a city of transience, sticky heat, and languishing in her desire to be anywhere else. Texas is buried inside “Breaking Up Slowly,” a torchy piece sung in an outlaw tenor. It calls upon the dissolution of the greatest twosome known to country—Tammy Wynette and George Jones—as a thematic fulcrum, but what she does more plainly in her duet with Nikki Lane is suggest country’s token lawlessness—the freedom of not knowing what to do or where to go next.
Her reverence for Wynette makes a lot of sense. Lana kept one of Wynette’s albums in the studio with her as she recorded her album (“I always have Tammy with me,” she said), likely as both spiritual and lyrical guidance. It’s almost too on-the-nose: Wynette’s biggest hit, “Stand By Your Man,” is a ballad that celebrates a particularly outmoded strain of womanly steadfastness in the face of difficult love—a sorrowful get-it-together mantra that seems more like a rationalization than a reminder. Lana’s “Let Me Love You Like a Woman” is its psychic twin—not country in sound but in aura, a tribute to the now-taboo thrills of traditional submission.
It should be less surprising that there is so much God in this. For someone with so much worship for the nation under it, her relationship to God has been complicated. (“Me and God we don’t get along,” she sang in “Gods and Monsters.”). But Lana has done a lot of reckoning with higher powers as of late: “It made me feel like a God,” goes the moonglow refrain of “White Dress;” there’s a lot of “contemplating God” in “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” and “Tulsa Jesus Freak” is a full-on ultra-glam evangelical spectacle, lifted to heaven on the prosthetic wings of AutoTune.
The holiest spirit here, however, is her own. When she goes full Lana and gives in to her proclivity for near-embarrassing, entirely seductive, overwrought American beauty, it sounds divine. “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” is a ballad drawn directly from the Lana Del Rey vein, all honey sun, moneyed smiles, the pleasure of living lavishly. The video shows Lana in a diamanté mesh mask, looking a little like Hedy Lamarr in low fidelity, glancing sweetly from the driver’s seat of a mid-century Mercedes-Benz Cabriolet. Chemtrails dart overhead in crosshatch as Lana stares up with widened eyes. Whether or not she actually believes in covert geoengineering is entirely irrelevant: it’s the idea behind them she’s in love with. Like so many who find themselves alienated and disillusioned, she erects dreamworlds to inhabit, writes narratives that provide substance to a life that threatens to spiral without them. “I’m not unhinged or unhappy,” she declares. “I’m just wild.”
Her reassurances come with reason—few artists in recent memory have summoned more concern. Recall how intensely critics offered outsized meditations on the authenticity of her persona when she emerged in 2011 with Born to Die—they just didn’t believe what they saw. Her image as a volatile WASP cosplaying as a bourgeois-boheme obsessed with American kitsch—reviews practically demanded an apology for her image, or at least some crumb of irony, to match our cynicism. Who was more detached, us or her? Morally or aesthetically, it felt unreal—so she doubled-down, showing us how real and earnest she was. After Norman Fucking Rockwell, pop culture took her more seriously. And so she wrote a manifesto about her womanhood, which proposed a few clumsily-worded questions and asked for space and credit among choice women of color. She later tried to assure us—with some belligerence—that she has given people of color plenty of room at her table. Small infernos ensued.
These are not isolated wildfires. Lana has been chronically drawn to the combustible. Thematically, lyrically, and in reality, her voice has always been incendiary. The groundswell after the BBC interview—the post-interview, welly-eyed “fuck you” directed at media magazines and her detractors—I can think of no artist of her caliber who has drawn a more direct line between the self-abnegation of her pop persona and the person before us. There is no rule in place here, but when the artist’s being starts eclipsing their art, it becomes, for better or worse, part of their art too.
Lana the artist and Lana the woman have been extraordinarily compelling as of late. Not because it’s in any way satisfying to see such a singular talent gesture so blatantly toward her own fragility and fear—off her albums, at least—but because she consistently manages to reflect back a very particular portrait of the country she holds so close. Chemtrails’ vision may be roaming, but the artist’s remains impressively narrow. To paraphrase Lana, it is definitely difficult to articulate one’s wildness, especially for those so inherently wild at heart. What is lucid, though, is that Lana Del Rey’s inheritance has always been truly American—and everything we’ve seen in recent memory confirms how disarmingly, specifically American she’s become.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor / Interscope | March 19, 2021 | 7.5 | 49967e3a-8261-4884-90c2-aa593cf82cd8 | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a ’90s pop-rock mainstay, a warm and rootsy record where Jakob Dylan came to terms with being his father’s son. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a ’90s pop-rock mainstay, a warm and rootsy record where Jakob Dylan came to terms with being his father’s son. | The Wallflowers: Bringing Down the Horse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-wallflowers-bringing-down-the-horse/ | Bringing Down the Horse | In 1992, no one wanted to hear organ on a rock song. At least that’s how Jakob Dylan, pragmatic frontman of the Wallflowers, explained the mediocre sales figures for his band’s self-titled debut. Those warbling, metallic emanations from Rami Jaffee’s Hammond B3 twisted through their scrappy first album like the double helix of a DNA strand, or miles of winding railway track. The record came out roughly one year after Nirvana’s Nevermind, which landed like a warhead and rearranged the molecules of rock music for the next two decades. To his label’s dismay, Dylan’s shambly bar-band melodies did not capture the rage—or the allowances—of American teenagers. But then, he never set out to be the voice of a generation.
Jakob Dylan formed the Wallflowers in a fit of surrender. Whether it was conscious or not, he’d been resisting the family business for years; many men outdo their fathers, but only a fool would think he could best Bob Dylan. So he didn’t try. When pressed about his childhood in early interviews, the younger Dylan alluded to a whitebread American upbringing. As a kid, he played Little League. He idolized his older brothers, who exposed him to all kinds of punk rock: the Jam, Stiff Little Fingers, and crucially, the Clash. That charged music ignited something in Dylan, who picked up a guitar as a pre-teen, and played in garage bands with names like Trash Matinee.
He had tried to conceal his lineage for as long as humanly possible. In school, there was nowhere to bury it, but Dylan would hide out when he could. One day in seventh grade, his classmates flipped their social-studies textbooks to a chapter about the 1960s. Printed on a page next to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Beatles was a thumbnail photo of Jakob’s dad. He asked for a bathroom key and slipped quietly out of the classroom. After high school, Dylan moved to New York to study painting at Parsons. It was one final push against a tide rising inside him. Two weeks into the semester, he returned to Los Angeles and accepted his fate.
Dylan enlisted his childhood friend Tobi Miller on lead guitar, bassist Barrie Maguire, and drummer Peter Yanowitz, who gigged in the late ’80s as the Apples, “which is even more pathetic than the Wallflowers,” the frontman once joked. Jaffee joined two years later, as the band became more of a presence around L.A. They convened in the back bar of Canter’s Deli for weekly jam sessions, where Jaffee invited scores of local musicians to bang out Neil Young covers around a beat-up house piano. Jaffee played with Dylan daily for about two months before Yanowitz tipped him off about his old man.
By the mid-’90s, the Wallflowers’ debut had only moved 40,000 units. Maybe it was the organ. Maybe the vocals were too muddied in the mix. Or maybe, to entertain another of Dylan’s pet theories, it wasn’t sad, angry, or grunge enough. “It’s just not what I’m interested in,” Dylan told The Los Angeles Times when asked if he’d consider a heavier sound. “I was never interested in just being in fashion. I was never the kid on Melrose who wanted to grow the dreadlocks and put on Doc Martens.” The limp reception prompted a change in labels and personnel—only Jaffee stayed on with Dylan as they readied their second album, 1996’s Bringing Down the Horse.
“When our contract fell through, there was a year where nobody would come to see us, talk to us, or even return our manager’s phone calls,” Dylan once told Billboard of his band’s post-debut slump. “We were severely damaged and mauled goods at that point.” That stale sense of dissatisfaction crept into the songs on Bringing Down the Horse, which Dylan wrote in the fallow years between 1992 and 1996. The title, a tweaked lyric from the forlorn “Invisible City,” referred to Dylan wresting control of his own creativity. For the Wallflowers’ second album, Dylan and Jaffee were joined by guitarist Michael Ward, drummer Mario Calire, bassist Greg Richling, and vitally, producer T Bone Burnett, who’d sculpted sounds by Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw, Bruce Cockburn, and Gillian Welch. Burnett had also known Jakob since he was a little boy, when he manned piano and guitar in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.
More than an adept, sensitive producer, Burnett was a kindred spirit to the Wallflowers. His own solo career was steeped in murky Americana. A sly observer and incisive commentator, Burnett would cut one record as a roots traditionalist and cram his next session with a drum kit, harmonium, and a string section. For Bringing Down the Horse, Burnett split the difference and mostly stuck to the Wallflowers’ core instruments, giving them some separation and clarity. Unlike their scruffy debut, which was recorded live, Bringing Down the Horse was warm and precise. Jaffee’s organ melodies, whirring out of a B3 and a Vox Continental, were a defining element of that sound.
Dylan had spent the past three years trying to sharpen his writing, almost as a defensive strategy. Comparisons to his dad were crowding the columns of every interview; it was the rasp and slight whine in his voice. His deft, painterly verses. The fact that he dared to make rock music at all. “I can’t imagine a more daunting specter to have for a father, especially if you’re a singer and a songwriter,” Burnett told The Los Angeles Times several months after Bringing Down the Horse hit the shelves. Despite everything it afforded him, Dylan hauled his surname around like an albatross. There would always be a sect who saw their prophet’s son as an unskilled leech.
Though he wouldn’t discuss song lyrics at length, Dylan admitted that “Bleeders,” one of the best cuts on Bringing Down the Horse, was a dissection of all that judgment. As the song crept in on spangled guitar and a liquid line from Jaffee, Dylan compared his conflict to a fish fighting against the current.
Once upon a time
They called me the bleeder
Swimming up this river
With sentimental fever
But this ain’t my first ride
It ain’t my last try
Just got to keep moving on
If they catch me ever
They’ll throw me back forever
Dylan would later admit that “sentimental fever” referred to the devotion to songwriting he’d inherited from his father. Those hands, plunging into the water to disrupt his upstream struggle, belonged to the record industry. “[I was] being told countless times that I was not very good, and that the songs were no good, the band was no good, and that there was no future to this thing,” Dylan told Details in 1997, elaborating on the origin of “Bleeders.” “There was a time there when it was embarrassing to say the Wallflowers were playing.” But the numbers were reflecting a different narrative.
Bringing Down the Horse was climbing the charts, and by the close of 1996, it had reached No. 74 on the Billboard 200— wedged unceremoniously between MTV Party to Go Vol. 10 and ESPN Presents: Jock Jams Vol. 1. The album front-loaded its two biggest singles: the keening ballad “6th Avenue Heartache,” and the moody alt-anthem “One Headlight.” Dylan had written the former during his stint in New York, where he watched an older unhoused man play Everly Brothers songs on the steps of an apartment building daily. One morning, the man was gone, and people pilfered his belongings bit by bit.
The production of “6th Avenue Heartache” is some of the cleanest and most calculated on Bringing Down the Horse. To complement Jaffee’s rippling chords, the band brought in Leo LeBlanc, a pedal steel guitarist known for his work with John Prine. Dylan’s melody, a heartsick country dirge, was near-perfect. But then someone brought in Adam Duritz. The Counting Crows frontman, with his treacly, Glee Club pipes, spoils Dylan’s effortless rasp. Duritz dates the song, and his presence almost feels like a cash grab. “Maybe you don’t think you will like the album because I’m on it, but hey, Adam Duritz is on it also,” Dylan joked with Billboard about the single. As a business maneuver, it was shrewd: Counting Crows were a multi-platinum property.
Because Dylan is a talented songwriter, his misses feel more lazy than overwrought. Sleeper tracks like “Three Marlenas” and “Angel on My Bike” bob atop stagnant, circular melodies, like ice diluting a drink. Lyrically, Dylan does little to spike the tepid punchbowl; “Angel on My Bike” features a string of dull and undetailed passages, like this one:
I can’t handle a care
I want, but I can’t be there
While angel’s a prayer
It’s 45 miles on that highway
Angel double prayer
Throughout the song, Dylan’s rhyme schemes are unimaginative, his vernacular feels limited, and there is hardly any concrete imagery to chew on. In one exception, he sketches a nautical quagmire worthy of scrimshaw: “She found me down on a two-ton anchor/Tangled up in wire.” It’s a brief reminder that Dylan’s poetic strengths lie in specific renderings of American masculinity—ill-fated sailors and wanderers, brined by the sea or cured in cigarette smoke.
“Three Marlenas,” “Josephine,” and cringey bar-rocker “God Don’t Make Lonely Girls,” present another thematic suite on Bringing Down the Horse, with Dylan tightening his scope on the opposite sex. He watches one woman dance “behind the glass at a peep show,” and trails another as she recovers from a one-night stand. “Josephine,” a modest but piercing ballad, centers on someone with a “schoolgirl smile,” who presumably tastes like “sugar and tangerines,” as Dylan muses over warm, gold-toned guitar. Whether he is recalling a childhood love, or writing from the perspective of a ’90s Humbert Humbert, I cannot say.
What connects these three cuts is an innate (though likely unintended) sense of moral superiority over sexually liberated women, or at the very least, a fixation on purity. On the drowsy “Three Marlenas,” Dylan’s language is sparse but seemingly loaded with judgment. A distressed damsel with lipstick-smeared clothing lies alone in “somebody’s” bed, indicating a screw that didn’t offer foreplay, or even a first name. “She only went and did what she did/’Cause he would drive her home then,” Dylan sings in the first verse, his vocal chords sputtering at the close of each line. His refusal to name exactly what “she did” smacks of an unspeakable act. That she leveraged sex transactionally—for a ride—seems clouded with misplaced pity.
The most garish of this conceptual trio is “God Don’t Make Lonely Girls,” which treats its leading lady like some honky-tonk “Roxanne.” Dylan plays the peep-show patron, who projects his wholesome fantasies onto the dancer before him. “Something is wrong, she don’t belong,” he drawls, his bandmates summoning the swagger and twang of a Ford commercial. Much like Sting’s sex worker savior, Dylan’s character fancies himself a shining knight who can solve the dancer’s problems with a mere wardrobe change. “I’ll bet she’d look good in a brand new dress/She never felt good in her fishnet,” he assumes, a bit too pleased with the thought. The song reeks of feel-good filler—like something that you might hear at a county fair. But its Puritan gender framing dates the album more than anything else. No wonder the Wallflowers front-loaded their strongest work.
If you watched MTV in the ’90s, you need no introduction to “One Headlight.” The music video was coursing through the cable TV circuit like an ice cream truck circling the suburbs. Like much of the album, the song was structurally simple—a canvas for Dylan’s rust-eaten imagery: cheap wine, busted trucks, and the stench of death. For all the media’s insistence that Dylan must have been influenced by his dad, “One Headlight” pointed to another American Son: Bruce Springsteen. The lyric “This place is old/It feels just like a beat-up truck/I turn the engine but the engine doesn’t turn” was a direct reference to Springsteen’s 1987 song “One Step Up”: “Went out and hopped in my old Ford/Hit the engine but she ain’t turnin’.” Dylan accepted the irony that even if he didn’t spin his father’s records till the grooves smoothed out, his idols surely had.
At some point during the promo cycle for Bringing Down the Horse, someone remembered a powerful economic force: schoolgirls. I was only 7 when the shadowy video for “One Headlight” hit MTV, but it was obvious that Dylan had been packaged as a heartthrob. Shot under a bridge in Brooklyn, the visual pulls tight focus on Dylan’s eyes, which have been labeled every shade of azure since the clip first aired in 1997. His fetishized irises seemed like a marketing course correction: The video for “6th Avenue Heartache,” directed by a young David Fincher, had all the allure of a PowerPoint presentation. It was also filmed in black and white, robbed of those “startling, Samoyed-blue eyes,” as one reporter described them. The rest of the album’s videos were shot in color.
Dylan was aware of his hunk status, but didn’t dwell on it too much. He was a husband and father in his mid-20s, and had seen first-hand how fame could corrode family life. If his picture was being torn out of glossy magazines and slipped into binder covers, he found it amusing. In a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone, the wry musician was asked to comment on his undeniable “yumminess.” “Well, you know, to be called yummy is a fantastic honor,” he said, tongue firmly in cheek. “I’m going to do everything I can to continue to face up to that and not let anyone down in the future.”
But while he laughed at himself and his perceived sex appeal, Dylan never dismissed the contingent of Wallflowers fans who were taping his photo on their bedroom walls. “People frown on having young fans, especially young girls,” he said in ’97. “But if people look back and get their education, they’d realize young girls discovered the Beatles before anybody.” Dylan was quick to clarify that he wasn’t ranking his band alongside the Fab Four—but he couldn’t ignore the frenzied concertgoers. One night at Boston’s Avalon Ballroom, a frilly brassiere made its way on stage, followed by a dog-eared copy of Lolita.
By 1998, Bringing Down the Horse had sold 4 million copies—more than any solo studio album by Bob Dylan, as the trade papers liked to point out. “One Headlight” picked up two Grammy Awards that year, for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. The Wallflowers would go on to release five more studio albums; their latest landed just two years ago. But they’d never summit the mountain again. Arriving between the death of Kurt Cobain and the release of Radiohead’s OK Computer, Bringing Down the Horse was the last gasp of chart-topping, Western-bent alternative rock. Dylan was no longer swimming upstream. And the hands that had tried to grab him were fishing in different waters.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. | 2023-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | July 16, 2023 | 7.3 | 49983e7e-a4bc-4feb-b140-89b67c6209c9 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
This Mexico City-based experimental collective has been operating underground for over 20 years. Here, Feeding Tube Records reissues a vital compilation of their art-rock psychedelia. | This Mexico City-based experimental collective has been operating underground for over 20 years. Here, Feeding Tube Records reissues a vital compilation of their art-rock psychedelia. | Los Lichis: Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22825-dog/ | Dog | With our crate-digger culture reaching peak levels, it’s always surprising to find an artist that has been making music for over 20 years and hasn’t already been anthologized. That’s what makes the surprise arrival of Los Lichis, a collective of experimental musicians and visual artists from Mexico City that first started working together in 1996, such a vital shock to the system. Chances are the recent reissue by Massachusetts-based Feeding Tube Records of Dog, a comp culling from the group’s self-released material, is the first time you’re hearing of them.
The members of Los Lichis—José Luis Rojas, Gerardo Monsiváis, Manuel Mathar, and French sound artist Jean Baptiste Favory—are entirely responsible for keeping below the cultural radar. Until recently, their music was only available for purchase in art galleries in Mexico. They have been slow to embrace digital distribution; their Bandcamp is just a couple months old. But from the sounds of this fantastic collection of dessicated art rock, cracked electronic experiments, and AM radio intrusions, their emergence from the shadows feels long overdue.
While the two-LP set isn’t arranged chronologically, listening through reveals how these men evolved as musicians and improvisers. Their work from the late ’90s—made before the arrival of Favory and his synthesizers—is rough-hewn and exploratory, built from junky-sounding drum machine rhythms and warbling electronic melodies. It has the excitement of Morton Subotnick compositions. Other tracks from that era, like the loopy and drowsy “Opium Boogie” and Throbbing Gristle-esque “Osaka ’77,” are a little more direct but remain suffused with a healthy dose of tape hiss and a playful energy.
As a producer, Favory’s input through the ’00s on helped bring Los Lichis even further into focus. Favory met Mathar and Monsiváis when the pair showed their art at Paris’s International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in 2000, and since then, he has been a satellite member of the group, visiting Mexico once a year for improv sessions and performances. His impact helped clean up their recordings considerably, and it also brought a welcome psych rock influence to the proceedings. “L’Origine de la Guitare Fantôme” slinks from its slow, glittery build into a nicely dawdling Dead-like jam punctuated by insistent keyboard bleats. “L’Inévitable Catastrophe,” meanwhile, has the overwhelming gush of a Loveless interlude.
What this collection is missing is the more overt political commentary that has been central to the visual work that Los Lichis has done on their own and as a collective. There are hints within certain song titles—the early Sonic Youth sounding “Krondstat Variation” is an apparent reference to the site of a major uprising during the Russian Civil War, and an overmodulated blues jam from 2002 is given the name “Eva und Adolf”—but otherwise, the music could have even more impact if married with some of the group’s striking videos and paintings. Even without visual accompaniment, Los Lichis retain that naturalistic spark and simmering wildness that only the best improvised music can provide. | 2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Feeding Tube | January 31, 2017 | 8 | 499e0d61-b5c6-4608-b993-a58cdba87161 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | null |
The Brooklyn band’s ninth album is vivid and weird: a celebration of second winds, unlikely comebacks, and undying rock’n’roll dreams. | The Brooklyn band’s ninth album is vivid and weird: a celebration of second winds, unlikely comebacks, and undying rock’n’roll dreams. | The Hold Steady: The Price of Progress | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-hold-steady-the-price-of-progress/ | The Price of Progress | You can almost picture Skippers, the stripmall bar that serves as the setting for “Carlos Is Crying,” off the Hold Steady’s ninth album. The place is packed with cubicle drones sharing pitchers of beer and guzzling glasses of box wine, everybody letting off steam on a weeknight. That’s where poor Carlos finally breaks down sobbing. As Craig Finn relates the story, the guy hasn’t been to his job in weeks, even though he tells his wife he’s earning a steady paycheck. This is not how he expected his life to turn out: “We started as skaters,” he reminds his friends at the table. “Man, we used to glide/We used to hang like the smoke.” The Hold Steady chime in with some sympathetic harmonica and a bouncing-ball guitar lick, until Carlos admits, “Now every conversation I have is about money.”
This is how the Hold Steady’s characters age. They used to skate, party, take drugs, give themselves tattoos with ballpoint pens, make up clever nicknames, finger their rosaries, and chase salvation “into dark parts of big Midwestern cities.” Now they work unspectacular jobs, scrape to pay mortgages, and tell the same old stories about the past as Finn measures the crushing distance between adolescent dreams and adult realities. But this is not the way the Hold Steady ages. In their best songs the scene was always better a month or a year ago, the bands always heavier, the drugs harder. They traffic in the tragicomedy of lowered expectations, and they’ve yet to lapse into self-parody because Finn is always generous with the details and the Hold Steady are always ready with a dramatic guitar lick. They never condescend to any of the dreamers still clutching at their old dreams.
Rather than ignore the flatline trajectory of adulthood, Finn first embraced it on his solo albums, and he has examined it more determinedly with the Hold Steady over the past few years. More than anything else—including their 2016 reunion with keyboardist Franz Nicolay—this untapped thematic territory gave the band a boost after two disappointing records. The Price of Progress is full of second winds and unlikely comebacks, with Finn’s characters finally reaching a point where they can move forward again. On opener “Grand Junction,” a frayed couple drift through the West, searching for a destination and almost getting there by the final verse. The song evokes a very particular American vista, with the guitars counting the white lines down the highway and the synths hitting a crack in the windshield. It’s less a travelogue than a 21st-century landscape painting where “all the mountains were mocking our own little pitiful lives.”
Finn subtly expands the stage and stakes on the album’s second half without taking his eyes off his characters, who travel without really going anywhere. “The Birdwatchers,” an epic with music-box keyboards and minor-key tension, follows a couple traipsing through an unnamed country and looking for thrills that can’t be found in their guidebooks. Maybe it’s the same country in “Distortions of Faith,” a woozy waltz about a desperate musician who accepts millions to perform for a dictator. Despite some murky production by Josh Kaufman of the Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman, the Hold Steady turn these songs into weird, vivid snapshots, always looking for new ways to soundtrack Finn’s globetrotting tales, whether that means the ’70s spy motif that adds a wink to “Understudies” or what sounds like an ’80s TV theme that casts “Perdido” as a strange period piece.
These are songs about desperation with no direction, alienation with no reconciliation, isolation in a crowded bar—a hunger for something that can’t be found on the laminated Skippers menu. That’s another way to say that the Hold Steady have lived up to their name: By slyly tweaking their musical palette and by expanding their familiar milieu, they’ve managed to thrive at a time when even high-functioning rock bands are having too many conversations about money. They’re adaptable, much like the protagonist of “Sideways Skull,” a woman who keeps her band going while living in a recovery clinic. Finn crams in so many amazing details about her world: the blood capsule in her mouth, the glam-rock top hat, the “jacket held together by the rock band patches.” It’s funny, but it’s not a joke. Instead, it’s a rousing anthem, an unabashedly positive jam. The Hold Steady are sincerely rooting for this artist who finds it “hard to fully rock in a halfway house.” They get you to root for her, too. “The trick is not getting cynical,” Finn barks, which sounds like the soundest and most adult wisdom they could pass along. | 2023-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Positive Jams / Thirty Tigers | April 1, 2023 | 7.6 | 49a1b219-7b04-437a-af4c-f2f500066305 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The My Morning Jacket frontman collaborates with his hometown orchestra on a spiritual set of covers and originals over symphonic arrangements. | The My Morning Jacket frontman collaborates with his hometown orchestra on a spiritual set of covers and originals over symphonic arrangements. | Jim James / Teddy Abrams: The Order of Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-james-teddy-abrams-the-order-of-nature/ | The Order of Nature | The friendship between My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James and Louisville Orchestra conductor and music director Teddy Abrams dates back to 2014, the year Abrams moved to Louisville to become the youngest director in the ensemble’s 82-year history. Upon taking over, Abrams immediately started focusing on attracting young locals to the symphony, arguing in a PBS miniseries that funk, jazz, bluegrass, and folk were all not just viable, but fertile sources of inspiration for orchestral pieces. Abrams is also a composer, and thus a collaboration with Louisville native James seemed not as much an “if” as a “when.”
It would happen two years later, when James contributed guitar to an Abrams-penned song for Muhammed Ali that was released on the day of the boxing legend’s funeral. Now, the two of them have gone in together on a full-fledged project. The Order of Nature: A Song Cycle is a nine-song program featuring James as vocalist, recorded live at Louisville’s Festival of American Music last April. Each song is either an original composed by James and Abrams, a classic cover, or an Abrams reworking of a James solo cut—none are from the My Morning Jacket catalog. James sent Abrams demos of these songs in acoustic form, which Abrams then filled out with new orchestral arrangements.
The arrangements frame James’ sonorous voice so that it sits at the serene eye of a symphonic and choral hurricane. James lovingly interprets Nina Simone on the Charles Reuben-penned “The Human Touch” and later puts his own spin on Simone’s version of “Who Am I?” the Louisville Orchestra keeping him surrounded and supported, not suffocated. When James bellows to the heavens on the latter, “Will I ever live again?/As a mountain lion, or a rooster, or a hennn?” it’s equal parts spiritual and goofy. That’s a familiar mode for James, but not so much for Abrams, who simply follows his lead and crafts an avalanching grand-piano podium for James to project from.
Some of James’ solo songs struggle to emerge from under the shadow of their former selves. “Here in Spirit” and “Same Old Lie” were highlights on James’ psychedelic Eternally Even, but Abrams’ cinematic grandiosity swamps them. Compared to the fine-grained studio versions, they just sound flat-footed.
Conversely, Abrams’ rollicking arrangement on “Over and Over”—the third official version of the song that James has released in two years, after it appeared last year on Uniform Distortion and its rearranged companion album Uniform Clarity—fluffs it with Bacharach-ian details, its trumpet micro-gusts and lush strings ushering it towards a brightness that the two prior versions couldn’t unlock. That blissful feel creates a new, suddenly essential contrast with James’ lyrics about the tragedy of repeated mistakes; after all, the idea that “we drop the same bombs” and “we shed the same blood” is about as irrational as layering happy brass and a fiddle solo over such grim sentiments. The song’s impact practically doubles. This sounds like the version it was meant to be, the best one.
The loose thread binding the album is Mother Earth’s ability to unite—or as James has put it, “the fact that nature doesn’t know how to hate.” But for every ounce of energy that The Order of Nature spends preaching peace, harmony, and the wonders of the great outdoors, it burns more working overtime to convince newcomers of the power and magic of the Louisville Orchestra. “Back to the End of the World,” the album’s majestic center, nibbles a melody from the Fred Neil-penned, Harry Nilsson-popularized “Everybody’s Talkin’” and Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby.” It’s lovely and rich, but like much of the album, it also strains a bit in reaching across the classical-pop divide. In Abrams’ own words, when it comes to writing music, “it’s really important that the atmosphere matches the experience.” But the merging of Abrams’ and James’ worlds owes more to geography than to atmosphere. That makes The Order of Nature something of an inherent gamble. The two composers end up breaking even.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Decca Gold | October 23, 2019 | 6.3 | 49a61c2b-68cc-40fe-8e77-6f9c4464580a | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Zomby follows his buzzed-about dubstep singles with... a full-length 'ardkore throwback album. In the process he reveals himself as a provocative genre-tweaker able to nimbly move-- historically and stylistically-- throughout rave, garage, and jungle. | Zomby follows his buzzed-about dubstep singles with... a full-length 'ardkore throwback album. In the process he reveals himself as a provocative genre-tweaker able to nimbly move-- historically and stylistically-- throughout rave, garage, and jungle. | Zomby: Where Were U in 92? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12543-where-were-u-in-92/ | Where Were U in 92? | Zomby is a wiseass. I don't mean that flippantly or pejoratively, but I just can't think of a more appropriate term. Here we have a producer who sealed his rep as a dubstep powerhouse with 2008's much-buzzed-about breakthrough single "Mu5h/Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)", and then he goes and decides that the best way to build on that goodwill is with a full-length 'ardkore/jungle throwback album. Well played, sir, and bonus points for turning a half-rhetorical phrase from M.I.A.'s "XR2" into a giddy, time-warping answer: Where Were U in '92? isn't just a rib-nudging throwback, but an electronic dance music family tree's branch rendered in flashing neon. Despite his dubstep associations, Zomby is revealing himself to be a provocative genre-tweaker, someone who's never content to let an idea stagnate for more than a moment and shoots out in all directions-- historically and stylistically-- to keep things interesting. As one of those crucial producers who can trace his current musical lineage back through a youth consumed by garage, jungle, and rave, he's long since figured out how all the pieces fit together.
This album's circa-1992 throwback elements are obvious but cleverly deployed: Bursts of ultra-pitched-up diva vocals provide hyperactive melody, only to be answered by rugged dancehall shouts; sirens and air-horns explode against densely-packed uptempo breakbeat rhythms; synthesized stabs and slashes blur the line between pianos and string sections. And while the album feels brief yet fully realized, its mood-swing structure and abrupt transitions-- the wobbly, dubbed-out gloom of "Tears in the Rain" jolted into the shiny 1 a.m. massiveness of "Get Sorted", or the rapid-fire "Hench" stepping into the subdued breakbeat of "B With Me"-- evoke the kind of feverish real-time mutation that came from a low-tech, pre-internet yet fast-moving DIY movement. It all sounds a bit like a homemade mix cassette assembled from scraps and pieces by some teenager with a dual-deck tape recorder and more interest in pace-tweaking, blunt-trauma segues than seamlessly-crossfaded transitions. (Though you can't say he didn't warn you, what with the first track bearing the title "Fuck Mixing, Let's Dance".)
Zomby's commitment to the era's style extends all the way to the equipment he used to record the album, using the studio techniques of the era and putting it all together on an AKAI S2000 and an old version of Cubase running on an Atari ST. So it's kind of jarring-- in a good way-- to hear a few more current-day notions run through it, like some of the robot vocals from "Technologic" downpitched and dragged across an archetypal breakbeat rhythm on "Daft Punk Rave", or the crunked-up ghettotech of "Pillz" making the UK hardcore/Southern bounce connection (and its shared interest in ecstasy) that much clearer. And there's never a sense that the music on here is strictly a backward glance; for every moment that sounds like it could've come from A Guy Called Gerald's 28 Gun Bad Boy or one of those great early jungle tracks that came out on Awesome Records or Moving Shadow back in the day, there's enough guttural bass and rhythmic elasticity to remind you of the garage and dubstep disciplines where breakbeat's successors eventually migrated to by the mid-late 00s.
It only makes sense that this album closes out with "U Are My Fantasy (Street Fighter II Theme Remix)", which reworks Baby D's '92 rave anthem "Let Me Be Your Fantasy" with music and sound effects from the classic fighting game, since Super Street Fighter II Turbo was recently revived as an updated, modernized, super-glossy high-definition remake for next-gen home consoles. And just as the people who grew up throwing dragon punches in arcades found out that there's still a tight, fluid game under that shiny new surface, Zomby's proven that the fundamentals of a sound that peaked over 15 years ago can still be streamlined into the current zeitgeist. He's gotten to the point where he can invoke old signifiers as something more than you-had-to-be-there nostalgia: all at once, Where Were U in '92? is a history lesson, a depiction of a musical timeline that folds in on itself, and a revival that works because it approaches its subject with the idea that it simply evolved instead of died. | 2009-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Werk Discs | January 14, 2009 | 8.3 | 49a9da57-01d8-4c34-988c-034947f56787 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
On his first album in nine years, the Los Angeles trumpeter-composer sounds like he’s remixing himself, taking apart his past 40 years of work and reassembling it for the present moment. | On his first album in nine years, the Los Angeles trumpeter-composer sounds like he’s remixing himself, taking apart his past 40 years of work and reassembling it for the present moment. | Jon Hassell: Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-hassell-listening-to-pictures-pentimento-volume-one/ | Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) | While it’s been nine years since his last full-length, 2009’s Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, Jon Hassell has not been completely absent from record shelves or streaming playlists. Several of the Los Angeles trumpeter, composer, and ambient godfather’s canonical albums have been reissued during that stretch, including a fantastic expanded edition of 1990’s hip-hop-influenced City: Works of Fiction and a remastered re-release of his swampy, cinematic fourth album, 1981’s Dream Theory in Malaya, helping reintroduce his smeared, fluid tones and colorful soundscapes to a new generation of listeners.
Hassell’s influence is increasingly apparent across younger generations of artists, too. Destroyer’s last couple of albums have made great use of Hassell-like trumpet treatments, and artists like Visible Cloaks and Sam Gendel are marking ambient compositions with similar touches of Eastern percussion or hazy electro-acoustic processing. Last year, Glasgow’s Optimo Music issued a compilation of material from Hassell and artists in his orbit, like the UK post-industrial duo O Yuki Conjugate and reclusive Spanish experimental musician Javier Segura, that filtered age-old musical ideas from around the world through a contemporary technological aesthetic. All of it fit neatly under the umbrella of “Fourth World,” a category that Hassell coined for his work alongside Brian Eno on 1980’s Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics.
The door, then, has been open for Hassell to return, and Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), his new album and the first on his Warp sublabel Ndeya, sounds like it has benefited from its extended gestation period. Its eight tracks are teeming with strands of melody and unbound rhythms that have been meticulously constructed into groaning towers of sound. The material fits perfectly into the continuum of Hassell’s entire career and steps beyond the cozy, hypnagogic compositions that made up Last Night. Where that album felt like an extended period of deep, restorative slumber, Listening to Pictures takes us slowly from that state into a stretch of twitchy, eyes-darting REM sleep. Even as many of the tracks on this new album soothe, they are still marked by a flickering, hallucinatory energy, built around stuttering beats that flood the stereo field through which little phrases of trumpet, synth, piano, and violin poke through.
Sometimes those elements are clear and direct, as on the bulbous “Ndeya,” where Hassell’s trumpet, a Rhodes electric piano, and Kheir-Eddine M’Kachiche’s violin play a series of halting refrains intercut with drones. But more frequently Hassell processes everything through effects pedals and computer until it blurs, to impressionistic effect. While “Al Kongo Udu” is underpinned by a quietly humming string section and a batucada-style drum pattern, the attention diverts to electronic pulses and whines that recall a broken cell-phone connection. “Pastorale Vassant” centers on a field recording of a gamelan that Hassell captured on the island of Mallorca, but it is nearly overwhelmed by the drunken bass notes and fluttering racket going on around it, in a manner similar to the dizzying spirit of his 1986 ECM debut, Power Spot.
This music may sound chaotic, but there’s a clear logic and structure to what Hassell has created on Listening to Pictures. That includes his well-chosen album title, a reference to a style of painting where traces of earlier versions of the artwork remain visible in the finished product. It’s possible to discern a double meaning here: not only the layering that distinguishes each song but also the way that echoes of the composer’s last 40 years of work swirl together in the new material. It feels like he’s constantly remixing himself, taking apart ideas from as far back as his 1978 debut Earthquake Island and using new technology to augment and re-contextualize them for the present era. In a perfect Fourth World twist, the music remains entirely grounded in the now while also sounding like it’s been floating in the cosmos for eons. | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ndeya | June 8, 2018 | 7.3 | 49aaf395-0132-48a4-8df8-a18588928b45 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
Nominally working under the umbrella of dubstep, this London producer has called his music "R&B concrète"-- a celebration of the abstract and the pop. | Nominally working under the umbrella of dubstep, this London producer has called his music "R&B concrète"-- a celebration of the abstract and the pop. | Actress: Splazsh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14375-splazsh/ | Splazsh | One of the upshots of dance music's active compartmentalization-- into genres and subgenres and niches aligned with certain kinds of basslines or BPM-- is the exalted space it affords work that jams the system. If an album proves unique, we celebrate it. And then that album makes us think all the more scrupulously about the system it happened to jam. Actress's Splazsh is one of those albums. Actress-- a DJ/producer from London named Darren Cunningham-- slots into a recognizable realm of artists working in the wake of dubstep. But little, if anything, in his sound shares much with dubstep as it's most often understood. His bass isn't very big, his snares don't crack in isolation, his atmospheres don't heave in the air of cavernous negative-space.
So what's the link? A certain formal seriousness and rigor-- a sense of tracks transpiring the way they do for reasons owing to some kind of project, whatever that project (probably rhythmic and arcane) may be. But such talk downplays the many visceral thrills of Splazsh. Even the subtle stuff has an immediate effect: By the end of its sneakily weird eight minutes, opener "Hubble" has gently pushed the album into a sort of spinning motion that speeds up and slows down, but never quite stops. The slow-motion speed lets Actress throw in an array of sounds he'll sort through in time: woozy ambient waves, dry drums, crazy lasers, a slow synth arpeggio that sounds lifted from some old grainy sci-fi movie.
And so Splazsh keeps spinning, even as it moves through floaty dreamscapes strewn with sighs and chimes ("Lost") and austere breakbeat abstractions ("Get Ohn [Fairlight Mix]"). There's almost nothing that ties such disparate tracks together, except for everything. And that everything owes to the simultaneous sense of adventure and control that has made Actress one of the most intriguing electronic-music makers at work today.
Actress himself has called his music "R&B concrète," and that helps illuminate the way he works from both inside and outside a track. He has an ear for building up a song from the bottom (like a pop producer) and then abstracting it from the top (like a musique concrète technician), so that he makes some incredibly strange sounds surprisingly palatable-- and without making a big show of their strangeness. In that, Actress shares a certain allegiance with post-dubstep artists like Zomby (who has made records for the label that Actress runs, Werk Discs). But there's a range of hooks and ideas at play in Splazsh that few others have approached, much less made coherent. | 2010-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | June 22, 2010 | 8.3 | 49ac2f7b-0878-4e86-ab2a-cc2835f0d1ae | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
The new record from 1960s hitmaker Glen Campbell is intended as his last. It’s a pleasant postscript, collecting covers of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, among others. | The new record from 1960s hitmaker Glen Campbell is intended as his last. It’s a pleasant postscript, collecting covers of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, among others. | Glen Campbell: Adiós | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glen-campbell-adios/ | Adiós | Glen Campbell bid a public farewell in 2012, playing his last concert roughly a year after he announced he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Improbably, the illness provided a coda to Campbell’s career; he quickly released four albums, culminating with this year’s Adiós. Considering his debilitating illness, this productivity is remarkable. But it has also been noteworthy as Campbell’s longest stretch of secular records since 1993’s Somebody Like That. He spent the next 15 years in a wilderness of Christian music and re-recordings before reemerging in 2008 with Meet Glen Campbell, an album designed to evoke memories of his plush 1960s hits while relying on songs from modern rockers. The skillful balance of relatively contemporary tunes—Paul Westerberg’s “Sadly, Beautiful” may have been old enough to drive by the time Campbell cut it—and classic production created the template for Campbell’s final years.
Like 2011’s Ghost on the Canvas, Adiós sounds as rich and detailed as any of his ’60s work, but that’s not the only similarity they share. Ghost on the Canvas was also billed as Campbell’s final album, but its supporting farewell tour did well enough to produce a documentary—I’ll Be Me, released in 2014 accompanied by a soundtrack album—and to convince Campbell and his team that the singer could record one more album, Adiós. It’s difficult to discern the precise sense of agency Campbell has had with any of the music he’s recorded while suffering from Alzheimer’s. All of these records allude to the idea of mortality. The very titles of Ghost on the Canvas and 2013’s See You There suggest Campbell has already left this world; I’ll Be Me’s new song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You” is a direct reference to his loss of memory.
Adiós doesn’t hard sell Campbell’s impending death as aggressively as its predecessors, but his imminent departure hangs over the proceedings, articulated clearly in its album title and surfacing on the margins via covers of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Mortality may be pushed toward the surface on Adiós, but this is an album intended to convey happiness, not darkness. Look at the artwork, which depicts a cheery, chipper Campbell. It’s a far cry from the spectre looming on the cover of Ghost on the Canvas, the fatalistic block type of See You There, or the haunted younger photo gracing I’ll Be Me. Adiós seemingly intends to offer a hopeful spin to a tragic story.
It succeeds, to an extent. Certainly, it offers comfort in a way none of its companion records do. Producer Carl Jackson picks up the throwback sensibility of Julian Raymond and Howard Willing—the pair who produced Meet Glen Campbell and Ghost on the Canvas—so Adiós feels like a cousin to Campbell’s lush ’60s and ’70s hits. Such warmth underpins the working thesis that this is the record the singer always wanted to make—the songs he never got around to cutting in his prime—and it also disguises how Campbell’s range has diminished, a welcome move after the stark See You There placed his flaws in the forefront. Here, his voice is just supple enough to lend some sweetness to melodies that demand a gentle touch, many of them written by Jimmy Webb, a songwriter who always brought out the best in Campbell.
Four of Webb’s compositions, all taken from his 1993 album Suspending Disbelief, comprise a third of Adiós. Those songs, along with the Miller tune, are the highlights of the album because they are perched on the precipice of the past and the present. They’re not overly familiar in the vein of the album’s take on “Everybody’s Talkin’”—presented in an arrangement that mimics Harry Nilsson’s hit—or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” They feel like they could be part of a new Campbell album that lacked any biographical baggage. Of course, such a record couldn’t exist. Campbell’s tragic story is woven into the marketing of Adiós, and the album was indeed created as a last testament from a legend; it is impossible to hear without the context of the rest of his career. Adiós doesn't add much to Campbell’s legacy—the comeback records of recent years formed a fitting final act—but it’s a pleasant postscript, a wistful reminder of the joys a great musician once gave. | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | UMe | June 17, 2017 | 5.7 | 49adae6b-7269-468b-8557-2d1a47544a0a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
Compiled by JD Twitch of the Scottish duo Optimo, *[*Cease and Desist] pulls together recordings by a bunch of desperately alienated British post-punk bands and one-offs into a remarkable, eye-opening and ingeniously sequenced album. | Compiled by JD Twitch of the Scottish duo Optimo, *[*Cease and Desist] pulls together recordings by a bunch of desperately alienated British post-punk bands and one-offs into a remarkable, eye-opening and ingeniously sequenced album. | Various Artists: [Cease & Desist] DIY! (Cult classics from the Post-Punk era 1978 - 82) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21100-cease-desist-diy-cult-classics-from-the-post-punk-era-1978-82/ | [Cease & Desist] DIY! (Cult classics from the Post-Punk era 1978 - 82) | The British D.I.Y. scene that arose in the wake of punk had a weird relationship with mainstream pop, one that continues to this day: This compilation was originally supposed to be called Now That's What I Call DIY!, until Sony inspired its new name. The records compiled here by JD Twitch of the Scottish DJ duo Optimo weren't exactly a genre at the time, but they had an ideology in common. Punk rock's Pistols/Jam/Clash wave had made a lot of noise about overturning musical orthodoxy, but it was pretty much a single kind of noise. The D.I.Y. bands made it their business to overturn every received idea about songs and recordings: rehearsed harmoniousness, formal structures, polish of any kind. But they did like to dance, or at least bounce, and some of them liked tunes, too. None of the artists on [Cease & Desist] DIY! were ever, ever going to make it onto the charts--or so they figured at the time--but they wanted it to be known that they weren't rejecting pop values out of ignorance.
If you were looking for these sorts of records fifteen or twenty years ago, when anybody other than collectors still had them, you'd paw through 7-inch bins from which the Buzzcocks and Young Marble Giants singles had already been nabbed. The sound came almost exclusively from England in the years of this compilation's subtitle. Its record sleeves were predominantly monochrome, or black and white and pink, although silkscreened artwork (as with the sole release by Sara Goes Pop, from which "Sexy Terrorist" is taken here) was also acceptable. Uneven Letraset type, or handwritten band names and song titles, are a good sign; so are record labels with names like Fuck Off Records and It's War Boys, and what-were-they-thinking band names. The Spunky Onions' "How I Lost My Virginity", for instance, comes from their "split single" with the Ghettoberries, who were of course the same group.
Twitch's sequence bends the usual rules for scene compilations. It's not all obscure artists—Thomas Leer, whose electropop single "Private Plane" appears here, went on to be half of the super-slick new wave band Act. Instead of surveying as many bands as possible, it includes two different tracks by the cunningly named Distributors: "TV Me," a sort of answer song to the Normal's "T.V.O.D.", and a curdled dub piece called "Never Never". It even ventures a bit outside of its own time range: a 1984 album track by the 012 is gerrymandered in on the grounds that it was recorded in 1981.
All of those turn out to be fine decisions on Twitch's part, because [Cease & Desist] manages to pull together recordings by a bunch of desperately alienated artists into a remarkable, eye-opening and ingeniously sequenced album. It's arranged into four four-song suites (there's no CD version of the album, but there is a double LP), each with a distinct focus. The first side is four stone classics featuring piping-voiced women singers; three of its four bands are by splinter projects of the Homosexuals (whose 1978 "Hearts In Exile" single is a fountain from which a lot of this music springs).
In particular, "C'est Fab", a 1982 single credited to Nancy Sesay and the Melodaires—a Homosexuals-related group never heard from before or since—justifies this compilation's existence all by itself. It's a struggle for supremacy between a rhythm section that's trying to play crisp, bouncy funk and musicians who are doing their utmost to derail it (a singer squeaking uncertainly and out of tune at the very top of her range, an out-of-control trumpeter streaking through the studio, a male chorus with comedy accents, somebody dropping in cascades of fist-hammered dub piano). Everybody ends up winning.
That's followed by a set of tracks that use the materials of synth-pop to build weirder and more obsessive structures than the stuff that was starting to turn up on the charts. (The highlight there is Dorothy's "Softness", an uncanny, close-miked spoken piece whose backing band includes both Genesis P-Orridge and Alex Fergusson, shortly before they formed Psychic TV.) The album's third side begins with three pieces inspired by the messiest extremes of Jamaican dub--a huge influence on that generation of British musicians--and ends with a song that recalls dub more or less by accident: the slow, sneering 1978 single "Violence Grows", by a wobbly band of teenagers called "Fatal" Microbes, fronted by a monomaniacal-sounding then-14-year-old who went by the name Honey Bane. (By the end of 1981, she would have a legitimate UK Top 40 single of her own, "Turn Me On Turn Me Off".)
The final suite of [Cease & Desist] highlights the D.I.Y. scene's connections to the punk rock sound and ethos that made it possible. In another compilation's context, actually, the Fakes' "Look Out" and the Prats' "Disco Pope" would just seem like ineptly performed punk songs, which arguably they were. But the genius of D.I.Y. was that it made any bug a feature: these records' aesthetic framed every off-key vocal or mangled rhythm as a rebellion against the boredom of sonic orthodoxy, and they are never for an instant boring. | 2015-11-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Optimo Music | November 2, 2015 | 8.4 | 49b381c2-ac3b-41b0-914d-e06eef3c163e | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
As the Atlanta rapper’s court case continues, this scrappy project is all the more compelling for its loose, improvisatory structure. | As the Atlanta rapper’s court case continues, this scrappy project is all the more compelling for its loose, improvisatory structure. | Young Thug: Business Is Business | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-business-is-business/ | Business Is Business | A third of the way through Business Is Business, the record Young Thug released with little warning during his 14th month behind bars as he awaits trial following a 56-count RICO indictment in his native Georgia, comes “Wit Da Racks.” The song leverages his keen pop instincts and elastic eccentricities at once. Nominally about the most banal part of being a famous rapper—the chorus is built around Thug summoning a club owner to pay him for a walkthrough appearance—his madcap opening verse expands, contracts, and contorts, beginning with a cascade of syllables that matches the “waterfall” shimmer of his jewelry.
But by its end, those nods to dull wealth grow syntactically strange: “What’s on your wrist?/Million,” he raps, the last word enjambed with the question. He brags of having beautiful women “to kick it with,” where all the emphasis is on the elongated “iiiiiiiiiit.” He’s zen about chain snatchings—he’s sure he’ll get his back—and calls girls “suburban” for having pretty toes. But the oddest thing Thug says is that “every album got no skippin’”: odd not because his LPs are padded with filler, but because there’s never been any sense that Thug thinks of his catalog in those discrete, contractually measurable terms.
I have no firsthand knowledge of the way Thug works, and what details we have been given by his collaborators—producer Dun Deal saying he once asked to see the sheet of paper Thug was holding while he recorded, only to be shown “weird signs and shapes” instead of words—seem to get us further from any real insight. Yet from near the beginning of his career, massive hard drive leaks and long delays of hypothetical records have clouded the provenance of the material that is eventually released, while recent album titles (Punk, So Much Fun) suggest icebergs of unreleased music that have been picked apart and organized based on underlying sonic elements. Business Is Business, perhaps due to its nature as a cobbled-together collection from someone who can’t access a recording studio, even to comb through his vaults, frequently recalls Thug’s loosest, most apparently improvisatory work. It’s all the more compelling for it.
This is despite the window dressing of a pop blockbuster. The album is bookended by nakedly commercial plays: the noodling, 90-second Drake turn that begins opener “Parade on Cleveland” and the preamble, from fun.’s Nate Ruess, to closer “Global Access.” Each implies not only chart gamesmanship but—through Drake crooning about a release from prison and a celebration in Atlanta and Ruess singing “They will try and lock you up/Drag your name down through the mud… ’Cause that’s life here in America”—an album that will explicitly address Thug’s legal situation. Beyond the logistical infeasibility, though, is the fact that this has never been the way he writes: Thug’s major themes (an obsession with family, the belief that loving someone else has to compromise or destroy you, being good at robbery) have always come through via triangulation or in muttered asides. Now, A-list guests notwithstanding, asides are all that’s left to assemble a “new” record.
And so the odds and ends become central. Business Is Business is anchored by songs like the plinking “Gucci Grocery Bag,” a beloved leak that’s been kicking around the internet since the beginning of the pandemic, and the Future duet “Cars Bring Me Out,” which takes a Wheezy beat already used by the late Drakeo the Ruler as the setting for crime-luxury vignettes (“Woke up in a mansion/Silk Dior pinstriped couch/Call the car man”) that recall the half-finished Nas narrative songs that used to trickle out to mixtape DJs. In these instances, Thug is rapping upright, animatedly; when he continues the water motif re: his jewels (“Think I’m lying? You can dive in this bitch just like a fish”) he sounds hellbent on convincing you.
Elsewhere he opens up veins, singing about extremes of pain, joy, and paranoia. On the foreboding “Abracadabra,” he follows four bars of wordless harmonizing with “Mistress, mistress, tell me who my mistress is,” the question made to feel as urgent as the quasi-spiritual concerns that come elsewhere. While “Parade on Cleveland” could have been excised, the other Drake collaboration, the exultant “Oh U Went,” joins “Wit Da Racks” as a potential hit, in large part due to Thug’s unique ability to teeter on the tonal knife’s edge that separates sincerity and contempt. But that song’s buoyancy is immediately qualified by what comes next: “Want Me Dead,” where Thug writes with such rawness that it at times feels voyeuristic to listen. “I told my brother, ‘Take this watch, because I’m vulnerable,’” he raps during the hook, adding, “I let her get away with murder when I fall in love,” underlining that notion that love is necessarily a pact of mutually assured destruction. When he sings about unnamed parties wanting him dead, he couples it with his desperation to bring his own departed friends back to this plane; the border starts to seem more than a little porous.
A handful of days after Business Is Business was released, a new version, expanded and resequenced by Metro Boomin, was uploaded to DSPs. The rearrangement is radically superior: It correctly locates the emotional core of the album, opening with the pained but playful “Jonesboro,” then “Mad Dog” and “Uncle M,” a pair of horror-movie themes that are reserved and explosive, respectively. The tension-release pays off with “Want Me Dead”; only then do we rappel up from the depths of Thug’s psyche, onto the silk Dior pinstriped couches. Nate Ruess is deemphasized by a new closing song; the lesser Drake track is buried in the middle. For all the commercial speculation that’s run parallel to what Young Thug has actually been doing on his records, the truth has always been in the scraps, on the fringes. | 2023-06-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | June 28, 2023 | 7 | 49b4d875-4020-429e-8948-c8d62a60a7fd | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
On an adventurous new album, the shapeshifting indie-rock band blends rave influences with larger-than-life hooks for some of its sharpest songwriting to date. | On an adventurous new album, the shapeshifting indie-rock band blends rave influences with larger-than-life hooks for some of its sharpest songwriting to date. | Strange Ranger: Pure Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/strange-ranger-pure-music/ | Pure Music | Strange Ranger emerged from lockdown transformed. With a heavier, more expansive sound, the band’s 2021 mixtape, No Light in Heaven, explored the sustained restlessness and dread of a moment when no one knew what the future would bring. A deafening blast of harsh noise in the opening moments of “In Hell” set the tone for a chaotic new sound as indebted to 1990s rave music as it was to the band’s Pacific Northwest indie-rock roots. The music also seemed to respond to the material realities of the pandemic with a more meticulous approach to digital production, incorporating sequencers, drum machines, and elaborate vocal effects that complemented their palm-muted riffs and larger-than-life choruses.
As pandemic restrictions lifted, the group continued to chase this adventurous spirit with glossy big-beat singles and a steady live presence in their adopted homes of New York and Philadelphia. The two cities’ seemed to collide on their output; as Philadelphia emerged as the regional capital of indie, emo, the “new wave of American shoegaze,” acts like the Dare, Frost Children, and Blaketheman1000 have come to occupy an adjacent place in downtown New York—all while sharing bills with Strange Ranger and contributing club-ready remixes to the expanded edition of No Light in Heaven.
All of this has brought new attention to the project and left Strange Ranger at a fascinating turning point. Yet Pure Music, their first full-length release since No Light in Heaven, doesn’t feel all that far removed from its predecessor; its 10 tracks are built from the same synth pads, drum beats, and narrative structures as before. But where the previous release was consciously divided between its synth-pop experiments and riff-driven alt-rock singles, Pure Music blends the two approaches, as vocalists Issac Eiger and Fiona Woodman sing about the search for inspiration during an extended period of uncertainty. The result is some of the sharpest, most clear-eyed songwriting to date.
Despite the Day-Glo exterior, Pure Music largely operates in a lyrical mode born out of the group’s time as a more conventional guitar-driven project. A dense assemblage of synth pads and arpeggios provide a sturdy foundation for Eiger and Woodman’s voices on “Rain So Hard,” as loose drums and a quivering guitar tone swell to enormous heights in the hook. “I heard you write about culture/What’s that mean?/Is it sort of like everything?,” Eiger sings, voice rising from a soft whisper to a raspy shout. Read as a dismissive exchange between acquaintances at a party, it’s the kind of line that might seem better suited for a pithy 1975 cut, but Eiger’s earnest inflection lends it a wide-eyed charm.
A world-weary sadness persists in spite of these occasional glimmers of humor. It’s present on “Rain So Hard,” where a few moments of miscommunication leave Eiger distraught about a breakup, and his frustration continues on “She’s on Fire,” an anthemic single that doubles as the album’s emotional peak. Synths and sequencers give way to massive drums and a chorus-drenched guitar line akin to the Cure or Cocteau Twins, while Eiger works through his disillusionment, leaning into a soaring rock-radio chorus that feels like a genuine breakthrough. The euphoric moment not only provides the album with its title—“And I could die in pure music”—but it also serves as a mantra for the group in their ongoing search for transcendence. In moments like these, the influence of rave music seems to take on a more personal shape. It isn’t just that songs like “Wide Awake” or “Dazed in the Shallows” tend to sound like Porches by way of Primal Scream, or an old Andrew Weatherall remix of My Bloody Valentine at their most Madchester. Strange Ranger allow every instrument to echo the same gnawing frustration, and eventual insight, at the heart of their songwriting: a sense of purpose that makes their searching feel like a destination in and of itself. | 2023-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | July 25, 2023 | 7.3 | 49b971e8-d147-4311-9bd7-f846b5bbd2b2 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
The funeral doom band Lycus make slow and heavy music with bleak lyrics, but the feel of it is surprisingly warm, cathartic, and uplifting. Their new album adds a second guitar and a cellist, and the four songs here have a very big feel. | The funeral doom band Lycus make slow and heavy music with bleak lyrics, but the feel of it is surprisingly warm, cathartic, and uplifting. Their new album adds a second guitar and a cellist, and the four songs here have a very big feel. | Lycus: Chasms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21347-chasms/ | Chasms | The Oakland band Lycus make funeral doom that's unique and accomplished without rejecting the basic tenets of the style. The music is slow and heavy, the three-part vocals mournful and guttural, the cover art by Italian painter Paolo Girardi melancholic and romantic, the subject matter bleak. For instance, "This wretched body/ The prison of the soul/ Weighted by the chains of depression/ I could never bear to let you in." Or: "Oh Mother/ Oh Father/ Relinquish this mistake of a life." But, all said, it’s also uplifting.
This has a lot to do with the guitars and tone. On the quartet's new album Chasms, fire and heat are mentioned in the lyrics, and even if they show up in a negative sense ("The sun will burn the cancer we have become/ Death will be the savior"), you get the sense of the night turning into day here*.* It was produced by Jack Shirley, who also helmed Deafheaven’s Sunbather and New Bermuda (and a ton of other records), and he gives the songs a very big feel.
Lycus’ first record, 2013’s Tempest, featured three tracks spreading across 42 minutes, though the last one, "Tempest," drifted off at the end with low-level hiss and feedback. The more tightly packed Chasms features four songs in 44 minutes, and each second is fully loaded. From blistering black metal freak-out to crushing Neurosis climax to an unexpected psychedelic undertow, there's no incidental music here.
They added a second guitarist, which brings a compelling texture to the sound, and there’s also the presence of go-to Bay Area metal cellist Jackie Perez Gratz (Giant Squid, Amber Asylum). She weaves the songs together into a kind of extended suite, and her work brings to mind another of her collaborators, Asunder, who released one of the great underground Bay Area doom albums, Works Will Come Undone, in 2006. Asunder, like Lycus, found a way to make a lot happen with a little.
This is one of my favorite records of the sort since then, which is saying a lot. Lycus maintain a specific atmosphere—deep greens, browns, dark shadows—but find a number of paths through it. Each feels right, the blending of genres and approaches and patterns seamless. More important, though, is the effect music of this sort can have on a listener. It's highly cathartic. It will move you emotionally. At the end of the haunting closer "Obsidian Eyes," which finds the protagnist "suffer[ing] through the void/ On the perilous bridge/ Between body and spirit," the band pushes forward with all their force into a gentle cymbal wash that closes the record. It's one of the few soft moments on Chasms, and it's welcome: a place to rest your head after experiencing this overwhelming, ecstatic, surprisingly meditative album. | 2016-01-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | January 14, 2016 | 8 | 49c0a071-8166-40af-a105-3443565330db | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
In his sparse, instrumental style, the Polish guitarist channels centuries of cultural exchange. His new album is slow and reverent, as if suspended in a different measurement of time. | In his sparse, instrumental style, the Polish guitarist channels centuries of cultural exchange. His new album is slow and reverent, as if suspended in a different measurement of time. | Raphael Rogiński: Talàn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raphael-roginski-talan/ | Talàn | Raphael Rogiński was supposed to be a sculptor, but his guitar got in the way. He practiced more than he slept; blood “was pouring” from his fingers, he told the Polish publication Polityka in 2015. He tore at his instrument “like wild meat, shamelessly and greedily.” These days, there’s not a trace of aggression in the Polish guitarist’s music. His playing is considered, graceful, meditative. Every effortless run is followed by a contemplative pause; his rubato sensibility suggests someone treading on uneven ground, deliberating over their next footstep. If you were him, you might pause too, because there is a numinous power in his instrumental songs—enchanted, uncanny, swarming with ghosts. His music is a dark forest inhabited by shadows and sprites and unseen forces. His playing feels like a spell designed to keep a forager safe while honoring the wild unknown.
Before he ever picked up the guitar, a pre-teen Rogiński, who grew up on the wooded outskirts of Warsaw, played an Uzbek kemenche, a three-stringed lyre, given to him by his grandmother. He played it without the bow, pulling and plucking as though it were a banjo. You can detect traces of that initiation in his playing still; he often sounds like he is manipulating some other, stranger instrument than his Gibson ES-335. Maybe his grandmother’s kemenche unlocked something in him. She was Tatar, a Turkic ethnic group with roots around Lake Baikal that is today found across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, all the way to the Black Sea. Rogiński once recalled of his grandmother: “As we ate raw meat, I timidly looked into her eyes, and saw the Scythian steppes and beyond. It was my first experience of meditation.”
Much of Rogiński’s music has concerned itself with channeling spirits from the past. His group Shofar—named after the ritual horn blown on Rosh Hashanah, and associated with the resurrection of the dead—is dedicated to the excavation of traditional Jewish music, particularly the Hasidic mystical songs called nigunim. His finest album until now, Raphael Rogiński Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes. African Mystic Music, distilled its inspirations into an ethereal and otherworldly form, a kind of anti-gravity blues. His new album Talàn picks up the spare, beguiling style of that recording and extends it. The record is dedicated to the Black Sea; many of its songs were written in Odesa, a Ukrainian port city defined by its historical mixture of cultures, and the gateway from Asia to Europe for some of Rogiński’s own ancestors. Across Talàn, that history of exchange plays out in eerie runs, folk melodies that feel like ancient wisdom, textures of dusty pages and worn stone.
These are simple songs, played on unaccompanied guitar with no apparent edits and few effects, save for occasional tremolo or slap-back echo. They transmit a powerful sense of presence, as though you were in the same room as Rogiński. The squeaking of his fingers is audible on the strings; the lengthy spaces between the notes allow for a rudimentary kind of echolocation, mapping the position and thickness of the walls, the height of the ceiling. It is not jazz, but he borrows that genre’s exploratory sense of structure, beginning each track with a simple exposition of the theme, then moving outward in increasingly slanted abstractions. His style of fingerpicking, plucking out basslines with his thumb and answering with skeletal melodies on the upper strings, often resembles two players in conversation; it took me many listens—and a video of him playing—to be convinced there were no overdubs involved.
The opening “Listopad,” Polish for “November,” encapsulates the album’s abiding melancholy in a dejected melodic figure that shifts unpredictably, like dry leaves on pavement. Most of Rogiński’s melodies have the elusive quality of something dancing on the tip of your tongue—they feel intuitive, yet try to sing one back, and you probably can’t. The closer you peer at them, the more they crumble. The guitar’s tone is muted and muffled, but also swollen, heavy on midrange and bass; it gives the impression of a surfeit of signal, slightly more than the circuit can carry. In “Cliffs and the Sea,” delay sloshes back and forth like water in an overflowing glass; in “Flickering Glances,” his dampened taps sound like dented steel pans. Occasionally, he’ll brush the strings beneath the bridge, unleashing bright streaks of dissonance against the midnight blue of his chords. His technique is unusual, but it is never show-offy; his songs always sound like they are trying to communicate, however wordlessly, some piece of wisdom, some essential knowledge handed down over generations.
But these details all come into focus later, after hours spent inside this music. The first thing you hear, the main thing, is its sadness. The melancholy is vast, though never maudlin; his playing is too mercurial, his harmonic choices too unpredictable, ever to lapse into sentimentalism. The word “talàn” can be translated as “maybe”; Rogiński says that it is a “very old” word, dating back to nomadic peoples who lived in Central Asia nearly 3,000 years ago. For the guitarist, that “maybe” implies a choice: “I take something in order to lose something else,” he says. Or, put another way, to carry one thing is to leave behind what doesn’t fit in the saddlebags. To follow one path is to abandon the others. In these repetitive, ruminative songs, I hear different ways of considering time, ways at odds with digital clocks and algorithmic models—cycles and seasons, strange mutations and sudden revelations. Handcrafted, fallible, as mindful as a walk on a mountain path, they sound like tributes to all the things steamrolled by modernity. Slow and reverent, they communicate a sense of incalculable loss. | 2023-09-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Instant Classic | September 12, 2023 | 8 | 49c2f019-d8df-4ee1-b961-860c4c309d95 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The French ambient producer uses the ocean’s duality of stillness and turbulence as inspiration to produce music that ebbs and flows eternally. | The French ambient producer uses the ocean’s duality of stillness and turbulence as inspiration to produce music that ebbs and flows eternally. | Malibu: Palaces of Pity EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/malibu-palaces-of-pity-ep/ | Palaces of Pity EP | Music is a temporal art form, a medium bound to a linear experience. Russian composer Igor Stravinsky described music as a chrononomy: a measuring tool for time. Yet some musicians can achieve a sense of infinitude in their sound by mimicking nature’s eternal characteristics. Laurie Spiegel’s endless arpeggiated synths flow like rivers, Lubomyr Melnyk’s cacophonous piano compositions blow like torrential winds, and Alice Coltrane’s rolled harp chords expand endlessly like our universe. On Palaces of Pity, French producer Malibu suggests boundlessness by embodying the expansivity of the ocean. Submerged synths undulate like waves folding into themselves, producing a sense of agonizing solitude that feels like drifting in a lifeboat with no land in sight. The sound begs you to slow down and stare into the horizon, squinting to find out just how far you can see before the world goes blurry.
In the years since her 2019 debut One Life, Malibu, whose legal name is Barbara Braccini, has developed her oceanic sound. On her monthly NTS radio show, United in Flames, she treats songs by Madonna, Dean Blunt, or Enigma like water-soluble compounds, dousing them with reverb until they dissolve into a sea of sound. In 2021 she morphed Himera and Petal Supply’s hyperpop banger “You Make It Look So Easy (S.M.I.L.E.Y)” into a heart-wrenching ballad, and earlier this year she released “Idle Citi,” a seven-minute collaboration with Swedish instrumentalist and vocalist Merely featuring seagull calls and the sound of thunder. Braccini, whose father was an oceanographer, has made the ocean her muse, using its duality of stillness and turbulence as inspiration to produce music that ebbs and flows eternally.
Palaces of Pity harbors the emotions you hold onto, willingly or not. There are few intelligible lyrics, most notably the voice in “Cheirosa ’94” that asks, “Can you feel it? When I look at you I feel it too.” Most of the album is narrated by longing moans that beckon like sirens. Braccini expands on this isolated yearning by building depth with distance. Ominous bass stabs mimic a faraway thunderclap on “The Things That Fade” and gull-like synths chirp in the skies above “So Far Out of Love.” Braccini has described the album as a sequel to One Life, which was inspired by the loss of a friendship. Palaces of Pity in turn represents the feeling of distant trauma, the way pain may fade from the surface while remaining within you.
Malibu’s music is as formless as water. Sounds creep into the picture with long attacks, slowly building into a frothy crest before dissipating into a silent trough, only to reincarnate as a new wave. “The Things That Fade” begins with a windy synth that moves from ear to ear while Braccini coos in Auto-Tune. A bass synth momentarily submerges everything underwater before her moans break the surface and the synths begin building once more. Along the way various instruments—cellos, guitars, mallets—appear like seasick hallucinations. These oscillating dynamics can be disorienting because they suggest a non-linear experience, perhaps the gradual and irregular process of healing.
By referencing the constant characteristics of the ocean, Braccini approaches a world where music can live outside of time. “Illiad,” the final track, is a nine-minute soundscape that feels like falling forever. It begins with overlapping voices, one cooing, another crying. As the vocals vanish the music settles into a descending three-note melody, conjuring the feeling of sinking into water, and a whale-like call reminds you that you’re not alone. Then a delayed synth begins to dance over the melody, like streaks of light piercing the surface. The song fades so slowly that it feels like you’ll never reach the ocean floor. Perhaps, in the Earth’s deepest waters, you can sink for eternity. | 2022-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | UNO NYC | December 7, 2022 | 7.8 | 49c65772-2b90-4ae3-9591-d5d9721e9b1f | Arjun Ram Srivatsa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arjun-ram srivatsa / | |
The standout track from Born Like This gets the remix EP treatment, with work from Thom Yorke, Dave Sitek, and Jneiro Jarel. | The standout track from Born Like This gets the remix EP treatment, with work from Thom Yorke, Dave Sitek, and Jneiro Jarel. | DOOM: Gazzillion Ear EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13800-gazzillion-ear-ep/ | Gazzillion Ear EP | After the better part of a year's worth of listening, it's not out of the question to call "Gazzillion Ear" the standout track from DOOM's Born Like This. At the very least, it's one of the album's most attention-grabbing cuts. J Dilla's hauntological tour of the 2000s' second half manifested itself here as a fused-together unearthing of two of his archived beats: the organ-driven psych-soul "Dig It" and the "Return of the 'G'"-gone-lo-fi Moroderisms of "Phantom of the Synths". DOOM united those two movements with a tour de force rendition of his characteristic hookless, free-associative pop-culture cliché-disemboweling that stands up to any of the top three verses on Madvillainy. And even through the rawness, he rode on that beat so securely that even without the Dilla shoutouts it'd be a fool's errand to separate his voice from it.
Not that Thom Yorke or Dave Sitek or Jneiro Jarel are fools, of course-- it's just that they have their work cut out for them when it comes to remixing this song. The Gazzillion Ear EP includes the Yorke remix that accompanied the iTunes release of Born Like This, a collaboration between Sitek and Jarel, and another Jarel mix created under his "Dr. Who Dat?" guise. The EP also includes the original track, largely for completion's sake, and a brief, shrugworthy bonus beat entitled "The.Green.Whore.Net"; it's probably for the best that most people who already own Born Like This (by which I mean pretty much anyone who would already be interested in "Gazzillion Ear" in any context) can pick this one up piecemeal.
While Yorke's remix doesn't supplant the original, it doesn't bother to try-- in fact, it doesn't even use the same vocal track. DOOM's flow on the Yorke remix is both faster-spitting and more intense, a reserved yet intimidating raspiness on some Clint Eastwood business. It's also split up, giving his lyrics some breathing room, but part of the appeal of "Gazzillion Ear" is that DOOM just goes nonstop, so hearing his voice drop out every so often to let Yorke's distantly twitching, wordless-murmur ambience burble for a moment sabotages the momentum. And as much promise as that skittering, icy beat holds, it sounds way too ghostly and mournful to back up a verse featuring namedrops of "The Gong Show" and Ernest Goes to Camp.
Jarel's two contributions make a lot more sense, since they capture the lyrics' menacing/absurd split personality in their own unique language. Given the advanced age of the Yorke remix, the Jarel/Sitek teamup is the blockbuster draw on this EP, and it doesn't disappoint. They pull a neat trick of turning Dilla's lifted keyboard melodies inside out and echoing it loosely with a burbling sound somewhere between highlife guitars and late-60s analog electronics, throwing in some truncated blasts of halfway-Afrobeat brass that eventually spill out into an invigorating horn outro. But it's Jarel's other contribution that steals the show: the Dr. Who Dat? mix is boom-bap that breathes through deep, thrumming digital bass, riding on zone-out synths and hi-hats that melt and freeze into crystalline sonics. He's done something better than distracting listeners from how great the original version is-- he's provided a good reason to speculate what DOOM might sound like over more beats like this. | 2010-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Lex | January 7, 2010 | 7.2 | 49cfbb55-5887-4237-8136-3f73878af35c | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
On her debut, the Norwegian pop phenom offers a patina of fresh-faced authenticity and not much else. | On her debut, the Norwegian pop phenom offers a patina of fresh-faced authenticity and not much else. | Sigrid: Sucker Punch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sigrid-sucker-punch/ | Sucker Punch | Two years since she first arrived, it is difficult not to feel cynical about Sigrid, much as her fresh-faced image resists it. Her first single, “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” was released in February 2017, and established her as a pop iconoclast: the young woman who (at least according to her oft-told story) left a session with patronizing older male writers to write her own song about how out of touch they were. Her vibe, going by her first single, was a mix of earthiness—the rasped vocals shown off in the relatively naked verses—and machine-honed Scandinavian pop bombast. Since then, it has not been killed so much as flogged by a stream of Spotify bait cut from the same cloth: Island have thrown so many singles at the wall that three from last year aren’t even on Sucker Punch.
Hers is one of the most assiduous campaigns in contemporary pop, and yet everything about the PR push insists that Sigrid is not like the other pop stars. She doesn’t wear make-up. She doesn’t do features. She—let me check the notes—got her favorite T-shirt free from a Dutch airline, and she just wants to be free to be herself. In this sense, the 22-year-old Norwegian is exactly like the other pop stars, selling a version of authenticity that is just as constructed as a 63-foot inflatable snake or a dude wearing a giant marshmallow head. It’s “realness” as a shortcut to relatability, a two-dimensional affect that her slick debut album does little to flesh out.
Sigrid includes two songs on Sucker Punch that directly address the music industry’s attempts to manipulate her. Alongside “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” which sets the album’s tone of synth-battalion sweetness, there is “Business Dinners,” its slightest and most appealing song. It's a faded tropical postcard decorated with geometric Memphis Group squiggles; SOPHIE kicking back and sipping a piña colada. Lilting and off-kilter, it extracts the essence of Sigrid’s message as if by IV drip: The industry wants her to be “sweeter, better, angel,” “pictures, numbers, figures/Yeah, deeper, smarter,” an astute summary of the contradictions facing young female artists that she kisses off impeccably. “Standing on the shoreline/I just wanna swim and float,” she sings idly, and for a second you’re there with her, watching her long brown hair ripple in the waves. Then those fateful words re-emerge: “And I’m just trying to be me.”
If Sucker Punch contained more songs this endearingly weird and casually incisive, there would be a case for Sigrid’s individuality. “Strangers” improves on the “Don’t Kill My Vibe” template, using tiny percussive snags and an icy synth glow in the verses to create an air of genuine desolation. Then it ramps up, via a smartly deployed EDM riser, into a belting chorus that inverts everything that came before: the feverish synth arpeggiations packed tight, her optimism about her poetic attraction to a stranger flipped to cold, hard realism (“We’re falling head over heels for something that ain’t real”). Nearly every other song repeats the formula less effectively, save the piano ballads, which feel more like “Writer in the Dark About How to Write ‘Writer in the Dark.’”
“Strangers” is the best bit of writing amid some underdeveloped concepts: “Basic”—as in, “I wanna be basic/‘Cause you make me so complicated”—is shameless start-from-the-hashtag songwriting that really does sound focus-grouped by old men. “Sucker Punch” attempts to set a scene—a hallway rendezvous, coffee by the stairs, matching red hoodies—which it quickly forgets as it heaves into a triumphant major-key chorus eerily reminiscent of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.” Equally chipper is “Mine Right Now,” which sounds, of all things, like Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.” “Don’t Feel Like Crying” and “Sight of You” start with the kind of jaunty, slashing string sections that introduce Eurovision competitors.
There is potential in Sigrid’s optimistic sound. “Don’t Feel Like Crying” is almost obscenely chipper: If it wasn’t for the odd swear word, it could easily pass for Kidz Bop. But its brightness is blinding, almost painful, suggesting the sheer effort required to avoid wallowing post-breakup. To Sigrid and her cowriters’ credit, Sucker Punch remains dedicated to this primary-color production scheme, which dazzles in contrast to contemporary pop's nihilistic grey. But its formulaic songs lack the free-spirited personality that telegraphed her early promise. The story of a young female songwriter pushing back against the sexist songwriters on her major label and modern pop’s oppressive beauty standards is an impressive one. The cautious Sucker Punch could do with more of that insurrectionist spirit. | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | March 15, 2019 | 6 | 49d4d4ac-e38a-47aa-a873-3dba545ec008 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The debut LP from Mountain Man's Amelia Meath and Megafaun's Nick Sanborn fills an obvious void. The Durham, NC duo’s fusion of quirky folk and quirky electro-pop would have otherwise been inevitably and awkwardly willed into existence, which is a good starting point for Sylvan Esso—but it’s also their endgame as well. | The debut LP from Mountain Man's Amelia Meath and Megafaun's Nick Sanborn fills an obvious void. The Durham, NC duo’s fusion of quirky folk and quirky electro-pop would have otherwise been inevitably and awkwardly willed into existence, which is a good starting point for Sylvan Esso—but it’s also their endgame as well. | Sylvan Esso: Sylvan Esso | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19414-sylvan-esso-sylvan-esso/ | Sylvan Esso | There are bands that arrive fully formed with a fresh sound satisfying a need listeners didn’t even know they had—and then you have an act like Sylvan Esso, who fill an obvious void. The Durham, NC duo’s fusion of quirky folk and quirky electro-pop would have otherwise been inevitably and awkwardly willed into existence, since those are two of the most reliable, likeable, and syncable subgenres that fall under the “indie” umbrella. It’s a good starting point for Sylvan Esso, but it’s their endgame as well.
All the same, there is a guileless charm to the whole project and without it, there’s no way opener “Hey Mami” would be remotely tolerable. As Amelia Meath neatly manicures her syllables while singing, “Sooner or later/ The dudes at bodegas/ Will hold their lips and own this shit,” Rob Thomas’ Mona Lisa is strutting through Spanish Harlem. Maybe the urbane playfulness is a stilted attempt to compensate for Sylvan Esso’s background in antiquated and Appalachian music: Meath is a member of Vermont au naturel vocal group Mountain Man and part of Feist’s touring band, while Nick Sanborn plays bass in Megafaun, often contrasted with Bon Iver as the woolier, weirder offshoot of DeYarmond Edison. Fortunately, “Hey Mami” succeeds in being a folk song in an ethnomusical sense, a document of a real life situation. Meath’s looped vocals lend a languid, sun-weary, and slightly drunk quality, and it’s the ambient street noise rather than Sanborn’s protruding bass and skittering beats that evokes the scene they’re trying to relate. The same sense of place is crucial to “Coffee”, where Meath sings about the freedom of dancing as a participant, rather than an observer.
Most of Sylvan Esso’s points of comparison are contemporary and complimentary, but it’s easiest to draw a straight bloodline to Dirty Projectors' indie R&B O.G. “Stillness is the Move”, as Sylvan Esso’s sounds are thin and gawky, while dealing with small, tangible situations. Meath’s lyrics carry streak of homesickness and displacement, but it’s nothing existential or incomprehensible; judging from “Could I Be”, it’s just a matter of being on the road, because it’s there you’ll meet people like the carnivorous charmer who’s the subject of “Wolf”, saddled with obvious Zevon allusions and obvious metaphor (“But no birds or beasts does he eat/ he only wants the tenderest meat”). You can subsequently hear the chorus of “H.S.K.T.” (“Head, shoulders, knees and toes”) as a calming inventory to stay in the present moment while surrounded by the constant chatter of people, beeping cellphones, and televisions.
Unlike most of their sleeker, sizeable peers, Sylvan Esso is by and for portable electronic devices. Sanborn’s beats are a collection of “sound effects” rather than cohesive production or ambience—buzzing bazz, vacuums of synths, and the rest sounding like a shareware version of TNGHT. If Sylvan Esso sounds like rudimentary remixes of what could otherwise be casual and agreeable Mountain Man or Feist songs, well, that’s exactly how Sylvan Esso got started—Meath asked Sanborn, working under the rustic electro alias Made of Oak, to reconfigure Mountain Man’s “Play it Right” (included as the penultimate track here) and it grew into a full-fledged partnership.
While it’s easy to view Sylvan Esso as longtime side musicians taking the lead, there’s a disappointing retreat towards inoffensive lap-pop after “Hey Mami” and “Dreamy Bruises” boldly announce their intentions. Once you get a grasp of what it is Sylvan Esso do, Sanborn’s production somehow manages to be both repetitive and unfocused, while Meath’s chants start to blend into an indistinct schoolyard chatter, percussive sibilance over melody; “Hey Mami” is by a large margin the most grating song here, and it’s the one that seems to stick. Sylvan Esso may represent a declaration of freedom and artistic renewal, but it doesn’t necessarily result in memorable songs.
Still, like raw milk, I can’t shake that the lack of homogenization, the small-batch “organic” presentation of Sylvan Esso, is the main draw. Sure, bands like Hundred Waters and tUnE-yArDs emulsify indigenous music into coherent and unique artistic statements—electronic pop just as suitable for Coachella as it is for Coffee Bean—but their evolutions don't serve as a narrative, a statement about an audience writ large: namely, that R&B, pure pop, and such should be considered a kind of folk music for people who’ve grown up in the 21st century, and hey, isn’t it great that can exist side-by-side? In that sense, Sylvan Esso is feel-good music on all fronts, and when it comes time to throw on something at a summer gathering that’ll make people feel slightly hipper than they were when they arrived, Sylvan Esso will be a go-to. But it’ll still feel like I’m living in a beer commercial, someone else's idea of an inclusive, hip summer day. | 2014-05-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Partisan | May 28, 2014 | 6.2 | 49d590d1-1222-4e7c-9d34-94f44ae9b916 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
In his final years, Chuck Berry endeavored to make another record worthy of his rock’n’roll legacy. The resulting Chuck is a collection of new songs and covers that meditate on love and mortality. | In his final years, Chuck Berry endeavored to make another record worthy of his rock’n’roll legacy. The resulting Chuck is a collection of new songs and covers that meditate on love and mortality. | Chuck Berry: Chuck | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chuck-berry-chuck/ | Chuck | With each year that passed after 1980, it seemed more and more likely that Chuck Berry had moved into the “strictly live performances” phase of his career. He stopped making records after 1979’s Rock It—an album where prototypical Berry songwriting is marred by dated late ’70s production like tinny drums and cornball keyboards. From then on, he performed countless one-nighters with a different backing band in every town. He earned a reputation for being a prickly, demanding performer, and that portrait was amplified by his openly hostile interactions with Keith Richards and Eric Clapton in the 1986 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. But while Chuck seemed like a tough guy to get along with, that film was also a testament to something else—he had tons of classics under his belt, and decades after they initially made impact, those songs remained vital.
In his final years, though, Chuck had unfinished business. He kept writing, and as he revealed a few years ago, he felt that he could still add something important to his discography. “I want to do something that I know will last after I leave,” he said in 2010. “I want to do another ‘Johnny B. Goode,’” or “something as powerful as ‘[My] Ding-A-Ling.’” So, on his 90th birthday last October, he announced his attempt at another career-defining work: Chuck, a 35-minute album with new songs and covers of old standards. He recorded the album with members of his family (all professional musicians in their own right) and a few marquee players. Tom Morello, Nathaniel Rateliff, and Gary Clark, Jr. all back up Berry on Chuck—each students of his work in their way, folding into his aesthetic fairly seamlessly. Chuck died five months later, making it his final recorded work and his last chance at creating a Chuck Berry classic.
The heartless truth is that, overall, Chuck is not as good as the early hits. That’s an impossibly tall order. Forgetting the untouchable “Johnny B. Goode” (deemed important enough to launch into space) and “Maybellene,” the guy released classics at a clip—“Nadine,” “You Never Can Tell,” “School Days,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” and tons of others. He wasn’t reinventing the wheel every time, but the hits kept coming, so he didn’t really need to.
The Chuck Berry template rears its head, for better and worse, throughout Chuck. “Big Boys” is the man at his best—an extremely familiar guitar solo intro that leads into a verse about working up the courage to dance with a crush. It’s a careening rock’n’roll song, vintage in its structure but lovably boisterous in its delivery. Chuck’s fully in his lane here—singing about falling in love and discovering rock’n’roll’s life-giving power when he was just “a little bitty boy.” During his prolific hitmaking stretch of the 1950s, when Berry was a 30-something high school dropout, he wrote extensively and expertly about teenage bliss. At the end of his life, he still knew exactly how to encapsulate the feeling of meeting someone special and having your life change at the perfect party.
The weakest links of Chuck don’t add anything new to his catalog. “Lady B. Goode”—his fourth (!) sequel to “Johnny B. Goode”—is predictable enough. The newest installment of the Johnny saga sounds a lot like “Johnny B. Goode,” only the lyrics are different and the pace drags a little more. “Jamaica Moon,” an updated version of his 1956 single “Havana Moon,” does not need Chuck’s newfound island patois: “Me still alone, me sip on the rum.” By recycling the old stuff, the new versions also highlight how Chuck’s crisp production quality can’t top the analog warmth of his earliest records.
When he announced Chuck, Berry released a short statement dedicating the album to his wife of 68 years, Themetta. “My darlin’ I’m growing old!” it read. “I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!” Ultimately, the best and most vulnerable moments of the album are meditations on love and mortality. He sings about how “life can pass so fast away” on “Darlin’”—a heartfelt duet with his daughter Ingrid Berry-Clay. His voice slinks on a satisfying blues rendition of the 1938 standard “You Go to My Head” (which, coincidentally, also just got covered by Bob Dylan). But it’s on his live recording of “3/4 Time (Enchiladas)” where the wild-eyed, duck-walking raconteur crops up. He sings excitedly to the crowd that, despite his age and his health, he stays up all night writing songs. “I love what I’m doin’,” he shout-sings. “I hope it don't end too soon!” And that’s the best thing about Chuck—a portrait of an icon who refused to stop. | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dualtone | June 13, 2017 | 6.3 | 49d8b90a-0d2e-4770-903f-35344041d16e | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
My wishlist of albums from artists who have yet to record full-lengths is as follows: Superpitcher, Junior\n\ Boys, Vitalic ... | My wishlist of albums from artists who have yet to record full-lengths is as follows: Superpitcher, Junior\n\ Boys, Vitalic ... | Michael Mayer: Fabric 13 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5551-fabric-13/ | Fabric 13 | My wishlist of albums from artists who have yet to record full-lengths is as follows: Superpitcher, Junior Boys, Vitalic and, most of all, Michael Mayer. Whenever a new Mayer project is announced, it serves as a reminder of how few of his productions have been released. Yet whenever I hear these projects-- whether they be remixes, another release on his peerless tech-house label, Kompakt, or his ground-shifting mixes-- I'm reminded how thankful I am that he's at least out there doing what he does.
The latest work from Mayer is his contribution to one of London club/label Fabric's mix series. Fabric's label division has been spoiling us recently with outstanding contributions from Swayzak (Fabric 11) and Jacques Lu Cont (Fabrclive.9), among others, but this is arguably the strongest release in its history. Incredibly, it also challenges 2000's Immer as the best release in Mayer's catalog, effortlessly drawing from his own Kompakt pool as well as eight other labels, including Playhouse, Plong, and Volt.
Like most of Fabric's releases, Mayer's record is made with the dancefloor in mind so it's more ferocious than Immer, but like that dissection of the blissed-out end of German microhouse, it retains a Big Picture overview. In the past, Mayer's mixes have often seemed to be an attempt at taking a definitive snapshot of a particular sound from Neuhouse's mission statement, from the effortlessly blended, almost soothing and silken Immer to the schaffelfieber of Mayer's recent Peel Session (which is available only on mp3, not that we endorse that sort of thing, etc.) to the collection of Kompakt's more banging 12\xA5\xA5 sounds on Speciher. Instead, Fabric 13 is a more eclectic set, blending the differences between the seductive warmth and melody-- and increasingly pop and nu-glam-- sounds of Kompakt and adding underlying tones of menace and melancholy.
Connecting the dots between elements of not only his own label but of German tech-house as a whole, Mayer offers a panoramic view of the scene. He even steps overground on a couple of occasions, utilizing both Jackson's Midnight Fuck remix of "Run into Flowers" by French nu-shoegazers and Pitchfork faves M83 and a remix of Westban's German hit "Oldschool, Baby". With vocals by Nena (of "99 Luftballoons" fame), who wields her retro charm as a weapon, "Oldschool, Baby" flits between quoting small elements of Italo-piano and acid house and 80s electro, drawing on the charms of the past without ever rooting itself in one place and time. "We are the moment/ Here to last," Nena claims on a track that even outdoes the set's other great pop moments, the pair of mixes of Heiko Voss' contagious "I Think About You" that bookend the mix. (Voss' oftentimes partner Thomas Schaeben appears twice, including a collaboration with Geiger and Schad Privat called "Really Real", a swoon song whose superfluous title fits its overflowing sound.)
Elsewhere, the always thrilling Superpitcher is represented by his Total 5 glam-shuffle track "Mushroom", and a newer Mayer favorite, Richard Davis, is tossed into the mix a couple of times-- most memorably on "Bring Me Closer", a nightmare filled with haunting skips and jumps, baroque strings that seem to move in multiple directions at once, and an uneasy central pulse.
The central pulse on Fabric 13, Villalobos' "Easy Lee", is more of a solemn, battered lub. One of the highlights of his Alcachofa album, the Chilean ex-pat's woozy, weak vocodered voice sounds even more ominous and mournful among the near-gothic tones of Mayer's mix. Villalobos' work is a fitting foundation for this record, a mix of surging, sharp dance rhythms which never build to any of the kind of overpowering peaks that could keep home listeners and/or tech-house novices at arm's length.
Every so often Mayer will get the odd criticism that he's simply an excellent ringleader and idea man, sort of the Dave Eggers of tech-house. Well, that line of talk is frankly wrong. He expertly scouts and attracts the talent, sequences the tracks, and sets the tone for the entire sound-- despite his own productions remaining sadly few and far between. Michael Mayer's two mixes and his Peel Session mark him as one of the year's most vital artists, a sort of weatherman who determines which way the wind blows in Berlin, Cologne, and any place where ears are cocked. | 2003-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fabric | November 13, 2003 | 8.5 | 49d9a3d1-7ff5-4d36-985c-fbec038571f1 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The meeting of unashamed, celebratory club music and rock star fandom is what gives Primal Scream's 1991 album Screamadelica its particular mood, half strutting with confidence, half yearning for transcendence. It’s a full-length manifesto not just for the brotherhood of clubbing but for the syncretic approach to rock Primal Scream were exploring. | The meeting of unashamed, celebratory club music and rock star fandom is what gives Primal Scream's 1991 album Screamadelica its particular mood, half strutting with confidence, half yearning for transcendence. It’s a full-length manifesto not just for the brotherhood of clubbing but for the syncretic approach to rock Primal Scream were exploring. | Primal Scream: Screamadelica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21328-screamadelica/ | Screamadelica | A trumpet riff; a louche, echoey, funk groove scoured by trails of guitar; a snatch of dialogue from The Wild Angels – "we wanna be free – to do what we wanna do". In February 1990, Screamadelica’s lead single "Loaded" made for an odd UK hit. Its sample soup might have put you in mind of tracks by DJs like Coldcut, but more laid back, and with the magpie wit replaced by studied cool.
The vibe of "Loaded" was unusual enough. The identity of its makers was what really startled. Primal Scream had already jumped from sweet-toothed jangle-pop, which Bobby Gillespie’s reedy voice suited well, to scuzzy proto-grunge, which it really didn’t. Reviewers found the band’s second self-titled LP an awkward experience, which explains why a further lurch in direction on "Loaded" attracted as much mockery as delight. Great single, everyone agreed – but was it actually Primal Scream in anything but name?
"Loaded" had precedent – the warm, loping shuffle of the Stone Roses’ "Fools’ Gold" for one – but its status was set as much by what came after. Gillespie wasn’t the only indie bandleader to find himself a new groove, and the summer of 1990 was speckled with similar hits from the obscurest of sources: the Soup Dragons, the Beloved, the Farm. Like earlier psychedelic explosions, you might argue how much of this was down to the liberating effects of drugs and music on shy boys in bands, and how much was down to the more worldly urge to make some fast money and get on TV. The indie-dance bubble inflated, and a saucer-eyed version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" by unknown chancers Candy Flip probably marked the exact moment it burst. Months after that, the Primal Scream LP finally came out.
If welding "dance" and "rock" was all it achieved, its 18-month gestation would have hurt Screamadelica. The album might have been a mere appendix to a briefly promising scene. Fortunately, Screamadelica's power isn’t in an abstract clash of two different genres, but in the marriage of two very similar sensibilities.
One is Bobby Gillespie’s. Primal Scream’s output has sometimes been dismissed as "record collection rock", their versatility no more than a procession of learned poses – the Byrds, rave, krautrock, post-punk. But Gillespie’s approach is less bandwagon-jumping and more a kind of aesthetic cosplay, where his fannish intensity of identification works to overcome the limitations of technique. The comedown blues of "Damaged" is Screamadelica’s weakest song, but Gillespie’s conviction makes it essential to the record.
The other is producer Andy Weatherall’s. Weatherall, along with Terry Farley who remixed the "Come Together" single, was part of the Boy’s Own DJ and fanzine collective in the earliest days of London Acid House. Boy’s Own loved big, uplifting records, played any genre they fancied, and everything they did, in print or on record, was touched with a cheeky swagger. The euphoric splash of Italo house piano at the climax of "Don’t Fight It, Feel It", Screamadelica’s most floor-ready track, is a great Weatherall moment.
The meeting of these approaches – unashamed, celebratory club music and rock star fandom – is what gives Screamadelica its particular mood, half strutting with confidence, half yearning for transcendence. One result is that the record is often better when Bobby Gillespie is a presiding spirit rather than an actual singer. Compare album centrepiece "Come Together" with its single version, where Gillespie enacts a loved-up Ecstasy high in winsome style. The LP drops his vocals, reshapes the track around the gospel backing singers, and it becomes something titanic. It’s a full-length manifesto not just for the brotherhood of clubbing but for the syncretic approach to rock Primal Scream were exploring. "All those are just labels", thunders a sampled Reverend Jesse Jackson, "We know that music is music." If you want to know how joyful – and how corny – pop’s discovery of rave could feel in 1991, this is where to start.
Other high points use the frontman better. "Higher Than The Sun" casts Gillespie as an astral voyager in a post-rave take on Tim Buckley’s "Starsailor". He sounds as awed by its soundscape of hoots, harpsichords, ambient drift and trumpet blasts as the listener. 13th Floor Elevators cover "Slip Inside This House" is just as questing, but more earthy and urgent, with a ragged-voiced Robert Young pushed beyond his limits by the groove.
Screamadelica is a limit-breaking exercise in general, exploring a central question: what is ‘a band’ in the remix age? One reason the LP remains a classic is that its answer to this is so bold and open-ended – ‘Primal Scream’ here is anything from a rock group having the time of their lives on "Movin’ On Up", to a vaporous but definite presence on "Higher Than The Sun (A Dub Symphony In Two Parts)". The scoffers’ question about "Loaded" – is this really Primal Scream? – is firmly answered: it is if it feels that way.
The fact that Primal Scream, and others, quickly retreated from this answer doesn’t make it less true. But even by 1992’s Dixie-Narco EP – included on this reissue - the band were downplaying the clubbing influence in favour of something more rootsy, recording new tracks in Memphis. Ultimately, the group’s own preference for being a rock’n’roll touring unit – with associated debauchery – stopped them pushing harder on the doors Screamadelica unlocked.
The two bonus discs fall either side of the tightrope they were walking – a collection of mixes, and a document of the group’s 1992 touring set. The former, like most mix collections, isn’t meant for linear listening, but assorted nearly-there versions of "Loaded" show a great idea coming together and the 12" of "Higher Than The Sun" is a glorious re-immersion in the song’s sensory otherworld.
The live disc finds a ramshackle group admirably committed to showing their audience a great time, twisting Screamadelica’s grooves into more band-friendly shapes in the process. Some of them suffer – the segue from "Higher Than The Sun" into a clodhopping fragment of Sly Stone’s "Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey" is an excruciating flip from Gillespie’s finest impulses into his worst. But at best, like on the vocal version of "Come Together", the tracks wear their extra muscle well. And even if it closes down half of what made Screamadelica special – its reinvention of band as aesthetic – it pulls focus onto the other half. The record is in places ambitious, cosmic, showily wasted – but the thing it is most is a great party album. "Loaded", "Movin’ On Up", "Don’t Fight It, Feel It" are still immense dance-rock singles, and Screamadelica is one of alternative music’s great periodic rediscoveries of rhythm. Dance music threw open new wardrobes for British indie – and an inveterate dresser-up like Bobby Gillespie could, and did, take full advantage. | 2016-01-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Sony | January 4, 2016 | 9 | 49dc266d-f471-421d-bcc6-351f133af3df | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
The English producer’s new album reflects his gift for meticulous construction, but it feels more akin to a well-curated playlist than a unified statement. | The English producer’s new album reflects his gift for meticulous construction, but it feels more akin to a well-curated playlist than a unified statement. | Vegyn: The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vegyn-the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions/ | The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions | Joseph Thornalley values his privacy. On the rare occasion that the London-born artist gives an interview, he keeps his cards close, only offering enough details to foster more curiosity. Thornalley, who records under the name Vegyn, doesn’t often perform live and mostly steers clear of social media, but has worked with megastars like Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, Kali Uchis, and Dean Blunt. His music doesn’t provide many intimate details either, but it does reflect his eclectic influences, ranging from dubby ambient to lush techno to toystore electro, as well as his deep love of hip-hop. Even if it isn’t explicitly personal, his music is always meticulously constructed and frequently gorgeous, the product of a songwriter’s approach to textural electronic production. Thornalley’s new album, The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, is another ornate but shadowy collection in his discography. It sounds incredible, but ultimately doesn’t reveal much beyond his wide-ranging taste.
Born of Thornalley’s itinerant lifestyle as a label head and in-demand producer, The Road to Hell took shape in various studios, hotel rooms, and apartments around the world. He was hoping to break out of his usual production methods, challenging himself to write songs on piano and guitar, instruments he hasn’t yet mastered. Many of the Vegyn trademarks are present—cannily programmed drums, sparkling synths that sit in the mix like low-lying clouds—but Thornalley tames the genre-hopping just a touch, keeping his sounds contemporary but homing in on the yearning emotional core of ’00s R&B crooners like Ne-Yo and Toni Braxton. “Last Night I Dreamt I Was Alone” and “Halo Flip” apply a loose jungle framework to the emotional balladry of the aughts, while “Stress Test” sounds like Craig David circa Born to Do It studying at Lofi Girl’s desk. These tracks are impeccably assembled, and, in most cases, quite catchy if listened to on their own outside of the album. But as a whole, The Road to Hell doesn’t quite gel, feeling more akin to a well-curated, vibey playlist than a unified statement.
It’s when Thornalley really lets loose that the record excels. The Road to Hell’s trip-hop flirtations are among its strongest cuts; “Turn Me Inside,” a rainy-day combination of glowing Rhodes, stuttering percussion, and Léa Sen’s smoky vocals, is a particular highlight. “The Path Less Travelled” is a blissful blast of big beat, sunburst synthesizers echoing into the distance like cathartic shouts from a mountaintop. Thornalley takes an especially strange left turn at the album’s midpoint and drops “Makeshift Tourniquet,” a festival-ready house heater. It’s the most propulsive song on the album, building tension through shuffling drums and pads that wobble in and out of tune like heat lines off a stretch of desert highway. When the song explodes into a flurry of spacey sequences in the final minute, it marks one of The Road to Hell’s most thrilling moments, but it doesn’t signify a distinct change in direction. Like most everything on the record, it jams and then we move on.
The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions is Thornalley’s most crowd-pleasing project to date, even if it isn’t his most cohesive. These songs are bigger and more immediate than much of his previous work, and an excellent display of the range in which he operates. But imagine if he were to explore the adventurous potential of a song like “In the Front,” which starts as a glitchy Boards of Canada tribute before morphing into an aching, string-laden swirl with trap drums straight out of James Blake’s playbook. Perhaps an entire project of shapeshifting arrangements would be too personal for comfort, a too-clear window into Thornalley’s mind. For now, he seems content to keep us at arm’s length, his exquisite music a shield against the vulnerability of really being seen. | 2024-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | PLZ Make It Ruins | April 19, 2024 | 7.1 | 49e01d4d-dcc9-4485-9973-6d37bfc0aeab | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
On his first album as Deepchord in four years, Rod Modell continues to refine his bustling, urban, singular take on dub techno. | On his first album as Deepchord in four years, Rod Modell continues to refine his bustling, urban, singular take on dub techno. | Deepchord: *Functional Designs * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deepchord-functional-designs/ | Functional Designs | Deepchord’s Rod Modell is a singular presence in a genre that makes a virtue of anonymity. Starting with Basic Channel in the 1990s, dub-techno artists have often attempted to remove themselves from their work, recording under cryptic aliases and fueling speculation about their identities. Modell, meanwhile, poses in photos with a tobacco pipe and isn’t afraid to present himself as an individual with a fierce vision, positioning his music as an alternative to the “Berghain sound” of techno that he finds spiritually damaging. Appropriately, his music reflects a more human presence than most dub techno: Taking place in a dense cityscape instead of an endless void, it’s more interested in everyday life than cosmic awe. His music is pristinely sound-designed instead of lo-fi, urban instead of elemental, crafted by hand instead of shaped by water and wind.
Functional Designs is Modell’s first release as Deepchord since 2018’s Immersions, and the brief ambient opener “Amber” immediately re-introduces the familiar hallmarks of his sound: hi-def production, dense layers of phasers and static, bustling field recordings of people and machines, voluptuous chords that simmer low in the mix and give the project its name. When Modell brings in the kick drum on “Darkness Falls,” it’s like stepping onto a subway train, or being sucked into a vortex. Modell often titles his records in the plural—20 Electrostatic Soundfields, Immersions, Auratones—as if to suggest we’re meant to take them as collections of tracks rather than front-to-back statements. Yet the sense of forward motion Modell’s music generates is so powerful we still get the sense of each track hurtling breathlessly into the next, racing headlong to the finish line.
Though Modell’s recent sound stands alone in dub techno, he’s been committed to it at least since 2010’s Liumin, released in collaboration with Stephen Hitchell as Deepchord Presents Echospace, which wove field recordings from Tokyo into one of electronic music’s most vivid evocations of metropolitan sprawl. Functional Designs is of a piece with Liumin, Auratones, Immersions, and most of Modell’s other recent work, and the record’s most surprising moments come less from Modell finding bold new contexts for his style than new sounds that work well within it. A vocoder casts vivid splashes of color on “CloudSat,” and a percussive effect on “Transit Systems” offers a ghostly hint of piano. “Strangers,” the prickliest track here, builds tension with a creepy tolling bell and a leaden hi-hat that lends a real sense of weight to this vaporous music.
Functional Designs finds Modell playing firmly to his strengths, but if you were looking forward to the producer expanding and re-thinking his sound on his return to the Deepchord project rather than continuing to do what he does best, you might come away from Functional Designs a bit underwhelmed. It’d be tricky to identify which Deepchord album many of these tracks are on from a blind test, and though “Strangers” nicely sours the album’s vibe in the middle, there’s no pervasive shift in mood, sound, or approach to give Functional Designs much of a distinct personality within his catalog. Modell’s vision for dub techno is one of the most striking since its inception, but he seems more content to keep fine-tuning it rather than use it to open new dimensions. | 2022-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Soma | October 3, 2022 | 7 | 49e353b4-93a9-4325-83c1-733450769a3d | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The German DJ offers a spellbinding summary of her sound with this compilation of slow, ominous machine grooves. It’s a cross-section of her record collection, but also a map of a community. | The German DJ offers a spellbinding summary of her sound with this compilation of slow, ominous machine grooves. It’s a cross-section of her record collection, but also a map of a community. | Lena Willikens: Selectors 005 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lena-willikens-selectors-005/ | Selectors 005 | Dekmantel’s Selectors series is an unusual proposition. Though a DJ helms each installment, they are compilations, not mixes. The theme varies according to the selector. Germany’s Motor City Drum Ensemble summed up his soulful predilections by licensing a bunch of decades-old, out-of-print house music; the Berghain resident Marcel Dettmann highlighted his industrial roots with tracks from Front 242, Ministry, and Clan of Xymox. The franchise is a bit like Back to Mine or Late Night Tales, just for people that drop their monthly grocery budget on rare 12"s on Discogs.
The concept is an outgrowth of the recent trend for “selector”-style DJs, said to dig deeper than their merely crowd-pleasing peers. (Dekmantel, a Dutch label and events outfit, also has a spin-off festival, Selectors, dedicated to the same.) On its face, unearthing seldom-heard records might seem to be a basic part of the DJ’s job; that it has been deemed worthy of notice says something about the state of dance music, where the quality of surprise has been downgraded to a nice-to-have rather than an essential component.
But if anyone deserves the tag, the German DJ Lena Willikens does. Her style of playing—slow and ominous, given to grinding machine grooves and clammy atmospheres—is unusually distinctive. She honed her chops as a resident at Düsseldorf’s famously eclectic Salon des Amateurs, a club known for its wide-open musical policy, and her sets are full of curveballs and head-scratchers, the sorts of tracks Shazam can’t begin to puzzle out.
That Willikens has released very little original music under her name makes Selectors 005 feel even more worthwhile as a rare opportunity to hear the world through her ears. At Barcelona’s Sónar last year, she turned a daytime, outdoor slot usually reserved for feel-good grooves into a dungeon acid séance, meting out bone-chilling EBM that stubbornly refused to break a sweat. Here, too, the tempos tend toward cryogenic. Minor keys predominate, and textures are resolutely analog, favoring unvarnished drum machines, gravelly synths, and an omnipresent lo-fi sheen.
Willikens’ repertoire is heavy on material given to her by friends and peers, and that’s largely what she’s chosen to run with here, filling half of Selectors 005 with exclusive tracks. The grimly droning “Sepses” is by a German duo, Garland, so unknown that as of this writing, they don’t even have their own Discogs entry. Willikens first encountered the Romanian producer Borusiade, whose paranoid coldwave fugue “Night Drive (An Exercise in Indulgence)” is a standout, through one of her DJ sets on SoundCloud. It’s striking how many tracks come with a personal story attached—a chance encounter and a shared musical affinity that led to a friendship. You get the sense that Willikens’ sets aren’t just a representation of her own tastes. They are a manifestation of a shared aesthetic, a map of a community.
When it comes to the previously released music here, none of her rarities are all that rare; many of them could be had for a few dollars, assuming you knew to look for them in the first place. “Morning Star (Dubmix)” is a 1996 track by Sandoz, a dubby alter ego of Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk, sourced from a dime-a-dozen electronic comp from the period. Vromb’s “Amalgame” is a sepulchral, slow-motion techno cut from 2001 that she discovered lurking in the Cologne record shop A-Musik’s dusty CD racks. Sysex’s excellent “Deep Space” has been hiding in plain sight for the past 24 years, tucked away on a long-forgotten CD anthology on Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 label. What’s so gratifying about all these is the way that, in context, they begin to flesh out the outlines of an idea. Heard on its own, “Amalgame” might not sound like much, just a minimalist variant on the kind of thing Pan Sonic did better. But here, it becomes part of a dialogue.
That idea is best illustrated by Varoshi Fame’s “Voice of Command (Chekov Re-Edit),” the compilation’s absolute highlight. The song originally comes from a 1987 cassette on a Toronto industrial label; the pounding, hypnotic remix comes from Leeds’ Chekov, a rising producer who introduced himself to Willikens at one of her gigs and asked if he could send her his music. His instincts were on point: Piercing and percussive, laced with laser zaps and sinister shouts, his edit navigates past and present in a way that’s perfectly in keeping with Willikens’ tarnished psychedelia. And without her curatorial hand, we might never have heard it at all. | 2018-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dekmantel | April 19, 2018 | 7.8 | 49f7bf74-0682-4627-80b2-70b6f5bf6502 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
A dizzying mix of Baroque, religious, mid-century, and contemporary classical music, this soundtrack captures its film’s tempestuous relationship with power and feelings. | A dizzying mix of Baroque, religious, mid-century, and contemporary classical music, this soundtrack captures its film’s tempestuous relationship with power and feelings. | Various Artists: The Favourite (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-the-favourite-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | The Favourite (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | The Favourite is a frenzied comedy of manic twists and turns, at least in short form—that is, its trailer. Soundtracked by Handel, Vivaldi, and, ultimately, dissonance, Emma Stone falls in mud, Olivia Colman faints, and Joe Alwyn dances some 18th-century variant on flossing. It seems fast, consequential, and mad, a feeling amplified by those melting strings and rumbling piano notes, courtesy of French musique concrète pioneer Luc Ferrari.
Stretched out to its full length, the insanity of The Favourite reveals itself languidly. The third English-language film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite tells the story of Great Britain’s Queen Anne (played by Olivia Colman) and the power struggle qua love triangle that develops with the regal Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and the wayward cousin Abigail Masham (Emma Stone). The soundtrack, likewise, disorients carefully. Across 78 minutes, it presents a thrillingly bizarre mix of baroque and contemporary classical music, sprawling from Johann Sebastian Bach and his son Wilhelm Friedemann to British experimental composer Anna Meredith and even Elton John. The ways that these incongruent parts interact define the soundtrack, creating a chimera that is neither wholly new nor dated, just as Lanthimos teases the concept of historical drama with a film as serious as it is campy and loose.
After seven sprightly minutes of concertos, the soundtrack slams to an intriguing halt with the start of Ferrari’s “Didascalies.” It begins with the quietest of violas, so low that the notes are hardly discernible for the first half. In his own analysis, Ferrari wrote that he incorporated son mémorisé (“Memorized Sound”) into “Didascalies,” a technique that involved the late composer recreating sounds from his natural environment by memory. Heard here, the piece requires the listener to attempt to remember the preceding pomp amid Ferrari’s lurking murmur. By the end of “Didascalies,” the viola, which once kept pace like a metronome, saws across the music in atonal slashes. Belgian pianist Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven hammers hard, rendering chaos in the place of what was once quietude. “Didascalies” underscores the idea that even the most solemn scenarios can devolve dramatically, a lesson implicit in The Favourite. Following this out-of-body episode, the first movement of a lively Vivaldi concerto snaps us back to royal business.
The album reaches its most curious stretch in the middle, with 19 minutes of organ music. The passage toys with seriousness and levity, placing church music alongside a J.S. Bach pastorale and fantasia. A late movement of Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur feels rigid yet formless, as if the organist is playing one-handed. The Bach pieces, in contrast, are lively. British organist Peter Hurford’s performance of the fantasia was even issued as a single, a fitting representation of The Favourite at large—a bit anachronistic, amusing, and idiosyncratic.
A quiet movement from Meredith’s Songs for the M8 leads the listener toward a feeling of dread after a period of loopiness. The soundtrack pursues that mournful tone, its most somber moment arriving with Schubert’s final piano sonata, finished two months before he died. It’s performed, no less, by Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel, considered the preeminent Schubert interpreter for his balance of heavy emotion and melodrama-free restraint. Beautiful, patient, and haunted, it nearly lifts the listener out of the soundtrack’s dizzying atmosphere altogether and into its own headspace. For the sonata’s 11 minutes, the world is bleak and important. But then it’s over.
And just like that, The Favourite’s soundtrack ends with Elton John’s harpsichord pleasantry, “Skyline Pigeon,” the wink following a deep sigh. We turn instantly from a composer’s final writings to a bit of fun, with a pigeon flapping its wings. This is the same trick Lanthimos plays again and again with the film. Enacted by flawed humans, power and feelings are not sacred or pure, the movie submits. The Favourite’s soundtrack, in turn, is a fussy but amusing collection, refusing to commit to a mood more distinct than emotional unrest. | 2019-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Decca | January 22, 2019 | 7.3 | 49fd775c-b727-4efa-b101-02bb7b995a30 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Side B is less a collection of b-sides than it is a continuation of last year's full-length smash, heart-swelling and heart-draining pop that exists in worlds just before or after love. | Side B is less a collection of b-sides than it is a continuation of last year's full-length smash, heart-swelling and heart-draining pop that exists in worlds just before or after love. | Carly Rae Jepsen: E•MO•TION Side B | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22354-emotion-side-b/ | E•MO•TION Side B | Carly Rae Jepsen doesn’t sing love songs, exactly. A friend pointed out that Carly lives in the intervals—when love is just out of frame, acting as a gravitational force. Her songs are preludes and codas. “First Time,” the opening track of E•MO•TION* Side B*—a collection of outtakes released a year after last year’s E•MO•TION—is a coda and prelude at the same time. It begins as a cassette-recording of its own chorus, a distorted and decayed memory of itself, which is then rewound to the start of its verse before it drops in with a sudden, severe clarity. The song is about a messy breakup that she tries to guide back to the more intelligible beginnings of a relationship. She sings, “When my heart breaks it always feels like the first time,” and, “Through all the heartbreak we’ll make it feel like the first time.” This is how time works in Jepsen’s songs. Every emotion contains all previous instances of its feeling and is experienced as a collapsed whole. The songs on E•MO•TION* Side B* are pop songs, gorgeous and direct, but they are also extremely recursive spaces, blushing compressions of time, small infinities of heartbreak.
These songs, sometimes more so than the album for which they were recorded, fold in synthetic textures from ’80s pop and give them a modern finish, producing music that feels incongruent with both of its intended time periods. The songs can derive meaning and power from their associative design; in “Higher,” for instance, synths provide both the song’s texture and rhythm, and guitars glimmer as if they were stars embedded in the track; it produces the crisp, fussed architecture of a Scritti Politti song and fills it with new feelings. It’s the most transparent “love” song released from Jepsen’s sessions for E•MO•TION (for which apparently 250 songs were written) in that it takes place in the context of an actual relationship. Elsewhere she is repelled or attracted by love, either by its presence or absence. “We should know better, this can’t last forever/Kiss me one more time,” she sings in “The One,” a song in which she actively resists the boundaries of a relationship but still finds herself slipping into its pull. There’s a shyness to the beat of “The One,” a kind of internal swerve as if it’s resisting the same designations and definitions as Jepsen. Form and function also align in “Cry,” a song animated by a synth bass that’s just muted enough to invert its usual effect, generating a feeling of weightlessness. Jepsen uses this environment to describe the cruel asymmetry of being in a relationship with someone who’s emotionally unavailable.
The songs on E•MO•TION* Side B* feel decidedly more like a continuation of E•MO•TION itself. Still, a few are included to reveal a more disordered process, a sense that Jepsen was working through as many forms and ideas as possible until she found the aesthetic for E•MO•TION. “Body Language,” co-written with Dev Hynes, builds to a chorus that feels like an unremarkable subplot of the verse. “Store” is fascinating, in that it sounds like different songs written at different times had inorganically fused together. The verse is carefully sung, a dream sequence from which the chorus is a violent waking. “I’m just going to the store,” Jepsen sings over synths that resemble individual belches of a saxophone, “You might not see me anymore.” Its greatest appeal lies perhaps in the conceit of the lyric, that Jepsen might casually break up with someone by walking to a nearby deli and dematerializing.
2015’s E•MO•TION has the design of a big pop record, but it found more critical success than commercial. “With pop I think the hidden article of faith is that music can take over public space, stamp itself on a moment,” Pitchfork contributor Tom Ewing wrote in 2011. “If a pop single can't do this, then what is it?” Like most pop music that’s only “pop” in an idiomatic sense, it tends to function as an unintended secret. Jepsen released E•MO•TION* Side B* in this spirit, a gift to the fiercely devoted if niche fanbase she’s amassed since the release of E•MO•TION. That the songs can sound enormous while maintaining this kind of person-to-person intimacy is Jepsen’s particular talent. On “Fever,” in the weird and unstable space just before a breakup, Jepsen describes stealing her boyfriend’s bicycle and then riding it back to his house, only to discover he’s not home. His absence causes a near silence in the song, where Jepsen's musical and emotional environment are vacuumed into the throb of a bass drum, a kind of vertigo and panic encoded in sound. “You want to break my heart/All right,” she sings, “I caught your fever/I’ll be feeling it forever.” In this fluctuating reality, the synths she sings over have a glow that’s both alien and familiar, like objects under a blacklight. It feels like the feeling. | 2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Schoolboy | September 8, 2016 | 7.1 | 4a00b025-a049-4015-be2e-d99380c7ba1f | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
On the first release on his new label Young Ethics, the Swedish producer steps outside his hazy comfort zone. | On the first release on his new label Young Ethics, the Swedish producer steps outside his hazy comfort zone. | DJ Seinfeld: Galazy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-seinfeld-galazy-ep/ | Galazy EP | DJ Seinfeld is something of an enigma: the accidental spokesperson for an internet micro-genre he largely disavowed, a producer whose silly moniker is at odds with the earnestness of his music. Galazy strips away some of the mystery. It is Jakobsson’s first release on his own record label, Young Ethics, an imprint whose name comes, he says, from “uncertain moments [that] stem from the maturity (or lack thereof) of the industry.” This quest for clarity seems to have trickled down into the music itself. Gone are the hazy textures of his 2017 full-length debut, Time Spent Away From U, and the tortured bassline exercises of last year’s Sakura EP. This is a newly focused Jakobsson, one in search of a sturdier sonic identity that might hold a better shot at standing the test of time.
Lead single “Electrian” is a dreamy opener; digital bird calls gradually swell into low-end catharsis. It’s perhaps the closest thing we get to the Seinfeld sound that drew listeners to him in the first place. The song taps into the introspective moods demonstrated by similarly atmospheric-minded producers like Lone, its long ambient tails propelled forward by breakbeats and the occasional well-placed cowbell.
“Uforia” and the title track seem to have been made with the Swedish producer’s last few years of DJing in mind. Where original productions he slipped into his recent entry in the vaunted DJ-Kicks mix series were pretty low-key, Jakobsson has no problem popping off here. “Uforia” aims to fill warehouses with its menacing techno percussion and off-kilter synth stabs, like a supercharged version of Radiohead’s “The Gloaming.”
On “Galazy,” Jakobsson resorts to one of the most widely sampled records of all time, Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” He eschews the ubiquitous “Yeah! Woo!” in favor of a secondary loop, but the song never transcends or even lives up to its iconic foundational element. By the midpoint, James Brown’s voice is a fly in the ointment, buried but ever audible amidst a tangle of Reese bass and chunky snares.
Jakobsson has demonstrated before that his grander vision lies beyond the realm of the dancefloor: The DJ-Kicks opener “I See U” combined field recordings with gratuitous amounts of reverb to set an otherworldly scene, with nary a beat in sight. Similarly, the most promising moment of the EP is “Mono Melo,” a slower track that sounds like an early Massive Attack demo, with its swung drums and brittle, digitally distorted synths. Gone are the days of cranked-up tape saturation deployed for the sake of an aesthetic; having helped define lo-fi house, DJ Seinfeld is reaching for something more. | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Ethics | May 21, 2019 | 7.1 | 4a0aa597-a6ef-450b-b979-42dbe289c620 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Impersonator is Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto's second album as Majical Cloudz. Like their live shows, it is searingly, emotionally direct, extraordinarily sung, and hypnotically focused, made special by Welsh's sense of emotional urgency. | Impersonator is Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto's second album as Majical Cloudz. Like their live shows, it is searingly, emotionally direct, extraordinarily sung, and hypnotically focused, made special by Welsh's sense of emotional urgency. | Majical Cloudz: Impersonator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18042-majical-cloudz-impersonator/ | Impersonator | Imagine someone at your otherwise-mundane party has dropped ecstasy; he's the only one there who has done so. Flushed, sweaty, intense, he stares everyone directly in the eyes and says things like "I see this light coming from behind and growing to enormous size. This is magic." Ignoring everyone's obvious discomfort, he presses on mercilessly: "Hey mister," he asks, locking eyes with you. "Don't you want to be right here?"
Devon Welsh sings these lines on Impersonator, his second album with synth programmer Matthew Otto under the name Majical Cloudz. And this role-- the Jehovah's Witness ringing your doorbell at 7 a.m. to save your life, the AA member interrupting your lunch hour to explain how his fear of being loved led him to key your Volkswagen last April-- is the role that Welsh plays on Impersonator. In his searingly direct live shows, which have often ended with Welsh standing in the crowd, basking in the communal emotional wellspring he's summoned, and on record, Welsh burns through surrounding obstacles in order make you feel what he is feeling. Impersonator is a gorgeous record-- extraordinarily sung, hypnotically focused-- but it is Welsh's sense of emotional urgency that makes it special. No-one else is likely to pin your ear back in quite the same way this year.
The foundation of the music is synth pop, though Welsh and Otto use it to construct glacially paced, small pieces of music with almost no harmonic motion. Most songs are made of three or fewer elements: "Childhood's End" has a four-note keyboard melody, two bare notes of synth string, one droning "ahhh" note, and a heartbeat-pulse click track. The air around each element is as palpable-- and as important to the track-- as the elements themselves. On the title track, some voices, looped and babbling, are the only sounds accompanying Welsh, apart from a hushed burst of church organ. There is a natural, inexorable feel to the repetition of these sounds; like clear water quarreling over smooth stones, they're an impersonal constant that situates Welsh's painfully personal performance somewhere larger than himself.
The simplicity of the sound also mirrors the purity and directness of Welsh's language. Here's his idea of an icebreaker: "Hey man, sooner or later you'll be dead." "I wanna feel like somebody's darling," he sings on "Impersonator". Welsh's are the carefully chosen words of someone whose life depends on getting his point across, and his lyrics often read, on paper, like self-help: "I feel the mood to love myself and I know I'm trying," he says on "Mister". But to someone dangling by a thread, self-help clichés take on a terrible significance, and Welsh's voice conveys the desperation of someone who has been tasked with believing in the simplest things again.
Welsh has said that, although he gravitated naturally towards the frontman role of whatever band he was in, he was never trained to sing. Listening to his expertly modulated phrasing, his long-breathed lines, and his rich, even tone on Impersonator, it's kind of hard to believe. (For his part, Welsh attributes his natural vocal command to the fact that his father is actor Kenneth Welsh, best known for playing "Twin Peaks"' Windom Earle.) There is a hint of Depeche Mode's David Gahan in the plummy edges of his voice, but Gahan's camp and hauteur are burned away; Gahan used those tools to establish distance, and Welsh's aim is to close it. He is startlingly flexible, capable of dipping to Calvin Johnson-basso profundo lows, but without Johnson's training-wheels wobbles. He can ascend effortlessly into a bell-clear head-voice that recalls the George Michael of "One More Try". His velvety, heated vocal take on "Turns Turns Turns", while not a pyrotechnic performance, remains one of the most nakedly beautiful pieces of singing I've heard this year, in any genre.
You can hear the idiosyncrasies of Welsh's self-training poke out of some of the album's odder edges. On "Childhood's End", the word "come," sung in an ascending melody, separates out so that it sounds like "come home." On the same song, he turns the word "me" into three words, each with a different vowel. These quirks work as part of Welsh's larger forceful disarmament strategy: “People that have written reviews of our shows have commented that, ‘Oh, he seemed nervous or he seemed uncomfortable on stage' … I tend to take that as a compliment," he said. "I never want to be the kind of performer that seems completely calm and collected on stage; I would rather … [be real] about the idea that when you get on stage it always feels new.” On "I Do Sing for You", Welsh reaches out to soothe a member of his own embarrassed audience: "You would laugh, but I'm on stage for you/ I do sing for you/ Of course I do, and I love to." There is very little you can do in the face of such an onslaught of loving kindness, so you surrender. Impersonator gently twists your arm like this, song-by-song and note-by-note, and it is as discomfiting as it is transcendent. | 2013-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 22, 2013 | 8.2 | 4a0ffedb-966b-42b6-95a9-95c5d487a863 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Gothenburg emo band specialize in commiseration rock, crafting combustible rallying cries for the overwhelmed and underemployed. | The Gothenburg emo band specialize in commiseration rock, crafting combustible rallying cries for the overwhelmed and underemployed. | I Love Your Lifestyle: The Movie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/i-love-your-lifestyle-the-movie/ | The Movie | There’s a utopian dreaminess to the Gothenburg music scene in Sweden that typically trickles down even to the punk acts. But even in paradise, apparently someone’s gotta make copies and take out the trash, and that’s where I Love Your Lifestyle comes in. On The Movie, they sound like they’ve come out swinging from a south Philly basement only to slump back after yet another soul-sucking day at work. They make commiseration rock, proceeding from the understanding that the depression borne from a shitty job and an utter lack of romantic prospects is universal.
Their 2016 debut We Go Way Back made them one of the leading figures of the international wing of the ongoing emo revival—bands for whom Algernon Cadwallader and Glocca Morra are primary sources, as opposed to Cap’n Jazz. It’s heartening to see the remarkable digital footprint of bands that never got much notice in their prime, as kids from Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Italy and Russia wear the same dad hats and shorts, singing about convenience stores while playing tapping solos in odd time signatures as if they were from any suburb in Middle America. In so doing, they avail themselves of the scene’s welcoming leniency, which explains how a math-rock band named Chinese Football is actually opening for the real thing instead of getting mocked or sued out of existence.
Having mastered 2008 simulacra, ILYL have advanced to something genuinely exciting on its own terms—a combustible flashpoint where emo’s unhinged rhythms meets indie-pop song forms. “Failing again, so many failures in a row,” Lukas Feurst sings on the album’s very first line, and the verse on “Imagination Station” ends right there. Really, what else is there to say? Why bother waiting to get to the chorus, especially when it’s specifically about being tired of waiting for something to change? “Adrenaline Rush to Kill My Crush” takes a similarly oblong approach to pop structure, hinting at a version of “Friday I’m in Love,” where no one ever gets past hump day.
ILYL’s power-pop shift echoes the move the Promise Ring made between their first and second LPs, but where Nothing Feels Good sought Zen calm amidst post-collegiate anxiety, on The Movie, there really isn’t a single thing that feels good. “Feelings, I remember when they used to have their meaning,” Feurst sighs on the profoundly dejected acoustic lament “The Party,” sounding like a guy who’d get his lunch money taken by Jens Lekman or José González. And then comes compare-and-despair anthem “23,” where Feurst catches up with a friend who’s had two kids, “bought a house and voting Green,” only to realize that this guy somehow envies him. Feurst spends the gorgeous, retro-futurist folky title track watching movies about camping until the smell of garbage becomes unbearable (this is somehow not the song on The Movie called “Indoor Living”).
Such moments explore the classic dissonance in second (and fourth) wave emo—the use of kinetic energy to express the crippling buildup of potential energy. When Feurst doesn’t feel the will to go forward, I Love Your Lifestyle gets him there, one day or even one minute at a time. Where there’s motion, there’s hope, and throughout The Movie, there is always an off-kilter drum fill, a finger-tapping solo, or a shouted melody to indicate a possible way forward. On the penultimate “Perfect Life,” Feurst imagines a day when he’ll get off meds and “try something new like yoga.” “Sometimes when you look at me, I think you like me too,” Feurst sings at the end of “Adrenaline Rush,” breaking into an off-key karaoke of his own guitar solo as a preemptive celebration.
He pulls a similar trick on “Dreamy Dreams.” In just about any other genre, the hook of “Dreamy Dreams” would be a cry for help—“When you get home and you can finally be yourself/And you can not believe how you survived another day with that fake plastic version of yourself,” Feurst shouts. But here, it’s a rallying cry for the overwhelmed and underemployed, rewarding and nourishing as those three beers that await at home if you can just make it to 5 PM. | 2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dog Knights | May 18, 2019 | 8 | 4a16b20f-0eb4-41ca-9c6e-0ae469e6bfed | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The R&B singer offers the third installment of his sexually charged mixtape series, featuring his latest protegé Mike x Angel on eight of its 11 tracks. | The R&B singer offers the third installment of his sexually charged mixtape series, featuring his latest protegé Mike x Angel on eight of its 11 tracks. | Trey Songz: Anticipation 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22814-anticipation-3/ | Anticipation 3 | At the end of last December, videos surfaced of Trey Songz destroying a stage at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit during a mini-temper tantrum. The event staff who prevented Trigga from performing past the venue’s 11:30 pm curfew presented him a golden opportunity for free promo—the smirk on the singer’s mugshot, which went viral, all but announced “new music is dropping soon.” Sure enough, Trey Songz and his frequent collaborator, Fabolous, surprised fans with their joint EP Trappy New Years on New Year's Eve. Eleven days later (and fittingly on a “hump day” Wednesday), the singer released the third installment of his sexually charged Anticipation mix-tape series.
Interestingly, Anticipation 3 is a collaborative effort, not a solo turn. Although the cover highlights Trey mid-performance, roaring and ripped, (possibly a screengrab from the Joe Louis Arena incident???), the smaller print reads “FEAT. MIKE X ANGEL.” But Mike x Angel, Trey Songz’s latest protegé, is more than just a featured act: he’s on eight of the 11 tracks. The singer is Virginia’s answer to Toronto’s Tory Lanez, with hints of R&B cult fave Pleasure P from Pretty Ricky. Trey’s guest opens up the mixtape on the slow, loopy jaunt “A3” promising “party favors, party favors.”
With the assistance of his pupil, Trey Songz delivers on his usual dimpled-grin bedroom talk, but this time around he's consistently upstaged by other featured guests. New York’s Justine Darcenne breathes new life into Anticipation 3 as the female antagonist of “Find My Love,” and the frank voice on the excellent “Vibrator.” “Vibrator” also includes a great turn by Chicago rapper Chisanity, whose sounds like a deeper-voiced 21 Savage crossed with “Atlanta’s” fictional character Paper Boi. On the other hand, “93 Unleaded” could have worked without Dave East, whose bars and flow overwhelm the simplistic beat.
Like Trigga, Anticipation 3 dabbles with trap&b atmospherics, a la Bryson Tiller’s TRAPSOUL. But Trey’s voice is a little too powerful to blend into the background of the wispy production, and he is too much of an old-school star to disappear from the foreground for long. The best is saved for last: “Sho Nuff,” a slow jam suited for the “Quiet Storm” segments of late-night urban radio. The electric guitar chords and eager hook of “is you still my baby, she say sho’ you right” is Trey at his freshest, throwing all the way back to the vibe of his 2005 debut I Gotta Make It.
Surprisingly enough, the other show stealer comes from Mike x Angel on closing bonus track, “Anxious.” Trey Songz is nowhere to be found as Angel tenderly asks a lover “What are we doing? What should I call this?”. Instead, we’re held to anticipate new music from an up and coming talent, wondering if this could be a sign of an Aaron Hall being usurped by his Kellz. Only time will tell, but based on recent events, it seems highly unlikely Trigga would allow that to become a reality. | 2017-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | January 23, 2017 | 7.3 | 4a182e87-7c27-4fe9-95d5-11b0da1cda04 | Da'Shan Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/da'shan- smith/ | null |
Folk legends past and present team up on this intriguing EP. | Folk legends past and present team up on this intriguing EP. | Animal Collective / Vashti Bunyan: Prospect Hummer EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/192-prospect-hummer-ep/ | Prospect Hummer EP | British folk singer Vashti Bunyan didn't influence the current [insert modifier here]-folk trend in indie rock so much as anticipate it. There's no way to know if records by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom would sound any different had Bunyan never recorded Just Another Diamond Day in 1970, but songs from her lone album certainly sound fantastic sandwiched between cuts from Nino Rojo and The Milk-Eyed Mender. The record's spare production helps keep it from dating, but what really works today is Bunyan's soft, fragile Peter Pan voice. I imagine her understated whisper sounded out of step in its own time but now it sounds like a founding document of a certain school of indie singing.
Bunyan's return to music after three decades away has been a gradual stroll back to the center stage. Guesting on records from Piano Magic and Devendra Banhart, she hooked up with Animal Collective while they were in London last year to sing lead on three new songs, which, combined with a sound collage by the Geologist, make up this short EP. It's not as immediately obvious a pairing as the Banhart duet on Rejoicing in the Hands because Animal Collective's focus changes so radically from record to record and its priorities sometimes shift from "songs" per se to something else entirely. A thread through the band's work to this point has been a focus on the emotional content of sound, apart from the nuts and bolts of the music. Even with an acoustic and relatively pop record like Sung Tongs the textural fixations remain, if only in the droney guitar sum that's become something of an Animal Collective trademark. How Bunyan's approach would mesh wasn't entirely clear.
Prospect Hummer turns out to be an inspired meeting, as Animal Collective's material meets her Just Another Diamond Day aesthetic halfway. The common ground for everyone involved turns out to be the small details and pastoral mood of rural life. Hearing the familiar guitar swells that opens "It's You" brings us immediately back to the screened porch where Campfire Songs was recorded, while the presence of Bunyan's voice transports to a different but equally remote place. It's like suddenly finding a cluster of Maryland pines rooted on an English moor, something out of a dreamy film, with a vaporous melody that wants to drift up to the stars. The EP's title song is filmic in a different way, conjuring 30s Disney, Bunyan the graceful Snow White with Animal Collective's faithful dwarves trailing merrily behind, with a "wah-wah-wah" chorus that's certainly a marching tune. Words are hard to make out but something like "loved to run up the tree branch/ And in the middle of it is a puddle of water/ Wind of faithful voices" covers three of the four elements in short order.
The Geologist provides the fire, though it's more of a low-level simmer, on his instrumental "Baleen Sample". He wasn't there for the London sessions but his five-minute contribution serves as a contrast with the three vocal songs, incorporating the strummed acoustic but layering in sound effects and various other instruments (nice use of steel drum) to create something comparatively dense. The brief and playful "I Remember Learning How to Dive" has the band singing in unison with Bunyan, ending the record on an appropriately communal note. It's a short EP, in fact it could almost fit onto a 7-inch single, but Prospect Hummer doesn't waste a note or a breathy sigh. | 2005-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | FatCat | May 15, 2005 | 8.4 | 4a1a5c61-d751-480f-a1e5-4e7a501be7f6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After big-name co-signs for the smooth, self-made producer and vocalist Francis Farewell Starlite, his latest album doesn't quite live up to expectations. | After big-name co-signs for the smooth, self-made producer and vocalist Francis Farewell Starlite, his latest album doesn't quite live up to expectations. | Francis and the Lights: Farewell, Starlite! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22475-farewell-starlite/ | Farewell, Starlite! | Francis Farewell Starlite, the creative force behind the contemporary R&B project Francis and the Lights, has always been billed as somewhat of a self-made pop star, a man who bucks record labels and all their corporate trappings for unchecked artistic freedom. Over the last decade, he’s released a string of EPs and one album (2010’s eclectic It’ll Be Better) all under his own imprint, toured with a line of pop acts from Drake to Kesha, and guested as a vocalist or a producer with a procession of influential artists including Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book and Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Clearly, you don’t accumulate this kind this kind of resume without a perceived sense of individuality and vision, which is why the stakes seem high six years after the group’s debut LP. While not totally missing the mark, Farewell, Starlite! doesn't quite live up to those expectations either, a shortcoming that is further compounded by Starlite’s many intriguing triumphs on other people’s records.
All of Starlite’s signature production is present, from swollen synthesizers to super-processed vocal overlays. Opener “See Her Out (That’s Just Life)” shifts from squelchy keyboard stabs to the quiet introspection of Starlite’s falsetto in the chorus. While it succeeds in setting the tone for the rest of the album, it’s a sound that is replicated so often in subsequent songs that after only one full listen, it’s lost its show-stopping power. Turning an album of similar-sounding tracks into a solid, encapsulating block of music takes astounding finesse—doubly so for pop music. The majority of Farewell, Starlite! is something along the lines of James Blake’s stoic pondering and Blood Orange’s futuristic soul, but less compelling. By seeking to avoid both mainstream bombast and underground obscurity, Francis and the Lights have landed squarely in the middle with a safe and uninspired choices.
Farewell, Starlite! is not without its pleasures. The album’s focus is, rightfully, “Friends,” a collaboration with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Kanye West. It’s a deeply affecting, mellow slice of alternative R&B, gliding along on a placid sea of finger snaps and interlocking vocal harmonies by all three artists, like some impossibly cool barbershop trio. When Starlite sings, “We could be friends/Just put your head on my shoulders,” it’s lusher than velvet. It sounds more like a lovesick supplication than a call for restraint. Francis and the Lights have been compared to Peter Gabriel before, but nowhere has this been more apparent as “May I Have This Dance,” a song that truly could be added to a reissue of So without anyone batting an eyelid. Its subtle Afro-pop drumbeat and jubilant chorale of lyrics about reclaiming lost love are so evocative of mid-’80s art pop that it defiantly stands out as an example of the kind of diversity Farewell, Starlite! could desperately use more of.
Surprisingly, another highlight is “Thank You,” a 90-second ballad tucked away at the very end of the album. Layered vocals create a one-man choir and Starlite’s voice shines in its strongest form yet, raw and semi-unfiltered. Towards the end, just as the song gathers momentum before fading out, he chants, “I should say thank you, thank you, thank you.” He knows he’s charmed, that he has both the talent and the connections to make music more or less on his own terms. While Farewell, Starlite! has its share of engaging moments, it’s a shame that under all its technical flairs, its overall mood isn’t gripping enough to do justice to its creator’s vision. | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | KTTF | October 6, 2016 | 6.4 | 4a1d7c6a-cb47-4e55-bdf6-5607b148e7e0 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
The PC Music alum surveys the history of rave, sucking serotonin from its gleaming extremes: teeth-chattering trance, Thunderdome-worthy techno, and psychedelic chill-out. | The PC Music alum surveys the history of rave, sucking serotonin from its gleaming extremes: teeth-chattering trance, Thunderdome-worthy techno, and psychedelic chill-out. | Danny L Harle: Harlecore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/danny-l-harle-harlecore/ | Harlecore | Danny L Harle chews pop music into a sugary sludge. From the effervescent radio refractions of his early singles for PC Music to more recent tracks for Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX, he melts down familiar forms into their basest elements, delighting in the gross, glowing sounds that pool around the edges. Each track showcases his surreal sense of humor alongside his love for saccharine melodies and alien sound design, a philosophy that extends across mediums: His most iconic piece of merch is a T-shirt emblazoned with the words HUGE DANNY.
Harle’s new album applies that gleeful approach to another of his obsessions, dance music. Harlecore surveys the history of rave, sucking serotonin from its gleaming extremes: teeth-chattering trance, Thunderdome-worthy techno, psychedelic chill-out, and other chaotic club concoctions. But with Harle behind the decks, the record isn’t just a collection of nostalgic tracks. It’s also an “interactive club experience where the rave never ends,” an immersive digital venue where a resident DJ soundtracks each room. All sorts of experiments like this have popped up as physical clubs remain closed—Harle played a party in Minecraft last year—but Harlecore feels distinct. The album art features some of the avatars that Harle imagines playing these tracks: a towering lupine beast, a being of pure light, a cosmic jellyfish, and a diminutive cartoon character. The album’s fantastical absurdity highlights dance music’s unique power to separate revelers from the mundanity of the day-to-day, to build new worlds.
Credited on the release are DJ Danny, who makes celestial club cuts; DJ Ocean, who plays aqueous breakbeats; MC Boing, who raps with the jittery fervor of an energy drink mascot; and DJ Mayhem, a force of pure gabber chaos. The alter egos reflect the record’s collaborations (Ocean is Danny’s work with Caroline Polachek, the Mayhem tracks are with Hudson Mohawke, and the Boing cuts are with fellow PC Music alum Lil Data), but the concept also gives logic and narrative to the album’s absurd flurry of dance music subgenres. It’s rare to hear so many disparate sounds smashed together on one release, but you can imagine a party where all of these DJs could sit under one roof, united in the collective euphoria of a great night out.
Across the record, Harle works with uncharacteristic intensity. In the disorienting video for DJ Mayhem’s “Interlocked,” a crowd of ghostly revelers writhes in the shadow of a massive bipedal canine who’s destroying the venue with a giant glowing hammer—like if you’d hired one of the monsters from Rampage to DJ your party. Built around a chest-caving gabber beat, the track is fantastical, ecstatic, and overwhelming—just like any memorable rave. Even the more open-hearted and earnest tracks (like DJ Danny’s breakbeat trance ballad “On a Mountain” or the pastel happy hardcore of DJ Mayhem’s “Shining Stars”) are head-spinningly maximal, even by the standards of a producer with a reputation for turning pop music on its head.
The tracks credited to MC Boing most clearly exemplify Harlecore’s unrestrained energy. On “Boing Beat,” a pitched-up voice scream-raps about a night that “never, never, never ends.” It’s a little silly, especially the digital didgeridoo sounds that give the track its elastic beat, but the animated energy is undeniable. It plays like a rambling late-night conversation with friends in the smoking area of a club, optimistic and naive about the world outside its walls. “Everyone here is safe and nice,” he raps. “Makes me wanna have a great life.”
Harlecore takes its name from a real-life club night that Harle started in London in 2017, welcoming friends and DJs like A.G. Cook and Evian Christ to celebrate the maximal dance music of their youths with a crowd of like-minded partygoers. Harlecore, the record, is obviously an attempt to celebrate and preserve the energy of those nights, but it’s also a statement about the power of this kind of music. Harle makes repeated reference to the idea that Harlecore is a party that never stops, a testament to the stubborn resilience of ravers who—even in a time when clubs around the world are shuttered—have found ways to stay connected and keep dancing. When celebration seems impossible, music like Harlecore can ferry you to a world that’s brighter and more interesting than your own.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mad Decent | March 1, 2021 | 7.3 | 4a218b89-48a0-4d80-959f-e950f0a5f7df | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Combining synthesizers, field recordings, nylon-string guitar, and hushed singing, the Istanbul-born, Glasgow-based musician creates an intimate take on laptop folk. | Combining synthesizers, field recordings, nylon-string guitar, and hushed singing, the Istanbul-born, Glasgow-based musician creates an intimate take on laptop folk. | Isik Kural: In February | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/isik-kural-in-february/ | In February | Isik Kural’s in february opens with a bleary calm, like the first moment you open your eyes on a clear Sunday morning. Piano notes loop and twinkle with the grace of sunlight bouncing off the window, while Kural’s childlike voice gently wavers in a silk-soft whisper. It’s as comfy as a big quilt. Kural’s blooming synths conjure the delicate aura of Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods or Haruomi Hosono’s Watering a Flower; in february similarly paints a charmingly homemade portrait of domestic whimsy. In his yawning lilt, Kural gives new meaning to the term “bedroom pop.”
With in february, the Istanbul-born, Glasgow-based Kural creates his own delightful take on laptop folk, combining field recordings, nylon-string guitar, synthesizers, and hushed singing, to sweetly psychedelic effect. Like an updated spin on the Orchid Tapes sound of artists like Blithe Field and Ricky Eat Acid in the ’10s, Kural’s music blurs the line between songwriting and sound design; tracks may start with a clear acoustic melody before breaking down into splintered tape loops of passing trains, or float in a haze of spinning bicycle sounds until crystallizing into a tender lullaby. Kural adds a healthy dollop of new age straight from the Leaving Records school as well, channeling the wide-eyed wallpaper music of Green-House and the soothing drift of Ana Roxanne into his fluffy sonic soufflé. In doing so, in february’s tracks feel less like songs and more like music-box melodies distilled to their airy essence.
Each sound feels as pristinely arranged as figurines in a dollhouse. The chattering birdsong in the backdrop of “paperhat,” the hand drums that pitter-patter underneath “hopefullyhopefully,” the cooing that flutters into the frame on the lovely “coral gables”—every piece of in february feels intentionally selected so as not to disturb the peacefulness of the larger picture. On “berceuse,” Kural hovers over guest vocalist spefy’s dainty vocals with a high-pitched synth tone as light and serene as humming wine glasses; it’s so precious that it feels as though the slightest wind could blow the whole thing over. Kural’s own vocals even resemble children’s music—as if Raffi decided to lead a sing-a-long version of Plantasia—and his quietly recited mantras about butterflies, lilies, seagulls, and similarly pastel-pigmented imagery only add to in february’s fragile feeling of innocence.
By the time the album nears its end, Kural’s kiddie vocals begin to teeter on the edge of cloying, particularly as the repetitive lyrics of “slippin” (which comes across sounding like “sleeping”) start to suggest literal naptime music. But with the closing “film festival,” Kural delivers one of his most elegant songs: After a radiant minute-long opening drone, Kural enters with a spliced-up piano loop more pensive and ethereal than anything that has come before. Where the rest of in february is bathed in a cheerful glow, “film festival” is melancholy and mysterious, ending the record on an ambiguous note that expands Kural’s microscopic sense of intimacy into otherworldly realms. It reaffirms Kural’s subtle control and skillful ability to spin just a few stray sounds into something so uplifting, heavenly, and warm. For all of in february’s smallness, it overflows with loving sincerity. | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | March 29, 2022 | 7.2 | 4a251519-49fa-4a7c-b066-471e833d774d | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The Purling Hiss frontman teams with Kurt Vile for a record of simple folk songs pairing blissful sounds with plainspoken sentiments. | The Purling Hiss frontman teams with Kurt Vile for a record of simple folk songs pairing blissful sounds with plainspoken sentiments. | Mike Polizze: Long Lost Solace Find | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-polizze-long-lost-solace-find/ | Long Lost Solace Find | Mike Polizze’s music used to feel like a secret. Public Service Announcement, the 2010 breakthrough from his project Purling Hiss, was classic rock as heard leaking from someone else’s earbuds, anthems that disintegrated into noise as soon as you started humming along. Polizze wasn’t the only artist testing the limits of scuzzy production at the time, but his interests seemed deeper than a mere aesthetic. Through the following decade, his follow-up releases found him cleaning up his sound and sharpening his songwriting, but he still maintained a distance through foggy melodies that swerved and plunged like question marks.
It was Kurt Vile who heard Public Service Announcement and convinced Polizze to bring his music on the road with an actual band. Ten years later, he makes a similar suggestion as his collaborator on Long Lost Solace Find, the first album credited to Polizze as a solo artist. Along with producer Jeff Zeigler (of the War on Drugs), Vile and Polizze recorded the album in their native Philadelphia, and it’s a record defined by closeness: simple folk songs that present Polizze and his acoustic guitar with the kind of intimacy we expect from rock acts going solo. Tonally, it exists somewhere between the hungover campfire songs of J. Mascis’ solo albums and the starkly drawn alt-rock of Greg Sage’s Straight Ahead. It is more straightforward than any of Polizze’s previous albums but no less evocative.
Nearly every song on Long Lost Solace Find opens with a bright major chord, and most of them spend their runtimes lingering in the light it offers. Polizze plays most of the instruments himself, and Vile shows up in the margins with subtle background vocals, slide guitar, harmonica, and, at one point, trumpet. They are natural collaborators; listening to this record can sometimes feel like an extension of both the softer points of Purling Hiss’ discography and the bleary universe of Vile’s own records. Like Vile, Polizze writes lyrics as if he’s muttering them to himself, even when he’s gesturing toward something universal. And if his language rarely feels bold on its own, it does establish an undeniable mood paired with such laid-back music. “Rest assured, enjoy the ride,” he sings in the closing track, and it is the bemused tone of someone confident in where they are going.
Polizze spends much of the album pondering love, but highlights like “Wishing Well” and “Eyes Reach Across” communicate less on the lyric page than they do in his delivery: an effortless speak-sing over gentle strumming and plucked guitar solos. It flows like a well-conceived song cycle and moves gracefully from one thought to the next. In the instrumental “D’Modal,” whose title could be a reference to a feel-good Led Zeppelin hit or his own guitar tuning, Polizze offers a groovy reprieve that segues into the twilight visions of “Sit Down.” In that song, he describes sunlight as “laser beams through my hair,” which seems like a good summary of the world he builds through songs: intimate, warm, a little uncanny.
The sound of the record approaches bliss: the sonic equivalent of a beer on the beach at sunset. But Polizze’s thoughts don’t always follow him there. The narrative in mid-album highlight “Do Do Do” seems fairly bleak: a plainspoken survey of getting older and playing in a band, pledging to change your self-destructive ways before they harden into habits. Kind of a drag. But every time the chorus hits, he ascends into a wordless refrain, echoed by an acoustic guitar stuck on the most amiable notes of a solo, repeated over and over again. It’s a palpable uplift from each verse, and it goes on maybe a minute longer than expected. This is not just the sound of Mike Polizze opening up; he’s inviting you in.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | July 30, 2020 | 7.2 | 4a30eeda-2c73-47e5-9c30-bfa899c1198e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
A revolutionary classic of soul music, four string-drenched epics, is reissued 40 years on, in a package that includes bonus tracks. | A revolutionary classic of soul music, four string-drenched epics, is reissued 40 years on, in a package that includes bonus tracks. | Isaac Hayes: Hot Buttered Soul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13233-hot-buttered-soul/ | Hot Buttered Soul | Think about how crazy this is for a moment: Stax loses Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays to a plane crash and the rights to their back catalog (and, later, Sam & Dave) to Atlantic. Without their biggest stars and their best session group, Stax executive Al Bell takes a desperate but necessary gamble: in an attempt to build an entirely new catalog out of scratch, he schedules dozens of all-new albums and singles to be recorded and released en masse over the course of a few months. And out of all of those records, the album that puts the label back on the map is a followup to a chart dud, recorded by a songwriter/producer who wasn't typically known for singing, where three of its four songs run over nine and a half minutes. And this album sells a million copies. If it weren't for the New York Mets, Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul would be the most unlikely comeback story of 1969.
Since then, the album's had an odd reevaluation process: it hit #8 on the pop charts and #1 on the R&B charts, but also hit #1 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart-- which alarmed partisans of Miles Davis and Sly Stone alike. After another couple of albums in its crossover-friendly, string-drenched vein, Rolling Stone declared Isaac Hayes an enemy of all that was good about soul music in the early 1970s; decades later, a generation reared on hip-hop reverse-engineered the beats on Pac's "Me Against the World" or PE's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and discovered an original brilliance. Now, after a listen to this new reissue 40 years later, Hot Buttered Soul might still seem a little historically counterintuitive. It stood as a newer, funkier phase of Southern soul, but it hinged on a sound more opulent than the most sharp-suited Motown crossover bid. It's an exercise in melodrama and indulgence that lays it on so heavy it's impossible not to hear it as anything but the stone truth. And it's an album whose edited-down singles-- both of which went top 40 pop-- sounded more like trailers for the real thing. (Said single edits are included here and can be safely ignored.)
Yet the success of Hot Buttered Soul owed a bit to a classic crossover formula: start with an easy-listening-friendly pop staple, keep the orchestral sweetness, but layer on a shining veneer of psychedelic R&B, then stretch it out with some soul-jazz vamping and nail it down with a voice that hits like a velvet sledgehammer. Hayes demanded full creative control for this album, and his auteurism resulted in a luxurious rawness that soul artists would scramble to catch up with for years. It wasn't exactly an unprecedented sound, however, and in its own extravagant way Hot Buttered Soul might be to the end of the 60s what Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was seven years previous: an album that redrew the parameters for R&B's high-class populism.
It's just that it hadn't been quite this audacious before-- not to the extent of Hayes' cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", all 18-plus sprawling minutes of it. Here we have a song that turns the idea of a slow build into something monumental: with a monologue he developed as a way to get apathetic club patrons to pay attention to where he was about to go, Hayes spends the first eight and a half minutes actually setting the stage for the scenario behind the song, from the wife's cavalier attitude and how the husband caught her cheating to the specific year and make of car he finally drove off for good in (a '65 Ford). It should be noted that all this time the band's been churning along with this hypnotic, minimalist swaying organ/bass/hi-hat drone that changes imperceptibly if at all; again, this is eight and a half minutes here. And when it finally does transition from Hayes' conversational murmur to the first actual sung line from the Jimmy Webb composition he's covering, it's the beginning of a metamorphosis that gradually transforms the dynamic of the song from sweet-stringed orchestration into full-fledged, brass-packed, explosively-cresting soul.
But where "Phoenix" is all slow build, the album-opening version of "Walk on By" throws almost everything it has at you right away, nailing you to the floor with those first two drumbeats. Hayes takes the restrained sorrow of Bacharach and David's composition as made famous by Dionne Warwick and chucks it out the window, replacing it with an arrangement that is the absolute antithesis of hiding the tears and sadness and grieving in private. And it's goddamned devastating at every turn: its go-for-broke opening, with those weeping strings and that stinging guitar building to their gigantic crescendo; that moment when it collapses and sinks into Michael Toles' famous slinky guitar riff, which then warps its way into psychedelic keening more Hendrix than Cropper; every hitch and moan and heart-wracked ad-lib from Hayes' deep bass voice ("you put the hurt on me, you socked it to me, mama"). The entire last half of the song's twelve minutes is an exercise in seeing just how long you can not only maintain but build on a frenzied finale, where Toles' guitar sounds like it's ripping itself apart and Hayes' Hammond organ trembles and growls and stammers like a panicking tiger. It might be the most intense six minutes of soul recorded in the confines of a studio the entire decade.
The remainder of Hot Buttered Soul isn't quite as ambitiously excessive, though the other two songs still have an indelible presence. Hayes' version of Charles Chalmers' and Sandra Rhodes' "One Woman" is affecting if short-- "short" in this case meaning a hair over five minutes. As breathers go, it works wonders in proving Hayes' way with a mellow ballad could still have an emotional impact in a more confined space. And Hayes' sole songwriting credit is the linguistically convoluted masterpiece "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," a straight-up slick-as-hell funk jam which gets a lot of mileage out of humorously-deployed latin phrases and five-dollar words ("My gastronomical stupensity is really satisfied when you're loving me"). Even if it's his only lyrical contribution, he subsequently if unintentionally caricaturizes the ornate but down-to-earth personality of the entire album: it's all self-consciously complicated, but man, the meaning's right there in front of you. And it can't help but hit you right where you feel it. | 2009-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stax | June 29, 2009 | 9.2 | 4a3439fb-a1e9-4cb5-a5a0-68450399f300 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Second album from these Brooklyn boozehounds finds them molding the reckless shoutalongs of their debut into overdriven beer-soaked party anthems. Vocalist Craig Finn comes into his own here as a lyricist, and as a sweat-drenched and drunk back-alley bawler: His brazen caterwaul may be a brief obstacle for the unprepared, but the bar band blazing behind him is a uniter (not a divider), rapturously comandeering every trick in the rock'n'roll fakebook. | Second album from these Brooklyn boozehounds finds them molding the reckless shoutalongs of their debut into overdriven beer-soaked party anthems. Vocalist Craig Finn comes into his own here as a lyricist, and as a sweat-drenched and drunk back-alley bawler: His brazen caterwaul may be a brief obstacle for the unprepared, but the bar band blazing behind him is a uniter (not a divider), rapturously comandeering every trick in the rock'n'roll fakebook. | The Hold Steady: Separation Sunday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3977-separation-sunday/ | Separation Sunday | Craig Finn isn't a singer. His voice is a harsh, nasal, confused, emphatic bleat, clamping down on certain words and rolling tricky internal rhymes around in his mouth until they come out all broken. He sounds more like the sketchy drunk guy yelling in your ear at a show, asking if you know where to buy drugs, than like the frontman of the band onstage. Finn's voice may be difficult, but don't let it be a deal-breaker.
Finn may not be Art Garfunkel up in this piece, but he uses his adenoidal rasp to blurt twisted, dense shards of squalid back-alley imagery and bruised druggy lamentations, broken teeth and broken bottles, and tattered hotel-room Bibles and hidden knives. He's the poet laureate of the loading dock behind the mall where the runaway kids get together to sniff cheap coke at 5 a.m.
The Hold Steady's first album, last year's ...Almost Killed Me, was a tangled mess of damaged character sketches and triumphant bar-rock thump-- Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle reimagined as an epic of Russian literature. But Separation Sunday is something more, the elegiac Biblical lost-innocence junkie odyssey that Denis Johnson never wrote.
Like Fiestas & Fiascos, the final album from Finn's former Minneapolis post-punk band Lifter Puller, it's an album-length story that forces us to pull bits of narrative from Finn's tangles of words. In Separation Sunday, a confused Catholic girl named Hallelujah hooks up with a motley assortment of shady characters, does a gang of drugs, gets born again when some guy with a nitrous tank dunks her in a river, wakes up in a confession booth, and maybe dies and maybe comes back from death. But the real story is in Finn's virtuoso evocations of menace ("When they say great white sharks/ They mean the kind in big black cars/ When they say killer whales/ They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in Penetration Park"), hedonism ("You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar/ And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after-bar"), and brief shining moments of lucidity ("Youth services always find a way to get their bloody cross into your druggy little messed-up teenage life").
None of this would work if Finn didn't have an expert rock band backing him up. Finn's songs wheel precariously from one unhinged lyrical idea to the next, almost never stopping for choruses or going out of their way to fit into any sort of structure, but the band plays these songs like long-lost fist-in-the-air classic rock anthems. It's well-schooled in every bar-rock cliché, and executes these moves with joy and conviction: the pick-slide before the climax, the weeping Hammond organ on the bridge, the pregnant pause before the big riff kicks back in. Since ...Almost Killed Me, the band has beefed up its sound with the help of Rocket From the Crypt producer Dave Gardner and keyboard player Franz Nickolay, and its Meat Loaf pianos, greasy George Thorogood blooz choogle, and wheedling Journey guitar carry more heft and authority than they had on the last album. This stuff would sound great behind just about any garage-rock hack, but it turns Finn's dirtbag chronicles into something epic and huge and molten and beautiful. | 2005-05-05T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-05-05T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss | May 5, 2005 | 8.7 | 4a3ea091-3c3b-40a9-9c3e-f316865bda47 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Isis follow their breakthrough Oceanic with the even more epic and swirling Panopticon, which combines their velvety, slow avant-metal with Godspeed marathons and stately Ride-style shoegazing. | Isis follow their breakthrough Oceanic with the even more epic and swirling Panopticon, which combines their velvety, slow avant-metal with Godspeed marathons and stately Ride-style shoegazing. | Isis: Panopticon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4136-panopticon/ | Panopticon | When people mention "heavy metal," I still kneejerk and jump back to ultra-specific childhood associations: The Bon Jovi/Mötley Crüe diptych in my sister's purple room, watching "Headbangers Ball" with a pack of Party Mix and decorating my first shiny, black, mall-bought guitar with Slayer stickers, the trashy Maiden fans in my neighborhood with their toothpick legs, seeing pre-suck-ass Metallica in a mid-sized club with a friend of mine who wore a fake wig so he could feel more the part. These memories are just the tip of the Viking's iceberg; the stuff has leaked into my adulthood, especially via first-generation Norwegian black metal, Mastodon, High On Fire, the Polish rockers who ran my borrowed van into a Los Angeles parking deck last spring, and-- mightiest of all-- the glorious slow-release sprawl of Isis.
An odd monster, the Boston quintet has toured with Ipecac rap artist Dälek; had their music tweaked on a series of 12-inches by (among others) label head Mike Patton, Godflesh's Justin Broadrick, Fennesz, Thomas Koner, and Khanate's James Plotkin; and have played both Mogwai's stage at 2004's All Tomorrow's Parties in East Sussex, England, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. They're not your mulletted uncle's bar band. Their album Oceanic was all dark grandeur and waterlogged heaviness, and those qualities define the seven tracks on their follow up Panopticon. Even more epic and swirling than Oceanic, Isis's third full-length combines their velvety, slow avant-metal with Godspeed marathons and stately Ride-style shoegazing.
Panopticon shares the crystalline production Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Pearl Jam) leant to Oceanic-- the drums and vocals are submerged, the riffs intricately monolithic-- but unlike on earlier efforts, the spare electronics are more seamlessly woven with the other instruments. A stronger record than its predecessor, Panopticon pummels but harnesses its sounds to a well-honed, diaphanous template.
In the grand spirit of over-the-top metal, Isis named the album after Michel Foucault's take on of Jeremy Bentham's concept of the panopticon; the tracks are thematically connected via Foucault's Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Because the lyrics are submerged in the mix they're fairly impenetrable, but Isis quote heavily from the French philosopher in the liner notes to make sure listeners don't think they chose the title at random: "The Panopticon is a machine for disassociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen." (See also: The satellite spy cam photos decorating the album.) Considering the light/dark of the Patriot Act's ubiquitous surveillance, Panopticon feels more relevant than the science fiction of Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime.
Isis's instrumentation also evokes a sense of creeping voyeurism. Astute track placement adds to the slowly building tidal, trance-like rush: individual pieces blend over and flood to the next. With a shadowy sense of repetition-- comparisons to Neurosis and the Melvins make sense-- the shortest track is 6:47 and the longest just under 10 minutes. "Backlit" starts with a delicate intro and stuck-in-the-well melodies before ultimately dam-breaking with gruff whirlpools; the distortion then ducks for cover, allowing a slow, clear bass line, percussion, and cascading arpeggios to bubble to the surface. Such complex dynamics overtake each new wave.
I remember in high school when a scruffy English teacher told me the word "awesome" should be saved for snow-capped mountain peaks not an AC/DC concert. I still don't agree with his Bob Ross-like language mangling-- both "awesome" and the equally 80s-rooted colloquilism "triumphant" are apt descriptions of Panopticon's intricacies. Plus, not to rain on Sir Shakespeare's parade: I grew up in swampy, dank New Jersey and have always preferred the angularity of flat, burnt-out fields to the obviousness of your purple mountains majesty. But for fans of such old-school sublime, Isis connect these overstated zero-oxygen heights with sludgy, brackish small-town waters, creating stellar classical music for kids with bad teenage mustaches-- and those of us who empathize with them. | 2004-11-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-11-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Ipecac | November 8, 2004 | 8.4 | 4a50f62b-48a0-4d61-baa1-ab09a72cba10 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Glenn Jones' fifth album for solo acoustic guitar and banjo was written in between spells spent caring for his sick, elderly mother at his childhood home. The period induced intensely personal reflections on the cycle of life he's experienced there, taking in discovery, love, and loss. | Glenn Jones' fifth album for solo acoustic guitar and banjo was written in between spells spent caring for his sick, elderly mother at his childhood home. The period induced intensely personal reflections on the cycle of life he's experienced there, taking in discovery, love, and loss. | Glenn Jones: My Garden State | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18007-glenn-jones-my-garden-state/ | My Garden State | Glenn Jones turns a trick with the title of his fifth album for solo acoustic guitar and banjo, My Garden State. Jones is known best as a Boston musician, having led the city’s art-rock updaters Cul de Sac through the 1990s and having alluded to his adopted hometown with the names and anecdotes of several cuts on previous records. But Jones grew up in northern New Jersey. During the last several years, he’s often returned to his childhood home for extended periods to take care of his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. The bulk of My Garden State was written during these eldercare furloughs, prompting Jones to take the thematically logical step of recording the tunes in New Jersey, too, 60 miles or so south at the farmhouse of friend and collaborator Laura Baird.
But this wistful 10-tune set is called My Garden State, not The Garden State, a clever way for Jones to sidestep songs about New Jersey so as to offer his experience with discovery, love, and loss within the state itself. Sure, the names of several numbers reference specific area locales-- the Tappan Zee Bridge that spans the Hudson River, the teeming county where Jones grew up, the nursing home where his mother now lives-- but these are places that have meant something to Jones. There is no ode to the Boardwalk, no observations on the state’s industrial cornucopia, and no interpolation of “Where Eagles Dare”. Instead, these songs are intensely personal reflections on the cycle of life as he’s seen it here. “The Vernal Pool”, for instance, is an improvisation Jones played shortly after Baird showed him the farm habitat of spadefoot toads, which use the “spades” of their feet to dig into their subterranean lairs for a season’s rest. When it rains in the spring, they dig their way out and become “explosive breeders.” Jones saw the toads in the fall, when they still lurked underground. This piece starts with listless hibernation, his slow notes languishing inside their own decay. Across its five minutes, though, it builds into a bustle, with a thumbed bass line muscling its way through a raga-like flurry of sound. Even at its most vibrant and vivid, “The Vernal Pool” reveals a constant vein of anxiety, as if to acknowledge at once the world’s forever-chained wonder and worry while celebrating it, too.
Indeed, My Garden State is defined by its sincerely bittersweet sense, where Jones never seems too mournful of or sentimental for the past nor overly naïve for some idealized future. Jones’ work isn’t emotionally conflicted; it’s simply emotionally honest, with his fingers doling out lessons as he’s learned them. These instrumentals seem to acknowledge Jones’ feelings as they are-- mixed and confusing and sometimes overwhelming, with the sweetness of childhood memories tempered by the exigencies of the present and the uncertainty of what’s ahead. “Bergen County Farewell”, written after Jones and his sisters had finally sold the family home, sublimates nostalgia into optimism and back again. Its darting melody is bright and cheery, but there’s sadness tucked between the notes, too, like a worried mind behind a well-intentioned smile. “Blues for Tom Carter”, ostensibly written for Jones’ fellow guitar traveler after the Charalambides co-founder fell seriously ill while on tour last year, doesn’t dip into full-lament mode as its title might suggest; rather, it feels like an affable Sunday afternoon phone call to an old friend, as though Jones is simply checking in to make sure everything is OK. You can imagine Carter making a wisecrack on the other end of the line.
Both of the album’s guitar extended guitar marvels-- the eight-minute duet with Meg Baird, “Going Back to East Montgomery”, and the slightly shorter “Like a Sick Eagle Looking at the Sky”-- thrive on such emotional imbalance. They’re both relatively warm and welcoming tunes; in fact, when Baird’s guitar joins Jones’ for the refrain, it’s possible to picture day breaking to the sound of the strings’ bright harmonies. For most of the piece, though, Jones simply winds back and forth through one lithe melody, a reminder that any “sweet shot of joy,” as he calls Baird’s playing in the liner notes, matters most because of the humdrum toil it interrupts. “Sick Eagle” is more dimly lit, but Jones lifts the melody at just the right moments, offering a sudden horizon of hopefulness.
Perhaps it’s strange to call any instrumentalist a master storyteller, but five albums into his solo career, that’s starting to seem like the most apt summation of Jones’ talents. The liner notes of My Garden State include the tuning systems of each of these songs, as well as technical notes about capo placement and a brief narrative about each tune’s inspiration. Aspiring guitarists might need the alternate tuning suggestions, but listeners won’t really need the anecdotes. Rather, Jones puts it all right there in the pieces, speaking volume about the challenges and triumphs of growing up and older without singing a word of the blues. My Garden State is your Garden State, too, a collection of magnetic ruminations that applies to anyone who’s ever struggled to go back home or leave it in the first place. | 2013-05-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-05-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B / Rock | Thrill Jockey | May 23, 2013 | 7.7 | 4a53c205-edb8-4286-9d98-b2d26daea224 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Steeped in a mixture of indie rock, shoegaze, emo, and ambient, the L.A.-based musician’s debut album is an ambitious attempt to make something new out of familiar materials. | Steeped in a mixture of indie rock, shoegaze, emo, and ambient, the L.A.-based musician’s debut album is an ambitious attempt to make something new out of familiar materials. | dreamTX: living in memory of something sweet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dreamtx-living-in-memory-of-something-sweet/ | living in memory of something sweet | dreamTX’s debut album, living in memory of something sweet, is a hybrid of indie pop, shoegaze, emo, ambient, and R&B that’s as unsettling as it is soothing, feral as it is familiar, wily and gnarled as it is unflaggingly melodic. Even without knowing that the Dallas-raised, Los Angeles-based artist Nicholas Das remembers the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion as a life-altering event, an astute listener will likely pick up on the project’s primary touchpoints: Animal Collective, yes, but also Broken Social Scene and Modest Mouse, How to Dress Well and Alex G. living in memory is an ambitious and intuitive psychedelic guitar-pop album that pulls from its predecessors without mimicking them and iterates upon their sound without replicating it.
Das is an NYU alum who co-wrote and produced “On + Off” and “Celadon & Gold” with former classmate Maggie Rogers and contributed music to the 2020 film Shithouse, in addition to playing in the band Kraus and scoring commercials, podcasts, and documentaries. But he aspired to more than piecemeal placements and occasional touring opportunities. When he landed a residency at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, he tunneled into his work, learning how to make complex compositions sound accessible rather than “hyper-articulate and totally wild.” living in memory is the product of this searching time. “You can either make something new or something good,” he said after the album’s release. “I was desperate to make something that was in some way both.”
The results of Das’ efforts may not sound entirely new, but they sure sound good. A song like “Elated” is clearly in conversation with recent electronic shoegaze artists like Jane Remover and Parannoul, but the vocal performance feels distinct, springing with pitch-shifted falsetto indebted to both R&B and Midwestern emo. The song does have a discernible structure—strummed acoustic guitar in the verses, noise-walled choruses, glitchy bridges—but its shape is slippery, devolving into chaos just when you think it’s going to settle down.
There’s a homespun charm to the album, a DIY spirit that gives character to even the more conventional tracks. It’s easy to imagine a polished and sanitized rendition of “In Too Deep” being performed by a pop-folk troupe like the Lumineers, but Das’ approach is refreshingly eccentric. Aside from the slick vocal processing, several stylistic choices—like the choral chants and synth effects that sneak into the upper midrange of the mix—offset the otherwise standard handclaps and tambourine rattles. Similarly, the clean-cut indie rock of “I Tried” is subverted by a tunneling ambient pad and Das’ warbled falsetto. Even at their most pleasantly straightforward, the songs are marked by an inspired unpredictability, a deliberate weirdness that gives otherwise simple ideas an exciting edge.
A defining feature of dreamTX’s music is the lack of decipherable lyrics. Das is most intelligible on the electrifying “Live Without,” where he sings, “I don’t want to write this song/I don’t want to live without you,” but even this refrain morphs and crumbles. Using his voice as though it were another instrument allows Das to burrow into a feeling and broaden it into a three-dimensional form, but at times I longed for more mappable meaning; the striking melodies of a song like “Cannot Believe” might have been rendered even more affecting had they been paired with some captivating detail or scrap of story. The coos and caws and cries for help, however, construct their own sort of dream logic, one that offers knotty, tempestuous emotions for those times we can’t articulate what feelings we’re actually experiencing.
Though living in memory of something sweet’s first seven songs are rousing and energetic, the album’s pacing is uneven. The closing songs—two droopy indie-rock numbers and an ambient guitar instrumental—are melodically interesting, but in sequencing them together, the record ends on a tepid and unrepresentative note. For a project whose radiance stems from its intuitive ease, the dip in energy is puzzling. But that shouldn’t distract from Das’ achievement: With a curious ear and playful touch, he’s welded together familiar touchstones and made something fresh out of them. | 2023-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Memorials of Distinction | August 16, 2023 | 7.5 | 4a5db789-c56d-43c1-854b-83e75795ab8b | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
On their third record, the indie-folk duo celebrate choices but settle on none. | On their third record, the indie-folk duo celebrate choices but settle on none. | Luluc: Sculptor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luluc-sculptor/ | Sculptor | You are the master of your own destiny. This is the thread loosely stitching together Luluc’s latest indie-folk album, Sculptor. The third record from Brooklyn-based Australians Zoe Randell and Steve Hassett saunters to the same plodding pace as their previous records—2014’s Passerby and 2008’s Dear Hamlyn—unfolding like a collection of yawning acoustic poems. According to Randell, the titular “sculptor” is emblematic of shaping one’s own world out of bottomless possibilities—but the ambiguity of those possibilities paired with Luluc’s noncommittal compositions result in an album at odds with its objective. Sculptor is said to celebrate choices, but it settles on none.
The theme of volition throughout Sculptor is nebulous at best and precarious at worst. Randell aims to explore “the different lives that are open to us,” but it seems that “us” represents a very particular demographic of people, namely the affluent, white, and educated masochists of Alex Ross Perry and Noah Baumbach films. It’s not that art made about this slice of society can’t be affecting (just look at the literate citizens of Belle and Sebastian songs, or Pulp’s “Common People”), it’s just that the characters stalking Sculptor’s tracklist lack flesh and blood, and the record’s homogeneous arrangements aren’t enough to fortify them.
It’s hard to discern Randell’s intentions in these songs, especially when it comes to the people that populate them. Take the hifalutin writer of “Genius,” whose stodgy lifestyle and rejection of “aesthetic dress” Randell criticizes, but in a terminology that suggests it takes one to know one. She uses overwrought language to critique someone who uses overwrought language, and it’s hard to sympathize with either author. Then there’s the pair of pals drifting between the beach and university in “Cambridge.” Randell sings: “Tonight I’m here in Cambridge and I guess we’re living proof/There are other roads open to me and to you.” The song’s evasive narrative of feeling lost and then (inexplicably) found feels two-dimensional—its subjects are bursting with existential complaints but they’re shy on the subtleties of actual human beings.
Vagueness plagues much of Sculptor, cloaking the album’s protagonists in crudely formed identities, and limiting its arrangements to uninspired combinations of drums, guitar, and occasional flourishes of Hammond organ. On Luluc’s earlier records, Randell’s voice was capable of great range; her lows smoky and arresting, her higher register delicate and celestial. Unfortunately on Sculptor she occupies her deepest timbre the entire time, and her words often drown in a persistent monotone. Hassett’s multi-tracked harmonies, as well as guitar cameos by J Mascis and Aaron Dessner are sadly not enough to pump oxygen into these tracks, and you’re left waiting for the album to break into a gallop, or even a light jog.
Sculptor postures as a manifesto of independent thought, without saying anything specific or of substance. Sure, there’s a teen who’s followed by cops for wearing a “filthy punk rock tee,” but Randell’s attempts at social commentary feel thinly spread, unfocused, and self-congratulatory. On campfire strummer “Me and Jasper,” for instance, she looks back on adolescence, applauding her own rebellious nature and propensity to ponder “something different than just shallow thinkin’ and bitchin.’” But what is that “something different”? Despite Sculptor’s learned characters, we’re never educated on the matter. | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | July 18, 2018 | 4.8 | 4a631ce4-4200-47c3-a10e-0690b75bb99a | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Life was a crummy movie on Okkervil River's breakthrough album, The Stage Names. On The Stand Ins, it's a lousy rock show. As the interchangeable titles and puzzle-piece album covers imply, this new record is an extension of its predecessor, a further untangling of themes and ideas about music, art, celebrity, love, and the folly of it all. | Life was a crummy movie on Okkervil River's breakthrough album, The Stage Names. On The Stand Ins, it's a lousy rock show. As the interchangeable titles and puzzle-piece album covers imply, this new record is an extension of its predecessor, a further untangling of themes and ideas about music, art, celebrity, love, and the folly of it all. | Okkervil River: The Stand Ins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12176-the-stand-ins/ | The Stand Ins | Life was a crummy movie on Okkervil River's breakthrough album, The Stage Names. On The Stand Ins, it's a lousy rock show. As the interchangeable titles and puzzle-piece album covers imply, this new record is an extension of its predecessor, a further untangling of themes and ideas about music, art, celebrity, love, and the folly of it all. The Stand Ins doesn't quite match the gusto and brainy emotionalism of The Stage Names but it exceeds its bleakness. Pop songs lie, tortured singer-songwriters are wealthy narcissists, groupies have regrets, music scenes wither, nothing changes. Rock promises redemption but delivers only destruction, or at best, cultish relative obscurity. Okkervil River are the anti-Hold Steady. They should tour together.
At first listen, the main difference between The Stand Ins and The Stage Names is that Okkervil's latest lacks the sense of surprise. The band's 2005 record Black Sheep Boy came out of nowhere, a thematic and musical step forward after two strong earlier albums, and The Stage Names revealed a tight, resourceful band who played with enough force to redeem leader Will Sheff's doomed characters. The Stand Ins continues that ambitious musical development, further roughing up the group's sound while sharpening its attack to an even finer point, and refining some of their old tricks while introducing new ones (see: the country shuffle of "Singer Songwriter", Sheff's smooth croon on "Lost Coastlines", and the short orchestral interludes tying everything together like incidental film music.)
The Stand Ins begins with an orchestral prelude, before filling in the pages of Sheff's tattered songbook with "Lost Coastlines", whose boat metaphor and buoyant bassline hint at a connection with Stage Names closer "John Allyn Smith Sails". The song changes shape often, toggling between an acoustic jangle and a tense electric groove until it finally drifts out to sea on a sing-along of la la la's. Those syllables carry as much weight here as any other lyrics. It's a thrilling introduction, maybe even more apt than "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe".
Touring almost constantly since well before Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River have transformed into an urgent rock band that imbues Sheff's songs with as much energy and personality as he does. At times, The Stand Ins sounds like a bassist's album: Patrick Pestorius plays like he's quit the rhythm section, adding unexpectedly melodic riffs that lend subtle gradations of color to these compositions. It's his bopping theme that connects the dots on "Lost Coastlines" and "Calling and Not Calling My Ex". When "Singer Songwriter" threatens to topple under its top-heavy accusations, Brian Cassidy and the Wrens' Charles Bissell right the song with their determined roadhouse gallop and piercing guitar licks. Then the band does a 180 and follows it up with the soulful, horn-laden midtempo groove of "Starry Stairs" (which may or may not be a sequel to "Savannah Smiles") and the grandiose show-closer "Blue Tulip", which ends with a perfect Byrdsy guitar riff-- one of the album's best moments.
In short, the band complements and counterbalances Sheff's cerebral songwriting simply by rocking out. His braininess is perhaps his greatest asset, and he's become one of the best lyric-writers going in indie rock, with a dense and distinctive style that trades on wordplay and internal rhymes. Song for song, he can jerk a tear with a carefully observed detail or turn of phrase ("Blue Tulip" in particular is a backlash tragedy on a human scale), but it's the way those songs talk to one another that makes Okkeril River albums so durable and fascinating.
Sheff wants to look beyond common pop song notions to discover something truer and more essential, no matter how disillusioning it may be, which is the central, enthralling contradiction for Okkervil River: Even as they ruthlessly deconstruct pop music, they make great pop music. The darker Sheff gets, the more honest he sounds and the more absorbing the song. By that equation, the stand-out on The Stand Ins is "Pop Lie", an exquisitely bleak dismantling of singer-songwriter pretensions. The pop singer lies in his songs, "and you're lying when you sing along!" (Hey, Hold Steady...) It's not hard to imagine a venue full of excited fans singing along, although it's difficult to determine whether he would view their participation as a bitter irony or a sincerely funny cosmic joke. Or if he would just smile and enjoy the moment, knowing that any listener can take that pop lie and make it true. | 2008-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | September 8, 2008 | 8 | 4a686549-b002-4f95-a761-23ec8aacdc59 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The music of New York producer Yaeji—part house, part hip-hop—hints at strong feelings with subtle tones. On her second EP, she pushes her sound further to its poles. | The music of New York producer Yaeji—part house, part hip-hop—hints at strong feelings with subtle tones. On her second EP, she pushes her sound further to its poles. | Yaeji: EP2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yaeji-ep2/ | EP2 | If most dance music works as a solvent drawing people out of their shells and into each other’s space, Yaeji’s songs—part house, part hip-hop—focus more on the shells themselves. The New York producer and vocalist doesn’t see the awkwardness of the club as a wall to be torn down with fast enough beats and deep enough bass, which is not to say that the bass on her second EP isn’t deep; its subdermal quake, especially on “After That,” ranks high among EP2’s many charms. It’s more that the beats, the bass, and the lyrics she drips on top of them all work to remind you of the limits of dancefloor transcendence, and the strange, lonely pocket you fall into when you aim for transcendence and miss.
Yaeji pushes her music further to its poles on EP2. While her first EP established her idiosyncratic vocals—she simultaneously murmurs and raps and sings, as if there’s nothing to shout over, nothing to prove—her second contrasts them with deep, ebbing backbeats and heavy rumbles of bass. She sings (and raps and murmurs) in both English and Korean, sometimes switching between the two mid-thought, as if she’s reached the limit of specificity one language can offer and has to use two to pinpoint her music’s uneasy emotional timbre in parallax. On “Drink I’m Sippin On,” she repeats the phrase “that’s not it” in Korean, emphasizing both its elegant syllabic architecture and the sensation of being not quite understood.
Even the EP’s most crowd-rousing track, “Raingurl,” casts overtones of alienation on its seesawing beat. The refrain of “make it rain, girl, make it rain” scans plainly enough, but like a lot of hip-hop vocalists, Yaeji tends to choose words as much for their sound as their literal meaning (if not prioritizing the former). “Mother Russia in my cup” doesn’t hold much semantic water, but it sounds badass and its meter hits the beat. It’s as if Yaeji is porting slang in from a world just adjacent to our own, one with colloquialisms that roll a little more smoothly off the tongue. She pronounces them so casually it’s disorienting, like you’re expected to know them and you don’t, which makes it all the easier to surrender to her beats.
EP2 closes with a cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit,” a song Yaeji renders in her own muted palette with a dash of Auto-Tune and some extra language play. Between verses, she collapses the phrase “passionate from miles away” into the portmanteau “passionway,” repeating it until it becomes another texture stippling the atmosphere. The line and her elision of it make for a concise summation of what she’s doing in her music as a whole: detailing affect and distance at the same time, hinting at strong feelings with subtle tones. Yaeji doesn’t concern herself much with disaffection; her music isn’t about proving you don’t care, but examining what it’s like to care from far away, through an obstacle that won’t budge. And unlike Drake, whose vocal patterns map so neatly onto hers that her “Passionfruit” almost starts to sound like the original one, she’s not casting judgment on that obstacle. She’s just noticing the barriers that crop up between people despite their better efforts and trying, with a little sub-bass, to echolocate their foundations. | 2017-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Godmode | November 7, 2017 | 8.1 | 4a6a379e-decf-4a03-b156-41b4f1814db2 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Building on the unusual interpretations it performs live, the Norwegian duo recorded an entire album of covers; unlikely choices including AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top" and Kiss' "Crazy, Crazy Nights" are slowed to a crawl and injected with a sense of bleak foreboding. | Building on the unusual interpretations it performs live, the Norwegian duo recorded an entire album of covers; unlikely choices including AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top" and Kiss' "Crazy, Crazy Nights" are slowed to a crawl and injected with a sense of bleak foreboding. | Susanna and the Magical Orchestra: Melody Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9468-melody-mountain/ | Melody Mountain | In the bringing-it-down-a-notch tradition of Cat Power's The Covers Record, melancholic Norwegian duo Susanna and the Magical Orchestra have followed its ice-veined 2004 debut with a collection of cover tunes. Speaking with the band members in August, they told me Melody Mountain was originally supposed to be an EP. They decided to record some of the covers they'd been doing live and the idea spiraled into a larger project. However they arrived at this 10-song collection, it plays to the band's strengths: Two years after the release of List of Lights and Buoys, their spare, unforgettable take on Dolly Parton's "Jolene" remains the band's calling card.
Instead of coasting along with expected, aesthetically linked updates, Melody Mountain's oddball set list includes imaginative revisions: AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top", backed by, among other things, cembalo, a baroque keyboard instrument; a simplified, back-porch incision of Prince's "Condition of the Heart"; a Cat Powered ramble through Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right". To the band's credit, every choice, no matter how strange at first, ends up sounding real. They own each unironic, personalized revision; this isn't some indulgent Gus Van Sant meta game.
The honest sound could be a result of the pared-down, two-person lineup, coupled with the crystalline Deathprod production. Rather than lugging along some weepy string section, the "orchestra" is just one guy, ex-Jaga Jazzist and Shining member Morten Qvenild. His instrumental expertise and good taste lends intricately lush, deftly subtle keyboard/piano/church organ-based backdrops. More striking than the band's minimalism are the pristine, unpolluted vocals of Susanna Karolina Wallumrød. A true talent in the vein of Chan Marshall and Mira Billotte, she sings like a Norwegian mountain stream, never over-enunciating or throwing in unnecessary trills.
Melody Mountain's interpretations vary in shades and gradations. Kiss' "Crazy, Crazy Nights" becomes a shivery, damp-highway anthem for the dispossessed; Scott Walker's "It's Raining Today", a spooky, pedal-steeled, echo-chambered finale to a one-woman musical. Live, it was "Hallelujah" that made the people cry. Most versions of Leonard Cohen's transcendent ballad can send tear ducts into overtime, but it's a song Susanna and the Magical Orchestra have been performing for a while and Wallumrod's pacing and phrasing were masterful-- like she snuck herself into each note and lived an entire life inside it before moving onto the next. Here, as the hushed, funereal opener, it's pretty tough to top.
The song earning the most attention is a taffy-stretched "Love Will Tear Us Apart", wherein Ian Curtis's most famous libretto is laid bare and slowed to half speed. The original's nervously bottled dance is replaced by a languid, nearly a capella drift. To go the pop culture route, if this version soundtracked Donnie Darko, that make-out scene would become more tenderly melancholic, less heady and nerve-wracked.
In a great year for mountain albums (think Blood Mountain and Return to Cookie Mountain, among others), Susanna & the Magical Orchestra contribute the most enigmatic collection to the pile. Of course, there's reason to be restrained in the praise: They do a nice job, but these are only covers, and it'll be interesting to hear their own songwriting developments on future records. In the meantime, Melody Mountain is an example of expansive restraint that, surprisingly enough, makes for good driving music. Maybe it's the ghosts of particular songs' rocker pasts propelling the molasses flow? Hypothermia's phantom aches? | 2006-10-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2006-10-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rune Grammofon | October 6, 2006 | 7.4 | 4a7b0d8b-224b-40a8-aa2d-3dc7ed95142b | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Canadian songwriter Crystal Dorval melts away the haze of dream pop for her most clear-eyed and expansive music to date. | Canadian songwriter Crystal Dorval melts away the haze of dream pop for her most clear-eyed and expansive music to date. | White Poppy: Paradise Gardens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/white-poppy-paradise-gardens/ | Paradise Gardens | As White Poppy, Canadian songwriter Crystal Dorval glides through dream pop’s highest altitudes with a guitar that rumbles like a jet engine. Releases like 2015’s excellent Natural Phenomena hid psychedelic Lisa Frank wonderlands and a distinct, unshakeable melancholy in their thick fog banks. On her follow-up, Paradise Gardens, these clouds clear to reveal her most immediate, adventurous music to date and the always razor-sharp songwriting that lurked behind them.
Whether you’ve just fallen in love or taken drugs, dream pop has always been great at mirroring wild shifts in brain chemistry, but Paradise Garden often sounds like a mind trying to hold itself together. Over the blissful drumbeat of opener “Broken,” Dorval sighs, “There’s a hole in my heart/Don’t know where the pieces are/There’s a hole in my head/Guess I’m better off than dead.” Her ethereal whisper makes no attempt to hide the dire image painted by the lyrics, which culminate in chants of “I don’t want to complain/I can’t help myself today” and a starry guitar solo. “Broken” is a gorgeously, euphoric song about feeling absolutely terrible, but it sets the tone for an album where Dorval achieves trippy highs by simply accepting the lows.
While Paradise Gardens recalls both dream pop originators like Cocteau Twins and revivalists like Dum Dum Girls, the direct and almost conversational way it explores subjects like depression is original. Depression doesn’t fit a tidy narrative, and Dorval’s layered writing captures the struggle of each new day. “Broken” and “Hardly Alive,” a song built on fuzzed-out guitars and driving drums that focuses on feeling trapped in your home, contain the album’s most anxious spirals. Yet it’s when Dorval shifts into the woozier side of her work that Paradise Garden takes on a meditative calm and a zen confidence.
“Memories,” the second track on the album, sets the leisurely pace that’s always suited White Poppy best. Over a shimmering guitar and simple drums, she delivers lines with a plainspoken simplicity that recalls Bill Callahan, letting each word hang for a moment before drifting to the next: “I/Am letting go/Of who/I used to be/Everything/I know/Is rearranging.” Each steady step brings the song closer to a kaleidoscopic beauty, and each fading memory seems to lift Dorval higher. On songs like the dubby “Hawk” and airy “Orchid Child,” Dorval’s hypnotic mantras float over her drifting guitar.
If previous White Poppy albums engulfed the listener in lo-fi guitar haze, Dorval unlocks new musical hues here by adding synths and samples. This experimentation leads to surprises like the magical “Something Sacred,” where Dorval, singing over a steady shuffle and chromatic guitar, is joined by the sound of a dolphin’s laughter bursting into the mix; the strange duet the two form has become one of my favorite musical moments of the year. It also gives us the staggering “Silence,” an unexpectedly uplifting song about feeling isolated that takes on a new power in a time of self-quarantine. “I/Am/Alone,” she sings in a whisper, letting each word hang over a distant glowing guitar, before adding “You/Are/Too.” It’s an equally heavy and heavenly realization, delivered in a moment when we are all trying to understand our situation and ourselves. White Poppy offers both blissful escape and inspiring strength just by taking it one day at a time.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Not Not Fun | April 30, 2020 | 7.5 | 4a7f9d8c-0b93-4503-914b-c258d2e7a6b7 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Jumping from the blockchain to streaming platforms, the four West Coast OGs offer an album’s worth of trunk-rattling traditionalism that celebrates their exalted elder status. | Jumping from the blockchain to streaming platforms, the four West Coast OGs offer an album’s worth of trunk-rattling traditionalism that celebrates their exalted elder status. | Mount Westmore: SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-westmore-snoop-cube-40-dollarhort/ | SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT | If you missed the debut LP from hip-hop supergroup Mount Westmore last summer, you’re excused. In a stunt seemingly designed to persuade blockchain enthusiasts to use multiple Slurp Juices on a single album, the quartet of West Coast OGs (Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40, and Too $hort) released Bad MFs on a shady Maltese NFT platform called Gala Music in July 2022. The release gambit mirrored Snoop’s announcement from a few months prior that Death Row —which he’d just purchased—would become “the first NFT label”; in a similar spirit, Mount Westmore made their live debut in April 2021 at a pay-per-view boxing match featuring YouTube irritant Jake Paul.
Outside the coterie of Bored Ape collectors and stunt pugilists, anyone who’d heard of Mount Westmore had every right to be suspicious of a simple cash grab by four rappers who got bored during lockdown. Once the singles “Big Subwoofer” and “Too Big” started circulating in a more traditional manner, however, actual rap fans—or at least those of us over 40—could feel something close to anticipation for more of the same trunk-rattling West Coast traditionalism. The rappers may all be in their fifties, but between Snoop’s syrupy flow, $hort’s raspy pimp croak, and E-40 rapping like he’s about to throw up at any moment, three of hip-hop’s most inimitable timbres show little signs of wear (Cube’s bark has, understandably, mellowed with time). While the revised, expanded, and retitled SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT that slipped onto streaming platforms in December won’t likely appeal to anyone born after the first Friday movie hit theaters, and its occasional attempts to court contemporary relevance fall flat, the album more than proves that it’s possible to age gracefully in a young person’s game.
The quartet reportedly recorded several dozen tracks for the project during quarantine, and, true to their chosen name—a nod to the interminable G.O.A.T. debates online and off—the contributions are equal, with few features (save a P-Lo appearance and a very brief spoken-word Dr. Dre cameo) and the collective privileged over individual showmanship. Thirty years after the rappers’ respective primes, it’s still thrilling to hear them trade verses on opening one-two punch “California” and “Motto,” with era-specific production handled by Bay Area veteran and longtime E-40 collaborator Rick Rock. Though 40 isn’t the most famous of the four, he nearly steals the show from the get-go, providing the sour hook for the first song and a wicked double-time verse to open the second.
The quartet is clearly comfortable with its exalted elder status, and it’s worth remembering that the four rappers came up during the hip-hop era that privileged Black entrepreneurship and multimedia stardom. On “Free Game,” over a DecadeZ track that hearkens back to the pre-Dre era of L.A. electro-rap, they outline their CVs and offer a how-to guide for surviving the game. “Fuck the police, pay attention to the OGs,” argues Cube, while Snoop—perhaps the most widely beloved ’90s rapper—reminds us that he’s “gettin’ money out your favorite television stations.” Though these four have crafted some of hip-hop’s most indelible songs about the politics of street life, this album prioritizes the party and bullshit. The small exception predictably involves Cube, who obliquely responds to critics of his dreadful COVID opinions and political allies on “Have a Nice Day” with a weak nod toward cancel culture. Cube’s strangest choice here comes via “On Camera,” which would seem to nod toward his iconic 1992 album track about Black citizen surveillance, but instead, no shit, is about the kind of home-surveillance system often used by suburbanites to profile and incarcerate young Black men: “Yеah, punk bitch, you better put it back/Let ’еm know we got cameras on this cul-de-sac.”
Cube telling trespassers to literally get off his lawn is a reminder of just how far hip-hop has traveled since N.W.A.’s debut 36 years ago. Coupled with the fact that the current crop of twentysomething rappers seem to have less knowledge than ever about the genre’s progenitors, this album could easily scan as a bunch of crotchety elder statesmen demanding respect from the youngsters. Instead, SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT is merely a good album on its own merits, which is not shocking at all to anyone who’s followed these rappers in their resting-on-laurels decades. Especially when we’re constantly reminded that rappers reaching their forties, let alone fifties, represents something of a minor miracle, it’s worth hoping not just for another Mount Westmore album—there are reportedly dozens more tracks—but for other OGs to stake their own claims to historical status in the present moment. | 2023-01-11T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-11T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | MNRK Music Group | January 11, 2023 | 6.5 | 4a8035b1-b66b-4f0e-b4c1-8d380cb85a2a | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
Already a global star, reggaetón’s reigning hitmaker tries his hand at becoming an auteur with an audiovisual album. | Already a global star, reggaetón’s reigning hitmaker tries his hand at becoming an auteur with an audiovisual album. | J Balvin: Colores | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-balvin-colores/ | Colores | J Balvin didn’t have to drop a concept album. He also didn’t have to include with it a series of “guided meditations,” or shoot a video for every song on the record. Already well into his global ascent, the Colombian juggernaut could have simply bundled Colores’ radio-ready hits and rode out the streaming wave. Yet Balvin has long outpaced that tactic, eschewing his earliest goals of mainstream reggaetón success for something greater. He recently told Vogue UK he wants to be a “living legend,” punto. So now, Balvin is in the business of crafting a lasting aesthetic—namaste hands and all.
Colores’ concept is steeped in this earnest (if slightly indulgent) pursuit. Each of its 10 tracks corresponds to a different color, in a sort of sonic mood ring. “Rojo” deploys atmospheric synths to evoke romance; on “Gris,” a cumbia-derived guitar recalls the sound of Balvin’s Medellín atop a chunky beat. We even get an answer to fellow urbano upstart Bad Bunny’s “Safaera” with another nasty puro perreo cut (“Negro”). But through all of this, Balvin’s underlying mission remains clear.
He telegraphed his commitment to his idea when he dropped the album’s final track, “Blanco,” as the lead single in late 2019, choosing it over surefire beach hit “Azul” or the rainbow of “Arcoíris” (featuring Oasis’ Afrobeats all-star, Mr. Eazi). In doing so, Balvin effectively slapped down a layer of primer, delivering an absence of color in preparation for the rest.
Directed by frequent collaborator Colin Tilley (who oversaw every video for the album), the accompanying music video for “Blanco” signals the madness of a world gone blank. In it, we see Balvin clad in dystopic drip courtesy of Virgil Abloh’s Off-White brand, as the reggaetonero’s face quite literally drips in glossy alabaster paint. Beside him, bone breakers writhe in zero-gravity, cats go flying, and a polar bear gets X-ray visioned. The only thing left to hold onto is recurrent partner and producer Sky Rompiendo’s clomping bassline, as Balvin’s “ey” spreads into the sparse breaks between each beat.
Given “Blanco’s” gaudiness, some likely chalked up the Colores concept as just Balvin’s latest playground. In some ways, it is: Album opener “Amarillo” (Yellow) teems with funhouse horns sampled from French hip-hop collective Saïan Supa Crew’s “Angela,” as Rompiendo pumps the sample into an addictingly—or, depending on your sensitivity, annoyingly—incessant loop. Overhead, Balvin croons, “¿Cómo te explico? No me complico (How can I explain? I don’t mess around)”/“A mí me gusta pasarla rico (I like to have a good time),” proving he’s still always up for a party. Yet it’s the minimalism of “Blanco”—both in its pared-down production and its spartan visuals—that makes its counterpart shine in equal measure. As an exercise in sequencing, these bookend tracks represent opposite poles of the Colores spectrum—Balvin’s playground, if it is that, has plenty of order.
And that’s because Balvin has always organized his work along visual terms. His offbeat mix of influences has made way for neon dye jobs, Spongebob grills, and luminous tours like last year’s Arcoíris Tour (named for Colores’ penultimate track), where a leopard-haired Balvin centered himself in what can only be described as an army of kawaii Michelin Men and emoji-adjacent mascots, recalling the work of Japan’s matchless visual artist Takashi Murakami.
Speaking of whom: Balvin’s latest cover art is credited to Murakami. It’s a big deal for Balvin, who had “dreams” of working with the artist for a better part of the last decade. In part for his shared whimsy, no doubt. But as it goes, a Murakami collaboration might as well be any nascent pop star’s christening. It puts Balvin in the same camp as fellow tastemakers Kanye and Pharrell, who have collaborated with Murakami to much renown. Now with his own seat at the table, J Balvin will no doubt sigue rompiendo. | 2020-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Universal Music Latino | March 27, 2020 | 7.3 | 4a80c173-3dd3-43a9-87b4-665ce9ca50a5 | Jenzia Burgos | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenzia-burgos/ | |
German electronic music veteran's second album is an elegant, eminently listenable blend of chirpy beats, homespun voices, and sighing keyboards. | German electronic music veteran's second album is an elegant, eminently listenable blend of chirpy beats, homespun voices, and sighing keyboards. | Robag Wruhme: Thora Vukk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15549-thora-vukk/ | Thora Vukk | A veteran of Germany's electronic music scene, Robag Wruhme released one of minimal techno's more idiosyncratic albums, Wuzzelbud "KK", in 2004. Since then he has quietly issued a handful of singles. In January, Wruhme-- né Gabor Schablitzki-- put together a sly, melodic mix for Cologne's Kompakt, followed in April by Thora Vukk. Released on DJ Koze's increasingly impressive Pampa imprint, Wruhme's second LP is an elegant, eminently listenable blend of chirpy beats, homespun voices, and sighing keyboards.
Wruhme's music has taken a path similar to that of one of his contemporaries, Isolée; tracks that once feasted on funny noises and unexpected pops have been smoothed over, like practical jokers settling into masters of the quip. Thora Vukk also has something in common with Nicolas Jaar's Space Is Only Noise; both are albums of modest treated-keys beauty, though Wruhme's music is deeply rooted in house traditions and tempos that Jaar's plays fast and loose with (or, more accurately, slow and loose).
Thora Vukk is a sunrise album, one that sits lightly. Its tracks don't build and peak so much as arrive and taper. "Brucke Eins", already a placid interlude featuring dollops of organ, ends with someone calmly pecking at a keyboard. Wruhme uses voices sparingly but memorably; "Pnom Gobal" features a back-and-forth between casual scatting and a string section. The closest Thora Vukk comes to cresting is a breakdown during "Tulpa Ovi", in which a skittering break comes to a stop for joyful call and response between a performer and a child audience.
It's telling that Thora Vukk's most memorable moment occurs when the music all but drops out, but it's also misleading. Wruhme's sound design is careful and deep; the album's homespun feel is in tone only (it would be lazy to compare it to the sweet, sepia-toned photograph on the album's cover, but, well, yeah). He leaves plenty of space between the muted chirps of his drums and those lovely velvet keys, and there's lots to be gained by playing the record loudly on a good system. Wruhme's career path and stature make Thora Vukk the type of album that never escapes the clutches of house connoisseurs, but fans of Jaar and even Four Tet will find a lot to like in its pacing and beauty. | 2011-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pampa | June 27, 2011 | 7.9 | 4a8d6f73-03f3-40d0-9fa4-7c593083d78b | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The far-reaching sound collage of the electronic musician’s sprawling album consists of gorgeous ambient tones and textures that feel more composed than found. | The far-reaching sound collage of the electronic musician’s sprawling album consists of gorgeous ambient tones and textures that feel more composed than found. | Flora Yin-Wong: Holy Palm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flora-yin-wong-holy-palm/ | Holy Palm | Flora Yin-Wong’s Holy Palm is a travel diary in sound, one where temple bells and voice notes replace passport stamps and ticket stubs. The London-born electronic musician sourced its contents from her frequent peregrinations, gathering abstracted rustling and rumbling from all sorts of exotic and mundane places: a supermarket in Tokyo, an airport in Bali, a street festival in Buenos Aires, weddings in Hackney and Thessaloniki. Buddhist monks chant in Cantonese in Hong Kong’s Po Lin monastery; a Greek Orthodox priest is recorded on a car radio in Crete; whales sing off the coast of Trømso. In many ways, her album is a record of motion itself. Not only do many of its sounds come from the actual act of travel—journeys by plane, train, and automobile; transit via tunnel, aqueduct, and escalator—but it is sequenced in a way that emphasizes forward motion. Sounds tumble together, sometimes layering into complex harmonies, but just as often, shoving and bumping into one another, like restless tourists in line for the Pompidou or the Taj Mahal.
But most of those references you might not ever glean with your ears alone; this record of motion takes place largely inside the sonic equivalent of a vehicle with blacked-out windows. In the album’s credits, many of Yin-Wong’s sounds—unlabeled mementos rescued from the depths of her iPhone—are identified only as “unknown.” The organizing principle here is similar to the strategy she used on Ubi Stunt, her 2019 commission for Somerset House Studios, in which a single piece might collage together wind and gravel in the UK, crows in Hokkaido, insects in Bali, and a thunderstorm that has lost its geotag. (Some of those same sounds seem to reappear on Holy Palm, in fact.) Here as there, place and nonplace dissolve into one another; fragments of highly specific environments crumble into a fine, gray dust.
Across much of the album, Yin-Wong’s collage consists of gorgeous ambient tones and textures that feel more composed than found. “Tirta Empul” opens the record with pealing gongs and the rattle of wooden percussion; as metallic drones swell in volume, the pace remains agonizingly slow, the mood ritualistic. In “Vale,” an extended foghorn blast is layered and harmonized with itself; gradually, the barest outline of a melody emerges, backlit against a scrim of deep, bassy tumult. Then, with “Martyrr,” a brief blast of noise—electrical static, a broken air conditioner, who knows—gives way to the mournful singing of a Christian monk, who is himself displaced, in “Bitterness,” by the sad, sour tones of plucked strings looped against keening, minor-key melodies. At times like these, Yin-Wong’s use of texture, contrast, and flow gives her arrangements an unmistakably musical, even lyrical character, like a dark-ambient DJ set accompanied by the tin-roof rattling of a Foley artist.
Venture deep enough into the labyrinth and you’ll find a few stabs at actual club music: In “Aurochs,” white noise is sculpted into the equivalent of techno’s customary kick/hi-hat/snare patterns, and in “Diyu,” heavy percussive strikes are looped into an ominous industrial march. But much of the time, club music appears only as the index of a specific memory. Captured from the green rooms of nightclubs or the backseats of taxis, snippets of grime, UK garage, and techno are recorded on Yin-Wong’s phone—drenched in hallway echo or tinnily compressed through car speakers—and then scattered through the mix like breadcrumbs leading back to late nights remembered only by those who lived them.
On the 15-minute tracks “Loci I” and “Loci II,” Yin-Wong largely abandons the musicality of the rest of the album in favor of a randomized slide reel of places. Layering gives way to simple juxtaposition. Each sound—a snatch of Corona’s Eurodance hit “Rhythm of the Night,” Balinese chanting, a snippet of grime MC—is given a moment’s time, then shunted aside in favor of the next. It is as though she were flipping through files on her phone—perhaps searching for a specific memory, perhaps just scrolling idly. These tracks are less expressive and more cryptic than the rest of the album, and on an aesthetic level, they feel less satisfying, but they also seem crucial to the questions Yin-Wong asks with Holy Palm.
In her quest to understand the nature of the relationship between sound, place, and memory, Yin-Wong’s collage resembles the French filmmaker Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil, an audiovisual essay stitched together with images from a fictional cameraman’s travels in Japan, Iceland, and Africa—department stores, temples, commuter trains—and overlaid with after-the-fact reflections taken from his letters. “He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time,” says the narrator. “Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.” Like San Soleil’s protagonist, Lin-Wong is a kind of hunter-gatherer, a collector of moments captured and severed from their original contexts. Fascinated by the banal, the forgettable, and the fleeting, she asks: What happens when a memory is cut loose, and only its echo is left?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Modern Love | December 2, 2020 | 7.3 | 4a92aa9c-4616-427f-a045-24ef7f7c922e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
In the 1970s, the Downtown saxophonist fused free jazz’s fire-breathing spirit with minimalism’s dizzying swirl. Three new reissues from Unseen Worlds document the evolution of his unique style. | In the 1970s, the Downtown saxophonist fused free jazz’s fire-breathing spirit with minimalism’s dizzying swirl. Three new reissues from Unseen Worlds document the evolution of his unique style. | Dickie Landry / Lawrence Weiner: Solos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dickie-landry-solos-4-cuts-placed-in-a-first-quarter-having-been-built-on-sand/ | Solos / 4 Cuts Placed in “A First Quarter” / Having Been Built on Sand | To hear Dickie Landry tell it, he’s been in the right place at the right time for decades. Within weeks of moving to New York City in 1969, he had met Ornette Coleman, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, forging lasting relationships with each. He was working as a plumber alongside Glass when he started photographing icons of the Downtown art scene, documenting the embryonic careers of sculptor Richard Serra and multimedia polymaths Keith Sonnier and Joan Jonas, as well as Glass’ ensemble, which he had just joined on saxophone. He bonded with Paul Simon and ended up playing sax on Graceland after introducing himself at a Carnegie Hall performance; he sat in with Bob Dylan at 2003’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the day after a chance meeting through a restaurateur friend. Despite his relative obscurity, Landry has been ubiquitous, repeatedly finding his niche among artists looking to push their work beyond the familiar.
Landry’s music occupies a peculiar, non-idiomatic zone all its own. He grew up on a farm outside Lafayette, Louisiana, in the 1950s and ’60s, playing saxophone from the age of 10 and diving headfirst into the jazz and zydeco that surrounded him. Early on, the multi-reedist saw the strange and thrilling results of cross-cultural exchange, and he carried that spirit with him to New York, where he shepherded many other Louisianans into the thriving avant-garde art and music communities of Lower Manhattan. Throughout the early-to-mid ’70s, as he became a key member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, Landry staked out his own corner at the intersection of free jazz and minimalism, developing a unique style of improvisation that unites the former’s fire-breathing revolutionary spirit and the latter’s dizzying swirl.
A new trio of reissues from Unseen Worlds—Solos, Four Cuts Placed in “A First Quarter”, and Having Been Built on Sand—documents the evolution of his style. Each album sprang from Landry’s connections across the avant-garde, but even when the music was recorded in a gallery setting, nothing about it is tidy or inert. Like fellow Glass Ensemble member Joan La Barbara, Landry harnesses the technicality and endurance that Glass’ music requires and puts it to work in far more esoteric—at times anarchic—contexts. As the ’70s progressed, Landry’s music became increasingly fixated on tonality and rhythm, but these three albums present a musician determined to confront and confound, even when he embraces repetition and melody. The music runs from rapturous, long-form group improv to hushed, circular melodies overlaid with cut-up poetry, but the most revelatory bits lie squarely in the middle.
From its very first seconds, Solos squirms in a million directions at once. Cut from a single, continuous session at the Leo Castelli Gallery over one night in February 1972, the album is a tangled thicket of bluster and skronk. Joining Landry on soprano sax and electric piano were seven other improvisers, including three additional saxophonists, two bass players, and drummer David Lee Jr., who emerges as its heroic figure and provides relentless forward motion throughout the album’s nearly two-hour runtime. Cohesion seems coincidental throughout, and while each player ostensibly takes solos in turn, collision and overlap are the rule rather than the exception. It’s as close as Landry got to paying homage to Ornette Coleman (whose “Lonely Woman” he quotes about halfway through), John Coltrane, the AACM, and the era’s other giants of improvisation. Here he is at his most unrestrained, reveling in the power of collective instantaneous invention. Yet Solos—immersive and at times overwhelming—lacks his next album’s clarity of vision.
Recorded just nine months later and with four of the same players, Four Cuts Placed in “A First Quarter” takes an introspective turn. Of its four distinct pieces, only the opening “Requiem for Some” features the full ensemble, with Landry focusing instead on solo and duo formations—a format that would define his work for the rest of the decade. “Requiem” showcases restraint, the horns exhaling long, sustained tones while Lee traces out ever-shifting patterns around his kit. For the rest of the album, including in its most brash moments, the empty space around the players is palpable, and Landry and his associates seem to be in constant dialogue with that absence. These minimalist settings are partially a result of practicality—the music accompanied a similarly oblique experimental film by Lawrence Weiner—but divorced from that context, even the most rudimentary musical gestures feel vivid.
“4th Register,” the second and most mesmerizing of the Four Cuts, documents an important step in Landry’s musical progression. Here he stands alone with his horn, working out increasingly abstracted variations on a folk-like refrain until it boils over into microtonal squeals. Each sound that his sax produces is fed into a half-second tape delay, a technique he would expand in live performances over the years leading up to his landmark 1977 album Fifteen Saxophones. “Vivace Duo” features Landry and fellow saxophonist Richard Peck in a 10-minute duel to see who can blow hardest and fastest, and the chaos is accentuated by the stark atmosphere. Each of the Four Cuts is emotive and direct, made all the more powerful by its simplicity.
The simplicity remains on Having Been Built on Sand, another collaboration with Weiner, but there’s a sense of detachment throughout that dulls its impact. Each track features Landry ruminating on a short melodic fragment while Weiner, Britta Le Va, and Tina Girouard recite the title phrase, lyrics of German folk songs, and other short pieces of text, seemingly without much conviction. Despite some inventive embellishment by Landry, and the remarkable resonance of the recording space (which belonged to Robert Rauchenberg), the album’s purposeful obscurity is a letdown, especially after listening to the passionate, laser-focused recordings that preceded it. Landry’s most potent work starts deep in the gut and then reaches for the outer limits of what music can do. That fusion of uninhibited grit and creative expansion illuminates his singular artistic spirit, restlessly in search of transcendence. | 2022-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | null | December 21, 2022 | 7.6 | 4a9376b2-3867-4f3b-b09d-06cbf3060b0b | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Let me come out of the gate stating the obvious: The summer of 1996 was a fucking long time ago ... | Let me come out of the gate stating the obvious: The summer of 1996 was a fucking long time ago ... | The Wrens: The Meadowlands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8742-the-meadowlands/ | The Meadowlands | Let me come out of the gate stating the obvious: The summer of 1996 was a fucking long time ago. I was fresh out of high school then, living with my parents in the outlying suburbs of Minneapolis, trying to craft an embryonic Pitchfork into something respectable without any prior writing experience. In the throes of that disgustingly humid, buggy summer in which it seemed I would one day die as I'd lived-- navigating the road construction obstacle course on Hwy 5 and despising an oppressive day job, yet forever hopeful of some distant, supernatural delivery-- Secaucus was sunwarmed bliss, the infinite pleasure zone I couldn't stop hitting.
Bursting immediately at its seams with the serrated dual guitar blast of "Yellow Number Three" and "Built in Girls"' steam-engine roar, Secaucus welcomes with a warm immediacy rare in even the most revered pop treasures, and a density whose every layer hides another secret synth melody, jagged hook or vocal harmony. The depth of realization in this record is unparalleled: every angle is perfected. Its surplus of pristine pop hooks and energetic discharge rivals the best of Built to Spill, Guided by Voices, Pavement, or any other heralded indie rock band, and tracks like the anthemic, accelerating "I've Made Enough Friends", the wistful malaise of "Won't Get Too Far", the hurtling "Surprise, Honeycomb", and the emotive high-school slowdance number "Jane Fakes a Hug" reveal proof in spades: Beyond their euphoric harmonies, melodic rapture, and marblemouthed vocals lie some of the greatest lyrics the genre's seen yet. Respectively, these songs contain tales of a nationwide murder rampage ("Being good made me burst/ The killing got worse/ It almost got fun"), a lovestruck abandonment of social lives ("A rush of wonder/ This charm we're under might last/ Are we too hoping/ Our years are showing and fast"), a hopeless high school graduate who fears he won't live up to his father's achievements ("I can't believe I'm grown/ None of my friends live at home/ Not since fall"), and the harrowing play-by-play of a brutal divorce ("Our oaths, our realty, a good job, a husband/ A husband or what/ Christ, Jane, I'm not/ I never was").
But as long ago as all of that was for me, for The Wrens, it's been an eternity. The band always made themselves accessible via Internet, and as the years passed, I would frequently email to wonder when a follow-up was due-- and even as I knew they had respectable careers and families, I didn't expect it would take seven years to see release. I also hadn't known that, at the height of their 1996 U.S. tour, all promotion for Secaucus was, allegedly, pulled in a huff by Grass Records labelhead Alan Melzter when the band dared question a million-dollar contract he'd tried to strongarm them into signing. It was just another in a long string of sloppy breakups that would eventually sour the band on the music industry. After endless reassurances that their third album would be out "in a few months, we promise," hope began to fade that the record would ever see light of day at all. Then came word that they had actually finished the record, and-- to celebrate and prevent them from further second-guessing-- were holding a party to destroy the master tapes.
The package finally arrived from the band themselves: an advance, unmastered CD-R labeled The Meadowlands with makeshift artwork and tentative song titles. Excitedly, I threw it into the car stereo, and waited. Waiting. Waiting. What the fuck happened to these guys? It had been seven years, sure-- no one was expecting anything as powerful as Secaucus from middle-agers, but to say The Wrens had mellowed would almost be a joke: There was little trace of the youthful, resonant joy or ecstatic intensity of Secaucus. This was a completely different band. These Wrens were defeated, miserable, hopeless, and-- in their own words-- exhausted.
Disappointed, I shelved the disc and stubbornly refused to listen to the final pressing, even after it arrived at the Pitchfork P.O. box loving wrapped in Tiffany-blue ribbon and paper. Which was about when everyone I knew began raving. People were stunned at my reaction: Surely we'd just heard different albums? And we had, but upon finally listening to the finished version after heavy persuasion from friends, it began to make more sense. This was a completely different band, defeated, miserable, and exhausted, absolutely, but not hopeless. Defying the unwritten rule that any band breaking a five-plus year hiatus must return lethargic and sapped of inspiration before retreating again to obscurity, here The Wrens prove themselves even more shockingly relevant than before-- they have survived extinction, and, fully inspired, they are telling the tale: The Meadowlands is a crushing confessional, documenting every disappointment of the past seven years, every difficult breakup, every bad gig.
If The Wrens were lyrically powerful when writing from third-person perspectives about trivial fantasies on Secaucus, they're devastating delivering their own personal failures, hardships and resignations. The breakup tracks are the least of it, and even those are masochistically autobiographical with recurring characters and story arcs bridging songs. "She Sends Kisses" opens on an acoustic strum and reflective accordion, increasingly piling on layers of instrumentation (electric guitar, drums, piano, vocal harmonies) while Charles Bissell reflectively croons, "A sophomore at Brown/ She worked lost and found/ I put your face on her all year." "Ex-Girl Collection" is upbeat on the surface and conflict beneath: "Ann slams in/ Another lightning round begins.../ 'Charles, I found out/ Wipe that smile off your mouth/ I think it's tell-me time.'" "13 Months in 6 Minutes" is somber and damp-eyed, dewy guitars drenched in wet reverb and whispered vocals at the end of a relationship: "I'm a footnote at best/ I envy who comes next."
But the first-hand accounts of the band's own struggles are what really hit hard, particularly for listeners who've waited the full seven years or who have intimate familiarity with similar situations. "Everyone Choose Sides"-- backed by crusty guitar fighting determinedly through tape falloff, electric piano, and Jerry MacDonnell's insistent, urgent drumming-- is a notable album peak: "Bored and rural-poor at 35/ I'm the best 17-year-old ever.../ We're losing sand/ A Wrens' ditch battle plan.../ Everyone choose sides/ The whole to-do of what to do for money/ Poorer or not this year and hell's the difference." And then there's "This Boy Is Exhausted", which blends the record's brightest hooks with its bleakest lines: Over two layers of blaring guitars (one pulsing, the other jangling), more of MacDonnell's colossal drumwork, and resolute background vocals, Bissell's hardened vocal buzzes: "I can't write what I know/ It's not worth writing/ I can't tell a hit from hell from one sing-along.../ But then once a while/ We'll play a show that makes it worthwhile."
The Wrens are now old enough to be considered indie rock's elder statesmen (their ages range from 33 to 40), and in trading the adolescent kick of Secaucus for ripened resignation, meticulous refinement for crippling maturation, they have realized their magnum opus-- the only album to eclipse Broken Social Scene's staggering You Forgot It in People on my year-end list. The Meadowlands exemplifies what every fan hopes for when a band announces a reunion or returns from more than a half-decade of silence: that they might have somehow improved exponentially each year they hid from the limelight, resulting in a payoff so cultivated it could be called their defining achievement by consensus. It's the reason we continue to harbor mixed feelings about a Pixies comeback: odds are, it ends in disappointment-- it always does-- but The Meadowlands is that one example left standing to offer a glimmer of hope. Black Francis, tomorrow this could be you. | 2003-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Absolutely Kosher | September 29, 2003 | 9.5 | 4a94348f-fdf2-48cf-8cdc-1417a7bafd77 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Phish’s instinctive new studio album is a pleasant surprise, a small joy, and an unlikely course correction. | Phish’s instinctive new studio album is a pleasant surprise, a small joy, and an unlikely course correction. | Phish: Sigma Oasis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phish-sigma-oasis/ | Sigma Oasis | Something interesting happens halfway through “Everything’s Right,” a 12-minute track on Sigma Oasis. For a while, it’s everything you might expect from a Phish record nearly 40 years into their career: an intentionally mind-numbing chorus (“Everything’s right/So just hold tight”) set to a melody that cycles between sunny major chords like a beach ball infinitely bobbing through a crowd of outstretched arms. It’s light and goofy—sorta funky. But then it shifts. Around the five-minute mark, after Trey Anastasio finishes a polite vamp on the word “alright,” he kicks off a guitar solo. Page McConnell follows on the organ. Soon, the whole band is in on it, listening intently to one another and changing shape, one note at a time. Suddenly, Phish is jamming, and you’re right there with them.
On a studio record by this band, it sounds like a total breakthrough. For longer than most groups have been around, the accepted wisdom was that Phish were unable to capture their spontaneous energy off the stage. Combined with their unremarkable songwriting, this failure has resulted in a discography that feels secondary to their actual legacy, best understood through decades of bootlegs, and even better by attending one of their inventive, Odyssean live shows. Maybe their last album, 2016’s obnoxious Big Boat, was rock bottom, the moment they knew something had to change. Maybe veteran producer Bob Ezrin, who departed after helming their past few releases, was to blame. Maybe Anastasio’s solo detour with Ghosts of the Forest was an actual creative reckoning as depicted in 2019’s fawning documentary, Between Me and My Mind. Whatever the case, Sigma Oasis is a pleasant surprise, a small joy, an unlikely course correction.
Its success is also the result of several smart creative decisions. The first was to bring these songs on the road for a couple years before solidifying them. The practice shows; these performances are lived-in and confident, at turns adventurous and refined. The second good idea was to limit the tracklist to just nine songs, all contributions from Anastasio and lyricists Tom Marshall and Scott Herman, with none of the failed experiments and pastiches that drag down nearly all their other albums. The third good idea was to keep the sessions brief and in-house: the whole album was recorded in just one week at Anastasio’s Vermont studio. The plan was to rehearse for their upcoming tour but they quickly realized there was something worth documenting. They trusted their first takes. They had fun.
Sigma Oasis cruises in the relaxed, muted groove this band has settled into over the past few years. None of these songs are new territory for them—the crunchy escapism of the title track, the rock opera Hallmark card of “A Life Beyond the Dream”—but they top anything they’ve recorded in the past decade-and-a-half by capturing their comfortable dynamic with a positivity that radiates from every note. Along the way, they nod to the stylistic diversions that pop up in their live shows: intricate prog (“Mercury”), Zappa freakouts (“Thread”), singing-in-the-shower balladry (“Leaves”), sci-fi atmospherics (the final moments of “Everything’s Right”). You can listen from beginning to end and get a sense of the buoyant, utopian universe they create when they’re playing at their best. And as jam band culture seeps into indie music and beyond, it’s a more concise introduction to their current state of euphoria than, say, a 36-disc box set.
Of course, there will always be people for whom Phish are irredeemable—the punchline in the great joke that is music fandom. Maybe you will tap out by the third time Anastasio tells you that “the tomb of the red queen is painted in vermilion” in “Mercury.” Maybe it’ll be when Page grabs the mic to sing a sad little verse near the beginning of “Leaves.” Maybe it will be during the breakdown in “Thread” that sounds like the house band at a suburban planetarium soundtracking their Halloween light show. These moments are ridiculous—but there’s also triumph in them. Part of the joy in Sigma Oasis is how Phish have learned to bridge their absurd side and their tasteful side, acknowledging that their best ideas have always lurked just one measure ahead of their dumbest ones. Credit also goes to Vance Powell’s production that seems more influenced by soundboard recordings than the slick, big-budget rock albums that this band will never successfully make.
Not everything works. The studio version of “Mercury” fails to live up to the marathon renditions they’ve been playing on tour. And at 11 minutes, “Thread” closes the album by overstaying its welcome with a lurching, menacing coda that punctuates an otherwise uplifting record like a question mark. Plus, there are those lyrics I mentioned earlier from “Everything’s Right” and plenty of others that wouldn’t fare much better printed out of context. But these are minor complaints. “When we recorded the album, we didn’t plan to release it this way,” Phish announced after debuting it with little warning during an April Fools livestream. “But today, because of the environment we’re all in, it just feels right.” This deep into their career, most bands could do a lot worse than sticking together, looking inward, and following their instincts. The rest, they have time to figure out. | 2020-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jemp | April 9, 2020 | 6.5 | 4a95437d-2815-44ae-9010-b06a8a813102 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Luke Wyatt, the Brooklyn-based Va. transplant behind Torn Hawk, releases an astonishing amount of music, some of it beat-oriented, some of it close to the VHS nostalgia feel of chillwave, much of it accompanied by collaged YouTube clips. On his newest effort, things don't lead where you expect them to on first glance. | Luke Wyatt, the Brooklyn-based Va. transplant behind Torn Hawk, releases an astonishing amount of music, some of it beat-oriented, some of it close to the VHS nostalgia feel of chillwave, much of it accompanied by collaged YouTube clips. On his newest effort, things don't lead where you expect them to on first glance. | Torn Hawk: Through Force of Will | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19195-luke-wyatt-through-force-of-will/ | Through Force of Will | Tracks by Torn Hawk draw on various strains of nostalgia, chopping up thoughts and feelings into a mazy whole that inhabits a ground somewhere between sincerity and amusement. Luke Wyatt, the Brooklyn-based Virginia transplant who is the man behind the name, puts an astonishing amount of music out into the world, some of it beat-oriented, some of it edging close to the VHS nostalgia feel of chillwave. L.I.E.S., Rush Hour, and now Not Not Fun are among the many labels to have released his work. Film plays an important part in Wyatt's world—a recent Rising feature noted how his stepmother operated a movie theater, his music is often complemented by a mish-mash of grainy YouTube clips heavy on collage, and his song titles frequently reference the silver screen ("Born to Win (Life After Ghostbusters)", "Damage with Jeremy Irons").
Wyatt calls his experiments in the visual realm "video mulching," most of which consist of a barrage of imagery of an 80s hue. Those clips fall somewhere between the late-night disorientation of John C. Reilly's Steve Brule character and Daniel Lopatin's experiments with sound and vision under his SunsetCorp moniker. Lopatin took tiny loops of 80s music and set them to fuzzed-out visuals, drawing on two fascinations he undoubtedly shares with the Torn Hawk project. Dire Straits, Don Henley, and Christopher Cross have all been sampled by Wyatt, and his off-the-wall work includes "Sundays CD, Skipping" (based around a glitched CD by indie pop icons the Sundays) and a track titled "The Music You Hear at Sea World and Never Forget".
The humor has been dialed down a notch on Through Force of Will, the latest Torn Hawk transmission, although the feeling of looking back to utopian visions of the past is firmly intact. What sets this apart from most chillwave is the strong sweep of romantic feeling that flows through Wyatt's mesh of guitar and electronics—there's palpable emotion here amid the tinny drum machines and twists of industrial synth. It doesn't all come out that way, especially when "Streets on Fire" begins with a hollowed-out drum sound that could have been ripped from a peak Jam & Lewis production. But Wyatt frequently uses his guitar tone, aligned somewhere between the dreamy strum of Mark McGuire and the type of squelchy soloing found on longer Spacemen 3 tracks, to give his music a vital sense of yearn.
Torn Hawk's emotional impact is offset by the visual package, which is all rugged photos of Wyatt, who looks more stud-like than his tender playing might suggest, especially when he's deep into the intricate picking on a track like "To Overthrow". But Through Force of Will partly works because of its intentional signal jamming, where things don't lead where you expect them to on first glance, with Wyatt guiding his audience through the drone-y ambiance of "Hutchison" and ending up in the altered-states pop of "Blindsided". The VHS aesthetics may have a touch of over-familiarity about them, but there's just enough in Wyatt’s beefcake poses to suggest another twist being wrung out of the template, giving his persona the air of an alien outsider invited to the drugs party.
It's in the parameters Wyatt throws around this project that he breaks away from the vagaries of chillwave, substituting ambiguity with personality. Or, as he put it himself in an interview: "I'm not going to restrict my impulses and make stuff in an anonymous fashion with some sort of minimal cover and numbered track titles." The only counterpoint to that is in the sheer weight of material being released, which can make it hard to get a handle on who he is and where he's going. There's already a follow-up to this record due imminently, and doubtless more will surface. But Wyatt clearly delights in setting things up in contrast to one another, particularly when polar opposites are involved, which gives him an incredibly broad field in which to play around. Somehow he's able to retain a sense of self even when looping his material over the blandest strains of 80s rock, and that's where he really succeeds, in defining a pallett that's recognizably his that concurrently allows him to go wandering in boundless directions. | 2014-04-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Not Not Fun | April 1, 2014 | 7.5 | 4a98c84b-b508-4bad-a949-b9414e6bbe73 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
No Age's strikingly spare third album proves that all the reverb, feedback, and velocity of their past work were hardly afterthoughts or subversive tactics to disguise pop songs. For the most part, An Object consists of potential rock songs denied everything they need to actually rock*.* | No Age's strikingly spare third album proves that all the reverb, feedback, and velocity of their past work were hardly afterthoughts or subversive tactics to disguise pop songs. For the most part, An Object consists of potential rock songs denied everything they need to actually rock*.* | No Age: An Object | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18325-no-age-an-object/ | An Object | An Object is protest music. Though their crusade is more principled than political, No Age employ a common countercultural tactic on their third proper LP, reappropriating a derogatory term: what are you calling an object? This is art, with an intrinsic value that cannot be quantified or commoditized and society is worse off when any record is treated differently. But the irony is that it's a clever marketing tactic whether intentional or not; No Age’s music, successful as it’s been, never tells their whole story. Whether it’s the Smell, the T-shirts, the "planned contradictory action," Dean Spunt’s Post-Present Medium label, or anything else bearing their imprimatur, the band’s always been a multimedia affair. They are a bundle of righteous affiliations, “lifestyle music” for people who shudder at the term because their lifestyle is an ethos, upholding certain ideas about DIY, local scenes and anti-corporatism.
When speaking to us earlier this year, Randy Randall promised a total teardown and the time did feel right for the duo to sell high on the “dream-punk” sound they’ve cultivated since Weirdo Rippers. Strikingly spare compared to their previous releases, An Object ensures the shortest distance between the listener and the songs, but with an idealistic corollary that still momentarily shifts the focus away from the music-- with Sub Pop’s blessing, the duo packaged and shipped the record with their own four hands. But what’s left of No Age when you take away the “dream-“ and “-punk”? An Object proves that all the reverb, shrieking noise, and velocity of their past work were hardly afterthoughts or subversive tactics to disguise pop songs. They were essential and the actual mechanics of songwriting-- melody, harmony, structure, instrumental chops-- are exposed on An Object as something that’s far down the list of No Age’s strengths.
You sense that in the three year hiatus between Everything in Between and now, the songs came quickly and most of the time was spent painstakingly turning them inside out-- to mute the drums or excise them completely, use feedback as a backdrop rather than an overlay, to turn rhythms into melody, bass into treble. This is the album that might’ve better earned the title Everything in Between, as the songs are composed of scraps, MacGyver tricks achieved with contact mics, bass guitars, and doctored amps. Occasionally, the effort manifests in notable progress. “An Impression” has a novel rhythmic swing that could actually pass for dancehall and the miniature bumps and bleeps bleed into sighing strings-- it’s No Age’s most typical “pretty” moment, something that could sway people who don’t seek out beauty in harmonic feedback.
But for the most part, An Object consists of potential rock songs denied everything they need to actually rock*.* The minimalism doesn’t make for a fighting trim No Age-- they sound emaciated, subject to a crash diet equally fueled by asceticism and stubbornness. None of which is helped by the clammy production, which casts a green-grey, sickly pallor over An Object rather than clarity. On past records, Spunt’s rigid vocals could most kindly be described as “effective in context,” but freed from the obligations of beating the shit out of his drums, he shrinks in the spotlight. There aren’t vocal melodies on An Object, so much as 11 iterations of one note being budged until it moves in the slightest one way or the other. Meanwhile, Randall forgoes riffs for granular, ephemeral textures and rather than building tension through restraint, the lack of rhythmic, tonal or melodic variation causes the album’s midsection to drone more than their past work which intended to be drone music.
No Age attempt to compensate by making An Object their most lyrically direct album, and at the outset, most of Spunt’s words are pointed towards “you.” You know who “you” are-- “Who do you think you are/ trying so hard/ to make that stage/ but it’s not made that way,” “When I see you/ underneath your lies,” “You’re a broken leg/ a knife with no blade.” It’s “us vs. the man, maaaan” boilerplate for sure, though the generality can work in the favor of a band that’s always had a cause but not much of a rallying cry. When Spunt sings “I won’t be your generator/ you get no power from me,” odds are it’s a bird flip to corporations who co-opt underground art, gentrify scenes, and buy out idealism, or whatever. But if you don’t know the first thing about No Age’s extracurriculars, “I Won’t Be Your Generator” is a multi-purpose rager at parents, bosses, boyfriends, girlfriends, whatever’s harshing your buzz. Much like ditching the drums, it’s an obdurate artistic move that’s effective three minutes at a time. But when a band that’s taken up the role of indie’s moral compass gets stuck in the same black and white thinking on “No Ground” and “C’mon, Stimmung”, the pervasive “you” becomes a strawman version of actual No Age enemies like Kings of Leon and Walmart-- certainly worthy of derision, but too big to bother fighting back in a way that might put those principles to the test.
As An Object trudges forward, a strange and welcome change slowly occurs; you can sense No Age growing fatigued enough to let their guard down. After spending the first half of An Object raging against shadowy power brokers, they’ve retained their autonomy only to find out they can’t outrun their own shadows. “Running From A-Go-Go” is the first point where the drab tone matches the mood; when Spunt complains about “bullshit on the stereo,” he’s probably not taking shots at Imagine Dragons or Macklemore or anyone else specific. It’s just a mundane acknowledgement of a touring musician’s crippling boredom, abject, incapacitating loneliness and how inadequate the moral high ground from earlier can be against emotional encroachment-- “There’s no escaping when it pays your way/ I tell myself it’s one more day/ and one more night alone again.”
On Nouns, Spunt shouted “with passion, it’s true!” So does the pervasive disillusionment of An Object make it false? Of course, not-- the subjects at hand are taken straight from Spunt and Randall’s lives, they've never dealt in fictional songwriting. But perhaps it’s too real, as you get the sense that the hot-button topics that can sustain a punk rocker through their 20s-- art vs. commerce, stability vs. freedom, underground vs. mainstream-- eventually grow tiresome and repetitive and best left to those who have the time and energy for endless debate. That doesn’t mean these conversations shouldn’t happen and perhaps An Object can spark a few. But as a musical document more utile and enjoyable as a conversation piece than for its intended purpose of listening, An Object sadly lives up to its own name. | 2013-08-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 20, 2013 | 6.2 | 4a9a84e3-3482-4f22-ad53-93627cf9c9f9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Chicago band amicably parted ways with Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley after the release of 2012's Pre Language. This tougher, noisier three-song EP is far more compelling than anything from that full-length. | The Chicago band amicably parted ways with Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley after the release of 2012's Pre Language. This tougher, noisier three-song EP is far more compelling than anything from that full-length. | Disappears: Kone EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17912-disappears-kone-ep/ | Kone EP | Chicago's Disappears are one of those bands that promise so much, but too often fall short of the high benchmark set by their best material. Sometimes it even feels like they're sabotaging themselves. A 2011 tour with the Psychic Paramount seemed like a great idea in theory, but the reality of trying to compete with the sheer force and invention of their touring buddies left them sounding like wimpy traditionalists. The band's 2012 album, Pre Language, didn't help matters, somehow losing the magnetic force that made the preceding Guider worthy of many repeat plays. Fortunately, changes are afoot. Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley has amicably departed from the lineup, and the band has returned to working in great breadth on "Kone", a 10-minute track that builds on the promise of "Revisiting" from Guider.
There's something old fashioned about Disappears' approach, perhaps a natural consequence of the fact that singer Brian Case has been around the block more than a few times, first with 90 Day Men and then the Ponys. This is music that comes from a place where there's no shame in trying ideas out in public view, where it's perfectly natural to arrive less-than fully formed. Kone has dropped from out of nowhere, not giving any real idea whether this is a hint of things to come, or a standalone diversion from whatever the band is plotting next. Either way, it's far more compelling than anything from Pre Language, opening up the suggestion that Disappears are fully aware that they function far better when working in repetition than they do when hacking everything down into more compact forms.
This three-track 12-inch simply offers up two versions of "Kone" and the additional "Kontakt". The version named "Kone (edit)" even ends in a locked groove, emphasizing the band's fondness for looking backward and firming up the suspicion that they're finally throwing up their hands and playing to their strengths. The main track is all air-raid siren drones, choppy guitar lines, heavily echoed vocal passages and, toward the close, a steady build of synthesized noise. It's a masterclass in control, never veering into sheer bludgeoning power, always maintaining a steady pace that helps lay out the underlying mood of unease. It goes precisely nowhere and is all the better for it; Disappears' best music sets a mood and pulls you down in it, leaving the listener suspended in a static state.
The same trick works to less effect on "Kontakt", especially when an ill-advised Duane Eddy guitar line surfaces, and the blurred version of "Kone" at the close of the EP doesn't add much to what came before. But there's an overall sense of bridges being rebuilt here, of a band renewed and galvanized for a bigger project ahead. Another album is promised later in the year, and "Kone" should be the natural launch point, a place from which to light the fuse. This is a tougher, more fully realized version of Disappears, operating where their most obvious influences (Spacemen 3, 13th Floor Elevators, Can) have propelled them somewhere instead of bearing down too heavily on their sound. They've regained some attention here. Now, they just need to capitalize on the forward momentum. | 2013-04-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-04-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | April 16, 2013 | 6.4 | 4a9eb69d-dbd4-494c-b339-3f41553dd44b | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye’s head-spinning vocal processing and unusual fusion of influences form a well of deep feeling, even when the meaning is obscured. | Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye’s head-spinning vocal processing and unusual fusion of influences form a well of deep feeling, even when the meaning is obscured. | Jockstrap: Wicked City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jockstrap-wicked-city/ | Wicked City | A first encounter with the UK duo Jockstrap can seem like a dispatch from a renegade shuffle play. Here’s singer-songwriter Georgia Ellery lilting sweetly over Casiotone bossa nova; here’s producer Taylor Skye mimicking a scratched-up copy of Now That’s What I Call EDM; here are the two of them laying down vintage orchestral pop courtesy of their classmates at Guildhall, a London conservatory. There’s more than a whiff of art-school hijinks to the project—particularly when you factor in that name, a predictable talking point in the duo’s interviews. (“I like that kind of gross shock factor,” says Ellery, who often sings in a cherubic coo.) But Jockstrap don’t come off like they’re trying to prove that they’re clever. Beneath the head-spinning vocal processing and surrealist wordplay, Ellery’s songwriting is a well of deep feeling, even when the precise meaning is walled off by layers of abstraction. This is particularly true on Wicked City, their second EP, on which her voice and lyrics soar confidently forward, no matter how jagged the path that Skye blazes.
In their short time together, Jockstrap have fashioned a singular sound from an unusual fusion of influences. The two met in composition class and began trading demos, finding inspiration in the overlap between Ellery’s imagistic character studies, Skye’s dubstep roots, and their shared classical training: not so much a Venn diagram as a wadded-up Moebius strip. On their debut EP, 2018’s Love Is the Key to the City, they toyed with easy-listening strings and space-age bachelor-pad vibes, setting Ellery’s carefully rendered tales of sexual awakening to wheezy electronic lounge jazz reminiscent of James Blake’s first EPs. With “Robert,” Wicked City’s opening song, they announce a marked shift. The strings and the dulcet harmonies are gone; in their place, a lumbering hip-hop beat, part Skrillex and part SOPHIE, that’s full of stop-start changes and sudden silences. Ellery’s cryptic spoken-word bits are digitally stretched and garbled, and the Arizona rapper Stepa J. Groggs, of Injury Reserve, drops 32 bars of pure non sequitur. Even Ellery’s verses are more about sound than sense: What begins as an address to an artist acquaintance (“You’re provoking me Robert/I want to be your playmate/I want my own portrait”) devolves into pitch-shifted gibberish with choice bits (“I want to/Be the bitch, be the masochist”) jutting like rusty iron bars from a scrap heap.
“Robert” sounds virtually nothing like Jockstrap’s debut EP, but with the next song, “Acid,” they’re back to their nostalgic silver-screen fantasies—strings fluttering, Ellery’s voice softer than a mink stole. The song shifts into a melancholy waltz; the lyrics, addressed to Ellery’s brother, are as ominous as they are enigmatic, leading from images of smashed vases, acid, and blood to a couplet of chilling clarity: “What if you kill me off/Or worse, yourself?” These juxtapositions are an essential part of Jockstrap’s aesthetic, and the duo spends the rest of the EP zigging and zagging, playing up every jarring contrast.
The record’s loveliest cut, “Yellow in Green,” distills the carnal sweetness of young love into lyrical piano glissandi redolent of Debussy, all salty skin and lavender breeze. The two-part “The City” begins with just voice and piano and sheds its skin to become a gnarly, distorted hip-hop beat; the first half is a stirringly vivid love letter to the city, a rush of sensations written with all the innocence of Ellery’s coastal upbringing, while the second half is an incomprehensible tale about a bear, a beaver, and a “hideous monster,” spun out like lysergic taffy. It’s beautiful, and also bewildering. The closing “City Hell” goes for a similar kind of discombulation, but to lesser effect, building from a winsome ballad for ersatz harp into a pyrotechnic display of trap beats and guitar solo that’s about as subtle as DJ Mustard remixing Queen.
There are precedents for this in the plasti-pop tomfoolery of PC Music and the stone-faced humor of Dean Blunt; in Jockstrap’s more wistful moments, you can also hear echoes of Julia Holter’s time-traveling chamber pop, a throwback to a world before color TV. But unlike the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach of 100 gecs, a group similarly interested in clashing textures and referential supercollisions, Jockstrap have a more sparing and inviting musical sensibility. It doesn’t always work; the severity of their switchbacks can make for an exhausting listen, and they don’t always know when to rein in the excess. There’s actually a false ending in “City Hell”: a trick fade-out, a moment of silence, and then a reprise of those pinwheeling guitars and buzzing synths, as though the first four minutes of major-key bombast hadn’t been enough. Jockstrap are young—Ellery and Skye are in their fourth year of music school—and they are still finding their way. But when they nail it, as on “The City,” their first-thought-best-thought creative bursts sound not just thrilling but genuinely new. For a group so steeped in retro modes, that’s no small thing.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Pop/R&B | Warp | June 6, 2020 | 7.5 | 4aa1ae0b-5e9b-4379-8626-b48b4918cbe9 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Comprised of Dieter Möbius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of astral synth explorers Cluster and guitarist Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia lived, practiced, and recorded in the hamlet of Forst, Germany during their short lifetime. This boxset gathers everything the group recorded, augmenting the audio with a book of photos and other goodies. It offers the definitive portrait of the band. | Comprised of Dieter Möbius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of astral synth explorers Cluster and guitarist Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia lived, practiced, and recorded in the hamlet of Forst, Germany during their short lifetime. This boxset gathers everything the group recorded, augmenting the audio with a book of photos and other goodies. It offers the definitive portrait of the band. | Harmonia / Harmonia & Eno '76: Complete Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20947-complete-works/ | Complete Works | Digging into the music of Can, Neu!, Cluster, and early Kraftwerk has become a record-collector rite of passage, but during the early '70s, when these bands were in their most active and exploratory years, very few people knew this music existed. Of the many German bands from the period that would later be called "krautrock", Harmonia, though ostensibly a "supergroup," were among the most obscure. Comprised of Dieter Möbius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of astral synth explorers Cluster and guitarist Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia was less a band than a two-year-long Iron John retreat, with electronics swapped out for the customary hand drums. Living, practicing, and recording in the hamlet of Forst, Germany, Harmonia managed two full-length records in their short lifetime, and neither made a dent in the consciousness of your average German music fan. But copies of their records found their way into some famously open-eared and influential fans in the UK—Brian Eno and David Bowie, among others—and Harmonia’s music has been part of the experimental rock canon ever since.
As with many krautrock O.G.s, Harmonia’s initial standing was enhanced by the fact that their records were never easy to find, even after they were discovered by cognoscenti. That was especially true in the U.S., where their records were reissued sporadically, sometimes on dodgy labels. This heavy box set from Gronland fixes that. Gathering everything the group recorded together in one place—and it turns out to be quite a lot, with more music than they managed to release in their lifetime, including newly unearthed fragments released here as Documents 1975—and augmenting the audio with a book of photos and an essay by krautrock expert Geeta Dayal and other goodies, it offers the definitive portrait of the band. With a group as odd as Harmonia, you take all the context you can get.
Harmonia were a key krautrock band because they brought together the most familiar strands of the sound and effectively perfected the whole. Krautrock in its platonic ideal should be basically instrumental; it should should seamlessly meld electronics and rock instruments; it should favor long, drawn-over structures over short dynamic shifts, and steady-state rhythms over syncopation. Can were too funky and had too much of an ear for pop; Neu!’s albums had jarring shifts in noise; early Kraftwerk leaned too heavily on flute and mid-period Kraftwerk was too heavy on synths; Ash Ra Tempel had a weakness for bluesy soloing, Popol Vuh changed their sound too often, and Amon Düül II were really a prog-rock band. Harmonia, in the midst of too much, was just right. And if that means their music could sometimes be pleasant and ambient instead of bold and challenging, that’s not a slight. They made virtues of control, understatement, shading, and texture.
Musik von Harmonia, the group’s 1974 debut, was a precise meeting of their constituent parts—Roedelius’ eerie beauty, Möbius’ sense of tension, Rother’s cool exploration—with each member contributing to the sound equally. It’s a shade darker and a half-turn more tense than what would follow, and was also more crudely recorded. Tracks like "Sonnenschein" and "Watussi" are already underway when we first hear them, making them feel like they’ve always existed and go on forever. __"__Dino"’s trebly rhythm brings to mind Lou Reed’s hypnotic major-chord strum in the Velvet Underground, and on top of the rhythm bed Michael Rother’s leads seem guided more than played, like he’s directing the flow of water through a maze. The meditative "Ahoi" is both futuristic and folky with its piano chords and gently plucked guitar, channeling the type of new age that taps into something ancient while warmly embracing current technology. From the beginning, Harmonia could take what sounded like an interlude and make it hold your attention for minutes on end.
If Musik von Harmonia mapped the range of everything Harmonia would ever do, 1975’s Deluxe used a more limited palette to paint a more beautiful picture. Working with master engineer Conny Plank and adding the deeper bottom end of drummer Mani Neumeier from Guru Guru, Harmonia refined their approach into a kind of shimmering pastoral dub. "Walky-Talky" is right there with Kraftwerk’s "Autobahn" and Neu!’s "Hallogallo" for the definitive smooth-humming motorway anthem; "Notre Dame" is an electro-pop update on Terry Riley in joyfully trippy "Rainbow in Curved Air" mode, and "Gollum" is a startlingly minimal and precise look ahead at the sound the Too Pure catalog would be known for two decades hence. Even when adding new wrinkles, as with the chanted vocals on the opening "Deluxe (Immer wieder)", Harmonia sound tremendously self-assured and comfortable in their sound. And their integration of something approaching proper songcraft intersected quite closely with experiments being done some distance away by the former keyboardist of Roxy Music, a young man who became enamored of Harmonia named Brian Eno.
Harmonia was pretty much always on the verge of breaking up, but not because of personal animosity; since the group was not well known, rarely played live, and was made up of three musicians who had other projects close at hand, their status was always tenuous. After Deluxe, they had no plans to continue, but Brian Eno asked to record with them and they re-grouped once more in Forst in 1976. The sessions with Eno were not released at the time, but have been re-packaged in various configurations since, and they are included here as Tracks & Traces. Eno’s presence is clear and the music is more atmospheric, feeling more like soundscapes than the low-key minimalist rock songs they band made their name with. Not surprisingly, the set also sounds a lot like the electro-acoustic work of the Rother-less Cluster & Eno, a collaboration that would extend into the late '70s over several more records. Tracks & Traces is enjoyable, but serves more as a look ahead to those records rather than something that builds on what came before.
The real heart of the box, a disc that sums up the band as well as any, is the 1974 live set. It’s both surprisingly high quality in its recording and also speaks to what made this band special. Rather than recreating tracks they had recorded for this album, they apply their music-making principles to a set of jams that are as beautiful as anything on their proper records. Thick with drones, highly repetitious, and often flat-out gorgeous, Live 1974 throbs, tumbles, pulsates, and twinkles, a gentle explosion in super slo-mo that unfolds over an hour.
Taken as a whole, The Complete Works doesn’t reveal Harmonia to be an especially varied group, but it does demonstrate that they did a small handful of things brilliantly well, and those happened to be things that no one else was doing. They also happened to sound like what various kinds of experimental music would sound like 20 years later and, I’m guessing, what some strains of it will sound like 20 years from now. | 2015-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | December 11, 2015 | 8.5 | 4ab24e44-411f-46be-a2cb-8226f25d6343 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On her second album, Lillie West retains the charming simplicity of her songs, but she finds new depth as a songwriter as she explores the act of standing up to herself. | On her second album, Lillie West retains the charming simplicity of her songs, but she finds new depth as a songwriter as she explores the act of standing up to herself. | Lala Lala : The Lamb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lala-lala-the-lamb/ | The Lamb | Lillie West has not been writing songs or playing guitar seriously for very long. The idea of doing so only dawned on her in 2014, while tagging along during a tour with brazen dance-pop outfit Supermagical. But her first record, 2016’s Sleepyhead, delivered on the simple promise of her band’s name, with melodies and rhymes easy enough to land on first listen. West’s songs tend to come in four-bar phrases, each in two distinct halves, a resolving “Lala” for every tension-building one. That formula remains for West’s first album for Hardly Art, The Lamb, but the scheme has been refashioned to uphold something new: a budding maturity.
West doesn’t write in a fundamental fashion just because she likes how it sounds; the approach serves a directness that seems non-negotiable. West’s songs are startlingly forthcoming, laying bare her life in plain terms. On Sleepyhead, West openly divulged her personal struggles in a wrung-out voice over baby-stepping riffs. “I drink more than I want to/’cause it makes you easier to talk to/And what you’re saying is boring,” began “Fuck With Your Friends.”
But West has given up drinking and other vices, the fact that propels much of The Lamb—a major leap musically and an unflinching reflection on the courage of rejecting easy comforts. Small pledges to self-control speckle the album. “If I’m using my hands, can you cut them off?/You’re a light turned on, and I’m a moth,” she sings during opener “Destroyer,” addressing the threats of internal push-back against sobriety. She even names a song “Water Over Sex.” The Lamb features less of West confessing, more of her making commitments to herself.
These frills-averse songs work because West has the gift of economy, choosing just the right word or note to find the center of the matter. “Scary Movie” sounds both intimate and galactic, like a handwritten letter read aloud from a space shuttle. The charged-up “I Get Cut” is perfectly elemental indie rock, as satisfying as a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. (In a full-circle moment, Supermagical’s Emily Kempf, who now plays bass in the band, adds wonderful backing vocals.) “See You at Home” ends The Lamb with a rare flourish, a saxophone solo that points to the personal change found within the preceding 30 minutes.
In the music video for “Destroyer,” West roams the town with a baseball bat. She takes some swings in a batting cage, lounges with it on a mattress, goes Gallagher on a watermelon by the lake, and poses beside the bat in a photo booth, as though they’re best friends on a big day out. It all seems fun, but last year, West slept through a home invasion, which she references during “I Get Cut.” “I bought a bat to keep me safe at home,” she sings. “And I’m so lucky that I’m never alone.” These are distilled glimpses into the album’s core and Lala Lala’s new sense of purpose: reclaiming something that represents fear, including life itself. | 2018-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | October 2, 2018 | 7.5 | 4ab49dea-e543-4b32-af55-cc72ed5c32ee | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Producer Huerco S.'s latest ambient release feels like something heard from the other end of a long, dark tunnel that you no longer remember how to find your way back across. | Producer Huerco S.'s latest ambient release feels like something heard from the other end of a long, dark tunnel that you no longer remember how to find your way back across. | Huerco S.: QTT4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22576-qtt4/ | QTT4 | Huerco S.’s music is mostly a process of addition-as-subtraction, piling up layers until the faintest outline of the original forms remains—something like Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” but with magnetic tape in place of feather mattresses. Obscure shapes lurk beneath a dark, oil-slicked surface, and when they poke their heads out of the murk, the glimpse you get is like a grainy photo of the Loch Ness Monster—mostly just shadows and guesswork.
On this cassette for New York’s Quiet Time, he takes the technique to a new extreme. These objects, whatever they may be, have disappeared far beneath the surface, until even their shadows have dissolved into the cold water, and all that is left is the merest ripple on the surface. In keeping with the series’ emphasis on long-form pieces, the tape consists of just one track. It is 31 minutes long, and at first it seems to consist of nothing more than a single held chord run through subtle effects. The other tapes in the series, by Aquarian, Baby, and Money, tend to be structured more like mixtapes. Aquarian’s veers between drone, footwork, and acid; Baby, a Los Angeles trio of RISD grads, massage bassy rumble, heavy metal samples, and massing choirs into an ominous and enveloping head trip.
Huerco S.’s tape is the softest of any of them so far, but with its unrelenting focus, it conveys a different kind of intensity. Turn it up loud enough and its atmospheres are all-enveloping; they invite you to dissolve into them. The longer and more intently you listen, the more detail opens up, although “detail” might not be the right word for a sound like this, worn smooth as limestone. But somewhere, deep down beneath all that reverb, the chord occasionally modulates, and slowly shifting EQ variously highlights different parts of the spectrum: swollen bass, burnished midrange, and bright, silvery highs.
The Kansas City-raised, New York-based musician has done something like this before on Colonial Patterns’ “ChunKee Player,” in which reverb, EQ, and tape compression sanded down the contours of a slow-moving chord progression—maybe strings, maybe synths, maybe something else entirely—to a pebbly blur. But that sketch wasn’t even two minutes long, and it still betrayed the hint of a pulse. Drawing out the technique half an hour’s length and pacing its changes in extreme slow motion exert an entirely different kind of force on the listener. It is a kind of deep-freeze ambient; it is beautiful in a way that tends to obliterate distinctions. Depending upon your mood, you may find it calming, gloomy, or perhaps even strangely emotionally blank. It is an empty shell around a fathomless, sourceless echo. There are no musical events to speak of, no attacks, no moments of distinction; just remnants of sounds, a memory of where a sound once was, like something heard from the other end of a long, dark tunnel that you no longer remember how to find your way back across. | 2016-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Quiet Time | November 3, 2016 | 7.7 | 4ab7b17c-f38f-46fa-bf0f-477859041780 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
With the deserved accolades accompanying their 2001 double-disc magnum opus, Southern Rock Opera, newcomers the Drive-By Truckers have the unenviable ... | With the deserved accolades accompanying their 2001 double-disc magnum opus, Southern Rock Opera, newcomers the Drive-By Truckers have the unenviable ... | Drive-By Truckers: Decoration Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2508-decoration-day/ | Decoration Day | With the deserved accolades accompanying their 2001 double-disc magnum opus, Southern Rock Opera, newcomers the Drive-By Truckers have the unenviable task of following up one of the more ambitious records of the (very) early 21st century with a critical spotlight shining directly into their eyes. Despite the pressure, they've managed to avoid repeating themselves-- or worse, buying into the hype that made them a flagship band of the newly re-energized southern rock scene. Decoration Day is possessed by an entirely different kind of energy: one that appears to be the result of a complete emotional U-turn.
Lead Trucker Patterson Hood and cohorts (guitarists/vocalists Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell, bassist Earl Hicks and drummer Brad Morgan) are still channeling that old Van Zandt spirit to come to grips with their "Southern-ness," but where Southern Rock Opera focused its attention on big Men-- capital-M Men like longtime Alabama governor George Wallace, whose iconic personas have strongly informed the Southern culture for the better part of the last quarter-century-- Decoration Day casts a much smaller net, grappling with more personal struggles.
The title and cover art, which depicts a decorated grave, give a hint of insight into the album's somber, mood-- several of its tracks draw sketches of down-on-luck Southerners facing some of life's biggest decisions and deepest losses. Opener "The Deeper In", the story of two siblings serving time for their incestuous relationship, is remarkably sparse, with Hood leading the song in a cappella before being joined by skeletal guitars and Brad Morgan's slow, martial drums. The thunderous "Sink Hole", loosely based on filmmaker Ray McKinnon's short film The Accountant (a 2002 Oscar winner), finds the narrator wishing death on the unctuous banker foreclosing on his struggling family farm.
Even the songs that a New England-raised, East Coast liberal-college-attending snark (er, not me, really) might find "rednecky" are propped up by the unwavering dignity of their narrators. Sure, new guitarist Jason Isbell's contribution, "Outfit", has its more than its share of bastard children, blue-collar housepainters and cars pawned for wedding rings, but there's also fatherly advice like, "Don't worry about losin' your accent/ Southern men tell better jokes," and, "Call home on your sister's birthday."
But it's not until we reach the two full-fledged epics-- Hood's nearly seven-minute "Your Daddy Hates Me" and the Isbell-penned title track-- which lead the charge on the album's second half that the Truckers' vision for the album fully crystallizes. The former follows a hard-drinking, self-loathing narrator ("I'd probably hate me, too") as he finds redemption in his faithfulness to women, backed by a slow-cooking dirge that mimics the beating he's taken in his lifetime. The roiling title track, meanwhile, recounts a son's relationship with his dead father, both of whom were involved in a generation-spanning blood feud. The confusion surrounding the origin of the decades-old battle boils over in a roaring coda that easily stands as the album's emotional core. Which is when it becomes clear: this album is about pride-- regional and personal-- and honor.
Some may insist that Decoration Day's cohesiveness suffers from Hood, Cooley and Isbell continually trading off lead vocals, but I find it adds an essential component of plausibility. That each of the record's protagonists is given his own unique voice only lends conviction to this record's examination of life in the South-- one of the best since, well, Southern Rock Opera, actually. And while its peaks fall just a whit short of those on its predecessor, Decoration Day's inward journeys nicely balance out Southern Rock Opera's bombastic expansiveness, and further confirm the Drive-By Truckers' status as the most poetic and insightful Southern rockers in existence today. | 2003-08-28T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-08-28T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | August 28, 2003 | 8 | 4ab9e01d-c55b-43af-8226-d10f403eb79b | Pitchfork | null |
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The British songwriter’s excellent debut mines the gentle and detailed sounds of soft rock’s past, while his lucid yet uncomplicated lyrics interrogate the uncertainty of the present. | The British songwriter’s excellent debut mines the gentle and detailed sounds of soft rock’s past, while his lucid yet uncomplicated lyrics interrogate the uncertainty of the present. | Westerman : Your Hero Is Not Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westerman-your-hero-is-not-dead/ | Your Hero Is Not Dead | On Your Hero Is Not Dead, Will Westerman creates gentle music made up of elements from experimental pop albums. Talk Talk is an obvious influence (the hero alluded to in the album’s title refers to the band’s late vocalist Marc Hollis), but so are folk musicians like John Martyn and Joni Mitchell. Martyn’s synthesizer explorations led to his 1977 album One World, and Mitchell’s 1985 record Dog Eat Dog combined hypnotic production and lyrics in service of pop prophecies of doom. With the help of Nathan Jenkins, aka producer Bullion, Westerman achieves a synthesis of these previous experiments, fusing together whimsical curiosity and technical proficiency. Over a backdrop made of the sounds of the past, his lucid yet uncomplicated lyrics interrogate the uncertainty of the present.
When Westerman asks, “Am I taking it too far?” on “The Line,” it feels like he is questioning a choir made up of himself; later in the song, he engages in a one-man call and response. Bullion’s production matches Westerman’s ambivalence. “The Line” takes several detours before returning to its original route; it is music prone to glitches. A distended guitar opens the track and floats around Westerman’s ruminations, which are both concrete and fantastical. The soundworld recalls the work of ’80s producer Thomas Dolby, full of small changes that lead to strange moments: a voice stretched at the beginning of the bar is suddenly paired with bongos; a cut-up chorus is utilized as the backbeat to a new lyric. It’s like hearing Westerman question himself in real time. These alterations don’t overwhelm the central contemplation; instead, they make what could be a simple chord-strummer into a revelation. When a small guitar solo appears halfway through, it calls attention to itself through its sheer normality.
Westerman’s voice functions as a guide. Take “Easy Money,” an energetic, angry kiss-off to someone or something. Its opening swirl of guitar and synth dissipates once Westerman finally says, “I don’t doubt/Somebody’s working harder now.” His words are mirrored by a drum machine and the suggestion of a guitar. As the aggression grows, so does the anxiety; beeps appear and disappear, while a synthetic clatter threatens to overtake his voice. At moments, Westerman slows down and repeats a phrase like “stay still” or “that’s enough,” allowing the machinery of the production to whirl around him. The electronic interruptions can be traced back to Martyn’s One World, and the vocal percussion wouldn’t sound out of place on New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies. Yet the tossed-off lyricism and world-weary contempt are all Westerman.
On the album closer and title track, Westerman melds the cast-off nature of his songwriting to the bric-a-brac of Bullion’s production. The instrumentation hovers around his guitar playing; it’s the album’s clearest folk song and his most direct statement. The basic structure and lyrics sound as though they were improvised in the back of a van, close to the end of a tour: “Busy working/Busy avoiding.” Bullion pairs Westerman’s rumination with subtle production, isolating piano notes, throttling synths, and gently doubling the chorus. Mutual devotion to perennially out-of-vogue styles has allowed Bullion and Westerman to create an album that sounds novel; the beauty they make is secondhand and stumbled upon. It’s a product of obsession that can be engaged without knowing all the references; it sounds good, sometimes even better than its antecedents. Bullion’s production reworks elements from ’80s AOR records; Westerman creates songs out of leftover sentences. Their music proposes that the judgments of yesterday aren’t written in stone, and that what we believe today is only as stable as we think it is.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | June 12, 2020 | 8 | 4ac046f1-6c60-428f-aa17-1350c3b958ae | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
Trading away the dance-pop trifles of their hits for a faceless stylistic shuffle, the duo seems to be tiring of itself, too. | Trading away the dance-pop trifles of their hits for a faceless stylistic shuffle, the duo seems to be tiring of itself, too. | The Chainsmokers: Sick Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-chainsmokers-sick-boy/ | Sick Boy | We’re going to be stuck with the Chainsmokers forever. Though the unctuous duo of Drew Taggart and Alex Pall are probably not destined for decades of unqualified success, their insipid spin on EDM’s big-money boom has become as much an eye-rollingly omnipresent part of our national fabric as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Most living humans in the Western world have likely had the unfortunate sensation of having a Chainsmokers hit stuck in their head, as gross as gum on a hot bus seat; after all, their Coldplay collaboration, “Something Just Like This,” seems made only to ooze from department-store speakers for eternity. There’s even a goddamn feature-length film based on the M83-aping “Paris” in development. Like so many modern American atrocities, the Chainsmokers are just something we’re going to have to endure.
Less than three years removed from “Closer,” their massive collaboration with Halsey, it reasons that, though the Chainsmokers didn’t kill EDM themselves, they gave the knife an extra twist before the cops arrived. Their airless take on dance-pop as a marketing ploy—ignominiously captured on their 2017 debut LP, Memories...Do Not Open—crumpled the squelching bro-downs of past hits “Selfie” and “Don’t Let Me Down” for a vaguely adult-contemporary sound with all the personality of Purell. Like a Vertical Horizon for the tank-tops-and-furry-boots set, the Chainsmokers stumbled on a form of devilish pop alchemy that made them, for a moment, instant pop heavyweights.
But the Chainsmokers’ second album, Sick Boy, largely abandons the vanilla skies of Memories...Do Not Open for more aggressive, beat-driven songs that recall their Ultra beginnings more than their recent past. This about-face aligns with new blood in the Chainsmokers’ collaborative ranks. Toronto’s DJ Swivel co-produced the majority of Memories...Do Not Open, but he’s nowhere to be found on this album, replaced instead by a bevy of industry heads and EDM toilers like bassface enthusiast NGHTMRE and Parisian DJ Aazar.
The closest Sick Boy gets to “Closer” is the Kelsea Ballerini-led opener “This Feeling,” a red herring that gestures toward the growing trend of EDM expats turning to country in hopes of beating back total obsolescence. Otherwise, Sick Boy sounds designed for festival season: “Siren” and “Save Yourself” embrace the lost art of “the drop” with showy vocal samples and buzzsaw synths, while the trop-house mist of “Hope” unfolds into a soporific groove. The scattered, try-anything-once approach suggests a sense of nervous anxiety, as Taggart and Pall attempt various sonic styles with the conviction of Bella Hadid talking about sneakers.
Oddly, the drifting, emo-tinged sound of modern rock-not-rockers twenty one pilots reigns supreme here. “Beach House”—a you-know-who-namecheck that stands as these lunkheads’ greatest troll job to date—ticks and tocks before revealing a gaping synth maw. The title track resembles the conscious, reflective anti-rock of twenty one pilots’ Trench; when Taggart pleads “Don’t believe the narcissism,” he sounds like a dead ringer for lead pilot Tyler Joseph. But the lyrical comparisons end there: “They say that I am the sick boy/Easy to say when you don’t take the risk, boy,” Taggart sneers, his sense of bitter entitlement reflecting Sick Boy as a whole. During “You Owe Me,” Taggart whines, “Don’t you think that I get lonely?” before turning an exquisitely rank phrase of blame-passing: “When it gets dark inside your head/Check my pulse/And if I’m dead, you owe me.” Devoid of any real personal reflection, the self-pity is suffocating.
No one expected Taggart and Pall to crack open a copy of bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love between albums, but the Chainsmokers’ determination to double down on their reputation for toxic masculinity is impressively disturbing. They add a dash of self-crucifixion for good measure. “Everybody Hates Me” is chiefly concerned with downing tequila and ignoring the haters, while “Beach House” references a red pill and a “Paranoid cutie with a dark past” before, like a blasé horndog, Taggart sighs, “She gets bored of everything/Not the type you can ignore.” Earlier in the song, he unintentionally highlights how tired his lyrical frat-boy misogyny remains with the line “I’ve been there before.”
At least there’s one diamond in this increasingly over-mined rough: Emily Warren, the pop songwriter and presumptive “third Chainsmoker.” She similarly livened up the aural wallpaper of Memories...Do Not Open; one would hope, at this point, the irony of a woman being responsible for some of the Chainsmokers’ most competent material is not lost on Taggart or Pall. Warren nabs several song credits on Sick Boy, most notably on “Side Effects,” a propulsive and cynically tasteful indie-disco facsimile featuring her most effective vocal turn yet. Her cool but punchy performance moves beyond the mid-tempo wisps and whispers of her past. Recalling the hedonistic days of bloghouse, “Side Effects” is fun, sharp, and nothing like anything the Chainsmokers have ever done. Given the self-loathing and stylistic anonymity of Sick Boy at large, it’s enough to suggest that maybe the Chainsmokers are starting to get sick of themselves, too. | 2019-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Disruptor / Columbia | January 9, 2019 | 3.1 | 4ac2767a-123c-48fc-bb45-229bd6b17952 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
On his debut album, the L.I.E.S. mainstay makes house music that’s dubby and lo-fi, like club tracks heard through a pillow. | On his debut album, the L.I.E.S. mainstay makes house music that’s dubby and lo-fi, like club tracks heard through a pillow. | Terekke: Plant Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terekke-plant-age/ | Plant Age | Matt Gardner’s understated, fuzzy house music as Terekke often feels greater than the sum of its parts. His 2013 track “Amaze” was a veritable underground ambient house hit: A highlight of L.I.E.S.’ Music for Shut-Ins compilation, it also kicked off a mix CD from Sven Väth’s Cocoon Recordings, an Ibiza perennial. At that time, L.I.E.S. was still in its infancy, and the role that dusty, hardware-based bedroom techno from Bushwick would play in the proliferation of this sound across the world was still undetermined. These days, Terekke calls Amsterdam home, but he remains a key part of the label family. Now on its 100th release, L.I.E.S. brought Gardner back for his debut album, and its eight tracks are an elegant and sedate summation of Terekke’s lo-fi oeuvre, pushing his sound into even deeper territory with a subtle, singular touch.
Terekke’s music is like a warped, alternate-reality version of Burial. Though the two producers conjure disparate moods (where Burial is rainy and despondent, Terekke is warm and hopeful), they take a similar approach to abstracting dance music into its own world, inside your headphones and your head. The two producers also share an affinity for using samples from pop stars like Mariah Carey or Beyoncé, melting their voices into gooey echoes that feel familiar but unplaceable. On last year’s “i wanna what love is,” Terekke molded Carey’s voice into a spectral image, and on 2014’s “Untitled B1,” under his X alias, he sampled Sade’s “Is It a Crime” into a loose, rippling club jam. Terekke’s skeletal, dubby approximations of house reflect the same deconstruction-reconstruction of dance music as Burial, though Gardner meshes inspiration from Chicago house and Berlin dub techno, where Burial reflects the musical legacy of the UK underground.
Plant Age is an album as comfortable and versatile as your favorite sweater—it’s lived-in, welcoming, and warm. Recorded sporadically over the past five years, it’s considerately sequenced and is glued together in a fairly uniform haze. The congruousness of Plant Age, the ubiquitous smoky gel that cushions all of his tracks, speaks to Terekke’s fondness for recording to cassette tape. The album effectively sets a mood and continues to reveal itself more deeply upon repeated listens. “BB2” is the clubbiest cut on the release, a muted yet pounding house track that sounds like it’s being played through a pillow. “BB2” hews closest to Terekke’s older material, with gorgeous oozy chords peeking through a smoky haze, and a ghostly vocal sample makes the song both spooky and forlorn.
Parts of Plant Age pass through inconspicuously—the ambient gestures of “Swim,” “Padi,” and “Closer” are lush and unassuming. A surface-level listen can find respite in the calm atmospheres, while closer attention reveals hidden layers of smudged melody and endless detail in the lo-fi fuzz. The generous, thumping dub of single “Mix 91” features little more than ricocheting drums, a minimal bassline, and a featherlight synth, but Terekke’s effects conjure sublime spaciousness with surprising economy. With everything in the studio plugged in and synced up, it feels like these tracks write themselves, pouring out as effortlessly as smoke.
The intricacies of Terekke’s dubbed-out mixing rival the spacey sensuousness of Basic Channel or Huerco S.: Each track seemingly extends from horizon to horizon, bouncing and echoing to infinity. No track on Plant Age reaches six minutes, yet the atmospheres are so engrossing, each cut is a world in itself. The album’s 33 minutes both feel like an eternity and a blip—once through, you wonder where the time went and how it could have passed so quickly. | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | L.I.E.S. | November 29, 2017 | 7.9 | 4ac4254f-79a3-4f8f-b400-389b91c2862d | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | |
The soundtrack for the Netflix drama The Get Down, which tells the story of the birth of hip-hop in '70s NYC, mixes disco classics with contributions from Nas, Miguel, Kamasi Washington, and others. | The soundtrack for the Netflix drama The Get Down, which tells the story of the birth of hip-hop in '70s NYC, mixes disco classics with contributions from Nas, Miguel, Kamasi Washington, and others. | Various Artists: The Get Down OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22262-the-get-down-ost/ | The Get Down OST | In 1977, New York City was in turmoil: the crime rate was high, morale was low and a serial killer was on the loose. Yet, as the social fabric was disintegrating across the five boroughs, artistic creativity was thriving. Punk rock shows attracted crowds too large for even the scene’s most popular venues, disco music flowed into the mainstream and the nascent hip-hop movement was gaining traction in the South Bronx. This is the setting for The Get Down, the Baz Luhrmann-produced series that was reportedly ten years in the making.
The show’s first six episodes premiered on Netflix on August 12 and its soundtrack was delivered on the same day, featuring a mix of disco-era classics and original compositions. These songs are woven through the episodes that retell the adventures of the protagonist (Ezekiel Figuero, played by a watchful Justice Smith) as a teenager in 1977, as narrated by his older self in 1996. Regrettably, despite a roster of all-star musicians, the album falls short as a standalone work and even shorter when considered as the accompaniment to a musical drama.
It’s very frustrating when a song has all the elements for success, but you can hear them getting in each other’s way. Twice, on two different songs, Michael Kiwanuka is derailed by verses from an apathetic Nas. The first instance is “Rule The World (I Came From the City),” which starts out as a brooding ballad bookended by Kiwanuka’s dark, bluesy timbre. But the second foul, “Black Man in a White World (Ghetto Gettysburg Address),” is flagrant, because the original version would’ve been a perfect addition to this soundtrack if left untouched. Its lyrics, recounting the malaise of disenfranchised minority citizens, ring as true in 2016 as they would have in 1977.
Though it’s tempting to blame the dischord on a somewhat unlikely pairing, this strategy proves quite effective effective elsewhere on the album. The tracklist smartly matches up artists who were born long after disco had died with musicians who lived through and even defined the era. Zayn and Teddy Pendergrass come together on a Grandmaster Flash-helmed rework of “You Can’t Hide From Yourself,” from Pendergrass’ debut album. Zayn commendably pushes his voice to the upper reaches of his range on the first half, but then steps aside to let Teddy P bring it home. “Telepathy,” a simple love song made grander through an arrangement of horns and strings, is one of Christina Aguilera’s best performances in recent years. The vocal is restrained by her standards, but it still comes through strong and measured—guided by the incomparable Nile Rodgers. Leon Bridges offers an amped-up tribute to “Ball of Confusion,” and he succeeds by respecting the Temptations’ 1970 hit single while somehow emulating their energy in a solo performance.
Some more relief comes around the soundtrack’s midsection, in the form of five unedited grooves. Among them, Lyn Collins’ funk classic “Think (About It)” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” which you either recognize because of her long-lasting influence as the Queen of Disco or from a manic Girl Talk album. While these tracks haven’t lost any of their floor-filling lustre through the years, they are almost outdone by two original compositions from Miguel and Janelle Monáe. Miguel flips a disco beat into something much trippier on “Cadillac,” which shares a name with the sinister coked-out club owner played by relative newcomer Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. The song comes complete with an esoteric bridge (“That unicorn, that lush/That savage baby, that rush”) and a dreamlike outro that lasts for over a minute. But Monáe’s “Hum Along & Dance (Gotta Get Down)” is the showstopper, built from uplifting brass, a dirty bassline and a chorus that name checks the series title. If the show were to have an official theme song this should be it, rather than Jaden Smith’s middling “Welcome to the Get Down.”
Monáe’s song is wedged between “Bad Girls” and CJ & Co.’s “Devil’s Gun” on a five-song throwback stretch that ends with Hector Lavoe’s “Que Lio,” but everything that follows feels like filler. The soundtrack is on sale as a deluxe version, a term that often foretells a sequence of unrelated bonus tracks tacked on to the end. Starting with “Just You, Not Now (Love Theme)” by Australian singer Grace, we shift away abruptly from the overarching disco theme and wade through a cluster of songs that are tough to appreciate when divorced from their context (although three of them showcase newcomer Herizen Guardiola who is definitely one to watch.) The entire thing clocks in at roughly an hour and a half—the average length of a feature film that would need to tell a much more cohesive and complete story to keep an audience engaged.
It’s rare for a soundtrack to exceed the performance of the work that it’s meant to complement. Superfly and Shaft are two notable exceptions from the same decade depicted in The Get Down—Pharrell’s “Happy” is a more modern example*.* The show will go down in history for many reasons, unfortunately it doesn’t seem like this album will be one of them. | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | RCA | August 16, 2016 | 6.2 | 4ac6d18e-a8f9-472a-81bc-0b9f9099b200 | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | null |
The Filipino black metal trio Deiphago embrace a sound that is chaotic even by black-metal standards. On Into the Eye of Satan, they worked with noted metal producer Colin Marston, resulting in their cleanest-sounding release yet. In this form, their chaos isn't squelched, just illuminated. | The Filipino black metal trio Deiphago embrace a sound that is chaotic even by black-metal standards. On Into the Eye of Satan, they worked with noted metal producer Colin Marston, resulting in their cleanest-sounding release yet. In this form, their chaos isn't squelched, just illuminated. | Deiphago: Into the Eye of Satan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20788-into-the-eye-of-satan/ | Into the Eye of Satan | Filipino black metal trio Deiphago, who formed in Manila but have been based in Costa Rica since 2004, are but one testament to the global reach of metal. They're indebted to the black metal of two Canadian bands, Blasphemy and Conqueror, as well as the Brazilian primitivism of Sarcofago, but play with a looseness not quite fitting any of those groups. Even by the lo-fi fetish standards of black metal, Deiphago commit to a chaos few bands could match. A more polished Deiphago record seems antithetical, but that's what Into the Eye of Satan, their fourth full-length, is to an extent. In the hand of noted metal producer Colin Marston, we see a more complete version of the band.
In Eyes, the chaos isn't squelched, just illuminated. From "Evil and Adverse", it's obvious their actual playing hasn't changed much, but Marston's production makes you better appreciate their muscularity. Guitarist Sidapa's leads are more prominent in the mix. "Bloodbath of Genocide" features wah-wah swaths in the beginning that would have gone unnoticed before, and these minor details add up. His mini-solos in "6x6x6/3" sound more like the playing of a college kid obsessed with free jazz and Thurston Moore than conventional shredding. Sidapa sounds most bizarre in "Calculated Acts of Cruelty" and the title track closer, abandoning any conceits of fluidity. Peaks become valleys without warning and notes criss-cross into tangled weaves.
With improved production, Eye inadvertently reveals the hardcore influence—especially that of d-beat groups like Discharge—that's always been latent in Deiphago's music. Drummer Savnok opts for a looser, punkier style. Vocalist/bassist Voltaire 666's bass may sound less distorted, but it's never sounded meaner. Deiphago may be the true successors of Venom, who brought endearing sloppiness and fuck-all attitude to the creation of black metal. All this, combined with Sidapa's guitar work, finds Deiphago oddly, if pleasingly, working against their own credo. They're not afraid to proclaim "Fuck off to the false!", but Eye is less straitlaced than many of their peers' works. Deiphago's other records may have served as a litmus test for how much discordance you can handle in metal; this is where you fully realize just how serious they are. | 2015-08-04T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-04T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Hell's Headbangers | August 4, 2015 | 7.3 | 4ac7d11b-795e-4aec-ab5a-09178358ba73 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The Australian noise musician has long used the guitar as a textural element, but here he puts it front and center, sculpting a claustrophobic landscape out of chugging metal riffs. | The Australian noise musician has long used the guitar as a textural element, but here he puts it front and center, sculpting a claustrophobic landscape out of chugging metal riffs. | Ben Frost: Scope Neglect | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-frost-scope-neglect/ | Scope Neglect | What if 4'33" went to 11? That’s one thought experiment posed by Ben Frost’s radical new album of deconstructed metal, in which the riffs are only as important as the silence that yawns between them. Strange things happen in the interstices: Microsecond-long reverb tails assume an almost physical form, jutting out against the vacuum in eerie bas-relief. Wisps of electricity sweep through filters and phasers, leaving smudgy fingerprints. But turn it up loud enough to hear those whisper-soft details and risk your neighbors’ wrath. This is a brutally loud album, its low end practically steroidal; downstrokes are accompanied by walloping thwacks, rendering the guitar a percussive instrument as much as a tonal one. Few records—certainly few records that take their cues from the heaviest strains of metal—can boast such a vast dynamic range.
The guitar has long played a central role in the Australian-born, Iceland-based musician’s work. On his 2009 breakout, By the Throat, one of the first sounds we hear is a gravelly crunch familiar from metal and hardcore. While the arrangements cycle through strings, horns, choir, electronics, and even wolf growls, the telltale rumble of guitar distortion is never far off; the whole album feels perfumed by the smoke of burning Marshall stacks. Frost leaned even further into both metal grandeur and textural swirl on A U R O R A’s fuzzed-out snapshots of the sublime. But he’s never foregrounded the guitar quite like he does here. To create Scope Neglect he enlisted bassist Liam Andrews, of Australian post-punks My Disco, and Greg Kubacki, guitarist of the Long Island progressive metal band Car Bomb. It’s Kubacki’s playing that gives the album its unique character: His chugging, disembodied riffs are treated as seedlings, nourished by Frost’s electronic treatments and left to blossom in the arid emptiness, like desert flowers sprung from sere volcanic soil.
Framing atonal bursts of guitar against inky silence, the album begins as a tug-of-war between being and nothingness. More prosaically, it sounds like someone trying out gear in Guitar Center—the riffs feel tentative, disconnected, uninterested in the sort of meaning-making that takes place when phrases are woven into an overarching continuity. But this Guitar Center would also have to be an anechoic chamber, a space so free of extraneous noise that you can hear the blood pumping through your own veins. That’s where the album’s profound strangeness begins to assert itself—in the dead spaces between the notes, the void that seems to swallow every sound as soon as it’s been made.
The album plays out like a loose theme and variations. Following the desiccated knots of the opening “Lamb Shift,” those same elements are stretched and manipulated on “Chimera,” filigreed with white noise and wreathed in reverb. “The River of Light and Radiation” brings a pulse to the table; its truncated explosions of guitar and kick drum bring to mind Oval remixing Helmet, while a softly melodic synthesizer adds a fetchingly gothic contrast. “_1993” smears the guitar’s tones into a doleful ambient drone; “Turning the Prism” returns the focus to Kubacki’s muscular playing and the mutant forms that multiply in its shadows.
The subtlety with which Frost treats his source material—with help from Tim Hecker, Paul Corley, Lawrence English and Daniel Rejmer, all longtime friends and accomplices credited with “additional production”—is dazzling. Heard on headphones, it suggests a mazelike path lined with trick mirrors and psychoacoustic trapdoors. But while Scope Neglect is technically impressive, it’s so austere that it can be an endurance test. If you don’t have an appetite for bludgeoning force, its relentlessness can turn suffocating. Where even the most extreme metal typically conveys a feeling of exhilaration, Scope Neglect feels dour and cramped and weirdly enervating—a foul mood in a windowless room.
The album’s biggest surprise occurs on the penultimate track, “Tritium Bath,” in which an undistorted guitar figure—it sounds uncannily like Raphael Rogiński’s muted tone—meanders through a minefield of metallic sturm und drang. Its timing feels untethered from the rest of the track; I checked, multiple times, to make sure I hadn’t left something playing in an open browser tab. That moment of disorientation makes for a strange and welcome highlight of an already inscrutable album: a moment in which Frost’s claustrophobic architecture briefly opens up, offering a glimpse of another dimension hovering just out of reach. | 2024-03-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Mute | March 5, 2024 | 7.3 | 4ac88dd0-3a42-4bd5-ac2d-975d6cd8d74a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Recording in a studio, the Chicago DIY trio sound newly airy and lush, but no less direct and sincere. Their confidence in their concision is the best part. | Recording in a studio, the Chicago DIY trio sound newly airy and lush, but no less direct and sincere. Their confidence in their concision is the best part. | Dehd: Flower of Devotion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dehd-flower-of-devotion/ | Flower of Devotion | One night last summer, at a 19th-century opera house, Dehd were playing in the middle of the room. Headlining a label showcase configured for 360-degree views, the bleeding-hearted indie-rock trio followed their steelier, more poker-faced peers Patio and Deeper. As the latter finished their set, all three bands convened for a cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” on which Dehd guitarist Jason Balla and bassist Emily Kempf took the mics with their typical on-stage abandon. That night—eye-to-eye with their listeners, hiding no side of themselves, and taking cues from Robert Smith by bending the rigid edges of post-punk with the brightness and zeal of pop—Dehd were exactly in their element.
This direct connection carries through Flower of Devotion, the band’s biggest-sounding album yet. Rather than hooking your attention with mystery, Dehd look you straight in the eye, sing you something discomfitingly simple and sincere, and dare you not to look at the floor. Kempf comes out of the gate screaming, “Baby, I love ya/Always thinking of ya,” and ends the album with, “If this is all that we get, so be it/It was worth it to know you exist.” Though it was finished before 2020 came to be defined by immense loss, Flower of Devotion makes the case for reaching out and being direct with the people who should hear it, while the opportunity exists.
Flower of Devotion’s sound is tightly tailored to its lyrics, but in a different way than the band’s previous album was. Water, which was self-recorded, sounded thin and tinny, a raw sonic quality amplified by the rawness of Balla and Kempf singing about how they had literally just broken up. But Flower of Devotion, recorded in a studio, goes in on saturation, dialing up reverb and echo effects and adding touches of synth and tambourine to their minimal set-up. It’s lush and inviting end-to-end, even as it gets uncomfortably close. These ringing, sustained sounds agree with the two singers’ fondness for squeezing every drop out of a single word. Kempf’s warbling, exaggerated “bay-ey-BAY” at the tipping point of “Letter” says more than any carefully worded text message could.
That moment is one of a few that sound almost straight from the songbook of Roy Orbison, one of Flower of Devotion’s key influences. Orbison—whose cover art for his own third LP might be referenced here, but whose knack for articulating yearning with efficient pop verses and potent vibrato definitely is—may as well be Dehd’s patron saint of heartache. “Loner,” for instance, feels at first like something of a spiritual cousin to “Only the Lonely.” But Orbison’s standard was an ode to heartbreak’s dubious consolation prize: the self-righteous comfort of belonging to a club. When Kempf sings about wanting “nothing more than to be a loner,” it’s an embrace of loneliness’s inevitability and the limitations of partnership—an affirmation of desire, but especially of desire to be comfortably alone. Her voice cracks upward when she holds the word “loner,” like a lone wolf howling at the moon, like Orbison when he was crying over you.
Kempf’s singing voice has steadily gotten stronger and more versatile with every Dehd release, and here it’s a flat-out force. She adapts it a dozen different ways to sell a feeling: a cautioning bellow when singing about being protective of her ex on “Letter”; a deteriorating tremble to grieve that “the house is burning, while I sit here drowning” on “Flood”; yelping and screeching and tongue-clicking when that’s just what feels fitting. It’s Flower of Devotion’s primary instrument, alongside Balla’s newly airy guitar. Whether soloing or providing counterpoint to the vocal melodies, Balla picks which notes to play like he’s picking vegetables from the produce section: selectively but without overthinking it, not opposed to a bruise or dent if the size and color are right, and if he touches it, he commits to it.
At first blush, Flower of Devotion can feel like it’s missing something. There’s a nagging instinct that pop songs are supposed to have more pieces to them, or that drummer Eric McGrady is supposed to be using more than half of a drum set. Stick with it, though, and something even better emerges from those gaps. By leaving their songs exposed, Dehd show how much they believe in them, and rightfully so. Their confidence in their concision is the best part. You can hear it when they observe the simple passage of time, when Balla sings about a calendar page’s impermanence on “Month” or when McGrady notices grey hairs and fading memory on “Apart”—his first song written and sung for the band. You can hear it when they ask a question, looking right at you: Why do you hide? Do you want to disappear? Is this living? Flower of Devotion generously rewards not looking away.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | July 21, 2020 | 8.3 | 4aca694d-bb4e-4ec4-bfc0-fc7381fb8136 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
All three installments of Wilco and Billy Bragg's tribute to Woody Guthrie are collected in this compilation, which lovingly-- and in timely fashion-- shows there was more to the Okie folkie than protest music. | All three installments of Wilco and Billy Bragg's tribute to Woody Guthrie are collected in this compilation, which lovingly-- and in timely fashion-- shows there was more to the Okie folkie than protest music. | Billy Bragg / Wilco: Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16518-the-complete-mermaid-avenue-sessions/ | Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions | With the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations reviving interest in American protest music over the last six months, it seems inevitable that Woody Guthrie would enjoy a resurgence in popularity and relevance-- and just in time for what would have been his 100th birthday. The Okie folkie's example has guided many musicians as they set the 99% to song: Tom Morello wandered Zuccotti Park strumming "This Land Is Your Land", which won something called the Occupy Wall Street Award from MTV. Others, including Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen, have debuted starkly acoustic, highly rhetorical songs squarely in the Guthrie vein, suggesting that the OWS generation (or, more precisely, the pre-OWS generation with closer ties to the 1960s folkies like Dylan, who considered Woody a secular saint) equates Guthrie strictly with protest music and protest music strictly with Guthrie. On one level it might seem like a colossal failure of imagination: By devising a form of dissent music that relies exclusively on historical examples rather than on the leader-less ethos of OWS, these artists not only dilute their dissent but grasp only one facet of the multi-faceted Guthrie. If you weren't familiar with him, you might think Guthrie was some humorless scold who spoke only in grand pronouncements against The Man.
In fact, Guthrie was a complicated and contradictory artist who explored many subjects and displayed a ribald sense of humor to temper his guiding sense of outrage; in other words, he could be just as silly as he was serious. Crucially, he understood the effect of a constructed public persona, adopting a faux rural accent not only onstage but in his famed autobiography Bound for Glory as well. No other posthumous reconsideration has captured Guthrie in all his compelling contradictions as precisely or as affectionately as Billy Bragg and Wilco's Mermaid Avenue did in 1998. At the behest of Guthrie's daughter Nora, the UK folk singer and the U.S. rock band, along with Natalie Merchant, took scribbles of lyrics and filled in the melodies, arrangements, performances and ultimately our understanding of the man himself. As Nora writes in the liners to this new anthology collecting the three instalments of Mermaid Avenue sessions, "The lyrics exposed him so absolutely it was like walking into a shower and finding him naked. Or like finding his little black book where every confession, every desire, every fantasy, every love, every pain, every hate, every hope poured out through purple and brown fountain pens…. Guess what. Turns out he's just the like the rest of us fools."
So the man who famously penned "This Land Is Your Land" and "Grand Coulee Dam" also waxed bawdy about Ingrid Bergman and Walt Whitman's niece (who reads aloud from Leaves of Grass in bed). He wrote nonsense verse for his kids and penned a sympathetic ode to exiled Austrian composer Hanns Eisler. He missed California and understood that a movement is only as good as it treats its womenfolk: "Women are equal and they may be ahead of the men," Bragg sings on "She Came Along to Me"-- and that Eisenhower-era proclamation remains remarkably relevant during an election that makes gender such a divisive issue.
The liveliness of Guthrie's lyrics precludes any deadening reverence, and Bragg and Wilco rise to the occasion with music that respects the source material but never sounds beholden to any particular conception of Woody Guthrie. The loping melody and longing vocals by Jeff Tweedy turn "California Stars" into an especially wistful West Coast reminiscence as well as one of Wilco's best songs. Opener "Walt Whitman's Niece" and "Hoodoo Voodoo" sound rambunctious and loose, while Bragg turns "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key", a duet with Merchant, into a bittersweet reverie about the boldness of youth. "Ain't nobody that can sing like me," Bragg boasts as Eliza Carthy's delicate fiddle colors in the years between adolescence and adulthood.
Mermaid Avenue was such a deeply nuanced and humanizing portrait of a larger-than-life character that it significantly shifted how listeners thought of Guthrie, especially at the end of the decade that produced the criminally reverent alt-country movement. It was almost impossible to follow up such a project, and Mermaid Avenue, Volume 2, arriving in 2000, lacked the impact and import of its predecessor. Musically, however, it might actually be more expansive, with the hootenanny country of "Joe DiMaggio Done it Again" and the somber doom folk of "Blood of the Lamb" jostling elbows against the proto-punk of "All You Fascists" and the spry rural blues of "Aginst th' Law" (sung by Corey Harris).
There's a sense of diminishing returns on Volume 2, as well as on the third volume that fills out the new Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions. But that's only natural: Of course you put your best material on the initial release. What's remarkable is the wealth of material available to these artists and the number of gems these sessions produced. Taken together, the collected, reissued Sessions may not have the same impact as Mermaid Avenue did 14 years ago, but they suggest a group of musicians emboldened and excited by their shared undertaking and their proximity to Guthrie himself (in reality, the sessions were rumored to be contentious).
And of course, there are a great many songs about the powers that be, about facing down the hypocrites and fascists, the totalitarians and even the Klan. In this context-- alongside so many songs about family, movies, baseball, sex, drugs, and other everyday concerns-- "All You Fascists" and "The Jolly Bankers" and the Swiftian "Christ for President" resonate more powerfully than they might on their own or even sung from a podium before likeminded citizens. By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension. | 2012-04-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | April 27, 2012 | 8.1 | 4acb0571-d3af-4377-9954-b84a52cd3ab1 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Stepping back from the clubbier styles he’s best known for, the prolific electronic polymath turns his attentions to a moody ambient album that shows remarkable restraint. | Stepping back from the clubbier styles he’s best known for, the prolific electronic polymath turns his attentions to a moody ambient album that shows remarkable restraint. | Mark Pritchard: The Four Worlds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mark-pritchard-the-four-worlds/ | The Four Worlds | The circle of musicians who have worked with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, grime godfather Wiley, and the 1970s folk singer Linda Perhacs is so small that it probably doesn't stretch any further than Mark Pritchard, a 46-year-old polymath from Somerset, England, whose three decades in electronic music have seen him master genres from techno to grime and deep house to drum ‘n’ bass. That unusually diverse set of collaborators nicely illustrates Pritchard’s peripatetic tendencies. But The Four Worlds, his second solo album for Warp, sees him settle down into what might actually resemble a groove after years of wandering.
The new album shares a simple melodic elegance with Under the Sun, his excellent 2016 solo release, even recreating that record’s medieval air on “The Arched Window,” a track that combines harpsichord with Kraftwerk-like melodies. But where Under the Sun had a whiff of grandeur, courtesy of a Thom Yorke guest spot and its 67-minute run time, The Four Worlds is more understated. Only two of the eight tracks pass the four-minute barrier, while guest spots come from outsider musician the Space Lady—a singer whose Greatest Hits was named by The Guardian as one of the 101 strangest records on Spotify—and the audio artist Gregory Whitehead.
There’s something smaller about the sound of The Four Worlds, too. Everything feels hushed, as if Pritchard had composed the music so as not to upset someone sleeping in the next room. On the only song that has drums, the opening “Glasspops,” they sound more like a comforting digital throb than an invocation to throw off your troubles and dance. Pritchard’s skill, which has been evident since his days in the ambient duo Global Communication, lies in selecting precisely the right tonal elements. Instruments on the album include a musical saw (on “Parkstone Melody II”) and a waterphone (on the filmic title track); each noise is notable for its perfectly honed timbre, and the results frequently blur the line between electronic and acoustic instrumentation. When paired with Pritchard’s considerable melodic nous, the effect is particularly moving.
“Glasspops,” a track Pritchard first laid down in a German air-raid shelter and then refined over the five years, is ample evidence of this. The track consists of little more than a simple electronic rhythm, mournful synth chords, a theremin-like lead, and a small handful of effects. That doesn’t sound like much to sustain a song that’s more than 11 minutes long, but the track’s rhythmic layers are beautifully arranged and the synths hugely rousing. The effect is both epic and strangely cosy, like snuggling up underneath the sheets with only the Carl Craig remix of Theo Parrish’s “Falling Up” and a flashlight for company.
After “Glasspops” eases the listener into a landscape of lunar melancholy, cinematic despair, and astral ambience, Gregory Whitehead’s faltering vocal on the droning “Come Let Us” resembles the last communication from a dying planet, while “Circle of Fear” evokes the shifting Martian sand in its softly circling melody. The album hangs together beautifully. Every song enhances the next, and shuffle feels like an instrument of vandalism. Ripped from the context of the album, “S.O.S.”—with its haunting chords and the Space Lady’s heartfelt plea for alien intervention—could feel naive. Instead, it tickles the tear ducts once they’ve been softened up by the album’s opening 20 minutes.
In a musical world where albums creak at their digital seams, it is refreshing to hear a release as artfully restrained as The Four Worlds. Warp seems almost self-conscious about its unassuming character, assuring that Pritchard is currently working “on the full album follow up” to Under the Sun. But there is no need for apology: A wonderfully poignant album that leaves you wanting more, The Four Worlds is proof that restraint can sing louder than excess. | 2018-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 28, 2018 | 7.6 | 4ad23e10-3236-4f6e-a65d-15f66d685e39 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Reinforcing the melancholy aspect of her work, this dark 44-track anthology of work by pioneering British electronic composer Daphne Oram draws from over 400 tapes she left behind after her death in 2003. | Reinforcing the melancholy aspect of her work, this dark 44-track anthology of work by pioneering British electronic composer Daphne Oram draws from over 400 tapes she left behind after her death in 2003. | Daphne Oram: The Oram Tapes, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16262-the-oram-tapes-vol-1/ | The Oram Tapes, Vol. 1 | Like Léon Theremin, an electro-acoustic pioneer and inventor whom the Soviets put to work developing surveillance technology, Daphne Oram seems like a star-crossed figure-- a visionary tripped up by circumstance and, perhaps, her own eccentricities. But a new anthology of Oram's work, drawn from over 400 tapes she left behind after her death in 2003, helps illuminate the depth and breadth of her legacy, suggesting her career as a kind of parallel history to electronic music's dominant narratives.
Oram's idiosyncratic methods and eccentric pursuits suggest the classic profile of the "outsider" artist, but she spent much of her career deep inside the system. When she was just 18, in 1943, Oram found work as a studio engineer at the BBC. Her official duties there were often unglamorous, but she took advantage of the studio to pursue her own experiments with magnetic tape and tone generators. The BBC's resources were actually quite meager, at least compared to the studios in European cities like Paris and Cologne, but Oram was resourceful: one story has her gathering all the BBC's tape machines together and working through the night on an electro-acoustic composition, then dismantling the array and putting its components back in their proper places before work the next morning.
Magnetic tape was a relatively recent medium, and electronic sound generation was still in its infancy, but Oram already grasped their enormous artistic potential. As she wrote in her 1972 book An Individual Note: Music, Sound, and Electronics, "In my work I am not concerned with synthesizing orchestral sounds-- we have excellent orchestras for making those sounds. My interest is in making new sounds which are musical." In 1957, she recorded the first all-electronic composition to be played on the BBC, and in 1958, she finally received funding to open an electronic-music studio, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram and her bosses had very different ideas about its purpose. She had imagined a research facility on par with the electronic-music studio at Cologne's NWDR or the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete at Paris' RTF, but the BBC was less interested in avant-garde composition than sound effects and background music, regarding the Radiophonic Workshop-- so named to appease the musicians' union and other music departments at the BBC-- as a kind of sci-fi Foley studio. (Indeed, today, the Radiophonic Workshop is best known for the music and sound effects it produced for Doctor Who.) After just one year, Oram left the BBC, setting up her studio in a house in Kent.
There, she pursued a range of work, both personal and commissioned, including sound effects for Jack Clayton's 1961 film The Innocents and various television commercials. The commissions, combined with a research grant, helped fund her main project: a home-built apparatus called the Oramics Machine, a combination synthesizer and sequencer that generated sound waves by "reading" hand-painted film strips with a reverse-engineered oscilloscope.
It looked like a gigantic Meccano contraption, and it was, by all accounts, a tremendously complicated device. What's more, it was a perpetual work in progress, under constant modification; only Oram and the engineers she employed really understood it. It's unclear when she stopped using the machine. By the late 1980s, she told an interviewer that she had moved onto working with computers, although she remained intent upon designing a system to read hand-drawn inputs. She suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s, and she died in 2003. The Oramics Machine was left gathering cobwebs in Tower Folly, which fell into ruin.
The Oramics Machine was recently restored for the London Science Museum's exhibition Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music, coinciding with a growing re-appreciation of her work. But no matter how much biographical detail comes to light, Oram and her work remain shrouded in mystery.
This first volume of The Oram Tapes, compiled from a trove of over 400 tapes held by Goldsmiths College, reinforces that impression. Where 2007's Oramics 2xCD set brought together the quixotic warbles of her Oramics compositions with quirky genre studies and commercial commissions-- sound effects, advertisements for Lego and power tools-- this release emphasizes her darker, more minimalist and abstract sounds.
Across 44 tracks, the album is by turns hypnotic and jarring, veering from sinewy drones, suggestive of Kevin Drumm, to pieces that sound like icicles being cleared from the eaves of a wind-chime factory. The prevailing mood is dank and claustrophobic, however, fogged with clammy reverb and bristling with strange clicks and alien voices.
It sounds as futuristic as it did then, but don't expect hi-fi: despite mastering by renowned Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering facility, the audio can be murky. It's not hard to believe that the original tapes lay moldering in a box for years before their restoration. But that sense of decay actually contributes to the emotional resonance of the music. There's a veiled quality to much of it, and a sense that there's so much more there than meets the ear, as frequencies melt into the ether.
The anthology is thin on data; few of the tracks have dates attached, and there's little information on what Oram was using to make a particular piece-- or even why. Experiments with pulse and delay rub up against musical sketches, spoken descriptions, even a recording of a baby's birth. Two tracks titled "2001 Effects Tape" were presumably intended as submissions to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It all raises the question of how much of this Oram intended as music, and how much the tracks are simply fragments of her work, sketches torn from a notebook. But the compilers have made the most of the jumbled source material. In the liner notes, they write, "As most of the tapes in the archive contain limited factual information, descriptions or dates, a chronological assessment of Oram's work was impossible to present. It is for this reason that we chose to arrange the tracklisting with an emotional narrative in mind, as albums are often sequenced."
They've succeeded here. Purely as a listening experience, it's wonderful. I've had it playing on nearly constant repeat during days of below-freezing temperatures in Berlin, and there are times when I can't decide if the music is the perfect complement to the climate or vice versa. It's both gripping and distracting, fading into the background and then jumping back out at you. In the few segments where Oram speaks, detailing her craft, it feels less like an archival document than a kind of relic, a spectral emanation. Recalling the early belief in the phonograph as a spirit medium, and keeping in mind Oram's own esoteric interests-- she began An Individual Note by suggesting that "memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards meta-physics"-- only reinforces the idea that there's something truly auratic humming in the grooves.
In an Invisibile Jukebox feature in The Wire, People Like Us' Vicki Bennett said of Oram, "A lot of her music has got a melancholy to it. It's like a sad machine that exists on its own planet and just sings to itself." That likely has something to do with the way that Oram was tuned to her own, unique frequency, resonating at a pitch inaudible to few others in her time. The Oram Tapes reinforces the melancholy aspect of her work, but it also offers a kind of solace, drawing her planet closer to ours, and finally finding an audience for her one-of-a-kind music. | 2012-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Young American | February 8, 2012 | 7.4 | 4ae00e6b-b2df-4ce2-8bd1-bab8b93c99b2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The L.A.-based, Pennsylvania-bred outsider pop artist Michael Stasis mines the sun-bleached sounds of '70s AM radio for inspiration, weaving in a pre-industrial grind and psychedelic guitar work. RIP III is the third in a series of compilation albums, all of which draw from Stasis' home recordings, cassette releases, and other ephemera. | The L.A.-based, Pennsylvania-bred outsider pop artist Michael Stasis mines the sun-bleached sounds of '70s AM radio for inspiration, weaving in a pre-industrial grind and psychedelic guitar work. RIP III is the third in a series of compilation albums, all of which draw from Stasis' home recordings, cassette releases, and other ephemera. | Michael Stasis: RIP III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20853-rip-iii/ | RIP III | Michael Stasis has jokes. On the L.A.-based, Pennsylvania-bred artist's new album RIP III, you'll hear the cult '90s kids show "Land of the Lost"'s theme music interpolated as "Land of the Goths" and the sky described as "green, like Mountain Dew." Like Ariel Pink, with whom he's often compared, Stasis mines the sun-bleached sounds of '70s AM radio for inspiration, while also weaving Martin Rev's pre-industrial grind and Cleaners From Venus' psychedelic guitar work into his tapestry of outsider pop. He used to be involved in a band called Snowboarder while living in the Bay Area, but told an interviewer he'd only snowboarded once. He's the type of artist fans will try to one-up each other with where-they-heard-him-firsts as they attempt to accurately retrace a career that's brought Stasis from Philly to New York to the West Coast.
That said, those fans would barely fill a Highland Park living room. Not only is Michael Stasis not particularly famous, he's essentially unknown outside a small subset of the California DIY scene. That leaves RIP III in the difficult position of serving as both a de-facto debut and a greatest hits collection for an artist with precisely zero "hits." As it turns out, RIP III is actually the third in a series of compilation albums, all of which draw from Stasis' home recordings, cassette releases, and other ephemera. III, however, has the unique distinction of being the first Stasis album released via Arbutus, the Montreal label that has served as a launchpad for alt-pop heavyweights Grimes and Majical Cloudz and remains home to underground faves like Sean Nicholas Savage and Tonstartssbandht.
Fortunately for Stasis, RIP III shows not only that he deserves the larger audience, but that it's a surprise he's stayed under the radar so long. "The Necklace" is a love song whose haunting, hummable chorus is darker and weirder than first appears. "This I'll hang on you," Stasis sings, irony saturating each drawn-out syllable, the twist being that what Stasis has to give is both a gift and a curse. Another parallel between Ariel Pink is Stasis' friendship with Jorge Elbrecht, known for having helped shaped some of the past decade's best experimental pop. Though RIP III is mostly self-recorded, Stasis' production, especially on songs like "The Necklace" and "Little Devil", hews close to Elbrecht's pillowy aesthetic. "Brown Cow", a track that appears to have no deeper meaning than describing a literal cow in a field, has a motorik groove that hits like Wilco's "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" if you listened to it at a Club Med on mushrooms. That the effect is charming, rather than just confusing, is a testament to Stasis' ability to sell even his strangest left turns.
As one might expect from an album recorded under varying circumstances and in different places, RIP III has radical changes in sound and production quality from track to track. It's not an exaggeration to say that, without some background info, you might not recognize that it's the same dude behind all these songs. "Crushed", for instance, is a bit of rollicking '60s surf rock that slams headlong into "All the Ways", a wobbly slow-burner that recalls Wolf Parade. "Surface Area", on the other hand, is a foray into Magnetic Fields' territory that's surprisingly affecting and totally unlike anything else on the rest of the record.
Though disjointed, RIP III's eclecticism is part of its charm. Rather than coming off as haphazard, the album has the feeling of surfing between public access channels with a one-hitter at hand. Nothing in particular unites the images, but a singular mood blankets the activity. The danger for Stasis is that his more satirical side will overshadow his skill as a songwriter, or, worse, that he'll be seen as a dilettante without a clearly-defined aesthetic of his own. But if playlists are indeed becoming as important as albums, RIP III shows that an individual songwriter can contain the same multitudes. On album opener and highlight "Venus of Soap", the chorus, huge and ecstatic, repeats the phrase "I'll just laugh it off." For Stasis, it's a mantra. But the joke's on us if we do the same. | 2015-08-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Arbutus | August 5, 2015 | 7.3 | 4ae33f52-b502-427a-afca-293c3ac504b6 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Unlike many of their contemporaries, this Unknown Mortal Orchestra-associated Portland dream-pop trio aren't out to deconstruct 1980s pop so much as dutifully replicate its essence. | Unlike many of their contemporaries, this Unknown Mortal Orchestra-associated Portland dream-pop trio aren't out to deconstruct 1980s pop so much as dutifully replicate its essence. | Blouse: Blouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15993-blouse-st/ | Blouse | I often return to this line from Simon Reynolds' Retromania: "Unlike digital formats, analogue degrades through overuse: each listener kills the sound she loves." There's a certain comfort in that kind of reciprocity, and anyone who's ever accidentally reset the listening history on their iTunes library and felt like they'd wiped a part of their identity clean is familiar with the digital world's maddening indifference to our affection. With that observation, Reynolds hits on the unifying and fundamentally human allure of chillwave, lo-fi, smear-pop, and any other kind of contemporary music that makes a conscious choice in an Auto-Tuned world to sound less than pristine. It's music trying to approximate the grubby, hopelessly destructive way we love books, records, and each other.
Like a pre-owned Delorean or a Berlin cassette slowly decaying in the bargain bin, Portland trio Blouse's self-titled debut comes to us sounding like it's already been colored by somebody else's use. Though it's got an unabashedly Reagan-era sound, it's the record's almost pathological obsession with the past that places it so squarely in the now. Any of its 10 tracks could sit comfortably on pretty much anyone's 2010s playlist: it broods like a lower-fi version of Charli XCX's Cold War-tinged tunes, it beams through cloudy dark like John Maus' murky pop, and it even boasts a song called "Videotapes" on which the synths sound like warping videotapes.
And yet, Blouse amounts to something more evocative and suggestive than trendy pastiche. There's one obvious reason: Some of these songs are just really that good. "Into Black" strikes the right balance of lush atmosphere and driving force, while the mid-tempo "Controller" evokes an austere cool. It's album opener "Firestarter", though, that best expresses the young band's manifesto, introducing them as a dream-pop group intent on razing the roof. "Let's forget the ceiling," vocalist Charlie Hilton beckons beguilingly over a wash of twinkling synths, "It's just made of stone."
Hilton's voice is breathy and commanding though not terribly distinct-- think Victoria Legrand channeling Trish Keenan minus a bit of je ne sais quoi. The propellant at the heart of Blouse is bassist Jacob Portrait, who also plays with Portland psych-poppers Unknown Mortal Orchestra: His steady pulse gives the songs just enough oomph to keep them from getting lost in their own gloom. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Blouse aren't out to deconstruct 1980s pop so much as dutifully replicate its essence. It's an easy thing to do wrong, but Blouse find success by not overreaching their grasp. It's beside the point to fault a record like this for not being innovative; by the end of this stretch of songs, there's something almost noble about their poker-faced commitment to time travel.
There are a few moments when all the backward glancing becomes a bit heavy-handed, but in their most inspired moments, Blouse find the connection between the limits of outdated technology and the terrible bliss of desiring something impermanent. (In one song Hilton's idea of fun is watching a lone blackbird perched on a telephone wire, "Just long enough to notice when he flies away/ Because he always flies away.") Blouse aren't just nostalgic for the golden years of MTV pop, but for an entire way of interacting with the world-- for the romance of a time when some things still felt out of reach. "Videotapes" finds Hilton longing to see the face of her perennially camera-shy lover. "What it would be like to see you again," she croons, wishing she had a videotape to remind her. That this sentiment feels like such an anachronism in a culture satiated by instant gratification only makes the track more heartbreaking. Blouse harkens back to love in the time before GPS to mine an enduring truth of pop music: getting lost has always sounded good. | 2011-11-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-11-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | November 3, 2011 | 7.4 | 4ae4c5c4-3f0b-4f8a-8b7b-79077c406f69 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
On the synth-rock project’s fifth album, the stakes feel higher, with new fatherhood and the perilous state of the world inspiring searching introspection and dramatic gestures. | On the synth-rock project’s fifth album, the stakes feel higher, with new fatherhood and the perilous state of the world inspiring searching introspection and dramatic gestures. | Son Lux: Brighter Wounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/son-lux-brighter-wounds/ | Brighter Wounds | Like Spencer Krug and Sufjan Stevens, Ryan Lott, who’s helmed the synth-rock project Son Lux for the past decade, is the kind of songwriter who can turn the most intimate moments sweeping and majestic. His albums treat crisp, minuscule detail with cinematic grandeur. Lott, a classically-trained composer, has scored several films, and it’s not hard to imagine any one of Son Lux’s recent songs soundtracking the trailer to an upcoming blockbuster. Brighter Wounds, Son Lux’s fifth LP and second since guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang entered the fold, has loftier ambitions than Lott’s prior work. It’s not the first time Son Lux have kept one eye trained on the state of the world, but it is the first time the stakes have felt quite this high.
“Is this the future standing over me?” Lott asks through muffling vocal effects in the first minute of the opening track, “Forty Screams,” singing darkly of seeds and “sour blooms.” Like many Americans over the past year and a half, he’s had to reckon with his share of responsibility for the condition of the country as it stands. Lott also recently had his first child, whose birth has pointed his wary eye toward the future. “I hear the future voice of my son every day: ‘Why did you let this happen?’,” Lott said in a 2017 interview. If the world is intolerable for Lott (“I can’t bear another day like this,” he repeats on “Forty Screams”), how can he expect his child to become part of it?
Brighter Wounds frames these questions with gorgeous instrumental bursts that lift Lott’s vocals to a desperate breaking point. Acoustic instruments like piano and strings ballast the synthesized chirps, squiggles, and vocal effects that have long detailed Son Lux’s music. Songs often follow predictable structures only to break from them at the last second, turning a false ending into a thrilling coda. There’s a moment toward the end of “Dream State” where a torrent of voices and synthesizers falls away, leaving only Lott against a drum beat, and he breaks into falsetto—not the coy, reticent kind that textures Bon Iver’s music, but a genuine shattered gasp. It sounds as though Lott has been punched in the diaphragm yet still needs to scream. It’s the only time on the album he uses that particular voice, and its deployment helps turn “Dream State” from a standard-issue radio-rock anthem (it makes abundant use of the millennial whoop, not to mention the kind of drums Imagine Dragons might want to steal) to a startling portrait of brokenness and fear.
To survive the present, Lott has to reckon with the past. “I am not my father’s son/I don’t belong to anyone,” he muses over a nervous breakbeat on “Surrounded,” and on “All Directions,” that million-voiced chorus asks, “Weren’t we beautiful once?” Throughout Brighter Wounds, Son Lux resist the idea that each moment is merely the sum total of all the moments preceding it. They do this in a formal sense, pivoting their songs with the grace and melodrama of an Olympic figure skater, and in their lyrics, making a declaration of something you might call faith. On the album’s climactic closing song, “Resurrection,” over towering drum crashes and whirlwinds of strings, Lott sings of the failure of both “silence and protest.” So he scours himself for a third option: something he can’t name yet, but can only begin, with wonder and curiosity and courage, to trace. | 2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | City Slang | February 16, 2018 | 7.3 | 4ae7b006-7775-4e84-9eaf-80865db7bda6 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Hatchie's platonic ideal of dream pop goes down a bit too easy, like another rewatch of a John Hughes film. | Hatchie's platonic ideal of dream pop goes down a bit too easy, like another rewatch of a John Hughes film. | Hatchie: Keepsake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hatchie-keepsake/ | Keepsake | Shoegaze offers the perfect place to bury bad feelings; there is a storied legacy of groups like Slowdive and Mazzy Star sinking Tory conservatism and post-breakup remorse into hazy swirls of distortion. Harriette Pilbeam uses Hatchie as an outlet for more quotidian concerns — friendships, romances, nostalgia. On her EP Sugar & Spice, Pilbeam offered glassy guitars, long sighs, and some bright choruses, but there was nothing darker beneath the surface to reward your close, ongoing attention. She promised a broader palette for her debut, but Keepsake feels hemmed in by the same lack of depth. Pillbeam's platonic ideal of dream pop goes down a bit too easy, like another rewatch of a John Hughes film.
“Not That Kind” opens Keepsake with the same buzzing synthesizers and metallic guitars that made Sugar & Spice such a potent nostalgia trip. By the time the same patterns repeat on “Her Own Heart,” and again, slower, on “Kiss the Stars,” Keepsake begins to drag. Even “Stay With Me,” pitched as an electro-pop escape from the guitar-heavy record, sounds more like a Revlon commercial than anything memorable enough to spin at the party featured in its music video. In a vacuum, each of these tracks is inoffensive but forgettable. Taken together, they are much less than the sum of their parts.
For an artist so laser-focused on pop production, Pilbeam’s songwriting is unapologetically sophomoric. Romance is either predestined in stars and magic (“Just as long as you keep me under your spell just a little longer,” she sings on “When I Get Out”) or painfully banal (“Just for a while, let’s reconcile,” she suggests on “Secret”). And as on her breakout single “Try,” the smallest efforts seem to mean the most: “Give it a try,” she repeats on the chorus of “Unwanted Guest.” At the very least, the platitudes provide a canvas of long vowels and deep sighs tailor-made for Pilbeam’s breathy vocals.
Album closer “Keep” sticks out as the most successful riff on a preset formula. After a surprisingly upbeat intro propelled forward by rubbery synths, it builds in layers; by the time the vocals come in, mixed low, the song resembles a fresh take on the early Flying Nun catalog. Keepsake is an album filled with small, inspired moments like this, but they don’t add up to much. Sugary but hollow, Keepsake melts like cotton candy, dissolving on impact.
Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | June 27, 2019 | 6.5 | 4af1e7b2-3c16-431c-aa53-e41332147d62 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Madonna’s 14th album feels stretched thin all over the globe, layered with an ambitious concept that ends up muddled and convoluted. | Madonna’s 14th album feels stretched thin all over the globe, layered with an ambitious concept that ends up muddled and convoluted. | Madonna: Madame X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-madame-x/ | Madame X | There is a case to be made for classifying Madonna, in 2019, as an underdog. Granted, it requires overlooking the superstar’s grotesque wealth and enduring ability to command some sort of an audience with every public move. But her status as a pop star has degraded considerably in the last 15 years. Whereas they once inspired awe, or at least controversy, her live televised appearances of late tend to yield mockery. Her days of hit-making seem long behind her. Her last album, 2015’s Rebel Heart, was a mess with more tracks and less to say than any Madonna record that preceded it. Apathy ensued.
It seems that Madonna, once queen of pop and enforcer of the regimentation that comes with that, is no longer controlling her narrative. This was never more evident than in her denouncement of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who Madonna dragged in an Instagram post for focusing on “trivial and superficial matters” such as her age. “It makes me feel raped,” wrote Madonna, echoing a contentious comment she made to Grigoriadis about her reaction to several Rebel Heart tracks leaking months before she had completed the album.
The magazine perhaps leaned too heavily into the age thing—the article, after all, was titled “Madonna at Sixty.” But of course Madonna’s age is relevant to her current story because it reminds us that her career path has always been one of uncharted territory. Today, the question is what does a veteran who redefined pop stardom for decades do in her 60s?
Even she doesn’t seem sure on her muddled 14th album, Madame X. Convoluted in sound and concept, it is intended as a means for both dissociation and the reaffirmation of Madonna’s multitudes. “Madame X” was a nickname given to her at 19 by her dance instructor, the legendary Martha Graham. “That was in the beginning of my career when I didn’t think about who I should be or what I should be,” Madonna told Billboard in May. In recent press, her wariness of public scrutiny after almost four decades of stardom is palpable: “I preferred life before phone,” she told Grigoriadis regarding the internet’s consistently shabby treatment of her. You can see why she yearns for a clean slate. Hear her pining in the opening lines of Madame X’s first single, “Medellín”: “I took a pill and had a dream/I went back to my 17th year.”
At the same time, Madame X is a secret agent, a dancer, a professor, a head of state, a nun, a housekeeper, and several other things, according to Madonna’s video announcement of the album. Later, she clarified: “I embody all of those people but then I also use those people to the extreme in the form of Madame X as a disguise to do my work.” Excepting the specific eccentricities here (such as referring to Madame X in the third person on Twitter and the fashion eye patch), the Madame X concept is the most recent example of a marketing trope in which divas use real nick- and middle names to thematically signal that they are revealing more sides of themselves than they previously allowed (see: Mariah Carey’s Mimi, Janet Jackson’s Damita Jo, and Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce). Needless to say, these exercises are rarely illuminating even when the accompanying music is good.
It’s a lot of puffery for business as usual—so much that it’s tempting to give Madonna a pass for trying. Madonna and her collaborators (chiefly Mirwais who co-helmed much of 2000’s Music and 2003’s underrated American Life) recorded in several different countries, marrying genres as disparate as Portuguese fado, baile funk, Cape Verdean batuque, and good old American trap to make a literal, at times clinical, rendering of world music. Madonna’s astonishing work ethic is written all over her voice: she raps, she sing-raps, she sings (in English, Spanish, and Portuguese). She has crafted a motif of did-they-or-didn’t-they sexual intrigue to accompany two collaborations with hunky Colombian superstar Maluma. Madonna and company have produced the shit out of virtually every notion here.
But blatant ambition has an unfortunate way of accentuating failure. In what could be most charitably described as delirious exuberance, many of Madame X’s songs trip all over themselves to change course and offer something new every few seconds for the attention-span deficient. Consequently, they often fall flat as an adolescent’s self-conscious contrivances of weirdness—the 808 gloom of “Dark Ballet” gives way to an interpolation of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite: Dance of the Reed-Flutes” done in the heavily synthesized style of Wendy Carlos’ score for A Clockwork Orange. It is horrendous. On “God Control,” Madonna’s mumble-rap intro begets a creepy children’s chorus, which begets ersatz disco whose strings are in perpetual flights of fancy, which begets Madonna affecting a cheesy I’m Breathless-era accent to rap about not smoking dope using the meter of De La Soul’s “Me, Myself & I.” Oh, and the song’s theme is roughly: “something…something…gun control.” This is supposed to be fun, but it’s exhausting.
Thematically, there are some vague references to civil unrest and social justice, but for the most part, Madame X is lyrically inarticulate. The grave “Killers Who Are Partying” opens with some unintentional comedy: Madonna referring to gay people as “the gay” (“I will be gay, if the gay are burned”) as if they’re elk or something. Over a shivering fado acoustic guitar and light four-on-the-floor pulse, she aligns herself with a litany of persecuted identities—people of Africa, Muslims, Israel, children—to gesture empathy without an iota of practicality. “I will be poor, if the poor are humiliated,” she sings. But no, she won’t. The poor are humiliated, and she will be wealthy for the rest of her life. The only functional implication here is to remind us of Madonna’s benevolence—the only thing this song actually expresses is an image.
Meanwhile, “Future,” begins with the line, “You ain’t woke.” Madonna sings this over a dubby Diplo beat as Quavo weaves in and out of her lines for punctuation (and eventually delivers one of his all-time least inspired verses). Madonna warbles through Auto-Tune and adopts a contemporary hip-hop posture that ends up just sounding like a flat sort of honking out of her nose. It’s not so much that she’s riffing on hip-hop that’s the problem (we’re not going to solve appropriation with one Madonna album, especially when it’s rampant); it’s that she’s being smarmy as she does it.
And look: Madonna’s always gonna Madonna. She’s always going to put her twist on culture to which she has no legitimate claim. From her first record’s dabbling in post-disco boogie to voguing to new jack swing to her Eastern philosophy-and-fashion period to revolutionary posturing to trying on Timbaland’s and Pharell’s space-age takes on R&B: Sharks bite, Madonna appropriates. Her pop exists to exploit and sand off edges, packaging esotericism for the masses. It’s just that on Madame X, she is not merely dining out on other cultures; she’s whipping around drive-thrus. Perhaps some find this sort of pretense charming, as she plays peek-a-boo with a tabla on “Extreme Occident,” describing globetrotting, feeling lost, not being lost, and then resolving that, well: “Life is a circle.” But it seems absurd to grade a superstar on a curve and to forgive her hackneyed attempts at depth simply because of who she is.
There’s a distinct tension between Madame X’s idiosyncrasies and its commercial aspirations. The best-case scenario for striking the balance is the first single “Medellín,” a sugary reggaeton cocktail shared with Maluma. The song’s beat slowly fades in and intensifies, like a great idea. But not enough of these songs are good enough to justify overlooking their imperialism, and the ones that are—the rickety, triplet-drunk “Come Alive” and “I Don’t Search I Find,” a loosely structured workout with chunky ’90s house percussion that sounds like it was ripped from The Rain Tapes—aren’t quite as extreme in their cultural pilfering. The worst-case scenario is “Crave,” a mid-tempo trap ballad with Swae Lee that sounds like a naked attempt to score Madonna her own “We Belong Together.” The singing is flat as a denial, and the lyrics are all tell, no show: “My cravings get dangerous,” Madonna warns without even the smallest sense of danger in the vicinity besides falling asleep at the wheel. What is she even talking about?
If you’ve cared about Madonna in the past, but aren’t currently viewing her through rose-colored standom, she presents an exhausting challenge: Rooting for her when you know she has done (and probably could do) better. At her height, Madonna was a great persuader who could convince you of her dominion over whatever she took on. But as her career stretches on and she finds herself in the position of niche artist, her large-scale projects have the one-way intimacy of a rich friend who drags you with her to a boutique and makes you watch her try on clothes that will sit in the back of her closet for the few months before they’re donated. Life is short; aren’t we all getting a little too old for this? | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Live Nation / Interscope / Maverick | June 18, 2019 | 4.8 | 4afad8e4-323a-41fe-ab60-5059b694b817 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
On her second album, the California singer and songwriter pulls in references and sounds from everywhere and shapes them into music that's both haunting and life-affirming. | On her second album, the California singer and songwriter pulls in references and sounds from everywhere and shapes them into music that's both haunting and life-affirming. | Julia Holter: Ekstasis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16352-ekstasis/ | Ekstasis | "I hear a lot of music that's just lazy-- you know, people in their bedrooms singing some shit into the microphone." That's California singer and songwriter Julia Holter, talking to Pitchfork recently. This passage from the interview leapt out at me because it gets at what makes her second full-length album special. Like a lot of home-recorded music in the indie sphere in the last few years, Ekstasis makes heavy use of atmosphere. There's plenty of reverb and vocal tracks are braided together into drones; it's the kind of swirly production that's good for hiding mistakes. But nothing Holter does feels random. This album is above all careful, and its deliberate construction allows it to work on a different plane from most music that scans as "ethereal." Ekstasis is not the sort of oceanic wash you lose yourself in; instead, Holter's music has a way of snapping tiny moments and small sonic gestures into focus. Ekstasis is above all smart, and it makes no apologies for it.
Holter's work exists at the intersection between pop and "serious" music. The mayor of that particular corner is Laurie Anderson, and there are obvious parallels between the two. You can hear Anderson in Holter's flat, chant-like inflection, which allows her music and lyrics to do the emotional work. You can also hear it in her love of simplicity and approach to mixing traditional instrumentation and electronics. Another touchstone is the dark magic of Klaus Nomi. It's not just that the tracks like "Fur Felix" bear a similarity to Nomi tracks like "Keys of Life", there's also an undercurrent of ritualism and theatricality in Holter's music. Ekstasis is certainly mysterious, but not because meaning is hard to pin down; it's more that there are so many possible meanings, so many places to focus your attention.
Listening to Ekstasis, I keep thinking about how it differs from music that feels superficially similar. The music of Julianna Barwick, for example, has liturgical overtones, bringing to mind stone and glass and voices rising in cathedrals. Barwick wants to tap into something beyond words. But Holter's music sounds like it was assembled in a dusty library a floor or two below the sanctuary. It's a few shades darker, but it's also based on ideas first and intuition second. Despite using vocoders, drum machines, and electronics, it feels "old" in part because Holter so deliberately connects her music to the distant past. On her debut album, she did so by basing her songs on a play from ancient Greece by Euripides; here, she pulls words and scenarios from literature and mixes them with her own idiosyncratic approach to words. The songs include quotes from the likes of Virginia Woolf and Frank O'Hara. A line from O'Hara's poem "Having a Coke With You"-- "I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world"-- animates "Moni Mon Ami", nestled amid the twinkling synths, strings, and keyboards that sound like harpsichord are original lines like "Hours become years when you're gone!"
Where Holter's Tragedy felt more like a tapestry, with vocal tracks mixed in with instrumental bits and interludes, Ekstasis leans toward proper songs, and it palette is more uniform. "In the Same Room", despite its chintzy drum machine and mechanized hand-claps, is actually a drama unfolding in close quarters. "In this very room, we spent the day and looked over antiquities. Don't you remember?" to which the other character replies, "Do I know you? I can't recall this face but I want to." You see it play out on paper on the lyric sheet and it feels like a linear exchange, but Holter twists the voices together and the narrative folds in on itself. It's there as pure, gorgeous sound if you want it-- you don't need to know what the songs are about to immerse yourself in this record-- but the deeper you go, the more the songs open up.
"I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry..." is a lyric from "Goddess Eyes", a new version of a song that appeared on Tragedy. It's a line from the Euripides play that inspired her first album, and it's delivered in processed voice reminiscent of a vocoder. So we have a 2,000-year old phrase run through a device that makes a human sound like a 1970s version of the robots of the future. And at the center of all this time travel stands Julia Holter, pulling in references and sounds from everywhere and shaping them into a music that's both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think. | 2012-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | March 2, 2012 | 8.6 | 4afbca56-0664-4858-9dd0-1e5e2961a243 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a hard-rock colossus, one of the heaviest and bleakest albums to come out of the early ’90s Seattle scene. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a hard-rock colossus, one of the heaviest and bleakest albums to come out of the early ’90s Seattle scene. | Alice in Chains: Dirt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-in-chains-dirt/ | Dirt | A few weeks after the notorious 1985 Parents Music Resource Center hearings, where the so-called “porn rock” lyrics of musicians like W.A.S.P., Prince, and Cyndi Lauper were debated before a Senate committee, the Seattle talk show “Town Meeting” devoted an episode to the issue of “obscene” pop lyrics. At one point, the host gave the floor to an 18-year-old audience member named Layne Staley, who at the time was fronting a local glam-metal band called Sleze, and offered a personal take on the manufactured controversy. “Our lyrics are all positive—we don’t use bad language or sing about drugs and sex,” he said, “but I just want the freedom to write about what I want.” Wearing blue-tinted aviators with his hair teased several inches above his head—the glam-metal look of the moment—Staley wasn’t nearly as high-profile as Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, but his brief take echoed Snider’s PMRC testimony. They were both participating in a heated cultural moment when it felt like pop music was under direct threat of censorship by an ascendant cadre of cultural conservatives.
Five years and a handful of band changes later, Staley’s first hit single with Alice in Chains stuck to that topic. The lyrics to “Man in the Box” came to Staley after dining with some vegetarian Columbia Records executives who explained how veal was derived from calves raised in tiny enclosures. “So I went home and wrote about government censorship and eating meat as seen through the eyes of a doomed calf,” Staley explained. The explosive chorus may have been the most attention-grabbing part of the song, but that core riff was a novel moment in hard rock–Staley’s acidic yawp doubling guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s serpentine melody to conjure the pained moan of a beaten creature.
There was nothing quite like “Man in the Box” on the radio or MTV at the time. Director Paul Rachman set the song’s video at an abandoned farmhouse and shot it with a low-budget art-horror vibe that distinguished it from its Headbangers Ball contemporaries. Though Cantrell looked very much the metal guitarist—long straight hair, shirtless under a leather jacket—Staley’s ratty blond dreads, goatee, and sad-eyed gaze didn’t fit neatly into any genre. It was eye- and-ear-catching enough for MTV to grant the video its prized “Buzz Bin” designation, concocted a few years earlier to grant “next big thing” status to lesser-known or genre-agnostic artists. By mid-1991, Alice in Chains weren’t just a promising new metal band, but had been programmed into the nascent “alternative” landscape populated by fellow Buzz-worthy acts like EMF, Jesus Jones, and P.M. Dawn.
It's become a standard part of the grunge origin story that “Man in the Box” was the first national hit to come from the region that would soon re-define American music and popular culture in its own image. While Seattle-area bands Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone, and Soundgarden had already garnered national interest, Alice in Chains were the first Buzz Bin band to sport flannel on MTV, introducing the world to the guttural grunge yowl that Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder would soon come to personify. At the same time, Alice in Chains never really thought of themselves as a “Seattle band,” however ill-defined that term was, and their first national tours for their debut LP, Facelift, predictably came on some ill-fitting bills. They weren’t nearly metal enough for the fans of godheads Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax, who threw all manner of shit at the band during their opening set; they weren’t pop enough for Van Halen fans, whom Staley constantly trolled during Alice’s opening slot on the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge tour.
On 1992’s Dirt, such distinctions failed to matter much anymore. The band merged Seattle scuzz, the vestiges of pop-metal, and Staley’s limitless self-loathing into a hard-rock colossus. The title itself says it all: Dirt is, on one hand, the most elemental album of the grunge era, tackling the big questions with bluesy and Biblical seriousness: a busted dam, a rainstorm, a flood, a big old pile of them bones. For dirt thou art, And unto dirt shalt thou return. It’s also an album about feeling like dirt, and knowing that others see you that way. Dirt is by and for a dispossessed generation who came of age in the shadow of Vietnam, amid skyrocketing divorce rates, hard drugs, and an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots. All this time, they swore they’d never be like their old man. “There’s a growing group of people in the States that just don’t feel a part of stuff,” Cantrell said in 1993. “They feel outside, they don't want in on the Dream. They want out, man, out. And our music is a very small part of that.”
Staley puts it more bluntly on “Junkhead”: “But we are an elite race of our own/The stoners, junkies and freaks.” And with Dirt, a collection of grimy bummer jams, pungent riffs, glowering shock rock, and a handful of hard rock’s most enduring ballads, he gave them their scripture. The album rightfully made Alice in Chains one of the most famous bands in the world, and revealed them as one of the most gifted, capable of shifting from the B movie jump-scare screams of “Them Bones” to the poignant hesher existentialism of “I’d like to fly/But my wings have been so denied,” from “Down in a Hole.” It’s not for the faint of heart, either: Dirt is one of the most unremittingly bleak albums ever released by a major label. As they toured it through arenas and amphitheaters, tens of millions of fans were listening—and screaming along—to Staley plumbing the depths and torment of his heroin addiction.
A painfully fragile rock frontman if there ever were one, Staley was crushed by the death of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood from a heroin overdose. Chris Cornell recalled to grunge historian Mark Yarm that Staley made a heartbreakingly dramatic entry at Wood’s wake: “Layne flew in, completely breaking down and crying so deeply that he looked truly frightened and lost.” A year or so later, in the klieg lights of post-“Box” stardom, Staley started using. “One of my ways of dealing with the success was to get really high,” he told a reporter. “I didn’t know how to deal with it. I’ve never been really good with people and crowds—going out and meeting a hundred people and shaking hands makes me nervous. So I started fuckin’ around with heavier things.”
While Cornell paired with Wood’s erstwhile bandmates to pour his grief into the Temple of the Dog ballad “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” Alice in Chains took a different tack on their own homage. Director Cameron Crowe was directing the Seattle-set film Singles at the time, and he sent the band into the studio to record a soundtrack cut. Along with jamming out some acoustic songs that would be packaged together on the Sap EP, they recorded “Would?”, which sounded like Jane’s Addiction’s shamanistic psych-rock soundtracking a biker rally, and would become the best track on the soundtrack. Over a slithery, dark-glam groove from bassist Mike Starr and drummer Sean Kinney, Cantrell’s enigmatic and suggestive incantations set up Staley to explode on the chorus. Far from an encomium for his lost friend, Staley, himself in the throes of addiction, screams the song to its conclusion with what amounts to a tantalizing, terrifying warning: If he succumbed to the temptations of heroin addiction, could you?
In the early 1990s, a lot of people were doing just that. Heroin was more potent than ever—by one measure, its purity had jumped from 4% in the mid-1980s to 65% in the early 1990s, an increase that made the drug far more seductive to the curious. Seattle was hit especially hard, with heroin and morphine-related emergency room visits more than doubling between 1988 and 1994. Kurt Cobain famously struggled with addiction up to his death; Mark Lanegan nearly had an arm amputated because it was so infected; Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch died from an overdose the summer before Dirt came out. But in popular culture, heroin wasn’t treated as a public health crisis as much as a sardonic part of the local color. Current Sub Pop CEO Megan Jasper framed her first visit to the city in the late 1980s with appropriate irony: “Welcome to Seattle: mountain climbers and heroin addicts.” A November 1992 Times story claimed that grunge was “inspired and tempered by that city's three principal drugs: espresso, beer, and heroin.”
Heroin had been a dependable rock star muse and subcultural cautionary tale since Lou Reed chronicled its instantaneous and confusing euphoria on a song that quickly became a live favorite—and which Reed often accompanied with a performative demonstration of tying off and fixing. Yet despite a cultural canon of twentysomething icons dying from heroin overdoses—Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Darby Crash, Jean-Michel Basquiat—rock culture tended to mordantly focus on the survivors. Thus: the ubiquitous dad jokes about Keith Richards’ dauntless dependence, The Onion begging a past-its-prime Aerosmith to get back on the smack, and the late-life resurgence of the original “unredeemed drug addict” William Burroughs, who cameoed in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 heroin-themed film Drugstore Cowboy and recorded a one-off with Kurt Cobain a few days before Dirt hit stores. Most dismal was the irony-pilled early ’90s kickstarting the morbid “heroin chic” fashion trend, epitomized by Calvin Klein’s early-1990s “Obsession” campaign featuring ultra-thin, expressionless model Kate Moss.
After a failed trip to rehab at the same clinic where Andrew Wood stayed, Staley quit cold turkey to start work on what would become Dirt. Unlike contemporaneous bands who used the drug as a vehicle for tasteful remorse, painful autobiography, or wink-wink wordplay, Staley eschewed subtext or sarcasm in lieu of a frightening carnival ride straight into the terrifying depths of smack-induced panic and despair. Dirt’s most successful heroin songs illustrate the drug’s ghastly effects by dramatically fluctuating between sonic and emotional extremes. On “Sickman,” Staley’s maniacal verses are underpinned with a wild stereo-panned drum loop which—cued by a delirious Staley scream—spirals down into a depressive waltz-time dirge for the chorus: “Ah, what’s the difference, I’ll die/In this sick world of mine.” In concert, like Reed, Staley would jab his arm with the microphone while performing. On “God Smack,” Staley chews the scenery in full grunge-Nosferatu drag, and “Angry Chair” ping-pongs between murky dope-fiend paranoia and a breezy “I don’t mind, yeah” refrain that comes in out of nowhere, sounding like the brave public face of an otherwise miserable addict. “Hate to Feel” contains the most depressing couplet about the descent into addiction: “Used to be curious/Now the shit’s sustenance.”
Dirt is quite a tough hang, nowhere so much as the mid-album back-to-back paeans to pain. Staley is still buried in his own shit, and things seem to be getting worse. “Junkhead” is a simultaneous ode to heroin and a sneering dismissal of the normies who’ll never know the truth. The refrain—“What’s my drug of choice?/Well, what have you got?/I don’t go broke/And I do it a lot”—is frighteningly celebratory, delivered like a valedictory address from a newly minted 25-year-old rock star who’s reached the absolute apex of fame-fueled addiction. The title track follows like a depressive solo come-down in the hotel after the show, with Staley doubling Cantrell’s opium-den riffs with that same ghoulish moan. They concoct a disconsolate psychedelic requiem, like Sabbath in Prozac Nation. Even in the “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” moment of hard-rock self-loathing, the second verse of “Dirt” is chilling: “I want you to scrape me from the walls/And go crazy/Like you’ve made me.”
The obvious precursors here are Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and Judas Priest’s “Better By You, Better Than Me”—both of which led to unsuccessful lawsuits from grieving parents of children who died by suicide. But maybe a better comparison is the Geto Boys’ 1990 track “Mind of a Lunatic,” a hyper-detailed gore-fest of murder and mental illness that its own record label initially refused to distribute. Indeed, as Seattle joined Black Los Angeles as the music scene-spectacle du jour, “Junkhead” and “Dirt” sketched a white outlaw icon to join the “gangsta” in the public imagination. But where the Geto Boys and N.W.A. rooted their provocations in a radical, if occasionally contradictory racial politics, the desperate, vengeful addict of Dirt pushes his body and mind to the edge of the abyss mainly to scare the squares. When, on “Junkhead,” Staley—a 25-year-old heroin addict with the keys to the kingdom—pits his “elite race” of dirtbag freaks against the workaday sheep of mainstream America who would do better to tune in, turn on, and tie off, it felt an adolescent taunt, not a liberatory offer.
Dirt’s centerpiece is a much more mature work about surviving a different kind of hell on earth—the catastrophic, decade-plus slog that killed millions and created a generation of emotionally devastated heroin addicts. But “Rooster” provides a complicated response to the rest of the album, because unlike Staley’s characters, he ain’t gonna die. “Rooster” was the nickname of Cantrell’s estranged father Jerry Sr., who served multiple combat tours in Vietnam and, unable to reacclimate to civilian life, left his son with his grandmother and mother (who died within six months of each other when Cantrell was 21). “Rooster” is a masterpiece, featuring Staley’s most impassioned vocal, Cantrell’s best riffs, and the group’s best harmonies. Cantrell’s mordant counterpoint to Staley’s yearning growl on the chorus has not lost an ounce of its potency, and the pair’s wordless, cooing introduction achieves a soulful solemnity all but invisible from hard rock of the era.
Columbia pulled out all the stops for the video, hiring Mark Pellington—fresh from directing Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”—to oversee a clip that merged documentary interviews with war spectacle. Inspired by Platoon, edited by the guy who cut JFK, and overseen by Oliver Stone’s military consultant, the “Rooster” video is a minor epic. One of the great hard-rock ballads, “Rooster” dramatically broadens the scope of Dirt and brings its themes into greater focus. It’s an album about hard drugs and depression, but it’s also about men trapped in terrifying conditions beyond their control and trying to negotiate their doom through sheer bravado, if not self-delusion—which, of course, are often one and the same. Cantrell has said that the song acted as a bridge to reconcile with his father after decades apart, and on an album that’s otherwise obsessed with misery, “Rooster” is the lone ray of light breaking through the tightly closed curtains.
In 1993, music journalist Ann Powers caught up with Alice in Chains on the Dirt tour and found a group wandering the wilderness. The show she attends is a mess—Staley and bassist Starr are wasted and miss their cues—and she sees a band on the verge of collapse. “They’re like the kids in Lord of the Flies, stranded in strange territory with no clear rules of conduct,” Powers observed. “They’re trying to survive, but they’re eating themselves alive.” Soon, the band would fire Starr for increasingly erratic behavior, before spending the year touring the world, including a co-headlining slot on the 1993 Lollapalooza tour. Exhausted, they quickly recorded Jar of Flies, which sounded more like Zeppelin III than Master of Reality; nonetheless, it became the first EP to debut at the top of the Billboard album chart. But Staley’s heroin addiction never disappeared for long, and the band was forced to drop out of an opening slot for Metallica the next year, as well as the Woodstock ’94 bill.
Apart from the band’s self-titled third LP—which also debuted at the top of the album chart in 1995—Staley’s last recordings were subdued affairs. He provided lead vocals on Above, the underrated, jazz-inflected LP from the Mad Season “supergroup,” and displayed his increasingly frail appearance on the band’s MTV Unplugged set the next year. The band decided not to tour for the self-titled album, and after their fourth show opening for Kiss in 1996, Staley was hospitalized for an overdose. Soon after, his longtime girlfriend died of complications from her own drug abuse. The band went on indefinite hiatus, and Staley disappeared.
While Dirt was solidifying itself as a modern rock standard, a crop of lesser Alice-influenced bands were rising up the charts, and “heroin chic” was falling out of fashion, Staley was wasting away in isolation. When he was found dead in his Seattle apartment in 2002, Staley’s body had been decomposing for two weeks. It made for a morbid, but superficial grace note in his numerous obituaries: This was the man, after all, who was known primarily for vividly documenting his addiction and depression on an album that sold four million copies a decade before.
But that’s also far too simple and cruel an explanation. When he was 18, Staley, like so many other aspiring rock stars, wanted the freedom to write about what he wanted, how he wanted. As his fame increased, and his addiction and isolation deepened, he started using his music to shock, but also to build a bridge into his world. In this light, “Would?” is a far more accurate depiction of Staley’s drive to draw others into his personal darkness. “Try to see it once my way,” he pleaded, both a provocative dare to the squeamish and an invitation to keep him company, for as long as you could. | 2022-07-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony Music Entertainment | July 10, 2022 | 8.7 | 4b050002-ab37-44fd-8d77-36a3d2cc5979 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
The Fayetteville rapper’s debut album is at its best when he shines a light on his darkest moments and traces his glow-up step-by-step, imbuing each word with purpose. | The Fayetteville rapper’s debut album is at its best when he shines a light on his darkest moments and traces his glow-up step-by-step, imbuing each word with purpose. | Morray: Street Sermons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/morray-street-sermons/ | Street Sermons | For North Carolina rapper Morray, music is an audible beacon of light. He first started singing in church at four years old and took to rapping years later after briefly moving from Fayetteville, North Carolina to Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Being kicked out of school for fighting led him to the streets and, eventually, back to the comfort of music. His first recorded song was a birthday post to his wife on Facebook in 2014, which proved to be his gateway to a serious music career. After six years of fine-tuning, his voice had become a precise instrument, one with the power of a gospel singer and the melodic finesse of a rapper.
On his debut project Street Sermons, that voice is complemented by a story both personal and universal. The album’s lead single “Quicksand” pairs Morray’s rapid-fire delivery with tales about his time in the streets, full of close-call shootings and desperation, and elevates the narrative with trills that breach the surface of Hagan and Ant Chamberlin’s warm production like a shark’s fin. The song’s ethos—the struggle is real, but it doesn’t have to last forever—turns out to be a worthy thesis for an artist who’s gone from penning hit singles in his bathroom to co-signs from fellow North Carolinian J. Cole. Street Sermons is at its best when Morray shines a light on his darkest moments and traces his glow-up step-by-step. And even when he occasionally wades into generic territory, his vocals imbue each word with dimension and purpose.
Morray’s good-natured approach to his newfound fortune is infectious: “Smile, nigga. Enjoy your bag because your good is right the fuck there,” he recently told Genius’s For The Record about the project’s intent. At first glance, there’s little separating him from Rod Wave, another crooner whose music blurs the tear-soaked lines between rap and the blues. But where Wave’s perspective usually lands on the glass-half-empty side, Morray’s point-of-view is the inverse: the glass isn’t only half-full—he can see the bottle containing his salvation. “Trenches” uses an anecdote about five friends sharing a bottle of liquor and a bag of weed to highlight how a strong community can make the darkness of hood living bearable.
When Morray does have to leave the comforts of home, it’s to support his family. On “Reflections,” he sings of buying his daughter a birthday cake using an EBT card during a bout of homelessness and remembers trying—and failing—to kill someone for profit. Even when he’s afraid of losing his grip on reality, his will pushes him to be a bard for his relatives and himself. “Been there, did this, did that, nigga/I seen so much pain,” he belts on the song’s hook.
What makes Street Sermons largely so engaging is Morray’s voice. It’s a gritty tone that doesn’t sound strained as he leaps from mid to high range with frightening ease. His breathless performances on songs like “Kingdom” and “Big Decisions” give equal dimension to the pains and triumphs that color his world. It even energizes the handful of otherwise rote songs peppered throughout the project. Street Sermons only stumbles when Morray drifts from the personal touch of his best songs into message-mongering. The anthem “That’s On God” and the chest-puffing kiss-offs “Facade” and “Real Ones” feel like the down sections of a rousing speech from a streetwise deacon. When the stories falter, though, Morray’s voice carries them to the end, every word an edict delivered from a mountaintop.
Morray has expressed concerns about his earlier music sounding too much like Drake and Chris Brown. While he’s found a unique, compelling voice on Street Sermons, the shifts away from his hopeful perspective tug at the seams of what’s otherwise a solid project—especially for a debut. Rap in 2021 is no stranger to sadness, which means anyone pushing back against the tide with positive vibes will only stand out more aggressively.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Pick Six / Interscope | May 12, 2021 | 6.9 | 4b0827c8-09ee-4104-8cc9-273ff27cdfcf | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
With a few catchy singles, the demonstratively upbeat L.A. trio's first album dares you to categorize them, assess them, or even engage with them. | With a few catchy singles, the demonstratively upbeat L.A. trio's first album dares you to categorize them, assess them, or even engage with them. | Foster the People: Torches | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15611-torches/ | Torches | "You say, 'Now what's your style and who do you listen to?'" Mark Foster sings on Foster the People's first album, before adding defiantly, "Who cares?" Later, he punctuates "Call It What You Want" with the declaration, "What I got can't be bought." With just a few catchy singles and a reputation for energetic live shows, this L.A. trio already sounds defensive and cagey, as if bristling from some imagined attack. We've heard their sort of scene dissection before, mostly from younger bands entering a fractious pop arena (Arctic Monkeys, for instance), but Foster the People-- at distinct odds with their nurturing moniker-- seem to be daring you to categorize them, assess them, or, hell, even engage with them. By way of introduction, it's a bit off-putting, especially soundtracked by demonstratively upbeat West Coast indie-pop buzzed on disco-infused vodka.
Once you get past the genre paranoia, Torches actually has enough going for it that Foster the People could conceivably make those same points through their music rather than their lyrics. The songs dodge and weave stylistically, avoiding perceived critical jabs by scavenging pop history for new old sounds. Foster's falsetto alternately evokes Jamiroquai and Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue-- surely the only overlap between those two performers-- while his keyboards volley between early-90s radio dance pop and more recent MGMT doodles. Foster the People's proud maximalism also extends cannily to their songwriting. Foster can write a chorus so bold and simple that you can hear it once and sing it for a fortnight, a tactic that has already made minor hits of "Helena Beat" and "Pumped Up Kicks" (the latter of which promotes hipster-on-hipster violence).
Particularly hoisted onto such dense production, the hooks are so big, blunt, and persistent that even my four-year-old niece counts Foster the People as her favorite band. But on Torches that plays as a crutch as well as a strength. For example, the band runs a two-line melody into the ground on "I Would Do Anything for You", never building on it or allowing it to evolve in any way. Still, when this earworm-core works, as on the singles, its pleasures are perfectly modest and enthralling. All of which makes the group's dodginess only more distracting-- no less so considering their rapid successes: a major-label deal, a Billboard top 10 debut, a coveted slot at Lollapalooza, and the devotion of at least one fan who prefers them over the Wiggles or Odd Future. Listing those accomplishments may strike Foster the People as an accusation of selling out, but seriously, relax. As the song that's wedged into my cerebellum goes, "Who cares?" | 2011-07-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | July 12, 2011 | 6.2 | 4b0883c0-ca9d-4de3-a2b5-73cb86f43386 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On their second LP, the New Zealand indie rockers downshift into a muted, sleeker sound, sacrificing some of the energy that made their debut special. | On their second LP, the New Zealand indie rockers downshift into a muted, sleeker sound, sacrificing some of the energy that made their debut special. | The Beths: Jump Rope Gazers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beths-jump-rope-gazers/ | Jump Rope Gazers | The Beths’ exhilarating 2018 debut, Future Me Hates Me, was paced like a perfect basement show. Even the slow burners accelerated into overdrive, with singer and guitarist Elizabeth Stokes’ wry, self-aware lyrics serving as perfect shout-along fodder. The two-year wait for their follow up has felt like hanging around for a very late encore, and in the opening minutes of Jump Rope Gazers, you’d be forgiven for thinking those ecstatic and restless Beths are back. On “I’m Not Getting Excited,” Stokes repeats the song’s title as the music tells a very different story—a guitar solo ascends and the tension cranks tighter until the song explodes. But it doesn’t last long: that kinetic energy falls off a cliff by the third track and never really comes back.
Instead, Jump Rope Gazers presents a sleeker, slower, more muted version of the band. The title track is a romantic ballad reminiscent of sentimental ‘90s and ’00s megahits like Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me” and Lifehouse’s “Hanging By A Moment.” It’s a novel and welcome departure for the band, but by the overly polished pop production of “Do You Want Me Now” and emo seriousness in “Out of Sight,” the novelty wears off and the album loses cohesion. The Beths might want to show their vulnerable side, but they were plenty vulnerable and musically diverse on Future Me Hates Me. The issue is that they do so on Jump Rope Gazers at the expense of their consistency and typically unbreakable tightness. Where FMHM pushed forward, Gazers simply ambles.
The songs are enlivened by stacked harmonies and girl-group-inspired call-and-response chants, breathing life and memorable hooks into songs that crave them. Those slaloming vocal lines, taking strange side paths to their harmonic resolutions, are a reminder that The Beths met while studying jazz at the University of Auckland, and at their most complex, the vocals suggest a hybrid of pop-punk and Motown.
Stokes’ neurotic lyrics have always made singing along with Beths songs that much more satisfying, and on Jump Rope Gazers, those details are still given room to shine. “I wish that I could wish you well,” she sings on “Mars, the God of War.” “Instead I’m hitting my head/And hitting backspace on ‘Can’t you just go to hell’.” Stokes has always presented her inner monologues in their most unvarnished form, and she’s in fine form here: “I’ve never been the dramatic type/But if I don’t see your face tonight / I… well I guess I’ll be fine,” she sings on “Jump Rope Gazers.” While these tidbits keep the sense of fun in The Beths’ music, they aren’t enough to fully invigorate their second album among the more sluggish songs. They’re mostly a reminder of what’s missing.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | July 13, 2020 | 6.3 | 4b11966f-4356-41cc-8888-00b5a6cc5662 | Dayna Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dayna-evans/ | |
A fifth reissue of a 30-year old album needs something remarkable to make fans bite, and EMI promised just that for this edition of ABBA's risk-taking final record, which hosts their first piece of unreleased material since 1994, along with a set of uniformly terrific bonus tracks. | A fifth reissue of a 30-year old album needs something remarkable to make fans bite, and EMI promised just that for this edition of ABBA's risk-taking final record, which hosts their first piece of unreleased material since 1994, along with a set of uniformly terrific bonus tracks. | ABBA: The Visitors [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16577-the-visitors-deluxe-edition/ | The Visitors [Deluxe Edition] | A fifth reissue of a 30-year old album needs something remarkable to make fans bite, and EMI promised just that for The Visitors-- ABBA's final album would now host their first piece of unreleased material since 1994. The Swedish pop goliaths have been quietly protective of their legacy over the last three decades-- no reunions and tight archival control-- so the new song made headlines. Would "From a Twinkling Star to a Passing Angel" be an unreleased gem or a justly forgotten offcut?
Actually, it's neither; instead, it's a good argument as to why exactly there's nothing left in the vaults. The twee-est title in ABBA's, and possibly pop's history, hides a fascinating, carefully arranged montage showing the group's craftsmanlike side. They take album closer "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room" from its birth as a re-arrangement of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to its release as a twilit meditation on mortality. None of the many versions-- disco, nursery rhyme, strings-attached-- are as good as the final release. The medley seems designed to show both ABBA's punctilious approach to getting a track right, and their good judgement in knowing when they'd managed it. Even as the band's commercial star faded and its professional relationships quietly unravelled, they were perfectionists.
ABBA's music on The Visitors is more pristine and ambitious than it had ever been, its themes darker, its personal politics more tangled. Both of the band's couples had divorced, but the men were still writing lyrics for the women to sing-- meaning it's easy to see a cruel edge in tracks like "One of Us", in which a woman regrets her new independence over a typically gorgeous melody. All of this has made The Visitors a perennial critic's favorite. It's the record on which the wintry melancholy of "late ABBA"-- whose sadness had bubbled under their music almost from the start-- could finally dominate.
But things are never quite so simple. The original nine tracks that make up The Visitors are no less uneven than any ABBA full-length; in fact, the weakest songs are a snapshot of their foibles as a group. They had a long dalliance with musical theatre-- the pomp-pop fantasia "I Let the Music Speak" is their last and most bloated attempt. "Two for the Price of One"-- a hokey story of a failed threesome-- calls back to their earliest, goofiest records. "Slipping Through My Fingers", about the impotence of watching your kids grow up, is a great example of how the group had come to pitch records at adults, but in execution it's pure schmaltz.
The highs, though, are astonishing. The title track is a snapshot of life in a totalitarian state, full of justified paranoia and exhausted fatalism: "I hear the doorbell ring" it begins matter-of-factly "and suddenly the panic takes me." The music lurches between seasick synth-pop and nervous disco flourishes, with Frida Lyngstad's raga-infuenced vocals rolling uneasily on top. It's five years and a musical lifetime since this band sung "Dum Dum Diddle", but for all its distance from ABBA's traditional sound, "The Visitors" never gives up on catchiness. This is grown-up, risk-taking pop, but always pop nonetheless.
The same goes for the record's other strong songs-- the ghostly "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room", the cryptic "Soldiers", the wise and sympathetic "When All Is Said and Done". Aurally, too, the group was never better: The Visitors is deliciously crisp, layered, and rewarding where a lot of contemporary synth-pop now sounds rather thin. Some of the band's latter-day weaknesses have been ironed out-- their rather awkward relationship with disco, for instance. Their "disco LP," Voulez-Vous, was marked by a noticeable stiffness: By the time of The Visitors ABBA hadn't got any funkier, but they had learned to use their unyielding rhythms creatively, turning their dance-pop into something intriguingly angular and staccato on "I Am the City" and "You Owe Me One".
Those songs are both included on the reissue as bonus tracks-- indeed The Visitors' set of bonus material is uniformly terrific, turning a fine album into a great one. "Cassandra", like "The Visitors", is a cryptic sketch of unspecified political disaster, given devastating dignity by Frida's measured vocals. "Under Attack" and "I Am the City" are clockwork jewel boxes of hooks. "Should I Laugh or Cry", a puncturing of a pompous husband and dead marriage, takes all the spite of their famous divorce songs and turns it back on the men to wounding effect. And-- leaving out "From a Twinkling Star"'s exercise in archaeology-- The Visitors ends with career highlight "The Day Before You Came", Agnetha singing a woman's hesitant reconstruction of the day before she met someone we assume is her lover. The details are banal, but Agnetha makes them live anyway, and they're contrasted by keening backing vocals of such dread that it's been speculated the song's "You" is killer, not partner.
"The Day Before You Came" is, on paper, a happier song than "The Visitors", but it shares its themes with much of the album: Life is unstable, happiness may be fleeting, and your world can be instantly and forever overturned. These are strong, resonant ideas to end a career on, and this is an excellent way to finish-- a band and a record divided between almost throwaway studio mastery and spectral, uneasy premonitions of their own demise. | 2012-05-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polar | May 18, 2012 | 8.6 | 4b12105d-86be-44c3-bc3e-6c7116ef5b6b | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
On a new shared EP, '90s G-funk legend DJ Quik and Problem, a rapper a generation younger, find a breezy, lazy rhythm together. | On a new shared EP, '90s G-funk legend DJ Quik and Problem, a rapper a generation younger, find a breezy, lazy rhythm together. | DJ Quik / Problem: Rosecrans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21840-rosecrans/ | Rosecrans | DJ Quik and Problem have been sporadic collaborators for years, but news of a shared EP called *Rosecrans *arrived as a relative surprise. Quik, the '90s G-funk legend who continues making some of the best music of his career well into his 40s, has been quiet since his last album, The Midnight Life, was released in 2014. Over the same time period Problem, a generation younger than Quik but from the same city, has released a handful of mixtapes pining after the commercial peak he reached in 2013 with a single called "Like Whaaat." At six songs, the duo's breezes by as a loosely fitting tribute to a shared hometown.
"Y’all know what Rosecrans is, it’s a long ass avenue that go from the beach to the streets," DJ Quik says coolly on the first song, describing the famous Compton throughway that the EP could soundtrack a drive down on a lazy day. *Rosecrans *was co-produced by Quik and Problem together but it’s the veteran’s genius that shines through in the music. For decades Quik has injected an anything-can-be-funky sensibility into his catalog and into hip-hop more generally, but his legend rests also on an understated musicality that he provides himself and enlists in session instrumentalists. He makes smart music that’s easy to listen to, both clinical and warm at once.
Problem is a practiced and stylish-enough rapper, and he’s noticeably channelled better in short verses here than you’d find on an aimlessly sprawling mixtape. He also seems to have corralled many of the EP’s seven guests. Wiz Khalifa drops in as a mostly forgettable cameo on "This Is Your Moment," which trades the EP’s frequent live bass for a bottom end programmed for the club, alongside a young and far happier-to-be-here Compton rapper named Buddy. The first verse on the album belongs to Game, who has made a career of reminding listeners he’s from Compton and that he knows a bunch of rappers. He does both here with a word-cloud-like verse that checks off self-implicating references to Dre, Drake, Bompton, and Chuck Taylor’s. Bad Lucc sneaks in on "Take It Off One Time," a skippable track that sounds like a contemporary-R&B grab Problem brought to the table and Quik tweaked to his liking.
Rosecrans features a pair of instrumentalists that also appeared on Quik’s last album and are billed here alongside the man himself as a trio called SuperDave. (They’re all named David.) David Forman’s bass is both fat and nimble on the shimmering opening title track, while David "Preach" Balfour finesses his keys into a twinkle on top. David Blake is the obvious coordinator, and he talks his shit instead of rapping it here—not that there’s that much difference—introducing himself as "the abominable DJ Quik." Quik has always considered himself a producer first, but as a rapper he’s one of hip-hop’s great acquired tastes, and carries the ability to revolt and charm in a single conversational bar.
The EP’s crown jewel comes early with "A New Nite / Rosecrans Grove," which seems to function as a sort of nostalgic retread on one of Quik’s earliest hits, 1991’s "Tonite." Vocalist Shy Carter does a bit of a Nate Dogg impression on the hook, but the beauty is in the laid back and eventually rearranged groove. "Now this the kinda beat that I might need Dre on," Quik raps truthfully before promising, "I’mma stay on." It’s the blippy, chiptune synth that rises above the fray and catches the ear though. The seemingly out-of-place sound—"Is that my fucking pager going off?" Problem wonders during the intro—becomes the meandering centerpiece of the track, oscillating from choppily plucked out funk to the sounds you might expect from a prancing Mario as he pockets strings of coins in a hidden level. Later, after more dissection and a vocoder has set the mood, the synth somehow shifts into a wailing police siren with a European accent. The groove never breaks, but the synth throws things off-kilter. It’s another Quik trademark: an unexpected sound twisted to surprisingly versatile depths, the same magic he’s been using to steer his still-winding career. | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / Diamond Lane Music Group, Inc. / Blake Enterprises | April 23, 2016 | 6.8 | 4b16481c-d99d-425d-abca-7c0e7b879a88 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi record together once a year at an annual concert in Tokyo. The latest product of this relationship does away with the improv and amorphous noise that defined its predecessors, and makes the trio sound like a fully locked-in experimental rock band. | Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi record together once a year at an annual concert in Tokyo. The latest product of this relationship does away with the improv and amorphous noise that defined its predecessors, and makes the trio sound like a fully locked-in experimental rock band. | Oren Ambarchi | Keiji Haino | Jim O'Rourke: Now While it’s Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17974-oren-ambarchi-keiji-haino-jim-orourke-now-while-its-still-warm-let-us-pour-in-all-the-mystery/ | Now While it’s Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery | At first glance, the collaboration of Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi looks more like a side-project than a band proper. Their albums are recorded at an annual concert in Tokyo, and billed under the players’ names rather than a group moniker. And their first two, though filled with high-level improvisation, were somewhat amorphous. Lengthy (sometimes half-hour-plus) tracks felt more like one-off experiments-- albeit excellent ones-- than purposeful music.
Things began to shift with 2012’s Imikuzushi, an enthralling set of noise rock journeys that made the trio sound more like an actual band. On their follow-up, Now While it Is Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery, Haino, O’Rourke, and Ambarchi have landed squarely on the spot they were clearly moving toward. This is now unmistakably a seasoned, fully locked-in experimental rock band-- and, not coincidentally, one of the best around.
The differences emerge both in form and content. For the first time, the trio sticks to shorter pieces-- six in total, with none longer than 11 minutes. And those pieces progress in a distinct arc, one that suggests more craft and forethought than before. Now While it Is Still Warm starts with quieter, more ambient tracks, gradually escalates into louder songs, then ends with a denouement that’s all mood and atmosphere.
More importantly, each track has a distinct shape, often featuring clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Whether with meditative drones, hammering riffs, or heavy rhythms, the trio diligently carves out patterns every step of the way, with at least one eye on where to go and how to get there. This is especially true of three tracks in the middle of the album. Here, Haino churns out guitar pyrotechnics supported by O’Rourke’s bass loops and Ambarchi’s weighty drumming. These are rock jams, though they still retain the group’s essential spontaneity, mostly in Haino’s ability to quickly shift from a memorable riff to an abstract explosion.
Just as compelling are the subdued pieces that bookend Now While it Is Still Warm. Opener “Once Again I Hear the Beautiful Vertigo... Luring Us to 'Do Something, Somehow'” sees Haino moaning hypnotically over the accompaniment of wineglasses (one of which is manned by master minimalist Charlemagne Palestine). Later, Haino’s flute and O’Rourke’s stage-shaking bass create dark lounge-jazz in “Who Would Have Thought This Callous History Would Become My Skin”, and the gentle tension of the closing title track could score an Akira Kurosawa noir thriller like High and Low or The Bad Sleep Well.
Those quieter pieces are so compelling that it’s tempting to hope for a future album made of nothing but. At the same time, it would be fascinating to hear the trio in tight-rock mode for an entire release. That’s the interesting paradox of Now While it Was Still Warm: by honing their music, the trio has actually widened it, showing how much they’re capable of. Haino, O’Rourke, and Ambarchi now sound like a band for whom anything is not just possible, but probable. | 2013-06-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Black Truffle | June 19, 2013 | 7.7 | 4b1c961f-89fa-4cdb-8d77-dc1992c1e6bb | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Having solidified their lineup, this Toronto band's third album is leaner, funkier, and more consistent than its predecessors. | Having solidified their lineup, this Toronto band's third album is leaner, funkier, and more consistent than its predecessors. | Holy Fuck: Latin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14207-latin/ | Latin | For most of their history, Holy Fuck have operated as the augmented duo of Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh, surrounding themselves with a rotating cast of bass players and drummers (sometimes more than one at a time). Over the last few years, though, a consistent lineup has solidified, with bassist Matt McQuaid and drummer Matt Schulz holding down the rhythm section. And as one might expect, the consistency has affected the band's sound, making Latin, the band's third album, leaner and funkier than its predecessors.
Borcherdt and Walsh have refined some of their more aggressive noise, and here they use their arsenal of tone generators, guitars, and keyboards to create washes of tone that wrap around the rhythm section like a scratchy blanket. The occasional stab of melody flashes out from the maelstrom, before following the band on its next rhythmic turn. In fact, the album opens with a long ambient wash that builds in volume and intensity before peeling back to reveal the skeletal dance groove of "Red Lights", a highlight that makes the most of the strange interplay between untethered ambient sound and insistent rhythm.
Even in its new, tighter state, the band can still bring the noise, as on the crunching closer "P.I.G.S.", whose melodic synth patterns culminate in a vicious stop-time coda that ends the album on its roughest, most brutal note. Holy Fuck's original mission was essentially to use a live band to create electronic, techno-informed music, and it's a goal they remain wedded to here. Single "Latin America" in particular seems to pattern its rhythmic breakdowns and buildups on modern dance music.
Holy Fuck have carved out a unique and identifiable sound of their own, and as the band itself has solidified, it's made their identity even stronger. If the record loses some of the sense that things could fall apart at any moment-- part what made their sound so gripping-- they largely compensate with solid compositions and strong instrumental interplay. | 2010-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Turks | May 14, 2010 | 7.8 | 4b214620-a698-4f83-998c-5ad60e5842af | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Lou Reed’s 1975 album has been called one of the worst albums ever made. The truth is it is the product of genuine love and passion, still exhilarating and bursting with possibility four decades on. | Lou Reed’s 1975 album has been called one of the worst albums ever made. The truth is it is the product of genuine love and passion, still exhilarating and bursting with possibility four decades on. | Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lou-reed-metal-machine-music/ | Metal Machine Music | It’s all there in the first minute: there’s a low-mid whoosh that’s clearly guitar feedback, like a Jimi Hendrix power chord trailing off; there’s a bit of an electric rattle, perhaps a fluttering speaker cone gasping for air; then come the high-pitched screeches, perhaps bringing to mind a grainy video image of seagulls circling over an open sea filled with radioactive garbage. From there, a ringing squall is folded in, an unstable mess of harmonics that shudders and quakes like nerve impulses curling down a human spine. And with that, we’re deep into Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
For a good 15 years after its 1975 release, Metal Machine Music, a double album of avant-garde noise put out by a rock legend who was only starting to get his commercial due, was discussed as a gesture more than as music. Explanations for its existence proliferated. Some said it was Lou Reed’s attempt to get out of a record contract, or a fuck-you to fans who only wanted to hear his most popular songs. Or it was mis-packaged, maybe, and was originally supposed to come out on a classical label, where there was some precedence for this kind of experiment. And some of these rumors about Metal Machine Music’s troubled release were started, or at least encouraged, by Reed himself.
Reed put out MMM at a precarious moment in his career, with VU firmly in the rearview but his own commercial prospects unclear. His 1972 debut solo album made almost no impact, but the David Bowie-produced Transformer fared much better with the rise of glam rock and the commercial success of the single “Walk on the Wild Side.” Though Reed followed that album with a poorly received commercial bomb (1973’s Berlin, now considered a theatrical rock classic), his profile in the rock world continued to climb through ’74 and ’75, and his past suddenly had currency. The Velvet Underground vault recording 1969 Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed appeared in 1974, and the successful live solo album from earlier the same year, Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, was heavy on glammed-up versions of VU songs. Sally Can’t Dance wasn’t one of Reed’s better albums, but the title song got some FM radio play, and the LP hit the Top 10. Given his dicey commercial prospects at the beginning of the decade, Reed could, by mid–1975, be called a successful rock star. Which explains why his next choice was so baffling.
Metal Machine Music is shrouded in mystery in part because Lou Reed made it alone. The nature of the music didn’t require a studio or an engineer, so he recorded it by himself at his Manhattan loft, working late into the night. Though he put a long series of instruments, filters, and technical specifications on the back cover of the record (“Ring Modulator/Octave Relay Jump”; “Distortion 0.02 bass and treble ceilings”), little or none of it had anything to do with the recording. The notes were a prank. The actual recording involved just a couple of amps and guitars with open tunings leaning against them, a few microphones, and a tape machine. When an amp is turned up, the vibration of the sound will stimulate the strings and pickups of a nearby guitar, generating what we all recognize as feedback. The harmonic information of the feedback will have a particular quality that varies along with the tunings, and with two guitars occupying the same space, the interactions between the instruments can create additional harmonics. Reed experimented with settings and guitar placements and then mixed the results into four separate 16-minute pieces, each of which has completely different information happening in each stereo channel.
Reed’s state of mind and thought process during the recording are not known, since there was no one else around during the recording and Reed himself, addled by chronic abuse of methamphetamine, served as an unreliable narrator (in his biography Lou Reed: A Life, Anthony DeCurtis called MMM a “hymn to speed”). All of which left an opening for stories to proliferate. In Victor Bockris’ book Transformer, Reed is quoted as saying “I put out Metal Machine Music precisely to put a stop to all of it. It was a giant fuck-you. I wanted to clear the air and get rid of all those fucking assholes who show up and yell ‘Vicious’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’” But Reed’s “fuck-you” was more of a defense mechanism. He clearly knew the album would cause a ruckus and some of his actions were antagonistic provocations, such as the legendary liner notes, alternately boastful and incoherent, where he says, “Most of you won’t like this, and I don’t blame you at all. It’s not meant for you.” But deep down, in the heart he protected at all costs and showed to the world only when he was ready, he adored this music. Metal Machine Music was, for him, a perfect recording, taking his love of noise and drone and musical chaos to its logical endpoint. In 2007, Reed told Pitchfork, “The myth is sort of better than the truth. The myth is that I made it to get out of a recording contract. OK, but the truth is that I wouldn’t do that, because I wouldn’t want you to buy a record that I didn’t really like, that I was just trying to do a legal thing with. I wouldn’t do something like that. The truth is that I really, really, really loved it.”
During the mid–1970s, Reed famously sparred in print with Lester Bangs, a Velvet Underground superfan who thought Reed was wasting his talent with his new music and was perfectly willing to tell him so to his face. Reed v. Bangs was the Fischer v. Spassky of the rock press’ golden era, two masters in their respective fields matching each other move-for-move. Two key Bangs articles capture Reed during the period. “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves” from the March 1975 issue of Creem, is among Bangs’ most famous pieces, and finds him and Reed, both drunk and drug-addled, basically screaming at each other as Bangs tries to get behind the rock star pose. “The Greatest Album Ever Made,” in the March ’76 issue, finds Bangs grappling with Metal Machine Music.
The title of Bangs’ Metal Machine Music piece is ironic, though Bangs clearly loved the music. The fact that he couches genuine appreciation in a series of jokes about the record shows that a critical language for appreciating the album didn’t exist in 1975. Even people who might have loved it (and there are very few accounts of anyone praising it at the time, other than Bangs) didn’t know how to explain why it might be good. At the time, with MMM considered only as “the new Lou Reed album,” it was met with confusion and derision. Some writers, like John Rockwell for the New York Times, took the record seriously and tried to evaluate it on its own merits, but came away puzzled. Writing in the Boston Globe, William Howard called it “An appalling rip-off.” In their year-end poll, Rolling Stone called it the “Worst Album by a Human Being.”
The record initially sold about 100,000 copies, making it what has to be the best-selling noise music album of all time, but a great many of those copies were quickly returned, and the record was almost immediately removed from stores. After that initial wave of press and puzzlement, Metal Machine Music was, for many years, mostly forgotten, trotted out periodically for a “worst music of all time” list. Since it didn’t make the ’80s transition to CD (there was no reason to put it out) it was barely on the radar at all. MMM had become just part of rock lore, a record you heard about, not one you actually heard.
But something started to happen to Metal Machine Music over time: a context for understanding and appreciating it began to build up around it. Sonic Youth, the unimpeachable aesthetic conscience of the ’80s, were inspired by the album (you can see the wheels turning in a photo of a rapt teenaged Thurston Moore communing with his copy). Noise was in the air. In 1991, Neil Young, also beloved by Sonic Youth, put out a live album called Arc, which consisted mostly of 35 minutes of edited feedback and noise. In 1998, Sonic Youth themselves put out an album called Silver Session (For Jason Knuth) that could be heard as a “cover” of Metal Machine Music, as it was created with a room full of amps and guitars in the throes of feedback. Extreme music from Japan, led by Masami Akita’s project Merzbow, brought harsh sounds to the CD racks, many of which sounded uncannily derived from MMM. Record collectors with turntables found used vinyl copies of MMM which had never been terribly scarce given the album’s initially huge rate of return. In 2000, Metal Machine Music was properly issued on CD, with liner notes from Rolling Stone critic David Fricke. And in the final decade of Reed’s life, he performed variations of the core idea of the record as Metal Machine Trio, and the work was scored for acoustic instruments and recorded by the experimental classical ensemble Zeitkratzer. Reed always said it would find its place, and he was right.
Reed has said he made Metal Machine Music for himself, and indulgence is baked into the concept. It’s the sound of electricity falling in love with itself, utterly relentless, a blast of energy that never lets up. On a casual listen, it seems static, like it’s only doing one thing. But the album constantly changes and is never the same from one second to the next. If you hear the music as placid, which is possible at lower volumes, it’s like a waterfall, endless particles of sound-matter crashing down and never landing in the same way twice. If you hear it as violent, which is also possible, it’s like an explosion that’s constantly at the moment of its concussive peak, one that never quite completes itself.
The key to understanding MMM is its physicality. Reed has underscored its connection to the body, which gives it a “functional” utility that separates it from the more cerebral end of experimental composition. He’s right that it’s best experienced on headphones, not just because of the extreme panning but because very few people have a living situation that allows them to blast an hour of noise music over speakers. To walk the streets with MMM playing loudly in your headphones is to bring focus to the present moment. You can feel your pulse quickening slightly because the noise triggers an alert in your body, but you then realize that when your nerves say “danger,” they’re not always correct. And the hormonal release that comes from experiencing noise can, if you pause to feel it, focus the mind. “It’s impossible to even think when the thing is on,” Reed said in Transformer. “It destroys you. You can’t complete a thought.” You see things and can isolate their shapes and colors while your ears are otherwise engaged in processing this overwhelming abstraction. And part of the masochistic excitement of the record when you listen to it loud is that it not only sounds like something that will damage your hearing, it’s the sound of the damage itself (warning: don't listen to it loud for long).
MMM’s greatest conceptual tweak might be the fact that it both has “an ending” and never ends. After 64 minutes of punishing noise that steers clear of melody and steady rhythm, a bassy rumble enters in its final seconds that sounds almost like percussion. It’s at this instant that the album slips into the circular locked groove created by mastering engineer Bob Ludwig. That rumble, now as fixed and tight enough for a rhythm track sample, goes around and around for as long as you want it to. If you have the vinyl, you can continue to listen to MMM as long as you like, that one bit of sound spinning round and round forever, it's beautiful, and it’s been playing for about 12 minutes as I write this now. | 2017-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | December 3, 2017 | 8.7 | 4b26c052-30ee-4139-848c-53bea65ed40e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Segall’s new album feels like a sampler of what he’s been up to in the last half-decade. It's an easy entry point into his imposing catalog, and a complete portrait of his many capabilities. | Segall’s new album feels like a sampler of what he’s been up to in the last half-decade. It's an easy entry point into his imposing catalog, and a complete portrait of his many capabilities. | Ty Segall: Ty Segall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22819-ty-segall/ | Ty Segall | Back in the ’60s, when bands like the Rolling Stones were averaging three new albums a year, they’d also drop quickie compilations along the way—like High Tides and Green Grass and Through the Past, Darkly—to summarize a particularly prolific period (or just cash-in on more casual fans). As someone who aspires to a ’60s Stones ideal—in terms of both his sheer level of output and his ever-evolving garage-rock aesthetic—Ty Segall is also wont to drop the occasional summary collection that allows the average listener to play catch-up. Except Segall is so restless and relentless, of course, that these compilations actually comprise all new material.
In the fall of 2012, Segall dropped Twins, an eclectic album that took a tasting-menu approach to the three aesthetically discrete albums that immediately preceded it. Likewise, Segall’s new album feels like a sampler of what he’s been up to in the half-decade since: the melancholic acoustic meditations of Sleeper, the classicist craftsmanship of Manipulator, the Marc Bolan séances of Ty Rex, the diseased, dementoid psych-punk of last year’s Emotional Mugger. Ty Segall is the second self-titled album in his discography (after his 2008 eponymous debut), seemingly because its 10 tracks offer a complete portrait of his many capabilities. But Ty Segall is more than just an easy entry point into his imposing catalog. The new album shows Segall has not only mastered several, stylistically divergent strains of rock—he’s becoming ever more adept at seamlessly stitching them together.
For someone with roots in a genre—garage-punk—that puts a premium on gritty authenticity, Segall has become increasingly fond of artifice, be it the Bolan-via-Barrett faux British accent that’s become his default vocal tic, the silver-lipstick vamping, or his use of Emotional Mugger as a vehicle to masquerade as a surrogate band and terrorize morning news programs. And that mischievous zeal is the glue that ultimately holds this album’s disparate pieces together, particularly when they collide in the same song. Bulldozing opener “Break a Guitar” forges a holy communion between Big Star melody and Black Sabbath brawn, and its cocksure attitude spills over to the stripped-down follow-up, “Freedom,” a scrappy, acoustic-powered number that recalls John Lennon’s frantic Abbey Road curio “Polythene Pam.”
But that’s not the only move Segall has cribbed from the second side of that Beatles classic. “Freedom” immediately gives way to an epic sequel, “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned),” a 10-minute multi-sectional suite that ricochets between warped glam-folk, proto-metal ferocity, sneering British Invasion swagger, overdriven fuzz-punk, and a jazzy guitar jam that attempts to out-Santana the Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” It’s the most ambitious, audacious piece of music Segall has ever produced, but he whisks through the song’s train-like structure with such manic glee that this colossal track ultimately feels as brisk and economical as a seven-inch single.
Given that it’s dropped early on in the No. 3 slot, “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)” casts a long shadow over the rest of the album—in its wake, even the sludgy stomper “The Only One” and the wild, glass-smashing roadhouse rave-up “Thank You Mr. K” feel a bit rote in comparison. But Segall wisely balances his most epic gestures to date with his most intimate, as Ty Segall’s back half yields the prettiest, most pristine pop songs he’s ever written: “Orange Color Queen” is a mash note to his girlfriend rendered in T. Rex’s mystic-lady language; the piano-rolled “Papers” wraps the album’s catchiest chorus around a cluttered-desk scene straight out of a late-’60s Kinks album. And on “Take Care (to Comb Your Hair),” Segall shrewdly builds a deceptively hippy-dippy folk song into a Who-sized barrage of finger-slicing windmill strums and kit-toppling drum rolls, effortlessly bridging the troubadour and trouble-maker sides of his personality.
Of course, Segall can’t help but follow up these handsomely packaged songs with “Untitled,” which is really just a four-second blurt of guitar noise that closes the album with all the subtlety of a fart let out in the most crucial moment of a wedding ceremony. But that throwaway gag nonetheless serves as a reminder of Segall’s most essential quality: his refusal to settle. Rather than chart a typically linear course from raw to refined, Segall has constructed a discography more like a zig-zagging thrill ride liable to careen off into any direction. And whether it’s the jarring track-to-track juxtapositions or within the shape-shifting songs themselves, Ty Segall shows that, nearly a decade into the game, the only predictable thing about Segall is his ability to continually surprise. | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | January 25, 2017 | 8 | 4b26dc99-1ab4-4b85-bb94-d8a8fedd6d98 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The 23-year-old rapper shows the most promise on his sophomore album when he dials down the menacing grit and focuses on how his emotions have shaped his current reality. | The 23-year-old rapper shows the most promise on his sophomore album when he dials down the menacing grit and focuses on how his emotions have shaped his current reality. | Lil Zay Osama: Trench Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-zay-osama-trench-baby/ | Trench Baby | Chief Keef may have turned over the engine for Chicago’s drill scene in the 2010s, but plenty of rappers have since taken the wheel and pushed the sound forward. Lil Durk set the standard for drill, building Keef’s mumbling into a cohesive cadence and adding a new element: an intensely detailed style of singing that made the simple acts of spilling his feelings to a woman or wiping blood out of a rug into 3D portraits. Lil Zay Osama brings a similar haunted level of scrutiny to his sophomore project, Trench Baby. Though the record is traced off Lil Durk’s blueprint, Zay offers a glimpse of what makes him unique, relaying emotions instead of scribbling sketches of bloodshed.
After an extended stint in juvenile detention, Zay got serious about music in 2017. Two years later, his ragged debut Hood Bible became an Auto-Tuned manifesto for the streets and proved what Lil Zay could accomplish in quieter moments, with reflective music that felt more sorrowful about the past than anchored by tall tales. On Trench Baby, this meekness takes the stage with pensive keys and muted melodies that go down easier than before. “Shooters” stresses the emotional toll of being caught in shootouts with former childhood friends. “We’ll Be Straight” succeeds, not just because of G Herbo’s frantic search for happiness within his own memories, but because of Zay’s wide-lens approach to constructing scenes of the past so that listeners can fill in the frame.
Whereas Durk distanced himself from drill with intricate, violent world-building, Lil Zay is still learning how to sketch his own. He’s not rapping in 3D like Durk, but he does offer enough detail to draw a comic book panel. “Niggas get to tweakin’, we don’t think first, we just splat, splat/And I slimed plenty niggas out, I could say slatt, slatt,” he raps on “61st to 64th.” Still, guest features like Doe Boy and Jackboy only exacerbate Zay’s lyrical weaknesses. More often than not, his violent talk sounds like filler. With earnest singing that trades in menacing grit for emotional moans, “Ride for Me” is a shining example of when speaking from the heart enables Zay to create his own blueprint. On “Ex Bitch,” he comes alive, spitting daggers about a woman who missed her chance to be his side chick amid his rise.
When Lil Zay tries to reconstruct crime scenes with lifeless scene-building, the results lack the gravity of his more therapeutic songs. On Trench Baby, he shows the most promise when he dials it down and focuses on how his emotions have shaped and dictated his current reality.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner | February 25, 2021 | 6.4 | 4b28d603-0426-44f6-8ead-e8452917db6c | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
The Danish rock band Communions offer a familiar sound—vaguely Strokes-y, ’80s-inspired pop rock—but they do it well. | The Danish rock band Communions offer a familiar sound—vaguely Strokes-y, ’80s-inspired pop rock—but they do it well. | Communions: Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22871-blue/ | Blue | There’s something to be said for familiarity. Sometimes you just want a burger to taste exactly like the one you had last time, and Blue, the full-length debut by the Danish quartet Communions, announces its ingredients right away with opener “Come On, I’m Waiting.” Had the band added a signature Greg Hawkes-style keyboard line, it would have been even easier to imagine “Come On, I’m Waiting” as being by the Cars. Within a few measures, it’s clear that Communions aren’t trying to hide the well of styles they're drawing from.
If you’re already familiar with the band's previous EPs, you know that Communions alternate between shoegaze and the meat-and-potatoes pop-rock that the Strokes sold to the world as punk/post-punk revivalism. On Blue, the smokestack plumes of guitar have mostly been cleared away in favor of a stripped-down production style that cuts closer to the bone. Second track “Today,” in fact, starts with a serrated, airtight guitar riff reminiscent of the Strokes’ 2001 debut Is This It. The similarity is so apparent that Communions may as well have tattooed the album cover onto their foreheads.
By this point, one has to wonder if there’s anything left to say, musically speaking, when bands choose to go down this well-traveled road. And when you consider that acts like the Strokes and Interpol lifted so blatantly from Television in the first place, Communions risk the quality erosion that you get when you make a copy of a copy. Nevertheless, Blue’s skill rescues it. After the Strokes-style riff introduces “Today,” the song switches to a looser ’80s-pop atmosphere reminiscent of the Smiths’ “Ask.”
That looseness is crucial; even the album’s basic production retains an openness that’s inviting rather than confining. Other bands who mold themselves after these styles typically do so with a fervor that can be stifling, but Blue conveys the sense that the band simply enjoys this music. At times, Communions sound inspired, like they pushed themselves to write songs that at least show some character. At other times, the band can sound somewhat lazy, as if it didn’t push quite hard enough. Which side of that line the songs on this album fall depends on where you draw the line yourself. Either way, the music on Blue is always lovingly crafted, and the album’s lack of musical pretense makes for an enjoyable, if predictable listen. If Blue were a restaurant, it would be the kind of place you go to for consistency and tasteful decor when you’re not in the mood for something fancier or more adventurous. | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | February 11, 2017 | 6.5 | 4b29508f-207f-45d5-a191-c18f9585abc7 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
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