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The Chicago footwork producer trades the genre’s emphasis on sampling for ultra-vivid sound design fleshed out with futuristic textures and classic synths.

The Chicago footwork producer trades the genre’s emphasis on sampling for ultra-vivid sound design fleshed out with futuristic textures and classic synths.

Heavee: Unleash

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heavee-unleash/

Unleash

Chicago footwork producer Heavee first acquired a taste for dance music through cartoons and video games. In an interview, he cited the breakbeat-laden scores from The Powerpuff Girls and Jet Set Radio Future as his introduction to electronic music. Some of his first tracks he produced on a Playstation 2, using Funkmaster Flex’s Digital Hitz Factory. On his 2018 debut album with the Teklife collective, Heavee’s lush, nostalgic synth arrangements set his style apart from the more minimalistic sound of his peers, and 2022’s Audio Assault EP, on Hyperdub, nodded even more clearly to the sounds of his youth, using eerie melodies and 16-bit samples to emulate the atmosphere of boss battles. Heavee’s first full-length for Hyperdub, Unleash, is largely a study in sound design, exploring strange metallic textures, new-age kitsch, and vintage club chord progressions. “Unlock!” opens with gnarly bass tones that sound like the growls of a high-level beast in a role-playing game, accompanied only by droning pulses of static. It’s a profoundly unsettling intro (especially for a track slotted so early into a dance record), but Heavee’s patience pays off when the elements finally coalesce into a beat. The result strikes a balance between Hausu Mountain’s proggy sound collage and SOPHIE’s most purely percussive experiments; it’s a wasps’ nest of intersecting hums, harried fluttering, and insectoid chirps. “Whiplash” is a similarly industrial reconstruction of footwork: Around woozy, pitched-down commands to “act a fool with it,” Heavee hammers away as though he were erecting scaffolding in the backdrop. It feels like dancing as the club is still being built around you. Elsewhere, Heavee offsets those pared-down cuts with baroque orchestration. Opener “StarSeeker” is as pretty as footwork gets, with sparkling synths reminiscent of ’90s IDM; “Smoke Break” enlists multi-instrumentalist Takayuka Nakamura to play live trumpet over dreamy jazz keyboards. A couple of tracks eschew drums entirely, focusing instead on Heavee’s fondness for the sounds of classic synths. With more traditional footwork cuts like “CanUFeelIt” and the Goodie Mob-referencing “WorkMe’’ filling in the space between the producer’s more out-there ideas, Unleash acts as a survey of both the genre’s history and the artist’s own. Unleash connects the chrome-plated optimism of Y2K pop culture to its influence on both a young Heavee and the cybernetic grit of early footwork, while charting a path forward that acknowledges contemporary avant-garde club sounds. The album can be chaotic, jumping from one disparate idea to the next, but each element draws you closer to understanding Heavee better. Where many footwork records work with a relatively contained set of samples and timbres, focusing most of their attention on rhythm, Heavee is an ambitious world-builder: Each track sounds like it’s been sourced from a different planet, but their intersecting orbits sketch a picture of the artist’s unmistakable vision.

2024-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Hyperdub

March 15, 2024

fe676f05-41e0-4d9e-bedd-3c1d9e6f0b74

Jude Noel

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

Afghan Whigs’ fourth album and major-label debut, 1993’s Gentlemen, is a harrowing song cycle chronicling the death throes of a relationship. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into the collection, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it.

Afghan Whigs’ fourth album and major-label debut, 1993’s Gentlemen, is a harrowing song cycle chronicling the death throes of a relationship. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into the collection, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it.

The Afghan Whigs: Gentlemen at 21

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19885-the-afghan-whigs-gentlemen-at-21/

Gentlemen at 21

Greg Dulli sings about some fucked-up shit on the Afghan Whigs’ fourth album and major-label debut, 1993’s Gentlemen, a harrowing song cycle chronicling the death throes of a relationship. But when it came time to record “My Curse”, one of the darkest moments on the album, he didn’t think he had it in him. “I tried to sing it, but it was kinda really impossible for me to do,” he told Loose Lips Sink Ships back in 2005. “It was too close to the bone. Basically I chickened out.” That’s a remarkable thing to contemplate: This is, after all, an album that serves as an emotional exorcism, visceral and violent, played by a band not known for its squeamishness. Rather than tackle the song himself, Dulli enlisted Marcy Mays of the Columbus, Ohio, band Scrawl, and she sings the absolute hell out of it. Her slurred, scrawled vocals are tough-minded and defiant one moment, freshly bruised and broken the next, as she treads the tightrope between temptation and repulsion, between pleasure and pain. “Curse softly to me, baby, and smother me in your love,” she all but begs, as though she must summon the courage to get each syllable out of her mouth. “Temptation comes not from hell but from above.” It is, to say the least, a powerful moment, but it also fulfills an important narrative function: If Gentlemen documents the demise of a romance, then “My Curse” allows the woman to tell her own side of the story, to call out the posturing in Dulli’s hyper-masculine lyrics, to express explicitly the pain he is inflicting on her. Offering a new perspective on the album’s brutal sexual politics, Mays reveals his outsize persona to be a ruse: a defense mechanism with which he can refract emotions too dark and messy and traumatic to face head on. Perhaps that’s why the album still sounds so vital and so fresh 21 years on. Removed from the alt-rock boom of the early '90s, Gentlemen is both personal and unknowable, cocksure yet deeply troubled—in other words, so complicated and contradictory that we’re still trying to untangle its knots. Gentlemen at 21 offers some fresh insights into this song cycle, but fortunately doesn’t remaster or repackage the mystery out of it. The album sounds sharper and a bit more dangerous, those coiled guitars riffs more potent and Steve Earle’s drums wilder and more insistent. And the bonus demos and covers reveal the DNA of the album, signaling not only the rock and R&B sources that inspired Dulli, but also giving some insight into the band’s creative process before they trekked down to Ardent Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis figures prominently on Gentlemen, even if the album opens with the buzz of car wheels on the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in the band’s hometown of Cincinnati. The Afghan Whigs had long been incorporating the sounds and fashions of black soul, funk, and jazz into their buzzy indie rock, which lent previous albums like 1990’s Up in It and 1992’s Congregation a sense of taut rhythmic urgency. The band had previously covered Al Green’s “Beware” and the Elvis hit “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road”, and they chose Tyrone Davis’ “I Keep Coming Back” for Gentlemen, proving their well of influences went much deeper than the usual alt-rock fare. While their contemporaries drew from indie bands like the Raincoats and the Meat Puppets or from classic rock acts like the Who and Neil Young, Dulli was much more interested in Stax and Motown, in Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes. On later albums, these sources would become much more obvious, but on Gentlemen they are buried in the mix, evident in the strangled riffs on the title track and in the sensual drift of “When We Two Parted”. Drummer Steve Earle is crucial to this balance of styles and sounds, keeping time as tight as the great Al Jackson Jr. but adding the fills and frills of showy rock drummers like Keith Moon. (Sadly, this would be Earle’s final album with the band.) In this regard, the covers included with Gentlemen at 21 prove more substantial than your typical bonus material, not only providing a blueprint for the Afghan Whigs’ sound but also providing a sort of mixtape for the characters involved. It’s not hard to imagine Dulli’s narrator blasting the Ass Ponys’ “Mr. Superlove” for inspiration, or tempting a lover with Dan Penn’s “The Dark End of the Street”, or consoling himself with the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You”. Over two decades Gentleman has most often been described as a “song cycle,” a term that distinguishes it from a concept album or a narrative album (although both terms are to some degree applicable). If that idea persists, perhaps its due to the word “cycle,” which seems apt: Gentlemen ends more or less where it begins. Scene-setting overture “If I Were Going” opens the album with a slow fade-in finally interrupted by Earle’s stop-start drumbeat, and “Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer” closes the affair with a long, cinematic fade-out, with a dissonant cello echoing the migraine drone of the Roebling Bridge. The sequencing shapes the album beautifully, creating a sense of emotional fatigue while only hinting vaguely at redemption. Thematically, however, that cycle implies a romantic fatalism, as though every relationship is doomed to end painfully. That’s what makes Gentlemen at 21 such a compelling and necessary reissue, even if the album has never been terribly hard to find. Living with this record, whether for a few weeks or a few decades, only repeats the pattern and makes the songs sound increasingly, almost unbearably desperate. That urgency has not softened over time or even with the addition of bonus material. The early versions of these songs, recorded at Ultrasuede Studio in Cincinnati, show just how little they changed at Ardent, although it’s unclear whether they burst out of Dulli’s brain fully formed or the band sharpened them. Perhaps the most intriguing bonus track is the Ultrasuede version of “My Curse”, with Dulli singing lead. He toys with pitch and meter like a man with more to say than his voice can convey, but he’s more engaged with the material than he sounds on later bootlegs like Time for a Bavarian Death Waltz. In fact, he sounds relatively timid, perhaps even beaten, exhausted, raw, lowdown—as though he no longer possesses the hope or the courage to keep the cycle going. In a way, chickening out may be the boldest thing he ever did.

2014-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00

2014-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Mute / Rhino

November 6, 2014

fe6801dd-1819-462f-82a4-576cd9aa5af7

Stephen M. Deusner

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

On their first album in four years, Brooklyn’s Blondes hone in on more overt dancefloor energies while maintaining the dreamy introspection that is their signature.

On their first album in four years, Brooklyn’s Blondes hone in on more overt dancefloor energies while maintaining the dreamy introspection that is their signature.

Blondes: Warmth

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blondes-warmth/

Warmth

Among the artists who helped give shape to the many-faceted entity that was Brooklyn techno in the early 2010s, Blondes always felt somehow separate. Sounding less stylized (whether intentionally “raw” or self-consciously digital-native-slick) than many of their peers, Sam Haar and Zach Steinman make improvisation-driven mini-epics that are equally invested in sanguine textures and the imaginative worlds made possible by their hardware. Thanks, in particular, to the former, their music can conjure the ecstatic energy of early 1990s rave hits, albeit reconfigured to feel more relaxed and more introverted. For Warmth, their first full-length since 2013’s Swisher, the duo parted ways with RVNG to join the Belgian label R&S. They were seeking, they said, proximity to a more dancefloor-oriented roster. The record is a little higher in energy than their older offerings, a little more forthright with its driving rhythms, but it maintains the dreamy, inward-looking quality that’s always characterized Blondes’ work. “OP Actual,” the album’s first track, lays the ground for their process. Subtle melodies float in and out of a slow-building chorus of synthesizers; some are full and tuneful, like organs, while others are mostly sticky texture. Somewhere underneath is a four-on-the-floor beat, but it’s almost an afterthought. All build-up, the track washes away without cresting. Just as its individual compositions follow an internal narrative logic, Warmth’s track-by-track development has all the bends and arcs of a live set. Following “OP Actual,” most of the album is quicker to get to the point, letting beats develop before unfurling a mesh of interlocking melodic and textural elements. It might be this directness, rather than a shift in BPM or style, that makes this more of a traditional dance record: These pieces are designed to be felt by the body before the brain. Haar and Steinman’s impulse for grandiose melodic developments (think of previous standouts like “You Mean So Much to Me” or “Elise,” which were so memorable that neighboring tracks paled in comparison) is toned down, and individual tracks are that much less distinguishable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, given the way the 65-minute set blends into a holistic experience. Once the listener is physically engaged, Warmth wanders into near-psychedelic terrain. The duo’s impulses are too subtle to be fully hedonistic, but Blondes are pleasure-seekers all the same: When a rich ambient progression soothes a shivering patch midway through “Stringer,” or when single “KDM” locks into a swelling aqueous groove, it’s hard, quite simply, to not feel good. Such moments are still punctuated by tense interludes: “All You,” for example, is built from sawing tones that ricochet as if locked in a claustrophobic, subterranean space. Blondes have often sounded like a project that’s in dialogue more with itself than with exterior influences; Haar and Steinman look less to their record collections than to their live sets as a jumping-off point for new material. Even as they bend aspects of their intent, the duo’s voice maintains a distinctive clarity, and their style of production maintains its vivid palette. Warmth stands to resonate with those seeking a transportive experience whose peaks and valleys never overwhelm.

2017-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

R & S

August 19, 2017

fe7046e1-caec-4484-830d-3cc95ce73bad

Thea Ballard

https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/

Originally released in 1980, the newly reissued second album from the Belgian art-rockers is a knotty experiment that freely slams together the sounds of contemporary classical music and free jazz.

Originally released in 1980, the newly reissued second album from the Belgian art-rockers is a knotty experiment that freely slams together the sounds of contemporary classical music and free jazz.

Aksak Maboul: Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aksak-maboul-un-peu-de-lame-des-bandits/

Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits

In March of 1978, a handful of European prog rock bands performed at a small music festival in London called Rock in Opposition. The event was conceived by the outsider British band Henry Cow, who had found kindred spirits in avant-prog outfits in countries like Sweden, Belgium, and France, and their slogan was, “The music the record companies don’t want you to hear.” For a couple years, RIO became a quasi-formal anti-establishment collective, and the arty Belgian avant-rock band Aksak Maboul joined its ranks as part of a second-wave expansion. At the time, Aksak Maboul were exploding their experimental ambitions, a charge spearheaded by co-founder Marc Hollander. The weird, tangled sophomore album they released in 1980, Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits, is just now receiving its first vinyl reissue on the same pivotal independent label it spawned nearly 40 years ago. The songs on Bandits are the product of an ambitious, kooky recording session Hollander orchestrated in Switzerland. The album was released just three years after Aksak Maboul’s debut, and the sound is far more erratic and knotty, almost absurd in the way it juxtaposes genres and tiring in some of its contemporary classical and free jazz improv explorations. The first song, “Modern Lesson,” struts a plain Bo Diddley guitar riff across the track as grungy foundation and thrashes it with a barrage of nutty accompaniment: screechy, deranged vocals skitter in and out, a bassoon and plunky synth lend a momentary near-carnival effect, an early drum machine maintains some parallel timeline. None of the songs on the album sound alike, but they share this maximalism that flirts with cacophony but drudges up a groove if you give it a minute or two (or four). Sometimes, the accomplishments are more austere. The eerie synths and awkward gait of the tense “Alluvions” sound indebted to the cinematic classic of the Fantasia soundtrack until the song wobbles into a frantic half-manic jam. Rarely do songs bleed into one another or follow logically; more often, neighboring tracks sound like they’ve cracked the album apart by standing so close together. When the opening thrashing guitar of “Inoculating Rabies” threatens a committed post-punk turn halfway into the album, a bassoon swoops in to perform an unexpected duet with a bass clarinet. Bandits is full of this dissonance as meta-commentary. “Geistige Nacht” sounds like sinister crime drama funk that snowballs off-kilter: a panicky bassoon solo (there’s a lot of bassoon here) sets the tone for the second half and then rattles further into a freewheeling jam. The percussion keeps the improv grounded with a shuffle; it feels like a final jigsaw piece that illuminates the rest of the sounds as the band feels around in the dark. Elsewhere, songs like “Palmiers En Pots,” a faithful tango, and “I Viaggi Formano La Gioventù,” a meandering Turkish raga, are capsules of Hollander’s tick for filtering traditional music from around the world through the baroque deconstructivism. (The tango was “written” by cutting and pasting, literally, lines of music from disparate traditional pieces into a Frankensteined whole; the music from “I Viaggi” was nabbed from a Turkish brochure.) Bandits sounds of a piece but stitched together from track-length experiments. It has no regard for flow and a dissonant chaos at its heart, but its unpredictability never comes at the expense of exhilarating technicality. The reissue’s extras, a backstory booklet with a spare bonus CD that lays out the chronology of the band and tracks the meandering experimentation that led to Bandits, helps position the recording and understand its intent. But the simple victory is that Bandits has been unearthed for a new audience. From the brainy free jazz improvs to hysterical noise rock jams and sludgy grooves, you don’t need to learn the nuance of its history to peel back the zeal of its musicians, who seemed all along to be saying, “Hey, serious music can be silly too.”

2018-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00

Experimental

Crammed Discs

January 24, 2018

fe7b4ef8-0e94-49b3-b0cb-906f34ee3ee1

Jay Balfour

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

On its first album in six years, the Austin group dreams up an elaborate fictional universe and delivers it with swaggering glam-rock panache.

On its first album in six years, the Austin group dreams up an elaborate fictional universe and delivers it with swaggering glam-rock panache.

A Giant Dog: Bite

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-giant-dog-bite/

Bite

A Giant Dog’s Bite, the Austin, Texas, group’s first batch of new material since 2017’s Toy, bills itself as a concept album, but Avalonia (the invented realm in which the action takes place) bears little difference from the modern United States. It’s a technocracy, a place where cyberspace trumps embodiment, and in A Giant Dog’s telling, it’s unclear which force will ultimately triumph—the artificial “synthemotional,” or the all-too human urge to “tear apart the place” in search of a tangible, equitable paradise. We live in a society, indeed, and the band explores this unfortunate fact through nine rollicking, anthemic rock songs laced with a defiant yawp that’s alternately convincing and contrived. Bite boasts a similar fervor to 2016’s Pile, whose “I’ll Come Crashing” sounds like the ne plus ultra of skate video soundtracks, but where previous songs read like dispatches from the edge of a brawl, the group’s latest is infused with glam-rock gloss and grandeur. “Happiness Awaits Inside” opens with a few instrumental bars that channel T. Rex by way of Ennio Morricone, and when Sabrina Ellis sings, “Sew me a gown I’m going downtown/In the fabric of space and time,” it feels like swaggering into a saloon on Orion’s Belt. Ellis’ languorous, sneering vocals on “A Daydream” counter quivering strings and a rumbling bassline, a jaguar pacing through a swarm of bees before the last few seconds descend into delightful chaos. The driving tempo and fevered drumming on “In Destiny” call back to the best of the band’s back catalog, an Iron Maiden canticle as at home in a game of Crazy Taxi as it would be on some hero’s journey. But amid this fierceness, some facets of the album crumble under closer scrutiny. “Different Than” opens promisingly with a Bratmobile riff and an earworm melody, but midway through, it gives way to a “Fight Song”-style chorus, the sort of triumph that feels suspiciously hollow. A similarly jarring switch happens in “Watch It Burn,” which starts with a come-hither acknowledgement of “heavy, heavy justice,” then devolves into what sounds like the final act of a stage musical. “One of these days, I’ll learn/You just have to watch it burn,” the band sings together like the cast of Les Misérables. Part of the issue is the haziness of Avalonia itself, which seems to exist in contrast to humanity, “a law that’s written on your soul,” as Ellis sings on “Watch it Burn.” Is it a cloud-hosted version of reality, with all the same injustices? Bite’s least successful songs never quite galvanize the listener, relying either on platitudes or vagaries. (A persona on “Daydream” implores, “Human, where’d you get your arms from?/Use them, just like an algorithm./ Your body was never ever welcome./There’s peace here in Avalonia.”) The rallying cries themselves aren’t particularly clear, except as an acknowledgement of us (the marginalized) versus them (the marginalizers). Without a guide to Avalonia’s characters, without a sense of how this world’s battles differ from the ones happening in the here and now, it’s hard to know precisely the direction in which to channel righteous rage, or if it’s worth summoning at all. In the press release accompanying the record, the band describes developing an entire cosmos, peopled by characters they “had to find ourselves within, or project ourselves into.” That process ultimately seems like it was more rewarding for the musicians than for their listeners. The album’s alternate universe and its residents remain as blurry as the last frame of a vision test. But in the moments that it comes into focus, Bite is ferocious and fun: a zip code you probably wouldn’t move to, but engaging enough as a dystopian tourist destination.

2023-08-28T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-08-28T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rock

Merge

August 28, 2023

fe7fb80a-894b-427c-8087-3da5b13df822

Linnie Greene

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

The adventurous trumpet player, best known for his work with Supersilent and his solo records on Rune Grammofon, makes a terrific debut for ECM.

The adventurous trumpet player, best known for his work with Supersilent and his solo records on Rune Grammofon, makes a terrific debut for ECM.

Arve Henriksen: Cartography

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13379-cartography/

Cartography

Arve Henriksen came at jazz sideways, honing his singular voice as a session player-- with David Sylvian's Nine Horses, Christian Wallumrød, Supersilent, and many others-- and through a series of fine, ambient-tinged albums for the Rune Grammofon label. These were tricky, seductively spare works that got at jazz by outlining jazz-shaped holes. They were most notable for Henriksen's adventurous, curiously-phrased style as a trumpeter. He made his instrument sound like a woodwind, a flock of birds, a Japanese flute, a punctured helium balloon. His strangled yet fluent tone is marked by a vivacious Scandinavian melancholy and a hint of noir. His meditations for trumpet and electronics expand the warm, alien landscape that Jon Hassell initially revealed, and populate it with Olivier Messiaen's avian familiars. Cartography, Henriksen's first album for the serious-business jazz label ECM, is an ambitious showcase for his exotic syntax: Notes float on cushions of air or clang like lead; they sigh, squeak in distress, bleat, and taper off into thin shrieks. When ravishingly full tones break out from the baroque constraints, the effect is devastating. Henriksen plays the way Ian Curtis sang: A rough-and-ready yet wounded voice, always on the verge of cracking with emotion. On "Migration", he unrolls a gaseous theme that periodically dissipates into the merest pinched tones-- minimalism's pervasive mark is not omitted here. The climactic swells of "Migration" have chafed edges, as if Henriksen's trumpet had a sore throat. He spits rapidly through the mouthpiece on "Ouija" to create a richly-textured, telegraphic stutter. But he's a focused, patient player, who miraculously condenses breathtaking themes from this almost-zoological diversity. Cartography differs from prior albums in that it was cobbled together from structured improv sessions with a variety of collaborators, both live and in-studio, over a three-year span. But it plays seamlessly, owing to Henriksen's highly-developed style, as well as to smart, immersive post-production by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, who enrich the live instrumentation with samples, field recordings, synthesizers, and programmed beats. While Henriksen's plaintive motifs are still central, pacing the development, there's a lot more going on around them than before. "Poverty and Its Opposite" sets Henriksen's trumpet against a distant shimmer and intensifying abstract percussion; it's like a forest coming to life as night falls. "Recording Angel", with its scratchy textures, haunting Trio Mediaeval vocal samples, and founts of drenching melody, is a jazz answer to Nico Muhly's Mothertongue. From the distressed orchestral samples on "Loved One" to the staticky piano of "Sorrow and Its Opposite", the invention never flags, and never veers away from the service of severe beauty. No matter how many times I hear the two pieces that feature spoken-word poetry by David Sylvian, I can never hold onto the narrative thread for very long before I slip into the sounds of the words and the timbre of Sylvain's calming voice. That's how deep an enchantment Henriksen casts on Cartography, which maps an impressionistic world where sound is meaning.

2009-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00

2009-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00

Global / Jazz

ECM

August 25, 2009

fe82978b-cbae-4924-bd3c-10da9976ccaf

Brian Howe

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

The toad's internal organs surged from its mouth as Brian's mother accidentally stepped on it. Brian had noticed ...

The toad's internal organs surged from its mouth as Brian's mother accidentally stepped on it. Brian had noticed ...

Mark Eitzel: The Invisible Man

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2703-the-invisible-man/

The Invisible Man

The toad's internal organs surged from its mouth as Brian's mother accidentally stepped on it. Brian had noticed the toad sitting on the grass just in time to witness its gruesome death, and stared for a few seconds before throwing up his hands and shouting, "The universe sucks!" Brian is fond of decrying the injustices of our chaotic environment, and perhaps no other single anecdote supports his rantings better. There was no reason for what happened to that toad. It just happened. Of course, Brian's simple three-word theory is applicable everywhere, and not just in the natural world. It was at work when Beta succumbed to VHS, despite being the superior format. It's at work every time Fox cancels a good TV show and replaces it with police chase videos. And it's at work almost constantly in the music industry, a world where the Britneys and the Backstreets rule the charts while so many true artists toil in the depths of commercial hell, neglected by a public hungry for eye candy and a quick thrill. While many artists have suffered similar fates, few have typified it the way Mark Eitzel has. Put simply, Eitzel possesses one of the most impressive oeuvres of any songwriter, living or dead. Even the perpetually clueless Rolling Stone couldn't ignore the man's genius, naming him Songwriter of the Year back in 1991. Despite his complete mastery of the craft, though, he's never seen his day in the spotlight, and at this point in his career, it seems unlikely that he ever will. The public at large isn't interested in music this brutally honest. All the more for you and me, I suppose. Transplanted in the early 80's from his boyhood home of Columbus, Ohio to the San Francisco Bay Area, Eitzel fronted the tragically overlooked American Music Club. Over the course of AMC's seven albums, Eitzel penned some of the greatest, most heartfelt tales of degradation, struggle, and sadness in modern music, finding his muse in dank bars, empty beds and lonely nights. When AMC finally called it quits in 1994 after a stalled deal with Reprise, Eitzel struck out on his own, releasing the jazzy 60 Watt Silver Lining and the fantastic Peter Buck collaboration West on Warner before the label left him on the curb. The good folks at Matador picked him up for 1998's cheekily titled Caught in a Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too Much Baby, a starkly beautiful album that was almost aborted due to the difficulty of making it. Three years later, Eitzel is still on his feet, though the weight of the world has hardly been lifted from his shoulders. The Invisible Man is perhaps his best solo effort yet, and nearly the equal of AMC's greatest triumph, Everclear. Greatness, of course, is a given where Eitzel is involved, but perhaps the most stunning thing about The Invisible Man is the fact that, so many years on, he's embraced electronics and emerged with an album that sounds utterly contemporary and vital. "The Boy with the Hammer" starts things off with deeply echoed piano and Eitzel's powerful voice singing, "When the boy with the hammer in the bag stands up to cheer/ Then you stand up to cheer," as ambient washes rise like an ether fog, pushed along by a mix of skittering beats and live percussion. Eitzel has always checked Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream as influences, but they've never come to the fore like this in the past. "Can You See?" finds Eitzel balancing his world-weariness with a newfound trace of optimism: "You say that another man's hell could be your heaven/ And if this is being blind and wrong give me more and more/ And let me light up the hand and let me pull the truth through/ But if the truth won't make you happy/ What would you do?/ The truth is that I'm happy when I'm with you." The understated electronics burbling underneath combine with knockout horn arrangement to wrap around Eitzel's confessions like a warm blanket. Goosebumps ensue. The hilarious march of "Christian Science Reading Room" is Eitzel's black humor at its best. "I was so high/ I stood for an hour outside the Christian Science Reading Room/ And suddenly I could not resist/ I became a Christian Scientist/ And I studied light and I studied sound/ And every question that I asked was suddenly profound." He goes on to convert his cat before declaring, "I love all seven deadly sins," in the opening of "Sleep." This is the point, where, as a reviewer, my job becomes difficult. There are thirteen songs on this album and every single one of them is tremendous in its own right. I could spend the rest of this review quoting lyrics and never truly convey the power of these songs. Eitzel has a creepy way of finding all the thoughts you have hanging next to the skeletons in your closet and conveying them succinctly and effortlessly. So rather than participate in a futile exercise like trying to describe how good this music is, I'll go for the big wrap-up and hope that I can convince you that this is totally worth listening to. It's way too early to declare anything the Album of the Year, but I will say that this one holds the top spot on my list by a long shot so far. Eitzel and his small group of talented cohorts have created a textured soundtrack to the outpourings of a broken heart that never once intrudes on the honesty of the proceedings. Every bleep and skitter is there to serve the song. Exploring new territory while maintaining the emotional weight of your material is rarely a working prospect for an artist, but The Invisible Man pulls it off nicely. Eitzel may still be the invisible man in many respects, but as long as he keeps translating his sorrow and suffering into batches of killer songs like this, we as listeners get to be the lucky beneficiaries. On the drunkenly jubilant closer, "Proclaim Your Joy," Eitzel exhorts us half-seriously that "it is important throughout your life to proclaim your joy." And with this album in your stereo, I think it's safe to say that you will.

2001-05-22T01:00:01.000-04:00

2001-05-22T01:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Matador

May 22, 2001

fe84740c-4584-46bd-8b5c-26d7357a22d6

Joe Tangari

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

This eight-song mini-LP from the veteran post-punks includes tracks that didn’t fit on their self-titled 2015 album and is marked by an unsettling, dead-of-night calm.

This eight-song mini-LP from the veteran post-punks includes tracks that didn’t fit on their self-titled 2015 album and is marked by an unsettling, dead-of-night calm.

Wire: Nocturnal Koreans

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21715-nocturnal-koreans/

Nocturnal Koreans

Throughout their 40-year existence, Wire have striven to both obliterate and preserve their past. The post-punk pioneers’ discography is one of abrupt but clean breaks, with prolonged periods of inactivity that neatly group their records into distinct phases—which the band and fans cheekily refer to as Marks, like upgraded models of the same sports car. It’s almost as if they’ve always approached their work as discrete discs in a career-retrospective box set, with each era defined by a specific aesthetic approach or change in personnel. Not surprisingly, for a band so self-aware of their legacy, Wire have been very selective about what songs make it onto their official albums. At the same time, they’re not ones to let leftovers go to waste—they’re committed to giving aborted material its proper due and consideration, no matter if it takes several years to work it into proper shape. Their 2013 release, Change Become Us, comprised updated versions of songs written in 1980 but only captured on a crude live recording from the era. The new Nocturnal Koreans likewise salvages scrapped material, though its shelf life can be measured in months rather than decades—the mini-LP features eight songs that were recorded alongside the 11 featured on Wire’s 2015 self-titled effort, but didn’t make it onto the album. According to the band, the songs featured on Wire lent themselves to more of a live approach, whereas the tracks compiled on and reworked for Nocturnal Koreans encouraged a greater degree of studio manipulation. But the two releases still sound like byproducts of the same moment—Wire was hardly lacking for textural trickery, while Nocturnal Koreans accommodates a couple of rockers. Furthermore, the atypical tools employed here (trumpet, lap-steel guitar) are treated less as feature attractions than soluble materials to be mutated and absorbed into the band’s soundstream. Whereas Wire effectively found this perennially re-inventive band settling into a comfort zone of sorts, forging the melodic middle ground between post-punk whirr and Krautrock swirl, Nocturnal Koreans uses that album’s brisk, motorik pop as its jumping-off point. Chronicling an experience with mid-tour insomnia, the opening title track masterfully mediates between inner-city tension and dream-world reverie, with frontman Colin Newman’s bleary-eyed mental haze (“I dressed in my shower before I awoke”) rendered through an encroaching, droning buzz that gradually blurs the edges of the song’s incessant backbeat. True to that nighttime scene-setter, Nocturnal Koreans ranks among Wire’s most musically relaxed releases, with Newman mostly singing in calm, sometimes hushed tones. But it’s only relaxed in the sense that a sleepless night in your bedroom is relaxed—the pillows and sheets feel familiar, but your thoughts are riddled with anxieties over the unknown. While the droll, dry “Internal Exile” may deliver its critique of cutthroat capitalism with a smirk (“Hearts of gold/ No pot to piss in/ Join the queue of future has-beens”), its tense acoustic stalk and prodding chorus apply palpable pressure. The more wiry—and typically Wire-y— “Numbered” packs in a cheeky callback to one of the band’s signature songs (“You think I’m a number/ Still willing to rhumba”), yet that knowing nod only reinforces the new track’s doomsday messaging. Those apocalyptic intimations are rendered all the more starkly through the dead-of-night stillness of “Forward Motion,” whose eerie, frosty ambience swells into a mushroom cloud of lingering cold-war paranoia. It’s easy to see how something like “Forward Position” was deemed too much of an aesthetic outlier to fit in with the Wire tracklist. But there are also a handful of tracks here (“Dead Weight,” “Still,” “Pilgrim Trade”) that seem like mere victims of attrition—functional, pro-forma songs that try to boost their mid-tempo pulse by piling on synth and noise textures. So when bassist Graham Lewis steps up to take his lone, lead vocal on the closing “Fishes Bones,” it’s a welcome jolt, his leering lyrics (“The back door’s open, are you needing a boost?/ Inside is where my chicken roost”) providing an absurdist counterpoint to Newman’s more contemplative observations. As per Wire’s 21st century M.O., it’s a song that obliquely references the band’s prior work—in this case, the strobe-lit, lockstep assault of late-’80s standards like “(A Berlin) Drill.” But it uses nostalgia like a slingshot, pulling back to the past as a means to shoot forth into the future.

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

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

Rock

Pinkflag

April 28, 2016

fe9bf87e-baf7-43b4-a90e-cc1a1f8dcbf1

Stuart Berman

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

With more ambitious melodies, bolder harmonies, and compositional complexity, the Chicago trio’s new album hypercharges their already electric sound.

With more ambitious melodies, bolder harmonies, and compositional complexity, the Chicago trio’s new album hypercharges their already electric sound.

Dehd: Poetry

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dehd-poetry/

Poetry

Dehd is as much a rock band as they are a viable alternative to Red Bull. The Chicago trio’s previous two—great, but relatively interchangeable—albums, 2020’s Flower of Devotion and 2022’s Blue Skies, established Dehd as something you reach for when you want to feel hypercharged. Singer Emily Kempf’s vocals have the endearing, squealing quality of a hog call, and Jason Balla makes the guitar sound like his strings are fruit-colored rubber bands. Their music offers a reliable path to sun-kissed paradise, if your version necessitates dirty knees and sticky fingers. But on Dehd’s latest album, Poetry, the band tries the backroads. With more ambitious melodies and compositional complexity, Dehd sends a lightning bolt through their already electric sound. All they needed was a binding agent. Balla notes in press materials that he, Kempf, and drummer Eric McGrady approached writing Poetry differently than past albums. They abandoned their typical roles—McGrady exercising his yogic restraint over the drum kit, Kempf spilling her voice all over the mic—in favor of experimentation. Balla recalls how they’d all “bounce around the room playing different instruments, dreaming up different ideas” and summoning the red-hot energy they felt when the band was younger. The result is worthwhile: Poetry still pulses like summer, but Dehd sounds more cohesive than ever. Forest layers of guitar and echoed vocals replace the ponytail swing of Blue Skies. Still, Balla often sings with charming indifference, like he found the lyrics crumpled in his back pocket. “It’s a lover, soft undressing,” he muses with Kempf on the headrush “Dog Days,” only to finish the next line with a statement of apathy: “It’s a, ugh, whatever.” His reedy voice and Kempf’s gunshot shouting have always mixed together well, like sparkling water and soda syrup. But Poetry elevates their natural chemistry with bold harmonies. The two trade light da-da-da’s and lazy ahh’s on the yearning “So Good,” as if they’re playing dentist. When McGrady’s drum starts to rumble, it feels like Earth is parting for the song’s true message: “I’m bad at this love thing/You’ll probably mean nothing.” Dehd tackle the same topics with a missing-tooth grin: addictive love, pain, being a happy outsider in spite of these things. Despite the cringey loftiness that a title like Poetry suggests, they consistently deliver sensible Bob Seger jams, like “Shake,” on which Kempf huffs out big breaths, as if she’s using them to keep herself cool. The poetry is in the mundane, they suggest. It’s in all the disparate pieces that come together to form one mosaic, your one life. That sense of quotidian beauty is especially palpable on “Pure Gold,” in which McGrady’s drums sway like blossoms in a windy wildflower field. Kempf and Balla chant triumphantly, proclaiming that it’s all “Easy, breezy/Ooh, yeah/We laugh so freely.” Their instruments no longer rub against each other like dry sticks, as they would on past albums—instead, they melt together like popsicles.

2024-05-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-05-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

Fat Possum

May 10, 2024

fea0da81-2398-45f2-81cd-c53d41717a84

Ashley Bardhan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/

After two albums of solo recording, the Love Language's Stuart McLamb enlisted a small army of collaborators on his third album. McLamb seems to be relishing the chance to get outside of his head, making music that is gorgeous and unashamedly fun.

After two albums of solo recording, the Love Language's Stuart McLamb enlisted a small army of collaborators on his third album. McLamb seems to be relishing the chance to get outside of his head, making music that is gorgeous and unashamedly fun.

The Love Language: Ruby Red

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18294-the-love-language-ruby-red/

Ruby Red

The Love Language's self-titled 2009 debut was endearingly frayed collection of alt-country pop, 1960s garage-rock swagger, and Spector-esque swells of melodrama, all recorded by leader Stuart McLamb, alone on his four-track. McLamb scrounged together seven-piece band to tour the record, and the adaptation of the rough-hewn debut album to a live setting was a revelation, as the motley lineup made each of McLamb’s songs pop in high-contrast technicolor. But McLamb's 2010 Merge debut, Libraries, found him continuing to record solo, crafting nuggets of Burt Bacharach inspired baroque pop if never quite moving beyond mid-tempo indie rock competency. McLamb’ took two years to record his third LP as the Love Language, Ruby Red, this time with the help over over 20 musicians across a handful of timezones. This album’s recording process was the complete antithesis of McLamb’s previous efforts, and the collaborative spirit has led to a record of relaxed confidence. The production details and influences that produced the most interesting moments from the previous albums-- Spector’s orchestral swathes, Bacharach’s deceptively simple pop compositions, a steely garage rock nerve, the twangy alt-country stomp-- have coalesced and hardened into a full-bodied dynamic sound that bristles with excitement and pleasure. Ruby Red is a willfully effervescent record that wears its pop music heart on its sleeve; string and horn sections are used liberally to crest and smash with the motion of McLamb’s melodies, while anthemic guitar figures and radio-ready hooks whistle through each song like they were designed to pour out of a set of car speakers. The lingering mopiness that permeated Libraries’ is swapped for the unabashed enthusiasm in songs like track one “Calm Down”, a bass-chugging thrasher that erupts into a piano/tambourine driven chorus. "Calm Down", along with the family-friendly garage rock of “Kids”, along with the loungey, sunkissed harmonies of “Hi Life” and the classical crooning vibe of “Golden Age”, make for a solid tour through McLamb’s M.O. on Ruby Red, as he filters a handful of faithfully rendered canonical styles from pop music’s history through his indie rock sensibilities. Even the weaker ballad “Knots”--which is marred by a shaky vocal performance early on-- slowly transforms into a heart-melting, jaunty, string-laden sing-along. This is the album that should have followed McLamb’s quaintly lo-fi debut and ensuing tours, as the small army of collaborators brings his pop music vision to life. McLamb seems to be relishing the chance to get outside of his head, making music that is gorgeous and unashamedly fun.

2013-07-30T02:00:02.000-04:00

2013-07-30T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Merge

July 30, 2013

fea0eede-6571-49bd-88c9-6f6b07ec7f4c

Patrick Bowman

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

On her debut solo album, the Best Coast leader draws inspiration from classic country and glossy pop-rock. It’s the brightest her music has ever sounded but the songwriting doesn’t rise to the occasion.

On her debut solo album, the Best Coast leader draws inspiration from classic country and glossy pop-rock. It’s the brightest her music has ever sounded but the songwriting doesn’t rise to the occasion.

Bethany Cosentino: Natural Disaster

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bethany-cosentino-natural-disaster/

Natural Disaster

Bethany Cosentino chose the name Best Coast in her early 20s, freshly appreciative of the California sun after a brief, wintery stint in New York. Her first album with bandmate Bobb Bruno introduced her as a lovelorn stoner who sang about boys, California, weed, and her late cat, Snacks (please, a moment for Snacks), over Bruno’s fuzzy take on Phil Spector. But long enough into an artist’s career, personas can become cages. Cosentino was tired of being, as she put it on 2020’s Always Tomorrow, the “lazy, crazy baby”—Best Coast had grown musically from the easy three-chord melodies and anodyne harmonies of their first album, but their image was stuck in 2009. For her first record under her own name, Cosentino returned to the music of her childhood: Bonnie Raitt (who gets a shout-out on “Outta Time”), Linda Ronstadt, and Indigo Girls. She recruited producer Butch Walker, who has helmed radio-friendly pop for everyone from Weezer to Taylor Swift, to help her realize her visions of Americana, and left the comforts of Los Angeles for his studio in Nashville. The approach is reminiscent of Best Coast’s second album, The Only Place, where they partnered with Jon Brion to fill in the gaps in their sound. Walker’s production builds from the blues rock of Always Tomorrow with a bevy of percussive elements and glimmering guitars. It’s the brightest and catchiest she’s ever sounded—if only her lyrics could rise to the occasion. Even before she decided to embark on a solo career, Cosentino’s writing had started to veer from sunny run-on sentences about West Coast supremacy to weightier topics: depression, isolation, sobriety. “I guess this is what they mean when they say people can change,” she sang about her own self-actualization on her last album as Best Coast. To Cosentino, growing older is a process of trading hedonism for disillusionment, or trying to find acceptance somewhere in between. That ennui is still present—“If nothing's guaranteed/Then what's the point of doing anything?” she muses on “For a Moment”—but her existential quandaries are almost always met with rote solutions: a kiss that can silence anxiety, if only fleetingly. Hackneyed lyrics seem to be part of a larger strategy: “I tried really hard with this record to leave certain things so that they could be a little bit more universally relatable,” Cosentino said. But the resulting songs are so broadly written that they become meaningless. “Everything’s insane,” she sings on the Train homage “Calling on Angels”; on “My Own City,” she gestures at some broader authority—“They say relax, gotta stay on track”— without hinting at who “they” might be. “Easy,” a piano-driven love ballad, makes the most obvious choice at every turn: “It’s always easy,” she sings. “I hate to sound cliché and cheesy.” Natural Disaster’s title track reads like a global warming update on the Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long”: “This is the hottest summer I can ever remember/‘Cause the world is on fire,” she belts on the chorus. But rather than use those anxieties as an axis for contemplation or change, Cosentino settles on nihilism: “Hey, if we’re all dying, then what does it matter?” Cosentino has said the song was “inspired by the energy of 2020, when there was crazy political unrest and people were dying in massive amounts,” but it’s hard to hear that fervor as she sings, unvaryingly upbeat, about the world ending. The chorus’s central phrase— “We’re a natural disaster”—attempts to link the destruction of the planet with the messy problems of growing up, but dismisses the unique struggles of the two in the process. Cosentino’s writing about more personal changes doesn’t fare any better. “It’s Fine,” a warm ode to taking the high road, stumbles when Cosentino sings “I am evolved,” on the closest thing the album ever gets to a bridge. The grammatical choices —“am” instead of “have”—come off more like self-help gibberish than a declaration of self-improvement. When we get to the chorus, an airy reiteration that “it’s fine” (what rhymes with “it’s fine?” Well, “it’s not fine,” of course!), her stratospheric belting feels unearned by the flimsy build-up. Cosentino’s voice—a robust, rich tone that made her a perfect fit for the National Anthem at Dodgers stadium—is unwavering throughout most of the album. She sounds just as effusive singing about global warming on “Natural Disaster” as she does singing about fleeting love on “For a Moment”—and stretches the 12-song album to feel twice its length. Elsewhere, songs sound like Linda Ronstadt mad libs: “I was born in the sign of water/But that don't mean I can save us now,” she sings on “Hope You’re Happy Now.” Her couplets beg you not to think too deeply about them: “It's a journey/And I think I'll stick around,” she sings on “It’s a Journey.” Cosentino often grabs for the same phrases over and over again; she uses some version of “the sky is falling” across multiple songs. These missteps might be growing pains: While it might have been straightforward to rhyme “baby” and “maybe” in a sendup to the Ronettes, putting her own spin on the heart wrenching power of country legends is a taller order. When Cosentino slows down and strips her voice back to its barest parts, though, a soft vision of pop folk comes into clearer view: “A Single Day” opens with just guitar and vocals, in medias res, as she’s “thinking a lot about how it’s all gonna disappear.” As the instrumentation builds slowly—a guiro here, a banjo there—she talks about singing the Mamas & the Papas in her car as she plans her escape. It’s a more subtle approach to songwriting than she takes on the rest of the album, and the chorus feels properly explosive as a result: “If the whole thing is going out and ending like they say/ Well we better live a million lifetimes in a single day,” she sings, her voice taking on a miasmatic quality as she stretches the last word of each line. Cosentino sounds strongest when she gives herself permission to veer from her influences and find her own voice.

2023-08-03T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-08-03T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rock

Concord

August 3, 2023

feab7d9a-859e-40d2-8647-13783b9da76d

Arielle Gordon

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

The upstart Alabama rapper has big hype and a personality to match. His new full-length shows off a more human side.

The upstart Alabama rapper has big hype and a personality to match. His new full-length shows off a more human side.

YhapoJJ: P.S. Fuck You

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yhapojj-ps-fuck-you/

P.S. Fuck You

Yhapojj has the kind of outsized persona where he takes on the identity of a wolf, is anointed to knighthood via sword emojis in TikTok comments, and has a show shut down by NYPD—only to take the music into the streets and the skate park. Since 2020, he’s been triangulating his sound, somewhere between Isley Brothers, ILoveMakonnen, and Bangerz-era Miley Cyrus. On P.S. Fuck You, the 20-year-old Huntsville, Alabama rapper comes back down to Earth with a vulnerable and sometimes silly project that’s ultimately sort of fun but not that deep. Alongside teenage phenom Nettspend, Yhapojj has popularized “jerk” rap, a genre known for pitched-up, layered vocals and bass that will make your speakers sound broken. With many of jerk rap’s major players barely beyond their teens, its lyrics tend to capture classic adolescent attitudes like “no one understands me,” “I need her so bad,” and “let’s get fucked up tonight.” Yhapojj’s fans admire his combination of sad, crooning lyrics over loud, kinetic beats. Call it crying while acing your math exam, but that duality is foundational to P.S. Fuck You, where Yhapojj weaves between blaring horns, melodic piano, and thick bass as he reflects on his relationships and mindset. On the standout “Turnin Lane,” produced by Charlotte, North Carolina’s ok, Yhapojj ruminates about a lover he doesn’t want to leave, asking her which way she’s going to go in the turn lane—as well as complimenting her feet. He’s trying to convince us that he doesn’t care, but the song’s anxious desperation betrays him. Atop a triumphant horn-filled beat on “Feelings,” Yhapojj hopes all his friends get married—if only so he gets a chance to see his crush at the reception, which is sweet in a rom-com type of way. His change of vocal effects and the tone of his voice create different versions of Yhapojj to represent different parts of his personality. His delivery has a mountain of charisma to stand on, but a lack of musical variety is what really drags P.S. Fuck You down. The album features work by a number of young producers, like Atlanta’s FearDorian and jerk rap beatmaker Hhhcra, but it starts to run out of gas towards the end, and piano-based tracks like “Whats Up Wit” and “Touch Evb” blend together. While Yhapojj has used angel or werewolf imagery to create a hyperreal version of himself that made zany music, P.S. Fuck You portrays him as just a guy going through it. It feels raw and complex, but it leaves you hoping for just a touch more magic.

2024-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Simple Stupid

May 20, 2024

feb3843c-10ca-4174-809e-d14b55e4a689

Allison Harris

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

In what is billed as the emo band’s farewell album, Max Bemis concocts a tangled rock opera about a burnt-out singer grappling with his rage and his sexuality.

In what is billed as the emo band’s farewell album, Max Bemis concocts a tangled rock opera about a burnt-out singer grappling with his rage and his sexuality.

Say Anything: Oliver Appropriate

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/say-anything-oliver-appropriate/

Oliver Appropriate

An emo rock opera might provoke some well-deserved eye-rolls in a post-American Idiot era. But Say Anything’s Max Bemis is no stranger to the form: His 2004 cult hit, ...Is a Real Boy, for all of its goofy pop-punk hooks and lyrics about phone sex, was originally conceived as a play, right down to its producer, Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer Stephen Trask. So it’s fitting that Bemis returned to the format for the band’s final record, Oliver Appropriate. For Say Anything, the outlandish nature of the stage—the heightened emotions, the unsubtle criticisms of politics and culture—lends structure to what might otherwise be unbridled hormonal rage. And in case it has to be said about a man who frequently screams “I hate everyone” on stage, Bemis has rage in spades. Enough rage for a nine-page screed ahead of their final record. Enough rage for a double-album about mid-aughts emo. Enough rage for a line like, “You are a vacuous soldier of the thrift-store Gestapo.” On Oliver Appropriate, he channels his rage into Oliver, the album’s protagonist, a suspiciously familiar “singer of a burnt-out emo/indie punk band past their peak,” as he put it in the record’s manifesto. But this dissonance between “Max” and “Oliver” means that Bemis, finally, can write about himself without really writing about himself. It means that Oliver—who’s also described as “the bastard son of Columbine” and “a thinly veiled critique of new age masculinity”—could really be any beanie-wearing dude doing mental backflips to reconcile his sexual proclivities with his self-image. The 14 songs on Oliver Appropriate detail two days in the life of this prototypical millennial with the specificity of a good script, down to the scene-setting he sings on album opener “The Band Fuel”: “The dream of Julian Casablancas, gyro salesmen and a stranger in my blankets. Awoken by Amazon Drones.” As has become tradition, the record also includes its fair share of digs at his fellow failed indie musicians—“I know a lot of men in hardcore bands who collectively fund the Colombians,” he sneers on “Pink Snot.” But all of this score-settling is really a bait-and-switch for the crux of the album, a sexual confrontation that finds seemingly straight Oliver/Max confusingly in love with a man. Bemis himself came out as bisexual in 2018. Max dealt with it by writing this record. Oliver deals with it by slitting his lover’s throat. Don’t be surprised, though, if you miss that morbid detail upon first listen. It’s a tossed off line—“I’ll slit your throat and leave you gaping”—that seems commonplace in a discography full of macabre lyrics sung with the pithy delivery of mediocre karaoke. The undertones of sexual confusion, made explicit in Bemis’ manifesto, are only briefly mentioned in the record itself. The most frank discussion of Oliver’s internalized, violent homophobia is on “Your Father,” a song about parental disapproval sung, somewhat ironically, by a man and a woman, neither of which are Bemis (creative partner Karl Kuehn and Bemis’ wife Sherri DuPree, respectively). Without the context that Bemis’ personal life and highly detailed essay provide, the record’s plotline is muddied and morally ambiguous at best. But in its sharpest moments, it is exciting to see Bemis really wrestle with himself again. Over the past decade, Say Anything slowly lost their lyrical might; their words still cut, but the blade was dull. By contrast, Oliver Appropriate is almost uncomfortably rich with verbose specificity, from the Paul Walker movies Oliver half-watches with a girl to the excuses he makes for his shitty behavior post-hookup: “Bowie’s my excuse so I can brag of how I tried, when all I want to do is send you off and get you high,” he sings on “Send You Off.” It’s hackneyed at times (lines about rock stars who “ramble about Trump over Stellas and headline Coachella” are dusty disses), but the record showcases the dark humor and narrative knack that set the band apart on ...Is a Real Boy. It’s refreshing to hear guitar on a Say Anything album after half a decade of the token failed experiments of latter-day emo (a “hip hop” record, an attempt at piano-driven ballads). The acoustic guitar, recorded so closely that you can hear the textured abrasion of fingertips against nylon, sounds romantic and nostalgic next to Bemis’ shredded whine on songs like “Daze.” Say Anything’s contemporaries from the mid-2000s are remembered as a series of slick pop-punk bands mixed into oblivion. But Oliver Appropriate, with its clap-along drumming patterns and stripped-back production, sounds like an elder statesman of emo gathering his fellow washed up frontmen around a campfire for a story or two. It’s a fitting ending for a band that always stood a step or two outside the scene, pointing and laughing.

2019-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Dine Alone

January 25, 2019

febcb478-d590-4459-9eeb-3a15d666f34b

Arielle Gordon

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

The sound of Puerto Rican-born, NYC-based duo Buscabulla is post-chillwave but decidedly Caribbean, with nods to salsa, reggaeton, and bachata. Their sophomore EP features a duet with Helado Negro.

The sound of Puerto Rican-born, NYC-based duo Buscabulla is post-chillwave but decidedly Caribbean, with nods to salsa, reggaeton, and bachata. Their sophomore EP features a duet with Helado Negro.

Buscabulla: EP II

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22818-buscabulla-ep-ii/

EP II

In many ways, the Buscabulla story is indicative of the new paradigm in independent music: an indie spirit buttressed by corporate sponsorship. The Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based couple of Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo Del Valle won a Guitar Center contest for the privilege of having Dev Hynes produce their first EP, which was recorded with help from Converse, and released by the hybrid clothing/record label Kitsuné. Berrios still holds down a day job as a designer, while raising her two-year-old with Del Valle. Their breaks are representative of the kind of opportunity that millions of American citizens in Puerto Rico have sought out as they’ve left their homes on the island to pursue new lives in the states. But the exchange runs both ways. Just as NYC’s global market and culture has shaped their lives, they help ingrain Boricua culture into America’s, bringing the sounds and stories of the islands to mainland and, often, to English-speaking audiences. You can count the recorded Buscabulla songs on two hands, and they all sound like love songs to their homeland; Berrios’ lyrics convey a longing, distant gaze that buffers out the island’s rough edges, a magical oasis that exists only in dreams. These themes permeate Buscabulla’s self-released second EP, a continuation of the first, both in concept and aesthetic. “Frío” is a duet with Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange, in which the “Young, Latin, and Proud” singer tries to comfort Berrios as they weather the winter’s biting cold, yearning for the warm embrace of their hometowns. “El frío éste duele/(Duele en tu mente),” they sing, or “This cold hurts/(The pain is in your mind.)” “Perdón” considers the closure of leaving things, and people, behind. And “Tártaro,” the ode to “salsa erotica” legend Frankie Ruiz, romanticizes the island’s seedier corners with a nostalgic fondness for sleaze that can quickly be punctured by the grimness of reality (like when the band found used towels and condom wrappers in the room they booked at an infamous Puerto Rican love hotel to shoot the video). But Ruiz is an excellent analogue to the vibe that Buscabulla seeks to create. He sings about adultery and promiscuity, but with a croon that sounds too pretty to be wrong. While Buscabulla’s live shows are considerably more high-energy than the lounge vibes on the records, they still draw from the same the sonic palette. Their aesthetic is post-chillwave but decidedly Caribbean, with percussion that skews towards salsa, and there are discernible nods to reggaeton, bachata, and even hints of Sade’s new age soul (if she was an alto). Del Valle has admitted to being drawn to the “peculiar type of charm” of Ruiz’s music, a kitschiness wrapped in a beautiful voice, reminding us it’s still fun to be naughty.

2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Baby Making

January 26, 2017

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Matthew Ismael Ruiz

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

The German musician Christian Naujoks makes pensive, idiosyncratic pieces somewhere between electronic and chamber music, and his new album is his most exquisitely melancholy work yet.

The German musician Christian Naujoks makes pensive, idiosyncratic pieces somewhere between electronic and chamber music, and his new album is his most exquisitely melancholy work yet.

Christian Naujoks: Wave

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21920-wave/

Wave

A maker of pensive, idiosyncratic music that blurs the boundaries between indie, electronic, and classical, the German musician Christian Naujoks would be an outlier in most contexts, and he certainly is on Hamburg's Dial label, which is nevertheless his longtime home. Founded in 2000, Dial is primarily a hub for the kind of moody minimal techno and crisp deep house espoused by co-founders Lawrence, Carsten Jost, and Turner, along with a roster that includes Pantha du Prince, Efdemin, and Roman Flügel. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything resembling a dance beat in Naujoks' catalog, however. His untitled 2009 debut, recorded on piano, marimba, strings, and flute, betrays the influence of composers like Steve Reich and Wim Mertens, while his 2012 album True Life / In Flames, for piano and marimba alone and recorded in Hamburg's storied Laeiszhalle, comes even closer to modern chamber music, right down to a reworking of John Cage's "Experiences No. 2." What Naujoks shares with his label mates is a propensity for melancholy—his debut album features an acoustic version of New Order's "Leave Me Alone," retitled as "Off the Rose," that drives home the impression of Naujoks as a moody romantic with his hands stuffed in a tattered wool coat, staring out at the rainclouds over the harbor—and his third album, Wave, is the most exquisitely melancholy thing he's done yet. It's also the most expertly crafted, demonstrating a significant step up as both a songwriter and an instrumentalist. Shifting and narrowing his focus, this time he concentrates on the electric guitar, which is accompanied on a few tracks by his typically spare, searching piano arrangements. This time, there are no vocals at all—a not unwise move, given that Naujok's slightly quavering voice has never been his strong suit. He avoids distortion for the most part, save some occasional, subtle overdrive, and though he occasionally multi-tracks his guitar parts, you wouldn't necessarily know it without listening closely. There's little in the way of artifice or obfuscation, just ringing delay and reverb that suggest an expanse as wide as the horizon. This is music that presents itself as the sound of things as they really are: metal strings, ivory keys, tape hiss, tube amps. The occasional squeaking of fingers against guitar strings, or the muted clunk of a piano pedal being lifted and lowered, lends to the music's grounded sense of physicality. Both rhythmically and tonally, these are fairly simple songs, gently tugged between consonance and dissonance, and lullingly repetitive. The moments that stand out against this placid backdrop are often nothing more than small, brief riffs—a trill that pulls against the root note like white foam peeling off the crest of a wave. Lyrical, meditative, and faintly bittersweet, Wave traffics in affect: It is good music for hiking in the high sierra, for late-night drives through rural Maine, for sunsets on the Pacific, for rainstorms anywhere. Favoring major thirds and fifths and major sevenths, it leaves plenty of open space for the listener to project her own emotions into, and it is never cluttered: In the patient "Playback Room," a sedate call and response between piano and guitar, the guitar is only touched some 20 times in the song's nearly four-minute run. Wave frequently brings to mind the work of Factory Records' Durutti Column. Naujoks' wistful melodies and rounded, jewel-toned chords are often strikingly similar to those of Vini Reilly, that group's mastermind and eventual sole member, and so are his atmospheric choices of guitar tone and effects, like the rippling delay of "Little Dume" and the burled flanger of "96 Frames Per Second." But that's hardly a drawback. The Durutti Column catalog itself often feels a bit like a set of variations on a single theme; that someone new should pick up the torch is a welcome development. And Naujoks' homage breaks new ground on songs like "Playback Room" and the title track, in which ruminative piano and guitar figures are spun into gauzy abstraction. The album's only real limitation is that the majority of its songs are all in the same key; given the uniformity of its palette, the songs begin to blend together by the record's end. But if we consider them as a set of variations themselves, that's hardly a grave flaw. It's not surprising that Naujoks is also a visual artist, because ultimately Wave feels like a one-room exhibition: a small gallery full of line drawings or watercolors all in a given style, matted in white and framed in blond wood—tasteful to a fault but still genuinely, even surprisingly, moving.

2016-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Dial

May 23, 2016

fecab285-4da6-45c3-9f7d-0b95ff8295f4

Philip Sherburne

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

Faithfull pairs her forever-soothing voice with the words of the Romantic poets who inspired her, over tasteful accompaniments from Bad Seeds sonic architect Warren Ellis.

Faithfull pairs her forever-soothing voice with the words of the Romantic poets who inspired her, over tasteful accompaniments from Bad Seeds sonic architect Warren Ellis.

Marianne Faithfull / Warren Ellis: She Walks in Beauty

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marianne-faithfull-warren-ellis-she-walks-in-beauty/

She Walks in Beauty

John Keats was at the tail end of a very short life when he coined the term “Negative Capability.” The best artists, wrote the 22-year-old Romantic poet, don’t concern themselves with logical arguments or scientific proof. They pursue something far more uncertain: beauty. The originality of Keats’ 1817 idea feels dulled in the 21st century, considering it influenced the next 200 years of literature, and provided a precedent for such shameless pleasure-seekers and starry-eyed psychedelics as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles—as probably too many scholarly articles have pointed out. Yet of all the ’60s musical icons, perhaps none is more inclined toward the Romantic poets than Marianne Faithfull. Her lyrics are chockablock with literary references that feel comfortable, lived-in: She even titled her 2018 album, which concluded the most prolific and artistically consistent period of her career, Negative Capability. Her latest, She Walks in Beauty, is a passion project of the highest order. Faithfull reads 11 Romantic poems over settings constructed by Warren Ellis, the longtime sonic architect of the Bad Seeds. If She Walks in Beauty feels underwhelming, it’s because the album doesn’t do a whole lot to transcend this concept. Faithfull could read a legal brief and make it sound beautiful, and part of the record’s appeal stems from hearing her posh British elocution wrap itself around outdated words like “contumely” and “thatch-eves.” Yet at its best, She Walks at least gestures toward something greater, an unusual merging of lieder and ambient music, like a pastoral Robert Ashley. Ellis’ settings demonstrate the same gentle, stately sensibility he brought to Nick Cave’s Ghosteen, reproduced with acousmatic methods. You can pick out birdsong in the beginning, and there’s a lot of piano—some of it courtesy of Cave himself—but largely Ellis snips found sounds from their real-world referents, pasting them back together into an abstract collage. Faithfull manages to cull the emotion from Lord Byron and Thomas Hood without hamming it up, and she never lapses into contemporary speech patterns, recognizing that the old-fashioned colloquialisms of Wordsworth must be nailed with our best approximation of a person from his time. Listening to her say “yon azure sky” pries open a past as mutable and imagined as the source material. We might be sitting in our English gardens waiting for the sun, or fleeing the soot-covered streets of early industrial London: She brings her knowledge of the 19th century to these poems, while leaving space for their time-bending splendor. The ceaseless lull of her voice accounts for the record’s ambient feel, but it also makes She Walks in Beauty seem like an actual poetry reading that drags on for a quarter hour too long. This sense might not be quite so strong if the record didn’t conclude with a 12-minute rendition of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallott,” which seems especially interminable because it follows a suite of much shorter readings, and also because it shows Ellis at his most reserved. He often approaches the poems cautiously, though the record works best when his arrangements intrude. His mournful violin coda to Wordsworth’s “Prelude: Book One Introduction” gives the album some much-needed space, while the vocal filter he lays on Shelley’s “To the Moon” offers us a modern reminder that this is music, not just a literary recitation. She Walks in Beauty never quite determines its place on the long continuum between the two, and in an era when so many musicians are incorporating spoken word in exciting ways, this lack of consideration is puzzling. Yet Faithfull and Ellis encourage us to bend our imaginations toward the 19th century in ways that feel powerfully ambiguous. Of course we can draw many literal parallels: Our opioid epidemic echoes their opium eaters, our digital fatigue reflects their newspaper-obsessed cities, our coronavirus mirrors the tuberculosis that killed a quarter of the adult population in Europe, including the 25-year-old Keats. But we don’t need a history lesson, and we don’t need to know that Faithfull almost died of COVID-19 last year, to feel how She Walks in Beauty is pulled by the polarities that life shares with Romantic poetry: death and wonder. If you were once lucky enough to be protected from the former, the past year has been a stark reminder that death is never far away. But wonder is also there, in the same azure sky that impressed the writers of yore, in their poetry and our music. 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.

2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock / Experimental

BMG

April 30, 2021

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Daniel Felsenthal

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

This expansive collection follows songwriter Roddy Frame from his second album Knife through his decision to retire the Aztec Camera moniker, highlighting forays into sophistipop, electronica, and soul.

This expansive collection follows songwriter Roddy Frame from his second album Knife through his decision to retire the Aztec Camera moniker, highlighting forays into sophistipop, electronica, and soul.

Aztec Camera: Backwards and Forwards (The WEA Recordings 1984-1995)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aztec-camera-backwards-and-forwards-the-wea-recordings-1984-1995/

Backwards and Forwards (The WEA Recordings 1984-1995)

Roddy Frame’s songwriting feels like an effortless extension of his restless internal monologue. From the career-defining arc of his band Aztec Camera through the many studio albums he’s released under his given name, the starry-eyed songwriter has assembled a vast catalog of honest, open-hearted love songs. Just 17 years old when he released Aztec’s debut single “Just Like Gold,” Frame emerged fully-formed, an indie poet laureate and brilliant instrumentalist, somehow Morrissey and Johnny Marr as one. The 1981 single was a natural fit for Postcard Records, where acts like Josef K and Orange Juice helped recast post-industrial Glasgow as a bookish, art school outpost ready-made for youthful dreaming. With its jangly, jazz-inflected chords and soaring, larger-than-life chorus, the single’s B-side, “We Could Send Letters,” felt like a naked defense of everything fun and pure about pop music, couched in a delightful complexity. The track later appeared on C81, the compilation series from NME and Rough Trade Records, and the infamous London label went on to release Aztec Camera’s full-length debut, High Land, Hard Rain, in 1983. Such was the start of one of the more promising careers in U.K. indie history, which included gushing profiles in NME and Melody Maker, multiple appearances on the beloved performance series Top of the Pops, and a multi-album deal with Warner-Elektra-Atlantic. While Aztec’s beginnings on Postcard and Rough Trade have been fairly well-documented, with elaborate reissues and reunion tours to mark the 30th anniversary of the band’s debut album, Frame’s move to WEA feels like an important second chapter, one that’s remained largely underexplored in coverage of the band. Backwards and Forwards (The WEA Recordings 1984-1995) amends this historical oversight, shedding light on Frame’s wildly inventive mid-to-late career. The 9-disc, 112-song collection—which follows the songwriter from his sophomore album, Knife, through his decision to retire the Aztec Camera moniker in 1995—offers a portrait of the artist as a committed experimentalist. From his dizzying forays into lounge, sophistipop, and electronica to collaborations with Mick Jones, Edwyn Collins, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Backward and Forwards complicates assumptions about Frame’s breakthrough success, revealing the songwriter as a force in constant motion. His major label debut, 1984’s Knife, follows Frame in unexpected directions that break with the indie ethos of High Land, Hard Rain. Produced by Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, the release feels like a send-up to anyone who expected Aztec to become jangle-pop superstars. Instead, Frame explores pop songwriting by way of its roots in American soul and R&B, with detours through the kind of sappy, DX7-drenched pop ballads so inescapable in the early ‘80s. A New Wave throwback by way of Elvis Costello, “Just Like the USA,” trades the colder elements of British post-punk for an earnest attempt at feel-good Americana—one that, in true Costello fashion, pokes fun at American exceptionalism in the chorus. Others like “All I Need Is Everything” and “Backwards And Forwards” expand on Aztec’s palette with the kind of synth flourishes and drum machine clatter that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Peter Gabriel record. It’s a broad attempt to emphasize the pining, lovesick aspects of Frame’s songwriting, now wrapped in sleeker packaging. Knife would be the first in a series of Aztec Camera releases that cribbed sounds from mainstream pop music, as Frame refracted his sincere approach to songwriting through new trends in adult contemporary. Love, his third studio album and second with WEA, largely abandons Frame’s scrappy acoustic strumming in favor of slower synth-pop and a newfound attention to craft. A tasteful Quiet Storm ballad, “How Men Are” recasts Frame as a sensitive crooner with insight on male chauvinism. Like plenty of Frame’s contemporaries in the late 1980s, the song feels like a self-conscious attempt to evoke timelessness and a sense of maturity. Frame’s lyrics deal mostly in abstraction, using the language of pop to achieve a heartfelt universalism. Times change, and Frame’s success with sophistipop would not outlast his evolving taste. Three years after 1987’s Love, Frame returned with Stray, a collection of nine tracks largely guided by the vocalist’s propulsive guitar. Recorded in Wales at Rockfield Studios, the album feels uniquely nostalgic for the rock and jazz records that informed Aztec Camera from the start. Frame recruited The Clash’s Mick Jones for the joint single “Good Morning Britain,” a rock-radio anthem that took aim at Margaret Thatcher and England’s historically domineering relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom. The loutish single peaked at No. 19 on the U.K. music charts, but always felt out of place from the mouth of an artist otherwise so committed to introspection. Despite the album’s stylistic inconsistencies, Stray was proof that Frame was still at the height of his celebrity, and after less than a year on the road in support of the album, he was ready to return to the studio—this time with Ryuichi Sakamoto. The musicians first crossed paths in Ibiza before reconnecting at a 1991 performance in London, and later decamped to New York to begin working on the followup to Stray. “I consciously tried to hand over the reins a bit,” Frame told The Scotsman in 1999. “It kind of backfired in a way, I suppose, because he wanted to make a record that sounded like High Land, Hard Rain and I wanted to make one that sounded like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” The resulting release, 1993’s Dreamland, departs from the swaggering politics of Stray and introduces elements of trip-hop and electronica. While much of this influence likely came from Sakamoto, whose solo albums were flush with similar textures throughout the early ‘90s, Frame remains an intrepid lyricist unafraid to take his ballads into uncharted territory. On “Birds,” Frame steers clear of clumsy Madchester psychedelia in favor of a simple love song just as light as his teenage material. “How sweet to fly, to touch the sky/To feel in the flow, like the one who glides there,” he sings over icy synths in the hook. As much as the album aspires to keep up with changing times, it’s Frame’s persistent melancholia that shines through in its strongest moments. Dreamland isn’t completely devoid of the indie rock arrangements that characterized earlier Aztec Camera releases, and even its most experimental tendencies feel firmly at home within the band’s extended catalog. For every song like “Birds” or “Vertigo,” there’s a bluesy “Safe in Sorrow” or “Black Lucia” that emphasizes Frame’s storytelling ability over any investment in electronic experimentalism. Less musically adventurous than its predecessor, Aztec’s 1995 album Frestonia is strongest in its softest moments, trading the sonic ambition of Dreamland for a classic approach to solo songwriting. Tracks like “Crazy” and “On The Avenue” are delicate and refined, with Frame finding peace where he once seemed so uneasy. While the album would remain among the band’s least successful commercially, peaking at No. 100 on the U.K. music charts without a charting single, Frestonia shows a songwriter content with his place in the universe, free from the anxieties of youth. This freedom has long been the driving force behind Aztec Camera’s live shows, where Frame seems to cherish the opportunity to look back on his earlier music. Live recordings included with the collection reveal how thrilling this music sounded on stage; the care and joy with which Frame cues up a fan favorite like “Oblivious,” or banters on about the profound sadness of his song “Backwards and Forwards” show that even the most comprehensive collection of studio releases still fails to capture the true dynamism of Frame in his prime. Nine discs and nearly a hundred songs later, you still can’t help but wonder how much still never made it to tape. 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.

2021-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic / Rock

Cherry Red

September 3, 2021

fed1da14-367a-4ba3-a559-78508c70e0a6

Rob Arcand

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

On this fully-improvised session, the jazz duo of drummer Bobby Kapp and pianist Matthew Shipp lock in and never lose focus.

On this fully-improvised session, the jazz duo of drummer Bobby Kapp and pianist Matthew Shipp lock in and never lose focus.

Matthew Shipp / Bobby Kapp: Cactus

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22358-cactus/

Cactus

The improvising jazz duo is a potent form, offering chances for dialogue, battle, and confluence. There’s immediate pressure on both players since neither can hide, so the opportunity to create tense, vital music is palpable. This seems especially true for piano and drum collaborations, since the piano—more so than horns or strings—is often a percussive instrument, and thus can intersect and connect with drums in unique ways. On Cactus, drummer Bobby Kapp and pianist Matthew Shipp take advantage of the possibilities inherent in their setup, persistently passing ideas back and forth in a wordless conversation. The quality level matches the participants’ pedigrees. Kapp came up in the middle of the ’60s free jazz groundswell, playing with saxophone legends Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown, and Noah Howard. Shipp, meanwhile, has been a mainstay in New York’s improvising scene since the mid-’80s, best known for his work alongside bassist William Parker in saxophonist David S. Ware’s quartet. Yet* Cactus* represents only the second time Kapp and Shipp have recorded together—following 2015’s Kapp-led quartet album *Themes 4 Transmutation—*and they had never played as a duo until they pushed the record button on this fully-improvised session. Given that level of unfamiliarity, their quick reaction time and thoughtful interplay are impressive. The pair lock in immediately and never lose their keen eye-to-eye focus, engaging in such thorough dialogue that it’s hard to find a moment where one isn’t responding to the other. The responses that Kapp draws out of Shipp are some of the latter’s most percussive playing on record. There has always been a heavy rhythmic bent to the pianist’s music, but here he’s so inspired by Kapp’s versatile work that at times it sounds like he wants to be a second drummer. Passages in the rolling “Money” and the meditative “After” find Shipp tapping chords between Kapp’s snare strikes in an impromptu call-and-response. In other spots, the pair’s exchanged pulses shift into less orderly flights, such as when Shipp’s hard-beat notes dissolve into Kapp’s cymbal runs on the gripping “Before.” That last example demonstrates the most compelling aspect of Cactus: the duo’s precise tonal control. Kapp and Shipp move from calm to urgent to portentous in single turns of musical phrase, bringing a wide range of moods completely and assuredly within their grasp. They certainly push each other, but they never overreach (one particularly dissonant passage in the aptly-titled “Snow Storm Coming” could be a mess in shakier hands, but here it feels like humans controlling weather). The thrill of *Cactus *is not that the music could fall apart at any moment, but that this duo can handle anything they throw at each other.

2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Jazz

Northern Spy

September 16, 2016

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Marc Masters

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

The Knife producer returns with his first major solo release in over a decade, a giddy, slippery EP that explodes into the sunlight.

The Knife producer returns with his first major solo release in over a decade, a giddy, slippery EP that explodes into the sunlight.

Olof Dreijer: Rosa Rugosa EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/olof-dreijer-rosa-rugosa-ep/

Rosa Rugosa EP

Between 2008 and 2010, the Knife’s Olof Dreijer—under the alias Oni Ayhun—released some of the freakiest dance music that this century has yet to produce. On eight untitled tracks spread across four cryptic 12"s, he veered between clean-lined techno and squalling white noise, slow-motion industrial and beehive drones, folk melodies and shards of shrapnel—sometimes all within the span of a single 15-minute track. Then, having carved his iconoclastic mark across a stagnating European techno scene, he went dark, at least as a solo artist. Beyond his work in the Knife, he put out little beyond the occasional remix or collaboration. But in recent years, Dreijer has gotten busier. He has produced a few rising artists (as well as a handful of tracks on his sibling Karin’s last album as Fever Ray) and remixed a few more; earlier this year, he and longtime collaborator Mt. Sims put out a beguiling ambient-adjacent record made entirely using Trinidadian steel drums. Now he returns with Rosa Rugosa, his first major solo release since 2010. The EP’s three tracks are, in one sense, textbook Dreijer: He’s still using the same eerie, pitch-bending synth riffs and jittery arpeggios. But a distinct shift has taken place. Where Oni Ayhun’s records felt like they emanated from some demonic dungeon, Rosa Rugosa comes exploding into the sunlight. All three tracks feel like variations upon a single theme: They’re all in the same key, and their side-winding melodies feel like funhouse-mirror reflections of one another. The title track sounds the most like Dreijer’s previous work, punctuating a lean, snapping drum groove with staccato synth stabs that hark back to some of Carl Craig’s floor-filling anthems of the mid ’00s. The syncopated lead takes the high-strung energy of a song like Fever Ray’s Olof-produced “What They Call Us” and dials up the nervousness; bright and colorful, it dances like a butterfly caught in a gust of wind, whipped around by tight spirals of echo. It might take a number of listens to realize just how minimalist the song actually is: There are almost no drums, save for a steady kick and some slippery shakers, yet every inch of the spectrum bursts with kinetic energy. Dreijer is clearly influenced by contemporary African and Afro-diasporic electronic music; his recent collaborators include artists from Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, and South Africa, and his DJ mixes are peppered with the sounds of kuduro and batida. Those influences come to the fore on the EP’s other two tracks, with their loping log-drum rhythms. “Cassica,” like the title track, is mostly empty space, with a mosquito synth lead buzzing drunkenly through a dappled canopy of glancing chords and quivering accents. “Camelia” might be the most ebullient thing here, and not just because the drums are a riot of dizzyingly syncopated rimshots and crash cymbals. The synthesizer melody positively sings, imbued with an expressive sensibility I associate with virtuoso R&B vocalists; that might be due in part to the peculiar qualities of the synth patch, which feels like a strangely organic hybrid of woodwind, brass, and wordless voice. As the song crests toward its high-flying climax, it transmits an unmistakably giddy sense of joy. Whatever its echoes of other contemporary global dance-music styles, it couldn’t be the work of anyone but Olof Dreijer. Fifteen years since the first Oni Ayhun record, he’s still in a class of his own.

2023-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-10-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Hessle Audio

October 24, 2023

fedac0dd-de78-4cc6-a5e9-01a5b1faac94

Philip Sherburne

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

The dub innovator reworks 2019’s Rainford, stripping the original down into a form that is warmer and weirder.

The dub innovator reworks 2019’s Rainford, stripping the original down into a form that is warmer and weirder.

Lee “Scratch” Perry: Heavy Rain

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-scratch-perry-heavy-rain/

Heavy Rain

For many artists, releasing a remixed version of your album just six months after it drops would be frivolous. For reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry, a man who helped invent the remix with his 1970s experiments in dub, this kind of rapid turnover runs in the blood. Heavy Rain turns out to be a stronger release than parent album Rainford: warmer, more inventive, and a great deal weirder. Not that Rainford was a failure: Billed as a Johnny Cash-style reinvention, it proved a decent stab at marrying contemporary production to Perry’s rare moments of personal reflection. But Heavy Rain, essentially a dubbed-out reinterpretation of Rainford from Perry and UK producer Adrian Sherwood plus occasional guests, plays to Rainford’s considerable strengths while papering over its weaknesses. Sometimes these are closely related. Perry’s iconic vocal tone, growling and soft, like a bear in a Björk video, is one of the key attractions of any of his records. But he does tend to ramble in his dotage, making many songs on Rainford resemble strings of non sequiturs. Heavy Rain is hardly compact or fat-free, but Perry’s often nonsensical lyrics are less jarring when treated as another instrument to be rolled about in the mix, while his gravelly vocal timbre is perfectly suited for the regimen of echo and delay that it receives on songs like “Mindworker.” By contrast, the “Heavy Rainford” remake of Rainford’s “Autobiography of the Upsetter”—one of the few overtly autobiographical songs in the latter-day Scratch catalog—feels slight in comparison to the original song’s mood of profound nostalgia. A similar logic of enhanced reduction applies to Heavy Rain’s musical bed. Perry and Sherwood strip Rainford down to its bones to better play about with individual elements, meaning that the dubs on Heavy Rain are both more minimal and more involved than their Rainford counterparts. “Here Come the Warm Dreads” (a remake of Rainford’s “Makumba Rock”) is a wonderful example. There’s not a great deal to the song—rolling bassline, shuffling drums, guitar skank, plaintive horn, and the occasional vocal interjection—but featured guest Brian Eno (on the right channel) and Adrian Sherwood (on the left) play merry hell with the mix, subjecting these elements to a magical mystery tour of production sorcery whose detail demands to be heard on good headphones. This approach also helps to highlight moments of individual brilliance: The plaintive refrain of Rainford’s “Children of the Light” works far better on Heavy Rain’s “Enlightened,” where it is untangled from Perry’s circuitous vocal and left to drift on a cloud of effects. Trombonist Vin Gordon, best known for his work with Bob Marley, is another notable highlight throughout Heavy Rain, adding such lilting melancholy to “Crickets in Moonlight” that the absence of vocal barely registers, while his instrument’s conversational tone on “Rattling Bones and Crowns” conveys more humanity than many singers’ most heartfelt confessions. That Perry’s octogenarian genius is better suited to dub than reggae (and to moods over songs) is evident in the two new tracks towards the end of Heavy Rain—“Dreams Come True” and “Above and Beyond”—whose songwriting feels overly polite compared to the album’s prevailing air of anarchic fun. That’s no big stumbling block, though: Heavy Rain is a surprisingly inspired piece of late-period dabbling from a dub master. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Experimental

On-U Sound

January 9, 2020

feea4be0-6e34-458b-9e6c-82905ba013bb

Ben Cardew

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

Edinburgh indie-pop quartet the Spook School embrace life's misinterpretations and messiness. On their sophomore record Try to Be Hopeful, they are not naively optimistic; instead, as the title insinuates, they attempt positivity with a grain of salt.

Edinburgh indie-pop quartet the Spook School embrace life's misinterpretations and messiness. On their sophomore record Try to Be Hopeful, they are not naively optimistic; instead, as the title insinuates, they attempt positivity with a grain of salt.

The Spook School: Try to Be Hopeful

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21342-try-to-be-hopeful/

Try to Be Hopeful

Edinburgh quartet the Spook School take their name from another group of four, a late 19th Century sect of the Glasgow School of Art who were given the nickname after the critically unpopular ghostly figures in their work. Later, their style helped inspire Art Nouveau, and thus the underdogs became the influencers. It is an appropriate title for a theatrical indie pop band that embraces life's misinterpretations and messiness, and their message has never been more apparent than on their sophomore record Try to Be Hopeful*.* Although it was still a defining theme on their 2013 debut, Dress Up, Try to Be Hopeful finds the group writing much more explicitly about queerness and identity. As singer and guitarist Nye Todd explained in an interview, "A lot of the lyrics I wrote on our first record were about coming to terms with being trans, whereas on this one the songs are more about a feeling of 'Yeah, this is an identity! This is GOOD!" "This is GOOD" is the overwhelming attitude of the record, given the sense that all of the depicted experiences—whether body dysmorphia, gigantic crushes, or the realization that identity is bigger than a hexadecimal—contain the possibility to be validating or enriching. This is not to say that the tracks on Try to Be Hopeful are naively optimistic; instead, as the title insinuates, they attempt positivity with a grain of salt. However, there is still plenty of room for fear to sneak in, as expressed in the album's eponymous track: "I've been waiting outside for what seems like years/ When I finally get inside I'll give in to the fear/ Of finally having what I want, I'll finally know/ If this really really will fix me/ If my problems will all sail away." "Burn Masculinity" defends the title's proclamation with the rationale that those of a certain gender should recognize their inherent, systematic privilege because "what good has it ever done?" Meanwhile, the penultimate track "Binary" claims that humans are not computers and thusly should not be "limited to binary desires." The journey from "Burn Masculinity" to "Binary" offers a literal marker of growth. While recording, Nye began taking testosterone treatment, and the change in his voice is evident over the course of 11 tracks. Much of Try to Be Hopeful is spent digging into the complexities of self and society with a lens that is simultaneously critical, sensitive, and goofy. Perhaps this final descriptor is most crucial: the Spook School's eagerness to grow is comforting and inclusive. Lyrically, the band appears more serious on Try to Be Hopeful, but their noise-pop jams remain as joyful as ever. Take "I Want to Kiss You", a track celebrating, clearly, desire with an unrestrained joy. "I want to run my fingers through your hair/ And you would say you've never done this before/ With someone like me," the four sing in unison. It's great fun, but the "with someone like me" phrase is a constant reminder that there is great risk in vulnerability. To layer these sentiments with shredding doesn't minimize the meaning: it just shows that humans contain the capacity for multitudes.

2015-12-11T01:00:03.000-05:00

2015-12-11T01:00:03.000-05:00

Rock

Fortuna Pop!

December 11, 2015

fef20f1e-78a7-4602-bb45-f0ca6b3b1709

Quinn Moreland

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

On their bashed-out new album of blues covers, the Stones sound, for the first time in eons, like a band playing together in the same room rather than one that travels on separate jets.

On their bashed-out new album of blues covers, the Stones sound, for the first time in eons, like a band playing together in the same room rather than one that travels on separate jets.

The Rolling Stones: Blue & Lonesome

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22653-blue-lonesome/

Blue & Lonesome

The Rolling Stones have been the World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band™ for so long that, over the past three decades, they haven’t had to worry about being an especially good one. Since the mid-’80s, they’ve been releasing forgettable records at increasingly protracted intervals, all while their ever-extravagant world tours have taken on the feel of a traveling Hard Rock Café resort—a glitzy simulacrum of a rock’n’roll show catering to those who can afford to experience it. Fittingly, earlier this year the band went from being a proverbial museum piece to becoming an actual one. The knock on the Stones isn’t that they’re too old to play a young man’s game—even at 73, Mick Jagger can still run laps around performers a third his age—but that aging has brought no greater depth or texture to their music. What the Stones have lost over the years is not their capacity for raunchy rock’n’roll, but their ability to invest it with purpose and meaning. Jagger and Keith Richards used to be among the best (and most underrated) lyricists in rock; their last album was called A Bigger Bang and kicked off with a tune that included a “cock” pun in the opening verse. However, the Stones’ new album is as introspective as we can expect them to get in 2016—even if it they are playing songs that are nearly as old as they are. Blue & Lonesome is a covers collection that pays tribute to the post-war Chicago blues that first got the Stones rolling and inspired their very name. And since then, the blues have served as the foundation the band can dig into whenever their sound threatens to turn too au courant, whether they were reacting to the hippy-dippy whimsy of Their Satanic Majesties Request with the sleazy acoustic struts of Beggars Banquet, or devoting a side of Black and Blue-era concert document Love You Live to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon worship. But Blue & Lonesome represents more than just a back-to-basics mission, It’s the most honest music the Stones have released in years—not because the source material confers it with the patina of authenticity, but because the entire blues-covers concept is a tacit admission that they don’t really give a shit about being a contemporary concern anymore, so they’re just going to do something that feels good. (The record was reportedly spawned as a warm-up exercise for a postponed album of new material.) And now that the band are older than Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf ever lived to be, they can fully inhabit the grizzled-bluesman archetype to which they've always aspired, and exude a genuine get-offa-my-lawn imperviousness to the modern world. Blue & Lonesome was bashed out in three days, and for the first time in eons, the Stones sound like a band playing together in the same room rather than one that travels on separate jets. Jagger is, naturally the star of the show—but not in his usual vampish ways. Whether he’s embodying the down-on-his-knees despair of Memphis Slim’s title track or playfully assuming the role of sad-sack cuckold on Little Johnny Taylor’s “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing,” his ageless voice sounds like it’s emanating from the middle of the band scrum rather than the lip of a catwalk. And while Chicago blues may have introduced the concept of jamming and guitar gods to the rock lexicon, Richards and Ronnie Wood’s grinding interplay ultimately plays a supporting role to Jagger’s harmonica honks, which cut through these songs like a rusty hacksaw with “Midnight Rambler”-worthy gusto. But as much as Blue & Lonesome plays it raw, it’s not all that raucous—the energy here is less rip-this-joint than rocking-chair steady. On paper, the idea of the Stones running roughshod over a set of classic blues tunes seems like a long-suffering fan’s dream. (The “best Stones album since Some Girls!” headlines practically write themselves.) However, what made the Stones the Stones wasn’t their purism—it was the sacrilegious impulse to corrupt their influences with their own singular swagger. But Blue & Lonesome is more about adhering to tradition than encouraging sedition. The Stones may be drinking from their fountain of youth here, but they’re content to just savor it rather than spit it back in our faces. On their best blues covers—Beggars Banquets’ “Prodigal Son,” Sticky Fingers’ “You Gotta Move,” Exile on Main Street’s “Shake Your Hips”—the Stones handled the songs like Ouija boards; they were less about paying homage to their heroes than channeling their sinister essence. Blue & Lonesome has flashes of that insidious inspiration: On the revved-up run through Howlin’ Wolf’s “Commit a Crime,” Jagger’s vocal oozes with implied violence overtop a repetitive, trance-inducing riff that rings like a police siren; on Little Walter’s “Hate to See You Go,” his pained baby-please-don’t-go pleas climax with an extended harmonica drone that threatens to swallow the song whole. But for the most part, Blue & Lonesome doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a good-time frolic among old pals (Eric Clapton cameos included), with the interchangeable, upbeat takes on Buddy Johnson’s “Just Your Fool” and Eddie Taylor’s “Ride ‘Em on Down” more conducive to knee-tapping in a seated supper club than tearing the roof off a juke joint. For an album rife with tales of heartache, duplicity, and death threats, it’s positively brimming with bonhomie. And, hey, given all the shit-talking Keith did at Mick’s expense in his autobiography, Life, that audible camaraderie is something of a minor miracle in and of itself.  On its own modest terms, Blue & Lonesome offers promising proof the Stones can still be a band instead of a brand.

2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Polydor

December 7, 2016

fef5cdc6-f4f1-4ae5-b323-4f60c0e1f9dc

Stuart Berman

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

Ryan DeRobertis, aka Skylar Spence, has ditched his previous corporation-provoking moniker, Saint Pepsi, and started singing himself instead of simply remixing others' voices. Prom King is his slickest project to date, brimming with as much confidence as its title suggests.

Ryan DeRobertis, aka Skylar Spence, has ditched his previous corporation-provoking moniker, Saint Pepsi, and started singing himself instead of simply remixing others' voices. Prom King is his slickest project to date, brimming with as much confidence as its title suggests.

Skylar Spence: Prom King

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20977-prom-king/

Prom King

"I was working, tried my hardest," Ryan DeRobertis, aka Skylar Spence, sings on Prom King’s disco-tinged ode to self-love "Can’t You See". "Slowed some music down and called myself an artist." The lyric is a recognizable jab at the musician’s own past, a career built on choppy dance remixes of pop songs labeled as "experimental" or "vaporwave," collected and stacked up like bricks in a well-supported corner of Bandcamp. But now DeRobertis has made moves to ground himself. He signed to Carpark Records, ditched his previous corporation-provoking moniker, Saint Pepsi, and started singing himself instead of simply remixing others voices. While "Can’t You See" is directed at grabbing the attention of a girl, as DeRobertis’ first statement on the record it's pointed just as much at his fans. And Prom King is his slickest project to date, brimming with as much confidence as its title suggests. This is dance music that’s almost a late-'00s throwback, with the record’s synth arrangements and affinity for Chic basslines more in line with the early music of artists like Miami Horror, Neon Indian, and Cut Copy than what clubs are playing now. No bass drops, no house revival, no costumed persona; this is highly warped nu-disco that’s frantically aggressive in its pacing and composition. Prom King vibrates at all times with hyperactivity. On songs like "Cash Wednesday" and "Bounce Is Back" it sounds like someone restlessly flipping between radio stations, with violins, new wave synths, and fluttery sampled R&B vocals rolling into one another. "My album is sort of about the narcissism that comes with nostalgia," DeRobertis said in an interview. "You have to have some sort of audacity to claim a certain time as ‘the best’ and throw out everything in the present and everything in the future." In this sense, Skylar Spence isn’t making pop music, but making music about pop. You don’t just hear it in how he mixes his songs, but also in how he writes them. "Oh darling, won’t you believe me," DeRobertis’ sings on the infectiously groovy, "Degrassi"-referencing "Fiona Coyne", first released as a single last year. "I’ll love you ‘til the record stops." And every "I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love" on "Can’t You See" is directed at his own reflection in the mirror. DeRobertis could plausibly have built an album of could-be radio hits like "Fiona Coyne" if he toned down the freakiness of the music beneath him, but that doesn’t seem to be his objective. The spliced-together samples and glitchy collages makes Prom King distinctive, although sometimes it feels over-indulgent. Even with DeRobertis’ distanced, conceptual take on pop nostalgia, he's still made a great pop record in itself. It doesn’t matter what noises or instruments he’s appropriating from, in his hands it’s all good to dance to right now.

2015-09-14T02:00:03.000-04:00

2015-09-14T02:00:03.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Carpark

September 14, 2015

fefd350b-315e-4b6b-9045-63715accf6a1

Hazel Cills

https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/

On their first album since member Stepa J. Groggs’ death, the Phoenix rap trio reintroduces themselves as wide-eyed explorers, a rep that suits their fascination with rap’s mechanics, its margins, and its future.

On their first album since member Stepa J. Groggs’ death, the Phoenix rap trio reintroduces themselves as wide-eyed explorers, a rep that suits their fascination with rap’s mechanics, its margins, and its future.

Injury Reserve: By the Time I Get to Phoenix

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/injury-reserve-by-the-time-i-get-to-phoenix/

By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Across nearly 19 minutes, Isaac Hayes’ cover of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” expands Webb’s lovelorn tale into a soul epic, dilating the original’s neat pop structure into a smoldering haze. On their first album following the death of member Stepa J. Groggs, Injury Reserve channels the spirit of Hayes’ remake, stretching their signature noise rap into freeform thickets of texture and tension. Shunning form and legibility, the Arizona group fully embraces the noise, trip-hop, and post-rock influences that loitered on the fringes of their past work. The keystone for By the Time I Get to Phoenix is an improvised DJ set Injury Reserve performed on tour in 2019. Building on a recording of that set, the group wrote the album early in the pandemic, mostly completing it by the time Stepa died in late June 2020. This more performance-driven approach—less “Let’s make a weird rap song,” and more “Let’s create”—completely rewires their songwriting. The songs are immediate and intuitive, brimming with personality and ideas. Ritchie With a T’s manic verse on opener “Outside” is an anxious stream of stutters, gasps, and chants that bob across a drumless void of sirens, keys, and distorted voices. Rhymes are scant, but his performance is engaging, the lack of percussion accenting his subtly metered flows. “What’s the elephant in the room?/Let’s talk to ’em,” he says, a line that could be a wink or just a transcription of his thoughts. When the drums appear nearly four minutes in, they’re the coda to the verse, not its foundation. “Ground Zero” takes a different approach. The drums fade out midway through as Ritchie jabbers about touchdowns, iced out jewelry, and Anquan Boldin routes. In the past, Injury Reserve’s outsized eccentricity could scan as a gimmick, with Stepa and Ritchie’s everyman rapping oversold by producer Parker Corey’s oddball beats. The mood here is loose and exploratory rather than declarative, the trio never planting their feet. They feel uninhibited. Ratking and Standing on the Corner come to mind as Ritchie, who provides most of the vocals, raps, sings, and growls over Parker’s shifting arrangements. But where those groups situated their restlessness in the palpable energy and voices of a cityscape, Injury Reserve often evokes the intangible. Stepa’s verse on “Footwork in a Forest Fire” is pure disorientation. “There’s panic in the sky/Even when it’s down below/There’s nowhere to go/You better run and hide,” he raps, his directions a koan. “Top Picks for You” is similarly abstract. “Your blood run through this home/And your habits through much after/Grab the remote, pops up something you would’a watched/I’m like, ‘Classic,’” Ritchie raps, adopting increasingly disembodied language—blood, habits, a remote control, a television show—to describe a departed loved one. Throughout Phoenix, images and sounds dissolve and flicker in this way, quicksand in a dust bowl. It’s a testament to Corey’s production that the record maintains a center as it constantly unspools. Whereas his past beats could turn overstuffed (“All This Money”) or needlessly outré and showy (“GTFU,” “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe”), here, he’s more hands-off, emphasizing atmosphere. “Smoke Don’t Clear” has some of the most understated drum programming of his catalog, its thick, dubby bassline guiding Ritchie’s theatrical whispers. Both “Knees” and “Superman That” are built around jagged guitar and drum loops that create crags of rhythm and melody. It doesn’t feel accidental that Zeroh, noted unifier of disparate sounds, mixed this. Even when it grows muddled, the album invites immersion. Injury Reserve’s reputation as a group for people who aren’t rap fans has always been overstated. But like many alt-rap acts, they lacked self-possession, their style defined more by their eclectic posturing than their vision. On By the Time I Get to Phoenix, they reintroduce themselves as wide-eyed explorers, a rep that suits their fascination with rap’s mechanics, its margins, and its future. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

September 23, 2021

ff015256-8693-4471-9ea5-ac5bc8eaeb57

Stephen Kearse

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

The debut long-player from UK funky pioneer Reiss Hanson, aka Champion, is high-energy bass music as bare-knuckled pointillism. His recordings have rarely sounded more dynamic or more colorful.

The debut long-player from UK funky pioneer Reiss Hanson, aka Champion, is high-energy bass music as bare-knuckled pointillism. His recordings have rarely sounded more dynamic or more colorful.

Champion: Snapshot

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/champion-snapshot/

Snapshot

Reiss Hanson, who works as Champion, is a veteran of the dance-music style known as UK funky—a boisterous, syncopation-heavy variant of house music that flourished in the UK in the latter half of the 2000s. Funky didn’t last long. “By 2011 it was done,” Roska, a fellow pioneer of the scene, told The Guardian in 2014. That hasn’t stopped Hanson, though. His first white label came out in 2009, but his recording career took off in earnest around 2011, when he began releasing a string of singles and EPs that married funky’s swinging congas with grime’s chilly sonics and, increasingly, the live-wire low end of the northern UK style called bassline house. Like many of his peers, he’s prone to tagging his own name across his tunes (“Champion sound!”), like a kind of sonic logo that leaves no doubt as to who’s responsible. That might not even be necessary; his work tends to stand out on its own, thanks to the controlled fury of his drums and the shadowy depth of his bass. Diamond-tipped hi-hats and snares sparkle against a matte-black background, lending a darkly lustrous, almost minimalist tinge to his palette. The same qualities define Snapshot, his debut album—a 12-track set of stonkingly high-energy bass music. The album’s opening “Intro” leaves no doubt that this is club music first and foremost, as crowd noise gives way to an MC barking, “When I say ‘Champion,’ you say ‘sound!’”; a call-and-response with the audience leads to bright, flickering soca chords that alternate with one of his characteristically bruising basslines. The glimmer of major-key uplift is a fake-out. “One Time,” which follows, is a better indicator of the album’s energy level, peppering a writhing bass riff with Caribbean-inspired MC chat. Most of his vocal features are gruff and glowering, and his rhythms are punctuated with the chorused shouts of trap music and the dub-siren eruptions of reggae and drum ‘n’ bass, both of which lend to the slightly manic, menacing air. It all amounts to a kind of bare-knuckled pointillism: The grime-tinged “Duppy Show” is riddled with gunshot samples; shrieking string vamps top its lurching drum groove like streaks of Windex over cracked glass. Fortunately, there are lighter elements at work, too: Miss Fire turns “Taste” into a sweet, slinky R&B-funky fusion, and BKAT brings a similarly dulcet energy to “Galaxy.” (Likewise, all those macho “Hey!” shouts are balanced by a more lighthearted interjection, seemingly—and rather incongruously—sampled from Art of Noise’s “Close (To the Edit).”) Even on the heaviest cuts, Champion’s music has rarely sounded more dynamic or more colorful. Thick with harmonics, his synthesizers are practically iridescent, and he harnesses all of bass music’s technical tricks to yield riffs as mutable as drops of quicksilver. A listener interested in understanding Champion’s virtuosity might begin with the bassline of “Kill Alla Dem.” If you were really serious, you could transcribe it in the way that jazz disciples used to notate exemplary horn solos. Start with the almost inaudible rumble of its opening salvo, and then, step by step, trace its sanded-down attack, its legato slide. A fleeting explosion of overtones is followed by a momentary fibrillation, and later, it will go from the consistency of tree sap to obsidian-sharp in the course of a heartbeat. It’s often exhilarating stuff, although how well it holds up across the length of an album will depend largely upon your predilection for sternum-thumping, gut-rearranging basslines. Fortunately, one song points to areas for potential exploration off the dancefloor. On “World,” Champion teams up with Four Tet, revisiting a partnership that has yielded several tracks over the past few years, including a Champion remix of Four Tet’s “Kool FM” and the collaborative tracks “Flip Side” and “Disparate” in 2016. (In fact, says Champion, it was Four Tet who encouraged him to undertake the album in the first place.) Though their roles blurred on last year’s 12”, there’s not much doubt about the division of labor in this one: The cycling marimba and wordless vocal sample are straight out of Four Tet’s woozy wheelhouse, while the shouts and bassline are pretty clearly Champion’s handiwork. That lumbering low end makes it as rugged as any of Champion’s productions, but the more ambient touches have the welcome effect of leavening the atmosphere. Instead of barreling its way across the dancefloor, the tune seems to float on air. It’s a smart move—and a neat way of transcending bass music’s genre divisions.

2017-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

self-released

November 14, 2017

ff08c04f-6a21-4711-98b3-a13398afab48

Philip Sherburne

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

Midlake's fourth album, the first since the departure of singer-songwriter Tim Smith, finds the Denton, Tex., band revisiting the sound of their earlier work, including the folky soft-rock of 2006 sleeper hit The Trials of Van Occupanther and the burlier psychedelia of 2004 debut Bamnan and Slivercork.

Midlake's fourth album, the first since the departure of singer-songwriter Tim Smith, finds the Denton, Tex., band revisiting the sound of their earlier work, including the folky soft-rock of 2006 sleeper hit The Trials of Van Occupanther and the burlier psychedelia of 2004 debut Bamnan and Slivercork.

Midlake: Antiphon

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18696-midlake-antiphon/

Antiphon

Midlake don’t get enough credit for being ahead of their time. Actually, they don’t get any credit, understandable in light of the Denton, Tex., sextet's antiquated imagery and sepia-drunk sound. But the formula that made The Trials of Van Occupanther a sleeper hit in 2006—bearded indie-folk meets California soft-rock meets Fleetwood Mac at their most glassy-eyed—would likely make it a massive success in 2013. It’s certainly in their best interest to revisit that style after the clock-stopping Tull torpor of The Courage of Others, and guitarist Eric Pulido claims their fourth LP Antiphon “is the most honest representation of the band as a whole.” Except he goes on to say, “as opposed to one person’s vision that we were trying to facilitate.” Pulido got an internal promotion to frontman after the departure of singer-songwriter Tim Smith in 2012, and...shots fired? Antiphon does somehow manage to be a “forget everything you know about Midlake!” album as well as a “return to form,” at least if you remember that Van Occupanther was preceded by the burlier, less precious (title aside) Bamnan and Silvercork in 2004. Pulido’s words foreshadow a more aggressive tack on the part of Midlake and they certainly oblige during the first half of Antiphon. If the title track and “Provider” don’t exactly boogie, they’re at least rollin’ and tumblin’, with the shuffling beats and sticky, distorted guitar leads that invert Midlake’s previous ratio of rock to folk. More notably, the flutes and other non-strung instruments are pushed to the periphery, foregrounding a lightly psychedelic blues that I suppose recalls Fleetwood Mac before their big personnel shakeup. Likewise, Pulido begins the record asking the listener to “start a war,” and goes on to speak of foxholes and space shuttles. There’s even one song called “It’s Going Down”, which doesn’t sound all that more vigorous than what came before it, but hey, make your own Yung Joc "meet me at the farmer's market" jokes. But throughout, it’s clear that Smith’s departure is an amputation that doesn’t change Midlake’s DNA. They’ve got a couple of opening gigs for Pearl Jam in the near future, so that should give you an idea of whether they’ve retained the earnestness of their previous work. Pulido doesn’t have Smith’s distinct, dulcet tone, though it’s actually to Midlake’s advantage on Antiphon. His vocals are alopecia-stricken, almost fascinating in their lack of texture even when layered in harmony, offering no resistance to the bulkier music backing him. So Antiphon never sounds awkward even when he sings about space travel on “Corruption” (“we went to the moon/ with a tycoon”) in a way that comes off as quaint as the more typically Midlake-y concerns like sorting out “The Old and the Young” and having a good woman waiting at home by the fire. The bigger shift is in the production, provided by Grammy-nominated Tony Hoffer. His most frequently cited credits are Beck and Air, who both ended up working with Nigel Godrich on their very next albums, so I’ve come to think of his aesthetic as a kind of Radiohead starter kit. Midlake get that kind of sound here—you wouldn’t call it overproduced, but there’s tons of production if you know where to listen for it, as the stereo panning is neatly utilized, the percussion crisp and non-obtrusive, while all of the folk instruments are spit-shined and shellacked. It’s a retro-modernist (or modernist-retro) schematic, aspiring for Laurel Canyon decor while paying West Hollywood rent. As far as, the songs themselves—well, to Antiphon’s credit, it's a very consistent record. And to its detriment, it's a very consistent record. While Antiphon might be the most honest representation of Midlake, Smith’s ostensible iron fist penned songs like “Roscoe” and “We Gathered In Spring”, songs that bore a personality and vision that the overly democratic Antiphon eschews. The nice things I thought I was going to say about the title track are actually applicable to “Provider” once I remembered which one was which. “It’s Going Down” also stood out mainly because it repeats the title, “Vale” only because it’s an instrumental and thus the most memorable song here by default. After “Vale”, side B of Antiphon has about as much melodic grounding as a drone record, and if it wasn’t for a reprise of “Provider” at the close, you’d be hard pressed to recall the goodwill generated at the beginning. And that’s problematic, because if they aren’t going to offer much in the way of innovation or currency, Midlake should at the very least be tuneful enough to counterbalance it. In our review of Swans’ pulverizing two-hour art-rock opus The Seer, Mike Powell explained its appeal by paraphrasing a quote from Ben Marcus regarding the nature of experimental fiction: it wasn't a record for someone deciding whether or not they'd rather be listening to music or playing paintball. By the same token, Midlake isn’t competing with Swans records. Considering who they are competing with makes for an even less flattering comparison. It’s not hard to find folky rock bands with stronger melodies, bolder personae, or even ones that are just flat-out weirder while operating squarely within the mainstream: let’s not forget that Fleet Foxes used a couple minutes of saxophone on their last album and purists flipped the fuck out. That doesn’t change the fact that Antiphon is still a likeable, pleasant listen that will always wait for you by the hearth after a long day. But for a “forget everything you know about Midlake!” album, it's almost exactly how you remember them.

2013-11-04T01:00:04.000-05:00

2013-11-04T01:00:04.000-05:00

Experimental / Rock

ATO

November 4, 2013

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Ian Cohen

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

Gathering a trio of EPs into a single sprawling package, the experimental club producer offers a nightmarish tour of late capitalism that’s dark, disorienting, and at times, draining.

Gathering a trio of EPs into a single sprawling package, the experimental club producer offers a nightmarish tour of late capitalism that’s dark, disorienting, and at times, draining.

Lee Gamble: Flush Real Pharynx 2019-2021

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-gamble-flush-real-pharynx-2019-2021/

Flush Real Pharynx 2019-2021

For a place that’s meant to be fun, the club is home to a lot of demons. How we seek release can be a mirror of what made us so tense in the first place, and some of the most forward-thinking producers in dance music have used the club as a jumping-off point to interrogate our desires, dreams, and nightmares. Theorist Mark Fisher described Burial’s music as “like walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction.” If Burial’s music is an elegy for empty rooms that once pulsed with energy, Lee Gamble’s music is like the phantoms slowly emerging from that space, becoming some twisted new half-alive being. Fisher, who died in 2017, is on Gamble’s mind throughout Flush Real Pharynx 2019-2021, a collection of three EPs dedicated to Fisher’s concept of the “semioblitz”—what Gamble interprets as “the aggressive onslaught of visual and sonic stimuli of contemporary cities and virtual spaces.” Starting in 2019 with In a Paraventral Scale, continued later that year with Exhaust, and now concluding with A Million Pieces of You, the project represents a shift in Gamble’s focus to the overstimulated ecstasy and dread of urban consumerism. Whereas earlier releases like KOCH and Diversions 1994-1996 consisted of gaseous loops and decayed jungle samples that spun out into distended horrors, here Gamble crafts his music out of disarmingly clean textures. You can hear the unnerving silent space creeping around the edges of this music, each shimmering synth line and mangled acid loop floating like a detatched limb. If his earliest work was in conversation with tape-hiss connoisseurs like Actress, Flush Real Pharynx takes its pages from the deconstructed-club school of Amnesia Scanner, leading us through a nightmare of late capitalism that’s dark, disorienting, and at times, draining. Assembled into one dense 77-minute package here, the three individual EPs that make up Flush Real Pharynx each bear a distinct character. The first EP, In a Paraventral Scale, is the smoothest of the bunch, luring the listener in with the seductive, silvery drones of “Fata Morgana.” A cybernetic meditation that gives way to panning, vertigo-inducing flangers, it slowly spins the senses in multiple directions at once, an effect as uncomfortable as it is hypnotizing. Gamble’s uncanny approach to the sounds of modern life greatly benefits from headphones: On “BMW Shuanghuan X5,” he creates a strange lullaby out of the sound of speeding cars, transforming their engine hum into something almost soothing, like ocean waves crashing against the shore. The effect is not unlike watching ASMR unboxing videos: a surgically precise serotonin release broadcast in eerie 4K. Gamble returns to the club on Exhaust, the trilogy’s second (and strongest) installment. Literally starting with a bang, Exhaust seamlessly folds Gamble’s sound-design ambitions into the context of rave music, to dizzying effect. “Envenom” leaps from one breakbeat to the next like a broken television skipping between channels, each loop more erratic than the last, until the whole thing collapses in a cacophony of information overload. Gamble’s drill and jungle rhythms constantly feel as if they’re being torn apart (quite literally, on the endlessly dissociating skips of “Saccades”). Their pounding bass alludes to an ecstatic release that might come if there weren’t so many different sonic threads to get lost in. Perhaps most gleeful is “Tyre,” a double-time techno workout by way of Jazz From Hell whose cartoonish marimbas speed by with a manic grin, an accelerationist funhouse mirror too fast for the mind to adequately keep up with. Not all of Gamble’s ideas stick the landing, particularly when he gets caught up in overwrought samples advertising luxury cars and perfume, along with other hackneyed tropes. The final EP, A Million Pieces of You, begins with a deepfake of Gamble’s own voice reciting indecipherable gibberish about selfies, and for much of the remainder of the collection, the fatigue Gamble implies about the digital world begins to bleed into the music. The only installment recorded during the pandemic, A Million Pieces of You strikes a balance between the first two EPs, achieving neither the preternatural calm of the first nor the frenzied movement of the second. At its best, on gently swelling tracks like “Hyperpassive” and “Balloon Copy,” a newfound melodic softness injects some warmth, capping off the trilogy on a refreshingly human note. Like the commercialist society it mirrors, Flush Real Pharynx is as dazzling as it is exhausting, offering a plethora of options to engage with, yet triggering a strangely hollow feeling. Its concept isn’t exactly the most original—many of these ideas have been played out through the deconstructed club and vaporwave movements for years—but even so, Gamble’s sound design remains evocative, a radiant, ever-shifting collage of sonic images to swipe through. It may ultimately be as surface-level as the culture it critiques, but even surfaces can be beautiful sometimes. 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.

2021-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Hyperdub

September 15, 2021

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Sam Goldner

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

The East Atlanta rapper and his producers distill their sci-fi flows and alien sensibilities into their most cohesive project yet.

The East Atlanta rapper and his producers distill their sci-fi flows and alien sensibilities into their most cohesive project yet.

Young Nudy: EA Monster

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-nudy-ea-monster/

EA Monster

Young Nudy sometimes sounds like he hails from another planet, but he's rooted in a real place on Earth. The neighborhood that Nudy represents in the title of his new album EA Monster is East Atlanta—more specifically, Zone 6. As one of the many trap stars with experimental flows to arise from Atlanta in recent years (a wave that includes Gunna and the late Lil Keed), Nudy often garners comparisons to Young Thug and Future, and his artistic kinship with hip-hop auteur Pi’erre Bourne has inevitably sparked mentions of Playboi Carti. But it’s Zone 6’s most famous son whose influence reverberates throughout his music: You can hear a hint of Gucci Mane not just in Nudy’s drawl and “Yeah” ad-libs, but also in his effortless confidence, which drips off him like melting ice. Nudy’s flow is like quicksilver, but he’s typically averse to clout-chasing co-signs or pop hooks, so his projects are often laser-focused. EA Monster clocks in at only 34 minutes, and Nudy keeps his circle tight here. There’s only one feature—a back-and-forth relay race with up-and-coming Atlanta rapper BabyDrill on “Duntsane,” evidence that Nudy has now built enough of a platform to share it with newer voices. The production team includes regular collaborators, like COUPE, Mojo Krazy, and his bosom buddy Pi’erre Bourne, who lends his inventive and futuristic touch to roughly half the tracks. The watery, Moog-like tones on “Kit Kat'' are curiously reminiscent of MeowSynth, a 2000s virtual synthesizer plug-in that drew on the meows of a cat named Baksik—an appropriate digital relic revived by a producer who grew up on MySpace and message boards. Elsewhere, the wet bass on “No Chaser” resembles someone squishing their fingers into slime, another moment where Bourne’s alien style is as unexpected as Nudy’s cadence. The cohesiveness is due in part to seamless sequencing, with each track promptly sliding into the next, no bar a breath too long. Opening track “Nun To Do” is almost all bass and sturdy 808 kicks, with the synth line reduced to background buzz. At times, EA Monster plays with a vintage sonic palette, an unexpected move for a rapper who so often lives in the future. “Impala” combines a driving Memphis-type drum pattern with a MIDI bass guitar that wouldn’t feel out of a place on a 1990s No Limit cut; “Fresh as Fuck” blends vibrato-modulated synths and warbly, theremin-like special effects, the kind you’d hear in a 1950s B movie. As relentless and in-your-face as Nudy can be, his voice rarely strays from a consistent volume or pitch, always sounding like he’s spitting while still holding the smoke in his lungs from a particularly fierce bong rip. When the daily grind ends, Nudy punches out with chilled-out stoner rap on “Ready.” “My Gang” opens with an inhale, before an echoing guitar swaddles Nudy, a hypnagogic, chillwave-adjacent piano line swaying in the background. After nearly eight years together, Nudy’s creative unit is now closely bonded, which makes his music feel much more complete and organic than so much of the Atlanta scene. This crew knows how to translate Nudy's visions into reality: Not a beat or verse is phoned in or farmed out, and there’s no pressure to skew to other styles or latch onto trends. The production on EA Monster is a refined package, bottling his electric slime into a gleaming container, distilled to its purest essence. East Atlanta might define Young Nudy down to his album titles, but he remains somewhat mysterious and alienated, a phantom drifter who exists in a world of his own. The flavor of his hometown might be unmistakable, but EA Monster is a reminder that Nudy operates on a singular wavelength.

2022-08-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-08-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rap

PDE / RCA

August 16, 2022

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Nadine Smith

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/

Noise musician turned rapper Travis Miller made his mark as Lil Ugly Mane with *Mista Thug Isolation, *a weird and wonderful album that, five years after its release, still commands a cult status.

Noise musician turned rapper Travis Miller made his mark as Lil Ugly Mane with *Mista Thug Isolation, *a weird and wonderful album that, five years after its release, still commands a cult status.

Lil Ugly Mane: Mista Thug Isolation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23067-mista-thug-isolation/

Mista Thug Isolation

How does Travis Miller, a noise musician from Richmond, Virginia, not only make the transition to hip-hop but end up making one of the decade’s most defining underground rap albums? Five years later, on its fifth vinyl pressing through small Italian label Hundebiss, Lil Ugly Mane’s Mista Thug Isolation still commands a cult status. It is largely based off the slowed down, nearly psychedelic remixes of DJ Screw and the hazy horrorcore of early Three 6 Mafia, both sounds experiencing a renaissance at the time even when Houston and Memphis’ mainstream sounds were beginning to wane in popularity. One of his first guest appearances was on Spaceghostpurrp’s mixtape Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991), which was treading similar territory. Nothing comes from a vacuum, but *Isolation’*s brilliance is that despite its familiar influences, it sounds totally alien from anything before or after it, even in Lil Ugly Mane’s own catalog. Isolation was produced by “Shawn Kemp,” which is really just Miller’s production alias. It’s a nod to his ’90s obsessions, but he went from horrorcore pastiche into a capable producer in his own right in just over a year from his first full-length, Playaz Circle. “Cup Fulla Beetlejuice” is classic Three 6 production mixed with goofy Halloween ghost sounds; “Lean Got Me Fucked Up” is bassy enough to justify the song’s name. He also works in Wu-Tang piano in “Bitch I’m Lugubrious” and “Serious Shit,” as well as some smooth saxophone in the latter. Despite beginning with a throwback to his noise days, parts of Isolation are surprisingly pleasant. “Breezem Out” and “Lookin 4 Tha Suckin” are the greasiest quiet storm songs, while “Mona Lisa Overdrive” sounds like Clams Casino remixing Kool Keith’s Sex Style, with Miller keeping his own horndog persona in check. This can be traced back to his core influences: Screw’s mixtape of chopped and screwed R&B Late Night Fuckin Yo Bitch and Three 6’s “Da Summa” both showed serenity in darkness. Isolation came at the tail end of Witch House’s popularity, and while bands in that sphere also toyed with Screw and Three 6 like Miller did, he went beyond overt druginess to establish the album’s wide-ranging, yet consistently menacing production. A project such as Isolation has to potential to have “tourist” written all over it, but the most surprising thing about Miller is that he has serious bars. While he traffics in the same boastfulness rife in hip-hop, he’s got a gift for absurdity with the strangest and catchiest lyricism. Sometimes it manifests in casual nihilism, like this slouching gem from “Lugubrious”: “I ain’t really nothing like a hero/I just wanna get my dick sucked and multiply them zeros.” Miller also isn’t weird just to be weird. As with his production, he finds new edges to common tropes. “Serious Shit” blows up the vaunted concept of the hustle: it’s one thing to rap about making a lot of money (“The earth revolves around currency/Copernicus”); it’s downright evil to “stay grindin’ till my pockets straight Halliburton.” Isolation is not a record of social commentary, but he still wants you to know who the really malicious grinders are. Miller’s taste for black metal blasphemy, which he explored in past projects Seidhr and Vudmurk, emerges in the raunchy “Slick Rick,” where he talks about engaging in affairs in church, “leave ‘em looking messy in the presence of God.” He applies metal’s over-the-top hysterics into hip-hop in Isolation, which is why he can pull off doing shows wearing an Incantation long-sleeve. A year after Isolation’s release, Miller toyed with the idea of retiring Lil Ugly Mane, which never came to fruition, even though it was completely understandable. Despite the underground hype, bolstered by an Earl Sweatshirt cosign, he didn’t really use it to advance himself, never being into touring or pursuing bigger features. He recently admitted in an interview for his side project Secret Circle that the idea of money for bars, second nature for established names, is still a new one for him. It gets real lonely being in your own lane. His later works would deal with paranoia and depression more personally, especially his new project Bedwetter whose debut came out earlier this year. In Isolation’s reckless and sometimes nonsensical boasting, it’s hinted at. The record is the fever dream of a conqueror, where nightmarish sounds become a perverted form of dream pop and fantasy eliminates the concept of consequence. He’s moved away from ghoulishness since then, but he’s still cerebral like no rapper above or below.

2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Hundebiss

April 12, 2017

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Andy O'Connor

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

For three decades, this 1989 album has remained one of dream pop’s chief benchmarks. While these songs will be forever associated with David Lynch’s work, the album stands proudly on its own.

For three decades, this 1989 album has remained one of dream pop’s chief benchmarks. While these songs will be forever associated with David Lynch’s work, the album stands proudly on its own.

Julee Cruise: Floating Into the Night

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julee-cruise-floating-into-the-night/

Floating Into the Night

When she was in high school in Creston, Iowa, Julee Cruise was a popular girl with a host of deep-rooted suburban fears—boys, cars, getting sucked down the bathtub drain—and a secret pastime that even those closest to her never knew about: making prank phone calls. “I’d call people if I was angry at someone and wanted to scare them. Or I’d call and not say anything at all,” she reflected in a 1990 interview. “There’s something kinda voyeuristic about doing something like that.” Eventually, Cruise made contact with the world. First in Blue Velvet and most prominently throughout Twin Peaks, she sang the eerie, beautiful songs that reached from the screen and pulled you inside David Lynch’s mind, giving voice to the complex web of emotions that kept his characters suspended in time. Her debut record, 1989’s Floating Into the Night, is the latest from the Lynch universe to receive a welcome vinyl reissue from Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. And while the lyrics were written by Lynch with music composed by his right-hand-man Angelo Badalamenti, and most of the songs will forever be associated with his work, Cruise’s album stands proudly on its own. Over the past three decades, Floating Into the Night has remained one of the benchmarks that all dream-pop artists are measured against. It set the standard for several reasons. One, of course, is that its songs were paired with some of the most unforgettable, vividly rendered dream sequences ever caught on camera: from the foggy, rainy vistas of Twin Peaks to its dusky barrooms, sepia-toned living rooms, and demonic purgatories. If you have any relationship to the images these songs accompanied, then just hearing the opening baritone-guitar pulses of “Falling” or the wheezing gramophone band of “Floating” can elicit an intense rush of emotions. Even stripped of this context, Floating Into the Night captured something important about dreams that plenty of other artists in the genre have ignored. Like most dream-pop records, it has the ability to wash over you, misty and serene, with a late-’80s synth gloss that made one of Cruise’s friends dismiss it as “white wine Muzak.” But Cruise and her collaborators also had the ability to shake you awake, to twist an image that should be pretty into something broken and grotesque. There are obvious examples: the nightmarish orchestral stabs that interrupt the whispered revery of “Into the Night,” the hellish fade-in crescendo of “I Remember,” or the disorienting drone and piano solo in “I Float Alone.” Lynch and Badalamenti shared a penchant for long, simmering builds and sudden cuts, dives into sentimentality harshened by pure horror. Their music together accomplishes a similar effect, never allowing you to feel fully at ease. Cruise was a natural collaborator, able to skate along gracefully without stumbling around these turns. It’s hard to think of another singer who could find so much space and resonance in words like “dark” or “alone,” and by subduing her musical-theater belt into a curling wisp of smoke, her mezzo-soprano takes on a haunted, slow-motion quality: If you close your eyes, you can almost see each word forming as she sings them before dissolving into blackness. The initial inspiration for “Mysteries of Love,” Cruise’s first collaboration with Lynch and Badalamenti, was This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren,” and you can hear what they admired in the recording: its sparse alien landscape, and the sense of longing in Elizabeth Fraser’s crystal-clear voice cutting through the mix. But they quickly evolved into their own sound, evoking a less heavenly tableau with more smoke in the air. Within this setting, Cruise favored a hushed delivery in layers and layers of multi-tracked harmony and unison vocals, like Christmas carols by ghostly choirs on deserted streets. (“This will be a very expensive tour because Julee will have to hire nine backup singers,” Lynch jokes in a priceless clip from the recording sessions.) Both Cruise and Lynch spoke of America in the 1950s as an enduring influence, and the songwriting spans aspirational jazz standards like “The World Spins”—a recording that, no matter how you listen, seem to play on a format that must be handled gently so as not to shatter—to early rock’n’roll throwbacks like “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart.” In the latter, Cruise remembered Lynch instructing the sax player to conjure “big chunks of plastic” from his instrument, suggesting the visceral, physical thrill they still found in music from this era. Even with these specific reference points, there is no true precedent for Floating Into the Night, and its greatest asset remains its timelessness. Describing her inspiration, Cruise pinpointed the feeling of paranoia that accompanies any surge of joy or new love. “There’s always that voice that says, ‘It’s going to go away,’” she explained. “That voice can be very disturbing and destructive, and that voice is talking all through the album.” If Lynch’s work remains a confounding acquired taste for some, then Floating Into the Night is a record that anyone can at least understand. It is the sound of a burgeoning crush accompanied by the quickening realization of their power to hurt you; it is your hometown at night, with a familiar stillness so quiet it can keep you awake; it is the voice on the other line, distant and mysterious, but close enough so you can hear every breath.

2023-08-09T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-08-09T00:02:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Sacred Bones

August 9, 2023

ff199a6d-ae88-463f-83b3-611857995a0e

Sam Sodomsky

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

Salt-N-Pepa laid out their best music and bravest activism on Very Necessary, an album about love, agency, and take-no-shit femininity from the Queens rap trio.

Salt-N-Pepa laid out their best music and bravest activism on Very Necessary, an album about love, agency, and take-no-shit femininity from the Queens rap trio.

Salt-N-Pepa: Very Necessary

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23309-very-necessary/

Very Necessary

In 1990, Salt-N-Pepa walked onto the Hollywood set of “The Arsenio Hall Show” ready to spread awareness about HIV and AIDS. The men in the audience were fervently doing the signature Hall bark well beyond the call of the show. The Queens trio—Cheryl “Salt” James, Sandy “Pepa” Denton and Deidra “Spinderella” Roper—were there to promote their spot in a fundraising traveling tour of Heart Strings, a new musical about AIDS and HIV featuring Cher and Magic Johnson, where they would perform their PSA-rework of “Let’s Talk About Sex” titled,  “Let’s Talk About AIDS.”  Maintaining its message that if you’re having sex, you have to talk about “all the good things, all the bad things,” the alternate version fine-tuned the song so that its focus on sexual health was more explicit. But it was hard to tell who in the audience was there to hear Salt-N-Pepa and who was just there to look. “We’ve talked about the image of female rappers in the past,” said Hall. “Your image is a lot more lady-like. Do you think that’s the reason for these guys?” A clearly frustrated Salt responded, “We’ve gotten a lot of flack about that.” She looked exasperated. “I’ve heard people say we’ve gotten over on our looks. First of all, I ain’t know I look that good. To get over for six years on your looks? We’ve been around for awhile and if it’s just looks, then that’s messed up.” If their fan base included dudes who just had crushes, they only made up a sliver. The rest were there because S-N-P were spearheading a movement toward take-no-shit femininity that didn’t require them to dress like B-boys. “We’re not soft, we’re not hard,” Spinderella explained it to Arsenio. Salt lifted her Docs over his coffee table and told him their style was all lipstick and combat boots. So much of the first decade of Salt-N-Pepa forged a path for women to follow for the next twenty years, both in rap and pop music, as well with social and sexual mores. The whole map of their conquest is laid out on their 1993 album Very Necessary. The confidence of “Push It”—which Pepa has insisted is about dancing, not about sex—and the emotional intelligence of “Let’s Talk About Sex” are present, but the womanly conviction here is far more plentiful than it had been in their music before. It was a palliative to the hyper-misogyny spewing from their male contemporaries. If Snoop Dogg and friends were going to harangue hoes, then in Salt-N-Pepa’s world, words like “hoe” and “hooker” were just as applicable to men. They maintained their themes of sexuality and empowerment—and were in good company with Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” and TLC’s “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”—but it got a new look. Whether in combat boots or pum pum shorts, their message was still clear: women need to have agency over their sexuality and, if she’s safe, she can express it however the hell she wants. The album’s lead single “Shoop,” in particular, is unintentionally prescient about the contemporary inverted misogyny so many feminists engage in now, in jest or otherwise. In the video, Pepa tells Salt and Spin about her weakness—“men!” they chant in unison—while she scours guys on Coney Island playing dice. It is reverse catcalling, a playful way of leveling the field of objectification. In a 1995 conversation with Mary Wilson of the Supremes for Interview, Salt conceded that the perception of the group changed once they started talking more frequently about their own sexuality instead forecasting what goes on behind other people’s closed doors. “When we get raw and sexy some people say, ‘Why do you have to go there?’ I feel like, as long as you’re letting the world know that you're intelligent and you're to be respected and you have a mind of your own and you're taking care of business, ain’t nothing wrong with showing off what you got, especially when you work out almost every day to get it. Of course, you have to show it with taste and with class. It’s about having an attitude of your own.” Part of that attitude was putting men like the ones in the “Arsenio” audience squarely in their place: sometimes women get to do the barking and no one gets to judge them for it. Very Necessary is packed with anthems that are unafraid to look at men with the same ogling eye and do not accept being told it’s unladylike. “None of Your Business,” the album’s third single, denounced slut-shaming before it even had a name and is stridently dedicated to pushing a message that no matter how desperately you want to judge women, it will not matter to them. Spinderella calmly raps, “How many rules am I to break before you understand/That your double standards don't mean shit to me?” Just as combative, “Somebody’s Gettin’ on My Nerves” is one of the album’s finer (and fiercer) points. Salt-N-Pepa make club records, but this track shows off they fare just as well when the bars are the focal point. Salt raps with a sober precision that only comes with a particularly refined and potent fury (it is not dissimilar to Ice Cube’s bite on N.W.A. diss “No Vaseline”). It is also the perfect playground for knockout punches like Pepa’s “You rolled up on me in your man's Beemer/And I could look at you and tell you was a meat-beatin' daydreamer.” Some of this ferocity is bolstered by the production handled by Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor. While quips like, “Get off my bra strap, boy/Stop sweatin’ me” are part of S-N-P’s power, the track’s menacing bass is what keeps it ice cold. Azor had been mentoring the group since he put Pepa and Salt together as the duo Super Nature in the early ’80s. He had seen them through their four preceding albums, but after relinquishing production control to Salt for the Coltrane-sampling single “Expression” from their 1990 album Blacks’ Magic and a toxic romance between Salt and Azor ended, the women wanted more say in what went into Very Necessary. A 1994 New York cover story reveals that Azor found “Shoop” uncompelling and that he wanted the group to take an even softer approach. Despite how much of a hand Azor had in the album production, Salt-N-Pepa's interest in keeping it more "street" endured. Songs like “Nerves” and “None of Your Business,” do have the trappings of the gangster rap that was populating the charts, its toughness mainly comes from the take-no-shit vocality delivered by the group. The album’s textures are as sundry as the city they are from: Opener “Groove Me” is indebted to the outer boroughs’ West Indian populations; “Break of Dawn” lifts the ecstatic sax from the J.B.s’ James Brown-produced “The Grunt” and takes Joe Tex’s funky “Papa Was Too” and pounds them into Queens Boulevard brashness. Public Enemy may have been the first to use “The Grunt” on their 1988 track “Night of the Living Baseheads,” but Salt-N-Pepa were in good company, as Wu-Tang Clan and 2pac both used the same sample in that year. On top of the beats, it was Salt-N-Pepa’s relentless campaign for social and sexual agency that drove the album. “Sexy Noises Turn Me On” may sound a little bit dated in 2017, but the frankness with which the women express their needs is anything but. It is the precursor to so many Foxy Brown one-liners and songs like Rasheeda’s “My Bubble Gum” and Nicki Minaj’s “Get on Your Knees.” There are calls elsewhere on *Very Necessary *for reciprocity, like when Salt raps: “You’re under my control/I got your heart and soul/Go down and take your time” on opener “Groove Me” but they were pushing to do even more than just smash the insidious taboo that women can only perform oral sex, not receive it that many of their descendants have rallied for (see: Lil’ Kim’s entire 1996 debut album Hard Core). This attitude bleeds through to tracks like “Step,” which uses a hefty sample of Hank Crawford’s jazzy “It’s a Funky Thing to Do” and comes off optimally unbothered. “Somma Time Man” is reproachful of male promiscuity (just like their 1986 Otis Redding-interpolating song “Tramp”), but so much of the critique is about infidelity and the lack of safety. Ultimately, Salt-N-Pepa’s mantra when it came to AIDS was, “If you don’t get it, you can’t spread it.” It is their entire ethos: sex is happening everywhere and it cannot be ignored because like all other thrills there are risks—risks you take with your heart and risks you take with health. If you’re doing it right, there’s no shame attached to it. It’s why they wrote “None of Your Business,” but also why they spent many of their television appearances talking about how easy it is to put on a condom. Pepa and Salt appeared on “Charlie Rose” a year before the album was released to talk about their activism. “Some guys don’t think it’s macho, some girls are insulted if you ask to use a condom,” Salt told Rose. Pepa offered, “It’s not macho to get AIDS… You have to wear condoms like you put on a jacket when it’s cold…” With many fans confiding in them their own diagnoses with HIV and AIDS, they felt it was their responsibility to keep the conversation going. *Very Necessary *closes with a skit unlike almost any that has ever appeared on a pop album. Titled “I’ve Got AIDS,” the sketch is a harrowing performance from two members of the multicultural peer education group WEATOC from Boston, Massachusetts. The script is bold and stark, featuring a female member, distraught, explaining to her boyfriend that she has just come home from a clinic where she was told she was HIV positive. Her partner then accuses her of being with other men because, even though he is untested, he couldn’t possibly have HIV. To close it with something so dark is to remind your audience to take care of themselves and that committing to your cause means using your platform to disrupt. Their fearless outspokenness has been unrivaled in the mainstream, conscious rappers be damned. Salt-N-Pepa, however, do not explicitly call themselves activists or even feminists. In the same interview with Mary Wilson from the Supremes, Salt also said: “I think we’re feminists to a certain degree. But I have no problem with the man being the man, as long as the man knows how to be a man.” The biggest song of their career, “Whatta Man,” is a paean to good-looking respectful guys. Peaking at No. 3, the track united the trio with En Vogue, who were still riding high off of their star-making sophomore album Funky Divas, released the year before. Although the song’s ballast may be “good men are hard to find,” the use of Linda Lyndell’s classic “What a Man” and Spinderella referencing Whitney Houston deep cut “My Name is Not Susan” in her verse still keeps it a celebration of womanhood. The video co-starred Naughty By Nature’s Treach, Pep’s IRL man at the time, and remains one of their fluffier offerings. In the context of the album, however, it rounds out the robust portrait of women’s romantic interiors: Not all love is fleeting and when it is good, it is so good. That lyrical flexibility made Salt-N-Pepa so versatile. Like their contemporaries Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, the group was interested in exploring their own world, from quotidian romances and jealousies to the ever-present threat of AIDS, as well as gang violence and drugs. This panoramic view of not just personhood but womanhood paved the way for someone like Nicki Minaj to be a pop superstar while still sticking to her Smack DVD roots. Whether they were thinking about it at the time, their output has always been about giving women opportunity to express themselves. In a recent interview on BuzzFeed podcast Another Round, rapper Remy Ma noted that because it is a genre that clings to youth, its legends get brushed aside. The acclaim dwindles and no one graduates to become like the Who or the Rolling Stones. Salt-N-Pepa were celebrated at VH1’s Hip-Hop Honors in 2016, but the event was specifically about female MCs and the celebration was a catch-all including so many artists for whom they were the forebears. They are classic enough to have toured with both the Fat Boys and N.W.A. (who were the women’s openers!) but are now relegated to ’90s nostalgia package tours, top-billed with people like Vanilla Ice. Instead of being canonized for their contributions to the genre, they are playing side-by-side with someone whose one hit song made a mockery of it. But that’s the thing about Salt-N-Pepa: There is so much more there than what you see on the surface.

2017-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Next Plateau

June 11, 2017

ff1e891e-159a-4108-ae26-70b517dddc91

Claire Lobenfeld

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

On his latest LP, the producer Ceramic TL (aka Egyptrixx) collaborates with Turkish composer Ipek Gorgun on another heady investigation of the global environmental crisis.

On his latest LP, the producer Ceramic TL (aka Egyptrixx) collaborates with Turkish composer Ipek Gorgun on another heady investigation of the global environmental crisis.

Ceramic TL / Ipek Gorgun: Perfect Lung

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ceramic-tl-ipek-gorgun-perfect-lung/

Perfect Lung

Like his debut album from 2016, the latest from Toronto producer Ceramic TL—better known as Egyptrixx—deals with the geopolitics of environmental catastrophe. A collaboration in experimental sound work with Istanbul composer Ipek Gorgun, Perfect Lung contains a song called “The Story of Our Salvation” that is only three-and-a-half-minutes long (a little short, maybe, considering the subject matter). For now, a story of salvation from eco-crisis does not exist. Or rather, it does not exist for anyone besides the world’s most powerful populations. So the track’s universal narrative is a speculative placeholder that may never come to fruition. It is pointedly followed on the album by “Magnitude of Oblivion, Refrain of Pacific Calm.” Sitting down with Perfect Lung requires the listener to brace themselves a bit. The fractured edges of its amorphous synth textures glitter and ooze, sloshing around as if miles below the earth’s surface. And yet, entering the record’s sonic space is like being in the cabin of an airplane as it makes its final descent, straining the inner ear’s air pressure levels. Discomfort mixes with nagging elation. On his last record, Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border, Ceramic TL made a point of using every nook and cranny of the sonic spectrum, and this one is comparably expansive. Sign of the Cross set out to investigate the philosophical implications of the anthropocene, and this record continues the project by zoning in on more micro musical details. Gorgun is currently nearing the completion of her Ph.D. in Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University, and it seems like her ear for granular, protean detail—evidenced on her remarkable debut LP, Aphelion—is partly responsible for this shift. Sequenced arpeggios nudged out of shape are all over “We Lack the Clout the Decision Isn’t Ours to Make, There Was No Crusade After All,” cut through by harsh noise in a process of embattled symbiosis. “The Story of Our Salvation” moves by way of cascading textures, evoking pastoral electronica that grows queasy. In these moments, Perfect Lung feels like it is genuinely in conversation with the present. Elsewhere, when neon ’80s synth enter the frame, it inevitably evokes something like the Blade Runner soundtrack and feels more rehearsed, less imaginative. What is a “perfect lung”? One thinks of homeostasis, the careful management of inputs and outputs, the immense labor of care. In an interview, Gorgun said it is “representative of a full breath, something that changes your whole existence once you breathe the air in with awareness, and something that is subliminally marketed under the category of wellness in a world literally coughing up polluted air.” With that, Perfect Lung embodies both speculative science fiction and a vérité-style depiction of the present. It chooses not to solely mourn dystopia, and yet—opting for complexity over convenient tidiness—it couldn’t be characterized as optimistic either. Like the remotely trembling currents that collide in the work’s sonic ecosystem, Perfect Lung remains torn by the sense of pervasive volatility.

2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Halocline Trance

December 11, 2017

ff1ed64a-16f9-47f1-8efb-38eef33dc912

Alexander Iadarola

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

Originally issued in 1980, Glenn Branca's first symphony for guitars now sees reissue through the Acute label that re-released his essential 1981 masterwork, The Ascension, last year. Lesson No. 1 is Branca's first great work, and documents the birth of a career whose influence would spread to everyone from Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine to Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Mogwai and Black Dice.

Originally issued in 1980, Glenn Branca's first symphony for guitars now sees reissue through the Acute label that re-released his essential 1981 masterwork, The Ascension, last year. Lesson No. 1 is Branca's first great work, and documents the birth of a career whose influence would spread to everyone from Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine to Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Mogwai and Black Dice.

Glenn Branca: Lesson No. 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/910-lesson-no-1/

Lesson No. 1

When Glenn Branca's "Symphony No. 8" was performed in Denmark at an arts festival attended by the queen and several dignitaries, the press described the effect of his music as "sound terror." For Branca, there is no such thing as "too loud": His most recent composition is an ensemble for 100 electric guitars. But Branca's album releases are far less grandiose than his live performances. While works such as "Symphony No. 1" for sixteen performers have overwhelmed audiences with their disorientingly high volumes, oil-drum percussion and Branca's spastic conducting style, the live sound is too large to be even approximated through two speakers, leaving a listener to wonder what the big deal was about. In contrast, last year's reissue of The Ascension and this year's Lesson No. 1 contain earlier works for small ensembles. They may not have shattered as many eardrums, but on CD the sound remains close enough to grab hold of you and lift you into Branca's intense world. The first two pieces on this album, "Lesson No. 1" and "Dissonant"-- originally released in 1980-- comprise Branca's first solo release after leaving punk/no-wave outfit Theoretical Girls. The liner notes quote him as regarding "Lesson No. 1" as a simple experiment in minimalism. Simple or not, it is most certainly huge. It begins with two guitars picking out pulsating Reichian riffs, before introducing a triumphant one-note wall of sound with organ and bass shifting underneath to give a sense of harmonic movement. It contains the seeds of Branca's future work with cells of tonal noise, and today can't help but bring to mind everything from the seared distorted walls of My Bloody Valentine to the triumphant crescendos of Godspeed You Black Emperor! to Oneida's ultra-repetitive jams. The guitars increasingly bend in pitch as the piece continues, exploring a microtonal world of detuned strings. Like minimalist composer Rhys Chatham-- with whom he briefly played before they became rivals-- Branca was interested in highlighting the harmonics extant in battling waveforms and the sounds that naturally emerge from repetition. As "Lesson No. 1" encapsulates the ecstatic drama of future instrumental post-rock, "Dissonance" foretells the broken industrial sound of many composers to come, especially that of the Bang on a Can collective with whom Branca has associated himself in recent years. Scored for guitar, keyboards, bass, drums and sledgehammer, "Dissonance" replicates the pounding honking perpetual motion of city life, shifting in and out of polyrhythmic experimentation and more chugging guitar work. "Dissonance" dispels any notion that Branca's complexity might only be rhetorical. Whether you want to call it punk-fueled anti-prog or recontextualized art music, it is complicated stuff, requiring great practice from the instrumentalists and mental engagement on the listener's part. Some classicists proclaim rock incapable of the emotional subtlety and variation of orchestral music. The extra inclusion of "Bad Smells"-- a piece written for Twyla Tharp's dance company in 1982 and played by an ensemble including Sonic Youth members Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo-- spends 16 minutes dispelling that notion. Though still a relatively early composition for Branca, it contains an overwhelming variety of moods and textures-- reverie, humor, triumph, anger, struggle-- and makes this CD worth considering even if you own the previous reissue of Lesson No. 1. This release also includes a video showing Branca conduct a part of his "Symphony No. 5", and it is a powerful thing to watch as this composer frantically embodies the electric energy of his own music-- or maybe it's the other way around.

2004-07-15T02:00:01.000-04:00

2004-07-15T02:00:01.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

99

July 15, 2004

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Pitchfork

Over the course of five albums, Toronto-born Max Turnbull has fashioned himself an outsider narrative as Slim Twig. For all his off-kilter aims—his desire to emulate and kill his idols (audibly Zappa, Beefheart, the Zombies) paired with a love of classic melodies and psychedelic murk—his frustrating new collection fits into a number of timely pop cultural concerns.

Over the course of five albums, Toronto-born Max Turnbull has fashioned himself an outsider narrative as Slim Twig. For all his off-kilter aims—his desire to emulate and kill his idols (audibly Zappa, Beefheart, the Zombies) paired with a love of classic melodies and psychedelic murk—his frustrating new collection fits into a number of timely pop cultural concerns.

Slim Twig: Thank You for Stickin' With Twig

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20740-thank-you-for-stickin-with-twig/

Thank You for Stickin' With Twig

Over the course of five albums and many peripheral releases, Toronto-born Max Turnbull has fashioned himself an outsider narrative as Slim Twig. It’s true that 2009’s slimy sample-heavy Contempt! wasn't about to find a mainstream audience, though the crux of his self-styled myth hangs on Paper Bag rejecting 2012’s A Hound at the Hem for being too far out, which feels off when you consider the rest of their roster. Compared to his previous records, Hound was Slim’s most accessible release: A concept album loosely themed around Lolita and L’Histoire de Melody Nelson that conjured L.A.’s chamber pop weirdos Van Dyke Parks, Harry Nilsson, and Randy Newman in a dank, oily guise. Owen Pallett provided string arrangements. Slim eventually issued the record on Calico Corp, the label he runs with his wife, U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy, and DFA Records saw fit to re-release it last year. They offered Slim a deal for new work, and encouraged him to "keep the music as weird as possible." In the meantime, he had released the milder Sof Sike to appease Paper Bag, a compromise he says he didn’t mind. For all Slim’s off-kilter aims, Thank You for Stickin’ With Twig fits right into any number of very timely pop cultural concerns. His desire to emulate and kill his idols—audibly Zappa, Beefheart, the Zombies—paired with an abiding love of classic melodies and psychedelic murk aligns him with self-conscious, costumed rock’n’roll stylists like Father John Misty and Ariel Pink. Both FJM and Pink use bad taste and misogyny in an attempt to radicalize the traditional realms in which they work, and are credited as complex artists for it, though, as NPR’s Ann Powers highlighted in a recent essay on Josh Tillman, it’s a marketing ploy as much as any potentially genuine creative impulse: "Maybe for that reason, outrageousness now doesn’t seek to change much beyond itself. It’s provocative, but not necessarily oppositional or even that unconventional at its core." With Thank You, Slim rejects FJM and Pink’s rejection of good taste, positioning himself as an ally on gender and wage equality, a woman’s pleasure, and an advocate for "dragging an appropriation of rock’n’roll kicking and screaming into a place free of cliché, sexism, and trod on association." It’s a big claim. And yet, Slim appointing himself as a corrective sits almost as uncomfortably as Pink’s "maced by a feminist" story and FJM's cultivated chauvinism. Pitchfork contributor Jes Skolnik wrote recently about "[recoiling] from men who are extremely keen to tell me exactly how Feminist they are." She continued, "[trust is] not something that comes with hardcore lyrics about the Right Topics." Given that Slim has talked about admiring "a lot of artists who would be considered assholes or even criminals like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Phil Spector," it’s hard not to raise a skeptical brow at his foregrounded activism on behalf of the disenfranchised. Thank You comes at a time when we greet any art that basically musters the Bechdel test with the enthusiasm of serfs receiving crumbs from the master’s table. Type "Magic Mike female pleasure" into your favorite search engine and there’s a whole page of essays from high-profile outlets praising the film’s portrayal of women’s satisfaction. This is where Thank You starts, with "Slippin’ Slidin’", a desperate, sleazy devotional where Slim puts himself at the mercy of his sexual partner, his distorted voice matching the guitar’s gravelly thrust. That it sounds like Queens of the Stone Age covering T. Rex is surely meant to make some audacious point about a cock-rocking song concerning female pleasure, a level of extra-textural interest that Thank You assumes of its listeners. (Cop the extensive explanations that accompany its page in the DFA web store.) Better is the subsequent "A Woman’s Touch (It’s No Coincidence)"—co-written with Remy—which confronts Yoko haters and attributes the Beatles’ wives with significant responsibility for their husbands’ success. This feels like a well-judged feminist statement coming from a male artist messing with rock’n’roll signifiers. It also sounds like a dub remix of the "Roobarb and Custard" theme tune that’s as irritating as it is fun. Also strong is "Fog of Sex (N.S.I.S.)"—if it were less corroded, its sharp lyrics might forge an anthem for gender fluidity: "Gender please/ Standardized questionnaire fee/ Simply mark which one you are/ Yet no option applies to me," Slim sings with Remy. "A Woman’s Touch" and "Fog of Sex" are the opening book-end to a bog of courtly baroque interludes ("She Stickin’ With Twig"), twisted junkyard carousel songs ("Stone Rollin’ (Musical Emotion)"), doomy stutter ("Trip Thru Bells"), and drawling electric guitar that magically captures the gleeful menace of Captain Beefheart’s voice ("Textiles on Mainstreet"; see also). Everything is doused in unkempt psych sleaze; the middle section is in desperate need of a corset. Amidst it is "Roll Red Roll (Song for Steubenville)". It starts as a murky waltz that veers again into that louche guitar tone, heralding inaudible lyrics that evoke the grim situation of the Steubenville high school football team rape case—all uneasy come-ons that don’t contain the option to say no: "You ever been a mule hon?/ You ever make it past the line?/ Even in a school zone/ I see you look just fine." Perhaps Slim has very personal reasons for wanting to inhabit this horrendous incident, but at the same time, the lyrics don’t convey a complex handle on its gravity. The only nod to Steubenville is in the title, which feels like another pat on his own back; outrageousness—masquerading as tribute—not seeking to change much beyond itself, again. The empty Big Ideas continue: "You Got Me Goin..." features a slurped sample of the Chi-Lites’ "Stoned Out of My Mind", which is rekindled again later on "Out of My Mind", with added woodwind. Following the genuinely clever and brilliant Hound, the mess is wildly frustrating. "The trouble is once having killed one’s idols, there’s a tendency to also do away with melody, structure, clever lyrics, and a more ambitious approach to production," Slim told one interviewer of his attempts to avoid doing that. He wasn't particularly successful. It’s no surprise that he named the supreme self-sabotage that was Julian Casablancas and the Voidz’ Tyranny as one of his albums of 2014. Perversely, the song where Slim confronts the tension between himself and his dearly held inspirations is both the least original and best of Thank You. The jaunty, confident guitar hook of "Live In, Live On, Your Era" evokes both the Stones’ "Rocks Off" and Bowie’s "Rebel Rebel", and sails through proggy patches as Slim delivers acutely written lyrics about the vital challenge of originality: "This ain’t the time to be cribbing in class/ One’s own voice is a great deal rarer/ With that in mind, start living out your era." As if to make—or break?—his point, he follows it and closes the record with a hoary cover of Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier’s "Cannabis". "On and on, the jokes and meta-sonic rock commentary continue like so many Zappa-esque indulgences," state the notes that accompany the album. But in Slim Twig’s incessant and overbearing winks to the camera, he’s lost sight of his own potential.

2015-08-05T02:00:03.000-04:00

2015-08-05T02:00:03.000-04:00

Rock

DFA

August 5, 2015

ff26924e-b431-41d9-822a-467f9becfa3f

Laura Snapes

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

Cleveland’s one-man garage-rock industry Lamont Thomas has a wide vision of what is noise and punk, and if *Louder Space *was his hip-hop album, *Niggative Approach *is his funk excursion.

Cleveland’s one-man garage-rock industry Lamont Thomas has a wide vision of what is noise and punk, and if *Louder Space *was his hip-hop album, *Niggative Approach *is his funk excursion.

Obnox: Niggative Approach

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23248-niggative-approach/

Niggative Approach

Lamont Thomas has made seven Obnox albums in as many years, and they’ve all been bold expressions of his wide vision. But his third, 2014’s Louder Space, was a true breakthrough. The hip-hop and R&B strains that course beneath his noisy one-man garage rock came into sharper focus on that record, his first made in a proper studio. It also showed that Thomas could delve deeper into specific sides of his persona—in this case, by crafting legit rap jams—without sacrificing the many styles of which he’s capable. The three Obnox albums that Thomas made after Louder Space were solid and diverse, but *Niggative Approach *feels like its true spiritual follow-up. The album is heavily focused on beats—Thomas has drummed in many vital Cleveland post-punk outfits—and filled with earworm-ready grooves. If *Louder Space *was his hip-hop album, *Niggative Approach *is his funk platter, bubbling with big bass lines and filled with studio touches like horn sections and keyboard accents. There’s still a lot of punk spirit here; the album’s title nods to hardcore legends Negative Approach, whose singer John Brannon opens and closes the album with spoken exhortations to Thomas. But *Niggative Approach *is first and foremost about groove. Many of Thomas’s grooves are so simple and powerful they feel instantly classic, as if he plucked them from some hidden vault of magic funk tricks. They also help create some of the most upbeat music he’s ever made. After Brannon’s brief invocation, *Niggative Approach *opens with three tracks ripe for blasting from car windows while cruising down beachside strips. “Hardcore Matinee” is positively bouncy, while “Jack Herer” sounds like a dream take on Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead.” “State to State” soars on a funky guitar line, chiming keyboard chords, and Thomas’s multi-voiced hums. Things even get romantic during “Carmen, I Love You,” a groove-ballad that Thomas could’ve sung while lying on the grass staring at clouds. Balancing that early sunniness, *Niggative Approach *gets denser, noisier, and more complicated as it progresses. Thomas melds different styles through masterful layering, piling sounds onto each other so that they merge and fuse rather than blur or obscure. In tracks like the slow-building “You” and the haunting “Beauty Like the Night,” he builds walls of sound by letting each element—echoing vocals, wavy chords, rattling beats—settle against another. At his most extreme, as on “Audio Rot,” he buries everything so deep it sounds like the song is playing a few rooms away. But that’s the exception on Niggative Approach, which mostly maintains a crisp clarity no matter how thickly Thomas boils his sonic stew. Thomas takes risks on Niggative Approach, which is pretty standard for him; nothing he’s made as Obnox has ever played it safe. Yet the boldest aspect of this album is how unabashedly hooky it is. Past Obnox albums were more about ebb and flow, alternating catchy jams with shorter jams or abstract interludes. But here Thomas doles out blow after blow, happy to jump quickly from one feel to the next. In less experienced hands this could be a recipe for listener fatigue, but Thomas continually finds new angles, maintaining diversity even as he’s charging full steam ahead. On Niggative Approach, his knack for variety and nuance is the strongest it has ever been.

2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

12XU

May 30, 2017

ff26eb17-ec33-4715-8e33-6547e069f606

Marc Masters

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

With dreamy experimental production and standout Tyler, the Creator features, the L.A. singer’s latest is an affecting document of how pain can smolder beneath a veneer of nonchalance.

With dreamy experimental production and standout Tyler, the Creator features, the L.A. singer’s latest is an affecting document of how pain can smolder beneath a veneer of nonchalance.

Snoh Aalegra: TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snoh-aalegra-temporary-highs-in-the-violet-skies/

TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES

For much of Los Angeles-based R&B singer Snoh Aalegra’s career, the names of other musicians have qualified her own. She was inspired to become a musician after hearing Whitney Houston sing as a child. She was mentored by Prince in the final three years of his life. Last week, a tweet calling her a new generation’s Sade gained so much traction that Aalegra felt compelled to clarify that she isn’t. It’s true that Aalegra’s golden-toned, jazz-inflected vocals make the Sade and Amy Winehouse comparisons easy. But it was sometimes hard to tell what made her earliest music distinct. On 2016’s Don’t Explain and 2017’s FEELS, her voice was often overpowered by extravagant production choices. She changed course on 2019’s -Ugh, those feels again, paring back the reverb and backing vocals to make room for irresistible pop hooks. Still, the lyrics at times felt anonymous. Her latest album, TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES, is her first project that sounds entirely her own. With exploratory production that’s as expansive and dreamy as it is frenetic, it’s an affecting document of the pain smoldering beneath Aalegra’s curated veneer of nonchalance. Aalegra works with a number of new producers here, including the Neptunes and Tyler, the Creator. The resulting sound is both free-associative and boisterous, a haze of ambient synth decorated with pitched vocal flourishes, syncopated ad-libs, and zig-zagging beats. Listening feels like plunging your hand into a jar of marbles or swimming in a bioluminescent bay, an immersion in a world of glimmering baubles. Aalegra counters the experimental production with the most gracefully restrained vocal performances of her career. She sings the titular phrase on “We Don’t Have to Talk About It” with so much poise that you’re ready to overlook the hurt along with her. On “In the Moment,” one of two excellent songs featuring Tyler, she sings with the ease of butter gliding across a hot pan, alternately proclamating that she would die for her lover and that she’d be alright whether they leave or stay. Tyler’s verses raise the stakes, calling out her inconsistency and aloofness. Opener “Indecisive” establishes the tension between Aalegra’s outwardly blasé attitude and the angst she’s quietly processing within. “See, I don’t really care/Now I start to sound like you,” she sings, swathed in echoes of synth and a beat that rushes forward like a child down a hill. It’s a declaration of independence that almost immediately betrays itself as overcompensation: a way to avoid feeling hurt by a partner who actually doesn’t care. Throughout the album, Aalegra makes refrains out of ambivalence: “I get it/Some things don’t work and that’s the way love goes,” she concedes on “In Your Eyes.” “I’m not tryna make you be mine,” she sighs on “Taste.” But she can’t stop herself from expressing the depth of her desire, as on highlight “Tangerine Dream,” where she remembers the exact time of the flight that an ex was also on, or on “Everything,” when she sings about the way a lover’s hands feel on her face. The moments when Aalegra’s facade slips are compelling for their specificity and emotional heft, but also because they supply the album’s context and dimension, the true intimacy of knowing everything’s not OK. She could benefit from trading a few more generalities for evocative details. Though the depth and fluidity of her vocals provide texture as often as meaning, a few lines do fall distinctly flat: “I’ve always been a worrier/But I’ll always be a warrior” stands out as a false dichotomy of convenient wordplay. “Let your muse be your motivation/Picture perfect like a painting” feels similarly likely to be yelled by a SoulCycle instructor. Around the time of her first project, Aalegra described her music as “cinematic soul,” and the descriptor has never felt more accurate. Any one of these songs could accompany an Insecure montage of rekindled love, impossible daydreams, or bittersweet nostalgia. In place of distinct characters and narratives, Aalegra deploys violet skies and neon peaches, geese flying south for the winter, love that hits like a flash flood—a language of natural phenomena and upheaval located within and beyond her own heart. It’s evocative and complex enough to establish Snoh Aalegra as a name worth remembering, even as it leaves you wondering what it might sound like when she finally faces the full extent of her feelings. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Artium

July 22, 2021

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Vrinda Jagota

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

Blending free jazz with South African protest music and rigorous academic study, the Cape Town drummer connects jazz tradition to contemporary oppression, and points a way forward for the music.

Blending free jazz with South African protest music and rigorous academic study, the Cape Town drummer connects jazz tradition to contemporary oppression, and points a way forward for the music.

Asher Gamedze: Dialectic Soul

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asher-gamedze-dialectic-soul/

Dialectic Soul

Asher Gamedze’s Dialectic Soul attempts to fuse the cerebral with the elemental by finding points of connection between the American and South African jazz traditions. If this sounds like the opening of a master’s thesis, that’s because it is. Gamedze, who was introduced to American audiences through his work on Angel Bat Dawid’s The Oracle, originally planned to submit this album along with his dissertation on South African jazz. The academic provenance of the work is reflected in its liner notes, which contain a schema for understanding the record and an introductory essay from historian and critic Robin D. G. Kelley. But the music is much more approachable than its intimidating supporting texts. By blending free-jazz excursions with South African protest music, Gamedze and his collaborators make the heady intimate and the complex intuitive: The music they play here expresses both the jubilation and the terror inherent in jazz creation. According to Gamedze, the “state of emergence suite” that makes up the first third of the album attempts to represent how colonial violence generates resistance. The song’s tripartite structure is as indebted to Max Roach as it is to G. W. F. Hegel (its three parts are named after the dialectic: “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis.”) We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite also contained a three-parter, “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,” that attempted to link American racism and colonialism. This is not the only connection the two artists share. Both use free-form drums in duet with another instrument to represent a particular conflict in the Black experience. Think Abbey Lincoln’s screams matching the anger of Roach’s drums on “Protest. ” For Gamedze, “solo drums in free time symbolise autonomous African motion, moving through and resolving its own contradictions.” The opening duet of the “state of emergence suite” puts this idea into practice; in the “thesis” section, his drums seemingly deflect all points of entry for Buddy Wells’ tenor sax. But this is not obfuscation, it’s determination. Wells’ sax, which, according to Gamedze, “introduces the violence of colonialism,” cannot conquer the tireless roving drums. Gamedze’s commitment to unceasing change characterizes the remainder of the album; his drumming refuses to stand still in history, leaving the other players to draw their own distinct narratives around it. The rest of the “state of emergence suite” is a mixture of modal wanderings and percussive chaos. Robin Fassie-Kock’s trumpet and Wells’ sax fuse together only to break when interrupted by Gamedze’s throbbing drums and Thembinkosi Mavimbela’s darting bass. The horns seemingly unite against this fury by splitting apart. Fassie-Kock plays Eric Dolphy-like intonations on his trumpet, where each sound takes the listener to a more astral space through its dilation. Wells’ sax slowly warps; its notes expand until their shape seems unnatural. It feels like watching firefighters slowly surround a building wracked by an ever expanding flame; as they douse water in every direction, you marvel at the fact that the structure still stands. This may be due to Gamedze’s search for connections between Western innovations and African tradition. He builds a syncretic edifice: His heroes are constantly remembered. On “eternality,” a bebop number that loses itself in the wind, Fassie-Kock’s trumpet will lie low, stab in the air, and twirl endlessly, its sound reflecting the capacious attitude of its player. The song’s menacing horns and Art Blakey drum patterns give it the melancholy atmosphere of modal records of yore, yet its combustive nature and sometimes atonal solos bring to mind the experiments of Ornette Coleman. It’s an ecumenical elegy to past legends strung together with their contributions. Yet Gamedze is not satisfied with homage; he is concerned with how the oppression that generated the music he loves is carried with us in the present. “hope in azania” comes from the South African liberation tradition. Its joyful melody belies the fact that it is crucially a song about being underfoot. It’s easy to lose sight of that in the glowing timbre of its united horns and the bouncy nature of its bass. But if you follow the path of Gamedze’s drums, which rush and clatter without wavering in their intensity for even a moment, you can hear the rage underlying the jovial mood. Gamedze’s drumming seemingly halts for no one; the closest he comes to stopping is on the album’s other song of remembrance, and the record’s most spiritual cut, “siyabulela.” Its percussion glitters, its horns are muted, and its tempo is slowed all the way down. The song is one of gratitude and acceptance, and it hinges on the voice of Nono Nkoane. Gamedze takes a marching rhythm here, appropriate for the memorial nature of the procession (he was inspired to write a version after hearing the song at a friend’s funeral). He increases tempo for a final solo of gratitude; it’s an attempt to make a noise that cannot be forgotten. It sometimes seems like contemporary jazz musicians only have two options—mimic what worked in the past or plumb the uncharted depths of left-field improvisation. Here, Gamedze shows that a third option is available: pursue the links between past and present. By fusing rigorous academic study with his musical practice, Gamedze connects jazz tradition to contemporary oppression. He does not merely lionize old jazz masters; he argues that their restricted circumstances necessitated revolutionary departures of form. The rapturous possibility that lies at the heart of Dialectic Soul comes from a recognition of this fact: If past fetters still bind us in the present, we can find new ways to free ourselves. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Jazz

On the Corner

July 15, 2020

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Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/

On his sixth album since re-starting his career post-jail, Gucci remains focused, funny, and at the top of his game.

On his sixth album since re-starting his career post-jail, Gucci remains focused, funny, and at the top of his game.

Gucci Mane: El Gato: The Human Glacier

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gucci-mane-el-gato-the-human-glacier/

El Gato: The Human Glacier

“People probably ain’t used to it...But they’re gonna have to get used to it because it’s here to stay.” Be honest: You were just a bit skeptical when you read the above pronouncement from Gucci Mane two summers ago. Somewhere in the back of your mind, a doubt lurked that the healthy, optimistic Radric Davis who emerged from prison—so unfamiliar that some fans suggested he had been replaced by a clone—was really here for good. But there he was in October 2017, more than a year later, slim as ever and smiling at Malcolm Gladwell as the bestselling author asked questions about his life and work. There he was last month, asking his followers what he should get his wife, Keyshia Ka’oir Davis, for her birthday (she requested a baby boy). And here he is again with El Gato: The Human Glacier, the fifth solo full-length Gucci has released since his July 2016 comeback album, Everybody Looking, and another project that gives the lie to the myth of the tortured artist. A healthy Gucci Mane makes significantly better records, every time. Flooding the market has long been Gucci’s signature move. The difference these days is the product is undiluted—or as he puts it on “Strep Throat,” a Gato standout, “Used to get slept on/But now the work ain’t stepped on.” The new record, produced in full by 808 Mafia head (and longtime Gucci collaborator) Southside, is a tight half-hour of streetwise raps on which the sunnier reality of the artist’s real life is only occasionally explicit, as when he ends the second verse of “Smiling in the Drought,” a song about the benefits of forethought in drug-dealing, with the line, “See you later alligator/’Bout to meet with Oprah.” In features and on his more commercial albums since his release, Gucci has often been ebullient—his guest spot on N.E.R.D.’s “Voila” consisted entirely of him proclaiming his ability to perform magic. Gato opens in a different vein, with the ice-cold lament “Rich Ass Junkie,” a song as full of pathos as any Guwop has released. In its first verse, over mournful organ keys and heartbeat bass, he lays out the plight shared by many who abuse drugs, including both buyers and sellers. “Money down the drain/Dog food in the vein,” he raps. “Cause I’m the one that serving her, am I the one to blame?” There’s an ashamed, ad-libbed “no!” immediately following, but the question answers itself. As ever, Gucci is a phoneme alchemist, able to transubstantiate syllables until he creates a rhyme (“stuntin’” matches with “Backwood” on the track “Dickriders”), or to go from word to concept to song like a masterful improviser taking suggestions from an audience. The best examples here are the one-two punch of “Mall” and Side EFX,” the latter of which includes the instant-classic Gucci-ism “Bitch you thirsty like a cactus.” And he’s still got one of the best ears in rap. There’s not a miss among the beats here, and even Southside’s stranger choices reveal themselves as fitting backdrops for Gucci’s pop instincts. On “Sea Sick,” for instance, the rapper revs up his flow midway through the song, neutralizing the beat’s grating recorder sound by calling attention to its tempo instead of its pitch. In the first week of 2018, Gato became Gucci’s 18th top 10 debut on the Billboard rap charts, tying a record held by middle-aged veterans E-40 and Tech N9ne. All of which is simply more evidence of the artistic benefits of clean living: When stable, Gucci easily approaches the realm of genius, consistently building hype for each new product. It’s no wonder that Gato, a platonic version of one of his early street mixtapes, has been able to stoke as much interest as the more commercial records he’s released lately. As Gucci has entered this new period of his life, he’s accomplished an extraordinary amount. It’s not gauche or even suspect to hope and pray that he keeps it up.

2018-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Atlantic

January 11, 2018

ff3c35d7-487b-42a7-8331-0affb5ff5189

Jonah Bromwich

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

A collection of soundtrack cues from the third season of “Twin Peaks,” Anthology Resource Vol. 1 is most effective when it remains in the background, tugging at the edges of your subconscious.

A collection of soundtrack cues from the third season of “Twin Peaks,” Anthology Resource Vol. 1 is most effective when it remains in the background, tugging at the edges of your subconscious.

Dean Hurley: Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dean-hurley-anthology-resource-vol-1/

Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△

You don’t have to pay attention to Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△. In fact, I’d go so far as to make that an order: Do not pay attention to Anthology Resource. This album of ambient music and soundscapes from the astonishing third season of “Twin Peaks,” by the show’s music and sound supervisor Dean Hurley, will frustrate focused attempts at listening. Passages feel overlong and repetitive, despite 11 of the collection’s 18 compositions clocking in at two minutes or less. Moments of beauty and terror burst out of the murk, only to dissipate with aggravating speed. Hurley’s airy electronic tones conjure up a sense of space so distinct you can practically see it, as titles like “Weighted Room / Choral Swarm,” “Tube Wind Dream,” “Interior Home by the Sea,” and “Forest / Interior” make clear. Yet the effect of sitting and listening intently to song after song is like looking through a window at these strange new worlds, only for someone to abruptly close the blinds on you over and over. Here’s the thing, though: So what? Of the various “Twin Peaks” soundtrack albums coming down the pike—the Angelo Badalamenti–based original score and a collection of the songs played by the show’s many musical guests at the Roadhouse are also on the way—Anthology Resource contains music that really isn’t meant to be noticed. These are the sounds that accompany overhead shots of the forest, or crackle and hum during visits to—or from—the otherworldly Black Lodge and the strange supernatural realm beyond it. They lurk in the background, helping co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost create a mood of mystery and menace, only occasionally leaping out to positions of prominence in the overall work. In that role, they’re ruthlessly effective. As a longtime Lynch collaborator, Hurley is familiar enough with the filmmaker’s sonic palette to get playful with it. Several songs evoke Lynch’s musical muse, Badalamenti: “Slow One Chord Blues (Interior)” sounds like one of the composer’s red-light rock grooves, but being played by a band at a party down the block, its guitar and bass distorted by distance; “Tube Wind Dream” has the feel of one of the wistful musical paeans to the doomed Laura Palmer from Fire Walk With Me, while “Angel Choir Reveal” and “Seven Heaven” echo its redemptive finale; “Eastern European Symphonic Mood No. 1” is a pastiche of the drawn-out minor-key synth lines Badalamenti laid down for Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Elsewhere, “Electricity I” and “Electricity II” are true to their titles, sizzling their way into an industrial cacophony not unlike the abrasive screech that accompanies the staticky Lynch/Frost Productions title card at the end of each episode. Similarly, “Black Box” sounds like a failed attempt to receive a transmission from one of the show’s many bizarre communication devices (or, perhaps, a radio station). Even the album’s most song-like track, “Night Electricity Theme”—featuring an ominous but contemplative melody halfway between Abigail Mead’s score for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and the Haxan Cloak—has a title that telegraphs the director’s preoccupations. Indeed, Lynch’s love of these jittery audio-visual sensations is well documented. “Sitting in front of a fire is mesmerizing,” he writes in his meditation treatise cum memoir Catching the Big Fish. “It’s magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights.” Add “wind through the trees” and you’ve pretty much nailed every sound on this album. All of these phenomena are characterized by an unpredictable ebb-and-flow, sparkle-and-fade rhythm. The same can be said of one of Lynch’s other great interests in life, the one he credits as the font of his creativity and success: transcendental meditation. Introduced to the pop-culture world when its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, taught it to the Beatles, and now practiced by figures from Lynch and Martin Scorsese to Katy Perry and Howard Stern, the technique is based on the mental repetition of a mantra as a means to reach a deep inner peace. The trick, however, is not to focus on that repetition: TM practitioners are taught to take the various thoughts and sensations that arise during meditation as they come, without making any concerted effort to clear the mind or bear down on any particular idea or goal. In this light, Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△ makes more sense, both as an accompaniment to “Twin Peaks” and as a standalone album. You’re not meant to make this music the centerpiece of your mental landscape, any more than you’re intended to ignore the on-screen imagery to listen to it during the show. Take it as it comes—noticing it when it becomes noticeable, enjoying it when it becomes enjoyable, and drifting away from it when it drifts away from you.

2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Sacred Bones

August 15, 2017

ff497a57-7687-4d29-99c8-51ae56544657

Sean T. Collins

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/

The largely acoustic, ambient Radiance and Submission is the furthest afield Canadian producer CFCF's projects have ever gotten from his midtempo electronic roots, but it still feels of a piece with his discography. This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

The largely acoustic, ambient Radiance and Submission is the furthest afield Canadian producer CFCF's projects have ever gotten from his midtempo electronic roots, but it still feels of a piece with his discography. This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades.

CFCF: Radiance and Submission

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20757-radiance-and-submission/

Radiance and Submission

I never gave up on night bus. Along with glo-fi, seapunk, witch house, and a host of other disyllabic hashtags, "night bus" was derided during the great microgenre boom of the early 2010s—irrefutable evidence, it was thought, of the Internet's insistence upon inter-genre incest. But unlike a lot of its contemporaries, night bus was never as easy to define as influence + influence or adjective + genre. Named after a Burial track but as easily applied to the music of 50 Cent, Tim Hecker, the Eurythmics, the xx, and Vangelis, night bus was more a tone or a mood than a genre in and of itself. It was often categorized as midtempo, minimalist post-dubstep—trip-hop, sort of—but its proponents always stretched it to more disparate moods and eras. As someone drawn to those touchpoints, it was nice to finally have a name for it all, an easy-enough way to connect Björk, "Twin Peaks", and Birdman. The Canadian electronic producer CFCF, too, has always been attached to night bus—he was a frequent poster on the message boards that birthed the term, and his 2010 mix Do U Like Night Bus helped crystallize the breadth of music to which it might be applied. He has, in the intervening years, stretched that mixtape into a trilogy of nocturnal, reflective volumes, including last November's Night Bus 3, which was knowingly subtitled "Death of Night Bus", as if in acknowledgment that, yea, all microgenres must pass. This is probably just as well. A couple years after its invention, night bus is the last standing of its contemporaries—and yet CFCF will not let it go softly. Even his proper studio records can feel like academic experiments within the night bus aesthetic, further defying its easy categorization by leaning into its applications in quiet storm (Outside) or minimalism (Music for Objects). All of which is to say that, while the largely acoustic, ambient Radiance and Submission is the furthest afield CFCF's projects have ever gotten from his midtempo electronic roots, it still feels of a piece with his discography. The mood remains nocturnal, even if the bus has made its way out of the city and now rattles through a pitch-black desert. This is sparse, windswept music, full of warm, circling guitar plucks, gathering echoes, and long, slow fades. Like all of CFCF's music, it is exquisite in its details, as when the haze of cicadas buzzing throughout "Tethered in Dark" finds a rhythm in a palm-muted riff, all before receding back into the fog of circling insects. There are surprises, too, if subtle ones: "La Soufrière" begins with a similar naturalistic buzz, but halfway through blooms into something startlingly songlike. It's one of the shortest tracks on a short album, but, as with recent short-players by Earl Sweatshirt and Thundercat, Radiance and Submission holds together thanks to the clarity of its vision. This patient, almost painterly approach to songcraft has always defined CFCF's work, which might on other records have faded in instead with soft synthesizers before five minutes of smart, pulsing boom-bap. Over 60 minutes, this meticulousness could all feel a bit too polished, but Radiance and Submission bucks that by forming itself entirely out of the interstitial moments. The establishing shots and denouements of his compositions are here turned into the raw material for something strange and fascinating and (for him, at least) new. He has mentioned Chris Marker's indescribable film travelogue Sans Soleil as an influence in the past, and its compositional method—the reassemblage of the periphery into a focal point—could well be part of it. Night bus was always about intermediary spaces, anyway: a long trip home from a club, an overnight journey spent staring out the window. If there's a through line to the musical works we categorize with the term, it's their quiet ability to transform these lonely moments, to make a pair of headphones not a way of shutting out the world but of letting it in.

2015-07-23T02:00:02.000-04:00

2015-07-23T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Driftless

July 23, 2015

ff5d0b9c-f8fa-4cfd-8e5b-ff92cb7cdbe1

Clayton Purdom

https://pitchfork.com/staff/clayton-purdom/

Hayley Williams and co. pivot to jittery, crackling post-punk on their sixth album, but the monotone vocals and political lyrics don’t always play to their strengths.

Hayley Williams and co. pivot to jittery, crackling post-punk on their sixth album, but the monotone vocals and political lyrics don’t always play to their strengths.

Paramore: This Is Why

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paramore-this-is-why/

This Is Why

Twenty years ago, Hayley Williams was a naive if precocious homeschooled teenager and a devout Christian who had just signed to a major label, first as a solo act and then as the singer of Paramore. Now, she is a 34-year-old divorcée, a fierce advocate for abortion access, and a role model and formative influence for a new generation of pop stars. She has been famous for more than half her life, a position that can both foist premature adulthood on teen idols and shield them against the outside world. Paramore’s sixth album, This Is Why, trembles with the paranoid anxieties of a grown woman peering outside her bubble: a bit out of step, a bit pollyanna, but all the more furious at the status quo. In the five years since Paramore’s last album, After Laughter, the jagged, sinister sound the band carved out on their earliest records has returned in the poison-laced anthems of artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Willow. Meanwhile, on a pair of solo albums, Williams brought in collaborators including boygenius and experimented with softer, more intimate production. As she reunites with bandmates Zac Farro and Taylor York, Paramore seem reluctant to retread their old rhythms: “We don’t want to be a nostalgia band,” Williams said last month. Instead of regurgitating the gnarled mall punk of their previous records, on This Is Why they reach for the propulsive sounds of post-punk. The genre’s wry lyrics and crackling energy hold sentimental meaning for Williams, who grew up on the early 2000s British post-punk revival. “It always reminds me of getting my driving license…Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm was always on in the car,” she said on her podcast last year. Yet in pursuing the sounds of their youth, Paramore lose the exuberance that launched their larger-than-life hooks into the stratosphere. They’ve pivoted before, to Day-Glo ’80s synth-pop on After Laughter, where Williams’ impassioned frustration was a perfect fit for bright-sounding songs about being mad as hell. This time around, it’s a riskier bet. The barking monotone of Bloc Party and the Rapture is an odd choice for a vocalist with such an arresting range. While the jagged edges of “This Is Why” establish a jittery energy to match Williams’ punctuated belting on the chorus, songs like “C’est Comme Ça” draw too closely from their inspirations. When Williams adopts the flat affectation of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, she crucially misses the irreverence and quotidian absurdity that make Shaw’s non sequiturs hilarious and commanding. Instead, we’re given schoolyard taunts (“na-na-na-na”) and a summary of Williams’ recent medical history. Williams has masked prosaic lyrics with her booming voice in the past, but without a melody as her guide, she comes across as uninspired. “Getting better is boring,” she sighs. It certainly sounds like it. This Is Why is front-loaded with similar lyrical missteps and ironies that would make Alanis Morissette roll her eyes: “No offense/But you got no integrity,” Williams sings with a smirk unearned by the weak disses on “Big Man Little Dignity.” On “The News,” a stilted treatise against the depressing churn of the 24-hour news cycle, Paramore appear to emerge from an early-2000s time capsule, only to be shocked and horrified by what they see on television: “a war” raging on the other side of the world, with no recourse other than to change the channel. It’s a sophomoric and one-dimensional outrage that lacks the venom Williams has brought to her political statements outside of the band. In interviews, the three members of Paramore openly discuss their political awakenings as Christians raised in the South, but they struggle to incorporate that nuanced perspective into their music. Instead, Williams spits a list of adjectives that feel straight out of 2016: “Exploitative, performative…rhetorical,” and, of course, “deplorable,” as if those words still burn fresh in her mind. It’s not that her anger is misplaced; it’s just that it comes off as too lazy and too late. Once they shake off their millennial discontents, Paramore find their groove in the record’s second half, combining the atmospheric density of Williams’ brooding solo albums and the band’s bloodthirsty 2009 release Brand New Eyes. “You First,” with its Silent Alarm-esque guitars, is propelled by the full ferocity of Williams’ voice. Her vocals on the bridge weave hypnotically before crashing into the bombastic belting of its chorus, and Williams finally sounds at home, confidently waging war alongside the band’s newly sharpened contours. “Figure 8” adds the velvety drone of a clarinet before Williams takes control. “All for your sake, became the very thing that I hate,” she sneers. Her falsetto on “Liar” sounds inspired by the wistful melancholy of Phoebe Bridgers, yet when she doubles her vocals at the end, harmonizing with herself over chiming guitar, it’s still unmistakably Paramore. The rich instrumentation adds a layer of depth while remaining a natural fit for a band driven, above all, by fury. “Thick Skull,” the first song written for the new record but the last in its tracklist, is the most optimistic vision of Paramore’s future: Williams’ patient lower register melds into her fiery roars, as if synthesizing her past and future selves. “Only I know where all the bodies are buried,” she sings. “Thought by now I’d find ’em just a little less scary.” The song marches slowly but with purpose, punctured by Williams’ screams and honeyed crescendos. It’s about making the same mistakes over and over again instead of growing wiser with age. But it’s also about bouncing back, ready to face the next challenge, even with bleeding fingers and mounting casualties. Paramore used to find inspiration in revenge; two decades later, they’re betting that resilience is the best way to get even.

2023-02-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

2023-02-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rock

Atlantic

February 10, 2023

ff617190-bc2c-4a39-8874-f5db8408b9c6

Arielle Gordon

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

The five tracks here are among the most satisfying productions the Icelandic musician has released, a mix of comic, deranged, and weirdly sensual moods.

The five tracks here are among the most satisfying productions the Icelandic musician has released, a mix of comic, deranged, and weirdly sensual moods.

Bjarki: Oli Gumm

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bjarki-oli-gumm/

Oli Gumm

Bjarki’s brief career has been both prolific and precocious. The Icelandic electronic musician first broke through in 2015, at the age of 24, with a two-track 12” on the Russian DJ Nina Kraviz’ label трип. The record—a coiled, peak-time techno banger backed by a slice of after-hours gloom—was well received, but that’s true of dozens, maybe hundreds of similar debuts in the techno scene, year in and year out. For most young producers, such a promising start might have led to a fairly well-trodden path: another 12”, maybe a few longer EPs, all leading up, a few years later, to a debut album. But Bjarki skipped a step or three, and instead, he opted to unleash the contents of his hard drive in the form of not one but three albums for Kraviz’ label, each one a triple-vinyl package, all in the span of a single year: thirty-seven tracks in all, not including still another 12” and a handful of compilation tracks. It was a lot. Hard-drive dumps are tricky business. Richard D. James got away with one, back in early 2015, but then, at the time, people were still buzzing about his unexpected return from a 13-year hiatus as Aphex Twin; they were predisposed to want more. (He also happens to be someone whose fans respond approvingly even when he plays sandpaper discs in place of records.) Bjarki’s offering, on the other hand, scanned as the work of a young artist with potential who could stand to learn to edit. Lately, he seems to be doing just that. His output has slowed, his focus intensified. The five tracks on oli gumm are among the most satisfying productions he has released. Inspired by the pile-driving sound of 1990s hardcore techno like the Mover, along with the skull-scouring distortion of Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin,” it’s thrilling from beginning to end, a nonstop cavalcade of steel-toed kicks, lacerating cymbal work, and sharp-edged acid riffs punctuating apocalyptic atmospheres. At the same time, no-frills floor-fillers are rarely as squirrelly as these. Even his toughest tunes, like the 148-BPM opener “oli gumm 2-2,” seem to dance over spongy ground, and his layered drum sounds feel both brutal and yielding at the same time, like sledgehammers sheathed in a mix of velvet, bubble wrap, and moss. Keeping his riffs simple, he lavishes attention on texture: Minor-key synths sparkle like a curtain of icicles; a single metallic ping pierces the gloom like the Evening Star cutting through fog. Each lo-fi scrap—remnants of rave siren, construction-site clang, shrieking feedback—comes wreathed in a silvery halo. It’s a curious effect: The individual materials are bruised and battered, but put together, they seem almost opulent. The moods he evokes are a mix of comic, deranged, and weirdly sensual. “7 filakaramellur lion bar,” one of the EP’s brain-bending standouts, harnesses the kind of gravelly vocal sample you’d find in an old Chemical Brothers tune, twisting and distorting it until it turns eerie and menacing; another vocal loop, just as indecipherable, might be an anguished beast trapped in a cistern. At the same time, his hooks are as giddy as Woody Woodpecker’s unhinged laugh, while the whispers swimming through the background have a calming energy. It all comes to a head on “hatann satann,” in which a no-nonsense stomp is set against a welter of weird, bubbly chirps and squeaks: synthetic birdsong, loosed balloons, the yelps of an injured dog. It’s primal, animalistic; it has all the industrial intensity of the classic Berghain sound, but weirder—a grayscale foundation flooded with fluorescent color. The hooting, squealing noises tug every which way against the gridded rigidity of the rhythm, suggesting a duet for factory machinery and free-jazz reeds—discipline and chaos locked into mortal combat.

2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

трип

August 2, 2018

ff67bbc6-6db5-4149-826b-c61d5ab310be

Philip Sherburne

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

The Ohio rapper’s new EP devours a half-decade of online scenes and styles and spits them out into a psychedelic combination that often feels overly referential.

The Ohio rapper’s new EP devours a half-decade of online scenes and styles and spits them out into a psychedelic combination that often feels overly referential.

Jasiah: War

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jasiah-war/

War

The rap industry has always moved fast, but the tempo at which new hip-hop trends spread and proliferate means that many artists can become deeply influential while still being relatively young. Dayton, Ohio’s Jasiah is an obvious byproduct of the speed of digital music, steeped in a world of online micro-genres, furiously sliding between contemporary rap-rock and something closer to hyperpop. It’s easy to mistake his work for what’s colloquially generalized as “SoundCloud rap,” but really, his music thrives on YouTube, where the algorithm will autoplay fan-made hour-long loops of his visuals for “Break Shit” and “Crisis,” directed by omnipresent video bro Cole Bennett. Jasiah began attracting attention online in 2018 with a tribute to XXXTentacion—a spirit hovering over his music. But his two primary influences are artists his age: Florida’s Denzel Curry and the more elusive cult rapper Sybyr of Maryland’s ANTI-WORLD collective. Jasiah’s 2019 debut album Jasiah I Am offered spare, guitar-driven ballads and angsty vocals alongside a Travis Barker feature; and while that record is indebted to X, his new EP WAR leans more in the direction of another anti-Christ figure, 6ix9ine, featured on Jasiah’s 2019 Law and Order-sampling single “Case 19.” Like 6ix, WAR is pure animated aggression, all cut-throat and forceful, a 15-minute blitzkrieg with a cover that puts a militaristic spin on the alt-comix aesthetic of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills. Listening to Jasiah’s music feels a lot like channel surfing: His first viral hit, the Yung Bans-featuring and Ronny J-produced “Shenanigans,” flipped SpongeBob SquarePants, and 2018’s  “Regular” built its beat from Regular Show dialogue. “Crisis,” WAR’s closing track, chops up Courage the Cowardly Dog, and several other songs on the EP would be at home in a Saturday morning cartoon. “Spit” blasts big band brass, and “Surfs Up” samples Bruce Morgan’s classic surf rock piece “Exotic.” “Break Shit” crafts a spy movie theme from an unexpected source: a flip of the horn-heavy “My Spies,” by the ’80s London-based Afro-Caribbean band The Republic. The self-produced “Unintelligible,” featuring frequent collaborator Nascar Aloe, is the most sonically extreme of the EP’s cuts and the most interesting indication of Jasiah’s hybrid potential. Its frenetic chiptune-like electronic beat almost recalls the futuristic hardcore of Machine Girl or anamanaguchi; the influence of Maryland’s ANTI-WORLD is most prevalent in the song’s brief flirtation with electronic music. Given his screamo-inflected vocals, it’s surprising that Jasiah so frequently gravitates toward instrumentals that aren’t rock or punk-influenced at all—though the EP’s core rhythm has mosh-ready aggression. The cartoonish quality of his sound sets it apart from vocally similar artists like City Morgue, but its novelty and referentiality can sound engineered with TikTok success in mind. Hoodrich Pablo Juan collaborator Danny Wolf proves Jasiah can do something different with the horror movie squeaks and stabs of “In N Out,” a bow-throwing posse cut that enlists TheHxliday and Rico Nasty—Jasiah’s most literal connection to hyperpop, given her collabs with 100 gecs and Charli XCX. Jasiah’s music is ultimately indicative of his digital origins. Even more than hyperpop, WAR takes an accelerationist approach to rap, devouring a half-decade of online scenes and styles and spitting them out into a chewed-up psychedelic combination. He screams loud enough to make you listen, but it’s hard to tell if his shouts will sustain for longer than 15 minutes. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

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

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

Rap

Atlantic

April 14, 2021

ff7c5aa1-57e8-4787-bf16-57e2f957a7ce

Nadine Smith

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/

The Massachusetts producer’s new Christianity-themed album infuses Chicago drill and Atlanta trap with an air of holiness.

The Massachusetts producer’s new Christianity-themed album infuses Chicago drill and Atlanta trap with an air of holiness.

Devstacks: Scriptures

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devstacks-scriptures/

Scriptures

Devstacks might as well have a Ph.D. in Chief Keef studies. The Springfield, Massachusetts, producer is part of a SoundCloud-based community that builds on moments of instrumental grandeur scattered across Keef’s discography (see loosies like “Fool Ya” or tapes like GloToven), imagining what would happen if that small slab of his style was its own thing. What materialized is a microgenre dubbed “regalia,” which basically infuses Chicago drill and Atlanta trap with the orchestral extravagance of old Hollywood epics and royal animes. Scriptures, the seven track mixtape entirely rapped and produced by Devstacks, is an all-out showcase for the style and a mesmerizing journey in its own right. If the title isn’t a dead giveaway, or the massive cross on the album cover, let me tell you that Christianity is the mixtape’s overarching theme. But it’s channeled into the hallowed production more than the messaging (although he does rap at one point, “She say she a Christian/I think she a liar/She was in them streets/But she said she retired,” so maybe that’s something.) The intro “Praise God” is true to its title, sounding like it should be playing over an impassioned speech from The Ten Commandments; by the time Devstacks starts lightly murmuring, you hardly register his brags about Prada and how he could “bag yo’ mama’.” Instead, his voice feels like another instrument added to the layers. The following track, “Nun Like the Rest,” is similarly over-the-top, making you feel like you’re staring upward in a cathedral, thanks to digital whispers that don’t sound far off from sped-up Grimes. The fluttering, melodramatic beats are the main draw; the plain lyrics and melodies are secondary. I listen to Scriptures much like I do a Pi’erre Bourne album. You could point out the unimaginative simplicity of say, “Cookin’ all these beats like I’m bakin’,” on “U Didn’t,” but really the song is about how his voice inhabits the guitar-driven spectacle. Or you could note how his vocals are flat and boring on “Can’t Help It,” but the celestial bent he puts on mid-2010s Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital makes you want to let it slide. It’s hard to forgive “Facetime,” though, because the beat just sounds like an Opium reject. The brevity of Scriptures is a blessing, because its sound is so potent that hearing too much would be like biting into a head of garlic. Structural shakeups could give the sound more legs: A bright spot in that respect is “Glo Up,” which starts off with Devstacks repeating “Had to glo up, had to show them” while synths that sound like choral chants keep the Biblical mood intact. Then in the back half, the beat fades out and turns to quiet yet heavenly pianos and choir croons. Devstacks catches you off guard for a moment, which goes a long way. As any Keef head knows, sometimes those few unpredictable seconds blow your mind the most.

2023-10-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-10-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rap

New 11

October 18, 2023

ff7e5323-c4ec-4f2e-9c23-3d4c53a273f8

Alphonse Pierre

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

There's something irresistible about that Chan Marshall. Recording under the Cat Power moniker, she's got a magic coolness ...

There's something irresistible about that Chan Marshall. Recording under the Cat Power moniker, she's got a magic coolness ...

Cat Power: Moon Pix

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cat-power-moon-pix/

Moon Pix

Moon Pix has a wonderful origin tale, one simply too good to miss an opportunity to retell: Chan Marshall was living in a barn with singer-songwriter Bill Callahan in a South Carolina town called Prosperity, on the brink of saying goodbye to music forever—or so she told scores of eager interviewers—when she woke up from a horrible nightmare. “Hell came to get me again,” she told The Fader, attempting to describe the mortal panic in which she awoke. She wrote the songs that night, with visions of spirits pressing the glass. Voilà: Her very own crossroads. This is the kind of myth that music fans cling to make their treasured albums seem more magical, and sometimes we can use these tales to terrorize their teller. When Moon Pix came out in 1998, the fevered hush of possessive adoration surrounding Chan Marshall was at its peak: This was the era of shows stopping and starting, of her faltering voice and mid-song apologies, of breathless reports of said interruptions showing up in the music press, as if Marshall were a consumptive 19th-century heroine. For her most avid listeners, this was the moment when Chan Marshall’s life and Cat Power’s music swirled together most hypnotically, most dangerously, when one threatened to consume the other. The problem with extricating these complicated ideas—who is making my music? Is this person feeling the feelings I feel?—is that sometimes an artist makes something dangerously potent, a piece of work with a mood so thick that it demands an explanation. Moon Pix is undoubtedly that album for Cat Power. We play it for some of the same reasons we play Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or Slint’s Spiderland—to bask in the suspended time it creates every time it fills a room. She made albums with more indelible songs on them, but she never again made an album so darkly spellbinding. All of the production choices that go into an album like this wind up feeling a little haunted, because the atmosphere they generate feels so unlikely and so unreal: Yes, that is the backwards drum loop lifted wholesale from Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere” on the album-opening “American Flag,” and yes, there is almost nothing happening around it—the drone of feedback around the electric guitar blurs into the whine of the sample, so they sound like one hybrid sound. But there is no real accounting for the heavy sense of doom this imparts, why it makes us feel like a low ceiling is suddenly moving lower. And yes, Chan Marshall sings “my new friend plays the drums” before a startled little crash of snares answers the line—as if she has reminded the guy at the kit to wake up, and he has fired off a panicked fill to assure her he’s working—and this gives the music a certain unmade feeling, as if unfolding in real-time. But that doesn’t explain, exactly, its incantatory effect. Nothing can really explain it besides intangibles like conviction, intensity, shared intention. Whatever nameless thing Marshall and her hired band were pursuing on Moon Pix, they were united in their pursuit, and this sustained fever of artistic purpose is another element in the mix, just as palpable as the instruments or the lyrics. It doesn’t take many elements to generate a trance, but it requires a Herculean level of concentration and empathy. All of this witchiness seeps into every fiber of the songs. Marshall reached out to the Australian trio Dirty Three, with whom she had toured. She asked her record label, Matador, to cover her airfare to Melbourne, and they complied. Nearly three months went by, during which not a note was recorded. Then, days before guitarist Mick Turner had to leave the studio, they crashed Sing Sing Studio and recorded everything, uninterrupted, for four or five days. As a result, the band plays as if sleepwalking across a five-lane highway—everything sounds high-stakes and somehow perfectly in place. The drummer was Jim White, a highly skilled player capable of navigating hairpin turns, but here he only played in eruptive splashes. He mastered a sort of controlled aimlessness, a series of managed stumbles that lent an air of hunger to the music. Questlove, another technician with a metronomic heartbeat, perfected a similar blindfold-tightrope style to play D’Angelo’s Voodoo, dragging just a millisecond behind the beat. In both cases, the tension their restraint generates is palpable, nearly visible on the surface of the music, like a neck bulge. If the arrangements were a canvas, then Marshall’s guitar would be the unruliest blot, hogging the most white space. She plays rhythm guitar the way people talk at a cafe—excitably, with varying levels of purpose and speed, prone to slumping off into peculiarly timed silences. Listen to her instrument at the center of “Moonshiner”—she speeds up, slows down, flubs a note here and there, places some notes a little more loudly than others without seemingly meaning to; some of her chords are choked off by her fingers. Her guitar nudges every other instrument into the corner of the mix, moving the entire baggy-shaped composition forward, pulsing blood through its veins with the irregularity of a heart murmur. Everything—everything—in the music seems to be responding directly to her, and to her innermost thoughts. When flute wanders up and down modal scales behind her on “He Turns Down,” it sounds loosed directly from Marshall’s singing mouth. All of the shapes Marshall’s music would later take were vaguely discernible here: the careful way she arpeggiates that root chord on “No Sense,” over and over, and how closely the figure evokes the luxurious stretch of Al Green’s Hi Records band, how the hesitation on the downbeat heightens the tension to near-erotic levels. You can hear her future as a soul balladeer on The Greatest whispering at you. On the rudimentary finger-picked minor chord of “Back of Your Head,” you can hear the shadows of future Cat Power dirges like “Babydoll” lurking. And on “Metal Heart,” the album’s moral center, you can feel her clasping her fingers around a message, a mantra that would follow and sustain through the next decade. “You’re losing the calling that you’ve been faking and I’m not kidding/It’s damned if you don’t and damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo,” she sings. The “you” in the song, addressed with such affection, feels like Marshall herself—an unverifiable, if inescapable, impression. She would go on to sing other songs to other “you’s,” also with unclear subjects: on You Are Free’s “I Don’t Blame You,” she offered another benediction to a reluctant and tortured performer. “They never owned you/And you never owed it to them anyway,” she sang. She was coy for years about the song’s source, telling one interviewer it was simply about “that feeling of not being understood, but supposedly being understood by everyone” Years later, she would tell a Guardian reporter it was definitely about Kurt Cobain “blowing his head off.” But whoever it was, her solidarity with them was unmistakable: That person onstage who “didn’t want to play,” was always Marshall, using someone’s story to tell us a version of her own. By the time of 2012’s Sun, she was comfortable and confident enough to start speaking directly to other people, to her idea of “kids” that were not her own obvious narrative surrogates—“You ain’t got nothing but time, and it ain’t got nothing on you,” she asserted, bravely. But here, in the haunted circle that was Moon Pix, she realizes something about herself, her art, and transmits it to us for the first time. “Metal heart/You’re not hiding/Metal heart, you’re not worth a thing,” she sang on the chorus. An “Amazing Grace” quote escapes her like a hiccup—she sounds startled to find herself singing it, mimicking the nature of revelation itself. Grace—itself accidental, capricious, not to be owned—seems to guide Marshall through Moon Pix like a waking dream. If we still yearn to embrace her tale about that single fevered night of songwriting, about keeping devils at bay with just her voice, well, we have Moon Pix to thank for prodding us into believing it.

2019-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Matador

July 28, 2019

ff9069fa-0de5-4a00-a324-f8db3c233303

Jayson Greene

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

Originally meant for a 2003 release, these unreleased songs from Nas’ latter-day output pale in comparison to the rapper’s greatest work.

Originally meant for a 2003 release, these unreleased songs from Nas’ latter-day output pale in comparison to the rapper’s greatest work.

Nas: The Lost Tapes 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-the-lost-tapes-2/

The Lost Tapes 2

In February 1999, just before the mp3 era reached its peak, 13 tracks from Nas’ forthcoming double LP I Am....The Autobiography leaked onto the internet. With the core of the album in the wild almost two months before the scheduled release date, Nas and his team at Columbia panicked, scrapping the original tracklist and pushing back the album release date. I Am....The Autobiography was intended as a concept double-album, with one disc recounting his life from birth to death by suicide and the second dedicated to his afterlife. The leak blew up that grand scheme, and the album was officially released as the haphazardly assembled single-disc I Am, without most of the leaked songs. Some would be released as part of the career nadir that was late ’99’s Nastradamus, but the rest circulated for years in varying fidelity, creating an aura of mystique around these “lost” tracks. When they finally saw an official release in 2002 as The Lost Tapes, it solidified the resurgence sparked by 2001’s Stillmatic and the legendary beef with JAY-Z. But The Lost Tapes 2 is a sequel in name only. Originally meant for a 2003 release, the project was delayed by his signing with Def Jam and their subsequent disagreements, and it’s unlikely this compilation is the same as the one he intended to release back then. Miles away from the leaked gems on The Lost Tapes—considered some of Nas’ best work—this sequel comprises detritus from the last decade or so of Nas’ storied career. Even if the lows of Nas’ post-millennium output have been plagued by corny hooks and questionable beat selection, his failures were often in the service of experimentation—or in the case of Nastradamus, a rushed production process—and he’s never lacked access to the game’s premier production talents. The credits for The Lost Tapes 2 reads like a hip-hop all-star team: Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, No I.D., RZA, Hit-Boy, Eric Hudson, DJ Dahi, Pete Rock, and the Alchemist are all featured. And there are indeed some highlights: The Swizz Beatz-produced “No Bad Energy,” a moody slow-burner washed in atmospheric background vocals that suits his wistful nostalgia, the crunchy lo-fi wizardry of RZA’s “Highly Favored,” or the vintage Queens boom-bap of Pete Rock’s standout “Queensbridge Politics,” in which Nas plays the wise old uncle, at his most comfortable and confident. But it’s tragic to hear what he’s done with some of these productions. For much of the record, Nas sounds like he’s trying too hard. “It Never Ends” is a swirling piano beat from Alchemist primed for a laid back flow that Nas...inexplicably yells over, biting The Notorious B.I.G.’s infamous “Seven Mac-11’s…” line in what appears to be a tribute. This mismatched energy is also apparent on a perfectly serviceable beat from Pete Rock (“The Art of It”), in which Nas sandwiches a single decent verse (“Pulled out the barrel/Four-fifths rip through bone marrow/Make his toes spiral the dirt/While his feet kick up rock, he’s a sprinter”) in between two head-shakers (“A life, Adidas under A, the B for beater, Bottega/British Knights sneaker...” and so on through the alphabet). “Beautiful Life,” his most direct reference to his divorce from the singer Kelis, offers no real clarity to their mutual allegations of abuse, and its celebratory tone leaves a stale aftertaste. Like most of the songs on Lost Tapes 2, it never should have seen the light of day, a sentiment that was, at one point, shared by Nas himself. That he would release an album that didn’t even meet his own standards is dispiriting.

2019-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Mass Appeal / Def Jam

July 24, 2019

ff9f709d-df48-449b-84e9-3de1bc20089b

Matthew Ismael Ruiz

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

San Francisco-based experimental alt-country band evokes untainted portraits of an Ol' West less steeped in folklore than shear, elemental love of life.

San Francisco-based experimental alt-country band evokes untainted portraits of an Ol' West less steeped in folklore than shear, elemental love of life.

The Court & Spark: Dead Diamond River EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1636-dead-diamond-river-ep/

Dead Diamond River EP

Twang: the plight of any alt-country musician. From Jeff Tweedy's inauspicious beginnings in Uncle Tupelo, to dusty latter day folksters like David Pajo and Will Oldham, the genre has always been haunted by detractors who yield the word like incriminating evidence. If the indie music press shares one thing in common with the right-wing media juggernaut, it's its eager defamation of this innocuous onomatopoetic device. Much like "liberal" in today's so-called political journalism, twang has come to mean something dirty among the critical elite. Aside from the obvious imbecility of the idea that any singular element can be inherently bad in music, twang is a relatively harmless quality to vilify. After all, the last thing one could call Ry Cooder's slide guitar meditations is pretentious. In fact, alt-country was founded in part to counter the sort of discreet braggadocio so virulent in underground music. The Court & Spark certainly belong to this category, albeit cast down a somewhat more experimental tributary. Conceived and reared in San Francisco, the band are as indebted to Cooder et al as anyone, and their vast soundscapes evoke untainted portraits of an Ol' West less steeped in folklore than shear, elemental love of life. And yes, their songs twang along with the best of 'em; see their tender "National Lights", off 2001's Bless You, one of the exemplary y'allternative songs of the last few years, for proof. But The Court & Spark are so much more than twang, and it only takes a few bars of "Invercargill", the opening cut off the group's new EP, Dead Diamond River, for them to reiterate it. Three years removed from their last full-length effort, the California quintet have had sufficient time to explore, hone, and expand their sound, and if this concise five-song collection is any indication, their forthcoming Witch Season LP should provide a more nuanced companion to the band's erstwhile work. Of course, given the band's rootsy aesthetic, there are the haggard old tricks-- dolorous tempos, heart-rending vocal deliveries, and plenty of pedal steel ("Bar the Door, Davy" even intercepts, verbatim, a riff from The Decemberists' "Clementine")-- but the band are adventurous enough in their retreads to revere a long lineage of forebears while simultaneously taking steps toward an advanced sound. Aforementioned "Invercargill" dabbles in mesmeric psych-folk atmospherics before performing an abrupt turnabout, dissolving inwardly, and emerging with a drowned-out rag that it rides to an anti-climax. Before long, the amicable "Lucia" cozies up to some bucolic acoustic fingering, and The Court & Spark are back to being their humble old selves again. But don't be fooled. The Court & Spark are a very sophisticated animal, and any intimations at simplicity are readily dispelled by the finesse of their arrangements. What saves songs like "Lucia" from succumbing to vapidity is a keen sense of dynamics, and a killer knack for arranging familiar instruments. Throughout Dead Diamond River, acoustic guitars, vibraphones, glockenspiels, pedal steels, organs, and analog synths intermingle with harmonious fluidity, resulting in a sum much greater than its parts. You don't need to have seen San Francisco to appreciate their visceral orchestrations; like any successfully evocative folk music, the portraits the band etch are almost better than the real thing for their fictitiously preserved perfection.

2004-08-01T02:00:03.000-04:00

2004-08-01T02:00:03.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Absolutely Kosher

August 1, 2004

ffa00bf5-5a15-4533-a711-84f47344cb44

Pitchfork

The second full-length from Hundred Waters is not an evolution so much as a refinement. If 2012’s Hundred Waters saw the electro-folk band sketching out the borders of their sound, The Moon Rang Like a Bell finds them zeroing in on what they do best and going deeper.

The second full-length from Hundred Waters is not an evolution so much as a refinement. If 2012’s Hundred Waters saw the electro-folk band sketching out the borders of their sound, The Moon Rang Like a Bell finds them zeroing in on what they do best and going deeper.

Hundred Waters: The Moon Rang Like A Bell

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19311-hundred-waters-the-moon-rang-like-a-bell/

The Moon Rang Like A Bell

The second full-length from Hundred Waters is not an evolution so much as a refinement. If 2012’s self-titled effort saw the band sketching out the borders of their sound, The Moon Rang Like a Bell finds them zeroing in on what they do best and going deeper. The production is improved in every way, but given how hushed and quiet they can be, the effect is still pretty subtle. Acoustic instruments have been jettisoned; the pillowy synths and layered vocals of singer Nicole Miglis nestle easily in the mix, sometimes leaving questions as to when one end and another begins. Indeed, the key to Hundred Waters’ rich and tactile atmosphere is that their machines never sound quite like machines, but everything sounds close; on “Murmurs”, distant piano is buried under reverb and digital crackle, sketching out chords with a vaguely gospel feel, as a strange voice sings a tune while so near to the microphone you can hear a tongue clicking against teeth. It’s an album that always feels like it’s whispering in your ear. The band’s approach is difficult to place in a specific time. That’s not because their aesthetic is especially innovative or new, or because it seems like it’s from the future; rather, they bring to mind a moment when updating dusty old song structures with the tools of the present seemed like the next logical step in music. “Digital folk” was the term used in a review of their self-titled debut, and that captures it as well as anything: music that is both earthy and disembodied, with humans and electronics joining at some blissful halfway point. Hundred Waters thrive in the place where post-rock meets freak folk, and sing-song melodies are twisted into strange shapes by circuitry. The connection to Björk is hard to overstate. Part of The Moon’s appeal is that it hearkens back to the style of Vespertine, the last album when Björk’s restlessly experimental music still had a foot in accessibility, before she took such a conceptual turn. There’s a similar sense of music-as-place here, and a desire to fuse ancient and modern in search of a new mode of expression. And in that respect, oddly enough, Hundred Waters remind me of another group from Iceland—Múm, in particular their 2000 album Yesterday Was Dramatic—Today is OK, an album sometimes described at the time as “folktronica.” These aren’t influences I’m talking about, necessarily, but ways of hearing what Hundred Waters are doing. It’s not a coincidence that these signposts are from music made around the turn of the millennium, when rapidly changing technology meant the future sound of pop was up in the air. But if much of Björk’s power comes from her unpredictability, the feeling that a breathy sight could turn into a scream and a song might explode, Hundred Waters are always set to simmer. That mostly works in their favor on The Moon Rang Like a Bell, as the album’s strength comes from its gradually accruing moments. So the spell of the minute-long a cappella opener “Show Me Love” is broken by clear piano chords and miniature percussive explosions on “Murmurs” and then the following “Cavity” raises the intensity before the bright and twinkly “Out Alee” brings it back to earth. Sequenced beautifully, the record is full of these gentle arcs, and the sound is so consistent it can feel like a 49-minute piece broken into 12 movements. The impact of any one song is heightened by its proximity to what came before and what follows. In an interview, Miglis highlighted the importance of her lyrics to The Moon Rang Like a Bell, but for me the album functions more like an instrumental album, where meaning comes from the sonics. On the page, her words are allusive and fragmented, hinting at moments of doubt and turmoil, but on record, the words come over as pure sound. There’s a moment about halfway through “Innocent” where Miglis breaks away from language and sings a “dah-dah-dah-do-dum” phrase, but with her voice coated in processed fuzz, she sounds like an amphibious creature prone to reverie. This line communicates as well as any phrase on the album. “Is it only in my head?”, she asks a moment later, and it wouldn’t be a bad subtitle for an album so steeped in imagination.

2014-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

2014-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Owsla

May 29, 2014

ffac33aa-2f46-4ef6-8b8b-3b222266d8fe

Mark Richardson

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

Multi-instrumentalists Ramin Rahni and Ariyan Basu formulate intricate art rock with unusual time signatures and impossible-to-predict textures.

Multi-instrumentalists Ramin Rahni and Ariyan Basu formulate intricate art rock with unusual time signatures and impossible-to-predict textures.

Tar Of: Confidence Freaks Me Out

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tar-of-confidence-freaks-me-out/

Confidence Freaks Me Out

If mathematics or advanced musical theory are not your strong suit, then Confidence Freaks Me Out might make an intimidating first impression. The second album from Tar Of, the Brooklyn-based duo of multi-instrumentalists Ramin Rahni and Ariyan Basu, is defined by unusual time signatures and impossible-to-predict textures that only occasionally tumble in the direction of pop songcraft. Like an uber-nerd going long on their latest obsession, Confidence Freaks Me Out takes some time to warm to, warding off those unwilling to sift through the discordance. But Tar Of aren’t here to bore you. As they narrate in an Instagram post describing the creation of the album cover, the duo collaborated with a mathematician and a felt artist to visualize the 11/8 time signature of lead single “Amused by Their Comment” as a cone of equal proportions, sliced to reflect the song’s 2-1-3-2-1-3 rhythmic patterning. The cone then reappears as the party hats that Rahni and Basu wear in press photos and in the icing on a Confidence Freaks Me Out-shaped cake. Instead of treating nerdiness like a members-only club, Tar Of want to invite you to celebrate. Confidence Freaks Me Out charts a dizzying path through thickets of Reichian repetition, spacious, circular dance tracks like Kate NV’s, and the orchestral chamber pop of Cate Le Bon, with dashes of Animal Collective-esque vocal harmonics familiar from the duo’s earlier records. “Amused by Their Comment” eloquently captures the shambolic spirit, assembling layers of toy piano, sawtooth synth, guitar, trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, and zurna, a double reed woodwind instrument often used in Assyrian folk music. Each instrument seemingly follows its own rhythmic dictates, latticing into a danceable pattern as improbable as Thom Yorke’s in “Lotus Flower.” On “Berry,” muted glockenspiel, an autoharp played with chopsticks, and the sound of a cracked La Croix can create a dreamy instrumental palette for whimsical lyrics about “my toot Feri,” melding the Farsi word for mulberry (toot) with the name of Basu’s grandmother, Feri. The interwoven instrumental and lyrical nods to Iran, detailed in behind-the-scenes Instagram posts, are a loving testament to the duo’s shared cultural roots. Though Tar Of’s kinesthetic quest for repetition often seems to struggle against itself, the fission generated is rewarding. Their competing sensibilities are best articulated on “Uh Oh,” as woodwind instruments swirl atop an off-kilter prepared piano beat before resolving into staccato bursts of clarinet, viola, and synth—a fleeting reminder of rhythmic stability grounding the chaos. On “Garbage In,” they force themselves to write a straightforward chorus at 120 bpm and conjure simple beauty, even as the lyrics—“In the season’s midst, fiction breathes a bit hot (too hot)”—gesture at natural disaster. With 14 of 24 songs coming in under a minute, the record is driven by interstitial tracks that frequently blend into one another. In these fleeting moments the duo’s esoteric tendencies occasionally fall flat, like the halting stutter-step drums on “What’s Up My Dude” awkwardly propping up lyrics that sound like leftover studio banter (“Where’s my dude?/There’s my dude”). But the short runtimes mean that such experiments hardly get the chance to drag things down. Confidence Freaks Me Out’s outsized density can feel both nourishing and unusual: A choice that clicks for one person may baffle another, and the bite-sized indulgences can pack in just as many ideas as the more fleshed-out compositions. When you feel like you’ve already heard every conversation in the room, Tar Of’s labyrinthian visions are a welcome reprieve.

2023-12-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

2023-12-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock / Experimental

Sound as Language

December 4, 2023

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Annie Howard

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

The Long Beach rapper threads the fables of the past with the reality of the present for another expertly written, starkly candid record.

The Long Beach rapper threads the fables of the past with the reality of the present for another expertly written, starkly candid record.

Vince Staples: Dark Times

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vince-staples-dark-times/

Dark Times

Vince Staples is not the rapper you come to for lyrical acrobatics. His bars are stark, jumping between straightforward recountings of gang-related violence and bits of dry humor fit for a Mitch Hedberg set. Both also extend into his presence as one of the rap internet’s favorite talking heads; he can turn an explanation of why he doesn’t share his home address with his closest friends into a hilarious exchange—until you stop to think about what exactly makes him so guarded. This candor helps his stories, jokes, and his recent Coen Brothers-indebted Netflix series, The Vince Staples Show, stick to the ribs. Looking back, Dark Times feels like a logical progression from his last few projects. During the press run for 2022’s Ramona Park Broke My Heart, Staples admitted he was ready to move on from making “an anthology of my neighborhood and my past,” a promise he frequently bends to suit his needs. Dark Times has plenty of trauma, but the difference is it more directly intersects with his present life as a celebrity trying to stay out of the way. “Children’s Song” hangs a lantern on this idea early by starting as a rallying cry for a friend who’s locked up before offering a cold reality check: “Niggas be like ‘Aye bro, ‘member back when?/Let it go, loc/I’m way too rich to be your friend/I’m way too lit to let you dim me,” he says in his trademark deadpan. That couplet is even more cutting when this hook follows just two bars later: “Don’t play with my Crippin’, go play with your kids, bitch.” He’s having his cake and eating it in the most Vince Staples way imaginable. Staples’ monotone voice used to dilute his more intense songs, but now he just sounds tired of having to read everything and everyone for an angle. After mapping out hip-hop toxicity over EDM and techno beats (made specifically for sync licensing) on Big Fish Theory and memorializing the California of his youth on his 2021 self-titled album and Ramona Park, who wouldn’t be? His insouciance still leads to great stories and affirmations of Black resilience, but what once registered as body blows now lands like a firm but loving grasp on the shoulder from an older relative. “Justin” slowly builds romantic tension up to its bombshell ending—the woman Staples is courting suddenly introduces him to her actual boyfriend as her little cousin—and then discards it with a shrug, like Staples is mad at himself for getting caught up. Other highlights like “Étouffée” and “‘Radio’” recast old encounters and family history as edifying parables for a stolen youth. On the former, Staples’ connections to Louisiana inspire him to chart a path from toting guns in Polo pajamas to a place where it’s a privilege to be told your music fell off. Later, “‘Radio’” draws bridges between chance encounters with music, from having his life changed after hearing Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens to appreciating Brandy and Roberta Flack more after a bad breakup. Using his still-blistering concision, these lessons flesh out aspects of Staples’ notoriously private life and give credence to motivational pieces like “Little Homies” and the opening verse for “Freeman.” It’s easier to take Staples’ advice (“You don’t gotta crash out for the set, lil homie/Keep your head on the swivel when you step”) and longing (“I’ll never find a equal mind, I’ll settle for the fattest ass”) seriously when he’s laid out the steps he took to get there. The production is where Dark Times can sometimes go from stoic to sleepy. On the surface, italso seems like the next logical step in Staples’ journey. A grip of producers both established (Michael Uzowuru, Jay Versace, Cardo) and more obscure (LeKen Taylor, Saint Mino) come together to offer a sound mixing the maudlin Cali worship of Ramona Park and the chirpy minimalism of the self-titled with a stately, polished tone. Staples often sounds best when the beat is busier than he is; or else he risks being dragged down by the BPM. That risk actually pays off on lead single “Shame On The Devil,” whose gauzy thump and smooth chorus from North Carolina singer Baby Rose is countered with some of Staples’ wonkiest vocals and the long hard looks at love and fame warbling through them. Otherwise, these are workmanlike mid-tempo cuts, occasionally to a fault. The Cali sway that never truly leaves Staples’ music is most apparent in the rattling synths and drum claps of “Étouffeé” and the disco-leaning rhythm of “Little Homies,” both viscous and smooth like olive oil flowing down the walls of a glass bottle. “Government Cheese” and “Freeman” lack the spark of the rest, generic offerings that are carried by Staples as opposed to both shouldering each other’s weight. There’s nothing on Dark Times that’s surprising and challenging for Staples but little that detracts from what already works. There are several moments on Staples’ Netflix show that, while definitely exaggerated, display the banal insanity of his life as a niche rapper: A bank he’s visiting to get a business loan is robbed by a group who turn out to be homies from around the way; family members press him for money while eating ribs at a cookout; his celebrity is constantly cast as either a non-starter or enough to get him shot at or jumped by theme park mascots. That same attitude, slightly toned down, flows through Dark Times. There’s nothing grand or portentous about this album—every win, mistake, lost loved one, and lesson is presented as a fact of life. Perhaps he’ll never truly get past reconciling the scars of his upbringing with staring down a million dollars for the first time in disbelief. “Life hard, but I go harder,” he sings softly on “Little Homies,” as much a reminder to himself as it is to the youth tracing his steps.

2024-05-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-05-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam / Blacksmith

May 30, 2024

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Dylan Green

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

Using electric mandolin, electrified violin, pedal steel, and snare, the Baltimore group’s music tilts bluegrass and Western swing toward raga and drone; it’s both avant-garde and compellingly listenable.

Using electric mandolin, electrified violin, pedal steel, and snare, the Baltimore group’s music tilts bluegrass and Western swing toward raga and drone; it’s both avant-garde and compellingly listenable.

Salmon Graveyard: Salmon Graveyard

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/salmon-graveyard-salmon-graveyard/

Salmon Graveyard

The 19th-century folk song “Arkansas Traveler” is as much a part of the Southern landscape as kudzu, red mud, and humidity. Its melody, which has been borrowed by everyone from Charles Ives to Raffi, is simple and playful; you can picture someone playing it on a banjo in a Les Blank movie as easily as you can imagine hearing it spilling from an ice-cream truck’s speakers. Where some songs of its era command a gravitas that makes them feel brittle as parchment, “Arkansas Traveler” can be pulled like taffy in a Gatlinburg candy store window. Some might call it kitsch. But judging by the way they play it on their debut album, Salmon Graveyard see “Arkansas Traveler” the same way John Coltrane saw syrupy tunes by Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer or Rodgers and Hammerstein: as a high-art gem that just needs a little polish. Salmon Graveyard is the project of guitarist and electric mandolinist Corey Thuro, a regular in the Baltimore and D.C. improvised music scenes who has collaborated with Matmos’ M.C. Schmidt, among others. The music he and his band play is, in a sense, a countrified form of raga, long improvisations over phrases that repeat relentlessly. Drones have figured in American folk music for centuries—you can probably follow the hum of an open-string fiddle back to the Highlands bagpipe—and artists like Henry Flynt and Pelt have long used bluegrass instruments to make stridently, uncomfortably avant-garde music that’s still recognizably within the lineage of Bill Monroe or the Carters. While Salmon Graveyard are willing to take their explorations to challenging places, the plucky swirl of John Hoegberg’s pedal steel and the nonstop march of Jonah Guiliano’s snare give their music a glossy cosmopolitan feel that has more in common with Western swing. Think of it as Bob Wills gone free jazz. That approach makes Salmon Graveyard unique in their musical realm: They are fun and easy to listen to. You can dance to them. Thuro’s distorted mandolin and Alani Sugar’s electrified violin wrap and tangle in “Arkansas Traveler,” squeezing the song so hard Hoegberg starts picking his bass like he’s playing hardcore, drawing out harmonics, playfully trying to push the song back open. It’s sprightly in a somewhat neurotic way, like it’s been up for two days, all black coffee and trucker speed. “Peak Bottom,” meanwhile, kicks off the 26-minute two-part composition that forms the center of the album with a long, slow whistle from Hoegberg’s pedal steel, the sound of a bomb dropping in a mid-century cartoon. “Peak Bottom” and its companion track, “Salmon Graveyard,” are built around a single brief repeating phrase played by Thuro and Sugar. It’s an asymmetrical curlicue reminiscent of Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’” that in a very short period of time manages to push and yank and finally resolve; it is also, in its gulping and hee-hawing and two-stepping, very funny. Thuro and Sugar play it like they’re chasing chickens around a barnyard, full of cheek and light sarcasm. While both musicians tug apart and take solos of their own—Thuro’s in particular edging toward the cosmic picking of Chris Forsyth—the piece is a showcase for Hoegberg, on both bass and pedal steel. On the former, he slurs and slides, sometimes sounding like he thinks he’s playing a fiddle and sometimes like he thinks he’s Fugazi’s Joe Lally. He plays his pedal steel with sparkle and twinkle, but he also lets it melt into a gooey mess of reverb and sustain. When the band regroups after a long period of deconstruction, he calls everyone back to the dance floor with a pinging harmonic and a train-whistle slide. He is probably the only pedal-steel player in history whose playing can credibly be called “angular.” You can dip in and out of “Peak Bottom”/“Salmon Graveyard” and feel like you’re encountering several different bands. The good cheer and ticklish approach to Western swing recalls ’90s semi-ironists BR5-49 or Austin stalwarts Asleep at the Wheel. Catch them once they’ve started to slow down and they play with the heartbroken cornpone lope of Hank Williams. At a dead standstill, with Hoegberg plucking his bass and Sugar droning on her violin, you can picture Brian Eno carefully placing a spittoon in the corner of his German studio. You might hear Tortoise in the pulse of Giuliano’s rimshots. At one point late in the piece, Thuro pulls away from the theme and makes his mandolin shriek like Joey Santiago’s guitar in Pixies’ “Vamos.” Remarkably, this never stops feeling like country music, even at its freest. Maybe it’s the way the perpetual one-two strike of Giuliano’s snare makes it sound like they’re vamping for time in an oversold beerhall, or the way the album’s democratic mix keeps the mandolin from taking over and pushing us into guitar-wonk territory, but Salmon Graveyard never feels as though its rusticity is something to be overcome. They may borrow an organizing principle from free improv, but Salmon Graveyard don’t have to look too far past country music’s borders to find new vistas; they’re already hypnotized by its past.

2023-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Ramble

October 25, 2023

ffcb6749-9f59-4ab3-a016-be7d80a7615c

Sadie Sartini Garner

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

The Bay Area trio takes several beats to slow down and expand on a nice EP that mines indie rock and slowcore for its finest components.

The Bay Area trio takes several beats to slow down and expand on a nice EP that mines indie rock and slowcore for its finest components.

Sour Widows: Crossing Over EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sour-widows-crossing-over-ep/

Crossing Over EP

When the pandemic hit, Sour Widows had just taken a big leap into the unknown. In February 2020, the Bay Area trio released their self-titled debut EP, a six-song set with alt-pop hooks and slowcore-infused grandeur. What particularly set them apart was the interplay between the two singer/guitarists, Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson, who have a talent for subtle builds to a big climax. Bolstered by empathetic drumming by their longtime friend Max Edelman, it’s tantalizing to imagine what they could’ve done if they’d played SXSW last year as originally scheduled. Their new Crossing Over EP, recorded remotely, could quite literally have never existed without the tragic disjuncture of a world on pause. But it’s also a bit of a mulligan, an extra chance to define themselves before a planned full-length debut. With Crossing Over, Sour Widows seize this unusual opportunity, leaning into their more introspective, atmospheric side across four songs that glide by in what feels like both less and more than their 22 minutes. They’re beguiling and impressive, showcasing a band with lightness as well as heft. Again and again on Crossing Over, Sour Widows create a sense of false comfort out of rudimentary furnishings, only to pull the emotional rug out from underneath. The sprawling title track is inspired, Thomson has said, by the reality of a long-distance relationship, and there’s a gentle familiarity both to the song’s Bedhead-ed opening riffs and the first verse’s apparently autobiographical description of battling the elements on an earlier, do-it-yourself tour. Before long, though, the guitars have become brambled, the storm imagery tangled up with the remote romance. Thomson and Sinaiko are harmonizing about, first, “Something in me crossing over in me,” and then “this life/splitting in me over and over in me,” and then there’s a ragged, windswept guitar solo. When “Crossing Over” finally ends, with an extended outro, it’s in a state of exhilarating ambivalence. Other songs on the EP use a similarly basic toolkit to achieve a similar giddy transcendence. Opening song “Look the Other Way” also relies on slow-burn guitars, splashing cymbals, and vine-like harmonies, passing through more lyrical inversions (“When you look the other way” becomes “I won’t look the other way”) en route to another piercing guitar solo. But the effect is almost as wonderfully disorienting, and there’s a charming loftiness to a line like, “Someday I’ll be as dead as a star.” The closing “Walk All Day” is Sour Widows at their most cozy and cosmic, with fingers squeaking over acoustic guitar frets as Sinaiko and Thomson murmur about cell division, angels, and how “love is blind/leading the blind.” Sour Widows find the infinite in the intimate. The narrative stakes in these songs are higher than they may seem, too. “Bathroom Stall,” which Sinaiko has said is “about a relationship I had with someone who struggled with addiction, who very tragically passed away three years ago while we were together,” again travels from serenity to catharsis. But there’s a jarring physicality to its climactic scene. “Do you remember it like I do?/Your lips turned blue/I had my fingers in your mouth/And I couldn’t get them out,” the band sings. With the Crossing Over EP, Sour Widows have a chance to reintroduce themselves, and they’ve come back wielding raw vulnerability like a superpower. 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.

2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Exploding in Sound

April 23, 2021

ffcc6a09-ee5f-4a8e-a15b-22971d37f1d6

Marc Hogan

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

On his third album, Berlin producer Sebastian Genz switches up his dreamy house sound with forays into drum ‘n’ bass and boom-bap hip-hop but can’t shake his nostalgia addiction.

On his third album, Berlin producer Sebastian Genz switches up his dreamy house sound with forays into drum ‘n’ bass and boom-bap hip-hop but can’t shake his nostalgia addiction.

Moomin: Yesterday’s Tomorrows

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moomin-yesterdays-tomorrows/

Yesterday’s Tomorrows

There are musical styles that stretch wide and loose, like a sagging tarpaulin, and there are those that fit as tight as a surgeon’s glove. The former aesthetics—minimal techno, say, or dream pop—allow for all kinds of variations. In the latter (dub techno, straight-edge hardcore), the tropes become so specific that to alter them even slightly would be to fundamentally undo the identity of the style in question. For nearly a decade now, as one of the core artists on Hamburg’s Smallville label, Moomin—the Berlin producer Sebastian Genz—has had a hand in crafting one of the most snugly proportioned aesthetics in house music. You can count the key elements of the Smallville sound on one hand: There’s typically a repeated chord progression on something like a Rhodes piano; the drums, either sourced from a classic Roland drum machine or sampled from disco or jazz, have been filtered so as to make the handclaps and hi-hats sound sharp yet battered, like your go-to kitchen knife. Added texture might come from a loop of faraway vocals, squashed like the sound of an AM radio transmission, or easy-listening strings, or maybe a snippet of seagulls. Where vinyl has been sampled, which is often, the clicks and pops are pushed prominently to the center of the mix. The overall effect is dreamy to the max: wistful, sparkling, jewel-toned. Suffused with both nostalgia and childlike innocence (Moomin takes his name from a Scandinavian comic strip), Smallville house verges on twee. Genz signed with Brighton, UK label Wolf Music for his third album, Yesterday’s Tomorrows, but the particulars of his style haven’t changed much. His drums still have the bite of a fresh Granny Smith; his keys still glow like an aquarium. Even when his drums are keyed to the 120-BPM skip of the dancefloor, the melodies feel more evocative of kittens yawning or willows weeping. It’s an excellent sound for outdoor day parties of the sort that are popular in Berlin, where lazily ecstatic crowds sway in slow motion to a pitter-pat groove that never breaks its step. There is one major difference this time out: No longer making just house music, he’s now stretching his template to encompass boom-bap hip-hop and even drum ‘n’ bass. Only four of the album’s eight tracks are the kind of four-to-the-floor deep house for which he’s known, and all of those are textbook Moomin. None is exactly surprising, but they all deliver a gratifying twist on his sound. “In Our Lifetime” gets its elliptical groove from jazz brushes. “Maybe Tomorrow” twists muted Rhodes and guitar counterpoints into an upbeat groove with a beatific mood. And both “Daysdays” and “Shibuya Feelings” achieve that alchemical reaction in which two chords and just the right drum sample combine to form a blissfully propulsive loop. The stylistic detours on the album are less surprising than they may seem. Both drum ‘n’ bass cuts, “Into the Woods” and “Move On,” use the same tremolo-kissed electric pianos as his house tunes; so do the boom-bap tracks, “Fruits” and “949494.” Genz has always been a nostalgist at heart—his house tracks, like those of his peers, have typically looked to the early 1990s for inspiration—and his breakbeat cuts, both fast and slow, are rooted in the same era. His jungle tunes evoke LTJ Bukem and other producers who wedded jazz licks with plunging sub-bass, while his downtempo tracks could easily pass for something off the pioneering trip-hop label Mo Wax’s Headz comp. Genz even acknowledges his debt to the past with “949494,” a 94-BPM foray into abstract beats that could have come from 1994, the genre’s heyday. All of these tracks are both skillful pastiches and fine productions in their own right—but, dwelling on the past as it does, the album doesn’t feel terribly urgent. It’s a cozy listen, no doubt. But instead of looking back to ’90s electronic music’s futurist impulse and taking those inspirations somewhere new, Yesterday’s Tomorrows seems mostly content to wrap itself up in the past and linger there, hitting the snooze button while history marches on.

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

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

Electronic

Wolf

May 22, 2018

ffdafda8-1037-4872-936a-990d0f89c0b5

Philip Sherburne

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

Andrew Broder's follow-up to Ether Teeth trades some of his obscurantism for electro-pop song structures.

Andrew Broder's follow-up to Ether Teeth trades some of his obscurantism for electro-pop song structures.

Fog: 10th Avenue Freakout

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3132-10th-avenue-freakout/

10th Avenue Freakout

As Fog, Andrew Broder's music sits at the crossroads of electro-pop, turntablism, found-sound collage, and indie-folk, and seems locked in a tug-of-war between clarity and deconstruction. Adding to this sonic tension is Broder's gentle and genial voice: It projects a tenderness absent from most collage-based music, which is typically either instrumental or features anesthetized vocals as a simplistic trope for modernity and alienation. Those contradictions played a major role in the success of Fog's sprawling but almost brutally minimal Ether Teeth. It's a shame then that 10th Avenue Freakout pulls away from this blankness, thereby muting the effects of its incandescent peaks. Here Broder is breaking with obscurantism and moving toward catchy Postal Service-like song structures, but although the spacious, detailed production is still topnotch, the record suffers because Broder doesn't fully embrace his pop impulses. "Hummer"-- the title track to Fog's 2004 EP-- recurs and is a template for this album. Over plodding drums and a clipped choral sample, Broder intones a melodically tedious verse that gives way to pristine, perfectly phrased falsetto harmonies. The off-kilter drums, patchy organs, and faltering vocal melody of "Can You Believe It?" evoke an electro-pop Neutral Milk Hotel-- especially the chirpy brass near its finale-- and the svelte, suburbanly sexy whirr of "We're Winning" dips into some cheeky cultural criticism: "Jesus Christ is my American Idol/ He's the brand new funky president." And "The Rabbit" returns to Ether Teeth's sharply drawn contrasts, surging and collapsing with counterintuitive élan. If the whole album were this charming, it'd be an unqualified success, but too many songs proceed from point A to B with little variation or depth. Those tracks seem to equivocate between the collagist Fog and the pop Fog, reconciling their tensions instead of exploiting them. And so despite being peppered with luminosity, 10th Avenue Freakout is too often dragged down by aural wallpaper-- stretches of anonymity with few distinctive moments.

2005-03-20T01:00:04.000-05:00

2005-03-20T01:00:04.000-05:00

Rock

Lex

March 20, 2005

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Brian Howe

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

As with its predecessor, 2005's Pixel Revolt, nearly half of the tracks on this new John Vanderslice album make mention of, or allude to, the World Trade Center attacks, while the rest of the songs are awash in the debris and carnage from the tragedy and its aftermath.

As with its predecessor, 2005's Pixel Revolt, nearly half of the tracks on this new John Vanderslice album make mention of, or allude to, the World Trade Center attacks, while the rest of the songs are awash in the debris and carnage from the tragedy and its aftermath.

John Vanderslice: Emerald City

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10459-emerald-city/

Emerald City

After a two-year wait, John Vanderslice follows 2005's Pixel Revolt, an album waist-deep in post-9/11 dread and despair, with 2007's Emerald City, an album waist-deep in post-9/11 dread and despair. If the previous sentence makes the new album sound like it's a carbon copy of its predecessor, then you see what I'm getting at. Vanderslice reportedly wrote most of the album while trying to resolve some visa issues concerning his French girlfriend entering the U.S. The album's concluding track, "Central Booking", is the one song that directly addresses this issue, though its concluding thesis-- "looks like September won once again"-- hangs over the entire album. As with Pixel Revolt, nearly half of the tracks make mention of, or allude to, the World Trade Center attacks, while the rest of the songs are awash in the debris and carnage from the tragedy and its aftermath. Even the album's title is a pointed reference, the "Emerald City" being a derogatory nickname for the "Green Zone" in downtown Baghdad. However, while Vanderslice's observations and commentary sounded fresh and fierce two years ago, the same essential message run through similarly sounding songs this time around rings hollow. Musically, Vanderslice is on top of his game, deftly walking the line between tasteful and ostentatious, but even his skill in this regard can't soften the heavy-handed rhetoric. The queasy acoustic guitars on "Kookaburra" lend the song (which details the apocalyptic power of "lightning shot from the sky", a recurring theme) an unsettling air, while the lilting piano figure of "The Parade" sets a happy scene for what turns out to be another ironically bittersweet paean to the collapse of the towers (never mind an awful case of synthesizer flatulence in the bridge). Throughout the album, Vanderslice chooses to use amplified acoustic guitars, similar to what you'd hear on Spoon albums. They lend the more aggressive tracks (like "Time to Go" and "White Dove") a percussive propulsion, but these gains are undercut by the lyrics' lack of oomph. In the past, Vanderslice could infuse both his fictional and non-fictional songs with a convincing emotional heft. This time around, he's as eloquent as he's ever been, refining and strengthening his short-story songwriting style. However, the constant referral to "lighting from the sky" and towers and drones flying by becomes as cloying and ineffective as the multiple references to 9/11 utilized by political hopefuls and pundits. Only on the album's concluding track does Vanderslice snap out of his insightful ennui and involve the listeners in what he's saying. The brief verses of "Central Booking" concerning the plight of his girlfriend and him being separated by distance and bureaucratic red tape ring truer than the purporetedly heady rush of imagery concerning a woman's dead daughter ("White Dove") or a Cindy Sheehan-esque war protester ("Tablespoon of Codeine"). The worst offender is "Time to Go", the portentous story of a wagon-train trying desperately to cross the country ("Burn the wagon wheels for heat"). Even on a short-and-sweet track like "Numbered Lithograph"-- a song that sounds an awful lot like something his last album's co-conspirator, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, would put to tape-- there's something missing. The idiosyncratic references that would ground the lyric sound forced, and the more immediate details ("Your cellphone shuddered and blinked/ It was your boyfriend again") don't resonate. Maybe the album falls short because of what Vanderslice claims at the end of "The Minaret": "I can see both sides, and it paralyzed me."

2007-07-24T02:00:02.000-04:00

2007-07-24T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Barsuk

July 24, 2007

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David Raposa

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