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Taylor Swift’s sixth album is an aggressive, lascivious display of craftsmanship, but her full embrace of modern pop feels sadly conventional.

Taylor Swift’s sixth album is an aggressive, lascivious display of craftsmanship, but her full embrace of modern pop feels sadly conventional.

Taylor Swift: Reputation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-reputation/

Reputation

For a decade, almost everyone agreed on Taylor Swift. She wrote exquisite love songs and scorching, funny takedowns at an age when most people struggle to put together a cogent email. She scattered breadcrumbs and winking clues through her lyrics and liner notes, inviting diehard fans and pop rubberneckers alike to agonize over what was fact and what was fiction. She won so many awards she was ridiculed for the shocked face she made every time her name was called. She was observant and savvy, and if those qualities were spun into a kind of Machiavellian cunning by her critics, it seemed like a good problem to have. How things have changed. The Swift that stands before us in 2017 is beleaguered and defensive, a figure fighting back from public relations problems she largely could’ve avoided. She stepped into back-and-forths with Nicki Minaj and her eternal nemesis Kanye West, when silence would have seemed optimal. She induced the Streisand effect by taking legal action over a barely-read blog post that drew connections between her work and neo-Nazism, a decision that shone a new spotlight on her steadfast apoliticism in an overheated political climate. And to top it all off, she released “Look What You Made Me Do,” a petty snarl of a lead single that jumped to No. 1 thanks largely to sheer anticipation. Chart watchers rejoiced when an ascendant Cardi B bumped her from the top slot; Taylor sent flowers. It turns out “Look What You Made Me Do” was closer to a red herring than a sign of things to come, a relief given how it neglected most of Swift’s generational gifts. Reputation, her sixth album, isn’t a tuneless vengeance tour—it’s an aggressive, lascivious display of craftsmanship, one that makes 1989 sound like a pit stop on the way to Swift’s full embrace of modern pop. (This is a trip that began the second the bass dropped on her 2012 song “I Knew You Were Trouble.”) She’s largely abandoned effervescence, wonderment, and narrative. Say goodbye to maple lattes and hello to whiskey on ice, to wine spilling in the bathtub, to Old Fashioneds mixed with a heavy hand. Her vision of pop, one she realizes with the help of Max Martin and Shellback, and man-of-the-moment Jack Antonoff, is surprisingly maximal: hair-raising bass drops, vacuum-cleaner synths right out of a Flume single, stuttering trap percussion, cyborg backing choirs. Songs like opener “...Ready for It?” and “Don’t Blame Me” are glittering monsters held together by Swift’s presence at their center. Her interest in hip-hop and R&B is most apparent in her voice, an instrument that’s been stripped of its signature expressiveness. Her best performances throughout Reputation are defined by cadence and rhythm, not melody: She’s cool, conversational, detached. These particular skills may have been hiding in plain sight—listen to the decade-old “Our Song” and focus on the way she places syllables while rattling off “Our song is a slammin’ screen door!”—but they’ve never been highlighted the way they are here. “Delicate” is built around a muted pulse and a murmured question: “Is it cool that I said all that? Is it chill that you’re in my head? ’Cause I know that it’s delicate.” She stretches out the titular compliment on “Gorgeous,” making it a fluttering prayer and letting the rest of the line tumble out in its wake. She even manages to hang with Future on the bizarre, compelling “End Game,” leaving poor Ed Sheeran in the dust: “I don’t wanna hurt you, I just wanna be/Drinking on the beach with you all over me.” The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now—she’s posted up at a Cozumel cabana with her out-of-office reply: “I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put ’em.” Her writing has never been less diaristic or more dependent on dramatic performance. For Swift, plunging head-first into pop has meant leaving behind the short stories on 2008’s Fearless or 2010’s Speak Now and relying more on snippets of vivid imagery and detail. (“Getaway Car,” a sparkling Antonoff production that sounds like an “Out of the Woods” retread, is a dramatic and enjoyable outlier.) She leans on characters, some old and some new: the unrepentant brat, the swooning dreamer, and the determined, seductive adult. The “Look What You Made Me Do” video was prescient in at least one respect: Reputation collects a half-dozen different aspects of Swift and lines them up in a row. You leave the album with a new appreciation for her versatility, for the way the tough-talking schemer of “I Did Something Bad” and the infatuated android of “King of My Heart” can share the same tracklist. The woman who built a career on family-friendly romances like “Love Story” and “Mine” now turns her gaze to the darker side of passion: obsession, jealousy, lust, the loss of control. A lover turns her bed “into a sacred oasis” on the featherlight “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” and she begs her partner to carve their name into her bedpost on “Dress,” a panting, shuddering highlight. Swift hasn’t played the romantic naïf since Red, and she delivers all of these lines with palpable confidence and ease. Even lesser material benefits: “So It Goes...” is replacement-level trap-pop, but it’s hard to shake the thought of her smeared lipstick, of fingernails dug into someone’s back. In any case, these songs are more successful than the tracks that invite the listener to revisit Swift’s public spats. “Look What You Made Me Do” is the album’s nadir, and “I Did Something Bad” violates what you could call Katy’s Law: the mention of “receipts” in your quasi-diss track renders it an embarrassment. Things somehow get less subtle: “Here’s a toast to my reeeeeal friends,” she sneers on “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” just before faking a weepy apology and breaking into cackling laughter. She’s shooting for over-the-top, campy villainy, but it scans as stubborn petulance. Every listener is over this. Reputation isn’t the failure that seemed possible a month or two ago; it’s full of bulletproof hooks and sticky turns of phrase. But in committing to a more conventional form of superstardom, Swift has deemphasized the skill at the core of her genius. The album ends with “New Year’s Day,” a spare, acoustic epilogue for an album made using a lot of synths and computers. It’s equal parts Lisa Loeb and Dashboard Confessional, and she conjures rich scenes with just a handful of lines: a hotel lobby strewn with party detritus, the silent back seat of a cab. She lands the album’s first true knockout punch in the bridge: “Please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere.” It’s a tiny universe in a dozen words, an economic marvel right up there with old classics like “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” and, “You call me up again just to break me like a promise/So casually cruel in the name of being honest.” This song is Swift at her best—not settling scores long past their expiration date but writing the kind of lines reputations are made of.

2017-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Big Machine

November 13, 2017

0098d71c-fe63-44ce-8979-5dcbb0a40b9a

Jamieson Cox

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/

The latest set from harpist Mary Lattimore is like an audio scrapbook, collecting songs she recorded between 2011 and 2016. It contains a sense of time frozen into snapshots of memory.

The latest set from harpist Mary Lattimore is like an audio scrapbook, collecting songs she recorded between 2011 and 2016. It contains a sense of time frozen into snapshots of memory.

Mary Lattimore: Collected Pieces

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23076-collected-pieces/

Collected Pieces

A few years ago, harpist Mary Lattimore ventured from her Philadelphia home and traveled across the country, making music at various stops along the way. But her resulting album, 2016’s At the Dam, wasn’t a travelogue in the literal sense. Lattimore’s solo harp work is usually instrumental and often improvised, and thus not easily pinned down to specific meanings. The record did work as a diary of her trip, though, with its wide range of sounds and moods suggesting open-ended adventure and keen sensitivity to changing environments. Now settled in Los Angeles, Lattimore has had time to reflect on what she left behind. Collected Pieces is like an audio scrapbook, comprising songs she recorded between 2011 and 2016, previously available only as downloads or streams. These songs aren’t just from the past—they’re largely about the past, too, recounting places and people that Lattimore encountered in Philadelphia and can now only revisit through recollection. Once again, her pieces are too abstract to carry clear narratives. But through titles that indicate a song’s subject, and music that’s patient and contemplative, Collected Pieces has a sense of time frozen into the snapshots of memory. In some cases, those snapshots are quite specific even if the music is open to interpretation. The name of opener “Wawa by the Ocean” refers to a convenience store Lattimore frequented whenever visiting the New Jersey beachfront town of Ship Bottom. It’s not hard to hear Lattimore’s delicate string plucks as waves gently tapping at a shore, or to hear the song’s rising and descending notes as analogs to the sun’s slow summer cycles. But what’s more interesting is the way Lattimore repeats and massages her melodic figures, modifying them throughout the song’s 10 minutes while never veering too far away. Her variations blur on top of each other to form a single motif, much the way memory can turn many specific events into one general one. It’s the musical equivalent of a thousand instances of “I'm going to Wawa” becoming one big “I used to go to Wawa.” That sense of the past as a living mental space pops up a lot on Collected Pieces. Lattimore’s slow plucks on “We Just Found Out She Died” echo like fading pictures—the title references a “Twin Peaks” actress that Lattimore had seen speak not long before she passed away, and the song itself eventually morphs into ethereal hums akin to Julee Cruise’s dreamy meditations. On “It Was Late and We Watched the Motel Burn”—which Lattimore actually did one night—effects give her harp sounds their own ghosts and shadows, which slowly subsume the 13-minute piece until it feels like it’s composed of remnants of music that ended a while ago. Not everything on Collected Pieces can be mapped to an event from Lattimore’s past, but each track seems to tell a story. Often that’s because her melodies are simple and unabashedly pretty, taking on the qualities of a nursery rhyme meant to stick in your ear. Yet Lattimore’s playing is complex and daring in subtle but distinct ways. You can hear it in the small strums she adds to the gentle sway of “Bold Rides,” skewing them just enough from the song’s rhythm that the tune is hard to predict, at times even interestingly uncomfortable. During closer “Your Glossy Camry,” she plays cleverly with pace, feinting toward an acceleration that doesn’t quite materialize, though your brain might fill it in anyway. Such layered playing makes Collected Pieces more than a compilation of disparate, isolated songs. Lattimore’s approach to the harp is so thorough that she can practically talk through it at this point; she’s created a language. That helps explain why music that is, on the surface, just a collection of string plucks can paint evocative pictures of the unique hold memory has on the past, and vice versa.

2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Ghostly International

April 15, 2017

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Marc Masters

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/

Drake’s fifth proper studio album is richly produced, studded with gems, and grapples with his fatherhood in a way that casts his arrested development into sharp relief.

Drake’s fifth proper studio album is richly produced, studded with gems, and grapples with his fatherhood in a way that casts his arrested development into sharp relief.

Drake: Scorpion

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drake-scorpion/

Scorpion

Drake was hiding a child. He’d like you to believe he kept his son a secret to protect him from the slings and arrows of gossip blogs and internet commenters. On Pusha T’s venomous diss track “The Story of Adidon,” he suggested Drake was biding his time until he could make his baby the centerpiece of a marketing campaign for his new line of Adidas clothing. His motives may still be up for debate, but the heart of it is undeniable. Aubrey Graham was hiding a child, and there’s no way for street-level philanthropy or for-the-ladies anthems to bandage the wound the revelation sliced out of his charming image. Scorpion, his fifth studio album, isn’t entirely focused on the significance of fatherhood. Many of its 25 tracks are built around standard-issue Drake themes—the audacity of rappers who dare speak his name, the psychic toll associated with dating multiple beautiful women at once, people who use Instagram weirdly—and the hyper-topical nature of the lines regarding paternity suggest they were added to the album at the last-minute. But fatherhood hangs over Scorpion all the same, casting Drake’s emotional immaturity into sharp relief. He’s never been more skilled as a technician or melodicist, and it’s remarkable how many of Scorpion’s 90 minutes are musically engaging. But the kind of juvenile navel-gazing that leads someone to write a line like, “She say do you love me, I tell her only partly/I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” is less compelling when it’s coming from a 31-year-old father than a would-be college kid trying to make a name for himself. Paternity has been a long-standing source of anxiety for Drake, one that’s persisted as he’s become exponentially more famous. He was already sweating close calls on “The Resistance,” a gaseous Thank Me Later highlight that references a one-night stand who wishes she’d kept Drake’s baby. He bemoaned the paperwork that comes with superstardom on 2015’s “30 for 30 Freestyle,” talking about the paternity tests he’s legally obligated to complete for women he’s never slept with. And the issue resurfaced on this year’s loosie “Diplomatic Immunity,” a song released when his son was just a few months old: “I got the sauce and now shorties keep claimin’ preggo.” Scorpion invites you to pretend that becoming a dad hasn’t been one of Drake’s foremost concerns for the last decade. He makes the disclosure for the first time on the stunning “Emotionless,” coasting on top of an instantly recognizable Mariah Carey sample: “I wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world, I was hidin’ the world from my kid.” He refutes Pusha’s claim that he’s a deadbeat dad on the opulent “8 out of 10”: “The only deadbeats is whatever beats I been rappin’ to.” To hear Drake tell it, he can’t be bothered to keep their spat going because he’s just too satisfied. “Kiss my son on the forehead then kiss your ass goodbye,” he taunts. “As luck would have it, I’ve settled into my role as the good guy.” Claiming the higher ground is a convenient way to elude the fact that Pusha had the last and most memorable word in their battle, but it doesn’t hold up under close inspection. On the odious “I’m Upset,” one of his worst songs ever, he sounds unenthused about the prospect of child support: “Can’t go 50-50 with no ho/Every month I’m supposed to pay her bills and get her what she want… My dad still got child support from 1991.” This from someone who’s settling into his role as the good guy? And it’s hard to overlook the fact that Drake’s still using his son as a tool—maybe not to sell sneakers and sweatpants, but to insulate himself from criticism over taking a decisive loss. If you can get past Drake’s toxicity, you’re free to luxuriate in Scorpion’s sumptuous sound. With glistening production from his favorites in Noah “40” Shebib and Boi-1da, and new faces like the young Memphis producer Tay Keith (the infectious “Nonstop”), Drake abandons the global pop dalliances of 2016’s Views and last year’s More Life—releases that derived much of their vitality from dancehall, Afrobeats, and grime—to revisit sounds and structures from his earlier career. The tough-talking, rap-centric Side A toggles between the icy, anxious mood of 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and the rich production of 2013’s Nothing Was the Same; the sung tracks on Side B reach all the way back to the moody, nocturnal Take Care, though he sounds less like a lonely sophomore than a zaddy whose heart hasn’t totally frozen over. This means that Scorpion is the first Drake album to double back instead of chart a new course, and its conservatism is disappointing given the near-decade he’s spent at pop music’s vanguard. Splitting Scorpion into two distinct sides—rap and R&B—detracts from his pioneering synthesis of those two genres, but the best songs here don’t sound like retreads; they’re the most refined possible expressions of familiar aesthetics. Soulful, sample-centric cuts like “Emotionless,” “8 out of 10,” and the long-awaited DJ Premier collaboration “Sandra’s Rose” are pure comfort food, a reminder that Drake idolized Kanye West long before they became each other’s nemeses. On the other end of the spectrum, the frosted android choirs haunting “Elevate” and “Finesse” are as weird and thrilling as any beat you’ll hear this year; they sound like Oneohtrix Point Never demos, but they still have a place in Drake’s sound world. It’s on Scorpion’s Side B that Drake comes closest to finding his sweet spot, that inimitable zone where aromatherapy candles never burn out and champagne flutes are never left empty. The Michael Jackson “feature” on “Don’t Matter to Me” is a preposterous flex—consider how many artists have the funds to clear a sample like that—but it’s also the perfect exclamation point for a pop song with the warm throb of “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” On the sublime “After Dark,” he upgrades Thank Me Later–era slow jams with filthy, funny smooth-talking and assists from the late Static Major and Ty Dolla $ign, this summer’s most valuable utility player. And the few songs that cover new ground are indisputable highlights: “Summer Games” supercharges a garden-variety breakup with new wave dread, and “Nice for What” and “In My Feelings” are infectious spins on New Orleans bounce. Cramming in 25 tracks means you’re guaranteed a few duds—the cursed, joyless “Ratchet Happy Birthday”—but for a bloated streaming-era release, the batting average here is remarkably high. Scorpion ends with “March 14,” an extended reckoning with fatherhood in place of Drake’s usual state-of-OVO status report. It’s an appropriate capper for a fascinating, flawed album. He connects his current situation—squabbling with his son’s mother, meeting him just once, buying him a store’s worth of gifts he’s already outgrown—to his recurring analysis of his parents’ failed marriage: “Single father, I hate when I hear it/I used to challenge my parents on every album/Now I’m embarrassed to tell ’em I ended up as a co-parent/Always promised the family unit/I wanted it to be different because I’ve been through it.” It’s some of the most vulnerable writing of his career, and it’s proof that he can still muster the kind of unflinching self-examination that once differentiated him from his peers. And yet, there are chunks of “March 14” that just don’t pass muster. He describes finding out about his paternity as “the first positive DNA we ever celebrated,” which is both a remarkably unsentimental way to react to becoming a father and hard to believe given the content of songs like “I’m Upset.” “I got this 11 tatted for somebody, now it’s yours,” he moans, as if regifting your own tattoo is something other than deeply embarrassing. The last thing you hear on Scorpion is an interpolation of Boyz II Men’s tender “Khalil (Interlude).” It's supposed to be an endearing transitional moment: an unexpected, consequential development has compelled music's foremost Lothario to change his stripes. The days of finding “two girls that I rope like Indiana Jones” and making “them hoes walk together like I’m Amber Rose” are over. It’s time for Drake to love something other than his bed and his mama. And then you remember that this extended mea culpa might have never have existed if Pusha T didn’t release a diss track featuring a young Aubrey Graham in blackface. It’s not like Drake needs to serve as a beacon of moral clarity, but this year’s paternity saga—and with Scorpion, its ostensible conclusion—has revealed his shortcomings as a writer and pop personality. Whether it’s 2011 or 2018, you’re getting the same guy: anxious, calculating, and self-obsessed, with a golden ear and a fondness for terrible punchlines. Fatherhood hasn’t made him grow up—and if you’ve gotten older and wiser, Scorpion just feels like the latest in a series of diminishing returns.

2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Young Money Entertainment / Cash Money / Republic

July 2, 2018

009a558f-888e-460f-8bdc-696b99aa30e0

Jamieson Cox

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/

The Brooklyn rapper’s latest project is a ready canvas for her technical skill and well-earned boasts, but she’s at her best when she digs deeper.

The Brooklyn rapper’s latest project is a ready canvas for her technical skill and well-earned boasts, but she’s at her best when she digs deeper.

Young M.A: Off the Yak

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-ma-off-the-yak/

Off the Yak

In a barbershop debate on who could beat Young M.A in a rap battle, there’s only a few strong contenders. She comes from the school of JAY-Z and 50 Cent, rapping with heart, grit, swag, and attitude. Refusing to be categorized as a female rapper or a queer rapper, she’s defied labels and broken stereotypes by shifting the focus to her technical skill. As an independent artist, she may not be as famous as Cardi B or Megan Thee Stallion, but her popularity grows organically with every career milestone. Being M.A means being herself—and being embraced in a genre that is now accepting more diverse voices. Off the Yak, Young M.A’s latest project, arrives at a time when she’s increasing the pace of her musical output. During quarantine last year, the Brooklyn rapper released the seven-song Red Flu EP as a quick follow-up to her 2019 debut Herstory in the Making. On Off the Yak, she’s in that same creative zone, having fun recording songs for brown liquor-fueled parties and riding around her borough. The project presents two sides of her personality, adding Brooklyn drill and aggressive trap beats to balance out her more seductive tracks. Young M.A isn’t as frequently in the conversation about the future of women in hip-hop as some of her peers, but she’s owned her lane for a long time. She first gained attention in 2014 for her sharp-witted rhymes and realism, freestyling over G Herbo and Mobb Deep songs. It was on her “Oh My Gawdd” freestyle over JAY-Z’s “You, Me, Him and Her” where she first teased “OOOUUU,” her 2016 single that eventually went quadruple platinum. Off the Yak takes her back to when she was hungry. “Still spendin’ money from 2016, bet they ain’t know that/They said I was broke, check my account, fuck am I broke at?” she raps with authority on “Friendly Reminder.” On these tracks, her loyalty lies to her block and her crew. What works for Off the Yak is the shorter length: 11 songs, compared to Herstory in the Making’s 21. A leaner M.A project means she’s getting better at picking her best recordings and leaving the throwaways on the hard drives. She again teams up with “OOOUUU” producer NY Bangers for five songs, and she’s methodical in her approach on mid-tempo beats. “Successful” is all truth-telling lyrics about winning as an independent artist for six years strong. “I’m one word with 10 letters, successful,” she raps on the hook. When she’s threatening, she’s clever. “Yak’ got me feelin’ woozy, Draco same size as Lil’ Uzi/So don’t ever think that shit amusin’,” she raps on “Henny’d Up,” another NY Bangers production. M.A hasn’t hopped on the trend of one producer/one rapper albums yet, but it might solve her problem with cohesion if she did. At moments, Off the Yak goes high and low, mirroring both the buzz and the sobering-up. An underwhelming collab with Rubi Rose on “Don Diva,” a reference to the gritty “Original Street Bible,” feels out of place between the harder “Henny’d Up” and the A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie-lite production of “Nasty.” Mike Zombie, who produced five songs on Red Flu, returns with just two: The Fivio Foreign-featuring “Hello Baby,” an attempt at mainstreaming BK drill, and “Big Steppa,” a woozier, weirder rehash of themes from Herstory in the Making single “BIG.” Off the Yak only skims the surface of M.A’s story, and the decision to release such a varied project on the way to her second album sometimes feels like an effort to test the waters. It’s worth remembering some old M.A cuts like “Through the Day,” “Sober Thoughts,” and “Angels vs Demons”—not necessarily big singles, but her best songs in articulating human emotion. On the new project’s penultimate track, “Yak Thoughts,” she returns to this space of vulnerability and pain. “Paranoid ever since I seen my brother dead/Observing niggas, that’s why I’m always one ahead/Trying to get these evil thoughts out of my fucking head/It ain’t normal when you gotta bring your gun to bed,” she raps. Listening to Off the Yak, you wish M.A had leaned into expressing the whole of what she’s going through. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

M.A. Music / 3D

May 28, 2021

009af348-2ca8-4a63-b2a4-1f8eb8069e42

Eric Diep

https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-diep/

The debut album from the Cleveland-raised, New York-based producer is a dreamy, hypnotic style of hip-house. It’s a low-key album that keeps its pleasures close to its chest.

The debut album from the Cleveland-raised, New York-based producer is a dreamy, hypnotic style of hip-house. It’s a low-key album that keeps its pleasures close to its chest.

Galcher Lustwerk: Dark Bliss

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galcher-lustwerk-dark-bliss/

Dark Bliss

You come to Galcher Lustwerk for the sound of his voice. He’s built a tidy career by wrapping soft murmurs in muted deep house and techno. The result: a kind of cottony, soporific hip-house where downy textures meet drowsy moods, and assonant rhymes are as hypnotic as a swinging pocket watch. Occasionally, though, he’ll sneak in a more pointed barb. On “Yo,” the fourth song on his new album, Dark Bliss, it’s so easy to get caught up in the mesmerizing repetition—“I got mine, that’s mine/Range Rover, that’s mine/Private jet, that’s mine/Penthouse, that’s mine”—that you may miss a more tantalizing breadcrumb: “Fuck public, I’m gonna keep it private.” Lustwerk—not his real name—has been keeping it private ever since his unexpected breakthrough on the back of 2013’s 100% Galcher, a showcase of his own productions. The Cleveland-raised, New York-based producer is remarkably prolific, though most of his releases have flown under the radar. Since the mixtape, there’s been a handful of compilation tracks and EPs; an unofficial bootleg EP of edits of Lumidee, SOS Band, and O.G.C.; an excellent album, and another EP, with fellow White Material member Alvin Aronson under their Studio OST alias; and no fewer than four albums of fly-by-night albums recorded as Road Hog, his low-profile handle for cruise-controlled deep house. But in all that time, he hadn’t put out a “real” album, which makes Dark Bliss, surprisingly enough, Galcher Lustwerk’s debut LP. It opens with a feint: Digital synths clang while a slow drum machine recalls Actress’ scabrous, lo-fi beats. “I’m drinkin’ a drink on a catamaran,” mutters Lustwerk through nasty distortion, his cadence a pinched approximation of a staccato triplet flow. It’s a long way from his dreamy default mode, though it’s plenty gripping in its own right; it’s also good to hear him pushing himself. With track two, “What U Want Me to Do,” he slips back into his customary lane, where he mainly stays for the remainder of the eight-track LP, threading deep-hued keys and bare-bones drum machines with the faintest hint of G-funk as he drawls a quietly defiant ode to self-actualization: “Two Lamborghini cars/We true Lamborghini stars.” It’s a low-key album that keeps its pleasures close to its chest. In “I’m in the Coolest Driver’s High,” low-end chords sound like a strummed electric bass; in “Lithuanian Water,” a sleepwalking drum shuffle captures the bleary-eyed reverie of being awake on one’s feet for too long (for a guy who writes a lot about driving, he sure flirts with dozing at the wheel). Virtually every track has minor chords and airy pads center stage while synth counterpoints flit around the edges of the spectrum—the unfussy arrangements sound both streamlined and spontaneous, never over-thought or overworked. Lustwerk has always taken a no-frills approach to his vocals; speaking to Pitchfork, he attributed at least some of his style to the $80 microphone he has used since he began recording. (“I went to Red Bull Studios once and tried to record a vocal on their $2,000 microphone, and it sounded like shit. I was just like, ‘Damn—maybe I only know how to do this one thing because that’s just what I’m used to.’”) But you can also hear him trying out new ideas here. On “Red Rose,” he plays subtle tricks with filters and delay to play up the music’s underwater vibe; on “Yeeno” he pushes his whisper high in the mix, until the contours of the track feel foggy as a mountaintop. Even on a wheelhouse tune like “What U Want Me to Do,” he stretches out and explores the possibilities of his voice like never before, lavishing attention on long, drawn-out vowels and digging into the consonants as though they were juicy morsels of steak cooked rare. The album’s closing cut and title track, like the bookending “Catamaran,” serves as a jumping-off point for possible journeys beyond the confines of his core sound. A slow, bumpy number, it represents a kind of deconstructed take on funk. An elastic bassline snakes through drum hits as Lustwerk broods on a shapeshifting rhyme scheme: “Cruisin’ down the strip with your main one/Always thought the main one was the same one/Need a cold drink, so I made one/All I do is play the same old game, son.” The smoky intensity of his delivery works as a kind of mask: Like the “cold drink” non sequitur suggests, Lustwerk’s stern music brims with personality and a sly sense of irony. He may be playing the same old game, but his debut album feels like a quiet victory that’s been a long time coming.

2017-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

White Material

October 3, 2017

009b0c08-b937-4887-b98c-17da0f1d2d2f

Philip Sherburne

https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/

The surreal, audiovisual album from the Philadelphia artist is only 15 minutes long, but it is overflowing with hooks and a powerful sense of imagination.

The surreal, audiovisual album from the Philadelphia artist is only 15 minutes long, but it is overflowing with hooks and a powerful sense of imagination.

Tierra Whack: Whack World

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tierra-whack-whack-world/

Whack World

Tierra Whack raps “best believe I’m gon’ sell if I just be myself” less than 30 seconds into her debut audiovisual album, Whack World. But it is nearly impossible to prepare for exactly what she looks and sounds like. Hers is a playful world of surreal scenes and mercurial soundscapes—slow jams while grooming a toy poodle, doo-wop while cleaning up a house party, trap music while lying in a bedazzled coffin. It’s Deep South country and cosmic raps, self-love and middle fingers to naysayers. And you have just 15 minutes to digest it all. Reared in Philadelphia’s famed cypher tradition, the 22-year-old Whack built a reputation on quick-witted freestyles. She was once known as Dizzle Dizz and her lyrical proficiencies earned praise from Meek Mill and A$AP Rocky. But as she moved beyond straight-ahead rapping across the last few years, her music took on more experimental qualities, toying with various types of vocal processing and psychedelic melodies, to riveting effect. She revealed herself as one who doesn’t take herself too seriously, who warps the boundary between simply making art and letting yourself become it. Like OutKast, Missy Elliott, or Busta Rhymes before her, she forces us to reimagine our realities by plopping us into outré versions of theirs. Whack World is a funhouse of minute-long vignettes, teetering between a fantastic dream and an unsettling nightmare. Lyrics share double meanings with the corresponding 15-minute visual Whack released alongside the album, which adds even more dimension and intrigue to the ambitious project; light and dark are forced to coexist. At one point, she snips the strings off of red helium balloons while singing in a comically excessive twang to a potential suitor: “You remind me of my deadbeat dad.” In another bubblegum-backdropped scene, she reveals a half-swollen face and declares: “Probably would’ve blew overnight if I was white.” She’s probably not wrong. This isn’t Whack’s first foray into the absurd. Last year’s “MUMBO JUMBO” video found her in the midst of a horrifying dentist appointment that could double as a deleted scene from Get Out. On that song, she delivers novocaine-induced, mush-mouthed lyrics over a trap beat that forces you to question whether it even matters what she’s saying. Her point, in part, was that mumbling doesn’t always connote the absence of skill but, on the contrary, can be a valid mode of creative expression. It’s a shrewd suggestion and one that lands well, considering her own lyrical nimbleness, and the way she need not rely on it to make compelling music. Little arguments and stories like this land all over Whack World. Despite the brevity of the songs (every single one is exactly a minute long), there are no half-baked ideas here; huge revelations are nestled in the frivolous. “4 Wings” masks the sting of death in a carryout order, while “Pet Cemetery” smudges the line between mourning your dog and mourning your dawg. “My dog had a name/Keepin’ his name alive,” she sings over a disarmingly jovial staccato piano, complete with barking puppies in the background and a video that’s just as literal. Elsewhere, on a lighter note, she encourages self-care—eating fruits and veggies, and drinking water—on “Fruit Salad,” while affirming that she cannot be defined nor denied. Whack World puts forth a portrait of the good and the bad, the weird and the unremarkable, while plowing through insecurities. She uses vanity mirrors to magnify her features on a song titled “Pretty Ugly” and bursts out of a house several sizes too small on “Dr. Seuss,” as if to reflect that feeling of having outgrown your surroundings or other people’s expectations. With the walls closing in, she throws down a bit of wordplay in a helium-infused voice—“Look but don’t touch/I should just be celibate/You the type to sell out/Me? I’m trying to sell a bit”—before pitching into a warped slo-mo like she’s being smothered. The triumph of Whack World feels that much more important given the music industry’s stubborn refusal to champion diverse portrayals of women in rap outside of hypersexualized stereotypes. There is freedom in the margins, and Whack has crafted a work that beautifully manifests her own vision on her own terms. The result is brilliant—from the length of the songs down to the exaggerated imagery. Though she springs from a rich stylistic lineage, her 60-second confections have few modern precedents. Short songs, while in vogue, serve a different purpose here: Where others stretch small ideas and repetition, thinning them out for easy absorption, Whack uses the time constraint to make her big ideas seem larger than the space they’re allotted. Like an evolution in real time, she gives just enough to complete the thought before she morphs and catapults you to the next one. Whack World morphs into a clever exercise in economy and using only what you need. It’s a visual album prepackaged for optimum social media consumption; every tiny piece stands on its own without losing sight of the larger picture. At its core, though, Whack’s sense of humor—her captivating depiction of a black woman’s imagination—is an opportunity to celebrate an aspect of art that often goes uncelebrated, an opportunity for Whack to celebrate herself.

2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

June 12, 2018

009c5868-d838-4254-be89-5c96271554d7

Briana Younger

https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/

The precocious 20-year-old singer fuses R&B, soul, and trip-hop on a debut album that documents her ongoing quest to discover who she is and how she fits into a troubled world.

The precocious 20-year-old singer fuses R&B, soul, and trip-hop on a debut album that documents her ongoing quest to discover who she is and how she fits into a troubled world.

Jorja Smith : Lost & Found

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jorja-smith-lost-and-found/

Lost & Found

“Why do we fall down with innocence?” Jorja Smith wonders on the opening title track of Lost & Found. The 20-year-old English singer’s deeply personal debut is full of impressionistic questions like this, yet she never demands easy answers. Her approach to seeking self-knowledge is compassionate and patient, demonstrative of a keen intellect and rich with precocious wisdom. “I need to grow and find myself before I let somebody love me/Because at the moment I don’t know me,” she admits on “Teenage Fantasy.” On “February 3rd,” she reflects, “I’m constantly finding myself.” But she doesn’t seem worried about the final result of that search. Smith makes the restlessness of young adulthood sound elegant. That self-assurance is what makes her special, and what makes her music sound timeless. “I know what I’m doing,” she told Pitchfork last year, and her music reflects that independence. After emerging in 2016 with the commanding Project 11 EP and finishing fourth on the BBC’s Sound of 2017 list, she employed expert restraint in picking her next moves: two features on Drake’s More Life, a solo placement on Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther soundtrack, a handful of cool collabs, and a few stellar standalone singles. The further she descended into herself, in disarmingly sincere ballads and DIY music videos, the higher her star rose. Comprising a brisk but dense 12 songs (including four previously released tracks and several others Smith has teased live), Lost & Found is the biggest test to date of Smith’s commitment to making music on her own terms. The result is a bold statement of artistic purpose. There’s nothing resembling “On My Mind,” her infectious 2017 collaboration with Preditah, nor does Smith seem to be taking cues from contemporary pop radio. She’s doing things her way. While Project 11 often resembled Amy Winehouse’s Frank, Lost & Found forges a more original sound, incorporating adult contemporary, R&B, acoustic folk, jazz, dancehall, and even gospel (on the stunning “Tomorrow”). But it’s most indebted to 1990s trip-hop in the vein of Portishead and Massive Attack. The instrumentals on “Lost & Found,” “Teenage Fantasy,” and standout single “Where Did I Go” rely on the same kind of downtempo, backbeat-laced grooves that so perfectly suited Morcheeba frontwoman Skye Edwards’ silky voice and breathless delivery. But Smith doesn’t whisper—she belts. Lost & Found thrives on emotionally raw minimalism, with her voice as the central instrument. Pure and soulful, it stretches like a rubber band, soaring between virtuosic Winehouse warmth and vertiginous, FKA twigs-style falsetto. It’s an appropriately mutable centerpiece for an album centered on youthful searching and questioning. “Teenage Fantasy,” written when Smith was 16 and originally released in 2017, has her singing smokily about a good-for-nothing lover, only to unleash the full power of her voice in a poignant chorus so vehement, it feels like she’s delivering it through a megaphone: “We all want a teenage fantasy/Want it when we can’t have it/When we got it we don’t seem to want it.” This is a familiar sentiment, but Smith’s intensity gives it new resonance. The previously unreleased track “On Your Own” could be a cut from Rihanna’s ANTI, with Smith’s howling vocals moving nimbly through dancehall drums and distortion. “The One” is even better and more surprising, employing morose piano and a Brazilian samba-tinged groove (anchored, like much of the album, by live instrumentation) that simultaneously encourage hip-swaying and wondering about your exes. “I’m not trynna let you in/Even if I found the one,” she warns a suitor. These songs help to build the convincing character of a young woman who is scowling and swaggering, only as vulnerable as she wants to be. But Smith’s wanderings extend far beyond the personal, and it’s this insight and curiosity that elevate her work. “Blue Lights,” her 2016 debut single, resurfaces here; its heartbreaking and transporting take on police brutality and racial profiling remains a remarkable feat of storytelling. This time, Smith’s questions are posed rhetorically, to illuminate injustice: “What have you done?/There’s no need to run/If you’ve done nothing wrong/Blue lights should just pass you by.” “Lifeboats (Freestyle)” is a spoken-word take on privilege, income disparity, and the failures of the welfare state. “So why are all the richies staying afloat?/See all my brothers drowning even though they’re in the boat/Mothership ain’t helpin’ anyone,” she raps with the swagger of a young Lauryn Hill, indicting her government for its treatment of marginalized citizens and mishandling of the refugee crisis. It’s not surprising that Smith resents comparisons to other artists, but her link to Hill is clear. Another wildly talented, young, black woman looking for clarity in a world built for everyone but her, Hill used her music to transform her pain into salvation. Just three years younger now than Hill was when The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was released, Smith shares her predecessor’s wounded takes on the world’s injustices and compulsion to search for deep truths. On Miseducation’s luminous title track, Hill sings what could be Smith’s battle cry: “Deep in my heart, the answer, it was in me/And I made up my mind to define my own destiny.” On Lost & Found, Smith is defining her own destiny. In the process, she confirms that she is special and rare, an asker of impossible but necessary questions.

2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Famm

June 12, 2018

009d63be-2a72-4a73-b9ae-7958521ef081

Jackson Howard

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/

The long-suffering Pusha and Malice finally issue their troublesome sophomore album-- a record packed with a dozen unrelenting tales of desperation and distribution, glamour and gloating that features bleak, spare Neptunes beats. It was worth the wait.

The long-suffering Pusha and Malice finally issue their troublesome sophomore album-- a record packed with a dozen unrelenting tales of desperation and distribution, glamour and gloating that features bleak, spare Neptunes beats. It was worth the wait.

Clipse: Hell Hath No Fury

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9658-hell-hath-no-fury/

Hell Hath No Fury

With the long-delayed, viciously imagined Hell Hath No Fury, Clipse-- hip-hop's meanest, smartest duo-- have done what a gathering collection of internet seekers, record-store goers, and street corner mixtape shoppers hoped they might: release a classic. With musical partners the Neptunes, Clipse have crafted 12 unrelenting tales of desperation and distribution, glamour and gloating. Lyrically, the album is spare and incisive-- wordplay abounds but the punches are quick and devastating-- and musically, Malice and Pusha T have arguably snatched the best dozen Neptunes tracks in years. Together, the quartet has crafted an album that's sonically deep, dark, and one of 2006's finest. An unforgivable mean streak powers this album, which is no surprise considering the endlessly documented label drama Clipse have endured, and the ascetic rage that courses through their music. Push and Mal spent much of their lauded 2005 mixtape, We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2, elucidating both their ethical and financial dealings: They were cold-blooded, joyous, and morally complex all at once. But the subject matter remained mostly street talk-- deals, slang, stunting-- with dabs of glitz tossed in. This album isn't about cocaine per se; it's the aftershock of a coke sale-infused existence. The results spray everywhere, from the vacant spending spree of "Dirty Money" to the terrifyingly earned braggadocio of "Trill". This is lifestyle assertion, not something as negligible and confined as drug music. The two men in the middle of it all are brilliant at nearly every turn. The younger Thornton brother, Pusha, remains star and stylist, brazenly dishing on minor details like his sunglasses ("Louis V Millionaires to kill the glare") while injecting a malevolent, almost maniacal intensity to his verses. His elder brother, Malice, is the vulnerable antecedent, not without floss but more leaning on family and fraternity: "Grandma, look at me, I'm turnin' the other cheek," he laments on "We Got It For Cheap (Intro)". Their rhyme patterns aren't overwhelmingly technical; Pusha rhymes straightforward syllables without tangling his syntax into a jumbled hush-mutter. (Jay-Z, take note: Sometimes directness is a blessing.) And, as if the sniping slow burn of lead single "Mr. Me Too" wasn't enough notice, Clipse are self-contained entities, seemingly uninfluenced by their contemporaries. Occasionally they recall duos of the past-- EPMD's playfulness, Outkast's willingness to attempt the unconventional, Mobb Deep's unerring rancor-- but they're true only to their sound, a simmering executioner's song. Rarely explicitly violent, their blistering conviction feels like carnage on "What It Do (Wamp Wamp)"-- Malice even compares himself to the genocidal Hutu tribe on the track. It confirms their unjustifiable relishing of moral decay, and while it's impossible to comprehend or condone, the energy and flair is undeniable. All that said, the Neptunes' mystifying, irregular sonics further elevate the record. When the drum sounds are light and chimey, the surrounding melodies sound sinister and serpentine. Otherwise that formula is completely flipped, as doorknocker snares often accompany spacious arrangements. It's an interesting juxtaposition-- fitting the furious and odd against bubbly and blissful-- but this is what the Neptunes have always done best (think Noreaga's "Superthug" or Kelis' "Milkshake"). Accordions, steel pan drums, harps, distorted synths, cowbell-- Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo throw everything at Clipse. (One assumes Hugo, whose work has leaned toward the dark and spare in the past, had a large hand in this album.) "Trill" and "Ride Around Shining" in particular are monstrous, freakishly beautiful constructions. "Trill" surrounds you with its blown-out bass sound while the tense harp plucks of "Ride", posed against clipped groans and a single straining high note, are both fractured and gorgeous. But what's perhaps most important here is that Hell Hath No Fury is uncompromising music: Delayed more than three years and pushed into some unclear anticipation vortex, Clipse still refused to make concessions. The one ballad, "Nightmares", featuring Bilal, is long and morose and ragged, while the frothiest ditty is about spending drug money on expensive shoes. Clipse make street music, so the more unlikely members of their fanbase-- hipsters, bloggers, students-- might seem perplexing. Of course, their wit and verve, always touched by a hint of self-loathing, connects with most anyone who's done any wrong in their life. Living with yourself can be a tricky thing, and for Clipse, that's now truer than ever.

2006-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00

2006-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rap

Jive

November 27, 2006

009e5f5c-cdd6-4f1e-8f77-91971df20c02

Sean Fennessey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/

Monét claims the spotlight on her debut project, a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control.

Monét claims the spotlight on her debut project, a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control.

Victoria Monét: Jaguar

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/victoria-monet-jaguar/

Jaguar

Victoria Monét was already in the studio when Ariana Grande meandered in, clutching Tiffany’s bags, tipsy from champagne served at the store. The story behind how they wrote “7 rings,” along with a slew of collaborators, is baked into the song—relishing their new matching jewelry, a huddle of Grande’s friends turned their conspicuous consumption into an “empowering” chant: “I want it/ I got it.” Monét met Grande two years before the pop star’s first album dropped, and since then she has been a force behind mega-pop hits: Fifth Harmony’s “Work From Home,” Grande’s quiet, hopeful, “thank u, next,” and Chloe x Halle’s incandescent earworm “Do It.” But after “7 Rings” became such a hit, Monét told The Fader last year, she took time off from making songs for other people and focused strictly on her own music for the first time. The resulting project, Jaguar, is a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control. “I’m just living on instinct,” she croons on the title track, as glossy disco beats skitter and pulse. “What it be like dealing with a queen?” she breathes on interlude “Big Boss,” before launching into a gooey, glimmering harmony. Monét has said she aims to write about sex the way men do. Though she succeeds, the results are sometimes unfortunate. The simmering ballad “Ass Like That” focuses entirely on her butt: She details her squat routine, burns her calories “like weed,” and insists she doesn’t edit her photos. It’s a catchy song that oscillates between charming and clumsy. “Dive” undulates over the sound effect of a creaking bed with shrieks and moans layered over the swoop of her voice in the chorus. “Life is but a dream, here we are inside of it/ and you’re inside of me,” she coos over swelling violins on “Moment.” From the velvet of her voice over sweeping strings to the slinky rush of electro beats, it’s the shimmer in these songs that keeps them compelling. That propulsive sheen reaches a crescendo on “Experience,” the latest in a series of sparkling electro-funk singles announcing a new female pop power. Normani took a whirl with this, matching Sam Smith on “Dancing With a Stranger,” just before “Motivation” catapulted her to a new level of stardom; two years before she released her studio debut album, Jessie Reyez smirked (also beside Sam Smith) on the on the Calvin Harris-produced “Promises.” Dua Lipa, maybe the most prominent figure of the recent pop-funk resurgence, had her juddering single “Electricity,” a Mark Ronson-Diplo collab. Monét’s voice swirls around S.G. Lewis’ disco drums and gauzy synths on “Experience,” and Khalid shows up for a palatable, anonymous-sounding feature. Monét makes the song a celebration, listing her hopes for a breakup’s aftermath to bleating trumpets that eventually fade in the background. Like the rest of the project, the track functions as both a triumph and a declaration: Victoria Monét is claiming the spotlight, dazzling and dancing all the way. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Tribe

August 7, 2020

00a0999f-b69c-4b1a-8069-07fa1f5bef7e

Dani Blum

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/

Justin's Vernon's project started out low-key and largely solo but has grown into an expansive and ambitious full-band affair with brilliant results.

Justin's Vernon's project started out low-key and largely solo but has grown into an expansive and ambitious full-band affair with brilliant results.

Bon Iver: Bon Iver

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15551-bon-iver/

Bon Iver

The guy who recorded an album alone in the woods. This line might end up on Justin Vernon's tombstone. There's something irresistible about the thought of a bearded dude from small-town Wisconsin retreating, heartbroken, to a cabin to write some songs-- especially when the result is a record that sounds as hushed and introspective as Bon Iver's 2007 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. These days, Vernon is more likely to poke fun at the image, but it endures because it fulfils a fantasy for us as listeners. Even if we don't care for the outdoors, most of us occasionally want to escape our lives, be alone with our thoughts, and see if we can tap into something true. In a time of easy distraction, the idea of heading into a cabin at the edge of the world to create is alluring. By tying the intimacy of that image to Justin Vernon's music, we're able to take the trip with him. Since that album's release, Vernon's approach to writing and recording has changed. "I don't find inspiration by just sitting down with a guitar anymore," he recently told Pitchfork. "I wanted to build a sound from scratch and then use that sound to make the song." That difference is clear on Bon Iver. Instead of something that scans as "folk," the music here is more like rustic chamber pop with an experimental edge that makes careful use of arrangement and dynamics. And rather than being tied together by a central theme of loss, Vernon has fully shifted into a more impressionistic mode; these songs are broader and more musically sophisticated than those on For Emma at every turn. But the thread between this album and its comparatively skeletal predecessor is Vernon's voice, an instrument that feels warm and personal and close regardless of setting. Now that we've heard him singing hooks with Kanye West and taking the lead with Gayngs on songs that touch on R&B and soft rock, the general sphere of Vernon's voice is clear. He simultaneously evokes the grain and expression of soul music along with the mythological echoes of folk. But more importantly, no one else sounds like him. The Beach Boys have been the primary touchstone for layered vocals in indie music for years, but Vernon's timbre comes from somewhere else entirely. Where "Beach Boys harmonies" have a spiritual undercurrent that brings to mind a choirboy's dream of perfection, Vernon sounds like a man who has outgrown such ideas. His voice is earthy and wounded and, despite his astonishing upper register, not something you would describe as "angelic." "Holocene" contains one of this album's many virtuosic vocal performances. "Part of me, apart from me," Vernon sings early on, and those six words hold a lot. The evocative nature of his diction is apparent even in a simple line like "I was not magnificent." He sounds centered and clear while taking stock and allowing memories to be mixed in with the details of the present. His conflicted vocals trigger a half-dozen feelings all at once before releasing the tension with a refrain that finds the fleeting moment where the world seems right: "I could see for miles, miles, miles." Vernon posted Bon Iver's lyrics shortly after the album leaked last month, but they're not easy to parse-- the storytelling here is oblique. But there are connections. The song titles reference actual places ("Calgary") and places that sound real, but aren't ("Hinnom, TX", "Michicant"); they're less about geography and more about putting a name to a state of mind that mixes clarity and surrealism. And the deeper you sink into these tracks, the harder it becomes to extract specifics. One recurring element is intoxication-- lines about being drunk or high that come with recounted details. Which makes sense, because the album deals with escape and the struggle to get outside yourself. The narrator takes in what's around him, mixing those thoughts with memories of where he's been. Sometimes the lines have a startling specificity ("Third and Lake it burnt away, the hallway/ Was where we learned to celebrate," on "Holocene") and sometimes they contain words that seem to function more as sound ("fide" or "fane" on "Perth"). Throughout, there's a strong sense of an observer taking things in and processing confusing images, trying to figure out what can be learned. If you caught Vernon live after For Emma, you gradually saw him putting more and more emphasis on his band, moving Bon Iver from that solitary project into something that felt more like the work of a group. And Bon Iver, with its rich and layered arrangements, extends that development in a striking direction that's both logical and surprising. Blending natural instrumentation supplied by recruited players-- such as string arranger Rob Moose (Antony and the Johnsons, the National, Arcade Fire) and a horn/woodwind section that includes versatile saxophonist Colin Stetson-- with an array of electronic and treated sounds, the album combines varied textures in ways that are ambitious and unusual but often subtle enough to miss on first glance. At points, Bon Iver draws on the experiments of Volcano Choir, Vernon's side project with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees (members from that group play on the album). Freed from conventional verse/chorus/bridge/chorus structure, the songs become more like tone poems, patient explorations of moods that proceed deliberately but unpredictably. The holistic style is evident on opener "Perth", which builds from total silence into a crashing peak over the course of four short minutes. And there's an uncanny moment on the breathtaking "Michicant", a song in part about childhood, where a bicycle bell rings twice, pulling you deeper into Vernon's reverie. It's a simple, brief effect, but it's indicative of how the album uses elemental sounds in unexpected ways. Vernon has taken that voice, and these arrangements, and crafted an album that unfolds like a suite. The structure is flawless right up to its conclusion, "Beth/Rest", which has been much remarked upon for its unabashed and unironic embrace of 80s adult contemporary pop sounds. If you've spent any time in the vicinity of a radio tuned to light rock, you hear the keyboard tone that opens the song and you think Lionel Richie, Richard Marx, and "No One Is to Blame". It's almost naive of Vernon to think he could pull this off. Yet, heard in context, it stands as one the record's bravest and most deftly executed moments-- not just because it lays bare Vernon's stated admiration for artists like Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby, but because it's executed to perfection. And while the production attempts to wring something new from a long-maligned sound, the song and voice remain true to Bon Iver as an idea. As a closer, "Beth/Rest" is more about finding comfort and resolution after a musical experience that asked more questions than it answered. The song draws a line in the sand for anyone with a deep investment in cool, and Vernon stands behind it with confidence. His belief in himself and in the power of his music is something that encourages us to transcend labels and preconceptions. After the closeness and austerity of For Emma, Vernon has given us a knotty record that resists easy interpretation but is no less warm or welcoming. You can feel it even as you don't completely understand it-- a testament to its careful construction and Vernon's belief in the power of music to convey deeper meaning. It's a rare thing for an album to have such a strong sense of what it wants to be. Bon Iver is about flow, from one scene and arrangement and song and memory and word into the next-- each distinct but connected-- all leading to "Beth/Rest". On the way there, the music moves like a river, every bend both unpredictable and inevitable as it carves sound and emotion out of silence.

2011-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

2011-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Jagjaguwar / 4AD

June 20, 2011

00a0f85c-606a-4702-aba9-f45f3e96f19e

Mark Richardson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/

The famously technical New Jersey band ends their career with one final album of squealing riffs, dizzying musicianship, and plenty of nostalgia for their heyday.

The famously technical New Jersey band ends their career with one final album of squealing riffs, dizzying musicianship, and plenty of nostalgia for their heyday.

The Dillinger Escape Plan: Dissociation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22540-dissociation/

Dissociation

The Dillinger Escape Plan’s blend of extreme harshness and technicality had a seismic impact on the metal and hardcore underground with the release of their 1999 full-length debut Calculating Infinity. Not unlike those ’90s-era hidden-image 3D posters, the New Jersey quintet’s transfiguration of progressive metal influences like Meshuggah, Carcass, Human Remains, and Deadguy required a cognitive shift to recognize the detail and structural complexity under all the noise. From that point on, DEP have shown a hunger for pushing boundaries while attempting to stay true to their essence. Every post-Calculating Dillinger Escape Plan album has contained head-scratching deviations from the original sound, something founding guitarist Ben Weinman and the original lineup once defined so clearly. By their last two albums, Option Paralysis and One of Us Is the Killer, the band had settled into marrying their signature mathcore style with high concentrations of melody and mid-tempo groove. As capably as they had found a middle ground, those albums pointed to a holding pattern. Dissociation, the band’s sixth and final album, touches often on the now-familiar template of pounding, grindcore-level noise flurries that once shook the world. Of course, Dillinger Escape Plan take sharp turns away from that template as well—often in the same song. Dissociation hits its stride when the band grafts new elements onto its classic sound—something that, for all their chops, hasn’t been easy to pull off in the past. In one four-song stretch, Dillinger Escape Plan stride across a variety of styles as confidently as the one they invented. “Fugue,” the first of those four tracks, tastefully emulates Squarepusher’s hyper-busy brand of synthetic future jazz before opening up into a vista of delicate, gloomy ambiance. “Fugue” makes you wish that Dillinger Escape Plan did a few more Aphex Twin covers or collaborate on a split with Squarepusher. It’s the first of several reminders that they are leaving some untapped potential on the table as they close out their career. On “Low Feels Blvd,” DEP’s familiar spazz-out crunch morphs into a grand jazz fusion section that you’d otherwise mistake for a Pat Metheny or John McLaughlin record. Not since Candiria’s heyday have extreme metal and jazz sounded like they belong together—a huge achievement for a band that built its reputation on sheer angularity. The song also stands out for how much vocalist Greg Puciato sounds genuinely unhinged. When Puciatio replaced original frontman Dimitri Minakakis in time for 2004’s sophomore full-length Miss Machine, he immediately increased the band’s threshold for melody, but he had to wait until after the Mike Patton collaboration EP Irony Is a Dead Scene to show the world his range. Unfairly or not, Puciato will continue to draw comparisons to Patton, especially on songs like “Surrogate,” where Dillinger scrapes close to Mr. Bungle/Faith No More’s bastardizations of Broadway-esque schmaltz. Nevertheless, “Surrogate” demonstrates how, somewhere along the way, Dillinger learned how to stop stacking changes in its songs just for effect. As “Surrogate” rolls from one style to the next—grindcore, a crashing downtempo section, film noir—the mood shifts convincingly as well. Where Dillinger once tossed styles around as if changing costumes, now they actually get into character. In flashes, the band still comes up with fresh sounds. “Honeysuckle,” for example, adopts a Latin-flavored grind as though Latin music had originated from some extra-terrestrial psychology. One of the things that made early DEP music so compelling was the way it conveyed the horrific malaise lurking behind the generic monoculture of the band’s native New Jersey suburbs—a sound so ugly grown out of a soulless environment. Now, the Dillinger Escape Plan aren’t anchored in a time or place, but that isn’t something the band has any control over. It’s a blessing and a curse that they will be forever synonymous with a particular period in hardcore and metal history. In subtle ways, Dissociation reminds us that the band hung in there long after the world could have passed it by.

2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Metal

Cooking Vinyl / Party Smasher Inc.

November 2, 2016

00a3f92e-c105-49c0-8d0a-4d50af5884cf

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/

On his first album in 15 years, the trailblazer cedes the spotlight to a roster of spiritual disciples. There are flashes of magnetism, but the visionary rapper we know and love is mostly missing in action.

On his first album in 15 years, the trailblazer cedes the spotlight to a roster of spiritual disciples. There are flashes of magnetism, but the visionary rapper we know and love is mostly missing in action.

Rakim: G.O.D.’s Network (Reb7rth)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rakim-gods-network-reb7rth/

G.O.D.’s Network (Reb7rth)

The accepted narrative of Rakim’s solo career—the exacting auteur who couldn’t get out of his own way—makes him an easy scapegoat for his catalog’s shortcomings. Dr. Dre offered the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ beats, but Rakim wasn’t interested; Rakim fled Aftermath with his masters, opting to churn out soggy, unmelodic odes to his own resume. In hindsight, Don’t Sweat the Technique, his final full-length with Queens DJ and producer Eric B., serves as a bookend in more ways than one. The duo dissolved months after its 1992 release, a moment when hip-hop swelled from an underground movement into a global, commercial force. Rakim laid the groundwork, and never quite cashed in. G.O.D.’S NETWORK (REB7RTH) doesn’t upend that version of the story, but it suggests a few complicating factors. Rakim’s spotty solo run (three albums in 32 years, for those keeping score) is blighted by lumbering dirges credited to no-name producers; G.O.D.’S NETWORK countervails the latter pitfall, at least in theory. Rakim produces everything himself, a quixotic endeavor exposing nearsightedness and structural defects—the metronomic drums are too loud for the mix. It might’ve been a torch-passing exercise, but most of the featured guests are 20 years past their primes. Rakim aims for moguldom, but lands closer to mixtape DJ. Rakim shoulders the hooks, but only raps three verses across seven tracks, meaning he’s MIA for large swaths of his own album. Still, the posse cuts are pretty good. “Now Is the Time” signals distinctive taste: The transcontinental lineup of B.G., Hus KingPin, and Compton Menace suggests Rakim and his assembly-line A&R are plugged into regional scenes and attuned to stylistic contrasts. What “Love Is the Message” lacks in novelty, it makes up in the magnetism of its contributors. Fresno veteran Planet Asia’s grizzled plea gives way to a double-time showcase from L.A. rapper Louis King; Rakim exhumes an old Nipsey Hussle verse for good measure. This tape should prompt inquiry into Rakim’s lost decades—he is, after all, an architect of the modern rap album. If he wished to transition into an executive-producer role, mentoring protégés in his image, what stopped him? Somehow, G.O.D.’S NETWORK lays blame at his doorstep. The tempos are plodding and the samples familiar: It’s literate punchline rap for and by middle-aged men, with all that entails. La the Darkman goes full anti-vax on “Pendulum Swing,” seemingly unaware that Fred the Godson, dead of COVID at 35, appears one track prior. “Sign of Se7en” features Sacramento rapper X-Raided, an actual convicted murderer. The curation is prone to hagiography—DMX and Prodigy appear from beyond the grave, along with a voice note from Snoop Dogg that may as well have been purchased via Cameo—without gesturing toward any future. Projects like this, aimed at a built-in audience of true-school crusaders, tend to be received in hushed, appreciative tones: Rakim’s reputation is hardly at stake. What’s curious is that Rakim can’t find anyone to produce or release his music. It’s no secret that hip-hop, as a genre, fails to look after its elders, and the flipside of the equation is that legends have bills to pay. Common just got an album’s worth of vibrant Pete Rock beats; Buckwild and DJ Muggs are Rakim’s age, and more prolific than ever. G.O.D.’S NETWORK positions Rakim as a passable producer instead of an elite MC, but he did it his way.

2024-08-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-08-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rap

Holy Toledo Productions / Compound Interest Entertainment

August 2, 2024

00a618b3-1e97-45d4-bfc5-83e3e60ae3fb

Pete Tosiello

https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/

A glimpse inside the studio for numerous outtakes and illuminating dialogue from the legendary “Second Great Quintet” sessions that would spawn Miles Davis' Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, and Water Babies.

A glimpse inside the studio for numerous outtakes and illuminating dialogue from the legendary “Second Great Quintet” sessions that would spawn Miles Davis' Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, and Water Babies.

Miles Davis Quintet: Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22554-freedom-jazz-dance-the-bootleg-series-vol-5/

Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5

Freedom Jazz Dance, the latest volume in Columbia Legacy’s Miles Davis Bootleg Series, opens with a discussion. It’s October 24, 1966, and Miles and bassist Ron Carter are working out a bass line until Miles interrupts and scolds him gently: “No,” Miles rasps, “that’s too common. C’mon.” Carter at one point says, “I don’t understand.” Miles continues on, “Play E diminished…start with a B flat,” and finally, to producer Teo Macero in the control room, he says, as he does again and again on this set, “Play that, Teo.” After eleven takes—and twenty-three minutes of talk, rehearsal, and some ball-breaking—Miles, along with Carter, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Tony Williams (famously known as the “Second Great Quintet”), embark on the master of Eddie Harris’ soul-jazz number “Freedom Jazz Dance” that would appear the following year on the album Miles Smiles. In fact, each of the six tracks on Miles Smiles are broken down, pored over, and built back up by the musicians and the producers of this set (Steve Berkowitz, Michael Cuscuna, and Richard Seidel), who have unearthed outtakes, false starts, and, for the first time, studio dialogue. Virtually two-thirds of this three-CD set is the making of—and love letter to—his 1967 album Miles Smiles, one of his finest works that’s often overlooked in “best-of” Miles shortlists. The rest of Freedom Jazz Dance includes reels of material that would later appear on Nefertiti and Water Babies. The alternate takes and the lively banter plop you right there in the studio as the artistic process unfolds. It’s what differentiates Freedom Jazz Dance from past volumes of this enthralling series, which were all live concerts that showed how Miles’s groups evolved on the bandstand. Here the studio is the laboratory—and what a studio, the storied 30th Street Studio, a converted Armenian Evangelical Church between Second and Third Avenue, where Kind of Blue was recorded seven years earlier. Though compared to what the new quintet was up to by 1966, Kind of Blue sounds almost quaint. The dialogue on this set is often profane (“That was a motherfucker!”; “Don’t sit up there giggling, cocksucker!”); sometimes tedious (“Wayne, what’s happening? You want a drink? Want a hamburger?”); but usually mineral-rich. “Hey Wayne,” Miles says, this time in his brownstone on West 77th Street, “I was thinking about writing a blues…like in F and then going to A-flat, you know?” before he tinkers with the idea on an electric piano. During a take of “Orbits,” he says, “Don’t rush it, Tony.” On “Gingerbread Boy”: “Herbie, don’t play chords on your left hand, just your right hand.” Miles is nurturing, but very much the boss. While working through “Dolores,” he says to Herbie, “Don’t play nothin’ until you’re ready to play,” to which Hancock answers, “You don’t want that thing in there? I thought it was cute.” Miles says, “I don’t." One could argue that this volume is superfluous (“Give Wayne half of that hamburger, Bobby”). New listeners to jazz or to Miles Davis particularly might be disoriented, especially if they don’t recognize the voices of the band members or understand the significance of Teo Macero. (“Teee-o? Teee-o?” “I need moral support Teo—immoral.”) For the uninitiated, Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, and The Bootleg Series, Vol. I are almost certainly better places to start. Who knows how Miles Davis himself would even feel about this. Would he want the outtakes included? The banter? In his 1989 autobiography, he wrote of these years: “I made six studio dates with this group in four years….We recorded much more than what was released….And there were some live recordings that I guess Columbia will release when they think they can make the most money—probably after I’m dead.” But one could also argue the exact opposite, that this set is found treasure, especially to Miles completists, enthusiasts, musicians, and students. The producers don’t take jazz or Miles Davis fans lightly, or as ATMs. This documentation underscores the artistic process of one of American music’s most seminal bands. You can hear how the Wayne Shorter-penned “Footprints,” maybe the highlight of Miles Smiles, went from a slower tempo to the perfectly paced, ethereal master take. Or Tony Williams, just 20 in October 1966, go from great to spectacular by the session-reel outtake of “Nefertiti” eight months later. He’s equally mesmerizing on a rhythm section rehearsal of “Country Son,” as is Carter. It’s been a big year for Miles Davis. In April, there was Don Cheadle’s biopic Miles Ahead, accompanied by Robert Glasper’s original score and his additional tribute album Everything’s Beautiful, which included Erykah Badu, Laura Mvula, and Bilal; Prestige reissued a box set of his early 1950s recordings on 10-inch vinyl; he has a presence in the brand new National Museum of African American History and Culture. May would have been his 90th birthday; September marked 25 years since he passed. Even a Scotch whiskey called Kind of Blue, in honor of Miles, launched in August. If there’s a drawback to the ongoing releases and reissues from Miles Davis, it’s that it can steer attention away from jazz musicians on the vibrant scene today. Not that they shouldn’t welcome it; there will always be a lot to glean from Miles’ canon. And there will likely still be more finds from his Columbia vaults; his early-mid 1980s’ work, for instance, hasn’t been sifted through yet. That’s a good thing. There will always be something to look back —and forward—to.

2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Jazz

Columbia / Legacy

November 2, 2016

00a94e97-08e3-4ce3-ab64-43ff893271c9

Michael J. Agovino

https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-j. agovino/

Much of Nicki Minaj's ambitious second LP sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation. At its best, she innovates with the playful abandon of prime-era Missy Elliott or Busta Rhymes. But in her quest to avoid becoming just another female rapper, she settles for being just another pop star.

Much of Nicki Minaj's ambitious second LP sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation. At its best, she innovates with the playful abandon of prime-era Missy Elliott or Busta Rhymes. But in her quest to avoid becoming just another female rapper, she settles for being just another pop star.

Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16471-pink-friday-roman-reloaded/

Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded

During the making of Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, Nicki Minaj had some sort of epiphany. The moment occurred while she was recording an evil moonwalk of a rap song called "Come on a Cone"-- after verbally shitting on any and all competition for two minutes, she peaks with, "If you weren't so ugly, I'd put my dick in your face." And then something special happens. She pauses the track and starts to sing "dick in your face" all melismatic, like she's vying to stay alive on "American Idol". She's skewering tired pop-star singing styles, hip-hop masculinity, and maybe even herself, because while her major-label debut turned out to be a star-making success, it often traded in Nicki's trademark, potentially-game-changing eccentricities for something smoother, blander, and more radio-ready. Reminiscing on the "dick in your face" breakthrough in a Complex interview, she recently said, "That's when it was like [makes soda-can spritz noise]-- explosion, Roman Reloaded is here!" And that sound-effected bit of self-promotion proves to be true on the album. Well, on some of the album, at least. Those who buy this thing based on the delirious bubblegum hit "Super Bass" or the CD's kindergarten-art-class via Maxim cover will likely be quite vexed by an extended opening salvo of minimalist, futurist hip-hop that recalls nothing less than Clipse's devilish opus Hell Hath No Fury. This streak includes two brilliantly off-kilter songs from "Niggas in Paris" producer Hit-Boy, the livewire "Cone" along with "I Am Your Leader", featuring verses from rap-cred stampers Rick Ross and Cam'ron. There's the effortless, pinging schoolyard taunt "Beez in the Trap", and the hyped "HOV Lane", which ends up pretty vicious considering its beat vaguely recalls the "Inspector Gadget" theme song. And the instrumental for "Roman Reloaded" employs safety-clicks and bullet booms for percussion as Nicki flips the sellout claims on their head: "Nicki pop?!/ Only thing that's pop is my endorsement op." On all of these songs, Nicki is dartboard focused-- she's rapping harder here than on almost anything from Pink Friday; the verses are akin to those on her breakout mixtape, Beam Me Up Scotty, or the myriad song-stealing guest shots she worked to leverage her big break in the first place. Listen to this album's first seven tracks, and it would be completely understandable to think that Nicki was using her first-class pop status to infiltrate and innovate with the playful abandon of prime-era Missy Elliott or Busta Rhymes. But the next 12 tracks (15 on the deluxe version) by and large find Nicki doing exactly what she just said she wouldn't: going pop. Which, to be clear, is a perfectly fine (and admirably ambitious) idea-- in theory. Talking to Complex about her perfectionist streak, she said, "I'm doing it to prove to... myself that I don't have to settle for less because I'm a female rapper or because I'm black." And what was so great about "Super Bass" was how it married Nicki's inherent weirdness (see: flinging pink goop at muscle-bound dudes in the song's video) with a hook that reached everyone from Taylor Swift to little girls who have no idea who the eff Slick Rick is. That kind of complementary appeal is missing in these new songs, which range from brittle Euro-trance to milquetoast R&B to washed-out balladry. Take lead single "Starships", produced by RedOne, whose bass-first style played a large role in making Lady Gaga the world's preeminent pop star on songs including "Bad Romance" and "Just Dance". The track throttles, its sky-aimed maximalism clearly designed to overtake the radio via pure volume. It seems to be born out of a creatively hobbled beer company's marketing team (an idea supported by the grossly pandering mention of "Bud Light" in the song's first few lines) rather than Nicki's gloriously odd brain. "Starships", along with the four club-ready tracks that come in its wake, do something that should be difficult; in her quest to avoid becoming just another female rapper, she inadvertently settles for being just another pop star. And the harsh truth is that she needs work in that department. Just look at her recent "American Idol" performance of "Starships". Sure, she doesn't even attempt to sing most of the song live-- though, usually such blatant and high-profile lip-synchs are coupled with intense dance moves, or something to make up for the lack of in-the-moment vocals. But while Nicki's simplistic dancing has been endearing in other venues, it's less so when she's trying to sell a stupidly massive dance tune. So, on "Idol", she was essentially relegated to playing hype-woman to her own song. While she'd never be able to get away with her "Idol"-satirizing "dick in your face" theatrics on the show (though I'd love to see Seacrest's reaction to that), playing to both sides of the aisle sends a terminally mixed message. Which brings up another inconvenient reality: Nicki's singing voice is a limited instrument, especially when contrasted with her limitless rapping. It can be shrill when it's not oddly blank or sounding like Rihanna ("Beautiful Sinner") or Ke$ha ("Young Forever"). But it's not hopeless; on the anguished "Fire Burns", Nicki embeds a palpable emotion into the song. She meets the track smolder for smolder, and her delivery on lines like, "You piece of shit, you broke me down/ Thought you said you, would hold me down," is more powerful than a thousand puddle-rumbling bass kicks. More common, though, is "Right By My Side", where Nicki flatly pines for a guy-- then again, her lackluster performance is somewhat understandable considering her duet partner is perennial asshole Chris Brown. Nicki is well aware of the potential criticisms of her pop turns. On the confessional 2009 mixtape track "Can Anybody Hear Me", she recalls a disappointing label run-in: "When it rains it pours for real, Def Jam said I'm no Lauryn Hill: 'Can't rap and sing on the same CD, the public won't get it they got ADD.'" And on a defensive (and funny) 20-minute interview that closes out the deluxe Roman Reloaded, she takes on hip-hop diehards by recounting the unfortunate fate of many a 1990s female rapper: "These other bitches that only did rap and now they live in low-income housing-- is that winning? Just so that a nigga in the street can give me a fucking dap? Get the fuck outta here." Clearly, she's branching out to avoid that sad story. But, at the same time, this album's shortcomings are not the fault of a label or an attention-deprived audience or close-minded rap fans. Making a strong artistic and commercial statement that's true to (yet also more than) hip-hop is not easy in this climate, but it's definitely possible, a fact Nicki's friend Drake proved with last year's Take Care. But much of Roman Reloaded sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation. "I'm a brand, bitch, I'm a brand," she raps. She's not wrong.

2012-04-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-04-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Cash Money / Young Money Entertainment / Universal Republic

April 6, 2012

00ac1067-bed7-417d-99dd-4d03fa6f3aaa

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

Long-awaited U.S. release from this at times perplexing electronic British outfit, who come across like a mellow, hip-hop-lovin' version of LCD Soundsystem.

Long-awaited U.S. release from this at times perplexing electronic British outfit, who come across like a mellow, hip-hop-lovin' version of LCD Soundsystem.

Hot Chip: Coming on Strong

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4028-coming-on-strong/

Coming on Strong

Bedroom laptop thug-pop. Electro-ironic soul music. Tongue-in-ass hip-hop. DF-Ay-Ay-Ay! There are all sorts of wonky titles we could create to describe Hot Chip, Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor's perplexing electronic British outfit. Hell, Goddard even looks like a mellow James Murphy. Their full-length debut, Coming on Strong, was released in Europe more than a year ago and warmly if not exasperatingly received. This slightly reconfigured U.S. issue comes off at first like slight pop-- novelty even. But extended listens reveal a goofy sincerity and romantic insouciance. Hot Chip wear influences like yellow Livestrong bracelets-- quietly, gallantly, but a bit too noticeably. The Beach Boys, Prince, Ween, 60s girl groups, Dr. Dre, Devo, Stevie Wonder, Madlib: Each hallmark has their moment, or idea borrowed. The sum of inspiration isn't always rectitude, but Hot Chip make it work for them. American heavyweight counterparts LCD Soundsystem, a more forceful, knowing act, are clearly an influence, and "Down With Prince" is Hot Chip's "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House". Admiration is draped all over the production-- clipped hollow snares, noodly bass line, funk keyboards-- and it's impressive that they don't get us rolling on the ground with an opener like "I'm sick of motherfuckers tryna tell me that they're down with Prince." The desperate Purple allegiance is pretty apparent though. Someone oughta FedEx this record to Paisley Park. These guys have the gall. "Keep Fallin'" is the big scandal ("I'm like Stevie Wonder, but I can see things.") and the funniest thing here. Built on a simple groove, Taylor, whose fragile vocals guide much of the album, drops all kinds of bombs on us. He nods at obvious lyrical influence Ween and daintily moans "Give up all you suckers, we the tightest motherfuckers and you never seen this before, now." The decision to end many of the unrhyming couplets with "now" usually signals amateur. Hard to say how much Taylor and Goddard are lampooning things, though. The whole pop-satire gag is a tidy little safety net to throw at critics. Chemical Brothers meets Art Brut or something like that. The synthesis isn't perfect yet though, like on the groan-worthy "Shining Escalade". Some of the melodies, the mortar of these attacks, are occasionally less than cocked, as well: They're all simple, keyboard-based splashes and once in a while the bottom of the paper bag gets too wet. Lyrics are sung so delicately-- fogged up in the cushiness of the production-- it's hard to make out the gangsta-lite gags. This complicates the consternation over whether these guys are "serious" or not. But in a world where 12-year-olds quote 50 Cent to their aunties at Thanksgiving dinner, it's not hard to understand why Goddard, the rap fan with the baritone, would consider dropping a chorus like the one on "Playboy": "Driving in my Peugeot, yeah yeah yeah/ 20-inch rims with the chrome now, yeah yeah yeah/ Blazin' out Yo La Tengo, yeah yeah yeah." Everyone likes everything these days, Cam'Ron to Ira Kaplan. That's why a group like this makes sense. It's what separates them from the likes of Goldie Lookin' Chain and Kidz Bop. Hot Chip's songs are lazy, or at least leisurely, but they're unafraid to roll up on you in the most unsuspecting ways. "Keep Fallin'" ends with a kazoo solo. "Baby Said" closes madly, with 30 seconds of honking Casio and buckwild kick-drumming after four minutes of parlor room mellifluousness. It's only really a tease, flirting with the concept of upbeating their sound. Four on the floor quaking seems to be their next goal. Hot Chip's new album, scheduled for a 2006 release, already has the danceteria types excited just on the strength of lead single "Over and Over" b/w with, fittingly, the DFA Remix of "Just Like We (Breakdown)." So, enjoy serenity now. The backbeat reigns supreme soon.

2005-11-30T01:00:02.000-05:00

2005-11-30T01:00:02.000-05:00

Electronic

Astralwerks

November 30, 2005

00aea193-dfd3-42eb-b60e-f2a3b67fb7b3

Sean Fennessey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/

Sasha Spielberg reunites with her Just Friends bandmate, Nicolas Jaar, for a somber solo EP that finds the Wardell singer forging an identity of her own.

Sasha Spielberg reunites with her Just Friends bandmate, Nicolas Jaar, for a somber solo EP that finds the Wardell singer forging an identity of her own.

Buzzy Lee: Facepaint EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buzzy-lee-facepaint-ep/

Facepaint EP

Sasha Spielberg has been meandering toward a solo career for years. In 2010, she formed the indie-folk act Wardell with her older brother Theo, and within a few years the pair were coasting on the appeal of their sibling-duo brand. (They happen to be the children of Steven Spielberg, but The New York Times urged readers to “Forget Their Dad; Just Listen to Them.”) By 2013, Spielberg was revisiting a slightly older collaboration, with her college friend Nicolas Jaar, the now-flourishing producer with whom she shared an electronic pop duo called Just Friends. For her first solo EP, Facepaint, Spielberg has assumed the alias Buzzy Lee. Although it’s not a Just Friends release, Jaar produced every song on the record, which finds Spielberg forging an identity by distancing herself from Wardell’s folky aesthetic and inserting her own dreamy reflections into the experimental, downtempo electronic music for which her collaborator is known. Most of the EP’s five tracks are melancholy ballads with lyrics that sound ripped out of a journal, all mysterious, context-free drama. On the hymn-like closer, “Walk Away,” Spielberg delivers her curt opening lines—“Save it for the sake of the fight/Copy-paste the child inside”—with a bite, as Jaar surrounds her vocals in warm, languid synth tones. She has never found a better showcase for her breathy yet powerful voice than the production on these songs. There’s a haunted elegance to Spielberg’s presence on Facepaint, a willingness to be still amid minimal production. “On the Radio” features the record’s sparsest staging, but she doesn’t overcompensate for that aural emptiness. “Pick the chairs and plates/I know that my things will find a home,” she coos, instead, describing a move into a new apartment as though she’s inside that empty space, watching someone else fill it with cardboard boxes. Throughout the EP, Jaar’s flourishes—a steamy guitar solo or a sudden break into percussion—are like vivid, oddball details that thrust a dream out of believability and into surreal wackiness. Near the middle of “On the Radio,” he inserts the sudden, shrill peal of a bell. Often, these choices add necessary emotional gravity to Spielberg’s songs. At the end of “Walk Away,” her voice rises with the swell of the music, as she sings “Is this how you’re gonna grow old?” over and over until the angry urgency of a fight dissolves into exhaustion. But not all of the lyrics bear repeating. On the title track, Spielberg frets about her heart being messed with “like face paint, like we’re children in the first grade, but with feelings.” The line doesn’t sound as awkward in the song as it looks written out, but it’s close. The apparent outlier on this somber debut is lead single “Coolhand,” a boppy, infectious pop song about being sucked into social-media superficiality. But beneath the breezy hooks, Spielberg explores some trepidation about the way she’s curating her image: “Do I have to act like that/And chew a formula?” she wonders. It’s promising to hear her reflect on how she wants to present herself on a release that marks her emergence as a solo artist. Facepaint is Spielberg’s experiment in how to occupy space on her own—and it reveals a musician wise enough to give herself room to move around.

2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Future Classic

May 1, 2018

00afc46f-5dda-4191-99e3-cd194da66ee6

Jay Balfour

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/

Nicolas Jaar returns to his dancefloor alias, swapping out the mid-tempo crowd-pleasers for a set of surprisingly stern techno that bristles with distortion.

Nicolas Jaar returns to his dancefloor alias, swapping out the mid-tempo crowd-pleasers for a set of surprisingly stern techno that bristles with distortion.

Against All Logic: 2017 – 2019

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/against-all-logic-2017-2019/

2017 – 2019

Under his Against All Logic alias, Nicolas Jaar writes music that sounds like it’s trying to break out of itself. Textures undulate and basses overwhelm, while vocals flutter in and out of focus as if someone were flicking through channels on a decrepit television. The project’s first LP, quietly released on his Other People label at the beginning of 2018, folded half a decade’s work into one of the most accessible albums of his career. Now that A.A.L. is a known quantity, Jaar returns with 2017 - 2019, trading the warmer house music of his debut for a warped techno counterpart. “Fantasy,” the opener, is all crunchy transients and harsh digital noise and—is that Beyoncé? Success has only further emboldened Jaar, who twists snippets of Bey’s classic Sean Paul collaboration “Baby Boy” into a hypnotic, mangled hook. But this sample is a red herring, as is the laidback gait of “If Loving You Is Wrong,” which follows. The classic soul flips that defined 2012 - 2017 are largely absent from that point on, replaced by frenetic clangs and extended, bristling percussion workouts like “With an Addict.” 2017 - 2019 has been rendered more purposefully than its predecessor, each track flowing into the next. It presents an identity for Against All Logic that transcends the previous mid-tempo crowd-pleasers, one that’s unafraid to draw from various club subgenres while injecting Jaar’s customary washed-out tape atmospheres. The harsh spirals of noise and pneumatic hi-hats of “Deeeeeeefers” sound like they’re pulled from a revised Justice cut or Thomas Bangalter edit, while “Penny” makes the case that “lo-fi house” might not be dead after all. The most exhilarating moment on the album appears courtesy of its sole feature, Lydia Lunch, whose voice and philosophy Jaar borrows for “If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard.” A longtime advocate of her work—he reissued her 1990 spoken-word piece Conspiracy of Women (C.O.W.) after layering clips from the recording into his live show for years—Jaar recontextualizes the no-wave icon’s uncompromising ferocity using brash distortion loops that make Yeezus sound tame by comparison. “Because you can’t beat ’em, kill ’em/If you can’t kill ’em, fuck ’em/If you can’t fuck ’em, kill ’em/If you can’t do it good, do it hard,” Lunch snarls amid waves of mutilated feedback. It’s not the first time Jaar has remixed her, but “If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard” turns what would otherwise be an intriguing experiment into a bona fide floor-filler. When the beat comes crashing down and Lunch’s manifesto echoes across a cacophonous explosion of drum machines, her brusque chant transforms into a menacing clarion call for the dancefloor. For the rest of the album, Jaar channels that same energy. The tracks pulsate with chaos and—on the introspective closer “You (forever)”—an occasional glimmer of hope.

2020-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Other People

February 11, 2020

00b0300e-0eb0-4102-8c48-35f7e6b7fab3

Noah Yoo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/

His debut album—and sequel to a 2014 mixtape—is equal parts cash grab, roster exhibition, and résumé bulletin. But because it’s a Mike WiLL creation, it can’t help but thrill.

His debut album—and sequel to a 2014 mixtape—is equal parts cash grab, roster exhibition, and résumé bulletin. But because it’s a Mike WiLL creation, it can’t help but thrill.

Mike WiLL Made-It: Ransom 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23087-ransom-2/

Ransom 2

As Metro Boomin became trap’s workhorse, Mike WiLL Made-It, so named by Gucci Mane in the thick of his prolific mixtape run, has expanded his repertoire with radical pivots—zany psychedelic trips and chic pop promenades. Since announcing himself on Meek Mill’s chest-beating fame-measurer “Tupac Back,” he has produced everything from spacey trap ballads (Future’s “Turn On the Lights”), to strip club anthems (“Bandz a Make Her Dance”), sensual R&B massagers (Ciara’s “Body Party”), pop bangers (Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop”), diva tributes (Beyoncé’s “Formation”), and even ad fodder, on his way to becoming one of rap’s most versatile soundmen. When WiLL shared instrumentals from his 2016 discography, it was a dizzying flex, a colorful mosaic of pop-trap stems that omitted key moments by mistake. There are so many jams he forgets some. In the middle, he scored his first-ever Hot 100 chart-topper by producing the viral sensation “Black Beatles” for Rae Sremmurd, the flagship act of his EarDrummers imprint. The victory seemed to affirm his vision: not only had thinking outside the rap box paid big dividends, it’d done so for artists he’d nurtured, who’d been all but denounced by old-fangled rap gatekeepers. The next logical step is a compilation projecting these accumulated successes. Ransom 2, WiLL’s debut album and sequel to a 2014 mixtape, is equal parts cash grab, roster exhibition, and résumé bulletin. But because it’s a Mike WiLL creation, it can’t help but thrill. Ransom 2 isn’t remarkably different than its predecessor; in fact, 13 guests return from the first outing. The bigger names showcase a quick flip through Mike WiLL’s contact list: Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Future, Pharrell, Lil Wayne, Big Sean, Migos, YG, and more. The other faces are part of an EarDrummers promotion: Rae Sremmurd, Eearz, Andrea, Fortune and producers Pluss, Resource, and Marz. Though many are repeat visitors, the album narrowly dodges feeling like a remake and there aren’t any obvious fluctuations in quality. It’s marked by plenty of Mike WiLL’s signature boggy drums, which hit with a slosh as opposed to a thud. Atop a choice range of his finest productions, the hitmakers of today and tomorrow collide. Over time, producers as accomplished as Mike WiLL acquire enough clout to cash-in the favors necessary to collect the one-offs and session extras that make up albums like these. They feel like rejects saved from the discard piles of more prominent releases. But many of the performances on Ransom 2 are so dynamic that songs don’t even feel like blips in the massive catalogs of constantly-active MCs like Future, Gucci Mane, and Young Thug. On “Perfect Pint,” the SremmLife duo trade raps with unlikely bunkmates Gucci and Kendrick Lamar, and the chemistry is a pleasant surprise. Future continues his recent form on the boomer “Razzle Dazzle.” Every good new Wayne verse feels like an affront to Birdman and “Faith” is no different, especially considering Young Money signee HoodyBaby tags along. With “W Y O (What You On),” Young Thug continues his trial runs with new flows, chattering through the first verse before ripping through the second in bursts. If anything, these tracks just feel like recaps for recent breakouts. As artists at the peak of their powers show glimpses of what makes them special, the crop of MCs hand selected by Mike WiLL for his crew earn their signings. Sremmurd’s Swae Lee, clearly the greatest asset on Mike WiLL’s team, gives a taste of the solo album he’s been teasing on “Bars of Soap,” a punchy departure from his usual animated fare. Andrea follows suit on “Burnin” with more bruising bars and a slashing flow. As a team, Lee and Slim Jxmmi make the most of a reunion with Chief Keef, each a unique but complementary variant of rap’s Auto-Tune wave. But it’s Eearz who makes the greatest impression with “Emotions Unlocked,” cutting through waves of distorted bass by pairing a sonorous delivery with nonstop pacing. Despite a slew of standouts, Ransom 2 doesn’t always get the most out of its guests. Lil Yachty’s ode to a Baywatcher, “Hasselhoff,” strays from the confectionary delights that made him so popular (and play to his strengths), opting instead for a straight-faced bar fest. Trouble and Problem’s tag-team effort, “Big God,” gets lost in the shuffle—neither big nor godly. And Fortune doesn’t show the same promise as his other EarDrummer colleagues on “Oh Hi Hater (Hiatus).” His mushy cadences get swallowed up by WiLL’s slimy synth gelatin. These minor misfires and a few forgettable verses aside, Mike WiLL Made-It’s Ransom 2 is an anthology that does exactly what it set out to do: fill his mantle with the shiny trophies of recent wins while making space for new ones.

2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Interscope / Ear Drummer

March 31, 2017

00b03cea-28d9-49ad-9483-ab2141bb82c6

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

Much like the producer’s former offerings, Dame Fortune tries to be everything all at once, making for a good listen with occasional lapses.

Much like the producer’s former offerings, Dame Fortune tries to be everything all at once, making for a good listen with occasional lapses.

RJD2: Dame Fortune

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21761-dame-fortune/

Dame Fortune

There’s a good chance you know producer RJD2’s work, even if you didn’t know he was at the helm. He composed the Mad Men intro, a layered blend of strings and cascading drums depicting the main character’s descent. Then there’s the beat in this Miller Lite TV spot—a brassy number with blaring horns, soaked in New Orleans-style soul. In these instances and others, the composer skillfully blends genres, creating rap/funk hybrids that seem influenced by his living in Philadelphia, a city known for its rich musical history. For the new album, he says, Philly provided a context for all the soul music he's liked over the years. RJD2’s art is full of unique twists and tough to pin down. His albums play like film scores, launching in one place and landing somewhere totally different. On 2002’s Deadringer—widely considered the producer’s magnum opus—his mix of jazz, New York rap and R&B went in all sorts of directions, but it made complete sense for El-P’s vaunted Def Jux label. Eleven years later, on More Is Than Isn’t, the results were decidedly electronic, pulling from the L.A. beat scene while streamlining his vast experiments over the years. Above all, RJD2 is a chameleon—able to navigate multiple scenes, eluding creative boxes along the way. RJD2 doesn’t deviate from that approach on Dame Fortune, his sixth album, which resembles parts of his previous work while keeping with current sounds. “A New Theory” in particular, with its menacing rap knock, is a worthy compliment to any Cannibal Ox or Mr. Lif release. “A Portal Inward” is perhaps RJD2’s best Pink Floyd impression: Collecting light and dark synths, it’s a long—perhaps too long—album intro ala “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” For RJD2, it doesn’t quite set a tone for the music that follows, which moves quickly toward festive breakbeats and progressive rock. Much like the producer’s former offerings, Dame Fortune tries to be everything all at once, making for a good listen with occasional lapses. Parts of it feel a little too on the nose—like “The Roaming Hoard,” a kinetic funk track that loses a touch of steam when the vocals kick in, and “Band of Matron Saints,” an edgy rock track somewhat out of place compared with Dame Fortune’s more versatile songs. The producer’s style is commendable, but the album is inconsistent, and the noteworthy moments run the risk of getting lost. “The Sheboygan Left,” a shape-shifting instrumental near Dame’s beginning, thrives from a gospel-esque collection of crashing drum cymbals and choral moans. On the celebratory "We Come Alive," long-time collaborator Son Little is given ample room to shine. As the album plays, you get a strong sense that RJD2 is traveling towards something. There's a road ahead that he's yet to endure, a path toward a destination he knows nothing about. Of course this isn't new for the producer. After all these years, it seems RJD2 is still searching for some sort of shade amongst the chaos, a place away from the pack. Dame Fortune is about the journey to some sort of eutopia—which for RJD2, is likely full of bright, panoramic views.

2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

RJ's Electrical Connections

March 28, 2016

00b0c033-5f47-415f-918c-7df6e70729b7

Marcus J. Moore

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/

The Carters round out a trilogy of confrontational albums about their marriage with something lighter but no less resonant. It is a celebration of resilient Black love and proud Black extravagance.

The Carters round out a trilogy of confrontational albums about their marriage with something lighter but no less resonant. It is a celebration of resilient Black love and proud Black extravagance.

The Carters / Beyoncé / Jay-Z: Everything Is Love

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-carters-everything-is-love/

Everything Is Love

Until recently, Jay-Z and Beyoncé had made careers of being astoundingly larger than life—cults of personalities we, in fact, knew very little about. He carefully crafted a narrative of corner-hustler-turned-corporate-CEO while guarding the intimate secrets of those closest to him; she was a perfectly manicured pop star who built an empire on turning the vagaries of life into empowerment anthems. Lemonade and 4:44 were watershed moments because they offered a glimpse of the more vulnerable traits of the mystical artists behind them. The Carters zoomed in close enough to show the cracks—to hear a man struggling to find maturity and a woman searching for clarity. Through those albums, we were allowed to see their flaws and we formed deeper connections to them because of it. Their surprise joint release, Everything Is Love, completes the arc. It’s a testament to how a complicated love survived through self-reflection, compromise, and ruthless honesty. The quintessential power couple has reemerged to stunt on everyone—haters, mistresses, America itself—while serving up a spectacle of romance and opulence like make-up sex on a bed of money. The Carters’ final episode of a presumed trilogy packages truth in a way that makes it more captivating than any lie or tabloid fodder. Elevator fights, rumors of discord, and marriage counseling swirled around their initial On the Run Tour in 2014. It took another two years to confirm the suspicion, and by then, it was near impossible to look away from their turmoil. But even now, with drama in the rear view, the return of marital harmony still holds a thrill. Opening track “Summer” picks up where Lemonade’s “All Night” left off, a slow dance with the warm sensuality of forgiveness. Above a soulful live band, Beyoncé croons sweetly about making love to her husband, but it’s one of the few times she’ll play the part of the mellifluous singer. This is “don’t think I’m just his little wife” writ large and there is little room for honeyed words; Bey is fired up and in rare form. The couple’s happily ever after is a celebration of both resilient Black love (to the chagrin of those for whom infidelity is irredeemable) and proud Black extravagance (to the chagrin of those who for whom money is not freedom). As quickly as the opener’s majestic strings fade out, the thunderous “Apeshit” rumbles in. And so continues the second life of Beyoncé, your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper. She kicks triplet flows all over Pharrell’s club-ready production, accented by Quavo and Offset ad-libs. She raps in double time, crashing the syllables into each other: “Put some respeck on my check/Or pay me in equity/Watch me reverse out of debt (skrt!).” Jay is an afterthought on the song despite seamlessly integrating Chief Keef’s “Faneto,” The Lion King, and some well-placed Grammys and NFL shade in the span of his verse: “Every night we in the end zone/Tell the NFL we in stadiums too.” And what audacity to film the video for a trap banger in the Louvre—the pinnacle of violent colonial history presented as high art—and to call it “Apeshit,” and to fill the place with Black creators who are rarely revered on the walls. Each frame of melanin situated against white space is a gorgeous piece of art unto itself. Everything Is Love largely doubles down on the status symbols, generational wealth, and sustainability put forth in songs like “Family Feud” and “Legacy” from 4:44. Bey’s line on “Boss”—”My great-great-grandchildren already rich/That’s a lot of brown chil’run on your Forbes list”—is the best of many flexes on the album. Likewise, Jay’s assertion on the same song that “Over here we measure success by how many people successful next to you/Here we say you broke if everybody is broke except for you” echoes a form of cooperative economics. Communal connections thread the album, coming to a head on the sinuous “Friends” which finds the Carters recognizing comrades (and frenemies, probably) as the bedrock of their prosperity. When “did it on my own” rhetoric is still the go-to for success stories, Jay and Beyoncé pausing to honor those in their orbit who ground them is as admirable as it is relatable. By and large, though, they hold the focus on themselves, staying in one another’s sight and playing off each other in a manner far removed from the honeymoon phase of “’03 Bonnie & Clyde” or “Crazy in Love.” He doesn’t even need to say anything else when he beams “it’s Beyoncé nigga, oh my god” on the synth-pop jam “Heard About Us.” Their peak synergy and star power make Everything Is Love an event, but Jay is the moon to Beyoncé’s sun. He has shown his spectacular bravado for 20 years, but we’re still getting accustomed to Bey, a woman of action over words, really talking her shit. She’s radiant here, a balladeer and trap rapper, an around-the-way girl and reigning queen all rolled into one. She works in nods to the stoner comedy Half Baked, Notorious B.I.G., Shawty Lo/Young Jeezy, and Dr. Dre by singing the hook of “Still D.R.E.,” a track her husband helped write. Her limberness on the album makes one of the best rappers to ever live look like a one-trick pony by comparison. The Carters remain billionaires who are not interested in leaving their Blackness behind, and that, in some ways, is renegade—even if capitalism isn’t salvation. It’s what makes a song like “Black Effect,” an explicit ode to Black excellence set to a soulful soundscape courtesy of Miami producer duo Cool & Dre, so powerful. They’re still using their platform to acknowledge the history—through the names Kalief Browder, Trayvon Martin, Sarah Baartman, MLK, Malcolm X—and the current condition of Black people through affirmation and critiques of appropriation and police brutality. As director Ava DuVernay wrote in 2011 of Jay and Kanye’s Watch the Throne: “Tell me who has ‘made it’ to the highest heights and then started speaking the truth about the beauty of us, Black Folk, our souls, our bodies, our brains.” Of course, Kanye has reneged, but Jay and Bey remain committed to championing our lives and experiences. Everything Is Love is a compromise between the spoils of Lemonade’s war and the fruits of 4:44’s labor. Jay and Bey extend an invitation to join their very public vow-renewal victory lap because we now know what it costs to get here and how expensive having it all can be. It may not be collective liberation (and why should it be?), but it is theirs. When Beyoncé declares, “We came and we saw and we conquered it all” on playful closer “LoveHappy,” it’s her final exhale, her reclamation of her throne of love pulled straight from the tongue of colonizers. Within this complex, messy and beautifully Black display, the Carters find absolution.

2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap / Folk/Country / Pop/R&B

Roc Nation / Parkwood Entertainment

June 19, 2018

00b22b9a-ab26-4d23-a28f-af2fd232657a

Briana Younger

https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/

Hype. It's a bitch. Ascending mediocre bands to heights of unwarranted popularity, and smacking the truly great down to ...

Hype. It's a bitch. Ascending mediocre bands to heights of unwarranted popularity, and smacking the truly great down to ...

The Strokes: Is This It

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7537-is-this-it/

Is This It

Hype. It's a bitch. Ascending mediocre bands to heights of unwarranted popularity, and smacking the truly great down to "critics' pet" status, hype has become a plague on any band hoping to achieve unbridled adoration among music elitists. When the media hounds smell success and respond with their annual cry of "saviors of rock and roll," disappointment is inevitable. So it goes with the Strokes, a band that's seen enough publicity in 2001 to make bin Laden jealous. Touted by the press as "the forefathers of a bold new era in rock," "the greatest rock band since the Rolling Stones" and "the second coming of the Velvet Underground," the Strokes have nowhere to go but out of style. And the album only came out last week! So why all the fanfare? Are they really that good? Of fucking course not. There is no bold new era in rock; the Rolling Stones have yet to be contended with; and if there ever is a second coming of the Velvet Underground, they won't be doing second-rate imitations of Lou Reed. The Strokes are not deities. Nor are they "brilliant," "awe-inspiring," or "genius." They're a rock band, plain and simple. And if you go into this record expecting nothing more than that, you'll probably be pretty pleased. See, while I can't agree with the Strokes' messianic treatment, I'd be lying if I said I thought Is This It was anything other than a great rock record. What's refreshing to me about the Strokes is that, in a musical climate where even the dirtiest garage bands can create the illusion of million-dollar studio techniques through sound filters on mom's Packard-Bell, the Strokes prefer to rock in the classic vein: no laser sounds, no ethereal reverb, no pre-programmed Aphex beats. Their influences are so firmly rooted in the post-punk tradition that it's as if the last two decades had never occurred. The same names are always dropped: the Velvet Underground, Television, the Stooges. And while the Velvets are obviously a major source of inspiration, the Strokes' only similarity to Television and the Stooges is the confidence with which they play. Frontman Julian Casablancas' vocals bear more than a passing resemblance to early Lou Reed, but where Reed seemed to accidentally dispense life-changing lyrics through a drugged drawl, Julian sings about the simple trivialities of big-city life with stark lucidity. These songs revolve around frustrated relationships, never coming near to approaching anything that might resemble insight. Yet, with Casablancas' self-assured, conversational delivery, and the almost primal energy of the four guys backing him, attention shifts from the simply present lyrics to the raging wall of melody these guys bang out like it's their lifeblood. There's a hint of Britain's post-punk 70s in the Strokes' frenetic furor. Bands like the Buzzcocks and Wire subscribed to a similar less-is-more production aesthetic, and seemed naturally adept at scribbling out instantly approachable melodies. And like Singles Going Steady (and, to a lesser extent, Pink Flag), there's something in the Strokes' melodies that few other bands possess: they're immediate without pandering, relying on the instant gratification of solid, driving rhythms while maintaining strong but simple hooks that seem somehow familiar, yet wholly original. Their production is stripped raw, and not terribly divergent from that of their band-of-the-moment contemporaries, the White Stripes. But the difference between the two bands lies in their degrees of skill: the Stripes have an air of amateurishness that belies songwriter Jack White's obvious talents; the Strokes, even on their debut album, sound like experienced professionals for whom mastering the form seems only an album away. "The Modern Age" stomps like a renegade elephant with bashed kickdrums and turbulent guitar riffs while Casablancas passionately reels off, "Work hard and say it's easy/ Do it just to please me/ Tomorrow will be different/ So this is why I'm leaving," in an unsteady sing-speak that invokes all the right elements of a great rock leadman. "Last Nite" quakes with growled vocals and bluesy, blustery distortion. "Hard to Explain" eerily recalls the blissful pop of the Wrens' Secaucus with an unforgettable hook, distorted drumkits and fuzzed-out ride cymbals. Of course, none of this changes the fact that Is This It lacks the creativity and unconventionality inherent in any of the all-time great rock bands they're so impulsively compared to. Still, the Strokes have struck an incredible balance between the two extremes of rock music: sentimentality and listlessness. Any sentimentality in these songs' lyrics is countered by Casablancas' self-reliant indifference, and his listless delivery is offset by the band's fervid attack. Beyond that, it's hard to pinpoint what exactly it is about the Strokes that keeps me listening. All I know is that it's not easy to come by, and I like it. A lot.

2001-10-14T01:00:02.000-04:00

2001-10-14T01:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

RCA

October 14, 2001

00b310a6-a512-4f49-81ad-69c42f3f8ea8

Ryan Schreiber

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/

The indie rock vet’s intimate songwriting comes to life in blossoming arrangements seemingly plucked straight out of a vintage California bachelor pad.

The indie rock vet’s intimate songwriting comes to life in blossoming arrangements seemingly plucked straight out of a vintage California bachelor pad.

Chris Cohen: Paint a Room

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-cohen-paint-a-room/

Paint a Room

Chris Cohen writes songs so gentle and sweet they seem to practically nuzzle up against you, but he hasn’t always intended to be a steward of comfort. “I think that there’s something in my music that people misinterpret as like, contentment or being chill,” he told Flaunt in 2020, lamenting the times he’s noticed his laid-back bedroom pop crop up as background music in restaurants or at Urban Outfitters. “It might be something that I’m not succeeding at as a musician that makes people think that I think the world is fine and we should just feel good,” he said. “That’s like, the last thing that I want people to get from my music.” Cohen’s curse may just be that he’s too adept at crafting gorgeous, heavenly little songs. If there’s one throughline between the various projects he’s been a part of—be it Deerhoof, Weyes Blood, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, or the Curtains—it’s this sense of him tapping out cracks in the edges of soft pop without ever letting it shatter. “Damage,” the opening track off Paint a Room (his first new album in five years) puts this dichotomy front and center: As Cohen, dismayed, sings about how abuses of power manifest in society, a summery bed of horns courtesy of Jeff Parker envelops his dread in a pastoral calm. “Somebody’s love was shot down again,” he coos, just moments before a smooth saxophone solo swirls into view. Paint a Room is full of these types of frozen-in-time vignettes, as Cohen’s intimate songwriting comes to life in blossoming arrangements seemingly plucked straight out of a vintage California bachelor pad. Inspired by Uruguayan and Brazilian artists like Eduardo Mateo and Milton Nascimento, who pushed their folk pop to proggy, boundless new places in the ’70s and ’80s, Cohen lines his songs with flutes, congas, and Clavinets that instill a psychedelically tropical lilt. At times, the subtly pretty haze can threaten to dissipate into thin air, but its highs demonstrate why Cohen remains one of indie rock’s most quietly wondrous songwriters. Cohen’s melodies convey everything his songs need completely on their own (he typically plots out all his chords and phrasings well in advance of figuring out what to actually say). His hooks can feel so simple and intuitive that it’s as if they’ve always been there: The central piano motif in “Dog’s Face” materializes as gracefully as a mist unspooling over the Bay, before a lightly dissonant guitar riff begins to pulse like distant thunder. The ghostly keyboard riff in “Randy’s Chimes” creeps around as if it were solving a mystery, while “Physical Address” cruises on a playful bossa-nova groove that glides up and down like a kid riding an elevator. When Cohen does attempt to say something more concrete with his lyrics, his concerns tend toward searching for hope in the modern day. On the radiant “Sunever,” he speaks to a transgender child about the future: “Up and up you climb, soon you’ll leave us far behind,” he murmurs tenderly, promising them that “you’re gonna find a way” and letting a joyous fiddle paint the path. Vibrant moments like this bring Cohen’s introverted musings to life; at other times Paint a Room’s mellowness slumps into the sedate. “Cobb Estate” rides a three-note guitar arpeggio so lackadaisical it almost feels like pre-rehearsal noodling, and the Meat Puppets-like cowpunk groove of “Wishing Well,” though intriguing as an experiment, never seems to find a melodic center to rest its heels on. Cohen’s inviting arrangements may not always strike the delicate balance between peace and uncertainty that he strives for, but when they do, his music remains as warm and rewarding as a fresh cup of coffee at dawn.

2024-07-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-07-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

Hardly Art

July 15, 2024

00b8524b-1ce2-4da9-99c7-9bc8a2763882

Sam Goldner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/

The Beastie Boys' landmark second album is remastered and reissued 20 years on.

The Beastie Boys' landmark second album is remastered and reissued 20 years on.

Beastie Boys: Paul’s Boutique

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12671-pauls-boutique/

Paul's Boutique

It’s easy to forget exactly how painted into a corner the Beastie Boys were after Licensed to Ill came out. Every complaint people harbor against so-called “hipster rap” today had its genesis in that debut album nearly 23 years ago—a bunch of upper-middle-class, never-been-battled punk rockers in leather jackets and skinny jeans bellowing knowingly obnoxious, semi-ironic lyrics—and it only escalated once the question of the inevitable follow-up came around. The only thing that would piss purists off more than the notion of three clownish white Jewish kids accidentally inventing frat-rap is the fact that they wound up ditching a beloved hip-hop label in Def Jam for the corporate juggernaut of Capitol Records. Not to mention jetting their asses to Los Angeles to cut records with the dudes who produced Tone Lōc’s “Wild Thing.” When Paul’s Boutique famously tanked upon release—peaking at #14 on a pre-Soundscan Billboard 200 and, even more damningly, only #24 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Top Albums chart—the haters triumphantly chortled along with 3rd Bass: “Screamin’ ‘Hey Ladies,’ Why bother?” Twenty years later, nobody’s asking that question. Paul’s Boutique is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky, early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades' postmodern identity as sure as “The Simpsons” and Quentin Tarantino did. It’s an album so packed with lyrical and musical asides, namedrops, and quotations that you could lose an entire day going through its Wikipedia page and looking up all the references; “The Sounds of Science” alone redirects you to the entries for Cheech Wizard, Shea Stadium, condoms, Robotron: 2084, Galileo, and Jesus Christ. That density, sprawl, and information-overload structure was one of the reasons some fans were reluctant to climb on board. But by extending Steinski’s rapid-fire sound-bite hip-hop aesthetic over the course of an entire album, the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers more than assured that a generally positive first impression would eventually lead to a listener’s dedicated, zealous headlong dive into the record’s endlessly-quotable deep end. There’s a lot that's already been said about the daring eclecticism and arguably irreproducible anything-goes technique with which the Dust Brothers assembled the album’s beats. The music is a big, shameless love letter to the 1970s filled with a conceptual bookend (the Idris Muhammad-sampling, ladies-man ether frolic “To All the Girls”), numerous line-completing lyrical interjections from Johnny Cash, Chuck D, Pato Banton and Sweet, and, just for kicks, nine truncated songs spliced together and stuck in at the end as a staggering 12 and 1/2-minute suite. If the sonics on It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back evoked a sleep-shattering wake-up call and 3 Feet High and Rising a chilled-out, sunny afternoon, the personality of Paul’s Boutique completed the trinity by perfectly capturing the vibe of a late-night alcohol and one-hitter-fueled shit-talk session. Even now, after being exposed to successively brilliant sample-slayers from the RZA to the Avalanches to J Dilla, it’s still bracing just how meticulous the beats are here. These aren’t just well-crafted loops, they’re self-contained little breakbeat universes filled with weird asides, clever segues, and miniature samples-as-punchlines. There’s dozens of clever touches and big, ambitious ideas that still sound inspired: a cameo appearance by the opening drumbeats of Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” in “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”; the manic yet seamless percussion rolls and the giddy tour through the Car Wash soundtrack on “Shake Your Rump”; the two-part slow-to-fast tweaking of late-period Beatles on “The Sounds of Science”; a sparingly-used Alice Cooper guitar riff adding a mockingly pseudo-badass counter to the whimsical Gene Harris-based soul jazz backbone of “What Comes Around.” It all gets writ large in “B-Boy Bouillabaisse,” the aforementioned album-closing suite, which careens through turntablist striptease, a not-yet-throwback 808/beatboxing showcase, funk grooves of every conceivable tempo, and a Jeep-beat bass monster so massive and all-consuming that Jay-Z and Lil Wayne 2.0’d it in late 2007. Even the less-frenetic moments are sonically inventive; there’s only two acknowledged and minimally-tinkered-with samples in “3-Minute Rule,” augmented with a starkly simple bassline from MCA himself, but it’s one of the finest examples of deep, cavernous dub-style production on any golden age rap record. And, of course, there’s Ad-Rock and MCA and Mike D themselves. Where the aesthetic of Licensed to Ill could have permanently placed them in the crass dirtbag-shtick company of “Married With Children” and Andrew Dice Clay if they’d kept it up, Paul’s Boutique pushed them into a new direction as renaissance men of punchline lyricism. They were still happily at home affecting low-class behaviors: hucking eggs at people on “Egg Man”; going on cross-country crime sprees on “High Plains Drifter”; smackin’ girlies on the booty with something called a “plank bee” in “Car Thief”; claiming to have been “makin’ records when you were suckin’ your mother’s dick” on “3-Minute Rule.” But they’d also mastered quick-witted acrobatic rhymes to augment their countless pop-culture references and adolescent hijinks. “Long distance from my girl and I’m talkin’ on the cellular/She said that she was sorry and I said ‘Yeah, the hell you were’”—we’re a long way from “Cookie Puss” here. While each member has their spotlight moments—MCA’s pedal-down tour de force fast-rap exhibition in “Year and a Day,” Mike D having too much to drink at the Red Lobster on “Mike on the Mic,” and Ad-Rock’s charmingly venomous tirade against coke-snorting Hollywood faux-ingénues in “3-Minute Rule”—Paul's Boutique is where their back-and-forth patter really reached its peak. At the start of their career, they built off the tag-team style popularized by Run-DMC, but by ’89 they'd developed it to such an extent and to such manic, screwball ends that they might as well have been drawing off the Marx Brothers as well. It’s impossible to hear the vast majority of this album as anything other than a locked-tight group effort, with its overlapping lyrics and shouted three-man one-liners, and it’s maybe best displayed in the classic single “Shadrach.” After years of post-Def Jam limbo and attempts to escape out from under the weight of a fratboy parody that got out of hand, they put together a defiant, iconographic statement of purpose that combined giddy braggadocio with weeded-out soul-searching. It’s the tightest highlight on an album full of them, a quick-volleying, line-swapping 100-yard dash capped off with the most confident possible delivery of the line “They tell us what to do? Hell no!” As reissues go, the 20th Anniversary re-release of Paul’s Boutique is relatively bare-bones. There’s a richer, cleaner audio mix remastered by the band, a tracklisting that splits “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” into its separate parts, and a sharp mini-gatefold package highlighting the iconic cover photo. That so little has been changed is more of a relief than a problem; between the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd samples, you’d think the clearance issues would be prohibitive. Just the fact that this album’s being reissued with all this care and attention should be enough. After Paul’s Boutique failed to move units, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that the Beasties would wind up like the protagonist of “Johnny Ryall”—with “a platinum voice/But only gold records,” reduced to obscurity while their most ambitious work faded into cutout-bin purgatory. As it turned out, they created an album we’ll probably never hear the likes of again—good thing it’s deep enough to live in forever.

2009-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2009-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap / Rock

Capitol

February 13, 2009

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Nate Patrin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/

Melina Duterte's careful, wise, and excellent album is the rare debut that expands the borders of a genre. It's not bedroom-pop because it sounds a certain way, but because it feels so intimate.

Melina Duterte's careful, wise, and excellent album is the rare debut that expands the borders of a genre. It's not bedroom-pop because it sounds a certain way, but because it feels so intimate.

Jay Som: Everybody Works

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22982-everybody-works/

Everybody Works

Virtuous though it may be, patience is a difficult quality to capture in guitar rock, a medium that much prefers boldness, concision, and urgency. Perhaps that’s why Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Melina Duterte’s reverence for the human capacity to wait and think and grow comes across as a revelation on Everybody Works, her first official album as Jay Som. “Take time to figure it out,” she advises on lead single “The Bus Song.” In its context, she’s caught between relationship statuses, assuring the object of her fixation that she’ll “be the one who sticks around.” As an introduction to an album full of reminders not to rush things, though, the line is a relief, enough to make you involuntarily exhale. Bedroom pop is a genre designation that loses meaning by the year—not just as technology creeps closer to erasing any distinction between studio production and home recording, but also as the musicians associated with it develop tastes more varied and less retro than, say, Ariel Pink’s. Twenty-two-year-old Duterte made the fuzzy, dreamy, plaintive aesthetic her own on Turn Into, nine self-recorded tracks she uploaded to Bandcamp on a tipsy whim over a year ago and re-released with Polyvinyl in late 2016, billing the makeshift debut as a collection of “finished and unfinished songs” rather than a proper album. Although she made Everybody Works alone in her bedroom studio, its repertoire ranges from folk to funk to chart pop. It’s not a bedroom-pop album because it sounds a certain way, but because it feels so intimate. Most of Duterte’s elaborate songs could be mistaken for full-band compositions, yet her preference for writing and recording in solitude imbues each one with an introspective quality. Liberated from the obligation to conform to any one sound, Duterte investigates new styles with purpose. She’s smitten with Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION, and it shows in the hooky choruses of “The Bus Song” and “Remain,” two tracks steeped in exuberant longing. With its smooth keyboards and slinky bass line, “Baybee” comes on like an R&B slow jam, but instead of steaming up the windows, it’s about seducing yourself into seeing your beloved through a rough patch: “If I leave you alone/When you don’t feel right/I know we’ll sink for sure,” Duterte coos on top of the music, like a layer of pure calm. “1 Billion Dogs” submerges anxious lyrics in a cloud of feedback that melds shoegaze, indie pop, and grunge as if it were a forgotten gem from the DGC Rarities compilation. But the most arresting songs are the ones that defy categorization entirely. The first minute of the album, on “Lipstick Stains,” sounds the way orchestra instruments might upon waking from an afternoon nap, blinking and stretching in the sunlight. When the vocals kick in more than halfway through the track, Duterte’s murmur is just as drowsily blissful: “I like the way your lipstick stains/The corner of my smile,” she breathes. Everybody Works closes with “For Light,” an epic, seven-minute ballad that transforms a whispered promise—“I’ll be right on time/Open blinds for light/Won’t forget to climb”—into a sing-along prayer by adding in the voices of backup singers. The mood of weary resilience is reminiscent of Nick Cave’s “Push the Sky Away,” another album-closing message of encouragement that fully acknowledges the herculean effort it takes, sometimes, to merely keep going. As that comparison suggests, Duterte has absorbed more of life’s hard lessons than most of us do by age 22. The patience that suffuses Everybody Works doesn’t reflect the naïveté of a kid who’s sure she has unlimited time to chase her ambitions and find love; it comes out of an emotionally mature view of relationships and the 10 years of work she has already put into her songwriting, taking shitty jobs and enduring family strife to become the musician she is today. “I’ll remain under your moon,” she pledges on “Remain,” an anthem of (perhaps one-sided) commitment. “Everybody Works” registers Duterte’s resentment at how easily success seems to come to the “rock star” who make her wonder, “Did you pay your way through?” But empathy wins out in the end; she makes “everybody works” a mantra, repeating the phrase as though to remind herself of the way other people’s painstaking efforts can be invisible to us. “All of my songs are so different, but you know it’s me,” Duterte remarked in a recent Pitchfork profile. She’s right, and there’s no better indicator that a songwriter has found her voice than the ability to explore new styles and still sound like the same artist. Just a few years into her adult life, and only one album into her recording career, Melina Duterte has swept past a milestone many musicians never even get in their sights.

2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Polyvinyl / Double Denim

March 10, 2017

00bb93d7-7854-450a-b1ec-799eae583026

Judy Berman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/

On his latest album, the Atlanta rapper lacks curiosity, imagination, and charisma. It’s like being whacked with a slab of styrofoam.

On his latest album, the Atlanta rapper lacks curiosity, imagination, and charisma. It’s like being whacked with a slab of styrofoam.

Ken Carson: X

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ken-carson-x/

X

Ken Car$on networked his way from military school expulsion to dilettante hanging around two of his city’s essential beatmakers of the last decade (TM88 and Southside) to the first signee of Playboi Carti’s Opium label, all while maintaining an apathetic relationship with music. To this day he’s not a fan of R&B because it’s so “nasty” that it used to make him angry as a kid; he would rather listen to the All-American Rejects than hip-hop, and he rarely spins music that isn’t his own. The schtick he’s going for is that he’s not like other rappers. He’s too extreme, too rebellious, too much of a delinquent—which is really just a bunch of nonsense to make up for the fact that he’s a cardboard cut-out propped up by influential friends and access to great producers. The easy way to harp on Ken Car$on’s latest album, X, would be to ask why such a supposedly singular artist made a project that sounds like a worse version of music that already exists: specifically, Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, which was similarly based on explosive synths and 808s heavy enough to cave in a dancefloor. Carti stretched and bent his vocals to make that album feel like an immersive experience, but X isn’t a clunker just because Ken Car$on isn’t Carti. It’s because Carson lacks the curiosity, imagination, and irreverence to do anything more than lay down the same glazed Auto-Tune raps, with only rare attempts to liven them up. It’s fine not to have anything to say as long as you say it in an interesting way. If you don’t, the music winds up like X, which hits without any effect, like being whacked with a slab of styrofoam. For rappers like Ken Car$on, without a drip of charisma, the loud and busy sounds of a production style that has been classified as “rage” makes a good cloak to hide behind. It’s a bad sign for Car$on that even still, the album is as forgettable as it is faceless. He tries to snap out of his zombie flow on “Go” by raising the energy a tick, but it’s just a distraction from an Outtatown and Starboy beat full of exciting bleeps that make it feel like you’re in the Top Gun control room. The same production duo shows out with the disorienting synths of “South Beach,” yet Car$on plays it chill rather than latching onto the weirdness. On “Intro,” he raps harder than he typically does, but all the song made me feel is a fonder appreciation for the more meditative tracks on Yeat’s 2 Alivë, which are similar in structure but have this stream-of-consciousness edge that distinguishes them. When Car$on strives to create a mood, it comes across as performative. “I do some illegal shit every night,” he vaguely raps in what’s supposed to be a badass moment in “Fuk 12,” which tracks if your idea of “badass” is Bart Simpson shooting spitballs and making prank calls. X is such a slog that the smallest signs of taste are cause for celebration. The pitch change at the end of “Get Rich or Die” is something! When he’s listing off his drugs on “PDBMH,” the Auto-Tune is turned up and in that instant the sped-up flow is slightly (emphasis on “slightly”) reminiscent of Thug! On “MDMA” (which has a pretty amazing beat, by the way), he raps, “Everybody rockin’ all black, I wanna be different, so I’m rockin’ navy,” and it’s pretty dumb but the dumbness made me laugh. That’s something, too! If you’re here for the beats—since you’re here for the beats—it’s fairly easy to block out Car$on’s monotony and reimagine X as an instrumental album. Too bad it’s not, because we’re at max capacity of rappers whose interest in the genre doesn’t extend beyond opportunities for free clothes and IG followers. But if Ken Car$on is going to insist, he should listen to a few more rap songs first. Maybe that would help.

2022-07-13T00:02:00.000-04:00

2022-07-13T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

Opium / Interscope

July 13, 2022

00bda426-9f42-42bf-ba85-b18199ebd833

Alphonse Pierre

https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/

The NYC-based duo have collaborated with Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, and William Winant, among others. Accidental Sky marks their first outing with Wilco's Nels Cline.

The NYC-based duo have collaborated with Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, and William Winant, among others. Accidental Sky marks their first outing with Wilco's Nels Cline.

White Out: Accidental Sky

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21193-accidental-sky/

Accidental Sky

Regardless of whoever is sitting in with multi-instrumentalists Lin Culbertson and Tom Surgal, the White Out modus operandi remains the same: daft, improvisatory pieces that spread like runaway kudzu or sputter like an overheated Datsun, often within a single song. The NYC-based duo have collaborated with Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, and William Winant among others over the years, but Accidental Sky marks their first outing with Nels Cline, the inventive avant-garde guitarist who has been a member of Wilco since 2004. The result is the band’s most abbreviated LP-sized outing, clocking in at a 38-minute length so economical that the record seems to conclude almost before it’s even begun. Given Accidental Sky’s pointedly terrestrial vibe, this brevity proves instructive. Surgal, Culbertson, and Cline aren’t hot-wiring and joyriding across the skies in an interstellar jalopy here; they’re locked outside the hangar, desperately MacGyvering some means—any means—of ingress. By his lonesome, in combos, or with Wilco, Cline is an inventive, expressive player, but his communions with White Out tend toward the quarrelous and cerebral. Sky is at its best when it runs the risk of suffocation. "Imperative" opens as a hashed blues, then quickly descends into a dark brew of mini-riffs, topsy-turvy synth jags, and savage little drum rolls. Flutes flutters through "Under a Void Moon" besieged by clawed noise, distended guitar, and Dada-esque utterances. At moments, White Out can sound as lost in the weeds as some listeners may feel: Culbertson’s zig-zagged wails and the pair’s bells, whistles, and effects congeal into an unstable nucleus around which guests revolve, wildly. What’s most frustrating isn’t ultimately that Sky doesn’t make it beyond the stratosphere, but that some of these songs should go on longer; they need more space to stretch, breathe, expand into stranger, deeper realms. The album winds down with "Soft Nameless Absolute", where contemplative Cline chords are buried beneath several strains of jittery, mirroring synthesizers. There’s a generous, sunburst grandiosity to the song, which is so coherent that it seems to have wandered in from an album by a different band. Given the tendency to self-edit and considering how Cline’s guitar elbows gracefully out of the fray and "Absolute" drifts to a measured close all suggests that, artistically, White Out may be nearing the end of a well-trod path.

2015-11-04T01:00:03.000-05:00

2015-11-04T01:00:03.000-05:00

Rock

Northern Spy

November 4, 2015

00be3169-5cd1-45bc-8776-cb23f17b2c69

Raymond Cummings

https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/

A concept album about killing his alter ego can’t save the impishly clever Eminem from the same tired, dated, developmentally arrested material.

A concept album about killing his alter ego can’t save the impishly clever Eminem from the same tired, dated, developmentally arrested material.

Eminem: The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eminem-the-death-of-slim-shady-coup-de-grace/

The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)

Eminem used to be reckless and thrilling. In the early days, he was a cruise missile slicing through the sky with the names of his targets spray-painted on the side. He aired grievances with a bullhorn, scaffolding crude insults with dynamic turns of phrase and flashy internal rhymes. Eminem could be arrestingly clever, sometimes issuing a line as meticulously written as it was shocking, but you’d never accuse him of being subtle. That was 22 years ago. A generation removed from The Eminem Show, his last great album, Eminem is a shadow of his former self. His lithe and menacing flow now feels antiseptic and strained. The high-pitched, manic tenor of his voice gave way to an ever-ratcheting growl; any East Coast groove or nervy West Coast slink in his beats was replaced by chintzy Casiotone melodrama. He became blocky and unwieldy, careening through tracks with the grace of a Cybertruck crashing into a ditch. His anger and defensiveness never dissipated, though. By the time he dropped his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, his early screeds yearning for a colorblind hip-hop meritocracy had already lost their impact—by that point, Eminem was an unavoidable cultural force. Those diatribes sound even whinier now. He remains one of the biggest-selling and most-streamed artists in the United States, but Em’s perpetually on a back foot, like a wealthy barbarian at the gates working as hard as he can to convince his critics he’s worthy of praise. His music still clearly strikes a chord for a sizable audience, but he seems to look past them, more concerned with convincing someone—anyone—that he’s the deadliest to touch a mic. Seldom does a blockbuster album sequel recapture that initial magic; The Marshall Mathers LP 2 often felt like trying to draw the original from memory with expensive crayons. Em honed his technical skills so sharply—the lightning-speed flow on “Rap God,” the precision syllable-matching on “Legacy”—that it rendered everything sterile. Notably, he tried to distance himself from his Slim Shady character, using several songs (including the smash hit “The Monster” with Rihanna) to destroy—or at least explain away—his trollish persona. Ten years and three middling records later, he’s back to kill off his alter ego for good. The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) is his attempt at Jungian shadow work, opening the closet for a knock-down drag-out screaming match with the skeletons. It begins with the sound of a hocked loogie. It could be Marshall Mathers trying to rid himself of the taste Slim Shady’s words leave in his mouth. Or it could just be a warning shot: This is gonna be gross. “Renaissance” functions mainly as a list of Eminem’s bona fides, comparing himself to rap legends like Big Daddy Kane and spitting lightly chuckle-worthy double entendres like, “Soon as I quit giving a fuck I started to sell a bit.” Near the end it devolves from a brash pen exercise to an attempt to shield himself from the criticism he can already feel coming. You get the distinct feeling we’ve been here before: “Premonition,” which opened Music to Be Murdered By, covered the same ground. It’s a grim harbinger that we will be exploring no new territory for the next hour. The loose concept behind The Death of Slim Shady, as reinforced through a few skits peppered throughout the tracklist, is that this is the final showdown between Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady. Slim kidnaps Mathers, a nod to his early work, and forces the captive to write the kind of outlandish songs that made him famous. The first half of the album is a dilapidated funhouse, a cheap reconstruction of Slim Shady’s oeuvre. He opens “Trouble” by sneering, “Fuck blind people.” “Brand New Dance,” a leftover from the Encore sessions, is a three-and-half-minute diss track aimed at the late Christopher Reeve, who died in 2004. He mentions Caitlyn Jenner six times before the 30-minute mark. There are confused, angry rants about pronouns and references to South Park. It would all be outlandishly offensive if it weren’t so tired, dated, and developmentally arrested. The album’s centerpoint, “Guilty Conscience 2,” is the ultimate standoff, the two characters meeting eyes and circling each other with hands hovering over their holsters. Em raps with two voices, one slightly affected with distortion to represent Shady, and one with a drier mix for Marshall. The two characters argue like drunken reality show contestants, scrunching their noses and waving a middle finger. Marshall limply explains that Shady’s cruelty is merely a product of his addiction, immediately decimating his own point by needlessly comparing Slim’s embarrassing antics to David Carradine’s accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation. Slim’s retorts sound like a “debate me” guy invoking the “it’s only a joke” defense. Finally, after exhausting each other’s arguments, the two voices combine. It’s probably supposed to be a moment of absolution, but reads more like an admission of guilt. “I gave you power to use me as an excuse to be evil/You created me to say everything you didn’t have the balls to say,” they both howl. Then, as the album title promises, Marshall gains the upper hand and shoots Slim Shady dead. The day before its release, Eminem tweeted that The Death of Slim Shady is a concept album and should, therefore, be listened to in order. It’s a long slog to get to “Guilty Conscience 2,” but there are moments of genuine inspiration along the way. Though he deflates “Fuel” with an overlong, technique-heavy tirade, Em enlists JID, one of his stylistic descendants, for a breathtaking verse. He shies away from the stadium stomp-clap bombast of his late career, selecting beats that run the gamut from goofy clarinet trap to the crisp, slithering boom-bap that marked some of his best early work. He’s still good for a dumb laugh, even if it’s a bit of a walk: “Call this sex ed with a splash of necrophilia/’Cause when I say that I’m really the evilest, I’m fucking deadass” from the otherwise bloodless “Evil.” But the album flounders, unsure of what it’s trying to say. There are five songs after the ostensible climax, none of which seem like a direction where the real, unburdened Eminem might travel. Maybe The Death of Slim Shady is Eminem’s attempt to indict a bloodthirsty American public, to reflect the zeitgeist of book-banning ideologues and armed protestors showing up to drag storytime. Maybe it’s a treatise on addiction and how substance abuse can amplify the worst parts of yourself, causing untold harm to others. It’s hard to believe any of this in good faith, though. Eminem seems pleased to be wading back into the culture wars: He uses the term “woke BS” and complains he’s being squashed by the PC police. In “Head Honcho,” the first song after he’s “killed” Shady, he admits that “punching down ain’t beneath [him].” His sincerity has the tenor of a bad celebrity apology: “I’m sorry if you were offended, but…” Mostly, The Death of Slim Shady just feels sad. No matter how self-aware he is about becoming the old white guy scared of a changing culture, Eminem can’t seem to get in front of that fact. He was so provocative on his first few albums not because of his lyrics—plenty of horrorcore and gangster rap records were just as gnarly—but because he anticipated the criticism his lyrics would inspire. He set up the hall of mirrors and led you right into it. Despite its dated, unnecessary content, “Brand New Dance” might be the best song here. It comes from the era when he still felt comfortable in his own skin, his gleefully provocative nature and undeniable skill sharing the same space. But now he’s stuck between contradictions; he claims to be above Slim Shady’s acidity but included that song anyway. If Slim Shady’s a mirror, as he asserts in “Guilty Conscience 2,” Marshall Mathers still can’t smash it. All the shards show the same reflection.

2024-07-16T00:02:00.000-04:00

2024-07-16T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

Shady / Aftermath / Interscope

July 16, 2024

00c0b49e-dc57-4ddd-b320-1e640e7b6699

Dash Lewis

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/

The debut solo album from the breakout grime MC is a detailed portrait and full-throated riot, switching between clapping back at lesser rappers and serving up smoothed-out Quiet Stormzy.

The debut solo album from the breakout grime MC is a detailed portrait and full-throated riot, switching between clapping back at lesser rappers and serving up smoothed-out Quiet Stormzy.

Stormzy: Gang Signs & Prayer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22917-gang-signs-prayer/

Gang Signs & Prayer

Two years ago, Michael Omari stood on the stage at the 2015 Brit Awards, shoulder-to-shoulder with a who’s who of UK rappers. Clad in all black, the MC known as Stormzy rocked along with Skepta, JME, Novelist, Jammer, Krept & Konan and dozens of others, flanking Kanye West as he performed his Paul McCartney collaboration “All Day” amid a sea of white faces in tuxedos and cocktail dresses. It was an important moment for British hip-hop and grime in particular. For years marginalized as too violent or “gang related” and mostly shut out from Britain’s biggest pop music awards show, the heroes of the London underground had snuck in through a back door propped open by an American iconoclast. To say it had a profound effect on Stormzy—and the entire underground scene—would be an understatement. It also marks the jumping-off point for Stormzy’s bum rush on the pop charts. The overwhelming success of “Shut Up”—the original video has now over 48 million views and the single bundled with “Wicked Skengman 4” cracked the charts—indicates a new paradigm in UK underground hip-hop. On radio shows and YouTube channels, in low-budget videos surrounded by the neighborhood squad, young MCs battle each other with pre-written “freestyles” spit over well-known beats. And it’s obvious why Stormzy has emerged from the scrum with a crown on his head: His booming voice and charisma are infectious and his 100-watt, silver-toothed smile lights up the screen. Stormzy brings this battle rap mentality to Gang Signs & Prayer from the get-go. Opening track “First Things First” was intended “to be a punch in the face,” and the hyped-up grime rippers like “Cold” and “Big for Your Boots” are full of dire warnings to lesser rappers that might consider challenging his supremacy. But while he’s made a name for himself battling, it’s clear that he’s set his sights on something bigger: Stormzy fancies himself a crooner. He spends much of Gang Signs & Prayer going back and forth between clapping back at lesser rappers and serving up the “Stiff Chocolate” of smoothed-out Quiet Stormzy. He goes full-on gospel on “Blinded by Your Grace, Pt. 1,” forgoing a protective autotune armor for a gentle—and pitchy—prayer. He gives it another go on “Velvet,” which also features NAO, singing declarations of love to his “princess.” It’s all painfully earnest, yet despite the cringes his croon inflicts, these moments feel essential to the ethos of Gang Signs & Prayer. Both hard and soft, belligerent yet spiritual, Gang Signs & Prayer reveals a vulnerability belied by his 6-foot 5-inch frame and menacing glare. Even as he barks boasts on “First Things First,” he admits he’s battled depression, and he follows up the horn blasts of “Mr Skeng”—a scathing screed against doubters and dickheads—with “Cigarettes & Cush,” a tender recollection of a doomed relationship featuring Kehlani and Lily Allen. He presents these parts of himself unapologetically, juxtaposing the gang signs of his youth with the prayers from his Ghanian single mother, which quite literally grace “100 Bags” in a touching ode to her love and influence. This dichotomy is fully realized on the album’s final track, “Lay Me Bare,” a syncopated confessional peppered with a chipmunk’d vocal sample and mechanical trap hi-hat. He bleeds for five straight minutes, admitting his brief retreat from the spotlight in 2016 was a crisis of faith that left him depressed and isolated. He relives the pain of running into his absentee father, whose first words in years are to ask for a handout rather than forgiveness—the one moment where his otherwise plaintive delivery is infused with rage. Even his catharsis is violent (“Grab this gun and aim it there/Shoot my pain and slay my fear”), taking a street-wise approach to conquering his demons. Stormzy’s biggest hits to date have all been testosterone-charged badman anthems, but he's also trying to reveal an artist with more than one dimension. It doesn’t always work—it’s hard to ignore the shortcomings of his singing voice, and the otherwise relatable lyrics on “Cigarettes & Cush” are mired by a trite composition. But from the themes to the production choices to the sequencing, it’s a remarkably well thought out debut from the ascendant 23-year-old MC. Even more impressive, Stormzy’s rapid rise to relevance comes independent of the major label/commercial radio industrial complex. It’s hard to imagine a major putting out a debut LP from a hardcore battle rapper with a song like the smoochy “Velvet,” but maybe that’s the point—he doesn’t need them. He’s thus far made his living playing shows, releasing Spotify singles and low-budget YouTube videos, and hyping his favorite artists on his Beats 1 radio show, #Merky. And almost exactly two years after Kanye snuck him in the backdoor at the Brits, he strode into the 2017 ceremony on the red carpet, glad-handing with Bradley Walsh and cheesing for the cameras in a crisp Burberry suit. And when Ed Sheeran brought him onstage to debut his verse on the “Shape of You” remix, the crowd’s fervent reaction proved he was anything but backup.

2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

#MERKY

February 28, 2017

00c181b6-6876-4116-b171-4a2ff64b2334

Matthew Ismael Ruiz

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/

A little more than a year ago, Mark McGuire announced his departure from Emeralds. On his kaleidoscopic new LP, Along the Way, he wrote, played, and produced everything, stepping beyond his usual guitar tessellations to add keyboards and mandolin, drum machines and hand drums, vocals and noise. It is a meticulous solo rendering of a full band’s effort.

A little more than a year ago, Mark McGuire announced his departure from Emeralds. On his kaleidoscopic new LP, Along the Way, he wrote, played, and produced everything, stepping beyond his usual guitar tessellations to add keyboards and mandolin, drum machines and hand drums, vocals and noise. It is a meticulous solo rendering of a full band’s effort.

Mark McGuire: Along the Way

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18939-mark-mcguire-along-the-way/

Along the Way

Mark McGuire does not idle: A little more than a year ago, the guitarist announced his immediate departure from Emeralds, the space-exploring Ohio trio that had emerged during the previous half-decade as a vivid, prolific syndicate for a romantic hybrid of electronica and post-rock. McGuire’s kaleidoscopic new LP, Along the Way, is, in some fashion, his post-Emeralds debut. It is, after all, his first album for Dead Oceans—a commercially accessible imprint that, after years of small experimental labels and self-releases for McGuire, might as well be a major. But before, during and after Emeralds’ steady rupture, McGuire has maintained an astonishing creative pace, appearing on nearly six dozen titles in about six years. Since the end of Emeralds, he’s recorded and released Along the Way, the hour-long Tiding III, and the playful Active Imagination EP, plus three reissues of earlier material. He just moved to Los Angeles with the hope of being more productive. McGuire lives, it seems, to make music. Indeed, McGuire’s individual work has often bridged his instrumental virtuosity with a charming Midwestern sweetness, creating a personal workspace of skill and sentimentality. His records have often felt like momentary cocoons of memories, realms in which to get lost and simply ponder one’s existence. The explosive “Brothers (for Matt)” closed 2010’s Living with Yourself. It opened with a cassette recording of Mark and younger brother Matt hanging out with their father as children before launched into ecstatic instrumental rock and ending with a tender reverie for acoustic guitar and windswept electronics. The Sounds of Xmas, a private Christmas collection initially intended only for friends and family, let gently crisscrossing guitars twinkle beneath home recordings of seasonal memories. Even when it’s 60 and sunny outside, it’s a fully operational time machine into childhood. Along the Way is an apogee of this dual approach to music. Again, McGuire cuts moments of his past, such as a tape recording of a “roast” of his father by friends from 1989, into complex musical webs. McGuire wrote, played, and produced everything here, stepping beyond his usual guitar tessellations to add keyboards and mandolin, drum machines and hand drums, vocals and noise. It is a meticulous solo rendering of a full band’s effort—and deservedly so, as Along the Way work as much as an empirical field guide for life as it does a mere album. In addition to the 13-track, 68-minute set, McGuire includes a nearly 8,000-word series of lyrics, essays, and acknowledgements that position this music as a sonic parable. “This is the story that turns in the heart of all mankind,” he writes, “the quest of the individual seeking the answers to the great mysteries of life.” The text follows a character from birth into the confusion of adolescence and the worry of young adulthood, where he realizes that the institutions of the world are gaining purchase of his ideas, honesty, and expression. The hero eventually ascends to “The Palace of Self”, hoping he (McGuire favors the male pronoun, perhaps as a matter of autobiographical self-reflection) might overcome those obstacles and wait for others to join. That story is the guiding force behind the album, as McGuire turns his prose into elliptical poetry that he coos like a phantom throughout the record. Accompanied as it is by a philosophical treatise and song-by-song pontification, Along the Way runs the risk of seeming didactic. When your liner notes include sagas divided into parts divided into Romanized subsections and phrases such as “psychic predators,” “interpersonal chaos,” and “the magic underlying life,” the ideals undergirding the music threaten to overrun the music itself. Certainly, Along the Way bends somewhat to the will of the narrative its notes espouse: Opener “The Awakening” feels like a sunrise, and closer “Turiya (The Same Way)” suggests a Ratatat-ready celebration of what’s been learned. The 12-minute “The Instinct” unfurls a rather literal rendering of its accompanying drama. “The individual does not flinch, and rides right into the heart of the beast,” writes McGuire of his hero, who has emerged from his own Plato’s Cave, prepared to lash away the world’s constraints. The music suggests every Rocky training montage ever, collectively soundtracked by Manuel Göttsching’s E2–E4. And both “The Human Condition (Song for My Father)” and “For the Friendships (Along the Way)” include not just long cassette recordings of the characters their titles name but also enough major chords, incandescent harmonies, and bounding rhythms to convey the character’s slow, hopeful evolution. When the text says smile, Along the Way absolutely beams. McGuire, however, seems too concerned with personal transcendence to closely follow the tale he outlines, especially when it involves existential anxiety or despair. Just before the record’s midpoint, for instance, the protagonist realizes that religion is a lie, that power systems are evil, and that his wisdom is inherited—essentially, he goes to a liberal arts college, discovers the bottom end of a bowl, and drops out to find himself. Aside from gobs of distorted bass and chord patterns that don’t always resolve, though, the supposedly troubled portions of the narrative still sound hopeful, as though McGuire’s chosen one knows enough to push ahead. For all the darkness McGuire suggests, he rarely pulls it into the sounds. That’s something of an easy way out, right, softening the story until the album feels more like a breezy mixtape than a document of personal crisis? It’s not exactly what Beethoven would have done. But both on the page and in speakers, Along the Way demands a certain suspension of cynicism or, perhaps more exactly, a willingness to accept the world the way someone else has come to see it. The same new-age principles that drip through McGuire’s passionately constructed sentences and gently rendered lyrics ripple through the music, too—those neon-green guitar lines and Sunday morning piano themes, arms-outstretched synthesizer lines and B-movie action sequence drums. It’s earnest enough to be called goofy, a vacuum of irony that revels in what McGuire might kabel “the possibility of an endless string of opportunities and destinations.” That guru-like sense of wonder might push some away, especially those interested in the dexterous marathons McGuire made with Emeralds or under his own name. There’s no chest-puffing here, no braggadocio; this is only the very sincere statement of a person doing his best to work through the worries of living and share any delight he’s stumbled upon along the way.

2014-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic / Rock / Experimental

Dead Oceans

February 6, 2014

00c40705-4c37-46e1-ba0b-9b2edb24be8c

Grayson Haver Currin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/

The Shaggs' Philosophy of the World became an enduring classic for its beguiling amateurism. But in its 2016 reissue, it's easier to hear the darkness and sadness behind the Wiggin sisters' story.

The Shaggs' Philosophy of the World became an enduring classic for its beguiling amateurism. But in its 2016 reissue, it's easier to hear the darkness and sadness behind the Wiggin sisters' story.

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22404-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/

Philosophy of the World

The Wiggin family of Fremont, New Hampshire were an all-American bunch. Father Austin Wiggin Jr. and Mother Annie were blessed with a lovely brood of six: Two boys, Robert and Austin III, and four daughters, Dorothy (Dot), Betty, Helen, and Rachel. However, in Austin’s eyes, his traditional-seeming clan was anything but—their existence was actually a case of cosmic circumstance. When Austin was a young child, his palmistry-practicing mother predicted that he would marry a strawberry blonde woman, have two sons after she died, and that his daughters would form a successful music group. Having witnessed the first two prophecies come true, Austin decided to give his preordained fate a little push. In the mid-1960s he pulled his three eldest teenage daughters, Dot, Betty, and Helen, out of school, equipped them with guitars and drums, and dubbed them the Shaggs. Though Austin had no real musical experience, he took quite naturally to the role of a Svengali-type manager. He demanded that the Shaggs practice all day in the family basement: While he was at work, when he came home, after dinner, and occasionally before bed (sometimes, this pre-bedtime practice was replaced by calisthenics). The Shaggs would play a song over and over and over again, until Austin deemed it perfect (or as close to the level of perfection an untrained group could reach). As Dot later explained in Songs in the Key of Z, “He directed. We obeyed. Or did our best.” Wanting to get the girls while their sound was “hot,” in 1969 after about five years of practice, Austin dragged the Shaggs to Fleetwood studio in Revere, Massachusetts, to record their first album, Philosophy of the World. “Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options,” Half Japanese’s David Fair writes in his brief manifesto “How to Play Guitar.” “If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.” Even though they barely learned any chords, it seems safe to say that even after countless hours of practice the Shaggs never mastered their instruments. But the essence of *Philosophy of the World *lies within Fair’s words: that technical limitations can equal musical freedom. By all accounts, the Wiggin sisters’ voices are painful—not nails-on-a-chalkboard unlistenable, but bizarre, like hearing early Animal Collective for the first time. Dot and Betty’s guitars are cheap and off-key. Helen’s drums have no consistency and jump from rumbling rolls to soft and stuttering taps for no apparent reason. The Shaggs are literally the sound of teenagers without any real training who are suddenly tasked with creating pop tunes. “It just came out of my head,” Dot explains in the reissue’s liner notes. “When I wrote the lyrics, I already had the way the song was supposed to be, the tune of it, so then I matched the melody with words and then chords with melody.” As such, the guitars follow the warbling vocals note-for-note, and since each accented word receives its own unique pitch, the plucking is acrobatic and difficult to follow. Rarely is there a moment on Philosophy of the World that feels cohesive. Yet, even though each sister moves at her own tempo, somehow the structure never falls apart. There’s something intriguing about the noises the Shaggs create and the way they become catchy; chaos is negated in the same way that after enough contemplation the violent splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting become calming. As the voice of the band, Dot wrote about the things she knew, the life her sisters lived, the world they dreamed of discovering. The Philosophy of the Shaggs, as explained via the chorus of the album’s self-titled opener (“you can never please anybody in this world”) is one of moxie, faith, and pragmatic emotional compromise. While the longings of other girl groups of the late 1960s were also marked by melancholy, an unsettling sense of darkness permeates the Shaggs’ songs, especially when one considers the forceful conditions under which they were created. Perhaps if the same lyrics were Spectorized and accompanied by some claps or twinkly piano they would come off as less nervous. But instead, the combination of the Shaggs’ creaky chords, jumpy vocals, and irregular melodies ring an alarm that something is off. Take “Who Are Parents,” a creepy call-and-response ditty about the righteousness of guardians, the ones who really care, the ones who are always there. “Some kids think their parents are cruel/Just because they want them to obey certain rules,” Dot sings, sternly beseeching other youths to stick to their morals. “Then they start to lean from the ones who really care/Turning, turning from the ones who will always be there.” “Who Are Parents” fails as a family anthem and instead is a haunting example of the pressure and fear Austin instilled in his daughters. Most of the Shaggs’ lyrics reflect their strict upbringing and ensuing social anxiety. On “I’m So Happy When You’re Near,” Dot and Betty unite to sing about the sadness that arrives when the song’s subject departs. In between verses, the Shaggs’ countless hours of practice truly shine with some intricate guitar work. Shortly after, “Sweet Thing” delivers a tale of woe and is perhaps the strongest display of anger the Wiggin sisters  muster. “You used to make me happy/Now you make me sad/You’ve told me many lies/I’ve never told you one,” Dot points out in the same, even voice used throughout the record, even though she’s sharing a deep moment of betrayal. The pain truly shines when Betty squawks “Hurt you, hurt you,” like a stuck toy. Out-of-tune, sharp moments like these could be overlooked as amateur, but they are really the rare occasions when fervor seeps out. The Shaggs’ introspection is best explored on “Things I Wonder” and “Why Do I Feel?.” The former slogs along with the simple chorus “There are many things I wonder/There are many things I don’t/It seems as though the things I wonder the most/Are the things I never find out.” Even from reading those words in your head, they are so clearly jumbled, so unbalanced. Beneath Dot and Betty’s stiff, severely accented vocals, Helen’s drums rumble and clang. Yet these elements are so unchanging that “Things I Wonder” becomes hypnotic. “Why Do I Feel?” is less repetitive and rather than just discussing the unknown, the Shaggs seem to be truly wondering. “Why do I feel the way I feel?,” they ask, drawing out each word with longing. “My Pal Foot Foot” has become a Shaggs anthem of sorts: a drawing of the legendary cat adorned the cover of a 1988 compilation album as well as many arms and legs of ardent fans. Their clumsy search for a roaming cat sounds like it is being delivered at the edge of a cliff. “Foot Foot…,” one of the sisters nervously murmurs. It’s sing-songingly charming in the way that nursery rhymes are until you realize the dark underlying message. All of this considered, there are perhaps only two purely innocent songs on Philosophy of the World, the radio-worshipping  “My Companion” and “It’s Halloween.” “It’s Halloween” and its talk of ghouls seemingly could have been sung by the Peanuts gang three years earlier in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” When Austin died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1975, the Shaggs immediately disbanded and resumed normal lives, working blue-collar jobs and starting families. “We figured when we ended it and we went on with our own lives, that that was the end of it,” recalls Dot. “That was one life, and now another.” But destiny had other plans for the Wiggin girls, who had yet to become the popular group of their grandmother’s prophecy. Even though 900 of the 1000 copies of Philosophy of the World produced disappeared immediately, the record managed to fall into the hands of influential obscure music fans who were drawn to discordant sounds produced by three sisters from New Hampshire. By 1980, new fans were introduced to Philosophy of the World thanks to a reissue campaign led by the band NRBQ. The Shaggs were quickly embraced by the exact opposite audience Austin desired: the longhaired avant-garde intellectuals. Listeners were amazed by this music that seemed ahead of its time, and totally different than what one might expect if they handed three teenage girls instruments with little instruction. The Shaggs pre-dated the trend of making music that sounds untrained; they probably would have hated Beat Happening. “I don’t know anything about music,” Captain Beefheart told Lester Bangs in 1980. But the big difference between Beefheart and the Shaggs comes down to intention. Whereas Don Van Vliet was improvising and experimenting, the Shaggs were simply surviving. On top of the musical strangeness, there are the universal sentiments that the Wiggin girls capture, their juvenile dreams and desires illustrated as intimate. Big ideas become small and accessible in their voices: Don’t you remember when you felt scared, sad, or alone? So do the Shaggs, and it’s comforting to relate. Kurt Cobain called Philosophy of the World one of the top five records of all time—what did he hear in the Shaggs? Perhaps he was entranced by what he saw as raw innocence. But in truth, contemporary listeners and critics will never identify with the Shaggs because their words are not for us. Since Philosophy of the World became a cult classic in the ’70s and ’80s, critics have been quick to label the Shaggs as outsider musicians. But if the outsider music genre is meant to be the logical counterpart to outsider art, the Shaggs do not quite qualify. Yes, their bumpy music pays no attention to conventional practices, yes, by all means they are amateur. But they had certainly heard mainstream music like Herman’s Hermits and sources differ on whether or not they received music lessons. Outsider art, and therefore music, is meant to come from an undisturbed place. “Here we are witness to the artistic operation in its pristine form, something unadulterated, something reinvented from scratch at all stages by its maker, who draws solely upon his private impulses,” said Art Brut founder Jean Dubuffet. The Shaggs were forced to make music by a father who physically removed them from school. While the Shaggs may have been expressing genuine emotions, it was not of their free will. “It’s just something we had to do,” one sister recalls in an interview with the BBC. One might consider the anecdote that the Shaggs would occasionally sneak away from practice to a nearby lake and then rush home as if they had been rehearsing. Calling them outsiders negates the trauma that is deeply rooted within their music. Austin emphasized over and over how “pure” the Shaggs were, how they were “unaffected by outside influences.” But their purity is that of claustrophobia. Outsider artists are expected to possess a degree of unconsciousness that acts as a path into the profound psyche. But the Wiggin sisters were self-conscious teenagers. Their peers tossed soda cans at them. Even though Dot’s lyrics clearly come from a significant place within (her adolescent anxieties) the difference is that of writing a daily journal to share with a classroom of peers versus writing a diary entry before bed. If new or old fans wish to experience a pure version of the Shaggs, check out 1982’s Shaggs’ Own Thing, a collection of unreleased recordings and covers. Shaggs’ Own Thing finds the Wiggin girls to be playful and free of anxiety, perhaps because there’s no clear-cut purpose behind the recordings. The covers (which include versions of the Carpenters) are faithful, graceful even. It’s a drastic shift from Philosophy, which comes off as even more abrasive and awkward in comparison. But Philosophy of the World is the realest version of the Shaggs, flaws and force in full-view. A teenage symphony this is not.

2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Light in the Attic

October 14, 2016

00c56a5a-2db0-40eb-8369-ac7ead515675

Quinn Moreland

https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/

The spectacular Red transformed pop and country music around it. It remains the pinnacle of Taylor Swift’s career, an intimate album of disappearances and lost relationships.

The spectacular Red transformed pop and country music around it. It remains the pinnacle of Taylor Swift’s career, an intimate album of disappearances and lost relationships.

Taylor Swift: Red

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-red/

Red

In early 2012, Taylor Swift turned in 20 songs to her label for what would become her fourth album, Red. They were all further outgrowths of the pop-country sound she had mastered in her early years, as a teenager finding her voice in the Nashville scene, trying on songs like “Tim McGraw” to reflect the starlight over Georgia and the allure and disappointment of romantic love through a lens that was unmistakably hers. As she amassed a body of work for Red, she was still writing songs about love and its fugitive presence, songs about relationships that swelled like an obsessive thought, songs that picked up and enhanced the smallest pixels of intimate detail as if they were scanning security footage in a crime procedural. When she strummed a chord, it shimmered and just hung there. It sounded like Swift, an organic progression from her previous records. Looking at the albums that followed Red, it’s obvious Swift longed for the inorganic, to send her songs through the distortions of modern pop and see what kind of genetically-scrambled horror would come back. You can hear it immediately in the first song she wrote in collaboration with pop gurus Max Martin and Shellback, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—a mutation is happening. A chord thrums from an acoustic guitar which then turns inside out as it plays, as if caught in the neck of a vacuum. It didn’t sound like the old Taylor Swift, the one who wrote 20 new Taylor Swift songs for a new Taylor Swift album. It sounded like a new version of her, being fitfully born. Swift was trying to push her music outside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between pop and country. Pop was just beginning to mingle its DNA with EDM; dubstep, a once varied and relatively new branch of dance music, had been reduced to the stomach-flip of the drop just as its popularity in America crested. Martin and Shellback were aware of these shifts in pop’s geography; they incorporated many of them into Femme Fatale, the Britney Spears album from the previous year. One of the other Swift/Martin/Shellback collaborations on Red, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” starts as a pop-rock song but its edges mimic the queasy wobble of dubstep. Synths scream behind Swift’s voice like mechanical saws. It was as if she had finally found a musical backdrop sharp as her lyrics—the lakes and backroads of Tennessee and Georgia disappear, replaced with formations of jagged crystal, a perfect environment for a song about falling in love with someone you know will hurt you and leave you feeling empty as a canyon. Red is an album of disappearances, of things that have gone or are just about to go missing—lost relationships, old sounds, previous Taylor Swifts, each photographed just as they’re receding out of frame. Even on the album cover, Swift is partially disappeared, her downcast eyes swallowed by a lip of shadow falling from a wide-brimmed hat. It’s her somewhat obvious way of referencing the front cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, where a photograph of Mitchell’s face is submerged in a blue-black lake of shadow. Red is also the first record where Swift directly echoes Mitchell’s writing, a once potential and hazy inspiration now coming into view. In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a newfound patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity. Many of Swift’s earlier, fantasy-driven songs, like “Love Story” and “Mine,” end neatly; both resolved with marriage. But real stories have a way of ending in places uneasy and uncertain, and what seemed to be the most enduring relationships splinter off into loose ends and glass shards. Swift knew this; she described Red in Billboard as being about “all the different ways that you have to say goodbye to someone.… Every different kind of missing someone, every kind of loss—it all sounds different to me.” So she sought out different producers and collaborators to give shape to these kinds of missing. She wanted the drum sounds that Jeff Bhasker brought to Fun.’s 2012 pop album Some Nights, hushed, cottony throbs that sound cobwebbed over. They bloom beneath the skin of “Holy Ground,” a song where Swift discovers a brief connection so glowing and true that she skips over the end of the relationship because it’s not important: “And I guess we fell apart in the usual way/And the story’s got dust on every page.” “Treacherous,” which she co-wrote with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, initially sounds like an old Taylor Swift song, but it deepens over time like none of her songs before or since, a masterclass in dynamics from arrangement to lyric. It starts off relatively motionless, frozen in time by all the tension in Swift’s voice, as if by keeping absolutely still she might not fall for the song’s subject. Then the guitars and drums melt into dark, wet echoes like pelting raindrops, as Swift’s focus narrows toward a driveway in the distance: “Two headlights shine through the sleepless night/And I will get you alone.” Even the songs she recorded with Nathan Chapman, the producer of her first three records and the initial 20 songs she turned in for Red, are expanding, sometimes sounding like a bloom of sound from an empty arena. On opener “State of Grace,” guitars chime like sonar, as if trying to measure the diameter of Swift’s feelings: the early blushes of a relationship, when you seem to recognize something in someone else that you’re not certain anyone else has seen. “We are alone/Just you and me/Up in your room and our slates are clean,” she sings, wiring images into a lattice of memory, “Just twin fire signs/Four blue eyes.” If Red holds together at all as it rockets through hybrid genres, it’s in the attentive way Swift dwells on memory and loss and the effect of time on both. In the liner notes, Swift borrows a quote from a Pablo Neruda poem—“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”—and, accordingly, the songs on Red stretch to the length of their forgetting. “Sad Beautiful Tragic” sways like a slowcore desert mirage, a Taylor Swift song on the verge of signing to 4AD. “Time is taking its sweet time erasing you,” she sings, while the music simulates that stuttered crawl of days after a breakup, a soft melt of chords that make seconds feel like hours. “Time won’t fly/It’s like I’m paralyzed by it,” Swift sings in “All Too Well,” the centerpiece of Red and potentially her entire career. It might be her own “Tangled Up in Blue”; like Bob Dylan, she sweeps up drifts of time into loosely-chronological piles of images. “There we are again in the middle of the night,” Swift sings, “We dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” The tenderness with which she observes this moment of intimacy makes it come to life; she reanimates a feeling instead of reacting to it, exploring all the howling negative space a person leaves behind when their shadow recedes—the things you talked about, the kinds of attention you gave each other, the arguments you had, the rooms where you held onto each other desperately. A kind of Chekhov’s Scarf that Swift sheds in the first verse reappears in the final verse (“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week/’Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”) as a metaphor for the continuity of their connection, how feelings persist long after they’ve lost their use. Nothing dies without leaving some trace of itself, she seems to say throughout the length of Red, and in “All Too Well” she becomes one of those traces—“I was there,” she sings in the chorus. “I remember it all too well.” Swift, like anyone, is a hostage to her own experience, but she’s also capable of being a witness to it, able to see a relationship—even as it shrinks further and further away in her vision—for what it was rather than what it couldn’t be.

2019-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Big Machine

August 19, 2019

00c88520-dd5d-4294-8f85-d3b4851dba50

Ivy Nelson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/

Brooklyn emcees Elucid and Billy Woods’ third album as Armand Hammer is a stellar underground hip-hop record. They are radical and full of heart, delivering cocksure homilies from the margins of rap.

Brooklyn emcees Elucid and Billy Woods’ third album as Armand Hammer is a stellar underground hip-hop record. They are radical and full of heart, delivering cocksure homilies from the margins of rap.

Armand Hammer: ROME

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/armand-hammer-rome/

ROME

Stratify today’s hip-hop scene in broad terms and you’ll find a commercial crop of reality TV graduates and Soundcloud poster boys mirrored by a huddled mass of hardscrabble rappers making up an oversized underground. The New York-based Billy Woods and Elucid, who form together as Armand Hammer, are often plotted as part of their city’s underground—but for ROME, which follows 2013’s Race Music and 2014’s Furtive Movements, the two emcees have delved deeper and burrowed further into the leftfield, carving out a shadowy nook that not only shuns the commercial trappings of the mainstream but also moves on from the boom-bap theology that can plague these kinds of records. ROME sounds like two outcast preachers delivering cocksure homilies from the duskiest hip-hop margins, a siren call from the subterranean. Geographically, Billy Woods and Elucid ready their work in Brooklyn. Elucid crafts music in “a proudly-crumbling East New York brownstone” situated in an area he says is the borough’s last holdout from gentrification. Woods, who ran with Vordul Mega of indie rap heroes Cannibal Ox in the early-2000s, is based in Bushwick where he writes rhymes inspired by the rugged facade of New York City culture. This grounding anchors Armand Hammer’s music. On “Tread Lightly,” Woods swaggers into action like the unofficial mayor of his block. “Words stolen from neighbors in bodegas when I cop my paper,” he announces. “Now you know where I got my flavor.” Across social media and press photos, Woods hides his face. His lyrics express a healthy distrust of the world that sometimes bleeds into paranoia. He barks with a punk attitude. “Microdose,” which features a guest verse from Quelle Chris, captures Woods in full force. Time-traveling through war-torn worlds while weaving in personal history via street-cosigned walkie-talkie, he spits, “Gonna need both those barrels, kid/Nextel chirp/My ancestors: ‘You’re gonna need more than bows and arrows, ya dig?’” Woods’s impactful style combines smartly with Elucid’s flow, which has a beguiling serpentine quality to it. As an emcee, his words seethe and coil around the beats. Raised in a religious household, he balances scriptural imagery with political commentary. “Made a bed of black orchids in the Leviathan’s fortress/It’s 2017 and Flint still ain’t got clean water,” he vents on the percussion-heavy “It Was Written.” Over the low-slung gumbo of Messiah Musik’s “Dead Money,” he throws out a call to arms: “Built to destroy, not self-destruct/There’s a time and place to not give a fuck/Right now seems so critical/I wanna see everyone who’s been made invisible.” Befitting its protagonist’s words, ROME is an unapologetically heavy listen. It can batter the brain as densely-packed lyrics fly forth, especially during the album’s mid-section where the production escalates into a cacophonous funk on “Shammgod,” a track that announces itself with screeching siren-like synths and is produced by Anti-pop Consortium’s High Priest. Throughout ROME, light relief comes only in the form of sardonic quips like on “Dead Money” where Woods shrugs, “If God made the world, motherfucker was wearing gloves.” But hold on for the ride and ROME successfully settles into a gentle ending. Just like Ka and DJ Preservation’s Days With Dr. Len Yo experiment from 2015—or parts of MIKE’s May God Bless Your Hustle from earlier this year—the closing trio of songs dispel the charge that so much underground New York City hip-hop apes ‘90s production styles; instead, atmospheric tones and sonic ticks are used to give tracks rhythm and momentum. The second half of “Pergamum” marries Woods’ voice to a rustling bed of static; “Barbarians” dissolves Elucid’s vocals into a slurry of fractured ambience. The closing cut, “Overseas (Epilogue),” has Woods imploring someone lay him to rest out at sea while playing Thug Life’s “Bury Me a G,” with his sentiments backed by a haunting saxophone riff and crystalline wind chimes. It’s serene and it’s powerful—it’s the sound of being beneath the underground.

2017-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Backwoodz Studioz

November 13, 2017

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Phillip Mlynar

https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/

Durk’s first studio album since signing to Def Jam has the spectre of death looming over it at all times. While it isn’t going to change lives, it is a view into the psyche of those who reframe the concept of death as a way of life, a cost of doing business, or even a source of motivation to create a better life for yourself and those you care about.

Durk’s first studio album since signing to Def Jam has the spectre of death looming over it at all times. While it isn’t going to change lives, it is a view into the psyche of those who reframe the concept of death as a way of life, a cost of doing business, or even a source of motivation to create a better life for yourself and those you care about.

Lil Durk: Remember My Name

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20564-remember-my-name/

Remember My Name

Deonte Hoard. Giovanni Matos. Savon Davis. Jennifer Ponton. Amari Sutton. Nicole M. Towns. Javante Linson. Terrell Campbell. Anthony Diaz. Uchenna Agina. These are a few of the 150-plus people killed by gun violence in Chicago so far in 2015. All of these names (and the ones I don’t have the space to list) are important, but for 22-year-old Durk "Lil Durk" Banks the last name hits incredibly close to home. Agina (better known as OTF Chino) was Durk’s manager, a confidante who was, in a cruel sense of irony, murdered after meeting with Bulls player Joakim Noah in an attempt to partner Durk with the latter’s anti-violence organization. It’s doubly frustrating given Durk’s affiliation with French Montana’s Coke Boys imprint, which recently suffered the loss of rising member Chinx Drugz. Durk’s first studio album (he’s released 5 mixtapes overall) since signing to Def Jam back during the Great Chicago Rap Gold Rush a few years back, Remember My Name, is a project that has the spectre of death looming over it at all times. A common criticism of Durk’s music revolves around his near-total dependency on Auto-Tune. He’s aware of the charge, addressing it on "What Your Life Like". The software is Durk’s friend when he adopts a singing delivery, like on single "Like Me". The tune showcases Durk (and featured crooner/fellow Chicagoan Jeremih) in his lane fully, producing a smooth entry into the pantheon of Sensitive Thug jams. Other times, like on the absolutely grating "Tryna' Tryna'" or when he tries to feebly hit high notes during the chorus on, uh, "Higher" it can be his worst enemy. Luckily, the highs outweigh the lows. It’s apparent after a few listens that Durk is only getting better, from both a rapping and writing perspective. He’s definitely grown from his earlier mixtapes (he sounds like a different person entirely than the one who once rapped "Yo' bitch know she doin' dick, we call that ho double D." Growth! Progression! Artist Development!). It’s apparent that Durk has a solid ear for production and a nascent ability to craft songs that get caught in your ear. The C-Sick-produced opener "500 Homicides" is a thunderous intro that finds Durk viciously addressing enemies, shouting out his affiliates and reminding folks that there are repercussions of your online actions. "What’s up with this Twitter beef?/ Thought we was keeping in the streets?.../ Hell yeah, you can die over a retweet!" Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives. It is, however, a view into the psyche of those who reframe the concept of death as a way of life, a cost of doing business, or even a source of motivation to create a better life for yourself and those you care about. On the album standout "What Your Life Like", Durk laments, "They say the murder started after L’s/ Now my phone got shit to tell... /Got that call, they cancelled 20 shows/ That's money down the drain/ I got kids, don't take it wrong." The moment underlines a curious tension for Durk and the other artists in his orbit. The culture of the neighborhoods that produced Durk, his OTF (Only The Family) affiliates and the rest of the various artists who find their sounds lazily lumped together under the name "drill music" find themselves in a weird catch-22. You rap about the stuff you’re seeing (and participating in, for some) and you’re rewarded with money, fame and the opportunity to make your life better. At the same time, you’re branded as "trouble" by promoters, your profile is raised among the police and old enemies, and you’re forced to go on the defensive. The thing that might make your life better might be the same thing that ends up killing you. What in the hell are you supposed to do? On Remember My Name, Durk chooses to keep on keepin’ on.

2015-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00

2015-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam

June 2, 2015

00cb5625-1988-49c3-818c-93261d6b428b

Ernest Wilkins

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ernest-wilkins/

These landmark albums have been remastered and reissued in 2xCD sets, accompanied by period bonus tracks, instrumentals, and remixes. They remain encouraging reminders of what a hip-hop album can be to the world.

These landmark albums have been remastered and reissued in 2xCD sets, accompanied by period bonus tracks, instrumentals, and remixes. They remain encouraging reminders of what a hip-hop album can be to the world.

Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back/Fear of a Black Planet

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19997-public-enemy-it-takes-a-nation-of-millions-to-hold-us-backfear-of-a-black-planet/

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back/Fear of a Black Planet

Roosevelt, New York is a beautiful social experiment gone awry. As post-war urban renewal squeezed black families into towering inner-city housing developments and whites out into their sprawling suburbs, this hamlet near the south end of western Long Island’s Queens bordering Nassau County served as a template for suburban integration. Blacks and whites cohabited there for years until real estate agents’ racist scare tactics pushed white families to sell at a loss and funneled new black ones into the same homes at inflated prices. The city’s methodical transformation would have a profound effect on Nassau local Carlton Ridenhour, better known as Chuck D. On the short trip from home to nearby Adelphi University, where he studied graphic design, Chuck could watch the soft segregated lower-middle-class black community of Roosevelt give way to golf and country clubs for the affluent, predominantly white Garden City, home to Adelphi and a pair of prestigious prep schools. First-hand experience of racialized contempt, along with a rich education from civil rights activist parents, sparked a righteous ire in Chuck that would burn hot and bright in the following years. Public Enemy formed around Chuck’s gig at Adelphi’s student radio station, gaining momentum as he and his friends’ forays into rap music grew increasingly accomplished. Their squelching, skeletal “Public Enemy No. 1” won a fan in Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin, kicking off a lengthy courtship of Chuck, sidekick Flavor Flav, DJ Terminator X and producers Hank Shocklee and Eric Sadler. Two years later, the group caved and signed with the label. A debut album (1987’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show) and a package tour with Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J followed. The music was boldly gritty, if a touch late to the party, scooped by advances in landmark singles by Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. & Rakim released the same year. The live show was gripping, Chuck and Flav stalking the stage as “Minister of Information” Professor Griff cut in with searing political diatribes and the S1w’s, the group’s security detail, performed silent combat exercises with toy rifles in the background. It was black power theater. It shocked American audiences cold. Concerns about P.E.’s image and intent quickly arose: Were they gangsters? Terrorists? Separatists? Yo! stalled out around 400,000 units sold, a modest turnout in the wake of the Beastie Boys’ blockbuster Licensed to Ill, and Public Enemy entered into a contentious dance with the media that would precipitate their greatest successes and their darkest hardships. In retrospect, Yo! Bum Rush the Show was a blueprint. What came after it was the work of a well-rehearsed unit keenly aware of its purpose and capabilities. Released the following summer, Public Enemy’s sophomore album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was a brash refinement of the themes of Yo! and a jab at the jaws of detractors, high and low. “Bring the Noise” and “Don’t Believe the Hype” railed against the press, holding up the lurid sensationalism surrounding the group as a warning against trusting anything you read. “Caught, Can We Get a Witness?” is a nightmare where P.E. gets nabbed for sampling. (More on that later.) Nation teemed with a didactic social consciousness too. “She Watch Channel Zero?!” strikes out against junk television, while “Night of the Living Baseheads” addresses the crack epidemic, and “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” leads a draft-dodging conscientious objector through a vengeful jailbreak. Chuck’s booming ministerial baritone sparred with Flav’s piercing yawp in a masterful hero-and-sidekick interplay. The message couldn’t entice the masses without the levity; the levity was gimmicky without revolutionary grit giving it weight. Nation found a way to expound on the explosive soundscapes of the debut without exhausting listeners or cluttering the mix. Chuck, Sadler, and the Shocklee brothers’ production as the Bomb Squad was as thick as its source material was diverse; it was rap, soul, rock, funk and musique concrète all at once. “Most people were saying that rap music was noise,” Hank Shocklee told Rolling Stone in 1989, “and we decided, ‘If they think it’s noise, let’s show them noise.’” "She Watch Channel Zero?!" pulls its central riff from Slayer’s thrash classic “Angel of Death”. “Night of the Living Baseheads” outfits a stable of trusty James Brown samples with over a dozen assorted soul and rap tidbits and bridges, folding in elements of ESG’s “UFO” and David Bowie’s “Fame”. Snippets of legendary speeches from Jesse Jackson and Malcolm X and stage banter from Public Enemy’s successful European tour formed connective tissue between songs for a unified listening experience that only let up briefly in the middle and finally, at the end. The Bomb Squad built beats like ships in a bottle, delicately stitching tiny pieces of black history into layered blasts of sound. Public Enemy looked and sounded a fright to the uninitiated, but careful attention showed every piece of this black radical machine moving in perfect concert. Nation of Millions netted Public Enemy the elusive American audience and platinum sales their debut couldn’t, and it changed the face of rap music. The hip-hop landscape of ‘89-’90 was dotted with sample-heavy sons of Nation. Chuck sent early copies of the album out west to Dre and Ice Cube, and N.W.A.’s landmark Straight Outta Compton cropped up like a gangsta rap rejoinder to the Bomb Squad ethos. (Cube would later tap the team for production on his post-N.W.A. solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.) De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique added a playful, psychedelic charm to the proceedings. Nation’s message of black self-sufficiency resonated through the proudly Afrocentric art of A Tribe Called Quest, X Clan, Brand Nubian and more. Beyond the ’80s, the music of Nation of Millions would continue to find new life in unexpected places: Weezer’s 1996 comeback single “El Scorcho” nicked its “I’m the epitome of public enemy” barb from “Don’t Believe the Hype,” and Jay-Z’s 2006 post-retirement salvo “Show Me What You Got” is a nod to Nation’s “Show ‘Em Whatcha Got.” (Without Public Enemy we don’t get Kanye West; in addition to sampling the Long Island legends liberally, Kanye inherited a bit of his fearless politics and kitchen sink beat construction from here.) Critics warmed to Public Enemy in the wake of It Takes a Nation of Millions but remained suspicious of their political affiliations. “If Farrakhan’s a prophet my dick’s bigger than Don Howland’s,” Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau quipped in a year-end roundup, “but that doesn’t make Nation of Millions anything less than the bravest and most righteous experimental pop of the decade.” Others would be less warm as Professor Griff’s incendiary ethics began to strike sour notes. He publicly accused white America of bestiality during a press-filled gig at Rikers Island in 1988 and voiced a shocking disdain for Jews and gays in various interviews overseas. In the spring of 1989, Washington Times scribe David Mills sat Griff down and coaxed out a rant charged with cold, ugly hate speech that would quickly torch the group’s reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Privately, Chuck struggled with how to respond to the controversy. At first, he stood by Griff, then he announced Griff’s expulsion from the group, then, amid a growing media firestorm, he disbanded Public Enemy entirely. The hiatus was short-lived. Spike Lee’s blistering racial relations passion play Do the Right Thing debuted a week after the firestorm with a new Public Enemy song as its theme. “Fight the Power” summarized the mood of both the film and the climate it was released into. It telegraphed the tense discomfort of a New York summer where innocent youth from Central Park to Bensonhurst would pay the ultimate price for being black in the wrong place at the wrong time. By July, the seemingly inactive group had a #1 Billboard rap single, and work was quietly underway on a Nation of Millions follow-up. Fear of a Black Planet from 1990 made kindling of the previous summer’s anti-Public Enemy sentiment, quoting the group’s biggest critics in interludes and ribbing them in the songs. “Contract on the World Love Jam” weaves negative news reports into a scene-setting intro; later “Incident at 66.6 FM” sets outraged calls from a Chuck D squareoff with New York political radio host Alan Colmes over sedate keys and drums, playing the grumps for squares without even responding to their charges. A late album Terminator X showcase snarkily titled “Leave This Off Your Fuckin Charts” is a tenacious dare. Elsewhere, Fear pulls the camera off P.E. to speak to community issues. “Anti-Nigger Machine” and “Who Stole the Soul?” levied heavy accusations of censorship while “911 Is a Joke” explored black community police mistrust and “Fear of a Black Planet” tackled apprehension about interracial dating. Sourcing Public Enemy’s media struggles back to age-old racial strife was a brash, heavy-handed play, but Fear’s genius trick was coating its righteous rage in music that aimed to groove where earlier songs seemed to want to maim. Fear of a Black Planet finds the Bomb Squad at the height of their powers, assembling deeply intricate grooves out of infinitesimal building blocks. “Pollywannacracka” cycles through a breakneck array of sounds inside of its first 10 seconds and modulates between spacious verses and a jam-packed chorus, bubbling into bedlam whenever Chuck stops rapping. “Fight the Power” manages to cram over a dozen different samples into five minutes of shockingly smooth funk. What sets these songs apart from the last batch is that their structure was often as varied as their list of ingredients. They didn’t just modulate between similar verses and choruses. These compositions breathed, moved, changed from one refrain to the next, from one second to the next. A new sound showed face on every listen. Fear of a Black Planet deftly stated the case for hip-hop as savvy collage art rather than pastiche. Sure, they borrowed liberally from pre-existing music, but these patchwork symphonies bore scant resemblance to their source material. It should be noted that none of this can ever happen again. Biz Markie was sued over an unauthorized sample in 1991, and the judge’s ruling required future producers to seek the original artist’s clearance before incorporating a sample into a new composition. Overnight it became forbiddingly difficult and expensive to incorporate even a handful of samples into a new beat. The nightmare of “Caught, Can We Get a Witness?” had become the hard reality. Producers scaled back their creations, often augmenting one choice groove with a bevy of instrumental embellishments. This is how we arrive at the lush live band pomp of West Coast G-funk, the cold synthetics of early 2000s East Coast rap, and the gothic textures of Southern crunk and trap. The early Public Enemy masterpieces remain unique and inimitable now, relics of a world irreparably changed though in a few notable ways, very much the same. The strife that birthed Nation of Millions and Black Planet is mirrored in some of the upheaval of 2014. The business of hip-hop has changed, as free mixtapes have supplanted retail albums as the chief method of kicking off a rap career. Artistic freedom can evaporate at the drop of a gavel. (see: Lord Finesse’s pursuit of Mac Miller for borrowing a beat on a free release.) Hip-hop has again had its political mettle tested by social injustices too systemic to deny. Returning to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet for these just-released reissues is an encouraging reminder of what a hip-hop album can be to the world, a peek back at that one time a rap act pissed square into the mouth of adversity and came away unscathed. Hear the drummer get wicked.

2014-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

November 25, 2014

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Craig Jenkins

https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/

Promising hip-hop star hits #1 with a compromised and creatively limp record. Thanks, major-label record industry.

Promising hip-hop star hits #1 with a compromised and creatively limp record. Thanks, major-label record industry.

B.o.B: The Adventures of Bobby Ray

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14242-the-adventures-of-bobby-ray/

The Adventures of Bobby Ray

B.o.B began griping about the trials of fame long before he had any. "They say that I'm changing/ Cuz I'm gettin famous," went the chorus to 2008's "Fuck You", a bluesy lope of acoustic guitar and twangy harmonica that recalled vintage Dungeon Family. The logic was counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous, but the song itself was warm, fluid, and surprising. It was B.o.B in a nutshell: arrogant, self-aware, undeniably promising. The long road from that to The Adventures of Bobby Ray seems dominated by record execs who manicured, man-handled, and placated the rapper. They catered to all his worst instincts, and he gladly surrendered himself to theirs. The result should serve as a cautionary tale to all involved, except for one small detail: The Adventures of Bobby Ray was the No. 1 album in the country last week. To put that in perspective: Bobby Ray sold 84,000 copies. In 2003, when people still bought CDs, these numbers would have been embarrassing for a high-profile hip-hop debut, but in 2010, they are, apparently, victory-lap worthy. Atlantic invested time and effort into "grooming" B.o.B, and since record companies tend only to take notice when their pre-planned strategies pan out (ground-level phenomena like Gucci Mane tend to get dismissed as flukes), we can expect to see a lot more records patterned explicitly on The Adventures of Bobby Ray. And that's a truly depressing prospect. As a primer on what major label execs think they need to do to sell a rap record to a mass audience in 2010, Bobby Ray is a queasily fascinating document. As an actual album, it is wretched-- a dishearteningly generic and hollow product with no soul or demographic or viewpoint that arguably bottoms out three separate times. It turns out that the answer to the above question-- "What do major labels think it takes to sell rap albums in 2010?" -- is simple: hide the rapping. Bury it under dewy pianos and sensitive cooing; sugar-coat it with emo-pop choruses; tuck it behind compressed guitars. Basically put it anywhere listeners are least likely to notice it. This is a disturbing strategy to pursue, but it's particularly galling here; B.o.B is a fantastically gifted rapper, with an astonishing rhythmic command and a tricky, limber way with phrasing. On Bobby Ray he's reduced to a guest rapper on his own songs. Only three tracks feel even remotely connected to a rap aesthetic, and they are the best things here by a mile: "Bet I" finds him somersaulting joyfully around a juddering 808 kick, backed by an equally on-fire T.I. and Playboy Tre. "Fame" flips a sample of Canadian cheese rockers April Wine into a surprisingly funky horn loop, and "5th Dimension", despite a ludicrous yowled hook from Lenny Kravitz stand-in Rico Barrino that bites "Inner City Blues" and regrettable space-rock guitars, features some of B.o.B's most vivid rapping. The bulk of the record, though, is a undifferentiated mass of sticky-sweet modern-rock radio in which it's difficult to single out the lowest moment. Is it the air-conditioned sub-Coldplay crooning of Bruno Mars on "Nothin On You"? Bobby Ray's inexplicable decision to turn Vampire Weekend's "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance" into a Sublime song? Or the appearance by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, whose creepily blank vocals on "Magic" sound like the engineer has a gun to his head? B.o.B himself struggles to inject personality into the proceedings. In the lyrics to "Airplanes", a moody teen-pop melodrama with a chorus by Paramore's Hayley Williams, Bobby Ray pines, just like he did on "Fuck You", for simpler times. "Somebody take me back to the days/ Before this was a job, before I got paid," he asks, remembering, "back before I tried to cover up my slang." It's a brief acknowledgment of what he has had to give up to get here. The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.

2010-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00

2010-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00

Atlantic / Grand Hustle / Rebel Rock

May 13, 2010

00cbddf6-3d1c-473b-a9e5-48ecdbe5556d

Jayson Greene

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/

Two new reissues of the group’s early-1980s albums capture a band at the intersection of AOR and power pop for whom precision was everything.

Two new reissues of the group’s early-1980s albums capture a band at the intersection of AOR and power pop for whom precision was everything.

The Cars: Shake It Up / Heartbeat City

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-cars-shake-it-up-heartbeat-city/

Shake It Up / Heartbeat City

An anomic interzone at the nexus of disco and new wave, 1981 needed the Cars more than ever. While the hundreds of Steve Dahls working as programming directors stuck with ugly AOR bands, the Boston quintet had done their part to popularize carousel keyboards, blocky rhythms, and splashes of controlled guitar anarchy, as well as the affected vocals beloved by Anglophiles who regarded Roxy Music and Bowie as the church of man love. Exploiting the possibilities of FM radio, 1978’s The Cars and 1980’s Panorama offered songs as gleaming and formidable as a new Impala; hell, song titles like “Moving in Stereo” could’ve been taglines for Impala ads. In that pre-MTV era, the Cars were an ideal first vehicle—fleet and meaningless, sure, in Robert Christgau’s ambivalent judgment, but also educational, for their meaningless was the point. Remember: This was a time when Styx had to doll up romantic banalities with elephantine concepts like Kilroy Was Here. By contrast, singer-guitarist Ric Ocasek wrote hooky songs about girls on hoods: dumb but not stupid, sexist but not offensive. They were touring vets whose stunted idea of female sexuality—and men’s, too—resonated with their teenaged fans. Ensuring their popularity, the Cars bridged rock’s swelling boomer gerontocracy and the kids besotted with power pop. Those harmonies? A cyborgian distortion of 10cc and the Eagles. Elliot Easton’s riffs? The Edgar Winter Group might’ve played them. Thanks, again, to Rhino, fans can enjoy Shake It Up and 1984’s blockbuster Heartbeat City baited with demos and single remixes. For audiophiles, owning these uneven albums in crisper mixes than the boxy sound of the original CD releases will give them a sense of how the Cars moved in stereo; fans can follow how the band became pop stars with “Shake It Up” and Heartbeat City’s “Drive,” sung by bassist Benjamin Orr, often mistaken for Ocasek despite the prettier voice. Given the stature of, say, “Just What I Needed” and “Let’s Go” on album rock and oldies radio, it’s still a surprise to learn that the title track of Shake It Up became the Cars’ first top-10 hit in America, in early 1982. But not much else took (imagine a half-dozen variants on the debut’s “Don’t Cha Stop”) until, bizarrely, the ballad “I’m Not the One” appeared in remixed form on 1985’s Greatest Hits, and as a single. Shimmying Stone Age drum machines and Elliot Easton’s wistful sigh of a guitar bend, “I’m Not the One” is a study in paradox: Romantic melody and harmonies foil Ocasek’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”-style declarations and pinched delivery. The remainder of Shake It Up has the aura of contract fulfillment, a recovery of commercial momentum after the relative failure of 1980’s Panorama—a worthwhile follow-up to 1979’s Candy-O and the eponymous debut, and one of the steeliest albums ever to make the top 10. Shake It Up’s “A Dream Away” survives as a reminder of what was. Between these two albums, though, Ocasek released Beatitude, a crucial link between his day job and the more outré bands he produced. It deserves a listen for “Jimmy Jimmy,” a worried valentine to a teenager in the throes of sexual frustration and sexual confusion. Unreliant on curt intimations of un-weird sins, Ocasek’s lyrics for once tell a story. Drum machines thud. Synthesizers imitate the rattle of a foul industrial wind—the influence of Ocasek clients Suicide. Ocasek uses irony for poignancy: The more detached his performance, the more moving the scenario. He allows himself to use “We’re all in this together” as a refrain; coming from Ric fucking Ocasek, this is like hearing “God bless you and keep you” from Donald Trump. A promising dead end, “Jimmy Jimmy” influenced Heartbeat City insofar as it showed how to strip a song to its chassis. Ocasek and Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the latter applying the lacquered reproductions learned with Def Leppard’s Pyromania, did similar transformations. “The Cars” ceased to exist except as perfect sounds pounded out of Greg Hawkes’ Fairlight keyboard (David Robinson admitted he did little live drumming). The result is as subtle as a gas fire and as loud a thermonuclear explosion. A considerable hit that rode the top 10 for months in 1984, Heartbeat City is often forgotten as one of the year’s pop music touchstones. Like Billy Ocean’s Suddenly and the Pointer Sisters’ Break Out, it was a mini-Thriller: five singles, including three top 15s, all of which, to use industry palaver, dominated all the markets, especially MTV, where Ocasek’s gaunt ice-packed face joined the iconography of the era as surely as David Lee Roth’s mugging and Cyndi Lauper’s dancing. The moment when seemingly everyone in sixth grade saw the same videos had a marked effect on pop. Thanks to Thriller, record companies bled albums dry; thanks to MTV, the songs turned into aural accompaniment to videos, which made those songs flashier and hookier than anything in a generation. The rat-tat-tat keyboard hook of “You Might Think” complemented its animated antics, MTV’s first Video of the Year winner: Ocasek riding a jackhammer on model Susan Gallagher’s teeth, turning into a fly, into King Kong. Well, it was amusing for anyone who was 10. For “Magic,” dependent on Orr’s ethereal multi-tracked harmonies, Ocasek walked on pool water so shiny that David Hockney’s reproductions look like bogs. Andy Warhol made a cameo in “Hello Again.” Chic and as chewy as nougat, the Orr showcase “Drive,” a rewrite of “I’m Not the One,” became the Cars’ biggest hit; the Live Aid organizers used it to soundtrack footage of starving Ethiopian children, in a move that the archangel Gabriel will explain on the Day of Judgment. The title track inexplicably appeared on cassette and CD versions of the 1985 comp. As for the rest of Heartbeat City, return to the phrase “bled dry.” Discrete touches matter. “I Refuse,” for example, is reliant on Orr-Ocasek call-and-response vocals; “It’s Not the Night” boasts an unwelcome AOR rhythm-guitar chug. Better to regard Heartbeat City as a Lange palimpsest on which listeners can read the traces of subsequent productions. The massed “Hello”s that cold-open “Hello Again”? A first draft of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and the Corrs’ “Breathless.” Like Hall and Oates, the Cars barely made it past the first Reagan term—no one bought 1987’s Nice Price-rack perennial Door to Door. Better to end with a marvelous example of fleet meaninglessness: “Tonight She Comes,” their last top 10, recorded for the 1985 comp and included on the Heartbeat City reissue. Easton, for the most part cowed and quashed on the last album, unleashes a series of whammy-bar dives and soars that, set against Hawkes’ pastel synth interjections, a playful Ocasek vocal, and Orr-acular harmonies, demonstrated the salience of noise-annoys: A splatter looks great against a sparkling clean kitchen floor. Other than a solo hit single apiece for Ocasek and Orr in 1986 and 1987, that was that for the Cars; it’s if humankind could no longer bear so much precision. Ocasek would pack up his toys and produce the likes of Weezer, whose own adolescent fantasies were, shall we say, more inchoate than the ones Ocasek chose to share. Skip Shake It Up and Heartbeat City and you won’t miss much if you own the greatest hits, but students of pop understand: Those who don’t know their history are condemned to choke on the exhaust fumes of progress—or regression. It was hard to tell where the Cars stood.

2018-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

March 31, 2018

00cec206-8d0f-44e3-a77b-4ab47e2bd480

Alfred Soto

https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/

The Queens band Wives channel the bygone squalor of NYC’s Y2K rock renaissance.

The Queens band Wives channel the bygone squalor of NYC’s Y2K rock renaissance.

WIVES: So Removed

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wives-so-removed/

So Removed

Had they emerged 15 years ago, it’s easy to imagine the Queens band WIVES getting scooped up by RCA in the post-Strokes feeding frenzy and lingering on the fringes of the New York Y2K rock renaissance just long enough to collect a few saucy backstage anecdotes about Albert Hammond Jr. to share in Meet Me in the Bathroom. But seeing as the infrastructure to hype up post-punky garage bands has all but disappeared in 2019, this quartet are free to be as weird and wired as they want to be. By channelling the locomotive rumble of the Velvet Underground, the menacing, bass-driven pulse of the Fall, and the surrealistic musings of the Pixies, WIVES eagerly hitch themselves to a long lineage of anti-social record-collector rock. But more than any particular band, their debut evokes a bygone era when underground New York City rock bands couldn’t help but reflect their seedy surroundings (back when there were still seedy surroundings to reflect). At a time when so much of the music we engage with is grappling—whether overtly or implicitly—with political turmoil and mental health, So Removed feels, well, so removed from the current conversation. Instead, WIVES coolly roam a subterranean nocturnal netherworld of their own design. WIVES guitarist Andrew Bailey is also a founding member of dream-pop phenoms DIIV, but any connection between the two outfits ends there. Fitting for a group that formed because one of its members had some leftover time at his practice space, WIVES conceal an improvisational jam-band soul in a punk band’s body—though in their case, the jamming is verbal. On the opening “Waving Past Nirvana,” singer/guitarist James Beach rifles through a series of free-associative internal rhymes and open-ended kickers (“And your uncle, he wears a dress/With a shotgun and some meth/And no teeth where he peeks in his mirror to speak in tongues”) sounding like Black Francis after a CBD-oil massage. Beach’s musings are the focal point of every WIVES song, but his presence isn’t always enough to invigorate the album’s more even-keeled tracks, like the Stonesy rocker “Servants” or “Why Is Life,” which recalls post-reunion Pixies. But Beach can deliver the hooks when he tries: “The 20 Teens” relocates the E Street Band to the corner of Lexington and 125, while the glam racket of “Hideaway” yields the album’s most quotable chorus (“Don’t you sweat it girl/You’ll regret it, girl/You’re doing all the cocaine in the world”). In fact, there’s enough evidence here to suggest here that WIVES’ true calling is to shake off the agitated post-punk posture and embrace their inner Marc Bolan: On the space-bound ballad “The Future Is a Drag,” they bow out with a rusted-out “Metal Guru” to call their own. “We blew it, just for kicks,” Beach sings as the planet around him crumbles, but he doesn’t sound too bummed—because this song is his first-class ticket from the gutter to the stars. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

City Slang

October 7, 2019

00d0201c-edde-466b-b28c-4a7b5fde7def

Stuart Berman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/

Seventh album from Dan Bejar encapsulates and elevates the best of his back catalog, serving as a potent reminder that the intelligence of his songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.

Seventh album from Dan Bejar encapsulates and elevates the best of his back catalog, serving as a potent reminder that the intelligence of his songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.

Destroyer: Destroyer's Rubies

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8970-destroyers-rubies/

Destroyer's Rubies

Those of you who keep abreast of online rumor-mongering might be surprised to find that the rating at the top of this page is a few points shy of a 10.0. No sooner had Destroyer's Rubies leaked to internet file-trading services than rumors (credited, as these things always are, to "reliable sources") began to spread that the album was to receive a perfect score from this publication. It wasn't until I actually sat down and gave Destroyer's Rubies a few good listens that the aptness of such a rumor really hit me: The album is structurally complex, thematically dense, and labyrinthine in its self-referentiality. Dan Bejar's vocals are, like many of his indie contemporaries, yelpy and dramatic, and many of his lyrics seem preordained to serve as mp3 blog headers. In other words, the qualities that once made Destroyer albums so "difficult" make Destroyer's Rubies a perfect record for this critical moment. Writing about Destroyer has proven to be, to borrow a quote from Bejar himself, "a playground for fun." Destroyer reviews have an unfortunate tendency to read like essays written for college seminars. Bejar's writing seems to lend itself particularly well to analysis as a "text," often resulting in reviews that focus exclusively on the referentiality of his lyrics. But, while listening to Destroyer's Rubies, I think many writers-- myself included-- have been missing the point. At its core, Destroyer is an almost unfashionably conventional (or, as Bejar would say, "classical") project. Bejar writes well-crafted pop/rock songs that, for all their lyrical complexity, tend to be about people (usually girls) and places he knows. The obtuse character of Bejar's lyrics strikes me not as a Waste Land-esque shot at epic intertextuality, but rather a simple refusal to write things that will make sense to everybody. If more singer/songwriters wrote lyrics without stopping to explain every single reference, or reducing their thoughts to poetic-sounding generalities, Bejar's lyrics might not seem so impenetrable. Yet, while some have been busy puzzling out every reference in every Destroyer song, Bejar has been quietly and consistently honing his craft, putting out albums that are uniformly strong but thoroughly unique in their musical sensibilities. Though 2001's Streethawk: A Seduction stands as his most concise and catchy record, 2002's much-maligned This Night was a triumph in its own right. With more-reverb-than-guitar guitars, more-fill-than-drumbeat drumbeats, and choruses that mostly consisted of "ba ba ba" or "la la la," Bejar recast musical excess as the core and foundation of a surprisingly solid rock album. With 2004's Your Blues, he dabbled in flamboyantly theatrical vocals and canned MIDI instruments, committing two of the very few aesthetic crimes that might have effectively dismantled the substantial buzz that was building around Destroyer. Which brings us to Destroyer's Rubies, Bejar's seventh, and best, full-length as Destroyer. The album's nearly 10-minute self-titled opening track makes clear that whatever Bejar may have lost in terms of precision he has made up in versatility. Structurally, "Rubies" is remarkably sophisticated, cycling through several mini-verses but never congealing into any standard song form. Built around a few simple themes, "Rubies" covers a great deal of ground both musically and emotionally as Bejar's characteristically serpentine melody carries him through careening guitar hooks, military snare drum fills, and a strikingly spare acoustic guitar finale. The endlessly catchy "Painter in Your Pocket" opens with a similarly stark acoustic guitar intro, then unexpectedly builds up more bounce and swing than any Destroyer song to date. By the time the song reaches its final chorus, it has attained a blissful, sing-songy energy that hasn't really graced any Destroyer record since Streethawk. The success of epic songs like "Rubies" and "Painter in Your Pocket" owes a great deal to Bejar's development as a singer. While Streethawk is considered by most fans to be the best Destroyer record, Bejar's vocal performance seems stifled and flat in comparison to Destroyer's Rubies. On Your Blues, Bejar's substantial growth as a vocalist was more or less entirely obscured by the record's synthetic accompaniment. But over the course of Destroyer's Rubies, Bejar coos, hisses, and snarls with uncharacteristic confidence. He's always had a knack for unique phrasing in his melodies, and his newfound expressive range greatly enhances their impact. Unfortunately, the album does falter a bit toward its end. "A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point" substantially outstays its welcome, ultimately coming across like a half-assed rehash of "Looter's Follies". "Priest's Knees" is sorely lacking in melody, and probably could have been omitted altogether. The album's closing track, "Sick Priest Learns to Last Forever", pushes the bar-band-from-hell aesthetic a bit too far, and winds up living up to its name in a rather unflattering manner. Given the generally high quality of the songs on Destroyer's Rubies, these bouts of sloppiness come off as particularly frustrating. But while Destroyer's Rubies is by no means a flawless record, its most glaring flaws are for the most part mercifully self-contained. Encapsulating and elevating the best of Destroyer's back catalog, Destroyer's Rubies serves as a potent reminder that the intelligence of Bejar's songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.

2006-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

2006-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Merge

February 20, 2006

00d093d3-d773-4210-a86d-0c988fe7d297

Matt LeMay

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/

On its fourth album, the Oakland duo uses disco-fueled dance grooves and gently psychedelic atmospheres as vehicles for introspection.

On its fourth album, the Oakland duo uses disco-fueled dance grooves and gently psychedelic atmospheres as vehicles for introspection.

Brijean: Macro

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brijean-macro/

Macro

A solid groove can be a gateway to the sublime. When the rhythm section locks in just right, it triggers a profound physiological response: As your hips move and head bobs, cortisol levels drop, replaced with a blissful rush of dopamine. Time may start to lose its shape, marked only by the throb of a kick or tick of a hi-hat. Songs throughout the ages have spoken to the ecstasy of getting lost in music, celebrating the ways that dancing can make one’s troubles vanish and wipe the emotional slate clean. Brijean Murphy understands this transformative power. She’s long been an in-demand live and session percussionist, bolstering the pulse of artists like Mitski, Toro y Moi, Poolside, and U.S. Girls. After years of playing for hire, Murphy realized that the freelance life was losing its sustainability. With the encouragement of friends and her partner, multi-instrumentalist and producer Doug Stuart, she began recording her own songs. Since 2018, the duo of Murphy and Stuart (operating under Murphy’s first name, à la Sade), has been making warm, lightly psychedelic dance music that weaves together bits of tropicália, Latin jazz, house, disco, and dream pop, placing emphasis on Murphy’s command of undulating rhythms. Macro, their fourth and most ambitious album, is a seductive invitation to boogie on the astral plane. Brijean’s debut, 2018’s Walkie Talkie, was set deep in the tropics, but they’ve never stayed in one place for long. On each successive release the duo has sharpened its pop instincts, adding instruments and collaborators, and widening its scope beyond easy genre tags. Macro’s swooning arrangements bloom and bend, revealing a band comfortable with experimenting within the boundaries of a certain sound. The Vancouver bounce of “Counting Sheep” morphs into stoned lounge music with the addition of a syncopated triangle. A sound collage briefly interrupts the ’60s mod swing of “Bang Bang Boom,” setting up the swirling psych of the song’s jammy coda. They’ve maintained a mimosa-and-CBD-gummy chill that gently nods at the sun-drunk, day-glo jams Murphy’s collaborators in Poolside make, but Brijean’s work has more depth. Even at their most billowing, these songs maintain a slight edge, an understanding that it’s easier to get to a place of cathartic release when your muscles are already tense. Twenty-five seconds into “Euphoric Avenue,” Murphy coos a sincere concern: “All I know is time moves much too fast.” Lightly picked guitar, synthesized strings, and ringing chimes run together as her words descend, leaving a vapor trail of reverb in their wake. Such a definitive, almost anxious phrase seems at odds with the pleasant instrumental fog that surrounds it, but as soon as Murphy intones the word “fast,” a waltzing bossa nova drum beat snaps to life, bongos rippling behind it. On “Breathe,” a plea for slowing down, Murphy asserts that she wants “to do more things that don’t take currency.” Her silvery voice uncurls over the lush but jittery breakbeat soundscape; the song is governed by an existential tug between ecstatic abandon and the looming dread of waking up the same as you ever were. “Workin’ On It,” Macro’s first single and arguable centerpiece, is giddy, iridescent roller disco. The classic hallmarks are there: Stuart plays a walking bassline, open hi-hats accent the upbeats, and tension builds to the occasional, emphatic “woo!” You’d expect a song like this to be titled “Work It Out” or some similarly sweaty encouragement. But strange touches like Murphy’s dry, upfront vocals and the textured delay radiating from the title phrase, give the song a more interior feeling. When Murphy sings about her desire for “depth and complexity,” the infectious groove feels like an invitation to get lost in self-discovery. You’re made to feel it all; your shaking legs, beating heart, and swimming thoughts are all part of the same dance.

2024-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Ghostly International

July 15, 2024

00d203aa-d0ef-4cc6-90a8-a626d284b9eb

Dash Lewis

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/

For their first album of original productions, the second-wave drag-and-drop duo ropes in over 20 collaborators, including Class Actress, A.C. Newman, Hooray For Earth, Kleenex Girl Wonder, and Cadence Weapon.

For their first album of original productions, the second-wave drag-and-drop duo ropes in over 20 collaborators, including Class Actress, A.C. Newman, Hooray For Earth, Kleenex Girl Wonder, and Cadence Weapon.

The Hood Internet: FEAT

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17040-feat/

FEAT

If second-wave drag-and-droppers the Hood Internet ever offered anything, it was that, in the wake of Girl Talk, their mashups were simple and digestible. At just two or three artists per track, the duo allowed a good idea to breathe and flourish, leading to some genuine moments of inspiration. FEAT, their first album of original productions, ropes in over 20 collaborators, and it threatens to ignore the very formula which has served the Hood Internet so well. Alas, this Frankenstein does not go on a rogue murder spree, but you almost wish it would-- despite the packed roster, FEAT is almost shockingly hemmed in. Something more messy and all-over-the-place might not have resulted in a better album, but after slogging through the deluge of blandness that is FEAT, it begins to sound at least like a more appealing idea. There is a war going on within FEAT, but it's probably not one that the Hood Internet wanted. This is an album where guest appearances have seemingly no rhyme or reason, yet, despite that, nothing interesting manages to occur. It's an experience not unlike visiting a supermarket deli on a weekday afternoon-- everyone gets served in a random but orderly fashion and all you want to do is get on with your day. It is a polite, neat album, especially coming from a group that has cut its teeth playing clubs and parties for several years. Every rap verse, for instance, sounds like it could've been recorded in your parents' family room without their minding. Most guests sound bored at worst, and at best like they are just trying to stay out of each other's way. This is not a mashup album, but sonically it feels fossilized in the same way. It is mostly an indie rap record, but its tones recall the bright, plasticky indie pop still prevalent when the Hood Internet formed a half-decade ago. If Kevin Barnes spent a few hours fiddling around and making rap beats, or if the Blow tried to rekindle their relevancy by capitalizing on the Soundcloud "trap" scene, they might end up with tracks that sound like what we hear on FEAT. "Uzi Water Gun", for instance, is what I imagine a lot of college kids thought the future sounded like after Arular dropped. On "Won't Fuck Us Over" there's even a particularly nonsensical and wretched interpolation of the National's "Mr. November". Sounding dated isn't a sin in and of itself, though, and anyway it's the least of the Hood Internet's problems at it pertains to FEAT. The main issue here is a distinct and debilitating lack of craft. Whatever skills the duo have at making mashups did not carry over to their original productions, at least not here. "Amateurish" is a phrase that can be used charitably at times, especially if you get the sense that artists are working toward unlocking their own music. But FEAT is amateur in a wholly negative way-- every beat, and thus the album's core, is thin and rudimentary. Tracks like "Won't Fuck Us Over" and "These Things Are Nice" are built around synth-horns that try and nod at Southern rap but instead sound like what you'd come up with in the first five minutes of ever using Logic. There are a few moments where things sort of click into place, but they happen to be when the floor is ceded to established professionals like Class Actress (the final 90 seconds of "Critical Captions") and A.C. Newman ("One for the Record Books"), a development that is probably not a coincidence. Those happen to be the first two songs, and the rest of the album is a string of dull, droning rapping and unmemorable choruses. Just about the only song that doesn't adhere to a numbing verse-chorus-verse structure is the brittle and "atmospheric" palate cleanser "Exonerated", which is so torturously dreadful that it makes the argument for never speaking of Kid A ever again. An album of original productions was a logical next step for a group that's been slowly easing its way out of mashup purgatory for years, but FEAT makes it clear that the Hood Internet were not ready. That isn't quite a death knell in theory, but the larger problem is that there's almost nothing on the album that suggests they ever will be. There may be more Hood Internet albums in the future, and if that's so, I guess the best we can hope for is better networking.

2012-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00

2012-10-02T02:00:04.000-04:00

Electronic

Decon

October 2, 2012

00d25028-dcf0-44d1-8da8-cb2c4dc9c43c

Jordan Sargent

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/

After the delicate, warm Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, Bill Callahan returns with a more idiosyncratic record.

After the delicate, warm Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, Bill Callahan returns with a more idiosyncratic record.

Bill Callahan: Apocalypse

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15285-apocalypse/

Apocalypse

A list of adjectives to describe Bill Callahan's writing and music is a list of contradictions. He's penetrating, he's ironic, he's intimate, he's elusive, he's distant and calcified, he's vulnerable and warm-- it's all there, album to album, song to song, and sometimes line to line. His voice is low and his songs are slow, so it's easy to mistake him for being sad. As a lyricist, he writes meticulously about distance: the distance between people and other people, and between people and themselves. He's a cartographer of broken roads. But more than sadness, his writing represents a stoic quest for understanding in the face of knowing that these gaps usually can't be filled. "There's no truth in you, there's no truth in me," he sang on 2003's *Supper. "*The truth is between." Apocalypse is his first studio album since 2009's Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. The contrast between the two is stark. Eagle was a bath of strings, open-air ambience, French horns, and soft, measured drums. It was delicate and planned, it called out warm. Lyrically, the songs were direct and steady admissions of the kinds of sentiments that rise to light after funerals and breakups-- an exercise in what we normally call "vulnerable." Apocalypse, ostensibly recorded live in the studio with a small band, is idiosyncratic and reluctant. Its narrators chew grass in silence and give you a too-long stare. They have meltdowns in foreign hotel rooms. And they come to us in a sound that is spare and liberated from Eagle's insistence on being gorgeous every single second. It's occasionally distorted, even ugly, a word I wouldn't use to describe almost anything Callahan's done since he recorded as Smog. One of his most remarkable tricks-- and one he returns to all over Apocalypse-- is the ability to sound both controlled and casual at the same time. The songs here are filled with silly, borderline bad ideas that an artist with less confidence might've scrubbed after taking a long walk and a good rest. "Baby's Breath" speeds up and slows down in a way that sounds unrehearsed, devolving into distorted guitar toward the end. The sloppy backing track on "America!" quotes what sounds like Civil War songs and 50s jungle-rock. (It also casts Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson as part of an imagined U.S. military force and ends on an acidic joke about American imperialism: "Well everyone's allowed a past they don't care to mention.") A few songs feature, prominently, the flute. But the feeling of spontaneity is also in Callahan's voice and delivery, which brings out the emotional dimension of the lines in ways the lyric sheet can't. On "One Fine Morning"-- one of two songs to use the album's title-- he sings, "It's all coming back to me now: my apocalypse, my apocalypse." The lyric is literally a realization, but it's the way he sings it that brings the feeling across: Curious and questioning, like he actually figured it out while tape was rolling. On "Universal Applicant", he describes a moment where he shoots a flare gun into the air, and punctuates it with a sound: fffff, pouh-- the flare burning and going off. The music falls silent for a few seconds. It's an aside that anchors the song. Ironically, it's not in the lyric sheet. All these apparent accidents and asides produce a strange effect: It's like Callahan is alive in the music while it's being documented. It's vital that way, but permeable, like a friend who can tell the same story over and over again with subtle variations and capture their audience each time. For me, Callahan's albums always return to questions of truth in song. For some people, the acoustic guitar-- when compared to the synthesizer-- is truth. For some, it's a line as unambiguous as "Most of my fantasies are of making someone else come," from 1997's Red Apple Falls. For others, it might be a line like "You always wanted to be the fire part of fire," from 2005's Woke on a Whaleheart-- a crowning example of Callahan at his most profoundly anti-poetic. He sets up alone and sings a lot of lines about feelings that start with the word "I" and doesn't use Auto-Tune, and so it's tempting to think of him as being a truth-teller. But it's more interesting-- and more flattering to him, I think-- to acknowledge the way in which he tries to climb to truth from so many different angles, where he finds footing and where he loses it, and the things he sees along the way. One of Apocalypse's prettiest and most agreeable songs is called "Riding For the Feeling". It's a slow waltz. Callahan strums an acoustic guitar and sings close to the mic. The drums are brushed and patient. The sound alone tells us it's honest. And yet the scenario presented in the song is so strange: Callahan singing about moving, leaving, disappearing. Callahan singing about being in a hotel room with the television on mute, listening to demo tapes: "My my my apocalypse," he calls it-- the other song where the album's title comes in. "I realize I had said very little about waves or wheels/ Or riding for the feeling/ Riding for the feeling/ Is the fastest way to reach the shore." The richness, as I hear it, is that the line describes how elusive-- and maybe even impossible-- honesty is. I don't have a clear idea of what "riding for the feeling is," but I wonder if that's the point: it's a journey toward something vague and variable. It's about the distance between how simple things feel when you experience them and how cluttered and gummed-up they come out sounding in song or verse. It's about the distance between something like Eagle's "Jim Cain" and "America!": The healthy-looking guy standing in a field telling you in past tense about his heartbreak and the one barking at you live and uncut from an Australian hotel room. One sounds too close to their feelings to make sense of them, the other sounds too far away to embody them. Which is more honest? When his first records as Smog started coming out, it would've been easy to situate Callahan in an axis of singer-songwriters who sounded both rooted in American folk traditions but also radically disjointed from them: Dave Berman (of Silver Jews), Cat Power, and Will Oldham (then playing as Palace). Berman has retired, Cat Power has slowed down, and Oldham, like Callahan, has become the kind of musician who only makes sense within the context of himself. Callahan has nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011 but is making the best albums of his career. And despite the superficial changes he makes to his sound or focus, everything he's done ends on similar gestures: a stare, a nod, and the quiet question of whether trying to get to the heart of something is the same thing as actually getting to it.

2011-04-13T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-04-13T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Drag City

April 13, 2011

00d26a9a-ccb8-49a1-bdc7-434d358f91a3

Mike Powell

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/

The krautrock master Hans-Joachim Roedelius continues—at 80!—to experiment across genres, here dipping into trip hop with Gotan Project's Christoph H. Müller. Though it's often as ominously dark as Massive Attack's best work, Imagori is marked by a strict adherence to precision, culminating in works that feel as though they were finely shorn down with an X-Acto knife.

The krautrock master Hans-Joachim Roedelius continues—at 80!—to experiment across genres, here dipping into trip hop with Gotan Project's Christoph H. Müller. Though it's often as ominously dark as Massive Attack's best work, Imagori is marked by a strict adherence to precision, culminating in works that feel as though they were finely shorn down with an X-Acto knife.

Mueller & Roedelius: Imagori

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21005-imagori/

Imagori

Music continues to pour out of krautrock figurehead Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who, at 80, shows no sign of pulling back from his work anytime soon. Still, Imagori comes at a difficult time for him, having recently lost his old sparring partner in Cluster and Harmonia, Dieter Moebius, who passed away in July. It’s unlikely Roedelius would let sentiment cloud his vision—much of his recent output is marked by a strict adherence to precision, culminating in works that feel like they were finely shorn down with an X-Acto knife. Imagori continues in that vein, with Roedelius linking up with Gotan Project member Christoph H. Müller. Over 10 tracks, the pair work around weighty, impenetrable electronics, dispensing with any loose ends and producing an overall sound positively suffocating in its density. The genesis of Roedelius and Müller’s collaboration lies in a series of concerts undertaken in Paris in 2012, where the pair improvised on stage together. Video footage of the events show the men bathed in stark white light, sharply dressed and fully focussed on the machines at their disposal, including a grand piano. Imagori is less tender than those performances, with the pair retreating into darkness in the studio. There’s a morbidity that eats away at the corners of these tracks, forming an atmosphere not far from the rolling banks of angst that blanketed Massive Attack’s trip hop classic Mezzanine. Trip hop may seem an odd reference point for Roedelius, especially as it possesses an emotional weight he’s rarely approached in his career. Müller's work in Gotan Project veers far closer to the genre's environs, although this album lands some distance away from his output there. Instead, Imagori finds Roedelius and Müller setting genre ideas in the abstract, linking classical piano embellishments to twists of bass synth reminicent of Mezzanine’s "Risingson" (on "Time Has Come") and letting ripples of piano form an echo back to Protection’s "Heat Miser" (on "Valse Mecanique"). The album contains an overall sketch-like quality, executed from shards of thought—not necessarily a bad thing, but not conducive to producing a work as enveloping as Harmonia’s "Watussi" or Cluster’s "Caramel". There’s a cameo from Brian Eno buried deep in Imagori, on a track about the process of recording music that's appropriately titled "About Tape". It’s a standout, largely because it forgoes the thickness that encases much of the album, instead working through glassier layers of electronics, plus a half-spoken, half-sung vocal from Eno that adds a welcome measure of eccentricity to an otherwise rather dry record. Its nadir comes on "The Question", where a Kraftwerk-like robo-voice peers from its slowly shifting groove—an idea that feels a little too rote for someone of Roedelius’ stature. Imagori is perfectly serviceable as a piece of background noise, but it doesn’t work in the multifaceted way that Cluster and Harmonia albums can, where they either prick the attention or provide a soundtrack to other things going on. This just drifts along in its immaculately chiseled way.

2015-09-10T02:00:05.000-04:00

2015-09-10T02:00:05.000-04:00

Electronic

Grönland

September 10, 2015

00d51afa-78d3-44e5-a7c2-15a2735d248e

Nick Neyland

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/

In a shocking turn, the Flaming Lips offer their most audacious undertaking since Zaireeka, an unrelentingly paranoid, static-soaked acid-rock epic.

In a shocking turn, the Flaming Lips offer their most audacious undertaking since Zaireeka, an unrelentingly paranoid, static-soaked acid-rock epic.

The Flaming Lips: Embryonic

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13522-embryonic/

Embryonic

Over its seven-year gestation, Christmas on Mars had come to represent everything wonderful and frustrating about the Flaming Lips. As much as we loved the idea of Wayne Coyne producing a sci-fi flick in his backyard with hardware-store materials, the Lips' musical production became less frequent-- and less consistent-- during its making. 2006's scattershot At War With the Mystics tried to cut down on the lightness of their two previous landmark albums but was largely overwhelmed by cloying singles ("The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", "Free Radicals") that felt like little more than excuses to shoot off their confetti cannons. The trio's desire to produce crowd-pleasing spectacle-- whether on stage or on film-- had seemingly taken priority over their desire to be a band. But when Christmas on Mars finally surfaced in late 2008, it came with a peace offering to fans longing for a return to the band's bizarro roots: a full-length soundtrack of unsettling instrumentals that conjured the film's icy desolation. Now, rather than close a chapter on this seven-year saga, the Flaming Lips have taken a dramatic left turn with their Mystics follow-up-- the double album Embryonic is the band's most audacious undertaking since 1997's Zaireeka. The sprawling 70-minute marathon ruminates on themes of madness, isolation, and hallucinogenic horror, translating them into an unrelentingly paranoid, static-soaked acid-rock epic. Embryonic actually feels like it was produced in one of Christmas on Mars' hermetic space-station labs, with squelching equipment that takes a few moments to warm up and frequent instructional studio chatter that gives the impression of a subject under observation. There's a raw directness to Embryonic that's been largely absent from Lips records since the mid-90s. For the first time in years, they've made an album that actually sounds like a band playing live together in a small room. In light of Mystics' overly processed, grab-bag quality, the holistic, audio-vérité approach on display here is remarkable-- the record is extremely dense, initially overwhelming, but unusually rewarding upon repeat listens. Like the double-disc, high-concept rock epics of yore (think Physical Graffiti or Bitches Brew), it captures them at their most sprawling and ambitious, boldly pushing themselves towards more adventurous horizons. Musically, too, Embryonic leans heavily on the Lips' formative 60s/70s psych-rock influence (like In a Priest Driven Ambulance's "Take Meta Mars" before it, Embryonic's formidable opener "Convinced of the Hex" grooves heavily on Can's "Mushroom"), but never before has the band recorded an album so unwaveringly sinister, or so devoid of pop-song levity. (Hell, even Zaireeka had "The Big Ol' Bug Is the New Baby Now".) Wayne Coyne no longer assumes the role of the endearingly creaky, puppet-toting crooner. Instead, he's a world-weary fatalist describing scenes of environmental holocaust in a chillingly unaffected monotone on the rampaging "See the Leaves". Or he's a cult leader deviously summoning his minions on "Sagittarius Silver Announcement", before leading them to a fiery demise on the monstrous, stoner-metal onslaught of "Worm Mountain" (featuring fuzzbox-stomping assistance from MGMT). The atmosphere of dread reaches its fever pitch in the album's spellbinding seven-minute centerpiece "Powerless", where, over top a coolly ominous bass riff, Coyne's nervous verses yield to a Syd Barrett-on-Mandrax guitar freak out. There are brief respites amid Embryonic's thundering eruptions, but even these carry a calm-before-the-storm unease: On paper, "I Can Be a Frog" reads like another of Coyne's animal-populated nursery rhymes, but the foreboding orchestration and giggly background squawks (courtesy of Karen O) render it too creepy for kindergarten. And the vocoderized lullaby "The Impulse" serves only to make the screaming intro to strobe-lit freakout "Silver Trembling Hands" all the more startling. True to an album named Embryonic, there are tracks that aren't fully formed (namely, the drunken Bonham stumble of "Your Bats" or the free-psych splatter of "Scorpio Swords"), but even in its slighter moments, Embryonic exhibits a renewed sense of fearless freakery for a band who so recently threatened to lapse into stagy routine. "I wish I could go back, go back in time," Coyne sings on "Evil", Embryonic's most conventionally Lips-ian ballad, but the nostalgic impulse is immediately undercut by the admission that "no one really ever can." Perhaps Coyne is anticipating the confused reactions of recent Lips converts expecting more life-affirming anthems along the lines of "Do You Realize??" or "Race for the Prize". But given the band's history, Embryonic's sea change arrives right on time to herald a new Flaming Lips for a new decade. Back in 1990, In a Priest Driven Ambulance signaled the Lips' transformation from garage-punk misfits into a splendorous, kaleidoscopic rock outfit; 1999's The Soft Bulletin reconfigured them once again into a sophisticated, sincere symphonic-pop troupe bestowed with increasing commercial acclaim and street-naming ceremonies in their honor. We can only hope that, as we enter the 2010s, Embryonic portends yet another new phase for the Flaming Lips-- one that's equally as improbable and rewarding as the ones that have preceded it.

2009-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00

2009-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Warner Bros.

October 12, 2009

00d5e4b9-7ee3-4bcb-aad1-94f4b374adf3

Stuart Berman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/

On her debut album, 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Yelich-O’Connor, aka Lorde, has fashioned herself as a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Pure Heroine is a collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop.

On her debut album, 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Yelich-O’Connor, aka Lorde, has fashioned herself as a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Pure Heroine is a collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop.

Lorde: Pure Heroine

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18614-lorde-pure-heroine/

Pure Heroine

In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole. That’s the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single “Tennis Court,” in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O’Connor) stares right at you—her taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screen—for a hypnotic and somewhat uncomfortable three and a half minutes. (I’'s an anti-video in the tradition of the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young,” and, fittingly, her moody cover of “Swingin Party” has been making the rounds.) In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction: an aspiring pop star who’s had a major-label development deal since age 12 (she was discovered at a local talent show) but has retained a seemingly genuine iconoclastic streak. The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her and—politely but firmly—she said no. With the global smash “Royals” (the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top Billboard’s alternative chart) she made her name by sneering at everything else on the radio (“We don’t care/We aren’t caught up in your love affair”). The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she’s already announced that she’s bored. Twice. Lorde’s voice occasionally takes the form of a wide-eyed, Feist-y coo, but much more often it’s a low, clenched growl; like everything else about her, it has an air of “wise beyond her years.” “I didn’t start writing songs until I was 13,” she said in a recent interview, almost apologetically, but then quickly accounted for the lost time, “Before that, I wrote short fiction.” Now that she’s a wizened 16, Lorde, who wrote all the lyrics on Pure Heroine and co-wrote the music, has fashioned herself a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Her songs capture the drama and debauched regality of being a teenager: Their subjects include online gossip, empty bottles, queen bees, and young people who already feel old. “I’m kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care,” she sings with a languid sigh on the bleacher-stomping single “Team.” Or is she saying “revelled”? It’s hard to tell the two words apart, and maybe that’s the point. That carefully cultivated ambiguity is precisely what makes Pure Heroine work. “Royals” walks the line between rebelling against and reveling in the trappings of power, luxury, and excess of contemporary pop. The arrangement is economical—just a few finger snaps and a barely-there beat caught in the gravitational pull of Lorde’s charisma—but overall, “Royals” gets to have it both ways. Lorde says she wrote it thinking of how she and her friends would listen to A$AP Rocky rapping about couture while they rummaged through a particular friends’ well-stocked kitchen, too broke (or too lazy) to spend money on dinner. And that’s a crucial subtlety: “Royals” doesn’t critique hip-hop culture so much as express a disconnect that many of the people who love it (Lorde included: “I’ve always listened to a lot of rap”) feel when listening to songs about luxury culture. Whether she’s singing about her schoolyard peers or the world’s most famous pop stars (who, as she admits on “Tennis Court,” have just become her new peers) Lorde achieves a tricky balancing act of exposing irony and even hypocrisy without coming off as preachy or moralistic, simply because—thanks to Pure Heroine’s constant use of the royal “we”—she’s usually implicating herself in the very contradictions she’s exposing. More fully realized than her debut EP, The Love Club, Pure Heroine is a fluid collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop that sometimes sounds like St. Vincent’s “Champagne Year” mixed into whatever’s in the punch at Abel Tesfaye’s house. Still, a lot of its best production ideas and lyrical motifs repeat in such a way that it sometimes feels like you’re listening to 10 versions of the same song. Current single “Team” has a memorable chorus, but most of its lyrics (“I’m kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air”; “We live in cities you never see on screen/Not very pretty but we sure know how to run things”) feel like scrapped lines from the “Royals” session. “Glory and Gore,” too, rehashes the same bloody/regal/teen imagery, but its greater crime is the way Lorde overstuffs the verses with so many words that it weighs down the melody. And yet, there’s something endearing about Pure Heroine’s more unfiltered impulses—though she’s had a record contract nearly a quarter of her life, you get the sense Lorde is still being given a lot of room to breathe and hone her own particular songwriting voice. These tracks all feel like they were written by a very precocious teenager, and that’s a big part of their charm. Pure Heroine is a decidedly post-internet album. Some of that has to do with its genre-agnostic blend of influences (in her live show Lorde has been covering both Kanye West and the Replacements, and her music is being marketed to a generation of people who in no way find that weird), but it’s mostly a comment on a certain kind of sensibility of self-presentation in the characters it deftly depicts. “It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care,” she boasts on “Tennis Court.” As the song goes on, though, cracks in the facade begin to show. “We’re so happy even when we’re smiling out of fear,” she admits, but at least “it looks alright in the pictures.” What’s fueling Pure Heroine is a tension between the tweet and the truth, the cumulative effect of the little digital fictions we craft for ourselves daily. But “Ribs” is the best song that this very promising songwriter has written so far because—even at the risk of seeming uncool— it gradually allows the walls to crumble. “It feels so crazy, getting old,” she sighs at the beginning, in a smoky pantomime of maturity and detachment—sort of like a sepia-toned Instagram filter applied to her voice. Soon, though, the beat ramps up and the song turns into an impressionistic swirl of memories: “The drink you spilled all over me/‘Lover’s Spit’ left on repeat.” She gets so caught up in the feeling that she lets herself blurt something truly vulnerable: “I’ve never felt more alone/It feels so scary, getting old.” Lorde’s music is quietly wise to a particular modern irony: Beneath every #DGAF there’s a person who secretly gives a fuck about something, and behind every anti-pop song there’s a singer who—just like everybody else—knows what it’s like to feel happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.

2013-10-03T02:00:02.000-04:00

2013-10-03T02:00:02.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Lava / Republic

October 3, 2013

00d9f691-66bb-47e7-9245-4624f6c8de3f

Lindsay Zoladz

https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/

The latest from these funk/soul throwbacks further affirms the validity of working in specific styles, even ones most people stopped exploring decades ago.

The latest from these funk/soul throwbacks further affirms the validity of working in specific styles, even ones most people stopped exploring decades ago.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: I Learned the Hard Way

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14085-i-learned-the-hard-way/

I Learned the Hard Way

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are the rarest type of retro/revivalist band-- the type that transcends its devotion to a style of music associated with a distant past. They make soul music in the classic sense, the kind of tracks that might have been laid down in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Chicago in the late 1960s and early 70s. But there's more to their sound than a nostalgia trip-- it's an affirmation of the validity of working in specific styles, even ones most people stopped exploring decades ago. The Dap-Kings succeed through attention to detail. While a lot of music makes aesthetic or stylistic nods to 60s, almost none of it actually captures the sonic character of the era. But on each of their albums, Jones and her collaborators, led by Gabriel Roth, have done just that. And it doesn't just come down to the production and placement of the microphones. Jones deserves the most credit, simply for having an amazing voice that she understands how to wield effectively. Her impeccable sense of delivery balances power with nuance, varying her forcefulness for maximum impact. The songs give her plenty of room to move, too-- if these tracks weren't every bit as good as the ones that inspired them, all of the performance and production acumen in the world couldn't save them. As rote as it sounds, "Better Things" and "The Game Gets Old", among others on I Learned the Hard Way, would likely be classics today if they'd been released alongside the music that influenced them. In fact, they may yet become classics to a smaller, more niche audience today. "Better Things" in particular is incredible, a brilliant kiss-off in which Jones reveals layers of anguish beneath her anger, while the band supports her with a heavy Muscle Shoals-style groove. It's striking to listen back to the very basic pastiche of the band's first album and see how far they've come, exploring different corners of funk and soul, experimenting with different meters and very complex arrangements. The trumpet in the intro to "Better Things" plays around with the vocal melody with a jazzy slyness that hits even harder when Jones follows it up by taking it over. Elsewhere, the horns and stormy backing track on "Money" save it from being a pretty typical soul rumination on being down and out, while Jones grabs the surfish guitar and bounding beat of "She Ain't a Child No More" and runs with them, delivering a commanding vocal to which her bandmates dutifully respond. It all comes together to make an album that stands up as a varied and well-sequenced work, and as a collection of songs you can scatter through a shuffle and dig just as deeply. It's nice to hear the band really stretch themselves and develop the drama and tumult of songs like "I'll Still Be True" and "The Game Gets Old", which you can really hear the band putting its creative all the way into. This record hardly needs to be recommended to soul fans, but even if revisitations of older music styles aren't usually your thing, I Learned the Hard Way is worth digging up.

2010-04-05T02:00:01.000-04:00

2010-04-05T02:00:01.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Daptone

April 5, 2010

00da07d7-e0e7-471e-8ef9-11f484ffc474

Joe Tangari

https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/

The Los Angeles singer’s whole songwriting vibe is magnetic, blending future pop, bedroom pop, and funk into a new and colorful swirl.

The Los Angeles singer’s whole songwriting vibe is magnetic, blending future pop, bedroom pop, and funk into a new and colorful swirl.

Remi Wolf: I’m Allergic to Dogs! EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/remi-wolf-im-allergic-to-dogs/

I’m Allergic to Dogs!

Remi Wolf has a bright, gamboling sensibility that extends from her music to her record titles to the way she presents herself and her work. Her ecstatic single “Woo!”, from her new five-song EP I’m Allergic To Dogs, is an “explosion of my feelings on LOVE,” she told Clash magazine. And Wolf has a whole cache of it judging not only by her joyful, sultry, playful new record but by her whole thing. It was clear even from her appearance on American Idol at 17, where she sang “Let’s Get It On” to Jennifer Lopez, Keith Urban, and Harry Connick Jr. not long after pivoting from training to be an Olympic skier. Wolf shied from the Idol-type path, though her expressive soul chops could certainly have carried her all the way. Wolf exists at the center of a Venn diagram that includes the post-PC Music hyper pop contingent (like Rina Sawayama and Wolf’s friend and collaborator Alice Longyu Gao), feel-good, “lo-fi,” “bedroom” pop artists (like JAWNY and Still Woozy, also friends of Wolf’s) and the current wave of funk and disco (like Ric Wilson and Ian Isiah). Her music clicks all the trend boxes, yet it feels super fresh. There’s a lot going on in the pop world right now, but Wolf has managed to nail all the fashionable references without losing her own sound. She’s cited Chaka Khan, Daryl Hall, David Byrne, Michael McDonald, John Mayer, and Erykah Badu as influences. There’s some reggae in here, too, on “Hello Hello Hello,” about “a certified gambler” who’s playing with Wolf’s feelings from the opposite coast, and the celebratory nature of her music at times recalls early ’90s dance hits from Deee-Lite and C+C Music Factory. Wolf’s music begs for remixes (Free Nationals’ “Photo ID” one is great) and the closeness of a club or a barbecue. Wolf’s puckish vibe is highly endearing. I’m Allergic To Dogs is her proper debut EP on Island, and a follow-up of sorts to her first EP, You’re A Dog!, which came out last September. (Wolf is in fact allergic to dogs, and yet she recently bought a puppy.) In the EP’s opening track, “Down The Line,” she references OutKast’s “Hey Ya” and at one point there’s a puppy bark and a baby’s squeal. She recently told The Line of Best Fit she’s been inspired by the silliness and absurdity of kids’ shows—there’s something about the freedom of childhood-informed expression that gives Wolf’s music its unhampered feel. She has a sense of humor about herself. The playfulness pairs well with the intrinsic sexiness of Wolf’s rhythms, even if her lyrics sometimes border on nonsensical. She annotated the Genius page of her own record to note You’re A Dog! was created in various bedrooms across California, all while she was “sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, and most times angry.” I love this summation because she speaks to the way this kind of punchy pop music can encapsulate a whole range of emotions while remaining what it is: really fun. It is possible to make a banging, exuberant pop song while full of rage or disappointment. “You’re so mean/But I can’t dream without you,” Wolf sings, her vocals pitched-up, on “Photo ID,” which was co-written with Solange collaborator John Carroll Kirby. The song snaps, zips, and fizzes with funk verve. It makes me wanna shake my ass. The whole EP does. The energy never really dips—it’s lowest on “Hello Hello Hello,” perhaps the EP’s weakest moment, but not by far. And although it’s cool when Wolf distorts her voice, it’s much better when you can hear the depth of her vocals, the emotion in her voice, like on “Woo!” or “Disco Man,” which is particularly passionate, as she sings about a man who’s “wasted all his money” but has “never been a waste of time,” and can decidedly “kiss [her] hand.” Above all, Wolf’s clear sense of herself is what makes her music really work. You can almost picture her, like a collage artist, going galaxy brain with all her references and kooky found sounds. There’s nothing exactly new happening here, but the deftness with which Wolf wields her voice, and guides what could be a too-chaotic sound into precise pop magic, is remarkable. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Island

July 6, 2020

00dc17f7-f79b-4e60-a81e-1a69935d17cf

Leah Mandel

https://pitchfork.com/staff/leah-mandel /

On his solo debut, Ghostface recreated the New York underworld of his adolescence in impressionistic fits over scythelike RZA beats. It is lean, vulgar, and irresistible.

On his solo debut, Ghostface recreated the New York underworld of his adolescence in impressionistic fits over scythelike RZA beats. It is lean, vulgar, and irresistible.

Ghostface Killah: Ironman

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghostface-killah-ironman/

Ironman

The drums on “The Faster Blade,” the third song from Ghostface Killah’s 1996 debut, Ironman, come from a song called “El Rey y Yo” by the Chilean band Los Ángeles Negros. The lift is direct, uncomplicated; RZA adds some body to the low end, but the pattern is unchanged. The new beat finds its melody, however, in a vibraphone borrowed from the Persuaders’ “Can’t Go No Further and Do No Better,” a plea from one lover to another to work through their problems. “The Faster Blade” strips the sound of its tenderness, repurposing it as a warning: Whatever sweetness remains in the world is about to be swallowed whole. The mutation suits Raekwon, who raps about locking down the cocaine trade in coastal Georgia, ripping off his Korean suppliers, arranging murders for hire from remote British territories. It’s the sort of pulp crime—meted out in bursts of improvised slang and girded by Five-Percenter moralism—that he and Ghost had perfected on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Rae’s monumental debut from one year prior. But when his verse ends (“All my Spanish niggas love us/We movin’ like Russia, bone crusher/At the flick, stick the usher”), Ghost is nowhere—the song is simply over. Just two tracks later, on “Assassination Day,” RZA’s instrumental is taunting in its sparseness; he, Rae, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killa trade verses about stalking enemies “like prey” and the devil “poisoning the birth water,” the blurring of lines between literal and metaphysical, criminal codes and animal chaos that are tenets of Ghost’s writing. Yet once again, the headliner is nowhere to be found. These absences had precedent on Wu-Tang records: Cuban Linx’s “Wisdom Body” is a solo Ghostface song. But where that was a creative decision (Rae, Ghost, and RZA agreed that Ghost’s extended pickup attempt would seem more unnervingly intimate if left alone), these new ones were symptoms of a yawning depression. Between Wu’s 1993 debut and the release of Cuban Linx, Ghost, then in his mid-20s, was losing weight and suffering headaches and blurred vision. By the time he was diagnosed with diabetes, his drinking had gotten so bad that RZA was patching together disparate vocal takes to work around Ghost’s frequent slurring. And in the spring of ‘96, his best friend was arrested for a murder he did not commit. “I couldn’t write to those records,” Ghost told Billboard last year, referring to tracks his collaborators had prepared for him. “I couldn’t come behind that, not feeling how I was feeling.” Recorded in that fog and against a deadline—the last one he would ever accept from a record company—Ironman captures a Ghostface who is scattered, overflowing with angst, lashing out. Where on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) he wrote concentrated bursts of athletic threats or longer, mostly linear reflections, here his internal logic is scrambled, the syntax shifting, time an afterthought. But this fragmentation is a natural complement to his written and vocal style. Whatever sorrow or delusion bleeds through the mix ends up making the rapper seem like a method actor, whipping himself into such a frenzy that he can convincingly render a world where there is a bag of cash sitting in the trunk of every bait car, an assassin in every vestibule. Over scythelike RZA beats that recall the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, Ghost recreates the New York underworld of his adolescence in impressionistic fits. The idea for the Blaxploitation riff came from RZA, whose creative whims dictated every Wu release he helmed. Working first from his estate in Ohio, the Abbot played Ghost beats over the phone: Al Green’s God-fearing “Gotta Find a New World” morphed into an impish bounce on opener “Iron Maiden.” Bob James’ “Nautilus,” a staple sample for rap producers dating back to the late ’80s, is made to sound, on “Daytona 500,” as if it’s gasping for its first breaths. The palette is loose and hooky, and it underlines Ghost’s humor. It also lowers the album’s stakes, at least in the early going. If Cuban Linx was a sweeping epic, Ironman is The Mack: lean and vulgar, irresistible all the same. The New York that Ghost and Rae (and Cappadonna, who receives prime billing and appears on the album cover) imagine is icy and intermittently forgiving. The album came out at the end of October, and its scenes are largely set in winters that are broken up by short trips to the Caribbean or Hawaii, where middle-class drug runners sip “mixed drinks out of broke coconut bowls” and trudge through slush on their way home from JFK. Ghost’s verse on “Motherless Child,” the cleanest distillation of the album’s concerns, crescendos to a rich young dilettante-hustler being killed during a robbery of his $5,000 King Tut necklace; one of his assailants’ puffy Guess outfit might suggest a bulletproof vest underneath, while the other’s Pelle Pelle certainly hides a gun. Raekwon’s numerous guest appearances do not make him quite the co-star Ghost was on Cuban Linx, but he adapts well to the lighter fare. One of his many gifts as a writer is to pack familiar patterns with so much idiosyncrasy that they feel wholly new. This is true when he’s dispensing straightforward wordplay on the wrong half of a bar (“Slide on these niggas like a fresh pair”), packing layered insults and odd imagery into seemingly overdetermined rhyme schemes (“No, you won’t play me like your lady/Pay me 380, spit it at you like a baby”), or sinking into the beat as if it were quicksand, as he does on “260” when he raps, “We walked in, both of us, looked like terrorists.” Cappadonna appears a comparatively modest five times and might be even more impressive—especially for his turn on “Camay,” where his “heart was racing like the hands on the clock” as he leaves a seduction on a tantalizingly ambiguous note. But Ghostface is one of the most inimitable writers New York has ever produced. His verses, like the vignettes within them, double back over themselves with plots intersecting or evaporating entirely. Momentary glimpses into his childhood (from “After the Smoke Is Clear”: “They used to push me in shopping carts”) read, initially, as myth. The silliest images, like Kiana’s girlfriend Wanda—the one with a cream Honda and legs like Jane Fonda—are precisely drawn. His understanding of the supreme mathematics short circuits the slot machines at outer-borough racetracks; he inhales smoke on the floor of a steel mill just to exhale it at his enemies. These threads of memory and imagination coil around each other in the text as they do in our brains. Even when something obvious seems to jut out, it’s quickly qualified with asides—or with plausibly deniable threats. “Poisonous Darts” is a typically breathless pair of verses from Ghost, but transforms in its final five seconds. “My heart is cold like Russia,” he blurts, a line so simple it scans as a real revelation. But he continues: “Got jerked at the Source Awards/Next year, 200 niggas coming with swords.” The picture of the Paramount Theater rushed by medieval warriors with chain mail and opinions about MC Eiht muddles time and context as amusingly as when RZA uses a whole verse, on “Smoke,” to move from Staten Island to the Punic Wars. That reflex—to smash stories about his own life into a thousand splinters—obscures any hint of real autobiography. But Ghost does not flinch when he sketches other characters. “Wildflower” is wickedly angry, rapped from the perspective of a scorned lover berating his ex. Whether or not you believe it was Ghost’s intent, the song plays with a knowing wink: It becomes a self-portrait of pettiness at some point between the wistful remembrance of the time the speaker “broke your ovary” and when he gets indignant about having introduced you to the films of Robert De Niro. Or take Juanita Cash Hawkins, the woman Ghost introduces, on “Camay,” who’s half-Hawaiian and works at a law firm on Fifth Avenue, “three blocks from the Gucci spot.” There is a notable exception to his tendency to hide the personal. On the album’s lead single, the Mary J. Blige-assisted “All That I Got Is You,” Ghost’s writing turns completely naturalistic as he recounts growing up with 15 people packed into a three-bedroom apartment, being asked to carry notes that begged for food to neighbors who might not have any, caring for two brothers with muscular dystrophy. On a song that is so sentimental, Ghost’s picture of his mother is surprisingly evenhanded. He remembers her buckling under the weight of his father’s disappearance; he remembers her wiping the crust from his eyes before he left for school. Case workers lurk like undercover cops, or poltergeists. It’s fitting, given both the uncanny state of commercial music preservation and Ghost’s own crypticism, that the album’s most representative song is not available on DSPs or new pressings, presumably due to sample clearance issues. “The Soul Controller,” Ironman’s original closer, is built around a Force MDs rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” But where Cooke’s song elegantly reduces civil rights issues and spiritual reckonings into tidy verses, “The Soul Controller” lurches and sprawls like the paranoia that snaked through the decades following Cooke’s death. “I don't know what’s up there/"In that great big ol’ sky” becomes less mystical, applying instead to the “UFOs” Ghost raps about—“Faces you never seen before” roaming the halls of your buildings, undercovers or out-of-towners. By the song’s parameters, the upper limit on success is you and your friends splitting a house in “the white part of Queens,” while hell is “being watched all day like enemy’s prey.” The arc of this story is supposed to be: Brilliant artist hits bottom, pours anguish into work, overcomes. Instead, things got worse. The year after Ironman’s release, Ghost’s best friend—the one arrested for murder—would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison. (Grant Williams was paroled in 2019 after serving 23 years of his sentence. Last year, that sentence was vacated following a review of the case that uncovered eyewitness testimony exonerating him.) His diabetes worsened, and he moved to a tiny village in Benin to seek alternative treatment. When he returned to the States, Ghost had to do a bid of his own—four months on Rikers Island for an attempted robbery outside of a club in Manhattan. It was around this time that the FBI started investigating the Wu as a gang whose true purpose was not music, but whatever could conceivably fall under the scope of the RICO Act. After surviving Rikers and gaining control of his health, Ghostface finally finished his masterpiece, Supreme Clientele, which was released in February 2000—long after it was promised; no deadlines. With that record and a handful of others (2006’s Fishscale and the leaked advance of Bulletproof Wallets chief among them), Ghost’s career seems to reject the notion that the dire circumstances under which Ironman were recorded are necessary for him to write or rap well. Federal agents and the ghosts of friends haunt his later raps, but their evocations feel literary. On Ironman—a record that is mired in, rather than about, this psychological torment—they’re tangible forces to be looked directly in the eye.

2022-10-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-10-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rap

Sony

October 9, 2022

00dcf9ec-8b3b-4a0e-81a7-e7e32c254a85

Paul A. Thompson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/

Luke Temple's new solo album Good Mood Fool is more playful and less particular than anything Temple's done in years. Though frequently gorgeous, the album's everything-in-its-right-place presentations occasionally outshine the songs' underlying melodies.

Luke Temple's new solo album Good Mood Fool is more playful and less particular than anything Temple's done in years. Though frequently gorgeous, the album's everything-in-its-right-place presentations occasionally outshine the songs' underlying melodies.

Luke Temple: Good Mood Fool

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18717-luke-temple-good-mood-fool/

Good Mood Fool

Luke Temple already had two LPs to his name when he formed Here We Go Magic in 2009, and that band's self-titled debut is, by most measures, a solo record; only on closer "Everything's Big" does Temple find himself backed by a full band. Over three subsequent LPs, Here We Go Magic became a proper band, subject to all the checks and balances that go along with group democracy. To hear Temple tell it, Good Mood Fool, his first solo LP since Here We Go Magic's launch—his 2011 effort Don't Act Like You Don't Care was recorded before the release of HWGM's debut—never would've made it as a Magic LP; had Temple tried to inject Fool's synth-heavy dalliances with reggae, 80's R&B and lite-funk into Here We Go Magic's twinkly kraut-folk, he would've found himself swiftly outvoted. (They might've talked him out of the Arby's slogan-skirting title, too, but that's neither here nor there.) So Temple decamped to a cabin in New York and took up the task himself, with a little help from Dirty Projectors drummer Mike Johnson and Glass Ghost keyboardist Eliot Krimsky. Fool's little more than drum machine, bass, a Juno-1 synth, and Temple's boyish, Paul Simon-ized vocals. This relatively spartan setup finds Temple sounding looser and more relaxed than he has in quite some time. Here We Go Magic's precision plinking occasionally leads to a kind of fussiness; though frequently gorgeous, their everything-in-its-right-place presentations occasionally outshine their underlying melodies. From the start, Good Mood Fool's considerably more playful and less particular than anything Temple's done in years, its production more spartan, less finicky, its songcraft sharp but not nearly as exacting. Opener "Hard Working Hand" is a more than passable stab at smoothed-out reggae; on a Burning Spear record, it'd stick out like a narc, but it's sharp enough to nick the sound without attempting to cop the spirit. "Katie", the restless pop-R&B rave-up in the Billy Ocean tradition, is even better; as he pitches falsetto'd woo to the gal on his screen, the camshow-enraptured "Katie" is Temple's anxiety-ridden take on "Ayo Technology". The limber late-afternoon funk of the slinky, strutting "Florida" is another winner, sleek without succumbing to stiffness. In light of Temple's tightly wound, fastidiously arranged back catalog, this diverse, limber opening trio feels a bit out of character. But that's precisely the idea; these were the left-turns Temple felt he couldn't take with Magic, and they lead him to intriguing places. There's an undercurrent of bitterness behind "Those Kids" keeping it from quite reaching the heights of the songs that precedes it. Describing a meeting with an MTV bigwig, Temple expresses frustration that his music hasn't caught on with either the gatekeepers or the titular youths. "Kids" closes with a chorus of backup singers mewling "they're all such idiots"; it's a little unclear whether he means the Viacom brass or the young people he's not reaching, but in either case, the hints of vitriol seem at odds with the song's honeyed harmonies. The squirrely, sputtering "Jessica Brown Findlay" also seems to lose something in the lyrics. An homage of sorts to the "Downton Abbey" actress, "Findlay" starts out sweet enough. But when Temple starts in on Findlay's "pineapple hair and deli-counter chest," things quickly turn icky. Temple, for all his musical particularities, can be a somewhat inscrutable lyricist. But even his more innocuous wordplay's vastly preferable to the oddly-pitched tangents that pepper Good Mood Fool. And closer "Hardest Working Self-Made Mexican" is certainly the set's strangest digression. The industrious immigrant at the center of the song is broadly drawn, more caricature than character, which leaves whatever point Temple hoped to make feeling muddled. Marital post-script "Sue" is lovely, a doleful, clear-eyed look at a relationship gone awry, easily the best song on the album's second side. But "Terrified Witness"—a sort of No Nukes song sung in retrospect—feels underwritten, and, at six minutes and change, the rigid groove of "Love Won't Receive" overstays its welcome. Fool starts out rangy and playful, but by its last few songs, the tone turns somber, and its ideas seem stretched a bit thin. It's telling, perhaps, that these three songs are the closest thing Fool has to Here We Go Magic tunes; they're fine and all, but Temple doesn't feel quite as enlivened by them as he does throughout the rest of the disc. A few awkward moments aside, Fool is at its best when Temple sounds the least like the Here We Go Magic guy; its buoyant, unfussy front half, out of character though it is, is up there with Temple's best work. Here's hoping Temple can bring a little of Fool's cavalier, hey-why-not spirit into whatever he does next.

2013-11-11T01:00:02.000-05:00

2013-11-11T01:00:02.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Secretly Canadian

November 11, 2013

00de60d7-5dec-4933-892e-94e05dd83e82

Paul Thompson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/

"They tried to make me go to rehab," wails Amy Winehouse on the opening track and first single from her second album *Back to Black*. It's not typical pop song fodder, but Winehouse isn't a typical pop singer. If she winds up as popular in the U.S. as she is at home in the UK, it'll be despite her reluctance to embrace the monotonous realities of promotional mechanics. Oh, she'll talk, but there's no guarantee what she'll say. (Our favorite is her heckling of Bono at last year's Q Awards: "Shut up, I don't give a fuck!") She'll be scheduled

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10032-back-to-black/

Back to Black

"They tried to make me go to rehab," wails Amy Winehouse on the opening track and first single from her second album Back to Black. It's not typical pop song fodder, but Winehouse isn't a typical pop singer. If she winds up as popular in the U.S. as she is at home in the UK, it'll be despite her reluctance to embrace the monotonous realities of promotional mechanics. Oh, she'll talk, but there's no guarantee what she'll say. (Our favorite is her heckling of Bono at last year's Q Awards: "Shut up, I don't give a fuck!") She'll be scheduled to perform, but there's no guarantee what she'll do, or even if she'll make it through the show. And she'll sing about her problems, but she won't give a shit what you think of them. If this makes Winehouse read a little like Lily Allen, that's not far off the mark. Both are larger-than-life singers who've found perfect vehicles for their outsized personalities. In Allen's case, it's a cocktail of pop, reggae, and hip-hop, with a cigarette in hand; for Winehouse, it's soul, jazz, and blues with a bottle of booze. Both pay tribute to their influences, with Winehouse's lyrics featuring shout-outs to Ray Charles, Donny Hathaway, and Slick Rick, and the two even share a producer: Mark Ronson, who's also worked with everyone from Sean Paul and Macy Gray to Ghostface and Rhymefest. But Winehouse is anything but a Lily Allen doppelgänger. After all, soul and jazz music are typically considered the province of grownups, and while Winehouse could be accused of slipping on these styles like costumes, she imbues her music with a surprisingly genuine soulfulness. Ronson's sneaky production provides most of the album's wit: The old school backdrop to "Me & Mr. Jones" is especially winking against couplets like "What kind of fuckery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig." But Winehouse's zingers (in that same song she tells her subject "'side from Sammy you're my best black Jew") and profane interjections (the title track begins "He left no time to regret/ Kept his dick wet") are only an occasional thing as she travels a well-worn lyrical path to both clinical and romantic rehabilitation. Songs like "Love Is a Losing Game" are full of regret, even if Winehouse refuses to wallow entirely in self-pity. However, as one might expect following the declaration of "Rehab", Winehouse does spend much of Back to Black on the defensive, trying to explain why she's stayed with the same guy who's done her wrong, or, in the case of "Wake Up Alone", why her ex gives her the night sweats ("I drip for him tonight," Winehouse less delicately puts it). It's one of the eternal themes of soul music, here spiced up with post-modern production where less forceful personalities might have gone with strictly retro emulation. The references to girl groups, northern soul, and ska are there, but no one would confuse these approximations (split evenly between Ronson and Salaam Remi, who produced Winehouse's since-disowned debut) with the real thing. Fortunately, Winehouse has been blessed by a brassy voice that can transform even mundane sentiments into powerful statements. She may be heartbroken, but she uses that ache, twisting the emotional scars to suit her songs-- and if she often seems like the masochistic recipient of each knife twist, so be it. It's not until the album's final track, "He Can Only Hold Her", that Winehouse finally switches from first person to third, the "I"s and "me"s giving way to "he"s and "she"s, suggesting that she's finally become an objective observer, able to see her personal issues for what they are. "He tries to pacify her, 'cause what's inside never dies," she sings, and we can only assume from this new vantage that Winehouse has moved on.

2007-03-28T02:00:02.000-04:00

2007-03-28T02:00:02.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Interscope

March 28, 2007

00df7e80-6540-49ec-b02f-b48e1313dcaf

Joshua Klein

https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/

On her third album, the New York rapper sounds as joyfully lascivious as ever, but slower and funkier, casting aside trifling men and centering her own self-fulfillment.

On her third album, the New York rapper sounds as joyfully lascivious as ever, but slower and funkier, casting aside trifling men and centering her own self-fulfillment.

Junglepussy: JP3

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/junglepussy-jp3/

JP3

“Black women are tired,” the rapper Junglepussy recently told Dazed. “Like, we have to do so much, and you really want me to tell you how to treat me like a decent human being? No!” In fact, Junglepussy spent much of her explosive first two albums, 2014’s Satisfaction Guaranteed and 2015’s Pregnant With Success, telling men to how do exactly that: Her best songs, like her breakout single “Bling Bling,” are booming, unapologetic, and hilarious instructions on how to serve a woman’s needs, whether that be making her dinner or giving her head. Still, on those two records, her fiery takedowns often had the ring of a Sisyphean burden—black women will always be forced to lead the way and keep others in line, ad nauseam, leaving no time for themselves. Even at her fiercest, Junglepussy sometimes had trouble practicing the self-sufficiency she preached, since it was so tied up in the actions of men and haters surrounding her (“You never greased my scalp/You never called me a Uber/You never picked no fruits for a nigga!” she hisses resentfully on Pregnant With Success’ “Nothing for Me.”) Three years later, Junglepussy is back with JP3, which finds her ditching the last of that resentment and replacing it with a funkier, more melodic, and more carefree vibe, full of slow grooves and self-affirming lyricism. “I’ve learned so much about myself” since Pregnant With Success, she said in the same interview, and it couldn’t be clearer: JP3 has Junglepussy looking away from trifling men and toward self-fulfillment. The high-tempo verbal assaults and twerk-ready anthems are mostly gone this time, but the real difference is Junglepussy’s energy: She’s full of laughter, trying her hand at humming and singing, leaving spaces for the beat to breathe where her younger self would’ve ripped half-shouted verses. Whereas before her rhymes about sex—her go-to subject—were rattled off with an almost confrontational absurdism, on JP3, they’re just as visceral, but almost entirely in reference to herself and the beauty of her own body, leaving her anonymous partner standing far off to the side (“Thighs thick as mud/pussy never funky like a skunk” she boasts on “Get Down”). Much of this change begins in the beats, which are simply exquisite. The production, overseen by her longtime collaborator Shy Guy, is rich, inventive, and hypnotic, and leagues more soulful and worldly than anything he’s previously provided Junglepussy. With the help of producer Say Hey, he nimbly hops from sensual, body-rolling dub (“Ready 2 Ride”) to a Kamaiyah-like Bay Area bounce (“I’m in Love”), providing Junglepussy with the kinds of lush, endlessly interesting instrumentals that few indie rappers have access to. The album begins with “State of the Union,” maybe the only track on JP3 that is a callback to her early work. Over a RZA-esque violin sample and heavy bass, Junglepussy reestablishes herself as one of the most entertaining one-line spitters working today: “No cook crack with that black girl magic/I’m smokin’ Spike Lee joint, she just gotta have it/Everybody wanna be black, it’s so tragic,” she spits with furor. It’s a great opener, but it also serves as a growth marker for the rest of the album: By the time JP3 wraps up with the all-sung slow jam “Showers,” it’s difficult to reconcile this unbothered, blissed-out Junglepussy with the fire-spitting hellraiser just nine songs earlier. Despite the sound switch, the principal subject matter is the same: Junglepussy is still in a league of her own when it comes to talking about sex, only this time it’s more on her terms than ever before. The Sporting Life-co-produced “I Just Want It” has her demanding head in a male-mimicking low register over flute samples and trap drums, while on “Trader Joe” she raps, with irreverent joy, “I think I like him more than I like Trader Joe’s/I’ll swallow kids if he start eating vegetables.” Best of all is “Long Way Home,” a late-night smoking groove dedicated to finessing one-night stands out of well-endowed men. “Feelin’ the dick, all up in my armpit” she chants in a chopped-and-screwed voice on the chorus, setting up Three 6 Mafia legend Gangsta Boo, whose confident, sex-filled wordplay is a clear predecessor to Junglepussy’s, and who sneers at her lover, “Damn that dick looks thick/How many inches is it?” The dirty talk is triumphant and silly, dominating and desirous, but without the gut-punch of Junglepussy’s previous work: Here, she’s diverted that aggression and energy exclusively toward female pleasure. JP3 closes with “Showers,” a blissful and exalted cookout-ready jam, and a perfect ending to an album about being sonically and spiritually free. JP3 might sacrifice some of Junglepussy’s previously hedonistic splendor for poppier hooks and mellower vibes, but it also introduces us to a happier, more mature woman. “Scars on my body-ody/Cutting like decorations,” she sings tenderly on “Showers,” in a rare moment of autobiographical revelation. But she doesn’t elaborate. Instead, she triumphantly launches into the chorus as an antidote: “Shower with my chains on, took a shower all my chains on!” Black women are tired, and they shouldn’t have to tell people how to treat them. Yet they do, and probably always will. On JP3, Junglepussy posits that the only way to persist through never-ending struggle is to look inward for joy and acceptance, and hope that the rest of the world will come around in time.

2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

May 11, 2018

00dfd320-4dac-426d-93f4-6da7eddb00ba

Jackson Howard

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/

The Atlanta rapper tries to tell the story of his rise to fame on his guest star-packed new album, but the music is all work and no inspiration.

The Atlanta rapper tries to tell the story of his rise to fame on his guest star-packed new album, but the music is all work and no inspiration.

Lil Baby: My Turn

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-baby-my-turn/

My Turn

Lil Baby fell backward into music and made the most of it. Before 2016, he’d never rapped a word, but after serving a two-year prison sentence, he decided to give it a try, thanks to the prodding of Quality Control executives Coach K and Pierre “Pee” Thomas and his former classmate Young Thug, who paid him to leave his hood and go to the studio. After releasing seven projects in two years, the Atlanta artist took a year off and returns on his new album My Turn as something approaching a marquee act. The album title’s message is obvious: He is stepping into his star moment, but while his songs are pleasantly steady and well-balanced, he still has yet to really command attention on his own. Lil Baby is like the inverse of Young Thug. Where Thug is explosively unpredictable, Baby is reliably inert. His mellow, lilting raps have poise, but when they lock into a groove they lose all momentum. There are songs called “Solid” and “Consistent” here, and that tells you almost everything you need to know. The album is only saved by his minor improvement as a songwriter and lyricist. He is ready to embrace his notoriety, albeit cautiously. “I never call myself a G.O.A.T., I leave that love to the people,” he hedges on “Emotionally Scarred,” a claim that seems to contradict the album’s baby goat-covered artwork. Much of My Turn concerns the familiar calls of street life and the uncertainty that comes with pursuing a rap dream at full tilt. “They want me catch a murder, I ain’t goin’ back,” he vows on “Commercial.” Baby keeps glimpsing the world he left behind in his periphery, and his most evocative writing finds him in between worlds; on “Same Thing,” he goes plain jane because the public associates bling with thugs, and on “Gang Signs” he returns home as a philanthropist and local legend. He’s trying to tell a story here, but he’s just not much of a storyteller—his bars keep the narrative going, but he doesn’t offer enough arresting imagery to make his scenes come to life. His supporting cast doesn’t do him any favors. Exchanges with Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, and Future can feel like adjusting from blurriness to the clarity of corrective lenses. Uzi is reading horoscopes on long flights and trying to spend enough money to bring Kobe Bryant back to life on “Commercial.” Baby loses a shop-off to the superior showman Future on “Live Off My Closet.” Even Baby’s best bar on “We Should” (“My Rolls Royce in the projects, they look at me like I’m God”) isn’t enough to outshine Thug’s Technicolor absurdity. It isn’t that Baby underperforms in any of these duets; on the contrary, he gives everything he has. But he doesn’t really have any charisma, or flavor, or personality. Sonically, the album has the same architects as his last two solo projects: in-house QC producer Quay Global, Tay Keith, and Wheezy. There’s additional production from Murda Beatz, DJ Paul, and Buddah Bless, most up to their usual tricks. The primary new contributor is recent Quality Control signee Twysted Genius, but he doesn’t have anything fresh to offer. With nine beats between them, Quay and Twysted Genius build out the bulk of the album, and they often sound like they’re working the same sample packs of synths, keys, hi-hats, and 808. Outside of the always-surprising Tay Keith (“Same Thing, “Commercial”), the refreshing DJ Paul (“Gang Signs”), and a soundtrack holdover (Queen & Slim’s Hit-Boy-produced “Catch the Sun”), the producers usually encourage Baby to color inside the lines. My Turn gets the most out of Lil Baby when he plays up the stakes, or as he puts it on “Sum 2 Prove”: “They don’t wan’ see us on TV unless it’s the news/I got somethin' to prove/Yeah, I’m young, but got somethin’ to lose.” “Hurtin” lingers in the losses he’s suffered but doesn’t succumb to them. “I’ve been bustin’ on that glizzy ever since I had got robbed/I done really beat the odds,” he realizes. On “Forgot That,” his song with his 4 Pockets Full signee Rylo Rodriguez, the raps come tumbling out of him, as he attempts to illustrate the work ethic he raps about through sheer exertion. It’s that same understated diligence that has fueled his star turn. But the album is all work and no inspiration.

2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Quality Control / Wolfpack Global / Motown / Capitol

March 4, 2020

00e1aa62-2eea-48ae-ac4c-dbe24c405ac8

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

Recorded across a few intimate evenings at a cozy L.A. cocktail bar, these four side-long tracks of bass, drums, sax, and guitar dissolve revelatory improvisation into mesmerizing ambient atmospheres.

Recorded across a few intimate evenings at a cozy L.A. cocktail bar, these four side-long tracks of bass, drums, sax, and guitar dissolve revelatory improvisation into mesmerizing ambient atmospheres.

Jeff Parker: Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-parker-mondays-at-the-enfield-tennis-academy/

Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy

Jeff Parker synthesizes jazz and hip-hop with an appealingly light touch. The longtime Tortoise guitarist has a silken, clean-cut tone, yet his production takes more cues from DJ Premier than it does from a classic mid-century jazz sound. In the early ’00s, when Madlib ushered a boom-bap sensibility into the hallowed halls of the jazz label Blue Note, Parker conducted his own experiments in genre-mashing in the Chicago group Isotope 217, dragging jaunty hip-hop rhythms into the far reaches of computerized abstraction. More recently, Parker enlivened quantized beats and chopped-up samples with live instrumentation, both as leader of the New Breed and sideman to Makaya McCraven. Inverting rap’s longtime reverence for jazz, Parker has gradually codified a new language for the so-called “American art form” with a vocabulary gleaned from the United States’ next great contribution to the musical universe. Parker’s latest, the live double LP Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, was largely recorded in 2019, while his star as a solo artist was steeply ascending. Capturing a few intimate evenings with drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and New Breed saxophonist Josh Johnson at ETA, a cozy Los Angeles cocktail bar, the record anticipates his 2020 opus with the New Breed, Suite for Max Brown. Yet Mondays amounts to something novel in 2022: It lays out long-form spiritual jazz, knotty melodies, and effortless solos over a slow-moving foundation as consistent as an 808. The results are as mesmerizing as a luxurious, beatific ambient record—yet at the same time, it’s clear that all of this is happening within the inherently messy confines of an improvisatory concert. Across four side-long tracks, each spanning about 20 minutes, Parker and Johnson trade ostinatos, mesh together, split again into polyrhythmic call-and-response. Butterss commands the pocket with a photonegative of their lead lines, often freed from rhythmic responsibilities by the drums’ relentlessness. Bellerose exhibits a Neu!-like sense of consistency, just screwed down a whole bunch of BPMs. His kit sounds as dusty as an old sample, and his hypnotic rhythms evoke humanizers of the drum machine such as J Dilla or RZA. You could spend the album’s 84-minute runtime listening only to the beats; every shift in pattern queues a new movement in the compositions, beaming a timeframe from the bottom up. Bellerose’s sensitive, reactive playing, though, is unmistakably live. We can practically see the sweat beading on his arm when he holds steady on a ride cymbal for minutes on end, or plays a shaker for a whole LP side. He begins the understated opener “2019-07-08 I” with feather-soft brush swirls, but on the second cut, he sets Mondays’ stride, as a simple bell pattern builds into a leisurely rhythmic stroll. Thirteen minutes in, the mood breaks. Bellerose hits some heavy quarter notes on his hi-hat; Butterss leans into a fat bassline; saxophone arpeggios, probably looped, float in front of us like smoke rings lingering in the air. It’s a glorious moment, punctuated by clinking glasses and a distant “whoo!” so perfectly placed we become aware of not only the setting, but also the supple knob-turns of engineer Bryce Gonzales in post-production. Anyone who’s heard great improvisation at a bar in the company of both jazzheads and puzzled onlookers knows this dynamic—for some, the music was incidental. Others experienced a revelation. Lodged in this familiar situation is the question of what such “ambient jazz” means to accomplish—whether it wants to occupy the center of our consciousnesses, or resign itself to the background. The record’s perpetual soloing offers an answer. Never screechy, grating, or aggressive, each performance is nonetheless highly individual. Even when the quartet settles into an extended groove, a spotlight shines on Johnson, Butterss, and Parker in turn, steadily illuminating a perpetual sense of invention. Their interplay feels almost traditional, suggesting bandstand trade-offs of yore, yet the open-ended structure of their jams keeps it unconventional. Mondays works in layers: Its metronomic rhythms pacify, but the performers and their idiosyncratic expressions offer ample material to those interested in hearing young luminaries and seasoned vets swap ideas within a group. In 2020, Johnson dropped his first record under his own name, the excellent, daringly melodic Freedom Exercise, while Butterss’ recent debut as bandleader, Activities, is one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022. Akin to Parker’s early experiments with Tortoise and Chicago Underground, Johnson and Butterss’ recordings both revel in electronic textures, and each features the other as a collaborator. Mondays captures them as their mature playing styles gain sea legs atop the rudder of Parker’s guitar. The only track recorded after the pandemic began, closer “2021-04-28” sculpts the record’s loping structure, giving retrospective shape to the preceding hour of ambience. In the middle of the song, Parker’s guitar slows to a yawn; the drums pipe down. After a couple minutes of drone, Bellerose slips back into the mix alongside a precisely phrased guitar line strummed on the upper frets, punctuated by saxophone accents that exclaim with the force of an eager hype man. Beginning with a murmur, the album ends with a bracing statement, a passage so articulated that it actually feels spoken. Mondays drifts with unhurried purpose through genres and ideas, imprinted with the passage of time. The deliberate, thumping clock of its drumbeat keeps duration in mind, and, as with so many live albums, we’re reminded of how circumstances have changed since the sessions were recorded. Truly, life is different than it was in 2019—and not just in terms of world politics, climate change, the threat of disease, or the reality that making a living in music is harder than ever. Seemingly catalyzed by COVID-19’s deadly, isolating scourge, jazz has transformed, hybridized, and weakened tired arguments for musical stratification and fundamentalism. Even calling Mondays a “live” album is a simplification, considering how Parker and other top jazz brains have increasingly availed themselves of the studio—including, in a sparing yet dramatic way, on Mondays. Near the end of the first track, the tape slows abruptly. The plane of the song opens to another dimension: This set, Parker seems to be saying, can be manipulated with the ease of a vinyl platter beneath a DJ’s fingers. Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room.

2022-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00

Jazz

Eremite

November 12, 2022

00e2fead-b81d-4f73-a1db-5d4a0b491ecb

Daniel Felsenthal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/

The four-song EP from the Michigan post-punk band features Kelley Deal of the Breeders and some of the most pointed and impactful songwriting of their career.

The four-song EP from the Michigan post-punk band features Kelley Deal of the Breeders and some of the most pointed and impactful songwriting of their career.

Protomartyr: Consolation EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/protomartyr-consolation-ep/

Consolation EP

The most recent LP of caustic rock from Detroit band Protomartyr, 2017’s Relatives in Descent, contained a song with a riveting name: “Male Plague.” Better still, it found frontman Joe Casey—typically a post-punk wordsmith of the compacted Mark E. Smith School, who can convey the nuance of a short story in four charmingly obtuse minutes—just chanting its title, “Male plague!/Male plague!” What a fun indictment of toxic masculinity. “Hey figurehead, what you gonna do?” Casey spouted, “Her truth moves too fast for you.” In the past, Protomartyr did what the best writers do and evoked a sense of place via grinding Midwestern humility. On “Male Plague,” however, that place was the future. Protomartyr’s new Consolation EP continues the discernibly politicized streak of Relatives in Descent—which also touched on Trumpism and Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. It was recorded with Kelley Deal of the Breeders, who lends her salty-sweet vocals to two of its four tracks. She also arranged the delicately aslant closer, “You Always Win”—an apparent comment on mortality, on growing “weak” and “grey” with another person—bringing in friends to add cello, violin, and clarinet. On previous records, the airtight tension and boiled-over poetry of Protomartyr’s music has been so densely packed that it could feel exhausting at album-length (maybe that’s the point). But the EP form serves them well. Consolation breathes. Opener “Wait” rumbles and bursts with the crescendoing ring of an alarm clock. It’s punctuated by the most anthemic chorus Protomartyr have done—though the song’s lovely, circling melody is really sung by guitarist Greg Ahee—and that explosive dynamic only serves Casey’s relatively abstracted verses, with lines about “a pair of fellas…punching the life out of each other” and “ironic T-shirts wet with blood.” “Same Face in a Different Mirror” sounds like a rumination on stagnant, grim parts of society coming into focus—“Ugly is intact/But now the frame is clearer”—but it turns hopeful, splitting the difference between feeling like a “terminal zero” and “feeling I’m in love.” Perhaps the sentiments require each other. Deal—the same Deal, of course, who put a halo of angelic harmonies onto the classic Last Splash; who fed her sewing machine through a Marshall amp—makes “Wheel of Fortune” spin. All of Protomartyr’s anxious tension seems to unwind at once as the song lifts off. “Wheel of Fortune” details the grotesque waking nightmare of systematic oppression in America, which ensures some people have less a chance at survival—be it from police brutality, poisoned water, global warming, white supremacy, patriarchy, religious groups, or (as the title suggests) the predatory industry of gambling. Its churn feels endless. Casey’s lyrics are a masterful mix of oblique and literal, spelling out the bleak realities just enough. He opens with short fragments—“Water as commodity/All is comedy/Acts of God/Acts of purse-milking apostles”—that grow in length as their subject matter grows increasingly dire. “A man with a gun and a deluded sense of purpose,” Casey rattles. “A good guy with a gun who missed/A police state desperate to reach quota.” The cutting refrain, repeated with fire by Casey and Deal in tandem—“I decide who lives and who dies”—rings disturbingly true of twisted America, summarizing this index of monumental failure. It adds up to one of Protomartyr’s best songs. When Protomartyr announced Relatives in Descent, the band mentioned the particular influence of Odyshape, the 1981 sophomore album from British feminist punk band the Raincoats. When Ahee first heard it five years ago, he said it exploded his way of thinking about music. With diffuse, woven textures and mystical, nonlinear rhythms, Odyshape is one of the all-time great examples of a feminization of rock. Protomartyr has commented, too, on how Deal’s sense of melody added “femininity” to their music of Consolation; her voice certainly adds life and levity. If Protomartyr learned anything from Odyshape, it might be the audacity to explore, to locate new methods of release—and they found a bracing clarity.

2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Domino

June 15, 2018

00eab48f-1061-4f7e-923c-c7d89bab038d

Jenn Pelly

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/

Electro-soul band's second album abandons the graceful, delicate melodies of its debut for songs with more wallop.

Electro-soul band's second album abandons the graceful, delicate melodies of its debut for songs with more wallop.

Hot Chip: The Warning

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4029-the-warning/

The Warning

It's only natural that Hot Chip would push themselves a bit after their debut Coming on Strong, a successful but safe entrée to the British electro-soul outfit. Their kitschy yet deeply affecting lyrics drew so much attention the first time around that I'd met more than a few people who said they hated the group simply because they seemed like cheeky fuckers. They missed the point, but that's another matter. Follow-up album The Warning is propulsion and power and punctuation rolled up into one, abandoning a lot of the graceful, delicate melodies of the debut for songs with more wallop. It was a necessary move-- a step forward-- and the results are mostly golden. Of course, a lot of their pert turns of phrases are still around, as are the molten ballads ("Look After Me", "Colours") but they're usually eclipsed by the zooming, gliding synths, keyboards, and drum machines that push things forward. If their flavor was DF-Ay! before, it now sounds a bit more DF-Hey. Nowhere is that more evident than on the unsteady, maniacally fun "Over and Over", the early single that got most excited for their turn to the dancefloor. Built on the best kind of chant (one you can remember), a skulking guitar, and handclaps, the song is a standout among spastic jams like the churning Human League-esque "No Fit State" or crystalline "(Just Like We) Breakdown". The centerpiece, though, comes in two parts, from two angles. First, the throbbing, sincere "Boy From School", which is marked by Alexis Taylor's sweetly thin vocals and the heartbroken line, "We try, but we don't belong." It's as good a pop song as has been written this year. The second, the title track, is a less direct hit and takes a minute to sink in. It's also got one of those couplets ("Hot Chip will break your legs, snap off your head/ Hot Chip will put you down, under the ground") to distract you. But like a lot of the band's best songs, it splits into three and four parts, veering into bridges where there should be choruses, verses where there should codas, and dirges where there should be melodies. It's not rocket science, but it's also not botany. "Prepare yourself for a mechanical fright" is the clarion call. Thing is, where Coming on Strong had scattered moments of mediocrity or unrealized embellishments, this album has several irrefutable numbers-- and a couple of clangs. "Tchaparian" is needlessly jagged on an album full of round edges. "Arrest Yourself", a kinetic live staple, manages to avoid the effortless groove created onstage by trying the push the envelope with loose horn sounds and a disorienting arrangement. Their failures magnify an incomplete rotation. As far as improvements go, The Warning isn't so much a triumph as it is a reach in the right direction. Beat maestro Joe Goddard seems to have taken more of a backseat vocally to Taylor's coo and this saps a lot of the joyful contrast from the group. Then again, the bear-like Goddard isn't much of a singer in the first place, though he's obviously got the bigger sense of humor. Their hip-hop influence has been scaled back a bit as well, turning to a punishing rhythm section stacked on top of deeper ambient sounds. The built-for-a-cathedral "Careful" opens softly and quickly erupts into choppy sample darts, then cools back down again. Its momentum and retraction is a good metaphor for the record.

2006-05-25T02:00:02.000-04:00

2006-05-25T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Astralwerks / DFA / EMI

May 25, 2006

00ec3a59-7bd0-4ee1-8c91-63922ce4def0

Sean Fennessey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/

Nicolás Jaar’s collaborative project for the 2020 Unsound Festival gathers Angel Bat Dawid, Laraaji, Senyawa, and a dozen more artists in a pensive, shapeshifting piece of pandemic-era live improvisation.

Nicolás Jaar’s collaborative project for the 2020 Unsound Festival gathers Angel Bat Dawid, Laraaji, Senyawa, and a dozen more artists in a pensive, shapeshifting piece of pandemic-era live improvisation.

Various Artists: Weavings

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-weavings/

Weavings

By the time Krakow’s Unsound Festival launched a special online-only pandemic edition of its annual event, in September 2020, livestreams were old hat. Sitting in front of our computers and passively absorbing a two-dimensional, unidirectional broadcast shared only with our Twitter feed and a few carefully vetted fellow bubble members—roommate, spouse, house pet—was not a terribly engrossing way to experience a performance, it turned out. If this was live music, why did we feel so dead inside? Still, musicians craved an audience. More than that, would-be collaborators craved musical company; the virus be damned, they craved shared vibrations in shared air. Nicolás Jaar, whose focus has become increasingly collective in recent years, came up with a solution: a format in which multiple improvisers would play together over the internet, in real time, dialing in from their home studios. In order to impose a sense of order on what could otherwise be chaotic, Jaar devised a novel structure of interwoven duets. Artist A would play with artist B for a predetermined duration; then artist A would drop out and artist C would join artist B. After another interval, artist D would replace artist B, and so on as the piece rolled forward. You might think of the format as a slow-motion square dance or relay race. Or, better still, a loom. Hence the title: Weavings. Jaar and Unsound curators Mat Schulz and Gosia Plysa recruited a diverse list of collaborators: spiritual-jazz polymath Angel Bat Dawid, new-age multi-instrumentalist Laraaji, oud player Dirar Kalash, clarinetist Paweł Szamburski, cellist Resina, and folk/metal/noise musicians Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara (of the Indonesian duo Senyawa), among others. Rather than streaming live—a technologically risky proposition, given the project’s intricacies—the ensemble’s real-time performance was recorded to Jaar’s hard drive in separate channels. He spent the following 24 hours mixing and finessing, and for the next day’s online event, he streamed the finished recording over the web directly from his computer. Ninety-two minutes long, featuring 18 players, including Jaar himself, Weavings is the document of that process. Despite the ambitious format and crowded virtual bandstand, Weavings is understated. A patient exploration of texture and mood, it incorporates a wide array of voices and styles into a porous, shapeshifting whole. Over the course of its run, it takes in spectral drones, mournful reeds, industrial clanking, and ghostly whispers and wails. Earthbound sounds—the rattle of small objects, the scuttling of insects—are paired with heavenly invocations and streaks of what sounds like pure light, gleaming with cosmic significance. The piece is bookended by group-improv passages featuring most of the players joining together at once, though you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from your ears alone; their restraint is remarkable. They seem to devote as much attention to listening as they do playing. In the streamed performance, each musician was visible in their own Zoom window, like an experimental-music version of Hollywood Squares. Listening back, however, it’s not always clear who is playing at any given time; foreground and background are in constant flux, as distinctive voices filter to the front and then recede into the mix. Certain themes recur. Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument lays out shimmering pedal tones mirrored in Resina’s bowed cello. Shabara and experimental vocalist Ka Baird contribute guttural chattering noises whose staccato attack and scraped textures are echoed in Aho Ssan’s percussive electronic treatments. Dawid’s introductory vocalizations feel like a calling down of spirits; Juliana Huxtable’s sing-song poetic delivery is a rumination on blood and bruises rendered in fanciful, candy-colored detail. It’s the rare moment where the music points to a referent outside itself, but even here, Huxtable’s hypnotic intonation contributes to Weavings’ immersive pull. What’s most striking over the course of the piece is how many contrasting sounds and motifs can be folded into a form so coherent: Scraped metal, folk melodies, and fevered speaking in tongues all come to seem like they’re cut from the same cloth. Weavings is—perhaps unsurprisingly, given the context of its creation—a pensive and even melancholy piece of music; its broadly meditative stretches are pocked with the occasional outburst of anxiety, anger, or fear. But there is a palpable sense of shared spirit in the music. It’s not something you can measure or even pinpoint, but you can hear the players joining together in service to a higher purpose. For all its restraint, Weavings feels determined and even celebratory, a declaration of defiance in the face of a microbe that tried to bring the world to a halt. Not two years later, the course of Covid has changed many times over, and it can be hard to remember what life felt like in the pandemic’s first year; some of the impetus for the work has faded from memory, and as a result, its meaning may have changed. But as one crisis has given way to another, now that Putin’s war rages just 160 miles from Krakow, perhaps Weavings takes on new meanings. It remains a powerful reminder that borders are purely notional, as well as a testament to the basic human need to come together in times of adversity. If you’re inclined to think of music in spiritual terms—as a summoning of grace, an invocation of a higher power, or a simple attempt to carve out a foothold for good in the world—you may find Weavings’ implicit message of harmonious union more needed now than ever.

2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

Other People / Unsound

March 24, 2022

00ec8b4a-ca68-4d14-b26c-c8687ee04c4f

Philip Sherburne

https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/

In the California pop singer-songwriter’s bright, hallucinogenic world, everything glows in the dark and almost every chorus is chanted.

In the California pop singer-songwriter’s bright, hallucinogenic world, everything glows in the dark and almost every chorus is chanted.

Remi Wolf: Juno

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/remi-wolf-juno/

Juno

Remi Wolf’s musical and lyrical language speaks in zany technicolor. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter opened “Doctor,” the first song on her 2019 debut EP, You’re a Dog!, by promising, “I’d literally pee outside for you on Hollywood Boulevard.” Last year, Wolf released a follow-up, I’m Allergic to Dogs!, and notched her biggest hit to date with “Photo ID,” an ironic quarantine-era anthem (“Inside, that’s where we can be free!”) with a surreal, hyper-saturated animated video. On her new full-length, Juno, she homes her scatterbrained Californian pop into an effervescent, hook-filled record that flirts with weighty emotions but often swerves for the safety of a joke. Wolf’s style manages to be funky without sounding cloyingly retro; at times the production on Juno is so shiny it edges toward hyperpop fluorescence. The first half of the album is entirely co-produced by Wolf with collaborator Jared “Solomonophonic” Solomon, whose groovy riffs and guitar shredding lend heft to the songs’ squiggly squelches. But every ounce of sunshine is tempered by grit; Wolf’s voice retains its powerful rasp even when she stretches it into absurd shapes. Seconds into opener “Liquor Store,” it’s woven into sour-sweet harmonies with the twang of a Duane Allman guitar lick. Wolf has said she wants her music to be “upbeat and danceable,” and that’s certainly true of Juno: Whether soulful or playful, happy or numb, every line and note is crammed into the kooky aesthetic. The lyrics are so full to the margins with wisecracks that it can be hard to discern a narrative arc—or, really, any way to engage other than sitting back, pulling on the weed pen, and sharing the giggle. But hidden between the wry asides and na-na-na choruses are murmurs of discontent. Bright and hallucinogenic as the music may be, “Liquor Store” is about Wolf’s experience getting sober, and through all the gags, Juno is an album about fitting uncomfortably into adulthood. On the frenetic “Quiet on Set,” Los Angeles is a dizzying movie lot where everything feels like it could fold up and roll away at any moment; on closer “Street You Live On,” Wolf contorts her voice until a song about feeling torn apart by a breakup sounds like a playground chant. An appealing weariness underlines these songs: Just listen to the squeaky three-part harmonies of “Front Tooth” that squeal, “This just don’t feel like it’s supposed to.” In Wolf’s relentlessly upbeat world, where everything glows in the dark and almost every chorus is chanted, Juno finds tension when it lets a bit of melancholy seep in, as on the muted coda of “Volkiano,” or the playful production of “Sally,” whose incongruous pairing of acoustic guitar and a high-tempo electronic drum break sounds like a set-up for a punchline, but instead disarms with its earnestness. In “Quiet on Set,” Wolf sings about how she doesn’t want to “be a Debbie Downer.” But it would be a shame to let a commitment to danceable music or a wacky persona hold her back from exploring her artistic range. Somewhere around Juno’s ninth or 10th track, the phantasmagoria begins to feel surprisingly monochromatic, and the idea of Wolf toning it down starts to sound appealing. The gags and the pathos are a package deal, but once all the jacks are back in their boxes, it’s worth asking if Wolf could be even more compelling as a real person than she is as a cartoon.

2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Island

October 19, 2021

00f1acbc-1db9-49b5-9f9e-fa48e5a5ef60

Adlan Jackson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/

Ditching the springy Europop of 2004's Deep Cuts, Sweden's the Knife here pits dark, ghostly electro backdrops against elastic vocals, which they mash through a wringer of digital manipulation. A far cry from the duo's friendly first singles, Silent Shout gorily births the Knife's mutant twin. The result is creepy enough to warrant its own genre: haunted house.

Ditching the springy Europop of 2004's Deep Cuts, Sweden's the Knife here pits dark, ghostly electro backdrops against elastic vocals, which they mash through a wringer of digital manipulation. A far cry from the duo's friendly first singles, Silent Shout gorily births the Knife's mutant twin. The result is creepy enough to warrant its own genre: haunted house.

The Knife: Silent Shout

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4590-silent-shout/

Silent Shout

One of the prevailing critical talking points surrounding the release of Radiohead's Kid A had to do with Thom Yorke's willful defilement of his own vocals. Remember the reactions? Those desperate for the band to remain in the golden-throated glory days of The Bends puzzled over the move before ultimately chalking it up to a function of Yorke's inscrutable eccentricity; others cited interviews in which Yorke professed to be sick of his own voice as proof there was a more sympathetic method to his madness. But despite all the peripheral talk about the band's blossoming love of electronic and experimental music, few critics advanced the simplest theory, which was that Radiohead had completely succumbed to its own lust for the textures of dance music. No wonder those vocals had to go. Vocal-fronted acts in dance and electronic music have tangled for years with how to rectify the textural freshness afforded by synths, samplers, and computers with the relative milque-toastiness of the human voice. The disco/house solution has been to lubricate vocals with a glossy coating of filters and vocoders; electro's has been to marry cold, bristly analogs with deadpan vocal affect; IDM's has been to chop, slice, and dice; and a number of general purpose dance acts have decided that multiplicity (by way of an endless procession of guest vocalists) is the key to staying energized. That said, only a handful of electronic full-lengths have navigated the vocal/textural divide as inventively as and refreshingly as Kid A. The latest is Silent Shout. The brainchild of Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson, the Knife have released three records, each an exponential improvement over the last. Although the last, 2004's Deep Cuts, boasted the shimmering "Heartbeats"-- a sort of "99 Luftballons" for the techno set, since covered by up-and-coming indie darling José Gonzalez-- it was also something of a mess, spitting up steel drum samples, happy hardcore breaks, and innocuous synthpop riffs. A much tighter, laser-guided record, Silent Shout finds the duo honing in on a specific mood, and at last, perfecting a signature sound. As evidenced by the Chris Cunningham-esque creature adorning the promotional material and artwork of the album's debut single, the operative adjective here is "evil." Along with recent outings from Mu and Cristian Vogel, Silent Shout achieves a forbidding cold-bloodedness by melding contemporary electronic sounds with a grotesque vocal palette. Call it "haunted house." As menacing as it is hooky, this is some bracing stuff. It helps that Dreijer's arrangements have become more assured and refined over time-- from the rushing percussion and synth flares of "Neverland" to the hall of plexiglass mirrors wonkiness of "We Share Our Mother's Health", he frequently finds a striking balance between minimalism and dissonance. But, as alluded above, Andersson's vocals do the bulk of the work. With "Heartbeats"-- not to mention her guest spot on Röyksopp's slept-on "What Else Is There"-- she proved that her shrill voice (think Björk by way of Ari Up by way of Siouxsie Sioux by way of Mu's Mutsumi Kanamori) was capable of magic in its natural form, but little of Silent Shout grants us that pleasure. Here, her vocals are almost always multi-tracked, with at least one of those tracks run through a pitch shifter or octave filter or something similar, usually to genuinely creepy result. On the record's eponymous horrorshow opener, she sounds like she's duetting with Zuul; "The Captain" runs her vocal through an exciter and pitch-shifts it up to mimic the Oriental scale; "Still Light" has her singing feebly into a ceiling fan from a hospital bed; and "One Hit" is possibly the only song in the world that could be reasonably classed "goblin glam" (note: that means it's great). An early contender for best record of the quarter, here's hoping Silent Shout inspires similar imagination and pushing outwards; after all, no matter how heady and interior electronic music allows itself to become, it could never get as scary as the world outside.

2006-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2006-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic / Experimental

Mute / Rabid

February 13, 2006

00f1bfb3-fd78-4b85-9c75-62b101eba433

Mark Pytlik

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/

Where Lorely Rodriguez’s debut album brought a refreshing dose of weirdness to the crowded field of alt-pop R&B, her follow-up is more of an anodyne amalgam of 2018’s pop trends.

Where Lorely Rodriguez’s debut album brought a refreshing dose of weirdness to the crowded field of alt-pop R&B, her follow-up is more of an anodyne amalgam of 2018’s pop trends.

Empress Of: Us

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/empress-of-us/

Us

Me, the first album by Lorely Rodriguez’s project Empress Of, was an astonishing debut. In a supercrowded field, Rodriguez’s production distinguished itself with all-too-rare menace and oomph, like the constant mallet hits of “Kitty Kat,” or the sumptuous electro-house grotto of “Water Water.” Making an alt-pop R&B album in 2015 (or any time in the past decade) is kind of like starting a fast-casual cronut chain in 2013, but listening to Me, the unlikely happens: The trend doesn’t seem trendy. Us differs from its predecessor in two ways. One’s in the title—where Me was entirely self-produced, on Us Rodriguez enlisted outside producers and songwriters like Dev Hynes, duo DJDS (Kanye West, Khalid, Kacy Hill), Cole M.G.N. (Ariel Pink, Christine and the Queens) and Spanish producer Pional (remixes for Chairlift and the xx). The other way’s in the interviews; as Rodriguez told Pitchfork, she wanted an album that wasn’t “as emotionally isolating as [Me]”. Less emotionally isolating, in music, usually means “happier,” and “happier” means “poppier”— more palatable, fitting more nicely in more playlists. Me wasn’t not poppy, but it wasn’t formulaic. There’s trop-house on “Standard,” but it’s been pulled apart like a carcass. “Threat” is a dance track with a drop, placed at the precise second the drop goes, but the drop is distorted, exuberant, menacing, weird. Very little on Us can be called weird. If you were a music supervisor in 2040, commissioning a stock soundtrack for a movie set in 2018—the exact amalgamation of sounds that’d root audiences in this year—it would sound a lot like this. Me, despite frequent reductive comparisons to Grimes or FKA twigs, was singular. But Us practically begs for comparisons—and comparisons to more formulaic artists. The inspirational soul-pop of “I’ve Got Love” recalls recent Kelly Clarkson. “Timberlands,” in its winsome delivery and Daria-like eye-rolling, could be an Alessia Cara song, and its chorus launches into those pitch-shifted vocal squiggles that are ubiquitous from Kygo to Calvin. “Love for Me” and “Just the Same” are the dancehall/house/synth puree that radio labels “trop-house.” The latter adds a pinch of “Lovefool”—a blend so hyper-specifically reminiscent to this exact moment it might as well have come from a radio study involving microseconds of listening time. (Since Mitski’s “Nobody” exists, it isn’t even the first “Lovefool” rip in the past few months.) The lyrics, too, are simpler, and deliberately so: “A younger version of me would try to mask a lot of stuff by being dreamy,” Rodriguez told Pitchfork. “Sometimes people can be uncomfortable by how direct my lyrics are [on this album].” And sure, directness is great. There’s just a line between directness and telling versus showing, and lines like “I don’t even smoke weed, it gives me anxiety” fall on the wrong side of it—particularly given the metronome-stiff 4/4 delivery of the melody. Other lyrics are just cliches: “Feel like I’m on the outside looking in”; “Eating out the palm of your hand.” Others are retreads: “Tear my clothes off like I was a paycheck,” from Me, is a great and oft-quoted line, and it’s almost heard again on “Just the Same”: “I want you on top of me like a paperweight.” The repetition almost renders the first track less impressive, like both songs came of flipping through the P’s in the dictionary. Rodriguez is an excellent songwriter when she’s on her game. The bilingual “Trust Me Baby” genuinely does sound direct, though Rodriguez’ plaintive delivery does as much for that as the lyrics. And Dev Hynes-assisted “Everything to Me” is in another class entirely, a story of friendship captured in fleeting snapshots of characteristically New York moments: “Drinking beer out of the bag, watching cars and yellow cabs”; “Everyone on the roof is in bathing suits, but there’s nowhere to swim.” Crucially, Rodriguez leaves the tension to subtext and to the instrumental: a synth track that prickles with an unsettled melody, or Hynes’ uneasy harmonies. This attention to detail is welcome, and Rodriguez and her co-producers do as much with the pop template as they can. An airhorn shows up halfway through “Love for Me,” as if to herald the arrival of a newer, more bracing track (albeit one that doesn’t come). “I Don’t Even Smoke Weed” dedicates a good chunk of its runtime to a synth-organ solo. “I’ve Got Love” adds a frenetic acid-synth underpinning and gives it arrangement little pauses and trail-offs that beg to be drawn out more. When tension slips in, it’s generally for the better. “Again” is a fairly standard ballad, but its sleepy expanse and dreamy melody are welcome amid the MOR. The drama of “All for Nothing” is even more welcome: a stormy dispatch from a troubled relationship set amid squalls of sawtooth synths, pained vocal runs, and an almost hymn-like bridge. It’s the closest track here to Us—but compared to “Water Water,” it’s more like a breeze in a puddle. It’s frustrating, really: a hugely talented songwriter and producer, thwarted by trends. Best-case scenario, they’ll let her find a larger audience—and money and license to once again reach Me’s heights.

2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Terrible

October 22, 2018

00f595b2-2b33-4b52-9519-4a1921fcc5f7

Katherine St. Asaph

https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/

The most crafty and evasive MC lays bare his complicated life. This late-career gem is soulful and diamond-sharp, confronting the failings and legacy of Shawn Carter and America.

The most crafty and evasive MC lays bare his complicated life. This late-career gem is soulful and diamond-sharp, confronting the failings and legacy of Shawn Carter and America.

Jay-Z: 4:44

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-z-444/

4:44

4:44 isn’t JAY-Z’s Lemonade, a response to Lemonade, or a Lemonade companion piece. The album is certainly built around a betrayal, but his duplicity, the corresponding apology, and his reassessment are vehicles for his own maturation. Before, he was unfadable, the supreme hustler without error. Fatherhood has eroded some of that cool, but 4:44 deconstructs an entire worldview. This is Hov’s gospel, a Shawn Carter retrospective measuring missteps and triumphs, wondering aloud if his work will appreciate in value, and what exactly is worth valuing. It only takes JAY-Z 36 minutes to create the historical artifact he’s wanted to make for years, a tell-all document to be hung in the halls of rap about infidelity and outgrowing friends, the way family shapes us and the way we carry those burdens into parenthood, and about evolving into more complete versions of ourselves. But, above all else, 4:44 is about legacy: how Jay will be remembered, what he’s leaving to his children, what he’s done for the culture, and what he’s trying to do for society. Every angle he creates is informed by blackness (on “Legacy” he raps, “We gon’ start a society within a society/That’s major, just like the Negro League/There was a time America wouldn’t let us ball/Those times are now back”), as “The Story of O.J.” states outright in its hook and “Moonlight” insinuates more subtly. Inside these personal revelations, one of rap’s greatest thinkers rediscovers his sharpness. Jay hasn’t been this precise or proficient in a decade, perhaps because he’s finally interested in disclosing the realest parts of himself. There’s mention of Solange drama and a sneak Kanye diss, but that’s flotsam around the heart of the record. Some of the flows are rough around the edges, and he isn’t as nimble in and out of cadences as he used to be, but he compensates with carefully considered schemes and a fluidity that has come to characterize his work. These are finely-tuned elegies for the old JAY-Z, for the old Brooklyn, for a broken marriage, for rap kayfabe. The closing verses on “Smile” and “Marcy Me” are among the most well-balanced and technically sound in a storied career defined by such performances. He is alternately full of slick punches (“My therapist said I relapsed/I said, ‘Perhaps I Freudian slipped in European whips’”) and full of pathos (on “4:44”: “I apologize, our love was one for the ages and I contained us/And all this ratchet shit and we more expansive/Not meant to cry and die alone in these mansions”; on “Smile”: “The more I reveal me, the more they ’fraid of the real me”). 4:44 may lack the Cohiba panache of Jay’s greatest albums, but it’s by far his most thoughtful one. That thoughtfulness, of course, comes at a price. Like Magna Carta Holy Grail, 4:44 was originally a Tidal exclusive released in partnership with a company trying to hawk cell phones. As a test run, Magna Carta was beamed into a million Samsung phones as a harebrained attempt to make money and go platinum the day the album was released. The latest collaboration was equally inelegant: new and existing Sprint customers were given a complementary Tidal trial; those who signed up for Tidal without Sprint after the album was released couldn’t at first access it, unless they had the voucher code “sprint,” which came with a download. (Eventually, all Tidal subscribers were given access.) There is a bit of a disconnect between Jay selling his darkest, most personal album to a corporation, and the added contradiction of championing black-owned business while recouping profits for a telecommunications giant. But Jay is at least aware of the conflicts and tries to reconcile the inconsistencies—he treats the business venture as another hustle. On “Legacy,” he raps of these deals as a means to further his line and benefit his people: “My stake in Roc Nation should go to you/Leave a piece for your siblings to give to their children too/Tidal, the champagne, D'USSÉ, I'd like to see/A nice piece fund ideas from people who look like we.” The move makes sense given that Jay’s defining principle has always been freedom through commerce. He does make the mistake of conflating his own business conquests with a scalable solution for economic inequality and white supremacy, which is both idealistic and naive. But his sustainable-wealth tutorials never come off as preachy and there are still lessons to be learned about prosperity and advancement, particularly when read as a self-help guide for rap stars. Though Jay proves himself a more than capable MC, it's No I.D. who does much of the heavy lifting. As the producer of all 10 beats on 4:44, the Chicago beat-maker builds a dusty soul feel that suits Jay far better than the production on Magna Carta, which leaned unnaturally on the contemporary. The samples aren’t just aesthetically beautiful but profound in context. They speak when Jay is silent, often saying what he can’t. On “The Story of O.J.,” which notes the inescapable shadow of colorism, Nina Simone, whose very melanin informed her politics, sings loudly, “My skin is black.” On the apologetic title track, Hannah Williams makes plain Jay’s shame: “I’m never gonna treat you like I should!” On the inheritance-bearing “Legacy,” which advocates for black independence, Donny Hathaway speaks it into existence: “Someday we’ll all be free.” “Bam Bam” and “Fu-Gee-La” are used as more on-the-nose sonic cues, both women’s voices distinct and recognizable, their echoing words evoking a specific connection to each song’s theme. A chorus of women are the bearers of strength and understanding on 4:44; not just Nina, Lauryn Hill, Sister Nancy, Kim Burrell, and Hannah Williams, his daughter Blue Ivy, Beyoncé and his mother Gloria Carter, who bravely comes out as a lesbian on the song “Smile.” “Love who you love,” Carter says, “because life isn't guaranteed.” This intergenerational ensemble helps Jay unlock these reflections on honesty, acceptance, and resolution. Though accompanied by a tasteful visual component, detailed annotations, and eloquent thoughts from Kendrick Lamar, Will Smith, Chris Rock, and more, the person and personhood of JAY-Z remain at the album’s center. 4:44 neatly packs his baggage and then makes a mess unpacking his legacy. It’s true, Jay’s wordplay and legendary pith don't sound dated when they’re peppered on top of his personal failings and potent ruminations on black financial liberation. He surveys ideas on wealth and success with a confidence that makes even his most clumsy boasts about not going ham on the ’Gram seem sophisticated. Rap’s biggest winner coolly sustains his biggest losses.

2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Roc Nation / UMG

July 5, 2017

00f78295-390b-45d4-b2d1-740f9c073018

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

Sub Pop debut from these chaotic Santa Cruz psych-feeders beefs up their production values to touch down as their hardest-hitting record to date. Drawing influence from Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Hawkwind, Blue Cathedral scales back the wanton experimentation of their previous albums to fire off post-Vietnam rounds of knotted feedback, monolithic riffs and outer-space jams. And perhaps its most impressive feat? At 53 minutes, it almost feels short.

Sub Pop debut from these chaotic Santa Cruz psych-feeders beefs up their production values to touch down as their hardest-hitting record to date. Drawing influence from Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Hawkwind, Blue Cathedral scales back the wanton experimentation of their previous albums to fire off post-Vietnam rounds of knotted feedback, monolithic riffs and outer-space jams. And perhaps its most impressive feat? At 53 minutes, it almost feels short.

Comets On Fire: Blue Cathedral

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1563-blue-cathedral/

Blue Cathedral

All ye indie hacks dressed in psych's clothing oughta hang up your underused echoplexes and unprocessed Blue Cheer albums, because from here on in, y'all shall be measured against Blue Cathedral, Comets on Fire's blistering full-length number three. Hyperbole's a scam-- and most shameful in the voice of a seasoned critic-- but from the initial sawhorse pummeling of "The Bee and the Cracking Egg" to the last-gasp strains of "Blue Tomb", it's clear this intense collection commands a sense of largess, as well as some sort of mystically heightened language. With all sincerity, I can report that these sludge denizens have burnt-to-a-crisp every ounce of ashy acidic energy currently floating around the hazy rock 'n' roll atmosphere. Though Ethan Miller and Ben Flashman formed Comets on Fire less than five years ago, these hymns feel centuries old: Sometimes bludgeoning, always regal, Blue Cathedral is a calcified, hippified holy place. Begin your pilgrimage... Expanding the multi-textured promise of Field Recordings from the Sun, here Comets throw down even more explosive hyperactivity. Still nodding to Pink Floyd, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, Hawkwind, and the less known sounds of Monoshock, the crew lights out into its own sweaty territory. With these eight tracks, the quintet's completed an impressive transformation from crunchy garage-rock stonemasons cribbing tropes to heady, mathy enfant terribles decimating Freakout City, USA. Like Field Recordings, Blue Cathedral was recorded at Louder Studios by The Fucking Champs' Tim Green-- so there's really no explanation as to why these sounds are so stadium-sized and crystal clear. Better mics? A new dose of inspiration? More likely, it's the official addition of Six Organs of Admittance raga whiz Ben Chasny on guitar two. He'd played with the band in the past, but now that he calls himself a bona fide Comet, perhaps he's allowing himself a few more aesthetic liberties. Or maybe, just maybe, leaving Santa Cruz for San Francisco and Oakland offered differently processed water and a worthwhile change of scenery. Whatever the case, the Bay Area group's purity of intention and sound is stronger here than on any previous offering. Musically, there are a bevy of fierce rockers, occasional saxophone distress signals, blissful chill zones: The instrumental, "Pussy Footin' the Duke" drifts into a relaxed milky way space probe with regal organ breakdowns, tender ebony-and-ivory arpeggios, and a my-guitar-gently-weeps melodic sense. As such a title would suggest, "Whiskey River" features gravelly rock vocals and frolicking echoplex that twists and darts within an overhauled Southern rock template; it dissolves into the wistful "Organ", an anomalously brief, melancholic fit of stargazing. The spiraling asteroids of "Brotherhood of the Harvest" performs triumphant astronomy-- I can see the metal guys getting teary over its discordant-to-majestic ebbs and flows. The knockout punch, "Blue Bomb" whips up the most languidly, ecstatic opus of a career built upon such outer-realm ecstasy: Lay back and whittle acid-rock and solar boogie-woogie notations on the surface of the sun as it expands. Beyond individual tracks, Blue Cathedral is a well-curated whole: The song cycle mixes noise and rest with stops on a dime-- in the midst of a sludgy solo, a hook dismantles itself and reforms, turning repetition into mantra. Living up to their evocative name, Comets on Fire's music is loud and harsh, and despite that Miller's screamed lyrics are largely indecipherable, Blue Cathedral is surprisingly not at all difficult. Avoiding sentimentality and the weight of an overblown intellectual message, this hedonistic outing could bring fans of all persuasions together as one tinnitus-toting family: stoners, indie rockers, metal heads, classic rock fans, open-minded gutter punks, non-ironic mullet owners, and even your older sister will join hands and find some riff or virtuosic accent to hold close to their heart and enjoy. In anticipation of that inspired moment, lift up your warm brews and repeat after me: Here's to the hard rock album of the summer and the backyard barbecues it will inspire, and to uncontested tofu pups basting alongside all-beef hot dogs, forever and ever, amen.

2004-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2004-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Sub Pop

July 29, 2004

00f79657-5b28-45f0-9090-fa6c48202529

Brandon Stosuy

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/

Italians Do It Better producer Johnny Jewel (Glass Candy, Chromatics) was originally tapped to score last fall's blockbuster movie, Drive, but much of his music went unused. Themes for an Imaginary Film is presumably that score, but stands alone as a well-rounded portrait of a key figure in the American electronic music landscape.

Italians Do It Better producer Johnny Jewel (Glass Candy, Chromatics) was originally tapped to score last fall's blockbuster movie, Drive, but much of his music went unused. Themes for an Imaginary Film is presumably that score, but stands alone as a well-rounded portrait of a key figure in the American electronic music landscape.

Symmetry: Themes For an Imaginary Film

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16148-themes-for-an-imaginary-film/

Themes For an Imaginary Film

Themes for an Imaginary Film* *arrives following the release of Drive, the film which Italians Do It Better star and Italo-disco producer Johnny Jewel was originally tapped to soundtrack. But much of his work (created with assistance from longtime collaborator Nat Walker of Chromatics and Desire) went unused in lieu of Cliff Martinez's score. There's no point in pretending that the Imaginary Film of this collection's title isn't that movie. The cover depicts a steering wheel and dashboard. The intro track begins with vehicle sounds. And the lengthy 37-track score suits Drive's distinctive blend of grit, glamour, and abject loneliness. Befitting its standalone release, though, this project does stand alone, and Themes for an Imaginary Film makes for an engrossing listen in a way that many film scores don't. Maybe it's because we can't hear the score over Drive itself, but Themes for an Imaginary Film makes up for its lack of a visual counterpart by telling a story of its own. Evocative, stirring, yet restrained, Jewel's mixture of eerie near-silences, ominously bubbling synths, and tearjerking melodies (rendered by real-life viola and cello players) is a formidable combination. For anyone expecting a quasi-album full of orchestral overtures or ambient mood pieces, Themes for an Imaginary Film's opening run will set you right: "City of Dreams" and "Over the Edge" are driven by Jewel's usual assortment of grainy analog synths and brittle guitars, and there's even a slight beat underlaid, though it's more like a faint heartbeat than the disco-driven rhythms of Glass Candy or Chromatics. But by the time we get to track six ("Outside Looking In"), the beats disappear and are replaced by moody, glacial waves of sound, reminding us that this is, in fact, a film soundtrack. Appropriately, Jewel's sonics are adjusted for their new setting. Though he uses his trademark sounds well, the claustrophobic, sweaty-club vibe that defines Chromatics and Glass Candy is completely absent. Compositions like the fantastic "Behind the Wheel" are either left completely dry, with their synth elements at the fore sounding bigger and clearer (the harshly distorted "Death Mask" is almost wince-inducing), or awash with reverb, like the woozy "The Maze" or the lonely electric piano lament "Hall of Mirrors". The spare, disconsolate atmosphere perfectly complements the film it was meant for, but it also makes for an immersive listen, with an unusual amount of space allowed for within Jewel's music. At two hours and 37 tracks long, Themes for an Imaginary Film is not exactly easy to digest in one sitting. But just as it bypasses many of the caveats associated with film scores, so it does with overlong albums: Themes works as well as mood music as it does close listening, and the way it swims between rhythm-driven beatscapes and ambient swells provides enough tension for it to unobtrusively grab your attention every once in a while. There's never too much drama, and there's never too much silence. The record is immaculately paced. For you impatient listeners out there, a number of highlights are worth taking out of their original context. In addition to the aforementioned, "Magic Gardens" features an overwhelming synth line that sounds like the "Streets of Philadelphia" refrain blotting out the sun, and with some fleshing out, the teasingly short "Nightshift" (appearing twice) could easily be a Chromatics stunner. The lack of any sort of human presence-- outside of the automated voice that begins the score and the ambulance sirens and police radio that appear chillingly halfway through-- is shattered with the album's closer "Streets of Fire". Performed almost entirely a cappella by Chromatics singer Ruth Radelet, the song is a stunningly naked, somber ending to the 2.5 hours that precede it. Combining plaintive lyrics with a nursery-rhyme melody, it trades the dangerous seductiveness or dirty street suavity of Jewel's other projects for pure sorrow. Themes for an Imaginary Film isn't a decadent disco soundtrack like Goblin might have made, nor a noodly synth odyssey à la John Carpenter or Vangelis. Rather, it's something completely Jewel's own, blending his distinctively fragile synthetic textures with a suitably cinematic realism that he's rarely let show. Whether you treat it as background music, incidental listening, or a two-hour magnum opus, Themes for an Imaginary Film is a well-rounded portrait of a key figure in the American electronic music landscape.

2012-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

2012-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Italians Do It Better

January 6, 2012

00f8f70b-8f9a-4f87-825a-51f74ef0183a

Andrew Ryce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/

Almost unbelievably, the French master's best work was out of print in North America. Light in the Attic rectifies that error.

Almost unbelievably, the French master's best work was out of print in North America. Light in the Attic rectifies that error.

Serge Gainsbourg: Histoire de Melody Nelson

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12852-histoire-de-melody-nelson/

Histoire de Melody Nelson

Serge Gainsbourg had no great attachment to genre. By the time he came to rock music, in his early 40s, the French star had traced his oblique, provocative course through chanson (French vocal music), jazz, and light pop. He'd made percussive café jams about suicide and given Eurovision popstrels France Gall and Françoise Hardy songs full of blowjob puns. Later on he'd make a rock'n'roll album about the Nazis and a reggae take on the French national anthem. A pattern emerges: Gainsbourg hops from style to style, but with a terrific instinct for finding the most startling content for any given form. So it's no surprise his rock work-- the early 1970s albums, of which Histoire de Melody Nelson is the first and finest-- was so original. Melody Nelson is a collaboration with composer and arranger Jean-Claude Vannier, who assembled a bunch of top sessionmen for the album. But Gainsbourg and Vannier had little interest in the conventions that had accreted around early 70s rock. Like a lot of 1971 records, Histoire de Melody Nelson is a concept album: Unlike most, it's only 28 minutes long. The songs are lavishly orchestrated, yet the dominant instrument isn't guitar or organ but rather Herbie Flowers' lascivious, treacly bass, playing a seedy, rambling take on funk. That bass is the first sound you hear on Melody Nelson, quietly tracking up and down in a windscreen-wiper rhythm: Gainsbourg starts talking in French 30 seconds later, describing a night drive in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. The album is routinely described as "cinematic," but the music is more of a mindtrack than a soundtrack-- a tar pit of introspection when Gainsbourg's brooding narrator is alone at the record's beginning and end, then giddy and savage by turns as he conducts his affair with the 15-year-old Melody across the short tracks in the album's middle. One of these-- "Ballade de Melody Nelson"-- is, even at two minutes, one of Gainsbourg's most assured and alluring pop songs. A lot of Gainsbourg's records are hard sells for Anglophone ears-- the music is there to illuminate and pace the man's riotous, sensual wordplay. But Gainsbourg's alliance with Vannier produced a true collaboration: The arrangements seem to respond almost intuitively to the twists in Gainsbourg's language and narrative, to the point where they're carrying as much storytelling weight as the words. Even if your French stops at "bonjour", the music lets you know that this is a record about a dark, obsessional love. On "L'hôtel Particulier", for instance-- describing the sleazy grandeur of the rented rooms where the narrator and Melody make love-- Gainsbourg's voice shudders with lust and dread, and the music responds, flares of piano and string breaking into the song over an impatient bassline. The actual story of Histoire de Melody Nelson is pretty negligible in any case-- man meets girl, man seduces girl, girl dies in freak plane crash. Melody herself (played by Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg's then-lover) is a cipher-- a breathed name, a ticklish squeal or two, and red hair. The album is all about its narrator: A natural obsessive just looking for an object; introspective before he meets Melody, more so after her death. First and final tracks "Melody" and "Cargo Culte" are musical siblings, with only the wordless chorales on "Cargo Culte" really distinguishing them. Together these songs take up more than half the record, and when people claim Melody Nelson as an influence, it's almost certainly with this pair in mind. The soundworld they create is like nothing else in rock-- orchestra, bass, and voice circling one another, blending slow funk, intimate mumbling, and widescreen scope. One precedent is the epic soul Isaac Hayes had been pioneering, but where Hot Buttered Soul is full of warmth and engagement, the bookend tracks of Melody Nelson are a trip through far more hostile territories, the black spaces of a man's interior. Gainsbourg realized he'd made something special-- he named his publishing company Melody Nelson after his fictional muse-- but, restless as ever, he didn't follow it up: His next album was a sequence of pretty acoustic songs, mostly about shit. Herbie Flowers, whose bass is the undertow pulling the album together, surfaced a year later playing on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side", whose bassline is the first ripple of Melody Nelson's wider pop culture influence. Since then it's been left to others-- Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Broadcast-- to pick up this record's breadcrumb trail. But Gainsbourg's dark focus, and Vannier's responsiveness, aren't easily equalled. This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album's been released in the U.S.-- a superb opportunity to hear a record that's been occasionally imitated but never matched.

2009-03-26T02:00:02.000-04:00

2009-03-26T02:00:02.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Light in the Attic

March 26, 2009

00f9d3cb-38ad-40cf-9fc9-94624347f6c8

Tom Ewing

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/

In the three years since the last Arp album, Alexis Georgopoulos has clearly spent some time thinking about how to retool this project. On his new MORE, he settles into a more song-oriented incarnation that is sometimes unrecognizable from Arp's spacey ambient work.

In the three years since the last Arp album, Alexis Georgopoulos has clearly spent some time thinking about how to retool this project. On his new MORE, he settles into a more song-oriented incarnation that is sometimes unrecognizable from Arp's spacey ambient work.

Arp: More

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18528-arp-more/

More

It's been a while since Alexis Georgopoulos worked under his Arp moniker, leaving three years trailing in the wake of his last full-length album, The Soft Wave. He's worked in art and modern dance in the interim, but Georgopoulos has clearly spent some time thinking about how to retool this project as well. The Soft Wave was all balmy synth textures and endlessly repeating figures, sometimes lightly prickled by waves of bass and distorted guitar. Georgopoulos found his voice toward the close of that record, forgoing his mostly instrumental work to deliver a pitch-perfect pastiche of Brian Eno's 70s vocal work on "From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea". Surprisingly, it's a thread he picks at for the bulk of MORE, settling into a more song-oriented incarnation of Arp that might cause people familiar with his older work to check the package to make sure it's not some other band. Where Georgopoulos has landed is somewhere in-between various strains of the British art school tradition, where the mundane and the fantastic are equally enthralling. It's part Roxy Music sci-fi fantasia, part Blur down-the-chip-shop scruffiness. Georgopoulos is interested in glamour for sure-- song titles here include "High-Heeled Clouds" and "A Tiger in the Hall at Versailles"-- but it's a scruffy, vaudevillian form of it. The sad, clangorous end to "Clouds" feels like a paean to actors who couldn't quite make it, to singers who had a shot at the big time and just fell short. It's heavy on pastiche, but very well done at times. You won't hear a better piece of Eno worship than "Judy Nylon" this year. Even the title is wonderfully Eno-esque. It's too bad Georgopoulos waits until the closing track, "Persuasion", to get anywhere near the same sense of pop euphoria again. So there's a strong sense of someone not reaching particularly hard to get beyond their influences, but even that takes on an appropriate hue as the album progresses. MORE edges into the feel of low-rent theater at times, where the makeup starts to run under the lights, where the performer on stage is revealed to be a fraud. Georgopoulos does a blues track and he calls it "(MORE) BLUES". He's emptied out pop and found a bunch of dead ends, all circling back in on themselves. Still, this isn't an exercise in the futility of writing this stuff in 2013; it's more like a light, cheerful prod at the parameters of pop. Along the way we get plenty of ambient interludes, hints of Brill Building pop, a dose of Beatles-y goodness. There's a sense Georgopoulos isn't sure what Arp should be, allowing him to resist being shaped, packaged, and neatly filed away. In among all the switching up there's a centerpiece to all of this, if one can exist in such a baffling, un-centered piece, titled "Gravity (For Charlemagne Palestine)", which is one-part Steve Reich repetitive build, one-part Spiritualized-style astral gazing. Naturally, going from that to the cheeky end-of-seaside-pier tracks takes some adjusting. But MORE is an album that takes some time to settle in, to really get to grips with all its diverse tendencies. Already it feels like it could become a weightier work over time if Georgopoulos leaves all this behind and moves on elsewhere, causing this album to perpetually spin in its own odd orbit. It's mostly a delight to return to, with its misshapen ways sometimes working toward a bigger picture until Georgopoulos flushes it all down the u-bend via another baffling turn. Here he's got a musical outlet that's not defined at all, and that's a strange and occasionally beautiful thing.

2013-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00

2013-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Smalltown Supersound

September 24, 2013

00fbb239-f4fd-4067-901e-a0ce1b5e9e31

Nick Neyland

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/

There are few emerging artists more polarizing than Travis Scott. After releasing a solid buzz-building free studio album, Days Before Rodeo*,* last year, Scott follows it up with his long-awaited major debut, Rodeo, a master class in the pyramid scheming of rap industry politics.

There are few emerging artists more polarizing than Travis Scott. After releasing a solid buzz-building free studio album, Days Before Rodeo*,* last year, Scott follows it up with his long-awaited major debut, Rodeo, a master class in the pyramid scheming of rap industry politics.

Travis Scott: Rodeo

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21016-rodeo/

Rodeo

There are few emerging artists more polarizing than Travis Scott, he of the dual deals (Grand Hustle as a rapper and G.O.O.D. Music as a producer) and the punk rock antics, a Kanye West progeny who is continuously changing shape. One minute he’s Kid Cudi, the next he’s Young Thug. The rager has made a living parlaying aesthetics into musical capital, but there’s value in his ability to repackage styles and sounds into something that requires little to no unpacking. After releasing a solid buzz-building free studio album, Days Before Rodeo, last year, Scott follows it up with his long-awaited major debut, Rodeo, a master class in the pyramid scheming of rap industry politics. Travis Scott studied carefully at the Kanye West School of Maximalism, where sounds are expensive and songs are sumptuous with rich, interlocking details and meticulously selected guests. Since releasing his debut EP, Owl Pharaoh, in 2013 (and perhaps even before) he’s been honing a sixth sense for emphasizing gravitas. His greatest trick is making songs feel big and important. But Scott has cobbled together a composite identity to compensate for lacking his own. He’s quickly earned a rep as a shameless biter, an aesthetic bender with no regard for ownership or authorship—a claim given credence by Rodeo’s second single, the Swae Lee-imitating "Antidote". This has become the enduring criticism of Scott’s work so far: That he’s a skilled impersonator posing as a creative, a mime playing puppetmaster. (There are at least three alleged reports of creative theft, which led to this takedown in Deadspin.) But this narrative overshadows the more glaring holes in his music. Travis Scott isn’t good at rapping—he often bawls out clunky phrases that dawdle into banality ("Always hit the gas like I broke wind")—and his self-proclaimed status as an auteur isn’t dictated by his own talent, but by the talent of those surrounding him. "Who do I owe? Nigga, no one," he boasts on opener "Pornography", when he’s actually deeply indebted to those in or adjacent to the Kanye Think Tank and the others he’s wrangled based on that affiliation. One thing Scott does very well is squirm through openings onto bigger platforms, which is a talent in and of itself. He is one of rap’s premier young capitalists, an opportunist deft in the use of social currency, turning a friendship with Illroots creator Mike Waxx into a relationship with T.I. and finagling a meeting with Kanye West out of networking with his engineer, Anthony Kilhoffer. The strength of his catalog is almost exclusively dependent on the strength of his connections. Rodeo is the culmination of Travis Scott’s amassed networking efforts. The credits are a Who’s Who of the big names in rap and its neighboring genres: Narrated by T.I., it tells a nebulous tale of Scott’s meteoric rise and the perils of fame. The lush and often gorgeous production comes courtesy of current league leaders in rap hit-making Metro Boomin, Sonny Digital, and Zaytoven, with add-ons and attachments from a host of heavy hitters like Mike Dean, DJ Dahi, Hit-Boy, Wondagurl, Southside, FKi, and TM88. There’s standout work from Frank Dukes and Allen Ritter. Sometimes, like on "Oh My Dis Side" or "90210", beats jack-knife in two, revealing stunningly posh second acts. Sometimes, like on the nearly eight minute epic "3500", they have shimmering piano outros. The Pharrell-produced "Flying High" fastens a surging, slow-rolling coda onto a wailing beat. The sound is a kind of big-budget alt-trap with lots of accents and gloss, like if Future’s Dirty Sprite 2 was executive produced by 2010 Kanye, and it often pays big dividends. Many of those dividends, though, feel as though they arrive in spite of Scott. He’s easily outmaneuvered by charismatic rappers of note Juicy J, Quavo, and 2 Chainz ("Crib bigger than your imagination"). Pop singers the Weeknd and Justin Bieber both steal the show with singsong rap-like verses on their respective features. Even Chief Keef and Toro Y Moi make their presences heavily felt, upstaging the Houston rapper in the process. Travis Scott’s verses are often without substance and chock full of choppy cadences, and songs without guests, especially "I Can Tell", are undone by the monotony. To be fair, Scott isn’t without his merits. He is most effective when he harshly distorts his vocals to create texture, and in the company of others he can serve as a welcome change of pace. He has an ear for programming. But Rodeo’s best songs—"Maria I’m Drunk" and "Nightcrawler"—mostly succeed because they overcome his contributions. He's still a middling talent, and comes across as rebellious youngster that’s been given the keys to dad’s Porsche and simply asked not to wreck it.

2015-09-16T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-09-16T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Epic

September 16, 2015

00fbbd7b-cb6c-448e-b51f-2b57dd424ee8

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

Swift’s third album is her most unabashedly transitional work: between childhood and adulthood, innocence and understanding, country and pop.

Swift’s third album is her most unabashedly transitional work: between childhood and adulthood, innocence and understanding, country and pop.

Taylor Swift: Speak Now

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-speak-now/

Speak Now

After two hit records, Taylor Swift decided that her third would be longer and more personal, and she would write it entirely by herself, no co-writers. The songs would concern major events in her life, many of which occurred in the public eye. The lyrics would take the form of letters, direct addresses, one-on-one conversations where she always got the last word. She wanted to use her newfound wisdom to reflect on her parents, her dreams, and how it felt to stand on stage and notice a bigger crowd every night, shouting the words back at her. The working title was Enchanted, though she didn’t always feel that way. After 2008’s massively successful Fearless, Swift wrestled with her outsider persona and sudden celebrity, and the dissonance weighed heavily on her relationships. But she was learning fast. Swift was 20 when the album, eventually titled Speak Now, came out and sold over a million copies in its first week—a record high in 2010. She had, and would continue to have, bigger hits, but these songs were breakthroughs in their own right. Co-produced by Nathan Chapman, the album is patiently sequenced; the average song length is just under five minutes, giving Swift enough time to pace her hooks—which had never been bigger—and her lyrics, which had never sounded more careful or wise. It’s an album focused on growing up, something she was learning would often be confusing, sad, and uncomfortable. It’s her most unabashedly transitional work: between adolescence and adulthood, innocence and understanding, country and pop. She was at a crossroads, and she was feeling lucky. Swift had already become known for her intimate and intense relationship with fans. On these songs, she took a more authoritative role. There’s “Sparks Fly,” an early song that developed a big reputation after a live acoustic version circulated online. It appears here with all its fireworks and rain-soaked drama, a call to arms for people who’d been following since the beginning. There’s also “Never Grow Up,” a quiet acoustic ballad that draws the clearest line to her old material. Only now, Swift is wistful and sentimental, sounding far older than her years as she urges girls younger than her to savor every moment: “I just realized everything I have is someday gonna be gone,” she sings softly. It’s a heavy thought for a young songwriter, and the key word is just. As in, this is all happening right now, and if I don’t document it, it may disappear. Here is where Taylor Swift found a lasting source of inspiration: the inevitable rise and fall of life and love, recast as emotional emergency. In the past, she had written sweet, airtight story-songs by turning the characters in her life into archetypes—nice guys, popular girls. Now she was dealing with a more complicated set of characters, so she adjusted her scale accordingly. “Dear John” and “The Story of Us” are likely about the same older musician. One is a crushing six-minute ballad about a famous guitarist emotionally manipulating a teenage songwriter. The other is a comic send-up of the night they ran into each other backstage at an awards show after the romance ended. The magic is how she wrings their hyperspecificity for universal truths—the older musician could be the sophomore jerk from the football team; the CMA Awards could be an after-school assembly. The message was clear: Swift was moving on, but she wasn’t leaving you behind. And while it’s no great revelation that the mechanics of high school don’t end after graduation, Swift was not content to simply reapply old morals to new stories. So many of these songs rely on the tension of hindsight—a perspective she always longed for but never wielded quite so artfully. Hear how regretful and apologetic she sounds in “Back to December,” the increasing desperation in each chorus of “Last Kiss.” Even “Innocent,” her much-anticipated response to Kanye West stealing her mic at the 2009 VMAs, takes a nurturing approach as she guides her tormentor through his old ambitions and career highs, asking how close he is to the man he dreamed of becoming. (After all, she acknowledges, public adoration can be a fickle thing, and one day, it might be her wondering what went wrong.) She affirms in the chorus, “You’re still an innocent.” It’s a strange, writerly phrase that she must realize sounds phonetically identical to “You’re stealing innocence”—a particularly Swiftian way to accuse and forgive in the same breath. On Speak Now, the way things sounded became just as important as what they meant. Swift was honing her skills as a pop songwriter, imagining a future where “country” was a biographical detail as opposed to an accurate descriptor of her music. Her arrangements were louder—an anxious string section tugging its collar through “Haunted,” a harmony-layered coda unfolding at the end of “Enchanted.” “Better Than Revenge” is a pop-punk bloodletting that owes its existence to Paramore, and it foreshadows the work to come: “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “Bad Blood.” Taking aim at a budding actress now dating her ex, it’s fascinating for how wildly Swift changes her perspective while maintaining focus: burning holes in her enemy’s eyes during the verses, pleading to her ex that “she’s not what you think” during each chorus, acknowledging the power and futility of her own response (“She thinks I’m psycho ’cause I like to rhyme her name with things”). You imagine her singing it, barging into a crowded room while everyone covers their mouth and avoids eye contact. It’s the cathartic freakout during an otherwise elegant party, full of personal revelation. She has a moment of ecstasy in “Mine,” where she and a new love vow to “never make my parents’ mistakes,” which is precisely what you do at your first hint of independence and stability. In “Mean,” she puts her personal life on the back-burner to deal with the people antagonizing her professionally. Its lyrics are proud and snappy, as banjos pluck around her like sarcastic bluebirds on her shoulders. “One day I’ll be living in a big ol’ city,” she promises a man who tore her down in reviews. Does it actually hurt a critic to know that the artist will always be more powerful and rich? Probably not, but it’s not really for him anyway—Swift already got what she wanted. In “Ours,” a bonus track as good as any song she’s ever written, she sums it up with a smile that you can hear in her voice: “Don’t you worry your pretty little mind/People throw rocks at things that shine.” She knew she was approaching her supernova phase. The ensuing tour was a blockbuster moment she had been preparing for. The intricate, explosive set design involved a full band, dancers, actors portraying the characters in her songs. There were fireworks, a massive bell she hurled herself at during “Haunted,” and a Shakespearean veranda that soared over the audience during “Love Story.” It was a little ridiculous. But for all the fans in attendance, this was how they always saw her: a superhero borne from their subconscious, someone larger than life and unafraid to look absurd. For the rest of the world, it was Swift’s reintroduction: Drop everything now—I have arrived. It’s the character she’d play for the rest of her career. The concerts would begin with a recitation over the loudspeakers, a piece that also appears in the album’s liner notes. “Real life is a funny thing, you know,” it began. “There is a time for silence. There is a time for waiting your turn. But if you know how you feel, and you so clearly know what you need to say, you’ll know it.” It reads as inspirational but, in retrospect, it was also a warning: Things won’t stay the same forever. Life can be jarring, full of little interruptions. You won’t be prepared for everything. Near the end of the show, Swift introduced a heartland anthem called “Long Live,” tearfully confiding that it was written for all her fans, her whole band, and the team behind her. “It was the end of a decade,” she sings, “But the start of an age.” The young crowd roars, as if in anticipation. This was all ahead of Swift as the album was nearing completion. Late in the process, she was out to lunch with mentor Scott Borchetta—among the first industry people to take notice of her in Nashville, offering a deal with his fledgling label Big Machine. By the end of the decade, he’d be just another on her long list of friends-turned-enemies. But for now, he was a confidant. She played him songs from the new record and discussed her plans for the rollout. She was excited. Borchetta was, too. But the working title didn’t seem right. Enchanted? He thought of princesses, fairytales, childhood. The old Taylor. This seemed different. Maybe she felt miffed by someone second-guessing her vision; maybe she was grateful to be challenged. After all, this music was precisely about these moments when your fantasies no longer apply to reality, when you have to grow up and make a choice and live with it on your own. She excused herself for a moment, and when she returned, she had a better idea.

2019-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Big Machine

August 19, 2019

00fc8d83-7f87-474b-9909-f8444bbdd129

Sam Sodomsky

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/

Bill Callahan's second post-Smog album feels unusually intimate and contains some of the most varied arrangements of his career.

Bill Callahan's second post-Smog album feels unusually intimate and contains some of the most varied arrangements of his career.

Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12929-sometimes-i-wish-we-were-an-eagle/

Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

"I used to be darker/ Then I got lighter/ Then I got dark again." With these three simple lines from "Jim Cain", the opening track of his lovelorn new album, the always-succinct Bill Callahan sums up his tempestuous musical trajectory. For those of you keeping score at home, "darker" seems to refer to most of his output as Smog, when his songwriting often succumbed to the weary dread his dead-planet of a voice exudes like gravity. The lightening occurred over the course of A River Ain't Too Much to Love, his final record as Smog, and Woke on a Whaleheart, his first post-Smog effort. On these records, romantic gratitude gradually replaced romantic pessimism. Bill Callahan was happy; at peace. But it wasn't to last. The slumbering beast of love, "the lion walking down city streets," awoke, and it was pissed. He got dark again. "I started telling the story/ Without knowing the end." And he's still doing so. Over the past two decades, Callahan's music has chronicled his unique, troubling insights about responsibility, faith, and love. The darkness that falls over Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle does not make it a Smog record-- it is an uncommonly gentle darkness that sounds light at first blush. Smog's malevolence seemed like a sweeping indictment of human nature, but here, Callahan's lyrics feel intensely personal. The record, an evident break-up affair, has such a strong air of private conversation that listening to it feels like eavesdropping; the second-person pronouns sail right past us to strike the target of the absent beloved. The reverent intimacy can become almost uncomfortable, as Callahan proffers up his words in the same way the devout handle rosaries. Like Whaleheart, Eagle is kitted out with the instrumentation-- cellos and violins, French horns, pump organs, electric pianos-- that he embraced post-Smog. On Whaleheart, such embellishments were rangy and shambling; here they're loosely clenched, as if Callahan built the music to hold him together. Eagle addresses a specific-sounding lost love, but more broadly, it does what every Callahan record does: It takes a long hard look at who he is and what he believes at this moment. As a result, it finds him questioning the truths he discovered on Whaleheart, as when, on "Eid Ma Clack Shaw", he dreams the perfect song and scribbles it down in the middle of the night, discovering in his notebook the next morning the nonsense words of the song's title. This self-portrait is so complex and subtle that it's tempting to skip discussing the actual music, which speaks so eloquently for itself. Some of the finest, most varied arrangements of Callahan's career are here. Wafting strings and contrapuntal soprano vocals render "Rococo Zephyr" as buoyant and lilting as its namesake. On "Eid Ma Clack Shaw", silvery electric guitar moves up and down staccato piano. "My Friend" and "All Thoughts are Prey to Some Beast" are almost like folk-Krautrock, with interlocked motifs billowing out over rigid pulses. Best of all is how the clenched arrangements open out into flowing, tender catharsis, and these are the moments you'll come to anticipate-- wait for the beatific chorus that bears Callahan's dense voice improbably high above the sinuous strains of "The Wind and the Dove", or the effervescent strings casting periodic surges of light through "Jim Cain". Like the birds he loves so well, Callahan's albums find him alighting momentarily on precarious perches and naming what he sees. By the time we hear the music, he seems to have flown on again. His vantage from Eagle is one of textured ambivalence; his images split and shimmer like double-exposures, immediately releasing an obvious meaning quickly followed by a subtler one that equivocates the first. He's "still as a river could be," and a "child of linger on." He used to be "sort of blind," but now he can "sort of see." On "Faith/Void", he decides that it's time to "put God away," to no longer strive for his "peace in the light." Twenty years in, and Bill Callahan appears to be tearing up everything he's believed and starting from scratch, armed with the terrifying wisdom of knowing that one knows nothing, and searching for meaning regardless. He's resigned but heroically presses on. The void looms, but the music keeps it barely at bay.

2009-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00

2009-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Drag City

April 17, 2009

00fcce68-86f9-4662-bd87-aabde639f8c1

Brian Howe

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/

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 ODB’s debut classic, a masterclass in winging it.

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 ODB’s debut classic, a masterclass in winging it.

Ol’ Dirty Bastard: Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ol-dirty-bastard-return-to-the-36-chambers-the-dirty-version/

Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version

Ol’ Dirty Bastard was meant for the stage. In 1993, he was the only fiend audacious enough to sideline Biggie at his own birthday show, taking over the set and turning one of the greatest rappers ever into a hype man. In 1998, he interrupted Shawn Colvin’s Grammy acceptance speech to protest Puff Daddy’s win for Best Rap Album before a national audience of 25 million people. In 2000, he escaped from a rehab facility in Los Angeles, went on the lam for a month, and popped up as a fugitive to perform at a Wu-Tang Clan release party in New York City. “I can’t stay on stage too long tonight, the cops is after me,” he told the elated and astounded crowd at Hammerstein Ballroom, after performing “Shame On a Nigga.” For Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the line between mania and lucidity was always razor-thin, a slapstick high-wire act that was as exhilarating as it was dangerous. ODB’s debut album, Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, is a masterclass in winging it. The spontaneity of his live stunts extended to his raps: You never knew what he was going to do or say next, and maybe he didn’t either. In The Wu-Tang Manual, RZA, the Wu’s producer, chief creative mastermind, and self-appointed abbot, dubbed him a “freelance rhyme terrorist.” Two forces are at war with each other on Return to the 36 Chambers: RZA’s diligence and ODB’s inconsistency. It’s an oxymoron, a work of orchestrated negligence, a makeshift classic. But beyond its place in the ODB mythology or in Wu-Tang lore, The Dirty Version is above all a brash indictment of American classism and respectability politics. Unapologetic and raw, he turned to Uncle Sam and hollered, this is the savage you created, and did it with a Cheshire grin. Wu-Tang’s 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) was like a rift in the space-time continuum. Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, RZA designed an epic franchise with a cast of outsized characters crossing over from one project to the next, and a rich cross-cultural history: Five-Percenter raps from cross-town New Yorkers drawing from ’70s and ’80s martial arts cinema, which itself drew on the mythology of ancient dynasties. (The Wu universe would come to include a comic series, an origin story TV show, and a one-of-a-kind million-dollar rap artifact purchased by the world’s most loathed pharmaceutical executive.) The Dirty Version kicked off a world-conquering year for the Wu, which included two other solo classics: Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and GZA’s Liquid Swords. In 1995, the Wu-Tang Clan were forging their legend, and ODB was the crew’s madcap mascot. Wu-Tang’s world of Wuxia iconography, lifted from overdubbed kung fu flicks, was the result of an obsession RZA and ODB nourished with regular trips to watch triple features on 42nd Street. ODB took his name from the 1979 film Ol’ Dirty Kung Fu, which was given the title Ol’ Dirty & the Bastard in U.S. syndication. At the center of the plot is a drunken eccentric whose aberrant behavior never compromises his mastery of martial arts, and even seems inherent to his form. ODB was drawn to the character and others like him, often taking the moniker the Drunken Master, after the 1978 Jackie Chan movie that spawned the archetype. Method Man once proclaimed that there was no father to ODB’s style: Without musical precedents, he leaned into aberration, just like his namesake. RZA’s plan to divide and conquer the rap world began before Wu-Tang’s studio debut was even released. They’d amassed a buzz around town, the self-released single “Protect Ya Neck” brought suitors, and the most valuable Wu assets were divvied up quickly: Meth signed to Def Jam, ODB to Elektra, Raekwon to Loud, GZA to Geffen, and Ghostface to Epic. After Enter the Wu-Tang was released, ODB was supposed to be the first soloist, but he couldn’t finish his album. He spent a chunk of the money from his advance on a jalopy in North Carolina and would go AWOL for long stretches of time, taking impromptu drives and writing on the road. He would bail out of songs mid-recording, vanish for days at a time, and then pop up drunk, destructive, and unpredictable. He once took an LL Cool J plaque off the wall at Chung King Studios and pissed on it, ending up in a standoff with LL’s manager Chris Lighty. The album took nearly two years to make because of this fitful approach. ODB was surrounded by a small team doing its damndest to keep him recording, but he could not be collected and he would not be rushed. He couldn’t have been further from Method Man’s 1994 debut Tical, an undeniably solid album from the crew’s most consistent rapper, which broke the seal on individual Wu-Tang releases thanks to ODB’s delay. RZA’s grand design spelled out the differences between Meth and Dirty: Meth would sign to Def Jam because he had crossover appeal; at Elektra, ODB would join fellow iconoclasts like KMD and Busta Rhymes. Tical, which went platinum in less than a year and spawned a Grammy-winning Hot 100 hit, was the perfect springboard for an ODB belly flop. Years before linking with Pras and Mya, Dirty became the ghetto superstar. On The Dirty Version, he subscribed to the age-old Rakim proverb that MC meant “move the crowd”; star-power meant garnering fans, and garnering fans meant rallying people. He wanted to luxuriate in the rap-star lifestyle, to conjure the euphoria of karaoke. His verses were as irresistible as they were startling. It isn’t a coincidence “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” has been sampled and interpolated 92 times, and as recently as this year. It is fun to mimic. Method Man joked that the album’s repeated verses were the result of ODB’s absentmindedness during a long recording process, but, intentionally or not, that repetition turned his verses into hooks. “Brooklyn Zoo II (Tiger Crane)” has verse fragments from three other songs on the album, like a reprise in a musical. His raps wormed their way into the brain in unusual ways, the product of his unusual methods. Those methods required several measures to wring an entire album out of Dirty. RZA was the hands-off architect. Buddha Monk was the handler, body man, and engineer, tasked with getting ODB prepped and into the studio, and making sure his vocals sounded right. Mastering engineer Tom Coyne was dubbed “the referee” in the liner notes for breaking up fights. Elektra A&R Dante Ross had the demanding task of shepherding the album to completion amid chaos. “I knew I had to get it to the finish line because there are times in life when you know you only have that moment in time, and you gotta get there,” Ross said of the Dirty Version sessions. “I had to get there, ’cause I strongly suspected that would not happen again.” ODB’s volatility created only a small window for capturing his output. He was anti-prolific, so inefficient in his recording style that it made The Dirty Version even more of a marvel—not just catching lightning in a bottle but harnessing its electricity to power a generator. It’s impossible to overstate how much his jolting vocals jump out and strike you. On “Don’t U Know,” he lurches along, his singing barely adhering to melody and meter. On “Hippa to da Hoppa,” he punctuates every bar with a grunt, then becomes conversational, then does some straight-up showerhead crooning. Across chest-thumpers like “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Cuttin’ Headz,” he becomes a caricature, a monster of pure id born of New York City’s sordid underbelly. Whether deliberately performative or not, Dirty’s persona embraced what the rest of the world saw as undesirable. Chris Rock, in his 1999 HBO special Bigger and Blacker, used ODB to characterize the politicized distance between “black” and “nigger,” a distinction between the respectable and the disreputable, as noted by the writer and African-American studies professor Richard Iton. To Rock, as to many, ODB was a depiction of a kind of blackness that was obscene: ignorant, dependant, deviant, unkempt, unruly, and, worst of all, uncontrollable. He was a character that has persisted in the cultural lexicon decades later: the crazy black homeless man as personified in novels like Same Kind of Different as Me or the shabby, mentally ill virtuoso of films like The Soloist. Only ODB didn’t seek redemption. He was proud. ODB made the low life into the hallmark of his celebrity appeal. In the “Intro,” he crowns himself the greatest performer since James Brown before digressing into a story about how he got burned by gonorrhea twice. On “Brooklyn Zoo,” he raps that he was “In the G-Building, taking all types of medicines,” referencing a local Brooklyn psychiatric ward. He often rapped as if on hallucinogens. “Drunk Game (Sweet Sugar Pie)” has a sort of degenerate charm, a singsong diatribe that’s the closest this pick-up artist comes to a ballad. It wasn’t that he couldn’t sing, it was if the concept of singing was entirely alien. On “Baby C’mon,” amid ravings about Wu (and personal) supremacy, he blurts out, “When it come to the money, yo it ain’t funny/It’s what you gotta do, what you got to do.” He was never embarrassed by being poor, but ODB was very clear about wanting to get paid. Those two truths were at the core of his biggest scandal: In 1995, as promotion for the album, an MTV crew filmed ODB taking his family to cash a $375 welfare check in a limo. The image of a rap star claiming food stamps reeked of abuse of power to the public: To middle-class black Americans, he was taking food out of someone else’s mouth; to white America, he was proof of a community looking for handouts. In a sense, it was profiteering. But more so, it was a display of government incompetence. How could a member of rap’s biggest group, who’d pocketed $45,000 as an advance, get away with this? It wasn’t so much pulling a fast one as it was highlighting a design flaw. In retrospect, it played like a comedy bit, something Eric Andre might pull. ODB had already warned them on “Raw Hide.” He was the product of a broken system, and if he saw any opportunity to make that system’s failures work for him, he would take it. On “Snakes,” he ups the ante: “Fuck my name, who I be?/Fuck the game, it’s all about the moneyyyy!” It is obvious to anyone paying attention: ODB felt America owed him, and he planned to recoup by any means necessary. He saw slavery as time served and wanted back pay. “Why wouldn’t you want to get free money?” he told the MTV camera crew. “You owe me 40 acres and a mule anyway.” (ODB was about wealth redistribution, too: he gave his money away in the streets.) There aren’t many job prospects for a lecherous, cock-eyed knucklehead in body armor, and so he was going to take every opportunity available to him to cash in. He’d achieved implausible fame. He was high enough to stun an elephant. He felt indestructible. The no-fucks-given debauchery of the Ol’ Dirty Bastard persona, which Ta-Nehisi Coates once dubbed “misanthropic lunacy,” made him an easy punching bag. But ODB wasn’t just in on the joke. He was delivering the punchline. His songs wholeheartedly played into the characterization. It was in the foul way he described his own talent in them: “funky like a stink bomb,” “old like toe fungus mold,” “style is evil like a wicked witch”; in the banter on “Don’t U Know,” where two women argue whether he’s bummy or charming; in his choice to make his welfare card his album cover, and in the mockery of his very name. “See this ain’t somethin’ new that’s just gonna come out of nowhere,” he says on “Raw Hide.” “No! This is somethin’ old! And dirtayyy!” He was revolutionary in his embrace of all things broken-down and deteriorating. His music assembled the secondhand (interpolated lines from Jim Croce, salvaged battle raps), the second-rate (a straining singing voice), and the shoddy (ramble raps recorded with antiquated technology) into a freak’s manifesto on escaping squalor but staying funky. Being poor is often met with shame. Being crazy is often met with fear. ODB was defiantly unable to feel shame or fear, and so this poor, crazy bastard rebuked public disgust the only way he knew how: By doubling down on everything the civilized world hated about him. His songs harnessed the inexhaustible power of his fuckery. He stumbles around in them, on cuts like “Baby C’mon” and “Raw Hide,” as much ranting and he is rapping. Hearing ODB spit rhymes was like watching a delirious man wander into a busy intersection and, through sheer luck or divine intervention, avoid getting hit by oncoming traffic. With each daring escape, each narrow staving of catastrophe, it becomes harder and harder to dismiss his nimble maneuvers as chance. Before RZA, GZA, and ODB were in the Wu-Tang Clan, the cousins were in a trio called Force of the Imperial Master (later All in Together Now), and would travel around New York trading material and facing off with other rappers. ODB spent enough time going toe-to-toe with guys around town for respect to understand what would galvanize an audience. The rapper with the bigger energy, the more immediate and resounding material, and the more confrontational demeanor could command the corner, or the crowd, or the colosseum. He fought dirty. Every single verse on his debut activates the muscle memory of that sparring, as he rediscovers old battle-tested chemistry while shadowboxing with his earliest partners. ODB and GZA basically finish each other’s sentences on “Damage,” playing hard into the dichotomy of the genius and the fool. The closer, “Cuttin’ Headz,” is call-and-response melee, with RZA seemingly channeling Dirty: “Once I go berzerk, mad brothers got hurt.” It’s a great song to go out on—casual play fighting and banter between family—but RZA was far from done flexing. His beats have long been hailed for their texture and impact—gritty, murky, and audacious—and they are all of those things. But they are also carefully arrayed and suited to their performers, especially in the early days, and specifically on The Dirty Version. The production plays up the hostility and comedy of ODB’s performances. “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” and “Brooklyn Zoo” are among RZA’s best creations, and perfect for Dirty; alongside the slightly blemished but tightly wound loops, he seems emboldened to splatter them further, like a prankster graffiting the walls. It has become commonplace in modern hip-hop to declare someone a “weirdo rapper,” and Ol’ Dirty Bastard is the weirdo rap exemplar. He was more unbalanced than Danny Brown, as unrestrainable as Young Thug, and as antagonistic as JPEGMAFIA. In a thought experiment in 2018, writer Julian Kimble imagined how ODB would emerge as a contemporary star. But such a framework ignores his unique place in hip-hop lineage. It’s like removing a domino from the middle of a lineup and expecting the rest to still fall accordingly. The Dirty Version set the stage for all the weirdos that followed. With considerable help, ODB turned his weirdness into a kind of sorcery and conjured rap’s unlikeliest satire. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Elektra / Rhino

March 29, 2020

00ff6da4-2feb-4ea5-aef7-b45a71854936

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

The longtime Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist swaps the acid-house influences of his Trickfinger project for a loving tribute to ’90s jungle and drill’n’bass.

The longtime Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist swaps the acid-house influences of his Trickfinger project for a loving tribute to ’90s jungle and drill’n’bass.

John Frusciante: Maya

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-frusciante-maya/

Maya

On paper, the on-again, off-again, on-again guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers writing a tribute to the UK’s mid-’90s hardcore rave and jungle scenes might seem like an odd proposition, but John Frusciante has plenty of experience in this domain. Along with more than a dozen strummed-and-sung albums under his own name, he’s released electronic music with his Trickfinger alias at a steady clip since debuting the acid-house-inspired project in 2015. In fact, this isn’t even the first electronic album he’s put out this year: An EP and third album as Trickfinger arrived in March and June, respectively. Maya, though, marks the first time he’ll release an instrumental electronic album as John Frusciante. The album arrives via Planet Mu offshoot Timesig, established by breakcore mainstay Venetian Snares—with whom Frusciante made one of his earliest electronic excursions, collaborating as Speed Dealer Moms in 2010. It’s named after and dedicated to Frusciante’s cat, who was until her death a steadfast studio companion. Frusciante gives this intimate dedication as the reason for releasing the record under his own name; however, his own personal affinity for the rave sounds he emulates and extrapolates here surely has had some influence too. He’s said previously that while playing guitar with the Chili Peppers he yearned to be making electronic music. In the early 2000s he would frequent jungle raves in L.A., attempting to get a taste of a scene he felt had passed him by in the ’90s as he was writing multi-platinum funk rock with Keidis and co. This album certainly carries the sweat of those formative nightclub experiences. Where his Trickfinger productions are defined by an almost clinical cleanliness (despite the considerable array of sounds they clump together), he roughs the edges on Maya. The album decays as it progresses, from gently undulating breakbeats and a luxe acid bassline on opener “Brand E” to elastic breakcore on “Zillion” and the disintegrating synths and squall of shattered drum kits of closer “Anja Motherless.” Frusciante’s beloved Roland TB-303—the squelchy synthesizer synonymous with acid house and rave, and a linchpin of those Trickfinger records—plays a supporting role while he throws himself into florid sampling and dramatic exchanges of control and release. “Reach Out” drenches a ’00s R&B staple in a hailstorm of breaks that shift between half-time lulls and double-dropped adrenaline shots. “Amethblowl”—the album’s lead single and a cinematic standout—encapsulates the fractious tension at the heart of the record, drawing out two minutes of glitchy snares and an imposing, repetitive bassline, before a mangled cry for relief sends the whole thing crashing down under a thunderous rolling breakbeat and cavernous bass. Having honed electronic music’s fiddlier, more technical aspects over the past half decade, here Frusciante relishes a new expressive freedom. Melodic flourishes—like the hypnotic scrambled scales of “Usbrup Pensul”, or the playful melee of basslines on “Blind Aim”—give the album an unblemished glee that propels it forward with infectious abandon. Perhaps more importantly, these touches also move Maya beyond the realm of admiring pastiche and into more rewarding territory. The album has all the hallmarks of the era that Frusciante apes, but offers thoughtful, intriguing embellishments at every turn: A sudden retreat from the dancefloor to the chillout room halfway through “Flying”; the mutation of g-funk and sci-fi soundtracks on “Pleasure Explanation.” As tributes go, this is as fine an homage as any feline companion could hope for. The UK’s rose-tinted ravers should be honored too. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Timesig

October 31, 2020

01036817-8bb9-4303-913c-a14e3b462625

Will Pritchard

https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/

On their second album, the abrasive New York band Couch Slut draw on hardcore, grindcore, and metal while offering unflinching lyrics about violence and terror.

On their second album, the abrasive New York band Couch Slut draw on hardcore, grindcore, and metal while offering unflinching lyrics about violence and terror.

Couch Slut: Contempt

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/couch-slut-contempt/

Contempt

If only every band that went out of its way to be shocking took notes from Couch Slut. The world would be a more disturbed place, mind you, but it would be all the better for it, too. Heavily steeped in the late-1980s/early-1990s work of pioneering noise abrasionists like Swans, the Jesus Lizard, and Today Is the Day, Couch Slut show a like-minded, almost compulsory drive to provoke. As if to broadcast the message “we don’t pull punches,” the cover of the band’s first album, 2014’s My Life as a Woman, was graced by an illustration of an erect penis ejaculating onto a woman’s face, her tongue extended for added effect. In Couch Slut’s case, though, there’s much more going on than just provocation. Even frontwoman Megan Osztrosits’ description of her own lyrical content—which the band sums up as “anger, depression, terror, drug abuse, mental illness, violence, the surreal, longing, and loss”—doesn’t quite capture the hair-raising impact that she and her bandmates make. Contempt, the follow-up to My Life as a Woman, kicks off with a kind of duel between a snaking electric guitar line and a baritone sax, as if guest saxophonist Davindar Singh were trying to silence guitarist Kevin Wunderlich rather than play along with him. Their contest doesn’t last long. When Osztrosits comes in with her paint-peeling howl, she swallows all the other sounds, even as the band lurches into a hardcore riff marked by the sort of guttural crunch you hear in the earliest, crust punk-nourished efforts by Napalm Death. “Dressed like that at a funeral,” Osztrosits shrieks, “You’re gonna give someone the wrong idea[...]/Get your face down in the dirt/I will fuck you/Now you’re dirt.” Titled “Funeral Dyke,” this opening song initially gives the impression of a band that’s content to just hammer away at the borders between hardcore, grindcore, and black metal while Osztrosits’ words remain only half-intelligible at best. But in a stunning example of musical bait and switch, both Osztrosits and the band stretch things way out from there, touching on myriad forms of noise and experimental rock along the way. When “Funeral Dyke” slows down for a middle section that approaches the pomp and drama of symphonic metal, you start to get the sense that Couch Slut have a lot more up their sleeve than speed, repetition, and screaming. Wunderlich, bassist Kevin Hall, and drummer Theo Nobel unveil their range gradually, meandering through their songs as if strolling through a stylistic labyrinth they have no interest in getting out of. Contempt’s production style immediately anchors the music in the boxy aesthetic of ’90s underground labels like Amphetamine Reptile—a decision that, unfortunately, marginalizes guest instruments like the bari, tuba, viola, and accordion. But if the production partially conceals the band’s agility, it also helps unify the material. Couch Slut chew through the various underground movements that influenced them with an apparent relish, but the sound they arrive at is startlingly unique and contemporary in spite of its production trappings. It’s also unremittingly ugly. On the Melvins-meets-Failure sludge/space rock hybrid “Summer Smiles,” Osztrosits half-whimpers, half wretches the words: “He took me down with a knife to my throat/He said, ‘Don’t you say a fuckin’ word.’/So I stared at the floor and tried to relax/The whole thing was quieter than I expected[...]/I can feel it pressed against my throat/When I close my eyes/I liked it.” That passage becomes all the more difficult to stomach when someone starts cackling maliciously in the background, casting the image into a deeper, more horrifying kind of realism. Still, the visceral approach of Couch Slut remains powerfully unresolved; consider the dissonance between the band’s use of noir, graphic novel-esque artwork and the imagery in Osztrosits’ lyrics. But it's how these images bounce off each other that gets you thinking differently about a subject area that few bands have dared to tread so unflinchingly. The fact that they offer no comfort by way of easy answers—or even clear interpretation—makes their art all the more necessary.

2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

Metal

Gilead Media

August 3, 2017

010437fb-225b-47aa-b262-eec958825908

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/

Disclosure's debut is not only 2013's best dance record so far, it's also one of the most assured and confident debuts from any genre in recent memory. Dance music's long had a fickle relationship with the album format, but Settle's impeccable sequencing leads to a record that begs to be heard in its entirety.

Disclosure's debut is not only 2013's best dance record so far, it's also one of the most assured and confident debuts from any genre in recent memory. Dance music's long had a fickle relationship with the album format, but Settle's impeccable sequencing leads to a record that begs to be heard in its entirety.

Disclosure: Settle

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18091-disclosure-settle/

Settle

In recent years, dance music's growing mainstream prominence has led to a number of excellent debuts: SBTRKT and Holy Ghost!'s self-titled efforts, Classixx's Hanging Gardens, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs' Trouble, and Katy B's On a Mission, to name a few. These records gained notice for recontextualizing the sounds of dance's various sub-genres-- disco, dubstep, house, and more-- into pop-leaning structures. The latest addition to this list is Settle, the brilliant debut album by Disclosure. The Surrey duo have not only made 2013's best dance record so far-- they've also concocted one of the most assured, confident debuts from any genre in recent memory. That they've done so on a major-label record that's absolutely loaded with guest spots-- these are typically red flags when approaching any dance full-length with crossover potential-- is nothing short of a miracle. The brothers behind Disclosure, Howard and Guy Lawrence, seem impossibly young considering their talents: Guy is 21, while younger brother Howard just turned 18 a few weeks ago. But they've actually been on the scene for three years, and their artistic growth over that period is impressive. Back in 2010, Disclosure first emerged on the blog circuit's nether regions with "Street Light Chronicle", a slice of competent, indistinct bass music that sounded like what you'd expect from a pair that have cited Burial's Untrue and Joy Orbison's "Hyph Mngo" as their gateways into club fare. With every succeeding release, however, Disclosure rapidly moved away from "Street Light Chronicle"'s weatherbeaten greys towards a smoother, brighter sound. Last year's fantastic remix of Jessie Ware's "Running" greatly increased both artists' profiles; earlier this year, Disclosure's collaboration with AlunaGeorge singer Aluna Francis, "White Noise", rocketed to #2 on the UK Singles chart two weeks after its release. Clearly, they've come a long way in a short time. A number of tracks from Disclosure's earlier releases would be considered highlights on any debut album. Two of them, "Boiling" and "What's in Your Head", from the enjoyable 2011 EP The Face, are relegated to bonus track status on Settle's deluxe edition. That such strong material didn't make the album proper speaks to its high quality. Over its hour-long runtime, Settle features an masterful sense of pacing, from the jacking propulsion of "When a Fire Starts to Burn" to the album's sweeping closer, "Help Me Lose My Mind". Dance music's long had a fickle relationship with the album format, but Settle's impeccable sequencing leads to an album that begs to be heard in its entirety. Settle's playful, high-energy attitude is sometimes reminiscent of Remedy, Basement Jaxx's star-making 1999 debut. The duos share divisive tendencies: Jaxx's brash and hyper-active production style rubs some the wrong way, and Disclosure have been called out for their clear debt to established UK dance styles. Specifically, Disclosure have been charged with riding the resurgence of the syncopated, R&B-infused gait of late 1990s/early 2000s 2-step and UK Garage touchstones like MJ Cole's "Sincere" and Hardrive's "Deep Inside"; last month, they released an answer-song remix of 2-step kings Artful Dodger's "Please Don't Turn Me On"-- and this after after UKG veteran El-B offered his own dusty take on "Boiling" late last year, making the inspiration explicit. The skepticism is understandable, to a point. UK dance culture has long prided itself on pushing things forward, and Disclosure's arrival on the scene-- not to mention bass music's current retro-fixated house excursions-- marks the first time in many years that the freshest dance sounds from across the pond sound a little second-hand. Ultimately though, complaining about young artists reviving sounds that they weren't around to experience the first time around is futile. We're a few years into an era where talented musicians are discovering influences new and old not through direct interaction with scenes but through their computers. And when the execution is this accomplished, it's hard to get too hung up on the source material. Some of Settle's giddiest highlights are clear UKG callbacks-- "Voices" and "You & Me", especially-- but Disclosure refuse to stick to any single genre. They effortlessly spin through romantic house ("Defeated No More", "F For You"), pitch-screwed bass music ("Second Chance"), and raunchy grime-inflected motifs ("Confess to Me"); nothing is off limits, and Settle is all the better for it. For all its dance trappings, Settle is a pop record first and foremost, one that feels remarkably inclusive. The handful of male-led vocal cuts range from solid (Friendly Fires vocalist Ed MacFarlane's sultry take on "Defeated No More", Jamie Woon's emotive pleading on "January") to showstopping (the indelible, effusive "Latch", Howard Lawrence's surprisingly effective turn on "F for You"), but Settle's array of female voices are the record's nucleus. While a few notable names are used in surprising fashion-- folk-pop singer Lianne La Havas' effusive, bleated samples on "Stimulation", Jessie Ware's muted moves on "Confess to Me"-- the biggest star turns come from up-and-comers like Sasha Keable and London Grammar's Hannah Reid, who shares a co-writing credit on "Help Me Lose My Mind". While listening to Settle, James Blake's 2011 quote about U.S. dubstep's "frat-boy market" came to mind; in 2013, it could be argued that such aggressively chauvinistic attitudes pervade many areas of big-tent dance culture, and it's hard not to hear Settle's wide-reaching accessibility as a potential antidote to the trend. Skirting dance's more bass-heavy strands, Disclosure take a spare approach to sampling throughout Settle. They lift a few stray sounds from Kelis and Slum Village and, most curiously, motivational speaker and self-proclaimed "hip-hop preacher" Eric Thomas, whose impassioned delivery is featured on the album's intro as well as "When a Fire Starts to Burn". The video for the latter brings the sample to life visually and it turns out to be a strange reflection of its source material. As was recently noted, dance music's history contains frequent intersections, ideological and otherwise, with religion. Much like when dance-pop alchemists Hot Chip released their own devotional to the dancefloor in the form of last year's stellar In Our Heads, Settle's appeal ultimately owes something to its spiritual tinge. Disclosure's unabashed pop sensibilities speak to the notion that music, as with a system of beliefs, can bring a diverse array of people-- the dance nerds and the poptimists, the club denizens and the festival obsessives, the perpetually stylish and the utterly clueless-- together as one. Settle is an album-length articulation of this idea, and it's hard not to believe in that.

2013-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-06-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

PMR

June 4, 2013

0105de38-d26a-474c-b66f-4fe3e7728ae4

Larry Fitzmaurice

https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/

On Justin Timberlake's first album in seven years, the pop superstar reunites with longtime producer/collaborator Timbaland for an album that seamlessly conflates the last 40 years of pop, soul, and R&B into a series of ambitious, long songs.

On Justin Timberlake's first album in seven years, the pop superstar reunites with longtime producer/collaborator Timbaland for an album that seamlessly conflates the last 40 years of pop, soul, and R&B into a series of ambitious, long songs.

Justin Timberlake: The 20/20 Experience

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17736-justin-timberlake-the-2020-experience/

The 20/20 Experience

Consider 'N Sync's 2001 hit "Pop", a defensive track co-written by Justin Timberlake that takes aim at boy-band haters. "All that matters is that you recognize that it's just about respect," he sings. The song was on 'N Sync's final album, Celebrity, which sold nearly two million copies in the U.S. in its first week-- and by that point the group had gone platinum about 30 times over. Even back then, this desire for meaningful admiration was nagging at Timberlake. "Pop" is slyly referenced on "Strawberry Bubblegum", a love-as-sugar-rush space-soul trifle from the singer's third LP, The 20/20 Experience. "I'm gonna love you 'til I make it pop," he goes, emphasizing the last word with the exact same sense of joy as he did 12 years ago. But now there's no irked aftertaste. Justin Timberlake is respected, and he's using that cred to make an eight-minute love song with the word "bubblegum" in its title that astutely references Barry White, Drake-style ambient R&B, and Sly Stone. He's walking the walk and chewing gum at the same time. The same can be said for the rest of The 20/20 Experience, which has Timberlake seamlessly conflating the last 40 years of pop, soul, and R&B into a series of warping seven-minute songs that shamelessly extol the joys of music and marriage. More ambitious and judicious than his first album, Justified, and more consistent than 2006's FutureSex/LoveSounds, the record mixes up not only genres and traditional song structures, but entire critical value systems. The poptimists who rode Timberlake's wave to post-guilty-pleasure virtuousness may decry its lack of three-and-a-half minute hits; old-schoolers may dismiss its simplistic themes. But by combining the direct warmth of a picture-perfect wedding with music that is complex and expansive, he's harkening back to an era when the biggest-selling album could begin with a six-minute, multi-part, groove-based epic called "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" and another extended, expertly arranged, gloriously campy touchstone called "Thriller". Within his own discography, Timberlake's current path can be traced back to one song, the Timbaland-produced "Cry Me a River". More than any other, that track-- which sounds as odd and gothic and heady today as it did in 2002-- made way for his current role as first-class pop vanguard. FutureSex, spearheaded sonically by Timbaland once again, developed the syncopated formula further, lengthening beats, adding scene-setting interludes, and generally approaching pop with the sort of rule-crushing abandon that is often desired but rarely achieved. But then Timberlake went into movieland, and Timbaland, along with many of his peers, went into Euro-schlock-land, and "SexyBack" became an ever-foggier memory, made more poignant because it marked a time and a collaboration that seemed completely over. Which is yet another reason why The 20/20 Experience is such a welcome comeback. It's not only about the return of a human being who can hold an entire stadium rapt for hours, but a producer who had seriously lost his way. 20/20 has Timbaland, along with protege Jerome "J-Roc" Harmon, returning to the sounds that flipped so many ears at the beginning of this century: the Bhaṅgṛā rhythms that drive "Don't Hold the Wall", the squealing vocal samples of "Spaceship Coupe", the sinister synths of "Tunnel Vision". And the new twist is also a blast from the past: many songs here are augmented with live instrumentation and vocal harmonies that go back to Motown, Stax, and Trojan. The stunning soul strut "That Girl" samples reggae great King Sporty's "Self Destruct", with Timbaland and Timberlake essentially approaching retro-pop with a hip-hop mentality. It's then, it's now, it's the type of song that'll be around for a long while. "That Girl" also sums up the album's overall message: "I'm in love with that girl, and she told me that she's in love with me," sings Timberlake, cleanly and sweetly. The rest of the record unspools that contented emotion-- presumably inspired by Timberlake's 2012 nuptials with actress Jessica Biel-- in various ways. He's high off of love on "Pusher Love Girl", he's enjoying a five-star reception with his head-turning date on "Suit & Tie", he's exploring the cosmos in a two-person vehicle on "Spaceship Coupe", where he sings, "Everybody's looking for the flyest thing to say/ But I just wanna fly away with you." The lines double as a love-dumb self-critique; though Timberlake cites Bob Dylan as an idol, he's no bard. This pop star is at his best when leaving intricacies to the music, like the voyeuristic, slightly creepy feeling of all-encompassing infatuation that imbues the swarming "Tunnel Vision", or on "Mirrors", which conveys both the arena-flattening power and pillowtalk intimacy of finding solace in another person across its eight minutes. 20/20 is akin to another recent album that successfully teased-out excitement from satisfaction, Beyoncé's 4. And like Beyoncé, Timberlake is looking to put himself above the fray of those pushing boom-boom beats to quick, repetitive, and oftentimes-numbing hits. It's a sensible strategy. Admittedly, pop culture wasn't built on sensible; instead, it rewards youth and conflict-- there's a reason why Rihanna has more #1 solo singles than JT and Beyoncé combined. Happy marriages, as a rule, do not sell records. But they could. And Timberlake is in a particularly opportunistic position to indulge in such aspirations. As a star who grew up in the money-printing CD era, he's got enough notoriety and loyalty to be able to challenge his audience without alienating them. So he's giving hopeless romantics just a little hope, one clattering seven-minute ode at a time.

2013-03-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-03-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

RCA

March 19, 2013

010678d6-a7b8-4beb-8467-9af2a9c9007c

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

The Catastrophist, the post-rock quintet Tortoise's first album in nearly seven years, shows a point of departure for the venerated band—for one thing, it is the group's first-ever work with prominent vocals.

The Catastrophist, the post-rock quintet Tortoise's first album in nearly seven years, shows a point of departure for the venerated band—for one thing, it is the group's first-ever work with prominent vocals.

Tortoise: The Catastrophist

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21406-the-catastrophist/

The Catastrophist

Tortoise, the Chicago-based instrumental post-rock quintet, have spent the past 25 years and seven albums fusing dub, jazz, prog, and indie into an instantly recognizable and much-loved trademark sound. The Catastrophist is their first studio album in nearly seven years, and in their time away, Tortoise were commissioned by their hometown to create several suites of music inspired by its storied jazz and improvisational music scenes. Based on this new record, the experience must have been a pivotal one, as The Catastrophist bears a subtle yet marked style change for the band—from sprawling and loose to something more cohesive, but nonetheless experimental enough so as to not alienate their core fans. The enjoyability of The Catastrophist is in this leap of faith, the idea that no mold is beautiful enough to remain unbroken, even if its new shape may be foreign and strange. In this case, the risk pays off. You cannot listen to this record as someone who is familiar with Tortoise's output and not be somewhat taken aback by at least one facet: vocals. The Catastrophist is Tortoise's first album ever to prominently feature guest vocalists, and they chose wisely. Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo provides vocals to the distorted, laid-back soul ballad "Yonder Blue" which makes exquisite use of her soft, choirboy voice. A cover of British singer-songwriter David Essex's 1973 hit single "Rock On," which is a fairly weird classic rock oddity to begin with, enlists Todd Rittman, guitarist for fellow Chicagoans U.S. Maple, and his distorted, echo-y vocals make Tortoise's version sound even more languid and surreal than the original, like a Satanic call for teenagers to experience the forbidden pleasures of rock'n'roll. When Rittman curls his tongue around "Still looking for that blue jean, baby queen/ Prettiest girl I ever seen," it definitely sounds more like a concrete threat than the plea of a disenchanted lover. The original song's staccato strings are replaced here by heavy synthesizers, and the result is a track that sounds both new and steeped in '70s and '80s gearhead synth-rock. It's clever and arresting, and illustrates perfectly what could be a very new direction in Tortoise's cannon. That being said, some of their more conventional tracks may pale a little in comparison to their newer aesthetics, if only because their evolution has been so slow and protracted. The album's first single, "Gesceap," beings with dueling synthesizers that are then joined by the vast array of Tortoise's instrumental arsenal, until all that's left is a tornado of texture and sound. There's a lack of the slightly more rock-oriented, guitar-driven pieces the band became popular for (the urgency of their 1998 record TNT, for example, is absent), but it has been replaced by almost tongue-in-cheek flourishes in some places: "Gopher Island" clocks in at just over a minute and might seem like mid-album fodder, but multiple listens reveals it to be a weirdo bubble of retro experimental electronica, the sort of thing Throbbing Gristle or Fad Gadget would have knocked around the studio while feeding each other magic mushrooms. The Catastrophist's namesake and opener is a song that begins with a synth line unironically reminiscent of a 1970s cultural television jingle, before sliding into Tortoise's hallmark atmospheric, plucked electric guitars and splashy cymbals. There's a playfulness there that, once again, belies a watershed moment for the band. As Todd Rittman howls on "Rock On": "Where do we go from here?"

2016-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00

2016-01-19T01:00:01.000-05:00

Experimental / Rock

Thrill Jockey

January 19, 2016

01094afb-dc38-4c41-b9a4-3950e3cea28e

Cameron Cook

https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/

With the shock release of Black Messiah, soul singer and multi-instrumentalist D'Angelo returns with his first album of new material in 14 years. Black Messiah is a study in controlled chaos, and D'Angelo is the rare classicist able to filter the attributes of the greats in the canon into a sound distinctly his own.

With the shock release of Black Messiah, soul singer and multi-instrumentalist D'Angelo returns with his first album of new material in 14 years. Black Messiah is a study in controlled chaos, and D'Angelo is the rare classicist able to filter the attributes of the greats in the canon into a sound distinctly his own.

D’Angelo / The Vanguard: Black Messiah

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20078-black-messiah/

Black Messiah

With this week’s shock release of Black Messiah, soul singer and multi-instrumentalist D'Angelo, the man music critic Robert Christgau once earnestly dubbed "R&B Jesus," returns with his first album of new material in 14 years. It was not, as many have suggested, 14 years of silence. The last D'Angelo album, 2000’s Voodoo, was a near perfect communion of buttery soul, Crisco-fried funk, and hip-hop thump, but the video for its calling card ,"Untitled (How Does It Feel?)", a lingering, sensual glance over the singer’s face and chest, turned him into an unwitting sex symbol. Live shows soon descended into catcalling, and D, convinced his music had become an accessory to his looks, slipped slowly out of sight. Dispatches grew scarce and worrisome. There were arrests. There was a car accident. For a while, D'Angelo appeared to follow talented but troubled forbears Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone into the dark. Even in darkness there was still music. D'Angelo guested on albums by J Dilla, Q-Tip, Snoop Dogg, and more. He taught himself to play guitar. There were perennial promises of a new album. D'Angelo returned to the stage in 2012 peppering sets of old favorites with carefully chosen covers and unreleased new material. Black Messiah isn’t a sneak attack; it’s a slow-simmering gumbo finally boiled over. We tasted its fearless ambivalence to genre boundaries in 2007 when Roots maestro Questlove snuck an early version of the stately Joe Pass homage of "Really Love" to Australia’s Triple J Radio, in 2010 when the punk-hop scorcher "1000 Deaths" briefly slipped onto YouTube and in 2012 when D'Angelo returned to television to unveil the big band funk smartbomb "Sugah Daddy" on the BET Awards. Still, it’s a wonder to hear his mutant groove unblemished by the passage of time and stretched around this gobstopping cosmic slop of country funk, psych and new wave. Black Messiah is a study in controlled chaos. The nightmarish chorus of "1000 Deaths" arrives late and fierce, as though the band unfurled its crunchy, lumbering vamp just long enough to violently snatch it out from under us. "The Charade"'s Minneapolis sound funk rock follows, every bit as bright as the previous track was menacing until you zero in on the threadbare heart-sickness of D and P-Funk affiliate Kendra Foster’s lyrics. Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite. One song might channel Funkadelic, another, the Revolution, but the shiftless mad doctor experimentation and the mannered messiness at the root of it all is unmistakably the Vanguard. Black Messiah is a dictionary of soul, but D'Angelo is the rare classicist able to filter the attributes of the greats in the canon into a sound distinctly his own. It’s at once familiar and oddly unprecedented, a peculiar trick to pull on an album recorded over the span of a decade. The timeliness of Black Messiah’s message is doubly astounding. The album was pieced together over painstaking years and originally pegged for launch next year, but D, affected by national unrest around unprosecuted police officer involved shootings in Ferguson, MO and New York City, nudged the release date up to speak to the times. Black Messiah plays out most like Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On in its penetrating sense of disorder. Where Voodoo concerned itself chiefly with the ups and downs of cohabitation, the new music steps outside to see what’s going on, and it ain’t good news. "1000 Deaths" folds the old adage about cowards and soldiers into a word about guns, fear and desperation. "The Charade" calls bullshit on a knotty history of systemic racism. ("All we wanted was a chance to talk/ ‘Stead we've only got outlined in chalk.") "Prayer" looks for strength from on high, opening on a choppy Lord’s Prayer whose signal keeps cutting out. Alongside this wartime pith even the sunnier songs come across darkly. The bipartite nostalgia romp "Back to the Future" looks for solace in memories ostensibly because the present is discouraging. The love songs run a little morbid. The titular pledge of "Betray My Heart" doesn’t speak fealty so much as candor, and the album’s barn burner of a closer "Another Life" is a song of devotion in the vein of the Stylistics’ "You Are Everything"—except that the couple never really meets. Black Messiah is about finding something to hang onto in dire times, soldiering through the infuriating insanity of oppression with a support system in tow. "It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen," D'Angelo writes in the liner notes. "Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader." He may have taken well over a decade to show face again, but it turns out D'Angelo is right on time.

2014-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

RCA

December 19, 2014

01095e8c-e0b8-4d54-a2b9-cde296c76faa

Craig Jenkins

https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/

The rising country star from Oklahoma works with a traditionalist’s appreciation for songwriting and the intense, earnest emotion of heartland rock.

The rising country star from Oklahoma works with a traditionalist’s appreciation for songwriting and the intense, earnest emotion of heartland rock.

Zach Bryan: Zach Bryan

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zach-bryan-zach-bryan/

Zach Bryan

Four songs into his very ambitious, very serious self-titled album, Zach Bryan anticipates some criticism. “Do you ever get tired of singin’ songs/Like all your pain is just another fuckin’ singalong?” he asks in “East Side of Sorrow,” one of the record’s many full-throated singalongs about a painful subject. By this point in the record, the 27-year-old songwriter has already recited a poem about the nature of fear and included a brief electric guitar interpolation of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; he’s shared a stark reflection on a road trip with a sick loved one and delved into his past as a Navy vet, rhyming “fight a war” with “don’t even know what you’re fighting for.” It sounds heavy—and it is heavy. So why does Zach Bryan feel like a breath of fresh air? For all his high-stakes musings on life and love and death, sung in a gruff, boyish howl that makes even just the word “child” sound like a stifled sob, Bryan has a lot of fight in him. A growing force on both the country and rock charts, he is a reluctant celebrity whose reluctance only makes him seem more like a celebrity, all while maintaining a focus on songwriting as a pure, unfiltered outlet for telling his story. “I’m too writing-driven to be a big star,” he told The New York Times last year. “I’m not meant for it.” And while he was being interviewed about American Heartbreak, his platinum-selling, star-making, 34-song major-label debut, he does have a point. Self-produced and written almost entirely without co-writers, his follow-up, Zach Bryan, lives proudly in its own world, for better or worse. Listening to Bryan’s songs, it’s clear why he’s thriving on country radio. Even with his stripped-back arrangements, he’s got a knack for memorable, meaty hooks that take you down the backroads beside him with the radio blasting. This gift is especially evident in “Hey Driver,” whose chorus about small towns and fine women is so big and fun that guest vocalist Michael Trotter Jr. of the War and Treaty can’t seem to stop belting the harmony part, getting louder and more soulful with each repetition. By the end of the song, Bryan has muted his own delivery to an uncharacteristic speak-sing, seemingly distracted by the effect his melodies have on the people around him. You can picture him closing his eyes tightly, imagining how it will feel when the whole crowd joins in. In moments like these, Bryan sounds like a pop star, but he still works firmly in the lineage of old-school country songwriting. Just the opening verse of “I Remember Everything,” a winning ballad featuring Kacey Musgraves, alludes to rotgut whiskey and an ’88 Ford, daddy and mama, and the inherited wisdom that “grown men don’t cry.” Raised in Oologah, Oklahoma, Bryan never tires of surveying the emotional landscape of his childhood and the effect it’s had on his young adulthood. From his time in the Navy to his unlikely ascent on the charts to the death of his mother in 2016, he has become a master at casting the facts of his life as hard-won pep talks: The proper opener, “Overtime,” is a rousing and self-aware underdog anthem, incorporating the closest thing this album has to a joke with a sample from a recent Barstool Sports fan interview. And yet occasionally Bryan stumbles when placing himself in a larger narrative about old souls in a modern world: “I wish I was a tradesman,” he tries late in the album, “learning from some beat-down old layman.” For all his traditionalism, Bryan is equally outspoken about what he doesn’t like about country music. He was one of the genre’s only major figures to criticize Morgan Wallen for being racist in the immediate aftermath, and compared to the slick sound of his contemporaries, he prefers the tender setting of live takes and four-track demos. He’s fond of the way his voice sounds clipping in the mic, how the strings of his guitar resonate after the other instruments die out, and how studio banter can give the effect of an impromptu jam session. The wistful closing tracks, “Smaller Acts” and “Oklahoman Son,” could be hits, but the recordings are too lo-fi to find a home on mainstream radio, opting for a scratchy setting to suit his tone of tearful remembrance. From the cozy tape hiss to the muted trumpets throughout, you get the sense that Bryan holds a copy of For Emma, Forever Ago very close to his heart. This earnest intensity is Bryan’s default setting—a quality that puts him closer to angsty young heartland rockers like Sam Fender rather than fellow country chart-toppers like Luke Combs. As he expands his sound beyond genre confines, he can sell a multi-part epic like “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” and a complexly orchestrated slow-burner like “Ticking.” But he doesn’t yet have the same range in his writing, lyrically or melodically. In one song he rails against acts who compose “songs about nothing” and others fueled by “backdoor deals and therapy,” and Bryan’s obsession with raw, unprocessed emotion sometimes boxes him into a dour, one-dimensional sound. The overall effect of his records can be like binging an entire season of a network drama: one dramatic gesture after another, all delivered with the same minor-to-major gravitas, all gunning for the same emotional response. When he sings a chorus of “I ain’t spotless/Neither is you,” accompanied by the Lumineers, the sentiment feels so meaningless that it might as well come from the same Nashville assembly line that Bryan stands so proudly against. In the place of these swings toward grand, everyman resonance, I sometimes long for any hint of the renegade spirit of Bryan’s stance against unfair ticket prices, or the irreverent righteousness of calling his first live album All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster. This is why it’s such a relief midway through the record when he enlists his band for “Fear and Friday’s.” They settle on a lighter, looser mood to navigate the album’s themes of desperate nights and broken promises—more The River than Nebraska. “I’ve got a fear, dear, that it’s gonna end,” Bryan sings in the chorus. “Won’t you get angry at me/Say you love me again?” In Bryan’s songs, these big emotions—love and anger, hope and fear—are all tangled up, and getting crushed by their waves is always preferable to feeling nothing at all. If Zach Bryan brings this approach near a breaking point, the fierce determination also ends up being his saving grace. Whatever effect his songs have on you, there’s never any doubt they’re coming from the heart.

2023-08-31T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-08-31T00:02:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Warner

August 31, 2023

0109b751-cb5c-442a-af68-a358a2005b36

Sam Sodomsky

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/

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 Carole King’s Tapestry, the second act that turned a master songwriter into a music legend.

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 Carole King’s Tapestry, the second act that turned a master songwriter into a music legend.

Carole King: Tapestry

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carole-king-tapestry/

Tapestry

Carole King was a 15-year-old pianist in a poodle skirt when she first took the elevator up to the Manhattan office of a record label with her stack of sheet music and her Big Apple tenacity, and asked to audition her songs. It was 1957. As a Brooklyn teenager, the daughter of a piano teacher and firefighter who separated when she was young, King had a front-row seat to the genesis of rock’n’roll. She wondered if she could be a part of it. Too smart to then be considered cool, too determined to care, King would sign her first contract with ABC-Paramount that same year. She was a married mother of two by the age of 20, living in suburban New Jersey with her husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, a brooding intellectual who she met at Queens College and ushered into music. As they co-wrote singles for stars to sing into the stratosphere—Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion,” the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” among them—King’s own life was a source of perspective. She and Goffin worked in a cubicle with an upright piano and an overflowing ashtray at the publishing company Aldon Music, a veritable pop factory across from the Brill Building. King spiked their A.M. mini-masterpieces with the R&B melodies of her youth and brightened them with the grandeur of her beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein. Many were composed in single nights while her children were asleep. If that’s all she ever did, she would still have been a legend. It was those pop standards that led John Lennon to remark that, when he and Paul McCartney first got together, they wanted to be “the Goffin-King of England.” It was those songs that were given to Randy Newman in demo form as examples of perfect writing (he has called King his hero), and that made James Taylor too nervous to speak to her on the night they met. But it was only a first act. Tapestry was King’s second album as a bandleader, primary songwriter, unvarnished singer, and tentative recording artist—an American master of melody whose introspection became a phenomenon. At 29, she had been in the music industry for over a decade, outlasting the sea change away from bubblegum music and towards the singer-songwriter. She was skeptical of stardom. (“I didn’t think of myself as a singer,” King has said, and having written for Aretha, who could blame her?) She had also divorced her lyricist. Gathering her daughters, Louise and Sherry, and her cat, Telemachus, King moved cross-country to the Hollywood Hills, where she undertook the time-honored pop-music tradition of self-reinvention by way of self-discovery. In time, she grew spiritual, becoming a follower of the artistically beloved Swami Satchidananda. Crucially, she finally began to write her own lyrics in earnest, penning more than half the songs, and all of the peaks, of Tapestry alone. King’s lyrics are a testament to the potential of the simplest phrases when heightened by an uncluttered arrangement and an unfettered truth, the definition of classic. “You’re beautiful,” “you’ve got a friend,” “you’re so far away”—her words are conversational, economic, and nearly telepathic, as if reading our collective mind. In songs that mix girl-group longing, Broadway balladeering, blues, soul, and wonder, Tapestry used the room itself as an instrument. The producer, King’s longtime publisher Lou Adler, wanted it to sound like the understated and sought-after demos she recorded when writing for other artists, with the tactile intimacy of a woman at the piano singing straight to you. The result was precise but not overly manicured. Owing to her newfound spirituality, there is a sweet serenity to Tapestry. Here was a ’50s rock’n’roller from Brooklyn having journeyed through the ’60s to become a ’70s lady of the Canyon, making music that seemed to elude time completely. Among an ever-present array of incense and candles, King recorded Tapestry at A&M Studios in Hollywood, in Studio B. The Carpenters were in Studio A—they would record King’s “It’s Going to Take Some Time” the following year—and in Studio C, Joni Mitchell was working on her confessional masterpiece, Blue. King’s band would sneak into Mitchell’s studio when she wasn’t around (better piano in there), and Mitchell would come by to sing backing vocals, alongside James Taylor, on the Tapestry recordings of “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” According to Sheila Weller’s chronicle of the era, Girls Like Us, Mitchell had been known to call “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” her favorite song of all time. The songs of Tapestry are like companions for navigating the doubts and disappointments of everyday life with dignity. Having composed hundreds of singles for others, King knew what they needed: raw feeling, careful phrasings, a little sparkle. She lets her voice break to show that it’s alive. The soulful “It’s Too Late”—co-written with Toni Stern, a then-unknown lyricist who King called “a quintessential California girl”—feels like a grown-up girl-group anthem, wherein the best part of breaking up is, it turns out, clarity. The gospel-tinged backing vocals of “Way Over Yonder,” sung by Merry Clayton, charge its calm with resilience, dreaming of “true peace of mind” and “a garden of wisdom.” By 1971, King was not only practicing yoga but teaching it at the Integral Yoga Institute, and an attendant sense of collectedness carries Tapestry. The Broadway-ready “Beautiful,” which came to King while riding the subway, is a loving-kindness meditation banged out to a Gershwin-like orchestra of piano chords: an appeal to the world to choose a positive outlook, to put forth what you’d like to receive. As King applied her Brill Building-era chops to newfound bohemianism, perhaps it was a harder East Coast mentality that kept her lyrics concrete and her sound percussive. The jaunty Tapestry opener “I Feel the Earth Move” is both a testament to King’s groundedness and her emotional attunement. Inspired in part by the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls—the characters make love in a forest and feel “the earth move out and away from under them”—she wrote the song early in ’71. On her birthday, February 9, the catastrophic San Fernando earthquake occurred. “I feel the earth move under my feet/I feel the sky tumblin’ down,” King sings with bluesy swagger, channeling the tectonic power of infatuation. Before Tapestry, King formed a folk-rock band called the City in her Laurel Canyon living room with two fellow New York transplants, Danny Kortchmar and Charles Larkey (who would become her second husband). They released one fantastic album, 1968’s Now That Everything’s Been Said; the title track, co-written with Stern, is an exquisite gem of a kiss-off. Somewhat astonishingly, Kortchmar and Larkey were former members of the Fugs: the East Village beat-punk antagonists whose anti-professionalism was more or less a total inversion of what you might think of when you think of Carole King. But in her memoir, King writes that her new collaborators pushed each other to “sing beyond what they believed was the edge of their ability.” You can hear that in how King often maxes out her limited alto range, reaching for something just beyond her. She called her own music “soft rock,” but the brink of her singing sounds deliberately loud. Through the lovely melody of “Home Again,” King’s lyric captures the precise feeling of trying to be present when it’s impossible: “Snow is cold/Rain is wet/Chills my soul to the marrow/I won’t be happy till I see you alone again.” King’s voice presses against the lyric—“marrow”—with evermore volume, vigor, and makes it ecstatically real: the furthest place the note can go. King so often wrote songs for others. At the time, she was touring in James Taylor’s band; she’d played piano on the sensitive, illuminated ballads of 1970’s Sweet Baby James. And though Tapestry’s peaks—“So Far Away” and “You’ve Got a Friend”—weren’t technically written for Taylor, she said she penned them with his sunstruck sound in mind. “So Far Away” came to her on the road while missing her then-husband, ex-Fug Charles Larkey. It is the record’s sparest song, a marvel that seems composed to make your heart race: the feelings of loneliness, transience, and long-distance yearning (life on tour, that is) are present in every cascading chord. “So far away/Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” King sings, each syllable a surface of inquiry. The borderlessness of King’s composition makes this liminal state feel infinite—as if bittersweet were itself a key. There are few promises in the history of pop music as generous or exalted as “You’ve Got a Friend.” “Ain’t it good to know that you’ve got a friend/When people can be so cold?” King sings, giving gravity to every note, as if to ask: What could matter more? It’s a song that seems to stare at you, no matter who you are, and affirm pop’s most profound capacity: to simply be reached. “You’ve Got a Friend” became a No. 1 hit for Taylor when he recorded his more genial version for his own 1971 record, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, on which King played. (She often said she felt they were recording one continuous album, sharing many musicians.) Taylor had long been inspired by King, and later, it was he who encouraged King to sing her own songs. It makes “You’ve Got a Friend” an exquisite ode to friendship, interconnectedness, and mutual inspiration. King’s superior take amplifies its hope almost to a shout. King also recorded two of her and Goffin’s standards for Tapestry—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and “Natural Woman”—and while you couldn’t quite call her versions definitive, they carry the bespoke power of a woman reckoning with her history in song. For one, they were the bookends to her musical-marital partnership. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” was her and Goffin’s first hit, for the Shirelles, the tune that made them full-time writers after Goffin finally quit his day job as a chemist. “Natural Woman” was their last before divorcing. In musical second acts, many artists attempt to split with their former selves entirely. But King had a past she could own. She was 19 when “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” first came out; she wrote the music, arranged the strings using a book on orchestration borrowed from the public library, and played piano on the recording. The lyric was a kind of response to the Shirelles’ previous hit, “Tonight’s the Night,” but turned “sideways and upside down,” King has said. For 1960, it was rather radical: the voice of a clear-eyed young woman accepting the possibility of a one-night stand—“Can I believe the magic in your sighs?”—despite her longing for true love, resigned but not fooled. It became the first No. 1 hit of the girl group era. King and Goffin were so proud of the song that they engineered the doorbell of their home in suburban New Jersey to play its lovelorn hook every time a visitor arrived. But perhaps it was a cautionary tale for their own doomed marriage. On Tapestry, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” was a raw emblem of King’s own complex teenage years, and she sang it in careful measures, as if savoring the memory in each note. King and Goffin wrote their monumental Aretha single after Atlantic exec Jerry Wexler pulled up to them while walking on Broadway, rolled down the window of his limo, and asked them to craft a hit for her with the title “Natural Woman.” They drove home to New Jersey, listened to R&B and gospel on the Black-programmed WNJR, and poured out a piece of history: “When my soul was in the lost and found/You came along to claim it.” Of course King’s “Natural Woman” does not summon the heavens with the same earth-shattering force as the Queen of Soul’s version, released in 1967. When King performed it live on tour with Taylor three years later, she would ask the audience to please imagine it as it once was—a demo for Aretha, and part of her life story. But the grasping of King’s “you make me”s and the fluttering of her “feel”s are charged with the force of a person attempting to turn herself inside out. In the voice of Aretha, “Natural Woman” is glory. In the voice of King, it is, like all of Tapestry, an act of pure conviction. Though barely promoted by King herself, Tapestry spent 15 weeks as the No. 1 album in the U.S. upon its release, and stayed on the charts for five years. King won four Grammys for Tapestry in 1972, more than anyone had ever received at once, and it was the first time that the New York award ceremony was broadcast live on television. But King didn’t attend to collect the awards herself. She chose to remain in California with her newborn third child, Molly, instead. It’s telling: There’s an unmistakable maternal energy to Tapestry. Throughout King’s career, she has recalled moments when her responsibilities merged, in which she’d have her baby in the playpen at the studio or be breastfeeding in between takes. Toni Stern has said that, while writing for Tapestry, King would be “playing the bass with her left hand and diapering a baby with her right.” King herself said that having kids kept her “grounded in reality,” which is audible in every loosely calibrated note of Tapestry. Her next artistic achievement was a collection of children’s music, 1975’s Really Rosie, in collaboration with author Maurice Sendak. A reworking of “Where You Lead”—rewritten, King has said, to sound less submissive—became the theme song to the mother-daughter sitcom “Gilmore Girls,” sung by King and her daughter Louise. I was a teenager myself when my own mom—noticing my tendency to remain locked in my bedroom with Mitchell and Bob Dylan on an endless loop—gave me her CD copy of Tapestry. I have to admit, at 17, I didn’t get it. Maybe “I Feel the Earth Move” sounded too conventional to my angsty and emotionally blown-out high school tastes, which is too bad. I’d love to imagine an alternate universe where Tapestry lifted my ever-solemn adolescent moods, King’s voice saying you’re beautiful and you’ve got a friend in no uncertain terms. But with records there are always second chances. It is still possible to play Tapestry and feel that someone is looking out for you. Unlike Dylan or Mitchell, King’s lyrics don’t immediately scan as political or poetic, and when Tapestry came out, the record was criticized by some as “lightweight.” In the wake of the civil rights movement and in the midst of women’s liberation, 1971 was the year that Marvin Gaye sang “What’s Going On” and Helen Reddy proclaimed “I am woman/Hear me roar.” But there was nothing light about a woman who came of age in the ’50s controlling her destiny, constructing and reconstructing her existence at will, choosing a life of both home and adventure, of heart and mind, and narrating her multitudes, the tapestry of her experience, with popular song. If it feels light, that is a feat; if it feels comforting, that is a gift. For all the teen-dreaming of those early Goffin-King tunes, there’s little fantasy on Tapestry: It’s real life. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Ode / A&M

December 22, 2019

0109f8d6-25bf-4d33-8511-ad10dc83b9d9

Jenn Pelly

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/

Perhaps their reunion is already doomed, but for the first time in almost two decades, this haywire tandem goes wild with their singularly subversive rock’n’roll.

Perhaps their reunion is already doomed, but for the first time in almost two decades, this haywire tandem goes wild with their singularly subversive rock’n’roll.

Royal Trux: White Stuff

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/royal-trux-white-stuff/

White Stuff

On the first line of their first album together in 19 years, Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty reintroduce Royal Trux with a joint affirmation: “This is the way it’s supposed to be.” You will find no habitat more natural for these longtime friends and foils than the title track of White Stuff. Cycling through shape-shifting riffs as if trying to outfox the cops, the duo sings in perfect disharmony about playing in a rock band, touring the nation, making duty-free pit stops, and, yes, using that white stuff. The song so effortlessly resituates Herrema and Hagerty in their element, it seems auto-generated by an algorithm that’s learned all Royal Trux’s old tricks. But as Herrema and Hagerty’s turbulent track record has shown, nothing here is ever the way it truly appears. Late BBC DJ John Peel quipped that his favorite band, the Fall, were “always different, always the same.” Throughout the 1990s, Royal Trux sounded like they were always together but always unraveling, too. Creative and romantic partners at the time, Herrema and Hagerty belonged to no particular city or scene beyond their own self-contained upside-down universe, where sleazy rock was rendered avant-garde and vice versa. Shortly after releasing their most congenial, conventional album, 2000’s Pound for Pound, the partnership collapsed, spurred in part by tough-love interventions for a relapsing Herrema. Given the messy nature of their breakup, Royal Trux’s reunion for White Stuff has been surprising and, in the end, predictably dysfunctional. A winter North American tour was reportedly canceled on account of Herrema’s priors (but rescheduled for the spring, it seems), while a recent MOJO interview and a series of cryptic Tweets from Hagerty suggest a lingering discord. But if the tenuous truce should only last long enough to yield White Stuff, the brief reconciliation was not in vain. Royal Trux’s ’90s catalog embraced the outsized mythology and sinister allure of classic rock when their indie peers sought to dismantle it; they reemerge on White Stuff at a moment when guitar-based rock has been pushed to the margins in the mainstream and underground alike. Rather than lament this state of affairs, Royal Trux again revel in it. Throughout White Stuff, Herrema and Hagerty treat the hallowed building blocks of classic rock—chunky riffs, rippin’ guitar solos, cowbell-clankin’ grooves—like discarded parts salvaged from the landfill. They upcycle them into the 1979 fairground fantasia of their dreams, a place where you might score the Royal Trux-branded coke mirror on the cover by winning a carnival game. Atop the arpeggio-slathered chug of “Year of the Dog,” they ask, “Can you hear rock’n’roll, in the year of the dog?” Assuming the answer is no, the duo deviously triggers their trusty phasing effects and sends the song careening like a Tilt-a-Whirl with busted controls. Forsaking the earthier vibe of later Trux records like Veterans of Disorder and Pound for Pound, White Stuff feels like an extension of Herrema’s work with Black Bananas, thriving on the tension between old-school authenticity and modernist manipulations. Tracks like “Purple Audacity #2” and “Under Ice” start out as deceptively anthemic sing-alongs, though the swaggering grooves, lysergic riffs, and synth smears eventually meld into hallucinatory swirls. “Sic Em Slow” is a tough boogie birthed from a flurry of tropical electronics. Kool Keith, meanwhile, turns up to rap about pizza on the boombox electro jam “Get Used to This,” the great Judgment Night deep cut that never was. Herrema and Hagerty wrote these songs via emailed file swaps, and Hagerty reportedly bailed on recording sessions before the album was completed. Still, the duo’s piss-and-vinegar vocal dynamic feels as broken-in as an old baseball mitt. In the past, Herrema and Hagerty often took solo lead turns; here, there’s rarely a moment when their voices aren’t overlapping. The ravaged tandem can be surprisingly poignant, too. “Suburban Junkie Lady” is a slow-motion psych-funk reverie about empathizing with a homeless woman trucking her life’s belongings in a shopping cart, as passersby blithely toss her food from their cars. Herrema’s a fashion stylist and designer in L.A. now, Hagerty a Denver-based dad—this song, though, serves as a blood-pact reminder of their hardscrabble past. But Royal Trux never sound more pure and fully realized than when practicing the fine art of falling apart. On White Stuff’s most disorienting track, “Purple Audacity #1,” Herrema and Hagerty sing competing melodies as if waging a custody battle over the track’s prog-reggae rhythm. An atonal guitar solo blares continuously, like a broken television in the next room. Hagerty somehow twists a nonsensical mantra—“Southern California drivers are the 19th wonder of the world!”—into a catchy hook. For all the admirers and imitators Royal Trux have amassed in absentia, no one else can make music like this. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

2019-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Fat Possum

March 4, 2019

010cfa41-0346-4f61-add9-054d0335f722

Stuart Berman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/

Backed by Lex Luger's visceral production, Gucci Mane's protege strips street rap to its essential characteristics and distills the genre into its purest form.

Backed by Lex Luger's visceral production, Gucci Mane's protege strips street rap to its essential characteristics and distills the genre into its purest form.

Waka Flocka Flame: Flockaveli

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14771-flockaveli/

Flockaveli

Flockaveli is for people who find M.O.P. too polite, Silkk the Shocker too relaxed, and Blaq Poet too introspective. Waka Flocka Flame is an unrepentant street-rap hardhead-- as much a descendant of New York aggro-thugs like DMX or Screwball as early 2000s southern club rappers. Producer Lex Luger provides most of Flockaveli's thunderous accompaniment, while a parade of no-name/street-fame character-rappers (plus, inexplicably, Wale) give the album the chaotic tone of a street brawl. But at the record's violent core, Waka Flocka Flame stands as a gangsta rap giant whose lack of range is more than made up for by his grizzled bark. For 17 straight tracks, Flockaveli is a furious torrent of gangsta rap id. There are zero attempts at crossover, no R&B choruses (unless you count Roscoe Dash's rasp over Drumma Boy's ominous marching horn anthem "No Hands"). Certain songs jump out immediately-- especially rap-anthem-of-the-year contender "Hard in Da Paint". "Grove St. Party" subverts the record's adrenaline into a cocktail of intoxicated cockiness and tense creepiness-- a dark, twisted party jam. "For My Dawgs" turns the record's energy into a survivalist street anthem: "One lousy-ass bullet can't fuckin' stop me." Waka's reckless fatalism-- that sense of him teetering on a knife's edge-- is the part of his persona that best fits with the approach of the album's Makaveli namesake. But it's the sound of the album that sticks out the most at first, a sonic barrage of uncontained hood aggression. The beats are confrontational, shredding up the template of early-2000s Atlanta and turning the remains into an overwhelmingly dense assault of hi-hats and gothic string pads. Along with gunfire effects and Waka's constant ad libs, these elements create a non-stop gut punch of aural adrenaline. Luger's production isn't far removed from the post-Jeezy trap sound of fellow Atlantans Shawty Redd and Drumma Boy-- in fact, he's a little less dexterous than the latter-- but it works perfectly with Waka's sledgehammer-subtle approach. His beats alternate between unrelentling repetition ("Bang") and unexpected, lurching drop-outs ("Hard in Da Paint"). But for all the credit given to Luger-- who, in fairness, has upped the bar for rap producers competing with the post-Tunnel nightclub gangster aesthetic-- it's Waka who gives this record its frenetic intensity. In gangsta rap's race to produce the hardest possible tracks, Waka seems intent on topping everyone, stripping street rap to its essential characteristics and distilling the genre into its purest form. But he's no traditionalist, either, avoiding the New York roughneck's reliance on older production styles. There are few attempts to integrate nuance or complexities, gray-scale morality, or introspection. Each track gives a new perspective on the same basic archetype, reducing gangsta rap to its building blocks: hypermasculine children of the drug trade, reckless fatalism, intensity, and physicality. Anyone coming to this record expecting wordplay, or criticizing it for its lack thereof, is missing the point completely: Flockaveli thrives on Waka's fresh approach to the same generation gap-widening narrative that's driven street rap since before N.W.A. That doesn't mean he can't rap; instead, Waka sells on the way his personality bleeds through his vocals and phrasing, the way his voice rolls, "I'ma die for this, shawty, I swwweartogod," on "Hard in Da Paint", imprinting his vocals in the most memorable possible way: "Mizz-ayy management, shit, that my motherrr." Which leads to the line that explains the entire record: "When my little brother died, I said, 'Fuck school.'" This one lyric summarizes the attitude of a record utterly unconcerned with authority and anyone else who gets in the way. It points to the unspoken undercurrent in gangsta rap that's usually mischaracterized as undirected underclass rage: Waka's aggression is the survivalist reaction of the powerless, directed toward the threats of the immediate environment. He knows his strengths and he plays to them, exactingly.

2010-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

2010-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Warner Bros.

October 28, 2010

010d5dbc-4777-47dd-805f-86cb3aa14177

David Drake

https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/

The Atlanta rapper’s first solo record in 11 years preserves his seismic bars, but its sanctimonious undercurrent can make it hard to stomach.

The Atlanta rapper’s first solo record in 11 years preserves his seismic bars, but its sanctimonious undercurrent can make it hard to stomach.

Killer Mike: Michael

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/killer-mike-michael/

Michael

In Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door, protagonist Dan Freeman is a Black revolutionary moonlighting as a CIA agent, hellbent on protecting himself and his people from a world on fire. The author described the book as part Civil Rights Era satire and part “training manual for guerrilla warfare,” and its portrayal of revolution as salvation is as relevant now as it was 54 years ago. With it, Greenlee aimed to inspire Black readers to take action, “rather than always reacting as victims of a racist society.” These kinds of well-intentioned but flawed sentiments, which place more blame on the individual than the system built to keep them down, have been connecting deeply with Killer Mike these days. The Atlanta rapper’s resurgence as one-half of Run the Jewels alongside El-P in the early 2010s amplified his already potent sociopolitical consciousness to superhuman levels. Those records were equally fun and confrontational: loose but always focused on raging against the racial and economic injustices of the world and forging a path ahead. During Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, Mike’s spirited battle cries captured so much of the country’s discontent. On “Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost),” from Run the Jewels 3, he rapped, “You can burn the system and start again.” A few songs later, he emphasized the importance of redistributing wealth to sex workers. At the same time, he was taking that radical spirit into the real world, building community-minded businesses and organizing food drives, among other initiatives. RTJ albums, especially the third and fourth ones, didn’t just foreground the kind of revolutionary anger and civil disobedience found in Spook—they gave it a modern urgency and a sense of direction. But in the years since, Mike’s fiery raps have gradually taken a backseat to some less-than-ideal optics. He went from endorsing Bernie Sanders for president to taking an interview with NRA TV to having an inopportune meeting with Georgia’s Republican governor. Like the protagonist of Greenlee’s novel, Mike sees himself as a leader offering his people tools in a world stacked against them. But from another angle, it appears as though he’s doubling back, more content to work within the system than rail against it. It’s a familiar arc for so many who spend their lifetimes fighting for social change. When the landscape shifts and you start to lose touch, it’s easy to dig your heels in. His latest album Michael—his first solo record since 2012’s R.A.P. Music—centers these conflicts and closes the gap between Killer Mike the rapper and Michael Render the husband, father, son, and born-again child of God. At its heart, Michael is an origin story that works best when it examines how worshiping at the altars of sex, money, and Jesus created the man we know today. But when he petulantly doubles down on critiques of his public persona and status as a Black multi-millionaire, the album is harder to stomach. Rap music exists in a complex web of capitalistic deification and stacking bands as a survival tactic, but Mike’s worst takeaways often contradict one another without a thematic payoff. It’s unfortunate to hear him rap about his days living off drug and minimum wage money on “EXIT 9” on the same album where he calls others in similar positions lazy (“Too many y’all niggas laid up/And that’s why y’all niggas laid off” on “SPACESHIP VIEWS”). Occasionally, nuance gets cast aside for snide finger-wagging. “You still talkin’ New Jack City, that’s why you niggas poor,” he says pointedly on “NRICH,” making lengthy arguments about investing in real estate and his own Greenwood banking platform. Three songs later, he’s bragging about using tour money to buy a new Benz. Generating income for your family and community is a wonderful thing, but there’s a difference between aspirational hustler music and judgmental pocket-watching. Not only does this dissonance feel very “old rap man yells at cloud,” by indulging his preachier side, it often sabotages the balance Michael is so keen on maintaining. Mike wants us to see him as both a human being and a superstar, but the further the album strays from genuine self-reflection into sour disapproval, the worse it gets. In a recent video posted to Twitter, Mike mentions a friend who told him that the album chronicles “the average working-class Black man’s story with dignity.” That’s true when the songs reminisce on Mike’s childhood and unpack his family history. On “SLUMMER,” he relives a whirlwind teenage romance that was blindsided by a surprise pregnancy. The girlfriend has an abortion and Mike reflects on paying for the procedure while unpacking his conflicted feelings. For all its awkward wordplay (“They call it adolescence ‘cause we learnin’ adult lessons”), his sincerity carries the song to the finish line. The same can be said for “SOMETHING FOR JUNKIES,” an account of his heart-to-hearts with his crack-addicted aunt, or “MOTHERLESS,” in which Mike works through the grief he feels after losing his mother and grandmother. Pain and pride course through every word as he considers his place in a complicated lineage: “Is this a blessing or a curse, or just some other shit?” he asks on the latter, exasperated. “No matter what, I’m numb as fuck ‘cause I’m still motherless.” On a technical level, at least, Mike’s raps are seismic. That deep baritone and Atlanta drawl has long rendered his voice one of the most distinct in hip-hop; it’s inspired by the enveloping rumbles of Ice Cube and Erick Sermon as much as it is by Bun B or Big Boi. But what really makes it hit is its malleability. On “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” a breathtaking Dungeon Family reunion with Future and André 3000, he catches a blistering flow that bubbles and snaps without ever boiling over. With his booming voice, he praises the virtues of Gucci and the work of pan-Africanist scholar John Henrik Clark on opener “DOWN BY LAW,” while “SHED TEARS” and “MOTHERLESS” keep its fullness, but scale down the fire and brimstone for an understated intimacy. He’s hungry and ready to experiment, invigorated by his first batch of (mostly) non-El-P beats in years. The producers he’s assembled here, which include Tennessee legend DJ Paul, Atlanta mainstay Honorable C.N.O.T.E., and executive producer No I.D., give Michael a lush, stately feel—a stark difference from the madcap sampledelia of Run the Jewels. Choirs, organs, and church bells drive home the pious theme and blend well with booming 808s, cascading synths, and Southern-fried bass licks. The trunk-rattling grooves split the difference between the classic and contemporary South, and it’s refreshing to hear Mike back in his musical comfort zone. “TWO DAYS,” with its wailing guitar sirens and fiery bass fretting, feels like a juiced-up version of Goodie Mob’s “Sesame Street.” Sadly, that comfort begets some fuckshit. Older solo tracks, like “Don’t Die,” “American Dream,” and “That’s Life,” worked exceptionally well because they spoke with empathy and offered level-headed criticisms of the establishment as much as they fleshed out Mike’s story. Michael still has love for the people, but now it clashes with bars flexing about being a landlord, or homophobic (and dated) Brokeback Mountain jokes. For the first time, he’s punching down, and this bitter disposition gives the album a sanctimonious feel, one that’s usually reserved for his prickliest interviews. When he says “My brother’s in the fire and to save him’s my desire” on closing track “HIGH AND HOLY,” it’s unclear how he decides who’s worth saving. It’s unfortunate to see him trudge further down this path, because at its best, Michael is a funky refresh that often finds clarity in its own backyard.

2023-06-23T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-06-22T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

Loma Vista

June 23, 2023

010def3d-7c25-4045-9772-4b644b78ea41

Dylan Green

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/

The prodigious singer reunites with producer D’Mile for a collection of live-band soul and future-R&B that aspires to update the classic seduction jam with a dose of modern vulnerability.

The prodigious singer reunites with producer D’Mile for a collection of live-band soul and future-R&B that aspires to update the classic seduction jam with a dose of modern vulnerability.

Lucky Daye: Algorithm

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucky-daye-algorithm/

Algorithm

As the singer of unforgettable tracks like “Over” and “Love You Too Much,” and as a songwriter on Ella Mai’s “10,000 Hours” and Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar,” Lucky Daye’s spent at least a decade cultivating a terrarium of earworm hits. On this third album, Algorithm, Daye reunites with Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II, whose agile production can be heard on An Evening With Silk Sonic and Victoria Monet’s Jaguar series as well as Daye’s first two albums. The duo’s balance of retro-soul and future-R&B is a little left of center, freewheeling without any discernible label, and focuses on instrumental exploration and playful genre-melding. Across Algorithm’s 14 tracks, live-band seduction pulls you out of the club shadows and into the light of a Delta dancefloor. Opener “Never Leavin’ U Lonely” is a sexy party trick, the type of song that sneaks up and surprises as it builds from its percussive backline into Daye’s falsetto vocals. It’s a high that continues onto the hip-swinging “HERicane,” the shoulder shimmying “Soft,” and the heart-pounding “Top.” The latter brings to mind the instructional foreplay of Eugene Wilde’s “Gotta Get You Home Tonight,” whose influence is felt in Daye’s plea for an itinerant lover’s time and interest: “I feel your body breathin’ but let’s not take a break…/Like sugar on my tongue till your body go numb/Then I’ma send you on your way.” Just because it’s a one-night stand doesn’t mean it’s over—Daye wants you to remember the first glance and the last climax. At its best, the album recalls the dynamic sensual abandon of Nile Rodgers as Daye rides over the grooves and edges of a melody. He never seems to be addressing a crowd: He is seeing and singing to you. Fans of old-school R&B ballads bemoan that today’s singers don’t beg like they used to, that there’s no urgency in their pining. Daye is prostrate, submitting to desire. When he steps away from that vulnerable longing, though, the album starts to meander with the listlessness of an automated “sex songs” playlist. “Think Different,” “Mary,” “Blame,” and the title track attempt to engage with the contemporary dating scene’s surplus of choices and dearth of intimacy, but the real problem never comes into clear focus and the songs wind up sounding like one-way romantic pontificating. “Mary” in particular feels quite archaic as Daye consults a Rolodex of women he’s met in each and every part of town. “Got a girl named Jill, stay up in the hills,” he brags, and so on, revealing nothing except the fact that there are still young women named Ruth. “Think Different” could have been a necessary dialogue between two people working to understand each other better, but it hits like a voice note from a partner who still wants to fight for the relationship but is increasingly resentful of all the work it’s taking. By contrast, British singer-songwriter RAYE takes command on “Paralyzed,” laying the stakes for a truly transformative love: “Intuition says, ‘Run for the door, save yourself’/But to leave both you and my heart in this room, I would’ve played myself.” Begging is all well and good, but relationships demand the courage to act. Algorithm sounds tactile and magnetic: The harmonies are slick but never processed and the beats are in the pocket but never quantized. The emotional picture is less clear. Daye sounds as though he longs to sink deeper into territory that requires him to become a little more uncertain, not only about the implications of desire and love, but what it means to express them while still growing as a musician. He’s committed himself to the labor of love—distilling all its tempestuous, petty, tender, and annoying traits into music that speaks as much to us as to his continued maturation. It’s a thrill to see an artist reach for that depth of feeling. Like love, it can be elusive.

2024-07-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-07-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Keep Cool / RCA

July 9, 2024

010df543-6c5d-4497-a67c-684f0bc8b73d

Tarisai Ngangura

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/

Two years after the excellent Does It Look Like I'm Here?, Emeralds have smoothed and streamlined their sound, delving into the soft shapes of new age, post-rock, and corporate music.

Two years after the excellent Does It Look Like I'm Here?, Emeralds have smoothed and streamlined their sound, delving into the soft shapes of new age, post-rock, and corporate music.

Emeralds: Just to Feel Anything

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17276-just-to-feel-anything/

Just to Feel Anything

It's been two and a half years since the release of Emeralds' excellent Does It Look Like I'm Here?, and each member of the trio has stayed busy. Mark McGuire continued to spool out guitar ambience, culminating in the highlight-reel A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire. Steve Hauschildt crafted a solid solo record of synth patterns, and has another due soon. And John Elliott's Outer Space project put out two stellar albums this year, while his Editions Mego sub-imprint Spectrum Spools has been perhaps the most exciting underground label of 2012, supporting material by Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Drainolith, and Gary War. Given all this activity, I expected the next proper Emeralds album to be filled with new ideas-- perhaps even overloaded with them. But Just to Feel Anything has the opposite problem. Smoothed and streamlined, it comes off as a retreat into the safety of genre. While there's nothing inherently wrong with Emeralds continuing to evoke the past, what made their earlier work so interesting was the way they tweaked and skewed influences in unpredictable ways. Hence they could breathe life into even the most hackneyed new age tropes. Here, though, the soft shapes and cheesy tones of new age, post-rock, and even corporate music tend to subsume the band's personality. The result is well-executed and pleasant to listen to, but generally lacking edge or distinction. In places, it sounds like anyone could've made this, much the way music in TV commercials sounds crafted by a committee or an algorithm. Despite how reference-heavy their work has been, that's something I've never thought about any previous Emeralds-related release. There are spots in the album's glossy haze where the band's originality pokes through. Generally this occurs when they eschew predictable beats. They nicely evoke the melancholy of mid-period Cure on the drifting "Through & Through", and offer dense layers in the drones of "The Loser Keeps America Clean". Strongest is eight-minute closer "Search For Me in the Wasteland", a patient guitar swirl that's like a languid, emotionally acute version of Labradford. Variations on those compelling sounds persist in other parts of Just to Feel Anything, but they're dragged down by an odd dependence on straightforward drum machines. So opener "Before Your Eyes" starts with a tense atmosphere, but a flat rhythm transforms it into a empty take on Mogwai/Explosions in the Sky-style cinematics. The following cut, "Adrenochrome", uses a similarly vague thump, and despite some hypnotic grooves in the middle, ends with soaring guitars precariously close to corporate video territory. Before you let that description scare you off, be advised that Just to Feel Anything is by no means a crass, calculated makeover. The sounds and styles here are ones that Emeralds have leaned toward in the past, and they're clearly committed to them aesthetically rather than as a pander to expand their audience. It's just that the smooth side of their style predominates, and isn't counterbalanced enough by more surprising elements. Still, even the weakest moments here feel just a few moves away from something much more interesting. So rather than dismiss Just to Feel Anything as a mistake, perhaps it's better to think of it as a mixed detour, one that some of the band's followers might in fact welcome. Personally, I'm hopeful that the idiosyncrasies that marked past Emeralds efforts will make a comeback.

2012-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00

2012-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00

Electronic

Editions Mego

November 5, 2012

010e6749-8c9b-4432-b3ac-171344bf28d3

Marc Masters

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/

Beams again finds the Detroit producer fully inhabiting his ink-black, hedonistic world and extends his run of strong vocal-oriented records.

Beams again finds the Detroit producer fully inhabiting his ink-black, hedonistic world and extends his run of strong vocal-oriented records.

Matthew Dear: Beams

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16973-beams/

Beams

Matthew Dear is an illusionist. Each successive release under the Detroit producer's own name has seen him reveal more of himself as he simultaneously retreats deeper into the shadows. As his singing voice continues to take a front-and-center position in his slithery electronic pop productions, it's also acquired a dark and oily air of decadence. Beams, his fifth solo full-length under his own name, is said by its maker to be more "positive" in disposition than 2010's high-water mark Black City. But don't be fooled. "I laughed when they hit you with their sticks/ You cried," goes one refrain. So the sinister hedonism continues. And while there's nothing quite as tongue-in-ear lascivious as Black City's Reznor-ian "You Put a Smell on Me", Beams' constant neon-gray chug brings to mind a party that never ends. Synths peer through the chemical murk, occasionally breaking through before getting swallowed up by clouds of grime. Basslines wobble with sickness. The song in which Dear sums up the whole vibe-- "Take a trip on something else"-- is called "Fighting Is Futile", and the title defines Beams' album-length experience: Dramamine be damned, it's tough to pull your way out of this thing. There's been no reason to assume that Matthew Dear lives this hedonistic shit for real, but Beams feels more personal. The first-person pronoun is all over these 11 tracks. Dear wasn't always comfortable being so bold, either vocally and in terms of accessible songwriting. His 2003 debut, Leave Luck to Heaven, and the following year's Backstroke saw his voice gasping in bursts under the abstract, janky techno soundscapes that are associated with his track-oriented work as Audion. The side of Dear that most are familiar with today emerged on 2007's enjoyable Asa Breed, a watershed that lacked cohesion but made up for its disjointed faults by virtue of sheer pop playfulness. Black City brought all these elements together, but Beams actually one-ups its predecessor in terms of cohesion. The album is Dear's most consistent work yet, operating as one upward build that, save for the leaden "Shake Me" (which feels out of place even without knowing its status as a repurposed demo that dates back to 2003), moves in the same direction until its conclusion. But consistency is a tricky thing. There are a few impressive, memorable highlights here-- the steam-column elation of album opener "Her Fantasy", the radiant confusion of "Ahead of Myself". But as a front-to-back experience, the album doesn't exactly stay with you. In one sense, it feels like a victory lap, extending some of the best ideas from his strong recent run without improving on any of them. Next year marks a decade since Matthew Dear started releasing music under his own name. And given that almost every release since then has seen him pushing his close-quarters aesthetic further into new territory, Beams' relative stasis is excusable.

2012-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00

2012-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic

Ghostly International

August 28, 2012

010f2742-bd6f-4e95-b42d-d6558dc92b74

Larry Fitzmaurice

https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/

On his overtly political ninth studio LP, Eminem is fueled by self-doubt. But with many bland hooks and cringe-worthy punchlines, Revival is another late-career album that does little for his legacy.

On his overtly political ninth studio LP, Eminem is fueled by self-doubt. But with many bland hooks and cringe-worthy punchlines, Revival is another late-career album that does little for his legacy.

Eminem: Revival

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eminem-revival/

Revival

Few texts in hip-hop are as bizarre as Eminem’s debut LP, Infinite. Released on a local Detroit label in 1996, it was either ignored or dismissed by those who rejected his whiteness and his borrowed aesthetic. Were it released in 2017, it might be celebrated for its scholarship of the form’s early classics, a la Joey Bada$$ or Roc Marciano. Instead, he was written off as a swagger jacker who sounded too much like Nas and AZ. The criticism burned, and from that fire he formed his alter ego, Slim Shady. A manifestation of Marshall Mathers’ inner turmoil, the persona served as a vehicle for his darkest, most violent thoughts and helped him step out from the shadow of his forebears to channel the darkest parts of himself. On 1998’s The Slim Shady EP, he found his unique and disturbing voice. It caught the ear of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who spent the next five years molding him into one of the biggest pop stars in the world. In those early years, for all the controversy his lyrics caused, Slim Shady helped Mathers focus his energy, a cathartic outlet that was both messy and intensely fascinating. But after more than two decades, he’s older, well-fed, and in possession of pretty much every accolade there is to acquire. The Slim Shady suit no longer fits; once the outsider, he’s now the establishment. If Slim Shady fed on hate, what does he do now that he’s beloved? What motivates a healthy, sober, 45-year-old father with enough money for several lifetimes? On Revival, his ninth studio LP, Eminem is largely fueled by his own self-doubt, a creeping fear that we might forget he was once one of the best to ever hold a mic. The only thing the battle-tested, Oscar-winning, best-selling hip-hop artist of all time has to prove is that he’s got another classic in him, the one thing that he hasn’t proven since the curtains closed on 2002’s The Eminem Show. On the records that followed—his 2004 Encore, the inevitable Relapse in 2009 into Slim Shady, and his eventual Recovery—Eminem struggled to reconcile with the aftermath of his rapid ascent to stardom. The confessional nature of his storytelling, often featuring his mother, his daughter, and her mother, laid bare his deepest insecurities and most twisted fantasies. By the time a sober Marshall Mathers dropped the sequel to his defining work, he seemed desperate to prove he still had the ability to shock, disturb, and amaze with his skills on the mic. But by then, it was already apparent that he’d run out of stories to tell. Having freed himself of substance abuse, he reconciled his toxic relationship with the mother of his child and the effects of incorporating his daughter into his art. He’d matured into a more evolved human. But the music didn’t grow with him. For the past 15 years, Eminem has been stuck in a feedback loop, revisiting different versions of his former self. Musically, Revival is no different, chock full of piano ballads and pop-star features that echo the most cynically commercial corners of his catalog. The shock value comes not from the album’s overwhelmingly bland hooks or cringe-worthy humor (of which there is plenty), but from the moments where his growth as a human is most apparent. Much of early single “Untouchable” is indeed unlistenable, but how many other rappers are reminding us of KRS-One’s teachings that “there can never be justice on stolen land?” And did the man who once mocked Lady Gaga with the lyric, “She can quit her job at the post office, she’s still a male lady,” really just diss the 45th president’s ban on transgender service members? That being said, Eminem is due no accolades for having thumbed through a copy of Between the World and Me or for finally acknowledging the humanity of non-binary people. Nor should he be deified for mackling about the privileges of whiteness and how hard it is to be black in America. These are not new topics in hip-hop lyrics, they’re just new for Eminem. In 2017, listening to an Eminem rant against police brutality or a racist president can feel like watching “60 Minutes” after spending the week on Twitter; a slow recounting of last week’s news. It’s certainly possible that these screeds could be revelatory for Eminem’s most delusional racist fans, but for those who’ve long since arrived and put in the work, it just sounds tired. And if the beats knocked, it would probably be tolerable, too. But legendary executive producers Dr. Dre and Rick Rubin managed to stuff a bloated tracklist with uninspired production and instantly forgettable pop hooks. Even Beyoncé couldn’t save “Walk on Water,” a stale piano ballad that undercuts Eminem’s attempt to explore the weight of his self-doubt. The Alicia-Keys-featuring “Like Home” is equally limp and toothless, defanging Eminem’s attempt to battle Donald Trump. He sees himself as a crusader against his influence, champion of the bullied, a notebook full of disses at the ready. It’s not his fault that all Trump has to do to beat him is ignore him, but it is his fault that the beat makes it so easy to do so. Rubin’s contributions are particularly embarrassing; his re-hash of hits from the Rush/Def Jam days (“Heat,” “Remind Me”) suggest he’s completely out of ideas. But while the long tracklist and equally protracted verses make for an exhausting listen, there are rewards for those that endure. The eponymous interlude features a short verse from the late Alice and the Glass Lake that sounds like a sketch for something potentially great. And on an album full of poorly matched beats and verses, the delicately morose guitar melody and heavy fuzz of the Cranberries “Zombie” suits his flow on “In Your Head” perfectly—even if the hook was pretty much cut and pasted from the original. It’s not until the album’s final tracks that we see a glimpse of the masterful storytelling he exhibited on early hits like “Guilty Conscience” and “Stan.” “Castle” is structured as three letters to his daughter, who, for better or worse, tends to inspire some of his strongest work. It’s hard not to be disarmed by his apology for the big ears he gave her, or his acknowledgement of how he fucked up by hashing out their family’s domestic strife in public. When it ends with his very real 2007 methadone overdose, he imagines the effect of his death on his family on the album closer, “Arose,” with a funereal beat that interpolates an elegiac backing vocal with the beeps and gusts of air from life support machines. This is the contradiction of Eminem in 2017. The brat who once boasted how he “Just Don’t Give a Fuck” now has an abundance of fucks to give. He’s still firing off juvenile sex jokes (“Your booty is heavy duty like diarrhea”), but he’s clearly still tortured by his love for his child’s mother. He decries the president’s racism, then (jokingly?) admits he agrees with his stance on pussy grabbing (“Why do you think they call it a snatch?”). These multitudes might be reconcilable were his considerable technical gifts not consistently wasted on tired themes and lame attempts to revive an irrelevant persona he outgrew years ago. Eminem’s consistent run of mediocrity over the last 15 years has not tempered his album sales, and it’s unlikely to start now—he remains one of the most bankable acts in pop. But sales and fame have never been his primary motivation. He’s always wanted to be the best, and ever since he conquered the music world in the early aughts, it’s as if he has no idea where to go. As he raps with precision on “Believe”: Man, in my younger days That dream was so much fun to chase It’s like I run in place While this shit dangled in front of my face But how do you keep up the pace And the hunger pangs once you’ve won the race? When that fuel exhaust is coolin’ off ’Cause you don't got nothin’ left to prove at all ’Cause you done already hit ’em with the coup de grâce These fears are relatable—what artist hasn’t struggled to find motivation?—if not necessarily interesting. But Revival is ultimately plagued by the same pitfalls as Infinite, which found him shadowboxing against ghosts, unable to land any punches. This time he’s competing with a version of himself that no longer exists. And though it’s easy to empathize with his creeping self-doubt, it’s tougher to swallow in the context of an album that ultimately proves that those doubts are correct.

2017-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Aftermath

December 19, 2017

010f2f15-b295-4b82-898f-6a483dd7245a

Matthew Ismael Ruiz

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/

Earnestly didactic “conscious” hip-hop is easy to mock but hard to do well. The Compton rapper’s rhyme schemes are persuasive even when his arguments don’t withstand close scrutiny.

Earnestly didactic “conscious” hip-hop is easy to mock but hard to do well. The Compton rapper’s rhyme schemes are persuasive even when his arguments don’t withstand close scrutiny.

Greydon Square: Type 4: City on the Type of Forever

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greydon-square-type-4-city-on-the-type-of-forever/

Type 4: City on the Type of Forever

Greydon Square is a forty-something rapper from Compton who belongs to the time-honored lineage of wrinkled-forehead, pressured-speech word-nerd rappers. Think your Aesop Rocks, your Gift of Gabs, your Ras Kasses—anyone whose raps might fall into a tag cloud of “third eye,” “the plan,” and/or “the singularity.” The title of his latest album, Type 4: City on the Type of Forever, likely refers to the classic Harlan Ellison-penned 1967 Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Captain Kirk must let Joan Collins die in order to somehow stop Hitler (it’s complicated), and as the “Type 4” hints, it belongs to a series—in this case, a “quadrilogy” of albums inspired by the Kardashev Scale, which was invented by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardoshev in 1964 to measure a society’s ability to harness its technology. It’s… a lot, and so are the rapper’s verses— “Cosmic accosted/Obelisk hostage/monolith option from the ominous doctrine” is an incredibly representative stretch of rhymes. And yet it’s a testament to Greydon, aka Eddie Collins, that even his nonsensical lines sound compelling. “I bet you didn’t even know that colors could move, did you?” he asks on the title track, and his baritone is so commanding that you might find yourself reflexively shaking your head: No, Greydon, I simply had no idea. With his deep, glassy monotone, he sounds a little like if Guru binged too many YouTube documentaries, and this smooth voice anchors him across some choppy waters where you’re not entirely sure what societal ills he’s addressing—complacency? Lack of empathy? Manufactured consent? (Probably all of those.) Greydon Square understands and exploits what I’ll call the Lupe Loophole, which holds that even your preposterously half-baked ideas will ring true if you flow slickly enough. Earnestly didactic hip-hop in this vein is easy to mock but incredibly hard to do well: At its best, galaxy-brain “conscious” rap encourages you to make connections between disparate ideas not so much through demonstration as by suggestion. What does a stray shot like “open range, broken with nothin’ but hope and change” (from album highlight “Hindsight”) say, exactly, about the unfulfilled promises of the Obama years? I have no idea, but the urgency in Collins’ voice makes me ponder the question for half a beat longer than I would if he lectured me straight, as does the fact that he’s onto something else in the very next bar. Like a lot of conscious rappers, Collins’ music feels most magnetic when he keeps the outlines of his critiques broad, allowing his music to remain slippery, allusive, suggestive. The production, from a number of sources including Collins himself, helps, wreathing his voice in profundity-boosting astral synths that heighten the atmosphere more than any single bar. The narcotic pull of conspiracy theorizing, after all, has nothing at all to do with details and everything to do with that heady sensation that all of your troubles are linked in a pattern whose broad outlines are just becoming visible. Or, in other words: No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative; it gets the people going. Collins is a fascinating character—a military vet who served in the Iraq war; a fierce atheist who regularly discusses the subject on talk shows; a former physics major and an outspoken antinatalist, or someone who believes fervently in not having children. He’s dropped a number of songs directly espousing these beliefs, laying out powerful arguments that probably matter very much to people caught up in the debate but have limited use outside those arenas. He dials back that tendency on Type 4, but on “6th,” for example, he raps pretty directly about his political disillusionment, railing against the “false duopoly” of the political system, the tokenizing paternalism of “limousine liberals,” the hypocrisy of “corporate socialism,” the fruitlessness of voter-shaming a disenfranchised populace. All cogent points, and yet I find there isn’t much to do with them other than to shrug and say “yeah.” Meanwhile, when he raps, “There in the crease, we buried it—a vision, lifted into position/A neo-view, often too vivid! I’m the illest to ever convert oxygen into CO2,” I am left awestruck, the afterimage of the words (a neo-view, too vivid!) dancing across my brain.

2022-12-06T00:02:00.000-05:00

2022-12-06T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rap

Grand Unified

December 6, 2022

010ffdf1-58d7-4c9c-8a26-5e9c13291216

Jayson Greene

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/

The Cleveland band puts thrills front and center on its second album, slotting monster riffs into gruesomely switchbacking arrangements.

The Cleveland band puts thrills front and center on its second album, slotting monster riffs into gruesomely switchbacking arrangements.

200 Stab Wounds: Manual Manic Procedures

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/200-stab-wounds-manual-manic-procedures/

Manual Manic Procedures

Fun isn’t necessarily one of death metal’s chief attributes, but it’s one of the defining characteristics of 200 Stab Wounds; you don’t name your songs “Skin Milk” and “Stifling Stew” if you don’t enjoy playing around in the grotesque. (They say that the title “Release the Stench” was inspired by a bandmember slipping off his shoes in the van.) The Cleveland quartet’s 2021 debut, Slave to the Scalpel, was an immediately accessible album of gritty riffs and sinewy grooves in a cartoonishly gruesome sleeve, and it established 200 Stab Wounds within a new wave of death-metal bands like Creeping Death, Necrot, Undeath, and fellow Ohioans Sanguisugabogg—bands that use hardcore’s relentless forward thrust to power traditional death metal in the vein of genre heroes Cannibal Corpse and Bolt Thrower. The music is dark, ugly, compact, and covered in grime. If Blood Incantation’s brainy sound explores the cosmos, and Tomb Mold’s visionary approach pushes aesthetic frontiers, then 200 Stab Wounds’ sinister, concentrated music plumbs the Zodiac Killer’s basement. Slave to the Scalpel was recorded before 200 Stab Wounds began playing live, and its songs occasionally suffered from not having been road tested; there’s a fine line between relentless and monotonous that not even the nastiest riff can overcome. In the years since, they’ve toured ceaselessly with death-metal legends like Obituary and Dying Fetus, and it’s clear that hearing songs like “Slowly We Rot” and “Born in Sodom” every night for weeks—and discovering how their own music fared before a skeptical crowd—helped 200 Stab Wounds figure out how to turn a great riff into a great song. On Manual Manic Procedures, they chop their sound to pieces and sew it back up into meticulously arranged music played with speed, precision, and obvious glee; they’re inflicting all those wounds as efficiently as possible, but you can sense them enjoying each and every thrust of the knife. Right from the start, it’s clear that Manual Manic Procedures has been built to keep a crowd on its toes and a pit in perpetual motion. After an intro that recalls both “South of Heaven” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the rhythm of opener “Hands of Eternity” changes five or six times in the span of a minute, from head-banging piston-pumping to thrashy swing to ’90s jock metal and back again; later in the song, they shift from a gallop into D-beat into a nu-metal drag. It’s nothing new for a metal band to combine subgenres, but making such a show of presenting the menu at the beginning of the meal shows the band’s fresh intent: Here are all the ways your body can and will respond to this record. 200 Stab Wounds pulls tricks like this throughout Manual Manic Procedures—setting patterns in motion, then upending them while you’re distracted by some musical sleight of hand. In “Defiled Gestation,” the missile scream of a pair of pinch harmonics flashes across the opening mid-tempo riff, and while you’re still partially blinded by the flare, the band pitches up the pace in mid-measure, launching into the song’s full-throttle attack a quarter-second or so earlier than it feels like they should. Even when they’re at cruising speed, they keep tinkering with the groove, finding new ways to voice the riff without losing momentum. Steve Buhl rips into “Release the Stench” with a melodic neon sneer of a solo that turns into a snarl before spinning out in aggression, his flailing knocking out the rest of the band and allowing them to reset the song as chopping sludge. While these newly intricate arrangements could come off as a fussy overcorrection, the sophistication of the songwriting makes the changes mostly feel natural rather than forced or showy. The title track scrolls from knuckle-dragging X Games groove to staccato grindcore and then into old-school death-metal riffing so elegantly, you sense it more as a change in tone—wound-up testosterone and clenched-teeth tension giving way to ecstatic release—than form. Andy Nelson’s rich, almost glossy production heightens the album’s fluidity. Without blowing the soundstage up to stadium proportions, the Weekend Nachos mastermind creates just enough space for the instruments to speak clearly to one another. The effect is like seeing being in a tiny club with a pristine sound system: When Buhl and Raymond MacDonald’s guitars chug together in “Gross Abuse,” the thickness is suffocating. They open things further in interlude “Led to the Chamber / Liquified,” whose light-blue keyboard melody haunts the track’s Argento abattoir synths like a naive specter. These are mostly subtle touches—minor adjustments to what was already a compelling aesthetic—that the band incorporates without sacrificing the swagger of Slave to the Scalpel. At times, listening to Manual Manic Procedures can feel like being put through a death-metal HIIT workout: 25 reps of two-stepping, 25 reps around the circle pit, 25 reps of headbanging, Keep up, let’s empty the tank for the wall of death! But by offering themselves up to the blood of the crowd and allowing it to reshape how they fashion their music, 200 Stab Wounds makes their priorities clear. Manual Manic Procedures is vicious in its attitude and surgical in its precision, but at its pulpy core, it’s an album that wants you to dance.

2024-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Metal

Metal Blade

July 25, 2024

0118e7dc-bdd8-4003-8887-8d819e84d683

Sadie Sartini Garner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/

Dr. Dre's latest prot?g? boasts not only an impressive set of producers (Dre, Kanye, Timbaland, Just Blaze, Scott Storch, Hi-Tek) and guests (Eminem, 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes) for this highly anticipated throwback to early 90s West Coast gangsta rap, but also a hoarse, guttural vocal style that commands more presence than precedessor 50 Cent.

Dr. Dre's latest prot?g? boasts not only an impressive set of producers (Dre, Kanye, Timbaland, Just Blaze, Scott Storch, Hi-Tek) and guests (Eminem, 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes) for this highly anticipated throwback to early 90s West Coast gangsta rap, but also a hoarse, guttural vocal style that commands more presence than precedessor 50 Cent.

The Game: The Documentary

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3663-the-documentary/

The Documentary

A couple of months ago, Vibe published an article lamenting the decline of New York hip-hop. With Southern and Midwestern rappers rising to prominence over the past few years, the birthplace of hip-hop has only constituted about a third of rap radio playlists. But the article's unspoken question was: What's going on with the West? A pie chart showed that California rappers only constituted around 3% of those same playlists-- a far cry from the early 90s, when Dr. Dre, 2pac, and Snoop Dogg all but owned the rap landscape. Since then, 2pac's been gunned down, Snoop and Ice Cube have fallen off hard, and DJ Quik and the Bay Area scene have had little success breaking through to the mainstream. Dre's kept his name in circulation by producing Eminem and 50 Cent-- but even he hasn't released material under his own name since 1999, constantly delaying the release of his supposed masterpiece, Detox. So The Game, Dre's newest protégé, has a lot riding on him. The Compton MC made a name for himself on the mixtape scene that made 50 Cent a star; it made perfect sense for him to become the first West Coast representative of G-Unit. And having spent the past few months embroiled in pointless beefs with also-rans like Joe Budden and Yukmouth-- and getting hammered from all sides-- Game needs more than ever to deliver a debut to back up his talk. Now he has: The Documentary is the best West Coast street-rap album since DJ Quik's 2002 LP Under tha Influence. All of the G-Unit solo albums thus far have been aesthetically unified, a rarity in hip-hop; the tracks on The Documentary actually sound like they belong on the same album. Dre produces five of the album's 17 songs, applying his recent stripped-down cinematic style, and many of the record's other producers follow his lead. Superstar beatmakers like Timbaland and Kanye West hold back on their signature tics, fitting their usual approaches into the album's fabric. The end result is a rich, triumphant sonic tapestry; you can hear every dollar that went into it. The Game is not a particularly singular rapper. His hoarse, guttural voice doesn't possess any of the relaxed menace of classic West Coast rappers; he sounds more like Tha Dogg Pound member Daz Dillinger than Eazy or Snoop or The D.O.C. He has an appealing confidence and an unforced lyrical toughness, though: "I spit for the niggas doing 25 on they fifth year, ready to throw a nigga off the fifth tier/ For the white boys in the Abercrombie & Fitch, yeeah/ And every nigga who helped me to get here," he rhymes on the dramatic and brutally hard Just Blaze banger "Church for Thugs". Unfortunately, he also frequently sounds awkward on hooks, seemingly hoping that simply repeating the same phrases a few times will suffice. In fact, many of the best tracks are the ones on which 50 steps in to deliver the hook, like the bananas single "How We Do", where 50 pushes the music-box Dre beat perfectly. Throughout the album, Game seems obsessed with his place in rap history, constantly name-checking Dre and Eazy-E; on "Dreams", he spits, "The dream of Erik Wright, that's what I'm giving you/ Who walked through the White House without a business suit/ Compton hat, jheri curl dripping on Ronald Reagan's shoes." But the impeccable beats and The Game's authoritative gruffness carry him through the album; he never sounds like anything less than a star on the rise. Only at the album's end, however, does he reveal his greatest gift: a powerful, heartfelt vulnerability. On "Like Father, Like Son", the album's final track, he tells of the birth of his son. Over Needlez' melodramatic, string-laden track, he raps, "Nose, ears, eyes, chin just like your daddy/ I'll die before you grow up and be just like your daddy." Same rhyme or not, it lends a stark humanity to Game's sometimes empty braggadocio.

2005-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00

2005-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rap

Interscope / Aftermath / G-Unit

January 18, 2005

011f2b9d-0259-49da-b458-0f967972f70b

Tom Breihan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/

Jace Clayton, better and more-often known as DJ/rupture, pays tribute to a pioneering figure in minimalism and an influential member of the 1980s Downtown New York scene.

Jace Clayton, better and more-often known as DJ/rupture, pays tribute to a pioneering figure in minimalism and an influential member of the 1980s Downtown New York scene.

Jace Clayton: The Julius Eastman Memory Depot

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17803-jace-clayton-the-julius-eastman-memory-depot/

The Julius Eastman Memory Depot

The composer Julius Eastman lived his life veering between irreconcilable extremes. A pioneering figure in minimalism and an influential member of the 1980s Downtown New York scene, Eastman studied at the Curtis Institute, sang with Meredith Monk on Dolmen Music, sat on symposia with Morton Feldman and John Cage. He also battled alcoholism and crack addiction and lived the last months of his life homeless, rattling between Manhattan's Tompkins Square Park and a shelter in Buffalo. When he passed away, alone, some of his closest friends and associates did not know of his death until months afterward. The potted-history of his life story is of a promising, mercurial talent who thrashed himself apart trying to live too many contradictions. A black, gay man rattling around loudly in the white, constrained world of classical music, Eastman was a living testament to unbounded American opportunity and woeful American inequality. To describe him in stridently political language is not to hang an unwanted frame around him; Eastman saw himself this way, and discussed his music and life explicitly in those terms. He was, by most accounts, an acrid, seething, and occasionally impossible man, a temperament you can detect in his music as far away as the titles themselves: "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich". "Evil Nigger". "Gay Guerrilla". The language was so acidic it ate away at the concert-hall universe like stomach lining, a fitting gesture for someone who saw as much rank hypocrisy as opportunity within its walls. This is a difficult, self-annihilating temperament to pay proper tribute to. On The Julius Eastman Memory Depot, Jace Clayton-- better and more-often known as DJ/rupture-- goes about it exactly the right way. "Reverence can be a kind of forgetting," he writes in the album's liner notes, and Memory Depot meets Eastman on his own slanted playground, toasting to acid with acid."Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerrilla", two solo piano pieces from 1979, form the core of the album, performed here by David Friend and Emily Manzo. Clayton feeds the results of their performances directly into his laptop and scrambles them, spitting out a third stream of input that is often altered beyond recognition. You can never quite tell, listening to the album, where the sounds are originating; the sound is a tempest with no center. The result honors the intentions behind Eastman's trickster spirit to the point that Clayton and Eastman seem very much to be making this music together in real time. Clayton's take on "Evil Nigger" begins with a stammering single note on piano that gets its resonance choked off, until it's just a hammer hitting in dead space. The piece's smallest piece of DNA is a jittery, repetitive nervous trill, and Clayton sends this little figure through a series of frightening transformations: the trill jingles like glass shards in a grocery bag in the second, dissipates into queasy smoke in the third, flits through irradiated air like mutant fireflies in the fourth. In the fourth movement, it's nearly swallowed by a forbidding boom of undertones that well up from the echo of the piano's foot pedals; Clayton pans this roar back and forth in your headphones until it sounds like an air raid. The effect is not so much "prepared piano" as "piano cut free from the time/space continuum." The second work Clayton dissects, "Gay Guerrilla", has the name of a manifesto, and Eastman once said of its title, "Without blood there is no cause. I use 'Gay Guerrilla' in hopes that I might be one, if called up to be one." But the piece, which contains a reinterpretation of the Martin Luther hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," feels less like a call to arms than a meditation. Leaning hard into the piano pedals, pianists Friend and Manzo build a calmly hurtling sense of forward motion that is similar to John Adams' "Hallelujah Junction". As the sound of the piano starts to leech out bits of its essence in the recording, it becomes, steadily, a music of ghosts. Considering both the state of the NYC gay community during Eastman's life, and how Eastman spent the last few years of his own, the feeling is mournfully appropriate. Clayton contributes one original piece to Julius Eastman Memory Depot. The "Callback from the American Society of Eastman Supporters" posits a different outcome for the memory of Julius Eastman, a world where supporters of Eastman are so legion that they are turned away via robo-call. "The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner is an equal-opportunity employer," the narrator (sung by Sufi vocalist Arooj Aftab) chirps brightly, before the piece breaks open into a cool-blue drone and meditation. "Regardless of age, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of creed and disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation" Aftab sings, searchingly. It is a supremely Julius-Eastman moment, a short sharp bark of wry laughter fading into dead seriousness, and it caps Clayton's searingly immediate communion with Eastman's vital, contrary spirit.

2013-03-28T02:00:01.000-04:00

2013-03-28T02:00:01.000-04:00

New Amsterdam

March 28, 2013

012080ca-6c5d-4e5d-a9c0-4c341272adc3

Jayson Greene

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/

The soundtrack for Harmony Korine's new film features new and old tracks from Skrillex along with contributions from Cliff Martinez, and fills out the selection with songs by Waka Flocka Flame, Meek Mill, and Gucci Mane. The disparate parts work together surprisingly well.

The soundtrack for Harmony Korine's new film features new and old tracks from Skrillex along with contributions from Cliff Martinez, and fills out the selection with songs by Waka Flocka Flame, Meek Mill, and Gucci Mane. The disparate parts work together surprisingly well.

Various Artists: Spring Breakers OST

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17801-various-artists-spring-breakers-ost/

Spring Breakers OST

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers was a media phenomenon before anybody had seen so much as a promotional still. For starters, Korine, the mind behind cult classics like Gummo (his directorial debut) and Kids (he wrote the screenplay for Larry Clarke's film), cast Hollywood wildcard James Franco as the uncannily RiFF RAFF-like rapper/dealer Alien while Gucci Mane makes his screen debut as his drug kingpin rival. Meanwhile, Korine tapped Disney Channel star Selena Gomez as the conflicted Spring Breaker, Faith, and former High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens as the reckless, dangerous Candy. An early teaser features the leads belting out Britney Spears' "…Baby One More Time" and that's not the only (nor the most memorable) Spears homage in the movie. And then, to top it all off, Korine hands the soundtrack to EDM figurehead Skrillex, a former Warped Tour band member turned posterboy for dubstep's more malignant cliches. It's clear from the opening credits of Spring Breakers-- the most cartoonishly turn't-up Spring Break scene you could possibly imagine, accompanied by the drop-heavy debauchery of Skrillex's calling card "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"-- that Sonny Moore was the man for the job. His music, old and new, serves as the spine of Spring Breakers, a compilation that also features carefully selected rap tracks and his remix of Birdy Nam Nam's "Goin In'" along with contributions from electronic musician and soundtrack veteran Cliff Martinez. The latter, who also steered 2011's well-received and similarly tense Drive OST, is a critical presence. Both musicians contribute their own ambient-leaning, instrumental originals to the soundtrack-- Martinez handles the curious, searching electronic interludes "Pretend It's a Video Game", "Your Friends Ain't Gonna Leave With You", and "Never Gonna Get This Pussy", while Skrillex handles the relatively more aggressive textures of "Ride Home" and "Park Smoke"-- but the fiber of Spring Breakers is the sonic influence that they have on one other. Skrillex, in particular, benefits from Martinez' presence. Though Moore has recently attempted more laid-back approaches to composition, songs like "The Reason" didn't sound as idiosyncratically him, and don't prove as captivating or recognizable as his contributions here. The new music, stitched between previously released tracks (like Skrillex's "With You, Friends (Long Drive)" and Gucci Mane's Ferrari Boyz cut "Young Niggaz"), achieves an important headspace for both the dramatic arc of the film as well as the soundtrack as a piece of music. Between the blurry revelry and the careening rush of consequence borne of violent impulse, Spring Breakers is all about the state between that original drug-fueled adrenaline burst and the depressing comedown crush. By cleverly interspersing the soundtrack with their original arrangements, Skrillex and Martinez successfully find that headspace throughout. Most importantly, Spring Breakers teases out the connections between songs that would be difficult to hear otherwise, offering new entry points. Take Waka Flocka's "Fuck This Industry"; on Flockaveli, the track comes across as repentant and desperate, a song that finds a self-doubting Flocka siphoning out his signature bellow in favor of a restrained, contemplative whisper. Here, it serves as a momentary sense-collecting pause before the chaos. By leading into Martinez pieces, Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" gains a pensive new tone, a fresh context that's only underlined by the orchestral back end redux of that track, as well as the Martinez/Skrillex sequel "Son of Scary Monsters". On Ferrari Boyz, "Young Niggaz" is known as one of the only tracks where Gucci and Waka didn't sound totally asleep, but here, it's a flag-bearer for shaking away the dark thoughts and getting back to the party; after all, it's spring break. There's a turning point of the film, where some characters decide they're overwhelmed and scared by this neon fantasy world and others find it all the more captivating. The question arises: Do we leave the party, or stay? Given its relatively seamless mesh of spiky, aggro party music and the more contemplative electronic moments created by Martinez and Moore, Spring Breakers is the rare soundtrack that covers both extremes and makes it work as a whole.

2013-03-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-03-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

Atlantic

March 14, 2013

0121f73d-da2f-436c-88d4-26c9f33f8e7e

Corban Goble

https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/

The members of Low retreated deep into rural Wisconsin with producer BJ Burton and recorded their latest album at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire. The band hasn’t sounded this lively in years; maybe not since its Sub Pop debut The Great Destroyer from a decade ago.

The members of Low retreated deep into rural Wisconsin with producer BJ Burton and recorded their latest album at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire. The band hasn’t sounded this lively in years; maybe not since its Sub Pop debut The Great Destroyer from a decade ago.

Low: Ones and Sixes

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20982-ones-and-sixes/

Ones and Sixes

Low will always be considered the quintessential slowcore band, but their real mastery, and the secret to their decades-long vitality, lies in something more intangible than tempo. They have a preternatural mastery of arrangement and dynamics, an instinct for when and how to pick the exact right moment to lift the volume a bit, to accent a repetitive moment with this synth line or that fuzzed guitar. The steady pace and the melancholy atmospherics are important, but without their keen ear for detail, the music would simply be a haze. Admittedly, Low’s last album The Invisible Way, produced by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and released in 2013, could have benefited from a few more of those lively punctuations. But it seems as though the fallout from that experience woke the band up, and Ones and Sixes is a far more interesting record for it. To create their new one, the members retreated deep into rural Wisconsin with producer BJ Burton and recorded at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studios in Eau Claire. It’s hard to tell what might have triggered it, but the band hasn’t sounded this lively in years; maybe not since its Sub Pop debut The Great Destroyer from a decade ago. The opening track "Gentle" is a discomfiting funeral dirge that sets an unnerving mood early on. The instrumentation combines static-y bits of industrial percussion with rich, elegant keyboard accents, as Mimi Parker’s near-falsetto flutters in and out, sometimes multi-tracked and sometimes padded out with as much reverb as can conceivably be applied. The song's verses feel like free-associative jumbles of words like, "gentle, battle, torture, stable and silence", underscoring the song's fitful, uneasy energy. That mood settles into the album, which otherwise doesn't offer dramatic shifts. Airy, luscious backing vocals and sparse, gritty instrumentation remain the mainstay of Low’s sound, and they are used to wondrous effect on the nearly 10-minute long penultimate track "Landslide". But there’s a real immediacy and liveliness to Alan Sparhawk's vocals and playing there that’s been missing from the group’s more recent records. His singing is so full and present on songs like "Spanish Translation" and "Lies" that it feels like a renewed bid for your undivided attention. And as much as they are able to make a conventional "pop" song then "No End" is it. For all intents and purposes it’s a pretty standard, under three-minute, get-in and get-out love song, and based on the words alone, a very treacly one at that: "I couldn’t wait to come back through/ To you." Not exactly a left-turn, but a welcome, additional flavor. Most bands don’t have either the stamina or the creative drive to make it up to and past the 20-year mark. The ones that do rarely find new things to say. As its enters its third decade making music, Low has reached a comfortable but engaging stride creating music that consistently seems to be at odds with itself. Ones and Sixes is all at once beautiful, ugly, tense, warm, inviting and repellent. It’s an emotional and sonic juggling act where even the slightest bum-note would draw attention to itself. As always with Low, the beauty is all about the details.

2015-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Sub Pop

September 14, 2015

01226c2d-0d49-4519-b322-4baf500780c8

Corbin Reiff

https://pitchfork.com/staff/corbin-reiff/

On her debut, Polly Jean Harvey matched Patti Smith’s incandescence with Bessie Smith’s lasciviousness, outplayed everyone on the British indie circuit, and became an instant star.

On her debut, Polly Jean Harvey matched Patti Smith’s incandescence with Bessie Smith’s lasciviousness, outplayed everyone on the British indie circuit, and became an instant star.

PJ Harvey: Dry

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22131-dry/

Dry

If PJ Harvey had her way, she would have made her public debut on Slint’s Spiderland. At age 20 or so, she answered the Kentucky five-piece’s call for a female backing vocalist, but never heard back. In one way, you can imagine it: both subtly violent acts from their respective south, with the accents to prove it. But even at the turn of the 1990s, the idea of Polly Jean Harvey bringing up the rear is hard to fathom—her Westcountry leer would have unleashed the devil incarnate into Slint’s whispered intimations of evil. Instead, Harvey’s debut single, which came nine months after Spiderland, in December ’91, confronted the danger of fulfilling someone else’s ideal. Released on indie label Too Pure off the back of a mailed-in demo and John Peel’s enthusiasm, “Dress” is a young woman’s desperate and naive attempt at seduction. Where riot grrrls in the Pacific Northwest were pouring acid on the grotesque mating charade, Harvey, fresh out of her first relationship, intensified the danger by playing the willing ingenue. In the song, she struggles against femininity’s constricting bodice; Eve drowning in apples, “spilling over like a heavy loaded fruit tree.” For all her efforts, it’s the wrong outfit: “‘You purdy thang,’ my man says, ‘But I bought you beautiful dresses,’” she mimics, sneering like the creep in a western. Her “clean and sparkling” dress instantly becomes a filthy rag, her identity abject: “Better get it out of this room/A falling woman in dancing costume.” Harvey’s identity, though, was immediately forged: Funny, furious, and capable of writing hooks—the taunted “If you put it on, if you put it on”—that burned like lit fuses. Two months later, in February 1992, Harvey followed “Dress” with second single “Sheela-Na-Gig,” a vocal tour-de-force: wheedling as she implores a man to gaze upon her “ruby-red ruby lips,” puffed up on revulsion—or is it awe?—as he dismisses her with a comparison to the titular Celtic fertility carving that depicts deranged women spreading their engorged vulvas: Her shout of “You exhibitionist!” sounds at once like a Puritan splutter and a belly laugh__.__ She vamps through a line from South Pacific (“Gonna wash that man right outta my hair”) and has her paramor recoil at her “dirty pillows,” like the mother in Stephen King’s Carrie, reinforcing her portrayal of a young woman doomed to humiliation through mimicking the candied sexuality of films and magazines. Capable only of seeing her as virgin or whore, this guy’s dismissal is horrifying, but Harvey’s extremes make it funny, and she channels her beloved Pixies’ loud-quiet dynamic into thunderous slapstick. After just two singles, it was obvious that Harvey didn’t fit anyone’s pre-existing rock ideals. Marrying brutal heft and deft melodies, she became Britain’s first viable answer to grunge’s iconoclasts and their underground ’80s forebears. She matched Patti Smith’s incandescence, Bessie Smith’s lasciviousness, Angela Carter’s grim subversions of feminine archetypes. She outplayed everyone on Britain’s indie circuit—the long-shorted weak piss of Carter USM, Silverfish, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin—and became an instant star. Her dark humor seemed to go in tandem with her Dorset upbringing, where she wrung sheep’s testicles on her parents’ farm, cropped her hair, and peed standing up to fit in with the boys. The rest of Britain has a limited understanding of the country’s south-west, perceiving it as a desolate cultural backwater. This daring, skinny thing from the sticks fearlessly singing about sex and subjugation was a media curio. She was from the tiny village of Corscombe, but where she had come from felt like a different matter altogether. Her background offers some clues, although nothing can really account for this shy girl’s self-possessed power. Harvey’s stonemason parents had taught her to create her own culture. Her hippy mother was fed up of missing out on live music and invited rock and blues bands down to play in the local village hall—“sixth” Rolling Stone Ian Stewart was a regular visitor to the family home. The artists earned their keep by teaching the young Harvey guitar and saxophone. She had been raised listening to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica over dinner, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which upset the very young Harvey so much it soon went out of rotation. She briefly rebelled against her parents’ tastes, embracing Duran Duran for a heartbeat in her early teens, before realizing that their record collection was golden: Howlin’ Wolf, Dylan, the Stones. Carnal music fit her extreme surroundings—the sheer Jurassic coast cliff faces and easy familiarity with death on the farm. After a brief stint touring Europe with Automatic Dlamini, she quit that band to pursue her own music, planning to pack it in the following year and take up her place studying sculpture at London’s Saint Martins College. The PJ Harvey Trio were undeterred when, at their first gig, the proprietor offered them money to stop playing because everyone was leaving. (They took the cash and split.) Off the back of “Dress,” Too Pure gave her £2000 (then $5000) to make an album, and she went to the Icehouse in nearby Yeovil to record with her core band, bassist Steve Vaughan and drummer Rob Ellis. Dry is a volcano and the scorched earth surrounding it, ripped with landsliding guitars, cowpunk mania, twisted blues, profound extremes, and power chords that hit like boulders dropped from on high. She never thought she’d have the opportunity to make a record, “so I felt like I had to get everything on it as well as I possibly could, because it was probably my only chance. It felt very extreme for that reason,” she told Filter in 2004. It was also a reaction against the “lame” music around at that time, she told The Telegraph in 2001. “I’m somebody who looks for something that’s going to shock or excite me; that really shakes me up in some way inside, so you have to stop and really take a look at what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. And nothing was doing that for me. So I had to do it for myself.” From Dry’s first line, Harvey relishes in that ambiguity, forcing the listener to figure out what they’re feeling and why. “Ohhh myyy loverrr,” she rasps in her thick accent, as if seducing someone with her dying breath. She’s assuring her man that it’s fine for him to see another woman simultaneously, promising she’ll soak up his troubles while he can take whatever he likes: Her character understands that his time is limited, his satisfaction paramount, and that compromise is the fate of all women. The bass thuds like a domino line of falling oak trees, while a harmonium’s eerie whine makes the song feel like a dark, lost folk standard. She follows the streak of subjugation: A frenzied prayer to the Virgin Mary on “O Stella,” to guide her through the night on “Dress.” Then comes “Victory,” where she’s a post-punk Vera Lynn lustily imploring the boys to “sweat, dig—I’ll mop it right off your brow.” On the earthy lurch of “Happy and Bleeding” she loses her virginity and turns from fresh fruit to rotten peach both “long overdue” and “too early,” her “idle hole” then rejected on “Sheela-Na-Gig.” That’s the first half of Dry: blitzing the rigged path young women must walk from innocence to sullied castoff. It’s rife with disappointment and violence, but Harvey treats the double standard for the absurd cabaret it is, making perfect sense of it through her formative blues vocabulary. She plays victim in her words and aggressor with her guitar, adopting a libidinous swagger that’s as nasty and thrilling as the abuser who keeps her coming back for more. Nobody sings like PJ Harvey sings on Dry, veering perilously (but exactingly) between wheedling, raging, vamping, always with a sly wink. These extreme contrasts confused critics at the time: Dry played like a feminist statement but she refused the label, wondering why anyone remarked on her sexual lyrics when plenty of rock and blues bands had gone further before her. Mostly dressed in black, her hair scraped back severely, she seemed to eschew image, but then posed topless on the cover of NME. She insisted that there was no depth to the lyrics, and professed to being baffled by people’s attempts to interpret them, but her considered use of female archetypes to depict a woman’s fall and subsequent vengeance told a different story. All of these things were true at once, part of her distancing push-and-pull. As she told Spin in ’93, “The biggest protection you can have is if people think they’ve got you and they haven’t got you at all.” She pulls the same trick on Dry’s scumbag subject, going into the record's vengeful second half. She’s Delilah to his Samson on “Hair,” flattering him into submission and cutting off his mane. “I’ll keep it safe,” she sings, sounding emboldened by power, before flipping on a knife edge, realizing: “You’re mine.” The bass zooms as if mapping the swift transfer of power; the rhythm section pounds like Samson’s impotent rage. “Joe” is the record’s most manic moment. There’s no quiet-loud shift, just pure piledriver dynamics as she spits nails at the treachery she’s experienced: “Always thought you’d come rushing in to clear the shit out of my eye/Joe, ain’t you my buddy, thee?” But rather than commit bloody murder as you might expect, she retreats on “Plants and Rags,” “[easing] myself into a body bag,” and finding solace at home: “Who thought they could take away that place?” she asks as the violin swirls to a deranged squall. Her love of Slint comes through on the menacing fretboard harmonics of “Fountain,” where she washes herself clean and a Jesus-like figure shrouds her modesty in leaves. On “Water,” her first utterance of the word sounds like she’s dying of thirst. By the chorus, when she’s walked into the sea, invoking Mary and Jesus again, she sounds as though the crashing waves are emanating from her own throat. Critics have theorized that she drowns herself at the end of the album, to rid the shame from her body. But it sounds more like a rebirth; the cure to her dryness, finding satisfaction on her own terms and eradicating the need she had looked to someone else to fill. Dry is an exciting, scary joyride through the dawning realization that learning to please yourself yields far greater pleasure than relying on others to do it for you: These gory myths are her lover’s discourse, an apocalypse—in the revelatory sense—that she would push even further on 1993’s Rid of Me (after her immediate fame resulted in a nervous breakdown). Following the NYC gloss of 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, she attempted to tap back into this sound on 2004’s Uh Huh Her, but the lack of her debut’s extreme urgency limited its success. On Dry, Harvey’s character may appear to subjugate her gratification, but it’s all there, bursting out in the zeal of her playing. “It’s the same kind of excitement, playing music, as in a sexual relationship, and the two go hand-in-hand,” she told a French TV show in ’93. “And I think I find music physically exciting as well—actually playing loud music and standing in front of a bass amplifier is quite a sexual experience, I think.” She tells a story about playing in Chicago, and how every time Steve Vaughan hit an A, she got vibrations right up to her middle. “Wonderful,” she muses. “We play a lot of songs in A as well, so it was a good night.” The French journalist gurgles like a stunned baby, unable to process this frank, feral waif who’s got it all figured out.

2016-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Too Pure

August 14, 2016

01235ca3-4901-4dc9-b0c5-b1448a814c83

Laura Snapes

https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/

The English and French musician makes crystalline electro-pop songs about mistakes, heartbreaks, and relationships that never got far enough to be either.

The English and French musician makes crystalline electro-pop songs about mistakes, heartbreaks, and relationships that never got far enough to be either.

Julia-Sophie: forgive too slow

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julia-sophie-forgive-too-slow/

forgive too slow

Oxford and Lyon musician Julia-Sophie makes music about the temptation to relive your past: the more regrets that remain, the stronger the gravitational pull. Julia-Sophie dates several of her own regrets back to Little Fish, a short-lived garage frock’n’roll duo she led at the turn of the 2010s. Little Fish toured with Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis (2010 was a time)—names splashy enough that, over a decade later, interviewers still ask about her stint in the band, thirsty for anything that might resemble Courtney Love goss. There are stories—a book-length mythology of this band exists, called Fuck the Radio, We’ve Got Apple Juice—but years later, Julie-Sophie remembered her time as a twentysomething industry scrapper not with rock bravado or “happy to be here” tact, but as a life that “broke [her], both as an artist and a human.” Julia-Sophie spent the intervening years learning to unbreak herself—and to reconstruct her music. Little Fish sounded about what you’d expect from triangulating Hole, Blondie, and Juliette Lewis: solid, in a kitschy sort of way. Julia-Sophie’s next project, pop-adjacent collective Candy Says, similarly sounded about what you’d expect from a band that recorded a dark electro cover of “Running Up That Hill” for a Netflix movie. Then she went mostly solo, working with a collaborator credited only as “B,” and her music got stranger. Julia-Sophie and B share an affinity with downtempo artists like Four Tet and Nicolás Jaar for heady sounds and studio work engineered like a puzzle box. Percussion sounds like nervous flutters; arrangements sound like the claustrophobic interiors of bathyspheres. “I feel like it’s been pretty intense listening to Julia-Sophie so far,” Julia-Sophie told The Quietus in 2021. Basic themes can be extrapolated from the titles of her past EPs, y? and </3, but the levity doesn’t extend past these cutesy winks at heartbreak and existential questioning. She hinted that the follow-up record might be “warmer”; that didn’t happen. forgive too slow is as grueling a listen, and as good an introduction, as either EP: songs, crystalline like teardrops, about mistakes, heartbreaks, and relationships that never got far enough to be either. On paper, this doesn’t sound much different from the tastefully emotive pop that can be heard every week on BBC Radio 6. (Her singles have also been playlisted there.) But Julia-Sophie’s confessionals actually confess things. “Numb” makes a statement with a Depeche Mode synth-throb that goes past “chilly” to “unforgiving” and an equally self-lacerating monologue: “Instead of loving you back, I cheated and I lied, I lost myself in drugs and I lost myself inside.” The track derives its power not from raw emotion but from the dispassionate tone of a disaster surveyor itemizing wreckage. Preceding this is “Lose My Mind,” an electro track with an arrangement that sounds like it’s periodically overclocking and a mood heightened to the point of horror. Preceding that is “I Was Only”: a withering melody, a repeated shuddering chord, and a cocoon-like arrangement tuned for maximum 3 a.m. languishing. That kind of stuff isn’t sustainable, of course. Just as evolution pulls animals ever closer toward becoming crabs, market forces pull downtempo artists ever closer toward crossover pop. To its credit, forgive too slow complicates what could have been mid, sadgirl mush. “Falling” is a slow-burn yearner, but it doesn’t enter the bedroom chorus without flipping “O Superman” first. “Comfort You” is essentially an adult-contemporary ballad—gloss over some of the lyrics, and it could soundtrack a slow dance. But its arrangement is bookended by a hesitant click track and an ominous buzz, and Julia-Sophie’s vocal never quite sounds present in the romantic moment. And then there’s “Wishful Thinking,” one of the most overt Body Talk rips in a truly crowded field; the synth intro is right out of “Hang With Me,” and the general situation is reminiscent of a “Call Your Girlfriend” halfway-affair. Julia-Sophie’s song is more introverted than Robyn’s, and her story far less hopeful: This love triangle won’t be fixed by a phone call. But as a single, it just sounds like a ruthless pop pivot—one so effective that it actually misrepresents the album. “Wishful Thinking” makes much more sense in its proper sequencing. The following track, “Better,” is the bleakest on the record: plainspoken misery over a flatline buzz. But it ends with a reprise of the “Wishful Thinking” intro, not spangly but frantic, not neatly packaged but ricocheting all over the place. The two songs feel like halves of a complete story: having an illicit crush, giving it up or failing at it, then trying to summon the leftover energy to pull yourself out.

2024-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Ba Da Bing

August 2, 2024

012488ec-b17d-4a4a-8f39-07940ad79dcb

Kathryn St. Asaph

https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathryn-st. asaph/

The psychic bond between Kanye West and Kid Cudi yields a spacious and melancholy album about brokenness—thoughts are fragmented, relationships are ended, and societal ties are cut.

The psychic bond between Kanye West and Kid Cudi yields a spacious and melancholy album about brokenness—thoughts are fragmented, relationships are ended, and societal ties are cut.

Kids See Ghosts / Kanye West / Kid Cudi: Kids See Ghosts

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-kid-cudi-kids-see-ghosts/

Kids See Ghosts

He just turned 41, and Kanye West still craves nothing more than to make a big mess, plunge into it headfirst, and take us with him. This impulse unites him with his dragon-energy brother in the White House, who similarly revels in just saying it out loud to see how it feels. It must be intoxicating to open your mouth and say whatever occurs to you, knowing you will endure mild censure at worst before reaping your rewards. For Kanye, the rewards are already here: Despite being the least finished-sounding recording of his career, last week’s Ye marked some of his biggest first-week returns in years; at one point, its seven tracks doubled as the seven most popular songs on Spotify. Big messes, it turns out, work for guys like him. So here we are, in week three of the big mess he is currently making. After Pusha T’s compact and sturdy Daytona and the hobbled and confused ye, we now have Kids See Ghosts, Kanye’s collaborative project with Kid Cudi. Three down, two to go, or so we tell ourselves, like beleaguered parents boarding a series of connecting flights with a small child. West has turned the album cycle into his version of Calvinball, jubilantly inventing rules while the rest of us hop along desperately in his wake. Flail hard enough and long enough, though, and you will hit some targets. On Kids See Ghosts, the mess at least feels more purposeful, and the songs are the most intriguing ones to emerge from this Wyoming project thus far. Since 2013’s Yeezus, West has been testing the line between “daringly raw” and “unfinished,” but on Kids See Ghosts, he vigorously erases it. G.O.O.D. Music label boss Pusha T assures us “the details is ironed out” on the album opener “Feel the Love,” a particularly poignant promise considering the track itself was delivered to all streaming partners mislabeled. It is an eerie arena in which to watch an Event Album unfold, one where the silences resound as deafeningly as the screams, where the props are missing or moved into place a beat too late. A lot of the energy that ye seemed to be gasping for fills the lungs of this project, and it’s humbling to consider how much this material might have enlivened West’s own album. They aspire to the same frayed edge: cut-off stumps of song bits bleeding into the next. “You should quit your job to this,” West shouts on “Freeee (Ghost Town Pt. 2),” a continuation of “Ghost Town,” the emotional peak of Ye. As he does on the original, he equates total numbness as freedom, and as a buzzing cello pecks at its tendons and the distorted drums smash into bone, you are left to contemplate the scary sort of freedom West prizes. It is the freedom of mania, of letting your mind gallop off its leash in as many directions at once. For anyone with personal experience with mania, there will be a pang of recognition in this exhilaration, as well as the understanding of how quickly the sensation curdles into another dead end. The most powerful moments on Kids See Ghosts underline this freedom with a wistful bite, suggesting it comes with a lasting price. This is an album about brokenness—thoughts fragmented, relationships ended, societal ties cut. “Reborn” is the most unhurried and atmospheric music of this chaotic cycle, a long spacious breath of a drum track that opens onto one of West’s best verses in years. In it, he offers something close to a full explanation for his recent behavior: “What an awesome thing, engulfed in shame/I want all the pain/I want all the smoke/I want all the blame.” There is an emotional honesty, at least, to the admission that he is nakedly grasping for whatever oxygen the public will give him, no matter the contaminants he takes in along the way. Hovering uneasily over the project, as it has over this entire Yeezy Season, is the specter of mental health. On the one hand, West has shown bravery in talking about his apparent bipolar diagnosis. But there is also danger, and potential stigmatization, in equating Kanye’s celebrity lawlessness—available only to him and those in his orbit—with mental health. Most people, after all, whatever their private struggles, don’t have the resources to stage their free falls into the arms of an entire industry built to placate them. Mental health, its effects on you, on those who love you: This is not a topic to be touched on lightly, and apart from scrawling his diagnosis on the cover of ye, there is a very real sense that he is simply bringing up these issues, not probing them. One of the revelations of Kids See Ghosts is how Cudi emerges as a better angel, a concerned but empathic friend who provides emotional ballast. Cudi, of course, has a few years on West in acknowledging his struggles with mental health. “Keep moving forward,” Cudi sings gently on “Reborn,” adding, “peace is something that starts with me.” His presence feels calming, cooling. The two men have always been better together than apart, lending depth and weight to each other's on-record presences. Cudi’s presence girds West's wild energy with a melancholy that adds some highlight and shadow to the weightless cartoon West has offered us. Cudi’s always struggled with being two-dimensional on his own records, but here he brings a soul and depth that his mentor can't muster. “Cudi Montage” even relocates a precious, nearly vanished quantity of Kanye’s music—empathy. The song samples Kurt Cobain’s “Burn the Rain,” a home-recorded scrap that was unearthed to soundtrack the 2015 documentary Montage of Heck. The movie was uneasy viewing, splitting the line between revelation and violation, and the music that wallpapered it felt intensely private, doodles that were meant for one mind, not the world. It is an oddly appropriate source for Kanye, a combination of ingenuity and bad taste that suits the man who sampled “Strange Fruit” so he could moan about child support. In his verse, Kanye revisits the wages of cyclical violence—“Everybody want world peace until your niece gets shot in dome piece.” The images are well-worn, down to their grim details (“auntie crying on the concrete”), but it is one of West’s most sustained efforts to imagine someone else’s life since he gave us the “Public visitation, we met at Borders” scenario in “All of the Lights.” The verse concludes with a namecheck of Alice Johnson, the African-American woman whom President Trump pardoned on Kim Kardashian’s urging, just last week. Like everything else in this wildly unstable political moment, the pardon (and its mention in song) slides across a tilted stage filled with compromised actors. What remains solid is the song itself, which opens into a simple plea after the verse fades: “Lord shine your light on me; save me please.” For the first time in years, Kanye sounds at peace. Here he is, again, where he has always yearned to be: damned, on the brink of irredeemable, gazing directly into some abyss from which he could never climb out.

2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam

June 11, 2018

012a8502-7899-4a14-9ffc-daaeae9345a2

Jayson Greene

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/

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 Pimp C and Bun B’s 1996 masterpiece about a weekend in Houston that became a touchstone for Southern rap.

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 Pimp C and Bun B’s 1996 masterpiece about a weekend in Houston that became a touchstone for Southern rap.

UGK: Ridin’ Dirty

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ugk-ridin-dirty/

Ridin’ Dirty

On December 4, 1995, Pimp C and DJ Screw sat in the parking lot of a Houston convenience store and began plotting for the night. After an uneasy first encounter at a local record store years prior, they’d become fast friends. Pimp, one half of the duo Underground Kingz, was the producer known for wild boasts and determination. Screw’s sound—a slowed-down drag of the world to a hallucinogenic crawl—engulfed the city. The night was supposed to be about bullshittin’—slide to a neighborhood joint called Carrington’s with Lil’ Keke, a member of Screw’s famed Screwed Up Click outfit, party, and then record a version of a song Pimp had been working on. Inside the car, Pimp was bemused about life. Weeks prior, he was in Chicago on behalf of Jive Records, recording material for Underground Kingz’ then-untitled third album. None of it sounded good enough to compare to the group’s previous effort, 1994’s Super Tight. Even his mother, UGK’s manager Mama Wes, called the demos “boo-boo.” But the two never made it to the studio to record. They never made it past Carrington’s. Instead, the two stopped to pick up styrofoam cups and Swisher Sweets to further activate the night. Screw and Pimp parked next to an undercover police officer outside of a convenience store neighboring Carrington’s. As the cop smelled the weed smoke in the air, he radioed for backup. Within moments, Pimp C and DJ Screw were in handcuffs and headed to the Harris County Jail. They bonded out two days later. The arrest—coupled with a tragic house fire in Dallas four days later, claiming the lives of four children, including the son of UGK hypeman Bo-Bo Luchiano—became the basis for “One Day,” the peak and tone-setter of 1996’s Ridin’ Dirty. Pimp lamented on the child’s death as if it were his own son, questioning God with the fearlessness of a sinner (“Why you let these killas live and take my homeboy son away?”) The base of Ridin’ Dirty aligns with the ethos of UGK as a whole: perseverance in the face of a mountain of unfortunate circumstances. At first, “One Day” didn’t even belong to UGK. The rumbling guitars that lurch like impending sorrow from the Isley Brothers’ “Ain’t I Been Good To You”—and Ronnie Spencer’s near-perfect Ronald Isley impression —was initially in the possession of Mr. 3-2, a Houston stalwart and Rap-A-Lot Records artist known city-wide. Before Snoop Dogg uttered, “We don’t love these hoes,” he learned it from 3-2. Before Roc-A-Fella crafted a posse cut in “1-900-Hustler” to highlight Freeway on The Dynasty: Roc La Familia, it belonged to 3-2 and Big Mike of the Convicts in “1-900-Dial-A-Crook.” UGK’s other half, Bun B, was hesitant to rhyme over “One Day,” seeing that the song initially belonged to 3-2, and rhyming over a dirge of production like “One Day” disrupted the bouncy, even-keeled production UGK was known for. But, compelled by the belief that UGK needed a song that people felt, Bun relented and recorded a verse. He mourns over a friend lost to a “funky ass dice game” and sneers that the prison-industrial complex was nothing more than an endless cycle for Black men. 3-2 barely even raps: His voice contorts into a sullen waltz that moves between understanding the bleakness of his reality and seeking protection while navigating crack transactions and potential death. He considered himself a wayward soul since his mom kicked him out; he wanted a proper burial in his neighborhood right next to the gas station. “As far as Pimp and I are concerned, it’s the first real UGK album,” Bun would later tell journalist Sama’an Ashrawi on his The Nostalgia Mixtape podcast. “Ridin’ Dirty is, in our mind, the first actual complete thought of UGK as far as an album is concerned.” For four years and across two prior albums, the group fought with their label, Jive Records, and had bruises to show for it. There was a disconnect; UGK would rather the label send them studio equipment to record Ridin’ Dirty as opposed to a standard monetary advance. Dating back to their debut album, Too Hard To Swallow, UGK knew Jive for shady, underhanded business. The label reproduced songs behind Pimp’s back in order to avoid paying to clear samples. Grandiose album concepts were scrapped due to the label, once again, being fiscally conservative. Even when it came time for Ridin’ Dirty, Jive refused to make a video for either of the two proposed singles, “One Day” and “Fuck My Car,” or even ship them for radio airplay. By the time UGK shot a video for “Wood Wheel,” a single from the Rap-A-Lot compilation album RNDS in 1999, it had been five years since their last video for “It’s Supposed To Bubble.” When Bun and Pimp first met KRS-One at the label’s New York offices in 1992, they came with a point to prove. KRS, long a protector of what hip-hop truly meant, felt that if the music wasn’t made within New York’s five boroughs, it wasn’t rap. And UGK, according to KRS, was country rap. Now, they were labelmates. Instead of a gracious embrace, UGK were met by a warning from KRS that came too late: Don’t sign to Jive. “We were happy for about 15 minutes and then … reality set in,” Bun would later tell journalist Matt Sonzala. “We never even had the chance to be disillusioned about having a record deal. We regretted it right after signing.” UGK weren’t commercial darlings, they were fixated squarely on making music for the people. But by sheer word of mouth, Ridin’ Dirty sold over 850,000 copies, earning UGK their first and only gold plaque. It gave the South, a region already galvanized by André 3000 at the 1995 Source Awards, a blueprint for how a soulful rap album could sound and feel. The situation with Jive, the storm of emotion and strife internally affecting the group, would manifest itself into a moment of show and prove for UGK. No producer in the South felt more proudly about his creations than Pimp. The son of a trumpet player who eventually learned piano by ear, he went from performing in New York with his high school choir to using the Meters’ guitarist Leo Nocentelli as a session musician. Sampling records, from the Stax sound of Isaac Hayes to the psychedelic crawl of Bootsy Collins, from the groove of the Fatback Band to Wes Montgomery’s virtuoso guitar work, was as mutually important as the reality UGK conveyed in raps. After hearing Dr. Dre master the cinematic style of music production for N.W.A, it influenced Pimp to make every sound feel like a score to a film. After the failed Chicago sessions at Jive’s Battery Studios, Pimp and Bun felt they needed to be home in order to fully embrace what Ridin’ Dirty was supposed to be. At the same time, the rush of creativity emanating from DJ Screw’s house made “home” feel like the center of the universe. In Screw, Pimp and Bun found a kindred spirit. UGK already spoke for Houston culture, crushing small aspects in car culture and laced cigarettes for their 1994 album Super Tight. The music had to align with the world they inhabited. Chapter 182: Ridin’ Dirty—a loose and free-wheeling tape of freestyles was the precursor to the album. Although Houston had wholesalers and marketplaces to pick up music, picking up Screw tapes was an entirely different journey. One had to personally drive to Screw’s house on the Southside of town, wait for his gate to be buzzed open around 7 p.m. and get their music. Pimp and Bun became further immortalized and endeared to Houston’s underground music culture rattling off rhymes about losing Eazy-E to AIDS, puffing their chests out with thick bravado, and echoing the slang that was wholly Houston and Southeast, Texas: slabs, barre, drank, grills, throwin’ up the deuce, comin’ dine, etc. Jive couldn’t understand the purpose of Screw music. As a middle finger to the label, the album version of Ridin’ Dirty is the glossiest version of a Screw tape ever imagined; a muggy and rich malaise of soul and everyman narratives. A weekend in Houston became the underlying concept for Ridin’ Dirty. Pimp and Bun, seeing themselves already as established characters, worked around creations of partying, bombast, and reflection. The weight of “One Day” is guilt-ridden and remorseful. Inside the rolling thump of “Diamonds & Wood,” a lift from Bootsy Collins’ “Munchies For Your Love,” Pimp allowed his real-life drama with the mother of his son, Chad Butler II, to play out (“All we do now is fuck and fight”) and detail the frustration of family dynamics and faceless enemies. “I stopped smokin’ with them haters back in ’94,” he bluntly states. “Niggas talk a lot of shit in a safe place, I know cause he can’t look me eye-to-eye when he in my face.” It was never about outright wordplay with Pimp—pointed directness with clarity was his calling as a rapper. He left his complexity for his production. Armed with N.O. Joe, the New Orleans-born producer who had helmed much of the bleak psychodrama of Scarface’s The Diary, Pimp dug deeper in his already chaotic mind to live up to the likes of Hayes and Curtis Mayfield. Smoke D, a UGK affiliate serving time in a Mississippi prison for manslaughter, operates as the album’s unsuspecting guide, offering comedy and reality in various interludes through jailhouse recordings. Bumpy funk transitions were layered underneath flippant guitar work for “Pinky Ring,” horror style piano stabs underscore the late-night creep of “3 In The Mornin.” Mellow guitar licks and drums pump through “Touched” where Bun indirectly gifts JAY-Z the basis for a story he’d use later (“Now once upon a time not too long ago...”). The mutated bassline of Detroit funk band the Brides of Funkenstein’s “Smoke Signals” was shifted around for “Murder,” morphing the track into the most sinister, yet defiant UGK record of all. “I’m still Pimp C bitch, so what the fuck is up?” Pimp would declare on “Murder.” It’s tough, a merciless downhill jaunt of chaos where no one was safe. Pimp’s verse, rooted in the idea of bringing the outside world to UGK’s close proximity, is among the all-time hardest opening verses in rap. Discussions of cocaine prices and slinging dope quickly destroyed the myth that the group were just characters you heard on CD or cassette. Bun and Pimp didn’t want to exude the fantasy of mafioso kingpins in the vein of JAY-Z, Raekwon, or The Notorious B.I.G. Songs like “Cocaine in the Back of the Ride” and “Pocket Full of Stones” granted humanity and consequence to a trade New York made feel flamboyant; an elaborate con. When Pro Tools evolved in the mid-1990s, it allowed artists to take a short cut in the studio and punch in vocals to help speed up the recording process. Ridin’ Dirty is the first album in hip-hop to ever use it, according to Bun. While recording his “Murder” verse with N.O. Joe, Bun woke up from sitting at the control panel, exhausted from a prior night of partying. With the reel still going, he began building a world with easy identifiers (“Well it’s Bun B bitch, and I’m the king of movin’ chickens”) and continued as if he were one man going up against 15 years worth of criticism about the South not having rappers. For nearly two minutes, Bun displays the nimbleness he picked up from ciphers with 3-2 and Chapter 182: double entendres and metered stacking of one-liners and demolishing everything within sight. He found pockets like this often, namely for “They Down With Us,” a 2000 romp with Scarface on top of Boogie Down Productions’ “I’m Still #1.” When he was done with the verse, Bun exited the booth and fell asleep; an implausible verse finished in one take. Ridin’ Dirty never comes back to the ridiculous highs of its first two songs, or the ruminative “Diamonds & Wood” or “Hi-Life.” But its heart remains central to what UGK means as a whole, to a region once cast aside and now is at the forefront. They wouldn’t have a chance to deliver a proper follow-up until 11 years later due to Pimp C spending a large bulk of his final years in prison. They also never truly got the recognition they richly deserved from their label, and were too stubborn to allow industry politics to swallow them whole. Anger from watching a label attempt to sabotage and hijack their identity and regional disrespect were the anchors of UGK’s greatest work, and only they could give the levity it needed. Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.

2020-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Jive

August 16, 2020

012b824c-713f-40c7-be38-e98c23059bb9

Brandon Caldwell

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-caldwell/

Featuring collaborators from across the Drag City universe and a repertoire of gospel, country, pop, and rock covers, Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s lockdown double-album is playful and spirited.

Featuring collaborators from across the Drag City universe and a repertoire of gospel, country, pop, and rock covers, Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s lockdown double-album is playful and spirited.

Bill Callahan / Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Blind Date Party

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-callahan-bonnie-prince-billy-blind-date-party/

Blind Date Party

In October of 2020, Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy posted a cover of the Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens’ 1967 protest anthem “Blackness of the Night.” “For this bad bad world, I’m beginning to doubt/I’m alone and there is no one by my side,” the Bills harmonize, Callahan low and steady, Will Oldham lilting above, over a gentle shuffle of acoustic guitar and synth courtesy of their labelmate Azita Youssefi. Though it’s a song centered on solitude and loneliness, sung from the point of view of an outcast, the recording exudes a spirit of camaraderie, longtime compatriots reaching across the digital expanse to connect, “Determined to make a new friend out of an old favorite.” It would have been lovely enough on its own, but the covers kept coming, through the fall and into winter, each pairing Callahan and Oldham with a new collaborator from the diverse Drag City roster. All 19 are collected on the newly issued Blind Date Party, which functions less like a singles collection and more like an overstuffed double album: discursive, playful, and full of imagination. While a few selections hew close to the country, hushed-folk balladry deep cuts one might expect—songwriters include Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Lowell George, and Robert Wyatt—they often veer into new territory, bouncing from hard rock to fluttering electronic pop, from meditative groovers to gospel, from the avant-garde to raucous sing-a-longs. The album’s concept was simple: Oldham and Callahan selected songs they wanted to hear each other sing and sent them off to a wide-ranging cast of collaborators—including Meg Baird, David Pajo, David Grubbs, and Sir Richard Bishop—who arranged and recorded contributions, returning them to the duo to finesse and eventually sequence into a full-length. Quarantine necessitated plenty of records assembled in a similar manner, but the “sight unseen” aspect—Oldham and Callahan gave no specific directions or input to their collaborators—injects a sense of spontaneity into the remote sessions. “If you give someone the freedom to make their own interpretation, then there’s a good chance that what they’re going to do is going to come from their heart, you know?” Callahan says in the album’s liner notes, noting Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas’ desire to give Iggy Pop’s “I Want To Go To the Beach” a reggae makeover. Liberties are taken, from Bill MacKay’s almost samba-like approach to Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” to the psychedelic mantras of Wyatt’s “Sea Song” with Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner. Though there were eventually some notes traded between collaborators, there are countless moments of creative verve, especially when the two take on each other’s songs. Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny resurrects one of Oldham’s Palace numbers with crunchy drums and gnarly guitars. Meanwhile, Dead Rider transforms Smog’s “Our Anniversary” into a genuine ripper, boosted by Oldham’s soaring vocals. “Everything that can sing/Is singing its mating song,” he yelps triumphantly over Todd Rittman’s overdriven riffs. The best songs here similarly evoke the most unmoored days of the pandemic, and perhaps that’s what informs the joyful whoop Callahan lets out at the start of Lou Reed’s ode to domesticity, “Rooftop Garden,” in which the Greek lutist George Xylouris stirs up John Cale-style drones. Those moments of levity are found throughout. Paired with his Superwolf bud Matt Sweeney, Oldham employs a clipped pronunciation of the word “cocaine” on Hank William’s Jr.’s “O.D.’d In Denver,” evoking the way Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland might say it. On Billie Eilish’s “Wish You Were Gay” with Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas, the two relish in the chance to go full-on synth-pop. At an hour and a half, Blind Date Party could be trimmed into a slimmer volume, but it plays wonderfully as a longform epic. The best mixtapes are bound together by a hard-to-pinpoint but somehow felt logic, and these songs about faith, horniness, devotion, bottoming out, and rising up bear the mark of their assemblers. “Human beings, they do miracles,” Callahan sings, backed by Ty Segall doing his best Sly Stone on a cover of Johnnie Frierson’s moving lo-fi gospel “Miracles.” In Callahan and Oldham’s hands, the song speaks in concert with the bruised hope of David Berman’s “The Wild Kindness,” performed here with Cassie Berman (David’s former wife and bandmate) and dozens of voices. As the song crescendos and Pajo’s distorted guitar snakes frantically, Callahan and Oldham’s own vocals are nearly swallowed up by the big choir. And yet, you still feel them. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-12-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

2021-12-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock / Folk/Country

Drag City

December 28, 2021

012ca7f5-0f55-4ec3-9d01-e10200345a78

Jason P. Woodbury

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/

Kanye West’s 10th album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

Kanye West’s 10th album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

Kanye West: Donda

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-donda/

Donda

Contending with Kanye used to be so thrilling. There was sport in watching a rapper go toe-to-toe with their own ego the way he did, all in service of passionate pop music that lived on the knife-edge of spectacle and solipsism. He was a tightrope walker in shutter shades and Louis Vuitton stockings. Now, something has dulled in his kingdom and the thrill of watching man vs. art has turned into a rote acceptance of Kanye and his stadium-sized album release events, shelved projects, billion-dollar sneaker empire, public grappling with bipolar disorder, devotion to Christianity and non-secular music, MAGA tryst with former President Donald Trump, and presidential run of his own. The subordinate clauses that are now required to contextualize the artist himself loom large over everything he does. The music of Kanye—who once said 400 years of slavery was a choice, who once tweeted that Bill Cosby was innocent, who revolutionized rap and has not made a truly great album in five years—sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat. Donda, his 10th studio album, named after his late mother, Dr. Donda C. West, came to life across three listening events held in two of the biggest stadiums in the country. Thousands of people in-person and millions more online watched as songs about God, family, divorce, and “throat coat for the throat GOATs” blasted through speakers while a masked Kanye did push-ups and frolicked with DaBaby, who recently spouted homophobic remarks, and Marilyn Manson, who is currently facing multiple lawsuits for sexual assault. Each session felt like market-testing disguised as performance art, and was somehow worse than both 2016’s Life of Pablo event at Madison Square Garden and his infamous Jackson Hole gathering for Ye. Like any album put on to streaming services without the artist’s approval, Donda arrived barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 1-hour-and-48-minute runtime includes euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling. On the surface, the themes Kanye’s ready to explore are obvious: the ways in which his mother and his faith have molded him. Christianity has played a role in his music since at least “Jesus Walks,” but now it seems to fuel every aspect of his creativity. Pablo’s concept was built around his attempt to connect Paul the Apostle to drug kingpin Pablo Escobar to revolutionary artist Pablo Picasso. He founded the Sunday Service Choir in 2019 and re-recorded clean versions of his classic songs. Shortly after, West declared that he would stop cursing in his music altogether, which might explain why the clean version of Donda is the only one currently available to stream. It’s easy to be evangelical when you’re selective about what parts of a religion to follow. On Donda, West’s relationship with God does push him in a slightly more thoughtful direction. The closing verse on “Off the Grid” homes in on the Tao of Kanye by laying out his religious mission statement: “I ain’t delivering heavenly messages just for the hell of it/Don’t try to test me; I keep it clean, but it can get messy.” The opening verse on “Jesus Lord” is the most focused and raw Kanye’s been in years, a swirling mass of pent-up anxiety, drug addiction, and memories of his mother. There are lines about talking to, finding power in, relying on, and needing only God—which make moments like Kanye asking a hookup to text him “heyyyyy with a bunch of y’s” and sneaky odes to getting head curdle under the somber, youth pastor vibe around it. Outbursts about delayed croissants and references to The Waterboy on Yeezus were low comedy inside high art. With all the listlessness and confusion happening on Donda, Kanye’s infamous joke bars land with a thud. An inherent flaw to beta testing your album in full public view is that everyone becomes a tiny little executive producer, each with their own thoughts on sequencing, versions, features. Here’s my piece: Apart from the title track missing its somber verse from G.O.O.D. Music President Pusha T, Donda herself is missing from a good chunk of this album. The first two iterations of Donda featured more vocal clips of Kanye’s mother, a guiding light and platonic ideal for he and his guests to strive for. (The grounding advice found on the cut track “Never Abandon Your Family” is a felt void on this final version.) Though she makes a few appearances, her truncated presence here robs the album of its initial tribute to confiding in maternal love and wisdom. The reverence he’s at least performatively after doesn’t land, exposed by the lack of women on the 27-song tracklist, the inclusion of a parade of men accused of sexual abuse—including Chris Brown and Manson—and others with a history of homophobia, like DaBaby and Buju Banton. The guests, however, are Donda’s clear highlights. Roddy Ricch and Baby Keem croon and shout their way to owning their respective songs, but Texas vocalist Vory shines, his wavy melodies lingering like a ghostly presence on his handful of features. Veterans Jay Electronica and Yonkers trio the Lox match West’s contemplative poise on the great “Jesus Lord Pt 2.” The sheer amount of guests and jumps in production from trap and drill to boom-bap and gospel invoke the 2012 G.O.O.D. Music album Cruel Summer, but that at least gave us “Clique” and “Mercy.” “Off the Grid” and “Junya” come the closest to bottling that manic energy, but neither will tear down a Summer Jam stage anytime soon. Kanye is great at A&R, and that’s part of the frustration here. We already know he can corral some of the best artists around on a charcuterie board’s worth of beats, even if Drake, Kenny Beats, and West’s own protege, Travis Scott, have since better wielded this mantle. Donda standouts like the soulful “Jonah” or the soaring “Pure Souls” work because they tap into the energy of the 2021 zeitgeist, but these moments are few and far between, set adrift in a confusing sea of post-marital anxiety and surface-level religious ideation. Strip Donda of most of its context—the constant editing, the laundry list of guests with real-life cases both alleged and confirmed, the last two decades of hip-hop’s largest ego—and a significant portion of this album still sounds incomplete, searching for meaning everywhere and coming up impressively short.

2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam

August 31, 2021

0136b8b6-d69d-4086-8bbe-9ce5351dbbfe

Dylan Green

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/

Following three mixtapes released in quick succession that contained some of the most influential and gripping R&B of the new decade, Abel Tesfaye's bleak and atmospheric project makes its major label debut.

Following three mixtapes released in quick succession that contained some of the most influential and gripping R&B of the new decade, Abel Tesfaye's bleak and atmospheric project makes its major label debut.

The Weeknd: Kiss Land

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18458-the-weeknd-kiss-land/

Kiss Land

Think about how some other male R&B artists might have worked with a title like "Kiss Land": in the hands of R. Kelly, perhaps it becomes his latest conceptual dramedy, an inset of the geography surveyed on “Sex Planet”. For Robin Thicke, it could serve as more proof of his insatiable need to be liked and his utter inability to look cool. Like The 20/20 Experience, the name Kiss Land brings to mind a family-friendly theme park overseen by pop music’s most tireless crowd pleaser. And if Miguel made a song called “Kiss Land”, it could be delivered with a wink, total sincerity, or, most likely, some combination thereof. But it's the name of the Weeknd’s first true major-label release, and the title track boasts characteristically lecherous lines like "not really into kisses leading into nothing." As such, Kiss Land scans as unintentionally hilarious, a sign that the project is rushing headlong into self-parody and Abel Tesfaye seems to be the only one who doesn’t realize it. Given that, it makes sense that Tesfaye has followed up Trilogy, a compilation of his highly influential and gripping 2011 mixtapes, with the rock'n'roll trope that results from ego and self-awareness becoming inversely proportional: a concept album about “life on the road." I could tell you that Kiss Land is dolorous, hook-averse, emotionally despondent, and says appalling things to women 85% of the time, but that was also true of Trilogy. Thing is, the earlier material also had some indelible melodies (mostly on House of Balloons), innovative textures (mostly on Thursday), and all-consuming atmosphere (mostly on Echoes of Silence). Kiss Land does manage some of the latter two qualities, but to seriously diminishing returns. While it doesn’t stretch far beyond the boundaries established by Trilogy, Kiss Land is a reflection of the Weeknd’s new reality, of what happens when studio nerds have access to massive appearance fees and the finest engineers in the world. A disembodied Emika sample and lithe, menacing drum programming evoke an android sadness on “Professional” that makes Tesfaye actually sound believable when he tries to turn the V.I.P. into “Atrocity Exhibition”. On “Adaptation”, the Police sound as threatening as any of the dancehall apparitions that haunted Yeezus, while on “Belong to the World”, the percussion of Portishead’s “Machine Gun” is slightly reconfigured and jacked up to punishing speed. The best songs here bring the Weeknd closer to where the project started on the comparitively pop-oriented House of Balloons. “Wanderlust” is springy disco that moves with unusual vigor, and in pitching up its vocal samples rather than screwing them down, it imparts Tesfaye getting caught up in the moment, left a little breathless. And while the Drake feature “Live For” is more or less a rewrite of *Take Care’*s “Crew Love”, it signifies happiness even if it doesn’t express it. Otherwise, without any strong melodic tether, songs drift by like the window view from a redeye flight, where the free champagne blurs the bloodshot sunrises and indistinguishable cloud banks. So while Kiss Land creates an immersive atmosphere, it rarely feels grounded with a sense of place. On Trilogy, Toronto established a tangible setting, where Tesfaye was beginning to become a “somebody in a nobody town”, to quote “Professional”. Sure, he was palling around with Drake and was a star by the time the set was halfway finished, but he was still subject to freezing winters, hanging around club kids still living with their parents, “drinking Alize with our cereal for breakfast.” On “Kiss Land”, Tesfaye moans “I went from staring at the same four walls for 21 years/ To seeing the whole world in just 12 months.” Judging from the results, it's as if the Weeknd has traveled the world only for Tesfaye to realize it revolves around him. The lyrics are often embarrassing, occasionally nonsensical and not worth quoting at length-- just know that "You can meet me in the room where the kisses ain't free/ You gotta pay with your body" is representative. Everyone here is complicit and compromised, which is key to understanding the draw of such overtly nihilistic music. Overfamiliarity aside, its joylessness becomes some kind of perverse asset. The Weeknd’s world is cruel, but unbiased; the accusations of misogyny are tempered (somewhat) by the fact that Tesfaye appears to mistrust everyone equally, with the exception of Drake. After relaying his frightening regimen of vices during the title track’s unhinged coda, he can only offer the misanthropic defensiveness of an addict: “This ain’t nothing to relate to even if you tried.” Point being, steer clear unless you plan to be as high as he is and are ready to indulge in whatever sexual command strikes his fancy. That's the only lesson in Kiss Land, because Tesfaye at least realizes he’s in no position to judge and doesn’t even seek redemption or your understanding. The deluxe version of Kiss Land contains a radio remix of “Wanderlust” that isn’t necessary to ensure the record’s success, not when the Weeknd is already playing Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre twice. Pharrell lends a funkier, lighter production touch to the song but his mere presence is revelatory. As post-Weeknd acts like Banks and PARTYNEXTDOOR crop up, Pharrell serves as a reminder that the R&B/pop zeitgeist consists of songs like “Blurred Lines”, “Get Lucky”, and “Take Back The Night”. These songs might not be a reaction to the Weeknd, but they do suggest that love is more than sex and sex is more than just a transaction. These loving and lovable songs serve as soundtracks for people who go on silly dates, make asses out of themselves at karaoke, get married, attend Bar Mitzvahs, and are capable as seeing everyone and everything as something other than an enabler. And that turns out to be a lot of us. Kiss Land is technically the Weeknd’s fourth album in two and a half years, and without the ear-turning innovation of the earlier work, all you can muster in reaction to its worldview, the same one that's been delivered repeatedly without variation, is, “Maybe it’s you, man.” Which in a way, vindicates it: Kiss Land sounds every bit as isolated and singular as Tesfaye feels.

2013-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Republic / XO

September 9, 2013

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Ian Cohen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/

The minimalist acoustic palette of the 24-year-old actor and singer’s second album makes a calming backdrop for her diaristic songwriting and white-smoke soprano.

The minimalist acoustic palette of the 24-year-old actor and singer’s second album makes a calming backdrop for her diaristic songwriting and white-smoke soprano.

Maya Hawke: Moss

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maya-hawke-moss/

Moss

Maya Hawke’s success in Stranger Things and recent teen dramedy Do Revenge have solidified her as a promising new presence in Hollywood, or at least on Netflix. But she’s found another foothold in understated indie folk. Hawke’s second album, Moss, the follow-up to her 2020 debut Blush, sets endearing and melancholic self-reflection against warm, drumless instrumentation. She narrates each song in a white-smoke soprano, viewing herself and others through eyes both critical and kindly. Hawke and co-producer Benjamin Lazar Davis created the album’s intimate, insulated sound with help from Christian Lee Hutson and Jonathan Low, whose respective past credits include Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher and Taylor Swift’s folklore. “We made sure that every sound we used on the record we used three times,” Hawke said in a recent interview. The recurring musical characters foster a sense of familiarity that’s comforting, if a bit monochromatic. The campfire-acoustic ethos doesn’t inspire much risk-taking, but the minimalist palette makes a calming backdrop for Hawke’s insights and brings her closer to forming an established identity as a musician. There’s less uncertainty in her direction now; she doesn’t, for example, attempt to emulate glam-rock swagger, as on Blush’s “Animal Enough.” Instead, Moss sticks to a diaristic indie-folk lane, a style that aligns well with Hawke’s intimate storytelling. Throughout Moss, Hawke’s earnest, sincere lyricism interlocks the public and private, overlapping reality and fiction to reflect how she has had to negotiate both spaces in life. “All I really want is an actor of my own,” she sings on the gentle “Hiatus,” punctuating a bittersweet love story with references to Sam Shepard and the Wilhelm scream. In the wrenching “Driver,” she shares a wide-eyed plea to see her parents kiss in the back of a taxi (in real life, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke separated when Maya was 5). “Oh, I can watch it in the movies,” she acknowledges, but “I don’t want to see it that crafted and clear.” On the charming “Sweet Tooth,” she sings, “Saw a movie everybody hated in an empty theater in Duluth/Swear I really loved it, love is such a better thing to do.” It’s the kind of profound, obvious statement that adulthood often forces us to forget, and it rolls out as gently as a pen she’s dropped. This industry-child introspection reveals a degree of maturity that comes through in even the simplest of premises, like the understated standout “Luna Moth.” With the help of her reliable acoustic guitar, Hawke describes how she has accidentally killed the titular creature. She apologizes; she had only come to the bathroom to cry. “I don’t need anyone to hurt me/I can do that myself,” she sings, and her airy, matter-of-fact delivery gives the impression that she’s finally voiced this thought out loud. Against a gently arpeggiating guitar that conjures the image of a dewy morning, Hawke opens “Backup Plan” by listing ordinary items: “Your pencils/Your dress socks/Your charger/Your bike lock.” It’s a seemingly innocuous series until she ties them with a ribbon: “I wanna be anything you’ve lost that you might be looking for.” The words encapsulate the feeling of offering yourself to someone (or, perhaps more importantly, to yourself), only to hope they aren’t careless with you. As thematically complex as Moss can be, vulnerability sometimes gets lost: The spoken-word outro of “Bloomed Into Blue” feels reminiscent of college café poetry, and “Sticky Little Words” sounds almost like a rhyming exercise. Compared to the captivating “Thérèse,” where the dichotomy between representation and reality offers the album’s most vivid illustration of public versus private life, and hopeful closer “Mermaid Bar,” which tells the story of a girl who survived jumping off a bridge, these tracks don’t carry nearly as much weight. But even in the album’s less compelling moments, Hawke retains a delicate charm. She feels believable. Correction: This review has been updated to credit Benjamin Lazar Davis as a co-producer of Moss.

2022-09-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-09-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Mom+Pop

September 23, 2022

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Jane Bua

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/

James Ferraro’s latest album feels a bit like a didactic student art project; it finds the vaporwave pioneer doubling down on the themes of 2011’s Far Side Virtual with a much heavier hand.

James Ferraro’s latest album feels a bit like a didactic student art project; it finds the vaporwave pioneer doubling down on the themes of 2011’s Far Side Virtual with a much heavier hand.

James Ferraro: Human Story 3

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22078-human-story-3/

Human Story 3

James Ferraro’s 2011 album Far Side Virtual stands as one of this decade’s most polarizing records. Depending on your perspective, it can read like a provocation, a joke, an incisive reflection of techno-utopian naiveté or some combination thereof. It was also, as it turns out, the unlikely harbinger of a New Aesthetic. To scroll through the vaporwave tag on Tumblr (or any of its wonderfully ludicrous sub-tags, which include troutwave, aloewave and simpsonwave), is to witness the world that Ferraro hath wrought, a warped reflection of ’90s futurism, computer-generated textures and postmodern culture jamming. Following recent detours into hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music, Ferraro has now returned to the vaporwave aesthetic he helped define with his latest full-length, Human Story 3. At the time of its release, Far Side Virtual was novel in Ferraro’s catalog for its clarity—most of its songs dispensed with the hazy, degraded tape sounds of his past work, embracing the production values of the commercial music that it sought to emulate. Human Story 3 goes further, jettisoning the last production artifacts of Ferraro’s experimental pedigree; every sound here gleams as if examined under the nauseating fluorescents of a big box store. The melange of noises that made up Far Side Virtual’s sensory overload are all represented here—conference call hold music, royalty-free sound effects, keyboard presets and chirping ringtones—though Ferraro balances out these elements with piano, synthesized strings, flutes, chimes and marimbas this time around. The result is a densely-composed record that vacillates between straigtfaced muzak, minimalist classical and manic hypnogogic pop. Recent Ferraro projects have made use of vocaloid spoken word and every track on Human Story 3 is punctuated by these disembodied voices. The two primary “vocalists” on the album are a woman’s and a man’s voice, both of which straddle the uncanny valley—not quite human, not quite computer. These voices repeat a series of brandnames and phrases (“Ikea,” “GPS," “Starbucks,” “market crash,” “mobile payments,” “FedEx," “smart car,” “latte”) at seemingly random intervals throughout Human Story 3’s songs. These phrases sometimes feel like mantras (“protecting your data and your identity”, “embrace all individualism”), sometimes toe the line between credulous marketing speak and hilarious sendup (“cloud security, with ambition and passion!”) and occasionally serve up cutting critiques with an impressive economy of words (“buy now, pay later,” in this context, reads like a succinct motto for our consumptive society as a whole). For the most part, however, the vocals tend to wash over these tracks in a constant stream of babble, a torrent of audio pop-ups that can’t be blocked. Unlike on his last few releases, Ferraro himself doesn’t sing on Human Story 3, though on a handful of tracks he does introduce choral arrangements, which cut a contrast against the album’s largely synthetic sounds. The record is bookended by such songs—“Ten Songs for Humanity” and “Plastiglomerate & Co”—both of which layer robotic sloganeering over human voices that reach for the sublime. These rank among Human Story 3’s more intriguing songs, providing a juxtaposition that complicates our reading of vaporwave’s now familiar tropes. It feels like Ferraro is trying to tell us something about the piousness with which market capitalism is applied as an organizing principle for human life, though we’re largely left to draw our own conclusions. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Human Story 3 is not nearly as subtle, and that’s where this album largely fails. The beauty of Far Side Virtual was that Ferraro never tipped his hand; whether the album was intended as a sincere homage to or cutting sendup of elevator music was left unsaid, at least on the record itself. Human Story 3, on the other hand, puts too fine a point on its critique. Its constant barrage of verbal rubbish makes the record feel something like a less artful, album-length version of Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier”. The aim here is fairly clear—to foreground the hollow dread that lurked just below the surface of Far Side Virtual’s slick, plastic veneer. In practice, however, these songs are often just as tiring as the commercial music they seek to skewer. That may well be Ferraro’s intent—he's never been afraid to make willfully ugly songs in order to get an idea across—though Human Story 3 tends to belabor its point to the detriment of the music.

2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Break World

July 1, 2016

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Mehan Jayasuriya

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/

Warp's Chris Clark infuses sonic streaks of contemporaries like Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and DJ Shadow into his repertoire, along with his usual Aphex and Boards of Canada tics, and in the process crafts his best album to date.

Warp's Chris Clark infuses sonic streaks of contemporaries like Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and DJ Shadow into his repertoire, along with his usual Aphex and Boards of Canada tics, and in the process crafts his best album to date.

Clark: Body Riddle

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9557-body-riddle/

Body Riddle

In a recent post on his MySpace page, Warp artist Chris Clark claims "words are nothing but ineffectual in describing a body of music." Not the most encouraging sentiment for a music reviewer, though he's probably right. And when it comes to the dense, wordless electronic opuses that are Clark's specialty, the written word can be an especially awkward translator. But just as Clark is drawn to explaining his ephemeral consciousness through brash beats and intricate melody, the urge to understand and champion such a compelling struggle is strong. While this underrated Aphex Twin disciple produces stunning machinated symphonies that are daunting in their technical proficiency, his music maintains a breathing, spontaneous dexterity. Falling in line with its title, Body Riddle encapsulates the ever-changing human form, part inexplicable being and part steadfast hardware. The continuous fluidity between those two states bolsters this puzzle's severe magnetism. What sets the album apart from Clark's other detail-oriented click-traps is its jacked-up confidence and stylistic diversity. While his most recent album, 2003's overlooked Empty the Bones of You, was a brilliant, bleak apocalyptic vision, it could easily be broken down into two categories: corrosive manic panic and somber piano elegy. Body Riddle's reach is grander and more assured with Clark now adding full flesh to the bone. The auspicious Brit infuses sonic streaks of contemporaries like Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and DJ Shadow into his repertoire, along with his usual Aphex and Boards of Canada tics. Significantly, these aren't thoughtless dilettante moves. The bright Four Tet-esque scutter of "Night Knuckles", for instance, is actually better than most of that artist's last LP. Similarly, the precision thump of "Ted" blows away anything Scott Herren's done in the last three years, and drum-programming clinic "Herr Bar" sounds like what Shadow should have done with his latest disc. This apprentice-master one-upmanship goes all the way to enigmatic godhead Richard D. James, who never seems to be far away from Clark's name on paper. Whereas James seems to be somewhat lost within his slippery mystique nowadays, Clark continues to mine his ominous perfectionism with increasingly spectacular ends. Finely hewn and paced, Body Riddle ebbs and flows, following an internal logic that's condensed, myriad, and unpredictable. The album's convulsing dynamics are key to its humanity. Within a single track, drum patterns and tones slide in and out while melodies intermingle and seemingly incongruous noises blend into unannounced cameos only to slip away soon after. Take album-within-a-track spectacle "Matthew Unburdened", which kicks in touting glitch percussion and warbling piano. Then, the beat dismantles suddenly, coming back new and improved, now with strings that sear classical ache into the song's synthetic fabric. The old world instruments take center stage for a melodramatic aside, only to finally give way to a mannered hyper-jazz denouement. That's only one song. Simply, the amount of interlocking minutiae contained within the album's skin-tight 43 minutes is staggering. The record's journey concludes with a eulogy, "The Autumnal Crush", which features Body Riddle's only line of intelligible language: "And I still miss you." Emanating from this website, the words mean little. But, within the context of this remarkably realized whole, they're completely devastating. The accompanying track fades the LP's linear life cycle with a haunting expansiveness of My Bloody Valentine drowning beneath its own distortions. Few have been able to extract sweeping emotion from such a modern sonic milieu as Clark does here. Fright, sorrow, joy, love, death-- they're all within Body Riddle's corporeal core, waiting to be whittled onto one's individual experience. It's a monumentally personal work that speaks universally; it's a glazed mirror that doesn't lie.

2006-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00

2006-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp

October 27, 2006

013b1c51-714b-45fb-8857-658fdc7df7f8

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

After the relatively buttoned-down Air Force, the latest from Xiu Xiu is frantic and wild, with swatches of noise and Jamie Stewart's voice often quivering on the edge of a panic attack.

After the relatively buttoned-down Air Force, the latest from Xiu Xiu is frantic and wild, with swatches of noise and Jamie Stewart's voice often quivering on the edge of a panic attack.

Xiu Xiu: Women as Lovers

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11091-women-as-lovers/

Women as Lovers

Art-making involves getting what's inside on the outside, but usually it passes through a sterilizing filter first. But with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart everything spills out unmediated and mucky. To put a fine point on it, on Women as Lovers' "Black Keyboard", over a serpentine acoustic guitar and synth dirge, Stewart sings, "Why would a mother say such things/ Why add tongue to a kiss goodnight?" That line is an attack against commonly held virtues of understatement and discretion, and Stewart's willingness to revolt audiences with squeamish personal details that make him seem more scarily fucked-up than sensitive or emotionally open is what makes his music unique. His art seems to be more about who he is than who he'd like to be, and it's the tension between the mores of taste and Stewart's honesty that brings us back, despite ourselves, time and again. And, of course, the music itself, a nebulous but forceful concoction of sopping wet harpsichords, detonating percussion, submerged rock, atonal scaffolding, and unhinged electro-pop. Recent Xiu Xiu albums have been less likely to make me feel nauseous than Fabulous Muscles and its forebears, and I figured I'd just gotten acclimated to their approach. But the rawness of Women as Lovers indicates that maybe, for awhile, they'd gotten acclimated to it themselves. The Air Force found Xiu Xiu in full-bore confessional mode, yet it was so mannered that the confessionals lost their seamy edge and verged on pure aesthetics. "Buzz Saw" and "Boy Soprano", great songs both, were uncommonly buttoned-down for Xiu Xiu, and "Hello from Eau Claire" was almost a Moldy Peaches song. But where Air Force made venting seem rather academic, Women as Lovers is frantic and wild, with swatches of noise skidding around and Stewart's voice quivering on the edge of a panic attack-- even in the whispery sections. In this light, "Under Pressure" is an apt cover choice, as the whole album conveys the sense of something about to boil over. With homely, impassioned vocals by Michael Gira, and the song's slick iconic bassline contrasted by a ragged interpretation of its arrangement, it takes on an air of desperation. Xiu Xiu's music is all about discomfort, but Stewart and co. have become quite comfortable in this conceptual space, and are able to inhabit it like painters making wild, broad smears that intuitively cohere into a look that is distinctly theirs. On "I Do What I Want, When I Want", a pummeling post-punk groove dressed up with strident synth peals and pitched percussion, Stewart sounds direly imperiled, especially when the free-jazz horns start ripping through the already-claustrophobic mix. "In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall" is an apocalyptic atonal composition with a driving backbeat, and Stewart commands it masterfully, his voice sometimes climbing the slope of the wreckage, sometimes punching in abruptly at its screaming peaks. "No Friend Oh!" thrums like an engine, with anxious flurries of touch-tone synth and manic brass. The quieter compositions offer no relief from the mounting sense of impending catastrophe. "Guantanamo Canto" smears bending chimes, headachy percussion, loony-bin whistles, and allegorical sirens across a disorienting blankness, as Stewart says it plain: "My country needs its freedom/ To contradict your humanness." The Air Force gave us Xiu Xiu as a crystallized concept, but Women as Lovers sounds no more conceptual than a spurting artery. On "F.T.W.", a clicky acoustic ballad that eventually erupts into a squeaking-helium hell of noise, Stewart whimpers, "Am I all right? Do I look all right?" He doesn't, and one feels for him, although maybe there's some small solace in that fact that as a musician, not-all-right is his best look.

2008-01-30T01:00:01.000-05:00

2008-01-30T01:00:01.000-05:00

Experimental / Rock

Kill Rock Stars

January 30, 2008

0142500a-af3b-4d5b-ae16-f0c303510491

Brian Howe

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/

Hudson Mohawke embraces dystopian trash-pop imagery on his first album in seven years, maintaining his trademark clarity while bleeding and oozing over a larger canvas than ever.

Hudson Mohawke embraces dystopian trash-pop imagery on his first album in seven years, maintaining his trademark clarity while bleeding and oozing over a larger canvas than ever.

Hudson Mohawke: Cry Sugar

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hudson-mohawke-cry-sugar/

Cry Sugar

Hudson Mohawke lives in L.A. now, and he’s fallen head over heels for the American tradition of dystopian trash-pop imagery. The video for a megamix of tracks he released in advance of his third album, Cry Sugar, shows us a CGI scene of a man cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway with an assortment of Mos Eisley-worthy weirdos and an animated woman so buxom she appears warped. It looks like Grand Theft Auto and Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” video at once, run through the brain-fried filter of Kuso, Tim & Eric, and Adult Swim’s Off the Air. The cover by Willehad Eilers features the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters horking down a hamburger. In a city whose hills host the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Observatory, and an alarming regularity of smoke-belching infernos, it’s hard not to find the humor—and the horror—in this aesthetic. The Scottish producer born Ross Birchard cites “American decadence” and the “quintessential backdrop of late capitalism” as an inspiration for his first solo album in seven years. Cry Sugar isn’t a polemic or satire, but it strikes some of the same notes as Idiocracy or Robocop, in which everything is so big, garish, and dumb it’s almost psychedelic. It’s full of moments that seem distasteful at first until you realize that’s exactly the point. Clarence Coffee Jr.’s rasp initially seems at odds with the music’s polymer-like textures, but he strikes the right note on “Bow” with crass, unsubtle lines like, “Now you walk around all stank-face like you need some Febreze!” Gospel samples abound, and when the choir rises up and screams “Freedom!” on “Intentions,” you might wonder if Birchard knows how cheesy it sounds—until the rest of the album makes it abundantly clear that he does. Birchard’s style has long lent itself to adjectives like “colorful” and “neon.” But while his sharp shares and tightly quantized beats usually bring a sense of order to the mayhem, Cry Sugar spills all over the place, and the time-stretching and pitch-shifting Birchard slathers on his samples make them sound like they’re melting under the pitiless Southern California sun. Tobacco and Neon Indian go for a similar effect in their work, but while those Day-Glo detritus-diggers tend to choke their tracks in thick production smog, Cry Sugar retains the clarity of Birchard’s earlier music, sometimes giving the impression of a sturdy steel skeleton whose flesh is melting off. “Intentions,” “Bicstan,” and “Dance Forever” are absolute monsters that approach the same almost ridiculous level of intensity as TNGHT’s definitive “Higher Ground” while clearly being born from a more expressionistic corner of Birchard’s brain. Cry Sugar is Birchard’s longest album by some measure, with 19 tracks that bleed and ooze across 63 minutes. But it’s not long in the way of some bloated event-rap album, rather in the way of great electronic long-players like Since I Left You or Geogaddi, where so much awesome shit happens that you grow excited about what comes next even when the album starts to drag. Most of Cry Sugar’s tracks are around two or three minutes long, but Birchard judiciously breaks up the flow with lengthier cuts, and they’re doozies. “Is It Supposed” is either building towards nothing or climaxing for six minutes, its wistful rave melody sparkling like a firework that refuses to extinguish. “Rain Shadow” is so rhythmically tricky that it eventually stops sounding like a banger and takes on a sort of insectoid beauty. “Lonely Days” is all strings and Westian melodrama. My personal favorite, though, is “Stump,” one of the first songs from Cry Sugar to see the light of day. It sounds like Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra*—*the tone poem used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to soundtrack mankind’s ascent into the higher realms of sentience—for about two seconds. Then Birchard plays a chord so dissonant the high drama immediately curdles into a joke, as if the starchild has missed its path back to Earth and gone plop into the surface of the sun. It’s exactly the kind of unexpected, pessimistic, profoundly ridiculous sound gag that Cry Sugar delivers one after another, adding up to the funniest, most mind-twisting album Birchard’s ever made.

2022-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp/Luckyme

August 15, 2022

0142ffe7-78a1-4083-913d-d9b528968705

Daniel Bromfield

https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/