Datasets:

bigdata-pw

/

Pitchfork

like 0

Parkay Quarts is Parquet Courts’ two frontmen and principal songwriters, Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, filled out with help from assorted friends, including Jackie-O Motherfucker’s Jef Brown. Content Nausea is brimming with smart, funny, punk-informed rock.

Parkay Quarts is Parquet Courts’ two frontmen and principal songwriters, Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, filled out with help from assorted friends, including Jackie-O Motherfucker’s Jef Brown. Content Nausea is brimming with smart, funny, punk-informed rock.

Parkay Quarts: Content Nausea

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20005-parkay-quarts-content-nausea/

Content Nausea

Pop history is full of instances of bands creating new identities to free themselves from the imagined strictures of their old ones. The Beatles had Sgt. Pepper’s; Prince had Camille; Beyoncé had Sasha Fierce; Garth Brooks had Chris Gaines. Parkay Quarts have been billed as an “alter-ego” of the smart, scrappy punk band Parquet Courts, but the term seems off: While “alter-ego” implies a different side of the same person—Superman to Clark Kent—Parkay Quarts are effectively Parquet Courts’ two frontmen and principal songwriters, Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, filled out with help from assorted friends, including Jackie-O Motherfucker’s Jef Brown and Bob Jones, from the band Eaters. Alongside PCPC—Parquet Courts’ collaboration with the muddy psychedelic band PC Worship—Parkay Quarts seems less like an attempt to devise a new identity than to blur the edges of the one they already have. Content Nausea was proudly recorded on four-track cassette, that old saw of indie cred and self-reliance in the pre-digital era. The recording is humid and a little sloppy; the songs are occasionally in rough shape, with scaffolding showing. Both Austin and Savage are expert mimics—the kind of songwriters who suggest a rich and variegated past without ever seeming like slaves to it. Listen to Content Nausea—as with Parquet Courts’ great Sunbathing Animal, which came out only six months ago—and you’ll hear Richard Hell, the Minutemen, the B-52s, the Raincoats, Pavement, Talking Heads, and an entire history of bands who took the nervous energy of early rock'n'roll and launched it into more oblique orbits. But people said the same thing about the Strokes almost 15 years ago, you might be thinking. They did, and they were right then too. Such is the great wheel of time. (Not that Parquet Courts are all that much like the Strokes—they are brainier, funnier, more severe and less likely to go over at barbeques.) And so we arrive once again at the indie-rock analog to a bistro burger: Something simple and familiar made with enough invention to make you feel like the tradition still has room to grow. Content Nausea—what a title! Song after song, Savage and Brown bark their anxieties about modern life with enough wit to suggest that they’re aware of the convention and enough passion to suggest that they feel those anxieties anyhow. “This year it became harder to be tender/ Harder and harder to remember/ Meeting a friend/ Writing a letter/ Being lost/ Antique ritual/ All lost to the ceremony of progress,” Savage says on the title track, his voice flat and intense, the beat poet unspooling his revelations over free jazz. And then comes the caveat: “Ignore this part, it’s an advertisement/ These people are famous, I’d trust 'em!” Are any of these lyrics specifically about 2014, a year in which you can walk into a bar and see someone wearing glasses connected to the Internet? Not really. Like Sunbathing Animal, Content Nausea keeps its symbols flexible and vague. Sometimes the vagueness seems a little lazy, sometimes just ironic—rather than preoccupying itself with the actual stuff of modern life, Nausea is preoccupied with albums preoccupied with the stuff of modern life. But like all traditionalists, closeted or out, Parquet Courts seem of the mind that these changes—dial-up to smartphones, missile launchers to drone strikes—are superficial. The only difference between now and then is the shape of the toy, not how we use it or what it does to our brains. Nausea is easier to listen to than Sunbathing Animal in part because it seems less ambitious. Four of its tracks are around a minute long; one is a so-so cover of "These Boots are Made For Walkin’" (itself a punk staple as ubiquitous as the safety pin); one is basically spoken word over noise—a reminder that for all the band’s nervous intensity, they’re basically bookworms. If they belong in a tradition of New York punk—an ambition Savage has talked cannily about in interviews—it’s the tradition of people like Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell and Patti Smith, stalking moonlit streets in ripped jeans with Rimbaud and Baudelaire tucked into their unwashed armpits, less concerned with smashing the state than with cutting through the red tape that holds them back from the wilderness within, romantics who tried to forge ahead by clawing back to the source.

2014-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

What's Your Rupture?

November 12, 2014

0146f306-b0e8-428b-905a-4ccca1b37b71

Mike Powell

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

The Montreal producer pays tribute to the classic sound of two bygone Canadian techno labels, yielding some of the liveliest music in his catalog yet.

The Montreal producer pays tribute to the classic sound of two bygone Canadian techno labels, yielding some of the liveliest music in his catalog yet.

Project Pablo: Inside Unsolved EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/project-pablo-inside-unsolved-ep/

Inside Unsolved EP

More than engineered emotion or physical release, producer Patrick Holland’s hazy, unhurried house music tends to evoke a sense of place. The reference points, particularly under his Project Pablo project, are often autobiographical: earworm melodies and jazzy grooves that reflect his native Vancouver, where he grew up listening to live bands and breezy, West Coast house; wandering basslines and fuzzy textures that soundtrack urban Montreal, where he’s lived and deejayed since 2014; and the sleepy, pastoral expanse that exists between the two (his mellow 2018 album, Come to Canada You Will Like It, was a tribute to rural chill). Most of these productions, while imaginative and inviting, aren’t engrossing enough to send you rushing across the border. But Inside Unsolved, Holland’s new EP for Spectral Sound, offers a refreshingly edgy and stirring glimpse at Canada’s eccentric underground. This time, he reaches outside of his own narrative and revisits the country’s musical past—specifically the mid 1990s to early 2000s, when experimental, minimalist house and techno thrived in once-bustling steel towns. The resulting EP—part tribute, part reinterpretation—hat-tips a few of the influences that made Montreal the dance-music hotbed it is today. The project unfolds in four distinct tracks, each with its own vibe, like rooms in a labyrinthine warehouse party. You begin in the middle of the action. “The Solution,” a hypnotic, acid-laced techno groove, is about as big a dancefloor moment as we’ve seen from Holland—bouncy, structured, immediate—and drizzles woozy melodies over concrete, shuffling rhythms. Fluttering whistles and billowing synths make it feel alive and oddly pretty, like smokestack clouds floating over an industrial skyline. For an artist who occasionally veers from low-key to soporific, the song feels like an awakening. Elsewhere, the mood is more far out. “Pill” and “Big Room Delusion” rattle with dizzying, mechanical polyrhythms, like wandering around a factory floor. The beats are somewhat secondary, overpowered by the synthesizers’ twinkling arpeggios, scurrying scales, and dissipating echoes. The sensation is busy but emotionless, like the unconscious energy of an ambling machine. Both songs carry on a little too long, until the activity begins to feel slightly claustrophobic. But perhaps that’s a part of being in a place, too. Sometimes, you overstay your welcome and find yourself scanning for the exits. Holland said that he was specifically inspired by two Canadian labels: Steel City Records, a mid-’90s techno outlet from Hamilton, Ontario, that took cues from nearby Detroit, and Vancouver’s Map Music, home to off-kilter, adventurous productions that delighted in chaos. Both of these labels have been defunct for years, but in the scenes and cities that fostered them, their presence can still be felt. By paying homage to the past, Holland also manages to bring the labels’ visions back to life, funnelling their outsider, industrial energy into loopy, danceable new songs to be spread through clubs and warehouses around the world. On the buoyant and glistening “Pressure No Impact,” a daydream of a track, the mood is at once nostalgic and hopeful: Are the pitter-pattering chimes and pipes echoes of a bygone era, or perhaps, a pulse?

2019-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Spectral Sound

November 4, 2019

0147b532-fe3b-4c41-8cf9-e5ecc04f8e8c

Megan Buerger

https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/

Twenty years on, the album that changed the course of popular music is reissued in two deluxe versions. The enduring brilliance of the original is at this point beyond dispute, but the value of the demos, alternate mixes, and live cuts included on two new sets is debatable.

Twenty years on, the album that changed the course of popular music is reissued in two deluxe versions. The enduring brilliance of the original is at this point beyond dispute, but the value of the demos, alternate mixes, and live cuts included on two new sets is debatable.

Nirvana: Nevermind [20th Anniversary Edition]

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15854-nevermind-20th-anniversary-edition/

Nevermind [20th Anniversary Edition]

Despite its tremendous influence on the mainstream rock that followed, it's hard to think of another album that sounds much like Nirvana's Nevermind, a record with so much more pop and punk punch than any music it inspired. Of course, no diamond-certified, canonical treasure hitting the two-decade mark can be left well enough alone in 2011-- especially one that changed the lives of a lot people now approaching middle age, with the discretionary income to prove it. After all, "super deluxe" reissues of classic albums don't even have to be tied to an anniversary these days. But Nevermind is 20 this week, still a pretty respectable number in a world where any milestone marks an excuse to shift a few more units. The only question is whether these reissues-- a single-disc remaster, a 2xCD "deluxe" version, and a 4xCD+DVD "super-deluxe" edition-- are that rare essential repurchase that makes you hear an album you've possibly exhausted in new ways, or if it's just another mediocre jumble of odds and ends that inadvertently reveals the flaws and blemishes carefully excised from the original 12-song set. Sadly, both expanded versions fall into the latter category, with material ranging from "interesting" to "historical curiosity" to "of zero value to even superfans." But this mish-mash of sketches, practice-space woodshedding, and alternate-but-not-very mixes does help explain what makes Nevermind so unique. Nirvana certainly never made another album like it. The precocious Bleach still has its partisans, folks who think its primal bash-and-howl is the be-all-end-all of rock, while In Utero stands as the band's most harrowing statement, where it's a toss-up as to whether the riffs or the lyrics hurt more. But Nevermind was and remains an unrepeatable object. It retains the gleeful pummel of the first album while hinting at the bleakness of the third. Yet there's also a concision and clarity that Nirvana hadn't quite mastered on the gnarly-by-necessity Bleach and wouldn't allow themselves on the stark and caustic In Utero. Nirvana began their career with no illusions about their chances for mass success and ended it by seeing just how abrasive a platinum-selling band could get away with being. But when they got their chance at the brass ring, they went at it with a bubblegum band's canniness, however much Cobain shit on the shiny final product after the fact. Andy Wallace's radio-ready mix certainly helped sharpen this potentially no-concessions, indie-to-major leap into an obvious commercial proposition. But even if they'd settled on producer Butch Vig's slightly less slick mixes-- made as a reference for the band and identified on the super deluxe edition's third disc as the "Devonshire mixes"-- Nevermind would likely have fared well in the charts, since these early passes aren't far from Wallace's infamous high-gloss version. Listening in hindsight, though, they have the woozy effect of feeling just slightly off, leaving you to focus only on what's missing. The box set does make clear that Nirvana honed these songs over a long period. Listening to the various sessions leading up to the one that gave us the album we know-- especially the nearly unlistenable "boombox" mixes of early demos-- you learn very quickly that these songs didn't arrive perfectly formed in one sustained burst of inspiration. The hours of rehearsals and the expensive time spent tinkering in the studio shaped them into classics. It helped that there are songs on Nevermind that might appeal to people who've never heard a hardcore album in their lives, who might have even (gasp!) kinda liked the glossier hard-rock bands whose era largely ended with the rise of grunge. Moving away from the heavy-at-all-costs sound he'd always been both enamored with and suspicious of, Cobain worked diligently on his big hooks and decided to stop smothering his natural melodic gifts under so much self-conscious sludge. The key was that Nirvana, unlike many of their indie peers, didn't assume that intensity was incompatible with polish. Cobain's discomfort could be unnerving because it sounded as unmediated as anything allowed on the radio could get. There was too much pop-rock study involved to claim Nevermind as some kind of art brut document of one dude's unraveling. Confronted with something like "Polly", Cobain's distress was obvious in 1991, long before his shotgun-assisted exit. But it wasn't the way Nevermind exposed Cobain's psychic wounds that provided support for those who related to him. It was the fact that, fucked up as he was, Cobain still found pleasure in rock's most emphatic clichés and bent them to his own never-quite-smirking ends. He snuck into the spotlight while remaining an alienated weirdo, but for a while there, you suspected he was enjoying the attention, even if he knew that it was all a joke to be taken about as seriously as high school cliquishness. "Territorial Pissings" is as raw as any punk song I know, but it actually found its way into the hands of suburban tweens. How good must that have felt, to be responsible for such a thing? Even as they moved toward the mainstream, Nirvana were trying shit that no one would have called an easy route to success. Nevermind is drenched in the filthy Pacific Northwest roar that slapped Cobain into action as a teen, but it's as catchy as any of the radio giants that caught his ear as a kid. It's driven by pain as naked and personal as the riot grrrl bands whose company he kept and as fuck-around goofy as the Seattle contemporaries who both reveled in and mercilessly parodied machismo. And despite the fact that none of those modes would seem to fit together on the same album, let alone all of them, it's all hammered into a still-disarming whole, a collection of anthems that retain the idiosyncrasies of the very weird band that made them. It helped that Cobain had yet to be disabused of the idea that you could be an idiosyncratic indie kid and a rock star without compromising on either front. That's probably why the bonus material here feels less like a revelation and more like the kind of peek-behind-the-curtain that you wind up regretting. Nevermind is basically a great fake-out. It presents itself as an off-the-cuff explosion, a from-the-gut expression of realness and energy in the grand punk tradition, but it was actually the product of a shit ton of hard work. If you don't hold with the first-take-is-the-best-take philosophy, your respect for Cobain may actually increase when you realize how dedicated he was to getting every element right. Listening to him fumbling his way toward greatness on the "boombox" mixes of songs like "Come as You Are" and "Something in the Way" or hearing a newly cemented group working out the kinks in their interplay in the studio, you may also realize that you don't want to hear the missteps and rewrites and second guessing that went into the perfect-as-is final product. The "boombox" mixes, Devonshire mixes, and Smart Sessions (early Vig-produced takes recorded with drummer Chad Channing that were initially intended for release on a second album for Sub Pop) are largely work tapes. Listening to them feels like studying every unused scrap of a film classic that someone managed to sneak out of the editing room, which is about as fun as that description makes them sound. If you've always been suspicious of the album's production sheen, there's no Holy Grail here that's going to give you the raw take you're looking for. For all its finessing and tweaking, though, Nevermind is still a thousand times closer to the unpremeditated intensity of Cobain's D.I.Y. days than any of the post-grunge rockers who claimed it as an influence. I defy you to listen to any of the live performances on this edition-- the only essential extras, though less uncomfortably intense than 1994's MTV Unplugged set and less definitive and uniformly powerful than 2009's release of their king-making set at the 1992 Reading Festival-- and not hear a ragged, joyful, charismatic band that makes those inert, angst-ridden followers sound like they come from another aesthetic universe. That charisma is a big reason why Nevermind remains a 10. But in-concert takes on "Sliver" and "Been a Son" that are the third most thrilling live versions officially available on CD? It's not as if all this "exclusive" dreck-- most of which has been floating around on bootlegs and .zip files and YouTube for eons-- will permanently dull the excitement of the Nevermind, but trying to swallow it all might put you off the album itself for a long while. If you're truly interested in hearing this stuff, the two-disc deluxe set is easily the better deal, giving you a little hint of the various stages of Nevermind's construction without wearing you out the way the four-disc set will. But if you really want to celebrate the 20th, you'll be better off just giving the original album a few spins. Despite how much better-left-forgotten material is being offered up here as essential, there's still more life in the real Nevermind than anything that's attempted to replicate its attack since.

2011-09-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-09-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Geffen

September 27, 2011

0148397d-586f-429f-be12-063dfbf067b9

Jess Harvell

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/

Unraveling from the pressure of success and celebrity, the Band moved to a new studio in Woodstock and made their fourth album, a stiff and scattershot record that is somewhat enlivened by a new reissue.

Unraveling from the pressure of success and celebrity, the Band moved to a new studio in Woodstock and made their fourth album, a stiff and scattershot record that is somewhat enlivened by a new reissue.

The Band: Cahoots (50th Anniversary Edition)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-band-cahoots-50th-anniversary-edition/

Cahoots (50th Anniversary Edition)

The Band knew they’d made a dud. Richard Manuel was in the throes of addiction and had stopped writing altogether. Robbie Robertson—who, by 1971, was tasked with churning out all of the Band’s material—found himself battling an intense bout of writer’s block, which sapped his passion for the project. So the Band didn’t have any completed songs to take into the studio with them, which was fine because the studio itself was barely finished. Their manager, Albert Grossman, had built Bearsville Recording Studio in Woodstock, New York, with the idea that his clients could use it as a clubhouse—most of them lived less than 10 minutes away. They would have a place to experiment, as they planned to do on their fourth album. “We are not traditional studio musicians where we go to a studio for a particular sound,” Robertson comments in the liner notes to this 50th-anniversary reissue. “This studio had no sound. We were trying to find its sound.” More dire than any of that, however, was the state of the Band, which was unraveling from the pressure of success and celebrity. Following their turn as Bob Dylan’s touring band in the months after he went electric, they’d made two albums—Music from Big Pink in ’68 and The Band in ’69—that took an irreverent approach to American traditional music, mixing old, weird folk with rock and whatever mad scientist Garth Hudson was doing. It was revolutionary, and half a century later those two albums form the bedrock of what we call roots music. It wasn’t a matter of how to follow them up: They’d already released the very-good-but-not-similarly-perfect Stage Fright in 1970, and there was enough ego among them to believe they could scale those heights once more. It was more a matter of rising tension within the Band, which either forced Robertson into a leadership role or allowed him to make a power play, depending on who’s telling the story. Whereas they once shared songwriting credit, by 1971, Robertson was getting the lion’s share. Most of the Band were off getting high and carousing around Woodstock. So those sessions at Bearsville were fraught, to say the least. Robertson had powered through his writer’s block, but the songs were assuredly not among his best. He’d always rummaged through American history to find his subjects, but these new songs had all the passion and mystery of a book report. By his own admission, he was more interested in film and literature than in music at this moment, but these songs sound like they’re about movies and books rather than actual human beings. Each one has a critical thesis, a clearly stated reason for being written, which makes them sound self-conscious, stiff, oppressively literal. Robertson based “Shootout in Chinatown” on Herbert Asbury’s 1933 book The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld, yet he presents the material matter-of-factly, without the lens of character to bring that milieu to life or reveal any stakes whatsoever. According to Hudson, Robertson’s songs were difficult and made it hard for him or anyone to find a place within them to experiment. Not that the others were trying: They quickly discovered that they could just pop in at Bearsville whenever they needed to track their parts; suddenly recording a new album became just another errand in the day. So the music turned out as stiff as the songs, not completely lifeless but never quite engaged. The most substantial contributions are made by people outside the Band. Van Morrison barrels through “4% Pantomime” with such lusty exuberance that he inspires an equally rambunctious performance out of Manuel. Robertson also had the good sense to ask Allen Toussaint to write horn charts for “Life Is a Carnival,” which provides the album’s wildest moments. He also asked Dylan if he had any songs for them. He gave them the humorous and inventive “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” perhaps the truest classic on the album, featuring one of Helm’s most animated vocal performances. Cahoots is about the past giving way to the future and what gets lost in the process. That theme is written on the surface of every song, too calculated in its persuasion and too superficial in its stakes. “How’re you gonna replace human hands?” Manuel sings on “Last of the Blacksmiths.” “Found guilty, said the judge, for not being in demand.” And there’s actually a song called “Where Do We Go From Here,” which ponders the fate of railroads and buffalo in the modern world. The Band once seemed to locate aspects of the past still embedded in the present, but here they sound like they’re stranded in 1971, eulogizing what’s gone and fearing what’s coming. It curdles into an easy, vague nostalgia resembling—horrifically—that of Nixon’s Silent Majority, hungry for the certainty of some mythic American past. For the first time, the Band sound like scolds wagging a finger at the whippersnappers who don’t appreciate the “eagle of distinction.” Not only did they realize Cahoots was a flop at the time, but they never forgot it. Helm barely mentions it in his memoir, This Wheel’s on Fire, and Robertson also dismisses it succinctly in his memoir, Testimony. But there’s an upside: Because it’s not a sacred text like Big Pink and The Band, this box set can take a few liberties with the recordings and even revive that sense of experimentation that was supposed to animate the original sessions. Whereas the first installments in this reissue series took pains in their remastering, Robertson and Bob Clearmountain cut loose. They take out instruments in order to declutter the arrangements and let the songs breathe a little more, bringing out the lovely sustain of the piano on “Last of the Blacksmiths” and highlighting Helm’s tom-tom rhythm to make “Life Is a Carnival” just a little funkier. They even add a few new parts, such as the new outro on “Where Do We Go From Here” and a reworked intro to “Shootout in Chinatown.” This kind of thing can raise some alarms, especially when the original mix is not included in the box set, but really, what’s the harm? These changes nudge the album in the direction of Big Pink and The Band and undercut some of its sappy nostalgia. This version sounds much livelier, putting more emphasis on Hudson’s contributions. While he did have trouble finding space in these songs, he was as keenly imaginative as ever, and his sax solo on “Volcano” and his parlor piano on sentimental closer “The River Hymn” sound even more vivid for being more prominent in the mix. The Band could still kick up a fuss, made evident by the live set included on this box set. These versions of “Rag Mama Rag” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’” barely hold together, but that ragged volatility makes them even more exciting, as though we’re watching a trapeze artist fly through the air. The tracks were recorded in Paris in May 1971, just after the sessions but before the album’s release. That tour—their first in Europe since they backed Dylan five years before—was rocky, and slow ticket sales exacerbated an already-simmering tension between the members. By the time they returned to the States, something had changed between them. It would be four years—an eternity in pop music—before they would release an album of new material. Would things have been different had the 2021 remaster been released instead of the 1971 mix? Probably not. It’s still a fundamentally flawed album, and those flaws were symptoms of a larger ailment within the Band. Perhaps that explains the overriding nostalgia on these songs, that sense of having something beautiful and essential. Cahoots is a eulogy for a Band that was already in the past tense. 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

Capitol

December 15, 2021

0149680a-4394-4499-a2a9-9120277fc7f0

Stephen M. Deusner

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

With incomparable flair, the pop diva returns to her dance-pop days with a fabulously fun and deeply personal album that is at turns bizarre, theatrical, and ambitious.

With incomparable flair, the pop diva returns to her dance-pop days with a fabulously fun and deeply personal album that is at turns bizarre, theatrical, and ambitious.

Lady Gaga: Chromatica

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lady-gaga-chromatica/

Chromatica

Lady Gaga has canceled Earth. She lives on planet Chromatica now. Yes, this is Stefani Germanotta’s return to all that is Lady Gaga: bizarre and theatrical and ambitious, swathed in electrodes, operating with a ga-ga-galaxy brain, delivering dance bangers for us canceled Earthlings. Chromatica is her first pop-pop album since 2011; unlike the non-“Why Did You Do That?” parts of the A Star is Born soundtrack and the beige acoustica of 2016’s Joanne, there’s not a ballad to be found. Specifically, according to Gaga lore, “Chromatica” is some kind of far-flung pink-prism Mad Max planet where “ballads are illegal.” Who doesn’t love world-building? But while Chromatica is a return to Gaga’s dance-pop days, that doesn’t mean quite the same thing now. It’s been 12 years since her debut album The Fame, released when “EDM” was just corporate jargon and “dance” meant stompy electroclash. In 2020, a Lady Gaga dance album comes out as an unabashed revival of ’90s house music. But if anyone’s earned a trip to the house, it’s Lady Gaga, who is among the few big pop stars today who can legitimately be called a diva. When Gaga sings, she sings out: not chill, not Idol-pretty, but unafraid to go there, whether there be throaty rasps or sotto-voice commands or feral desperation. It’s why her hard-rock dalliances largely worked, and why Chromatica feels more substantial than other artists’ throwaway dance turns. So much nu-house is producer-driven, its vocalists reduced to decorations if even credited; there is no risk of this with Gaga. Everything here would be unmistakably her even if self-reference didn’t abound. Lead single “Stupid Love” salvages the juddering sequencer of “Do What U Want,” kicks up the speed, and weaves Gaga’s past lead singles around it like Maypole streamers: the oncoming-juggernaut heft of “Bad Romance,” the melodic contour of “Born This Way,” the conceit of “Applause.” The other line about Chromatica is that it’s Gaga’s most personal album. You may recall that Joanne was also called Gaga’s “most personal album.” That time, it was “personal” in the same way all pop stars’ unplugged albums get called that: the arrangements had acoustic guitar, and the AutoTune was kept to a tasteful touch-up. Chromatica loses the guitars but certainly handles heavy subject matter: PTSD triggers, antipsychotic meds, sexual assault. In fact, most of Lady Gaga’s music since The Fame has been very personal. For every shiny, poppy song like “Telephone” or “Hair,” Gaga’s recorded three more with wounds at the core: the personified fears of The Fame, the parts of Born This Way that are more darkwave or Warcraft than bubblegum; the bitter mess of 2013’s Artpop. Themes recur: fragmented identity, soldiers to emptiness, drinking tears, dying a little when being touched. The art is often messy, the specific mess of art written from trauma. Even when Gaga dons freaky costumes or writes high-concept songs about Judas or swine, the artifice cracks. It’s why her albums hold up surprisingly well. It’s telling which Gaga moments have resurfaced from the early 2010s into current cultural memory: the deadpan, panting intro to “Monster,” or the sludgy-gothy “Bloody Mary,” which TikTok made even sludgier and gothier. Chromatica reverses this effect. This is house music at its most shiny and immaculate, a genre made from ache and escapism, high strings and numbing throbs. But Gaga’s lyrics are plainspoken, mostly free of religious metaphors and pretense; of the two high-concept songs on Chromatica, one is deliberately silly (“Babylon”) and the other (“Alice”) immediately yanks the metaphor back into reality: The first words are “my name isn’t Alice” and the song is inhabited not with white rabbits but the more terrifying creatures inside one’s mind. The emergency in “911” refers to olanzapine, a fast-acting antipsychotic that Gaga says saved her life. The track begins with a cold, stark beat, her vocals affectless and vocoded. The whole thing sounds off, and when the sweet, singsong chorus arrives, it just sounds off even more. The counterpoint never quite resolves with the melody, and the most painful lines (“Wish I laughed and kept the good friendships”) are tossed off, almost missable. But these are wonderful details, ones you can dance through now, then catch later. For all Gaga’s emphasis on Chromatica being an album meant to be heard start-to-finish with no skips, the sequencing is a bit off. The string interludes, composed with Morgan Kibby (M83, White Sea), separate the albums into three acts, each with its own filler. The climactic redemption of Ariana Grande collab “Rain On Me” comes about ten tracks too early, and “Free Woman” and “Fun Tonight” lose energy so close together. In act two, “Plastic Doll”—the basic idea of which you can guess just by reading the title—would have been too on-the-nose on The Fame. “Sour Candy,” the break-the-internet collaboration with K-pop superstars BLACKPINK, is sassy enough, but on a Lady Gaga album, and particularly this album, it feels out of place. That’s partly because there’s no Gaga until over a minute in, partly because we’ve literally heard it before: “Sour Candy” is at least the fourth pop song built on a sample of Maya Jane Coles’ “What They Say.” Then there’s the unavoidable fact that Chromatica is an album explicitly made for big communal dancefloors, released just before Pride month, a big celebratory mood, in a year when none of those things quite exist like they used to. Chromatica’s two strongest tracks are near-total opposites. Imagine an axis from bizarro transcendence to pure transcendence; “Sine From Above” is all the way at the left. Each individual part of it makes sense, kind of. Lady Gaga and Elton John? Sure; they’re godfamily, after all, and he’s a livelier duet partner than Tony Bennett or Bradley Cooper. Elton John with two-thirds of Swedish House Mafia? That was the idea, back in 2013. An ode to a literal sine wave, dropping decibels from the heavens? If anyone would write that, it’d be Gaga. Attacking that theme with zero-irony gusto that Eurovision would co-sign, going for it and never looking back? Chopping everything up for a drum-and-bass tangent at the end? To borrow the theater-kid saying, it’s big and wrong—yet so big, it’s hard to call it wrong at all. If “Sine From Above” runs on WTF, “Enigma” runs on familiarity: Every musical and emotional beat arrives precisely on cue, as if the club had muscle memory. It’s massive, it has a gravitational pull. Uncoincidentally, the chorus recalls a certain other song about being heroic lovers, just for one night. It slots right into Gaga canon: Enigma is the name of her recent Vegas residency, and the snippets of sax that crest above the choruses recall the late E Street Band member Clarence Clemons on Born This Way. And, crucially, it nails the desire of meeting someone in all its urgency. On planet Chromatica, “Enigma” is otherworldly: the atmospheres light up violet, dragon’s eyes and phantoms abounding. It’s the same drive that’s powered dance music, from disco to house to Gaga—turning a moment heightened, more fantastic, and, even at its most strobe-lit and artificial, somehow entirely human.

2020-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Interscope

June 1, 2020

01499a1c-d670-4f68-ad2b-1f122b74dde7

Katherine St. Asaph

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

Dirty Sprite 2 brushes aside the pop overtures of Future's sophomore album Honest. Building off a powerful three-mixtape comeback run, DS2 is bleak and unforgiving, a redemption story for a man who is certain it’s too late for his soul to be redeemed; instead of a triumphal arc, we burrow deeper and deeper into Future’s dystopian universe.

Dirty Sprite 2 brushes aside the pop overtures of Future's sophomore album Honest. Building off a powerful three-mixtape comeback run, DS2 is bleak and unforgiving, a redemption story for a man who is certain it’s too late for his soul to be redeemed; instead of a triumphal arc, we burrow deeper and deeper into Future’s dystopian universe.

Future: Dirty Sprite 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20810-dirty-sprite-2/

Dirty Sprite 2

The same week Future announced the release date for Dirty Sprite 2, his third official retail release, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto. Its data has been revealing the dwarf planet as an icy, complicated world, still in geological flux, marked by a bright, heart-shaped feature in the center of much darker terrain. It’s not just an apt parallel for the rapper, who named his expectation-defying debut after the misunderstood planet: it’s the ultimate symbol for the latest and most relevant phase of Future’s career. The stars have never been more uncannily aligned for the man born Nayvadius Wilburn, the reigning king of Atlanta who’s deployed a trilogy of album-quality mixtapes since last October to recapture some of the goodwill lost as he’s figured out what kind of artist he wanted to be over the past three years. There’s been a backlash against sophomore album Honest in the past year—even Future has distanced himself from the project, which he released before the ugly demise of his relationship with ex-fiancée Ciara. But Honest wasn’t a bad album by any means; it was just confused. It was obvious Future was being tugged in too many directions at once: the sledgehammer street bangers, the poignant lone ranger ballads, the big-name collabs with Kanye and Pharrell. The album’s emotional nucleus was "I Be U", the ex-romantic’s most stunning love song to date. But it was no coincidence that it saw Future learning to empathize with his partner by literally becoming her, projecting himself onto her being (compare it to the similarly-titled but far less resonant bonus track "I’ll Be Yours"). He was caught between dissonant identities: the wide-screen romantic who made songs with Miley Cyrus, and the hustler from Little Mexico, Zone 6, who flirted with death on record. "I think I lost my heartbeat for a second and a half," he chanted dispassionately on the title track of Dirty Sprite, the 2011 mixtape to which DS2 nods with its title. "Tried to make me a pop star, and they made a monster," Future snarls on "I Serve the Base", a skuzzy, fiendish track that busts down DS2’s doors early, its Metro Boomin beat built around what sounds like a sacrificial lamb’s last minutes of life. That pivot from hero to villain is the album’s central conceit, the culmination of the journey from Monster’s wounded hedonism to the numb howl of 56 Nights. The cruel irony is that Future was great at being a pop star, at least in a mercenary sense; Pluto, with its glossy ballads about looking for love with a flashlight, remains one of the best major label rap debuts of the last five years. But he remained visibly uncomfortable in the spotlight, stepping out in matching designer with Ciara like Atlanta’s begrudging Montague. There is no such self-consciousness on DS2. Its universe is bleak and unforgiving, a redemption story for a man who is certain it’s too late for his soul to be redeemed; instead of a triumphal arc, we burrow deeper and deeper into Future’s dystopia. Before we hear his voice at all, on intro track "Thought It Was a Drought", we hear the slosh of codeine stirred into soda, the dull snap of ice cubes crackling in styrofoam. The only songs that resemble anything like radio hits are mostly pre-released and relegated to the bonus tracks ("Fuck Up Some Commas", "Trap Niggas"), and the only feature is Drake, who does a commendably bitter Future impression on "Where Ya At". There is no room for misinterpretation: Future does not want to be your role model. This is music for nihilists, for the reckless, for those who embrace darkness because they don’t see another option. With his run of post-Honest releases, Future has made it clear who he would like to speak for, and who he is no longer interested in courting, and his recent work is an obvious gesture towards his day-one fanbase who supported him pre-Pluto. Most of the production is handled by Metro Boomin and 808 Mafia’s Southside, with a few appearances from Zaytoven and a small handful of Atlanta trap mainstays. All these guys have an obvious synergy with Future, with whom they’ve worked for years, and their chemistry provides a cohesiveness and clarity of vision missing from his previous two albums. But as a stylist and a technical rapper, Future’s operating on a level unmatched in his five-year discography, early mixtapes and all. As a storyteller, he’s evolved considerably, his lyrics crystallizing into a specific poetry. "A product of them roaches in them ashtrays/ I inhale the love on a bad day/ Baptized inside purple actavis," he raps on "I Serve the Base". Miniscule yet significant details come into crisp focus, like a series of tightly framed, disorienting closeups. On "Kno the Meaning", which doubles as an oral history of the Beast Mode and 56 Nights tapes, we meet his Uncle Ronnie who washed cars and Uncle Don who robbed banks, snapshots of the men he once looked up to. Future was always straightforward, never ashamed to confess his depression or infatuation, but the narratives never felt so focused, nuanced, or vulnerable than here. Lucidity is a poignant theme in his recent work, since he seems to be constantly seeking to escape it. For Future, razor-sharp memory is a curse, one that even month-long benders cannot break. (He spells this out on "Hardly", one of Monster’s more underrated tracks; "Hardly, hardly, hardly forget anything," he croaks, obsessing over moments with a deceased friend.) Thus is the strange and singular beauty of DS2, as ugly as its themes may be: it is at once detail-oriented and hazy, painfully coherent while advocating against coherence, creating an atmosphere like club spotlights piercing through fog machine and blunt smoke, or the beam of a lighthouse searching in the dark for a shipwreck. This dissonance creates the album’s essential tension between what Future literally describes and what he truly feels. "I pour two zips/ I’m feeling way better," he crows on swirling, melodramatic "Slave Master". "Way better," here, is fraught with subtext—the transcendent but fleeting relief of giving in to temptation. This isn’t an album that giddily champions substance abuse as a rock star trait, as his Future Hendrix persona once may have. Reckless drug talk and boilerplate trap themes are undercut by incessant bitterness, loathing, and nausea. "God blessing all the trap niggas" is more than just a shout-out to people who grew up like he did, it’s a sincere plea. "I know the devil is real," he promises on "Blood on the Money", one of the album’s most stunning productions, somehow austere and baroque at the same damn time. Future thumbs through blood-stained bills, reminded of the life from which he ascended but can’t ever really escape, as much as he may have tried.

2015-07-22T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-07-22T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Epic / Free Bandz

July 22, 2015

014afb5e-0303-4802-9b33-acf0d91756e4

Meaghan Garvey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/

The legendary rapper formally ends his retirement with a record that attempts to negotiate what the world's biggest and best hip-hop star is supposed to do on the mic as he approaches 40.

The legendary rapper formally ends his retirement with a record that attempts to negotiate what the world's biggest and best hip-hop star is supposed to do on the mic as he approaches 40.

Jay-Z: Kingdom Come

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9647-kingdom-come/

Kingdom Come

Jay-Z is bigger than this. He doesn't leak singles to the street; he launches them on Budweiser commercials during the World Series. He doesn't blog on Myspace; he flogs for Hewlett-Packard. He doesn't beg for time at MTV; he owns the billboards above it. To most of the world, he's not just a rapper, he is the rapper. When he calls himself the "Mike Jordan of recordin'," he's not talking about being the greatest player the game has ever known, he's talking about being the game itself. But, like athletes, we expect rappers to disappear when they turn 30. We have no use for them as they become older and more comfortable with themselves-- even if their minds are as sharp as ever. We don't want to see them smiling on the cover of Life or hear about their hopes for the future. In hip-hop, there is no future. Everything is now because, presumably, it could all end brutally tomorrow. Jay's two biggest rivals are dead, and we canonized them partly because they were murdered in their mid-20s, most likely because of each other. Jay-Z didn't die young, though. He dubbed himself Jay-Hova and lived beyond any of our imaginations, and now he's left to figure out what the biggest rapper in the world is supposed to do when he gets old. The early consensus on Kingdom Come is that it's one of Jay-Z's worst albums. He's still more charismatic and intelligent than nearly any other rapper, but for every vintage run like the one on "Trouble" ("Y'all viewing y'all's version of the Lord God/ MC, little nigga, applaud, or/ Forever burn in the fire that I spit at y'all/ I rebuke you little nigga/ The meek shall perish/ I'll roof you, little nigga/ I'm a project terrorist"), there are dozens of uninspired stretches and a few horribly misguided rants like "30 Something", on which Jay unleashes his new catchphrase "30's the new 20," and boasts of leaving rap as if he were ashamed of his past. His nose in the air, he spits the most ridiculous fiscal rap this side of Bloomberg, saying in the chorus, "now I got black cards, good credit and such, baby boy, I'm all grown up." He's grown up, alright. With the energy Jay brings to most of these tracks, you'd think 30 was the new 60. His patented whispery change-up is used more than ever before, and often makes him sound like Dr. Moreau-era Marlon Brando when all we needed was a little Apocalypse Now. We didn't expect the young, brash Jigga, but we never thought Jay would be flashing AARP brochures in our faces and dropping Gwyneth Paltrow's name in a rap song. Twice he addresses his recent heavily publicized boycott of Cristal champagne which even he acknowledges is unimportant. But that's Kingdom Come: Jay boringly rapping about boring stuff and being totally comfortable with it The production doesn't help, either. Jay-Z's name on an album used to be a guarantee of at least a few certified anthems, but Kingdom Come is mostly certified anesthesia. Just Blaze's flip of the Allman Brothers' "Whipping Post" on "Oh My God" is a pretty good example of his new stadium rap sound, and his "Kingdom Come" take on Rick James is pretty clever. But the latter has been sitting on the internet for a long time which means Jay-Z now gets Just sorta Blaze instead full-on Blaze. The Neptunes' contribution on "Anything" has been accurately compared to the The Legend of Zelda theme, and Swizz Beats' "Dig a Hole" might be the worst beat to ever appear on a Jay-Z record. It's never a good sign when Chris Martin of Coldplay makes the best track on your record, but that may be the case with Kingdom Come. It is the first album in Jay-Z's career that doesn't sound like he got first choice from his producers, and one has to wonder where the much-talked-about Timbaland songs went (FutureSex/LoveSound, perhaps?). Still, despite the rampant mediocrity, there's an interesting theme of spirituality and Jay's own messianic tendencies running through this album, hence the title. When Jay-Hova has an identity crisis, the proportions are biblical. He believes he's hip-hop's savior, and Kingdom Come, at times, sounds like his Passion Play. From "The Prelude"'s genesis story to the title track's sermon on the mount to the Kanye West-produced synth-hymn "Do U Wanna Ride?"-- on which Hov introduces his "beach" meme-- the narrative arc of the album loosely resembles that of the Bible's Gospels, ending with Jay's ascension on "Beach Chair". The Beach Chair, of course, is not a beach chair; it is a metaphor for the hip-hop afterlife where all is happiness and one can wriggle his bare toes in the sand if one is not afraid to remove one's sneakers. (Jay was emasculated last summer by former Rocafella artist Cam'Ron for wearing sandals on the beach; Jay responds on "Dig a Hole" with, "It's like the disciples dissin' Jesus, becoming his rivals.") It's on the final song, the Chris Martin production, that Jay's insecurities about getting old-- or worse, irrelevant-- are most naked. Over Martin's surprisingly decent-- if unsurprisingly epic, rock-ish beat-- Jay muses, "If the prophecy's correct, then the child should have to pay/ For the sins of the father/ So I bartered my tomorrow's against my yesterdays…/ I'm both saint and sinner…/ I'm on permanent vacay/ Life is but a beach chair/ This song's like a Hallmark card until you reach here." Instead of just making a song about how nice it is to be able to sit on the beach, Jay defensively blows a ridiculous image up into a meditation on life. It's strange to the point of discomfort at first, but it becomes oddly compelling. But we don't want oddities and bizarre narrative arcs from a Jay-Z album. We want unadulterated bangers and innovative hustler imagery, and we want the Jay that's invincible and funny and venomous. And that's probably the Jay that Jay wants too, but that's not who he is anymore. He thinks he's going to save hip-hop and New York City with his triumphant return, and maybe he might. But it won't be because he shouldered their burdens; it'll be because he shrugged and someone else carried the weight. If he wants to remain relevant, it's likely with songs like "Minority Report", on which he speaks honestly about his response to Hurricane Katrina, saying, "Sure I ponied up a mil/ But I didn't give my time/ So, in reality, I didn't give a dime/ Or a damn/ I just put my money in the hands/ Of the same people who left my people stranded." It's the only song on Kingdom Come that offers any real insight into the unique position Jay-Z is in, and possibly the only one that anyone will care to remember.

2006-11-20T01:00:02.000-05:00

2006-11-20T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rap

Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella

November 20, 2006

014c2666-71ae-48f9-ba64-e52f935a1ccd

Peter Macia

https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/

Mild High Club is the solo act of Alex Brettin, a tourmate and disciple of Mac DeMarco’s sunny sound. On his sophomore album, Brettin finds a voice more distinctly his own.

Mild High Club is the solo act of Alex Brettin, a tourmate and disciple of Mac DeMarco’s sunny sound. On his sophomore album, Brettin finds a voice more distinctly his own.

Mild High Club: Skiptracing

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22241-skiptracing/

Skiptracing

It seems reasonable now to look back on late 2012 as the Time of Mac. That fall, independent music fans en masse embraced the twinkly delights of scrub hero Mac DeMarco’s 2, opening the door for legions of low-key fiends ready to peddle their slinky, ’70s AM radio-inspired songs. Folks like Travis Bretzer, Alex Calder, and Connan Mockasin have all owed some debt to DeMarco for his role in making their music more visible and palatable. (Godfather credit goes to Ariel Pink as well.) And they won’t be the last to fall under the banner of “Brought to you by Mac.” Up next are his tourmates Mild High Club, the solo act of Alex Brettin, who is already following up last fall’s pleasant but slight debut Timeline with the significantly improved sophomore LP, Skiptracing. Timeline saw a technically-gifted artist trying his hand at new spins on various staples of the late ’60s and early ’70s: Todd Rundgren, the Zombies, Jim Croce, T. Rex. But while Brettin’s ability to imitate was impressive, his vocals and personality felt muted. The results were more derivative than exciting. On the surface, Skiptracing treads much of the same nostalgic ground, with a specific focus on the tropes of sunny “Lost Weekend” era L.A. But while Brettin’s first record seemed to run through depictions of those influences like cards in a rolodex, he’s now synthesizing them together into an identity more uniquely his own. On Skiptracing, a more confident artist emerges with a fuller vision and voice. The album frontloads Brettin’s best results: the first three tracks function as a heavenly, psychedelic triptych. The eponymous opener has a slinky beat and bass line that sets the chill tone nicely. It’s embellished by periodic cowbell percussion that feels cheesy and lovely at once, and a beautiful slide guitar solo that George Harrison would appreciate. “Skiptracing” slides directly into “Homage,” which begins with some plinky DeMarco-style guitar and a baroque harpsichord before a lush, sunburst chorus emerges. “Homage” tumbles into “Cary Me Back,” which uses a circulating melody and cymbal hits to summon a bit of the “‘Til I Die” ache from the Beach Boys’ own early ’70s L.A. masterpiece, Surf’s Up. The overflowing musicality of these three tracks highlights an important point: while Mild High Club and Mac DeMarco share warm aesthetics and shit-eating “What Me Worry” grins, one place where the comparisons fall flat is the former’s interest in sound and production. This suite of tunes plays like a mini trashcan pop symphony; Brettin does an interesting job crafting elaborately layered songs that still have a sort of four-track sound. When Brettin reaches in this way, his tunes leave DeMarco at the door and instead seek the territory explored by bands like under-appreciated ’90s Brian Wilson worshippers the High Llamas. Skiptracing also draws on early ’70s jazz-rock and funk much more than its predecessor. “Tesselation” recalls Bill Withers with a slacker bent. “Kokopelli” channels ’70s jazzbos like Steve Kuhn as well as ’90s tricksters like Ween, with a guitar solo that would sound at home on that band’s classic Chocolate and Cheese. Still, while Brettin’s singing is greatly improved—lazy but more present and self-assured—his lyrics are at best inscrutable and in general lacking in substance. The album’s story apparently is meant to track some kind of mystery, but other than the instrumental track explicitly labeled “¿Whodunit?,” you’d never know from the words. More problematic is the fact that the album loses steam in its second half, with an aimless instrumental and two 30 second interludes bookending the two most forgettable tunes, “Chasing My Tail” and “Chapel Perilous.” The effect, unfortunately, is that the album just kind of drifts away, belying the strength and substance of the record’s first half. *Skiptracing *is a great step forward for Brettin, though, as he elevates Mild High Club from nifty disciples of DeMarco and Ariel Pink to sneaky-good purveyors of sunshine pop.

2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Stones Throw

August 23, 2016

014d01bc-c28f-4246-a995-f16fe2318250

Benjamin Scheim

https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/

With the crackling sounds of “lo-fi house” achieving autoplay ubiquity in the dance music corners of YouTube, one of the micro-genre’s progenitors runs up against the style’s limits.

With the crackling sounds of “lo-fi house” achieving autoplay ubiquity in the dance music corners of YouTube, one of the micro-genre’s progenitors runs up against the style’s limits.

Ross From Friends: The Outsiders EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ross-from-friends-the-outsiders-ep/

The Outsiders EP

There’s a good chance if you leave YouTube on in the background—especially if you’re listening to house music—Ross From Friends’ 2015 song “Talk to Me You’ll Understand” will eventually surface in autoplay. This makes some users pretty happy (“Thank you YouTube for showing me this song!” reads a typical comment), and others less so (“I hate this fucking song. It always ends up in automatic play”). Whatever your reaction to it, the track was one of the first salvos in a new micro-genre that some have taken to calling lo-fi house. The style clusters together a growing roster of internet-literate, hyper-ironic, 1990s-nostalgic producers with names like DJ Seinfeld, DJ Boring, and of course Ross From Friends. Their songs are tape-hiss-filled affairs replete with cheap drum machines and sitcom-synth grooves, and they’ve angered some portion of the internet to no end, raising questions of authenticity, intention, and seriousness. Ross From Friends, aka the London producer Felix Weatherall, is one of the few who actively embraces the category and all its implications. “I’ve been trying to keep up this persona of being goofy, and people have really reacted to that,” he said in an interview last year. The Outsiders is Weatherall’s most serious and tightly produced record to date; at the same time, it demonstrates the creative limitations of lo-fi house. Opener “Crimson” is like a leaner and meaner version of his initial hit: The analog crackle, the tactile rhythm, and the overall fake-vintage sound are of a higher class than they were before. On songs like “D1RT BOX” and “Romeo, Romeo” he even highlights the idea of decaying technology that is so central to the genre by having the tracks stall out and stutter, like a VCR player that’s about gobble up an unspooled tape. And a guitar riff on “D1RT BOX” that approximates the glitchy joy of Jai Paul is a moment of small glory. But these are exceptions to the law of diminishing returns that governs the release. The problem Weatherall runs into on The Outsiders is that after showcasing how good he’s gotten, he uses up his bag of tricks. It can be painful, like the 10-minute-plus title track, a grating drum loop that spins out of control, or just plain annoying, like on “Suzinak,” where his use of Eastern-inspired strings is worthy of an eye-roll. He can’t resist the temptation of slathering on thick globs of static, and the drum programing is uninspired and wooden. These knee-jerk failings render his more sober-minded decisions in a harsher light. Listening to The Outsiders, and to lots of Weatherall’s peers, it’s easy to see what there is to hate about these guys. They are close kin to, if not the direct product of, the meme accounts, shitposting, and garbled ‘90s nostalgia that permeate the internet. Without even asking for it, Twitter stars like Seinfeld2000 now have a soundtrack perfectly suited for them: The millennial ennui that infuses this faux-vintage house is perfect background music for the mindless infinite scroll. If anything, what is most revealing about the success and failures of lo-fi house is how it shows the ongoing homogenization of digital culture. In an essay for The Verge, the writer Kyle Chayka talks about a phenomenon called “AirSpace,” which describes how glossy internet photos on Airbnb, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., have helped disseminate a certain kind aesthetic—lots of chrome and distressed wood—that’s made cafes in Bucharest indistinguishable from those in Williamsburg. Digitally rendered vinyl crackle, chintzy synths, tape warp, and the like are the musical equivalent of exposed brick. Just as our residential and public spaces can be subject to homogenization, so can our digital and musical ones. In some way, the anger the lo-fi housers have elicited in the last two years might have less to do with their alleged inauthenticity than with the anxiety that wherever you turn, the same images and sounds keep popping up. As hard as Weatherall tries on The Outsiders to take the movement (if you can call it that) seriously, he runs into a wall with his hyper-stylized effects and reference-laden tunes. Fun as it can be, it all starts to sound the same.

2017-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Magicwire

July 31, 2017

014d3f06-2a0c-4046-8d6e-dc66474b9dcb

Kevin Lozano

https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/

Matt Ward is no longer at the point in his career where you devote an entire album to the memory of an obscure folk guitar hero. The Portland-based singer, songwriter, and accomplished guitar player is enjoying his highest level of mainstream recognition yet, thanks in no small part to a fine, comfortingly nostalgic collaboration with actress Zooey Deschanel last year as She & Him. He has shared stages with Norah Jones, Jenny Lewis, Bright Eyes, and My Morning Jacket. During the presidential primary season, he played a benefit show for Barack Obama. On *Hold Time*, Ward loses himself to find himself.

M. Ward: Hold Time

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12681-hold-time/

Hold Time

Matt Ward is no longer at the point in his career where you devote an entire album to the memory of an obscure folk guitar hero. The Portland-based singer, songwriter, and accomplished guitar player is enjoying his highest level of mainstream recognition yet, thanks in no small part to a fine, comfortingly nostalgic collaboration with actress Zooey Deschanel last year as She & Him. He has shared stages with Norah Jones, Jenny Lewis, Bright Eyes, and My Morning Jacket. During the presidential primary season, he played a benefit show for Barack Obama. On Hold Time, Ward loses himself to find himself. With increasingly expansive production and broader lyrical themes, Ward's sixth studio album polishes away a little bit more of the individual character that makes his best recordings so human and rewarding. Paradoxically, that mostly just reinforces Ward's defining trait: a conviction that simple songs can transcend time, and that categorizing music by era can be just as artificial as categorizing music by genre. Ward argues his case pretty convincingly for much of the album, if not quite as eloquently as he has in the past. Hold Time is not an album-length diatribe about your cable company's understaffed customer-service call centers. "If only I could hold time," Ward's winningly cracked voice sighs wistfully on the title track, a strings-and-piano ballad that sounds like "The Long and Winding Road" and name-checks the Beach Boys compilation Endless Summer. Where 2003's Transfiguration of Vincent was inspired by a memorial service for folk legend John Fahey, 2005's Transistor Radio had the golden age of radio, and 2006's Post-War had wars, Hold Time is conceptually similar to Ward's underrated sophomore album, 2001's End of Amnesia. Back then Ward was helping us remember. Now he's making time stand still, with old sounds, a few old songs, and age-old subjects: love, god, old songs. He also has some indie-famous guest stars. Bigger arrangements; same folk, rock'n'roll, and Americana roots. With mixing and assistance from Saddle Creek mainstay Mike Mogis, plus strings by Peter Broderick (Horse Feathers, Efterklang), Ward keeps his voice sounding lo-fi even when the production is Phil Spector-sized. "Never Had Nobody Like You" alludes to The Dark Side of the Moon while basically rewriting The Music Man's "Till There Was You" as a stomping glam-rock duet with Deschanel. Ward could've stopped writing "Stars of Leo" early and called it "I Get So High", but to his credit he keeps going; the cascading guitars, vivid verses, and multi-layered percussion make it one of the album's best tracks (though it's not actually "above" the name-checked "Sea of Love"). However, orchestration and vocal overdubs aren't enough to save acoustic strummer "Jailbird" from dying in its cage, despite some twangy, lyrical lead guitar work. God is the perfect subject for a songwriter of Ward's aspirations toward timelessness. Shuffling guitar hoedown "Fisher of Men" extends one of Jesus' favorite metaphors, while the organ-kissed surfer-folk wisdom of stripped-down "Blake's View" is touching and beautifully phrased, its potentially grating reference to Blake perhaps a way for Ward to distance himself from the song's reassuring sentiments even while offering us comfort in them (pretty close to Transfiguration's "Dead Man", though). "If you're trying to sing an old song/ You're getting all the words wrong," he sings, crediting Paul, whether the Apostle or the Beatle, on strings plus banjo acid-rocker "Epistemology". Grandaddy's Jason Lytle fits well enough into the Wall of Sound on bouncy, clever "To Save Me". Suggested alternate title: "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands (So Would It Kill the Motherfucker to Answer a Guy's Prayers?)". Covers are another way Ward sets Hold Time out of time. One of them sure goes on forever, anyway: a ponderous rendition of country classic "Oh Lonesome Me" with awkward call and response vocals featuring an out-of-place Lucinda Williams. Buddy Holly's "Rave On" matches up nicely with Ward's simple-is-good philosophy, and this laid-back remake is sonically detailed enough (another Deschanel guest spot) to justify itself-- it has nothing on Transfiguration's irony-free cover of David Bowie's "Let's Dance", though. Meanwhile, Ward's instrumental take on Billie Holiday-sung jazz standard "I'm a Fool to Want You" is a smoldering guitar showcase recalling Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack work or the solos of Giant Sand's Howe Gelb, who released Ward's debut a decade ago. Memory is the world's greatest liar. So it's possible that Ward's past albums seem a cut or two above Hold Time only through the rose-tinted lens of hindsight-- sort of like how we've come to romanticize the Old West, say, or previous eras of rock'n'roll. But the new one, although steeped in American music tradition, could use some more of the pioneering spirit that got us here. Hold Time is an enjoyable, well-constructed album, and as good a place as any for newcomers to start-- it just doesn't hold many surprises. If it all seems too familiar to you, too impersonal, try the back catalog. As memory turns to myth, some myths are worth remembering. Not only John Henry, but Prometheus, too.

2009-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00

2009-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Merge

February 17, 2009

014f6e59-38e5-41e0-bb4d-25776db3441d

Marc Hogan

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

The Scottish trio's frigid, militant, rhythmic Andrew Weatherall-produced third LP is more about obsession than release.

The Scottish trio's frigid, militant, rhythmic Andrew Weatherall-produced third LP is more about obsession than release.

The Twilight Sad: No One Can Ever Know

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16189-no-one-can-ever-know/

No One Can Ever Know

Here's an incomplete recap of the Twilight Sad's self-reported listening syllabus leading up to their third album, No One Can Ever Know: Cabaret Voltaire, Magazine, Autechre, Public Image Ltd., Nine Inch Nails. In other words, a group that has to this point been either compared to shoegazers or other Scottish acts (Aereogramme, Mogwai) was looking to completely overhaul its sound. That's a good thing-- while their debut Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters was the work of a powerful and fully realized band, its follow-up Forget the Night Ahead suggested it wasn't a particularly versatile one. Whether it was a result of familiarity or just its suffocated production, the torrential downpour of Andy MacFarlane's guitars and James Graham's heavily accented howl didn't have the same impact. Now here's a nearly complete list of who No One Can Ever Know actually sounds like: The Twilight Sad. That's also a good thing. No One Can Ever Know is kind of a failure as a total sonic rebranding, but it's a strong transition for the band into something a little more form-fitting while carrying over their commitment to morose atmosphere and Graham's handsome vocals, deeply entrenched characteristics that just so happen to be their strengths. Still, that they brought in Andrew Weatherall to produce is proof enough that they meant business. The mention of Weatherall's name most instantly brings to mind his work on Primal Scream's Screamadelica and Fuck Buttons' Tarot Sport, two records whose wildly bright timbres and celebratory attitudes exist somewhere way the fuck on the other side of the world from where the Twilight Sad set up shop. That's still the case if song titles like "Kill It in the Morning" and "Dead City" are any indication of what's to come, and they sure are. It's tough to pinpoint the exact contributions, but whether Weatherall was meant as a spiritual adviser or a contributor is a moot point-- the Twilight Sad intended for this to be a frigid, militant, and rhythmic record, and they got it. The main difference is the shape these songs allow themselves to take: "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" and "I Became a Prostitute" achieved weapons-grade catharsis by cresting and crashing unexpectedly, visually represented by right-angle dynamics. No longer able to fall back on volcanic distortion to bring the big moments, the Twilight Sad have more curvature and forward motion, something closer to the color-drained gothic clangor of *Pornography-*era Cure ("Don't Look at Me") or "Street Spirit"/"Knives Out" Radiohead (particularly "Sick") than any of the post-punk firebrands they namechecked. Accordions (or approximations thereof) wheeze, artificial strings moan, and guitars are thick with distortion, yet everything feels of a single piece, and at first it makes No One feel a bit limited dynamically compared to its predecessors. But it's a record more about obsession than release, and the mesmerizing, cyclical guitar figures of "Sick" and the throttle-down locomotion of "Don't Move" make the best use of repetition as a conveyance of passion. Easy as it is to dwell on the instrumental changes, No One focuses on what might not be Graham's rangiest performance, but certainly his most absorbing. His vocals have always been too prominent to make the shoegaze comparisons stick, and he's just less of a competitor for sonic space this time around, which is key to understanding No One's appeal. Though an undoubtedly emotive singer, Graham isn't much of a details guy-- there was something post-traumatic about Fourteen and Forget, the sudden rupturing of the music acting as a counterbalance to Graham's lyrics, which were evocative in a general sense and every bit as repressed in a literal one. The emotions were identifiable, the events not so much. There was no real way to determine what they were "about" specifically, which is true of No One Can Ever Know as well, but there's a crucial role reversal for both Graham and the listener, in that the former is an aggressor rather than a victim and the latter is assumed to actually be in on the conversation rather than being a therapeutic sounding board. Or maybe we're in on a confession-- Graham's words are carefully chosen and ominous, something like an urgent call on a tapped phone. Something has clearly gone wrong, possibly a murder but definitely a love crime. Throughout, Graham does little to distinguish between the two, he and an unnamed other "paired off in the violence." The chorus of subtly dramatic opener "Alphabet" contains the Twilight Sad's most surefooted melody and Graham's most legible declaration: "So sick to death of the sight of you now/ Safe to say I've never wanted you more." Likewise, on "Don't Move", Graham's brogue smears the album's two parallel, primal instincts ("I want you more than you will ever know" and "I'll hurt you more than you will ever know"), his dead-eyed recitation of those words betraying that he's hanging on for dear life to any kind of sanity. It's not really accurate to call "Kill It in the Morning" delayed gratification-- not when No One is actually the most sedate and evil Twilight Sad album-- but after five minutes of spiky industrial grind, the music drops out for an exasperated Graham to yell, "What more do you need to know?/ It's staying here well down below." It gives the feeling of a story completed, and while the wholeness of No One is absorbing to those in tune with the Twilight Sad's relentlessly downbeat demeanor, it's easy to see it as forbidding or impenetrable. Multiple listens reveal layers instead of peaks, and that's to be expected from a band for whom volume and texture meant more than melody: While the greyscale atmopsherics of "Nil" and "Not Sleeping" contribute to No One's sonic consistency, if you don't immediately take a shine to Graham's mantric vocals, there aren't a lot of thrills to find in the cushy synth pads behind him. But even if No One Can Ever Know is more of a way to please those already down for the cause than a means of bringing new listeners into the fold, the attempts to push the boundaries of sound and setting result in the least-insular Twilight Sad album to date-- the kids are still on fire, they've just left the bedroom.

2012-02-02T01:00:02.000-05:00

2012-02-02T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

FatCat

February 2, 2012

014f82f9-9aab-49ad-904c-b6c93aff2383

Ian Cohen

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

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 PJ Harvey’s searing and monumental album from 1993.

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 PJ Harvey’s searing and monumental album from 1993.

PJ Harvey: Rid of Me

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pj-harvey-rid-of-me/

Rid of Me

On September 24, 1993, Polly Jean Harvey made her “Tonight Show” debut with a peculiar solo performance of the title track from her second album, Rid of Me. Her black hair looked crunchy and wet, so shellacked with product it gleamed. Sloppy streaks of raspberry lip liner ringed her mouth, and thick brows framed eyes that radiated mischief. In a dramatic departure from the androgynous black uniform she’d adopted in advance of her debut, 1992’s Dry, she wore a gold, sequined cocktail dress that sparkled in the light. Her self-presentation screamed femininity—but the form that femininity took was so performative, so purposefully imperfect, it confronted you with the arbitrary strangeness of gender itself, the visual equivalent of repeating the word “woman” over and over until it sounded like a foreign utterance. After the tense summer tour that had followed Rid of Me’s spring release, she had split with her bandmates, drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan, in the trio they’d called PJ Harvey. So Polly appeared on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” accompanied only by her guitar. From a technical standpoint, it wasn’t a stellar performance. On the album and in concert, Ellis had taken over the haunting falsetto backing vocals: “Lick my legs, I’m on fire/Lick my legs of desire.” Even the demo was mixed to layer Harvey’s throaty, menacing leads over her high-pitched chant. But on Leno’s stage, she played both overlapping parts at once, and the effect was hair-raising. Her falsetto sounded involuntary and unnaturally girlish, a genderless being’s impression of women, as though the song of violent obsession had awakened some histrionic alternate personality within Harvey. She closed by taking her hand off the strings, repeating the “Lick my legs” chant a cappella smiling more to herself than to the audience. Leno pronounced her performance “very nice,” with all the forced enthusiasm of a high-school English teacher who’d asked the quiet girl to read her poem aloud. In the short interview that followed, he raised what must have seemed like an innocuous topic: Harvey’s rural roots on a sheep farm in Dorset. “So you still go back and do the chores?” Leno wanted to know. She responded with a list of tasks that included castrating sheep. “For the male lambs that you don’t want to become rams, you have to ring their testicles with a rubber band,” Harvey explained, as frank as any lifelong farmer would be. “And after about two weeks, they drop off.” The crowd roared as though she’d made a joke. If he’d been following her career in the UK music press over the past two years, Leno might have asked Polly about the controversy that had dogged her in her home country, where Rid of Me had reached No. 3 on the pop charts. The British weeklies lost their minds about every new song her band put out—and more so about every image of Harvey that accompanied them. She had appeared naked from the waist up, her back to the camera, on the cover of NME in 1992, offending the delicate (and hypocritical) sensibilities of Melody Maker. Even the cover of Rid of Me, Maria Mochnacz’s photo of the artist in the bath, which exposed only her head, shoulders, and a shock of wet hair in whip-like motion, caused an outcry. By fall of 1993, rubberneckers had moved on to rumors that she’d had a nervous breakdown while writing Rid of Me. A SKY magazine profile from that period followed a typical formula: Reporter Simon Witter contrasted Harvey’s “suave, demure, elegant, womanly” mien with her “howling banshee music” and recounted confronting her with his insight that “while her ensemble says ‘Look at me!,’ its [all-black] color scheme [was] the classic camouflage of fatties and fence-sitters.” Then he shifted into sympathetic mode, asking about the rough patch she preferred not to call a breakdown, which took her from London to the seaside room in her home county where she recorded the Rid of Me demos. She attributed the dark period to the end of her first real romance, an unpleasant experience at the Reading Festival, and the constant flood of feedback from the industry, fans, and—in a hint Witter must have politely ignored—the media. Her Leno appearance feels like a truer representation of who she was at the time than any contemporaneous profile. Certain young musicians—mostly innovators with strong points of view who don’t check all the straight, white, male boxes—have the misfortune of entering the public sphere as society-wide Rorschach tests; critics on both sides of the Atlantic just couldn’t resist projecting on Polly. Leno’s viewers, by contrast, met neither a righteous feminist (Harvey notoriously distanced herself from the term) nor a shrewish hysteric, but an earthy farm girl with an impish streak. Not making an overt political statement so much as she was experimenting with her persona, the Harvey of Rid of Me inhabited outlandish new looks and perspectives, seemingly as a way of dividing her newly public identity from her more vulnerable private self. From the ashes of PJ Harvey the band, she was constructing the first iteration of PJ Harvey the solo artist. Singer-songwriters whose music is intensely emotional, violent, or sexually explicit often have to contend with the assumption that their lyrics are autobiographical. Particularly with female musicians, the word “confessional” tends to come up. In Harvey’s case, her words and the volume at which she delivered them defined her: a “screeching harridan,” a “castrating bitch-queen,” and, in one Rid of Me review that has aged terribly, the “PC” perpetrator of “one of those angry-woman-spews-sexual-politics records.” Listeners weren’t wrong to infer that she wrote from life; she acknowledged that her breakup, as well as the despair she’d felt after moving to London from the country, had influenced the album. Yet it’s her artistic influences, her gender-dysphoric childhood and her sheep-farm upbringing, more than her politics or even her personality, that are most evident on it. You can almost hear Harvey’s work boots squish through the moorland muck in the burbling bass tones that tie most of the songs together, simmering under the surface of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds,” twitching through the intro to “Yuri-G,” building tension in the hushed interlude a minute before “Dry” launches its final attack. She also imported these sounds from an agricultural region thousands of miles from Dorset: the Mississippi Delta. Rid of Me was neither the first nor the last PJ Harvey album that, unlike the punk-derived rock so many of her white contemporaries were making at the time, felt grounded in the blues. 1995’s To Bring You My Love, her masterpiece of dark sensuality, drew even more heavily on the structures and tropes of American roots music. But Rid of Me is still the PJ Harvey release that succeeds most spectacularly in evoking the unvarnished emotional intensity of the blues without ever resorting to mimicry. Some of that immediacy came thanks to producer Steve Albini, whom Harvey hired in spite of acquaintances’ warnings about “what he’s like with women.” Just before he’d help Nirvana restore the raw edges of their pre-Nevermind recordings on In Utero, Albini performed his minimalist magic on Rid of Me, capturing the depth of the band’s live sound by working quickly and recording the full trio at once. “I can get precious about things, and Albini doesn’t allow you to do that,” Harvey said in one interview. The band spent barely two weeks in the studio, mixing included. Though Albini’s warts-and-all method was a product of the punk tradition he treasured, its messiness proved equally well-suited to a blues aesthetic; an audible cough at the beginning of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds” suggests the homespun intimacy of a hastily recorded 78. Like the music of Pixies, whose 1988 debut Surfer Rosa Albini had produced, the album thrives on sudden shifts in volume and tone. It opens, on “Rid of Me,” at a whisper. Even the drums sound like echoes from a mile away until, midway through the track, every instrument shifts to a scream and Harvey spits out the chorus—“Don’t you wish you never, never met her?”—her voice coated in venom. The abruptness only magnifies the impact. Each song is a different scary pop-up book: Turn any page and a three-dimensional monster could leap out at you. At other moments on the album, it’s the sparseness of the instrumentals that throws Harvey’s words into relief: “I might as well be dead,” she bellows, amid the droning guitars and clanking percussion of “Legs.” Then, suddenly, the song is ending, and only the ghost of a strum accompanies the chilling final line, “But I could kill you instead.” On “Dry,” written for the album of the same name but saved for Rid of Me, a similar quiet sets in the first time Harvey utters the defining kiss-off of her early career: “You leave me dry.” To overstate the power of Albini’s recordings, however, is to undervalue the versatility of Harvey’s songwriting. “Man-Size,” which appears in two very different versions, makes for a cathartic shout-along rocker; as a poem recited over a haunted string sextet, it’s unsettling enough to soundtrack a Hitchcock thriller. Amid the campy, sci-fi/rockabilly sprint of fan-favorite single “50 Ft. Queenie” and brutal verbal assaults like “Snake,” “Missed” is the most conventionally pretty song. In a chorus that escalates as she repeats “No, I missed him,” Harvey could be baring her lonely soul. But the verses channel that quotidian heartbreak through a more vivid and specific story that some have interpreted as alluding to the gruesome tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots. You wouldn’t have known it from the way Rid of Me was psychoanalyzed, but most—possibly all—of its songs contain or are written in the voices of characters who are not literally Polly Jean Harvey and the men who crossed her path. She has called “Highway 61 Revisited”—the raucous Bob Dylan rag that she covers here as a frantic invocation of Patti Smith—a formative influence on her songwriting. Beginning with a dust-up between God and Abraham, before flashing forward to the 20th century the blues-rock classic really does fit seamlessly with her original compositions. Her stories, from the possibly abusive relationship detailed in “Hook” to the Miltonian encounter between Eve and the serpent that comprises “Snake,” often take the form of dialogues, with Harvey giving voice to women, men, and various other animals. Many of these narratives are grounded in history, religion, or the arts: “Me-Jane” is, as the title suggests, a lament from Tarzan’s long-suffering civilized partner. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman inspired “50 Ft Queenie.” Mythology was an obsession of her mother’s, and Harvey’s language on Rid of Me subtly reflects that. “Yuri-G” is a sort of pagan love spell addressed to the moon goddess Luna. “I’ll make you lick my injuries/I’m going to twist your head off, see,” from the title track, is supposed to be one of the album’s most fearsome images. Yet that “see” changes everything, transforming a lurid threat into the goofy taunt of a movie gangster or a fairy-tale giant. Even as she was singing from her soul, Harvey was acting. Of course, the part every person plays from childhood to death—whether we embrace it, subvert it, change it, or some combination of the three—is our gender role, which may not look quite the same in the city as it does on the farm. Women who inhabit non-traditional gender roles, as Harvey certainly has throughout her career, are often presumed to be speaking as feminists. But, as gratifying as it would have been to hear her proclaim allyship with fans who believed in the equality of the sexes, you can see why she tried to prevent Rid of Me from being viewed through that lens. As a child, Harvey expressed her desire to be a boy by sitting backwards on toilet seats in an imitation of the way her older brother peed and demanding to be called Paul. When she drawls “Got my leather boots on/Got my girl and she’s a wow” on “Man-Size,” a song widely interpreted as an indictment of masculinity, you can hear her imagining what it would be like to inhabit a typical male body. It is as much a fantasy, and a dark joke, as the B-movie rampage of “50 Ft Queenie.” Beyond their smattering of angry-woman signifiers, Harvey’s songs are literal performances of gender; they shed light on, poke fun at, and rail against the misery of being trapped by the expectations of femaleness or maleness for one’s entire life. “I never think of myself separately as ‘a woman’—I’m always a musician first,” she told The Guardian in 1993. This is what’s so frustrating about making art as a member of the second sex: You identify as an artist, and trace your lineage to Dylan or Willie Dixon, only to watch helplessly as you’re shunted into the role of “woman artist” the minute your work attracts any attention. If women identify most intensely with PJ Harvey’s music, maybe that has less to do with a set of body parts or political aims than with the unconscious sensitivity we’re forced to develop to the species-wide tragicomedy of gender. The brilliance of Rid of Me is in the vividness and detail with which it captures that Boschian panorama using only blues rhythms, loud-quiet-loud dynamics, Harvey’s voice (and sometimes that of Ellis, whose falsetto and status as a backup singer constitute additional instances of gender subversion), and an arsenal of extreme characters and loaded allusions. It was that rich, strange, deliberately alienating picture that Harvey attempted to reproduce, not flawlessly but unforgettably, alone on Jay Leno’s stage with her dress and her guitar and her conspicuous lip liner and her startling second voice. She would investigate feminine archetypes in greater detail on 1995’s To Bring You My Love, naming her sexy alter ego Vamp, clothing the character in a hot-pink catsuit, and slathering her face in gobs of blue eyeshadow and red lipstick. But even then she was exploring gender from the distant perspective of someone who realized that sex was a shared delusion, an arbitrary binary, a sick joke. The one constant in PJ Harvey’s long discography is the mosaic of voices. Listen only to the female ones on Rid of Me, and you’ll only hear one side of the conversation.

2018-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Island

September 16, 2018

01514248-b68a-409f-92c3-fedea5a134c9

Judy Berman

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

Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, an uplifting mix of spiritual and grounded that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to.

Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, an uplifting mix of spiritual and grounded that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to.

Chance the Rapper: Coloring Book

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21909-coloring-book/

Coloring Book

When Chicagoan Chance the Rapper delivered his verse on “Ultralight Beam,” the opening song from Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, there was a lot going on—sly homage was being paid to West; rappers were being put on notice (“This is my part/Nobody else speak”); and, most importantly, Chance was encapsulating his past, asserting his present, and telegraphing his future. He was finally positioning himself as a rapper to be reckoned with from a mainstream podium, but he was also delving deep into Christian ideology, with allusions to Noah’s Ark and Lot’s wife, with his “foot on the Devil’s neck till it drifted Pangaea.” That verse rolled out the red carpet for Kanye’s long-awaited album, but it doubled as an announcement of Chance’s new Coloring Book (then given the working title Chance 3), which may very well be the most eagerly-anticipated hip-hop project this year that doesn’t come attached to an actual record label. West billed his album as “a gospel album with a whole lot of cursing on it,” but The Life of Pablo wasn’t that; it was a rap album with some gospel overtures. Coloring Book, however, fits the billing, packing in so much gospel verve that it sounds like Hezekiah Walker & the Love Fellowship Crusade Choir are going to drop into half the tracks and recite 1 Timothy 4:12 in chorale. Instead, we get Kirk Franklin promising to lead us into the Promised Land, alongside appearances by demonstrated materialistic heathens like 2 Chainz, Lil Wayne, Young Thug, and Future—and the result is an uplifting mix that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to. Thematically, Coloring Book is a far cry from Chance’s previous efforts. His debut mixtape, 10 Day, was a small, heavy-lidded odyssey of being suspended from high school “for chiefin’ a hundred blunts”; his breakthrough, 2013’s dilated Acid Rap, contained songs about being a “Chain Smoker” and confessions of “cigarettes on cigarettes/My momma think I stank/I got burn-holes in my hoodies.” But here, on Coloring Book, Chancelor Bennett observes that “we don’t do the same drugs no more” over acoustic piano and choristers backing his sentiments. He says the song is not about drugs, but it still comes off as a sobering admission from a rapper who once dedicated a small travelogue to taking acid south of the U.S. border. “Music is all we got,” Chance professes on “All We Got,” the inaugural number featuring the Chicago Children’s Choir and West returning the “Ultralight Beam” favor—but it’s clear from the outset that this is Chance’s show. His vocals—elastic and taut, all jerky grace, full of word-sound collages that hearken back to his spoken-word genealogy— are now almost fully dedicated to God and being high on life. “I get my Word from the sermon/I do not talk to the serpent/That’s a holistic discernment,” he raps before threatening to “give Satan a swirly.” Although his puerility remains intact, his fervor is amplified as never before. On “Blessings,” poet-activist-singer-songwriter Jamila Woods comes through with the hook: “I’m gon’ praise Him/Praise Him till I’m gone,” while Chance drops sanctified tweetables: “I don’t make songs for free, I make ’em for freedom/Don’t believe in kings, believe in the Kingdom” and “Jesus’ Black life ain’t matter/I know, I talk to his daddy.” He also manages to mix in heavenly faith, the joy of fatherhood, and redemption in a couplet and a half: “I know the difference in blessings and worldly possessions/Like my ex-girl getting pregnant and her becoming my everything/I’m at war with my wrongs.” It’s a heavy message delivered lightly, with tongue aflame. Coloring Book is not all about transcendence, however. Despite asking “when did you start to forget how to fly?,” Chance still has his feet firmly planted as one of the biggest independent rappers of the moment. On “No Problem” he raps, “If one more label try to stop me/It’s gon’ be some dreadhead niggas in your lobby.” (In a sublime stroke, the song features Lil Wayne, stretching and compacting his flow to approximate Chance’s delivery while speaking on his own ongoing contractual issues with Cash Money Records.) “Mixtape” features Young Thug and Lil Yachty—two rappers who have found growing success by upending traditional music industry norms like Chance—to speak on their outsider stances. Thug doesn’t get specific enough to make the song as heavy as it might have been, but Yachty’s verse is strong (“Time and time again they told me no/They told me I wouldn’t go…/Fuck them reviews that they put in the paper/Did what I wanted, didn’t care about a hater/Delivered my tape to the world as a caterer”) and helps the hook shine through: “Am I the only one who still cares about mixtapes?” (It’s worth noting that Chance, who has never released a project for sale before, also released a real-time mixtape last year with fellow outlier Lil B.) The bars here are so hard that it ain’t one gosh-darned part you can’t tweet, but the tracks carry their weight like their brother’s keeper. “Summer Friends” hisses with soft humidity; “Juke Jam” is the soundtrack to a candlelit bedroom; “All Night” moves its feet to Chicago house, courtesy of a roller-rink jam from Kaytranada. But the bulk of this record is handled by musical ensemble the Social Experiment. They’re Chance’s trusted collaborators—together they released last year’s Surf, spearheaded by Donnie Trumpet—and they’ve been refining a sound of expansive but intimate live jazz-indebted soul for the past few years. Here, they take listeners to church with organs on “How Great,” steel drums on “Angels,” and choirs, choirs everywhere. On the “Blessings” reprise that closes out the album, there’s an uncredited “All of the Lights”–esque group harmony courtesy of Ty Dolla $ign, Raury, Anderson .Paak, BJ the Chicago Kid, and others. Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, and is destined to be on year-end lists aplenty. It’s a more rewarding listen than Drake’s recently released Views; it’s nearly as adventurous as The Life of Pablo. In execution and focus, it comes as a joyful, praise-dancing rejoinder to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. It feels a bit silly to compare Coloring Book to Butterfly, but it feels even sillier not to. When music comes like this—personal and panoramic, full of conversations with God, defying hip-hop norms while respecting them, proving that the genre can still dig deeper into its roots—it needs to be contextualized as what it is. This is an ultralight beam; it’s a God dream. CORRECTION: The original version of this review stated Chance the Rapper was suspended from college. He was suspended from high school.

2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

May 17, 2016

01528f34-7223-4a6b-b8b6-91837f4339e1

kris ex

https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/

It's a more mature album with songs about the intricacies of relationships, but 4 has its share of stunning tracks, many co-written by The-Dream.

It's a more mature album with songs about the intricacies of relationships, but 4 has its share of stunning tracks, many co-written by The-Dream.

Beyoncé: 4

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15585-4/

4

One of the year's best music videos was directed by Jay-Z and cost about zero dollars to make. The camera phone clip shows Beyoncé rehearsing her new album's opening eternal-love ballad, "1+1", backstage at "American Idol". There she is: eyes shut, standing in front of a mirror, singing her guts out while family and friends look on in quiet awe. The video has a similar impromptu charm to the many intimate, one-shot performance clips popularized by Vincent Moon's "Take Away Show", its appeal compounded by the shock of seeing such a notoriously manicured superstar without embellishment. "Help me let down my guard," she belts. And, as Beyoncé finishes the song, you hear her proud husband let out a joyous "woo!" It's all quite endearing and personal-- two words one might not often associate with this superhumanly talented and famous couple. "Sometimes you need perspective," wrote Jay in an intro to the video on his Life + Times website. "You've been right in front of greatness so often that you need to step back and see it again for the first time." It's a fitting sentiment and song to introduce 4, which largely deals with monogamy and all that comes with committing to one person for a potential lifetime. Which, like a bad marriage, might sound boring, repetitive, staid. But, in Beyoncé's more-than-capable and still-in-love hands, a relationship that lasts can seem as complicated and rewarding as anyone would hope. "If I ain't got something, I don't give a damn/ 'Cause I got it with you," she testifies on "1+1"-- potentially dubious words from a woman who certainly has "something," but her mainlined vocals quickly dismiss mere logistics. The song boasts some of her finest-ever singing laid over a bed of warm and flowing synths, strings, and bass that manages to connect the dots between Sam Cooke and Prince without sacrificing any Beyoncé-ness. "1+1" is that rare wonder: a wedding song that pleases but doesn't pander. The only recent pop ballad that comes close to its power is Adele's stunning "Someone Like You". But where that song-- and its massively successful corresponding album, 21-- wrung out the aftermath of young heartbreak, Beyoncé is aiming for something a bit more challenging with 4: love the one you're with, and have some fun doing it, too. The album's relative riskiness extends to its music, which side-steps Top 40 radio's current Eurobeat fixation for a refreshingly eclectic mix of early-90s R&B, 80s lite soul, and brass'n'percussion-heavy marching music. All of the album's best elements, thematically and sonically, burst ahead on Jay-Z ode "Countdown", a honking, stutter-step sequel of sorts to "Crazy in Love". The new track makes 10 years of loyalty seem just as thrilling as the first time, with Beyoncé offering her partner copious praise in that famed half-rap cadence: "Still love the way he talks/ Still love the way I sing/ Still love the way he rock them black diamonds in that chain." The album's carefree retro sensibility pops up on three more highlights, including the Kanye West-assisted "Party", which combines a pitch-perfect André 3000 guest verse, a Slick Rick sample, bubbly 80s keyboard tones, and 90s girl-group harmonies. The track has Beyoncé infatuated once again while its mid-tempo bounce provides prime summer barbecue background. "Love on Top" lilts like a lost Reagan-era smash, its light-as-air bop recalling Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Stevie Wonder at their sunniest. And "End of Time" is perhaps 4's most strident declaration of co-dependence; sounding like En Vogue remixed by a high school pep band, the song has Beyoncé finding the strength in two as she sings, "I just wanna be with you/ I just wanna live for you/ I'd never let you go!" That track-- along with most of 4's stand outs-- was co-written and co-produced by the star's other invaluable partner, Terius "The-Dream" Nash. The pair first combined forces on super hit "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", but their collaborative relationship fully blooms on this album's ramped-up back half, including the bombastic, Major Lazer-sampling empowerment tract "Run the World (Girls)". As a songwriter, The-Dream has a way of drawing out a side of Beyoncé that's both more personal and brash, and, as seen on his several brilliant solo albums, his production style routinely references past greats while standing in the now. Tellingly, without his help the album stumbles, as on the overblown "I Was Here", a faceless, theoretically-inspirational slog written by veteran schlockmeister Diane Warren. (Unsurprisingly, "I Was Here" is the only cut on the record that wasn't co-written by Beyoncé herself, too.) Elsewhere, Babyface spearheads the decent "Irreplaceable" retread "Best Thing I Never Had", which probably wouldn't sound out-of-place on a Vanessa Carlton album, and Sleepy Jackson/Empire of the Sun leader Luke Steele worked on the ungainly "Rather Die Young", which ruins its Philly soul vibe with a theatrical Broadway glaze. (Steele also contributed an awful hook on Jay-Z's Blueprint 3 trash-can bait "What We Talkin' About"-- can we get him away from this couple, please?) Ironically, 4's deluxe edition comes with three bonus songs that would easily count among the proper album's finest moments. Chiefly, The-Dream co-written/produced "Schoolin' Life" is an irresistible Prince tribute that's much more motivational than "I Was Here" could ever be: "Who needs a degree when you're schoolin' life?" struts Beyoncé. The singer has said she recorded more than 60 songs while making 4, and some of the wrong-headed inclusions are lazy attempts at re-creating her past hits. But they are few. And the lion's share of the album-- along with its excellent deluxe tracks-- has one of the world's biggest stars exploring her talent in ways few could've predicted, which is always exciting. After 2008's I Am... Sasha Fierce, which saw Beyoncé catching up to trends when she wasn't trying Streisand-wannabe ballads, 4 is more akin to her wily sophomore solo album, B'Day. But where that record was preoccupied with the club, 4 is happy at home; on Off the Wall-style bonus track "Lay Up Under Me", the contented 29-year-old gushes, "You ain't gotta worry 'bout a club, just come on lay up under me tonight." If anyone can make a quiet Friday night come off like an open-bar blowout, it's Beyoncé.

2011-06-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-06-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country / Pop/R&B

Columbia

June 28, 2011

0155c7a8-b6cf-42b0-b520-3cb637d898e4

Ryan Dombal

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

What may be the final Dirty Beaches album was recorded in Alex Zhang Hungtai's current homebase of Lisbon. The album consists of instrumentals and primarily features synths and saxophone; in stark contrast to that combo’s new-agey connotations, the tracks here corrode in grainy, greyscale textures.

What may be the final Dirty Beaches album was recorded in Alex Zhang Hungtai's current homebase of Lisbon. The album consists of instrumentals and primarily features synths and saxophone; in stark contrast to that combo’s new-agey connotations, the tracks here corrode in grainy, greyscale textures.

Dirty Beaches: Stateless

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19863-dirty-beaches-stateless/

Stateless

Our adult lives exist on a spectrum demarcated by domesticity and liberty. The stability of long-term companionship, steady employment, and home ownership comes at the expense of spontaneity, adventure, and wanderlust—and vice versa. Inevitably, those residing on opposite ends of the spectrum start to long for what the other has. For the working musician—whose very livelihood is a function of perpetual financial risk and chronic displacement—those poles shift further apart with each passing year, thus amplifying the cruel irony of trying to make a living so, that one day, they can enjoy a life that’s ultimately creeping further out of reach. While the old adage says "there’s no place like home," for Alex Zhang Hungtai home is no place. The music he’s produced as Dirty Beaches has amounted to an extended examination of the vagabond life, one that he comes by honestly. (Well before he became a touring performer, he had spent his formative years shuttling between Taipei, Hawaii, Montreal, and all points in between.) While his 2011 breakthrough, Badlands, romanticized the lone-wolf lifestyle with its impeccably pompadoured inhabitations of early-Elvis and Suicide-schooled bad-boy archetypes, the music he’s released since has focused on the flipside of that outlaw ideal: the constant sense of dislocation and isolation. His electro-shocked 2013 album, Drifters and its soundscaped counterpart Love Is the Devil respectively captured both the hedonistic allure and homesick ennui of globe-trotting travel. But on Dirty Beaches’ latest release, that feeling of disorientation and disconnection becomes all-consuming—to the point of obliterating his Dirty Beaches identity altogether. If Love Is the Devil was a series of impressionistic snapshots cataloguing the many far-flung locales stamped on Zhang's ever-crowded passport, the all-instrumental Stateless captures the eerie sensation of waking up and not knowing where—or who—you are. After hearing this album, you'll understand why Zhang recently announced he's retiring the Dirty Beaches concept: this is the sound of an artist who, after years of nomadic musical exploration, has reached the end of the road, with nothing but open water before him and a desire to submerge himself completely. The pensive instrumentals on Love Is the Devil revealed Zhang's mounting interest in less theatrical, more introspective modes of expression. With Stateless, he finally achieves the state of pure anonymity that his work has been inching toward, fashioning four extended pieces that do away not just with vocals and rhythm, but identifiable melodic motifs altogether. As was the case with Love Is the Devil, the song titles serve as highly evocative headers to blank diary entries—but where its predecessor offered some geographic cues to help frame Zhang’s free-form excursions ("Berlin", "Alone at the Danube River"), Stateless deals in intangible, existential messaging: "Displaced", "Time Washes Away Everything", and so forth. Even the one recognizable locale—"Pacific Ocean"—is defined by its imposing vastness. For all its seeming aesthetic and thematic open-endedness, however, Stateless proves to be the most focussed, tightly orchestrated release in the Dirty Beaches canon. For one, its two album sides share a similar arc, opening with a relatively shorter piece—both of which clock in at exactly 7:27—that set up longer works surpassing the double-digits mark. And where the instrumentals on Love Is the Devil had a more roaming quality—with Zhang laying down wandering piano lines and serrated guitar shards as a gateway into his subconscious—Stateless is a work of deceptively serene, slow-roiling tension, liberated from traditional song structure yet claustrophobically contained at the same time. Recorded in his current homebase of Lisbon, the album primarily features Zhang on synths and saxophone, but, in stark contrast to that combo’s new-agey connotations, the tracks here are corroded in grainy, greyscale textures. With Zhang’s staccato sax squawks woven into Colin Stetson-like oscillations alongside guest Vittorio Demarin’s trembling viola, the opening "Displaced" resembles the foreboding intro to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor epic (shut your eyes and you can practically picture the accompanying Karl Lemieux projections), but lingers on the sense of encroaching dread rather than deliver the crescendo rock-out. On the title track, layered synth drones form an oppressively thick mist under which Zhang’s saxophone murmurs are barely audible, like foghorns emanating from some indeterminate location far off in the distance. For Zhang, the ship is always arriving, but never settling. Stateless’ second act eases up on the tension, and in its place, reveal subtle but forceful moments of emotional release: "Pacific Ocean" begins as a synth hum that’s as monochromatic and all-enveloping as the namesake body of water, but Zhang gradually introduces affective chord changes that hint at all the wondrous subaquatic life that exists beneath the surface. And the immense 14-minute closer "Time Washes Away Everything" brings Demarin back for an exquisitely melancholic meditation whose intertwined, synth-swaddled viola and sax sweeps constantly seem to be on the verge of flickering out, before the embers come alight more brightly than before. If Love Is the Devil was intended to challenge the expectations of fans initially drawn to Zhang for the greaser persona and wild-child shrieks, then *Stateless—*fitting for a finale—proves to be the ultimate test of their commitment. The album’s stationary sound and glacial pace, ironically, make it a more demanding listen than Dirty Beaches’ more outwardly confrontational, punk-inspired previous releases. But coming from a musician who, not too long ago, could be easily slotted alongside other retro-fetishist garage-rockers, Stateless feels less like a sad, unceremonious farewell than the quietly triumphant completion of a mission, the final step in an ongoing process of deconstructing Zhang's prefab persona into something pure and personal. Before the news broke of Dirty Beaches' demise, Stateless sounded like an audio analogue to Zhang’s eternally unmoored existence. But now, it feels like the natural end point of Dirty Beaches' unpredictable aesthetic evolution. In other words, it feels like home.

2014-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00

2014-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00

Experimental / Rock

Zoo Music

November 3, 2014

01560718-fbab-4c0c-8832-75a595de9e76

Stuart Berman

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

Riding the wave of success from the Fugees’ The Score, Wyclef Jean’s 1997 solo debut is a 74-minute party, as advertised. It’s a proud transcultural product that broadcasted an eclectic future.

Riding the wave of success from the Fugees’ The Score, Wyclef Jean’s 1997 solo debut is a 74-minute party, as advertised. It’s a proud transcultural product that broadcasted an eclectic future.

Wyclef Jean: The Carnival

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wyclef-jean-the-carnival/

The Carnival

The Fugees’ beautiful 1996 landmark album The Score went six-times platinum, numbers only racked up within the world of hip-hop by people like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. During an era when JAY-Z and Nas made early career statements and 2Pac and Biggie were murdered, the Fugees presented a wide path for the future of hip-hop. Missy Elliott and TLC had already drawn plans for some of the genre’s pop futures; the Fugees corroborated and ran with them. In three interplayed voices, they were cooly courageous instead of reactionary. They rose Roberta Flack from the past, covered Bob Marley at the Grammys, and won two of them. In The Score’s wake, Wyclef Jean, the multi-instrumentalist producer, was the first to go solo. He recorded The Carnival on the road as the Fugees traveled the world. The album was born in the summer of 1997: Bill Clinton was president again, before the Lewinsky scandal, the economy was booming, and the Gap was playing the Roots, Jamiroquai, and Sublime on the same in-store playlist. The executives at Wyclef’s label, Columbia, were not shy about their hopes for The Carnival’s success. One marketing VP told Billboard that their goal was for the record to achieve “total global saturation,” picking up where The Score had left off, introducing rap to listeners that hadn’t traditionally embraced it. That potential audience wasn’t explicitly described as nonblack, but the implication was strong. The album was intended to be understood as universally accessible, and to be taken seriously as high-concept pop theater. Those expectations weren’t unmerited. Years before the iPod revived the singles market and trained listeners to shuffle their favorites into new contexts, The Carnival gathered an ambitious array of personalities into 24 disco-roots-creole dance tracks. Lauryn Hill, Pras, the Neville Brothers, Celia Cruz, Funkmaster Flex, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra all play on this 74-minute thing. One single’s music video has a Bob Dylan cameo, another song samples the Bee Gees. There are eight skit interludes, several of them acting out a court case in which Wyclef humorously frames himself as someone whose character is on trial. “He’s a goddamn revolutionary!” a prosecutor yelps. In response, Wyclef presents The Carnival as proof he is the kind of winking populist rascal who can make a home anywhere and thrive. “Feel the excitement, taste the culture, know who you are!” extols an announcer on the album’s infomercial-styled intro. Wyclef ups the ante: “We are not stopping for no red lights tonight!” An hour later, a skit called “Closing Arguments” seems like it’s going to end the album. Instead, it’s followed by another interlude, and three more songs. This is a party with enough endurance to actually replace the everyday, not just help you temporarily escape it. If the runtime seems exhausting in hindsight, the premise holds up. At The Carnival, anything can happen. You could look at The Carnival as a craven ploy by record companies seeking to further mainstream black music ahead of the millennium’s turn, but even that wouldn’t betray the remarkable history of how its particular hybrid sound came to be. Wyclef’s move from Haiti to Brooklyn (and then New Jersey) was part of a large migration of Haitians to the U.S., prompted by the repressive Duvalier regimes of the ’70s and ’80s. With the Fugees, he fused his immigration story with the DNA of New York’s housing projects and Caribbean sonics. The Carnival is an equally proud transcultural product, attesting to how dislocation and intersection mix people up. Its songs sung in Creole celebrate and affirm Haitian identity, but the album also indicates that most people have claim to multiple heritages, are the inheritors of multiple pasts. Since his debut, Wyclef has been effectively called on to cross artists over. He produced a radio hit for fusion guitarist Carlos Santana, and re-gifted his song “Dance Like This” to Colombian idol Shakira as the double-platinum breakout “Hips Don’t Lie.” With “My Love Is Your Love,” he provided Whitney Houston’s early aughts comeback a contemporary reggae canvas. He wasn’t the first to sidecar substance in the name of style, but all-embracing, rap-rooted albums like Puffy’s No Way Out were made more thinkable by Wyclef’s contributions. “It’s an algorithm, dog, when you put cultures together. That kind of music is no longer music. It becomes just a cultural phenomenon,” Wyclef said of this winning strategy, on the Drink Champs podcast this year. “As much as I’m Haitian, no one can’t tell me I ain’t Latin, no one can’t tell me I ain’t African… If you close your eyes and I start to play piano, you be thinking I’m from Cuba.... They separate us or whatever, but for me, I know I got family from Cuba, from Jamaica.” Can we recognize this as the same kind of strategic anti-essentialism that’s been familiar since Lil Wayne boasted that he wasn’t a human being? Or that people like Future and Lil Yachty now invoke when they plead to be considered more than rappers? Music has always been inhabited by people whose lives defy tidy paths, and what people embrace as their own can be as powerful as where they come from: American Jazz heroes had classical chops, and Western classical music was inspired by Turkish trends. DJ Khaled and Rihanna’s omnipotent 2017 smash “Wild Thoughts” revives “Maria Maria,” the song Wyclef was inspired to write by a Sondheim musical, which takes its guitar line from both “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit” and a popular gypsy scale. The eclectic future The Carnival broadcast was always real, and it still is. At the time of The Carnival’s release, critics reckoned with Wyclef’s dual appetites for social change and pop stardom. In an issue of SPIN with Ani DiFranco on the cover, reviewer Sia Michel argued that even if he thought of himself as a revolutionary, he was more a savvy politician. “It was once hip-hop tradition to crown yourself a leader, but armchair gangstas have made it uncool to care about anything you can’t smoke, fuck, or spend,” she wrote. “Wyclef emerges from the vacuum less a public enemy than a dreadlocked diplomat... He’s for cohesion, not confrontation.” Translating stories and combining styles is a powerful, important tactic, but one perhaps more easily employed in music than outside of it. When Wyclef took his appealingly unpreachy social conscience into actual politics in 2010, mounting a campaign for the presidency of Haiti, he was disqualified for living in the U.S. Around the same time, the expenditures and tax filings of a charity he founded, Yéle Haiti, were scrutinized in the wake of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. The organization was closed in 2012. Speaking with The Daily Beast in 2014, Wyclef said: “Within every foundation, will there be mistakes and errors? Yes. If you’re in the middle of a crisis and there’s an earthquake and you’re trying to help 250,000 people, you’re just trying to get them water. That’s what I was thinking. It’s not my job to be filing paperwork.” Recently, a streaming service served me an artificial-intelligence playlist of songs it speculated would be meaningful to me, with The Carnival’s “Gone Till November” at the top. There’s something fundamentally bittersweet about this; having your memories pandered to by a machine. But I’m pleased by the crowd-supported recognition that the songs I engage with most now—rap music from unsinkable personality Cardi B, Latin trap prince Bad Bunny, and grime singer Not3s that draw inspiration from far-flung locales and imagine a world not dominated by any nation’s taste—have identifiable roots in an album that captured my attention at a formative time. And I’m not surprised. In the streaming era, the dream of reverse engineering culturally resonant megahits is alive; in Wyclef’s words, they’re almost algorithmic. We can learn a lot about big audiences and what they might like. Global scale has arguably never been more alluring, or attainable.

2017-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Columbia

October 8, 2017

0156dcd8-04a2-4708-bf50-300499653cc6

Naomi Zeichner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/naomi-zeichner/

While the Japanese producer’s early music was grounded in footwork, he relegates rhythm to the margins on his latest EP, arranging his samples into wild abstractions and warped folk songs.

While the Japanese producer’s early music was grounded in footwork, he relegates rhythm to the margins on his latest EP, arranging his samples into wild abstractions and warped folk songs.

Foodman: Uchigawa Tankentai EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foodman-uchigawa-tankentai-ep/

Uchigawa Tankentai EP

Before Takahide Higuchi tried his hand at music, he dreamed of working as a game designer and bringing to life the fantasy worlds in his imagination. Though his initial experiments with RPG Maker software proved frustrating enough to put those ambitions aside, the Japanese producer’s abstract beatcraft under the name Foodman can often resemble the intricate worldbuilding of classic titles like Chrono Trigger and EarthBound. Inspired by the cut-and-pasted bricolage of footwork and juke, his songs are built out of tiny, chirping samples that skitter like 16-bit sprites ambling across the screen. Earlier works like 2021’s Yasuragi Land remained tethered to the conventions of club music, occasionally locking into bouncy four-on-the-floor grooves, but his new Uchigawa Tankentai EP is a detour into greater fragmentation. True to its title, which translates to “inner journey,” the record is guided by a loose, instinctual sensibility, evolving organically rather than following a linear progression. “Hajimari,” for example, develops like a screen-recorded playthrough of Pikmin. While you can distinguish the vague outline of a rhythm beneath the track’s chaotically deployed samples, it’s more interesting to observe it from a distant point of view, as a self-contained ecosystem. Insectoid synths warble and coo as if in conversation while tom drums, reversed hi-hats, and visceral squelching noises illustrate the collective efforts of a hive foraging for food and constructing shelter. In the album’s introspective focus, it’s as if Higuchi’s soul-searching had distilled emotion down to a cartoon symbiosis between neurons and gut flora. Elsewhere, Higuchi inserts his own voice into the soundscape, turning splintered pieces into warped folk songs. On social media and in interviews, Higuchi often cites private moments like cold baths or lunches eaten alone as sources of inspiration, and on opener “Pichi Pichi,” he imitates the strained croak of an old man, waxing nostalgic about the texture of perfectly crisp potatoes and warm summer days as metallic synths clatter in the distance. The blend of sounds can be disjointed and sour, but that imperfection is by design. These sound like the tuneless songs you might sing to yourself while doing chores: snippets of naive expression that lend human intimacy to Foodman’s digital songcraft. Covering five tracks in just 10 minutes, Uchigawa Tankentai is one of Foodman’s shortest releases. There’s charm in its diminutive scale, though a track like the 90-second “Hoso Michi” would benefit from further development. The interplay between its dissonant chords and MIDI choral arrangement is fascinating—like Anthony Braxton composing on a Dreamcast’s sound chip—but the song explodes into a whirlwind of drums and screams before the atmosphere can take hold. Despite its brevity, the EP succeeds as an opportunity for Foodman to steer his already eccentric artistry in a number of new directions without disrupting the flow of more conceptual LPs. Embracing the post-structural freedom evident in his earlier releases, it’s some of his most expressive—and challenging—work yet.

2023-11-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

2023-11-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

Experimental

Hyperdub

November 15, 2023

015876eb-9578-465a-a021-1d5481fb395c

Jude Noel

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

On his first solo billing in six years, the guitarist—a member of Darkside and Taper’s Choice—bids farewell to NYC. These patient, wistful explorations are heavy on both melody and collaborative spirit.

On his first solo billing in six years, the guitarist—a member of Darkside and Taper’s Choice—bids farewell to NYC. These patient, wistful explorations are heavy on both melody and collaborative spirit.

Dave Harrington: Skull Dream

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-harrington-skull-dream/

Skull Dream

In 2019, Dave Harrington, lifelong New Yorker and stalwart of the city’s avant-garde jazz and improv scene, moved to Los Angeles with his partner. But before he left, the guitarist gathered some of the city’s best players, both contemporaries like bassist Spencer Zahn and longtime heroes like Steven Bernstein, and made one last New York record. Fittingly, Skull Dream is an album of patient, wistful explorations that seem unable to keep from casting their eyes California’s way, even as they celebrate a lifetime of rich musical relationships. The album is at times funereal and at times shot through with optimism; its generosity of spirit shines so brightly, its desire to be in two places at once so palpable that it blots out all boundaries—between places, between jazz and noise and Americana, but also between the songs themselves. If that means it gets a little same-y, well, so does a cross-country move. Harrington first came to prominence in Darkside, his collaboration with electronic producer Nicolás Jaar, where the hard slink of his stippling phrases—part soukous, part erotic murmur—dug creases in the otherwise placid surface of Jaar’s productions. Listening to his playing on their instant-classic 2013 album Psychic sometimes feels like watching someone run their tongue over black velvet. A regular at eclectic Lower East Side club Nublu, he quickly installed himself at L.A.’s ETA after the move, becoming a regular player in the surging local jazz scene. He also joined up with Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker and Vampire Weekend’s Chris Tomson, as well as keyboardist Zach Tenorio-Miller, to form the instantly beloved jam band Taper’s Choice, turning their mostly straightforward choogle inside out with effects-heavy leads that sometimes sound like they’re beamed in via choppy satellite. On Skull Dream, Harrington’s guitar tone is a little hoarse and a little spacey, and he often uses it to tangle notes into tumbleweeds, sounding like the 1980s version of Jerry Garcia trying his hand at some Duane Eddy and Link Wray. His last major release, 2019’s Pure Imagination, No Country, was credited to the Dave Harrington Group, and while Skull Dream’s solo billing might suggest a showcase for the guitarist’s grandest riffs and flashiest licks, he brings the same cooperation and composure to these songs as to his other projects, a collaborator in his own music. In opener “Dust String Peaks,” Harrington laces his patient lead through a sighing choir of saxophones and clarinets. It’s the kind of plaintive and plainly beautiful melodic line that sometimes made the Band sound like they were imagining their own funerals. The guitar and horns stroll over the patient strike of the drums with so much dignity, it feels valedictory, like the ensemble wants to sum up decades of accrued wisdom while it still has the time. Harrington occasionally allows himself a showy moment, as when the juicy horns of “Acid Western” give way to a guitar that sounds like a soprano sax, then an overdriven harmonica, and finally a wordless vocalist. But his instrument is largely beside the point, just one ray among many in the shifting light that shines and fades in what one track dubs a “Box of Sun.” Skull Dream’s songs have a similar relationship to the album as a whole. As with any prolonged goodbye, everything here is colored by a bittersweet vibe. Even the skronkiest tunes—like “Vistavision,” where the heat shimmers of guitar and battering horns jam the knotted percussion down into a grainy mash—seem to be playing out under a long shadow. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Consider the power of your best friend’s going-away party. Harrington has said that his priorities when mixing the album were to keep melody as prominent as possible, avoid needless obfuscation, and above all focus on allowing himself to pursue the sounds he likes, rather than something that might sound “right.” That freedom is key to Skull Dream’s thematic consistency, and to the largeness of its heart. But allowing those amber lights to shine so brightly without changing the colors flattens some of the ensemble’s dynamism over time and nearly edges the album into melodrama. The trade-off, though, is that Skull Dream is intimate and emotionally present in a way that this kind of music frequently is not; you can sense the affection coming off each of the players. In the same way that grainy clips of future Olympians carry a strange affective charge when juxtaposed with their present selves on the podium, Skull Dream is an encounter with both the romance and the tragedy of time—a portrait of how we got here, and a promise that there’s no going back.

2024-08-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-08-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

Electronic / Jazz

Maximum Overdub

August 6, 2024

015c6ee5-71b8-4831-9d88-293bc690d514

Sadie Sartini Garner

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

For the majority of Americans, it's a given: summer is the best season of the year. Or so you ...

For the majority of Americans, it's a given: summer is the best season of the year. Or so you ...

The Shins: Oh, Inverted World

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7113-oh-inverted-world/

Oh, Inverted World

For the majority of Americans, it's a given: summer is the best season of the year. Or so you'd think, judging from the anonymous TV ad men and women who proclaim, "Summer is here! Get your [insert iced drink here] now!"-- whereas in the winter, they regret to inform us that it's time to brace ourselves with a new Burlington coat. And TV is just an exaggerated reflection of ourselves; the hordes of convertibles making the weekend pilgrimage to the nearest beach are proof enough. Vitamin D overdoses abound. If my tone isn't suggestive enough, then I'll say it flat out: I hate the summer. It is, in my opinion, the worst season of the year. Sure, it's great for holidays, work vacations, and ogling the underdressed opposite sex, but you pay for this in sweat, which comes by the quart, even if you obey summer's central directive: be lazy. Then there's the traffic, both pedestrian and automobile, and those unavoidable, unbearable Hollywood blockbusters and TV reruns (or second-rate series). Not to mention those package music tours. But perhaps worst of all is the heightened aggression. Just last week, in the middle of the day, a reasonable-looking man in his mid-twenties decided to slam his palm across my forehead as he walked past me. Mere days later-- this time at night-- a similar-looking man (but different; there a lot of these guys in Boston) stumbled out of a bar and immediately grabbed my shirt and tore the pocket off, spattering his blood across my arms and chest in the process. There's a reason no one riots in the winter. Maybe I need to move to the home of Sub Pop, where the sun is shy even in summer, and where angst and aggression are more likely to be internalized. Then again, if Sub Pop is releasing the Shins' kind-of debut (they've been around for nine years, previously as Flake, and then Flake Music), maybe even Seattle has turned to the bright side. For some have hailed Oh, Inverted World as the next great entry in a long line of clean and carefree pop albums that strings back to the Beach Boys' early surfing days. This is what's meant by "sunny" music: both laid-back and upbeat, with crystalline vocals and lyrics that, while sincere, aren't particularly weighty. Thankfully, the Shins are a little more unpredictable than the summer, with its incessant, oppressive heat. "Caring is Creepy," the opener, recalls the slower numbers on Sunny Day Real Estate's last prog-heavy offering, The Rising Tide. James Mercer's voice is nearly as inhuman and unclear as Jeremy Enigk's, and his dramatic delivery shifts momentum almost as often. A less fortunate similarity is the echo-heavy vocals, which likewise provide ample pretension, but they're not enough to derail this good rock song. The following track, "One by One All Day," is decidedly different. The more conventional vocals are instead layered and slightly withdrawn, allowing the thumping drums and jangly guitar to share the forefront. However, for all its pleasantness, it's fairly uniform. "Weird Days," the most obvious Beach Boys-inspired song here, slows the pace to a drift. Like the previous number, it's not particularly dynamic, but the vocals and tropical strumming are pretty enough. The Shins start showing their real strengths with "Know Your Onion!" which sounds like a 60's British garage band striving for the Kinks and just falling short. Just. The hook is surprisingly deceptive, the occasional childish background vocals are fun without being irritable, and there's even a welcome hint of their previous sound, which comes in the form of a slow, Modest Mouse-like interlude that ends with a patented Guided by Voices guitar lick. "Girl on the Wing" is another strong, but more straightforward pop song that rides along on ringing keyboard notes not unlike-- but less abrasive than-- GBV's "Titus and Strident Wet Nurse (Creating Jeffrey)" from this year's Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel compilation. But "Pressed in a Book" is undoubtedly the most straightforward, and perhaps the best song on Oh, Inverted World. The sound is like Weezer at their best-- simple, addictive chord changes and clear, sing-song vocals-- but for some background rattling and a few slow, strummy passages. At times, though, the Shins seem too content to float along. The folky "New Slang" is Simon and Garfunkel all the way down to the celestial humming. "The Celibate Life," with its distant guitar and soft percussion, would be a carbon copy of the Magnetic Fields if it weren't for a lone harmonica. "Your Algebra" returns to S&G;, this time to their chantey side, adding only a spare, diligently picked acoustic guitar as accompaniment. But despite the obvious comparisons, these songs are too pretty to turn down. Like summer itself, the Shins are slightly over-hyped. All the buzz that's surrounded this release had me thinking (read: hoping) it would be the pop album of, at the very least, this summer. Oh, Inverted World comes close, but too much of the material here recalls other bands to consider it a "great" album. Nonetheless, I still can't believe this is what most people think summer sounds like. I only wish this wretched season sounded so good.

2001-06-30T01:00:02.000-04:00

2001-06-30T01:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Sub Pop

June 30, 2001

015d3418-bcc3-4328-9acc-141055112d2b

Pitchfork

Like many of their early ’80s UK peers, Maximum Joy mixed punk, funk, disco, and reggae. This new set captures a band carving its own place with two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy.

Like many of their early ’80s UK peers, Maximum Joy mixed punk, funk, disco, and reggae. This new set captures a band carving its own place with two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy.

Maximum Joy: I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights: Singles 1981-82

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maximum-joy-i-cant-stand-it-here-on-quiet-nights-singles-1981-82/

I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights: Singles 1981-82

Listening today, three-and-a-half decades later, it’s easy to hear Maximum Joy as a relic of their era. The defining characteristics of their music—rope-like basslines, squalls of dub delay, and alternately soaring and honking horn parts—peg them to the early 1980s, when punk rock, funk, disco, and reggae were all mixing together. But the Bristol, UK, group has never enjoyed the acclaim of contemporaries like Rip Rig and Panic, Pigbag, or the Pop Group (with whom they shared members), to say nothing of New York acts like ESG or Liquid Liquid (with whom they rubbed elbows on the roster of New York’s 99 Records). The group’s prime recording years spanned only from 1981 until 1983, in which time they recorded three singles, an Adrian Sherwood-produced LP, and a handful of compilation tracks. Since then, Maximum Joy have remained largely a footnote, despite the widespread reappraisal of funk-punk that began in the early 2000s, with the rise of DFA. They landed one track on Strut’s landmark 2008 compilation Disco Not Disco and another on last year’s Sherwood at the Controls Volume 1: 1979-1984; it has largely fallen to DJs like Andrew Weatherall and Optimo’s JD Twitch to keep their memory alive for the dancing public. This new collection overlaps with an out-of-print 2005 anthology on Germany’s Crippled Dick Hot Wax! label, though the compilers here have mostly opted for different mixes, like the 7” “Silent Dub” of “Silent Street” instead of the 12” version, or the 12” mix of “In the Air,” which runs nearly twice the length of the previous comp’s version. Focusing primarily on the group’s three singles, I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights captures a band carving out its own place using two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy. The former is right there on the surface, in the group’s slashing and zig-zagging rhythm section and horn riffs. Bassist Dan Catsis, formerly of the Pop Group, is alternately nimble and brute in his attack: On “Silent Street (Silent Dub),” he traces a taut pattern so neatly you might not even notice that the song is in 9/4 time; on “White and Green Place (Extraterrestrial Mix),” he digs in hard, thumbing a riff that suggests kinship with Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern” bassline before sliding fat, greasy fifths down the neck of his instrument. Ex-Glaxo Babies drummer Charlie Llewellin is the perfect foil for Catsis’ blend of agility and force, with a fondness for crisp, skeletal grooves—nimble dub on “Silent Street,” neck-snapping disco on “Stretch (7 Inch Mix)” and “In the Air (12 Inch Mix)”—that make the most of the emptiness between hi-hats and snares. As for guitarist John Waddington, another Pop Group alumnus, he sides mainly with that gaping negative space, his presence felt mainly in glancing funk chords that fall across the music like the glow of a stained-glass window. It’s singer Janine Rainforth that best embodies Maximum Joy’s exuberance: Having co-founded the group when she was just 18 years old, she channeled her inspirations—singers like X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene and the Slits’ Ari Up—into her own shape-shifting style. On “Stretch,” the A-side of the group’s debut single, she belts it out in the manner of her mentors, slicing into the midrange frequencies with a tone poised at the midway point between speech, screaming, and singing. It’s an entirely fitting complement to the song’s defiant positivity: “Stay positive, stay strong!/Hold safe, hold straight/Don’t terminate, no end!” Listen closely, though, and you’ll hear another side of her: a soft soprano background coo, diffuse as a pastel-colored mist. This is the voice that gives “Silent Street (Silent Dub)” its ethereal, sui generis feel: The lyrics (“Let’s have the music all day long/Let’s have the sound all night”) may scan as reggae boilerplate, but her airy tone lends a uniquely spooky quality to the song, like a ghost haunting the dancehall. It’s a quality you won’t find in any of their contemporaries. Somewhere in between all that sinew and euphoria, Wrafter’s saxophone and trumpet blaze their own trail, shrieking and soaring and honking. On “In the Air,” no wave skronk comes to the fore, abetted by Rainforth’s own dissonant violin; on “Simmer Til Done,” his lowing, lyrical style has more in common with Clarence Clemons or the “Saturday Night Live” band’s Lenny Pickett. It’s here, as well as in his guttural bellowing on “Stretch,” that Maximum Joy’s music can occasionally feel dated. Elsewhere, though, Wrafter's woozy tone gives the music its undeniable frisson: On “Silent Street” and “Building Bridges (Building Dub),” his atonal trumpet blasts are the glue that holds everything together. It’s no wonder the compilation opens with “Silent Street,” which was the B-side to their debut single. The song is where they found something inimitable. At the nexus of a bunch of different styles, in the shadow of their peers, they struck a spark that still glows.

2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Silent Street

September 8, 2017

01612595-d0e9-4cad-9be9-239e2e405541

Philip Sherburne

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

Chicago's NE-HI come out of the basement for their second album, one that sees the band shaping their wiry garage rock sound for larger stages while still honing their musical personalities.

Chicago's NE-HI come out of the basement for their second album, one that sees the band shaping their wiry garage rock sound for larger stages while still honing their musical personalities.

NE-HI: Offers

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23028-ne-hi-offers/

Offers

Selectivity is the calling card of Chicago’s NE-HI. On the band’s self-titled 2014 debut, which was recorded in one of the many city basements that grew them, they never showed their full hand. Four of its nine tracks were a single hook of eight or nine words and almost nothing else. Jason Balla’s guitar lines featured plenty of space between each note, and they honk, nasal and blaring, as if their garage indie rock was designed with the express purpose of forcing their way through to the back of an overcrowded basement. The band learned quickly that their overflowing energy is best spent when pouring more into less, and not vice versa. Offers is NE-HI’s second album and first on Grand Jury Music, and it reintroduces the band as one who plays above-ground. Coming off of multiple tours where they regularly played on proper stages for the first time, NE-HI built these songs accordingly: They sound twice as developed. The co-frontman platoon of Mikey Wells, the more verse-chorus-minded songwriter, and Balla, who on stage assumes the form of a rubber band in flight, dial up the energy between the two. Their ballooning sound is a close approximation of the NE-HI live show—the band's best foot forward—and captures the breath of the band up close like being inches away from their mics in a moldy basement. On the Wells-led highlights “Buried on the Moon,” “Sisters,” and “Don’t Wanna Know You,” Balla’s guitar buzzes and swerves behind him, forming these hardly logical interactions that make for Offers’s most interesting moments. The album’s first single, “Drag,” is also the best bridge between basement- and stage-NE-HI, featuring a full structure without sacrificing the shouts. The abrasive instrumental breakdowns that NE-HI leaned on for their loudest early songs aren’t common here, but the one that shows up on  “Out of Reach” punctuates one of the least ambiguous lyrics Balla has written: “Do you want to get along?/Say the word, I’ll let you right in.” Neither singer is one to get cheated on a single vowel sound. Offers was completed on its second studio go-around after the first was scrapped almost entirely. The pressure to deliver—and to fold into the business of building a successful band—seems to have found its way into the songs, which can flirt a little too closely with self-obsession. “Every Dent” reckons with all the glad-handing required to get ahead in the business, and on “Buried on the Moon,” Wells takes an even more cynical look at the process: “Well come on make a record like your dear old dad/Yeah, we’ll give you all the money then make you feel sad.” The shoegazing title track looks upon the defeat of a missed opportunity with dread: “Offer’s gone/No response/I’ve been on too long,” Balla sings, exhaustingly. But Offers deliberately ends on a more optimistic ode to their roots, a song that feels like NE-HI’s home base. On “Stay Young,” they talk changing, growing, and resisting age—while all too self-aware of the embarrassment of admitting to resisting age. “Time gets away from you / And it’s not coming back,” Balla sings. But time spent pouring energy into work that marks a new chapter, while the energy is still there, is time well spent. NE-HI are comfortable doing as much as they can.

2017-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Grand Jury

March 17, 2017

01618c01-1528-45fd-a2b8-f98ff1eb307b

Steven Arroyo

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

Compared to the Wu-Tang Clan’s rowdy 36 Chambers and the canonized solo albums that followed it, Method Man’s solo debut is a reclusive, interior record, concerned primarily with securing refuge and dispatching threats.

Compared to the Wu-Tang Clan’s rowdy 36 Chambers and the canonized solo albums that followed it, Method Man’s solo debut is a reclusive, interior record, concerned primarily with securing refuge and dispatching threats.

Method Man: Tical

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/method-man-tical/

Tical

Of the many monikers, aliases, and riffs that whizz like flying guillotines across Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), only one gets spelled out: Method Man. The Staten Island rapper’s self-titled song, a geyser of idioms and allusions to cartoons, commercials, and weed, offers the earliest proof that Wu-Tang is for the children. His puerile free associations spring off and glom on to RZA’s dusty drums and piano plinks like chewing gum on teeth. “You don’t know me and you don’t know my style,” Method Man taunts, an ethos that would come to define his debut album. Released a little over a year after Enter the Wu-Tang in the fall of 1994, Tical opened the fusillade of solo Wu-Tang albums that followed the clan’s rowdy debut. It was supposed to be second in line, but Ol’ Dirty Bastard blew his $45,000 advance from Elektra on a hooptie and had an erratic recording schedule. Meth stepped up with a debut informed by drug-altered states and the grim environments that make them desirable. It lives in the shadow of the canonized Wu solo albums that succeeded it, and relative to the cold precision of Liquid Swords, the wry unpredictability of Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, and the dizzyingly stylish pulp of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, it’s not as refined, eclectic, or cinematic. But that’s by design. Though he became the breakout star of the group, thanks in part to his frequent collaborations with non-Wu artists like Biggie and Spice 1, Tical is an interior record. Across these reclusive tracks, Method Man’s primary concerns are securing refuge and dispatching threats. Named after methtical—Staten Island slang for weed—but also deeply shaped by angel dust, Tical molds the suave playfulness of “Method Man” into anxious evasion. The music is claustrophobic and quicksilver, Method Man’s liquid delivery sliding around, across, and into RZA’s jigsaw beats. “Bring the Pain” is a flow clinic in which Method Man skillfully drifts in and out of meter over a purring sample of Jerry Butler’s soul gem “I’m Your Mechanical Man.” Though he sounds unbothered as he peels off boasts and references to Star Wars, Driving Miss Daisy, and Kris Kross, his fleet-footed rhymes are charged with unease. “Is it real, son, is it really real, son?/Let me know it’s real son, if it’s really real,” he rattles off on the jittery hook. In a 1994 ego trip profile, Method Man said the goal of the album was to “take niggas outta hell for a minute,” but the music never feels escapist in the traditional sense. He presents escape as active and adrenal, his thoughts racing as he chases relief in a rhyme or an inhale. Music about getting high often basks in the way weed dilates consciousness and stretches time, but Tical is more like a cigarette break on the clock, every puff underscoring the brevity of the comfort. Most of the verses are functionally strings of battle raps, harking back to both the Staten Island cyphers where the Wu members cut their teeth and the internal competitions that would determine who ended up on the Clan’s songs. “Meth vs. Chef” epitomizes that mode, staging a friendly skirmish between Method Man and Raekwon. But Method Man’s shit-talking often doubles as venting. On single “Release Yo’ Delf,” he sounds outright annoyed. “Notice, that other niggas rap styles is bogus/Doo doo, compared to this versatile voodoo/Blazing, the stuff that ignites stimulation inside ya/’Cause I be that hell sure provider,” he raps, slyly emphasizing the first counts of each measure. He has a singular gift for stylizing transitions between words and bars, a skill that makes his rapping conversational and personable even when he’s taking heads. The opening lines of “Sub Crazy” are full of artful pauses and change-ups that string threats into a vignette: “What up, opp? Niggas is strapped, ready for war/On the ill block, things just ain’t peace no more/Fuck it, if you ain’t with me then forget me/Niggas tried to stick me/Retaliation, no hesitation, shifty/Creepin’ niggas in the dark, triggers with no heart/Ripping ass apart, I be swimming with the sharks now.” The rhymes are polysyllabic but unembellished, his voice instead stressing the shifts in cadence that stitch all the images together. Method Man would later become revered for his smooth and assured voice—a pillar of orthodoxy in the midst of the Wu ruckus, and the legible counterpoint to Redman’s freehand word splatters—but here he’s as dynamic as he is suave.  RZA’s inkblot beats are just as fluid; the sooty drum kits, corroded piano melodies, and spectral voice samples shroud the album in moody darkness. On “Mr. Sandman” he degrades the Chordettes’ cheery ’50s pop standard of the same name into an eerie death wail and sprinkles it over a dulled breakbeat. He tops the cavernous bass of “Sub Crazy” with a chilly, melodic howl and the disturbing sound of a bomb falling. “Release Yo’ Delf” flips Gloria Gaynor’s anthemic “I Will Survive” into a dubby marching drill. “Keep it moving, baby, we be moving,” chants Method Man, the drum major to RZA’s one-man band.  Compared to Enter the Wu-Tang, Tical’s production has briefer skits and fewer identifiable movie and soul samples; that may be the result of a flood that laid waste to scores of completed tracks and beats in RZA’s basement. Method Man ended up having to re-record verses over refurbished beats, a snag he has credited with diminishing the album’s quality and impact. But RZA’s jagged and phantasmic productions fit Method Man’s restless rapping, underscoring the recurring mentions of death, loss, and disease. “I’m from a small town where nigga do or nigga die,” Method Man wheezes on “Stimulation,” distilling the bleak world of Tical to its solitary core.  Tical is essentially a photographic negative of Enter the Wu-Tang; the Shaolin mythology and bonds of brotherhood dissolve as Method Man pushes through the abyss alone, comforted by fleeting pleasures and his loved ones. “All I Need” provides the album's sole moment of respite, Method Man promising his girl better days while thanking her for back rubs and support. RZA’s surgical sample of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “You’re All I Need to Get By” leans into the longing of Method Man’s writing, pulling and compressing the source’s melody without the vocals. The platinum-selling remix with Mary J. Blige would become the canonical version of the song (and cement Method Man’s begrudging role as Wu-Tang’s resident heartthrob), but the original captures the indelible blues of the track. Method Man speaks to and about his muse, who would later become his wife, as if trying to condense the expanse of his love into a single message. Tical’s singles ended up having a longer tail than the record as a whole. Chris Rock named a comedy special after “Bring the Pain,” and 2Pac, Missy Elliott, and R.A.P. Ferreira, among many others, interpolated it. The “All I Need” remix became a Top 10 hit and a hip-hop soul classic. But the full album isn’t as lauded as 1994 rap albums like Nas’ Illmatic, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, Scarface’s The Diary, and Redman’s Dare Iz a Darkside—a legacy in many ways attributable to the caginess of its elusive narrator. No single song or sequence quite conveys who Method Man is; the constant shapeshifting reveals his style and interests but not his worldview or background. In its narcotic detachment, though, Tical anticipates the groggy inward turns that rappers as varied as Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi, Earl Sweatshirt, and Lil Peep would take as drugged states became a sonic and narrative pillar of hip-hop. Method Man dusted so Future could sip. There’s a distinctive openness to Tical compared to its distant cousins, however. Unlike the many stoner anthems (some of them coauthored by Method Man) and laments that succeeded it, Tical declines to foreground its muses; the benders that shape it are always subtext, never a focal or talking point. That chronic distance allows the pleasures and miseries of addiction to go unfixed, instead of cohering into an easy takeaway about the drugs or the user. Method Man baked that slipperiness into the record when he scrapped the album’s weed-referencing original title, The Burning Book, in favor of hyperlocal slang that couldn’t be reduced to a lifestyle or brand. Tical, he explained to High Times in 1995 when asked what it meant, was a “word that’s gonna mean more shit in the future”—a deflection and a bit of prophecy. In 2017 Method Man told Desus & Mero that “tical” stood for “taking into consideration all lives.” Though that clearly retroactive riff adds no new dimensions to the record, it feels congruent with RZA and Method Man’s expressionist songwriting. In their view, slang—like samples, like flows—is meant to keep morphing, keep moving. Sometimes a stride is as striking as a story.

2022-10-09T00:02:00.000-04:00

2022-10-09T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam

October 9, 2022

0161dd78-1e10-42e6-9601-b6fe07113245

Stephen Kearse

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a monument psychedelic funk, a defining document of Black rock music in the early ’70s.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a monument psychedelic funk, a defining document of Black rock music in the early ’70s.

Funkadelic: Maggot Brain

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/funkadelic-maggot-brain/

Maggot Brain

Inside the gatefold of vinyl copies of Maggot Brain is an excerpt from an article about the concept of fear, published in a magazine by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a religious sect founded in England in the mid-’60s. Its thesis: “Fear is at the root of man’s destruction of himself.... Do we know the extent to which we are at war with one another—on every level from personal to world wide [sic]—because we are afraid?” That’s some heavy shit for a funk band to be dropping on folks, but Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton harbored an iconoclastic streak. While his fledgling ’60s band the Parliaments tried to adapt to Motown Records impresario Berry Gordy’s preference for matching suits, synchronized dances, and well-crafted vocal harmonies, they failed to make the cut. In his 2014 autobiography, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kind of Hard on You?, Clinton observed that Gordy deemed the Parliaments as too similar to Motown artists the Temptations and the Contours, and their wildly varying heights struck the label boss as too odd. Ultimately, this rejection was for the best, as Clinton’s imagination was sprouting in ways too strange for Motown, as manifested in Funkadelic’s first three albums. With the freedom afforded by Armen Boladian’s Westbound Records, Clinton proceeded to create a sonic and lyrical universe that placed equal importance on moving minds and bodies in unprecedented ways. If that meant immersing listeners in unconventional thoughts about fear or triggering meditations about world destruction, then the headstrong bandleader had enough faith in his audience to handle his bold blend of the pleasure principle with eschatological matters. Though the Process Church dogma took up a quarter of the gatefold’s layout and imbued the record with a gravity, it wasn’t necessarily essential for analyzing and enjoying Maggot Brain’s merits. In fact, in a 2006 interview with Wax Poetics, Funkadelic bassist Billy Nelson said that he held no truck with the religion’s allegedly Satanic doctrines—nor, for that matter, with the grotesque cover art featuring a screaming Black woman buried in a mound of maggot-laden dirt, with the back cover revealing simply a skull. “That’s George [Clinton] sabotaging us again,” Nelson lamented. Defending the Process Church in Brothas, Clinton described its ethos as “a form of self-actualization.” He would delve further into its thinking on Maggot Brain’s 1972 follow-up, America Eats Its Young. But this was an ephemeral phase in Clinton’s artistic life, and secondary to the revolutionary sounds he and his bandmates were creating. Funkadelic’s self-titled debut LP (1970) and the same year’s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow proved that Clinton and company were adept at penning hook-laden soul nuggets, “wayback yonder funk,” gully blues-rock, sinister gospeldelia, and freak-flag-flying jams. By the time they entered Detroit’s United Sound Systems in late 1970 to record their third full-length, Maggot Brain, they’d honed their myriad styles to a raw-nerved peak. For a group rumored to record while zonked out of their minds, Funkadelic really held it together on Maggot Brain. They may not have been as tight as James Brown’s backing band the J.B.’s, but Clinton, Nelson, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, and drummer Tiki Fulwood had cohered into a fearsome unit. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about Maggot Brain is its incomparable bookends: The opener “Maggot Brain” and closer “Wars of Armageddon” are the most evocative expressions of birth and annihilation ever put on record. In the former, Funkadelic plunges into the dank throes of an existential quandary, as Clinton intones, “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time/For y’all have knocked her up/I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe/I was not offended/For I knew I had to rise above it all/Or drown in my own shit.” Clinton really knew how to rivet attention and prep you for the journey of a lifetime. The mythos surrounding this 10-minute epic is extraordinary. Clinton claimed that he and Hazel were tripping hard, and then the bandleader told his guitarist to play like his mother had died. Realizing that Eddie had executed a world-historical solo, Clinton decided to excise most of the other players’ contributions from the track and then “Echoplexed everything back on itself four or five times,” as he noted in Brothas. “I could see the guitar notes stretch out like a silver web.” (An alternate take with all the instruments intact appears as a bonus track on a 2005 CD reissue of Maggot Brain, and in retrospect, you can’t argue with Clinton’s decision. The keyboards, bass, and drums are fine, but they impinge enough on Hazel’s wizardry to be distracting.) This solo—with its solarized, distraught wails, smooth dive bombs, and shattered-crystal grace notes—occupies the loftiest perch in the guitar-hero pantheon. How can something so mournful fill you with so much life? It was perverse of Clinton to place such an elegiac show-stopper at the beginning, but in the early ’70s, perversity was the man’s lifeblood. Conventional wisdom in those days involved starting albums with the most instantly appealing song; instead, Clinton opened with amplified and warped chewing sounds and a lysergic monologue about planetary impregnation and cranial infestation. Out of such grotesque imagery, Clinton and Hazel alchemized heavenly beauty. If “Maggot Brain,” is the album’s yin, “Wars of Armageddon” is its yang. Right from the start, Funkadelic unfurl a maelstrom of angst: explosions, crying baby, grouchy dad, protesters chanting for freedom—all of it accompanied by a surfeit of cowbell, bongos, and organ. The track’s chthonic thrust and swagger foreshadowed Miles Davis’ later fusion masterpieces On the Corner and Dark Magus. As it turned out, Miles so loved the drumming here that he temporarily stole Fulwood from Clinton. Clinton may have been an avid druggie in Funkadelic’s early years, but his mind was highly attuned to the outré music, anti-war sentiments, class struggles, and free-love mores of the time. All of his thoughts and feelings cohered to a potent degree in “Wars of Armageddon.” In the song’s final third, we hear more chants (“More power to the people/More pussy to the power/More pussy to the people”) and some nasty animal and bodily function sounds as the music continues to wildly carom. This is Funkadelic’s ultimate freakout experience, their “Sister Ray” and their “Helter Skelter” rolled into an acid-rock/musique concrète journey to the center of a blown mind. Toward the end, Clinton mutters, “Goddamn/Look at that pollution!/It’s a fat funky person” amid the sound of distant explosions. The music may signify end times, but he can’t help facing catastrophe with a prankster’s devil-may-care blitheness. Between these towering extremes, Funkadelic wheeled out the sort of soulful funk-rock that could fuel world-class parties. It would be hard to name a hotter five-song streak in the Clinton canon than that which flows from “Can You Get to That” to “Back in Our Minds Again.” The former is actually a remake of the Parliaments’ “What You Been Growing,” and when this ditty ambles into earshot after the desolate “Maggot Brain,” it feels as if your entire extended family’s swarming you with good vibes at your surprise birthday party. Funkadelic lay down sun-fatigued funk with intricate female/male vocal interplay, including Ray Davis’ basso profundo interjections and the harmonizing of Isaac Hayes’ backing singers Pat Lewis, Dianne Lewis, and Rose Williams. In Brothas, Clinton claims that the metaphor of “When you base your love on credit/...insufficient funds” for troubled social or romantic relationships was lifted from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was a new twist on an old sentiment, one that would be further manipulated by time and genre in Sleigh Bells’ “Rill Rill.” Sleigh Bells’ sample was not the only example of Funkadelic’s early material resonating with white artists from the ’80s to the ’00s; musicians as diverse as the Balancing Act, Mike Watt and J. Mascis, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others, have covered Funkadelic songs. In Brothas, Clinton noted that in their early years Funkadelic were too Black for most rock kids and too white for most funk and soul aficionados. But it was exactly this in-between-ness that generated the essential friction of their music, the X-factor that lent it its heady allure and unusual durability. Contemporaries working in similar modes such as Sly & the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, and War—all of whom were multiracial groups—had found the key to crossover success. But as an all-Black rock unit, Funkadelic struggled to achieve more than cult status in their heyday, even if some of their releases scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Upon its release, Maggot Brain was too strange for most music consumers to grasp. Even in their Detroit homebase, Funkadelic couldn’t catch a break with the city’s AOR radio outlets. Over the decades, however, the album’s guitar heroics, relentless grooves, and cavalier hooks have infiltrated their way into more receptive minds. Listening to the staccato “Hit It and Quit It,” you can understand why those early-’70s listeners would be perplexed. Keyboard prodigy Worrell unfurls Keith Emersonian burbles and proggy flourishes alien to the funk genre at the time. Revealing Funkadelic’s democratic nature with regard to singers (a ploy that may have hindered their ability to break through commercially, as there was no dedicated frontman), Clinton allowed Worrell to sing his skinny ass off amid a libidinous landslide of guitar riffs and basslines. “Hit It” ranks as one of the filthiest lust songs ever to stoke a libido. Another example of Funkadelic’s egalitarian microphone policy, “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks” is sung by Billy Nelson; the track exudes the air of a communal Sly & the Family Stone anthem, but imbued with the menace of the Manson Family, with the bass/drums groove ranking as one of the most lethal in the Funkadelic canon. Despite the sinister aura, the song is a plea for equality and understanding among all people. For what it’s worth, “You and Your Folks” is the most-sampled track on Maggot Brain (11 times), and Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter Brittany Howard covered it on 2020’s Spotify Singles. In a 1985 issue of Spin, P-Funk professor emeritus Greg Tate dubbed “Super Stupid” a “heavy-metal hydrogen bomb test”; it’s no wonder heavies such as Audioslave and Big Chief took stabs at it. This is mercilessly vicious rock that attracted the attention and respect of British rock royalty when Funkadelic first toured England. Clinton claims David Bowie, Rod Stewart, and members of Cream, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin checked them out on that jaunt. “Super Stupid”’s metallic guitar avalanche is tempered by Worrell’s circus-y keyboard effusions, but the real star is Hazel, who is on fire in extremis, both on ax and vox. “Super Stupid” warns of the foolishness of drug abuse (Worrell claimed in Wax Poetics that band members were snorting heroin) while, incidentally, making you want to take drugs. Following the release of Maggot Brain, Hazel and Nelson split to work for the vastly more popular Motown act the Temptations, reportedly due to dissatisfaction with Clinton’s handling of the band’s financial situation. Fulwood also was disgruntled about pay and left Funkadelic. Although Clinton doesn’t mention this issue in Brothas, the Wax Poetics interviews feature complaints about George’s stinginess. Ross, too, departed, after alleged misadventures with either LSD or speed. These painful losses were ameliorated by the additions of Bootsy and Catfish Collins, Garry Shider, and Boogie Mosson—all world-class funkateers. Nevertheless, Funkadelic never again released an album as laden with genius as Maggot Brain. It was the culmination of their first phase’s most outrageous and ingenious sonic ideas, establishing a new precedent for how Black musicians would exist in a rock context, juxtaposing metal, gospel, prog, funk, blues, and jazz fusion with nonchalant virtuosity. It’s the epitome of their extravagant virtues and vices. Summarizing the LP in Brothas, Clinton wrote, “Maggot Brain was going places that Black groups hadn’t gone, into questions about whether America was still on the right path or whether the promise of the late ’60s had completely evaporated.” In these seven songs, you can hear Funkadelic attempting to make sense of the turmoil of the times, as they express the euphoria and anguish of being born and dying in the most extraordinary ways. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Rock

Westbound

June 21, 2020

01627762-ecdf-4649-8cea-4029f1344976

Dave Segal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/

Jeff Tweedy produced the Duluth band's tenth studio album, placing an emphasis on the drama that distinguishes it from previous Low efforts. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sound like true equals here, as their writing, singing, and playing complement one another vividly.

Jeff Tweedy produced the Duluth band's tenth studio album, placing an emphasis on the drama that distinguishes it from previous Low efforts. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sound like true equals here, as their writing, singing, and playing complement one another vividly.

Low: The Invisible Way

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17781-low-the-invisible-way/

The Invisible Way

It’s easy to forget and hard to believe that Low have been doing this for 20 years now. Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker, and John Nichols started the group in 1993, following in the wake of Codeine and Galaxie 500 but eventually coming to represent the slowcore sub-subgenre by dint of sheer longevity. Those two acts have already reissued their entire catalogs, but Low have kept on keeping on. Still, slowcore is an odd sound to buoy such a long career and sturdy catalog, if only because it’s defined by its self-imposed limitation: at its best, that slow tempo can be as intense as a punk song; as boring as wallpaper at its worst. Having hit both extremes at one point or another, the most perfectly named band on the planet have owned up to the restrictions of their aesthetic. As a result, their catalog is not necessarily diverse, but they’ve managed to find a great deal of variety within this small patch of terrain, thanks primarily to the open-ended nature of the band. Sparhawk and Parker have proved mainstays, with numerous musicians caught in their orbit over time (the latest being multi-instrumentalist Steve Garrington). Furthermore, Low have never shied away from working with producers who bring their own specific styles and aesthetics to their songs. In the late 1990s, Kramer, Steve Fisk, and Steve Albini helped them define and refine their sound; in the next decade, Dave Fridmann and Matt Beckley helmed albums with varying success. All used the band’s glacial dirges as a blank canvas, and Low savored these outside perspectives, as though they knew the band was never quite a self-contained unit. The latest producer to helm the boards for Low is Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who recorded the band at the Loft in Chicago. On one hand, he’s such a perfect match that it’s surprising they’ve never worked together before: they’re all indie veterans who have come to represent various aspects of the Midwest-- Tweedy the busyness of Chicago and Low the remote plane of Duluth. On the other hand, Tweedy may be the most Americana-bound producer Low have hired, and at the very least represents a departure from Albini’s punk austerity, Fridmann’s art-sprawl, and Beckley’s pop haze. Especially compared to their 2000s output, The Invisible Way sounds crisp and live, produced to emphasize the individual instruments and to highlight their natural reverb. The sustain of the piano is a major component on “So Blue” and “Waiting”, and the Loft shapes the fading tones of Sparhawk’s sharply picked acoustic guitar on “Amethyst”. The album sounds so good-- and so quintessentially Low-- that the music distracts from the occasionally weak songwriting, which is just what it’s supposed to do. This sparer sound allows Low and Tweedy to emphasize the drama of the album that distinguishes it from previous Low efforts. While “Holy Ghost” and “Mother” sound sharp in their soft-spoken approach, the pace of “Just Make It Stop” is relentless, at least relative to how we perceive the band, with the piano pushing Parker’s vocals to a subtly harried and desperate pace that fits the lyrics. She’s a stronger presence on this album, singing five songs (nearly half the tracklist) instead of her usual one or two. Even when she’s not taking lead, she remains prominent. As Sparhawk ponders the nature of time and songwriting on opener “Plastic Cup”, Parker ghosts his vocals, her voice trailing off of his and turning each line into a question thrown into the abyss. Parker and Sparhawk sound like true equals on The Invisible Way, as their songwriting, singing, and playing complement each other vividly. Still, he gets saddled with two of the weakest tracks here, which is especially disappointing coming so soon after his excellent Retribution Gospel Choir album, 3. With its prominent, yet distracting proper nouns, “Clarence White” sounds like it should allude to something specific, yet the only thing truly harrowing about it is the steady, unsettling drum tattoo. When every other instrument falls away, that simple rhythm sounds like that old horror trope: the lumbering monster you can’t seem to outrun. “On My Own” begins with a sweet, straightforward melody about the looming fear of solitude, but then blunders into a lengthy outro that awkwardly languishes in some guitar fuzz and wishes you happy birthday 32 damn times. Repetition has always been a useful, if risky tool in Low’s songwriting kit, but here it just sounds jarring, even embarrassing. Even when it stumbles, though, The Invisible Way gives the impression of a band on the run. From what, not even they can say. But something horrible lies in wait just offscreen, something like time or death or irrelevance or separation. Low are wise enough not to show the monster, which means these songs are compelled by a strange desperation and worry-- as though Low are barely keeping their demons at bay. Nothing on these songs sounds the least bit rote or comfortable, and that’s remarkable for a band so far into an unlikely career. The Invisible Way suggests that Parker and Sparhawk have been able to maintain the band for so long by never making it easy on themselves. They’ve questioned every assumption about what a band like Low-- a band with a very rigid aesthetic-- can do, which has proven a sound strategy for turning a trend like slowcore into a career.

2013-03-21T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-03-21T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Sub Pop

March 21, 2013

016ade0e-fda0-4d28-bc32-c4ecace5cbbd

Stephen M. Deusner

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

Layering his custom-built 48-string zither with slide guitar, clarinet, and pump organ, the Texas native makes music that draws as much from drone and ambient as from jazz and Americana.

Layering his custom-built 48-string zither with slide guitar, clarinet, and pump organ, the Texas native makes music that draws as much from drone and ambient as from jazz and Americana.

Blue Lake: Sun Arcs

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blue-lake-sun-arcs/

Sun Arcs

The music of Blue Lake is a solitary journey. Led by the Texas-born, Denmark-based artist Jason Dungan, the instrumental project is characterized by a peaceful, wandering approach that should be familiar to anyone who enjoys walking along the same route every day, noticing how different seasons, soundtracks, or moods can alter the view. As a composer, Dungan never tires of a few specific textures: the melodic drone of a zither winding along a major scale; the way a drum machine can loop into a trancelike momentum; the sketch-like presence of clarinet and recorder suggesting the outline of a symphony. To create his latest album, Sun Arcs, Dungan retreated to a cabin in the Swedish woods where his days were occupied solely by making music and walking his dog. The results of his exercise feel clear-eyed and optimistic, ambitious and multidimensional enough to conjure the sound of a full band even though he is the only person in the room. The project shares a name with a live album by jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, and the influence of improvisatory ensembles is clear in Dungan’s work. He leaves an impression less through melody than through feeling: the kind of ecstatic release that comes from hammering a simple theme over and over, until its movements come second nature and each subtle shift promises to lead somewhere new. This sense of patience aligns Dungan’s music with genres like drone and ambient as much as jazz, and his use of acoustic instruments helps strike a blend that feels distinctly his own. His work centers on the sound of a 48-string zither, which he built specifically for the project: a texture that lands somewhere between harp and sitar. Some tracks are devoted almost entirely to the instrument. The title track is a duet between zither and the driplike, amelodic plucks of slide guitar, played high up the neck. “Green-Yellow Field,” meanwhile, is an improvised solo performance that sweeps with incidental harmony reminiscent of wind chimes, the pauses between each note carrying as much resonance as the strings. Other songs feel like breakthroughs, new ways to ground his distinctive voice. “Bloom” is Dungan’s most uniformly gorgeous performance to date, based on an open-tuned, fingerpicked melody that would sound equally at home on a solo guitar record or accompanying a singer-songwriter. The magic is in how it builds. Like guests slowly arriving at a party and filling the room with conversation, the arrangement gathers at a natural pace that grows warmer and brighter as each new element joins in: a deep, sawing cello; a childlike keyboard melody; percussion that seems to echo the movement of Dungan’s hand along the fretboard. Taking a tactile approach to each instrument, Dungan’s music transcends from merely pleasant to something inhabitable: places that you will want to return to. In the liner notes, he refers to visual cues as often as sonic ones, and the recording process seems inextricable from the compositions themselves. He recalls the way his dog slept on the floor beside him through the entire recording of “Fur,” whose pattering drums, pump organ, and clarinet each find subtle ways of offering companionship. For the nine-minute closer, “Wavelength,” he cites the 1967 film of the same name by experimental auteur Michael Snow, whose endless zoom-in technique he draws from by pulling us closer without limiting the psychedelic, open-ended appeal of his art. In addition to fellow Americana wanderers like William Tyler, whose experiments with krautrock on Modern Country set a precedent for the more fleshed-out songs here, Snow’s minimal but boundaryless approach seems a fitting model for Dungan’s evolving vision. Near the end of his life, Snow focused on art made with the perspective granted by his remote Newfoundland cabin. “The isolation and silence, the lack of interruption, has been inspiring,” he said in a 2021 interview. In one of his later pieces, he filmed a curtain blowing against an open window at sunset while he and his wife were eating dinner, the sound of their dishes faintly audible alongside their breath and the wind. The recordings on Sun Arcs conjure a similarly intimate view, one that can feel both magical in its simplicity and all the more compelling for what’s just out of frame.

2023-06-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-06-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Tonal Union

June 29, 2023

016c30a5-d979-4486-983f-e86701b3fac8

Sam Sodomsky

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

Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection expands the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set supplemented with video.

Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection expands the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set supplemented with video.

Bruce Springsteen: The Ties That Bind: The River Collection

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21306-the-ties-that-bind-the-river-collection/

The Ties That Bind: The River Collection

The River doesn’t flow—it floods. Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. Coming after the deliberate twin masterpieces of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, records epic in scope but precise in execution, The River not only appears to be a mess but embodies the classic definition of a double album: it seems to be a clearinghouse for every song Bruce Springsteen had at the ready in 1980. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection shows just how wrong that assumption is. Expanding the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set supplemented with video, it laughs at the notion that the original album was much too much by underscoring exactly how Springsteen intended the album to overwhelm. Initially, Springsteen planned to follow 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town with an album called The Ties That Bind but he withdrew the record in the fall of 1979, believing that it wasn’t "big enough." This claim came from the stage during a 2009 performance of The River at Madison Square Garden, with Bruce going on to say, "I wanted to capture the themes that I’d been writing about on Darkness. I wanted to keep those characters with me and at the same time added the music that made our live shows so much fun and enjoyable for our audience." On this box, the scrapped The Ties That Bind gets an official airing as the third disc on the set—here it’s dubbed The River [Single Album]—and it does indeed play like a truncated, miniature version of The River, containing in its 10 tracks seven of the double-album’s songs, along with two alternate versions of tunes that wound up on the released record. What’s striking is what’s absent: shorn of its party songs, the record feels gloomy and haunted—even "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" in a lonesome Sun rockabilly incarnation feels like a transmission from the lonely black of night. It reiterates many of the themes of Darkness, only without aggression, fury, or precision, the very things that give that record a lift that fights against its undercurrents of hopelessness. Surely recognizing this deficit, Springsteen spent roughly another year in the studio, reviving old songs and writing new ones, arriving at full-blown, completed recordings of most of these tunes, then picking and choosing from his surplus to create the final album. The result was enough material for another double album, presented here as The Ties That Bind, a collection that runs two songs longer the 1980 double-LP but winds up six minutes shorter. This is an absurd amount of shelved material—and, even with this abundance, there are a handful of bootlegged cuts that didn’t make the grade. There’s a lot of unheard music here, even if some tracks are colored with new Bruce vocals, a slightly sour grace-note that is only notable upon close inspection. Listening through the box, it’s hard not to be struck by Springsteen’s labor-intensive creative method. He knew the broad outline of what he wanted to achieve, so he kept tweaking his material in the studio, rearranging and recording until he found just the right emotion. If The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 proves how Bob Dylan sought to capture the lightning of a live performance, Springsteen always is seduced by the illusion of a record: sure, he’s invigorated by live performance—and the Tempe concert included here is tremendous, the E-Street Band at the peak of their power—but he sculpts his albums out of tracks that are powerful as recordings, not simply songs. This is especially true of The River, which Bruce loaded up with the purest, hardest, and happiest rock’n’roll the E-Street Band ever cut in the studio. "She’s the One" pulsated to a beat borrowed from Bo Diddley and Darkness surged with desperate passion, but Bruce’s first four records rarely touched on the ecstatic joy that can be had from just making noise. The River is full of these moments ("Sherry Darling", "Crush on You", "I’m a Rocker", "Cadillac Ranch"), and some of the weightier items trade in this same sense of exuberance—a sense of desperation cuts against the grain of the sunny hook on "Hungry Heart", and "Two Hearts" spins headfirst into unfettered romanticism. But this music is so simple, so visceral, that it’s often been tagged as throwaway, the detritus surrounding the haunting "The River", "The Price You Pay", and "Stolen Car". Thing is, these throwaways give The River its cinematic scope. Some of the newer additions were cut from a familiar forlorn cloth ("Independence Day", the closing pair of "Drive All Night" and "Wreck on the Highway") while "Point Blank" and "Jackson Cage" split the difference between the celebration and sorrow. But the biggest distinction between The River and the original Ties That Bind is this full-on bash, funny and furious and entirely sincere in its worship of the sounds rocking frat houses and AM radio in a '60s that didn’t belong to the Beatles. It’s the Springsteen album that can easily slip onto any show on Little Steven’s Underground Garage, and this party winds up providing an ideal counterpoint to the sweeter, sadder moments on The River. Take the second side, which opens with "Hungry Heart"—Bruce’s first genuine hit single, reaching number five on a combination of its hook and Springsteen’s general momentum—then dwells upon the cinematic escape "Out in the Street" and serves up two breakneck rockers before settling into the dreaminess of "I Wanna Marry You" and the stark "The River", the latter two hitting harder due to the companions. Each side is structured similarly, with the last song tipping slightly toward melancholy, the cumulative effect suggesting there’s no separating pleasure from the pain. It all comes at once and, depending on mood, The River either seems like the happiest or saddest of Bruce’s records: in its mess lies a mirror that reflects the listener’s state of mind. The Ties That Bind illustrates this sprawl was no accident. Within these 22 rejects—some of them sneaking out as B-sides or on previous reissues, including the 1998 box Tracks and the bonus disc on 2003’s The Essential Bruce Springsteen—Springsteen explores the same terrain as he does on The River: urban romance, accidental violence, working-man’s blues, and restless nights. Like its parent, The Ties That Bind achieves a delicate balance between adult despair and adolescent freedom: he may dwell upon "Little White Lies" and "The Time That Never Was", but he also borrows a song title from Claudine Clark ("Party Lights") and tips a hat to Connie Francis’ beach classic Where the Boys Are ("Where the Bands Are"). Enough great songs didn’t make a cut that it’s possible to cobble together a killer single album from the outtakes—one that would open with the breathless "Meet Me in the City" and contain the cloistered paranoia of "The Man Who Got Away", the blank desperation of "Roulette", the open-hearted "Ricky Wants a Man of Her Own" and "From Small (Big Things One Day Come)", a heightened Chuck Berry story song Bruce turned over to Dave Edmunds. But like the completed album, what resonates is the magnitude of the sprawl itself. As they spill out, the songs play off each other, accentuating the sorrow or celebration heard in their predecessors. Combing through these outtakes, it quickly becomes clear how Springsteen, Van Zandt, and Jon Landau constructed each track to deliver its own specific visceral thrill and then culled through their finished product to find the cuts that fit their intended design. Some of these rejects rely on that headstrong old time rock’n’roll—"Living on the Edge of the World" bops along to its syncopated swing, "Paradise by the C" is a roadhouse jam highlighting Clarence Clemons—but others play like ripostes to the E-Street Band’s peers: the live "Held Up Without a Gun" (which would later morph into the finished "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)") careens like Elvis Costello & the Attractions, the chiming guitars of "Take ’Em As They Come" seem like an answer to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while "I Wanna Be With You" pulses to the Iron City rush of Joe Grushecky & the Houserockers. Thirty-five years after the release of The River, it’s easy to think of Bruce Springsteen as existing on a separate plane from such contemporary kindred spirits or perhaps as somebody who only belongs to part of a self-styled lineage that runs through Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. By adding The Times That Bind, both the scrapped '79 LP and this new double-disc collection of outtakes, to The River, this box highlights the plain, prosaic ways he belonged to his time. On these 52 songs, Springsteen sings about gas shortages, cold beer, unemployment agencies, busted dreams, and Burt Reynolds, fleeting images of a blue collar America that unknowingly was entering its decay but these words are married to the sound of a working band that knows it has to work, aware that it has to have songs to fuel those marathon three hour shows. Springsteen never really let these straight-up rockers be part of his records again—maybe on Born in the U.S.A., but both "Darlington County" and "Working on the Highway" end in tears—but he also never quite worked the same way again, producing such a ridiculous surplus of finished material as he set out on his quest for bigger, greater things. The River brought Bruce to those heights, giving him his first number one album and Top 10 single, but it’s hard not to think of it as not a beginning but an end, the last record where he and the E-Street Band were not the biggest band in the land but merely the best. In that light, piling on a ton of unreleased music, all in the same spirit and feel as the final album and nearly as good as what made the cut, feels like a gift. And for those who may think four CDs and three DVDs are too much, consider this: for an album that is all about contradictions, excess and mess, more of everything is most certainly a good thing.

2015-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

2015-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Columbia

December 7, 2015

016c5ce3-732a-4c84-a87c-daf84ef55c29

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/

This year marks Yo La Tengo’s 30th anniversary, and they’re celebrating it by reissuing their sixth album, Painful, released nearly a decade into their career. The cardigan-cozy sound of the record effectively established Yo La Tengo as indie rock’s great romantics, and featured a couple of significant firsts for the trio.

This year marks Yo La Tengo’s 30th anniversary, and they’re celebrating it by reissuing their sixth album, Painful, released nearly a decade into their career. The cardigan-cozy sound of the record effectively established Yo La Tengo as indie rock’s great romantics, and featured a couple of significant firsts for the trio.

Yo La Tengo: Extra Painful

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20017-yo-la-tengo-extra-painful/

Extra Painful

Nineties indie rock was the sound of '80s hardcore kids growing up. And for many get-in-the-van vets, it was a transition that necessitated a clean-slate reboot, whether it was Lou Barlow channeling Dinosaur Jr.’s roar into Sebadoh’s trembling whispers, Jon Spencer reshaping Pussy Galore’s skronk into the Blues Explosion’s funk, or Davids Yow and Sims harnessing Scratch Acid’s strangulated squeals into the Jesus Lizard’s militaristic might. But for Yo La Tengo co-founders/cohabitants Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, the ascent to the Amerindie frontlines was a more gradual, unceremonious process, one that involved downsizing their band from a quartet to a trio, jumping from label to label, and a chronic inability to hold onto a bassist for more than one album at a time. Where they began as a prototypical college-rock outfit in the Velvets-via-Feelies mould (with an unabashed soft spot for '60s-pop covers), Yo La Tengo would go on to define '90s indie—and its evermore sophisticated post-millenial permutations—not by refining their sound, but by blowing it wide open. Painful was the moment of detonation. The importance of Painful to the Yo La Tengo narrative can be gauged as such: This year marks the band’s 30th anniversary, and they’re celebrating it by reissuing their sixth album, released nearly a decade into their career. Painful marked a couple of significant firsts for Yo La Tengo: it was their first album made with eventual long-time producer Roger Moutenot, and their first to be issued through Matador Records, whose post-Pavement popularity (and resultant Atlantic Records parternship) afforded the band their widest distribution yet. And though Painful was actually the second Yo La Tengo album to feature bassist James McNew, it was the first to fully enmesh his sensibilities with Kaplan and Hubley’s, shirking the typical new-guy/third-wheel dynamic for a more polyamorous professional relationship that continues to this day. As recently as 1992’s May I Sing With Me (McNew’s debut with the band), Yo La Tengo albums tended to slide back and forth between narcotic noise-pop and hushed folky balladry, producing music that was unerringly charming and consistent if not exactly transcendental. But with the introductory organ hum of the prophetically titled "Big Day Coming", Yo La Tengo’s musical universe instantly turned three-dimensional, projecting a vastness their previous records never really approached; by the time they kick into the dizzying tremoloed groove of the following "From a Motel 6", you can already hear their hearts beating as one. Remarkably, Painful thoroughly expanded Yo La Tengo’s sound by emphasizing two basic ingredients: a little shaker here, and a lot of Ace Tone there (a development so notable, it even earns its own celebratory rock-out in "Sudden Organ"). But taken together, they temper the band’s once-scrappy vigor into hypnotic motorik motions and droning reverberations, while casting Hubley’s plainspoken vocals in a dreamy haze, and inspiring Kaplan to drop the bratty insolence of old for a more congenially conversational drawl. The cardigan-cozy sound of the record effectively established Yo La Tengo as indie rock’s great romantics. Though musical-cum-matrimonial partnerships weren’t exactly a novelty at the time (see: Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, Jon Spencer and Cristina Martinez), Kaplan and Hubley were the rare pair to use their songs to openly address matters of the heart. But while Kaplan and Hubley’s exchanges on Painful can resemble scenes from a marriage, it’s not necessarily their own; rather, a hazy-headed ballad like "Nowhere Near" conveys both an intimacy and non-specificity that make it applicable to any long-distance relationship spent waiting for the phone to ring. And the album’s most tender moment—with Kaplan crooning "baby, I’m in love with you" like a lonesome doo-wop singer abandoned by his crew on some moonlit corner—comes through a to-die-for cover of UK power-popsters the Only Ones’ "The Whole of the Law" (yet another sterling example of Yo La Tengo acting out their record collection). Even Painful’s most blown-out moments are infused with an unspeakable tenderness—Yo La Tengo were no strangers to extended, feedback-screeching jams at this point, but never before had they pulled one off that could actually make you weep ("I Heard You Looking"). What makes Painful so eminently approachable after all these years is that it manages to sound like a fully realized, band-defining statement yet unpretentiously off-the-cuff at the same time. It’s a feeling reinforced by the overflow of material available on this reissue, appropriately retitled Extra Painful on account of its enlarged 2xCD girth (not to mention an additional album’s worth of download-only odds and ends even more revelatory than the bonus disc proper). More so than any other band in recent memory, Yo La Tengo’s body of work hinges on the notion that no song is ever a completely finished, end-state product; what we hear on any given album is seemingly a function of what mood they were in the day it was recorded, what the weather was like on the day of mixing, or how much studio time was left before the budget was blown. There is no such thing as a permanent record; songs have many lives before they’re officially documented and continue to evolve long thereafter. It’s a concept that Yo La Tengo had hinted at before with the two oppositional treatments of "The Evil That Men Do" on 1989’s President Yo La Tengo and the double, duelling dose of "Upside-Down" on the 1992 EP of the same name. Painful continued the conversation with dramatically different versions of Kaplan’s "Big Day Coming"—the gauzy, weightless opener and the penultimate, fuzzed-out chugger—but Extra Painful ups the ante with three more wildly varying live mutations: a laid-back acoustic take sung by Hubley, a revved-up rendition that’s almost twice as fast as the second Painful one, and a mammoth 19-minute distention that fills in the canyon-like divide between Yo La’s soothing/squalling extremes. Likewise, a percussion- and fuzz-free CBGB performance of "Double Dare" foregrounds the pent-up longing that gets washed over by the original’s shoegazey drive, while an Ace Tone-free demo of the same underscores just how important the organ was in achieving it. And it speaks volumes about Painful’s superior quality—and the band’s surging creative energies at the time—that the steely, Stooges-inspired stomper "Shaker" could be earmarked for a non-album single, while the spectacular slow-dissolve ballad "Slow Learner" would be shelved altogether. From this point on, Yo La Tengo could no longer be described as mere Velvet Underground wannabes (unless, of course, they were playing them in a movie), and within just a few years, you’d be hard-pressed to even call them a rock band anymore. But then, such a free-ranging future seemed almost predestined when, after a decade of playing the rock'n'roll classicist, Kaplan opened up Painful by declaring, "let’s be undecided." As Yo La Tengo’s post-Painful path would prove, indecision has never sounded so assured.

2014-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Matador

December 2, 2014

016febd6-7999-496c-b4b7-e844e95d2b47

Stuart Berman

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

Released five months after the catharsis of Sweetener, these songs of affirmation feel lighter, freer, and more fun, carried effortlessly by Grande’s undeniable voice.

Released five months after the catharsis of Sweetener, these songs of affirmation feel lighter, freer, and more fun, carried effortlessly by Grande’s undeniable voice.

Ariana Grande: thank u, next

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariana-grande-thank-u-next/

thank u, next

In 2016, Ariana Grande manifested herself a future scandal. It was the premise of her self-aware monologue as a first-time host on SNL, but the gag was cutting. “I think I’m in a place where I’m ready to be caught in a real adult scandal, something to take my career to the next level,” she said. By that point, three years into her chart-topping musical career, her only offense of note had been licking a bunch of donuts. Grande continued, over a bed of lounge piano: “Miley’s had ’em, Bieber’s had ’em, everyone’s had ’em, and each day, I sit by my window and I dream, ‘What will my scandal be?’” She was joking, but not really. A couple of years earlier she’d suggested as much in a New York Times interview: “Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty.” Of course, Grande couldn't possibly have known back then what exactly was in store for her, how difficult and cruel the world would prove to be. After confronting the aftermath of a deadly attack on the Manchester stop of her 2017 Dangerous Woman Tour, she retreated, reemerging a year later with new resolve. The story of her personal 2018 is a little too familiar now: She broke up with Mac Miller, quickly and very publicly became engaged to Pete Davidson, and then called that relationship off while grieving Miller’s death. In the midst of it all was Sweetener, a potent album that soundtracked her newfound role as pop's most lovable personality. With Rihanna focused on makeup and lingerie, Beyoncé preoccupied as the better half of the Carters, and Taylor unwilling to share anything beyond an entry-level grasp of politics, Grande ascended. In retrospect, Sweetener was a bridge, a necessary post-tragedy assertion of survival and strength. In contrast, thank u, next, released just five months later, feels like the deliverance following Sweetener’s catharsis. When she put out the title track as a single last fall, it felt like something had finally clicked. She’d not only survived a real adult scandal, but she’d also cracked it, and herself, wide open. She was untouchable. That seems to be the ethos of thank u, next, which stands out in sublime contrast to her previous releases. There are no wonky guest features or unconvincing, if always technically adept, ballads, as on past albums; she no longer needs those distractions. But as usual, it’s Grande’s voice—gently whistling here, totally annihilating there, always undeniable—that carries the album. The release of “7 Rings” as a single last month brought scandal anew. She was immediately accused of both theft and appropriation, and an unfortunate misspelled tattoo punctuated the episode. And while she kinda-sorta engineered her own absolution in the form of a 2 Chainz remix, Grande’s collaborators on the song—Victoria Monét and Tayla Parx—are also her longtime friends and co-writers, not simply anonymous voices hired because Black slang and Atlanta rap rhythms are trendy. In general, thank u, next is a calling card for Monét and Parx, both signed artists with forthcoming projects of their own, who have helped Grande capture the zeitgeist in clever lines and melodies. (Almost too perfectly, “thank u, next” producer Tommy Brown is co-writer Monét’s ex.) But “7 Rings,” frankly, is just as good as any track on the last album or this one. I suspect it was actually the jarring shift in her tone that left people confused and disarmed; it seemed she’d ditched the inspiring moral high ground, luxuriating instead in Tiffany’s jewelry and pink Veuve Clicquot. Though thank u, next’s 12 songs are inspired by romantic and sexual relationships, taken together, they are actually assertions and affirmations of self, a reflection of millennial group chats the world over. “needy” is a therapist’s dream: “You can go ahead and call me selfish/But after all this damage, I can’t help it.” The extended space metaphor of “NASA” is The-Dream-lite by way of Kacey Musgraves, executed in good faith. Soul singer Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter (Comes Tears),” most famously sampled by Wu-Tang on the heartbreaking “Tearz,” is cleverly repurposed into “Fake Smile,” possibly thank u, next’s most compelling song and the thesis of this current era in Grande’s life. “I can’t fake another smile/I can’t fake like I’m alright/And I won’t say I’m feeling fine/After what I been through, I can’t lie,” she sings in reclamation. There are more high points throughout—the soaring hook on the Max Martin classic “Bad Idea,” the slinky emotional honesty of “Ghostin,” the delightful Beyoncé facsimile “Make Up”—but it’s still the album’s existence at all that thrills. The gentle familiarity of Grande’s musical references makes for effortlessly digestible, of-the-moment pop songs, but they’re elevated by a palpable despair that sits just below the surface. Beyond her four-octave soprano and robust wielding of it, thank u, next is buoyed by an urgency that could only come from the depths of her self-described “Damage.” That it comes so soon after an already-spectacularly received album only swells the effect. Grande explained in a recent Billboard interview that her motivation is “to release music like rappers do”—without the burden or unwieldiness of the major label machine, but certainly with much of its power. For all its spontaneity, thank u, next still registers as a big event. She has bragged that the album was written in a week and recorded in a couple more, and while that expediency gives it its weightlessness, it also accounts for the occasional notes of sloppy writing; I can’t get past, for example, the premise of “Bloodline,” which seems to confuse genealogy with hypothetical procreation. But in the rare spots where the production is grating and the writing limp, Grande makes up for it with skill and intuition. thank u, next may be an imperfect album but it’s a perfect next chapter.

2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Republic

February 11, 2019

017599cb-a0e2-4d9b-8f4f-7a0c889d6cde

Rawiya Kameir

https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/

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 Lady Gaga’s most divisive and conceptually ambitious album.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Lady Gaga’s most divisive and conceptually ambitious album.

Lady Gaga: ARTPOP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lady-gaga-artpop/

ARTPOP

In 2013, Lady Gaga was in pain. Ten months into touring the world with her Born This Way Ball, the singer exacerbated a hip injury while performing in Montreal, causing her to cancel all subsequent shows and withdraw from the spotlight. What was reported as a labral tear was actually much worse. “Before I went to surgery, there were giant craters, a hole in my hip the size of a quarter, and the cartilage was just hanging out the other side of my hip. I had a tear on the inside of my joint and a huge breakage,” she said in an interview that July. “The surgeon told me that if I had done another show, I might have needed a full hip replacement.” There were also creative and business tensions happening behind the scenes. A week before ARTPOP hit the shelves, Gaga split from her longtime manager, Troy Carter, citing creative differences. Later, she suggested greed and doubt: “I was not enough for some people,” she wrote to fans on her Little Monsters forum. Six years later, the album buried under personal career highs like her in-studio kinship with Mark Ronson and Oscar nominations, she tweeted, “i don’t remember ARTPOP.” At the time, Gaga was guarding herself against the music industry’s intentions for her as she tried to reconcile her status as both the public-facing vessel of a creative hivemind and a singular visionary. The album plays with the friction between vulnerability and persona, object and agent, trauma and ambivalence over a glutted EDM backdrop. It’s an unruly prototype for the polished and hopeful Chromatica but maintains an enduring fanbase who relish its sludge of sonic and theoretical ideas. Although full of her own experience and pain, she invited personal projection from listeners eager to co-opt. “Come to me with all your subtext and fantasy,” she sings on the title track. “My artpop could mean anything.” The goal was to channel Andy Warhol, only with one essential difference: “Instead of putting pop onto the canvas, we wanted to put the art onto the soup can,” she told the UK telecom company O2 in a promotional interview ahead of the album’s release. This meant commingling her pop aesthetics with fine art, past and present. She collaborated with the pop artist Jeff Koons—known best for his massive mirrored balloon animals constructed in stainless steel—who turned her into one of his Gazing Ball sculptures for the album cover; then, its photograph was spliced with pieces of Botticelli’s famous Renaissance painting, The Birth of Venus. It’s a gesture of turning the inaccessible into the ordinary but with an additional undertone: In the orb’s reflective surface, you see yourself looking, engaging, and perhaps trying to possess something. You’re implicated in the gaze. It’s a theme that runs throughout ARTPOP. But the art, or the reception of Gaga’s use of art as wildly pretentious, dominated the early conversations about the album. There are many reasons for this: She commissioned a drone-looking garment so she could have the world’s first flying dress. She collaborated with performance artist Millie Brown, known for her work with vomit, at a Doritos-sponsored SXSW performance. She remade conceptual artist Marina Abramović’s Portrait with Scorpion (Closed Eyes) for the artwork to a single and appeared in the Kickstarter promo for Abramović’s eponymous Institute “dedicated to the presentation and preservation of ‘long durational’ works of art.” Even without all these trappings, the very sound of ARTPOP did not have much of a chance in 2013. Crunchy, aggro synths were met with EDM fatigue from some despite it all pushing beyond simple womp-womp-drop compositions. Others were just underwhelmed. The songs are hooky and encompassing but not with the easy cheese of Katy Perry’s “Roar” or Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop,” and the lyrics about power and agency are shrouded in metaphor, unlike Lorde’s simple and sincere “Royals.” All of them received an easier public embrace than ARTPOP, whose reviews were uneven across the board. Rolling Stone called it “bizarre,” while The Boston Globe welcomed it as a return to form after the “preachy” Born This Way. At the conclusion of 2013, ARTPOP found one of its champions in veteran critic Robert Christgau who wrote it was “berated by online rockcrit’s ever-shifting gaggle of dunderheads crying ‘insincerity’... this was not only the rawk album of the year for me, it sounded fresh. Really, who needs guitars?” The idea that pop music should be taken seriously echoes the same struggles of agency and objectification that Gaga does with ARTPOP. If a critic finds value in commercial music made for the masses, does an intellectual examination still make the critic part of the major label’s gain, or does it mean the critic is transcending the expectations of their format? Ultimately, it is not possible for artist or critic to escape the specter of the machine, and an album full of drama-club dubstep does warrant some critical skepticism, especially compared to the feel-good arena anthems of the multi-platinum Born This Way. Gaga herself was braced for the institutional response. With lead single “Applause,” she opened with the lyrics, “I stand here waiting for you to bang on the gong/To crash the critics saying, ‘Is it right or is it wrong?’” She craves distance from censorious headlines, love from an adoring audience, and freedom from the song’s dissection. But in the world of ARTPOP, meaning can be quarried out of literally anything, and never is that so apparent than in the director’s cut music video for “G.U.Y.” In it, Gaga gorges on symbols of artifice while also doubling down on the message that the major label ivory tower doesn’t understand what she’s trying to do. Suits clamor for hovering cash before gleefully retreating with their money, leaving a winged Gaga in the dried grass to find her way to recovery. Her refuge is Hearst Castle, where five Real Housewives of Beverly Hills play musical accompaniment in matching pink frocks with bell sleeves as if in worship. They are entertainment but bolstered by this juxtaposition to Gaga in her era of fine art; surrounded by revelry among the Ancient Greece-evoking Mediterranean Revival architecture, they are a reminder that stories with high-octane dramas have been popular since the dawn of theater. “G.U.Y.” is the album’s best song and was Gaga’s career-best dance track up until her Ariana Grande- featuring trauma-balm “Rain on Me” was released in 2020. From the hook’s bright and buttery vocals to the spiky melodrama of Zedd’s production, the track has the stickiness of traditional pop. Its lyrics play with the power dynamics of sex and gender and affirm the mutability of prescribed identities with lyrics like, “Our sex doesn’t tell us no lies.” The song is a slick laugh and a totally serious implication that the construction of power is absolutely fucked. It has great companions in the spacey “Venus,” which apes from Sun Ra’s “Rocket Number Nine Take Off For the Planet Venus,” and DJ Snake-assisted “Sexxx Dreams,” a disco-bright come-on punctuated with a grotesque pre-chorus of layered Gagas, slinky and feral, singing, “Heard your boyfriend was away this weekend/Wanna meet at my place?” Sex is an inevitable subject for a project so concerned with power and access, and these themes have a kinship with songs like the snotty “Donatella.” According to Gaga, this paean to the Versace designer is about not caring what people say about you, “not so much about Donatella as a brand as it is Donatella the person, about me as a person, that idea of what the public wants from you.” But with lyrics like, “This purse can hold my black card and tiara,” and, “Just ask your gay friends their advice/Before you get a spray tan/On holiday in Taipei,” it’s way more tongue-in-cheek than revealing. So much of ARTPOP is that kind of tease. Gaga asks early on the album, “Do you wanna see the girl who lives behind the aura?” then shirks being straightforward for almost the entirety of the album. Denying entry is the point. Denying entry has been the point of a lot of what Gaga does. Mostly, it’s a tool of self-preservation. “When they wanted me to be sexy, or they wanted me to be pop, I always fuckin’ put some absurd spin on it that made me feel like I was still in control,” she says in the 2017 documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two. “If I’m gonna be sexy on the VMAs and sing about the paparazzi, I’m gonna do it while I'm bleeding to death and reminding you of what fame did to Marilyn Monroe and what it did to Anna Nicole Smith and what it did to… yeah.” That “yeah” is presumably a stand-in for Diana, Princess of Wales, a figure who Gaga and her mother idolized and was the subject of “Princess Die,” a piano ballad originally intended for ARTPOP. The track was ultimately scrapped at the urging of execs, but the theme of public perception and possession are still present on the album. In particular, “Do What U Want,” a duet with R. Kelly about a separation between body and personhood. Woof. The song is absurd. Its concept and execution are appalling. Kelly’s then-known history as a sexual predator—mainly an alleged marriage to 15-year-old Aaliyah and a 2008 recording in which he engaged in sex with and urinated on a 14-year-old girl—was treated more like a barely-visible scar than the open wound it actually was. But it wasn’t only Gaga doing this at the time. Until later that year, Kelly’s behavior was largely overlooked, and Gaga was flippant about his reputation. When asked about the controversial collab at a Japanese press conference, she said they both had “very untrue things written about [them], so in a way, this was a bond between [them].” This grim comment, with its soft-touch victim-blaming, also feels in service of the song and its presentation. For a performance at that year’s AMAs, she and Kelly did Oval Office-affair burlesque, pantomiming fellatio that invoked Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, all while Kelly lyrically hoisted up John F. Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe. A never-released music video directed by Terry Richardson featured Dr. Kelly hosting a softcore orgy with Gaga’s anesthetized body, a nurse straddling the passed-out pop star as she dances a lobster next to Gaga’s sheet-covered breasts. “[She] had a video directed by an alleged sexual predator, starring another sexual predator,” a source told Page Six after a 30-second clip was leaked. “With the theme, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want with your body’? It was literally an ad for rape.” To be clear: In 2022, there is no such track when you stream the album. A month after ARTPOP was released, The Village Voice published an interview with journalist Jim DeRogatis. The Chicago reporter was a witness in Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial—for which the singer was acquitted of all charges—and has done extensive investigating into Kelly’s history of sexual predation on young girls. Earlier this summer, Kelly, who is 55, was sentenced in New York to 30 years in federal prison for racketeering and human trafficking; he still faces trial in his native Chicago for federal charges of “producing child pornography and luring minors into sex acts” according to The New York Times. A “Do What U Want” redux performed on The Voice with Christina Aguilera was an attempt to bury the blunder, but it wasn’t until 2019 and dream hampton’s Surviving R. Kelly Lifetime series debuted that Gaga truly disavowed the song via Twitter. “I stand by anyone who has ever been the victim of sexual assault,” she wrote. “As a victim of sexual assault myself, I made the song and video at a dark time in my life [and] my intention was to create something extremely defiant and provocative because I was angry and still hadn’t processed the trauma that had occurred in my own life. I think it’s clear how explicitly twisted my own thinking was at the time... I’m sorry, both for my poor judgment when I was young and for not speaking out sooner. I love you.” Perhaps the flash of fine art, the salacious party tracks, and this foul duet were part of a distraction—creative compartmentalization that we survivors of sexual assault and rape have a tendency toward. But that pain has its place with the rubbery “Swine,” a track Gaga said “put a lot of rage into [the] album” and that it would be hard to let go of it. When she did, she wasn’t shy about what it meant. “The song is about rape [and] demoralization,” she told Howard Stern. “I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release, and I said to myself, ‘I want to sing this song while I’m ripping hard on a drum kit, and then I want to get on a mechanical bull, which is probably one of the most demoralizing things that you can put a female on in her underwear, and I want this chick to throw up on me in front of the world so that I can tell them, ‘You know what, you can never ever degrade me as much as I could degrade myself and look how beautiful it is when I do.’” Pain is ultimately a stronger foundation for art than a soup can. And while ARTPOP does trade in camp—i.e, rhyming “Uranus” with “ass is famous”—the album, as it now stands, is at its best when it collides with what’s hurt her. It just doesn’t need to be drenched in symbols and winks. When she endeavors to reveal how hard it has been to survive and begs to be loved clean on the piano ballad, “Dope,” she herself becomes the reference. Reminiscent of The Fame Monster’s “Speechless,” a self-described “plea” to her father about his drinking, and a suggestion of what was to come on the gritty Joanne, she sings achingly for forgiveness from her loved ones around whom she’s smoked herself numb. The confessional is too dark to be a stripped-back breath, but it does reveal that Lady Gaga’s best when she’s centering herself.

2022-08-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-08-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Interscope

August 14, 2022

01784f6e-c674-412c-bb41-f180cffcdf14

Claire Lobenfeld

https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/

The veteran ambient musician pushes back at the hollowing out of the form with a burly, physically imposing release peppered with moments of gentle beauty.

The veteran ambient musician pushes back at the hollowing out of the form with a burly, physically imposing release peppered with moments of gentle beauty.

Tim Hecker: No Highs

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-hecker-no-highs/

No Highs

Ambient music is in crisis. Passive listening is no longer an alternative or fringe idea but the model on which the entire streaming industry is built. YouTube radio stations guarantee hours of chilled-out, challenge-free audio, and albums on Spotify fade into endless loops of sound-alikes. How to preserve the tradition of thoughtfully made ambient music in a market inundated with corporate-friendly fluff, or to convince listeners of the importance of artistic vision when an AI program can churn out a perfectly good drone? On No Highs, a self-described “beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient,” Tim Hecker gives his answer. The Canadian musician’s first album in four years isn’t a grouchy get-off-my-lawn statement, nor is it an abrasive audience-thinner like Vladislav Delay’s Rakka. In fact, it’s less confrontational than a lot of Hecker’s albums, even ones that don’t seem intended to be difficult, like his recent experiments in Japanese gagaku music Konoyo and Anoyo. What No Highs argues for instead is the importance of a wizard behind the curtain. The album is strongest when it makes you aware of the artist’s invisible presence, standing behind the scenes and summoning thunder and lightning at will, playing the audience like the director of a good thriller. The most satisfying passage comes less than two and a half minutes in. “Monotony” begins with one of the many Morse code-like, single-note sequencer patterns we’ll hear throughout. Atop that, Hecker creates a wilderness of sirens and street sweepers that begin to slow and morph into grand minor chords. Then—here is the moment—Hecker introduces the magisterial growl of a church organ, blowing the track’s low end wide open with vivid color and high drama. It’s a sound he’s used many times over, and it comes across here as a personal stamp, like Shinichi Atobe’s echoing piano or GAS’s kick drum. It’s his way of saying, You are listening to a Tim Hecker album, a reminder that this stuff couldn’t be made by just anyone. No Highs can be physically discomforting to listen to, not because it’s particularly noisy or dissonant but because it seems to consciously resist syncing with the bodily rhythms of the listener. “In Your Mind” introduces a throbbing sequencer pattern in its first few seconds, but Hecker keeps slowing it down and speeding it up, fading it in out, preventing the brain from getting a foothold. Saxophonist Colin Stetson appears throughout the album, exhibiting his usual burly, physical approach to his instrument. As he commences his endless runs on “Monotony II,” the clack of his keys clear as day, the listener might actually find themselves contracting their lungs in sympathy with his gobstopping breath control. This music is not going to align with your chakras. But No Highs can be beautiful in passing, and its last 10 minutes are devoted to two remarkable tracks that conjure the spirit of ambient’s early years. Mewling steel guitars make “Sense Suppression” a cousin of Daniel Lanois’ work on Brian Eno’s Apollo, a ghost of a country song drifting on the wind. “Living Spa Water,” meanwhile, is based on a metallic twinkle reminiscent of Laraaji’s zither, even if Hecker undergirds it with big synth blats that that gentle soul would probably find disquieting. These two tracks nod to ambient as a tradition—a noun rather than an adjective. For a state-of-the-genre address like this to work, the music has to present a viable alternative to whatever it’s railing against, and the physicality of Hecker’s approach allows the music greater range and freedom than if it were merely trying to set a mood. But Hecker’s primary concern here appears to be staking out a certain patch of turf rather than experimenting or expanding the possibilities of his music, and he shies away from extremes. No Highs is muted in comparison to the Gothic grandeur of Harmony in Ultraviolet, the buffeting noise of Ravedeath, 1972, the thorny ruggedness of the underloved An Imaginary Country. But Hecker’s title seems to already anticipate this criticism, and No Highs ultimately works as an example of what ambient music can be, rather than a suggestion of where it might go.

2023-04-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-04-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Kranky

April 11, 2023

017cbda1-5f55-4775-9a28-e3fd5fcd197b

Daniel Bromfield

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

UK producer's debut full-length inches closer to pop than his post-dubstep contemporaries James Blake or Jamie Woon.

UK producer's debut full-length inches closer to pop than his post-dubstep contemporaries James Blake or Jamie Woon.

SBTRKT: SBTRKT

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15607-sbtrkt/

SBTRKT

The debut full-length from UK producer SBTRKT comes as a bit of a surprise. Up until now we knew him mostly for some high-profile remixes and his original, instrumental tracks, which were solid but nothing to flip out over. He was loosely dubstep in the way, say, Floating Points is, using the genre as a rough guide but also weaving in several other strains of contemporary bass music. But with this self-titled LP, SBTRKT is something different: Recruiting guest vocalists to sing over his arrangements, he's working more as a traditional producer, and his music, while still grounded in experimental bass, is inching much closer toward pop. You might call what SBTRKT is doing here "post-dubstep". That's not a totally accurate term (for one, he's building off more than just that one genre), but his approach is certainly similar to what guys like James Blake and Jamie Woon have been up to in the last year or so. The central differences here are that a) SBTRKT doesn't sing himself (he's brought in vocalists Sampha, Jessie Ware, Roses Gabor, and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano for that); and b) his music is more immediate than both Blake's and Woon's. Rather than go for showy, scene-stealing productions, he keeps things tight and purposeful: The focus is on the overall song and the vocal, and beats are just one part of that equation. The record pits some emotive and occasionally downcast singing against arrangements that throb nicely, and there's a good sense of balance and variety throughout. First single "Wildfire", for example, is a squelchy, Timbaland-like pop moment, where "Trials of the Past" is spooky and slower-paced. The reason the tracks work individually and as a whole is that SBTRKT has a keen sense of how to draw the most out of his guest vocalists. UK singer Sampha, who is featured heavily on the LP, has a warm, higher-range croon that seems built for R&B, and SBTRKT arranges accordingly, giving him stuttery tracks that draw from American urban pop and smoothed-out drum'n'bass. Importantly this makes the album greater than the sum of its parts. "Dubstep dude with a bunch of singers" becomes something much more collaborative and cohesive. SBTRKT is ultimately a colorful and highly enjoyable future-pop record, an extension of bass culture but not indebted to it. The other crucial thing is that the album is actually quite accessible, which is something that's eluded similar post-bass projects. Those other guys-- Blake, Woon-- might have a purer artistic vision, but of the three, SBTRKT has arguably assembled the broadest and most listenable collection of songs. And in a field where approachability isn't always given a ton of weight, it feels brave to take this more song-oriented path and pull it off.

2011-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00

2011-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic / Rock

Young Turks

July 7, 2011

017cde4c-134c-456d-b2af-7815eccaf88d

Joe Colly

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

The third album from the extremely chaotic pop star, battle rapper, and edgelord is a thrilling ride that puts her eclecticism on full display.

The third album from the extremely chaotic pop star, battle rapper, and edgelord is a thrilling ride that puts her eclecticism on full display.

Doja Cat: Planet Her

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doja-cat-planet-her/

Planet Her

Doja Cat is a triple threat: a pop star, an edgelord, and a hottie. On the surface, she resembles an e-girl making fart jokes who’d peak at 70,000 Twitter followers more than a masterful, total-package artist. Or the intensely hermetic version of that: a popular, anonymous forum shitposter everyone assumes is a man because the assumption is women—Black women, especially—mobilize against offense instead of causing it. On June 11, Doja released the second single, “Need to Know,” from her third studio album, Planet Her. It’s one of three tracks from the album produced by hitmaker Dr. Luke (and they’re not the best ones, the Y2k-produced ones are). Dr. Luke is better known these days for his legal battle with Kesha regarding allegations of assault. Like many women, Doja entered into a working relationship with a man before the whole story came to light, which, in our modern world, isn’t that scandalous. What is scandalous, however, is Doja’s track record of not performing penitence for her audience. Whether it’s using of the f-slur in her apology for using the f-slur or her perceived indifference following a “showing feet in racial chatrooms” brouhaha, Doja isn’t ensnared by the predictability of pop stardom. Planet Her is a kaleidoscope of pop versatility that benefits greatly from a market that currently values eclecticism. It feels both premeditated and casual, well-crafted yet trenchantly frivolous. All of Doja’s music—from her early SoundCloud offerings to 2019’s Hot Pink—is perfunctory and unpretentious. Whether it’s her lackadaisical enunciation or carefree lyrical quips, she doesn’t need to recapitulate retro aesthetics as a gimmick (Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa), eschew long-term replay value in favor of chasing TikTok hits (Megan Thee Stallion), or attempt to out-diva her peers by misguidedly channeling her efforts into sentimental ballads nobody wants to hear. She entertains and enthralls with minimal effort, especially in her delivery. Doja, who is often accused of jacking flows (namely Kendrick Lamar’s), can rap adroitly like Nicki Minaj. (She shouts Minaj out at the end of “Get Into It (Yuh).”) Her hyponasal vocal switch-ups—including the deployment of a nonspecific African accent (likely inspired by her own heritage) in “Woman” on Planet Her and “Got to Town” off of Amala aren’t theft, but rather evidence of her chameleonic, limitless flows and intonations. From the introductory guitar chords and anguished operatic background vocals of “Alone” to the 808s of “Options,” Doja Cat skates on Planet Her’s impeccable production. But her candy-sweet melodies are the star, whether it’s the crystalline falsetto in “Love to Dream” or the way her voice flutes up to a “woohoo” in the chorus of “I Don’t Do Drugs.” In “You Right,” the longing and yearning in her restrained pre-chorus segues effortlessly into a resigned hook. But Planet Her’s true standouts draw on the same cinematic, life-affirming spirit that propelled Hot Pink’s “Bottom Bitch”: The harpsichord-assisted digicore of “Payday,” ft. Young Thug; the uniquely Black girl celebration of life contained in “Get Into It (Yuh)” as it encapsulates the two seconds that preempt twerking—the pre-leg kick—while Doja rattles off the prerequisites to “get into it.” (“And if she ain’t she got a butt, fuck it, get into it, yuh.”) Even “Kiss Me More,” which shares attributes with other songs you might hear while perusing Forever 21, is too inspired to be just that. It’s more immediate than the kind of charmless session throwaway that has to be aggressively top-lined into something listenable. SZA’s breathlessly idiosyncratic verse distinguishes it further: “All your niggas say that you lost without me/All my bitches feel like I dodged the county/Fuckin’ with you feel like jail, nigga/I can’t even exhale, nigga.” But while SZA’s words ripple with angst, Doja is unconcerned. She exceeds the mark without ever appearing like she’s trying. She’s an underachieving overachiever, singing the lines to “Imagine” (“Imagine, imagine, put the studio in the mansion”) like she took a muscle relaxant. Her attitude feels perfectly calibrated for a burnout generation. Some artists release albums that function as grand gestures, but Doja Cat doesn’t have to; Planet Her is an enormous shrug, the edgelord hottie pop star telling the world that it’s not her job to care. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap / Pop/R&B

Kemosabe / RCA

June 25, 2021

0182bf32-5aaf-4daf-b503-0196d39d6e41

Safy-Hallan Farah

https://pitchfork.com/staff/safy-hallan-farah/

The Stuttgart producer Michael Fiedler’s debut album under a new moniker distills ambient dub into a wispy, wraithlike form.

The Stuttgart producer Michael Fiedler’s debut album under a new moniker distills ambient dub into a wispy, wraithlike form.

Ghost Dubs: Damaged

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghost-dubs-damaged/

Damaged

Back in 1994, tasked with curating the fourth volume of Virgin’s ambient series, Kevin Richard Martin coined a new subgenre when he dubbed the compilation Isolationism. Less a hard-and-fast category than a general air of desolation that might crop up in any number of contexts—drone, post-rock, industrial, and more—isolationism cast a long shadow across subsequent decades of dark ambient. Yet Martin himself didn’t linger there. Though he has made many different types of music under many different aliases over the years, he became most closely identified with the industrial-strength dancehall that he records as the Bug. That range makes Michael Fiedler a natural fit for Martin’s Pressure label. Using aliases like Tokyo Tower and Jah Schulz, the Stuttgart producer has been turning out dub reggae for nearly two decades. But in 2020 Fiedler began putting out a series of drone-driven ambient albums under his own name, tapping into the claustrophobic dread that haunted the original Isolation comp. The two sides of his musical persona now come together on his debut album as Ghost Dubs, a distillation of ambient dub into a wispy, wraithlike form. Fiedler has been moving toward this sound for a while. On 2020’s Dub Over Science, he slowed his tempos and muffled his bass, luxuriating in the murk. But on Damaged, he takes that process to new extremes. This is dub compressed to the point of abstraction, everything extraneous stripped away. A uniform palette carries across the album: ultra-low sub-bass pressure, hi-hats sanded down to silvery streaks, an omnipresent crackling fizz. Monochrome chords slosh back and forth like water in a bucket; whatever they began as—guitar? keyboard?—now they’re just fleeting smudges smeared across the tape. The bass is remarkable—even at a relatively low volume, it seems to vibrate the walls, turning the room into a larger-than-life speaker cabinet. Yet Ghost Dubs’ sound is also remarkably refined, accentuating the contrast between crystalline details and a swollen low end that wants to devour everything in its path. This is by no means an original sound—but then, things associated with reggae rarely are. The most obvious antecedent is the music that Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald made as Rhythm & Sound, shifting from the club vestiges of their Chain Reaction label—home to ethereal recordings from Porter Ricks, Vainqueur, Vladislav Delay, and Shinichi Atobe—to a more vaporous vision of ambient dub, which gradually abandoned the “techno” half of dub techno. There are also echoes of Deepchord Presents Echospace’s The Coldest Season, a canonical ambient dub album from 2007; Pole’s alternately lilting and lurching studies in throb and crackle; and Andy Stott albums like Passed Me By and We Stay Together, whose air of Sisyphean effort anticipates the trudging uphill gait of Ghost Dubs’ agonizingly slow-motion grooves. Where Ghost Dubs stands out is in the intensity of his productions. Lots of people have tried their hand at this tradition, but few have achieved the heaviness, or the strangeness, of Ghost Dubs’ best work. In “The Regulator,” a dogged 4/4 behemoth, the chords sound like something dredged up out of the murk. In “Dub Lobotomy,” a metallic loop of tone has been completely severed from its origins; the track’s maze-like acoustics suggest slamming doors, footsteps on cement, heavy objects being dragged downstairs. Vocals, when they appear, are no more than disembodied sighs. Some of the most captivating tracks are the most disorienting: “Second Thoughts” is little more than a fistful of coppery chords held up against a backdrop of substation hum, the kick drum stumbling and irregular, the form barely even recognizable as dub. Not everything here is as memorable; in a genre like ambient dub, where there are few chords at the producer’s disposal, it all comes down to the novelty of the detailing. Over the course of the album’s 48-minute run, tracks invariably blur together. But given the hypnotic aspect of Ghost Dubs’ sound, I suspect that’s partly the point. And in any case, every so often a chord rings out in a way that sounds completely new. For me, it happened with “Dub Simulation,” the album’s penultimate track; outwardly, it barely differs from its companions, yet there’s something about the chord’s heft and proportions, at once pillowy and leaden, that immediately stood out. On tracks like that one, Ghost Dubs’ project feels like a formal experiment and a philosophical argument. The popular imagination frequently conflates reggae with sunshine and repose—prelapsarian idyll as stoned fantasy. But what if it were really the soundtrack to darkness, struggle, and enervation? That’s the sound of Damaged, channeling the friction between sensuous pleasure and strenuous physical effort into a virtual boulder of a sound—massive, smooth to the touch, and stubbornly unyielding.

2024-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Pressure Sounds

July 24, 2024

0183c995-30ca-4d2b-a5ad-bf29a2210020

Philip Sherburne

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

Inspired by house music’s roots in the queer and black communities of her hometown, the Chicago DJ delivers a DJ set joyfully at odds with the dominant strains of contemporary dance music.

Inspired by house music’s roots in the queer and black communities of her hometown, the Chicago DJ delivers a DJ set joyfully at odds with the dominant strains of contemporary dance music.

Eris Drew: Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eris-drew-raving-disco-breaks-vol-1/

Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1

It often feels like the word “rave” means about as much to electronic-music fans these days as “punk” does to the rock crowd. The term can still conjure certain iconic images—booming sound systems, dancing masses, Day-Glo attire—but there’s no denying that rave culture long ago lapsed into caricature. You’re as likely to hear the word used by a hectoring politician or youth marketing specialist as by someone actually in the know. So it’s curious that Eris Drew has titled her latest mix Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1, which kicks off her T4T LUV NRG label with her partner Octo Octa. There are some genuinely ravey moments—particularly the organ vamps and piano stabs toward the end of the mix’s latter half, which she’s dubbed “I’ve Got a Story to Tell…” (The first half is called “Good News Boppers!” and yes, that’s a reference to 1979 cult classic The Warriors.) On the whole, though, the session showcases her deep affection for a particular strain of early- and mid-’90s breakbeat house music that likely soundtracked many of her youthful nights out while growing up outside of Chicago. Drew, who still calls the Windy City home, came of age when house music was still emerging from the local black and queer communities in which it was born. That history is inextricable from this mix, even on a technical level, as Drew relies not only on vinyl, but also on uniquely Midwestern techniques such as doubles (cutting back and forth between the same record on both turntables) and fast-paced “hot mixing” (rapid transitions between records). For a generation of electronic-music aficionados brought up worshipping ultra-precise, nearly imperceptible transitions, Drew’s quick cuts and sudden turns may sound odd or even jarring, but Raving Disco Breaks offers a window into how many of dance music’s originators operate behind the decks. That window also includes the music itself, which drips with elements of funk, soul, disco, and even hip-hop. The mix is full of black voices, many of the diva variety, and although there’s no rapping, the music swings with the same sort of euphoric abandon and loose shimmy that characterized hip-house during its brief heyday. These days, it’s easy to conflate all electronic music with the rigid, four-to-the-floor march of Instagram-ready tech house and Berlin-style techno, but back in the ’90s, house and techno tunes were just as likely to sashay down the runway as they were to pummel you into submission. Where does the raving come in? It’s there, but Drew isn’t waxing nostalgic about glowsticks and JNCOs. Her artistry is driven by what she calls the Motherbeat, a sort of divine feminine energy and ancient healing force that she says first came to her in a vision while she was being driven home from a party, high on LSD, in 1994. Simply put, her rave roots run deep, and she’s interested in the culture’s most powerful element: freedom. She is a trans woman whose life has been profoundly shaped by experiences on the dancefloor, so it makes sense that Raving Disco Breaks’ connective thread is one of joy, elation, and release. Drew not only found herself on the dancefloor; she also found a kindred spirit and loving partner in Octo Octa, and their T4T LUV NRG label—which sprang out of a series of back-to-back DJ gigs under the same name—is both a celebration of that love and a full-throated celebration of trans visibility. (T4T is short for “trans for trans.”) All profits from Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1 will be donated to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), a nonprofit working in defense of gender identity and expression. Given the “Vol. 1” of the title, we can assume, or at least hope, that additional installments are on the way. If they maintain the vibe of this first Raving Disco Breaks, celebrating dance music’s marginalized past while optimistically working toward a more accepting future, then perhaps the term “rave” might still have some legs after all.

2019-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

T4T LUV NRG

June 28, 2019

01882014-afee-4134-be57-bfb201ba8f27

Shawn Reynaldo

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

The first of two albums released within seven days of each other, FUTURE is an ambitious Future exhibition, but replicating his brightest moments is often a hit or miss proposition.

The first of two albums released within seven days of each other, FUTURE is an ambitious Future exhibition, but replicating his brightest moments is often a hit or miss proposition.

Future: FUTURE

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22933-future/

FUTURE

Future is certainly a prolific artist, though it is getting a bit excessive. Since 2011, he has released at least two projects every year, often three or more. His work ethic, long a point of personal pride, paid big dividends across an excellent mixtape trilogy (Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights) in the run up to his commercial peak with Dirty Sprite 2 and his cash-in collaboration with Drake, What a Time to Be Alive. Since then, his music is either chasing those highs or stuck in cruise control. His Purple Reign tape introduced some moving new deep cuts to his catalog but was modest by his standards and he rushed out EVOL a month later for an Apple exclusive. His new self-titled album is the first in a pair of projects released in a seven-day span. Perhaps for Future, prolificity is about excess, not just because it’s a flex, but because it always requires giving more of oneself—almost too much. Both nonstop motion and overindulgence are in his DNA. FUTURE, in many ways, unmasks Future: he’s a creature of habit. The Atlanta rapper has funneled most of his music through three personas: Super Future, Fire Marshal Future, and Future Hendrix (he explained them as the hitmaker, the party packer, and the rockstar, respectively). The alter egos have characterized much of his output, giving names to his various aesthetics. FUTURE is meant as a Future exhibition, a portrayal of his many sides—superstar, romantic, heartbreaker, hedonist—which have previously only been showcased in flashes. But it doesn’t do anything past Future projects haven’t done already, and ironically it doesn't tell us anything new about Future. Even under these circumstances, FUTURE is true to form for Future in both content (the first lines rapped are “Got the money coming in, it ain’t no issues/I just a fucked a rapper bitch, I should diss you”), and the sounds he chooses to channel. A song like “Poppin Tags” is “Commas”-esque and “Super Trapper” is forged in the image of 56 Nights’ “Trap Niggas”; both are indicative of Super Future, lining pounding 808 bass with clustered raps. “Flip” is reminiscent of 2013 one-offs like “Finessin’” with warping synths and cracked vocals. The ballad “When I Was Broke” harkens back to the romanticism of Honest or “Turn On the Lights.” There are bits and pieces of nearly every part of his past here, but replicating his brightest moments is a hit or miss proposition. In bringing all these previous personas together, he creates an album that’s mostly retreads. And there are a few moments that completely lack Future’s patented dynamism and evocation, particularly “Good Dope” and “Scrape.” But even on autopilot, Future can churn out some truly high octane flows (“POA”), sweetly-sung gun ballads (“Draco”), and some pleasant surprises (like the hum-heavy throbber “I’m So Groovy”). The highlights come when Future journeys into uncharted waters or deep into his own memory bank. “I lost so many niggas to the streets this year,” he opens on the affecting cut “Feds Did a Sweep.” “I ain’t even talkin’ ‘bout,” he pauses to clarify. “They ain’t even dead.” The song recounts days trafficking drugs to survive, police raids orchestrated to suppress said trafficking, and state-sanctioned oppression against black ghettos, all while using intensely lucid writing (“Started cooking work and skipping Chemistry”). Like “Feds,” the ominous “Mask Off” tells a similar tale of crime as a means to survive poverty, but it relinquishes the former’s mournful tone, opting instead to be brazen—doing a robbery without a mask is reckless and implies either carelessness or apathy. He takes drastic measures: “My guillotine, drank promethazine/Tec and beams, go to those extremes.” The two songs have some symmetry—in one, Future is the raider; in the other, the raided. These encounters provide a counterbalance to all the braggadocio and a sharper, behind-the-scenes look at the world that shaped him. Sonically, FUTURE plays with a pretty interesting array of textures, from the Arcade Fire-sampling minimalist piano chord on “Might As Well” to the whiny, xylophonic chimes on “Zoom” to the wobbly frets screeching on “Outta Time.” Some songs mimic the unpredictable strobe of a laser light show; others induce oriental flute music. Some are fixed, oscillating to and from a single point (like “POA” and “Flip”). Others are slightly off-balance (“Massage in My Room”). But its drum kit patterns are beginning to sound old hat, perhaps a result of overtaxing the same core group of producers (Metro Boomin, Southside, Zaytoven, and Tarentino) the last few years. The songs almost all have the same exact pulse, but they usually manage to intrigue with subtle tonal shifts. Seventeen tracks is clearly a profusion, but it's a fitting display given Future’s commitment to mass production. The glut of songs create a sampler that allows listeners to pick and choose a handful of favorites, and the cult classics will likely be the ones that make it into his sets. Future has a formula now. That means that we can expect less spontaneity and more sustainability. FUTURE is a fine mix of the stylings of past Futures layered in a rich blend of sounds from a now refined sonic palette. It doesn’t communicate the same intense and complicated emotional concoction that fills his songs when he’s at his most vulnerable and compelling. But it doesn’t have to. It is prototypical of Future, who continues to overshare, often for better but sometimes for worse. He will continue to do the things that allowed him to reach this point: amp up the output, stay active, and feed a ravenous, culture-obsessed public. That is, until he’s ready to surprise us again.

2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Epic / A1 / Freebandz

February 23, 2017

01882b76-3478-4ebc-b54b-262e93379e1e

Sheldon Pearce

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

Heady, self-loathing, and occasionally overwrought, the Ohio singer and producer’s new album plays like an obsessive process document of internet-mediated anxiety.

Heady, self-loathing, and occasionally overwrought, the Ohio singer and producer’s new album plays like an obsessive process document of internet-mediated anxiety.

brakence: hypochondriac

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brakence-hypochondriac/

hypochondriac

brakence’s songs surge with combative angst and agitate with electronic detail, never resolving to easy conclusions. “argyle,” the lead single from the 20-year-old singer-songwriter’s new album, hypochondriac, is indecisive, a spiraling emo-pop garden without a path. As brakence wrestles with dissatisfaction at his music career (“I was tryna make a living/Well, I did, and now I don’t wanna live at all”), his drums feel just as speculative, wandering between careful, metallic snares and clipped scratches. In July, a fellow producer asked the r/brakence fan subreddit for advice on how to make similarly distinct sounds. brakence himself answered, rattling off different technical approaches, linking some sample packs to try out, and offering a visual exercise: “Try closing your eyes and ask, what do my [percussion samples], or the beat in general, feel like?” he suggested. “Wood? Oil in a frying pan? Water droplets? Bugs? Industrial machines? [...] Use your imagination!” Despite its surface-level similarity, brakence’s music doesn’t originate in hyperpop, as he’s often categorized, but painstaking beatcraft. He’s a self-described “synth nerd from the suburbs,” one of many Ableton wunderkinds who, in the wake of the 2010s EDM boom, found a home in an online ecosystem of traded samples and tutorials, staggered drum programming indebted to the L.A. beat scene, and vibe-based YouTube channels. Although brakence is somewhat private—he didn’t reveal his face until a couple years into his career—he’s become a zoomer star with an eager internet audience. On hypochondriac, he warps pop structures with gauzy sound design and hair-trigger songwriting, always bristling at the ill-fitting expectations of his artistic persona. hypochondriac upgrades the woozy beat-tape presentation of brakence’s previous albums to a neurotic polish, so thick with effort that its psychic assault can sometimes be hard to take. He cocoons himself within his audio software to tweak his songs as they stack and unfurl. On “5g,” his feverish, drill-inspired instrumental and emo rap hooks feel like they’re in different dimensions, held together by a ghost in the machine. Vocal samples surface like glitches in the Matrix, often with a disarming, nerdy sense of humor: On “caffeine,” he reimagines the infamous Super Smash Bros. Melee “wombo combo” soundbite as an EDM riser. Moments like these illuminate the album’s closest link to hyperpop: the way its litany of online reference points lets you see the gears turning in an artist’s head, soliciting emotional investment through audacity. brakence begins “caffeine” like a clunkier version of his 2018 single “effort,” with self-satisfied bars that recall the most annoying kind of YouTube rapper: “How this shit ain’t obvious to you? I’m not even 21/My music be the snobbiest, somehow I’m still gon’ get it done.” Two minutes in, he injects the track with Jersey club stimulants and becomes increasingly frantic until he sounds almost possessed. brakence’s irascible vocals pull from the streaming-era tones of singer-songwriters like EDEN, but lurch in all directions as his attitudes shift. They make fumbled overshares sting, like when he likens playing guitar to “finger-fuck[ing] strings” on “bugging!” But they also fill out his studied songs with volatile personality, making his intentions difficult to pin down. On hypochondriac, brakence fixates on a familiar catch-22: the realization that when you express your vulnerability to an online audience—through a tweet, a lyric, or a DAW —the performance can curdle into something that feels dissociative, even parasitic, draining your energy as it rewards you with attention. “I hit control-alt-delete/And yet I can’t stop manufacturing heat,” he frets on “teeth”; constant visibility lingers at the back of his mind even when he’s alone. Some of his younger peers, like his touring partner Jane Remover or quinn, have worked in a similar songwriting mode before. Here, brakence makes his anxieties his muse. His solipsism can grate over a full album, but the wealth of imagery he finds to describe it—Greek mythology, DMT hallucinations, his titular fear for his health—gives hypochondriac a writerly quality. This is a heady, self-loathing, and occasionally overwrought record, but its best songs stumble upon something earnest. The regimented pop groove of “cbd” pulls brakence out of his shell: Even as he insists no one cares for him, the smallness of his voice seems to reach out for connection. He finds pathos in clutter, too, like on album highlight “intellectual greed.” Tangled guitars, piano rolls, and electronic scrawls skitter across the track, as if brakence were crumpling up ideas and tossing them aside. “I know everything,” he sings, his voice overwhelmed with mania; he could be bragging about his musical technique, lamenting information overload, or lashing out at the millions of eyes watching him work. hypochondriac’s strength is how, in its obsessive commitment to an impenetrable style, it can suggest all of these readings at once.

2022-12-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

2022-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Columbia

December 15, 2022

0188afc6-4b51-48e6-9e6d-96a60103e98e

H.D. Angel

https://pitchfork.com/staff/h.d.-angel/

New Orleans musician Christian Scott craves a more absorbent and sensitive kind of jazz. Stretch Music finds him experimenting with moods and electronic textures, bumping against the genre's conventions even as he remains rooted in tradition.

New Orleans musician Christian Scott craves a more absorbent and sensitive kind of jazz. Stretch Music finds him experimenting with moods and electronic textures, bumping against the genre's conventions even as he remains rooted in tradition.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Stretch Music

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21105-stretch-music/

Stretch Music

Stretch music, according to New Orleans jazz musician Christian Scott, is an approach that engenders a more absorbent and sensitive kind of jazz. "We are attempting to stretch—not replace—jazz's rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can," he says on his website. He titled his fifth album after the concept, but this sensibility is visible even in his earliest work as a leader; the title track of 2007's Anthem is jazz in its instrumentation, but it also obeys the rhythms and structures of post-hardcore, a series of contrasting shapes which build an atomically tense and spectral space, like a cathedral at night. His description of "stretch music" somewhat resembles the omnivorous jazz approaches of bassist/singer Esperanza Spalding and pianist Robert Glasper. It's similarly collaborative and elastic. But Scott's genre splicing is not as mosaic as Glasper's. It’s doesn’t lock different genres together in unusual patterns as much as it melts them down into asymmetrical and indivisible sculpture. It's almost curious to call it "stretch music" when it feels as if jazz isn’t so much expanded here as collapsed into small, oblique jewels. Later in his mission statement, Scott describes his intention to draw unusual instruments through distortion. This is how Stretch Music begins: A piano, played by Lawrence Fields, struggles through noise, as if pressing and blurring against a force field. Instruments undergo a kind of metamorphosis in Scott’s aesthetic, which is reflected in the album cover: his trumpet bends and warps into elastic shapes. On record, Scott’s playing is patient and crisp, and it seems the product of spatial reasoning, more concerned with the area around his notes than their actual occurrence. He is sometimes accompanied by the ribbony flute phrases of Elena Pinderhughes, which contrast pleasingly with the routine collapse of the backdrop. This collapse is occasioned by the percussion, played by Corey Fonville and Joe Dyson, Jr., alternately on drums and SPD-SX pads. Snare rolls are enhanced into dense exaggerations, glitching in and out of compressed rattles which physically approach vortexes of static. It lends the songs the accelerated yet organized rhythms of accident; it reminds me of sparks convulsing from a severed cable. Sometimes the instrumentation is more obscure, as on "Tantric" and "Perspectives", each chord landing and shimmering with a kind of blurred phosphorescence. There are also more typical fusion exercises, as on "West of the West", where Matthew Stevens’ guitar recalls the metallic echo of Sonny Sharrock. When Scott played at this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, he said "West of the West" describes the sense of dislocation he felt when he lived in L.A., a place that seems unlocked from its own geography, released into imaginary and aggressively blank space. His music is the opposite of dislocated; it is thoroughly articulated, busy and compressed. The reach of Stretch Music can often feel literal—even as the threads warp and drift a deeply woven structure is preserved.

2015-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00

2015-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00

Jazz

Ropeadope

October 7, 2015

018aa40d-99d9-4ae0-a195-f03253c5b51e

Ivy Nelson

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

Taylor keeps her re-records very close to the originals, but five previously unreleased songs add depth and context to what was then her galactic, career-shifting pop debut.

Taylor keeps her re-records very close to the originals, but five previously unreleased songs add depth and context to what was then her galactic, career-shifting pop debut.

Taylor Swift: 1989 (Taylor’s Version)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-1989-taylors-version/

1989 (Taylor’s Version)

For Taylor Swift, 2014 might have felt like one long debutante ball. On her fifth album, 1989, she emerged as a pop superstar, platinum coursing through her veins, Victoria’s Secret models flanking her like groupies, and a jewel-encrusted microphone permanently affixed to her right hand. For the first eight years of her career, she had been known for her intimate, open-hearted songwriting. On 1989, she traded in six-minute open letters and vivid diary entries for songs that were bright, punchy, and dramatic. It was her “first official pop album,” as she herself put it at the time (dubstep drops on 2012’s Red be damned), inspired by the decade of her birth but totally contemporary in its single-minded pursuit of chart domination and Grammys supremacy. The gambit worked: Your aunt who only listens to Whitney Houston probably bought 1989; the guy who thinks his indie records are much cooler than yours definitely told you it contained “some really well-crafted pop songs” on a Tinder date once. The album yielded five Hot 100 top 10s, including three No. 1s, and hovered in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 for its entire first year of release. Behind Adele, it was the best-selling album of 2015. And it crystalized an image of Swift that she hasn’t been able to shake off over the intervening decade: that of an invulnerable, sweetly Machiavellian pop deity, arranging her music and the world around her with equal precision. 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the fourth entry in Swift’s series of re-recordings, goes some way toward fleshing out this chapter in her career. The “vault” tracks packaged with the Taylor’s Version series range from astonishing (“Nothing New”) to feeble (“Castles Crumbling”), and while the five songs added to 1989 (Taylor’s Version) lack the wallop and precision of the album proper, they also sometimes reveal humanizing depth—the equivalent of seeing a star exhale and slump their shoulders the minute they step from the afterparty into the Escalade. Toward the end of “Now That We Don’t Talk,” a glittering catwalk-stomper shot through with the bitterness of Speak Now’s “The Story of Us,” Swift basically positions the poise and shine of 1989 as a way to cope: “The only way back to my dignity/Was to turn into a shrouded mystery.” If 1989 lacks some of the texture and nuance that defines her best work, the vault tracks can be encumbered by their wordiness. On “Suburban Legends,” Swift writes in the dense, largely rhymeless run-on style that defines later records like Folklore and Midnights. The second verse builds to the lines, “I am standing in a 1950s gymnasium/And I can still see it now”—an unwieldy contrast to the appealingly quantized bounce of 1989 cuts like “How You Get the Girl” and “Style.” But this messiness can yield the kind of bittersweet gems that are Swift’s specialty: As ever, she excels when channeling the cocktail of victimhood and superiority that foments in the aftermath of a breakup. On “Now That We Don’t Talk,” she tells an ex that “from the outside, it looks like you’re trying lives on.” “You dream of my mouth before it called you a lying traitor,” from “Is It Over Now?” is an instant addition to Swift’s already-heaving canon of perfect last words. The most striking moments of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) are shivering and defensive, taking a bat to the knees of the pageant-ready main record. The title of “‘Slut!’” raised a lot of eyebrows upon announcement, with many assuming that it would be a rejoinder to misogyny in the style of “Blank Space,” Swift’s comment on her treatment in the tabloids. Really, it’s far meeker than that: Over a Chromatics-style synth fog, Swift sings about trying to hide a relationship for fear of becoming gossip-rag fodder once again. When she attempts an empowering chorus—“If I’m all dressed up/They might as well be looking at us/If they call me a slut/You know, it might be worth it for once”—she delivers it listlessly, unable to hide the false sentiment. It’s a compelling idea that nonetheless is the weakest of the vault tracks, ambling and aimless in comparison to the songs that come after it. By contrast, “Say Don’t Go,” the best new addition to the record, shimmers with tension. Where much of 1989 wears its ’80s influence loosely, if at all, the patient verses of “Say Don’t Go” seem like a shot at the glowing slow builds of Phil Collins, to whom Swift would pay tribute a few years later with an exceptional “Can’t Stop Loving You” cover. Its booming chorus is like her take on the grand, percussive hooks of her friends in Haim, but the lyrics bridge the gap between 1989 and Red, almost vicious in their angst. “Say Don’t Go” is the only vault track written with an industry stalwart: Diane Warren, who penned a swath of megahits through the ’80s and ’90s. The rest were written with Jack Antonoff, whose rise to pop music ubiquity largely began with these songs. (Max Martin and Shellback, who co-wrote and produced most of the record, are absent, and their tracks on the main album were recreated with Christopher Rowe, Swift’s main re-recording partner.) Many of the new songs could slot easily onto Midnights, the pair’s first album-length collaboration. I don’t doubt that chunks of these songs, whether large or small, date back to the original 1989 sessions—“Is It Over Now,” in particular, feels mostly shorn from the same cloth, as does “Say Don’t Go”—but it feels as if many of them were fragments that were built out at a much later date. Swift’s style has changed dramatically in the past nine years; melodically and rhythmically, these tracks don’t wholly match the original 1989. Not that it really matters. Although the vault tracks extend 1989’s runtime to about 81 minutes, they also make the record’s cloying moments seem more palatable. The fresh-start optimism of “Welcome to New York” is more believable when set in relief against wearier breakup tracks; “I Know Places,” a boilerplate on-the-run-from-the-media narrative, plays like a flipside to the defeatist “‘Slut!’”. These songs aren’t technically better now, but they’re certainly easier to understand. Not everything can be saved by this added context: Nearly 10 years later, “Bad Blood” sounds more basic, bratty, and boring than ever. And while I have a soft spot for the peppy, doe-eyed “How You Get the Girl,” I suspect that no amount of time will mellow its HFCS-level sweetness. (Aside from the slightest tweaks in vocal delivery or processing, the 1989 recreations are the closest to their source material yet.) No new wrinkles are necessary to appreciate the record’s immaculate highs: the tug-of-war between yearning and anthemic on “I Wish You Would”; “Style”’s Miami Vice strut; the Tumblr-teen euphoria of “New Romantics.” It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.

2023-10-30T00:03:00.000-04:00

2023-10-30T00:03:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Republic

October 30, 2023

018d6dbb-a64a-465e-9916-f5ece1526260

Shaad D’Souza

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

The Los Angeles pianist, a collaborator of Solange and Frank Ocean, sinks back into spare soul-jazz and meditative new age, occupying a middle ground between deep and easy listening.

The Los Angeles pianist, a collaborator of Solange and Frank Ocean, sinks back into spare soul-jazz and meditative new age, occupying a middle ground between deep and easy listening.

John Carroll Kirby: My Garden

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-carroll-kirby-my-garden/

My Garden

Composition is a kind of cultivation: All the best stuff a product of daily toil. Beauty, for those who work at it, is as much a process as a physical product. It’s invisible and stashed deep below the surface, until it occasionally blooms for the benefit of us all. The producer, pianist, and composer John Carroll Kirby, a consummate cultivator and songwriter on recent records by Solange, Frank Ocean, and Harry Styles, has no difficulty coaxing beauty out from the depths of his own square of earth (or home studio). But on this new solo album of cloudless piano compositions for the Los Angeles label Stones Throw, Kirby unintentionally reveals a crucial trade secret of each job: Beauty itself is often no more important than the labor that brings it into the world. My Garden catches Kirby in the middle of this work, mostly at the piano, and on an array of digital accompaniment: synthesized pads, flutes, and sparse programmed drums that never get in the way of the keyboards. As a pianist, Kirby falls somewhere on a scale between Sun Ra’s blissed-out tappings and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s architectural precision. Despite the clout of Kirby’s past collaborations, who have taken him to unexpected corners of the musical world (location: Kali Uchis), he hasn’t used his solo albums to burnish a reputation as creative polymath or production guru. He’s taken a much quieter path on the music that bears his name, stretching back to 2018’s Meditations in Music, an eight-part ambient suite composed of Minimoog leads and minimal DX7 voices, released on the new-age-inclined Leaving Records. Kirby recently released a collection of piano-only compositions titled Conflict, recorded sometime last year, with the intent to “induce inner calm” in listeners shaken by the global crises triggered by the ongoing pandemic. The California-raised musician’s songs are so dogged in their pursuit of total aesthetic pleasure, they sound almost aloof in the context of a full album. Kirby’s production taste, melodic invention, and feel for surfacing grooves with the sparest of parts make him an unusually compelling musician. But the songs on My Garden seem unable to make a case for themselves, or for your attention, beyond this. The result is an album that wouldn’t sound out of place in the mood-based playlists of the Spotify universe, even if it would represent the very best of that world. Take album opener “Blueberry Beads,” which sounds heavily inspired by Head Hunters-era Herbie Hancock. Its sound alone is striking enough for repeat listens—block chords chomp through a swinging drum pattern, each instrument glued together by the sinewy upright bass work of JP Maramba, making this the album’s only collaboration. The song is essentially a single vamp played with laidback force and swagger, and it’s one of the album’s high points. But its single-mindedness amounts to nothing much more than one very cool groove which runs until it doesn’t run anymore—perhaps the point at which Kirby lost interest. There are few dynamics shaping or redirecting the energy flow on My Garden’s nine songs, making for capricious endings. For “Beads,” which runs three and a half minutes, Kirby simply removes the song’s core elements one by one before his piano freestyles across the double bar lines. There’s a diaristic air to My Garden. Kirby’s songs commence with little preamble, as if we’ve stumbled into a folder containing his works in progress. This isn’t to say the album is carelessly dashed off, but Kirby is content to move quickly and chase new leads when they appear. New ideas pop up in rapid succession, even though the tempos on My Garden never break out of a leisurely stroll. In “Night Croc” and “San Nicolas Island,” Kirby crafts melodies with a neat geometric precision, playful inventions that sometimes seem like they are leading Kirby by the hand, rather than the other way around. Still, his arrangements perpetually expose a deft studio touch. He expertly inserts divergent textures—shimmering Moog swells and paunchy synth-bass hits that break over a song’s surface—without interrupting these daydreams, casting each song in subtly different light. But these subtleties box My Garden into a gray zone of sorts. This isn’t quite a background accompaniment; nor is it an immersive, deep-listening experience. It’s a collection of short stories, where a novel might make more sense for the approach. Kirby’s competent home production, and his economic arrangements, amount to a rich product that still manages to sound one-dimensional on repeat listenings, with little sonic depth. And his predilection for the occasional bright melody line works at cross purposes with his atmospheric tendencies. The album can never fully let itself recede into pure ambience. Instead, like the “my” in the title, Kirby’s latest album does feel a tad possessive. Instead of inviting listeners into his music, he’s exposing us to it. You can hear how he works his way through a musical fantasy, but it’s difficult to access the feeling of it, perhaps with the exception of album closer “Wind.” The longest song, it opens with cascading lines that have been digitally edited and chopped in a way that recalls the sloshing runs of Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. Kirby’s hands work expressively at the piano, teasing at a melancholy style that’s somewhere between rag and gospel, before the chords settle into the grip of a steady drum pattern. It’s the clearest moment of levity across the album—a lone pianist playing with the sounds in his head, not stopping to wonder if anything beautiful will come of it. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Jazz

Stones Throw

April 27, 2020

018f12bd-e1b3-4a1a-b005-b2411a79a367

Nathan Taylor Pemberton

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-taylor pemberton/

On one of his most ambitious and definitive projects, Mach-Hommy reunites with Westside Gunn and puts on an unforgettable clinic with his razor-sharp bars and an exceptional eye for detail.

On one of his most ambitious and definitive projects, Mach-Hommy reunites with Westside Gunn and puts on an unforgettable clinic with his razor-sharp bars and an exceptional eye for detail.

Mach-Hommy: Pray for Haiti

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mach-hommy-pray-for-haiti/

Pray for Haiti

On Pray for Haiti’s opening song, “The 26th Letter,” Mach-Hommy raps about a sort of alchemy: “It’s crazy what y’all can do with some old Polo and ebonics.” The spectral Newark rapper’s work blurs the sounds and images of past lives, be they rap songs from his adolescence or his ancestors dating back generations. He will interpolate Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album cuts then slip into Haitian Creole, nod to ritualistic healing practices and then to Thirstin Howl III. His slang and diction shift depending on the narrator, depending on the mood, the beat, the threat or the plea being conveyed. His work is not designed to be decoded; its success does not hinge on the listener knowing which words or cadences are borrowed from Vol. 3 or Mm..Food?, or on the Creole being translated exactly. Mach reveals himself slowly, through allusion and immersion, an image loading grainily. Pray for Haiti is his most ambitious, definitive project since his 2016 masterpiece Haitian Body Odor, a collage rendered in full. Pray for Haiti is a reunion with Westside Gunn, the Buffalo rapper whose Griselda collective included Mach before the two had a falling out. Gunn serves as executive producer and raps three times, though his added value is clearest when he shows up to ad-lib under Mach’s verses or talk neo-Puff shit between them. Mach has long been a chameleon, rapping or singing over some of the drumless loops that are a staple of the post-Marcberg underground, but also beats that are far more punishing, or far more maximal; the unifier has been a jagged mix. (On “Makrel Jaxon,” he speaks directly to that omnivorous streak: “Next tape might hear me sliding on flamenco/Or calypso/Maybe you should tip-toe.”) The beats he and Gunn have assembled here—mostly from Griselda mainstays like Cee Gee, Camoflauge Monk, and Denny Laflare, plus, notably, three in succession from Kansas City’s Conductor Williams—are varied enough to draw out of Mach each of his many styles: see “Magnum Band” and its low growl, the deceptively rich vocal arrangement on “Kriminel”’s chorus, the way “Makrel Jaxon” sounds like a copy of Donuts that was left out in the rain. Broken into discrete parts, Mach’s rapped verses would seem more conventional than they end up being: They are full of de rigueur punchlines, clever similes that were once the default setting for East Coast rappers. Some of these are ordinary (“Got lawyers on retainer just like an orthodontist”) and others exceptional (“Lotta these rappers big 12 like March Madness”). But they are stitched together in strange ways and at unexpected times and delivered with a flat affect that draws attention to the fact that the punchline is being placed here, as if he’s creating his own source material to quote and interpolate. And then there’s the level of detail he brings to his records. Mach is worldly the way you imagine a spy would be, or at least upper management in a global oil conglomerate: He knows how to order coffee in Damascus and a hit in Paris, knows which local toughs to muscle out and which to charm into his service. This caginess makes it even more arresting when Mach is totally earnest. On “Kriminel,” when he raps about being unable to eat and seeing visions in his sleep, the verse has a desperation deeper than what would be apparent on the page. That song, like many others, is augmented by his practiced, scratchy singing voice, a mode that Mach slips into not only to vary the textures but to provide a tonal break from the step-ahead slyness of his raps. Pray for Haiti is 16 tracks, and its 13th is simply the audio from an academic discussion of Haitian Creole, where it is noted that speakers in one region of that country might use terminology that is totally foreign to speakers in another. The interlude underscores a central theme—Mach revels in specificity, and seems to enjoy that it makes his work elusive, even illegible to some—but it also serves a structural purpose on the album, cordoning off the final three songs as their own suite. This begins with the melancholy “Au Revoir,” where the material things Mach sometimes raps about so gleefully—the yachts, the “thousand-dollar brunches”—sound almost terrifyingly hollow. But he qualifies this tone, as he so often does, with the album’s closer, “Ten Boxes - Sin Eater,” where he cheekily conjures the image of a messiah resurrected “in Vetements linen.” While his singing is a reliable vehicle for sorrow and longing, Mach excels while rapping in this lighter palette, when that tongue-in-cheek venom seeps out in unexpected ways. See “The Stellar Ray Theory,” where an extended sun metaphor inevitably recalls the song that was meant to open Ghostface’s Bulletproof Wallets but was cut due to clearance issues. Mach is not often compared to Ghost—the whine in Westside Gunn’s voice sometimes is—but he shares some of the same writing instincts, from the impulse to cut off vignettes in the middle and pivot to something syntactically different, to the way he often finds himself in the [location] with the [fucked-up detail about location]. And like Ghost, he’s extraordinarily funny, though not eager to let you in on every joke—he is perpetually Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, asking you “funny how?” He will quip about all the Andrei Kirilenkos he’s accumulated, indifferent to you remembering the Russian’s jersey number. Speaking of Ghostface: The album that casts the longest shadow over this corner of rap is Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, its sneering crypticism xeroxed and xeroxed to ever-paler returns. That album’s most famous skit, of course, is about biters. But its second-most famous is the one where Rae asks Ghost where he can buy the Clarks he’s wearing, and an ecstatic Ghost explains that he dyed them himself using a new technique he’s developed. “Just imagine,” he muses, willing his friend to see a pair of cream Wallabees with a homemade navy-blue accent. It tracks that Ghost and Rae would be this excited and this exacting about their clothes—everything they wore, like every shard of their slang, came to be part of an inimitable whole. Mach has carefully guarded his identity, and this opacity has a strange effect on his music: It collapses time. When he raps about coveting Gore-Tex, the verse is not moving rotely through, say, his teenage years; it evokes the people of a certain place in a certain era, and it isolates the desire as a feeling that can be accessed now, rather than something tied to a stage in his growth. It doesn’t even matter if it was true for him—it was true for somebody. In Pray for Haiti’s first verse—the one with the line about old Polo—Mach raps: “Mach-Hommy is a icon, end quote/This gon’ be the year I get my python trench coat.” A python trench coat is exactly the type of item Mach might pull from the closet of his mind, stupid expensive and absurdly exotic. But it also pays off “Tunnel Vision,” HBO’s thunderous second song, which opens with Mach demanding the garment that he now transforms into a marker of accumulated influence, a tiny prophecy fulfilled, his next skin until he molts into something even newer. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Griselda

May 27, 2021

01923073-a6f2-44b4-883f-445ec1c9d9cc

Paul A. Thompson

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

Originally intended for release in 2018, the second album from the short-lived Philadelphia-via-Albany DIY band is a pristine time capsule powered by lo-fi ingenuity.

Originally intended for release in 2018, the second album from the short-lived Philadelphia-via-Albany DIY band is a pristine time capsule powered by lo-fi ingenuity.

Jouska: *Visions From the Bridge *

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jouska-visions-from-the-bridge/

Visions From the Bridge

Jouska existed in the space between greatness and legend that breeds the truly definitive bands of an era: those that aren’t quite transcendent, but memorable enough to serve as shorthand. The Albany group’s story is a familiar one for emo-adjacent DIY artists during the mid-2010s: Upstart band in burgeoning local scene attracts national attention, signs to a respected label, and moves to Philly, generating momentum that soon stalls on side projects, life commitments, and a pandemic. A new album that’s actually quite old, Visions From the Bridge brings Jouska back into conversation by confirming their four-year silence as a permanent hiatus. Dated December 2018 and quietly dropped on Bandcamp several weeks ago, it serves as a bittersweet relic of a promising band and a reminder that talent doesn’t always reach its full potential. Then again, the appeal of Jouska’s music lay in its constant threat of collapse. Reminiscent of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s unruly and unpredictable post-rock, The Glow Pt. 2’s mercurial naturalism, and LVL UP’s cashed-bowl cosmology, Jouska’s debut Topiary arrived in autumn 2016, when the leading lights of emo’s revival were starting to recede, outshined by more immediate weed’n’meme and alt-country strains of the genre. Topiary’s rickety production left much to the imagination, though an eventual re-release on Tiny Engines proved the duct tape and bubble gum holding it together was load-bearing; the album’s immersive spell was broken by an altered and inferior track sequencing that facilitated its pressing to vinyl. The 2018 EP From Elson to Emmett was both more ambitious and antagonistic than its predecessor, its cleaner sound contrasting with pricklier melodies and complicated song structures; it was a weighty and presumably transitional work. Had it been released a few months after Emmett, as originally intended, Visions From the Bridge is where it all could’ve come into focus. Jouska had taken their vision to the most forbidding outskirts of post-rock and returned seeking the simple pleasures of following a single, propulsive groove, carrying a verse into a chorus, and clocking out in less than three minutes. The sound of guitar-oriented indie rock hasn’t shifted enough for Visions From the Bridge to sound dated, though it serves as a pristine time capsule of “Philly indie rock in 2018”: a distinctly American and extroverted form of shoegaze, heavy on the low end, with analog trickery attesting to the gravitational pull of Alex G and Spirit of the Beehive on out-of-towners. Whereas Jouska once compartmentalized their influences, Visions From the Bridge coalesces into browned-out psychedelia, bad vibes without the passivity. Doug Dulgarian’s vocals are usually battered by harsh, trebly reverb, an effect that emphasizes an unmistakable and constant struggle rare in this style of music; his images are borne of gravel, dirty water, chloroform, and cancer. “Fall asleep with my teeth clenched,” he shouts under plush weighted blankets of distortion on “Exit Spell,” capturing the persistent stalemate between depressive paralysis and anxiety. The extraterrestrial, pitch-shifted vocals on “Humming” provide the album’s most beautiful and most unnerving sound, like if My Bloody Valentine spent their post-Loveless hiatus getting stoned and watching The X-Files. In moments like these, Visions From the Bridge pointed forward, recapturing the boundless creativity and lo-fi ingenuity that powered Topiary with newfound concision. But the lengthier numbers that close out side B lie in a netherworld between these two qualities, their sights set on “epic” but abandoned about 80 percent of the way through. It’s an anticlimactic and revealing end to Visions From the Bridge, an album with enough exciting ideas to get Jouska started, though maybe not quite enough to carry them to the next level. As Dulgarian’s current project They Are Gutting a Body of Water gears up to release a split and a second album, Visions From the Bridge provides closure: Jouska’s story might have come to a quicker and quieter end than expected, but it’s likely part of a bigger one to come.

2022-08-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-08-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

self-released

August 17, 2022

0192d4b2-0d2c-4297-b537-7d146aaa6d4d

Ian Cohen

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

If Mark Ronson’s previous albums were united by formalizing principles (retro-soul makeovers of alt-rock standards on 2007’s Version, odd-couple duets on 2010’s Record Collection), the producer's strategies on Uptown Special are more conceptual. The Bruno Mars collab "Uptown Funk" is already a massive hit, and other guests include Mystikal and Kevin Parker of Tame Impala.

If Mark Ronson’s previous albums were united by formalizing principles (retro-soul makeovers of alt-rock standards on 2007’s Version, odd-couple duets on 2010’s Record Collection), the producer's strategies on Uptown Special are more conceptual. The Bruno Mars collab "Uptown Funk" is already a massive hit, and other guests include Mystikal and Kevin Parker of Tame Impala.

Mark Ronson: Uptown Special

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20121-uptown-special/

Uptown Special

Crowning the Song of the Summer has become an annual tradition akin to the Super Bowl for music pundits, spawning its own Billboard chart, a seasonal stream of speculative think pieces, and official betting odds. But no such fanfare exists for determining the Song of the Winter, an arguably more impressive achievement, given that it must seize our attention from the hectic pre-Christmas crunch through to the post-New Year’s onset of Seasonal Affective Disorder (and all the grueling family gatherings in between). Where Songs of the Summer are readymade soundtracks for the happiest moments of your life, Songs of the Winter must be scientifically engineered with enough exuberance to fire up your serotonin during the most miserable time of year. Lest we forget, some of the most universally embraced, monoculture-fortifying singles of this millennium—from "Hey Ya!" to "Crazy" to "Happy"—all surfaced during the chilly season, making their outsized energy not just welcome, but psychologically necessary. And if 2014 was indeed the hottest year on record, we can thank "Uptown Funk" for raising the mercury during its dying days. A year ago next month, Bruno Mars appeared at the Super Bowl half-time show in a rare, shared bill with Red Hot Chili Peppers—the implication being that, even with two multi-platinum albums under his belt, the singer was somehow still too young or unproven to carry the show on his own without the help of some rock veterans. But on the heels of "Uptown Funk"—his inescapable, undeniable chart-topping collaboration with producer Mark Ronson—Mars could not only claim the show for himself this year, but make everyone in the stadium forget there was a football game going on. If "Uptown Funk" represents something of a supernova moment for Mars’ ascendant star—unleashing a braggadocio that’s several degrees sassier than what we’ve heard on his more congenially soulful solo hits—it’s a hard-fought moment of Stateside redemption for Ronson. Though his name can be found in the fine print on some of the biggest British pop records of the past decade, Ronson’s own collaboration-heavy albums failed to establish the London-born producer as a star in his own right in his second home of America (where his sister Samantha is arguably more famous for being Lindsay Lohan’s long-time party pal). His productions for others have cracked the Billboard Top 10, but this time he has a monster hit to call his own—that is, if you discount the veritable syllabus worth of '80s-funk sources "Uptown Funk" so unapologetically references. Between the Morris Day-schooled mojo and Michelle Pfeiffer name-drops, all the song is missing for maximum period detail is an Eddie Murphy cop flick to soundtrack. There’s more where that came from on Uptown Special—though not as much as you might think. Where last fall's "SNL"-showcased double shot of "Uptown Funk" and its gloriously profane, Mystikal-manned counterpart "Feel Right" suggested Uptown Special would be Ronson’s star-studded reenactment of a Revolution-vs.-Time First Avenue showdown, the album is actually more like a five-CD-changer shuffle through styles that dominated pop radio while Ronson was still a grade-schooler. Pieced together in several cities spanning Toronto to Memphis to L.A., the album represents something of a Sonic Highways-style journey for Ronson, and like Dave Grohl, the producer boasts both the chart-pop and alt-rock bona fides to attract luminaries from the mainstream and indie-verse alike. The guest list here includes everyone from a hall-of-fame legend like Stevie Wonder to an unknown choir singer, Keyone Starr, recruited from Mississippi State; from electro-pop pin-up Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow to reigning psych-rock king Kevin Parker of Tame Impala; from the guy who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to the guy who wrote "Shake Ya Ass". If Ronson’s previous albums were united by formalizing principles (retro-soul makeovers of alt-rock standards on 2007’s Version, odd-couple duets on 2010’s Record Collection), his strategies on Uptown Special are more conceptual. For several songs, he enlisted novelist Michael Chabon to pen pulp-novel-like lyrical vignettes of crime and passion on the outskirts of Las Vegas and hipster identity crises in L.A., providing the album with, if not a linear narrative, then a recurring motif of dislocation. And in the spirit of Todd Terje’s producer-cum-artist-album gold standard, It’s Album Time, the tracklist follows a loose dusk-till-dawn trajectory, welcoming us in with Stevie’s signature harmonica squeals on the sunset-summoning intro "Uptown’s First Finale" before slipping into the cocktail-hour psychedelia of "Summer Breaking" (the first of Parker’s three leads). But before the album’s 15-minute mark, Mystikal has already gotten up and offa that thing, Mars has completed his one-and-done deal, and newcomer Starr has held her own with the jazzy, jittery R&B of "I Can’t Lose", rendering Uptown Special as an album of all-too-brief, berserker highs followed by a protracted, increasingly ponderous comedown period. The problem isn’t that Uptown Special’s incongruous collaborators clash with one another, it’s that Ronson sounds like he’s mashing two entirely different albums—one libidinous, one languorous—together. In sharp contrast to the scene-stealing performances that dominate the album’s first half, Uptown Special’s second act essentially sees Parker and Wyatt trading smooth soft-rock volleys overtop chill grooves, with refereeing from Jeff Bhasker (who plays the same role on "In Case of Fire" as Todd Edwards did on Random Access Memories’ "Fragments of Time"—i.e., a big-name producer making a rare vocal turn on a thinly veiled Steely Dan tribute.) Parker’s contributions—be it the Toro Y Moi-style cosmic funk of "Daffodils" or Ween-like bounce of "Leaving Loz Feliz"—provide a prophecy of what a tamer Tame Impala might sound like another five years down the road should they ever trade in heavy-duty guitar jams for streamlined pop; Wyatt’s "Heavy and Rolling" cops its strut from "Billie Jean" but none of its dramatic tension, denying Uptown Special the late-game climax it’s begging for. Before you know it, Stevie Wonder’s returned for the sunrise swirl of "Crack in the Pearl, Pt. II" to send us off with another unmistakably Stevie-esque harmonica line (while making you wonder why the hell Stevie Wonder isn’t doing anything more on this album other than playing harmonica). Too top-heavy to sustain its momentum, yet too fleeting for its thematic framework to cohere, Uptown Special is that rare beast: a concept album that actually could use more fat.

2015-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00

2015-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Sony

January 21, 2015

0194d15e-cdbb-4b96-94be-8b75da437787

Stuart Berman

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

Producer behind the recent reemergence of Dipset and Cam'ron strikes out on his own, making lush instrumentals with his own fully developed aesthetic.

Producer behind the recent reemergence of Dipset and Cam'ron strikes out on his own, making lush instrumentals with his own fully developed aesthetic.

AraabMuzik: Electronic Dream

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15566-electronic-dream/

Electronic Dream

Alongside the roaring Harlem rapper Vado, Rhode Island native AraabMuzik has been one of the key figures in the re-emergence of Cam'ron, Dipset's language-bending figurehead. After a long period of complete disappearance, Cam's been going through something of a comeback lately, aided in large part by tracks like Araab's punishing "Get It in Ohio". Araab's work for Cam, and for other freelance clients, sounds dollar-store cheap but knife-edge tense; it reminds me of Steve Jablonsky's score for Friday the 13th. He makes ferocious, diamond-hard gangsta rap beats with a pervading sense of dystopic anxiety. Araab's sense of vision comes through even more strongly in the web videos he's been releasing, in which he shows off his MPC virtuosity and slices up samples of, oh, say, Cannibal Corpse. Like fellow underground rap visionaries Clams Casino and DJ Burn One, Araab makes freelance beats that hint at a fully developed personal aesthetic. And like those guys, he's now striking out on his own, making instrumental music that brings that aesthetic to the forefront. Electronic Dream is Araab's first commercially available album, but it works more like a collection of remixes. Rather than creating his own tracks from scratch, Araab spends his debut album dismembering a series of cheesed-out hairgel-house superclub anthems: DJ Nosferatu's "The Underground Stream" on "Underground Stream", Jam & Spoon's "Right in the Night (Fall in Love With Music)" on "Golden Touch", Starchaser's "So High" on "Feelin So Hood". This is, to put it mildly, an unexpected direction for Araab. With a little bit of Googling, you can find plenty of online screeds from fans frustrated or even enraged at Araab for making an album based on this music, or for dishonoring his sample sources by leaving large pieces of these tracks unchanged while neglecting to properly credit the original producers. But Araab's changes, relatively minor though they may be, turn a sound built on populist uplift into something darker. It's tough to imagine the tracks on Electronic Dream getting any play in any dance club in the world, and it's virtually impossible to picture anyone rapping over them. Instead, this album is a genre unto itself-- ominous future shit that creates an atmosphere but never bleeds into the background. Araab's snare-hits resonate like eye-punches, and his drum-programming is pure, unrelenting rap shit. But he's applying that sensibility to songs where the melodies shine even when Araab's using a screaming sound effect as part of the rhythm track. The end result is a truly weird little album-- something at once anxious and euphoric. As hard as his drums punch, though, Araab still let the textures of these anthems shine through. And in Araab's hands, these melodies work differently; the anonymous dance divas wailing ecstatically over their original beats become lost, lonely souls, anxiously whispering to themselves that everything will be OK. Araab's music doesn't allow for dizzy buildups and cathartic breakdowns; instead, it's all murky tension, all the time. At times, his tracks can sound a bit like the woozy bass music of L.A.'s Brainfeeder scene, but Araab is always more direct and more ferocious than those guys. And yet the sugary beauty of those melodies sound like they belong on his tracks; nothing is out of place. "Got a feelin' so high," the singer on "Feelin So Hood" coos, and the drums beat that feeling down while the gorgeous ripples of synth lift it back up. There's something truly fascinating about the entire LP: An up-and-coming hardcore rap producer leaving his genre behind so that he can twist and scramble this hands-in-the-air big-room sound. And in peeling back its excesses and substituting in his own eccentricities, Araab uncovers a primal emotional force in this music, one that fits beautifully with his own air-raid siren aesthetic. Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade-- you don't want to fuck with it.

2011-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-07-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Duke

July 6, 2011

019576c3-c6d9-4600-8184-9909cd04000d

Tom Breihan

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

The debut album from Moses Sumney is a soulful, cosmic embrace of aloneness. His deep blue songwriting examines the blasé cruelty that defines intimacy in our swipe-left era.

The debut album from Moses Sumney is a soulful, cosmic embrace of aloneness. His deep blue songwriting examines the blasé cruelty that defines intimacy in our swipe-left era.

Moses Sumney: Aromanticism

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moses-sumney-aromanticism/

Aromanticism

African-American writer and activist Langston Hughes penned these unsentimental lyrics in 1946: “The night for me is not romantic/Unhook the stars and take them down.” On Moses Sumney’s full-length debut, the art-soul singer-songwriter taps into the enduring resonance of Hughes’ blues melancholy. What does it mean to never experience romantic love in a world so structured by the need for it? Alongside other post-Arthur Russell auteurs like Arca or Perfume Genius, Sumney’s got a jones for drifty, slo-mo songcraft and ambient production. Across a couple of EPs, including last year’s Lamentations, he’s explored these drifting, spare environments while distinguishing himself with his austere guitar arrangements and performances. His tricky harmonic progressions recall Brazilian jazz deities like Gilberto Gil as much as they do the contemporary neo-jazz of Flying Lotus. Sumney’s emotionalism and rapturous crooning also connect him to the legacy of underappreciated post-’90s neo-soul like India.Arie, Lianne La Havas, and Bilal. His hip Los Angeles take on navel-gazing boho blackness makes his music the perfect soundtrack for Issa Rae’s sad-sack HBO comedy series “Insecure” and his 2014 ballad “Plastic,” included on Aromanticism, was once featured on the show. Fused together from disparate stylistic influences, his idiosyncratic sound borrows from the musical style of every decade since the 1970s, but doesn’t seem beholden to any specific one. The concept of aromanticism—the incapacity or unwillingness to reciprocate romantic feelings or love—runs throughout Sumney’s fragile, existential lyrics: Broken, disappointed, and isolated, Sumney is like Melville’s forlorn Bartleby staring somberly out the window into the void—or, perhaps, a 21st-century version of Tina Turner whispering “What’s love got to do with it?” But he finds radical politics in foreclosing the possibility of finding lasting intimacy and love with a partner. On the burnished “Doomed,” he sings: “If lovelessness is godlessness/Will you cast me to the wayside?” Then there’s the ressentiment of “Indulge Me”: “Nobody troubles my body after/All my old others have found lovers.” In these moments, Sumney is decidedly more downer Friedrich Nietzsche than liberationist James Baldwin. Sumney’s cosmic embrace of aloneness and dissociation—his nihilismus, to borrow a phrase from writer and poet Amiri Baraka—has particular resonance in our current cultural moment in which the leader of the so-called free world sees no problem in putting down black men for protesting their own derogation. Sumney has no patience for the façade of respectability politics or knee-jerk uplift narratives. You won’t find kumbayas on the inconsolable “Don’t Bother Calling,” and there’s no Hollywood ending on “Quarrel,” where attraction between partners of unequal backgrounds only results in incongruity: “We cannot be lovers/Long as I’m the other.” Sumney’s deep blue songwriting examines the blasé cruelty that defines our swipe-left era. It also reminds us how much same-sex marriage battles have managed to reshift millennials’ interest in normalcy and the pursuit of intimacy in the age of Tinder. Does love need to be desired, much less found? Sumney’s music is woeful, but it’s still erotic and sexy: libidinous tryst-song “Make Out in My Car,” replete with jazz flute, repeats the hook: “I’m not tryna go to bed with you/I just wanna make out in my car.” Aromanticism envisions a loveless universe by way of sensuous musicianship: I suspect some couples will probably fall deeper in love while bumping and grinding to these songs. The exquisite production is atmospheric and bold: There’s lots of negative space, and you can’t help but dig the dreamlike harmonies and the curiously-EQ’d neo-classical strings. And Sumney’s gossamer falsetto, equal parts Smokey Robinson and Thom Yorke, is the album’s fertile throughline. Aromanticism’s quietude and calm sensitivity deliver a musical detoxification from the exhausting stream of information that now constitutes a normal day of news. “Can I tell you a secret,” Sumney coos on “Plastic,” stretching his voice over a moment of musical silence. Aromanticism wins points for delivering intense, raw feeling in a global moment defined by sinister cruelty and the ongoing repression of black bodies. If there’s a critique to be made of this collection of songs, it’s that Sumney doesn’t summon the fierce wit and ebullient humanism of some of the classic-era jazz he musically draws from (think: Andy Razaf, Billy Strayhorn, or Fran Landesman). The album caters to pessimists who argue that our culture’s brain-dead emphasis on romance and love distracts from the inevitability of racial and class power struggle. It might confound others who don’t think the pursuit of those things is necessarily diametrically opposed. Frantz Fanon, the greatest writer on colonial politics and colonial love in the 20th century, was also a skeptic, not unlike Sumney: “Oh my body,” he famously wrote in 1952’s Black Skin, White Masks, “always make me a man who questions.” But Fanon believed that romantic love was possible—that, above all else, was why love was worthy of critique and dismantling. Sumney, for his part, seems to have gone down a different path: diving into the bleak void in search of answers, giving us sumptuous music along the way.

2017-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Jagjaguwar

September 27, 2017

0195d489-8311-4bc5-a22d-8a505a691b4b

Jason King

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

Hot Chip's fifth full-length, a meditation on positivity, is their most playful and colorful record to date.

Hot Chip's fifth full-length, a meditation on positivity, is their most playful and colorful record to date.

Hot Chip: In Our Heads

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16706-in-our-heads/

In Our Heads

It's easy to forget that, when they first started out, Hot Chip operated with a devilish grin. "I'm like Stevie Wonder/ but I can see things," Alexis Taylor sang on "Keep Fallin'", from the band's 2004 debut, Coming on Strong. In the same breath he compared himself and compatriot Joe Goddard to Gene and Dean Ween: "We're like brothers who make records who can't play things." There was a boast about blasting Yo La Tengo from expensive cars, a heartbroken lament centered around prepackaged macaroni and cheese, and a cheeky proclamation about remembering Prince play with Vanity 6 when the narrator was still in diapers. And, I mean, that album title: If naming a fairly minimalistic, handmade electro-soul album Coming on Strong isn't having a laugh, then I don't know what is. Over the years, Hot Chip retained their sense of humor, largely in the visual sense (funhouse torture devices, boy bands getting attacked by laser beams), but something not-so-funny also started to take place: As they perfected a savvy alchemy of dance and modern pop, their music became more serious. Amidst the big, beating heaters, dancefloor deconstructions, and "Simpsons"-soundtracking anthems, there emerged sincere ruminations on love, protection, and the pleasure that one derives from simply experiencing life, all of which were fully realized on 2010's excellent One Life Stand. The band's most concise and uniformly gorgeous album to date, One Life Stand also represented Hot Chip's most clear-eyed material yet, suggesting that the group was, somewhat soberly, growing up. Luckily, growing up in Hot Chip's world is a fucking blast. In Our Heads, the group's fifth full-length, is their most playful and colorful record yet, an album-length manifestation of that "sounds of the studio" game that cut straight through the middle of "Shake a Fist". Fittingly, the record that In Our Heads bears most resemblance to in Hot Chip's catalog is the one that bore that single, 2008's Made in the Dark. That album's audacious genre-flaunting was softly tsk-tsk'd at the time of release for being too uneven and grab-baggy, but its bold charms have lent it a fond longevity. In Our Heads is similarly shaggy-- it kicks off with a tuba-heavy anthem and sails off into the sunset in delicious, wispy yacht-rock glory, with nine detailed detours in between-- but the upward progression in quality from One Life Stand is apparent. The songwriting is as strong and intricate than on 2006's classic The Warning, even if it takes a few listens for the finer points to sink in. A good word to describe One Life Stand's overall vibe was "devotional," where the practice of worship was solemn and the higher power being worshiped was love, whether for a partner or your fellow man. In its own way, In Our Heads is a religious album, too, a fact that could be gleaned before hearing a single note, courtesy of the colorful cover art and inside-package designs that strongly resemble stained glass. On this collection, worship is celebratory, a point driven home by the LP's mission statement tucked within the sped-up house of "How Do You Do?": "A church is not for praying/ It's for celebrating the light that bleeds through the pain." Clubgoing agnostics might stay in forever as an act of protest, but the act of believing in something-- whether everlasting love, family, finality, or the essence of self-- is presented throughout as euphoria, the absolute definition of getting high off your own supply. More than anything else, Hot Chip believe in music itself. On the outset, that statement comes across as a tad obvious, considering the band's career-long demonstration of impeccably executed taste has lent them the somewhat double-edged tag of "your favorite music nerd's favorite band." However, In Our Heads' benevolent generosity stretches beyond well-placed reference points, becoming an act of celebration that relates to making music. Joe Goddard told us back in March that much of the album's inspiration came from the "ecstatic moments" found on maxi-12" extended mixes from the 1980s. Although the slow jams on display (especially the affecting closer "Always Been Your Love", featuring Gang Gang Dance's Lizzi Bougatsos on backing vocals) find the band further spinning their love of R&B and soft-rock staples into the type of sonic gold that would be impressive on its own, it's the psychedelic blowout of In Our Heads' back half, which nicely compliments the front end's squelchy pop pleasures, that embraces that extended-mix ideal. There's the dark, swirling techno of "Flutes", the up-with-movement electro-gospel of "Ends of the Earth", and, most notably, "Let Me Be Him". The song's a seven-minute-plus odyssey that lovingly glides through miles of endless warmth, its final destination a tropical utopia slathered in snatches of Balearic guitar that drip with sticky nectar. "Let Me Be Him" is one of the finest songs Hot Chip have put to tape, and from Goddard's lyrical genuflection to a higher power to an Alexis-sung line that doubles as a plea for fertile creativity ("Work hard, play hard at work/ Lend me your ideas/ But not too fully formed"), it beats with a bejeweled heart. As a culture, dance music is sometimes perceived to be exclusionary, but its most basic pleasures lie in the escapism that the raw materials provide. Whether you're getting pummeled by a club's soundsystem or enjoying the comforts that a decent pair of headphones provide, the right tune can turn you starry-eyed, wiping your mind totally blank and making you happy to be alive just so you could be present to experience that very moment. Hot Chip understand that feeling, and through the broad populist strokes that frequently make up their work, they want everyone to experience it. That's why they're an important band, but In Our Heads isn't the work of a band that's attempting to assert its relevance. It's a meditation on positivity, a hedonistic joyride that isn't afraid to get deep, and a reminder that any band-- any album, any song-- can be your life, even for just a moment. Hot Chip do this for themselves, but also, for us.

2012-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Domino

June 11, 2012

019a65b1-4759-46c9-aff9-ed3ec883b5df

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

Following last year's excellent Kindred EP, Burial's latest effort showcases 25 minutes of new work that hews closer to his much-imitated future-garage sound while also exploring fresh territory that at times feels almost celebratory.

Following last year's excellent Kindred EP, Burial's latest effort showcases 25 minutes of new work that hews closer to his much-imitated future-garage sound while also exploring fresh territory that at times feels almost celebratory.

Burial: Truant / Rough Sleeper

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17498-truant-rough-sleeper/

Truant / Rough Sleeper

From the time of his first single in 2005 until he revealed his identity in August 2008, Burial maintained a carefully cultivated anonymity, arguably inventing the idea of the unknown but well-branded producer in the age of too much information. After the release of the landmark Untrue in 2007, Burial went quiet for almost two years. There was a lot of talk then about where his music might go next, about whether there was anywhere left for it to go. It's become a familiar problem in electronic music: when you create and own a sound completely, how do you continue to grow? Does growth matter? Until his first 12" collaboration with Four Tet in 2009, it seemed like the man born William Bevan might just avoid addressing the question at all. The steady series of collaborative and solo 12"s he's released since are an inspiring example of how to re-draw the borders of one's aesthetic. He's still Burial, and he still owns this sound, but he's slowly and surely expanding the idea of what Burial means. Bevan has accomplished this, in part, through his creative use of the 12" format. If Untrue was an album that sometimes felt like a single masterful song, Burial's best work since consists of long tracks that feel like miniature albums. "Truant", the A-side of his latest 12", is nearly 12 minutes long and unfolds in distinct sections that, taken together, form a riveting narrative. The track immediately establishes itself as prototypical Burial: It moves from a brief opening drone to the familiar clattering snare; the crackles, the mournful synths, and the brief vocal sample are all there. Then, the idea of "prototypical Burial" is taken on a journey. Four minutes in, the tempo and rhythm shifts completely, the vocals change, and the mood moves away from bleary contemplation towards sharp-edged anxiety. When garbled orchestral samples enter in the final third, Burial is exploring completely new territory with fanfare-like music that feels almost celebratory. This is not the stuff of empty 5 a.m. streets, the echoing sense of comedown and loss. The music feels deep and wide and grand, and yet it still sounds like no one else. "Truant" is the Burial track as wide-ranging suite, and the progression from Untrue's "Archangel" to here is staggering. The B-side, "Rough Sleeper", covers just as much territory. Shifting into an up-tempo beat, the track folds in organ chords, pitch-shifted vocals, and, ultimately, a repeating music-box refrain that sounds like a bummed-out and broken version of a Latin-inflected piano refrain from a house track. The word "soulful" means different things to different people, but this earns that designation; there's a touch of gospel warmth to it, something that feels even optimistic. Usually, when Burial samples a voice saying something like, "There's a light surrounding you," it sounds like a dying memory. Here, it sounds like an acknowledgement of the glory of the here-and now. "Rough Sleeper"'s emotional world is quite different from that of "Truant"; where the latter feels deep and wide, it oozes intimacy. Truant/Rough Sleeper doesn't have the intensity of last year's Kindred EP, and it leans closer to the classic Burial sound, but its subtlety is its own reward. Who knows if or when a full-length follow-up to Untrue will arrive, but as long as Bevan continues to release smaller missives of this quality, it hardly matters. Taken together, this 12" and the Kindred EP are roughly the same length as Untrue; the form and content are in perfect sync.

2013-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2013-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Hyperdub

January 4, 2013

019a758d-c4da-43e4-ae90-aa82c337dc7b

Mark Richardson

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

Prolific singer/songwriter issues his third full-length of the year, a conceptual work on which each track portrays the singer, now 31, at a different year in his twenties.

Prolific singer/songwriter issues his third full-length of the year, a conceptual work on which each track portrays the singer, now 31, at a different year in his twenties.

Ryan Adams: 29

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/44-29/

29

More often than not, Ryan Adams' prolificacy-- check the three full-length records he released in 2005 alone-- is snorted away as a feat of spectacular cockiness, worthy only of eye-rolls and disenchanted sighs. Adams' avalanching output certainly perverts common notions about art-as-pain, perplexing folks who think songwriting should be all clenched fists and bloody fingernails-- but no matter where you land on Adams' preposterous pacing, there's still something compelling (fearless, even) about the display. Produced by Ethan Johns (who worked with Adams on 2000's Heartbreaker and 2001's Gold), 29 features nine songs, each of which portrays Adams, now 31, at a different year in his twenties. The album might be murky and inconsistent, but it's also an eerily apt encapsulation of country-trotting, post-collegiate confusion, and flitting relentlessly between styles, moods, cities, and fucked-up affairs. Scattered, slow-building, and occasionally soporific, 29 is also unfortunately easy to dismiss-- meaning naysayers will miss a handful of perfectly transcendent tracks. Adams has never been particularly skilled at masking his influences, and opener "29" is a walloping reinterpretation of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'", with the same squished vocals (including the roll call of American locales), guitar noodles, and thump-thumping percussion. Adams may howl "singin'" instead of "truckin,'" but the sentiment and the sound remain the same. "Strawberry Wine" is eight minutes of muffled acoustic guitar and falsetto, a slow-burning, lyrically-meandering rumination on west coast slumps, high and sad, nodding to both Devendra Banhart and Neil Young. On first listen, "Strawberry Wine" plods, but the track is impeccably recorded (Johns manages to tangle a 12-string and a eukele into Adams' guitar lines, building a tingly, strummy haze), and Adams' penchant for storytelling is awfully well-showcased. Even the song's sluggish pacing is ultimately justified, as Adams' whimpers "I'm getting older/ Gotta break out," wailing desperately, incessantly-- as if he doesn't quite know how to stop himself from making noise. The thick, elegiac "Night Birds" is 29's most memorable track, and one of Adams' better vocal performances, as he moans over hollow piano riffs, lamenting all the stagnation and hopelessness of being 26: "I feel like a body stuffed into a trunk/ From a million years of light/ And getting drunk." "Night Birds" is a haunting dirge (and introduces themes-- sinking, especially-- that pop up over the course of 29), but Johns leans too heavily on volume and echo here; Adams already has a habit of coordinating sounds and lyrics in a way that's distractingly deliberate, and by song's end, the chorus ("We were supposed to rise above/ But we sink/ Into the ocean") is so bloated with reverb it's hard not to cringe a little, fighting off the implied portrait of Adams splashing helplessly into the sea. The pedal steel-riddled "Carolina Rain" follows in the country-travelogue footsteps of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, all railway lines, fried eggs, southern cities, and freight cars teeming with granite. "The Sadness" is full of wiggly, Ennio Morricone-inspired spaghetti guitar, while "Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part" is a piano-and-vocals meditation on loss and depression. Stunning closer "Voices" sees Adams employing Biblical players to convey proper despondency, howling "Elijah/ Don't you call," repeatedly invoking the messenger's miraculous firestorm (battling the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, Elijah shot fire from heaven to prove God's power.) "We're never coming back, once the signal's been fired," Adams roars, over barely-there acoustic strums. "Run away from the light." Self-serious and wildly inconsistent (in both ingenuity and style), 29 is hard to swallow without acknowledging and appreciating the record's overarching storyline: getting through your twenties is way hard. Adams may churn out heaps of uneven tracks-- unfiltered and unedited, scrappy and undercooked, too long, too earnest, too much-- but 29 still fulfils its narrative promise, in terrifically failed, oddly beautiful ways.

2005-12-15T01:00:01.000-05:00

2005-12-15T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Lost Highway

December 15, 2005

019b0df4-359b-4ead-8f61-3d1d46c7885a

Amanda Petrusich

https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/

Notions of place and displacement feature strongly in the works of Fatima Al Qadiri. The Brooklyn-based producer refers to her debut full-length as a “virtual road trip through ‘imagined China,’” refracting the skewed manner in which Asian motifs have sunk into Western pop culture.

Notions of place and displacement feature strongly in the works of Fatima Al Qadiri. The Brooklyn-based producer refers to her debut full-length as a “virtual road trip through ‘imagined China,’” refracting the skewed manner in which Asian motifs have sunk into Western pop culture.

Fatima Al Qadiri: Asiatisch

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19318-fatima-al-qadiri-asiatisch/

Asiatisch

Notions of place and displacement feature strongly in the works of Fatima Al Qadiri. Her clearly realized Desert Strike EP, which was based around the experience of playing a videogame based around Operation Desert Storm—an event she lived through as a child growing up in Kuwait—and Asiatisch arrives with a new cloud of conceptual thought hovering over it. Now based in Brooklyn, Al Qadiri uses her debut full-length as a lens to refract the skewed manner in which Asian motifs have sunk into Western pop culture. She calls it a “virtual road trip through ‘imagined China,’” a country she has never visited, but has extensively experienced through a barrage of appropriated thoughts, images, and sounds. It’s set to a musical backing so bare it feels like someone scooped out most of the contents and dumped them out, providing an intriguing counterpoint to the dense flood of thought the record carries on its back. The ideas surrounding Desert Strike were inspired by the rapid bastardization of other cultural experiences by the West, dealing with a particular form of accelerated baton-handing that effectively transforms horror into fun in rapid time. Asiatisch—its title taken from the German word for Asian—broadcasts from a similar space, only with a stronger sense of remove at work. In a sense, it’s a forebear for how the West will dilute something like the first Gulf War 40 or 50 years from now, slowly contorting it and shaping it until it becomes something few who were actually there will have experienced. If Desert Strike was about feeling an immediate sense of personal remove, Asiatisch observes the long-term effects of societal remove, where great blocks of culture are siphoned off then progressively diluted until they have as much significance as an empty Coke can. The tiny sub-genre of sinogrime—essentially the sound of London producers briefly looking East for inspiration circa 2002-3—has been vaunted as an influence on this record, although Al Qadiri admits she wasn’t familiar with the style until after this album was finished. Still, there are ties, although most sinogrime efforts were denser in structure than these songs. Sometimes there’s little more than a crisp trap snare and a bass welt or two; often there are glassy, MIDI-indebted synth lines padding away. “Jade Stars” sounds like a sci-fi Vangelis fantasy ripped straight out of Blade Runner, while “Wudang” features music so hollow it perfectly reflects the sunken feeling of binging on low culture for too long. Journalist Dan Hancox described sinogrime as a sub-genre “that barely ever existed”, which is fitting because Al Qadiri also makes music that barely exists, to the point where the gaps between notes almost become the songs themselves. The best tracks further dilute culture in themselves, acting like real-time examples of the disintegration Al Qadiri is interested in. “Shanzhai” is titled after the word used to describe pirated goods produced by Chinese companies, which she turns into a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” (itself a cover), using a vocal she describes as a “nonsense version” of the song sent to her by friends. It’s only a political record in a faint sense, making few overt statements outside of “Dragon Tattoo”, which observes Disney's racist co-opting of Asian culture by borrowing lines from “We Are Siamese” from Lady and the Tramp. Certainly it’s not always so easy to trace Al Qadiri’s intentions, and the largely dynamic-free range she operates in can grate at times. But the immaculate emptiness is, in a sense, Asiatisch’s masterstroke, helping bolster the pervading sense of dislocation of being exposed to a society that’s been fed through the photocopier one too many times.

2014-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00

2014-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic

Hyperdub

May 7, 2014

019b1c1c-4cac-4397-9b7b-ed2979bc2788

Nick Neyland

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

John Darnielle offers up a concept album based on Biblical verses, and the theme leads to an intense collection of songs that yields more with every listen.

John Darnielle offers up a concept album based on Biblical verses, and the theme leads to an intense collection of songs that yields more with every listen.

The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13483-the-life-of-the-world-to-come/

The Life of the World to Come

It's Halloween, 2005, and John Darnielle-- preparing to lead another show as the Mountain Goats-- pulls on his costume: a priest's robe. If it's a joke, it's a kind-hearted one: Most people at Mountain Goats shows know the words and aren't afraid to sing them. Some weep while doing it. Darnielle has power over his audience, but he doesn't wield it-- instead, he posits himself as one of them: Someone moved by small stories of liquor-store clerks struggling with big concerns like salvation; a cautious optimist with empathy for the last gasp and the broken promise; someone who holds a melting candle for four-chord American folk music; a "lyrics guy." He sings a song about best friends whose dreams of death-metal stardom are crushed when one is shipped off to school. The story ends with Darnielle crowing, "hail Satan!" Everyone under the roof crows with him. Darnielle's voice swells and his face fills with light. The irony is obvious, but I don't think that's why he's happy. (And I doubt he even registers it-- during performances, he squints, bucks, shouts "yeah!" before just about every instrumental break, and is in general totally unselfconscious.) My guess is he's happy because he's singing about two people who have found god for themselves, even if they couldn't decide whether to call their band Satan's Fingers or the Killers or the Hospital Bombers. This is how he works: Imposing grand themes on squalor, lending dignity to those who have none, passing gentle hands over people who probably deserve the lash. He's written an album about the salvation of meth-heads and another about the bond between codependent alcoholics. Under a canopy of violins on last year's "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident", he detailed what was either a rape or a murder with a voice a prosecutor might point out as sounding almost sympathetic. On 2005's "Love Love Love", the sick feeling in Raskolnikov's stomach-- after murdering Alyona Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment-- is posited as a reflex of love. Hallmark may disagree. This keeps him honest and makes it almost impossible for him to be sentimental. In an interview early last year, I asked him if he loved his characters. "I have loads of affection for them all, for sure," he said. "But my relationship to most of them is the relationship you have with a close friend who you know is also a chronic liar." These themes-- forgiveness, redemption, religion generally, and the Bible specifically-- have backlit his writing since the early 1990s, from boombox-recorded albums for tape-only labels like Shrimper to full-band albums like Tallahassee, which Darnielle started releasing in 2002 for 4AD. (I've told curious friends that his music was "alt-Christian," which ends the conversation pretty quickly.) But he's never been as explicit about the Bible as on The Life of the World to Come, 12 songs about "hard lessons" he learned from specific verses. Thankfully he's not a pedant about it, and his songs aren't songs of praise. He's a lapsed Catholic and professed nonbeliever who told Pitchfork he still chants the Hare Krishna. He is, in his own words, "into" the Bible. He makes use of the book for what it is: A series of stories used to comfort and instruct us. Joan Didion once wrote that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." Darnielle is a professed fan. Life's tone is quiet and contemplative. The raw-nerve hollering of his early music is gone (except on "Psalms 40:2", where there's a blast of raw-nerve hollering so forceful that he's basically excused from straining himself in perpetuity). But over the past few albums he's filed his whisper into a tool as unique as his shout. The cataclysmic shutter-rattling of fan favorites like "Going to Georgia" is replaced with songs like "Genesis 30:3" and "Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace"-- in the latter (based on a verse where god promises total fucking disaster), Darnielle's narrator ties up a hostage, drives through torrential rain, shoots up in the car as the world ends, and still never breaks out of his library voice. In these cases, the music's intensity comes from Darnielle's restraint instead of being undermined it. He still drives at uncomfortable dissonance: A vandal realizes vandalism is his way of standing closer to god; someone all but sings "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from a hospital bed. In general, though, Darnielle's presence is ruminative and gentle. The arrangements are simpler, too-- mostly acoustic guitar, bass, and drums, occasionally accompanied by a small string section. Sometimes, just his voice and a piano, an instrument Darnielle was trained on as a child but didn't play with the Mountain Goats until 2005. (His self-taught guitar playing was a big part of the music's primitive appeal.) Life has no marimba jollies or effects-box glitter. No reggae-esque songs like "New Zion" or anthemic alt-rock like "Autoclave". This isn't a good, bad, or even surprising thing-- its simplicity actually echoes early Mountain Goats albums more clearly than anything he's released in the past few years. While he might elicit the specific from his listeners, his music-- especially here-- is general. This is his gift and the gift of effective storytellers: to build toward the general by using the specific. Jacob works for seven years to marry Rachel. Rachel is barren. Rachel asks him to sleep with her servant, Bilhah, so they can raise children. And now there's a Mountain Goats song called "Genesis 30:3" about the cheeks we turn and the tasks we take on for the people we love most. In a way, it's like he's giving back to his fans or anyone who wants to listen: He spends an album relating to some of his favorite stories and tacitly invites us to do the same-- to consider what we've lived through and what we've learned. At a recent Q&A with the filmmaker Rian Johnson, who'd shot him playing Life in a Pomona College auditorium, Darnielle talked about how we'd hunted certain species to extinction, losing a relative to cancer, and valleys of paralyzing depression. He knew when to make a joke, and he made them often-- he has a really vigilant sense of humor, actually, which people who find him whiny probably don't expect. But his intensity radiates even when he's joking: One story he told involved a sound guy who'd asked him if he'd seen a particular film, and his response was, "Does it have a guy in a hockey mask hacking up teenagers?" The guy said no. "Then I probably haven't seen it." "I'm not great with personal boundaries," he said later, "so I'm sorry if I'm making anyone here uncomfortable." Well, a little. But the discomfort isn't without redemption; it's part and parcel. It's probably what most of us came for.

2009-10-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

2009-10-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

4AD

October 14, 2009

019bbe5c-1057-496a-b22a-3437be395fd1

Mike Powell

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

His guest-heavy sophomore album sees Travis Scott amplifying the fun and theater of his projects as he finds his true home as a host for others.

His guest-heavy sophomore album sees Travis Scott amplifying the fun and theater of his projects as he finds his true home as a host for others.

Travis Scott: Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22361-travis-scott-birds-in-the-trap-sing-mcknight/

Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight

First presented in 2014, Vetements is among the buzziest new fashion lines. Created by the Margiela and Louis Vuitton-trained designer Demna Gvasalia, the line takes inspiration from the common; its name is even just French for “clothing.” Non-luxury materials often highlight Gvasalia’s runway shows, which take ordinary items and brands and fit them to haute couture with extreme, unnatural silhouettes. Among Gvasalia’s admirers is Kanye West, and with his taste goes the rest of contemporary hip-hop. Long West’s mimic, Travis Scott has performed in the clothing and attended Vetements runway shows with his mentor. He embodies its ethos: take the artificial and common, then distort, re-contextualize, and exaggerate to make it something beautiful. Scott’s second studio album, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, is the Houston rapper’s most concise and cohesive project to date. On last year’s Rodeo, Scott struggled to balance ambition, quality, and star power. Songs ran much longer than they needed, letting the vibes simmer until you realized they were trite. Further, his production selection showed little growth from his largely self-produced 2013 debut Owl Pharaoh, and its well-received follow-up mixtape Days Before Rodeo. Both those tapes featured a recognizable “Travis Scott Sound”—an even larger, even more gothic take on Lex Luger’s trap anthems. Rodeo simply amped up the grandeur with little substance or variation. Scott remains committed to his signature sound on Birds but has finally made small tweaks to make it his own. Most Travis Scott songs sound very serious, and Birds finds him at his most melodramatic. Even the peak ridiculous moments on Birds are delivered with a completely straight face. On “through the late night,” he utters, “Relieve my heart of malice,” but offers no reason why that may be necessary. Because he does not provide great detail or context as to why he’s in dire need of salvation, it comes off as both grandiose and vacuous, which, at best, is just really fun to listen to. His apocalyptic vanity is less high art than it is camp, but his commitment is similar to Lana Del Rey’s high-stakes ennui ballads on Ultraviolence, or all of the soapy affairs across David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” The use of synthetic sound curios across Birds also help define this world, this pre-fab movie studio lot where Scott’s antics start to make more sense. The production across Birds’ 14 tracks is as big and important as any across Scott’s discography, but every outsourced producer here creates something bespoke to Scott’s developing aesthetic, with at least one alien soundbite making an otherwise conventional beat something special. “sweet sweet,” for example, opens with a glossy noise recalling mid-2000s AIM sound effects and the standout “pick up the phone” features a hollowed-out synth that sounds like it’s been digitized 10 times over. The latter culminates with that effect turned into a beautiful glissando that cuts off abruptly. Better to do more with less than try to pack as many flourishes as possible onto one track. The two main criticisms that have followed Scott his entire career are that he doesn’t rap about anything, and when he does rap, he doesn’t do it well. It’s easy to tell when Travis Scott is “trying to rap,” as on album opener “the ends,” because he really turns down the Auto-Tune. And when given too much time on the mic, Scott reverts to bad hashtag rapper. But when the verses are short, he offers, at the very least, intriguing bits of imagery: spending “a Sunday morning in a brothel,” or lacking cell “service in the mountains.” The scenes never materialize into anything, but they help decorate an album and keep the artificial stakes high and the energy up. It’s also telling that each major guest highlights a key component that Scott lacks. André 3000, delivering a new trap flow, paints a vivid picture on “the ends.” Kendrick Lamar puts on a technical clinic, annunciating and shifting pitches on “goosebumps.” 21 Savage is plainspoken, straightforward, and fierce on “outside.” On “pick up the phone,” Quavo even delivers the titular “Birds in the Trap Sing Brian McKnight.” Despite even more vocal contributions from the Weeknd, Young Thug, Cassie, Kid Cudi, Swizz Beatz, Bryson Tiller, and others, Travis Scott remains at the center because he’s finally found his calling. He’s no longer a biter or an up-and-coming protege or an industry plant. He’s the rich and often ineffectual host of the party, overlooking the grounds from his dubious veranda, here to make sure everyone comes in and goes out looking and sounding spectacular. He has always been a mood-setter and a vocalist, and he is in full command of the vibe, tone, and mood of this entire project more than ever. It’s a triumph that Travis Scott sources from different parts to turn Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight into his unified vision. The cover art (shot by Nick Knight) shows Scott as something between a bird, a fallen angel, and a video game character—his eyes pure white with plumes of equally white smoke rising above. It’s a ridiculous image to cover an album that includes a song called “beibs in the trap”—a misspelling of Justin Bieber as slang for cocaine—but that’s the point. Travis Scott repurposes conventional subjects and sounds, making them compelling with his panache. Like his mentor, he seems keenly aware of his place in the genre. At one point, he literally says, “Shout my tropes!” By and large, the whole record is about rampant drug abuse, yet he transcends the rote topic with how forcefully and pompously he indulges. Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight escapes as Travis Scott’s best work yet: a combination of elevated significance, self-awareness, and the old trick of spinning something so plain into something so luxurious.

2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Epic

September 8, 2016

019eccb4-9f7c-4ccb-872d-3c0e775b732f

Matthew Strauss

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

On his first new album since 2018, the longtime Detroit beatmaker unites rap, soul, funk, rock, and ghettotech with meticulous craftsmanship and a wonky-yet-smooth touch.

On his first new album since 2018, the longtime Detroit beatmaker unites rap, soul, funk, rock, and ghettotech with meticulous craftsmanship and a wonky-yet-smooth touch.

Black Milk: Everybody Good?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-milk-everybody-good/

Everybody Good?

Detroit rapper-producer Black Milk floats into his eighth studio album, Everybody Good?, on a bed of the lushest synthetic funk this side of Thundercat. Intro “God Willing” sets a frenetic bassline against strata of electronic keys, soft background vocals, and drums hard enough to knock a filling loose. It’s a stone-cold groove with a hip-hop twist, the kind that compresses 60 years of Black music into a sound equally fit for a sweaty dancefloor as head nods in AirPods. Following in the footsteps of multihyphenates like Q-Tip and the late J Dilla, Milk has spent the years since 2018’s FEVER closing the already small gaps between rap, soul, funk, rock, and ghettotech while honing an anxious, socially conscious writing style. On Everybody Good?, he sounds more comfortable than ever as both a bandleader and an astute everyman. He remains a producer first and foremost. The music of Everybody Good? was produced, arranged, and mixed pre-COVID, and the beats, as ever, are gorgeous and meticulously crafted. Splitting the difference between traditional and live-band hip-hop, Milk often samples session players and then chops up the recordings the old-fashioned way. What separates him from fellow era-blending contemporaries like Oddisee is his love for the rakish, crooked bliss of Dilla time. Drums pop seconds before and after you expect; the low end is turned up in the mix, looming over the arrangements of “Wait Til Fate” and “Downs Got Up.” Lead single “Is It Just Me?” gives the vintage Black Milk sound a stickier feel with a beehive of synths, bass, and keyboards whirring around stilted drum claps. There’s a proggy sprawl to these songs only hinted at on previous Black Milk records. Several feature long instrumental bookends that let the song marinate before any voices are heard. “Ain’t Nobody Coming Down to Save You” turns an interpolation of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” into a rapturous stomp that echoes and wails like a Parliament-Funkadelic song. The flickering notes and muted bass of “Feelings Don’t Feel” and “The Black Surf (Everybody Good?)” are disrupted by crunchy drum fills that punch through the mix. The scale of these beats is impressive enough to sequence alongside legends like Karriem Riggins, who co-produces “Fews & Trues,” and Raphael Saadiq, who provides the one beat not touched by Black Milk on “No Wish.” Milk’s growing ambition helps his work slot seamlessly next to theirs. Milk has struggled in the past with indistinct writing, but with every project since 2010’s Album of the Year, his perspective has sharpened. The lyrics for Everybody Good? came after the beats were made, and they refine the anxieties and joys of navigating the world as a Black man previously explored on FEVER. Sometimes, they’re presented as “tightrope walking in the sky” (“Downs Got Up”); at others, funneled through outlets like money (“For How Much?”) and social media (“Feelings Don’t Feel”). On “Wait Til Fate,” he alludes to a health issue that landed him in the hospital, forcing him to consider whether or not to worry his mother with the news. He’s dealt with life issues directly on record before, but it’s rarely been this tender and exposed. Despite the occasional forced punchline (“came up short like a dress in June”)—and being outclassed by scene-stealing verses from Mick Jenkins on “Feelings Don’t Feel” and Phonte on “No Wish”—Milk’s bars are more fleshed-out than before. Still, the beats are the main attraction. It’s invigorating to hear musical ideas that started out as sample-based noodling on 2005’s Sound of the City and 2008’s Tronic arrive full-formed. In a world gripped by paranoia and mistrust, Black Milk finds solace in the one aspect of life he can control.

2023-07-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-07-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rap

Computer Ugly / Mass Appeal

July 19, 2023

019f9541-18b9-4b28-b95e-20826d0c3f4e

Dylan Green

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

The four-LP box containing everything Newman recorded for his Songbook series is a self-made and ever-shifting canon from songwriting's most charming cynic.

The four-LP box containing everything Newman recorded for his Songbook series is a self-made and ever-shifting canon from songwriting's most charming cynic.

Randy Newman: The Randy Newman Songbook

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22367-the-randy-newman-songbook/

The Randy Newman Songbook

Randy Newman started strolling through his back pages for Nonesuch in 2003 following a commercially disappointing stint at DreamWorks, the mega-label that never was. Recorded while Newman labored on songs that would become 2008’s Harps and Angels, The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1 also provided some insight on what the composer considered to be his canon. Bypassing his 1977 neo-novelty hit “Short People,” along with anything else a wider audience may know, he concentrated on songs other singers covered. Among those featured were “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” a ’60s standard sung by everyone from Dusty Springfield to Leonard Nimoy; “You Can Leave Your Hat on,” a big hit for Joe Cocker; and “Sail Away,” previously by Bobby Darin, Linda Ronstadt, and Ray Charles. Newman trod lightly upon his soundtrack work and offered just enough cynical jokes to offset the beautiful melancholy of the ballads. The spartan arrangements helped showcase not only his songcraft—his wry lyrical turns, how the verses interlocked with the bridges—but also Newman’s musicianship, how he slurs his vocals in a manner not dissimilar to his New Orleans barrelhouse piano roll. *The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 2, *released in 2011, emphasized sly, laconic performances, possibly because Randy’s longtime associate Lenny Waronker signed on as a co-producer with Mitchell Froom. Either way, Vol. 2 lacked the austere overtones of the first, as does 2016’s brand-new The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 3. Such playful laziness is an attribute here because Newman finally revisits the Randy Newman songs you know if you don’t know Randy Newman. First up is “Short People,” a song he once dismissed as a “bad break,” followed by Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me (Not to Come),” the Toy Story theme “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” “I Love to See You Smile” from *Parenthood *that later worked its way into a Colgate commercial, and “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear,” which Scooter once performed with Fozzie Bear on “The Muppet Show.” It’s the sunny side of Newman. However, the spartan arrangements and light touch on Vol. 3 undercut the sentimentality and whimsy since they’re executed with the same sense of mischief as the idiosyncratic renditions of deep cuts on Vol. 2. Such aesthetic continuity becomes evident on the four-LP collection The Randy Newman Songbook, which consolidates and reshuffles all three albums, adding five exclusive bonus tracks to the whole shebang (initially available as a vinyl-only set, the box will later be released on CD and as a download). Allegedly reassembled according to theme, the four LPs still roughly correspond to the sequencing of the three initial volumes, which means it gains momentum as it progresses, with buoyancy eventually overtaking precision. As the four albums play, a whirl of character sketches, satire, sincerity, and heartbreak float by, the work of a writer who values economy over all else. But most impressive is how Newman plays with and rearranges his own songs. Sometimes he finds them so perfectly crafted he can’t stray from his original template, other times he gives them a distinctly different spin. Take “Rollin’,” the bittersweet conclusion to 1974’s Good Old Boys newly recorded for Vol. 3. As a bemused antithesis to the gloss of “I Love L.A.,” its irony shines as bright as Newman’s earnest love for his hometown. The ease of *Vol. 3 *allows it to stand on its own as straight-up entertainment, but better to take the four-LP box as a whole. It captures so many different elements of Newman in one hefty set. But don’t mistake these latter-day renditions for the definitive versions. For some reason or another, Newman hasn’t gotten around to revisiting a few major songs off his ’70s albums, which were masterpieces of the golden age of major labels, exquisitely produced that thrived on their California sheen. Instead, The Randy Newman Songbook, especially in its four-LP incarnation, is proof that a songbook isn’t something carved in concrete. It’s a living, breathing thing whose contents and meanings can change over time, even for its own author. Correction: This review originally included a statement suggesting that Newman conceived Vol. 1 of the Songbook series to buy time while writing his album Harps and Angels. However, the conception of the Songbook series pre-dates his work on that album.

2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Nonesuch

September 21, 2016

01a10f4c-c61c-498b-887b-4e8fc7b0ab90

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/

My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden headlines the three-woman team behind this original and hauntingly vivid psychological portrait.

My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden headlines the three-woman team behind this original and hauntingly vivid psychological portrait.

Shara Worden / Sarah Kirkland Snider / Signal: Penelope

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14934-penelope/

Penelope

The quietly devastating song cycle Penelope begins with an unexpected homecoming. A man returns to his wife's doorstep after 20 years in an unnamed war, suffering brain damage-- a shadow of his former self. The woman takes this mournful figure in gravely, sorting through her ambivalence, bitterness, and grief by reading to him from Homer's Odyssey. The story's parallels to their lives-- a husband striving heroically over vast distances and years to return to his wife-- become a psychological probe for the woman to sound the depths of her shell-shocked husband's ruined mind. Speaking to him through the poem, she is able to gently coax him back from oblivion. This eloquent meditation on death, memory, being lost, and homecoming is the work of three women. Playwright and poet Ellen McLaughlin wrote the incisive lyrics; Sarah Kirkland Snider composed the dreamily disquieting score; and Shara Worden, the smoky-voiced contralto of My Brightest Diamond, sings it. Together, they render the titular woman's voice with unsettling clarity. Penelope is a gorgeous piece of music, but it is more-- it is also a hauntingly vivid psychological portrait, one that explores a dark scenario with a light, almost quizzical touch, finding poetic resonances everywhere. Snider's score, written for the new-music ensemble Signal, is the work's worried heart. Penelope lives entirely inside the heads of two people who can't communicate, and her music, coursing with mute anxiety, reflects that solitude. The strings hover like low-hanging fog, repeating a few harmonically troubled chords in softly insistent strokes-- the veil of confusion that clouds the man's memories, perhaps, or the heavy silence that settles in between the newly estranged married couple. This fraught suggestibility between music and theme takes Penelope deep beneath your skin. On "This Is What You're Like", Worden's character tries to remind her husband of the man he once was; when she sings the line, "you are a man who, when the music dies away, you keep on dancing," the music stumbles briefly into a few bars of a half-remembered waltz. The story opens on the woman's house by the sea; a lapping and receding violin [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| figure traces the shore while quiet gull-like cries circle overhead. Snider's music lives in a netherland between richly orchestrated indie rock and straight chamber music, an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all: No matter what perspective you bring to this album, it bears profound rewards. Shara Worden's eerily poised singing will raise the hackles of St. Vincent fans, while Snider's ambiguous sense of harmony might put classical listeners in mind of Charles Ives' similarly memory-haunted Three Places in New England or Arvo Pärt's elegant simplicity. The work doesn't straddle a stylistic crossroads so much as swirl together artistic currents, creating a slipstream where electric guitar, chimes, strings, drum kit, and subtle electronic touches interchange fluidly. There is an obsessive quality to Penelope's cellular, repeating mini-melodies, and it is echoed in McLaughlin's mantra-like lyrics. Songs hinge on poetically elusive but piercingly direct turns of phrase-- "Can't you do that?/ Can't you hide me, God?"; "The world is never done with you/ The world wants her travelers to stay lost." Worden sings these words with enigmatic wisdom, investing something as vague as "I am known for who I am" with palpable regret. McLaughlin's words speak with wry frankness about the burdens of waiting on, and caring for, men, and this touch makes Penelope a feminist story, a sly reappraisal of a male-centric tale on the order of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Like a siren song, it cloaks rocky edges in something soft and lyrical. Beneath the placid surface, you can hear the sound of one woman's thoughts, rendered with such care and intimacy that you can sense her staring out of the record back at you.

2011-01-05T01:00:02.000-05:00

2011-01-05T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock / Experimental

New Amsterdam

January 5, 2011

01a2dfbd-14ae-446d-9440-50fe89407bbb

Jayson Greene

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

This 2xCD reissue of brilliant, reclusive L.A. songwriter Shuggie Otis' 1974 masterwork Inspiration Information includes four extra tracks from that session along with Wings of Love, comprising 14 tracks that Otis recorded between 1975 and 2000. Combined, the collections feel like a parallel universe greatest-hits compilation, from a world where a label embraced Otis’s genius and eccentricity, instead of driving him away.

This 2xCD reissue of brilliant, reclusive L.A. songwriter Shuggie Otis' 1974 masterwork Inspiration Information includes four extra tracks from that session along with Wings of Love, comprising 14 tracks that Otis recorded between 1975 and 2000. Combined, the collections feel like a parallel universe greatest-hits compilation, from a world where a label embraced Otis’s genius and eccentricity, instead of driving him away.

Shuggie Otis: Inspiration Information / Wings of Love

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17909-shuggie-otis-inspiration-information-wings-of-love/

Inspiration Information / Wings of Love

It’s an unfortunate trick of the life of a musician that a single cover version can supercede its original author’s career. One job of the reissue is to hopefully right such wrongs. Such has been the fate of Shuggie Otis, who, at the time of writing, has an All Music Guide entry with the album art of the band who took “Strawberry Letter 23” to #5 on the 1977 pop charts featured before any image of Otis himself. What had become a minor cult around Otis’ short-but-overlooked career surfaced for the first time a quarter-century later. The 2001 Luaka Bop reissue of Otis’ 1974 masterwork Inspiration Information was the first time many heard the original version of “Strawberry”, but that release managed to muddy Otis’ discography, as well. “Strawberry” was originally included on Otis’ previous album, 1971’s Freedom Flight, though it and four other Freedom songs were tacked onto the end of Inspiration. Their provenance was noted as such, but new Otis converts could be forgiven for slotting “Strawberry” as a late-album Inspiration track*.* Those extra tracks did no favors to Inspiration, which works incredibly well as its own statement, without the need for bonus material. Originally, it was to be the coming-out party for a tremendous new talent, though one who was no stranger to the music business. A blues guitar prodigy who’d been playing with his father (pioneering R&B bandleader Johnny Otis) since he was 11, Otis played on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats when he was 16, and released an album with blues-rock gadabout Al Kooper before he was 20. Though he stayed out of the recording process, Johnny Otis served as the executive producer for his son’s work, and he convinced Columbia to build Shuggie a home studio to record Inspiration, which took the better part of three years. Upon release in October 1974, Inspiration certainly sounded like the work of an isolated L.A. savant. Smooth, organ-driven California funk, quasi-new age psychedelia, loungey jazz instrumentals, string interludes-- all propelled by the same kind of analog drum machine that had piqued Ralf & Florian's interest at the same time. Inspiration instantly earned comparisons to Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, and reportedly made Sly Stone’s jaw drop upon hearing it. The LP’s title track-- every bit as good as “Strawberry”-- was issued to radio, though it only reached #56 on the R&B chart. The album failed to live up to Columbia’s expectations, such as they were, and Otis was unceremoniously dropped from the label after its release. In August 1977, as the Brothers Johnson version of “Strawberry” was emanating from car stereos and DJ booths, no one had heard a peep from Otis for more than two years. He wouldn’t return to public life for nearly 40 more. Reissues are weird things, particularly for albums that don’t instantly announce themselves along clear genre lines, and especially for artists who don’t show any interest in adding to the conversations themselves. Which is why Epic/Legacy’s 2xCD reissue is the definitive version. On the first CD, Inspiration is included as its own entity, and appended with four extra tracks from those sessions-- solid B-sides, but impossible to imagine on the original album. The second CD, Wings of Love, is the collection’s real revelation, comprising 14 tracks that Otis recorded between 1975 and 2000. Wings reveals that while Otis was reclusive, he was far from idle. Listening in 2013, it’s hard not to compare it to the year’s other album, m b v, that’s composed of tracks that theoretically could have been written anytime over a period of decades. Reissues are pop music’s preeminent form of historical revisionism, but the great thing about the Inspiration and Wings set is that combined, they’re closer to a parallel universe greatest-hits compilation, in a world where a label embraced Otis’ genius and eccentricity, instead of driving him away altogether. It may have killed his career, but what a way to go out-- Inspiration ranks among the 1970s most unique and personal musical statements. In the album, it’s possible to hear the kaleidoscopic ambition and bruised optimism of What’s Going On and Innervisions, hints of Miles Davis’ prolific funk-fusion period and Bob Marley’s ascendant good vibrations, the lingering specter of Love’s death-of-innocence opus Forever Changes, and the drawn-out, spaced-out folk-rock sigh emanating from Laurel Canyon. The month Inspiration was released, Otis’ friend Billy Preston hit #1 with his single “Nothing From Nothing,” and Inspiration’s beatific title track channels that same generous spread-the-good-word spirit, which he refracts through the kind of sleek, jazz-derived rock that NYC transplants Steely Dan were mastering at the time. Otis was no druggie, but admitted in a recent interview that Inspiration highlight “Aht Uh Mi Hed” arose from one of his three acid trips, colored by the isolation-derived depression he was suffering during the album’s multi-year recording process. It’s a testament to Otis’ character that “Hed” is the opposite of dark. Instead, it serenely shimmers, like “Strawberry”: a drum machine and organ form a foundation for Otis to float above, buoyed by flutes and broken up by an orchestral interlude before segueing into a choppy funk coda. Even under such a spell, Otis convinces himself “it’s about time for something new,” and that he’s “got to grow.” Inspiration has long been cited as the symbolic birthplace of Prince, but the reissue’s timing and penchant for dream-logic also suggests that Channel Orange is among the album’s most prominent descendants. “Hed”s otherworldly air is due in part to the Rhythm King drum machine, a gadget that Otis had fallen for when writing “Strawberry”. In late 1971, Sly Stone blended a Rhythm King track with a wah-wah guitar on “Family Affair”, lending that track its irresistible effervescence, and in February 1973, Timmy Thomas rode the Rhythm King to #1, via his single “Why Can't We Live Together”. The machine’s unique analog warmth allowed savants like Otis and Stone to do everything themselves, starting one of its simple metronomic presets and building a song around it. This is how “Pling!”-- Inspiration’s penultimate track and the centerpiece of its experimental b-side-- took shape. With only the Rhythm King keeping rhythm like a clock in the next room, Otis layers on a quiet Fender Rhodes line, stirs in a hodgepodge of instumentation-- a harp, a sax-- but never brings the track over the level of a whisper. Along with the jazzy, film-score style instrumental “Rainy Day” and percolating Esquivel-style lounge-funk of “XL-30” preceding it, “Pling!” moves Inspiration far away from Otis’ blues and R&B roots, aiming toward a space at the time only occupied by his imagination. It’s this angle that many indie fans in 2001 were drawn to-- the Luaka Bop reissue featured pull-quotes from Sean O’Hagan, the kitsch-obsessed mastermind of the high-minded 90s British ensemble High Llamas, and Stereolab founder Tim Gane. It’s also possible to imagine Columbia’s befuddled reaction upon hearing these tracks-- as great as they sound to music fans now as then, they must have signaled something closer to a break with reality, or perhaps one of those nettlesome “creative” types who release new material every 4-5 years. When Columbia dropped him from their roster, Otis retreated and regrouped, recording new tracks and sending them to labels, who uniformly showed no interest--to their detriment. As a compilation, Wings of Love plays like a bonafide album-- it’s got an “intro” and everything-- and a good one, at that.If it doesn’t quite show the knack for experimentation and variety hinted at via Inspiration, Wings is a quietly amazing document of Otis’ doggged determination over the quarter century between leaving the business and the first Inspiration reissue. It’s a fair bet that Otis has never come into contact with the retromaniacal AM Gold-worshipping weirdos who’ve been lingering around the L.A. fringes for the better part of a decade now, but delightfully lo-fi, echo-laden Wings tracks like “Special”, “Tryin’ To Get Close To You”, and the Prince-styled “If You’d Be Mine” bear a striking (if entirely coincidental) resemblance to Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel. It’s easy to parallel Otis dreaming of these demos winding up on Top 40 radio during the actual 1980s, with the recent chillwave contingent dreaming similar dreams from a fully nostalgic register. Elsewhere on the album, there are nods backward to Drifters-style soul (“Walkin’ Down the Country”), gaudy synth monsters (“Give Me A Chance”), and even a couple cuts closing the album that nod back to Otis’ blues-rock roots. Yes, Wings is packaged as an addendum to a reissue, but it’s no simple B-sides collection. If all this isn't convincing enough, perhaps Wings’ outlandish 11 minute title track, sequenced right in the middle of the album, will. At once, it’s a reminder that Otis had few peers as a shredder (at his peak, both Bowie and the Stones offered him sideman gigs), and the sort of wild, proggy imagination that would make Yes album-art designer Roger Dean blush. It starts with seashore sound effects-- waves crashing, seagulls squawking-- and blossoms into the kind of earnestly majestic, new age prog-funk that might not be everyone’s bag, but which is impossible not to appreciate on its own merits, because it’s performed with such conviction. It only adds to the song's allure that it's been kept private for so long. Such is the wholly unique career trajectory of Shuggie Otis, who is now touring for the first time in 40 years. The Child Prodigy, the Next Big Thing, the Cultishly Admired LA Recluse. Johnny Alexander Veliotes, Jr., the man who vanished, but never stopped.

2013-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00

2013-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

April 16, 2013

01a41606-24af-400b-b7a1-b69b6f9ed473

Eric Harvey

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

Mariah Carey, the cultural attaché of Christmas, offers a reissue of her 1994 album, which sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the innocuous filters of mid-’90s adult pop.

Mariah Carey, the cultural attaché of Christmas, offers a reissue of her 1994 album, which sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the innocuous filters of mid-’90s adult pop.

Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas: Deluxe Anniversary Edition

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mariah-carey-merry-christmas-deluxe-anniversary-edition/

Merry Christmas: Deluxe Anniversary Edition

Living by the adage, “Go where you’re celebrated, not tolerated,” Mariah Carey has established a veritable empire around Christmastime. There are the annual holiday concerts, the yuletide-themed children’s book, the animated movie featuring her CGI likeness, the Hallmark movie she directed, and enough merch to fill a sleigh. The day after Halloween this year, she posted a video on Instagram to usher in the commencement of the Christmas season. There’s something archetypical about her performed love of Christmas. Like horse girls, Carey’s identity has absorbed her interest. She is the epitomized Christmas girl. And to think it all nearly didn’t happen. Carey said she initially balked when her future ex-husband/label boss Tommy Mottola presented her the idea of recording the Christmas album on which she’d eventually build her merry brand. Just a few years into her major-label career, it was too early, she thought, for such a legacy-artist flex. Once convinced, she threw herself into the process. In a method approach to recording, she kept a tree up for the majority of 1994 as she rifled through the Christmas canon, devising new arrangements for old classics, mashing-up secular with spiritual (a pop-house riff on “Joy to the World” was given a Three Dog Night injection), and writing three new songs alongside her longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff. The result, 1994’s Merry Christmas, sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the consciously innocuous filters of mid-’90s adult pop. Though constructed with a utilitarian hand to stand the test of time across demographics, Carey said the album gave her opportunity to dabble in areas her other albums hadn’t; namely, gospel and overt retroism. At the time, her label saw her as a franchise and clipped her wings leading up to 1997’s Butterfly. That a Christmas album was Carey’s laboratory for experimentation says everything about the intensity of her struggle for creative control early in her career. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Merry Christmas, Carey has released a two-disc Deluxe Anniversary Edition. The original album returns untouched, anchored by her perennial smash “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which is, at this point, a total cultural anomaly, a phenomenon unto itself, a singular sensation, if you will. It might be the happiest song about heartache. The joy of this indefatigable song casts Christmas both as an exacerbation of preexisting melancholy and a salve—Carey’s yearning, belting narrator is fine by virtue of her yuletide surroundings. Snow makes a fine cushion. The song is a multivalent blur of sensibilities, yet simple enough for a child to understand, like Disney at its most optimal. Multiple in-depth dissections of its inherent appeal have yet to explain it adequately or sap it of its magic. It is the apotheosis of the nearly diabolical populist ambitions of Carey’s early work. No mere chestnut of recurrent radio, it re-becomes a smash hit year after year, as it’s propelled into the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 alongside contemporary songs. (Last year, it hit a new peak: No. 3.) It become the definitive Wall of Sound carol—Carey cited the legendary producer Phil Spector’s influence in the initial press cycle for Merry Christmas (she generally referenced the Ronettes), though her riff is decidedly cleaner with a dynamic range that gives its parts even more room as they bounce off the song’s walls. Carey’s version must be just what the style sounds like to recent generations of listeners. An oft-cited study claims that when you remember something repeatedly, you don’t actually remember the event, per se, but your last memory of it. Here’s the musical equivalent, a flagrant copy that redefined the aesthetic of its source material. Further establishing this dominion are covers of Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.” And then there were the nonsecular songs. Unlike her predecessor Whitney Houston, Carey did not come up through singing in the black church, but her debt to its musical traditions had never been more explicit than on Merry Christmas. For the gospel-tinged songs like “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” and “Jesus Oh What a Wonderful Child,” Carey showed up touting her signature melismatic flair and emotional acrobatics. Sure, she’d hit a sharp note so gleaming as to be objectively holy and she might really take it to church in a one-off praise break, but vocally, Merry Christmas was Carey doing her thing. The major musical shift occurred in subject matter and backdrop—organs, bouncy pianos, and choirs (Carey’s handful of backup singers was itself a small choir that had the power of a midsize one). Like the greatest snapshot Sears ever produced, the album is a holiday portrait of Carey’s voice in its prime. She took words that had one syllable and gave them five. She hit the ground enraptured, attacking first verses with gusto, and then swung back around, aiming at the melody like she was attempting to cut off its head at an angle. She made it look easy, but at the same time, hard. The manner in which her pipes seized around a note, as if to cradle it as delicately as possible, telegraphed effort. Even back then, Carey was singing as if her career depended on each and every phrase coming out of her mouth. Her aptitude and technique may have shifted over the years, but that fraught delivery stayed consistent, disc two of the Deluxe Anniversary Edition contests. Spread across the bonus disc are yuletide odds and ends Carey has recorded since the original release of Merry Christmas. Like a stocking filled by an overenthusiastic parent, it’s teeming with stuff you don’t really need. There’s a mini-concert Carey performed at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine a few weeks after the release of Merry Christmas, back when she aimed to recreate verbatim live the vocals on her albums. On top of a muddy sound mix, there’s simply not enough variation to make the live cuts essential. Most of the remixes are merely novel with the exception of David Morales’ transcendent “Celebration Mix” of “Joy to the World,” released the same year as Merry Christmas. It’s a titanic slice of stomping gospel house somewhere between a track and a song that finds early Carey at her loosest. It’s a true gift, this one. The only strictly new thing here is the “Sugar Plum Fairy Introlude,” 45 eccentric seconds in which Carey vocalizes along to “The Nutcracker Suite” selection mostly using her whistle register. It sounds like Christmas getting kicked in the shins. There are a handful of post-Merry Christmas originals, too—three songs from her 2010 follow-up Merry Christmas II You and some soundtrack cuts. Their inclusion telegraphs some attempt to collect all of the Christmas songs Carey wrote in one place, but there are things missing, like another Merry Christmas II You cut (“One Child”) as well as “Where Are You Christmas,” which Faith Hill recorded for the 2000 live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The affectation of completism is, in fact, half-assed. Still, taken as a (near) whole, the thesis spread out over these 29 tracks is simple: Mariah Carey loves Christmas very much indeed. One repeating theme in her original compositions is the suggestion that Christmas is a group project largely defined by a collective attitude. Christmastime is in the air again, everyone is singing, the whole world is rejoicing, we gon’ help the world become a better place, every year forever and ever, amen. While Carey’s faith is explicit in much of her music, she remains fixated on the granular, secular aspects of Christmas: twinkling lights, mistletoe, the exchange of gifts. Given the amount of space these totems occupy in our world (arguably more than the religious ones), it’s not illogical that an icon would rise up as a sort of cultural attaché, rounding out a holiday trinity. Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, and Mariah Carey: Father Christmas, the son of God, and the merry spirit.

2019-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Sony Legacy

November 29, 2019

01aa3795-5c36-4ff0-be7b-fe820b75dcb6

Rich Juzwiak

https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/

Most musicians have their own toy boxes, the places they hide away all the obsessions and experiments that don't ...

Most musicians have their own toy boxes, the places they hide away all the obsessions and experiments that don't ...

Gorillaz: Demon Days

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3526-demon-days/

Demon Days

Most musicians have their own toy boxes, the places they hide away all the obsessions and experiments that don't fit comfortably under the umbrella of their main projects. Compared to other artists', Damon Albarn's playroom chest must be filled to bursting: the cultural drawer cluttered with horror films, anime, and rock'n'roll stereotypes; the musical drawer crammed full of dub, hip-hop, dancehall, and afropop. In fact, Albarn seems to have so many creative distractions tempting his muse, he can't even keep them from occasionally invading the conservative environs of his day job-- each Blur album manages to squeeze in at least one ill-fitting endeavor like Think Tank's "Crazy Beat". Fortunately, Gorillaz provides Albarn an outlet to vent his taste for sci-fi kitsch, and satiate his urge to break free from rock with guitars-- and it's a surprisingly successful outlet, at that. (Did anyone really expect an edgy street-cred Banana Splits to be worth discussing four years into its discography?) Rather than falling flat, Gorillaz have strangely become a therapeutic and clever way for Albarn to subvert the usual egolympics associated with a solo project. Coyly hiding behind Jamie Hewlett's thick-inked pop caricatures and a phalanx of guest stars, Gorillaz allows Albarn to practice self-indulgence under heavy personality camouflage-- though never so heavy that there's any question as to who's really pulling the strings. Like the Gorillaz's self-titled debut, Demon Days goes the way of most auteur projects, its oversize idea load making for a trip equal parts peak and valley. But also like the debut, Demon Days is better than it has any right to be, featuring singles stronger than anything released under the Blur banner since, you know, that "Woo-hoo" song. For a project that could easily have been little more than Damon Albarn Remakes "Ghost Town" 15 Times (With More Rapping & Cartoons), this is a follow-up that proves Gorillaz, weirdly, has legs-- not that the four-year break hurt any. In order to keep things fresh, however, Albarn made a few exchanges at the hip-hop Wal-Mart, trading in his sputtering old Dan the Automator model for Danger "as seen on CNN!" Mouse, and swapping out Del tha Funkee Homosapien for MF Doom and... Dennis Hopper. These new collaborators add more to the proceedings than just increasing the comic-dork factor by about 10, particularly Danger Mouse, whose colorfully dense production helps buoy the occasionally slight genre sketches scripted by Albarn and his fleet of retro keyboards. For most of the album, Danger Mouse & Albarn make like they're Dario Argento & Goblin, to the point that this Fangoria neophyte can't tell the difference between the sampled zombie-flick scores and the facsimile ones (I'm pretty sure "Last Living Souls" is the former). Obviously, this agenda cues me to resort to adjectives like "foreboding," "ominous," and "sinister," but Albarn can't help making his haunted house a discotheque. As with the standouts from the debut album, the best tracks here strike a unique balance between slacker detachment and dance-floor bounce: "Feel Good Inc." swerves through an anxious bassline to a choice De La Soul drive-by, while "DARE" defibrillates Shaun Ryder to shout along while Albarn channels Prince's synths and falsettos. Of course, there are a few blown-up test tubes amid the successful experiments, too: undercooked genre dalliances (the robo-punk "White Light"), a few dull, unfortunately frontloaded Xanax lopes ("Kids With Guns", "O Green World"), and the truly bizarre (Hopper's once-is-enough spoken word on "Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head"). Albarn also occasionally gets too distracted trying on the outfits of other bands, like on Beach Boys replicant "Don't Get Lost in Heaven", and fires his one radio dud with his second shrine to Clint Eastwood, a collaboration with Booty Brown and a children's choir called "Dirty Harry". On the album-closing title track, the appearance of a choir genuinely works, accomplishing the amazing task of being the second time (after "Tender") that Albarn has gotten away with effectively employing that ultimate lazy rock add-on. In fact, if the Gorillaz concept achieves anything beyond keeping Hewlett employed and producing some snazzy videos and websites, it's proving that Albarn can successfully wield the sonic toys he's mostly kept partitioned apart from his flesh band. Though the results of his exuberant mixing and matching are uneven at times, Albarn's obsessions fit together just often enough to again make Gorillaz more than mere Adult Swim novelty.

2005-05-22T02:01:40.000-04:00

2005-05-22T02:01:40.000-04:00

Electronic / Rock

Virgin

May 22, 2005

01aabcd8-6642-4735-b393-85ee36471dfb

Rob Mitchum

https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/

This film's soundtrack features contributions from Johnny Jewel projects including Chromatics and a score by Steven Soderbergh's go-to composer Cliff Martinez. All told, it has as much neon camp and sex as the film itself.

This film's soundtrack features contributions from Johnny Jewel projects including Chromatics and a score by Steven Soderbergh's go-to composer Cliff Martinez. All told, it has as much neon camp and sex as the film itself.

Various Artists: Drive OST

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15908-various-artists-drive/

Drive OST

A few weeks ago, the film Drive opened to wide release. Nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, it's a pulpy story about a stoic wheelman (Ryan Gosling) who digs himself even deeper into the Los Angeles criminal underworld on behalf of a woman and her son. Drive is a genre film, heavy on style and short on dialog, complete with finger-shuttering spurts of violence and, despite being set in the present, a pointed focus on retro-cool and classic car films. The Monday morning after Drive's opening weekend, the soundtrack-- anchored by a few unknown but choice 1980s-indebted synth-pop songs and a score by Cliff Martinez (Steven Soderbergh's go-to guy)-- went to number four on the iTunes music charts, its success credited to good word-of-mouth thanks to Twitter. If you've seen the film, it makes sense: The Drive soundtrack pops with just as much neon camp and sex as the lipstick-scrawled opening credits. Effective and memorable soundtracks need to either introduce you to new music that works on its own or transport you into the world of the film. Drive manages to do both, mostly thanks to the five songs that come early in the album, preceding Martinez's score. Director Nicolas Winding Refn (known for ambitious indies Bronson and Valhalla Rising) pre-selected these tunes before the score was written. Most of them catalog key moments in the film and are-- for the sake of getting this thing on folks' radars-- the real draw. These songs follow such a similar format, you could almost mistake them for the work of a single band. All have hyper-literal lyrics, dry-pulsing beats, and subdued, comely female vocals. Sounding like a more sinister second coming of the Human League is opener "Nightcall" from French electronic artist Kavinsky, featuring vocals from CSS's Lovefoxxx. "I want to drive you through the night down the hills/ I will tell you something you don't want to hear," purrs an almost demoniacally mechanized voice, and it's hard not to imagine yourself double-clutching it down Mulholland. Lovefoxxx's tender counter, "There's something inside you, it's hard to explain," feels like a perfect encapsulation of the film's juxtaposing moments of benevolence and brutality. Glass Candy's Johnny Jewel gets his hands on two tracks here, with his Desire and Chromatics projects, respectively. However, Jewel could've played a larger part: In a recent interview with Box Office Magazine, he revealed being approached by both Refn and Gosling to score the film (Glass Candy's "Digital Versicolor" plays a big part in Bronson), but wires were crossed, and, despite having finished "the whole score," conflicting interests left Martinez with the job. It's hard not to speculate what Jewel's music could have brought to the film but Martinez's muted yet deft approach makes it hard to imagine anyone else smearing such wonderfully subtle hues across the screen. On the album's second half, Martinez's score works like a patient, engaging ambient record with a dramatic arc that works independently of the film. Keyboards plink back and forth like turn signals and human heartbeats, with atmospheres that hang in the air like ghosted taillight streaks. As things get grittier onscreen, so does the music, with industrial grindings and craggy booms slowly working their way into the mix. It's long-- 50 minutes to be exact-- and obviously not the selling point, but where other soundtracks weave bits of score around the proper songs, Martinez's vision, while challenging, smartly gets its fair shake being presented as a whole. By far the most notable thing about the Drive soundtrack is "A Real Hero", a collaboration between French producer College and Toronto duo Electric Youth, both of whose phones are no doubt ringing off the hook. Working as a theme and mantra for Gosling's Driver, it's a shimmering, deeply romantic track that, thanks to its repeated use in the film, sticks in your head. "Try getting behind the wheel without hearing that 'Real Hero' song," a friend mentioned to me after I saw the film. Luckily, I had a four-hour slog ahead of me the next day, and while a clogged New Jersey Turnpike at noon is about as far away from a driving experience as the blinking sprawl of Los Angeles at 3 a.m., I couldn't help but feel the stitching from a phantom, scorpion-emblazoned satin jacket itching at my back.

2011-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00

2011-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00

Lakeshore

October 11, 2011

01afce93-6988-4f16-a68b-3277494b2487

Zach Kelly

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

If there’s anything The Pinkprint makes clear over its sprawling 22 tracks (six of which appear only on deluxe editions), it’s that Nicki Minaj is exhausted. The 2014 singles underwhelm, even in proper context, but the real gems are in the bonus tracks.

If there’s anything The Pinkprint makes clear over its sprawling 22 tracks (six of which appear only on deluxe editions), it’s that Nicki Minaj is exhausted. The 2014 singles underwhelm, even in proper context, but the real gems are in the bonus tracks.

Nicki Minaj: The Pinkprint

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20058-the-pinkprint/

The Pinkprint

Nicki Minaj is fed up. It’s 2010, six weeks before the release of her debut album, Pink Friday. She’s working on the album’s finishing touches, though it’s just gone up for presale on Amazon, and people are blowing up her phone, asking for favors. She’s pissed, but she composes herself for the camera crew—they’re in the studio shooting footage for a documentary MTV will premiere a few years later, called "My Time Now"—to explain. She’s wearing a goofy, cotton-candy beehive wig, but her tone is serious. "When you’re a girl, you have to be, like, everything. You have to be dope at what you do, but you have to be super sweet, and you have to be sexy, and you have to be this, and you have to be that, and you have to be nice—it’s like, I can’t be all those things at once!" She pauses for a single dramatic blink, and for a moment, she goes somewhere else: "I’m a human beiiiinnnnngggggg!" She draws the word out for three full seconds, the same way she would a year later in her song-stealing verse on Big Sean’s "Dance (A$$)" ("In the islands of Waikikiiiiiiiiii…"). It’s sort of a joke—her inflection is completely alien, or like a robot malfunctioning—but nobody laughs, and she quickly apologizes for ranting and goes back to fixing her eyeliner. Until this year, that side of Nicki didn’t get out much, at least on record. Over the course of three official mixtapes, two studio albums (plus one Re-Up), and countless features, we’ve been acquainted with Nicki Lewinsky, Roman Zolanski, the Female Weezy, the Harajuku Barbie, and most of all, with Nicki Minaj LLC ("I’m a brand, bitch! I’m a brand!"). But we know surprisingly little about Onika Maraj, the 11th-highest paid rapper in America according to this year’s Forbes list, whose first and second platinum-selling albums were critically panned for appealing more to teenage girls than middle-aged guardians of Hip-Hop Culture. Onstage at 2012’s Summer Jam, Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg openly trashed Minaj, the headlining act: "I know there’s some chicks here waiting to sing 'Starships' later: I’m not talking to y’all right now, fuck that bullshit. I’m here to talk about real hip-hop shit." Minaj dipped out; today, "Nicki Minaj controversy" is one of four sub-categories of the "Career" section of Rosenberg’s Wikipedia page. Minaj entered 2014 with an agenda. She toned down the technicolor costumes and wigs, making headlines when she debuted her natural hair at the premiere for The Other Woman, her first film role. She spent the winter unleashing a string of remixes hard enough to re-invigorate the "Best Rapper Alive" claims sparked years ago by her "Monster" verse and subsequently abandoned by rap fans whose delicate sensibilities were no match for glossy RedOne beats and Bud Light plugs. She railed against "non-mogul ass niggas" on the snarling misandry anthem "Lookin Ass", toting twin machine guns in the video; she recruited Lil Herb, Chicago drill’s rookie of the year, for gritty loosie "Chi-Raq", where she promised to "smack bitches, no Smack Cam, closed fists, no backhands." Longtime fans, and those freshly back on the bandwagon, postulated that third album The Pinkprint would be a return to "Mixtape Nicki," the one from Southside Jamaica, Queens, who had more substantial concerns than pink wigs and global entrepreneurship. Of course, then came "Pills N Potions", a simpering Dr. Luke piano ballad, and "Anaconda", by Minaj’s own admission a novelty song and perhaps her most explicitly girl-oriented single to date. There was that confusing anecdote tucked into her BET Awards acceptance speech that almost felt like a cry for help: "The other day, literally I didn’t tell anyone this, I really thought I was about to die. Like I was saying my prayers to die. And I didn’t even wanna call the ambulance because I thought, well if I call the ambulance, it’s gonna be on TMZ." Months later, TMZ alleged that Minaj had smashed the windows of maybe-fiancé Safaree Samuels’ Benz; their exceedingly private 14-year relationship seemed to be over. Whether her jarring 2014 trajectory was an elaborate scheme to dangle a "real hip-hop" carrot in front of naysayers only to yank it away, or a plan gone awry as her personal life imploded, The Pinkprint defies expectations from both poles of her fanbase. It’s not a return to Mixtape Nicki, or a third round of Nicki The Brand’s world-conquering dance-pop. It’s an album by Onika Maraj. And it’s a serious album, in the sense that it asks to be taken seriously. If that seems audacious, consider that most rappers don’t have to ask. If there’s anything The Pinkprint makes clear over its sprawling 22 tracks (six of which appear only on deluxe editions), it’s that Nicki Minaj is exhausted. On intro "All Things Go", her delivery is pointedly plain as she reflects on her cousin Nicholas Telemaque’s 2011 murder, for which she blames herself, and references what may have been an abortion 16 years ago. "I Lied" grasps despondently at the loose ends of her unraveled relationship over Mike WiLL Made-It’s most haunting production of 2014. Later, Minaj convincingly paints her ex as an opportunistic scrub: "You can never make eye contact, everything you got was based off of my contact," she snaps on "Bed of Lies". The closest thing to the carefree rave of Roman Reloaded here is "The Night Is Still Young", but even there she’s consumed with creeping nostalgia for a party that has yet to end. It’s impossible to ignore her frequent mentions of pill-popping. "I popped a perc and I said thonk youuuu!" she crows on "Want Some More"; it’s the most fucked up Minaj has sounded on wax, and she used to rap from the perspective of the lunatic child that lived in her brain. As with Drake and masculinity, Minaj’s music has long centered around the performance of femininity. On her first two albums, that performance centered around femininity as a spectacle: the elaborate costumes, the affinity for lurid Barbie pink, the cartoonishly exaggerated "SIGH" on "Super Bass". For an artist repeatedly defined by her gender in an art form historically biased against it, the preoccupation made sense. But on The Pinkprint, Minaj addresses a different performance: that of the "strong woman," the self-sufficient bad bitch role model who works twice as hard as her male peers and looks good doing it (in other words, the performance of the "only rap bitch on the Forbes list"). This, Minaj declares, is what the weight of your expectations has wrought, as she emerges from underneath them for the first time, as a heartbroken 32-year old who has sacrificed having a family to become the best rapper alive. Which raises the eternal question: is she, though? Minaj’s rapping on The Pinkprint is hardly a revival of her Smack DVD days, but the long-upheld fallacy of Mixtape Nicki as the gold standard against which her raps must be measured was due to be put to bed anyway. Under scrutiny, the habit of neatly dividing Minaj’s music into "rap" or "pop" doesn’t hold up. Few songs from her mixtape era can hold a torch to her bars on Re-Up bonus track "The Boys", the verbal acrobatics on "Starships" B-side "Stupid Hoe", or the upper-handed smirk of her "Boss Ass Bitch (Remix)". Though they might be delivered over sparkly pop synths, her rap skills have only sharpened over the last five years, and on The Pinkprint, they change form constantly. You want punchline-oriented Mixtape Nicki? She’s right there on "The Crying Game": "Blood dripping out your arm, on my Asian rugs/ We was just planning a wedding, Caucasian doves" cribs a flow straight from 2009. More impressive is "Feeling Myself", a show-stopping Beyoncé duet that reads as a divine premonition of Bey’s eventual Gangsta Grillz installment. "Bitches ain’t got punchlines or flow; I have both, and an empire also," Nicki repeats slowly and emphatically, as though she’s speaking to an idiot; they’re lines from Re-Up bonus track "Up In Flames", but maybe you didn’t hear her the first time. Then there’s "Four Door Aventador", an uncanny Biggie impression slipped in between twisted Atlanta homage "Want Some More" and R&B floater "Favorite", with what feels like a knowing wink towards Rosenberg’s legion of "serious hip-hop" proponents. Rosenberg atoned for his remarks on air when Minaj returned to Hot 97 last year, but his apology (the "sorry if you were offended" type, peppered with qualifiers like "underground" and "mainstream") only amplified the source of the problem. Of course he only came at Minaj because, as a believer in her potential, he expected more from her. "I was a women’s studies minor in college," he stressed. "I’m the antithesis of that dude!" His language will sound familiar to any woman who has been patronizingly told, "I’m not sure if you have the capacity to understand what you’re doing the same way I do" (presumably, then, to every woman on earth). On The Pinkprint, Minaj inches closer toward her goal of not just destroying the rap/pop binary, but smashing sexist challenges of her agency along with it, deading any lingering questions as to whether the most objectively successful female rapper of all time truly understands where her strengths lie. "THIS is The Pinkprint," she declares on "All Things Go", and it’s loaded beyond a simple introduction a la "This Is the Carter". It’s an outright rejection of any authority besides her own: "No, THIS is what my music sounds like." For an artist repeatedly accused of pandering to the unrefined palates of teenyboppers, The Pinkprint’s production and feature roster is surprisingly sophisticated, if a bit scattershot. The crew of collaborators ranges from trap innovator Zaytoven to casual diva Jessie Ware to house producer Maya Jane Coles to someone credited simply as "The Mad Violinist." Though she hasn’t always worn it on her sleeve, Minaj has always had an acute understanding of what’s "cool" in rap and beyond, and it’s finally started to click. She slips sly contemporary references into The Pinkprint as little gifts for those paying attention: a quick nod, on "Feeling Myself", to O.T. Genasis’ viral hit "CoCo", or the built-in inside joke of "Want Some More", its title a riff on Metro Boomin’s producer tag. Still, The Pinkprint’s singles underwhelm, even in proper context. "Pills N Potions" is cute but hollow, its sentimentality trumped by the album’s deeply personal opening triptych. "Anaconda" makes more sense recontextualized as post-breakup stress release, but that doesn’t make it much more listenable. "Only" remains vile, a jizz-fest masquerading as an unfunny in-joke over a photocopy of a photocopy of a trap beat. But they’re redeemed by the bonus tracks—a thrilling, confounding six-song set that elevates The Pinkprint from an occasionally transcendent, if unbalanced, break-up album to something far more intriguing. On "Shanghai", Minaj barks red-blooded bars, the kind "real heads" froth over, on a beat that could’ve been an outtake from Fatima Al Qadiri’s Asiatisch. Sequenced differently, "Win Again" may have been the album’s triumphant centerpiece, simultaneously a mission statement, victory lap, and warning shot (and there should be no confusion as to whom Minaj is inferring with "Don’t write they raps and plus they flow shitty"). Stream-of-consciousness Auto-Tune freak-out "Mona Lisa" might be Minaj’s most bizarre album cut to date, gurgling "I’ll fuck around and shoot youuuu" through a Detail-produced benzodiazepine haze. "Truffle Butter" with Drake and Lil Wayne is such a lay-up of a radio hit, instantly 100 times more likeable than "Only", that it’s hard to understand its bonus track placement as anything other than mischievous trolling—Minaj giggling to herself as she tosses off precisely what her critics craved as little more than an afterthought. It’s the ultimate statement as to whether anyone but Minaj herself understands what’s best for her career. When many thought they’d had her pegged—as a New York battle-rapper, a predictable pop diva, a brand—The Pinkprint presents Minaj in her most unexpected role yet: a human being.

2014-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Cash Money / Republic / Young Money Entertainment

December 16, 2014

01b23402-e2b3-4475-a644-00e62051b193

Meaghan Garvey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/

After an unpredictable decade, the rock vet starts off a new one with a near-solo record helmed by famed producer Daniel Lanois.

After an unpredictable decade, the rock vet starts off a new one with a near-solo record helmed by famed producer Daniel Lanois.

Neil Young: Le Noise

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14684-le-noise/

Le Noise

Even by his own unpredictable standards, Neil Young's had a pretty contradictory decade. The confusingly titled Chrome Dreams II was one highlight, but some of its best tracks were decades-old. Last year's Fork in the Road was a lark, a neo-concept album about electric cars whose humor undersold Young's convictions. His angriest albums, Living With War and Greendale, were each instantly dated time capsules. His prettiest, Silver & Gold and Prairie Wind, were also pretty disposable, and there are likely about as many people who pull out Are You Passionate? as there are those waiting for a Road Rock Vol. 2. Yet all those subpar, uneven, or just plain odd releases matter, because they show the guy's still trying to bottle whatever it is that's been swimming in his soul for the better part of five full decades. Which brings us to Le Noise, Young's perhaps inevitable team-up with famed producer Daniel Lanois. The album features mostly just Young, electric guitar, and a battery of effects-- echoing, resonating, occasionally roaring, and raging. Not that Young necessarily needs all that. With his sneering warble and ragged but right guitar playing, he's always been his own best effect, but here Young and Lanois relish the happy accidents both producer and artist have always embraced, resisting the urge to sand off the jagged edges into the ambient ether. Of course, ambience is a big part of Le Noise's widescreen appeal, and Young's playing is as intriguingly exploratory as it is sometimes explosive, taking advantage of Lanois' trademark bag of tricks like a kid testing pedals in a guitar store. Still, given its familiar crunch and gait, it's hard to hear Le Noise without imagining the famously ramshackle backing of Crazy Horse anchoring the riffy murk of songs like "Walk With Me", "Sign of Love", "Angry World" or even the queasy, off-kilter "Rumblin'". Admittedly, the lyrical nod in the long unreleased drug epic "Hitchhiker" (which has been floating around in some form for years) to Trans' "Like an Inca" implies Young understands he's working in curveball mode. Regardless, there's never any denying the guy on the mound-- Le Noise is as closely linked to Young's primal instincts as anything in his catalog. Like many of Young's most formidable works, the specter of death hangs over the record, too, specifically his recently passed collaborators Larry "L.A." Johnson and especially long-serving guitarist Ben Keith. Considering the demons creeping deep through the disc, it's perhaps no surprise that the sole pair of acoustic tracks, "Love and War" and "Peaceful Valley Boulevard", are as heavy as the louder tracks, their relative clarity almost disconcertingly intimate compared to the surrounding racket. In fact, for all its hushed restraint, the eerie "Peaceful Valley Boulevard" is a real highlight, a paean to a doomed America that plays like a tragic lyrical descendent of "Pocahontas" and "Cortez the Killer". Young may be famous for his maelstrom guitar, but in this case the apocalypse sneaks up on us with a whisper, Young's voice steeped in decades of watching the world go to hell. "When will I learn how to heal?" he later implores in "Rumblin'", knowing full well that the damage has already been done.

2010-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

2010-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Reprise

October 1, 2010

01b34cae-3470-42af-a82f-4025ffc2892a

Joshua Klein

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

Inspired by the Ridley Scott crime epic, Jay-Z's quickly-made drug kingpin record isn't as conceptually tight as he'd have liked, but it rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place.

Inspired by the Ridley Scott crime epic, Jay-Z's quickly-made drug kingpin record isn't as conceptually tight as he'd have liked, but it rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place.

Jay-Z: American Gangster

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10879-american-gangster/

American Gangster

The story goes like this: After seeing an advance print of the Ridley Scott heroin-trade epic American Gangster, Jay-Z found himself inspired. The movie details the story of the Vietnam-era Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, and Jay saw so many parallels between Lucas's life and his own. Over the course of a few weeks, Jay recorded his own widescreen epic, a concept-album about the rise and fall of a gangster like Lucas, an imagined what-if trajectory for what might have happened to Jay if he'd never left the drug trade. It makes for a good story and a great marketing coup. By attaching himself to a big-budget crime epic, Jay guaranteed himself cross-media presence and positioned himself to regain some of the grimy credibility he'd lost with 2006's Kingdom Come, the would-be comeback that found Jay rapping about brands so expensive most of his audience had no idea what he was talking about. In working to create the impression that he'd sacrificed commerce for art, Jay recast himself as an artist rather than a CEO, a canny commercial move at a time when rappers like Kanye West are outselling CEOs like 50 Cent. As a piece of media-manipulation, American Gangster is dazzling. But as music? Well, as a concept-album, American Gangster is kind of a wash. Over the course of its first 13 tracks, the album loosely outlines the criminal rise and fall we've seen in so many movies: the desperation of youth, the excited early schemes, the slow hard-fought rise, the lavish celebration of that rise, the eventual joyless inertia involved in maintaining that success, the sudden and inevitable descent into a prison-cell anonymity worse than death. That story animates the album, but it doesn't dictate its movements. Throughout, Jay-Z breaks that narrative whenever he feels like it, taking care to force in all his standbys: The sneering aristocratic death-threats, the breezy uptempo party-songs, the (especially forced) for-the-ladies seduction-song. Jay actually corrupts the impact of his own moralistic rise-and-fall story by ending the album with a pair of bonus tracks, "Blue Magic" and "American Gangster", that trumpet Jay's own triumph over the vast impersonal forces that landed his protagonist in prison. On "Blue Magic", he even growls, "Can't you tell that I came from the dope game?" like it's a point of personal pride, immediately after he depicted an inevitable criminal downfall. On his wide-scope art-piece, Jay still can't put aside commercial success and relentless self-aggrandizement, even if those twin impulses fuck up his concept. So American Gangster doesn't quite work as a concept album, but it's difficult to imagine the record would be better if that concept had been fully realized and fleshed-out. Jay's evident obsession with the post-Don Imus furor over nihilistic rap lyrics has fuck-all to do with his gangster narrative, for instance, but Jay's willingness to break narrative and address that obsession leads to lines like this one, where he calls out recent rap foe Al Sharpton on "Say Hello": "Tell him I'll remove the curses/ If you tell me our schools gon' be perfect/ When Jena 6 don't exist / Tell him that's when I'll stop saying 'bitch,' bitch!" The album's story gives it enough structure to feel huge and all-encompassing, but Jay floats in and out of it as fluidly as he switches between the first and second person. And so the drug-dealer story serves an important purpose: It rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place. On American Gangster, he's fallen back in love with language, making slick puns and jamming his lines with internal rhymes and vivid, detailed images without letting those devices detract from the emotional punch of his mini-narratives. "No Hook" has some of the most complicated rhyme-patterns he's tried in years, but it's all in service of a sad picture of the conflicts of anyone who makes a living doing dangerous, immoral things: "'Stay out of trouble,' mama said as mama sighs/ Her fear her youngest son being victim of homicide/ But I gotta get you out of here, mama, or I'm [long pause] die [long pause] inside." (Nobody uses long breathless pauses like Jay-Z; when he's at his best, as he is here, those silences can say as much as his words.) On "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)", the buoyant and celebratory ode to financial success, Jay thanks every device and corrupt institution that made his rise possible: "The Nike shoebox for holding all this cash/ Boys in blue who put the greed before the badge." On "Blue Magic", his wordplay is so dense that it can take multiple listens to parse: "Blame Reagan for making me to a monster/ Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra/ I ran contraband that they sponsored." (Maybe I'm dumb, but it took me a while to realize that the second of those lines ends with the exact same four syllables as the next line's beginning.) On "Fallin'", the song about the dealer's comeuppance, Jay sounds like he's spent a lot of time thinking about the fate he avoided: "Come January, it gets cold/ When your letters come in slow and your commissary's low." And on "Ignorant Shit", a Black Album outtake revisited and revamped here, Jay positively relishes the contradictions of rap, a genre where every artist theatrically proclaims himself to be more real than everyone else: "Actually believe half of what you see/ None of what you hear, even if it's spit by me/ And with that being said, I will kill niggas dead." Musically, American Gangster is lush and spacious. The sampled voices of Al Green and Marvin Gaye float through the record like ghosts of Jay's past, sweetly offering encouragement like benevolent angels. Jay's handpicked lineup of producers keep his voice grounded in thick, organic globs of 1970s soul. Diddy and the Hitmen, the reunited production who gave old Bad Boy albums their flamboyant elegance, turn in five tracks on the album, and their work drips with ambition. On album-opener "Pray" they outfit Jay with churning strings, screaming guitars, cinematic sound-effects, and a histrionic gospel choir; the horns, windchimes, and rolling drums of "Sweet" are almost exhausting in their richness. But not all the production is that warm and languid. On "Success", Jay and guest Nas rant paranoically over No ID's disorienting storm of organ-wails and murky, off-kilter drums. On "Ignorant Shit", Just Blaze layers up a furious storm of tinny synths and guitars, giving Jay's shit-talk a trashy "Miami Vice" veneer. And "Hello Brooklyn 2.0", built from an old Beastie Boys track, is a stark corrective to all those florid harps and violins: all booming bass and skeletal handclaps, Jay sounding more at home than guest Lil Wayne. When Jay taped his episode of "VH1 Storytellers" in Brooklyn last month, he kept comparing tracks from the album to moments from The Godfather and Scarface. American Gangster isn't really about Jay's own memories, and it's certainly not about Frank Lucas. Instead, it's an album about Jay's mythic legacy, his place in a pantheon of larger-than-life outlaws. Problematically enough, it works because it reconnects Jay with the verbal and musical eloquence that allowed him to escape from an outlaw's life. If it took a big Hollywood movie and a half-baked concept to get him back to that, then thank God for big Hollywood movies and half-baked concepts.

2007-11-08T01:00:01.000-05:00

2007-11-08T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rap

Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella

November 8, 2007

01b4f142-653c-47b3-b107-11736ee2b3f0

Tom Breihan

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

The Louisville indie rock trio takes a gloomy, fantastical turn on its third album.

The Louisville indie rock trio takes a gloomy, fantastical turn on its third album.

Wombo: Fairy Rust

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wombo-fairy-rust/

Fairy Rust

To create Fairy Rust, Wombo transported themselves into the haze of a mystical forest. Inspired by the works of Washington Irving, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson, the Louisville indie rock trio dug through old morality tales for their folkloric wisdom. While their previous record, Blossomlooksdownuponus, had a happy-but-possessed childlike energy, this one searches for darker, more tormented subject matter, complemented by hypnotic music that seems suited for live performance in a cave. The album has a more exaggerated post-punk tint, foregrounding cyclical basslines and combative, dry drums. Each track sounds both organic and artificial, with traditional instruments filtered through eerie effects that make it sound like you’re listening through a cardboard roll. On opener “Snakey,” vocalist Sydney Chadwick’s typically satellite-high vocals sound overcast, lower in range and pushed back in the mix, making space for her mid-tempo arpeggiating bass. Her voice disappears for the haunted instrumental breaks that highlight Cameron Lowe’s detuned droning electric guitar and drummer Joel Taylor’s cowbell hits. Compared to the ASMR baby-talk of Blossomlooksdownuponus opener “Sweet Powder Sugar Sandy,” it’s a noticeable departure: Levity seems to have disapperated, leaving ardent gloom in its place. In some tracks, the references to mysticism are obvious and immediate: The title of “RVW” is short for “Rip Van Winkle,” while “Headstand” opens with the Greek myth of Athena being born from Zeus’ skull. In more subtle ways, the concept of a warped reality threads throughout the whole record. Imagery of a hidden town beneath a hill, a demon wading through a creek, and lopsided walls covered in shadows feel as though they exist on a Twilight Zone plane. Wombo have stated that lyrics always come “dead ass last” in their collaborative writing process, a fact that occasionally comes to mind. Between the more bracing imagery, they incorporate catch-all lines like “I am slipping through while grabbing for my memories,” and, “On a winding road you come to meet yourself again/Never growing old, you only gain experience.” On a record that draws from such vivid source material, these vague thoughts feel out of place. Even grittier spots, like the feedback-ridden electric guitar outro on 7/8-time standout “Below the House,” can seem choreographed. Compared to the band’s more experimental past work, only a few moments actually feel adventurous: the echoing vocal canon on “Regular Demon,” or some delightfully unexpected saxophone on “She Go.” Even the nod to atonality on “It Melted” is overshadowed by a repetitive bassline and drum pattern. Although their journeys lead to mostly familiar places, Wombo sounds right at home in these moments of dark escapism, and the mystical tales of Fairy Rust are short tours into the murky caverns of the mind.

2022-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Fire Talk

August 10, 2022

01b60ad3-4896-4b52-818f-c986f4ddc6fb

Jane Bua

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

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Eminem’s monumental album The Marshall Mathers LP.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Eminem’s monumental album The Marshall Mathers LP.

Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eminem-the-marshall-mathers-lp/

The Marshall Mathers LP

Eminem prowled down a long line of young men, each sporting close-cropped, bleached blonde hair, each dressed just like him. Floodlights lit up the empty avenue outside of Radio City Music Hall where the rapper marched into the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards with his army to perform “The Real Slim Shady,” the first single from The Marshall Mathers LP. Underneath the song’s wide umbrella of references, a fleet-footed MC took up residence in Dr. Dre’s gooey bass and ornamented harpsichord—J.S. Bach bouncing in a lowrider. Proto-memes and trending topics got thrown into a blender; they came out laced in elegant knots. This was the primordial oil slick from which Eminem emerged, the god particle that launched him to new levels of superstardom. ”The Real Slim Shady” wasn’t rap about what was happening on the streets of Brooklyn or Compton or Atlanta or even Detroit. It was rap about what was on television. Specifically, what was on television at that very moment. It was an echo-chamber of MTV-watchers, a real-time “Beavis and Butt-Head” for those who would be later be crowned millennials. As reality TV gained traction, Eminem’s dressing-down of celebrities endeared him to a generation who would soon find “drama” to be the coin of the entertainment realm. He knew it before many: People like the stuff they recognize. That’s pop music. This was 18 years ago, two or three epochs in music-industry time, back when “Total Request Live” held sway while boy bands and newly crowned pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera filled the airwaves. Long before I ever started thinking critically about music, I sat watching Eminem’s VMA performance from my rural Wisconsin couch, a 10th grader with no social media, no cell phone. I was Eminem’s audience, a teen from Middle America, one of millions. As he stormed the theater with about a hundred carbon copies of himself, countless sociopolitical minefields were being set up around me. I had no awareness of any of them. What I thought, instead, was: This guy is really fucking good at rapping. After the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem would shatter sales records with 1.7 million copies sold in the first week alone, 6.5 million in the first month, and eventually, over 35 million sold worldwide. It’s still the best-selling rap record of all time. He would cross over from rap to pop and rock radio, sell out arenas, win Grammys, rankle Lynne Cheney in front of the U.S. Congress, add a word to the dictionary, and incite protests from no small number of social justice groups. By virtue of his whiteness and talent in almost equal measure, Eminem would come to rule pop culture in America by becoming this century’s prototypical troll. Whatever he’s become since, there can be no question that Eminem was one of the greatest to ever do it. He blew a young Kendrick Lamar’s mind, teaching him things about narrative clarity that he wouldn’t learn elsewhere. He killed JAY-Z on his own track, thus spoke Nas. It was Dr. Dre—N.W.A., The Chronic, Aftermath Records, kingpin of West Coast rap-Dr. Dre—who got Eminem’s demo tape in the late ’90s and co-signed this twentysomething, lemon-faced, twiggy, vociferously self-proclaimed son of a bitch from the East side of Detroit born Marshall Bruce Mathers III. He was also, and remains, a homophobe, a misogynist, a confessed domestic abuser. He wrote later that, because of his critics, he went into what he called the “‘faggot’ zone” for this album “on purpose. Like, fuck you.” He defended this ugliness using the modern troll’s boilerplate: double down on the thing they want you to change until they can’t tell what you believe and what you don’t. To be a long-suffering listener of Eminem is to contend with this petulant fake-radical impulse, but it remains an impulse that defined the scope and tenor of The Marshall Mathers LP and became part and parcel to its success. Before “The Real Slim Shady” came out, Eminem was convinced he didn’t have another song in him that could attract as many new fans as his 1999 breakout single, “My Name Is.” The fear of being a one-hit wonder—a point hammered in a 1999 interview with a pretty-racist Howard Stern, widely regarded as the impetus for the line about “cocky caucasians” who thinks he’s some “wigger”—hung over his head. At a remove, the spacious “My Name Is” scans just barely as rap, something that could possibly have been lumped in with the era’s droll, white-guy rhymes from Nada Surf, Cake, the Butthole Surfers, and Beck. ”My Name Is” landed on “TRL” in January of 1999, tipping the scales just enough to give suburban teenagers their first taste of Eminem’s aesthetic: The lyrics were violent, full of one-liners and references (Usher, Nine Inch Nails, Spice Girls) that piqued pop listeners while having the air of danger and a beat by Dre that signified its home was on rap radio. The Beastie Boys debuted at No. 1 with Hello Nasty in 1998, but Eminem was the first solo white rapper whose name wasn’t a pun on vanilla or snow to achieve huge crossover mainstream success. Across his major label debut, The Slim Shady LP, Eminem established the framework of his mythology: He was born into poverty, raised without a father, shuttled between Missouri and the lower-middle-class black neighborhoods of Detroit, rootless, bullied to near-death. The album established his to-put-it-lightly Freudian relationship with his mother, his clear love for legends like Big Daddy Kane and Masta Ace and Nas, and his come-up battle-rapping at the Detroit hip-hop clubs. When the dust settled, his rapid ascent and sudden fame began to burrow into his writing, coloring his every want, thrumming behind the text. “The Real Slim Shady” was one of the last songs written for the record. All through 1999, Eminem had been scribbling lyrics—not actual lines, just two or three words, little scraps of meter and verse unarrayed on a page—while on a world tour supporting his debut. Verses began to blacken notebooks after had found inspiration in the deregulated drug culture of Amsterdam, so much so that he almost named this album after the city. Meanwhile, over in the States, Dr. Dre and several other producers, including the Funky Bass Team and the 45 King, were assembling the beats for what would become the bulk of The Marshall Mathers LP. In early 2000, when Eminem submitted the project to Interscope label boss Jimmy Iovine, he was unsatisfied. It was macabre, morose, reflexive, and unflinchingly personal. It also didn’t have a hit. The album’s second single, “The Way I Am,” was a direct response to the boardroom ultimatum with Iovine. Eminem got the three-note piano rhythm in his head on the plane ride after leaving Interscope’s office in California, but the rhyme scheme that he wanted to do wouldn’t fit with any other beat he had in the bank. So Eminem made his own backing track, ratcheting and mechanical, giving him his very first production credit. Yoked to this short-short-long cadence, Eminem shadowboxed his critics, his fans, his label, anyone who, real or not, got in his way: I’m not gonna be able to top on “My Name Is” And pigeon-holed into some poppy sensation That got me rotation at rock’n’roll stations The virtuosity of “The Way I Am” gained Eminem access to an audience that believed that the better you were at your instrument, the better music you made. That virtuosity made his skill logical, diagrammable, even provable: just look at his enjambment, his multisyllabic rhyme schemes, his never-before-done cadence. It was less about the feel or joy so ingrained in the black music that inspired it, and more about the rap qua rap that awed those white teenagers (there are thousands of videos on YouTube of fans attempting Eminem’s raps, in spiritual concert with the thousands of videos of people trying to play Eddie Van Halen guitar solos). The goal of rap, for Eminem, is to overwhelm. The Marshall Mathers LP floods the room with “South Park” and grisly kidnappings, Ricky Martin and ecstasy, the assassination of Gianni Versace and the impregnation of Jennifer Lopez. One minute you’re dealing with hypocritical gun legislation, the next you’re subject to an Insane Clown Posse diss track; as soon as you consider Bill Clinton’s abuse of power, Eminem is recasting the shooters of the Columbine High School massacre as the real victims. It is data overload, that sharp inhale and sigh of never getting a word in edgewise. For 70 minutes, you are tethered to a twirling Mathers, eye to eye, a dizzying and intimate manipulation by pathos and abuse by words. Sometimes it really is just a litany: “Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts,” or, “Fuck, shit, ass, bitch, cunt, shooby-de-doo-wop, skibbedy-be-bop.” The album’s centrifugal force is thrilling and it is to Eminem’s great credit that he doesn’t once let go of his grasp. American culture allowed Eminem to freely negate any kind of identity he wanted to, as was his inherent privilege. But, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in his 2003 essay “White Noise,” it didn’t matter to Eminem. “Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged,” Als wrote. It’s interesting, though, that Eminem never negated his masculinity or heterosexuality, two identities that were and, more or less, remain intrinsic to the success of male rappers. His privilege meant that he could shed his racial signifiers and become a ghost, a psychopath, a loving father, a bigot, a clown. So why do fans believe any of this? Why, when they listened to Eminem rip his vocal cords open and disconnect from reality and mimic slitting the throat of his wife while he screams at her to “bleed, bitch bleed” do they take him so seriously? Part of it has to do with that virtuosity. If contemporaries like OutKast and Ghostface grew their albums from the soil, Eminem grew his from the salted earth. He’s grounded but acidic, you see the ink of his words, the indent they make on the page, the ridges formed around the letters by the force of his pen. The delight when he finds a little turn of phrase like “ducked the fuck way down,” or, “I guess I must just blew up quick” shoots out dopamine. It would be one thing if Eminem simply loved language, but more than that, he loves the tradition of rapping, this guy whose passion was donated to him by hip-hop at an early age, a vocation that rescued him from the status quo of poverty, that kept him from becoming among the millions just like someone else. At his best, he is like watching a gymnast spin on the parallel bars in slow motion: I’m blind from smokin’ ’em, with my windows tinted With nine limos rented, doin’ lines of coke in ’em With a bunch of guys hoppin’ out, all high and indo-scented Part of it, too, was the fantasy he offered. Along with his ’00 nu-metal tourmates Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, Eminem’s music became synonymous with a kind of ball-chain necklace, mad-at-the-world angst, channeling the latent rage leftover from rap rock’s heyday. Here was a guy who put to carefully chosen words the feeling of being broke, at the end of your rope, jealous and backed up into a corner. Those who threw up their arms and screamed “You don’t want to fuck with me” along with him could feel a little bit of anger exiting their bodies, and the mental pressure dropping by a few millibars. But the anger and trauma he conjured from his childhood of abuse and bullying felt uncomfortably real in all his performances. On The Marshall Mathers LP, he suits the action to the word and the word to the action. He picks the right tone for the right mood, the horrorcore of “Remember Me?,” the beleaguered artist on “The Way I Am,” the impish malevolence of “Criminal,” or the tortured, regretful, loving, deranged, murderous everything-all-at-once feeling of “Kim.” We don’t really believe it, but we believe Eminem really believes it. Art bends the world in ways we can’t always see. This album is categorically music for kids, and it rests on the shelf as a time capsule from the last big cultural flashpoint of the 20th century. Heard now, the album is still a considerable piece of music, but it’s also full of this hate. And the targets of that hate—women, the LGBTQ community—are the same people that those in power seek to marginalize. To say otherwise is to rob great art of its power. To say that Eminem’s clearly homophobic lyrics should be read as satire is to argue in bad faith that the impact art has on the world, the way it shapes the life of those who experience it, can be controlled and mitigated. Because hate emerges under the guise of art, it doesn’t erase the profound hurt it brings to a population that may be out of your own purview. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut’s words are consigned to the long epilogue of The Marshall Mathers LP, one that began at the 2001 Grammys. The album won Best Rap Album honors but lost Album of the Year to Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature, a fine record made by two aging private-school-educated jazzbo hipsters who sang about incest and pedophiliac threesomes. The toast of the evening was to be Eminem’s performance with Elton John. As Mathers saw it, this was somehow an olive branch to the gay community, irrefutable proof that he wasn’t a homophobic rapper, that he didn’t have a problem with gays. Protests from the gay-rights group GLAAD and women’s rights group NOW sounded loud from outside the theater. “This is not Lenny Bruce,” said NOW president Patricia Ireland at the event. “This is not even Tupac Shakur. Eminem is not rebelling against authority. He’s attacking groups who are the minority. This is vicious, old-fashioned bigotry.” They chanted “Two-four-six-eight, Eminem is full of hate” and GLAAD bought a 30-second anti-bullying ad on CBS that featured the mother of Matthew Shepard, a man who was beaten and left to die because he was gay. The grand finale arrived: Eminem walked out in a baby-blue crushed velvet tracksuit with that same left-to-right prowl he had five months ago at the VMAs, sat astride a bed, and calmly went into “Stan.” Stoic and austere, at his best, Eminem just talked to you while the rhymes seemed incidental, divined without effort. He casts himself as the obsessed fan, Stan, and fires off three letters to himself with escalating severity until we find out that, having drawn inspiration from Slim Shady, Stan kills his own pregnant wife and himself in a car crash. On the fourth verse, Eminem steps into back into a calm Marshall Mathers to respond, tender and apologetic. “Stan” was the third single from The Marshall Mathers LP, built from a beat made by the 45 King after he heard the Dido song “Thank You” used in a commercial preview for the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. It is the lodestar, the faint and slow-beating heart of the album. The word “stan” was added to the dictionary last year, demonstrating how Eminem articulated a brand of sensationalism and celebrity-worship we now take as normal. The song is the key Rorschach test into the indulgent fame-drenched persecution complex of Mathers at the time. He plays both sides of the coin, signifying his total understanding of any controversy around him: He’s both the troubled fan who misunderstands the art of Slim Shady, and he’s Marshall Mathers, the guy who says all “this shit just clownin’ dawg.” It is the light and the dark that gives dimension to the entire album. In the performance, Eminem, again, offers a studio-perfect version, crescendoing through Stan’s verses with histrionic flair, his mic glued to his lips, his other arm a besieged windsock. As the song ends, Elton John trots out to meet Eminem centerstage. They embrace. Mathers glares impudently at the audience, as if the hug were a provocation on its own, as if deeming to touch John in public somehow proved something to his critics. It was a feckless, empty gesture born of a basic bigot’s misunderstanding: How can I be a homophobe with a gay friend? But during Eminem’s imperial year, these objections were drowned out by the roar of the crowd. He joined hands with Elton John and they raised them together, and then Eminem threw his middle fingers up. Everyone in the theater was already on their feet.

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

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

Rap

Aftermath / Interscope

April 15, 2018

01b65e2a-eebf-4c48-a91c-364b4601fd65

Jeremy D. Larson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/

The Britpop icons contemplate middle-age turbulence and inertia on a meticulously polished reunion album.

The Britpop icons contemplate middle-age turbulence and inertia on a meticulously polished reunion album.

Blur: The Ballad of Darren

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blur-the-ballad-of-darren/

The Ballad of Darren

Soon after booking the biggest concerts of their lives at Wembley Stadium, Damon Albarn played his Blur bandmates the demos for a prospective reunion LP. It was an easy sell: The Ballad of Darren would become the prettiest and tightest of their nine albums, elegantly arranged with lush harmonies, baroque flourishes, and a splurge of 1990s cosplay. They opened an early run of reunion sets with “St. Charles Square,” a new song that strides into the boardroom and slaps the whiteboard with an irresistible pitch: This is the Blur you really remember, in all their delinquent glory. You can compulsively play “St. Charles Square”—a doghouse blues brawler with a throwback “Oiiii!” and nostalgic squeals of fretboard skidding—10 or 20 times, perhaps still waiting for a proper chorus but so very pleased they are back, being Blur. Along with Pulp’s latest reunion dates, Blur’s two sold-out Wembley shows received raves from critics who made their names in the heyday of ’90s music press. For better or worse, Britpop and Blur were back on the agenda. The Blur that is both revered and reviled for its class-coded caricature of humdrum English life was immortalized in the early ’90s. Middle-class Essex boy Albarn—dropping pull quotes at such a clip he sometimes lost track of whether he had a Cockney accent—swanned into the grunge years denouncing rock as “ornamented and cliquey” and claiming to prefer “the vagueness of pop, its lack of any real message.” Giddy magazine editors sidelined jungle and drum’n’bass coverage and fired out resources to arm these insouciant art school fops to storm the charts and daytime radio. Everything changed in 1997. Princess Diana died and Blur got into Pavement. Neoliberal centrist Tony Blair swept into government and alienated everyone to his left, starting with the Cool Britannia artists who had piggybacked him into power. “Britpop is dead,” announced a derisory column by journalist Caitlin Moran, who nonetheless tweeted from Wembley last month, “Oh Blur. For thirty years, you’ve been the best.” The Blur who survived that reckoning—who clawed themselves out of Britpop’s nadir—are emblems of the long ’90s: the decade that calcified the cultural and political imagination of the London media class. Albarn has now completed the journey from celebrity hell-raiser to heroin user to yoga guy. His ever-renewable guises conceal his status as the antsiest man in pop: Since Blur’s 2015 LP The Magic Whip, he has released four albums with the endlessly scalable Gorillaz and three more with other projects; he also composed an Alice in Wonderland musical, conceived an opera mixing “Goethe with club music,” and tried to develop a Gorillaz movie for Netflix. He was made a local king in Mali. Like many former addicts, he is on the run from inertia. Blur’s fourth act was always coming for him. The Ballad of Darren’s title playfully honors Blur’s security guard and resident everyman Darren “Smoggy” Evans—but also riffs on the more melodramatic Ballad of Damon, suggests Albarn. That implied title aligns with the romantic split that has plunged Albarn, or at least his narrators, into mortal reflection. Comeback single “The Narcissist” surveys Blur’s history while reckoning with their legacy of addiction: Albarn’s call-and-response with Graham Coxon suggests fraternal sympathy with the guitarist’s own destructive alcoholism. Across the record, Albarn describes heartbreak and chemical temptations while the band drifts along in a crystalline reverie, insulated by James Ford’s double-glazed production. After hitting their anthemic cues, both “The Narcissist” and closer “The Heights” climax with guitar noise that threatens, or promises, annihilation. Albarn makes a show of tearing himself open, yet stretches so far to “transcend” autobiography, as he puts it, that the guts drop out. Could “Barbaric”—a lackadaisical breakup anthem with a Johnny Marr-style riff and a chorus about “barbaric” disunity—in fact allude to political polarization? The heartbreak songs studiously maintain plausible deniability. Albarn invokes current affairs and tiptoes around rich man’s self-pity as if tormented by visions of cynical hit pieces: “Reunited in Their 50s, Blur Rewrite ‘Country House’ From the Homeowner’s Perspective,” and so on. He invites us along when he gets in the storytelling zone: We see the “basement flat with window bars” in “St. Charles Square,” hear the “balalaikas and singing” in “Russian Strings” (a song about Putin’s “senile autocracy,” says Albarn). Highlight “The Ballad” poignantly links breakups with mortality to the tune of Think Tank on antidepressants. But in lovely songs like “The Everglades,” the man so proud to write his own lyrics can summon only vague “paths I wish I’d taken” and “times I thought I’d break.” There is an irony to these platitudes, implied in drummer Dave Rowntree’s admission this January: “The sneering songs we wrote about old people when we were in our 20s are now aimed at us…. I remember thinking at the time, these people don’t know anything. They don’t even know they’re alive!” Snarky anthems like “End of a Century” were always alive with the latent fear we might yet become their dowdy, domesticated subjects. The reunion hyperbole betrays those songs’ lasting sting for some—a hardened anxiety that things can only get worse, that life peaked back in the day. The Ballad of Darren pegs that melancholy to middle-aged turbulence, but its gentility and concision displace Blur hallmarks that would more forcefully evoke a man’s unraveling: Coxon’s trapdoor drops, blunt sharps, screwball blues; Albarn’s riptide swims into hypnagogia and alien genres. Albarn plays the part of heartbroken confessor, but these meticulously polished songs conjure something more real than anguish: the dulling of losses, the warm aura of midlife decline, and the fading belief, with advancing years, that crisis serves to raise the curtain on your next act.

2023-07-20T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-07-20T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rock

Parlophone

July 20, 2023

01b9d777-2428-4cff-baa5-d45ecc610668

Jazz Monroe

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/

Rilo Kiley leader steps out on her own with an indie-yuppie soul/country record released via Conor Oberst's Team Love label.

Rilo Kiley leader steps out on her own with an indie-yuppie soul/country record released via Conor Oberst's Team Love label.

Jenny Lewis With the Watson Twins: Rabbit Fur Coat

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4998-rabbit-fur-coat/

Rabbit Fur Coat

Linda Ronstadt never got hung up on writing her own material. When she found a song she liked, she sang it, and nobody complained that her biggest hits were covers. Jenny Lewis, armed with a lovely voice and too little material, should have taken the same route. On her solo debut and her most soul/country record to date, Lewis' vocals sparkle and the intimate performances make a great first impression, but ultimately, the material grounds her. The production is arresting: The engineers-- primarily Bright Eyes guy Mike Mogis-- are always ready for Jenny Lewis' close-ups, from the soaring a cappella opening track to the acoustic ballads, where they adoringly catch the strengths and nuances of her crisp, clear alto. The Watson Twins also earn their album co-credit with big gospel harmonies. (And the twin thing doesn't hurt: dig their Shining-esque pose on the front cover.) The twins are a winning addition to every song on which they appear, although they sound so good that you start to take them for granted. It's not that they sound good here, so much as they would sound good anywhere; they could back up Khanate and still turn heads. But on repeated listens, the songwriting makes the album lukewarm. The melodies feel textbook, and the lyrics disappoint; they're often unwieldy (like the flurries of multisyllabic words on "You Are What You Love") or vaguely nonsensical (the title song seems heartbreaking, but just try to parse it). This material lacks the grace or the wit that could make the songs sizzle: a line like, "When you're sleeping with someone who doesn't get you/ You're gonna hate yourself in the morning," lacks the clean punch of, say, "I may hate myself in the morning/ But I'm gonna love you tonight." (It's not even a "This One's for the Girls".) While the spare acoustic arrangements suit Lewis' voice, they don't lend themselves to the hooks and idiosyncracies that made Rilo Kiley. Lewis put far more on the line in her band's "I Never", and although that song has a bit of kitsch, its ruby red cowboy boots stomp on the toes of most of this album. In fact, more than any indie country album in months, Rabbit Fur Coat makes me question why indie singers put on their cowboy hats in the first place. The classy folk and Americana that Lewis invokes here never goes deeper than an aesthetic decision, and she's better at talking about bad times than bringing them to life-- or making them go away. That's also why the lone cover on the record, of the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle With Care", doesn't bug me. Some Fork staffers hate this cut with a burning bile, especially when Lewis invites Conor Oberst, Ben Gibbard, and M. Ward to sit by her campfire and share the vocals. I just think it's cute that the quartet set themselves up as aged Bob Dylans or Roy Orbisons-- even if it's an easier sell to aim a few years younger and call them our generation's Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Stephen Stills, and, of course, Linda Ronstadt.

2006-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

2006-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Team Love

January 23, 2006

01bc0313-0ba1-485a-871e-9c66a6496713

Chris Dahlen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/

The West Coast-based rapper and singer/songwriter Anderson .Paak showed up frequently on Dr. Dre’s Compton. His third album, his most assured and most personal project yet, is informed by voices from the past and full of guests (the Game, ScHoolboy Q, Talib Kweli) who are given ample space to do their best work. Malibu is an expansive opus that flows in multiple directions like a classic '70s double album.

The West Coast-based rapper and singer/songwriter Anderson .Paak showed up frequently on Dr. Dre’s Compton. His third album, his most assured and most personal project yet, is informed by voices from the past and full of guests (the Game, ScHoolboy Q, Talib Kweli) who are given ample space to do their best work. Malibu is an expansive opus that flows in multiple directions like a classic '70s double album.

Anderson .Paak: Malibu

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21387-malibu/

Malibu

It doesn’t take long to reach the heart of Anderson .Paak’s new album, Malibu. Just a minute into opening track "The Birds," the West Coast-based rapper and singer/songwriter offers: "My mama caught the gambling bug... My papa was behind them bars/ We never had to want for nuthin’/ Said all we ever need is love." His voice is warm, strained, and conversational, like a Baptist minister or your favorite uncle schooling you, and the wide-open groove has an unhurried feel. It's immediately clear: This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance. Brandon Anderson Paak has seen a lot in his 29 years. His mother was a farmer from South Korea, and his father served in the Air Force and later worked as a mechanic until he was sent to prison. "I didn’t see him again until he was being buried," .Paak told Consequence of Sound in a 2015 interview. All of this life experience is reflected in Malibu, which is both his most assured and most personal project yet. .Paak's name is more prominent these days given his recent work on Dr. Dre’s Compton, where he appeared on six of 16 tracks, but even his sophomore album, 2014's Venice, showed flashes of brilliance. Venice was an easy listen; on Malibu, .Paak celebrates his progression by acknowledging where he’s come from, the trials he’s endured and things he’s seen. "I spent years being called out my name, living under my greatness," .Paak asserts on "The Season / Carry Me," a shape-shifting album highlight. He grew up performing in church, and on the song’s second half, you can hear a rich gospel flair in his voice: "Ya moms in prison, ya father need a new kidney/ Ya family’s splittin’, rivalries between siblings/ If cash ain’t king, it’s damn sure the incentive." Much like Kendrick Lamar, .Paak skillfully depicts his surroundings while remaining in the foreground. Kendrick's spirit feels present at many points on Malibu. .Paak's quicksilver flow on "Your Prime" feels teleported in directly from To Pimp a Butterfly as the music flows expansively from creamy soul harmonies to trap cadences. But .Paak is a confident and unique presence, with a strong command of style and genre as a producer and songwriter. He leapfrogs three eras in a festive suite of songs mid-album that examine heartbreak: '60s soul on "Put Me Thru," club grooves on "Am I Wrong," and '90s hip-hop on "Without You." His musical and emotional generosity ties everything together, making Malibu an expansive opus that flows in multiple directions like a classic '70s double album. Malibu is a community-oriented project, much like Chance the Rapper on last year's Surf, informed by voices from the past and full of guests who are given ample space to do their best work. The Game drops one of his most disarming, winning verses in a minute on "Room in Here"; Rapsody flows affectingly about heartache over Dilla-style boom-bap. Many songs ride out on extended breakdowns, like "Parking Lot," which feels like a studio band given room to stretch. On "The Dreamer," the album’s celebratory final track, .Paak shares his success with his community, people who look like him and work to avoid similar pitfalls. "Who cares ya daddy couldn’t be here/ Mama always kept the cable on/ I’m a product of the tube and the free lunch/ Living room, watching old reruns." This is powerful art, not only for people of color, but for everyone who exists beyond societal constraints. It’s for those who’ve been told they don’t quite fit, those viewed through a different lens because of their circumstances. It’s a beautiful reminder that, no matter what you’ve endured, you can go anywhere and reach glorious heights.

2016-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Empire / OBE / Steel Wool / Art Club

January 11, 2016

01bdfac2-e296-4807-8eb7-023d4ea14d35

Marcus J. Moore

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

The Scotland-based duo delight in controlled chaos, interweaving arguments and anxieties with their most exuberant work to date.

The Scotland-based duo delight in controlled chaos, interweaving arguments and anxieties with their most exuberant work to date.

Sacred Paws: Run Around the Sun

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sacred-paws-run-around-the-sun/

Run Around the Sun

The neon sheen of Carly Rae Jepsen may not be the first thing one associates with Sacred Paws, the UK duo known for Rachel Aggs’ loose guitar licks and Eilidh Rodgers’ punchy percussion. But the Canadian queen was evidently on their minds as they recorded their second album, Run Around the Sun: “We don’t make similar music but we want to create a similar feeling,” Aggs said of Jepsen in a recent interview. Over ten propulsive tracks, the similarities to Jepsen’s pop philosophy come into view: lyrics that detail arguments, anxieties, and regrets are set against the duo’s most exuberant work to date. Take “Life’s Too Short,” the bright and brassy third track. Its snappy snare hits and warm horn section feel primed for a party, but the duo is focused on an absentee lover: “I don’t know what you want/I don’t care, life’s too short.” “Shame on Me” similarly masquerades as a celebration filled with rubbery guitars, but Aggs’ and Rodgers’ sunny vocals wax nostalgic about a past romance: “Can’t you see this was meant to be forever?” The song ends as they repeat the titular phrase, an act of self-flagellation set to breakneck arpeggiated chords. Speed is perhaps the point here; whereas 2017’s Strike a Match punctuated energetic pacing with more meandering tracks, Run Around the Sun barely stops for breath. Aggs has called Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock one of her biggest influences as a guitarist, and that album’s frenzied urgency manifests in the reverberating guitar squeals of “Brush Your Hair.” Sacred Paws’ lyrics share this immediacy; their strongest verses tend to open in media res. “Fresh air was everything,” Aggs declares on “What’s So Wrong,” and suddenly the scenery zooms into a perfect summer’s day. Sacred Paws have also mastered Sleater-Kinney’s fiery instrumental give-and-take, a shifting rhythm that constantly reestablishes the band’s center of gravity. Seven songs in, as the onslaught of Aggs’ fretwork threatens to send the record into a tailspin, “Is This Real” finds Rodgers unleashing a chorus of bells and claves. The power exchange extends to the verses, which diverge into anxious repartee that conjures miscommunication in a long-distance relationship. “The Conversation” sounds like an argument over a broken telephone (“Why would we even try to have this conversation?” Aggs asks stubbornly; “It can take a while,” Rodgers offers patiently). “Write This Down” finds the two nervously singing over each other, backgrounded by drum fills and crashing symbols. But more often than not, these parallel verses melt into triumphant harmonies. These moments, where Aggs and Rodgers tackle two distinct narratives that meet at the chorus, cement the band’s dynamic: controlled chaos that, against all odds, finds its way to a central refrain. Sacred Paws used to be a multi-city affair—Aggs in London, Rodgers in Glasgow—a fact that provided consistent interview fodder, and one they seem to nod to here. “It’s just a page on a map that’s keeping us apart,” they sing over Aggs’ meandering noodling on “How Far.” It’s by far the record’s slowest song, and one could read the chorus (“How long, how far”) as a plea to reconcile the miles between them. But if much of Run Around the Sun is concerned with repenting for past mistakes, the present looks brighter: Aggs recently relocated to Glasgow, where the two bandmates now share a back garden. On the closing track, “Other Side,” they reach an uneasy peace. “I found you/Nothing can stand between us,” Rodgers sings, while Aggs’ answer is more ominous: “I have changed in ways I can’t explain.” But her final riffs, reviving the song after its last refrain, hint that she’s having more fun than she might’ve let on.

2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Merge / Rock Action

June 3, 2019

01bf34e3-4bc1-4719-9701-0a04f74936c3

Arielle Gordon

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

With theatrical élan, the Swedish rabble-rousers lampoon the masculine and the moneyed on songs that match parody with precision.

With theatrical élan, the Swedish rabble-rousers lampoon the masculine and the moneyed on songs that match parody with precision.

Viagra Boys: Street Worms

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/viagra-boys-street-worms/

Street Worms

In the mid-1990s, wrestling went into storyline overdrive, welcoming a new cast of cheesy antiheroes, convoluted backstories, and gimmicks too silly for even a teenage drama club. Perhaps nobody did this better than Mick Foley, who wrestled as three distinct personae: Dude Love, Cactus Jack, and Mankind. When Cactus Jack made his WWE debut, Foley simply donned a new costume in order to provide a more imposing threat. That era of wrestling perfectly captured the difficulty of designing characters who play into machismo stereotypes while mocking them, too, a surprisingly sophisticated feat of writing and acting. Swedish six-piece Viagra Boys are the Mick Foley of the post-punk world: a tour de force of musical comedy disguised as society’s most accepted reprobates. From their name to their vocal delivery, Viagra Boys appear to be a joke, but they want to be in control of when and how the comedic plot unfolds. Until now, they have left a small, nearly untraceable trail of clues about their identity. They formed in 2015, released two short EPs, performed occasionally in Europe, and, for the record, have only taken Viagra once. Street Worms, their debut album, is a grand introduction. Viagra Boys manage to mock everyday negative qualities—boasted virility, misplaced classism, and blissful ignorance—with sincerity and ambivalence. Like most mid-’90s WWE characters, the Boys depend as much on exclamatory writing as hammy performances. “Down in the Basement” emerges with an instant snarl, the rhythm section pulsing with restraint and grit to match Sleaford Mods. Singer Sebastian Murphy points a new finger every few seconds, as when he calls out a cheating husband and demands he give his wife the apology she deserves. The interplay between his wobbly singing, itself an homage to Mark E. Smith, and the band’s tempo-aligned tightness creates an intense but aloof dynamic. The mix makes Viagra Boys confrontational. When guitars and the saxophone take turns flashing in “Slow Learner” or the manic, descending noise of “Frogstrap” refuses to relent, that’s the band fortifying Murphy’s criticisms and quips. There’s a freeform enthusiasm to Viagra Boys’ music, even if nobody is taking solos. The band’s greatest trick is mimicking the very people they despise. On “Best in Show,” a whirlwind of unnerving synth squeaks, Murphy nails the elitist mentality of wealthy breeders and silk-stocking owners devoted to competitions. He introduces a Texas dog show by rattling off fake contestants. Purebred names become rambling titles. Fruits come into play. He’s suddenly idolizing the seriousness of it all through absurdist comparisons, like cocker spaniels defying the space-time continuum or moonwalking canines literally taking a piss. Then there’s “Sports,” which funnels the vapidity of U.S. masculinity through reverb and distortion. On paper, Murphy’s words read like a liberal arts student mocking the game his parents dragged him to: “BASEBALL! BASKETBALL! WEINER DOGS!” But when heard, those same exclamations take on a gruff exterior, his game of tongue-in-cheek word association now driven by deep-bellied roars and anger. Viagra Boys match parody with alarming precision. On Street Worms, Viagra Boys pull off the very feat that made mid-’90s wrestling so successful: They put on a show that’s as corny as it is engrossing, with more trenchant commentary. The album’s final lyrics—“The same worms that eat me/Will someday eat you, too”—leave Murphy’s lips dryly, an attempt to put every self-absorbed person already mocked in their place. But as he sings the chorus again, the send-up’s bleakness becomes clear—not all who commit common indecencies will see punishment. Like that, the chorus becomes the album’s signature move, a lesson that may make you feel queasy but, somehow, won’t make these songs any less entertaining.

2018-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Year0001

October 1, 2018

01bfd80d-4555-4aa4-8bb4-521299dc7590

Nina Corcoran

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/

This is the first full-length collaboration between the rappers, whose styles are almost completely opposite. If Gucci painted pictures, Waka looks at a blank canvas and dumps a can of red paint on it. Then maybe breaks it over his knee.

This is the first full-length collaboration between the rappers, whose styles are almost completely opposite. If Gucci painted pictures, Waka looks at a blank canvas and dumps a can of red paint on it. Then maybe breaks it over his knee.

Gucci Mane / Waka Flocka Flame: Ferrari Boyz

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15739-ferrari-boyz/

Ferrari Boyz

Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame have always shared a symbiotic relationship. With Gucci frequently in and out of jail, keeping the Brick Squad name and label relevant has mostly fallen on Waka's shoulders, and he's done a more than adequate job, releasing a few legitimate radio hits as well as one of the best rap albums of last year. Waka has also gathered a host of new rappers under Brick Squad's wings-- most notably Slim Dunkin, who appears on Ferrari Boyz twice-- and while likely none of them will end up as stars, the brand extension certainly can't hurt. Waka, of course, was brought along for the ride as Gucci ascended upward, and his success was undoubtedly accelerated by his proximity to Gucci's budding stardom. What made the partnership work artistically is that their styles are almost completely opposite. At the height of his profligacy, Gucci was penning colorful and singular verses that, from a writing and conceptual standpoint, put him in rap's upper tier. But he also had a keen ear for pop; his best hooks were almost impossibly intricate (arguably even unnecessarily so, considering how much music he gave away for free), and he managed to embed most of his ad-libs in the genre's collective consciousness. Standing in stark contrast, Waka's style is purposefully non-lyrical, and his choruses are often him just shouting a phrase or two-- no less catchy, but still an altogether different tactic. And where Gucci's beats were highly musical, Waka's are often loud and seemingly best fit for head banging. If Gucci painted pictures, Waka looks at a blank canvas and dumps a can of red paint on it. Then maybe breaks it over his knee. But here's the dirty secret about Waka and Gucci: They've never worked well as collaborators. Though they've now been on dozens of songs together, none ranks in either artist's upper echelon, and many have been an outright bore. On paper, their styles do not mesh, and in practice they don't either. They both sound awkward and out of place on each other's tracks-- Gucci blunts Waka's raw emotion, and Waka leaves little room for Gucci's writerly leanings. That trend doesn't change on Ferrari Boyz, their official commercially released collaborative album. Most of their collaborations arrived after Waka really blew up, and they've found Gucci heavily drawn to his aesthetic. That can probably be chalked to staying with the hot hand-- basically everyone in rap is flocking to the beats of producers Lex Luger and Southside (who partly owe their success to Waka's), so why go in a different direction? And truly, if you took Gucci's contributions off Ferrari Boyz and replaced them with Brick Squad underlings, you'd probably be looking at something close to Flockaveli's follow-up. But that raises another question: If Gucci is worlds better than guys like YG Hootie and Kebo Gotti, shouldn't Ferrari Boyz be as good, if not better, than Flockaveli? Theoretically, yes, but it's missing most of the elements that made Waka's solo album so great and so invigorating. Namely, it lacks the manic energy that is Waka's calling card: If it's possible to go through the motions while still mostly shouting, Ferrari Boyz would be a prime example. The album can also get drearily monotonous-- though at times the beats will switch out of the album's minor key template, Ferrari Boyz desperately lacks the standout outliers like "Fuck the Club Up" or "Grove St. Party" that help buoy Flockaveli. The album does pick up near the end: "Too Loyal" rides a blippy beat that's maybe the record's most fun production, and it also finds Gucci retaining some of the playfulness that's always been a part of his music. "So Many Things", the real keeper, is a fluttery track that finds Gucci singing the album's best hook with an endearingly amateur whine. (It should come as no surprise as to who is behind both: Fatboi, a frequent Gucci cohort.) Though guys like Hootie couldn't hold Gucci's rhyme book, they fit perfectly into Waka's aesthetic-- even if they don't rock anti-skill as a skill nearly as well as he does, they're at least willing to sound animated. Gucci, in contrast, puts little effort into his writing here, which is made all the worse by him sounding profoundly bored, tired, stoned, or some combination of the three. It's a problem that has plagued a lot of his music recently, but it's a bigger issue now that he doesn't have the appropriate production to perk, or prop, him up. That said, Ferrari Boyz is far from dire-- it's largely just disappointing. Gucci and Waka still don't sound at home together, and it's of little comfort that their clashing styles are what made them great in the first place.

2011-08-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

2011-08-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rap

Warner Bros.

August 23, 2011

01c0fcda-7fac-4ff8-9ba0-b05071681156

Jordan Sargent

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

On the Kentucky metalcore band’s titanic fourth album, they’ve amplified and concentrated their sound into something so potent that it has its own gravitational pull.

On the Kentucky metalcore band’s titanic fourth album, they’ve amplified and concentrated their sound into something so potent that it has its own gravitational pull.

Knocked Loose: You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knocked-loose-you-wont-go-before-youre-supposed-to/

You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To

The verdict on You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To appears to be well settled among the Knocked Loose faithful. That’s if the reaction videos for “Blinding Faith” are to be trusted—and they probably should, since the lead single of the Kentucky quintet’s titanic fourth album is all reaction shots: That’s a seven-string Ibanez Iceman; oh shit, a SECOND breakdown; 3 members of the band screaming within 5 seconds is fucking god-tier. That’s not entirely accurate because Bryan Garris is not really screaming, but making a death metal gurgle so heinous that it can’t be compared to any actual vocalizing so much as Banned from TV, Joe Theismann’s leg injury or the Alien chest-burster. But can Knocked Loose break out? This sort of question has surrounded the band since they appeared at both Coachella and Bonnaroo in 2023, not just as each festival’s biggest draw in contemporary metal, but the only one, an emissary for the totality of heavy musics for the most casual but curious of listeners. If You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To draws this demographic, it does so as the exact opposite of a “crossover event.” Rather than expanding outward, Knocked Loose have amplified and concentrated their aesthetic into something so dense that it has its own gravitational pull. So, despite what you might assume from those Slipknot opening gigs and the presence of a producer who’s worked with NLE Choppa, Beartooth, and Disturbed in the past two years, there are no clean vocals, no alt-metal choruses or wavy trap drums, no rage-rap guest verses. In short, nothing that might suggest Knocked Loose had reached their logical endpoint with a concept album about a fatal car wreck and could only make their heavy heavier by contrast. They’re a hardcore band in practice, an action/horror franchise in spirit, one that takes its escalating success as a mandate to re-up a self-imposed arms race—the stunts, the thrills, the killshots, they all need to be bigger, badder and bolder before something hungrier takes its place. And if the breakdown has indeed replaced the riff as modern metal’s lingua franca, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is about as eloquent as it gets. Bring back the nasty riff but slower? Maybe that was enough in 2016, but “Piece By Piece” is going to bring in a new nasty riff and also an ultra-hammered China cymbal that sounds even gnarlier. Half-time breakdowns? “Thirst” achieves the heretofore inconceivable quarter-time tempo switch, while the Southern shuffle riff on “The Calm That Keeps You Awake” turns Pantera’s “Walk” into a funeral procession. The breakdown on “Don’t Reach For Me” hits, but mostly because there’s at least a half-dozen little teasers of silence where it doesn’t happen first. Of course, any art form reliant on this much physicality can easily devolve into parody without some sort of emotional anchor. Some of the trepidation surrounding You Won’t Go was fixated on the cover art’s implication that Knocked Loose might be a Christian band now. I’d describe it as spiritual, not religious; “Blinding Faith” shouts down any form of dogma, whereas “Don’t Reach For Me” imagines a great, cleansing flood in more of a Taxi Driver way than a biblical one. The album title was taken from a pep talk Garris received from an elderly woman as he stressed through the band’s first post-COVID flight—yes, God’s plan and all, but maybe you’re supposed to go today. Throughout, Garris still sounds like that guy before the conversation, someone who probably would’ve called for a couple of Xanax if his seatmate wasn’t so chatty. It’s fitting that music so reliant on breakdowns takes its lead from someone who sounds like he’s in a constant panic attack. Or, it’s fitting that Knocked Loose’s riffs often mimic the exact sound someone expects to hear on a 737 before a crucial piece of equipment flies off. And yet, none of this means that You Won’t Go is inaccessible. Giving shape to aimless rage, the illicit thrill to imagine playing it for people who have no interest whatsoever in “metal” or anything that ends with “-core,” let alone “metalcore,” the way it makes metal that actively catered towards mainstream tastes sound washed and timid. As a teenager, I remember Far Beyond Driven or Life is Peachy getting on the charts by doing similar things. Or, just go look at those Coachella and Bonnaroo sets—Knocked Loose isn’t playing to empty tents of college kids wishing they were watching Matt Maeson or Jai Wolf instead. Whether Knocked Loose fits into anyone’s perception of what popular metal should sound like, they know they belong.

2024-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Metal

Pure Noise

May 10, 2024

01c137df-67c2-4017-9f46-c495c3ff65e5

Ian Cohen

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

Filled with warmth, horns, and many messages of love, Woods’ tenth album is a feel-good record for these rough times.

Filled with warmth, horns, and many messages of love, Woods’ tenth album is a feel-good record for these rough times.

Woods: Love Is Love

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23105-love-is-love/

Love Is Love

Woods have never been a band of grand gestures. Over nine albums in a dozen years, changes for the Brooklyn indie folk band have been incremental. There was the record where they ditched the tape effects of G. Lucas Crane (2012’s Bend Beyond) to discover that one of their signature elements wasn’t as integral to the group as thought. There was the one that proudly flaunted itself as the first Woods full-length recorded in a “real studio” (2014’s With Light and With Love), a move that stripped lo-fi as a defining characteristic. For a band that’s rivaled in success by both a former member (Kevin Morby) and a soundalike (Whitney), there is an unspoken imperative that their 10th record shifts the status quo, and songwriter and bandleader Jeremy Earl is explicit in stating his intention: Love Is Love is a political album. The platitude from the days following the 2016 presidential election stated that at least we’d get good music out of the era of Donald Trump. Besides the obvious fallacy that good tunes somehow could make up for contingents of people having their rights stripped, this also ignores that there will be releases of all sorts of quality responding to the political climate. Earl struggles with this notion over the six songs and 31 minutes of Love Is Love. The title alone is a mantra that seeks to gain meaning through its repetition, echoing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s poem at the 2016 Tony Awards dedicated to the victims of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, used here as the core of the record’s bookends. It’s a phrase that sounds better on a picket sign than it does in a real-world application, where it doesn’t take a cynic to note that love’s mere existence isn’t negating laws or bombs or walls. Earl’s sloganeering doesn’t end there. On “Bleeding Blue,” he reflects on election’s immediate aftermath, with flower-power cadences applied to lines like “Have you heard the news? Hate can’t lose” and “I am the wind/Love’s not dead.” The album’s closing track, “Love Is Love (Sun on Time)” asks “How can we love if this won’t go away? How can we love with this kind of hate?” It’s enough to think Earl might start quoting John Lennon or even Moulin Rouge!. Yes, love is a many splendored thing, but on a lyric sheet announces itself as “A Meditation on Love” and literally ends with a peace sign, the need to have something to say should be predicated by actually having something to say. Where Love Is Love lacks ambiguity is in its musical presentation. Woods’ incorporation of jazz on last year’s City Sun Eater in the River of Light returns the ten-minute leg-stretcher “Spring Is in the Air,” full of patent leather vibrato and a lava-lamp glow balanced by a moaning horn section, a versatile layer of sound throughout the album. On “Hit That Drum,” Alec Spiegelman’s saxophone and flute are both texture and canvas for Earl to pile on the drama, while Cole Kamen-Green’s trumpet grounds “Bleeding Blue” in a triumphant spirit that paints the song as a rally rather than a wallow. Earl as bandleader is getting the most out of his supporting cast, allowing his effortless pop sensibilities to form the collection’s sturdy spine. On “Lost in a Crowd,” Earl retreats to one of his most charming tendencies. He fills his lines with a few too many syllables and has to rush out the lyrics, singing “Just when we thought that it couldn’t get worse/I’m lost in a crowd, a descending darkness.” It’s a direct sentiment that lacks the heavy-handedness of the rest of the record. Here, Earl allows himself to be confused, battered, and worried. He doesn’t have all the answers for the world and he doesn’t have to. The ease of his melody is matched by his own ideas. It might be a small notion, but that’s where Woods operate most efficiently, for a moment achieving the solidarity that Love Is Love desperately seeks.

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

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

Rock

Woodsist

April 24, 2017

01c18221-3224-4578-8c9c-d91812e4d307

Philip Cosores

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

Juliana Hatfield’s new album is her angriest by a landslide. It’s packed with scathing vignettes about predatory men, particularly the one currently leading the free world.

Juliana Hatfield’s new album is her angriest by a landslide. It’s packed with scathing vignettes about predatory men, particularly the one currently leading the free world.

Juliana Hatfield: Pussycat

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23223-pussycat/

Pussycat

It was supposed to be the moment Donald Trump lost the election. Republicans bolted by the dozens, rescinding their endorsements and calling for him to drop out. Paul Ryan uninvited him to a rally. His own party chairman denounced him, and even Mike Pence, perhaps the most unwavering of all of Trump apologists, seemed to tease the possibility of turning on his running mate. And then somehow, with remarkable speed, the news cycle moved on. Within just a few weeks, the press seemed to completely forget about that unprecedented video of a presidential candidate admitting to—graphically bragging about—serial sexual assault. That voters were able to look past Trump’s “Access Hollywood” confessions remains astounding to Juliana Hatfield, who wrote of how deeply she was shaken by them in an essay for Talkhouse. “Since the Trump ‘pussy grab’ tapes were released, I’ve found myself wanting to reach for my emergency supply of valium,” the veteran alt-rocker wrote, describing what she dubbed “the Trump effect”: “The sight of his face and/or the sound of his voice tightens the stomach, the heart, the sphincter. Everything’s clenched. Even—maybe especially—the ‘pussy.’” Trump’s comments hang heavy over Hatfield’s latest record, Pussycat, an album packed with scathing vignettes about predatory men, particularly the one currently leading the free world. “I Wanna Be Your Disease” opens the record with fantasies of smiting the President, bringing him to his knees and making him pay for all his “vile and hateful words.” Heated as that track is, it’s tame compared to some of what follows. Few records this year have cried out quite so loudly for a trigger warning. On the queasy “When You’re a Star,” Hatfield connects Trump’s words to Bill Cosby’s sexual assaults. “She won’t remember a thing, and even if she did the law is on your side,” she sings, “They never prosecute your kind.” The sex in “Rhinoceros” is more consensual but no less graphic. Over a whimsically nasty riff, Hatfield imagines the horror of what intercourse with her husband might be like for Melania Trump. She spares no grotesque detail: the stench of rotting meat, the slobbering of his thick tongue, the hopelessness of feeling crushed under his mass (she likens it to being water boarded). Pussycat isn’t above some cheap shots—“Short-Fingered Man” pries at one of the President’s most legendary insecurities—but Hatfield’s lyrics nail the gut-level revulsion the President provokes in many women, especially those who’ve been victimized by powerful men. Apparently she wrote and recorded the album in a flurry of inspiration right after the election, playing everything but the drums herself, and that impulsivity often shows. Like much of the country last November, she was still working through her shock, straightening out her thoughts, and giving herself the freedom to follow them when they turned ugly. And yet, as loaded as the subject matter is, it does amazingly little to diminish Hatfield’s bright spirit. Even on this, her angriest record by a landslide, the singer retains the intrinsic tunefulness that’s marked every record she’s made since she was a teenager. Three decades after her debut with Blake Babies, her voice remains perpetually youthful, and her guitars continue to default to an agreeable jangle whenever she doesn’t make a concerted effort to toughen them up a bit. It’s difficult to imagine anybody else coming across quite so good-natured when singing about lighting Kellyanne Conway on fire and watching her face melt off. Ironically, Pussycat is the kind of bluntly political record Hatfield used to be knocked for shying away from. At the height of her 1990s stardom, Hatfield was dismissed in the more activist corners of the music world as a lightweight (never mind that her songs frequently explored the ways society needles and dismisses women). She’s spent her career in an often thankless middle ground, too feminine for the masculine music press, yet not punk enough for the riot grrls. But Pussycat lends to the case for a critical reappraisal. Now would be an ideal time for one, given how the DNA of Hatfield’s hooky, plainspoken alterna-pop has carried through some of indie-rock’s sharpest young songwriters, from Waxahatchee to Bully to Laura Stevenson and Charly Bliss—artists that have demonstrated there’s plenty of substance in this sound. What a treat it would be if, 30 years into their careers, they were all making records as relevant, passionate, and strangely personable as this one.

2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

American Laundromat

May 1, 2017

01c4e88c-d7dc-4b2f-ab57-75fa8955cb75

Evan Rytlewski

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

This 1973 album by a group of Lagos high-school students shines a spotlight on a Nigerian psych-rock scene that’s long been overshadowed by the legacy of Afrobeat.

This 1973 album by a group of Lagos high-school students shines a spotlight on a Nigerian psych-rock scene that’s long been overshadowed by the legacy of Afrobeat.

Ofege: Try and Love

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ofege-try-and-love/

Try and Love

According to Soundway Records boss Miles Cleret’s liner notes to the 2008 compilation Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria, the Afrobeat movement wasn’t that nation’s most popular musical style of the decade, as many Anglo-Americans believe. Rather, Westernized, fuzz-laden psych rock captured more local mindshare back then. Ofege, whose players were still in high school, ranked among the most beloved of a scene that included Blo, the Funkees, and Ofo the Black Company. It’s easy to hear why. Ofege’s 1973 debut album, Try and Love, abounds with open-hearted rock that can connect with anyone who’s fallen in love before reaching voting age. Given the accomplished musicianship and gravity of emotions on display here, it’s hard to believe that Ofege’s members were all between 15 and 17 during the recording of Try and Love. These Lagos students come off as rock-infatuated youths expressing feelings of love for the first time, and it’s absolutely charming. More strikingly, the songs sound as if they could’ve been the handiwork of London art-school proggers, Arthur Lee’s post-Forever Changes Love, or the filthy funkateers rescued for posterity by 2003’s Chains and Black Exhaust comp. On Try and Love, no debts to Fela Kuti are detected. Opener “Nobody Fails” instantly subverts whatever expectations you may have of Nigerian rock with its quasi waltz-time rhythm, chikka-wakka guitar punctuation, and Melvin “Noks” Ukachi’s vocals, which sound as if he hasn’t totally transitioned out of puberty. The lysergic, alpha-male guitar solo that divides the song is by top session musician Berkley Jones, who also played with Blo. The joyous music of “Nobody Fails” contrasts with Ukachi’s laments about potential lovers inevitably leaving one disappointed. The occasional double- and triple-negative constructions sow confusion (e.g., “You can’t never see nobody fail”), but, regardless, such bleak jadedness is shocking for a teen songwriter. Ofege’s compositional complexity flowers on “Gbe Mi Lo,” as drummer M-Ike Meme flaunts the semi-galloping gait and intricate stickwork of much modern Tuareg desert rock. Meanwhile, in a plot twist, Jones’ majestic guitar solo recalls the florid runs of Lino Ajello of Italian prog rockers Il Balletto di Bronzo. Similarly, “You Say No” is dramatic prog that’s wise and sophisticated beyond its years. By contrast, “Lead Me On” bustles with youthful optimism. Ukachi pleads with his crush to take his hand and lead him on to idyllic planes of love as Meme’s beats emulate the skitter and tumble of a heart in the throes of a new passion. Try and Love peaks on “It’s Not Easy,” the lone track with lyrics written by bassist Paul Alade. It’s one of those songs that never fails to stop time and launch you into a rapturous reverie. The mood is as languorous as Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” or Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” but it replaces the latter song’s grown-up creepiness with an adolescent’s doe-eyed earnestness and tenderness. The yearning beauty of the melody and the swaying, sighing backing vocals could move Jagger and Richards’ wild horses to tears. No wonder the song’s been licensed in four TV shows this decade. Perhaps the pinnacle of West African love balladry, “It’s Not Easy” is the anomalous, gooey center of an album that proved these young Nigerians could compete on rock’s world stage with the best that the West had to offer.

2023-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Strut

May 15, 2023

01c7f9a1-bf61-49f4-a12e-31193aeb9214

Dave Segal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/

Young producer Nicolas Jaar issues a sharp collection from his Clown & Sunset imprint that offers intriguing new horizons in minimal.

Young producer Nicolas Jaar issues a sharp collection from his Clown & Sunset imprint that offers intriguing new horizons in minimal.

Various Artists: Inès

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15062-ines/

Inès

Ever since Ricardo Villalobos forged a 17-minute club anthem out of a looped piano riff and children chanting in Spanish (2007's "Enfants (Chants)"), minimal's narrative of rewriting the definition of club music has felt exhausted (more kindly: completed). The astonishingly young Nicolas Jaar has emerged in the shadow of that endpoint, and he has pursued a sound that cuts diagonally across modern house and techno's continuum of revivalist simplicity to outré sound design. This range can be heard from his straightforwardly lush disco edits to the generous use of silence and repetition on his forthcoming solo album, Space Is Only Noise. It's as if Jaar is simply adding new lines across post-minimal's completed coloring book, straining through sheer craft to change the tone and feel of the pictures. This restlessness gives his work the feel of being transitory, offering no statement of a fully formed aesthetic, only snapshots of resting places between one mode and the next. Somewhat perversely, the most coherent articulation of Jaar's approach is captured on a release not even in his name. Strictly speaking, Inès is a compilation of output on Jaar's experiment-slanted Clown & Sunset label, though as compilations go it's very single-minded: four of the 10 tracks here are from Jaar, and he collaborates with artists Soul Keita and Nikita Quasim on two others, while Keita and Quasim offer two solo tracks each. Inès is also single-minded in feel in spite of its sonic diversity, each track asking different versions of the same questions: what is the relationship between groove and non-groove, between chaos and order? Does the sun shine more brightly if it suddenly emerges from behind clouds? While stylistic contexts differ, from the softly popping Jan Jelinek downtempo of Quasim's "Freshman Year" with its woozy accelerations and decelerations, to the loping blues-disco stomp of Jaar's "Love You Gotta Lose Again" to the morose and mysterious instrumental hip-hop of Keita's "Dusties N 808s", everything here points to an underlying sensibility of absolute looseness finding itself pressed into the service of the beat. If that sounds like Downtempo 101, well, it is; Inès' point of distinction is the deliberateness of its constructions. They are simultaneously more fragmentary and more intricate, more tentative and more precise than your standard narcoleptic headnodder, with tracks that are rigid with barely restrained tension. So, the seemingly adrift piano tinkles of Jaar's "Tribute to My Mother" become drawn into a cat's-cradle of electronic zaps and buzzing bass surges, while on his "Dubliners" papery rustles and scratches gradually coalesce into an eerie percussive house groove, like cells becoming molecules before your eyes. Best of all is the entire collective's "Her String", where succulent hand percussion and live bass build to a gorgeously deliquescent flamenco guitar solo. With its fragile, whispery pools and eddies of sound, Inès recalls the rhythmically attenuated constructions of Villalobos (in particular his Achso EP) but also Henrik Schwarz's naturalist dance music fusions. But unlike these artists, Jaar and company remain determinedly small scale, preferring to offer carefully constructed pinnacles that never outstay their welcome. As such, it's easy to dismiss Inès as a minor work, to conclude that the delicacy of its articulations feel hard-won only because they're staged that way. All of which is true, but once you're on the album's microscopic level of activity even the slightest developments feel immensely evocative.

2011-02-01T01:00:04.000-05:00

2011-02-01T01:00:04.000-05:00

Clown & Sunset

February 1, 2011

01c8a02b-3424-4ea6-b1c2-67068a36592d

Tim Finney

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/

The New York/Berlin composer and choreographer’s second album explores creative collaboration as a means of creating family, particularly within the context of queer liberation.

The New York/Berlin composer and choreographer’s second album explores creative collaboration as a means of creating family, particularly within the context of queer liberation.

Colin Self: Siblings

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colin-self-siblings/

Siblings

There’s a noise-techno stomper right at the heart of Colin Self’s new album, Siblings. Fragments of mangled vocals play hide and seek with a pounding beat: “Whaaaa,” one yell-yawns on repeat, while others are condensed into tics that form its sticky percussion. The track is called “Stay With the Trouble (For Donna)” and it’s the lit match to the beacon that the album builds in reply to feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s 2016 book Staying With the Trouble. In it, Haraway makes the case that the most fruitful response to challenging times lies in “making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.” Finding kin has been the meat of Self’s artistic practice for many years now. The work of the composer and choreographer, who lives between New York and Berlin, actively creates community. He co-founded the performance collective Chez Deep in 2012; he organized a group deep-listening walk for the release of his 2015 debut album, Elation; he’s collaborated with artists including Holly Herndon and Amnesia Scanner for their own releases; and four years ago, he founded the Xhoir vocal workshop, which is open to beginners and professional singers alike. “[I]t’s a really important outlet for dealing with the present moment, politically and socially, ” he said in an interview at the time. “Singing is a very freeing act, it lets you leave your body and touch people with sound.” Siblings is the final installment of Self’s Elation Series, a six-year body of collaborative work that spans opera to performance art, sculpture to song, and in doing so showcases the vitality and versatility of the queer creative underground of New York and beyond. Such interdisciplinary interdependence both necessitates and creates the ideal conditions for kinship: trust, play, close listening. On his debut album, Self’s musical expression was centered on choral arrangements with electronic production that he tagged “devotional.” While his debut LP remains a salve, Siblings demonstrates an extraordinary evolution, pulling the concept of the devotional into an abundance of new shapes. To borrow Haraway’s term, the album is a compost of sonic vocabularies—including choral, techno, pop, folk, string quartet, noise, and East Coast club rhythms—and vocal evocations of kinship, in and among which a network of invigorating ideas burst into life. On the tender synth-pop bubbler “Emblem,” Self sings of feeling like an “anomaly” before finding “the others who get it/Who might/Take care of me/Stand together/As a family.” His vocal, specifically on the intro, recalls Jimmy Somerville’s ecstatic falsetto on UK group Bronski Beat’s 1984 song “Smalltown Boy.” On it, Somerville sings that “the love that you need will never be found at home.” “Emblem” doesn’t just pick up the story where Somerville left off, it replaces the runaway narrative with one of running to; toward new ways of synergistic understanding and learning. The album makes home for exquisitely arranged, empowering odes that work within the Western songwriting tradition, marrying skin-prickling strings with Self’s clear-eyed soar of a voice (“Survival,” “The Great Refusal”), as well as tracks that earnestly sidestep structure altogether. A Belarusian political poem written and read aloud by artists Tanya Zamirouskaya and Anastasia Kolas kicks off the chaos of “Ante-Strategy,” which fashions hyperactive dialects from digital distortion. “Research Sister” reads like the sonic sibling of WALL-E’s junk compression, a sci-fi speed-walk through humanity’s trashing of the planet and the care-taking that continues in spite of everything. Siblings, like any chosen family, is held together by moments of joy. There’s a melodic jig near the end of album opener “Story” that would flash a mischievous grin if it could. Snatches of laughter and gossip, exaltations and excitations, punctuate the ballroom-influenced “Quorum Feat. Aunt Sister,” which is built around a video chat conversation between artists Martine Syms and Diamond Stingily. The tick-tock tumble of “Uncounted,” which features fragments of artist Emily Roysdon’s text of the same name and evokes the sound-effect explorations of Art of Noise (whose music Self has previously performed to), is set in motion by a conspiratorial cackle by Amanda Peters Gilmore, who Self counts as one of his “many mothers” in the liner notes. Roysdon’s voice and ideas can also be heard on the earwormy “Transitions,” which reminds that the margins have always been, will always be, a site of movement, resistance, and joy. “Genders and governments,” she proclaims; “a chance to be moved.” While the Trump administration attempts to commit acts of trans erasure, “Transitions” makes its position clear. Over rainfall chimes at the song’s tail-end, a mantra is repeated: “We commit to you.” A simple statement of siblinghood, its spirit resounds throughout the whole album. In creating space for such a rich spectrum of expression, Self and his many families of collaborators have created a timely and timeless document of the kinship possibilities that await when ears and hearts stay open.

2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Rvng Intl.

October 30, 2018

01c8b8bd-5ce9-4067-93ae-e149c1eeeed6

Ruth Saxelby

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/

Matt Kivel's acoustic Double Exposure is a small masterpiece of humble virtues: warm, patient, calm. It is beautifully, pristinely recorded, finely wrought; its twelve songs represent some of the least insistent music you will be spellbound by all year.

Matt Kivel's acoustic Double Exposure is a small masterpiece of humble virtues: warm, patient, calm. It is beautifully, pristinely recorded, finely wrought; its twelve songs represent some of the least insistent music you will be spellbound by all year.

Matt Kivel: Double Exposure

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18651-matt-kivel-double-exposure/

Double Exposure

Matt Kivel's Double Exposure is a small masterpiece of humble virtues: warm, patient, calm. It is beautifully, pristinely recorded, finely wrought; its ten songs represent some of the least insistent music you will be spellbound by all year. Kivel's close-miked acoustic guitar strums close to your ear, but everything above it, from Kivel's high, frail falsetto to the washes of electronics that occasionally stop the action, is constantly threatening to dissipate. Kivel wrote and recorded it over the last two years, redirecting his creative efforts away from the band Gap Dream in favor of this sort of acoustic music—not quite shapely or distinct enough to be folk, too temporally detached to be grouped near rock— that is simply music we murmur to ourselves. Daily music. Ever since I first heard Double Exposure, in March, it has been that for me. For awhile, I was hard-pressed to articulate its appeal, even to myself; it was delicate and pretty, for sure, but I was hearing something else in it, something elusive. Now that the record has made its way onto a label, Olde English Spelling Bee, I think I've located what that something is: There is a modesty here, of a particular, almost-holy sort. It's the sort that doesn't much make a spectacle or a point of its own performance. It is simply written into the delivery, in Kivel's musing, unaffected vocals and in his steady, artful finger-picking. Nick Drake is an obvious comparison point, and a strong one. Like Drake, Kivel doesn't sweat comprehension in his mumbled, blurred lyrics, sharp phrases of which only swim occasionally to the surface: "You said all these boys will do is fuck/ Take away their cocks and they dry up," he sings, startlingly, on the title track. With a lyric sheet, the darkly personal nature of the music swims into focus. "Pleasure to me/ Wishing I was dead," he croons on "Tetro." The phrase "When I'm dead" is one of the only phrases in "Eleison." There is a frightening amount of death in the record, in fact. But Kivel doesn't seem or sound frightened by it himself—simply drawn toward it, compelled to examine it. The lullaby of "Rainbow Trout," with its refrain of "sweet babe, don't cry," turns on some ghastly imagery: "As the body/ shook with pain/ It was thrown again and again/ Up against the fissured wall/ Covered in the bile of it's maw." And on "Whip," he sings gently, clearly, "I want to kill myself." The effect is unsettling precisely because you're unsure how unsettled to be—the song appears to be told from the perspective of a whipped horse, and the phrase is sung so lightly, over an ascending finger-picked line, that the overwhelming emotional message is one of contentment, serenity. Mark Nieto produced Double Exposure, and his work is strong enough to serve as a supporting character. (Paul Oldham mixed and mastered the album). Atmosphere is a fragile strength, the first quality to disappear when pressed, but it blossoms in headphones, and it's really in this setting that you should hear Double Exposure. The muffled boom of the bass drum on "White Rice", the pearly piano notes, ringing down a long hallway in "Rainbow Trout", the humming—insect looping guitars that swarm through "All Will Be Well", the small bursts of static at the edges of "Days of Heaven"—each touch registers like an event within the hallowed space that Kivel creates. The album doesn't so much grow on you as accrete, like daytime shadow creeping across the room. It's been seven months since I first tried to puzzle out Double Exposure, and it keeps eluding me. I don't know when I'll want to stop trying, but not soon.

2013-10-30T02:00:02.000-04:00

2013-10-30T02:00:02.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Olde English Spelling Bee / Burger

October 30, 2013

01c96645-e8d4-4654-a656-c96a07350d38

Jayson Greene

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

Featuring gorgeous, dynamic live studio recordings from her last two albums, In the Same Room is a showcase of Holter's imagination and her ability to reimagine.

Featuring gorgeous, dynamic live studio recordings from her last two albums, In the Same Room is a showcase of Holter's imagination and her ability to reimagine.

Julia Holter: In the Same Room

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22967-in-the-same-room/

In the Same Room

The essential fibers of Julia Holter’s compositions are sturdy yet pliable, amenable to shifts in contour and color. “Goddess Eyes” first appeared on 2011’s Tragedy in subtly exultant form; Ekstasis, released the next year, featured both a blocky rejigging and a retextured version. And on an EP that year, an acoustic “Goddess Eyes” revealed the patient ballad earlier obscured by static. They track Holter’s inclination towards clearer vocals and ensemble ingenuity. It’s as if, as time passes, she’d rather reimagine a song than retrieve its original spirit. The 32-year-old Los Angeles artist’s latest release, In the Same Room, is a live studio recording of songs largely from her ravishing last two albums, 2013’s Loud City Song and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness. Some of the players—drummer Corey Fogel, violist Dina Maccabee, and bassist Devin Hoff—are familiar from Holter’s touring outfit and those two records, the strength of which owes much to the musicians’ intuitive, often idiosyncratic groove. In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning. “Horns Surrounding Me,” on Loud City Song, features a backbeat and shades of terror. It’s nearly arrhythmic on In the Same Room, a mélange of cymbals and viola. Its darkness evokes calm instead of anxiety. The spiraling outro on In the Same Room’s “Silhouette,” meanwhile, intensifies its impending madness. It’s among her most stirring vocal performances, full of melismas on the brink of abandon. “Lucette Stranded on the Island,” sung from the perspective of someone left to die by her lover, makes the earlier version’s noisy climax seem overdone. Unadorned, we hear Holter mid-disenchantment, amorous going on helpless. Holter has said that producer Cole M. Greif-Neill insisted on bringing her vocals, less thoroughly treated than usual, to the fore of Have You in My Wilderness. In the Same Room, though, lacks that record’s saturated backdrop, leaving Holter’s voice as palpably present as each of the instrumentalists (whose subtle dynamics enliven “In the Green Wild.”) That completes an impressive arc for Holter: from an interior, hermetic-seeming artist to one who can unlock the nuance of her compositions in live ensemble settings. Which is why I wish In the Same Room—which does feature a couple redundancies, like a familiar “Feel You”—retooled more pre-­Loud City Song material. All but two songs are from her last two albums: “Betsy on the Roof” first appeared in similar albeit hazier form on 2010’s Live Recordings; and, more significantly, “So Lilies” returns from 2011’s Tragedy. In place of the album version’s field-recordings and interference, there’s pattering percussion and hesitant bits of melody. What would more of these predominantly electronic, in-the-box recordings sound like as band arrangements? With Holter’s restlessness to reprise, we may yet find out.

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

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

Experimental

Domino Documents

April 3, 2017

01caa473-3f2d-4aca-abb7-ecba295c307f

Sam Lefebvre

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

"Look, I don't know why, but George Wagoner is going to kick my ass today. Don't laugh, bitch ...

"Look, I don't know why, but George Wagoner is going to kick my ass today. Don't laugh, bitch ...

Beastie Boys: Licensed to Ill

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/607-licensed-to-ill/

Licensed to Ill

"Look, I don't know why, but George Wagoner is going to kick my ass today. Don't laugh, bitch, I'm serious! I never should have told that slut that skins were assholes." "Haha, you're dead, man." "Shut up, bitch, I'm telling you I can't wait for the bus because they know where I catch it. You have to try to get Mr. Davis to drive around to the side like he sometimes does for Chris. I'm gonna go out the back, from the cafeteria. And I already talked to Nick, but he just said he didn't know if he could do anything. Which, that doesn't even make any sense because I thought they were supposedly best friends." "Hey man, I think you're gonna get killed today. You know Tracy's sister?" "Yeah, fool, that's the one who I told about skins. That's what I was talking about." "Yeah, she's crafty and she's just Dom's type. Hahahaha!!!" "She is a crafty bitch." Poltergeists and Licensed to Ill: Some things only make sense to kids. Too many years removed from junior high, they tend only to reveal themselves in annoying bursts of violence, confusion and rhymes like Abe Vigoda. And it's not even because their appeal is particularly juvenile, but rather that they operate in a realm only comprehensible to the innocent; those untouched by the brutal reality of the real world, where everyday injustice skews our perception to the point that what might have been common sense to us as adolescents now seems mystifying. To little Carol Anne, Ad-Rock simply is another child. New York brats-cum-activists Beastie Boys have gone to great pains to explain the error of their 80s ways. This is not to say they've been apologetic, but only too keen to emphasize the arcs of their characters over the years. Licensed to Ill, like Cooky Puss and the underrated Rock Hard EP before it, were indeed both impressively ahead of their time, and rudimentary to the extreme. How a city that already had ESG felt it needed the Beastie Boys in the mid-80s is a question that confounds the ages; yet, Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D could hardly have predicted the slacker generation better if they'd tried (which they didn't). Chalk it up to NYC eclecticism, perhaps. Chalk it up to Run-DMC and Madonna, who helped showcase them to the most economically and culturally powerful generation of kids since the boomers. Chalk it up to Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin. And MTV. Most of all, remember that at their worst, these guys got thrown out of White Castle for being too loud. Licensed to Ill is given a lot of credit for predating the whole rap-rock thing of the 90s. Bad news for the Beasties: History appears to contradict that assessment. First of all, their cornball Cali cousins the Red Hot Chili Peppers had already graced the earth with two LPs prior to Ill, not to mention beating them to the 70s funk revival by working with George Clinton. Secondly, contrary to most rock writers' beliefs, white guys + guitars do not necessarily = rock. Had they released Ill even four years later, it would have been a novelty record. It's dated remarkably badly, while Rick Rubin's skill with the mixer (and drum machine) is entirely questionable. The rhymes... well... "I got franks and pork and beans/ Always bust the new routines." "Spent some bank, I got a high powered jumbo/ Rolled up a wooly and I watched Colombo." "I keep a pistol in my pocket so you better be cautious/ Fly around the world but it makes me nauseous." "Get ready/ 'Cause this ain't funny/ My name's Mike D and I'm about to get money." Okay, so it isn't the music or all the rhymes that translate beyond the scene of the crime. What, then? Probably just that the Beasties didn't give a fuck-- AND AMERICA DESPERATELY NEEDED TO BE SHOWN HOW NOT TO GIVE A FUCK. And it sort of still does. Licensed to Ill demonstrated that you could be "groundbreaking" and "important," and still have no goals beyond getting drunk before 6th period. Think about that. It meant that you could live life as one giant inside joke, speaking in tongues and making hilarious references to Chef Boyardee with no one outside your circle of jerks the wiser. Sorry ma, forgot to take out the trash, but that's okay because I drink Brass Monkey and I rock well. "What?" "Nothing." In light of this information, it almost seems pointless to recap the highlights. Does anyone really care that "Rhymin' and Stealin"" witnessed Rubin's genius for exposing the sample-ability of Led Zeppelin? No, because, "My pistol is loaded, I shot Betty Crocker/ Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones' locker" is awesome, and if you don't get it then what-the-fuck-ever. Does it matter that "Fight for Your Right" actually does kind of invent rap-rock? No, because everyone has their best porno mag, and these guys are just telling it like it is, and rap is the CNN of rock. Do you know what "I did it with my whiffleball bat" means? Has anyone ever even been to Brooklyn? Who in their right mind is sampling Creedence? Is "I should have probably guessed her gay" the best line ever, or is it when they brag about having more rhymes than Phyllis Diller? Despite its seeming defiance of respectable society, there is no shortage of folks who would canonize Licensed to Ill-- hence this new edition, replete with commemorative DVD. For Miller's sake, it's the Beastie Boys' worst record. (Even though we all secretly know it's their best.) Yet, there's something impressive about tapping into the secret language of the immature and terminally slack. All these years later, with every listen, it becomes clearer to me that you can never really outrun your inner idiot.

2004-04-15T01:00:03.000-04:00

2004-04-15T01:00:03.000-04:00

Rap / Rock

Def Jam

April 15, 2004

01cb0845-9e21-4fec-9265-649d2daa3c1f

Dominique Leone

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/

Finally, after a protracted and often chaotic rollout, the new Kanye West album is here. The Life of Pablo is the first Kanye West album that’s just an album: no major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. But a madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and the new record has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography.

Finally, after a protracted and often chaotic rollout, the new Kanye West album is here. The Life of Pablo is the first Kanye West album that’s just an album: no major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. But a madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and the new record has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography.

Kanye West: The Life of Pablo

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21542-the-life-of-pablo/

The Life of Pablo

Pablo Picasso and Kanye West share many qualities—impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses—but Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. Kanye, specifically, toasted them. The Life of Pablo’s namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of “which one?” set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for Kanye’s Blue Period (808s & Heartbreak), his Rose Period (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and his Crystal Period (Yeezus). If Kanye is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s final muse and the woman to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for his place in history. The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that’s just an album: no major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. It’s probably his first full-length that won’t activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. He’s changed the genre’s DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, he sees mirrors. “See, I invented Kanye, it wasn’t any Kanyes, and now I look and look around and there’s so many Kanyes,” he raps wryly on “I Love Kanye.” The message seems clear: He’s through creating new Kanyes, at least for now. He’s content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees. Kanye’s second child, Saint, was born in early December, and there’s something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. “Ultralight Beam” opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: “This is a God dream,” goes the refrain. But everything about the album’s presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late. Thankfully, he’s bringing a Kanye album, and Kanye albums make pretty goddamn good gifts. His devotion to the craft of album-making remains his greatest talent. Albums are his legacy, what he knows, deep down, will endure after the circus of attention he maintains around him subsides. His ability to package hundreds of stray threads into a whole that feels not just thrilling, but inevitable—at this, he is better than everyone, and he throws all of his best tricks into The Life of Pablo to remind us. He picks the right guests and gives them idealized settings, making people you don’t care about sound fantastic and people you do care about sound immortal. Chance the Rapper, a spiritual heir to backpack-and-a-Benz Kanye if there ever was one, is given the spotlight on the opener “Ultralight Beam,” and uses his dazed, happy verse to quote both “Otis” and the bonus track to Late Registration. His joy is palpable, and it's clear he has waited his entire adult life to be featured on a Kanye album. On the other hand, “Fade” pits Future knockoff Post Malone, of all people, against a sample of Chicago house legend Larry Heard’s “Mystery of Love” and a flip of Motown blues rock band Rare Earth’s “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and rigs the mix so that Malone, somehow, sounds more important than both of them. This moment is also a reminder of Kanye’s audacious touch with huge, immediately recognizable pieces of musical history—his best work as a producer has always drawn from iconic songs so venerated most sane people wouldn’t dare touch them, from "Gold Digger" to “Blood on the Leaves” and beyond. He doesn’t just sample these songs, he climbs in and joyrides them like the Maybach in the “Otis” video. On "Famous," he does it twice, first by matching up Nina Simone’s “Do What You Gotta Do” with Rihanna, who sings the song's hook before Nina does, and then with Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam,” which gets flipped so it sits atop a chorale-like chord progression. It sounds like a dancehall remix of Pachelbel’s Canon, and it’s the most joyful two minutes of music on the album. “Waves,” a song that made the tracklist at the last second at Chance the Rapper’s insistence, has a similar energy. You can hear why Chance, specifically, might’ve wanted it back: It is a throwback to the Rainbow Road maximalism of “We Major,” and it is so warmly redemptive it even makes Chris Brown, who sings the hook, sound momentarily benevolent. “Waves” is hardly the only last-second change made: The Kendrick Lamar collaboration “No More Parties in LA” is back on here, as is an inexplicable minute-long voicemail from imprisoned rapper Max B, granting Kanye permission to use his popular slang term “wavy.” Such last-second fidgets seem to say something about The Life of Pablo itself. After years of agonizing over how to follow up the conceptually triumphant 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, he seems to have settled upon eternal flux as a resting place, and the album plays like Kanye might still be remixing it furiously in your headphones while you listen. “Father Stretch My Hands” tosses a sample from Southside Chicago icon, activist, and one-time fraud convict Pastor T. L. Barrett into a gurgling trash compactor alongside some pigeon-cooed backing vocals and an entire undigested verse from another Future knockoff, Brooklyn upstart Desiigner. It’s the least-finished-sounding piece of music to ever feature on a Kanye album. This is the logical endpoint to the sort of obsessive perfectionism that led West to make 75 near-identical mix downs of “Stronger,” and in the song’s lyrics, Kanye admits that the same workaholism that made his father a distant figure in his childhood now keeps him from his family. On “FML,” he name-checks the antidepressant Lexapro on record for the second time in a year, and alludes to something that sounds an awful lot like a manic episode. The life of a creative visionary has dark undercurrents (“name me one genius who ain’t crazy,” Kanye demands on “Feedback”) and it’s possible that The Life of Pablo title serves as much private warning as boastful declaration. The album’s most humane moments come when he reaches for his family: “I just want to wake up with you in my eyes,” he pleads at the end of “Father Stretch My Hands.” On “FML,” a bleak song about resisting sexual temptation, he sings to Kim, “They don’t want to see me love you.” “Real Friends” reprises his “Welcome to Heartbreak” role as the unhappy outsider at his own family events, squirming through reunions and posing for pictures “before it’s back to business”; it’s maybe the saddest he’s ever sounded on record. Tuning into the humanity in Kanye’s music amid bursts of boorish static can be difficult, and the most prominent example of assholery on Pablo comes from the instantly infamous jab “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” which feels like a piece of bathroom graffiti made to purposefully reignite the most racially-charged rivalry in 21st-century pop. But there’s lots more where that came from, sneaking in behind the headline: “If I fuck this model/And she just bleached her asshole/And I get bleach on my T-shirt/I’ma feel like an asshole” is maybe the most unforgivably stupid thing Kanye West has ever rapped. And on the bonus track “30 Hours,” he takes a moment to sneer, “My ex said she gave me the best years of her life/I saw a recent picture of her, I guess she was right.” At moments like this, you sense the airlessness of super-celebrity closing in around him. Even when he was being loathsome, Kanye’s behavior always felt rooted in something messy and relatable. During the wild scrum of The Life of Pablo’s press cycle—when he tweeted “I own your child!!” at Wiz Khalifa in response to a minor misunderstanding, or his “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” tweet, for instance—there was a prevailing sense that Kanye had entered such a consequence-free zone that we can never truly relate to him anymore. Once upon a time, he was The Asshole Incarnate, the self-described “douchebag” that we couldn’t look away from. But there are moments here where he just sounds like another asshole. And yet, as it always does in Kanye’s essentially crowd-pleasing, deeply Christian music, the light wins out over the darkness. A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes. “It was my idea to have an open relationship, now a nigga mad,” he jokes on “30 Hours,” sending up his own masculine fragility. “I need every bad bitch up in Equinox/I need to know right now if you a freak or not,” he jokes on “Highlights.” And with The Life of Pablo, this humor isn’t just in the verses, it’s in the rollout, too. Somewhere between the record’s several title changes, it started to feel like Kanye had decided to turn his troubled-blockbuster-syndrome into performance art. “We still don’t have a title,” Kim Kardashian tweeted, days before the announced rollout. The day after he rented out Madison Square Garden so he could plug in his laptop, it was suddenly unclear, again, if the album was coming out at all; the mess was so profound that a tweet noting “young thug claimed on periscope that it’s coming out after snl tomorrow” suddenly seemed like solid intel. Chaos reigned, and as the twists and turns mounted, it was hard to keep from laughing helplessly. Around this point, the joke became clear: This whole thing—album cycles, first-week sales, release dates, the album-as-statement, the album itself—is ridiculous. The only other recent marquee star to allow something this messy to bear their name was Rihanna, whose Anti was released into the world last month in a similarly slipshod manner. Both stars are jewels in the late-period Roc-A-Fella dynasty, their careers forged in the dying embers of the old-school music industry where promotional campaigns were telegraphed months in advance, where singles and video rollouts were executed with airstrike precision, where release dates loomed like skyscrapers. In the ensuing industry free fall, Kanye and Rihanna have weathered every absurdity imaginable—platinum plaques handed out by Samsung, biometric suitcases carrying leakproof records, artist-owned streaming services that put up their records for a few minutes by accident. Watching the sea of confusion and despair on news feeds and timelines, you can almost hear them chuckling: None of this matters, because none of it is real. If there was a larger message behind all this impulsive last-second lurching and heaving, that was it. “We on an ultralight beam/This is a God dream” reads like an affirmation that we live in a world touched by divinity—but it could also mean the universe is a trick of the light, and we’re nothing but a figment in a higher being’s imagination. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is safe from revision, and nothing lasts: In one last rug pull, Kanye claimed that the “Pablo” of the title was neither Escobar nor Picasso, but St. Paul of Tarsus (“Pablo” in Spanish). The claim slots neatly with his assertion that The Life of Pablo is a “gospel album,” and on “Wolves,” he offers a resonant, lonely image: Kim and Kanye as Mary and Joseph, alone in the manger and surrounded by the void. “Cover Nori in lamb’s wool/We surrounded by/The fuckin’ wolves,” he raps. If Pablo is indeed St. Paul, Kanye might have a passage on his mind from 1 Corinthians 13:2: “If I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” CORRECTION: The original version of this review misinterpreted a lyric from “Highlights" as a reference to writer and comedian Bridget Phetasy; it has since been removed.

2016-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

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

February 15, 2016

01cbcf09-fd5b-4f42-9370-e1194bd81f29

Jayson Greene

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

After the more introspective tone of 2010’s Personal Life, Desperate Ground superficially evokes the Portland trio’s incendiary earlier work, speaking the same vocabulary as 2006’s high watermark, The Body, The Blood, The Machine.

After the more introspective tone of 2010’s Personal Life, Desperate Ground superficially evokes the Portland trio’s incendiary earlier work, speaking the same vocabulary as 2006’s high watermark, The Body, The Blood, The Machine.

The Thermals: Desperate Ground

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17876-the-thermals-desperate-ground/

Desperate Ground

Though the Thermals have often been described as a "political" punk rock band over the past decade, their latest album comes from an anti-apolitical standpoint, a less strident and specific version of protest music that reads more like common decency: not so much forged by considered opinions and intense debate as it is a natural byproduct of being sufficiently intelligent, informed, and idealistic. If you posted something on Facebook that admonished gun violence, war, or an impingement on civil rights, Desperate Ground would “like” it without leaving a comment. But it ultimately rings hollow here, as the Thermals still are trying to sound like insurrectionists while leaning so heavy on boilerplate sloganeering you’d think they were the ones running for public office. After the more introspective tone of 2010’s Personal Life, Desperate Ground superficially evokes the Portland trio’s incendiary earlier work, speaking the same vocabulary as 2006’s high watermark, The Body, The Blood, The Machine-- so much that at the outset it feels like a return to form more than a retreat. In fact, opener “Born To Kill” could just be The Body’s supernatural sermon “I Might Need You to Kill” told from a different perspective. The Thermals were never much for variety or innovation anyway, and the 10 servings of zippy pop-punk here are of nearly uniform length, tempo, topic, and structure. Even the relative curveballs amidst the missionary strumming of four-chord progressions-- like Hutch Harris straining for a high note in the chorus, just exceeding his range-- seem to pop up in nearly the exact same place. This classicist template is hard to fuck up, and the Thermals typically have good taste behind the boards: they might well be the only band who will ever be sympathetically produced by members of both Death Cab for Cutie and Fugazi, so the shift from John Congleton’s immaculate naturalism to 90s revivalist John Agnello (Male Bonding, Sonic Youth) should be a cinch. Yet Desperate Ground feels overproduced: The guitars are rendered toothless, in particular, the gutted distortion of “You Will Find Me”, which sounds ripped from a thrice-dubbed cassette. Harris remains a distinctive and effective singer-- his nasal bray can cut through just about any kind of sonic clutter-- and Desperate Ground never drags, the hooks as facile and forgettable as you might expect from songs with titles such as “You Will Be Free”, “You Will Find Me”, and “Our Love Survives”. Let a latter-day Mark Hoppus or Jim Adkins get a crack at these melodies and you’d have a perfectly enjoyable and gooey low-stakes pop-punk record. But Desperate Ground is a record that really wants to convey having something to say and Harris has run out of ways to say that something. Not long after “Born To Kill” sets the tone, Desperate Ground feels less like a sequel to The Body than a series of sequels to itself-- on “The Sunset”, Harris sings an executioner’s song, his remorse haunting him like his own shadow. On “Faces Stay With Me”, the same thing happens, only with faces instead of shadows. By the time “I Go Alone” situates itself between Whitesnake and Green Day, they’ve lost even the basic righteousness of sloganeering and you start to hear it as Thermals magnetic poetry with “blood,” “kill,” “war,” “road,” “sunset,” and “shadows” all popping up with alarming frequency. You could probably guess 75% of the lyrics from “The Sword By My Side” without even hearing it, and yes, they’re using a weapon as a metaphor for another weapon. In a way, the stultifying generality of Desperate Ground does lend it a perspective, though it’s the all-too-common affliction of seeing the same wars drag on and the same talking heads making the same points on the news and feeling utterly helpless. Perhaps the pileup of clichés and the numbed production is supposed to give Desperate Ground a meta context, that the endless body count has rendered Harris completely desensitized. But that’s a generous reading for an album that begins and ends with guns-blazin' mission statements with plenty in between, so it’s more likely Desperate Ground is a failure to respond to the horror rather than an intention to reflect it.

2013-04-16T02:00:02.000-04:00

2013-04-16T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Saddle Creek

April 16, 2013

01cd2272-4b30-46ed-bb7f-86a106ae503f

Ian Cohen

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

What a Time to Be Alive was allegedly born out of an impromptu, six-day recording session between Drake and Future, and the mixed results won't surprise anyone who has already noted the decided lack of chemistry between the two. There's been a Drake feature on every Future album, but none of them are particularly riveting, and on What a Time it's clearer than ever that they have difficulty sharing the same space.

What a Time to Be Alive was allegedly born out of an impromptu, six-day recording session between Drake and Future, and the mixed results won't surprise anyone who has already noted the decided lack of chemistry between the two. There's been a Drake feature on every Future album, but none of them are particularly riveting, and on What a Time it's clearer than ever that they have difficulty sharing the same space.

Drake / Future: What a Time to Be Alive

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21102-what-a-time-to-be-alive/

What a Time to Be Alive

Superstar team-ups almost always seem better in theory. History suggests they are nearly twice as likely to produce a resounding dud as a working piece of art, and yet the prospect never ceases to excite us. When rumors began to swirl weeks ago that Drake and Future might be releasing a joint project, the Internet went into a frenzy. Watch the Throne parallels were drawn, fake cover art circulated, and a website countdown appeared as if to wish it into existence. What a Time to Be Alive materialized on Sunday*,* and the mixed results won't surprise anyone who has already noted the decided lack of chemistry between these two. There's been a Drake feature on every Future album, but none of them are particularly riveting, and on What a Time it's clearer than ever that they have difficulty sharing the same space. Many tracks are just Future songs with Drake verses tagged on (Future gets almost double the airtime), and Drake often sounds out of his element. When Future gets rolling on songs like "Digital Dash" and "Live From the Gutter", Drake is a bystander. The tape was allegedly born out of an impromptu, six-day recording session, and too many moments on it feel like they were thrown together in that time span. Drake probably shouldn’t be on a song called "I’m the Plug", for example, and the hook on "Big Rings" is terribly bland and awkward. This wasn't created with the care or the dutiful curation we've come to expect from both artists when solo. But that spontaneity is kind of the point of What a Time to Be Alive. Unlike Watch the Throne, which was presented as a grand statement album from self-coronated heads of rap royalty, What a Time is a tag-on release, a one-off that intentionally exists in the shadows of its 2015 predecessors as a bonus disc. Designating it a tape seemingly alleviates the pressure to curate. Meanwhile, Drake’s cushy Apple deal allows him to disseminate it for retail via iTunes and premiere it exclusively on his OVO Sound show on Apple Music’s Beats 1 Radio. It’s a low risk, high reward proposition. Both artists offer slightly watered-down versions of themselves: Drake offers snarky responses to his recent ghostwriting allegations ("I might take Quentin to Follies," "The pen is working if you niggas need some ghostlines," etc.) and Future mentions internal struggles ("When you say you love a nigga do you really mean it?/ When I was sleepin' on the floor you shoulda seen how they treat me/ I pour the Actavis and pop pills so I can fight the demons," "I watched my broad give up on me like I'm average"). It’s an odd juxtaposition, especially with Drake returning to the stiff, pinched "yes, I wrote these, can’t you tell?" style of his circa-2010 hashtag rap bars, with some truly dire results ("You remind me of a quarterback/ That shit is all in the past", from "Digital Dash", needed a vigorous "no" from someone in the room). Even with Drake’s lazy punchlines, though, both he and Future are still great rap artists in their primes, and sometimes they figure things out just based on sheer talent. What the tape lacks in congruence, it makes up for in glimmering Metro Boomin production, and Drake throws Future the perfect alley-oop on "Scholarship" over his muffled synths. "Jumpman" is a certifiable banger. "Diamonds Dancing" is the first great Drake-Future collab that clicks on all cylinders. Of course, the brightest moments for both rappers come at the end of WATTBA when they are each allowed to work on their own and make music in their respective comfort zones—first Future on "Jersey", then Drake on the 40-produced "30 for 30 Freestyle", which showcases some of his best rapping in recent memory. It’s a disjointed but fitting end for a working relationship that’s still a work in progress.

2015-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Epic / Cash Money

September 23, 2015

01d11833-905c-44d6-88f1-9f69d0864347

Sheldon Pearce

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

The Opium affiliate’s new album is a creative breakthrough, flipping the script on Atlanta rap production and funneling his hedonistic tendencies into joyously unholy music.

The Opium affiliate’s new album is a creative breakthrough, flipping the script on Atlanta rap production and funneling his hedonistic tendencies into joyously unholy music.

Ken Carson: A Great Chaos

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ken-carson-a-great-chaos/

A Great Chaos

“Fuck,” Ken Carson mutters on “Jennifer’s Body,” as KP Beatz and Lucian’s cybernetic beat starts, stops, starts, stops, like a heaving spacecraft that just needs a good kick. (He said it’s a Green Day reference.) Strange, gleeful moments like this signal his considered approach to curating his new album, A Great Chaos, designed with restless attention to damage—on loop, it could soundtrack a never-ending moshpit. The beats are some of the hardest Ken’s ever rapped on, but A Great Chaos transcends via its details—in the folds of its rich, Atlantan production, in Ken’s vastly expanded arsenal of vocal stunts and inflections—fleshing out the world of an artist who previously hinted at this promise in fits and starts. Ken Carson is a lot of things: Playboi Carti protégé turned star in his own right, excellent beat selector, style and swag influence to lots of young people. Somehow, still, the last thing I’d call him is “a good rapper.” Infusing Future and Thug’s straight-line flows and restless chants—and almost none of their personality or writing—with the artificial cool of a Mentos, he tends to lapse into wallpaper rage rap, the kind his young fans will pay money to see live because Carti hasn’t dropped in almost three years. They can barely explain what they like about his music. Well, something shifted on A Great Chaos. Within the churn of these outrageous beats, Ken sounds alive, funneling his hedonistic tendencies into joyously unholy music. Just a couple minutes shorter than his last album, the limp X (which sounds even more lifeless now), Chaos feels brisker due to its more calculated sequencing. As in the past, production is handled collaboratively by a familiar cadre of artists: Dutch producers Starboy and Outtatown, Working on Dying’s F1LTHY, Lucian, Ssor.t, Lukrative of the collective Neilaworld, to name a few. Refreshingly, instead of copy-pasting rage beats or trying to chase after an abstract notion of punk, this album achieves some of its most monstrous moments by flipping the script on Atlanta rap for a new generation. Check the tumbling keys and organ glissando on the epic “Me N My Kup,” or how the descending, Lex Luger-esque snare roll on “Singapore” introduces an icy duet with Opium labelmate Destroy Lonely. That transitions into the thrillingly blown-out “Lose It” (which asks, What if Ken Carson dropped a late-2000s Gucci Mane tape?) and then into the bludgeoning “Hardcore,” where Ken pulls a WIZRD-era Future, repeating the same four words so that their shape and texture is pulled apart and reconfigured like clay. Like Carti’s marble-mouthed verse on UTOPIA standout “FEIN,” Ken opts for a radically blunt approach, both in the delivery and the vocals-up-front mix. He sounds totally fried in the best way over Clif Shayne and Lucian’s rolling beat for “Pots” (imagine a swarm of those robot spiders from Spy Kids 2). On “Succubus,” which cranks up its heaviest bass frequencies into a blinding fog, he numbly croaks and croons through a bender while obsessing about an ex. He still sometimes reverts to uninspired clunkers and basic, Opium-core angst. (How many times do we need to hear about an “emo bitch” who “slit her wrists”?) And don’t get me started on this unforgivable get it? moment in “Vampire Hour”: “Everywhere I go, I keep a letter after J/Don’t let that shit go over your head, I keep a K.” But cloaked in this album’s alluring packaging, a lot more of this strange, “bad” writing works because of how amped up everything is. Sometimes, he’ll do Wayne-like free association to land on future fan art: On the squelching “Nightcore 2,” he says he’s fly, then asks you to look up in the sky: “It’s not a plane, it’s not a bird/It’s X-Man, bitch, fuck what you heard!” It’s so dumb that you can’t help but crack a smile. At a Brooklyn listening party for A Great Chaos last week, Ken moped around stage, lost in his own music, while a crowd of mostly high schoolers thrashed around and belted songs that had already leaked. At one point, he brought out Destroy Lonely; at another, his boss Playboi Carti, white diamonds embedded in his face like a Hindu god. Phones were whipped out, but Carti didn’t say a word, quickly retreating stage left to his posse and ceding attention back to Ken. It was no “Dre passing the torch to Kendrick” moment—they’re too cool for that—but the exhilarating music, experienced in unison by the Opium crew, indicated this was a coronation. Rap since Whole Lotta Red, and since Yeat’s breakthrough records, has gotten brasher, bolder, more fiery. But Ken’s sound is now its own branch from that tree. The buzzing rapper OsamaSon, for example, seems to take influence from Ken’s sweltering production, meted-out flows, and flattened cadence. If Red is the Rosetta Stone for Rage 1.0, vast and colorful and dynamic, then A Great Chaos may well be the next crucial LP in this wave, capturing its own mind-numbing senselessness. It argues that maybe the doubters were just listening to Ken the wrong way. As for his longtime fans: This is the future those Rick-obsessed Opium disciples deserve: Something genuinely cool, risky, and relentless.

2023-10-19T00:03:00.000-04:00

2023-10-19T00:03:00.000-04:00

Rap

Opium / Interscope

October 19, 2023

01d13649-449d-42f1-a613-ec3db82de1b9

Mano Sundaresan

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

Everybody stand up. Come on, all of you. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you hold your ...

Everybody stand up. Come on, all of you. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you hold your ...

Billy Bragg / Wilco: Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/902-mermaid-avenue-vol-ii/

Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II

Everybody stand up. Come on, all of you. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you hold your hat to your heart and sing our national anthem. You're standing-- okay, probably not-- to salute an American folk hero: Woody Guthrie. Indisputably one of our best singer/songwriters ever, Guthrie was the voice for those who didn't have one: the abandoned poor and the hard-working middle class, the despondent and the dreamers. In fact, Woody Guthrie is so historically important that the Smithsonian currently has an exhibit about him, named after his most famous song, the anti-"God Bless America" number, "This Land Is Your Land". But as the existence of such an exhibit would suggest, Guthrie is a cultural icon only to older generations or the well-informed. The exhibit's video presentation shows how desperately the curators are trying to expose a new generation to his work. The video opens with Billy Bragg praising Guthrie as a "lyrical poet" who brought a personal edge to his socio-political songs. Then comes Billy Bragg & Wilco's version of "California Stars", culled from the first Mermaid Avenue album. Throughout the video, we also hear from Bono, Ani DiFranco, Corey Harris, Bob Dylan, and The Bruce (as in Springsteen). Of the twelve songs on the video soundtrack, only four are actually performed by Guthrie, including a repeat of "This Land Is Your Land". This attempt to contemporize Woody Guthrie began in the spring of 1995 when his daughter, Nora, approached British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg with over 2,000 sets of lyrics her father never put to music before dying of Huntington's Disease in 1967. She asked Bragg, a politically charged musician himself, if he would like to choose a handful of songs and put them to music. Naturally, Bragg accepted the honor, asking Wilco's Jeff Tweedy to collaborate with him (Tweedy's background in the alt-folk/country/rock group Uncle Tupelo made him a perfect candidate). The result was 1998's rightfully critically acclaimed Mermaid Avenue, named after Guthrie's street on Coney Island. Between the two of them, Billy Bragg and Wilco had twelve songs left over from the Mermaid Avenue sessions. So now, in 2000, they've decided to issue a second volume, only three songs of which were recorded since the original sessions. Perhaps this explains why the sound isn't much different this time around, and why the songs aren't on par with the previous album. Volume II is like an unnecessary b-sides compilation, and for the most part, there's a reason why these songs didn't make the cut the first time around. Since Guthrie's lyrics are just as exceptional on this album, ranging from the romantic to the playful to the political, one must look solely at the music for comparison. Unfortunately, nothing on this album is as beautiful as "California Stars", as saddening as "At My Window Sad and Lonely", or as touching as "Another Man's Done Gone." In some cases, the songs on Volume II are the embarrassing cousins of songs from the first album. As an album opener, "Airline to Heaven" gets the foot stomping just as well as "Walt Whitman's Niece", but you can't sing along to it. And in the battle of songs about cultural icons, the plodding "Joe DiMaggio Done It Again" makes "Ingrid Bergman" seem much more pleasant than it really is. What's more, the weak moments here are even less passable than they were on volume one. Nonetheless, the album does have its high points. Driven by an unvaried, chantey organ straight off Dylan's Time Out of Mind, "Hot Rod Hotel" is a haunting auto-biographical song about Guthrie's dreary jobs as a youth. On "My Flying Saucer" and "Secret of the Sea", Bragg and Wilco use lofty, wandering guitar notes to capture the fantasy in Guthrie's lyrics. On "All You Fascists", Bragg is accompanied by a driving guitar and raucous harmonica. When he belts out, "I'm gonna tell all you fascists you may be surprised/ The people in this world are getting organized/ You're bound to lose," he does so with an intensity that befits the lyrics. And on the final track, "Someday Some Morning Sometime", Tweedy's vocals are perfectly paced with Guthrie's lyricism. If it weren't for the first album, I might really enjoy Volume II, but as it is, I'm corrupted by the greater artistic success of its predecessor.

2000-06-30T01:00:06.000-04:00

2000-06-30T01:00:06.000-04:00

Rock

Elektra

June 30, 2000

01d1e12f-e684-41c2-b201-e103b509ef47

Pitchfork

The debut from the young East London rapper is a unique coming-of-age story that shapes the best of grime, Afrobeat, dancehall, and early ’00s hip-hop into a vibrant, wholly unique sound.

The debut from the young East London rapper is a unique coming-of-age story that shapes the best of grime, Afrobeat, dancehall, and early ’00s hip-hop into a vibrant, wholly unique sound.

J Hus: Common Sense

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23288-common-sense/

Common Sense

If you’re a rap fan, at some point this year, someone is going to recommend that you listen to J Hus, a 21-year-old from East London who raps with a gravity beyond his years. His music is boldly personal, and he’s a technically precise, adaptive vocalist. He can hit complicated patterns, pack color into his writing, and harmonize more effectively than artists with decades of experience. Enthusiastic coverage of J Hus has leaned heavily on his ability to blend a variety of musical styles—Afrobeat, dancehall, W. Bush-era hip-hop, tinges of grime—into a coherent, singular vision. His debut album, Common Sense folds all these influences into a world that is specific and engrossing. But there’s more than that: J Hus’ debut serves as a unique coming-of-age story, one that should resonate on both sides of the Atlantic. J Hus was born Momodou Jallow in London to a mother who had emigrated from Gambia in her 20s. When he was a child, Hus (for “hustle”) accompanied her to parties where he was introduced to music from Africa. (Jae5, the producer responsible for crafting and expanding J Hus’ sound, spent three years in his parents’ native Ghana, making for another important connection to the continent’s pop music.) The Afrobeat threads run through Common Sense, alongside grime’s menace (see “Clartin”), contemplative pianos (“Who You Are”), or the sheen of turn-of-the-century Roc-A-Fella (the title track). The shifting musical styles underscore Hus’ own versatility; he flits from a lilting sing-song to something more gruff and guttural easily and without hesitation. The production on Common Sense also pulls from a wide swath of source material, but J Hus himself is firmly rooted in hip-hop. J Hus has cited 50 Cent as a major influence, and on “Good Luck Chale” he channels mid-period Cam’Ron. Passages like “Who You Are”’s, “My pockets ain’t fat, they’re just big-boned/I sweet-talk my chicks on the flip phone/She wanna send me nudes, but ain’t no WhatsApp on a brick phone” would fit right in on a breakout mixtape from a New Yorker. The booming “Goodies” even recalls Notorious B.I.G.’s “Suicidal Thoughts,” the common denominator between the two artists being their comfort trafficking in Jamaican rhythms. As J Hus’ popularity exploded in London over the past two years, he also became a target for enemies both in and out of police uniforms. Early last year, he served five months in prison on a weapons charge; in the summer of 2015, he was stabbed multiple times and rushed to the hospital. From his bed, he posted a jarring photo to his Instagram, flashing what appears to be a gang sign while a doctor tends to an open wound on his leg. London police have banned J Hus from playing headlining show in the city, a fate familiar to rappers worldwide. Despite these roadblocks, he’s become one of the most promising rising stars in UK music. His album is alive with this tension between the larger-than-life, invulnerable character he sometimes embodies on wax and a thoughtful, sensitive adolescent. The elastic bounce of “Bouff Daddy” might as well be the theme for a superhero but “Closed Doors” hears J Hus, over a vintage trumpet line, deliver the kind of earnest, eager declarations everyone makes when they’re 18: “I’ma give it to you all, give you everything/And even take you where you never been.” “Like Your Style” is soaked in Ciroc, but he’s pouring it in wine glasses while he entertains girls from the local university. In many ways, this is an album about someone on the brink: of adulthood, of death, of fame and fortune. And so the musical diversity on Common Sense feels less like a formal exercise or a crash course in curatorial tastemaking, and more like the hyperactive, omnivorous brain of a 20-something who has a WiFi connection and a flat in one of the world’s biggest cities. What it reveals is someone of talent, ambition, and enough wit and self-awareness to keep that ambition grounded in reality. It’s an excellent debut from an artist on the cusp.

2017-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Black Butter

May 19, 2017

01d23b91-2e90-45bc-b739-0d2ab4def577

Paul A. Thompson

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

The Atlanta rapper’s third record is both wildly innovative and strikingly consistent. It’s hard, melodic, experimental, and unlike anything else happening in mainstream rap.

The Atlanta rapper’s third record is both wildly innovative and strikingly consistent. It’s hard, melodic, experimental, and unlike anything else happening in mainstream rap.

Playboi Carti: Whole Lotta Red

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/playboi-carti-whole-lotta-red/

Whole Lotta Red

Whole Lotta Red functions like a pressure cooker. Playboi Carti takes an endless supply of bright and serrated beats and packs them together, end on end, so that the album seems to careen wildly toward an unknown destination. Those beats are then populated by the 24-year-old’s most outré, expressive vocals yet, a string of barks, ad-libbed shards, and crooned melodies that compound the mania. The effect is to make Whole Lotta Red’s predecessor, 2018’s already intense Die Lit, sound nearly staid by comparison––and Carti’s slightly cloudy, self-titled debut from 2017 seem positively tranquilized. Despite his youth and his brisk release schedule, Carti’s cultish fanbase would have you believe that the periods between his records are long droughts, ones that can only be weathered with frenzied detective work. It is easy to find hours-long playlists of unreleased Carti songs, some ripped in 15-second increments from Instagram stories, others leaked by hangers-on or purchased from enterprising hackers. For an artist who already has an audience’s attention, snippets and half-finished leaks can be more effective than singles: Our brains correct for the compression of sound by imagining the fullest possible mix, and hearing the most interesting parts of a song—the bridge that everyone in the studio agrees is the best part, the opening four-bar run that justifies the track’s existence—suggests a more exciting finished product than the one that, in all likelihood, exists. Whole Lotta Red transposes that thrill of hearing an inspired work-in-progress and builds it out into a fully realized style. There is no imposed formality of structure or delivery that could stiffen Carti or bleed the life out of the demos; instead, there is “New Tank,” which seems to have a half-dozen chorus ideas that are dispensed in a single long take. Verses disintegrate into Gregorian chants; “D-R-A-C-O” is spelled out repeatedly as if Carti’s trying to win the world’s most heavily armed spelling bee; the middle of the absolutely skull-rattling “Stop Breathing” is built around a single, constant ad-lib sound. Even when songs do conform to more traditional arrangements, they arrive at them in unexpected ways. “Beno!” opens with an aside about Carti buying his sister a Jeep, a cute and specific image in step with the beat, which sounds like an iPhone ringing in heaven. It’s only halfway through the song that it becomes clear that aside—one of the least-produced vocal stretches on the album—will be repurposed and repeated as a chorus. At its best, Whole Lotta Red sounds like Carti’s voice memos have been laid over the most punishing production he could find. One of the signature elements of Carti’s style has been his so-called “baby voice,” a softer touch in a higher register. He has not completely excised it from Whole Lotta Red, but the album’s most arresting moments come when Carti is rasping, evidently on the verge of losing his breath. (WLR smartly opens with one of its most propulsive songs, where Carti’s voice sounds as if it’s already been strained by an hour-long performance.) Most impressive is the way Carti has merged his delivery with his pared-down writing style, like when he gets stuck on the line “When I go to sleep, I dream about murder,” delivered over and over in a threatening stage whisper. For an album with such an extensive list of producers and co-producers—there are 24 beats, and only two from longtime collaborator Pi’erre Bourne—WLR maintains a strikingly consistent palette of mostly electronic sounds. But those sounds are deployed in dizzyingly varied ways, from the white-hot punkish tracks near the beginning to the evolutions of early-2010s molly rap that pop up toward its end. (Sometimes there are literal echoes: KP Beatz and Jonah Abraham’s “No Sl33p,” which comes immediately after Juberlee and Roark Bailey’s “Slay3r,” might as well have been built around a hummed recollection of “Slay3r.”) There is sinister Atlanta rap scaffolding—Richie Souf’s “JumpOutTheHouse” sounds like something an agitated Gucci Mane might have jumped on in 2008—but also a refreshing sense of humor, and a looseness that allows the zaniest idea to occasionally win. On “Vamp Anthem,” when KP and Jasper Harris—I’m not sure how to say this—chop up Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” you can practically see Carti laying the vocals in a black cape and those plastic Halloween fangs. The core element of Whole Lotta Red is its hyperkinetic pacing, especially in its extended opening run. With the three-song set of “New N3on,” “Control,” and “Punk Monk,” the album transitions from its buzzsaw front half to the more exultant back, but also introduces minor problems of bloat and pacing: Each of these three songs has a better-executed analogue elsewhere on the tracklist, though “Monk” is redeemed in part by the industry intrigue it airs. And the trio of guest appearances (a phoned-in Future verse on “Teen X,” stock Kid Cudi on the texturally interesting but too-long “M3tamorphosis,” and executive producer Kanye West’s verse on “Go2DaMoon”) should all have been left on a hard drive somewhere. These are quibbles, mostly, but they add up—less for being outright failures on their own terms, and more for derailing the momentum that Carti otherwise so carefully creates. It’s one thing for a 24-song, hour-long album that had become an object of such intense speculation to deliver on its promise. That it does so while maintaining an aura of mystery around its creator is doubly impressive. In some ways, Carti’s public persona betrays his fixation on high fashion: the rapper as couture, something you can’t simply walk into a department store and see, touch, own. His work, or at least traces of it, seems ever-present, but the man himself is a bit of a ghost. By contrast, the songs on Whole Lotta Red are urgent, immediate. While they seldom trade in anything like autobiography, they cut close to the bone all the same. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

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

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

Rap

AWGE / Interscope

January 5, 2021

01d3d1a7-acfe-4271-ad0f-1c2242cd87c5

Paul A. Thompson

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

UK producer Stuart Howard's Brainfeeder debut offers sparkling pop deconstructed with avant-garde abandon.

UK producer Stuart Howard's Brainfeeder debut offers sparkling pop deconstructed with avant-garde abandon.

Lapalux: When You're Gone EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16329-when-youre-gone-ep/

When You're Gone EP

Brainfeeder kingpin Flying Lotus has a talent for stargazing. The label's ranks include jazz fusionists (Thundercat, Austin Peralta), psych-rap futurists (Samiyam, Teebs), and the endearingly inscrutable (Matthewdavid) existing together in dazzling constellation. But when Baths signed to Anticon, Brainfeeder lost their experimental pop artist, the kind of producer who could marry head-swiveling beats to ghostly vocals. Consider that niche filled. Lapalux, aka Stuart Howard, makes a similar type of sparkling deconstructed pop. He fits the Brainfeeder aesthetic perfectly, as he likes to envision his songs as aural paintings-- a visual tie-in obviously appealing to a synaesthete like FlyLo. Lapalux's snares first started snapping on his remix of Thundercat's "For Love I Come". Suddenly, a relatively straightforward love song turned fuzzy and discombobulated, as if the track had been put on small wheels and spun around a room until it was too dizzy to keep its parts in order. The Essex native's aesthetic has advanced on the When You're Gone EP. The tracks sound like amniotic imaginings of more accessible songs: all parts present but re-arranged with avant-garde abandon. The structure of "102 Hours of Introductions" is practically non-existent on first listen: gliding with faint keys and a wispy voice, as though Howard's setting up the listener for a massive drop. Instead, the beat is disarmingly light, softly swathed in a vocal that repeats ad infinitum: "I've been waiting so long. Give your love to me, baby." For a label that's made its name on galvanizing the spare parts of hip-hop, soldering them into novel formations, and blasting that formation into the stratosphere, When You're Gone is surprisingly needy. But that's the point of Brainfeeder: Expectations are expected to be upended. Lapalux's specialty is fusing the label's sense of meticulous beatcraft to tease out the meanings behind the sampled lyrics. "Moments" begins with a lyricist languidly confessing: "I keep moments of you trapped in film." As the song unfurls, the singer's utterings become swamped in sonic ooze, mirroring the song's theme. The effect is jarring, and at the song's conclusion, he cuts through the sentimentality, warping the moment that the singer once deeply treasured. But it's not all dark. The best songs, the bewitching single "Gutter Glitter" and stuttering disco workout "Yellow 90's", are lithe and light. The former starts with an elliptical loop but quickly skitters into a James Blake-like R&B track-- a voice hovering above buzzing bass and fluttering synths. Howard acts as a conductor here, demanding that specific sections express themselves with more volume. "Yellow 90's" seems the most traditionally ordered and even veers toward danceable. Yet once you're locked in the groove, the chair is removed and the song unravels. However, the song stays afloat, ending on a patch of gorgeous haze and a delirious lingering confusion. Howard's Brainfeeder debut shatters expectations, offering an always shifting balance of alien and familiar. It's not perfect. The closer, "Face Down, Eyes Shut", tries so hard to be enigmatic that it dissolves into nothing. But more often, When You're Gone reveals a stunning beauty within its small moments.

2012-02-29T01:00:04.000-05:00

2012-02-29T01:00:04.000-05:00

Electronic

Brainfeeder

February 29, 2012

01d511dd-d431-48db-93fa-778b904eab83

Jonah Bromwich

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

Based loosely on Ovid’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth, the Icelandic composer’s latest work reveals the grandeur of his music outside of scoring films.

Based loosely on Ovid’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth, the Icelandic composer’s latest work reveals the grandeur of his music outside of scoring films.

Jóhann Jóhannsson: Orphée

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22305-orphee/

Orphée

Orphée, the latest album by the Icelandic composer and filmmaker Jóhann Jóhannsson is billed as his first studio album in six years since the somber and excellent The Miners’ Hymns**. But during that time Jóhannsson has released eight records—three of which were scores to major films (including Sicario & The Theory of Everything) and the rest music for smaller film projects, one of which Jóhannsson directed himself. But with even The Miners’ Hymns itself serving as a score to a film, the particular criteria for which Jóhannsson deems a record to be a “studio album” as opposed to a “film score” is somewhat unclear. What is clear is that after years of albums on 4AD and small post-classical labels such as Fat Cat’s 130701, in moving to Deutsche Grammophon—the oldest and most significant classical music label left standing—Jóhannsson wants Orphée to be seen as a work of music propped up by nothing but itself and its own deserved grandeur. Loosely themed around Ovid's version of the Orpheus myth, Orphée’s grandeur is made clear within seconds. Using only a few repeated parts of piano, violin, and some crackling sound treatments, opener “Flight from the City” takes off. It feels like film music in a way that most of Orphée does not; you could easily imagine it playing over credits, or an opening scene, or in a mid-film montage. But the palette, tone, and structure of Orphée vary greatly and much of it embraces a compositional approach akin to ’90s chamber experimentalists the Rachel’s and others in the post-classical mold on 130701 or Erased Tapes. “A Song for Europa” features more of those crackling sound treatments as well as a recurring spectral vocal sample, while the stately “A Deal With Chaos” or “The Radiant City” would be at home on the Rachel’s Music for Egon Schiele. Apart from “Flight from the City,” the most unforgettable tracks on Orphée are where Jóhannsson adds more experimental textures, particularly in the penultimate diptych of “Good Morning, Midnight” and “Good Night, Day.” In a way, these two tracks play out the climax of the Orpheus myth: The former begins with dreamy slow-waltz strings and burbling sound effects that connote the gait of a person heading toward destiny unknown, before giving way to a close-mic'd solo piano piece that sounds like the ruminative thoughts of man by way of Satie-style impressionism. The latter, “Good Night, Day,” begins with repeated string warnings that plays as a realization of chased dreams lost, with a cello melody serving as an elegiac narrative counterpoint. On each, the blend of early 20th-century modalities and experimental recording approaches make them archetypal post-classical tracks. Boldest of all is Orphée’s a capella closer “Orphic Hymn,” which features a breathtaking choral vocal performance by Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices of text from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. Sung vocals are rarely found in Jóhannsson’s work, but the angelic arrangement makes you wish that he had found more opportunities to integrate vocals into the rest of the record. “Orphic Hymn” also brings Jóhannsson back full circle to British post-classical elder statesman Michael Nyman. The piece strongly recalls the longing of “Miserere” from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, a great example of how Nyman’s scores work as independent music woven into a film rather than applied to the surface of scenes. It’s exciting to hear the freedom of Jóhannsson’s compositions in autonomous music, and with Orphée he’s reasserted himself as not a just an elegiac film score guy. As good as his cinema work has been, the act of telling someone else’s story puts limits on both an artist’s freedom to work and the impact of how they might be received, and Jóhannsson likely isn’t looking to become known as “the Next Thomas Newman.” The voice he uses on Orphée says otherwise, and provides a clear blast attestation that Jóhannsson is among the brightest lights of any member of the loosely grouped post-classical genre.

2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Deutsche Grammophon

September 13, 2016

01d772f8-ed1b-4c45-bfd2-9912d6db7ffb

Benjamin Scheim

https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/

On her fifth album, Swift loses her naïveté. It’s her full turn into pop, a savvy move from a superstar thrust into the spotlight.

On her fifth album, Swift loses her naïveté. It’s her full turn into pop, a savvy move from a superstar thrust into the spotlight.

Taylor Swift: 1989

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-1989/

1989

If there’s one thing Taylor Swift wants you to know about her, it is that she once felt deeply uncool. Even as a superstar with best-selling albums, stadium tours, and high-profile friends, she said in 2014 that she had never felt “edgy, cool, or sexy.” Her first four albums hinge on that feeling, full of vivid, sprawling documents of failed romances that left her gasping for air, wondering how to be someone her lovers would miss. She was almost always the one who was in pain, the outsider, the underdog. That changed with 1989. Its predecessor, Red, was the pinnacle of diaristic specificity, an album that blew up the tiny intimate details of her romances into public eulogies. The media surrounding that album critiqued Swift as clingy, boy-obsessed, and vindictive. 1989 is in part Swift’s response to the negative, often sexist, press she’d received. On the album, Swift loses her naïveté, dons a sense of unfazed nonchalance, and learns to navigate a world that underappreciated her lyricism and shamed her for dating too many men. She has said that she would work in marketing if she didn’t work in music but, really, she has already been doing both simultaneously and spectacularly. For those who might openly cry while listening to Red, the first listen of 1989 stings of indifference. The album, named after the year she was born, treats heartbreak as if observing a painting on a wall, rather than a feeling she desperately needs to articulate. Grandiose memories of 2 a.m. fights and dancing in refrigerator light are replaced with glossy odes to big cities and weekend flings. Where liner notes of previous albums offered hyper-specific hints about each song’s subject, these tell the story of a generic on-again off-again romance. At the time, Swift temporarily disavowed dating to instead celebrate the power of female friendship and flaunt her celebrity “girl squad” with extravagant Fourth of July parties and a different guest appearance every night of her tour. Yet 1989 is the album that feels least like spending quality time with your best friends. Still, there’s an allure to 1989’s escapism. Now the dramas of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Fearless’ “Love Story”) or 1945 Americana (Red’s “Starlight”) come with lower stakes; her new fantasy world allows for broken hearts to be stored away safely in a drawer. The polished, propulsive synth-pop of album highlight “Style” showcases it best, with lyrics that celebrate a lustful relationship between people whose most revealing traits are that they would look good together on a movie poster. Is it about a real experience, or is it fiction? “Blank Space” weaponizes Swift’s newfound romantic skepticism: In the accompanying music video, an aristocratic romance deteriorates catastrophically, poisoned by her jealousy and need to control her partner. On Speak Now’s “Dear John,” she’d lamented being added to a lover’s “long list of traitors who don’t understand.” Here, she proudly flaunts her own “long list of ex-lovers” who think she’s crazy, adding the sound of a clicking pen to heighten the gleeful melodrama. She looks at the camera almost as much as she does her lover, warning us that she knows what we think of her and she doesn’t care. Though Swift’s interest in pop was evident on songs like Red’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” and Speak Now’s “Better Than Revenge,” 1989 was the first time an entire Swift album could exist as party music without slow-burning heartache. These were still love songs, so Swift’s familiar themes peak through—dismissal of doubters, pleas to remember a romance favorably after it ends, and heavy use of one of her favorite words, “forever.” Still, the glitzy sound and ethos provided an entry point for new listeners and a chance for old ones to come up for air, to recognize that everything doesn’t always have to be so serious. It can be just as freeing to shrug in the face of heartache as it is to spell out exactly why and how you were hurt. “New Romantics,” a surging, euphoric song from the deluxe version of the album that was released as a final single, does this particularly well. Swift’s voice is processed and couched in thrilling yelps and sighs, crunchy synth, and galloping drums. After a certain amount of pain, sometimes your best defense is to channel the burning energy of your big hopes and desires into a night of uninhibited hedonism. On Speak Now’s “Mean,” Swift told a critic that one day she would be “living in a big ol’ city,” while he’d never be anything but a washed-up hater. On 1989’s opener “Welcome to New York,” she makes good on that promise. She was already famous when she wrote “Mean,” of course, but now she sounded like she was “big enough so you can’t hit me.” The big ol’ city was imaginary; but on 1989, Swift writes and inhabits a fully-realized fantasy of self-reliance, confidence, and ensuing pleasure. Her music was no longer just a diary entry. You can almost hear her winking on every track.

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

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

Pop/R&B

Big Machine

August 19, 2019

01d7964f-28f0-43b6-819f-c8004de967dc

Vrinda Jagota

https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/

On his latest, “Uptown Funk” vocalist and animatronic sequined suit Bruno Mars compresses all of his various personae into one: The retro song-and-dance man who happens to be really, really horny.

On his latest, “Uptown Funk” vocalist and animatronic sequined suit Bruno Mars compresses all of his various personae into one: The retro song-and-dance man who happens to be really, really horny.

Bruno Mars: 24K Magic

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22634-24k-magic/

24K Magic

It’s good to remember the improbable things in life. For example: “Uptown Funk” vocalist and animatronic sequined suit Bruno Mars once sang the words “loungin’ on the couch just chillin’ in my Snuggie.” Every part of it is retroactively bizarre: the idea that Mars, the hardest-working embodiment of the “hardest-working man in showbiz” cliche, once attached himself to something called “The Lazy Song”; that he once aligned himself with flash-in-the-pan acoustic bros like Travie McCoy; or, more broadly, that he used to make pop in the 2010s that sounded like the 2010s. Much has been made of Mars’ childhood stint as an Elvis impersonator, with reason. The same talent that allowed a squeaky 4-year-old to channel, uncannily, the King’s gruff bark and distant whiff of scandal is the talent that allows Mars to inhabit whatever he wants. He’s as convincing a cheeky horndog (early hits with his production group the Smeezingtons include Flo Rida’s cheesy-sleazy hit “Right Round” and Mike Posner’s dubiously conceived “Bow Chicka Wow Wow”) as he is a worshipful loverman (the chaste stretch from “Nothin’ on You” through “Grenade”); he's as eager an omnivorous music fan (the Unorthodox Jukebox era remade Billy Joel and the Police as faithfully as any R&B or funk referents) as the comparatively laser-focused revivalist of 24K Magic. Also improbable: that “Uptown Funk,” still inescapable at weddings and stadiums near you, still has life in it, let alone an album’s worth. The title track to 24K Magic is all but an explicit retread: YSL swapped out for designer minks, Chucks for Inglewood’s finest shoes, corny “dragon wanna retire, man” line for corny line about red getting the blues, “Oops Upside Your Head” biting swapped out for only slightly less lawsuit-prone Zapp voiceover vocoders. What it lacks in a hook it makes up for (almost) with vibe, and more importantly, earnestness. 24K Magic, the album, sticks to the same well-trod path. It often comes off as a one-man recreation of Mark Ronson’s similarly retro-fetishist Uptown Special—Ronson himself was tapped early on as a potential collaborator—with one key difference: all roles here are filled by Mars. Aside from a couple guest production jobs by former collaborators Jeff Bhasker and Emile Haynie, the album is largely produced by Shampoo Press & Curl—a mildly reorganized incarnation of the Smeezingtons. And as Mars boasted in pre-album press, there are no features. The idea is that he needs no features. He’s become practically all things to all people—he has enough session-wonk credibility to appeal to the Grammy-voting industry types who’ve adopted Mars as a standard-bearer for Real Musicianship; he has enough pop and R&B cred to keep the radio listeners around; enough showmanship to pull off a Super Bowl halftime performance while barely into his career; enough wedding-reception goofiness to ingratiate himself to anyone left over. The line between lovingly recreating the music of the past and cynically 3D-printing it for easy profit is fine and much fretted-over, sometimes at book length. And indeed, 24K Magic aims to recreate a time and a vibe much of its personnel weren’t even around for. (Said producer and Mars collaborator Brody Brown of a side project that sounds suspiciously 24K Magic-adjacent: “It’s going to make you feel like 1985—even though I wasn’t born until 1989.”) But in a self-conscious Vegas-revival way, 24K Magic pulls it off. It helps that it compresses all Mars’ personae into one. Go back to Smeezingtons cowrite “Fuck You” and you’ll find a blueprint: a retro-obsessed guy who makes songs your great-uncle recognizes, that also happens to be really, really horny. It helps that the album is barely over 30 minutes and meticulously sequenced, and it also helps that Mars is a notorious perfectionist (in a Rolling Stone interview earlier this year, he bragged about the dozens of versions of these tracks that got scrapped because the vibe wasn't right; routine studio business, to be sure, but Mars evidently takes it more seriously than most). It helps that the past couple years have gradually whetted pop audiences’ appetite for sounds that might have once been considered too chintzy for top 40. “Perm” may be yet another attempt to revive James Brown, but while it isn’t quite as convincing as Mystikal’s would-be resurrection on Uptown Special, it does gives us the deliberate anachronism of a James Brown song with the line “forget your Instagram and your Twitter.” “That’s What I Like” is a song about opulence that sounds it—it’s sort of like what The 20/20 Experience thought it was—while “Versace on the Floor” and “Too Good to Say Goodbye” are as faithful recreations of mid-’90s R&B as you’ll find outside the decade, from the roller-rink synths of the former to the latter’s slow-dance power balladry (albeit one that, if it actually came out then, would mostly recall Luther doing “Superstar”). But most of all, it helps that Mars is a consummate performer; this kind of showmanship is  much more convincing, and coherent, from one showman than from one dilettante producer. If “Uptown Funk” was the theme-park version of one sliver of funk, 24K Magic is the rest of the park: rebuilt shinier and glitzier and safer, every element engineered to please more than the real thing, and with a hell of a tour guide. It’s not history, not even historical fiction, but harmless fun.

2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Atlantic

December 2, 2016

01d91f2f-bd63-4cd6-9938-fa9baa024b92

Katherine St. Asaph

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

The Australian electronic-music producer and streaming behemoth signals a shift in his approach with a surprise mixtape featuring appearances from JPEGMAFIA and SOPHIE.

The Australian electronic-music producer and streaming behemoth signals a shift in his approach with a surprise mixtape featuring appearances from JPEGMAFIA and SOPHIE.

Flume: Hi This Is Flume

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flume-hi-this-is-flume/

Hi This Is Flume

In a “visualizer” accompanying his career-high mixtape Hi This Is Flume, the Australian electronic producer drives a car decorated in kaleidoscopic metal panels, like something that the pastel-obsessed pop artist Bridget Riley might create for MTV’s “Pimp My Ride.” When the vehicle needs refueling, he cracks open a can of La Croix and dumps it into the gas tank. The appearance of the mildly flavored, urbanite-favored seltzer here is clearly meant to be at least partly tongue in cheek. But there’s something fitting about it, too: Of course Flume would drink La Croix. Despite his work with inventive artists like Vince Staples and Lorde (and a Grammy to his name), Harley Streten’s music as Flume has often felt like bait for audiences who have moved on from the soft-focus EDM of the influential YouTube channel Majestic Casual but still prefer to keep their listening lite. His mega-popular pillowy bangers are engineered for broad appeal, often possessing the “soft, emo-y, cutesy” simplicity that one streaming-first producer, speaking anonymously to Liz Pelly in The Baffler, recognized as playlisting catnip. Hi This Is Flume is set up to self-consciously dismantle the view of Streten as making music optimized for the algorithm. The mixtape’s title has a pointed sense of re-introduction, like the pop superstar who indicates, with a self-titled album years into an established career, that she is pushing the reset button. One song, the bright, chime-strewn “Ecdysis,” is even named after the process of a snake shedding its epidermis. (Streten’s previous full-length was titled Skin, geddit?) Underscoring this message is Hi This Is Flume’s opening title track, a spoken-word novelty which parodies streaming platform commercials. “Tap the artwork to listen and save to your own music collection,” Streten says with satirical faux-buoyancy. Then he screams. Hi This Is Flume is, both philosophically and sonically, an inflection point. Seventeen cohesive tracks nudge the needle on Streten’s sound, with frequent jump cuts from dismantled clubby beats to pogo-inducing drops and thick bass, while generally keeping his gifts for emotive melodies in the foreground. The bulk of the mixtape’s tracks circle the two-minute mark, giving the sense of a sketched roadmap to a new outlook (Streten has already promised “more music to come”). “Dreamtime,” a vortex of white noise with feathery vocal effects, could soundtrack a Coachella documentary filmed by David Lynch, while the synths of “Jewel” take on an uncanny vocaloid quality, a little like the melodic manipulations of Battles’ “Atlas.” At other times, a certain scrappiness would be welcome: less airtight momentum, more negative space. “Wormhole,” for all its Call of Duty lock-and-load effects, never quite feels sinister, and the siren-like textures of “Daze 22.00” aren’t as trippy as the title promises. Hi This Is Flume’s fragment-like moments might take on more dynamic and emotive tension if Streten allowed himself more complex arrangements, or track lengths with more room to maneuver. In her review of Flume’s Skin, Stacey Anderson noted a “mathematical quality” in the way Streten treated the vocals of his guest singers, most of them women. Happily, Hi This Is Flume snuffs out that habit, adopting a more sparing and even-handed approach to collaboration. Just four songs feature guest vocalists, and one of those is a remix. The SOPHIE co-production “Voices” is a Gregorian-chant-led melodrama, reminiscent in part of Fatima Al Qadiri’s experiments with religious music, with a yearning Kučka hook that’s shredded and slapped with latex. SOPHIE’s idiosyncratic style seems to have had a more holistic effect on Hi This Is Flume, too—and not just in Flume and San Francisco producer Eprom’s superfluously amped-up “Is It Cold in the Water?” remix. The stepped-on balloon squeaks and soda-can hiss of “Amber” also call to mind SOPHIE’s earliest music, offering further evidence of Streten’s ear turning toward pop’s relative fringes. Speaking to Zane Lowe last year, Streten detailed his technique when working with rappers, one that involved overhauling the beat after they lay down their verses “so the whole piece of music fits the vocal like a glove.” He hasn’t always made good on that, given previous disjointed tracks with Vic Mensa and Pusha T. Refreshingly, Hi This Is Flume’s two collaborations in this vein, both highlights, flow much more naturally. “High Beams,” a co-production with Perth-born HWLS, pairs Slowthai’s livestreamed-from-hell punchlines with thudding bass and jostling clusters of synths. And the hydraulic bounce of “How to Build a Relationship” ricochets from menacing low end to ray-gun zaps around JPEGMAFIA’s riotous quotables. Many artists have an anecdote that they are forced to regurgitate in every interview. For Streten, it’s the story of how he started making music after downloading a “gimmicky,” loop-based music program from a giveaway in a Nutri-Grain cereal box. “The whole concept of how music was laid out in layers [...] but came out as one piece of music was really intriguing for me,” he has said. The most vivid takeaway from Hi This Is Flume is how he breaks apart his now-familiar sound, zooming in on the different layers and looking at them in new ways. He has taken his music a long way from the safety of the cereal box. It will be fascinating to see how far he is willing to push it.

2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Future Classic

March 26, 2019

01da3549-ae1e-40e9-a3c1-b2ce32056042

Owen Myers

https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/

The long-awaited debut from this hotly tipped South London rapper fails to meet its astronomical expectations but shows glimmers of real brilliance.

The long-awaited debut from this hotly tipped South London rapper fails to meet its astronomical expectations but shows glimmers of real brilliance.

FLOHIO: No Panic No Pain

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flohio-no-panic-no-pain/

No Panic No Pain

A week before Flohio’s debut mixtape was due for release, the south London rapper was having second thoughts about the title. Unveiled, as it was originally to be known, didn’t feel right. No Panic No Pain, a lyric from the title track, was a better fit, Flohio said, for “a challenging time like this where I feel a little vulnerable.” There’s little sign of this vulnerability on the retitled tape: its 10 mostly brief tracks are cool and aloof, and the sound is more concrete façade than open-armed embrace. Opener “FLOFLO!” begins with Flohio, real name Funmi Ohiosumah, making awkward apologies over the phone for not being more emotionally available—before withdrawing abruptly into her own stresses: “All I know is madness,” she raps tensely, trailing off. Flohio’s journey to this point has been one studded with acclaim. She first turned heads four years ago with a bouncy homage to her hood in “SE16”; fashion mag Dazed named her in its zeitgeisty Dazed100 list a year later. A steady drip of arresting singles led to 2018’s four-track Wild Yout EP and saw her lumped in with a loose grouping of alt-rappers that included the likes of Denzel Curry, slowthai, and Kojey Radical. She covered magazines and was picked out by supermodel Naomi Campbell as one of “10 Rising Female Stars Reimagining Our Future” for a piece of Vogue brandvertorial. The BBC named her in its influential ‘Sound of...’ list for 2019. The belated arrival and pressure of outsize expectations on this debut full-length release might explain Flohio’s last-minute jitters. The result doesn’t quite live up to the hype (it’s difficult to imagine what could), but still offers moments that confirm why everyone has been so excited about this 28-year-old rapper. If you haven’t been to Flohio’s backyard of Bermondsey in south London—with its brick-built factories, warehouses, and disused wharves—then listening to No Panic No Pain is a good way to visit. The beats tend towards distorted kicks, metallic snares, and industrial synths. Flohio’s go-to flow is one that’s clipped and staccato, all straight edges. It’s a sometimes exhausting pairing that contracts and flattens song structures. “Booby Traps” feels stiff and fails to generate much forward momentum from a chanted call to arms; “Flash” gets halfway to a catchy chorus before shrinking back into verses that are difficult to decipher. Touches of US rap gloss offer some relief: on the Take a Daytrip-produced “Unveiled,” Flohio adds a silky sheen to her snippy flow that, contrasted with the natural grit in her voice, sounds vivid and bright. In the past she’s identified Lil Wayne as an influence, and this comes through as a playful lilt in her voice over the flexy swing of “Sweet Flaws”; on “Stuck In A Dance,” she elongates rounded vowels and floats from kick to snapping rimshot with gripping effect. These are real glimmers of brilliance; but No Panic No Pain would be more memorable if it had more of them. Beyond that, it’s hard to identify exactly what’s missing. The appearance of a picked guitar on “Medicine” draws Flohio into sensitive introspection and a looser flow that adds some balance to the mixtape’s otherwise relentless pummel. The melancholy of “Roundtown” (with its chorus of “I’ve been around town, for a second going ham now/See me rolling tryna get my balance right”) puts the brakes on somewhat, but still struggles under its oppressive delivery. Despite its short runtime, No Panic No Pain can sometimes feel like an endurance test, more marathon wall than victory lap. People tend to encounter panic and pain—unpleasant though they are—when the body needs them most. They’re best experienced in small doses. Sadly, it’s hard not to feel the same way about this mixtape. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

AlphaTone

November 30, 2020

01da812e-b02b-4ba8-abdd-7dd91c183512

Will Pritchard

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

Though it has perhaps slipped in estimation since its initial issue, the 1967 release that defined the LP format still packs surprises.

Though it has perhaps slipped in estimation since its initial issue, the 1967 release that defined the LP format still packs surprises.

The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13435-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band/

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Finally free of touring, the Beatles next sought to be free of themselves, hitting on the rather daft concept of recording as an alias band. The idea held for all of two songs, one coda, and one album sleeve, but was retained as the central organizing and marketing feature of the band’s 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hailed on its release as proof that popular music could be as rich an artistic pursuit as more high-minded media such as jazz and classical, the record’s reputation and sense of ambition ushered in the album era. Its influence was so pervasive and so instructional regarding the way music is crafted and sold to the public that this is still the predominant means of organizing, distributing, and promoting new music four decades later, well after the decline of physical media. The concept, of course, is that the record was to be recorded by the titular fictional band, a washed-up rock’n’roll group on the comeback trail. (This was actually the second concept earmarked for the Beatles’ next LP; the original, a record of songs about Liverpool, was abandoned when its first two tracks were needed for the group’s next single, “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane.”) Probably for the best, little of the fictional-band vision for the record made it through; what did last from that conceit are a few tangential ideas—a satirical bent on popular entertainment and a curiosity with nostalgia and the past. The record opens with a phony live performance by the Lonely Hearts Band, a sort of Vegas act—the sort of thing that, in 1963, people thought the almost certainly soon-to-be-passé Beatles would be doing themselves in 1967. Instead, the Beatles had completed their shattering of the rules of light entertainment, even halting their own live performances, which they’d never again do together for a paid audience. Even as they mocked this old version of a performing band, ironically Sgt. Pepper’s and its ambitions helped to codify the rock band as artists rather than popular entertainers. In the hands of their followers, the notion of a pop group as a compact, independent entity, responsible for writing, arranging, and performing its own material would be manifested in the opposite way—rather than holing up in the studio and focusing on records, bands were meant to prove in the flesh they could “bring it” live. Notions of authenticity and transparency would become valued over studio output. (To be fair, upstart bands had to gig in order to get attention and a reputation, while the Beatles, of course, could write, break, and rewrite their own rules; they had the luxury and freedom to take advantage of a changing entertainment world and could experiment with different, emerging models of how to function as a rock band in much the same way that Trent Reznor or Radiohead can today.) The freedom from live performance didn’t necessitate that Beatles songs now sounded practiced or rehearsed, and indeed they weren’t. Instead, they were studio creations assembled in sections and pieces. As the band splintered, this practice would spill over into releasing song sketches on the White Album and inspire, in part through necessity, the lengthy song cycle at the close of Abbey Road. On Sgt. Pepper’s, the most rewarding manifestation of this shift was the record’s most forward-looking piece, “A Day in the Life.” Complex in construction and epic in feel, “A Day in the Life” nevertheless seems enveloping and breezy to listeners. Indeed, the sustained, closing ringing chord of the song comes a mere 4:20 into the track. “A Day”’s only best-in-show competitor was McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home.” (As on Revolver, the peaks here were a mold-breaking closer and classically inspired story-song.) “A Day in the Life” has only grown in estimation, rightfully becoming one of the most acclaimed Beatles tracks. “She’s Leaving Home,” by contrast, has slid from view—perhaps too maudlin to work on classic rock radio and too MOR for hipster embrace, it was nevertheless the other headline track on Sgt. Pepper’s when it was released. The story of a runaway teen, it misses as a defiant generational statement in part because it's actually sympathetic to the parents in the song. In the second verse, McCartney defies expectations by not following the young girl on her adventure but keeping the track set in the home as her parents wake to find her goodbye letter. In the end, we learn “She” left home for “fun”—a rather churlish reason, and when paired with McCartney’s simplistic sentiments in “When I’m 64” (the aging couple there will be happy to “scrimp and save”), the young girl seems more selfish than trapped. In fact, for a group whose every move was a generational wedge, and for such a modern record, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s is oddly conservative in places: “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” takes inspiration from a Victorian-era carnival; “When I’m 64” is a music-hall parody that fantasizes about what it would be like to be the Beatles’ grandparents’ age; “Fixing a Hole” has a rather mundane domestic setting; the fantasy girl in “Lovely Rita” is a cop. Lyrically, it's an atypical way to usher in the Summer of Love, but musically, the record is wildly inventive, built on double-tracking, tape effects, and studio technology. The dream-like haze of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the fairground, sawdust feel of “Mr. Kite,” and the cavalcade of sound effects at the end of “Good Morning Good Morning” were the most demonstrative sounds on the record, but otherwise benign passages were also steeped in innovation, whether recording from the inside of a brass instrument or plugging instruments directly into the sound board instead of capturing them through mics. Almost everything done on Sgt. Pepper’s turned out to be new and forward-thinking, from the iconic record sleeve to the totemic ending to “A Day in the Life.” There are very few moments in pop music history in which you can mark a clear before and after, in which almost everything changed. In the UK, it’s arguably happened only five times, and on just four instances in the U.S. (Thriller here; acid house and punk there, and Elvis everywhere, of course); in both nations, the Beatles launched two of those moments. In retrospect, it almost seems like this time the band itself was taken aback by its own accomplishments, not only shying from directly living up to Revolver via the smoke and mirrors of the Lonely Hearts Club Band but then never again throwing themselves into their work as a collective unit. Sgt. Pepper’s, possibly as a corrective to the hushed tones with which it’s been received for decades, has slipped in estimation behind a few of the band’s other records, but it’s easy to hear how it achieved that reputation in the first place. Even if John, Paul, George, and Ringo would arguably go on to best a handful of its moments, the amazing stretch of music created in 1966-67 was the peak of the Beatles as a working band. [Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]

2009-09-09T02:00:02.000-04:00

2009-09-09T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Apple / EMI

September 9, 2009

01dfaed6-9d14-4d9f-b81e-744041cf1699

Scott Plagenhoef

https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/

The songs on Florence and the Machine's third LP aren't just about heartbreak, they're songs about total and utter eclipses of the heart. What really binds How Big together, though, is Welch's exceptional sense for melody. No matter how tormented these songs get, they let her show off with grand, arching vocal lines.

The songs on Florence and the Machine's third LP aren't just about heartbreak, they're songs about total and utter eclipses of the heart. What really binds How Big together, though, is Welch's exceptional sense for melody. No matter how tormented these songs get, they let her show off with grand, arching vocal lines.

Florence and the Machine: How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20605-how-big-how-blue-how-beautiful/

How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

Florence Welch has built her career on the premise that she feels things more painfully and powerfully than anybody else. Accordingly, her band's third studio album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is one long Ophelia mad scene, a breakup record from the point of view of someone who is absolutely convinced that her breakup is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to anyone. She makes a pretty good case for that, to be fair. "What was it that I said?/ I can't help but pull the earth around me to make my bed," she cries in "Ship to Wreck", which goes from sleeping pills to great white sharks in its first two lines. Welch has quoted producer Markus Dravs as telling her that she's "not allowed to write any more songs about water," although she appears to have dodged that dictum at every opportunity. These aren't just songs about heartbreak; they're songs about total and utter eclipses of the heart. "Delilah", for instance, concerns the epic psychic carnage involved in waiting for a phone call from a boyfriend, and yes, that's Delilah as in Samson. (Several songs later, she's "thrashing on the line," this time as a fish.) Over the course of the album, she also invokes (or casts herself as) Persephone, Lot's wife, the Virgin Mary, Daphne, Jonah, and St. Jude—both the saint and the European storm, alluded to in both senses in two different songs. Over "Queen of Peace"'s stomps and choir and horns, she imagines herself "dissolving like the setting sun/ Like a boat into oblivion/' CAUSE YOU'RE DRIVING ME AWAAAAAAY!" (See? Aquatic lyrics again.) It takes an alarming seriousness of purpose to pull this stuff off—the campy playfulness of Florence and the Machine's 2009 debut single "Kiss With a Fist" wouldn't do. The obvious presence lurking near Welch's current songwriting is Adele, whose "Rolling in the Deep" she has to wish she'd thought of first, but the other source of inspiration floating nearby is PJ Harvey, specifically the PJ Harvey of To Bring You My Love. (As with Harvey, there's a lot of gender-flipping in Welch's lyrics: "Mother" would be very obviously a gospel song if it were called "Father".) Welch's voice trembles and groans until she hauls herself up to the parts of her songs that she can belt out with desperate, bleating vibrato. And the arrangements on How Big are this big: lush and ornate, tinkering with their details every few seconds, cresting and crashing and cresting and cresting some more. The title track's orchestral coda is worthy of Trevor Horn's wildest fantasies. What really binds How Big together, though, is Welch's exceptional sense for melody. No matter how tormented these songs get, they let her show off with grand, arching vocal lines, leaping deftly across her registers. (There are going to be a lot of disappointed karaoke singers signing up for "What Kind of Man" or "Delilah", then discovering that their range is nowhere near Welch's.) This is a huge, sturdy record, built for arenas—the band is among the headliners at this year's Bonnaroo, Roskilde, Lollapalooza and Governors Ball—and it's richly and carefully enough constructed to endure the extensive exposure Welch's heartache is going to get over the course of this summer.

2015-06-02T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-06-02T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Island

June 2, 2015

01e13122-c1c5-4ac2-a90d-f9e106cf9540

Douglas Wolk

https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/

Kieran Hebden’s pursuit of new sounds has found him digging into his own catalog. New Energy is a wide-ranging album that connects the warmth of his early work to his latest club experiments.

Kieran Hebden’s pursuit of new sounds has found him digging into his own catalog. New Energy is a wide-ranging album that connects the warmth of his early work to his latest club experiments.

Four Tet: New Energy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/four-tet-new-energy/

New Energy

Nearing 20 years as an ambassador between indie rock and dance music, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden has winnowed down the parts that clutter up music-making itself: He declines most interviews and still trots out the same publicity photo that accompanied his 2003 breakout Rounds. But after 2009’s sumptuous There Is Love in You, he took the reins himself, releasing a flurry of albums, experiments, collaborations, and singles on his own, and now keeps up a healthy social network presence on Twitter, Snapchat, and Soundcloud. With his legacy as one of the 21st-century’s finest electronic musicians all but assured, Hebden has become more of a populist, making few distinctions between working with Burial or Skrillex, Terror Danjah or Rihanna. His restless forward momentum and pursuit of new sounds make every Four Tet album distinct from its predecessor. But with Four Tet’s ninth album, New Energy, Hebden does something unexpected: He revisits previous sounds. There’s the low-key warmth of 2003’s Rounds, the free jazz at the heart of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, the friendly thump of 2012’s Pink, the sprawl of 2015’s Morning/Evening. Downtempo nodders, beatless passages that flow into big bangers—he synthesizes all this into his most accessible listen since There is Love in You. ”Alap” opens the album gently with plucked strings, alluding to its definition in Indian classical music as “prologue to the formal expression” of a raga. But as those glissading strings carry on into “Two Thousand and Seventeen,” Hebden yokes it to a beat that very closely recalls Rounds’ centerpiece, “Unspoken.” The opening third of New Energy hews to that album’s sensibilities, highlighting wistful and evocative melodies with breaks crunching beneath them. But despite Hebden’s look back, the strummed strings are more nimble here and the textures are more detailed. Tempos notch upwards on early standout “Lush,” the gamelan-like tones and double-time shaker providing the velocity as Hebden strikes a balance between new age chill and dance-floor quickener. That mixture of extremes makes “You Are Loved” another clear highlight. The luminous drones at the start are folded into the sort of dusty break that defined so many early records on Stones Throw. But as Hebden dashes in an array of squiggles and blats, the track changes shape again into something heady and electronic, spacy and gravity-free. At times, his attention to textures comes at the cost of exploring new terrain. The wordless female voices and saxophones swirling around “Scientists” add new sonic wrinkles but don’t punch through into a revelatory new space. New Energy’s back half toggles between the type of club tracks that have become his forte (“SW9 9SL”) and interludes that give a breather before the next workout (“10 Midi”). It’s a shame that “10 Midi” lasts just under a minute and a half, as its interplay between metallophone, piano, and bowed cello creates a neo-classical restraint that remains one of the few places Hebden hasn’t explored. Same goes for the pure ambient waves of “Gentle Soul,” which flows into anthemic closer “Planet.” With its mix of carillon overtones, flickering strings, minced voices, and hiccuping garage thump, it suggests the very place where Steve Reich’s studied minimalism might meet adventurous bass music. The heart of the album occurs a few moments prior on “Daughter,” which again recalls Rounds. The tock of snare and bass drum, a vocal loop that just slips beyond comprehension, a dreamlike melody twinkling in the middle of it all—it hooks you while at the same time escapes your grasp. Four years ago, Hebden spoke about why his album Rounds remained a touchstone for all the music that came after: “I really connected with the idea that I needed to make something more personal, something real that counted. I started to give the songs titles that were a little more personal to me.” It’s hard to think of something more evocative than a father naming a piece of music for his daughter, a relationship that—no matter the passage of time—requires one to always remain present, giving, and open to something new.

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

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

Electronic

Text

October 3, 2017

01e2ce9c-d3b1-4d08-90b4-37561d82dab3

Andy Beta

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

Titus' sophomore record, a sprawling concept album loosely about the U.S. Civil War, is packed with anthems and brimming with energy and ambition.

Titus' sophomore record, a sprawling concept album loosely about the U.S. Civil War, is packed with anthems and brimming with energy and ambition.

Titus Andronicus: The Monitor

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14010-the-monitor/

The Monitor

Modern indie rock generally treats emotion as something that should be guarded or disguised. The Monitor does not subscribe to this viewpoint. On their second album, New Jersey's Titus Andronicus split the emotional atom with anthemic chants, rousing sing-alongs, celebrations of binge drinking, marathon song titles, broken-hearted duets, punked-up Irish jigs, and classic rock lyric-stealing. And through it all, they take subtlety out on the town, pour a fifth of whiskey down its throat, write insults on its face in permanent marker, and abandon it in the woods. Loosely based on the U.S. Civil War, The Monitor may be one of the most absurd album concepts ever, invoking the battle that caused Abraham Lincoln to claim, "I am now the most miserable man living," to illustrate the sound and fury of suburban Jersey life in a shattered economy. In the annals of using historical metaphors for emotional communication, it's up there with Jeff Mangum empathizing with Anne Frank. But it all turns out so ridiculously fun-- with Ken Burns-style readings of speeches from Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, daguerreotype cover art, and song titles all participating in the reenactment-- that it never even begins to approach the pretentiousness these elements might suggest. In the end, the Civil War is just a recurring theme, and one that's more personal than political. For stadium-rock inspiration, Titus Andronicus look no further than their home-state hero, paraphrasing Bruce Springsteen in the first song and name-checking him in the last. And while the central muse is obvious, there's a full menu of influences on display. There's the Hold Steady in its mythology of intoxication, the Pogues in its cathartic singalong gutter-punk, and Conor Oberst's Desaparacidos in its brazen earnestness. There's also the fatalistic fuck-all of early Replacements and the brutalist thrashing of east-coast hardcore in its violent instrumentation and apocalyptic worldview. Somehow that laundry-list of inspirations all manage to make an appearance in the first two minutes of leadoff track "A More Perfect Union". After an opening half that's equal parts slop and ambition, the album turns a corner on "A Pot in Which to Piss" and settles into a reliable pattern, each song building from frontman Patrick Stickles' self-described "piss and moan" to a punk-rock fury, and finally to an instrumental call-to-arms. The repeated structure feeds the album's narrative arc and provides some much-needed breathers, until the record's big finale. At 14 minutes, "The Battle of Hampton Roads" adds a couple of extra X's to the already XL project: Oscillating even more wildly between the album's twin poles of suicidal ideation and vengeance fantasies, Stickles builds to his frothiest moment, spilling it all out in a verse that rivals Neutral Milk Hotel's "Oh Comely" for uncomfortable honesty. And in the end there's a bagpipe solo. "The enemy is everywhere," Stickles keeps reminding us over the course of the record. It's difficult to tell what that enemy is, as Stickles' target moves from social anxiety to pure boredom to the symbolic frat-brahs of "Hampton Roads". But as the casualties pile up and the battle hymns keep egging on the troops, it becomes clear that the opponent isn't nearly as important as the fight itself. Catharsis is Stickles' fuel, and The Monitor is a 65-minute endorsement of angst and opposition as the best way to present that combustible sorrow: Light it with footlights, throw a giant shadow against the back wall, and rock the fuck out of it.

2010-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

2010-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

XL

March 12, 2010

01e32c61-4e70-4233-be63-c3fcd6debdb5

Rob Mitchum

https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/

The California singer and producer’s whimsical alt-pop bounces between disco beats and reggae grooves, 1960s soul and 1990s indie folk.

The California singer and producer’s whimsical alt-pop bounces between disco beats and reggae grooves, 1960s soul and 1990s indie folk.

Remi Wolf: Big Ideas

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/remi-wolf-big-ideas/

Big Ideas

Remi Wolf begins Big Ideas with “Cinderella,” a Soul Train-inspired disco-funk number about her everyday mood swings. Bursting with jazzy horns, triangle dings, and chirpy whistles, it’s the feel-good chromatic commotion we’ve come to expect from the Palo Alto artist. The opening track and lead single is saturated with her signature brainworms (“Cinderella making babies on the company’s dime”), but Wolf finds space for the first of many existential questions she poses on her second album: “Is there something wrong with the way I am designed?” Following in the footsteps of her 2021 debut, Juno, “Cinderella” leverages danceable beats and one-liners to mask an undercurrent of vulnerability. The rest of Big Ideas scales back the gimmickry but maintains the infectious energy, mixing Wolf’s DayGlo disco pop with detours into ’60s soul, ’90s indie folk, and psych-y prog rock. “Wave” ebbs and flows between a reggae-ish groove and emo-rock eruptions. On the surface, it comes across as a moody love song, but the Flaming Lips-inspired chorus plunges into Wolf’s anxious mindset. The heart of Big Ideas comes to light in the outro, where she verbalizes her greatest fear: “If I get too fucked up, if I get drunk all night, will you still love me?” The question could be meant for a loved one, an old flame, or even herself: Nothing cuts deeper than self-disappointment. Wolf peppers her songwriting with confessions and anecdotes, like the taste of someone she kissed at Chicago’s Empty Bottle on Halloween (“Cherries & Cream”). She’s refreshingly frank on subjects like sexuality, mental health, and sobriety. “Alone in Miami” recounts a hazy Art Basel week in Miami, cluttered with crypto bros, cocaine, and Cubano sandwiches. In “Toro,” Wolf lets her freak flag fly, spinning unflattering images like “I’m drooling like a rabid dog” into sexy come-ons. It’s no “Eating my ass like the human centipede” (from “Quiet on Set”), but it still hits. “Motorcycle” stands out as a soulful ballad that elevates a mundane premise to the stuff of fantasy. Wolf cosplays as a modern housewife who yearns for secret escapades on her Harley. “I love my motorcycle/It gets me around this funny town,” she sings, syrupy vocals floating over slow, bluesy guitar, “Pass the chaos by in this great big world/Where no one knows what they’re talking about.” Torn between the comfort of stability and the thrill of escape, Wolf ends the song on a poignantly unresolved note. Big Ideas plays like an eclectic compilation of scattered thoughts from her journal. Songs grapple with big questions but offer few answers: “Are you fearful? Do you regret?” she seemingly asks a paramour at one moment. Even “Toro” carries a tinge of melancholy, hinting at the imminent end of a euphoric night. But weaker moments can feel like half-baked ramblings (“The thing about the chase is it plagues the human race”) mistaken for storytelling. “Frog Rock” and “Pitiful”—which sounds like the Teletubbies’ version of “Buy You a Drank”—come off as lightweight goofs. If Juno was a hallucinogenic wonderland that painted the self-declared “Sexy Villain” as a comic figure, Big Ideas works to humanize Wolf’s music without sacrificing its theatricality. Closing disco fever dream “Slay Bitch,” allegedly a bonus track, is the pick-me-up to counteract all the album’s nerves and insecurities. Wolf sounds like she’s commanding you to vogue through your own dress-up montage, somersaulting through the melody with the whimsical attitude of a young Cyndi Lauper. She’s a little bit scattered, and she sounds right at home.

2024-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Island

July 18, 2024

01e7292a-c0ac-4ee1-a03c-0965c45aad00

Boutayna Chokrane

https://pitchfork.com/staff/boutayna-chokrane/

The Magic Whip is the first Blur album since 2003’s Think Tank, the first with guitarist Graham Coxon onboard since 1999’s 13 (Coxon was booted from the Think Tank sessions a week in and summarily quit), and the first with producer Stephen Street since 1997’s Blur. Like Albarn's recent solo work, it explores the distant traveler’s conflicting sense of wonder and alienation.

The Magic Whip is the first Blur album since 2003’s Think Tank, the first with guitarist Graham Coxon onboard since 1999’s 13 (Coxon was booted from the Think Tank sessions a week in and summarily quit), and the first with producer Stephen Street since 1997’s Blur. Like Albarn's recent solo work, it explores the distant traveler’s conflicting sense of wonder and alienation.

Blur: The Magic Whip

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20539-the-magic-whip/

The Magic Whip

Early in the jarring opening pages of science fiction novelist Ray Bradbury’s 1953 masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, the author appears to catch a glimmer of the actual future. Protagonist Guy Montag comes home from work to find his wife limp and dying of an overdose on sleeping pills. Montag calls for assistance and hangs back helplessly as paramedics revive her, thinking to himself, "There are too many of us. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone." Could Bradbury have foreseen the quiet anomie of faces bathed in smartphone light, shuttling through overcrowded cities, alone together in only tangential acknowledgement of one other’s humanity? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Singer-songwriter Damon Albarn invokes Bradbury’s sentiment on "There Are Too Many of Us", the emotional centerpiece of The Magic Whip, the reunion album from his reconstituted flagship Blur, as he muses about an Australian hostage crisis he once spectated on television from a hotel room above it. "For a moment I was dislocated by terror on the loop elsewhere," he admits in verse two—not horrified, just momentarily "dislocated"—as if to call into question our dwindling concern for people in places outside our cubicles of convenience. Technology has made our world smaller, but it hasn’t made us less isolated. Ease of access doesn’t equal closeness. The Magic Whip is the first Blur album since 2003’s Think Tank, the first with guitarist Graham Coxon onboard since 1999’s 13 (Coxon was booted from the Think Tank sessions a week in and summarily quit), and the first with producer Stephen Street since 1997’s Blur. In 2013, a lucky twist of fate netted the group some downtime between festival dates in South China and Indonesia, and Blur holed up in a Hong Kong studio to workshop new material. Anyone who’s waited a decade and a half for Albarn and his songwriting foil to resume tussling over bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree’s lithe low end will find a lot to enjoy; something special happens when these four get in a room, and you can still hear some of it happening here. The distant traveler’s conflicting sense of wonder and alienation is the running theme here. "New World Towers" gazes at the web of neon signs overhead in awe of their glow, "Go Out" details nights alone at the bar and defeated late-night self-love. On "Thought I Was a Spaceman" Albarn recasts a longing for the comforting familiarity of London as a space-wrecked astronaut’s homesickness. The Magic Whip was conceived as Albarn wrapped work on his 2014 solo album Everyday Robots, and it’s tempting to see its disaffected tourism as a sister to Robots’ shattered workaday ennui back home. Sensibilities from Albarn’s extracurricular projects frequently bleed into the frame, especially the Gorillaz, which shows both in dubby, beat-oriented cuts like "New World Towers" and in the lyrics’ pervasive sense of Englishness-in-exile. "Thought I Was a Spaceman" could easily serve as a prequel to Demon Days’ post-apocalyptic opener "Last Living Souls" in sound and story, and "Ghost Ship" wouldn’t look out of place anchored off the shores of Plastic Beach. At times the sonic tug-of-war feels like Albarn clawing at the restrictions of a framework his ideas have outgrown. In the moments when The Magic Whip is most interested in sounding like a Blur album, it is perhaps too interested. There’s a nod to nearly every epoch, from the synth-accented Parklife alt-rockisms of "I Broadcast" to the busy Great Escape pop of "Lonesome Street", the Blur-ish guitar squall of "Go Out" and the winding 13-influenced electro-psych of "Spaceman". Whip functions as a career travelogue in that sense; one wonders whether the decision to have Street, the band’s Britpop-era producer, helm the sessions hasn’t aroused a certain sense of nostalgia. Restless innovators deserve a cycle back through the worlds they’ve crafted here and there (see: the last decade worth of Prince and Beck) but it’s disorienting for a band as keenly interested in artistic recombination as Blur. Sometimes the album veers into sleepy territory: The ambient washes and close mic’d, reverb-drenched strumming of "Spaceman" are welcome flourishes, as is the cluttered keyboard-and-acoustic bounce of "Ice Cream Man", but both are better showcases for production than song structure. There’s also sluggish, saccharine adult contemporary on "My Terracotta Heart" and closer "Mirrorball", though, momentum-killers in a back end that sometimes lags where it should lift. The tempo only picks up on "Lonesome Street", "Go Out", and "I Broadcast"; the rest of the album bobs calmly adrift. It suits the album’s geographical fixation on Hong Kong, Indonesia, and especially the beaches and waters in between, but not the band’s own sweet spot. All these frustrations fall away when the quartet locks into its signature jangly strut, as it does on the late album highlight "Ong Ong", a chugging rocker outfitted with a chorus of lilting la-la’s. Its sunny soul is infectious, as Albarn, who once lamented he had "no distance left to run," professes a love no measure of forbidding space could quell. Coxon’s in the wings playing hokey luau guitar, zeroing in on Damon’s seafaring yearning and playing it up for yaks until he storms center stage as the song draws to a noisy close. Blur’s always been puckish in spirit, its greatest gift the identification and gleeful subversion of listener expectations, and in moments like these it re-emerges, untarnished by the passage of time.

2015-04-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-04-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Parlophone

April 28, 2015

01e8514d-d972-44bb-b6a4-56082bf59897

Craig Jenkins

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

Few would have expected Ladytron to last a full decade, but here they are in 2011 with a well-chosen comp that includes two new tracks.

Few would have expected Ladytron to last a full decade, but here they are in 2011 with a well-chosen comp that includes two new tracks.

Ladytron: Best of 00-10

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15377-best-of-00-10/

Best of 00-10

Early on, Pitchfork contributor Stephen Troussé off-handedly described Ladytron as the second coming of Elastica. It was a good enough comparison for me to remember it a decade later. Like Elastica, Ladytron are a co-ed band built on detachment, androgyny, black clothing, and tons of hooks. Also like Elastica, they were dogged at the start as being vacant fashionistas photocopying the past. A few blinks of the eye later, and Ladytron have been around for a dozen years, and the requisite 17-track Best of 00-10 compilation feels earned. (An expanded version adds 16 more tracks and a huge booklet of photos; depending on your interest in the group, one or the other will certainly qualify as all the Ladytron you'll need.) Out of the gate, Ladytron dovetailed with and were lumped in with electroclash. They certainly preceded the term, but the group benefited from it and earned quite a bit early attention on the back of it. At the time, they got by on charm, low-rent production, and a few winks. Songs like "Paco!" and "He Took Her to a Movie" feel like defining electroclash documents-- the deadpan vocals, the fairly rudimentary comments on consumerism and sexual politics. Part of the goal, and this was an epidemic in electroclash, was to coat everything in a layer of irony. Trying hard, ambition, giving a shit-- these weren't desired qualities. Cheapness, disposability, peacocking-- these were in style. By that measurement, Ladytron succeeded-- only two tracks from their debut LP, 604, are featured here: "Discotraxx" and "Playgirl", a couple of gossipy girltalk songs, observational character sketches that draw different conclusions about young women growing up quickly. (Compilers: "Commodore Rock" was jobbed.) It came as a surprise when Ladytron went right out and grew up. Stepping up their tempos, sharpening their rhythms and low-ends, and acquiring a sheen of professionalism, they took a step toward longevity on their next record, Light & Magic (2002). The results weren't as strong as 604, but they carved a way out of what looked like a trendy dead-end. Darkening the tone of their songs and providing more muscle to their sound, Ladytron graduated from a concept into a band. And yet from the record only "Seventeen"-- a lament that could have been penned for the girls who grew up too fast on 604-- is truly first-tier. The band itself may have gotten that message: Evolve or risk being left out. They evolved: The leap on their next album, Witching Hour, was stark. Bottle service and velvet ropes are entirely absent; a confident, poised blend of goth, shoegaze, and rock instead characterizes the album-- by far their career peak. It's no surprise that five of the 17 tracks here, including arguably its three best ("Destroy Everything You Touch", "Soft Power", "International Dateline"), are from that album. Ladytron continued their morphing into theater-rock on 2008's Velocifero; the three singles included here-- "Ghosts", "Tomorrow", and "Runaway"-- find them perilously close to Killers territory, but they're talked down from the ledge by Helen Marnie's vocals. With a more demonstrative or earnest singer in tow, the band may have been tempted to graft itself to songs that aim for scope over subtlety. A sense of humor and keying in on specific images or lyrical ideas have always suited Ladytron, so a drift toward more big-tent songs would be unlikely to yield anything other than vague plaudits. It wouldn't be a 21st century compilation without a few add-ons. There's a new song, "Ace of Hz", and a cover of Death in June's "Little Black Angel". Both are decent songs that won't raise eyebrows tacked onto the back end of a band's best work, but would never be considered career highlights on their own. Some of the playfulness of their early days is missed on Best of 00-10, the loose analog charm of their earliest songs would have given the collection a little more lift. (How odd would it have sounded a decade ago to say a Ladytron comp would suffer from being too leaden?) But these 17 songs collectively are a hell of a strong argument for why you're still reading about Ladytron now instead of, say, Miss Kittin or Fischerspooner or Peaches.

2011-04-29T02:00:01.000-04:00

2011-04-29T02:00:01.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Nettwerk

April 29, 2011

01e85b51-d447-4663-b2bb-27a649e9bf2c

Scott Plagenhoef

https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/

These "Brooklyn hipsters" treat extreme metal with the élan of a ripe young garage rock band or a focused noise artist.

These "Brooklyn hipsters" treat extreme metal with the élan of a ripe young garage rock band or a focused noise artist.

Liturgy: Renihilation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13915-renihilation/

Renihilation

Note the words "Ecstatic Rite", the title of the fifth track on Renihilation, the debut LP from Brooklyn black metal band Liturgy. With its nihilism and necromancy, its demons and doom, heavy metal-- especially this strain-- is most often tagged for its dark, grim obsessions, not its celebration. Liturgy, at a glance, might not seem much different: Frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix writes about meaninglessness, disaster, and apocalypse in terse, declarative terms, and the band's guitar waves and drum cascades sometimes suggest suffocation. But crank Renihilation again, and notice the way Greg Fox rebuilds his beats when the band relents-- how hard he slaps those cymbals, how he slowly fills the spaces in his own meter, especially during the backend of "Pagan Dawn". Or listen to the intensity of "Arctica"-- the triumphant guitar introduction, the thunderous way the drums roll into it, the sudden stops and stronger restarts. It feels, conveniently enough, ecstatic, the sound of four "Brooklyn hipsters" (as some super kvlt Internet analysts have derided) who go by their given names, wear street clothes, and avoid corpse paint treating extreme metal with the élan of a ripe young garage rock band or a focused noise artist. However harsh the words and however heavy the music, Liturgy have fun with their chosen form-- playing ferociously, writing imaginatively, and, in the process, making a record that reveres black metal's legacy while, at its best, pushes it forward. For, you know, Brooklyn hipsters, the quartet supplies convincing power and precision. They play hard, fast, and with stamina, storming through these seven three-to-five-minute tracks and using only four interludes (always some combination of guitars, electronics and overtone singing) for rest. But it's not all bustle and blaze. There's lot of space in these tracks, so that even the most tumultuous tunes offer surprising detours. That's actually where Liturgy are the most compositionally interesting. On "Mysterium", for instance, Fox overruns his own frenetic clip, drumming so quickly that all he can do is start and stop again. Each time this happens, Liturgy pause on sharp, dissonant notes, maintaining a pins-and-needles suspense rather than resolving the drama. Liturgy cites minimalist composers La Monte Young and Glenn Branca and Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as influences. The record's interludes are obvious homages to those outsiders, but so are these moments, when Liturgy reinforce the tension with choices that run counter to rock'n'roll impulses. The possibilities are infinite and largely unexplored. Indeed, one of Renihilation's most appealing aspects is what isn't here: From the dissonant guitar shards anchoring the pauses on "Arctica" to the mix of chants and electronics serving as interludes between tracks, Liturgy deliver a stream of ideas that seem like strands for continued exploration and synthesis. It's a captivating listen in its own right, but mostly Renihilation establishes the band's bona fides. Yeah, maybe they're art kids or the sons of classical music critics, but Fox destroys on the drums, and Hunt-Hendrix suffers for his words when he howls. He and Bernard Gann comprise an interesting guitar pair, too, as comfortable marching along the same serrated path as they are spiraling around each other in riffs and counters. Bassist Tyler Dusenbury mostly stays out of the way. Renihilation suggests that Liturgy are more certain of possibilities than, at this point, their ability to achieve them. That is, despite a frontman who roars, "being shall become the eternal return of fire," during a song in which he depicts the modern world crumbling in a natural blaze, the aggressive ecstasy of Renihilation promises an exciting future-- for Liturgy, and for us.

2010-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00

2010-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00

Metal

20 Buck Spin

February 12, 2010

01ec3a26-fb27-4c53-aae3-0158d7831944

Grayson Haver Currin

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

Roc-A-Fella vet balances expert guest spots, grand, sweeping production, and lonely, bitter desperation.

Roc-A-Fella vet balances expert guest spots, grand, sweeping production, and lonely, bitter desperation.

Beanie Sigel: The B.Coming

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7808-the-bcoming/

The B.Coming

The first thing you need to know about The B.Coming is that nearly every track has a guest rapper or two, and nearly every one of these guest spots is perfect-- emcees playing to their strengths, finding their voices, bringing their A-games. Redman spits raw maniacal gorilla mayhem all over "One Shot Deal". Bun B brings his gravelly authoritative drug stories to "Purple Rain". Twista contributes what may be his all-time greatest guest verse to "Gotta Have It", wrapping his dazzling machine-gun flow around Chad Hamilton's snare shuffle with James Brown timing and Louis Armstrong nuance. A lot of very talented rappers have worked hard to make sure The B.Coming is something special. The second thing you need to know about The B.Coming is that none of these guest verses is the least bit important to the success of the album. It's nice to have them around, but the album would not suffer at all without them. Only two things matter here: the production, which is masterful, and Beanie himself, a virtuoso of lonely, bitter desperation. Beans recorded the album in the weeks between being found guilty on a federal gun charge and beginning his one-year sentence. When that sentence ends, he'll stand trial for attempted murder. He could be inside for a long, long time. Fittingly, The B.Coming is suffused with a sense of dread and regret and emptiness. "Wanted (On the Run)" is based on a standard rap theme-- life on the lam-- but Beans attacks the track like it was "Life During Wartime", breathlessly painting a bleak picture: "You never see the daylight/ Jakes get on your tail, never let 'em see the brake light"-- a stark contrast from guest Cam'ron's blithe confidence. On the searing, gospel-infused track "Lord Have Mercy", he begs God for understanding and forgiveness: "I do my dirt so my kids can see heaven on earth/ But the pain on my heart weighs heavy, it hurt". But on the next track, the ominously cinematic "Flatline", he's snarling, "Had to try to show a nigga what the metal do/ But didn't succeed; the nigga still breathing." Even on "Look at Me Now", his song for the haters, Sigel sounds defiant and weary; there's not an ounce of joy in his voice. The album's producers weave a grand, sweeping tapestry to give Sigel's lament the heft and majesty it deserves. Like Ghostface's The Pretty Toney Album, The B.Coming swims in the sad signifiers of 70s soul: glistening strings, weeping guitars, swollen horns. On "Feel It in the Air", producer Heavy D has nothing but mournful noir saxophones for ya, baby. Ty Fyffe slathers "Change" in swooning, melodramatic violins. On "Wanted (On the Run)", da Neckbones give the chipmunk-soul treatment to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive", mining that track's theatrical sweep with stunningly funky results. Even "Gotta Have It", the album's only remotely club-ready track, drowns in an ugly, metallic synth wash. The tracks build on each other, swirling into a symphony of pain, a fitting soundtrack to one man's dark days.

2005-04-12T01:00:01.000-04:00

2005-04-12T01:00:01.000-04:00

Rap

Roc-A-Fella

April 12, 2005

01ece329-0add-4c34-a268-fb22dbcab8c6

Tom Breihan

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

As a solo artist, GZA was essentially everything that distinguished Wu-Tang Clan from other crews: strictly chess, kung-fu, battle raps, investigative reports, mysticism. This masterful 1995 collection is the most potent distillation of that aesthetic.

As a solo artist, GZA was essentially everything that distinguished Wu-Tang Clan from other crews: strictly chess, kung-fu, battle raps, investigative reports, mysticism. This masterful 1995 collection is the most potent distillation of that aesthetic.

GZA: Liquid Swords: Chess Box Deluxe Edition

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16857-liquid-swords-chess-box-deluxe-edition/

Liquid Swords: Chess Box Deluxe Edition

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will have many great minds gracing its lecture halls in 2012, but 45-year old rapper Gary Grice, aka GZA, will almost certainly be the only one who actually claims "Genius" as his job title. Yeah, the accomplishments of MIT alumni in the fields of genetics, engineering, and computer technology are certainly impressive, but are any of those fuckin' with Liquid Swords? When I read literature on the aforementioned topics, I seem to recognize only the proper nouns and maybe the prepositions, so in the interest of confirming the greatness of Liquid Swords, I'll defer to someone who had a lot more experience with genius than I do: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." And really, there's hardly a hip-hop record, Wu-Tang or otherwise, that demonstrates how knowledge is power in more easily understandable terms than Liquid Swords: You're certainly not on GZA's level, but he rarely goes over your head. There's never been a shortage of "real hip-hop" acolytes ready to explain why Liquid Swords sent MCs into hiding in 1995. But the question with a reissue like this one is, "Why has it endured?" Because while the deluxe packaging certainly makes it a worthwhile purchase, it's far short of revelatory: In addition to a long interview with GZA in the liner notes, you get something described as a "working" chess set and a bonus disc of instrumentals in case you're the type who likes to spend a night with friends arguing about who gets to be RZA during "4th Chamber" karaoke. As to why it needs to come out in 2012, it's simultaneously welcome and wholly unnecessary in the same sense a Beatles, Velvet Underground, or Led Zeppelin reissue is: It'll never again be the sound of contemporary pop music, but it's equally impossible to imagine a time when it fails to be a rite of passage for the discerning, a "phase" of intense immersion and compulsive consumption almost inevitable after first contact. It's more informative and worthwhile to view its impact on listeners than other artists, and Liquid Swords is the easiest entry point once people start going beyond the Wu-Tang group LPs. The reason? It's the most potent distillation of the Wu aesthetic as laid out on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Whereas Tical, Ironman, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, and Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version extrapolated upon themes and personalities that necessarily had to be curtailed in the interest of cohesion, GZA as a solo artist was essentially everything that distinguished Wu-Tang from other crews: strictly chess, kung-fu, battle raps, investigative reports, Five Percenter Islam. Most crucially, out of everyone in Wu-Tang's original formation, GZA is the only one who didn't seem to have much interest in being a star. Nor was he promoted as one, even if he did end up stealing the Wu's "Chappelle's Show" skits. Which still worked out: You didn't need to be a star or get much airplay to go gold back in 1996, and do you even know which track here was the first single? Do you recall ever seeing any videos from Liquid Swords? The album's lack of commercial ambition is also reflected in its status as one of the least sexual hip-hop records ever made. Off the top of my head, there are probably two total lines which acknowledge women as physical beings. That asceticism was to expected, since on Wu-Tang's introductory posse cut "Protect Ya Neck", GZA was everything he would be for the duration of his career. In a single line, "First of all, who's your A&R?/ A mountain climber that plays an electric guitar," he conveys a righteous, hard-earned wisdom of someone who'd seen and experienced more things as an artist and a human being than everyone else in the Clan. Which was true. He's the oldest member of the crew, and like RZA, he had a formative and demoralizing crash course in industry rule #4080 that led to a long-forgotten curiosity of a debut in Words From the Genius. Those lessons inform GZA's lyrics to a great extent, whether it's a casual but fatal dismissal during "Shadowboxin'" ("Check these non-visual niggas with tapes and a portrait/ Flood the seminar trying to orbit this corporate industry") and especially on "Labels", the track here that might lose new listeners most quickly because something like 85% of the companies GZA puns upon no longer exist. And so then, Liquid Swords is a consummate MC's album, and finding a weak line on it is nearly impossible. What makes it all the more impressive is that he's rarely, as the similarly stentorian Chuck D once put it, rhyming "for the sake of riddlin'." He's not beyond a well-timed "motherfuckin'" to pad out his cadences, though, and it's most likely the record with the most consistently astounding use of simile, that easily and frequently abused stepbrother of metaphor. "Lyrics are weak like clock radio speakers," "I bang like vehicular homicide and July 4th in Bed Stuy," "that's minimum and feminine like sandals." Outside of RZA's phenomenal third-eye verse from "4th Chamber” (yell "lynched the prominent dominant Islamic, Asiatic black Hebrew" on the subway, it's fun), there is almost nothing here that can't be easily understood by a teenager. GZA's rhymes here are incredible, but Liquid Swords isn't just GZA's only great album, it might just be his only good one (though fine arguments have certainly been made on the behalf of Legend Of The Liquid Sword). It's hardly surprising that the man who told his peers during the height of hip-pop commercial fusion "make it brief son, half short and twice strong" didn't have much patience for rap derived from classic verse-chorus songwriting. But nonetheless, his later albums would make it abundantly clear how everything went right for him on Liquid Swords in terms of hooks and beats and song structure. (Listen to the chorus of "Did Ya Say That?" from Legend of the Liquid Sword or pretty much any track produced by someone not named RZA to get what I mean.) Really, 17 years after the fact, I'm still struck by how a record of such grim subject matter and "opium scented, dark tinted" music could actually be kinda fun. It's a crucial balance and even the most unhinged of the Wu are willing to exchange a bit of their own levity for GZA's gravitas. Ol' Dirty Bastard shows up in the only way that makes sense, refereeing a match between GZA and Inspectah Deck by yelling "duel of the iron mic! It's that 52 fatal strike! NUH!" Which is meant to convey absolutely nothing other than "this is the illest rap battle ever." Ghostface Killah sips rum out of the Stanley Cup while asking the toughest metaphysical questions on "4th Chamber". "Shadowboxin'" has no hook, but the interplay between Method Man and GZA made it a surprising interloper during frat parties in the late 90s. Catchy hooks abound, as with the playful reminiscence of the title track, the insatiable yet calm list of demands on "Gold", the impossibly bugged-out synth hook from "4th Chamber" tracing the flight of a mosquito. One of the many great things about Liquid Swords is that while it's an unimpeachable work of lyrical mastery, of fierce intellect and sound morals, it's in no way a record for prudes.  Yes, there are plenty of high-minded theological dissertations, particularly the Killah Priest solo curiosity "B.I.B.L.E.".  But the criminology element is every bit as present as on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. While Raekwon and Ghostface sounded high off their own supply, embodying Mafioso and druglords dealing with the extreme emotions, rewards and larger than life personalities, GZA is far more objective about the situation. After a classic skit ("I think you do know him"), he announces the start of "Killah Hills 10304" by yelling "LIFE OF A DRUG DEALER" in case you're unaware of the subject at hand. But even with that kind of straight talk, GZA still hovers slightly above the situation and his associates are indeed like chess pieces, functional pawns and slightly higher ranking associates who are still ultimately disposable-- the surgically-altered drug mules, solemn terrorists, low-level dealers and anonymous fiends. The more important contrast to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, RZA's self-described "summer album," Liquid Swords was clearly meant for winter warz. During the first round of solo releases, RZA created a sonic template that masterfully mirrored the personality of every MC, and this is his most cohesive and visionary work largely because GZA was already so fully formed. Even the kung-fu samples are the most seamlessly integrated, from the unnerving retelling of a failed assassination which begins the LP to the slain warrior who ends it, befallen by a decapitation replete he always assumed he'd inflict on another-- it's impossible to shake the grotesque sounds of his final breaths, where his slit neck emits a wailing winter wind. It's the most horrific effect on Liquid Swords, but not by much: the soul and funk guitars were originally pressed to vinyl and hot wax, whereas here, they sound like they were brought out of storage from particularly forbidding meat lockers. The lo-fi digital hiss of Alesis cymbals and snares evoke dirty, crushed snow and black ice. The slightly off-key hook from "Cold World" would later be sung by D'Angelo, but it's the bundled-up, shearling and Timberland's rocking dude on the cover of Brown Sugar, not the simmering lothario on Voodoo. And yet, there are still strange pockets of warmth: the minimalist patches during "Cold World" that evoke the eerie, disorienting calm of city streets abandoned during a snowstorm, that guitar bump in "I Gotcha Back" flickering like a trashcan fire, the juking Willie Mitchell riff in the title track that RZA admits was a rare straight rip, but a very inspired one all the same. I won't begrudge any purist who wants to hear the crackle of "Duel of the Iron Mic" or the dense murk of "I Gotcha Back" enhanced by vinyl. But to these ears, Liquid Swords is a winter album meant to be heard in winter which is why most of us grew enamored with it as a portable experience, lodged into CD players or Walkmen, and stuffed between layers of puffy coats on subways, school buses. Even a solo listen in a car feels fairly inadequate, you almost have to ice grill a neighboring passenger while you're listening to it, knowing that they're plotting on the same gold. It's a record to make your surroundings as cartoonishly violent as Liquid Swords' chessboard cover, when you recognize that you're, as GZA memorably puts it, "trapped in a deadly video game with just one man." I've lived in Los Angeles for the past six years and really haven't found a lot of times appropriate to listen to Liquid Swords. That's not an indictment of its quality; it's a confirmation of its monomaniacal genius.

2012-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Geffen/Get On Down

July 27, 2012

01ed27e2-1799-4ff1-b411-147b6e49d1d0

Ian Cohen

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