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Diplo's latest solo release, the Revolution EP, features four originals and two remixes, with a guest list that includes Action Bronson, Mr. MFN eXquire, Angger Dimas, Mike Posner, Travis Porter, and RiFF RAFF. Everything sounds expensive and well-made.

Diplo's latest solo release, the Revolution EP, features four originals and two remixes, with a guest list that includes Action Bronson, Mr. MFN eXquire, Angger Dimas, Mike Posner, Travis Porter, and RiFF RAFF. Everything sounds expensive and well-made.

Diplo: Revolution EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18607-diplo-revolution-ep/

Revolution EP

A pile of asses locked into prime twerking position, coalescing to form a giant fist that unmistakably resembles an iconic symbol typically used to represent those who are fighting against oppression: not the most subtle image in the world—but then, Diplo's never been one for subtlety. The Ferry Gouw-designed cover art for Diplo's latest solo release, the Revolution EP, is tasteless, provocative—and, given pop culture's current watercooler fixation with twerking, quite timely. Then again, Wesley Pentz had a leg (or two) up on Miley in culturally co-opting the dance style. The bounce-heavy title track to last year's Express Yourself had an accompanying video that spawned one of the most NSFW hashtags in recent memory. Ever the canny opportunist, Diplo rode the wave he hath wrought into 2013, staging a failed attempt to assemble a record-breaking twerk session (a record that, rightfully, was finally set by bounce queen Big Freedia in NYC late last month) and putting out a video for that EP's "Butters Theme", which questionably integrated Pussy Riot-esque balaclavas into his endlessly ass-shaking meme. On a purely musical level, Express Yourself was a considerable success for Diplo. His try-anything, be-everywhere ubiquity continues to reflect itself in an endlessly growing list of collaborators, and the EP's six songs came with a list of features that rivaled most full-length rap releases in length alone; but in the midst of an especially collab-heavy year for one of the world's richest DJs, it nonetheless affirmed that Diplo could still deliver shiny, sour-sounding party music when his name's not buried in production credits. On the outset, the similarities between that release and Revolution—six songs (this time, four originals and two remixes), a load of guest appearances, more drops than a container of Visine—suggest a desire to replicate Express Yourself's mid-level triumphs as exactly as possible. As Diplo's first solo release in nearly a decade, Express Yourself benefited from a lack of set expectations, and it came out smack dab in one of Diplo and Mad Decent's most commercially fruitful years in recent memory. But that was the past, and Revolution arrives near the tail end of a creatively soft year for Diplo: collaborations with Snoop Lion, Usher, and the Weeknd—as well as a not-exactly-timely "Gangnam Style" remix—proved ultimately unmemorable. And then there was Major Lazer's sophomore LP, Free the Universe, which took the pirate-radio giddiness of its predecessor and dulled its edges with collaborative bloat and a genre-hopping lack of cohesiveness that yielded more misses than it did hits. One of Free the Universe's few memorable cuts was "Bubble Butt", a boneheaded exercise in bass salaciousness that, as the title suggested, found Diplo's attention wavering south yet again. Revolution kicks itself off by completing his gluteal trilogy with "Biggie Bounce", a song not dissimilar to its predecessor that features contributions from Jakarta-hailing EDM upstart Angger Dimas, as well as an impossibly douchey verse from Atlanta pop-rap auteurs Travis Porter. With a rolling snare sample, hissing-steam percussion, and a deceptively deep low end that pairs nicely with a flatulent horn line, "Biggie Bounce" is a fine example of Diplo at his most texturally engaging, particularly when the track doubles into chopped-up vocal samples and gym-teacher whistles halfway through. Everything on Revolution sounds expensive and well-made, as much a testament to Diplo's resources as it is to his effortlessness in turning out productions that resemble city-crushing gizmos as much as they do future Mad Decent Block Party crowd-pleasers. Specifically, he's perfected the art of the almighty drop, and Revolution's spring-loaded twists and turns are what stand out the most, from the spacious hiccups that dot the title track's wordless chorus to the bass-siren assault that emerges from "Crown"'s thick trance-worshipping synths. The EDM explosion in the U.S. marked the first time in Diplo's career that he wasn't at the forefront of a trend in populist American dance music; he's a smart guy, so he's found a way to integrate himself into the conversation cosmetically, but regardless of where you stand on the bass-face divide, the garishness of Electric Zoo-esque fare is just the latest style that happens to fit Diplo like a glove. Zooming out from Revolution's more appealing micro-details, however, reveals the EP's fatal flaw in the form of cohesiveness. What made Express Yourself a considerably distinctive statement was its ability to jump from genre to genre and still manage to hang together as a unified body of work; Revolution sounds less considered and more like a small-scale data dump, a collection of also-rans that makes poor use of its guest stars; the title track's Guetta-fied diva-electro expansiveness, bolstered by faceless vocalist Kai, resembles a worn copy of the low points on ex-Mad Decent affiliate Rusko's otherwise enjoyable sophomore effort, last year's Songs. The watered-down boom-bap of "Rock Steady" boasts appearances from Action Bronson, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, and RiFF RAFF—but the only rapper whose presence sticks is the latter, purely by virtue of being the least mechanically talented of the three. RiFF RAFF's featured on "Crown", too, but he's barely distinguishable when cast about the track's synthy fromage and Mike Posner's caterwauling. Revolution is rounded out by uninspiring remixes of its title track and "Biggie Bounce" from respective producers Boaz van de Beatz and (fittingly) TWRK; their inclusion furthers the suspicion that this release wasn't too carefully thought out. Diplo's always been one for having too many cooks in the creative kitchen, both to his advantage and detriment—but what's dismaying about the waste of talent on Revolution is that he would've ostensibly done better working with the people just lingering right under his nose. Mad Decent's 2013 has been considerably strong in terms of curation, with solid releases from talents like Dillon Francis, LIZ, Jahan Lennon, and a little-heard tune from some guy named Baauer. As mainstream dance's enfant terrible, though, Diplo's never been one to follow anyone's advice but his own, and Revolution is evidence enough that what he can do isn't always going to turn out as well as what he should've done instead.

2013-10-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-10-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Mad Decent

October 11, 2013

01f03e7b-75fb-421b-87be-256105c421e9

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

Neil Young's first four albums, remastered and gathered together in a pricey (but impressive) box set.

Neil Young's first four albums, remastered and gathered together in a pricey (but impressive) box set.

Neil Young: Neil Young / Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere / After the Gold Rush / Harvest

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13771-neil-young-everybody-knows-this-is-nowhere-after-the-gold-rush-harvest/

Neil Young / Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere / After the Gold Rush / Harvest

It's getting hard to keep up with Neil Young. In addition to a new studio LP, 2009 has seen the release of the green-car concept album Fork in the Road, a new live set (Dreamin' Man Live '92), and of course the 10-disc Blu-Ray/DVD/CD extravaganza Archives Vol. 1, which documents the first 10 years of his musical life. Not to mention that just over a year ago Sugar Mountain - Live at Canterbury House 1968 came out, so that even seems relatively new. We're drowning in Neil Young this year, which for hardcore fans (and it seems like the percentage of his fanbase that meets this criteria increases every year) isn't such a bad thing. Add to the above the "Neil Young Archives Official Release Series," which is the umbrella term for the wholesale reissue of Young's catalog in remastered form. The first four albums, from 1968's Neil Young to 1972's Harvest, were released on CD under the banner a few months back, which made the Archives set even more confusing than it seemed initially. Since much of Archives turned out to be previously issued material, with some albums appearing almost in their entirety, it stood to reason that it would serve as the best way to hear these songs for a while. Anyone ponying up between $100 and $300 for Archives surely already had all those albums, and they'll probably want the better-sounding versions in their original form, too. Young, like Bob Dylan, is almost impossible to read as far as stuff like this goes. It's easy to say that he's ripping people off by getting them to buy the same music over and over. But so many of his puzzling moves over the years, such as refusing to put out On the Beach on CD even though fans were clamoring for it, would seem to be to his financial detriment. Here's one more for the shelf: the first four albums have been packaged in two limited edition box sets. The CD version is pressed on 24-karat gold discs, and the packaging is new; the vinyl is pressed on 180-gram records (as opposed to 140-gram for the standard issue of the LPs). The vinyl set, which is what I listened to for this review, is going for $150, which certainly isn't cheap. It packages the records in extra-heavy gatefold sleeves that will probably outlive me, and includes full-size reproductions of the original inserts, but there's no extra documentation otherwise. For me, there's an irony in listening to these deluxe versions, because I've long regarded used vinyl copies of Harvest as a litmus test for record stores. If they're selling a used copy in excellent shape for $4 or $5, it's my kind of shop; if they're selling it for $8 or $9, I'm probably somewhere in the New York Metropolitan Area. Fact is, Harvest was the #1 selling album of 1972, and it continued to sell all through the 1970s. Literally millions of copies were pressed, and used copies are very easy to find. It's a record that shouldn't cost a lot of money. Which is not to say it's not a great record. All four of these albums, in fact, are excellent-- records that everyone should have in their collection eventually, in whatever format. I say "eventually" because Neil Young is an artist you shouldn't force yourself to get into; his most devoted fans are so convinced of his genius, and so bent on tracking down every last bootleg, that it's easy to hear a few songs and decide that Young isn't such a big deal. Sometimes it can just take a little while to come around to his music, and you need to be in the right frame of mind. Harvest, whatever your copy ends up costing you, closed out one of the stronger four-album career-opening runs in pop history. Of course, Young had some practice before he went solo, so he had a head start. After gigging around Canada as a teenager in the garage-rock outfit the Squires, he headed out to L.A. and hooked up with the newly forming Buffalo Springfield in 1966. They were a band with a few songwriters, each of whom had their own personality, and Young's songs ("For What It's Worth", the group's biggest hit, wasn't one of them) revealed an emerging and distinctive voice. In 1968, he left the band and started his solo career, releasing Neil Young at the end of the year. The album bearing only Neil Young's name is the one that sounds least like him. It's a fine psych-tinged folk-rock set with colorful arrangements and top-shelf instrumental contributors like guitarist Ry Cooder and visionary keyboardist and arranger Jack Nitzsche, who would continue to work with Young periodically through the 70s. But Young himself sounds oddly tentative throughout, as if he weren't quite sure what he wanted his music to sound like, and this is his most restrained singing on record. There are echoes of the great music to come, like the ballad "The Old Laughing Lady", and the arrangements are lush and inviting, but Neil Young in a sense represents a road not taken, and it's most interesting now in comparison to what was to come. The opening riff to "Cinnamon Girl", the song that kicks off Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, erases the memory of Neil Young completely in about five seconds. In the months following the release of his debut, Young hooked up with a ragtag trio of musicians from a band called the Rockets, renamed them Crazy Horse, and found his raison d'être. Where the performances on Neil Young were eminently professional, the sophisticated and exacting parts executed with polished precision, Crazy Horse were loose and sloppy, privileging groove and feeling above all. Many of Young's seasoned contemporaries considered them an embarrassment, but for him they represented a new way of thinking about music, one that favored intuition and stayed true to the moment. A year later he would hook up with the hugely successful Crosby, Stills and Nash; Young would eventually call CSNY his Beatles, while Crazy Horse was his Stones. By this logic, they were making music on the level of Sticky Fingers from the jump. Discussion of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere usually gravitates toward the two extended guitar workouts, "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand". Both are masterpieces of rock minimalism, demonstrating the power of repetition as the Crazy Horse rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot cycle through the chords and Young solos endlessly in his grimy, deeply-felt tone, playing off the subtle, prodding rhythm work of guitarist Danny Whitten. But the more compressed and accessible moments on the record are just as powerful. The title track is a brash, rollicking country-rocker in the vein of the Band, while "Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)" is a gorgeous acoustic ballad that finds Young, Whitten, and violinist Robin Lane engaged in three-part harmony on the achingly slow chorus. Best of all on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Young sounds comfortable and confident, singing with the versatile (and hugely influential) voice that has changed remarkably little in the 40 years since. Everybody Knows was a sort of big bang for Young, a dense moment of creative explosion that saw possibilities expanding in every direction. So its follow-up was anything but a retread. With his newfound confidence, Young was poised to stretch, and After the Gold Rush sounds a bit like an overview of the Great American Songbook but with one guy writing almost all the songs. Members of Crazy Horse appear in various combinations on a few of tracks, and songs like "Southern Man" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love" have the hypnotically stoned but sneakily intense groove of the previous record. But more precisely crafted songs like "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", "Birds", and especially the astonishing title track, which has become a rock standard, show Young's gift as a writer of original melodies of extraordinary beauty in full flower. It's an aspect of Young's work that can be overlooked: the guy can write a simple tune over a chord change that hollows you out completely. Sure, the record has a phrase or two that might sound a little dippy to those with an aversion to hippies (Young was one of those, though of a very individualistic sort), but After the Gold Rush is basically unassailable. There's a reason why it's the favorite Neil Young album for so many. Which brings us back to Harvest, Young's mainstream breakthrough. Stepping away from Crazy Horse and hooking up with Nashville session musicians he dubbed the Stray Gators, Harvest finds Young experimenting again with a richer, more painstaking studio sound, but one informed by the spontaneity he'd found so inspiring. It's probably his best sounding album, and the ear tends to gravitate to the rhythm section in particular, as bassist Tim Drummond and drummer Kenny Buttrey are almost absurdly in the pocket throughout. (Here I should note that, while they certainly cost a lot of money, the vinyl pressings of these four albums live up to the hype: whisper quiet and clear but full and punchy-- these records have never sounded better). But Young's songs, though not up to the level of Gold Rush, continue his winning streak. "Out on the Weekend" and the title track set the table for a mellow, rootsy, and breezily melodic album, which later songs like "Heart of Gold" and "Are You Ready for the Country" continue, but Harvest has a more tormented side as well. "A Man Needs a Maid", recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, is one of his stranger creations, an affecting portrait of loneliness undercut with a clumsy, lunkheaded chorus refrain, the sincerity of which has never been quite clear. "Old Man" is something of a signature song, laying out the wizened, long-view outlook that didn't fit with his chronological age (by the time of the record's release, Young was 26). And then there's harrowing and radiant "The Needle and the Damage Done": at just over two minutes, it's far too short, almost painfully so, just like the lives of the junkies it was written about. Soon enough, two people close to Young, Crazy Horse's Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, would die from drugs. The unexpected success of Harvest, combined with the grief and guilt Young felt after Whitten and Berry died, would send Young into a dark and raw place with his next few records as he famously "headed for the ditch" to escape the middle of the road. Hereafter, an always-fascinating mix of success and failure would define Young's career, and along the way he'd make some pretty lousy records along with the great ones. To embrace Young as an artist after Harvest would mean accepting his many flaws (including the questionable business decisions, like the many confusing releases of this year), which have made his career unusually rich and varied as well as maddeningly inconsistent. But all that would come later. Enjoying this brilliant four-album run requires no special commitment.

2009-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2009-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

December 11, 2009

01f29de8-be3b-41fe-b0e7-f512e059f8a9

Mark Richardson

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

Mark Kozelek's sprawling, cathartic fifth album as Sun Kil Moon feels like the work of a songwriter clearing his palate.

Mark Kozelek's sprawling, cathartic fifth album as Sun Kil Moon feels like the work of a songwriter clearing his palate.

Sun Kil Moon: Among the Leaves

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16674-among-the-leaves/

Among the Leaves

Minimalism isn't a word you'd think to apply to Mark Kozelek's fifth album as Sun Kil Moon: As noted in our interview with the man last week, it's 17-songs-long (plus a five-song bonus disc with alt and live versions of album tracks), and boasts titles such as "I Know It's Pathetic But That Was the Greatest Night of My Life", "The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Young Woman vs. the Exceptionally Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man", and "Not Much Rhymes With Everything's Awesome at All Times". Among the Leaves is the opposite of the emo navel-gazing session that those titles might imply, but in terms of sheer volume and loquacity, the record certainly feels like the work of a songwriter clearing his palate: It's a fairly cathartic, sprawling creative outpouring. In terms of paring back, though, the deluge is executed with minimum musical verbosity: Sun Kil Moon's last album, Admiral Fell Promises, featured just Kozelek playing nylon-stringed guitar in a Spanish-influenced fingerpicked style, and it's much the same here, save for a handful of songs where he's backed by a small ensemble-- banjo, violin, light drums. The Spanish flourishes are condensed to an occasional trill and the odd bout of dramatic inflection (the tremulous waltz of "The Winery"), with Kozelek embracing the genre by being less the flamboyant and romantic artist presenting small and considered masterpieces; more an observer content to sit back on warm, dusty street corners, casually chronicling what he sees (or imagines) and throwing in oblique personal reflections from his 20-plus years as a songwriter. In Stephen Deusner's review of Admiral Fell Promises, he wrote that the split between Sun Kil Moon and Mark Kozelek is "a way to document the complex lives of his songs, which are never quite finished but always hold the potential for rebirth and transformation." At their sparsest and least lyrical, the songs here are all finished in a sense, even when Kozelek openly sings about how he thinks certain efforts could be better ("It's a chore to write half a dozen/ Some guys lay back and rest on their laurels like lazy old hacks/ Well I wrote this one and I know it ain't great," he admits on "Track Number 8"). However, the casualness and immediacy of his recollections (a homeless girl outside his door, watching cats in the street), and the repetitive nature of much of the playing, indicates that he hasn't worked much of the material up a great deal. "King Fish" is the only song here performed on electric guitar, swaying pendulum-like with a dour heft that recalls the absorbing, weighty tone of Ghosts of the Great Highway, yet its relatively basic way with transition and lack of development over its near-seven-minute duration (there's a little closed-eye, loping-head guitar jam toward the end, that's about it) again makes it seem fairly unadulterated. This lack of formality and sense of true "finishedness" may well feel frustrating, whether you preferred the bittersweet fullness of Ghosts or the compact, elegant sculptures of Admiral Fell Promises, perhaps the two furthest removed cornerstones of Sun Kil Moon's releases to date. Certainly, some of the songs here, particularly towards the end-- the record clocks in at 73 minutes-- feel a little lazy or unnecessary. Kozelek's main way of increasing the drama or tension of a wiry, rankled song like "That Bird Has a Broken Wing" is to raise and layer his voice, a trope that gets a bit tired after a while. There are plenty of moments of graceful, serene beauty, however, that pull their weight as part of such a large body. The dry stroke of "Young Love" feels forlornly romantic; the title track could easily be the theme to a cerebral family drama, such is its quintessentially warm, accepting tone (and sweetly syrupy violin); the song with the ridiculously long title bows and sparkles like birds hopping on a telephone wire in the wind. Deusner posed a question in his review of Admiral Fell Promises: "What makes a Mark Kozelek solo album different from a Sun Kil Moon album?" While the mostly solo Among the Leaves really serves only to muddy any answer to that question, it poses another: What's Kozelek gunning for on this record? It's uncompromisingly long, but often courtly and sweet, the kind of familiar furniture that feels as though it could easily soundtrack a beautiful moment. He's rancorous about touring and how much he hates London ("UK Blues"), and magnanimous whether singing about the woman he loves ("Track Number 8"), women he's cheated on ("That Bird Has a Broken Wing"), women who have stalked him around the world ("I Know It's Pathetic"), or died and broken his heart (he names the subject of "Katy Song" on "UK Blues", and her presence hovers elsewhere). The lyrics are uncharacteristically jokey in parts: the "guys in tennis shoes" who replaced the hot girls who once made up Red House Painters' audiences on standout song "Sunshine in Chicago"; citing a crowd member in Ireland who moaned that he hadn't had such a bad time at the show since seeing Bill Callahan ("UK Blues 2"). There's little poetry or affect to the words, which are concerned with fairly straight storytelling about Kozelek's personal and impersonal relationships rather than anything particularly lyrical. Overall, you get the impression he isn't really trying that hard, that bettering his bests isn't a notion that interests him, 20 years after the release of Red House Painters' debut album. He's the kind of talented songwriter that can mostly pull that off; though for a record so spare and simple, Among the Leaves comes off as strangely confrontational.

2012-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00

2012-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Caldo Verde

June 1, 2012

01f2dfb6-257c-433b-b9f7-cb583aa4b3bc

Laura Snapes

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

Using a bespoke tuning system, the Finish producer builds his songs inside an otherworldly ecosystem of sound using the pulse of electro, funk, and classic IDM. It is simply alluring.

Using a bespoke tuning system, the Finish producer builds his songs inside an otherworldly ecosystem of sound using the pulse of electro, funk, and classic IDM. It is simply alluring.

Aleksi Perälä: Sunshine 3

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aleksi-perala-sunshine-3/

Sunshine 3

Aleksi Perälä believes in the power of vibration. The Finnish electronic musician, who lives in rural Wiltshire, England, is a follower of something called the Colundi Sequence: a musical system, created by his friend Grant Wilson-Claridge, that harnesses microtonal differences in pitch to create sparkling, crystalline fields of sound. “You know that feeling when you hear a really amazing song and your hairs go up on your body?” Perälä once asked an interviewer from Resident Advisor. “Colundi is that feeling all the time.” For Perälä and Wilson-Claridge, Colundi isn’t merely academic or aesthetic: It has a mystical dimension that they claim unites physics, math, astronomy, psychology, “human bio-resonance,” and more into an all-encompassing belief system that even they struggle to understand. Of course, it’s possible that this is all bullshit. Wilson-Claridge co-founded Rephlex Records, where the young Perälä got his start, with Aphex Twin, the most notorious prankster in electronic music. Rephlex shuttered sometime after 2013, allegedly so Wilson-Claridge could devote more time to Colundi, but Perälä has remained remarkably, scarily prolific: His discography since 2007 numbers some 30-odd albums, including at least 17 volumes (or “levels”) of The Colundi Sequence series. You don’t need to understand the intricacies of Colundi to appreciate Sunshine 3, the third and apparently final installment of a series for the Dutch label Clone Dub. The way the album fuses clean-lined machine rhythms with the vivid detailing of classic IDM is plenty thrilling in its own right. His drums, which toggle between four-to-the-floor pulses and the syncopated snap of classic electro, have the satisfying thwack that has distinguished recent Aphex Twin recordings, full of crisp snares and sternum-thumping rimshots, while his layered pads and staccato counterpoints have an almost three-dimensional feel. Beyond the considerable funk behind his grooves, every element exists in a state of perpetual flux: timbres morphing, proportions shifting, patterns rising and falling in the mix, all of it almost imperceptibly in constant motion. But Perälä’s fondness for unusual tunings, even if you don’t buy into the more fanciful aspects of Colundi, might help explain why Sunshine 3 feels subtly but crucially different from most electronic music. There’s a shivery, tingly quality to Perälä’s synths. The spectrum seems to shimmer as if swirled with phosphorescence. It’s an almost psychedelic experience, like looking at an object—or even into thin air—and suddenly becoming aware, with a kind of dizzying, microscopic certitude, of every single molecule playing its tiny part. That vibrancy has something to do with Perälä’s use of dynamics: Unlike a lot of contemporary electronic music, it’s not mastered to make it seem uniformly, oppressively loud. Look at one of these songs’ waveforms in a standard audio-editing tool, and you’ll see that it appears unusually slender compared to the “brick-walled” casualties of the loudness wars. Every sound is given room to breathe, and the results can be intoxicating, as physical as slipping into a warm bath. At the same time, that richness of tone can, after an extended duration, leave you feeling almost queasy: It’s a surfeit of frequency, more than we’re used to. Given the vastness of Perälä’s catalog and the consistency of his style, it’s not always easy to differentiate his records in terms of quality. But several tracks here stand out among his most immediately appealing work. The slow, skulking “NL-L56-18-07450” is built around a single chord that flickers with a strange kind of brightness, a quality you can’t quite put your finger on. The perpetually detuning synth lead of “NL-L56-18-07474” lends an eerie, M.C. Escher-like feel to his stair-stepping arpeggios. And the closing “NL-L56-18-07441” (as usual, these titles do not exactly lend themselves to DJ requests) offers the rare instance of Perälä’s music in beatless mode; it sounds every bit as expansive and immersive as you’d expect. But the highlight of them all is “NL-L56-18-07443,” whose major-key riffing sounds uncharacteristically sweet, even naive. The wistful melody is such that it’d probably be a pretty great tune even if Perälä availed himself of a simpler system of tuning. But as it is here—chiming and pinging, luminous as dewdrops on sunlit gemstones—it feels like a glimpse at an unknown dimension, a secret frequency beamed in from another world.

2019-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Clone

February 26, 2019

01f53ba6-0980-4013-9c5a-ec395a7d80dc

Philip Sherburne

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

The latest installment from the prolific SF-based psych rockers finds frontman John Dwyer handling more of the instruments and taking the pace down a notch.

The latest installment from the prolific SF-based psych rockers finds frontman John Dwyer handling more of the instruments and taking the pace down a notch.

Thee Oh Sees: Castlemania

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15540-castlemania/

Castlemania

Over the past decade, San Francisco's Thee Oh Sees have morphed from a showcase for skronk-savant John Dwyer's sensitive side into the hardest working band in garage-rock. Their output is prolific and their live show combustible. But on Castlemania, Dwyer opts to go it alone. With the exception of live-band regular Brigid Dawson-- who, along with the Sandwitches' Heidi Alexander, contributes some backing vocals-- the shaggy-banged songwriter handles almost all of the instruments. Drummer Mike Shoun and Guitarist Petey Dammit aren't out of the picture permanently. They're just off-duty until the fall, when Thee Oh Sees are scheduled to release yet another full-length record. Castlemania is a fairly introspective affair, at least by Oh Sees standards. It's Dywer's most melodious batch of songs since 2006's mostly acoustic Cool Death of the Island Raiders. Without the heavy full-band artillery he leans toward skewed bubble-gum pop, fleshing out the guitars and drums with flutes, bells and thrift store synths. It was recorded, at least in part, at Dywer's former group house. "This here is the last record worked on at 608c Haight Street in San Francisco (very near and dear to my heart and heavy in my memories) before control was assumed by rich assholes," he writes in the liner notes. Not that this is Thee Oh Sees' answer to Nebraska. Even at his most reflective, Dwyer's songwriting retains a sinister, "Sesame Street"-on-LSD sensibility-- simple melodies and creepy lyrics, frequently delivered in a whacked-out monster-voice. "It don't feel too good to be dead in the 21st century/ I am dirt but I can be/ A home for wayward hungry seeds," Dwyer growls on "I Need Seed", deploying a Looney Tunes-worthy narrative in a song about death. It's summery retro nuggets pinned into the red, shot through with a healthy dose of drugs and dread, while "Pleasure Blimps" finds him singing of machines stripping away flesh over shimmering glockenspiel lines and 12-string guitars. All in all, Castlemania is a fairly loose and scattered record. There are plenty of oddball tangents, including a stripped-down and spooky cover of West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band's "I Won't Hurt You" and the forlorn mellotron and sax instrumental, "The Horse Was Lost". Songs frequently melt down into racket rather than stop on a dime. But it's good to hear Dwyer step away from his backing band's big guns, if only for a moment.

2011-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00

2011-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

In the Red

June 15, 2011

01f88c64-0209-45bb-857f-028b91cee4c3

Aaron Leitko

https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/

Up to now, Scott Herren-- the shy, lanky Atlantan responsible for Prefuse 73's fabulous glitch-hop debut Vocal Studies + Uprock ...

Up to now, Scott Herren-- the shy, lanky Atlantan responsible for Prefuse 73's fabulous glitch-hop debut Vocal Studies + Uprock ...

Prefuse 73: One Word Extinguisher

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6449-one-word-extinguisher/

One Word Extinguisher

Up to now, Scott Herren-- the shy, lanky Atlantan responsible for Prefuse 73's fabulous glitch-hop debut Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives-- hasn't made his name as a purveyor of confessional music. The closest he ever came was the laptop catharsis of Delarosa and Asora, which had no secrets to tell; rather, its intricacies of meter and texture gave your head something to do while your guts spilled out over it. Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives was hard-edged and fast-cutting, immersed in early rap techniques and sensibilities; it didn't express feelings, it steamrolled them. But One Word Extinguisher shows a range of emotional grappling usually foreign to instrumental hip-hop. It's clear that Herren was coming back to the studio night after night not just for skills and thrills, but for a measure of solace. Make no mistake: This is a breakup record. "The never-ending battle" is what Herren calls the break-up that lasted for the year-plus during which this album was in production. "I locked myself in my room working, disconnected the phone, bummed out as fuck," he told CMJ in March. "You can't talk to anybody, you feel like shit, and it's the only thing you have to express yourself." A year of unspeakable suffering channeled into sixty ripe minutes: In the hands of anyone else, it could be torture. This sorrow, however, sparks with a sweeping wail of queasy ahhh's that carry stunted hopes for a soon-to-be-doomed relationship. Vocal scraps and a blood-curdling scream announce the descent of the mask of hip-hop rage, as an eightfold synth-scribbling bomb drops right into "The End of Biters", the first of several sucker-punching cutfests in the illustrious tradition of the edit record. Next comes Diverse's self-absorbed "Plastic", a screed that rails with righteous indignation against "pop trends and predetermined top-tens." All this over-the-top rebuke is obviously an escape from something. Things begin to come into focus as "Uprock and Invigorate" bounces in with its edges exposed. Warm, fretless bass, flitting Rhodes, drizzling sawtooth, and a brittle snare become intent on stocking up and locking down with every passing bar. But beneath the surface lies a hint of tension between the percussive exoskeleton and its syrupy core, an orderly contest of soul-versus-machine that momentarily eclipses the sense of loss. The rest of the album projects this kind of tension into a giant battle of the sexes. "The Color of Tempo" mangles its feminine samples with a virile beatbox pattern; "90% of My Mind Is with You" breaks up heavy panting with a deliberately difficult, meter-defying beat, and ends with a series of mournful, defeated R&B; samples. There can be no more doubt when, on "Female Demands", a girlfriendish voice casually tells Herren to "fuck with the beat here" only to be throttled by digital effects; the rest of the track feels like a giant damaged gynorcism. Before we know it, we're desperately trying to forget her, bumping with another woman who croons "you... you... you..." on the offs. Meanwhile, straight meters are often sprinkled with triplet ligaments, propelling the beat with an uncommonly light touch. But Prefuse's rhythmic sophistication isn't just about alternating threes and fours-- as the lesson goes, it takes two interlocked meters to make African music. While Herren rarely tries to stand up in two meters at once, he often relies on the juxtaposition of mildly divergent rhythmic feels within the same beat, proving his mastery of some of the subtler tensions available to the instrumentalist. This gives him access to some very subtle tensions-- though many tracks seem like tricks to distract us from the ongoing devastation. Sooner or later, it sinks in that we're in the company of an emotional fugitive, sealed in a room with machines whose perfect control, he is convinced, will allow him to avoid the inevitable emotional reckoning. Through scorn and bombast, through distraction and self-parody, through the sheer weight of craft, this Prefuse tries to wear his sorrow down, to crush himself, to explode the emptiness. A thrilling listen, but how could such a mission succeed? I'm not sure how he did it. There's a glimmer of hope in the open restraint of "Choking You", a sawtooth shuffle scattered with chirpy, chalky bits. Another late track calls a gender truce, as a skeletal crunch frames some lightly doctored female vocals, giving a cold, sweet impression, like melon rinds left out in the rain. And the last track, in spite of its metric and sexual duplicity, offers a baffling promise of balance. Unexpectedly, the music becomes its own consolation.

2003-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

2003-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp

May 7, 2003

01f8ac24-dd10-4eaf-b94e-eb9e95c62925

Jascha Hoffman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jascha-hoffman/

Blonde Redhead have long been maligned as self-consciously artsy, drawing facile comparisons to Sonic Youth and a host of No-Wave ...

Blonde Redhead have long been maligned as self-consciously artsy, drawing facile comparisons to Sonic Youth and a host of No-Wave ...

Blonde Redhead: Misery Is a Butterfly

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/807-misery-is-a-butterfly/

Misery Is a Butterfly

Blonde Redhead have long been maligned as self-consciously artsy, drawing facile comparisons to Sonic Youth and a host of No-Wave acts-- references that owe as much to their bandname's tribute to a DNA song as to Blonde Redhead's often discordant noise-rock. That rhetoric, of course, should've been shelved after the release of Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons. I only felt I should mention it again because, apparently, many of their party-line detractors never got the memo. By Melody, much of Blonde Redhead's feedback-laced art-rock had given way to brittle pop and arm's-length romanticism, yet somehow they still caught flak for the sound they had already largely outgrown. Just saying, is all: What used to be true is now tired, and, with the release of Misery Is a Butterfly, such knee-jerk dismissals can finally be considered irrelevant. On Melody, the band's artistic growing pains had already become evident, most notably in the wide-eyed, fairytale pining of "This Is Not", a vibrant synth-ballad that-- like the first protuberance of wing from a cocoon-- threatened to split the seams of their style-damaged rock wide open. That's not just flowery critic-speak, either-- Kazu Makino and the Pace twins (Amadeo and Simone) split from Touch & Go Records and financed their latest recording themselves, because, according to Simone, they "didn't want to have any kind of limits with what [they] wanted to do as far as expenses; with Touch & Go, sometimes things were a little tight." The confidence that led them to strike out on their own-- even before 4AD expressed interest in the album-- is impressive. But more striking is how clearly that confidence has translated to their music. Freed from all constraints, Blonde Redhead are beautifully reborn on Misery Is a Butterfly. True, feelings of loss, insecurity, and outright alienation do factor heavily into the record's thematic vision (this butterfly isn't called "Misery" for nothing), but the band's sense of assuredness surrounds the album's themes of vulnerability. Misery Is a Butterfly was recorded before being shopped to a label, but judging by the sound of the album, its eventual release on 4AD seems to have been an inevitability. From track one, the record is lacy and moody, perfectly suited to the one-time home of the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. The word "lush" doesn't quite capture the fluttering whirls of strings, keyboards, and delicately plucked guitar that open "Elephant Woman"; I'd go so far as to label such enveloping richness of instrumentation "baroque," perhaps even "rococo." For Blonde Redhead's latest incarnation, the softer production simply serves as polish for tarnished, tired guitar, drums and keyboards. Here, the bristling energy that once held would-be sympathizers at bay has been turned inward, resulting in an unprecedented illusion of warmth. "Anticipation", for example, ventures into completely foreign territory for the band; it's vulnerable, yet remains emotionally available, and is breathtaking even in comparison to the band's most typically pretty compositions. Never before have Makino's gentle whispers seemed so genuine or close at hand. The psychedelia-inflected title track and the fractured desolation of "Falling Man" also offer inviting hints of the underlying humanity Blonde Redhead had, until now, been so reluctant to display. Of course, even now, that humanity may be little more than an apparition. Their tales of heartache and desperation have cast Makino and Amadeo Pace-- the emotional heart of the band-- as tragically misunderstood, tortured poets who pin misery on their sleeves, never conceding that anyone else could be capable of understanding their pain. And despite the more inviting nature of Misery's music and production, they remain insular and distant here, as well. Only on "Anticipation" are Makino's vocals as beckoning as their musical surroundings; elsewhere, Blonde Redhead remain as they've always been: beautiful and vacant. But they excel at being just that. It bears repeating that Misery Is a Butterfly is a gorgeous achievement. Parrying the double-edged sword of pathos in music-- the "emo" trap, if you will-- Blonde Redhead have perfected their own unusual strain of perceived insincerity. They said it themselves, and it still rings true: "Fake can be just as good." Though this album's lustrous ornamentation is often placed at odds with its halting vocals, Blonde Redhead are wise enough to embrace their own imperfections. They once espoused the merits of loving another despite our faults, and it shouldn't be hard for fans to seize on that sage advice. Misery Is a Butterfly makes it easy.

2004-04-12T01:00:03.000-04:00

2004-04-12T01:00:03.000-04:00

Rock

4AD

April 12, 2004

01f8fd2d-88fd-458a-952c-d68dc196d894

Eric Carr

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

Ariana Grande, a teenage actress turned singer, manages to skirt all kinds of retro with ease on her debut Yours Truly. It's not quite pastiche,  it's bland in spots, but it's certainly not your typical 2013 pop album.

Ariana Grande, a teenage actress turned singer, manages to skirt all kinds of retro with ease on her debut Yours Truly. It's not quite pastiche,  it's bland in spots, but it's certainly not your typical 2013 pop album.

Ariana Grande: Yours Truly

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18591-ariana-grande-yours-truly/

Yours Truly

Ariana Grande, a teenage actress turned singer, is bubblegum through-and-through-- and she’s already changed her preferred flavor. Her debut single, 2011’s 4 Non Blondes-sampling “Put Your Hearts Up”, was a generic Disney radio tune that she now publicly disavows. Apparently asserting control over her career, she's now dabbling in nostalgia, as is instantly clear when Hollywood strings and doo-wop vocals kick off the 1950s-styled “Honeymoon Avenue", the first song from her debut album. But why should you care about any of this? Because the minute her wordless vocals cut through the canned backing, they demand attention; her voice is smoky, world-weary and featherweight all at once, and the first thought that should come to mind is how did you stumble on this old Mariah Carey outtake? That’s no small statement, but Grande is no small talent. And she’s self-aware. On an album that had a bit of a troubled gestation, the singer switched gears again through its making, opting for a 90s hip-hop soul vibe that awkwardly sits with the more doo-wop-indebted songwriting. Second single “Baby I” is most representative of where Grande is at this stage in her career. It’s a hodgepodge of familiar clichés, from its Britney-esque “yeah yeah yeahs” to the punchy horn riffs that somehow melt into a staggered hip-hop verse. It’s a cross-generational mess of influences, and all the better for it; Grande’s boundless energy means she can power through like no one else, tying hooks into knots with her voice as if it were nothing. Her four-octave range is almost ludicrously powerful, and though it still feels like untapped potential, she has admirable control for a 20-year-old. Though her songs are simple, every time she runs across a repeat phrase, she’ll attack it differently, and her melismatic loops and athletic scales breathe life into even the most staid of lyrics. Even the most hackneyed songs, like the Grease-calibre cheese of “Daydreamin", are lifted by her intonation, and when she really sounds like she believes it, the results are fiery. Album highlight “Piano”-- a surefire feel-good radio hit in the vein of Katy Perry, but stripped lean-- benefits from Grande at her most impassioned, turning a charming conceit into a life-or-death matter as she shrieks “If I got my piano I know I’ll be okay!” Even this one feels irrepressibly old-fashioned, even if it's not clear exactly what era she's pining for this time-- how many 20 year old pop stars sing about dancing to a piano? Songwriting is the album’s biggest flaw. Whether or not it’s Grande’s own inexperience or simply major label meddling sanding off the edges, Yours Truly is a very safe record. Mostly written by two of R&B's most mawkish hawkers, Babyface and Harmony Samuels, it’s built on cliché and tradition, and written professionally to a fault. Let's just say that her personality certainly doesn’t come from the lyrics. The blandness seeps into the production as well: the Lex Luger hi-hats and slowed-down southern rap vocals on a few tracks feel remarkably neutered, as if they were sampled from Kidz Bop: Trap Edition. It’s all antiseptic white surfaces, but maybe that works in her favour, because there’s nothing to distract from her vocals. “I wanna say we’re going steady/ Like it’s 1954,” Grande sings on one of Yours Truly’s most earnest ditties, “Tattooed Heart". It’d be tempting to label her with the Grammy-baiting title of "old soul," but that’d be a bit diminutive-- she’s just a huge talent that admires her forebears, and knows their tricks very well. If her debut album has a strength, it manages to skirt all kinds of retro with ease, not quite pastiche and certainly not your typical 2013 pop album. Ending with its one concession to EDM, the feel-good stomper “Better Left Unsaid", Grande insists that she’s “gonna say things” that she shouldn’t. It’s a low-key sort of rebellion, but it’s encouraging-- if she owns up to that promise, there’s not much that could stop that voice from taking over the world.

2013-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00

2013-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Republic

September 23, 2013

01f9af9e-55d9-40b7-a17b-7016bc703cc1

Andrew Ryce

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

Metro Boomin pulls the best out of Gucci Mane on his fourth LP since he was released from federal prison. Together, they are sharp and unhinged.

Metro Boomin pulls the best out of Gucci Mane on his fourth LP since he was released from federal prison. Together, they are sharp and unhinged.

Gucci Mane: Droptopwop

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23355-droptopwop/

Droptopwop

Last summer, just two months after his release from a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., Gucci Mane dropped his comeback album. The title made sense at the time: Everybody Looking. Already one of the most celebrated rappers of the century—a cult hero who had caught Billboard lightning a few times—the Atlantan’s profile had only risen while he was behind bars. The generation of rappers who owed Gucci their careers, either by borrowing his creative DNA or as one of his legions of mentees, had finally reached maturity and were dominating rap’s mainstream. Lean and sober, Gucci went on a charm offensive in the press, breaking bread with magazine editors and beaming on Snapchat. Everybody was looking, and Gucci was ready, mostly. Crucial in all this was that many were looking for the very first time. The thing about Gucci Mane’s work is that it’s best consumed in endless, bludgeoning waves. The jewelry appraisals and the re-up math and the latent paranoia are supposed to bleed into one another like an endless river. But the comeback album is supposed to be a Machiavellian statement of purpose, and *Everybody Looking *was weighed down by more than a few cobwebs. When the house lights came up, Gucci retreated back into his music to work out the kinks. Droptopwop, his full-length collaboration with Metro Boomin, is Gucci’s first post-prison project that truly gels. This is thanks in no small part to Metro, who Gucci had sought out for production when Metro was still in high school, who has since evolved into one of the genre’s most important architects. And while his reputation as a hitmaker has long been above reproach (he’s scored four top-ten hits in the past twelve months, including Migos’ “Bad and Boujee,” which hit No. 1), *Droptopwop now stands alongside the 21 Savage vehicle Savage Mode *as a testament to Metro’s skill as an auteur. The beats are spare and disquieting; “Finesse the Plug Interlude” sounds as if it’s playing out of a haunted Game Boy Color. “Dance With the Devil” is built on the shivers you feel when the feds are watching you as you watch your friends succumb to drug addiction, when you have unprotected sex and tremble in the clinic’s waiting room. And while “Met Gala,” which guest stars a furious Offset and includes assists from Southside and CuBeatz, is comprised of familiar parts, they’ve been arranged in a way that’s just a little bit foreign. Imagine hearing Flockaveli* *out of a passing car and then trying to describe it to someone who only speaks a little English. Though much has been made about Gucci’s radiant positivity, the truth is that he’s still working out fiercely, sometimes uncomfortably dark things in his music. “Helpless” plays around with the titular concept, throwing it into lighter contexts—into strip clubs—but the hook has a sinister subtext. “Tho Freestyle” pays tribute to fallen friends between gas station dead-drops and flying dope in on a drone. There are times, too, when Gucci’s sly sense of humor pokes through: On “Finesse” he raps, “I’m a shyster, I’m spiteful, and I love rifles/And I love white folks/I walk on a tightrope.” That last quote is the sort of thing Gucci does when he’s at his best: tightly-wound raps that betray a love of language, a comic’s sense of timing, a keen awareness about the way people see him, and the baggage of their preconceptions. *Droptopwop *is a worthwhile listen because Metro draws this out of his mentor by instinct, which makes for some of their most unhinged music in some time. So if you’ve tuned out since the welcome-home party, it might be time to start looking again.

2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Atlantic

June 5, 2017

01f9ce93-22c7-4ede-bc60-2ec5d4d54425

Paul A. Thompson

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

The decorated pop songwriter arrives in the spotlight with a full-length debut whose plush R&B and live-band arrangements strike a tone that’s classic, sexy, and understated.

The decorated pop songwriter arrives in the spotlight with a full-length debut whose plush R&B and live-band arrangements strike a tone that’s classic, sexy, and understated.

Victoria Monét: Jaguar II

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

Jaguar II

The jaguar sneaks up on you. Victoria Monét can relate. One day you could audition for a Darkchild-sponsored girl group that never got off the ground, and nine years later, you could be a celebrated songwriter picking up Grammy nominations for work on Ariana Grande’s thank u, next—and the crowd probably still don’t know your name. So Victoria Monét McCants, who’d always dreamed of becoming a triple threat, adopted the apex predator. It must have worked, because Jaguar II, originally slated as the second in a trio of EPs, was promoted to full album. Slick and professional without feeling impersonal, Monét’s first LP is fresh, populist R&B illustrated in the harvest-gold hues of the 1970s, a vision of plush velvet paintings and even plusher video treatments, an album designed to marry the analog textures of Smokey Robinson with the sparkling earworms of Keri Hilson. The first Jaguar, released in 2020, was about the good life: Monét wrote a ballad celebrating what squats can do for your butt, a car-sex jam about hooking up with Kehlani (with Kehlani on the remix). Jaguar II lives there too, rolling up with the weed-blazing Lucky Daye duet “Smoke” and turning out for “Party Girls,” a reggae-pop cut with Jamaican heavyweight Buju Banton. This song and the extremely fun, choreo-forward third single, “On My Mama,” are slight stylistic outliers on an album saturated in what Monét has called “elevated soul,” the glossy, Motown-inspired sound she and returning executive producer D’Mile summoned for the first installment of Jaguar. “I felt like a wannabe Quincy Jones,” Monét said of the earlier record. Writing and recording during the pandemic touring freeze, she’d imagined how she would one day present the songs onstage, “thinking about how a Bruno Mars or an Earth, Wind & Fire show would feel.” (The next year, D’Mile’s take on neoclassical R&B comfort food would reach larger audiences with his work on An Evening With Silk Sonic.) In a sense we have Bruno Mars to thank, because he’s the reason Monét started writing hooks. In 2010, Mars landed his first vocal credit as a featured guest on rapper B.o.B’s debut single “Nothin’ on You,” a surprise No. 1 hit. The younger Monét, with several songwriting credits already to her name, regarded it as a case study for how a well-placed vocal feature could launch a solo career. She decided to specialize in writing pop hooks, promoting herself as a singer by putting her own vocals on demo tracks. Eventually she landed a B.o.B feature too. “I would try to sing them so well that they wouldn’t take me off and replace it with another artist, and sometimes it would work,” she recently explained in conversation with Earth, Wind & Fire. Speaking of Earth, Wind & Fire: Jaguar II practically counts as a stop on the veteran band’s summer tour. They’re prominently featured on “Hollywood,” and the late Maurice White picks up a credit for a “Beijo” interpolation on “Smoke”; in the video, Monét slaps on a Verdine White mustache to reenact “September.” The ’70s revival aesthetic might recall Foxxy Cleopatra, teen Beyoncé’s Pam Grier-inspired character in Austin Powers, but Monét is taking more notes from the grown Beyoncé of Lemonade and Renaissance, building toward ambitious statements rooted in music that reminds her of family, culture, and home. The legacy guests, EW&F and Banton, are voices from Monét’s memories of family gatherings and her mom’s Sunday housecleaning soundtrack. She taps into her own generational nostalgia for “On My Mama,” a glammed-up flip of Chalie Boy’s 2009 song “I Look Good” designed for feeling yourself on a level only Texas rap braggadocio can match. Monét isn’t rapping, but you could play her right alongside Megan. Jaguar II sounds like checking in someplace swanky: the arrangements are contractor-grade, rewardingly rich, augmented with the kind of live trumpet and violin you don’t get at home. It’s Monét’s longest release yet, with transitional moments (“Smoke Reprise”) and a track-to-track mix that isn’t quite continuous but clearly intended for fluid listening. The hooks come gift wrapped and hang around longer than Mylar balloons. “We keep it smooth like a Cadillac/With the diamond spinners in the back,” Monét coos on “Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem),” a dub-flavored soundtrack for low-riding ladies where a playful allusion to “five with the Black hand side”—as in “gimme some skin”—becomes a period-appropriate flirt. Monét excels at striking this tone that’s classic, sexy, understated. Even when she makes it dirty, there’s a veneer of fantasy and metaphor, like how it still counts as a dress even if it’s mesh. “Might be too fine to hit it from behind,” she brags on “On My Mama,” a wink-wink you could almost blink and miss. “Stop (Asking Me 4 Shyt),” about hangers-on looking for unearned favors, feels like a complaint that could’ve been lodged by some jazz diva a century ago. “Stop askin’ me for money, get your own/I barely even just got on,” Monét objects, but her line readings feel more influenced by mellow ’90s R&B, so it’s easy to add a modernizing, “Don’t call my phone… bitch.” (Mercifully she does not try to rhyme anything with “Cash App,” whose brand placement is limited to those expensive-looking videos.) Taking “Party Girls” into the Kaytranada-produced “Alright” is a play-it-straight-through flex that ends with a big-cat growl—arrrgh. But as brand-name producer collaborations go, the first Jaguar’s S.G. Lewis disco groove “Experience” shone a little brighter. And though these days Monét’s deep cuts are much too good to be called filler, the hook-focused writing style fosters songs that bet long on a pretty melody and a broad idea, like cosmic love is divine on “How Does It Make You Feel?” or Hollywood is all glitter on “Hollywood.” Within the sequence, this lighter fare is pleasant, an eminently listenable update on an iconic sound; still, you wish she’d spill about some of these randos with the ridiculous financing requests, drive that Cadillac somewhere and not just spin the wheels. In Monét’s songs, love can be idealized even when it doesn’t work out. In “I’m the One,” her beau wouldn’t recognize her brilliance even if God’s own angels seated her directly on their face. Sometimes Jaguar II kinda feels like that: Frictionless, full of instrumental flourishes so smooth they risk sailing by unremarked. Monét can sell even a slightly clunky lyric with practiced polish, sounding like the consummate performer even when you know she’s lived it. The only real unguarded moment comes at the end of “Hollywood” (“Dreaming bigger than I ever should”), with a loud giggle-squeal from Monét’s baby, who’s now 2. You’ll have to check the credits to see that it is her daughter’s voice—more meaningful and, in a way, less obvious than the jaguar growl. Even if you get the sense her best work still lies ahead, it’s refreshing to see an emerging star earn their concept album. Simply imagining you are Bruno Mars won’t take you there—but an album like Jaguar II will. It’s the rare species of pop-soul that evokes a real sense of spiritual uplift: We’re not just succeeding, we’re made for better things.

2023-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-08-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Lovett Music / RCA

August 26, 2023

01fa617f-a19c-4ef4-ba99-620a443c5506

Anna Gaca

https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/

Soulwax's first LP in eleven years is a soundtrack to a Belgian film about two brothers who run a hedonistic nightclub in Ghent, Soulwax's hometown. For the sixteen-track album, the band invented fifteen fictional personas, each with its own sound, aesthetic, and backstory that draw from different decades of club culture.

Soulwax's first LP in eleven years is a soundtrack to a Belgian film about two brothers who run a hedonistic nightclub in Ghent, Soulwax's hometown. For the sixteen-track album, the band invented fifteen fictional personas, each with its own sound, aesthetic, and backstory that draw from different decades of club culture.

Soulwax: Belgica Original Soundtrack

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21682-belgica-original-soundtrack/

*Belgica* Original Soundtrack

Soulwax are nothing if not mercurial. The band was founded in the mid '90s as a sort of Flemish take on Britpop, only to trade grunge guitars for analog synths a few years later. Around the same time, founding members Stephen and David Dewaele began moonlighting as 2 Many DJs, whose mashup classic As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Pt. 2 introduced electroclash to the masses and featured, among other things, a conflagration of The Stooges "No Fun" and Salt 'n Pepa's "Push It." (Just think: this was four years before Night Ripper.) Soulwax eventually became more or less synonymous with its side project, as the group remixed fellow dance punk acts like LCD Soundsystem and weirdly — and most successfully — their own material, with 2005's Nite Versions. During their most active period, Soulwax had an uncanny ability to stay on trend, seeming to predict mashup culture, European electro and big-tent EDM consecutively. Today, you could either laud them for their foresight or accuse them of carpetbagging, but it'd be wrong to undersell just how influential they were at their peak. Lately, though, the band has kept a lower profile, occupying themselves with their Radio Soulwax project, programming a Grand Theft Auto radio station, and laying down the occasional remix. The Dewaele brothers' first LP in eleven years is actually a soundtrack to Belgica, a Belgian film by the Oscar-nominated director Felix Van Groeningen about two brothers who run a hedonistic nightclub in Ghent, Soulwax's hometown. For the sixteen-track album, the band invented fifteen fictional personas, each with its own sound, aesthetic, and backstory that draw from different decades of club culture. Genres range from Studio 1 reggae to indie rock, under pseudonyms like Burning Phlegm, White Virgins, and Noah's Dark. (The Shitz do double duty – no pun intended.) That a band could attempt a project like this with such strict historical verisimilitude is a fascinating technical exercise; the fact that many of these songs are actually decent is just an added bonus. The album opens with "The Best Thing," a synthpop track starring a vocalist named Charlotte, who plays the role of R&B diva. "You're the worst thing that always happens to me," she sings, over percolating synths. The effect is more Jessie Ware than Janet Jackson, but it's a decent pop song that sounds authentic enough to be an actual, if unremarkable, '90s single. Then it's on to The Shitz with "How Long," a slab of angular indie rock ripped from the pages of NME. (RIYL: Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines). Listening to these two tracks together provides a good idea of what you're in for over the course of the album: disparate sounds stacked together in ways that make little sense outside the context of the movie they soundtrack. Sometimes it works: There's probably no reason why Turkish pop should play next to Italian electro, but "Çölde Kutup Ayisi" and "Ti Ricordi Di Me" are legitimately enjoyable back-to-back. Probably because it's closest to their "real" sound, Soulwax seem most comfortable when they mine club music for inspiration, which is pretty often. White Virgins' "Turn Off The Lights," for instance, sounds a whole lot like Ladytron, which is to say it's a decent piece of chilly synth pop. Better still are Rubber Bands, whose bongo-driven disco jam "Caoutchouc" could be worked seamlessly into a 2 Many DJs mix. Belgica could be seen as the logical extension of what Soulwax has been doing for years, but what made "Radio Soulwax" and Nite Visions great was how the band holistically united various styles with little effort. Nothing felt overthought; it just worked. Belgica, however, somehow scans as both too varied and not varied enough. Sure, it's interesting to hear Soulwax make hardcore punk with a dude from Sepultura (Burning Phlegm's "Nothing"), but is that really what we want from the band's first new music in more than a decade? In the end Belgica sounds like what it is: an impressive exercise in musicology that never quite transcends its core concept. Soulwax deserve to be celebrated for their ambition and their enormous contribution to the film, but let's hope the next Soulwax album is a Soulwax album.

2016-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00

2016-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00

Electronic

Play It Again Sam

March 4, 2016

01fcc501-a41d-47bc-bce1-1897a50d7a64

Nathan Reese

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/

Josh "Deakin" Dibb's  Sleep Cycle is a short album but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member.

Josh "Deakin" Dibb's  Sleep Cycle is a short album but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member.

Deakin: Sleep Cycle

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21822-sleep-cycle/

Sleep Cycle

Josh “Deakin” Dibb is the Ringo of Animal Collective—the member of a revered psychedelic-pop quartet that gets the least amount of love. Though in Dibb’s case, that’s mostly a function of spotty attendance. He’s the only Animal Collective member still taking advantage of the group’s formative open-door policy, having appeared on just five of their 10 official albums, and his perceived expendability is further underscored by the fact the band’s most successful record to date—2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion—was recorded without him. Unfortunately, his status as Animal Collective’s resident black sheep was further entrenched by the well-intentioned but ill-conceived Kickstater campaign he used to announce this debut solo album way back in 2009. After crowd-sourcing over $25,000 to fund a festival trip-cum-recording mission to Mali—with promises of an accompanying picture-book to complement the resultant album—Dibb provided scant updates about the project’s status for the better part of seven years, causing many donating AnCo fans to lose their chill. But this would-be scandal failed to address a more prosaic problem: as Dibb recently relayed to Pitchfork, the extended delay was mostly the product of chronic, near-paralyzing self-doubt about the quality of his material and vocal performances. Now, having long ago donated the majority of the Kickstarter proceeds to a Malian NGO, Dibb has finally emerged with a mostly self-financed, small-scale album that was quietly released this month in a special cassette/book edition for donors (and on Bandcamp for everyone else). But despite all the Kickstarter confusion and communication breakdowns, none of Dibb’s out-of-pocket supporters should feel short-changed. Because whatever anxiety Dibb felt about not following through on his Kickstarter campaign has been channeled into a wonderful little album about overcoming the anxiety of not following through on your Kickstarter campaign. Okay, so Sleep Cycle doesn’t include any lyrics that specifically reference inflated funding targets and comment-section outrage, but this exercise in self-help psychedelia provides a poignant portrait of an artist regaining their confidence one song at a time. It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes—but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work. To date, Deakin's biggest solo vocal was on the swirling Centipede Hz centerpiece “Wide Eyed.” But even if Sleep Cycle’s opener, “Golden Chords,” finds him crooning in a heretofore-unheard higher register, it’s instantly identifiable as an Animal Collective product, its field-recording ambience and hypnotic acoustic oscillations conjuring allusions to Sung Tongs (ironically, another AC album that Dibb sat out). But Dibb’s lyrics are far more lucid and plaintive than anything Avey Tare and Panda Bear were attempting back in 2004: “Stop believing your being’s been shattered and distorted/ because, brother, you’re so full of love,” he sings atop a beautifully aching melody, and though the lyrics are delivered in second person, you get the strong sense Dibb is singing them into a mirror. As a vocalist, Dibb is positioned about halfway between Panda and Avey—not gifted with the natural angelic grace of the former, yet more plainspoken and less prone to hysterics than the latter. But he knows how to get the most out of it, immersing his voice in his aqueous mixes without obscuring its emotional intent. Amid the phantasmagoric dub-pop of “Just Am,” he sings, “I’ve lost my voice, I need direction,” so he relies on the song’s repeated juju guitar lick, steam-piped beat and drifting piano chords to show him the way. And if unadorned opening verse of “Footy” initially puts some Jeff Mangum-like strain on his cords, they prove resilient enough to withstand the incoming onslaught of percussive shocks. True to its title, “Footy” essentially sounds like Dibb kicking a drum set down a never-ending flight of collapsing stairs, pausing at each wobbly landing before working up the strength for another punt. But just as the song seems like it’s going to completely combust, an encroaching tsunami of analog synths washes the destruction away, representing the victory of inner peace over external pressure. Sleep Cycle’s weightier tracks are threaded together through brief interstitials featuring street recordings of Malians that Dibb encountered on his African excursion, but they’re more than mere vacation souvenirs—on “Shadow Mine,” he mutters his own affirming words overtop a Malian chant, and the effect is like eavesdropping on the private prayer of someone working up the courage to face the outside world. “Seed Song”, meanwhile, answers the cacophonous chaos of the aforementioned “Footy” with a rippling, pulse-regulating soundscape that provides another vivid reminder of Animal Collective’s mid-2000s masterworks. But the closing, stargazing ballad “Good House” is less about Feels than the #feels. Atop a churchly, Spiritualized-style sway, Dibb dispenses reassuring mantras (“Breathe in without/ Breathe out you’re alright/ Breathe in with all/ Spit out all that rage/ You’re safe now/ Don’t fight”) much as he did back on “Golden Chords.” But here it sounds less like a personal therapeutic exercise than the sage advice of someone who’s survived a crisis of confidence and is now trying to help you cope with your own. And surely, that’s a reward more valuable than anything promised on his Kickstarter page.

2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

My Animal Home

April 18, 2016

01fd5ff1-2192-444f-bf60-55ddad43a521

Stuart Berman

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

Where the Weeknd's House of Balloons was a debut tour-de-force and Thursday an arduous journey into the internal turmoil of a self-loathing narcissist, the rising Toronto star's third release in nine months exudes a brazen, sexy confidence.

Where the Weeknd's House of Balloons was a debut tour-de-force and Thursday an arduous journey into the internal turmoil of a self-loathing narcissist, the rising Toronto star's third release in nine months exudes a brazen, sexy confidence.

The Weeknd: Echoes of Silence

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16134-echoes-of-silence/

Echoes of Silence

"Baby, I got you/ Until you're used to my face, and my mystery fades," Abel Tesfaye sang on "Rolling Stone". It was a surprisingly self-effacing line for a singer whose mystique is a central part of his appeal. And he's not wrong. By now, we know most of Tesfaye's tricks: his choir-worthy voice, his debauched lyrics, and the rich tapestry of synths and samples that backs it all up. His third full-length in nine months, Echoes of Silence, is more self-referential than ever, repeating lines and themes from previous records, including XO cognac (or ecstasy and oxycontin, if you prefer), questionably consensual sex, and self-destructive behavior. It was novel on his debut House of Balloons, but does it still work three albums in? Well, it turns out Tesfaye isn't out of surprises: As his fans now know, opening track "D.D." stands for "Dirty Diana", and Tesfaye channels the King of Pop with an eerily accurate vocal facsimile. It's an audacious intro even for an artist whose output has already stretched lyrical and musical themes to depraved extremes. The ease with which Tesfaye can shock and awe listeners at this point feels like something of a victory lap. Where House of Balloons was a debut tour-de-force, and Thursday an arduous journey into the internal turmoil of a self-loathing narcissist, Echoes of Silence exudes a brazen, animalistic confidence: The production is impeccable but never showy. The songwriting is tighter and more streamlined. The slinky, spectral "Montreal" is the closest thing to a pure pop song Tesfaye has written since "What You Need". And his conversational intonation emphasizes the lingering threat that underlies every lyric. In lyrical terms, Echoes of Silence is Tesfaye's strongest work. With a clearer and less obtuse narrative arc than Thursday, the album finds his snaky, manipulative persona at its most blatantly corrosive. Album centerpiece "XO / The Host" is a stomach-turning tale of corruption and coercion, featuring one of the record's most uncomfortable moments: After Tesfaye sings of reducing some nameless girl to destitution, the beat goes quiet as he self-satisfyingly mocks, "And if they won't let you in/ You know where to find me... 'cause all we ever do is love." It's transparently deceptive, and it slips into "Initiation", a cringe-inducingly detailed tale of drug-fueled kidnapping and gang-rape told through the part-grunted, part-rapped exhortations of an inhuman goblin. With drums that stutter and slice more like Trent Reznor than Tricky, "Initiation" handily defines what separates the Weeknd from other R&B acts, folding in the post-punk influences, the industrial touches, and that oddly alluring menace into four minutes of captivating hell. While Tesfaye's voice remains the star attration, Illangelo's production is at a high point on Echoes: From the decadent "Hong Kong Garden" orientalisms on "Outside" to the heart-rending vocal looping on "The Host" to the sleepy-eyed, morning-after bluntness of "Same Old Song", each lecherous tale is lifted by the attentive and elegant production. Those tiny strokes of detail-oriented genius pull Echoes of Silence from "yet another Weeknd mixtape" to its own lithe, cocksure plateau, the same way that the meandering production on Thursday emphasized the numbingly sublime feeling of loss and confusion. A lot has been said of how Tesfaye has run amok with the introspective R&B of artists like Drake and Trey Songz, but the particulars of self-abuse and excess haven't been profiled so intimately or persuasively by any act of comparable size or influence. Of course, all Weeknds must end: producer Clams Casino guest produces "The Fall", and his mournful melodies and distorted synths climax in a locust cloud of buzzing and whirring, suddenly rendering Tesfaye's self-reassurances shaky and hollow. The album's eponymous closing track is stark naked, a hospital-bed lament so unflinchingly bright it recalls the Knife's "Still Light" in its mournful fatalism. Tesfaye sounds near tears, and as Echoes peters out with his whimpering, "Don't you leave me all behind/ Don't you leave my little life," it's difficult to tell whether he's quoting a nameless victim or gasping the words himself. Those four minutes of unguarded sparsity -- Tesfaye's quivering falsetto and a funereal piano-- unwind 2011's most exciting, conflicting, and self-mythologizing musical universe. On closer "Echoes of Silence", is Tesfaye's protagonist finally unraveling or merely beginning anew? That his loosely narrative album trilogy seems like it could begin and end at any one of its entry points seems to hint at the latter. It's a chillingly cyclical picture of decay and self-immolation marking the Weeknd's greatest triumph: an emotional thread so confusing we can love, hate, fear, and be revolted all at once. Tesfaye's recycling of previous lyrics, melodies, and ideas on Echoes of Silence is bound to give fresh ammo to fairweather fans eager to hurl accusations of diminishing returns and unimaginative retreads at the rising Toronto star. But the repetition is akin to devices used by artists as separate as Terius Nash and Dan Bejar, a self-contained world of idiosyncratic artistry that the Weeknd's trilogy ambitiously embraces, rising above the catcalls of inauthenticity and "PBR&B" lashed at it from the very beginning to somewhere else completely its own. "I used to do this for the thrill," Tesfaye laments on penultimate Echoes track "Next", and even as his world disintegrates into the desolate closer, it's hard to think of anything more morbidly thrilling in 2011 than listening to the Weeknd methodically destroy himself. Echoes may lack the surprise-and-delight factor of House of Balloons, but it's a strong finish to Tesfaye's first trilogy, providing just enough closure to satisfy, and just enough mystery left to entice us back for the next round.

2012-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

2012-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

self-released

January 3, 2012

01fdc318-7d3d-4223-9bc8-cfb316de1d2d

Andrew Ryce

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

New Jersey’s Mach-Hommy is one of the East coast’s finest working rappers. Building on his cryptic mystique, his latest effort finds him diving into a collection of beats by Earl Sweatshirt.

New Jersey’s Mach-Hommy is one of the East coast’s finest working rappers. Building on his cryptic mystique, his latest effort finds him diving into a collection of beats by Earl Sweatshirt.

Mach-Hommy: Fete Des Morts AKA Dia De Los Muertos EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mach-hommy-fete-des-morts-aka-dia-de-los-muertos-ep/

Fete Des Morts AKA Dia De Los Muertos EP

It would take thousands of dollars to acquire the full Mach-Hommy discography—not because his records are long-forgotten or out of print, but because he’s charging what he sees fit. Market price, cold commerce. Those price tags (upward of a thousand dollars for records like DUMP GAWD: HOMMY EDITION and Dollar Menu 2) give the rapper’s music a cryptic mystique, but they aren’t gimmicky; Mach-Hommy seems profoundly uninterested in gimmickry. To wit: this fall’s excellent DUMPMEISTER, which retailed for the delightfully unsubtle $187, plays like a breathless best-of, no pauses, no frills—just the blunt rhythms of a card number, expiration date, and security code. For his latest effort, the $111.11 Fete Des Morts AKA Dia De Los Muertos, Mach-Hommy taps Earl Sweatshirt for beats and dives back in. (On his Bandcamp, the record is credited, confusingly, to DUMPMEISTER.) Fete Des Morts is a compelling look at Earl’s influences and instincts behind the board—including a soul bent that bypasses turn-of-the-century Roc-A-Fella—but it transcends because Hommy uses it as yet another venue to argue for himself as one of the East coast’s finest working rappers. The New Jersey-based Hommy was briefly affiliated with the Conway- and Westside Gunn-helmed Griselda Gang, but has since splintered off into his own section of the genre. His major work is Haitian Body Odor, an LP he sold directly to fans through his Instagram DMs last year, before finally putting it online for free this March. HBO is a remarkable record, dense and patient. Its cover is a portrait of Michéle Bennett, the former Haitian first lady who fled the country in 1986; Hommy litters his writing with the relics of French colonization, class revolt, and Giuliani-era New York. Songs unfurl slowly: “1080p” has a 60-second prelude before its first verse, but once he starts rapping, he goes in fits and starts, lamenting that “nobody love you when you alive,” remembering how his friends blanched at how seriously he took The War Report. By contrast, Fete Des Morts feels like a series of contained exercises. Songs flow seamlessly into one another; the 70-second exhale of “Henrietta LAX” gives way to “TTFN,” which itself abruptly stops for Mach to mock “social media metrics” and let off a gunshot. Earl’s beats are uniquely post-Dilla in their treatment of vocal samples and in his affinity for warm tones cut by jagged textures. (There’s even an exultant airhorn at the beginning of “Bridge of the Water G-d.”) The artists’ partnership, then, is compulsively listenable: acrobatic writing over no-nonsense beats by another verbose MC, who knows where to leave the crevices. It’s tempting to classify huge swaths of East Coast rap from this decade as post-Marcberg, full stop. The comparisons to the vaunted half-revivalist Roc Marciano are not unfounded, but Hommy is a more unpredictable writer. He’s more likely to pick up a narrative thread for an extended period, or to start writing in discursive lines, filled with the pronouns and prepositions. There are also stark, fascinating diversions: “Embarrassment of Riches,” which is produced by Navy Blue rather than Earl, opens with an extended bit of singing, before transitioning back into razor-tongued raps. Structurally, Fete Des Morts frees Hommy to try a quick series of different ideas: a Twitter-nodding crime vignette on “Manje Midi,” a modern-day “Les Mis” on “THEJIGISUP.” The themes he explored in such depth on HBO—familial honor, the weight of tradition—reappear here mostly through implication, while the writing is more overtly concerned with naturalistic, often grim details. And that’s where the EP succeeds so beautifully. It exists, on one level, as a clean, distilled 22 minutes of exceptional rap music. But it also serves as a companion piece to both Mach and Earl’s larger catalogs, continuing old threads and hinting at directions either one might pursue in the new year.

2017-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Mach-Hommy

November 28, 2017

01ff94a3-17cb-41f9-9d75-f83d687fee45

Paul A. Thompson

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

Slidin'. Ramblin'. Driftin'. Movin'. Strugglin'. The War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel is all of these things on Slave Ambient, the Philly outfit's second full-length release. But they're the sort of band that believes the journey is more important than the destination.

Slidin'. Ramblin'. Driftin'. Movin'. Strugglin'. The War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel is all of these things on Slave Ambient, the Philly outfit's second full-length release. But they're the sort of band that believes the journey is more important than the destination.

The War on Drugs: Slave Ambient

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15733-slave-ambient/

Slave Ambient

Slidin'. Ramblin'. Driftin'. Movin'. Strugglin'. The War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel is all of these things on Slave Ambient, the Philly outfit's second full-length release. Given these professed feelings of restlessness and uneasiness, it's no surprise the band's hypno-roots-rock is all about forward motion and momentum, favoring steady, locomotive rhythms that rarely pause or waver-- elements that reinforce Granduciel's efforts to make his problems disappear in the rearview mirror. Slave Ambient shares several qualities with its 2008 predecessor, Wagonwheel Blues: a sense of open-freeway abandon and splendid isolation set against a glorious expanse; an unabashed admiration for FM-radio Americana icons of yore (Springsteen, Dylan, Petty); and a willingness to buff the band's gritty edges with serene, if randomly deployed, instrumentals and reprises. In other words, the War on Drugs still deal in "excellent road trip music," as Pitchfork's Stephen Deusner described Wagonwheel Blues. However, this time Granduciel is less interested in documenting the environmental and economic travesties he sees unfolding outside his window as he is the internal dramas swirling around in his head. Nearly every song here expresses some desire to get outta town and start anew. The band responds by amplifying the more textural qualities of their sound: dreamy synth drones, liquefied electric-guitar leads that linger and fade like raindrops rolling down the windshield, and the most tasteful use of smooth saxophone this side of Kaputt. (Interestingly enough, Slave Ambient was recorded without founding member Kurt Vile, who applies a similarly lysergic approach on his latest solo release, Smoke Ring For My Halo-- for fans of rustic rock'n'roll, the two albums collectively yield an embarrassment of riches not experienced since Wilco and Son Volt released A.M. and Trace in tandem.) When the band's wide-screened psychedelic flourishes are fused with Granduciel's well-worn Dylan- and Petty-isms, songs like "Brothers" and "It's Your Destiny" wondrously conjure nothing so much as the Traveling Wilburys recording for mid-1980s 4AD. Or in the case of the excitable "Baby Missiles" (a holdover from last year's stop-gap Future Weather EP), it's as if the Spiritualized and Springsteen albums filed alphabetically next to one another in your record collection had melted together on a hot August afternoon. But as much as the War on Drugs make music to accompany an escape to something better, they're the sort of band that believes the journey is more important than the destination. The songs on Slave Ambient don't necessarily end in a place very different from where they began, but through subtle sonic manipulations and layering-- like in the last two minutes of opener "Best Night", where the guitars, piano, and melodica start to blur into the same blissful wavelength-- they give the impression that a great distance has been traveled. The really amazing thing about the album is how anthemic and affirming it feels despite the near total absence of proper sing-along choruses. Case in point, centerpiece track "Come to the City" is all about ascension, rising out of the miasmic haze of preceding interlude "The Animator" and gradually accruing all the confidence and verve of Live Aid-era U2. But rather than work up a chest-thumping, Bono-worthy wail, Granduciel is happy to sit back and ride out the song's dense waves of sound, to prolong the euphoric feeling of anticipation-- the road trip he's soundtracking is very much his own, and he's as much a slave to the ambience as we are.

2011-08-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-08-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Secretly Canadian

August 23, 2011

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Stuart Berman

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

After two releases mined from years of home recordings, Calgary songsmith Chad VanGaalen gathers a handful of songs recorded around the same time, in the same place, and unsurprisingly he finally attains a uniformity of sound and theme that can hold his gorgeously fractured songs together.

After two releases mined from years of home recordings, Calgary songsmith Chad VanGaalen gathers a handful of songs recorded around the same time, in the same place, and unsurprisingly he finally attains a uniformity of sound and theme that can hold his gorgeously fractured songs together.

Chad VanGaalen: Soft Airplane

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12319-soft-airplane/

Soft Airplane

Sometimes we want the sounds of the city, sometimes we want the sounds of the country. Ours being a suburban republic, now and then we want both, and few musicians are better at this union of sensibility than Chad VanGaalen. The one-time busker from Calgary has a knack for summoning a virginal rural past with his picking and strumming, a dreamy patch of woodland, though he can also work up a mean batch of richly abrasive experiments that bear little relation to the pastoral. Part of the charm of VanGaalen's past two records, 2005's Infiniheart and 2006's Skelliconnection, arose in their sense of looseness and disorder, which came through in the lyrics, the sequencing, and the textures. Both releases drew from an archive of home recordings; consistency would be tough to fake. But on his latest release, he gathers a handful of songs recorded around the same time, in the same place (his basement), with the same equipment ("primarily on an old tape machine and a JVC ghetto blaster," according to the press notes). Small wonder that, with Soft Airplane, VanGaalen finally attains a uniformity of sound and theme that can hold his gorgeously fractured songs together. Past the numberless instruments, styles, and guises, the solid form of Chad VanGaalen is now visible. Neil Young meets Thurston Moore, an irresistible comparison to draw, does touch the heart of VanGaalen's aesthetic. The emotionally cracked falsetto, the nerdy forays into science fiction, the death-instinct, the longing, and the very metropolitan impatience with harmony and quiet are all there. We see this as we slip into "Molten Light", a murder ballad in the vein of Young's "Down by the River", as VanGaalen sings, "I dumped her body into the molten light/ It floated to the surface and it did not ignite." He shot his baby, but unlike Neil's gunman, he watches her rise out of the water to sort him out. Equally morose, bearing another final-resting-place title, "Willow Tree" describes death as liberating as he reflects on hangings and Viking funerals over a twanging banjo. Which isn't to say that the ratty glimpse of the future, the glitch and crunch of his on-the-cheap production, is no longer there. He keeps the rainbow of precious instruments-- jury-rigged drum machine, analog synths, accordions-- only now the choices feel smarter, more attuned to each song's spirit. Fuzzed around the edges, thick with mood, the Thurston Moore-like "Bare Feet on Wet Griptape" whizzes by on its careening guitars and melodic hooks. Clearly VanGaalen wants to keep his grip on a pop sensibility, even if it's in the warped form of a no wave jam. With its curious pairings of harmonica and synthesizer, "Phantom Anthills" and "TMNT Mask" drift further away from the countryside, all the way onto the dancefloor-- or rather VanGaalen's skewed vision of a dancefloor. These gestures toward a wider audience aren't free of VanGaalen's chronic morbidity. Where we do it in our thoughts, or on our anonymous blogs, this man thinks about death with his instruments. Now he's just going easier on the ears. We see this on the charismatic "Cries of the Dead", which artfully fleshes out the fixation on death that has marked all of his work, with the help of pop flourishes and patterns. In a matter of minutes, listeners are shuttled from the sight of a man beating his dog, to a memory of gazing upon a lover's painting of mountains and feeling like he was there. The song distills the essence of Soft Airplane, an intimate, intelligent, and always transporting cycle of songs that sends VanGaalen closer to his own voice and, in the process, closer to us.

2008-10-17T02:00:03.000-04:00

2008-10-17T02:00:03.000-04:00

Rock

Sub Pop

October 17, 2008

02030aba-5e82-44b2-9dc0-c6c2646dc8eb

Pitchfork

Interweaving spiritual jazz, thumping rhythms, and contributions from a tight-knit group of collaborators, the Nicaraguan Canadian musician imbues his fifth LP with the warmth of human connection.

Interweaving spiritual jazz, thumping rhythms, and contributions from a tight-knit group of collaborators, the Nicaraguan Canadian musician imbues his fifth LP with the warmth of human connection.

Mas Aya: Coming and Going

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mas-aya-coming-and-going/

Coming and Going

A simple tenet guides Brandon Miguel Valdivia’s music as Mas Aya: “The more personal you can make music, the more interesting it is.” He does just that on his fifth album, Coming and Going. On “Be,” the Nicaraguan Canadian percussionist and producer passes the mic to his young daughter, Martina, and Valdivia’s partner and co-parent, Lido Pimienta, appears throughout the album—as she did on 2021’s Máscaras—softening Mas Aya’s twitchy, organically textured beatscapes to the point that they feel like the fruit of a family jam session. Spending an afternoon with Valdivia and Pimienta sounds like it must be enchanting, considering the duo’s vast range of experiences, credits, and collaborations—from remixing Run the Jewels to starring on a children’s television show with Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Keeping busy throughout pandemic purgatory, Valdivia and Pimienta not only became parents, but moved from cosmopolitan Toronto to the comparatively suburban London, Ontario. Coming and Going was initially composed around field recordings that Valdivia collected at his parents’ house, drawing upon Buddhist spiritual practices to create a sense of tranquility within the frantic beats, like Arthur Russell after listening to Traxman. Coming and Going boasts a patient, panoramic sound that embraces a lifetime of disparate cultures, communities, and influences. Valdivia welcomes house music’s pulse under spiritual jazz’s sprawling tent; the album gathers together a village of guest players, such as Afro-Cuban percussionist Reimundo Sosa, trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud, and Josh Cole on bowed bass. “Dora” and “Windless, Waveless,” the album’s bouncy opening songs, flash back to folktronica-era Four Tet and Caribou. “Ocarina” is anything but a reference to The Legend of Zelda, wrapping Rob Clutton’s luminous electric bass in rustling percussion and Rampersaud’s bright streaks of horn. Pumping pianos reminiscent of Mas Aya’s labelmate Scott Hardware echo throughout “What Shattering!” and the astonishing “No Trace,” an oasis of jazzy ambient bliss with vocals from fellow Toronto musician Isla Craig. By the time he reaches closer “Abre Camino,” Valdivia has stretched all the way out, filling nearly seven minutes with shimmering synths, wooden flutes, and rhythms piled upon rhythms. Miraculously, these kinds of densely crisscrossed threads soothe instead of stress, drifting deeper into the ambient dimensions of Mas Aya’s music. On Máscaras, his music’s spiritual dimension masked political subtexts that were revealed in samples of street protests and revolutionary poets. This time, the personal is political. Alongside the warmly tactile sounds of the album’s innumerable interwoven instruments, the loving presence of the two primary people in Valdivia’s life, and an even larger chosen family of close collaborators, creates a human connection so strong you can feel it. One way of pushing back against injustice, he suggests, is simply existing in the here and now with your loved ones—an action so potent it needs no words to resonate.

2024-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Telephone Explosion

July 13, 2024

02079326-fe4d-43e2-b541-a8e7b8ceafdf

Jesse Locke

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

Lana Del Rey's third album is her purest album-length expression, and her most artistic one. It is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence. While she's obviously a pop artist, Honeymoon feels as though it belongs to a larger canon of Southern California Gothic albums, and synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work.

Lana Del Rey's third album is her purest album-length expression, and her most artistic one. It is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence. While she's obviously a pop artist, Honeymoon feels as though it belongs to a larger canon of Southern California Gothic albums, and synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work.

Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21033-honeymoon/

Honeymoon

On the cover of Honeymoon, we see our star, Lana Del Rey, the idle passenger of a parked convertible Hollywood tourmobile, gazing behind her through face-obscuring shades. As an artist, she's never shied away from the obvious, but the image feels almost too on-the-nose, too apt—Lana doing The Full Lana. And yet, that's exactly what Honeymoon gives us—it is Lana Del Rey's purest album-length expression, and her most artistic one. Accordingly, Honeymoon is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence, and the pall does not lift for its 60-plus minutes. It's an album about love, but "love", as Del Rey sings it, sounds like mourning. The romance here is closer to addiction—something that's sought for its ability to blot out the rest of life's miseries. On the title track, when she croons "Our honeymoon/ Say you want me too", she's dopily hopeful as Brian Wilson singing "We could be married/ And then we'll be happy." The album luxuriates in this bleak space between dream and reality, which stretches endlessly from one melancholy track to the next. It's not until "The Blackest Day", eleven songs in, that Honeymoon's static depression gives way to apocalyptic ecstasy, as she gasps "In all the wrong places/ Oh my God" in multi-tracked harmonies on the chorus. The moment is Honeymoon's emotional apex, but it still moves at the pace of a funeral march, and the release it depicts is that of embracing rock bottom. The morose orchestral grandeur of the album feels like an arrival point, and also possibly a dead-end: the sentimentality and drama throws back to old Hollywood film scores. The setting is pitch-perfect and a million mothballed years away from the current pop landscape; it's strange, a barometer of youth culture trading in such old music. As a singer, Del Rey sounds more like the singer of her pre-Lana Lizzy Grant days here, when she was was performing torch songs in secretarial skirts at A&R showcases, looking too young to seem so haunted. Her previous two records felt like earnest stabs at finding a pop context for that voice, but they were both overwrought, and Honeymoon's arrangements feel built to rectify that. Honeymoon acknowledges what, or rather who, we are here for. It knows that we want big, sad, fucked-up epics. It's rare to get to a chorus within the first minute, and until that point it's usually just Lana, maybe a little guitar or some cinematic strings. The programmed drums of "High by the Beach" and "Religion" wait nearly a minute to enter, and "Terrence Loves  You" is even sparser. Many tracks expand sleepily past the five- or six-minute mark, which is to say that Honeymoon's languor takes our attention for granted. Which is certainly not a mistake. While she's obviously a pop artist, Honeymoon feels as though it belongs to a larger canon of Southern California Gothic albums—Celebrity Skin, Hotel California, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. She sings about it all—the sprawl, toxicity, the culture of transactional relationships, the particulars of the light ("God Knows I Tried")—with an East Coast blue-blood accent ("scared" becomes "skaaaahd"). All the gee-whiz irony of previous albums is gone, often she sounds like ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog roused from a nap, sweet but disconnected. Like Joan Didion's ur-California girl transplant, Maria Wyeth, Del Rey sings like a woman who "knows what 'nothing' means"—on "High by the Beach", "Freak", and "Art Deco" she sounds beyond longing, like it's been a long time since she felt anything at all. She is cruelly incisive on "Art Deco" ("you're just born to be seen"), a highlight that curdles when the careless phrase "You're so ghetto" comes out in the chorus. It's one of the few tonal misfires on an album that otherwise feels like Del Rey moving into the temple she's built. She has been transfixed by, and riffing on, America since the beginning, but Honeymoon pushes past easy Kennedy kitsch and undulating flags to mine something more specific. In the opening track, she sings "We could cruise/ To the blues/ Wilshire Boulevard," and the name check is shrewd. One of L.A.'s earliest thoroughfares, a locus of establishing the city's car culture, Wilshire runs sixteen miles, and as architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne writes, "can take you from a world-famous piece of architecture to a weed-choked lot, from a realized ambition to an abandoned one, in the space of a few blocks." In the following verse, she replaces blues with "news" and substitutes "Pico Blvd.", which is working class for its duration, bi-secting Koreatown and running through Ecuadorian, Salvadoran, Russian, and Mexican communities. The juxtaposition is startling and canny. In the space of one lyric, she posits the invisible, real city running parallel to the gleaming, manufactured one, sketching an arterial map of a city coursing with ambition. It reminds us of something that was the very issue with Del Rey that irritated some early on—she knows exactly what she is doing. Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.

2015-09-21T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-09-21T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Interscope

September 21, 2015

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Jessica Hopper

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-hopper/

In contrast to his former Death From Above 1979 partner's MSTRKRFT project, Sebastien Grainger's debut solo effort ventures down a more conventional rock path with tracks built loosely on the singer-songwriter template.

In contrast to his former Death From Above 1979 partner's MSTRKRFT project, Sebastien Grainger's debut solo effort ventures down a more conventional rock path with tracks built loosely on the singer-songwriter template.

Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains: Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12406-sebastien-grainger-and-the-mountains/

Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains

When details of Death From Above 1979's breakup surfaced in 2005, it was surprising to learn of conflicts between Jesse Keeler and Sebastien Grainger, the band's only two members. The tight synchronicity of their rage-dance breakout You're a Woman, I'm a Machine-- released just a year before the split-- instead suggested that the look-alike duo shared a close creative companionship. In retrospect it seems like they probably didn't agree on an aesthetic, either. Keeler's post-DFA79 project MSTRKRFT abandoned rock for techno, shooting for (and whiffing on) a heavily vocodered brand of Daft Punk-inspired electro-house. Grainger's debut solo effort Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains, meanwhile, ventures down a more conventional rock path with tracks built loosely on the singer-songwriter template. Of course, that term conjures unpleasant notions of watered-down Dylanisms (or worse), but Grainger isn't a neo-folkie (though signing to Saddle Creek might further the misconception). He's simply fleshed out his own song sketches with power-pop and, occasionally, 1970s arena rock to create a batch of high-energy, radio-friendly tunes. The record showcases Grainger's command of melody and works best at its most straightforward, like on album opener "Love Can Be So Mean". As with other standout moments here, the song leans heavily on the beefy power chords of Cheap Trick and an anthemic, new wave-inspired chorus. With its shouts of "Let's go out tonight!" the track could easily play beneath a high school flick's one-last-party sequence, and I mean that wholeheartedly as a compliment. "Who Do We Care For?" and "American Names" are equally catchy, the former recalling QOSTA's heavy-rock crowd pleaser "Go With the Flow" with its handclaps and insistent piano backing. Had Grainger chosen to stick with this direction, Mountains would be perfectly listenable (if unoriginal), but unfortunately the album's strong lot ends with "American Names". On the bulk of the remaining songs, he shows an odd tendency for lopsidedness-- songs with capable choruses but plodding, asymmetrical verses. Make it through the inconsistent patches of "I Hate My Friends" and "By Cover of Night (Fire Fight)" and you'll be rewarded with sugary sweet, synth-flecked hooks and left feeling only half-satisfied. On these songs (and others such as "[I Am Like a] River" that suffer a similar fate), it feels like Grainger is going for a Pixies-esque verse/accessible refrain format, but this material-- uncomplicated and pop-reaching as it is-- doesn't call for it. Mountains also trots out a handful of head-scratchers. Grainger includes a live version of "I'm All Rage", and while it's a good recording of a decent song, it protrudes oddly from the studio cuts surrounding it. There's a Jay Reatard-type punk thrasher called "Niagara" that is said to have been originally posted to MySpace after a night of heavy drinking and doesn't appear to have been improved upon since. Decisions like these make for an effort that, at times, comes across as slapdash and underthought. Which brings us full circle, in a strange way, to DFA79. While the band surely wasn't the headiest of its era, there was a svelte, muscular quality to their music-- a feeling that any excess had been cut away-- that is absent from this record (and, it's worth noting, Keeler's work in MSTRKRFT). What's also gone is the sense of aggression and urgency that made You're a Woman, I'm a Machine so impressive. Perhaps the same discord that did the group in was also its driving force; we'll never know. What does seem clear now, though, is that if Keeler and Grainger continue at their current pace, they won't soon escape the shadows of their former glory.

2008-11-07T01:00:05.000-05:00

2008-11-07T01:00:05.000-05:00

Electronic / Pop/R&B / Rock

Saddle Creek

November 7, 2008

0210193d-513f-4c1e-bb67-6c14d8160398

Tyler Grisham

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tyler-grisham/

With his big legacy album Tha Carter V out of the way, Weezy is back in the booth and cruising, experimenting with an array of styles and a dizzying maze of wordplay.

With his big legacy album Tha Carter V out of the way, Weezy is back in the booth and cruising, experimenting with an array of styles and a dizzying maze of wordplay.

Lil Wayne: Funeral

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-wayne-funeral/

Funeral

Lil Wayne has been rapping so long that the protégés of his protégés have protégés. A teen prodigy turned megastar turned cautionary tale turned comeback king, Wayne has led about as many lives as anyone in rap: From Best Rapper Alive to “flash without the fire” and back again. Now, at 37, free of the colossal stakes hanging over his oft-delayed legacy album, Tha Carter V, Wayne has settled in and rediscovered his looseness. An album title like Funeral had fans speculating that this one might be his last, a requiem for his career. That idea seems ridiculous now. Why would one of the great rappers of this millennium retire just as he’s returning to form? Tha Carter V reestablished Lil Wayne as a force, answering many longstanding questions about his viability as an artist. Released at the conclusion of legal battles with his surrogate father and lifelong mentor Birdman, the album felt like the beginning of a second (or third) act. Wayne has said Carter albums are the only projects that require any specific preparation and focus, and that his other albums and mixtapes are simply born from his marathon recording sessions. With his rebound record finally liberated and the pressure alleviated, Funeral gets back to business as usual for Wayne. Which is to say: funneling what is likely countless hours in the booth spitballing and freestyling into something coherent. Wayne’s down years were largely the product of a diminishing punchline-to-clunker ratio. He’s still a volume shooter, but like Rockets guard James Harden (who gets a song named after him here), his low-percentage play is offset by his high degree of difficulty, his ability to break the game with crafty maneuvers and extreme skill. On the Mannie Fresh-produced “Mahogany,” which warps lyric fragments from Eryn Allen Kane’s “Bass Song” into jazz scatting, Wayne bends in and out of shape around her interjections. His “Ball Hard” verse is a free-associative word game, bouncing from one character to the next until they begin to blur together. Listening to Wayne on Funeral is a bit like watching a skateboard trick compilation: He wipes out a few times but it’s always in service of some epic stunt and when he does land one, it can be awe-inspiring. Just take a look at this perfectly absurd sequence from the opener: “Drive-bys in a Winnebago/Snipers never hit a baby, crib, or cradle/Sit tomatoes on your head and split tomatoes/From a hundred feet away, now it’s a halo.” There is a breakneck speed to many of these verses, as if Wayne is so anxious to keep rapping that he can’t wait to get into the next one. The songs where he stops to catch his breath and gather his thoughts tend to venture toward the vaguely introspective, considering isolation, distrust, and love, and they produce most of the album’s sleepier moments. On “Trust Nobody,” which leans into a flatlining Adam Levine hook about not even being able to trust oneself, Wayne sounds both bored and boring. Wayne, The-Dream, and Mike WiLL Made-It should be an ideal trio, but “Sights and Silencers” is an inert ballad with an ill-defined concept. Like most Wayne albums, it is longer than it needs to be and thus prone to dry spells. For years, it has been easy to find trace amounts of Lil Wayne’s style from pop-rap’s center to well out along the weirder edges of the rap internet. The thought experiment “Dreams” is reminiscent of the best of Auto-Tune Wayne. “I Don’t Sleep” sounds like something Pi’erre Bourne might produce for Playboi Carti, the fluttering flutes and springy synths suiting Wayne’s half-sung cadences well. “Darkside” hedges closer to the sounds of SoundCloud gloomcasters like Trippie Redd, and he stalks through it with whiny tumbling phrases. Wayne mashes through every song with such reckless abandon it’s hard to tell where he draws influence these days. But it doesn’t take long for a song to get jump-started, and when it does, it’s thrilling to hear him romp about. Wayne raps with a lightning ferocity that will often conceal his more direct revelations. Lyrics about longevity (“I had a Benz when you had a bike”) and his artistic slump (“Safe to say I lost my way but I never lost the lead/Safe to say I lost the brakes but I never lost the speed”) are snuck in behind cartoonishly vivid sequences (“She say I got a vanilla aftertaste/Cut his face, let him use his blood for his aftershave”). There is decidedly less storytelling on this record than Tha Carter V, but there is still plenty of clever and unpredictable writing. “I’m on Cloud 9, nigga, you just on iCloud/I’m a icon, I shine and burn your eyes out,” he raps on “Piano Trap.” Across the hour, Funeral sounds less like last rites for Wayne and more like a resurrection.

2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Young Money Entertainment / Republic

February 4, 2020

021028fe-1b4d-4702-8f4f-02647ebb9ba9

Sheldon Pearce

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

Every once in a while a record like this one appears out of the ether without clear reference points. Web ...

Every once in a while a record like this one appears out of the ether without clear reference points. Web ...

The Books: Thought for Food

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/854-thought-for-food/

Thought for Food

Every once in a while a record like this one appears out of the ether without clear reference points. Web details on The Books are sketchy, but I have ascertained that they're a duo consisting of guitarist Nick Zammuto, who lives in North Carolina and has released some solo material under his surname, and cellist Paul de Jong, who lives in New York and has composed for dance, theater and film. After that, the pool of Books information dries up fast. The music is similarly unknowable, in the sense that it's difficult to classify. Musicians famously hate to be 'put into a box'; well, if more bands sounded quite as original as The Books, the practice would likely cease. If this record is the product of any sort of 'scene,' it's not one I've heard of. Thought for Food is going to sit comfortably in my collection in its own little category, a small world unto itself. Despite Thought for Food's unique sound, the record, on one level, is not hard to pin down. The musical elements are so simple and commonplace that describing them is not a problem. What's difficult is conveying how these few everyday pieces are placed together so artfully to create something this striking and unique. I'll give that a shot later, but first-- what sort of music are we talking about here? Essentially, three different things go into nearly every Books song: there is always a guitar, usually acoustic; there is usually a stringed instrument, either cello or violin or both; and there are always sampled vocal fragments. That's basically it. Two tracks have a few bars of soft singing, while another, "Mikey Bass," has some bass work by a guy named Mikey. Sporadic percussion and a few other instruments are scattered here and there, but the guitar/strings/samples troika is the meat of The Books. These three instruments are recorded and then cut up and arranged via computer. Sounds boring, you say? Think again. Somehow, The Books manage to turn these meager components into something touching, quirky and profound. The fact that vocal samples (which we can all agree have been done to death) sound new again here is nothing short of amazing. I'm not completely sure how they do it, though I know that the unusual amount of empty space in this record is part of it. While the rule of thumb for music with a collage approach has always been to stuff the samples into every nook and cranny, The Books let all the sounds breathe. In addition to the folky guitar, strings and the voice samples, silence is really the fourth primary instrument. Another great thing about the record is the way the samples, though they at first seem random, manage to tell a story. "Read, Eat, Sleep" contains slow guitar plucking that alternates between two chords and some gentle, bell-like synth accents. Over the barely-there musical backing, voices spell out "r-e-a-d- e-a-t- s-l-e-e-p" as distant sound effects appear. As the track winds down, different voices start repeating various pronunciations of the word "aleatoric." Finally, the main voice, which sounds like it could be the host of a spelling bee, clarifies: "By digitizing thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric music." Ah, yes, aleatoric, a word meaning composition by use of chance. As he speaks his final word, the last ring of the guitar fades out, and you realize that the sampled dialog had been describing the process of the track as it unfolded. "Contempt" references the Jean-Luc Godard film of the same name. It contains a measured exchange between two men, with one asking the other the questions Brigitte Bardot asked her husband in the film: "What about my ankles, do you like them?" and "My thighs... do you think they're pretty?" Recontextualized here, the song takes on humorous overtones, as the men seem relaxed and speak slowly as if they're engaged in a job interview. The musical accompaniment to this dialog is a swaying waltz-time duet between plucked guitar and slightly screechy violin, and the tension that builds through the track is palpable. "All Our Base Are Belong to Them" could be live, it's hard to tell. Someone is strumming a guitar and then a voice starts counting down from ten, "Space Oddity"-style. When he hits "one," a noisy chord is played and four of five people cheer. Instead of annoying, though, the background chatter sounds wonderful against the guitar and picked banjo, as the vocals (the only real singing on the album) sing something close to Pink Floyd's "Mother," sans-melodrama. It's warm and cozy wherever this is being recorded, even though something feels vaguely alien and unfamiliar. A disturbing vocal exchange opens "Motherless Bastard," as a man speaking to a small child says, "You have no mother and father... they left, they went somewhere else." The tune that follows this sampled intro is a pretty folk strum, the melodicism of Fahey without the flash or technique. Indeed, if I had to name one clear forbearer for The Books, John Fahey would be it. The odd combination of folk guitar forms and aural collage seem at least tangentially related to his experiments. But the pleasure to be had from Thought for Food has nothing to do with musical referencing. This modest and unusual album stands on its own as a quiet triumph-- one unlike anything I've ever heard before.

2002-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2002-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Tomlab

July 23, 2002

0210d20c-c769-466b-89dc-a51b01123065

Mark Richardson

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

The Philly rapper’s Eternal Atake victory lap feels like a collection of outtakes, but the high points are thrilling.

The Philly rapper’s Eternal Atake victory lap feels like a collection of outtakes, but the high points are thrilling.

Lil Uzi Vert: LUV vs. The World 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-uzi-vert-luv-vs-the-world-2/

Eternal Atake (Deluxe) - LUV vs. The World 2

It would have been crazy to expect more of Lil Uzi Vert after Eternal Atake. Uzi’s long-awaited third album didn’t just deliver an hour of new music, it felt like the best possible record he could have made, a dizzying showcase for his technique, charisma, and style. And yet, one week later, he’s already returned with Eternal Atake (Deluxe)—LUV vs. The World 2, which gives us 14 new tracks and more than 40 additional minutes from the endless Atake sessions. Despite its length and billing as the sequel to Uzi’s breakout 2016 mixtape Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World, the album hews to the standard “deluxe edition” blueprint: This is a cobbled-together collection of B-sides—good ones, but B-sides nonetheless. In many cases, it’s clear why these songs didn’t make the cut. That said, the high points are as thrilling as you’d expect from an artist who just hit his peak. LUV vs. The World 2’s crown jewel is “Bean (Kobe),” a Chief Keef collaboration that already enjoys legendary status in fan circles. The two rappers have been teasing the track on social media since 2017, and with good reason: the woozy song zeroes in on the sweet spot between Keef’s hard-charging flows and Uzi’s impressionistic yelps. Over a Pi’erre Bourne instrumental whose smeared synths recall the producer’s work with Playboi Carti, the rappers stretch out: Uzi makes a Tony! Toni! Toné! joke while Keef uses the Swahili word for “blood.” The chorus is just Uzi breathlessly shouting the names of high-end Swiss watch brands over and over. It sounds incredible. There are a few other songs on LUV vs. The World 2 that approach this level, even if they are lesser executions of Eternal Atake ideas. “Lotus” resembles a transmission from a distant planet thanks to an Oogie Mane beat that sounds programmed on a haunted Game Boy. Uzi flexes the exhilarating acrobatic flows of Atake’s first half on “Myron.” And on the bubbly-trap rave of “Got the Guap,” Young Thug and Uzi melt their voices into a delightfully gooey mess (we also get to hear Thug rap, “I put a fish on the wrist”). Uzi has always been a chameleon, but hearing him go toe-to-toe with rap’s most flamboyant stylist underscores just how versatile he’s become. Unfortunately, some of LUV vs. The World 2’s collaborations sounded better on paper. “Wassup” features a perfectly competent verse from Future in full HNDRXX crooner mode, but Uzi’s chorus feels unfinished and inert. Despite a surreal title and the combined efforts of Uzi, Young Thug, and Gunna, “Strawberry Peels” never gets off the ground. Uzi manages to elevate Nav’s soulless flexing on “Leaders,” but the song still feels like the result of Nav calling in a favor, not the other way around. The solo tracks that fill the record’s midsection—“Moon Relate,” “Come This Way”—feel half-baked. Still, even when the songs don’t click, you can’t help but marvel at all the expensive materials littering the cutting-room floor. Most rappers would kill for these features, or these producers. But Lil Uzi Vert isn’t most rappers. Eternal Atake maintains its momentum with just a single feature and a set of instrumentals that were largely sourced from one production collective; It’s the rare hour-long record that feels like the product of focus and restraint. The songs here reveal the very different record that Atake could have been: a label-friendly, guest-filled grab bag that probably still would have done massive numbers on streaming. Even if it isn’t equal in quality to Eternal Atake, LUV vs. The World 2 speaks to the strength of Uzi’s vision all the same: sometimes, what you take out is as important as what you leave in.

2020-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Generation Now / Atlantic

March 20, 2020

0214037e-4cd6-429a-97d5-8198c1a2fe00

Mehan Jayasuriya

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

Drake has gone from an unlikely rapper to an accepted rapper to maybe the biggest rapper out, all in four years, and he’s the genre’s biggest pop crossover star. His new album is a dimly lit affair, both morose and triumphant; as Drake albums go, this is the Drakiest.

Drake has gone from an unlikely rapper to an accepted rapper to maybe the biggest rapper out, all in four years, and he’s the genre’s biggest pop crossover star. His new album is a dimly lit affair, both morose and triumphant; as Drake albums go, this is the Drakiest.

Drake: Nothing Was the Same

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18511-drake-nothing-was-the-same/

Nothing Was the Same

“Really I think I like who I’m becoming,” Drake told us cautiously on his second album, Take Care. On its follow-up, Nothing Was the Same, he’s thought about it some more. “Prince Akeem, they throw flowers at my feet, nigga!” he screams. “I could go an hour on this beat, nigga!” The song, “Tuscan Leather,” which opens the record, is six full minutes long with no chorus, a point Drake is eager for us to absorb: “This is nothing for the radio/But they’ll still play it though/’Cause it’s the new Drizzy Drake, that’s just the way it go.” The Drake Era has ended; welcome to the Drake Regime. Aubrey Graham’s gone from an unlikely rapper to an accepted rapper to maybe the biggest rapper out, all in four years, and he’s the genre’s biggest current pop crossover star. Kanye has, for the moment, stepped out of the pop-radio wars, which means that Drake currently has no meaningful competition. On Nothing Was the Same, he acts accordingly—the mansion doors swing shut behind you and he mostly stops pretending to be nice. “I’m on my worst behavior,” he leers, over a glowering low-end synth and an insectile battery of defaced-sounding percussion, courtesy of DJ Dahi. It’s the meanest-sounding thing Drake has rapped over, and he matches it with some of his angriest lyrics, a series of sputtered “muhfuckas never loved us” surrounding an extended riff on Mase’s verse on “Mo Money Mo Problems.” As Drake albums go, this is the Drakiest: Except for Jay-Z, who shows up at the end of the album, Nothing Was the Same is an entirely solo affair, and all of Drake’s tendencies are dialed up. Even for a rapper known for sniping at non-famous girlfriends on record, he’s breathtakingly petty here: The album is four days old on the internet, and already his line, “The one that I needed was Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree/I’ve always been feeling like she was the piece to complete me,” from “From Time” is infamous, a reference so specific that the actual Courtney has had to put a padlock on her social-media life. Drake has been talking to old flames who have no equivalent soap box to climb on to talk back since before “CeCe’s Interlude,” of course, but as he’s gotten more famous, they’ve grown more malicious, and here they feel like a series of emotional drone strikes. On “Paris Morton Music,” he relishes the thought of showing up at his high school reunion, watching everyone “go through security clearance,” and on “Too Much,” he airs out his family: “Money got my family going backwards/No dinners, no holidays, no nothing,"”he laments, before going in on his uncle, his cousins, and even his mother: “I hate the fact that my mom cooped up in the apartment, telling herself that she’s too sick to get dressed up and go do shit like that’s true shit.” Drake recently performed this song on Jimmy Fallon, apologizing briefly to his family before tearing into it. The album title, in context, reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy viewed from the rear view, an acknowledgment that he’s cutting final ties, torching the last bridges. He might like who he’s become, but you can hear he doesn’t expect anyone else to. That’s OK: Loneliness, self-afflicted or otherwise, has always been Drake’s most reliable fuel. His albums draw strength from their insularity; when everyone outside them in mainstream rap was piling on epic minor-key horns and turning their songs into armored tanks, Drake drew the curtains. His sound was set apart more by what wasn’t there—snare claps, hi-hats—then what was. Nothing Was the Same is Drake and 40’s most audacious experiment yet in how far inward they can push their sound; a lot of the album sounds like a black hole of all 40’s previous productions being sucked into the center. Song-to-song transitions, which have always been melty and blurry, are more notional than ever. “Wu-Tang Forever” is a sunken glimmer of piano with a tiny tag of RZA’s voice, screaming “It’s Yourz,” before shading, at some point, into “Own It.” There is no uncomplicated forward motion in Drake songs; usually one small element worms forward while everything sits around it, a haze of rhythmic and harmonic indecision. Drake continues his qualified, complicated claiming of Houston on Nothing, rapping “I was birthed there in my first year, man, I know that place like I come from it” on “Too Much.” But the only quality his music shares with Houston rap is its vague relationship to momentum. On “Started From the Bottom,” the bass isn’t even a settled pitch, but a buckling floor beneath the destabilized-sounding pianos, which scrabble down its side. “305 to My City” sits almost completely flat, a ticking snare the only indication of a pulse. The only thing tumbling endlessly forward, of course, are Drake’s words, one emerging breathlessly after the other. He has never boasted many of the skills that define a technically skilled rapper, but he has cleared away any obstacles to his tangled thoughts in 40’s muted music and let his wordy lines climb up the walls like kudzu. To live in Drake’s music is to come away with his words smudged on you like newsprint ink. His eye-rollers and his stunners are all linked together, one long runaway train of sentiments: “I wanna take it deeper than money, pussy, vacation/And influence a generation that’s lacking in patience/I’ve been dealin’ with my dad, speaking of lack of patience/Just me and my old man, getting back to basics/We been talking about the future and time that we wasted/When he put that bottle down, girl, that nigga’s amazing,” he raps on “From Time.” It’s hard not to feel exhausted, slightly, after an album’s worth of these torrents. You sense that Drake is exhausted, too. There is an intriguing whiff of third act rot hanging in the air on Nothing Was the Same, and because Drake is such a deft micro-manager of his own narrative, he’s drawing our attention to it, telegraphing it in his lyrics and dramatizing the sense that whatever he does after this album, it can’t quite be this again. He’s “somewhere between psychotic and iconic” on “Furthest Thing,” promising to “break everyone off before I break down.” There are big, friendly singles as well—notably, the bar mitzvah floor-filler “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” which borrows its smoothly bumping glide from “Sexual Healing.” The song is terrific, one of Drake’s best pure pop songs ever and instantly a standard. It is also out of place on this dimly lit album, which is the most morose and triumphant of Drake’s career. “My life’s a completed checklist,” he boasts on “Tuscan Leather”—for Drake, it’s another reason to feel superior. But it’s also what you say right before you die, and I can’t imagine an admission more depressing.

2013-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-09-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Young Money Entertainment / Cash Money / Republic

September 23, 2013

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Jayson Greene

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

In her breakthrough debut, a teenage Swift showed all the qualities that she would eventually use to conquer the world.

In her breakthrough debut, a teenage Swift showed all the qualities that she would eventually use to conquer the world.

Taylor Swift: Taylor Swift

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

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s self-titled 2006 debut arrived at a fortuitous moment for young women in country music, particularly those with crossover ambitions. The beers-and-trucks bro-country grip of Florida Georgia Line and their ilk was a few years away from fully tightening; Carrie Underwood had won the 2005 season of American Idol; and the Dixie Chicks’ defiant “Not Ready to Make Nice” and Sugarland member Jennifer Nettles’ syrupy Bon Jovi duet “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” were making inroads into Top 40 radio. (The Chicks’ anti–George W. Bush stance had gotten them kicked out of country rotation.) The 16-year-old Swift crash-landed into this landscape with “Tim McGraw,” a saudade-drenched mid-tempo ballad that’s as much a love letter to music’s power as it is to a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend leaving for college. Swift’s quivering low soprano made the lyrical details—her “little black dress,” the stalled-out Chevy truck, “the moon like a spotlight on the lake”—hit harder, and showcased her ability to make diaristic songs universally relatable. You can track the song’s quiet hope (“When you think Tim McGraw/I hope you think my favorite song”) all the way to Reputation closer “New Year’s Day,” while its clear-eyed view of time’s passage is reflected in 1989’s “Clean.” “I love writing songs because I love preserving memories, like putting a picture frame around a feeling you once had,” she wrote in Elle earlier this year, and “McGraw” shows how essential that ideal has been to her work since the beginning. Two years earlier, her family had left Wyomissing, Pennsylvania and moved to Nashville in support of their firstborn child’s teenage country-star dreams. Taylor Swift showed someone who had been honing her craft since her preteen years, meticulously turning her experiences with boys and with her girlfriends into country songs that reflected the lives of her peers, whom she connected with via MySpace. (“Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans,” she told The New York Times in 2008.) MySpace would morph into Tumblr and Instagram Live, but the impulse would remain the same. The album turned out to be a solid, spunky-yet-reflective country record told squarely from the teenage perspective, as opposed to the “can you believe someone so young sounds like that” packaging that weighed down former teen sensations like LeAnn Rimes. While Taylor Swift’s chief genre signifiers, like fiddles and vocal twang, are rooted in ’00s Nashville tropes, the influence of millennial teen pop bubbles up in the bouncy music and in ripped-from-the-LiveJournal lyrics like the cheerily insouciant chorus of “Our Song” (“Our song is the slamming screen door/Sneakin’ out late, tapping on your window”). “Picture to Burn” is a descendant of JoJo’s “Leave (Get Out),” given a Southern-fried twist by Swift’s drawled asides (“alla yer best freeends”), her mockery of the dude’s “stupid old pickup truck you never let me drive,” and the plunking banjo. (“Picture to Burn” also showed that she was learning to hone her poison pen: In the original version’s first verse, she threatened to tell her friends the guy who’d wronged her was gay, a line she dropped from live performances shortly after Taylor Swift’s release. The album version followed suit.) “Teardrops on My Guitar,” a longing ballad about an out-of-reach crush, presaged Swift’s eventual embrace of pop; in early 2008, her now-former label Big Machine released a “pop version” that added echo to her voice and a mid-tempo beat, dropping the weepy slide guitar that doubled as a realization of the song’s title. While Swift was hardly alone in reworking country songs for the “hits you can play at work” crowd, the ease with which “Teardrops” translated to straight pop showed that her deft melodic touch and conversational way with deeply felt emotions could scale to the widest possible audience. Today, her production takes its cue from current trends, and her subjects don’t need to be identified via online fishing expeditions, but her detailed lyrics and canny worldview were there from the start. Back then, though, she had doubters. An Associated Press report on her early success opened with sneering from a Nashville bigwig: “Tell her to get back in school and come back and see me when she’s 18, and bring her parents,” manager and promoter Jerry Bentley scoffed. That his biggest client was Lee Greenwood, the man behind the hoary “God Bless the U.S.A.,” is almost too delicious; that the piece quoting him found his dismissals worthy of the story’s opening lines is depressing. But Swift showed—and her songs’ subjects learned over and over again—that she’d always get the last word.

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

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

Pop/R&B

Big Machine

August 19, 2019

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Maura Johnston

https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/

On a stirring full-band album, the classically trained harpist lets her instrument become an integral part of her twangy, easygoing rock’n’roll sound.

On a stirring full-band album, the classically trained harpist lets her instrument become an integral part of her twangy, easygoing rock’n’roll sound.

Mikaela Davis: And Southern Star

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mikaela-davis-and-southern-star/

And Southern Star

From Alice Coltrane to Joanna Newsom to Mary Lattimore, a rich lineage of artists have sought to liberate the harp from its familiar roles in the symphony and the church. In the worlds of jazz, ambient, classical, and even electronic music, the instrument is enjoying a prolonged renaissance. But it’s still rarely heard in a rock-band context. Both impractically large and delicate in timbre, the 90-odd pound instrument tends to be spotlit and showcased—not made to wrestle with guitars and drums. On Mikaela Davis’ latest album, And Southern Star, the Hudson Valley-based songwriter and bandleader embarks on her most stirring experiments yet in blending the soft tones of the harp into a fully realized rock sound. And Southern Star emphasizes its full-band approach in every aspect, including the title. Southern Star is the name of the ensemble—comprising drummer Alex Coté, guitarist Cian McCarthy, bassist Shane McCarthy, and pedal steel player Kurt Johnson—that has backed Davis onstage for a decade. And Southern Star marks their first time appearing on a record with her, and their years of symbiosis come through in the easy chemistry of these arrangements. Davis and the band work through passages of rugged alt-country, twangy roots rock, paisley-bedecked Laurel Canyon psychedelia, and jam-band choogle, always staying anchored in the interplay between the stringed instruments. The relationship between Davis’s harp and Johnson’s steel guitar is particularly fascinating. It’s a thrill to hear these instruments—one from the chapel, one from the honky-tonk—weave in and out of one another’s paths, occasionally meeting in harmony. Country music isn’t the sole focal point of And Southern Star, but it’s where the album shines. “Home in the Country” is breezy and pastoral, with Davis and Johnson trading lead melodies over a strummed acoustic pattern. (A disintegrating vocal effect in its back half is a pleasant surprise, and one of the album’s few distinctly modern touches.) “Saturday Morning” dials into the same languorous, cosmic frequency as the Flying Burrito Brothers, while “Don’t Stop Now” nods to the sun-soaked country-rock of Sheryl Crow. Davis’ harp gives the album a textural signature, but it’s her pliant, deceptively sturdy vocals that give the songs their shape. Like Crow, she manages to find emotional profundity while sounding monumentally unbothered. Even when she’s singing about the sting of faded love, as she does on highlights like “Far From You” and “Promise,” she sounds like she’s dispensing wisdom from a beach chair. Her easygoing delivery nearly obfuscates the strange configuration of And Southern Star, a contrast that feels deliberate. The harp hasn’t found much mainstream success as a lead instrument, but these warm, inviting songs make it feel possible. On And Southern Star, Davis and her bandmates make a daring choice of instrumentation that becomes an intuitive, integral part of their rock’n’roll.

2023-08-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-08-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Kill Rock Stars

August 9, 2023

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Brad Sanders

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

Marking his return as Oval after a 10-year absence, glitch pioneer Markus Popp issues a sharp, prickly, and finely detailed EP.

Marking his return as Oval after a 10-year absence, glitch pioneer Markus Popp issues a sharp, prickly, and finely detailed EP.

Oval: Oh EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14368-oh-ep/

Oh EP

If you weren't following the more abstract/IDM end of electronic music between the middle of the 1990s and early 2000s, you can be forgiven for only having a hazy idea of what Markus Popp's Oval project was all about. You might have heard that his music involved digital glitches, or that he remixed Tortoise a couple of times, or that he had a side project with Jan St. Werner from Mouse on Mars. The last proper Oval release, Ovalcommers, came out in 2001, so we're talking almost 10 years since he put out anything new under the name. Those making experimental music heavily dependant on software are taking a real risk when they decide to sit a decade out. Things change fast, and people forget. How much you know and care about the records Oval released between 1993's Wohnton and Ovalcommers will probably have something to do with what you get out of his very different new EP, Oh. Though in truth, the project always seemed to be in a state of perpetual transition. In Oval's early years, Popp worked with Frank Metzger and designer Sebastian Oschatz to make hypnotic and highly textured tracks that often featured a rhythmic pulse that sounded like a skipping CD. Following the departure of Oschatz and Metzger after the gorgeous ambient masterpiece 94 Diskont, Oval's music grew increasingly dense and harsh, to the point where it moved freely between placid sounds and flat-out noise. While there was an overriding Oval aesthetic centered around the sonic beauty of digital disruption (Popp's ideas were central to many conversations about electronic music during the time), the specific qualities of the records varied. And that's important to keep in mind when approaching Oh, because this record sounds almost nothing like the Oval we once knew. Where Oval once felt huge and immersive, Oh is sharp, prickly, and finely detailed. The central sonic motif in most of these minatures-- 15 tracks zoom by in 25 minutes-- is what sounds like samples of guitar strings plucked between the bridge and the tuning pegs. Which is to say that these sounds are high-pitched and metallic with virtually no resonance, though they are digitally looped and stretched and warped when they're not bouncing between the speakers. The recording environment is very dry, which is interesting, because Popp is for the first time working with the sounds of "real" instruments, including a drum kit that pops up regularly. Though these are virtual instruments arranged by Popp electronically, they're used in a way that suggests a band with a post-rock bent playing in a room together-- the cymbals splash and the kick drum kicks and the guitar bits buzz and repeat and you get the sense of a trio searching for the spaces that exist in between genres. It sounds a bit like improv, a bit like instrumental rock, and a bit like turn-of-the-millennium IDM, even as it never really sounds like Oval. With all of its pings and scrapes in the middle and upper part of the sonic spectrum, Oh can be a difficult listen on headphones. In a room, though, the EP opens up, and the logic of Popp's approach becomes more apparent. One thing this music shares with earlier Oval is the sense that it seems just on the verge of falling apart. There's a nice tension here as randomness-- mostly embodied by the frenzied guitar samples-- struggles with order. It's good to have Oval back, and there's something to be said for re-thinking one's art from the ground up. But there's also a nagging sense here that it's all been done before. Popp's "virtual band" moves are reminiscent of Jan Jelinek's likeminded experiments in the early part of the 00s, and the focus on clicky guitar samples is close to the work of the California-based artist Christopher Willits from around the same time. Of course, all of these artists are obscure in the grand scheme of things, so the fact that this sound has been touched on before shouldn't matter to most. Popp has broken more than his share of ground, and now it's time to try something else.

2010-06-18T02:00:03.000-04:00

2010-06-18T02:00:03.000-04:00

Electronic / Experimental

Thrill Jockey

June 18, 2010

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Mark Richardson

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

R&B singer/producer theMIND’s debut project Summer Camp is a low-stakes surprise, the late-night stoner’s LP we didn’t know we needed.

R&B singer/producer theMIND’s debut project Summer Camp is a low-stakes surprise, the late-night stoner’s LP we didn’t know we needed.

theMIND: Summer Camp

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22240-summer-camp/

Summer Camp

TheMIND (real name Zarif Wilder) bides his time floating between two Chicago worlds: He has backing vocals on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book and appeared on SaveMoney Crew affiliate’s projects like Joey Purp’s excellent iiiDrops and Noname’s Telefone, and Chance-compatriots Donnie Trumpet and Knox Fortune make appearances on his debut project Summer Camp, which snuck out into the world last June. But he made a name for himself before that, as a member of production collective THEMpeople, producing songs for Mick Jenkins and guesting on his albums (along with other auxiliary members of this scene, Sean Deaux and Saba). It’s an easy-but-accurate comparison to place theMIND in this world: maybe it’s the tone of his voice more than his lyrical content, but he’s this scene’s Frank Ocean. Summer Camp isn’t Nostalgia, Ultra, though, even though I think it aspires to be, with its vaguely conceptual narrative (songs that play in a car as a couple vacillate between talking and arguing) and snippets of tracks that filter in and out of focus like a dream (or a channel surfer). But its biggest strengths lie elsewhere—theMIND is a gifted producer, and the way he’s constructed this record is less like some alt-R&B throwaway mixtape and more like a cavernous, meandering album. A whistling tea kettle sets things off on opener “Summer Camp” before the song finds the album’s cushiest groove. A headphone-friendly nocturnal mood, consuming the album like embers around a campfire, is established: “Run through the woods if the rain comes/cover your head ’til the pain numbs/lose it all in the earth, leave your tears in the dirt/fall in love ’til it hurts/we young,” works the same wistful, doomed-young-romance lane Ocean has trafficked in since 2011 (if not recently). It’s not the most subtle stuff, but the pleasures of Summer Camp reside in Wilder’s ability to conjure a mood with his production, then sell the emotion with the most direct line of songwriting. “Pale Rose” is the single, and it’s less effective, a propulsive, “I Would Die 4 U”-type beat that suffers from a generic, overwrought bridge: “Hey you/right over there/who even loves/who even cares?” It’s the growing pains of a songwriter still trying to reach his final form. On the brisk “In Peace,” an introspective, neo-soul-esque production that would slot nicely onto Jamila Woods’ HEAVN, Wilder hits his deepest nerve: “My granny told me read my Bible/as I start to daydream/I see it all in HD/we’re bigger than they told us we were.” On the Noname-assisted “Only the Beginning,” he adopts a husky, sing-song Isaiah Rashad flow: “I often sweat when haunted nightly by regret like/why I didn’t kill that nigga when my sister told me what he did to her?” He rambles a bit more about his sister, but never hits the detail of what happened to her—he’s yet to develop a songwriter’s storytelling instinct, but he’s attempting to tap into that vein. Wilder’s gift is to summon some of the magic of guys like Ocean, Rashad, and Chance, but it’s also a curse, because you can more easily chart out how much more maturing he has to do before he can hang with them. All said, Summer Camp is one of the summer’s few surprises, a low-stakes album available for free, the late night stoner’s LP we didn’t know we needed. If you like Mick Jenkins but wished his songs were a little lighter, or if you want to hear an earnest young Chicago artist find his voice without literally sounding like Chance, theMIND’s Summer Camp is a pleasant place to stop in. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified theMIND as a member of Chance the Rapper’s SaveMoney Crew. It has been amended.

2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

August 12, 2016

02187634-2e70-4356-a78c-d7ffcd800d2d

Matthew Ramirez

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

On Darkness and Light, John Legend pushes beyond his comfort zone for something a bit more ambitious.  This is a love record about navigating the bleak world and finding happiness in dark times.

On Darkness and Light, John Legend pushes beyond his comfort zone for something a bit more ambitious.  This is a love record about navigating the bleak world and finding happiness in dark times.

John Legend: Darkness and Light

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22645-darkness-and-light/

Darkness and Light

John Legend doesn’t waste time getting to the point of Darkness and Light, his fifth solo album. On “I Know Better,” the record’s gospel-infused opener, the singer refutes the celebrity he’s acquired to date: “Legend is just a name, I know better than to be so proud/I won’t drink in all this fame/Or take more love than I’m allowed.” At this stage of his career—which includes 10 Grammy awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award for Best Original Song—Legend could’ve continued to play it safe; his mix of secular and spiritual soul has taken him far over the years. But on Darkness and Light, Legend pushes beyond his comfort zone for something a bit more ambitious. With its meditative and ingratiating songwriting, this is unmistakably a John Legend album, yet there’s a renewed sense of peace and even a sad wisdom that distinguishes it. He sings lovingly of his infant daughter, Luna, wondering who she will become as she grows older. He ponders the different sides of love, and the raw emotions they evoke. He's made a love record about navigating the bleak world and finding happiness in dark times. For Darkness and Light, Legend reached out to Blake Mills after hearing what the producer did for Alabama Shakes’ breakout LP, Sound & Color. In turn, Mills wanted to push Legend to the limits of his emotional range. “There was this hole in John’s material that I felt like a huge part of his personality could come through,” Mills recently told Billboard. “We’re still talking about ‘What’s Going On’ some 40 years later. Yes, ‘Sexual Healing’ is a great track. But when we think of Marvin Gaye, ‘What’s Going On’ is the song that comes up.” The implicit criticism there rings true: Legend has calling-card songs like “Ordinary People” and “All of Me,” yet by and large, he makes safe R&B that doesn’t resonate long-term or hit hard politically (he released a collaborative LP with the Roots in 2010, but those were covers of Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, and Bill Withers.) For Darkness and Light, Mills wanted to merge Legend’s artistic and political sides, bringing the opinionated guy we see on “Real Time With Bill Maher” to the forefront. We hear shades of this on “Penthouse Floor,” a standout featuring Chance the Rapper, even if the grooving track behind Legend still feels more sultry than angry as he wonders: “All this trouble in this here town/All this shit going down/When will they focus on this?/Streets fired up with the TV crews/Look, Ma, we on the news!/But they didn’t notice before this.” Conversely, on the Miguel-featured “Overload,” Legend reflects on his marriage to model Chrissy Teigen, running down the endless distractions posed by the shiny device in his hand as a metaphor for connection (“Let that cell phone ring/Let that blue bird sing/Let that message say ‘unread.’”) The album comes full circle near the end, on “How Can I Blame You,” in which Legend is pulled over for a traffic violation—but instead of a menacing encounter, or a meditation on the rash of police shootings of black men during traffic stops, Legend uses the moment as a metaphor for life’s rapid pace. He’s urged to slow down and appreciate what he has. In the end, Darkness and Light isn’t the political feat Mills and Legend had hoped for, but it’s a step forward in the singer’s evolution. He may never be a firebrand, but Legend proves there’s still strength in humility.

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

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

Pop/R&B

Columbia

December 5, 2016

02198d1c-66c2-4338-9c2c-0c2d3ca204b3

Marcus J. Moore

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

At once telegenic and slightly tongue in cheek, the Montreal composer’s ersatz chamber music is proof that you can love something and poke fun at it at the same time.

At once telegenic and slightly tongue in cheek, the Montreal composer’s ersatz chamber music is proof that you can love something and poke fun at it at the same time.

d’Eon: Leviathan

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deon-leviathan/

Leviathan

Imagine this: you’re watching an actor in his mid-fifties playing a politician—a tall white guy with a good head of hair and a crisp blue suit, who greets his adoring public after a successful rally. Think a very special episode of Scandal. People cheer, they wave signs of support. Our great nation beholds its benevolent leader. And then, entering from the side of the screen comes a scary freak dressed in dark clothes. He has a gun! Pop, pop, pop. Screams, commotion. As the camera pans out to take in the bedlam, the music enters, just as you expect. An orchestral piece scaled down to computer size, its patriotic flattening uncanny. This is the music of a real crisis in a fake nation. Will our country survive? That is the question being urgently asked by d’Eon’s imagined score. On “The President Has Been Shot,” the song with the most appropriate title of all time, the oboes are distressed, the cellos are deeply upset, and the violins pump fast enough to match the speed of our racing hearts. Though Montreal producer Chris d’Eon always leaned toward a telegenic brand of miniaturized chamber music, at first it seemed like that predilection was an accent, not the focus itself. On 2011’s Darkbloom, a split LP with then-fellow underground Canadian producer Grimes, his sacramental trilling was blended with an instrument largely absent from his new music: drums. The use of percussion, largely owing to various forms of Chicago dance music, from house to footwork, was the least interesting part of the music, but the most prominent. Dropping the propulsion to focus on warped melodies has created a new lane, one in between the avant-garde and the heavenly, the classical and the canned. In the past decade, he’s released several volumes of fairly straight-ahead liturgical music via his Music for Keyboards series, though in the context of his much more fulsome new album Leviathan, those records seem more like a dare to see if he could do it, a mastering of mimicry along the way to truly finding his own goofier voice. Much of the music on his new album, like “The President Has Been Shot,” is dramatic, but, importantly, self-knowing. Yes, you can love a thing and make fun of it at the same time. This is music that sits somewhere between religious and hold music, where purgatory is both subject and experience. Two other tracks, in addition to “The President,” describe an action: “Climbing the Overhang” and “Installation of the Cisterns.” The former takes a playful approach with bloopy ’80s digi-funk synths, like climbing an overhang is an accomplishment that might have happened on The Jeffersons. The latter, with digital zither and bells giving the track a MIDI-gamelan feel, is ceremonial but a little sinister. These cisterns might end up as a part of a zany plot in Oceans 14. Elsewhere on Leviathan, d’Eon tackles, with less success, aughts-era radio R&B, the type of thing Polow Da Don or Jim Johnson trafficked in. It’s not that d’Eon doesn’t create a perfectly fine beat that Christina Milian would have gladly used, it’s that those songs, like “Heat Wave” and “Figurine”—which feels a little too indebted to the beat for TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine”—don’t add much to a template that was well worn a decade ago. Leaving the immediate world of references, onscreen or otherwise, my favorite song on Leviathan is “Rhododendron pt. IV,” which shreds every one of d’Eon’s influences into a sunshiny tune. It’s a silly song, the bold and repeated organ giving way to the synthesizer woodwinds. It feels fun, curious, invigorating. It has echoes of early music’s pump-organ rigor, but it’s more whimsical than wallowing. It’s religious music if your pastor was the Rock. If d’Eon invites you to church some Sunday, you should probably go.

2024-07-11T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-07-11T00:01:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Hausu Mountain

July 11, 2024

021e98c7-59b2-432e-8bef-7a7c6bdcbe3a

Matthew Schnipper

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

The pop star offers his ambitious, grandiose sophomore album: Almost entirely produced by Timbaland-- and with a more pronounced hip-hop edge than its predecessor-- the album abandons the feelgood sheen which the Neptunes peddled so adroitly on his debut, Justified, but makes up for it with the largesse of its sonic embrace.

The pop star offers his ambitious, grandiose sophomore album: Almost entirely produced by Timbaland-- and with a more pronounced hip-hop edge than its predecessor-- the album abandons the feelgood sheen which the Neptunes peddled so adroitly on his debut, Justified, but makes up for it with the largesse of its sonic embrace.

Justin Timberlake: FutureSex / LoveSounds

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11888-futuresexlovesounds/

FutureSex / LoveSounds

How Justin Timberlake must have sweated and strained over following his debut, Justified: As an album it was merely good, but it was graced by four singles so monumental they made him one of the decade's most celebrated pop icons. According to the laws of momentum which govern pop music, any sequel could only be either be a pale reflection or a hubristic monstrosity. With FutureSex/LoveSounds he unrepentantly chooses the latter. If Justified was openly modelled on Off the Wall, FutureSex/LoveSounds' affectations are more panoramic: In reductive terms, it's the logical Thriller-style follow-up, steelier and sexier and more neurotic than its predecessor, but generally the album is more reminiscent of Prince-- not only the polished funk-pop of Purple Rain, but also the grandiose excess of Prince's last 20 years. Nothing is necessarily gained (and often much is lost) when pop music attires itself in notions of artistry and ambition, but with Justin it is, perversely, what makes him such a good pop star: As with Christina Aguilera, towering self-belief and stylistic metamorphoses provide a spectacle which papers over his stumbles and adds lustre to his successes. Almost entirely produced by Timbaland-- and with a more pronounced hip-hop edge than its predecessor-- the album abandons the feelgood sheen which the Neptunes peddled so adroitly on Justified, but makes up for it with the largesse of its sonic embrace, with Timbaland resurrecting many of his most effective guises, from rubbery synthetic funk to pseudo-crunk blare to eerie Eastern opulence. Throughout, the grooves are defined by their melodic intensity: It's the searing synth riffs and skyscraping strings which grab your attention, not stuttering beats or startling sound effects-- although these, too, are present in abundance. Here, Timberlake magnifies the persona he adopted on his debut, somehow both consummate lover and desperately needy. On hyperactive second single "My Love" his sexual propositions constantly elide into a proposal, as if anything less than matrimony is barely worth contemplating. Likewise, the suavely portentous title track-- poised between the carnal strut of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" (well, its verses) and the masochistic flutter of the Junior Boys-- derives its charm from its lofty aspirations, like a familiar lover staging an elaborately exaggerated seduction. It is this excess of ambition over achievement, as opposed to any real consistency, which makes FutureSex/LoveSounds more of an album than Justified was. Songs which sound puzzlingly self-indulgent in isolation-- most obviously, the smirking, tenuously tuneful first single "SexyBack"-- are cloaked in a compelling intensity and purposefulness when played in succession. Most brilliantly, the tight, clipped disco-funk of "LoveStoned" descends precipitously into the gorgeous melancholy of "I Think That She Knows", all MOR-rock guitar churn and weightless strings, the same chorus ("She's got me love stoned…and I think that she knows") transformed from infatuation to the paranoid and elegiac admission of an addict. This unselfconscious (or, rather, hyper-selfconscious) revelling in melodramatic gestures is among the album's attractions; even the handful of glutinous ballads are admirable for their lack of restraint or proportion-- in particular, the gospel-tinged morality tale "Losing My Way", graced by utterly cringeworthy lyrics, is somehow both a colossal disaster and deeply lovable. Such missteps are few, but also a necessary piece of this album's puzzle: By courting disaster so fearlessly, Timberlake's reach makes his music attractive-- even when it exceeds his grasp.

2006-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00

2006-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Jive

September 13, 2006

021ebcf9-16ea-43c8-bffc-cced5b8b9185

Tim Finney

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

PC Music Volume 1 compresses two years of A. G. Cook's London-based label into a half hour. Taken together, it delineates the PC Music aesthetic: airbrushed articulations of digital life in all its silly, beautiful, desperate triviality, escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape.

PC Music Volume 1 compresses two years of A. G. Cook's London-based label into a half hour. Taken together, it delineates the PC Music aesthetic: airbrushed articulations of digital life in all its silly, beautiful, desperate triviality, escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape.

Various Artists: PC Music Volume 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20542-pc-music-volume-1/

PC Music Volume 1

PC Music Volume 1 is anti-physical music for an anti-physical time. Like everything that A. G. Cook’s London-based label’s released since 2013, these 10 songs are invocations of the hyperreal, created to meet the anxieties of an age where bodies are rarely written about as sites of joy or authenticity, and more frequently discussed as zones of inequity, violence, embarrassment and pain. The desire to exist as a well-tended garden of pixels fuels many of our culture’s dominant systems: the databases of altered thoughts, distorted images, the avatars that demonstrate reaction or stand in for action. Like all of these networks and products, PC Music answers our desire to escape the burden of physical presence—and in the process ends up sharpening and perpetuating the desire even further. Both a label and a self-contained genre, PC Music is constructed from deep abstractions of pop and experimental electronic music; its building blocks are the musical equivalent of emoji, symbols that replace words that replace voices. It’s an airbrushed articulation of digital life in all its silly, beautiful, desperate triviality; it has an avant-garde surface but is reactionary in its bones. Sonically, it’s a response to today’s alarmingly easy production glosses, the intense plurality of sub-subgenres that flourish online. If pop’s basic work is to grab you by the heart, PC Music flips and disses that aim completely. The label’s sound resembles what aliens would produce if they sunk a jukebox in acid and then tried, from the randomized wreckage, to communicate some version of love. Instead of affection, they’ll give you a heart-shaped simulacrum—and maybe, as suggests PC Music, that’s what you wanted after all. When physical presence is a source of so much complication, sometimes an abstraction is the only thing a person can bear. A test of the boundaries, possibilities and limitations of this ultra-focused aesthetic, PC Music Volume 1 compresses two years of work into a half-hour. Taken together, the rapturous, nightmarish cartoon corpus is maddeningly effective; it solidifies PC Music’s ability to only produce strong reactions, whether starry-eyed captivation or powerful revulsion or a nauseating juxtaposition of both poles. There’s a meaningful spectrum of approaches within the PC Music ethos—classical composer Danny L Harle’s "In My Dreams" has a heartbreakingly soft, sweet, harmonic gravity, while A. G. Cook’s alter ego Lipgloss Twins’ "Wannabe" is a chopped-up, anti-melodic spatter of brand names and robot garble—but there’s a relentless logical consistency to the sound. Every track feels almost auto-generated, scrambled, which makes the human precision in each arrangement even more eerie: PC Music sounds chaotic but is sneakily minimalist, deliberate to the last distorted note. The calculation behind this effect is a large part of what makes it monstrous: it’s the sound of whimsy without spontaneity, lightness without joy, longing without knowledge, aggression with no object. It’s a dollhouse universe, for female voices and female figures only. The male producers and artists are controllingly invisible in PC Music, and it’s hard to say whether that’s a real aesthetic constraint or a deliberate large-scale perpetuation of the idea of women as powerless, squeaky, sweet. The genre, anyway, has been slapped with labels of "gender appropriation," and the sound does feel awkwardly, distinctly male sometimes, in its "South Park"-ish warehouse artlessness. But, if anyone’s really in drag here, it’s humans pretending to be avatars—the total elision of soul. Like a Kardashian, PC Music cannot be insulted by the word "contrived." PC Music is deeply contrived; it’s fake as hell, that’s the point, that’s the entire energy. But this ethos, of course, has its limits. PC Music only works when its theoretical intention lines up with its physical effect: when you listen to it and become instantly depersonalized, blissfully and bubbly, more pixel than flesh. The best route to this end naturally centers on pleasure. In Volume 1, the pastel jelly-bean melodies and baby-girl anime coos of Hannah Diamond’s "Every Night" and A. G. Cook’s "Beautiful" reach this synthetic liftoff; the two pair up again for "Keri Baby", a maniacally playful track with a stormy bassline, a bubble noise vamping, a refrain of "Give it to the girl/ Give it to the girl/ Give it to the cutest girl." The closing track, easyFun’s "Laplander", is transcendent: all simulated mechanical longing, synth squeaks and stilted voices reaching for ecstasy. In tracks that are less joyful—GFOTY’s "Don’t Wanna / Let’s Do It", for example—the self-perpetuating darkness and denial that PC Music draws on gets a little too clear for comfort. PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album—the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span—the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling. You wish you didn’t live in a world that produced PC Music, but you do—and because you do, thank the god in the machine for PC Music. It’ll come whispering and screaming in an absolute vacuum; it’s a party reconstituted long after anyone’s been there to laugh. It’s empty, and yet somehow the stakes are monumental. Can you chip your way to the real through this pixelated thicket? Well, you can, and worse, you have to.

2015-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

PC Music

May 4, 2015

021ee40a-6a66-4c19-8b9a-c9af280359c4

Jia Tolentino

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jia-tolentino/

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross follow their award-winning score to David Fincher's The Social Network with this bleak three-hour The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack, a sprawling mass that exceeds the length of the film it was meant for.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross follow their award-winning score to David Fincher's The Social Network with this bleak three-hour The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack, a sprawling mass that exceeds the length of the film it was meant for.

Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo OST

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16180-the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo OST

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score for The Social Network was brilliant because it worked as a conventional film score even though its approach was boldly unconventional. The pair assembled a dense but brittle map of drones, foreboding sound effects, and delicate melodies, submerging acoustic sounds in pools of digital filters. The result was something suited to filmmaker David Fincher's work-- brooding, mysterious, and tinged with anxiety. The film world agreed: Reznor's first foray into soundtrack work after putting Nine Inch Nails on hiatus landed him both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. Who knew? Fincher clearly has confidence in their abilities, as he tapped Reznor and Ross once again to score his latest movie, the film adaption of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. With the team earning another Golden Globe nomination, it would seem like they're doing something right. Dragon Tattoo doesn't differ drastically from Social Network but it's not a retread. For starters, this one's a three-hour beast, spread out over three CDs, six vinyl LPs, or a whopping 39 digital files. So while The Social Network could be received as a digestible standalone product, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo doesn't offer the same sort of flexibility. That's in part by design as much as structure: Where The Social Network had discernible motifs like "Hand Covers Bruise" and pseudo-techno like "In Motion", the music here is more obtuse, focused on building tension and defining space rather than conveying feeling or emotion through melody. Which means there are few standout tracks; instead, the most arresting moments emerge out of layers of increasingly damaged sounds that set an uncompromisingly bleak mood. The score's overcast outlook is well suited to Fincher's portrayal of Sweden as an outwardly and proudly modern country overrun with the dehumanizing potential of technology. It's a place haunted equally by industrial remnants of past eras and shameful personal and political histories. The task of Reznor and Ross is to create something conflicted between technology and tradition, and they opt for a sound that's essentially future-baroque: fiercely plucked strings, ominous bass, decaying chimes, and spare pianos held together with meticulous post-processing. But where Dragon Tattoo excels in its role as soundtrack, it falters in listenability: imagine something like Ghosts I-IV but almost double the length and without all the catchy parts. True, it is easy to admire the sheer complexity of their work in small doses. Pieces like "Hypomania" drift into clouds of hellish distortion and re-emerge, while "Oraculum" features vividly tactile drums that feel heavily removed from your typical Hollywood percussive suspense music. So while this might be a soundtrack, it rises above mere Hollywood muzak. As the set drifts into its third and final disc, the pace begins to pick up and form shapes that might be recognizable to Reznor adherents. "Great Bird of Prey" could be an instrumental leftover from The Fragile days, while "Infiltrator" weaves in and out of sections of intensely energetic movement. "An Itch" traps what sounds like human screams and moans beneath an actual beat, while the warbly "Closer" piano even makes a reappearance in "The Heretics", a sly wink and nod to its composers' considerable musical history. For those fans who wouldn't want to spend $300 on a 6xLP box set of soundtrack music, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is likely to remain a curiosity apart from its two bookending vocal tracks. The movie's sleek opening sequence is soundtracked by the Reznor and Karen O's cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", a mean reminder of the power Reznor's pop music holds at its most ferocious. On the other end of the spectrum, the three hours wind down with a cover of Bryan Ferry's "Is Your Love Strong Enough?" by How to Destroy Angels (the band composed of Ross, Reznor, and wife Mariqueen Maandig). To hear a human voice so bright and clear after what's come before is a moment of pure pop relief. But pop is not what Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about. It's reasonable to question the necessity of a score whose sprawling mass exceeds the length of the film it's meant for. But even if it doesn't quite work as a standalone experience, the real takeaway here is that Reznor and Ross may be ushering in an exciting new realm of possibility for mainstream film scoring.

2012-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

2012-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock / Experimental

The Null Corporation

January 17, 2012

021ee7f0-e1f7-4f31-b36a-53b3fb534146

Andrew Ryce

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

The unassuming Melbourne five-piece build garage-jangle guitars and blunt-edged harmonies into strangely hypnotic arrangements that feel simultaneously long and short.

The unassuming Melbourne five-piece build garage-jangle guitars and blunt-edged harmonies into strangely hypnotic arrangements that feel simultaneously long and short.

Possible Humans: Everybody Split

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/possible-humans-everybody-split/

Everybody Split

In the age of Bandcamp democratization, anyone with an internet connection can record, say, a collection of Dixie Chicks covers, or an hour of improvisions, and then make it public, no financial strings attached. That’s how Melbourne-based five-piece Possible Humans released their 2016 debut Ringwood/Ozone, one of the more interesting pieces of Bandcamp debris to surface in the past few years. Ringwood/Ozone demonstrated the group’s talent for extending mostly freeform pop across a whole record; strange and often silly, it showed off their chops without really seeming to try. On their new album Everybody Split, Possible Humans marry that penchant for layered, fluid songwriting with an impeccable sense for well-crafted pop songs, resulting in one of Melbourne’s most pleasant rock records in recent memory. While no songs are as loose as anything from their debut, Everybody Split still shows a certain affinity for raucous guitar jams. The 12-minute “Born Stoned,” the only such long track here, sprints toward a climax of squalling guitars and pounding cymbal. After a run of denser, more ambling songs like “Nomenclature Airspace” and “Stinger,” it arrives as a shock to the system. The vocals feel redundant; even without a lyrical anchor, Possible Humans’ musicianship is a magnetic joy. With no obvious high points nor particularly boring stretches, the album feels paced for start-to-finish listening. The easiest comparison for Possible Humans’ sound is New Zealand indie rock progenitors the Clean. Saying a band from Melbourne sounds like the Clean is akin to saying a river is wet: nearly always true, and rarely worth noting. Where Everybody Split feels most closely tied is the small scene around Hobbies Galore, the Melbourne-based label that released it. Operated by Alex Macfarlane, a member of beloved local bands the Stevens and Twerps, Hobbies Galore has released excellent records by the Stroppies, Blank Realm, and J. McFarlane’s Reality Guest, and Possible Humans sit flush with its slate of oddball indie rock and post-punk. Macfarlane also produced Everybody Split, and its garage-jangle guitars and blunt-edged harmonies bear more than a passing resemblance to his 2017 record with the Stevens, Good. But where Macfarlane’s band often sounds as though it’s in a constant state of propulsion, Possible Humans take a different tack: Much of Everybody Split is defined by strangely hypnotic arrangements that feel simultaneously long and short, buzzing with activity but advancing nowhere. Early highlight “Aspiring to Be a Bloke” builds simple guitar lines into something paranoid and noirish; when vocalist Steven Hewitt sings, “Help me, I need to be somewhere/I’m not on time,” it sounds coyly referential, a nod to the song’s tangled structure. While unassuming on paper, there’s something about Possible Humans’ music that sticks; there are hooks hidden in these songs, obscured by Macfarlane’s production but present enough that you might hum them after even a passive listen. The album’s lack of showiness seems borne of the band’s low-stakes origins; Everybody Split still feels like the work of five musicians messing around on a Sunday afternoon, making an album for the hell of it. It’s so easygoing that one might overlook its fascinating warps of a traditional jangle sound. There’s a beauty in that quality; Possible Humans never demand attention, but they deserve it anyway.

2019-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Hobbies Galore

April 16, 2019

021ef914-6a9c-440b-b88b-654d1b508b4c

Shaad D’Souza

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

Noname’s first album in five years is a cool and masterful interrogation of the culture. She’s taking everyone’s name—including her own.

Noname’s first album in five years is a cool and masterful interrogation of the culture. She’s taking everyone’s name—including her own.

Noname: Sundial

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/noname-sundial/

Sundial

Sometimes the only way to work through the bullshit is to point at your close friends and ask, “Do you all see this, too, or am I bugging?” Their confirmations stop you from feeling like you’re on a different planet from everyone else. That’s the driving force behind Noname’s first project in five years, the eye-opening and disruptive Sundial. On the first track, with her typical buttery, head-in-the-clouds delivery, she raps, “We smokin’ positivity like dust, trust.” It’s a cutting quip: She’s fed up with anti-critical positivity, the kind that leads corporations to dress up and commodify Black art, turning an artist’s politics into a commercialized performance. She has no time for the idea that It’s all good as long as they’re Black, no matter what they’re selling. Sundial pushes back against that complacency in a real regular-person kind of way. It’s not preachy or too heavy. Noname is not trying to sell herself as a revolutionary. She’s also unafraid of biting self-reflection that leaves her own contradictions out in the open. In rap, where it’s so often about seeming indestructible, hanging yourself out to dry is a gutsy move. With her loopy, shapeshifting flow and gentle, dynamic voice, Noname uses her sense of humor to seamlessly thread together everyday reflections with anti-imperial ideology. Bars like, “Get that pussy to drip/Wear that drip in the hood,” live cozily alongside, “We is Wakanda/We queen, Rwanda/First Black president, and he the one who bombed us.” They’re both distinctly provocative, the former because of the wordplay, the latter because of the bluntness. Criticizing Disney or Obama is still low-hanging fruit, but Noname lays the line down so matter of factly, as if she knows that. I guess she won’t be on the next playlist. Noname doesn’t just land blows at big targets for the fun of it; she isn’t getting some takes off or being a hater. Instead she uses these musings to interrogate herself. On “Namesake,” producer Slimwav’s sonorous funk bassline and forceful percussion set the tone for some of the most inspired rapping of the year. “’Cause if you want some money you can say that/You deserve the payback, these niggas took everything,” she spits, seemingly addressing other Black entertainers, less agitated by the single-minded ambition to deepen their pockets than by the fact that they’re pretending otherwise. Then, the synths deepen, and her fiery raps switch to a cheer-squad cadence as she shades Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar’s working relationships with the NFL (she got Jay-Z in an earlier line). Throwing grenades without taking shelter; it’s shocking to hear another artist challenge them. Eventually, she circles back to herself: “Go Noname go, Coachella stage got sanitized/I said I wouldn’t perform for them and somehow I still fell in line, fuck.” On one side, it’s a slight cop-out, softening her condemnation of the megastars by making sure not to position herself as impervious to the same temptations. And, at the same time, it’s incredibly honest rapping that leaves her vulnerable to scrutiny. Being that real about yourself only sharpens the darts you throw at others. Like Kendrick’s thrillingly messy therapy session Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Noname is also wary of the pedestal she’s been placed on. In the years since 2018’s Room 25, she started Noname Book Club, which, by her telling, was a way to use the platform she gained from music to foster community and to familiarize both herself and club members with Black writers across genres. But nothing is ever that simple. The conversation around “the radicalization of Noname,” as The New York Times put it, has caused her—much like Kendrick after winning his Pulitzer—to be slotted into the role of the artist whose voice we so desperately need right now. It’s an impossible image to live up to and the teardown is always inevitable. A more shameless musician would have run with it as long as they could—channeled the performativity of the Mau Maus from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, got their own Disney-stamped event for the culture—and cashed out. But Noname amplifies her flaws and normalcy. She’s still in the real world, and not because she’s visiting as some act of radical relatability like Beyoncé riding into the disco on horseback. Caring about shit doesn’t stop her from still getting high, going through the ups-and-downs of relationships (the way she repeatedly claps “Fuck you nigga” on “Toxic” is acidic), and probing her own beauty standards on “Beauty Supply.” The one slight drag of Sundial: In contrast to Noname constantly barring out, her hooks sound a little weak, as on “Hold Me Down,” where her plain melodies are backed by the type of full-throated choir that sounded better on Chance’s Coloring Book. The features, however, are explosive, especially $ilkmoney on “Gospel?” who opens his verse with, “I’m not gon’ lie, I’m not surprised to hear the Fugees was FBI” over the warmest church pianos, and Jay Electronica, who sets off nuclear bombs name-checking Louis Farrakhan and mocking Ukrainian president Zelenskyy on “Balloons.” Both are outspoken rappers who provoke backlash and don’t seem that bothered by it, something I suspect Noname finds almost aspirational. There is hypocrisy to the inclusion of Jay Electronica, the kind of rapper you might expect Noname would heavily criticize given his blatant antisemitism and closeness with the institutional power of Jay-Z. But she’s as drawn to that messiness as anyone, and because of that, “Balloons” is a thorny track that feels at odds with her messaging. It’s also a full-on rap clinic. “And if you sing about a sister then we buyin’ a ticket for real,” she raps, targeted words that she says with what seems like a sarcastic smirk. Do the open contradictions make the song any less great? It depends on what they are and who you are, and your answer will say as much about her as you. Artists like Spike Lee, Tupac, Kanye West, Kendrick, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé have these inconsistencies. As you have them. As I have them. Noname’s got ’em, too.

2023-08-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-08-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

August 11, 2023

021f87f2-2d2e-406d-88e7-fbfaac700465

Alphonse Pierre

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

The Brainfeeder-affiliated Brooklyn rap duo's debut mixtape has a druggy aesthetic. It's a work of art-damaged mysticism and Issa Dash and Ak's pyrotechnic wordplay, guided by the Entreproducers' broad, psychedelic production palette.

The Brainfeeder-affiliated Brooklyn rap duo's debut mixtape has a druggy aesthetic. It's a work of art-damaged mysticism and Issa Dash and Ak's pyrotechnic wordplay, guided by the Entreproducers' broad, psychedelic production palette.

The Underachievers: Indigoism

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17716-indigoism/

Indigoism

The Brainfeeder-affiliated Brooklyn rap duo the Underachievers are part of New York City's loose knit Beast Coast collective, which counts Joey Bada$$ and his Pro Era crew along with Flatbush Zombies among its membership, and the A$AP Mob as friends. But the Underachievers are a singular presence within the new New York scene. They're not retro-leaning traditionalists like Bada$$, whose 1999 mixtape studiously replicated the vibe of classic 90s New York rap. They're not as aggressively weird as the Flatbush Zombies, and their seriousness of purpose sets them apart from the A$AP Mob's faded party rap. And while many of their contemporaries subscribe to a school of rap that extols the joys of drug use, gleefully cataloguing chemicals consumed, the Underachievers' Issa Dash and Ak treat mind-altering substances like sacraments, like battering rams at the doors of perception. Their debut mixtape, Indigoism, is druggy, but aesthetically so; beneath the surface lies a work of art-damaged mysticism and pyrotechnic wordplay. Indigoism derives many of its psychedelic properties from its production team, the Entreproducers, whose broad palette supplies Issa and Ak with bountiful and bizarre sounds. "Herb Shuttles" and "T.A.D.E.D" affix spectral keys to the skittering hi-hats and 808s of modern Southern rap. "So Devilish" and "New New York" are built around menacing psych rock grooves. "Revelations" seamlessly marries elements of blues and reggae to trap. Indigoism covers a lot of ground, and there is as much movement within songs as there is between them. "Leopard Shepard" chops a muted horn sample no less than three different ways, and songs like "Gold Soul Theory" and opener "Philanthropist" modulate between divergent verse and chorus sections like a live band would. Even meat-and-potatoes boom bap numbers "6th Sense" and "The Madhi" sneakily shift melodic elements in and out of the mix as they progress. Indigoism's one relative constant on the production front is a tendency toward a low BPM. Slower beats are the perfect launchpad for the breakneck doubletime raps and stop-on-a-dime flow shifts that are the Underachievers' calling card. Indigoism's dizzying flurry of internal rhymes matches California rap luminaries Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul at their most switched on, but where the Black Hippy crew likes to slow things down periodically to air out the rhyme schemes, the Underachievers rarely let up. It's as if they have too much to say without the time to get it all out. The fury of their lyricism also calls back to unsung technicians of 90s rap like Freestyle Fellowship and Organized Konfusion, acts possessed of an almost intimidatingly masterful command of words. This isn't to say that Underachievers' ability to rap very well is a liability, but Issa and Ak's battery of lyrical speed trials occasionally feels one-note when spread over 16 songs. Indigoism clocks in at under an hour, but it feels longer than it is, and is probably most effectively ingested in smaller doses. After more than a year of sporadic live shows and piecemeal track releases, this full reveal of Underachievers' vision shows a group that's thick with promise. Issa Dash and Ak are intriguing thinkers with formidable mic skills and a team of producers challenging them with moving, breathing soundscapes. In an era rife with aesthetes playing dress up with rap and auteurs who treasure texture and feel over good old-fashioned musicality, the Underachievers are a monument to the complex lyricism and drug-friendly experimentation of Souls of Mischief and the offbeat spirituality of the mystics in the Dungeon Family. But Indigoism isn't really about showing off a good record collection; it's about digesting influences and turning out something vaguely familiar but somehow brand new.

2013-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00

2013-02-12T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rap

Brainfeeder

February 12, 2013

0221b851-65d7-46d0-8f70-5d4c9e1da60b

Craig Jenkins

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

Two years ago, Teen Dream felt like such a complete realization of Beach House's potential that it had to make you wonder where they could possibly go from there. By just about every measure, the Baltimore duo's fourth album is stronger than anything they've done before.

Two years ago, Teen Dream felt like such a complete realization of Beach House's potential that it had to make you wonder where they could possibly go from there. By just about every measure, the Baltimore duo's fourth album is stronger than anything they've done before.

Beach House: Bloom

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16604-beach-house-bloom/

Bloom

Beach House's decision to call this record Bloom is almost too perfect. Over the course of four albums that's exactly what this band has done. Two people from Baltimore started by making incense-smelling, curtains-drawn bedroom pop. Now, eight years later, they make luminous, sky-sized songs that conjure some alternate universe where Cocteau Twins have headlined every stadium on Atlantis. "Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion. The word captures the music's slow sonority: the round, gleaming edges of Alex Scally's arpeggios and how, in Victoria Legrand's unhurried mouth, all words seem to have a few extra vowels. And here we thought they'd already bloomed. Two years ago, Beach House signed to big-time indie Sub Pop, started selling out larger rooms, and put out their first great record, Teen Dream. Brimming with lush sadness and lyrics that painstakingly documented the evaporation of a love ("It can't be gone," Legrand gasped on "10 Mile Stereo", "We're still right here"). Teen Dream was a break-up album, a clearer and more assured exploration of the exquisite, minor-key feelings the band had been mining since their self-titled debut. It felt like such a complete realization of the band's potential that it had to make you wonder-- a little worried, even-- where could they possibly go from here? Bloom suggests that this is the wrong question. "I hate it when bands change between records," Scally admitted recently. "[T]hat's not the way we work." And he's right: Beach House haven't changed, or at least not much. Bloom doesn't stray far from the structure or the emotional tenor of its predecessor. It finds the band making small, sharp adjustments to its craft, but these shifts are so subtle it takes a few listens for them to sink in. The songwriting is tighter, yet the atmosphere feels more diffuse; the lyrics are more straightforward, yet they're somehow suggestive of larger things. By just about every measure, Bloom's wingspan is fuller than anything Beach House have done before. Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions. Still, Bloom has a definite thematic fascination with idle youth and the bittersweet residue that remains once it's gone. "Troublemaker" looms with the threat of bad romance, and the brazen, epic "Wild"-- one of their best songs yet-- conjures teenage feelings of boredom, broken homes ("Our father won't come home, 'cause he is seeing double"), and the inordinate amounts of faith placed in the things that take someone out of those particular hells ("That's when your car pulls up, its hood is black and gleaming"). Legrand's ethereal contralto huffs so much life into her lines that even lyrics that look plain on the page take flight. Throughout, Legrand and Scally sound in perfect sync: his nimble riffs punctuate her long, drawn-out notes to add depth and layered rhythm to the tracks. Toward the end comes a mid-tempo, quietly spectacular song called "Wishes", on which Legrand sings about "the moment when a memory aches." It might be tempting to call that feeling nostalgia. But the sort of nostalgia Bloom employs feels so distant from the definition that word has taken on lately when we talk about music. What they do feels not just wonderfully self-contained but improbably intimate: It's a huge testament to Legrand and Scally that, although they're one of the most popular bands in the indiesphere at the moment, their music still has the hushed air of an overheard secret. Filmmakers call the part of the day right before the sun goes down "the magic hour." It's that brief moment when the waning daylight causes everything to take on a holy, hazy glow. It took Terrence Malick about a year to shoot his 1978 movie Days of Heaven because he insisted on filming only during this time of day, but the results perfectly capture and distend that dizzy, overripe feeling of right before something very good ends. Bloom does that, too. "What comes after this momentary bliss?" Legrand wonders on "Myth". It's a question Beach House don't seem interested in answering any time soon. Because that's become their signature magic trick: stopping time right before the sun disappears over the horizon, tricking you into believing a feeling can last forever.

2012-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Sub Pop / Bella Union

May 14, 2012

0221df23-d7f5-4892-8b39-ec97c1310f44

Lindsay Zoladz

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

After last year's prison stint-- not to mention the disappointing rock experiment Rebirth and various underwhelming stop-gap releases-- Lil Wayne finally attempts to reassert his hip-hop supremacy with Tha Carter IV.

After last year's prison stint-- not to mention the disappointing rock experiment Rebirth and various underwhelming stop-gap releases-- Lil Wayne finally attempts to reassert his hip-hop supremacy with Tha Carter IV.

Lil Wayne: Tha Carter IV

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15770-tha-carter-iv/

Tha Carter IV

A lot of rappers show a lot of love for Lil Wayne on his new album. "Thanks for giving us a whole 'nother classic with Tha Carter IV," huffs Busta Rhymes. "It's important that you are more than welcome to Tha Carter IV, and y'all enjoy it," advises André 3000. "Cash Money is the company and Weezy the boss," reiterates Wayne's fellow ex-con Shyne. And it's Drake who provides the record's most impassioned verse about his mentor's 2010 prison stint for criminal gun possession: "Rikers Island on this flow, eight months for that pistol/ But at least they had some bad bitches workin' in that shit hole." The man born Dwayne Carter never needed to be propped up like this before. During his Untouchable Era-- from the December 2005 release of Tha Carter II through 2008's Tha Carter III, with several classic mixtapes in between-- Wayne was The Best Rapper Alive because he said he was, and then rhymed his brain off to prove it. He doesn't claim that world-beating title once on Tha Carter IV. And no one else claims it for him. We accepted last year's duo of disappointments-- the aggravated rock turn Rebirth and the unfocused stop-gap collection I Am Not a Human Being-- because they were mere anomalies or appetizers. This summer's Sorry 4 the Wait mixtape was passable, but slight compared to previous off-label bounties like Dedication 2, Da Drought 3, or No Ceilings. So while there hasn't been much recorded evidence to support Wayne's hip-hop supremacy over the last three years, Tha Carter IV was always going to be the true test. As such, it's the rapper's most unfulfilling and worrisome move in a long while. Almost everything about Wayne is relaxed, regurgitated, or regressing here. Most noticeable is his slowed-down flow, perhaps a capitulation to the booming arenas he now plays to regularly, where intelligibility often trumps quick wit. But whereas the only permanent aspect of Wayne's cadence used to be its shiftiness, his delivery has slackened, severely deadening his ferociousness in the process. The falloff is made more apparent by a couple of guest shots from two of rap's most exuberant fast talkers, Busta Rhymes and Kansas City cult hero Tech N9ne. It's as if Wayne dispatched the pair to provide the dexterity he won't (or can't) come up with himself anymore. On "Interlude", Tech N9ne and an oddly uncredited André 3000 reel off two of the album's best verses, perfectly setting up its star for a clean-up finale. But Wayne never shows on that track, or the star-studded "Outro", as if he'd rather play curator than be the focus of some of the highlights on his own album. His trepidation is understandable considering how Drake and Rick Ross easily overshadow him on recent singles "She Will" and "John", respectively. In fact, one of Wayne's more spirited moments on the album comes when he forgoes a third verse on "She Will" and just hollers and mugs behind Drake's hook instead; he just sounds excited to be in the background. After an epic run, it seems as though Wayne has finally run out of inventive ways to say he's on drugs, or great at sex, or extremely interested in making money. Because after you've been "so motherfuckin' high, I can eat a star," as he claimed on Da Drought 3, being "so high, I get star-struck" just doesn't pack the same oomph. Elsewhere, he's found a new love for the type of faux-profundity he rarely had time or patience for before. "I'm searching for today, instead I found tomorrow/ And I put that shit right back like, 'I'll see what I find tomorrow,'" he blankly philosophizes on "Nightmares of the Bottom", itself a downgrade of Tha Carter III's brilliantly soulful "Let the Beat Build". Once joyously freewheeling, Tha Carter series has gotten to the point where it comes with its own hip-hop tropes and rules: a combination of East Coast lyricism, West Coast violence, and a distinctly Southern rhythm and flair. That singular formula has served Wayne well in the past, but some of this album's most enjoyable moments do away with it altogether. The squelching T-Pain duet "How to Hate" is a paradoxically gorgeous kiss-off that finds the pair heart-worn and a bit pissed. "She used to always say, fuck my niggas/ And when I went to jail, she fucked my niggas, well..." laments Wayne in a coaxing purr. As usual, T-Pain plays a permanent resident of the friend zone, while Wayne lashes out in the most charming way possible; the track makes you wish the rumored T-Wayne project would actually get off the ground. Even softer is that song's R&B rejoinder, "How to Love", Wayne's most mature song to date. And while it's a little jarring to hear the guy behind "Lollipop" and so many Gremlins references attempt a legitimate grown-up ballad, the 28 year old's tough love feels earned. Without a fierce beat or screaming guitars backing him, Wayne's sing-rap croak is caught out there on the track, and it results in one of the few Carter IV performances that doesn't sound like a canned retread. Recently, Lil Wayne spoke out on the topic of retirement. "I want to become a better father and a better man to my woman, and those things take time," he told MTV. "And time takes away from [music]. So the honest answer to that [retirement] question is, I don't know. Maybe so." Even back in his hallowed heyday, on Dedication 2, he had retirement on his mind. "My career is my life, so I could never retire out, even when I stop rapping," he said in an interlude. "Hopefully, I'm known for something different-- not different, but known for something else, also." It's a nice thought. And, after all, this album's uncharacteristic R&B anomalies stand out most. While Tha Carter IV isn't the first indication that Wayne's finest verses are behind him, it is the most glaring. Still, he seems smart enough to know that for every Jay-Z there are scores of rappers-- including several guests on this very album-- trying to relive past glories on a daily basis. Wayne has floated the notion that Tha Carter IV could be his last album. The threat makes sense.

2011-08-30T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-08-30T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment

August 30, 2011

022250de-06b8-4aa1-97be-197ef1515f47

Ryan Dombal

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

The industrial noise-punk duo Deli Girls’ I Don’t Know How to Be Happy is a vengeance document built on industrial mutant rage.

The industrial noise-punk duo Deli Girls’ I Don’t Know How to Be Happy is a vengeance document built on industrial mutant rage.

Deli Girls: I Don’t Know How to Be Happy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deli-girls-i-dont-know-how-to-be-happy/

I Don’t Know How to Be Happy

There is a truism that the best revenge is a life well-lived, and maybe that works eventually, but before that there is another necessary step—a violence, a purge. Deli Girls’ second record with New York-based Sweat Equity, I Don’t Know How to Be Happy, is a vengeance document built on industrial mutant rage. Their rogues’ gallery, named without deflection, includes cops, hypocrites, fascists, and apologists. This alone is not unusual—in 2019 we know who our enemies are. The truly celebratory part is how it all unfolds. Deli Girls is only two people—Danny Orlowski on vocals and Tommi Kelly on machines, but on record they are legion. In “I’d Rather Die,” Kelly layers on cyber-noir synths then drops in distorted-to-oblivion beats that crunch like combat boots on broken glass. Orlowski’s shredded vocals and weaponized hysterics come in from all points of the mix. The Deli Girls world has always been a claustrophobic one, but where their 2017 record Evidence was played through in one or two takes like a live show, Happy is more intentionally constructed, with dense overdubs that make it all the more immersive. For the most part, these are dance tracks. When performed live, they often stir up revelatory mosh pits in which Orlowski thrashes. Brooklyn punk shows aren’t known for their dancing, but in a devoted underground populated by artists such as Dreamcrusher, Machine Girl, Show Me the Body, and SIGNAL, bodies still collide. In the crucial queer text and AIDS memoir Close to the Knives, honored last year in a Whitney retrospective, David Wojnarowicz raged against the expectation of civility in the face of constant state-sanctioned violence, and attending a noise-punk show in Brooklyn at the moment can feel like a collective exorcism, an opportunity to discharge some of this ubiquitous anxiety. The legion, after all, exists. And in the “Hey Mickey”-meets-“Bank Head” claps on the intro to “Abortion,” or the off-kilter pulse anchoring the kinetic “Officer,” or the pinball timpani on “Peg,” there is an implicit invite to join up. Kelly grew up on video game music and Nine Inch Nails and, in that legacy, composes each song a little like a showdown in a dystopian action-shooter. “Shut Up” sounds wholly like a final boss battle, complete with Mortal Kombat acid pit dripping sounds, rolling war drums, and samples from Unreal Tournament deadpanning “excellent” and “you have lost the lead.” (Kelly and Orlowski are also both frequent collaborators on the absurdist desktop webseries Comp USA Live, located somewhere in the same aesthetic ouroboros of Y2K/retro/future/tech/media/anxiety as Ryan Trecartin or Molly Soda’s work.) Orlowski revels in their own villainy, leaning into a deranged cackle on “Here We Go Again” or “It Must Be So Nice,” volleying between whimpers and barks on “Money,” or unleashing ragged metal scream-growls on “Abortion.” As with Kelly’s samples, their extensive vox repertoire is used percussively, turning indictments like “I got my hand in my pocket/You got me?/You scared?” or “I see you and I heard you/Nothing stops me from deserting” into sick grooves. Where Evidence delved into more autobiographical elements, Happy is committed to the attack. Songs are built around refrains like “put your money where your mouth is” or “shut up about the end of the world,” refusing narrative. But whether you’re kicking an aggressive person out of the show space or asserting your rights to law enforcement, it bears remembering that any excess words can be used against you—the surest course of action is to repeat what you need to say and stand firm. There is no playing devil’s advocate with a mantra.

2019-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Sweat Equity

March 13, 2019

022378fc-663f-435d-bcee-083c862b2b12

NM Mashurov

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/

Domino reissues the indie rock classic, adding an 18-track bonus CD and new liner notes. Released the same month as Nirvana's Nevermind, this album perfectly nailed the mussed, cynical, love-struck vibe of early-90s cassette-trading zinesters, and it still sounds fresh and remarkable today.

Domino reissues the indie rock classic, adding an 18-track bonus CD and new liner notes. Released the same month as Nirvana's Nevermind, this album perfectly nailed the mussed, cynical, love-struck vibe of early-90s cassette-trading zinesters, and it still sounds fresh and remarkable today.

Sebadoh: III

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7053-iii/

III

Released the same month as Nirvana's Nevermind, Sebadoh's III-- along with Pavement's 1992 album Slanted & Enchanted-- functioned as my preferred scattershot post-adolescent soundtrack. Sebadoh's third, at that time most "polished" album, isn't as universally influential as Nirvana's watershed; for cassette-trading zinesters like my teenage self, though, the scrubby Massachusetts trio nailed a perfect mussed, undeniably cynical, love-struck vibe. Hardly a lifer, I jumped ship after Lou Barlow's foil Eric Gaffney quit in 1994 before the release of 1994's Bakesale. The "classic lineup" fell apart with the departure of that bong-cracked noisemaker; as a result, Barlow's ballads felt too sugary and, well, ordinary. That's what makes III so great: Firmly entrenched in the band's fragmentary, boom-hiss salad days, the 23 tracks strike a ragamuffin balance between the two songwriters and collaborators at their idiosyncratic prime. That history's been mapped thoroughly, but in 1991, part of the appeal sprouted from a certain mystery. The unknowability's gone; still, reissued with an 18-track bonus CD and new liner notes written by the band, the original indie masterpiece hasn't aged a bit. Hitting the record bins after The Freed Man and Weed Forestin', III added bassist/drummer/third vocalist/middle man Jason Loewenstein, solidifying the band's prime formation. Song-wise, Barlow was still smarting about his unceremonious firing from Dinosaur Jr.-- along with his anxious relationship with on-off girlfriend and future wife, Kathleen Billus. Accordingly, his best songs call out Mascis ("The Freed Pig"'s insistently angular guitar jab) and/or pine for/praise his lady (the gorgeous "Kath"). Gaffney, on the other hand, displays a darker vibe, documenting his fucked-up family life ("As The World Dies, The Eyes of God Grow Bigger", with his dad fried on liquid LSD, young Eric's head hitting concrete, grandma getting stoned), "Violet Execution", and "Scars, Four Eyes" (co-written with Barlow). Even the covers-- the Minutemen's "Sickles and Hammers" and a warped rendition of Johnny Mathis' "Wonderful, Wonderful"-- comfortably snuggle into the grainy, duct-tapped landscape. There are some Loewenstein-penned stinkers (see "Smoke a Bowl") and average bits (the country jangle of "Black-Haired Girl"), but the lows are so fucked up and indulgent, they become an integral part of its imperfect charm. If you remove one, the structure topples. I remember seeing Sebadoh live at Maxwell's in Hoboken right around the release of III. Barlow had a big-ass pimple on his cheek, his guitar was held in parts by tape, and he was peddling Sebadoh shirts he'd made with magic markers. Between songs, he bent down and pressed play on a boom-box, launching pre-recorded salvos (including a "three is the magic number" sample): "Turning personal vendetta and small-minded revenge tactics into eventual cult status. The only man in the world who truly appreciated the genius of the Swans, Lou Barlow," "Sebadoh, featuring that guy who played bass in Soul Asylum," "another evening of oppressive noodling," "metaphorically pissing in your mouth," and "Your postmodern folk-core saviors, Sebadoh." These one-liners and non-sequiturs are available on the reissues bonus CD, as a track called "Showtape '91". I approached Barlow at that same show and asked him some dumb teenager question about Mascis and he sorta told me to fuck off. Today, I miss that snotty, anti-PR indie-- it was both the piss and romanticism that made Sebadoh vital. Once Barlow got over Mascis (see Dinosaur Jr. reunion tour) and tied the knot the band felt hollow. Fifteen years ago, his bile was best, most humorously encapsulated on "Gimme Indie Rock". Beyond its right-on satire, if you changed the dates around a bit, it offered a musical biography of just about everyone I knew at the time: "Started back in '83/ Started seeing things differently / Hardcore wasn't doing it for me no more/ Started smoking pot, thought things sounded better slow..." Then comes the gallery of in-scene disses: "Cracking jokes like a Thurston Moore/ Pedal hopping like a Dinosaur J.../ Taking inspiration from Hüsker Dü/ It's a new generation of electric white boy blues." That fight song, along with the four other songs that joined it on a 1991 7", appear on the bonus CD with a four-track demo of "The Freed Pig", a super flanged almost throat-sung "Stars For Eyes", and a 2004 "Violet Execution" remix. Reviewing an album that functioned as such a personal watershed obviously presents the opportunity for nostalgia-induced hyperbole, but even after taking a step back from III it still deserves every last bit of praise. Sebadoh followed this effort with other fine moments; nowhere else did they so perfectly meld rickety folk, tin-can guitar, Shrimper-style ambiance, feedbacking "power sludge," eccentric compositional constructions, carcinogenic hooks, and poetic sincerity. Over the years since its release, the "I'm just me! Listen to me! A whole all-American original!" mantra that surfaces amid the trembly acoustic boom of "Downnmind" has become more than just tongue-in-cheek tomfoolery: Even if Lou, Eric, and Jason didn't know it at the time, those stoner fucks created something essential. I haven't heard anything like it since.

2006-08-07T02:00:00.000-04:00

2006-08-07T02:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Homestead

August 7, 2006

02244340-40a2-443c-9890-7a008834feec

Brandon Stosuy

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

After her much-loved Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape collaboration with Diplo, and a series of delays, the debut album from London-via-Sri Lanka club artist M.I.A. proves worth the wait.

After her much-loved Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape collaboration with Diplo, and a series of delays, the debut album from London-via-Sri Lanka club artist M.I.A. proves worth the wait.

M.I.A.: Arular

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5618-arular/

Arular

Arular was first expected to be released in late 2004, but instead M.I.A. gave half of its vocals away to Diplo's Piracy Funds Backlash mixtape, which married her London Sri Lankan patois to music from New York, Rio, and Kingston. The mix highlighted her big-tent approach to global rhythms and Now Sounds, an M.O. that was cemented when she professed her love for hip-hop crew the Diplomats and rap's spiritual cousins, grime, baile funk, dancehall, and reggaeton in The New York Times. Faster than you can say "galang-alang-alang," M.I.A. became the one-woman embodiment of what to some is great about the contemporary pop music landscape. All that's left is for M.I.A. to draft Seba as producer and that voice that name-stamps dancehall tracks like a heavily drugged, vocoded Just Blaze as MC: "M.I.A. on... Bionic Ras... Baile Funk... Forward Riddim..." This transglobal express isn't new, of course: Young Jamaicans have been combining the best of U.S. hip-hop and UK dance culture for years, American rap producers seem addicted to the sub-continent, grime is actually lobbing singles into the UK top 40, and Nigeria is threatening to become the new hip-hop hot spot. "From ghetto to ghetto, backyard to yard, taking it transglobal on the aboveground, because that's where the people are," Hyperdub's Sterling Clover said of this trend a few years ago. At the time he was talking about bhangra and the Indian influences on hip-hop, but he could just as easily have been talking about dancehall or grime or baile funk. And when it comes to M.I.A., you can practically talk about all of them at once. Unlike most musical tailors, neither she nor her mixtape partner Diplo is afraid to let the seams show. Rather than hiding up the ass of cratedigging culture, they relish sharing the spotlight with and revealing their sources, with M.I.A. dropping names in NYC broadsheets and Diplo opening two-way routes between Philly and the favelas rather than stashing all the best dubplates for himself. Northern Soul is probably turning over in its grave. If the two are interested in creating a dialogue between different artists and sounds, they're also more than happy to allow listeners to eavesdrop, whether they're improvising (Piracy) or well-rehearsed (Arular, Favela on Blast). M.I.A.'s freedom-through-homelessness is shared by other artists (most notably dj/Rupture) but not by many of the source sounds found on her records, most of which are fiercely regional. Where Rupture's name suggests a destruction of the borders between scenes, cultures, and nations, his methods-- which include healthy doses of splatter beats and breakcore-- can also seem violently deconstructionist. M.I.A's moniker, on the other hand, appropriately suggests rootlessness. She's not exploring subcultures so much as visiting them, grabbing souvenirs and laying them out on acetate: The favela trumpet on "Bucky Done Gone", the London slang of "Galang", the disco sample on "Sunshowers", the steel drums of "Bingo", the electro-fueled vocal edits of "Hombre". M.I.A.'s detractors claim her flirtations with terrorism and revolutionary politics reveal the biggest case of sufferer's envy since Joe Strummer but little depth of thought. But if the latter is true, so what? An in-depth examination of demonizing The Other, the relationship between the West and developing nations, or the need to empathize with one's enemies would likely make for a pretty crappy pop song. An argument can and has been made that her political lip service is unique enough to get those topics onto your tongue or into your brain, prodding listeners to at least examine them. Some might find that off-putting, but pop music that reflects uncomfortable realities and is packaged in this sonic collage beats the hell out of 1980s left-wing hand wringing from Bragg or Bono or Biafra. And when it comes down to it, that "sonic collage" is still what's important here. With all the column inches and message board posts arguing about whether M.I.A. is an opportunist or a clever contextualist, genuine or a fraud, full of good intentions or no specific intentions at all, the closest thing to a truism about Arular is that it's a taut, invigorating distillation of the world's most thrilling music; a celebration of contradictions and aural globalization that recasts the tag "world music" as the ultimate in communicative pop rather than a symbol of condescending piety.

2005-03-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

2005-03-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

Global / Pop/R&B

XL / Beggars

March 22, 2005

0224dc88-8ed8-44dc-b62f-c3a2944928f9

Scott Plagenhoef

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

Following two volumes of roots renditions of his own songs, the shapeshifting country musician returns with a bluegrass concept album about love among the legends of the Kentucky frontier.

Following two volumes of roots renditions of his own songs, the shapeshifting country musician returns with a bluegrass concept album about love among the legends of the Kentucky frontier.

Sturgill Simpson: The Ballad of Dood and Juanita

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sturgill-simpson-the-ballad-of-dood-and-juanita/

The Ballad of Dood and Juanita

Sturgill Simpson does not do half measures. Almost a decade ago, following vagabond stints in the Navy, a railroad yard, and a Seattle IHOP, the Kentucky songwriter circumvented country music convention with Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the kind of once-in-a-long-while reappraisal of the genre’s core values that only a lifetime outsider might dare make. Embracing new wave and honky-tonk, trading Jesus for DMT, Simpson’s masterpiece drew upon the maverick spirit of country’s bygone visionaries in order to give a complacent genre something beyond pickup trucks and watery domestics. It was vivid and urgent, an inspiring revelation. He chased its success with an organ-funked instruction manual for life and a grungy kiss-off to the music industry, so relentless it registered as the mannered Southern cousin of Eminem’s Kamikaze. Then, amid COVID-19 lockdowns last year, Simpson again pivoted, recruiting a crackerjack, intergenerational crew of bluegrass musicians like Sierra Hull and Tim O’Brien to quickly record twin volumes of traditional renditions of his own songs. A quiet act of confident defiance, Cuttin’ Grass suggested that traditionalism to evolve could also be a form of subversion. The Ballad of Dood and Juanita, a bluegrass concept album recorded with the stunning group he has dubbed the Hillbilly Avengers, is an even more audacious salvo in Simpson’s back-to-the-roots campaign. By turns romantic, playful, sympathetic, and solemn, The Ballad of Dood and Juanita is a compelling update on American frontier mythmaking, delivered by a band good enough to push lovingly against genre conventions. The premise of Dood and Juanita is a stock tale of hardscrabble settlers, as familiar as any classic Western. A half-Shawnee toughie, Dood is a wild child of Eastern Kentucky who delights in domesticity after meeting Juanita, “a good woman” who “calmed down the rage.” When she is abducted by the outlaw Seamus McClure, Dood (already shot by the hooligan) saddles up his mule and pursues Juanita, sights set on mortal vengeance. During the quest, his towering and steadfast mule, Shamrock, gets tired, while his trusty hound, Sam, dies. Saved by a band of Cherokees, Dood finally finds Juanita, gets her home, and kills McClure with a single shot (and then a tomahawk chop) from his Martin Meylin rifle, a gun so tied to the United States’ westward advance that Daniel Boone helped make it famous. Dood and Juanita is unequal parts love story, history lesson, and action-adventure tale, a cross as classic as the sounds around it. Dood and Juanita works so well because Simpson sounds comfortable within this form and just beyond it. He harmonizes tenderly with his band above Stuart Duncan’s sweet fiddle line during “One in the Saddle, One on the Ground,” an ode to both mule and hound. “Played Out” is an exceptional bluegrass ballad about bearing impossible burdens. And Simpson reaches bluegrass’ nasal apogee during “Go in Peace,” his voice expressing the same anxiety as Scott Vestal’s restless banjo. For Simpson, this music is a return to terra firma, to land he knows innately. Listen, though, for the tiny surprises—the wailing harmonica and bounding jaw harp during “Go in Peace,” the field recordings during “Played Out,” the background bells and absurdist harmonies of “Ol’ Dood (Part I).” They’re minutiae, sure, but they collectively suggest Simpson isn’t content just to pick and grin. The entire record, after all, hinges on an exquisite Latin love song, complete with a discursive solo by Willie Nelson. It’s the kind of modern bluegrass fantasy Simpson has not only the temerity to try but also the skills to accomplish. Though the folk tale and the sound may seem antiquated, Simpson’s subtle choices of setting and circumstance resonate right now. Juanita goes missing in 1862 in Eastern Kentucky, then a coveted piece of Civil War real estate. Despite being a master of the state’s legendary long rifle, Dood, 33, has already walked away from the then-new conflict to settle at home with Juanita. He’s rejected the coal industry’s self-perpetuating system of labor penury for a quiet life of homesteader self-reliance, too. From the actual battle lines of our current politics to a new generation of coal strikes, these details comport with current headlines with an unsettling clarity. More important, these wrinkles reflect the actual depth and contradictions inherent in rural life, perennially reduced to a string of assumptive stereotypes. Named for Simpson’s late grandfather, Dood isn’t some ideologue; he’s just a country man looking for a quiet life. Simpson is speaking for his people here, telling the stories of Appalachia without the condescension of, say, J.D. Vance. Simpson equivocates about the shape of his sounds to come—he told Rolling Stone that life as a bluegrass picker was his bona fide birthright, while he suggested to the BBC he’d essentially play whatever genre paid. Is this the legitimate beginning of his bluegrass career, or just another detour for a songwriter who has mapped his career with them? The Ballad of Dood and Juanita makes that question especially tantalizing, since Simpson seems hellbent on bending the ideas of whatever genre he momentarily chooses, no matter how cloistered it seems. Bluegrass has long benefited from a lineage of weirdo rebels. Simpson fits right in, even if he might one day slip right out. 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.

2021-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

High Top Mountain

August 19, 2021

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Grayson Haver Currin

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

On this new mini-LP, Best Coast return to the unmistakable elements that characterized the band when they hatched during the fuzzy garage-pop boom a few years ago. After the bland turn on The Only Place, Bethany Cosentino is back with propulsive melodies and simple lyrics about aimlessness and love.

On this new mini-LP, Best Coast return to the unmistakable elements that characterized the band when they hatched during the fuzzy garage-pop boom a few years ago. After the bland turn on The Only Place, Bethany Cosentino is back with propulsive melodies and simple lyrics about aimlessness and love.

Best Coast: Fade Away

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18623-best-coast-fade-away/

Fade Away

Bethany Cosentino is 26 years old and watching the clock anxiously. On her band’s new mini-album, Fade Away, she’s often found monitoring the unsettling passage of time. “I don’t know who I am this year,” goes one song. “When did I wake up and suddenly my soul had grown so old?” she asks. “Last 30 seconds I’ll wait for him,” she sings, resigned and bitter. “You taught me that my heart would grow old.” And as if giving herself a pep talk to buffer the unease: “Life is short but so am I. What does it matter, anyway?” Over the span of three years and two full-lengths, Cosentino has achieved a rarefied sort of indie-rock success and its attendant stardom, but she’s still left asking the questions you ask once you realize adulthood is not the bed of enlightenment it’s advertised to be. What do I have to show for myself? Am I any smarter than I used to be? Why isn’t this getting easier? And literally: Who have I become? Fade Away attempts to answer these questions in a single, satisfying way: by returning to the unmistakable elements that characterized Best Coast when they hatched during the fuzzy garage-pop boom a few years ago. She's back with propulsive melodies, a significant dose of reverb, repetition, and sticky, simple lyrics about aimlessness and the type of love that advances at a lackadaisical West Coast pace. The project is a return to form in the most literal of senses, too—it’s out on Cosentino’s new label, Jewel City, and at an unorthodox seven-song length, it has the scrappy, self-governed feel of her band’s early demos, albeit with a bit more polish. There are no name producers in the credits or songs that sound like jingles written for the Los Angeles Department of Tourism. Which is to say there’s nothing on Fade Away that would fit naturally on Best Coast’s slickly inert sophomore album, The Only Place, a record that boasted maturity but never really resonated. But while it’s tempting to claim that Best Coast have reverted to a simple formula, or to think of Fade Away as an easy stopgap between The Only Place and the band’s next record, that’s not quite what’s happening, either. There are touches of sophistication across Fade Away that Best Coast haven’t been able to achieve until now, and Cosentino glides easily between shades of guitar-pop and chillier sounds. She seems as comfortable on a swooning ballad (“Fade Away”) as she does on a song that harnesses the frenetic sugar of Josie and the Pussycats (“This Lonely Morning”) or the gauzy whisper of Mazzy Star (“Baby I’m Crying”). She’s flexing her muscles as a songwriter, and she makes something that’s probably very difficult sound as though it comes easily to her. The Cosentino who openly admits to struggle, or to not having figured it all out, then, is now relegated a familiar lyrical space. It can be easy to write her words off as too simplistic, too repetitive, or to dismiss them as retrograde in sentiment, but those qualities are what allow Best Coast to endure in a sea of acts with similar aesthetics. Cosentino is unafraid to fuss over the trivialities of plain old-fashioned love in a time when marriage has been described as the merging of brands. She’s ambivalent or confused about pretty much everything while everyone else’s tastes are codified to Likes. She has become reliably great at distilling a complex range of human emotion to basic sentences, and all of a sudden, the weed leaves and cats and cut-outs of the shape of California are merely kitschy insignias rather than overarching frameworks. "I won't change/ I'll stay the same," she sings on "I Wanna Know". While Cosentino is anxious to figure out who she’s become, Fade Away points to how strong she’s been all along.

2013-10-21T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-10-21T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Jewel City

October 21, 2013

0225aced-b81e-4112-a7c0-8e8ca1cf3dcf

Carrie Battan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/

Rising New York fixtures AceMo and MoMA Ready team up on a collaborative album that pays homage to the fast-and-loose aesthetics of ’90s underground dance music.

Rising New York fixtures AceMo and MoMA Ready team up on a collaborative album that pays homage to the fast-and-loose aesthetics of ’90s underground dance music.

AceMoMA: A New Dawn

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/acemoma-a-new-dawn/

A New Dawn

The ’90s was a particularly fecund time on New York City dancefloors. The heyday of Todd Terry, Masters at Work, and imprints like Strictly Rhythm was a fount of ecstatic, pounding, and brazenly sample-heavy tracks. New NYC producers AceMo and MoMA Ready (Adrian Mojica and Wyatt Stevens, respectively) are actively inspired by that era of dance music, even thought they’re cognizant of working at a distance from it. “There’s been nobody to pass the torch to us since the mid-’90s,” Stevens recently told the zine Love Injection. “There’s a ginormous age gap between the last generation of Black and Latin music producers and the current generation.” But they have been so prolific, it’s as though they are intent upon filling the gap all by themselves. Since the beginning of 2019, the two have put out some 15 releases between them (not counting loosies like this bananas beatdown of an R&B classic). After a house- and jungle-heavy EP last year, A New Dawn is AceMoMA’s first proper collaborative full-length. As on so much of their recent output, they work assuredly fast —even ludicrously so—as they fidget between house, acid, rave, breakcore, techno, and ’90s hip-hop. Beats gleefully push into the red and samples ride roughshod over programmed drums . But their confidence never wavers, and as raw as the 12-track set can get, every imperfect element sounds perfect. The bell-laced “The Elder Trance” contains both woozy ambient, destabilized by echo and delay, and whiplash-fast jungle, toggling between neutral and overdrive at a second’s notice. “Rubber Band Man” is dramatic and dark, full of skin-prickling minor-key tones and claustrophobic atmosphere, with each menacing, blown-out kick and too-close woodblock clop making it feel like the walls are closing in on an unlit corridor. “Amen 2 Swing” sounds like a shout-out to the revered duo Mood II Swing: The first half is furious, coarsely chopping hi-hats and breakbeats; then they introduce a cartoonish rave keyboard line and knock the two elements together, making for a drunken anthem. “Disrupt the System” tops 144 BPM and still the two producers decide that’s not hectic enough, pouring all manner of alarm tones, claps, and laser effects into the slivers of space between the beats. Only the eponymous (and hilariously cheesy) vocal sample of “Start the Riot” and the repetitive, cut-to-ribbons chorus of “Breathe In” fail to make much of an impact. The title track has all the makings of a 3 a.m. anthem (preferably at their unofficial home, Bossa Nova Civic Club). Gloriously fast and careening nearly out of control, it feels at once familiar and totally fresh. When the walloping kick bursts back in after an anxious, tingling build, it makes for a genuinely hands-up moment. AceMoMA connect back to their NYC forefathers (with nods to techno dons Derrick May and Jeff Mills), while also keeping a healthy disregard for the past, pushing ahead with palpable enthusiasm and energy. As Stevens explained in that same interview, “[As] brown people making dance music… we needed to create context for what we were doing. So we did.” Like the best moments of a night out, A New Dawn feels like instant history and an instant party.

2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

HAUS of ALTR

February 25, 2020

02269f07-daa3-449f-96f9-9404467a2a31

Andy Beta

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

Jessie Ware's sophomore LP finds the singer moving past the type of smoldering desire that borders just slightly on desperation, moving into the territory of real, messy love; accordingly, her vocal power facilitates this shift, which speaks to her impressive versatility in this stage of her career. Miguel, Dev Hynes, and others contribute.

Jessie Ware's sophomore LP finds the singer moving past the type of smoldering desire that borders just slightly on desperation, moving into the territory of real, messy love; accordingly, her vocal power facilitates this shift, which speaks to her impressive versatility in this stage of her career. Miguel, Dev Hynes, and others contribute.

Jessie Ware: Tough Love

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19913-jessie-ware-tough-love/

Tough Love

On Jessie Ware’s second album, Tough Love, there’s a deeply weird song that could potentially infiltrate the mainstream—not in spite of its sonic alien quality, but because of it. “Keep On Lying” sounds like a gospel choir singing atop a chintzy keyboard stuck on the "bossa nova" setting, yet it's easy to picture "So You Think You Can Dance" hopefuls popping-and-locking to it. This delicate balance is lightning-bolt brilliance that may not even strike once in a career for most artists, but Jessie Ware has made the balance appear effortless several times already in her young career, a talented pop vocalist who projects an interesting taste in music and a canny know-how in regards to the up-and-coming electronic producers she chooses to work with. Ware's musical vision revolves around genuine curation and experimentation when it comes to sounds that don't appear as often in today's pop music landscape. Sure, there's plenty of divas who have embraced their quirky sides, from Kylie Minogue’s Impossible Princess to Madonna’s Ray of Light to Katy Perry’s two-minute preoccupation with 1990s dance-pop vocalist CeCe Peniston last year. But rarely does a major-label pop singer sound as tasteful as Ware does, especially while avoiding the sleepy trappings of Adult Contemporary. At its best, Ware's music sounds truly exciting without sounding as if it's trying too hard to come across that way, and as such Tough Love isn’t packed with explicit experimentation. Following her excellent 2012 debut Devotion, Ware is engaging with a variety of genres that stand to introduce her to new, different listeners with ears tuned to the mainstream. Some of these songs, like the midtempo disco banger “Want Your Feeling” or the xx-smacking “Sweetest Song”, properly fit Ware rather than coming across as the singer playing dress-up. On the other end of the spectrum, top-40's hobbit du jour Ed Sheeran plays a key role with a co-writing credit on the swooning acoustic ballad “Say You Love Me”, a soulful and catchy number that nonetheless doesn't exactly reinvent the pop-music wheel. That's a fine enough standard for many singers who are not Ware, but her past work has suggested that she's better than that. The same could be said of the album’s most clichéd lyrical moment, the BenZel-produced “Champagne Kisses”, which sounds more like a Miguel B-side than the two Tough Love songs the R&B singer actually contributed to—namely, the mushy “You & I (Forever)” and sexting-my-exes anthem “Kind Of...Sometimes…Maybe”, the latter of which functions as the album's highlight. Part of the increased variety on Tough Love stems from a more diverse array of collaborators, from producer Emile Haynie (Eminem, Lana Del Rey) to Blood Orange's Devonté Hynes; it's also due to a wider emotional range of lyrical themes, as well as an increased show of confidence on Ware’s part. Her music has moved past exuding the type of smoldering desire that borders just slightly on desperation, moving into the territory of real, messy love; accordingly, her vocal power throughout the album facilitates this shift, which speaks to her impressive versatility in this stage of her career. You get the sense that pretty much any style could be Ware’s if she commits to it, but for now it’s nice to hear her explore a level of sophistication as her star continues to rise.

2014-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00

2014-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Universal Island / PMR

October 20, 2014

0228c7c1-9398-43cd-a244-7a262c58d248

Jill Mapes

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/

As they devoted more time to the studio, the Beatles' individual voices and confidence continued to grow, resulting in the sonic landmark Revolver.

As they devoted more time to the studio, the Beatles' individual voices and confidence continued to grow, resulting in the sonic landmark Revolver.

The Beatles: Revolver

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13434-revolver/

Revolver

Like any band, the Beatles' recording career was often altered, even pushed forward, as much by external factors as their own creative impulses. The group's competitive drive had them, at times, working to match or best Bob Dylan or Brian Wilson; their drug use greatly colored the musical outlook of John Lennon and George Harrison in particular; and the death of former manager Brian Epstein ushered in a period of distracting and poor business choices and opened the door for individuals such as the celebrity guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Yoko Ono, and businessman Allen Klein to penetrate, alter, and, some would say, disintegrate their inner circle. The most important of these external shifts in the Beatles narrative, however, was a series of changes that allowed them to morph into a studio band. The chain of events that ushered in the band's changing approach to studio music began before Rubber Soul, but the results didn't come into full fruition until Revolver, a 35-minute LP that took 300 hours of studio time to create-- roughly three times the amount allotted to Rubber Soul, and an astronomical amount for a record in 1966. Longtime Beatles producer George Martin, justifiably upset that EMI refused to give him a raise on the back of his extraordinarily profitable work with the Beatles, quit his post with the label in August 1965. Martin used his clout to create his own company, and the group and producer used theirs to effectively camp out at Abbey Road Studios for whatever length of time suited them rather than being forced to comply to the rigid and economically sound schedules demanded by labels at the time. The Beatles could now work both in and out of the studio, taking full advantage of new advancements in sound recording that allowed them to reflect upon and tinker with their work, explore new instruments and studio trickery, and refine their music by solving problems when they arose. This new approach not only greatly altered their work environment, but drove the Beatles to value the flexibility of emerging technology. They also cashed in some of their commercial capital to abandon the mentally and physically sapping practice of touring-- and the glad-handing and public relations requirements that went with it. Exceptionalism became the watchword for the band, and it responded by using its freedom to push forward its art and, by extension, the whole of pop music. Musically, then, the Beatles began to craft dense, experimental works; lyrically, they matched that ambition, maturing pop from the stuff of teen dreams to a more serious pursuit that actively reflected and shaped the times in which its creators lived. Revolver was also the first record in which the impression of the Beatles as a holistic gang was disrupted. The group had taken three months off prior to Revolver-- easily its longest break since the start of its recording career-- and each band member went his own separate way after years of moving around the world as a unit. Even without the break, it's possible that the group would continue to explore individual concerns: After starting to do just that on Rubber Soul, it was only natural that the Beatles wished to continue to highlight their individual strengths on its follow-up, and they did by listing each song's lead singer on the record sleeve. The first, surprisingly, was George Harrison, who kicks off the record with another stab at politics on "Taxman", and then later offers philosophical musings on "I Want to Tell You" and the Indian-flavored "Love You To". Over the next year or two, Harrison's guitar played a more background role in the group's recordings-- fortuitously, then, that time also corresponded with the years in which the Beatles were pleased to bunker down in the studio and most explore the dynamic tension between their individual interests and their final stretch of camaraderie and mutual respect. Lennon's primary interest throughout much of this time was himself, something that continued throughout his career-- he was always suspicious, even dismissive, of Paul McCartney's character songs, but once he and Yoko Ono joined forces, her Fluxus-rooted belief in art-as-subjectivity became orthodoxy in his mind. Lennon's early explorations of self and mind that began on Rubber Soul continued on Revolver, as the suburbanite spent much of his time at home indulging his zest for the exploratory powers of LSD. He contributes five songs to Revolver, and, indeed, each is concerned with drugs, the creative mind, a suspicion of the outside world, or all three. Each is also uniformly wonderful, and together they provide a tapestry of Lennon's burgeoning art-pop, which, along with Martin's inventive arrangements and playful effects, would peak the next year with the triumphs of "I Am the Walrus", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "A Day in the Life". The gauzy "I'm Only Sleeping" and rollicking 1-2 of "She Said She Said" and "And Your Bird Can Sing" aren't nearly as demonstrative as the songs he'd write in their wake-- as a result each remains oddly underrated-- but they function as some of Lennon's most purely satisfying pop songs. "Tomorrow Never Knows" is another thing entirely. While "Doctor Robert" or "She Said She Said" touched on drug culture playfully or privately, "Tomorrow Never Knows" was a full-on attempt to recreate the immersive experience of LSD-- complete with lyrics borrowed from Timothy Leary's *Tibetan Book of the Dead-*inspired writings. Remarkably, though, much of it due to Martin's experimental production, tape loops, and musique concrète-inspired backdrop, the song is lively and giddy instead of self-serious or preachy. Even Martin's primitive psychedelia could have been thudding and ponderous, and yet more than four decades later the entire thing seems less a clear product of its time than not only most art or experimental rock, but most Beatles records as well. Despite that triumph, however, Revolver was McCartney's maturation record as much as Rubber Soul was for Lennon. While Harrison was learning at the feet of sitar master Ravi Shankar and Lennon was navigating heavy use of psychotropic drugs, McCartney was refining his compositional chops by exploring classical music, training an eye for detail and subtlety in his lyrics, and embracing the orchestral work of Brian Wilson. McCartney's optimism and populism resulted in the most demonstrative songs he created for Revolver-- the brassy "Good Day Sunshine" (which delightfully toes the line between schmaltz and heartwarming) and "Got to Get You Into My Life", and the children's music staple "Yellow Submarine", an inventive and charming track too often derided as camp. (It's also an early indication that it would be McCartney who would hold tightest to the impression of the group as a unit-- the image of the band all living together here was, for the first time in years, untrue.) The understated qualities of McCartney's lyrics began to be misconstrued as simplistic in his ballads, but he provides three of his best here: "For No One", all the more affecting because it's slight and difficult to grasp, "Here, There and Everywhere", a model of sepia-toned sentimentality, and "Eleanor Rigby", which in its own way was as groundbreaking and revolutionary as "Tomorrow Never Knows". Virtually a short story set to music, "Rigby" and its interwoven descriptions of lonely people was and is a desolate and altogether mature setting for a pop song. Revolver in the end is the sound of a band growing into supreme confidence. The Beatles had been transformed into a group not beholden to the expectations of their label or bosses, but fully calling the shots-- recording at their own pace, releasing records at a less-demanding clip, abandoning the showmanship of live performance. Lesser talents or a less-motivated group of people may have shrunk from the challenge, but here the Beatles took upon the task of redefining what was expected from popular music. Lest we forget it, the original flashpoint of Beatlemania remains the most influential and revolutionary period in the Beatles career, but the creative high points of 1966-67 aren't far behind. It's worth remembering as well that what had been demanded or expected from them as entertainers and popular musicians was something they'd challenged from their first cheeky, flippant interview, but just a few years later they were no longer mere anomalies within the world of pop, no longer potential fads; they were avatars for a transformative cultural movement. [Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]

2009-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00

2009-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

EMI

September 9, 2009

0228ff93-2edb-428d-89e3-5b25b976dd05

Scott Plagenhoef

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

The duo’s wild-eyed genre mishmash covers chiptune’d pop-punk, chintzy trance synths, and the closely mic’d intimacy of indie pop—sometimes all in the same song.

The duo’s wild-eyed genre mishmash covers chiptune’d pop-punk, chintzy trance synths, and the closely mic’d intimacy of indie pop—sometimes all in the same song.

100 gecs: 1000 gecs

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/100-gecs-1000-gecs/

1000 gecs

If you're the type to take pleasure in connecting dots across the overwhelmingly scattered trends of 2010s digital music culture, then 100 gecs are right up your alley. Production and songwriting duo Dylan Brady and Laura Les—hailing from Los Angeles and Chicago, respectively—make abrasive, maximalist pop music that isn’t so much indefinable as it is endlessly identifiable, cross-sectioning myriad mainstream-leaning and definitively underground music released over the last decade. Nothing they’re doing is new, per se, but the way in which they do it feels fresh and appealingly unique. PC Music’s arch, conceptualist cyber-pop is an easy reference point, as are the crunchy, compressed headbangers that Sleigh Bells pumped out in their prime; at times, 100 gecs sound like Visible Cloaks producing for Charli XCX (fittingly, Brady’s already turned in an official remix for the latter’s Lizzo-assisted single “Blame It on Your Love”). The duo’s most defiantly ear-bleeding moments recall the bass-shaking abrasions of XXXTentacion’s “Look at Me!”—but they also bring a sense of cocked-eyebrow playfulness shared with storied Swedish indie label Sincerely Yours, especially the dearly missed Situationist pop act the Tough Alliance. If that sounds like a lot, wait until you get a load of 1000 gecs, one of the year's most fascinating, exhilarating experimental pop albums. There’s no better title for this thing than 1000 gecs, which references both the group’s charming self-titled 2017 debut and their sheer multiple-atop-multiple audaciousness. The album’s singles to date—the pulsing, cavity-inducing “Money Machine” and “800db Cloud”’s drop-dotted miserabilia—both conclude in washes of coruscating noise and death-metal thrashing; “I Need Help Immediately” is a sounds-of-the-studio collage in which the most recognizable melodic line sounds like an inverted McDonald’s jingle. The style and attitude of hip-hop is pervasive, but that barely encapsulates 100 gecs’ wild-eyed genre mishmash, which covers chiptuned pop-punk, chintzy trance synths, and the closely mic’d intimacy of indie pop—sometimes all in the same song. Brady and Les are musical fabulists, but 1000 gecs surprisingly rewards close listening when it comes to lyrical content, too. Though the opening line of “Money Machine”—“Hey, you lil’ piss baby”—scans as pure chest-puffing braggadocio, it also contains one of the most appealingly strange taunts in recent memory: “You talk a lotta big game/For someone with such a small truck.” “Stupid Horse” is the catchiest song about the dangers of racetrack betting since the Hold Steady’s “Chips Ahoy!,” doubling as a hilarious evocation of financial hedonism and a touching tale of animal liberation. “Ringtone,” 1000 gecs’ clearest-eyed selection, details intimacy in the age of group chats before its sweet sentiment curdles like milk left out on the counter: “Used to love that ringtone when you called me/Now it makes me sick.” 1000 gecs saw release in May on Brady’s Dog Show label, and the duo is currently affiliated with Diplo’s always-trending Mad Decent imprint as well. But they’re not for everyone, and that might be an understatement. Brady and Les’ ability to turn on various sonic and thematic dimes—to describe a loving exchange between two long-distance paramours one minute and brag about being addicted to Monster Energy drinks the next—can be disorienting. Even at their most accessible, 100 gecs sound like a bunch of fireworks stuffed into a fax machine, or human beings singing in the key of dial-up. They traffic in pure and uncut absurdity, but even their most outrageous moments radiate a strange sincerity—the kind that could only come from two denizens of a perpetually logged-on generation.

2019-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Electronic

Dog Show

July 27, 2019

022b67e3-15b5-4e77-ab86-9830bb8c3f6f

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

Compton is Dr. Dre's first record in 16 years, following news that his long-awaited Detox has been scrapped. Billed as a soundtrack to coincide with the new N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, the album finds him sounding charged-up, relevant, and coming to terms with his career for himself, not others.

Compton is Dr. Dre's first record in 16 years, following news that his long-awaited Detox has been scrapped. Billed as a soundtrack to coincide with the new N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, the album finds him sounding charged-up, relevant, and coming to terms with his career for himself, not others.

Dr. Dre: Compton

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20935-compton/

Compton

Dr. Dre has been holed away for a worrying amount of time. A few years ago, he released a pair of singles ostensibly linked to his since-abandoned third album, Detox, and they were dire. "I Need a Doctor", in particular, was awkward and clunky, and it seemed as though Dre was straining too hard to perfect his comeback. He only re-emerged from the shadows in the name of Aftermath's latter-day luminary, Kendrick Lamar, who appeared to be energizing the elder statesman. But even Dre's surprise appearance on Lamar's major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city in 2012 felt disjointed, providing more reason to fret over the producer's impending solo return. News that Dre had scrapped Detox entirely was confirmed alongside the announcement of this new album. Years of build-up washed away in the cancellation. It must have been a unique catharsis, purging an undeliverable hype with something tangible finally in hand. Compton isn't a bait-and-switch. If anything, the album is undersold by its billing as a soundtrack, a tag that misleads how well it stands on its own originality. Dre claims the recording was inspired by the set of Straight Outta Compton, the just-released biopic about N.W.A., and for a guy who's been helplessly coddling music in private for years, Compton ended up being a bit of a rush job. And yet, that haste helps the album sound more of-the-moment and free-flowing. For the first time in more than a decade, Dre's inspiration met up with a corporate deadline, and you can see the appeal for him: an opportunity to bundle his final record with a blockbuster movie about his career's origins. In that way, he's toying with the bookends of his career, polishing the story of his come-up while coming to terms with how to step away for good. Dre has been here before, of course, years removed from a game-changer with an entire industry's eyes trained on him, wondering, "How might he do it again?" But he's less invested in building a comeback narrative on Compton than he was on 2001. Instead, the album finds Dre coming to terms with his career for himself, not others. If there's a surprise here, it's that Dre, a 50-year-old near-billionaire long suspected of drifting out of touch, sounds charged-up, nimble, and relevant. Dre has always relied on other rappers and producers for inspiration and his own legacy is tied up in showcasing talent, lifting and rearranging it for his own cause. On Compton he's taken the approach and doubled down, and while the album is frequently personal, it's also communal, pushing his own voice towards the margins in favor of other vocalists. The first raps we hear on the album are delivered by King Mez, a Raleigh native who, alongside Justus, the least known of the album's features, appears to have helped Dre with the bulk of his lyric writing. (Either one or both of them are credited on all but one of Dre's vocal tracks.) When Dre comes in on verse two of the sweeping opener "Talk About It", he brags about his unopened Eminem royalty checks and jokes about buying the state of California. It's a reminder that Dre is the richest hip-hop artist ever, but he actually seems more interested in pinning down and framing his influence than bragging about his bank account. "Genocide" is the earliest and clearest standout, carrying one of two showstopping Kendrick Lamar appearances, who bends and stretches his voice to the limits he encountered on To Pimp a Butterfly. The song is also the first instance on the album of Dre sounding completely unlike himself. To be sure, he's always been an obvious conduit as a rapper, unashamedly channeling the flow and cadence of his ghostwriters, but here he's adopted a delivery that spills out in bursts, his register is higher, and he's snarling; it's not the only place on Compton that Dre's rapping is both impressively light-footed and almost unrecognizable. Musically, the album is a reminder that Dre's palette and appetite for sound has always been eclectic, and rather than retread, we hear him pushing into new territory. At one moment, he's sampling an obscure modern funk band from Italy (for "One Shot One Kill") and the next, lifting a guitar riff from a random Turkish psychedelic burner. Throughout, session musicians polish out the edges, and Dre continues to lean on live keys and bass to fill out chunky bottom ends. Dre's quietest and most stalwart collaborator behind the boards on Compton is Focus…, son of Chic bassist Bernard Edwards and a longtime Aftermath in-house guy. (Focus… ditched the label in 2009 after spending years on end piling music into the Detox dump. He returned a few years later, working directly alongside Dre.) If Focus… is the easily overlooked workhorse—he contributes keys and bass as well as frequent co-production credits—higher-profile appearances from the likes of DJ Premier and DJ Dahi inflect Dre's music with their personalities. Primo's offering comes in the form of "Animals", impressively billed as the first-ever Premier and Dre collaboration. (Russian producer BMB SpaceKid programmed drums, which carry the best of the Gang Starr producer's fingerprints.) The song is also the most politically pressing on the album and nearly 30 years after "Fuck Tha Police" we hear desperation in place of rage. Anderson .Paak, a young multi-talent from Los Angeles who's all over Compton, finds his star turn here. (The song originally belonged to him and Premier.) Still, Dre's verse is powerful, a member of the one percent grappling with racism and the depressingly consistent anguish of being Black in America. "Why the fuck are they after me?" he booms, "Maybe 'cause I'm a bastard, or maybe 'cause of the way my hair grow naturally." The cast of musicians employed on Compton is as varied as ever, but some of the most dramatic displays come from the legends. On "One Shot One Kill" Snoop Dogg rekindles an agitated menace that he seemed to have lost more than a decade ago. Xzibit and Cold 187um dip into a perfect stride over the meandering "Loose Cannons". The Game, for the first time since The Documentary, sounds like he deserved that original Dre co-sign, owning his original identity instead of falling into chameleonic flow-stealing. "Deep Water" is the most dynamic and brooding cut, a moment where everyone's contributions click into place. Anderson .Paak's performance as a drowning man is upsetting and uncomfortable, while Kendrick Lamar appears to be throwing Drake subliminals—and enlisting Dre in doing so. His verse is so overspilling with genius technicality that it's hard to dwell in any one place. Part of the trouble in anticipating a new Dre album, then, has been a difficulty in framing our expectations. Hip-hop has been evolving around Dr. Dre for decades: He injected the type of ambitious orchestration into the genre that helped it modernize in the '90s, cannibalizing and assimilating everything around it. On his previous classics he showed us that new things were possible, a magic that's available only so many times in one life. Compton doesn't have the same breathtaking power, but it's excellent nonetheless, and more complicated and jarring than we could have known to hope for. The biggest and most immediately recognizable accomplishments here are basic: Dre is doing more than just fitting in or harking back, and both of those inclinations together were the real nail biters surrounding his new music anyway. Knowing that this is Dre's finale, there's a pleasant melancholy that frames Compton, and with the music in our ears, acknowledging that maybe that's for the best.

2015-08-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-08-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Interscope / Aftermath

August 11, 2015

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Jay Balfour

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

Produced by Mark Ronson and performed and co-written by a suite of female vocalists, this compilation explores the many shades of heartbreak in current pop.

Produced by Mark Ronson and performed and co-written by a suite of female vocalists, this compilation explores the many shades of heartbreak in current pop.

Mark Ronson: Late Night Feelings

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mark-ronson-late-night-feelings/

Late Night Feelings

The artist Audrey Wollen, best known as the creator of Sad Girl Theory, has long argued for the radical potential of feminine sorrow. Rather than weakness to be purged, Wollen sees a sturdy foundation for collective action. “Feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is really hard, one of the hardest things there is,” Wollen said, in a 2015 interview. “Our sadness is actually a very appropriate and informed reaction.” Something of Wollen’s principles surface in Late Night Feelings, a collection of 13 songs produced by Mark Ronson and performed and co-written by a suite of female vocalists. Ronson has described these tunes as “sad bangers;” contributor Camila Cabello called them “emo bops sung by girls about love and heartbreak.” And while the prevailing mood is, indeed, sadness, the record makes for a finely shaded portrayal of that feeling. In a pop landscape at present awash in sad girls, Late Night Feelings lands several notches below the profundity of Lorde’s feral manifesto and several notches above Bebe Rexha’s disjointed smash of yesteryear, “I’m A Mess.” Never nihilistic, never narcissistic, the women of Late Night Feelings understand sadness as a vital conduit for solidarity and self-expression. It’s not a knock on Ronson to say that the project succeeds, in large part, because of how little it sounds like his work. His distinctive production hallmarks—the neo-soul of Amy Winehouse, the sticky bounce of “Uptown Funk”—are largely absent, save for brief, restrained doses. The women on this record are diverse in terms of race and orientation, their target audiences, and their places in the music industry. For the most part, Ronson seems content to remain seated at the boards, allowing the unique strengths of each vocalist to inform the music. A long stretch of the album is commanded by YEBBA, who proves conclusively, across three tracks, that she has the range, darling. Her daring vocals leap from near-Joanna Newsom falsetto to sultry, guttural contralto. Her delivery defies convention, particularly on “When U Went Away,” where she makes a glorious, expressive meal of a lyric as simple as “I’m gonna be alright.” Another highlight is “Why Hide,” an understated ballad from tremendous talent Diana Gordon. Gordon, a Beyoncé co-writer whose 2011 debut album as Wynter Gordon flew under the public radar, has been waiting and working for a breakthrough for a number of years. May this track be her first step toward ubiquity. Lykke Li, no stranger to Sad Girl Theory, gives game performances on the title track and the penultimate “2AM,” lending nuanced perspective to narratives of unrequited love and emotional manipulation. She calls the uncaring cad of her affection to account, demanding better from him, never understating or excusing the damage he causes. Her anger, her sadness, even her tendency to fall for uncaring cads—all of these are stated plainly, and none of them lay the blame at her own feet. A similar ethic courses through Angel Olsen’s “True Blue”: heartbreak as reasonable, justified reaction to cruelty. In her delivery, Olsen’s voice becomes a damning, pointing finger: “I ran to you, and you know why.” Not every song on Late Night Feelings can rival these peaks, but even at its lower points, the album is refreshingly candid. “Find U Again,” performed and co-written by Cabello, is wildly endearing for the sheer, unapologetic 22-year-old-ness of its perspective. “This crush is kind of crushing me,” she sings, and follows the line with: “I do therapy at least twice a week.” The lyric is no less effective for its clumsiness, an honest expression of anguish that resists the urge to slap a pretty, poetic bow on weeping on the sofa in a psychotherapist’s office. Even “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,” a Miley Cyrus contribution that aims to recapture the magic of her “Jolene” cover, is a cut above her middling recent history. Though much of the song dips into pop cliché unmoored from context, a brief reference to a “burning house” with “nothing left” is a jarring reminder of Cyrus’s real, aching vulnerability: her house really did burn down in the Woolsey Fire; she really did lose her home. Cyrus recently starred in an episode of “Black Mirror,” playing a pop star clad in cotton-candy colors who retreated, miserable, to her grand piano in the early hours of the morning to pen acoustic numbers about being, despite all her rage, still just a rat in a cage. The episode was laughably out of touch in its portrayal of the plight of the modern pop star, in large part because pop does, increasingly, take the sadness of girls seriously. It’s hard to imagine pap like “On a Roll” taking root in an era where Beyoncé makes history by narrating her honest feelings of worthlessness in the aftermath of infidelity, or Billie Eilish dominates the charts by vomiting tarantulas. Late Night Feelings is not the first recent record to treat the sadness of women as a healthy response to all manner of hurt. It is, however, a worthy entry in this still-developing pop pantheon, authentic and honest in its rendering of many shades of feminine sorrow. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

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

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

Pop/R&B

RCA

June 28, 2019

022d4d51-095a-4aaa-8d38-46d0b596cbbc

Peyton Thomas

https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/

The debut album from the Nigerian-American sisters in VanJess is a captivating fusion of 1990s R&B with contemporary electronic touches; its defining feature is the sisters’ uncanny synchronicity.

The debut album from the Nigerian-American sisters in VanJess is a captivating fusion of 1990s R&B with contemporary electronic touches; its defining feature is the sisters’ uncanny synchronicity.

VanJess: Silk Canvas

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vanjess-silk-canvas/

Silk Canvas

Jessica and Ivana Nwokike, the Nigerian-American sisters behind the R&B duo VanJess, are unusually in tune with one another. Born just a year apart, the two women look almost like twins, and they seem to read each other’s minds when they sing; their sound is so cohesive, their harmonies so fluid, that it’s impossible to imagine one without the other. Their sensual, confident, and, at its smoky best, near-perfect R&B is the clear work not only of years of practice, but a singular bond. They know how to play off one another. Ivana, with a deep, rounded voice that can cut across a song like a thunderclap, usually sings lead, while Jessica, whose lighter, scratchier voice recalls TLC’s T-Boz, injects personality and flair. When they’re in sync, they seamlessly share verses with a hairflip and a sultry smirk. It’s easy to imagine the two women as girls, putting on shows for family members in their living room, patiently waiting to grow up. Silk Canvas, the duo’s debut album, is a cohesive and mature collection of R&B that takes its time developing its songs—the project’s throbbing production molds itself around the sisters’ vocals like magma. When it works, and it works often, the songs on Silk Canvas flawlessly incorporate the harmonizing R&B of Groove Theory, the wailing house of Crystal Waters, the effervescent bounce of Disclosure, and the vocal synergy of the sisters themselves to create some of the most compelling, hybrid R&B of the last few years. Two of the best tracks on the album, the singles “Control Me” and “Addicted,” come courtesy of IAMNOBODI, the Soulection-affiliated wizard who provides layered, body-rolling beats for the sisters to sing love songs over. “Control Me” blends pounding drums, hazy synths, and a lilting Portuguese vocal sample into a hypnotic potion perfectly suited for VanJess—you can almost see the two sisters emerging from a smoke-filled club late at night and into the warm, summer air. Ivana steals the show, her voice dripping with yearning: “Yeah he callin’ but I hear no sound/Feel you only when you not around.” On the even sexier “Addicted,” the desire practically leaks out from the beat, which, with its stop-and-go drums and subtle chord modulations, is pure Aaliyah. Yet VanJess manage to avoid cheap ’90s imitation on the strength of their chemistry and sudden flow switches; there’s a feeling in every VanJess song that something unexpected is around the corner. Two other singles, the soul-warming, Masego-featuring “Touch the Floor” and the dancefloor-ready, GoldLink-assisted “Through Enough,” prove that the sisters are more than capable of expanding beyond downtempo R&B and into electro-soul. The best of the upbeat offerings, “Another Lover,” is produced by Kaytranada, whose soul claps, shakers, and trademark pulsing synths propel VanJess’ vocals to house-music heights. It’s an ideal pairing—Kaytra’s (inevitable) drop is accompanied by a defiant Ivana belting: “Yes I’m angry and in pain/But know what? I can find/Another lover!” Silk Canvas is as much a soundtrack as an album: It’s a playlist for a sticky summer night on a friend’s rooftop, a project committed to setting the scene more than controlling it. As a result, the sisters’ lyrics work more toward creating a vibe than actually saying anything of weight, hovering instead around standard treatments of lust, heartbreak, and toasting the good life. Their voices carry enough personality that it usually doesn’t matter, but the album’s closing third lags a bit due to sonic and lyrical fatigue. Save for “Easy,” the final four tracks are B-side retreads of better songs on the album, with “Best Believe,” an overproduced, shockingly ungroovy pop track, standing out as Silk Canvas’ one true miss. Still, the sisters wield enough magic to make Silk Canvas a success: a surefooted proclamation of sensuality, musicality, and sisterly love that can hold its own with the best of new-wave R&B. “I have played and haven’t always won/Every guard will stay up,” Ivana sings on “Through Enough,” a momentarily slip of vulnerability. But then Jessica joins in and the moment is gone, inhaled by the sisters’ Teflon-strong harmonies and stinging confidence. For now, VanJess are letting us see what they want us to see, saving their deeper selves for each other’s eyes only. Luckily, the small glimpse we’ve been given is more than enough to hold us over until the next.

2018-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

self-released

July 30, 2018

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Jackson Howard

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

Ashley Monroe is a country singer with a peripatetic career: She has worked with Jack White in the Raconteurs, with Wanda Jackson, and belongs to the trio Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley. She follows up her strong 2013 comeback LP Like a Rose with another collection of songs that hint at pop but remain rooted in classic country traditions.

Ashley Monroe is a country singer with a peripatetic career: She has worked with Jack White in the Raconteurs, with Wanda Jackson, and belongs to the trio Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley. She follows up her strong 2013 comeback LP Like a Rose with another collection of songs that hint at pop but remain rooted in classic country traditions.

Ashley Monroe: The Blade

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20813-the-blade/

The Blade

In retrospect, it was inevitable that Ashley Monroe would re-record "Has Anybody Ever Told You?" The song has been in her repertoire for nearly a decade, and has long been her signature tune. She first recorded it back in the late '00s, when she was an upstart from Knoxville and when Nashville had even less time for young female singer-songwriters than it does now. Monroe had signed to Sony, which in a no-faith vote had released her debut, 2009's Satisfied, digitally instead of physically. Soon, she would be on her own again. Many artists might have simply disappeared, but Monroe simply switched her career GPS to take her down less-traveled industry routes: performing on the Ten Out of Tenn tour in 2009 (which featured ten emerging singer-songwriters from the Volunteer State), recording an EP with Trent Dabbs, working with Jack White on a Raconteurs single and a Wanda Jackson album, and forming a supergroup called the Pistol Annies with friends Angaleena Presley and Miranda Lambert. So, by the time she re-signed with a major, Monroe had re-established herself as a cult commodity in Nashville, and her ascendency looked certain. In 2013, she released what amounts to a comeback, Like a Rose, one of the best country albums of this decade. The history of "Has Anybody Ever Told You?" also shows how Monroe's conception of country music has remained constant throughout all the professional twists and turns. Her original was spare and direct, with as few instruments as possible to get the point across, but the version on her new album The Blade is fuller and denser. It sounds made by someone with many more resources at her disposal, yet it retains its stateliness, its essential intimacy. Even with more musicians involved, Monroe makes the song sound like a whispered exchange between the listener and herself—less a profession of desire than a reassuring embrace. The old song fits perfectly on the new album, which is less about the vagaries of relationships than the trauma of their aftermath. As such, it may not have the immediacy of Like a Rose, which was all about finding and asserting your identity both professionally and personally. Yet The Blade has its own specific character, its own set of concerns, even if it does take Monroe a few songs to settle into the album. Opener "On to Something Good" is a statement of unflinching optimism by an artist who might have succumbed to bitterness ages ago. The title track hinges on a devastating break-up metaphor: "You caught it by the handle, and I caught it by the blade." Rather than belt that line, Monroe wisely dials it back, sounding like she is already getting on with living with the hurt. The theme of The Blade isn't the wound, but the salve. As such, some listeners new to country music—enticed by the success of recent efforts by Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, and Presley—might write off songs like "Weight of the Load" and "From Time to Time" as platitudes, the kind you might find on sympathy cards. Country, however, does these sentiments better than most genres, and the best country makes extroversion sound compassionate and humane. When Monroe is singing about her own travails, as she does on the upbeat "Winning Streak" (which is actually about losing) or the satisfyingly dark "Dixie", she manages to convey a very specific and detailed perspective, to suggest a very real human being within the song. Like so many country albums, especially recent ones by Monroe's friend and bandmate Miranda Lambert, The Blade could be stronger if it was more streamlined and sequenced with some kind of overarching narrative in mind, but that's almost beside the point when the album sounds so damn good. Once again Monroe worked with Vince Gill and veteran engineer Justin Niebank, and together they hint at pop directions while never abandoning classic country traditions. This is country music for headphones, intricate and inventive and endlessly detailed. A looped beat opens "From Time to Time" with a rigid meter, but it loosens up gradually until it recalls something recorded decades ago at Muscle Shoals. On "Winning Streak" Monroe is joined by what sounds like the ghosts of the Ray Conniff Singers, egging her on toward disaster. And perhaps that's the secret to Monroe's longevity in a cutthroat business where radio rules and women are dismissed as "tomatoes": Digging in its past, she still finds sneaky ways to point towards country's future.

2015-07-21T02:00:02.000-04:00

2015-07-21T02:00:02.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Warner Music Group

July 21, 2015

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Stephen M. Deusner

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

The New York singer’s smoldering, sophisticated songs get a little more cosmic while retaining their characteristic wit and charm.

The New York singer’s smoldering, sophisticated songs get a little more cosmic while retaining their characteristic wit and charm.

Cassandra Jenkins: My Light, My Destroyer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cassandra-jenkins-my-light-my-destroyer/

My Light, My Destroyer

In March 2022, Cassandra Jenkins was laid up with COVID at a Homewood Suites in Aurora, Illinois, drowning her sorrows in Wayne’s World while her tour bus drove on without her. It was a terrible time to get sick. Not long before, the lifelong musician had been ready to give up music altogether—or at least jettison hopes of ever making a real career of it—when her second album, 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, unexpectedly connected with fans and critics. Now, quarantined in her hotel room, her mind spinning with worst-case scenarios, she began writing a song to keep anxiety at bay. “You know I’m gonna keep at this thing if it kills me/And it kills me,” she sang, in an early version of what would eventually become “Aurora, IL,” one of the standouts from her new album, My Light, My Destroyer. Determination and its flip side, desperation, are nothing new in Jenkins’ work. (“Give yourself a few years… None of them like you, dear,” she sang wryly on her solo debut, Play Till You Win.) But here, they take on almost cosmic dimensions, providing the backdrop to some of her most revelatory—and carefully rendered—songwriting yet. “Desperation,” in fact, is the sixth word we hear on the whole record, in an opening line in which Jenkins tells us, in no uncertain terms, just how desperate she is. She recounts an existential search, nonspecific yet unmistakably real. As she reaches a climax in her quest, she sings, “And I felt my arms rise light as feathers,” her alto warmly reassuring over a sweet approximation of Van Dyke Parks-esque ’60s pop. But everything gossamer suddenly turns hard and brittle: “And the clock hit me like a hammer/And my eyes rolled back like porcelain/And the breeze cooled me like aspirin/And I cried.” You can practically feel each one of the objects she invokes beneath your fingertips. The album is peppered with similarly dazzling images and unexpected counterpoints. In the slippery heartland rock of “Aurora, IL,” her sickbed spell leads her gaze upward, to planes crisscrossing the sky, and then even higher, to a vision of William Shatner circling the planet, weightless in one of Jeff Bezos’ rockets. Shatner weeps upon re-entry. Juxtaposed against this, she spins humdrum worry (“How long can I stare at the ceiling/Before it kills me?” goes the line in the final version) into a meditation on the precarity of the human condition. She’s also just plain funny. Jenkins has always had a sneaky sense of humor—look no further than her fondness for unexplained Easter eggs. (After her debut album ended with “Halley,” a song about the comet, she slipped “Hailey,” a tribute to her friend Hailey Benton Gates, the actor/journalist/model, into the penultimate slot on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature; the new album closes with a lilting instrumental outro called “Hayley.”) On “Clams Casino,” a smoldering rave-up about loneliness inspired by her grandmother’s death, she contemplates leaving the hotel bar and driving out to the ocean, leading to an unexpected punchline. “I heard someone order the Clams Casino,” she sings. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ They said, ‘I dunno.’” It’s a joke so anticlimactic, you can almost imagine Stephen Wright intoning it in his trademark deadpan. Yet there’s tenderness here, too—the empathy of someone who knows what it feels like to be let down in a moment of need. Once loosely rooted in Americana-tinged indie, Jenkins stretched herself on An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, experimenting with ambient jazz. Here, she pushes further into a switchbacking sequence of interstitial instrumentals and collaged field recordings. Some of these feel central to her themes: “Betelgeuse” captures a moment in which Jenkins and her mother, a science teacher, go star-gazing, pointing out Orion and the Moon. Her mother’s enthusiasm is infectious, and the feeling of looking up at the vastness of space, awed by the sprawl of all of those tiny pinpricks of light, will be familiar to anyone who has ever rolled out a sleeping bag in their suburban backyard. The collages don’t always work; “Attente Téléphonique,” a meandering spoken-word fragment in French, breaks up the flow of the album’s final third. But it’s nonetheless gratifying to hear Jenkins loosening up and pushing beyond the signposts she’s previously established for her sound—no more so than in “Petco,” a song about loneliness and regret (like so many on this album!) set to molten guitar tones that summon ’90s alt-rock and, particularly, the clean-lined pop-grunge of the Breeders. It’s an audacious shift in tone, but, thanks in part to her collaborators, it works beautifully. If only all grunge pastiches felt so natural and so fun. Like “The Ramble,” her previous album’s closing song, “Only One” highlights Jenkins’ facility for understated sophistipop; she’s a masterfully silky interpreter of hurt, a canny channeler of failed love in the softest possible tones. But the album’s very best song is its most atypical. “Delphinium Blue” is mostly synths—per the credits, a dream lineup of Korg Poly 800, Yamaha CS15, Roland JX-03, Roland Alpha Juno, and more, plus a little fretless bass, from Spencer Zahn, to keep the whole thing well-oiled. It’s an unusually distilled sound, as though all of those keyboards had been fed, via a slow drip, into a clear liquid in a clear tube. Jenkins’ writing is equally concentrated. “I saw I missed your call/Sorry for not picking up/I got the job/At the flower shop,” she sings in the song’s first four lines. But if desperation—which is nothing but a particularly unruly form of desire—is the backdrop of the album, here she keeps that want coolly in check. Drop by drop, she fills in just enough details to complete the picture of her determined protagonist, who intones motivational mantras to herself in a soft, meditative purr: “Chin up/Stay on task/Wash the windows/Count the cash.” Jenkins has never wielded a more finely tipped pen than when she offers us the image of night falling “like thorns/Off the roses,” or her protagonist methodically snipping stems, keeping cool in the walk-in. Over a backdrop that sounds like Enya scoring a David Lynch film, Jenkins paints an exquisitely detailed picture of desire and control. Scissors in hand, eyes fixed on the fogged glass, she keeps the tumult of unchecked emotion at bay. Correction: A previous version of this review misstated the proprietor of the space rocket. It was Jeff Bezos, not Elon Musk.

2024-07-18T00:02:00.000-04:00

2024-07-18T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rock

Dead Oceans

July 18, 2024

022e69c7-46a2-4846-841e-0911e0c76712

Philip Sherburne

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

The pop-punk band’s six-track follow-up to last year’s Morbid Stuff invites listeners to sit with pain of their own, to study it, and, of course, to scream through it.

The pop-punk band’s six-track follow-up to last year’s Morbid Stuff invites listeners to sit with pain of their own, to study it, and, of course, to scream through it.

PUP: This Place Sucks Ass EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pup-this-place-sucks-ass-ep/

This Place Sucks Ass EP

This virus has taken so much from us, not least of all my right to break my nose in the pit at a PUP show. Way back in February, when COVID-19 was still just a scary headline to scroll past, I wanted, desperately, to hit their set in Peterborough, a small town outside of Toronto. (All the members of PUP hail from Hogtown, as do I.) But the last Greyhound back to the city would leave the station long before the show’s conclusion: a one-two punch, usually, of “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” and “DVP;” unmissable. Because I couldn’t afford an Airbnb, and because my efforts to arrange a carpool via r/puptheband proved fruitless, in the end, I threw up my hands. “Oh, well,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll play more hometown shows this year.” Eight months on, as I write this review, perched at my kitchen table in the apartment I’ve not left in seven months, I wish I’d made Peterborough work. This is the very intentional irony in the title of This Place Sucks Ass, a six-track follow-up to last year’s excellent Morbid Stuff, composed largely of outtakes from PUP’s recording sessions for that album. “This place sucks ass” was something the band used to say “as a joke a million times on tour,” says frontman Stefan Babcock, whether they were performing in “Lethbridge, Alberta or New York City.” Like many of you, I’ve been yearning this year for any show, anywhere, no matter how much the place sucks ass. I especially miss pits. I miss tossing my body into a sweat-slick crowd of other bodies, inviting harm instead of hiding all year from it. On these new songs, PUP emphasize the ways pain demands to be felt. In the past, the band offered a simple solution to the agony caused by drugs and alcohol: more drugs and alcohol. This time around, there’s no such numbing. On opening ragers “Rot” and “Anaphylaxis,” Babcock confronts his body in vivid, tangible terms: blood spilling, hives swelling, tissue turning green. There are no chemical solutions in these songs, whether licit (“I took the medicine, it wasn’t working”) or otherwise. Hell, in the chorus of “Anaphylaxis,” Babcock sings “way too stoned” like it’s a bad thing. These songs are acutely aware of physical pain. They invite listeners to sit with pain of their own, to study it, and, of course, to scream through it. It’s a remarkable shift for a band whose previous therapeutic suggestions involved going “numb, and losing feeling” before barreling ramsquaddled down the Don Valley Parkway at 180 kilometers per hour. Drunk and disorderly conduct still pops up on This Place Sucks Ass, but it’s tempered now by a newfound conscience and a commitment to recovery. Reeling from a break-up on “Nothing Changes,” Babcock requests “a quiet lull, some books, and alcohol,” before promising to “begin again” in the morning. Though the weary chorus complains that “nothing changes, no, nothing ever changes,” echoing the sentiment of 2016’s “Familiar Patterns,” it’s very evident that something has changed. Four years ago, an average evening looked like “knocking back Jell-O shooters till I puked in the kitchen;” these days, he makes do with a glass of wine and a good book. The stunning closer “Edmonton” does see our hero returning to old, bad habits—hunched drunk over a urinal, awash in guilt over missing friends’ birthdays “and a couple of funerals.” Here, though, the regret feels useful. The song flies by, a “Full Blown Meltdown”-esque rager condensed to a mere seventy seconds, but it has the quality of a man stepping outside of himself and floating through a moment frozen in time. He looks at his bandmates on the stage, feels searing guilt for “singing songs about killing them,” and mourns a friend whose “body… is still warm in the ground.” PUP is beloved for diaristic songs about venting anger in unhealthy, dangerous, and even violent ways. These struggles have not disappeared now that they’ve earned a couple of Polaris nods and dived off some big stages and played the hits for adorable head-banging puppets on Canadian children’s television. Babcock sings movingly, in “Rot,” of his ongoing struggle with self-loathing, despite all the listeners who look up to him, who sing his lyrics back to him at shows. He rehearses an acceptance speech, delivering a superb, sneering, “I wanna thank the Academy,” but wonders privately whether he even deserves recognition, whether he’s not just full of shit. If the record feels like PUP’s most forward-looking, optimistic music ever, it may be an attempt to reckon with this new role-model status. There is an honest wish, in their cover of Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180,” to imagine a future where “something good happens.” The weak nihilism of “Nothing Changes” doesn’t even survive to the end of its chorus: “Even if the wait is long, and all the words are wrong/Put the recorder on, and I’ll begin again.” They sound like they’re about five seconds from hollering about orcas. If The Dream is Over dramatized the one-step-forward-five-steps-back reality of recovery, and Morbid Stuff rejected the practice of reveling in sadness, This Place Sucks Ass is a dispatch from beyond the moment of catharsis, after the floodgates have closed, sucking down shitty instant coffee in the back row of your 20th or 30th AA meeting. Really, though, all of this is a continuation of the familiar PUP ethos: standing up and screaming about what ails thee is vastly preferable to standing still and shutting up about it. Before the term was bastardized by roommates who never fill up the fucking Brita, “emotional labor” described the work of managing emotion in the low-wage service sector. There is something truly soul-killing about earning five bucks an hour to grin into the face of a shrieking Karen, to not even wince as the spittle flies out of her mouth and paints your face. Conversely, there is freedom in being forthright about your feelings, ridding yourself of any requirement to slap on a smile while your whole world crumbles. If you can rise to your feet and declare proudly that this place sucks ass, you’ve taken the first step toward creating a place that sucks less ass. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Little Dipper / Rise

October 27, 2020

02321302-456a-4592-9514-40f5da7d5aec

Peyton Thomas

https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/

On paper, pairing recent Young Money signees Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug together for a 84-minute release seems like a half-baked idea. Along with label head Birdman, though, the duo have put together one of the finest mixtapes of the year.

On paper, pairing recent Young Money signees Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug together for a 84-minute release seems like a half-baked idea. Along with label head Birdman, though, the duo have put together one of the finest mixtapes of the year.

Birdman / Young Thug / Rich Homie Quan: Tha Tour Part 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19901-birdman-young-thug-rich-homie-quan-tha-tour-part-1/

Tha Tour Part 1

On paper, pairing recent Young Money signees Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug together for an 84-minute release seems like a half-baked idea. Though both rappers roots’ orginate in the variegated modern Atlanta rap scene, Quan is a rapper who rides the beat like Adrien Broner rides a speedbag, while the shape-shifting Thug is brilliant—future-sounding in the sense that no one on earth sounds like Young Thug—but unquantifiable. Though they’ve already got one totally great, totally anthemic single together, ”Lifestyle”,  there was no guarantee that the arrangement would hold up over 20 songs that feature little else but Thug, Quan, and occasionally Birdman. Luckily, Daddy knows best, and Tha Tour Part 1 is one of the year’s best tapes, a tape that exudes the electric chemistry between Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan for the great majority of its runtime. Though Rich Homie can play the role of a bruiser, he has a deft ear for melody, and the points where he locks in harmonically with Thug—”Tell Em (Lies)” is perhaps the best example—feel magical. Given that his counterpart is wont to do his own thing, Quan finds a way to match him stride for stride and Quan’s versatility leads to a number of standout features. Thug, for his part, is coming off a string of loose hits that showcase just how much good will has buoyed the young, strange Atlantan whose swag is best described as “singular.” Bouncing off of Quan on Tha Tour Part 1, that groundswell of goodwill feels like a tidal wave, a rush that takes you to a new plateau for both artists, and especially for Thug. Most of Young Thug’s releases to this point have a good number of songs that feel unfinished, or sound like sketches that haven’t quite found their true form. Thanks to some truly confusing label drama, finding out when, where, or how a given Young Thug song was recorded is a confounding task. With respect to his breakout tape 1017 Thug, then, Thug’s approach has never been as polished and effective as it sounds on Tha Tour Part 1. Even though it’s still tough to figure out what Thug is talking about—”CREW CUT! CREW CUT!” he yells on “Flava”, about his preferred t-shirt style—never has his Vine-loop flow sounded so awesome. This is 84 minutes of mixtape-rapping released by two dudes who have lucrative label deals in place, so naturally, there’s points where this release drags. Songs like “Throw Your Hood Up” dribble past the five-minute mark and come across as like experiments with delivery (“Scabies on your babiieeessss,” sings Thug), but when they strike the balance—”730”, “Tell Em (Lies)”, “Givenchy”, “I Know It”—it’s the stuff of vivid dreams. Operating over London on da Track’s bed of snappy, energetic-but-slightly-warped trap, Quan and Thug are basically the Larry Johnson/Priest Holmes backfield of rap, and they know it. Birdman’s involvement on Tha Tour Part 1 is comparatively spare but serves an important purpose—to stamp the two latest stars of his stable with his invaluable seal. Young Thug is making the music that many imagined Lil Wayne could make, and it makes perfect sense that Birdman has thrown his weight behind what is probably the best free mixtape offered for download in 2014.

2014-10-03T02:00:01.000-04:00

2014-10-03T02:00:01.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Rap

self-released

October 3, 2014

02322850-8012-46b3-9a2c-70f9f42f0012

Corban Goble

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

Glasgow producer sounds both richer and more restless, serving up pitched-up hip-hop, tripped-up drum patterns, and shorted-out 8-bit melodies.

Glasgow producer sounds both richer and more restless, serving up pitched-up hip-hop, tripped-up drum patterns, and shorted-out 8-bit melodies.

Hudson Mohawke: Butter

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13557-butter/

Butter

Showcasing his stuttering spin on hip-hop beats, 23-year-old Glaswegian producer Ross Birchard, who records as Hudson Mohawke, demonstrates no shortage of ideas and energy on Butter. Like the album's neon-scorched cover, which includes hawks with mohawks, he doesn't do restraint or subtlety. "Joy Fantastic" has to be the true over-the-top cartoon moment of the already wired debut album. Preceded by a silly skit featuring two kids whispering about escaping to a magic land, the track of sinewy, bulbous beats features vocalist Olivier Daysoul laying down some fantasyland pap that makes Fonzworth Bentley sound like a thug. He also deadpans "You can swim the Minnetonka," dropping the last word like Dave Chappelle imitating the Purple One. An amusing aside on an overly precious track, it might also obliquely suggest where Mohawke is going with this electronic carnival. He gets both richer and more restless with Butter, aiming to inject more soul into his skewered style while still fidgeting through pitched-up, Premier-inspired beats, tripped-up drum patterns, and shorted-out 8-bit melodies. Hudson Mohawke already has a track record of refracting hip-hop and R&B through his own neon-colored prism. Between the re-imagined jams on the Oops EP, the Polyfolk Dance EP-- the latter named after a track by prog-rock violinist Jean-Luc Ponty-- and various singles and remixes, he's helped position his LuckyMe crew and the Wireblock label at the forefront of a multi-city axis of boundary-pushing producers. And new tracks like "No One Could Ever", which rolls out with dull snare taps and sped-up vocal snippets, would make fertile ground for a freestyle. Butter overflows with these kind of neon-tinted beats, almost tropical in the way they suggest warmth and sunshine (see "Rising 5"), and deliriously happy. A teenage DMC champ, Mohawke made some initial forays into producing as a teenager by messing with the Music 2000 program on his Playstation, and it's clear video game tones and quick-cuts form a large portion of his musical vocabulary. Melody lines aren't just bright, they're blinding, buoyant, and sometimes verge on child-like. So high they sound pitch-shifted, the tracks still manage an unsteady swagger and would fit in well with Alexander Nut's recent Rinse mix. "FUSE" glides between pitches, tweaked to massive effect despite a lack of bass. "ZOo00OOm" blends bleeps, waves of bass, and what sounds like a beat boxer with a facial tic. "Shower Melody" soars on a virtuostic, screaming guitar riff while "Gluetooth" slowly bumps, chipmunk vocal chirping over a steady low-end march. His collaborations with Dam-Funk, especially "Tell Me What You Want From Me", are a bit more slinky, but the overall sheen is hard to escape. His wobbling, histrionic beats can also showcase his propensity for going over the top. Like a child on a sugar high, he dives into ideas-- short tracks like "Twistclip Loop" and "3.30"-- and doesn't always follow through, taking multiple directions at once and occasionally dropping under-developed tracks, which flash and quickly fizzle without much resolution. While the album has been in the works for a while, Butter suggests he's moving at a rather frenetic pace. By the time the closer "Black N Red" rolls around, another bombast of tinny keyboards and chipmunk vocals, it's not contagious, it's overkill. Hudson can definitely do tweaked, but he has work to do before being transcendent.

2009-10-12T02:00:02.000-04:00

2009-10-12T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp

October 12, 2009

023244c6-ba15-44b4-8f00-e955e7287589

Patrick Sisson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/

The follow-up to the New York lyricist’s Def Jam debut is a stripped-back canvas for his searing, lived-in stories. His vision is clearer than ever.

The follow-up to the New York lyricist’s Def Jam debut is a stripped-back canvas for his searing, lived-in stories. His vision is clearer than ever.

Navy Blue: Memoirs in Armour

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/navy-blue-memoirs-in-armour/

Memoirs in Armour

When Sage Elsesser first started anonymously self-releasing his music, listening to him felt like pressing an ear against a bedroom door, eavesdropping on a troubled man and his muffled prayers. Considering the community he’d sprouted from—fashionable Fairfax kids, skateboards in one hand and sponsorships in the other—his affect was markedly sober, a bare-bones hush that foregrounded little more than pen and paper, rhymes and loops. Since then, each of his albums as Navy Blue has been a study in self-interrogation, reckoning with the things closest to his conscience: family, spirituality, and the voices of his ancestors. All the while, his sound has been steadily evolving from the sparse, confessional-booth digs of his earliest days, branching out to accommodate his expanding worldview. Gradually, the microphone hum has faded, along with the scratchiness of the loops and the grainy languor of those grand piano swells: By last year’s Ways of Knowing, it didn’t sound like we were stealing secrets through a closed door anymore. Navy Blue was presenting a fully-produced snapshot of someone who had grown up. For all its existential baggage, this growth made Navy’s fourth LP feel like a cornerstone of his saga, a glimpse of how he could rap with more than just a distant snare in his headphones. Few moments passed where he was alone—there was constantly a fellow vocalist, a seductive melody, or an ornate live-band arrangement to keep him warm in the dusk of his turmoil. (“I can’t do this shit on my own,” he sang on “Freehold,” and it sounded like it.) Scaling back these accouterments makes Memoirs in Armour, his first release since being dropped by Def Jam, equally raw and rewarding. In a minimal record that elevates his voice, he ventures back into dusty early-career closets, commanding the no-frills confines he once found his footing in. Stripped-down as the music may be, his words carry more than enough weight to fill out the room. On Memoirs, he doesn’t seem nearly as interested in selling soundscapes as sitting us down and telling us difficult stories. Although Navy is rarely preachy, his raps can leave you wondering whether you’re going to hell. Part of this is the sheer mass, the brooding existential glare, of the matters he reckons with: the circularity of life, the looming specter of death, the cathartic gratitude that threads these things together. These are hefty subjects in their own right, though Navy’s message is fortified by his disposition, the steely cadence he’s long wielded to synthesize his heaviest burdens. Stern and unflappable, he spends Memoirs staring you in the eye, daring you to avert your gaze. Fittingly, there’s only one track here (“Running Sand”) that eases his onslaught with something close to a chorus; even then, he’s grim, as if reading his lyrics from a crystal ball: “Conceived, you born, you live, you die/My mama said don’t rush it, I can’t function with my pride.” He’s right—it isn’t pride that lines his voice, but reverent longing, stripping the walls of his past selves then studying the debris. Memoirs in Armour draws from a deep bullpen of guest producers, including the soulful Budgie (“Take Heed”), who worked extensively on Ways of Knowing, and Chuck Strangers (“Boulder”), who shares Navy’s meditative East Coast stomping grounds. For all the prowess they pack on their own, it’s compelling to see them take a backseat, parting the Red Sea for the rugged prophet at center stage. It’s even more compelling to watch Navy navigate the dry earth. “Time Slips,” a jarring eulogy of his sullen past, opens with quite the candidate for Introspective Hip-Hop’s pledge of allegiance: “This is the first time somebody would ever say this on a rap song, but can you turn me down?” Somber as he may sound, his vision is as clear as ever. “Depression was the birth of Navy Blue,” he raps. “My message is to serve a greater you.” He’s talking to us, but he could just as well be talking to himself. Correction: A previous version of this review stated that Navy Blue left Def Jam. It has been updated to reflect that he was dropped from Def Jam.

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

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

Rap

Freedom Sounds

August 2, 2024

02328d7a-4906-4b89-8b51-5034fbd96a0c

Samuel Hyland

https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/

Despite the Oxford-based house producer's goofy moniker and preferred costuming (feathered wings, feathered headdresses, stegosaurus spines, etc.), Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs' pop-infused debut isn't incredibly showy.

Despite the Oxford-based house producer's goofy moniker and preferred costuming (feathered wings, feathered headdresses, stegosaurus spines, etc.), Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs' pop-infused debut isn't incredibly showy.

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs: Trouble

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16719-trouble/

Trouble

The name's a lark, kind of. When Oxford-based pop-infused house producer Orlando Higginbottom uploaded some rough demos to MySpace back in the pre-Soundcloud days of 2007, he attributed them to the rather ridiculous-sounding moniker of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. His reasoning, as he told former Pitchfork contributor Philip Sherburne over at SPIN, was that he was looking for a name that "couldn't be cool, couldn't be put into some kind of scene that gets hip for six months and then falls out of fashion." Many discerning listeners still put plenty of stock into what artists call themselves, but in an age of music culture that favors layers of extra-musical imagery (or lack thereof) as key to an artist's narrative, such nomenclatural recklessness as Higginbottom's actually comes across as fairly brilliant. The deeper joke: Despite the goofy name and Higginbottom's preferred costuming (huge feathered wings, huge feathered headdresses, stegosaurus spines, headgear that resembles glued-together mosquito nets), TEED's proper debut LP, Trouble, isn't incredibly showy. That much is obvious as soon as Higginbottom's voice drifts into his self-programmed rhythmic fray. If we're talking about octaves, he's got range-- his ability to slip into a soft falsetto is something that other mid-level electro-pop crooners should work hard to emulate-- but overall, he sounds shy and reserved vocally, in a way not totally dissimilar to fellow multitasking countryman Kwes. Trouble is Higginbottom's Polydor debut, but he's previously released music on Greco-Roman, the reliable label run by Hot Chip's Joe Goddard (who himself turned in an astounding remix of early single "Garden"). The connection makes sense, since TEED's approach to dance-pop, much like Goddard's main act, sounds especially everyguy. The project's live show provides plenty of evidence that the stuff pleases crowds, but you get the feeling that he's doing this for himself more than anyone else. While Hot Chip's lyrical focus has turned toward a beatific and universal mindset, Higginbottom's subject matter is more introverted. Mostly he sings about girls-- about how they don't pay him much mind and about how much mind he pays them, with a few heart-on-sleeve pleas for mutual appreciation sprinkled throughout. Trouble's production is top-notch, with some sweaty club heartstoppers (the bouncing bass of "Solo", "Your Love"'s euphoric vocal-house vibes), but Higginbottom's work never really sounds sexy, precisely because he's not trying to make it so. Even though his guise has appeared on a Crosstown Rebels single, TEED ditches the sultry vibes of his contemporaries and embraces his inner nerd. "Household Goods" is an on-your-knees beg for attention directed toward someone preoccupied with someone else, but when all's said and done, Orlando's fairly noncommittal about the whole thing: "Give me a shot/ 'Cause I could be the dog to your bone/ Or something." On "Stronger", he delivers devotionally, "The feel I love in you is making me stronger," the kind of accidental play on words that spills out when you're keyed up on whatever's available-- or, when you're making hay out of a loveless situation by trying to siphon euphoria from future heartbreak. Those sensitive, vaguely bookish tendencies definitely lend Trouble a distinctly indie pop appeal-- a Junior Boys for the sexually frustrated, perhaps, a comparison that builds steam when noticing the comparability between Higginbottom's vocals and those of Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan circa Last Exit. But anyone with a pocket-protector-protected heart knows that even nerds have wandering minds. Besides slightly overdoing it on track-by-track rhythmic similarities and sounds shaded with warm reds and blacks, Trouble is a hair or two too long, which makes it all the more ironic that some of its strongest moments take place when its creator is content to let his short hair down and escape to the comforts of his own mind. The vocal-skipping echoes of "Closer" move at their own pace, while "Shimmer" seems less concerned with a conclusion than finding a way to stick its head further into the clouds, as Higginbottom wistfully exhales, "If you mean it, if you mean it, if you really do/ Right on." The exclamation comes across more like a sigh, but feeling good often feels bad, too.

2012-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00

2012-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic / Rock

Casablanca

June 27, 2012

0234fdb1-0c36-44a5-80f0-5dbb73c792f2

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

Read Scott Plagenhoef’s review of the album.

Read Scott Plagenhoef’s review of the album.

Kanye West: 808s & Heartbreak

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12498-808s-and-heartbreak/

808s & Heartbreak

Poor Kanye West. The guy was already a ball of conflicts and contradictions—hand-wringing over his consumption one moment, boasting about his wealth the next. He’s someone as driven by ego as he is plagued by doubt—in other words, a wholly human pop star. This year, however, was particularly rough: He and his fiancée broke up, and his mother, Donda West—who alone raised Kanye from the age of three—died from complications after cosmetic surgery. Kanye blamed himself for his mother’s death, singling out his own vanity, wealth, and pursuit of glamour and celebrity. His response? He’s made 808s & Heartbreak, which as the title hints is an introspective, minimal electro-pop record steeped in regret, pain, and even more self-examination than a typical Kanye West album. And as you’ve no doubt heard, on 808s West sings everything through Auto-Tune rather than rapping, a decision that for some has made this record a non-starter. The recent embrace of the common studio aid seems akin to pro wrestling saying, “Fuck it, this isn’t real” and making it more transparent and scripted (and successful). But vocal manipulation isn’t only the practice of radio-ready rap, of course—it’s been a signpost for “futuristic music” ever since Joe Meek heard “a New World” almost 50 years ago. In this decade, records like Radiohead’s Kid A/Amnesiac, the Knife’s Silent Shout, and Daft Punk’s Discovery were heralded in part for screwing with vocals; last year both Battles and Dan Deacon revived the old Alvin and the Chipmunks trick of shifting pitches and speeds; and Bon Iver’s forthcoming EP features a song sung through vocoder. And, lest we forget, Kanye West himself made his name as a producer in part thanks to his “chipmunk soul” vocal samples. So why is this approach, from this guy, now such a problem? In part it’s because it's not what people want or expect from Kanye West. Stylized Auto-Tune seems to be on about every third song on top 40 radio these days, making West seem like an opportunist or a bandwagon-jumper. But Kanye has always been more of a master assimilator: He’s achieved in part because he’s used wealth and fame to explore the wider world—culturally and artistically—rather than shut himself off from it. If this guy was jumping on a radio fad here, we’d likely get an LP’s worth of “Put On”s, his summer hit and collaboration with Young Jeezy. Instead we get bedroom pop, quiet ruminations in which after staying up night after night pursuing and living the good life, Kanye wakes up to a cold, lonely dawn. West’s singing is shaky, of course, which is in part why he leans on the Auto-Tune. But it functions here as a democratizer as much as a crutch, because like all Kanye West songs, these are primarily about the experience of Being Kanye West. These are expressions of the specific feelings of one guy; there is still, to West at least, more emotional nourishment to be wrung from song than speech, which certainly colored his decision here. But filtering these ideas through John Legend or Chris Martin or whomever would essentially kill the whole effect. This isn’t new: Kanye West’s music is about being a specific celebrity more than anyone’s since the solo works of John Lennon. Sure Eminem weaved biography into his songs but he also wore multiple faces and worked in and out of character when it suited him; West, on the other hand, is one of the few hip-hop artists without any pseudonyms, let alone characters. Colleagues at Pitchfork have therefore wondered why this wasn’t a private record West made for himself, but again nothing he’s done is private, and that’s in part why he’s been so compelling. The album does, however, sound purposefully removed from the start. Opener “Say You Will” boasts one of the record’s biggest vocal lines but eventually runs out into a three-minute, table-setting outro—a patient, defeated-sounding collection of choral vocals and drum machines. (A similar trick is repeated, to much worse effect, later on “Bad News.”) But the album is much larger and brasher than it would first appear—the closer it hews to a mix of sad-sack indie pop and elegant, monied Patrick Bateman commercial ’80s sounds, the better it works. The strings on “RoboCop,” the relatively busy sounds of “Street Lights,” the clapping drums on “Love Lockdown,” and the 909 and descending synth on “Coldest Winter” are among the sonic highlights, though even these are subtle. From West’s vocal delivery to the stuttering rhythms, the album reveals folds and layers on repeated listens where at first it seems almost horrifically one-note. It’s no surprise that 808s is a bit of a grower: The record’s best songs—“Paranoid,” “Street Lights,” “Coldest Winter,” and “RoboCop”—are often its most dismal, with cavernous production giving the Auto-Tune vocals more of an echoing desolation than a pop sheen. By contrast, the more pop aspects of the album are where it relatively stumbles. “Heartless” and “Love Lockdown,” both very good songs, work surprisingly well on the car radio, but they’re second-tier Kanye West singles. And when the mood is broken up by outsiders or actual rapping, the results aren’t pretty: The two songs featuring superstar guests—“Amazing” with Jeezy and “See You in My Nightmares” with Lil Wayne—are also the proper LP’s low points. In the end, whether you care to envelope yourself into West’s pain and self-torment largely depends on what you already think of the artist. He isn’t at his most eloquent here—raw emotion and rolling expressions of self-doubt don’t seem to be ripe for poetic expression (and, woof, the tacked-on “Pinocchio Story” is a WTF curiosity at best)—but very few songs, perhaps only “Welcome to Heartbreak,” ask you to care about specific rather than expressive language. For the most part, West’s pain is articulated in ways that, while borne from his experiences, can be easily translated to the listener’s. The kind of universality is a staple of great pop, but it’s also something that many indie-centric fans don’t find appealing. That West’s ego is a roadblock has long been a lament to me, but I think it’s ultimately his strength. To twice paraphrase the wisdom of The Daily Show, the guy is aiming to be the biggest pop star in the world—he should feel bigger than us; too often, though, we instead ask for artists to be just like us or worse. West is endowed, however, with a sense of purpose and drive that pushes him to make records with Jon Brion, to crib from French house, to put on events rather than shows, to valorize art along with commerce at a time when major labels are circling the wagon and becoming stiflingly conservative, and to break out of his comfort zone when he wants to create a record as uncomfortable as 808s. Nobody else on a large scale is coming close to firing imaginations on this level, and if the guy wants to make a record for himself he’s earned the right to do it—even if the public ultimately prefers his big, brash summer jams more than blubbery Notwist-like bedsit indie. If you’re in the former camp, don’t worry: Kanye has claimed he’ll have another record out by June.

2008-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

2008-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella

December 2, 2008

02366de2-59b8-43df-bb6f-5290ea19bf70

Scott Plagenhoef

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

Perry Farrell started out as the most engaging guy who ever hit you up for change. It wasn't just ...

Perry Farrell started out as the most engaging guy who ever hit you up for change. It wasn't just ...

Jane’s Addiction: Strays

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4203-strays/

Strays

Perry Farrell started out as the most engaging guy who ever hit you up for change. It wasn't just his wiry, damaged looks and a voice that sounded like rent tissue; this guy had stories to tell, about what he saw on the streets, the drugs and hookers, the sound of gunshots and polyglot arguments. Then he'd get in his own head, and spill his wild theories-- sex is violence! Jesus enjoyed a good menage-a-trois every now and again! You can piss in the shower! On yourself!-- and fantasies about the mountains and deserts he'd probably never seen. If you drove in from the 'burbs and met this guy, he'd tell you things you'd never imagined-- but the whole time, he just wanted your money. The three albums that Jane's Addiction cut, from their commercial breakthrough in '88 to their sudden breakup in '91, placed them solidly as one of the great bands of their time. Farrell partnered with star lead guitarist Dave Navarro-- a fellow metal drama queen-- and the stellar rhythm section of Stephen Perkins on drums and bassist Eric Avery: you could send them out on reconnaissance and know they'd come back. Not only did the band help start the "alternative rock" era and revive great hard rock on the major labels, but their fusion of metal, goth, punk-funk-grooves and art-rock showed a breadth and power close to none other than Led Zeppelin-- a band whose greatness they scraped with their artistic and commercial pinnacle, Ritual de lo Habitual. And then it was over. Without dwelling on every solo project and spinoff band, you can argue that each new album was safer and duller than the one before. Farrell's Porno for Pyros made him tame and serviceable, as the one-time street threat became the professional concert promoter behind Lollapalooza. With his exotic electronica record Songs Yet to Be Sung, he'd finally made it out to the desert, even if he was too straight and cleaned-up to make anything of it. The others didn't fare much better, but aside from a one-off reunion tour (with Flea on bass), the band had been inactive for over a decade when they got back together-- with Chris Chaney replacing Avery-- to record Strays and revive Lollapalooza, which they're currently headlining. Again. If you're an old fan you might stop cold when you hear the band's new sound. I'll just be direct here: Jane's Addiction have embraced the stainless steel of nu-metal. That said, the old band is recognizable-- Farrell even shouts "HERE WE GO!" to kick it off-- but now they're tight, clean and less dynamic; some tracks sound slick enough to fit in a movie about street-racing sports cars. And who thought Farrell's voice would fit the bold, basic hard rock of the single "Just Because"? But let's assume none of that bugs you. They went modern, and sometimes they sound like the music your little brother listens to because he's still scared of your records-- but they still knock aside pretty much anything else on commercial rock radio today. The performances are ferocious. Farrell sounds completely committed, pushing more out of his voice than you'd think it could give him. Navarro's leads fly by so often he barely pauses to point them out. Producer Bob Ezrin (Kiss, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd) deserves credit for catching (or generating) all the excitement in this date, even if the perfection is unnatural: the finishing touches are immaculate, from the light use of keyboards to the occasional choir and horn section, all layered barely above the surface. "Hypersonic" is a dizzyingly tight piece of metalcraft that screeches to a giddy finish; "True Nature" and "Wrong Girl" echo the segues and moody sections of past Jane's tunes, while "Superhero", the most cussing (and probably my favorite) song, acts as traditional mid-album sass-swagger, with its catchiest hooks. They sequenced the most creative songs around the clichéd hard rock of "Price I Pay" and "To Match The Sun", but unfortunately, the album's strengths stop at its construction. Strays lacks what what made the band great in the first place: believable songs and lyrics. According to interviews, the band wrote this material in the studio, so it's not surprising that none of the songs sound like they were burning to be written-- or remembered. The chorus of "Superhero" and the Zep-riffs of "Wrong Girl" don't excuse the forgettable hooks and by-the-numbers hard rock that fill most of the record. The problem isn't that they didn't write a new "Jane Says", it's that none of these songs can touch any of the material from the first three records. The dynamics-- the bass-led segues and sudden avalanches of sound, the hooks and stylistic extremes-- are simply absent. Strays boasts the band's career-worst dog, the ballad "Everybody's Friend", with an acoustic guitar part that won't be played in dorm rooms across America, and groaner lines like: "Men of peace/ Men of war/ Tell me, who knows more?" And that's more colorful than the kitchen magnet verse on the other songs. Still, as if knowing this, Farrell whizzes through and preferentially emphasizes the timbre of his voice over what he's saying: the lyrics have gotten wordier, yet none of them sound like they matter. It's hard to go from the songs on Ritual that seemed torn from Farrell's guts to this one-dimensional writing, but to be fair, those comparisons ignore that twelve years have passed. Farrell's not the man he was-- and nobody wants to hear a fortysomething sing about living clean and studying the Torah. He's in a different life: he's done letting us live vicariously through his mania. Judging from Strays, he and the band aren't out to add to the significance of their earlier work; they take the momentous quality of their reunion momentum and aim for the ages. At least they want to rock. For a reunion cash-in, that's saying a lot.

2003-07-22T01:00:01.000-04:00

2003-07-22T01:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Capitol

July 22, 2003

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Chris Dahlen

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

Over the last six months, the Flushing native made the leap from promising character to one of the most hilarious and creative writers in rap. On Blue Chips, he's eminently quotable and savagely funny.

Over the last six months, the Flushing native made the leap from promising character to one of the most hilarious and creative writers in rap. On Blue Chips, he's eminently quotable and savagely funny.

Action Bronson / Party Supplies: Blue Chips

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16425-action-bronson-blue-chips/

Blue Chips

You can't catch Action Bronson crushed out heavenly. He's smoking savage out of Sarasota, twisting joints just like a contortionist. He's not hitting Poughkeepsie crispy chicken, he's devouring roasted bone marrow spread onto lightly toasted rosemary bread-- drizzled with vinaigrette. He's not lampin' in the throne with Wonder Woman bracelets and King Tut hats. He's swaddled in suede loin cloths and knee-length leather jackets. Meaning: He is not Ghostface Killah. After all, Tony Starks never laid out in the Galapagos, eating tacos, higher than an opera note (that we know). The Ghostface similarity is the arrière-pensée precluding people from joining the Bronsolino bandwagon. But Bronson doesn't ask for his French to be pardoned. He speaks Polish out in London, with a face just like a young John F. Kennedy. Bronson is Homer Simpson staring into the mirror and seeing a chiseled Adonis. But it's not true self-delusion. 5'7", 260, ginger-bearded, bowling ball-built, Bronson has the swaggering confidence of the original overweight lover, Heavy D. He blends that with epicurean inclinations-- a dirty sex and esoteric food obsession suggestive of Henry Miller scripting episodes of No Reservations for Anthony Bourdain. Sautee the intricate rat-a-tat patterns of Kool G Rap, the stoned perversion of the Beatnuts, and the super-fly vivid laser eye-guide specifics of Ghostface and... bon appétit. But when the 27-year old of Albanian ancestry uploaded "Shiraz" and "Imported Goods" to YouTube two years ago, the Flushing native was little more than a Ghostface manqué, a chubby, Knicks Jersey-sporting, blunt smoking chef, spitting slang over formalist soul loops and break beats. There was promise but the only thing that made truly set him apart from the crowded field of New York revivalists was his ability to articulate the differences between Canadian bacon and prosciutto. Admittedly, that's not entirely different from what he does now. But at some point over the last six months, Bronson made the leap. He went from promising character whose music always seemed on the brink of making you turn it off in favor of Supreme Clientele, to one of the most hilarious and creative writers in rap. What's weird is that he did this by becoming even more like Ghostface Killah, going so far as to sample "Apollo Kids" on "Tapas". Rather than mimic Ghostface's trademark vocal exaggerations, Blue Chips-era Bronson mines from the same concepts that made Ghost great: bodega slang, sleazy narratives, childhood flashbacks, and bizarre allusions. Sculptures of Bronson's body are out in Nagano, he smuggles cheese in baby bags, sometimes his only friends are drugs and cannoli. Take "Hookers at the Point", a triptych of pimp, ho, and john, interwoven with samples from the 2002 documentary of the same title. There have been a million songs that cover similar terrain, but Bronson boasts his own brand of gonzo humor, subtle pathos, and specificity. He raps from all three perspectives, taking special glee in his absurd portrait of Silk, aka Montel (one "L"), a pinky-ringed, Henny-swilling pimp, sporting lizard-skin boots and green suits, with "eight bitches look like they straight from the Alaskan blizzard." The most harrowing cut might be "Thug Love Story 2012", where Bronson spins a tale of "young love/ But we thought it was eternity/ Raw sex/Never thought about paternity." It ends up with diapers being flung and assault and battery charges being beat. Bronson's New York is one of loud arguments keeping entire apartments awake, exotic smells seeping out into hallways, thick accents and thin walls, the tug-of-war between assimilation and the preservation of old world roots. It is what a Weegee photograph would look like now. Should you be searching for them, there are flaws to be found on Blue Chips. It's fair to say that Bronson's influences could be synthesized more. The audio fidelity is about what you'd expect it would be when samples were lifted straight off of YouTube after searching stoned for phrases like "100 Acre Burgundy Carpet". You could also cavil that the project is too retro-minded. Originally conceived as a 1980s throwback (and taking its name from a 1990s Nick Nolte college basketball film), producer Party Supplies rifles through familiar beat breaks and Cyrus Neville, the Flamingos, and Frank Zappa samples. To futurists, it might sound too traditionally New York. Then again, A$AP Rocky got shit for not sounding enough like New York. There is no winning. Blue Chips works so well because it's as tailor-made to Bronson as the leather Jodeci suit he invokes. The album's structured structureless-ness plays to Bronson's strengths. It has the loose off-the-cuff spontaneity that lends to its playful vibe. Bronson fucks up no fewer than three times on "9-24-11", but keeps recording. Nor are there any real attempts at hooks. Bronson's goals are minimal and fully realized: Make eminently quotable East Coast rap, and be savagely funny. Think of Bronson as less throwback, more raw Queens charmer, scheming in the tradition of old working class New York: the fast-talking cabbies with the Noo Yawk patois, porno theaters, immigrant waiters, and bizarre late-night public-access programs. Blue Chips spits back the striving native son as white Queens rapper, weaned on old WWF and NWA, the Doc Gooden Mets, Wu-Tang, and fistfuls of baklava. Under the influence of fly shit, puffing hibiscus, chilling eating lamb brain.

2012-03-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-03-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

March 23, 2012

0236bc84-a02b-4fa9-8a5e-ca26967f9c94

Jeff Weiss

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/

Over a 10-year recording career, the Queens rapper has diversified his bonds and spread himself thin musically. Still, he remains a captivating figure on his most eclectic album yet.

Over a 10-year recording career, the Queens rapper has diversified his bonds and spread himself thin musically. Still, he remains a captivating figure on his most eclectic album yet.

Action Bronson: Only For Dolphins

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/action-bronson-only-for-dolphins/

Only For Dolphins

When Action Bronson emerged a decade ago, he was hailed as a paragon of formalist East Coast hip-hop: a buddha-sized trash-talker who kicked loquacious rhymes, toked on breakbeats, and paid tribute to New York tacos. But recent years have seen Bronson embrace something akin to Dame Dash’s octopus business strategy: keep eight revenue streams open at all times. These days, he moonlights as an author, has his own cooking show on Vice, pops up in movies like The Irishman, and dabbles in art. Beneath his growing celebrity remains a rapper, albeit one whose dedication to the form may be diluting as he spreads himself across multiple interests. Given Bronson’s expanding outlook, it seems suitable that Only For Dolphins is his most eclectic album yet. Once infatuated by the eternal truths of boom-bap, he now boasts a more diversified palette that includes 1960s Brazilian pop, Latin funk, lounge jazz, and reggae. If nothing else, the album is a triumph of Bronson’s omnivorous musical taste, starting with the self-produced opener “Capoeira”—one of the best instrumentals he has ever spit over. Sampling the intro to I.N.D.’s obscure 1981 sophisti-pop number “Into New Dimensions,” the beat evokes memories of Operation: Doomsday-era DOOM, tempting Bronson to detail various adventures: sniffing coke off mirrors, jumping in a Jacuzzi with “12 freaks,” and cruising around in his beamer listening to Gerald Levert. Conversely, closer “Hard Target” places Bronson on stage in an underground jazz club, delivering a monologue on his achievements in the publishing industry and the diminishing effects of weed on his brain. A pianist tinkles in the background as the percussionist sprinkles in some natty little drum fills. Then there is a song like “Shredder,” a two-minute potboiler draped in the midnight noir sounds of somber saxophone lines, a prominent bassline, and shimmering keys. Perhaps taking influence from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ arch-nemesis Oroku Saki, Bronson describes a night in the life of a villain. When in form, his worldbuilding remains sharp and vivid. It’s when you peer in closer that the cracks start to appear. There’s evidence that Bronson’s rapping has lost significant velocity, even compared to his relatively well-rapped last album White Bronco. Yes, the man who was moved to apologize to Ghostface Killah for claiming, “He’s not rapping like this no more” just ain’t rapping like that no more. This reduced emphasis on cannonade bars is why many of the better songs are the slower jams—“Hard Target,” “Shredder,” the swooning strings of “Vega”—but such is the lack of urgency on tracks like “Cliff Hanger”—you can picture Bronson studiously reading from his book of rhymes in the booth. It’s enticing to accept Bronson’s slowing flow as design rather than fading skills. Yet “C12H16N2” hints at a world-weariness that perhaps is evident in his voice: “I got older and I realized there was no heroes/Don’t even talk to me unless you’re talking more zeroes.” This lethargy is present in the writing throughout. Bronson can still be more imaginative than almost every other rapper, but here his idiosyncratic humor, kaleidoscopic use of pop culture references, and culinary fantasies aren’t as consistently gripping or eccentric as they once were. The hook from “Latin Grammys,” for instance, sees Bronson feebly brag about his promiscuity, something he’s done many times before with more inspiration. He still raps about food, but bars like, “Me and my brother go together just like lamb and rice” (“Mongolia”) feel static from a star who once claimed that ginger ale and hot sauce were the two things he lived by. Despite these flaws, Bronson is a captivating personality. Only For Dolphins may not be vintage Bronsolino, but it’s still a display of why so many entities outside of music want a piece of him. Where the artist goes from here is not an unusual question to pose after the release of an album, but in Bronson’s case, it’s reasonable to query whether the recording studio is a destination in the short-to-medium term or whether he’ll instead find that his other interests offer a warmer embrace. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Loma Vista

September 30, 2020

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Dean Van Nguyen

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

Two of Van Morrison's essential early albums have been given deluxe reissues, with unreleased takes and alternate versions. Astral Weeks remains a singular item in his catalog, and indeed in pop music as a whole. His Band and the Street Choir stands as something of a counter, a record all about the rough and tumble joy of living.

Two of Van Morrison's essential early albums have been given deluxe reissues, with unreleased takes and alternate versions. Astral Weeks remains a singular item in his catalog, and indeed in pop music as a whole. His Band and the Street Choir stands as something of a counter, a record all about the rough and tumble joy of living.

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks / His Band and the Street Choir

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21092-astral-weeks-his-band-and-the-street-choir/

Astral Weeks / His Band and the Street Choir

Van Morrison released Astral Weeks in November 1968, not even 18 months after cracking the Billboard Top 10 with "Brown Eyed Girl". Much of the ebullience of "Brown Eyed Girl" derives from its AM-radio friendly arrangement, a sound encouraged by Bert Berns, the head of Van's label Bang. Berns was determined to get the record on the charts because that's where the money was, so the single sounded peppier than its lyric, a disconnect Morrison later noted. An undercurrent of melancholy desire runs through "Brown Eyed Girl"—Van pines for a moment as it's passing—and Astral Weeks brings that yearning to the forefront as it ventures into the slipstream of memories, dreams, and regret. Generalized longing—for a lover or a friend, for a certain time or place, for a younger version of yourself—is one of the defining elements of Astral Weeks, an album where spirituality, mysticism, and death intertwine on a vast expanding plane. It is youthful and old, the first flowering of expanded consciousness, one not yet tarnished by either tragedy or cynicism but impeded by an encroaching sense of mortality. Death flows through the album but doom doesn't cloud each moment. Rather, this music comes from the perspective of a young man realizing everything he has will erode, an awareness arriving while the wonder of life has yet to fade. Morrison doesn't dwell upon such sadness so much as he brushes upon them, a sensibility mirrored in his open-ended songs—compositions that largely evade traditional structure in favor of a boundless ballad, one stripped of story but following an interior emotional narrative. There's reason why both its creator and admirers so often call Astral Weeks poetry: it has its own internal language. Other singer/songwriters wound up using Astral Weeks as a primary text, either discovering their own voice in its viaducts or wallowing in its detours, but nobody has approached its soft, untethered spirituality, not even Van Morrison himself. In a way, Morrison's occasional disregard for the record helped fuel its cult, suggesting he tapped into a vein that frightened even him (this is a common thread among cult albums, where audiences choose to live eternally within a few dark months of an artist's life; see also Big Star's Third or Weezer's Pinkerton). Certainly, Astral Weeks seems to exist in a separate dimension from the rest of Van Morrison's catalog, its supple, soft-focus jazz-folk lacking the deeper R&B grooves of so many of his records, while its songs are often absent on compilations (tellingly, there's not a single song from it on the artist-endorsed 2007 compilation, Still on Top—The Greatest Hits). All of which underscores its separateness, playing into the myths that Astral Weeks is a record out of time and place. But even this, the most mystical album in the classic rock canon, has prosaic beginnings. Although it gives the illusion that it was written as a piece, several of its songs were composed years earlier ("Ballerina" dates from 1966, when Them recorded a prescient version of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"), with Morrison recording two of the songs—"Beside You" and "Madame George"—for Bang Records during a day-long 1967 session designed to deliver all 36 songs he owed the label. This patchwork assemblage wasn't an accident. Part of the condition for Morrison's departure from the imprint dictated that he record two Bang-era songs for his Warner debut and, if Morrison released a single in 1968, half of the copyright would belong to Berns' publishing company. Morrison had radio-friendly material at the ready—"Domino", the lead single from the subsequent His Band and the Street Choir, was kicking around in '68—but he deliberately saved these songs for a later date, choosing contemplative compositions that were frankly uncommercial. Critics and Morrison himself would occasionally lament the album's lack of promotion but that underselling seems a deliberate tactic: there were no singles by design and both the artist and Warner would benefit financially if the hits arrived somewhere down the road. Hence, Astral Weeks is a bit of conventional artist building by Warner, a label known for being artist-friendly. Where Bang sought to shoehorn Morrison into the confines of AM radio, Warner's Mo Ostin and Joe Smith indulged their new signing, teaming him with producer Lewis Merenstein, who recruited a band of jazz players led by bassist Richard Davis, a veteran of out sessions by Andrew Hill (he played on every one of the pianist's pivotal mid-'60s Blue Note titles) and Eric Dolphy, but also straighter sessions by Brother Jack McDuff and Lou Donaldson. Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay came next, along with guitarist Jay Berliner and vibraphonist/percussionist Warren Smith Jr., both veterans of sessions with Charles Mingus, and the group simply followed the lead of Morrison, who was playing the songs while sequestered in his separate booth. Three days—just two longer than the Bang copyright dump—was all that was needed to finish the record, with four songs completed the first day of the session. Morrison later told NPR in 2009 "That was that performance on those days" and, in a way, that's all that needs to be said about the record: it is musicians, previously unknown to each other, discovering a shared vernacular, stumbling upon something transcendent that no party attempted to conjure again. Astral Weeks is defined by Morrison's transient collaborations, not only between the musicians in the studio but producer Merenstein. So distinct is its atmosphere, it's easy to assume this is the work of a lone auteur who crafted the compositions and arrangements, but Merenstein is the one who sequenced the album, imposing the designations "In the Beginning" and "Afterwards" to the two sides, thereby strengthening the illusion that this is a song cycle. He's also the one who directed the orchestrations and chose to clip "Slim Slow Slider" so the album shudders to a halt, the dream coming to a conclusion with a start. The long-rumored complete version of "Slim Slow Slider" is one of four bonus tracks added to Warner's new remastered and expanded reissue of Astral Weeks; the other three include a longer version of "Ballerina" and alternate takes on "Beside You" and "Madame George", the latter with no orchestration and heavy vibes, offering a muted variation on the original. "Slim Slow Slider" does feel different in its lengthier incarnation, where it now glides to a gentler conclusion with Morrison trading lines with John Payne's saxophone, an effect that lends a slightly hopeful edge to an otherwise harrowing song. Perhaps this is closer to the author's intent—when Morrison performed Astral Weeks live at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009 he inserted the song in the middle of the set, softening its impact—or perhaps not; as Van says, either album is nothing more than a snapshot of a moment, the way those songs were performed on that day by that singer. This essential ephemera means this longer version of "Slim Slow Slider", along with its companion alternate takes, are mere grace notes to an album that ultimately can not be illuminated, only experienced. His Band and the Street Choir, the other Van Morrison album receiving an expanded treatment in this inaugural series of deluxe reissues, stands as something of a counter to the heady Astral Weeks: it is all about the rough and tumble joy of living. Delivered almost immediately after the breakthrough of Moondance—that record came out in January 1970, His Band arrived in November of that year—His Band and the Street Choir is the first of Morrison's albums where the production is credited entirely to the man himself. He elbowed Merenstein aside during the recording of Moondance when the producer sought to bring in the Astral Weeks band for a second round—the veteran retained an executive producer credit—and Morrison labored over that album, recording for three months and work-shopping material in the studio. **His Band and the Street Choir bore a similarly lengthy creative process but the album gives an illusion of buoyant immediacy thanks in no small part to its heavy R&B kick. Where Moondance traded in jazz—even its liveliest moment was named after a Duke Ellington song—His Band and the Street Choir relied on soul and gospel, using folk almost as an accent. "I'll Be Your Lover, Too" and "Virgo Clowns" almost offer respites from the raucous rhythms of "Domino", "Blue Money", and "Call Me Up in Dreamland", songs that sound joyous no matter what their topic (and, in the case of the two singles, they're likely about separation and nude modeling, not exactly rousing topics). When Morrison claimed Astral Weeks sounded "samey" in latter-day interviews, he had a point: it was variations on a theme, whereas His Band and the Street Choir shoehorns celebration, sweet melancholy, and reflection into 12 songs. Perhaps this doesn't make for a spiritually transcendent record but it is an album of sustenance, providing sustained pleasures for times of joy and sorrow.

2015-11-06T01:00:02.000-05:00

2015-11-06T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

November 6, 2015

02388027-8f45-481b-8f45-3a4682bb771b

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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

In his industrial techno guise Vatican Shadow, Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) explores some of his most simultaneously bleak and clubby music yet.

In his industrial techno guise Vatican Shadow, Dominick Fernow (aka Prurient) explores some of his most simultaneously bleak and clubby music yet.

Vatican Shadow: Media in the Service of Terror

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22034-media-in-the-service-of-terror/

Media in the Service of Terror

Dominick Fernow, the musician behind Prurient and a whole host of other noise and electronic projects, has insisted that art should be about asking questions, not necessarily finding answers, and that's especially true with Vatican Shadow, his industrial techno outfit. Political figures and conflict are referenced in album design and song titles, but the music isn't political per se, working instead as a meditation on the labyrinth of politics. His insistence on this principle, in a time where we're asking the same questions over and over with little, if any, progress, may be more incendiary than the fact he's used Nidal Hasan on the covers of four releases. It's vital for Media In The Service of Terror, his latest album, and it validates this principle by providing an attention to structure and consistency not always prevalent in this guise. Media carries a lot more of the overarching darkness from Games Have Rules, his collaboration with Function, and the ambient tracks from his six-tape set Death Is Unity With God. It's Fernow's slickest work as Vatican Shadow; gone are the haphazard percussion sounds and the hazy production qualities that matched his dedication to the tape format. “Ziad Jarrah Studied Mathematics” opens the album with lush, nocturnal synths that sound as home on a black metal album's intro as they do on here. Under a bassy current lies small peaks that ebb and flow without totally dominating, like some sort of inverted organ. There are metallic drops, but they're buried in echo, not brought to the front. Remember Your Black Day, what Fernow considers Vatican Shadow's full-length debut (he does not see Ghosts of Chechnya or Kneel Before Religious Icons as albums) didn't quite nail his gift for making cohesion out of disunity, a huge part of Prurient's major albums, and while some of the songs were among Vatican Shadow's best, it also felt somewhat directionless. Media is carried by the chokehold ambiance rather than the beats themselves, an inversion of what one expects from “dance” music, and ultimately what makes the record come together. Deep synths plunge “Take Vows” into Lustmord-gone-dub territory, pulsating ever so slightly. “Wherever There Is Money There Is Unforgiveness” reintroduces explosive beat clashes, and like in “Mathematics,” their bombast is sanded down and consumed by the clinical, cold spread. Media does not wear you down by sheer force; it's more interested in instilling consciousness you might be doing your damnedest to repress. There isn't an outright banger here like “Enter Paradise” from Remember. Media still has a galvanizing track in “More of the Same,” simultaneously one of his clubbiest and bleakest tracks. Three minutes in the melody finally enters, and as brittle as it is, it provides the late charge to elevate it from beat workout to a righteous dance track. The melody is prime Fernow, imbued with an iciness prevalent in his more synth-reliant pieces. Like Prurient's “You Show Great Spirit,” when his focus on Vatican Shadow bled most into his main project, it's equally appealing whether you know how fucked things are within or not. It's the romantic gloom of New Order, driven by a Discharge-like cynicism, both ruled by Fernow's distinct touch for making decay sublime. The set ends with two remixes of “Same” (suffixed “Tunisia”—the cover image is taken from a memorial following last year's Sousse attacks) and “Vows,” (“The Inevitable Bitterness Of Life”) both of which place more emphasis on rhythm while maintaining the suffocating atmosphere. “Tunisa” is more immediate, arriving at the main melody quicker, making it feel even more on the brink of collapse. The remixes represent the cyclical nature of struggle, here and abroad—even with slight change, for better or worse, shit feels like nothing's changed. Fernow's pretty tight-lipped about what Vatican Shadow really means, so it's not clear if that's his real aim. With the repetitiveness so crucial to dance music, even his esoteric variety, it's all too appropriate.

2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Hospital Productions

June 20, 2016

02388918-93fe-4be3-9eb2-480752790453

Andy O'Connor

https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/

On their eighth album, the Canadian new wave torchbearers interrogate their career and mourn the death of a kind of rockstar success even as they celebrate their achievement of it.

On their eighth album, the Canadian new wave torchbearers interrogate their career and mourn the death of a kind of rockstar success even as they celebrate their achievement of it.

Metric: Formentera

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metric-formentera/

Formentera

In 2003, Metric arrived with a bitter look in the rearview mirror. “Dead disco/Dead funk/Dead rock and roll/Remodel/Everything has been done,” spat Emily Haines on “Dead Disco,” one of the band’s first Canadian radio hits. By this time, they had already gone through music label hell. First, they had accepted a short development deal with Warner Bros. in 2000 that resulted in a demo called Mainstream EP and their supposed first album Grow Up and Blow Away, then had moved to indie label Restless to release the album in 2001, only then for that label to be sold that year to another label called Ryko Corp., which led to that album going unreleased for the next six years. (Ryko Corp. was then bought by Warner Music Group in 2005.) It took a whole new label (Everloving), and a whole new album, for Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? to finally be released as Metric’s debut. They were, understandably, a bit jaded about the whole thing. Now, almost 20 years later, the band have become Canadian indie rock icons, all while continuing to play savvily on romantic nostalgia for the “old world underground” that could still afford to be picky about “selling out.” They’ve also put their money where their mouth is, starting their own label Metric Music International (MMI) in the process of working on 2009’s Fantasies while turning down a couple of multimillion dollar offers from the majors in the process. For those following in their footsteps, though, the patchwork approach to artist development and financial support has only intensified since the early ’00s, when the music industry was still flush with cash and willing to take risks on talent, and weren’t themselves beholden to the star-heavy economics of streaming. Not only is it harder to say “our band could be your life,” it’s harder for most bands to support their own lives, let alone to turn their career into a cause, or statement of values. It’s into this increasingly precarious space that Metric’s eighth album, Formentera, arrives, echoing the memes about frivolous spending in the aughts that disguised the ever-growing distance between young adults and home ownership. On Formentera, Metric are fixated on the swift, silent retraction of the ladder that allowed them to ascend, and the foreignness to new listeners of the path they took to get to that elder status. “Doomscroller,” the more than 10-minute krautrock-lite opener, is the main attraction here. Anchored by a rippling bassline that erupts with bursts of noise and supported by a gently sung paean to the “salt of the earth underpaid to serve and scrub the toilet” and their struggle against the “ruling class trickl[ing] piss from champagne glasses,” the song takes a class struggle subtext and renders it as bolded and underlined text. This newfound intensity extends to the rest of the album, drawing on tools like funk-rock bass fuzz and double-time drum sections to heighten a sense of ever-present agitation. “False Dichotomy” weaves new wave fuzz with a squiggly synth line that sounds like it could be ripped straight from Prince’s “Delirious.” It revels in the contradictions of rock stardom, which ostensibly rebels against conformity but often creates its own consumerist traps right along the way: “Show me something that can’t be bought/It’s harder than I would have thought,” Haines sings in a menacing but celebratory tone. “Oh Please” fully compresses all this raw energy into a strutting, sparkling dance-rock gem, rapid-firing imagery in the vein of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” and the 1975’s “Love It If We Made It” with a completely incomprehensible reference to Slim Shady sandwiched next to “wildfires underperform xenophobes.” The structure of the song once again invokes the “doomscroller” archetype, even as the chorus zooms out and takes a look at the sudden self-consciousness of the person doing the doomscrolling: ”I thought this was just what everyone did/I thought this was just how everyone lived.” The gravity of these thematic commitments might mislead one into thinking that Metric have decided to go full Rage Against the Machine. But when you peel back the layers of social commentary, the songs on Formentera are mostly characterized by an irrepressible sense of grace and appreciation for the unnamed “you” they’re directed at—whether it’s a lover, a friend, or the listener themselves. The coda to “Doomscroller” reassures that “whatever you do, either way we’re gonna love you” and the closing track “Paths in the Sky” finds solace in the imagery of a friend taking you out to a bar to listen to your latest “brutal news.” At its best, the album squares that clear-eyed view of the present with sincere faith in people and our capacity to love and support each other. It doesn’t all quite land. In a saggy middle section, synth-smeared ballads like “Enemies of the Ocean” and the title track meander through wistful recollections of past glories with a raised eyebrow, like a more existential Drake. These tracks, like Haines’ references to the band’s “golden cage,” sour some of the lyrical themes without quite managing to find the right synth tones or chiming guitar melodies to recapture Balearic-rock crossovers like New Order’s classic Technique or, more recently, Cut Copy’s In Ghost Colours. But with the glow of “Doomscroller” acting as a foil, even those lesser songs still manage to productively contribute to that contradictory posture of solidarity-oriented striving that suffuses Formentera. Above all, Metric find meaning in the sober assessment of their own increasingly rare success story. On the stop-start anthem “I Will Never Settle,” Haines is at her most autobiographical, somehow pulling off the trick of directly expressing the band’s new raison d’etre without sounding sloganeering: “We belong to another time…” croons Haines with a palpable sense of yearning, “but if they don’t care about it/do you still care about it?” Throughout Formentera, the band sincerely mourns the death of a kind of rockstar ambition they achieved, even as they gesture at, and brush up against, its limitations.

2022-07-12T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-07-08T00:03:00.000-04:00

Rock

Thirty Tigers

July 12, 2022

0238d4bb-168f-4833-9783-d7a735da398e

Austin Brown

https://pitchfork.com/staff/austin-brown/

On her third album, Kaya Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up with her free-roaming mind; the music has gathered weight and mass, bringing her distinctive insights into focus.

On her third album, Kaya Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up with her free-roaming mind; the music has gathered weight and mass, bringing her distinctive insights into focus.

Okay Kaya: SAP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/okay-kaya-sap/

Okay Kaya: SAP

Kaya Wilkins opens her third album as Okay Kaya with an arrestingly odd image: “Like a newborn building/I take up space.” Beyond the strangeness of the comparison, there is also a troubling Frankensteinian composite in the juxtaposition of “newborn” and “building,” a dissonance that grows more disturbing as she elaborates: She’s covered in scaffolding, she blots out the sky, people scurry nervously beneath her. As metaphors go, it’s labored, but Wilkins uses the music to show us what it means. As she sings, “Come into my metal arms,” in stepwise ascending harmony, cymbals shudder and crash, deep bass resounding beneath her while synthesizers, courtesy of Nick Hakim, creak and whine. The music acquires a sense of scale, and suddenly Wilkins is the building, erecting herself right before us. On previous albums, Wilkins wrote about her emotions with similar titanic wonder, as if mapping the surface of an alien planet via probe, but the music often failed to keep pace. Her lyrics aimed for the defamiliarizing gaze of the filmmaker John Wilson, creator of the cult HBO Max hit How To, with whom she recently conducted a podcast interview and who, it turns out, shares her belief in the thematic possibilities inherent in scaffolding. Wilson and Wilkins are spiritual siblings, with Wilkins singing patiently to you about your cerebrospinal fluid the same way Wilson stammers earnestly about the importance of plastic on furniture, both toeing the line between charming and cloying. Until now, Okay Kaya records have often felt like a compelling viewpoint in search of a sound, but on SAP, Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up to her free-roaming mind. Tapping into a wide range of collaborators, from Hakim to Adam Green, Deem Spencer, and Eli Keszler, the music on SAP is bold and sinuous, full of unexpected intrusions like the synthesized tuba that blurts on “mood personified into Object” or the depth-charge pulse on “Inside of a Plum,” which resounds right after Wilkins dreamily compares her orgasm to “scuba diving in space.” There is more happening, in all corners of her songs, than before, and as she keeps trying new things, the music gathers weight and mass, bringing her strange insights into focus. Take the mordantly funny “Jazzercise,” in which Wilkins’ impersonation of a chipper fitness instructor (“Spandex, Lycra, every day”) quickly veers into alarming territory—“Did you know/Without the ego/There is no narrative/Just being here and having been”—as the Casio-preset funk of the backing track burbles away, oblivious to her existential panic. It’s clever and incisive, and she would never have quite been able to pull off something like it on her comparatively sleepy earlier records. Here, as in the processed stacked harmonies on “Pathologically Yours,” Wilkins touches some of the playfulness of early Laurie Anderson, a hallowed touchstone she’s never been anywhere near before. You can tell Wilkins is emboldened by this new freedom from her decision to assay something as audacious as “Jolene From Her Perspective,” which is just what the title says. Not only does she have the gall to chide Dolly Parton—“Dolly, Dolly, Dolly/I could never take one human being from another”—she sidles up next to her and purrs in her ear: “Don’t you know I think you’re heaven sent/I can’t believe we’re arguing about some man/That’s so silly, in fact I’d rather talk about you and me.” The audacity of it is charming and disarming: “I know you cheated too,” she coos. The nerve! There are dark moments—on “Origin Story,” she confronts her ambivalence about her father in the most graphic terms (“I am scum/I am cum…/Wish I came from no one”)—but it turns out the the more fun Wilkins dares to have on record, the better and more distinctive she sounds. “In Regards to Your Tweet” is an invitation for a lover to “sleep on me” (“I don’t mind it/It’s like a weighted blanket”), its simple guitar figure enlivened by a plasticky 1980s R&B groove, drifting far behind in the mix. It’s a complementary noise, a car passing by her window, perhaps, but it creates the kind of shared loneliness that has often emanated from bedroom pop, which by its nature twines together impulses for communion and isolation. Someone, somewhere, that distant groove suggests, might be dancing along to this music with Wilkins, if even only from within the solace of their own minds.

2022-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

2022-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Jagjaguwar

November 8, 2022

02401aa6-0047-4cc3-867a-bcfb851aea82

Jayson Greene

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

Following on the Curtis Lane EP, the Denver-based singer and producer releases his full-length debut, and it mixes ethereal choir-like vocals and minimal R&B with currents of rumbling post-dubstep. But the allusions to modern trends are so well-realized that it creates a slightly numbing impression of pastiche.

Following on the Curtis Lane EP, the Denver-based singer and producer releases his full-length debut, and it mixes ethereal choir-like vocals and minimal R&B with currents of rumbling post-dubstep. But the allusions to modern trends are so well-realized that it creates a slightly numbing impression of pastiche.

Active Child: You Are All I See

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15745-you-are-all-i-see/

You Are All I See

Though no sound suits every taste, the harp has to be one of the most inoffensive instruments in existence, which is why we aren't greeted in heaven by angels with marimbas. Active Child's Pat Grossi makes free with the harp's transfiguring power on his new album, and it's not the only thing stacking the deck in his favor. You Are All I See is full of stuff that almost everybody likes, or seems to, right now: epic electronic landscapes, monastically minimal R&B, and currents of rumbling post-dubstep sound design. Grossi's strong yet ethereal voice-- its corners neatly squared by a childhood spent in choirs-- masses and hovers, imparting an elevated piety to the music. The slick, timely aesthetic is appealing, but works at slight odds with the timelessness Grossi cultivates. If you enjoyed how harps and beats entwined in a glittery haze on Active Child's Curtis Lane EP, you'll enjoy You Are All I See, which is similar but runs on finer gears. The EP's fairly rigid boundary between dance numbers and atmospheric ones has become much more porous, creating a subtler flow that carries us smoothly from the frosty soul and coiled percussion of "Hanging On" to the expansive art-pop of "High Priestess" and "See Thru Eyes", where jagged but spare synthetic drums and holographic tone colors make Grossi's voice seem to tower even higher. It all sounds like the work of someone whose computer expertise is catching up with his instrumental chops. With this welcome refinement of style comes a minor downside, namely, that it feels overly familiar. This isn't to say that Grossi is ripping anyone off-- at a time when music is so instantly responsive to its own immediate context, his recombinant approach is routine. But on You Are All I See, craft edges out personality. The allusions to modern trends are so well-realized that it at least creates a slightly numbing impression of opportunistic pastiche, even if the similarities were unintentional. If you enjoyed the experimental soft-pop moods of Bon Iver's recent album and are looking for more spiritually glamorous music, step right up. Pacesetter How to Dress Well, who mines a vein similar to Grossi's but more ghostly, guests on the excellent "Playing House", while "Hanging On" sounds like a heartfelt synthesis of "Lady Luck", "The Boy Is Mine", and "Pony". To top it off, "Way Too Fast" and "Shield & Sword" both have the prayerful, hollowed out turbulence of James Blake. With a figurative dugout like that, it's hard to go wrong in 2011. Nothing wrong with a low-stakes success if it sounds this good. But it's odd when a record that puts such a high premium on the personal feels so formal and emotionally opaque. Grossi's lyrics about longing and engulfing isolation have been polished to the point where they are immaculately vague, and sometimes, precious. They project plenty of emotional grandiosity. What's missed are more specific details, which might have led to something more relatable. As it stands, the sound of Grossi's voice is much more eloquent and moving than his words. Taken together, You Are All I See still can't help but feel like an old cathedral-- easy to admire in awe, but somehow cold and remote; hard to really make your own.

2011-08-26T02:00:01.000-04:00

2011-08-26T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Vagrant

August 26, 2011

02407613-dfb8-42d1-9bbe-c76e7ede2a37

Brian Howe

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

On their fourth album proper, Cuddle Magic dive into the pop side of chamber pop with more fluency and confidence than they've ever shown in the past.

On their fourth album proper, Cuddle Magic dive into the pop side of chamber pop with more fluency and confidence than they've ever shown in the past.

Cuddle Magic: Ashes/Axis

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22829-ashesaxis/

Ashes/Axis

Individual members of the chamber pop group Cuddle Magic have worked with the likes of Beyoncé, Amanda Palmer, and Okkervil River. But for better or worse Cuddle Magic have never come across as pop-music natives. Their conservatory training always shows through in the combination of complex structures, bright harmonies, and snappy humor that has defined their sound. Ashes/Axis marks a major turning point. The proper follow-up to 2012’s Info Nympho (following a 2014 full-length collaboration with toy pianist Phyllis Chen and pianist Ran Blake), Ashes/Axis captures Cuddle Magic diving into the “pop” side of “chamber pop” with more fluency and confidence than they’ve ever shown in the past. Right off the bat, the smooth, spit-shined mix by Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Atony and the Johnsons) contrasts dramatically with the dusty immediacy of the band's previous records. From the fat, synthetic groove of leadoff track “Slow Rider” onward, they've traded the primarily acoustic instrumentation of past work for gurgling, bottom-heavy synths and electronic drumbeats. On Let It Be You, last year’s collaboration between Cuddle Magic bandleader Benjamin Lazar Davis and Joan As Policewoman, Lazar Davis went for the commercial jugular with an audacious turn at arena-ready bubblegum R&B. In some ways, Ashes/Axis behaves as a companion piece to that album. Like Let It Be You, several of the songs have a basis in intertwined Ghanaian rhythmic patterns. And it’s obvious that Let It Be You's bassy thump was still in Lazar Davis’ ear when he sat with Goggin to run the original studio tracks for Ashes/Axis through post-production effects. But Lazar Davis’ bandmates bring such strong presence to the table that they offset the exaggerated, sweaty-handkerchief affectations that nearly turned Let It Be You into a caricature. Though Lazar Davis remains the principal songwriter, Cuddle Magic’s fellow multi-instrumentalists Christopher McDonald and Alec Spiegelman also contributed songs, as did guest co-writers like Bridget Kearney of Lake Street Dive and Lip Talk’s Sarah K. Pedinotti. With all those hands on deck, it's no surprise that Ashes/Axis contains more layers, both musically and thematically. And Kristin Slipp’s vocals, whether she sings lead or backup, serve as a kind of backbone that binds the album together. Where Joan Wasser opted to keep pace with Lazar Davis’ playful melodramatics on Let It Be You, Slipp’s more reserved style conveys an infinitely wider range of emotions. If you go back to the Info Nympho track “Hoarders,” she invests the line “Shit/that/fills/our/homes/is/too/hea-/-vy/to/move/and/so/we/leave/it” (a veiled reference to feeling trapped in a relationship) with a lingering resentment that belies the tune’s quirkiness. On Ashes/Axis, Slipp approaches her vocal parts like an actress with a healthy aversion to overstatement. Once again, she laces the music with faint traces of woe, bringing a sense of everyday believability to the songs even when the lyrics aren’t explicitly clear. When Slipp harmonizes with McDonald on the line "give me the keys / to your condo" on the new tune "Getaway," her voice supplies an extra touch of mournfulness to an already melancholy mood. Easily the most haunting and atmosphere-heavy Cuddle Magic song to date, the song percolates with detail. Throughout the whole album, Lazar Davis and Goggin find creative ways to vary the balance between natural sounds and effects. On "Getaway," they filter a helium-pitched Slipp vocal (that's not actually pitched-up) to mimic violin strumming. And when they turn McDonald and Slipp's vocals into spectral blurs of reverb at the beginning and end of the tune, the music causes goosebumps, scaling breathtaking heights the band has never attempted before. Strangely enough, Cuddle Magic’s move to a chillier, more digitized palette actually adds dimension to the songs. By reaching outside their comfort zone, they bring the content of the songs to the foreground. Which is not to say the band has lost its organic flavor. On the contrary: at the end of the quasi-title track, “The First Hippie on the Moon, Pt. I,” for example, the music unravels as all of the instruments simply collapse into chaos. At that moment, Cuddle Magic land surprisingly close to a rock band, closing its set out in a heap of smoldering noise. By that point, though, the band’s transformation into a formidable pop act is already complete.

2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Northern Spy

February 1, 2017

0240dc96-ad0c-48bb-a306-3fcee3229ef6

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

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

The Spanish superstar’s third album is a showcase for Rosalía’s exceptional range. It aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and attains exactly what it sets out to achieve.

The Spanish superstar’s third album is a showcase for Rosalía’s exceptional range. It aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and attains exactly what it sets out to achieve.

Rosalía: MOTOMAMI

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rosalia-motomami/

Motomami

On Rosalía’s Saturday Night Live debut in March, she sang her pop-bachata hit “La Fama” while wearing a sequoia-sized puffer jacket and beaded mantilla. It was a strikingly dramatic look for a song trembling with betrayal, and it was immediately memed for its resemblance to a quilted comforter and shower mat (the resulting virality was, perhaps, part of the point). But the streetwear-meets-Catalonian tradition look was also a visual cue to her current mindset as a musician releasing her third album: to finesse the gap between classical and contemporary in a big and brazen fashion, with humor and cojones. Theoretically, a wide-open, globalist approach is not so different from the Spanish superstar’s astounding second album, El Mal Querer, where her electronic take on flamenco shot her to international renown. Because of flamenco’s relative scarcity in the pop world, and because her interpretation of a centuries-old Romani art form was so futuristic, she was regarded as something of a miracle, a performer with a singular gift whose interior was just out of reach. Since its 2018 release, she’s toured the world, covered major fashion magazines, and collaborated with stars like J Balvin, James Blake, and the Weeknd. But on MOTOMAMI, her 16-track follow-up to El Mal Querer, she sounds preternaturally at ease within her talent and finally ready to let us in. The trappings of fame and a new major label have, in some unlikely ways, freed her to loosen her impulses, and what results is a collage of styles and experimentation that could be messy on paper but is threaded together by her artistic fortitude. She toys with minimalist dembows (“La Combi Versace,” with Dominican star Tokischa), Auto-Tuned dirges, spirited champeta, juiced-up electro, bachata, and glitchy Björkian ballads, with help from an eclectic range of co-producers like Tainy, El Guincho, Michael Uzowuru, Sky Rompiendo, and Pharrell. There may be some more commercial tracks in here—including “La Fama,” a song with the Weeknd about how fame sucks that ironically made her more famous—but overall the vision is clear and the influences cohere. La Rosalía is a musician’s musician, and there’s so much more to her than the austere flamenco singer, powerfully warbling from 13th-century texts. MOTOMAMI opens with “Saoko,” a smattering of free-jazz drums and a nasty synth bassline that serves as a “tribute” to Wisin y Daddy Yankee’s 2004 single “Saoco.” It’s a disclaimer that she’s swerving freely between lanes: She bears down on the refrains “Yo me transformo” and “Fuck el estilo,” and frankly, kinda eats up the beat, doing her best reggaetonera with a butterfly-grilled sneer. More significantly, it’s a bold statement out the gate—she’s become a kind of problematic fave for many Latinxs, particularly for her experiments in genres like dembow and reggaeton at a time when their Afro-Caribbean roots, long excoriated by racist and classist critiques, have been either erased or subsumed by the popularity of white Latinos. The specter of Spanish colonialism runs painfully deep, and the question has been: What does it mean when a white Catalan woman working in traditionally Afro-Latinx genres attains worldwide acclaim in ways the originators—and her Black contemporaries—have not? For MOTOMAMI’s part, it seems that Rosalía has done her homework and pays tribute wherever she can. She has Kawasaki-zoomed into the 21st century, reminding us that she is still a 28 year old in 2022, a prolific denizen of TikTok whose interest in familiar tropes—fast cars, flossing, thot shit—is neither of her interest in the art of flamenco, nor divorced from it. She references faith in God as much as the corporeal desires of a powerful woman, and approaches sex with nearly as much gravity as she does lost love and emotion. Over here she’s sampling Burial; over there she’s rapping, “Bish, me creo Dapper Dan.” Rosalía wants us to know she’s an idiosyncratic bad b, and she’s also out here trying to have some goddamn fun. MOTOMAMI is packed with references to the genres in which she dabbles—among her many namedrops are Willie Colón, Fania Records, the reggaeton duo Plan B, and her friend Frank Ocean, with whom she’s collaborated on music not yet released. On “Bulería,” the album’s lone straight flamenco song, she shirks stylistic expectations and cites her influences like she’s crossing herself: “Yo soy muy mía/Que Dios bendiga a Pastori y Mercé/A la Lil’ Kim, a Tego y a M.I.A.” M.I.A. might be the holy ghost in this triumvirate (Kim and Tego can decide who’s the Father amongst themselves)—MOTOMAMI’s minimalist raps are playful and swaggy, and she’s having a blast with reggaeton-tinged electro like it’s 2005. Little brag tracks like “Chicken Teriyaki” (co-written with her partner Rauw Alejandro) and the deceptively sing-songy, feminist “Bizcochito” aren’t the most substantial bangers, but you can’t belt your face off all the time. And yet, that voice! That ebullient voice. Her pristine soprano tone is one thing, but it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful if it weren’t for the power she wields behind it. On “Candy,” her mournful qualities are in pure, transcendent form, as she delivers a dembow dirge for a lost love who still lingers in her mind. This same emotional evocation lends itself to the unexpectedly dirty “Hentai,” an intimate ballad named after triple-X manga, in which she coos about riding her man’s “pistola” with all the dainty aplomb of Audrey Hepburn doing “Moon River.” Elsewhere, she’s a bit less cheeky: An unexpected high point comes when she puts her spin on “Delirio de Grandeza,” by the great Cuban salsero Justo Betancourt. Not only does she emote it like the greatest of singers in the Latin American tradition, she sneaks in a Soulja Boy sample from the Vistoso Bosses’ 2009 gem “Delirious.” It feels rare to hear an album that’s so experimental, that aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and that attains exactly what it sets out to achieve. Rosalía was already a formidable singer, but here she also sounds like she learned that with global superstardom comes the freedom to set her own agenda. On the album’s stunning final lines, she sings nearly a cappella: “​​Solo hay riesgo si hay algo que perder/Las llamas son bonitas porque no tienen orden/Y el fuego es bonito porque todo lo rompe.” There’s only risk if there’s something to lose, she says. MOTOMAMI is an ante up.

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

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

Pop/R&B

Columbia

March 18, 2022

0242a92f-cc49-49d1-a8de-9acb2f4ecd60

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/

For his first proper solo release, Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt uses a synthesizer to turn tiny sounds and gradual shifts into something larger.

For his first proper solo release, Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt uses a synthesizer to turn tiny sounds and gradual shifts into something larger.

Steve Hauschildt: Tragedy & Geometry

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16119-tragedy-geometry/

Tragedy & Geometry

The music of Cleveland trio Emeralds is pretty wide, both in the range of sounds and instruments they use, and the expansive feel of their New Age-tinted creations. For his first proper solo release (after a handful of low-run cassettes and CD-Rs), Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt took a step in the opposite direction. As he told the website Stool Pigeon, Tragedy & Geometry "came from just wanting to spend time with one instrument and really exploring all the possibilities of sound you can get from that." The instrument in question is synthesizer, and the music Hauschildt makes with it is like Emeralds in miniature. He focuses on small, basic patterns that produce two kinds of songs-- slow, drifting drones and pulsing, minimalist loops. The effect can be as big and spacious as anything his group does, but Hauschildt always starts from a base of simplicity. Each track is an exercise in turning tiny sounds and gradual shifts into something large. The lack of obvious variety could make Tragedy & Geometry sound generic, but Hauschildt's devout tack actually gives the album a distinct personality. Choose any single track, and reference points quickly come to mind-- Tangerine Dream, Steve Reich, and various half-remembered foreign film scores and PBS-doc soundtracks. But listen in sequence, and Hauschildt's consistent way with this kind of sound becomes clear, in a starry-eyed mix of small swells and planetarium-friendly wonder. At times the music can get sentimental and even sappy, but it's never heavy-handed. In Hauschildt's songs, emotion feels closer to a happy accident than an overarching intention. This comes across strongest in Tragedy & Geometry's best cut, "Music for a Moiré Pattern". At 11 minutes, it's by far the album's longest piece, but it's no grand epic. Though its sparkly loops crest into some moving crescendos, its core is simple repetition and the fascinating patterns it creates. Throughout, Hauschildt deftly treads the fine line between guiding his instrument and letting its cyclical mechanisms do the work. You get the sense that he's basically happy to get out of his own way-- a common goal with anything this mantra-like-- and is as awed by the hypnotic aspects of overlapping synths as the emotional ones. Maybe that's the key to Tragedy & Geometry's sneaky power-- by letting his synths tell tales instead of forcing them to, Hauschildt finds stories bigger than his own.

2012-01-03T01:00:04.000-05:00

2012-01-03T01:00:04.000-05:00

Electronic

Kranky

January 3, 2012

0242fbc7-12d3-4035-8a1a-25f5e6303833

Marc Masters

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

Pusha T’s solo career post-Clipse has often seemed rudderless but he's found his spot on his major label debut thanks to help from Kanye West. While Kanye never utters a word here, the sound and scope of the record are unmistakably his, and Pusha T's rapping remains in fine form.

Pusha T’s solo career post-Clipse has often seemed rudderless but he's found his spot on his major label debut thanks to help from Kanye West. While Kanye never utters a word here, the sound and scope of the record are unmistakably his, and Pusha T's rapping remains in fine form.

Pusha T: My Name Is My Name

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18277-pusha-t-my-name-is-my-name/

My Name Is My Name

Pusha T’s solo career post-Clipse has often seemed rudderless. He made great strides playing the preening, streetwise Mase to Kanye’s Diddy on songs like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s “Runaway” and Cruel Summer’s “New God Flow”, but it took him a few releases (Fear of God, a patchy stab at bygone Re-Up Gang mixtape glory, and its sometimes distractingly star-studded sequel Fear of God II: Let Us Pray) to find his footing on his own. When he did, on January’s Wrath of Caine, he surfaced snarling over trap beats. The mixtape often subsisted off the sheer intensity of his delivery, and it placed him in lockstep with the mainstream rap zeitgeist. But it also cut him off from the flashy new-money arrogance of the first 10 years of his career, and it suffered in spots thanks to a noticeably diminished lyricism. Push flounders without a hands-on producer, it would seem. For his major label debut, My Name Is My Name, Kanye West is that guiding light. Kanye never utters a word here, Auto-Tuned scatting on “Hold On” notwithstanding, but the sound and scope of the record are unmistakably Westian. The blaring fanfare and hyperactive drum programming Hudson Mohawke and Beewirks brought to “No Regrets” are direct descendants of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s “All of the Lights”. On opener “King Push”, Kanye and Sebastian Sartor reprise the vocal sample from the breakdown in “New Slaves”, pinching and distending it into funhouse versions of itself over horror movie synth stabs. Kanye’s production with DJ Mano on “Who I Am” advances the dark, austere Yeezus vibe as it melds oft-used samples (the “Yeah!” from Mountain’s “Long Red” and the frantic lick from South Bronx dance-punk pioneers ESG’s “UFO”) and a swatch of Warp producer Kwes’ serene “LGOYH” into something leagues more sinister than its requisite elements. My Name Is My Name is borne out of the same minimal, uncompromising darkness as Yeezus, but its communion with radio rap values delivers on the accessibility that listeners put out by Yeezus’ monomaniacal hellishness clamored for. My Name Is My Name makes concessions for radio accessibility, but it’s never rankled by them. Guests grace nearly every track, but where they gobbled up real estate that should’ve been Pusha’s on Fear of God II, on My Name Is My Name, they’re mostly tasked with giving Pusha’s impish abandon wings. Frequent alley oops from singers scan as shots at offsetting the brass tacks boom bap of “Numbers on the Boards” and “Nosetalgia” with hooks, but Pusha seems wholly unfazed by any of it. He nets a beat from the-Dream and a lilting Kelly Rowland hook on “Let Me Love You” and effects a Mase flow so spot-on you’ll look for him in the liner notes. Elsewhere a disembodied, wraithlike Chris Brown’s good life platitudes on “Sweet Serenade” are waylaid by at every turn by gun-toting mogul talk. Rappers get the same treatment. Trap clown prince 2 Chainz and dick joke dispenser Big Sean are so outmatched on “Who I Am” that they hang back to play comic relief. (2 Chainz wins here: “Entrepreneur/ Strip club connoisseur/ Hot fudge sundae/ Pour it on you, hallelujah”). On “Hold On”, Pusha sneers about studio gangsters who never sold drugs, then cedes verse two to corrections officer turned crack rap kingpin Rick Ross. Kendrick Lamar brings the expected lyrical pyrotechnics to “Nosetalgia”, matching Pusha’s verse about growing up a dealer with reminiscences of a childhood profoundly affected by family members’ drug use, and it’s the only time an outside voice comes close to stealing the show. Though My Name Is My Name can feel like a moon around Kanye West’s recent work, the star here is unquestionably a reinvigorated Pusha T. This is never more apparent than on the minor Re-Up Gang reunion cut “Suicide”, where Pharrell provides a skittering metallic bounce with pitch 808s in place of a bassline, and Pusha and Ab-Liva trade bars with a zeal that’s been missing since the Clipse started to wither on 2009’s Til the Casket Drops. The rhymes on “Suicide” and the rest of My Name Is My Name are a cut above what we’ve come to expect from post-Clipse Pusha. He’s finally figured out how to marry the unlabored lyrical dexterity and unflappable cool of earlier work to the vengeful, bottomless menace of the new material. Pusha’s released a fair amount of music since joining Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music army three years ago, but My Name Is My Name is really the first release that delivers on the excitement initially engendered by the pairing.

2013-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-10-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

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

October 9, 2013

0243e50d-6c89-4ec7-861b-e87862d127a6

Craig Jenkins

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

Famed neo-blue eyed soul producer expands his range beyond Stax, Philly, and Motown. Ghostface, Simon LeBon, Spank Rock, and Boy George guest.

Famed neo-blue eyed soul producer expands his range beyond Stax, Philly, and Motown. Ghostface, Simon LeBon, Spank Rock, and Boy George guest.

Mark Ronson & the Business Intl.: Record Collection

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14728-record-collection/

Record Collection

It's very easy to be suspicious of Mark Ronson. Never mind the family connections, the fame garnered from helming albums by Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse-- artists charismatic enough to give any producer a cushy job-- or the dubious entity called the Business Int'l. The real cause for all those cocked eyebrows and dubious looks has been the diminishing-returns appropriation of old soul tropes in service of neo-soul radio hits, which actually sounded great on Back to Black but much less compelling-- almost comically crass-- on Ronson's own cashgrab 2007 album, Version. Full of payback cameos by Winehouse, Allen, ODB, and Robbie Williams, Version was a covers album that tried to position Ronson as a trendsetter, but proved dead-end rather than innovative and fresh. Ronson's moment may have passed, but he actually seems relieved. Record Collection, his follow-up, succeeds at leaving his signature sound in the past and rolling out some new, often impressive tricks. Mercifully, there are no Daptone horns on here (no slam on that group, but they sound better when paired with Daptone artists), and Ronson expands his range beyond Stax, Philly, and Motown to reach into the 1970s and especially the 80s for inspiration. "You Gave Me Nothing" rollerskates on glittery disco beats, "Lose It All (In the End)" mimics the orchestral pomp of 60s crooner pop, and both "The Colour of Crumar" and "Circuit Breaker" soundtrack lost Atari games ca. 1986. The result is a grab-bag of an album: scattered, frantic, distracted, overeager, yet occasionally engaging nevertheless. While that title may suggest a navel-gazing bedroom-auteur beatshop, Record Collection proves a surprisingly gregarious album, varying up the sounds and styles and making better use of cameos by his famous friends. Unlike Handsome Boy Modeling School and N.A.S.A., Ronson doesn't pair up his guests in stunt combinations. Rather, he's more interested in how they complement each other and the songs; he's after chemistry. "Somebody to Love Me" pairs Boy George with long-time Ronson associate Andrew Wyatt, and the former's gritty delivery makes him a nice foil for the latter's youthful falsetto. It's one of the most dramatic moments on the album, especially when Boy George pleads for someone to "see the boy I once was in my life." Ghostface is the consummate professional, Spank Rock goes twee, and the album's runaway star is former Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall. She gets three songs that show new range, playing ABBA's Agnetha on "You Gave Me Nothing", Dusty Springfield on closer "The Night Last Night", and Debbie Harry in "Hey Boy". Her easy presence on these songs only hints at what a full-length collaboration between Dougall and Ronson might sound like. Alongside such naturally charismatic personalities, however, guests like Kyle Falconer from the View (the band, not the TV show) and Planet's Andy Greenwald fade into the mix, so overshadowed as to be absent. Through almost every song, Ronson rides a shuffling drumkit beat, stitching the album and the guests together sonically. It's a bit too clipped and choppy to be especially funky, but it does keep things fleet and agile as Ronson introduces and develops new ideas, revealing a musical curiosity that Version seemed to preclude. His mission here is modest: As Simon LeBon sings on the title track, "I just want to be in your record collection." That's easy for him to say, since Duran Duran is in just about everybody's record collection. But Record Collection is a small step in that direction for Ronson. It sounds more curious and less intrinsically bound to any particular trend, which ultimately gives it a good chance of not embarrassing him in three years

2010-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00

2010-10-14T02:00:01.000-04:00

Columbia

October 14, 2010

0244ddca-da85-4b6a-a707-caf8ee06be44

Stephen M. Deusner

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

The talented pop singer flirts with outright self-absorption on his latest record, a solo piano effort on which he bites off more than he can chew.

The talented pop singer flirts with outright self-absorption on his latest record, a solo piano effort on which he bites off more than he can chew.

Rufus Wainwright: All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14156-all-days-are-nights-songs-for-lulu/

All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu

Rufus Wainwright seems only fitfully interested in being a pop musician. That's certainly his prerogative, but it's not great for those who love the things he can do with a four-minute tune. Throughout his admirable yet frustrating career, Wainwright's assorted passions (for opera, for theatre, for Judy Garland) have led his music down paths that were often more intriguing in theory than execution. He should be lauded for allowing nothing to dictate his artistic choices, with the understanding that such boldness opens him up for criticism when he bites off more than he can chew. However, the real danger with an artist who listens solely to his own muse is that he'll cut off the outside world, making music that can't be related to or enjoyed by anyone but himself. Wainwright gets closer than ever to that vanishing point of self-absorption on his latest effort, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu. The only things you hear on the album are Wainwright's voice and his piano, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that he wants you to luxuriate in both when it's far more likely you'll feel like you're drowning, given how rarely Wainwright buoys the listener with an actual melody or memorable lyric. Wainwright's biography is fascinating-- child of famed folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and the recently departed Kate McGarrigle, an openly gay performer who's been an outspoken social activist yet also battled serious addictions. Still, it's a bit much for Wainwright to ask his listeners to follow as he enumerates Big Apple landmarks ("Who Are You New York?") or sings for six minutes in French ("Les feux d'artifice t'appellent") or transcribes a phone conversation with his singer-songwriter sister ("Martha"). This is particularly true if our only accompaniment is going to be plodding piano chords and mooning vocals (a symptom that's stretched to almost-hilarious extremes on "Zebulon" when Wainwright resorts to sounding the same single piano note several times in succession). Even when the words are gift-wrapped for him, however, Wainwright struggles. Three of the album's songs find him setting music to Shakespeare sonnets, but only his arrangement of "Sonnet 20", often held up as proof of the Bard's homosexuality, manages to avoid being a droning mess that actually saps power from those legendary verses. As for the most salvageable of the songs that are solely Wainwright's own, "The Dream" is admittedly movingly sung, but the only genuine keeper is "True Loves", a heartbreaking tune about how happy lovers make lonely people feel miserable that's so universal in sentiment it feels like a modern-day standard. Something anyone can enjoy-- imagine that.

2010-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

2010-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Decca

April 23, 2010

024906e1-a171-49d9-8fcd-8cf41c7d9c2d

Joshua Love

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

With the help of Converge guitarist and veteran metal producer Kurt Ballou, the versatile emo band continues to mature with hints of Big Star and subgenre subversion.

With the help of Converge guitarist and veteran metal producer Kurt Ballou, the versatile emo band continues to mature with hints of Big Star and subgenre subversion.

Joyce Manor: Million Dollars to Kill Me

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joyce-manor-million-dollars-to-kill-me/

Million Dollars to Kill Me

Even in the surprisingly experimental context of recent emo-leaning indie rock, Joyce Manor have always depended upon an impressive versatility. An accelerated, bashing cover of the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” served as the theoretical centerpiece of 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, while the band’s 2014 breakthrough, Never Hungover Again, offered a masterclass in emo’s many moods—reflective, angry, sentimental, self-incriminating, passionate. Before they even released 2016’s Cody, Joyce Manor had cemented themselves as emo’s answer to Guided by Voices, packing albums with brief melodic gems indebted to the band’s ancestry but retaining their own peculiar, scruffy charm. On that record, leader Barry Johnson and the band pushed their songs past the four-minute mark, even adding acoustic textures that genre purists liked to dis as “selling out.” But the developing songcraft on Cody’s highlights was undeniable. Closer “This Song Is a Mess But So Am I,” for instance, added ounces of fabric softener to Joyce Manor’s melodic-hardcore washing machine. Johnson crooned over spiky riffs as he tore into the the very act of songwriting: “I wrote this one for you/’Cause that’s all I could do/Sad, but it’s all true/So I guess it’ll have to do.” On their fifth full-length, Joyce Manor continue their trend of maturation, musically and emotionally. This record began as a collection of potential solo songs for Johnson; with contributions from former Impossibles leader Rory Phillips, it’s the band’s least-punk, most melodically rich album to date. Johnson revealed during a recent Stereogum profile that he was concerned Cody sounded too much like “a rock record with Big Star riffs.” That fear seems to have vanished, as Joyce Manor sound more like the power-pop pioneers than ever on the brisk Million Dollars to Kill Me, from the sweetly sung bridge of “Think I’m Still in Love With You” to the soft strums of closer “Wildflowers.” The depth that supports these songs owes in part to veteran producer and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, who makes his recording debut with the band here. It’s funny to think about the guy who grinds in one of music’s most intense bands working on a song like “Silly Games,” a sock-hop number that doubles as the most slow-dance-ready emo tune since Rufio’s “One Slowdance.” But Ballou’s careful hand has added a sophistication to many metal bands in the past, including his own. He situates a layer of ba-ba-ba’s just beneath the surface of “Fighting Kangaroo,” while the shoegaze-tinted “Gone Tomorrow” sways atop a bedrock of riffs through which a stray melodic line occasionally surfaces for air. If there’s one aspect of Joyce Manor that suffers during Million Dollars, it’s Johnson’s writing. In the past, he’s often been inscrutable even at his most emotional, but the impact was there. Here, though, he sometimes dips too deeply into purple territory, singing “My friend Tommy, he does origami/Forever in the morning shade” during “Gone Tomorrow” and exclaiming “Broke-a-hontas, orange eating/Talk like that, now who’s screaming” near the end of the peppy “Up the Punx.” But elsewhere, Johnson shares the defeated tenderness that stems from getting older and wishing to live more simply. He marvels at roadside foliage and “sunshine coming in through the open window of my bedroom” on “Wildflowers” and archly flips emo’s reputation for toxic misogyny at the start of “Big Lie.” “Girls can be kinda controlling/I wanna be controlled, I think it’d be alright,” he sings. “Everybody thinks I’m joking/If it’s funny, then hold me while I cry all night.” It’s the kind of surprising turn that epitomizes Joyce Manor’s trajectory so far. Their willingness to expand the subtleties of their sound makes Million Dollars to Kill Me an enthralling listen, even at its lowest points.

2018-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Epitaph

September 22, 2018

02493a17-61a7-47b0-97e0-fdd550253dad

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

My brother turned me on to jazz in the mid-80's. At that time, many classic records were out of ...

My brother turned me on to jazz in the mid-80's. At that time, many classic records were out of ...

Chicago Underground Quartet: Chicago Underground Quartet

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1440-chicago-underground-quartet/

Chicago Underground Quartet

My brother turned me on to jazz in the mid-80's. At that time, many classic records were out of print and just starting to be issued on CD. Columbia had the most distinguished catalog, with Miles Davis, the Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens, all the early Billie Holiday, some Duke, the most popular Monk, and Dave Brubeck, to name just a few. One by one, Columbia reissued the old records on CD as part of the "Columbia Jazz Masterpieces" series, complete with new artwork, digital remastering and, in some cases (like Miles Ahead), radical remixing. I remember reading the promo material in the CD booklets and getting excited about what was going to be reissued next. Another Columbia artist was Wynton Marsalis. When I first began listening to jazz, Wynton was creating high-profile records of his own. At that time, his quintet included his brother Branford and was heavily indebted to the Wayne Shorter/Herbie Hancock lineup of Miles Davis' quintet. I liked some of those mid-80's Marsalis records. Black Codes from the Underground, in particular, still stands as a powerful statement. While he was making this music, Wynton was just hitting his stride as a tastemaker. Along with critic pal Stanley Crouch, he was telling the world that this music was the greatest form since the demise of symphonic music, but that only a narrow slice of what was being marketed as "jazz" actually deserved the appellation. To him, the biggest imposter was electrified fusion. Now, I admit I was an impressionable teen. Wynton, Crouch and my brother all told me "fusion sucks," and I never thought to question their judgment. Any jazz with electric instruments, with the possible exception of In a Silent Way, was to be avoided at all costs. That was the Chuck Mangione shit. Fuck that. Forgive me, Miles, for I knew not what I did. It took me another ten years to figure out that there was some great electrified jazz floating around. And now I find music that blends jazz with textures from other music more interesting than the "real thing." Like the last Isotope 217 album. Or this new one by the Chicago Underground Quartet. Like Isotope, the Chicago Underground in its various numerical configurations is an adventurous fusion unit fronted by cornet player Rob Mazurek. The other constant is drummer/vibraphonist Chad Taylor. This edition also includes the guitar of Jeff Parker (of Isotope and Tortoise), in addition to the old standby Noel Kupersmith (now also a member of Brokeback) on bass. With so many musicians on loan from such familiar bands, the Chicago Underground Quartet is bound to sound a bit, well, familiar. And it does. This is definitely the kind of tech-tweaked instrumental music that Chicago has been specializing in for close to a decade. But the tweaks are subtle, and this is such a low key, unassuming and melodic record that it still sounds very fresh to my ears. Jeff Parker opens the album on "Tunnel Chrome" with a deftly plucked guitar pattern that recalls the opening chords to "Night in Tunisia." Taylor doubles up on both drums and vibes, and Mazurek adds some heavily processed horn (he's also credited on the album sleeve with "electronics") that has a very guitar-like tonality. His processing gives the piece, which is very straightforward post-bop jazz, a bit of an otherworldly flavor. In addition to Parker's lovely guitar playing throughout, these less traditional flourishes are what make this record interesting. "Three in the Morning" begins with a gorgeous guitar lead that soon dissolves into delicate phase-shifts and backward harmonies as Mazurek's cornet states the theme. "Four in the Morning" sounds all the world like a ballad off of Miles Davis Cookin', with Mazurek on Harmon mute. But Taylor's brushwork is so robotic it sounds like a Pro-Tools loop (which I suppose it might actually be). There's no thought of adding an offbeat accent to this brief song, which gives a whiff of the technology involved in the recording. This restrained approach is the order of the day for the Chicago Underground Quartet, and only occasionally do they cut loose and blow. On the flowing, impressionistic "Welcome" (not the Coltrane tune), Parker adds some distortion to his guitar and Mazurek goes into gospelized Donald Ayler mode, sounding like he's gearing up for a march. It's a welcome change of pace, but the mood here tends toward the controlled, thoughtful and expressive. While this is nothing like the full-blown electronic love-in that was the last Isotope record, the Chicago Underground Quartet know how to integrate technology into their distinctive jazz sound. It's a fusion of some kind-- I'm sure of that-- so Wynton would not approve. But I'd call it a worthy extension of the tradition.

2001-06-19T01:00:06.000-04:00

2001-06-19T01:00:06.000-04:00

Thrill Jockey

June 19, 2001

024bb72d-338a-4cb8-ad47-6695d06de0d6

Mark Richardson

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

Amidst personal and professional turmoil, Lil Wayne's stopgap release Sorry 4 the Wait 2 finds him sounding wounded in a way he's rarely allowed himself to be.

Amidst personal and professional turmoil, Lil Wayne's stopgap release Sorry 4 the Wait 2 finds him sounding wounded in a way he's rarely allowed himself to be.

Lil Wayne: Sorry 4 the Wait 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20186-sorry-4-the-wait-2/

Sorry 4 the Wait 2

Sorry 4 the Wait 2 shouldn't exist. If Lil Wayne had his way, we'd be listening to Tha Carter V right now, originally scheduled for release in October, which turned into early December, which came and went with only a series of frustrated tweets from the rapper. It's not strange for artists to complain about the glacial pace at which record labels often move, but Wayne's tweets felt less like a display of temporary discontent and more like the words of an artist that has reached the end of their rope—it doesn't get much more black and white than "I want off this label and nothing to do with these people." With rumors swirling that Wayne is ready to take his label, Cash Money, along with his long-time mentor and father figure Bryan "Birdman" Williams to court, the possibility of a reconciliation between the estranged parties seems less and less likely with each passing day. Amidst this intra-label drama, there feels like there's something at stake in Wayne's music again. Whereas the first Sorry 4 the Wait served a similar function—it was a prime example of mixtape as apology—its sequel carries a sense that its star has his back against the wall for the first time in years. There's a purpose in Wayne's rapping that's been absent for a while, and when mentioning his current situation with Cash Money, he sounds wounded in a way he's rarely allowed himself to be. Over O.T. Genasis' "CoCo", he raps in an exasperated sigh: "Tunechi, niggas don't appreciate you/ You've been down since day one, it meant nothing on day two." In 2015, Wayne's approach to mixtapes—rapping over beats popularized by other rappers—is an anachronism. These days, the tapes of even the greenest rappers contain mostly, if not entirely, original work. At his peak, Wayne would make beats his own through a manic inventiveness that he's still trying to recapture almost a decade later. There aren't any performances here that will have you dragging the originals to the recycle bin, but there are moments that thrill, like when he lifts the melody of Rich the Kid's hook from Migos' "Jumpin' Like Jordan" and then takes it in about eight different directions on "Trap House". If there's a word that describes Wayne's rapping on Sorry 4 the Wait 2, it's "engaged." Wayne remains really good at the physical act of rapping, even if now you can hear the gears lurching into action whenever he switches into a double-time flow, like he does on "Selsun Blue", which finds him dropping quotables again ("Got the yay locked down like Kim K.") over the minor-key dread of Roofeeo's "All About the Money" beat. With that said, what used to be knee-slappers have been forehead-palmers for a few years now, and what he presumably considers clever is usually less so by at least half. Mercifully, the groaners-per-minute ratio here is lower than usual, and this is likely due to the fact Wayne's got more than just bad sex puns on his mind. Wayne's in a weird position: his style has been so thoroughly picked apart that, in many cases, rappers who have absorbed traits of his have taken them to even further extremes. For instance, "Off Day", the immediately-forgettable single he released in November, saw him try to play the oddball. At different points on that song, he sounds like Drake, iLoveMakonnen, and Young Thug—basically, everyone but himself—and it's as cringe-worthy as it is transparent. On Sorry 4 the Wait 2, he's enjoying being Lil Wayne again, for better or worse. It also feels like rapping is once more a choice rather than a contractual obligation, which, at this point, might be the single greatest compliment one can pay Lil Wayne.

2015-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

2015-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

self-released

January 30, 2015

024f6229-a2c9-411b-b261-d124ae85d6f5

Renato Pagnani

https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/

The new album from Cory Hanson’s band Wand is its most focused, finessed, and best record to date. It contains an audacious refinement that transcends the group’s beginnings in the garage-rock scene.

The new album from Cory Hanson’s band Wand is its most focused, finessed, and best record to date. It contains an audacious refinement that transcends the group’s beginnings in the garage-rock scene.

Wand: Plum

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wand-plum/

Plum

The first thing you should forget about Wand may be the only thing you remember about them. The intoxicating Los Angeles quintet’s founder, Cory Hanson, has backed both Mikal Cronin and Ty Segall, vanguards of a pan-garage scene with which Wand has been linked from the start. On Wand’s first three records, recorded and released in a 13-month rush beginning in late 2014, the band invoked a similar musical mania, ping-ponging among subgenres with a teenaged enthusiasm that reflected the spirit of those contemporaries and mentors. But after substantial personnel shifts, a requisite Hanson solo record, and a workaday spell of full-band songwriting with a new lineup, Wand has returned with Plum, its first album in two years. Not coincidentally, it’s the most focused, finessed, and best Wand record to date, with a refinement that transcends those aforementioned peers. It’s among the most exhilarating rock records you’ll hear all year. Wand’s first three albums were ecstatic scatter plots, with points of musical interest spread across the tracks with a joyful and casual abandon. Within the span of a few songs, Wand would slip—as they did on a particularly strong portion of their debut, Ganglion Reef—from clench-jawed stoner rock to swirling psychedelic pop to “Going to California” acoustic melodrama. There have been florid instrumental interludes and serpentine prog-rock constructions, blustery punk tantrums and hazy pop dreams. All of that returns on Plum, but Wand has folded those strains into single tunes, connecting an array of once-disjointed thoughts into strong, singular statements. The title track leaves no room for uncertainty in the shift: Over staccato piano, Hanson sings with newfound soul, belting blues of self-doubt over twin guitars that scrape and crawl like those of Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. “Bee Karma” buttresses spectral, psychedelic drift with a riff strong and sharp enough for a classic rock station, while Hanson follows the melodic contours of Radiohead’s “Optimistic.” Time and again, Wand resorts to this hyper-condensed juxtaposition. “Driving” switches from country mope to guitar theatrics, and “White Cat” somehow puts the rhythmic map of Lightning Bolt beneath an arching power-pop hook. This holds together remarkably well, as if Wand, for the first time, melted its influences and ideas into the same piece of vinyl, not a string of isolated singles. This succession of touchstones, one wedged neatly against the next, is thrilling. Indeed, Plum feels fun, with its declamatory pianos and slicing riffs, magnetic hooks and grand solos. But it was written during a prolonged period of change and loss—“politically, familially, romantically,” Hanson told Stereogum. “It really helped to have all of us together,” he continued, “because in the end, when all this shit was going down, we were kind of all that we had.” Peek beneath that veneer of delight, and the lyrics dig into an admixture of despair and hope. “The Trap,” a gorgeous ballad supported by the sublime harmonies of Sofia Arreguin, ponders the will to persevere when what matters most to you is falling apart. These songs animate death and disagreement, reconciliation and regret, forever bound like the sounds themselves. Realizing that some of these feelings are bigger than his ability to express them, Hanson even ponders the wisdom of words: “Stand on a frozen language/Terrified by light,” he sings poignantly during “Blue Cloud,” a bittersweet song about the push and pull between being lost and found. “Beauty will surround you, and you’ll be free at last.” Impossibly knotted guitars grind and growl, finally emerging in radiant consonance. Hanson and the band express what they cannot with words: You keep going long enough and, just maybe, it all works out. At its initial clip, Wand would now be about nine records into its four-year-old career. That seems to be a ridiculous prospect, but listening back to the wealth of ideas that percolated and passed through that introductory suite, it isn’t impossible. Hanson had a lot to sort through and say. But a multivalent record like Plum—where the songs peel apart into layers of fun and frustration, sadness and esprit—likely wouldn’t have been possible in such a mad dash. Wand smartly stepped out of that cycle, not just to regroup but to change its process and product. For a rock band that had earned a reputation as ramshackle and unfiltered, there’s an uncommon audacity to that decision—to slow down, to press “pause,” to reemerge as something more nuanced and thoughtful. Sure, Plum still delights in rock’n’roll, but, in only two years, Wand has mirrored the maturation of the genre itself, moving from the youthful verve of “Tutti Frutti” toward rich, emotional terrain. That’s a fast pace, after all.

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

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

Rock

Drag City

September 27, 2017

024fa021-2b50-4c6e-9283-34f57f54ab80

Grayson Haver Currin

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

On Donald Glover’s latest project as Childish Gambino, he ditches rap for lovingly produced funk worship, resulting in his most enjoyable project yet.

On Donald Glover’s latest project as Childish Gambino, he ditches rap for lovingly produced funk worship, resulting in his most enjoyable project yet.

Childish Gambino: “Awaken, My Love!”

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22671-awaken-my-love/

“Awaken, My Love!”

By now, the world knows who Donald Glover is. From Community to the sharp and universally beloved Atlanta to his forthcoming Star Wars role, he’s carved out his persona; he’s likable, sensitive, and observant, the self-aware everyman. But Childish Gambino has always been harder to pin down. Since emerging with throwaway mixtapes under that alias, Glover has released two highly self-reflexive rap full-lengths, a Southern rap EP and a straight pop EP, and hosted a mysterious, cell phone-free festival. The unifying thread connecting all of this has sometimes been hard to spot. His recently released “Awaken, My Love!” is his hardest left turn yet, ditching rap wholesale in favor of funk worship, and the result is his most enjoyable project to date. In paying homage to heroes, he even hits upon some of the genuine emotional connection that has often been missing from his music. The album’s production is majestic, aiming squarely for the cosmos depicted on its striking cover artwork. Like the cosmic soul it emulates, the atmosphere is lush, full of period ambiance worthy of a high-end television set. The album’s first track and lead single, “Me and Your Mama,” is a satisfying slow burn that shows off Glover’s impressive falsetto. Its imagery (“This is the end of us/Sleeping with the moon and the stars”) might be vapid, but the intensity of Glover’s singing compensates, as does the ripping electric guitar. The tracks are embellished with intricate details throughout, like the delicate xylophone on “Terrified.” “Redbone” builds from a slow jam into a peak of futuristic guitar and forceful staccato piano chords. It’s a love song, which has always been Glover’s forte, whether on Because the Internet’s “3005,” “Telegraph Ave.,” or Camp’s “L.E.S.” The same goes for the open-hearted “Baby Boy,” possibly inspired by the birth of his son. These songs dig into something that feels unique to Glover’s heart, not just his record collection. Too much of the rest, though, simply nods to sentiment without producing any. On “Have Some Love,” he limply advises the audience to “really love one another.” The song called “Riot” isn’t exactly riotous: He screams a little, but only for the sake of fulfilling a pre-ordained funk yelp quota—nothing in the song seems to have moved him to shrieking. There are also a few indistinguishable tracks that feel like funk retreads; “Have Some Love” sounds uncomfortably close to “Can You Get to That” from Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. “California,” a cringey tropical parody complete with fake patois, sticks out for the wrong reasons. It sounds like “Kokomo” for the “Hotline Bling” era, or maybe Ween covering Sublime’s “Caress Me Down,” and its inclusion is entirely baffling, considering the sonic cohesion of the rest of the project. Donald Glover’s greatest talents remain his tragicomic touch as a screenwriter and his ease with performance. He’s skilled enough to figure out how to excel at something, and, for the most part, look like he knows what he’s doing. As a rapper, he almost sounded the part: Take a step back, and there he was, rapping fast, switching up flows, delivering (too many) punchlines. But zoom in, and it didn’t really click. Rarely did he make a song about anything, and those zingers were plain obnoxious. (“Fandango my mandingo, we should do a movie” from a 2012 track with Danny Brown, for example.) That same on-paper ability is what makes “Awaken, My Love!” a well-executed project: He has clearly absorbed a great deal of musical history, as the album nods to Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Rick James, Prince, and more. There are times, however, when that nodding feels more like mimicry than anything else. Maybe he’ll figure out how to smuggle Donald Glover’s heart into Childish Gambino’s brain eventually, but if he hasn’t figured out what he wants out of Childish Gambino yet, it’s increasingly rewarding watching him try.

2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Glassnote

December 6, 2016

024fa2f2-9b57-4f33-a1bb-e35c5a9f516f

Matthew Strauss

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

Mysterious L.A. producer Benedek draws on obscure boogie, funk, freestyle, house music, modern soul, and lost R&B to create a strange yet danceable new world of sound on his new Untitled EP.

Mysterious L.A. producer Benedek draws on obscure boogie, funk, freestyle, house music, modern soul, and lost R&B to create a strange yet danceable new world of sound on his new Untitled EP.

Benedek: Untitled EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19084-benedek-untitled-ep/

Untitled EP

At the very end of 2013, a white label 12” with only the name “Benedek” written on it came through the mail, bereft of any other information whatsoever. And when the full-length album began arriving in shops last month, it had about the same amount of info on it. There are eight tracks in total, all of them untitled, released by the Washington, D.C. imprint Peoples Potential Unlimited. For the PPU label, this is par for the course. Since 2008, PPU’s catalog makes for strange, eclectic listening, primarily reissuing demo recordings from the early 80s of African-American acts hoping to be the next Earth Wind and Fire or Marvin Gaye. The bizarro world of boogie and R&B that PPU unearths—far from the upper echelons of kings like Michael Jackson and Prince— is fascinating stuff and almost any toe dip into the PPU catalog will reward listeners. But the label also releases music from acts similarly informed by such lost musics, be it Tom Noble, Psychic Mirrors or Benedek. A bit of research revealed that Nicholas Benedek hails from Los Angeles and while he’s had a few cassette-only comp appearances, his only other release available to date is a collaboration with Dâm-Funk. Much like his peer Ariel Pink and how his hypnagogic pop vision influenced an entire generation of indie-rockers, Dâm-Funk’s aesthetic seems to have had a similar effect on a new generation of post-Dilla producers, drawing on obscure boogie, funk, freestyle, house music, modern soul and lost R&B to create a strange yet danceable new world of sound. There’s something uncanny and familiar about Benedek’s sound palette across these eight instrumentals: the bubbly synths, the popping basslines, the crisp drum machine hits, the canned handclaps, all of which evoke the production tropes of a bygone era. The first track has this sliver of sound that makes me think of Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings", which may just be a trick of the mind akin to Ariel Pink’s, in that it attaches itself to what you have stored in your own musical memory banks. Another section has the warm pads and chopped-up hand percussion reminiscent of a proto-house track, interspersed with chimes. There are sounds that might bring to mind a workout video from the 80s, unless you weren’t born in that decade, in which case the bassline might instead sound like something from the early 90s. The third track features the sort of harmonica preset of an old synth and Jacuzzi-warm keyboard chords, all set against the kind of boom-tick that my girlfriend would call “grown and sexy.” The fourth untitled track sticks out for me, laced with the kind of hook that could either be from an obscure lite jazz album, a rare modern soul 12,” or some sort of boogie track that might have gotten aired one night at the Paradise Garage, full of airy guitar upstrokes. But perhaps it’s not a sample at all, but rather from the mind and fingers of Benedek himself. His evocative debut, while scrubbed of track titles, vocals and eschewing easy genre categories from the past thirty years, nevertheless makes such blurred lines be part of its listening pleasure.

2014-03-12T02:00:04.000-04:00

2014-03-12T02:00:04.000-04:00

Peoples Potential Unlimited

March 12, 2014

0252f0e2-7c66-4d4d-a4f1-6c1b736255e1

Andy Beta

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

Synth-pop legends' first album in four years aims to match the mood and quality of their Violator-era sound.

Synth-pop legends' first album in four years aims to match the mood and quality of their Violator-era sound.

Depeche Mode: Playing the Angel

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2285-playing-the-angel/

Playing the Angel

First things first: You can count me among that class of people who haven't paid the closest attention to Depeche Mode over the past, umm, decade. I don't imagine this is all that unusual. Sure, the music they've released seems fine enough. But laying claim to our brainspace takes more than that, and each album these guys produced seemed to be slotting them further and further into that place where groups just naturally wind up after a couple decades as a going concern-- the band version of adulthood. Band adulthood is where you've settled into enough of a groove that your core fans know who they are, and everyone else happily ignores your continued existence. Band adulthood is where you make perfectly fine and increasingly subtle and sophisticated new albums, and your members embark on highly touted Significant Solo Projects-- neither of which anyone can really work up any enthusiasm about. Band adulthood means reviews that are a big swirl of stock phrases like "return to form" and "just may be their best since [insert classic here]"; it's a world of die-hard fans politely trying to convince everyone that actually, this new album, it's interesting, you should give it a listen. Band adulthood is a city where R.E.M. and Elvis Costello have offices downtown, and the Cure and New Order keep stopping by open houses in the suburbs. No mistake: people of all sorts still love their Depeche Mode; last year I even got to watch a 19-year-old metalhead dig back and convert. But people want their prime-era DM, not a paler adulthood. Even the titles of the band's last couple releases seemed to know it: after Ultra (!) and Exciter (!), I'm half-surprised they didn't manage to call one No Really, We're Still Worth It. If you've caught any advance word on Playing the Angel, you'll probably have heard the same rumors that swirl around all band-adulthood records: That this is the one, the "return to form." That this isn't just the "best since Violator," but maybe even just as good. That they're about to pull off the same trick Morrissey did-- following the same path as always, and yet somehow getting everyone to sit up again and take notice. (Publicists help.) And while I wish I could take some bold, controversial true/false stance on that one, this album just won't let me. If you really are the sort of person who's been waiting with bated breath for a new Depeche Mode release, then don't worry: You'll love this. Dear everyone else: It's pretty okay. It certainly sounds as good as anything they've done in a while-- and isn't that always the key with these things? Band-adulthood records leave everyone in fear of limp retreads, embarrassingly bombastic attempts to capturing former glory, ill-advised experiments, laughable bandwagon-jumping, or that ultimate horror of classic acts trying to ape the bands they're meant to have influenced. Depeche Mode have long managed to avoid those traps (say, "showing Linkin Park how it's really done"), and on this record they've done even better, hitting on something that feels solid and relevant and natural: a dense, buzzy web of sound that folds in the old arena anthems, the camp noir-gospel of the early 90s, and the polished micro-production of Exciter. The whole problem of the "new" DM has always been the gap between the clean-lined synth clang of their prime era and the lush, fussy computer-assisted electronics of today; the most surprising tracks here shoot past that issue entirely. "Precious", the first single, works some slow-rolling "Enjoy the Silence" beauty-- but the whole thing's riding on burbling acid-synth lines, retro-classic and up-to-the-minute at the same time. "John the Revelator" does up-tempo "Master and Servant" pulse and "Condemnation" choir calls over ultra-modern bleep and click, "A Pain That I'm Used To" does slow industrialist grind, and some other tracks pull off something like Depeche Mode torch songs. Yes, they've got their style working, their production mostly down, and Dave Gahan's singing gets richer and better with each passing record. Only here's the thing: Surely a pop album lives or dies by its songs. And while the sounds here, apart from some sterile "modern" clicks and flourishes, climb their way past the pitfalls of the 25-year-old band, the songs here can't. Give any songwriter a couple decades, and the same things will happen-- the writing gets progressively more subtle, more sophisticated, until eventually it's curiously free of spark, always skirting the obvious old hooks in favor of something too professional to even notice. It's all here: the arch, wandering melodies; the methodically constructed key changes; the weirdly formless slow-and-quiet epics; the standard lyrical stew of religion and lust and fragile, innocent, faithful things in a dark, dark world. Yes, this group has spent the past 15 years trading in mood and atmosphere-- much more so than the relentlessly tight pop of their 1980s arena days. Yes, given enough time, they'll gather up into something passably engaging. No, no one's asking for karaoke classics. But none of the moods and atmospheres and slow-growers here stand much of a chance of reaching out and drawing you in-- or of making a believer out of anyone who didn't believe already. The end product, then, is one of those signature artifacts of the Adult Band: an album we hardly even need to review. Depeche Mode's core fans will flip for it; it's the best thing they've released in a long while. Everyone else? It's pretty okay. And these days, over a decade since Songs of Faith and Devotion, well, you already know which of those two camps you fall into.

2005-10-19T02:00:01.000-04:00

2005-10-19T02:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic / Rock

Mute

October 19, 2005

0254caa8-0431-481d-87c0-8dd3d3c54bf6

Nitsuh Abebe

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/

Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records.

Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records.

Steely Dan: Aja

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steely-dan-aja/

Aja

For much of my youth and young adulthood, I listened to music for cheap emotional catharsis, and so I preferred songs that were feral, tenuous, unstudied, and impolite—anything that sounded as mixed-up and precarious as I usually felt. I equated wildness with authenticity, and wanted only to be reminded, again and again, that I wasn’t alone or unique in my feelings. This isn’t a particularly unusual way to commune with records, though it is, perhaps, the easiest way. I eventually came to understand that over-valuing anguish and ecstasy—conflating theatrics with feeling, and feeling with Art—was limiting and naïve. Things like pleasure, contentedness, a solid laugh—any good, ordinary moment—are just as evanescent, and certainly just as formidable (and important) to capture. Beginning in the early 1970s, Steely Dan—the duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—made cerebral, clever, formally sophisticated music that resisted any autobiographical extrapolating. Even in the context of the era—the late 1960s had seen the development and rise of both jazz-fusion and prog-rock, two of the brainiest, chops-iest genres going—their work was shrouded in irony and a distancing intellect. There was no pretense of dissolution or even emotion. Listening to their records felt like running my hands along a slab of polished marble—there were no craggy bits to grab on to, no easy way to find purchase—and so for years, I believed that Steely Dan’s seeming aversion to sincerity meant that they were cold and dorky. Did they not just make inert, polished music for men with meticulously groomed facial hair? Then Aja—Steely Dan’s sixth album, from 1977—turned everything around for me: It’s a thoroughly convincing argument against my notion that aggressive or discordant music was inherently real and rebellious, whereas virtuosic or studied songs were always limp and bloodless. Aja is as bold as records get. It’s full of strange, unprecedented, disorienting moves. It is braver, more idiosyncratic, and more personal, in some ways, than any other record I own. Aja is as much a jazz record as a pop one, though in its best moments, it’s both and neither. Steely Dan were so expert at fusing genres it’s often hard to say what bit came from where, or exactly which tradition (fusion, R&B, soul, disco, classical) was being mined or reimagined. Because these songs were rendered so seamlessly, it’s easy to overlook how brazen they were. Aja is like driving down a treacherous, cliff-side road in the most luxurious car ever made: If you sink deep enough into that supple leather seat, it is possible to forget entirely about the twists and turns, the threat of looming destruction. It’s possible to forget about gravity entirely. Steely Dan is generally associated with Los Angeles, where they made most of their records, but Becker and Fagen are both New Yorkers (Becker was born in Queens; Fagen was born in suburban Passaic, New Jersey), and their sensibilities were plainly shaped by a kind of wry, East Coast cynicism. It manifests most palpably in Aja’s lyrics, which are funny, surreal, and, for the most part, narratively ambiguous. On a song like “Deacon Blues,” which they co-wrote, it’s impossible to deny the precision of their phrasing, and the unexpected depth of the song’s sentiment: Learn to work the saxophone I play just what I feel Drink Scotch whiskey all night long And die behind the wheel They got a name for the winners in the world I want a name when I lose They call Alabama the Crimson Tide Call me Deacon Blues Becker later said the song was about the “mythic loserdom” of being a professional musician—how glorious it might look from the outside, how grueling it is in practice. “Deacon Blues” is a fantasy of art-making, spun by someone who has never had to do the work, and therefore requires a funny sort of narrative distance: Becker and Fagen were looking at their own lives from the perspective of someone who wants what they’ve got, but also someone who fundamentally misunderstands the costs. Aja produced three excellent singles (“Peg,” “Josie,” and “Deacon Blues”) and sold millions of copies, becoming the group’s most commercially successful release. But it was a perplexing bestseller. Steely Dan spent the 1970s getting progressively more esoteric: jazzier, groovier, weirder. Even now, mapping the album’s melodic and harmonic shifts is impossible to do with confidence. Its songs are sprawling and fussy, populated by oddball characters with inscrutable backstories, like “Josie,” from the song of the same name (“She’s the raw flame, the live wire/She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire”) or “Peg,” an aspiring actress headed who-knows-where, who’s “done up in blueprint blue.” “Blueprint blue”! It’s the kind of simple, perfect description prose writers pinch themselves over. Outside of the studio, Becker and Fagen reveled in being a little rascally. They took long breaks from touring, and when they conceded to an interview, they often appeared self-satisfied, if not antagonistic. Their disdain for the record business occasionally bled into a disdain for their fans, itself a kind of merciless, punk-rock pose. When they did tour—like, say, in 1993, when, after a decade-long hiatus, they booked a few weeks of U.S. dates—they did not pretend to enjoy it. That year, when a reporter from The Los Angeles Times asked Becker how the tour was going, he said, “Well, not too good. It turns out that show business isn’t really in my blood anyway, and I’m looking forward to getting back to working on my car.” Because the production on Aja is so expert—whole stretches are perfect, impenetrable, like the first 31 seconds of “Black Cow,” when that creeping bass line cedes passage to guitar and electric piano, and the backing vocals pipe up for “You were high!”—it’s easy to ignore the sophistication of its architecture. Becker and Fagen used obscure chords (like the mu major, a major triad with an added 2 or 9) and custom-built their own equipment (for 1980’s Gaucho, they paid $150,000 to build a bespoke drum machine). What they were doing was so particular and new, it was often difficult for critics to even find a vocabulary to describe it. On the title track, the verse shifts and dissolves as Fagen croons, “I run to you.” His voice thins as he finishes the line, a little gasp of tenderness. The minute-long drum solo that closes “Aja,” performed by the virtuosic session man Steve Gadd, is dressed with horns and synthesizers, and makes a person briefly feel as if they are being transported to a different dimension. Steely Dan reveled in making technical choices that would have hobbled a less ambitious outfit. That they succeeded still feels like some kind of black magic. By 1977, it is possible that some corners of the culture had become desperate for music that was intellectually challenging but not exactly arduous to consume—something less predictable than Top 40, but not quite as hyperbolic or gnashing as punk. By the end of the 1960s, rock had been relentlessly and breathlessly defined as a frantic, bloody, all-consuming practice, for both performers and fans. Aja, though, doesn’t necessarily require any sort of deep emotional entanglement or vulnerability from its listeners. In that way, the record works as an unexpected balm, a break—a little bit of pleasure just for pleasure’s sake. In 1977, on the day Aja was released, Cameron Crowe interviewed Becker and Fagan for Rolling Stone. Predictably, they were bemused by his questions. Becker told Crowe that they spent most of their time writing, recording, and obsessively tinkering. “We overdubbed a lot of the overdubs over,” he said. By then, whenever Steely Dan decamped to the studio, they hired a cabal of professional musicians—more than 40 are listed in the credits to Aja—and ran the sessions themselves, with militaristic precision. Becker and Fagen seemed to savor the idea that Steely Dan might be mischaracterized, in print, as something as pedestrian and ordinary as a band. “You can get studio musicians to sound exactly like a rock and roll band,” Fagen said. It’s obvious what he meant. They’d pulled one over on us, again.

2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

ABC

November 20, 2019

02584f9c-f7eb-41b5-b155-99ed0eec4634

Amanda Petrusich

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

The landmark album gets a remaster and a reissue, complete with a sadly inessential bonus disc of remixes and B-sides.

The landmark album gets a remaster and a reissue, complete with a sadly inessential bonus disc of remixes and B-sides.

Beastie Boys: Check Your Head: Deluxe Edition

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12923-check-your-head-deluxe-edition/

Check Your Head: Deluxe Edition

Critical hindsight's declared Licensed to Ill their fun, guilty-pleasure introduction and Paul's Boutique their visionary artistic statement, but as history tells things it was Check Your Head that made sure the Beastie Boys were sticking around. It was their return to the Top 10 of Billboard's album chart, it reinvented them as a new mutation of the West Coast punk rocker via NYC, and it paved the way for their 1990s-hipster Grand Royal empire. Most of all, it reintroduced the Beastie Boys to a demographic that, three years after their previous album, was now said to listen to "alternative rock"-- and at a time when being deep into hip-hop was still considered a sort of weird trait for a white teenager to have, that proved to be a canny lateral move. Nobody really knew at the time that numerous other, stupider, more aggro bands would take the punk-rap structure of Check Your Head and warp it into the testosterone-poisoned mookery of the Woodstock-torching late 90s. Nobody could predict that its meat-and-potatoes approach to live-band rap would soon be shown up spectacularly by the far tighter Roots. And nobody foresaw that the appeal of its loose, garage-funk instrumentals would begin to fade once Bosco Mann started Daptone rolling and showed people what the pros sounded like. So looking at Check Your Head in hindsight and saying it's aged poorly is largely an issue of unfortunate circumstance; I certainly remember it being fairly invigorating at the time (the time, in this case, being high school). So how's it hold up as its own thing, without the weight of 17 years of inferior imitations and superior refinements upon it? Well, if you look at it in terms of what they lost from their previous two albums, the biggest thing going against Check Your Head is its strange lack of the smart-assed, literate, quick-witted playfulness that had previously informed their lyrics. Never mind its most infamously-quotable lyric, from "Pass the Mic"-- "Everybody's rappin' like it's a commercial/ Actin' like life is a big commercial," which was supposed to rhyme "rehearsal" instead and got left in as a joke at Mike D's expense. Aside from the nimble "Finger Lickin' Good", the real issue is that most of the lyrics focus on sledgehammer impact at the expense of the high concepts and slippery wordplay they'd exhibited on Paul's Boutique. "Jimmy James" is still the jam, but it's surprising just how sketched-out and simple those otherwise vibrant-seeming lyrics are, and while the Rollins-grunt platitudes in "Gratitude" might sound energizing with those heavy-stomping Sabbath-funk riffs underneath, it's missing that spark of trickster glee that first made them great. If you didn't know better, you might think the lyrics on Check Your Head were an afterthought-- and, well, they kind of were. The album originally started out as a jam-heavy instrumental work, where the Beasties refamiliarized themselves with their instruments-- MCA on bass, Ad-Rock on guitar and Mike D on drums, with an odd assortment of session hands including carpenter/keyboardist "Money Mark" Nishita and percussionist Juanito Vazquez. Most of the album was built with an then-unconventional self-sampling approach, where live instruments were cut-up and reassembled from numerous takes, arising from ideas that spontaneously transmogrified and shot into different directions. In combining that approach with the overdriven, semi-lo-fi, blown-out production, it proved that the Beasties could find a new tack on their sonic workmanship without needing a Rick Rubin or some Dust Brothers to guide them (though co-producer Mario Caldato, Jr. proved a good partner). Still, it's a bit of a mishmash: sublime moments like the hallucinogenic peace-and-love dub of "Something's Got to Give" and the inspired weirdness of Sly & the Family Stone's "Time for Livin'" gone near-unrecognizable as hardcore punk have to share room with tracks that either sound a little too sloppily anything-goes (the rattletrap fuzz-rock "Stand Together") or come across like half-formed funk jams with great percussion, slinky Hammonds, not much else ("Funky Boss" and "Pow"). Lest you think the score's a bit uncharitable towards what many fans think is the Beasties' second-best album, it's factoring in this deluxe edition's bonus disc and warning you off buying this particular package. Yes, you get "The Skills to Pay the Bills", a shoulda-made-the-album B-side if there ever was one, but it also includes some of the least essential B-sides ever-- dick-around jokes like Mike D's yowling lounge act "Netty's Girl", the RZA-sniffing-paint kung-fu-funk goof "Drunken Praying Mantis Style", the unremitting horror of "Boomin' Granny"-- as well as some completists-only live tracks and more versions of "So What Cha Want" than you will likely ever need (feel free to draw the line after the classic Soul Assassin remix). Plus you get "Drinkin' Wine", in case you ever wanted evidence that the Beasties had a Side 6 of Sandinista! moment. Maybe Check Your Head doesn't hit the same rap-geek nerves that Licensed to Ill or Paul's Boutique did, but let's look at it this way: It was a worthwhile experiment that resulted in some vital music. The Beastie Boys knew that Paul's was finding appreciation as a cult album, but they couldn't recapture its feeling, not after its commercial failure left them practically forced to take a new tack. Making that approach a smaller-budget, DIY/punk mutation of everything they'd  tried along the way and starting from the ground up as a band rather than a crew of MCs was an inspired idea. Going back to the studio to polish that approach up resulted in their second #1 album, 1994's Ill Communication, which does most of what Check Your Head does just a little better and funnier. But if time has diluted the impact of Check Your Head, clamping on some ear goggles and turning the EQ to its most bass-expanding level is compensation enough.

2009-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

2009-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap / Rock

Capitol

April 14, 2009

025a8bf5-ce1c-44e2-87dc-7cdaa2f27658

Nate Patrin

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

After three albums in which he used his songwriting gifts to examine himself, John Darnielle again turns his eye outward, here penning tunes about hopeless urchins, spies from China, a girl in a Marduk t-shirt, a young father, a kid in a Marcus Allen jersey, H.P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn, and a reggae singer with a bullet hole in his chest.

After three albums in which he used his songwriting gifts to examine himself, John Darnielle again turns his eye outward, here penning tunes about hopeless urchins, spies from China, a girl in a Marduk t-shirt, a young father, a kid in a Marcus Allen jersey, H.P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn, and a reggae singer with a bullet hole in his chest.

The Mountain Goats: Heretic Pride

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11181-heretic-pride/

Heretic Pride

The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle has written songs about speed-freaks, drug-dealing high school running backs, short-time jail inmates, big rabbits, debt collectors, garden-seed salesmen, bootleggers, alcoholics, and attic-dwellers. In the whole lot, the only honest man Darnielle ever bothered writing about was himself. We Shall All Be Healed, The Sunset Tree, and Get Lonely-- his last three albums-- were the autobiographical invocations he'd staved off for over a decade and some 400 songs. Since 2004, he's been his own only subject, after 12 years of avoiding a biography full of sharp objects. "As you all know," Darnielle used to say from stage, "I don't write songs about myself." On Heretic Pride, his newest, the "I" is once again someone else: hopeless urchins, spies from China, a girl in a Marduk t-shirt, a young father, a kid in a Marcus Allen jersey, H.P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn, a reggae singer with a bullet hole in his chest. The antic, hammering thrum of the Mountain Goats' tape-grind era-- before the finer arrangements, the ornamentation, the orchestration of the band's first four 4AD releases-- returns. As before, John Vanderslice and Scott Solter produce. Old usual suspects Peter Hughes, Franklin Bruno, and the Bright Mountain Choir are re-enlisted. St. Vincent's Annie Clark, Erik Friedlander, and Superchunk's Jon Wurster are sworn in. Darnielle wrote songs in Fairbanks, Seattle, San Franscisco, and Durham; their subjects stray as far as the Xinjiang Province, Spanish Town, East Berlin. Darnielle's characters are back where they know best. They join cults ("New Zion"), huddle together in cars ("So Desperate") or gather in smoke-filled rooms ("In the Craters of the Moon"). Many do not survive. "Spoiler Alert!" reads the characteristically bombastic liner note to "Heretic Pride": "The main character here will not live long after he gets done lauding his imminent demise." What a difference two years makes. Get Lonely (2006) was a agonizingly introspective dissection of a dissolving relationship, the logical finale to Darnielle's trilogy of self-revelation, the final unburdening. The Mountain Goats-- champions of the low-fi, singer-songwriter-subverters-- had become scrupulously hi-fi, confessional. Gone was the guitar that played its own drums, gone was the tape-hiss, gone were the doctrinaire fans. Only you and Darnielle remained. "When the villagers come to my door," he sang on Get Lonely's "If You See Light", "I will hide underneath the table in the dining room, knees drawn up to my chest." On Heretic Pride, the villagers return to find their victim no longer afraid. "They come and pull me from my house, and they drag my body through the streets" declares Darnielle on "Heretic Pride": "I will feel so proud when the reckoning arrives." Of all the musicians that have come and gone in the 4AD era, Superchunk's Jon Wurster is-- Peter Hughes aside-- the first to hear, and replicate, the precise, surging, and teeth-chattering headlong rhythm that is Darnielle's stock-in-trade. Behind Wurster's "high-spirits-on-fire" (Darnielle's phrase) four-four, "Heretic Pride" is the most immediate thing the Mountain Goats have done since "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton". Elsewhere, "Sax Rohmer #1", "In the Craters of the Moon", and "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" are seething throwbacks-- taut, propulsive, paranoid, furious. "Lovecraft" imagines the writer come to Red Hook, xenophobic, terrified, filled with hate, switchblade in hand. "Someday, something's coming from way out beyond the stars," snarls Darnielle. "To kill us while we stand here." "San Bernadino": the paranoia relents, the sun rises over the mountains, a young couple with a son on the way checks into a motel; the father runs a bath, scatters rose petals into the water. Composer Erik Friedlander provides the sole instrumentation, a humming cello pluck and a smeared, gorgeous chord progression. Heretic Pride is the first since The Coroner's Gambit to lack a unifying concept, but it has balance: For every furious declaration, there's a moment of uncertainty-- the unresolved lovers and muted chords of "How to Embrace a Swamp Creature", the neutral meeting place the two estranged people pick to reconcile in "So Desperate". As in most of the post-Tallahassee Mountain Goats material, Darnielle's Heretic Pride writing tends towards themes rather than details, movements rather than moments. But human beings stride through his songs once again; for every broad-stroke metaphor-- "Autoclave" heart-as-surgical-purifier, "Tianchi Lake" swamp-monster-- there's a "Marduk Men's Room Incident" disco-refugee, her head against the sink, trying to cool down. Heretic Pride's title is lifted from an Aura Noir's "Black Deluge Night"-- "Soaring demons now swarm the skies/ In awe and heretic pride," goes the couplet-- but Darnielle's got his own invasion stories. Sunset Tree outtake "The Day the Aliens Came" imagined a smoldering planet, rooftops and sidewalks "melted like plastic," one man still standing: There's Darnielle, wearing Italian shoes and a white tuxedo jacket, a survivor explaining himself for the sake of the rest of us.

2008-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

2008-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

4AD

February 18, 2008

025aa4e2-c365-43cb-a89c-f813437fda34

Pitchfork

Travis Scott’s third album is inarguably his strongest to date. His skill as a curator helps sculpt a sticky, humid, psychedelic world with dazzling production and odd pleasures at every turn.

Travis Scott’s third album is inarguably his strongest to date. His skill as a curator helps sculpt a sticky, humid, psychedelic world with dazzling production and odd pleasures at every turn.

Travis Scott: Astroworld

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/travis-scott-astroworld/

Astroworld

“Who put this shit together? I’m the glue” declares Travis Scott on Astroworld, and it’s hard to think of a more accurate summation of his aesthetic approach. The 26-year-old is an avatar for a generation of playlist-making curators who have positively embraced “creative” as a job title. He’s risen to mainstream rap prominence by way of pure tastemaking, exerting the au courant currency of borrowing exactly the right talent at exactly the right time since the hybrid hip-hop of his 2015 debut, Rodeo. Depending on a variety of factors—age, genre predilections, level of active investment in the myriad intersections between popular culture and social media—Scott’s artistic approach can come across as inspiring or infuriating, but it’s also proved undoubtedly successful. He’s wielded his own influence over areas of pop culture—Drake’s 2017 “playlist” More Life was arguably as influenced by Scott’s revolving-door A&R approach as it was by the evolving fluidity of the album format—even as he remains indebted to mentor Kanye West, whose titanic 2013 album Yeezus (to which Scott contributed) was its own ultra-collaborative, cut-and-paste monster. If Yeezus embraced by-committee creativity as a means to an end, Scott has taken it several steps further by allowing such an ethos to define his very artistic being. This has, of course, made him a divisive figure in hip-hop circles and elsewhere. A 2015 Deadspin post titled “Travis Scott Is Worse Than Iggy Azalea” made the case for Scott as a canny cultural plagiarist—a notion that became somewhat more fortified the following year, when he was accused of essentially stealing the framework for the Young Thug and Quavo collaboration “Pick Up the Phone” from Thug himself. The album that song appeared on, 2016’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, captured Scott in the process of refining the rougher edges of his sound, with bolder hooks and a slow tilt towards streamlined song structures. But last year’s full-length collab with Migos member Quavo, Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho, felt driftless and tossed-off by comparison, suggesting a weird paradox embedded in his career thus far: For someone so reliant on others to properly perfume his own work, Scott seems to be most engaged when he’s able to solely take credit for it. Such is the case with Astroworld, unquestionably his strongest release to date. The album takes its name from a since-shuttered amusement park in his hometown of Houston and often resembles a humid day spent at a carnival: sticky, sweet, bustling with activity, and packed with cheap thrills that still feel a tad overpriced. As far as trippy-sounding hip-hop goes, Scott is operating at something of a gold standard here, out-hallucinating fellow stylist A$AP Rocky’s own recent blotter-blotted efforts. “Psychedelics got me goin’ crazy,” he lolls over the spooky and beautiful “Stargazing,” his voice sounding like a sentient iTunes visualizer as he nods to Houston legend Big Moe and shouts out Ellen DeGeneres. It's the epitome of the Travis Scott experience. Featuring a coterie of guest stars representing pop’s upper echelon (Drake, the Weeknd, Frank Ocean), big-ticket indie’s creative brain trust (Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, James Blake), and newest-wave rappers (Gunna, Sheck Wes, Juice WRLD), Astroworld also boasts the most potent production of Scott’s musical life so far. “Astrothunder” ripples with contributions from Thundercat and John Mayer, the former dialing back his frenetic jazz-funk to a percolating crawl, while “Stop Trying to Be God” plays host to the record’s most involved vocal take from Scott, with wistful harmonica lines (courtesy of Stevie Wonder) and swirling keys surrounding his voice. The album is dotted with sonic intricacies throughout—fluttering guitar lines, showy samples (the deathless hook of Uncle Luke’s “I Wanna Rock (Doo Doo Brown)” on “Sicko Mode”), enough gooey synths to fill a share-sized Milky Way—providing a Magic Eye-level of texture: It might all seem the same from afar, but blur your perspective just enough and the details reveal themselves. The lovely “R.I.P. Screw” and the haunted-house dirge “5% Tint” were both handled by frequent Scott collaborator FKi 1st, who is also known for his work alongside pop’s unlikely megastar-of-the-moment, Post Malone. It’s tempting to draw parallels between Malone and Scott: Both are hotly contested figures in or adjacent to rap who possess massive young audiences and occasionally dabble in sounds associated with nascent early-2010s indie trends like witch house and chillwave. But regardless of how you feel about him, Malone is an unmistakable presence on his songs, his otherworldly croon an essential element to his genre-hopping sound. Despite the considerable leaps in quality taken on Astroworld, it still doesn’t feel like Scott can muster that level of individuality. The fact that Drake’s verse on “Sicko Mode” (leagues better than most of his own turgid recent album Scorpion) has proved the most meme-able and headline-grabbing Astroworld moment speaks volumes about Drake’s too-big-to-fail pop dominance and Scott’s ability to get overshadowed on even his strongest tracks. Elsewhere, the blurred line between drawing from influence and straight-up facsimile continues to nip at Scott’s heels, as he borrows from Kanye’s worst lyrical impulses throughout, at one point positing over the toy-piano kaleidoscope-pop of “Skeletons”: “If you take your girl out, do you expect sex?/If she take her titties out, do you expect checks?” Kanye’s influence carries through to the very end of Astroworld with closing track “Coffee Bean,” a rumination with dusty production courtesy of Nineteen85 that strongly mirrors the sound and flow of The Life of Pablo’s similarly downbeat, soul-searching “30 Hours.” (Placing this uncharacteristically personal track at the album’s very end also yet again elicits visions of Drake, who’s often saved the most diaristic moments for his projects’ final moments.) It’s on “Coffee Bean” that Scott reflects on his recent and seemingly unexpected parenthood with Kylie Jenner, obliquely addressing his complicated feelings on the matter: “Your family told you I’m a bad move/Plus, I’m already a black dude.” It’s a fascinating, somewhat jarring moment of introspection on an album where Scott is otherwise content—intentionally or not—to play ringmaster to his neon-decayed circus of sound rather than become the main attraction.

2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Epic / Cactus Jack

August 7, 2018

025ea301-ebe5-46f6-84c9-dbc0b25268b5

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

Beyoncé’s seventh album is not just a pop star’s immaculate dance record, but a rich celebration of club music and its sweaty, emancipatory spirit.

Beyoncé’s seventh album is not just a pop star’s immaculate dance record, but a rich celebration of club music and its sweaty, emancipatory spirit.

Beyoncé: Renaissance

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beyonce-renaissance/

Renaissance

Over the last decade, every Beyoncé project has become an integral part of a larger Beyoncé Project. Though she hasn’t released a proper studio album since 2016’s sprawling visual statement Lemonade, she’s made a film (Black Is King), released a collaborative record with her husband Jay-Z (Everything Is Love), lent her voice to a Disney film (The Lion King), dropped a series of singles, and masterminded her sportswear line Ivy Park—all while making clear that she’s intensely focused on celebrating the long legacy of Black musicians and artists, of which she is a part and beacon. Her global reach is a reminder that Beyoncé, the billionaire pop icon, does not and could not exist in a vacuum. Recall 2019’s Homecoming, the live album and concert movie documenting her vaunted “Beychella” festival set, in which she indelibly framed her entire discography within the larger history of contemporary Black American performance. By centering her music within the context of HBCU culture, incorporating a massive marching band, a step show, and J-setting choreography, she delivered a tectonic performance that also ensured all her fans would see the lineage of Black art receive the credit it’s due. And when the pandemic hit, Beyoncé caught on to what her fans missed most: the unfettered joy of gathering together in the club, rolling face and sweating as a collective body. As our biggest pop stars increasingly turn to dance music for inspiration, Beyoncé focused her famous work ethic on the nuances of club culture for a challenging, densely-referenced album that runs circles around her similarly minded, Billboard-charting peers. For nearly a decade she has made pop music on her own terms, uninterested in the dusty edicts of the music industry and pointed about her intended audience; now pop fans bend to Beyoncé, not the other way around. Beyoncé is hooked on the feeling of self-expression. In the liner notes posted on her website, she writes that Renaissance, her seventh solo album and “Act I” of a mysterious trilogy, is a “safe place, a place without judgment… a place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking.” In turn she pays homage to the true safe places for many of her fans, celebrating the clubs made by and for Black women and queer people, Black Chicagoans and Detroiters and New Yorkers who created house and techno, Black and Latinx ball and kiki houses. Inside Renaissance’s vast tent, there’s a safe place at the roller rink (“Virgo’s Groove”), at the disco (“Summer Renaissance”), at the subwoofer contest (“America Has a Problem”), at Freaknik (“Thique”), in church, at the NOLA hole-in-the-wall hosting the bounce party after church, at the ball in the Harlem community center, right underneath the basketball hoops. She’s under a strobe, flipping her hair, twirling that ass like she came up out the South, as she raps on the ebullient “Church Girl,” praying to god over a Clark Sisters sample and then squaring the propriety on a Trigger Man beat, bussing it with the godly state of being “born free.” Renaissance is a feat of imagination, daydreaming about partying in the pandemic, capturing the feeling of thinking about all the places you wish you could have gone when you were just stuck in the crib. Unlike Lemonade or 2013’s Beyoncé, Renaissance sticks to the dancefloor—no ballads or breakup paeans, just pure energy, propulsive BPMs, and fuck-’em-all strut. The love songs are almost entirely aimed inward, to the self and her crew, and the songs about a “boy” are underpinned with a libidinous frankness. (Beyoncé has never been this horny in public.) Release your job, sure—if you can afford it; Beyoncé is her own boss, after all—but most importantly, revel in who you are. She dedicates the album to her “godmother,” Uncle Jonny, who died of complications stemming from HIV, and to the “pioneers who originate culture… the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized for far too long.” She enlists Grace Jones, Sheila E., Nile Rodgers; samples Teena Marie, Chicago house artist Lidell Townsell, and Atlanta rapper Kilo Ali; belts with abandon and fealty to styles from the 1970s through the 1990s that signify a loose writing process, implying the notorious perfectionist meant what she said. Maybe Beyoncé and her extensive array of producers and co-writers, which includes mainstream names like Raphael Saadiq and The-Dream as well as more underground artists like the Black trans DJ/producer Honey Dijon and the Dominican musician and visual artist Kelman Duran, spent the last two years digging in the crates. It’s hard to imagine that Beyoncé’s been able to go to the kinds of clubs celebrated on Renaissance since, say, 1999. Maybe she joined one of the copious DJ sets streamed on Zoom and Twitch in 2020 with a burner account, as many of us were dreaming of people outlined by wisps of a fog machine, craving sound-system affirmations that we were still corporeal entities too. Renaissance is inherently about bodies undulating in the dark, under strobes; sexual agency; and the Black queer and trans women who are both politicized and the most endangered people among us. As physical movement was necessarily constrained during pandemic isolation, the dissociative effects of being unseen became both detrimental and liberating. Renaissance is a commanding prescription to be perceived again, without judgment. Listening to the album, you can feel the synapses coming back together one by one, basking in the unfamiliar sensation of feeling good, if only for its hour-long duration. Dance music necessarily centers on the immediate present—the seconds ticking along during the transcendent act of unleashing on a dancefloor—but it thrives on the fluidity of sampling, of elder respect, and of reimagining classic sounds to invent the new. (Renaissance has approximately 100,000 credits thanks to all the samples and many tiny contributions from artists and friends.) This is how we get PC Music proprietor A. G. Cook and Lady Gaga’s go-to producer BloodPop on a low-key love song deconstructing techno (“All Up in My Mind”), and how Skrillex ended up doing Afrobeats through a ketamine filter (“Energy”) with Bey drawling lyrics so minimal and onomatopoeic they exist mostly in service to the vibe, a melodic extension of percussion. This approach is perhaps better than in other places, where the lyrics are jarring enough to disrupt the ambiance, like when she raps, “You said you outside but you ain’t that outside” in the middle of the house single “Break My Soul.” But in general, she adheres to the sweaty demands of club music, singing and rapping to the carnal id. In contrast to past albums, her emotion here is devoted to looking good, dancing good, and fucking good. (Though her propensity for sexual detail à la “Drunk in Love” continues apace; call me if you can figure out how to get over “Motorboat, baby, spin around” on “Virgo’s Groove.”) Beyoncé’s focus on dance music extends to Renaissance’s samples, where she lets her intent speak through the art of her predecessors. The stunning “Pure/Honey” alone braids together decades of ballroom, taking samples from ’90s club hits by drag icons: Kevin Aviance’s hit “Cunty,” from 1996, and Moi Renee’s “Miss Honey,” from 1992. It also nabs a bit from “Feels Like,” a 2012 track by MikeQ, legendary ball DJ and DJ for HBO’s Legendary, and Kevin Jz Prodigy, the ball commentator and musician whose vocals—“cunt to the feminine what”—lead the song. The production on “Feels Like” builds on the work of Vjuan Allure, who passed in 2021, and who pioneered the sound of contemporary vogue fem ballroom by reworking what’s known as the “Ha” from Masters at Work’s seminal “The Ha Dance,” from 1991, which has long been a voguing staple, but was originally meant for b-boys in Latin clubs. That’s years of history in just one song, and just one magnifying-glass example of the ways Beyoncé uses Renaissance to put some respect on these club legends’ names. But it’s also part of Beyoncé’s deep appreciation for the sprawling tapestry of Black music and culture throughout pop history. She is positioning herself as an archivist, and also just flexing her true music-nerd passions with more disregard for preconceived notions of marketability—and label returns—since the indubitable B’Day. On “I’m That Girl,” Tommy Wright III and Princess Loko’s “Still Pimpin” are placed upon the ghost of a dembow riddim, threading Shabba Ranks to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic via Kelman Duran. The deep house track “Cozy” features two Black trans women—Honey Dijon and actor Ts Madison—and seems to be a dedication to trans self-determination (“Might I suggest you don’t fuck with my sis”). “Alien Superstar” channels Vanity 6 as an old-way house anthem. The end of “Heated,” a pulsing Afrobeats track with some of her silkiest vocals on the album, finds her commentating in a vocal register that, at points, barely scans as Beyoncé, embodying the growl and propulsion of the runway. In the 2018 book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, professor and musician Madison Moore captures the innovation of certain queer aesthetics: “The fact that beautiful eccentrics put themselves on the line every day despite the odds shows how important they are not only as aesthetic geniuses but political activists too.” Beyoncé, of course, has a gigantic bank account and a team of people to help her look extravagant—“It should cost a billion to look that good/But she make it look easy ’cause she got it,” as she vamps on “Pure/Honey”—and to make the kind of fantasy she’s crafted on Renaissance plausible, from the Swarovski-encrusted imagery to the refinement of the album’s song choices. But using her global proscenium to showcase the work of marginalized people, as the political and legal scapegoating of their existences ramps up to a terrifying degree—including draconian legislation in her home state of Texas—is important, even a rejoinder to 2014’s big FEMINIST sign moment, a subtle kiss-off to people who’ve made vilifying trans women a cornerstone of their feminism by making space for all sorts of femme expression. Renaissance reinvents Beyoncé again, and she trusts that her fans will be up for the challenge. She is 40 years old, the age society at large tends to start writing women artists (and women in general) off as creatives who still have something to offer, but she refuses to submit to that bullshit, making herself impossible to ignore. “I’ve been up, I’ve been down,” she sings on “Church Girl,” “Felt like I move mountains/Got friends that cried fountains.” It’s the most plaintive moment on the album, and then, in full Beyoncé fashion, she comes back more determinedly: “I’m gonna love on me. Nobody can judge me but me.” It’s a transcendent, beautiful, deceptively simple moment. She extends a diamond-encrusted, gloved hand—an invitation to a better kind of party.

2022-08-01T00:03:00.000-04:00

2022-08-01T00:03:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country / Pop/R&B

Parkwood Entertainment / Columbia

August 1, 2022

025faa80-595d-4c56-8e2c-19daf256306a

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/

The legendary no wave band honors late drummer Dee Pop on a mournful album of sludgy post-punk.

The legendary no wave band honors late drummer Dee Pop on a mournful album of sludgy post-punk.

Bush Tetras: They Live in My Head

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bush-tetras-they-live-in-my-head/

They Live in My Head

Like Mission of Burma or Minor Threat, Bush Tetras are a band whose influence vastly exceeds the quantity of their initial output. They shaped the no wave scene of the early 1980s, made Thurston Moore envious, and scored an unlikely underground hit with a twitchy and radical panic attack called “Too Many Creeps.” Yet they never released a proper album until 1997’s Beauty Lies. Such a late-blooming trajectory instills each successive album with unusual weight: They’re not making music out of any sense of obligation, but because they still have something to say. Even in 2023—as their influence reaches a new generation of talky post-punk upstarts—Bush Tetras are still writing their legacy. The underground New York band was fêted with a career-spanning box set in 2021, but a month before its release, longtime drummer Dee Pop died at 65. Eventually, the surviving musicians recruited former Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan and ex-Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley to flesh out the lineup. Aiming to honor Pop’s memory, they completed They Live in My Head, their first album in over a decade, with Shelley also serving as producer. The mood is somber yet defiant. Stormy waves of distortion bring a spectral air to “Ghosts of People,” a brooding reflection on the band’s early days in downtown New York. Lead singer Cynthia Sley summons “Ghosts of people/I used to know/Hairdos made at home,” but these fragmented glimpses of youth don’t stave off mortality: “Crave more time/Get nothing done!” Sley repeats at the climax, aware that punk survival is inextricably linked with grief. “Tout Est Meilleur” goes for careening, blues-addled punk, with Sley yearning in French for community and connection amid lockdown. The other standout, “Things I Put Together,” makes cryptic reference to some crisis or health scare. “They said I wasn’t worthy/Ever, no never,” Sley wails as Pat Place’s wandering guitar squalls push toward redemption. The track resembles a soulful spin on late-era Sonic Youth. Inspired as they were by Bush Tetras, Sonic Youth were not a particularly groove-driven band, and They Live in My Head does not attempt to replicate the spiky funk backbeat of Bush Tetras’s ’80s classics. The sound is thicker, heavier; a sludgy post-punk roar consumes tracks like “I Am Not a Member” and “Bird on a Wire” (not the Leonard Cohen one). Sley sings where she once chanted and yelped, her lyrics more reflective than surreal. “Rest assured, there will be no peace/Until I render myself complete,” she declares during the roiling closer, “The End.” If They Live in My Head lacks the woozy danceability of vintage Tetras, it doesn’t skimp on the political bite. But the most topical song, “2020 Vision,” doesn’t quite transcend the corniness of its title, hinging on vague platitudes (“Looking back on 2020/All I know it’s been a journey”) and references to mansplaining. On songs like this, these punk legends could easily be mistaken for some buzzy new group of no wave-inspired 27-year-olds. That doesn’t mean that Bush Tetras have fallen behind—just that the rest of the punk scene is finally starting to catch up.

2023-08-08T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-08-08T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

Wharf Cat

August 8, 2023

025ffcbb-854a-40a2-b631-d319a0fc1b10

Zach Schonfeld

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

Try to picture the rock scene in 1974, when Bruce Springsteen started writing and recording the album that would thrust him into the national consciousness. Elvis had hit merely 18 years prior; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles had died or called it quits only three or four years earlier. Bob Dylan had been at it for a while and potentially seemed dated, though he was still only 33. The weight of pop music history was something that could be shrugged off, and with so much unexplored territory, bands felt an obligation to see where rock music

Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7728-born-to-run-30th-anniversary-edition/

Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition

Try to picture the rock scene in 1974, when Bruce Springsteen started writing and recording the album that would thrust him into the national consciousness. Elvis had hit merely 18 years prior; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles had died or called it quits only three or four years earlier. Bob Dylan had been at it for a while and potentially seemed dated, though he was still only 33. The weight of pop music history was something that could be shrugged off, and with so much unexplored territory, bands felt an obligation to see where rock music might yet go. In this environment Springsteen was just 24, still a kid; he'd been hailed as the New Dylan and had recorded two quirky albums but he wasn't a star. He had talent and ambition in equal measure but the thing that would put him over was his vision. Springsteen believed like no one else in the power and possibility of rock, which led him to places that seem strange and maybe even awkward to those who grew up with MTV and everything punk came to symbolize. His naïve but inspiring outlook found its purist expression in Born to Run, which Columbia has now reissued in a deluxe 30th Anniversary Edition packaged with two feature films-- one documentary and one concert-- on DVD. Born to Run is a distinctive record, even in the Springsteen canon. Its world is one of impossibly romantic hyperrealism, where the mundane easily becomes fantastic, and it all happens line by line. Picture the depressed state of the Jersey Shore in the early 70s, the dull sense of an era gone, and then check Springsteen's description in the title track: "The amusement park rises bold and stark and kids are huddled on the beach in the mist." This could have been a couple of bored teenagers sitting on a bench bullshitting, but with Springsteen's imagery, some glockenspiel, and a deep sax drone, it's transformed into filmic splendor. The next phrase ups the ante: "I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss." From one angle it's the kind of line that can make you wince, at best a silly emo cliché. The way Springsteen sang it in 1974, it wasn't a dorky diary confessional; it was unhinged expressionism, Kerouac with a bottle of red wine in his stomach. While everyone was zoning out in front of the TV this scruffy dude saw an opera out on the turnpike and a ballet being fought in the alley. He wants to know if love is wild and real, he says, but reality isn't a particularly useful concept in the context of this record. A masterpiece Born to Run may be, but only on its own terms. Springsteen at this point didn't know much about women or relationships ("She's the One" is powerful and catchy but fails as a portrait of an actual person) but he had an instinct for drama, and his stories focus on plot and circumstance rather than character. Nearly every song touches on the central mythical image of the rock'n'roll era, the ideas of escape and abandon. The protagonist in "Thunder Road" thinks everything will change if he can make it out of town. The workers in "Night" suppress their daily rage by disappearing into a dark theater of sex after the whistle blows. Conflicts are all man vs. environment and man vs. society; Springsteen would get around to man vs. himself later, after he'd settled down and lived a little more. The size extends to the sound, greatly improved on this reissue with the first wholesale remastering since it was first released on CD. Phil Spector was a well-known obsession of Springsteen's at the time, a logical complement to the room-sized thematic canvas he'd stretched. "Jungleland" and "Backstreets" are famously epic, but shorter songs like "Thunder Road" and "She's the One" seem constructed as mini-suites, with tinkly intros building to immense climaxes. The title track was Springsteen's "Good Vibrations", toiled over endlessly in the studio and smothered with endless layers of god knows what before finally being abandoned, flawed and perfect, to the loving arms of radio. His voice would never sound quite this strong again-- perhaps he never pushed it as hard-- and the slap-echo trailing a split second behind adds to the effect. The first DVD, a complete 1975 show from the Hammersmith Odeon, is a major find. For someone like me who never got over the disappointment of only one song from 1975 on the Live 1975-85 box, this film is a revelation. The opening piano and harmonica version of "Thunder Road" is the scene setter, with a dim spotlight on Springsteen alone on a darkened stage and Roy Bittan playing somewhere behind. When the rest of the band joins him they have a ball, with a performance in turns earnest, theatrical, melodramatic, and clowning. It's an absolutely essential item in the Springsteen discography. Wings for Wheels, the VH-1-ish documentary on the making of the record, is a third too long and will be of only marginal interest for anyone other than committed fans, but there's still something important here. If you can get past the repetitive and fawning testimonials from the band, producers, manager, etc., there's a wealth of information about the technical process of the album, with demonstrations of how songs evolved over time. Hearing the various parts of the dense "Born to Run" picked apart, for example, just the acoustic guitar or saxophone isolated, is like a mini course on how songs are mixed. There's also Springsteen's own commentary on the songs-- what they mean and how he wrote them-- which is interesting if not always consistent with how I hear the record. When he says toward the end of the film that Born to Run was "the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom-- it was the dividing line," it seems to me he's exactly wrong. A dividing line may be visible, but Born to Run lies entirely on the dreamy and reckless side of maturity and is all the better for it. Every young person should be so lucky, to have a time in his or her life when the inflated romanticism of Born to Run makes perfect sense.

2005-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00

2005-11-18T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Columbia

November 18, 2005

0262b417-f8dd-41b4-8063-e96a87919b7e

Mark Richardson

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

The charismatic 20-year-old Bay Area rapper Nef the Pharaoh gained momentum mostly through creatively covering classic beats and delivering crisp neighborhood pride anthems. This six-song EP showcases his pop prowess and adaptability, offering stabs in a variety of promising directions.

The charismatic 20-year-old Bay Area rapper Nef the Pharaoh gained momentum mostly through creatively covering classic beats and delivering crisp neighborhood pride anthems. This six-song EP showcases his pop prowess and adaptability, offering stabs in a variety of promising directions.

Nef the Pharaoh: Nef the Pharaoh EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21255-nef-the-pharaoh-ep/

Nef the Pharaoh EP

The odds tend to permanently be stacked against San Francisco-area rap artists, exportability-wise. Even the undisputed legends of the area have never become true household names outside of their home state—Too $hort, E-40, and Mac Dre. It’s a disheartening trend, but it’s easy to theorize about why the pattern has continued for decades. In general, Bay artists tend to like staying independent and favoring sometimes-indigestible levels of prolificacy over carefully curated releases. They also build off of their region’s existing musical traditions — sticking to their corner rather than trying to reinvent the sound of the genre. There always seems to be a gold standard of slapper already in mind—for well over a decade, it’s hinged on a handclap snare, a thin kick beating out Morse code, and a foghorn bass lick—and targeted at all times. Charismatic 20-year-old Vallejo up-and-comer Nef the Pharaoh also holds these truths to be self-evident, and basically fits the usual bill of a regional Bay star. The young rapper gained momentum mostly through creatively covering classic beats—a swaggy flip of Nas’ "Oochie Wally"—and delivering crisp neighborhood pride anthems: Last year’s muted "Bitch I’m From Vallejo" turned the heads of local hero Cousin Fik and his mentor and labelhead E-40. Nef’s first release for 40’s Sick Wid It Records is also full of stylistic references and hat-tips, though—perhaps surprisingly for a Bay MC—mostly to idols from far outside San Francisco. Quotes from classic '90s Cash Money Records singles structured his January single "Big Tymin’", and the influence of this kind of music weighs heavily on the entire EP. "Boss Me" is based around a sing-songy bounce cadence, and Nef recycles Juvenile’s "Ha" line construction on his Auto-Tune-riddled twerking ode "Meantime". Nef is contributing to what seems to be a mini-trend in post-hyphy rap toward turn-of-the-millenium Southern music these days: His tourmate, collaborator, and Heartbreak Gang sideman Kool John regularly bites Hot Boys flows (his most recent single with Joe Moses interpolates 2002 Big Tymers hit "Get Your Roll On"), L.A. affiliate Problem notably interpolated Master P and Young Bleed, and Juvenile himself hopped on the popular remix to fellow HBKer Iamsu!’s strip club anthem "100 Grand". If Kool John likes to play the Juve or Mannie role, the less laconic Nef favors Wayne. Just when the likeness starts to become eerie, Nef backs off and switches hats, always with an overtly comic, lightly ironic timing, like he’s carrying off an elaborately plotted series of pranks. His verses pit in-and-out-of-phase, cartoonish rambling (à la his mentor and labelhead E-40) against lilting but controlled double-time. Snap-jumps between simpering bad boy posturing in his high range ("Trips to Rome, shrimps and calzones/ I’m always outta range, I’ma text you when I get home"), a more intimidating low purr, and a diplomatic, Drake-ian midrange (see introspective closer "Come Pick Me Up") give his verses a character-driven quality that's almost Jim Carrey-esque. Luckily, this isn't a When Nature Calls scenario; Nef’s sensibility isn't exhausting. The rapper can embody the obnoxious neighborhood bully, the smoothest game-spitter in school, and a conscientious father in one song all without spoiling the mood, or upstaging the beat. The flow and intonation shifts as Nef pans between scenes: after-shift rendezvous with strippers, hustling rituals encrypted in dense slang, and more bald-faced, confessional anecdotes. He tends to pick simple governing metaphors and pushes them to logical but satisfying conclusions—in the marimba-studded nu-G-funk strut "Michael Jackson", most effectively, he uses an extended King of Pop metaphor to forge an elaborate tribute to designer shoe shopping. This six-song EP does not provide a definitive answer on whether Nef is just an effective conduit for great party songs, or if he’s got a voice that’s resonant enough for a full career of albums and features. It’s a bunch of stabs in promising directions—a more ambitious extension of his earlier YouTube drops and his #RichBy25 mixtape. Success is ensured on the EP by the neighborhood heroes he’s got supporting him: rising talent June on Da Beat, G-Funk wizard and indispensible area talent scout DJ Fresh, and P-Lo, HBK’s more baroque answer to DJ Mustard. Even in the Bay—which, from Mac Dre to Shady Nate to Husalah, has birthed an untold amount of slickness—charm as strong and effortless as Nef’s doesn’t come along everyday. He may slide into other people’s flows so well that you lose track of him for a moment, but the style and grace with which he ducks and weaves between them imbues everything he does with personality. His brand of unfailingly zany energy has characterized the best hip-hop of his region for decades, and Nef’s never been ashamed to acknowledge it ("Mac motherfucking Dre lives in me," he claims at the beginning of last year’s "M.A.C."). He’s pretty good at making anything sound cool, and maybe even cleverer than it is. See his song-stealing verse on DJ Mustard's "You Know It" from earlier this year, which closes out with: "Money on my mind like a headband/ Fucking with my ‘fetti, you a dead man/ Shoot him in his chest, watch his head split/ Every day I make a band and never play the instrument." What he has that many of his local peers don’t is a consistent ear for hooks, a willingness to play the field stylistically without outpacing himself, and a precision of purpose. "In the land of the lost, I’m the nigga to win," he claims on "Mobbin". With industry cosigns, a "Big Tymin’" remix from Cali-stars-turned-national-influencers Ty Dolla $ign and YG (included here) and a national tour with the latter under his belt, Nef has a rare entry point for success beyond Solano County. If this EP is any indication, he may also have the pop prowess and adaptability to make the most of it.

2015-11-17T01:00:03.000-05:00

2015-11-17T01:00:03.000-05:00

Rap

Sick Wid It

November 17, 2015

0262f415-22f8-43c2-86ca-7de0eefdde75

Winston Cook-Wilson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/

The Cairo electronic linchpin at last combines his kinetic production and hip-hop acumen in quick blasts that delightfully warp the words of some of Egypt’s best rappers.

The Cairo electronic linchpin at last combines his kinetic production and hip-hop acumen in quick blasts that delightfully warp the words of some of Egypt’s best rappers.

ZULI: Terminal

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zuli-terminal/

Terminal

In 2015, Cairo producer Ahmed El Ghazoly unapologetically summarized the false binary of his city’s club scene: “DJ culture is synonymous with, you know, bad artists,” he told Resident Advisor. “They don’t get that dance music can be art.” El Ghazoly is a vital part of crucial Egyptian club nights like VENT and JellyZone, but his own productions straddle different worlds. Under the handle of Swag Lee, he has provided an array of Jeep-quaking beats for Arabic MCs. And as ZULI, he makes the type of frenzied techno that has wormed its way into the audacious sets of Lee Gamble, Machine Woman, and Aphex Twin. With Terminal, his debut full-length as ZULI for Gamble’s UIQ imprint, he finally brings together his dizzying electronic productions and hip-hop acumen, creating two- to four-minute blasts that constantly challenge, overwhelm, and confound. See, for instance, “Nari,” a wicked posse cut full of tectonic bass and haboob-level noise. If you can’t parse Arabic, no worries: By design, ZULI renders it as indecipherable, anyway, scrambling the signals of the acclaimed MC Abyusif and up-and-coming cyphers like Mado $am, Abanob, and R-Rhyme into a blur of garbled words and trap snares. When they reconvene for the Auto-Tuned R&B of “Ana Ghayeb,” they come through clearly, each verse addressing heartbreak against a cresting synth backdrop. One of Egypt’s more prominent hip-hop artists, Abyusif graces five of Terminal’s tracks. While he’s rendered into noise on the opener, he cuts through the din and the lackadaisical beat of “Archimedes,” his flow conversational and peppered with staccato accents, a little like MF DOOM’s abstraction. He sounds similarly surefooted amid the stop-and-start hi-hats, motorbike noise, and alien throbs of “Akhtuboot.” As he references designer Roberto Cavalli, Pinocchio, and multiple synonyms for “confusion,” his voice moves through all manner of processors. Even without a rapper on the track, ZULI’s fractured production style mimics their flows. During “Bump,” El Ghazoly matches the speedy flow of a grime MC, juggling and slurring beats and buzzing bass while mincing a voice that croaks “rude boy.” He strews the IDM-esque “Wreck” with all sorts of aural shrapnel, as Uzi bass and disembodied voices whiplash in and out of earshot. But starting with the haunting swells of centerpiece “Kollu l-Joloud,” the album starts to open up and allow for more space. Across the album’s back half, the pyrotechnics even give way to nuanced etudes full of enticing sound design and melting structures. He smears voices and strings across “Follow Your Breath,” while “In Your Head” mixes piano with vespers. Terminal’s dense beat tracks suggest the manic streets of Cairo, but tracks like these reveal ZULI’s interiority. ZULI juggles techno, garage, grime, modern R&B, noise, and future bass throughout Terminal,each element soon dissolving into the whole. Not once does this feel like flashy grandstanding or forced eclecticism. If anything, it feels like his attempt to make these many fractured subgenres and scenes cohere. “In a world that feels like it’s regressing into tribalism,” he has said, “many of us who don’t fit into any one specific group identity feel sidelined at best.” Whether you hear this as a statement album from a bright new electronic producer or a showcase for Egypt’s risk-taking rap scene, it’s a head-nodding and brain-boggling work of art.

2018-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

UIQ

November 28, 2018

02649fd1-c1f9-4db7-a6fd-26433400f528

Andy Beta

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

A collaboration between Will Oldham and his longtime pal, former Chavez and Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney.

A collaboration between Will Oldham and his longtime pal, former Chavez and Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy / Matt Sweeney: Superwolf

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/703-superwolf/

Superwolf

In "My Home Is the Sea", Bonnie "Prince" Billy, voice thin and impossibly brittle, conveys proud love for his bulbous tummy, gleefully declaring it "round and firm and funny"-- just like him! Sardonic or not, this kind of belly-speak marks a rare moment of self-revelation for Will Oldham, who skewers accepted notions of static identity nearly every time he lowers his big, bearded jaw. Still, Oldham (appearing here as contemporary alter-ego Bonnie "Prince" Billy) is, ultimately, exactly what he says he is-- smart and tough and weird, an awkward, oddly charismatic songwriter just as well-suited to coughing up death-ballads as he is to giggling out ditties about his penis. Witness, again, the bitter joy of loyal Oldham-hood: He is simultaneously quiet and loud, both crushing and absurd, and filed in seven different places at the record store. Superwolf, a new collaboration with guitar freelancer Matt Sweeney, sees Oldham at his squirrely best, squeaking out his finest songs since 1999's I See a Darkness. Superwolf marks Oldham's first official partnership with Sweeney, whose credits include a predictably brief stint axe-grinding in Billy Corgan's Zwan (alongside longtime Oldham buddy and Slint-forefather Dave Pajo), occasionally playing guitar in Guided by Voices, and fronting the long-departed Chavez (who released two revered full-lengths on Matador in the mid-90s). Sweeney's participation in Superwolf was supposedly a response to a songwriting "challenge" from Oldham, and in addition to songwriting, Sweeney contributes backing vocals and guitar figures that echo Oldham's own blows, sometimes with eerie accuracy. But despite all that buddying up, Superwolf is still at times unnervingly spare-- Oldham and Sweeney's pauses can be devastating, and some of Superwolf's most powerfully convincing bits pop up between notes. Opener "My Home Is the Sea" may sound an awful lot like late Grateful Dead (or, perhaps more specifically, like a slightly less raucous version of brother Ned Oldham's Anomoanon, who regularly employ Garcia-brand noodling and wild, space-rock somersaults), but most of Superwolf is quiet and intensely meditative, despite Sweeney's significant rock-inflections. Still, Oldham has always had a funny habit of inserting perverse, quasi-sexual shouts into otherwise-staid songs (see brutally confessional couplets rubbing up against phrases like "my horny horn"), and at least thematically, Superwolf's eleven tracks are predictably shifty-- "My Home Is the Sea" is rife with snarky lyric tricks (watch Oldham follow the momentarily devastating "I have often said/ That I would like to be dead" with a tiny pause and silent giggle, finally finishing with: "In a shark's mouth"). No matter who or what he calls himself, Will Oldham has always been uniquely capable of making colossal leaps in tone between breaths, and from track to track Superwolf nobly maintains that practice, drifting gracefully from classic-rock stomps to whispery dirges. Consequently, Oldham followers may recognize Superwolf as a welcome midway point between Oldham's past aliases, as it hops from shambling, Viva Last Blues-ish, Palace Music-era shakes to dark, Master and Everyone haunts. "Beast for Thee" matches a gorgeous, barely-there melody with self-deflating lyrics ("Why are you kind to me?/ You could so easily take me in your arms and see/ A donkey"), Oldham's quivering pipes and Sweeney's fragile guitar coalescing into a soft, droning, and tremendously pretty whole. The equally excellent "Blood Embrace" features some of Oldham's heartiest vocals, each word strong and full, floating above dark electric guitar swirls, dodging film samples of a faithless woman whispering to an unnamed lover, crafting an atmosphere so tense and ominous that you almost can't help twisting your face around to peep over your shoulder. Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine. Oldham and Sweeney mew coquettishly, stroking their guitars, cawing bizarre stories about love, death, and body parts: theirs is a rancid and beautiful landscape.

2005-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

2005-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

Folk/Country / Rock

Drag City

January 31, 2005

0268734e-453f-42ac-a495-4d86c530dd7a

Amanda Petrusich

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

Steered by his nasally voice and laid-back delivery, one of the original members of Team Eastside delivers a no-frills, 25-track Detroit rap album.

Steered by his nasally voice and laid-back delivery, one of the original members of Team Eastside delivers a no-frills, 25-track Detroit rap album.

Damedot: The Umbrella Again

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damedot-the-umbrella-again/

The Umbrella Again

If someone wanted to get the gist of Detroit rap, a link to Damedot’s YouTube channel would do the job. He was one of the original members of Team Eastside (which also included Peezy and Babyface Ray), an influential Detroit crew formed more than a decade ago that, along with Doughboyz Cashout and more, helped pave the way for the city’s current wave. Growing up, Damedot, with his mom, listened to the generation of Detroit rap that came before his; names like Street Lord Juan, Blade Icewood, Tone Tone, the Eastside Chedda Boyz, and more. It’s a musical foundation that comes up again and again during online interviews with the city’s biggest names, the lack of influence from outside trends and movements has kept the scene’s sound so singular. Damedot’s newest tape The Umbrella Again is no-frills Detroit rap. Steered by his nasally voice, a delivery laid back like a consigliere in a tailored suit, and the repeated use of a Meadow Soprano clip, he raps almost exclusively about getting money, expensive fashion, sleeping around, and slinging dope up and down the Midwest, over pounding 808s, ominous piano melodies, and a splash of Motown soul. At 25 tracks, it’s a lot—but only four songs run over three minutes, most hover around two, and the hooks bleed right into the verses. You can breeze through it like a beach read. There’s no clear standout track or moment on the album, but there are little things that make the best songs click. Usually, it’s when the lyrics are detailed enough that they create a scenario so implausible that it’s hilarious. On “Cocomelon,” he bonds with his toddler son as they watch nursery rhymes and count up 100 racks. His Balenciaga boots are so impractical he can barely walk in them on “Cold Shoulder.” He claims to order lamb chops without even looking at the menu (chaotic behavior) on “Lemme See.” “Dior” fires on all cylinders; from the sputtering drums to Damedot seemingly listing every purchase on his bank statement down to the $60 Uber ride. “Chrome Hearts,” with its dramatic thunderstorm intro, doomsday pianos, and Dame’s menacing punchlines, sounds like it could backdrop the final fight in a gloomy martial arts movie. Damedot’s more romantic side, if you can call it that, is mostly him ogling at asses and hitting on bottle girls. The beats are still steady, but he writes like he’s auditioning to be the next C-plot on Love & Hip Hop; lots of talk about Casamigos, Fashion Nova, and even a track titled “Likes on Instagram.” The worst is when he starts to play around with AutoTune, his use of it on “Funny” is unimaginative like a lifeless Money Man. His voice sounds cool and distinct without it; luckily, it’s only a couple of songs. But for the most part, there are no twists or surprises on The Umbrella Again, and while that won’t make anyone scramble for their phone to give it a spin, that’s not a bad thing. It’s rap completely in its own bubble, made specifically to appeal to anyone with the slightest interest in Detroit or mafioso rap, and done well at that. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Forever Gutta / Empire

February 1, 2022

026dd066-49b8-4524-aaaa-03675a78a5b4

Alphonse Pierre

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

Instead of focusing on the micro, painstakingly stitching together each track second-by-second, Autechre's latest album grew out of jamming, with Sean Booth and Rob Brown reconfiguring and "versioning" elements of their formidable live show into new tunes.

Instead of focusing on the micro, painstakingly stitching together each track second-by-second, Autechre's latest album grew out of jamming, with Sean Booth and Rob Brown reconfiguring and "versioning" elements of their formidable live show into new tunes.

Autechre: Quaristice

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11245-quaristice/

Quaristice

There was a time in the late 1990s when Autechre embodied one way of thinking about music's future. Producers exploring the infinite possibilities of increasingly complex software were creating new sounds on an almost weekly basis. Autechre were recognized as the leading edge of this clan. Their music, while not always alien in terms of texture-- they've often favored timbres that reference electro and early techno in one way or another-- was difficult to get a handle on; the beats were hard to follow; the spaces in which the music breathed impossible to define. Music this strange was only possibly through accelerating technology, and you got the idea that Autechre's music would continue to accelerate in parallel. They were pioneers. One of the ironies of Autechre a decade on is that they still more or less occupy the same position, while trends in experimental music have drifted elsewhere. While some laptop producers began to think about songs again-- working with vocalists, putting their own spin on krautrock, or seeing how shoegaze might sound coming through a computer-- a younger generation came at abstraction in an analog frame of mind. They began with crude electronics, incorporated tribal metaphors, and forewent the beautiful pure math of the circuit board for the messy concerns of the body; instead of shaved heads, they sported wild hair and beards and maybe a bit of face paint. I thought of these contrasts with regard to Quaristice, Autechre's first new album in three years, when listening to "The Plc", the album's second track, which follows the ghostly synth-drone opener "Altibzz". "The Plc"'s reference point is electro-- the stiff and mannered snare drum, seemingly fashioned from tin, marks every measure robotically. But swirling around the steady-state beat are a number of odd sounds that lend a decidedly psychedelic cast. In purely sonic terms, it's not all that far from something like Excepter in their more beat-oriented mode, but Autechre's way of getting there couldn't be more different, and process is in part what defines them. Autechre's research-and-development-style approach to music making is one of the things they're known for, but Quaristice is said to be special in that regard. Instead of focusing on the micro, painstakingly stitching together each track second-by-second, this album grew out of jamming, with Sean Booth and Rob Brown reconfiguring and "versioning" elements of their by all accounts formidable live show into new tunes. It's hard to tell exactly how that plays out, but one thing about this record is very different from anything else Autechre has done this decade: The tracks are short (most around three or four minutes) and there are lots of them (20). While it's tempting to think of this collection of sonic miniatures as a set of "singles," Quaristice winds up working in almost the opposite way. Since the bulk of these pieces each explores one focused idea without a lot of variation, they don't make a whole lot of sense when removed from the album. Autechre have always made music of changes, where part of the interest was in hearing the gears of the music slipping as rhythms fell in and our of sync with each other and wound up somewhere different from where they began; development within most of the tracks on Quaristice is smaller and less noticeable, and many are over before you know it. So it might be more useful to think of the short tracks as sort of miniature movements within the album's suite-like whole. Which is another way of saying that I've most enjoyed this record when I've had the time and focus to allow me to listen to the entire thing straight through. It's then I can follow the arc of the record as it moves from the billowy opening of "Altibzz" past the menacing, high-speed future-shock fuckery of "IO", to the nervous ghost-in-the-machine drone of "SonDEremawe", on through the positively AFX-ian "Simmm"-- with its wired gamelan percussion hits and too-bright melody that makes you think of an artificial sun-- stopping along the way for the towering beat and acid riff of "Rale", the disorienting implosion of "Fol3", and the double-speed Detroit assembly line of "bnc Castl". As they move from ambient washes to classic-sounding IDM to their usual variations on techno and electro, I'm hearing more overt referencing of sounds of the past on Quaristice, like Autechre are more readily glancing and poking at genre, perhaps in an attempt to escape the oppression of so much focus on detail. So Quaristice also feels a bit like a survey, an esoteric and abstracted summary of electronic music's past that also glances toward what might come. After the hyper techno of "chenc9", the album folds back in on itself in the final two tracks, allowing space for contemplation of where the music has been. "Notwo" is so moody it almost sounds like Angelo Badalamenti; with its a dubby underwater drone and clipped upper range, it wouldn't sound out of place on Amber. And then lengthy "Outh9X" finishes the album on a more neutral note, as a steady electronic pulse is stalked by bassy tones that eventually trail off into mist in an extended ambient coda. It's been some time since we've heard Autechre sounding as purely beautiful as the opening and two closing tracks on Quaristice, but these moments aren't indicative of the record as a whole. Even while *Quaristice * is in some ways the most listenable album they've created in a decade, it's ultimately no easier to parse, and can be very rough going indeed if you're not in the mood for their peculiar world. Ultimately, this is still the same Autechre, remaining apart from trends as the rest of electronic music world goes on its way, their steadfast commitment to their vision being both their greatest strength and most confounding obstacle.

2008-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00

2008-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00

Electronic

Warp

March 5, 2008

026f40dc-8cd0-4bd6-bf87-bc2aabb33ece

Mark Richardson

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

On-U Sound legend Adrian Sherwood gives Spoon’s latest album a surprisingly sprightly and occasionally awkward dub reconstruction.

On-U Sound legend Adrian Sherwood gives Spoon’s latest album a surprisingly sprightly and occasionally awkward dub reconstruction.

Spoon: Lucifer on the Moon

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spoon-lucifer-on-the-moon/

Lucifer on the Moon

Twenty years ago, in an essay in The Village Voice, the writer Frank Kogan noticed two divergent trends in contemporary popular music. Heading in one direction were rock bands pulling wildly various styles like trance and New Age into an otherwise unified “rock” sound; and in the other camp were pop artists he classified as “Recombinant Dub,” which “take out the ‘lead’ instrument—the singer, the melody, the lead guitar,” and in its absence offer manifold possibilities for what aspects of a song to emphasize or cut back. The first classification is a near-spot-on description of Spoon, whose nerviness and boxed-in swagger belie their quirky musical choices, at times incorporating vibraphones, saz, and beatboxing. And the second could be retroactively applied to Adrian Sherwood, a prolific producer and soundboard mixer whose dub treatments of everything from Lee “Scratch” Perry to Depeche Mode bear a distinctly punky and industrial edge. On Lucifer on the Moon, these two pathways converge—sort of. Spoon asked Sherwood to remix a few tracks from their most recent album, this year’s Lucifer on the Sofa, and the band enjoyed his takes so much they requested he tackle the whole thing. What emerges isn’t Lucifer on the Sofa with different mixes; Sherwood recorded new parts from other musicians for his “reconstructions,” most notably drummer Keith LeBlanc and bassist Doug Wimbish, often regarded as the in-house rhythm section for his On-U Sound label. Lucifer on the Moon is rather a radical reworking, exhibiting a level of commitment rarely taken by other artists on remix compilations. And it certainly doesn’t resemble much of anything else made by either artist. Spoon has never sounded as relaxed or as spacy, and Sherwood hasn’t produced anything quite this sunny or shimmering. Such a direction is unusual considering the source material. For all its sly humor, Sofa alternates between music that’s either sleazy and sinister (“The Hardest Cut,” “Feels Alright”) or druggy and reflective (“My Babe,” “Astral Jacket”). The expectation is Sherwood would foreground these aspects of Sofa, evoking the murk and spookiness of his On-U Sound releases from the 1980s, but Moon is uncharacteristically sprightly, even when the tempos slow down. Sherwood’s reconstruction of “My Babe” could be the soundtrack for a Balearic sundown or a Screamadelica B-side. His upset of “On the Radio” excavates dubby, spliffed-out undertones that weren’t present on the original version. Yet more often than not, the results are awkward. This is particularly true on the remakes of Sofa’s energetic, rock-oriented songs. The reconstructions of “Feels Alright” and “Wild” don’t veer too far from the originals outside of a lot more phasing. And Sherwood maintains the same pulse on the downcast title track, but with his beachier mix it starts to recall early-2000s chillout lounge music, a period that doesn’t need a revival. Part of the problem is Britt Daniel, whose scratchy voice and quasi-sneering delivery suit Spoon’s suit-and-tie rock but bristle against a lusher backdrop. It’s natural to compare Moon to other dub-meets-indie-rock forays like Bill Callahan’s Have Fun With God or even Sherwood’s Echo Dek, his similar overhaul of Primal Scream’s 1997 album Vanishing Point. But a better analogy might be the Fireman, Paul McCartney and Youth’s ambient-house renovations of the former’s studio-pop LPs. Moon also showcases an unlikely collaboration that pushes both sides in new directions. But in trying to break new creative ground, these inventive musicians end up sounding stuck somewhere in the middle.

2022-12-07T00:02:00.000-05:00

2022-12-07T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rock

Matador

December 7, 2022

026f6ef6-bbf6-4bc7-8bd3-672f733ed007

Tal Rosenberg

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/

Though his international esteem is virtually nonexistent, this Japanese polymath pioneered a musical ethic of open borders and freewheeling hybridity, epitomized by five new reissues.

Though his international esteem is virtually nonexistent, this Japanese polymath pioneered a musical ethic of open borders and freewheeling hybridity, epitomized by five new reissues.

Haruomi Hosono: Hosono House/ Paraiso / Cochin Moon / Philharmony / omni Sight Seeing

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haruomi-hosono-hosono-house-paraiso-cochin-moon-philharmony-omni-sight-seeing/

Hosono House/ Paraiso / Cochin Moon / Philharmony / omni Sight Seeing

In the early 1980s, the Japanese singer, bassist, and producer Haruomi Hosono created an idea he called “sightseeing music.” It is a mode of making and listening that asks both creators and consumers to think of themselves as musical tourists, soaking up the sights and sounds of foreign cultures with an open mind and documenting them through personal translations. This peripatetic strategy ignored walls between genres and operated with an ethos of open borders and freewheeling hybridity. This concept powered a catalog of near-encyclopedic breadth. New Orleans funk, Okinawan folk, big-band swing, Bollywood bop, jazz fusion, acid-house chaos: A true musical polymath, Hosono has explored it all. Hosono, now in his 70s, remains a titan in his country’s musical history, but he does not strike such a towering figure abroad. Still, the impact of his vision has rippled across vast musical distances, making him perhaps the only artist whose sphere of tangible influence includes Derrick May, Afrika Bambaataa, Duran Duran, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Mac DeMarco. With his techno-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra, Hosono helped pioneer sounds that shaped modern techno, hip-hop, and synth-pop. While Yellow Magic’s influence is unimpeachable (if underrated), Hosono’s role before and after the band’s pioneering run lingers in the margins. That’s partially because the bulk of his solo work has never been available in the United States, so his brilliance felt like a secret for record collectors and YouTube spelunkers. But a series of long-awaited reissues from Light in the Attic documents a five-album stretch from 1973 to 1989 that offers a revelatory glimpse at a mere sliver of his dizzying discography. At last, Hosono can step toward deserved international attention. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hosono helped foster a local folk music scene in Tokyo’s Shibuya coffee shops. One of his bands at the time, Happy End, became the first Japanese rock group to sing exclusively in the native tongue, teasing out how to bend the idiosyncrasies of the language around Western rhythms. This alone is a career-defining achievement, but Hosono was rapaciously creative. After the band broke up in 1973, he and a group of musicians called Tin Pan Alley (a kind of Japanese answer to Phil Spector’s “Wrecking Crew” of ace session players) rented a pad an hour from Tokyo. While there, they recorded Hosono House, an album of what Hosono called “virtual American country”—a sort of Japanese emulation of Americana. In the chunky rhythms of “Bara to Yaju” and the honky-tonk swing of “Fuyu Goe,” you can hear how careful and considerate he was of the musical vernaculars he sourced. Hosono House instantly establishes a thread through this line of reissues: Hosono had a concrete belief in the plasticity of genre. In his singular focus on the mutable, he was able not only to inhabit different genres but bend them to his will. Hosono’s albums suppose you can travel entire musical worlds in a single sitting, or you can at least take a trip somewhere you’ve never been. On 1978’s Paraiso, he brings you on a tour of the world’s tropics, crafting lounge pop songs so elegant and languorous they should be heard with a fruity drink in hand. The album is the first to feature his Yellow Magic bandmates—Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. On their “Femme Fatale” (unrelated to the Velvet Underground), the caws of tropical birds, Sakamoto’s lush Rhodes chords, and Takahashi’s paradisical acoustic drums coalesce into a rich oceanside scene. Yellow Magic, which emerged soon after Paraiso, was intended as a one-off critique of the exocticism and Orientalism of Western visions of Asian music. (Their loving target was Martin Denny’s “Firecracker,” which led to a cover more famous than the original.) The beginnings of that intellectual engagement become clear here. The same year, Hosono released a radically different record, Cochin Moon, a synth-and-sequencer fantasia that recreated the uneasy feeling of his month-long trip to India alongside legendary Japanese visual artist Tadanori Yokoo. Hosono hoped for the album to be an ethnographic work of field recordings, like the flutes of snakecharmers or the recitations of the religious. But two unforeseen events waylaid him: First, Yokoo introduced Hosono to Kraftwerk, a central influence on the electronic backbone of this record and Yellow Magic’s subsequent debut. Hosono also contracted a stomach illness, the diarrhea producing a delirium so intense he felt he was near death. Cochin Moon is a hallucinatory listen. Though the music is informed by Bollywood soundtracks and traditional Indian touches, the clear disorientation of his sickness is embodied in each synth pulse and distended vocal. On “Hepatitis,” the synths sound simultaneously like bubbling cauldrons, malfunctioning zippers, and manic music boxes, an overload meant to make you woozy. That unfiltered mood gives the record an almost-shocking quality. Those first synth explorations would flower with Yellow Magic Orchestra. In 1982, during one of the band’s hiatuses, Hosono took it a step further with Philharmony. It elevated the rudimentary technology of sampling into avant-garde expression. Listing a Prophet-5 synth, LinnDrum drum machine, MC-4 sequencer, and the early Emulator sampler as his “guest performers,” Hosono used Philharmony as an opportunity to test the limits of recording technology. He described the process of sampling, looping, and rewiring his breaths, vocals, and instruments into what feel like cubist shapes as improvisatory painting. Listening means surfing a circuit board one moment and spending an evening at a robot-run opera the next. Alongside all this cybertronic experimentation were funny 16-bit funk songs (on “Living-Dining-Kitchen,” he sings about his love of junk food) and straight-up synth-pop killers like the wonderful “Sports Men.” It still feels groundbreaking. After the Yellow Magic Orchestra broke up for the first time some seven years later, Hosono fully established his theory of “sightseeing music” on omni Sight Seeing, a clear refutation of the homenogizing phenomenon of “world music.” His inveterate genre-hopping takes us between the acid-house epic “Laugh-Gas” and the Steve Reich-inspired keyboard exploration “Orgone Box,” between the ambient experiment “Korendor” and the bizarro pop of “Pleocene.” Other songs reference Algerian raï and American swing. A winking eccentricity flows through it all, as if Hosono saw each trope he encountered as another card in a deck, ready to be shuffled and made into the stuff of magic tricks. This unabashed love of trying new things without fear of failure is what makes Hosono’s catalog so delightful even now. In these five albums, we’re only given a snapshot of his 21 solo records, but the wizard-like inventiveness displayed here spotlights why Hosono should be considered a major figure. Taken together, these reissues represent a partial shadow history for the slow breakdown of genre boundaries. Nearly half a century after Hosono House, it’s easy to take for granted how permeable once-distinct zones have become. But rule breakers like Hosono, however overlooked they became, had to first do the hard work that’s so lovingly documented here.

2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic / Pop/R&B

October 3, 2018

02706341-7695-4acc-b993-08cbb3c00966

Kevin Lozano

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

This guitar-based ambient project from Will Wiesenfeld of Baths demonstrates the range of his interests and skill in a very different sphere.

This guitar-based ambient project from Will Wiesenfeld of Baths demonstrates the range of his interests and skill in a very different sphere.

Geotic: Mend

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15037-mend/

Mend

It's becoming common for hazy electro-pop artists to have an ambient side project (see Evan Abeele's work away from Memoryhouse, and the Teen Daze offshoot Two Bicycles), which makes sense. The music is about vibe and feel, after all, so it has to be tempting to ditch the songs altogether and dive all the way into atmosphere. But while there's a lot of music in this vein being made, much of it seems interchangeable. So it's natural to approach Geotic, a side project of Will Wiesenfeld from Baths, with a certain amount of skepticism. But there's more going on here than just a break from songwriting. Mend is Wiesenfeld's fifth album as Geotic, a project he's been returning to since 2008. There are a few non-musical elements that might make it seem tossed-off-- its unveiling via an Angelfire page, the fact that it was recorded in four days total, just after this past Christmas. But the record itself is more than just half-formed ephemera. Most of Mend was recorded on electric guitar, an instrument that didn't feature heavily on Baths' breakout debut LP, last year's Cerulean. Wiesenfeld's recent Daytrotter session demonstrated his skill on piano and his ear for deconstructing his own material, and Mend offers further revelations in the form of his guitar playing. Throughout, gently picked patterns skip across webs of static tone, all of which is swathed in amniotic fuzz. There's a bit of sleepiness here and there, particularly on the loping "Beaming Husband", but this is otherwise quite physical music for an ambient album. You can hear the bent notes and fingers sliding along the fretboard on opener "Unwind", and there is real movement on the lightly galloping highlight "And Upon Awakening". Mend ultimately feels organic and human, more about people than machines. Which makes sense, since the bloops and warped samples of Cerulean were always in service of exploring emotion (the guy titled a song "♥"). A quick scan through Mend's tracklist ("Find Your Peace", "Sleep and We'll Transition", "I'll Have Come and Gone With You") reveals that those preoccupations are still very much present. There are no lofty themes or overwrought sentiments here, though. Instead, Mend's melodies are gently simple, carrying enough heft to stick to your brain without becoming syrupy. For most bedroom artists, that'd be a triumph; for Wiesenfeld, it's something he did over the holidays, another bend in an increasingly compelling career path.

2011-01-28T01:00:03.000-05:00

2011-01-28T01:00:03.000-05:00

Electronic

self-released

January 28, 2011

0270ebcd-8b5e-40b8-bcae-404ef9bc4024

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

Restraint prevails on the debut solo record from Tortoise’s Jeff Parker—a collection of quiet, atmospheric mood studies that seems to hang in mid-air.

Restraint prevails on the debut solo record from Tortoise’s Jeff Parker—a collection of quiet, atmospheric mood studies that seems to hang in mid-air.

Jeff Parker: Slight Freedom

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22664-slight-freedom/

Slight Freedom

What does the concept “slight freedom” mean when you’re a musician like Jeff Parker? Is the qualifier tongue-in-cheek? It’s not like he must hear the word “no” very much. Since the 1990s, as a linchpin of Chicago’s music scene, Parker has developed his singular voice across a variety of contexts. He’s a core member of Tortoise, where his playing often feels like the glue that holds the band together; as a co-founder of the Tortoise spin-off Isotope 217, he tackles looser, spongier strains of jazz-funk. Then there are his sideman gigs—for Toumani Diabaté, Matana Roberts, Meshell Ndegeocello, among many others—and his activities in a number of more traditional jazz ensembles, including his long-running trio with bassist Chris Lopes and drummer Chad Taylor. Even as a frontman, though, Parker is a stealthy player, not a limelight-hugger; he’s known for his restraint and his carefully controlled tone. His uncluttered playing seems to hew to the tenets of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: “Discard anything that doesn’t spark joy.” This past year has seen Parker moving outward, in multiple directions—filigreeing the edges of Tortoise’s sly, energetic comeback, The Catastrophist; exploring tangled textures and timbres alongside cornetist Rob Mazurek on the album Some Jellyfish Live Forever; and rolling up a decade’s worth of beat sketches on The New Breed, a laid-back set of soul-jazz experiments colored by his recent move to Los Angeles. With Slight Freedom, he tries something new yet again. Unlike The New Breed, where a handful of collaborators helped execute his ideas, Slight Freedom, his first totally solo album, is all Parker. He recorded everything live in the studio with no overdubs, using a Boomerang Phrase Sampler to layer loops and drones in real time. But where some users of looping pedals are prone to building up towering stacks of tone, Parker’s restraint still prevails. He constructs the title track like a spider spinning its web: Using a dubby, percussive pattern as the main support, he lays down fine, almost invisible fibers—seemingly wispy yet deceptively sturdy—that are more structural than ornamental. There are no wasted motions. Yet the whole, which seems to hang in mid-air, glistening, remains deeply expressive, despite its extreme economy. “Slight Freedom” sets the tone for the whole album. All four songs, including a drowsy instrumental cover of Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” and a loosely woven instrumental version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” are quiet, atmospheric mood studies that tend to conceal more than they reveal. Sometimes it seems as if Parker is intent upon hiding behind his own shadow: In “Super Rich Kids,” his muted, almost bossa nova-like plucks are nearly obscured by sounds pouring in through an open window: braking buses, car horns, the occasional burst of police siren, terse and menacing. A similar kind of veiling happens on “Lush Life,” in which a dull electrical hum stretches from beginning to end, masking the contours of Parker’s tremolo-soaked guitar with faint dissonance. Parker’s take on the standard is bittersweet, almost resigned; from time to time, the melody reluctantly pokes its head out from beneath the chords, but mostly the song dwells in an all-consuming fog—a perfect evocation of Strayhorn’s hungover and heartbroken narrator, slumped against the bar in some seedy dive. “Mainz,” on the other hand, gives Parker his chance to shine—at least, within the spare framework he has set up for himself. It’s hardly acrobatic, but the song’s unusual time signature, which switchbacks between 13/8 and 12/8, is as tricky as it is lithe. In his trio’s 2012 recording of the Chad Taylor composition, the band closes out the song by locking into a slow, driving groove, but here he takes a considerably different tack: The song’s final five minutes are just pure, shimmering held tones and softly droning feedback. It turns out that some of the album’s most striking moments are those, like this one, where the least is happening. In the opening “Slight Freedom,” the principal theme is eventually swallowed up into a luminous bath of tone, and for six more minutes he proceeds to gently stir it, eking quiet mini-melodies out of the swirl. It’s not jazz, it’s not ambient, it’s not noise; it’s something more idiosyncratic and more personal, something only Parker could have come up with. Perhaps this is what “slight freedom” is supposed to mean: Not an anarchic exploding of rules, not the total liberation proposed by free jazz, but a steadier, stealthier path—dissolving boundaries, softening constraints, and wearing away at the edges of things until the ideas run as freely as water.

2016-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Jazz

Eremite

December 19, 2016

0272401d-8093-4157-8cf6-7dc4ba894123

Philip Sherburne

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

On Read Music/Speak Spanish, Desaparecidos saw themselves in the lineage of the Clash. 13 years later on Payola, they find their inner Sex Pistols: more cynical, more in character, taking advantage of no-win, no-future situations to create potent, punk rock theater. It is by far Conor Oberst's most fun record. Because really, it's his only fun record.

On Read Music/Speak Spanish, Desaparecidos saw themselves in the lineage of the Clash. 13 years later on Payola, they find their inner Sex Pistols: more cynical, more in character, taking advantage of no-win, no-future situations to create potent, punk rock theater. It is by far Conor Oberst's most fun record. Because really, it's his only fun record.

Desaparecidos: Payola

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20720-payola/

Payola

It's been 13 years since Desaparecidos' previous album and in the time since, Conor Oberst's political conscience has seemed to age in reverse. Payola simplifies colossal, complex systemic issues into an "us vs. them" cage match and the Royal We are up against mostly strawmen and supervillains. This would be an issue if Oberst was using lines like, "Now we're taking it back for the greater good/ Goddamn Robin Hoods" and "Freedom is not free/ Neither is apathy" as a means of convincing listeners to vote in a primary election, draft a persuasive letter to their local representative, or go to law school. But Payola advocates chaining yourself to an ATM, taking a baseball bat to a limousine, and shouting every word at the nearest authority figure. And this makes Conor Oberst a writer of awesome punk rock lyrics. It would appear that Payola is where Oberst's been storing the splenetic rage that fueled his most compelling work and has mostly gone missing since I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. But while Payola is his most urgent and angry work in a decade, it's by far his most fun record. Because really, it's his only fun record. This is the result of an important shift in a classic punk rock binary. On Read Music/Speak Spanish, Desaparecidos saw themselves in the lineage of the Clash—a fair accusation as Oberst was months away from dropping his Omaha Calling magnum opus Lifted and Desaparecidos would later cover "Spanish Bombs". Their songs were topical, idealistic and had no sense of humor whatsoever. Often singing in the same whole-body quaver as he did in Bright Eyes, Oberst led you to believe these songs saw themselves as the actual solution to the suffocating, transactional nature of marriage, a spiritually broken American military, and the overabundance of Starbucks in Omaha. Payola is a discovery of their inner Sex Pistols: more cynical, more in character, taking advantage of no-win, no-future situations to create potent, punk rock theater. Up against institutions too big to fail but also too big to defend themselves, Desaparecidos provide heavy ammo for cathartic finger-pointing and maximum collateral damage. Though Oberst is largely responsible for Desaparecidos' profile, this is not his side project—this is a full-on band and one that has grown increasingly tight and versatile despite only intermittently existing in the 21st century. Infamously recorded in a week of chaotic sessions, Read Music/Speak Spanish played out like a demolition derby, riffs, corroded shouts, and clamorous drums careening into each other. Payola is fast and furious, but carefully engineered for maximum, straight-ahead velocity. Despite the professed influence of the Cro-Mags and T.S.O.L., Desaparecidos are not a convincing hardcore act. Most of their arsenal draws from pop music, New Wave or even metal—Oberst's major-key, happily resolving melodies would've fit into his folk songs while Denver Dalley gilds the edges with tapping solos and ingratiating call-and-response riffs with keyboardist Ian McElroy. Regardless of its throwback sonic inspiration, Payola sounds far more contemporary than Read Music. So So Glos appear on "Slacktivist" and provide context for the harmonized guitars and beer-muscled pop-punk. Meanwhile, Against Me! has always balanced their most affecting, crucial work with potent sloganeering, so Laura Jane Grace is a perfect accomplice to piss on the Wall Street frat houses during "Golden Parachutes". It's hard to say whether Desaparecidos have truly influenced similarly minded, popular punk acts who have emerged in their absence or vice versa, but it lends Payola a current vibrancy that Read Music avoided—Patrick Stickles has been saddled with Bright Eyes comparisons from the get-go, and now that he's making compact rages against the machine like "Dimed Out", he's a real-time competitor with Conor Oberst's band. Meanwhile, "Te Amo Camila Vallejo" imagines if Joe Strummer had the foresight to write a Japandroids song, a pound-the-steering wheel anthem about going to the ends of the Earth for a charismatic, beautiful woman. In this case, it just so happens to be the "World's Most Glamorous Revolutionary", a Communist leader of Chile's 2011 student uprisings and now an elected member of congress. But as with Strummer or any political writer who tries to give voice to people outside of his own demographic, Oberst could be accused of being out of his depth (not to mention the question of whether their name brings light to a terrible situation overseas or is being utilized for its cachet). It would take a very willful misreading to accuse Desaparecidos of misappropriation—"Radicalized" split screens a potential Islamic extremist and an American mourning his fallen brother in a double wide trailer, and it's not attempting the depth of Steve Earle's "John Walker's Blues"or even the bite of Desaparecidos' own "The Happiest Place on Earth". This juxtaposition is built upon by the thematically linked "10 Steps Behind", presumably inspired by a religious tradition of requiring wives to trail their husbands. The imagery in "10 Steps Behind" remains intentionally vague—is the subject from the Middle East or Middle America? Do both cultures see women as property in their own way? As with "Radicalized", the seething anger underlying "10 Steps Behind" is better conveyed through the blistering music and Oberst knows when to get out of the way. And mostly, chucking any pretense of nuance works in Payola's favor. When discussing the policies of celebrity racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the beneficiaries of the Wall Street bailout, or a cancer patient whose life is going to be determined by paperwork, these songs seem to ask, do you really need to hear both sides? Whether or not Payola was "worth the wait" is a moot point—not much about Read Music/Speak Spanish suggested a follow-up was ever going to happen at all, so who was waiting really? But Payola's weaker points are entirely due to its latency period: by the time "City on the Hill" had debuted, exactly half of this record had been publicly available. Every song here is effective and memorable, just some less so than others, and most of them are packed towards the end, repeating earlier ideas ("Von Maur Massacre", "Anonymous"). And a topical record that's been cobbled together over the span of five years is going to sound dated in a 24-hour news cycle. It's not just the references to Occupy or the NSA's Fairview surveillance system or flashmobs, though those tend to jut out like 2012 RT's on your timeline. There's an Auto-Tune joke buried in "Backsell", but also a warning from former big league washout Britt Daniel, whose A&R-ripping "The Agony of Laffitte" single made him and Oberst short-lived labelmates on Saddle Creek. Since the release of "Backsell" in 2012, however, Spoon has signed to a major label started by a former Warner Bros. executive. Then again, Read Music/Speak Spanish was written and recorded shortly after 9/11 and while it captured the spirit of its time, it actually proved to be prophetic—though criticized for its maladroit lyrics at the time, it (however clumsily) pledged feminist allegiance, fretted over the overinflated housing bubble and a war with no end in sight. The outlier was "Mañana", a desperate rallying cry where Oberst hoped against hope that humanity could create a new future rather than an increasingly shittier version of the past. They played it at their first reunion show in 2010, a benefit to oppose a Fremont, Neb. renter's ordinance that blatantly targeted the influx of Latinos into the town by requiring an oath of legal citizenry. The U.S Supreme Court declined intervention and a headline detailing its current status perfectly sums up Payola's reason for existence: "furor persists."

2015-06-22T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-06-22T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Epitaph

June 22, 2015

02724592-a5e9-4095-91a4-c026fc43236d

Ian Cohen

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

Promising and fast-rising group brings a sense of drama and lust and elliptical, unexpected arrangements to indie rock.

Promising and fast-rising group brings a sense of drama and lust and elliptical, unexpected arrangements to indie rock.

Braids: Native Speaker

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15004-native-speaker/

Native Speaker

There are dreams, there are nightmares, and then there are those night visions that don't quite qualify as either, the unnerving images and dialogues that rattle about your head in your waking life for the rest of the day and reveal strange, forgotten details every time you pick at them. That's the kind of stuff we need to be talking about if we're going to call Braids "dream-pop" as so many others have. The quartet's bracing debut Native Speaker is almost Inception-like in its warping of reality, equally tactile and dissolute, cerebral and surreal and ultimately haunting for its refusal to answer questions the same way twice. The Montreal group is constructed like your typical indie rock outfit-- keyboards, guitar, bass, drums, all parties contributing vocals-- but each element is employed in a way that embodies the best ideals of post-rock, where each member coaxes sound like they're trying to learn something new about their instruments at each turn. The same exploratory nature applies to structure-- Native Speaker's seven roomy compositions (ranging from four to over eight minutes) rely heavily on loops and drones, pinwheels of guitar, and clusters of bell tones. There's constant motion, each layer pushing and prodding until they prop each other into something like stasis, its minimalist bent never drawing too much attention to how it's working really hard. The loop that drives "Lemonade" reads like an EKG, dipping and rising steadfastly as the rhythm section builds a limber, athletic pace and introduces Raphaelle Standell-Preston's intriguing and idiosyncratic vocals. She's not without precedent: tonally there's some Régine Chassage in her higher register, and her knack for knocking the listener off course with well-placed vulgarity recalls prime-era Jenny Lewis. But the loopy, playful interaction of her and the strange, gripping placidity of Native Speaker feels like something all its own. She's demure as "Lemonade" begins but gets more and more unhinged as Braids hurtle forward. Despite the bizarre imagery she sets forth, the song is ultimately an impressionistic commentary on suburban romantic prospects-- "what I've found is that we're all just sleeping around." As Native Speaker truly starts to take shape toward its midsection, you can hear them disassembling "Lemonade" only to rebuild each aspect of it into longer forms. It's no discredit to the band that it eases into the record's biggest sounding moments, while amidst the catharsis the vocals do the heavy lifting. "Glass Deers" plays it as straight as it gets on Native Speaker: the closest they come to typical strumming and clean guitar lines, while Standell-Preston recalls fellow deconstructionist Sue Tompkins (Life Without Buildings), repeating "I'm fucked up" for as much of a percussive effect as an emotional one. Coasting on volume swells and whirring sound effects, the title track finds a point where Braids capture a woozy warmth not far removed from a more tactile take on Animal Collective circa Feels. But within what could scan like post-coital calm, the lyrics drop their often coy logic puzzles for about as straightforward of a cry for sexual need and desire as you'll hear in indie rock. Immediately thereafter, "Lammicken" deeply upsets the mood and throws Native Speaker into a stark relief. "I can't stop it," Standell-Preston repeats as she navigates a hall of funhouse mirrors with only that line to comfort her, her vocals warping and rising. Native Speaker tails off slightly thereafter almost out of necessity, yet it reaches a fitting conclusion with the distant drones of instrumental "Little Hand". Native Speaker is by nature elliptical, never seeking out a final word even as it converses with itself, almost as if it's meant to be played as a loop, something that can begin as soon as it ends.

2011-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

2011-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Kanine

January 19, 2011

027399a7-e611-4398-a593-1e83c4ebd103

Ian Cohen

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

At the edge of crossover success, the hardcore stalwarts sputter out with an overstuffed album of weak modern-rock imitations.

At the edge of crossover success, the hardcore stalwarts sputter out with an overstuffed album of weak modern-rock imitations.

Code Orange: Underneath

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/code-orange-underneath/

Underneath

Code Orange have been on the brink of a breakthrough since they were teenagers. A dozen years ago, the Pittsburgh kids rose from the local ranks to the taste-making Deathwish imprint before making their major-label debut with 2017’s Forever. Abrasive and volatile yet accessible, Forever became a consensus critical favorite, topping year-end lists at Rolling Stone and Revolver and prompting praise from The New York Times when it was nominated for a Grammy. They were a hit away, it seemed, from crossing over into whatever’s left of mainstream rock. But Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting. Recorded with Nick Raskulinecz, who has spent 25 years helming consistently middling efforts from the likes of Ghost and Korn, Underneath aims to justify Code Orange’s major-label existence, from its rigorously high concept about the psychological damage of our digital reality to the warmed-over rock radio moves of its would-be hits. During “You and You Alone,” Jami Morgan seethes, “It’s killing me, every line you scribble on the page/In trying to be an amalgamation of everything you see.” It’s an unintentional encapsulation of Underneath, an album that wants to be so much it’s barely anything at all. The central idea is obvious enough: Our online lives cause dangerously wide divisions within our personalities. Code Orange call nomophobia—a neologism for the fear of being without your phone—by name and criticize the din of modern life as “crowded Technovision.” They take this theme to its violent extreme, painting technology as a parasite feeding off our energy and a tool that will drive us—“the guinea pigs of a generation”—to madness or death. They quote Ricardo López, the Björk stalker who committed suicide after mailing her a bomb, and assail the way we have become “brains in chains.” Underneath reads like the Twitter account of a paranoid friend you muted long ago, or the slapdash musings of someone who shouldn’t smoke sativa after morning coffee. The music itself prompts the same sort of shrug and chuckle. An overzealous pastiche full of inspirations but near-devoid of new ideas, Underneath is as goofy and garish as the worst of nu metal. Code Orange sprint between touchstones and subgenres as if they were running a Tough Mudder, trying to prove their versatility and grit. “Cold Metal Core” gilds grindcore with harsh noise, like Pig Destroyer with an unnecessarily big budget, while “Last Ones Left” founders in its attempt to find solid ground between Slipknot and Wolf Eyes. The metal riffs are more aluminum than iron, the industrial beats hilariously dated, and the power electronics too weak to stand on their own. Code Orange’s longtime enthusiasm for stop-time pauses—moments in which everything goes quiet, so they can redirect a song’s momentum—was once unpredictable and exhilarating. Now, it feels like a crutch. The radio-ready anthems here are hackneyed and awkward, like ’90s leftovers reheated with post-millennial white adolescent rage. With its sustained guitar squeals and whisper-to-roar dynamics, “Who I Am” sounds like a teenager experimenting with basic electronics while listening to the Deftones. “The Easy Way” springboards from cheesy industrial signifiers to a pandering hook that recalls Filter. “Underneath”—the closing track and first single—is the ugly crust that got stuck between Sirius XM’s Lithium and Octane. It’s so repetitive, at least, that you can turn it off after the first half and save yourself the last two minutes. Code Orange are proud practitioners of scene beef and self-aggrandizement. They seem to thrive on bombast and controversy, even telling Kerrang that “[Underneath] … is more relevant than anything that’s coming out in rock and metal this year. Period.” Underneath may indeed set them apart from the fray and push them to larger audiences, shouting back the chorus of “Who I Am” or grunting out some approximation of “Swallowing the Rabbit Whole.” But it will be at the expense of the very recent feeling that Code Orange could reshape the vanguard of popular metal.

2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Metal

Roadrunner

March 17, 2020

02788a22-cb4c-48dc-b20c-eb26148c4157

Grayson Haver Currin

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

Five years after it helped define microhouse and kick the clicks + cuts aesthetic to the curb, Luomo is reissuing his groundshifting house LP Vocalcity on his own Huume imprint.

Five years after it helped define microhouse and kick the clicks + cuts aesthetic to the curb, Luomo is reissuing his groundshifting house LP Vocalcity on his own Huume imprint.

Luomo: Vocalcity

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4929-vocalcity/

Vocalcity

New Year's Day, 2003. At a semi-luxury hotel a few kilometers from the coast, a sprawling complex of balconied buildings and a swimming pool nestled next to a stand of trees, a few hundred ravers in summer duds-- some in dirty Diesels, some in bikinis, and all eyes hidden behind enormous, smoke-colored shades-- pivot and sway while the last molecules of MDMA sweat their way out of their systems. On a stage facing the pool, a skinny young man with a blond mane swigs champagne from the bottle while he nudges absently at a computer mouse; his own massive eyeshield tosses off disco glints that mirror the flashes of light that go tearing up the firelines between bass and space in his music. It's every Balearic cliché at once, except that this isn't Ibiza, it's Reñaca, Chile; and the laptop jockey isn't Sasha van Oakenweed but a skinny Finn named Luomo, née Sasu Ripatti, best known until not long before as Vladislav Delay-- a former free-jazz drummer who made the leap to Chain Reaction-styled "heroin house" before being crowned prince of clicks + cuts. The event is notable for several reasons, among them the globalization of European leisure culture; but the real significance here concerns the ongoing conversion of tight-lipped minimalism into something self-consciously sexy and sophisticated and Ecstasy-friendly. It's the preface to an ongoing evolution that is only coming to fruition in 2005, when the Sasha van Oakenweeds of the world pepper their mixes with tracks from Kompakt and Traum, and Creamfields' beachside raves feature the likes of Ellen Allien and Blackstrobe alongside Deep Dish and Carl Cox. In many ways, all this began with Luomo's 2000 debut, Vocalcity, reissued this month on Ripatti's own Huume label. Vocalcity was unexpected, and not a little audacious: "Luomo-- The Next Episode in House-- prod. by Vladislav Delay," proclaimed a sticker on the sleeve. The album was published by Force Tracks, one of an avalanche of sublabels from Frankfurt's Force Inc., an erstwhile "proper" techno imprint that had gone all theoretical as it aged, christening sublabels after Deleuze and Guattari tomes and fashioning grand philosophies around concepts like "clicks + cuts." (Full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes for Clicks + Cuts 2.) "The Next Episode in House" sounded like the kind of sweeping, appropriationist, Zeitgeist-stroking statement that Force would make-- but damned if it weren't true. If anything, it sounds even truer today. It's not that Luomo advanced the cause of house music in some way that his forebears (Chez Damier, Derrick May, and Maurizio, to pick three) didn't manage to. But there was nothing else that sounded like Vocalcity at the time, and there's been precious little that sounds like it since, including Luomo's slightly disappointing, ill-fated 2003 followup The Present Lover. Writing in The Wire back in 2001, I pegged Vocalcity as the tipping point (the clipping point?) in what I called microhouse-- a genre that seemed to take the essential template of house music and shrink its constituent parts (that shoomping beat, a cavernous sense of space, and an echo of soul music as processed through disco) down to byte-sized pieces, leaving a schematic of dotted lines swimming through oceans of dubwise absence. But listening now, it's clear that I got it exactly backwards, at least in Luomo's case. What stands out now, a half-decade later, isn't the smallness of Vocalcity's sounds but its fullness. Sure, Luomo has the requisite clicks and clanks; as "Market", the absolutely epic lead track, opens up, half the action is in the chattering of truncated hi-hats and a distant rattle that sounds like an army of mechanics spinning their ratchets. But house music has always had these kind of details; for comparison, just listen to E-Dancer (Kevin Saunderson)'s 1997 cut "World of Deep", the track I've come to believe most closely heralds what Luomo would later attempt. Beneath those enormous, cascading pads, the hi-hats and bells have been whittled down to needlepoint proportions. Luomo emphasized his details by framing them in white space, but what you hear now, after the demise of clicks + cuts, aren't the pinpricks but the enormous, inflated sounds of everything else-- bass, pads, and of course those vocals. True to its name, Vocalcity put breathy, yearning male and female vocals at the center of its pneumatic mix. Tracks like "Market", "Class", "Synkro", and "Tessio"-- a full two-thirds of the six-track, triple LP-- expand like inner tubes as those voices come rushing in. Indeed, my favorite element of the album has always been the way that "Market" begins by teasing in the vocalist's breaths and sighs, one tiny gasp at a time, along with fragments of sung melody buried deep, deep, deep in the mix. Only at 4:48, nearly halfway through the 12-minute track, does she finally introduce the full vocal hook. And when the sad reprimand drops-- "There's nothing in the world that you can do," repeated a full five times, then a quick breath, and finally the explosive charge buried in the slug, "For me"-- Well, we could talk about formalism all day, but people, that right there is one of the most perfect moments in the world of pop music, albeit a full minute and 18 seconds after most pop songs have punched out the clock and gone home to sleep. That's the triumph of Vocalcity. Not reduction, but expansion. Vladislav Delay has always aimed for the long view. (If you think Luomo's tracks are long-- "She-Center", at 10 minutes, is the shortest thing on Vocalcity, and the rest average around 12 minutes apiece-- check out Vladislav Delay's 2000 album Entain, where the cuts run from 15 to 22 minutes long. 2001's Anima went even further, comprising a single, hourlong track that swirls in place like a dead tide.) If there's anything "micro" in Vocalcity, it's the way tiny little holes open up within the frizzing chords, as though you could see the pixels framing each fraying waveform. But that's all academic. Five years later, "minimal" techno has fattened itself up again. Most of today's rave hits don't sound anything like Luomo, but I don't think anything today would sound the way it does if Luomo hadn't seduced the tinkerers away from their mouse pads and back to the land of goosebumps and sex. What you hear most in Luomo today are the stomach-punching bass lines, the pistoning chords inherited straight from Chicago's finest, and those maddeningly ambiguous vocals, always hovering just out of reach. Perhaps the long exception is the male refrain in "Synkro", which could stand as the tautological epigraph to the album's simple brilliance: "Because you move/ The way you move."

2005-09-08T01:00:01.000-04:00

2005-09-08T01:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic

Force Tracks

September 8, 2005

027b3c63-9003-435f-bb34-2476accffdf4

Philip Sherburne

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

Future's current run of dark and compelling music is reminiscent of Lil Wayne at his druggy peak. Purple Reign, his latest mixtape, is a slightly minor release, but the best songs on it still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy.

Future's current run of dark and compelling music is reminiscent of Lil Wayne at his druggy peak. Purple Reign, his latest mixtape, is a slightly minor release, but the best songs on it still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy.

Future: Purple Reign

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21496-purple-reign/

Purple Reign

Unhealthy, sick, desperate, hopeless: You’ve done something either very wrong or very right if these are the words hardcore fans use to discuss your music. But this is the rubric Future listeners now consult when he drops a mixtape: Just how lost and broken does Nayvadius Cash sound this time around? Is his life still a grim parade of the saddest, most transactional sex you can imagine two humans having? (Last year’s LP Dirty Sprite 2 had a minor-key song called "Groupies" that sounds like a funeral march.) Just how many mournful references to perkys, Zans, and promethazine does he make? If you’re new to the Supervillain Stage of Future’s career, a quick primer on how we got here: Mix one part noxiously awful publicity (Future cheated on universally beloved R&B singer Ciara, breaking the public’s perception of the pair as an idealized super couple); one part savvy embrace of resulting notoriety (the phase was kicked off with 2014’s aptly titled mixtape Monster); and one part obsessive focus on a single aesthetic—mostly one or two producers per mixtape, short track runs, and a single uniform vibe. Out of this mushroom cloud sprung the obsessive online community known as #FutureHive, and it can be a weird place to spend time: I’ve seen fans expressing ambivalence or even disappointment upon learning that Future may not in fact be the codeine-crazy drug addict he plays in his songs. This sort of dance-of-death vicariousness is nothing new in rap (see: "I Feel Like Dying"-era Lil Wayne, which could also be a Monster-era Future song title), nor is this childish magical thinking about artists by fans. But Future’s taken this poisoned chalice and run further with it than anyone in rap since Wayne at his druggy peak. To listen to Future’s output right now is to feel concerned for him, repelled by him, and slightly coated in slime from association. His best and most potent songs should make you feel a little nauseated, a little sad, and exultant all at the same time. This is the place to note that Purple Reign, his latest mixtape, is a relatively weak dose of Dirty Sprite. Heard in the context laid out above, the den-of-sin air has cleared a bit. The lights have started to come up (or maybe your eyes are adjusting), the feeling that something unspeakable is about to happen has receded. It’s a fine tape, but considered in the run of the most vital rapper working, relatively minor. The beats on Future’s best work give off an eerie, muted light, like alien eggs glowing beneath a blanket, but the music on Purple Reign is some of the least distinctive work his star producers (Metro Boomin’, Southside, Zaytoven, Nard & B, and others) have ever given him. A few of the beats here, like "Hater Shit" and "Wicked," are so minimal they almost resemble presets. Future's delivery also hits a few rough patches: The chorus to "Drippin (How U Love That)" is a dishearteningly direct Fetty Wap imitation, and his groaning, stomach-pains cadence on the "Never Forget" chorus is a Gucci Mane rip. Meanwhile, one of the best songs ("Inside the Mattress") feels like a stealth rewrite of last year’s classic "March Madness." The project doesn’t feel uninspired, exactly, just rushed. The best songs on Purple Reign still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy. "Perkys Calling" is downcast and beautiful, a piano ballad full of Future’s heat-lightning one-line observations: "Everything around me turn to fast food," he mumbles, an abstract line that manages to be feel more heartbreakingly specific the more attention you devote to it. "I had to take a loss so I could cherish that shit," he declares on "Never Forget," maybe the world’s best philosophy. On that same song, he defies his characterization as a destructive force, someone who uses people up and throws them away, by acknowledging the family members he has hurt by selling them drugs. He might be a monster, but he has a conscience. But then there's the closing title track, where he briskly snuffs out this ember of humanity, declaring syrup his "girlfriend," compares himself to a heroin trafficker and a terrorist, and tells a rival "until you gunned down, we ain’t gon' never have closure." Playing the heel is tiring work, and Future sounds convincingly exhausted. Sounding convincingly exhausted, in fact, is one of his biggest gifts. The way he records his vocals, and the sensitivity he uses to explore its smallest inflections, shows a producer’s mind as well as a rapper’s. Listen to the slight catch in his voice while repeating "purple reign"; these are the moments that draw in #FutureHive, the moments that bottle and sell a helpless wail of pain.

2016-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Free Bandz

January 21, 2016

027d3b27-5a6c-48d9-80f4-019ab97d238a

Jayson Greene

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

The debut from this instrumental trio has the air of a purifying ritual, blending psychedelia with a loose-limbed minimalism.

The debut from this instrumental trio has the air of a purifying ritual, blending psychedelia with a loose-limbed minimalism.

numün: voyage au soleil

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/numun-voyage-au-soleil/

voyage au soleil

Numün’s first album, voyage au soleil, works in a stealthy, unobtrusive way. The band’s use of lowercase letters in their name and titles isn’t mere affectation; it’s a reflection of their introverted, sly methodology. Bassist Bob Holmes of the cosmic country band SUSS and guitarist Joel Mellin and percussionist Chris Romero of Gamelan Dharma Swara have arrived at a rarefied strain of instrumental music that has the air of a purifying ritual, blending the opiated psychedelia of Brightblack Morning Light with a loose-limbed minimalism that privileges subtle effects and incremental chord progressions. They achieve these results through instruments traditionally alien to rock, such as dholak, Theremin, gongs, and gender wayang. Album-opener “tranceport” epitomizes this approach; it fades in with a feather-light drone, taking Brian Eno’s Apollo to church and to an even deeper quadrant of space. (The LP’s title translates as “trip to the sun.”) With its reverberant, two-chord bass plucks criss-crossed with the squawks of a cümbüş (a fretless Turkish banjo), Mellotron whorls, and tambourine-enhanced beats, “tranceport” morphs into a beatific psych-rock procession redolent of Chocolate Watch Band’s “Voyage of the Trieste.” By the time the second track, “first steps”—a radiant slice of East-West psychedelia devoid of the tired tropes typically associated with this gambit—you realize that numün’s innate peacefulness guides their every move. Augmented by a snippet of astronauts conversing with President Nixon during the first moon landing (it’s jarring to hear the latter’s voice in such a blissful setting), “tranquility base” achieves liftoff through shimmering tones created by a synth version of a celeste and methodical bass riffs that add a riveting contrast and ballast to the track’s delicately beautiful atmospheres. On their debut album, numün have created a suite of becalming songs that move at a tempo slower than a resting pulse while seemingly striving for a sacred quality. Much music in this vein has a tendency to lull you to sleep or to cloy, but voyage au soleil reveals numün as savvy navigators of paths less traveled. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Musique Impossible

September 17, 2020

0280534e-1efe-4948-ac4a-c5c321aa4802

Dave Segal

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