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Recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a seven-piece band, Moses Sumney’s first live album and film find freedom and beauty in the isolation of the forest.

Recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a seven-piece band, Moses Sumney’s first live album and film find freedom and beauty in the isolation of the forest.

Moses Sumney: Live From Blackalachia

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moses-sumney-live-from-blackalachia/

Live From Blackalachia

About 30 minutes into his new concert film Blackalachia, Moses Sumney takes off into the air. He is singing “Plastic” while floating a few feet off the ground, a lone, weightless figure against the sky at dusk. Then, midway through the song, the ropes holding him up suddenly become visible, as though we’re catching behind-the-scenes footage from a movie set. “My wings are made up,” Sumney croons, “and so am I.” It’s a dizzying effect, one that exposes the structures that constitute our self-presentation—the things that we show, the things that we don’t. In a way, the scene feels like a natural continuation of themes Sumney explored in his most recent album, 2020’s grae: Masculinity, gender, race, the multiplicity of identities that comprise who we are and how we are seen by the world. Sumney has long grappled with image and perception. Burdened and distracted by what he described as a “cult of personality” attached to being a performer, he left Los Angeles in 2017 and took refuge in Asheville, North Carolina. He was drawn to the city’s natural surroundings—the forest, the sky, the birds—and Live From Blackalachia was born out of this newfound home. Over two days in summer 2020, Sumney and a seven-piece band recorded 13 songs culled from grae and 2017’s Aromanticism live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an hour outside Asheville. Transported into Blackalachia and away from societal context, the music meets us with open arms. As sprawling as their environs, the live renditions are all longer than their studio counterparts. The changes are sometimes minute: A note is held longer, a melody delivered more slowly, an instrumental interlude stretched and woven like a climbing vine. “Bless Me,” the longest track on the album, extends to eight minutes as Sumney freestyles off operatic vocal runs, toying with constraint and structure. On “Doomed,” the addition of Serena Wiley and Brian Horton’s saxophones and Derrick Johnson’s trombone adds a sweeping cosmic jazz sensibility. In the companion film, Sumney lies on the grass, twisting and turning, beckoned by the sinuous, organic motion of the music. At their most indulgent, the live takes make the studio versions feel domesticated by comparison. Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of Live From Blackalachia is how undiluted each performer is, even at such length. Without his signature vocal harmonies, Sumney sounds more alone than ever. “In Bloom (in the woods),” the most radical reimagining, pares down the symphonic production of the original to basic string elements: A cello pulses underneath Sumney’s voice; a lone plucked violin evolves into frantic bows. The first third of a newly dynamic version of “Me in 20 Years” does away with many of the production flourishes and vocal layers in favor of a singular, slow-burning sensuality. When the song bursts open at the chorus, it’s like sunbeams on your eyes. But Sumney is also joined by new company: Crickets chirp in the background; wind hums in the trees. Set atop living, breathing soil, the maximalist pizzazz of a song like “Virile” is imbued with earthy energy. Its wild-hearted outro rises and falls in a thunderous roar, as though the ground beneath were quaking. Live From Blackalachia has just one newly written track, an interlude titled “Space Nation Race Place.” When it plays in the film, Sumney lies naked in a bathtub in the middle of a field, his body garlanded with orange flowers. As the camera zooms out, he becomes smaller and smaller, eventually replaced by a shot of passing trees, like they’re one and the same. “I’ve needed a space to articulate my own loneliness, not at the level of state, or nation, or race, or place,” he recites. In Blackalachia, his isolation becomes a means to freedom and connection—an oceanic feeling so profuse and lush that it invites us in. As the interlude ends, the camera settles among the shrubs, Wiley emerges from the woods with her sax, and the first notes of “Colouour” drift forth like a greeting. 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.

2021-12-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

2021-12-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Tuntum

December 15, 2021

f5975f01-4c97-47b0-92b8-1e8b94828690

Kelly Liu

https://pitchfork.com/staff/kelly-liu/

The short-lived New York band WALL recorded this debut LP before breaking up last year. Drawing on the sardonic din of post-punk and no wave, they paint a picture of the city in a time of uncertainty.

The short-lived New York band WALL recorded this debut LP before breaking up last year. Drawing on the sardonic din of post-punk and no wave, they paint a picture of the city in a time of uncertainty.

WALL: Untitled

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23189-untitled/

Untitled

A posthumous debut is a strange thing. If it stinks, then good riddance. But if it is great, as is WALL’s Untitled, then fans are left with a craving that is insatiable. Like many bands formed in the underground of constantly mutating metropolises, WALL began as casually as it ended. Upon moving to New York City after three years in Berlin, bassist Elizabeth Skadden reunited with her childhood friend from Texas, vocalist and guitarist Sam York. The pair were joined by guitarist Vince McClelland and drummer Vanessa Gomez and WALL was born. In early 2016, the Brooklyn quartet released a self-titled EP of breakneck, agitated songs, and they concurrently developed a reputation for thrashing concerts (that their recordings were all produced by Parquet Courts’ Austin Brown also helped). Then, in summer ’16, WALL quietly called it quits. Unlike Skadden’s work in feminist garage outfit Finally Punk, and McClelland’s in the 1960s pop throwback group the Keepsies, WALL conjures the desperation and immediacy of post-punk and no wave bands like Pylon, Au Pairs, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. “I’m supposed to be fucking positive? Fuck you!,” Lydia Lunch once said. “You want positive, go elsewhere. Go find a different lie.” WALL, like their contemporaries Priests, take the pragmatic spirit of Lunch and apply it to critically examining the pains of modern society and the failures of fleeting pleasures. The city reflected in Untitled is dystopian, numb, a metallic wasteland. Sound familiar? “Validate me/Validate me/Competition, self promotion/Oh we’re all guilty,” York jeers on “High Ratings.” York’s voice is rightfully steely and sardonic as her bandmates create a combative frenzy behind her. “Wounded at War” is a desolate tale about how America glamorizes war and valorizes soldiers before abandoning them. “There’s no thrill in actualities/Sensationalize the truth and/Feed it to me,” York sings before the band flicks from a claustrophobic chug into into a surfy, slippery break. While WALL’s cover of Half Japanese’s “Charmed Life” shares the original’s skronking saxophones, in the context of Untitled it feels relentlessly cynical. One of WALL’s great strengths is their ability to sound cohesive amid their rapidly descending chaos. “Save Me” witnesses a man and a woman, both voiced by Skadden, separately jumping to their presumed deaths from perilous heights. “See I’ve got the compulsion,” the male character explains over churning guitars and steady drums. “I like how danger feels/I’ve tried to best it, but human nature always wins.” As she recounts these stories, Skadden sounds more jaded than traumatized (“It really freaked me out,” she deadpans later), as if horror and helplessness are parts of daily life. The song only falls into a nightmare at the chorus, as the guitars reach their shrillest peaks and Skadden and York chant Ramones-style, “Save me from myself/Help help!” “Turn Around” remains cool and collected, as York recalls an encounter with a scary man “just dripping with confidence.” But once she confronts him, the song boils over into bellowing feedback. Untitled concludes with “River Mansion,” which wraps up all of the record’s pummel into one grave, ghostly song. “River Mansion” is by no means cheery—“Lost in the dream,” York sings, “And we’re lying through our teeth when/Our eyes meet”—but Untitled is, crucially, not nihilistic. WALL point out the state of reality and attempt to exist within the never-ending nightmare. Together, the songs on Untitled paint a picture of a city in a time of uncertainty. The vague collapse of WALL reflects this as well; the band has yet to make a statement regarding their dissolution and have moved on to other other projects. Untitled doesn’t answer whether or not it’s best to burn out or fade away, but it suggests how to do the former quite well.

2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Wharf Cat

May 2, 2017

f597d013-1f1e-4012-8000-e50afb031e2f

Quinn Moreland

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

The first live album from the Philadelphia band feels loose and sounds immaculate, cementing their status as one of the premier live bands of their generation.

The first live album from the Philadelphia band feels loose and sounds immaculate, cementing their status as one of the premier live bands of their generation.

The War on Drugs: LIVE DRUGS

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-war-on-drugs-live-drugs/

LIVE DRUGS

There’s a phenomenon at the heart of the War on Drugs’ music called the crossover: the point when one moment folds into another. You can hear it in most of their songs. Sometimes it’s evoked in their steady-marching swells, which can sound like the last sliver of rooftop fading out of focus in the U-Haul’s rearview mirror, or the last flicker of candlelight atop a birthday cake. Often it’s more literal: the point when Adam Granduciel sings his last word and the song’s grand, several-minute-long outro begins. The crossover is all over the Philadelphia band’s first-ever live album, which captures them at the end of a metamorphosis. Before releasing their 2014 breakthrough, Lost in the Dream, which sped their graduation from small rooms to huge festivals, the War on Drugs were a four-piece touring group that excelled at making those small rooms feel enormous. Their rise in popularity precipitated their upgrade to a bigger lineup, which now includes baritone sax player Jon Natchez, multi-instrumentalist Anthony LaMarca, and mean-mugging drummer Charlie Hall in addition to Granduciel and longstanding members Dave Hartley on bass and Robbie Bennett on keys. LIVE DRUGS comprises recordings from tours behind Lost in the Dream and its follow-up, 2017’s A Deeper Understanding, as they found their footing as a six-piece between 2014 and 2019, documenting their evolution as a live band and their solidification into a Live Band. The decision by Granduciel and co-producer, guitar tech, and stage manager Dominic East to pick recordings from such a large sample ensures that LIVE DRUGS always sounds immaculate. It has an especially muscular low end—and not just Hartley’s bass. Hearing Natchez’s baritone sax captured so cleanly in such a deep register almost makes it hard to believe that it could be a wind instrument. When Bennett strikes a couple low piano chords to accompany Granduciel’s first words of “Pain”—“Go to bed now I can tell/Pain is on the way out now”—it offsets the storm clouds around him as immediately as a weighted blanket. Granduciel is a much different vocalist in the live setting than he is on record: more punctuated, less delicate, and even a little less melodic. His soloing, meanwhile, consistently sounds more articulated as he rips into these songs on a tailwind of spontaneous inspiration. In the first episode of a podcast made as part of the rollout for LIVE DRUGS called The Super High Quality Podcast, they discuss being open to songs evolving onstage from their recorded forms. They make good on that here, down to a song’s structure in one case: “Eyes to the Wind” goes drum-less for its first verse, the byproduct of the song once collapsing at a performance in Copenhagen. (This one, regrettably, is not that performance, but a later one that replicated and refined the new version.) It’s a nice respite of “small” from the constant “big.” Bennett’s piano plays the high end this time, sprinkling stardust over Granduciel’s words about the before and after of someone entering his life. Drugs heads may be disappointed to find that there are no Slave Ambient cuts here, although “Buenos Aires Beach” from the debut album, Wagonwheel Blues (when the War on Drugs was essentially Granduciel’s loosely defined solo moniker) is given new, fuller life. The only other song not from Dream or Understanding is a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Accidentally Like a Martyr”—hardly a Zevon hit, and probably best known as the song that comes on after “Werewolves of London” on his best-selling album, Excitable Boy. The song choice is a small surprise, but Zevon is anything but: The War on Drugs have always stood proudly and obviously in the heartland rock lineage, and given that many others in there, like Zevon, had less-than-stellar reputations, they’ve also been an option that you could feel less messy about enjoying. It’s a beautiful take, but a less on-the-nose inspiration—they tackled a Bill Fay song and a Pretenders song multiple times in those years, for example—could have been a more interesting cover choice. LIVE DRUGS flows well, too, as if it were all from one show. Which is to say that listening to it feels like being at that show, which is a whole different feeling in late 2020. The live album has always functioned to some degree as a reminder—but more of moments, not of: “What’s a concert?” When Hall slams his toms to ignite the final surge of “Under the Pressure,” easily among their best live cuts, it’s like they heard the question. You can hear the audience, revved-up by the harnessed tension of the previous two minutes, bleed into the mix. They are singing gibberish along to the guitar melody, which maybe you have forgotten is the absolute best genre of rock-concert-singalong, transcending languages and inebriation levels. To have been there at that moment must have been a thrill. To hear it today, at this moment, feels like a gift. 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.

2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Super High Quality

November 23, 2020

f5a13ed5-631e-4b43-a9ba-83f9a0e7d68c

Steven Arroyo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/

Copenhagen band Lower's 2012 EP, Walk on Heads, possessed a specific kind of fury; their full-length debut, Seek Warmer Climes, is more romantic and refined, announcing a shift in Lower's sound. Lower are still noisy, but this time around they're focusing more on the jagged, wordy music you could easily term as "post-punk".

Copenhagen band Lower's 2012 EP, Walk on Heads, possessed a specific kind of fury; their full-length debut, Seek Warmer Climes, is more romantic and refined, announcing a shift in Lower's sound. Lower are still noisy, but this time around they're focusing more on the jagged, wordy music you could easily term as "post-punk".

Lower: Seek Warmer Climes

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19301-lower-seek-warmer-climes/

Seek Warmer Climes

The cover of the Copenhagen band Lower's 2012 EP, Walk on Heads, featured vocalist Adrian Toubro, head shaved, singing dramatically in a live setting. Its look and feel was reminiscent of an early hardcore 7", and the music itself possessed a similar kind of fury. Their full-length debut, Seek Warmer Climes, features a more romantic, refined image of a man in white lounging in the dirt, announcing a shift in Lower's sound. (The photo was taken by Lower bassist Kristian Emdal, who plays in Vår with Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, and who also did the cover art for Iceage's You're Nothing.) They're still noisy, but this time around they're focusing more on the jagged, wordy music you could easily term as "post-punk". The thing you'll notice first on Seek is the growth in Toubro's approach. He croons, and sighs, and doesn't shout as often. He possesses a writerly approach—the vocal lines often ramble and collide with the music as if he wants to cram in as many syllables as possible regardless of what the rest of the band is doing. His delivery smacks of the type of vocalists that gravitate towards new wave and death rock (and he somewhat resembles Bryan Ferry at times, too). Lower aren't making pop songs, but the best songs here have hooks. The central motif and narrative of opener "Another Life" ("Strive for another life/ Open your arms/ Invite it inside/ I'll show you what it takes to stay balanced"), along with Toubro's upbeat clip, makes for a potent salvo; that energy continues onto the second track, "Dart Persuasion", which pairs rabid drumming with another nice central repetition that would fit well in a manifesto: "For all the tragic scars of your past/ You pointed out/ With an eye pinned to your navel/ Should I be shocked to the core/ By your rigmarole/ Your snivelling narration." "Lost Weight, Perfect Skin" possesses a plastic surgery metaphor that comes across as ponderous, but it possesses enough fire to match the sarcastic, cutting sentiments within: "Lost weight, perfect skin/ Will bring the torment to an end/ Put the smile back on my lips." The album's first single, "Soft Option", is another good example of Lower in the zone, bringing in Morrissey-like background vocals with serrated guitars. Elsewhere, Seek can drag in a way that this kind of music shouldn't. "Unkempt, Uncaring" echoes its title in its loose construction and doesn't leave much of impression; elsewhere, the grand cacophony of "Bastard Tactics" and "Craver" don't amount to much more than that clatter. That said, even in Seek Warmer Climes' less impactful tracks, there are glimmering moments, and it's a testement to Lower that it's hard to discount any of the songs in their entirety. Befitting such a curious band, the best song on Seek Warmer Climes is the longest, and the one that features accompaniment by two cellos. The 7-minute "Expanding Horizons (Dar es Salaam)" is about Toubro traveling to Tanzani in 2009 to work at an orphanage and finding that the religiousness of the place conflicted with his own change-the-world idealism. He left, moved around Africa, was almost kidnapped in Dar Es Salaam, and so on. "Expanding Horizons" opens with him singing, "Here I stand/ On foreign land/ Expanding horizons/ Though nothing seems to match my fantasies/ I'm living a dream", and the song itself offers the spaciousness of travel. It's patient, open, and the build feels earned. When he repeats "caress yourself" a few dozen times toward the end, you want him to keep going with that brief, very effective phrase. It may not be fair, but it feels necessary regardless to acknowledge that fellow Danish punks, and associates, Iceage have cast a large shadow that all young Danish punk bands are measured against. That group's 2011 debut New Brigade still feels like the perfect encapsulation of the scene's overall aesthetic, and Lower strike me as the other Danish group from that scene who have it in them to reach those heights. Toubro has said that "every song on [Seek Warmer Climes] deals in some way with personal development, be it emotional or cosmetic. How to act in different social contexts, and to acclimatize oneself into a given situation without losing face." With that in mind, the occasional sense of compositional confusion makes sense: even if it doesn't always result in a thrilling listen, Seek Warmer Climes captures a promising band in transition.

2014-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

2014-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Matador

June 23, 2014

f5a25fdc-b1b8-449f-86ae-ad76471e418a

Brandon Stosuy

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

Foo Fighters dropped the free Saint Cecilia EP right before Thanksgiving. Though Grohl gushes over the spontaneity of its creation in the warm liner notes, the results sound about as slickly produced and hedge-betting as an actual Foo Fighters album.

Foo Fighters dropped the free Saint Cecilia EP right before Thanksgiving. Though Grohl gushes over the spontaneity of its creation in the warm liner notes, the results sound about as slickly produced and hedge-betting as an actual Foo Fighters album.

Foo Fighters: Saint Cecilia EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21315-foo-fighters-saint-cecilia-ep/

Saint Cecilia EP

Dave Grohl is as much of a rock 'n' roll ambassador as he is a rock musician at this point, and his politics stand on a well-meaning, but wobbly platform: whenever someone with an elite level of money, power and influence presents himself as an everydude, cognitive dissonance is inevitable. While the star-studded travelogue Sonic Highways promised "a musical map of America", it could've passed for a longform Hard Rock Café commercial, ignoring basically every genre outside of the blues-rock lineage. The featherweight Sound City: Reel to Reel documentary and soundtrack was similarly amicable, but it happened to conflate rock 'n roll's "human element" with the Neve console, a machine costing somewhere between $78,000 and $1 million. The same unintended gap in perspective between Grohl's aw-shucks persona and his output defines Saint Cecilia, a free EP dropped right before Thanksgiving. In the virtual liner notes, Grohl gushes over its recording process, telling of good friends digging through old riffs and creating new jams, wasted away in Margaritaville. The results still sound as slickly produced and hedge-betting as any actual Foo Fighters album. As well they should—when Dave Grohl and his friends want to record over a lost week(end), this means having Austin's St. Cecilia Hotel turned into a recording studio within the matter of hours, while Gary Clark Jr., Jack Black and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band jam in the periphery. There are expensive microphones and professional recording engineers and famous photographers namedropped like high school buddies. If you really want to hear Foo Fighters songs in chrysalis, by all means, find a bootlegged copy of Pocketwatch. Meanwhile, St. Cecilia's title track arrives already sounding like it's made the rounds on whatever's left of your local rock radio station. It's the most immediately pleasing thing they've done this decade and also the most instantly familiar, with a robust chorus built on a progression of straight-strummed barre chords, stacked harmonies and broad lyrics that express a general sense of yearning, but nothing that puts Grohl's personal life on the spot. In other words, it's not terribly different than "Learn to Fly" or "Times Like These" or "Next Year", proof that Foo Fighters are modern day, power-pop workhorses in their natural state rather than a rawk band. Whenever that reputation threatens to stick, Grohl always draws on a Northern Virginia upbringing that put him within driving distance of DC's hardcore scene. "Sean" and "Savior Breath" are punk Foo Fighters, or as punk as they can sound in 2015—infinitely more energetic than anything on Sonic Highways, but only incrementally edgier, Wasting Light without Butch Vig's glossy overlay. Foo Fighters couldn't make a truly sloppy, abrasive or hookless song if they tried, and they're certainly not going to. With every album prepping the inevitable Foo Fighters' Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, Grohl gets closer to actualizing his unstated goal of being this generation's Tom Petty, a real deal, aw-shucks everydude churning out one centrist and likeable rock song after another. Just look at Grohl's personal trajectory: After Kurt Cobain's suicide, he made the painful decision to turn down his hero's offer to play drums on tour with the Heartbreakers (Saturday Night Live had to do) and Foo Fighters have recently added "Breakdown" as a staple in their live sets. But even if Grohl's vocals are as immediately identifiable as Petty's by now, he is further than ever from having a distinct voice; Foo Fighters remain our most unknowable and emotionally blank rock stars. Grohl's hooks are wide enough to catch any feeling,—"Things are gonna go, no matter what I say/Nothing's set in stone, no matter what I say"; "Who you runnin' from?"; "No one lets everyone in." Foo Fighters are a power-pop band in this sense. But amidst the plodding alt-roots of "Iron Rooster", Grohl's genial recriminations ("Have you ever been young enough to feel what you wanted to feel/ Take back those years for something real") are best pointed back at him; as well as being their most diverse, hooky and unpredictable records, Foo Fighters and The Colour and the Shape were the only ones where you could trace Grohl's lyrics to some kind of source and there was still some question as to what he wanted this band to be. Even at their exalted status, Foo Fighters are not an institution like U2 or Coldplay; unlike those bands, there's never any debate or even discussion surrounding their next artistic move. If you consider Grohl in a rock 'n' roll CEO role, like Dan Auerbach or Jack White, it only draws attention to how perverse and prickly Auerbach and White  seem in comparison. But for as much effort as it takes to love Foo Fighters, it's nearly impossible to dislike them. Read Grohl's letter again and even Beach Slang can seem kinda wishy-washy about rock music, leaving no doubt that making Saint Cecilia was clearly a rejuvenating experience for Foo Fighters. The EP itself is less convincing as evidence.

2015-11-30T01:00:01.000-05:00

2015-11-30T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

RCA

November 30, 2015

f5abf5ee-8175-46bf-9dcd-a4a492a70417

Ian Cohen

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

The L.A. band has long carried the flag for a particular strain of SoCal indie, but the follow-up to 2016’s fashionably yearning Sunlit Youth sounds both more personal and more timeless.

The L.A. band has long carried the flag for a particular strain of SoCal indie, but the follow-up to 2016’s fashionably yearning Sunlit Youth sounds both more personal and more timeless.

Local Natives: Violet Street

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/local-natives-violet-street/

Violet Street

Local Natives epitomized L.A. indie with the airy harmonies, hirsute style, and earnest ambition of their lovably scrappy debut, 2010’s Gorilla Manor. As the decade comes to a close, they still do. A collaboration with the director Van Alpert and visual artist Public-Library on the video for the Shawn Everett-produced single “Café Amarillo” puts Local Natives just one degree of separation from Post Malone, Drake, Kacey Musgraves, and Nike, rather than Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes. But that kind of development is part of the inevitable gentrification that comes with long-term success. In 2019, you can hear the music of recent L.A. emigre Wild Nothing in 24 Hour Fitness and pay $3000 a month to call Wavves your landlord. The band has frequently been acclaimed (and occasionally criticized) for its uncanny ability to embody the sound of a particular moment, but the unusually direct lyricism and domestic mindset of Violet Street key the album not to the 2010s, specifically, but young adulthood in general—transitioning from post-grad uncertainty to adult grief to idealism to disillusion and, now, the business of getting on with the rest of their lives. Local Natives have led by example on that front. In 2017, under the Jaws of Love. alias, Kelcey Ayer released Tasha Sits Close to the Piano, a collection of tender ballads so intimate that they felt like a wedding gift made public. Bassist Nik Ewing covered Dennis Wilson’s troubled cult classic Pacific Ocean Blue in its entirety, and Taylor Rice got married, an event addressed here on the sleek, shimmering “When Am I Gonna Lose You.” Alongside Violet Street’s classy, retro sleeve, the new songs carry a thematic and sonic timelessness, a welcome sidestep after Sunlit Youth’s overreaching currency. The broad uplift in both the synth pop and politics of songs like “Fountain of Youth” feels frozen in a much happier, more innocent time, somewhere between a 6 p.m. Coachella set and hearing “Fight Song” at an “I’m With Her” rally. Most of Violet Street focuses on the unsung upkeep of relationships. If not especially sexy subject matter, it’s substantial enough to balance the aloe-infused smoothness of “When Am I Gonna Lose You” and “Café Amarillo” that carries over from Sunlit Youth. Local Natives have never shied from expanding their reach, and Violet Street’s singles could easily slide into drive-time playlists between the similarly soul-infused pop-rock of latter-day Beck, Haim, or Cage the Elephant, even though they are too emotionally jittery to feel comfortable, despite the luxe materials and enviable backdrops. Most of Violet Street’s lyrics bear that out literally. Rice traces the California coastline toward Big Sur with his wife on “When Am I Gonna Lose You,” unable to enjoy the moment for what it is; Ayer is halfway between Dover and Calais on “Café Amarillo," in search of grounding; formative memories of drinking cheap vodka admit the echoes of Dodger Stadium are slivers of sunlight in the June gloom of “Garden of Elysian”; while Wilshire Boulevard is reimagined as a post-apocalyptic wasteland on “Megaton Mile.” But for all of the globe-trotting that went into Violet Street, Local Natives remain quintessentially SoCal: genial, approachable, and optimistic, even if their surroundings are liable to be on fire or crumbling into the sea. Even the grim doomsaying of “Megaton Mile” sounds like a backyard party at ground zero, a soundclash of Earth, Wind and Fire’s ecstatic vocal volleys and “Gimme Shelter.” To the same extent that their artistic peak, Hummingbird, bore the deep blue imprint of its producer (the National’s Aaron Dessner), Violet Street follows Everett’s code of organic experimentalism. Local Natives don’t claim particularly esoteric influences; there’s something refreshingly quaint in the way they still gush over Frank Ocean and “Pyramid Song,” and designed “Munich II” to sync up with the intro to Drive. But whereas their integration of modern R&B felt a little too obvious on Sunlit Youth songs like “Coins,” to say nothing of their Beyoncé cover, Local Natives sound liberated by Everett’s oblique strategies, bringing the same kinetic energy they used to bash floor toms to stitch together samples in ProTools. They created the symphonic soul of “Megaton Mile” by feeding loops to the mixing console and playing “a game of Twister” on the faders; the “musical time machine” app Radiooooo spawned the Silver Lake sunrise of “Munich II”; and the brief return to their previous album’s blaring KROQ synths, on “Gulf Shores,” is actually a guitar run through fuzz pedals. The harmonies still have the tendency to gloss over the grit in the lyrics, but the refrain on “Café Amarillo” goes to the heart of an album that balances immediate lyrics and inscrutable methods, to ends both experimental and elemental: “Some things are so simple, they’re impossible to explain.”

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

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

Rock

Loma Vista

May 3, 2019

f5af8177-b628-48f6-aec2-05b80d397394

Ian Cohen

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

On her second album, the Montreal songwriter pens straightforward tales of escape but fares best when she’s retreating into fantasy.

On her second album, the Montreal songwriter pens straightforward tales of escape but fares best when she’s retreating into fantasy.

Ada Lea: one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ada-lea-one-hand-on-the-steering-wheel-the-other-sewing-a-garden/

one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden

When the going gets rough, Alexandra Levy flees—by bus, by car, or by daydream. On her debut album as Ada Lea, 2019’s enticingly messy what we say in private, the Montreal musician reported on breakup grief with one foot out the door. But her second album, one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, is narrated on the go. “I’m flying out of here tonight like a butterfly,” she sings on “violence,” her words followed by booming drums. After three nearly percussion-less minutes, her breakthrough suggests that the price of escape—having to constantly look over her shoulder—is worth the departure. Written in bursts over the past few years and co-produced with Phoebe Bridgers collaborator Marshall Vore, one hand covers a wide range of stories, both autobiographical and fictional. On the moody folk-pop highlight “partner,” Levy sings through hazy vocal filters over percussive pitter-patter, memories of a past romance flashing through her mind as she hits the road. On the throbbing nylon acoustic ballad “hurt,” she imagines busing back to her parents’ house after a particularly rough breakup; on “backyard,” she fantasizes about never having left in the first place. “Stars wouldn’t leave our backyards for as long as we’d ask them to stay/And they stayed,” she sings in a daze. She sounds like she wants to remain there forever too. Levy is at her best when she’s retreating into fantasy. During the second verse of “my love 4 u is real,” she describes walking up cathedral steps, with a wedding band “foreshadowing something tragic, something mad.” As her narrator moves forward, Levy’s voice sharpens alongside backing vocalist Charlie Hickey, and the gurgling synths get louder. The music is appropriately high-stakes for the dizzy spells that Levy describes, and the melody only gets catchier as the noise increases. “I wanted so badly for you to feel it like I did,” she sings in her highest register, addressing a love that isn’t “like other love that hangs there half-dead, always taking something from behind your back.” The explosive distortion mirrors her rage and desperation at the unrequited affection. This burst of electric guitar and drums, helping Levy convey the disorienting aftermath of doomed romance, feels more connected to the shapeshifting chaos of what we say in private than the rest of one hand: Nothing else here thrills like the constant twists of “mercury” or the monstrous seething that ended “for real now (not pretend).” Levy opts for more straightforward sounds, but she also manages to carve some new territory. The gentle yet ominous propulsion of “can’t stop me from dying” evokes the feeling of walking home alone at 5 a.m. in complete darkness, convinced a stranger is following you. “Nothing in the world can stop me from dying again,” Levy repeats, imagining her own Montreal version of the time-looping Netflix series Russian Doll. Both narratively and sonically, it’s a striking contrast to the album’s more literal stories: This fictional character actually can press the reset button. But each escape, whether real or imagined, is a chance to start anew. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Saddle Creek

October 7, 2021

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Max Freedman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/

Fronted by onetime Jay Reatard collaborator Ryan Rousseau, the Arizona collective Destruction Unit's chaotic sophomore album Deep Trip is spacey and punky, and it refuses to acknowledge that there’s anything remotely untoward about that particular alchemy of elements.

Fronted by onetime Jay Reatard collaborator Ryan Rousseau, the Arizona collective Destruction Unit's chaotic sophomore album Deep Trip is spacey and punky, and it refuses to acknowledge that there’s anything remotely untoward about that particular alchemy of elements.

Destruction Unit: Deep Trip

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18382-destruction-unit-deep-trip/

Deep Trip

There’s a chapter in Mark Barrowcliffe’s 2007 memoir The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange in which the author recounts the time in the late 70s when he stopped listening to punk-- the cool music of his native England at the time-- and got into Hawkwind instead. Hawkwind, so his teenaged self reasoned, was more conducive to his Dungeons & Dragons lifestyle and its fixation on all things mystic, cosmic, and denim-jacketed. Punk was about confrontation; Hawkwind was about escapism. At the same time, Barrowcliffe glosses over the basic irony: Many early punk bands, including the Stranglers and the Damned, were influenced by Hawkwind-- and Hawkwind could rage as ferociously as their punk cousins, even when singing about psychedelic warlords and space rituals. For Destruction Unit, this is all so much false dichotomy. The Arizona collective’s sophomore album, Deep Trip, is spacey. And it’s punky. And it refuses to acknowledge that there’s anything remotely untoward about that particular alchemy of elements. Void, released earlier this year, showed glints of this shimmering space-punk alloy, but it hadn’t quite cohered and hardened. That’s understandable; although the band came together a decade ago, while frontman Ryan Rousseau was serving in the Reatards-- Jay Reatard and his Lost Sounds bandmate Alicja Trout were original members of D-Unit back then-- the group’s current lineup is relatively new. The scrambled, scratchy shakiness of Void has given way to a sound that’s far more focused, corralled, and even refined in its primal ergonomics of paranoia. Chaos abounds, but it’s been funneled into Deep Trip’s streamlined and astrodynamic pulse. As pulses go, it’s still an erratic one. One of Rousseau’s strengths is knowing the difference between being spacey and being droning; although Deep Trip tracks such as “Slow Death Sounds” and “Final Flight” are brutally, brain-poundingly simple, their riffs don’t lapse into repetition for the sake of repetition. There’s some deceptively catchy and even classic songwriting going on, as one might expect from an ex-Reatard. Here, though, those caveman hooks are given an even more corroded crust of gunk, howl, and echo. On “Control the Light”, Rousseau gulps for air in some bug-eyed trance, like Lux Interior’s last gasp stuck in a near-death-experience loop. Grinding washes of wah pedal and modulated distortion evoke misanthropic freakouts and crises of pataphysical identity, and the low throb of motorik locomotion creeps in to calm the spasms. The chemical formula is a familiar one to Hawkwind cultists. But “The World On Drugs” and “God Trip” are far less merciless in their cenophobic contemplation of the emptiness of space, both inner and outer. Rousseau and crew are shoveling noise like frantic androids to fill the void, a process of proto-industrial dehumanization that mirrors Chrome at their most savage and severe. But where Chrome-- and their closest contemporaries, Hawkwind-- skirted punk, Destruction Unit embraces it, sticking everything from garage slop to hardcore convulsion into its nihilistic nightmare fantasy. But in the same way Chrome and Hawkwind crafted eternal hymns to stellar and cellular entropy, Deep Trip is anything but fixed to any one time and place-- contemporary or retro. Even when the album infrequently dips into crooning, diffuse looseness on “The Holy Ghost”, there’s something more timelessly potent in the way D-Unit throttles the warp drive. If space-rock as a whole is a role-playing game, one in which its players imagine having front-row seats for the heat-death of the universe, then Deep Trip is the one of most advanced vehicles yet designed to take them there.

2013-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00

2013-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Sacred Bones

August 21, 2013

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Jason Heller

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/

We hear the avant-garde composer’s antic voice here and there on her interpretation of Vivaldi’s masterpiece. If it’s not a mind meld, it’s at least as fun as a Face Swap filter on Instagram.

We hear the avant-garde composer’s antic voice here and there on her interpretation of Vivaldi’s masterpiece. If it’s not a mind meld, it’s at least as fun as a Face Swap filter on Instagram.

Anna Meredith: Anno

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-meredith-anno/

Anno

“The Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi have been balled up, stretched, flattened. They have been remixed, rewritten, “reimagined,” deconstructed: Whatever interpretive violence can be done to a piece of music has been visited upon these four drearily familiar little concerti composed in the 18th century. The same way that hip new restaurants tee up to offer their spin on the hamburger, modern composers will turn to “The Four Seasons” to demonstrate the extent of their daring on its blank canvas. Max Richter loosened the timing belt on the piece’s engine, so that the fluttering strings fell out of sync, calling to each other over distances like lost birds. Now Anna Meredith—whose most famous composition sounds like the “Ride of the Valkyries” as reenacted by an arcade machine—swaggers up to these broken, chipped-up monuments to see what she can do. The weirdest thing about Anna Meredith’s spin on “The Four Seasons” is that, at least at first, there doesn’t appear to be much of one. Her collaboration with the Scottish Ensemble begins pretty reverently: The harpsichord on “Spring” is genteel enough, and the string playing idiomatic enough to make you forget you’re not listening to a local daytime classical station. Only at the edges does Anna Meredith practice mischief—at the very end, “Spring” melts into cawing birds, fluttering wings. Meredith’s antic voice comes out in these interstitial bursts. She cherry-picks moments from each of the four concerti and weaves them together with her own additions, which separate the movements. These pieces do all kinds of interesting little things—smudge the borders between movements, offer ambivalent shades of feeling, comment on the themes themselves. What they don’t do much of, really, is show us what Meredith is drawn to in this classical-music chestnut in the first place. They seem like bedfellows of convenience, or commission, rather than like minds of any sort. Meredith’s music is caffeinated, anxious, exultant—in a word, urban. She tends to luxuriate in feelings of dark panic, of clamminess. Hearing her descend on these pastoral themes like some mechanized swarm of bees is fun, in a vandalizing sort of way, but some of these the pieces aren’t in conversation with Vivaldi so much as they hock spitballs at him. The burbling keys of “Autumn” crash into the end of “Summer” like a Stereolab album that has poked its head into the wrong meeting. Her muted material casts longer, more unsettling shadows. “Low Light ,” one of two elaborations on Winter, sounds a little like “Dowager,” a lovely chamber-pop highlight from her 2016 album Varmints. It’s a reminder that although many institutions have turned to Meredith to give them kinetic, exciting commissions, she can also summon vast reserves of feeling. On her addition to “Summer,” which she titles “Haze,” she draws out long-limbed, sinuous melody lines, which sound like the evaporating fumes of the movement itself. As the harmony darkens, bringing some hints of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (another chestnut from classical’s unofficial Top 40) with it, wisps of keyboard smear the digital/analog border. This little zone feels like a fertile clearing—not quite belonging to Meredith, but bearing her marks; not quite Vivaldi, though haunted by his melodies. If it’s not a mind meld, it’s at least as fun as a Face Swap filter on Instagram. Anno might have worked better, or engaged more fully, on stage, where it was accompanied by lights, by projected images, by surround electronics. Live, it landed in that bright, attractive zone between performance and installation, the kind that that tends to attract young audiences and win press. On record, however, it feels less consequential—intermittently fun, occasionally pretty, slightly surprising. The larger problem isn’t so much with Meredith or Vivaldi as the question of why they were ever in the same room in the first place. Without a larger sense of comity, the kind that tends to unite jazz musicians with Stravinsky, or techno producers with Steve Reich, Anno has the feel of a speed-dating workshop. You can’t deny anyone’s enthusiasm or ingenuity in the venture. But, looking at the results, you can’t help but wonder if everyone’s energy was best spent elsewhere.

2018-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Moshi Moshi

August 24, 2018

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Jayson Greene

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

The solo debut from this rapper and singer, who’s worked with Usher and Jidenna, unfolds like a shamelessly wild night out, with material highs and emotional lows galore.

The solo debut from this rapper and singer, who’s worked with Usher and Jidenna, unfolds like a shamelessly wild night out, with material highs and emotional lows galore.

SAINt JHN: Collection 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saint-jhn-collection-1/

Collection 1

Shamelessness rules SAINt JHN’s world. It’s a place devoid of inhibition, where overindulgence is as regular as breathing, and “ratchet” is a compliment of the highest order. Consider his maddeningly addictive single “I Heard You Got Too Litt Last Night,” a gleeful account of bad decisions (“One pill had her looking like Naomi/And two pills had her looking like my soulmate”) without any of the regret. When he sings the hook over wacky synths and a bit of boom, it’s more a pleased taunt than an accusation. On the contrary, by his own measure, “it was a vibe.” SAINt JHN grew up between the Caribbean nation of Guyana and New York, and got his feet wet in the music industry writing songs for Usher, Jidenna and Hoodie Allen before deciding he no longer wanted to “live [his] life through other people’s voices.” Now, he’s using his own to showcase himself as an artist with as much potential as he has bad habits. His full-length debut, Collection 1, unfolds like one of the wild nights he loves singing about, offering a contrasting portrait of material highs and emotional lows along the way. When “I Heard” finally hits at the end of the album, it’s a dazed flashback to all the debauchery that’s come before. To listen to Collection 1 is to inhabit, however briefly, the highly Instagrammable lives of the pretty ones. There’s more alcohol and drugs than anyone could ever need, but underneath the haute fashion and the partying-based lifestyle is a bed of insecurity and hurt. It’s not necessarily new ground, but SAINt JHN’s overly-proud air does a good job of convincing listeners that it’s all flex and fun...until it isn’t. For every turned-up bender, the depression of “Some Nights” is trailing not far behind. The song, which wears a major Kid Cudi influence on its sleeve, is the album’s most introspective. “Some nights I kill myself just so I can feel like I’m so alive,” he moans: Heartbreak is the reason for this particular trip to the bar or club. The vapory “Reflex,” meanwhile, captures both moods in one swoop. It’s all “bad bitches,” “real niggas” and foreigns, almost but not quite hiding lines like “picture me rolling something up to chase the demons.” These brief flashes pull the bravado down to earth, grounding the album in something beyond superficial vice. Stylistically, SAINt JHN fits well within the current pop landscape, with his seamless shifts between rapping (“Traci Lords”), singing (“Selfish”), and sing-rapping (“3 Below”). He borrows from everywhere: “God Bless The Ratchets” sounds like it could’ve been pulled from a SoundCloud trending list, while “Brilliant Bitch” is the sort of trap-y R&B song that rules more mainstream charts. With his industry experience in tow, it’s clear he knows his way around a song. His hooks are sticky, and the production choices are primed for ubiquity. “Selfish,” in particular, is a display of undeniable pop prowess, with its arena-ready synths, island-flavored garnishes, and wispy vocals lamenting an ill-fated romance (“I wish we were both somebody else/so you wouldn’t be somebody else’s”). Taken as a whole, Collection 1 plays out like a series of tweets, going so far as to even adopt the lingo social media has helped popularize (“lit,” “issa vibe”). SAINt JHN is just charismatic enough to pull it off. He makes a balancing act of self-examination and self-destruction, and still emerges largely unapologetic for the choices he’s made. It makes for an enchanting soundtrack for the most reckless of nights and the morning after.

2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Godd ComplexX

March 30, 2018

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Briana Younger

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

In the second installment of his “COVID-themed” remix series, the Brooklyn-based drummer-producer reworks jazz classics and modern recordings.

In the second installment of his “COVID-themed” remix series, the Brooklyn-based drummer-producer reworks jazz classics and modern recordings.

Kassa Overall: Shades of Flu 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kassa-overall-shades-of-flu-2/

Shades of Flu 2

Kassa Overall isn’t being glib when he calls his Shades of Flu series “COVID-themed.” It was cruel that the pandemic hit America at the same time the Brooklyn-based drummer-producer’s excellent second album, I Think I’m Good, dropped, forcing him to go to ground when he should have been out riding the crest of a wave. Remixing has provided an outlet during this strange period in the jazz world. By taking apart old records and piecing them back together in audacious new ways, Shades of Flu encapsulates the adaptability of musicians forced to create in their bedrooms and basements. The sometimes tumultuous nature of Kassa’s mixes also reflects the peculiarity of present-day existence. There’s an element of chaos to this music you wouldn’t associate with Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note, the series’ clearest inspiration. Shades of Flu 2: In These Odd Times improves upon what made last year’s Shades of Flu: Healthy Remixes For an Ill Moment great. Once again, Kassa remixes jazz recordings, both old and modern, but this time he recruits musicians from his inner circle, such as Dezron Douglas, Brandee Younger, and Tomoki Sanders (son of Pharoah), to add new improvisations to the old arrangements. Yet Shades of Flu remains highly personal. It’s easy to picture Kassa thumbing through his vinyl shelves to get a feeling for which of his favorite cuts he can reinterpret. Like the first album, the set takes the form of one single track with Kassa’s voice wandering in and out of the mix to guide you, giving it the feel of a DJ set. As before, one of the most prominent sounds Kassa adds is a flat, thumping style of programmed percussion. Placed under jazz recordings’ acoustic timbres, it creates a natural tension. Those drums are present on Kassa’s take on Kris Davis’ “Diatom Ribbons,” from the prolific Canadian pianist’s 2019 album of the same name. Kassa jumps around different points of the arrangement, focusing on short piano riffs or simply letting the brass solos ride out, deconstructing Davis’ work like a mad scientist obsessed with unraveling the composition’s mysteries. To top it off, in the intro, he shouts out each musician’s first name, like a jazz hypeman. Specters of hip-hop history fly through Shades of Flu 2. Kassa loops the word “one” throughout the Heath Brothers’ late-night funk number “Smilin Billy Suite Part 1” in a way that’s reminiscent of Ghostface Killah’s “One.” The opening bass riff of “The Creator Has a Master Plan” gestures toward A Tribe Called Quest’s iconic Lou Reed sample, and Kassa takes the low-hanging fruit by editing in one of Rakim’s most famous bars: “Thinking of a masterplan.” Most surprisingly, he adds what appears to be Kanye West’s drum intro and vocal ad libs from “Heard ‘Em Say” into Wayne Shorter’s “Ponta de Areia.” There are even elegant guest verses from Stas THEE Boss of THEESatisfaction and Nappy Nina to match the cool double bass of “I’m a King” (which doesn’t list its source material), while one voice—probably Kassa’s—is slowed to a hypnotic crawl, evoking the spirit of DJ Screw. He understands that remixing and rap can’t be disentangled. Despite some radical alterations, Kassa typically preserves the general tone of the songs he reworks. There are times when you get the impression he just wants to vibe to his favorite records with you. On a new mix of Roy Hargrove’s beautiful midnight jazz tune “Never Let Me Go,” he embellishes the soft piano with just a few extra elements. And he preserves the Hitchcockian air of Chick Corea’s “Trio Improvisation Part 2,” a claustrophobic cut for piano and violin, but takes it to another plane by adding panicked voices and percussion that sounds like a ticking clock. The set ends with Kenny Baron’s “Passion Dance” as Kassa takes the original’s storm of piano keys and adds jittering drums to form a more tweaked-out piece. The young futurist’s final act is to bask in the sound of applause. And so he should. With Shades of Flu 2: In These Odd Times, Kassa Overall once again proves that COVID measures can’t deter his determination to push jazz into strange new realms. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Jazz / Rap

self-released

April 14, 2021

f5e801a4-dc29-4ea9-8f65-4e9ac76b30e8

Dean Van Nguyen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/

The enigmatic Philadelphia producer’s latest release submerges vocals in dark interiors, suggesting that the truth may lie just under the surface of our perception.

The enigmatic Philadelphia producer’s latest release submerges vocals in dark interiors, suggesting that the truth may lie just under the surface of our perception.

Pontiac Streator: Triz

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pontiac-streator-triz/

Triz

Pontiac Streator’s music seems deliberately engineered to confuse; it arrives without any real clues as to how it’s meant to be parsed. The pseudonymous Streator is based in Philadelphia, but his releases are conceptually detached from place. They don’t belong to Philly, or any other city, as much they belong to a particular scene. You might call it West Mineral-adjacent; flitting between styles and stage names, the loosely defined collective putting out ambient-electronic music on labels like Motion Ward and Experiences Ltd. is unified by a commitment to the intentionally obscure. It suggests that these heady sounds are more purely absorbed without the constraints of identity and specificity. This elusive M.O. works on the level of Streator’s discography, too. 11 Items, Streator’s 2019 collaboration with Ulla Straus, handled a dizzying breadth of textures, from slippery, percussive rumblings (“Item 3”) to a sort of sleek, postmodern TV performance, complete with samples of a live studio audience (“Item 7”). The projects Streator has already put out this year range from punishing cybergrind and noise (virtualdemonlaxative) to restless, tongue-in-cheek ambient (Micro Incubus) to more amorphous chill-out music (Select Works . vol 1). All of it is uniquely stubborn, resisting interpretation at every turn. Streator’s new solo album Triz is just as confounding as these past works, but offers a deeper, buzzier high. The density is part of the appeal; with repeated listens, the record’s intricate mixes yield new surprises. “Post Los” is a burbling mass of unplaceable, vaguely organic sounds, as indebted to the alien dialogue in District 9 as to the effects of Space Cadet 3D Pinball. “Lamp Fest,” another feat of layering, is roomier, and nearly tropical—as close to restful as the album comes, while still managing to sustain the spell. Though there are no lead vocal parts on Triz, the album is haunted by voices. Ghostly hums trace the contours of “Transier Unt”—a chilly fractal of ambient electronics—while “Trizlang Gem” rests on soft choral figures. “Om Ne Ud” recalls Loscil’s aquatic concept record Submers, but the textures here are busier and more tightly knit; studded with blips that feel a little like sonar, the track bleeds periodically into lo-fi radio crackle—transmissions of what sounds like a human voice, its message hopelessly scrambled. On “Angelus Spit,” which invites similarly garbled vocal fragments into an emptier tableau, those corrupted blasts feel like a taunt. The truth echoes out there, Streator hints: It would offer some resolution, if only we had the tools to decode it. The breakdown of communication and perception is at the heart of the final track, “Stuck in a Cave.” The production is sticky and humid, embellished with alien bird calls; what might initially scan as naturalistic is filtered to the point of feeling eerily artificial. Streator works best in the dark, in constructed interiors and glitched-out paradoxes; here, finally, the radio dispatches of “Om Ne Ud” and “Angelus Spit” crystallize into something at least perceptible, if not entirely lucid: “I’m stuck in a cave, what’s happening?” Triz is less an answer to the question than an acknowledgment that there may not be one. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

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

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

Electronic

Motion Ward

August 4, 2020

f5ea3347-ae59-43b5-b5c0-b32d36559cfb

Will Gottsegen

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

The reunited Guided by Voices' third 2012 release is the most consistent of the lot, faithfully approximating the tumbling, track-to-track momentum of the band's mid-90s masterworks, proving that Pollard and co are determined to make the most of this second wind.

The reunited Guided by Voices' third 2012 release is the most consistent of the lot, faithfully approximating the tumbling, track-to-track momentum of the band's mid-90s masterworks, proving that Pollard and co are determined to make the most of this second wind.

Guided by Voices: The Bears for Lunch

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17321-the-bears-for-lunch/

The Bears for Lunch

Even when Robert Pollard was exploring new extremes in amateur home-recording, hyper-prolific songwriting, and Budweiser consumption in the 1990s, he was always picky about which of the thousands of songs he wrote was officially issued under the Guided by Voices name. From their 1986 formation through to the b(r)and's dissolution in 2004, Guided by Voices proper released an average of one full-length album per year. That's a brisk clip for most acts, but a relative coffee drip when you consider the song overflow Pollard continues to divert to his exponentially increasing array of solo and side projects. So his decision last year to revive Guided by Voices with its "classic" 1992-96-era line-up suggested a return not just to the band's ramshackle roots, but their old quality-control standards as well. The band's actual post-reunion strategy tells a different story. Pollard and co. were already well into their mid-30s when the band first emerged in the early 90s. Now, two decades on, they seem determined to make the most of this second wind and release as much music as possible while they can still physically withstand the scissor kicks and windmills. The Bears for Lunch is their third album of 2012, following January's comeback Let's Go Eat the Factory and June's Class Clown Spots a UFO. And like its immediate predecessors, The Bears effectively picks up where this line-up left off with 1996's Under the Bushes Under the Stars, mediating between the band's formative lo-fi lunacy and their desire for a more streamlined sound. But if all this new GBV material faithfully approximates the form and fidelity of the band's signature works, its impact has been diminished by a lack of context or conceptual vision. Back in the mid-90s, each new GBV album played out like a game of "will they or won't they": would Pollard and his trusty foil Tobin Sprout limit their morsels of melody to 60-second spurts, or would they allow the songs to flourish into alternate-universe power-pop classics? And despite their randomized appearances, those album sequences were always carefully considered, where even the seemingly throwaway tracks were strategically stitched into the crazy-quilt patchwork. But by mostly settling into the Under the Bushes mid-fi comfort zone, the band's 2012 albums mostly just sound like one Guided by Voices song after another-- some exceptional, some forgettable. That's hardly a bum deal for long-time fans, but there's little sense of the organizing principles that made those early albums eminently replayable and rewarding. The Bears for Lunch, however, is the most consistent of this year's trifecta. It may not boast an instant, indeliable earworm like Class Clown's "Keep It Motion" or Factory's "Doughnut for a Snowman", but there are no buzzkill duds like "The Big Hat and Toy Show" either. And, of the three, it's the album that most faithfully approximates the tumbling, track-to-track momentum of the band's mid-90s masterworks, with off-the-cuff oddities like the gruff busker ditty "Have a Jug" and the absurdist chant "Finger Gang" effectively setting up more dignified, resonant turns like "Hangover Child" and "The Challenge Is Much More". As per GBV tradition, Pollard's lyrical concerns mostly orbit around aviation, medieval folklore, and boys of various preternatural abilities. So the greatest revelations here come when Pollard seemingly takes stock of his own mortality, as on the sleazily suggestive love song "She Lives in an Airport" ("she makes it quicker and competition thicker/ designed to spark up a real weak ticker") or on "The Military School Dance Dismissal", which sounds like Pollard crooning a Hunky Dory piano ballad in some Dayton dive at the age of 85. Sprout, for his part, responds to Pollard's ever-changing whims by keeping his feet firmly planted in Rubber Soul, contributing The Bears' most richly melodious songs in the folksy "Waking Up the Stars" and "Waving at Airplanes" (the latter of which is no less poignant for pinching its acoustic fanfare from Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love"). Taken together, GBV's three releases this year plot an alternate late-90s course for the band, one which in Pollard stuck with his basement buds and never hooked up with Cobra Verde for 1997's muscular Mag Earwhig!, never signed to TVT, and never asked for Ric Ocasek's phone number. This GBV would've simply continued to crank out album after album of pleasingly wobbly indie rock, gradually refining their craft and reining in their eccentricities but stopping short of realizing their hi-fi arena rock potential. Still, as The Bears' late-album progression gets tripped up by the one-note discord of "Tree Fly Jet" and "Amorphous Surprise", you can't help but think the band's re-emergence would be that much more dramatic if they had pared down their three 2012 releases into one record stacked with the best songs from each; surely, no O.G. GBV fan would've felt cheated by receiving "only" a single, no-filler album from a line-up they never thought they'd see in action again. After all, Guided by Voices' 1994 critical breakthrough Bee Thousand was as much a triumph of judicious pruning as quality songcraft; the most important takeaway from this year is that Guided by Voices can still produce enough of the latter to allow for the luxury of the former.

2012-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00

2012-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Guided by Voices Inc. / Fire

November 12, 2012

f5ece6cb-71ac-4982-aad7-630f8e6ed00f

Stuart Berman

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

The Austin-based producer Spencer Stephenson (aka Botany) builds his music, made from loosely interlocking samples and loops, like a collage artist.

The Austin-based producer Spencer Stephenson (aka Botany) builds his music, made from loosely interlocking samples and loops, like a collage artist.

Botany: Raw Light II

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22795-botany-raw-light-ii/

Raw Light II

The music made by Austin-based producer Spencer Stephenson (aka Botany) has an air of psychedelic spirituality. Stephenson has toyed with narrative frameworks to bolster this impression: His third album, an instrumental project released last year called Deepak Verbera, was presented as a continuation of the 20th-century work of an Argentinian metaphysical researcher named Horris E. Campos. Except, it’s not entirely clear that Campos was real. “Horris is kind of my Ziggy Stardust, a character that I feel like I channel music through in some way,” Stephenson told FACT Magazine a few months ago. As Botany, Stephenson builds his production like a loose-handed collage artist. He doesn’t interlock his samples—obscure and unexpectedly funky loops, religious chanting, Eastern psychedelic sounds—so much as neatly pile them atop one another, setting into motion paralleling trajectories. Sometimes Stephenson’s beats seem to end in two different places, resolving separate beginnings. The former jazz drummer has also become increasingly indifferent to consistent percussion, often letting his creations meander with a casual disregard for traditional structure that borders on ambient. *Raw Light II *is Stephenson’s fourth album as Botany, but he’s billed it as a follow-up and companion piece to his sophomore record Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw. Both albums were mastered by the L.A. beat scene mainstay and Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid, but the new one is a little shorter and entirely instrumental, skipping out on the welcome vocal appearances of the original. Stephenson’s beats are certainly busy enough to stand alone and command their own attention, and they just as frequently demand some patience. Stephenson often barely avoids cacophony, but seems to revel in his nearness to the effect. At the middle of “Yon,” Stephenson strips away everything but a throbbing bottom-end kick, maybe just to splay out the absurd intrigue of the sounds he’s lifting. Is that a cow mooing? Suddenly it sounds perfectly nice underneath an anxious shout and hymnal vocal bops. The density of Stephenson’s sample-stitching can obscure the accomplishment of the pairings themselves. There are plenty of sounds and interesting moments I heard only through headphones and furrowed concentration, but I’m not sure I enjoyed the record that way any more than setting it in motion and zoning out. Still, some of the tracks are convoluted enough to constitute a slog. “Janis Joplin,” a short burst of a track in the middle of the record, stands apart. It stutters and clanks along, but it serves up the most immediately digestible, loopy funk here, like an intermission palette-cleanser. I found myself returning to the song often, but never enjoyed it as much out of context. It’s the same effect Stephenson nurtures throughout, arranging unexpected sounds and somehow making them sound perfectly, weirdly in sequence together.

2017-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Western Vinyl

January 19, 2017

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Jay Balfour

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

Combining folk instrumentation and found sound, the Norwegian duo’s debut fosters a sense of familiarity, even when the music meanders.

Combining folk instrumentation and found sound, the Norwegian duo’s debut fosters a sense of familiarity, even when the music meanders.

Konradsen: Saints and Sebastian Stories

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/konradsen-saints-and-sebastian-stories/

Saints and Sebastian Stories

Norweigan duo Konradsen’s debut was written over a period of three years by band members and longtime friends Jenny Marie Sabel and Eirik Vildgren, and the meticulous attention to detail bears this out. Saints and Sebastian Stories moves from one lush set piece to the next, interrupted by the occasional spoken interlude. The instrumentation signifies folk, but the music is less inspired by contemporaries Jesca Hoop or Laura Marling than someone like Blonde-era Frank Ocean, even as the horn arrangements and quirky touches are indebted to Sufjan Stevens. Comparisons abound, though the result is less memorable than the influences. With the creativity of a bedroom recording and the polish of studio production, these 13 songs often feel like sketches. Found sounds and samples create a sense of familiarity, even when the music meanders. “Dice,” the first song Sabel and Vildgren made together, swaps out traditional percussion for the sounds of cutlery and clinking dishes. “Television Land” arrives with a bizarre prelude from a family friend (both the friend and the track are dubbed “Big Bruce”) before interpolating Bette Midler’s classic “The Rose,” referencing the Brad Pitt baseball drama Moneyball, and incorporating a surprisingly jazzy groove into its climax. The left-field references complement the music’s found-art aesthetic without really clarifying anything. Lead songwriter Sabel’s voice is airy and upfront, her singing alternating between conventional runs and babbling ad-libs. Still, a record this quiet needs lyrics that deliver, and that’s where Saints and Sebastian Stories begins to fall short. The imagery can be evocative (“Hold me closer/The rest is an odd mistake”), but they are too opaque by half. For every moment of clarity (“Some say I should never be a mother/It’s a loving thought I left to die,” from closer “Written to the Others”) there are long stretches where they seem to be saying nothing much with great effort. With time the music blends together, until initially beguiling arrangements become less surprising. The drum break in “Give” or the unexpected saxophone solo that closes “Roasted” are gorgeous, but the songs don’t gel. The influences seem to become more overt as well; the self-conscious Justin Vernon mimicry of “Baby Hallelujah” is distracting, and “Warm Wine” recalls José Gonzélez’s electronic experiments without reinterpreting them. Listeners fond of early 2010s folk like the moody, wandering Ben Howard or Americana trio the Staves will feel at home in Konradsen’s record. Both Howard and the Staves took ambitious detours after finding initial success with less interesting music; Konradsen’s approach skips the groundwork to go for experimentation. It’s folk music untethered from tradition, prioritizing well-crafted production over well-crafted songwriting.

2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00

Folk/Country

Cascine

November 5, 2019

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Hannah Jocelyn

https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/

Two notable sidemen collaborate on an elusive instrumental album inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music. The melodies are fleeting and the arrangements ever-shifting.

Two notable sidemen collaborate on an elusive instrumental album inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music. The melodies are fleeting and the arrangements ever-shifting.

Pino Palladino / Blake Mills: Notes With Attachments

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pino-palladino-blake-mills-notes-with-attachments/

Notes With Attachments

Contradictory as it sounds, Pino Palladino is possibly the most famous working session bassist. The 63-year-old Welshman is known for his glissando tone and melodic fills, and he has built a four-decade career as the ultimate supporting player: providing a Stravinsky-inspired fretless performance on Paul Young’s 1983 U.K. number No. 1 Marvin Gaye cover “Wherever I Lay My Head,” contributing to neo-soul landmarks Mama’s Gun and Voodoo, joining The Who after the death of original bassist John Entwhistle in 2002, and much more. Notes With Attachments is the first album released under Palladino’s own name, co-headlining with producer and instrumentalist Blake Mills. The 34-year-old Mills has a similar history as a supporting player, producing for artists like Perfume Genius and Alabama Shakes and facilitating Fiona Apple’s playing on Bob Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. After first collaborating on John Legend’s 2016 album Darkness and Light, the pair developed songs from Palladino’s archive of musical sketches, recording with a small group of players at famed Los Angeles studio Sound City in a series of sessions spanning two and a half years. Notes With Attachments is an elusive instrumental album, subtle despite the pun in its title. The songs are based around repeating chord changes inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music, but the continuously shifting arrangements mean that no one instrument carries the melody for long. It’s the sound of consummate collaborators imagining a world where there’s no such thing as a lead performer. On “Ekuté,” Palladino’s bass and guitar lines bounce off each other in a syncopated rhythm. As fuzzy, distorted yawns of guitar give way to squealing saxophone and bass clarinet, the players match intensities so that they sound almost like the same instrument at different ends of its range. The song started out as a Fela Kuti-inspired one-chord jam. “We were trying to figure out all the different places that one beat or bassline could take you,” Mills said in a statement. Many songs here seem as if they were already in the air, just waiting to be captured in final form: “Man From Molise” began as a Palladino composition inspired by Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal and recorded with a New York ensemble. Mills played it at half-speed, and from there the duo created an entirely new song—though a sluggish feeling lingers, exacerbated by the lopsided 7/8 time signature. “Soundwalk” was written around a horn arrangement extracted from a fully mixed demo that Palladino and saxophonist Jacques Schwartz-Bart recorded while snowed in at a Chicago hotel during D’Angelo’s 2000 Voodoo tour; its lurching rhythm is reminiscent of another D’Angelo collaborator, J Dilla. The percussion drops in and out while the saxophones drag the music ahead, as if the players were exchanging glances, unsure whether to keep playing but carrying on anyway. For listeners expecting a more conventionally groovy project from Palladino, the album’s restless rhythms may be unsettling. Compared to neo-soul or blues-rock, the melodies are fleeting, the grooves more intricate and less dependent on the downbeat. Running contrary to expectations is part of Mills’ M.O.; “My favorite musicians are people who have a certain dissatisfaction with the sound of their own instrument,” he told Pitchfork in 2018. The few exceptions are hard to miss: a monster riff played in unison by bass, sax, and drums midway through “Djurkel” looms over the entire album. A sax solo on the title track briefly glitters with sentimentality before the song shifts to something more dissonant. Like cornetist Rob Mazurek’s recent album Dimensional Stardust, Notes With Attachments was stitched together in the studio from multiple performances, yet effectively mimics the chemistry of a live ensemble. On Stardust, Damon Locks’ recitations burst from a bullhorn to be heard through the noise, but here the shifting arrangements don’t even bother to make space for vocals. (A human voice would only diminish the majestic unfurling of “Just Wrong,” or the eerie atmosphere that Sam Gendel generates with sampled saxophone on closer “Off the Cuff.”) Without a lead melody to hone in on, the album’s ever-shifting arrangements can sometimes feel uncertain, like carrying on with a scavenger hunt after forgetting the hiding places. But heard in full, Notes With Attachments’ restlessness sounds more like determination: an insistence on fitting as many ideas into as short a time as possible. 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.

2021-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

2021-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

Jazz / Rock / Experimental

New Deal / Impulse!

March 12, 2021

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Jack Riedy

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jack-riedy/

Kaya Cohen's third guitar-and-voice album is a sprawling fascination with the natural world and the nature of people.

Kaya Cohen's third guitar-and-voice album is a sprawling fascination with the natural world and the nature of people.

Itasca: Open to Chance

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22386-open-to-chance/

Open to Chance

There’s a bit of irony in the title of Itasca’s third album, *Open to Chance. *Musically, this is Kayla Cohen’s most precise, controlled work to date, compared not only to her early abstract drones as Sultan but even to her last full-length, 2015’s beautifully wandering guitar-and-voice record Unmoored by the Wind. It’s also her first recording with a band, which perhaps explains why she kept a tight ship, lest her subtle, intricate folk songs get blurred or drowned by overly-busy accompaniment. Thematically, though, *Open to Chance *has an apt name. It’s a record about trying something new and journeying into unknown experiences with eager, if cautious, optimism. The album opens with Cohen proposing a move to the mountains with her mate, travels through observations and interpretations of her environs, and closes with a meditation on how this dream might end. That might sound heavy, and certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse. Much of that joy comes from Cohen’s guitar and voice, two finely-tuned instruments that are uniquely adept at conveying her ideas and images. There’s always some spring in her acoustic, finger-picked step, even in Open to Chance’s most reflective moments. Her vocals are more wistful and bittersweet, delivered with a fading restraint that evokes Vashti Bunyan’s best whispers. But she also has a bright lilt that suits her open-eyed musings. When it's applied to lines such as “Wonder if I’ll ever turn this around,” or, “I’m rolling in circles again,” it’s equally possible to hear them as hopeful or downbeat. More likely, it's both at the same time. *Open to Chance *is also engaging simply because Cohen sounds so fascinated with everything she sees. Her purview is mainly the natural world—trees and flowers, sunsets and breezes, mice and hens— but she’s just as concerned with the nature of people. In one absorbing track, “No Consequence,” she marvels at confident individuals, the kind so assured and charmed that they seem unreal. Cohen views them from every angle, but she’s still suspicious: “You tell me it takes time/But I think you’ve got a joker on your side.” Apparently for Cohen, that kind of self-certainty means the death of adventure. She’s more interested in potentials and indeterminacies, and all the different ways that things could go. In that sense, “Just for Tomorrow” is Open to Chance’s most fitting song. Just eight lines long, it's tinged with regret. Cohen sings, “I once held a faithful dream,” perhaps referencing the fantasy that opened the album, and yet she still celebrates the unknown: “After all there are so many ways/I might have just walked.” It’s that appreciation of possibility, of the paths ahead and the ones left behind, that makes *Open to Chance *compelling.

2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Paradise of Bachelors

September 27, 2016

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Marc Masters

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

Reissued for Record Store Day, the live *Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 *captures the combination of determination, ambition, and vulnerability that makes Bruce Springsteen’s early years so fascinating.

Reissued for Record Store Day, the live *Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 *captures the combination of determination, ambition, and vulnerability that makes Bruce Springsteen’s early years so fascinating.

Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23115-hammersmith-odeon-london-75/

Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75

In 1975, Bruce Springsteen became one of the decade’s great success stories, but he remained plagued by self-doubt. While that year’s Born to Run is often perceived as his masterwork—the aural equivalent of the “rock and roll future” ad copy that’d been plastered above his face to boost sales of his previous two LPs—Springsteen was convinced upon completion that he’d produced a failure. The solution, he thought, was to shelve Born to Run and release a live album instead. His perfectionist tendencies in the studio and the high-pressure stakes of making a hit record amplified Bruce’s worst fear: that he, an artist steadily building his name on supposed authenticity, was in danger of being reduced to a product. But on stage, he was in control. From an early point in his career, Springsteen knew that nobody (no label, no management, no pull quote) could sell his music like he could. Ironically, it would be decades before the first full-length Springsteen show was released as an album. That show would be his November 1975 performance at London’s Hammersmith Odeon theater—issued as a film accompaniment to 2005’s Born to Run reissue, a stand-alone 2xCD set in 2006, and a vinyl box for this year’s Record Store Day. Among the most celebrated nights in Springsteen’s career, Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 captures the potent combination of determination, ambition, and vulnerability that makes Bruce’s early years so fascinating. Taking place three months after the release of Born to Run and several weeks after he graced the cover of both Time and Newsweek, this show would be his first outside the U.S. Same goes for the E Street Band, now solidified into a sturdy six-man rock group, after stints from jazz musicians and a violinist. “Finally,” proclaimed posters splattered around the city (which Springsteen allegedly tore down in a fit of nervous rage before the show), “London is ready for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.” While many of Springsteen’s 24 recorded songs at this point were precisely about breaking out of your hometown, proving yourself to the world, and never looking back, his Hammersmith performance feels gloriously unrehearsed. At the 3,500-seat venue, Springsteen effectively separated himself from the crowd—turning his back to them, pulling his thick wool cap over his eyes, and literally crawling into a hole during the breakdown in “Spirit in the Night.” When he tries to make conversation, his storied ability of connecting to an audience is not on display: “So, how’s things going over here in England and stuff, eh? Alright?” he asks, before doubling over in laughter: “I never been here before.” His unrefined energy carries the show. It took Springsteen six months to record “Born to Run,” but it takes him just four minutes to blast through it, a mere six songs into the set. The band proceeds with a shaky, sloppy spirit, landing miles away from the arena workhorse the song would evolve into. More practiced tunes like “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” are amplified and energized. When the songs reach their climaxes, Springsteen backs off the mic and lets his band overpower him, with massive waves of catharsis from Stevie Van Zandt’s lead guitar and Clarence Clemons’ saxophone. As a composer and bandleader, Springsteen began refitting his catalog to carry the load of increased expectations. “The E Street Shuffle” is slowed down to lament the innocence of bygone days, while a verse about a dead-end relationship with a waitress in “Sandy” is replaced with him whispering how “the angels have lost their desire for us.” From Roy Bittan’s austere piano introduction in “Thunder Road” to a proggy extension of “Kitty’s Back” that spans an entire side of vinyl, Springsteen’s catalogue feels big and dynamic enough to take on the world. As the show goes on, you can almost hear Springsteen realizing it. While Bruce and his band were ready for London, the feeling wasn’t entirely mutual yet. A Creem review of the show read disappointedly, with Simon Frith describing the E Street Band as being “pretty crummy in its technical range and subtlety.” He even took issue with Springsteen’s physical presence: “I mean, he’s so bloody small!,” he seethed, “This is the future of rock’n’roll??” Writing for Sounds, Vivien Goldman was sympathetic but skeptical: “There was an immense feeling of strain about this show, following a press and publicity campaign of unparalleled intensity.” An NME writer, meanwhile, concluded his review assuredly: “Bob Dylan can relax.” The audience seemed similarly impassive, occasionally roaring with excitement (especially for the roots-rock covers in “Detroit Medley”), but more often clapping in awkward patches, filling the silence with heckles like, “Oi, turn the guitars up!” Springsteen took it all to heart. After all, this is an artist who selected his rock critic manager after reading his mixed review of The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, calling out its poor production. Once Springsteen returned to the states, his setlists started including a cover of the Animals’ “It’s My Life,” a gnarly enactment of an artist taking control over his narrative. Bruce would evolve accordingly, turning the guitars up and sonically tearing down his label’s press posters with 1978’s righteous, unadorned Darkness on the Edge of Town. But for his desperate stand at the Hammersmith Odeon, Springsteen stood as far from home as he’d ever been, and—backed by a band swiftly ascending to the height of their powers—defined what he’d do for the rest of his career. For those two hours, his myth and his music were inseparable.

2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Legacy

April 25, 2017

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Sam Sodomsky

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

The Oakland band’s wide-ranging debut is a whirlwind of biting critique, nervy post-punk guitars, and absurdist humor. Rarely does a first record speak with such a trenchant voice.

The Oakland band’s wide-ranging debut is a whirlwind of biting critique, nervy post-punk guitars, and absurdist humor. Rarely does a first record speak with such a trenchant voice.

Fake Fruit: Fake Fruit

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fake-fruit-fake-fruit/

Fake Fruit

For Fake Fruit, there’s no shortage of things to be pissed off about, so you might as well enjoy the ride. The Oakland, California band’s coltish self-titled debut favors spirited punk primitivism and two-minute art-rock tracks—punchy, melodic songs united by nervy guitars and cutting takedowns of modern frustrations (scene-y social structures, bad sex, the “plight” of men). Miraculously, they manage to avoid self-serious posturing, resulting in an occasionally dissonant, frequently delightful album where fun and fury overlap. Rarely does a band’s first record speak with such a trenchant voice. Fake Fruit has had time to figure itself out: Chief songwriter and frontperson Hannah “Ham” D’Amato originally founded the band in 2016 in New York, then moved to Vancouver, B.C. and restarted as a trio, before finding new footing in Oakland. There, she secured a semi-finalized lineup—lead guitarist Alex Post, drummer Miles MacDiarmid, and a rotating cast of bassists—as well as a few side gigs: deejaying Chicano soul and oldies at events hosted by psych-rock eclecticist Sonny Smith of Sonny and the Sunsets and once playing in a Suburban Lawns cover band called Gidget Goes to Hell. By mid-2019, D’Amato, Post, and MacDiarmid had saved up enough to turn a tour tape into their debut LP, tracking the instrumentals in two days spaced a year apart. Now, two years later, Fake Fruit finally arrives via Smith’s label Rocks in Your Head. It’s well worth the wait: In the half-decade since its first iteration, the band has evolved from nomadic experimentation into nascent punk prowess. From the get, Fake Fruit is electrifying. Rhythmic, garage-y riffs ignite “No Mutuals,” propelled by the song’s dissatisfaction with online social etiquette. At its center is Fake Fruit’s most distinctive asset: D’Amato’s voice, which hits like Courtney Barnett fronting a punk band. “I don’t wanna wait to be christened as cool,” she sings, blowing up the pronunciation of “cool” until it fractures, sounding almost like “cruel.” The final word in “You look like a fool” receives a similar distortion—an eviscerating affectation. From there, Fake Fruit chase whatever seems to interest them: math-y staccato and frustrated sprechgesang (“Miscommunication”), spiky vibrato (“No Space for Residence”), untidy tempos (“Stroke My Ego”), even an echo of indie pop as D’Amato harmonizes with Post on “Swing and a Miss.” Tonally, “Swing and a Miss” stings of sentimentality, but a closer listen flips the meaning: D’Amato is singing about a partner who couldn’t please her (“It was a swing and a miss/That’s alright/You didn’t make me cum/It wasn’t enough”), and cheekily enough, this song follows another titled “Stroke My Ego.” There’s more absurdity here than it may first appear, a reminder of the humor to be found in the throes of irritation and even of pain. It surfaces in the anxious, acerbic rock of “Yolk,” where D’Amato bellows, “I’m with my honey/He says I’m funny/I had a bad day/His yolk is running,” and on the skronking closer “Milkman,” which opens with a deliciously sour tribute to the list-making mundanity of post-punk: “Hot sidewalk/No shade/Milk curdles/With age.” This band is just a little too impatient to watch paint dry, so milk curdling it is. What imperfections do appear lie in the album’s pacing: a whirlwind of biting aphorism and gloomy post-punk in one corner; asymmetrical, snapping guitars in another; one song that leverages frustration at self-victimization (“Don’t Put It on Me”) and another where D’Amato riffs on male entitlement (“Lying Legal Horror Lawyers,” featuring the line, “Let’s talk about men’s rights/Let’s talk about their plight/Nah! They’ll be alright”). The amount of movement can be overwhelming, but that’s the point: Whatever the topic, whatever the sound, Fake Fruit is both annoyed and engrossed, teetering between having a great time and trying to hold a conversation with someone who isn’t worth the effort. It’s an urgent, emphatic kind of chaos, where life is a series of discontents, each one worthy of a catchy song. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Rocks in Your Head

April 9, 2021

f63c56ef-1d40-4069-b01f-fa18787e521d

Maria Sherman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/maria-sherman/

Plaid have been reliable fixtures in “intelligent dance music” since the genre first rose to prominence in the 1990s. Their latest, Reachy Prints, is full of new sounds, but their experimentation is tempered with strides towards a greater accessibility.

Plaid have been reliable fixtures in “intelligent dance music” since the genre first rose to prominence in the 1990s. Their latest, Reachy Prints, is full of new sounds, but their experimentation is tempered with strides towards a greater accessibility.

Plaid: Reachy Prints

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19363-plaid-reachy-prints/

Reachy Prints

Plaid have been reliable fixtures in “intelligent dance music” since the genre first rose to prominence in the 1990s. Ever since their career-launching debut, 1997's Not for Threes, Andy Turner and Ed Handley have released carefully composed recordings full of warm tones, friendly melodies, and interesting technical sleights of hand; they've often found themselves situated between the genre's mercurial virtuosos (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher) and a legion of hacky glitch engineers. Their latest, Reachy Prints, is full of new sounds. Handley and Turner are dedicated tech geeks who embody the genre’s commitment to exploring off-label uses of different gear in order to see if it makes any interesting noises. “Nafovanny” possesses an intriguingly detuned lead, while “Tether” generates an edgy atmosphere from a fascinatingly ugly, dissonant synth patch. The arrangements are familiar, though, and the album fits in comfortably with the rest of Plaid's discography, defined by a relaxed-but-peppy energy and well-mannered songs that evolve smoothly with as few shocks as possible. (The exceptions to this rule appeared on 2011's Scintilli, which featured some uncharacteristically aggressive and bumpy tracks and was all the more intriguing for it.) IDM has always been devoted to challenging approaches to experimentation, so consistency isn’t necessarily a virtue in the genre; while Plaid's latest batch of material should satisfy those who have kept track of the duo's output thus far, it doesn’t push many boundaries. Interestingly, though, the type of electronic music that Plaid makes—melodic enough to be accessible while retaining glitchy qualities—has, over the last twenty years, moved from the very fringes of the pop landscape to a little closer to pop's center. Specifically, Aphex Twin's become a touchstone of sorts for rap producers, and his influence has trickled up to the point where it’s not unusual for chart-placing songs to feature the stuttering rhythms, tweaked-out synthesizers, simulated vinyl brakes, and other various controlled malfunctions that Aphex and, by extension IDM’s known for. So as the pop world has tilted in a way that’s moved Handley and Turner’s music in a closer vicinity to the mainstream, which suits them better. The qualities that previously constrained their music—specifically, their melodic affability, especially compared to the compellingly malicious vibe their contemporaries give off—now work in their favor, but that also means that as an experimental electronic album, Reachy Prints comes off as milquetoast. As a pop album, though, it sparkles: the oscillating beat, flickering melodies, and cooly dark atmosphere of opening track “OH” could have fit in nicely on Saint Heron, last year’s Solange-curated compilation of alternative R&B. The pair have worked with vocalists regularly in the past, and “Lilith,” their collaboration with Bjork on Not For Threes, is not only one of the best songs of their early career but one of hers too. If Turner and Handley embraced their poppier tendencies, they could conceivably reach a new level of success—stranger things have happened.

2014-05-23T02:00:05.000-04:00

2014-05-23T02:00:05.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp

May 23, 2014

f643746e-ca66-4a0f-8ed6-d3bf84ea123c

Miles Raymer

https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/

Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas has never reached the heights of acclaim afforded to his IDM contemporaries like Aphex Twin, but his importance in shaping the style is indisputable. Chewed Corners, his first µ-Ziq LP in six years, is brimming with optimism and ideas.

Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas has never reached the heights of acclaim afforded to his IDM contemporaries like Aphex Twin, but his importance in shaping the style is indisputable. Chewed Corners, his first µ-Ziq LP in six years, is brimming with optimism and ideas.

µ-Ziq: Chewed Corners

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18207--ziq-chewed-corners/

Chewed Corners

Mike Paradinas has never reached the dizzying heights of acclaim afforded to IDM contemporaries like Aphex Twin. But, listening to his early Rephlex-released LPs under the µ-Ziq alias, his importance in shaping the style is indisputable. From there his career path has been far from straightforward: by the late 90s he'd made a lateral move, setting up his own label and arguably proving himself a better A&R than he was a producer. Planet Mu presided over several major developments in global electronic music, from millennial breakcore to mid-noughties dubstep and, more recently, footwork. Paradinas’ own production, meanwhile, seemed to falter during the 2000s. 2003’s Bilious Paths was an enjoyable exploration of the sound-and-fury of drill and bass and breakcore, if a little beholden to label successes like Venetian Snares. 2007’s Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique, meanwhile, followed the break-up of a long-term relationship, and its suffocatingly maudlin spin on Paradinas’ usual melodic style proved rather difficult to love. Since then we’ve heard little from Paradinas the producer, but 2013 has marked a surprising return to form. First there was Heterotic’s Love & Devotion, an album of euphoric, romantic synth-pop produced in collaboration with Paradinas’ new wife, Lara Rix-Martin. Following that was a µ-Ziq EP, XTEP, which showcased a newly airy sound, contiguous with his past work but also displaying the influence of chillwave, italo disco, piano house, and plenty else besides. As with both of these records, Chewed Corners, the first µ-Ziq LP in six years, has a certain giddiness to it-- a giddiness, it’s tempting to conclude, born of new love and fresh optimism. Of course, that optimism could be less to do with Paradinas’ personal life than with the state of music: much of this record displays the influence of recent Planet Mu signings, or of broader trends in contemporary electronic music. "Taikon" and "Twangle Melkas" draw on Kuedo’s Vangelis-via-Southern-hip-hop schtick; "Tickly Flanks" owes a debt to the sugar-rush hardcore-footwork hybrids of Machinedrum, though it’s a little torpid in comparison to its forebear. "Wipe"'s syncopated rhythms nod to UK funky, while "Houzz 10" could be a symptom of the recent house revival-- except Paradinas’ take on the form is particularly dreamy, rolling along on a single blissy break-of-dawn plateau for its duration. Fortunately, Paradinas just as often succeeds in massaging his inspirations into an idiom entirely his own. There are plenty of highlights here-- heat-warped synth interlude "Monyth", the heavy-lidded "Hug", "Mountain Island Boner", whose portentous piano chords would almost be laughable were they not rather affecting. All of them sound fresh, but are also recognisably µ-Ziq-- unlike the occasional borderline-pastiche footwork remix Paradinas has turned out in recent years. Granted, the weaknesses of past µ-Ziq work live on along with its strengths, and Paradinas’ penchant for overwhelmingly dense arrangements occasionally gets the better of him-- particularly in closer "Weakling Paradinas", which aims for euphoric texture-overload but overshoots, resulting in a fatiguing mess. But in Chewed Corners Paradinas has put together an LP brimming with fresh ideas-- which, for an artist entering the third decade of his career, is no mean feat.

2013-07-22T02:00:01.000-04:00

2013-07-22T02:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic

Planet Mu

July 22, 2013

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Angus Finlayson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/angus-finlayson/

Lucky 7 is Statik Selektah's seventh and supposedly final producer compilation album, and features contributions from Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Royce Da 5'9 and others.

Lucky 7 is Statik Selektah's seventh and supposedly final producer compilation album, and features contributions from Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Royce Da 5'9 and others.

Statik Selektah: Lucky 7

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20762-lucky-7/

Lucky 7

Lucky 7 is Statik Selektah's seventh and supposedly final producer compilation album. The title might be a joke, but it also signals an uncomfortable familiarity. Statik, whose real name is Patrick Baril, has unceremoniously pumped out hour-long projects like this for the last eight years, and just about all of them feature some three dozen rappers. Earlier this year Baril was asked about what motivates him as a producer and he responded, "It's a really simple formula: fuck with artists that don't suck at rapping." It's a pretty flat, dispassionate motto, but practically speaking, he's built the philosophy into an alignment with a batch of East Coast semi-underground rappers for the better part of a decade. On albums like Lucky 7 Statik corrals them into an assembly line and feeds them beats. As a producer, Statik isn't the type to push boundaries. His baseline sound is manufacturable with skill: a few similar drum patterns snap into place on almost all of his songs, a loose sample—guitar, horn, or twinkling keys usually—clicks on top, and a chorus is often, but less frequently recently, scratched out of a famous '90s vocal sample. It's a recipe for an unambitious palatability, but Statik has also definitely gotten better over the last decade, and at his best (which includes about a quarter of this album) he can coax out smoother, more alive grooves than this latter-day boom-bap formula usually allows. The worst thing here is the format—21 tracks and no continuity—not the music. Statik has loosened his tendency toward a three-rapper quota per song—though there are still far too many of them here—and it's easier to down the first few tracks in sequence because of the effect. On "Another Level", Rapsody delivers with less flash than the rest of the bunch but is nonetheless one of the most interesting. Her oddly placed inflections and abrupt rhyme schemes have become a hallmark, but it's still fun to soak up and parse. On "Beautiful Life", a best-foot-forward lead single, Statik musters up an '80s pop-inflected feeling for Action Bronson and Joey Bada$$, the New York rappers with whom he's most closely aligned. Bronson can make himself at home anywhere, but at worst the collaborations can run cold, a hazard of the format and Statik's production as much as anything else. Royce da 5'9'' sounds tired of his dexterity when he often revels in it elsewhere, but there's nothing in the choppy beat of "Crystal Clear" to charge him up. It's easy to mistake Illa Ghee for Sean Price on "Gentlemen", but at least the off-kilter loop Statik builds up from a prog sample suits them well enough to share the same space. Later, "Top Tier" gathers obligatory and disposable verses from Bun B and Styles P over the most middling production of the album. As a whole Lucky 7 sounds a lot like everything else Statik Selektah has done up to this point; the album is neither offputting nor particularly exciting, and it's hard to feel strongly about at all. A couple of the songs sound good enough to have just gotten cut from better solo albums, but that's not a strong selling point. To his credit, the guy churned a formal mixtape series into a bona fide discography. It's not surprising he's leaving the format behind, and he's certainly milked it for all it's worth.

2015-07-08T02:00:02.000-04:00

2015-07-08T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rap

Duckdown / Showoff

July 8, 2015

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Jay Balfour

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

On their fourth album, the Welsh rockers build their towering songs on wobblier foundations for the sheer thrill of trying to make them topple.

On their fourth album, the Welsh rockers build their towering songs on wobblier foundations for the sheer thrill of trying to make them topple.

The Joy Formidable: AAARTH

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-joy-formidable-aaarth/

AAARTH

A major-label deal may no longer be a prerequisite for breaking into the mainstream, but they still do come in handy if you want to stay there. When you think of the biggest rock bands of the past 20 years—Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Muse, the Black Keys—they all ascended to the top line of the festival poster, in part, due to the largesse of a deep-pocketed corporate imprint. And from day one, Welsh power trio and Atlantic Records hopefuls the Joy Formidable seemed poised to join them in the 50-point-font club, with their atomic fusion of Britpop-scaled anthemery and post-shoegaze overdrive. When firing on all cylinders, they could be the heaviest rock band that you would never think of classifying as metal, or the most pop-friendly act to drop the occasional blast beat. So when the Joy Formidable split from Atlantic after two respectably charting albums, there was a more profound sense of unfinished business than with your typical major-to-indie reversion. Initially, the change in circumstance was noticeable only if you scoured their Spotify page for the label metadata fine print: the band’s 2016 album, Hitch, was streamlined and stage-ready almost to a fault. But where that album saw the band overcome an internal crisis—i.e., the end of singer/guitarist Ritzy Bryan and bassist’s Rhydian Dafydd romantic relationship—their fourth record was nearly aborted by an existential one. And so, with AAARTH, the Joy Formidable have embraced independence not just as a business-survival strategy, but as a creative-liberation philosophy, too. They still sound very much like a rock band striving for the “Top of the Pops”; only now, they want to be the strangest one on there, too. The sense of playful abandon is right there in the album’s name: the Welsh term for bear (albeit with a few extra A’s for guttural emphasis), AAARTH is the sort of title that would make major-label marketing departments wince, while requiring radio announcers to activate the phlegmiest reaches of their larynx. Ironically, now that the Joy Formidable have resettled in the Southwest U.S., they seem more eager to assert their Welshness. AAARTH opens with a rare display of their native tongue, “Y Bluen Eira,” but the language isn’t the only thing the average Anglophone listener will find inscrutable. It’s less a song than a statement of purpose—a funhouse-mirrored portal into an album that isn’t as eager to make friends as its predecessors. AAARTH is hardly lacking in towering rock songs, but the band builds them on wobblier foundations for the sheer thrill of trying to make them topple. The staccato-riffed standout “The Wrong Side” comes on like the introductory lurch to Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” spun off into even more over-the-top anthem: What begins as an earnest, reach-across-the-aisle plea for kindness in post-Trump America gets gradually sucked into a swirl of squirrelly guitar lines and player-piano frivolity. And while “The Better Me” could be the most fetching pure pop song this band has ever produced, it too builds into a whirling dervish of booming drum breaks, short-circuiting synths, and noisy spasms that gurgle and wheeze like gastro-intestinal indigestion. Not every song here aspires to the same degree of inspired irreverence. While the album introduces some intriguing new looks—like the Eastern-psych strut of “Cicada (Land on Your Back)”—the Joy Formidable still have a tendency to pummel their tunes into a modern-rock mush. AAARTH sags under the weight of its less melodic, more melodramatic moments, like the nu-goth pummel of “Dance of the Lotus” or the muscular but meandering grunge-funk workout “Caught on a Breeze.” They’re the sort of songs that immediately show their hand on an album that otherwise excels at slow reveals and sonic Easter eggs. AAARTH’s most arresting moment comes in the form of “All in All,” a gentle glockenspieled ballad that gradually floats skyward until it burns up and explodes into the stratosphere. Of course, by this point, such nuclear-grade eruptions are to be expected from even the Joy Formidable’s most subdued songs. But here, we at least get a clearer view of the artfully arranged debris swirling inside the tornado.

2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Seradom Records

October 8, 2018

f658495c-270a-4796-9bfb-1df05e7b7610

Stuart Berman

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

Singer-songwriter Kevin Patrick Sullivan exchanges straight-to-tape simplicity for full-band arrangements, bringing a warm Americana glow to bedroom ballads full of sadness and yearning.

Singer-songwriter Kevin Patrick Sullivan exchanges straight-to-tape simplicity for full-band arrangements, bringing a warm Americana glow to bedroom ballads full of sadness and yearning.

Field Medic: grow your hair long if you​’​re wanting to see something that you can change

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/field-medic-grow-your-hair-long-if-youre-wanting-to-see-something-that-you-can-change/

grow your hair long if you​’​re wanting to see something that you can change

Until recently, Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s only bandmate in Field Medic was a boombox. On 2017’s songs from the sunroom and 2019’s fade into the dawn, the California songwriter paired his distinctive reedy voice with simple, lo-fi folk guitar and a drum machine. When he performed live, he drove the van and sold the merch himself, setting his specially decorated boombox on a stool to spit out backing tracks while he stood and sang alone. His new album, grow your hair long if you’re wanting to see something that you can change, exchanges the straight-to-tape simplicity of his earlier work for more expansive full-band arrangements. Across the album, Sullivan delivers new sounds with elevated confidence. The record opens on “always emptiness,” a slice of warm, textural Americana with steel guitars and piano in the mix. “stained glass” introduces sophisticated, almost orchestral flourishes, while “weekends” has a country-rock backbone. Sullivan’s trusty drum machine reappears on “i had a dream that you died,” which sounds like an older Field Medic song with a synthy new tint, and “i think about you all the time,” where the prominent, melodic bassline and wordy yet catchy chorus recall the ’90s guitar pop of singer-songwriters like Natalie Imbruglia. Though Sullivan worked in producer Gabe Goodman’s studio with backing musicians, as opposed to alone in a bedroom with a tape recorder, these songs sound intimate. There’s a slight increase in fidelity, but Goodman wisely uses a light touch. Directness is important because Sullivan’s lyrics are rawer than ever: grow your hair long… is full of hopelessness and yearning, and the songs are naked, painful documents of just barely getting by. “I wanna fall off the face of the earth and probably die,” goes the album’s opening line. “Recently a lot I ponder suicide, but I could never do that to my mom,” Sullivan sings on “i had a dream that you died.” The plain recording style creates an almost uncomfortable tension when paired with statements like these; it’s unfiltered and disarmingly matter-of-fact. In the past Sullivan has written with self-deprecating levity, but here he trades it for a purer self-loathing. Some of his most memorable songs—2017’s “uuu,” 2020’s “i want you so bad it hurts”—are addressed to a lover. The only song on grow your hair long… that scans as a love song, “i think about you all the time,” is more ambivalent; Sullivan calls it “a love song to alcohol & younger days.” Yet it isn’t an overwhelmingly heavy listen, thanks to the prettiness and charm of the music. And while Sullivan’s lyricism is straightforward and unflowery in service to its subject matter, his quietly evocative imagery pulls you into its despairing headspace. “My heart’s a dark shroud, your heart is book bound,” he sings on “i think about you all the time.” The line that titles the album, which comes from “house arrest,” is one of its most effective, beautiful in a simple, natural way. It’s also one of the rare moments on the album when Sullivan seems to look up from the bottom. There’s another such poignant glimpse of light in “i had a dream that you died,” when he repeats, “I had a dream that I saw a blue whale, I was happy.” The music’s layered, thoughtful melodicism gives credence to these lines, transforming them from desperate grasps to purposeful expressions of faith. grow your hair long… doesn’t make peace with anything, yet the honesty it offers is strangely warm.

2022-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Run for Cover

October 17, 2022

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Mia Hughes

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/

On a new label spun off from the eponymous Berlin party series, Franklin De Costa and Hodge curate a strong selection of formidable bass/techno hybrids from acts like Laurel Halo, Batu, and Violet.

On a new label spun off from the eponymous Berlin party series, Franklin De Costa and Hodge curate a strong selection of formidable bass/techno hybrids from acts like Laurel Halo, Batu, and Violet.

Various Artists: Mother’s Finest Compilation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-mothers-finest-compilation/

Mother’s Finest Compilation

Berlin is often touted as the techno capital of the world, but the city’s music scene goes deeper than the steadily thudding kick drums emanating from clubs like Berghain and Tresor. The German capital has always been a musically diverse place, particularly for those interested in leftfield and experimental sounds, and in recent years, a variety of styles have taken root across the city’s many dancefloors. Until last month, several of those dancefloors could be found at Griessmuehle, a former grain mill-turned-nightclub that was a beloved hub for a myriad of non-techno styles: house, disco, electro, UK bass, and more. The club closed in early February after the property’s owner chose not to renew the venue’s lease, but while the place was still open, its roster of regular parties included Mother’s Finest, with German artist Franklin De Costa at the helm. During the series’ seven-year run—for now, its events are part of the “Griessmuehle im Exil” series at Alte Münze, with a new permanent home coming later in the year—De Costa has established himself as one of Berlin’s most trusted nightlife curators, especially for those who gravitate toward heavy bass and the more adventurous varieties of house and techno. He now applies those curatorial skills to a new record label, which kicks off with the simply titled Mother’s Finest Compilation. A 15-track collection put together by De Costa and Bristol artist Hodge—a Mother’s Finest resident since 2016—it’s an impressive assemblage of talent that places established artists like Batu, Laurel Halo, and Mosca alongside hotly tipped up-and-comers like Anunaku (aka TSVI), Otik, and Karima F. Although Berlin and the UK are heavily represented, the record does reach beyond the usual electronic music hotspots, gathering tracks from Portugal’s Violet, Mexico’s Nico, and Italy’s Katatonic Silentio. Stylistically, the compilation resides mostly in the hard-to-categorize nether region between bass music and techno, making additional forays into ambient, breakbeat, electro, and jungle. Similar to the output of labels like Timedance, Livity Sound, and Hessle Audio, the music marries the potent basslines and adventurous drum programming of the UK hardcore continuum to a more focused techno framework, resulting in a hybrid sound that’s remarkably potent. Mother’s Finest Compilation is loaded with formidable club tracks. Hodge’s “Silo” is a particularly animated drum workout, while Nico’s “Common Drum” blends percussive acrobatics with delicate melodies and a more introspective mood. The North African palette and rambunctious spirit of Anunaku’s “Nascent” make it one of liveliest offerings, although it’s rivaled by the breakbeat-infused ghetto house of Nasty King Kurl’s “Complicated” and the booming basslines of Violet’s “Infinite Source,” which brilliantly captures the raucous, rave-ready vibe of ’90s jungle. Dynamo Dreesen’s hypnotic “From This Era” pursues a more linear path; wonky, off-kilter rhythms fuel the seasick glitch of Mosca’s “Swann Morton,” the serpentine groove of Batu’s “High Press,” and the alien stomp of Franklin De Costa’s “Rage.” If there’s one drawback, it’s a lack of narrative. Mother’s Finest Compilation may be stuffed with top-shelf tunes, but its larger purpose is unclear. Most of the artists featured have played at Mother’s Finest before (some several times), so perhaps it works as a sort of overview of the party’s history, but only Hodge and De Costa are actually residents, and most of the producers don’t even live in Berlin. Without knowing the label’s future plans, it’s possible to see this compilation as a sort of public branding exercise—a practice that’s become common in the electronic music realm. Especially for a new label, it’s a lot easier to market and sell a record with 15 different artists, all of who have their own fan bases and social media channels, than it is to find an audience for an EP or album from a single act, particularly one that’s relatively unknown. Fortunately, while many artists aren’t naturally inclined to offer up their best stuff for a random compilation, Mother’s Finest Compilation hardly feels inconsequential. It’s clear that De Costa and Hodge made sure to accept only high-quality material, and as first releases go, Mother’s Finest Compilation makes an impressive statement. Its storyline may not extend much beyond, “Here’s a bunch of tunes from artists we like,” but when the music is this good, perhaps that doesn’t matter.

2020-03-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

Mother's Finest

March 10, 2020

f65e2da9-a7ed-4047-b9c2-eda91b349efe

Shawn Reynaldo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/

On her debut album, the 24-year-old Tallahassee native briefly makes good on her instinct for mass-appeal pop anthems, but most of the 76-minute album dwells on roiling gloom and smoldering Americana.

On her debut album, the 24-year-old Tallahassee native briefly makes good on her instinct for mass-appeal pop anthems, but most of the 76-minute album dwells on roiling gloom and smoldering Americana.

Ethel Cain: Preacher’s Daughter

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ethel-cain-preachers-daughter/

Preacher’s Daughter

Ethel Cain’s relationship with pop is nearly as complicated as her relationship with God. Inspired by her restrictive upbringing in a rural Southern Baptist community, the songwriter Hayden Anhedönia, born in Tallahassee and now based in Alabama, introduced her stage persona on her breakout EP, 2021’s Inbred. In its songs, she presented herself as a kind of American gothic Lana Del Rey, with a flair for lurid prose about hateful sex and violent impulses. Split between dreamy, contemporary pop and brutalist, witchy dirges, the EP left uncertain whether Cain, then 23, was setting out for cult stardom or actual stardom. At times, like the opening single “Michelle Pfeiffer,” she seemed to be campaigning for total TikTok saturation; at others she sounded as if she might retreat permanently back into the woods. Like Inbred, Preacher’s Daughter, Cain’s full-length debut, places its catchiest pop salvo up front. With its heartland-rock pomp and beaming guitars, “American Teenager” plays like something off Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, a taste of the kind of mass-appeal anthems Cain could make if she opted to commit to that route. The rest of the record, though, makes clear she has no interest in that. For the bulk of the album’s heady 76 minutes, she turns her back on pop in favor of roiling gloom and smoldering Americana. If “American Teenager” didn’t so efficiently introduce the album’s motifs—disenfranchised youth, hard living, and misplaced ideals—it’d be a complete fakeout. Preacher’s Daughter softens some of Ethel Cain’s more subversive edges, humanizing a character that Anhedönia first envisioned as a cult leader. Here she’s more of a tragic heroine in a doomed romance. The torchy “Western Nights” vaguely outlines a narrative involving a woman and her Harley-riding boyfriend crossing state lines, on the run from their past and still bearing family traumas. Cain originally conceived the album as a screenplay; it’s likely the finished film would have had echoes of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. It all might sound a little fresher if Lana Del Rey hadn’t already mined these character archetypes exhaustively. The record is paced like dripping candle wax, with most of its songs spilling over pop’s tidy running times. That leaves plenty of time to luxuriate in Cain’s remarkable voice. On the rootiest songs, “Hard Times” and “Thoroughfare,” her voice rings with the sterling clarity of Natalie Merchant. Just as often, though, it’s caked in soot or seething with disdain. On the industrial-shocked “Ptolemaea,” the record’s lone descent into nightmarish terror, she breaks open the song with an agonizing shriek any horror director would envy. Cain’s songs often threaten to erupt, but “Ptolemaea” is one of the few that truly does. Preacher’s Daughter would benefit from a few more raw thrills; too often the haunted, churchy ambiance falls into a predictable stasis. There’s a disconnect between Cain’s provocative public image and the rigid composure of these songs, which rarely shock the way Inbred’s did. The album’s length works against it, too. Cain winnowed the record down from what she once planned to be a two-plus-hour epic, and at times she sounds like she’s writing to run out the clock. The album buckles under the weight of its many seven-minute songs, each of which dulls the impact of the next. As captivating as Cain’s mood-setting can be, Preacher’s Daughter is such a slow burn you periodically wonder if the flame is even still lit. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review calculated the album’s running time as 90 minutes, not 76.

2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Daughters of Cain

May 18, 2022

f6604e9b-bc2e-40d5-a465-72a8e725b3a7

Evan Rytlewski

https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/

This long-forgotten 1985 album is far from the legendary jazz trumpeter’s best work, but look past its awkwardness and dated sonics, and a certain charm reveals itself.

This long-forgotten 1985 album is far from the legendary jazz trumpeter’s best work, but look past its awkwardness and dated sonics, and a certain charm reveals itself.

Don Cherry: Home Boy, Sister Out

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/don-cherry-home-boy-sister-out/

Home Boy, Sister Out

Think of a trumpet player. A jazz musician. Think of someone who broke boundaries with ease, who innovated so effortlessly it’s hard to imagine music didn’t always sound that way, the way they played. Think about restless reinvention, relentless forward momentum. Think about making a stone classic in your youth and never pausing to revisit it. Think about a distinctive voice. Think about a squeak, a honk, a shimmering arc of tone, instantly recognizable, bursting atop a stripped-back quartet, an electric fusion combo, tape loops, a simple duet. Think about ditching that trumpet for whatever else is on hand, because why not? Think of a singular artist whose half century on the stage never stopped drawing on the most modern, cutting-edge forms available. Now don’t think of Miles Davis. Who’s left? Don Cherry, and that’s about it. Cherry was active from the mid 1950s until his death in 1995. Each of his eras comes with its own devotees, but it’s rare to hear someone bring up his mid-1980s work. If Davis epitomized the tempestuous visionary, Cherry was the benevolent explorer, and he spent the Reagan years easing into smoother sounds and supporting his daughter Neneh in her post-punk collective Rip, Rig & Panic. Having so comprehensively innovated, he began to relax into the role of elder statesman, going wherever the party was. In 1985, that was in Paris where, alongside French artist and musician Ramuntcho Matta and a crew of arty downtown types, he recorded Home Boy, Sister Out. Reissued here by France’s Wewantsounds, the album emerges from the depths of obscurity: a warmly spotty mix of uneven digi disco, clunky rapping, and moments of fleeting beauty. There’s no way around it—Home Boy is not great. The record attempts the kind of jazz/punk/hip-hop/reggae fusion that drew liberally from Talking Heads’ 1980 landmark Remain in Light. Surely it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the ultra-crisp production techniques and pop leanings do Cherry no favors. It’s a first, but being unfettered works against him. He raps about sweet potato salad, sings new-age ballads about his “butterfly friend,” and mumbles like a distracted karaoke patron after a few drinks too many. In its awkward overeagerness to get the party started, “Treat Your Lady Right” lands a little too close to Mr. T’s similarly titled paean to motherhood. “Alphabet City”’s anti-drug stance keeps the undercooked PSA vibe going, with Cherry wandering around the mic, ad-libbing the sounds of junkie euphoria where the verse should be, and leaning on the chorus a bit too hard. Album starter “Call Me” unfurls with some promising fanfare but quickly locks into an elevator-ready backing track, with Cherry pushing some choppy lyrics into the edges of his falsetto. The loose arrangements might have come off if the sound of the album were more inviting. Cherry’s studio work in the 1970s was lush, utilizing trippy effects, tape saturation, and laid-back virtuosity to invoke a gooey spirituality. Home Boy sounds comparatively tinny. The contrast is highlighted by the recycled vocal bits from 1975’s Brown Rice, here drained of their vitality. On the other hand, it’s a Don Cherry record. For all its flaws, Home Boy is a grower. Cherry’s magnetism remains, despite the chintzy production and slapdash approach. Not quite two minutes into “Bamako Love,” his trumpet swells for a breathtaking moment of sublimity that stops you in your tracks. Across the album his playing remains singular, although you wish he’d wedge it into some more challenging corners. But he doesn’t mind being the guest of honor and plays nice. It’s hard not to forgive him for having some fun. One notable aspect is the undercurrent of drugs that winds through Home Boy. Cherry struggled with addiction and here takes the opportunity, at the dawn of the crack epidemic, to sing about this notably un-cosmic theme. He doesn’t come to any conclusions, but it gives the album an intriguingly dark edge. “Kick” and the aforementioned “Alphabet City” explicitly address drug users, while “I Walk” perhaps narrates the dazed inner life of an addict attempting equilibrium. “I better get to this program, though. I don’t want to be late today… Today I don’t exist in a definite way, I don’t know where I’m going.” A year after Home Boy came out, Paul Simon would release his smash hit Graceland, bringing South African vocal harmonies and smooth funk into the homes of a generation. Now the children of the ’80s are getting deeper into their thirties, and suddenly world-funk albums like Home Boy sound like home. If the original release coincided with an aging boomer generation’s turn away from its counterculture roots, perhaps the allure of such a reissue lies in its familiarity. We all become our parents. In this regard, all of Home Boy’s weaknesses—its awkwardness, time-stamped sonics, and apparent disregard for self-editing—can be enjoyed as strengths. Home Boy is shoddy but sweet, ineffective but earnest. It’s one of Cherry’s weakest outings, but if you tune out and let it play, it kind of feels good—comforting and safe. Probably not what they intended, but history has its way of making even the most subversive artists into icons and the blandest work into lost treasures.

2018-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

Jazz

Wewantsounds

June 18, 2018

f66da7ed-eab5-46c7-bcd5-e4d84a10d5b7

Daniel Martin-McCormick

https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/

With his second album, Berlin’s TJ Hertz leaves techno behind in favor of hyperreal sound design charged with a narrative sensibility.

With his second album, Berlin’s TJ Hertz leaves techno behind in favor of hyperreal sound design charged with a narrative sensibility.

Objekt: Cocoon Crush

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/objekt-cocoon-crush/

Cocoon Crush

Objekt’s Cocoon Crush opens on a lonely riff with a curious sonic character, part pan flute and part mandolin. Though likely electronic, it’s clearly meant to suggest the realm of acoustic instrumentation, where the quality of the tone produced depends upon things like fingertips, lips, and breaths. Pizzicato strings, wooden mallets, birdsongs, and gurgling water join, but it’s difficult to differentiate between the “real” and the synthetic. This enigmatic mixture is a shot across electronic music’s bow, one launched from a catapult deep in the uncanny valley. In the same way that the glistening ambient sketch “Agnes Revenge” announced the digital palette of the Berlin-based producer TJ Hertz’s debut album, Flatland, these exotic sounds, so strange in their familiarity, prime us for the acoustic inspirations of Cocoon Crush. Flatland, which explored techno’s fringes, wasn’t entirely devoid of acoustic fingerprints, but the album concentrated on the imaginative possibilities of purely synthetic, non-mimetic sound design. Hertz once had a day job designing signal-processing algorithms for Native Instruments’ software synthesizers and effects, so he knows a thing or two about the expressiveness of 1s and 0s. On Cocoon Crush, the vacuum-sealed expanse of Flatland gives way to a multi-dimensional spectrum of physical objects pushing air. Cocoon Crush is far from being Objekt’s Unplugged, though; there are hissing 808 hi-hats and warm ambient pads. But even amid his most obviously digital sounds, there’s a new emphasis on tactility and force. In “Dazzle Anew,” hammered strings recall Oneohtrix Point Never’s hyperreal dulcimers, while chattering percussion suggests an insect flexing its spiky legs. The shape-shifting “Rest Yr Troubles Over Me” begins with a chiming grandfather clock, the decay just slightly too long to be real, before it’s strafed with the accelerating clicks of a spring doorstop and punctuated by what might be heavy slamming doors. The slow-motion electro tune “35” even indulges something akin to slap bass, conjuring visions of Autechre remixing the theme from “Seinfeld.” Nothing on Cocoon Crush is a mere gee-whiz demonstration of Hertz’s programming chops; there’s a real narrative sensibility behind his sounds. These are some of the most meticulously arranged compositions that dance music has ever produced, even when their movements seem as arbitrary as those of tidal flotsam. In “Rest Yr Troubles Over Me,” an inky silence pierced by a high-pitched whine follows a whoomp that sounds like an airlock being sealed; it feels like a dramatization of John Cage’s experience in an anechoic chamber, when the soundlessness of the space revealed to him, he believed, the buzz of his own nervous system. “Silica” is another largely arrhythmic piece that, along with “Rest Yr Troubles,” forms the gelatinous heart of the album. Hertz works his way through a chaotic thicket of clicks and chirps, only to introduce a single, milky chord during the final 17 seconds—perhaps the most evocative thing heard in the entire stretch, an afterthought that doubles as a revelation. That narrative approach also plays out across the album, and the story is of Hertz’s own estrangement from dance music itself. Cocoon Crush begins in relatively familiar territory: “Lost and Found (Lost Mix)” is the kind of atmospheric ambient techno you can imagine a DJ slotting in a warmup set. But he spends the next few tracks exploring slower tempos and more elastic cadences, letting himself be led by the particularities of his sounds rather than by clubbers’ demands. Track five, “Deadlock,” is the album’s heaviest cut, but it’s also the slowest: a bare-knuckled hip-hop instrumental that sounds like classic Def Jux rendered in retina-burning high definition. Even on “Runaway,” the album’s only true club cut, he refuses to play it straight. In the middle, he removes the beat for nearly a minute, layering tentative piano chords and gurgling synths over the sounds of a children’s playground. When the beat finally returns, it’s stronger, as if recharged by a meditative walk around the block. It’s like a diagram of the creative process itself. The closer, “Lost and Found (Found Mix),” is a rework of the intro, but it’s no mere coda. A more customary producer would have floated an ambient intro and then wrapped up with the dancefloor version, but Hertz takes the opposite approach: The closing is a seven-minute deconstruction of the opener that jettisons almost all trace of conventional beats. It’s no coincidence that the version subtitled “Found Mix” is the one that ventures furthest from the familiar: To find the essence of Objekt, Hertz has ventured well past techno’s borderlands. Four years later, Flatland still sounds ahead of its time, but Cocoon Crush is leagues beyond it. It shows a total disregard for club music’s strictures, concerned primarily not with floor-filling, but world-building.

2018-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Pan

November 17, 2018

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Philip Sherburne

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

The Australian multi-instrumentalist and songwriter’s second album finds a home in the shadowy space between post-punk, trip-hop, and lo-fi folk.

The Australian multi-instrumentalist and songwriter’s second album finds a home in the shadowy space between post-punk, trip-hop, and lo-fi folk.

Carla dal Forno: Look Up Sharp

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carla-dal-forno-look-up-sharp/

Look Up Sharp

Autumn is the most charged of the seasons, and the most melancholy. As English novelist Kate Atkinson wrote in Human Croquet, the air can feel laden with “an aromatic shadow… the fragrance of last year’s apples and the smell of the insides of very old books with a base note of dead, wet rose-petals.” This same haze is conjured in almost everything recorded by London-via-Australia artist Carla dal Forno. A multi-instrumentalist and detail-obsessive, she records albums that, were they images, would be heavy with fog and sepia. She writes, generally, about the longing that precedes and follows relationships, the kind that casts a sillage of tension and want around the surrounding days. Look Up Sharp, dal Forno’s second album and her first on her own Kallista Records, doesn’t depart from her past work so much as coalesce the haze into more of a shape. Dal Forno imprinted on post-punk, and she found a fitting home for her early records amid the doomy, dubby shadows of her former label, London-based Blackest Ever Black. But there’s an equally strong current of folk influence to her music, specifically the stark, lo-fi records of Virginia Astley and former labelmates Gareth Williams and Marie Currie. The midpoint of the genres is a shadowy space occupied by goth-folk singer-songwriters like Emma Ruth Rundle or Laura Sheeran, or the cello-and-violin mood pieces of former 4AD session musicians Martin and Kimberlee McCarrick. This is where dal Forno is at home, and newly assured. The arrangements—starting with the first lead bass notes of “No Trace”—are more muscular. Her vocals move from foreground to background, though there are still moments where you might swear you’d heard the voice of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan: the soprano brushstrokes of “No Trace,” the trip-hop murmurs of “Push On,” or the austere, layered choral opening to “Don’t Follow Me.” Her lyrics are more direct, even pointed. Single “So Much Better” isn’t just direct for dal Forno; lines like “you were a disaster, I’m glad I caused you pain” would be blunt coming from anyone. (“I had to trick myself that it was a bit of a joke that I was writing these lyrics down,” she said of writing the track.) It’s a calm anger, though: The song moves slowly, with deliberately paced bass and measured, almost deadpan vocals, like a grudge held so long and rehearsed so often it’s become an internal rhythm. “I’m Conscious” is less conflicted: “I crave drama,” she sings, and the track she conjures delivers. It’s as if, seeing romantic disaster approaching like thunderheads, she’s decided to go storm chasing. Dal Forno can afford such candor; her arrangements are flush with subtext as is. “Took a Long Time” and “Push On” bloom with “Teardrop”-esque percussion shudders. “Don’t Follow Me,” a lyrical nod to the Cure’s “A Forest,” suspends dal Forno’s vocals above a grotty low end like thick moss. And the instrumentals on Look Up Sharp are characteristically palpable: a string solo on “Heart of Hearts,” the most McCarricks-like track here; the late-night meditations of “Leaving for Japan” and “Creep Out of Bed,” one neon and one smoky; the stark foreground-background arrangement of “Hype Sleep,” where clock ticks, live-wire buzzes, and longing woodwind fade in and out around a heavy, perseverating lead bass line. It is, as they say, an extremely big mood, and dal Forno is by now an expert at setting them. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Kallista

October 8, 2019

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Katherine St. Asaph

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

Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson has worked with Björk, Damon Albarn, Sigur Rós, and many more. His new collection of long-form works feature emotional string arrangements in a digital setting.

Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson has worked with Björk, Damon Albarn, Sigur Rós, and many more. His new collection of long-form works feature emotional string arrangements in a digital setting.

Valgeir Sigurðsson: Dissonance

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23180-dissonance/

Dissonance

Thanks to his part in establishing the Bedroom Community label, Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson also doubles as a classical impresario. He has long worked closely with label co-founder Nico Muhly, collaborating on the occasional short opera and helping to produce a series of drone EPs. On his own albums for the imprint, Valgeir has put his stamp on contemporary electro-acoustic trends, with the chamber music programs Architecture of Loss and Draumalandið. Already in 2017, Valgeir has contributed a pair of compelling pieces to an album by the group Nordic Affect. That pair of compositions gives a sense of his range. The propulsive electronic opus “Antigravity” would fit nicely on many of his prior solo sets, while on “Raindamage,” he foregrounds acoustic instruments while incorporating digital effects. For his own label, Valgeir now offers an ambitious program of long-form works that touch on the computer-edited acoustic approach of “Raindamage,” two of which come loaded with weighty concepts that reach back into classical music’s past. The expansive title track makes a direct reference to Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19, commonly called the “Dissonance” quartet (thanks to the overlapping, chromatic lines that are present during its opening). Valgeir’s intention was to stretch Mozart’s initial gambit into a much longer piece: “I took the bars and stretched the 40 seconds out to 23 minutes. The movement is the same as Mozart envisioned, only much slower.” As an experiment, this seems promising, but this particular adaptation robs Mozart’s progression of too much drama. In the String Quartet No. 19, part of the wonderment is caused by the fact that the initial music is packed with so many clashing elements. Even as the music swoons slowly, this density quickly outstrips your ability to keep track of the overall direction, which gives the writing a dizzying power. During Valgeir’s “Dissonance,” which was multi-tracked in the studio and later modified digitally, a listener can become too well accustomed to each portion of the music, and the crucial sense of surprise is gone. Other extended works on the album have more purchase on ingenuity. The title of “No Nights Dark Enough” references the lyrics to English Renaissance composer John Dowland’s iconic “Flow, My Tears.” Valgeir does honor to the source material; this Dowland-influenced music is still suffused with sorrow. But the sudden, downward-sliding tones in the first movement (“flow”) have a savagery that feels beholden to no past. The second movement (“infamy sings”) sets some fast-repeating piano lines against drawn-out brass and string exclamations, and the contrast feels like some elegantly shouted objection in the face of trauma. The glitchier third section (“fear and grief and pain”) treads on some production grounds Trent Reznor might recognize. This emerging sense of a bummed-out lineage—from Dowland to The Fragile to Valgeir—makes a strange, perfect form of sense. The album’s final piece is the three-movement “1875.” Pitched as a reflection on an historic Icelandic settlement in Canada, it’s foremost an acoustic piece. And the composer’s ability to craft a journeying instrumental narrative is never in doubt. After a jarring beginning, it explores moods of unease—eventually closing in a hushed, chilling fashion. Valgeir surely has more electronic beats and drones to create, but purely symphonic writing remains well within his grasp.

2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Bedroom Community

April 24, 2017

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Seth Colter Walls

https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/

Recorded in real time and released without further edits, the Hungarian musician’s dizzyingly unstable experiments in rhythm and timbre revel in the plasticity of sound.

Recorded in real time and released without further edits, the Hungarian musician’s dizzyingly unstable experiments in rhythm and timbre revel in the plasticity of sound.

Gábor Lázár: Boundary Object

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gabor-lazar-boundary-object/

Boundary Object

Sine waves are the blood and guts of music, and no one knows this better than electronic composers. Pioneers in the 1970s built the genre by subtracting: With a variety of analog tools, they removed waves from waveforms to forge eerie, pathbreaking sounds. Fifty years later, Hungarian producer Gábor Lázár does the opposite: He layers waves on top of each other, crafting uncharted timbres at the heart of harsh, serpentine, forward-thinking records. Lázár is hardly the originator of this method, additive synthesis—it’s how the millennia-old pipe organ works, for example. But on his latest, Boundary Object, the 32-year-old producer manipulates his digital instruments with a demonic complexity, lavishing even more attention on tone color than he does on rhythm, and contorting each patch like a magician twisting balloons into different shapes. The album walks a fine line between precise and clinical, but it ultimately teaches us its own peculiar vocabulary: By the end of its 34 minutes, this glossary seems to have the far-flung possibility of an entire language. Boundary Object marks a shift in Lázár’s style, technological and otherwise. The producer programmed his last couple of albums, 2018’s Unfold and 2020’s Source, using Logic, the ubiquitous software on which he cut his teeth as a young beat whiz frequenting Budapest clubs. Full of sinuous techno, these releases were deeply pleasurable and coyly nostalgic. Yet Lázár sought more control, so he produced his latest using the endlessly customizable software application Max. The album revels in the plasticity of sound, offering an unblinkingly serious technological immersion he hasn’t attempted since his early career. Newer fans may miss the propulsive grooves, but Boundary Object expands on many of Lázár’s strengths while pointing toward another kind of physical movement. The LP’s jerky tempos and frantic, arhythmic bass drum seem more modern dance accompaniment than soundtrack to a night out. This might remind us of Jlin, who scored a piece for Company Wayne McGregor in 2018. But unlike the Indiana-based luminary (or another Planet Mu labelmate, RP Boo), Lázár’s low end lacks the malleability of liquid and the wobble of dub, and there are no vocal samples. His music is decidedly less luxurious; each of Boundary Object’s eight, eponymously titled tracks asks us to find our own handholds in the mix. The opener’s half-note kick drum feels like an anchor, but before we can learn how to move along with the composition’s thump, Lázár staggers his beat, introducing handclaps to undermine the song’s flow. On the second track, the midrange turns starchy and fuzzy with static, while the bass stumbles along like someone tapping nervously on a desk. There are flashes of danceability—on “Boundary Object III,” for example—but Lázár’s percussion constantly liberates itself from timekeeping duties, so we cling to almost-melodic squelches of noise, the way we might to a soloing saxophonist during a particularly dissonant free-jazz set. Structurally, Boundary Object coheres thanks to symmetry. Handclaps from the opening track return, but this time in a catchy way, on “Boundary Object V,” and throughout Lázár introduces phrases and inverts them, all the while pacing his drum sounds with a sense of pressure mounting and releasing. The record’s inscrutability becomes a greater boon as it speeds along to its close. Lázár’s frenetic kick drum speaks directly with the rest of the elements, while he runs his patches through such deliberate, momentary changes that they resemble glissandos. We enter Boundary Object bewildered by its lexicon until we calmly parse each phoneme of sound. By the LP’s end, we’ve learned some idiomatic expressions from another world. For Lázár, such an opaque language is innate: He performed each track in real time and then released the recordings unedited. His use of computer programs as an expressive tool conflicts with ordinary conversations about “naturalness” in the electronic realm—such a term usually refers to four-on-the-floor rhythms pounding like heartbeats, or digital timbres that feel acoustic. But what is naturalness, and how can music be unnatural when it’s just a collection of waves, moving periodically? Lázár’s sound is rawer in concept than his peers’, and manipulated with an implacable, impressive fussiness most producers would never attempt. But what truly sets him apart is something both universal in appeal and organic in spirit: He uses his art, in all its permutations, in order to be himself. Buy: Rough Trade

2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Planet Mu

February 24, 2022

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Daniel Felsenthal

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

Now relocated to Los Angeles, the five-piece moves comfortably into breezy, slow-going, cosmic country as both an escape and a protest.

Now relocated to Los Angeles, the five-piece moves comfortably into breezy, slow-going, cosmic country as both an escape and a protest.

Gun Outfit: Out of Range

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gun-outfit-out-of-range/

Out of Range

Gun Outfit singer-guitarist Dylan Sharp describes the sandstone butte, that archetypal desert platform as, “...the only stage on which our kind of puritanical decadence can successfully perform the irony of its existence.” On their newest work, he and co-founder Carrie Keith are willfully Out of Range—from cell service and pop culture frenzy, honoring instead the timelessness of Western expanse. Aligning your art with such iconography as a means of dismissing the digital sandstorms that sweep said art into consumer consciousness is a bold profession. It’s a mission statement at worst construed as pretentious and grandiose, and at best a bit naive. The music Gun Outfit writes—breezy, slow-going, cosmic country tunes drenched in scholarly musings and West Coast vibes—live removed from the cultural vacuum of anxiety-inducing messaging on 24-hour blast. Laid back as they are, the songs protest the marketing frenzy of present-day, a dismissal of social media strategies in favor of the beauty and simplicity of emptiness. It’s an invocation of unplugged-ness, and an invitation to U-turn from all the mental traffic toward the vastness of desert sunsets over horizons accessorized with saguaros, Joshua trees, and sagebrush. Out of Range acts as a sort of sonic Ayahuasca ceremony, Sharp and Keith the shamans inviting you to purge of your toxins in the only place left largely untouched by human constructs. For the anointed, it’s a communal celebration and exploration of consciousness. But for everyone else, it’s a just a bunch of longhairs puking in the desert. Recall your reaction to your friends’ Instagram transmissions from the empty confines of Joshua Tree: You either get the allure of the Integratron, or you smirk at all of the dummies who paid $30 to lie in a dome listening to a dude play crystal bowls in 102-degree temperatures. It can be hard to bring folks to your side when it comes to crunchy shit. Though they tread steadily in these waters, it’s something the band seems at least partially aware of. ”Pardon me for the hippie talk,” Sharp sings on “Slow Realization.” The apology is a disclaimer for the next lines: “I’m trying to tell you how the flow was blocked/Like a crisis in a dream/The patterns are unseen.” For a guy whose lyrical professions traverse German mathematicians, Waiting for Godot, and phrases like “psychic ghetto,” it’s a moment of unexpected self-consciousness. It’s also a track that best embodies the group’s current focus. The five-piece left their Olympia punk rock roots for the canyons of Los Angeles, and their music slowed down and lost its angular crunch in the process. But all good punks hold a torch for their past and it’s perhaps why at many junctures Out of Range recalls a coterie of great ’90s acts, like Pavement, Sonic Youth and the madman philosophies of Silver Jews. The album’s lyrics are steeped in scholarly ideas that either apply to or stand beside observations on the every-day, and it’s impossible to ignore the similarities between David Berman and Sharp’s vocal delivery. Through their commixing of twang and affectation, Gun Outfit express the Southwestern panorama without being too on the nose about it and avoid becoming a parody of their tropes. It favors posi-vibes over cowboy clacking. Album opener “Ontological Intercourse” beams with sunny optimism, a traffic-free ride in a droptop, with Sharp as omniscient narrator splicing Greek mythology with tales of personal evolution over shiny cymbal taps, bass shimmies, and dual guitar texturing. “The 101” reads as a modern folktale as Keith recounts the trek from her home in Washington state to Los Angeles, Sharp’s banjo co-mingling sounds of past and present behind her mystic singing. Multi-instrumentalist Henry Barnes recently joined the band full-time and his dulcimer, fiddle, lap slide and other contributions inject the tunes with an earthen appeal. His playing of traditional and homemade instruments give the songs an effortlessly timeless quality lacking in past efforts, and his presence marks another natural fit in a line of punk and folk hands in glove—Jason Molina’s long alliance with lap steel player Mike “Slo Mo” Brenner comes to mind. The problem, though, with aligning yourself with such an immortal landscape as Monument Valley, and such an iconic sound as cosmic American music, or “western expanse music,” as Gun Outfit calls it, is that you risk falling short of its might. Despite some of the lyrical weight, overall Out of Range floats like a feather and relies too heavily on atmosphere, an intangible vibe. It doesn’t have the teeth that really gnaw into one’s consciousness, lacking the bleeding heart and pleading lyrical hooks of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Instead, Out of Range dishes out good feelings and Zen calm—more East than West. These days, we all need that sort of thing, regardless of your stance on sound baths.

2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Paradise of Bachelors

November 15, 2017

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Erin Osmon

https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/

Montreal musicians Ouri and Helena Deland recorded their debut album together in eight days; the album’s eight songs feel like the diary of a gradual mind meld.

Montreal musicians Ouri and Helena Deland recorded their debut album together in eight days; the album’s eight songs feel like the diary of a gradual mind meld.

Hildegard: Hildegard

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hildegard-hildegard/

Hildegard

In the music of Montreal upstarts Ouri and Helena Deland, the mere idea of transformation can create a frisson of excitement. On the title track of her radiant album Someone New, Deland wondered whether the act of kissing someone new—or even imagining kissing someone new—could be enough to spark some transformation of the self. Ouri, meanwhile, has spent the past few years using ambient pop and rich, hot-blooded techno to interrogate the way experiences of emigration and falling in love reshape identity over time. Earlier this year, discussing her mobilegirl collaboration “Too Fast No Pain,” she described the heady feeling of “los[ing] your identity for the better”: Recalling her move to Montreal, she said, “I could be anything. I destroyed my sense of self for a moment.” There’s limitless potential in this kind of “What if?” thinking, and that manifests in both Deland’s music, which traverses the static buzz of electronic and drone as well as indie folk, and Ouri’s, which draws on her background as a cellist and harpist as much as it does the conventions of viscerally embodied dance music. Hildegard, the pair’s first collaborative album, expands upon that potential, drawing inspiration from any number of “What if”s: What if we did it on the phone, and never had to touch? What if life alone could be as fulfilling and romantic as life with someone else? And, in the bones of the project itself: What if Hildegard were not a midway point between Deland’s art and Ouri’s, but an entirely separate entity, channeling impulses different from those in their respective solo work and producing an entirely different result? It’s that final question that creates Hildegard’s most indelible moments. Like a slightly less austere twin to Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden’s Menneskekollektivet, released earlier this year, Hildegard feels like an opportunity for Deland and Ouri to consider the freedom that a musical union offers. Although Deland sings lead most often, Ouri’s voice is almost always present, and after a while, their voices melt into each other; by the arrival of “Jour 8,” the album’s steely, righteously pissed-off final track, Hildegard is her own person, calm and all powerful as, over a hazy, electronic thrum, she delivers parting words to a lover: “I don’t give a fuck who you dream of.” Hildegard’s eight tracks were recorded over eight days, and their sequencing implies a chronology, from “Jour 1” to “Jour 8”; you can track Deland and Ouri’s growing connection across the course of the album, with “Jour 8” representing something close to pure creative symbiosis. On “Jour 3,” the album’s coy, lilting highlight, Deland and Ouri play id and ego, wrestling over how to interact with an object of desire. As Ouri vocalises unbridled impulse (“I just wanted to ask you, how was your day!,” she screams, as though giving voice to an exasperated text message, before muttering “Just waiting for you,” like another text sent a few hours and a few drinks later) Deland offers poetic sweet nothings: “I’ll speak to you/In the most sensitive words/And it will sound like a purr/Show you what I’m made of/Be better than making love.” Someone New took place in tense, fractured bedrooms, populated by antagonistic and narcissistic men. Here, Deland is given room to be amorous and mischievous, the fantastical elements of this one-sided courtship allowing her to adopt another guise for a night. Ouri, too, seems liberated by the opportunity to inhabit a new creative outlet: On “Jour 4,” on which she sings lead, the core tenets of her solo music—strings, her vaporous voice, destabilizing sound design—appear in surprising formations. Where her classical training is often deployed to assist in ambient experiments, strings play a more traditional role here, providing pathos and cinematic pomp; in turn, her vocals are immediate and foregrounded. Hildegard is the first project that Ouri has mixed and mastered in its entirety, and that top-to-bottom involvement comes through in the music, which is filled with unique moving parts—harp, beats that sound like bare feet crunching on dry sand, the creak of a desk chair, speaker-destroying bass, a kick like a woodblock—but never feels busy or unfocused. Although elements of Deland and Ouri’s solo practices undeniably come through on Hildegard, as a whole it feels like a remarkably realized whole, as opposed to some Frankenstein of styles and ideologies. By the time “Jour 8” has run its course, you’re left wondering what the collaboration might sound like had they pushed it to 10 days or 14 days. Still, as it stands, Hildegard is a satisfying and invigorating document—the mark of not just instinctual collaboration, but of complete transformation. 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.

2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Section1

June 10, 2021

f6920fe4-c31c-45ce-8f9d-5ae6b5fcf316

Shaad D’Souza

https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/

After a series of records credited to Brave Captain, the former Boo Radleys leader releases his first LP under his given name.

After a series of records credited to Brave Captain, the former Boo Radleys leader releases his first LP under his given name.

Martin Carr: Ye Gods (And Little Fishes)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13265-ye-gods-and-little-fishes/

Ye Gods (And Little Fishes)

Martin Carr spent the 1990s writing songs and playing guitar for the Boo Radleys, one of the most idiosyncratic bands ever to be lumped in with the Britpop thing, a movement they really weren't a part of. Their Wake Up! LP scored them a couple of hits, but it's the previous record, Giant Steps that really showed Carr's incredible scope as a writer. He could do catchy blasts of sunshine, dub freakouts, noise opuses, straight-ahead rock, and intentional kitsch with equal aplomb. His solo career after the band split in 1999, carried out primarily under the stage name Brave Captain, has embraced a similar eclecticism-- Carr's last album under that name, the 2006 free download Distractions, was loaded with electronic textures and even some decent rap courtesy of Akira the Don. His first album under his given name is more of a back-to-basics thing. It's as friendly as Wake Up! and the Boo's Kingsize, but also more stripped down and intimate. It could just be that Carr is writing these songs for himself to sing-- he wrote songs for Sice Rowbottom to sing with the Radleys, and though they have similar-sounding voices, Sice was more at home belting and yelping, while Carr prefers a very English sort of understatement. Opener "The Dead of Winter" could be a leftover from Carr's mid-90s heyday-- it sounds familiar the second time you hear it, like it's been with you for years. It features a tumbling vocal melody, blasting horn theme, frantic drums and nasty guitar break that keeps you guessing which sides Carr is going to show on the rest of the record. Mostly, he shows his quiet side on brooding songs such as the dark, undulating "Tired, Broken, Black and Blue" and the slow crawl "Pontcanna Stone", where he gets in a haunting lead guitar part that drifts through the song as though some part of it were smoldering, giving off waves of heat. The album's six-minute centerpiece, "Goldrush '49", is built up from a few simple acoustic guitar phrases to a long, stretched-out chant of nothing but the word "California". Carr can still deploy an easy melodicism seemingly at will, as the late-album duo "Orpheus Lament" and "Running" demonstrate. He gives one of the best songs to his wife, Mary, to sing. "Why You Gotta Bring Me All This Rain?" is one of those awesome, miserable British slow songs that inevitably makes you feel better about things after listening to it. Though it lacks the conscious ambition and open challenge of his best work, Ye Gods (And Little Fishes) is still a very pleasing album, and Carr is way past the point where he needs to open up a bag of tricks to make impressive music. If you and Carr last communicated when he was still a Boo Radley, this might be a good time to get re-acquainted, and if you've followed the Brave Captain through every stage of his voyage, you'll certainly want to take this opportunity to get to know him on a more personal level.

2009-07-07T02:00:04.000-04:00

2009-07-07T02:00:04.000-04:00

Rock

Sonny Boy

July 7, 2009

f69591f7-a435-476c-a21a-51021bf5687a

Joe Tangari

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

These South Korean devotees of the ’90s indie-rock canon make delicate, bruising music about indecision and loneliness (and lots of drinking).

These South Korean devotees of the ’90s indie-rock canon make delicate, bruising music about indecision and loneliness (and lots of drinking).

Say Sue Me : Where We Were Together

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/say-sue-me-where-we-were-together/

Where We Were Together

Busan, South Korea’s Say Sue Me write songs about indecision, loneliness, and drinking—lots of drinking. The bar is the stage on the band’s second LP, Where We Were Together. Singer and lyricist Sumi Choi describes it as a crowded, noisy circus on “Let It Begin” and as a quiet, secret safe haven on “Funny and Cute.” When lead guitarist and principal songwriter Byungkyu Kim slurs the last couple syllables of a guitar phrase just a split second behind the beat, you can smell the place. Don’t be shocked that this is such a prevalent theme on the follow-up to a 2014 debut entitled We’ve Sobered Up. For Choi, contradictions make for the best subject matter. “I’m full of things I hate/But I like you,” goes the chorus of one fuzz-covered highlight. “I just wanna leave here/But I wanna stay here,” she sings on the giddy lead single “Old Town.” Even the declaration of new beginnings that opens the album comes with an undercutting asterisk: “Let it all begin/Let it all begin again.” Say Sue Me makes no effort to hide the bands that it takes after, each of whom is likely the subject of a 20th anniversary retrospective piece dropping somewhere soon and might or might not have been signed to Matador at some point. The band wears Painful and Terror Twilight on its sleeve, and Kim, in particular, seems to have internalized so much of the indie-rock canon that its approach to texture is second nature to him. His guitar warps, dilutes, and casts shadows over these songs, and his reverb placement reflects a well-versed ear. Throughout this album, the band generally keeps within its sweet spot of familiar, wistful progressions complemented by Kim’s interior detailing. But that’s not to say it’s without brave moments. For starters, Choi sings just two of its eleven songs in her native Korean, even though she has said it makes her feel uncomfortably exposed and that she actually prefers English. Halfway through the writing phase for this album, Say Sue Me drummer Kang Semin went into a coma after an accidental fall. The band eventually completed the album with a new drummer, but they were writing from a place of sadness. Four songs here address Semin’s absence, and two others also appeared on their Semin EP, released on Record Store Day 2017 to raise funds for him. “I’m afraid of making new memories without you,” Choi sings on “Funny and Cute,” offering to save his seat at the aforementioned bar. “I’m so tired and can’t dry my eyes.” This makes Where We Were Together’s last impression sound that much stronger. King-size closer “Coming to an End,” written with Semin before his accident, is the band’s best work to date. Kim’s guitar starts as a flickering candle and erupts halfway through into a bonfire outro, a screaming, seizing solo that makes a single half-step down his guitar neck feel like a freefall into the Grand Canyon. It’s a convincing demolition of the argument that Say Sue Me can’t be anything other than gentle, and a persuasive case that they should be other things more often.

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

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

Rock

Damnably

April 12, 2018

f6987ab1-26ab-426d-b77b-381f20c5aeaa

Steven Arroyo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/

On its latest album, the obsession-inducing North Carolina garage band integrates the diversity that was found on its first two LPs into a charging, playful collection. Largely recorded in something of a party atmosphere, Shake My Head is a sad-eyed celebration record.

On its latest album, the obsession-inducing North Carolina garage band integrates the diversity that was found on its first two LPs into a charging, playful collection. Largely recorded in something of a party atmosphere, Shake My Head is a sad-eyed celebration record.

Spider Bags: Shake My Head

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16910-shake-my-head/

Shake My Head

People tend to obsess over North Carolina's Spider Bags, a nominally identified garage rock band that sputters into broken-down country and spirals into high-flying psychedelics from a firm base of petulant, propulsive, and fun three-minute rock tunes. To wit, Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles used to perpetually call them the greatest band in the world. Some years ago, when a DJ friend who'd moved several states away returned to the Carolinas for a weekend, she learned that the Bags were performing at a nearby haunt and canceled all of her impending plans. In her mind, at least, the best local band ever-- the one with the shout-out-loud anthem called "Waking Up Drunk" and the frontman, Dan McGee, who sang about his demons with a conviction that made them the crowd's demons, too-- were playing, and she simply had to be there. And as colleague Marc Masters recently quipped online about the band's compulsive tunes, "And now to listen to Spider Bags & Apache Dropout constantly, even when I'm not listening to them." As their name implies, when Spider Bags hook into you, it's hard to shake the hold. The first two Spider Bags full-lengths depended on diversity. 2007's A Celebration of Hunger creeped through country turns that had more to do with Townes Van Zandt than whatever Little Steven plays on his show ("Lonely Man" is the band's secret stunner) and occasionally climbed into the alt-country molds of Drive-By Truckers. The blistering rock'n'roll tracks were only part of the picture. They were more prominent on 2009's Goodbye Cruel World, Hello Crueler World, but there was still much more to be heard than fuzzy, frenzied barnstormers-- banjo songs, Crazy Horse-sized epics, sad-eyed duets and baby-please pleas. Shake My Head, the band's third album and their first for North Carolina imprint Odessa Records, is their most stylistically cohesive to date. Rolling through 10 tracks in less than 35 minutes, it delivers would-be rock hit after hit, shifting away from that template only for the record's closing third. That's not to say that Shake My Head is stylistically stripped at all; rather, those variations are woven into the charging songs rather than separated from them. "Shawn Cripps Boogie", for instance, is a xylophone-dotted instrumental played by a half-dozen guitarists, but its almost post-rock surge and otherwise playful countenance make it feel less like a departure or deviation than a great if wordless Spider Bags tune. With McGee's mix of don't-leave-me protestations and fuck-you-then imprecations, "I'll Go Crazy" is nothing if not a country song reworked for a rock band drunk on the idea of soul harmonies. "Friday Night" is surf music for the town's slouch, too wasted to go to the beach with his friends and too sad to go home with his memories. Spider Bags have finally fit all their interests and eccentricities into one tight, identifiable set. Shake My Head might not be their most surprising or inventive album to date, but it's certainly their most irrepressible, a record that seems suited and able to land its charms with a lot more people. That's fitting, since Shake My Head is the product of a band at a curious crossroads in its own history: After two frustrating experiences with full-length release schedules and press cycles, McGee vowed to focus more on singles than albums. Spider Bags stuck to that, too, releasing a slew of unimpeachable 7"s but ultimately slowing the pace as an on-the-road, in-the-studio work force. Co-founder and bassist Gregg Levy headed back to New Jersey, committing to rejoin the band for tours while they recruited another bassist, Steve Oliva, to assume the role locally. When they headed west to Memphis to finally record Shake My Head, Levy flew down to split bass duties with Oliva. Perhaps in recognition of that strange lineup situation, Spider Bags used the Memphis sessions of Shake My Head-- and the long, guest-heavy overdub process that followed-- as an excuse to invite a horde of friends over to the studio and capture a party as they made a record. The jangling if jilted "Simona La Ramona" pairs fuzz bass from Memphis legend Jack Oblivian with the distant Theremin peal of Chapel Hill songwriter Billy Sugarfix, while opening blast "Keys to the City" hinges not only on multiple charging guitars but also backing vocals from, as the liner notes put it, "The City of Memphis." As you might expect, the space around these songs is often filled with laughter and false starts and chatter not necessarily intended for the microphone-- friends, hanging out, sharing the spirit of these songs and probably spirits, too. It's a sad-eyed celebration record. That atmosphere fits McGee's songs. He is a writer, after all, who is best when extending empathy for the dispossessed, when he-- a married father at the helm of a great rock band-- writes about and for those who don't have it so good. Sure, there's nonsense written into these lyrics, too, but McGee's perfectly able to express misery in an economical phrase or two. "I'm a dog, baby, without an owner," he sings on "Simona La Ramona", bouncing into the rhyme with hope for the future. "I can't keep a phone/ And I can barely pay rent/ And the car I own/ I only really own the dents," he offers during the brilliant "Shape I Was In", a breezy, organ-backed tune that seems to treat despair like a necessity of life, not a reason for exasperation. Above sizzling guitar lines, boogie-woogie keys, and flickering tambourine, "Standing on a Curb" opens with what might seem to be a dismissive image of McGee "waiting on some girl." But as the song unfolds, we learn that the person he's waiting on doesn't matter as much as the general feeling of being specifically sad about loving someone who could care less what curb you're standing on, or if you're able to stand at all. The anxiety overruns any ambition he's ever had. "I don't have anything else to do," McGee admits. "I'm looking at a picture of you." And then, of course, he beats the shit out of the photo. Hell, what else could he have done? And what else could you do, besides commiserate with and sing along to a record that turns problems into a party you'll wish you had attended.

2012-08-14T02:00:02.000-04:00

2012-08-14T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Odessa

August 14, 2012

f6997c11-eebe-4f51-8dcb-6bf3a2f3eedb

Grayson Haver Currin

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

Joined by a wealth of collaborators, the house band for the venerable South London spoken-word night thrives on a nearly imperceptible blend of live improvisation and studio assemblage.

Joined by a wealth of collaborators, the house band for the venerable South London spoken-word night thrives on a nearly imperceptible blend of live improvisation and studio assemblage.

Speakers Corner Quartet: Further Out Than the Edge

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speakers-corner-quartet-further-out-than-the-edge/

Further Out Than the Edge

For more than 150 years, amateur orators have been clambering atop soapboxes in Speakers’ Corner—as the quadrant along the northeastern edge of London’s Hyde Park is known—to rant, declaim, and pontificate. Karl Marx and George Orwell each took a turn there; so have innumerable preachers, cranks, and conspiracy theorists. Since 2006, some four miles to the southeast, MCs and poets have been taking the stage at Speakers Corner—a hip-hop and spoken-word night at the city’s Brixton Jamm nightclub—to the accompaniment of the in-house band. Further Out From the Edge is that group’s debut album, and despite the range of guests—singers like Tirzah, Sampha, and Lafawndah; poets Kae Tempest and James Massiah; woodwind player Shabaka Hutchings, of Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming, and cellist Mica Levi—the record’s slow-burning hybrid of jazz, hip-hop, and dance music is a world away from the hoarse, anarchic tenor of the club night’s namesake. Channeling decades of UK soul, it’s elegant, reflective, and immaculately constructed. The house band’s lineup has evolved over the years; these days, Speakers Corner Quartet consists of bassist Peter Bennie, drummer Kwake Bass, flutist Biscuit, and violinist Raven Bush. They honed their chops over innumerable improvisatory live sets, but Further Out From the Edge is the product of painstaking offstage labor. They began tracking the album’s raw material across four weekend-long jam sessions in 2016, and over the next seven years, Biscuit, the group’s de facto producer, gradually chopped and looped instrumental parts into their final shape, folding in additional sessions and guest contributions along the way. (Like Dilla, whose rhythmic signature influenced the group’s loping, cut-up grooves, Biscuit pieced together some of the album from his hospital bed during a lengthy convalescence.) In many ways, it’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario. The quartet’s grooves lurch and roll with that deep-in-the-pocket funk of seasoned players vibing off each others’ energy; at the same time, a track like “Shabz Needs Sun,” featuring needling flute runs from Hutchings, simply wouldn’t sound the same played live. It thrives on the symmetry of the almost imperceptibly cut-up breakbeat, as well as the uncannily perfect repetition of Hutchings’ runs, suggesting something like Jean Paul Goude’s cover for Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm, in which some deft razor-and-tape work turned the singer into an eerie, broken-mirror image of herself. All that time spent polishing sounds in Ableton makes for some striking details: The vibey “Wavelet” repeatedly zooms in on a captivating few milliseconds of snare flam, turning the offhanded accent into one of the song’s defining features. If skeletal funk rhythms and a pervasive neo-soul melancholy tend to remain constant across the album, the group nonetheless pushes those influences in a variety of directions. The opening “On Grounds,” a wistful meditation on friendship and support networks sung by Coby Sey, begins with an ambient-jazz swirl reminiscent of Nala Sinephro and gradually builds into a chugging, house-adjacent four-on-the-floor. “Acute Truth” pairs a slow, swinging bass-and-drums groove with droning strings from Los Angeles cellist Kelsey Lu, suggesting an unexpected collision of London jazz hub Total Refreshment Centre with New York minimalist temple Theater of Eternal Music. Occasionally, they come remarkably close to full-on pop. The sliding bass chords of “Soapbox Soliloquy,” featuring a gorgeously expressive turn from rising London singer LEILAH, sound almost like a riff on Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ ’90s folk-pop staple “What I Am,” while “Dreaded!” uses a similarly catchy guitar riff, along with the husky voice of French-Martiniquan singer Léa Sen, to fashion an unusually dulcet take on 4Hero-styled broken-beat soul. While exactingly played and produced, Speakers Corner Quartet’s songs don’t always push forward stylistically; a few tracks, like “Can We Do This?,” built around Sampha’s familiar coo, feel like songs you’ve heard many times before. But there are moments of breathtaking originality. On “fix,” Tirzah sings softly—so softly that it sometimes seems as if she is singing into her own shoulder—over cut-up strands of acoustic bass, her voice almost imperceptibly multitracked, to add harmony and space. It’s not so much minimalist as miniature—an ink drawing on nubby paper that’s all the more captivating for its smallness. Kae Tempest’s spoken-word poetry on “Geronimo Blues” is even more compelling. In elliptical verses, Tempest warily circles the contemporary condition, nodding at class warfare and self-medication in carefully delineated images and stream-of-consciousness rhymes (“How can a million blips with their silicone chips/And an Instagram twitch/Repair the deep cracks to the kingdom?”). Halfway through, the band falls briefly silent and then changes gear, mirroring a shift in the poem’s intensity as Tempest gathers energy and surges forward. The maneuver both reflects the group’s open-mic origins and testifies to the players’ sensitivity: For all the virtuosic energy they bring to the recording, they know when to let their featured vocalists shine.

2023-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-06-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Jazz

OTIH

June 13, 2023

f6a59866-2496-45a5-b7d3-04c26c06b6c3

Philip Sherburne

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

With history and folklore as its backdrop, the Haitian band moves further away from Western styles to focus on Creole tradition and West African roots.

With history and folklore as its backdrop, the Haitian band moves further away from Western styles to focus on Creole tradition and West African roots.

Ram: RAM 7: August 1791

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ram-ram-7-august-1791/

RAM 7: August 1791

Because spirit guides are an inherent part of RAM’s music, it is not at all surprising that sleeve notes to the newest album by Richard A. Morse’s Port-au-Prince-based rasin band contain dedications to two recently departed loved ones who also happen to be great beacons for RAM 7: August 1791. The first dedication is to Emerante “Emy” de Pradines Morse, Richard’s mother, a matriarch of Haiti’s modern folkloric traditions (and daughter of Kandjo de Pradines, a populist giant of Haitian song and strong believer in vodou’s cultural weight as part of the country’s identity). The second is to Jonathan Demme, famed Hollywood director and lifelong gringo champion of global rhythms, who in 1993 placed RAM, then at the dawn of their career, on the soundtrack of Philadelphia, his film about the AIDS crisis. Both are giant figures in RAM and Morse’s history, and on August 1791, the mix of personal and national accounts is the main story. Morse grew up in the U.S., yet his Haitian influence was always strong. An island vibe can even be gleaned in the music of the Groceries, his late-1970s/early-1980s new wave band that played around Jersey and downtown NYC (often sharing bills with Regressive Aid, a proto-jazzcore group whose bassist, Andrew Weiss, went on to fame with Ween and Rollins Band; Weiss has been helping Morse make RAM albums since 2001’s RAM III: Kité Yo Palé, and his musical snarl is evident on RAM 7). By the late ’80s, Morse moved to Port-au-Prince to reconnect with his heritage and ended up running the city’s historic Hotel Oloffson. RAM formed there in 1990 (they still have a weekly residency at the hotel). They became aligned with mizik rasin, an ’80s movement of contemporary Haitian musicians who mixed rock and related styles with the folkloric ideas of vodou, especially its symbolic role in invoking Haiti’s revolutionary and spiritual history and African roots. (And its Carnival role of speaking truth to Haiti’s strong-man rulers.) RAM is a long-term, multi-familial concern—Morse’s wife Lunise (vocals) and son William (guitar) are both members, while drummers Wichemon Thelus and his uncle, Dieuveut Thelus, are second-generation RAM players. Yet it also reflects Morse’s exploration of his ancestry; the more embedded he became in Haiti, the more the band’s focus did too. Where once RAM’s recordings fused post-punk’s global vocabulary with Haiti’s deeply rooted traditions into pop-like, world-music polyglot, most Western ideals have been receding. Which is why, like its 2016 predecessor, RAM 7: August 1791 is an all-Creole affair, consisting almost entirely of folk and ceremony songs that are deftly intricate (up to nine percussion instruments on some tracks), sonically blasphemous (fuzzy metallic electric guitar tones square off with single-note tin rara horns), and full of sharp rhythmic turns. The central joy of this album, which is named after the month in which Saint Domingue slaves first conceived their uprising against French colonists, is how naturally it melds the past and the future, consistently West African in its Haitian-ness as it strives to define the future sound of traditionalism. Such fusions sparkle on August 1791’s upbeat numbers. The musical intensity of the juxtapositions—keyboard and horn lines from Caribbean dance music; the complex spiritual drumming of Ebo, Kongo, and Dahomey generations and Creole descendents; post-shredder guitar riffs, all mixing in the service of folk songs with ancient themes—can be overpowering. The opener, “Danmbala Elouwe,” musically recontextualizes a Dahomey ceremony piece, with Yonel Vendredi’s lead guitar bursting like sunlight through the drum line. The remarkable “Otsya” tackles herbalism as both practice and potential spirit-world currency, thrashing with abandon. “Dawomen Dakò” paints a Black Atlantic historical scene of an anti-colonial pact between Africans and Haitians. And “St. Clair,” a galloping medley of three songs—two traditional verses about Maman Brigitte, one of vodou’s grand spirits (Queen of the Cemetery), followed by an original RAM Carnival verse about a clairvoyant named Claire—stokes the flames at an almost soca-like breakneck. In fine folkloric fashion, most of the songs are short on lyrics and rich with choral harmonies, when Richard and Lunise’s solo voices are not leading a call-and-response refrain. This is big-crowd party music, first and foremost, ritualistic in the best ways. The few reflective moments on August 1791 are no less important—full-body sighs and acknowledgements of loss that present RAM as a multi-dimensional vehicle, emotional troubadours and not simply tricksters, holy rollers and storytellers. Yet it’s never long before the band’s songs re-enter the narrative slipstream and begin stirring history’s racket anew. Their beacons are spirits, after all, continuing to breathe life into those they left behind.

2018-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

Global

Willibelle Publishing & Sales

August 14, 2018

f6ae2481-4bfe-4690-95bd-a81838cf4939

Piotr Orlov

https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/

Beach Fossils’ latest album distills the best of their daydreamy indie-pop with new wisdom and existential angst. But they’re just still as laid-back as you remember.

Beach Fossils’ latest album distills the best of their daydreamy indie-pop with new wisdom and existential angst. But they’re just still as laid-back as you remember.

Beach Fossils: Bunny

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-fossils-bunny/

Bunny

When Brooklyn’s Beach Fossils released their self-titled debut in 2010, frontman Dustin Payseur had given little thought to his band’s name, which he’d offhandedly pulled from a notebook. By the time Captured Tracks released the band’s second record, Clash the Truth, an entire cottage industry of surf-pop acts had emerged in their wake, including Beach Day, Beach Vacation, and Horsebeach, just to name a few. As this initial wave of coastal indie-pop has rippled to new generations—see the surprise resurgence of Surf Curse’s 2013 track “Freaks” on TikTok, for example—Beach Fossils have grappled with their own identity, exploring washed out post-punk, paisley-patterned jangle pop, and even vocal jazz in reinventions that never quite matched their debut’s allure. Bunny, their first project since 2017’s Somersault, folds together the best of each album in their discography. The scrappy, Flying Nun-inspired guitar tones that defined the band’s infancy are once again at the forefront, now supported by the noisy crescendos of Clash the Truth and the lush string arrangements that appeared on Somersault. In retracing these steps, Payseur has ample space to reflect on Beach Fossils’ trajectory, and in turn, his own growth as a person. Payseur’s daydreamy lyrics remain steeped in memories of aimless drives and city skylines, but on Bunny, Beach Fossils’ celebrations of slackerdom find a wiser perspective in a concrete present. “Run to the Moon” and “Dare Me” open with similarly rowdy scenes of parties and basement shows, but branch off into separate trains of thought. On the former—a slide guitar-infused song that recalls the Byrds’ flirtations with country music—Payseur equates the sense of purpose he derives spending time with his baby daughter to the guiding light of celestial bodies, while the latter portrays an existential crisis spurred by life on the road. “Kill the cliché for a moment, and I’ll tell it like it is,” he sings. “Dare me to say something stupid: I think I need more than this.” The hesitance to get sincere is baked into the music, his disclaimers and defenses shattering in real time. “Is this a meaningful moment?” Payseur asks, interrupting an early morning bike ride on “Don’t Fade Away,” an ode to friends who’ve moved and subsequently lost touch. It’s true it may read like cliché, but in the anodyne world of Beach Fossils, it comes as a radical (and welcome) dose of reality. Like rubbing fresh baseballs with mud to prepare them for regulation play, Bunny’s sound scuffs up the pristine mixing and baroque flourishes of Somersault with the gritty, riff-forward production that typified the band’s earlier work. “Tough Love” and “Seconds” do the best job of bridging each era of the band. On both songs, Payseur crafts complex latticework out of intersecting staccato guitar parts that could easily be slotted into Clash the Truth, but rather than meander as that album’s weaker tracks tended to, these verse sections build purposefully toward towering choruses. This sharpened focus also allows outright experiments in shoegaze like “Feel So High” to hit with the force of their early ’90s influences, instead of getting lost in a dense cloud of reverb. Beach Fossils are still as laid-back as you remember, but in the six years since Somersault, the band has embraced a cozier mode of creative loafing, trading their old vices for melatonin, coffee, and Ativan. Bunny is not as uptempo and optimistic as the punk-adjacent guitar pop that put them on the map; instead it basks in its afterglow, as if spending the morning in bed after a long night out. The fleeting, unplaceable nostalgia that Beach Fossils helped proliferate during the chillwave era is now the object of Payseur’s own reminiscence. Bunny is proof you can look back while staying comfortably rooted in the present.

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

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

Experimental / Rock

Bayonet

June 2, 2023

f6b575e1-bfb4-4de3-b475-61d5ebb71af5

Jude Noel

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/

There's something about the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it's being overshadowed by towering evergreens that instills a modest reverence ...

There's something about the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it's being overshadowed by towering evergreens that instills a modest reverence ...

Death Cab for Cutie: We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2227-we-have-the-facts-and-were-voting-yes/

We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes

There's something about the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it's being overshadowed by towering evergreens that instills a modest reverence for beauty. Perhaps it's the evergreens remaining ever green under the gusts of snow which keeps hope alive. Perhaps it's the cradling of cold coast and the Rocky wall. Whatever the causes, the Pacific Northwest has played womb to some of the most skyward, heart-wrenching, and gentle pop music of recent history. The trademarks of the Northwest sound continue to be cherubic eunuchs on vocals, crisp production, slow rollercoaster melodies, and tales of crushes and the crushed. Built to Spill, Elliott Smith, Quasi, Sunny Day Real Estate, and even Modest Mouse and Caustic Resin, to some extent, all revolve around this central axis of Northwestern pop. In two short albums, Death Cab for Cutie have firmly established a stylistic nexus from which all of these bands spoke. Like history in reverse, We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes documents the proto-Northwest sound as a footnote to a decade of tranquilizing rock. Death Cab for Cutie effortlessly weep gems like a band stuck deep in a comfortable career. Subcutaneous organ and glockenspiel infuse warm, rich tones which bruise slowly between skeletal percussion and waxy guitar pickings. Sometimes the band patiently fills wooden cathedrals with echoes of reverberating slowcore, like on "No Joy in Mudville" and "The Employment Pages". The latter builds to an e-bow climax that weakens like a welcome influenza. "For What Reason", "Lowell, MA", and "Company Calls" click along at quick clips, yet maintain the shroud of delicate beauty thanks to Ben Gibbard's lachrymose wails. From a distance, the group appears manilla. But even top secret documents come stuffed in manilla. Subtle technological flourishes glimmer under the organic pulp like microchips in lumberjacking valleys. If fault can be found, it's Death Cab for Cutie's continual quest to shine a diamond from petrified wood and dark coal instead of letting some of the rough, raw rock pass through. But then again, that's why the Northwest gave us Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. Guitar heroics can be found elsewhere. Death Cab for Cutie have a killer name and lugubrious elixir. The hooks are barbless and coated in Novocaine. They pull through your skin and leave obscure scars. But in today's rock climate, this sort of gentle niche makes for a relaxing vacation with some good prospects of getting laid.

2000-03-31T01:00:01.000-05:00

2000-03-31T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Barsuk

March 31, 2000

f6bd2289-d764-4428-bd17-9b8045d08ebb

Brent DiCrescenzo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/

Brash, rude, and definitely not sober, the Yorkshire bassline trio return with a new mixtape full of soulful house samples and performance-art level idiocy.

Brash, rude, and definitely not sober, the Yorkshire bassline trio return with a new mixtape full of soulful house samples and performance-art level idiocy.

Bad Boy Chiller Crew: Disrespectful

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-boy-chiller-crew-disrespectful/

Disrespectful

Pressing play on Full Wack No Brakes, the debut album from Bad Boy Chiller Crew, felt like being slapped over the head with a sock full of pressed pills. Who are these semi-feral British twentysomethings, and why are they rapping so hard over such delightfully peppy dance beats? you might have asked, alongside questions like, Who thought it was a good idea to give them cocaine? and Why is one of them called “Clive”? As the frenetic frisson of Full Wack opening track “450” faded away, answers began to emerge from the fog-machine mist. Bad Boy Chiller Crew is made up of three dudes: Kane, GK, and the aforementioned Clive. They proudly refer to themselves as “charvas,” a sort of post-chav British slang word which, according to the definition printed on the packs of rolling papers sold at their official merch store, is “a disparaging term for a poor or uneducated young person, especially one who behaves in a brash or vulgar manner and wears ostentatious clothing and jewelry.” They’re from Bradford, a staunchly blue-collar city in Yorkshire that, since the mid-2000s, has been one of the epicenters of bassline, a type of sunny bleep-bloop-ba-dump-a-bump dance music that the late cultural critic Mark Fisher once called “a fabulous sweet shop, full of delicious sugar rushes.” Bassline is the wellspring from which BBCC’s beats flow, which explains why they sound like they do. As for Clive, your guess is as good as mine. Though Bad Boy Chiller Crew are still an underground concern in the States, Full Wack No Brakes set the trio on a path to becoming a genuine force in their home country. Since its release, they’ve signed with Sony and put out an EP whose single “Don’t You Worry About Me,” which also appears on their new mixtape Disrespectful, notched them a UK Top 40 hit. They made the cover of NME and became the subject of an ITV reality show. Their 2022 live schedule includes sold-out shows and festival appearances from Manchester to Croatia. In a recent video interview, Clive says he used to work construction and Kane talks about training to be a glassblower, only to get laid off after completing his apprenticeship. You get the sense that the group is still in a state of shock that any of this is happening at all. Part of their appeal, beyond the exhilarating oddness of watching three young men who still look like teenagers rap about doing drugs over not-particularly-fashionable dance tracks, is that outside of their music, BBCC turn abject dumbness into something approaching performance art. The group got their start in part by making goofy and often gross comedy skits, and they’ve remained true to their roots. In recent months, they’ve filmed themselves enthusiastically diving into frozen puddles, throwing poop at their manager, tattooing a fan’s forehead, and holding a contest to see whether Clive could drink a fifth’s worth of Jägerbombs before GK could chug a two-liter bottle of high-gravity cider (this last video has been deleted; GK finished first but Clive threw up more, so I think it’s safe to call it a tie). But to focus solely on their antics would be to overlook BBCC’s actual music, which is often genuinely thrilling and not quite like anything else out there. When it comes to hip-hop artists rooted in a hyper-regional sound who’ve freshly aligned themselves with a major, the concern is always that the label will water down their style in an attempt to chase mainstream success at the expense of what made them interesting. In the lead-up to Disrespectful, it momentarily seemed that this was the direction the group might have been headed. In July 2021, Kane told Mixmag that their future releases would be “proper music mate, commercial, stuff that you hear on charts ‘n that. We’re going for commercial, we’re not going for the underground.” On Disrespectful, though, it turns out that Bad Boy Chiller Crew’s idea of going for the big time mainly involves ditching the hooligan-esque chants that populated Full Wack No Brakes in favor of soulful house samples, rapping about cocaine slightly less often than they used to, and recruiting the Grammy-winning Newcastle producer Riton to do the beat for “Come With Me.” The rest of the instrumentals are handled by their DJ, the Bradford producer TACTICS, who uses his expanded role—he had a handful of credits on Full Wack—as an opportunity to push the group to embrace a broader constellation of dance music. Thanks to him, we have the Craig David-esque two-step garage of “BMW,” the R&B balladry of “Stick Around,” and the kitchen-sink Ibiza-rap of “Wasting Time,” probably the best example of the form since Tinie Tempah’s “Pass Out.” The brightly stuttering synths of “Bikes N Scoobys” and filter-happy sample populating “Somebody Else” make the tacit argument that idiosyncratic regional scenes often do a better job of recreating the warped pop of early PC Music than PC Music itself ever did. Lyrically, these guys aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel. Rarely do they deviate from their preferred subjects of A) going crazy with their boys on the way to, at, and back from the club, and B), offering heartfelt apologies to their girlfriends for the dumb shit they pulled last night when they were out with their boys. Which is fine—write what you know, and honestly, the less said about this mixtape’s forays into not-particularly-convincing raps about how good the individual members of Bad Boy Chiller Crew are at sex, the better. But Kane, easily the most skilled MC of the three, finds creativity within this constraint, rapping with such fire that even verses about drunk-driving stolen whips to a rave begin to resemble intense expressions of Bradford pride. On “Somebody Else,” probably the tape’s finest track, he takes his breathless, minute-long verse in unexpected directions, beginning with braggadocious lines about stealing cars before dropping the cool-guy facade, rapping, “I’m from a place where kids wear Nike Air/This shit a nightmare/I don’t wanna die here.” Over the throbbing Chicago house of “Come With Me,” he offers street-level sociology, painting a picture of a hometown full of “daylight robberies, raiding properties, kids in poverty, messed-up morally.” In these moments, he places the rest of the tape in context: Bradford is the fifth-most income-deprived district in England, youth unemployment is high, and nearly a third of adults did not finish secondary school. They don’t just party because it’s fun. They party because everything else around them sucks and there’s not shit else to do. But these unexpected forays into depth are the exception that proves the rule, and Disrespectful is still largely a mixtape meant to get you so pumped up that you’ll feel like chugging Strongbow out of a traffic cone. The trio clearly understand that Kane is their most valuable asset, and tend to place him front-and-center on tracks, allowing him to rap for the majority of the song and then bringing in GK and/or Clive for a quick clean-up verse or two. Each offers a distinct sensibility—GK tends to favor a nimble stop-and-start flow that provides a nice counterbalance to Kane’s verbal acrobatics, while Clive’s thick Yorkshire accent brings personality to every line, even when it’s something like, “Shots at the bar, I’m lit!” Their levity throws Kane’s this-rap-shit-is-deadly-serious-mate vibes into sharp relief, helping to spotlight his genuine talent while injecting a sense of fun into the affair. Like a Tasmanian devil with two 40-ounces duct-taped to his hands, Bad Boy Chiller Crew are a wacky, manic perpetual motion machine leaving chaos in their wake. Disrespectful sounds like the rap equivalent of a cartoon tornado, which is what makes it hard to dismiss them as a novelty act or an organically grown version of People Just Do Nothing’s hapless Kurupt FM crew. In a recent interview with MTV, GK described them as “a real boyband from Bradford,” only for Kane and Clive to erupt into giggles. Looking at the trio, the joke is obvious. They don’t look like pop stars; they look like three young men plucked out of any low-wage job in Yorkshire. They’re brash, they’re rude, they’re definitely not sober, and through it all, they come across as genuinely wholesome and heartfelt. At a time when new artists are actively encouraged to act like miniature tech startups, prioritizing your own charming idiocy can go a long way.

2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Relentless

February 11, 2022

f6c0a811-931c-4dbf-b72f-d9bac4d9b070

Drew Millard

https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-millard/

The first collaboration from increasingly-mellow producers Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft) and Dang-Khoa Chau wades into sedate territory that’s tentative but promising.

The first collaboration from increasingly-mellow producers Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft) and Dang-Khoa Chau wades into sedate territory that’s tentative but promising.

D.K. / S.K.: D.K. / S.K. EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dk-sk-dk-sk-ep/

D.K. / S.K. EP

By most accounts, Los Angeles is a relaxed city, but when Angeleno Diego Herrera decamped for Amsterdam a few years ago, his music took a decidedly more mellow turn. As Suzanne Kraft, Herrera released warm, loopy disco-rooted house back in 2011. Over the years, his music has slowly sloughed off its chunky beats and drifted off into the ambient ether, with last year’s What You Get for Being Young his headiest soundtrack yet. In this musical trajectory, Herrera’s not alone. Parisian producer Dang-Khoa Chau has also moved on from the sounds that first brought him attention in underground music circles; his early singles for the L.I.E.S. imprint were lo-fi and off-center, his boogie beats revealing some grit underfoot. But Chau’s more recent releases have been slicker Balearic affairs, full of glistening surfaces and gentle ripples. Collaborating together for the first time as D.K. / S.K., Chau and Herrera wade deeper into the sedate end of the spectrum, to where it’s difficult to parse just which sound belongs to which party. “Burn” is iridescent, its filigrees of piano and guitar floating 10 feet off the ground, but aside from echo in space, there’s little momentum in the piece. That the patches are warm and radiant should come as no surprise on “Xerox,” but the fragmented drum sounds never cohere into a steady pattern or make their purpose known; the flanged, disjointed beats do little more than act like gravel in a Jello mold. The hand percussion patterns on “No Man’s Ground” provide a bit more texture and break the inertia that opens the album, giving the piano and deep bass tones something to bounce off. The synth mists and eerie ambience suggest that a more foreboding side of the duo’s ambient sound might soon manifest. It doesn’t quite come, but as the album proceeds, the duo become more comfortable with one another. The back half of the set lingers in the memory more than its opening tracks. “Hammond Blue” has a melody that worms around the fuzzy bass and measured ticks that reverberate like crystals dropped into a cave. A sound like a rustled bamboo windchime trickles around the edges of “Bricks in White,” soon joined by swells of synth and sizzling cymbal tones. The piano line is reticent, picking its spots between the clattering sounds around it, but the emergence of an arpeggio provides an uptick of pace. Numerous sounds arise, but Chau and Herrera are effective in making the track feel natural and uncluttered. It feels like, beyond its seven minutes—were one to follow its tributary further along—it might flow into the Orb’s Orbus Terrarum, Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask or Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick. Closer “Fade” returns to its gentle beginnings, but rather than feel like a tentative interaction between the two, it suggests that—were the duo to work together again—they might move towards more of an invigorating middle ground, one that covers the full scope of their range.

2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Melody As Truth

October 19, 2017

f6c589a5-d66c-4fdf-9192-7e9ac80355a9

Andy Beta

https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/

The Kenyan producer occupies his own switchbacking lane, blending global bass music and regional African rhythms with bits of grime, trap, and drum’n’bass.

The Kenyan producer occupies his own switchbacking lane, blending global bass music and regional African rhythms with bits of grime, trap, and drum’n’bass.

Slikback: Lasakaneku / Tomo

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slikback-lasakaneku-tomo/

Lasakaneku / Tomo

The first thing I heard about Slikback, a year ago, was his prolificacy. A friend, an events promoter, returned from Uganda’s Nyege Nyege festival raving about the young talent who had wowed audiences at multiple performances during the four-day festival, shaking jungle foliage along the banks of the Nile with his unique blend of global bass music and regional African rhythms. Not long after, he performed a similar trick at Poland’s Unsound festival. In the scant 18 months that Slikback, aka Fredrick Mwauru Njau, had been making music, he had reportedly completed hundreds of tracks, the majority of them never heard outside of his live sets or his studio. The first five arrived in June 2018 on Hakuna Kulala, a sub-label of Nyege Nyege Tapes; the next six followed in February. Now, both of those digital-only EPs have been fleshed out with three new tracks and repackaged as a 2x12" vinyl (or digital) release, making for an opportune moment to catch up with one of East Africa’s most exciting electronic musicians. Where many of the acts on the Nyege Nyege Tapes label work in accordance with specific regional styles—like Otim Alpha’s electro acholi, or the Tanzanian singeli of Bamba Pana, Jay Mitta, Duke, and Sisso—Slikback occupies his own switchbacking lane. The tempos are all over the place, from the slow-motion dembow snap of “Just I” to the 175-BPM assault of “Venom”; a few tracks, like “Bantu Zen” and “Shell,” ride syncopated pulses not too far from late-’00s dubstep. But the tempos of Slikback’s tracks are often a question of perception: “Acid,” which opens the album, starts off torpid, with sludgy 808s punctuated by staccato vocal chops, but a double-time groove soon takes over, flipping a sloth-like creep into a full-on headbang. The same thing happens on “Gemini,” as drawn-out digital death gurgles spin into a rolling footwork rhythm. In place of melody, Njau tends to concentrate on texture and tone color, and those harsh, brittle timbres might be the most distinctive thing about Silkback’s music. Aside from the occasional nod to the TR-808 drum machine, most of his sounds are resolutely synthetic and wrenched apart from any obvious source. A see-sawing riff in “Venom” might be bowed strings or a weeping alien; the main feature of “Rage” is wave after wave of thundering digital feedback, amplified to a speaker-destroying volume. Plenty of contemporary club music—particularly of the “deconstructed” variety—favors this kind of crashing, concussive palette, but little of it displays the rhythmic dexterity that Slickback does. Njau had little guidance when he began producing his music, but a stint working at Nyege Nyege’s Kampala studios changed that: There, Nyege Nyege founders Derek Debru and Arlen Dilsizian introduced him to producers like Jlin and Errorsmith, along with labels like PAN and Planet Mu. After that, Njau told The Quietus, “I began to learn how to let go of what I thought music should sound like.” What he’s come up with so far bears trace elements of those influences, along with bits of grime, trap, drum’n’bass, and singeli; in places, his music has affinities with South African gqom and the spirit, if not the specific sonic tropes, of Afro-Portuguese batida. But mainly it sounds placeless and otherworldly—music from everywhere and nowhere at once. The new tracks here—“Shell,” “Kite,” and “Senshi”—are self-evident standouts that refuse to slot into a predictable pattern. “Kite” is apocalyptic trap; “Shell” could be mistaken for a Livity Sound or Timedance single; and “Senshi,” the heaviest of the bunch, might be a footwork remix of Ben Frost. Shortly before Lasakaneku / Tomo dropped, Hakuna Kulala and Shanghai’s SVBKVLT label jointly released a pair of new Slikback EPs, Slip A and Slip B, far more extreme than anything he’d done previously. Some of that might come down to newfound collaborators like Yen Tech and 33EMYBW, both figures from China’s avant-club underground; mostly, though, chalk it up to Njau’s rapidly expanding vision and chops. Just a little over a year ago, Slikback seemed to appear out of nowhere; now, with his staggeringly original productions—by turns forbidding, malevolent, and scarily disciplined—he’s leading all of us into the unknown.

2019-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic / Global

Hakuna Kulala

October 19, 2019

f6c7bfd0-263d-4965-a6b3-9ffbc99fd194

Philip Sherburne

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

Though an accomplished actress, the French star fails to sell her cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway” on an EP that otherwise amounts to a deserved victory lap.

Though an accomplished actress, the French star fails to sell her cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway” on an EP that otherwise amounts to a deserved victory lap.

Charlotte Gainsbourg: Take 2 EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-gainsbourg-take-2-ep/

Take 2 EP

Whether you blame Keanu Reeves and his grunge band Dogstar, DMX and his turn in Romeo Must Die, or any other entertainer who tries to parlay musical success into movies or vice versa, the public seems to have a general suspicion of that particular crossover, as if the two arts must sit eternally apart. Since making her film and music debuts in 1984, Charlotte Gainsbourg has been a pointed counterargument to this stubborn belief. She seems to ladle her voice and on-screen performances out of the same dramatic well, a sense captured by her gift for interpreting songs so that you believe them. “Lemon Incest,” her 1984 single alongside late father Serge Gainsbourg, prompted French scandal, as an entire nation seemed to fall for its provocative suggestion of pedophilia. Take 2, the five-track follow-up to 2017’s excellent Rest, brings Gainsbourg’s interpretive skills to the fore with mixed results. Produced by French techno star SebastiAn, Take 2 includes a few brilliant cuts, but the most notable surprise, a live cover of Kanye West’s searing mea culpa “Runaway,” feels disingenuous. Gainsbourg replaces the air of bombastic apology with the atmosphere of cocktail-hour soul, the stuff you would tune out in the lobby of an upscale hotel. So often an instrument of understated tension, her breathy voice and cut-glass accent feel meager and meek; she doesn’t sell her own appeal to Kanye’s rogues’ gallery of douchebags, scumbags, and assholes. Swapping the original’s puffed-up charm for wafty synths and apologetic drums, the music follows her down. At least the other live track, a take on Rest’s “Deadly Valentine,” fares better. Onstage, Gainsbourg can be restrained to the point of seeming timid, not prone to flights of vocal fancy. The first four minutes feel superfluous here, only slightly muddying the original’s edges. At the end, though, Gainsbourg’s band delivers an immaculately built freak-out; the nerve-shredding string rises are probably the closest Gainsbourg will get to the detuned power of the Velvet Underground. For the EP’s three studio originals, Gainsbourg reprises the mixture of dramatic tension and disco fantasy that make Rest a lingering joy. “Such a Remarkable Day” combines a magnetic harpsichord line that nods to Serge Gainsbourg’s own 1960s work with florid synths and strutting disco drums. Gainsbourg relates the kind of tersely mysterious prose that could double as a promotional pitch for a classic spy film: “There’s blood on your hands either way/How can we ever pay your due?” During the similarly melodramatic “Bombs Away,” she undercuts the song’s underlying tension with an air of sly humor, infusing the spoken-word bridge (“The Queen is marching back to Paris tonight/The priests are praying and preparing the rites”) with campy intensity. “Lost Lenore,” meanwhile, mixes orchestral splendor with creeping menace, Gainsbourg’s theatrical whisper the sugar dusting atop a rich mix of bells, horns, and clavinet. Familiar sounds win out on Take 2, so the EP feels largely like a post-Rest victory lap. Sure, the hopes might have been high for some full-blooded and unorthodox take on Kanye, but Gainsbourg instead dwells in Rest’s sweetly dramatic glory. As every good actor knows, there’s much to be said for taking your bow when the audience demands.

2019-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Because Music

January 3, 2019

f6cde85b-6060-4879-a22c-f2e2aa14692c

Ben Cardew

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/

The Nigerian-born, London-based artist returns with his strongest work yet, celebrating black selfhood in expansive, richly textured songs rooted in Afrobeat and electronic soul.

The Nigerian-born, London-based artist returns with his strongest work yet, celebrating black selfhood in expansive, richly textured songs rooted in Afrobeat and electronic soul.

Obongjayar: Which Way Is Forward? EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/obongjayar-which-way-is-forward-ep/

Which Way Is Forward? EP

Obongjayar is a musician taking his time. After releasing a clutch of EPs in 2016 and 2017, and then a handful of singles and collaborations (with Danny Brown, Wiki, Jesse James Solomon, and Richard Russell) in the intervening years, he returns with his most accomplished work to date. Slightly longer than his previous records, it’s still relatively compact—running to just seven tracks and a shade over 20 minutes in total—but finds him exploring new, more fruitful ground that goes beyond the art-school spoken word and deconstructed, Frank Ocean-via-James Blake instrumentals of 2017’s Bassey EP. What’s most striking about this growth is that the Nigerian-born, London-based musician’s voice has become more instrument than deliverer of sermons. His vocals have a magnetic, elastic quality: Half coo, half gravelly, wizened intonation. The resulting juxtaposition simultaneously suggests both naivete and long-toothed wisdom as he navigates issues of identity, racial politics, and belonging. “Our fathers put us in the sand [...] we’ve been paying for it ever since,” Obongjayar hisses on “Soldier Ant,” interrogating what it is to be a black man in the modern world. He reflects on a society that serves constant reminders of his skin color—“I get it everywhere/From the bobbies on the beat/To the airport security”—and uses the shifting register of his voice to wrestle with conflicting portrayals of black masculinity. Ultimately his message is one of defiance. “Keep your head up, press your weight against the winds that try to throw you,” he murmurs on “God’s Own Children,” before launching into a full-throated refrain: “It’s your world now, can you feel it?” Just as his songs explore a sense of being, the music feels lived in. It’s sonorous, enveloping stuff. There’s a meditative quality to the interaction between his voice and the arrangements it inhabits. As a performer, Obongjayar offers an enormous sense of presence, too, channelling the traditions of Afrobeat bandleaders like Bola Johnson and Fela Kuti. Yes, Kuti is an obvious reference point—perhaps too obvious—but Obongjayar shares an undeniable sense of both gravity and drive with the activist Afrobeat pioneer. The songs’ textural depth belies the fact that they are the work, for the most part, of a solo artist. Writing and producing all the tracks himself, with assistance from multi-instrumentalist Barney Lister (and Oli Barton-Wood on “Soldier Ant”), Obongjayar pulls from a vast instrumental palette: slinky guitars rubbing against space-age synths; sharp, disembodied yelps; a railway rattle of hand drums. Sonically, Which Way Is Forward? sits somewhere between the mystic expansionism of Kamasi Washington and the colloquial, upbeat grooves of the Dur-Dur Band. He borrows the clipped, precise percussion of any drummer who’s tried to emulate Tony Allen and the tight songcraft of contemporaries like Moses Boyd or Sampa the Great. If there is any complaint, it’s that Obongjayar hasn’t allowed Which Way Is Forward? to spill out into a full-length album. With a little extra room to stretch out, the songs’ tempos and densities might not feel so uniform. But there’s reassurance for those left wanting to hear more, as he purrs on “Still Sun”: “I know who I am/This is not the end.”

2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

Global / Rap

September

February 7, 2020

f6d2bb7a-0a4e-4d7e-b931-3f5fa65b7a11

Will Pritchard

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

This new compilation adroitly selects high-water marks from Strummer’s solo career while never quite ameliorating the “what if” questions that haunt the Clash’s legacy.

This new compilation adroitly selects high-water marks from Strummer’s solo career while never quite ameliorating the “what if” questions that haunt the Clash’s legacy.

Joe Strummer: Assembly

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-strummer-assembly/

Assembly

Among the great songwriting teams of the second half of the 20th century, perhaps none suffered more self-evidently from their cleaving than the Clash’s Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. They were two powerhouse talents whose skill sets uncannily complimented one another. Strummer was an idea factory whose burning intellectual curiosity and far-flung travels as a diplomat’s son gave the Clash a panoramic sweep that set them apart from their more provincial peers in early British punk. The glam-loving Jones was a natural studio technician with a masterful ear for melody and arrangement, and a knack for streamlining Strummer’s peripatetic concerns into something palatable to a large audience. After the band’s breakup, both would go on to make excellent work as solo artists (and occasionally collaborators), but neither would again achieve such a harmonious and productive partnership. Strummer lamented their parting of ways for the remainder of his life. Following the unfortunate dissolution of the Clash, Strummer’s erratic tendencies became further ingrained without the organizing principle of the band. He globe-hopped relentlessly, indulging both his curiosity and his appetites, a culture-shifting punk icon turned genuine nowhere man. Creatively, he remained as fertile as ever, but without Jones to challenge him, his sundry projects with backing bands the Mescaleros and Latino Rockabilly War varied wildly in quality. The groundbreaking dub and electronic interludes that populated later Clash records Sandinista! and Combat Rock frequently drifted into inchoate sketches, while Strummer’s well-honed ear for hooks clearly needed Jones’ singular ability to bring them to the fore. In this sense, Strummer’s entire solo career was a lost opportunity. Still, inevitably, the highs were high and in many ways well suited to the best-of treatment, which manages the editing that Jones never got to do. The new compilation Assembly adroitly selects high-water marks from Strummer’s solo career while never quite ameliorating the ”what if” questions that haunt the Clash’s legacy. The collection commences with two of the best songs Strummer recorded with his longtime backing band the Mescaleros: The winsome opener “Coma Girl” is a chugging singalong whose parade of roaming outcasts would fit comfortably in Thin Lizzy’s firmament, while “Johnny Appleseed” is a slow-burning union anthem that functions as a kind of spiritual sequel to the Clash’s epochal “Clampdown.” Following 40 years of systemic abuse of the working poor, Strummer addresses the investor class with Solomon-like wisdom: “If you’re after getting the honey/Then you don’t go killing all the bees.” Strummer was not so much catholic in his tastes as open at every aperture: receiving dub, rockabilly, hip-hop, and Spanish folk songs with equivalent ecstasy, and unwilling or unable to decide why they shouldn’t all be played together at once. While tracks like the sonic gumbo of the seven-minute “At the Border, Guy” or the shimmering “Yalla Yalla” don’t exactly cohere, they are fascinating insights into the mind of an artist whose first principle was shared humanity through cultural exchange. Other highlights include the dyspeptic pop of “Love Kills,” which bares more than a passing resemblance to Mick Jones’ brilliant-post-Clash outfit Big Audio Dynamite, and the down-and-out busker blues of “Long Shadow,” which seems to write Strummer’s own epitaph: “And if you put it all together/You didn’t even once relent/You cast a long shadow/And that is your testament.” Assembly’s greatest rescue job is the heartbreaking ballad “Sleepwalk,” taken from 1989’s Earthquake Weather. It’s a slow-burning meditation on loneliness that sounds like Los Lobos covering the Kinks’ “Picture Book,” and underscores the boundless melancholy that always lay beneath Strummer’s deep-in-the-red empathy. “What good would it be?” the chorus ponders, “If you could change every heartache that ran through your life and mine?” It’s a fair point. And to the extent that Assembly is intended to disentangle the final years of Strummer’s life from the echoes of his previous achievements, it largely succeeds. When he died at age 50 of a massive coronary in 2002, it was just a month after he and Mick Jones had shared the same stage for the first time since 1983, blasting through giddy versions of “White Riot” and “London’s Burning.” Talk of a reunion was always taking place. He never once showed signs of flagging, or slowing down. It’s a shame he didn’t have longer. 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.

2021-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Dark Horse

March 27, 2021

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Elizabeth Nelson

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

On a landmark mix album, the Detroit icon gathers together multiple generations of the city’s dance-music faithful in a celebration of history, community, and possibility.

On a landmark mix album, the Detroit icon gathers together multiple generations of the city’s dance-music faithful in a celebration of history, community, and possibility.

Theo Parrish: DJ-Kicks: Theo Parrish

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/theo-parrish-dj-kicks-theo-parrish/

DJ-Kicks: Theo Parrish

Dance music’s primary function is right there in the name: make the people move. Detroit legend Theo Parrish has been doing this for three decades, both with his superlative productions and ruggedly selected, daringly mixed DJ sets. Although he self-bootlegged his own mixes long ago and is a regular in the NTS booth, where his thematic marathon appearances are avidly tracked, this contribution to the long-running DJ-Kicks series is his first widely released commercial mix album. Let the boogie commence. And the boogie most certainly does, though what separates Parrish and other Motor City dance-musickers from their contemporaries is an explicit intention to soundtrack how the movement of dance reflects both a community’s memory and its ongoing development. In recent years, historic layers of what’s often aggregated as Detroit Techno™ have been explored with extra diligence—just 2022 has brought an indispensable book (DeForrest Brown Jr.’s thick Assembling a Black Counter Culture) and an excellent film (Kristian Hill’s God Said Give ’Em Drum Machines) that bring its past into concrete context. Detroit’s dance culture is a tributary of the city’s broader musical heritage—always has been, always will be. Yet despite Detroit’s continuing production of innovative club sounds, its adherents remain mostly stuck on past glories. Call it a folk-art mentality if you want, but that critique misses the way that Black music’s improvised and rhythmic progress has operated under a collective “ancient to the future” ethos for over a century, continuously advancing culture. Parrish’s DJ-Kicks, pointedly subtitled Detroit Forward, demands to be judged not only for its ability to move bodies, but also for the sonic possibilities it opens up, and the answers it offers to a crucial question: What is it about Detroit’s linkage of minds, asses, and social potentialities that has played such a key role in American culture? The artists gathered on Detroit Forward are almost all locals, of different generations and profiles than the originators that Detroit’s global fetishists tend to mythologize. The lone out-of-towner is Andres “Specter” Ordonez, a Chicago house DJ whose productions on Parrish’s Sound Signature label give him honorary 313 status—and whose “The Upper Room,” named after a gospel standard and led by the fluid repetition of an off-kilter piano line, is among the comp’s instant funkafied floor-fillers. The other statesmen are all lesser-known homegrown treasures. There’s RayBone Jones, whose immense DJing skills (he once mentored the budding superstar Kyle Hall) have overshadowed his rare forays into production—though as “Green Funk” attests, he’s inherited the parish craft of mixing bubbly synth basslines, jazzy chords, and understated yet insistent circular rhythms into something both soothing and tense. There’s Howard “H-Fusion” Thomas, a studied experimentalist whose reputation also shrouds a too-short catalog of improvised diversity (from Roland 303 fantasias to R&B stomps that sound like Julius Eastman playing piano house) and whose contribution here, “Experiment 10,” is a rave Koyaanisqatsi. There’s breaks’n’synths wizard Sterling Toles, whose recent ascendancy has been buoyed by old work with the rapper Boldy James, and whose “Janis” shames most lo-fi experimental hip-hop. There’s also saxophonist/flautist De’Sean Jones and keyboardist Jon Dixon, who over the past decade have energized live performances by community stalwarts Underground Resistance, but whose own tracks have remained mostly buried. Detroit Forward’s other notable feature is that all but one of these contributions are previously unheard (often brand-new) work, picked by Parrish to showcase an artist’s latest direction, as well as the city’s less visible music. This is where the breadth and fluidity of Detroit’s sound is most clear, a snapshot of how a culture’s evolution is informed far from media glare or mainstream platforming. There’s no better example than UR’s Jones, a noted jazz saxophonist, Grammy-nominated arranger of gospel records, and contributor to jazz drummer Makaya McCraven’s band: His three completely different appearances on Forward are a taste of the Detroit tradition operating outside expectation. “Pressure,” the album’s opening track, a collaboration with the vocalist Ideeyah, begins with a delicious looping electric-guitar hook before mutating into a downtempo groover; “Psalm 23” features a small live group playing what could only be described as power gospel; and the horn- and piano-heavy jazz-house of “Flash Spain” is so crisp it’s as though it was just picked off the tree. All of it feels of a piece and very much like Detroit. A similar energy connects drummer/producer Omar Meftah’s pair of contributions: Where his synth-leaning psychedelia accompanying John C’s earnestly biographical raps on “Full” brings late-night dizziness, the layers of percussion that scaffolds the bass synths on the extended “When the Sun Falls” make explicit the jazz bridge between Detroit’s swing and London’s broken beat. Meftah is among the younger talents in Parrish’s new Detroit, whose approaches seldom fit simple narratives. If the arpeggiated synth and raw drum machine that power producer Terrilyn “Whodat” McQueen and keyboardist Sophiyah Elizabeth’s “Don’t Know” hint at the best of what next-gen Detroit techno could be, and Deon Jamar’s “North End Funk” is a spiraling, minimalist composition that echoes electronic music’s classic experimental wing, other tracks color incoming culture outside prescribed lines. With the help of Nova Zaii, the singer-songwriter Kesiena “KESSWA” Wanogho creates the gorgeous “Chasing Delirium,” a spoken-word “covert blues” deeply informed by noisy, sculpted dissonances; it’s both funk and abstract art. Parrish’s re-edit of Monica “mBtheLight” Blaire’s “aGain” shares that sonic space—a vocal loop and synth lay out a rhythm bed over which Blaire delivers something between a rap, a monologue, and a poem—but when the song turns emotional, it also unleashes simmering hi-tech soul. And at the mix’s center, the pianist/producer Ian Fink, whose credits include Carl Craig’s Synthesizer Ensemble and drummer Kassa Overall’s touring group, lays into his Rhodes during a propulsive, live-band version of Parrish’s 1997 classic “Moonlite,” embodying the hybridity of the main musical intersection that Detroit Forward calls home. It’s familiar, but also musically audacious. As for the DJ? On this set, the mixmaster defers to his immediate task as selector and advocate. Parrish has never been afraid to speed up or slow down his performances depending on the moment, and this one calls for less mixing-desk aerobics than a 3 a.m. dancefloor might; here, the freewheeling spirit is in the stylistic choices and juxtapositions. Even when picking which of his own tracks to include on Detroit Forward, he parries the notion of club intentions. “Real Deal,” co-credited to Parrish and Duminie DePorres, is a beatless piece of ambient jazz—just piano, Juno, and guitar, an early-in-the-mix Easter egg that hints at what’s going on here. Theo Parrish’s work has long asserted that there’s more to Detroit’s dance music than simply making the people move. It’s a way to celebrate the richness of the community that gave it life, and which continues to be the primary inspiration for the sonic fiction of its beats, techno and otherwise. DJ-Kicks: Detroit Forward proves that few are more trustworthy to sketch that community’s stories and potential futures.

2022-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

!K7

October 29, 2022

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Piotr Orlov

https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/

A collection of songs the iconic Malian guitarist and his collaborators recorded at jam sessions and concert rehearsals between 1991 and 2004 reflects the timeless vitality of his music.

A collection of songs the iconic Malian guitarist and his collaborators recorded at jam sessions and concert rehearsals between 1991 and 2004 reflects the timeless vitality of his music.

Ali Farka Touré: Voyageur

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ali-farka-toure-voyageur/

Voyageur

Ali Farka Touré lived life on his own terms. Hailing from a noble lineage, he overcame his family’s disapproval to become a musician, and as a young boy taught himself to play the njerkle (single-string guitar), njarka (single-string fiddle), and ngoni (four-string lute). He took up the guitar after seeing the Malinké guitarist Fodéba Keita play with the national dance company of Guinea, and his unique playing style quickly made him a star in Mali. Touré would find international fame later in life, but it’s impossible to overstate his impact: He was the first musician to introduce the mesmerizing sounds of desert blues to the world, and his legacy lives on through the music of his son, Vieux Farka Touré, and the long line of Malian musicians who’ve followed. Despite all this Touré considered himself first and foremost a farmer, and spent the better part of his final decade tending to his farm in his hometown of Niafunké, where he was also elected mayor. But whether touring the world or at home in Mali, Touré was at heart a traveler, someone who went into the world with open arms and invited people into his own. When he died in 2006, Ry Cooder said: “Ali was a seeker. There was powerful psychology there. He was not governed by anything. He was free to move about in his mind.” Voyageur, produced by his son Vieux and World Circuit’s Nick Gold, reflects this sense of freedom. Recorded between 1991 and 2004 during improvised jam sessions and concert rehearsals, the album’s nine tracks capture Touré’s life on the road, the warmth and naturalness of his collaborations, and his unswerving commitment to preserving the traditions of his homeland. The record flows so naturally it’s easy to forget these tracks were not made to go together. Album opener “Safari” (which means journey in Swahili) is immediately recognizable as Touré’s classic Sonrhaï style, underscoring his winding guitar refrain with the regular beat of the calabash and the occasional flourish of tambin (flute). The steady rhythms echo the regular pace of a long workday, while Touré’s powerful, unwavering voice seems to offer strength and guidance to the chorus of voices that follow, as his guitar slips out into a focused, whirling solo. Touré’s guitar always leads the way without overshadowing—he leaves enough space for his fellow musicians to insert themselves and comfortably mold their playing to his. On the acoustic version of “Sambadio,” a Fula song in honor of farmers, the springy, plucked notes of Bassekou Kouyaté and Mama Sissoko’s ngoni chime off Touré’s sharp guitar line, while the regular thump of the calabash anchors the wandering strings. Hama Sankaré and Afel Bocoum’s delicate backing vocals carry through to the song’s electric version, which is transformed by Pee Wee Ellis’ jazzy arrangements and Steve Williamson’s playful sax. But even amid all the extra flourish, Touré’s voice commands attention as he picks up a note and settles into it with astonishing ease, the sax almost shy next to his self-assured delivery. Perhaps the most significant guest on Voyageur is vocalist and longtime Touré collaborator Oumou Sangaré, whose three appearances represent some of the record’s high points. “Bandolobourou,” with its spiraling guitar and colorful mosaic of percussion, feels warm and intimate, like a late-night conversation between friends. At times during the propulsive “Cherie” the two musicians sound engaged in a playful competition, each trying to impress the other—Touré with his agile guitar trills and Sangaré with her ululations and vocal acrobatics—before rejoining the central refrain in enchanting unison. On “Sadjona,” a traditional Wassoulou song for hunters, Sangaré’s majestic voice rides an insistent kamele ngoni groove as she improvises a paean in honor of Touré, predicting the vast celebrations that would take place upon his passing. It’s half jest, half recognition of Touré’s immeasurable standing. When Touré eventually did die in 2006, 11 years after this song was recorded, Mali’s public radio stations suspended regular programming to play his music. Today, he is revered as one of Africa’s greatest musicians, and a statue now stands near his house in Bamako. Posthumous releases like Voyageur continue to shed light on his vast, and still partially unheard, catalog. Though decades old, the songs collected here sound as current as ever—a testament to the timeless vitality of Touré’s music.

2023-03-21T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-03-21T00:01:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country / Global / Pop/R&B

World Circuit

March 21, 2023

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Megan Iacobini de Fazio

https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-iacobini de fazio/

On her fourth solo album, Eleanor Friedberger embraces ’80s goth pop and explores a newly fragmented internal landscape as a post-election expat in Greece.

On her fourth solo album, Eleanor Friedberger embraces ’80s goth pop and explores a newly fragmented internal landscape as a post-election expat in Greece.

Eleanor Friedberger: Rebound

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eleanor-friedberger-rebound/

Rebound

Eleanor Friedberger is making steady progress inward. Over the course of three strong solo albums, she has interrogated her emotions and experiences with a focus so sharp that her insistent self-examination has become an act of sociology more than narcissism. In Friedberger’s relentless investigations of her day-to-day existence, listeners can recognize themselves, their friends, and the particulars of their own lives. Her terrific fourth album, Rebound, set in a post-2016 Greece, provides plenty more of the same. But there are times on the record when Friedberger’s writing turns elliptical and the narrative becomes more difficult than usual to piece together. The Illinois-born artist has been nothing if not consistent since she and her brother Matt stopped making music together as the Fiery Furnaces, and the shift on Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working. It’s as if Friedberger is cautiously extending a leg, searching for a foothold to help her swing to another, more daring, form of songwriting. Though it’s not the best song of the bunch, opener “My Jesus Phase” may be the best example. As has been written about the novels of Rachel Cusk, it’s a “mosaic of fragments,” a picture formed from broken poetry, backed by rhythm guitar and simmering, ominous synths. The track begins with a plea for amnesia—“Let me forget the words/Let me forget the time”—as Friedberger loses the plot in an Athens hotel bar, figuratively and literally. She has a gift for narrative density: Reading the Iris Murdoch novel The Nice and the Good and struggling to follow the story becomes an analogy for the sudden wild spinning of our collective moral compass after the 2016 election. Friedberger had always wanted to go to Greece, so after months of touring followed by that bleak November, she escaped to Athens and assembled a band. But she didn’t write many of the songs on Rebound until she visited a club of the same name, which had been described to her as “an ’80s goth disco where everyone does the chicken dance.” The sound she discovered there resembled a Mediterranean knockoff of Joy Division or the Cure, and she imbued the new record with that spooky, dancy vibe, lacing its gentle psychedelia with a dash of foreboding. Like famous artistic pilgrimages to Ionia from Cusk’s novel Outline to Joni Mitchell’s dalliance with the goat-dancing redneck Cary Raditz on Crete, Rebound has the bleached, hazy feel of a sun-damaged Polaroid with a blurred figure in the corner. After “My Jesus Phase,” though, it takes awhile for Friedberger to return to her more outré exploration. Before that come some of the strongest songs on the record, in a more familiar, sharply drawn and narratively coherent, mode. The chorus of “The Letter” reverberates with regret: “The opposite of what he thought he thought/The opposite of what she wanted.” One of the danciest songs she’s ever recorded, “Everything” is a cathartic anthem of defiance with a subtle current of ennui running underneath. Even on those songs, though, Friedberger radiates ambivalence, often through double entendre. “When the pain ended I won a prize,” she sings on “The Letter,” after recounting how she took some pills found by the side of the road and was soon lying prone on a wharf. What a lyric! It could be entirely literal, it could refer to some event that goes undescribed in the song, or it could simply be that the release from pain was the prize. The title and refrain of “Are We Good?” uses a similar trick, with the familiar check-in question sharing space with the larger question about the nature of humanity. Friedberger explicitly acknowledges how difficult it is to determine whether you’re doing the right thing on “It’s Hard”—a song that, like “My Jesus Phase,” laments the impossibility of making life make sense. Set atop a creaky rhythm and shot through with seesaw synths, the track is set at Rebound, where a song within a song that recalls the Cure rings out. Friedberger tries to find its pulse: “Walk back and forth with my head held low,” she sings. “Arms swing in time to the tune that I don’t know. And it's hard.” The haunting closer, “Rule of Action,” finds Friedberger equally lost, calling herself “a writer on the edge” as she endures “days with no structure and nights of bad dreams.” For so many people, the 2016 election activated a sense of uncertainty or inspired aimless wandering. There’s something closer to home happening to Friedberger on Rebound, though. On “Everything” she sings of a coveted romance, “a man in Greece, a girlfriend in Italy.” “Are We Good?” gives her an approximation of what that relationship might be like: “I proposed to a woman for a man last night.” But the experience is remote and dissatisfying. Friedberger isn’t exactly part of the action. While it continues her project of self-investigation, Rebound does not quite feature the Eleanor Friedberger we’ve come to know from her first three albums. It’s as though part of her has receded from view, as she tries to figure out—as we all do, all the time—what happens next.

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

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

Rock

Frenchkiss

May 4, 2018

f6e355a4-c32a-42da-9dab-32d678b79393

Jonah Bromwich

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/

Ron Morelli has spent the last three years building his L.I.E.S. label into a paragon of noisy, Made-in-the-U.S.A. club music. Spit, the first music under his own name released on Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions, defies the type of romantic, back-to-basic engagement L.I.E.S. inspires.

Ron Morelli has spent the last three years building his L.I.E.S. label into a paragon of noisy, Made-in-the-U.S.A. club music. Spit, the first music under his own name released on Dominick Fernow's Hospital Productions, defies the type of romantic, back-to-basic engagement L.I.E.S. inspires.

Ron Morelli: Spit

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18780-ron-morelli-spit/

Spit

Ron Morelli has spent the last three years building the L.I.E.S. label into a paragon of noisy, Made-in-the-U.S.A. club music. It's a role that, between managing a prolific release schedule and selecting producers out of what amounts to a little black book of underground dance misfits, requires a bit more creative agency than your average label head. Spit, Morelli's first music under his own name, appears hell-bent on separating the man from the hailstorm of narrative and praise surrounding his label. It arrives via Hospital Productions, 36 minutes of ill-at-ease industrial simmer whose length, construction, and tenor defy the type of romantic, back-to-basic engagement that L.I.E.S. inspires. There is nothing nice about Spit. The album title was inspired by a neighborhood Morelli lived in, one in which hookers would "smoke cigarettes, read the paper, talk on their cell phones, and spit. They would spit...a lot." So not just spit, but "hooker spit," which should give you a window into the tension, claustrophobia, and foulness that infect Morelli's music. Spit is dark, more so than the glut of industrial-leaning techno and eerie machine music Morelli has dug up for L.I.E.S. Those works often had expanse on their side: they're long, winding tracks that, however noisy, could engender mystery or psychedelic escape. Spit, in comparison, trudges through its eight tracks: fed up, exhausted, grim. When asked why he didn't release his album on his own label, he responded tersely: "Dom[inick Fernow, head of Hospital Productions] simply proposed I make a record for him. If he did not ask, then I would not have done it." Ok, then. This sense of duty and drudgery comes to life on scraping, hissy tracks such as "Sledgehammer II" and "Slow Down". Ugly, metal-on-metal machine music, Spit is rhythmic in nature, but not as dance-oriented as much of the L.I.E.S. output. I don't think the tired, delayed claps and barely-there acid bassline of "Modern Paranoia" want to make anyone dance; they're exhausted, it was a long day, they need a beer and a shot. They're very much at home with the noir-ish menace of Hospital Productions-affiliated acts like Vatican Shadow and Silent Servant. If you squint hard enough you can find some playfulness in Spit, in the way pitched toms hop around in the background of "Crack Microbes" or in "Director Of…"'s garbled, beatless trip. The album's centerpiece, in placement if not tone, is "Fake Rush", a nervy, light-on-its-feet stew of rhythmic oscillations. Were it not for its bit-reduced crunch and battery-acid exterior, "Fake Rush" could've come from one of London's many young bass manglers, especially as it clocks a heart-racing 140 bpm when it's not wandering around drunkenly in half-time. It's hard to truly love an album that seems a constant threat to shiv you, though, and while Spit's economy prevents it from careening into pure aggression, it remains irritated throughout. This feels by design, and it's easy to read Spit as a reaction to all of the love poured on L.I.E.S. of late. More likely, Spit represents another of Morelli's inspirations, after several collaborative projects. (On the process of making the album, he offers, "[Y]ou’re working in a tried and true format and throwing your own shitty take on what has been done by the masters years ago.") There's enough on offer that its tone can be forgiven, perhaps, but there are going to be plenty of nights when Spit just wants to be left alone, and you'll be inclined to grant it as much.

2013-12-11T01:00:03.000-05:00

2013-12-11T01:00:03.000-05:00

Electronic

Hospital Productions

December 11, 2013

f6e98948-6b3e-4a8c-b91c-357c15bcee86

Andrew Gaerig

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

The first installment of the trumpeter’s ecstatic series to be recorded in a studio is its most beautiful, and somehow the most convincing document of the cycle’s in-person grandeur, too.

The first installment of the trumpeter’s ecstatic series to be recorded in a studio is its most beautiful, and somehow the most convincing document of the cycle’s in-person grandeur, too.

Nate Wooley: Seven Storey Mountain VI

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nate-wooley-seven-storey-mountain-vi/

Seven Storey Mountain VI

On an ordinary Saturday evening, back when ordinary meant large rooms full of strangers, I attended the premiere of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain VI in Manhattan. It was November 2019, and perhaps appropriately for the latest entry in a song cycle named after the autobiography of a priest, monk, and philosopher, the venue was a church, St. Peter’s Episcopal in Chelsea. Beneath the vaulted ceiling, the crowd hummed with an energy between the echoey hush of a religious space and the anticipatory buzz of a see-and-be-seen cultural event. The Bibles positioned in each pew looked less like texts of an active parish and more like decorations in a hip, aestheticized club. Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo sat a few rows in front of me, I was almost certain. An actual hum began around us, shadowy and doleful. Singers inserted into the audience belted out a choral work from the neighboring benches. “Didn’t they do this when Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt were at The Shed?” I muttered. But the choral music was ideal for the acoustics of a 19th-century cathedral, rising like heat over the Spuyten Duyvil blue stone. Musicians, seated on the pulpit surrounding Wooley’s trumpet like stoics, started to play. Susan Alcorn’s pedal steel accented the vocals. Brushes swirled on a snare drum. The piece that followed was hardly ordinary, and it didn’t aspire to the divine, either. An ecstatic, communal experience in a city seemingly built for them, the debut roused and moved us as our night bled into the wee hours of Sunday. When my partner and I woke at home the next morning, we could still feel the music, even as its immediate sensory imprint faded. Meanwhile, Wooley and an edited version of his ensemble—which, even in slimmed-down form, consists of 14 musicians, among them contemporary downtown fixtures C. Spencer Yeh, Chris Corsano, and Ava Mendoza—headed to Oktaven Audio in the suburb of Mount Vernon and recorded the previous night’s composition in a single day. The result loses the setting of the sanctuary, but none of the polyphonic fullness that the sacred proportions of a cathedral allow. The proximity of the musicians to the show—the way the church must have continued to ripple through them—makes St. Peter’s Chelsea a player on the incantatory Seven Storey Mountain VI. On record, Wooley balances the immediacy of his live set with the clarity of a studio session. The keyboard loops that detail the piece’s woozy middle section are audible underneath crash cymbals. Readings from John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs mumble below droning violin. Lyrics from “Reclaim the Night,” a 1979 Peggy Seeger song that censures sexual violence, conclude the 45-minute, one-track album. At last year’s opening, the references to Adam and Eve sounded ecclesiastical, but Wooley writes in the album booklet, “Religious dogma holds little interest for me.” Instead, the aesthetics and fellowship of Christianity become a vessel for condemning patriarchy’s treatment of women, one of the many fascinating knots in his composition’s skein. Wooley started the Seven Storey Mountain series in 2007, and each chapter takes the same general shape: Beginning with a spare musical line, the works build into a dissonant freak-out before they flatten again into a gentle melody, drone, or percussion pattern, often mirroring the initial motif. Wooley’s alchemic mix of jazz, minimalism, choral music, indeterminacy, and musique concrète depends on the varied, individual creative processes he implements to guide his musicians: Some read written scores, others follow jazz chord changes, others aleatoric prompts. Stems from previous installments of SSM reappear as time markers and cues. To mesh their playing styles in a single work, the players explore their incompatibilities. Making decisions collectively becomes its own brand of spontaneity, and failure is welcome. “Virtuosity,” Wooley tells us, “is the possibility of total collapse.” He collapses these diverse methodologies into a philosophy that celebrates writing as a kind of artistic cooperative, which he calls “Mutual Aid Music.” If its components aren’t inherently original, Wooley’s blend of sensibilities is. He dashes his Cageian, improvisatory brew with old-school, pre-modern concerns, treating the acoustics of rooms as active participants in a piece’s creation. Previous entries in SSM were recorded live at Manhattan’s Abrons Art Center and Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room—the former a traditional, balconied theater, the latter a marble-floored, cubic hall designed by legendary architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. Each of these albums is powerful, yet they come with all of the sonic diminishment and experiential FOMO that can attenuate a concert recording. VI is the first installment of Seven Storey Mountain to be recorded in a studio. It’s more beautiful than its predecessors, and somehow the most convincing document of the cycle’s in-person grandeur, too. Today, live shows increasingly feel like relics of an old social order, and religious congregations, including St. Peter’s Chelsea, are assembling for services digitally. Yet Seven Storey Mountain VI never alludes to communality as something that exists in the outside world. It expresses communality, with all of its potential for the profound and the spiritual. What we search for in crowds of people is complicated, but at the album’s end, Wooley’s chorus of women tells us, “You can’t scare me,” the strength of their numbers turning a “me” into a “we.” Gathering once gave us courage. Wooley’s latest shows us that, even in the isolation of our homes, the glowing residue of a past togetherness can make us feel more resolute than afraid. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Jazz

Pyroclastic

November 4, 2020

f6f03b09-9a0f-4adb-82ff-fa2bad42aef9

Daniel Felsenthal

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

The hard-bitten and prolific Sacramento rapper Mozzy shifts slightly to accessibility on his first album of 2017. YG, Jadakiss, and G-Eazy are featured.

The hard-bitten and prolific Sacramento rapper Mozzy shifts slightly to accessibility on his first album of 2017. YG, Jadakiss, and G-Eazy are featured.

Mozzy: Fake Famous

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22879-fake-famous/

Fake Famous

The title of Mozzy’s latest album, Fake Famous, is ambiguous. The Sacramento rapper’s star has certainly risen. He followed his prolific 2015 with an even more active 2016. YouTube hits for his music videos traffic in the millions. He’s recently appeared on releases from E-40 and Rihanna favorite Boogie. And his first album of 2017, Fake Famous, features YG, Jadakiss, and actual pop star G-Eazy. So is Mozzy fake famous or just famous? Better yet, does he want to be? The album’s compactness and consistency speak to Mozzy’s pop sensibilities, but its heavy tones and themes suggest that he has more on his mind than stardom; maybe he just hopes to earn greater renown on his own terms. Mozzy’s greatest attribute is on full display throughout the record: He has one of the richest, most unique and elaborate vocabularies in all of hip-hop. His phrasing focuses details and brings out the poignancy in his words. A line like “I could get your flowers watered for a bronze Rollie” brilliantly emphasizes the outcomes of killing for gain, not the act. Later, on “Get Em,” Mozzy straightforwardly states that he could easily commit murder—no help needed. His attitude in both cases is the same, but it shows the measured perspective of someone who has weighed the serious consequences of a brutal situation. Gang activity and violence are consistent throughout Mozzy’s work. Fake Famous is no exception, yet it still feels vital, which speaks to his ability as a storyteller and lyricist. Instead of providing an account with a beginning, middle, and end (à la “Meet the Flockers” or “The Art of Peer Pressure”), Mozzy tends to create micro-narratives within each song. He sometimes veers into generalities, but for the most part, he plucks out the right specifics to immerse the listener in any given moment. “Borrowed Time,” for example, stitches together admissions of a drug-addicted family with tales of driving away from cops. On “The People Plan,” he ranges from the perils of the courtroom to the church days of his youth and back to the destructive system that breeds inequality. Mozzy’s lyrics are brought to life by his exceptional delivery and flow. His lines don’t layer double entendres like Pusha T’s or explode with vivid similes like Danny Brown’s. They’re remarkably colorful and elastic, though, full of sharp phrasing: “Throwing handles when I steer/Couple piglets in the rear/Watch the diamonds do they Dougie/I had to adjust the mirror.” He has a dexterity that works greatly to his benefit, but also his detriment: When nearly every line is high quality, and they connect seamlessly, few pop out. Fake Famous does not aim to have a breakout single, but it is a relative shift toward accessibility for Mozzy. Ironically, the G-Eazy and YG-featuring “Hold on Me” is lackluster compared to more effortless pop swings like “Scorin.” Still, G-Eazy’s slower, easier-to-follow verse highlights what Mozzy is unwilling (or unable) to do to cater to more casual fans: Let his foot off the gas. Of course, Mozzy is not trying to land on a song with Britney Spears. But particularly when he hands off hook duties (to Iamsu!, Lex Aura, and Bobby Luv), crossover potential is evident. Fake Famous is the best he’s done in translating his talents to a more conventional format. But Mozzy’s mindset remains the same as ever: He’s mired in a troubled past and present that define him. He may never be a superstar, but he is very close to what others could consider real fame. It seems to be his choice not to reach that so-called pinnacle.

2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Mozzy / Empire

February 4, 2017

f6f64563-9b7a-46eb-b94d-3c262a86216e

Matthew Strauss

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/

The Manchester producer’s latest songs take us deep into the catacombs to explore a vision of club music at its most damaged.

The Manchester producer’s latest songs take us deep into the catacombs to explore a vision of club music at its most damaged.

Andy Stott: It Should Be Us

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andy-stott-it-should-be-us/

It Should Be Us

The vanguard club sounds of the past decade have tended to favor gleaming surfaces and vivid shapes rendered in crisp high definition, affording dazzling visions of the technological sublime. Andy Stott’s It Should Be Us is a report from the opposite extreme. No spotless chrome expanses, rippling LED arrays, or algorithmic pulses here: The Manchester producer takes us deep into the catacombs to explore a vision of club music at its most damaged—of busted samplers, waterlogged wax, cracked cement, and lumpy sandbags. None of this is new for Stott; he’s been mining the vein for nearly a decade now. But It Should Be Us might be his most provocative attempt yet to throw a shovel of dirt on the idea of techno-futurist utopia. It has been three years since Stott’s last LP, Too Many Voices, and eight since he put out a pair of consecutive double-packs that radically redefined the sound that, until then, he had shared with many of his Modern Love labelmates—a nuanced, warehouse-ready strain of techno that balanced Detroit’s expressive release with Berlin’s dub atmospheres. Passed Me By and We Stayed Together pulled the rug out from beneath dance-music convention, slowing the tempo to a rickety crawl and wrapping his synths in a layer of grit. It was less deconstruction than exhumation, with zombie beats trudging dully forward, dead-eyed and caked in earth. Stott reached his peak with Luxury Problems and Faith in Strangers, infusing slow-motion techno with hints of goth and bass music; at its best—particularly on songs featuring the vocalist Alison Skidmore—the results suggested the lo-fi trap remix of This Mortal Coil you never knew you needed. On the slightly scattered Too Many Voices, it sometimes felt like Stott couldn’t decide where to go from there—to choose light or shadow, movement or stasis—but with It Should Be Us, he plunges straight into the wreckage and never looks back. If the new record is billed as an EP, despite its length (eight tracks on the 2x12", nine on the digital release), it might be because these feel less like songs than experiments in pushing Stott’s habitual techniques to the breaking point. Agonizingly slow machine beats shuffle like a shackled convict, their syncopated accents turned painfully halting. It’s not just the pace: The sound design also contributes to the mood of mortal exhaustion. Stott’s basslines are hardly recognizable as such—less a progression of notes than a mournful shrug. A synth lead might be a broken foghorn or a swarm of bees; pads droop listlessly, like vines after the first frost. Stott’s sound palette has always veered toward distressed textures, but on It Should Be Us, the quality of his drums—a kind of powdery crinkle, diffuse and ill-formed—sounds almost like he’s been sampling 32-kbps stream rips. Hi-hats rustle like a sticky wad of cellophane; bass drums don’t so much kick as cough, heaving like diseased lungs. We tend to associate lo-fi techniques with analog tools: things like tube distortion and vinyl hiss that, for whatever reason, contemporary listeners tend to find satisfying on a gut level. Not many artists have waded into the waters of digital lo-fi yet. Stott’s wheezing, phased shakers don’t always sound pleasing to the ear, but that might be part of the point. He’s clearly out to disorient us. Again and again, his beats challenge your ability to parse them: Snares, claps, and cymbals thrash and jerk according to a logic that seemingly only they understand. Then the kick drum drops and all the stray elements seem to snap into place around it. Sometimes his beats can be truly devious: “Ballroom” drags itself out of the gate like a wounded animal until a wordless vocal loop sets the true tempo somewhere way up in footwork territory. Even then, the collision of arrhythmic woodblocks and rapid-fire hiccups resists any attempts to make sense of it, suggesting a caffeine high gone dangerously wrong. What’s missing from It Should Be Us are the moments of beauty that defined Luxury Problems and Faith in Strangers. Stott has backed away from the airy vocals and the muscular post-punk that, combined, made songs like the latter album’s title track so compelling, and he hasn’t quite figured out how to replace them. Here, the pitched-down vocals often sound like placeholders for a fresher, more distinctive idea; Burial and his imitators have already wrung that trope pretty dry. But at the level of rhythm, texture, and atmosphere, It Should Be Us marks a step into the unknown. Most promisingly, it takes post-punk’s bleak worldview and reformats it for the 21st century, mimicking corrupt files to create a new music of technological failure. Stott’s enervated club music, a fitting way to cap a decade of increasing fatigue, doubles as a timely reminder that our apps won’t save us.

2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Modern Love

November 16, 2019

f6f68905-8551-48dc-b1e3-f2336ca88765

Philip Sherburne

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

Swedish "sad boy" rap curiosity Yung Lean's new album scrubs away the most amateurish (and most likable) parts of his sound. Instead of bringing something new to rap, he’s making cheap copies of his role models.

Swedish "sad boy" rap curiosity Yung Lean's new album scrubs away the most amateurish (and most likable) parts of his sound. Instead of bringing something new to rap, he’s making cheap copies of his role models.

Yung Lean: Unknown Memory

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19827-yung-lean-unknown-memory/

Unknown Memory

Born Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, Yung Lean is an 18-year-old Swede who speaks, raps, and sings over beats mostly created by members of his Sad Boys clique. His general shtick is an approximation of contemporary swag-rap that comes across as a mixture of tribute and parody; he initially attracted notice as a kind of musical meme. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Lean gaining an audience without visuals, and the video for "Ginseng Strip 2002" exemplifies his approach: the baby-faced rapper dons his now-trademark bucket hat and a bad Southern accent, shouting out Makaveli within the clip's opening seconds. His verses are stilted, his movements awkward; he resembles a rap-obsessed misfit from a summer camp who freestyles poorly and doesn’t worry about distinguishing between the positive and negative attention he's receiving. And Lean receives plenty of both: the video has over 2.6 million views, and fans and haters still lob pejoratives at each other in the comments section to this day. On last year’s Unknown Death 2002 mixtape, Lean’s rapping was wooden but relatively easy to ignore, and those who found themselves responding in earnest to his music may have been attracted to the cloudy instrumentals provided by producers such as Yung Gud and Yung Sherman. On the trance-like “Gatorade”, Lean’s voice was screwed up and down the register so often that he simply became part of an appealingly chaotic mix; “Lemonade” was a blatant Clams Casino rip-off, but the imitation was accurate enough to capture that producer’s appeal. As a whole, Yung Lean wields the appeal of a charming reality star: he's ridiculous without knowing it. His new album, Unknown Memory, is reminiscent of the second season of "Jersey Shore", where it slowly became clear that the cast was in on the joke. The record finds Yung Lean doubling down on every part of his personality that hit home with those initially drawn to his music, while simultaneously scrubbing away the most amateurish (and most likable) parts of his sound. He’s added two notable tricks to his arsenal: a bastardized form of dub, and a heightened tendency to eschew rapping altogether in favor of Auto-Tuned wailing. This latter development flatters the fidelity of his music—one can easily imagine a track from Unknown Memory passing by anonymously in a public space—but it also makes many of these songs indistinguishable from one another. Consequently, it's harder to ignore Yung Lean's vocals to focus on his more palatable beats; “Sunrise Angel” and “Yoshi City” are relatively interesting production-wise, but Lean’s voice is too high in the mix. His revamped flow, which cements him as a terrible rapper rather than someone who doesn't know how to rap, comes across as more grating than his older, more fruitless attempts at piecing verses together. The most engaging song here, the Travis Scott-featuring “Ghosttown”, might have been more potent if Yung Lean didn't appear on it at all. One of Lean’s noteworthy qualities has always been his expression of sad feelings, and on Unknown Memory that tendency is kicked into overdrive. On the hook of “Yoshi City”, he refers to himself as a “lonely cloud”; on “Monster”, over the same brassy synths and a TNGHT-like build, he laments “nothing matters anymore.” “Leanworld” finds the rapper reaching the nadir of this expression—it’s a swampy, soupy production, almost unimaginably irritating in the club-land fantasy it conjures up. These sentiments feel like the performative sadness that’s been explored with much more sophistication by artists like Lana Del Rey; in comparison, Yung Lean’s expression sounds empty. Yung Lean's tendencies to randomly emote and stunt come in part from approximating the real emotions of the music he takes his cues from—mostly, Southern and West Coast rap ranging from the sad robotics of Future to the anything-goes ethos of Lil B. But he never shows any real emotional investment in the style he’s chosen, and his lyrics and tone don’t reveal much personality beyond “rap fan.” Yung Lean isn’t bringing anything new to rap; instead, he’s making cheap copies of his actual role models, and in doing so he removes the humanity of the rappers he’s imitating, creating unwitting caricatures of those artists and not much more.

2014-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00

2014-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

September 24, 2014

f6fa0f0a-e396-4053-9bab-823cb3a397e0

Jonah Bromwich

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/

Chicago rapper Dreezy is a drill-adjacent upstart from the South Side, and her major-label debut is a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances rugged raps with pristine pop songs.

Chicago rapper Dreezy is a drill-adjacent upstart from the South Side, and her major-label debut is a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances rugged raps with pristine pop songs.

Dreezy: No Hard Feelings

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22135-no-hard-feelings/

No Hard Feelings

Chicago rapper Dreezy, a drill-adjacent upstart from the South Side, put competitors on notice when she ripped through a remix of Nicki Minaj’s “Chi-Raq,” proving herself a capable stand-in. Since seizing her moment, she’s grown into quite a well-rounded artist, appearing alongside veteran conscious rap guru Common, drill holdouts Lil Durk, Lil Bibby, King Louie, Sasha Go Hard, and Katie Got Bandz, and electronic duo AlunaGeorge, earning a record deal with Interscope in the process. Poised for a breakthrough, late last year she tested the waters with From Now On, a superbly-rapped EP that made use of her dexterity with nimble verses that swiftly navigated sounds from the producers of the moment—Metro Boomin and Southside. It was to-the-point, trap-centric, and a bit one-note, but it had just enough legs to build buzz for a proper entrance. A few weeks later, Dreezy released her lead single, the surprisingly smooth, Jeremih-featuring crossover jam “Body,” which seemed to suggest a more versatile effort was in store. No Hard Feelings is Dreezy’s major-label debut, and it makes good on that promise. It’s a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances her more rugged raps with pristine pop songs (sculpted in “Body”’s image) and tender slow jams. There are just enough drill bits to pacify Schizo era fans, but the album moves and turns on more subdued songs delivered in singsong and a few straight-up R&B joints. Dreezy is as accomplished a vocalist as she is a lyricist, with a glossy tone that rises as painlessly into falsetto as it does a playful squeal, and she slots in songs that sound like they could be a fit on a Sevyn Streeter album, like the infectious “Wasted” and the slow-burner “Break the News,” with more traditional bangers and deep cuts. Skits help pull together a loose narrative that finds Dreezy at the center of a love triangle with a philandering boyfriend and a new would-be beau. The album drops the listener into a changeover—she’s put off by her boyfriend’s latest escapade and open to a replacement just as another suitor comes along—and the sequencing shuttles listeners through this story-in-progress with snapshots and vignettes of the trio’s interactions. But No Hard Feelings never goes out of its way to force-feed us these romantic entanglements. It isn’t a concept album—the songs don’t exist as building blocks for a relational drama—but they are carefully assembled to unspool the plot while making individual statements about love, sex, and compatibility, and they provide insights into Dreezy’s own life. The transitions are purposeful and well thought out. The intro is a phone call from Dreezy’s friend alerting her that her man is with another woman and it segues into “We Gon Ride,” a song about Day Ones that functions as a vehicle for explaining that bond and transporting them to the cheater’s house. When they get there, he claims the girl is his cousin on a skit before “Spazz” drops in, and its central message—“On any nigga, I spazz/ On any bitch, I spazz”—lends itself well to the scene. The whole album is arranged this way. Details in songs interlock even when the songs themselves differ. It’s ambitious and well-executed, especially in the run from “Body” to “Afford My Love.” This is a byproduct of talent, work ethic, and circumstance aligning; Dreezy couldn’t have made this album a year ago, and the scope of the project shows just how much she’s grown and how far she’s expanded her repertoire. Dreezy got here unleashing her flows, hunkering down into backloaded rhyme schemes and pressing her weight into them. It’s easy to hear Minaj’s influence on songs like From Now On’s “Money Printer,” where she flexes into pronunciations, and G Herbo’s on any number of older songs, barreling downhill and muscling through verse on sheer intensity. But stylistically she’s becoming independent of those sounds, adding more variety to her game and finding a voice that is distinctly her own. Her punches are direct and effective and still beholden to her forebears, but now she’s opting for a style that suits her even better: a chronicling approach that makes use of her sharply pivoting flows. She eases longtime listeners into the transition with drill-indebted tunes like “Spazz” and “Bad Bitch,” which rely heavily on her punchline acumen (on the latter: “Mean-muggin’ in the Ghost, they yelling Beetlejuice” and “Second time getting top from the same nigga, call that shit a recap”). But that’s merely one sliver of her identity, and she opens up when trapped in love’s throes (On “Ready,” she raps, “I’m really everything you think I am boy, it ain’t no hype/Young, independent, with a bankroll, I can change your life”). She’s expressing more now than she ever has. Dreezy credits Interscope with broadening her palette, expanding her sound and testing her range, and No Hard Feelings makes a strong case for the nearly extinct A&R position. The album maximizes Dreezy’s talents, sets her up to hone her songcraft, and brings out her personality. Guests are all hand-selected for their roles: T-Pain plays the perfect partner for the duet “Close to You,” Wale is the ideal candidate to play the adversarial male voice opposite Dreezy on “Afford My Love,” and Gucci rides shotgun with ease on “We Gon Ride” (“MAC 11, I ride, keep shooters at every session/I’m ahead of my time, a blessing to the present”). Contributions from Bloodpop (Grimes and Justin Bieber), Terrace Martin, Cardo, and TM88 all find ways to push Dreezy’s limits. The slow strut of “Ready” provides an opportunity for more careful penmanship. She slips from a tottering singsong into a even slipperier cadence on “See What You On,” inspired by the swaying, sax-led tempo. On “Don’t Know Me,” Dreezy asks, “You don’t really know me, do you?” But on No Hard Feelings, she finally gives listeners a chance to.

2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Interscope

July 21, 2016

f70b6d3e-c4ef-4e2e-a2fe-7b7e1586b5cc

Sheldon Pearce

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

Continuing a remarkable run of post-comeback releases, the secretive Japanese producer trades chilly dub techno for warm, almost chipper house music.

Continuing a remarkable run of post-comeback releases, the secretive Japanese producer trades chilly dub techno for warm, almost chipper house music.

Shinichi Atobe: Yes

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shinichi-atobe-yes/

Yes

In dance music, anonymity used to be a currency as stable as gold. To be a “mysterious techno artist” was to present an alpha confidence about the only thing that mattered: the music. For some, it was an anti-commercial gesture. Detroit’s Mike Banks held that concealing his face emphasized the durability of his talent, “because as a man you’re frail, but your work can stay in humanity forever, like the Egyptians,” the Underground Resistance member told The Wire in 2007. But somewhere along the way, self-effacement among techno artists became an increasingly silly cliché, a Shutterstock image for a Berlin DJ starter pack. The pursuit of facelessness has occasionally cannibalized dance music’s Black heritage; some white producers have adopted racially ambiguous pseudonyms in the name of cultivating mystique. At a moment where Black techno artists are spotlighting their identity to re-center their position in dance music, a stronger desire for attribution is, to borrow a good line from Twitter, probably the energy we need right now. If secrecy’s stock is plummeting in electronic music, it’s been interesting to see Shinichi Atobe, a famously mysterious techno artist, beginning to open up. His new album, Yes, arrives with the same sunny disposition of its housey predecessor, 2018’s Heat, and a rare headshot of the Saitama-based producer—included, possibly, as a response to rumors he is actually his sometime Chain Reaction labelmate Vainqueur. Sloughing off the dub techno of Atobe’s first two records, Ship-Scope and Butterfly Effect—between which lay a 13-year gap and not a single word from the artist—his latest LP is closer in style to house aesthetes like DJ Sprinkles or the late Boston producer Callisto. Where Yes stands apart is in its inherent optimism—in a couple cases, the mood comes close to a deep contentment. On “Lake 2,” piano and organ keys skate with the ease of Moon Safari-era Air or Italo house producer Don Carlos. In the hands of an extrovert, “Yes” might have been called “Yay!”—its descending, major-key piano chords evoke an everyman joy, while a whistling harmony seems ready to swing open a studio door and say, “Honey, I’m home!” However much Atobe’s music has changed, it’s still recognizably his in at least one way: those sharp, throat-tickling trebles that could make a stone cough. They’re an acquired taste. Matt Colton, the mastering engineer for most of Atobe’s records, admitted treating Butterfly Effect’s “bright,” “cold-sounding” pre-masters with warmer mids and fatter lows. Even if we accept that Atobe’s nettling claps and rimshots are a feature rather than a bug, Yes’s hi-fi polish intuitively seems like a less forgiving environment. Somehow, though, it comes together, thanks to some nice contrasts of space and texture. “Lake 2”’s shaker has a satisfying safety-match scrape, and works as a gentle brake on Atobe’s cruising keys. And the mallets on “Rain 3,” which might remind you of a cartoon spider scrambling out of a bathtub, are set amid floaty, holographic synth figures. You may notice that the trebles are slightly softer than usual. With a couple of comparable tracks on Heat—especially “Heat 4”—the effect could be like having your skull scratched from the inside. Where Heat introduced warmth to Atobe’s music, Yes has made it smooth. (Only “Ocean 7,” a Drexciyan étude of questing chords, and “Loop 1”’s echo of Scion’s early Chain Reaction classic really break from the theme.) Nothing makes the case as emphatically as “Ocean 1.” As it opens with an irresistible g-funk bassline, the scene quickly assembles itself: palm trees, Venice Beach, lowriders on an endless boulevard. “Ocean 1” fills out nicely with honeyed wafts of synth and Atobe’s typically elegant piano accents. But the trilling guitar that suddenly struts through, a third of the way in? A real chef’s-kiss moment, best enjoyed on a dancefloor—although the point at which we can safely share little moments like these is, for now, dance music’s most pressing mystery. As for Atobe, it’s funny to wonder whether he’s taken cues from Burial about seclusion and productivity. Reasonably secure in the knowledge that he isn’t the figment of a German man’s imagination, we can probably abide the not-knowing of his life story. But there are still so many questions, the most immediate of which might be this: After all those years of inactivity, how is it that Atobe came to be this reliable, this prolific, or this good? Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

DDS

July 21, 2020

f714c652-aff4-4afe-95b9-fe855d36832a

Ray Philp

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ray-philp/

The label that defined Cologne techno may have uncoupled from dance music’s zeitgeist, but on its 18th annual compilation, Kompakt finds freedom in its ability to keep on Kompakting on.

The label that defined Cologne techno may have uncoupled from dance music’s zeitgeist, but on its 18th annual compilation, Kompakt finds freedom in its ability to keep on Kompakting on.

Various Artists: Total 18

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-total-18/

Total 18

Kompakt’s 18th annual label showcase opens with an inside joke: a track from the veteran Cologne producer Jürgen Paape called “Well, It’s Paape.” A little background: Paape is one of the Cologne label’s co-founders and a stone-faced fixture in its eponymous record shop; he’s also among the least prolific producers on the roster. Despite occupying the compilation’s pole position, he resurfaces in the least flashy way possible, with a rustling, shuffling techno groover that could just as well have appeared on 1999’s Total 1. That’s not a knock on the track, which nails the Kompakt sweet spot, that rare fusion of tough and supple, stern and pliant. Rather, it’s a way of saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Whole empires have risen and fallen in the dance-music world during the 20 years since Kompakt began documenting and codifying the sound of Cologne techno, where bristly minimalism met swooning synth pop and arthouse experiments went off on saucer-eyed rave benders. And as other sounds have come to seem more current and perhaps more urgent—first the uneven throb of dubstep and bass music, more recently the livewire sonics of a range of club styles that look primarily to Africa and the Caribbean, rather than the U.S., UK, and EU, for inspiration—Kompakt has come to seem less like a standard bearer and more like a niche concern. But there’s freedom in uncoupling from the zeitgeist, and Total 18 proves that one of the label’s strengths is its ability to keep on Kompakting on. It’s not just “Well, It’s Paape”; many of the most satisfying tracks here could have come from any of the previous 17 installments in the series. Many of them are the work of the label’s inner circle. Tobias Thomas and Michael Mayer’s “So Mad” is a slyly spooky haunted-house ride complete with carnivalesque chords and a wraithlike vocal hook. Jörg Burger’s “Petra Kelly” harnesses the luxurious synths of Violator-era Depeche Mode for a moody, slow-burning cut with a barely concealed snarl. The irrepressible Rex the Dog fuses electro-house chug with bleep-techno flashbacks. T.Raumschmiere’s spiky, vocoder-infused fist-pumper parties like it’s 1999. At the heavy end of the spectrum, Wolfgang Voigt—Kompakt’s paterfamilias, best known for his ambient project GAS—teams up with his younger brother Reinhard for an enjoyably DGAF techno brooder that sounds a little like a duet for kick drum and dentist drill. All of these tracks demonstrate a time-tested understanding of the way dance music often boils down to fitting the right sounds to the right groove. It’s not rocket science. Happily, quite a few of the comp’s best tracks come from relatively new players. Sonns’ “Tame” sounds a little like a Scandinavian disco rework of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” trilogy. Tom Demac and Real Lies evoke both the Streets and Pet Shop Boys in a note-perfect take on the sort of melancholy deep techno that Superpitcher pioneered for the label in the early 2000s. Aaron Ahrends strikes the quintessentially Kompakt balance of quirky, seductive, and hard hitting. And ANNA delivers a big-room floor-filler that’s effortless in its execution. Why is her track demonstrably better than hundreds of songs traversing exactly the same acid-streaked ground? It’s impossible to say, but that’s why dance music is a dark art—and why the peak of Kompakt’s wizard hat is often just a little bit sharper than that of other labels. Unfortunately, Kompakt can’t quite sustain that hit rate across the compilation’s 25 tracks. Many of the best selections are sequenced toward the beginning for a reason, and the album tends to sag as it progresses. There are no real duds—though Vermont’s “Dschuna (Dixon Mix),” a leaden cut pairing African chant with chamber strings, comes close—but more than a few songs either feel like filler or fall back on cliché. Animal Print’s “The Last Night of Laura Palmer” indulges in a gravelly recitation of the Lord’s Prayer; Enzo Elia & Musumeci’s “Gothic Safari” goes whole hog on—you guessed it—growling lions. Still, for every slightly generic cut like Anii’s “Korzenie” (Afro-Latin percussion, one-note bassline, predictable builds and drops), there’s another like La Marine’s “Flash,” which joins a killer vocal hook and a sleek rhythm with just the right amount of funny business. At moments like this, you can sum up the spirit of the label in only one way: Well, it’s Kompakt.

2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Kompakt

August 27, 2018

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Philip Sherburne

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

Pairing multilingual processed vocals with shape-shifting electroacoustic arrangements, the Italo-Congolese singer and composer explores the limits of the unconscious.

Pairing multilingual processed vocals with shape-shifting electroacoustic arrangements, the Italo-Congolese singer and composer explores the limits of the unconscious.

Laryssa Kim: Contezza

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laryssa-kim-contezza/

Contezza

Laryssa Kim—an Italo-Congolese singer, composer, dancer, performance artist, and student of acousmatics—melds musique concrète and processed vocals into otherworldly, polymorphous compositions that abandon typical song structures. The title of Oneironauts, a 2020 performance, speaks to the Brussels-based musician’s wandering ethos: she traverses dream states to draw out the strange beauty lurking beneath our everyday consciousness. On her debut album, Contezza (which in Italian means “awareness”), she casts a trance-inducing spell with atmospheric electroacoustic arrangements and vocals in English, Italian, and French. It’s her most accomplished work yet, a mesmerizing odyssey guided by sharp intention. Kim takes her time across Contezza, slowly unfurling field recordings, stretches of eerie ambient tones, and her own tender vocalizations. The continuous mix, threaded together with rushing waves and rolling thunder, deepens the contemplative intensity, as though Kim were moving through nature and transforming what she sees into sweeping, fragmented sounds of her own. The opening “Les Amants d’Osmium - 76 OS” and “Tum Tum - Cuori in Tumulto” stitch together drones, birdsong, and an insistent digital patter that resembles a thumping heartbeat, welcoming listeners into Kim’s unsettlingly beautiful world. Synth tones pierce “Scegli Me - Contesa,” where a haunting chorus of Kim’s looped humming levitates like an encroaching fog. “Scegli me/Portami con te/Portami nel sogno,” (“Choose me/Bring me with you/Take me into the dream”) she sings, establishing the album’s hypnagogic tone with her lullaby-like intonation. Contezza dovetails with Kim’s inspirations in intriguing ways. Her early work drew on reggae riddims, informed by a childhood love of Bob Marley; on the French-language track “L’attente - Auspicio,” a throbbing bassline forms a taut beat behind her echoing vocals, yielding a seductive, bare-bones trip-hop track. On “Obsession - Indomita Mente,” another standout, a metronomic click and dramatic synth sweeps set the stage for Kim’s lovelorn lyrics: “Can’t take the thought of you anymore/It’s like a chain,” she sings softly, tempering the bittersweet kiss-off: “Keep on fighting it… But now I know/I know/I’ll let you go.” She warps the final line into a contorted, held note that slips into a clattering beat, painting a surprisingly broad emotional arc in under five minutes. The abstract interludes that punctuate Contezza lend to its hypnotic qualities. The synths that crinkle in on themselves on “Intimacy - Reserbo” lead into a gorgeous chorus and spoken-word outro flecked with birdsong, while “Voeu - Canto Votivo” dabbles with even more extreme vocal manipulation, distorting Kim’s voice into an oscillating, vibrantly reedy instrument. Like much of Contezza, it’s cerebral but never insular—throughout, Kim balances her esoteric impulses with a radiant warmth. On “Ma Chi Sei - Ascoso,” a tenderhearted ballad toward the end of the album, Kim reaches for answers to existential questions posed both to herself and listeners: “Cosa senti?/Cosa pensi?/Cosa vuoi?/Chi sei?” she asks, the melody dancing along a tightrope (“What do you hear?/What do you think?/What do you want?/Who are you?”). Then the song dissolves into a percussive, uplifting beat; a sense of optimism emerges from the uncertainty, driving home Contezza’s belief in liberation from limitation.

2024-02-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

2024-02-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

Electronic

City Tracks

February 26, 2024

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Eric Torres

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

On his fourth solo album, Jack Antonoff and his band keep writing their own version of the rock’n’roll myth. It’s clever, empathetic, and still a bit clunky.

On his fourth solo album, Jack Antonoff and his band keep writing their own version of the rock’n’roll myth. It’s clever, empathetic, and still a bit clunky.

Bleachers: Bleachers

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bleachers-bleachers/

Bleachers

Put the new Bleachers record on for a friend and they might be floored: Do the National have another record out? On the opening track “I Am Right on Time,” the similarities are uncanny: the jut-jaw baritone, the cryptic profundities, the modest motorik pulse driving an illusion of endless ascension. In time, though, the millennial touches of Jack Antonoff reveal themselves: a sense of shared disillusion (“Our ballroom bliss/Counterfeit, under-extended”), a stray “whoo!” in the background. Even the downers on a Bleachers record can feel like a party might break out. Antonoff and his crew are still trying to answer the plea from the last album’s title. There, Bleachers’ best grooves were tied up in stadium-made swirl. It was a world where Talking Heads headlined Live Aid: the quirks vanished at scale. But on Bleachers—especially on the singles-heavy first half—the band is simply playing for each other, much to the songs’ benefit. “Jesus Is Dead” is a dispatch from New York that wistfully namechecks Longwave and the venerated dance-punk label DFA, but the track moves with the economy of prime Strokes; instead of cresting on some post-punk swell, Antonoff dials up a dual-sax solo. They play the rapid-fire list song “Modern Girl”—think “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” crossed with “Dancing in the Dark,” but listenable—with the verve and cross-stage winks of a seasoned bar band. But most bar bands aren’t fronted by a three-time Grammy-winning Producer of the Year. Jack big-ups a couple of the boys on “Modern Girl,” a nice gesture if a little low-effort; later, when someone yells “fuck off!” after Antonoff puts some “venue herbs” on blast, it lands with the dutifulness of an employee posting a positive Glassdoor review. As with any of Antonoff’s A-list production jobs, the Bleachers project is as much mythological as personal. So when an actual A-lister—Lana Del Rey, who’s mastered both of those dimensions—shows up to duet on “Alma Mater,” he goes for broke. The pair race down the Jersey Turnpike, screaming about Balenciaga, fake-crying to Tom Waits, throwing shirts out the window. The result is surprisingly blissful: cocooned in a puttering sophistipop arrangement that recalls Antonoff’s recent work with the 1975, Jack and Lana luxuriate in the chaos. Those hijinks aside, the fourth Bleachers record marks a conscious shift in subject matter. Previous albums drew from the unimaginable loss of Antonoff’s younger sister to brain cancer. Even at his most life-affirming, there was a mania familiar to anyone who’s endured something similar. Now he’s trying something different. “I’m not numb to the pain,” says skate legend-turned-motivational speaker Rodney Mullen at the end of the sweetly desperate ballad “Ordinary Heaven,” as Jack mutters along. “I would argue I’m more conscious of it than anyone else. But I’m also more conscious of what that gives me.” “Ordinary Heaven,” like the album’s outlook as a whole, takes inspiration from Antonoff’s wife, the actor Margaret Qualley. She makes a left-channel cameo on “Call Me After Midnight,” an adult-contemporary R&B strutter that exchanges one Bruce for another (Hornsby). Co-produced by Kevin Abstract and Romil Hemnani, the song is Antonoff at his best: chameleonic, tender, and casually grandiose. “They don’t want you, they want your faith,” he howls at the climax. Then he cuts himself off to answer the door. Antonoff is famous for beginning a co-write by asking, essentially, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” His newfound domesticity has disrupted that process: a number of these songs are basically him rubbing his eyes in moony disbelief. The devotional acoustic number “Woke Up Today”—which recalls Joni Mitchell in its dulcimer-like tone and its evocation of the “holy surreal”—bridges grief and joy. “Me Before You” borrows the smolder of mid-’90s Springsteen for a portrait of the producer in drift (“Crossfade in the dark/Have a smoke”); On the compact, lovestruck “Tiny Moves,” Bleachers change into their reception-band duds, yawping as a group until a Disney orchestra pops up in the final minute. It can feel like a bit much, or perhaps not enough. In a recent viral interview with the L.A. Times, Antonoff teed off on the idea that his good friend and occasional client Taylor Swift doesn’t write her own material, comparing it to “challenging someone’s faith in God.” But even the omnipotent Swift wouldn’t risk referencing “wires” in six different songs. Having shelved their musical fireworks, Bleachers’ lyrical clunkers (“The muddled and the modern/Will pull you down a size”) echo all the louder. The fluttering, deliberate “Self-Respect” is a defense of messiness that, in rhyming “the day that Kendall Pepsi smiled” with “the day that Kobe fell from the sky,” truly walks the talk. (With “Batter after batter/I couldn’t play ball,“ “Jesus saves and Bubba scores,” and “Call it American football chic/Breakin’ your neck for no reason,” Bleachers goes 0-for-4 on sports references.) Antonoff fares better when he’s talking shop, whether drawing from Swift’s arsenal of counterattacks (“I guess I’m New Jersey’s finest New Yorker/Unreliable reporter/Pop music hoarder”) or undergoing ego death (“A teenage girl just sized me up/It’s something I don’t wanna discuss”). Antonoff has spent years assembling a sort of doomsday empathy machine. Now he’s trying to retool it on the fly. Approaching his 40s at the pinnacle of his profession, the Jersey-boy underdog scrappiness that fueled him may be in shorter supply. But he’s got a deep bench of collaborators, a goldmine of capital, and an emotional breakthrough to explore. All that could make for one hell of a party.

2024-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

2024-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Dirty Hit

March 8, 2024

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Brad Shoup

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/

Live at the Music Hall, a three-LP, career-crossing set from Phosphorescent, was recorded during a four-night stand at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn after the release of 2013’s Muchacho. On it, Matthew Houck strives to overcome the official live release format's high potential for emptiness.

Live at the Music Hall, a three-LP, career-crossing set from Phosphorescent, was recorded during a four-night stand at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn after the release of 2013’s Muchacho. On it, Matthew Houck strives to overcome the official live release format's high potential for emptiness.

Phosphorescent: Live at the Music Hall

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20097-live-at-the-music-hall/

Live at the Music Hall

Of all rock 'n' roll’s tropes and traditions, is the official live album the most meaningless? There's a certain we-made-it hubris to it, an assumption that people not only care enough to see you perform but that they wish to relive the experience in the privacy of their own homes, too. It’s not enough to simply press "Record" and play: If you’re going to issue an onstage set, you’d better make sure that the band behind you is rehearsed, that your catalog is fit to be culled, and that every factor in the room, from the amplifiers to the engineer capturing it all, is ready to be immortalized. What’s more, the band had better be prepared to be more than a mere traveling karaoke machine. If they can’t add some new element or interpretation to the tunes, why bother with a two-dimensional reproduction of something that happened in front of a three-dimensional audience? This troublesome sub-category has produced some incredible and urgent records, but during the past five decades, it has also built a monumental morass of between-album stopgaps, a wasteland of records that mostly remind you a band you like still exists. Live records, then, can be as functionally unnecessary as the carbon filler used to turn virgin vinyl black—there to keep up appearances, if little else. Live at the Music Hall, an exhaustive hour-and-a-half, three-LP, career-crossing set from Phosphorescent, falls somewhere in between these extremes. Recorded during a four-night stand at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn nine months after the release of 2013’s Muchacho, the album attempts to meet the extra pressures of the official live format. Surrounded by a six-piece that features drums and auxiliary percussion, stopping for an intimate solo acoustic section, and adding a string quartet on "Song for Zula", Matthew Houck works to turn Live at the Music Hall into more than a mere document of another gig. The band recharges "Dead Heart", an old organ-and-acoustic dirge, with the neon-light electricity of Crazy Horse. They turn up the volume for a closing 10-minute version of "Los Angeles", where Houck screams and the drummer rolls and the pianist pounds until the air of desolation becomes an exorcism. And they amplify the space-cowboy glee of "Ride On/Right On", with Houck smiling audibly through the playful wah-wah pedal and calypso organ. But the six-piece around Houck is more competent than combustible, a quality that’s long made Phosphorescent a good band to see for a 90-minute show but not one that makes you need to take them home. Phosphorescent was, for years, a crew powered by instability, where players would fall into and out of a fold that clearly belonged to the frontman. And no matter how many people ended up playing on them, his records were at their best when they read like personal transmissions, confessions delivered during the dead of night or from the bottom of a bottle. In recent years, though, Phosphorescent has somewhat codified its lineup, with anchors like Ricky Ray Jackson on guitar, Christopher Marine on drums and Scott Stapleton supporting with piano and harmonies. They’re all here. Still, these 19 songs make it clear that Phosphorescent remains Houck’s act. The players are there to support the songs, not to rearrange them. As a result, the musicians sometimes feel hemmed in, leashed. "A New Anhedonia" is heavier and more indulgent than the Muchacho take, but it mostly scans like the studio version sans its subtle flourishes. "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)", which follows, suffers the same problem. As if aware of the stasis, Houck screams the final chorus, his voice cracking in an uncontrolled eruption. For a singer who can make even the most tortured feelings sound like small talk, it’s a rare error of overexertion. Indeed, the star here remains the same that it’s been for much if not all of Phosphorescent’s discography—Houck’s voice, a beautifully idiosyncratic instrument full of cracks and bumps and bruises that have always made his words feel lived-in and real. During the set’s three-song solo stretch, he’s in stunning form, whether condensing and distending the syllables in lithe little runs during "A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise" or harmonizing with himself and a loop pedal for the sublime close of "Wolves". During an organ-abetted rendition of "Muchacho’s Tune", he brilliantly renders the helplessness and hope of the song’s protagonist. He murmurs about being fucked up and being a fool, his voice in shambles. But then he strenghtens his tone subtly, and by verse’s end, he sounds the signal of his own redemption: “I’ll fix myself up to come and be with you.” The transition gives the familiar song a fresh layer of vulnerability. He's just as poignant leading the band through a full version of "Wolves", too, adding just enough soul-singer gusto to suggest abandon without losing control. Phosphorescent has always indulged popular music’s great referential gestures.  In 2009, that meant naming and recording a Willie Nelson tribute album in the same way Nelson had done for his own hero, Lefty Frizzell. In 2013, it meant using introductions and reprises to bookend Muchacho, a quick nod to concept albums. The spirits of Houck’s inspirations have always been a vital part of his music, too, linking his work to a strange but specific arc of predecessors that includes Will Oldham and Willie Nelson, Brian Eno and Sandy Denny, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. The live album, then, seems inevitable for Phosphorescent, another tradition-steeped move in a career rich with them. It’s obvious that Houck has studied how these things should go, the requisite features that bind the best ones. At points, he even gets there, but most of those successes don’t require a six-piece band, a string quartet or a three-LP set. They just require these songs, that voice and a little air to breathe.

2015-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

2015-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Dead Oceans

February 19, 2015

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Grayson Haver Currin

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

Shelved for decades and now finally released in full, Wings’ 1974 Abbey Road sessions are intimate and exploratory, showcasing a seldom heard, anything-goes side of the former Beatle.

Shelved for decades and now finally released in full, Wings’ 1974 Abbey Road sessions are intimate and exploratory, showcasing a seldom heard, anything-goes side of the former Beatle.

Paul McCartney / Wings: One Hand Clapping

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-mccartney-wings-one-hand-clapping/

One Hand Clapping

It took 52 years and an eight-hour docuseries to confirm that the recording sessions for the Beatles’ Let It Be weren’t exactly the miserable, band-killing ordeals that the namesake 1970 documentary had made them out to be. But long before Peter Jackson put a feel-good spin on the Beatles’ dying days in Get Back, Paul McCartney had already made it clear he was totally cool with having a documentary crew hovering over his shoulder during his most vulnerable moments of creation—because a mere five years after the Let It Be experience, he eagerly subjected his post-Beatles band Wings to the same cinematic scrutiny. Riding high on the runaway success of 1973’s Band on the Run, McCartney and Wings set up shop in Abbey Road Studios for four days in August 1974 and let filmmaker David Litchfield document their every move as they whipped through a sprawling setlist of recent hits, upcoming singles, B-sides, neglected album cuts, off-the-cuff medleys, instrumental jams, songs that wouldn’t be officially released until the following decade, ’50s rockabilly covers, and even a few Fab Four favorites. The result was a documentary called One Hand Clapping, whose overriding concept wasn’t so much “get back” as “get born”—an opportunity to show skeptics that Wings weren’t merely McCartney’s appendages, but a blossoming group fueled by the same sort of collaborative camaraderie and derring-do that his previous band possessed a decade prior. Alas, like the 1969 project, things didn’t go exactly as planned, and it’s taken five decades for a definitive document of the moment to see the light. From day one, Wings were burdened by a seemingly insurmountable contradiction. “For me, I like working with a gang of people, I like a little team,” McCartney told Litchfield. “I’ve never been a solo performer, so it’s natural for me to find myself a group.” Despite his stated desire to be part of a community, the fact is, no one but John Lennon could hope to be on equal creative footing with Paul McCartney in a band. In former Moody Blues member Denny Laine, McCartney found not so much a new partner as a trusted accomplice who could both fill the harmonic holes left by Lennon’s absence and flex the extra guitar muscle required in the hard-rockin’ ’70s. But even with the core of McCartney, keyboardist wife Linda, and Laine in place, Wings were always a band in flux, with different personnel appearing on each record; the triumphs of Band on the Run ultimately owed more to the trio’s crafty approach to their low-tech setup in EMI’s Lagos studio than to a proper band coming into its own. But the version of Wings that McCartney corralled for the One Hand Clapping sessions exhibited the laser focus and playful spontaneity of a tight-knit rock’n’roll band that seemed to have put in their 10,000 hours in just a few weeks. The preternaturally talented guitarist Jimmy McCulloch would be the closest thing McCartney ever had to a swaggering, Mick Ronson-like guitar phenom at his side, and drummer Geoff Britton consistently hit the sweet spot between Ringo Starr steadiness and Keith Moon power (while effortlessly adjusting his sunglasses without missing a beat). Sadly, this iteration of the band barely outlasted these sessions: Britton left the group six months later, reportedly because the drummer—and judo enthusiast—had the opportunity to work on a karate flick in Japan. With American session drummer Joe English stepping in, Wings continued their skyward trajectory with two more chart-topping albums—1975’s Venus and Mars and 1976’s Wings at the Speed of Sound—and an epic world tour. In the midst of this hot streak, the One Hand Clapping project shifted to the back burner before being shelved outright. Cherry-picked selections from the ’74 sessions eventually surfaced as bonus tracks on the 2010 Band on the Run box set, which also included an official DVD release of Litchfield’s One Hand Clapping film. This new release compiles Wings’ Abbey Road repertoire into a joyful 2xLP document of Paul in peak mullet ’n’ cigarettes form, as he was transitioning Wings from a low-stakes Beatles antidote into a formidable rock institution in their own right. Though it was recorded without an audience, One Hand Clapping unfolds like a proper concert, charging out of the gate with the band rocking at full strength, before calling in an orchestra to launch the symphonic fireworks of “Live and Let Die,” detouring into a mini solo piano set, throwing a few old nuggets to the Beatlemaniacs, and ending on a “Hi, Hi, Hi” note. (A bonus six-song 7" of acoustic recordings captured in Abbey Road’s backyard serves as the comedown encore.) McCartney has spent his entire onstage career contending with arenas full of shrieking fans, so it’s a real treat to hear him perform without being drowned out by screams. Compared to the bombastic, cavernous sound of the 1976 live set Wings Over America, the recordings on One Hand Clapping are appealingly raw and in-your-face intimate, making the listener feel like the sole ticket-winner to a private Macca soundstage performance. In essence, One Hand Clapping is the photo-negative counterpart to Get Back: Instead of capturing the casual genius of pulling future classics out of thin air, it showcases McCartney’s willingness to rough up and rearrange his songbook. With Linda’s fuzzy keyboards jacked up in the mix, this version of “Jet” makes a case for Wings as the first synth-pop band, while Britton’s hard-charging backbeat injects the song with a punky thrust. And while this performance of the rarity “Soily” is more taut and less manic than the runaway-train version that brings Wings Over America to a fiery finale, it retains its status as McCartney’s toughest rocker this side of “Helter Skelter.” Even when he revisits weighty Beatles ballads like “Let It Be,” he approaches them with the carefree confidence of someone who’s discovered a vacant piano stool in a hotel lobby; after singing a verse of his melancholic magnum opus “The Long and Winding Road,” he clears his throat and barrels into a brief run through the jaunty “Lady Madonna.” Get Back’s greatest virtue was allowing us to see rock’s most omnipotent group as mere mortals, wracked by the same dysfunction and insecurities that afflict any band running low on time and inspiration. But for McCartney, Wings represented its own kind of demystification process: In contrast to the Beatles’ rarefied status and trailblazing track record, Wings responded to the music of their contemporaries. One Hand Clapping serves as a time capsule of a moment when rock was splintering off into infinite subgenres, with McCartney’s effortless melodicism serving as the connective tissue between the glammy strut of “Hi, Hi, Hi,” the country serenade “Sally G,” and a divine reworking of “Bluebird” that transforms the Band on the Run cut from a low-key “Blackbird” sequel into a proto-yacht-rock groover. And while critics weren’t kind to early Wings albums like Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, representative tracks from that oft-overlooked era—like “C Moon” and “Power Cut”—reflect a longstanding fascination with Jamaican music that abetted reggae’s mainstream entrée. For all the charming moments contained within, you can understand why McCartney opted to scrap One Hand Clapping back in the day: It showcased an already outdated iteration of the group, and its loose, anything-goes spirit must’ve felt at odds with Wings’ growing reputation as an arena-rock powerhouse in the mid ’70s. But its reappearance in 2024 aligns perfectly with the current Macca moment, when younger generations of fans have reclaimed him as the patron saint of oddball indie auteurism. The McCartney we hear on One Hand Clapping isn’t so much the pop perfectionist of classic-rock legend as the merry prankster less concerned with pleasing the masses than amusing himself.

2024-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

MPL

June 15, 2024

f743f978-e3ce-4871-93bc-b68d18c66fa3

Stuart Berman

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

Pharoah Sanders’ group rolled up all the best qualities from his early-1970s LPs into a newly reissued set that bursts with joy and discovery. It’s a concert that sounds more like a party than a seance.

Pharoah Sanders’ group rolled up all the best qualities from his early-1970s LPs into a newly reissued set that bursts with joy and discovery. It’s a concert that sounds more like a party than a seance.

Pharoah Sanders: Live in Paris (1975)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pharoah-sanders-live-in-paris-1975/

Live in Paris (1975)

When Pharoah Sanders played tenor saxophone with John Coltrane in the 1960s, his tone was harsh and wild. Soloing alongside Coltrane on records like Ascension, Om, and Live in Japan, Sanders’ horn would shriek and howl and cry, reaching a pitch of earth-shaking intensity on pieces that pushed jazz to the limits of legibility. But after Coltrane’s death in 1967, Sanders began exploring a different path. Playing with Alice Coltrane on Ptah, the El Daoud and Journey in Satchidananda, and on his own albums for the Impulse! label, his sound was still searching, but now it was lyrical, and his musical settings often included trance-inducing grooves. After a half-decade enduring the blast furnace of free jazz, Sanders’ style grew more spiritual and cosmic and started looking to music from around the globe for inspiration. The records Sanders made for Impulse! in the first half of the 1970s are marked by intensity and emotional focus but also by accessibility. Solos sometimes included intense overblowing, but sunny melodies and rich instrumental textures bent the music toward peace and light. This is where we find Sanders and his band when they played a show in Paris in 1975. His Impulse! period was behind him, and a few years away were the records for Clive Davis’ Arista, where he’d make deeper forays into R&B and even touch on disco. While he was in this in-between space, Sanders’ group rolled up all the best qualities from his early-1970s LPs into a set that bursts with joy and discovery, positive vibrations radiating in every direction. It captured a gig in a studio at the studios of Radio France with a capacity of about 800 people, the site of live albums by Cannonball Adderley, Freddie Hubbard, and Grant Green. The quality of the sound is exceptional. Given the sonics and the wide appeal of the set, this isn’t a bad place to start for someone new to his work. The essence of Sanders’ music in this period is the two-chord vamp. This wasn’t the only structure he used and he would occasionally take on standards or tunes by John Coltrane, but vamps undergirded a lot of his most memorable music. Most of the tunes on “Live in Paris (1975)” are built from simple basslines by Calvin Hill, and pianist Danny Mixon seesaws back and forth between two chords, with a few variations. Music that goes on for minutes on end with only two repeating chords creates a special mood. It’s not unlike listening to the sound of breathing. Tension builds and releases with each successive bar, but the feeling is open and easeful, bringing to mind dreamy images—trees moving outside a car window, waves crashing into a shore. A two-chord vamp suggests travel, but it never feels like it’s going anywhere in particular. The journey, rather than the destination, is what counts. Such a harmonic framework is perfect for Sanders, who stretches out on solos that are melodic and lyrical but still relatively simple, a triumph of tone and phrasing possible only when virtuosity is a given. “Love Is Here,” performed in two parts, mostly centers on a vamp, with Hill playing his bass high on the neck to give the groove an elastic propulsion, as if he’s in front pulling the band behind him. At times, Sanders goes into the fiery overblowing that he made his name with, but these eruptions never last long, and they seem celebratory rather than violent. He also sings through his horn, creating a beautiful bird-like yelp that blurs the lines between voice and instrument. Similar techniques are found in “Farrell Tune,” another classic-sound vamp that bears some resemblance to Sanders 1971 tune “Thembi.” Sanders’ reins in his most far-out musical conceptions here; it’s a set that sounds more like a party than a seance. The original version of “The Creator Has a Masterplan,” which debuted on Sanders’ 1969 album Karma, ran over 32 minutes. But this take is more focused, keeping the original’s searching melody but simplifying the arrangement. Mixon gets harp-like tones out of his piano, with quick trills on the upper keys that sound almost like strums, and he breaks out for a funky solo. “I Want to Talk About You” is a ballad closely associated with John Coltrane—it appears on both Soultrane and Live at Birdland—and it’s the one change-up on a set that is otherwise quite unified. Sanders gives it a yearning, though relatively straight reading, and the standard’s chord changes offer a welcome diversion from the consistent groove. Three of the six tracks feature the word “love” and another suggests that God knows what he’s doing, so the overriding mood here is one of comfort and bliss. On the closing “Love Is Everywhere” Sanders sings and chants as often as he plays his horn, sounding like a preacher at a revival leading a call-and-response. Hearing his rough vocals over the impossibly peppy and cheerful music compels the untrained singers among us to join in. The song’s false ending, taking a page out of James Brown’s book, is pure communal ecstasy, filled with an organ swell, crashing drums, and chants that seem to bring every Parisian in the room to their feet. It’s so stirring, it makes you want to look around wherever you are when listening to confirm what he’s singing: Love is everywhere. Could it be? Whatever contrary evidence exists elsewhere in the world, now or any other time in history, Sanders makes a convincing case for its omnipresence on this particular day 45 years ago.

2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

Jazz

Transversales Disques

April 13, 2020

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Mark Richardson

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

The version of the band that toured behind 2017’s American Dream gathers in the legendary New York studio, giving old songs new life and additional oomph.

The version of the band that toured behind 2017’s American Dream gathers in the legendary New York studio, giving old songs new life and additional oomph.

LCD Soundsystem: Electric Lady Sessions

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lcd-soundsystem-electric-lady-sessions/

Electric Lady Sessions

Though they mostly sound the same, there are two LCD Soundsystems. There’s the one James Murphy cooks up in private, the one you hear on albums, studio concoctions where one guy plays the glockenspiel, the bongos, the tambourine, the Casio MT-68 and the Casio CT-410V, and sings, too. Other names pepper the liner notes, but Murphy’s sits beside the most instruments, conjuring the image of a studio nerd laying down track after track until everything’s dense and perfect, which it often is. Over the past 17 years, this LCD Soundsystem has served as a sparkling vessel for one guy’s neuroses, threading lines about aging, ennui, and self-loathing into complex webs of disco beats and new wave basslines. The second band, the one that takes to the stage, has the same lyrics as the first but isn’t really about individual insecurity. Because LCD Soundsystem play dance music, toying with elements of disco and house and new wave, they are always in dialogue with an impression of the crowd and their own interactions. Live, LCD Soundsystem work as a decentralized commune, Murphy the competent yet reluctant leader. He doesn’t typically play instruments onstage; more often than not, he’s just negotiating with the microphone, serving as interlocutor between the band and the audience, softening the barrier between the two. Electric Lady Sessions, like 2010’s London Sessions, fits this second band in a room and documents the conversation that unfolds among its members. There’s no crowd here, no mass of people singing along with Murphy as on 2014’s The Long Goodbye. There’s just the band that toured behind American Dream, the 2017 record that ended LCD Soundsystem’s self-imposed hiatus. Recorded in the famed New York studio of the same name, this session captures a moment of arresting chemistry among longtime collaborators who sound excited to be playing together again. LCD Soundsystem’s position as a mouthpiece for a talented, anxious frontman has always created friction with the genres the band absorbs. Disco, at root, springs from the queer collective, from long nights at gay clubs in the early 1970s, when the DJ kept crowds pulsing until sunrise. There’s no consistent history of bedroom disco, no solid pedigree of dance music as a pressure valve for one guy’s intergenerational insecurity. Disco seeks to break down walls around the individual psyche, while Murphy’s sly witticisms and open complaints have often reinforced them. That tension eases when the band plays live. Murphy’s voice rings out not as a narrator presiding over an environment of his own making, but as another instrument as prone to failure and bouts of joy as any other. The adrenaline bursts that pop up through American Dream—the moments when Murphy breaks from dazed, dreamy synth jams into post-punk existential terror—take on new life and added volume on Electric Lady Sessions. The end of “Emotional Haircut” here might be the heaviest this band has ever gotten. Propelled by Pat Mahoney’s vicious drums, Murphy sounds like he’s ready to sink his teeth into the nearest jugular. “Listen to it now!” he howls, almost buried beneath bandmates, like he has to fight to be heard since he’s no longer the only star of the show. This dynamic, where Murphy flows along with his band, does wonders for these songs. Most in this session are taken from American Dream—“Call the Police,” “Tonite,” and “Oh Baby” stand out—although a few pop in from This Is Happening and Sound of Silver. In this arrangement, “You Wanted a Hit” loses some of its defensive barbs, shifting attention from Murphy’s sour monologue to playful exchanges between Nancy Whang and Gavin Rayna Russom on the keys and group vocals that coalesce at the hook. Smartly, nothing from LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut makes the cut; that album’s acidic tone would derail the setlist, which finds the band pushing for moments of spontaneous vulnerability. Covers of Human League’s “Seconds” and Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” serve as bookends, grounding the record as an explicit reprieve from daily horrors that are not music. “Seconds” touches on the specter of gun violence, with a verse that mentions white knuckles and a shot “heard around the world” and a jarring chorus that insists, “It took seconds of your time to take his life.” The commanding baritones of Murphy and guitarist Al Doyle are gripping. The fast-paced group singalong “Fascist Groove Thang” makes a fun epilogue, the title speaking for itself. And a cover of Chic’s “I Want Your Love” late in the set sees Whang take lead vocals, rounding out LCD’s nod to their formative influences. Their version is tighter and crisper than the original, but it retains Chic’s utopian bent. On Electric Lady Sessions, LCD Soundsystem strip back and then bone up the grooves that have always made their music work, despite its contradictions. The groove takes precedence over the words, and Murphy gives his studio meticulousness over to the energy of the group. The synths run bright and juicy. The bass sounds like it could knock you out if you stood too close. The drums hit fast and sharp. Murphy slips from his throne as record-geek auteur and dissolves into the group—one musician among many, and better for it.

2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic / Rock

Columbia / DFA

February 7, 2019

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Sasha Geffen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/

Though it’s full of guests and emotional twists and turns, the late rapper’s posthumous album is largely sloppy and inconsequential, a sour note to bookend a storied legacy.

Though it’s full of guests and emotional twists and turns, the late rapper’s posthumous album is largely sloppy and inconsequential, a sour note to bookend a storied legacy.

DMX: Exodus

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dmx-exodus/

Exodus

Aging in hip-hop is still a fairly new phenomenon. Death often forces fans and critics to prematurely unpack a rapper’s legacy, whether they were cut down in their prime or before they began to truly blossom. Some don’t live to see 30. Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., two of the most important rappers of all time, were murdered in their mid-20s, barely six months apart. Over the last three years, the rap community has lost a string of young talent to gun violence (Pop Smoke), drug overdose (Juice WRLD), and other unfortunate circumstances. This makes it all the more special when a rapper does cross over into middle age, a privilege only some of the genre’s legends have been able to enjoy. DMX had just turned 50 before he passed away on April 9, 2021. Since the early 1990s, X had funneled a life of unspeakable adversity into music as pious as it was grisly, a guttural voice confronting his own personal hell in order to see heaven. His constant struggles with drug addiction and mental health were a frequent topic in his music, coloring a tumultuous 30-year career that included five consecutive No. 1 albums, several hit singles, and film roles. DMX wasn’t the first rapper to turn their demons into jet fuel, but he lived to build an inspiring legacy that persisted even as his personal problems became public fodder for jokes and memes. Exodus, his posthumous eighth studio album and first proper album since 2012’s Undisputed, was sparked by the overwhelming fan support shown during his Verzuz battle against Snoop Dogg in July 2020. According to longtime collaborator Swizz Beatz—who also executive produced the project—X wrestled with thoughts of retirement during the recording process, so they attempted to make Exodus as emotionally and musically varied as possible. “There are many different sides of X,” Swizz recently told Complex. “We wanted to channel all those sides on this album.” It may have sounded like a fitting tribute on paper, but Exodus is largely sloppy and inconsequential, a sour note to bookend a storied legacy. In all fairness, Exodus wasn’t initially intended to be the swan song for DMX’s career. On the contrary; it was supposed to be a comeback album of sorts. Swizz insists that the album was finished within X’s lifetime and that the only change made to the record was subbing out a previously used Pop Smoke verse for one by Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo on the aptly titled “Money Money Money.” If this truly was X’s vision, his attempt to come back with a big bang with his partner-in-crime by his side, it sputters more often than it pops. At its best, X’s voice is magnetic, dragging everything in its orbit to the center like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. However, many of his verses across Exodus sound spent, his trademark bark hollowed out and strained. Both “That’s My Dog,” a reunion track with fellow Yonkers rappers The Lox, and “Hood Blues,” the highly anticipated matchup with Buffalo trio Griselda, begin with their respective trio of guests before ending with an X verse as an attempt to build tension before the man of the hour bursts through the door. Both verses are underwhelming and pale in comparison to their guests, but the “Hood Blues” verse is noticeably lackluster. X’s overdubbed vocals and ad-libs sound more incoherent than menacing, stumbling through bars like a boxer on the ropes while Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, and Benny the Butcher rap circles around him. This verse should’ve never left the studio. The verse is also a microcosm of Exodus’s most glaring flaw: This is a feature-heavy album—all but two tracks have guests—that put X in various uncomfortable spots. On “Money Money Money,” he and Moneybagg Yo flail over chintzy organ keys and drums, operating on two completely different wavelengths. “Skyscrapers” with U2 frontman Bono and “Hold Me Down” with Alicia Keys are stabs at pop balladry that attempts to marry X’s gruff motivational talk with sappy swelling instrumentals but never truly find a balance. “Bath Salts,” a nearly decade-old track that was initially leaked during a 2017 beat battle, houses X’s best verse on the album but can’t help being outshined by JAY-Z and Nas’ second reunion of the year. Exodus has the most features of any DMX album, and whether they were his idea or not, it’s clear much of the star power overwhelmed his usual gravitational pull. A handful of inspired moments prevent Exodus from fully succumbing to mistakes and whiffs. Swizz seems to be having fun behind the boards. “Take Control” teases a modern swing out of a well-flipped sample of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” to create a nice slice of rap-funk for X and Snoop Dogg’s horny uncle bars. “Hood Blues” is a decent aping of the grainy Griselda aesthetic that wouldn’t sound out of place on any of their most recent projects. “Hood Blues” also houses one of the album’s handfuls of truly arresting moments: “I ain’t 50 years old for nothing,” X growls on the song’s outro, confronting his mortality in more literal terms than he likely realized. But the album really takes off on its final two tracks. “Letter to My Son (Call Your Father)” abandons all pretense for a heart-to-heart between X and his son about fading love between parents as he extends an olive branch (“We could've been best friends all along/But it kinda defeats the purpose of the song”). It’s a heartfelt moment quickly followed by “Prayer,” a two-minute prayer session recorded at Kanye West’s Sunday Service at Coachella 2019. These two moments are the closest X gets to the life-or-death anxiety of earlier albums like It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, his love for his family and his God pushing him through the ring of fire. Posthumous releases are never easy, though DMX’s Exodus stands in a unique position. It wasn’t A&R’d to death like Pop Smoke’s Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon; it wasn’t cobbled together from years-old recordings like any Tupac album released after 1996. For all its shortcomings, it’s a genuine effort propelled by a sense of purpose instilled from artist to producer. DMX lived long enough to know his legacy was secure, but he still deserved a better sendoff than this. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam

June 1, 2021

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Dylan Green

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

In a collaboration with the stunning singers Theo Bleckmann and Jodie Landau, the sharp young composer processes poems and strings into surprisingly magnetic meditations on time.

In a collaboration with the stunning singers Theo Bleckmann and Jodie Landau, the sharp young composer processes poems and strings into surprisingly magnetic meditations on time.

Jacob Cooper: Terrain

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jacob-cooper-terrain/

Terrain

No, your stream is not buffering, and your headphones are not broken. But for the first two minutes of Terrain, the captivating second album from the conceptually intrepid and processing-minded composer Jacob Cooper, you will invariably wonder what is wrong with your sound. A fusillade of glitches and silences suggests an interrupted connection or a failing circuit. Soon enough, though, Cooper’s digital cacophony yields to the splendid consonance of Theo Bleckmann, a singer whose dashing fluidity made him a mensch of Meredith Monk’s Vocal Ensemble and shaped his stunning album of Kate Bush interpretations. “Nettles, daisies, and long purples,” he finally manages after the slurred start of “Ripple the Sky,” images of natural wonder barely outracing Cooper’s ruthless electronics. For the next 15 minutes, Bleckmann serves as a sort of narrative tour guide, singing a poem about the depression and suffering that thread together Ophelia’s woe in Hamlet, the suicide-minded works of Robert Schumann, and our own inescapably anxious times. He rises above a snarling string section only to have his splendid tone chopped, screwed, doubled, and damaged to the edge of oblivion. “Ripple the Sky” is a daring piece about trying to hold onto shreds of beauty in a cold world that rarely cares about what you covet. Those stutters at the start, the ones that will make you check your connection, and the squeal of scraped strings at the end are ellipses, reminders that our worries were no more new to Ophelia than they are to us. Shakespeare, Schumann, and you—that’s the timeline Cooper is condensing. Cooper has long been a fan of teasing his audience’s perception of time. In an opera, he constructed an alternate universe where Justin Timberlake again wooed Britney Spears. He also stretched the start of a hymn about Mary mourning Jesus’ crucifixion until you could almost visualize her forming tears. (That last work, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, is rapturous and highly recommended, as beautiful a buck as you will ever spend on Bandcamp.) Terrain features three pieces written between 2016 and this year, each based around new poems commissioned by Cooper and sung by Bleckmann, his younger stylistic descendant Jodie Landau, and, for the finale, the two in tandem. These poems and the pieces at large consider the ways time reinforces or diminishes our individual experiences. Where “Ripple the Sky” is about the immortality of our woes, “Expiation” examines humanity’s customs of killing animals and, broadly, our inability to “escape past pressure.” The most recent work and title track, “Terrain,” tries to hold onto fleeting moments of beauty while the world races ahead. All of this might sound dry or overly esoteric—and, yes, it’s a lot to ponder. But the wonder of Terrain is how Cooper makes these ideas and his rigorous treatments sound so vital and compulsive, in conversation with a world well beyond the conservatory. Late in “Ripple the Sky,” for instance, the strings become especially grating, and Bleckmann seems ready to succumb. It’s like the dreamworlds of Tim Hecker turned inside out, so that the music is pure hellish attack. For its magnetic middle, “Expiation” sounds like Animal Collective circa Strawberry Jam, when skywriting vocals crisscrossed intricate layers of surrealist sequences. The piece’s climax is a proper dance number, with hypnotic harmonies webbing a throbbing beat to Landau’s half-yelled pleas for empathy. “Each tongue troubles its dark canker,” he repeats, demanding that the past be reconsidered for the continually changing present. During “Terrain,” a duet Cooper builds by processing both singers against the pensive cello drones of frequent collaborator Ashley Bathgate, Bleckmann is in the foreground, his voice given a kind of magisterial authority. Landau is below, squeezed until he sounds like a robot running out of electricity. The combination feels like hearing someone’s internal dialogue about some deep turmoil, an approach familiar from Moses Sumney’s græ or Bon Iver’s 22, A Million—extravagantly warped vocals and largely unadorned ones vying for limited space, slipping in and around one another in an uneasy exchange. It’s fitting that Cooper continues to dwell on time and how we handle it, since Terrain feels like his futuristic view of classical music, firmly rooted both in the distant past and music much closer to the present. His audacious interpretation of these librettos stems from tradition. The tools he uses to do so, though, border on production’s bleeding edge, so much so that, now and again, you will wonder if something’s wrong with the sound itself. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

New Amsterdam

July 14, 2020

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Grayson Haver Currin

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

On their second album in as many months, the Los Angeles rap crew stay sleek and cool, but offer more appealing bouts of aggression and swagger.

On their second album in as many months, the Los Angeles rap crew stay sleek and cool, but offer more appealing bouts of aggression and swagger.

BROCKHAMPTON: Saturation II

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brockhampton-saturation-ii/

Saturation II

BROCKHAMPTON’s second album arrives just over two months after their debut. A third album is imminent. So it’s fitting that this trilogy is called Saturation, a flood of material functioning as an extension of the group’s personality. BROCKHAMPTON are a rap collective defined by confidence—the idea that trying is as valuable as doing. They’re like a West Coast Wu-Tang Clan where everybody’s a winner. “It’s musical vomit, you just throw it up, you can’t resist the urge,” Ameer Vann said after the first Saturation came out. “We’re just trying to capitalize on how easily everything is flowing right now, we don’t really want to stop.” The sequel is not vastly different from its predecessor, but it is an improvement. Whereas the first Saturation preached self-assurance, the second actually collects on it. In a short span, BROCKHAMPTON have ameliorated some of their more glaring flaws that existed on their debut. In place of the preachy motivation and biographical introductions, the Los Angeles group offer more appealing bouts of aggression and swagger. On the sinister “Chick,” Vann raps astutely, “Imma be a star even if I say the same things.” He’s has emerged as the most magnetic member of the nebulous-numbered crew. He’s got a biting sense of humor and weaves political commentary into his lyrics as easily as he does drug talk, but it’s the “Chick” line that gets to the core of his and BROCKHAMPTON’s ethos: They don’t have to say much to succeed, so long as they say it convincingly. On the same track, Matt Champion proves the point: “And I won’t cater to you/Yeah, I am not Carrabba’s/And I ain’t taking orders,” all with a knowing wink that name-dropping an Italian food chain is not exactly fashionable, but he still sounds good doing it. The catchiest BROCKHAMPTON songs isolate one glossy element—like a keyboard arpeggio on their debut’s “Gold” or string plucks on II’s “Jello”—atop the mix as stand-ins for richer, fuller beats. The production on II continues in the same form as their debut: cool, funky, and polished, with just enough odd ornaments (a swirling G-funk synth on “Gummy,” a snake charmer’s melody on “Sweet”) to stand out from the mainstream. But there’s a grimier mood that adds to the record’s urgency. Kevin Abstract begins “Junky” with a ferocious verse about being queer—“‘Why you always rap about being gay?’” he shouts, “’Cause not enough niggas rap and be gay!”—and even when his bandmates rap with less objective gravity, the coiled beats makes them feel just as important. It’s not yet clear the through line that makes BROCKHAMPTON a bona fide crew rather than just a bunch of guys who rap together. Across these 16 tracks, their personalities and strengths come into sharper focus: Abstract, the founder and leader, is best when relegated to the hook; Dom McLennon plays the straight man, delivering a steady flow when called upon; Champion is dry and blunt; Merlyn Wood is a vocal wildcard; JOBA is the falsetto changeup who can hold his own as a rapper; bearface is the hidden balladeer; and Ameer Vann is just plain great. But there are precious few moments where they complement each other or build on distinct themes. For the most part, members are just placed together on lengthy tracks like “Sweet,” “Gummy,” and “Swamp,” where serviceable verses become less than the sum of their parts. BROCKHAMPTON are still awkwardly straddling the hip-hop and pop worlds, a byproduct, perhaps, of their superego-free approach to making music. It feels like the bars and hooks from the young crew are still incubating, so the music on II comes out a little underdone. The album is joyful, but it’s more like joy in a vacuum, with little ebullience to make the music transcend beyond its inherent quality. The beats are smooth, but often lack the requisite bass knock to rattle around in your head for days. Their rhymes are playful (Dom McLennon puts on a show on “Sweet,” opening his verse with, “The original lick-splickety, higher than Yosemite”), but they don’t test vocal or lyrical limits. On Saturation II, there remains a sense that no matter how cool BROCKHAMPTON sound, they prize coolness more than they prize breaking molds and taking risks to become something bigger.

2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Empire

September 6, 2017

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Matthew Strauss

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/

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 the album that made the Dave Matthews Band forever famous, in search of its long-overlooked dark heart.

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 the album that made the Dave Matthews Band forever famous, in search of its long-overlooked dark heart.

Dave Matthews Band: Crash

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-matthews-band-crash/

Crash

The Dave Matthews Band seemed lame from the start. The quintet emerged, after all, at the beginning of the 1990s from Charlottesville, Virginia, a quaint college town better known then as a tourist hub for Shenandoah National Park and Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved fiefdom than its music scene. Flanked by fiddle and saxophone, Matthews was a lanky white weirdo who sang about satellites, climate change, and the crucifixion of Christ like Kermit the Frog, raspy from all the weed. The locals lined up in throngs outside of clubs, coffeehouses, and frat parties to hear these anachronistic Grateful Dead acolytes. But the truly big cities sounded different than the University of Virginia quad around 1992, with music that was unequivocally defiant or unabashedly snotty. Hip-hop poured into the heartland from both coasts, locked in a steadily escalating duel. Seattle’s grunge scene spawned a web of glowering toughies, all pursuing fiscal nirvana. And indie rock drifted toward wider prominence, abetted by a fawning music press and loaded major labels. By 1994, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus was the cool-kid avatar exported from Charlottesville. Matthews was just the town’s astronomically profitable punchline, a magnet for and magnate of hippies and yuppies. “Matthews jams politely,” Robert Christgau ribbed the band’s 1994 studio debut, Under the Table and Dreaming. “He’s as bland as a tofu sandwich.” In the spring of 1996, nearly five years to the day after their first performance, the Dave Matthews Band declared that coolness would never be their credo. Crash, their second studio album, burrowed deeper into the idiomatic musical mélange that had made them popular and polarizing. The funk hit harder. The ballads luxuriated in deep moods, sexy or solemn. There were pan-African instrumental duets, velvety saxophone solos, and snarling acoustic rockers. Oh, and of course there was “Crash Into Me,” a once-ubiquitous precoital standard for some that doubled as an onanistic anathema for others. Crash typecast the Dave Matthews Band as the neoliberal darlings of Bill Clinton’s happy, wealthy, largely white United States, a sound perfectly suited for a second term. A quarter-century later, that assessment feels superficial, overlooking not only the album’s dark heart but the way the band presaged the collapsing borders between genres, between pop and everything else. Crash made the Dave Matthews Band a beloved household name and one of the most reviled acts in the history of contemporary rock’n’roll, fodder for competing visions of how music should function. The biography of Matthews himself cuts to the roots of his band’s head-scratching lineup and sound and their surprisingly enduring relevance, especially on Crash. It likely doesn’t resemble that of his legion of disciples, either—namely, the youngest Gen Xers or oldest Millennials who learned the horny “Crash” or the philosophizing “Typical Situation” to woo anyone within earshot of their state school’s dormitory. Born in 1967 in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, Matthews followed his family between England and New York for much of his first decade, accompanying a father who worked as “one of the granddaddies of the superconductor,” he once told Rolling Stone. But his father, John, died of cancer when Matthews was 10, prompting the family of five to return to South Africa after three decades of apartheid rule. Back in one of the world’s most destabilized political climates, Matthews learned about pacifism, activism, and resistance from his mother, Valerie, while absorbing the country’s native sounds and imported Western pop. A lackluster student, he indulged instead in listening to music, drawing, and acting. He bucked apartheid strictures, too, like a teenage punk. As he once told Spin, he’d lift his Black friends and physically carry them into segregated businesses. “See, they’re not touching the floor,” he’d say, taunting the staff, “so they’re not really here.” To avoid South African military service, though, Matthews fled to the United States in the mid-’80s. Around the age of 19, he settled with his family in Charlottesville, where his father had once taught. Matthews soon found a downtown bartending job, a natural fit given his quick wit and knack for impersonations. There, he encountered a fertile community of musicians motivated by improvisation and collaboration. With his mind set on making a demo, Matthews first approached a regular from the bar—LeRoi Moore, a Southern jazz saxophonist with a languorous sense of melody. Moore had worked for years with the drummer Carter Beauford, an area hotshot and BET session player who seemed as busy as an entire beehive behind his kit. A friend soon recommended the electric bassist Stefan Lessard, a teenage phenom who had been raised by hippies but was now sneaking into bars to jam. Fiddler Boyd Tinsley, the last to join, broke any easy notion of how this racially diverse quintet might sound—jazz? rock? bluegrass? country? Arabic maqam? African highlife? Yes. From the very start, the quintet seemed like an awkward but interesting teenager during puberty, trying to suss out what all these strange parts could do. The band’s star rose quickly, especially in their native South. They would play most anywhere at any time, from frat houses to warehouses. And thanks to a tape-trading network modeled after ones used by the Grateful Dead, they turned those early shows into a form of proto-viral marketing, so that the kids in Savannah knew the songs before the quintet even arrived from Chattanooga. They signed a major-label deal and sold three million copies of 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming by the time they finished its follow-up, Crash. In a way, their mainstream introduction felt hesitant, even unfinished. It seemed as if they understood that being an acoustic rock band with a fiddle and a saxophone (and not singing all-American epics like Bruce Springsteen) made them plenty weird three years after “punk broke.” Recorded to click tracks and polished by veteran producer Steve Lillywhite—the real rock star in the room thanks to his work with U2 and the Rolling Stones—its songs were peppy or sentimental, snappy or pleasant, avoiding any liminal sense of danger. Months before it was released, one of Matthews’ sisters, Anne, was murdered by her husband in South Africa, leaving Matthews and his other sister, Jane, to raise her children. The Dave Matthews Band’s subsequent ascent to fame as the happy-go-lucky band singing about marching ants was chased by the long tail of yet another family tragedy. The success of Under the Table and Dreaming—and the band’s relentless tour schedule—served as a permission slip to push their panoply of sounds harder the second time. By the time they reconvened with Lillywhite for several months in upstate New York to record Crash, they’d been playing its songs for years, many of them already bootlegged fan-favorites. They burned through untold hours of tape, vamping in the same room while they tried to tease out fresh renditions of tunes their “Daveheads” already knew. In retrospect, previous live versions of these songs sound like pencil sketches for grand paintings. On Crash, the band ping-pongs between gleeful aggression and droopy melancholy, between feather-light strings and heavyweight horns for a full hour. “Too Much” and “Tripping Billies” are supreme gutbucket funk, Matthews growling his way through the verses as Beauford and Lessard work the meter like it’s a championship racehorse. (James Brown would eventually join the band onstage.) That rhythm section is the secret to “Crash Into Me,” too, with Beauford’s drums pushing the song toward a climax that never comes. It is a maniacal tease, a musical illustration of the song’s unfulfilled desire. While Moore and Tinsley take a few extended solos, most memorably during “#41,” Lillywhite smartly enlists them as textural experts alongside Tim Reynolds, the band’s longtime part-time guitarist. Moore’s baritone saxophone lines during the first four songs, for instance, add welcome ballast, a counterpoint to Matthews’ reedy tone and Beauford’s prancing rhythms. Tinsley’s violin howls beneath “Drive In Drive Out,” lending the song a sense of true madness, like Matthews’ brain is about to break. Still, the most daring moment of Crash is “Say Goodbye,” which empties out of “#41” through a clever segue. The song begins with a flute-and-drums duet, Moore and Beauford darting around one another like two hummingbirds eyeing the same colorful blossom. Violin plucks and muted guitar chords bounce through the mix like free electrons. It is a clear callback to the South African Kwela Matthews would have heard in his youth, a prelude that slides into seductive pop. More adventurous than any moment on Under the Table and Dreaming, “Say Goodbye” is a testament to the Dave Matthews Band’s escalating will to incorporate almost anything into its dynamic. This new fusion gave critics even bigger fits than before. While Christgau had given that “tofu sandwich” a C+, he refused to reward Crash with anything other than a typographical bomb. In Rolling Stone, Jim DeRogatis compared Matthews to Sting and the band to Roxy Music before dissing the album via an extended metaphor for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And in an issue with a leather-clad Roseanne on the cover, Spin’s blistering review deadpanned, “If the DMB hadn’t existed, Sesame Street would have had to invent them.” Even the positive notices were littered with backhanded compliments, deploying phrases like “guitar wanking” or “You couldn’t mosh to it if you tried” as caveat emptors. It was as if, as far as the music literati were concerned, continued Dave Matthews Band fandom required a preemptive apology. A high-school nerd, I was an obsessive DMB fan, with binders full of bootleg CDs and a wardrobe consisting mostly of overpriced tour shirts. But as college began, I fell for the false binary these critics framed—you couldn’t simultaneously like the Dave Matthews Band and “serious music.” It took the better part of two decades for me to realize I’d been posing, that the Dave Matthews Band could also count as serious music. Crash’s popular appeal, on the other hand, was both instant and extended. The record sold a million copies in two months, a pace that flagged only slightly during the next year. The band sold out Madison Square Garden in three hours, added a second show, and sold it out again. They were the unquestioned stars of that summer’s H.O.R.D.E. tour, permanently outstripping festival founders Blues Traveler. In 1997, “So Much to Say” won the band its only Grammy despite 11 career nominations, somehow besting the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Garbage, and the Wallflowers. (“Crash Into Me” would lose to the Wallflowers the next year.) But the feel-good image that Crash’s sounds and sales created never quite comported with the songs themselves, the messages Matthews nested within the music. Naysayers often cite the Dave Matthews Band in the senescence of grunge, their giddiness supplanting that movement’s raw angst. But on Crash, Matthews mined the same emotional cores as Kurt Cobain—dejection, loneliness, anxiety, sexual and social frustration. Everything about their presentation—the sounds, the mood, the culture—was different, but the sentiments were often the same. This semblance is perhaps clearest on the 1999 album Live at Luther College, the fifth show from Matthews’ 1996 acoustic tour alongside Reynolds just as Crash was being finished. It is their MTV Unplugged, the songs stripped to their essence. Without its horns, “#41” sounds broken and mournful, wallowing in hurt. It is a gorgeous elegy for innocence. Indeed, Crash’s songs fit neatly into three broad categories, each a bit more serious than the album’s musical buoyance may suggest. There are, most famously, three songs about unrequited love and lust, a nascent rock star pining for sex he will never have. “Crash Into Me” epitomizes the idea, of course, with the true-to-life testimony of any teenager who’s ever fallen asleep in the throes of a fantasy. It is both creepy and quotidian, the testimony of a child confronting changing biochemistry. Taken together, “Say Goodbye” and “Let You Down” shape a cautionary tale—the former a plea to forgo morals for a night of fireside adultery, the latter his mea culpa for the deed after it is done. Matthews was years into a courtship that led to marriage and children; this trio presents his subliminal timeline for learning to respect love amid the temptations of stardom and the exigencies of adulthood. He begins it as a boy staining the sheets; he ends it as a partner swallowing his pride. A second triptych, scattered unevenly through these 69 minutes, represents what Matthews has long called his “seize-the-day” songs. These are his odes to living informed by those around him who have died, each anchored to a slogan fit for high-school yearbooks and cursive tattoos. “I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves/Dreaming of things we might have been,” goes the most mirthful one. “Celebrate we will/Because life is short but sweet for certain,” reads the moodiest, laced by pizzicato violin and eerie wafts of noise. And Matthews bastardizes multiple Bible verses at once for “Tripping Billies,” a gleeful Meters approximation that races with delight around a joyous violin line. All three remain live staples, each an enduring memento mori for a band and fans aging at the same pace. But the most interesting parts of Crash—fully half the album—document Matthews’ interpersonal and sociopolitical woes. These laments are sometimes oblique. Seemingly ebullient opener “So Much to Say” lambastes our tendencies for small talk, for example, and demands we be something more honest and vulnerable, like a “little baby.” “#41” is a punch-drunk epic about the financial conflict that prompted the band to split with their first mentor and manager. It sounds elliptical and guarded, as though purposely written to avoid being entered into evidence during a lawsuit. Matthews eventually squares up to that greed and concomitant cruelty. “Too Much” feels like one of those carpe diem anthems, with Matthews yowling and growling about eating and drinking over cataracts of bright horns and strata of snarling guitars. But it is a barbed indictment of American wastefulness at home, imperialism abroad, and how they’ve been normalized into a pernicious cycle. We use what we have here, Matthews sings with acrid glee, until we must crush someone else’s culture to get what they have, too. Played on Saturday Night Live and at the disastrous bacchanalia Woodstock ’99, “Too Much” is the Dave Matthews Band’s Trojan Horse, their way to soundtrack and excoriate the party in the same five-minute span. “Cry Freedom,” on the other hand, is as musically unadorned and politically explicit as the band has ever been. Before and after, Matthews took care not to overstate his life as a young white man in South Africa, around for the beginning of the end of apartheid; he has assiduously avoided inserting himself into abuse that his heritage can never fully allow him to understand. But “Cry Freedom” takes its name from the 1987 film about Steve Biko, the South African revolutionary murdered by Afrikaner police a decade earlier. It is Matthews’ most straightforward lyrical reference to his childhood surroundings. The band treats the subject with the reverence it deserves. Beauford taps out a simple beat over grayed guitar chords. Tinsley and Moore stretch long, woebegone tones behind it, the drapery blocking the sun from a room full of mourners. “How can I turn away?” Matthews sings softly at the start, framing himself as an ally. He maintains that cautious approach throughout “Cry Freedom,” reiterating that he’s only the anxious observer to this injustice, not the injured party. Though written about apartheid after its end, the song feels prescient for the United States 25 years later, a smoldering lament for a country of Blue Lives Matter banners that flap even as state-sponsored violence rages on. It is a salient reminder to be a witness, even if you’re not a savior. Matthews’ outlook doesn’t resemble the vision of the United States that the saxophone-playing president broadcast at the time or the version that glassy-eyed suburban kids twirling on amphitheater lawns as the band played “Too Much” had likely experienced. Crash is dark, frustrated, and vulnerable, no matter how many hacky sack circles or light-beer-flavored makeout sessions its songs soundtracked. These messages are the secrets beneath the sounds; hearing them is like noticing the shadows that linger around the neon glow of Dan Flavin’s light sculptures or the turmoil lurking inside one of Meredith Monk’s exercises in vocal ecstasy. Crash is an album that actually longs to lift you up, not break you down. There are a lot of reasons to deplore the Dave Matthews Band, to have never given Crash a second thought—so many, in fact, that speculating about them has become Matthews’ de facto sport during interviews. Perhaps you think Matthews sounds like he’s squeezing his voice from the warped horn of a tiny Victrola. Perhaps you think Beauford is always too fussy behind his drums (he certainly can be) or that the since-disgraced Tinsley was often out of tune, which isn’t wrong. Perhaps your relationship with “Crash Into Me” lacked the same redemption as that of Lady Bird. Or maybe they’re for you what the Doors are for me—an absolutely smoking band fronted by a self-important windbag. No act was more important to my rural childhood life, exposing me to so many musical ideas in the course of a single album that here I am, still pondering them. But all those complaints check out. But the Dave Matthews Band fared well in the end. Crash made them superstars, pushing them to such popularity that they’ve been playing the same circuit of massive amphitheaters and arenas since they released it. That status eventually earned Matthews a tender-hearted cameo on Sesame Street and the band its own Ben & Jerry’s flavor, the delicious “One Sweet Whirled,” named for their most blatant example of hippie idealism. Their ultimate rejoinder to critics, however, was that they were right on Crash—right to pursue whatever sounds they loved, right to pile one unlikely element atop another, right to be weird in earnest. A complete accounting of those that Crash influenced is both impossible and useless, an endless index of guitar strummers and kinetic drummers. Justin Vernon’s high-school band, for instance, thanked them in their adolescent liner notes. John Mayer sat in with them at the Hollywood Bowl in 2007 for a 14-minute rendition of “#41,” prefacing it with, “I’ve been waiting a long time to say this: I am who I am because of Dave Matthews Band.” Even Stevie Nicks has faithfully covered “Crash Into Me.” You could spend the better part of a lifetime watching covers of Crash songs on YouTube. (You probably shouldn’t.) More important than any single musician it helped shape, Crash helped give a generation of upstarts permission to do whatever they wanted with their own music. That sort of broad philosophical inspiration was altogether different than what Nirvana, Pavement, or most every other rock act cooler than the Dave Matthews Band supplied at the same time. “That is bad as shit,” Beauford screams off-mic at the end of “Drive In Drive Out,” a frantic confessional about emotional torment. He is marveling at the tight-cornered rhythmic maze the band has navigated at top speed. It is, as he insists, bad as shit. I suppose that isn’t a cool thing to say about your own music on tape, especially on an album that will forever make you famous. But it sounds deeply felt and sincere, the core characteristics that always made Crash more compelling than its critics dared to admit. Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.

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

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

Rock

RCA

October 10, 2021

f7947584-26b4-40bb-8661-06ec8babe824

Grayson Haver Currin

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

True critical consensus is rare, but I've yet to read a bad word about Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt label ...

True critical consensus is rare, but I've yet to read a bad word about Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt label ...

Markus Guentner: In Moll

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3585-in-moll/

In Moll

True critical consensus is rare, but I've yet to read a bad word about Wolfgang Voigt's Kompakt label. If Voigt had to set aside making music as Gas to get Kompakt off the ground, figuratively trading in his mixing console for a shiny Steelcase desk piled with telephones and staplers, at least he's done it right. Kompakt is emerging as a model electronic label, showing the upstarts how it should be done: present a unified visual aesthetic, release an impressive variety of music that manages to retain identifying reference points, and offer a number of excellent compilations that develop and refine the overriding approach. Last year's Pop Ambient 2001 compilation was the first to showcase the ambient side of the Kompakt coin. The fantastic collection offered two tracks by Germany's Markus Guentner, who has now released his debut album, In Moll, on the label. The initial buzz surrounding the record had Guentner picking up the torch of hyper-textural cloud music where Gas had left it with Pop. And it's true: Guentner's approach has similarities to Pop, especially on In Moll's first half. Keyboards focus on spiraling patterns of repeating melody, precisely mixed clusters of noise highlight the music's tactile qualities, the 4/4 thump pokes in its well-manicured head on a track or two. Mind you, I'm not complaining about the similarities-- Guentner does Gas-eous ambient extremely well. But there's much more to Guentner than mimicry. While the timbral quality of the music sure feels familiar, the overall tone of In Moll is unsettling. Rather than conjuring images of vast open space, Guentner seems to bounce around inside a concrete box. There is, for example, a distinct claustrophobic edge to the second track (the pieces are not titled). For all the squishy sonic seasoning it contains, the piece sounds like a recording of the boiler room that powers some bleak animated world. The wheezes and throbs of the machine seem to echo in some tight, dank space: industry triumphs over nature. The fourth track begins with two spare chords that suggest a peaceful "calm after the storm" kind of atmosphere, then takes a left turn as the pastoral chords are overwhelmed with a swell of prickly static. The fifth track is the glitchiest of the bunch, as several distinct and individually compelling swatches of music are stitched together into complex overlapping patterns. Track six adds a synthetic orchestral grandeur that reminds me a little of... well, Vangelis, really-- there's something epic and dignified about 'strings' that aren't even trying to sound real. Even In Moll's closing piece, a patient exercise in drone and assorted electronic percussion, manages to stay engaging for its sixteen minutes. Guentner's debut album is an impressive work of atmospheric electronica, and In Moll threads another feather into Kompakt's cap.

2002-04-18T01:00:01.000-04:00

2002-04-18T01:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic / Experimental

Kompakt

April 18, 2002

f79537ab-2980-427b-9802-831001ee8d37

Mark Richardson

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

Blending elements of J-pop, rap, and hardcore, the experimental Japanese artist’s latest album presents a convincing balance of nihilism and hope.

Blending elements of J-pop, rap, and hardcore, the experimental Japanese artist’s latest album presents a convincing balance of nihilism and hope.

Haru Nemuri: Shunka Ryougen

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haru-nemuri-shunka-ryougen/

Shunka Ryougen

Kimishima Haruna’s artistic world revolves around springtime, in both its renewing beauty and its violent contrasts. The title of her 2018 studio debut, Haru To Shura, referenced both spring and a demon of war from Japanese folklore; her newest album, Shunka Ryougen, roughly translates to “spring fire lighting the field ablaze”; her stage name, Haru Nemuri, means “spring slumber.” In parallel, Haru’s bright, euphoric J-pop is shot through with incongruous screams of fury, a vibrant juxtaposition of life and death. Self-described as a poetry rapper, she performs with electrifying abandon, breathlessly illustrating the crush of her helplessness and existential anxiety. Across Shunka Ryougen’s sprawling 21-song tracklist, her voluble poetry investigates destruction—whether to the environment, to authorities, or self-inflicted upon herself. Haru’s sound is hemmed with an experimental, noise-rock edge, an eccentricity flavored with Aurora’s superlunary alt-pop, the rich detail of Fugazi’s punk, and the proud “RIOT GRRRL” label in her Twitter bio. In 2018, Haru To Shura infused breakneck, upbeat J-pop with the sound of DIY reinvention. Shunka Ryougen sustains the voice and tempo, but takes on a colder, more mechanical cast. Though it cycles a flurry of musical ideas, the record avoids overshadowing Haru’s presence; instead, it works alongside the searing dynamism of her voice. The cybernetic rhythm and Haru’s glacial Auto-Tune electrify tracks like the erhu-tongued “Souzou Suru” and the eerily bare “Sister With Sisters.” The martial march of “Déconstruction,” a single threaded with references to Fight Club, introduces Shunka Ryougen’s obsession with catalysts as Haru instructs: “Let’s start our paradigm shift/Like the project mayhem.” The recurring motif of déconstruction refers to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of dismantling form and medium to better understand concepts themselves, an idea Haru vibrantly reappropriates into the tangible context of her music. Frenzied, she fires off a litany of invective—spitting “asshole!” at a “pedigreed politician” on “Old Fashioned,” arguing with herself about the efficacy of her own lyricism and punctuating the quarrel with a self-directed “shut the fuck up!” on “Heart of Gold,” and personifying global warming as a flaming angel as she cries “Who the fuck is burning the forest?” on a track of the same name. There’s an inexpressible depth of conviction in Haru’s delivery; her voice is a finely reactive instrument that can switch from a desperate, out-of-breath invocation to a primal scream at the drop of a pin. When she asks, “Why do you want to die? Why do you want to live?” on the title track, her voice deepens into a growl that knifes into her vocal cords. It’s so vivid you can practically feel her gripping you by the collar and demanding an answer. Destruction is not only external: “Never Let You Go,” Shunka Ryougen’s crown jewel, deconstructs the very idea of Haru Nemuri—the moving, self-destructive cry of its chorus confesses that Haru’s “whole body is hoping to disappear.” Ultimately, she offers herself a solution steeped in both obliteration and renewal: “Breathe in, breathe out, and become a song.” Despite all of Haru’s frustration and fury, her poetry finally blossoms into joy. Optimistic punk records aren’t anything new, but Shunka Ryougen is convincing in its balance of nihilism and hope. After more than an hour of Haru’s candid self-doubt and self-confessed misery, the logic of her decision to embrace love for its own sake is sincere and unsaccharine. The bouncy melody and glittering poetry of “Ikiru,” which translates to “live,” sounds like a traditional romantic love song. But instead of singing to a lover, she adopts Nietzsche’s concept of “amor fati” and declares her love for the struggle of being alive—both the good and bad. Radiantly, she ends Shunka Ryougen with a full-hearted, hard-won call: “How beautiful life is!”

2022-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

To3s

April 27, 2022

f798f890-2dab-41f0-acec-2eb3d9437ef4

Zhenzhen Yu

https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/

The Coneheads are nothing if not self-aware. On their first vinyl release—a compilation of two crude 2014 cassettes—the Indiana punk trio are making some of the most extraterrestrial rock music around, fueled by their hatred of big cities, authority, and themselves.

The Coneheads are nothing if not self-aware. On their first vinyl release—a compilation of two crude 2014 cassettes—the Indiana punk trio are making some of the most extraterrestrial rock music around, fueled by their hatred of big cities, authority, and themselves.

The Coneheads: L​.​P​.​1. aka "14 Year Old High School PC​-​Fascist Hype Lords...

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20701-lp1-aka-14-year-old-high-school-pc-fascist-hype-lords/

L​.​P​.​1. aka "14 Year Old High School PC​-​Fascist Hype Lords...

Yeah, that's the full title: 14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords Rip Off Devo for the Sake of Extorting $$$ From Helpless Impressionable Midwestern Internet Peoplepunks L.P. (The alternate title could be When the Pawn Hits the Devo.) The Coneheads are nothing if not self-aware. The Northwest Indiana punk trio actively resist the goofy mechanics of the music industry in 2015, cobbling together bits of late-'70s popular and unpopular culture to create their own hidden galaxy. Their first vinyl release is actually a comp of two 2014 mean, crude, and acutely hilarious tapes: Canadian Cone and Total Conetrol, the latter of which is curiously going for $200 on Discogs now (hopefully just another outsized joke). If those newfound close-ups of the most-distant Pluto had a cartoonish soundtrack, it could be Coneheads—this is some of the most extraterrestrial rock music around. (Referring to your audience as "peoplepunks" seems like calling fans "earthlings.") Coneheads do steal from the art-rock of their Midwestern forebears—a previous band of theirs did a hardcore cover of "Mongoloid"—but they mutate those robot sounds with a raw, rare grasp of punk history and a breakneck sense of pacing. It sometimes sounds like a four-track has been set up inside of a cardboard box with three people playing three different songs, including unlikely nuggets such as "I Used to Be a Cheesepuff", the tale of a guy who "[goes] to school in studs and leather." Just as you think a minute-long track has run its course, a demented riff will jump back in for the final three seconds. Though skilled players, they use their instruments in a way you might if you'd just landed on Earth and never held one before—so while Coneheads may "rip off Devo," per the title, their weirdness seems more spirtually akin to, say, the Shaggs. When he sings, vocalist/bassist Mark Winter actually sounds like a Conehead, his voice flat and nasal, with words spit so fast as to make the listening process a delightfully obnoxious blur. But Winter's words are pissed as hell, brimming with disdain for authority, the "chumps" of the outside world, and himself. On the angry 67-second blast "Violence", he smugly references the "pathetic human race" alongside a thick, rubbery, rocketspeed bassline (a mere 10 seconds is reserved at the end for a guitar solo). "Hack Hack Hack", a song literally about taking an axe to your enemy, appears in two versions—one of which is a creeping minimal synth rendition—because why not? The best tune here must be "Big City Baby", clocking in at 41 seconds, a middle-finger to the bourgeois faux-intellects of major cities: "I got a big city baby, she's just like me/ We both listen to the Smiths, ain't that interesting?" But cities are not restricted to geography in 2015; earlier he snarls a warning at his critics, "You don't even know who the fuck I am/ You and your Internet snooping can burn in hell." (True to form, they make fun of Pitchfork on the album sleeve.) Make no mistake, Coneheads despise big cities. For a band that clearly takes the ethos of "what we do is secret" to heart, the closer "Way Things Am" is an anti-mission statement: "I like the way things am/ I can stay with any luck/ An uninteresting jaded fuck... When it comes to all good things/ I'm the sole authority/ So shove it." The band steam-rolls through a genius, hyper-compressed cover of Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer"; while David Byrne is busy shaking his fist at a cloud because New York has changed, Coneheads are laughing all over his song. If Kurt Cobain could hear Coneheads' recent cover of "In Bloom"—rudimentary and unrecognizable—he might cry tears of joy at their terrible racket. It behooves us to remember that Coneheads—with its premise of clowny aliens stranded on Earth—started as an "SNL" skit in 1977, just as punk was taking shape, and the reference hangs over this analog outsider music like a gravitational pull towards that era. Coneheads, however, are the center of their own tiny local scene alongside Big Zit, CCTV, and Liquids, as documented on their own compilations: Cool Bands, Cool Bands 2, Cool Bands 3. This crew has ties to Chicago hardcore, but Coneheads' alien approach and bizarro time signatures remind me of late Vermont synth-pop freaks Blanche Blanche Blanche more than anything going on in hardcore. Their cult and deliberate enigma are palpable: they included "I Am a Coneheads Fan" bumper stickers with the album, and they share phone numbers on their releases that you can text to inquire about new material, or whatever. (This spring, to learn more, I tapped out a text message to one of the numbers, found inside a Liquids tape, but it felt more like dropping a letter into a well or unleashing a carrier pigeon.) Since the release of these two endearingly peculiar cassettes, Coneheads have been subject to the nebulous and perennial cycle that is "punk hype"—an odd elixir of divisive chatter on blogs, message boards, and word of mouth that can go far in 2015—but not without good reason. It's true, for instance, that Coneheads turned down an opportunity to work with Jack White's Third Man Records. And Coneheads' appeal is not dissimilar to the stranger side of a New York band that recently worked with the label: Parquet Courts. This album has been "released" in the most minimal sense imaginable—it first surfaced earlier this year from small German label Erste Theke Tontraeger, also responsible for a collection last year by Coneheads comrades Lumpy and the Dumpers, and is now, apparently, fleetingly available stateside from the band at shows, but who knows. They do not sound like they want to be found.

2015-07-31T02:00:01.000-04:00

2015-07-31T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Erste Theke Tontraeger

July 31, 2015

f7ba40c6-6e44-473e-b245-6bc708f6cf23

Jenn Pelly

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

The Georgia teenager’s oddball digicore tracks reflect the creative freedom of rap on TikTok. His debut EP opts for a more traditionally hard sound to diminishing returns.

The Georgia teenager’s oddball digicore tracks reflect the creative freedom of rap on TikTok. His debut EP opts for a more traditionally hard sound to diminishing returns.

cheRomani+: 3 EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cheromani-3/

3

A legion of hip-hop vloggers, streamers, influencers, and promo accounts—some bankrolled by record labels—wants you to believe in a New Underground of internet rap. Its commander-in-chief, a white, keffiyeh-wearing man from Portland named Yeat, has over seven million monthly listeners on Spotify. In his wake, an army of RapTok-famous teens trot out their attempts at pluggnb, digicore, rage rap, and everything in between. Platform dynamics threaten to erase musical lineages; kids ditch class for studio sessions in L.A. Are we out of touch, or has the future somehow been decided for us? How to separate the signal from the noise? cheRomani+’s viral single “euphoria,” featuring Specxfic, presents one solution: Cut away all the noise. Drumless loops aren’t just for steely New Yorkers with snow in their beards. When digicore producers SEBii and kimj fit a bouncy bassline (and little else) to cheRomani+ and Specxfic’s breakneck flows, it prompts you to experience the song through their rubbery voices, tuning in to every namedrop and silly threat. Their almost cartoonish velocity atop the sparse instrumental feels like slamming two cans of Monster, or if Do or Die had a hyperpop arc. Fast rap hasn’t sounded so fresh and alive in a while. Like a lot of newly minted TikTok rappers, the most notable thing about cheRomani+ might be just how little there is to know. Early in the pandemic, the high schooler from Georgia quit basketball and casually started toying around on FL Studio. Last summer, he received attention on TikTok for his remix of Yeat’s song “Off the Lot.” He scored a couple more internet hits with “euphoria” and a feathery tune called “agenda,” and…that’s about it. Compared to his big singles, cheRomani+’s debut EP 3 opts for a more traditionally hard sound to diminishing returns. A disciple of rapper-producer Lil Tecca, he’ll occasionally land on an idea that marries voice to music in a unique way, like when he sings urgently over the triumphant brass of “Hugo.” On opener “City” and closer “Nine,” che does a serviceable Yeat impression; his latest collaboration with Specxfic, “007,” is fine but doesn’t touch “euphoria” or their ridiculous TisaKorean-meets-Tay-K moment “School k pt 2.” cheRomani+ isn’t a particularly compelling writer (few rappers in this scene really are; this is a producer-driven environment), so when his beat selection is average, too, there isn’t much left to chew on. What’s interesting about che is that he doesn’t have the baggage of an artist forged in a specific SoundCloud scene. For as much hate as “TikTok rap” gets, it offers a creative freedom that the hyper-specific norms and genre tags of other internet rap communities sometimes suppress. Yvngxchris pivots from sample drill to rage beats, pluggnb artist Weiland draws fresh ears to his weird, kinda bad synth pop, and cheRomani+ can make oddball digicore. 3 presents a small, rather unexciting picture of that freedom; in the grand scheme, it’s probably just noise.

2022-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

May 12, 2022

f7babc52-981a-4be4-84b7-96632fac4e2a

Mano Sundaresan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/

Powered by her commanding voice, the L.A. songwriter’s debut casts questions about family, relationships, aging, death, and the afterlife in buzzing neon hues.

Powered by her commanding voice, the L.A. songwriter’s debut casts questions about family, relationships, aging, death, and the afterlife in buzzing neon hues.

Caroline Kingsbury: Heaven’s Just a Flight

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-kingsbury-heavens-just-a-flight/

Heaven’s Just a Flight

If the dulcet tones of Norma Jean are to be believed, it takes a lot of faith and a little resilience to make it to the pearly gates. “Heaven,” she sang sweetly on her 1968 country-gospel standard, is “just a prayer away.” For Caroline Kingsbury, an L.A.-based musician raised in a religious family in Florida, the great beyond is more attainable. If Norma Jean was spending her Sunday mornings in church, Kingsbury finds spirituality under cover of night, in drum machines and thrumming basslines. Her debut record, Heaven’s Just a Flight, casts questions about family, relationships, aging, death, and the afterlife in the buzzing neon hues of backroom bars and dimly lit dancefloors. On past projects, Kingsbury experimented in the hazier (and perhaps more anonymous) textures of dream pop. For her first full-length, she commits both her look and her sound to the sequin-clad, cocaine-dusted ethos of glam rock. That level of drama is a tall order, but it’s a stronger and more defining background for her rich and robust voice, which flits between a growl and a yelp on a moment’s notice. Her deep, textured croon recalls the power and theatrical range of Heart. “Massive Escape,” a runaway fantasy set to minimal new wave instrumentation, nearly vibrates with the strength of her voice, so commanding that when she sings about causing a plane crash, you’re scared to doubt her. At other times, she recalls the naked vulnerability of Karen O or Kate Bush, conjuring a sense of danger with her vocal slipperiness. When she belts out the final “fall” on the chorus of the booming “Fall in Love,” her voice tics up as if suddenly startled, evoking an actual fear of falling. Heaven’s Just a Flight finds its footing in these winking moments when hair-metal kitsch becomes living, breathing performance. The album’s instrumentation is a collage of stylistic eras united by their outsized personalities, from disco to post-punk revival. While the distorted guitars and twinkling synths never quite transcend their root influences the same way Kingsbury’s vocals do, they provide such a convincing homage to the source material that it would almost feel perverse to stray further. Variation and experimentation takes the form of imitation across genres: “Breaking Apart” maps Kingsbury’s vocals onto the gothic syncopation of Depeche Mode. “Lose,” a mid-album slow burn, stretches her voice into a withered howl, like an uncanny companion piece to the Killers’ “Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll” (Math Bishop, who’s credited on Wonderful Wonderful, also worked on several songs on Heaven’s Just a Flight). On an album that runs nearly an hour over 16 tracks, it’s easy to miss these small differentiations. Kingsbury describes the record as the culmination of three years of songwriting, and despite her best efforts to unify disparate periods of creativity, the album’s writing is uneven and drags in the final third. Her best songs grab you by the rhinestone-studded collar; her weaker ones feel like discarded diary entries, unfolding slower than life itself. Kingsbury covers a lot of ground on Heaven’s Just a Flight—the loss of her brother, coming out to her religious family, falling in love with her girlfriend. But in trying to compress these events into a singular vision, their themes blur and her message loses its meaning. From another angle, though, it’s just the right amount of excess for an album that paints every last call as a biblical experience. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Fortune Tellers

April 20, 2021

f7bc6113-a6c3-4026-8311-94d21c75acc3

Arielle Gordon

https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/

Banks' The Altar has a lot in common with the alt-R&B singer's breakthrough Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position her as edgy or dangerous, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Banks' The Altar has a lot in common with the alt-R&B singer's breakthrough Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position her as edgy or dangerous, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Banks: The Altar

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22489-the-altar/

The Altar

Alt-R&B artists love to evoke turn-of-the-century R&B, albeit a version of it in which everyone was Aaliyah. While Banks, the alt-R&B project of LA singer-songwriter Jillian Banks, seems conceptualized and curated to within an inch of its life, the reality is a couple years of Banks searching for that fit. The list of collaborators on 2013’s London comes off as an attempt to reverse-engineer getting onto BBC's Sound Of list; Goddess did the same for getting onto playlists with the Weeknd. And after some success—including “Beggin for Thread” becoming a minor alternative hit—Altar attempts to do the same. In fact, The Altar has a lot in common with Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position Banks as edgy or dangerous, despite all musical evidence to the contrary. Single “Fuck With Myself” is indicative. The conceit, your basic tale of fuck-the-haters-I’ve-got-self-love-but-ooh-what-kind? (in an interview with Zane Lowe, Banks boasted that it had “so many meanings,” which is weird because the slang has one or two) is so anodyne in 2016 that True Grit kid Hailee Steinfeld's done it with mild bowdlerization. Producer Al Shux (“Drowning,” “Empire State of Mind,” “Wicked Love”) constructs a skeleton of an R&Bass song, the sort of half-there production that’s minimalist in a way that suggests they avoided fleshing out the details. Where Banks might have brought menace to the void, she substitutes vocal gimmicks: stage whispers, clipped runs or, bizarrely, a gulped cadence that suggests she’s either choking through a straw or greeting an approaching cat. You don’t pull out this many vocal tricks unless you’re compensating for something, and in this case it’s probably Banks’ voice. At best, it evokes Martina Topley-Bird; more often, it evokes Martina Topley-Bird with a bad cold, or that bit in Chicago where Roxie likens Amos’ voice to fixing a carburetor. This wouldn't happen so often if Banks wrote to her voice, but like too many alt-R&B artists she tries to fit her voice to other artists’ cadences and winds up showcasing every weakness. The heavy Drake-reminiscent drone drags down “Haunt”; the title to would-be slow jam “Lovesick” scans a bit too literal, and the quavers-intact Vocodering of “Poltergeist” turns the track into 808s and Pneumonia. The production, while consistently solid, isn’t noteworthy enough to compensate, and while Banks’ lyrics are noteworthy, it’s not in the good way. “Judas” spends more effort name-dropping Banks’ past singles than it does on the metaphor; the last pop song, and inescapable comparison, on this subject was a brash, theologically junk mess, but at least it sounded like its artist actually fucked with Judas, or at least considered the thought. “Gemini Feed” relies on tabloid astrology and a bloodless couple’s gripe of a pre-chorus: “you’re passive-aggressive.” Perhaps it’s the remarkably coincidental timing, but “I smell a clown looking goofy dressed up like a native” would kill any track’s momentum. The other thing you'll hear Banks’ music described as is “dark pop.” In 2016 this could also mean just about anything, but mostly marketing; Tove Lo, Dua Lipa, and dozens of aspiring pop stars are launching careers on it. At this point it’s possibly an even more flooded market than R&B, yet it’s where Banks sounds the most natural. “Trainwreck” evokes, to great effect, the particular darkness that was all over pop radio in the early ’10s—blown-out vocals, big menacing synth pads, barely concealed panic. The production goes loud, and so does Banks. (It’s no coincidence that here Banks finally starts to sing.) Hitched to the chorus is a sprinting, stopping verse, Banks racing the beat and pausing to emote. On another album this might evoke rap, but it evokes just as much singer-songwriters like Maria Mena, or unlikely Drake collaborator Chantal Kreviazuk, or, more than anything, “Fast As You Can” by Fiona Apple—one of Banks' stated idols. The track’s a standout, in that it sounds like it’s off an entirely different record. If this were actually the late ’90s, with the industry trends of the time, The Altar would either be R&B via Hot AC—think Jennifer Paige—or an acoustic singer-songwriter project, and there are hints throughout the album that Banks may have had that in mind. “To the Hilt,” save a few Mýa cadences, is a straightforward piano-and-strings ballad. The title telegraphs this a bit much, but “Mother Earth” gets quite close to folk-Americana, wisps of harmonies and all, and Banks' voice serves this material nicely. One wonders what an entire album of this sort of thing would be like. It might be fusty. It would not be particularly on trend. It would not get one tours with the Weeknd. But it might finally let Banks be herself, more than anybody else.

2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Harvest

October 12, 2016

f7bedfd2-783c-48d8-9d57-7ad56a09491b

Katherine St. Asaph

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

Eleven albums in, a band that has become an industry unto itself attempts an artistic rejuvenation that still seems out of reach.

Eleven albums in, a band that has become an industry unto itself attempts an artistic rejuvenation that still seems out of reach.

Pearl Jam: Gigaton

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pearl-jam-gigaton/

Gigaton

Before they had anything—a legion of devoted fans, walls of platinum records, a destination festival—Pearl Jam had a community. In the Seattle grunge scene of the early ’90s, they emerged as part of a larger mosaic, members of a supergroup before their debut even came out. This support from contemporaries is likely what empowered Pearl Jam to find their voice, writing earnest, soaring rock songs inspired by punk but delivered as arena anthems in jam band-style marathon live sets. Now that they are an industry all to themselves, their origin story might seem like a footnote—especially in 2020, when they remain the last band intact from their particular scene. But this sense of uplift still defines their work. Communal goodwill is the saving grace of Gigaton, their eleventh studio album and first in nearly seven years. At 57 minutes, it’s their longest album, as well as the one that took the longest to complete. You feel the weight of both durations throughout. The ballads stretch out slowly, and the uptempo numbers are derailed by meandering build-ups, like stopping for a chat while running in place mid-jog. From the curveball disco-rock of first single “Dance of the Clairvoyants”—a portal into an alternate universe where David Byrne produced the Who to soundtrack an ’80s action film—the band immediately forecasted an attempt to revitalize its sound. In context, it’s more of an outlier: a reminder of their underdog mentality, that they have some fight left in them. From the sounds of it, Pearl Jam pieced Gigaton together from various sessions over several years, with Vedder adding vocals to the choice bits after the fact. It’s hard to imagine this process leading toward a unified statement from any band, let alone one that’s already been having trouble finding inspiration. After records like 2009’s Backspacer and 2013’s Lightning Bolt combatted their dearth of ideas with low-stakes thrashiness—a throwback to the rowdy garage band that they never actually were—Gigaton attempts to reinstate their ambition. Co-produced by the band and Josh Evans, it’s filled with all the markers of cerebral, studio-born rock music: drum loops and programmed synths, swirling keys and fretless bass, wide dynamics and spacey textures. For the first time in a while, the winning moments are the slower cuts: songs like “Retrograde” and “Seven O’Clock” that evolve patiently into their atmosphere, as opposed to pro-forma ragers like “Never Destination” that never quite find their groove. To unify this sprawling material, Vedder offers wordy, zoomed-out lyrics that directly address Trump, the climate crisis, and a growing sense of apocalyptic unease. And if his lyrics occasionally come out jumbled (“They giveth and they taketh/And you fight to keep that what you’ve earned”) or totally miss the mark (a reference to the title character of Sean Penn’s novel), his performance is as keyed-in and comforting as ever. For all the record’s studio experimentation, the moments that cut through are the subtle choices he makes as a vocalist: his anxious speak-sing in “Seven O’Clock,” the way he mimics the wordless refrain of the eerie “Buckle Up,” the seething cry of the chorus in “Quick Escape.” With songs contributed by each band member, Gigaton is an undeniably democratic statement, but Vedder remains their guiding light—the voice that allowed this particular band to outlast an entire generation of imitators. The artistic rejuvenation that Gigaton aims to provide still seems somewhat out of reach. In that sense, it reminds me of U2’s No Line on the Horizon—another late-career attempt at experimentation after a series of back-to-basic statements. Both records indulge an influential band’s artsier side in mostly superficial ways—longer songs, pasted-in ambience, grand attempts at state-of-the-union philosophizing—while backing away from the actual subversion that made them exciting in the first place. Like U2, Pearl Jam have been able to sustain their legacy even without vital new studio work. But unlike U2, Pearl Jam seem content to deliver their messages to the already converted, with no interest in the mainstream attention that once came naturally. Their self-awareness both grounds this music and confines its ambition. For a long time, Pearl Jam had an uncommon strength for asserting their individuality while pleasing the masses, looking to the future while staying true to their own history. On Gigaton, they admit they don’t know what happens next. Their message hits hardest in the closing tracks: the singalong strummer “Retrograde” and the fragile pump organ ballad “River Cross.” Both tracks forecast darker skies with calm, reassuring music. In the final moments of the record, Vedder offers a mantra: “Can’t hold me down.” As the music swells and his voice rises to the occasion, he switches from “me” to “us”—a last attempt to gather the community, to band together before the coming storm.

2020-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Monkeywrench / Republic

March 28, 2020

f7c1fc4c-1873-41f3-8783-7683c0e8c5f3

Sam Sodomsky

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

Two veteran electronic producers balance their club instincts with headier inclinations, fusing breakbeats, dub delay, and squalling electronic frequencies into side-winding psychedelic excursions.

Two veteran electronic producers balance their club instincts with headier inclinations, fusing breakbeats, dub delay, and squalling electronic frequencies into side-winding psychedelic excursions.

Wrecked Lightship: Antiposition

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wrecked-lightship-antiposition/

Antiposition

Wrecked Lightship make music that evokes great civilizations collapsing—crumbling structures and ruined grandeur, marble columns disappearing beneath sea-foam. Its imaginative scope is slightly distant from the music that the duo’s members made their names with. Laurie Osborne, best known as Appleblim, came up as a DJ at the foundational London dubstep nights FWD>> and DMZ and helmed the Skull Disco label alongside Shackleton; over the past decade and a half, he has flitted between house, techno, bass music, and hairsplitting hybrids of them all, typically with at least one eye on the dancefloor. Adam Winchester also has a background in dubstep, under the alias Wedge, though his more recent experimental music—in the duo Dot Product and under his own name—offers a hint of where Wrecked Lightship’s world-building tendencies might come from. Winchester’s industrial soundscaping suggests mainframes on the fritz and nuclear cores in meltdown, dystopian sci-fi fantasies playing out on a galactic scale. Antiposition is the duo’s third album in as many years. Where 2022’s Drowned Aquariums and 2023’s Oceans and Seas often veered into pure abstraction, Antiposition puts the percussion first. The improvisatory drift of the previous records has given way to a newfound focus; the bass and drums sound like they’ve been designed to stand up to the gale-force winds of the duo’s dubwise effects. The record’s intensity is surprising in part because of its context: The label releasing it, Peak Oil, is better known for the wispier, more amorphous sounds of artists like Purelink and Topdown Dialectic. Compared to their grainy fantasias, Antiposition is a tornado trailing debris in its wake. Across the album, the duo maintains a careful balance between club inclinations and more psychedelic effects. In the opener “Hex,” syncopated kicks and massive Reese bass call back to canonical tropes from the hardcore continuum, while flickering bleeps and bursts of white noise fill out the atmosphere. It’s both powerful and enveloping, a full-body blow that feels like an embrace. So is “Bizarre Servants,” whose thrumming drums—faintly reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s classic Bradley’s Robot EP—suggest taiko drummers in a wind tunnel. The pulse is tough and driving, but a gleaming, tape-warped synth melody adds an optimistic note to the mood of grim determination. “Sunken Skies” is the album’s heaviest track, growing from a quick-stepping dub rhythm into crisp breakbeats whose stuttering repetitions call back to the cut-up techniques of jungle’s pioneers. The bass threatens to crater the foundations, yet the high end is a dreamy wash of reverberant harp—an inspired contrast that sets the track apart from its predecessors in the breakbeat canon. Elsewhere, the two musicians mark their distance from club convention in subtler ways, like their preference for tension-building arrangements that withhold the Pavlovian pleasure of a climactic drop. Wrecked Lightship abandon drums entirely on the closing “Sounding Bodies,” a beatless reverie of clanging bells and shape-shifting electronic tones with a meditative and intermittently wistful air. In an Instagram post, Osborne wrote that the track features a light-reactive synthesizer called the Brain designed by a friend of theirs. That friend, named Bobby, is no longer alive; Osborne marveled about the process of transubstantiation—a chain of neurological and electrical signals across space and time—that allowed a late friend’s creation to continue manifesting, even now, in the sounds that stream from the speakers every time the song is played. It’s an observation that goes to the mystical heart of Wrecked Lightship’s ethos, which holds that whole worlds can spring from nothing more than vibrating air.

2024-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

2024-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Peak Oil

March 1, 2024

f7c94a55-a29a-48ee-9e87-b1f5029c3473

Philip Sherburne

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

Another unfabulous collection of classic 70s rock riffs, recorded by today's most irrelevant artists!

Another unfabulous collection of classic 70s rock riffs, recorded by today's most irrelevant artists!

Theodore Unit: 718

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8276-718/

718

For Ghostface and his Theodore Unit, 718-- a collection of outtakes from this year's The Pretty Toney Album-- is all about freedom: The freedom to host as many guest MCs as possible, to experiment with samples that could have seemed too outlandish on Pretty Toney, to be brash and angry and emotionally honest, and to call out "faggot niggas" at every turn. That The Pretty Toney Album has criminally underperformed seems to defeat the commercial mandate for an outtakes collection, but the bevy of surplus material is surprisingly consistent; Ghostface's first entry under the Theodore Unit moniker serves as a nice, if unnecessary, accessory to its criminally unsuccessful counterpart. 718 compiles recent mixtape tracks that didn't make the cut for Pretty Toney and a handful of previously unreleased odds and ends. But the continuity, strength of production, and sharpness of the record's guest lineup suggests a good deal of forethought. A track like "Guerilla Hood", for instance, which would have sat favorably in the Pretty Toney tracklist, was probably reserved with a side project in mind. "Punch In Punch Out" is a fairly straightforward battle-rhyme-cum-testament to black market business operations. Pejoratives like Trife's: "You's a has-been/ Always will, always have been/ That garbage you pumpin'/ You need to save it for the trash bin," roam over a brooding beat underpinned by a single sustained synth note. "88 Freestyle" features some nimble verses but the song is sullied by a particularly garish sample: A wailing, vaguely Middle Eastern guitar bend that feels awkwardly wedged in. Lest we forget this isn't a Ghostface solo effort, "The Drummer" brings a cast to make Ocean's Eleven soil its pants. On previous outings, such generosity has been an invitation to unwelcome distractions, but here the MCs' interplay is arch, transitioning quickly from voice to voice over a breathy, crackling beat. Even Method Man drops in for a droopy verse. Despite this being a decidedly populist affair, the tawdry, blaxploitation production and the tic-addled vehemence of Ghostface's verses are intact. But beyond its reliably scruffy sound, the sampling on 718 is-- with a few catchy, well-placed exceptions-- chintzy. "Mama Can You Hear Me" thrives off the nervous trills of an overwrought orch-pop ballad, while "Smith Brothers" uses a stinging string line and cops Queen in its bawdy chorus: A serpentine verse fit to a familiar cadence before the telltale, "Tell 'em, 'We will, we will rock you...pop you.'" Such witticisms pervade the album but, on the whole, 718 is more introspective than previous Ghostface releases. Whereas in the past Ghostface has been preoccupied with gregarious, almost parodically violent lyrics, 718's "Mama Can You Hear Me" and "Who Are We" show a touching vulnerability. On the former, Solomon Childs levels charged laments ("This the projects/ Summertime ain't comin'") in a huge baritone swollen with echo. Of course, amid this panoply of competent lyricists, Ghostface still shines. But his closest competitor remains Trife, whose verses, delivered in a thick, cocky cadence that sounds naturally double tracked, are among 718's finest. It's hard to imagine why Trife doesn't yet have a solo album to his credit, but his spots on Supreme Clientele, Pretty Toney, and now 718 have given him a fantastic endorsement. Though undoubtedly strong, 718 is a pale stand-in for a proper Ghostface full-length. That's because it's a different record, more varied, more scattershot. Even so, Ghostface chose the right men to surround himself with. Commercially feasible or not, 718 features enough stylish production and idiosyncratic rapping to service Ghostface's reputation while providing the Theodore Unit stable with a cornerstone for its own.

2004-12-01T01:00:03.000-05:00

2004-12-01T01:00:03.000-05:00

Metal / Rap

Sure Shot

December 1, 2004

f7d18766-5b15-40ed-a324-4fdd578c2abf

Pitchfork

Following a standout contribution to Berlin label PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation, the Stockholm producer delivers an impressive debut album that’s both gloomy and delightful.

Following a standout contribution to Berlin label PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation, the Stockholm producer delivers an impressive debut album that’s both gloomy and delightful.

Oli XL: Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oli-xl-rogue-intruder-soul-enhancer/

Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer

Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer is an almost uncomfortably gorgeous piece of work. “Clumsy,” the second single from the Stockholm producer Oli XL’s striking debut LP, is a good distillation of the record’s most memorable qualities. Working with a sound palette that recalls humorless glitch recordings, it offers a demented version of bliss that a listener could live with for a very long time. The melancholy yet weirdly fun track is built around a pair of freeze-dried chords and features a pitched-up rendition of the iconic chorus from Beck’s 1993 single “Loser.” Where the original hook sounds like Sappho on whippets, Oli XL makes the words mean something else. Now they’re not just about a guy in a disorienting historical moment, but about everything, somehow. “Soy un perdedor. I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Next to Oli XL’s angelic sound design, this comically profane request starts to feel sacred. Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer recalls aughts electronica, jungle, and Basement Jaxx, but Oli XL’s approach is thrillingly his own. It follows the producer’s standout contributions to PAN and Posh Isolation compilations, arriving on his own Bloom imprint, a subsidiary of Stockholm's YEAR0001. The record is both gloomy and joyful, and its pop-adjacent tracks are produced with severe attention to detail. “Liquid Love” sounds like a cosmic turntablism exercise, and you get the sense that it might help astronauts in a lonely space station unwind after a long day of arguing with the computer. The heavy drum patterns on “Orchid Itch” make it one of the more DJ-friendly tunes on the album, while the EQ and compression settings are warped to create a sense of disorienting atmospheric pressure. The specter of dub hangs heavy over the LP as a whole: Sonic space is stretched out, pulverized, and uncannily flattened. Even in its most depressive moments, the album is playful. The album would (probably?) sound fine as background music in an H&M, and it would sound great in a playlist alongside heady compositions by Iannis Xenakis and Kara-Lis Coverdale. Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer is heavy on breakbeats, and while many club producers have explored that rhythmic world in the last few years, Oli XL is in his own orbit. “I think about music in a pretty ‘theoretical’ way, but it’s my own completely made up rules I try to follow, often with silly analogies,” he said in a recent interview. “Like judging the rhythmic vibe—it’s some dude walking a wire between two skyscrapers… No one wants to see someone just walk flawlessly back and forth, dude needs to look like he just might fall!” The producer suggests that we might think about his music as sleight of hand: a kind of cunning performance. While there isn’t any linear narrative tying Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer together, it tells a compelling story on its own terms. There are recurring themes of failure and self-doubt in track titles such as “Hesitation,” “Imposter,” and “Clumsy,” while “dnL” features a funny robotic voice doing some abstract chastising: “Boring… lame!” The album’s less-than-optimistic subject matter has a certain tragicomic effect alongside its borderline effervescent sound. A number of songs feature lyrics, but they’re often hard to parse, which itself feels like a form of self-obfuscation. The final track, called “Sniper Baby”—a very surreal and funny title—does feature some legible verses over its introspective beat. “I don’t go outside/I’m losing my friends/How you gonna fill the void and make it end.” After about a minute his voice coos a little, then trails off as the take comes to a close, breaking the recording’s fourth wall. Just before the song ends, there’s a sound that could either be a muffled sob or a microphone being moved—it’s genuinely hard to tell.

2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Bloom

July 22, 2019

f7d75db7-6859-433b-9f80-d4b1f1e9262c

Alexander Iadarola

https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-iadarola/

On their Relapse debut, the infernal Full of Hell crack apart metal genres like oracle bones.

On their Relapse debut, the infernal Full of Hell crack apart metal genres like oracle bones.

Full of Hell: Weeping Choir

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/full-of-hell-weeping-choir/

Weeping Choir

Full of Hell can be hard to parse, even for those well-versed in grindcore or for connoisseurs of harsh noise. The East Coast outfit—with its members split between Maryland and Pennsylvania—have made their name by cracking apart genre conventions like oracle bones. Grindcore, hardcore, and death metal meet within their music to produce something feral and unknowable, doubly so when they team up with other like-minded oddballs like The Body or Merzbow. There’s just something about them, a reason that they’ve been met with such acclaim and fervent fandom. The nihilistic vibe helps—when Samuel DiGristine gurgles, “All goes onward and outward/All collapses” on “Silmaril,” it’s hard not to shudder. Recorded by the legendary Kurt Ballou at God City, the band’s third album (and Relapse Records debut) is intended as a companion piece to the band’s innovative 2017 LP, Trumpeting Ecstasy, but even a passing listen shows that the band’s interests have shifted a bit. The band’s affinity for the most bestial side of grind is on full display, and on Weeping Choir, only death is real. “Burning Myrrh” blasts the record wide open with two minutes of pummeling grind, dual vocalists Dylan Walker and Samuel DiGristine frantically trading off registers like they’re pulling a double shift in hell’s biggest department store. “Haunted Arches” abruptly ends with a few seconds of warped, ghostly audio reminiscent of The Caretaker’s bastardized 1930s parlor recordings, before “Thundering Hammers”—an apt title if there ever was one—comes crashing down, its destructive grooves redolent of classic Morbid Angel. They veer between the swampy, old-school stomp of death metal and cerebral, choppy swaths of experimental brutality, keeping the tone and pace unpredictable. “Downward” veers away from the bludgeoning pace of the album’s first half into more complex territory, while “Silmaril” is distinguished by its inhuman howls and gleefully ignorant goregrind stomp. The track that separates the two, “Armory of Obsidian Glass,” is an album highlight—a measured dollop of thoroughly haunted death/doom that stretches to nearly seven minutes, periodically collapsing into puddles of sometimes-wretched, often-lovely ambient noise and featuring guest vocals from Lingua Ignota’s Kristin Hayter. The profane marriage of old and new, big ugly riffs and shrieking noise, beauty and brutality seems like the clearest marker indicating where Full of Hell may intend to head next.

2019-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Metal

Relapse

June 8, 2019

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Kim Kelly

https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/

The third LP from Altar of Plagues is a dense, demanding record where black metal slams against industrial throb, and noise sheets work alongside diaphanous electronics. It suggests the heyday of Touch and Go, Nine Inch Nails in their prime, or Swans at their vitrolic apex.

The third LP from Altar of Plagues is a dense, demanding record where black metal slams against industrial throb, and noise sheets work alongside diaphanous electronics. It suggests the heyday of Touch and Go, Nine Inch Nails in their prime, or Swans at their vitrolic apex.

Altar of Plagues: Teethed Glory and Injury

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17854-altar-of-plagues-teethed-glory-and-injury/

Teethed Glory and Injury

Two years ago, Altar of Plagues frontman James Kelly talked about his band’s enormous black metal landscapes as though his Irish trio played free jazz: The group, he said, would lay dormant for extended periods and then work obsessively in an isolated, caffeine-fueled state for two-week bursts, using that sporadic schedule to create music that capitalized more on feeling than technicality. “With us, it’s almost let it write itself. That allows us to engage with it more, too, because it’s so repetitive,” Kelly said, explaining the oblong and unordinary structures of the four massive songs on Mammal, the band’s second LP. “We just let it grow.” Kelly also called Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew the most inspirational music he’d ever heard, compared Arvo Pärt to Emperor, mentioned his excellent muted dance productions under the name Wife, and called jazz “fire from the soul.” Kelly’s references and enthusiasms did not adhere at all to any metal-dude stereotypes, and to an extent, that’s long been the fount of intrigue at the center of Altar of Plague’s music. Their post-metal, if one must call it that, took unexpected turns, with moments of ruthless industrial slink or minimal improvisations that turned suddenly to mournful throat signing embedded within more standard forms of aggression. They could roar, too, working themselves into sustained roils that gave any accusations of hipster or dilettante metal a direct and devastating gut punch. Teethed Glory and Injury, the third LP from Altar of Plagues, is again intended to do exactly that but in a much different way than before. “I just found that the type of black metal we were being associated with was not exciting to me anymore,” Kelly told Terrorizer in an in-studio interview earlier this year. “What a few years ago was a very exciting and promising template for a genre … has also just been watered down.” Both Mammal and 2009’s White Tomb comprised just four tracks each, with the shortest pushing past the eight-minute mark. But Altar of Plagues pushes the action back toward the center of the song on Teethed Glory, a nine-piece set that favors a more immediate four-to-five minute range. This is a dense and demanding record, where fragments of black metal slam into shards of industrial throb, where sheets of noise work alongside diaphanous electronics. Moments suggest the heyday of Touch and Go Records and, alternately, Nine Inch Nails in Trent Reznor’s commanding prime or Swans at their vitriolic apex. Several electronic impasses are as dense as those of Altar of Plague cohorts the Haxan Cloak, while others could pass as tinted Boards of Canada fragments. If that matrix of touchstones sounds intriguing, it often is; indeed, with Teethed Glory and Injury, Kelly’s reputation as an avid and eclectic listener feels fully represented by the music his band makes. However, the other alluring aspect of Altar of Plague’s music-- the jazz-like ease with which it was made and, consequently, unfolded-- has almost altogether disappeared. Every moment of Teethed Glory feels like a deliberate plot point, built to fly squarely in the face of any expectations for this brand of aggrandized heaviness. The omission of that free-and-easy mentality isn’t a problem because of the songs’ relative brevity; rather, the pieces within Teethed Glory often feel forced together, coerced into collisions that don’t meld the components so much as stack them side by side. Altar of Plagues overthinks and overstuffs here, creating a gauntlet that defaces its own delight. “Burnt Year”, for instance, opens with an almost phosphorescent surge of distorted guitar and bass thrum, funneling into a belligerent, howl-along march that suggests the work of Ministry. By song’s end, Altar of Plagues has ripped through an atavistic black metal sprint, dipped into dreamy moments of rest and ultimately arrived at an instrumental surge that suggests the rocky peaks of Pelican. On “A Body Shrouded”, Altar of Plagues' seesaw between post-punk simmer and doom-like pounce adulterates both aspects. Individually, they’re interesting, but taken together, they simply feel claustrophobic. It’s a problem that hounds most of Teethed Glory, a string of compelling parts that does not compel as a whole The album’s most successful songs are also its most fully synthesized: “Twelve was Ruin”, for instance, pairs Kelly’s blossoming electronic touch to Altar of Plagues' previous sense of sprawl and current sense of attack. It builds through icy keyboards and scythe-shaped guitars, culminating in a coda that’s urgent and intricate, two qualities that often combat one another throughout Teethed Glory. And the record’s first single, “God Alone”, is written so well that its most brutal stretches dovetail perfectly with its more delicate moments. It all cascades into a chorus that sounds as soft as Alcest but as savage as Immortal. Though Teethed Glory and Injury doesn’t deliver the systemic and singular rupture Kelly and his band might have intended, it should not diminish the excitement for Altar of Plagues’ revolutionary compulsion. If anything, the trio have proven here that they’re driven only by the need to subvert and shock, to weld rather traditional ideas into strange new hybrids. The possibilities that Teethed Glory and Injury present are more interesting than the album itself--and, really, more interesting than the possibilities presented by any Altar of Plagues music to date. Maybe next time, they’ll write themselves into reality.

2013-05-06T02:00:03.000-04:00

2013-05-06T02:00:03.000-04:00

Metal / Rock

Profound Lore

May 6, 2013

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Grayson Haver Currin

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

The techno artist discovers a softer, warmer side in an album named for his childhood home.

The techno artist discovers a softer, warmer side in an album named for his childhood home.

Shed: Oderbruch

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shed-oderbruch/

Oderbruch

Outside of Germany, most people likely haven’t heard of the Oderbruch. Situated along the Polish border, this former marshland was first drained during the 18th century by Prussian king Frederick the Great. A century later, the region played host to months of intense fighting at the end of World War II, including one of the Nazi regime’s final stands at the Battle of the Seelow Heights, the war’s biggest conflict on German soil. That same soil is where René Pawlowitz, best known as Shed, was born and raised. His family has been based in the Oderbruch for generations, and Pawlowitz himself continues to split his time between Berlin and this largely rural area in which he grew up. Clearly, he feels a connection with the region, so much so that he’s dedicated his latest full-length to it. Oderbruch is the fifth Shed album, and easily his most colorful. While Pawlowitz’s music has always been heavily rooted in the past—particularly the ’90s house, techno, and rave that soundtracked his teen years—he’s expanded his repertoire here, taking inspiration from nature while venturing into bucolic ambient and dewy-eyed synth swells. It’s an unexpected move from a producer best known for driving techno and cracking breakbeats—not to mention one who’s also always seemed like a relatively serious (if slightly grumpy) figure—but on Oderbruch, Pawowitz sounds downright refreshed. With its fuzzy field recordings and joyous, marimba-like melody—a sound one usually wouldn’t expect to hear in a Shed track—the sprawling “Nacht, Fluss, Grille, Auto, Frosch, Eule, Mücke” (translation: “Night, River, Cricket, Car, Frog, Owl, Mosquito”) feels like a lazy walk alongside a babbling brook. Another beatless cut, the pensive “Der Wolf Kehrt Zurück” (“The Wolf Returns”), is a bit darker, but there’s genuine emotion living inside the song’s creeping synths and lingering patches of static. Even when percussion is brought into the mix, Oderbruch still feels like something new for Pawlowitz. “Das Bruch” pairs a stuttering hip-hop beat with dreamy melodic pads, recalling the blissfully blunted sounds of beat scene stalwarts like Teebs and Nosaj Thing. With its plush—and slightly weepy—strings stretching across its hyperactive frame, “Trauernde Weiden" might be the album’s most epic moment. In fairness,Pawlowitz’s work as Shed has always varied, and over the past decade-plus, he’s employed upwards of 20 different aliases while exploring different strains of electronic music. However, in the past few years his music has sometimes felt less innovative, mostly because his once-signature style has been so widely imitated. A decade ago, when techno producers everywhere were scrambling to recreate the stereotypical Berghain aesthetic of artists like Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann, Pawlowitz was something of an outlier. These days, however, electronic music is rife with clever nods to the ’90s, not to mention the slamming, UK hardcore-style breabeats that have populated much of Pawlowitz's work. Perhaps that’s why his last album, 2017’s The Final Experiment, was greeted somewhat unenthusiastically; for many, it was just another Shed record amongst a vast sea of soundalikes. Oderbruch is not just another Shed record. The LP displays a warmer, softer side of Pawlowitz, and while the album is not without its bangers—opener “B1 (Anfang und Ende)” is a dynamic piece of chirping bleep techno, and “Seelower Höhen” is built atop a kick with all the subtlety of a battering ram—even those tracks rely upon lush pads and vivid melodies. “Sterbende Alleen” (“Dying Avenues”) ramps up the melodrama even further while bathing its jungle rhythm in a thick glaze of opulent synths. Although Pawlowitz isn’t known for tugging on heartstrings, he sounds comfortable during Oderbruch’s more cinematic moments. Pawlowitz called his first album Shedding the Past. All these years later, the title still feels a bit ironic, especially coming from an artist whose work, even then, was so thoroughly tied up in his influences. Yet Pawlowitz’s music has never truly been a mere nostalgia exercise. In his mind, history—particularly his own—is just fodder to create something new. It’s undeniably a difficult tightrope to walk, and Pawlowitz had arguably begun to wobble as of late, but Oderbruch seems to indicate that he’s confidently regained his balance. Apparently, all it took was a trip home.

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

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

Electronic

Ostgut Ton

December 12, 2019

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Shawn Reynaldo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/

Former Vivian Girls and the Babies member Cassie Ramone has marked her transition to Burger Records by taking on the modern Christmas classics. Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to—the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core.

Former Vivian Girls and the Babies member Cassie Ramone has marked her transition to Burger Records by taking on the modern Christmas classics. Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to—the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core.

Cassie Ramone: Christmas in Reno

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21307-christmas-in-reno/

Christmas in Reno

"Alternative" (in the loosest sense of the word) Christmas covers are usually brimming with positive holiday cheer, even if they have a slight humorous bent à la Yo La Tengo's "Toymageddon" or Ben Folds' "Bizarre Christmas Incident". Cassie Ramone's collection of covers, however, forgoes the usual Christmassy spectacle; the songs on here are dark and harrowing in their interpretation. As gusts of wind introduce both the record and Ramone's drawling take on "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)", she immediately projects loneliness and isolation. As she sings "The snow's comin' down/ I'm watchin' it fall," Ramone counteracts Darlene Love's powerful hopefulness in the original song with sheer hopelessness. While she had some assistance from Ariel Pink on bass and Jay Heiselmann in mastering on her first solo effort, The Time Has Come, this time Ramone, formerly of Vivian Girls and the Babies, is truly on her own*. Christmas in Reno* was recorded and mixed mostly by Ramone herself, rendering these covers with a vulnerable and intimate touch. Nothing is tight and structured per se, but everything is meticulously executed in order to reach its intended effect: portraying a despondence and loss of interest in life. Reverb guides Ramone's disturbed voice on her version of Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime", letting her pain linger. The track fades out with a wobbly wah-wah, leading into a haunting and fuzzy rendition of "Blue Christmas". "I'll Be Home for Christmas" is tragically slurred and toward the end Ramone's recital of Bing Crosby's popular lyrics becomes indecipherable. "Run Run Rudolph" is probably the most upbeat thing here—it sounds like a rough DIY track, which Ramone accentuates with guileless yelping. But even "Sleigh Ride", possibly the chirpiest and most festive Christmas ditty of all time, feels haunted. Ramone zooms in on the "you" in the line "It's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you," letting it linger with ache; she wants whoever "you" is to know how much they hurt her. Her memories of Christmases together with a former lover are too painful, but she tortures herself over and over, ending the song with a repeating "you." Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to—the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core. However, that's exactly Ramone's intention—to find the melancholy in a "joyful time of year." Bad things can happen to you no matter the time of year. She affirms this using Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song", halfheartedly ending the record with a bleak "Merry Christmas to you."

2015-12-07T01:00:02.000-05:00

2015-12-07T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

Burger

December 7, 2015

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Sarah Sahim

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sarah-sahim/

On her Dave Cobb-produced latest, country singer/songwriter Lori McKenna shows her remarkable facility for conveying the inner lives of women trapped in soured relationships.

On her Dave Cobb-produced latest, country singer/songwriter Lori McKenna shows her remarkable facility for conveying the inner lives of women trapped in soured relationships.

Lori McKenna: The Bird & the Rifle

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22181-the-bird-the-rifle/

The Bird & the Rifle

Lori McKenna has released ten albums in nearly twenty years, amassing a formidable catalog that marries forlorn country-folk melodies with vivid-story song lyrics about desperate women and dying towns. But her solo work has been lately overshadowed by the hits she has either written or co-written for other artists, including Faith Hill, Alison Krauss, and Mandy Moore. Last year she stirred up controversy when Little Big Town recorded a composition she co-wrote with Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose. Radio programmers and some listeners objected to “Girl Crush” and its intimations of gay desire, specifically to the physicality of her lyrics (“I want to taste her lips, because they taste like you”). Despite the hubbub, it won a Grammy for Country Song of the Year. This past spring Tim McGraw took McKenna’s “Humble & Kind” to the top of the country singles chart—the first time in four years that a song with only one writer reached that spot. The songs on her latest album don’t veer too far from anything she has done before, but The Bird & the Rifle may do for McKenna, career-wise, what Traveller did for veteran songwriter Chris Stapleton last year. McKenna has a remarkable facility for conveying the inner lives of women trapped in soured relationships; that may not be an easy sell for the conservative playlists of country radio, but it makes for one of the most accomplished and devastating singer-songwriter albums of the year. McKenna even worked with producer Dave Cobb, who helmed Traveller. As he’s done with so many artists from Jason Isbell to Sturgill Simpson to literally anybody on his recent Southern Family compilation, he gives the music a lived-in quality, emphasizing an amiable acoustic strum, a relaxed backing band, and the ragged texture of McKenna’s voice. The drama in her songs has the easy feel of the everyday; nothing much happens beyond her characters pondering where things might have gone wrong. “Wreck You” opens with a disarming couplet: “I get dressed in the dark each day/You used to think that was so sweet.” The language is simple and direct, but that phrase “used to” hangs in the air, suggesting several years of quiet sacrifices and well-worn routines that have frayed the edges of this relationship. The narrator dreams of disentangling herself from this late sleeper, and the Mellotron strings on the coda—a Cobb signature—soundtrack a daydream that may never come true. Even with its references to teenagers blasting Nirvana while racing down suburban backroads, “We Were Cool” isn’t about generational nostalgia but something more personal, and the last verse throws a twist into the story, with McKenna going full Springsteen: “Duran Duran on the radio, those wild boys would never know we had a baby on the way the year our friends started school.” It’s an understated reveal, but something about the melody makes the sentiment sound bittersweet instead of just plain bitter. McKenna knows that the power of a barbed lyric or a rich character relies on a bold melody and a patient vocal, and more than anything else her vocals put these songs across and makes these stories relatable. On “Always Want You,” the break in her voice implies intense yearning even as the lyrics hedge their bets. The most important words in the chorus are the first two: “I think I’ll always want you.” McKenna doesn’t cover “Girl Crush,” but she does include her own version of “Humble & Kind.” It sounds like it ought to be a Hallmark card of a song, with a parent passing life lessons along to her children, but what could easily have been platitudes turn out to be bits of hard-won wisdom. “Know the difference between sleeping with someone and sleeping with someone you love,” McKenna cautions, “‘I love you’ ain’t no pick-up lines.” When she gets around to that chorus, to that loving reminder to rise above your basest fears and to “always stay humble and kind,” it’s a startlingly powerful moment, especially at a time when such virtues of humility and compassion seem to be in such tragically short supply.

2016-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

CN Records

July 28, 2016

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Stephen M. Deusner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/

Animated by a sense of endless potential and patchwork charm, a new box set collects the influential British songwriter’s work during a transitional period.

Animated by a sense of endless potential and patchwork charm, a new box set collects the influential British songwriter’s work during a transitional period.

Bridget St. John: From There / To Here: UK/US Recordings 1974-1982

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bridget-st-john-from-there-to-here-uk-us-recordings-1974-1982/

From There / To Here: UK / US Recordings 1974-1982

Sparrowpit is the fanciful name of a small village in Derbyshire, a small cluster of old buildings located at a bend in the road almost halfway between Sheffield and Manchester. In 1973, the folk singer Bridget St. John settled there and wrote songs for what would become her fourth album, Jumblequeen, the centerpiece of a new box set, From There / To Here: UK / US Recordings 1974-1982. Judging by those songs—which chronicle divorce, grief, confusion, loneliness, and a very gradual recovery of self—she lived there during a period of extreme upheaval. “Her gentle man has left her after just four years of life, it became impossible to call her ‘wife,’” she sings on the song she named for that place. “Now she has no place she can call her home, has to start all over this time on her own.” “Sparrowpit” is a torrent of jigsaw syllables delivered against a runaway melody and a folk-funk arrangement. The music suggests a life moving too fast, and St. John sounds like she’d love just a moment of calm: “If you’d like to help her better, got to take her under your wing.” She might as well be singing that directly to the good people of Sparrowpit, asking for all the peace and quiet such a quaint village promises. Jumblequeen is an album about emotional wounds, about feelings too extreme to corral or even identify. So why does St. John sound like she’s having so much fun singing these songs? “Sparrowpit” is almost jubilant, like a game she’s playing with the listener, especially when she dives into her lower register. Even on the saddest songs, though, she savors certain details, certain turns of phrase. She dispenses wisdom casually, especially on the devastating “I Don’t Know If I Can Take It.” Even at such emotional extremes, these songs make space for hope and possibility, as though St. John knows she’ll leave Sparrowpit stronger and more clear-headed than ever. “I want to be where someone loves me best of all,” she declares on “Want to Be With You,” and she makes it sound like the most perfectly natural desire of all, and a perfectly achievable one, too. Jumblequeen is, as its title implies, a piece-by-piece self-portrait by an artist who’s not quite sure how the final puzzle picture will look—but she relishes the process just the same. Along with the dusky timbre of her voice and the bounding eccentricity of her phrasing, this is a crucial part of St. John’s appeal as a singer and songwriter: It’s not that she makes sad sentiments sound happy, but that she finds a kernel of creative joy in confronting such hardships. She seems to love turning pain into something useful, or beautiful, or fun. In other words, she doesn’t write simply to express herself. She makes music to move through the world. From There / To Here, which collects Jumblequeen along with several discs of rare and unreleased tracks, traces St. John’s movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recounting her story of moving halfway around the globe to find a community of like-minded souls, trying but failing to keep record labels interested, working with various producers and collaborators, and gradually settling into a more grounded life as a mother. St. John was supposed to be a star. In 1968 John Peel started playing her music on BBC radio, in particular her single “To B Without a Hitch,” and he even started a new label—Dandelion Records—just to put her songs out into the world. Her ’69 debut, Ask Me No Questions, featured just her voice and her crisp guitar picking, and her second album, 1971’s Songs for the Gentle Man, added softly psychedelic flourishes of strings, horns, and flute. Like John Martyn and Kevin Ayers, St. John pushed against the strictures of British folk-rock, incorporating American country and R&B elements into her music, which made the press take notice even when the public did not. Dandelion had rocky promotion and rockier distribution, and the label folded mere months after releasing St. John’s third album, 1972’s Thank You For…, essentially marooning her and her potential hit single, “Nice.” Those albums were compiled on the excellent, if dully titled, 2015 comp Dandelion Albums and BBC Collection, which serves as preamble to From There / To Here. If Sparrowpit is the “There” in that title, then the “Here” is New York City. After Jumblequeen performed no better than her previous albums, St. John was dropped by yet another label and moved across the Atlantic. She found a musical home in Greenwich Village, then more than a decade past its folk-revival heyday but still a bustling neighborhood for musicians, and she booked sessions with new collaborators and even recorded an album’s worth of material with Stuff, a popular crew of session players. It would take 20 years before those songs got a proper release on the 1995 comp Take the 5ifth, which is the second disc in this set. It shows an artist casting in all directions for inspiration, as though a new country presents a new set of possibilities. “Moody,” her first demo recorded in America, opens with a springy bossa nova riff, then blossoms into a lush arrangement with a chorus of saxophones and an electric guitar solo. But St. John wrings as much sound from the two syllables in that title, which only makes the key change at the end sound all the more ecstatic. Occasionally Take the 5ifth and the unreleased demos on the set’s third disc sound a little too slick and professional, which distracts from her vocals and robs the music of its intimacy. The Stuff recordings in particular are moored in the marina of yacht rock, a curious development for St. John, but it brings out something in her voice and pushes her in new directions. She adopts an accusatory tone on “Chamille,” her voice like barbed wire in such a silky arrangement, and by rounding out her vowels and drawing out her consonants, she tries to stop time on “Song for John,” a eulogy for the Beatle, written and recorded in the wake of his death in 1980. What could easily have been a maudlin ballad quoting “Working Class Hero” and “All You Need Is Love” instead becomes a weirdly affecting eulogy not for the man but for what so many saw in him, all the possibilities he perhaps reluctantly represented. “This is more than a light put out,” she insists. “This was more than fire dying.” That sense of endless potential is what makes this music so lively and rambunctious nearly half a century later, and it’s perhaps why a new generation of folk artists—including Ryley Walker, William Tyler, and Steve Gunn—has found inspiration in her work. She thrives on all these different sounds and styles: an artist in love with all the possibilities of music, the infinite ways she might sing a single syllable and all the subtle gradations of emotion a melody might convey. That makes From There / To Here a patchwork set, but St. John has always been the queen of jumble.

2022-08-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-08-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Cherry Red

August 26, 2022

f80d4c19-629f-4f79-8ab6-96cd91633b3b

Stephen M. Deusner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/

Loosely keyed to a story of Hollywood hedonism in the ’70s, the second album from William Basinski’s dance-pop project taps into the teeth-grinding edginess that follows a euphoric high.

Loosely keyed to a story of Hollywood hedonism in the ’70s, the second album from William Basinski’s dance-pop project taps into the teeth-grinding edginess that follows a euphoric high.

Sparkle Division: Foxy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sparkle-division-foxy/

Foxy

William Basinski shares a few traits with the late director William Friedkin. The two artists—who both have answered to the nickname “Billy”—have created prolific bodies of work while moving gracefully between disparate genres. Like Friedkin, Basinski has become bolder while growing older, letting his hair down on playful releases that contrast with the somber drones he is known for. In 2020, right around the time that he moved from NYC to the palm-lined streets of Los Angeles, the revered ambient composer upset listeners’ expectations with a new dance-pop project, Sparkle Division. Collaborating with electronic artist Preston Wendel—who records solo as Shania Taint—Basinski pulled out his saxophone and his sense of humor on To Feel Embraced, an album of fizzy filter-disco concoctions. Three years later, the group—now augmented by new member Gary Thomas Wright—returns with Foxy, ushering in the teeth-grinding edginess that inevitably follows a euphoric high. The album’s deconstructed disco maintains many of the elements of Sparkle Division’s debut—schmaltzy exotica strings, moody piano chords, noir-jazz standup bass—but a specter of evil now lurks in the shadows. On To Feel Embraced, choppy samples and looping vocal snippets made the duo’s soft-focus songs sound more like Eccojams than Jam City, but uch of their harder-edged sophomore effort is propelled by hectic breakbeats, while Basinski’s sax blurts continually, providing the only constant in a panoply of genre explorations. Beatless fantasia “The Punch!” offers the closest link to his drone works, sinking into a morass of bell-like tones that reverberate across nearly nine minutes. As the carefree hedonism of the 1960s’ free-love bubble was burst by the Manson Family murders at decade’s end, parties in the Hollywood Hills took on a nightmarish quality. Foxy is guided by a loose narrative set in that historical moment that gives the eight songs their titles and structure. A note on the album’s Bandcamp page spells out the album’s characters and trajectory: “gorgeous young interns,” a drug dealer named Foxy, drinks spiked with LSD25. “Have Some Punch” and its reprise “We Were There” bookend the album’s path from rising tension to bad acid trip, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had along the way. The stomping drums and late-’80s production touches of Foxy’s title track initially bring the attitude of “What Have You Done for Me Lately” until silky synths glide into the chillout room. After the album’s vaporous centerpiece, “The Punch!,” drum’n’bass rhythms teased out in previous tracks are shoved to the front of “Oh Yeah!” If it wasn’t for Max Kaplan’s tenor sax, this airy banger could be mistaken for the soundtrack of an N64 snowboarding game. By the time they reach the liquid beats of “Slip and Slide,” the two musicians are riding the faders in a way that suggests a Boiler Room Session loosened up by a tray of bellinis; the chipper “We Were There” wraps it all up in a deranged, dissonant bow. Like the taut three-act structure of a Friedkin film with an ambiguous ending, Foxy stays compelling until the finish. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story omitted the name of Sparkle Division’s third member, Gary Thomas Wright.

2023-10-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-10-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Temporary Residence Ltd.

October 26, 2023

f80e0bd8-4895-4ceb-9f29-1f2c63ce38d7

Jesse Locke

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/

A quick, tangentially related diss from our sponsors: In what twisted mockery of a universe does a label like V2 ...

A quick, tangentially related diss from our sponsors: In what twisted mockery of a universe does a label like V2 ...

12 Rods: Lost Time

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8202-lost-time/

Lost Time

A quick, tangentially related diss from our sponsors: In what twisted mockery of a universe does a label like V2 give Moby the green light to crap out opportunistic schlock like 18, while simultaneously cutting loose a band as talented and unique as 12 Rods? I mean, okay, the Rods' last product for V2, the ass-Rundgren'd Separation Anxieties, was a complete disaster from any angle, failing to satisfy the band's devoted fanbase and completely tanking on a commercial level. But isn't there something to be said for sticking behind bands with artistic merit, bands with the potential for greatness? Sad, but true: In the end, the age-old struggle of quantity versus quality (or lack thereof) is the simplest explanation for this seeming judgmental error, and 12 Rods had to take the fall. Fortunately, the karmic scales are being righted even now. Though this band no longer has the resources and backing necessary to move the kind of volume an operation like V2 could provide, Lost Time is rich in quality, and if self-releasing the record is what it takes to get the boys back on track, so be it. Bear in mind now that unlike some people, I wouldn't have you believe that Gay? was the sound of God's orgasm, nor did I find Separation Anxieties quite as terrible as it's sometimes made out to be. It seems to me that, on their previous outings, 12 Rods have served as a balancing act of sorts, combining a bewildering array of desultory styles and influences, sometimes successful and sometimes not. Their full-length debut, Split Personalities, nailed the ratio of spacy, synth-driven lounge jazz to sharp-toothed arena-pop, and when it was on, it was both incredibly original and stunningly catchy. Lost Time is that record's proper follow-up. Here, 12 Rods juggle slow grooves, killer hooks, and stop/start changes with the same practiced ease that endeared them to so many in the first place. The manic, metallic sheen of Anxieties has been subdued and replaced with more of the organic production that marked Gay?, albeit of much higher fidelity. But most importantly, the band has rebounded from the uneasiness of Separation Anxieties to actually sound comfortable with their material again. The tempo and mood of Lost Time change with virtually every song. The glitchy, slow-burning harmonies of "Fake Magic 8-Ball" dissolve seamlessly into a tower of guitar and complex rhythmic shifts to open "Twenty-Four Hours Ago"; trilling keyboards segue the bouncing power-punk of "Terrible Hands" into the laidback stadium rocker, "The Time Is Right (To Be Wrong)". 12 Rods can't seem to sit still long enough to commit themselves to any one monolithic sound, so they simply bend every atmosphere they create to their own inventive aesthetic. The result is entirely natural; nothing is out of place, nothing is overdone. A significant portion of the credit for Lost Time's paradoxical feeling of simultaneous unity and diversity can be attributed to Ryan Olcott's vocals; his slickly treated delivery shows chameleon-like adaptability across all of this album's varied terrain. He croons, shouts and wails with equal proficiency, maintaining the record's remarkable pace without losing so much as a step. In fact, in many ways, Lost Time's consistency even gives it an edge over Split Personalities. Now, admittedly, consistency often amounts to little more than a critical consolation prize in the art of album-building, something to be trotted out when other defenses fail to justify quality ("But, at least it's consistent!"). Not this time. Lost Time is an exceptional start-to-finish listening experience, and on top of that, it hits as high as, or higher than, any Rods album to come before, minus any of the awkwardness that occasionally accompanied earlier releases. In short, Lost Time brings 12 Rods back from the brink of irrelevance to thrive outside the corporate clutches of V2, and shows them poised to finally deliver on the promise of the early material they built their name on.

2003-02-10T01:00:04.000-05:00

2003-02-10T01:00:04.000-05:00

Rock

12 Rodsz

February 10, 2003

f827f98a-6363-468b-a225-4cf6255be967

Eric Carr

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

Joji’s first full-length project features a host of guests in a quality effort to help push past the confines of his bedroom walls and tedious heartache.

Joji’s first full-length project features a host of guests in a quality effort to help push past the confines of his bedroom walls and tedious heartache.

Joji: BALLADS 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joji-ballads-1/

BALLADS 1

George Miller’s nearly seven years of trolling the internet as the equal parts viral and vile YouTube personas Filthy Frank and Pink Guy were accented by his quiet SoundCloud releases as Joji. Comprised of emotional croons and lo-fi, sample-driven production, Miller’s side project eventually caught the attention of 88rising, a largely Asian music collective home to acts like Rich Brian, NIKI, and Keith Ape. A debut EP and an 88rising world tour later, Joji has seemingly cleared the leap from bizarre internet comedian to full-fledged musician, officially retiring his YouTube channel and all. Now, with all the shiny trappings of a label and a fanbase hungry for self-deprecating zingers like “Yeah Right” rather than Pink Guy’s stir fry raps, his first full-length project BALLADS 1 makes an effort to push past the confines of his bedroom walls and tedious heartache. Joji serves as the record’s main producer, manipulating the same chain-clanking samples, tinny percussive hitches, and maudlin keyboards that drove 2017’s In Tongues EP on tracks like “WANTED U” and “XNXX.” But on BALLADS 1, Joji solicits contributions from a grip of artists that align with his cloud-rap and trap-influenced mentality, including Clams Casino, RL Grime, Ryan Hemsworth, and Shlohmo (one of his proclaimed musical idols). And as the album’s title announces, he loosely follows a simple objective: fine-tuning his sound against a style championed by the Whitney Houstons and Adeles of the pop mythology. The ballad is a great mode for Joji. It retains the tormented intimacy of his music while elevating his approach to a more radio-friendly consistency than the runny compositions of In Tongues. The album’s second single—the self-described “new age Celine Dion”-type power ballad “SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK”—is a brighter, bolder take on his usual lovesick songs about an ex moving on. Production from Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly imbues a high-fidelity clarity with harp arpeggios and synths that expand and contract around Joji’s near-yelling vocals. He flips pangs of an unrequited crush into the danceable Clams Casino-assisted “CAN’T GET OVER YOU,” dishing out both delusional and self-aware sentiments over an elastic Thundercat bassline. “I don’t have no social cues, I’m all for you,” he mumbles before delving back into a chorus that ends with the tired, toxic trope: “If I can’t have you no one can.” Whether he’s singing about waiting for someone to desire him back on “WANTED U” or driving around, alone, feeling dead inside on “NO FUN,” Joji wallows in the tension between being the bigger person and lashing out. “Give me reasons we should be complete/You should be with him I can’t compete,” he cries on “SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK”’s anthemic chorus, unable to keep his intentions straight for two consecutive lines. He’s cathartic at best and pathetic and worst, but there’s a strange comfort in his neurotic rumination. Yet outside of a few standout tracks, BALLADS 1 coasts along a lukewarm formula of sad-boy R&B. Joji relies on a driving analogy to carry the underwhelming songwriting of his RL Grime collaboration called “TEST DRIVE,” while he misses the mark with his only non-producer feature Trippie Redd as they sing through a repetitive, aimlessly morbid narrative on the Ryan Hemsworth-produced “R.I.P.” There’s a sense that Joji is searching for peace in his life beyond failed romances and conflicted guilt. The album’s opening track “ATTENTION” is, per usual, about his unfulfilled expectations in a relationship, but it’s also about the expectations he places on himself. “I don’t wanna die so young/Got so much to do,” he casually throws between lines about his insecurities and neediness. In the context of the neurological condition behind his departure from YouTube—which causes stress-induced seizures and requires he take daily medication—his preoccupation with mortality feels earned. Along with his medical scare, feeling “stuck” as the clownish content creator of his own making drove him to a point of drinking too much before he decided to take a chance on a new career. Throughout the despair and negative self-talk, there’s a hope underneath BALLADS 1 that Joji is closer to outrunning the immaturity of his past life.

2018-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

88rising

October 31, 2018

f830d555-43b2-455b-a42f-ed3442801c0e

Braudie Blais-Billie

https://pitchfork.com/staff/braudie-blais-billie/

The Atlanta rapper is slowly coming into his own as a Young Thug disciple with an intrinsic tunefulness and strong storytelling that is marred by the undistinguished Quality Control production.

The Atlanta rapper is slowly coming into his own as a Young Thug disciple with an intrinsic tunefulness and strong storytelling that is marred by the undistinguished Quality Control production.

Lil Baby: Too Hard

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-baby-too-hard/

Too Hard

Ever since he was released from prison last winter after serving two years on a drug charge, Lil Baby has been making up for lost time. The 22-year-old only began rapping in February, but he already has four mixtapes, the backing of the taste-making Atlanta incubator Quality Control, and a major street hit, “My Dawg,” that just got the star remix treatment with verses from Quavo and Kodak Black. By March, Gucci Mane was already trying to sign him. Even in a city that breeds overnight successes faster than any other, Baby’s ascent has looked almost too easy. Credit Young Thug for fast-tracking Baby to the city’s inner circle. An old friend from the neighborhood, Thug cosigned the melodic rapper right out of the gate and appeared on some of his earliest tracks. As Baby tells it, even before he began rapping, he spent days in the studio watching Thug do his thing, internalizing his work ethic. Inevitably, he picked up a little bit of Thug’s singsong lilt, too, but his own delivery is considerably more subdued than the typical Thug performance. He sings in a slack, Auto-Tuned murmur, with an intrinsic tunefulness that suggests he could probably be a decent R&B singer if he put the work in. Despite his embrace of the word “hard” on the titles of his last solo mixtape, Harder Than Hard, and his latest, Too Hard, his voice is soft around the edges, almost pretty. Most of Too Hard finds Baby in a contemplative mood, still processing his sudden good fortune. “I went to prison, it made me a better me,” he croons on “Money Forever,” opposite Gunna, another singing rapper specializing in florid trap serenades. There are a lot of them right now. This is one of the most crowded lanes in rap, but Lil Baby distinguishes himself with a rare command over his voice. The quieter he goes, the more emotion he conveys. That delivery heightens his already-sharp storytelling. On the tape’s most vividly written track, “Best of Me,” he relays a close call. “Remember that shootout we had that time we thought a kid died?/Only thing I know is when we pulled up, everybody hopped out fine/I remember on the way back, everybody in the car quiet,” he raps somberly. He goes on to recall watching news coverage of the shooting and hoping the kid survived, knowing the ramifications if he didn’t. The chorus’ assurance that he isn’t embellishing—”Ain’t no facade, no cap in my raps, everything that I say is the real me”—is almost redundant. His voice is so sullen, so shaken, that there’s never any doubt whether he’s making any of it up. Tracks like that make it almost impossible to believe Baby’s been at this for less than a year. He’s got clear talent, and considering how much he’s improved just in the months since his first mixtape, Perfect Timing, his ceiling is potentially massive (even Young Thug’s earliest projects weren’t nearly this assured). Too Hard also has a potential hit in “All of a Sudden,” where Baby and an electric Moneybagg Yo ping-pong speedy bars off of one another, putting maximum spin on each. It’s one of the tape’s few outright bangers. What Baby still lacks, though, is an original vision—he’s skilled at parroting popular styles, but hasn’t yet honed his own. He isn’t helped in that regarded by Too Hard’s production, which is as refined and professional as you’d expect from the Quality Control stable, but also completely undistinguished, almost stubborn in its refusal to deviate from the most established sounds. He’s got time to figure it out, but for now Baby faces the same problem as many of his peers in Atlanta’s overcrowded rap scene: Talent can only take you so far when you sound so much like everybody else.

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

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

Rap

Quality Control

December 12, 2017

f84467a4-25fe-481a-94ad-625577e759d1

Evan Rytlewski

https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/

Dylan LeBlanc is a 25-year-old Louisiana native with ties to Muscle Shoals. His latest album Cautionary Tale documents his recovery from a personal tailspin.

Dylan LeBlanc is a 25-year-old Louisiana native with ties to Muscle Shoals. His latest album Cautionary Tale documents his recovery from a personal tailspin.

Dylan LeBlanc: Cautionary Tale

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21389-cautionary-tale/

Cautionary Tale

We are not, nor have we ever been, short on young, white, male singer-songwriters: Moody, earnest, troubled and usually in their mid-twenties, wielding an acoustic guitar and writing songs ranging from thoughtfully introspective to blissfully unaware. Enter Dylan LeBlanc, a 25-year-old Louisiana native. According to his bio, LeBlanc found himself, at 23, "exhausted and damaged," thanks to alcohol and hard living. True to this particular troubadour form, he more or less got his life together and wrote some songs about it. He’s even got a tie to the Muscle Shoals golden goose, having lived in the Alabama town as a child before returning to write his third LP, Cautionary Tale. The result lands comfortably in the contemporary singer-songwriter canon, but it’s hard to say exactly where. Lilting pedal steel, brushy acoustic guitar strums and tender piano licks suggest Americana, but string sections pull LeBlanc in a different direction. Cautionary Tale often feels like what most folks probably expected from Night Beds as a follow-up to 2013’s Country Sleep. LeBlanc’s somewhat high mumbled singing directly recalls Night Beds’ Winston Yellen, most notably on "Man Like Me." It’s these richer textures and unexpected twists that do Cautionary Tale the most favors. The result is a record that, on the surface, sounds beautiful from start to finish. At times, though, these arrangements create a smoke-and-mirrors effect that obscures the weak spots in LeBlanc’s songwriting. "Beyond the Veil" is a slow, bluesy track with blunt lyrics about lying politicians and media manipulation that don’t read much different from a teenager’s Tumblr post encouraging readers to "stay woke." Later, "Balance or Fall" feels like a tired take on a lonesome cowboy metaphor: guns, the desert, harlots, and the hangman’s noose all come up at some point. An Americana-leaning song romanticizing the Wild West: imagine that! These arrangements don’t prevent Cautionary Tale from dragging in its back half, either. Centerpiece "Beyond the Veil" sounds pretty, especially with its extended instrumental coda, but by the song’s end, you’ve pretty much gotten the gist of the extent of LeBlanc’s capabilities. The remaining four songs end up feeling like dead weight, adding little else of note. "I’m Moving On," a pleasant shuffle that sounds teleported from the early '60s, might be an exception—even if most of its lyrics are just the title repeated about a dozen times. Despite these shortcomings, LeBlanc still fares better than many of his like-minded contemporaries. Cautionary Tale never feels cloying or over-the-top—LeBlanc’s voice and arrangements always fit together naturally. His songwriting seems promising enough to expand, offering him an opportunity to examine himself and the world around him with a more critically thoughtful eye. LeBlanc might be part of a club that never seems to stop expanding, but he at least offers some extra intrigue with his membership.

2016-01-11T01:00:04.000-05:00

2016-01-11T01:00:04.000-05:00

Folk/Country

Single Lock

January 11, 2016

f84eb2e7-47e1-4df4-bbd1-304730f2b24d

Allison Hussey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/

Twenty years ago, Joel Gibb joyfully preached a vision of gay revolution. His group’s debut offered a prescient vision of the currents that power queer culture today.

Twenty years ago, Joel Gibb joyfully preached a vision of gay revolution. His group’s debut offered a prescient vision of the currents that power queer culture today.

The Hidden Cameras: The Smell of Our Own (20th Anniversary Edition)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-hidden-cameras-the-smell-of-our-own-20th-anniversary-edition/

The Smell of Our Own (20th Anniversary Edition)

At the dawn of the new millennium, charismatic hunk leader Joel Gibb gathered his apostles, tens of ragtag Torontonians with fluency in gay culture and faith in indie rock. They gathered organs of every kind, from throats on down, and began hosting ceremonies in porn houses and museums. Crucially, they did their work in houses of worship, of both the dancing and devotional kinds. They called it “Gay Folk Church Music.” In 2002, with just some demos on a CD-R called Ecce Homo and a few gigs under their belt, the Hidden Cameras won converts across the city. Even Rough Trade heads Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee came to Canada to witness. A news report on their pilgrimage surfaces as part of the 20th-anniversary celebration for The Smell of Our Own, the Hidden Cameras’ debut album. You can see how they pulled Travis and Lee into their flock. In the beginning, the band gussied up the egalitarian gang mentality of Belle and Sebastian with the gay-and-loud flamboyance of queercore. They put on shows, with themes like “Bread and Shit” and “Skulls” and “Disease” and dancers dragged up in sports costumes and excitable twink choreography and no real demarcation between those watching the scene and the people plucking harps, pounding timpani, bowing strings, and crying out in joy and rage. At the center of it all was Gibb delivering his gay revolution psalms and infectious paeans to drinking piss. The Smell of Our Own, which Rough Trade put out in 2003, starts with a pipe organ pumping. It ends that way, too. It surrounds Gibb’s versatile pipes, sometimes crooning like a post-coital Karen Carpenter and sometimes calling out like Slim Whitman or Sylvester, with choirs stacked with luminaries including Owen Pallett and the Fifth Column’s G.B. Jones. Its 10 songs, not a dud among them, thrust complicated existential and spiritual concerns into boisterous orchestral pop. “Golden Streams” is a urophilic fantasia in which the bonds created by the intimate act become literal world-building, as the piss cools into ice. “A city of gold that lives in broad daylight,” Gibb proselytizes, then prophesies its ruin as he and his lover flood it again. The legend is soundtracked by heralding trumpets, swells of Pallett’s violin and viola, belfries of vibraphone and glockenspiel and sleigh bells. The allegorical “Animals of Prey” is equally baroque: Gibb and co. “descend on fours” like moles, fuck and kiss, and “ascend as swans.” Gay sex is metamorphical. A Hammond organ throbs like blood. Virilely, they pack a couple climaxes into the original album’s 43 minutes. “The Man That I Am With My Man” queers the idea of blood brothers. Two lovers wash and consume each other, then become a literal army of lovers. “We could be in the army or the Klan,” Gibb warns—and, truly, the subsequent decades have proven that gay men, from Andrew Sullivan to George Santos, are as likely to be found at the forefront of racist and transphobic movements as they are in the #resistance. “Boys of Melody” offers counterpoint. In five minutes that build into a shattering crescendo rivaling “O Holy Night” for sonic reverence (and faith in the virtues of falling to your knees), Gibb takes up a pack of ghosts who leave the sea to cruise the beach. They sing in harmony. They march along. They’re finally, finally happy. The song is a coup, a fairy tale, both a recording and invocation of the kind of queer joy we all should be so lucky to witness. I swear there are generations in the echoes. If “Boys of Melody” is a cathedral, the live take from a contemporaneous CBC session is a blueprint of how to build one yourself: Get some friends and some instruments, and voilà. Other tracks on the reissue prove Gibb was a kind of visionary, tapping into the currents that power queer culture today. A demo of their introductory anthem “Ban Marriage” lacks the finished version’s majesty but feels somehow more revolutionary in its intimate arrangement of mostly acoustic guitar and percussion. As the story goes, a groom shows up at the altar after a night of glory holes. God then appears, not to condemn gays for wanting to marriage but to condemn the joyless institution entirely. It’s a riot. B-Side “Fear of ’Zine Failure” could have come out last fall, when New York City’s queer cognoscenti made the Art Book Fair the sold-out social event of the season, with hundreds left feeling like flops on the sidewalk when they couldn’t make the scene. The album’s magical “A Miracle” appears here as a humble demo, shorn of its blooming string arrangements but leaving its thorny disquisition into the nature of suffering intact. The song threads bug chasing, bad dreams, sodomy, martyrdom, and Anne Murray-style vocals, and it’s a miracle indeed. More live tracks finish off this very welcome reissue. “Shame,” a private interrogation of the gender politics of picking up closet cases, becomes a shimmering invocation of sexual solidarity. And gathered together, “Breath on It” and “Day Is Dawning” are proof that the Hidden Cameras can pitch a tent revival wide enough to take in the psychedelic Christian visions of Judee Sill and the holy fuck of Prince and the rip-roaring filth of John Waters and the DIY shambolic fervor of their Rough Trade brethren. Like all evangelicals, their point might be that they believe, and if they can, so can you. Get your organs ready. Let’s begin.

2023-04-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-04-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Rough Trade

April 17, 2023

f850a75b-b5f1-4d21-a8c9-e71f0ce4d72f

Jesse Dorris

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/

The fourth album in Nas’ ongoing series of collaborations with producer Hit-Boy locks into a straightforward groove. It’s loose and expert and finally nimble again.

The fourth album in Nas’ ongoing series of collaborations with producer Hit-Boy locks into a straightforward groove. It’s loose and expert and finally nimble again.

Nas: King’s Disease III

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-kings-disease-iii/

King’s Disease III

For the first 20 years of his career, each Nas album was not only a major event, but a departure from or escalation of what came before. This changed in 2020, when he locked into a steady rhythm with Hit-Boy, the producer from Southern California’s Inland Empire who seemed, at the beginning of the 2010s, like he might shape the decade in rap (he produced JAY-Z and Kanye West’s “Niggas in Paris,” A$AP Rocky’s “Goldie,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle” in a little over a calendar year), only to retreat into the quasi-anonymity of expensive pop projects. Since then, he and Nas have been on an unwavering schedule, arriving once a year to drop music that has to this point hovered just above “competent,” a master artist with a workmanlike producer doing earnest work for hire. Their most recent installment, somewhat ironically, was called Magic. King’s Disease III, which is almost twice as long as Magic, is the first argument in favor of this deliberate demystification. Nas’ chief concerns (Queensbridge circa 1988, the corrosive effects of violence, upward social mobility for Black Americans, and banal luxury) are the kind that come into sharper focus with each variation on minor variation. And a rush of new albums frees each from the albatross of his legacy, which he no longer feels the need to litigate to the lengths he once did. KD3 is steeped in nostalgia but not besotted with it; it is routine, and all the better for it, loose and expert and finally nimble again. With this newfound looseness comes a more direct mode of writing and delivery. Nas verses were once like cobwebs, seeming to stretch in every direction at once, phonetically and topically, until isolating the individual threads became impossible—and beside the point. Songs like 2001’s “Rewind,” where a pulp crime vignette, including its lines of dialogue, is told in reverse, are actually easier to digest on first pass than many of the denser, knottier ones from his first several albums. As late as 2012’s “Nasty,” he was staking his albums on ostentatious displays of raw technique. Here he seems to stride atop Hit-Boy’s beats where he once would have scurried back and forth through a network of tunnels he’d dug beneath them. On “WTF SMH,” he makes nearly every point—about Big Daddy Kane’s influence and how profitable his publishing has been for MC Serch, about “cowards” who “cut the tough guy shit”—land with percussive single-syllable bursts. The enemy, as is always the case with Hit-Boy and often with Nas, is the middle. KD3’s most effective songs are the ones pulled toward opposite poles: “Thun” recalls the mournful songs, produced by DJ Premier et al., that imagined mid-1990s New York City to be rife with well-dressed mobsters and poorly maintained project stairwells, while “Once a Man, Twice a Child” is its languid, luxuriating counterpoint. When Nas describes himself, on the lush, Marcus Miller-sampling “Hood2Hood” as a mixture of “Paisley Park Prince with Supreme Team Prince,” he’s finally landed on the elusive elevator pitch that resolves his most seemingly irresolvable contradictions. The paring down of Nas’ verses necessarily makes them feel less improvisatory; he has always been such an exacting writer that little seems to be discovered in the recitation of lyrics themselves, but density brings more opportunity for little bends in inflection and hitches in rhythm. The drabbest moments on KD3 come when he lapses into mechanical entrepreneur-speak (“For those who claim a hundred million on taxes…”) doled out with a deliberate hand and no room for flourishes that might undercut or deepen its meaning. Fortunately these are far rarer than on the first two King’s Disease volumes—and they’re balanced by more charming references, as when Nas notes, on “Get Light,” the “grown ladies with Mercedes-Benz keys” who are “friendly as little kids on 10-speeds.” While one could point to his singing hooks as far back as 1996’s “Street Dreams”—or to the huskier, 2Pac-indebted vocals he dabbled in beginning around the turn of the century—Nas is dogged by a reputation as a rapper who is not particularly musical. This critique obscures how well he has modulated his voice to inhabit different characters, emotions, and mindsets in his songs. The four Hit-Boy records, this one included, tend to flatten out this dimension of his work, being rapped largely from a place of evident comfort. So when Nas interrupts “Don’t Shoot,” the final song of the album proper, with his exhausted, pleading rasp of a hook, he injects the lyrics with the stakes he clearly feels they deserve. “Don’t shoot, gangsta, don’t shoot,” he exhorts as if he’d sprinted into the recording booth and is only now trying to collect himself. “You are him, and he is you.”

2022-11-21T00:02:00.000-05:00

2022-11-21T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rap

Mass Appeal

November 21, 2022

f85483e0-7e31-4fb0-9b3b-22181bbdbddf

Paul A. Thompson

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

The Australian musician caps an adventurous trilogy of EPs with another round of plush, laid-back songs that effortlessly mix pop, rap, R&B, and reggae.

The Australian musician caps an adventurous trilogy of EPs with another round of plush, laid-back songs that effortlessly mix pop, rap, R&B, and reggae.

Tkay Maidza: Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 3

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tkay-maidza-last-year-was-weird-vol-3/

Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 3

Tkay Maidza’s Last Year Was Weird trilogy is an open sandbox, a way for the Australian artist to try out as many genres as she likes without overcommitting. Since the first volume arrived in 2018, she’s paved a fresh, reliable lane: With a dexterous flow and a close ear for wordplay and melody, she infuses her music with a breezy, effortless mix of pop, rap, R&B, and reggae. The new Vol. 3 caps off the EP series with another round of plush, laid-back songs that mingle with some of her toughest rapping yet. Her bright, boastful personality remains front and center. Vol. 3’s songs are newly tactile: Maidza is soft like cashmere and rich like syrup, comparing a lover’s bond to sticky honey. The lyrical flourishes give way to deeper ideas as she digs into the sense that she’s been overlooked, whether by a former flame or the public at large. “Yes Lord, I been slept on,” she sings over a jittery beat and choral backing vocals on “High Beams.” Maidza, of course, is nonplussed: “They late, can’t cope.” On the leisurely “Cashmere,” she allows a more vulnerable side through: “I disconnected myself,” she sings in a lilting voice before letting loose a haymaker: “And when I wanted your wisdom/You just gave me a reason to put a hole in your chest.” The delicate balance between big talk and forthright emotion colors the EP, closing the distance between Maidza as a person and a performer. Her regular collaborator Dan Farber serves as executive producer, wiring the new set with bass-heavy undertows. The cheerleader stomp and rumbling buzz of “Syrup” nod to Timbaland and Missy Elliott’s future-shocked collaborations, but Maidza makes it her own, cruising in the pocket as she reels off boasts: “I want it all, can’t apologize/I’ll take the cake and the kitchen knife,” she vows. The standout “Kim” pays homage to the 2000s cartoon show Kim Possible with one of Maidza’s most swaggering hooks: “Bitch I’m, bitch I’m Kim,” she roars over ping-ponging synths and shuddering bass, her voice filtered as though shouting through a speakerphone. Like last year’s stadium-sized “Shook,” it’s electrifying proof of Maidza’s talent for catchy songs that punch above their weight. Listening back through the entire LYWW series confirms that Maidza has found her artistic footing, evolving past the nondescript dance-pop of her 2016 debut toward a wide-ranging approach that serves both her creativity and her confidence. “Kim” exposes her stealth mission to the top in a springy cadence: “I been going hard and I ain’t slept/And they ain’t even know it, I’m a threat.” Though she has yet to notch a bona fide hit, Vol. 3 gives credibility to the claim. By building steady momentum at her own pace, Maidza has delivered her most bracing music yet. 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.

2021-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

4AD

July 14, 2021

f854df98-8c3e-40f8-b30f-b0d4f1597134

Eric Torres

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

With help from producer Cate Le Bon, the Chicago band’s 13th album flickers to life on several songs that hint at the controlled chaos of their bygone experimental era.

With help from producer Cate Le Bon, the Chicago band’s 13th album flickers to life on several songs that hint at the controlled chaos of their bygone experimental era.

Wilco: Cousin

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilco-cousin/

Cousin

There are protest songs that rage with righteous fury. Then there are protest songs that simply gesture at the headlines, powerless and numb. “Ten Dead,” a glassy-eyed track on Wilco’s Cousin, is the latter. Counting up the casualties, Jeff Tweedy decries the normalization of mass shootings: “Turn on the radio, this is what they said/No more, no more, no more than ten dead,” he murmurs as Nels Cline’s nimble jazz chords surround and console him. Tweedy sounds more weary than outraged (“Ten more, 11 more/What’s one more to me?”) as a dust cloud of guitars commandeers the final minute. Isn’t that the point, though? It’s hard not to feel more weary than outraged when hearing about another massacre. The song, to its credit, indicts its own shrug. This is Wilco in their 30th year: more overtly political than ever—recall the double entendre of last year’s long-winded Cruel Country, with its patriot-baiting title track—yet musically more introverted. Channeling weariness is what Wilco do best these days, and on the refreshingly compact, fitfully surprising Cousin, weariness and uncertainty abound, elicited by violence, family (“Cousin”), and interpersonal relationships (“A Bowl and a Pudding”). After flirting with a youthful twang on Cruel Country, Tweedy scarcely raises his voice above a concerned hum. It’s a muted album about searching for connection amid decay, though it flickers to life on several tunes that hint at the controlled chaos of the much-mythologized Yankee Hotel Foxtrot/A Ghost Is Born era. Much as those albums benefited from the input of an experimental interlocutor (the great Jim O’Rourke), this one shakes up Wilco’s inner circle with outside producer Cate Le Bon, the Welsh songwriter, who squeezes some blood and guts out of these arrangements: the turbulent build-up in “Ten Dead,” the splattery organ groans that enhance the dirge-like “Pittsburgh.” During the recording process, Le Bon favored multitrack complexity over the live-in-the-studio approach of Cruel Country and encouraged the band to take more risks. That comes through on opener “Infinite Surprise,” which instantly feels like the most daring Wilco track this side of “Art of Almost.” Tweedy’s mantra-like repetitions (“It’s good to be alive/It’s good to know we die”) pair well with an ever-mutating symphony of synth shards and deconstructed guitar. As on many of Wilco’s best songs, Tweedy sounds like he’s reaching for stability in a storm and it keeps slipping just out of reach. A small bummer, then, that little else on Cousin summons that tension. The album’s middle stretch settles into an amiable midtempo blur. “Levee” and “Evicted” chug along on autumnal minor chords and climate dread, but it’s hard to imagine anyone but the realest Wilco heads differentiating them from listless deep cuts on Schmilco or Cruel Country. “Sunlight Ends” delivers one of Tweedy’s more oblique love songs, but its twinkling folktronica never quite lifts off. The lovely “A Bowl and a Pudding” spins a brooding variation on the undulating arpeggios of “Muzzle of Bees,” while the title track finally summons some jagged edges and post-punk vigor. “The dead awake in waves!” Tweedy repeats at the song’s snarling finish. Remarkably, Cousin is the fifth Wilco album since 2015’s Star Wars, an eight-year stretch during which Tweedy has also released four solo albums and three books. The guy is prolific. Since writing his memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), he has sometimes activated a more diaristic, literal approach to songwriting. This resulted in the stirring, grief-informed songs of 2018’s Warm, but can also yield exercises in banality. In “Levee,” lyrics like “I love to take my meds/Like my doctor said/But I worry/If I shouldn’t instead” hang there awkwardly, absent any conclusive revelation or melodic momentum. If the inaction of “Ten Dead” served a grim message, this just feels passive. Cousin isn’t a sister album to Cruel Country, but would it be too on the nose to call it a cousin album? Both peer out at a country infected with hypocrisy and moral rot. This is the album Wilco was working on in 2019, before the band decided to shift gears during the pandemic and make the country record instead. In interviews promoting the latter last year, Tweedy teased the existence of Cousin: “It’s pretty sculpted art pop,” he told Aquarium Drunkard. “It’s alien. The songs are alien shapes.” If Cousin falls short of that tantalizing description, that’s all right. It’s the first Wilco album in years to activate, in fits and starts, the band’s long-dormant experimental gene; the first one in years where the songwriting feels as guided by the production as vice versa. It’s a reminder that, as much as Wilco have become known for longevity and sturdy perseverance, the group’s creative restlessness remains their calling card.

2023-09-28T00:03:00.000-04:00

2023-09-28T00:03:00.000-04:00

Rock

dBpm

September 28, 2023

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Zach Schonfeld

https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/

On her soulful second album, Chicago singer-songwriter Kaina Castillo reconciles childhood memories and future dreams with the hard work of getting through today.

On her soulful second album, Chicago singer-songwriter Kaina Castillo reconciles childhood memories and future dreams with the hard work of getting through today.

KAINA: It Was a Home

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaina-it-was-a-home/

It Was a Home

Kaina Castillo’s music focuses on the machinations of identity and love. The Chicago-born Guatemalan-Venezuelan artist’s 2019 debut Next to the Sun deconstructed the complexities and inner turmoils of life as a first-generation Latina with immense vulnerability and clarity. As she moved through elements of R&B, Latin jazz, indie pop, and soul, Next to the Sun’s stark lyricism and resounding vocals revealed an artist speaking to the purgatory woman of color face simply for existing: the expectation to perform labor for others despite holding less power over their autonomy. KAINA’s refreshing take on the personal as political refused to be watered down or made palatable, a reflection of someone unapologetically working through societal projections with the stylistic tools other artists of color have long labored for. That will to remain open defines KAINA’s second album, It Was a Home. Produced by KAINA with fellow Chicagoan Sen Morimoto and boosted by collaborations with Sleater-Kinney and Helado Negro, It Was a Home is a soothing progression from her debut and a soulful ode to the city and the relationships that have nourished KAINA’s life. Using the sonic and visual repertoires of her childhood as a guiding force, KAINA contemplates new ways of healing, calling upon the time-honored medicine of love and self-acceptance. Much of KAINA’s mythologizing around love is rooted in her reckoning with community. Bringing to mind Solange’s When I Get Home, KAINA conjures up imagery of people and places of her life that feel foundational to the record’s spirit. In the video for album closer “Golden Mirror”—a jazzy curtain call reminiscent of Jessie Ware’s “Remember Where You Are”—KAINA invites friends into a dreamy recreation of her home, decked out in the brilliant palettes of childhood favorites like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street. As the group embraces and eventually heads out to perform the song onstage, KAINA invites local artists like NNAMDÏ to join in what eventually becomes a family affair, repeatedly singing the irresistible hook: “Love can feel like an illusion/But I see it everyday.” Whether through colorful interiors or animated plants, It Was a Home’s visual and sonic indulgences play to a childlike wonder that honors KAINA’s past and future idealizations. On the title track, KAINA pays homage to the apartment where her family lived for 16 years while incorporating the Motown sounds her parents played on repeat. “And that little room/In the middle house/Is not the way I remembered/It was a home,” she sings, surrounded by production reminiscent of Al Green or Jackson 5. But she leaves room to critique memory as well. “That song is about, you know, feeling so small in a space or feeling like you might not reach the next thing, but sometimes you’re missing that beautiful moment right in front of you,” she recently told NPR. A song like “Casita” functions as a response: Coming towards the end of the record, “Casita” calmly blends Latin rock and classic R&B sounds to evoke the home she hopes someday to inhabit—almost as if tapping into a familiar formula will make these dreams a reality. As much dreaming and recollecting is done on It Was a Home, KAINA also succeeds at addressing her well-being. Rather than dwelling on factors outside one’s own control, she homes in on the stillness of a moment in larger conversations around oppression. Tracks like “Sweetness” or “Good Feeling” unspool like self-affirming mantras: “I could give a little sweetness,” KAINA reflects on “Sweetness,” even as she laments the isolation and exhaustion of work. On “Blue,” Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange joins in for an assured meditation on the value of rest. Lange’s syrupy voice drips all over Castillo’s alto rasp as they embrace inertia as essential to recharging one’s relationship with the world. While it’s refreshing to see KAINA develop into an even more confident artist—making strides at her own pace—there are moments on It Was a Home that could be more daring. Take the record’s most hazy and experimental track, “Friend of Mine.” As it fades out, her voice submerges into the song and recedes out of sight. At this moment, Castillo sounds somewhere in the territory of L’Rain’s Fatigue or Xenia Rubinos’ Una Rosa, and the distant undulations of her vocals pass like clouds across It Was a Home’s bright sky. KAINA’s intentions proudly lead elsewhere on this record, but these experimental moments are exciting nonetheless, and deserve further development. By allowing herself to feel the full weight of her traumas and insecurities, KAINA is able to address them with the care and imagination learned from her community, educators, and the legacies that precede her. It Was a Home succeeds best when KAINA is at her most carefree, even if she recognizes there’s a long way to go. “When it all goes astray/Gotta just laugh about it,” she sings on the whimsical “Apple.” Every song and image on the record harkens back to some aspect of KAINA’s life, whether it’s the late-night salsa parties her parents threw growing up, the Black feminist thought she’s studied as an adult, or something as small and ordinary as an apple. These memories, ideas, and objects embed themselves into the grooves of her music, a balm for her and anyone who comes to join.

2022-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

City Slang

March 18, 2022

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Gio Santiago

https://pitchfork.com/staff/gio-santiago/

The rapper and professional gourmand’s latest album is a hallucinatory, fuzzed-out journey into the wilderness.

The rapper and professional gourmand’s latest album is a hallucinatory, fuzzed-out journey into the wilderness.

Action Bronson: Cocodrillo Turbo

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/action-bronson-cocodrillo-turbo/

Cocodrillo Turbo

Action Bronson has always projected a unique air of authenticity. He’s a half-Albanian bearded bear of a man from Queens, equally shaped by the borough’s vibrant food culture and his experiences running with the graffiti squad Smart Crew. He oozes the sort of charisma that could inspire an old-timey, cigar-chomping Hollywood agent to gush to a room full of studio executives, “This guy can rap! He can cook! He makes jokes like nobody’s business! He’s got this old-school New York thing going on but the kids who are into all the hipster streetwear crap love him too! He’s got moxie, I tell ya—he’s going straight to the top!” And after over a decade in the public eye, Bronson is certainly a star—just not a conventional hip-hop power player. He’s created his own little solar system in which he is the undisputed gravitational center, one that spans music, vapes, clothing, and books on cooking (F*ck, That’s Delicious), weed (Stoned Beyond Belief), and self-improvement (F*ck It, I’ll Start Tomorrow). Perhaps nothing helped build Bronson’s name as much as his food show, Fuck, That’s Delicious, which originally aired on Viceland and found the Queens roughneck exhibiting such personal warmth and cultural open-mindedness on camera that the New Yorker positioned him as one of the few credible successors to Anthony Bourdain. (I was an editorial staffer at VICE Media while Bronson was signed to the company’s record label, although I was uninvolved with VICE Records and left the company years before the rapper’s relationship with other departments became openly adversarial.) Though his fanbase is enormous, he’s never had a true radio hit, or needed one. Instead, he’s a cult phenomenon like Fugazi in their prime—or, to put a more cynical spin on it, less of a rapper and more of a one-man media company. In this sense, Bronson’s past couple of records might be best seen not as genuine artistic statements but as grist for the content mill, fuel for more tours and merch lines, and for maintaining brand awareness as Fuck, That’s Delicious moved from Viceland to Bronson’s own YouTube channel and began focusing more on health. But on Crocodrillo Turbo, his latest record, Bronson is a more focused rapper than he’s been in years. As he did on past highlights such as Dr. Lecter and Blue Chips, he’s crafted a rich and strange world, and while those records were informed by Queens and YouTube sample rabbit holes, respectively, Crocodrillo Turbo is a hallucinatory, fuzzed-out, straight-up bonkers journey into the wilderness—think Dr. Octagon guest-starring on an episode of Wildboyz, plus a bunch of fuzzy guitar solos. This is still an Action Bronson album. Yet again, he plays the sophisticated boor, your friendly local dirtbag who gets to say whatever he wants because everybody can tell he doesn’t really mean it (or he’s just so likable that they convince themselves he doesn’t). On the other hand, there’s something undeniably more interesting going on. Bronson’s gotten vaguely more progressive, rhyming “easily triggered by old trauma” with “you know I voted for Obama” on “Subzero,” and there’s probably like 40 percent less misogyny on Crocodrillo Turbo than usual. He also raps portions of almost every track from the perspective of various deadly beasts. Communing and/or engaging in combat with nature is a steady theme on this record—and, to hear Bronson tell it, informed his mentality while making it. “I did a crocodile death-roll for 10 songs,” he told Blackbird Spyplane. Opening track “Hound Dog” begins with a sonic collage of roars, barks, and breaking glass before Bronson raps about “smoking drugs ass-naked, just a hat on” and “run[ning] a hundred miles in a downpour with six giraffes on my back.” On “Jaguar,” he’s both “jumpin’ over the hood of a Jaguar” and “in a tree” like a jaguar, and he kicks off “Jaws” by rapping about how he’s just killed a goat with his, uh, jaws. The record’s guests, including longtime collaborators Meyhem Lauren and Hologram (who happens to be Lauren’s brother), as well as underground stalwarts Roc Marciano and Conway the Machine, gamely step into Bronson’s biome. Conway nearly steals the show on “Tongpo,” embracing Bronson’s reputation as a wisecracker and one-upping him with a masterclass in intentionally tasteless humor, at one point pausing to laugh at his own bawdy Andrew Cuomo joke. Roc Marci’s verse on “Zambezi” is the greatest guest verse ever to include the phrase “horse poo.” None of the madcap antics would land if there weren’t a suitable bed of beats for all the zaniness to rest upon, and in this regard, Crocodrillo Turbo delivers. Though Bronson has found success in the past working with a single producer on a project, here he taps a group including the Alchemist, Roc Marciano, Griselda stalwart Daringer, and himself. The music is almost uniformly psychedelic and spacey, with stray guitars wantonly wailing in some parts, insistent and razor-tight soul loops egging on the rapping in others. The album’s greatest musical achievement comes with closer “Storm of the Century,” a plaintive, drumless wonder from Daringer featuring saxophone work from Yung Mehico of Bronson’s live band the Special Victims Unit. Bronson raps the entire track not as a beast, dog, motherfuckin’ problem, goon, or even goblin, but instead as a man, one who walks the streets with a head full of regrets. “I’ve done things only the Devil knows/Got bicep tendonitis from revving the boat/And all this ancient knowledge, reverend, that’s from heavens ago,” he tells us. And while a common muscle injury sustained as a result of conventional watersports might not seem as mysterious as demonic deeds or the arcane teachings of yore, that’s just because you’re not using a sufficient level of Crocodile Logic. If you’re a big-ass reptile with no understanding of human society, boats are truly unknowable, not to mention inedible. Maybe that’s why Bronson sounds so electric on this record: His persona is motivated by raw power, yet he can still find wonder in the everyday.

2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Loma Vista

May 6, 2022

f874982c-8da1-49e5-86ab-a51afb73f9e0

Drew Millard

https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-millard/

They’re still cooped up and bummed out, but the Swedish emo revivalists’ third album also boasts longer songs with stronger verses and a keener grasp of sequencing and flow.

They’re still cooped up and bummed out, but the Swedish emo revivalists’ third album also boasts longer songs with stronger verses and a keener grasp of sequencing and flow.

I Love Your Lifestyle: No Driver

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/i-love-your-lifestyle-no-driver/

No Driver

I Love Your Lifestyle don’t go outside unless it’s absolutely necessary. On the title track from 2019’s The Movie, frontman Lukas Feurst enjoyed the natural splendor of his Swedish homeland through his television screen, watching movies about camping until the trash piled up too high to ignore. “Dreamy Dreams” made getting home and going to bed sound like the highest possible reward for another day of pretending like you were someone who actually belonged in an office. Those two songs were preceded by another titled “Indoor Living.” Barring a massive attitude adjustment in the past 18 months, I Love Your Lifestyle were going to make an album suited for global indoor living whether they intended to or not. At the beginning of the pandemic, grim introverts joked that they’ve been training for quarantine their whole lives; on No Driver, I Love Your Lifestyle are likewise prepared to make the best of it. Oh, and there’s been no massive attitude shift. “This song is made for rocking out,” they said of No Driver’s opening track, “and talks about how stupid this band must look from the outside.” Fair enough: “Stupid” uses the common tools bequeathed from pop-metal to emo—tapping riffs, massed harmonies—with the kind of self-deprecation that can be life-affirming in small enough groups. Gulfer provide backup vocals in a show of fourth-wave solidarity, underlining how I Love Your Lifestyle remain an anomaly of both time and geography. At the turn of the 2010s, this kind of music could convince a couple dozen kids in a Philly basement that they were witnessing the world’s best-kept secret. These days, a first press vinyl of Glocca Morra’s Just Married might run you over $400. No Driver appears inspired by the same set of bummer personal circumstances as The Movie: “Car” is a sequel to “Dreamy Dreams” where not having a job doesn’t make sleeping all day sound any less appealing, while “Inner Freakness” recoils at even the possibility of roommates. But I Love Your Lifestyle are more in tune with their powers; they had previously made one song longer than five minutes, a number that quadruples on the first half of No Driver. Everything likeable about The Movie has been supersized: Verses are no longer speedbumps, but carefully constructed ramps that give Feurst enough momentum to leap towards chorus melodies at the absolute limits of his range. Guitar leads are now doubled in glam-rock harmonies, “No Harm, No Foul” swaps lines in English and Swedish, and “Align!” simultaneously evokes the lovesick innocence of American Football’s first album and the jazzy sophistication of their third. If the second half of No Driver can’t quite sustain those peaks, the less ambitious tracks show a keener grasp of sequencing and flow. The 46-second thrasher “Well, That’s Not Ideal” comes just after the band’s signature Swedish-language track (“Fram Och Tillbaka”) regales itself with King’s Quest prog fanfare; the Tokyo Police Club fanfic “OK” arrives to reiterate the underappreciated bridge between blog-rock and revival-era emo. These guys can’t not be emo even when they try: The mesmerizing krautrock groove of “Inner Freakness” frees Feurst to take inventory of his failures until he’s buried in paperwork, and even though ILYL aimed “to make this song 0 percent emo,” they estimate it’s “at least 60.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, Feurst might be willing to start digging his way out. No Driver closes with “Making Nothing Out of Something,” which isn’t about an inferiority complex. Rather, this song ends the album because it’s when Feurst admits he’s finally run out of things to say about boredom. Hell, he might actually have to leave the house at some point for new material. The post-quarantine I Love Your Lifestyle album will either break big or break them. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2021-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Dog Knights

January 4, 2021

f878093d-106b-4865-ae36-f81d4a474582

Ian Cohen

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

Like his last LP, the drummer-producer’s Warp debut rejects false dichotomies like jazz vs. hip-hop. But sometimes, his freeform style is too haphazard for its own good.

Like his last LP, the drummer-producer’s Warp debut rejects false dichotomies like jazz vs. hip-hop. But sometimes, his freeform style is too haphazard for its own good.

Kassa Overall: Animals

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kassa-overall-animals/

Animals

About halfway through the lead single from Kassa Overall’s third studio album, Animals, the Seattle-based, ex-Brooklynite drummer, producer, and MC introduces an alter ego of sorts. Amid the cosmic jazz and methodical rap of “Ready to Ball,” a pitched-up Overall scoffs, “If you ain’t got no money, then shut the fuck up!” Given that his music doesn’t necessarily scream mass appeal, it might be a double-edged taunt. Like Overall’s previous album, 2020’s I Think I’m Good, his Warp debut is an audacious freeform collage that leans on a community of collaborators to break down ancient false dichotomies between jazz and hip-hop, organic and electronic, spontaneous improvisation and meticulous editing. I Think I’m Good was a dreamlike labyrinth, with memoir, mental health, and Black struggle as guideposts. Animals is similarly thick with ideas, and in certain moments Overall’s heady meld of genres, lyrical conceits, and gifted guest performers can sound sublime. Overall has understandably tired of being defined narrowly by jazz-rap or self-care. But Animals, though a friendly hang, is a bit too precious to give a clear picture of what’s next. On the prior album’s standouts, such as the ethereal “Please Don’t Kill Me” or propulsive “Got Me a Plan,” the music transcended and rendered irrelevant the decades-old discussion between jazz and hip-hop, mapping out an astral realm between Flying Lotus and Overall’s kindred drummer-beatmaker Makaya McCraven. Animals is at its most rewarding when it proceeds along a similar post-everything trajectory. That’s particularly true on centerpiece “The Lava Is Calm,” which lavishes folk, samba, and orchestral soul with Theo Croker’s serene trumpet, a noise-rock guitar solo, and furious drumming that’s like a one-man instrumental equivalent to Overall’s Warp labelmate Squarepusher. The handful of tracks that are wordless, or nearly so, are intermittently engrossing, but sooner or later they run back into jazz-hop awkwardness. Vijay Iyer’s eerie piano sounds great with fidgety electronic beats on penultimate track “The Score Was Made,” but then Overall lets the percussion go all “Rock the Bells,” without using the famous original sample, and it takes you right out of it. The cerebral jumble of “Still Ain’t Find Me,” one of several numbers with saxophone by Tomoki Sanders, requires a bold appetite for jazz with vinyl scratching. Overall’s own cadences as a rapper, meanwhile, tend to be measured in a way that can seem hammy (“jewelry” is “JEWEL-uh-RY”). This unfortunate habit undercuts the ornate jazz futurism of songs like Croker-backed “Make My Way Back Home,” which also enlists Nick Hakim for a sonorous guest vocal. The most cohesive track on Animals is “Clock Ticking,” which brings fellow Warp signee Danny Brown’s yawping mischievousness and NYC indie-rap linchpin Wiki’s grizzled introspection to noirish boom-bap, sounding something like a Madlib collab without the samples. It’s thoroughly engaging, but even here, the pairing of these individualistic talents with a live instrumental emulation of golden-age hip-hop, however virtuosic, seems arbitrary. Six-minute finale “Going Up,” the song most likely to put a smile on your face, recalls the charm of Chance the Rapper circa 2015’s “Sunday Candy,” but it feels needlessly labored. Overall has compared the song’s bustling instrumental intro to “the part where Neo gets kicked out of the Matrix… but when you get spit out, you actually get spit out in the bush in Africa”—and that’s before we get to Lil B rapping non sequiturs atop Tomoki Sanders’ pillowy saxophone peals, or Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces rapping through orchestral swells, in an apparent nod to infants and their pacifiers, “Baby treated me like a binky.” Overall is an ace drummer with credits that run from Arto Lindsay to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and a savvy producer going back to his Tumblr-era rise in the camp of indie rappers Das Racist; Animals can best be enjoyed as a display of prowess by adept jazz players and distinctive MCs. Overall’s lofty creative ambitions have long been appealing, and he hinted at fitting grandeur in a statement upon the album’s announcement, where he drew connections between the album’s title and his thoughts on race, freedom, and the entertainment industry. We never really quite find out what those are. “It’s Animals,” the closest Animals comes to a title track, depicts two pilots talking about a “disruptive passenger,” as ruminative piano is disrupted by elephant roars. “There’s a large percentage of us that are not going to do OK,” Overall recently told The New York Times, linking the title concept back to personal well-being. “So maybe those are the people we consider animals.” This expansive menagerie of metaphorical creatures is not particularly manifest on the record, where you’re more likely to drift away to Overall crooning, smoothly if not particularly meaningfully, “Life is very long/I could’ve gave you everything/But you can’t have it all.” Animals is a provocative proposition with flashes of inspired bricolage, by a likable veteran muso, but for something so fussed over, it’s a little half-baked.

2023-06-13T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-06-13T00:02:00.000-04:00

Jazz / Rap

Warp

June 13, 2023

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Marc Hogan

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

Rilo Kiley return, now on a major label and boasting a sound polished like so many discotheque mirrors. It's all in good fun until you delve into the lyrics and discover that fun may be in bad faith.

Rilo Kiley return, now on a major label and boasting a sound polished like so many discotheque mirrors. It's all in good fun until you delve into the lyrics and discover that fun may be in bad faith.

Rilo Kiley: Under the Blacklight

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10555-under-the-blacklight/

Under the Blacklight

It's the prerogative and privilege of any pop act to change direction. It's one of the things that makes pop music so exciting. But change always carries a degree of risk, and in the case of Rilo Kiley's fourth album Under the Blacklight, it manifests a wonderful sense of irony: Under the Blacklight is Rilo Kiley's riskiest album because it's their album that takes the least risks. Finding the band's music polished to an almost blinding sheen, Blacklight is not a commercial album so much as Rilo Kiley's conception (or misconception) of what a commercial album is. It's their "Project Mersh", an alternate-universe sell-out move. But beneath that surface-- and Under the Blacklight is at first listen almost overwhelmingly surface-- Rilo Kiley must know they're full of shit. Either they're utterly serious about their flirtation with the mainstream or they're taking the piss with a wink. In both cases, the songs suffer a smothering slow death by context. At the same time, the fun-- or maybe "fun"-- disc stresses how humorless and full of shit Rilo Kiley's former indie brethren remain, scared stiff of the prospect of unabashed pop in the true please-the-masses sense. But it's still an audacious, fascinating exploration of banality, almost to a patronizing point. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the big, straight down the middle-sounding first single is called "The Moneymaker". From note one, the album's musical allusions and the references come fast and furious, and are often strikingly specific. The mock swagger of "Moneymaker", for instance, sounds like Heart doing Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero", and the rest of the disc revels in similar oddball but specific collisions. The title track sounds like Aimee Mann writing a song for Mandy Moore. "Dejalo" is Rilo Kiley's take on Miami Sound Machine. "Dreamworld" is *Mirage-*era Fleetwood Mac. "Smoke Detector" is Blondie by way of the Beatles. "15" does blue-eyed soul like Dusty Springfield. And so on. The saving grace for something so shallow is, as usual, Jenny Lewis, a strikingly direct singer and an even better lyricist. Especially following the verbose More Adventurous, she's almost ruthlessly efficient with her words here, making the most of a few choice lines. "Smoke Detector" demonstrates nearly as many derivations and variations in meaning of the word "smoke" as there are of the word "fuck," including "to fuck." "I took a man back to my room," she coos. "I was smoking him in bed/ Yeah, I was smoking in bed." In "Close Call" Lewis wryly observes "funny thing about money for sex/ You might get rich but you'll die by it," while the title track features the withering pun of an aphorism "even dead men lie in their coffins." "15" tracks the seduction of a wounded and vulnerable young woman, ripe like a peach and "down for almost anything." Many of Lewis's other character-study lyrics plum the sexual, too, not like a cop-out coy pop princess (even though someone like, say, Hilary Duff could do a fine job with the obvious cell phone metaphor of "Breakin' Up") but in a grown up sort of way. Or at least a distorted, corrupted, grown-up-in-L.A. sort of way. Ah, L.A., where there's a thrift shop on every corner, the breakfast spots bustle well into the night, the lines at clubland bathroom stalls snake to early 1980s lengths, acts get signed at karaoke bars, and the plastic surgeons know just the thing to do with all those rough edges. Forget that Rilo Kiley's songs namedrop Brighton, New York, and Laredo: Under the Blacklight adds up to the familiar headline "California Band Makes California Album." Were all the AOR indulgences at least tied together into a concept they might have been more easily forgiven. And were any of those lyrics a little more pointed and less generalized, like they were in the anomalously galvanizing anti-Bush protest "It's a Hit", they'd add up to more than just a 40-minute short story collection on tape (with incidental music). For the relative few who really, really care, debates may rage over whether Under the Blacklight marks some sort of progress, though what's just as likely is that Rilo Kiley's earlier output was artificially regressive in a bid for some sort of cred. But leave that stuff to the conspiracy theorists. To be fair, most everyone would be well served giving in and enjoying Rilo Kiley's pop for pop's sake, smart, dumb and especially smug in equal measure. Song by song it goes down awfully easy, but be warned. The band sure cleans up well, but there's a fair amount of guilty washing and hand-scrubbing to be done afterwards.

2007-08-22T02:00:02.000-04:00

2007-08-22T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Warner Bros.

August 22, 2007

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Joshua Klein

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

The California-based producer crew and indie rap icon’s first full-length collaboration isn’t revelatory, but it does show off their gifts as classicists.

The California-based producer crew and indie rap icon’s first full-length collaboration isn’t revelatory, but it does show off their gifts as classicists.

Real Bad Man / Blu: Bad News

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/real-bad-man-bad-news/

Bad News

In the early 2010s, Los Angeles rapper-producer Blu went from a scrappy, true-blue hip-hop devotee with a Warner Records deal to California beat scene and underground hermit. He seemed determined to play against type, cranking out projects under different names and even scuffling with other rappers on Twitter. But in the years since 2015’s Bad Neighbor, his collaborative album with Madlib and M.E.D., he started embracing his gifts as a world-weary and lyrically agile everyman. On Bad News, his first full-length link-up with Real Bad Man, he channels his best work by kicking jaunty battle raps and probing everyday anecdotes. Real Bad Man, a streetwear brand and label spearheaded by ex-Stüssy art director Adam Weissman, has been releasing compilations since 2020, when they dropped the first two volumes of their no-frills boom-bap series On High Alert. The collective’s production is workmanlike and occasionally zany, recalling the tongue-in-cheek qualities of Deltron 3030-era Dan the Automator, or perhaps the more colorful corners of the Alchemist’s early 2000s beat tapes. Both RBM and Blu are prolific classicists, but they are still occasionally adaptable. On Bad News, these strengths make them a compelling pair. Few rappers are as intricately introspective as Blu is. As a writer, he’s confident and brash, bending rhyme schemes and meters into pretzels. Take the second verse of “Aladdin,” a latticework of phonetics and slant rhymes which features Cali-specific boasts and bars about winning someone’s shoes in what’s implied to be a basketball game. His skills pop just as much when he’s steering through rain clouds, like on the standout “The Hurt,” where he contemplates whether to hang up the mic and go back to school. Rapping about retirement and your struggle to own a home isn’t exactly sexy, but Blu’s lively way with words confirms he was born to spit. RBM’s beats—which are built on everything from maudlin violin strings to creaking pianos and wandering bass arpeggios—provide Blu with sturdy ground to kick his shit. They’re all handsome and complement Blu’s flows well, but they shine more when RBM is willing to get a little kooky. This mostly comes when RBM punctuates certain clichés with knowing, on-the-nose samples. On “The Golden Rule,” an errant bell ring from a boxing match chimes in before Blu and C.L. Smooth mention a boxing championship bout. “Aladdin” takes this approach further: Whirring sci-fi synths fit for an episode of Hello Tomorrow! and nose-twitching tinkles from Bewitched preface Blu’s claim that he “grants wishes like a genie.” It’s a restrained type of self-awareness, a light wink and nudge that doesn’t feel too overbearing. No matter what demons he may be wrestling with, Blu always finds solace in rapping. He sounds rejuvenated trading bars alongside longtime collaborators Cashus King and Donel Smokes on “Fall of Rome,” and on “Hebrews,” he sketches his relationship to faith by connecting dots between religious parables. He’s come a long way from waiting for the bus in the rain, having carved out a niche for himself within the fickle world of indie rap. While Bad News isn’t revelatory for either Blu or Real Bad Man, it proves they’re both still able to generate sparks even when they’re just having fun.

2023-09-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-09-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Real Bad Man

September 6, 2023

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Dylan Green

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

An Indian film-music superstar raised on rap and indie, the 33-year-old singer taps Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and producer Ryan Olson in the attempt to reconcile his transnational influences.

An Indian film-music superstar raised on rap and indie, the 33-year-old singer taps Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and producer Ryan Olson in the attempt to reconcile his transnational influences.

Sid Sriram: Sidharth

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sid-sriram-sidharth/

Sidharth

The first thing you need to know about Sid Sriram is that the guy can really sing. He’s got a lush, honeyed baritone with just a hint of smoldering melancholy, at once sensual and brooding. A lifetime spent in the rigorous discipline of Carnatic music—a South Indian sub-genre of Indian classical that he started practicing when he was three—allows him to deploy this voice with great tonal precision and flexibility, switching effortlessly between sultry croon, warbling falsetto, and the meditative melismas of traditional ragas. It’s what has made him so successful in South Indian film music, where he’s spent the past decade delivering hit after hit, weaving his vocal magic over everything from Ilaiyaraaja’s traditional raga-inspired compositions to A.R. Rahman’s more contemporary pop and rap-influenced creations. Before he was a superstar playback singer in India, Sriram was just another musically inclined kid growing up in Fremont, California. He was steeped in his mother’s Carnatic music tradition, but there was also R&B and gospel, West Coast hip-hop and peak blog-era indie rock. While studying music production and engineering at the Berklee School of Music, he had his first brush of viral fame with a genuinely heartbreaking cover of Frank Ocean’s We All Try, hinting at the directions he was looking to explore in his own songwriting. If not for a chance interaction with Rahman, who gave Sriram his first break in Tamil film music, what sort of songs would the pop-obsessed twenty-something have written? Where would his talents have taken him? On Sidharth, his ambitious, boundary-pushing new album, Sriram offers one potential answer to that question. Written over an intense week at producer Ryan Olson’s Minneapolis studio—with a small team of collaborators that includes Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—the album is a nostalgic romp through the diverse traditions that Sriram calls his own, an attempt to reconcile the totality of his transnational musical inheritance. Its 13 tracks veer from Carnatic-inflected gospel to jittery, alt-electro love ballads and expansive, orchestral R&B, all tied together by his distinctive voice. Lead single “The Hard Way” features crisp Auto-Tuned romantic exhortations over caffeinated beats and chopped-up electronics, a classic love song draped in retro-futuristic finery. Over the pensive keys and languid rhythm of “Do the Dance,” Sriram sings about searching for a home he cannot name or define, his longing embodied in visions of a green-eyed girl. His voice drips with multi-tracked yearning when not being pitch-shifted into an otherworldly yowl. On the Afrobeat-adjacent, Vernon-featuring “Quiet Storm,” a song about letting go and giving in to divinity, gospel harmonies transform into Carnatic-tinged vibrato as Sriram’s powerful voice threads the needle between two very different devotional traditions. Many of the album’s highlights come from Sriram and Olson’s experiments in serendipitous juxtaposition—the Tamil folk chorus soaring over stabs of industrial synth and breakneck tabla percussion on the breakup cut “Friendly Fire,” the uplifting pop vocals floating above stuttering, blown-out percussion on “Stance.” It doesn’t always work. The discordant synths and slow-burn vocals of “Blue Spaces” never quite build to a convincing crescendo, no matter how many vocal runs Sriram throws in. The house-y lounge pop of “Shoulda Been There” falls flat, like a badly mixed mashup of two incongruent songs. At times, Sriram’s obvious Bon Iver worship leads him astray. His lyrical approach mimics Vernon’s impressionistic songwriting, but his lyrical conceits can be unconvincing, as on Do the Dance” (“Bring back the street fights I brawled at for you”). “Dear Sahana” sacrifices raw emotion for stylistic perfection, rendering its love-lorn lyrics in a mellifluous but emotionally inert baritone—a torch song with the flame turned way too low. Still, these stumbles fade in the afterglow of Sriram’s agile voice and earnest sincerity. Sidharth remains a bold, risk-taking record about coming to terms with the many contradictions of a transnational identity and the existential crises that come from a life lived across two continents. The key, he suggests, is to focus on love in all its myriad forms: romantic, divine, and—most elusive of all—for oneself. As he proclaims on the quietly transcendental “The Hard Way,” “Love’s at the center of it all.”

2023-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Rock

Do What You Love / Def Jam

September 13, 2023

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Bhanuj Kappal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/

The debut album from the co-founder of NON is a noisy and unrelenting ride through the hell of this world, full of label associates who help define its gruesome electronic sound.

The debut album from the co-founder of NON is a noisy and unrelenting ride through the hell of this world, full of label associates who help define its gruesome electronic sound.

Chino Amobi: PARADISO

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23270-paradiso/

PARADISO

We live in such times where shadowy forces have distorted our democracies, science is increasingly viewed with suspicion, and verifiable information is dismissed as “alternative facts.” If death becomes the only truth we can all agree upon, what are we all doing to prepare? The first full-length album by Chino Amobi addresses these existential anxieties and mortal fears in epic, violent terms. Running to over an hour in length, PARADISO is a gutsy, gruesome inversion of its sweet title—but there’s a crucial ambivalence at its heart. Should we run for our lives? Or is this chaos a satisfyingly sadistic end to the entire, ill-conceived project? The Richmond, Va. artist, formerly known as Diamond Black Hearted Boy, is the co-founder of NON, the family of experimental artists with African roots whose stated mission is a rejection of mass culture and existing political conditions. True to his collaborative principles, Amobi brings in a dizzying number of guest artists to flesh out the savage world of PARADISO. Fellow NON artists Nkisi and FAKA, rapper Haleek Maul, trans model Aurel Haize Odogbo and singer Benja SL are all brought in to chant desperate mantras as the city crumbles. Elysia Crampton appears several times with her dark, cryptic poems, setting the gothic mood on the opening track with an amended version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The City in the Sea,” which she recites over crashing waves and bolts of thunder; pathetic fallacy blown up to widescreen proportions. Dutch E Germ, aka Tim DeWit, formerly of psych collective Gang Gang Dance, co-produces five tracks including the album’s hallucinatory climax, “Paradiso,” while Rabit appears on the bone-crunchingly belligerent “Negative Fire, III.” The hour-long album hurtles forwards, zig-zagging from blasted noise collages to lilting Latin rhythms, noisy ’80s industrial to thrashing surf rock, and even sun-kissed pop on “The Floating World Pt 1,” a dazzling break in the clouds provided by Benja SL. But the sounds of our already-existing hellscape are a constant intrusion. Amobi pummels us with the sonic detritus of urban life: demonic radio jingles, malfunctioning gadgets, and fried car alarms. Are we circling the inferno, or is this real life? Can we speed our way through purgatory? These clashing styles and genres rarely settle into music as such, leaving Amobi’s enticing grooves straining to be heard under the cacophony. Noise obscures our perception, the flow is constantly interrupted, and chaos reigns. The sensory overload speaks to Amobi’s rejection of “the passive experience of listening,” as he described it to Okayafrica. “I try to use sounds that are active, to wake the listener up and to bring them into the moment.” The sound of breaking glass, for instance—now almost parodic through over-use in the “deconstructed” club tracks sometimes found adjacent to NON’s experimental electronics—is twisted into knowingly ridiculous shapes, hammered out repeatedly in grotesque, pitch-bent variations. The relentless disorder feels like dipping out of consciousness, as fantastical as a happy dream or as grueling as a nightmare. Sometimes the horror aesthetic is plainly signposted, tongue firmly in cheek, as with the creepy fairground organs of “White Maetal” and the barked radio idents: “You are listening to NON Worldwide Radio with Chino Amobi!” Like any horror movie buff, he knows that choosing to be frightened is also a way of reclaiming your fear. Amobi has said he wants to express “an optimism in the face of dire circumstances,” explaining that his music is “making a point of showing care or empathy in a space that can seem like a void. Empathy through the matrix.” PARADISO is his battering ram, a weapon that places the listener constantly in the now. You can’t comprehend it as a whole; you merely exist in it from one moment to the next. If hell is already here on earth, well, so are we, and as long as we can hear each other’s screams, we must still exist. Not just death, but the fact that we are alive becomes another truth we can all agree on. Scream back, and send your empathy into the void.

2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

NON / UNO NYC

May 15, 2017

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Chal Ravens

https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/