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The witch-house pioneer and a Berlin-based producer join forces on a purposefully “difficult-to-digest” album whose sprawling array of references and styles mimics life online.

The witch-house pioneer and a Berlin-based producer join forces on a purposefully “difficult-to-digest” album whose sprawling array of references and styles mimics life online.

oOoOO / Islamiq Grrrls: Faminine Mystique

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ooooo-islamiq-grrrls-faminine-mystique/

Faminine Mystique

There’s a disorienting quality to Faminine Mystique, the purposely “difficult-to-digest” collaboration between bedroom producer-songwriters oOoOO and Islamiq Grrrls, that will be familiar to anyone coping with the modern affliction known as “extremely online.” You know the one: shallow breathing, legs turning red under a hot laptop, two dozen tabs open—yet time seems to stand still, somehow, as long as you keep scrolling. Now that the internet is less a novelty and more a banality, as one “post-internet” thinker described it, we’re all pretty used to tackling endless streams of seemingly unrelated thoughts as we navigate our newsfeeds every day. For oOoOO and Islamiq Grrrls, all that complexity and incongruity comes built in. Faminine Mystique, which was written and recorded at home in Berlin, is built from a sprawling array of discrete sounds and styles: whispery shoegaze, trap hi-hats, soaring guitar solos, detuned pianos, wobbly Auto-Tune, and even what appears to be a lo-fi tribute to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games.” Adding to the density of references, the album’s title—a play on Betty Friedan’s influential text The Feminine Mystique—is meant to refer to “a powerful set of social forces” that allows us access to vast amounts of music while favoring “easy consumption” over experimentation. Fortunately, the results are much more accessible than all of that sounds—nothing a seasoned tab-flipper can’t handle. The album is the first full-length release in five years from Chris Dexter Greenspan, the New Jersey-raised producer whose early releases on the nascent Tri Angle Records, with their hazy atmospheres and trap-influenced electronic drums, were filed under “witch house.” Returning from a self-imposed break from the industry, Greenspan found an eerily compatible collaborator in Islamiq Grrrls, a singer and musician who grew up in a strict Bosnian Muslim household in small-town Germany (she gives her name only as Asia). They originally linked up to share feedback on their solo albums, but after some back and forth, they realised their separate projects had merged into one. Many of the songs on Faminine Mystique in fact remain solo productions, but it’s remarkable how smoothly they fit together. Side by side at the center of the album, “You Don’t Love Me” and “Y’re Gonna Love Me” share the same trap-inspired flourishes, with purring hi-hats and booming bass laying steady ground for moody synths and, on the latter, a pitch-shifting piano melody that sounds like a 1990s mixtape melting in the heat. Ideas are stacked precariously, referencing multiple genres and eras at once. On “When Y’re All Alone,” processed vocals are buried under a pastoral synth melody, bursts of breakbeats, and the polite ding of an elevator. On “Feeling Feelings,” Greenspan’s voice wobbles with Auto-Tune over squealing post-punk guitars, perhaps channeling the “retrolicious” and homespun quality of Ariel Pink. Tunings are frequently out of whack, lending the entire record a certain queasiness; in atmosphere, it shares the unsettling nature of Angelo Badalamenti’s synth-and-jazz-heavy “Twin Peaks” themes. Strange samples abound, popping up unexpectedly and disappearing just as soon; they even have the nerve to sample a famously litigious classic-rock band in the breakdown of “Be on Through.” Lyrically, it’s far less daring. Her words are direct and heartsick—“baby” and “love” appear repeatedly—while his are more opaque, but their poppy simplicity at least stands in relief from the weirdness elsewhere. The songs don’t stick out so much individually, but the overall effect is engrossing; soon enough you’re sucked into their disorienting, time-flattened grooves. Hallucinatory and inward-gazing, Faminine Mystique offers a distinctly post-internet strain of eclecticism.

2018-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Nihjgt Feelings

May 17, 2018

028195ed-f9f5-4b2d-9338-b6ecabf0ea3f

Chal Ravens

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

Indiana "stoner emo" outfit Cloakroom's debut album, Further Out, packs a wealth of hooks, even if it’s an album for the gearheads who’d rather spend time and money assessing amplifier nuance than effects pedals.

Indiana "stoner emo" outfit Cloakroom's debut album, Further Out, packs a wealth of hooks, even if it’s an album for the gearheads who’d rather spend time and money assessing amplifier nuance than effects pedals.

Cloakroom: Further Out

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20138-further-out/

Further Out

The most frequently quoted fact from Cloakroom’s bio is that they’re a trio of factory workers from Indiana. It is a backstory that makes sense in hindsight upon hearing their minimally arranged, moderately morose, and maximally loud debut LP Further Out. Cloakroom know from heavy machinery; the operative terms for Further Out are "bulldoze," "steamroll." Here’s a picture of the band—Brian Busch is on the left and the drums on Further Out sure sound like they’re being hit by a guy who has 100-litre barrels for arms. Meanwhile, Doyle Martin valiantly keeps up with all the might his lanky, mortal frame can bear, as Further Out comes off like the only indie rock album released in 2015 actively gunning for its own tablature book. Opener "Paperweight" sums up Martin’s sedentary, sarcastic point of view ("You exist in material states/ One part paper, one part weight/ You could not decide what force is holding you down today") and empties his arsenal of bullying power chords, fluid, clean arpeggios, melodic fills and narcotized acoustic strums. All of the aforementioned provide for a wealth of hooks throughout Further Out, even if it’s an album for the gearheads who’d rather spend time and money assessing amplifier nuance than effects pedals. Proudly analog from the recording to the vinyl pressing, Further Out utilizes a mere handful of tones because Martin took like two years to get these settings just right: his favorite is a super-saturated buzz that somehow sounds both impenetrable and like it could dissolve on contact. It’s a shame someone else beat Cloakroom to Let’s Cry and Do Pushups at the Same Time as an album title, as Further Out is equal parts thick muscle and lactic acid. The result is a record heavy enough to justify a 2xLP pressing even with a relatively brief 45 minute runtime. It’s probably best for the vinyl considering the contents: "Paperweight" inherits the Secret Machines’ ambitions to recreate Texas-sized arena boogie that’s part Slacker, part Dazed and Confused, "Lossed Over" and "Moon Funeral" are the basis for the pop record to which Jesu refused to commit, while "Outta Spite" and "Starchild Skull" hulk boxes upon boxes of CDs from the time when indie rock went alt and cast a lot of truly great bands as one-hit wonders stashed in the Buzz Bin. Most specifically, Hum—Further Ou**t was recorded in Matt Talbott’s studio and his former band would be a reference point even if had no direct involvement. Hum have become a kind of shorthand for contemporaries like Cloakroom who draw from but are not limited to shoegaze, slowcore, alt-rock, emo, basically all forms of music that favor distorted guitars and never really have their "moment" in indie rock post-1995. But for that reason, they also never really go out of style. Further Out does successfully sound genreless despite being referential of a half dozen genres at once and is presented as a continuous listening experience. Though Cloakroom might be selling themselves short in the interest of cohesion—"Mesmer" and "Sylph" are meant as instrumental interludes, but their skittering rhythms and timbral beauty are such intriguing divergences from the consistent piledriving that they feel like unkept promises; one wishes they could’ve been extended into vocal tracks. But in light of the effort and exertion required of Further Out’s eight other songs, perhaps that was too much of an undertaking for the time being. All of the deliberate aggression in Cloakroom's music is a none-too-subtle defense mechanism for the implacable depression at its core. Martin’s yawning moan is a dead ringer for that of Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, somehow managing to emerge clean and clear from the murk despite him never raising his voice. But unlike Bazan, Martin’s pen is caked with bong resin rather than poison. Cashed bowls and empty cans litter Further Out, having served as coping mechanisms rather than means of escape. All of these low-level narcotics have a way of muddling situations as Martin attempts to explain his disappointment in people who continue to fail him. At any given point, it’s unclear whether he’s addressing a girlfriend, a friend, a coworker, a parent, the mailman, whoever. Most likely, it’s himself, but his lethargic delivery becomes a part of the hook: on "Asymmetrical", Martin describes suburban, drunken intransigence as a night out where he, "Took a long drive/ Got a few dents/ Told a couple jokes at your expense"; the major-key melody appears to be mocking the target, as Martin’s words drip with both dejection and derision, a perfect match of content and delivery. Cloakroom once described themselves as "stoner emo" as a joke and they’ll probably spend the rest of their career getting shit for it. It’s clearly meant as a joke, the punchline being the obvious incompatibility of its two parts. The latter is defined by anxious rhythms, a tenuous connection to straight edge, brazen, high-register melodies and a desperate desire for human connection amidst a litany of misunderstanding and communication failures. Meanwhile, a band named Sleep made one of stoner rock’s formative documents, which just so happens to be called Dopesmoker and sounds exactly like what you think it does. To the extent that their turbid, somewhat timid debut EP Infinity couldn’t achieve, Further Out presents those genres existing as a continuum rather than in conflict: Cloakroom are driven by a distinct Midwestern despair and disillusion, they just don’t make music that reflects it. Instead, they hit a very specific catharsis wrung from exhaustion; at a certain point, you’ve earned your place on the couch after a hard day at the factory, the office, or just enduring a line at the grocery store, and you figure you may as well just spark up and crank up the amps. [Editors note: an earlier version of this review contained an aside in the first paragraph whose meaning was unclear; it should have been removed in editing initially and we have done so in hindsight.]

2015-01-21T01:00:04.000-05:00

2015-01-21T01:00:04.000-05:00

Rock

Run for Cover

January 21, 2015

0285cf9a-b1aa-4638-aa73-9c170a104be4

Ian Cohen

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

Numero Group's compilation collects guitar instrumentals first issued between 1966 and 1981, showing a solo steel-string world apart from John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke.

Numero Group's compilation collects guitar instrumentals first issued between 1966 and 1981, showing a solo steel-string world apart from John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke.

Various Artists: Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11118-wayfaring-strangers-guitar-soli/

Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli

Guitar Soli, the Numero Group's collection of obscure solo acoustic guitar instrumentals, professes to explore the "private side of the solo guitar movement from 1966-1981". The public side needs no introduction here, having been documented by Martin Scorsese in his revealing 1983 documentary The Last Raga about the decadent concert blowout for solo guitar's leading lights. Davey Graham did a load of blow off of a Martin D-28 and Bert Jansch nearly choked Sandy Bull with a nickel-wound 46-gauge string. Wait, no, that never happened. The scene's leading lights used 1966-1981 to move into some combination of obscurity, poverty, and cult worship. Solo acoustic guitar is not by definition a private affair but its conventions-- and the personalities that are drawn to those conventions-- are not typically the public type. But I'm being a shit: surely Numero means only to show a side of acoustic composition and performance outside the genre-defining names like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke, none of whom were really public figures but all of whom enjoyed (or enjoy) critical acclaim and understanding audiences. Guitar Soli collects fourteen such pieces, focusing neither on technical achievement nor on any coherent historical narrative. Freed of even minor stylistic excesses-- like Fahey's collage or Basho's chant-- Guitar Soli defies categorization as anything but six-string plainsong. So silly miniatures help focus Guitar Soli. Ted Lucas, who turns in the comp's most furiously picked track, "Raga in 'D'", was Motown's Indian-music session man, playing sitar for the Temptations and the Supremes. Richard Crandell has found work after learning the mbira while driving Thomas Mapfumo's bus. Daniel Hecht knew Moondog and now writes mystery novels. Best of all, Mark Lang's "Strawberry Man" is sunny and weightless in its contemplation of a beachside fruit vendor but it never would've hit the tape if Lang hadn't grown jealous of his brother Peter, who cut an album with Fahey and Kottke. Other tracks require no backstory at all: Stephen Cohen's "No More School" is exactly as red-faced and dimpled as its title suggests, while Jim Ohlschmidt's "The Delta Freeze" is Guitar Soli's most singular sonic statement, a mess of strangulated slides that grow denser and angrier until the tape saturates. The music only gets so peculiar, though: these are acoustic guitar tracks mostly in the folk mold with occasional Eastern influences. Guitar Soli doesn't even contain a proper blues; its most far-off cut is its last, Dwayne Cannan's "One Forty Eight", which features an electric guitar part best described as...Carlos Santana-y? Strange, but it fits: these artists, along with Fahey, Basho etc., were important bridges between the American Primitive style birthed by the 1960s folk movement and the New Age 80s. Guitar Soli is no missing link but its placidity, a product of carefully minded source music and the subtlest of desires to innovate, suggests that the artists of Guitar Soli belong in the discussion, however private and odd their endeavors.

2008-02-14T01:00:04.000-05:00

2008-02-14T01:00:04.000-05:00

Numero Group

February 14, 2008

028699bf-9876-4948-bd3a-c398f71b7846

Andrew Gaerig

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

On the first album released under his Caribou moniker, Dan Snaith mostly eschews the spiraling psychedelica of Up in Flames; instead he creates clearer arrangements and better songs, both more expansive and comparatively sober.

On the first album released under his Caribou moniker, Dan Snaith mostly eschews the spiraling psychedelica of Up in Flames; instead he creates clearer arrangements and better songs, both more expansive and comparatively sober.

Caribou: The Milk of Human Kindness

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1805-the-milk-of-human-kindness/

The Milk of Human Kindness

When Dan Snaith's Manitoba released Up in Flames in early 2003 it felt like a debut. Bearing little resemblance to the cuddly IDM of 2001's Start Breaking My Heart, Up in Flames felt like the work of another mind, and logic dictated that the project should have a different name. The Gods of Music apparently agreed but were a little slow on the uptake; finally sensing the marked shifts in tone and focus they sent Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators to smite the project. Papers were served, a trade infringement lawsuit was threatened, and Caribou was born. Bummer that the record racks of the world are going to get more confusing, but in purely musical terms the name change isn't such a bad thing. The Milk of Human Kindness sounds once again like an album from a band without a past, a band ready to take risks and go where the music needs to go. The contrast between The Milk of Human Kindness and Up in Flames is certainly less pronounced than the jump from the debut, but the feel here-- clearer arrangements and better songs, both more expansive and comparatively sober-- is new to Snaith. I should explain that when I say that Caribou sounds like a band without a past, I mean a past of their own. Certain historical strands from the last 35 years or so of rock are easy to discern. Where Up in Flames referenced spiraling psychedelia, this record is more controlled, carefully choosing its moments and arranging peaks for maximum impact. The most obvious addition to the sound is a strong dose of Krautrock, particularly the classic propulsion of Neu! The opening riff of "Bees", for example, takes a handful of Booker T & the MGs' "Green Onions" and spreads them like flares along the Autobahn of "Hallo Gallo". That's only the bedrock rhythm, and as the song progresses Snaith indulges his fondness for dynamic builds and folds in a chorus of horns that lead to a booming drum crescendo. "A Final Warning" is another strong motorik beat and this time Snaith rides the efficient engine through the kandy-kolored dreamland of the Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun, exploding from dark tunnels into a vast, yawning mother sky with a wailing "Ahhh!!!!" The noisier tracks here are a lot of fun-- the spazzy "Brahminy Kite" is all cymbal crash and tom roll, its martial pulse and tinny organ contrasting with a repeating vocal refrain. The flipside of these drum-heavy tunes (which you know the band is aching to play live) is "Hello Hammerheads", an upfront and folksy vocal where Snaith aims for Simon and Garfunkel territory and winds up in the same area code, which is saying something considering how "just another instrument" his crooning can be. Tying the various strands together are a well-crafted series of minute-or-two interludes, which move from Lynchian melodrama ("Subotnick") to manipulated bits of warped baroque ("Drumheller"). Some of the "big" tracks remind me of the gothic reconfigurations of DJ Shadow, particularly the dramatic build-of-steam "Pelican Narrows", with its melancholy "Theme From the Incredible Hulk" piano theme and loose, splashy drumbeat, but also the gangly interlude "Lord Leopard". The Shadow feel is doubly interesting because, though Snaith is currently leading a full band when out on tour, complete with two drummers, he brings a record fan's approach to his music. He's digging into the past to find the best bits and combining the new ways, reinforcing the idea, suggested at on earlier Manitoba material, that his particular genius is curatorial rather than strictly inventive. However he does it, he's created another thrilling, excellent record.

2005-04-20T01:00:01.000-04:00

2005-04-20T01:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic

Leaf / Domino

April 20, 2005

0287bf57-1380-42c6-8367-6d8ea882ab99

Mark Richardson

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

With Beauty Behind the Madness, Abel Tesfaye achieved pop stardom without compromising his vision. On its uninspired follow-up, Starboy, he seems to lose sight of that vision almost entirely.

With Beauty Behind the Madness, Abel Tesfaye achieved pop stardom without compromising his vision. On its uninspired follow-up, Starboy, he seems to lose sight of that vision almost entirely.

The Weeknd: Starboy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22668-starboy/

Starboy

Who is the Weeknd? That’s the question a lot of us asked when the act first materialized, fully-formed, with 2011’s House of Balloons. Thanks to the group’s savvy anti-publicity campaign, the question had a literal bent: who are the people who made these songs? Fast-forward five years and there’s little mystery remaining when it comes to the provenance of the Weeknd’s music—like so many modern pop songs, his are now designed in consultation with a committee of experts. And yet, even as we watch Abel Tesfaye walk the red carpet in the light of day, the question remains: Who is the Weeknd? Is he a drugged-out lothario? A beloved pop star? A nihilist foil to Drake? The second coming of Michael Jackson? The runaway success of last years’ Beauty Behind the Madness—two No. 1 singles and over two million units sold in the U.S.—seemed like it might finally force an answer to this question. And yet, Starboy, the Weeknd’s sixth overall album and third for a major label, only further muddies the waters. Initially, there were signs that Starboy would represent a much-needed pivot, a rethinking of a sound and image that seemed to have run its course, from DIY mixtapes to the top of the charts. The album’s lead video features Tesfaye murdering a past version of himself before taking a cross-shaped bat to a condo full of awards and sales plaques. Starboy, however, is hardly a dramatic reinvention—if anything, it feels like a watered-down retread of the same old tropes. Beauty Behind the Madness managed to smuggle sleaze into the mainstream by refining Tesfaye’s pop songcraft, even as it doubled down on the darkness. Starboy eases up on both fronts, recycling melodies, ideas, and even whole songs while presenting a sanitized version of the Weeknd that often lacks any real sense of perspective. It’s a curious move for a guy who so decisively managed to succeed on his own terms. As if to guarantee that it feels like a slog, Starboy is also overstuffed: over an hour of music stretching out over 18 songs, many of them bland. “Rockin’” sounds like a label executive’s idea of what the Weeknd could be: inoffensive club pop tailor-made for office karaoke parties (“I just want your body next to me/’Cause it brings me so much ecstasy/We can just be rockin’, yeah”). “False Alarm” snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, its sublime opening harmonies devolving into a screamed chorus that’s as contrived as Michael Jackson’s bellow at the beginning of “Scream.” “Six Feet Under,” a collaboration with Future, is essentially just a rewrite of the pair's much sharper “Low Life” (“Reminder” also recycles the vocal melody from “Low Life”); both here and on “All I Know,” the melodically-gifted rapper feels sorely underutilized. Kendrick Lamar’s verse on the autotune-heavy “Sidewalks” is characteristically dexterous but even he sounds a bit unenthused to be here. It’s hard to blame him. There are a few bright spots on Starboy, moments that feel guided by a stronger vision. Both of the Daft Punk collaborations are satisfying, if hardly groundbreaking; “Starboy” glides like a sleek, high-performance car, while “I Feel It Coming” sounds like a slowed-down version of “Get Lucky.” “Secrets” pushes the Weeknd’s nocturnal sound into new wave territory, borrowing washes of clean guitar from Tears for Fears’ “Pale Shelter” and lifting the chorus from the Romantics’ “Talking in Your Sleep” wholesale. “True Colors” sounds like a ’90s R&B slow burner produced by Noah “40” Shebib (who was once apocryphally rumored to have ghost produced for the Weeknd). And “Ordinary Life” proves that Tesfaye is still more than capable of raising eyebrows, opening with a vivid description of fellatio behind the wheel before taking a hard left into petite mort fatalism (“David Carradine, I’ma die when I come”). Starboy’s most interesting song is barely even a song. The two-minute-long “Stargirl Interlude,” finds Lana Del Rey reprising her role as Tesfaye’s foil, relating a pornographic “vision” over a minimal backing track, before Tesfaye closes out the song by cooing, “I just want to see you shine, ’cause I know you are a Stargirl.” The brief snippet is filled with the sort of tension that’s so lacking from most of Starboy, playing up the theatrics for which both artists are known. “I feel like we’ve always been talking to each other through our music,” Tesfaye said of Del Rey in an interview last year. “She is the girl in my music, and I am the guy in her music.” Here, the pair embrace that meta-narrative, responding to their perceived lack of authenticity by retreating fully into the pop fantasy where their characters connect. It’s a boldly self-aware move, one that smartly manages to wring art from artifice. Starboy could use a lot more of this kind of audacity or really, any kind of coherent storytelling that challenges, complicates or further illuminates our understanding of the unfeeling villain that Tesfaye has been playing since day one. Instead, we get a grab bag of difficult to reconcile contradictions: a “Party Monster,” on one track, a doe-eyed balladeer on another (“Die for You”). Tesfaye used to be near-obsessive about packaging projects that felt narratively whole—after all, this is the guy who released an entire trilogy of interconnected albums in his first year. Starboy, by way of contrast, feels more like an opportunistic compilation of B-sides than an album. Who is the Weeknd? At this point, even the man behind the curtain might not know.

2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

XO / Republic

November 30, 2016

0289c708-171f-4cee-a361-9433d54a7470

Mehan Jayasuriya

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

The indie-rock icon fires up his laptop and lays down a set of quasi-electronic jams that owe more to late-1970s post-punk than to the Berlin nightlife that supposedly inspired the record.

The indie-rock icon fires up his laptop and lays down a set of quasi-electronic jams that owe more to late-1970s post-punk than to the Berlin nightlife that supposedly inspired the record.

Stephen Malkmus: Groove Denied

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stephen-malkmus-groove-denied/

Groove Denied

When promo copies of Stephen Malkmus’ eponymous 2001 solo album began to circulate, they bore the record’s working title: Swedish Reggae. It was an obvious joke that worked on two levels. There was the implicit contradiction in terms, which seemed more preposterous in a dial-up world where the internet had yet to dissolve geographic and musical boundaries; the gag was also rooted in the equally absurd notion that Stephen Malkmus would deign to make music that sounded like anyone other than himself. As the primary singer and guitarist in Pavement, Malkmus had not only been one of the defining figures of 1990s indie rock; his signature mix of skewed, fuzz-coated songcraft and cryptic lyricism had practically become a subgenre unto itself. And with his post-Pavement outfit the Jicks, the song has more or less remained the same, even as the guitar solos have gotten longer. Now in his 30th year as a recording artist, Stephen Malkmus is so good at being Stephen Malkmus that the mere prospect of him futzing around and making electronic music with Ableton Live might raise eyebrows, even after plenty of indie-rock titans of his vintage have dabbled in digitalism. Malkmus started writing Groove Denied while he was living in Berlin in the early 2010s, after a DJ friend chaperoned him into the city’s infamous club scene—but Ravement this is not. Rather than thrust him into foreign musical territory, the album returns Malkmus to the murky soup of lo-fi, DIY post-punk that once served as Pavement’s petri dish. But now he’s taking his cues from the primitive, proto-industrial synthwave of the Normal and “Being Boiled”-era Human League instead of the gnarled guitars of Swell Maps and the Fall. As far as records inspired by Berlin nightclub benders go, the vibe here is less “Dance like no one’s watching” than “Mess around like no one’s listening.” Groove Denied channels circa-1979 post-punk not just in austere sound but in mindset, harking back to an era when machines represented the sound of the future but no one was quite sure of what do with them yet. There’s a palpable sense of “What does this button do?” curiosity to the opening “Belziger Faceplant,” where jabbing synth notes arrhythmically spar with a sputtering drum-machine beat while Malkmus intrudes with an atonal croon like someone hamming it up in a karaoke booth. Even as he fortifies the rhythm with tambourine effects and a circular police-siren refrain, he pokes and prods it with distorted synth bleats, as if checking to see if his steak is done. Groove Denied is technically Malkmus’ second proper solo album after his 2001 debut, but that record was really a trial run for the then-unbilled Jicks. In stark contrast to the Jicks’ West Coast open-road splendor, Groove Denied is a true solitary effort, the sound of after-hours home-studio tinkering, gear bursting with tangled wires, and cabin-fever claustrophobia. This is especially true of “Forget Your Place,” a slow-motion swirl of ambient techno where Malkmus modulates his voice down into a drowsy drone, imagining a future where the robots have come for his job. Even his overtures toward straightforward synth pop eventually start to short-circuit. For a recent Noisey feature, Malkmus sat down and listened to LCD Soundsystem’s first album for the first time; fittingly, “Viktor Borgia”—with its neon-lit Kraftwerkian tone clusters, minimalist disco groove, and archly delivered meta-lyrics about making a beat connection (“We walk into the club/Thank the heavens above”)—sounds like Malkmus trying to make a James Murphy song having only read about the dance-punk icon. But he stops short of building the track up into a LCD-level thumper, because he’s having too much fun switching up the drum-machine settings. Compared to the triumph of 2018’s Jicks effort Sparkle Hard—an album that featured some of the most endearing and incisive writing of Malkmus’ career—Groove Denied can’t help but feel like a minor effort. It’s essentially his answer to McCartney II—the sound of a veteran artist with two beloved bands under his belt reveling in the freedom to indulge a latent fascination with the latest gadgets. Like that record, Groove Denied’s tech fetishism ultimately has its limits. A handful of these tracks (like the toga-party Velvets rumble of “Rushing the Acid Frat”) are guitar-based one-man-band rockers that could’ve easily been retooled into Jicks jams. But Groove Denied’s slapdash kitchen-sink experimentation rarely overwhelms Malkmus’ singular charms. With the lonesome, sitar-speckled lament “Come Get Me” and the Southern Gothic prog-pop opus “Ocean of Revenge” (whose earworm chorus melody was teased in the string arrangement of Sparkle Hard’s “Brethren”), the album yields a pair of aces that can stand alongside his finest songs. Since the ’90s, Malkmus and Pavement have become lazy shorthand for “ironic slackers,” a reputation that’s always undersold the emotional distress and subtle social commentary at the heart of his best writing. But even on a willfully irreverent record that puts a premium on groove, those qualities can’t be denied.

2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Matador

March 16, 2019

028d6e3e-fa6e-4947-94c9-a5ecea30f577

Stuart Berman

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

Like Chromatics and Junior Boys, Nite Jewel makes dance music more suitable for the ride home from the club than the actual disco.

Like Chromatics and Junior Boys, Nite Jewel makes dance music more suitable for the ride home from the club than the actual disco.

Nite Jewel: Good Evening

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12888-good-evening/

Good Evening

How far from an actual disco can dance music get? Chromatics and Junior Boys make a sort of dance music suitable for transit-- steeped in typical club-friendly sonics, their records are the soundtrack to the drive home from the club rather than the night out itself. Taken to its logical extreme, is it possible to make a sort of dance music as a completely disembodied observer? Los Angeles' Ramona Gonzalez, under the name Nite Jewel, seems set on finding the answer. Like the phrase "Nite Jewel" itself, Good Evening is minuscule and precious, both of which are charming descriptors, but its fragility is taken to an almost palpable extent. Once the record gets past a certain volume in headphones (it doesn't take much), you can faintly hear recording buzz splitting it apart at the seams. Take "Suburbia": Underneath Gonzalez's incorporeal wail, nothing feels concrete, despite the insistent and simple repetition. The leading synth blurt falls in and out of tune while the four-on-the-floor kick drum threatens to go into slack triplets. Any quantizing feature could "solve" this problem, but is seeing the stitching part of the appeal? The whole appeal? On "What Did He Say", the most immediately striking track on Good Evening, there's a nifty bassline but the moment it modulates up a couple of steps, the mix turns to mush. If you've ever played a preset song on a Casio and switched up between incompatible major scales, you might get the idea. There are positives, but even they raise questions: Bubbling single "Artificial Intelligence", which is probably the first track on Good Evening with a discernible lyric (even if it's just the title), has a clear-eyed purpose. Meanwhile, "Let's Go (The Two of Us Together)" and "Chimera" follow in the path of "Weak For Me", an earlier highlight that cops its sound from the Jets' "Crush on You". It's debatable whether this DIY take on lite and funky Reagan-era R&B is refreshing or akin to munching on a piece of bubblegum that's been stuck in a pack of Donruss since the mid-80s-- why dull the hooks when the sort of fidelity that could bring them to a focus is more readily available than ever, even to artists at their most entry-level? But then again, maybe it's not a remix Good Evening needs so much as a fair yardstick to measure it by. Though it's arguable that each has different goals, the same sort of disembodied vocals and languorous textures you hear in acts like Grouper, Beach House, and A Sunny Day In Glasgow are proof there's more to this sort of thing than sounding like a Cocteau Twins record playing two parties over. Alas, Nite Jewel isn't at the level of the aforementioned; with her devotion to a sound at the relative cost of songs, she's more like a shuttle-mate of Salem in the blog-hype space race to find an act that can merge tapes-out-of-the-trunk hip-hop recording methods with 4AD gossamer. Now let's see if they're willing to outsource the engineering.

2009-04-14T01:00:04.000-04:00

2009-04-14T01:00:04.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Human Ear

April 14, 2009

0292bf7e-503e-4ca2-910b-25de499af93e

Pitchfork

https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/

Accompanied by strings, sax, and piano, the Toronto musician sorts through his past on an intimate collection of orchestral pop, bursting with hooks.

Accompanied by strings, sax, and piano, the Toronto musician sorts through his past on an intimate collection of orchestral pop, bursting with hooks.

Scott Hardware: Ballad of a Tryhard

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scott-hardware-ballad-of-a-tryhard/

Ballad of a Tryhard

After a period of intense searching, Scott Hardware finally took a vacation. While writing his third album, the Toronto songwriter travelled to the quiet city of Elche, Spain for an idyllic escape with his romantic partner. Naturally, this lush setting on the southeast coast of the Mediterranean Sea inspired him to adorn his music with ornate arrangements of strings, sax, and piano, resulting in a pristine atmosphere drifting dangerously close to adult contemporary. In comparison to the spiky disco grooves and decaying electronic passages of his previous album, 2020’s Engel, these 10 songs are disarmingly earnest and boldly uncool—and all the more beautiful because of it. As a collaborator, Hardware has bounced around the Toronto scene for years, playing with drone-rockers Ostrich Tuning and bristling post-punks WHIMM. His earliest synth-pop solo offerings arrived under the name Ken Park, before a move to Berlin influenced the techno-flirting sound of 2016’s Mutate Repeat Infinity, the first album credited to Scott Hardware. “I imagine dance music as hallowed ground,” he explained at that time, paying tribute to a generation lost to the HIV/AIDS crisis while writing evocatively about his own queerness. Four years later, Hardware was still yearning. The transitional nature of 2020’s Engel stripped his desires down to a raw and vulnerable mess of meaty stumps as he attempted to overcome emotional blocks. That album crescendoed with the skyrocketing hi-hats of “Joy,” yet Hardware revealed that he only experienced the passion described in his lyrics second-hand: “I was seeing somebody and thinking ‘I’m supposed to feel something,’” he confessed. Ballad of a Tryhard brings those buried emotions up to the surface and into the sky, like a plane pulling a banner to profess his romance to the world. Hardware’s soft, nimble voice has earned comparisons to Thom Yorke, but the Radiohead frontman wouldn’t dare sing lyrics this direct. (“Here with a love I’m not worthy of,” he sings. “And full with a strength I can’t take away.”) Tugged by glammy guitar riffs, “Love Through the Trees” makes the shift in perspective clear. While he seemed inconsolable in the past, Hardware admits that finding a connection has softened his edges: “We both know that don’t come around that often,” he adds. “Metaterranean” plunges into his European getaway in medias res, as he leafs through a book of common phrases and sips cola in the salty sea air. Yet despite the peaceful atmosphere, Hardware can’t escape his anxieties: “I go somewhere else and I sing the same song.” The intimate “Is Something Wrong Tonight” uses a lovers’ quarrel as a springboard to reflect on the fights that fade like shooting stars, “burning out and gone without a sound.” Hardware has always excelled at conjuring tactile imagery, as on “Joy,” when he tasted someone who reminded him of cinnamon, and dug his hands through the dirt in search of deeper sensations. On this album’s catchiest song, “Watersnake,” he flashes back to a childhood memory of reptiles slithering across the lake near his mom’s home. Bolstered by swooning strings, there is an understated intensity to Hardware’s voice as he vividly describes a person from his past returning to interrupt his tranquillity and “make a meal of a swimmer’s peace.” With the deft touch of co-producer Matt Smith, who releases electronic music as Prince Nifty, Hardware lets his guard down. Frequent collaborators such as drummer Jonathan Pappo dance around these agile arrangements, and some of the most stunning moments are when Hardware is accompanied by guest vocalist Caitlin Woelfle-O’Brien of the Toronto band Jaunt. On previous releases, striking melodies were hidden between haunting experiments, but Ballad of a Tryhard is a relatively straightforward collection of orchestral pop, bursting with hooks. Like the heartfelt folk songs of Amen Dunes’ Love, it is a grand step towards traditional songcraft. The lyrics on Ballad of a Tryhard sort through Hardware’s past, using wistful sense memories to examine how he’s arrived in the present moment. In “Bootleg,” he is a teenager basking in the glow of the television, late at night, alone; in “Another Day Ending,” he zooms to the present day, reaching out for solace and resting his head in his boyfriend’s lap. Songs this sincere, presented with such sophisticated arrangements, have a risk of becoming overly sentimental, but in Hardware’s hands they feel singular and personal. No matter which point in time or which place on the map his music brings us, he feels close enough for us to reach out and touch him.

2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock / Electronic

Telephone Explosion

March 3, 2022

02952cc7-4c3c-4975-ab2a-f4b7f97606da

Jesse Locke

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

The St. Louis rapper’s new mixtape channels Gucci Mane and Trina, delivering filthy, laugh-out-loud punchlines and setting the tone for the freakiest summer since the advent of the smartphone.

The St. Louis rapper’s new mixtape channels Gucci Mane and Trina, delivering filthy, laugh-out-loud punchlines and setting the tone for the freakiest summer since the advent of the smartphone.

Sexyy Red: Hood Hottest Princess

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sexyy-red-hood-hottest-princess/

Hood Hottest Princess

Only a few rap songs from the past few years have lyrics that offer a welcome shock every single time I hear them. On the shortlist is Rio Da Yung OG’s punchline-driven madness “Legendary”; RXK Nephew’s “American tterroistt,” a 10-minute saga that is the sonic equivalent of a Reddit thread; and lastly, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s raunchy megahit “WAP.” Sexyy Red’s breakout single “Pound Town” is in that league, earning the title of the wildest rap hit of the year. Over a Tay Keith beat that would have the strip clubs on lock in 2008, Sexyy Red is getting her toes sucked, recruiting dudes who are savages in bed but can also be decent stepfathers to her son, and theatrically moaning like she’s in a Paul Verhoeven-directed sex scene. Then, of course, there’s the line: “My coochie pink, my bootyhole brown,” a declaration she breezes through like it’s just another bar. It’s funny, out-of-pocket, and makes pearl clutchers squirm—but it never feels like she’s trying too hard to be provocative. Elaborating on the spirit of “Pound Town” is Red’s new mixtape Hood Hottest Princess, which sets the tone for what she hopes is the nastiest, sweatiest, and freakiest summer since the smartphone came along. Fittingly, the booming sound of the project feels of a time when beats by Shawty Redd and Zaytoven were the blueprint (honestly, if you were to tell me that Sexyy Red has been in a cryo chamber since the summer of 2012, I wouldn’t be surprised). But the throwback spirit of Hood Hottest Princess actually comes from Red’s St. Louis roots, a city that is, according to her, stuck in the 2000s: “We don’t listen to the new rap; we still listen to the old shit,” she said in a recent interview. You can hear that sensibility in the way she raps with a slurred delivery, as if she’s been stranded on an island with banging 2008-2009 Gucci Mane tapes, like EA Sportscenter and The BurrPrint: The Movie 3D. And most importantly, she doesn’t simply refashion existing Gucci hits. In an era where so many artists are looking to capitalize on “ready-made nostalgia,” that would be the easier route. But for Red, that source of inspiration is a foundation—not necessarily the point. You could let practically all of Hood Hottest Princess ride at a party or club without killing the vibe; it’s 30 minutes of straight-up standing-on-the-table raps. There are a handful of songs on here that are bound to be summertime anthems (if they aren’t, then we’ll get what we deserve, which is three months of rappers riding the wave of club-rap and J. Cole and Lil Durk doing their version of Schoolhouse Rock). “Hellcat SRTs,” a song about getting turned on by a man who’s willing to do everything behind the wheel that traffic laws would advise against (speeding, fucking, smoking dope), will turn dancefloors into shouting matches. The beat is so thunderous that it sounds like you should be listening to it in an IMAX theater. Meanwhile, “Sexyy Walk,” produced by Juicy J and DJ Paul, is all brute force, with Sexyy Red starting the song off blazing hot and never letting up: “Coke-bottle shape and I got some soft skin/Chanel No. 9, exotic weed, that’s my scent.” Hood Hottest Princess is also full of moments that are hilariously off the rails. The shrill hook on “SkeeYee” is so hypnotic and nutty, you’ll probably be asking Why? until you just decide to give in. When Red’s voice is in this high register, the spirit of Gucci that possesses her starts to sound a lot more like Trina. That’s where she’s at on “Mad at Me,” laying down raps that talk about guys the same way male rappers have women forever: They’re all just there to “lick-lick between my ass, suck on my clit” (except her baby’s daddy, whom she seems to have a soft spot for). On “Female Gucci Mane,” she leans into the Guwop comparisons; her delivery is almost drunken, but it never slips into full cosplay. That approach is less successful on the Three 6 Mafia-indebted “Strictly for the Strippers,” which interpolates “Sippin’ on Some Sizzurp.” It’s the one time she lets nostalgia do all of the work. Underwhelmingly, the original “Pound Town” is not on the mixtape; in its place is “Pound Town 2,” which is pretty much the same song, this time featuring a Nicki Minaj verse that isn’t steamy enough to match Red’s energy. These chart-chasing remixes are inevitable at this point, but if it had to be done, Cardi B would have been a better fit; her updates of Latto’s “Put It on Da Floor” and Glorilla’s “Tomorrow” are worthwhile, not just industry formalities. Luckily, it would take a whole lot more than a mailed-in Nicki verse to bring down a mixtape as fun as Hood Hottest Princess. For a minute there, the mainstream options for soundtracks to warm-weather debauchery were looking slim. That’s where Hood Hottest Princess comes in. Lighten up and take your pick.

2023-06-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-06-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rap

Open Shift Distribution / Gamma.

June 15, 2023

0295eb3a-276b-4fee-bbf0-a5445dc5108c

Alphonse Pierre

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

The latest from the one-time member of shadowy experimental outfit Hype Williams veers in the direction of proper song and sounds heartbroken, boasting sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and harp flurries, along with ominous clock chimes and distraught voicemail messages.

The latest from the one-time member of shadowy experimental outfit Hype Williams veers in the direction of proper song and sounds heartbroken, boasting sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and harp flurries, along with ominous clock chimes and distraught voicemail messages.

Dean Blunt: The Redeemer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17956-dean-blunt-the-redeemer/

The Redeemer

Dean Blunt is heartbroken, possibly. The Redeemer is his break-up album, a relatively straightforward affair after numerous releases that seemed to reveal as little about him as possible-- or maybe they revealed everything. His prior work, both on his own and with sometime partner Inga Copeland, varied wildly in quality, finally reaching a dead end with last year's The Narcissist II, a half-assed tribute to half-assedness. Where do you go from there? For Blunt, the answer is to lose the dopey feel of his prior records, strip away the layers of fuzz, and etch out a set of short ballads that form something resembling a relationship crisis album. There are occasional diversions-- distraught voicemail messages, clocks chiming ominously-- but much of The Redeemer assimilates the feel of someone slumped over a bar, reading the last rites on a romance. The most interesting thing this album does is pose a few questions about substance and how it's ascribed. Does Dean Blunt now come with added "weight" due to sad horn solos, sweeping strings, and the sound of hands running up and down harp strings? No, not really. Often it sounds like someone keenly aware of the trappings of music that reads as "heartbroken," and how to manipulate them. At least it occasionally seems like there's genuine hurt there, sometimes from a twist in Blunt's voice, or a passage of particularly weepy piano playing. But most of the songs are half-formed and barely able to gain any momentum, strangled by track lengths that clock in around the one- or two-minute mark. There's a strong sense of something as transient as the Narcissist material, just dressed up in different clothing. Fortunately, The Redeemer isn't just an elongated comment on how heavily certain devices have been leaned on throughout music history. On a song like "Demon", tellingly one of the longest here, Blunt ties together vocal manipulations, sound collage, pounding drums, and even a softly tooting trumpet solo. It finds room to bridge between Blunt's prior inclinations for haze and the roomier ones he works in here. His work as an arranger is often skilled, even if the end result either can't or won't get beyond feeling like a simple exercise. "All Dogs Go to Heaven" is his attempt at a Histoire de Melody Nelson cut; "Make It Official" briefly dips into woozy David Sylvian territory. Even Inga Copeland, possibly the person cast as Blunt's subject matter, surfaces on the title track, although her appearance lacks any dramatic élan. The Redeemer is too cynical an enterprise for that, always stopping short of actually feeling very much. There is some worth in giving common musical tropes a kicking, although Blunt's approach-- essentially swilling the dregs of balladry around in his mouth and spewing them out-- too often ends up more flaccid than the style he's referencing. The Redeemer ends up somewhere between sarcasm and sensitivity, but can't dig deep enough in either direction to provide something that's worth returning to. The fragmented nature of the tracks, where ideas are set in motion and just trail off into insubstantial thought, can't get to the genesis of what makes material like this work. Pop that comments on pop needs to have a thorough understanding of the form in order to function. As a consequence, it doesn't really matter whether this is Blunt making a genuine attempt at recording a break-up album or using it as a framework to illustrate how vacuous such a gesture can be. Whatever he was looking for, he hasn't found it here.

2013-05-24T02:00:03.000-04:00

2013-05-24T02:00:03.000-04:00

Experimental

Hippos in Tanks / World Music

May 24, 2013

029691dd-c67a-4f08-988e-2457eaa7709b

Nick Neyland

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

Can a band build an entire career, a legacy even, on a handful of EPs and a boundless torrent of ...

Can a band build an entire career, a legacy even, on a handful of EPs and a boundless torrent of ...

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Fever to Tell

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8888-fever-to-tell/

Fever to Tell

Can a band build an entire career, a legacy even, on a handful of EPs and a boundless torrent of press? How many party dresses need to take a beer bath before the Yeah Yeah Yeahs drop the rock icon pastiche and just play some music? Over and over again, they've been accused of empty posturing, wallowing in scrofulous, self-conscious "irony," disguising themselves Predator-style as the public conception of who they were supposed to be rather than who they actually are. And yet (dramatic pause), until the stylists and spin-mongers start writing the music, why does this still have to matter? The band plays the blistering, bassless hand they're dealt, plus or minus the cards up their designer sleeves, and make the "right moves." More power to them; hype, famously, is a bitch, a shrew, and in the end, it's still theirs to try and tame. No one wants to be the ill-fated morning-after tat on the ass-end of the garage-rock revival, after all. The really stupid part of all this, though, is that the shitstorm of publicity that's been hanging overhead the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is based on all of, what, eight songs? Two EP/singles? Robert Pollard throws away eight songs before breakfast and you sure as hell don't see him on the cover of NME. Well, hold yr breath, kids. The YYY's have finally released the plot element that their garage-to-riches Cinderella II story has most sorely lacked: The Full-Length Album. This is gonna make 'em rockstars, everybody! The final story arc-- and how's this for irony-- will conclude with them shedding their personas here, showing everyone that they've got what it takes to endure, and living happily ever after as the saviors of rock 'n' rollllll... Except, they don't do any of that. Or maybe (and this is only an hypothesis) they were never all that guilty of the heinous crimes of Fashion they've been charged with in the first place? Either way, here it is, Fever to Tell, and they just play the same guitar/drums rock they have since the beginning-- what'd you expect? Sure, you can practically feel Karen O looking over her shoulder for approval with every faux-erotic squeal or disdainful shout, and a number of these tracks fall flat entirely because of the knowing, brutal swagger they try so damn hard to affect. And when it's all over, the slow-burning, gently chaotic dissolve of "No No No" (even the title is self-conscious) or the bluesy strut of "Black Tongue" will wither under anything more than passing scrutiny, but more will remain. Reason is, first and foremost, the near-faultless musical support at the core of the YYY's: Nick Zinner and Brian Chase. If you can hear (or even care to try to hear, which you shouldn't) an ounce of "posture" in Zinner's thunderous guitar licks or Chase's relentless percussive assault, then you're a more cynical man (or woman) than I. The rhythms are never very complicated, but when it counts, Chase pounds away with enough precise desperation to project an unfailing sense of urgency; it carries through even the more emotional tracks, lending the rare vulnerability a tragic sort of transience. Between the vicious buzz and slender trill of Zinner's strings is a breathtaking range-- the robotically looped harmonics of "Rich" coupled with the layered crunch of the wall-of-sound that collapses on top of them; the stop/start emergency-room shriek of "Date With a Night". Even Karen O seems stunned by the anthemic scope of the blazing, surf-like guitar and Chase's deafening percussion on "Y Control"; she turns in one of her most subdued vocals, as if it's all she can do just to keep up. Not coincidentally, it's also one of her most impressive turns. That's not O's only compelling performance, though-- there are a couple moments when she drops her lacquered sneers and teases, and when this happens, it suddenly becomes very difficult to avoid seeing the music in a different light. Of course, her success varies. At times, she's the linchpin of the band-- and not just because her gratuitous sexual tension has become their trademark-- while at others she's the weakest link. The problem here is that, while the guys are definitely on here, they're still nowhere near groundbreaking, and as a result, they rise and fall depending largely on Karen's delivery. Her play-acting is what got the Yeah Yeah Yeahs slapped with the charges of shallow insincerity in the first place. It shouldn't matter if it's a façade, but it does; knowing beforehand what you're dealing with or not, it becomes very trying to accept every sleazy squeak as part of her routine. If the band ever wants to really dump these lingering doubts for good, they'll need to overcome this obstacle. Still, for proof that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, at their core, make a better band than they do runway trendsetters, one need look no further than Fever to Tell's singular true moment of clarity-- a tune of such moving grace I can scarcely believe they're responsible for it-- "Maps". Though the song is sadly in a class by itself on this record (it would take about two seconds to call roll for the tunes that even come close), absolutely everything falls into place here. The drums are gentle enough to simply caress the tune, but still pressing enough to make it clear that this second of happiness is fleeting, and Zinner's guitar work is easily his best to date, equal parts joy and discord. But it's Karen's vocals that steal the show; for once, they fairly drip genuine, regretful emotion: When she sings, "Lay off/ Don't stray/ My kind is your kind/ I'll stay the same.../ They don't love you like I love you," almost on the verge of defeated tears, the emotive response it produces is very real, and that means a lot.

2003-04-28T01:00:02.000-04:00

2003-04-28T01:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Interscope

April 28, 2003

0296c5a5-3c55-40a6-92d4-507f913189be

Eric Carr

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

After her darker sophomore effort 2012's Master of My Make-Believe, Santigold returns with a sunshine-bright pop album, shaded with biting commentary on consumerism and the price of art. It comes across as a pointed reaction to her own success over the past decade: If Master of My Make-Believe was a trip down the rabbit hole post-Santogold, 99¢ tries to be the yin to its yang: a hyper-positive, yet self-aware, happy-pill remedy.

After her darker sophomore effort 2012's Master of My Make-Believe, Santigold returns with a sunshine-bright pop album, shaded with biting commentary on consumerism and the price of art. It comes across as a pointed reaction to her own success over the past decade: If Master of My Make-Believe was a trip down the rabbit hole post-Santogold, 99¢ tries to be the yin to its yang: a hyper-positive, yet self-aware, happy-pill remedy.

Santigold: 99¢

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21439-99/

99¢

In retrospect, Santigold's debut album was something of a miracle. Freshly split from her massively underrated Philly ska-punk/new wave band Stiffed, she found her way to a fresher, grimier rock-pop sound. Eight years later, Santogold pretty much stands as filler-free document of its time, and it maintains its integrity no matter how many Bud Light Limes it sold. In the meantime, Santi White has released a darker sophomore effort (2012's Master of My Make-Believe), had a baby, took on acting jobs, and is now attempting to shed her more jaded side for a sunshine-bright pop album, shaded with biting commentary on consumerism and the price of art. It comes across as a pointed reaction to her own success over the past decade: If Master of My Make-Believe was a trip down the rabbit hole post-Santogold, 99¢ tries to be the yin to its yang: a hyper-positive, yet self-aware, happy-pill remedy. The moment on 99¢ where it all comes together is on "Banshee," an absolute firestorm of a track co-written with Cathy Dennis, the bonafide genius hit-maker behind chart-toppers from "Can't Get You Out of My Head" to "Toxic." A bubbling cauldron of handclaps and perky synths, "Banshee" sounds like the soundtrack to a military invasion by a chorus of anime schoolgirls. The joy is so pure that it casts a pall over actual lead single "Chasing Shadows," co-written and produced by Rostam Batmanglij, which basically plods along inoffensively until it ends. The faltering momentum grinds to a complete halt during "Walking in a Circle," which resembles a trap version of the Siamese twin cats' song from The Lady and the Tramp. *99¢'*s other major winning moment is "Who Be Lovin’ Me," which reinforces the theory that there are few things iLoveMakonnen's soft and sleepy flow can't improve. Santi matches his rhymes beat for beat, meanwhile, revealing surprising prowess as a rapper. "Rendezvous Girl" is a tasty nugget of '80s synthpop (down to the lyrics about a powerful businesswoman "sashaying through town"), driving the second half of the album into more stable territory. "Outside the War" begins to dip again, but luckily the end is salvaged by the "Run the Races," an effectively plaintive ballad co-produced with Batmanglij that profits from wailing guitars from Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, and "Who I Thought You Were," the album's upbeat rock-pop closer. The album veers awkwardly like this, sometimes giving the impression that Santigold is getting in her own way. At her best, she elevates the party song to an artform; "Walking in a Circle" and its soundalikes lack the enthusiasm and focus that we know she is capable of, as if these lulls are the result of trying to balance out 99¢’s serotonin rush. Self-consciousness is usually the enemy of a good party, and the downtempo moments feel like she’s pumping the brakes on her own talent. The album is presented as a consumerist critique, intentionally blurring the line between artist and product, but the quality of the songs varies too widely to pull off an actual concept album. Even as a tongue-in-cheek statement, Santigold is worth more than her self-affixed 99¢ price tag, and the peaks of this record just about outweigh its valleys. But for all its colorful packaging and flirtations with bubblegum pop, 99¢ feels constrained, like she took the cover image literally and vacuum-sealed all of her best traits—reggae-tinted riffs, candy-colored fashion, Casio synths—into one too-neat package. On 99¢, sealed away they remain, poking through the plastic just enough to tantalize.

2016-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Atlantic

February 23, 2016

0297e0fe-8415-4e28-b446-b6967e8b7c03

Cameron Cook

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

Japanese post-rock-cum-hardcore band leaves the thrash behind and wanders through a moody cinematic landscape reminiscent of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky.

Japanese post-rock-cum-hardcore band leaves the thrash behind and wanders through a moody cinematic landscape reminiscent of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky.

Envy: Insomniac Doze

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9496-insomniac-doze/

Insomniac Doze

What to expect from a record titled Insomniac Doze? Those prone to sleep at the prospect of 15-minute songs titled impressionistically after the abstract (say, "The Unknown Glow"), and after further discovering those songs are performed by a band, Envy, from a country, Japan, known as the spiritual home for musicians who pick up guitars and play them for not minutes but months at a time, will likely drift off at the very thought. And disciples of Envy's early years, when they formed an unofficial international alliance with like-minded post-hardcore bands Yaphet Kotto, in America, and Yage, in Germany, might do more than nod off at the news-- they'll likely chuck the disc. Envy's days as a forward-thinking hardcore band are well behind them, and Insomniac Doze makes the case that they were never one at all. Their songs were always longer, their aesthetic, gauzier: With their stretched-out, openly cinematic take on hardcore's slasher-vérité came longer album titles, longer sets, even longer hair. Rather than drafting their countrymen Mono's slipstream, Envy probably helped pave the way for that quartet's nakedly orchestral snooze fests, just as Corrupted's infinite doom and Acid Mothers Temple's extended space-time explorations had paved the way for Envy. On their newest record, Envy sound mild enough for the dentist's office. Reminiscent of the film scoring Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky have been doing in the last few years, Insomniac Doze accepts the same contours: chiming builds and ringing climaxes, drawn-out clean guitar lines, and EBowed sustains leading towards mournful bridges. But Tetsuya Fukagawa's tortured howl-- as if the band hadn't told him that they're no longer constantly aiming for red-- sits on top like an oil slick. The fascination with cinema common to lesser Japanese post-rockers evidences a lack of imagination: They reenact scenes of rain falling, the camera circling up and away from a kneeling, drenched protagonist. It's the kind of effect that draws snickers when beheld firsthand and, post-Godspeed, on record as well; Envy, in retaining the gut-punch of their hardcore roots, manage the same general arc with less shtick and more gravity. "Crystallize" is aggressive but otherwise near-symphonic pop that starts out galvanized and soaring before stretching out the confines of the song, carrying the melody on echoed, playful note-slivers. When the vocal comes in, it's not ethereal Bowie but more like City of Caterpillar, another U.S. band who successfully blended abstract-rock with hardcore immediacy. Envy's "Shield of Selflessness" successfully takes City of Caterpillar's mid-tempo blast and adds even more bombast, replacing naked panic with a kind of existential sadness, conjuring vast empty landscapes and cold vacant rooms. "Night in Winter" drops the storm entirely, suggesting only its drained aftermath. So too with Insomniac Doze-- gone is the furious band that once expanded rock palettes with tricky arpeggios and lots of air. Instead, Envy have given themselves completely to their once dormant spacey impulses and time-lapse songwriting. Your interest may well depend on your attention span.

2006-10-18T02:00:05.000-04:00

2006-10-18T02:00:05.000-04:00

Rock

Temporary Residence Ltd.

October 18, 2006

02983d27-8c2a-416e-aee0-bba0da3f9068

Pitchfork

Tucker Pillsbury’s second album turns to folksy sincerity, recounting a celebrity breakup in songs that feel competent, cutesy, and almost believable.

Tucker Pillsbury’s second album turns to folksy sincerity, recounting a celebrity breakup in songs that feel competent, cutesy, and almost believable.

Role Model: Kansas Anymore

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/role-model-kansas-anymore/

Kansas Anymore

Tucker Pillsbury sure looks like a pop star. He’s got the movie-star good looks, a collection of trendy tattoos, and an eccentric Fashion Week wardrobe. The 27-year-old Maine native nearly landed a role in HBO’s Euphoria but was passed up for Dominic Fike, another suave, tattooed singer. Like Fike, Pillsbury has struggled to channel his on-camera charisma into compelling music. Since 2017, he’s released room-temperature pop as Role Model, portraying himself as a sweet-natured yet mentally tortured heartbreaker. He’s clearly inspired by alt-pop heroes Frank Ocean and BROCKHAMPTON, but his music mostly resembles Shawn Mendes if Mendes were a mediocre singer. “I want something on the radio,” Pillsbury told GQ in 2022. Shuffle through his catalog and you’ll hear an artist desperately searching for a star-making moment. Pillsbury’s second album, Kansas Anymore, is a step in the right direction. It’s a compact, confident, and well-produced pop-rock record about breaking up with one of Gen Z’s most influential stars, Emma Chamberlain, who has served as Pillsbury’s muse two records in a row. Rx, his 2022 full-length debut, was a frictionless and frequently excruciating collection of lyrically bland, Imagine Dragons-indebted love songs. While Kansas Anymore has shortcomings—cutesy choruses, unadventurous melodies, middling vocal performances—its personality and songcraft are more mature and palatable than any of Pillsbury’s past work. Though it makes a few bids for radio singles, Kansas Anymore seems less concerned with landing a hit than it does building a sturdy home to hang out in. Pillsbury and executive producer Noah Conrad draw from a folk-pop playbook of Fleetwood Mac and Kacey Musgraves to pen a selection of sunny, sentimental songs. “Look at That Woman” is pleasantly arranged with bright acoustics, slide guitar, and grand piano, and Pillsbury maneuvers well within his vocal range, cruising through plainspoken verses before stretching into a faint falsetto hook. In slower moments, like on the beautifully raw “Slut Era Interlude” or the silky Lizzy McAlpine duet “So Far Gone,” he winds his way into genuinely moving melodies; when he croons “I don’t want you but I want you to spend the night,” it sounds like he really feels what he’s singing. It’s a first for Pillsbury: He elicits a sincere emotional reaction, and he’s not playacting. There is definitely some playacting on this record, though. Pillsbury’s stomp-clap pivot feels slightly forced considering the recent success of artists like Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan. (“The Dinner” is a full-on Kahan rip—or Mumford & Sons, blame whoever you want.) Still, the role of cowboy-hatted songwriter suits Pillsbury better than the swaggering bad boy character he sought to cultivate on Rx, where he sang “I’d die for my bitch” with the conviction of a boy-band backup. In this softer, more contemplative mode, he’s an occasionally deft writer: “If I was younger, I’d take a downer/Lay on the carpet, pills on the counter/If I was lonely, I’d call up Rachel/Be there in twenty, jeans at her ankles,” he sings on “Slipfast.” He’s still prone to a weak chorus—the punchline on “Superglue” is a wincer—but Kansas Anymore proves Pillsbury to be a sensitive and competent songwriter, even when the G-C-D-major chords and verse-chorus archetypes wear thin. Despite some biting moments, the album-wide breakup narrative also loses intrigue. Pillsbury admits to masochistically reveling in disillusion, embracing “the feeling of letting it all burn down.” But voyeurs looking to get a documentarian view into his and Chamberlain’s private lives—and the album’s marketing certainly alludes to this possibility—will be disappointed. For all Pillsbury’s claims that he’s a “scumbag,” he’s quick to a cliché, and even quicker to a cheery silver lining. He wants what’s right for her; he tried his best; maybe they’re still meant to be? Without show-stopping talent or anything that truly differentiates him from the gaggle of guys who hope to blow up like Zach Bryan, he remains stuck in pop star limbo. He looks the part, but the role may already be filled.

2024-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Interscope

July 30, 2024

029934e7-2bbf-4ef9-9968-73dcde78e9ca

Brady Brickner-Wood

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/

A powerful, iconic document of West Coast punk is reissued, warts and all.

A powerful, iconic document of West Coast punk is reissued, warts and all.

X: Los Angeles

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/x-los-angeles/

Los Angeles

By the time the late ’70s rolled around, maybe it was more punk to be in Los Angeles. In California, the artists revolted against the easy feelings that pervaded FM radio and ripped apart the culture of cocaine and groupies and limousines. Los Angeles is where X first marked their spot, the title of their 1980 debut, and the first of their catalog to be reissued this year as the band heads back to the studio to make a new record and on tour. Several songs off Los Angeles were featured in The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary of the L.A. punk scene, placing X in the landscape of Germs, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks. The band couldn’t have been more Los Angeles: The X of their name signifies anti-everything, certainly a lack of a proper signature in an autograph-worshipping town. Singer and bass player John Doe took his stage name from the police code for an anonymous person. He came to L.A. inspired by how the city was starkly rendered by writers like John Fante and Charles Bukowski. Exene Cervenka, née Christine, was living in Tallahassee; they met in a poetry workshop. Drummer DJ Bonebrake was in the early L.A. punk band the Eyes; guitarist Billy Zoom came up in groups that opened for Etta James and Johnnie Taylor and joined Gene Vincent’s rockabilly band. And Ray Manzarek, well, he came from the other side. “I liked the Doors’ version of the ocean, which was dark and scary,” Cervenka says in We Got the Neutron Bomb. X had a thing for the Doors and they found a kindred spirit in Manzarek, who plays organ and produces this album. By all rights, the keys in “Light My Fire” absolutely should not work on a searing punk record, but they add a psychedelic undercurrent that is both upbeat and a little bit unhinging. Cervenka best described the band in her contribution to Doe’s book about the L.A. punk scene, Under the Big Black Sun: “Bits and pieces of Britpop, glam, country, old music, new music, old cars, East LA sugar skulls and lowriders, Hells Angels with their choppers lined up on the Sunset Strip—it was a sexy, scary thrill to walk the gauntlet of all those biker eyes.” Musically, Los Angeles is almost infallible. “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You‘re Not” kicks off with relentless immediacy as if you’ve jumped into a speeding car on a midnight tour. Doe and Cervenka trade lead vocals and occasionally Cervenka veers stunningly off course in vivid and blistering wails, a Siouxsie Sioux in Southern California. On top of Bonebrake’s motoring drums, the songs are dark and doom-laden, fiery and mordant. X sings about drugs and violence and cruising and ennui, conjuring a mood that prefigures Hüsker Dü’s “Diane” and Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising. They stick it to the upper class with “Sex and Dying in High Society” and they finish with one of the best punk love songs of all time, “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss.” “Go to hell, see if you like it/Then come home with me”—the musical equivalent of cigarette ashes and red lipstick—the end to a wild ride through Los Angeles’ underworld. Doe and Cervenka’s co-authored lyrics are written in character—told in the first person, the second person, and in close third perspective. They are noir snapshots, deliberately literary, sprung from pulp fictions and Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, a fatalistic vision of Los Angeles told through a flawed cast of characters with raging, reckless impulses. Jarring still, almost 40 years later, is the title track, a song starring a vitriolic character on her last day in L.A., where Doe and Cervenka deploy the n-word. There’s no salvaging or smoothing over the inherent weaponry of that word in the song of a white person, no matter how great the artist, no matter the intent. As the writer Camille Collins observed in a piece published on Afropunk in 2011, “Black lovers of punk are no different than any other kind; we love the assault of impolite, opprobrious sounds thrashed out and hollered with little regard for the protocols of harmony and catchy lyrics that define pop... But what’s a black person to do when their favorite punker drops the ‘N’ word in what might otherwise be a totally awesome song?” Collins is also the author of a young adult novel, The Exene Chronicles, about a teenage girl growing up as one of the few African-American persons in her San Diego neighborhood, idolizing Cervenka. What is any listener to do when an album re-enters the world decades later in which a dearth of compassion is met with a dangerous shortage of nuance and complexity? What are artists to do, if anything? The reissue doesn’t attempt to answer those questions. There’s no 2019 addendum in its liner notes. The lyric sheet is reprinted in full here, but does not rewrite or redact or explain. Granted, that leaves “Los Angeles” in its original context. It’s evident the narrator has hatred for “every...Jew” and “every Mexican that gave her a lotta shit/Every homosexual and the idle rich.” The fact that they reserve their lone actual slur to refer to, presumably, African-American persons loads it with greater violence. The character is based on a former roommate of Cervenka’s, known as Farrah Fawcett Minor, who was leaving L.A. for England. If she’s the narrator of a song, whose name is a city, perhaps—charitably—she is also a metaphor of the city’s rapidly evaporating past, the buried ugliness of intolerance. The song is a reminder, in a culture that rhapsodizes the early days of punk, exactly how limited its considerations of the most marginalized people were, how narrow its stage once was and how vast it is becoming.

2019-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Fat Possum

February 25, 2019

029c2897-9ca1-4f8a-ba92-20386520e230

Rebecca Bengal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/

The New Jersey sextet’s fifth studio album is an easeful tour of muscular riff-rock, noodly song suites, and curtsying pastoral folk.

The New Jersey sextet’s fifth studio album is an easeful tour of muscular riff-rock, noodly song suites, and curtsying pastoral folk.

Garcia Peoples: Dodging Dues

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/garcia-peoples-dodging-dues/

Dodging Dues

Since debuting in 2017, Garcia Peoples’ greatest challenge has been to get people to forget what they’re called. You don’t name your psychedelic rock band after the most famous member of the most famous psychedelic rock band of all time if you’re not up for the challenge. And while their particular trip has often taken them through the Grateful Dead’s astral wake, they’ve steadily widened their sound and ambition over the past five years to include touches of dub, sticky Bitches Brew jazz, and tetchy post-punk. They’re too nervy to be a proper jam band, but they jam way too much to be anything else. Dodging Dues, the New Jersey sextet’s fifth studio album, dials back some of the abrasion of 2020’s Nightcap at Wits’ End, but its easeful tour of muscular riff-rock, noodly song suites, and curtsying pastoral folk settles further into a sound worth taking on its own merits. If you pick up this record in the hopes of hearing someone imitate the tone of Jerry Garcia’s tiger guitar, look elsewhere. Dodging Dues was recorded in a pair of sessions in 2020, with Superwolves maestro Matt Sweeney in the producer’s chair. Though it’s relatively tidy at 34 minutes long, its sense of patience and control makes its runtime seem broader, if not longer; where most rock groups’ studio improvisations feel unnaturally compressed by the band’s consciousness of an album’s shape and size, Garcia Peoples never sound burdened by much of anything here. Their general ease and comfortability, aided by the clarity of Sweeney’s production, give these seven songs a sense of fluid communication as they move through styles; even if the details dim in the memory, the feeling of their conversation is easy to internalize. Dodging Dues is built around the trio of “Cold Dice,” “Tough Freaks,” and “Stray Cats,” a musically interlocking triptych of songs whose lyrics circle the exhaustions of big-city life in search of a place to catch a breath. Danny Arakaki, Tom Malach, and Derek Spaldo’s guitars pass one another like pedestrians in a busy crosswalk, become entangled, split back apart, and pursue oblong paths that don’t appear to follow logic, but they never stumble into dissonance. “Sick of dodging dues,” they sing in “Tough Freaks,” “stop wasting all your time.” This is ordered, well-managed music about the importance of living an ordered, well-managed life. “Heal me with truth, you immaculate one,” goes one line in “Cassandra,” a song so mannered and traditional in its expectations you expect it to doff its cap as you pass. It’s Garcia Peoples playing to their strengths. Though still firmly tape-trader music, their form of psychedelia has more in common with the likes of Kikagaku Moyo, Dungen, and Chris Forsyth, the latter of whom they’ve backed live—all artists who use the clicked-in propulsion of krautrock to keep their wildest trips firmly within the guardrails. For Garcia Peoples, this sense of restraint makes their music more compelling and allows them to subvert expectations. At just the moment you’d expect closer “Fill Your Cup”’s middle solo to lift off into some triumphant shredding, it suddenly goes stroboscopic and buries itself in the belly of the song. Where most bands would draw out a shining, imperial solo to cap something like the aforementioned three-song run, on “Stray Cats” Garcia Peoples give you 10 needling seconds of mosquito buzz, then peace out. This dedication to a form of efficient and orderly journeying—musically or otherwise—carries through much of the album. In “Here We Are,” the guitars go balletic, interweaving, touching down, springing back up. They’re not quite interlocking or running parallel or phasing; Sweeney places them just close enough to force you to consider the blank space their dancing creates. Listening to it is like tracing the gaps in a healthy monstera. Even when things get loud, they don’t get heavy. Opener “False Company,” a beefy valediction to a fake friend, pumps by on an oil derrick beat from drummer Cesar Arakaki and bassist Andy Cush (who is also a contributing editor at Pitchfork), while the guitars smoke a low and slow barbecue riff. It’s an almost absurdly muscular song, the kind of thing you can imagine slapping the hood of while cracking a cold beer, but the vibe is pure light: “Now that the weight has been lifted,” Pat Gubler sings, “There’s a gladness in my heart that’s returning to me.” You can hear a touch of Thin Lizzy in “False Company,” and a whole lot of ZZ Top. There’s Fairport Convention in “Cassandra,” and, yeah, the Grateful Dead pretty much everywhere else. Dodging Dues isn’t interested in clearing new territory for psychedelic rock, which is not a criticism: Wandering a well-tended garden path can be far more rewarding than hacking your way through the brush. Lyrically and musically, this album is built to pursue the felicity of spirit that can come with following an expertly manicured path, which is another way of saying it goes where it wants without worrying about the weight of other peoples’ expectations. You can travel so much farther when you pack light. 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.

2022-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

No Quarter

January 20, 2022

029cd3a7-21ee-4248-8e6d-c4206cab526a

Sadie Sartini Garner

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

On a softly melancholic new album, the Los Angeles musician offers a concentration of his strengths in service of one sharpened, sustained mood.

On a softly melancholic new album, the Los Angeles musician offers a concentration of his strengths in service of one sharpened, sustained mood.

Sam Gendel: Blueblue

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-blueblue/

Blueblue

Years before Sam Gendel was one of the main fixtures of Los Angeles’ bubbling ambient jazz scene, he was the frontman of a quiet little outfit called Inga. Though the group barely had any releases to its name, Inga’s performances were twisting and spontaneous, as Gendel wove his way through lopsided bossa-nova patterns with his understated, fluttering guitar technique. To watch them play was like watching a hunched caterpillar sneaking its way through the grass, each modal jump as oddly angled as it was delicately naturalistic. Since then, Gendel has primarily focused on his solo output, building his kooky sound world around mellowed out hip-hop beats and his psychedelic, Jon Hassell-indebted approach to saxophone. But on Blueblue, Gendel returns to the guitar as his primary vehicle once again, taking everything he’s learned in the intervening years and yielding one of his most richly rewarding sets in the process. Gendel has earned a reputation for his ability to distill disorienting free-jazz experiments into something that goes down smoother than iced tea, but following his output can still be daunting. Between his endless stream of collaborations and his willingness to bury some of his best material in sprawling 3-and-a-half-hour compilations, Gendel gives the sense that music simply pours out of him—that it’s as easy for him to create as it is for us to listen to. Blueblue, however, benefits from precision: Its 14 tracks are concise, writhing creations, often revolving around just a few stray elements caressing against one another to build a distinct, unified sound. Recorded in a cabin in Oregon overlooking the Columbia River, Blueblue ebbs back and forth like a body of water unto itself. Where Gendel’s previous work has often tended toward jarring stylistic leaps from track to track, Blueblue remains satisfying by sticking with its calm frame of mind, as Gendel dives in to see just how much he can find. Born from a collaboration with a Japanese clothing company that works with traditional sashiko embroidery, each track of Blueblue is titled in kanji after a different stitching pattern within the style. Though this titling scheme comes off more like a tired aesthetic appropriation, the music itself is executed much more gracefully. Where on previous albums Gendel would often push his squiggling saxophone lines into as many atonal places as he could take them without totally killing the vibe, here his guitar playing is soothing, even inviting, in its softly melancholic strum. “Tate-jima (縦縞, vertical stripes)” opens the record on an intimate note, as Gendel’s unadorned guitar inches along as if he were playing it lying on his back, his eyes grazing the bedroom ceiling. Even on minimal tracks such as this, there’s a textural coarseness to the sound, pulsing with a cassette-tape warmth without losing its bassy, hypnotic depth. Aside from Craig Weinrib’s pitter-pattering drums, Gendel performed all of Blueblue’s instruments himself, and he deserves just as much credit for his skills as an arranger as he does for his musicianship. As he fingerpicks through the breezy “Toridasuki (鳥襷, interlaced circles of two birds),” a glowing bed of harmonized horns slowly enters, the jittering saxophone never overtaking the track as it glides through one sublime chord change after another. Gendel fills Blueblue with these kind of luminescent details, be it the fairy-tale chimes that hover about “Hishi-igeta (菱井桁, parallel diamonds or crossed cords),” or the tense synthetic strings that lend a horror-movie eeriness to “Tate-waku (竪沸く, rising steam),” or the phantasmagoric flute that careens over “Shippō (七宝, seven treasures of the Buddha)” like some brightly plumed bird soaring over a cliffside. Oftentimes, Gendel luxuriates in a surreal sense of unease, as on the standout “Uroko (鱗, fish scales),” which lurches on a slanted guitar groove and a chorus of beeping synths that flicker on and off like machines in some evil laboratory. There have been times where Gendel’s dazed approach to slacker jazz has given his music a low-stakes quality, where its effectiveness as good background listening has betrayed a deeper lack of focus. But his latest feels like a purposeful statement, a concentration of his strengths as an instrumentalist in service of one sharpened, sustained mood. In a way, Blueblue plays like Gendel’s tribute to exploratory, late-night jazz records like Andrew Hill’s Judgment! or Bill Evans and Jim Hall’s Undercurrent, swirling about untethered as if searching for a place to rest. Those albums remain enduring today not only for their willingness to experiment, but for how much emotion their creators were able to express using only their instruments and their wit. With Blueblue, Gendel sounds like he is finally learning how to let feeling guide the way.

2022-10-14T00:02:00.000-04:00

2022-10-14T00:02:00.000-04:00

Jazz

Leaving

October 14, 2022

029f0f37-d574-4a1a-ad51-71a4847d2d92

Sam Goldner

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

The soulful debut from Syrian-born Azniv Korkejian showcases the depth of her songwriting and uses Spacebomb’s retro sound to create an exquisite, subtle, and wide-eyed collection of songs.

The soulful debut from Syrian-born Azniv Korkejian showcases the depth of her songwriting and uses Spacebomb’s retro sound to create an exquisite, subtle, and wide-eyed collection of songs.

Bedouine: Bedouine

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

Bedouine

Halfway through Azniv Korkejian’s gorgeous debut album as Bedouine comes an abrupt shift in tone. While the rest of the record dazzles with sweetness—“like a lamp in the light of day/Drowning in summer rays,” as she puts it—the centerpiece is a haunting protest song. Born in Aleppo, Syria before moving to Saudi Arabia and eventually landing in Los Angeles, Korkejian wrote “Summer Cold” in a moment of despair. The lyrics reflect her reaction to news that American-made weapons had fallen into the hands of Syrian terrorists. “I don’t want anything/Ever to do with them,” she sings, using her wise, fluttering voice to convey a sense of anxious fear. The song resolves with a cycle of found-sound samples she recorded at her grandmother’s home, making its previous verses feel at once more vivid and more distant, the way a nightmare lingers after you wake up. “Summer Cold” is an outlier on Bedouine—an album more successful at sustaining a mood than reacting to any moment in time—but it’s indicative of the depth in Korkejian’s songwriting. Recorded for the Richmond, Virginia label Spacebomb, Bedouine is backed by full horn and string sections, lending it a similar fairy-tale whimsy to Natalie Prass’ self-titled debut. Still, Korkejian’s songs retain their natural intimacy, with arrangements that, at their most ornate, feel like impromptu daydreams in the minds of their narrators. In the swooning “Dusty Eyes,” she dreams of city lights and lost love as the music builds in intensity, as if to match her lovesick fantasies. In moments like these, Korkejian’s work as a music editor for films (most recently The Big Sick) becomes evident: Her songs gain resonance equally from her lyrics and the sheer sound of everything. The sound of the record is exquisite, breezing through about 40 minutes with an effortless charm. “I will try my best/To keep my head nice and quiet/For you,” Korkejian sings sweetly in the opening track, a subtly powerful song about our instinct to maintain an air of perfection in relationships. The moments on Bedouine that break through that pleasant veneer are welcome, whether in the stark realism of “Summer Cold” or the moody imagery of “Back to You.” Over creeping Hissing of Summer Lawns jazz-pop, Korkejian places herself as an outsider in the city, where people “talk in exclamation marks” and lead “lives so designed.” Her skepticism reflects a self-awareness that pairs nicely with the wide-eyed wonderment in her music. Korkejian strikes this balance with such delicacy that it’s sometimes hard to believe this is her first album. “Solitary Daughter” is a direct line to the conversational inflections of early Leonard Cohen. In its verses, she sharpens her vocal style into a rougher spoken-word delivery, stretching out her words and landing on each rhyme with metronomic precision. She takes a similar approach in “Heart Take Flight,” the album’s finest, subtlest track. As Korkejian gives her heart permission to soar away, the music remains decidedly earthbound. Her words are accompanied only by gentle fingerpicking and a lonely array of distant horns, letting each image bloom in your imagination. “Everything around me is/Exactly as it should be,” she sings, “I feel so free.” It’s a contagious feeling, one that Azniv Korkejian seems fully prepared and grateful to share with the world.

2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Spacebomb

July 25, 2017

02a0dbb8-5881-43e1-8a79-1ad7215a0f7d

Sam Sodomsky

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

These Nashville upstarts keep the doomy legacy of their forebears close and add to the mix teeth-gnashing thrash, ferocious grindcore breakdowns, slabs of Palm Desert-style stoner rock, and a little industrial ambience.

These Nashville upstarts keep the doomy legacy of their forebears close and add to the mix teeth-gnashing thrash, ferocious grindcore breakdowns, slabs of Palm Desert-style stoner rock, and a little industrial ambience.

Yautja: Songs of Descent

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19013-yautja-songs-of-descent/

Songs of Descent

The performance spaces of Nashville clubs like The End and Exit/In have incubated one of metal’s best-kept-secret scenes, as heard in the sludgy strivings of acts like Loss, Across Tundras, and the city's own Yautja. On their debut LP, Songs of Descent, the trio keep the doomy legacy of these forebears close—but not too close, since there are plenty of other ingredients in the mix: teeth-gnashing thrash, ferocious grindcore breakdowns, slabs of Palm Desert-style stoner rock, and a little industrial ambience. If that scans as disjointed, blame the pedigree; Bassist Kayhan Vaziri shares his duties with sludge-lords Coliseum, while axeman Shibby Poole plays bass in local hardcore outfit Nameless Cults. Rounding out the trio is drummer Tyler Coburn of Gnarwhal, whose atypical polyrhythms provide Songs of Descent’s frenzied, untraceable pulse. Mix it all together, and you’ve got one beast of a border-crossing debut. Grind is all about the pivots, and Songs of Descent makes a conscious effort to keep things unpredictable. “Denihilist” takes a simple melodic thread as an invitation to lurch forth into oblivion, before scaling back to a swampy jam just past the halfway point. The mechanical riffs that opens “A Crawl” could have been copped from Queens of the Stone Age—until the instant when Coburn cues up the blast beats for its manic microsong of a coda. Two instrumental interludes,“(Path of Ascent)” and “(Path to Ground”), stir up unease as they plod along, massive and uncertain. The “gotcha!”’s that follow, “Denihilist” and “An Exit”, respectively, feel all the more thrilling. To mix this monster, the band enlisted Mikey Allred, who’s played tech wizard to everyone from Hellbender to Inter Arma. His raucous, ramshackle approach is heavy on the bass, giving Vaziri’s melodic, mucky tones the auditory advantage over Poole’s noodling. This gnarled sound lends heft to hardcore-leaning tracks like “Tar and Blindness”, but can’t stick to “Faith Resigned”, a seven-minute slog that proves exhausting with its abundance of (literal) bridges to nowhere. “Teeth” treads water similarly, a teasing series of fills and fake drops that opens up, finally and agonizingly, to little more than a relative rumble. Still, with Songs of Descent, Yautja has conjured up the brute force and brain power necessary to live up to both their monstrous namesake and the heralded hometown. World domination? Not quite. But give that surly stock more time to develop, and that just might be an intergalactic emergency.

2014-02-21T01:00:04.000-05:00

2014-02-21T01:00:04.000-05:00

Metal

Forcefield

February 21, 2014

02a13afc-8f66-4504-8b2c-143ab658f4d2

Zoe Camp

https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/

Guided By Voices' classic record gets a makeover on this vinyl-only release. The new album includes the original 33-track sequence for Bee Thousand, another record's-worth of tracks that weren't initially included but eventually made their way onto the LP, and The Grand Hour and I Am a Scientist EPs.

Guided By Voices' classic record gets a makeover on this vinyl-only release. The new album includes the original 33-track sequence for Bee Thousand, another record's-worth of tracks that weren't initially included but eventually made their way onto the LP, and The Grand Hour and I Am a Scientist EPs.

Guided by Voices: Bee Thousand: The Director's Cut

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3600-bee-thousand-the-directors-cut/

Bee Thousand: The Director's Cut

Our Pollard, who art in Dayton, hallowed be thy name... man, look at that rating. The eighth deadly sin must surely be the curse of objectivity. By now, having been lucky enough to spill my guts all over this site on such diverse topics as the ghosts of GBVs past, present, and future, the myth of Robert Pollard, and a religious experience at a long-gone concert when it seemed like the band might just be the answer to any question rock 'n' roll wanted to ask, it may seem that my objectivity is in short supply. It is. The part of me that holds an irrational, almost baseless devotion to Robert Pollard's hissed-out anthems is screaming "10!" from the back of my brain, and it only takes a listen to the restless ghosts of "The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory", or the rejuvenated arena dinosaurs of "Buzzards and Dreadful Crows" to weaken my resolve. But something's wrong, and every time that voice speaks up and asserts this album's perfection, it's shouted down by a simple, immutable truth: "If it's right, you can tell." Guided By Voices got it right back in 1994. Bee Thousand is the band's definitive moment, the point when the ringing Who-isms of Pollard's youth-- filtered through four-tracks and his own post-punk, X-Men, stream-of-consciousness quirks-- finally matured beyond the atonal growing pains of Vampire on Titus and Propeller. The distinction was slight but unmistakable-- like learning to harness all the jaw-dropping, stadium-quaking power of Propeller's triumphant exclamation ("I'm much greater than you think!") without all the run-up or refining the unworked defiance of "Exit Flagger". On Bee Thousand, GBV mastered all those fragments of greatness and assembled an entire album from them. Sure, it stumbles occasionally, and falters as only four spare-time, blue-collar bandmates from Dayton, Ohio can-- that is, humanly and forgivably-- but the original Bee Thousand simply stands alongside the greatest of the modern era. The original warrants a 10. So what of The Director's Cut? Shouldn't this just be a bionic Bee Thousand? In what parody of a just universe is this not every ounce of the original plus whatever else was left over? I feel faint... Track sequence, it turns out, is really, really important. This new, expanded version of the record includes an early, 33-track sequence. It's spread out over four vinyl sides, along with another record containing the standard B1000 tracks that weren't initially included, as well as The Grand Hour and I Am a Scientist EPs. Unfortunately, this original sequence is so bafflingly unsatisfying that it might've kept Guided by Voices in the basement for another decade had clearer heads not eventually prevailed. "I Am a Scientist" first earned GBV a measure of notoriety and in some small way helped legitimize the rise of lo-fi to minor prominence in the early 90s; sadly, it wouldn't even have been included on Bee Thousand (here, it's relegated to the extras and outtakes disc). And that's least of the original's tracklist problems: The "new" material in the early sequence is composed almost entirely of Suitcase and King Shit and the Golden Boys tracks-- material that was substandard even on those collections of outtakes. The burden is only slightly ameliorated by an older, thinner version of the otherwise classically bombastic concert staple "Postal Blowfish" (better reprised on the Brain Candy soundtrack), a four-track demo of "It's Like Soul Man", and a few lazy, acoustic charmers like "Indian Was a Angel" or "Supermarket the Moon". But for every new highlight, there's an equally inaccessible "Deathtrot and Warlock Riding a Rooster" or "Zoning the Planet"; the resultant load proves to be a little too heavy for even classics like "Echoes Myron" to completely bear. With the remains of the final cut haphazardly tacked on at the end, in addition to a thoroughly mixed bag like The Grand Hour, and almost-redundant alternates of both "Shocker in Gloomtown" (included twice in the span of four tracks, and yet still valuable for the energy infusion it provides both times) and "I Am a Scientist", the "bonus record" is as slapdash as The Director's Cut itself. Thankfully, a fantastic unreleased version of "My Valuable Hunting Knife" ends this ordeal on perhaps its highest note, dispensing with the haunting atmospherics found on the Alien Lanes version and plunging into a sea of churning guitar and a clipped, punchy vocal performance from Pollard. Of course, a phenomenal finish isn't quite enough to correct the confusing missteps of the previous hour. Despite containing the core of one of the most stunning, unexpectedly triumphant records ever recorded, and a few wonderful tracks besides, Bee Thousand: The Director's Cut manages the almost impossible feat of reducing itself to a merely good album with some incredible highlights-- maddeningly similar to almost every other album our beloved Fading Captain has ever tossed off. The slipshod nature of this expanded reissue serves only to prove two things: for better or worse, GBV is ever Robert Pollard's child (and thankfully Tobin Sprout was around to shepherd it, at least for a time), and that the final edit of Bee Thousand is every bit the miracle it sounds.

2004-12-06T01:00:01.000-05:00

2004-12-06T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Scat

December 6, 2004

02a1a88a-4363-4a06-ba18-15f5b4b6347c

Eric Carr

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

The avant-pop stalwarts return with one of their loosest and most rock-heavy records yet, slightly bending their own rules while remaining stubbornly singular.

The avant-pop stalwarts return with one of their loosest and most rock-heavy records yet, slightly bending their own rules while remaining stubbornly singular.

Deerhoof: The Magic

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22013-deerhoof-the-magic/

The Magic

It’s hard to pinpoint what “consistency” means in the context of a restless band like Deerhoof, who have spent the past 20 years crafting record after record of experimental rock music—each sounding distinct from one another but also sounding unmistakably like Deerhoof. While it’s true a single moment of their inscrutable avant-pop can sometimes recall other artists—a garage-y guitar riff, a Stereolab-y keyboard part, a Fugazi drum roll—each Deerhoof record (or even song) mashes all of these things together in a way that feels completely exclusive to them. It should be no surprise then that The Magic stands out from the rest of their output while still being “another Deerhoof record.” Like on 2014’s La Isla Bonita and 2011’s Vs. Evil, this new album shows the band continuing their recent trend toward music that is ever-so-slightly more accessible. But unlike on those records, which each featured plenty of synths and a number of soft spotlight pop moments, The Magic—recorded in seven days in an abandoned office in a New Mexico desert—is one of their loosest and most rock-influenced records yet, with the guitars placed front and center. Beginning with a ripping riff and galloping drums worthy of the White Stripes, the “bring the rock” mentality is made clear from the album’s opening moments on “The Devil And His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue” (a title apparently taken from a section of Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise describing Stalinist opera). A few of the album’s tracks go even further, all the way to traditional-rock-song territory. “That Ain’t No Life to Me,” sung by guitarist Ed Rodriguez, pumps out no-frills garage-grunge, complete with simple, allusion-free lyrics. “Dispossessor” is a bit more interesting, channeling ’70s arena guitar  into a less sexy Cobra Verde. And “Plastic Thrills” features a lip-snarling guitar line, woo-woo backing vocals, and even handclaps. These three tracks are so unexpectedly straightforward that it’s almost hard to believe that it’s Deerhoof. It’s no coincidence that all three feature male lead vocals in place of main vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki’s typical dreamy sing-speak chants, perhaps the band’s biggest distinguishing factor. While the male voices of Rodriguez and drummer Greg Saunier help fill out Deerhoof’s sound palette, particularly on harmonies, it’s Satomi’s voice that consistently makes Deerhoof sound both cool and weird. It works like an instrument in the same way that out-of-place vocalist Damo Suzuki’s yelps worked on Can’s classic run; in either case, going with a traditional white male rock voice would have dumbed down the musical output. The Magic’s rock’n’roll feel extends throughout the record, but Satomi thankfully leads the way. Both “Model Behavior” and “Debut” are deliciously funky, with the latter sounding almost like a Satomi-fronted take on Bowie’s Station to Station. And “Kafe Mania!” blends bursting guitars with the Deerhoof mainstay technique of Satomi singing a mirrored melody of an accompanying keyboard line to great effect. The Magic’s true highlight though is “Criminals of the Dream,” a five minute epic that begins with a dreamy synth intro that sounds like it could play over a scene of Atreyu and Falcor in The Neverending Story, before a kraut guitar and Satomi’s vocals kick in. After a long build-up, the song finally climaxes with a minute of one of the most gorgeous melodies Deerhoof has ever put to record. The circling chords and refrain of “I know you can dream things aren't as bad as they seem” makes you wish the song would just go on forever, even though you know it won’t. As rock-leaning as it may be, The Magic is no less an acquired taste than most of the other records Deerhoof have put out. The strange vocals and constant, hyperactive changes in pace will never be for everyone, and the overall bursting-at-the-seams-ness can even impart a feeling of exhaustion in a listener. Within the context of Deerhoof’s oeuvre, The Magic is a bit of a back-to-the-garage reset that doesn’t approach the heights of career apexes Friend Opportunity and Runners Four**, but offers a fresh energy that rewards the converted.

2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Polyvinyl

June 29, 2016

02a59cfb-96de-4b7d-a44a-b21ed00e25a7

Benjamin Scheim

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

Barely out of his teens, Chancelor Bennett has transformed himself from a suspended high school student to a much adored Chicago rapper. His second mixtape, Acid Rap, invites elements of classic soul, juke, gospel, blues-rock, drill, acid jazz, house, ragtime scat, and R. Kelly, Twista, and a young Kanye to the same open mic poetry night.

Barely out of his teens, Chancelor Bennett has transformed himself from a suspended high school student to a much adored Chicago rapper. His second mixtape, Acid Rap, invites elements of classic soul, juke, gospel, blues-rock, drill, acid jazz, house, ragtime scat, and R. Kelly, Twista, and a young Kanye to the same open mic poetry night.

Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18105-chance-the-rapper-acid-rap/

Acid Rap

In another world, you can imagine Chance the Rapper lip-syncing “Twist and Shout” at Chicago’s Von Steuben Day parade, surrounded by frauleins doing the money dance. You can visualize a rap game Ferris Bueller: arms outstretched to snare a foul ball, staring stoned at Seurat, ducking fascist educators, and oblivious parents with cinematic ease. You can hear his impression of Abe Froman, sausage king of Chicago, and it’s pitch-perfect. Barely out of his teens, Chancelor Bennett has already transformed himself from a suspended high school student to the young Chicago rapper universally adored among "sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, and dickheads." The release of last week’s Acid Rap triggered such intense demand that it crashed both hosting site Audiomack and Windy City rap agora Fake Shore Drive. Cops recently banned Chance from two separate high school parking lots after mobs formed once kids discovered he was on campus. But life rarely parallels a John Hughes script. Unlike Bueller, Chance actually got caught skipping school, a 10-day sabbatical that inspired his first mixtape, last year’s #10Day. His neighborhood of West Chatham might not be the worst in a city whose alias is Chiraq, but it’s still South Side and far removed from baronial Highland Park. The drugs are high-velocity, the slang is crisper, and in this scenario, Cameron dies. The victim was Rodney Kyles Jr., a close friend who Chance saw get stabbed to death one gruesome night. His memory haunts Acid Rap. On “Juice”, Chance mourns his inability to “be the same since Rod passed.” On “Acid Rain”, he still hears screams and sees “his demons in empty hallways.” The circumstances aren’t necessarily unique. Last year, Chicago murders outnumbered American casualties in Afghanistan. Drill stars, King Louie, Chief Keef, and Lil Durk have given the violence a public face with videos so dark they practically resemble a first-person shooter PS3 game set in Section 8. Acid Rap isn’t trying to be an alternative; it’s an attempt to encompass everything. There are shout outs, musical or lyrical, to practically every important Chicago tradition short of Thrill Jockey. It invites elements of classic soul, juke, gospel, blues-rock, drill, acid jazz, house, ragtime scat, and R. Kelly, Twista, and a young Kanye to the same open mic poetry night, where the kid on-stage is declaiming about what’s going unreported. Its genius is that he somehow makes this work. The structure is as expansive and freewheeling as any strange trip. Acid Rap is a less about the attempt to break on through than a way of describing the hallucinatory shades, transitory revelations, and cigarette burns of the journey. You can get off or on the bus at any juncture. There is no ideology or orthodoxy. No arbitrary binaries between conscious or gangster, apostle or agnostic. Freaks and free thinkers are accepted. Chance understands that those who are frightening are often frightened, too. He comes off as a guy who could find something in common with anyone but a high school principal. Chance mixes nostalgia with a nasal tone as effectively as almost anyone since the Pharcyde. He’s only 20, but “Cocoa Butter Kisses” laments the days of bright-orange Rugrats cassettes and Chuck E. Cheese pizza. It could come off like sentimental back-in-the-day cliché, but there’s a street-smart edge that holds the cheesiness in check. He puts Visine in his eyes so his grandmother won’t know he’s high, acknowledges his addictions, and invites Twista to play the smoked-out, speed-rap, O.G. Jedi. The guest spots mirror the funhouse characters you’d expect to meet on a memorable acid excursion. Action Bronson offers instant quotables on “NaNa”, sticking out his tongue, slicking back his hair like Rick Pitino, and peeling out in an El Camino with three Japanese lesbians. Ab-Soul plays the shadowy street pharmacist in the liquor store parking lot, opening up the trunk of his Dodge to offer grass, acid, and offside soccer metaphors. Chance’s Save Money crew partner, Vic Mensa and Childish Gambino act as effective co-conspirators. Some ears won’t settle to Chance’s voice. It occasionally recalls an Animaniac playing the harmonica, a scat singer with a mean soft shoe routine, and/or Lil Wayne and Kendrick Lamar. The latter is his most obvious immediate predecessor and clearly, Chance owes him a stylistic and conceptual debt down to the parental voicemail of “Everything’s Good (Good Ass Outro)”. But Chance’s vocals are mostly modulated for effect not eccentricity. The cartoon squawk of first single “Juice” bears no resemblance to the mournful Caribbean Kaddish of “Acid Rain”. He leans on his hip-hop inspirations as homage. The intro and outro flip a Baptist hymn from an early Kanye mixtape track. The beat from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Sucka Nigga” is repurposed for “NaNa”. Slum Village’s “Fall in Love” serves as the base for “Everybody’s Something”. 2Pac gets rightful daps on “Juice”. While “Favorite Song” artfully nicks the sample from Mary J. Blige and Biggie’s “Real Love” (Remix). Even if the voice leaves you cold, you could be sold by the sheer sense of playfulness and love of language. Despite the weighty subtext, it’s often fun and life affirming. Chance stretches syllables to ToonTown lengths. He caroms them off each other like a pool hustler sinking trick shots. He’s a “tobacco-packing acrobat/packin’ bags back and forth with fifths of Jack.” You tend to get swept up in the youthful adrenaline rush like Lamar, mixtape Wayne, early Eminem, or Jay-Z in the ”22 Twos” era. To make sure he has his own spin, Chance stashes his own psychedelics and local slang (“thot,” “dino,” “hitters”). If Lamar’s good kid m.A.A.d city stoked tension through plot cliffhangers, home invasions, and ominous minor chords, Chance’s Acid Rap is a triumph of meditative moments, open-ended quests, and brass flares. The hooks are more jabs than uppercuts. None will probably bang in a club, but most will make sense live, as chanted back by a thousand fans. “Everybody dies in the summer, wanna say ya goodbyes, tell them while it’s spring,” Chance sings this with funereal drone on the second half of “Pusha Man”. It’s the line that keeps sticking in my head when I play the record on loop. It’s a requiem for those already dead and a warning about the imminent carnage coming soon. It’s this fleeting spring afternoon where Acid Rap seems to take place-- the last day off before adulthood-- after you’ve realized your mortality, but before your fate has been sealed. When you aren’t sure if you’re supposed to say hello or goodbye.

2013-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

2013-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

May 7, 2013

02a8b866-f300-4919-87ab-fc87e99e7259

Jeff Weiss

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

Not quite the concept album we were promised, The Cool still features isolated moments of widescreen drama-- and Fiasco's storytelling abilities, lyrical dextrousness, and willingness to submerge himself in the theatre of it all make for a rewarding sophomore album.

Not quite the concept album we were promised, The Cool still features isolated moments of widescreen drama-- and Fiasco's storytelling abilities, lyrical dextrousness, and willingness to submerge himself in the theatre of it all make for a rewarding sophomore album.

Lupe Fiasco: The Cool

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11022-the-cool/

The Cool

Serious bonus points go out to anyone who can manage to extract some kind of meaningful narrative out of The Cool, Lupe Fiasco's purported concept album. His pre-hype interviews may have informed us that the record centers around three metaphysical characters called The Cool (spun off from the track of the same name from Lupe's 2006 debut Food & Liquor), The Streets, and The Game, but it turns out those facts-- or any discernable storyline, really-- aren't immediately evident from just, you know, listening to the album. There's a fine line between respecting your listeners' intelligence and mistaking your own vague allusions and abstrusities for some kind of coherent statement, and this time around, Lupe's landed on the wrong side of that line. But here's the thing: The Cool ultimately features enough isolated moments of widescreen drama that what it fails to deliver in terms of a linear experience, it makes up for in sheer pathos. There are genuinely thrilling moments to be had here; some of it from Fiasco's storytelling abilities, some of it from his lyrical dexterity, and some of it from his willingness to submerge himself in the theatre of it all. Add it up and you have an album that unwittingly delivers on its promises, even if it takes a slightly convoluted route there. The Cool's overarching story may exist mostly in Lupe's head, but there is some sort of vague logic to its structure. Forgetting the cringeworthy and condescending opening monologue "Baba Says Cool for Thought" (which you should probably play once for laughs before banishing to the trash can), its first portion is relatively untroubled by any of Lupe's big-picture proselytizing. Instead, we get tracks like the virtuosic double-time of "Go Go Gadget Flow" (mostly just a lyrical flex) and the hooky first single "Superstar", with Fiasco protégé Matthew Santos (who has probably heard a few Coldplay albums) playing Adam Levine to Fiasco's Kanye West. There are also two other highlights upfront: the bittersweet chamberpop lament of "The Coolest", on which Lupe, backed by a choir and dripping strings, weighs up his conflictedness with a laser-sharp opening line ("I love the Lord/ But sometimes it's like that I love me more") and the lazy jazz of the shuffling "Paris, Tokyo", which adds another dimension to this past October's Fiascogate by sounding pretty much exactly like vintage A Tribe Called Quest. Conflict is a big part of Fiasco's persona, and in this record's first half, he wrestles with it accordingly, tempering any allusions to his comfortable lifestyle with what sound like warnings to himself. As these become increasingly portentous, the album's production style moves towards darker, more cinematic flourishes; as if moving in time with the circling pianos, brooding strings, and moody guitar squalls, Fiasco pulls the camera back from himself to take a rooftop-level view of his surroundings. The rest of the album plays out this way, with the first person expunged from the frame and replaced by Fiasco in storytelling mode. When it works, it works tremendously. Much has been made of Fiasco's love of comic books, and indeed there are stretches during this second half where you can feel him working a lot of the same angles; his predilection for stylized city-under-siege dystopia is so refined that it's not difficult to imagine these stories playing out in panels. The beautifully shaded rapper origin story "Hip-Hop Saved My Life" kicks off an evocative three-song stretch that includes the chilling "Intruder Alert" (which uses the title phrase to connect the stories of a rape victim, a drug addict, and a landed immigrant) and the doomsdayish "Streets on Fire". Elsewhere, though, tracks like the much-maligned "Gotta Eat" (on which Fiasco uses a cheeseburger as a clumsy metaphor for the high-calorie lifestyle of the streets, or something), the UNKLE-produced, rap/metal, sub-Linkin Parkisms of "Hello/Goodbye (Uncool)", and the jokey closer "Go Baby" render the album's final third a mixed, occasionally tedious, and anti-climactic affair that provides little in the way of satisfying resolution. With the notable exceptions of Snoop Dogg (who appears on the middling party track "Hi-Definition"), Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump (who lends production to the surprisingly bumping "Little Weapon"), and UNKLE, there isn't much room for outside collaboration on The Cool. In fact, from Santos and producer Soundtrakk to Chicagoan rapper Gemstones and vocalist Sarah Green, most of the album's remaining featured talent comes courtesy of 1st and 15th, the Atlantic-bankrolled label of which Fiasco is co-founder and acting CEO. While the jury's still out on whether that stems from a canny marketing sense or control-freakishness, it doesn't leave much room to doubt that the vision for this sprawling, grandiose, and occasionally overambitious record came from anyone other than Fiasco himself. Whether he delivered on the full extent of what he wanted to achieve is up for debate; luckily, he's good enough that even when he comes up short, he's still better than most.

2008-01-08T01:00:01.000-05:00

2008-01-08T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rap

Atlantic / 1st & 15th

January 8, 2008

02aba5df-1a23-40e5-96e7-556cd94e8d90

Mark Pytlik

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

On their first new album featuring all four original members since 1985, the Los Angeles punk icons return to the sound of their heyday on a highly formidable comeback.

On their first new album featuring all four original members since 1985, the Los Angeles punk icons return to the sound of their heyday on a highly formidable comeback.

X: ALPHABETLAND

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/x-alphabetland/

ALPHABETLAND

This month, the venerated Los Angeles punk rock band X opened a window that had been shut for 35 years, returning with their first new album featuring all four original members since 1985. They released ALPHABETLAND early, while X fans are quarantined inside and waiting for refunds for the Los Angeles 40th-anniversary tour the band was set to embark on this month. A quick glance at the tracklist reveals instant fan service. “Delta 88 Nightmare,” first released on the 2001 reissue of Los Angeles as a demo, gets a proper recording. Its 100 seconds of vintage X fury is kicked off by guitarist Billy Zoom’s rockabilly lick, blazing like an Eddie Cochran LP mistakenly played at 45 RPM while Exene Cervenka and John Doe shout in unison, invoking John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row. Even though the reference is a literary one, based on Depression-era Monterey, California, it’s easy to transpose the imagery to X’s version of Los Angeles, Doe and Cervenka stumbling drunk down back alleys, past the “cute resort with dads and moms/Staring at us and making fun.” “Cyrano de Berger’s Back,” another Los Angeles-era demo that the Zoom-less X recorded for 1987’s See How We Are, gets the version it always deserved. Zoom funks up the verses with some chunky upstrokes and the production from Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Saves the Day) gives the song—written during Doe and Cervenka’s courtship, recorded after their divorce, and presented as intended here—an emotional weight it was never previously afforded. “I got ten arms for you,” the former couple harmonizes, as beautifully as ever, even though the words mean something different 40 years later. “Ten hearts all beating blue.” X certainly played with its sound across records—even going pure country as the Knitters for a pair of albums—but ALPHABETLAND is a return to the X of the early 1980s. On “Free,” Zoom’s rhythm guitar part dances in-between drummer D.J. Bonebrake’s toms as Cervenka finishes Doe’s phrases. It’s a jangly mid-tempo rocker that peaks with Bonebrake repeatedly slapping the bell on his ride cymbal as forcefully as he did on “We’re Desperate” and “I’m Coming Over,” from 1981’s Wild Gift. “Lemme go free/Don’t tell me I can’t,” Doe pleads. The lyric echoes a 2017 interview on the PBS show Overheard with Evan Smith. Smith, the Texas Tribune CEO, asked Doe point-blank, “What is punk rock?” Doe, a silver streak now bisecting his black mane, answered before Smith finished: “Freedom.” The one outlier, ALPHABETLAND’s closer “All the Time in the World,” is Cervenka doing spoken-word over a piano. It’s an odd and clunky choice to conclude the record. But even if the song isn’t an ideal way to end an otherwise formidable comeback album, Cervenka’s lyrics are quite fitting. She looks back on the last 40 years, of the notion of her “youthful infinity” that now appears like mortality. She laments the young punks lost along the way, to “infected needles” and “speeding metal,” the latter likely an allusion to her sister, Mirielle, killed by a drunk driver in 1980 on her way to an X show. Perhaps resurrecting the past in making ALPHABETLAND 35 years later both inflicted pain and gave some needed perspective on life. Either way, she has no regrets: “It was fun while it lasted.”

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

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

Rock

Fat Possum

May 2, 2020

02ad6007-bde9-4894-855a-4f00f1993a20

Chris O'Connell

https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/

This set gathers the three 2011 mixtapes from Toronto R&B singer Abel Tefsaye and adds three new songs along with new mixes and mastering. Trilogy as a whole sets up a narrative that was previously only implied and has more force when heard in this form.

This set gathers the three 2011 mixtapes from Toronto R&B singer Abel Tefsaye and adds three new songs along with new mixes and mastering. Trilogy as a whole sets up a narrative that was previously only implied and has more force when heard in this form.

The Weeknd: Trilogy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17280-the-trilogy/

Trilogy

If you checked out completely in 2011, Trilogy has all the makings of a blockbuster: 22-year old Toronto native Abel Tefsaye along with producers Illangelo and Doc McKinney developed a state-of-the-art R&B template and scored several radio hits; they're associates of megastar Drake, and have played sold-out club shows and rapturously received festival appearances. But there's one catch: If you weren't checked out completely during 2011, you've already heard the vast majority of Trilogy, for free. So it's understandable if you're wondering why this set, which collects the Weeknd's three 2011 mixtapes in one package and adds three additional songs, exists in the first place. But presentation matters to the Weeknd. This is evident in the project's early anonymity, the unified typography, the striking photographs, the ambitious videos and, most important, the fact that Tesfaye called his three releases of 2011 a trilogy. It's not unprecedented for someone to put out three albums in a year, but Trilogy suggests an ambitious and rigorously planned Work of Art. While the previously available versions of House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence already felt definitive, a three-hour immersion provides a new way in, assuming you are willing to take it as a single piece. Which isn't easy: in spite of Tesfaye's diaphanous voice and the lush production, these are heavy records, with tempos that slow to a codeine drip for five minutes or more. But Trilogy as a whole sets up a narrative that was previously only implied. House of Balloons is the "fun" part of the story, though that's a relative term. It has the only Weeknd songs you might play at a celebration, and the only point where the illicit behavior feels alluring. On House, the Weeknd introduce an aesthetic that, over the course of the rest of the three tapes, gradually evolves into something deeper and less based in traditional songcraft. It's a continuation of the purple-tinted R&B and hip-hop hybrid forged by The-Dream and Drake, with eye-of-the-quiet storm assurance of Sade and Aaliyah and industrial and trip-hop touches that range from Nine Inch Nails to Tricky. But the Weeknd show a flair for melody that allows every richly atmospheric song on House to stand on its own, boasting strong (and sometimes borrowed) hooks that embrace repetition without feeling manipulative. The cyclical choruses of "What You Need", "The Morning", and "High For This" in particular are both immediately striking and subtly ingratiating, overtures to pop radio that operate outside of it. Those borrowed hooks mean that House of Balloons is the part of Trilogy most affected by the remaster. If you can't catch how the guitars hit a little harder and the drums have a bit more pop on "High For This", you'll definitely notice how the sample from Aaliyah's "Rock the Boat" has been wiped from "What You Need". If I had to choose, I prefer the original House of Balloons for its spontaneity, but it's kind of like familiarizing yourself with your partner after they get a new haircut; it's just different for a while, and if you want, you can always go back. Thursday is exactly the kind of "difficult" second record you'd expect from the Weeknd had they disappeared for two years and holed up in the studio as a reaction to House's success. But it came just a few months after. It's more ambitious in its way, incorporating influences far from the R&B mainstream and generally just sounding like it has something to prove. The title is a loaded metaphor; Thursday is a day for the most dedicated partiers, the one that separates a lost weekend from a week full of blackouts. Accordingly, the album is an hour-long exploration of people acknowledging a point of no return. What had been seductive has become menacing. Outside of Drake's guest verse on "The Zone", there's not much indication that the songs take place in a club of any sort. The pleasure on House of Balloons felt consensual; here, it feels codependent. Echoes of Silence benefits considerably from the Trilogy context and now seems on equal footing with House of Balloons and Thursday. As Juicy J helpfully reminds us out of nowhere at the end of "Same Old Song", Echoes was released near Christmas, a refractory period between the publication of year-end lists and the turn of the calendar. It's easy to overlook new music that drops at that point, especially in this case, where the lack of immediate hooks suggests that it could have been a rush job. But get familiar with Echoes' aims and you can hear its value. For one, the lyrical and thematic callbacks make clear that Echoes was meant to interact with what preceded it, to serve as an epilogue and appendix in addition to a denouement. More importantly, it's easier to tune into the final third's resounding depression after having been tenderized by the preceding two hours. It's a morning-after record for a night that never ended, where people have to go into their day shift with no sleep, where club stars still live with parents and the parents find drugs in the laundry. And it's where people who only hours before were perfectly fine to snort their life away simply cannot fucking stand to be around each other for another minute. But the arresting music redeems that potentially alienating emotional view. "Montreal" boasts a frigid and concise hurt as well as a pop sensibility that went missing from the previous half hour, "Outside" incorporates intriguing Eastern overtones, and "The Fall" integrates Clams Casino's brand of beautifully wasted hip-hop, which ascended in parallel to the Weeknd throughout 2011. On House's "The Party and the After Party," Tefsaye sings, "They don't want my love/ They just want my potential." In the context of Trilogy's progression, it's the first crack in his callous exterior, revealing a lifelong studio nerd with possibly years worth of grudges ("I don't play/ Unless it's keys and I play all day," he claims on "Loft Music"). He makes repeated mentions of "potential," and being "next," fixating on those particular words like he's holding onto something a girl told him in 7th grade. If you turn your ear right, Trilogy is the most in-depth exploration of male sexual neuroses this side of Pinkerton. "You never thought I'd go this far," Tesfaye sings on "Same Old Song". That line could be a reference to marathon drug use or the progressive demoralization of his narrator, which bottoms out amidst the pall of gang rape coursing through the very uncomfortable "Initiation". The inclusion of Michael Jackson's venomous "Dirty Diana" on Echoes (renamed "D.D.") is perfect in this context, retaining the original's deplorable depiction of predatory groupies as the feminine norm. Tesfaye's narrator celebrates his own irresistibility and embraces the poisonous justifications of victimhood. Just as perfect is the closing title track, which finds Tesfaye alone in a quiet room, letting the past reverberate, hitting bottom because he simply stops digging. It's the point where the Weeknd's 2011 stops and it's a perfect way to end things. At least it was; on Trilogy, it's followed by "Till Dawn (Here Comes The Sun)". Like all of the new songs, it's strong enough on its own but arbitrary in terms of sequencing and has only minimal relation to the LP it was included on. This is some of the best music of the young decade; judging by its already pervasive influence, it's safe to say Trilogy (or at least House of Balloons) will be one of those records that will be viewed as a turning point when we look at the 2010s as a whole. Some of it's up to demographics. Artists of Tesfaye's age had formative years where Timbaland, the Neptunes, Missy Elliott, D'Angelo, and Aaliyah were at the peak of their powers. And given the "new rock revolution" early in the 2000's, which created nothing new at all, it stands to reason that many who came of age in that era don't hear rock as a progressive form. You can sense the shift when talking to new bands. And of course, for those who have some indie rock inclinations, Beach House and Siouxsie samples don't hurt. Ultimately, the Weeknd's music creates a world. In it, people acknowledge their humanity as expressed by their desires to fuck, to get high, to resent one another, to hurt, to not care about tomorrow. That's a lot for a single artist to take on. "You'll wanna be high for this," Tesfaye memorably sings within the first minute. Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.

2012-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2012-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Universal Republic

November 13, 2012

02adae31-067b-4e1b-b541-14b1ff03aaf1

Ian Cohen

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

The young techno producer with a heavy Villalobos influence and strong singles and remixes to his name crafts a weird and wonderful debut LP.

The young techno producer with a heavy Villalobos influence and strong singles and remixes to his name crafts a weird and wonderful debut LP.

Nicolás Jaar: Space Is Only Noise

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15122-space-is-only-noise/

Space Is Only Noise

Strange can exist anywhere, but we have a habit of thinking only the maximal and unhinged-- Captain Beefheart, Basement Jaxx, R. Kelly-- are truly weird. How bizarre can the music of Philip Glass or Wolfgang Voigt really be? It seems contained, planned; the curio is the choice to be so on-keel in the first place. One of my favorite aspects of Nicolas Jaar's debut full-length, Space Is Only Noise, is how thoroughly it scatters this misconception. Space is leftfield electro-pop, far-flung and without reserve, but it is also patient, quiet, and small. Jaar is a Providence via New York via Chile producer. He is 21, he attends Brown University, and he already has several well regarded singles and EPs to his name in addition to running the Clown & Sunset imprint. Requisite hot remixes: check. He exhibits all of the earmarks of a rising techno star: He remixes dance music, and his early singles were released as 12"s on dance labels. He counts Chilean techno giant Ricardo Villalobos as a prime inspiration. Little with Jaar is straightforward, however. His father is an acclaimed visual artist. His mixes play like outsider pastiche. There are conflicting reports about whether his downtempo beats-- usually clocking between 90 - 110 bpm-- actually move dancefloors (Jaar himself is skeptical). Here is an alternate theory as to why Jaar occasionally fails to shuffle Nikes: He makes weird, self-contained music that only lands a glancing blow on house or any other particular dance subgenre. Jaar's music incorporates lounge pop, African jazz, hip-hop, and sound collage in addition to house and pinches of dubstep. The type of soundsystem most appropriate for Space isn't a sleek club hi [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| -fi but a Victrola in a stop-motion film ("steampunk house"-- let's please not go there). The textures and ingredients of Jaar's music exist in the context of techno-- rhythm and repetition are clearly important to him-- but Space is not dance music. It's too slow, sure, but it's also too diffuse in its methods and results. Pianos, organs, guitar strings, and, most surprisingly, Jaar's voice all fall under Space's sepia-toned veil. This sounds like a lot to take in, but Jaar goes to great lengths to ensure that Space settles lightly. The tracks are short, funny, and always hitched to a melody. He sidesteps impulses-- during the quivering "Almost Fell", for instance, or during "Specters of the Future", during which actual techno threatens-- to drift into full-on ambience, skronk, or extended beat passages. The goofy bass bumbling of "Problems With the Sun" is as likely to stick with you as the elegiac "Colomb". Functionally I keep thinking of my first listens to The Books' Thought for Food: familiar styles and influences are wafted under my nose. There is a lot of teasing recognition but very little realization. The record passes easily and quickly. Just as Jaar's treated instruments blur the line between digital and acoustic, his voice-- calm and husky, somewhat affected-- saddles up to the soul samples and film dialogue that pepper the album and confidently blends. He hums earworms-- "Replace the word 'space' with a drink and forget it"; "Too many kids finding rain in the dust"-- that ripple across his productions. These voices-- Jaar's own or samples-- are more than melodic placeholders. The gentle house balladry of "I Got a Woman" uses a looped Ray Charles refrain and French film dialogue to evoke something more specific than the electric pianos and breakbeat can. Jaar is akin to labelmates DJ Koze and Dave Aju, who weave voices among beats in counterintuitive ways. Space never feels like a showcase for Nicolas Jaar; it's just a modest and well-decorated gathering place for some things he loves, a place for them to interact. This teetering restraint masks the true weirdness of Space Is Only Noise. I could understand someone finding the intensely self-contained Space a bit claustrophobic, but the album is most rewarding when you just grab a seat at the table. Because when Jaar chants "Grab a calculator and fix yourself" I don't sit there and think, "Gosh, why am I listening to electro-acoustic downtempo future-jazz?"; I go look for my calculator.

2011-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

2011-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Circus Company

February 17, 2011

02b1e30a-0cbb-43fa-9539-d4272fd753d2

Andrew Gaerig

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

After creating 137 records under 135 monikers-- including Viktor Vaughn, King Geedorah, and Metal Fingers-- this ex-KMD and current Madvillain star finally releases his second album under his Christian name, MF Doom.

After creating 137 records under 135 monikers-- including Viktor Vaughn, King Geedorah, and Metal Fingers-- this ex-KMD and current Madvillain star finally releases his second album under his Christian name, MF Doom.

MF DOOM: Mm..Food?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5255-mmfood/

Mm..Food?

Rap loves food. Skeptics: name another genre that has its own brand of potato chips, or counts as heroes men named Notorious B.I.G. and Big Pun and Puffy and Fat Joe and Raekwon the Chef, or singlehandedly stabilized a dying French wine town with an MTV spot and a few choice Diddies. Foodtalk is facile shorthand, and after 15 years in the game, MF Doom has had his share of Warren G Cheezie Nachos and Master P Platinum BBQ Rap Snacks. But when hip-hop got fat and gangsta and lucrative-- as well as massively important, culturally influential, and-- Doom kept low, disgruntled by what he saw as big-money rap's new self-importance. "Only in America could you find a way to earn a healthy buck/ And still keep your attitude on self-destruct," Doom would say later in "Rhymes Like Dimes". By 1993, rap had toasted to The Chronic, Illmatic, and 36 Chambers; had it been released then, KMD's pointed and confrontational Black Bastards would have sounded but a wolf cry while the rest of hip-hop was taking its first sips of gin and juice. "There are different topics besides murdering everybody. That seems to be the in thing-- how many people you can murder on a record. So I'm bringing it back to the old, bragging about how nice you are with the words." Doom said this on NPR in 2003, but the sentiment holds true for his 1999 comeback solo full-length Operation: Doomsday. Like other rap heavyweights at the time, Doom promised world domination, but with tongue firmly in cheek, making tall boasts only to undermine them with nerdy self-deprecation and high-falutant science-fiction soap-ops. Doom "came to destroy rap" because rap had betrayed itself: Operation: Doomsday was the story of-- and vehicle for-- his return-to-roots revenge. "Operation Doomsday complete," we're told in the opening sound collage of Mm..Food?. As an official follow-up to Operation: Doomsday, Mm..Food? is an attempt to make good on Doom's almost fascist conceit to restore rap's golden age despite its loss of innocence. While Doom doesn't drop strictly food-related rhymes, the album's subject matter is always commonplace: friends, sucka MCs, girls, weed, and hip-hop. Post Doomsday, MF Doom as MF Doom has no interest in the space-laser rapocalypse of King Geedorah's Take Me To Your Leader or the dysfunctional gangster whim of Madvillain's Madvillainy. Here Doom wants nothing more than to score some Clever Points with quirky one-liners over tight beats. "On his own throne, the boss like King Koopa", Doom spits silver dollars like a subway-card dispenser, but he also loosens his mask a bit for a few tender bleats: "Look like a black wookie when he keeps his hair low," he confesses on "Beef Rapp". There aren't as many belly laughs on Mm..Food? as there were on VV1 or Madvillainy, but Doom does manage this spam-mail slam on "Kookies": "Supposed to be checkin e-mails/ All I got is messages from ass naked females [cookies]/ I don't know no Jenny, she said it's free/ And I won't owe her a penny, and that's the last time I saw her/ But thousands of more horrors are on line (Gomorrah...)". Unlike Doomsday, guest spots are smartly kept to a minimum, though in fairness, "Rapp Snitch Knishes" co-emcee Mr. Fantastik hardly embarrasses himself: "True to the ski mask New York's my origin/ Play a fake gangsta like a old accordian." Most of Doom's raps on Mm..Food? sacrifice cohesion for maximum punch. When Doom does muster some self-restraint, he comes off triply brilliant. From the beginning, the Count Bass-D production "Potholderz" darts back and forth across the metaphor until we simply can't tell whether Doom's talking about gloves or roach clips: "What-- these old things?/ About to throw them away with the gold rings that make them don't fit like OJ". The Whodini sample on "Deep Fried Frenz" is awful in that purposeful maybe-Eminem sort of way. Here Doom turns a feel-good song into a mess of betrayal, bitterness, and matter-of-fact credos: "You could either ignore this advice, or take it from me/ Be too nice and people take you for a dummy." With the exception of the album's two older tracks-- the Madlib-produced, Madvillainy leftover "One Beer" and the PNS-produced "Yee Haw", here re-recorded as "Kon Queso"-- and "Potholderz", Doom controls all the production on Mm..Food?. A lot of these beats are old no-frills Special Herbs loops, most lacking the marks of Doom's science-fiction fetish. Of the newer beats, the 70s Blue Note funk on "Vomitspit" is up there with Doom's best production work, and the stuttery "Potholderz" has the best bassline on any hip-hop album this year. Doom is also one of the few producers who should be allowed to do sound collage skits: "Poo-Putt Platter" has sample sequences that at one point reads, "'You risked your life for us.' 'Thanks.' 'I've lost an arm.' 'Good.' 'Stop it father!'" One skit would have been plenty though; instead, Doom dumps four of these right in the middle of the album, a nasty rut that makes Mm..Food? pretty much unplayable front-to-back after the first few spins, especially since the tracks that follow these skits-- the elevator-rap "Kon Karne" and the maudlin "Guinnesses"-- are among Doom's worst. If Mm..Food? feels merely good or somewhat inconsequential, it's because it is that way by design. Doom has no pretense here-- he's an equally great rapper and producer, and he wants people to respect him for his skills alone: "It's about the beats/ Not about the streets and who food he about to eat". On one hand we can admire his intentions; on the other we can criticize his pigheadedness. Hip-hop can be consequential and important when it wants to be, and perhaps the capable Doom is keeping his aspirations too far in check. The truth is that Doom could go on making five or six Mm..Food?'s each year for the rest of his career-- but when will "merely good" not be good enough?

2004-11-15T01:00:01.000-05:00

2004-11-15T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rap

Rhymesayers

November 15, 2004

02b3343c-7248-400e-b54b-cf1a980572a5

Nick Sylvester

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

Free mixtape from Adult Swim pairs Atlanta's top rappers (Jeezy, Cee-Lo, Gucci) with some of today's top indie producers (El-P, FlyLo, Dam-Funk).

Free mixtape from Adult Swim pairs Atlanta's top rappers (Jeezy, Cee-Lo, Gucci) with some of today's top indie producers (El-P, FlyLo, Dam-Funk).

Various Artists: ATL RMX

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13797-atl-rmx/

ATL RMX

It probably says less about the State of Hip-Hop than it reads, but Adult Swim, an offshoot of the Cartoon Network, is now one of the most trustworthy names in the genre. Doubt their cred if you must, but you can't doubt their sincerity: With all due respect, you don't release Witchdoctor albums in 2009 if you're just in it for a quick buck. Beyond that, they eased in naturally since there was always heavy overlap between the fanbases of, say, MF DOOM and "Aqua Teen Hunger Force". However, ATL RMX departs Adult Swim's safety zone for something more controversially curatorial: something called "Imma G (Memory Tapes Remix)" by Dem Getaway Boyz isn't some prank along the lines of Trent Reznor's Strobe Light-- it's the actual third track here, and pretty typical of what to expect, some of electronic/hip-hop's bigger producers reconfiguring a murderer's row of Atlanta rappers who... okay, let's be upfront: If you've had a discussion with someone concerned about the obsolescence of "lyrical" hip-hop, I'm almost certain you got an earful about how the MCs on ATL RMX are at fault. But even if El-P and Young Jeezy are the battle lines upon which ideological wars about what constitutes "real" hip-hop are fought, wouldn't it be worthwhile to see if there's any crossover between each's unique and impactful take on urban dystopia? They're both really good at what they do-- it's worth a shot. But is it worth a listen? Well, ATL RMX's first track, Jeezy's "I Got This (El-P Remix)" bangs like crazy, but it does so in a weirdly individualized way. It takes a monster of a beat to make Jeezy sound overwhelmed, and his boasts end up as a nearly incidental sound effect under all those clip-emptying drums and enjambed female vocal interjections (this mixtape appears to exist only as a "clean version"... that doesn't necessarily help). I'd love to hear more, but maybe if Jeezy heard the beat first? Still, ATL RMX starts out strong: DJA adds a buzzier backing track to Rich Kids' "Patna Dem", but it's the irrepressibly emphatic chanting that's going to sell it every time. "Imma G" has a strangely sweet and sour tropical taste and essentially becomes a typical Memory Tapes track by its midway point, suggesting Dayve Hawk has incorporated more hip-hop into his sound than he's often given credit for. There's also honest to god rapping from Cee-Lo. If that doesn't justify this mixtape's completely nonexistent download cost, I don't know what to tell you. But elsewhere, the remixers seem compelled to justify their existence/appearance in ways that rarely do any favors to the source material. I suppose SALEM's reverence for both Chapterhouse and Swishahouse will pay off someday, but their decision to chop and screw Playboy Tre's subdued, lyrically potent sipper's lament "Sideways" feels like a misunderstanding of the material at best and a joke at worst-- the last interpretation this sort of thing needs. Many have remarked upon the influence of rave music on Lil' Jon's mid-decade work, but matched up with the BPMs and sinus-eroding coke bump of Danger Beach's "Give It All You Got" remix, he hardly sounds revitalized or even relevant. And if HEALTH truly want to make an impact in hip-hop, they'll let M.O.P. spit flame over "Die Slow", because that shit knocks. Their pounding, dissonant remake of OJ Da Juiceman's "Good Night" should be enough to really make M.I.A. rethink boasting her upcoming album as a crit-wank fantasy of Animal Collective-meets-Gucci Mane. But even when ATL RMX fails, it represents a discussion worth having-- though OJ Da Juiceman getting booed at a CMJ showcase served as a flashpoint, it was less "OutKast gets booed at the Source Awards" than "Philadelphia Eagles fans boo Santa Claus," an understandable reaction (it was a skinny, poorly dressed Santa/I didn't hear Pill or Curren$y getting booed) with understandable timing (the Eagles were blowing a chance to get the #1 pick, oddly enough, O.J. Simpson/it was hours into a rap show running impossibly late on a Wednesday night) that made an audience with an already hostile rep look irreparably bad. No one comes out looking good, especially in the wake where sides are too easily taken, when hip-hop is considered a zero-sum game where only one region or mindset can be "right" and enjoyed only for the right "reasons." But is it worthwhile at all to wonder if Scott Herren enjoys Shawty Lo "legitimately" or whether it's "correct" to finally give Gucci Mane a shot only because he's being remixed by Flying Lotus (or vice versa)? Hell, most of hip-hop listening these days seems to revolve around conversation anyway, so let's keep it going. Maybe next time we'll hear DOOM over some Zaytoven beats.

2010-01-07T01:00:01.000-05:00

2010-01-07T01:00:01.000-05:00

Adultswim.com

January 7, 2010

02b56d89-31d3-4578-8d55-15319c9a22a4

Ian Cohen

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

The 1983 film score aspired to the weightlessness of outer space. A remastered edition adds an album’s worth of new songs that reflect how far we’ve come from the Apollo missions’ optimism.

The 1983 film score aspired to the weightlessness of outer space. A remastered edition adds an album’s worth of new songs that reflect how far we’ve come from the Apollo missions’ optimism.

Brian Eno: Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks - Extended Edition

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-apollo-atmospheres-and-soundtracks-extended-edition/

Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks - Extended Edition

A decade into a solo career dedicated to aural novelty, Brian Eno released an album intended to transform weightlessness into a kind of spiritual exaltation. On Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, the former Roxy Music keyboardist/troublemaker took a break from the fractured narratives and lissome grooves he had helped create for David Bowie and Talking Heads, respectively. The occasion? In its original, 1983 form, a documentary consisting of 35-millimeter footage of the six moon missions; the score composed by Eno, brother Roger, and guitarist Daniel Lanois complement its static, clean images. But in the era of The Return of the Jedi, maybe audiences didn’t respond well to static cleanliness in space movies. After director Al Reinart’s re-edit, the documentary was released in 1989 as For All Mankind. The backstory inspires less interest than the soundtrack itself, which excels at simulating a visual experience from the sparsest means: Call it Another Gravity-Free World. Long a favorite among Enophiles, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks gets a sparkling remaster and almost an album’s worth of okay-to-pretty-good new tracks. Listeners familiar with consistent royalty generators like “Deep Blue Day” (used to beatific effect in 1996’s Trainspotting) will note the bell-like clarity of these souped-up versions, the better to savor the tension between Eno’s occasional dissonance and Lanois’ penchant for gauze, especially on the friendlier second half. “The idea was to try and make a frontier space music of some kind,” Eno said in a 1998 interview. “When I was asked to do the music for the film, I discovered that the astronauts were each allowed to take a cassette with them on those missions, and they nearly all took country and western songs. I thought it was a fabulous idea that people were out in space, playing this music which really belongs to another frontier—in a way, seeing themselves as cowboys.” Tickled by the protean sampling possibilities of new synthesizer technology, the Enos and Lanois constructed a suite of tracks that approximate Duane Eddy on Mars (there’s another possible album title). This is the album’s real innovation, still under-discussed. Ambient music is called many things, but “cornball” isn’t one of them; the way the guitar twang on “Always Returning” schlocks up the pretty ripples of Eno’s keyboards and the purr of tape manipulations should have produced three dozen offspring by now. (Imagining the electric piano on “Weightless” anchoring a Jack Wagner hit is not out of bounds.) Lanois stars on “Silver Morning,” the ur-text for the well-behaved producer-goes-singer exertions of 1989’s Acadie. “Deep Blue Day” has earned its rep as Eno’s most recognized instrumental thanks to the turquoise density of the synths and the warmth of Lanois’ pedal-steel playing; it’s emphatic¸ unlike other Eno ambient recordings, like 1975’s Discreet Music and 1992’s The Shutov Assembly. When Eno goes on his own solo exploratory missions the results are predictably immersive. Ominous gurgles turn “Matte” into a quiet nightmare: trapped in an oil drum at the bottom of the Pacific. On other tracks he gives Lanois a heads-up on future arrangement ideas—Peter Gabriel, whom Lanois would produce a couple years later, might have concluded after listening to the prominent bass and faint, stately wash of organ on “Stars” that they’d do nicely for “Mercy Street,” 1986’s So mediation on poet Anne Sexton. Credit Eno’s discovery of the Yamaha CS80, one of the first polyphonic synthesizers; it formed, according to Lanois in a 2012 interview about the album, “an essential part of the work we did together.” The new tracks don’t sully the original recordings so much as recontextualize them in sometimes rather garish ways. The gleam of the synthesized chords on “Like I Was a Spectator” doesn’t summon outer space; it summons boutique hotel elevator music, which might be the idea. Perhaps that’s as it should be. As the excitement about manned space missions—a consequence of Cold War politics intersecting with Great Society notions about what the federal government could fund—has waned in the last 35 years, Apollo’s clear lines and our memories of, say, National Geographic back issues with photos of the moon’s surface fuse into a nostalgia of the mildest evocatory power. The following year Eno and Lanois would produce U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, an album on which anthems, Eurodisco, and modest, modish synth doodles rub against each other with nary a fuss. The Unforgettable Fire presents itself as a book of prayers; Apollo: Soundtracks and Atmospheres limns an eternity without a heaven. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

UMC

July 20, 2019

02b93024-6d3c-4fc7-8943-2aa7cf6176b9

Alfred Soto

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

DAMN. is a widescreen masterpiece of rap, full of expensive beats, furious rhymes, and peerless storytelling about Kendrick’s destiny in America.

DAMN. is a widescreen masterpiece of rap, full of expensive beats, furious rhymes, and peerless storytelling about Kendrick’s destiny in America.

Kendrick Lamar: DAMN.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23147-damn/

DAMN.

Life is one funny motherfucker, it’s true. “DUCKWORTH.,” the last song on Kendrick Lamar's fourth studio album DAMN., tells a winding story about Anthony from Compton and Ducky from Chicago, whose paths cross first over KFC biscuits, and again, 20 years later, when Ducky’s son records a song about the encounter for Anthony’s record label. It’s a precious origin story, the stuff of rock docs and hood DVDs, and it’s delivered with such precision, vivid detail, and masterful pacing that it can’t possibly be true. But it’s a tale too strange to be fiction, and too powerful not to believe in—just like its author. Kendrick Lamar has proven he’s a master storyteller, but he’s been saving his best plot twist this whole time, waiting until he was ready, or able, to pull it off. Storytelling has been Lamar’s greatest skill and most primary mission, to put into (lots of) words what it's like to grow up as he did—to articulate, in human terms, the intimate specifics of daily self-defense from your surroundings. Somehow, he’s gotten better. The raps on his fourth studio album DAMN. jab mercilessly like a sewing machine. His boyish nasal instrument is distinct and inimitable as it slithers up and down in pitch on “PRIDE.” Even when Lamar sounds like Eminem, or Drake, or OutKast, he sounds like himself, and he arguably outpaces them all as a writer. On “FEAR.,” he relays daily threats from his mom (“I’ll beat your ass, keep talking back/I’ll beat your ass, who bought you that? You stole it”) and from his neighbors (“I’ll probably die because I ain’t know Demarcus was snitching/I’ll probably die at these house parties fucking with bitches”) over low-slung blues stirred by The Alchemist. Lamar’s recitation is so effortless you wonder where he breathes, or if he does at all. Kendrick is a relic of the mid-aughts rap blog era, where bedroom WordPress pages would post .zips of albums by amateurs. After years of such releases, Kendrick dropped a self-titled EP in 2009 that featured Big Pooh from Little Brother and elicited such Nah Right comments as “I like the beats on this” and “who da fuk?” Accolades swelled with each project; by 2011, he was considering signing with Dr. Dre; by 2013, he was playing “SNL” and touring with Kanye West. He came of age with his fans, and by 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, he put to music their chest-clenched frustrations. Ever the curtain-puller, he released an album of untitled and unmastered drafts and grew his hair out. His short absence, even after lending Taylor Swift a verse, has been made to feel longer by his media shyness and a surging tide of new rappers shuttled out daily. Throughout it all, he’s avoided the boxed-in fates of predecessors like Nas and peers like J. Cole through an electric originality and curiosity. He mastered rap not for mastery’s sake, but to use it as a form, undeterred by slow-eared fans who’ll only highlight his “simplest lines.” His best new trick is repetition; it offsets his density and drills his ideas, as enthralling as a Sunday sermon or pre-fight chirp session. There have been few threats committed to record as sincere as, “Let somebody touch my mama, touch my sister, touch my woman/Touch my daddy, touch my niece, touch my nephew, touch my brother”—you tick down the list along with him, slot in your own lifelong bonds with loved ones. Such internal processing plays out through the album’s Greek chorus, via the singer Bēkon, who speaks in riddles of balance throughout: “Is it wickedness, is it weakness;” “Love’s gonna get you killed, but pride’s gonna be the death of you;” “It was always me versus the world/Until I found it’s me versus me.” DAMN. is best in these philosophical spaces. It lags slightly around the center, where the concept loosens: “LOYALTY.,” with Rihanna, has all the makings of a radio mainstay this summer, and is as low-stakes as the platform demands; it’s always fun to hear Rih rap, and her presence is its most interesting aspect. “LUST.” would sound better if it weren’t next to an ear-worm as tender as “LOVE.,” which slow-dances between Zacari falsettos and Lamar’s sheepish read of the girl who fills him up. Between the two tracks, it’s easy to tell which force is tugging at him harder. The record’s few lulls succumb to what surrounds them. The springboard bounce of “HUMBLE.,” the war chant of “DNA.,” and hot steel of “XXX.” show Kendrick in his element, fast and lucid, like Eazy-E with college credits and Mike WiLL beats. The production is taut and clean, but schizophrenic, often splicing two or three loops into a track and swaying between tempos, closer in kin to good kid, m.A.A.d city’s siren-synths than Butterfly’s brass solos. If he was “black as the moon” on his last album, he’s an “Israelite” here, refusing to identify himself by the shade of his skin but fluent in the contents of his D.N.A. Butterfly floated along to soften its scathing stance—“We hate po-po” sounds better over a smooth saxophone—but with so many “wack artists” in play, what’s the reward for upliftment? Kendrick is so alone at his altitude that when he acknowledges Fox News, let alone Donald Trump, it feels like a favor to them both. Still, the album exists for “DUCKWORTH.” It’s the final piece of the TDE puzzle, a homegrown label of Compton natives that happened to deliver the best rapper of his generation. If we’re to believe the song’s last gunshot—and its seamless loop back to track one—much of DAMN. is written from the perspective of a Kendrick Lamar who grew up without a father to guide him away from the sinful temptations outside his home. He bobs in and out of this perspective, but the repeated pledges to loyalty and martyrdom evoke the life and mind of a young gang member who carries his neighborhood flag because no one’s proved to him that he shouldn’t. These choices, Lamar suggests, aren’t pre-determined or innate, but in constant dialogue with and in reaction to their surrounding circumstances. They aren’t above or beneath anyone who can hear his voice. Success and failure choose their subjects at their whim; we’re as grateful as Kendrick for his fate.

2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope

April 18, 2017

02b9b517-7ae5-491f-837e-86fc67d41711

Matthew Trammell

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

Prince is back on Warner Brothers more than two decades after his bitter departure from the label, and he has two new albums in tow: one solo record, and one credited to his all-female backing band 3rdEyeGirl.

Prince is back on Warner Brothers more than two decades after his bitter departure from the label, and he has two new albums in tow: one solo record, and one credited to his all-female backing band 3rdEyeGirl.

Prince / 3rdEyeGirl: Art Official Age/PlectrumElectrum

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19900-prince-3rdeyegirl-art-official-ageplectrumelectrum/

Art Official Age/PlectrumElectrum

Back in the mid-1990s, Prince and Warner Brothers did not split amicably. Not only did the superstar write the word SLAVE on his face, he also changed his name to an unpronounceable logo that was quickly translated into English as “The Artist Formerly Known As…” Unhappy with faltering sales in the new decade, he tried to release a quick slew of albums in order to get out of his contract, but Warner insisted on waiting the industry-standard two years between major releases. It must have felt like a demotion after Prince more or less owned the 1980s, a decade when even a flop like Under the Cherry Moon could spin off a hit album like Parade. Despite his complaints, however, Prince never regained his former popularity following his departure from Warner; as he struggled to go his own way and keep up with trends he was no longer setting, his independent output quickly grew prodigious and preeningly self-indulgent, ranging from the triple-disc Emancipation in 1996 to the soggy The Rainbow Children in 2001 to the one-two punch of MPLSound and LotusFlow3r in 2009. What’s most surprising about Prince re-signing (or resigning?) with Warner Brothers nearly twenty years later is just how much sense it makes for both parties. The label has welcomed one of its signature stars back to the fold, who brings his never-reissued/never-remastered back catalog with him. They’ve already teased a new edition of Purple Rain—the dream we all dream of—and Prince gets some major-label backing at a time when he seems creatively rejuvenated and newly focused. A string of startlingly solid singles led to Art Official Age, which despite its ludicrous title, is the most engaged Prince has sounded in a long while. In particular, “Breakfast Can Wait” is an AM lovemaking jam that schools R. Kelly with its old-school slink and Prince in supreme pillowtalk mode (“Come here baby, let me put you on my plate”). Musically, Art Official Age is all over the map—gloriously so, in fact—as though Prince is trying to cram a triple album into a single disc. Opener “Art Official Cage” cribs directly from Daft Punk’s more arena-ready moments, building a post-disco banger on some Nile Rodgers-style rhythm guitar. It sounds perhaps too familiar, but the song mimics its source with aplomb and what sounds like Princely arrogance. Cockiness has always looked better on Prince than assless chaps or satin frocks, and the song has a feisty energy that even a new jack swing rap can’t derail. Some of the best songs here are slow jams, like the wishful “This Could Be Us” and “Breakdown”, which sounds like one of the most personally revealing tunes Prince has ever recorded: “Waking up in places that you would never believe,” he sings with what sounds like deep regret. “Give me back the time, you can keep the memories.” As the strings lift the song out of the depths and laserbeams fire at the edges of the music, Prince launches into some vocal contortions that prove his voice has lost none of its wild mutability over the years. It’s the rare moment of true gravity on an album that sounds like Prince actually had a lot of fun making. There’s something reassuring about such good spirits coming from him, as it recalls a much younger Prince whose mischievous smile and eye rolls conveyed a self-possession and self-awareness. On the other hand, the few times he nods to an overarching funk/sci-fi mythology—something about being cryogenically frozen for 50 years and waking up in a society with no first-person pronouns—Prince comes across as a grouchy old guy. “Twenty-four karat hashtag, put your phone in your bag,” he raps on “The Gold Standard”, sounding too much like a man in his mid-50s. Art Official Age is not a return to form by any means, but a modestly exciting Prince album. That’s certainly more than we could expect in 2014, and it’s certainly more than we get out of PlectrumElectrum. Prince recorded the album with his all-female backing band 3rdEyeGirl, which includes drummer Hannah Ford Welton, guitarist Donna Grantis, and bassist Ida Nielsen. All have backgrounds and even degrees in rock and jazz, so it’s obvious they have immense chops. The rhythm section lock down the grooves on the punk-/surf-rock “Marz” and the strutting “Stopthistrain”, and Grantis (formerly a member of the New Power Generation) riffs and solos on “Anotherlove” with Princely abandon. What they don’t have is much of a personality. Recorded live in the studio using analog equipment, the album is nevertheless too proficient, too slick, and too professional to come across as much more than anonymous. They show little of the kinky inventiveness of the Revolution or the innate versatility of the New Power Generation; instead, Plectrum is crammed with predictable rap-rock riffs, vague alt-rock menance, and bloozy showboating. Especially blasting from Paisley Park, this is a perversely unimaginative and restrictive idea of rock‘n’roll, with none of the musical freedom that Prince has traditionally shown. One of the great pop synthesists, he has blended so many different styles and sounds so fluidly that his best music sounded positively utopian: a world without charts or genres, release schedules, or label contracts. Prince and 3rdEyeGirl have good intentions, of course, and at times the album sounds like a rebuttal to the pesky rock-is-dead palaver that so many of the form’s aging practitioners have memorized. “A girl with a guitar is 12 times better than another crazy band o’ boys,” Prince asserts on “Fixurlifeup”. But he’s decrying prefab pop groups while backed by a prefab pop group, preaching female empowerment while playing up the novelty of an all-female band. Both of these albums sound slightly out of time, but at least Art Official Age, despite its flaws, has the bravado to imagine how the pop music of the future might function. By contrast, Plectrum merely duplicates the sounds and politics of rock ‘n’ roll’s stodgy past.

2014-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00

2014-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Rock

October 3, 2014

02bb49c0-cd7b-4f99-aa4b-44f7ab98d7c9

Stephen M. Deusner

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

On an album inspired by the psychological effects of trauma, the Detroit techno pioneer and science-fiction storyteller pursues his search for new frontiers that lie far from the dancefloor.

On an album inspired by the psychological effects of trauma, the Detroit techno pioneer and science-fiction storyteller pursues his search for new frontiers that lie far from the dancefloor.

Jeff Mills: The EyeWitness

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-mills-the-eyewitness/

The EyeWitness

In techno, Jeff Mills is one of one, and he continues to move further from the genre norm. A remarkably prodigious icon who remains deeply associated with Detroit (though he splits his time between Paris and Miami), the 62-year-old DJ/producer is unwilling to be bound to the sounds and ideas that once defined him. A long-time sci-fi adept, he continues to use the language of techno—much of which he almost single-handedly pioneered—to comment on present-day dystopias or suggest new potentialities for anyone still willing to listen. Though Mills’ time as a turntable wizard, Underground Resistance co-founder, and techno’s ultimate ambassador and autodidact informs every inch of his music, the context of his work has stretched beyond dance culture into something wider and headier. Mills’ compositions are humanist and often highly collaborative, and created in a self-imagined environment (Black American future music gone global, fluent in advanced technology and showing Borgesian comfort with the boundlessness of storytelling), with an eye to continuously revolutionizing the milieu they came from. He remains a dance festival headliner (though, pointedly, very rarely in America), yet the stimulation behind his vast recorded output seems more focused on the mind than the ass. The EyeWitness, Mills’ second album of 2024 and one clearly reflecting the dark night of today’s human soul, is a good opportunity to hear how an electronic- and dance-music originator pushes the fruits of his legacy toward a more imaginative discourse. (It’s also one that’s easier to hear, period: After years of being unavailable on streaming platforms, the full-length releases on Mills’ Axis Records are now an easy click away.) It is a set of listening techno that, according to Mills’ liner notes, addresses the effects of shock and trauma on the contemporary condition. That The EyeWitness may have (almost) nothing to do with dancing reflects Mills’ belief that techno’s purpose and history are grounded in principles of future freedoms, intellectual mysteries, and cosmological phenomena, rather than mere physical reaction. The EyeWitness’ reaffirms Mills’ marriage of thematic narrative, psychology, and sound, and it has plenty of precedents in the producer’s recent work. His second (!) score for Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 silent film, Metropolis, released in 2023; the exploration of feeling and knowing of 2021’s more rhythm-driven The Clairvoyant; his six-part 2018 radio series The Outer Limits, made with NASA for London’s NTS Radio about the universe and astrophysics—each is a spectacular piece of musical sci-fi storytelling that questions known life’s governability, and brings to mind Samuel R. Delany more than any electronic composer or producer. Yet at their shared musical center rests what may be Detroit techno’s most crucial contribution to modern sound: layers of musical tension without release, chord patterns that don’t resolve, beats that keep unfolding, a music that embraces mystery with no clear ending. It’s a strategy that stands in direct opposition to EDM’s almighty drop and pop’s built-in limitations. It’s also a great metaphor for one way that Mills and the techno culture he represents regard the composition of a track and a set, and what they intuit the payoff to be. Not only are there no drops on The EyeWitness, there’s barely a kick drum. Only “Indoctrination,” which closes the vinyl release (streamers include four additional, primarily beatless tracks), resembles what a club environment might expect from Mills: a fat four-note loop and bass kick as a maypole for trademark 909 hi-hats to dance around. Even here, layers of synths pile on overdrive-building energy, jabbering like aliens in the background of a scene they actually dominate. Mills’ theme—the way that trauma changes people, and ingrained wounds destroy our relationships with the world and each other—is admittedly a heavy lift for instrumental electronic music, however freeform. The topic is a potential broadsheet of discontent, so Mills’ text purposefully refuses to get stuck in either partisan- or identity-centered moans. What the music does express is the ubiquitous dread brought on by hurt’s cognitive effects. Much of Mills’ argument rests on provocative titles, matched by the kind of technologically updated tricks of the sci-fi trade not unfamiliar to UR soldiers or Vangelis stans. Except that Mills long ago reimagined these tricks. Tracks like “In a Traumatized World,” with Mills’ synthesized voice cut up into a chattering invented language that would make Lucasfilm proud, and “Menticide,” a post-WW2 word that describes torturous interrogation techniques meant to reshape a person’s will, are underpinned by sonambient sound effects, synth textures, and haunted melodic figures. This spooky foundation represents the album’s throughline, though, at times, other textures reinforce the nightmarish scenario: “Mass Hypnosis” builds into something approaching a swirl of digital koras and Giorgio Moroder’s Midnight Express sequencers, while “Pledge to the Sacred Iridescent Mirror” centers a martial beat and a minimalist bassline. Overwhelmingly, The Eyewitness is bathed in history’s shadows, unspoken but ever-present. Only once does Mills step back from the darkness toward something more polychromatic, reflecting the unexpected metamorphosis when trauma begets beauty. “Wonderous Butterfly” is built on the shipwreck of a musical trope (the chopped recasting of the “Oriental riff”), built into dub-like, looping scaffolding that is the album’s least futurist moment. The track’s two lead lines—one that sounds like a synthetic clarinet, the other like a percussive electric piano—harmonically discolor any sense of cliched meaning, weaving instead into a mysterious, emotionally complicated concerto. Purposefully or not, the riff, the title’s lepidoptera, and the clarinet bring to mind Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” a classic product of colonial art whose historic trauma plays in opera houses worldwide. The EyeWitness’ “Butterfly” provides a counter-argument that is part of the whole, a momentary escape from the machines, a simple dance of remixing history in the timeline’s other direction. It’s also proof that Mills’ techno storytelling keeps reasserting itself as a narrative form as complicated as its topics, and as the world that brings them to mind.

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

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

Electronic

Axis

July 18, 2024

02bedc1d-8ef1-4c46-a47c-d92717e523ea

Piotr Orlov

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

Claire Cottrill’s third album sinks deeper into a soft-rock sound as her songwriting takes on an understated new confidence.

Claire Cottrill’s third album sinks deeper into a soft-rock sound as her songwriting takes on an understated new confidence.

Clairo: Charm

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clairo-charm/

Charm

On the final track of her third album, Clairo finds herself at the pier, “playing out moments when there was a touch.” Just a touch: more intimate than pining from afar, sure, but not a kiss or even so much as an embrace. These kinds of experiences—when the memory of a tiny gesture captures the entirety of your attention—are hallmarks of Claire Cottrill’s best songwriting, like the flushed cheeks of “Bags” or the objectifying glances of “Blouse.” On Charm, she retains her attention to these fleeting touches, but pairs them with a lush, rich production, sinking deeper into a soft rock sound that is at once smoldering and whimsical. Charm is not a dramatic shift in the manner of Clairo’s second album, 2021’s Sling. After she achieved viral fame as a teen on the strength of her sweetly lo-fi YouTube uploads, Clairo released Immunity, her impressive Rostam Batmanglij-produced debut. Then she took a left turn. She moved to upstate New York, teamed with producer Jack Antonoff, and holed up in the woods to make Sling. Where Immunity showed off Clairo’s kinship with bedroom pop darlings like Frankie Cosmos, Sling worshiped at the altar of Carole King—a pastoral, folky album that seemed entirely uninterested in chasing her past or reaching for new pop hits. To make Charm, Clairo worked with another new producer, Leon Michels, known for his work in the El Michels Affair and as a member of the Dap-Kings. Together, they dug deeper into the ’70s palette Clairo developed on Sling and crafted arrangements dense with Wurlitzer, mellotron, piano, and organ. “Slow Dance” ends with fluttering flute and clarinet; “Terrapin” is filled with piano flourishes. If Antonoff’s production on Sling sometimes felt cool or atmospheric, Charm emits a palpable warmth. Plus, most of these songs groove. Clairo’s vocals remain, by and large, hushed, but thanks to the golden-hued production, her voice comes across more like a murmur in a crush’s ear than a sheepish mumble on a first date. The intimate experiences that Clairo examines on Charm have to do, she’s said, with “fleeting moments … where I’ve been charming or have been charmed” and the fantasies such moments can produce. It’s a mood Charm’s sensual confidence and retro propulsion readily conjures: “You make me wanna/Go buy a new dress,” she sings on “Juna,” “You make me wanna/Slip off a new dress.” On “Sexy to Someone,” a cozy song about wanting to be wanted, Clairo’s feather-light voice sways atop playful production you could almost call funky. Even in more downcast moments—when Clairo sings of mourning a love while “all alone upstate,” or describes how she’ll “pull on the string/That binds me to memories of/The way I loved you”—the music never wallows. Rarely do these songs stray from this sophisticated palette. It suits her well, but it marks Charm as yet another successful but polite soft-rock outing, a format with somewhat diminishing returns. One song towards the album’s end breaks away gently from the rest: “Echo,” a spacey highlight where psychedelic synths and Clairo’s droning delivery bring it closer to Broadcast than Carly Simon. It’s a strange tune about a love that “goes nowhere,” whose musical gestures enhance its lyrical ones. These are the quotidian details and the tiny imperfections that make Clairo’s music uniquely alluring. It’s a new kind of Clairo song, but it has what makes the best Clairo songs so unforgettable.

2024-07-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

2024-07-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Clairo

July 11, 2024

02bf0a4b-0c16-4e81-ba09-fbc55784ac0f

Marissa Lorusso

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marissa-lorusso/

On a frenetic album that tests the limits of his trolling, JPEGMAFIA hints at the delicate balance of truth and fiction behind his confrontational mix of noise, rap, and punk.

On a frenetic album that tests the limits of his trolling, JPEGMAFIA hints at the delicate balance of truth and fiction behind his confrontational mix of noise, rap, and punk.

JPEGMAFIA: I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jpegmafia-i-lay-down-my-life-for-you/

I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU

The exact moment that NBA player Dillon Brooks lost the mandate of heaven: After poking the bear of LeBron James in the 2023 playoffs, failing to live up to his own slanderous trash-talk while his aggressive style of play floundered on the court, Brooks unceremoniously hit free agency as the Memphis Grizzlies leaked that he wouldn’t be re-signed “under any circumstances.” Brooks’ story appears as an omen on “i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone,” the opening track on JPEGMAFIA’s fifth studio album, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU. In the first lines, the 34-year-old Baltimore rapper—whose iconoclastic presence is forged on a confrontational mix of noise, rap, and punk—likens himself to a worse version of Brooks as cymbals titter in the background. It’s an initiation to JPEG’s caustic humor laced with a smidge of accidental wisdom: You can play the role of the tireless provocateur as long as you continue to deliver. On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, JPEG entrenches himself in the agitator role. The follow-up to his 2023 Danny Brown collaboration Scaring the Hoes is blanketed in frenetic energy, as if JPEG can’t decide where to aim first. At times his extremely online subject matter takes the bloom off his writing. But his innate ability to shift between breakneck flows amid chaotic production buoys the album. In a 2023 interview, JPEG said that he aspires to create music that “tears you out of yourself.” On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, it feels as though he’s tearing in 30 directions at once, incorporating a dizzying mix of genres seemingly at random. The imperfect marriage of a 2014 Future sample and a persistent whirring sound on “New Black History” registers as grating rather than electrifying; his chants and growls in “vulgar display of power” are eroded by a blistering rock backdrop. At other points his glitchy, staccato raps fit seamlessly with the production’s entropy: on “it’s dark and hell is hot,” a 170 bpm Brazilian funk production assisted by DJ RaMeMes, or over a staticky Jade sample on “I’ll Be Right There.” As it did on his 2018 release Veteran, JPEG’s ability to walk the line between distortion and discord permits the industrial chaos to feel somehow familiar—as if the only thing more jarring would be unified sound direction. No matter the subject, JPEG’s raps never shy away from confrontation (he described the Drake disses on “New Black History” and “it’s dark and hell is hot” as “throwaway bars”). On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, he continues to hip fire with an air of superiority: “Fake-plug-talkin’ Tubi rappers/Got a machine behind ’em, and still they can’t fill up capacity with they raps,” he spits on “SIN MIEDO.” There’s room to take aim at white people who act Black and shit-talkers with their own skeletons in the closet, all while keeping pace with a fun Denzel Curry appearance. His pop culture references are simple and high-powered: Calling himself the “Black Michael Phelps” is objectively funny. The nonstop airing of grievances is entertaining, but eventually it can feel like JPEG’s off-the-cuff trolls are reaching critical mass. There’s wanton carelessness in using “African booty scratcher” as an insult while also claiming that he scares people “that ain’t got no Black friends.” He’ll go and liken himself to the IDF on the five-minute opus “Exmilitary,” then name the next track “JIHAD JOE,” not bothering to adjust for the contradictions between his personality and political commentary. It would be less honest for JPEGMAFIA to shy away from those contradictions. His general state of defiance—molded by his honorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force and his experiences with racism growing up in Alabama, filtered through his fluency in meme culture—informs the best aspects of his artistry. In trying to parse through the idea of being a Black man, a Black artist rapping to a predominantly white fanbase, in an online landscape full of censorship and disinformation, the line between performance and survival is razor-thin. Sometimes the shocking statement is a method of protecting one’s true self; other times it’s an actual window into the artist’s soul. “I’m so terminally online, goddamn, I gotta check myself,” he raps on “JIHAD JOE.” The musical highs of I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU lift JPEG above the potential pitfalls of this highwire act, but the cautionary tale of Dillon Brooks is never far from mind.

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

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

Rap

AWAL

August 8, 2024

02c0998b-6263-4833-b024-6805b0ff366c

Matthew Ritchie

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

Soldiering on without one-time frontman Daniel Blumberg, Yuck continue to pay homage to '90s indie rock, but the most telling reference point may be their former selves.

Soldiering on without one-time frontman Daniel Blumberg, Yuck continue to pay homage to '90s indie rock, but the most telling reference point may be their former selves.

Yuck: Stranger Things

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21567-yuck-stranger-things/

Stranger Things

Like 2013’s Glow & Behold and any future albums this lineup of Yuck might go on to record, Stranger Things carries an implied asterisk. This isn’t the work of the same band that released a lovably frazzled, fondly remembered self-titled album in 2011. Since frontman Daniel Blumberg quit the group and guitarist Max Bloom took over as its leader, Yuck have carried on as a faded copy of themselves, retaining their devotion to '90s indie rock but losing the misfit energy that made revisiting sounds that have already been recycled many, many times before seem like a genuinely exciting proposition. Bloom and Blumberg’s voices are superficially similar enough that casual listeners might not even be able to pinpoint exactly what’s changed, but they’ll almost certainly notice the diminishing returns. The scrappy enthusiasm of Yuck’s debut has been replaced by bland, box-checking competence. Given that a few of his songs on Stranger Things hint at the anxiety caused by the public pressure of filling in for his old bandmate, it feels mean-spirited to single Bloom out for particular criticism. But it’s hard not to. He’s the Doug Yule to Blumberg’s Lou Reed, a passable enough fill in for a song or two who lacks the charisma, personality, and way with words to carry an entire album on his own. And while his flat, cheerless vocals are the type of limitation that a more self-aware band might work around, the group’s self-produced third album counterintuitively plays them up, plastering them at the front of the mix. It’s a voice you can really grow to resent over 47 minutes, and Stranger Things locks you in such close quarters with it that when bassist Mariko Doi finally takes her lone lead vocal turn on "As I Walk Away," it feels like hard-earned relief. Under Blumberg’s reign, Yuck muddled their influences together into a fluid pastiche—a little Pavement here, a little Yo La Tengo there, a big splash of Dinosaur Jr. on top of that—but Bloom tends toward more structured, predictable homages. "Cannonball" shares a name with a Breeders song but plays like a Superchunk song. There’s also a stab at an Elliott Smith song ("Like a Moth"), a Teenage Fanclub song ("Only Silence") and a Matthew Sweet song (the title track, which features the extremely '90s chorus "I hate myself," only none of the black humor that era’s songwriters used to cut that kind of sentiment with). The record ends with a pair of Built to Spill rips. "Down" is the more effective of the two, because Bloom nails Doug Martsch’s boyish innocence—it’s one of his best performances, even if like everything else on the album it feels secondhand. He sounds way out of his element, though, on the thundering, six-and-a-half minute "Yr Face," an attempt at "Broken Chairs"-style gravitas that runs in circles instead of building to something. Built to Spill could pull off that kind of song because they had big ideas to convey. Yuck do not. So, rough album. Glow & Behold was no great shakes either, but at least that record compensated for Blumberg’s absence with richer instrumentation, and some smartly deployed shoegaze textures that helped conceal Bloom’s vocal deficiencies. Where that album felt like an expansion, albeit a minor one, Stranger Things feels like a retreat. The group recorded it themselves in an effort to reconjure the rawer, fuzzier sound of their debut, and for a band that’s trying to escape their own shadow, that’s probably the worst thing they could have done. Yuck have always invited comparisons to other bands, but these days, the one that flatters them the least is the comparison to themselves.

2016-02-29T01:00:02.000-05:00

2016-02-29T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

Mamé

February 29, 2016

02c11ac7-0f7d-4d67-a12e-b9af08e0f87c

Evan Rytlewski

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

SZA’s long, ambitious, luxurious new album solidifies her position as a generational talent, an artist who translates her innermost feelings into indelible moments.

SZA’s long, ambitious, luxurious new album solidifies her position as a generational talent, an artist who translates her innermost feelings into indelible moments.

SZA: SOS

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sza-sos/

SOS

SZA has mastered the art of the inner monologue, transforming deeply personal observations into gilded songs that feel intimate, relatable, and untouchable, all at once. On her remarkable debut album, CTRL, she narrated these contradictions through warbled melodies that threw modern R&B and pop song structure out the window, letting her voice weave in, over, and through the beats, in a style that recalled the jazzy structure of Joni Mitchell and the technical prowess of Minnie Riperton. Not having a traditional formula, it turned out, was a winning tack: CTRL was certified triple platinum this August, reflecting both its continued relevance and fans’ salivatory desperation for a follow-up five years later. Of course, she’s been busy in the time since, having dropped 16 singles or collabs—including the Oscar-nominated Black Panther track “All the Stars,” with Kendrick Lamar—an album’s worth of material unto itself, plus a small handful of wildly acidic videos like “Good Days” and “Shirt.” She had the summer of 2021 in a chokehold with the record-breaking cellophane candy that is “Kiss Me More,” with Doja Cat. She’s filming a movie. She dropped some Crocs. She taught herself to play musical bowls. Like, damn. The cover of SOS depicts SZA, a former marine biology major, perched on a diving board surrounded by the deep blue ocean, her face pointed contemplatively at the sky. She was inspired by a 1997 photograph of Princess Diana on Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht taken one week before her death and said she wanted to pay homage to the “isolation” it conveyed. On SOS, she feels like a superwoman who deserves the world one minute, and a depressive second-stringer sacrificing her well-being for garbage men the next. She counteracts the millennial Bad Bitch/Sad Girl dichotomy (tale as old as time) by filling in the vast emotional space between. The album opens with the Morse code distress call and a sample of the Gabriel Hardeman Delegation’s 1976 gospel exhortation “Until I Found the Lord (My Soul Couldn’t Rest),” which lead her into a muscular opus of self-determination, singing in a rap cadence/breath-control flex about how she’s simply over the “fuckshit.” This opening title track sets up a kind of thesis for most of the album: that even amid self-doubt, she’s gloved up, in the ring, a heavyweight champ looking for the belt. We already know SZA’s dedication to her work is indefatigable—amid public woes with her longtime record label TDE and her major-label partner RCA, she wrote hundreds of songs for what became SOS, so culling it to just 23 is, in context, an exercise in restraint. At the same time, SOS is a clear document of how extensively SZA has sharpened her songwriting since the exquisite CTRL, how she’s become an even more exacting lyricist and imaginative musician. While placing herself firmly in the tradition of R&B, she’s forcefully blasé about genre tropes. On SOS, she belts her face off on an instant classic “fuck you” number (“I Hate U”) alongside a savage rap track that recalls the glory days of physical mixtapes (“Smokin on my Ex Pack”) and, perhaps improbably, a country song with a pop-punk chorus about revenge sex (“F2F”). This can sometimes land in the mushy middle—“Ghost in the Machine,” her breathlessly anticipated collab with Phoebe Bridgers, finds them mirroring each others’ vocal timbres over glitch electronica complete with synthetic harps courtesy of frequent collaborators Rob Bisel and Carter Lang. And “Special,” a track about body dysmorphia, sounds like she was writing from a Swiftian persona, à la her loosie “Joni,” yet comes off a bit pat sandwiched between a compendium of songs where she richly depicts the same sentiment. But, wow, woe to her trifling exes. On the bait-and-switch stalker lullaby “Kill Bill,” she lodges the chorus, “I might kill my ex/Not the best idea,” getting all her darkest thoughts on the page with a strolling electric bass holding her hand. “Blind” delivers “my pussy precedes me,” and, “You still talking ’bout babies/I’m still takin’ a Plan B,” on a soothing, string-laden ballad befitting a water sign. “Nobody Gets Me,” another tumultuous acoustic ballad that conjures “Fade Into You” transmitted through an AM radio in Nashville, proffers a carnal scenario: “You were balls deep/Now we beefin’/And we butt-naked at the MGM, so wasted, screamin’ ‘fuck that.’” She is a seriously funny songwriter, who also dignifies her specific visual place-setting (Vegas is particularly cursed) and raw expression of feelings by giving them space and melody. While delivering these insights, SZA is at her most intimate, with a suite of mid-tempo songs that elevate the loping pace with her vocal and emotional dynamics. She places herself in the lineage of classic R&B, as on the open-heart ballad “Gone Girl,” a moving break-up song over a warm Rhodes piano that showcases the purity of her vocal range. “Too Late” draws sonically from mid-’80s Janet Jackson and wonders if the breakup was the wrong move, while “Far” negates that thought while surveying the aftermath: “I’m far cause I can’t trust nobody,” she practically weeps, compelling you right alongside her, rooting for her to pick herself up from the mess. And on “Snooze,” a Babyface-produced track so rooted in the classics that the outro fades out rather than ends, she memorializes the woozy feeling of being in love before sneaking in a pitch-shifted addendum: “How you threatening to leave and I’m the main one crying?” Even amid her copious emotional toil, SZA still stands on her own terms. SOS ends with an Ol’ Dirty Bastard freestyle, which she pulled from old documentary footage shot by legendary R&B producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. The sample, which ended up in “Goin’ Down” on Return to the 36 Chambers, bookends her final missive on an album where she does what she does best while showcasing her stylistic versatility. “Give a fuck what you prefer,” she rap-sings over a grimy boom-bap. “I’m too profound to go back and forth/With no average dork.” Maturity looks good on her—who among us hasn’t scolded herself with a version of “damn bitch you so thirsty,” as she intones on the soundly quotable “Shirt”?  It’s that exact melange of confidence and pettiness that has engendered such passion for her music and persona. SZA’s talent is otherworldly, but you just might know someone a little like her, too. It might even be you.

2022-12-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

2022-12-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Top Dawg Entertainment / RCA

December 9, 2022

02c3cbec-6f0b-48fa-8522-6a881bcbb856

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

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

Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington renamed their Darkside project Daftside to remix Daft Punk's Random Access Memories in full, deconstructing it to resemble a thin, hollowed-out version of its original deluxe self. It's an internet-redux model that sees virtue in ultra-low production values.

Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington renamed their Darkside project Daftside to remix Daft Punk's Random Access Memories in full, deconstructing it to resemble a thin, hollowed-out version of its original deluxe self. It's an internet-redux model that sees virtue in ultra-low production values.

Daftside: Random Access Memories Memories

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18243-daftside-random-access-memories-memories/

Random Access Memories Memories

For all the discussion around the backward-looking facade of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, there was one aspect most people could agree on: it felt expensive. There were echoes of a once-thriving industry in there, harking back to a time of money being endlessly funneled into lavish studio complexes, sometimes in aid of wild vanity projects. RAM added a whole other level of expenditure in service of the concept of retro. You can buy all the vintage amps and instruments you want, loot endless thrift stores to get just the right period ruffle on your shirt. But can you hire the guy who played drums on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall? In a sense it's a grand folly, an ill-fitting match for the way music is mostly consumed at this point in time. You're not likely to hear the nuances of Bob Ludwig's mastering job through tinny laptop speakers, crappy earbuds, low bitrate MP3s, and streaming YouTube clips. Of course the sheer ambition of RAM is a large part of its appeal, a big group purposefully acting big to flesh out the music as they imagine it in their heads. Nicolas Jaar's Darkside project, here renamed Daftside, take all that aspiration and siphon out every drop of it from the original source. This album, really just a series of clips uploaded to Soundcloud, remixes RAM in full, deconstructing it to resemble a thin, hollowed-out version of its original self. It's an internet-redux model of Daft Punk's work, a scratchy counterpart that sees virtue in the kind of ultra-low production values and consumption models that RAM veers away from. The first half of Daftside's "Give Life Back to Music" is positively emaciated, its drums falling flat, its cymbal splashes resembling old Casio presets caked in cheap distortion. It's the kind of thing John "J.R." Robinson, Daft Punk’s ludicrously accomplished drummer on the original track, must have nightmares about. It's difficult to judge exactly how long Jaar and his musical partner, Dave Harrington, spent on this work (probably not much, considering how quickly they turned it around). So the tweaking is minimal at times, with pitches shifted resolutely down and that crackly flimsiness recurring as a theme. There was already something of a sad-robot motif to some of RAM, and the downturned atmosphere here emphasizes it further. "Get Lucky" sounds positively bluesy at times, with Pharrell's vocal reduced to a drunken slur, making its central refrain sound more like a lost hope than a promise of good times ahead. It's indicative of this project's inclination for taking big moments and making them small, pushing them inward. Even RAM's centerpiece, the Paul Williams-fronted "Touch", is pulled out of its its wide open space, given a minimal techno makeover, then shunted to the penultimate slot in the running order. Daftside's ability to find something else in this music doesn't just stretch to them reducing the mood to a set of internal post-club jams. At times they're looking for the direct inverse in mood, turning the gloomy "Game of Love" up in pace so it resembles a shuffling disco tune. For "Contact" they open with a gnarled take on the noise bursts at its close, placing it at the start of the tracklisting in a move that mirrors Oneohtrix Point Never's positioning of the similarly bracing wake-up call "Nil Admirari" on Returnal. Surprisingly, the material that seems more in Jaar's orbit-- the slow-build electronics of "Motherboard", the pulsing "Giorgio by Moroder"-- produce less satisfying results, with the former a mess of runaway electronics and the latter a tangle of empty loops. "Doin' It Right" is better, taking Panda Bear's escalating vocal and turning it into a wonderfully ugly set of belches. Amusingly, for something that often deliberately drags so hard, Daftside simply brush over one of the RAM tracks that taps into that mood, turning the indifferent "Lose Yourself to Dance" into a two-second vocal passage then moving on. That sense of play, resembling Jaar and Harrington poking Daft Punk with a stick then gleefully running away, is partly what makes this a far greater work than standard remix albums. At times they're looking for nuances in the original, small threads they can pick up and take somewhere else. Elsewhere they're just having fun, acting on instincts, never over-awed by the material. Certainly there's an overall feel of taking all of Daft Punk's expansion and turning in a low-rent version of it, an Off-Off-Broadway version constructed in a cardboard pyramid patched together with tape and glue. Jaar's Space is Only Noise worked from a similar mix of nuttiness and constraint. Somehow, he found a way back there through a most unlikely route.

2013-06-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-06-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

self-released

June 28, 2013

02c56f91-4b45-46e0-bea1-e0a97e4df967

Nick Neyland

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

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the groundbreaking 1989 debut album from hip-hop legends De La Soul.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the groundbreaking 1989 debut album from hip-hop legends De La Soul.

De La Soul: 3 Feet High and Rising

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/de-la-soul-3-feet-high-and-rising/

3 Feet High and Rising

Their aim had simply been to make some space to raise their own voices. At that moment, in 1989, when hip-hop seemed surer of its destiny than at any time since, De La Soul gave us a glimpse into their coming-of-age, and let us listen to the sound of three (well, four) Americans working out how to hear each other and move forward together in a cruel world. Consider that in the preceding 12 months, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Straight Outta Compton, Critical Beatdown, Lyte As a Rock, and In Full Gear had made a massive impact in hip-hop. All of these records commanded attention, wore their sizable ambitions on their jackets. But while their New School peers stood tall, offering righteousness (Public Enemy), rebellion (N.W.A.), street wisdom (MC Lyte), style-war futurism (Ultramagnetic MC’s) and crowd-pleasing showmanship (Stetsasonic) to hip-hop’s expanding audiences, De La Soul were the quiet kids lingering at the edge of the cipher, withdrawn and a little mysterious, conversing in coded language meant to distance themselves from all the big personalities jockeying for position around them. They were largely known as a trio—Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Pasemaster Mase” Mason—a little left-field, a lot obsessed. As thoughtful and opinionated students of the culture, their wainscoted suburban rooms were strewn with rare dusty records plundered from their parents’ collections, and they financed their passions as janitors who came to their jobs rocking gold fronts. In 1987, the three young men enlisted a ringleader and mentor in Stetsasonic’s DJ Paul “Prince Paul” Huston, who could match their kookiness pound-for-pound. With his yuk-yuk scatology, technical skill, and bottomless trove of pop-cult records, Prince Paul stepped in like a madcap hybrid of Malcolm McLaren and George Martin. All four of them had gone to Amityville Memorial High in the Black Belt of Long Island, between the white-fled city and the whites-mostly exurbs, the same socio- and psycho-geography that produced Public Enemy, Rakim, Biz Markie, and MF DOOM. They made music with an abiding trust in each other and an intense devotion to craft. Their process was: OK, we’ve made this beat, joke, metaphor, rhyme style, now how do we take it up another level? 3 Feet High and Rising emerged fully formed, offering a world as richly imagined as anything American pop has ever produced. Just as hip-hop was firmly establishing itself as the most avant of pop’s garde, the best of their peers—from smooth operator Big Daddy Kane to Blastmaster KRS-One to Living Colour’s Vernon Reid—showed up at their release party to salute their achievement. Even KRS, who had just dropped what would come to be recognized as one of the best albums in hip-hop history, said it couldn’t compare what De La Soul had just made. While huddled in Los Angeles to finish their own sample-heavy Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys reportedly listened to 3 Feet High, despaired, and briefly considered starting all over again. What they all heard in it was an unprecedented assemblage of sound. Four years before, Marley Marl had accidentally unlocked the power of the sampler—a technology that allowed time to be captured and manipulated. The sampler vaulted hip-hop out of its inferiority complex. Now it too could meet the sonic ambitions of rock, funk, jazz, and soul. Like their peers, Prince Paul and De La Soul set about using it to build a world. The album sounded like a hip-hop version of the novelist Dos Passos’ America, crowded with voices, rhythms, rhymes, and the wit, joy, and pain of becoming aware of one’s power to change the world. And De La Soul felt like the closest hip-hop equivalent to Parliament and Funkadelic: high-concept, hilariously genuine, generously human. Along with their Native Tongues peers, they were as generative as sunshine, spawning fertile new scenes around the world, including LA’s True School, the Bay Area’s indie underground, Atlanta’s Dungeon Family, Detroit’s network of Dilla and his acolytes, and subsequent generations of self-identified indie rappers, including Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common. More broadly, 3 Feet High and Rising helped secure a new alignment of hardcore street heads with an emerging global audience of fans, the foundation of the soon-to-be-named “hip-hop nation.” Thirty years later, it remains one most influential records of the storied class of 1988-89. But the narrative of the album is still framed by a tired contrast between the rise of N.W.A. and the West Coast gangsta rap and that of De La Soul and the Native Tongues’ ”completely unthreatening” “message of positivity.” De La never asked to be the saviors of hip-hop, much less to answer for all the supposed pathologies that critics wanted to put on Black masculinity and Black popular culture. Instead, De La Soul defined their outsiderness through a weird, wild, and wholly self-referential creativity. Their MC names were “Sounds Op” and “Yogurt” spelled backwards. Their album would be full of inside jokes, invented slang (“A phrase called talk” was their rhyme style, “Public Speaker” was a dope emcee, “Buddy” was a hot body, and “Strictly Dan Stuckie” meant “awesome”), and an odd mix of preoccupations ranging from TV to Aesop’s fables to Luden’s cough drops to, of course, sex. The culture wars were raging all around them, the central fact defining N.W.A.’s work. But De La’s world was small, insular, and, in many ways, refreshingly naïve. While he was still in high school in 1984, Prince Paul had been recruited into the Brooklyn crew, Stetsasonic, to serve as their showcase DJ. Stet sold itself as the first hip-hop band, a live act with studio chops, even predating the Roots. But as the scene evolved away from Old School showpeople toward New School bedroom lyricists and producers, Stetsasonic changed its style. Their 1988 album In Full Gear offered one path forward for hip-hop: a slick, high-def sound. Paul had become a key member of the production team, but he felt under-credited, and he also knew that the New York sound was shifting toward dusty sampler aesthetics. (Polish and sheen would not return to the forefront until Dr. Dre’s 1992 debut The Chronic.) He felt creatively stifled. At the same time, Posdnous, Trugoy, and Mase were putting together “Plug Tunin’,” a song that had evolved out of a live routine the crew rocked over the “Impeach the President” break. But then Pos pulled from his father’s collection a rare doo-wop record by the Invitations called “Written on the Wall.” (Later, Tommy Boy stirred a small frenzy among the nascent crate-digging community when it offered $500 to the first person who could identify the sample. The prize went unclaimed for a long while, firmly establishing De La Soul and Prince Paul as beat-diggers par excellence.) In the Long Island tradition of leaving no record unturned, “Written on the Wall” was on the B-side. Printed on the flip were helpful instructions for radio DJs needing to know what to play: “Plug Side.” From this odd detail, De La Soul developed an album concept: They were transmitting their music live from Mars through microphones—Pos on Plug One, Trugoy on Plug Two. It was an audacious step away from both Old School party-rocking and New School realism. Their lyrics didn’t lean too heavily on Five-Percenter cosmology or Afrocentric ideology for conceptual depth. They were striving for their own new rap language. Armed with this obscure 45, a cassette deck, and a lo-fi Casio RZ-1, the crew slowed the routine to a toddler crawl and recorded it. They rocked head-scratching metaphors (Plug One: “Dazed at the sight of a method/Dive beneath the depth of a never-ending verse”) and odd riddles (Plug Two: “Vocal in doubt is an uplift/And real is the answer that I answer with”) in neatly matched cadences. When Paul heard the hissy demo, he knew he had found kin. He took them to re-record “Plug Tunin’” at the hip-hop hotspot, Calliope Studios, and they were on their way. Tommy Boy signed them to an album contract soon after and De La Soul began building their sonic world on a shoestring budget of $25,000. Over a two-month period, they learned how to work the expensive studio gear as they made the record. The Black suburban imagination of Long Island rappers offered a distinctive kind of street romance and horror. Public Enemy rapped about cruising the boulevards in muscle cars, their adrenaline amping up their politics of provocation. De La Soul’s second single, “Potholes In My Lawn,” was a battle rhyme refracted through the brutal status consciousness of the ‘burbs. De La played the family on the block coming into success, only to be met with the envious rage of the Joneses next door. Trugoy complained, “I don’t ask for a barbed wire fence, B, but my dwellin’ is swellin’.” Meanwhile, imitating wannabes lurked in the bushes. These rhyme-biting rappers took the form of vermin leaving unsightly craters all over the front yard. The crew repatched the potholes with daisies. Individuality trumped suburban conformity. As De La Soul and Prince Paul moved deeper into recording, they developed a kind of one-upmanship, trying to shock each other by procuring deeper records to thicken a song’s gumbo. The tracks became dense with info, opened up to jarring risk and surprise. Their lyrical ambitions also multiplied, as the group sought new ways to retell timeless adolescent tales. Built on a sample of ’60s bombshell Maggie Thrett’s “Soupy,” “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge)” was interrupted by an energetic Liberace performance of “Chopsticks.” The hormonal frenzy and awkwardness of teen lust were summed up in the half-terrified, half-grateful cry Maseo let out after his first kiss: “And I hollered!” These were not suave girl-stealing Old School or New School lovermen. When Jenifa inevitably moved on, Pos dropped his head in shame: “Don’t flaunt that the candy’s good, unless you can get plenty.” As buzz built in advance of the album’s release, the label gave the group’s image a full makeover. De La Soul already had style—the gold fronts had given way to funky fades, Afrocentric fabrics, and African medallions. But their new look was designed by the hip London and New York-based Grey Organisation, who heightened the crew’s difference from their peers by giving them neon palettes and flattening them into Keith Haring-like 2-D. In the words of designer Toby Mott, the Grey Organisation wanted to critique “the prevailing macho hip-hop visual codes which dominate to this day.” But as Dave, who dropped his stage name “Trugoy” somewhere after the second album, recounted to Rob Kenner in the documentary De La Soul Is Not Dead, “I think, for me, it was just the photo shoots. I mean, every damn photo shoot you could bet there was a florist hanging around with flowers. And I mean, come on man, flowers? That’s not what it’s really about.” The Black suburban crew had set out to express their difference, but now they began to realize that their pop success was making them into something they were not. On their subsequent albums, the tension between the joy of release and the control over their image—especially as Black men—would lead them to make some of the most important records in American pop. Late in the recording process, Tommy Boy label head Tom Silverman asked for a radio-friendly unit shifter. Maseo obliged by suggesting they sample Parliament’s 1979 hit single “(Not Just) Knee Deep” for “Me Myself and I.” Paul agreed and flipped the track into an irresistible crowd mover. Trugoy did the bulk of the lyric writing, working from the Jungle Brothers’ “Black is Black” rhyme pattern and responding to the now proliferating “hip-hop hippie” articles with a “let us live” message. He rapped, Proud I’m proud of what I am Poems I speak are Plug Two type Please oh please let Plug Two be Himself, not what you read or write Write is wrong when hype is written On the Soul, De La, that is Style is surely our own thing Not the false disguise of show-biz Silverman once credited De La Soul as being the group that jumpstarted rap’s “third generation.” The first generation had taken rap from the parks to records, and the second had taken it from records to the arenas. The third reclaimed it for themselves—reinventing traditions and busily making new revolutions. They idolized the energy and accomplishments of the first, while trying to displace the second. The video for “Me Myself and I” put the crew back in high school to be bullied by teachers and classmates who are gold-roped, troop-suited Old Schoolers. In the end, only De La Soul made it out of the classroom and into the waiting world. The song triumphed over an increasingly fragmented hip-hop map, propelling them out of certain obscurity. As hip-hop reached a new level of sales and visibility, “Me Myself and I” reached No. 1 on the R&B charts. But success threatened the group. On their first national tour, the crew seemed to recoil from their audiences. They trudged through low-energy sets anticipating the inevitable conclusion, having to perform “Me Myself & I,” as if their biggest hit had been their biggest mistake. Even later, long after they had become one of hip-hop’s best live acts, they would still introduce the record by asking the crowd to chant, “Say, ‘We hate this song!’” Worse were the physical threats. From coast to coast, antagonistic fans and managers tried to roll them, believing their allusions to peace, love, and daisies made them soft hippie marks. Word soon got out that De La Soul was knuckling up and taking down heads from Rhode Island to Cincinnati to Denver. Dejected and besieged, they returned to New York to their management’s office one day and stared up at a whiteboard full of upcoming tour dates for all the acts, including their own. Trugoy decided he had had enough. Taking an eraser, he wiped off all their dates, and wrote instead: “De La Soul is Dead.” The guys laughed. Now they had something to look forward to—album two. If Black complexity had been the meta-message lost in De La’s big crossover, abstraction, abjection, and humor were the winning trifecta of 3 Feet High and Rising. The skits and interludes poked fun at more of their obsessions—funky smells (“A Little Bit of Soap”), fashion trends (“Take It Off”), and porn flicks (“De la Orgee”). The funniest featured hip-hop party-starters veering off script (“Do As De La Does”). The game show skit might have been a transferral of rap’s meritocratic competition into something absurd—no one wins but the audience: Were you not entertained? Four months after the album’s release, after the album had gone gold, lawyers for the Turtles filed a lawsuit against De La Soul for the use of four bars from their song, “You Showed Me.” Paul and the group had cleared 60 of the more than 200 samples on the record. But the Turtles sample, used on “Transmitting Live From Mars,” in which Paul scratched a French-language instruction record over the loop, was not. At the time, the one-minute song sounded like an amusing non-sequitur. Nearly thirty years later, the string loop sounds ominous and claustrophobic, a sonic analogue for the legal purgatory to which De La Soul’s back catalog has been consigned. Although the group and the label eventually settled with the Turtles, Warner Brothers has not maintained physical formats for De La Soul’s back catalog, and has refused to make these albums—including 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul Is Dead, Buhloone Mindstate and Stakes Is High—available in digital and streaming formats. Label heads, who own Tommy Boy’s pre-2002 catalog in full, have apparently decided that the potential labor and expense of sample clearances are too much to bear. De La Soul have previously volunteered to do the labor of re-releasing the catalog, but Warner was not interested. They have been denied the right to profit from their work, and we have been denied the ability to listen to and share some of the most important records in our shared musical history. It is true that many of the Black artists sampled by hip-hop producers have also been denied the profits of their work. It is also true that works by so-called minorities—whether the sampled or the sampling—suffer disproportionately from the land-grabbing, barbed-wire-fence-erecting, tons-of-guns-defending mentality that drives the growing corpus of intellectual property law. What is currently called copyright protection is also the wholesale locking away of people’s labor, legacy, and inheritance. The current structure of sampling law functions like—because it is—a process of cultural erasure, a glaring and expanding cultural injustice. In 2011, 3 Feet High and Rising was added to the Library of Congress National Registry of Recordings. Even that honor prompted no action from Warner Brothers. So on Valentine’s Day in 2014, De La Soul gave away digital files of their entire Warner catalog to their fans. That sharing has been the only official digital release of these records, which remain locked away in that null existence between copyright orphanhood and full viability. Questlove told New York Times reporter Finn Cohen, “I mean, 3 Feet High and Rising is very much in danger of being the classic tree that fell in the forest that was once given high praise and now is just a stump.” We are left to ask: as history is made and remade, who can be heard in America? On the album’s proper opener, “The Magic Number,” over a sample of the “Schoolhouse Rock” theme song and a chopped version of John Bonham’s huge drum break from “The Crunge,” Pos and Trugoy had rocked a virtuoso, rapid-fire manifesto full of mind-spinning wordplay. Pos positioned hip-hop as the new insurgency: Parents let go cause there’s magic in the air Criticizing rap shows you’re out of order Stop look and listen to the phrase, Fred Astaires, And don’t get offended while Mase do-si-do’s your daughter Trugoy described his creative process: Souls who flaunt styles gain praises by the pounds Common are speakers who honor the scroll Scrolls written daily creates a new sound Listeners listen ‘cause this here is wisdom By the end, Mase and Paul were scratching snippets at a fast and furious rate—Steinski, Syl Johnson, and Eddie Murphy all fly by before Johnny Cash suddenly drops in to give the album its title: “How high’s the water, mama? Three feet high and rising.” The line was taken from a reverb-drenched performance of “Five Feet High and Rising,” a blues in the grand tradition of Mississippi River flood songs. De La Soul were making a point about the power of culture to mobilize people to action or immobilize them with fear. It was an idea they explored more explicitly on their fable, “Tread Water.” There were animals, squeaky organs, friendly humming—at the time, journalist Harry Allen called it the most African song he’d heard in hip-hop—but “Tread Water” also offered perhaps the most ambitious hope on the record, that De La’s music might help us all elevate our heads above the water. In this polar-cap-melting, politically disastrous age, the song feels prophetic. Today’s debate over sampling is mostly mind-numbingly narrow, shaped largely by big-money concerns that are ahistorical, anti-cultural, and anti-creative. The current regime rewards the least creative class—lawyers and capitalists—while destroying cultural practices of passing on. Post-hip-hop intellectual property law rests on racialized ideas of originality, and preserves the vampire profits of publishing outfits like Bridgeport Music, that sue sampling producers while preventing artists like George Clinton from sharing their music with next-generation musicians, and large corporations like Warner Brothers that continue to disenfranchise Black genius. By contrast, the processes of sampling and layering on 3 Feet High and Rising and other hip-hop classics of that era demonstrate the opposite: expansively, giddily democratic—Delacratic, even—values. Pos’s production on “Eye Know” put Steely Dan into conversation with Otis Redding and the Mad Lads, his work on “Say No Go” Hall and Oates with the Detroit Emeralds. The musical chorus of “Potholes in My Lawn” pointed not only to Parliament’s 1970 debut Osmium, but to the African American roots of country and western music. Together, the sampled sounds of the Jarmels, the Blackbyrds, the New Birth, and even white artists like Led Zeppelin, Bob Dorough, and Billy Joel, make a strong case that all of American pop is African-American pop, from which everyone has been borrowing. Sampling—De La Soul sampling Parliament, Obama sampling Lincoln, Melania sampling Michelle—is nothing less than the American pastime, the creative reuse of history amid the tension between erasure and emergence that is central to the struggle for the republic. No one can ever do it as big as De La Soul did.

2018-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Tommy Boy

September 23, 2018

02c57c97-316b-451f-b5f2-5ef2ec22d37b

Jeff Chang

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

The 28-year-old rapper’s latest album is a glitchy, frantic, confrontational album on both a musical and political level. It feels born of an internet wasteland.

The 28-year-old rapper’s latest album is a glitchy, frantic, confrontational album on both a musical and political level. It feels born of an internet wasteland.

JPEGMAFIA: Veteran

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jpegmafia-veteran/

Veteran

There’s a particularly absurd song called “Goin’ Down” on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s debut album that opens with the late rapper doing this sort of open-throated croaking kids do to annoy their parents. This sample of ODB’s disembodied voice looped over and over again provides the framework for “Real Nega,” from the experimental rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA’s new album, Veteran. The album’s title refers to both the time that the 28-year-old JPEG—born Barrington Hendricks—has put into his craft and his time in the U.S. Air Force. A four-year military bid took him around the world, but he also spent some time in the American south, which was clearly formative: He cites living in Alabama as foundational to his understanding of racism, and one of the covers for Veteran features JPEG’s own Louisiana driver’s license, evoking the mock food stamp card on the cover of Return to the 36 Chambers. ODB at his most formless would be an impossible model for most artists in any century. For JPEG, it’s just the starting point. Veteran, his fourth solo record, is a glitchy, frantic, confrontational album on both a musical and political level. The record’s social commentary amounts to more than darts tossed at critical music outlets like Dead End Hip Hop and Pitchfork, rifles that get compared to Lena Dunham, and the scathing takedown, “Word on the street: You fucked Tomi Lahren.” There’s a sort of ideological rigor, an N.W.A.-ish promise that girds his provocations. Where MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E mixed their politics with language that stoked the post-Reagan moral panic, JPEG—fluent in internet-native irony and bad-faith arguments—wields those tactics to serious, sometimes disarmingly earnest ends. On the grim “Williamsburg,” he opens the song “selling art to these yuppies” and burrows down a rabbit hole of Phoenix Suns jerseys and expensive coffee. It makes gentrification sound cold and creaky, empty and industrial, which it is. Entirely self-produced, Veteran is a remarkable exercise in sound and texture. At its best—“Baby I’m Bleeding,” “Rock N Roll Is Dead,” “Panic Emoji”—the production makes the frayed edges of each element part of the atmosphere, a mess of distortion that works percussively and melodically. JPEG gestures at broad, propulsive flows but parcels them out in fragments. He sings on “Thug Tears,” then raps in heavy staccato, smooths things over, and loops back to singing again, all in brief, energetic bursts. At other points, like on the semi-sober “Macaulay Culkin,” he has the droll bounce of mid-period Cam’ron, casually melting “Orange is the New Black” references down to a grim reality. JPEG’s greatest trait is his ability to move from rap’s center toward its fringes by reimagining soul-sampling New York rap in a late-2010s internet wasteland. Though he recently relocated to Los Angeles, JPEG had been living and making a name for himself in Baltimore since 2015. There’s a spate of exciting young rappers (Creek Boyz, Peso Da Mafia, Bandhunta Izzy) in Baltimore right now, many of whom have a potential to cross over to a national audience. But JPEG doesn’t fit comfortably in that generation, or really any generation. His production is more schizophrenic, his writing shifts tone and syntax too quickly. Yet, while it only borrows a few musical elements from Baltimore’s famous club music scene, that genre might be the best analogy for his music in terms of energy and pace: JPEG is very comfortable at breakneck tempos, and he manipulates voices or industrial sounds to make them part of a rhythmic spine. It makes for a breathless album, one that takes white-hot riffs and the most distasteful parts of our national politics, chops them up, and somehow scatters them perfectly into place.

2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Deathbomb Arc

January 31, 2018

02c95d17-73d0-4e19-8b4d-08fca7aa1ffa

Paul A. Thompson

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

The Great Pumpkin unveils his first official solo album, and it's a vaguely shoegaze LP with Corgan talking candidly to the mirror-- a recording for himself and interested fans.

The Great Pumpkin unveils his first official solo album, and it's a vaguely shoegaze LP with Corgan talking candidly to the mirror-- a recording for himself and interested fans.

Billy Corgan: The Future Embrace

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1810-the-future-embrace/

The Future Embrace

In an alternate world, The Future Embrace could pass for an average shoegaze record with a few OK songs. Because really that's what we got here: Tracks like "Mina Loy (M.O.H.)" and "DIA" cough up all the proven pink noise progressions, hot drums pushed back in the mix, so-called lush layers of guitar distortion, an acceptable vocal melody, frothing overdrive, etc. Even the single "Walking Shade", however hookless and octave-bass trendy as electro-funk (think the Killers, then thank mixing boy Alan Moulder), still sounds enough like New Order at times that, hey, things are gonna be fine-- one less Out Hud song on the radio. Unfortunately, Billy Corgan's changed a few lives in his time, which makes it difficult for some people (me, at least) to have any sense of the song's musical merits before their brains pavlov. For a time, Smashing Pumpkins were tops; in my neighborhood alone, dressing up for Halloween as the Asian Guy From Smashing Pumpkins was a politically acceptable if not publicly applauded costume choice. So was making your own ZERO shirt, and locking yourself in your locker, despite all your rage. So there are, in fact, two ways The Future Embrace can, will, and possibly should be read. The first is, like I said, as just another shoegaze record with some/many lyrical missteps (a teaser: "On the ninth day God created SHAME!!!!!!!"). The second: Although Pumpkins fans enjoy explaining to their peers how, actually, Corgan recorded most of Siamese Dream himself, etc., The Future Embrace really is his first solo record. He's dropping the ruse of band co-operation, and, however much it's often untrue, asking us to read his songs to be at least partially autobiographically. Officially, Corgan no longer represents Smashing Pumpkins (or Zwan), just himself, and the solo run implies a certain interest in showing his true face to those who want to see it. "All Things Change" has loveful guitars and flimsy drums and really nasally vocals. But for the Corganites this is The Artist justifying his return, explaining his motives for disbanding the Pumpkins, putting faith in pop music, and steeling himself in a way that, if we're buying into the song as a personal account, is kinda sorta affecting. The song's last line, "We can change the world," is cliche, sure, but so is "I love you" to your girlfriend, and "I can't believe I'm doing this" to yourself before the virgin line-- what matters more is Corgan's saying it. So, forgive Corgan his infinite lyrical badness, but know that infinity's a lot to forgive. "You are love/ You are soul/ You are real to me" is bad, approaching the level of "Can I give my old heart TO YOU!!!!!!!", also a line from The Future Embrace. In fairness, I don't remember what I was thinking exactly when I first heard something like, "I torch my soul to show/ The world that I am pure," stuff like that. Anyway, while that line from "Rocket" seems intentionally poetic, The Future Embrace doesn't seem to aspire to the craft's inherently mediated affair. This is Corgan talking candidly to the mirror, a recording for himself and interested fans, but a big fuck-you to anyone who never cared in the first place. I can't reward that, but I think I get it: When we talk to ourselves about stuff, most of us don't think in necessarily poetic terms-- we just think what we feel. Granted, I've never said something like, "Every time I start reaching out to find you/ Loneliness abounds," but you get the point. Tonally and compositionally, The Future Embrace is either samey or consistent depending on your mentality, but Corgan throws one undeniable curve with his cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody"-- thirds dropped and Robert Smith on backup vox to boot. Turns out it's not a straight cover; Corgan personalizes it in a spot. Perhaps underscoring the tension he's had in his own career-- a tension he seems to enjoy talking about-- Corgan doesn't sing, "And I'm blind, so very blind," as scripted, but instead asks himself, "Am I so blind, blind to believe?" Woof. For an answer, we might turn back to Corgan's cover of "Destination (Unknown)": "I know I'll leave when it's my time to go/ Till then I carry on with what I know." The swoons fight the groans.

2005-06-19T02:00:24.000-04:00

2005-06-19T02:00:24.000-04:00

Rock

Warner Bros.

June 19, 2005

02ceab88-90d0-49e5-b20a-47edab99f938

Nick Sylvester

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

The debut from the UK pop singer is a proficient study of her influences but can’t help but feel like there’s a lack of personality to the songs.

The debut from the UK pop singer is a proficient study of her influences but can’t help but feel like there’s a lack of personality to the songs.

Griff: Vertigo

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/griff-vertigo/

Vertigo

On 11 May 2021, a minor pop schism occurred. It was the first Brit awards in the pandemic, delayed a few months from the ceremony’s usual February date. That night, two young stars who made their names in lockdown had massive debuts: Olivia Rodrigo’s first-ever live performance, of “drivers license,” and the British pop songwriter Griff’s second ever, of the very Gotye-like “Black Hole.” Backstage, that year’s Global Icon winner Taylor Swift held court in her dressing room, inviting the two self-proclaimed Swifties to share chips and take goofy selfies. Not two months later, it emerged that Swift had been awarded 50% of the writing credit for Rodrigo’s song “deja vu,” which had a faintly similar bridge to her song “Cruel Summer,” leading to an obvious distancing between the two. Meanwhile Swift has continued to shout out Griff and invited her to support a recent Eras date in London, praising her from the stage as “so creative on every single level.” What’s curious about the continued support, given the apparent reason for the estrangement of Swift and Rodrigo, is how profoundly indebted Griff’s debut album, Vertigo, is to Swift’s sound. This year’s The Tortured Poets Department watered down the boom and sheen of Swift’s 2014 album 1989, which is further diluted by the eminently tasteful pop songs of Vertigo. The racing pulses never risk causing alarm. The bubbling synths would barely disturb the surface of any pond. The martial drums are more ceremonial than primed for battle. There’s a cavernous, momentous glow to the production that reminds me of how the 1989 portion of the Eras tour echoes around the stadium every night. The quieter songs, like “Into the Walls” and “Everlasting,” immediately evoke the tenderly plucked strings and twig-snap beats of Folklore and Evermore. Obviously none of that suggests that Griff should be held liable for taking inspiration from a formative songwriting hero (she’s said her earliest musical memory is getting an iPod loaded with Fearless and playing it on repeat) or that creativity should be litigated that way. It’s just one aspect of how oddly derivative this long-gestating debut is. Tilt it this way and you hear the formal liturgies of London Grammar (soppy ballad “Astronaut,” piano courtesy of Chris Martin); that and the long tail of the excitement over 2010s Scandi pop that never really anointed any proper pop stars (the desperate, cathartic splash of the appealing “Miss Me Too” has Robyn in its DNA). Here’s a little MUNA (the gently punchy and ecstatic “Anything”); here’s quite a lot of the 1975 (the snapping “Hiding Alone,” the surprisingly loose dance breaks of “Cycles”). Griff (born Sarah Griffiths) got her start by releasing music online and in 2019 quietly signed a deal with Warner in the midst of doing her final high school exams. She broke out in 2020 with “Good Stuff,” a piano ballad direct enough to connect during the pandemic when Instagram was the only way to perform for fans. When concerts became possible again, she supported Dua Lipa, Coldplay, and Ed Sheeran, all but skipping mid-tier venues. That night at the Brits three years ago, she won the Rising Star award, the weight of the British music industry behind her. Griff has never failed to hit her marks professionally. Her songs—which she also co-produces, and always has—also come with a distinct air of competency. Nothing is off; Vertigo is very well-studied and primed to reach the rafters of the mega venues she was thrust into early on. It just lacks much sense of her in it, and for an album seemingly about being failed by a vanishing lover and named after the physical sensation that the world is lurching on its axis, it seems more focused on finding steadiness again than embodying those head-spinning feelings. Griff sings in a tone of rueful anguish about falling for what now appears to be an illusion; even the relatively riotous breakdown of the clattering, choral pop moment “Tears for Fun” processes her voice to mute the rage in it. The subtleties are very subtle: “Pillow in My Arms” is softly tweaky, Griff’s desperation blurred into a whirlwind; ominous serrated textures bite at the lonely “19th Hour,” where she sounds convincingly on her last nerve. The frustratingly slick Vertigo speaks to two issues. First, how to translate pandemic pop stardom into the real thing—giving a promising, major-signed young artist the opportunity to work out her voice on her own terms, and adapt to a scale bigger than a phone screen but smaller than a stadium. And second, how entrenched the Scandinavian formalities of pop songwriting have become in the last 15 years. When the rigors of craft are well established, the artist’s personality becomes even more critical, and this summer’s reigning outlandish, cheeky, brash pop girls have illuminated and fed that hunger. For all that Griff has aced the industry’s rungs and garnered all the right plaudits, Vertigo can’t hope to compete with peers who have taken weirder routes to their breakout moments. Griff’s talents are so clear you suspect she could do this with her eyes closed; may she yet escape the industry tractor beam to take some shots in the dark.

2024-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Warner Music UK

July 26, 2024

02d0edd9-cdd6-4a2c-bad5-f1f648e5057a

Laura Snapes

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

Dylan Brady’s experimental pop troupe finds idiosyncratic takes on late-aughts pop, but gets bogged down by great gecspectations and its leader’s own overwhelming influence.

Dylan Brady’s experimental pop troupe finds idiosyncratic takes on late-aughts pop, but gets bogged down by great gecspectations and its leader’s own overwhelming influence.

Cake Pop: Cake Pop 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cake-pop-cake-pop-2/

Cake Pop 2

Cake pops entered our collective consciousness around 2009, when 3OH!3 was ushering crunkcore onto the Billboard charts, the Annoying Orange was YouTube’s biggest meme celebrity, and Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” was the song of the summer. These relics double as tasting notes for Cake Pop 2, the second release from experimental pop troupe Cake Pop, a project of 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady. Mid-to-late-aughts references are baked in (no pun) to the extended gecs universe, as are genre mashups, mood swings, inside jokes, simple pleasures, crushing angst, and the audacious production that makes it all make sense. Cake Pop 2 adapts the gec fundamentals to fit more conventional song structures and a new set of flavors, but the risks are calculated. They tone down most of the funny business (no “Stupid Horse” or Seinfeld bass) while still supplying levity (opening lyric: “Hella scared of bees”), delivering straightforward pop that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Brady formed Cake Pop in his hometown of St. Louis with local friends and collaborators including Aaron Cartier, Ravenna Golden, Lewis Grant, Pritty, Robel Ketema, Kevin Bedford, and Adam Newcomer. The group’s eponymous 2015 EP mixed playtime with explosives and xylophone scales, teasing the chiptuned sugar rushes and Monster Energy-sized caffeine crashes that Brady and Laura Les would later fine-tune with 100 gecs. By the time gecs released their 2019 debut 1000 gecs, Brady’s signature clank had resonated from hyperpop playlists to the mainstream. Now, he’s sharing Cake Pop with his expanded fanbase. But as Brady’s imprint on pop music deepens—with everyone from Linkin Park to Lizzo tapping him for production—his vision is spreading thin. Cake Pop 2 is a collection of sketches, idiosyncratic takes on pop formulas: orchestral balladry, alt-rap, happy hardcore, Top 40, video game soundtracks. “Satin Bedsheets” calls to mind Young Money’s 2009 smash “Bed Rock” crossed with Tierra Whack and stadium EDM. “Ether” puts Sia-slash-Halsey-esque radio songs through a glitchy gecs filter. The twinkly, dancehall-inflected “Pombachu” interpolates the chorus from Ja Rule’s “Mesmerize,” while the horns on “Boom” throw us back to “Tik Tok”-era party-all-night pop. At 20 minutes, the album doesn’t linger on any one idea, which can be both a strength and a weakness. Certain standouts leave you hungry: “Cake Happy” works as a short, bouncy duet, but Golden and Grant’s lovers’ dialogue is ripe for a plot twist and another key change. “Whistle” is such a robust, whimsical 72 seconds that you’re tempted to listen twice. At its best, Cake Pop 2 is like a cypher or a dance circle, where everyone gets a turn in the middle and nobody disappoints. The album teases some compelling concepts (“Candy Floss” stages Minecraft on Broadway) and highlights the talents of Cake Pop’s members (Cartier’s “Magic” flow, Ketema’s Auto-Tune reggae stylings), but doesn’t give the artists or their ideas enough room to flourish. There’s been no shortage of music for gecs fans over the past two years: Since the release of 1000 gecs and its remix album, Brady has produced or co-produced songs for Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, 03 Greedo, Rebecca Black, Rico Nasty, and Pussy Riot, to name a few. By this point, we know what to expect from a Brady-helmed project, and Cake Pop 2 doesn’t challenge those assumptions. The album is a lively introduction to Cake Pop and its members, but as the sounds of Brady’s busy schedule leak in, there’s a sense that we’ve heard most of it before. Though the production flexes to fit the eccentricities of each song, the tailoring could have been closer. Still, for existing gecs fans, Cake Pop 2 is a welcome addition to the rotation. It goes down easy; the sugar makes you want to bounce off the walls. But a cake pop is not a meal. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Pop/R&B

Mad Decent

May 6, 2021

02d2e436-a189-472d-8dc4-e50467eacaab

Julia Gray

https://pitchfork.com/staff/julia-gray/

Like Beast Mode and Monster before it, Future's latest mixtape hints at the lingering effects from the rapper's soured relationship with Ciara. Where many songs on Beast Mode found Future trying to sort out the pain of estrangement in the embrace of other women, 56 Nights drowns in a potent drug concoction that influences its sound and lyrics.

Like Beast Mode and Monster before it, Future's latest mixtape hints at the lingering effects from the rapper's soured relationship with Ciara. Where many songs on Beast Mode found Future trying to sort out the pain of estrangement in the embrace of other women, 56 Nights drowns in a potent drug concoction that influences its sound and lyrics.

Future: 56 Nights

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20424-56-nights/

56 Nights

Future has been on an underrated tear since last October, when his rage-fueled Monster mixtape was dramatically overshadowed by an ill-advised guest appearance on Mike WiLL Made It’s "Pussy Overrated" with Wiz Khalifa, which, in the context of his failed romance with R&B singer Ciara, seemed even more crass than it was foolish. The tape itself was vintage Future but also magnificently petty, and it went mostly underappreciated as a result. He continued his strong run with the Zaytoven-produced Beast Mode, which was an equally snappy but less petulant response to his emotional turmoil. After announcing plans earlier this month to keep the ball rolling with a sequel to 2011’s Dirty Sprite on Twitter, Future unexpectedly dropped 56 Nights, the latest in what feels like a sustained campaign. The mixtape's title refers to the amount of time Future’s DJ, Esco, spent in a Dubai jail on a trip to the 2014 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. It’s officially billed as a DJ Esco tape hosted by Future, the first since 2013’s No Sleep, but unlike that 23-track offering, featuring contributions from Shy Glizzy, Young Scooter and PeeWee Longway, 56 Nights is Future standing alone with no guests. When he raps "None of this money that matter; all of my niggas, they matter" on "Diamonds From Africa", it feels like an acknowledgement of his DJ’s ordeal. Future still has other problems, too, and like Beast Mode and Monster before it, 56 Nights hints at the lingering effects from his soured relationship. Where many songs on Beast Mode found Future trying to sort out the pain of estrangement in the embrace of other women, 56 Nights drowns in a potent drug concoction that influences both its sound and his addled, prattling lyrics, which often give way to profound moments of clarity. Casual sex is often written off as tedious, only spurred on by copious drug use ("I didn’t wanna fuck the bitch/ This molly made me fuck her even though she average," on "March Madness"; "I pour up again and again/ I said I wasn’t gonna fuck with that bitch then I fucked her again," on "Never Gon Lose"). The overarching theme is reliance on drugs over women, a preference he spells out on "Purple Comin In": "Fuck a bitch on that shit, I don’t need her" versus "Fell in love with that drank and I need it." Future seems to have developed a codependency on pharmaceuticals, one that fills a void and levels his unease—on "Trap Niggas" he raps, "I’m drinking Activis, the only thing that relax me"—and this continuous state of inebriation allows Future to be remarkably open. The bulk of the production on 56 Nights is handled by Southside with one song produced by Tarentino. Both are members of 808 Mafia, the in-house production team of Waka Flocka Flame’s Brick Squad Monopoly, and Future follows their unhinged, woozy lead, lining knocking 808s with frenetic flows that fumble into mumbling like on "No Compadre".  He occasionally offers brief bits of social commentary and self-reflection: On "March Madness" he sings "All these cops shooting niggas, tragic" and on "Trap Niggas", "I got a lower case T across my chest/ Your crack house doing numbers then you blessed/ You move your mama to a crib from the 'jects." The ideas arrive as garbled fragments that, when pieced together, tell his story, and 56 Nights is an unfiltered look at life through the eyes of a wasted Future.

2015-03-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-03-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

March 27, 2015

02d68693-3355-4857-9ef0-a80a80c94d5b

Sheldon Pearce

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

Part biting satire, part cognitive behavioral therapy, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris’ collaboration is a hilarious, caustic, and gorgeous consideration of what it really means to be “fine” today.

Part biting satire, part cognitive behavioral therapy, Jean Grae and Quelle Chris’ collaboration is a hilarious, caustic, and gorgeous consideration of what it really means to be “fine” today.

Jean Grae / Quelle Chris: Everything’s Fine

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jean-grae-quelle-chris-everythings-fine/

Everything's Fine

At this point, the word “fine” can be shorthand for an earnest self-help maxim, a sarcastic weapon wielded to reflect the batshit nature of our current political discourse, and a defense mechanism used to shield against acknowledging tensions that lie just beneath the surface. We will usually claim to be fine when we’re not. Rappers Jean Grae and Quelle Chris are fascinated with the mechanics of actually being fine. Part biting satire, part cognitive behavioral therapy, their new collaborative album, Everything’s Fine, is a gorgeous consideration of how simply existing can beat the “fine” out of us. Jean Grae and Quelle Chris have a considerable pedigree as soloists and collaborators. Since the early aughts, Grae has been a force on the indie rap circuit, building a sizable rap archive highlighted by her oft-leaked, constantly changing opus Jeanius with 9th Wonder. Chris first broke out with the 2013 mixtape Niggas is Men, and has since carved out space as a rapper and beatmaker on Mello Music Group. But Everything’s Fine is a great entry point to both their catalogs, an album that brings the best out of both MCs, as performers and producers. Over distorted soul and oddball funk beats, Grae and Chris create a mood that strikes a balance between their poles: Grae is technically precise, almost methodical, drilling through the skull with lacerating wordplay; Chris is looser, unbound, sometimes improvisational, pleasantly deadpan and wonky. Where Grae is layered, coiling in and out of complex schemes, Chris is blunt and almost brusque in presentation. They use these extremes to map out the main question of why we’re so ineffectual these days—why everything’s just, you know, fine. Maybe it’s routine complacency, outright denial, or the unwillingness to unpack the everyday terrors of the world in our small talk. (When there’s a new reason to be angry pushed directly to your phone every few hours, it can be tough to come up with the bandwidth to process it all.) Grae and Chris never fault anyone for being tired, but they warn against the consequences of inaction. The album leans into the inherent ridiculousness of having to be OK amid our nation’s political farce, using skits, spoofs, and impressions to explore the balancing act of being mad online and all right IRL. Tonally, Everything’s Fine follows a design that was first established by the duo’s pleasantly snarky That’s Not How You Do That trilogy from a few years ago, projects that were each tagged as “instructional albums for adults.” But Everything’s Fine is warmer and more sincere. Some songs feel like inside jokes traded among like-minded misanthropes as if you’re picking up in the middle of a private conversation. It’s just that Grae and Chris exposing their anxieties in the open, one quip at a time. The charms of this record involve the ways it navigates traumas with caustic humor, grace, and levity, without losing any of the gravitas. Somehow, optimism still sneaks through. Adding to the many dynamics at play, several moments are like a surrealist musical written by comedian Hannibal Buress (who fittingly appears on the album as a rapper). There’s the eviscerating “My Contributions to This Scam,” which parodies everyone from fake-woke allies to Insta models-turned-rappers to white fans who listen to rap ironically or use it as a guise to say the N-word. After an opening from Grae and Chris, where a game-show intro becomes a stage for an existential crisis, the album pivots on interludes from comedians Nick Offerman, John Hodgman, and Michael Che, who offer that things are “fine,” with varying degrees of certainty. One of the most thoughtful songs is a collage of spoken word digressions from former Das Racist hype man Ashok “Dap” Kondabolu. “It feels like it’s the worst time ever to be alive, ’cause the world is so fucked up, but it’s probably the best time ever to be alive for the most people on earth,” he says, calmly. Conflicting ideas get presented at the same time, each granted equal weight. These comics add color, and Chris and Grae’s sense of comedic timing is just as impeccable. But the album is truly moving when it embraces urgency. The heartbreaking “Breakfast of Champions” is a dispatch on police killings. In their own ways, both Grae and Chris wrestle with the recurring misery of constantly seeing unarmed black people murdered in state-sanctioned violence and then watching the officers involved go free. “Saw somebody else got shot up, this time by some cops in Texas, or Virginia, can’t remember,” Chris intones; “Children called they mamas while they stared at they daddy’s entrails/C’mon, how much more evidence you want?” Grae pleads. But whenever things start to get too real, they crack another joke. That’s the dizzying tone of Everything’s Fine, pulling and pushing you to the edge, constantly questioning the state of your emotions. On the chugging “Gold Purple Orange,” Chris punctures preconceived notions about everything from the alt-right to capitalism, his deflating, sarcastic delivery punching up each idea. “The Smoking Man” with Denmark Vessey takes on the faceless, all-powerful “They” (who “stopped Cosby from coppin’ these chicks” and killed your favorite MC), considering power and its corrupting influence, before summing up the entire record in a one-liner: “LOLs for the ELE” (that’s “extinction level event”). There are ways to hear this album as both damning or redemptive, depending on the perspective. But it is never sanctimonious, and it is constantly breathtaking. Grae and Chris aren’t encouraged by the fire raging around them, but they soldier on, as we all must, finding a sort of black humor in the idiocy, the chaos, and the sheer absurdity of it all. Sometimes the only way to survive is to be “fine.” Sometimes all you can do to be fine is laugh.

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

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

Rap

Mello Music Group

April 4, 2018

02d695d4-fc8e-4313-aeb3-3f4eee186988

Sheldon Pearce

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

The debut album from Los Angeles psych-rock project Wand is all about: the passageways between one place or state of mind to another. Accordingly, it moves, what makes Ganglion Reef so euphorically hypnotic is the way it translates bandleader Cory Hanson's itinerant, hyperkinetic tendencies into song.

The debut album from Los Angeles psych-rock project Wand is all about: the passageways between one place or state of mind to another. Accordingly, it moves, what makes Ganglion Reef so euphorically hypnotic is the way it translates bandleader Cory Hanson's itinerant, hyperkinetic tendencies into song.

Wand: Ganglion Reef

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19650-wand-ganglion-reef/

Ganglion Reef

The insert that comes with Ganglion Reef, the debut album by Los Angeles’ Wand, is printed with the kind of map that might appear in the front of a fantasy novel, full of fanciful coastlines and tidal whorls. It seemingly depicts Ganglion Reef itself—an imaginary island that the members of Wand might just frequent from time to time, perhaps transported there by the same psychotropic substances that fuel their music. Travel, after all, is what Ganglion Reef is all about: the passageways between one place or state of mind to another. Accordingly, it moves. Frontman Cory Thomas Hanson is a mover himself. In addition to playing (usually fleetingly) with a wide array of fellow L.A. garage-rockers over the past few years, from together PANGEA to Meatbodies to Mikal Cronin, the singer/guitarist/keyboardist helms the electronic pop project WHITE. Hanson just can’t sit still, and accordingly what makes Ganglion Reef so euphorically hypnotic is the way it translates his itinerant, hyperkinetic tendencies into song. “Clearer” stomps and throbs through a barrage of zap-gun bursts and bongo-punctuated, acid-flashback breakdowns; beneath it all, riffs the size of thunderbolts hurl the song through wormhole after wormhole. Hanson’s breathy, elfin voice glides overheard, but it’s only half as ethereal as his steam-calliope synths and creamy smears of distortion. The albums most fantastic voyage is “Fire on the Mountain (I-II-III)”, an epic that manages to condense itself into a relatively compact five minutes. Unpacking it is effortless, but not without effect; Hanson’s high, glassy coo is light years away from Lee Landey’s infernally heavy bassline, and the gulf between them is a vacuum that yanks at sanity. The airlock is completely breached by the time the track hits its second movement, a spasm of Paleolithic proto-metal that wrestles with Hanson’s progressive-folk sprawl. It’s way too much to fit coherently into a single song, but coherence isn’t the endpoint. When an aural lightshow of intertwined synths and guitar solos lifts and soars like the Verve with a sci-fi fetish, it feels like infinity has cracked open. Hanson’s fantasy bent is even more pronounced on “Strange Inertia (Ctrl Alt Death)”, a shakily scrawled love letter to other dimensions that expends every Crayola in the box, and “Flying Golem”, a surrealist lullaby that resembles "Adventure Time" fanfic set to singsong psychedelia. Fantasy gaming is referenced more explicitly on “Generator Larping”—but instead of coming across as a live-action role-playing session of World of Warcraft, it spends six minutes daydreaming the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” as rendered in a Neu!-like cascade of sine waves and pulses. There’s a faint krautrock undertow to Ganglion Reef, but it’s motorik for a sandy beach instead of the Autobahn. Plenty of new psych-rock albums are content to fill the signifier checklist and then just sit there, but Ganglion Reef is as much a vehicle as a destination—and rather than wallowing in inner space, it’s a gateway to other worlds, not so much an escape as an intrepid exploration. It’s fun, sure, but it’s also thrillingly restless, at times almost desperate. “Run for your life,” Hanson chants on “Broken Candle”, an organ-toggled, kaleidoscopically melodic dreamscape that could be an evolutionary offshoot of the Zombies’ “Brief Candles”. It sounds like winsome nonsense, but it’s telling. Prowling and propulsive, Wand are musical sharks; if they stop swimming, they’ll die. No wonder Ganglion Reef is the liquid, liminal domain they made for themselves to dwell in.

2014-08-25T02:00:03.000-04:00

2014-08-25T02:00:03.000-04:00

Rock

Drag City / God?

August 25, 2014

02d903f0-3ce2-4984-93a3-96c3f09de99e

Jason Heller

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

The debut from the UK melodic hardcore band shows their passion for experimentation in a genre where that is desperately welcome.

The debut from the UK melodic hardcore band shows their passion for experimentation in a genre where that is desperately welcome.

Ithaca: The Language of Injury

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ithaca-the-language-of-injury/

The Language of Injury

Ithaca’s debut is an invitation for whiplash. The young, politically principled band vault between genres like they’re playing a game, and sonic homogeneity is lava. Conflicting elements butt up against one another as the band pits noise rock against post-rock, metalcore against doom, and expectations of what a metalcore band should sound like against the reality of what they’re doing. A passion for experimentation underpins every move they make here, and the band’s origin story—that the members came together “out of a mutual love of metallic hardcore but despair at its lack of ambition”—checks out, manifesting in each unexpected note or unfamiliar pairing. A ghostly choir rising above ’90s screamo riffs? Sure. The title track’s marriage of noodly noise rock and stadium crust? You got it. A seamless hybrid of Oathbreaker and Poison the Well with a feminist, anti-Nazi bent? Ithaca’s on the case. There’s been a good deal of hype around Ithaca already. They’ve landed in an angular, unexpected sweet spot in the UK’s metallic hardcore world, rubbing elbows with forward-thinking bands like Svalbard, Employed to Serve, and Venom Prison—with whom the band, which features members of Arab and Indian descent, share a drive to foster inclusivity and diversity within the extreme music scene. At the same time, they take huge chunks of inspiration from vintage ’90s screamo and noise rock, forcing a meeting of new and old that could have gone direly wrong but has instead found an eager audience. Overall, there's a real lushness to the music, punctuated by skronky jabs of dissonance that add a tense dynamism. It’s also very unpredictable, which is a nice thing for a metalcore band to be in 2019. Buzz aside, the band’s true strength lies in their ability to employ a diversity of tactics both politically and musically to hammer their end-time message home. Opening track “New Covenant” is a battle cry, and couches its beatdown breakdowns within expanses of frantic picking, spacious post-rock, and vocal misery. “Impulse Crush” ramps up the urgency with squeals of discordant noise rock and crystal-clear tremolo picking, anchoring more triumphant moments like the mid-song break with chugga-chugga aggression. “Secret Space” continues in that vein, breaking through a surge of dizzying, technical guitar work and epic swells of grandiose melody with a heart-rending mid-song acoustic passage that sees versatile vocalist Djamila Azzouz push her voice to the brink. That voice is one of the band’s strongest assets, which makes it even more of a shame when the production occasionally allows it to get unintentionally buried under the sound and the fury (“Better Abuse,” for example, could have hit even harder had the vocals been brought to the fore). For an album that barely breaks the 30-minute mark, The Language of Injury asks a lot. That progressive, boundary-pushing sensibility informs every moment of the release, which is less pit-ready than anthemic. Some songs, like “Youth Vs Wisdom,” show signs of straightforwardness, but Ithaca’s obsession with progression would never allow for something so boring. “Slow Negative Order” comes drenched in a brittle, shining atmosphere that highlights its lovely vocal harmonies; juxtaposed with Azzouz’s feral bark and juddering guitars, the melodicism ebbs and flows into the relentlessly pretty instrumental interlude “No Translation.” This soft-to-loud, pretty-to-harsh tactic is a classic entry in the melodic metalcore playbook, and is one that the band pulls out multiple times on The Language of Injury, notably on the soaring “Gilt” and perhaps most effectively in the final salvo, “Better Abuse.” The song begins with a simple melodic riff suspended in waves of reverb, adds in a set of clean vocals dripping in almost gothic splendor, explodes into combative noise, and then ends the album in uncomfortable near-silence. Thankfully, Ithaca keep their listeners guessing until the absolute last second of this album.

2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

Metal

Holy Roar

February 16, 2019

02d9c469-d10a-429e-8355-099521ceca7b

Kim Kelly

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

Cam & China, twins from Inglewood and veterans of L.A.’s jerkin’ scene, are uniquely attuned to one another,  resulting in some of the year’s fiercest, most viscerally exciting rap music.

Cam & China, twins from Inglewood and veterans of L.A.’s jerkin’ scene, are uniquely attuned to one another,  resulting in some of the year’s fiercest, most viscerally exciting rap music.

Cam & China: Cam & China

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22204-cam-china/

Cam & China

The rap duo is a delicate balance. OutKast staked itself on the player-and-the-poet duality; André and Antwan transcended because each one could animate either side of the split. When Phife Dawg passed away this year, the eulogies rightly pointed out that the five-foot assassin kept Q-Tip tethered to Queens, to Earth. But the duo doesn’t have to be a down-the-middle yin and yang (see: the Ying Yang Twins). Havoc and Prodigy made Mobb Deep great by offering slight variations on the same dead-eyed fatalism. More recently, the Clipse became critical darlings despite Pusha T and Malice trafficking in virtually identical cadences and points of view. Cam & China, twins from Inglewood and veterans of L.A.’s jerkin’ scene, carry the Mobb/Clipse approach to its natural conclusion. Even among those who share DNA, they’re uniquely attuned to one another, and their minds are melding to make some of the year’s fiercest, most viscerally exciting rap music. Their debut EP is a reintroduction of sorts: At the end of the 2000s, Cam & China—then Cammy and Cece—accounted for two-fifths of the Pink Dollaz, one of jerk’s most exciting acts. The Dollaz were making slick, provocative songs like “I’m Tasty” and accruing fans rapidly. But the group dissolved as the style itself slowed. Two summers ago, under the new monikers, Cam & China dropped “Do Dat,” a furious warning shot. It came out just a handful of months after YG’s My Krazy Life; where their former jerkin’ peer folded pieces of New Orleans and the Bay into his sound, “Do Dat” sounded as if it had been incubating and mutating strictly in Los Angeles County. And if Still Brazy* *synthesizes decades of West coast rap production, *Cam & China *strips jerkin’ for parts and refashions it into something bolder, heavier, and more menacing. But first, some misdirection: opener “Extravagant” owes as much to Atlanta as it does to L.A., like if Playaz Circle slinked into 2016 with too much Gucci on. The huge, staccato hook is designed to rattle around in your car and your skull; vocals pan and bunch up and dart across the beat. It’s virtuosic. The thematic center of the EP is the three-song run that starts with “In My Feelings.” It opens with “It’s about the power of the tongue” and unspools from there; it’s a song about sex that’s really about a slow-burning power struggle. As writers, Cam & China touch on an interesting divide, treating sex as a purely physical venture, but lingering on the more ephemeral parts of romance. So the verses on “Feelings” have you fucking on the floor and in the kitchen, but the airy hook gestures at the sort of mutual attraction that ends up being left unspoken. A remix of “Run Up,” the duo’s massive local hit from last year, appears here with a new verse from Compton’s AD. It’s lean and kinetic as ever, and shows just how technically adept the twins got in their time out of the spotlight. The layered bridge tacked onto the end bends a Master P “Uuuuhhhhhhhhh!” into a pointed threat that whole high school classes could sing along to. But for all of Cam & China’s threats and sneers, the runaway highlight is the closer, “We Gon Make It,” which grapples with their career aspirations. It teeters between certainty and desperation, the way your ego probably does when you’re sketching out your own five-year plan. The difference is you could never rap this well.

2016-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

August 6, 2016

02d9d775-1893-47c5-9880-485bf2188ba9

Paul A. Thompson

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

Screaming Females' new Rose Mountain refines the guitar rock trio's grotesque side in order to form the group's most deliberate music yet.

Screaming Females' new Rose Mountain refines the guitar rock trio's grotesque side in order to form the group's most deliberate music yet.

Screaming Females: Rose Mountain

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20197-rose-mountain/

Rose Mountain

Screaming Females' 2012 album, Ugly, was a brazen arrangement of squeals, wails, and howls. Their new Rose Mountain, like the title suggests, pretties up the guitar rock trio's grotesque side. Since Ugly, Screaming Females have reworked their songwriting process, poring over the nuts and bolts of each composition. Marissa Paternoster, the band's vocalist and guitarist, also spent months fighting off a nasty bout of mono, and chronicled the sterile boredom of doctor's offices in a slew of new songs. Rose Mountain might be Screaming Females' most deliberate music yet, but it lacks much of their former wildness. What it's missing in ragged edges, the band's sixth studio album makes up for in force. Matt Bayles produced the record, and part of the change in mood comes from the strange way he slots Paternoster's guitar. He's more of a metal guy, having worked with Mastodon, Isis, and Russian Circles; in his hands, Screaming Females' frayed chords clump up into solid blocks. Rather than a backbone, King Mike's basslines feel more like walls enclosing the whole sound into a smaller space. At times, the songs sound choked by the professionalism of their own treatment. Though her voice falls lower in the mix this time, Paternoster still pounds home powerhouses like "Empty Head", whose chorus packs a blunt and heavy punch. But she's dropped the sneer on the edge of her words. On Ugly's "Rotten Apple", she sings the line "I'm a rotten apple" six times at every chorus, and each one feels bound up in a new irony. Her singing remains skilled and idiosyncratic, but on Rose Mountain, she plays things straight. Even her lyrics lose some of their sense of play; on "Wishing Well", Paternoster imagines the titular change receptacle as a portal straight to hell, a clunky image compared to, say, Kim Deal's lean, evocative turn of phrase ("spitting in a wishing well") on "Cannonball". Even when Rose Mountain addresses sickness directly, its tone keeps closer to the ennui of a waiting room thick with the smell of hand sanitizer than the stifled pain of a blood draw in the exam room. On "Ripe", Paternoster sings, "Peel the skin raw/ Pinch till the feeling's gone," while the instrumentation around her—the stifled distortion, the clipped drums—sounds more numbing than painful. They're still young, but Screaming Females have carved out their own corner in this century's take on guitar rock. It's hard to fault them for going clean, but it's easy to miss the happy accidents they stumbled upon when they weren't so worried about keeping within the lines. For an album about how bodies can betray us with their chaos, Rose Mountain sounds remarkably groomed.

2015-02-23T01:00:02.000-05:00

2015-02-23T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

Don Giovanni

February 23, 2015

02db8ea6-57cb-46de-a1b2-86ac2c13541e

Sasha Geffen

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

The 21-year-old Portland rapper isn’t doing anything all that new, but he has a refreshing album-focused approach, best listened to as one continuous stream, getting lost in the noisy madness.

The 21-year-old Portland rapper isn’t doing anything all that new, but he has a refreshing album-focused approach, best listened to as one continuous stream, getting lost in the noisy madness.

Yeat: 2 Alivë

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeat-2-alive/

2 Alivë

Yeat is a white rapper in his early 20s from Portland who questionably wears turbans, uses umlauts in his song titles for no reason, and is trying super hard to make lingo like “luh” and “twizzy” happen. He hit the TikTok lottery last summer with one line on “Gët Busy”: “This song already was turnt, but here’s a bell,” followed by what sounds like a gong being hit with a sledgehammer. It was the catalyst in skyrocketing Yeat from toiling away in the underground to being signed by Zack Bia, a so-called “cool” influencer. I know this all sounds incredibly corny but hear me out. Unlike the usual white rapper advertised as the next big thing, Yeat doesn’t feel like he was handpicked and molded by some deep-pocketed record label (see: The Kid Laroi). For a while, he experimented with his blurry AutoTuned-soaked delivery full of screwball melodic touches built off Young Thug and the YSL camp as a minor member of the now-disbanded SoundCloud collective Slayworld. Yes, his music often leaves me with the feeling of something I’ve heard done better before, but he has a refreshing album-focused approach, best listened to as one continuous stream, getting lost in the noisy madness. 2 Alivë, the polished sequel to the first of three full-length projects he released last year, has that quality. It’s hard to highlight standout tracks, instead, it’s the moments that cut through the vibescape, like his Travis-like AutoTuned hoots on “Poppin.” Or when he whistles, burbles his lips, and pitches up his vocals like a digicore artist in the background of “On tha linë.” Or how he snarls on “Jump” over a beat where the drop hits like the finale of a firework show. Or the nearly two-minute blustering flow smack in the middle of “Rollin,” interrupted by a line that would make early 2000s Juelz Santana proud: “Osama Bin Laden my bro.” I do wish the lyrics mattered more. It’s not to say that he needs to rap about something other than being zooted out of his mind, but the only lines that really stick are because I’m thinking why the hell did he just say that. (For example the absurdly dark: “Off the perc I can’t walk at all, paraplegic,” on “Doublë.”) Like during Future’s Monster to DS2 run, it wasn’t just that he was numbing himself with Percocets and molly, it was the way that the numbness fucked everything up in different ways. Or even Playboi Carti on “Teen X,” a song about being extremely faded, is set off by the exasperatedly delivered line, “I just broke up with my bitch.” Even in contrast to “I just broke up with my bitch,” Yeat’s lyrics are too vague. But to harp on lyrics isn’t exactly the point of Yeat. Not everything needs to be spelled out anyway, sometimes words don’t do a feeling justice. 2 Alivë is about how big and loud it is, a production style that has been labeled “rage.” Though this production trend is retooled from 2010s Atlanta, whether that be the more eccentric instrumentals in the catalog of Mike WiLL Made-It, or the business-under-the-percussion you can find on some of Dun Deal or C4’s beats on 1017 Thug, or 2015 Metro Boomin and Southside, who were basically soundtracking a futuristic doomsday. Those beats are more exciting, but it’s interesting that Yeat’s idea of expanding is to work his way deeper into that sound instead of searching for influences outside of the genre. Yet it leads me to my feelings about 2 Alivë in general: It’s pretty good fun but the small details prevent it from being that time-stopping moment it wants to be.

2022-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00

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

Rap

Field Trip / Geffen

February 22, 2022

02e0e366-6216-4978-8136-ccb9d2c4883b

Alphonse Pierre

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

Recorded over two years, the up-and-coming Berkeley rapper’s debut is artfully subtle. Few rappers can say so much with so little.

Recorded over two years, the up-and-coming Berkeley rapper’s debut is artfully subtle. Few rappers can say so much with so little.

Koran Streets: You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koran-streets-youknowigotit-the-album/

You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album)

The sweet, effortless musicality of Koran Streets' songs make them easy to enjoy. But his work rewards close listening because of how the 26-year-old Berkeley, Calif. rapper conveys intensity through the unique, subtle artfulness of his narrative style. There’s an internal logic, a 360-degree consistency to his work, the byproduct of an auteur who has marshaled all the tools at his disposal to convey his story in the most compelling possible fashion. It was an approach he pioneered on his U.Know.I.Got.It mixtape series and perfected on 2016’s underrecognized debut You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album), which was recorded over the course of two years. Newly released as a “Deluxe Edition” with new cover art and three appended bonus tracks, Koran Streets’ debut has a more refined, well-defined artistic vision than even the most celebrated contemporary hip-hop. He was homeless as a child before his family settled in Berkeley. Early in his teenage years, he was badly burned in a “freak accident,” spent six months in a coma, and received multiple skin grafts. His mother, Ayodele Nzinga, was also the founder of a small Bay Area theater company, and he and his six siblings grew up acting. (Koran Streets has since appeared in critically acclaimed independent films Licks and Kicks.) His past and present were spilled across a run of underground mixtapes dating back several years, where he developed an ear for hip-hop’s seductive textural possibilities. On You.Know.I.Got.It, it’s Koran Streets’ distinct sound that makes each track feel of-a-piece. The beats build mainly on a thumping Bay Area template, but he distinguishes the album by opting for pillow-soft synthesizers polished to a sleek finish. An archetypal example is “Struggle,” which recognizes the potential for an infinite loop in the cool sigh of the intro to Cherrelle’s ’80s R&B song “Everything I Miss At Home.” Atop these satiny canvases, he layers his choruses with a heavy dose of imprecise overdubs and his own “You know I got it” and “Streets!” audio drops. This verbal cacophony gives a rattle to the image, like watching the rearview mirror vibrate when the bass kicks. In this way, his rapping also serves as a center of gravity, so much so that the beats feel like they were laid against his verses rather than the other way around, the drums yoked to his vocals. The contrast between the soft-focus production and this echoing vocal cloud is magnetizing. Yet the cleverness of this approach, essential as it is to the album’s success, takes a subordinate role, drawing listeners in only to orient them around the visceral stories at the center of each song. Few rappers say so much with so little; where others rely on ornamental tricks, piling syllables up like so many blankets in a humid summer season, Koran Streets’ lyrics have an austere directness which captivates because of his devotion first and foremost to the gesture—each line fits the idea like a hotel sheet. Attempting to capture the exact substance of this work is a slippery task; it’s not the lyrics, not flows, not vocals, moral, or “message.” Rather it’s the primacy and strength of the connective tissue between each of these more concrete qualities, the sense of coherence which bonds them to each other and allows each piece to reinforce the power of the others. So far, Koran Streets hasn't had the kind of virality that mints “street rap” stars of today, and his lack of an experimental pedigree or explicit political focus keep him from appealing to the audience who like “good hip-hop—not like that commercial stuff.” Instead, he embraces the grammar of hip-hop’s pathologized center, with song titles like “Struggle,” “Hard,” and “Ima Thug” and concepts that revolve around a street soldier stuck in the local drug game. He seems uninterested in pushing away from the genre’s tropes in part, Occam’s Razor suggests, because it still relates to his life. That he reinvigorates what some deem “clichés” is a credit to the narrative particulars of style and story, a deeply personal approach that relies on contrasting its quotidian setting with monumental emotions. His ability to craft novel experiences from these commonplace tropes can be revelatory; witness newly-added bonus track “Real Money,” where Koran Streets dreams of a life in which he is making a lot more money. This is, of course, one of the most conventional hip-hop saws existent. Yet his proximity to poverty is conveyed in such palpable terms throughout the album (“So many households I done slept on the floor!”) that the emotional stakes have been dramatically heightened; when he pleads, “Just a little longer, let me please not open my eyes,” the effect is devastating. It’s not poverty-porn, it’s an anchor for a wide breadth of experiences that grants equal power to biting, comic lines like this one, moments earlier: “Attend the event, even if it’s weak, it’s the shit, cause a nigga rich.” The way he pulls grand emotions from the linchpin of realism is epitomized on the album’s scene-setting centerpiece, the lushly-produced “Mama House.” The familiar, hyper-local setting is transformed into a world-sized stage. His lyrics have an elemental simplicity, directed towards straightforward stories which gain power in the contrast between his plainspoken poetics and their implied emotional content, the surging production, and the purposeful determination of his rap style: In front of mama house selling till it’s all gone In front of mama’s house hurtin’ cause my dog gone In front the corner store trynna get rich homie Don’t snitch homie, I’m just trynna find my niche homie There’s no wordplay, no efforts at distancing through abstraction. Yet this austere style shouldn’t be confused with old romanticized clichés of “raw emotion,” where the artist’s expressiveness breaks against the strictures of technology or songcraft, letting the blues seep out through the flaws in his primitive approach. Koran Streets’ narrative style is one of purposeful economy, the effect of having stripped his style down to its most urgent pieces. This consistency is a product of experience, an inner artistic confidence that refused to be boxed in by the opportunities presented to him, and a vision which seeks to create a world that makes sense from the raw material of a difficult life.

2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

YOU.KNOW.I.GOT.IT Entertainment

September 21, 2017

02e5096a-4456-49c9-b218-737d8d562fa7

David Drake

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

After signing to the Weeknd’s label XO, Toronto rapper-producer Navraj Goraya is releasing a full-length collaboration with Atlanta producer Metro Boomin. He sounds as lyrically hollow as ever.

After signing to the Weeknd’s label XO, Toronto rapper-producer Navraj Goraya is releasing a full-length collaboration with Atlanta producer Metro Boomin. He sounds as lyrically hollow as ever.

Nav / Metro Boomin: Perfect Timing

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nav-metro-boomin-perfect-timing/

Perfect Timing

In the 2003 remake of the British heist thriller The Italian Job, Edward Norton plays a villain who triumphs in a discernibly boring way. After he’s stolen all his friends’ gold, Norton isn’t creative enough to know what to do with it. So he and his heist crew steal their wish lists, too: an extravagant stereo, an Aston Martin Vanquish, a gaudy mansion—just all this stuff that he knows other people want. The Toronto rapper-producer Navraj Goraya is a bit like that, too. Nav has jacked his favorite artists’ shopping lists and thinks that reciting the purchases back to you might build some character. But no matter how many pairs of Gucci shoes Nav buys or pints of lean he cascades, he still sounds like a tryhard wannabe. Nav didn’t steal anyone’s thunder, though, as much as he’s manufactured his own. In 2015, he co-produced Drake’s Meek Mill diss “Back to Back”; last year, he conspicuously featured on Travis Scott’s “biebs in the trap.” After signing to the Weeknd’s XO label earlier this year, Nav has spent the last several months reasoning that he might be his own star. He has a SoundCloud track record and a handful of co-signs to back him up, but there’s nothing yet in his music that can justify Nav’s potential spot in a prolonged spotlight. He has halfway apologized for his first album, tweeting about the shabbiness of his cheap microphone. He also promises that he’s done saying the N-word in his music, a blunder worth unpacking considering the Punjabi-Canadian is spearheading a rare representation in hip-hop—a lonely trailblazer who deserves no forgiveness for extending the racism in an endearment that doesn’t belong to him. (Nav recently offered an interviewer an “I’m sorry people were offended” type statement that lacked any semblance of critical self-awareness, but he has stayed true to his word.) All of this casts Perfect Timing, his full-length collaboration with of-the-moment Atlanta producer Metro Boomin, as Nav’s mainstream crossover. The record might have cost him more in-studio time and stretched his network, but it’s no less hollow and ugly than Nav’s previous music. If anything, now that he can live up to his narcissistic materialism, Perfect Timing confirms that Nav is as empty as he ever was, lyrically especially. Nav’s delivery—a thin-singing rap style that never strays from a couple of basic, oscillating melodies—does little to appease his shallowness. “Smoke a lot, got a permanent cough/Popping them pills again/Used to think you was my dog, now you are not my friend,” he drones on “Hit.” That last line is the type that consumes Nav throughout Perfect Timing. Now that he’s rich, he’s bent on proving it to it everyone and corralling the doubters. Instead of the triumphant revenge he’s aiming for, Nav sounds smarmy and petty. And when he’s trying to sound smugly cool, he just ends up corny. “You say you’ve got a party, I might pop up there/You a cub, your main bitch fuck me like I’m Papa Bear,” he raps on “Minute” before getting embarrassingly upstaged by a pattering Offset. That’s not the first or last time a guest steals Nav’s show. Gucci Mane and Belly each show up on their own tracks, punching quick verses that spice up a dead party. Even 21 Savage, the quietly sinister Atlanta emcee who has charted his own rise alongside Metro Boomin and usually sucks the air out of a room, overshadows Nav with an extended whisper on “Both Sides.” The beats—brooding, soft-synthed trap—would be in familiar and more capable hands if the guests were alone with them, but they aren’t enough of a saving grace. If anything, the precious industry commodity of Metro Boomin’s production—all of it here featuring contributions from Nav himself—has a simplicity that begs for and rewards easy showmanship. Nav doesn’t have that, and instead wastes the spread by dousing it in the same unenthusiastic flow for just under an hour. It’s not just that he doesn’t have anything to say, it’s that he sounds so bored, tallying up the trophies of someone else’s fantasies. No matter how many diamonds or women adorn him, he postures like a lifeless mannequin, and you can tell he’s straining to perfect the pose.

2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Boominati Worldwide / XO / Republic

August 2, 2017

02e59df5-c365-4b05-abf4-fe84cfc4e2af

Jay Balfour

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

On Pantha du Prince’s sixth album, the organic tumult is so thick that electronic tones and rhythms bend and buckle around it.

On Pantha du Prince’s sixth album, the organic tumult is so thick that electronic tones and rhythms bend and buckle around it.

Pantha du Prince: Garden Gaia

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pantha-du-prince-garden-gaia/

Garden Gaia

Pantha du Prince’s catalog plays like a time-lapse of techno being reclaimed by nature. The German producer born Hendrik Weber had a Neuschwanstein-sized Romantic streak from the beginning, and his production style was always indifferent to the associations conjured by techno’s name. He prefers instruments to synthetic sounds when possible, collaborating on his 2010s albums Black Noise and The Triad with musicians like bassist Tyler Pope and drummer Bendik HK. His work this decade has skewed increasingly new age, with 2020’s Conference of Trees leaning so uncompromisingly into its wild talking-trees concept as to halfway convince the listener that plants might actually sound like this when they communicate. Surrounding nearly everything he makes is a thick cloud of bells and percussion that seems to have a mind of its own, inescapably following his music around like a tenacious swarm of bees. On Garden Gaia, Weber’s sixth album as Pantha du Prince, the organic tumult is so thick that everything else seems to bend and buckle around it. The sound design is familiar from the first ding-a-ling on “Open Day,” but the generosity with which it’s applied is not. Every empty space in the mix is filled not just with bells but also recordings of birds and rushing water that form part of the music’s fabric, rather than simply lapping at its margins. It takes more than a minute for the beat to assemble itself on “Open Day,” and it’s not a four-on-the-floor rhythm but a burdened half-time lope. Pantha’s drums have always been a bit flimsy, performing the bare minimum duty of driving the music forward rather than targeting the listener’s head with sonic or rhythmic trickery. Here they resemble snapping twigs, often paired with woody creaks and rustles that sound as if Weber is clearing the overgrowth from his music in real time. The sense of momentum that thrives in Pantha’s music is de-emphasized here, and while Black Noise and Conference of Trees felt like journeys along a linear path, Garden Gaia is more like staring into nine individual thickets of climbing vines, hoping to make sense of the overwhelming growth. The tracks are shorter than usual, all hovering around four to five minutes, and the division between rhythmic tracks and more ambient ones keeps the album from generating any sense of forward motion. Some of the techno tracks seem to hurtle toward dead ends; “Crystal Volcano” and “Blume” take their time to emerge from the ether but waste none retreating back into it. Gaia sounds best when it commits fully to atmospheric sound design, as during the eerie bass-and-hand-drums invocation “Mother” and the sumptuous, string-drenched closer “Golden Galactic.” Pantha’s 2020s are shaping up to be his most eclectic and experimental decade yet, and the ecologically conscious concepts and hand-crafted sound of his recent music serve him well. Yet he seems reluctant to stray too far from the bread and butter of his sound. “Liquid Lights” devotes crucial climactic running time to a simple chord progression and a rudimentary beat underlined by the usual bells, and it sounds so much like Pantha-by-numbers that we might find ourselves scanning old tracklists to see if it isn’t an edit of something from Black Noise or The Triad. The music on Garden Gaia is inspired by the idea of Earth as a self-regulating system, and it’s heartening in that context to hear Weber let his machines fall into disrepair. But Garden Gaia sounds best when they’re swallowed up entirely.

2022-08-30T00:02:00.000-04:00

2022-08-30T00:02:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Modern Recordings / BMG

August 30, 2022

02ec27de-afd9-4d91-acfa-84bf7bdf1afe

Daniel Bromfield

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

The French duo-- who have received hilariously horrified reactions from some in the dance music community-- take French dance and blows it out by embracing 21st-century stadium-rock production, filtering heavy rock through disco until it sounds more Judas Priest circa 1983 than Stardust circa 1998.

The French duo-- who have received hilariously horrified reactions from some in the dance music community-- take French dance and blows it out by embracing 21st-century stadium-rock production, filtering heavy rock through disco until it sounds more Judas Priest circa 1983 than Stardust circa 1998.

Justice: †

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10321-justice/

†

Everyone should be wary of pulling out the following two statements, but they fit Justice like a pair of $500 jeans: 1) If it's too loud, you're too old, and 2) Age ain't nothin' but a number. Given the hilariously horrified reaction that many in the dance music community have when confronted with the music of French duo Justice, you'd think they were two 300-pound rampaging Huns who sacked Berlin's Panorama Bar and made off with Ricardo Villalobos and Ellen Allien over their shoulders. Instead, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay-- high school kids when Daft Punk's Homework dropped over a decade ago-- grew up, like many a young Parisian, filtering hard rock (never a French strong suit) through disco until it sounded more Judas Priest circa 1983 than Stardust circa 1998. Their "new French touch," as the genre's being termed, actually feels like the caress of a sledgehammer. Throughout †, Justice's long-awaited debut album, Augé and de Rosnay genuflect again and again in front of the Stations of French Dance Music: The metallic ripples of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's Crydamoure label, which once sizzled your ear hairs; Thomas Bangalter's Roulé imprint, and its champagne kisses and Chaka Khan dreams; the coke-mirror reflections of idealized 80s keyboards in Alan Braxe and Fred Falke's work; the tongue-lolling hip-hop buffoonery of TTC; Mr. Oizo's spritzing-sphincter bass and convulsing keyboards; and Jackson's OCD vocal edits. Listen to the Cassius-esque disco-twang of "Genesis" and tell me these guys are somehow dance-ignorant. But like two naughty schoolboys, they've got their fingers crossed behind their backs the whole time; one thing the duo is not is reverent. Justice takes this history of the French rave era and blows it out by embracing 21st-century stadium-rock production. They squeeze everything into a mid-range frequency band so loud that the riffs on tracks like "Let There Be Light" and "Stress" practically cock-slap you in the face. ("Stress" in particular sounds like a disco-era string arranger came to an in-house orchestra with the injunction "make it sound like Emergency Broadcast System.") The drums on "Let There Be Light" and their big breakthrough single "Waters of Nazareth" are the rat-a-tat rhythms of electro scraping like Freddie Krueger's fingertips along the slimy walls of some basement dungeon. That's it-- engorged electronic riffs, dizzying astringent strings, vocal samples torqued to all hell, and nasty metallic drums. It's astoundingly unsubtle stuff and bracing as fuck, a decade's worth of French electronic music stripped down like a Peugeot parked overnight in a bad neighborhood. Of course, if that's all † was, it would be unbearable for a full hour, and Justice's critics might have half a point. But the album's more varied than most folks will give it credit for. (Unfortunately, that variety also includes "The Party", featuring Ed Banger's abhorrent in-house female rapper Uffie.) "D.A.N.C.E."-- the album's slightly incongruous, Schoolhouse Rock-esque filter-disco track-- is Justice's only obvious stab at a capital-p pop crossover hit and you'll certainly be humming "Do the D-A-N-C-E, 1-2-3-4-5" whether you want to or not after hearing it. But like Homework, † is a harsh and mostly instrumental set that nonetheless plays like the ideal crossover electronic-pop record. Justice knows how to sequence a dance album to avoid drag and boredom, a skill more suited to hook-friendly architects than a putative demolition crew. The wistful instrumental vignette "Valentine", coming after the one-two slap of "Phantom Pt. 1" and "Phantom Pt. 2", is like a sour, palate-cleansing appetizer between fat-rich courses in big ol' French meal. But well-sequenced or not, † is also a sensation-for-sensation's-sake record, something French house has always excelled out-- even when it's been more classy than crass. Cheekily disregarding so many things that good dance music is "supposed" to have-- especially, you know, bass-- and in a post-microhouse era where "quality sound design" is a fetishistic obsession, Justice's digital distortion, 128kb-grade hyper-compression, and sometimes aggressively un-funky house sprays good taste with its pissed-up, pissed-off 3 a.m. musk. They've somehow managed to split dance music into a brother-against-brother battle, turning message boards into minefields and blog posts into mini-manifestos. There's no mystery to Justice tracks, true. But whether it's deep house revelers out of their heads on jacked-up gospel or folks in German basements getting down to their own form of minimalized riffing, club rats all over the world are just trying to have a good time. Even if Justice is more about throwing devil horns than doing the hustle, well, we're all still in the same gang.

2007-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00

2007-06-12T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Vice / Because / Ed Banger

June 12, 2007

02ec4c04-b62a-4550-b779-a555ce44952c

Jess Harvell

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

Stretching their signature sound to its abstract extremes, the Montreal doomers construct chilly, majestic settings for classic poetry and original lyrics.

Stretching their signature sound to its abstract extremes, the Montreal doomers construct chilly, majestic settings for classic poetry and original lyrics.

BIG|BRAVE: A Chaos of Flowers

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-brave-a-chaos-of-flowers/

A Chaos of Flowers

Over the past decade, Montreal trio BIG|BRAVE have released albums through both Southern Lord and Thrill Jockey, a track record that speaks to their fluency in both bone-shaking doom metal and post-rock experimentation. But their first language was folk music. In the years leading up to their tremorous 2014 debut, Feral Verdure, BIG|BRAVE founders Robin Wattie and Mathieu Ball performed early gigs as an acoustic-oriented duo. Even as they transitioned to electric instrumentation and loaded up on percussive firepower to become one of the most punishing and prolific bands in the contemporary avant-metal landscape, BIG|BRAVE’s emotional core has remained largely intact—in their hands, noise is simply a megaphone to amplify the unrest embedded in their songs from day one. But while their official discography has turned both more expansive and abrasive—culminating in the throat-shredding epics of 2023’s Nature Morte— BIG|BRAVE also took a detour back to their folk-song roots with 2021’s Leaving None But Small Birds, a rustic retreat with Rhode Island metal mutants the Body that was ultimately less Earth than earthy, complete with revamps of dustbowl standards like “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” and “Once I Had a Sweetheart.” You could say that A Chaos of Flowers is another collaborative archival project that reanimates ancient texts. In this case, the key contributors are summoned from the grave. The majority of tracks on A Chaos of Flowers take their lyrics or inspiration from poets spanning countries, cultures, and eras—from American icon Emily Dickinson to British-Parisian lesbian raconteur Renne Vivien to Japanese proto-feminist Yosano Akiko to Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson aka Tekahionwake. (A true tortured poets’ department, as it were.) But they find their point of intersection in Wattie’s identity as a queer woman of mixed heritage living in a bilingual city. If Leaving None But Small Birds journeyed through the past to reconnect with storytelling tradition, then A Chaos of Flowers is more about recontextualizing old wisdom as premonitions of our current condition. As such, the album sounds less like a loud rock band mellowing out than a loud rock band sculpting their squall with all the craft and care of folk music. This isn’t so much doom metal as doomed metal—like 1,000-foot-high sand castles, these songs feel majestic yet ephemeral, as if they could dissolve into the ocean at any moment. In the past, the band might’ve used the sinister riff of “Not Speaking of the Ways” as the foundation for a monstrous march—and the presence of guest guitarist Tashi Dorji and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi certainly intensifies its nauseous grandeur. But drummer Tasy Hudson lays off the kick pedal and floor tom to tap out a tentative rhythm on her cymbals, allowing the song to float instead of crush. It’s a treatment that perfectly mirrors Akiko’s source verse, a freeze-frame portrait of a love so strong, it has the power to stop time and provide momentary sanctuary. For all of their brute force, BIG|BRAVE’s most powerful weapon has always been Wattie’s voice, whose natural radiance cuts through the sludge to foreground an expressiveness rarely heard in a doom context. On A Chaos of Flowers, she’s not so much trying to overpower the storm as stake out the calm within it. The album’s chilling opener, “I felt a funeral,” is based on Dickinson’s 1861 poem “I felt a funeral, in my brain,” a vivid rumination on the precarity of sanity, depicted here as a showdown between Wattie’s trembling but resolute melody—which suggests a goth-blues spin on “House of the Rising Sun”—and the slow-motion waves of fuzz that threaten to swallow her whole. On the album’s dark, droning centerpiece, “theft,” the dynamic is reversed: As Wattie recites Esther Popel’s namesake poem about an old woman cruelly beaten down by the elements in the dead of winter, her tone almost feels conspiratorial, as if she’s summoning the thick sheets of feedback that close in from all sides. Wattie’s own songwriting contributions feel of a piece with her muses: the ashen-skied ballad “canon: in canon” (featuring the deceptively tranquil fretwork of Thrill Jockey stablemate Marisa Anderson) weaves similar thematic connections between nature, mental health, and survival, while “quotidian : solemnity” reinforces the lyrical focus by doing away with percussion completely to let Wattie’s scabrous soliloquy hover inside a thick thundercloud of distortion. In these meditative moments, BIG|BRAVE boldly stretch their signature sound to its abstract extremes while retaining its doom-metal essence, and in doing so, they affirm that this album’s symbiotic relationship with its predecessor goes beyond a shared floral motif: If Nature Morte was a Richter scale-busting apocalypse of a record, A Chaos of Flowers is the ominous aftershock, an extended reverberation that accrues its own awesome, unsettling force. On the closing interpretation of Tekahionwake’s “Moonset,” Wattie declares, “I may not all your meaning understand/But I have touched your soul in shadow-land.” On A Chaos of Flowers, the heaviness has much to do with the weight of the words as the intensity of the sound.

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

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

Metal

Thrill Jockey

April 24, 2024

02ec56a9-fcc5-4ca0-8696-d93d3bf3203b

Stuart Berman

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

Heavy on filler even though it's only 11 tracks long, Rihanna's sixth album feels not only slight but muddled, an assortment of half-baked ideas that never bloom.

Heavy on filler even though it's only 11 tracks long, Rihanna's sixth album feels not only slight but muddled, an assortment of half-baked ideas that never bloom.

Rihanna: Talk That Talk

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16072-rihanna-talk-that-talk/

Talk That Talk

"We found love in a hopeless place." Over a frantic, Calvin Harris-produced, Guetta-meets-"Sandstorm" beat on her sixth record's lead-off single, Rihanna repeats these words almost 20 times. "We Found Love" ranks among Ri's best singles because it recognizes that there's not much more that needs to be said: in three and a half minutes, the line moves from being a great pop lyric to a triumphant mantra to something suggestive of a whole spectrum of unspoken emotion. The best pop music transports you to somewhere beyond words, and Rihanna's strongest singles all seem to be in on this secret. Need I remind you of some of her most powerful hooks: Ella-ella-ella-ay. Oh-na-na. Ay-ayy-ay-ayy-ay-ayy. But as anyone with a Twitter handle will tell you, these are chatty times, and in 2011, the pop landscape's fittingly caught between two maximalist extremes: the winking theatricality of Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry, and the dribbling confessional-pop of Drake, Kanye West, and (yes, they're more alike than they'd like to believe) Taylor Swift. Barbados-born, millions-selling, armfuls-of-awards-winning Rihanna has found staggering success (23 years old; eleven #1 singles and rising) borrowing a little bit from each of these tendencies. Her recent music videos have dabbled in trendy pop artifice (check out her neon-hued, irresistibly smiley turn in Guetta’s "Who’s That Chick?" or the David LaChapelle-aping-- literally-- "S&M"), while her brooding and personal 2009 album Rated R commented-- however obliquely-- on her public struggles. Rihanna seems more comfortable flitting between these two extremes than settling on either, but her past two albums have at least had some thematic cohesion. The same can't be said of Talk That Talk: Heavy on filler though it's only 11 tracks long, it feels not only slight but muddled, an assortment of half-baked ideas that never bloom. A stitched-together collection of club bangers, sleaze-pop missteps, and mid-tempo inspirational ballads, Talk That Talk feels at times like three different records, only one of which might have been any good. Of course, what we're supposed to be talking is about how this is Rihanna's "dirtiest" album yet. Early blog chatter reported to lots of critics blushing in preview listening sessions and making questionably bold declarations ("The dirtiest pop album since Madonna's Erotica!") that suggested that they listen to very little pop radio, or that they have never been to an R. Kelly concert. Talk That Talk's raunchier moments should surprise no one: Rihanna's always been singing about sex-- she's just never shown such an unfortunate proclivity for cheesy lyrics and dessert metaphors. "Suck my cockiness/ Lick my persuasion," Ri commands on the embarrassingly literal "Cockiness (I Love It)", hoping the boldness of the delivery will distract you from thinking about what a clunky line it is (it won't, though Bangladesh's beats might). The Esther Dean-penned "Drunk on Love" features a weak chorus lyric and vocal whose bombast feels out of place in the track's laid back, xx-sampling atmosphere. Clocking in at a puzzling-yet-merciful one minute and 18 seconds, The-Dream co-produced "Birthday Cake" is even more heavy-handed (lots of icing puns). There are flickers of empowerment here, but mostly it proves little more than the fact that a female artist can be responsible for Jeremih-grade cheese, too. A Rihanna album has never been without the occasional lyrical misfire ("Sex in the air/ I don't care/ I love the smell of it" comes to mind), but at least on a track like "S&M" she sounds like she's having fun. For a record so preoccupied with passion and pleasure, most of Talk That Talk feels unsuitably robotic. At least things start out strong. Talk That Talk's saving grace is its first stretch of tracks: the blithe and tropical "You Da One", "We Found Love", and the album's other Harris track "Where Have You Been", which doesn't stray much from the single's winning formula, a simple lyric of romantic longing that explodes into a club-ready beat. And though it's no "Umbrella", the Jay-Z reunion "Talk That Talk" is one of the more playful moments here, though I'll say that the patented H.O.V.-giggle doesn't feel entirely earned following a line like: "Had it by a bladder/ She like 'oh I gotta pee'." I've read some comment-section conspiracy theorists who believe Rihanna is in single-minded pursuit of Hot 100 domination, and the rate at which she's pumping out albums (roughly one a year since 2005) is an attempt to populate the singles chart until the end of time. There might be some truth to this (her singles collection is going to be killer), and with "Death of the Album" prophecies ever looming it's worth wondering whether or not that's such a crime. But 2011 found plenty of pop artists still breathing new life into the format: Beyonce's 4 and Lady Gaga's Born This Way were probably the most solid examples-- two bombastic records that also explore the nuance of their respective artists' personas. Talk That Talk tries too hard to send a more one-dimensional message and ends up falling flat: Rihanna's obviously going for sexy here, but her music's at its most alluring when she's blissed out in her own reverie, not taking the time to spell it all out for us.

2011-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

2011-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Def Jam

November 23, 2011

02eca011-fa03-4624-a9bf-5586877b577a

Lindsay Zoladz

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

Opeth formed more than 15 years ago, but didn't manage to release an album until five years later, when Candlelight issued their debut, *Orchid*, in 1994. Gradually building an ever-loyal following, the Swedes flirted with semi-mainstream success around the time of the concurrently-recorded *Deliverance*, released in 2002, and *Damnation*, which came out a year later. The first found the band in heavy mode; the second was a set of deathless '70s rock. Blending those two strands excellently, the band's eighth album, 2005's *Ghost Reveries**\--* now reissued in a deluxe edition with bonus tracks, a surround sound mix, and a documentary--

Opeth: Ghost Reveries [Special Edition]

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9717-ghost-reveries-special-edition/

Ghost Reveries [Special Edition]

Opeth formed more than 15 years ago, but didn't manage to release an album until five years later, when Candlelight issued their debut, Orchid, in 1994. Gradually building an ever-loyal following, the Swedes flirted with semi-mainstream success around the time of the concurrently-recorded Deliverance, released in 2002, and Damnation, which came out a year later. The first found the band in heavy mode; the second was a set of deathless '70s rock. Blending those two strands excellently, the band's eighth album, 2005's Ghost Reveries*--* now reissued in a deluxe edition with bonus tracks, a surround sound mix, and a documentary-- sealed the deal. A carefully crafted set of melodic progressive death-tinged metal, the record made Opeth's past releases feel like tiny sketchbooks for the present. Much of Opeth's success is due to their charismatic vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt, whose well-documented idolization of both David Coverdale and Morbid Angel icon Steve Tucker translates surprisingly well to his own music: He can do melody and/or suffocated growls; he's Deep Purple expressive and also raging death dude. In Beyond Ghost Reveries, the documentary included with this reissue, Åkerfeldt says that after years of honing and experimentation, he once feared he'd become a "pussy" who could no longer manage his "evil" growls. Naturally, he was thrilled to discover that, when needed, he could still conjure that exquisite blackness. And, in fact, even when shifting from folksy hymns to distorted mayhem, the overall feeling of the music remains dark with a few flickering streaks of light. Instrumentally, in addition to the usual double-bassdrum action, Opeth blend prog, jazz, stoner haze, blues-rock, Indian raga, pastoral tips, and acid-tinged freakers. Newest, sage member Per Wiberg contributes textures, stuffing his sounds-- a Moog solo here, a Gregorian hum there-- into different corners using Mellotron, Hammond, and piano. All those keys sometimes create a slight distance, but then the guitars hit the same rhythm as a jazz organ and shape-shift on a dime: The band lulls, then explodes. Unlike a number of other tech wizards embraced by the metal community, Opeth make the most of their skills, playing complexly and expressively. The music is poppier and more sumptuously recorded than Katatonia or Agalloch, but maintains an edge, banging to Amon Düül II. At times you may even be reminded of Japanese psych folk-rockers, Ghost. Opener "Ghost of Perdition" starts with gentle guitar, lasting all of four seconds, before Åkerfeldt begins his hemlock snarl. The next move, before the 1:30 minute mark, is a soulful fusion moment: "Devil cracked the earthly shell/ Foretold she was the one/ Blew hope into the room and said:/ 'You have to live before you die young.'" A creepy organ death-dances in the background, facing off a pastoral moment lined with angelic traditional folksy harmonies before an aching solo guitar steps aside for more of the brutal stuff. Ghost Reveries' lyrics never stray far from these makeshift death pyres. The landscape is feverish, filled with rotting trees ("roots sucking, thieving from my source"), fog, and darkness. Protagonists dodge the sun, fear dying alone, and carry their pale flesh through ashen alien lands. A complaint could be made that Opeth pack songs-- particularly the opener or fabulously epic "Reverie/Harlequin Forest"-- with too many changes. (Dudes, are you trying to get a silver star from Musician magazine?) But each move feels like it's going somewhere, not simply treading water to showcase chops, and this ADD factor ups the emotional power: Half of Ghost Reveries' eight tracks clock in at over ten minutes, but the word "lag" never comes to mind. Preaching to the converted? If you already own the original, you won't need this reissue unless you want the smooth cover of Deep Purple's "Soldier of Fortune". Other extras include an embossed cover, added artwork, and pep rally-style liner notes from Åkerfeldt. There's also a second disc with a 5.1 mix of the album and the "director's cut" video for "The Grand Conjuration", where a snake sucks a Tawny Kitaen-looking girl down a toilet and a hooded bully tortures an old guy and douses him with gasoline. And then there's the 30-something-minute documentary, with standard fare like live footage, interviews, studio shots, food sculptures, Opeth swimming in a pool, lap cats, reminiscences, "sex, drugs, and e-mail," lots of talk of the "rock-n-roll dream," and new tattoos. At one point in the documentary Åkerfeldt says, revealingly, that what Opeth's doing is "more than metal." That depends, of course, on your definition of metal. People often stress the idea of "transcending genre" in relation to the band, but while forward-thinking and often quite singular, Opeth's still very much within the tradition. That Åkerfeldt thinks otherwise casts an interesting pattern on the past. It also makes me curious about his recently announced (unnamed) side project and Opeth's ninth studio album (reportedly due before the end of the year).

2007-01-02T01:00:01.000-05:00

2007-01-02T01:00:01.000-05:00

Metal

Roadrunner

January 2, 2007

02f32b27-538c-45cb-b32c-4fe8824924dc

Brandon Stosuy

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

Courtney Barnett’s second album is smaller, more introverted than her debut. It’s tentative but with a purpose, songs about what it means to not have—or need—the right words for everything.

Courtney Barnett’s second album is smaller, more introverted than her debut. It’s tentative but with a purpose, songs about what it means to not have—or need—the right words for everything.

Courtney Barnett: Tell Me How You Really Feel

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/courtney-barnett-tell-me-how-you-really-feel/

Tell Me How You Really Feel

The most Courtney Barnett line on Courtney Barnett’s second album is a quote from an online troll. “He said, ‘I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you,’” she recalls, on “Nameless Faceless,” and then offers an uncharacteristically cocksure response in a shruggy sing-song: “But you didn’t.” The anonymous critic’s putdown assumes that Barnett’s witty early EPs and debut album cemented her style, making it ripe for parody. Abandoning social realism and polysyllabic razzle-dazzle, Tell Me How You Really Feel in fact overhauls almost everything we’ve come to expect from Barnett as a writer while vindicating everything she promised of herself on her 2015 debut LP: “Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you.” On Tell Me, Barnett repeatedly flails at the question of what a Courtney Barnett line would be anyway: What kind of bargain does a songwriter strike with her audience? “I don’t know a lot about you but/You seem to know a lot about me,” she sings, perturbed, on “Need a Little Time.” What does she have to say and should she even say it? “Indecision rots like a bag of last week’s meat” on a song called “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence.” She vacillates between despair and self-loathing, living on nerves and feelings. Introspection becomes claustrophobia, the kind where you want to unzip your skin, clamber out, and shake your self off like a wet dog. The palpable discomfort could come off as Barnett complaining about her modest fame if her low-key personality didn’t make evident precisely how much she’d abhor that idea. It’s more essential than that: Courtney Barnett is tentative about how to be in the world, full stop. Fortunately, her crisis of confidence isn’t reflected in the music: Tell Me is adventurous and nuanced; shapelier than its rabid greyhound predecessor, making Barnett’s game, punky guitar a key part of the storytelling rather than kindling for the engine. She can still go neck-and-neck with Stephen Malkmus when it comes to hangdog indie-rock triumphalism, but her playing now tells stories of tenderness and frustration, too. The country lockstep of guitar and rickety piano at the end of “Walkin’ on Eggshells” feels like being carried along by a creature much bigger than you, and then placed, safely, at your destination. “Help Your Self,” in which Barnett seems to admire a customer much cooler than her, starts in a meditative fashion, her long, sinewy guitar purrs evoking breathing exercises as she tries to channel this person’s chill. It doesn’t work, and she lets her frustration erupt into extremely satisfying absurdity: “You got a lot on your mind/ You know that half the time/It’s only half as true/Don’t let it swallow you,” she sings. But as she repeats the refrain, it sounds as if she’s saying, “It’s only half a strudel/Don’t let it swallow you!” just as the guitar goes knees-first-through-the-mud bananas. It’s sweet, silly relief: Who’d be consumed by half a pastry? Considering that Barnett squeezed the word “pseudoephedrine” into her debut single, the linguistic treats on Tell Me come in smaller, subtler nuggets. There’s confidence and elegance to the paring down (and maybe a smart long view, too, unburdening herself of her reputation as rock’s quirkiest chronicler). She conjures in an image what previously took a small parable. Compare the debut’s “Elevator Operator”—a picaresque story about a kid called Oliver who sacks off work to admire the view from a skyscraper rooftop—with this line from “Need a Little Time,” a terse study in caution and release: “Shave your head to see how it feels/Emotionally it’s not that different/But to the hand it’s beautiful.” In that vein, she preserves moments of secret meaning: What exactly is your “innermost lecherous,” a phrase she coins for the grist listeners demand from songwriters? And what’s an “absolute anosmic”? These seeds of cryptic potency develop her own private language. But for now, Barnett’s inability to express herself is the album’s main theme, and it’s a strange, almost meta proposition: a 30-year-old artist lauded as one of the most gifted songwriters of her generation who’s convinced, on just her second album, that she’s a false prophet. If her debut’s “Pedestrian at Best” sounded like the fierce thrash of In Utero, Tell Me shudders with its malign spirit. Barnett’s introspective outlook also allows her to test the limits of songwriting, from the cliché to the confessional. “City Looks Pretty” contains one of the record’s blandest choruses—“Sometimes I get sad/It’s not all that bad”—but it’s chased by a line that makes that drab couplet seem knowing rather than feeble: “The city takes pity on your injured soul/And heavenly prose ain’t enough good to fill that hole.” What use is a well-turned phrase in the pit of despair? Tell Me opens on “Hopefulessness,” one of a few songs that invokes a rhetorical cliché in disbelief. “You know what they say…” Barnett drawls in a faded croak, a tone she maintains throughout the song as it builds to a catastrophic sludgy squall, a clever reflection of numbness. Imagine having the blithe confidence to lean on cliché, she seems to imply, when you mistrust everything that comes out of your mouth. Barnett has a go at coining her own turn of phrase on “Walkin’ on Eggshells,” and it’s a beautiful one: “Before we get started I’ll clean this up/No use drinkin’ from a leakin’ cup,” she sings, trying to hit reset on a destitute argument. But it misfires: “Y’know what I mean? Not really, it seems…” A few lines later, she subverts well-worn terms commonly used to describe pain and swashbuckling adventure to distill her frustration at not being able to get the words out: “Pullin’ teeth, white knucklin’.” These opaque emotions are harder to parse and less immediately easy to love than the anecdotal action of her debut, but they make for a rich album all the same, one that pushes the listener to meet Barnett on her terms. “Don’t stop listening,” she sang on her debut; “Are you listening?” she yowls here. At the center of Tell Me, Barnett gives the listener no choice but to listen when she adopts an unusually ferocious tone across two consecutive songs. “Nameless, Faceless” paraphrases a Margaret Atwood quote for its grungy chorus: “Men are scared that women will laugh at them/Women are scared that men will kill them.” And “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch” is a roiling tirade that needs little more explanation beyond its title. They’re both visceral, lunging songs, but neither really works—they’re too broad for an artist who excels at minutiae. Both have been described as Barnett addressing the era’s misogyny, and there is something a bit box-ticky about them. But one of the more refreshing things about Tell Me at large is how uninterested Barnett is in providing any kind of “necessary” commentary at a time when many artists feel duty-bound to address politics in their work: The chorus on the next song, “Cripping Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence,” finds her singing, “I don’t know, I don’t know anything” with breezy relief. There’s courage in admitting her inability to know what to say, though it’s a privileged position—something she alludes to. “Sorta self-righteous, my heart of gold,” she concedes on “Walkin’ on Eggshells,” highlighting the dual bind of being a nervous introvert: the anguish over self-expression coupled with the suspicion that not using your voice is neglectful. Barnett has often sung about that gap, the one between who she is and who she wants to be. On Tell Me, the gap widens, and those dueling identities become even less clear. It’s complicated. There are no punchlines. In these songs of existential despair, a change in perspective is its own kind of revelation, as is Barnett finding the few good words to describe it.

2018-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Mom+Pop / Milk! / Marathon Artists

May 22, 2018

02f33f79-0f8e-4c18-971e-aae13723883d

Laura Snapes

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

This surprise-released collaboration sees the Atlanta rappers finally finding common ground, though neither is in peak form. Super Slimey forgoes explosiveness and poignancy for streamlined action.

This surprise-released collaboration sees the Atlanta rappers finally finding common ground, though neither is in peak form. Super Slimey forgoes explosiveness and poignancy for streamlined action.

Future / Young Thug: Super Slimey

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-young-thug-super-slimey/

Super Slimey

Young Thug and Future are often mentioned in the same breath. It’s not just because they’re both Atlanta rappers, or that their creative arcs began cresting at the same time, but because it’s hard not to spot some obvious stylistic parallels, the most glaring being Auto-Tune. It’s hard to believe that the two ridiculously prolific MCs—who grew up 20 minutes from each other, run in the same circles, and dip their pens in the same lean-laced ink—so rarely cross paths. Both rappers are longtime running mates of producer Metro Boomin. They frequent the same track lists: Travis Scott’s Rodeo, Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, Lil Durk’s LilDurk2X, Mike WiLL’s Ransom 2, to name just a handful of the albums they’ve featured on. Thug once claimed Future was planning to sign him to the Freebandz imprint for $1.5 million, but the deal never came to fruition. For a while, everyone seemed to be putting the two together—except the artists themselves. Their weird dance quickly shifted from “constant coexistence” to “outright avoidance” in 2015 when Metro publicly questioned the productivity of other rappers and warned that they shouldn’t try to replicate his and Future’s tireless work rate. Thug took offense, and called Future the Tito to his Michael Jackson. Months later, as both artists were preparing to drop new projects, Future and Thug traded insults about output (“I hope Apple save you lil niggas… Or church!!!!”). It seemed these two pillars of the rap zeitgeist would never connect as fans hoped. Things turned around when Thug apologized for the “internet arguments,” making amends on stage during Drake’s Summer Sixteen tour and finally hitting the studio. Thug named a song on JEFFERY “Future Swag,” and more recently featured Future on the BTG number “Relationship.” Capping their tumultuous dynamic, Future and Young Thug join forces for a new mixtape called Super Slimey and finally find common ground—in syrupy Auto-Tune, colorful diamonds, Patek Philippe timepieces, double cups, cruise ships, and personal torment. But maybe it’s because they’ve squabbled so much about efficiency, and quality over quantity, that Super Slimey is somewhat anticlimactic. It is, in part, a release memorializing audio engineer Seth Firkins, who died in his sleep last month. Firkins was Future’s primary vocal producer and mixer, a man behind the scenes on several popular mixtapes, Future's reissued debut Pluto 3D, and 2015’s Dirty Sprite 2. (The engineer also worked on records for Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Young Thug.) Firkins worked closely with Future for more than six years, and so Super Slimey is offered as an homage. “Super Slime in Peace Seth Firkins,” Future tweeted after the project dropped. On “4 da Gang,” he raps, “Go check my profile, I beat the verdict/I was kicking it in overdrive, for Seth Firkins.” These guys value the studio grind most, and so the highest compliment they can pay him is to keep working. Future often finds strength in tribute and on Super Slimey, he pushes through the pain just like on 56 Nights, when he toasted his newly-freed, wrongfully-detained DJ Esco. Few go bigger than Future in mourning, and Thug also adds his share of colorful one-liners and wowing stunts (“Different color diamonds, I’m a peacock,” “I’ve been blown a mil’ on jewelry, but it’s past tense”). There are flashes of their more private sides, too, like Thug rapping, “It’s true I said I love you but I didn’t promise” on “Real Love,” or Future opening up about depression on “4 da Gang”: “I look my demon in the face, I’m booted up the worst way… I can’t grieve, ‘cause ain’t none of my grandma bills late.” Neither Future nor Thug is at the peak of his powers on Super Slimey, which forgoes explosiveness and poignancy for streamlined action, and many of the solo cuts shine brighter than the team-ups. The same problem plagued Future’s collaboration with Drake, What a Time to Be Alive. The assumption here was always that this would be different because Future and Thug supposedly occupy the same territory—they’re both croon-first, spontaneous emoters whose viscous squawks rely heavily on pitch-shifting technology to add dimension—but there have always been subtle variations in the ways they like to move in open space, and their short track record shows they have trouble maximizing their talents in tandem. Most of the songs are never greater than the sum of their parts. Even when the verses and hooks aren’t pedestrian (by their standards), the segments seem cut together. A song like “All da Smoke” is really just a FUTURE cut with a pasted-in Thug verse. But there are moments like the Offset-assisted “Patek Water” or “200” where the stars align and they seem like perfect companions, or at least sparring partners. Even when they don’t click, you sometimes end up with two dynamic MCs trying to dunk on each other. The Super Slimey production crew spotlights standout beatmakers from across the Future and Young Thug discographies: Mike WiLL Made-It, Southside, TM88, Wheezy, and London on Da Track. But Metro Boomin, who has unquestionably had a hand in both artists’ success and produced their best ever tag-team cut “Chanel Vintage,” is noticeably absent from the project. That void is never quite filled, despite the constant slaps, delivered especially on the glimmering Thug solo song “Cruise Ship” and the spectral “Drip On Me.” There’s something unfulfilling about Metro unwittingly driving a wedge between them and not being around for their reunion, as his comments seem to reverberate throughout it. If anything, Super Slimey is a reminder that compromise isn’t always productive.

2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Epic

October 24, 2017

02f8131f-53a4-46cc-9374-33766c4a5d57

Sheldon Pearce

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

With her sixth album, Charli XCX transcends all narratives and delivers a hit. Brat is imperious and cool, nuanced and vulnerable, and one of the best pop albums of the year.

With her sixth album, Charli XCX transcends all narratives and delivers a hit. Brat is imperious and cool, nuanced and vulnerable, and one of the best pop albums of the year.

Charli XCX: BRAT

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charli-xcx-brat/

BRAT

It’s the era of the relatable pop star, where the Machiavellian hustlers of the music industry A-list write songs about being as unlucky and confused as you and I. These days, the world’s biggest musicians are apparently also the salt of the earth, perpetually downtrodden by their relationships or jobs. They’re down bad but they’re doing the work, jamming the radio with songs about setting boundaries or learning their moon sign. And have you heard? Their latest album is their most vulnerable to date, despite the public’s seeming allergy to moral ambiguity and the sense that it’s been years since anyone was remotely honest about their motivations. Are you having fun yet? Meanwhile, Charli XCX has been dreaming of a time when the It Girls were hot messes, flashing the paparazzi as they tumbled from the Chateau or looking feral outside Les Deux at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday. The Bimbo Summit’s on her mood board, as are the neon-splattered club nights of the mid- to late-2000s, back when dance music was in its bedroom-producer phase and pop singers were still divas who’d never condescend that they were anything like you. It’s a vibe that’s rather popular as of late. (Oh, to be a creative director tasked with explaining “indie sleaze” to Camila Cabello.) But Charli lived it, albeit as an English teenager whose MySpace demos had titles like “Art Bitch,” raging vicariously through the blogosphere. BRAT, the sixth album from the 31-year-old songwriter, has roots in this stretch of the aughts, which holds a tenuous claim to the last IRL gasp of “alternative culture” before it moved into our phones. It’s also a reaction, as Charli’s records tend to be: to the focus-grouped monotony of playlist-fodder pop, the tedium of our current “authenticity” obsession, and to her previous album, 2022’s Crash, which posed the question: “What might it sound like if I did sell out?” If you read trendy literature or spend much time on “X,” you might recognize the mode of defensive self-awareness, pre-empting the possibility of sounding like an idiot or looking like a flop. That album—on which she utilized for the first time in a decade the A&R services of her label, Atlantic Records—was her first to top the UK Albums Chart. But it lacked the culture-shifting oomph of a Vroom Vroom or Pop 2, records that felt like risks that no one else would take. Joining their category and transcending it, BRAT arrives as the best-sounding version of the Charli XCX promise to make the Apollonian pop landscape Dionysian again. The moment bent to Charli as the winter turned to spring, beginning with the February Boiler Room set that broke the company’s RSVP record within a matter of hours. In a sweaty Bushwick warehouse, alongside BRAT producers A. G. Cook and EasyFun, she debuted the album’s first single, “Von dutch,” whose revving synths trigger flashbacks to the mid-’00s electro of Boys Noize and the Bloody Beetroots, with a hitch before the drop you can feel inside your gut. “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me,” she yelps, winking but meaning it. The imperial streak continues on its follow-up, “Club classics,” over whose stripped-down bounce she declares her intentions to dance to her own tracks all night. Is it just me or is “360” her best pure pop tune in ages? (The video, teeming with It Girls, feels heavy-handed but not unearned.) For years, both Charli and her critics seemed distractingly obsessed with her position—the darling of the underground who either would or could not graduate to Main Pop Girl. Then something shifted, and it hardly seemed to matter. She had something they didn’t. She was cool. With the charts full of warmed-over disco and weepy Reddit-detective pop, I’d have happily accepted 15 high-end throwback bangers about being iconic and dressing like you’re on The Simple Life, as Charli seemed to tease. And as an homage to French dance music of the late ’90s and 2000s, from the euphoric filter house of Crydamoure and Roulé to Ed Banger’s heavy metal disco, BRAT delivers. I hear Bangalter and Braxe in the compressed ecstasy of “Talk talk,” the sweetness of Breakbot on “Apple,” shades of DJ Mehdi’s piano drama on “Mean girls.” “Rewind,” a love letter to MySpace-era naivety, is served up in ditzy spoken word somewhere between Uffie’s “Pop the Glock” and The Teaches of Peaches. Charli reprises the affect on “Girl, so confusing,” a song that busts the floodgates of a dozen “indie dance” memories I was certain I’d repressed. Not once in 42 minutes does the momentum fade. But past the singles, Charli complicates the idea she’s introduced of the imperious bad bitch whose ideas the world loves to jack, beginning to explore much more fascinating themes: jealousy, narcissism, “girl power.” On “I might say something stupid,” whose Gesaffelstein piano chords distill the essence of early Justice, she returns to her liminal position in the industry, describing with writerly precision the feeling of being the least famous person at the party: “Snag my tights out on the lawn chair/Guess I’m a mess and play the role.” I’ve never had a Charli lyric bounce around my head the way that lines from “Apple” have, with its curious fruit allegory and wonderfully vague remarks about driving to the airport. On “Sympathy is a knife,” whose buzzsaw synths and modulated banshee howls sound most like the Charli we’ve known, she spirals over an acquaintance who taps her insecurities: “I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” (“Don’t want to see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show,” she goes on. “Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” Wait…) There are a handful of cute songs clearly directed to said boyfriend, the 1975’s George Daniel, now her fiancé. But BRAT’s most intriguing moments regard her relationships with women, which she unpacks with striking candor. The pop feminist discourse of the past decade never seemed to make it to the topic of competition, but on the sparkly/scuzzy “Girl, so confusing,” Charli goes there, painting a picture of a peer to whom she’s frequently compared, who’s either her long-lost BFF or perhaps wants to see her eat shit—it’s hard to say. (Surely Deuxmoi will have a field day with lines like “You’re all about writing poems, but I’m about throwing parties,” but for now let’s enjoy the mystery.) If you’re a certain kind of online, you’ll pretty quickly recognize the motifs of “Mean girls”: cigarettes, vocal fry, daddy issues, Catholicism. Yes, it’s the first major label pop song inspired by the Red Scare podcast. It’s also a counter—a catchy one, at that—to what the “Relatable Era” demands of artists. Is there a way to be a pop star without being a role model? Can a woman feel empowered without being a girlboss? Can she reject the pose of perma-victim and still make resonant art? These ideas feel substantial in new ways for Charli. Writing BRAT, she quieted her inner industry pro who strung together vowel sounds and buzzwords that rhymed, approaching her lyrics as if she were typing a gossipy text to a friend. The method worked, nudging songs about subjects like grief and motherhood past the usual clichés of “confessional writing” and into reality. The somber “So I” is about missing SOPHIE, Charli’s late mentor; it’s also about how terrifying it can be to be friends with a genius. Much ink will be spilled about “I think about it all the time,” where a visit to a friend who recently became a mother inspires life-altering questions about what her freedom’s worth. But what gives the story life is the striking admission that, alongside tenderness and joy, she feels a sting of jealous FOMO: “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father, and now they both know these things that I don’t.” You might call it her most vulnerable record to date, if you’re into that sort of thing.

2024-06-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-06-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Atlantic

June 7, 2024

02f9ccc3-894a-4005-8fe1-c1fc17a62f8f

Meaghan Garvey

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

A raw, high-energy run-through of their early live set, the Beatles' debut is also the sound of rock'n'roll finding a suddenly large, new audience.

A raw, high-energy run-through of their early live set, the Beatles' debut is also the sound of rock'n'roll finding a suddenly large, new audience.

The Beatles: Please Please Me

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13419-please-please-me/

Please Please Me

Whether or not you think the Beatles are the best rock band of all time, it's hard to deny they're the best rock story*.* Their narrative arc-- of graft, tragedy, and stardom; of genius emerging and fragmenting-- is irresistible. More so when you factor in the sense that they drove their fascinating times as much as mirrored them. But the satisfying sweep of the Beatles' epic risks doing them a disservice. It makes their achievements and development feel somehow predestined, an inevitable consequence of their astonishing talent. Of course, this isn't the case: Every record they made was born out of a new set of challenges and built around tough decisions. The marketing of the band over the past few decades by their record label, Apple, has been aimed at creating a sense of apart-ness: Let lesser talents digitize their songs, feature on compilations, sell their music to samplers. The Beatles are different. This flatters listeners who were there, but setting the band apart from the rest of the pop world risks sterilizing their music and making newcomers as resentful as curious. Besides, at the start they weren't so different at all. Britain in the early 1960s swarmed with rock'n'roll bands, creating local scenes like the Mersey Sound the Beatles dominated. Rock'n'roll hadn't died out, but it had become unfashionable in showbiz eyes-- a small-club dance music that thrived on local passion. It was raucous, even charming in a quaint way, but there was no money in it for the big-timers of the London music biz. At the same time the record market was booming. The Conservative UK government of the late 1950s had deliberately stoked a consumer boom: Aping the post-war consumption of the U.S., more British households than ever owned TVs, washing machines, and record players. The number of singles sold in Britain increased eightfold between the emergence of Elvis in 1956 and the Beatles in '63. Combine this massively increased potential audience with the local popularity of rock'n'roll and some kind of crossover success seems inevitable-- the idiocy of the Decca label in turning down the Beatles isn't so much a businessman's failure to recognize genius as a businessman's failure to recognize good business. The Beatles' life as a rock'n'roll band-- their fabled first acts in Hamburg clubs and Liverpool's Cavern-- is mostly lost to us. The party line on Please Please Me is that it's a raw, high-energy run-through of their live set, but to me this seems just a little disingenuous. It's not even that the album, by necessity, can't reflect the group's two-hour shows and the frenzy-baiting lengths they'd push setpiece songs to. It's that the disc was recorded on the back of a #1 single, and there was a big new audience to consider when selecting material. There's rawness here-- rawness they never quite captured again-- but a lot of sweetness too, particularly in Lennon-McCartney originals "P.S. I Love You" and "Do You Want to Know a Secret". Rather than an accurate document of an evening with the pre-fame Beatles, Please Please Me works more like a DJ mix album-- a truncated, idealized teaser for their early live shows. More than any other of their records, Please Please Me is a dance music album. Almost everything on the record, even ballads like "Anna", has a swing and a kick born from the hard experience of making a small club move. And it starts and ends with "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Twist and Shout", the most kinetic, danceable tracks they ever made. The "evening with the band" feel makes Please Please Me a more coherent experience than other cover-heavy Beatles albums: Here other peoples' songs work not just as filler, but as markers for styles and effects the band admired and might return to as songwriters. McCartney, for instance, would go on to write songs whose drama and emotional nuance would embarrass "A Taste of Honey", but for now he puts his all into its cornball melodrama, and the song fits. Please Please Me also works as a unit because the group's vocals are so great. At least some of this is due to the remastering, which makes the Beatles' singing thrillingly up-close and immediate. I'd never really paid much attention to "Chains" and the Ringo-led "Boys", but the clearer vocals on each-- "Chains"' sarcastic snarls and the harmonies helping Ringo out-- make them far more compelling. And as you'd imagine, making the voices more vivid means Lennon's kamikaze take on "Twist and Shout" sounds even more ferocious. Done in one cut at the session's end, it could have been an unusable wreck. Instead, it's one of the group's most famous triumphs. This sums up the Beatles for me. Rather than a band whose path to the top was ordained by their genius, they were a group with the luck to meet opportunities, the wit to recognize them, the drive to seize them, and the talent to fulfil them. Please Please Me is the sound of them doing all four. [Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]

2009-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00

2009-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

EMI

September 8, 2009

02fb0996-def3-40c0-85ec-ea0f705fd441

Tom Ewing

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

The innovative Toronto kulintang ensemble’s debut album is a hybrid of traditional Philippine gongs, electronic production, and Western pop influences.

The innovative Toronto kulintang ensemble’s debut album is a hybrid of traditional Philippine gongs, electronic production, and Western pop influences.

Pantayo: Pantayo

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

Pantayo

In the southern Philippines, kulintang music is played by multiple Indigenous groups, including the Maguindanoan and T’boli peoples, during ceremonial and everyday events like weddings and village homecomings. Named after its main instrument, a set of eight knobbed gongs laid on a wooden rack similar to a xylophone, it’s often accompanied by other gongs (gandingan, sarunay, agung) and a drum called a dabakan. Traditionally considered a women’s instrument, kulintang ensembles in the country today include both men and women. When the music was introduced to North American audiences in the 1970s and ’80s, though, it was played primarily by male artists like Danongan “Danny” Kalanduyan and Usopay Cadar. For the Toronto-based all-women collective Pantayo, who describe themselves as “lo-fi R&B gong punk,” kulintang is a vehicle for exploring their identities and experiences as queer diasporic Filipinas. The group’s five members—Eirene Cloma, Michelle Cruz, Joanna Delos Reyes, and sisters Kat and Katrina Estacio—switch between instruments and share vocal duties, delivering lyrics in English and Tagalog. Produced by alaska B of Canadian operatic rockers Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, with whom Pantayo previously collaborated on the soundtrack to the 2016 indie game Severed, the quintet’s self-titled debut is the result of several years spent honing their sound in Toronto’s arts centers and music venues. Blending atonal traditional percussion, electronic production, and Western influences including synth-pop, R&B, and punk, these eight tracks are joyful, resilient, and wholly contemporary. In the hands of lesser musicians, the hybrid of styles might come across as gimmicky, but over an economical 28 minutes, Pantayo prove adept at deconstructing genres and building something new with seemingly disparate parts. These songs never rest in one place for long, frequently shifting tempos midway to encourage spontaneous movement. Pantayo’s gongs often feel like additional vocalists, thrumming and conversing with one another as they oscillate between meditative and frenetic rhythms. Opener “Eclipse” begins with a simple kick drum, bass, and gently chiming gongs, before introducing cooing R&B harmonies. Instrumental centerpiece “Bronsé” creeps and reverberates, and the first half of “Bahala Na” floats like an Angelo Badalamenti dream and then descends into a cacophonous psychedelic freakout. Unlike their previous recordings, Pantayo incorporates vocals, and serves as a love letter to the pop and hip-hop acts that the group grew up with. “Sometimes when I play kulintang ‘riffs’ I am reminded of some pop song I’ve heard and then this idea drives me to hum along with the melody of that song,” band member Katrina Estacio said. During a recent DJ set for Zoom-based queer dance party Club Quarantine, Pantayo paired their own tracks with selections by Missy Elliott and Canadian neo-soul singer Remy Shand. It’s not hard to draw a line between Shand’s 2001 hit “Take a Message” and Pantayo’s self-love ballad “Divine,” which pushes gongs to the background in favor of soulful vocals. Warped four-on-the-floor highlight “Heto Na,” inspired by OPM (Original Pilipino Music) disco songs from the ’70s, celebrates the dancefloor as a safe space for community to gather and be themselves, instructing listeners, “Pakapalan no mukha” (“Own up to that funky shit”). As their platform grows, Pantayo continue to amplify other queer and diasporic voices, while challenging themselves and their audiences to consider their participation in colonial, patriarchal, and heteronormative systems. On Pantayo, they engage serious topics with the guidance of producer alaska B, who suggested they keep the “vibe a little light.” The record’s most exhilarating moment comes on the electro-pop anthem “V V V (They Lie).” Though the band likens the song’s varied textures to a glass of bubble tea, there’s nothing sweet about the implied story of street harassment at its center. The narrator hears a passerby say, “Fuck you/Really, really fuck you,” but they choose to roll their eyes and walk on, knowing the culprit is unlikely to fess up. And with “Taranta,” Pantayo sound ready to call bullshit and rally together in sisterhood. It’s only fitting that their name means “for us” in Tagalog—they know they’re stronger together than apart. Update: After publication, some language in this review has been adjusted.

2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Telephone Explosion

May 29, 2020

02fd4b59-0cac-4ff0-bf1c-6c6d9b9f5b13

Max Mertens

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

De La Soul’s knotty and brilliant third album is a fever dream of shared memories, historical touchstones, geographical landmarks, first-person pronouns and six feet-deep self­-actualizations.

De La Soul’s knotty and brilliant third album is a fever dream of shared memories, historical touchstones, geographical landmarks, first-person pronouns and six feet-deep self­-actualizations.

De La Soul: Buhloone Mindstate

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22043-buhloone-mindstate/

Buhloone Mindstate

In 1972, Nikki Giovanni wrote a lovely poem by the name of “Ego­ Tripping (there may be a reason).” Inspired by a trip to Africa, it was an anthropological toast to black feminine pride and drew strength from history, geography and, ultimately, impenetrability: “I am so perfect, so divine, so ethereal, so surreal/I cannot be comprehended except by my permission.” It’s not entirely clear that the Long Island trio De La Soul had this poem on their mind specifically when, in 1993, they recorded their knotty and brilliant third album, Buhloone Mindstate. “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” was the album’s second single, but that title was by all accounts a hand-me-down from rap’s earliest eccentrics the Ultramagnetic MC’s, who recorded their own “Ego Tripping” in 1986. It’s possible that the De La MCs Posdnuos and Trugoy the Dove and DJ Maseo recorded their “Ego” without ever knowing of Ms. Giovanni’s existence—hip hop memory has always been shallower than its actual roots often demand. In any case, it’s hard not to read Buhloone as a direct successor to the OG “Trippin’”—a fever dream of shared memories, historical touchstones, geographical landmarks, first person pronouns, and six feet deep self-­actualizations. It's also a notoriously and proudly ­inaccessible project. “Fuck being hard, Posdnuos is complicated” has become its unofficial tagline in part because it was one of but a few direct statements made in an otherwise indecipherable web of interlocking wordplay. The De La catalog had always been littered with linguistic in-­jokes and secret passwords, but the broad stroke mythology was fairly straightforward prior to Buhloone. Check any number of the nth-anniversary reviews that practically write themselves today: Their 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, was an exercise in fluorescent sampledelic hippie rap, conceived or at least marketed as an antidote to all the tough guy posturing that had previously come to define hip-­hop. The follow up, De La Soul Is Dead, was the reaction to that reaction. The group recanted their flower child ways and knuckled the fuck up. They were weirdoes to be certain, but these lunchroom identity narratives—the Peace Loving Hippies Have Arrived; the Peace Loving Hippies Strike Back at the Folks Calling Them Peace Loving Hippies­—provided an anchor for that weirdness. Buhloone was just weird, lost in the woods. There is no decoding this album; you can only hope to inflate its context. So here it goes: Buhloone Mindstate came at a time when De La’s career was hanging in the balance. …Is Dead was a success by both critical and commercial standards but less so than the dominant 3 Feet. Their Native Tongues collective­—an amorphous, ever­-growing posse comprised of A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, and basically every other rapper to ever rock a leather medallion at the dawn of the ’90s—was falling apart in the way adolescent social circles typically dissolve with time. Dr. Dre’s genre realigning gangsta opus The Chronic had just dropped. Enter the Wu-Tang was on its way. But rather than chasing trends or (worse still) pushing back against them with a grown-up scowl, they embraced their fate as outsiders. It was a case of personal liberation via free fall. They buried themselves in themselves. “This time out, the peace of mind was cool,” Pos told Vibe in 1993. “We dealt with the stuff we had to deal with on the second record... we didn’t care; we said, ‘Let’s go back to ‘Buggin’ Out.’” “Buggin’ Out” meant bouncing off the walls in a narrow space. Songs might stop mid-verse; verses felt like they might never end at all. The production was deceptively accessible, less chaotic and warmer than their earlier stuff and drawing a bit from the jazz-rap pool that Tribe and Gang Starr had been dabbling but without any of the explicit nostalgia. It’s a much shorter album than its overstuffed skit-heavy predecessors too, clocking in at under 50 minutes with just ten full rap songs ­and yet is crammed with more information than ever before. It’s never light but always loose. “We had so much fun in the studio creating it,” Pos continues in the same interview. “The mistakes we made on this album? We left them in, ’cause they sounded cool.” Cue Nikki: “I am so hip even my errors are correct.” It didn’t have to be quite so bugged, though. The first movement of Buhloone hints at a more coherent concept album. The intro incantation of “It might blow up but it won’t go pop.” is clever but to the point, on some “No Sell Out” shit. And while the three songs that follow were definitely written from the advanced De La code book—“I hit the shines but I’m shoeing it now/’Member when the floor model had a spine? Well it’s all bent over/A day­glo nigga gets the red doormat/It’s a roller coaster when your shit’s burnt toast” laments Dove—they also occupy a clear thematic territory, navigating industry racism and the pitfalls of fame. But then just as those ideas start to coagulate the group’s focus turns outward. They turn their mics off and make room for a somber five minute solo track from long time James Brown saxophonist Maceo Parker. Then comes a short freestyle from the Japanese rap trio Scha Dara Parr, who don’t utter a word of English until they chant “Yes, yes, y’all, we don't stop” right before being tagged out by a lo-­fi live dub of Bronx old schooler Tricky Tee shouting about Long Island. And just like that the whole album cracks open, giving way to a full­-on psychedelic-egotistical history lesson. While Ms. Giovanni traced the full African American diaspora, De La narrows in on its one corner that has, for better or worse, come to most visibly represent it over the past four decades of­ hip hop music. Their Sahara was the South Bronx, their Noah was Kool Herc, their precious jewels were the hand me down tape recordings of late ’70s and early ’80s rap concerts funneled eastbound to the Long Island suburb of Amityville that they called home. (Pos’ personal background is even more tangled than than just the reels on his cassettes here—when he was still in elementary school his family was forced out to L.I. after their South Bronx apartment was burnt down by one of the many crooked landlords who would leave the borough in ruin while inadvertently setting the stage for the most important American cultural movement of the 20th century. You can hear Pos’ own take on these events in the opening verse of the gorgeous Michael Jackson-–flipping “Breakadawn.” His telling also involves catscans and stew.) Though hip hop’s absolute commercial peak wouldn’t come for a few more years, it was already a global, multimillion dollar industry by 1993. And as is frequently the case with global, multimillion dollar industries it had already begun to lose sight of its cultural origins. Rappers who were once household names to the small cadre of first-wave, five borough hip hop heads had become ancient history in the wake of the Def Jam explosion. To many of the kids buying De La Soul tapes, particularly those outside of the culture for whom 3 Feet’s hippiedom provided an easy point of entry, Grandmaster Caz or Melle Mel might as well have been Fats Waller. It would’ve meant something had De La just said their names. And they did do that. But they also showed a deeper spiritual connection to the old school, foregrounding the language and stylistic tics of their predecessors. If you spend enough time listening to rap music, your brain will break, and all of your thoughts will be colored within the lines of the many raps you’ve memorized. I think a little bit of that was happening on Buhloone. Nearly every bar on the record is a triple folded origami reference to a rap verse from a bygone era. Disembodied Busy Bee routines dialogue with repurposed Joeski Love adlibs. On the 12"-only “Ego Trippin’ (Part 3),” Pos explains: “My style was created from the tapes of boys and girls/Who had the second generation dubs of crews at Harlem World.” (For further B-side breadcrumbs check the rare, supplemental promo EP Clear Lake Audiotorium where they actually rocked alongside Caz, Prince Whipper Whip of the Fantastic Five, and LA Sunshine of the Treacherous Three on the posse cut “Stix & Stonz.”) And however tethered they were to those old-school routines this was no revival act. There was a perpetual newness bursting out of their cadences. Pos in particular was peaking here, rocking a sharp-elbowed, crisply enunciated and instinctively avant-garde flow that had few stylistic precedents. Sometimes he’d stilt his bars, leaving half measures hollow or letting sparred ad-libs from guests like Biz Markie and Shorty No Mas fill in the blanks. Elsewhere he would ramble on for bars and bars without even hitting a single identifiable rhyme. I’ve long believed that the greatest rappers—from T La Rock to 2Pac to Gucci Mane—were the ones who rapped and wrote like they needed to get every last thought they’ve ever had committed to tape. Pos’ style here gives shape to that sense of urgency. At times that stream-of-consciousness gives way to straight-up consciousness. Check the album’s emotional centerpiece “I Am I Be,” a pageant of self­-definition that draws Pos back down to earth for a minute to paint the record industry as a modern-day slave system and to shout out his daughter and late mother by name. Dove, on the other hand, stays in the abstract, letting trees fall for ink playgrounds and spilling H2O drops, but does so with such sentimentality that you would swear he was speaking simply. “This record flowed on feeling, on emotions.” Pos told Vibe. “I listen to it now and think ‘Wow we weren’t even thinking of saying this or that.’ It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.” This is perhaps the best way to approach Buhloone as a listener, too. If you roll with the stikabushes and absorb all the zoas, and dodge every punk squid, the album’s depths reveal themselves with time. Let it all go over your head and it will come back around and hit you in the heart. Unsurprisingly mainstream audiences did not show Buhloone the patience it demands upon its release. It did not go pop; it did not blow up. It fared well critically—four-and-a-half mics in the Source, No. 8 on the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics poll —and was embraced by diehards but was basically dead-on-arrival commercially. It remains a bit of a favorite amongst critics to this day, but isn’t nearly as adored as the more accessible De La albums. When it does get a mention, its inherent and remarkable weirdness is usually brushed over in favor of parroting the basic Won’t Go Pop thesis. Even the group themselves has seemed baffled by the project in retrospect and reluctant to stand behind the strength of their own gibberish. On the follow up, Stakes Is High, they would take a sharp turn towards conservatism in both form and content, fleshing out many of the concerns about the state of hip hop that had only obliquely addressed on Buhloone and in the most literal terms possible. “We being real blatant now,” Mase told Rap Pages at the time of its 1996 release. “No more symbolism, no more beating around the bush, no more talking over people’s heads in a language we only understand.” In a 2005 interview with AllHipHop.com, Dove—having long since formally rechristened himself as just “Dave”—dismissed the bug outs of Buhloone even more directly: “Personally, I hated Buhloone Mindstate.… I think we were just a little too creative.” But appropriately enough, Buhloone lives on in the subconscious of modern day hip-hop. You can hear specks of its style in Kendrick’s anxiety of representation, in Chance’s responsible whimsy, in Earl Sweatshirt’s ADD introspection, in Young Thug’s cascading chatter, and in Big Sean’s run-on sentences. It’s unlikely that all or even many of these artists have even heard the record—in part because it, like every ’90s De La album, remains woefully unavailable for streaming or legal download—but again, sometimes influence is ephemeral. And hip hop’s memory is still out of focus. It cannot be comprehended.

2016-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Tommy Boy

July 24, 2016

03000c7b-d6aa-492a-acbb-0a789623155a

Andrew Nosnitsky

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

The late sculptor Harry Bertoia became a drone musician almost by chance, making tactile sound-art out of metal rods before his death in 1978. These previously unreleased recordings befit his legacy.

The late sculptor Harry Bertoia became a drone musician almost by chance, making tactile sound-art out of metal rods before his death in 1978. These previously unreleased recordings befit his legacy.

Harry Bertoia: Clear Sounds/Perfetta

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22715-clear-soundsperfetta/

Clear Sounds/Perfetta

Lots of drone musicians have been called sound sculptors, but Harry Bertoia literally was one. The Italian-born American artist, who passed away in 1978 at age 63, remains well-known today as a sculptor and designer. In the last decade of his life, though, he also became a musician, pretty much by chance. While building large metal sculptures—mostly collections of tall rods standing upright on square bases—he discovered that they generated long, rich tones when struck. Enthralled by these sounds, he remodeled a barn in rural Pennsylvania to house over 90 of the pieces and began obsessively playing and recording them. A series of 11 privately-pressed LPs—released on Bertoia’s own Sonambient label—became highly sought-after among experimental music aficionados. Last year, John Brien of Massachusetts label Important Records collected all of Bertoia’s albums in a CD box set, and began combing through the unreleased recordings that Bertoia left behind. In keeping with the format of the original LPs, Brien’s first release on the relaunched Sonambient label, Clear Sounds/Perfetta, is titled after single, uninterrupted tracks that appear on each side. And just like the very first Bertoia LP—1970’s Bellissima Bellissima Bellissima / Nova—this new record features a performance by Harry Bertoia on Side A and one by his brother Oreste (who assisted Harry in much of his playing and recording) on Side B. The legend of the original Sonambient albums looms so large in sound-art circles that choosing their successor comes with some pressure. But Brien was up to the task, as Clear Sounds/Perfetta holds up well next to Bertoia’s previous releases, sharing their unique combination of tactile realism and otherworldly abstraction. Often the clanging and crashing of the metal is so tangible you can practically see Bertoia’s sculptures swaying and vibrating. But just as frequently, his massive sounds feel utterly removed from time and space—alien tones that have no real parallel in any music generated by conventional instruments. Bertoia’s work reaches a frightening pitch in “Clear Sounds,” a recording he made in June of 1973. Amid a wealth of high-end ringing, sounds emerge that could be repurposed for a horror film, including buzzsaw-like noise mirrored by cavernous echoes and distant gong-like rumbles. There is a terrifying moment at the 12-minute mark that must be the disembodied cries of tortured ghosts. Yet “Clear Sounds” is also imbued with a calm, meditative tone, which persists even through the piece’s loudest, most skin-raising stretches. Recorded in June of 1971, Oreste Bertoia’s contribution, “Perfetta,” is not as immediately striking or oddly intriguing as “Clear Sounds.” But Oreste’s style is busier and more tonally varied, and there’s much to be hypnotized by in his rippling static and quiet-to-loud drones. Whether you actually are hypnotized by this music or simply find it a neat sonic curiosity seems on the surface like an either/or question. But one of the attractions in Harry Bertoia’s work—and perhaps what makes it still sound so alive 40 years later—is that it's simultaneously a creative marvel and a captivating experience. Clear Sounds/Perfetta continues and extends that multi-layered effect, while stoking the fires of anticipation for what’s still to come from Bertoia’s archives.

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

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

Experimental

Important

January 4, 2017

030683df-4078-4dac-8ddb-9a2b04b48f58

Marc Masters

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

Earl's latest release feels like the realization of a voice he's been working towards: one that is both fluid and all angles, vacillating between naked introspection and pushing us as far away as possible. He is whittling away carefully at the tendencies he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right.

Earl's latest release feels like the realization of a voice he's been working towards: one that is both fluid and all angles, vacillating between naked introspection and pushing us as far away as possible. He is whittling away carefully at the tendencies he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right.

Earl Sweatshirt: I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20422-i-dont-like-shit-i-dont-go-outside/

I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside

In an interview with Clash Magazine following the release of Doris, Earl Sweatshirt said: "I’m starting to sound like myself again*. Doris* is cool, but you can hear the doubt in my voice." The remark played into the narrative surrounding the album: that it was a document of re-acclimating to the world after a year lost to boarding school, of trying to figure out (amongst a sudden rush of newfound attention and worldly temptations) what kind of music the still-teenage rapper was really interested in making. Nonetheless, "doubt" seemed a curious way of describing the actual music on Doris. Earl exhibits a stunning level of technical and tonal control on that album; if Doris, in all its brazenness and complexity, was Earl feeling timid, what would the opposite sound like? His latest album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, suggests an answer. From the first bars of the swaggering organ-driven opener "Huey", it feels like the realization of a voice that, in some sense, he's had an APB out on since his first record: one that is both fluid and all angles, vacillating between naked introspection and pushing us as far away as possible. He sounds deadly serious and self-effacing at the same time, and his rocky, withdrawn psychology is more visible, and easier to trace, than ever. Increasingly Earl is doing more with less, to an extent that might surprise many fans. He streamlines his verses radically, sometimes rapping at half his average speed on Doris. I Don’t Like Shit will come as a letdown to those who valued his DOOM-esque free association or Eminem-esque title-fight motor-mouthing, but he's lethally effective, absorbing whole styles for a verse's time as they seem to fit him. He strikes cocky, familiar poses in inventive ways ("Niggas want to fade me, bitches feel some type of way for me/ 50s in my pocket falling out like fucking baby teeth," "Niggas, my team is magicians/ We think of the shit that we want then we get it"). "DNA" finds him insult-rapping in stop-and-start and triplet flows straight from Kevin Gates and Lil Herb. He never sounds like he's experimenting or even switching hats—just finding the mode of communication that best fits his thought or mood. The album’s aesthetic is still based in the ambling beats, messy synth counterpoint and off-jazz chording to which Odd Future releases usually defer. But Earl, who produces every track except Left Brain's "Off Top", dims the light to near-darkness. Melodies are oblique or hardly there, with keyboard leads diced up and strewn across tracks in fragments; drumbeats are tuned down and fuzzed out halfway into oblivion. The lead single "Grief" is perhaps the most interesting piece of production on the record—set back in a haze of post-industrial smog, it wheezes along like a broken piece of rusty machinery. The sound resembles the murky and glitch-ridden "alternative trap" of Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$, a recent collaborator of (stylistically like-minded) R&B artist FKA twigs. While other OF artists struggle to avoid self-parody or anonymity, Earl is carefully whittling away at the proclivities he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right. He’s making music that never gets ahead of itself, or what he needs to communicate: the way he processes the outside world (on an example-by-example basis) and why and how he runs away from the things he runs away from. EARL’s precocious kid who said things you couldn’t believe he was saying, or Doris’ prodigal teen who had insights beyond his years, both feel distant. With nothing to prove and no longer an upstart, Earl sounds, more than ever, simply like himself.

2015-03-24T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-03-24T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Columbia / Tan Cressida

March 24, 2015

0306f96c-f8cd-41c4-959d-cdea054d91af

Winston Cook-Wilson

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

The Wand frontman’s second solo record blows open the chamber pop of his first for a lysergic and unsettling take on cosmic Americana.

The Wand frontman’s second solo record blows open the chamber pop of his first for a lysergic and unsettling take on cosmic Americana.

Cory Hanson: Pale Horse Rider

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cory-hanson-pale-horse-rider/

Pale Horse Rider

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that many musicians are just frustrated TV-show hosts. Not content to stage a mere livestream concert, a number of artists used their forced break from touring to launch their own DIY telecasts, from Miley Cyrus’ Instagram gabfest Bright Minded to IDLES mouthpiece Joe Talbot’s Balley TV to Yungblud’s transformation into the pop-punk James Corden. Cory Hanson—best known as the frontman for L.A. acid-rockers Wand—is the latest to cross the line, with the recent debut of his new web series, Limited Hangout. But where those aforementioned acts have used their online shows to reinforce their connection with fans in a time of isolation, Hanson is using his to scramble the signal. For one, Hanson doesn’t so much host Limited Hangout as haunt it, appearing in red face paint and a yellow suit, and only opening his mouth to sing songs from his new solo album, Pale Horse Rider. But in between those psychedelic performance segments, Limited Hangout presents an absurdist, Tim and Eric-esque procession of puppets, dancing Uncle Sam mimes, and fishermen decked out head-to-toe in Spotify swag, all hosted by a creepy talking pink blob hovering over an ersatz Tonight Show set. In other words, the show is the complete aesthetic opposite of the serene country-rock serenades of its companion record. And yet, the two share a codependent relationship: Limited Hangout is a funhouse reflection of the manic media saturation and junky pop culture from which Pale Horse Rider provides a welcome wagon-wheeled escape. Pale Horse Rider is Hanson’s second solo release following 2016’s The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo, an album of lushly orchestrated psych-folk lullabies that—like much of Wand’s output up to that point—still betrayed Hanson’s pedigree as a Ty Segall acolyte. But just as Wand eventually found their own voice, Pale Horse Rider finds Hanson evolving into a different kind of singer-songwriter. He’s expunged the last vestiges of arch, Brit-tinged glamminess in his voice for a honeyed cosmic-Americana croon and blown open the claustrophobic chamber-pop of Unborn Capitalist to bask in vast desert skies. Pale Horse Rider was recorded out in the Mojave, and sounds like it—this is patient, languidly paced music, full of casual saloon-piano rolls and shooting-star pedal-steel sweeps (courtesy of Tyler Nuffer). But it’s a desert record where the glow of big-city lights can still be felt in the distance at night and the ominous hum of power lines infuses the air, suggesting the album’s peaceful mood can be disrupted at any moment. Standing at the crossroads of Music From Big Pink and All Things Must Pass, “Paper Fog” begins as pure cowboy fantasy camp—“The wind is at my back, horses running in my head,” Hanson sings—until the song’s ticking drum-machine beat explodes into a gush of psychedelic guitar. His TV show’s namesake track, “Limited Hangout,” begins in Neil Young Harvest mode before its jittery background noises become all-consuming. You start to feel like you’re laying in a hammock whose sway is making you nauseous. Pale Horse Rider’s uncanny vibe is heightened by Hanson’s lyrics, which blur the line between fact and fable: “Angeles” shares a title and a certain bedsit intimacy with an Either/Or-era Elliott Smith track, though it’s hard to imagine Smith ever delivering a confabulated line like, “Your mama, she was a psychoanalyst, until she egged my car, and then she was my nemesis.” But when he’s not rendering everyday L.A. street scenes as mini-soap operas, Hanson strives to make the mythical feel real. Inspired by a tarot-card image of a bone-collecting skeleton on a horse, he turns the soaring title track into a redemption song that’s both triumphant and tragic, a celebration of a savior who may not be as virtuous as they appear. After spending the record carefully tiptoeing the line between idyll and unease, Hanson finally loses his cool on “Another Story From the Center of the Earth.” Over the course of this eight-minute epic, Hanson drifts out from placid “Fade Into You” territory before arriving at his very own “Cortez the Killer.” It’s the moment where the silent flashes of lightning that were always flickering over Pale Horse Rider’s horizons become a full-on monsoon, with squealing solos that buzz and spark like a downed transformer. But even in this moment of chaos, Pale Horse Rider remains a source of great comfort. As the guitars fizzle out, the track continues on its steady path, reassuring us that every storm shall pass. 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.

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

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

Rock

Drag City

April 19, 2021

030808d2-30ed-4b09-bf5d-589a6848d079

Stuart Berman

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

Still balancing earnestness and technique, Marnie Stern's songs here are darker, the lyrics lingering on loss, regret, doubt, and failed love.

Still balancing earnestness and technique, Marnie Stern's songs here are darker, the lyrics lingering on loss, regret, doubt, and failed love.

Marnie Stern: Marnie Stern

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14705-marnie-stern/

Marnie Stern

Marnie Stern's hyperactive finger-tapping guitar technique is flashy and impressive when taken at face value, but her records are memorable because they're more about earnest expression than technical demonstration. Her complex arrangements evoke emotional turmoil as the songs ping-pong between excitement and panic, ecstasy and despair, extraordinary confidence and harrowing self-doubt. It's intense stuff, and given its jittery rhythms and extreme treble, it's not always easy on the ears. Still, Stern's songs invite a strong bond with the listener-- for all its charged-up rock power, this is intimate music. It's like jumping headfirst into someone's psyche. Stern's last two albums were long on self-directed pep talks, and channeled the nervous energy of her guitar playing into optimistic anthems like "Ruler" and "Transformer". Her latest isn't quite so positive. Though her words still show some faith in her ability to overcome adversity and change bad habits, the tone is far from triumphant-- in fact, some of these songs are outright defeatist. Stern's approach to songwriting and performing hasn't changed much, but the mood is darker, and the lyrics linger on loss, regret, doubt, and failed love. It's an album full of heavy, noisy catharsis, and the lines that stand out amidst the clatter are the ones most at odds with the can-do spirit of her last record. The fact that she spent so much time in self-help mode last time around makes the moments of crippling self-doubt all the more gutting-- it's hard to hear the woman who once declared, "nothing can hold me down!" and sold "WIN 'MARNIE' WIN" t-shirts at her merch table insist that she is "not enough" on two consecutive tracks. You just want her to believe in herself all the time. The bad vibes on Marnie Stern have a way of highlighting an expressive, emotionally resonant quality that's been in her work all along. "For Ash", a song written in memory of a deceased ex-boyfriend, opens the album by cycling through stages of grief in waves of speedy riffs and harsh percussion before ending on a lovely, brittle melody-- "I want to be in your imminent, elegant light." "Transparency Is the New Mystery" is the closest Stern has come to a power ballad, and its equal measure of longing and hopelessness is totally heartbreaking. "Her Confidence" gains its power from an atypically blunt riff that blurs the line between terror and empowerment. Many of these songs would be little more than pyrotechnics and flamboyant gestures in lesser hands, but Stern infuses every moment of her songs with odd humor and wounded, fragile humanity. It's impossible to miss the distinct person at the center of this noise. Given that Stern is a genre of one-- art-metal math-rock bubblegum pop, basically-- there's always going to be some novelty factor to her music for certain listeners. But with this set of songs, she's proving that the bells and whistles of her style are less important than what she's trying to express. This isn't to say that her technical prowess isn't still dazzling, or that her chemistry with drummer Zach Hill has become anything less than a thrill. As usual, Hill is her secret weapon. His percussion consistently enhances and complements her parts, and rarely in obvious ways. In some songs, such as "Gimme" and "Female Guitar Players Are the New Black", his fills seem to fight it out with Stern's notes, while in others, his accents fall on surprising beats. There's plenty here for musicians to analyze and dissect with envy, but first and foremost, this is an album for the body and the soul.

2010-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00

2010-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Kill Rock Stars

October 7, 2010

03091fdc-c4bf-43e4-906e-ba9032d4d424

Matthew Perpetua

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

The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the Atlanta rap trio Migos to national attention remain on display throughout Yung Rich Nation, their major-label debut. It hints at weirder records it could've been, but ultimately comes across as safe.

The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the Atlanta rap trio Migos to national attention remain on display throughout Yung Rich Nation, their major-label debut. It hints at weirder records it could've been, but ultimately comes across as safe.

Migos: Yung Rich Nation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20843-yung-rich-nation/

Yung Rich Nation

As a young rapper with a fresh record deal, there are a few ways to navigate your first formal release. You can sidestep hype and release a juiced-up approximation of your pre-album mixtapes, as Young Thug did this year on Barter 6, a stunning but low-stakes offer that didn't seek new listeners so much as drag them in with sheer oddball magnetism. You can play ball with terrestrial radio, genuflecting to popular regional sounds and shopping for chart-topping guests with label money but also running the risk of losing sight of what made you intriguing in the first place. This is a well-trodden path littered with experiments too awkward to fly but too funded to fail, ill-remembered debut albums by Wale, Meek Mill, B.o.B, and the like that it would take dedicated stylistic retrenchments to undo. Another strategy is to forsake fan and label expectations to charge full bore into something scary and new. Vince Staples and No I.D.'s anemic, apocalyptic dance party Summertime '06 was a challenging, unexpected gear shift, jarring and immediate as shin splints. Yung Rich Nation, the debut album from Atlanta's Migos, toys with a few of these methodologies. Throughout, the group leverages a further push toward pop sounds initiated on last fall's Rich Nigga Timeline with the harder edged meat-and-potatoes street rap of last spring's No Label 2. But what's missing is a lot of the goofy spirit and momentum of 2013's Young Rich Niggas, which drilled the group into the national consciousness with the madcap "Hannah Montana" and "Versace". The first five songs on the new album establish a plodding brutality, thanks in large part to darkly cinematic production from the Honorable C.N.O.T.E.; the lyricism is sharp and the cadences more varied than usual, but grim early album autobiographical cuts like "Migos Origin" and "Street Nigga Sacrifice" will likely scare off a casual listener drawn to the group by a "Fight Night" or "Handsome and Wealthy". These are all solid album cuts, but laid out in a row at the top of the tracklist, they're uninviting. The album opens up around "Highway 85", a white-knuckle cop chase sequence on the interstate highway that runs from Virginia through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama aided by a C.N.O.T.E. production mining the sparse, Moogy funk Dr. Dre hasn't made much since the second N.W.A. album. Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff's tales of cruising out of run-ins with the law are gripping exercises in verse-length storytelling from a group whose lyrics tend to get absorbed line by outrageous line as humor. This classic gangsta rap sound is Yung Rich Nation's most intriguing fit; "85", along with "Gangsta Rap" and "Street Nigga Sacrifice", serves up a poignant reminder that Southern rap and West Coast rap have commonalities that stretch back decades before Jeezy and 2 Chainz hopped on DJ Mustard beats. They also prove that the Migos don't need a big ugly trap beat to get busy. (See also: Social Experiment's "Familiar".) Lead single "One Time" pops up in the middle of the album suggesting that Yung Rich Nation could've been sleek and mercenarily hooky if the group wanted, but then the Chris-Brown-by-numbers rap&B collaboration "Just for Tonight" follows, illuminating what happens when an impressionable act courts spotlight too openly. The one is effortless and fun-loving; the other, labored and unnatural, like Migos guesting on someone else's album instead of the other way around. Neither one carries that feeling, which was so palpable on their early mixtape hits, that the Migos had arrived at radio thanks to a magical collusion of undeniable skill and personality. They feel like concessions. Yung Rich Nation avoids many pitfalls that render major label rap debuts forgettable or else regrettable but sacrifices a world of possible intrigue in sticking to its guns. It hints at weirder records it could've been but, in choosing the sampler platter over a more brash dish, ultimately comes across as safe. Peppering what seems to want to be a street album with quirky little singles that jut out perpendicularly from the rest of it makes for a record unsure of whether it should shirk commercialism or embrace it. In a time where we're keen on young Atlanta talent but casually disinterested at the first indication the hit parade's about to subside, there's not much room left for the Migos to keep figuring out how to present themselves in a mainstream field of play. The rhyme skills and lurid way with imagery that first brought the group to national attention remain on display throughout the album, but YRN's warring agendas suggest a few more tries are in order for the Migos to get their formula sorted.

2015-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Atlantic / Quality Control / 300 Entertainment

July 31, 2015

0309632b-47cc-495c-9559-3addae427c43

Craig Jenkins

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

The experimental polymath looks back on key musical influences in a 34-minute piece that seamlessly melds noise and melody into one of his most personal recordings yet.

The experimental polymath looks back on key musical influences in a 34-minute piece that seamlessly melds noise and melody into one of his most personal recordings yet.

Jim O’Rourke: Shutting Down Here

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-orourke-shutting-down-here/

Shutting Down Here

In 1990, Jim O’Rourke visited the studio of the Groupe de recherches musicales (INA GRM) in Paris. The experience was monumental for the guitarist, budding composer, and 21-year-old college student. Back at DePaul University in Chicago, O’Rourke’s teachers, he once told an interviewer, “were just trying to mold you into becoming professors.” In Paris, he was meeting his heroes, radical luminaries of the mid-century avant-garde, particularly the concentric genres of musique concrète and acousmatic music. O’Rourke’s latest, Shutting Down Here, is billed as his return to INA GRM 30 years after he made his first pilgrimage. This narrative might seem like a bit of sentimental marketing boilerplate, but his 34-minute piece slots brilliantly into the history of the French studio, which pioneered the musical uses of field recordings and noise, along with the notion that compositions could exist only as recordings, as opposed to pieces meant to be performed in concert on traditional instruments. For O’Rourke, who rarely plays live, and whose pedigree as a composer is rivaled by his crackerjack sound design and engineering—he mixed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Ys, to name a couple of touchstones—the GRM philosophy fits well. Importantly, though, he pushes back against the studio’s orthodoxy by employing instrumental collaborators and ensuring the sources of his found sounds are recognizable. Shutting Down Here melds noise and melodic ideas so seamlessly that the piece works as both tape music and as contemporary orchestration, reminiscent of John Adams’ similarly audiophiliac The Dharma at Big Sur. This isn’t O’Rourke’s first venture into the symphonic—or acousmatic—sphere. A spiritual sister to Shutting Down Here, his 1995 album Terminal Pharmacy balanced bracing car sounds with delicate instances of cello and woodwind. Shutting Down Here has a similarly mammoth dynamic range: It tempts you to crank up the volume to hear the swelling harmonics that begin the record, then turn it down again when a door slams. There are spectral piano chords, courtesy of Eiko Ishibashi, and a bit of trumpet in the last 10 minutes, played by Elvind Lonning. Yet in consummate musique concrète fashion, O’Rourke treats these orchestral elements like a computer musician layering blocks of sound, not a composer writing for the various pieces of an ensemble. During the decades since his first visit to INA GRM, O’Rourke has worked on hundreds of albums that span rock, folk, classical, and, most thrillingly, the gaping maws between these varied styles. He’s turned ambient music into a journal-like daily practice with his prolific Steamroom series. He played rock star in the early ’00s, helping Sonic Youth scale peaks of both accessibility and audacity during his five years as a member of the band. Shutting Down Here, with its moments of moving consonance, gives the impression of a polymath coming full circle, approaching a very early passion with honed skill. The result feels personal and even direct, both strange words to hang on O’Rourke. Whenever we’ve expected the musician to embody these qualities—for example, on his excellent Drag City-released songwriter albums—he subverted our expectations with his famously evasive sense of humor and bleak worldview. His detractors have sometimes taken umbrage with O’Rourke’s slipperiness, as though the trait were invariably a pose, rather than a reflection of the musician’s character. Shutting Down Here is further proof that wordless abstraction is O’Rourke’s way of being candid. His album is almost memoiristic, even though it eschews the literal for the heady crafts of recording and arrangement. Revisiting a studio that captured his imagination as a very young man, he chips away at his wit and irony to reveal a feelingful core. Yet Shutting Down Here never sacrifices the knotty complications that make his work far weightier than a mere genre study. This is a personal record, after all, and knotty might just be a big, welcome part of who Jim O’Rourke is. 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.

2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Portraits GRM

August 14, 2020

0309e2dc-e67c-454f-9414-1f154b69b4dc

Daniel Felsenthal

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

With its emphasis on slacker attitude and anything-goes energy over ambition and technical polish, indie rock is the consummate entry-level genre. It's the musical equivalent of a pick-up-and-play Wii game compared to, say, techno's steeply learning-curved Xbox 360 shooter. As such, musicians who began their careers as catch-all indie rockers before narrowing their focus to more technically and conceptually challenging genres are a dime a dozen. Fog's Andrew Broder is much rarer: His trajectory inverts the familiar one. Fog's first two LPs were released on Ninja Tune, but they were steeped in the Anticon aesthetic (fittingly, Doseone brought Fog to Ninja

Fog: Ditherer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10948-ditherer/

Ditherer

With its emphasis on slacker attitude and anything-goes energy over ambition and technical polish, indie rock is the consummate entry-level genre. It's the musical equivalent of a pick-up-and-play Wii game compared to, say, techno's steeply learning-curved Xbox 360 shooter. As such, musicians who began their careers as catch-all indie rockers before narrowing their focus to more technically and conceptually challenging genres are a dime a dozen. Fog's Andrew Broder is much rarer: His trajectory inverts the familiar one. Fog's first two LPs were released on Ninja Tune, but they were steeped in the Anticon aesthetic (fittingly, Doseone brought Fog to Ninja Tune's attention)-- an obscure haze of post-Prince-Paul sample wizardry ballasted with baubles of melody and avant-hop guest stars, generously laced with rhythmic decomposition and seething negative space. The delicate Ether Teeth gave us Fog at its most challenging and rewarding-- it was an uncompromising attempt to build music that towered, teetered, but didn't move. For listeners bored by artful stasis, the relatively straightforward electro-pop of 2005's 10th Avenue Freakout (which featured discernible structures and more of Broder's vocals than ever before) must've seemed like a step in the right direction. But for those who admired the imperfect yet promising Ether Teeth, it was the first step in a regression that culminates in the unabashed indie-rock of Ditherer. There's nothing wrong with the urge to try on more traditional garb, but while Broder is an adequate frontman, it's not his best look, and Ditherer makes the previously outré musician sound mundane. He's in the habit of mercilessly stretching his syllables over the tricked-out riffs, which is a good cheat to make awkward lines fit into consistent structures, but quickly becomes monotonous. And in this context, his ridiculous lyrics have more in common with the dopey pretensions of Primus than Bob Pollard's absurdist Zen. For Ditherer, Broder coalesced Fog into a rock trio featuring himself on guitar and vocals, Mark Erickson on bass, and Tim Glenn on drums. As if making up for lost time, the album finds Fog stitching together a hodgepodge of rock styles into a quilt of clashing colors. "We Will Have Vanished" is ponderous, enervating stoner rock. "Inflatable Ape Pt. 3" is indebted to Pavement, with its stabby guitars and nervous drums. The roots-rock-gone-wild of "I Have Been Wronged" tangles up a percolating guitar figure with forlorn hound-dog vocals, zippy prog trills, and a lounge-y breakdown. "Hallelujah Daddy" is off-kilter Southern rock, and the spacious, eerie "What Gives?" (which features Microphones' Phil Elvrum on backing vocals) reminds us that it's hard to understate how crucial Thom Yorke's otherworldly voice is to Radiohead's success. Broder is better at details than broad strokes, and Ditherer contains some excellent ones; they're just buried in the piecemeal and decidedly indelicate songwriting. "Hallelujah Daddy", which features a guest appearance from Why?, comes to life in its gospel-rock middle section. The dubby title track (dubby is good for Broder; it plays into his strengths) profits greatly from Dosh's sprightly electro embellishments and Andrew Bird's weepy violin, while "What's Up Freaks?" offers a welcome respite from Broder's voice with a guest spot by Low's Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk. It's easy to admire the careful studio touches that pop up in almost every song-- the helium-deflating breakdown of "We Will Have Vanished", the telegraphic percussive blips and vocal strobes of "You Did What You Thought", and the bending sheet-metal on post-rock epic "On the Gallows". But it's hard to enjoy them without bogging down in been-there, done-that songwriting.

2007-12-13T01:00:04.000-05:00

2007-12-13T01:00:04.000-05:00

Rock

Lex

December 13, 2007

030b0ef7-b7fa-42ef-b28e-713a1df7dda2

Brian Howe

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

Scandinavian house and disco producer Mr. Tophat recruits his superstar compatriot Robyn for a three-song EP.

Scandinavian house and disco producer Mr. Tophat recruits his superstar compatriot Robyn for a three-song EP.

Mr. Tophat: Trust Me EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22776-trust-me-ep/

Trust Me EP

In the world of Scandinavian electronic music, Stockholm’s Mr. Tophat is swimming upstream. Instead of icy electro-pop or intricate IDM, Tophat offers massive, 10-minute-plus underground disco and house tracks through his Junk Yard Connections and Karlovak labels. These epic re-edits reference everything from Moroder to Larry Levan, passing through ’80s boogie and ’90s rave. His most recent release, titled Trust Me, is his most audacious yet—not only because of its intriguing balance of experimental textures and pure momentum, but because he has recruited superstar compatriot Robyn to provide vocals. Believe it or not, Robyn's last solo release, Body Talk, came out in 2010 (coincidentally, the same year Mr. Tophat released his first record), which is several decades in pop time. Entire careers have come and gone in the time that fans have awaited a proper follow-up to “Call Your Girlfriend.” It’s a mark of his producer's ear that on Trust Me, Mr. Tophat seems aware of exactly how much Robyn is enough; her unmistakable voice envelops the songs without overcoming them, and Tophat expertly weaves her vocals in and out of the mix like one of many instruments in his arsenal. Their partnership feels playfully equal, Robyn’s phrasing even improvisational at some points. On the opening title track, when she sings “We can make love/Don’t think twice/You can trust me,” she sounds like a mischievous siren luring a drunken sailor under the waves—even more so when moments later, she erupts in primal yelps and squeals. It’s this versatile exuberance, refusing to take itself too seriously yet the product of quiet perfectionism, that makes Robyn such a compelling pop star. Even away from the sweaty haze of an actual club, Trust Me keeps your attention. Club music heard in headphones sometimes falls victim to druggy repetition, but these tracks are so layered and dense that new elements keep bobbing to the surface after multiple listens. The 15-minute closer “Disco Dovato” begins with loose percussion, lagging almost behind the beat (courtesy of drummer Per Lindvall, a former member of ABBA and another nod to Swedish pop royalty), until a typical disco guitar riff slowly filters in—but then distorted, looped samples begin slowly encroaching, along with Robyn’s cheeky vocal take. By the time the beat drops and the hi-hats kick in, well past the song’s midpoint, you half-expect the thing to fall apart under its own weight. But it never does. Mr. Tophat has a gift for this kind of balancing act, and on Trust Me, he manages to share the spotlight with one of his country’s famous pop stars.

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

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

Electronic

Smalltown Supersound

January 19, 2017

030ce01d-aeb0-4314-9e61-6a4e9850eddd

Cameron Cook

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

With Frozen Niagara Falls, Dominick Fernow has taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

With Frozen Niagara Falls, Dominick Fernow has taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

Prurient: Frozen Niagara Falls

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20463-prurient-frozen-niagara-falls/

Frozen Niagara Falls

Prurient, the main guise of Dominick Fernow, peels back the grislier aspects of the human condition within the boundaries of noise music. He doesn't just talk about desire and hate and pushing oneself in his music, he soaks those very feelings into his works. Within his massive discography, littered with limited-release tapes that can be frustrating to any would-be collector, are his "statement" records, which often introduce new elements that advance his artistic growth. Among these are 2006's Pleasure Ground, where his talents for rhythm really started to bloom, 2011's Bermuda Drain, his blackened new wave masterpiece*,* and 2013's Through The Window, where he nearly ditched noise for unknown-hours techno. Frozen Niagara Falls, Fernow's latest double album, is definitely one of his "statement records," and it brings back much of the harsh noise that faded away from his more recent works, but it's neither a "return to form" nor a retreat into his early career. With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same. Fernow's moved back to New York from L.A., where he was briefly a member of Cold Cave, and Niagara cements that return. There's none of the techno of Window or any traces of his European adventures following his side project Vatican Shadow's frequent touring there, and only some of Bermuda's bizzaro synth-pop. There are no remaining traces of Fernow the underground playboy posting swanky selfies on OkCupid; on Niagara, he is once again the man standing shirtless outside in the New York winter. The closest to anything resembling Bermuda is "Every Relationship Earthrise", which would make for excellent darkwave if the hiccuping beat would hold still. Fernow takes the tools most noise artists use as ends themselves and uses them to further narratives and enrich the compositions. Take "Traditional Snowfall", which starts off as a murder-romance fantasy—"I want to rip out your lower back/ And suck the air out of your lungs/ And wrap my hands around your neck/ And collapse your throat/ And squish your thorax/ And kiss you"—but turns into a rumination on the ambiguity so prevalent in modern love: "Friends are everywhere but I'm always leaving/ Dismantling us with rumors." (Maybe some of the club weariness of Window stuck around after all.) Fernow takes that confusion and buries it in the hisses and frantic electronics, so that it bleeds through every element of the track. Huge blasts of static and contact mic chaos come back into the fore, a passionate and turbulent dance between beauty and ugliness. To work with contrasts like that, on that deep a composition, is a rarity in noise. It may seem weird that Prurient would have "hits" or "fan favorites," but they do exist. Fernow designed Niagara to be sprawling and cohesive, and there are multiple competing candidates for new ones here, across the spectrum. The first would probably be "Dragonflies to Sew You Up", with percussion that resemble Godflesh's drum machine becoming sentient and suffering a panic attack. Beneath the barrage, blue synthesizers and pianos chime, barely surviving the mortar-fire of the percussion. In the lyrics, Fernow flips the script on how lust is portrayed in noise—it's far from the simplistic objectification that comes too often with big, burly loud music. There's a conflicted pain when he screams, "IN AUGUST/ YOU'RE OVERDRESSED/ PLYWOOD BROKEN/ UP ON IMPACT." A line like "I promise I will only fuck prostitutes" may seem comical on paper, but add in the context of Fernow's vocal performance, and it's clear he takes no pleasure from yelling such a thing. Fernow's synths sound both lusher and icier than they did on Drain, thanks to producer Arthur Rizk, known for his work on Power Trip's Manifest Decimation, Inquisition's Obscure Verses for the Multiverse, and other notable recent metal and hardcore records. Fernow has pushed the limits of what lo-fi can do—Pleasure in particular is a testament to the beauty of buried synths—but with his grander ambitions, he needed a bigger sound, and Rizk's contributions are so invaluable he may as well be Prurient's second member. Niagara is Prurient's most developed record, not just for its length, but the attention to detail that Rizk provides. Fernow's original intent for Niagara was to source all of the material acoustically, with no electronics at all. That would have been radical, even for him. Still, upon first listen, it is jarring to hear acoustic guitars, provided by Rizk and Fernow, in the beginning of "Greenpoint", Niagara's peak New York song. From there, it descends into throbs of darkness, but that's only part of the point of the song. While "Greenpoint" is about someone Fernow knew, when I read the lyrics my mind went to Oliver Sacks' New Yorker essay on monologist Spalding Gray's descent into irreversible depression that led to his suicide in 2004. Gray's thoughts of suicide always centered around drowning and his mother, whose own suicide figured heavily into his work, and it's eerie that "The East River isn't romantic anymore you know/ That's where the suicides go/ Or maybe that's what you want in the end/ To be mixed together and reunited with your mother" are almost as if they were about him. It's specific yet flexible, adding another layer of complexity as only Fernow can. Like "Greenpoint", closer "Christ Among the Broken Glass" shows a side of Prurient that is sometimes overlooked: poignancy. It's also the closest thing to Fernow's original vision for Niagara, which makes it an even more appropriate ending. The sound of fire combines with the guitars, evoking a séance more than a campfire. Like "I Understand You", the closing track from JK Flesh and Prurient's Worship Is the Cleansing of the Imagination where fragile glimmers of serenity are eaten without mercy by squalling feedback, "Christ" reveals itself slowly. Niagara was recorded "in the spirit of homelessness," and Fernow's lyrics in "Christ" capture how winter brutalizes the homeless and how self-sacrifice can make one appear messianic, especially when that figure is among the afflicted themselves. The man, "Jesus of cities," becomes both more noble and more destitute with every verse—"Cobbling together syllables/ Over a frostbitten tongue/ Trying to remember the prayers"—though this isn't about pity, but about reality. Fernow's hushed vocals don't even come in until close to the end of the song, and they make his silent stalker tone on Window sound pronounced in comparison. Who knew that one of the least noisy Prurient songs would strike the deepest? A double noise album is a lot to take in, and Prurient's never been about accessibility. He's also not about acceptable signifiers; he's bigger than noise. He offers an endless, probing self-exploration that simply isn't found in noise, metal, hardcore, power electronics, whatever harsh music you can think of. In that regard, Niagara is a landmark not just in Prurient's discography, but within extreme music. His few utterances in "Falling Mask" sum up the experience of the album, and of his body of work: "What we do/ We invite pain/ It's ok to be hungry/ Hunger is normal/ I'll meet you there." He knows Prurient isn't for everybody, and that's part of the appeal, but if you're not going to invite growth and reveal yourself, why bother?

2015-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Profound Lore

May 14, 2015

030d0158-8fa9-46fa-8444-db535afa6dba

Andy O'Connor

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

This 2xCD cordons off the rockers from the acoustic tracks; Dave Grohl calls it his band's Physical Graffiti, and here he's at his most pensive, purposefully distanced from his all-American prankster persona.

This 2xCD cordons off the rockers from the acoustic tracks; Dave Grohl calls it his band's Physical Graffiti, and here he's at his most pensive, purposefully distanced from his all-American prankster persona.

Foo Fighters: In Your Honor

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3149-in-your-honor/

In Your Honor

Having publicly declared In Your Honor, the Foo Fighters' fifth full-length since their start in 1995, the Physical Graffiti of the band's oeuvre-- hence, the Foos' definitive artistic statement-- frontman Dave Grohl understands the sudden need for gravity. Now he sings with his eyes closed-- earnest and calm, face pressed to the microphone, hair plastered to his forehead: the two-disc In Your Honor is Grohl at his most pensive, purposefully distanced from his all-American prankster persona, attempting to build a legacy that extends beyond the shadows of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, past well-publicized star-turns in other people's bands. In Your Honor is Dave Grohl claiming ground. Sadly, the record suffers from that largeness-- reportedly recorded in a warehouse, its double disc conceit (one half is hard rock, the other acoustic) is heavy handed, the segregation too deliberate. Grohl's "metal" voice periodically strains, like he's concentrating too hard on forefronting his emotional intensity; likewise, the softer tracks can sound stifled, like their proprietor is holding something back, curbing his urges for the sake of classification. Disc One features loads of thundering guitars and manic drum breakdowns, classic Foo structures (brash verse, anthemic chorus) and aggressively contemplative lyrics. Single "Best of You" muses furiously about the frailty of the human heart, asking clunky questions ("Were you born to resist, or be abused?/ Is someone getting the best of you?"), Grohl's chest-screams barely seeping through his bandmates' soupy guitars. The song fades out where it should climax, bleeding into "DOA", a twisty, death-obsessed cut ("It's a shame we have to disappear/ No one's getting out of here/ Alive") with docile vocals (that almost sound as if they were snatched from another song.) Meanwhile, the 70s rock-infused "Resolve", a dynamic call for tenacity, is memorable-- but still weirdly reminiscent of nearly every Foo Fighters single ever shot to radio. The big problem is that the Foo Fighters are telling the exact same story, over and over: heavy guitars, Grohl's bitter, self-directed hollers, loud drums, catchy choruses. At their best, the Foo Fighters are muscular and unrelenting, pushing in all the right spots-- but Disc One still confirms an undeniable stasis. Ten years have passed, and the band isn't evolving: This is where In Your Honor's big curveball-- the acoustic second disc-- attempts to make up for all the retreads. It succeeds, to an extent. The bossanova-tinged "Virginia Moon" (which features guest vocals from Starbucks' own Norah Jones) proffers brushed cymbals, flamenco guitar, and tinkling piano bits-- it sounds more like a classic Norah Jones track than anything the Foos have ever recorded, but the band's sudden break in character is also intriguing: With its jazzy, coffee-table lyrics ("Sweetest invitation/ Breaking the day in two/ Feeling like I do/ Virginia moon, I wait for you tonight"), "Virginia Moon" allows Grohl to croon gently into the night sky, singing lullabies to an army of dudes driving home from their girlfriend's houses in their Honda Accords. Barely breaking a whisper, Jones and Grohl's respective vocals blend effortlessly; surprisingly, it's Jones who adds a bit of grit to the track, her grainy murmurs sneaking texture into Grohl's squeaky-clean pipes. The docile "Miracle" features a cameo by Led Zeppelin's own John Paul Jones, although its gentle piano and sweet acoustic strums aren't terribly suggestive of sharp Zep bluster. "Cold Day in the Sun" sees drummer Taylor Hawkins assuming lead vocals, steering the Foo Fighters dangerously close to adult contemporary mush; "Friend of a Friend", a Nirvana-era Grohl original (supposedly written about his former bandmates) is eerily quiet, just strums and voice, Grohl's vocals controlled and determined, pushing his way through. That unwavering restraint provides one of the most emotionally honest moments on In Your Honor-- listen close, and you can almost hear Grohl's face going white. In Your Honor, like most Foo Fighters records, is sterile and controlled; there is never any threat of dissolution. While Grohl's musicianship and charisma are certainly a credit to any project he participates in, he still lacks the volatility typically inherent to life-shaking art. Nirvana felt wobbly, fragile, and fleeting, Queens of the Stone Age pound deranged, Probot are full-on bananas: The Foo Fighters are strong, neat, and clean. So we wonder: Can a steady, hard-working everydude from northern Virginia make transcendent art? Sure. Does Dave Grohl? Sometimes.

2005-06-15T02:00:34.000-04:00

2005-06-15T02:00:34.000-04:00

Rock

Sony

June 15, 2005

0311773d-efe2-4b12-81e3-1f89f5527890

Amanda Petrusich

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

The Dominican bachata king follows his chart-topping Golden with a celebration of the genre's rich history, lifting up his forebears and revealing his musical DNA.

The Dominican bachata king follows his chart-topping Golden with a celebration of the genre's rich history, lifting up his forebears and revealing his musical DNA.

Romeo Santos: Utopía

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/romeo-santos-utopia/

Utopía

“Dominicano soy De mis raíces yo no voy a olvidarme Soy bachatero y lo llevo en la sangre” Thus begins Utopía, the new album from Dominican-American bachata king Romeo Santos. The album’s intro reimagines the classic Fernando Villalona merengue cut, and paints a clear picture of what you’re about to get into: “I am Dominican/I’m not going to forget my roots/I am a bachatero/It’s in my blood.” The album it introduces is a veritable syllabus for the distinctly Dominican genre of bachata, a record full of collaborations between its biggest star of the present and the legends from its past. Santos didn’t need to do this. On his last LP, Golden, he pushed bachata’s boundaries through collaborations with reggaetoneros like Nicky Jam, Daddy Yankee and Ozuna and urban radio mainstays Ne-Yo and Swizz Beatz. The result cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 and dominated the Latin and Tropical charts, proving that the market for Spanish-language music was big enough to render the old crossover paradigm irrelevant. He is a massive, ground-shifting star—the Beyoncé of bachata. For his fourth LP, he could have done anything; that he chose to celebrate bachata’s rich history and lift up his forebears is nothing short of remarkable. This undercurrent of humility runs through Utopía. Santos is inarguably the biggest star in bachata, but to get there he had to stand on the shoulders of others. Here, he gives all of them their due. The album features all four members of Santos’ group Aventura—in their prime, they were derisively been referred to as bachata’s N*SYNC, but their popularity helped raise the genre’s profile. There are appearances by the OGs Santos grew up listening to in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, legends like Antony "El Mayimbe" Santos. El Mayimbe is the godfather of bachata, credited with helping take it from the campo to the capital, bringing the music of the working class to the mainstream—in the Dominican Republic, at least. On “Bellas,” Santos’ collaboration with El Mayimbe, Santos takes a back seat to his elder on his own record. Santos’ generosity isn’t just symbolic: “Canalla,” his collaboration with El Chaval de la Bachata, is the bachata veteran’s first new song on the chart in more than a decade. Of course, this is still Romeo’s album. While he shares the spotlight with other artists, the album is still filtered through his perspective. Each collaboration on Utopía is with an artist he grew up listening to, so you won’t find Prince Royce or any of his contemporaries here. This serves the album well—rather than try to squeeze the entire history of the genre into one 12-track LP, he instead explores his own musical DNA. The results are often stunning. Each track is molded to match his collaborators. On the Raulín Rodriguez track “La Demanda,” his lyrics slyly reference some of Rodriguez’s best-loved hits. And while the Aventura reunion will garner most of the headlines, the most important collaboration on the album is arguably the reunion of Monchy y Alexandra, the male-female duo that broke up in 2008. Alexandra is the only woman on the record, and her contribution stands out for not only for its rarity but its heat and sensuality. It’s hard to understate the impact of a prominent female voice on a big bachata record—women are almost always the subject of these lamentations, but their perspectives are rarely heard. Utopía’s sonic palette is somewhat traditional, with the requisite requinto lead guitar, segunda electric rhythm guitar, bass guitar, bongos, maracas and guiras. But he still lets his guitarist flex a bit, as on the blistering solo in the middle of “ileso.” If you think the songs sound the same—a common, if lazy, criticism of bachata—you’re not listening closely. Lyrically, Utopía consists of lovesick anthems oozing with drama. The aesthetic is on full display on opening song “Canalla”: “Hoy voy a morir de un amargue / Y la asesina eres tú / Este masoquismo es rentable / Aunque me afecta la salud” he sings, or “Today I will die of bitterness /You’re the murderer /The masochism is profitable /But it affects my health.” Extra, for sure, pero soy Dominicano. “Maldito sentimiento,” Santos and Zacarias Ferreira sing on “Me Quedo,” lamenting their “damned feelings” like Drake drowning in his tears in VIP. How you feel about all of this depends on your tolerance for melodrama. But it’s inherently of bachata, and therefore, Dominican. Santos is such an outsized star within his genre that his gravitational pull is strong enough to shape bachata with each new album. If Golden drew English-language stars into his orbit, getting them to cross over into Spanish language music (as opposed to the more common inverse) and introducing bachata’s profile to their audiences, Utopía is re-shaping the fabric of bachata spacetime, shining light on living legends and reuniting defunct-but-influential acts from its recent history. It’s a monumentally generous act, evidence of humility and star power that makes Romeo one of the most beloved Dominicans on the planet.

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

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

Pop/R&B

Sony Music Latin

April 19, 2019

0314bd42-9991-4a72-955b-19b22bbcd516

Matthew Ismael Ruiz

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

After two records of quiet, lonely, piano-only music, Spencer Krug returns to the guitars, bleeping synths, and pounding rhythms of his best-loved work.

After two records of quiet, lonely, piano-only music, Spencer Krug returns to the guitars, bleeping synths, and pounding rhythms of his best-loved work.

Moonface / Siinai: My Best Human Face

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21977-my-best-human-face/

My Best Human Face

After releasing two consecutive records of quiet, lonely piano-only music (2013’s Julia with Blue Jeans On and the 2014 City Wrecker EP), the Spencer Krug of guitars, of bleepy synthesizers and occasionally pounding rhythms is back. Earlier this year, his first famous act Wolf Parade announced that the band was reuniting, first with a secret show and then by dropping their first recording of new music in five years. And now he’s followed that development with the release of his latest effort under the Moonface name, the fully electrified My Best Human Face. Considering that his last two records relied entirely on piano, Krug’s lyrics and his wearied moan—a nicely distinctive voice to be sure, but one with limited range and an ability to grate on overexposure—they turned out to be surprisingly strong, particularly the full-length Julia. Despite the limited instrumentation, on each he made great use of both depth-adding vocal overdubs and ruminative, carefully considered piano accompaniments showing not a rock musician playing songs but a trained pianist uncovering notes. With My Best Human Face, however, Krug has returned to traditional keyboard-driven rock, and in offering a new electric version of the previous EP’s title-track ode to Montreal “City Wrecker,” he implicitly asks his listeners to assess the results. The original “City Wrecker” was emotional centerpiece of that release; looking back on Krug’s time spent in Montreal and his somewhat anguished decision to leave, it worked quite well in the cold and stark context of piano and voice. However, with Krug’s decision to repeat the track here he does himself a bit of a disservice, as his chosen ornamentation for it in a Twin Shadow-y imaginary-'80s slow burn removes some of the heft of the song and makes you speculate on the seriousness of its sentimentality in the first place. Elsewhere, the rock contrivances work better. Lead single “Risto’s Riff” charges out of the gate with a pounding four-on-the-floor rhythm and sinewy guitar that carry Arcade Fire-style urgency. It's so immediate that you are compelled to shout along with the chorus even as you realize it hinges on the half-hilarious, half-ridiculous rallying cry “At least I'm not a photographer!” On “Ugly Flower Pretty Vase,” he marries a tight drum-and-bass rhythm to snappy, minimal Britt Daniel guitar. And “Them Call Themselves Old Punks” nails the cresting payoff that “City Wrecker” strived for. Unfortunately, the brief seven-song album neither starts nor ends well, bookended by two dirges. Opener “The Nightclub Artiste” feels like a textbook example of when Krug takes too much time on a slow song going nowhere, putting too much emphasis on a voice that just isn’t dynamic enough. Plodding closer “The Queen of Both Darkness and Light” is even worse, sounding like exit music that plays over credits while an audience exits a theatre. The fact that it clocks in at a baffling seven minutes—the longest song on the record—makes it seem like Krug must be hearing something the rest of us are not. Then there are Krug's way with lyrics, which can be as divisive as his voice. There’s no question he puts painstaking effort into telling stories rather than singing songs, but there are times when is choices are so off-putting it's hard not to do a double-take.  Take the aforementioned “At least I'm not a photographer” in “Risto’s Riff,” or the equally awkward “There’s nothing punk about that” refrain in “Them Call Themselves Old Punks.”  Both moments don't feel witty or unorthodox as they do just awkward, like chunky square pegs jammed into the round holes of standard rock songwriting. When Krug sticks to his strengths—off-the-beaten-path keyboard-driven rock n’ roll, with taut, wiry tunes that match his voice and wry wit—he generally succeeds. But his tendency to slow it down and draw it out leads him to take risks that often don’t pay off. He hit a decent payday on Julia with Blue Jeans On, but already that formula delivered diminished returns on its successor City Wrecker EP. And here now on his electric return, even less so.

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

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

Rock

Jagjaguwar

June 6, 2016

0316abb0-ca92-43f1-ae67-761abbef0da5

Benjamin Scheim

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

The Smashing Pumpkins' fourth album is the latest to get the lavish reissue treatment, with five discs of bonus material. With Adore, Billy Corgan made an album nearly as diverse, sprawling, and confounding as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which was the exact opposite of what he set out to do.

The Smashing Pumpkins' fourth album is the latest to get the lavish reissue treatment, with five discs of bonus material. With Adore, Billy Corgan made an album nearly as diverse, sprawling, and confounding as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which was the exact opposite of what he set out to do.

The Smashing Pumpkins: Adore

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19684-the-smashing-pumpkins-adore/

Adore

Here we have the little, lovesick album where the caged rat sings and alienates Smashing Pumpkins fans by the millions—you know, the one that’s 73 minutes long and whose first single begins with the lyric, “It’s you that I adore/ You’ll always be my whore.” The one that’s called "underrated" so often that, by definition, it can’t actually be true. It’s also the one that should be held in highest regard by indie musicians—it features a highly stylized gothic cover, lacks anything resembling an Almighty Riff, features drum programming from a guy from Nitzer Ebb, and shares a producer with Exile in Guyville. And yet, Billy Corgan made an album nearly as diverse, sprawling, confounding and compelling as the diamond-selling, massively influential prog-pop masterwork Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—which was the exact opposite of what he set out to do with Adore. The tortuous dualities that inspired Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie—most notably, grandiose ego and bottomless self-loathing—were clearly encoded in their titles, but these qualities are harder to spot here. The title would be read for its amorous overtones and an allusion to Prince’s own intimate, lovesick record, when it’s actually a homophone for “a door”—as in, a way out. So the main tension here is between the album Corgan was compelled to make and the one he felt Smashing Pumpkins were compelled to make. Billy Corgan is Smashing Pumpkins—it’s hard to remember the last time anyone had illusions otherwise—but the two are not synonymous. The even-numbered Pumpkins LPs in the project's discography tend to be autobiographical, and opener “To Sheila” is Corgan talking directly to the listener as someone who just experienced the loss of his mother, his marriage, and his “musical soul mate” after firing drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. During the Mellon Collie tour, keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin died of a heroin overdose in a hotel room with the drummer; from most accounts, due to his struggles with addiction, it could’ve just as easily have been Chamberlin. There have been Smashing Pumpkins songs like this one before—spare and acoustic, Corgan’s unmistakable soft-palate vocals high in the mix, proving he could actually write poetic lyrics rather than diary simulacra. “To Sheila” is a salvo in its own way, albeit one whose tone isn’t sustained throughout Adore. Somewhere deep within the five bonus discs of material is a live version of “For Sheila” where the banjo is inaudible amidst orgiastic crowd noise that negates the opening lyric,“Twilight fades on blistered Avalon.” And it’s there you sense that Corgan may have had that Dark Knight feeling where he wanted to streamline his operation, but not by that much. He empathized with Batman while recording “The End is the Beginning is the End” for that franchise’s very own MACHINA/The Machines of God (Batman & Robin), and why not—we’re talking about a guy driven by childhood trauma and lifelong grudges, with no real superpowers outside of his alter ego and available weaponry. Corgan always took his fans into consideration, and that crowd noise may have talked him out of his Nebraska; how could he go there when Smashing Pumpkins were his sole means of smiting enemies both real and imagined? But 1998 was a strange and unstable time for alt-rock superheroes—as hard as it is to picture in 2014, the record industry literally had more money than they knew what to do with, but the big names of years past were finding themselves crowded out by rap-metal, post-Disney pop, and hip-hop. That much hasn’t changed, and on the other side—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a critic-instigated push for electronic musicians as the new rock stars forced actual rock stars to pay lip service to the obsolescence of guitars (more so than* OK Computer did*). And that’s how you got, amongst many others, Nine Inch Nails’ baroque, Debussy-quoting double-album The Fragile, Marilyn Manson going glam, Chris Cornell and Scott Weiland making neo-psychedelic solo records, and the closest analog to Adore, R.E.M.’s Up, which is also way too long, missing their original drummer, and has a rightfully loathed electro-rock single. This is how we likely ended up with “Ava Adore”, the closest thing to a “rock” song that still honored Corgan’s ambitions—there are discernible chords, a braying chorus, and a guitar solo (albeit one that only lasts four bars). But “Ava Adore” didn’t build on the promise of “The End is the Beginning is the End” or “Eye”; rubbing elbows with Bon Harris must’ve convinced Billy Corgan that he got a little closer to Trent Reznor vibe-wise, though most people who related to Smashing Pumpkins don’t do “menacing” or “sexy”. Corgan doesn’t either—the song never gets as bad as its first lyric, but the video is the least sexy “sexy” alt-rock clip next to “Lakini’s Juice”. It somehow holds up less than the unearthed “Puff Daddy Remix”, which unsurprisingly sounds like the two never once spent time in the same room. (I mean, Corgan couldn’t handle the egos of James Iha and D’arcy, imagine how we would've gotten on with post-No Way OutPuffy.) Nevertheless, the remix sounds like it could’ve fit next to that “Kashmir” reboot on the Godzilla soundtrack and while I’m not sure if that means it’s any good, it does mean it achieved exactly what it set out to do. Adore’s commercial fate may have been sealed anyway—perhaps it was a sign of the times that a band whose last record sold 10 million debuted at #2 right behind MP Da Last Don, which could be considered Master P’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. But “Ava Adore” was a bad stumble at a time when the Pumpkins could ill afford one, and while the luminous follow-up “Perfect” was a logical extension of “1979”, the Pumpkins overplayed their hand—the video is literally a sequel, albeit with John Mellencamp’s bald drummer and Corgan wearing a cowboy hat. It was a negation of a bold rebrand that flopped and rather than a correction that set Adore right, it felt needy, if not somewhat desperate—this tendency got worse, never better, as Smashing Pumpkins proceeded. However, “Perfect” is how most people who love the record choose to remember Adore, working within the polarity established by its opening duo and revealing that Corgan had his next move already figured out two years prior. The aforementioned door had already been blown open by “1979”, as Smashing Pumpkins learned to use guitar without being reliant on it—a pristine acoustic demo recording of “Perfect” shows how it could’ve fit on any Smashing Pumpkins record or even Zwan’s. On Adore, guitars are distorted, but not with distortion, instead given blushing effects that complement the more subtle emotional palette. Ornate chamber ballads were relegated to the "experimental" final quarter of Mellon Collie, whereas hearbtreaking sob stories “Once Upon a Time” and “Crestfallen” have come to define Adore's character. Moreover, “1979” (and really, everything after “X.Y.U.”) unintentionally prepared Corgan for life without Jimmy Chamberlin—compare “Perfect”’s stone-skipping pace or the lush, sultry “Appels & Oranjes” and “Daphne Descends” to Chamberlin’s pummeling heavy metal funk on MACHINA’s “Raindrops and Sunshowers”. With a light touch and a heavy heart, Corgan expands his range and alchemical abilities beyond classic and symphonic rock of the 1970s; trip-hop’s hermeticism is infiltrated by a sunlit chorus on “Pug”, while 8-bit percussion gives way to a silvery Fleetwood Mac pop ballad (“The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete”) that now appears to be 15 years ahead of its time.Even the requisite eight-minute guitar epic isn’t really a guitar epic—“For Martha” is a tender tribute to his mother that builds from a simple piano line to an even simpler guitar solo bearing a similar tone to the one Corgan’s father lent to The Aeroplane Flies High cut “The Last Song”. Centerpiece “Tear” finds room for minimalist electro-pop, clattering Zep-sized drums, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash, foreshadowing M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us, a record from one of the Smashing Pumpkins’ most outspoken and famous fans. Of course, none of the above changes the simple fact that Adore is 73 minutes long—reissuing it with five bonus discs, which includes a version recorded in mono, certainly doesn't either. It’s been in regular rotation for me over the past 15 years and when I listened to Adore in its entirety for the purposes of this piece, it dawned on me how long it’s been since I had done that. I’m hesitant to call songs like “Annie-Dog” and “Blank Page” “filler” even though they’re rough, indistinct sketches filled with insular lyrics. They’re almost certainly meaningful songs to somebody. But they both arrive as comedowns on a record that certainly didn’t lack for them. It’s where Corgan wins out over Smashing Pumpkins, a show of generosity when concision would have made for a stronger record. The duality of Adore is best demonstrated in an oft-quoted line from a 1998 MTV interview: “I’m not talking to teenagers anymore.” It can be seen as a cynical, preemptive strike in retrospect, Corgan realizing Adore wasn’t going to achieve the widespread commercial success of Mellon Collieand shifting the blame. But this is a guy who so convincingly sang the words, “Time makes you bolder/ Even children get older/ And I’m getting older too” as if they were his own. There was likely a recognition that Smashing Pumpkins fans who’ve been there since the beginning were becoming adults now, and yeah, I graduated from high school two weeks after Adore dropped, though I’m sure I truly believed that having my emotional tumult soundtrack by Smashing Pumpkins entitled me to feeling like an old soul. Either way, Corgan once belted “I’m all by myself/ As I’ve always felt”, and previous Pumpkins records offered empathy towards fellow isolators in their preferred quarantine, whether it was in the clouds (Gish), your past (Siamese Dream), or your room (Mellon Collie). Without being overt about it, as much as this record was meant to provide “a door” for Smashing Pumpkins’ music, it was an emotional portal as well, to perhaps get outside yourself to risk loving something or someone. And that can be scary—Mellon Collie spoke to hyperbolic and yet safe associations developed in one’s teen years, offering, “Love solves everything” and “Love is suicide.” Love is a lot of things on the feedback-stained long walk home of “Shame”—it’s good, it’s kind, it’s drunk, it’s blind. But Corgan gives his first piece of grown man talk about how it always ends—“You’re gonna walk alone/ You're gonna see this through/ Don't let them get to you." Delivered in a warm register but a discomforting tone, it reveals the other unifying theme of Adore: moving on in the face of loss, of friends, of family, and of the Smashing Pumpkins.

2014-09-26T02:00:00.000-04:00

2014-09-26T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Virgin / Interscope

September 26, 2014

0318aa42-c440-4b50-9725-f224203c941d

Ian Cohen

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

Blur frontman Damon Albarn's last 15 years have included film soundtracks, operas, and collaborative projects including Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad, & the Queen. Everyday Robots is his first proper song-based solo album.

Blur frontman Damon Albarn's last 15 years have included film soundtracks, operas, and collaborative projects including Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad, & the Queen. Everyday Robots is his first proper song-based solo album.

Damon Albarn: Everyday Robots

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19280-damon-albarn-everyday-robots/

Everyday Robots

Blur singer Damon Albarn has had 20 years of practice perfecting a certain kind of song. It’s a sad song but comfortable in its sadness, the kind of song that might make might you stop in a crowded bar and remember that even beautiful things come to an end. It is grand, but rumpled and a little isolated, too. It has quieter places to be. For someone who has performed in front of a crowd of 200,000 people, Damon Albarn never seems to be far from his next nap. Blur has been on and off hiatus since 2003. Since then, Albarn has made 12 albums, including four with the downturned pop collage project Gorillaz, who came on like an afterthought and ended up selling millions of records anyway. He has co-written two film soundtracks and two operas. He has collaborated with folk musicians in Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with the rigorously buttoned-up English composer Michael Nyman. He has also partnered in a label called Honest Jon’s that specializes in curiosities like London is the Place for Me, a four-volume set of Calypso, jazz, and highlife. He is your dog-eared friend who never seems to be doing much and yet gets more done than anyone. All the Albarns appear on Everyday Robots. It is sleepy music, with the looseness of reggae and the bittersweet grace of gospel and soul. It connects the globetrotting Albarn to the fashionably moody one who sang Blur songs like "Badhead" and "This Is a Low" and "Tender", without Blur’s reluctant grandeur. Most of its songs are anchored by drum-machine heartbeats down low and plinking acoustic sounds up top, with a big warm hole in the middle. (Robots was produced by both Albarn and XL Recordings owner Richard Russell, who Albarn has previously worked with on Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here and Bobby Womack's The Bravest Man in the Universe, albums with a similarly old-soul quality.) Albarn is famous whether he cares about fame or not, but has tended to set his own name to the side. Robots is actually the first time an album has been credited to Damon Albarn and Damon Albarn alone. There he is on the cover, sitting in the middle of an indefinite gray space, hanging his head and smirking at some private joke, the boy who refuses to look at the camera even when it’s time for his close up. Robots relishes in alienation, and specifically in the way technology facilitates it. Cultural concerns like this are important but can feel pedantic when turned into art. Parts of Robots—the lyrics of “Lonely Press Play” and the title track, for example—are obvious statements made in obvious ways, right-on but one-dimensional, melancholy rendered melancholically. More interesting is when Albarn manages to graze the side of his subject matter in a way that knocks it into place. Robots starts with a sample from the British comedian Lord Buckley talking about the explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca: “They didn’t know where they was goin’ but they knew where they was wasn’t it.” Removed from its literal context the line becomes a comment about society writ large. “Mr. Tembo”, a sweet, upbeat song Albarn originally sang for a baby elephant he met in Tanzania, keeps returning to the refrain, “It’s where he is now but it wasn’t what he planned”—a reminder that unfortunate circumstances are less important than how you deal with them. The album’s best songs, “Photographs (You Are Taking Now)” and “You and Me”, mention Albarn’s hot-button topics but set them to the side, frames about other kinds of stories more than the stories themselves. Albarn has often been compared to English writers like Ray Davies but has always seemed more like Paul Simon, a heavy-hearted and moody person who nevertheless manages to bring a room together. A lot of pressure rests on an album like this but it would seem out of character for him to rise to it. Robots is decidedly lowercase music, more a piece of his puzzle than a picture on its own.

2014-04-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

2014-04-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Parlophone

April 28, 2014

0319014f-01f9-4832-b023-ff997db15885

Mike Powell

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

On her seventh album, Taylor Swift is a little wiser and a lot more in love. Though uneven, Lover is a bright, fun album with great emotional honesty.

On her seventh album, Taylor Swift is a little wiser and a lot more in love. Though uneven, Lover is a bright, fun album with great emotional honesty.

Taylor Swift: Lover

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

Lover

The theme of Taylor Swift’s Lover is right there in the title. These 18 songs are odes to the things she loves most and knows best: her boyfriend and her mom, the West Village and the West End, and, always and forever on a Taylor Swift album, being in love. It’s an exuberant celebration of the challenges of maintaining a relationship through seasons and across continents, of telling the truth and saying sorry. Swift has always mined her personal life for opaque fables of love and retribution; she memorializes a romance’s fleeting details, wraps them in bows, and ferries them to an audience eager to receive her gifts. She writes about a life that’s strengthened, not broken, by heartbreak. Lover is the suggestion that the right person, the right song, might lift heartbreak from your life, too. The concept is, as she claims early on, both “overdramatic and true.” Lover nods to 2017’s Reputation, but, in spirit, it’s the sequel to the synth-pop glitter of 1989. Produced mostly with ubiquitous pop whisperer Jack Antonoff, it’s full of low-lying synthesizer pulses and reverbed beats that can feel more like scaffolding than full songs. Sometimes it attempts to honor Swift’s entire artistic journey at once: The waltzing “Lover,” full of fiddle and fairytale weddings, harks back to the Old Taylor; “I Think He Knows” is a thumping electro-pop shout-out to Nashville’s Music Row. She uses the word “shade” twice, up from once on Reputation. She’s 29, but she still writes metaphors about prom dresses and homecoming queens. It’s bright and fun and occasionally cloying. Lover’s emotional peaks and valleys are higher and deeper than reputation, where romance played out under a long shadow of doubt. Opener “I Forgot That You Existed” is a hopscotch rhythm set to a rhyme like you’d leave in your nemesis’ yearbook if you were really being honest—which is to say, it doesn’t sound like she forgot for one second. It comes off as throat-clearing, but it opens a stretch of drama-free delights, like the magnetic pink glow of “Cruel Summer” (“I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you!”) and the crystal-ball clarity of “The Archer,” with its elegant, Chromatics-esque synthesizer build and self-aware regret: “I cut off my nose just to spite my face/And I hate my reflection for years and years.” The exception is undercooked gender-equality anthem “The Man,” a song that hilariously, unironically points to Leonardo DiCaprio’s playboy image as the height of masculine privilege, and proves that other people shouldn’t write Kesha songs. Is it the prickly cotton-candy production or the lyrical detail or the vocal echo or just the event album–ness of it all that keeps Lover in the foreground, song after song? With the possible exception of the steel drums on music-box oddball “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” the album never claims any new ground; some of its best moments are unavoidably familiar. Rihanna or Robyn might intend their new music to sound entirely fresh; Swift, our most conventional pop star, builds atop what has worked already. And with Antonoff behind so much of the sound of pop music in the latter half of the decade, the bold, ’80s-inspired style isn’t inherently more interesting or varied than any other. “I Think He Knows” sounds like Carly Rae Jepsen; “The Archer” sounds like Lorde’s “Supercut”; “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” actually a Joel Little joint, sounds like Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die. Swift and her collaborators try some real doozies: Pop-punk marriage proposal “Paper Rings” has a key change borrowed from the Shangri-Las and more than a little acoustic guitar in the mix. It’s cute, and then exhausting. The perky, England-themed “London Boy” begins sweetly—“I saw the dimples first and then I heard the accent”—but devolves into a parade of rugby and high tea and “I fancy you”s, a love song as predictable as one of Mary-Kate and Ashley’s direct-to-video European adventures. She samples Idris Elba joking about taking James Corden on a scooter ride, apropos of nothing except that he says “London.” I can only imagine what it sounds like to a Brit. “London Boy” is relentlessly upbeat, but the next mood swing will knock you sideways: It’s “Soon You’ll Get Better,” a heartrending ballad about Swift’s mother’s ongoing cancer battle, with background harmonies by the Dixie Chicks. Three minutes later, her tender testimony of new faith is outshined by the terrific “False God,” a moody sophistipop meditation on transatlantic romance where worship (“Religion’s in your lips… the altar is my hips”) sounds more like a metaphor for… oral sex? On a Taylor Swift album? Am I losing my mind? Then “You Need to Calm Down” crashes in to remind us that she also considers making nice with Katy Perry to be a form of activism. Because Swift is better when she’s learning than when she’s trying to teach us a lesson, Lover’s garish lead singles contribute to the strain. I’ve thought about “Me!” every day for four months; it still sounds like a musical number taken out of context, just unearned celebratory fanfare without plot or character development, so dead-eyed it’s spooky. But she’s better when she gives herself real space to think, as on “Cornelia Street,” a lovely, understated tribute to memory and nostalgia with the power to make one rarefied block of Manhattan feel universal. Like Red or Speak Now, Lover is a sprawling scrapbook of invisible personal bookmarks, an escapist fantasy about a real-life celebrity boyfriend, a shrewd self-mythology disguised as a benevolent offering. It’s probably five bad songs away from being better than 1989. It’s also a little wiser and more emotionally honest. “I once believed love would be black and white… I once believed love would be burning red/But it’s golden,” she sings on dreamy pastel closer “Daylight,” replacing the fiery passion of Red with a gentler, more mature understanding of true love as a good idea you don’t want to stop having. Heartbreak can strengthen you; love sustains you. If only all of Lover had the same heart.

2019-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Republic

August 26, 2019

031d9dd0-007c-4a40-b8a9-ee0ef2c4fe97

Anna Gaca

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

Bill Fay’s 2012 LP Life Is People, his first proper record in more than 40 years, felt like a spectacle. Who Is the Sender? finds Fay coming down from that high, frustrated by humanity and praying that some force bigger than a singer behind a piano will someday intervene.

Bill Fay’s 2012 LP Life Is People, his first proper record in more than 40 years, felt like a spectacle. Who Is the Sender? finds Fay coming down from that high, frustrated by humanity and praying that some force bigger than a singer behind a piano will someday intervene.

Bill Fay: Who Is the Sender?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20475-bill-fay-who-is-the-sender/

Who Is the Sender?

Of course Life Is People, Bill Fay’s 2012 LP, felt like a spectacle: It was his first proper record in more than 40 years. At the start of the '70s, the Englishman released two imaginative, mystifying folk-rock albums that were critically lauded but commercially stillborn. After low sales prompted his label dismissal, Fay decided not to press the issue. He retired to private life, started a family and recorded new tunes only for his own fulfillment. Still, his reputation steadily spread among singer-songwriter literati, and those early albums became collector’s items. Reissues followed, along with a plea from the young American producer Joshua Henry: Make another record with me. On the resulting 12 songs, choirs emboldened Fay’s humble mantras about self-fulfillment, miniature orchestras afforded his modest folk songs symphonic splendor, and Jeff Tweedy traded verses and shared choruses with one of his idols. Fay seemed like a singer who’d returned to reclaim the due he’d missed for an entire generation. Life Is People was his triumph over time. But the new and muted Who Is the Sender? finds Fay coming down from that high. He expresses frustration and consternation with the world, its wars and persecutions, and prays that some force bigger than a singer behind a piano will someday repair it all. Fay sighs as much as he sings here. The once-soaring strings turn doleful, and harmonies that felt like life-affirming proclamations just three years ago now seem like cries for survival. The album’s only celebrity guest, Spiritualized leader J. Spaceman, is relegated to near-anonymous background harmonies. Fay’s transition suggests a radically time-collapsed echo of Bob Dylan’s career between the early '80s and the late '90s, as he moved from religious exaltation to end-times anxiety. "What on earth is happening? What have we done?" Fay mutters over a somber piano stomp during "Underneath the Sun". The song is an observation in two parts: Fay first finds wonder in the nature around him, where trees climb skyward and squirrels scavenge for their refuse. When his gaze turns to people, though, he sees only the threat of bullets and bombs and the suspicion that society will ruin everything around it. That same resentment creeps into "War Machine", a smoldering excoriation of humanity’s animal instinct to kill by funding an army it doesn’t question. And the beautiful ballad "The Freedom to Read" tells the tale of the court-ordered immolation of a 16th-century Protestant labeled a heretic for translating the Bible into English. It’s as if, three years after promising universal redemption on "The Healing Day" or exploring the magic of miracles on "Cosmic Concerto", Fay has accepted that his songs have yet to make the world any less bitter or more benevolent. But Who Is the Sender? runs deeper than blind kvetching: Fay’s Christianity, and his cautious optimism in its power, uplifts him. The gently rising "Order of the Day" treats the Book of Revelation like a balm. The banjo-backed "Bring It on Lord" is a prayer for peace and healing. Perhaps all this sounds off-putting and naïve, but on Who Is the Sender?, Fay emerges as the rare religious songwriter who talks about his God without imploring the audience to make it their God, too. His beliefs seem too personal for him to proselytize on their behalf, too wrapped up in his survival for him to justify them. On "Something Else Ahead", he even confesses that his doubts about religion have never really vanished but that maintaining his faith is his tool of perseverance. "Let’s just hope there’s something else ahead," he sings sweetly above circling strings, "that a life on Earth don’t just end." That sentiment resonates with the resurrection of Fay’s interrupted career. Who Is the Sender? effectively doubles his recorded output and moves him from the category of a curiosity who returned after a four-decade absence to make a third great album to someone perhaps capable of doing so in perpetuity. But Fay seems to have few regrets about the way things went, a question he addresses during the opener "The Geese Are Flying Westward". He follows the avian migration and wonders if he should have ventured far from home, too, if he would have been happier had he pursued his musical aspirations. But he concludes he’s grateful for the seasons and years he’s witnessed at home, the place that’s made the perspective of his late-life albums so very poignant.

2015-04-27T02:00:02.000-04:00

2015-04-27T02:00:02.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Dead Oceans

April 27, 2015

031eec74-8014-4825-83d5-a0d81ea7e8d1

Grayson Haver Currin

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

The Philadelphia rapper’s first project out of prison is a quick and powerful Meek sampler: the bustling street anthem, the croon-assisted sex jam, the tortured flashback.

The Philadelphia rapper’s first project out of prison is a quick and powerful Meek sampler: the bustling street anthem, the croon-assisted sex jam, the tortured flashback.

Meek Mill: Legends of the Summer EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meek-mill-legends-of-the-summer-ep/

Legends of the Summer EP

For 171 days, from November 2017 to April 2018, Meek Mill was detained at Pennsylvania’s Graterford Correctional Facility because the NYPD saw an Instagram video of the Philly rapper doing wheelies through Manhattan on a dirt bike. The probation violation stemmed from 2007 charges for drug dealing and weapons possession that have forced Meek to spend nearly all of his adult life under the eye of law enforcement. Meek would be the first to admit he isn’t blameless in his situation, but every mistake he made in his 20s—from failing to report his travel plans to getting in a fight at a St. Louis airport—was compounded by trying to survive in the streets at 19. He’s 30 now. This dirt bike infraction, seen by many as a miscarriage of justice, rallied many to his cause. He was visited in prison by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Allies popped up from all corners to voice their support: from his Roc Nation boss JAY-Z and frenemy turned rival Drake to Olympic athletes and the governor of Pennsylvania. At this year’s Super Bowl, the Philadelphia Eagles took the field to Meek’s “Dreams and Nightmares” intro—they won the game. With public support behind him, his two-to-four-year sentence was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, after a series of appeals. On his first day out, he attended a Philadelphia 76ers playoff game. Most of these extravagances have only been afforded Meek because he’s a prosperous celebrity rapper. He has become an inadvertent and unlikely paragon for criminal justice reform, specifically in sentencing and police conduct, and yet he is still an outlier: It’s hard to imagine that Meek Mill would be free today if he wasn’t Meek Mill. But true freedom is the right to be autonomous, the ability to live without oversight. “I don’t feel free. I ain’t feel free since I caught this case at the age of 19,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt in a “Dateline” special in April. It’s a sentiment echoed by “Millidelphia,” from his first post-prison release, Legends of the Summer: “They was screaming ‘Free Meek!’/Now Meek free, judge tryna hold me,” he raps exasperatedly about being denied a new trial for the 2007 conviction keeping him on probation. There’s an anxiety carried in these songs—as with the best Meek songs—like he doesn’t know how much time he has left on the outside. This new four-song EP plays like a Meek sampler: the bustling street anthem, the croon-assisted sex jam, the tortured flashback. And while there are plenty of face-offs with judges, it finds him largely celebrating a life out of the box in search of freedom, if not exoneration. For 2017’s Wins and Losses, Meek Mill redrew the lines for victory and defeat after his ill-fated battle with Drake, explaining that being outmaneuvered by a rap rival means little in the face of time served. That appraisal seems prescient now. The complete 180 from more mercurial fans who went from writing him off to demanding his release means he has more goodwill behind him now than ever. He capitalizes by returning to the same punchy tactics that have made him a great rapper for nearly a decade. “Who came and tripled his worth? Meek/Who shall inherit the Earth? Meek,” he shouts on the “Millidelphia.” Reuniting with longtime collaborator Jahlil Beats (the man behind hits like “Ima Boss,” “Amen,” and “Burn”) on “1am,” he luxuriates in life on the late-night circuits: V.I.P. for all the P.Y.T.s/Puffy up in the session, we doing B.I.G.s/I’m notorious just for sportin’ these Givenchys.” These aren’t quite his most engrossing or impactful songs, but they are among his most energizing. He has never quite foregrounded his experiences with prison culture the way he does with Miguel on “Stay Woke.” The song is topical, but it’s also a soul-bearing chronicle of a life spent in the revolving door of the justice system, an introspective look that uses the turmoil of his own experience as a lens through which to consider systematic imbalances. “It’s amazin’ this environment we was raised in/On them papers, one mistake and I’m gettin’ caged in,” he raps. “You gotta feel me, feel like the system tryna kill me/Got arrested and the charges F1 for popping wheelies, stay woke.” For all the EP’s chest-thumping, hate-me-now confidence, “Stay Woke” is Legends of the Summer’s beating heart. It is one of Meek’s best songs, well-written and well-rapped, performed as if in search of solace. With great aplomb and self-consciousness, he relives his waking nightmare with clear-eyes, takes stock of the young rappers making the same mistakes he did, takes on a racist judiciary, and asks more of his community. “How can I pledge allegiance to the flag/When they killin’ all our sons, all our dads?” he asks, before weighing the role the streets play in perpetuating this disparity: “I come from a place when you kill your own brother you can brag/Like he got bodies, but that’s a fad, no, that’s a fact.” Meek’s now a powerful symbol for the many ways our broken government over-penalizes those it disenfranchises. Even when faced with these insurmountable odds, the Philly rapper refuses to be defeated, delivering his verdict: “That’s impossible ’cause I’m unstoppable.” His conviction feels freeing.

2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Maybach Music Group / Atlantic

July 10, 2018

03258c05-48ed-4c26-bf0e-cbd25dde13cc

Sheldon Pearce

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

On his debut album, the Atlanta rapper/singer makes his strongest case yet that he is one of the foremost sources of rap that's as peculiar as it is pop. He also miraculously shows that it's still possible for Auto-Tune to be an interesting artistic tool.

On his debut album, the Atlanta rapper/singer makes his strongest case yet that he is one of the foremost sources of rap that's as peculiar as it is pop. He also miraculously shows that it's still possible for Auto-Tune to be an interesting artistic tool.

Future: Pluto

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16554-pluto/

Pluto

Rap has its eccentrics, and it has its pop stars, but as the genre has been pushed further and further out of the mainstream, it seems to have little room for artists that split the difference. Never has the phenomenon been more clear than on Nicki Minaj's Roman Reloaded, one of the most anticipated albums of the year from the genre's premier eccentric, but one that has such a clear delineation between out-there rap and bloodless pop conformity that it might as well ask you for your passport halfway through. Atlanta rapper/singer Future, a Dungeon Family blood relative who'd be as at home on "The Voice" as Cee-Lo, has made it his aim to bridge that gap, and with Pluto, his debut album, he makes his strongest case yet that he is one of the foremost sources of rap that's as peculiar as it is pop. Future's lineage is easy to follow, and the forebears of Pluto are pop stars that are (or were) divisive weirdos. His music pulls heavily from Lil Wayne's syrup-soaked ballads, T-Pain's robotic rapping turned singing, and Akon's illusions of stadium grandeur, but Pluto is far more familiar than it is formulaic. Future's ability to orbit those influences instead of cynically mining them means that his debut is much more an extension of those artists' groundwork than it is a monument built using their blueprints. Where T-Pain gave up rapping for singing or Wayne ping-ponged from one to the other (sometimes within the same song), Future turns the art of singing and rapping at the same time into a science. He also miraculously shows that it's still possible for Auto-Tune to be an interesting artistic tool. It's the latter that is Future's calling card, and it's what his singularity more or less hinges on. Before it was hijacked by T-Pain, Auto-Tune was initially used to paper over deficiencies in a singer's performance, but on Pluto, Future finds a multitude of ways for the software to accentuate and color emotion. On "Tony Montana", his breakout solo hit that is the album's most threatening-- though also its goofiest-- cut, he cuts the buzz of Auto-Tune by rapping with a slight hoarseness in his voice, and it allows the song to be as weary and paranoid as it is chilling. Then there are tracks like "Truth Gonna Hurt You" and "Neva End", a break up song and love song respectively where Future lets his voice crack and deteriorate. The former is a lament that Future sings with a hint of cheeriness, but the treatment of his voice imbues the song with an unmistakable heartsickness. On the latter he reinforces the strength of a relationship in the face of turmoil, and his raspy singing is the perfect punctuation, making it seem like he recorded the song immediately after an hour-long screaming match. His voice is never perfect, but that's explicitly the point. This push-pull between computerized precision and soul-baring imperfection has been explored before by other artists. So has Future's use of Auto-Tune as a license to affect street-true hardness while still writing an album that would be plied by "American Idol" contestants in an alternate universe where Atlanta swag rap was the biggest music in the country. But arguably no one has explored those contradictions so thoroughly and seamlessly across an entire album, at least since 808s & Heartbreak. It shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise either, as Future is a much smarter artist than his music would indicate at first blush. Take "You Deserve It", a song about himself that he sings to himself that hilariously comes directly after the stunner about his dream girl ("Turn on the Lights"), or "Long Live the Pimp", a Pimp C tribute that eschews the sounds of Texas in favor of being an especially banging Future song. The result is what may end up being the most singular rap album to hit Billboard in 2012. Future may soon flame out, but his current status as rap royalty is one of the best things in recent memory to happen to a genre that has almost wholly succumbed to sucking the singularity out of its nascent pop stars. Pluto is Future's album and no one else's, and though it will sound instantly recognizable, his personality, voice, and skewed take on pop-rap make it instantly different. No Stargate beats necessary.

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

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

Rap

Epic / A1 / Free Bandz

April 27, 2012

03278a99-dbee-4d99-95c5-58c75fd19716

Jordan Sargent

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

This shadowy UK outfit brings the ominous, hazy electro-dub and never gives too much away.

This shadowy UK outfit brings the ominous, hazy electro-dub and never gives too much away.

Hype Williams: One Nation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15212-one-nation/

One Nation

Hype Williams are, ostensibly, a London-based duo comprised of one Inga Copeland and one Roy Blunt. Except Inga's name might be Karen Glass, and Roy Blunt may actually be Roy Nnawuchi. It's possible neither exists; some have suggested Hype Williams may in fact be a much larger collective, while others have offered the name Denna Frances Glass as a potential culprit. When they perform live, they don elaborate masks, and are notoriously-- albeit understandably-- interview-averse. The vinyl version of One Nation, their latest, is a white record, tucked into a plain white sleeve in a glossy white cover. Even their name, Hype Williams, seems less an SEO-piggybacking attempt at easy nostalgia points than a pun on the very idea of "hype." There's an intentional blankness and an almost post-punky spirit of deconstruction to Hype Williams' image that does well by their stark music, a spacious, hazy, hip-hop-influenced electronic dub. As you'd imagine, Hype Williams don't exactly provide credits for One Nation, but they do take the time to shout out a couple of special guests: MDMA and blueberry kush. Despite a certain stoney splay, there's a weird solemnity to One Nation that belies the presence of these mood enhancers, an unsettling ominousness even in its floatier moments. Snatches of smeary g-funk, synth-pop, and monster-movie soundtracks sneak into the mix, but One Nation is sparse throughout, with most tracks consisting of little more than a beat and a bit of queasy synth. There are few vocals, fewer hooks; it's not quite ambient enough to slip completely into the background, but nothing's quite fleshed enough to demand full attention, and you're better off losing yourself in the drift of One Nation in total than attempting to settle on a highlight. In their rare interviews, Hype Williams have done what they can to distance themselves from this kind of half-there hypnagogy, and their aloofness sets them apart from much of the bedroom-borne haze of late. Melodies don't just waft, they meander, beats shuffle into unlikely grooves, and any hints of prettiness are suffused with a looming dread. But there's an intentionality to every gesture on One Nation. Even when the melodies threaten to lose their shape, they seem to bend just so, and the notes they're not playing seem every bit as important as the few they do. The negative space envelops like a fog; whoever's making this music has a producer's ear and editor's spirit, excising all unnecessary details while embellishing what little's left. At its best, One Nation sounds like a beat tape left to crackle for a decade in somebody's garage, a kind of post-Chronic spin on one of those far-out late 70s dub-inflected collaborative krautrock LPs. But other times it feels like a series of conceptual curios that seems to think holding the listener at arm's length might even be too close.

2011-03-16T02:00:04.000-04:00

2011-03-16T02:00:04.000-04:00

Electronic

Hippos in Tanks

March 16, 2011

03290ffa-9f25-4c0a-adb7-c6c31419dd2f

Paul Thompson

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

The second solo album from former Grandaddy frontman Jason Lytle begins much like his first, with a veiled statement about the state of his career, and ends with the kind of mock-epic album closer he does so well. But in between, Dept. contains frequently bracing explorations of the unexpected.

The second solo album from former Grandaddy frontman Jason Lytle begins much like his first, with a veiled statement about the state of his career, and ends with the kind of mock-epic album closer he does so well. But in between, Dept. contains frequently bracing explorations of the unexpected.

Jason Lytle: Dept. of Disappearance

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17178-dept-of-disappearance/

Dept. of Disappearance

Jason Lytle's second solo album begins much like his first solo album, with a veiled statement about the state of his career. On the title track of 2009's Yours Truly, the Commuter, he claims he was left for dead: "I could give two shits about what they said/ I may be limping, but I'm coming home." At the time it sounded like he was still bristling over the breakup of Grandaddy, the Modesto-based band that soundtracked Lytle's weird tales of space miners and lovelorn robots. The lines were vague enough, however, that you could appreciate the renewed sense of mission without getting caught up in any potential intraband politics. On "Department of Disappearance", which likewise opens and sets the tone for an album of the same name, Lytle explains, "I'll crawl into the mountains, I'll fall into obscurity/ A phantom on the landscape, a memory of what used to be." Is this an ultimatum of some sort? And is the titular institution really a secret society of veteran musicians from the 1990s, still tooling around years after their breakthrough albums and playing to dwindling audiences of aging fans? If Yours Truly announced Lytle's return, Department of Disappearance sounds like a musician embracing obscurity as perhaps the natural outcome of a career whose chief subject has been emotional, mechanical, and ecological entropy. There's nothing worse than an artist waxing bitter about his career, and to his credit Lytle doesn't sound self-pitying or entitled to more than his current lot. But Department of Disappearance does sound strangely complacent and monochromatic, offering no twists on the technorganic aesthetic he's been plying since Grandaddy were still a bedroom act. The album toggles between the mountains of Europe and the badlands of the American West, as Lytle indulges a bit of emotional mountaineering on "Last Problem of the Alps" and "Matterhorn". Geographically, this is new terrain for him, but musically Lytle is walking in his own footprints. He's climbed similar hills before, both with Grandaddy and as a solo artist. Once again he fashions widescreen panoramas out of instruments seemingly ill suited for the job: chintzy synths evoking Bierstadt landscapes, grotty guitars tracing the country's inexorable westward progress, saccharine strings coloring in complex feelings. This is, of course, Lytle's thing. And it's a good thing. He's done what few artists possess the vision or the tools to accomplish: He has devised a new combination of styles and instruments into a sound that is immediately recognizable as Lytleputian, and perhaps more impressively he has fashioned a unique perspective from which to write about himself and the world-- specifically America in all its mythic strangeness. Last year's reissue of Grandaddy's second album, The Sophtware Slump, reminded us how vibrant and weird that voice could be, and Department of Disappearance has the distinct disadvantage of following up that release, which provides an unflattering point of comparison for familiar, almost boilerplate songs like "Somewhere There's a Someone" and "Hangtown". If once he imagined a new world defined by millennial fears and technological detritus, on "Willow Wand Willow Wand" and "Get Up and Go" the naivety sounds forced, the sense of whimsy merely workmanlike. For every valley, however, there is a peak. "Young Saints" sets an uneasy tone with its creeping vocal melody, disembodied drums, and dark intimations of mortality: "Your ex-girlfriends, lost pets, and dead friends," he sings in his trademark deadpan. "No, they won't be hanging out with you again. You are gone!" It's intense and disquieting, yet it's the one song where Lytle sounds most present, with no character, robotic or otherwise, to absorb or soften those fears of absence. Similarly bleak, "Your Final Setting Sun"-- which was, according to Lytle, inspired by Cormac McCarthy-- recounts a killer's final taunts to a dying man: "I know you loved your life, but say goodbye, this is your final setting sun." Has Lytle ever sounded so cold-blooded? So musically malevolent or so emotionally hardened? As the drums barely keep pace with the frantic keyboard themes, his vocals take on a menacing quality that we've never heard from him before and that quite frankly I didn't dream he could muster: It's a bracing moment and completely unexpected, both the album's biggest risk and its biggest reward. Then Department veers into the valedictory closer "Gimme Click Gimme Grid", and we're back on sadly familiar ground. This is exactly the type of mock-epic album closer that Lytle does almost too well. Think "So You'll Aim Toward the Sky" off Sophtware Slump or "The Final Push to the Sum" off Sumday. But it sounds absolutely anticlimactic sequenced after "Your Final Setting Sun", which suggests a much more inventive and exciting artist than we get throughout most of the album. That song says more about Lytle's career than any veiled lyric could: If he can't push himself in new directions, he'll be stuck at his desk job, pushing paper for the Department of Disappearance forever.

2012-10-18T02:00:02.000-04:00

2012-10-18T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Anti-

October 18, 2012

032dc9ee-6970-403e-bb56-c88a5b6581e1

Stephen M. Deusner

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

This Montreal-based band touches on shoegaze and other 1990s signifiers but manages to craft a melodic squall all its own.

This Montreal-based band touches on shoegaze and other 1990s signifiers but manages to craft a melodic squall all its own.

No Joy: Ghost Blonde

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14929-ghost-blonde/

Ghost Blonde

No Joy was a band founded on the concept of distance. Starting out as a collaboration spanning almost the entire length of North America (co-principal Jasmine White-Glutz briefly took up residence in Los Angeles, while Laura Lloyd remained in Montreal), the duo sent tracks back and forth, and Mexican Summer eventually picked them up after hearing two songs on their MySpace page. Before long, White-Glutz moved back home, the band was praised by the always-enthusiastic Bethany Cosentino (whose tweet referred to No Joy as, "the best band ever"), expanded to a quartet, and recorded their debut album, all in less than a year after forming. Whoever says that long-distance relationships never work out should take Ghost Blonde for a spin. Distance is an ideal that seeps into the pores of every guitar strum and snare hit on the record. Lloyd and White-Glutz's airy vocals are pushed low into the mix, to the point where their voices resemble conversation from a foggy, half-remembered dream. The guitars, loud enough to obliterate everything within 50 yards, create a balmy atmosphere where lacerating riffs and blurry strumming shares face time with ear-piercing feedback. And this noise becomes just as much of a compositional tool as the actual notes summoned from their six-strings. Filing Ghost Blonde as shoegaze would be reductive, as the reference base is deeper than most of today's bands who work in that template. Lush, My Bloody Valentine, the Breeders, Sonic Youth, and even traces of Hole can be picked up from No Joy's sometimes-melancholy, sometimes-violent sounds. And while the list of references draws heavily from the 90s, the band displays a very uncommon sense of originality. "You Girls Smoke Cigarettes?" is a bass-driven tune with an addictive slurry chant during the verses and a chorus that explodes with harmony, followed by a destructive climax, breakdown, and bridge, all in just a little over two minutes. "Still" is an 80 MPH push featuring ethereal vocals not even trying to rise above the careening, bleating guitars that ping-pong all over the track. "Indigo Child" and "Pacific Pride" temper the righteous noise of the aforementioned songs. The former is a glacial stride into sadder territory offset by the low rumbling of noise that eventually reaches a crescendo by the end of the track, and the latter tests the band's sense of dynamics and succeeds wildly. "Distance" can be a pejorative term, as if the fact that certain things can't be held at a close range can feel defeating. But while Ghost Blonde can feel like it's keeping the listener at arm's length, further listens reveal a record full of vibrancy, the kind in which you soon find yourself fully immersed.

2011-01-17T01:00:02.000-05:00

2011-01-17T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

Mexican Summer

January 17, 2011

032e96c3-9069-476c-be48-e19856c6bffa

Martin Douglas

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

On their first project in 17 years, the voices and the wordplay of Styles P, Jadakiss, and Sheek Louch have aged not one bit since 2000, for better and for worse.

On their first project in 17 years, the voices and the wordplay of Styles P, Jadakiss, and Sheek Louch have aged not one bit since 2000, for better and for worse.

The Lox: Filthy America… It’s Beautiful

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22724-filthy-america-its-beautiful/

Filthy America… It’s Beautiful

There were innumerable cameos at the Bad Boy Family Reunion Tour, but as is often the case with nostalgia packages, “the inexorable march of time” stole the show. Shyne lip-synced “Bad Boyz” in exile from Belize. Lil’ Kim was as magnetic as ever, but tragically so, going blank during large portions of her past hits. While DMX and Ruff Ryders’ constant shirtlessness and bloody-knuckled Casio beats were a corrective to hip-hop’s sample-happy Shiny Suit era, with enough distance, they could all be lumped together as “late ’90s NYC rap.” And most bizarre of all were the once-estranged Lox screaming “if you glad that L-O-X is Ruff Ryders now!” during “Wild Out,” their first single after a nasty, public and possibly violent extrication from Bad Boy—referred to as “Rape'n U Records” on the subsequent We Are the Streets. Now signed to Roc Nation, the Lox are once again close to the locus of money, power and respect, affiliated with their third megastar-owned hip-hop conglomerate in as many albums. Their bizarre career is probably their biggest asset at this point and they have a hell of a story to tell. Filthy America...It’s Beautiful has little interest in telling it. No longer subject to the commercial expectations of their late-90s heyday, they should be able to talk directly to an audience for whom the first Lox album in nearly 17 years is “highly anticipated.” There’s enough time-stamped gossip in “What Else You Need to Know” to reward people who remember the narcissism of small differences fueling the D-Block and State Property beef and, yes, Sheek Louch utters the magic words “bring New York back.” More importantly, the voices and the wordplay of Styles P, Jadakiss, and Sheek have aged not one bit since 2000—no mean feat if you’ve tried to talk yourself into a recent Wu-Tang or DipSet project, or hell, just skip to Prodigy sounding like a wax figure of himself on “Hard Life.” Even within the narrow narrative structure on “What Else You Need to Know,” the chemistry between the trio is still a marvel. Jadakiss’ rasp remains one of hip-hop’s most indelible vocal instruments, a blank-faced menace even during the vast majority of Filthy America when he isn’t saying much of anything. Styles P’s wearied nihilism has naturally gotten more potent with age and as for Sheek...well, the bullish enthusiasm he shows for even his clumsiest rhymes is actually endearing at this point, providing an emotional immediacy to balance out his more reserved partners. He even knows he’s the third wheel—in fact, that’s exactly what he talks about on “What Else You Need to Know,” admitting he thought the “All About the Benjamins” beat was wack (they never had much of an ear for beats), weathering constructive criticism and chalking up his obvious exclusion from “Jenny from the Block” and “John Blaze” to knowing his role. You’d be hard pressed to find another example of a hardcore rapper taking an L with such dignity. All of this material would make for a fascinating interview on Hot 97, though it’s preceded by just that, the interminable “Stupid Questions” proving that the Lox are still the most tone deaf skit-makers in rap history. But because it’s a Lox track on a proper studio album, “What Else You Need to Know” is a reminder of the skill set separating great rappers from great songwriters. Like much of Filthy America, it’s saddled with an awkward hook and the kind of stainless steel, geographically non-specific, vaguely “futuristic” synth beats you typically hear from once commercially-viable rappers on the album after they’re no longer privy to A-list producers. Granted, Dame Grease and Pete Rock might be permanent A-listers to some, but their presence is only felt after reading the credits. And then there’s DJ Premier on the ironically titled “Move Forward.” If hearing Styles bitch about “mumbling rappers/DJs with the aux cord” still makes you want to pull irresponsible ATV tricks in celebration, it’ll be a pleasure to hear any Premo beat in 2016 because you know exactly what you’re getting. At the same time, you have to wonder what that’s worth when Premo’s 2016 output has been split between territorial flame-keepers like Royce 5'9 and remixes of Desiigner and Twenty One Pilots. The Lox are spared similar indignities here—Fetty Wap and Gucci Mane could churn out tracks like “The Agreement” and “Secure the Bag” ten times over in the span of a month and their appearances show the Lox have an interest in contemporary rappers without chasing contemporary trends. But maligned as they were for playing dress-up with both Bad Boy and Ruff Ryders—too grimy for the former, too conventional for the avant-Tunnel Banger phase of the latter—their commercial ambitions were the solution, not the problem. The Lox’s most beloved songs—“Money, Power and Respect,” “Wild Out,” “We Gonna Make It,” “Good Times”— provided state-of-the-art beats, ready-made hooks, and most importantly, direction for a group whose artistic zenith is probably a collection of radio freestyles. Otherwise, despite no longer being required to stuff a $17.99 compact disc to capacity, the Lox still have a way of making at least half of Filthy America feel like filler. They’re far more interesting characters than they let on: Styles P wrote a novel on his Blackberry and also opened a juice bar with Jadakiss. Surely the ins and outs of franchising would make for more interesting material than the “concept tracks” or production choices here, all of which seem designed to recall 1999 —“Hard Life” is Dame Grease blatantly Xeroxing “It’s Mine”; “Move Forward” is “Recognize Pt. II,” while “The Family,” “The Omen,” and the courtroom procedural “Filthy America” have precedents that can be easily identified by even casual rap consumers from the late ‘90s. But while both Styles and Jadakiss are capable of coming up with a scene-stealing guest verse or two every year—see: Schoolboy Q’s “Groovy Tony/Eddie Kane,” the “Ooouuu” remix—they know damn well that’s what keeps their career going at this point and they know better than to waste their best material here. The Lox have never lived up to their potential and they certainly aren’t going to start now.

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

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

Rap

Roc Nation

January 4, 2017

032fb779-891f-4725-9e18-7edf24d6fe93

Ian Cohen

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

After last year's hit "Video Games" and the endless remixes, leaks, think-pieces, and controversy that followed, it's finally here: the major-label debut from Lana Del Rey.

After last year's hit "Video Games" and the endless remixes, leaks, think-pieces, and controversy that followed, it's finally here: the major-label debut from Lana Del Rey.

Lana Del Rey: Born to Die

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16223-lana-del-rey/

Born to Die

What happens to a dream fulfilled? More specifically, an American dream fulfilled, rags turning to riches with the snap of a manicured finger, kissing James Dean in Gatsby's swimming pool, getting played on the radio. This is a central question animating Lana Del Rey's Born to Die. Our heroine has all the love, diamonds, and Diet Mountain Dew she could ask for, yet still sings, "I wish I was dead," sounding utterly incapable of joy. To paraphrase Liz Phair, if you get everything you wish for and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you. Given the waves of hype and backlash over the last six months, it can be easy to forget that we're here, first and foremost, because of a song. "Video Games" struck a nerve not just because it was an introduction to Del Rey's captivating voice but because it seemed to suggest something as-yet-unarticulated about the way we live today. Whatever her intention, as a metaphor about disconnect and detachment from our own desires, "Video Games" felt frank, pointed, and true, and it had a chord progression and melody to match. The ultimate disappointment of Born to Die, then, is how out of touch it feels not just with the world around it, but with the simple business of human emotion. The singer born Elizabeth "Lizzy" Grant may have made her mark with a grainy homemade video that brought to mind other grainy homemade videos in the indie sphere, but the slick sound and sentiment of "Radio", Born to Die's most straightforward statement of purpose ("Baby love me 'cause I'm playing on the radio/ How do you like me now?"), places it firmly within the realm of big-budget chart pop. Born to Die was produced by Emile Haynie, whose credits include Eminem, Lil Wayne, and Kid Cudi, and the album's impressively lush atmosphere might be the one thing that will unite its detractors and apologists. The album's recurring themes ooze out of every note: sex, drugs, and glitter hover in the yawning atmosphere around Del Rey's breathy vocals. There are strings and trip-hop beats and bits of 1950s twang, and the melodies, assembled with assistance from hired-gun songwriters like Mike Daly (Plain White Ts, Whiskeytown) and Rick Nowels (Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth") are built to stick. But for an album that aims for fickle radio listeners, many of its pop signifiers feel stale and ill-fitting. On "Million Dollar Man", Del Rey drawls like a highly medicated Fiona Apple, and "Diet Mountain Dew" and "Off to the Races" aim for chatty, sparkling opulence, this singer doesn't have the personality to bring it off. The album's point of view-- if you could call it that-- feels awkward and out of date. Whether you take a line like "Money is the reason we exist/ Everybody knows that it's a fact/ Kiss kiss" with a 10-carat grain of salt is up to you, but even as a jab at the chihuahua-in-Paris-Hilton's-handbag lifestyle, it feels limp and pointless (unlike, say, Lily Allen's mock-vapid but slyly observant 2008 single "The Fear"). Still, the dollar signs in its eyes aren't an inherent strike against Born to Die: Even in the wake of an international debt crisis and the Occupy movement, it was hard not to fall for Watch the Throne. But that's because Jay and Kanye made escapist fantasy sound so fun. Del Rey's gem-encrusted dreamworld, meanwhile, relies on clichés ("God you're so handsome/ Take me to the Hamptons") rather than specific evocations. It's a fantasy world that makes you long for reality. And speaking of fantasy: The conversation surrounding Lana Del Rey has underscored some seriously depressing truths about sexism in music. She was subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny-- about her backstory and especially her appearance-- that's generally reserved for women only. But the sexual politics of Born to Die are troubling too: You'd be hard pressed to find any song on which Del Rey reveals an interiority or figures herself as anything more complex than an ice-cream-cone-licking object of male desire (a line in "Blue Jeans", "I will love you till the end of time/ I would wait a million years," sums up about 65% of the album's lyrical content). Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique ("This is what makes us girls/ We don't stick together 'cause we put our love first"), she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are ("Don't cry about it/ Don't cry about it.") In terms of its America-sized grandeur and its fixation with the emptiness of dreams, Born to Die attempts to serve as Del Rey's own beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, but there's no spark and nothing at stake. The critic Ellen Willis once wrote of Bette Midler: "Blatant artifice can, in the right circumstances, be poignantly honest, and she expresses the tension between image and inner self that all of us-- but especially women-- experience." But Born to Die never allows tension or complexity into the mix, and its take on female sexuality ends up feeling thoroughly tame. For all of its coos about love and devotion, it's the album equivalent of a faked orgasm-- a collection of torch songs with no fire.

2012-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

2012-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Interscope

January 30, 2012

033042c0-2d9d-4861-b2bd-1b1c820ba3de

Lindsay Zoladz

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

After a debut littered with yearning club jams, hits penned for pop stars, and a romance with the singer Ciara, Future has come to be understood as one of his generation’s premier romantics. His new mixtape, produced in full by Atlanta trap legend Zaytoven, finds him speaking to a specific personal turmoil without worrying about whether it’ll be relatable or even likable.

After a debut littered with yearning club jams, hits penned for pop stars, and a romance with the singer Ciara, Future has come to be understood as one of his generation’s premier romantics. His new mixtape, produced in full by Atlanta trap legend Zaytoven, finds him speaking to a specific personal turmoil without worrying about whether it’ll be relatable or even likable.

Future: Beast Mode

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20166-future-beast-mode/

Beast Mode

After a debut album littered with yearning club jams like "Turn on the Lights" and "Neva End", warm hits penned for pop stars, and a whirlwind romance with singer Ciara that produced a few pretty duets and an adorably well-dressed baby, Future has come to be understood, perhaps prematurely, as one of his generation’s premier romantics. His story was always more complex than that, though, as we came to understand over six months in 2014, when our rap Romeo went from "Girl when I’m with you, feel like a champion" to "Girl you know you like a pistol, you a throw away." Things soured for Future and Cici somewhere between the April release of Honest and Halloween’s Metro Boomin produced Monster, and the callous nature of his writing post-breakup has given the lie to the Nicholas Sparks perception that’s clouded his major label career. On Beast Mode, produced in full by Atlanta trap maestro Zaytoven, Future retreats further into the flashy player lifestyle presented on pre-album mixtape highlights Dirty Sprite and True Story. He’s colder than he’s been since 2012’s Astronaut Status’ "My Ho 2" on cuts like "Lay Up" and "Peacoat", bragging on the former about passing a hook-up off "like a lay up" and glibly remarking that he "spent a check on that pussy" on the latter. At first it seems like a continuation of the aggy sexual and emotional revenge tactics of Monster (see: "My Savages"’ "You think I’m sitting up depressed?/ I’m somewhere counting up me a check," "Throw Away"’s "I was fucking on a slut and I was thinking about you") but the deeper you delve into Beast Mode, the more it comes off as the vice grip headache and hangover to Monster’s seedy rager. At the outset Beast Mode is somewhat mechanical, Future locking into whirring synth arrangements and churning out three-minute nuggets of dopeboy grit. Opener "Ooooh", Juvenile tribute "Aintchu", and closer "Forever Eva" coolly channel the inherent catchiness of mixtape Future, the half cast off, half accomplished greatness he exuded before he began to write more keenly for mass consumption. But when Zay tosses out something darker he gets it back in kind. You can hear Zaytoven catch Future in the chest at the top of "No Basic" as the track billows in and he ad libs, "You gotta feel the pain of a kid in the ghetto, the heart of the ghetto" before laying out a list of hard hits he took in getting to the money ("Took all the pain and I ran with it.../ I took a few losses and ran with it"). On "Just Like Bruddas", he’s suspended in a daze of Percocet, Xanax, and promethazine self-medication amid a bad press cycle of his own design as his producer dances around a gutting, intricate piano line underfoot. Future and Zaytoven have collaborated quite a bit in the past but it’s apparent that Zay is bringing something different to the table this time and that it’s bringing something else of Future. Zay’s best works (Gucci Mane’s "Bricks" and Usher’s "Papers", to name just two) are wonky collisions of trap drums and church organs armed with a fleet musicality that the bullish simplicity of the Lex Lugers and the druggy atmospherics of the Mike WiLLs have often lacked. Recent Zaytoven productions have eased off a measure of the emotionalism of his playing, though, resulting in still great, still quirky winners like Migos’ "Versace" and Shy Glizzy’s "Catch a Body" with hooks that grip but don’t much pull. Beast Mode feels heavier, particularly in the stretch from "No Basic" to "Where I Came From", a succession of dour compositions rendered quietly devastating by Zay’s soulful riffing around the central themes and by Future’s matching reflective malaise. Their deepening chemistry is Beast Mode’s boon. Jutting outside his hitmaking responsibilities has allowed Future to make music that speaks to a very specific personal turmoil without worrying about whether it’ll be relatable or even likable. The feed-the-charts-feed-the-streets formula of Honest worked as well as it possibly could’ve last year, but lately, Future’s feeding himself, taking inventory of his journey, and learning how to navigate a very public rough patch. The casual sex doesn’t seem fun, the recreational pharmaceutical use feels ominous, and there’s a distinctly mournful air to the proceedings. Though he’ll only tacitly admit as much, our player entrepreneur is hurt, and Beast Mode’s heavy-hearted sounds assist him in sorting through it just as Monster’s menace helped him turn spite to fuel.

2015-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

2015-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

self-released

January 29, 2015

03338668-111d-4a2d-ad14-f3e659d4fc14

Craig Jenkins

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

Damon McMahon's Locust release recalls other claustrophobic, inner-space travelers like Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Skip Spence.

Damon McMahon's Locust release recalls other claustrophobic, inner-space travelers like Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Skip Spence.

Amen Dunes: DIA

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13476-dia/

DIA

The fact that Damon McMahon (aka Amen Dunes) recorded DIA while holed up in a Catskills cabin is so fitting it feels like a myth. The album's claustrophobic, voice-in-head tone immediately evokes inner-space travelers like Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Skip Spence. And McMahon's simple songs, fuzzy guitar, and buzzing vocals all sound like the product of some solitary brain, sitting in some isolated cabin, buried deep inside some dark forest. It's telling, though, that after he made DIA, McMahon moved to Beijing: as the album progresses, it reveals a musical vision reaching beyond the boundaries of a lonely woods. Early on, his stylistic umbrella expands to let in a Suicide/Spacemen 3 loop, the eerie howls of early Royal Trux, and the post-Barrett folk of Robyn Hitchcock. But his farthest-flung and strongest reference point proves to be the underground sounds of 1980s New Zealand. As McMahon's tunes sharpen and deepen, he becomes like an American cousin to Kiwi songsmiths Alastair Galbraith, Chris Knox, and brothers Graeme and Peter Jefferies. The key to how McMahon can evoke those greats and still bring some of himself to the mix is his voice. On the surface his singing sounds raw and monotone, pitched in a droning hum and distorted at the edges. But listen closely and you can hear subtle changes that give DIA a surprising diversity. On "White Lace", his singing rises sharply, pulling his guitar along with it. He alternates tough moans and eerie falsettos in the Barrett-ish "Castles", and ghosts of Knox and Galbraith emerge via his openly earnest croons in "No Shot". By album's end, McMahon's meditative hums are practically all that's left, like shells on a beaten shore glistening in the sunset. "Glisten" is a relative term here-- overall, DIA is still a rather constricted album, with a tonal range that's pretty narrow despite how much McMahon mines from it. But the record does hold indications of how wide his sound could become, particularly the perfectly-crafted bit of psych-folk called "Two Thousand Islands" that pops up near album's end. Here, his modest voice melds beautifully into some clucking, Velvet Underground-ish guitar. That alone is enough to make you look forward to what McMahon comes up with next, perched above a temple in Beijing rather than tucked away in a Northeastern woodland.

2009-09-21T02:00:04.000-04:00

2009-09-21T02:00:04.000-04:00

Rock

Locust

September 21, 2009

0337ee4c-abb8-4506-b328-f10256cc5da8

Marc Masters

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

After years of searching, Ariana Grande has found her true voice. Sweetener is an exemplary pop album, radiating with low-key joy and newfound love.

After years of searching, Ariana Grande has found her true voice. Sweetener is an exemplary pop album, radiating with low-key joy and newfound love.

Ariana Grande: Sweetener

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariana-grande-sweetener/

Sweetener

Ariana Grande’s journey from child star to “human cupcake” to heir apparent to the diva throne has been centered around discovering the song that defines her. Though her soprano is instantly recognizable—floating from sultry melismas to whistle singing, elocution be damned—locating her in the hits has been difficult at times. Her last two albums, 2014’s My Everything and 2016’s Dangerous Woman, were solid but musically scattershot, filled with trendy guests and weighed down by her bad-girl alter-ego. For Grande to ascend to the next creative level, she’d need more than just the range. Sweetener, Grande’s first album since the 2017 bombing at her Manchester concert, feels more honest and distinct than any of her past work. Perhaps because tragedy has a way of revealing our true selves, the 25-year-old star finally allows herself to just take things as they come. She doesn’t force the heart-wrenching emotion of it all into tearful ballads and message-heavy anthems, but instead lets the low-key joy of the title track radiate across the album. The best parts of Sweetener have her looking for hope and stumbling upon the glow of new love. By the time you reach the interlude about her comedian fiancé Pete Davidson called “Pete Davidson,” where the word “happy” is repeated 22 times in just over a minute, whatever cynical snapshot of their quickie engagement that may have formed between That Lollipop Photo and reports of Big Dick Energy has fallen away. Let the yung diva love in peace. Grande co-wrote more songs than usual (10 out of 15) and formed a clear bond with Pharrell Williams, who serves as a songwriter and producer across Sweetener’s stronger half. His funk-lite idiosyncrasies set a bright tone and help elevate the record’s more conventional song structures. Grande and Williams leave themselves plenty of room to play around with texture in clever ways, particularly when it comes to layered vocals and skittering percussion. Set to little more than panting, tongue clicks, and keyboard orbs, “R.E.M” finds novel ways for Grande to expand her vocal repertoire. Singing in a stream of consciousness style about the man in her dreams, she flows in and out of R&B crooning, doo-wop vocal runs, gospel harmonizing, cheeky sing-talking, and a surprisingly precise rap flow (“’Scuse me, um? I love you/I know that’s not the way to start a conversation, trouble”). She doesn’t even need a money note to stamp her mark. The non-Pharrell tracks come courtesy of past Grande collaborators like Max Martin, Ilya, and TB Hits, and largely tap into the ongoing trap influence on the Top 40. Not one of them is outright filler, but an ode to a toxic ex like “Everytime” is markedly less original—the kind of bad-decision-making set to ominous thumping that’s all over the charts. Grande’s got her own new rules, though: She tweaks the daydreaming of Imogen Heap into the throbbing EDM twinkle of “Goodnight N Go” and turns the melancholy of Drake into a meditation on anxiety with “Breathin.” Neither is a direct extension of her work with Williams, but both feel like natural fits on an album all about finding the light. Grande may have delivered more of a full-album vibe than a bangers-filled juggernaut, but there is at least one career-defining moment here—the song she has been looking for, wrapped in an unassuming package. Sweetener ends with “Get Well Soon,” the sort of freeform, self-help soul ballad you’d maybe expect to round out a Beyoncé opus. Anyone who knows how gracefully Grande handled the horrific events at her Manchester show last year will recognize an equally graceful response to her own emotional aftermath in this song. Channeling all the conflicting voices in her head, Grande sings striking downbeat counter-melodies of “girl what’s wrong witchu come back down.” She soothes herself with her own luscious harmonies, urges fans to take care of one another, and modestly assures that anyone can work their way to the top. Like much of Sweetener, the song is musically sparse but encompasses a kaleidoscope of vocal tones. It is here, four albums in, that the true multitudes of her voice, and by extension herself, blossom.

2018-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Republic

August 21, 2018

03392dc0-7415-431a-b78e-b1c7e478c3e8

Jill Mapes

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

Sebadoh's most focused album, originally released in 1994, is given a deluxe 2xCD reissue with added singles and outtakes.

Sebadoh's most focused album, originally released in 1994, is given a deluxe 2xCD reissue with added singles and outtakes.

Sebadoh: Bakesale [Deluxe Edition]

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15522-bakesale-deluxe-edition/

Bakesale [Deluxe Edition]

This Bakesale reissue is actually part of Lou Barlow's second unexpected reunion of the last decade. The first, of course, was his thought-it-would-never-happen rapprochement with longtime estranged partner J. Mascis in Dinosaur Jr. And then Sebadoh, the one-man-project turned full-blown band, found its second and best-loved line-up coming together again late last decade. The early Sebadoh records were purposefully fuzzy, mumbly things, full of raw pop yearning that was sometimes pretty hard to make out through all the hiss and crackle. Though they were key documents in the rise of lo-fi as a distinct movement in 1990s American indie, it's probably not coincidental that the word "weed" appeared prominently in several of the band's early releases, which often literally sound like the product of a baked mind and a four-track, flip-flopping between silliness and vein-opening. As Sebadoh became more of a democracy, the clashing urges of the various songwriters (Barlow, bassist Jason Loewenstein, second guitarist Eric Gaffney, who left before Bakesale) turned the full-band's first few records into sometimes frustrating (the CD skip button was made for these sort of jumbles) and sometimes beguiling (they had a real way with an anthemic pop-punk hook when they wanted to) collisions of styles. Pure indie-pop instincts fought with an urge toward experimental cassette tape fucking around. Bouncy power-chord jams rubbed up against shameless acoustic mopery. By Bakesale in 1994, they'd already written a couple of undeniable anthems with "Gimme Indie Rock" and "Brand New Love", the latter an instant-classic covered by peers like Superchunk in what seemed like seconds after it's release. But Bakesale was the first Sebadoh album where the power-chords and anthems seemed to win out. It was, and remains, their most focused and purely pleasurable record. The early- and mid-90s were great years for albums that brought punk's two-minute punchiness together with the earnest relationship laments that briefly defined that slippery terrain known as indie rock. And Bakesale is one of the era's best. If it's got fewer romance-gone-wrong epics than Superchunk's Foolish and lacks the emphatic guitar-snarl of Archers of Loaf's Icky Mettle, it combines bits of both tendencies into 15 songs that rarely outstay their welcome. Unlike Sebadoh's scattershot early albums, it works as a brief, memorable whole. The band probably wasn't trying to make a statement-- that sort of ran counter to the whole aesthetic back then-- but by tightening up and aiming for clarity, they managed one anyway. "Feels good just to bitch about it," from "Magnet's Coil", is one of those lines that defines a certain part of early indie's appeal, where kids-like-you kvetched about their foibles and fears in an unpretentious way. But the album's frantic pace, where even the slow songs feel like urgent expulsions of heartbreak, defines the other side of indie's appeal. At its best, all that emoting was delivered with a healthy shot of energy that felt necessary given the sluggish tempos of alt-rock radio at the time. Bakesale sounds a little brighter on this remaster, though this isn't an album where you're really looking for crisp and distinct-in-the-mix instrumental interplay. Its opening three-song blast, all tumbling drums and jittery-but-beefy noise-pop guitar, is an obvious attempt to grab the attention of a new generation of kids who'd sprang up to embrace feelings-and-feedback. But even the somber stuff, like the "Not a Friend" to "Dreams" run early on, features strong, clear hooks instead of burying things in murk. This isn't to say the album is clean, at least not in the way indie records routinely are these days. But it's also not "lo-fi" in the indistinct or noise-obliterated way we've come to know. Without sacrificing the music's rough edges, the band was up enough on its hook-game that "Rebound" briefly hung around modern rock radio, Barlow's first unexpected minor-league hit until Folk Implosion's "Natural One" became the really unexpected hit a few years later. So Bakesale itself remains a strong and lovable essay on 90s indie's charms. But what of the expected and extensive bonus material? Well, in bearing-down to make a no-filler album, it's pretty clear that Sebadoh's goof-off and boo-hoo sides went into the singles, EPs, and ancillary material from the same era. Tunes (using the word very loosely) like "MOR Backlash", "Foreground", and "Drumstick Jumble" sound like the "wacky" bedroom sound-collage filler they would have been if they'd been included on Bakesale, and acoustic demo takes of "Not a Friend" and "Mystery Man" prove how quickly charming sensitivity can give way to unfortunate sad-sack territory when you strip away the electric oomph of the album versions. (Though the acoustic "Magnet's Coil" and "Rebound" prove they could hit you without any amplification.) Despite a few strong songs like "Punching Myself in the Face Repeatedly, Publicly" and "Sing Something/Plate of Hatred" that can almost stand with the album's best, these Bakesale add-ons will mostly be of value to those who loved Sebadoh's first few years of all-over-the-place wildness, but it's not as if their second-disc inclusion can dull the parent album's punch.

2011-06-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-06-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Sub Pop

June 14, 2011

0339793b-7abd-4a95-ad5e-4bb2b0d4c634

Jess Harvell

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

Whether the motivations stem from a Derrideian desire to transform our monsters into pets, a post-feminist\n\ need to latch ...

Whether the motivations stem from a Derrideian desire to transform our monsters into pets, a post-feminist\n\ need to latch ...

50 Cent: Get Rich or Die Tryin'

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3045-get-rich-or-die-tryin/

Get Rich or Die Tryin'

Whether the motivations stem from a Derrideian desire to transform our monsters into pets, a post-feminist need to latch onto a lost sense of dominant masculinity, the streets' unquenchable thirst for heroes, or simply a quest for a compelling urban narrative, hip-hop's obsession with the gangsta has dominated the genre for more than a decade. It has resulted in political pundits-- many, it must be noted, with latently racist agendas-- dismissing the entire culture as violent, misogynistic, and ultimately destructive. Stylistically, gangsta is a mesh of Cinema Verite and action blockbusters, where the grime and moral ambivalence of the crack trade clash with the unmitigated bravado of playa anthems. At its best, gangsta delves into these contradictions-- the pull between community and wealth, morality and survival-- with a deftness and wit alternately charming and horrifying. Unfortunately, Get Rich or Die Tryin' rarely reaches these pinnacles; for most of the album's duration, 50 wallows in the genre's clichés. The wit is sparse, the details are slim, and the threats are hollow. This isn't as much a moral quarrel as it is one of thematic development. Biggie came with the soul, Pac came with the charisma, L. had the wit, and Nas had the words. But, with the exception of a few quality verses sprinkled here and there, 50 strikes as a parody of these masters, and does little on his debut to establish a persona of his own. He doesn't delve into the character of the gangsta any deeper than the prosaism he spits, and while he obviously has an excellent vocal cadence and a finely tuned ear, his lyrics lack the textured imagery and dexterity of themes necessary to sustain interest over the course of a full album. In perhaps his biggest misstep, 50 Cent eschews a world inhabited by real people doing real shit for most of Get Rich, instead relying on generalized threats, proclamations of invincibility, and calls for pussy. Even the threats and declarations, bereft of the violent, pull-no-punches absolutism of Big L.'s early horrorcore, seem sanitized for Middle America. To put it bluntly, 50's rap sounds cold and mechanical, as though he were paralyzed by the pressures of hype or the prospect of his album being used as evidence against him in his trial for alleged weapons possession; the album sees him alternately declaring that he cares/doesn't care whether the D.A. hears these tracks. Yet, for all the flaws in 50 Cent's persona, Get Rich or Die Tryin' isn't without its redeeming qualities. For one, the album offers a handful of great singles (obviously: "In Da Club", "Wanksta"), anchored by his distinctive, rolling drawl. Loping beats and Caribbean Casios adorn "P.I.M.P." while 50 flosses that misogynistic swagger; trigger-happy snares and organ punches cry out from the Dre-produced highlight "Heat". Yet, none of the tracks touch his appearance on 1999's In Too Deep soundtrack-- even while its fish-in-a-barrel attacks on virtually every platinum-selling artist of the last five years smacked of Eminem strategies, "How to Rob (An Industry Nigga)" factored heavily into the anticipation surrounding Get Rich, offering a glimpse of the juggernaut he might become. In the meantime, the production work remains Get Rich's strong suit, boasting contributions from Sha Money XL, Megahertz, Rockwilder, Kon Artis, and both Eminem's and Dr. Dre's crews. Dre's team drops four tracks, each supreme examples of the raw ingenuity and virtuosity that, beyond the killer rhymes, made 2001 such a visceral, addictive party record. He also proves that, though rarely as experimental as Timbaland or as self-consciously high-tech as the Neptunes, he can still drop a hit to rival either of them, and with half as many layers. The bounce on "In Da Club" is straight-up irresistible, Dre at both his minimalist best and most deceptively infectious. Still, 50 just isn't quite there yet. Had he offered more tracks that showcased his talents quite as tangibly as "How to Rob (An Industry Nigga)" alongside the massive radio hits bumping from every inner-city Escalade, Get Rich or Die Tryin' very well might have been the landmark achievement it's being touted as. But as his character presently lacks the dynamism and depth required for that elusive gangsta magnetism that's a prerequisite for notoriety, 50 goes down as simply a decent MC with a wrenching back story, whose potential landed him a gig with the world's dopest beatmakers and the hype machine that shot the Great White Way into the pop culture stratosphere.

2003-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00

2003-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00

Pop/R&B / Rap

Interscope / Shady / Aftermath

March 4, 2003

033acdb2-2f27-4bc7-9fcf-47e7bfa8dc14

Pitchfork

The London artist’s surprising second album pivots from twinkly, futuristic electro-pop to nostalgic guitar anthems for the bummer generation.

The London artist’s surprising second album pivots from twinkly, futuristic electro-pop to nostalgic guitar anthems for the bummer generation.

Mura Masa: R.Y.C.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mura-masa-ryc/

R.Y.C.

To be a young person in 2020 is to feel deeply lonely, politically distressed, and rattled with anxiety. It is also, perhaps as a result, to be obsessively nostalgic—for sitcoms, tracksuits, even old memes—clinging to memories and their soothing power. Mura Masa can testify to all of the above. The 23-year-old artist and producer born Alex Crossan recently told Zane Lowe that he spends “all his free time playing old video games, watching cartoons, and eating cereal, arrested development-style,” and revisiting the music that shaped his youth. All this rearview mirror-gazing laid the foundation for Mura Masa’s sophomore album, R.Y.C. (Raw Youth Collage), a meta-commentary about Gen Z’s fixation with the past. The Guernsey native recycles the sounds that he grew up on—a mix of post-punk, Britpop, emo, and French house—and turns them into contemporary internet-kid anthems about surviving adolescence. It’s a surprising stylistic U-turn for Mura Masa, who is best known as a forward-thinking electronic-pop producer. His debut mixtape paired off-kilter beats with vaguely Japanese flutes and strings, and his first album pinned big voices like A$AP Rocky and Charli XCX into the futuristic corners of UK club music. In both, the songs were tinny and distorted, rich with negative space. R.Y.C., in contrast, is a concept-forward guitar album that explodes with sound and feeling. Taking cues from artists like Justin Vernon, Kevin Parker, and Damon Albarn, all multi-instrumentalists who front larger projects, Crossan takes on the roles of a band, playing guitar, drums, and bass, and singing on nearly every song. Unlike on his last LP, where Crossan’s guests nearly overshadowed him, the featured artists here—mostly young, DIY, and British—fit neatly into his creative vision. They also drive home the point that R.Y.C. is neither a tribute record nor a wistful toast to the ’90s; in fact, it’s only loosely retrospective. The album’s strongest and most affecting moments, such as the Ellie Rowsell-assisted “Teenage Headache Dreams,” draw on sounds and textures from our recent memory to color a picture that’s unmistakably now. The album unfolds like a tug-of-war between two coping mechanisms: yearning for the past or passivity against the future. Crossan illustrates this conflict by toggling between two moods: He’s hyperactive and all-caps on “Deal Wiv It,” featuring Slowthai, a yelping, rambunctious rant against gentrification and culture’s oppressively cyclical nature; he’s dazed and meditative on “Today (feat. Tirzah),” a warped, looping bedroom ballad that numbs in its repetition, mirroring the habitual dread of online life. Where R.Y.C. succeeds—and where Crossan reveals a real point of view—is in his ultimate rejection of these initial frameworks in favor of something more fluid, a hybrid space in which these sounds, stylings, and emotional responses work together. This opens the field up for a few left turns. “In My Mind,” a psychedelic electro-folk song about distrusting your memory, gets submerged in a well of distorted synths and post-dubstep trembles. “Teenage Headache Dreams,” featuring Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice, swings from soaring pleas to hushed recollections to a frenzied, electronic head rush. And “I Don’t Think I Can Do This Again,” at first a tender pop song with Clairo, suddenly veers underground when three iconic chords wave in the rave. (The sample was popularized by Basement Jaxx in 2001 but written by Gary Numan in 1979. Crossan, who has two autistic brothers, has said that Numan, an introverted songwriter with Asperger’s syndrome, is one of the artists he most identifies with.) In the studio Crossan is less reserved, nudging genres and eras up against each other like he’s introducing friends at a party, highlighting what makes them unique while searching for common ground. In doing so, he generally avoids the elementary mawkishness of other recent emo-dance attempts (see: the Chainsmokers) and sometimes gives the featured artist new dimensions. Slowthai, already an invigorating rap force, sounds even fiercer in the fuzzy clutches of post-punk. Similarly, Rowsell’s natural melancholy morphs into heady hopefulness in the ecstatic glow of synth pop and electro. Mura Masa occasionally trips on cliché and stumbles into pastiche. The platitudinous “Live Like We’re Dancing,” featuring Georgia, feels like an amateurish Robyn knock-off, and the disposable Ned Green interlude about his teenage girlfriend’s bedroom scans as a schmaltzy, faux-earnest play on listener emotion. On “vicarious living anthem,” Crossan disguises his feeble voice in a haze of fuzz and Auto-Tune but can’t escape his fatuous lyrics (“Everyone can be who they want to be!”), predictable guitar melodies, and juvenile overtones that feel contrived and stale. Nostalgia is most powerful when it takes us somewhere new. “No Hope Generation,” the project’s snappy, sarcastic centerpiece, achieves this. Harnessing the bratty self-deprecation of late-’90s pop-punk and the anxious shuffle of drum’n’bass, Crossan sets off on a 2020 anxiety trip through Gen Z’s preferred methods of self-care: an endless scroll of memes and meds wrapped in safe, sunshiny arrangements. “Everybody do the no-hope generation/The new hip sensation craze sweeping the nation,” he sings archly, addressing generational depression like it’s making the rounds on TikTok. The implication isn’t that all this malaise doesn’t matter, but rather that, like viral dances, music trends, and precious youth, it won’t last. “I feel so relaxed/I feel so relaxed/I feel so relaxed,” he insists suspiciously after asking for a bottle and gun. There’s something about the song’s casual angst and playful duplicitousness that feels the most like teendom—restless, reckless, fleeting. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Polydor / Anchor Point

January 22, 2020

033c7e59-4795-4b30-94fc-4aa495a7023e

Megan Buerger

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

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Creedence Clearwater Revival’s improbable stardom with 1970’s Cosmo’s Factory.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Creedence Clearwater Revival’s improbable stardom with 1970’s Cosmo’s Factory.

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Cosmo’s Factory

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/creedence-clearwater-revival-cosmos-factory/

Cosmo’s Factory

The four hirsute, sheepish men of Creedence Clearwater Revival were greeted as conquerors when they arrived in London in April 1970. From humble beginnings in suburban San Francisco, the quartet had ascended, in barely a year, to the absolute height of late-’60s rock stardom. They’d headlined Woodstock, released an ongoing run of multi-platinum albums and singles, and in 1969, did what seemed impossible at the time: They outsold the Beatles. They looked hale and healthy, too, muscular but bashful dudes in Army surplus jackets and flannel shirts. They lacked any real group personality or public image beyond tough-guy smiles and ubiquitous hits. Meanwhile, the Beatles were looking lurid. Since 1968, the rumors were all about heroin and bitter interpersonal squabbles. Just as Creedence arrived to begin their first European tour, Paul McCartney released advance copies of his first solo album to the media alongside a “self-interview” that referred to his “break with the Beatles.” There was suddenly no one left to outsell. For those next two weeks in April, Creedence did what they always did: played an unchanging set for one adoring audience after another, then refused encores. (Their shows were so consistent that they famously released a “Live at the Royal Albert Hall” record that was actually recorded in Oakland). This was John Fogerty’s policy, one of an increasing number of rules that he’d created to match his total control over their group’s songs, production, and finances. His bandmates—drummer Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, bassist Stu Cook, and Fogerty’s brother Tom on rhythm guitar—went home to the Bay Area with wonderful memories of their self-taught bashing ringing out in opera houses. But they also remembered standing just offstage, thousands of new fawning converts screaming for more, and their leader expending all his clout just to deprive them of that worship for some meaningless personal code. That was Creedence Clearwater Revival in spring and summer of 1970, as they finished and released their fifth album, Cosmo’s Factory. They had started playing music together in middle school and had been slugging their way through a music career for more than a decade in various iterations. There was the studio session backing an over-the-hill doo-wop singer, the years with Tom on lead vocals, the costumed jangly years as the Golliwogs. Having now achieved hard-won but revelatory success, they were still plagued by the same stubborn-garbage, masculine hardwiring that they’d been carrying since adolescence. They were all raw nerves and personal vendettas but were operating musically like one four-limbed brain. You must remember: Literally and figuratively, they were brothers. When you hear one of those songs, you know the ones—in Vietnam movies, The Big Lebowski, classic rock radio, your uncle’s radio by the grill—you’re hearing bone-deep, childhood-borne closeness and codependency. They learned how to play instruments together, how to cultivate a discerning musical taste, how to give their music that elusive, ineffable “in-between” that their bluesman and R&B heroes had. They started with squaresville garage-band dance-party stuff, then slowly absorbed Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Bakersfield country, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Roy Orbison, Muddy Waters. John Fogerty grew into his role as bandleader while Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and Berry Gordy were developing instantly recognizable musical brands. They had sounds as distinctive as Sun or Chess, which Fogerty also revered for their spareness and guitar tones. This was hardly in step with the psychedelic music that Creedence’s Bay Area peers were developing, but Fogerty was resolute. He was developing an entire aesthetic vision and the whole responsibility for enacting it rested on his brother and his schoolmates. Cosmo’s Factory begins with the purest expression of those varied inspirations and pressures that the band ever recorded. “Ramble Tamble” has somehow escaped the kind of classic-rock canonization of “Black Dog” or “Baba O’Riley” as an epic album opener, but it stands tall among them. It opens with a jaunty country-funk riff that sounds almost like James Brown once the band kicks in, then they instantly switch gears into roaring double-time rockabilly. Fogerty’s guitar and howling vocals are both treated with the same ghostly slap-back effect that he’d borrowed from Sun and Chess. He shout-sings one of his signature apocalyptic scenes, full of images of junk and ruin, like “Bad Moon Rising” but furious. Then the band slows down, Fogerty’s sketch of “mud in the water…bugs in the sugar” comes to a halt and is replaced with a slowly building space-rock squall unlike anything that Creedence, typically so earthbound, ever recorded. Then they dissolve that and rebuild the rockabilly section, where Fogerty returns to his angry-preacher routine. He’d written about specters and new dawns before, but this was the first time that he’d conveyed the idea in music itself. “Ramble Tamble” sounds like a band fighting its way to find new horizons, new styles, all the way past language in the title. Near the end of the record, the 11-minute take on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” reverses the opening song’s sense of adventurousness, turning Motown’s sophisticated dance song into a droning, claustrophobic blues. The rest of Cosmo’s Factory is a hodge-podge, which was typical of Creedence’s full-lengths. Between the extended tracks and a handful of previously released hits like “Travelin’ Band” and “Long as I Can See The Light,” they included lively but inessential covers like “Ooby Dooby” and “Before You Accuse Me.” It’s not a statement record or some kind of grand step forward in the band’s evolution. It’s just an unpretentious collection of songs, named for their little San Francisco practice space and featuring one of the least affected album covers of the classic rock era. Somehow, in 1970, the year of Kent State, the My Lai massacre trial, and Let It Be, no album spent longer at No. 1 in the U.S. Creedence broke up within two years. Their roiling interpersonal difficulties explain the brevity of Creedence’s success, but what accounts for its intensity? How did a band so far apart from their peers and so untrendy become the most popular group in America—and during a time of so much unrest? Creedence never wrote a love song, barely ever used vocal harmony, never employed guest musicians, and had a strict (and mutually agreed-upon) policy against alcohol and drug use during music-making. They were not exactly the face of late-’60s youth culture, but they were its most consistent soundtrack. Those earlier iterations of the band were all relatively square—“a garage band, a little band” is how John Fogerty described them. It was his twin obsessions with recording technology and old blues that opened the band to new vistas. Starting with “Born on the Bayou,” on 1969’s Bayou Country, Fogerty summoned a mythic rock’n’roll South lyrically as well as musically: his songs were as spare and tight as Stax, whose records, along with Wilson’s and Spector’s, he studied like a scholar. But his words could bend toward Uncle Remus or the Book of Revelations. On Cosmo’s Factory, “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” is the former and “Run Through the Jungle” is the latter. “Back Door” paints a children’s-book scene of dancing animals, while “Jungle,” a staple of Vietnam movies, depicts a literal army of Satan. Fogerty didn’t write from one clear vision for America; instead, he tried different visions on like hats, singing passionately about lazy riverboat days as well as societal collapse. Another Cosmo’s Factory standout, “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” depicts a storm that lasts generations, leaving widespread sadness and confusion. Moments of great civil unrest tend to refocus our view of the past—we see previously overlooked steps to destruction with renewed clarity. The Vietnam era spawned many pop acts with a deep sense of history, from the Band’s Faulknerian evocations to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s epochal bluegrass love-letter, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? But none had John Fogerty’s monastic understanding of pop record structure or his clear-eyed obsession with instrument separation. They had notable album tracks throughout their career, but Creedence were a singles band, where Fogerty’s fussy, learned vision was best-expressed and his sidemen showed themselves of highest musical sensitivity. Listen to the way they push and pull Fogerty throughout “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” following his solo as much as prodding it on. The simple gallop of “Ooby Dooby” is just marvelous from the first note, while “Long as I Can See the Light” stands as one of Creedence’s most powerful ballads and soulful, nuanced band performances. Clifford’s bass drum alone makes the song sound heartbreaking. So it almost seems silly to ask why Creedence—and Cosmo’s Factory—were so popular as the country burned. They played ’70s rock with the emotional intensity of early R&B and the workaholic tightness of the Muscle Shoals or Dixie Flyers bands. They defined the early years of album rock, but their background was in the single format. For all their aww-shucks media personalities, their sound was flexible enough to be fun, angry, sorrowful, or worried. They were a band that could match the sweaty, crowded emotional tenor of America at war, and they could please anyone but themselves.

2018-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Fantasy

July 22, 2018

033c884c-2ff2-46dc-b608-a53fa4bab310

John Lingan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-lingan/

The rising Nigerian singer is on the vanguard of the hybrid “Afro-life” sound and his latest album is the peak of his vision so far, a melodious, detailed, and effortless album of feel-good pop and R&B.

The rising Nigerian singer is on the vanguard of the hybrid “Afro-life” sound and his latest album is the peak of his vision so far, a melodious, detailed, and effortless album of feel-good pop and R&B.

Fireboy DML: APOLLO

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fireboy-dml-apollo/

APOLLO

Apollo, one of the most complex characters of Greek mythology, is recognized as the Olympian god of light, truth, prophecy, poetry, healing, and music. His motives are anchored by three emotions: pride, lust, and loss. So is Fireboy DML. But on his second album, APOLLO, the Nigerian singer-songwriter vows to aim high, without going full Icarus. “How human am I to think myself a god?” Fireboy says on the project’s preamble. The music itself begins with his bold declaration: “I be king.” In this moment of popular Nigerian music awash with divergent styles—from more traditional music like highlife, to reggae, hip-hop, to the more modern Afro-fusion, alté, and the mainstream Afrobeats—Fireboy doesn’t put himself into one category; he rests at the intersection of R&B, pop, Afrobeats, and alté. It’s the self-described “Afro-life” sound from his 2018 breakout song “Jealous”; ambient, relatable, everyday-life music. APOLLO comes on the heels of Burna Boy’s Twice as Tall, in which Burna reasserts his status as the premier African giant standing firmly atop the scene, both in the states and overseas. While the Afro-fusion star leads social and political-leaning conversations bridging the Black diaspora with his music, Fireboy isn’t as much a part of that exchange. Instead, he’s situated in a separate class of artists, not making overt statements with his music and not dominating the mainstream either, but pushing the new vanguard of Afropop. In a lineup of current Afropop singers, Fireboy stands alongside the fluid, trap-leaning rapper-singer Rema, the young crooner Joeboy of Mr Eazi’s Empawa Africa label, and rising star Oxlade. Fireboy adds to the pantheon of loverboy languish, singing mostly about unrequited affection, delightful and depressing dalliances, and love that wanes just like summer heat on August nights. APOLLO takes the load off the heaviness of now. Fireboy excels at extracting the allure in the mundane, with his sincere and sober musings on life and himself. The album features familiar and fresh production from previous collaborators Pheelz, Type A, iamBeatz, and P.Prime, as well as a feature verse from Nigerian hip-hop heavyweight and APOLLO executive producer Olamide, who has a knack for discovering and developing new talent. Fireboy’s tried-and-true formula blends the old and the new, like when Afropop veteran and reliable hitmaker Wande Coal shows up on APOLLO. Fireboy is a disciple of Coal in ingenuity and style, and his vocals complement his predecessor’s signature falsetto on “Spell” as he leans into Coal’s mastery of melody for a pleasant cross-generational connection. Like any young artist culling from creative movements on the ground and across the internet, Fireboy plucks from a cornucopia of influences. With Afro-life, he tinctures his chameleonic R&B with subtle hints of pop, Afrobeats, and dance music, producing a cocktail of R&B whether he intends to or not. “Tattoo” is his most sensual song to date, reminiscent of the sweet soulfulness of Miguel’s 2010 debut, All I Want Is You. The bright horns and slick production on “Favourite Song” aim for the groove of Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones’ bubbly boogie music. There is minimal range in his simplified style of songwriting. “God Only Knows” is guided by chants and a few trite one-liners, but the celestial, grandiose production thankfully overshadows its shortcomings. Olamide makes an appearance with his mentee on “Afar,” a solid and smooth track anchored by the hook, “Make them dey love me from afar.” What sounds rudimentary on first listen soon becomes catchy melodies that linger on the lips. Fireboy’s lyrics are so uncomplicated that they become unforgettable. “I’m not tryna be the number one,” Fireboy sings on “Airplane Mode.” “So many legends dey, I’m just tryna be another one.” The declarations of defiance throughout the project are more charming than thundering. He isn’t so much the flash of lightning as a soft power, the quiet after the storm. At times, the album’s sentimentality may sound overwrought, but at its core, APOLLO is easy, exciting, and earnest. It’s what feel-good music sounds like as it becomes increasingly difficult to feel good; it’s soothing in a palliative way. APOLLO is not grand or abstract enough to qualify as escapism. Instead, Fireboy stays grounded, shooting the breeze, limning the simplicities of romance and life. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

YBNL Nation / Empire

August 26, 2020

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Ivie Ani

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivie-ani/

The official debut from the young digicore producer and songwriter is riveting, a shapeshifting emo-electronic record that sounds like new worlds seeping out of a digital abyss.

The official debut from the young digicore producer and songwriter is riveting, a shapeshifting emo-electronic record that sounds like new worlds seeping out of a digital abyss.

Jane Remover: Frailty

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dltzk-frailty/

Frailty

Editor’s Note: Jane Remover came out publicly as a trans woman in 2022. This review is presented as it was originally published in 2021 and uses their prior artist name and pronouns. Within the first few moments of “your clothes,” off dltzk’s debut album Frailty, a chugging guitar riff seems to melt down and remold as a synth. Under the hood of its frayed emo and shoegaze, Frailty is full of these small, shimmering details that reveal themselves like Easter eggs in a role-playing game. This is a vast, shapeshifting record that, like its predecessor Teen Week, redefines the parameters of “digicore” by pulling the young New Jersey producer and songwriter’s instincts into new territory. It’s guitar music created by a Skrillex and Porter Robinson obsessive, a snowscape of reds and oranges. Inside the more writerly songs, you can sense that producer-brain, the meticulous tinkerer aiming to smack your pleasure centers with critical hits. It’s easily some of the most ambitious work to have sprung from this nascent online scene to date. In the world of internet music, histories are scrawled quickly and genres cycle like the seasons. Even though dltzk’s EP Teen Week only came out in February, it’s already been hailed by fans as an important work of digicore—not least because digicore was still searching for a definitive record. You could make the case for a shortlist of essential singles, and maybe 1000 gecs and Bladee’s Icedancer as sacred texts. But Teen Week charted a path forward. It rattled with youthful chaos and argued for digicore as a high-stakes, immersive art form with plenty more ground to cover. Some stretches traded the hard breakbeats for soft, 16-bit passages with pensively sung lyrics about the kind of stuff a Zoomer in high school struggles with: comparing themself to their peers, feeling unwelcome at home, passing days in quarantine staring at a phone. Frailty follows the intuition of those slower, more forlorn moments, particularly Teen Week’s grungy outro “seventeen.” Its opening track, “goldfish,” is a “Nikes”-level curveball—pure, no-frills emo that centers dltzk’s vocal. This mode isn’t exactly unique, but it works well with the album’s fuzzy mixing and their writing, which longs for someone through suburban memories of Six Flags and tree forts. But thinking about the individual songs on Frailty betrays the album’s form. Frailty functions like a fluid substance and its tracks blur together with seamless transitions. dltzk approaches emo through the lens of EDM and dubstep, evoking the rise-and-fall, deceptive buildups, and stomach-turning drops accompanied by digital explosions and bit-crushed screams. These genres blend into and inform each other in adventurous ways, like the soaring culmination of “search party,” wherein a massive guitar intermittently cuts out like a DJ mashing the volume slider at a rave. Despite its somber themes and textures, there’s room to dance on nearly every song. For how serious Teek Week and Frailty come off, dltzk isn’t some doomer teen; their defining moment of the year may be inventing a glorious microgenre of shitposty Jersey club mashups called dariacore. That absurd style creeps in occasionally, like the mini-malfunction in the middle of “kodak moment.” And it’s easy to get lost in the electronic hailstorms that pepper the devastating “movies for guys,” which dunks 2009 Top 40 in liquid nitrogen before abandoning that idea entirely, matching the complicated feelings dltzk has for a crush who won’t accept them for who they are. On the flip side, the emo haze of this record shrouds everything in mist. The electronics on the devastating “champ” feel small and cold, a soundtrack to dltzk shivering, lying in the snow. They remind me of the pastoral, Pokémon-like blips and bloops that dltzk toyed with on Teen Week. In fact, between songs like “champ,” “how to lie” and “let’s go home,” a certain listener might find comfort and nostalgia in Frailty’s JRPG coziness. Maybe dltzk’s forays into this genre sound staid, even downright bad at times. But Frailty sounds less like cosplay than new worlds seeping out of a digital abyss. Since its emergence from the churn of SoundCloud, digicore has continually faced an ontological question: What exactly is it? Is it a scene? A genre? Is it rap? Hyperpop? With Frailty, dltzk argues that digicore is a methodology, a way of understanding new forms with an existing toolkit. The closest comparison may be Porter Robinson’s 2014 album Worlds, which applied the language of dance music to synth-pop. But where that album was born from exhaustion with festival EDM, Frailty is less cynical. It sounds like a teenager peeking through new doors, uncovering new modes of expression, discovering themself and their sound. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

2021-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

Experimental / Pop/R&B

DeadAir

November 23, 2021

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Mano Sundaresan

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

The Irish modern-rock producer, best known for his work on records by U2, Snow Patrol, and Kasabian, opts for an idiosyncratic electronic melange featuring a surprising roster of guests.

The Irish modern-rock producer, best known for his work on records by U2, Snow Patrol, and Kasabian, opts for an idiosyncratic electronic melange featuring a surprising roster of guests.

Jacknife Lee: The Jacknife Lee

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jacknife-lee-the-jacknife-lee/

The Jacknife Lee

Jacknife Lee’s discography has historically moved in two very different directions. His production credits for acts like U2 and Snow Patrol display a penchant for self-serious adult-contemporary rock; like the nu-metal mashups of Missy Elliott and Eminem that brought him notoriety around the turn of the century, his solo music has aimed for far lower stakes, looping trite lyrics (“I like it/I like it, yeah”; “I really love it and it’s making me money”) over uninspired big beat. On The Jacknife Lee, the Irish producer shows us a third way, taking ideas he had deemed “too odd” for other projects and realizing them with the help of a diverse, international group of artists. The results feel like a release of pent-up energy after years of melancholy modern-rock production. A world away from his Kasabian and Two Door Cinema Club commissions, The Jacknife Lee trades modern rock for a melange of rap, R&B, alt rock, dance punk, and global pop. Most of Lee’s guests here are far less famous than the artists he typically works with. Ghanaian-Australian singer Genesis Owusu’s voice shape-shifts over rumbling bass on opener “Flutter”; on “Hit the Bell,” Toronto rapper Haviah Mighty punctuates an ethereal melody sung by Merge signee Sneaks. All the songs feel like genuine partnerships in which Lee provides a lavish framework for other artists to excel. Lee does best when he leaves his comfort zone to create something completely new alongside his guests. Muthoni Drummer Queen commands “Sisa Wabaya,” in which the Kenyan rapper’s bilingual boasting (the title translates as “We are the bad ones” in Swahili) is accentuated by clipped bass and overdriven percussion. “Firewalls,” with Petite Noir, is constantly shifting, trading slow-burning atmospheres for stranger elements—guttural vocal samples, filtered breakbeats. There’s a winning sense of restlessness to these productions, as though Lee were always on the search for a new noise to insert, another genre to reference. The higher profile the artists, the more predictable (and consequently, weaker) the songs often are. Aloe Blacc feels out of place, and his lovelorn “I Gave You Everything” doesn’t match the innovative qualities of the rest of the album. “Made It Weird” marks swaggering new territory for Open Mike Eagle, but he’s written more compelling anxiety-focused songs before. And a handful of songs are too slick for the mood they’re trying to convey. The defiant lyrics of “I’m Getting Tired” lose some of their power over a backing track—already too similar to Lee’s big-beat solo work—that previously served as Apple keynote background music. The Jacknife Lee improves in proportion to its risk. Veteran adult-alternative acts don’t often have it in them to be as eccentric as Lee can be here, no matter how ambitious they get. There are fans to please, radio singles to push, Grey’s Anatomy syncs to land. But, guided by his long-standing instinct for combining disparate elements, Lee has found new freedom in letting other voices have the spotlight. 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.

2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Slow Kids

August 11, 2020

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Hannah Jocelyn

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

On his new album, the verbose rapper’s fascination with creatures widens into a cosmology, resulting in the most joyous album he’s ever made.

On his new album, the verbose rapper’s fascination with creatures widens into a cosmology, resulting in the most joyous album he’s ever made.

Aesop Rock: Spirit World Field Guide

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aesop-rock-spirit-world-field-guide/

Spirit World Field Guide

Aesop Rock loves critters. Since his conscious turn toward storytelling on None Shall Pass, he’s become quite the zoologist, using pigs, crows, and his pet cat, among other animals, as muses. His fixation runs so deep that when he isn’t observing creatures directly, they’re still in his peripheral vision: He partners with Homeboy Sandman as Lice; his second album with longtime collaborator Rob Sonic was titled Bestiary; a Dali-esque dinosaur skeleton graces the cover of Skelethon. On Spirit World Field Guide, this fascination with creatures widens into a cosmology. Animals no longer play bit parts in Aesop Rock’s intricate tapestries; they are the omphalos, a turn that leans into Aesop’s wearied misanthropy and softens it. This is the most joyous album he’s ever made. Presented as a travelogue of the “spirit world,” a realm composed of occult and biological oddities, Spirit World Field Guide flips Aesop’s trademark anxiety on its head. Instead of retreating into his addled, overactive brain, he plunges into the “unwavering otherness” of the spirit world like an intrepid adventurer. His observations from the alternate planes of existence are surreal and psychedelic, from the “billion bats exploding out a mountain cave” on “Sleeper Car” to the loyal tentacles “in every corner of heck” on “Holy Waterfall.” Rapped with verve, every detail is delivered with a lysergic pop or an eldritch crackle, animals and action verbs smashed together like chimeras. Aesop has always been a vivid and imagistic rapper, but here his writing brims with wonder. “I leave an awkward conversation like a cow to the saucer/Inspire a thousand Our Fathers, people start calling their priests/ “We’ve never seen a man so vehemently drawn to the beast!” he says with a wink on “Crystal Sword.” One of his favorite life forms is himself, whom he renders with morbid clarity. Alongside Ishmael Butler and Kool Keith, Aesop is one of the few veteran rappers for whom aging is an experience and not a challenge. Instead of fighting his mortality, he dissects it. “1 to 10,” an ode to his ailing back, features the darkly humorous and human bar, “Rate your pain level on a scale from 1 to 10/I said “‘Well, doc I tell ya, it feel like I lost a friend.’” If you can't relate to that line now, you will. “Dog at the Door” is a tug-o-war between paranoia and composure, both emotions making his imagination run wild as he tries to identify an unexpected noise outside his house. “Maybe it’s a trap,” he repeats as his lineup of suspects grows more elaborate. He sounds like the spooked geezer he knows himself to be. Sometimes the pain doesn’t warrant a punchline. “Faking normal has worn me down,” he raps with weariness on “Boot Soup,” one of many moments where he lifts the curtain. “I shouldn’t even be here,” he assesses on “Kodokushi,” the Japanese word for the grim phenomenon of dead people being discovered long after their time of death. These blips of candor lack the emotional punch of similar moments on The Impossible Kid, where Aesop would build to and wind into his disclosures rather than shunt them into one-liners and asides. But even in passing, these confessions convey the heavy undertow of Aesop’s vision quest. His survey of the spirit world is clearly in service of enduring the flesh. In animals he seems to spy an undaunted sense of purpose. “A rat’s a rat/It scatters/That’s like it’s magic power,” he says with admiration on “Salt.” Producing has recently become Aesop’s second magic power. He’s been a producer as long as he’s been a rapper, contributing beats to all his records, and producing his last two records in full. Although aesthetically Spirit World Field Guide draws on his standard mix of electric guitar, laser synths, and crisp drums, he’s never before been such a commanding presence behind the boards. The beats here are the best of his career, full of torque and life. “Attaboy” flickers between squelchy boom bap and leisurely funk. The scuzzy guitar chords on “Gauze” rev up Aesop’s flows. The goofy, percolating wub-wub on “Crystal Sword” accents his RPG-inspired misadventures. These zany backdrops amplify his writing, selling the complete otherness of the spirit world. Spirit World Field Guide wears its concept loosely. As seen on Miss Anthropocene, Visions of Bodies Being Burned, and There is No Year, music about death and oblivion is often macroscopic, zooming out into a birds-eye view. Aesop does the inverse, sticking his head into the soil like an ostrich and conversing with the bugs and roots. His bizarro yarns are certainly eccentric and meticulous, but they’re always anchored by his fascination with the material and tactile: old, decaying bodies; gross smells; odd aches. By presenting the great beyond as a marvel rather than a horror, he makes it less unwieldy, and perhaps even appealing. “Why am I here if it isn’t effectively cutting the hellions out of me, huh?” he asks on “Gauze.” He’s talking about the real world. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Rhymesayers

November 14, 2020

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Stephen Kearse

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

The New York musician’s trance-inducing studies for drums and voice, breath and heartbeat, are laid bare as the sources of all expression.

The New York musician’s trance-inducing studies for drums and voice, breath and heartbeat, are laid bare as the sources of all expression.

Ka Baird : Respires

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ka-baird-respires/

Respires

If the voice is the original instrument, as the experimental singer and composer Joan La Barbara once posited, Ka Baird’s Respires retreats into breath itself. Here, in trance-inducing studies for drums and voice, breath and heartbeat are laid bare as the sources of all expression. The New York musician’s often wordless vocalizations are cushioned by audible lungfuls of air; ritualistic incantations come in a lattice of hissing and huffing. What is normally silent becomes as palpable as a heavy sigh on a winter’s day. Even Baird’s instrument of choice, the flute, is itself a kind of breath incarnate, the edges of its tone wispy and diffuse. It’s a reminder that sound is just stirred air, a disturbance of the invisible. If that sounds almost mystical, well, so does she: On Respires, her chanted mantras often sound like she is snatching phantoms out of the very ether. “Pulse,” which opens the album, is exactly as promised: steady loops of hiccupping phonemes laid over a bright drone; it might be a diagram of the electrical current coursing through the central nervous system. Every now and then, an eruption of sibilance rushes forth, like steam from a subway grate, and the music takes on an even more otherworldly character. “Symanimagenic” deploys similar elements to even more dramatic ends: Nervous flute runs dart and dive above hand drums while Baird’s digitally processed voice channels bullfrogs, snakes, and jaguars, a one-woman rainforest chorus. “Azha” is made principally from interwoven flute loops that have been re-pitched and made strange, like bird calls of some undiscovered species. The centerpiece of the album’s first half is “Teaching Lodge of the Arrows.” A gong strikes, setting the meditative scene for multiple instances of shape-shifting: Baird’s flute is a flock of butterflies, her voice a volley of obsidian-tipped projectiles. Stylistically, it is part free jazz and part operatic aria. She uses the tension between repetition and moments of rupture to tap into an ecstatic dimension, as though speaking in tongues. And then, some invisible peak having been reached, the whole thing plateaus into seven minutes of coruscating drone. The album’s second half is more percussive, but just as intense, layering animalistic chattering sounds and the occasional recognizable word (“Walking,” she intones in the eponymous song, as though willing herself into motion) over insistent hand drumming that draws a direct line between contemporary dance music—the beat of “The Orion Arm” sounds almost like early Chicago house—and the kinds of rhythms that humans have used to make contact with the divine since time immemorial. On stage at Krakow’s Unsound festival earlier this month, the ritualistic aspect of Baird’s music was unmistakable. Spitting into the microphone, pouring rapid-fire flute riffs into her sampler, it seemed less like she was performing songs than channeling spirits. Pacing forward and back, crouching down, even at one point getting down on all fours, she seemed like a person possessed, answering to a private muse. That kind of energy isn’t easy to replicate on record, but Respires comes remarkably close. This is heady music with a physical presence: an intensely private communion with some unnameable, unknowable other, translated into a force you can feel in your bones. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Rvng Intl.

October 31, 2019

034b41d7-c9ba-4535-812e-f01a5b894231

Philip Sherburne

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

The Atlanta rapper has promised an unprecedented sound, but this overlong, monochromatic LP juggles a handful of shopworn topics and recycles gimmicks, flows, and ideas.

The Atlanta rapper has promised an unprecedented sound, but this overlong, monochromatic LP juggles a handful of shopworn topics and recycles gimmicks, flows, and ideas.

Destroy Lonely: If Looks Could Kill

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/destroy-lonely-if-looks-could-kill/

If Looks Could Kill

Ask any 16-year-old who uses their mom’s credit card to buy Rick Owens what they’ve been listening to lately, and they’ll tell you the same thing: Destroy Lonely is the future. After working under the radar for a few years, the Playboi Carti protégé with the gleaming yet guttural voice broke through with last year’s NOSTYLIST. Like all the hottest new rappers, the 21-year-old Atlanta native has incited both millennial hate and zoomer worship, spawned a genre of type beats, and has Redditors investigating what brand of fork he uses. Everyone is watching his voice, his style, and his sound, which has allegedly already inspired a legion of clones. Hyping his new album If Looks Could Kill in an interview, Lonely said it would be nothing like NOSTYLIST, which was exhilarating but flooded with so many sparkling beats—imagine Crystal Castles’ glitchy electronica fused with wonky rage-rap mayhem and flecks of dream-pop psychedelia—that they sometimes blended together. Expectations for If Looks Could Kill grew after he dropped its titular single, a rush of venomous guitar and feathery drawls that teased a shadowy, manic mood for the project. Sadly, the 26-track LP is overlong and haphazard, offering only tantalizing glimpses of the album that might have been. Like his last record, there’s only one feature, his labelmate Ken Car$on; beyond that, Lone’s alone for 25 songs, circling the same handful of topics: drugs, drip, cash, anxiety, women, stunting. Where the similarly copious Yeat leavens and enlivens his megadumps with chaotic vocal spasms and bizarrely catchy chants, Lonely’s hooks are so hookless they smear into the verses. Strangely, his vocals are frequently muted and wispy compared to the last record, whose beaming, electric energy on songs like “NOSTYLIST” slashed through the monotony. The beats, many of which his longtime collaborator Clayco had a hand in, copy-paste the same pattern for three or four minutes without any intriguing switch-ups. The most striking shift is the addition of a muddy, distorted exterior and doomy, dirge-like guitars, but they often sound generic, like Lonely heard Carti’s extended “Narcissist” tour intros and thought they were hard. Lonely has spoken emphatically about wanting to make music so new it’s like nothing ever done before, but a lot of these songs recycle structural gimmicks, flows, themes, and sounds. The album’s bloated shape and suffocating insularity make it easy to miss its redeeming qualities. One of Lonely’s biggest draws has always been the moon-white shimmer of his voice, often so Auto-Tuned that it sounds like he’s gurgling La Croix, and the way he strafes around and against the rhythm, evoking elastic, frenetic rappers like Carti, Future, and the late Lil Keed. Sometimes he raps in straight lines like he’s skating on ice; elsewhere he pogoes in and out of focus, like when he adopts a punchy bunny-hop flow for part of the “fly sht” hook. Among the surfeit of bargain-bin, Destroy Lonely-type beats, some genuinely weird, jolting, wildly drunk instrumentals stick out, showing that Lonely’s killer ear for the unusual hasn’t fully faded. Clayco and Y3’s “came in wit” crushes a serrated synth into a slow-mo haze of reverb and dissonance, with a stretched-out freeze sound effect that brings to mind Krxxk’s producer tag. “right now" and “how u feel?” are a couple where the infernal blaze of gothic guitar really enhances his voice. Esko, Carter Bryson, Glasear, ssor.t, and Clayco’s “safety (interlude)” buries acoustic guitar in a dust storm of distortion and drums as Lonely whimpers and rambles about paying for his safety, working for his riches, and switching up his fashion. At nearly six minutes and with only one minor deviation (a flashy volume swivel near the end), it underscores how much more exciting these songs could be if the structures were actually fluid and anarchic. If you try diving deep into Destroy Lonely lore, you’ll quickly realize how little there is to be found. Like his Opium sibling Ken, Lonely’s aesthetic and musical raison d’etre seem to be based on a hazy idea of being “different”—like how he chose to be homeschooled because he thought he was too ahead of his school classmates. It’s a familiar pose: the self-selected “outcast” who prefers darker colors and tries to cultivate a mystique around himself, who identifies with antiheroes like Batman and believes the art he’s making is incomparable to anything else. Lonely’s music has always radiated a fashion-killer cool and pristine effortlessness, but the dampened vocals and amorphously uneventful beats on If Looks Could Kill are a new level of aloof. The neon joy of his past music is lost in these songs, resulting in an album that’s monochromatic and myopic, a vacuum of formulaic beats and flexes with the odd flicker of genuine creativity.

2023-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-05-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Opium / Interscope

May 10, 2023

034bc8f0-8258-4b2e-b175-3fb7d324b8af

Kieran Press-Reynolds

https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/

Boards of Canada’s 1998 album is a beat-music touchstone, a record that took the previous decade of home-listening electronic music and essentially perfected it. This reissue offers a chance for a fresh look.

Boards of Canada’s 1998 album is a beat-music touchstone, a record that took the previous decade of home-listening electronic music and essentially perfected it. This reissue offers a chance for a fresh look.

Boards of Canada: Music Has the Right to Children

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/838-music-has-the-right-to-children/

Music Has the Right to Children

Sometimes an album is so good and makes its case so flawlessly that it spawns a mini-genre of its own and becomes shorthand for a prescribed set of values. The Velvet Underground's third and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew are two older records that spring to mind, and I'd toss in Spiderland as well. It's not a long list, but somewhere on it belongs Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children. Earlier this month, Warp Records reissued Music Has the Right to Children worldwide, adding the bonus track "Happy Cycling" (which we Americans with our Matador-licensed copies have always known as the album closer) and redesigning the cover art as a foldout digipak. It's always a bit strange when an album is reissued when it has not, in any sense, ever gone away. How could we possibly have forgotten about Music Has the Right to Children when the sound Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin created here is still the predominant inspiration in IDM? And yet, here we are, new package and new marketing push. Even so, six years after its original release is as good as any time to look into why Music Has the Right to Children has resonated so strongly. Boards of Canada's sound was not wholly original. Seeds of it can be found in Eno, Aphex Twin (in a big way), The Orb, and all over the home listening electronic scene that sprang up in the wake of Warp's Artificial Intelligence compilation. Boards used drum machines, samplers, and an unfathomable collection of analog and digital synths, like others in their sphere. Their chords were typically gauzy ambient, their beats head-nodding downtempo. Properly speaking, they invented nothing. And yet, the parts had never come together quite like this. The first thing to note is that Music Has the Right revealed Boards of Canada to be geniuses with texture, where god is in the details. The incredibly simple melody of the short "Bocuma" becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man's place in the universe through subtle pitchshifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on "An Eagle in Your Mind" is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off. The long history of the electric piano was nothing but a lead-in to the tone Boards used on "Turquoise Hexagon Sun", the perfect evocation of a happy walk through the woods in an altered state. Every IDM artist since has at least once labored over their modular unit to get a patch that sounds like one of the many brilliant sounds found here. Boards of Canada had released some singles and two EPs previous to this record's release, material which showed that they'd already developed their sound. But with Music Has the Right to Children, the duo set out to make a proper album, and approached the album from a rock perspective, carefully mixing and editing the track sequence, while drafting interludes and tightly restricting the palette. You aren't likely to hear more subtly effective layering of sounds on any electronic record in the last 10 years: Music Has the Right to Children is as unified and complete they come. Here, Boards of Canada set their sights on a small set of moods and characteristics-- innocence, apprehension, wonder, mystery-- and probed every possibility in minute detail. What's it all about, then? "Childhood" is the usual answer, but that's not as easy a connection as it seems on the surface. The giggling voices of kids that crop up are a sure giveaway, as are the song titles ("Rue the Whirl", "Happy "Cycling"), but Music Has the Right to Children avoids the twinkling music box melodies that Múm has been coasting on for a while now. Boards managed to evoke childhood without seeming cute or twee. It's childhood not as it's lived but as we grown-ups remember it, at least those of us with less-than-fond recollections. The shades of darkness and undercurrents of tension (qualities which came further to the fore on 2002's Geogaddi) accurately reflect the confusion of a time that cannot be neatly summed up with any one feeling or emotion. When you discover that Boards of Canada took their name came from an organization committed to educational film, the overriding idea of their project clicks immediately into place. I've no memories of the National Film Board of Canada but I remember tapes with narration and incidental music accompanying filmstrips, tapes that were always damaged from age and overuse on poorly maintained equipment. The warbly pitch and warped voices mirrored the anxiety that came with the "carefree" days of being a kid and living subjugated to others. Boards of Canada tapped into the collective unconscious of those who grew up in the English speaking West and were talented enough to transcribe the soundtrack. No need to get hung up on specifics; however we lived and whoever we were, Music Has the Right to Children reflected back the truth for a lot of us. You can't ask more of an album than that.

2004-04-26T01:00:01.000-04:00

2004-04-26T01:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp

April 26, 2004

034bcf70-dbc8-404b-88b1-7560a608097f

Mark Richardson

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

Much like director Ridley Scott has with the film, composer Vangelis has frequently overseen the tweaking of Blade Runner's score, and here he adds a second disc of unreleased material and again effortlessly evokes the seamy underbelly of a futuristic megapolis.

Much like director Ridley Scott has with the film, composer Vangelis has frequently overseen the tweaking of Blade Runner's score, and here he adds a second disc of unreleased material and again effortlessly evokes the seamy underbelly of a futuristic megapolis.

Vangelis: Blade Runner Trilogy: 25th Anniversary

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11110-blade-runner-trilogy-25th-anniversary/

Blade Runner Trilogy: 25th Anniversary

Ridley Scott's future-noir Blade Runner turned 25 last year, and to commemorate the landmark, the director unveiled yet another tweak with Final Cut. Since its 1982 release, the film has gone back to the editing room a number of times-- for separate U.S. and European theatrical releases, as well as an unauthorized Director's Cut. Scott released his own Director's Cut in 1992 that removed the voice-over by protagonist Rick Deckard, and also suggested he was-- gasp-- a replicant. With Final Cut, Scott seems to have settled on the story he wanted to tell: No voice-over, re-inserted footage, scrubbed-up sound, and another possible change regarding Deckard. Greek composer Vangelis's Golden Globe-nominated Blade Runner score has taken a similarly ephemeral path. The first version released of the film's soundtrack wasn't even done by Vangelis, but consisted of adaptations from the New American Orchestra that Scott disparagingly calls "muzak." Vangelis himself didn't release his version of the soundtrack until 1994, and his version included a number of "inspired by" pieces, but paradoxically left out a big portion of his score. For the 25th Anniversary edition, much of that missing music is finally released. The 1994 version of the soundtrack appears here in its entirety on the first disc, finally getting remaster treatment after the questionable sound quality of the original release. Vangelis's enduring classics like "Love Theme" and "Memories of Green" have never sounded clearer or more timeless: stunning synthesized counterpoint to the bleak, noirish landscape of Scott's 2019 Los Angeles. Certainly not as iconic as the title theme to Chariots of Fire, and not as busy or sunny as his late-70s sequencer-driven albums like Spiral and China, Vangelis's score nevertheless effortlessly evokes the seamy underbelly of a futuristic megapolis. The unreleased material of the second disc is the second treat offered by this re-issue. The disc includes classic works like the piece accompanying Dr. Tyrell's death and the theme to Deckard and replicant Roy Batty's duel. Vangelis organizes the disc much like his original, setting up loose transitions between works and letting themes wash in and out with little discernable chronology. These pieces are of no less quality than the original soundtrack pieces, but they fit more into the background. These stylized impressions are certainly some of the most ambient works in Vangelis's decidedly ambient score. One of two bonus tracks, "Desolation Path", appeared in the unauthorized Director's Cut but is given wide release for the first time, and its stark, cathartic synth may just be the best new material. Given the much-discussed nature of Blade Runner, it's a little confusing that Vangelis tacked on a whole disc of new compositions and didn't just release the entire score. The works on the third disc are certainly fine on their own, a nice return by Vangelis to the synthesized new age that he doesn't compose much anymore. The work on this disc sounds dated at times, and sort-of purposelessly includes muffled spoken-word performances from the likes of Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, and Roman Polanski. Is it really necessary to include, as Vangelis does on "No Expectation Boulevard", actual dialogue of Ridley Scott discussing the Final Cut project? Little details like this are inexplicably slapdash. There are no liner notes from the composer himself, and only a page of exposition from Scott. The greatest surprise is the unedited main title theme wasn't included. Still, it's a major improvement over a soundtrack that has been, like the film, a narrative in flux. We're a little more certain now of Vangelis's desolate near-future vision, rooted in his ambient and new age roots but rarely sounding like a product of its time. Too bad it's not quite The Final Score we all were waiting for.

2008-02-07T01:00:04.000-05:00

2008-02-07T01:00:04.000-05:00

Electronic / Experimental

Interscope

February 7, 2008

034da291-1aed-4bd8-951f-598dfe07f0d2

Pitchfork