Datasets:

bigdata-pw

/

Pitchfork

like 0

Follow

BIG data 15

The minimalist composer trades his usual chamber ensemble for the comparatively monochromatic tones of the Farfisa organ.

The minimalist composer trades his usual chamber ensemble for the comparatively monochromatic tones of the Farfisa organ.

Bing & Ruth: Species

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bing-and-ruth-species/

Species

As Bing & Ruth, composer and pianist David Moore aims for quiet grandeur. His music attempts to capture the essence of transcendent experiences, like the glorious, humbling feeling of being dwarfed by the immensity of nature, or the calm, gauzy moment between consciousness and sleep. He falls into the lineage of minimalists like John Luther Adams, Terry Riley, and Gavin Bryars, composers that evoke the personal revelation of existential beauty, and there are moments in Moore’s discography that live up to that spiritual and emotional ambition. Moore sets himself apart from contemporary minimalists like Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, and Kara-Lis Coverdale in his steadfast dedication to a sense of pensive beauty over all else. Rarely has he let darkness or discord seep into his work. On its surface, Species, Bing & Ruth’s fourth album, feels like a tonal and stylistic break from the relentlessly wide-eyed posture of Tomorrow Is the Golden Age and No Home of the Mind. On those albums, Moore’s piano was the most consistent element; over strings, winds, and tape delay, he made the instrument billow and ripple, causing simple chordal patterns to feel momentous. The vast majority of the sounds on Species were made with a Farfisa organ, a relatively compact keyboard that creates a warm, buzzing tone. Philip Glass frequently used the instrument, and it was notably featured on Steve Reich’s Four Organs. Trading the timbral menagerie of an expanded chamber ensemble for something more barren and monochromatic, Moore is occasionally forced out of his comfort zone into abstraction and dissonance. These forays can feel like a significant artistic leap, but complacency flattens some of this music, occasionally exposing the emptiness of certain compositional habits that, in the past, he’s been able to dress up with lush arrangements. In some instances, Moore has translated the basic template of earlier Bing & Ruth albums into this new sonic landscape. One of his most recognizable compositional tics is the juxtaposition of slow-moving chordal patterns with quickly flowing arpeggios, and on the piano, with its expressive dynamic range, the trick can be entrancing. This is still the dominant mode on Species, but on Farfisa it plays out as a reenactment of Reich and Riley, awakening only a shallow sense of optimism rather than the metaphysical wonder elicited by those pioneers. In several cases, like “Badwater Psalm,” Moore picks a simple melodic phrase, couples it with a dramatic chord progression, and does little else to craft a journey for the listener. Intensity is a crucial component of the best minimalism, but it appears on this album only in fits and spurts. “The Pressure of This Water,” which appears late in the album, is its most interesting piece. At its center is a modal arpeggiated pattern that is woven into revolving, slowly moving chord clusters that repeat for the duration of the composition. With each repetition they seem to melt further into each other, certain tones elongating and stretching beyond their original parameters. Halfway through, a swell of bowed upright bass emerges, fixated on a cyclically dissonant low pedal note, causing the originally celestial chord progression to feel claustrophobic as it uncomfortably unspools. In its last 90 seconds, the piece dissolves into the solemn ease of an open fifth, resolving. It is a remarkably beautiful moment, one made even more entrancing by the tension that preceded it. In a statement accompanying the release of Species, Moore describes writing the album as a process of losing himself in the oceanic expanse of Point Dume, near Malibu, and “finding a nothingness so big it must contain everything.” But sometimes this nothingness just points right back to itself, vacant and hollow. One of the most impressive aspects of Bing & Ruth records, Species included, is Moore’s insistence on recording his ensemble live. In moments where this technique is especially apparent—like when Moor’s breathing is audible on “Live Forever”—we are reminded of the presence and complexity of the humans behind the music, which cultivates nuance and depth. These moments are a reminder that the most beautiful parts of life aren’t the most placid or consonant, but those in which the tangly mess of being a person becomes revelatory. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

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

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

Experimental

4AD

July 21, 2020

fb8f8e7d-e3bb-4ac2-967f-de0d7f34aa4c

Jonathan Williger

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/

On their second EP, the Atlanta trio swirls post-punk, drone, and math rock into self-described “deconstructionist pop.”

On their second EP, the Atlanta trio swirls post-punk, drone, and math rock into self-described “deconstructionist pop.”

floral print: floral print EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/floral-print-floral-print-ep/

floral print EP

Atlanta rock trio floral print want you to know they’re not interested in writing songs that follow familiar patterns or linear progressions. Even their Bandcamp tags, including “bipolar” and “happy sad,” are direct—if somewhat crass—indications of their intent to present contrasts as compliments. For the most part, floral print’s self-titled second EP—which follows 2017’s full-length debut, mirror stages—satisfies their capriciousness. Frontman Nathan Springer, keyboardist/drummer Paul DeMerritt, and bassist Joshua Pittman swirl post-punk, drone, and math rock into self-described “deconstructionist pop” that grants them the flexibility to shapeshift through a collaborative songwriting process born primarily from jam sessions. Opener “six pillows” introduces the EP with multiple false starts, repeatedly curling in on itself and revving back up again. Even as a series of tight drum fills takes over, it sounds as though floral print are stumbling over their own feet. But as the song progresses, it begins to invoke the victory of standing up again after each fall. “You’ve been fucking with my head/In a good way,” Springer sings, suggesting floral print might be trying the same trick on you. A sparse slowcore intro gradually gathers speed on lead single “i go down on the breeze,” before crashing into a single-word chorus of noisy guitars: “Carry!” Springer yells to a partner who’s drifting out of reach, “He won’t need you the way I do.” As the track fluctuates in tempo and time signature, the lyrics are equally disjointed: “I can't stand when you fall/Keep it all on track, let the reel of film recall/Break my hands, yes I do/It's not a lie if I can see right through.” Alone, each line feels like the beginning of a separate thought; strung together, they make even less sense. Though there are fascinating rhythmic intricacies in floral print’s songwriting, the EP rarely accomplishes the profundity it seems to aim for. “Pardon my ailment/I can’t love you… I wanted to show you all the things that we could be/If you were patient with the cutting parts of me,” Springer sings on closer “viridian,” stifling some of floral print’s most vibrant instrumentals with a self-incriminating admission of undateability. Promising when not obscured by artificial depth, floral print presents the case for an ardent young band in pursuit of something greater than themselves. They’ve yet to clue us in to what that might be; maybe they don’t know, either.

2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Tiny Engines

August 9, 2019

fb980969-53a1-4f7a-bdd9-d0a8d7ad335c

Abby Jones

https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/

Another holiday mixtape, this courtesy of one of rap's more theatrical MCs, doesn't reach the highs of Teflon Don, but its scope remains pretty epic.

Another holiday mixtape, this courtesy of one of rap's more theatrical MCs, doesn't reach the highs of Teflon Don, but its scope remains pretty epic.

Rick Ross: Ashes to Ashes

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14973-ashes-to-ashes/

Ashes to Ashes

Chances are Rick Ross and Barry White never met. But in a lot of ways, the two are kindred spirits. As two big dudes with booming voices and theatrical appetites, Ross and White have both taken what should've been limited styles and managed to transcend anyway, just by pushing those styles way beyond excess. White could make arenas ooze just by bellowing the word "love" over and over; Ross can emulsify car speakers just by roaring about all the drugs he's almost certainly never sold. And on "Even Deeper", a track from his new Ashes to Ashes mixtape, Ross sounds almost as comfortable on the smooth orchestral funk ripples of "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby" as White once did, with White's disembodied voice showing up to egg him on. Ashes to Ashes comes on the heels of last year's Teflon Don album, the moment when Ross pushed his own zero-subtlety bark to insane levels of charismatic absurdity. Beyond the singles, Ross albums used to be grim trudges, but Teflon Don just about burst with indulgent decadence, Ross sharing million-dollar tracks with A-list guests and slurping up every minute of it. And it also had the identity-bending anthem "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)", rap's song of the summer. Ashes to Ashes is a free mixtape dashed off on Christmas Eve, in anticipation of yet another new album that's supposedly lurking just around the corner, and it's no surprise that nothing on it reaches the facepunch immediacy of "B.M.F." or the chiffon luxury of "Maybach Music III". But for a dashed-off mixtape, the scope remains pretty epic. Ashes to Ashes has famous guests (T.I., Ludacris) and big producers (Boi-1da, Lex Luger), and its sonic depth and serious mastering job are enough to push it way beyond most mixtapes. But the mixtape's best moments come directly from Ross himself. Here, he continues to conjure hilariously larger-than-life ways to let you know he's spending more money than you are: "I'm still ballin' like I'm Bo Diddley! I park the Caddy in the living room!" On "Retrosuperfuture", he claims to be "skateboarding aboard the Pan American," and the image of Ross skateboarding anywhere, for any reason, is pretty amazing. Even Ross' dumbest moments are fun. On "John Doe", he says he's "jumping niggas like a chess piece," and unless he's talking about the knight, I'm pretty sure he's thinking of checkers. And on the chorus of the very first song, he rhymes "cell phone" with "iPhone"; he's almost certainly the only big rapper currently working who could get away with that. The tape moves from bangers to slick, more meditative tracks before returning to bangers, and it might work better if it were all bangers, all the time. Ross knows he's onto something with "B.M.F.", and he sounds more urgent and alive over churning minor-key trunk-slams than over just about everything else. But other than one godawful chorus from the Chester French chump, the whole thing comes off slick and professional-- more than enough to tide the world over in the brief period between Ross albums. And it ends on a deliriously high note: "Another One", an early glimpse of Ross' new Bugatti Boyz duo with Diddy, one of the only guys alive who can match Ross in sheer, infectious money-zest. These two sound just awesome together, Diddy inhabiting Ross' flow and Ross relishing his violent punchlines just a little bit more. This guy is just having fun with us now.

2011-01-12T01:00:02.000-05:00

2011-01-12T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rap

Maybach

January 12, 2011

fba29a9a-7104-4a07-b461-6232b6b5de66

Tom Breihan

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

Reissue of the debut LP from Jello Biafra's agit-punk group.

Reissue of the debut LP from Jello Biafra's agit-punk group.

Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2626-fresh-fruit-for-rotting-vegetables/

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

Dead Kennedys were one of the most influential bands in the history of punk rock, blending twisted humor, in-your-face political ranting, and aggressive, spastic music, and paving the way for countless imitators. Their debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables was originally released in 1980 on the UK label Cherry Red, and has since been re-released by several other labels, including IRS, Alternative Tentacles, and Cleopatra. The newest reissue-- the special 25th anniversary edition-- features the original artwork and a bonus 55-minute DVD documenting the making of the album as well as the band's early years. The packaging here is fantastic: The once grainy, indistinguishable burning police cars that don the cover now appear in much sharper detail. For the original pressing, the band requested the flames look orange, and as a result, the entire cover was printed orange on white. After that pressing, strict black and white was used, and most versions looked like something produced on a gas station copy machine. The tri-fold digipak offers a pull-out replica of the original collage/lyric sheet, featuring newspaper clippings, advertisements, and political diatribes all infused with the bands usual biting sarcasm and bizarre humor. Ronald Reagan grins out at you despite his drawn-in Hitler mustache and the fact that someone has written "sex" all over his face. The label from a can of salmon with Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle pasted over it sits above a marching line of breakfast foods. You could spend an hour looking over the double-sided poster and still miss things. Unfortunately, there are no bonus tracks. The original 14 songs are here; the album is still barely over a half-hour long. It is remastered, but considering that this is a 25-year-old debut recording by a punk rock band, don't expect it to suddenly sound impeccable. It is what it is, and the group's amateurism showed more on this record than on subsequent ones. Even some of the songs fall prey to the band's younger, less focused outlook. "Kill the Poor", the album opener, is fun to sing along with, but at its heart it's a generic rock song hiding behind satirical lyrics and low-fi production. The final track is the ill-conceived cover of "Viva Las Vegas", which seems tame after the 13 originals that precede it. There are several classic DK tracks here though, most notably "California Über Alles" and "Holiday in Cambodia", both of which still sound powerful and fresh. The opening bass notes of "Holiday in Cambodia" are some of the most sinister sounds punk rock ever produced. Of the lesser-known tracks, "Drug Me" is one of the band's faster songs, and it strongly hinted at where the band would head with their next EP. "When Ya Get Drafted", "Let's Lynch the Landlord", and "Your Emotions" all show off the group's ability to blend upbeat, light-hearted music with sinister satirical lyrics. Over the years, the Dead Kennedys' lyrics and vocals have recieved the most attention. Jello Biafra's over-the-top warble is instantly recognizable, and no one used sick and twisted humor to deliver such serious messages-- many are still applicable today -- with the same level of skill. "Chemical Warfare" predicts bio-terrorism that hits too close to home, or perhaps I should say too close to the country club. "Holiday in Cambodia" mocks the poor little rich kid who thinks he's got it bad with lines like, "You'll work harder with a gun in your back/ For a bowl of rice a day." The bonus DVD offers little for the serious fan, mostly interviews with East Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride, a couple of radio DJs, and other people connected with the band in its early days. Little attention is paid to the actual creation of the album; most of the interviewees just find various ways to talk about how great it is. Included are six live performances, all filmed with the original line-up. Most of the footage here has been widely available, either on the Dead Kennedys: The Early Years Live DVD, or on various VHS tapes throughout the years. But these early performances are interesting if you've never seen Biafra's bizarre pantomime-style antics (or his obsession with green plastic gloves), but some clips just go to prove that watching any band try to entertain 20 or 30 people who seem completely uninterested can be painful-- even if the band went on to become legendary.

2005-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00

2005-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00

Metal / Rock

Cleopatra / Alternative Tentacles / Manifesto / Cherry Red / IRS

November 9, 2005

fba8bec0-0a0b-40bf-a90b-215a5c21c126

Cory D. Byrom

https://pitchfork.com/staff/cory-d. byrom/

Over more than a decade and almost 300 records, Dance Mania staked its claim as ghetto house’s Motown, holding its own as the brash, DIY counterpart to more internationally-established, crossover-primed Chicago peers like Traxx and DJ International. Ghetto Madness, Strut’s second Dance Mania tribute, digs deep for gems from the label’s mid-'90s heyday.

Over more than a decade and almost 300 records, Dance Mania staked its claim as ghetto house’s Motown, holding its own as the brash, DIY counterpart to more internationally-established, crossover-primed Chicago peers like Traxx and DJ International. Ghetto Madness, Strut’s second Dance Mania tribute, digs deep for gems from the label’s mid-'90s heyday.

Various Artists: Dance Mania: Ghetto Madness

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20205-dance-mania-ghetto-madness/

Dance Mania: Ghetto Madness

Dance Mania’s appeal is often summed up in terms of its raunch. That part’s crucial—the sleazy shout-alongs, the implied physicality of its focus on rhythm above all else, the moment when enough repetition elevates music about dancing and fucking from hedonistic to transcendental—but there’s more to the scrappy, prolific house label than the dirty stuff. Over more than a decade and almost 300 records, Dance Mania staked its claim as ghetto house’s Motown, holding its own as the brash, DIY counterpart to more internationally-established, crossover-primed Chicago peers like Traxx and DJ International. Sure, the stuff that hewed a bit closer to house’s disco roots got the European licensing deals, but Dance Mania’s deep, familial roster got the overcrowded projects of Chicago’s south and west sides, the ones Parris Mitchell immortalized on 1995’s "Ghetto Shout Out", where guys like DJ Deeon and Jammin Gerald were DJing Kraftwerk, gangsta rap, Ron Hardy, and their own bedroom recordings. The music was raw, explicit, often escapist, and made do with the resources available, and as such, its apparent simplicity was often deceptive. In as much as anything can be about shaking asses, Dance Mania made music about shaking asses. But as the buttcheek-thinkpiece industrial complex should suggest, for better or worse, it’s never really just about shaking asses. Last year’s Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997, released via Strut, marked the first official compilatory survey of the label, and it arrived on the heels of Parris Mitchell and owner Ray Barney’s 2013 announcement of Dance Mania’s re-launch. (It shuttered gracefully in 2001; the label’s commitment to musical risk-taking had always relied on the financial success of its primary role as a record distribution hub, a foundation that crumbled in the late '90s as the independent retailers it serviced began to disappear.) That compilation focused on the label’s most essential tracks, documenting straightforward but formative early work like Hercules’ 1986 "7 Ways", the label’s second-ever pressing, as it grew leaner, rawer, and lewder by way of flirtation with acid, hip-hop, and techno. These are records that never crossed over into the mainstream in any significant sense (beyond the errant Daft Punk shout-out) but often sell for thousands of dollars on Discogs today, thanks to a recent surge in popularity among primarily European collectors. It’s a familiar paradox for Rust Belt dance music innovators looking to keep their legacy alive: if financial viability is at all a priority, artists risk a loss of crucial context as they invest in outside markets. Contrary to the pulp extremism of its title, Ghetto Madness, Strut’s second Dance Mania tribute, homes in on subtler, deeper-digging gems in the label’s sprawling catalog. Where Hardcore Traxx gave special attention to ghetto house’s formative years, Ghetto Madness sticks primarily to Dance Mania’s mid-'90s heyday, by which point the label had found its niche and dug deep, its dogged prolificacy speeding up to match the steadily increasing BPMs. The tracks are brittle, matter-of-fact, mostly percussive, and often devoted to giddy mythologizing of the city’s myriad pleasures. But Ghetto Madness also makes a case for the deeply meditative nature of these tracks at their best, and proves the bawdy shout-outs that have become ghetto house’s calling card are hardly representative of the genre as a whole. Tracks like DJ Rush rarity "The Reactor" and DJ Deeon’s "1112" are entirely non-vocal, closer to straight-up techno than any of the label’s earlier jacking anthems or hip-house workouts. Compared to the hyper, in-your-face instructionals of some of Tyree Cooper’s late-'80s singles, soul-sampling album highlight "Nuthin' Wrong", originally released in 1995, feels strikingly restrained. There’s subtlety here. And along with horny entreaties for girls to shake their shit, there’s real community outreach, too: DJ Milton’s "House-O-Matics" celebrates the Chicago dance crew of the same name, effectively an after-school program as much as it was a performance team. From a strictly commercial standpoint, Europe’s new generation of Dance Mania fanatics with disposable income would be reason enough for Strut’s second DM reissue in two years. But in the context of house music’s renewed relevance on the global pop charts, the commitment to Dance Mania homage takes on a special poignance. At a glance, house’s most visible torchbearers in 2015 are, for the most part, precocious, white British boys often not yet old enough to legally get into the American clubs they sell out. With the commercial success of festival-primed EDM acts and the increasing reliance on overseas touring for house’s pioneers, some have wondered if house still matters in its hometown of Chicago. But doubting the movement’s persistent relevance in its hometown ignores a fundamental truth: House never left Chicago, it simply changed forms. Steadily evolving over its three decades of existence, house has appeared as disco re-routed through MIDI, motivational hip-house, warp-speed juke, and abstracted footwork. The legacy of Dance Mania’s insouciant, trail-blazing ghetto house is preserved in the city’s flourishing juke and footwork communities as much as it lives on through the label’s second life; Ghetto Madness is just a reminder.

2015-02-05T01:00:03.000-05:00

2015-02-05T01:00:03.000-05:00

Strut

February 5, 2015

fbaa9925-bfa3-4f7d-9cf6-ca1fedd3edf7

Meaghan Garvey

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

On a bittersweet and impressionistic solo album, the former Walkmen member confronts the joys and humiliations of a life devoted to music.

On a bittersweet and impressionistic solo album, the former Walkmen member confronts the joys and humiliations of a life devoted to music.

Walter Martin: The Bear

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/walter-martin-the-bear/

The Bear

Life is long and rock stardom is fleeting. If you’re lucky enough to make it to middle age, you might hear a song from a past life and scarcely recognize yourself. Stephen Malkmus once wandered into a bakery and struggled to place a Pavement B-side inexplicably resurrected by a streaming algorithm. There’s the legend of Steven Tyler hearing an Aerosmith deep cut in a drug-addled haze and suggesting the band cover it. (“It’s us, fuckhead,” Joe Perry supposedly admonished him.) Walter Martin tells a story like that—well, not like that—halfway through “Easter,” the melancholy centerpiece of his sixth solo studio album, The Bear. Over rustling guitar and the plaintive whine of a lap steel, Martin describes the experience of hearing his old band—presumably the Walkmen, in whose ranks he served 13 years—on the radio. “But I didn’t recognize my old friends/And I didn’t recognize myself,” Martin sings in that croaky, endearing voice that tends to imbue his songs with a certain sincerity. The kicker is that Martin frames this story not with sadness or nostalgia but with gratitude: “I thanked the Lord I’d found that I was someone else,” he sings. Martin has been someone else for nearly a decade now, since the Walkmen entered hiatus and he abandoned all pretensions of coolness by making a debut solo record for kids. Few indie veterans have activated aging-dad-songwriter mode more gracefully. Martin’s first few solo albums were full of funny, family-friendly folk singalongs about zoo animals, art museums, and trips to Australia, but 2020’s The World at Night, inspired by the death of friend and ex-bandmate Stewart Lupton, carried a more wistful tone. The Bear follows in that spirit. Martin’s songwriting is bittersweet and reflective, full of musings on music and family and an uncertain future. He imbues the material with a deeper sense of himself, even as he is less concerned than ever with letting listeners know what exactly he’s singing about. A warmth radiates from The Bear, which is impressive since the record opens with an ambling wintry tale called “Hunters in the Snow.” Much of the material was written in a one-room schoolhouse in upstate New York, with only a stove for heat, during that first Covid winter. Some of this warmth stems from Martin’s fondness for the tone of vintage gear, a holdover from his Walkmen days. The twinkly piano that pitter-patters into the foreground on “Baseball Diamonds” is reminiscent of the wobbly piano sound on Walkmen classics like “The Blizzard of ’96” and “We’ve Been Had,” except here it’s played by film composer Emile Mosseri, whom Martin reached out to on a whim after hearing his work in Minari. There is a trebly glow to everything. The dominant sound is Martin’s own guitar: light fingerpicking on a 1955 Gretsch, a lovely, faded sound that complements his unpolished voice. Given how much old-fashioned care went into these recordings, the only disappointment is his overreliance on stagnant and familiar folk melodies. Martin can write a rich, slow-burning tune—“Easter” and “The Song Is Never Done” are proof—yet he burdens the otherwise moving “Hiram Hollow” with a traditional waltz melody that sounds like it was recycled from an old Pogues song. “Not My Mother,” with its meandering, loping gait, feels similarly flat. Yet Martin’s charm and self-deprecation always shine through, as he confronts both the joys and discontents of a life devoted to music. “The Song Is Never Done” is a highlight about his life’s work aspiring to write the perfect song. (“No, it’s not this one,” he clarifies midway through.) In an explanatory pamphlet that accompanies the vinyl, Martin admits that his instinct has often been to write songs as directly as possible to keep live audiences engaged. On The Bear, he tried to let that go. “I let myself write more loosely, like a painter or something,” he writes, and it pays off; songs like “New Green” and “Easter,” with its veiled references to early-pandemic anxieties, are impressionistic and open-ended. Ironically, Martin’s least direct album proves to be his most revealing and memoiristic. There’s a wonderful moment in the title track where he condenses the story of his entire adult life into one 90-second verse. He recalls a dream that he was in a “mid-level rock-and-roll band,” crisscrossing the country’s “shithole nightclubs”; when it ended, “I was bald, broke, and 39”; after that came marriage, child-rearing, and raising chickens, “out here where the buffalo roam.” You can learn a lot about Martin from this verse, and not just his life’s trajectory. His friendly-raconteur approach to songwriting, his self-effacing humor, his weathered voice, his optimism and disinterest in fronting as cool—it’s all there. I suspect that, if he were to hear it playing in the wild 20 years from now, he would recognize himself.

2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Ile Flottante

March 25, 2022

fbb323b4-98fd-4db3-ba40-36d716439969

Zach Schonfeld

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

The Australian singer-songwriter eases up on her customary digital glitches, manipulated vocals, and sudden cuts for a warm record about the difficulty of forging intimacy through technology.

The Australian singer-songwriter eases up on her customary digital glitches, manipulated vocals, and sudden cuts for a warm record about the difficulty of forging intimacy through technology.

Katie Dey: mydata

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-dey-mydata/

katie dey: mydata

Katie Dey’s best music has long fixated on the ways humans fail to connect. On the handful of records she’s released over the past half decade, the Australian singer-songwriter has meditated on fear, loss, heartbreak, and the deep loneliness of isolation. Her 2019 album solipsisters was intentionally named for the philosophical idea that nothing exists outside one’s own mind. She acknowledged in interviews that while the record makes references to other people, to “you” and to “we,” other characters were purely hypothetical. “It’s really all just about me, because I was so totally alone while I was writing these songs,” she said. "You end up talking to yourself a lot if you’re isolated." Dey’s digitally manipulated vocals reinforced these themes even as they obscured the literal meaning of her lyrics. The songs, while beautiful, were full of harsh glitches and sudden cuts—testaments to the troubles of forging the bonds of a relationship through technology. Sometimes intimacy can feel just out of reach. For her fourth solo record, mydata, Dey examined similar themes but with a decidedly more optimistic attitude. She’s said that the record is directly about an “internet relationship,” but rather than focusing on feelings of distance and isolation, Dey expounds on the love and companionship that the internet can allow physically distant people to experience. “I was trying to prove to myself, maybe, that a conversation is still a conversation,” she has said. “That sex is still sex.” Accordingly, the storm clouds of glitches and distortion have parted a bit—the connection is better, so the message is clearer. “bearing” most explicitly addresses the strange joys of internet-mediated relationships, describing the warmth you can feel just from seeing a loved one’s username pop up, or the ruination of well-kept sleep schedules just to try to spend more time with one another across vast distances. It’s a simple song, which only underscores the sentiment. Over a few burbling synth lines, Dey sings with a voice full of hope and yearning, a striking contrast to the chaos and turmoil she once wrung out of her digitally twisted compositions. Even on the record’s more intensely arranged moments, like the orchestral swells that fill "happiness," she leaves a lot of space for clarity—stripping away the fuzz and ornamentation to allow a closer glimpse at the core that’s always lived at the heart of her songs. There are still suggestions of stormy times—the record opens with a song called “darkness” that discusses a desire to hold onto a lover’s “suicidal ideation”—but it doesn’t dwell in those moments. Every cloudy passage is soon followed by a dizzy synth passage or a Technicolor swell of strings. Sometimes mydata offers a tenuous sort of hope, but it’s hope nonetheless. In the time since mydata was finished, the rest of the world has had to consider a lot of the same questions that Dey poses throughout the record. Forced inside, separated from the rest of the world from circumstances outside of our control, we wonder: What do commitment and community look like when you can’t sit in the same room as the people you care about? What is love without touch? Dey’s records once posited gloomy answers to these questions, miring themselves in the dark spirals that can result from long periods of seclusion. But mydata is different; it suggests the possibility of perseverance, connection, and kindness to oneself and others. Dey finds peace in knowing that this kind of love is just as real as any other. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Run for Cover

July 25, 2020

fbbca16c-da30-4587-a9a5-d35f0310240a

Colin Joyce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/

On the follow-up to 2018’s warm, naturalistic Zebra, Alexis Georgopoulos veers in the opposite direction, constructing a glassy paradise out of ’80s-inspired drum machines and analog synths.

On the follow-up to 2018’s warm, naturalistic Zebra, Alexis Georgopoulos veers in the opposite direction, constructing a glassy paradise out of ’80s-inspired drum machines and analog synths.

Arp: New Pleasures

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arp-new-pleasures/

New Pleasures

Many miles separate Eden from utopia. The former sprouts, green and abundant, from untouched soil. Utopias, the work of mere humans, are simulacra of perfection, cast in streamlined shapes and buffed to a blinding gloss. On his 2018 album Zebra, composer Alexis Georgopoulos, aka Arp, sowed an organic paradise out of lustrous synthesizers and tactile percussion. It felt warm and breezy; even when it was blanketed in electronic tones, you could practically feel the wood grain on the plates of his softly struck marimba. On New Pleasures, Georgopoulos rejects Zebra’s naturalism. Instead, he peers ahead, crafting a sleek, machine-operated sanctuary out of plasticky drum machine patterns and jagged synthetic textures. Mallet instruments and fretless bass infuse the album with mild warmth, but Georgopoulos seems more interested in icy, detached soundscapes. If this is a picture of our silicon future, it’s an often airless one. New Pleasures is the second installment in Arp’s Zebra trilogy. The first chapter, winding and sun-drenched, felt like gliding along the water, snug in an inflatable raft, through unfamiliar but idyllic terrain. The new record also suggests forward motion, but it more closely resembles speeding through a freshly paved tunnel late at night: smooth, propulsive, and illuminated by a cool fluorescent glow. Georgopoulos returns to his beloved collection of analog synthesizers throughout New Pleasures, coating clacking drum machines with a metallic sheen. His choice of instruments enhances the album’s retrofuturistic ambience, particularly on the title track—a neon-lit, sci-fi joyride that layers spiny bursts from a Prophet 5 and Moog Model D with fretless bass and 808s. His lattice of synths is intricate and dynamic, but it’s Georgopoulos’ drum machines and percussionist Lautaro Burgos that supply the real meat of the track. Padded Linn patterns and delicate marimba ground the muscular, Phil Collins-sized beats that punctuate the song, evoking a high-gloss update of ’80s tech noir. New Pleasures emphasizes just a few key sounds, like a painting rendered in a minimal color palette. Each detail is carefully arranged, but the ultimate effect can at times be too polished. It’s easy to listen to, yet unlike its predecessor, New Pleasures tends to fade into the background, enticing listeners to space out. Occasionally, a gorgeously mixed drum passage or keening synth penetrates the haze: Opener“The Peripheral” is lifted by chattering mallets and an effect that sounds like seltzer bubbles exploding in Dolby. Little gems like this reveal themselves in each meticulously recorded track. Georgopoulos designs the closing “Cloud Storage” exclusively from such precise granules. It feels somehow astral and earthly all at once; synths sway like searchlights beaming across the sky as marimba and programmed chirps burble beneath. It’s one of the record’s sparsest pieces, inviting in its spaciousness. “Cloud Storage” is the more intimate companion piece to “The Peripheral”; the conversation between the two cuts suggests a more vulnerable, quietly adventurous album than many of the songs in between. Some songs are less nuanced: big, primary colored blocks of sound that don’t always encourage further inspection. Take “Traitor (Dub),” with its silly, rubbery synth melody. It’s artificially funky, like an episode of Soul Train broadcast live from Chuck E. Cheese. “Sponge (for Miyake)” is similarly entrenched in ’80s pastiche, its bright, springy keystrokes evoking a low-stakes chase scene. Though both songs disrupt the album’s placid surface, they jut out at odd angles, inviting a head scratch rather than a closer look. Georgopoulos is superb with minutiae—brief washes of static, a curiously undulating synth line—but the overall arc of the record feels flat. He is fully equipped to construct bold new sonic edifices, but on New Pleasures, Georgopoulos too often settles for the skyscrapers we already know; shiny, but ordinary.

2022-07-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-07-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Mexican Summer

July 19, 2022

fbce0e77-c93f-4fb4-99d4-a2a384e3932e

Madison Bloom

https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/

Second solo covers EP from the Decemberists leader, this record collects interpretations of traditional folk songs arranged and recorded by 1960s folk troubadour Shirley Collins.

Second solo covers EP from the Decemberists leader, this record collects interpretations of traditional folk songs arranged and recorded by 1960s folk troubadour Shirley Collins.

Colin Meloy: Colin Meloy Sings trad. arr. Shirley Collins

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5628-colin-meloy-sings-trad-arr-shirley-collins/

Colin Meloy Sings trad. arr. Shirley Collins

Is this going to be a regular series? After releasing an EP of Morrissey covers last year, Colin Meloy has recorded a six-song covers EP of traditional songs originally arranged and recorded by 1960s folk troubadour Shirley Collins, again to tie in with a solo acoustic tour. Collins lacks the cache of Moz, but Meloy's not playing Devendra to her Vashti. Colin Meloy Sings trad. arr. Shirley Collins is no revival attempt; the purpose of this release appears simply to show Meloy's affection for these songs. As if undaunted by the prospect of reinventing well-known songs like "Everyday Is Like Sunday", he lovingly plays them with a little more humor and a lot more care, and as a result, the EP sounds like more of a direct extension of his day job than a mere tour souvenir. Collins proves ideal to Meloy's treatment: During the 60s and 70s, she drew on traditional English music as well as contemporary folk to create a revered body of work. These six songs are so suited to Meloy's idiom that they rarely sound like covers. While I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend at least checking out her originals, Sings Shirley Collins doesn't require any knowledge of its source material the way Sings Morrissey did. That was a one-note release: Once the novelty of hearing an indie pin-up boy covering the ultimate indie pin-up boy wore off, that EP was archived on the CD rack, a gem for Morrissey and Decemberist completists alike but a curio for everyone else. But ...Sings Shirley Collins has a leg up on its predecessor from the word go: Collins is Meloy's kindred spirit. Her sassy wives, errant wanderers, death-scared sailors, and duplicitous thieves could be the same vengeful mariners and lovelorn barrow boys who inhabit Decemberists songs. Meloy fills these tracks out lovingly, eschewing the austere voice-and-guitar setting of Sings Morrissey for an arsenal of bells, banjo, electric guitar, and plucky percussion. The songs remain spare and the mood intimate, but the music feels less imitative and more inhabited. On opener "Dance to Your Daddy", bells ding a soft melody to echo Meloy's vocals, reinforcing the song's evocation of parental tenderness-- an obvious choice for the dad-to-be. "Charlie" is a little more upbeat, with a banjo bolstering the jaunty chorus. Carson Ellis, Meloy's girlfriend/partner and the artist behind the Decemberists' distinctive album covers and merchandise, makes a brief appearance as a spirited wife-to-be who throws her suitor's expectations right back at him: "I will marry you but I won't do your washin' or your cookin'," she sings, proving a perfect foil-- Cher to Meloy's Sonny. Nothing else is quite as upbeat or as charming as "Charlie", as the album takes a slightly darker turn with the death song "Barbara Allen" (which Meloy, like Collins, pronounces "Barb'ry Allen"). A metronomic rimshot and a sharp electric guitar stomp out a death march, as if ticking away life's remaining minutes, while Meloy sings of love and mortality, bending up the end of his lines as Collins did nearly 40 years ago. "Cherry Tree Carol" continues that funereal pace, dragging a little. It probably doesn't help that Meloy replaces the burbling church organ of Collins's original with an electric guitar that glides around the song's firmament. As if losing energy, the final two songs are the EP's barest: "Turpin Hero" is a cautionary tale of thievery and trickery, and "I Drew My Ship" is a short a cappella number that might have worked better as the EP's opener, offering a friendly introduction to Meloy's re-creation of Collins' world. In fact, as well chosen as these songs are for Meloy's vocal range and persona, the sequencing does seem slightly off: Listening to these six tracks, I kept thinking I might rearrange them somehow, but of the many possible iterations of the tracklist, none that I devised seemed any better or worse than the official order. It's a quibbling criticism, but this puzzlement prevents the EP from fully realizing the seemingly ideal combination of singer and source. Nevertheless, Sings Shirley Collins is an enticing addition to what could become a very fruitful series.

2006-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00

2006-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

self-released

February 9, 2006

fbce7277-b72b-4fa4-b483-995c22b50fbc

Stephen M. Deusner

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

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the definitive Lil Peep experience with his breakthrough 2016 mixtape.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the definitive Lil Peep experience with his breakthrough 2016 mixtape.

Lil Peep: Hellboy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-peep-hellboy/

Hellboy

It was difficult to know Lil Peep. You could say he was sad or depressed. He had a lot of tattoos. He sang and rapped about drugs. He died tragically young. People knew Gustav Åhr, though. “He gets paid to be sad,” Peep’s older brother Oskar told People on November 17, 2017, hardly more than a day after Peep died. “It’s what he made his name on. It’s what his image was in a sense.” That image made you think you knew Lil Peep as someone who willingly revealed his pain and struggles in his music. How could the kid who sang, “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself,” be anything but deeply inconsolable? But Oskar also added, “He was not as sad as people think he was. It’s frustrating as someone who remembers a happy brother.” Uploaded to SoundCloud in September 2016, Hellboy is the masterpiece of Lil Peep’s lifetime. The mixtape is filled with suicidal declarations, rampant drug use, and moments of delight and impulse. All the while, Peep hid the reasons for his behavior from the listener. “I ain’t gonna lie, I’ma keep it real/I don’t wanna tell you how I feel,” he sang on “Fucked Up,” at once revealing and concealing the truth. Hellboy paints the portrait of a young person who is bursting open with emotion, trying to share his experiences as vividly as he can while covering all the formative scars that still ache. It’s callous, brazen, and indulgent, the sound of someone testing out the entire spectrum of feeling for the very first time. It is an artifact that brings you as close as possible to Lil Peep. Hellboy arrived two disproportionately long years ago, before emo trap was marketable and mumble rap was canon. The top rap song at the time was DRAM and Lil Yachty’s “Broccoli,” which sounds ancient now. This is not to say that Lil Peep single-handedly invented a genre or door-busted his way to the top of the industry. Even a nascent underground sub-genre like emo trap had its forebears: There was the Swedish “Sad Boys” cloud rapper Yung Lean—who, by 2016, had transitioned into the auteur portion of his career—and the mysterious graveyard rapper Bones, who finagled his way onto an A$AP Rocky album before retreating back into the darkness of the web. But Hellboy stood out because it is extreme and obvious, a record that tells you exactly what it’s about. The songs can be defined broadly: “Drive By” is about recklessness; “OMFG” is about depression; “The Last Thing I Wanna Do” is about regret and pain. Peep made big songs with a central idea that he could fill with color, in lieu of conjuring moments or people or places. They don’t develop, so much as orbit around a theme. He didn’t complicate his songwriting. The chorus of “Fucked Up,” for example, starts, “I’ve been all the way fucked up/Girl, you got me fucked up/One chance and I fucked it up.” There was no need for excess when he made the consequences of his music so steep. Amid the clear communication, however, were clues that Peep’s mind was impossible to penetrate. “You don’t even know what I been through,” the tape begins, with Peep rapping flatly over a bass guitar lifted from the Christian metalcore band Underoath, as if to suggest that the full story is not worth the time. That line feels like an invitation into his psyche, but he’s telling you that you will not know him. You cannot. It speaks to his barrier, a built-in defensive nature. If you’re going to engage with him and listen to his art, you’re going to do so on his terms and accept what he provides. Still, the truth in Lil Peep’s songs matched with Gustav Åhr’s reality. “I suffer from depression, and some days I wake up and I’m like, Fuck, I wish I didn’t wake up,” Peep told Pitchfork in January 2017. He sang as much on “The Song They Played [When I Crashed Into the Wall]”: “I don’t wanna die alone right now, but I admit I do sometimes.” In that same interview, Peep said he didn’t want to take anti-depressants. “I just like smoking weed and whatever other drug comes my way,” he offered as the alternative. That intake indifference shows on “Cobain,” when Peep raps, “Sniffin’ cocaine ’cause I didn’t have no Actavis.” The brilliance in Hellboy comes with how Peep juxtaposed his desires with his reality. The tape exists in a constant state of flux between Peep’s superego and his id, as on “Interlude” where he asks, “Two racks on my new shoes/Why the fuck I do that?/Tell me, why the fuck do I do that?” What are we to believe when he sings, “I just fell in love with a bad bitch/Told me that she love me too, baby, I’m not havin’ it.” Peep could be impetuous but maybe not overly serious; expensive footwear and reciprocated love are both distressing and perhaps funny or even boring to him. Instead of deliberating toward a solution, he communicated his uncertainty. The through line in Hellboy’s confusion is Lil Peep’s voice, which reveals pain when he declares numbness, and joy when he claims ennui. He was not a classically gifted singer; his vocals were always a bit distorted, typically bathed in reverb instead of the more en vogue Auto-Tune warble. Whether on pitch or not, though, Peep sounded perfect. Nothing resonates with me more than when he sings, “Leave me to bleed” on the title track. He doesn’t sound like someone who’s asking to be left to waste away—he sounds rich and fulfilled, satisfied with his expression of strength in a dark moment. Hellboy was a breakthrough in Peep’s discography in part because he just made everything louder. His vocals are at the very front of the mix and he could perceive the tiniest changes in tempo or key or mood to direct the song with his icy wail. Hellboy also utilized samples more expertly than on previous Lil Peep releases. Yes, Peep basically redid “Wonderwall” and the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” at different points on his previous tape, 2016’s Crybaby. But on Hellboy, producers including Smokeasac and Nedarb handled the source material with greater care. Instead of simply repeating the originals, the beatmakers reconfigured them into Lil Peep’s world. It was still apparent, however, that the beats were constructed around a sample, no matter how obscure, unidentifiable, or historically insignificant. Fitting these samples into Lil Peep’s signature sound meant stripping away the saccharine sentiments of emo and pop-punk, rendering them darker but more fun—less woebegone and more destructive. On the opening title track, a whiny Underoath track is transformed into a Berliozian funeral dirge—melodramatic, bombastic, and jubilant in its self-righteousness. The guitars on “Gucci Mane,” sampled from Japanese post-rock band Toe, twinkle while Peep sings about “cocaine in your bitch brain.” Hellboy amplified the internet’s tendency to flatten the scope of music history: Toe have nothing to do with Avenged Sevenfold, who have nothing to do with Aphex Twin, but they’re all sampled here. They become pieces of sound, whittled down to a single element and recontextualized for this album. It feels like no coincidence that barely two years later a rap interpretation of Sting’s “Shape of My Heart”—a schmaltzy and unfashionable song—is able to become the No. 2 song in the country. The way Lil Peep sampled and sang and drew from alternative rock music initially stirred ire from hip-hop and indie fans, no matter how much that discourse was washed away in the wake of his death at age 21. He made music that was, at times, intentionally uncomfortable, and part of Hellboy’s appeal is in its brazen ugliness. He said things like, “Coke in her nose, and my dick all in her butt.” And yet, he could sing these words tenderly—like on the mellow “Girls,” where he says, “They try to get me mad/I try to make ’em sad/So they fall in love with me/Yeah, girls I can read ’em like a book”—but the sting was still there. So when I listened to Lil Peep, it was for these contradictions. The songs were an alchemy of major and minor key whose narrator sang of his cheer and suffering. He sounds at his most relaxed singing, “Nobody wants to talk to me, but everyone wants to walk with me.” And there are countless times when he opposes himself, asking a woman on “Hellboy,” “Please just hold me one time,” and then telling her, “You’re the same as my ex, fuck you.” There was a joy in figuring out how this all fits together. I felt grief when Lil Peep died, but I still don’t know how to process it. It’s weird enough to come to terms with the death of someone who you never met, especially when that person’s music told you, “And as long as I’m alive, I’ma die, baby.” The video I watched most after Peep died was a clip where he sang his friend Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s opening verse on “Absolute in Doubt,” from Crybaby. The video humanizes Peep in a way that Hellboy never intends. Singing someone else’s words, he sounds shaky. It feels like peering into the apprehension that informs the self-loathing gusto of Hellboy. Peep was deliberately dark but also didn’t necessarily take himself seriously. Agony and weariness lived side by side. Hellboy is at times hopeful and boastful, but also hopeless and dry: “I’ma die, I ain’t even 25.” It is at once a high-stakes affair of life and death and also an opus of intentional nothingness. The record begins with a sample from a Hellboy cartoon. “Can this be him? The one I have waited centuries to see?” the character asks. “Can this be him, this Hellboy?” It’s a question left unanswered.

2018-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

self-released

November 18, 2018

fbd487ad-b40b-4996-882b-b67e76a50867

Matthew Strauss

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

The backside of Nick Drake's headstone, wedged deep into the earth of Tanworth-in-Arden's parish church graveyard, reads: "Now ...

The backside of Nick Drake's headstone, wedged deep into the earth of Tanworth-in-Arden's parish church graveyard, reads: "Now ...

Nick Drake: Made to Love Magic

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2445-made-to-love-magic/

Made to Love Magic

The backside of Nick Drake's headstone, wedged deep into the earth of Tanworth-in-Arden's parish church graveyard, reads: "Now we rise and we are everywhere." The words were penned by Drake in 1974; 30 years later, they seem jarringly prophetic. Like nearly all prematurely buried cult figures, Nick Drake is reinvented each time he is rediscovered. In 2000, the sheepish, astral musings of "Pink Moon" became synonymous with backing a Cabrio convertible out of a house party, sparking an unlikely boost in record sales and propelling Pink Moon towards platinum status nearly 26 years after Drake's death. But with each well-intentioned revival of interest, Nick Drake slips further and further out of reach, hopelessly martyred and codified, superceded and consumed by his own tragic context. Nick Drake has become: the 26-year-old prophet, the diffident enigma, the tortured precursor to Kurt Cobain, the fallen hero, the folksinger-as-folksymbol, the self-sacrificing patron saint of lonely, disaffected teenagers-- the One who died for our sins. Even now, being indoctrinated into the cult of Drake is stupidly easy. Line the unbearably poetic circumstances of Drake's death (swallowing a fatal handful of anti-depressants, either deliberately or by accident) against the soft melancholy of his tiny canon, and witness a very specific kind of bedroom deity being birthed: Drake's three proper studio records form a bulletproof triumvirate, synergizing to create an impossibly satisfying (and telling) arc, riddled with prescient pull-quotes and expectedly dynamic emotions. Given the irrefutable magnificence of what he left behind, it's always seemed perfectly logical to assume that every single thing Nick Drake ever did should be worth piles of attention. And really, who wants to know if it's not? Thus, it's only appropriate to approach each new Drake compilation with a bit of honest trepidation, and to be anxious about the sullying of an otherwise pristine recording career. Nick Drake wrote, recorded, and released three records between 1968 and his mysterious death in 1974, but the subsequent permutation of capitalistic yearning and superfan desperation saw Drake's discography significantly (and mercilessly) puffed up by a handful of dubious posthumous releases. Some of these efforts have been worthwhile (the excellent Time of No Reply, which rounded out the first reissue of the Fruit Tree box, and Heaven Is a Wildflower, both released in 1986), some renegade (the widely distributed Tanworth-in-Arden Home Recordings and Second Grace) and some completely superfluous (1994's sloppy Way to Blue, which unapologetically regurgitates, unchanged, ten of Heaven Is a Wildflower's fourteen tracks). In 1994, Drake's pioneering producer, Joe Boyd, promised Mojo: "Everything releasable has been released." Compiled by engineer John Wood and former roommate Robert Kirby, Made to Love Magic is a footnote, a hiccup, a voyeuristic peepshow. It is not a revelation. Completists will revel in the resuscitation of rare/unheard tracks, including two Cambridge-era dorm demos ("Mayfair", "River Man"), outtakes from the Five Leaves Left sessions ("Joey", "Clothes of Sand"), remastered stereo versions of the mono mixes that appeared on Time of No Reply ("Rider on the Wheel", "Black-Eyed Dog", "Hanging on a Star"), two tracks with strings re-orchestrated and re-recorded by Kirby ("I Was Made to Love Magic", "Time of No Reply"), an early rendition of "Three Hours" (with Drake backed by an anonymous flautist and percussionist Rebop Kwaku Baah, later of Can and Traffic), and even causal fans will be anxious to hear the recently discovered Drake original, "Tow the Line." Recorded just four months before Drake's death, "Tow the Line" has been loudly touted as the last song Drake ever committed to tape, and his pale, listless vocals do little to detract from the artist-on-the-edge theatrics so implicit in that tag-- the song would fit neatly on Pink Moon, its frail lyrics and stark strums easily maintaining the fatalistic mood of Drake's final record. "Tow the Line" may be Made to Love Magic's big selling point, but it's hardly the only attraction: Robert Kirby's sprawling new string arrangement on the title track, while conceptually awkward (and vaguely disingenuous), proves a marked improvement over the maudlin squealings available on previous versions. Still, Kirby can do little to stop "I Was Made to Love Magic" from sounding like a ridiculous, fawning homage to Walt Disney, all maudlin, unconvincing swoons and gooey swells, with Drake goofily crooning the song's title. Despite the best intentions of its creators, Made to Love Magic feels disjointed and weird, and even the most mundane of improvements somehow still seem contrived-- the new, stereo mix of "Black Eyed Dog" shatters the stark precariousness of the original, wherein Drake, barely singing, howled blankly: "I'm growing old/ And I don't wanna know/ I'm growing old/ And I wanna go home." Bolstered by a thick and ominous slathering of tape hiss, the bootleg version of "Black Eyed Dog" violently suggested, however inadvertently, that Drake might not make it all the way through the song-- and that tension only ever added to its morose appeal. In some ways, Made to Love Magic nobly attempts to strip Drake of his signifiers, and to cut him loose from his cross. But broadcasting Drake's comparably mediocre drippings won't alter his deification, at least not significantly. All it really does is muddy up the water a bit.

2004-05-26T01:00:01.000-04:00

2004-05-26T01:00:01.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Island

May 26, 2004

fbd98108-c30f-4379-919a-b72fb12a34a7

Amanda Petrusich

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

A lot of what you need to know about Montreal duo Chromeo is built right into their name. The "chrome ...

A lot of what you need to know about Montreal duo Chromeo is built right into their name. The "chrome ...

Chromeo: She's in Control

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1754-shes-in-control/

She's in Control

A lot of what you need to know about Montreal duo Chromeo is built right into their name. The "chrome" tips us off to their penchant towards flash, veneer and the artificially formal, while the "romeo" lets us know that real lovermen lurk behind the curtain, and that it's their human fingers tweaking out this analog bling. The word's not necessarily coincidental proximity to "Cameo" also helps locate them as spiritual contemporaries to the electro-funk of the 80s. Some of this aesthetic sounds familar, sure, but as grade-A pastiche artists, Chromeo wear familiarity well. Consisting of lifelong friends Dave 1 and P-Thugg, Chromeo was formed at the behest of Turbo Recordings head Tiga, who was already a fan of their work within local hip-hop circles and wanted to hear them try something electronic. The liquid funk workout of "You're So Gangsta" followed. Featuring a rubbery keyboard lead, a coattails-to-the-wind saxophone solo and an accompanying remix from Playgroup's Trevor Jackson, the single fell perfectly in sync with the burgeoning Vice City-inspired 8-bit revival. She's in Control, the duo's ensuing full-length, is an 80s-plundering scrapbook of talk boxes, gloopy synths and digital funk that, for all its contrivances, proves Dave 1 and P-Thugg to be extremely keen-eared dilettantes. From the slightly unpolished quality of the recording to its carefully gated drums, the album doesn't simply appropriate the plasticky elements of the decade so much as it marinates in them. Were its hooks not as strong, She's in Control would probably come across as mechanical and calculated, but its many bright spots elevate it above being just a shrewdly timed exercise in cultural re-appropriation. The punchy "Me and My Man" opens the record with a slap-funk bassline and a flurry of canned beats, while P-Thugg heads the haters off at the pass through heavily treated vocals ("You think it's irony/ I wish you'd try to see/ That I need someone to set me free") before being drowned out by a barrage of percussion. Even better is the album standout "Needy Girl", a bright-lights-big-city cruiser that's equal parts Hall & Oates and Mantronix. The aforementioned "You're So Gangsta" makes an appearance, as does the rubbery funk of "Destination: Overdrive", which houses a glorious instrumental hook and features an impressively gaudy abuse of the vocoder. Admittedly, things do drag a bit during the latter half (especially on the aimless "Mercury Tears", which grinds itself into the ground with an ill-advised guitar motif), but even most of Chromeo's misfirings have something interesting behind them. Opulent in all the right ways, She's in Control has the good sense to wear its gimmick proudly.

2004-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00

2004-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00

Electronic

Vice

February 22, 2004

fbdf622c-8c3a-40f5-8404-d7a435a99052

Mark Pytlik

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

The singer’s debut album is an intimate, soulful project that spotlights her versatile voice and the experimental touches that give the album its unique texture.

The singer’s debut album is an intimate, soulful project that spotlights her versatile voice and the experimental touches that give the album its unique texture.

Zsela: Big for You

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zsela-big-for-you/

Big for You

Zsela’s music is rooted in intimacy, a term that both describes a profound closeness and serves as a euphemism for, well, fucking. In the case of the Brooklyn-based artist’s debut full-length, Big for You, her portrayal of intimacy is firmly the former. That isn’t to say the album isn’t sexy, but that her music retains the tenderness of a blossoming crush and the feelings that swell when you realize you’re witnessing parts of someone that typically remain unseen. Listening to Big for You is a bit like doing that “36 Questions That Lead to Love” exercise with the 29-year-old singer. From the first second of her new record, she introduces (or reintroduces) listeners to her hypnotic, honeyed voice and reels them into mutual vulnerability with each subsequent word. In 2019, Zsela’s debut track “Noise” had a nocturnal beauty to her brooding, contralto vocals, and in 2020, her Ache of Victory EP perked the ears of Sade-worshippers with its memorable lo-fi R&B, including the nostalgia anthem “Earlier Days.” (Zsela, née Zsela Thompson, has a musical pedigree; her father, Marc Anthony Thompson, is the neo-soul artist Chocolate Genius.) Since then, Zsela has chiseled away at her full-length while performing alongside Caroline Polachek, Arooj Aftab, and Cat Power. She once again taps producers Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Kelela, FKA twigs) and Gabe Wax (the War on Drugs, Soccer Mommy), resulting in an eclectic, experimental album that straddles the worlds of alt R&B and folky indie rock. The record is an exercise in presence, at times taking in deep pulls of oxygen, at other points folding into lyrical repetition or dropping surprises that leave listeners breathless. Zsela opens the slow jam “Fire Excape” crooning a cappella in her falsetto. Then, over a building funk bassline, she sings that she’s falling in love as day breaks on the fire escape. A moment later, a hose-blast of synths drenches her voice as she finds herself helplessly “falling down” into infatuation. It’s one of the most evocative vocal hooks (and earworms) on the album, and the boingy, sultry bassline brings to mind the more spartan pop-funk arrangements of Prince, combining the remixability of a club track with the hushedness of a coffee-shop confessional. She seems to have found that if you want to be heard in a crowded room, don’t shout—get close and speak softly. The melancholy “Moth Dance” gradually lets out layers of musical fabric; Zsela repeats “I am alive” over and over at its end, finally with a quivering voice, like an affirmation that never really resonated until now. On “Lily of the Nile,” she reveals, in a husky stage whisper, that she “hitched a ride with the bride last night” as though she’s telling you a salacious secret. And “Not Your Angel,” a cheerfully breathy electropop anthem, treats lyrical obstinance as a flirting tactic and evokes the emotive, hook-forward baroque pop of Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass.” Some endeavors are less engaging, i.e. the baby-voiced, whimsical “Now Here You Go,” which neither enhances nor shifts the scope of the record. It segues somewhat awkwardly into the spoken-word-driven “Easy St.,” a steamy, abstract mood board of jazz guitar (performed by acclaimed avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot) and meditation. “Watersprite,” a slow-moving composition, feels indistinct alongside the more rhythmic drive of the record’s first half. Still, at 10 songs in 33 minutes, the album never overstays its welcome. Zsela’s at that special juncture in her career—the one before too many people get in an artist’s head, want a piece of their pie, want a credit in their liner notes—that generates a refreshing authenticity. Big for You captures that rare, fearlessly vulnerable lightning in a bottle. It’s a collection of hymns for those yearning for an “I love you”—or even just a text—back.

2024-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country / Pop/R&B

Mexican Summer

June 21, 2024

fbe1e1c7-5c0c-4f2b-a4a8-48badc18b1dc

Hilary Pollack

https://pitchfork.com/staff/hilary-pollack/

Produced with the National’s Aaron Dessner, the introspective Canadian singer-songwriter’s stately fourth album evokes an atmosphere of quiet loveliness.

Produced with the National’s Aaron Dessner, the introspective Canadian singer-songwriter’s stately fourth album evokes an atmosphere of quiet loveliness.

Hannah Georgas: All That Emotion

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hannah-georgas-all-that-emotion/

All That Emotion

In 2009, Hannah Georgas wrote a song about hoping to run into an ex at a National concert. Like most of Georgas’s music, “The National” is both an internal monologue and an address, the things she thinks but would not say: “The other day someone mentioned your name/It brought back hurt and all your pain.” As the National became arena-rock stars, and the band’s Aaron Dessner a celebrated producer in his own right, Georgas found success in her home country of Canada, garnering multiple Juno Award nominations across three albums. In 2018, after a year spent recording demos alone, she and Dessner began to collaborate on a fourth. While the Dessner-ification erodes some of Georgas’s own artistic identity, All That Emotions is stately and well-made. Dessner still produces with the intimacy of someone making music in their garage—it’s just that the garage is now an upstate New York barn whose exterior covers a Grammy-winning album, and the sound is usually recognizable as National-adjacent. Where Georgas’ lightly chaotic music previously matched her quirky lyrics about emotionless robots and naked beaches, Dessner submerges her words in soft drum machines and felt pianos, and Georgas tones down her performances to match. On “Just a Phase,” her melodies often anticipate or echo the guitar lines, content to blend into the sound. On opener “That Emotion,” the melodies are drawn-out and laconic, the delivery laid-back and unobtrusive. The stylistic balance of the album tilts in Dessner’s favor, which can mean that All That Emotion sounds like Taylor Swift’s folklore sounds like Eve Owen’s Don’t Let the Ink Dry sounds like Trouble Will Find Me. The one-size-fits-all approach leads to the occasional clash, as on “Easy,” where Georgas’s modest soft-rock chorus sits awkwardly over fussy Dessner crescendos. Even then, Dessner and engineer Jonathan Low keep the production immersive enough that the discrepancies are easy to ignore. Georgas and Dessner’s most successful synthesis is tucked away at the end: “Habits” soars in a way that the rest of the album actively avoids. It’s still a classic slow build, but the harmonies and guitar squeals create the same feeling of intoxication that powers Dessner’s most lavish productions. With Dessner handling the music, Georgas defines herself through her internal monologues. “I don’t want to hold on to you,” she sings on “Change,” positing that because “love is change,” there’s no reason to stay if a relationship becomes fraught. “Someone I Don’t Know” deepens the expected sentiment, willing an ex to become unrecognizable: “Someday I’ll get over you... You’ll become something I forgot.” “Punching Bag,” a song that somehow mixes the dread of Radiohead’s “Idioteque” with Alanis Morrissette’s garrulous “Front Row,” takes the tension to a logical extreme. Though Georgas sings about needing to “save” someone, the background lyrics reveal her ambivalence: “I take you for a walk to a place that means so much to me/And go for your hand to hold you and you pull away immediately.” It’s the only moment on the album that truly feels surprising. By insisting on quiet loveliness in all aspects of its production, All That Emotion misses out on the weirder and more fascinating elements of Georgas’ older music. The Casio SK-1 Homestar Runner drums of “Bang Bang You’re Dead” or the distortion of “Enemies” would be welcome on this record. Though Emotion is refined, it also isn’t different from Dessner’s other production work—it’s still musically reticent, covered in fog. Its clarity originates in Georgas’ ability to process what she’s feeling, and spending 40 minutes in her head as she figures things out doesn’t feel suffocating. There’s always just enough reason, an poignant insight or an intricate guitar line, to stay. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Arts & Crafts / Brassland

September 12, 2020

fbe3beb8-a8c3-40e3-9f26-0bb89afa01a5

Hannah Jocelyn

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

The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s charming third album is full of recurring worries, but her nods to ’80s synth pop and adult contemporary imbue the music with a sense of lightness.

The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s charming third album is full of recurring worries, but her nods to ’80s synth pop and adult contemporary imbue the music with a sense of lightness.

Kacy Hill: Simple, Sweet, and Smiling

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kacy-hill-simple-sweet-and-smiling/

Simple, Sweet, and Smiling

Around the middle of Simple, Sweet, and Smiling, Kacy Hill is wandering outside and staring at the moon. It’s midnight, and the 27-year-old singer has slipped out of a party while her companion remains there, just down the street. She wishes she could have stayed, but she is overwhelmed by anxious fixations: “I just overthink/Can’t shut up,” she sings delicately. It’s a familiar set-up for Hill’s songs, which often motion to her surrounding scenery as she negotiates restlessly with herself. “Six,” from her last album, saw her “high up in a canyon” talking to a stranger, struggling move on from an ex; the title track of Simple, Sweet, and Smiling nods to the city horizon—“a line that fades away/’Til the trees start to blur with the skyline”—as she wrestles over the desire to feel special. Fretting is in Hill’s nature: As she’s joked on Twitter, the two words that best describe her ethos are “ambient stress.” Simple, Sweet, and Smiling, her charming third album, is full of recurring worries: about being stagnant in your aspirations and inadequate to the people you love, about being forever plagued by dread. At the time that Hill was writing this record, her father survived a heart attack, and her agoraphobic panic disorder returned. Amidst such heaviness, the concept of being “simple, sweet, and smiling,” became an unattainable aspiration: “It was this idea, in my own little world, of not wanting to be this weight in someone else’s life,” she said. As if to be tongue-in-cheek about the fantasy of it all, she appears on the album’s cover as a pin-up girl in front of a sunset backdrop, a tourist’s vision of paradise. Accompanying this cheesy, blissful image is a more vibrant sound. In the past, Hill has veered toward muted, skeletal R&B; the songs on her last album, Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again, didn’t rely on that much more than atmospheric synths, the pitter-patter of a drum machine, and her wispy, light falsetto. Made with the assistance of her boyfriend, Jim-E Stack, along with the composer John Carroll Kirby and, on one song, producer Ariel Rechtshaid, Simple, Sweet, and Smiling delves deeper into Hill’s interest in 1980s synth pop and adult contemporary, maintaining a misty-eyed ease. You can hear this change on the new age-y lead single “Seasons Bloom,” about the sweet, palpable relief of seeing someone you love. It starts off minimal but, as if mimicking the transition from winter to spring, turns plush and buoyant at the chorus. Songs like “So Loud” and “Easy Going” situate Hill within Carly Rae Jepsen’s zone of windswept pop; she leans toward soul on the piano ballad “Mochi’s Interlude,” and tries more acoustic instrumentation on “Another You.” Some palettes work better than others: While Hill’s voice is pretty, it’s not particularly versatile, and its standard delicacy feels ill-fitted on the funk-inflected “The Right Time.” Meanwhile, she sounds lovely on the rich and churning opening track, “I Couldn’t Wait.” “Oh how the night feels soft,” she sighs over vivid piano, guitar, and saxophone, the elements mingling like watercolors. Throughout Simple, Sweet, and Smiling are references to the natural world—the morning sun and the sea, the clouds and the moonlight. (You even hear the crackle of thunder on “Caterpillar.”) To many people, the environment represents groundedness and simplicity, the very traits Hill hopes for. And while the album’s songs might reflect her continuous stresses—navigating a lover’s hesitancy, not being as successful as she wants—they still feel unfussy because of her honest and straightforward lyricism. In several songs, she is learning to make her world more still and manageable by asking for what she wants. “One day you’ll look back/And barely recognize that you/You’ve been talking to,” she sings on the closer, ever so reassuring. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Platoon

October 20, 2021

fbe6ca99-5073-494b-805a-efc2a360aeff

Cat Zhang

https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/

Assisted by the pianist Phillip Bush and her colleagues in the percussion ensemble Meridian, the American composer tests conventional notions of musical narrative.

Assisted by the pianist Phillip Bush and her colleagues in the percussion ensemble Meridian, the American composer tests conventional notions of musical narrative.

Sarah Hennies: Reservoir 1: Preservation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-hennies-reservoir-1-preservation/

Reservoir 1: Preservation

Much the way Paul Klee compared drawing a line to taking a walk, American composer Sarah Hennies’ Reservoir 1: Preservation feels like what happens when a percussion ensemble throws on its hiking boots. The 56-minute work, the first of three Reservoir pieces based on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, is scored for three percussionists, who shake, hit, and tease their instruments into vividly atmospheric shapes over a piano’s sparse, mournful melody. The piano is ever present in Reservoir 1, its jazzy, sometimes jarring lines played with admirable restraint by Phillip Bush. But it is the percussion, performed by Hennies alongside her partners in the improvisational group Meridian, Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart, that stars. We are used to percussion playing a supporting role to the whims of melody, or serving as a tool for dancing. Here, though, it dominates, driving Reservoir 1's heady atmosphere as if indifferent to the demands of the piano's chords. This is percussion as a tool for expression, an end in itself rather than a means toward a wider goal. The dramatic range achieved by such apparently limited means is impressive. Toward the start of the piece, shakers cut through the piano’s artfully dripped melody to inject urgency and life, their rhythms overlapping in a way that suggests the babble of hurried conversation. Later, percussive touches bring tension, echoing the nervous patter of rain on a tin roof as it builds to a storm. From there, Reservoir 1 dives into emotional extremes. At 26 minutes, a globular droning effect conveys drowsy serenity; five minutes later this has curdled into paranoia and violence, as blunt percussive blows strike malignantly, recalling percussionist Alasdair Malloy’s meticulous assault on a slab of meat for Scott Walker’s The Drift. Through all this, the piano drifts onward, discernible but somehow out of reach, the mysterious unconscious to the juddering passion of percussion’s conscious mind. The constancy of the piano helps to hold Reservoir 1 together; its internal logic bonds the album into a coherent, satisfying listen. But Reservoir 1 is adaptable, too. Hennies has said that the idea behind the three Reservoir pieces—the second was premiered in spring 2019 by flautist Claire Chase and vocal performance ensemble Constellation Chor, while the third is intended to be a piece for strings—is that they will work together and individually. It’s also possible to cherry-pick outstanding moments from Reservoir 1’s well-rounded whole. I love the stumbling rhythm between bass drum and woodblocks around the 10-minute mark, which seems to delight in slipping out of frame, and the haunting scrabble at 44 minutes that echoes the ghostly cracking of an abandoned boat at sea. The occasional frustration with Reservoir 1 is that it can feel like it would be better experienced live than on record. Meridian drift so far from typical percussive sounds over the 56-minute piece that human nature demands to know how this music is being made. But what the listener loses in understanding, they gain in mystery. Hennies has spoken of the importance of recordings in removing the visual associations that we have around music, with the sight of a cymbal being played, for example, automatically triggering certain assumptions. On Reservoir 1 the shape-shifting percussive palette is all the more gripping for its enigmatic origins, like a magic trick that must forever remain secret. Hennies’ work is an oasis of inscrutability, where ignorance is bliss and time slips by unhurried.

2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Black Truffle

September 30, 2019

fbef234c-e0e1-43be-9de7-dc9cffb093e1

Ben Cardew

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

With cohesive production and lyrics that veer from tender to stoic, the Detroit rapper’s latest is his most meticulous project yet.

With cohesive production and lyrics that veer from tender to stoic, the Detroit rapper’s latest is his most meticulous project yet.

Babyface Ray: MOB

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babyface-ray-mob/

MOB

Since the release of FACE in January, Babyface Ray has checked into another class of rap stardom. Aside from FACE becoming the Detroit rapper’s highest-charting project to date—debuting at number 31 on the Billboard 200, nearly 100 spots higher than 2021’s Unfuckwitable—Ray was included in XXL’s 2022 Freshman Class and, just last week, made his late-night TV debut on the Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. His performance of “Masterpiece,” a standout song from his flashy and melancholic new album MOB, was backgrounded by a shot of the Detroit River, an emblem that amplifies the duality of Ray’s stories. He’s a rapper who’s traveled the world but can’t leave the house without a gun, offering advice to the youth while in the process of curbing a lean addiction. MOB follows these complicated leads, burrowing deeper into the troubled thoughts and labored fruits Ray has always explored in his music. Ray’s raps typically glide with the efficiency of cold steel, but between forced features, uninspired beat changes, and some ultimately half-baked ideas, his major-label projects have all had a handful of shaky moments. MOB deads that trend, standing as his most meticulous project yet. There’s little fat and just enough experimentation to showcase what Ray does best: bring his world of opulence and tragedy to life with a stoicism that would send chills up Ghost from Power’s spine. On “Wonderful Wayne & Jackie Boy,” he compares his strategic movement to that of Golden State Warriors forward Klay Thompson and claims he’s ready to “knock his shit off, Mr. Potato Head” before praying that his karma “don’t come back on my daughters” one song later on “Rap Politics.” Ray’s deadpan is surprisingly malleable, bringing dimension to his boasts and confessions without losing his distinct sound. His tone rarely changes but still sells the danger of popping Percocets while driving luxury cars (“Brand New Benz”), the humor in comparing his misanthropy to Tommy Hilfiger’s racism scandal (“Crazy World”), and the glamour of hiring a personal shopper (“Nice Guy”) with equal skill. At any given moment, he’s as funny, menacing, or benevolent as he needs to be. Ray’s persona is even more affecting when he digs deeper into his life. Attempts to stop his lean habit—and simultaneously judging others for indulging— come up several times, most notably on the intro to “Spill My Cup.” There are more mentions of his daughters, cousins, and nephew, all of whom he wants to spoil and prepare for a cruel world. These thoughts hit hardest on “Vonnie Skit,” an interlude that dwells on a conversation between Ray and his mother about how she gave up her dreams to raise Ray and his brother. Ray isn’t immune to feelings of remorse, but the tender streak on MOB gives its sadder moments the heft of diary entries from a capo scared enough of the future to start memorializing the past. MOB’s stable of producers bring variety to the album’s sound without messing with its consistency. “Rap Politics,” “Crazy World,” and “Massacre” crackle with dark synths and 808s—courtesy of Shawn Ferrari, Space, and Sledgren, respectively—that jog next to the raps like a courtside cameraman would follow basketball players. Pooh Beatz and Topside continue to evolve the fast-paced Michigan sound with a handful of beats each. Pooh’s piano plinks and drum hits on “Masterpiece” feel like a stadium-ready R&B beat turned inside out and given a peppy skip; on “Wavy Gang Immortal,” Ray and guests Samuel Shabazz and King Hendrick$ trade heartfelt verses backed by Topside’s chilly vocal samples and keys that swirl like the eye of a snowstorm. Each beat impacts and peels off differently, but they all serve the same wistful tone that remains Ray’s sweet spot. Every new Ray album has bits of incremental growth. He’s a little more thoughtful and a little more prone to flex that new Tesla and put on for the Motor City in the process. On MOB, Ray is more mature but unafraid to bask in what he’s earned, putting his skills to use on the most cohesive set of beats he’s rapped over since 2019’s MIA Season 2. In a recent profile with GQ, he admitted that he’s not competing with anyone in particular, just “trying to be the best for me right now.” What MOB proves is that good music and hard work can be their own self-fulfilling prophecy.

2022-12-08T00:02:00.000-05:00

2022-12-08T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rap

Wavy Gang / Empire

December 8, 2022

fbf222ec-c2a5-4905-9731-2faf061650a6

Dylan Green

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

After years of recording and quietly releasing beatific folk music, the Bay Area singer/songwriter flexes her voice and vision on pop songs of complicated feelings and private anxieties.

After years of recording and quietly releasing beatific folk music, the Bay Area singer/songwriter flexes her voice and vision on pop songs of complicated feelings and private anxieties.

Rose Droll: Your Dog

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rose-droll-your-dog/

Your Dog

Rose Droll makes music that could soundtrack a yoga retreat. The 10 tracks on her debut LP, Your Dog, feel like individual breathing exercises. Her vocal range—from whisper-sung refrains to all-out shouts—mirrors a pranayama, a series of breathing techniques that transitions from panting to extended exhalation. Your Dog crisscrosses low-budget electronica, soft bedroom pop, folk-punk, and even a little hip-hop, stretching Droll’s limbs as a producer, percussive polymath, delicate vocalist, and deliberate lyricist. Your Dog is Droll’s first LP, but she has been floating around the Bay Area scene for almost a decade, quietly recording airy, beatific folk music. Dig into her catalog, and you’ll find tiny wellsprings of plaintive plainsongs and careful harmonies. Rather than conjuring closeness, the production of her lo-fi bedroom pop has often imparted a sense of depth. On the 2017 EP Photograph, fingerpicked guitars drift in the distance while melodies linger like mere suggestions. Not so on Your Dog, which begins with a guttural incantation—full-bodied and low, somewhere between a sigh and a shout. Though tempered by sparse xylophone hits and lolling guitars, her holler is an immediate break with her once-hushed coos. She continues to shapeshift, playing the parts of a savvy poet and a scorned seductress. On “Hush,” a whisper-sung cypher cuts short a pitch-shifted rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” The song twists around Droll’s verses, her gliding cadence and breezy tone suggesting a cross between Norah Jones and Digable Planets. There’s surprising rap battle bravado here, too: “So baby when you gonna give a fuck? It doesn’t cut it to rely on luck.” Just as you’ve caught up with her lyrical hopscotch, though, the beat disappears, revealing another child’s tune, “Ring Around the Rosie.” If her previous releases were wistful, they were at least sonically linear. But this record sees her playing with the predictable patterns of songwriting. On “Boy Bruise,” spoken-word bits, staccato shouts, and magnetic chants nest between the lyrics, bursting out momentarily as though coming from a music box. Not every experiment with form is so successful. “Cat June” drags as it pits sheepish declarations against painfully slow raps. But when it works, like on the neo-R&B track “Fat Duck,” Droll is an electrifying shape-shifter—bratty one moment and sweet the next, reminiscent of Miya Folick’s frenzied energy. Droll’s emphasis on rhyming at all costs sometimes creates the effect of simplistic campfire sing-alongs. During “Riddle,” she begins, “I had a hell of a time making these memories of mine/Fit like a fiddle into just another riddle of mine.” It is tidy to the point of being empty, the syllables coming off more like a nursery rhyme than a nostalgic reflection. She relies too much on rap-whispered affectations, too, something the singing, scatting, and shouting of singles like “Boy Bruise” and “Hush” reinforce. Still, at her best, her writing feels like that of an older sister or ex-lover—worn-in, intimate, direct. “I know you keep the bath lit to dull all of your senses,” she starts slowly on “Fat Duck” before cutting to the point. “But now is not the time to sit with a joint lit/Shitting little bricks over the small stuff.” It’s tempting to call Your Dog breezy, but that diminishes the anxieties Droll expresses, reducing her to the sum of her mostly acoustic past. Droll has slowly moved away from the folk that once defined her; on Your Dog, she actively seeks new spaces. This is an artifact of self-discovery, then, one that often defies expectations of how a singer like Droll should sound.

2018-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Experimental

Father/Daughter / Double Denim

December 10, 2018

fbfb7297-c3c7-4a19-b591-08d5a17e7f99

Arielle Gordon

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

The Long Island emo outfit pushes the classic poison-pen sound into brightly colored power-pop territory.

The Long Island emo outfit pushes the classic poison-pen sound into brightly colored power-pop territory.

Macseal: Super Enthusiast

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macseal-super-enthusiast/

Super Enthusiast

In 2019, “emo from Long Island” and “Long Island emo” are two very different things. Over the last few years, the classic poison-pen-valentine sound has slowly commingled with the bookish, bashful indie rock that was once seen as its antidote in the era of Fuse video blocks. While Oso Oso’s Basking In the Glow remains the most brilliant example, you can also hear it in the extended universe of associates and peers that has sprung up around Jade Lillitri. Guitarist and Yunahon Mixtape producer Billy Mannino released a strong debut this year as Bigger Better Sun, while Lillitri’s former State Lines bandmate Tom Werring bowed with Yeah Is What We Have; both drew on Death Cab and Teenage Fanclub more often than the Starting Line or Taking Back Sunday. Macseal is the project of singer-songwriter Ryan Bartlett, but the Lillitri EU extends here as well—the band’s Francesca Impastato once served as Oso Oso’s touring drummer. Unlike Werring and Mannino, who more or less arrived fully formed, Bartlett on Super Enthusiast sounds stuck in the middle road, trying to summon the confidence to change lanes. This problem is hardly exclusive to Macseal—as with alt-country, grunge, and shoegaze in earlier years, power-pop is emo’s exit strategy du jour, and just ask longtime Joyce Manor fans what they think of Barry Johnson getting into Big Star. Turns out that power-pop and emo aren’t instantaneously compatible—emo is driven by anxious, imperfect musicianship where the former prides itself on being finicky and clever, emotional distance often proof of a sense of craft. Macseal prove to be adept students, as evidenced by the cascading melodic resolution in “Graduating Steps” or the beaming falsetto lines neatly layered like rainbow Jello on “Without a Trace.” Against the kind of meandering verse melodies that typified Macseal’s earliest work, the pop classicism here is endearing and jarring. As he did with Wild Pink’s Yolk in the Fur, producer Justin Pizzoferrato exfoliates a once-scruffy band for proper mainstream presentation and otherwise trusts the songwriting to provide the dynamic frills. But while “Always Hazy” and “Irving” could safely blend into the latest All New Indie Spotify list, they can just easily pass by without any kind of impression. Both songs are victims of Bartlett not completely trusting himself. There’s a discernible emotional core in each—a coming of age, a realization of failure—but both are obscured by lyrics that sacrifice clarity and concision to read nice on paper. “What’s clear to me, has always been hazy,” he sings—an unintentionally meta moment. However, the late-autumn crispness of the sound (and its early November release date) is no accident. Super Enthusiast addresses life from a standpoint where the afterglow of summer or graduation has long faded and the reality of “Where do I go from here?” has set in. “They reserve a special kind of defeat/For when your new home spits you back to old/They expect a swift and solemn retreat/Back to the hole that you first crawled out of,” Szilagyi moans on “Graduating Steps,” an earnest show of empathy for boomerang kids who watch friendships fade, people outgrow each other, and nostalgia become a trap. If “Graduating Steps,” like much of Super Enthusiast, feels like it’s stopping shy of conveying the kind of energy suitable for its youthful milieu, notice that it’s describing a special kind of defeat—a point where anger gives way to surrender. If Super Enthusiast seems hamstrung with uncertainty about Macseal’s next phase, that’s pretty much the entire point. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

6131

January 6, 2020

fc09cd20-8fc7-41ef-ad63-25e1b22dcd27

Ian Cohen

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

The avant-pop songwriter whose career has intersected with that of Ariel Pink focuses on melody and delivers a delightfully weird full-length.

The avant-pop songwriter whose career has intersected with that of Ariel Pink focuses on melody and delivers a delightfully weird full-length.

John Maus: We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15596-we-must-become-the-pitiless-censors-of-ourselves/

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

John Maus first gained notice while collaborating and playing with fellow Cal Arts classmate Ariel Pink more than 10 years ago. Though both have since developed cultish followings by releasing distinctive takes on murky lo-fi, Maus has steeped his music in new wave signifiers, an association furthered by his deep, commanding voice. Whether he's evoking Joy Division's Ian Curtis or Bauhaus' Peter Murphy, Maus opts to abstract the genre, inserting noise into unexpected places and walking the line between sincerity and surreality. From the beginning, he's been an artist fascinated by the parameters, paradoxes, and possibilities of pop. Earlier this year, Maus took a walk through New York's Central Park Zoo with a journalist from Self-Titled. "I didn't realize that the music I was making was especially weird," he says in the piece. "Honestly, I thought I was making Top 40 kind of stuff. It wasn't until people kept telling me so that I realized my work was thought of as something 'other' than that." If you're at all familiar with the Minnesota native's swampy retro-futurist synth-pop, you may understand why he might place emphasis on the word "other." One experience with his body of solo work (or brave live performances) makes clear that his could be categorized as "outsider" art, but it's difficult to say that without also seriously considering why. He makes thought-provoking music that's disguised as something else. We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, his latest full-length, is the most vibrant and toothsome expression of Maus' pursuits yet. He keeps his vocals awash in gothic reverb and echo-driven effects, blurring the lines between what he's saying and emoting. Sometimes, as on "Cop Killer", a Jan Hammer-indebted number on which Maus sings over an iced bed of keys, the results are outlandish and oddly funny at the same time, in the way that certain scenes in David Lynch films can leap from chilling to comically exaggerated. ("Cop killer, let's kill the cops tonight/ Cop Killer, kill every cop in sight," he sings.) And then there's "Matter of Fact" immediately thereafter, a song whose staccato, orc-like chorus line is "Pussy is not a matter of fact." They're not the kind of earworms you want to find yourself singing aloud in public, but it might happen anyway. Sonically, Maus works a minimal, primitive setup: sputtering drum machines and an arsenal of 1980s-vintage synth presets undercut his lyrics just as much as those exaggerated, often grotesque vocal turns do. Sometimes, these songs seem to exist solely to pose questions: Top 40 cheese or ironic cool? High-brow or low-brow? Honesty or posturing? Artifice or reality? But what makes We Must Become his finest full-length yet is how fluidly he communicates it all by foregrounding melody. On "Keep Pushing On", Maus' monastic, cellar-level singing lends the song the feel of a Gregorian chant-led exercise tape. Though the vocals and basslines on arpeggiated fever dream "Quantum Leap" mirror Joy Division's to an almost cartoonish degree, you still get a good sense of Maus' persona in the music. There's a genuine, almost maniacal sense of glee in the way he seems to approach each turn. When Maus takes the stage, he plays with notions of performance by singing over his own backing tracks. He pogos, he screams, he runs-in-place and pulls his hair and spits and sweats and clenches up until he looks like he might burst through his button-down and chinos. It's hard to look away. Now Maus has a full set of songs whose architecture is just as sophisticated and riveting in actuality as it is in theory. While earlier records have been riddled by experiments gone awry (see: "Rights for Gays" and "Tenebrae", from 2007's Love Is Real), they also didn't feature the revolving parts and aerodynamic hooks of "Believer", the closing track here and one that glitters from any angle. And although there's another vocalist at his side in the lullaby lilt of "Hey Moon" (songwriter Molly Nilsson, who wrote and performed the song on her 2008 album These Things Take Time), the way Maus sings to the heavens makes it sound as though he's no longer alone with his thoughts. Spend a lot of time with this record, and it's hard not to feel like you're right there with him.

2011-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Ribbon Music / Upset the Rhythm

July 8, 2011

fc0bf84b-ef2a-48be-87be-b6c60fa7a132

David Bevan

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

The second album from the acerbic and eclectic emo-rock band expertly bottles their energy as they sing about constantly pushing for more when given so little.

The second album from the acerbic and eclectic emo-rock band expertly bottles their energy as they sing about constantly pushing for more when given so little.

Home Is Where: The Whaler

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/home-is-where-the-whaler/

The Whaler

Home Is Where singer Brandon MacDonald is starting to dissociate. You might be too if you’re battling the inhibitions of being forced to live in a world you did not choose. “I always end up starting over again/The end of the world is taking forever,” she sings, as if in a daze. The band’s second LP, The Whaler, is billed as a concept album about how, to quote one song title, “everyday feels like 9/11”: a cyclical trudge through a catastrophe, its aftermath, and the ways in which we’ve become numb to it. Interpreting their I Became Birds follow-up as solely that, however, sells the record short. Instead, this album is the band bottling their energy as they find themselves constantly pushing for more when given so little: for actual enshrined equality, for the privilege of peace of mind, for the freedom to be an idiot and the luck to be forgiven. Home Is Where just want to live, really live, without feeling like they’re already dead. After a nervous breakdown in 2021, MacDonald found herself disillusioned with the relentlessness of life and an increasingly apathetic society. She pinpoints the feeling on “9/12,” the shortest song on the record, placing minimalist piano over children babbling to offer one sentence only: “And on September 12th, 2001, everyone went back to work.” The band’s indictment is twofold: We tout resilience as a proud American trait, while unspeakable tragedies become increasingly mundane parts of our days. But MacDonald never sounds as weary or hopeless as the subject matter suggests. She’s wriggling and fighting for something, anything, to change—and that energy is what elevates The Whaler as a rowdy, worthwhile successor to I Became Birds. Home Is Where approach emo like it’s a college course. Thanks to an unspoken tradition in the genre—cheeky name-drops like Chris Farley, Dale Earnhardt, and their lead single sharing its name with a Pittsburgh emo revival band—that’s apparent just by skimming the lyrics, but the real knowledge is in the music. The Whaler puts Home Is Where’s musical indexing skills on display, merging emo’s past and present into a fifth-wave blueprint of what makes the genre’s evolution so comprehensive. Tilley Komorny sprinkles in Midwest guitar tapping, Connor O’Brien nods to emo’s origins with heavy breakdowns on bass, and Josiah Gardella injects his drumming with the straightforward punk that started it all. Once again, MacDonald contributes delicate singing saw and harmonica to “Whaling for Sport” and the cascading horns that rain down in “Skin Meadow” sound like Cap’n Jazz covering the Olivia Tremor Control. Whirring above are tape loops they manually cut up, stomped under their boots, and popped into the microwave; the final product is pitched up and crinkled, creating a sepia-toned ambiance that lends instrumental outros and dreamy interludes a chilly air. Throughout, MacDonald splits her time between singing, yelling, and screaming, each mode purging a different type of heartfelt defeat. She builds off last year’s split Dissection Lesson to strengthen her scratchy, piercing tone in line with ’90s screamo titans like Orchid, a physically taxing undertaking that shows off her commitment to vocal growth. Good emo music makes you feel their feelings; great emo music makes you see the world through their eyes. MacDonald’s lyrics render images like chewing on bread that’s turned to flesh, peeling a drunk driver off the asphalt like roadkill, feeding nickels and dimes to ducks in a pond. Even the song titles themselves invoke art film horror in the style of Jeff Mangum, be it pupils morphing into lily pads or a meadow comprised of stretched skin. Her penchant for inverted imagery often returns to the idea of god cowering from humans, and the extent to which pleasure has been drained from monumental events. “An all-knowing god doesn’t know what it’s like to not know anything at all,” she brags at one point. In “Yes! Yes! A Thousand Times Yes!” a minister grants the newlyweds their first kiss, but instead, they stare at each other awkwardly and drive home in separate cars. Much of The Whaler oscillates between sounding repulsed and disillusioned. Several band members went from being proud Floridians hellbent on rehabbing their state’s reputation to frustrated former residents driven away by anti-trans legislation. When the daily give-and-take starts to feel like a losing bet, it’s hard not to grow cynical and view politicized hatred or mass violence as an inevitable pattern. During “Lily Pad Pupils,” MacDonald identifies with a hangman bringing flowers to the execution, or the whaler watching belugas wash up at her feet. As the song transitions from country emo twang to unnerving post-hardcore in an impressively discreet way, she lets out a scream that quivers with disgust and guilt: “Earn your urn!” How twisted to be forced into a harmful occupation simply by the regional and class boundaries fencing you in. Is a job just a job if it’s the only one available? The Whaler is intended to make you feel unsteady, from MacDonald’s own spiraling to America’s great unraveling and the blind eye we turn to it. “You’re your own tapeworm,” she later screams, bile burning her throat, as if to question the very idea of nourishment. It’s arguably her most succinct metaphor for our new normal. On The Whaler, Home Is Where stick a finger in their wounds as a bonding mechanism, a gross display that they know how you feel. They’re grabbing a camcorder, sailing into the eye of the storm where the uncertainty and destructive winds come to a brief standstill, and marveling at how their tiny speck of a self is still existing at all. “I’m trying to show you,” MacDonald sings at one point, before amending the phrase: “I’m trying.”

2023-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Wax Bodega

June 21, 2023

fc17ec31-881a-4948-b0ab-cdc2fb1d3d70

Nina Corcoran

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

The latest album from the meditative duo is an impressionistic portrait of life spent in transit.

The latest album from the meditative duo is an impressionistic portrait of life spent in transit.

TENGGER: Nomad

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tengger-nomad/

Nomad

When the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō began the journey he would immortalize in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he carried only a paper coat, a bathrobe, rain gear, pen and paper, and a few mementos. TENGGER makes their trip with little more than a synth and a pump organ. Like Bashō’s landmark work of travel writing, the Japanese-South Korean couple’s second album for Brooklyn psych label Beyond Beyond Is Beyond, Nomad, is an impressionistic portrait of life spent in transit. Even when they linger to take in the view, the six songs here are largely formed around the idea of movement as a virtue in and of itself. They unfold with the logic of linked haiku; the individual sounds—gently arpeggiating analog synthesizers, droning harmonium, processed field recordings, the occasional tick of percussion—aren’t necessarily interesting in themselves, but by arranging them into elegant relationships with one another, TENGGER imbue them with a sense of rustic majesty. TENGGER’s music often lacks rough edges and internal tension, which forces them to find less obvious ways of generating movement, something they do successfully across the album. They take cues from Neu! and Aguirre-era Popol Vuh, creating distinct floating worlds bonded by singer itta’s featherlight vocals and drawing them into one another with graceful precision. Throughout, field recordings of rushing and trickling water and, in “Eurasia,” what sounds like the distant sound of train tracks, introduce notes of motion and unpredictability into their hermetically sealed micro-environments. But what makes Nomad instantly compelling is the way it both reflects and celebrates the feeling of a peaceful morning walk. Both “Bliss” and opener “Achime” set off with two-chord shuffles, shifting from one to the other at a steady hiker’s clip. In “Achime,” the chords land with a muffled crunch that evokes footfalls, while an organ swells to fill every available groove. itta recently said the group’s aim is to “make music that connects with the sounds of nature and the spirituality of making the music within that moment.” Accordingly, every note is given space and allowed to find its place in the greater whole. itta and synthesist Marqido’s roles almost seem to lie more in guiding the sounds than in producing them; their steady hands and faith in their own sense of timing make Nomad feel intensely personal. itta and Marquido’s skills—their horticultural attention to detail and patience with their own material—are best-suited to moving at a walker’s pace. Like all good pilgrims, they know the true blessing lies in the journey itself, but that doesn’t stop them from pushing Nomad to a glorious destination. Closer “Flow” is goosed by a thick drone that gives the couple a rare counterforce, something to react to. They move together in ecstatic union, radiating sounds that they shape until they’re all resonating together on a single chord, everything tuned to the same pitch. And when the water once again comes streaming in near the album’s end, it’s clear and bright, fed by the deep wells of feeling TENGGER have drawn from the natural world. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Beyond Beyond is Beyond

June 12, 2020

fc198d06-64da-4ac2-a123-7ea2e4629615

Sadie Sartini Garner

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

More interested in earmarking ideas than in formulating an overarching aesthetic proposition, Carly Rae Jepsen’s fifth album diversifies her portfolio of 1980s pop sounds.

More interested in earmarking ideas than in formulating an overarching aesthetic proposition, Carly Rae Jepsen’s fifth album diversifies her portfolio of 1980s pop sounds.

Carly Rae Jepsen: The Loneliest Time

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carly-rae-jepsen-the-loneliest-time/

The Loneliest Time

Cynicism is typically an unwelcome visitor in Carly Rae Jepsen’s castle. She is a sword-wielding cult hero with an army of believers: in the authority of a fluttering heart, in the gulf between desire and desperation, and most importantly, in the cathartic potential of a verse, chorus, and bridge. Since unleashing her starry-eyed worldview with the breakout 2012 hit “Call Me Maybe,” Jepsen has written songs like Ask Polly letters, full of breathless confessions and earnest wondering. Yet there is cynicism to be found on The Loneliest Time, Jepsen’s fifth album. It’s folded into “Beach House,” the second single, which chronicles the singer’s misadventures with a series of unsavory men, from a pitiful mama’s boy to someone else’s husband to a (presumably fictional) Jeffrey Dahmer type. Sacrificing melody for character voices, the song chugs along mechanically, as if played by the Chuck E. Cheese house band. Making its unsubtle bid for relevance at a time when social media is flooded with first-person Hinge horror stories, “Beach House” feels corny and dated on arrival. Worse, from Jepsen’s mouth, it sounds plain wrong. Dating sucks; men are terrible. We’ve heard this before—but from the person who brought us “Cut to the Feeling” and “Now That I Found You”? Though in many ways a red herring, “Beach House” suggests that Jepsen, who has invested heavily in swooning ’80s pop, is looking to diversify her portfolio. The Loneliest Time considers possible paths: dialing her typical pop maximalism up to outrageous new levels of camp; dialing it back to featherweight easy listening. But Jepsen seems more interested in earmarking ideas than in formulating an overarching aesthetic proposition. In the spaces between these experiments, she’s in familiar form, dropping rapturous lyrics into fizzy synth songs like sugar cubes into champagne. The Loneliest Time isn’t the introduction of a new era—a marketing concept that demands artists reinvent themselves every few years (particularly if they are women who have aged out of the term “ingénue”). It’s just a new album. And it’s just fine. Jepsen’s best new ideas are found on “Western Wind,” a gorgeous meeting of music and message where Rostam stops by to play congas and help Jepsen realize her earth-toned dreams of a love as natural and all-encompassing as the elements. His fingerprints are all over this track, which recalls the gentle percussiveness of Haim’s “Summer Girl” and the graceful unspooling of Maggie Rogers’ “Fallingwater,” two other standout singles for their respective artists that he produced. I would gladly take five more “Western Wind”s, but the next-closest thing is “Far Away,” a song about trying to stay grounded that ends up rollerblading down Rainbow Road, aux percussion section in tow. Rostam reappears only on “Go Find Yourself or Whatever,” a lighters-up ballad whose sentimentality is winningly cut with a dash of snark. Rostam is one of more than a dozen writers and producers, including Jepsen’s frequent collaborator Tavish Crowe, that she brought on for this album—her own little pop factory. As on previous projects, their output was substantial: Jepsen says she used a “mad, scientific process” to whittle down the tracklist from more than a hundred song ideas. Some that made the cut feel dashed off; you wonder if Jepsen could have written less, more carefully. The breakup banger “Talking to Yourself” feels like two different Dua Lipa outtakes cut-and-pasted together, with some distracting production flourishes tossed in. On “Sideways,” a wisp of a song that barely passes the two-minute mark, Jepsen is characteristically lovestruck, lost in daydreams about her new boo. She’s so busy smiling at strangers, she forgot to write a bridge. Loneliness isn’t the dominant emotion on this record. It’s mostly felt as the liminal space in between crushes, which remain Jepsen’s pet projects. Even on the title track, an oddball duet with fellow Canadian Rufus Wainwright, loneliness is just a speck in the rearview mirror on Jepsen’s drive to reunite with an ex: “I’m coming back for you, baby!” she yelps in a theatrical spoken-word interlude, just before the strings swoop in and a car engine revs. Her chosen palette leans disco, a genre that implies the convergence of bodies—an antidote to loneliness, built right into the music. The nearby “Shooting Star” shares a similar aesthetic orientation, all rhythm guitar bubbles and spaceship synths and vocoder effects. The best disco song on The Loneliest Time technically isn’t even on The Loneliest Time—it’s “Anxious,” a slinky bonus track. Here, the dancefloor lights dim slightly and the text brings more emotional nuance, as Jepsen grapples with jealousy and the idea that romance is sometimes distracting, not curative. The song’s placement in overflow seating feels arbitrary, reflecting a recurring frustration: Jepsen’s albums tend to function more as vessels for songs than as fully conceived projects. Releasing both E•MO•TION and Dedicated twice, as A-sides and B-sides, blurred their conceptual boundaries for no reason other than the availability of material; it’s hard to imagine how a theoretical The Loneliest Time Side B could clarify the new record’s somewhat unfocused vision. There’s no question that Jepsen can write songs that transport you—to the heat of the moment, the late-night neon glow, the driver’s seat on the way out of town. With a more defined roadmap, the whole album might have led somewhere worth sticking around for a while.

2022-10-21T00:03:00.000-04:00

2022-10-21T00:03:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

604 / Schoolboy / Interscope

October 21, 2022

fc1aaee2-b0e3-4c3a-b6a1-71e74c633792

Olivia Horn

https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn /

On their fearlessly creative, beat-heavy new record, the Montreal band spikes their dream pop with trip-hop, nu-metal, and other ’90s signifiers.

On their fearlessly creative, beat-heavy new record, the Montreal band spikes their dream pop with trip-hop, nu-metal, and other ’90s signifiers.

No Joy: Motherhood

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/no-joy-motherhood/

Motherhood

Perhaps it was inevitable that shoegaze would lose some of its capacity to awe over time. The genre’s disorienting squalls and nurturing fuzz create the impression of pulling beauty from murk, defying the sense that none of these noises should sound as alluring as they somehow do. It’s a powerful trick, or at least it used to be. But decades of repetition have proven there’s an almost innate property that makes the genre’s distorted guitars and vaporous synths work together so pleasurably, so even the most artful contemporary shoegaze rarely feels as daring as the genre’s heyday works. It’s akin to watching yet another magician submerge themselves in a water tank. Whatever appearance of risk the exercise once held is gone. All that speaks to how No Joy emerged as one of the most distinguished shoegaze acts of the last decade: They’re one of the few that dares to upend the genre’s fundamental alchemy. The Montreal band, once a quartet but now essentially a solo project for principal member Jasamine White-Gluz, has grown bolder about challenging genre conventions since their 2010 debut, most recently deemphasizing the guitar and dabbling in electronica on 2018’s No Joy / Sonic Boom, a collaboration with Spaceman 3’s Pete Kember. But on Motherhood, No Joy’s fearlessly creative, magnificently beat-heavy new record, the outside genre influences are even more radical and esoteric. White-Gluz spikes her dream-pop with trip-hop, nu metal, and a pastiche of time-stamped ’90s club music, from early ’90s U.K. dance-rock to the breakneck big beat of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. The smeared vocals and synths still scan as shoegaze, but the rhythms are pure body music. That Motherhood somehow never crosses the line into overkill is remarkable, because sometimes it seems to be trying. To heighten the uncanniness of “Nothing Will Hurt,” a knotty tangle of synthesizers and slap bass with echoes of Luscious Jackson, White-Gluz and her collaborators shoved bananas into microphones and wedged kitchen knives into guitar necks. Much as musicians love to trade stories about them, these kinds of DIY studio hacks usually don’t make much difference, but here the cumulative effect lends to the sense of delirium. Even more audacious is the charcoal-blackened “Dream Rat,” which goes full thrash with a viciously growly assist from White-Gluz’s sister Alissa, the vocalist for the Swedish death metal outfit Arch Enemy. Another metal luminary, Kittie’s Tara McLeod, sits in on guitar for the whole album, and for added texture she plays a bit of banjo on several songs, too. Each song is a Chopped basket, a mish-mash of clashing ingredients that White-Gluz somehow makes work together, from the beat flips and DJ scratches of “Four” to the snapping snares and Siouxsie and the Banshees wails of “Ageless.” And, like the best Chopped chefs, she treats the Cap’n Crunch as reverentially as she does the wagyu. In the hands of a different artist, the album’s hard drum machines and amplified alterna-rock production might be played for kitsch, but White-Gluz never looks down at the sounds she borrows. As irreverent and inherently whimsical as the music often is, White-Gluz’s songwriting is dead serious. Her lyrics blur in and out of focus, but the audible ones touch on motherhood, bodily sacrifice, and fears of aging out of fertility. “Grateful for the family that loves me still, but I can’t seem to make my own,” she sings on the closer “Kidder.” That sincerity is the secret to why the album hangs together. While White-Gluz fucks around plenty on Motherhood, she’s never just fucking around. In her hands, eccentric genre cues become a means of making difficult subject matter go down easy. And in the process, she reclaims a very ’90s ideal: the belief that if you earnestly love music styles, however mismatched, they should pair together. It didn’t always work out that way in the ’90s, of course– no amount of good intentions was going to redeem some of those Big Audio Dynamite or Bran Van 3000 records—but here White-Gluz wills it so. In the process she’s achieved something remarkable: a shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Joyful Noise

August 27, 2020

fc22c938-3ff2-4b7d-a415-44840cb62339

Evan Rytlewski

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

Reworking his 2020 album Actual Presence, the Los Angeles percussionist links up with friends like Deantoni Parks and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, while Laraaji and Iasos lend new-age gravitas.

Reworking his 2020 album Actual Presence, the Los Angeles percussionist links up with friends like Deantoni Parks and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, while Laraaji and Iasos lend new-age gravitas.

Carlos Niño & Friends: Extra Presence

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carlos-nino-and-friends-extra-presence/

Extra Presence

Like a West Coast Bill Laswell, Los Angeles-based producer, composer, and percussionist Carlos Niño possesses golden ears and platinum musical connections—i.e., talented folks who happen to be his friends. He’s a community-builder and conceptualist who brings an indomitable optimism to every project he helms. For nearly two decades, Niño has lent a utopianist duende to hip-hop, ambient, jazz, and new age. In the defunct Ammoncontact, he was one of the earliest artists to infuse hip-hop with new-age spirituality and cosmic-jazz atmospheres. On 2004’s One in an Infinity of Ways, he and partner Fabian Ammon Alston released a track called “Healing Vibrations.” It’s not a stretch to say that the title of his soul-jazz ensemble Build An Ark’s Peace With Every Step album could be Niño’s musical motto. Extra Presence is yet one more piece of Niño and pals’ sprawling mosaic of beatitude. Constructed from a 2019 improv performance and then retrofitted with overdubs in his studio during the pandemic, with help from his collaborators, Extra Presence is an expanded version of Niño & Friends’ self-released 2020 album Actual Presence. Like its predecessor, it’s decidedly a headphone listen. These musicians revel in the cumulative power of minutiae coalescing into detailed tapestries. You can hear that approach on “Luis’s Special Shells Alternate Mix”: Featuring said shells and keyboardist Jamael Dean, the track is a miniaturist wonderland of ASMR-inducing percussion and synthesizer textures. The tiniest sound takes on monumental importance in this microscopic sonic environment. Niño’s predilection for gongs, chimes, bells, and other percussive tools lays a heavenly metal foundation for many of these pieces. In a coup, Niño enlisted ambient/new-age avatars Laraaji and Iasos to add luster to his beatless excursions. The former contributes zither to “AmazonianPulse,” which begins with dripping water, twitchy scratching noises, and insectoid chittering. When Nate Mercereau’s placid guitar and Laraaji’s twinkling zither finally enter the frame, after three minutes of this disorienting collage, it’s like sunlight dappling dense flora. Iasos appears on two tracks. On “Mushroomeclipse,” Iasos contributes, as Niño puts it, “celestial sounds.” This is the music you hear in a dream in which you’re slowly sinking in a calm, clear lake. On a more kinetic tip, “In the Moment” evokes the pastoral chamber jazz of Third Ear Band via Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s violin, Devin Daniels’ alto sax, Randy Gloss’ pandeiro slaps, and Niño’s tersely suspenseful synth. Funk rarely flows as sparely or blissfully as it does on “Actually,” which pits Deantoni Parks’ slyly funky beats and rimshots against Dean’s pointillistic piano filigrees and Mercereau’s probing bass. “Dreamishappening” appears in two different iterations, plus a separate reprise. The instrumental’s trip-hop hauntology could soundtrack an eerie scene in a movie. The vocal version features Shabazz Palaces MC Ishmael Butler’s diamond-sharp, interstellar-traveling poetry (“See, I rode in on a moonbeam from the indigo corridors”) amid a paradise of Niño’s crystalline tintinnabulation and Dean’s seductively slurring keyboards. The result is a zenith of oneiric hip-hop, or perhaps D’Angelo’s Voodoo in zero gravity. The album closes with the nearly 23-minute “Recurrent Reiki Dreams,” whose serene swirl of wind chimes, cirrus-wisp synth pads, and susurrating waves harks back to the calmest moments of Niño & Friends’ 2012 album Aquariusssssss. When you have Iasos in your ranks, you let him burble and drift for as long as he wants, and on “Recurrent Reiki Dreams,” the new-age icon proves that he still has the transcendentally tranquil touch. One should always harbor skepticism toward anyone claiming to make “healing” music—even someone as steeped in aural spirituality as Niño. But on Extra Presence, more often than not, he and his comrades seem to have cracked the code.

2022-07-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-07-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

Jazz / Experimental

International Anthem

July 28, 2022

fc2321ce-3a97-41a8-9821-409870bda4b5

Dave Segal

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

On her new album, the Memphis singer-songwriter and guitarist pens her most heavy-hearted songs, treating love and loss like old scars, fondly remembered.

On her new album, the Memphis singer-songwriter and guitarist pens her most heavy-hearted songs, treating love and loss like old scars, fondly remembered.

Valerie June: The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/valerie-june-the-moon-and-stars-prescriptions-for-dreamers/

The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers

When Valerie June arrived, she ignited conversations for the daring, easy way she mixed folk, soul, and Appalachian old-time music. The Memphis singer-songwriter and guitarist flaunted the fiddle and the nasal projection of Appalachian balladry on her 2013 label debut, Pushin’ Against a Stone, but they were also overshadowed at times between Richard Swift’s Wurlitzer and producer Dan Auerbach’s hi-fi touch. Tracing the gnarled roots of Appalachian music might lead you to Scotland or to Mississippi, depending, and June only wishes to further tangle those lines, while never fully abandoning the songcraft traditions that represent home to her. Her latest, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, is probably her most far-reaching (look no further than the trap beat of “Within You”). But, crucially, this doesn’t feel like a calculated step as much as a symptom of something closer to the album’s center: June is carrying a noticeably heavier heart. Throughout these songs of love and loss and the acceptance of bygones, she sounds like she’s finger-tracing her own scars, looking down on them with a half-smile, remembering the story behind each one. It’s not as much a “feel good” record as her prior two, but it is no doubt a “feel more” record. WIth ambitions set plainly high and an assist from producer Jack Splash, June delicately layers parts beneath her unmistakable voice, like memories converged beneath her calm. “You and I,” an early standout that blends the watercolor-vocal shading of Julianna Barwick into a ballooning ballad, features no fewer than 15 players, not one of whom overstays their welcome. As if to pause for reflection, June places short interludes around the best songs here, the spots where you might be inclined to pause anyway and let it sink in, culminating in an ambient track of birdsong and wind chimes to close out the album. “Call Me a Fool,” which brings in the Memphis and Stax legend Carla Thomas for backing vocals and a spoken-word intro, is the grand centerpiece, a graceful retrofit of Etta James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind.” When June gets to the kicker, her declaration that the reward of loving the right person is worth any accompanying humiliation—“And I’ll be a fool anytime”—she casually chops off the front vowel of “And,” leaving just this beautiful and cracked “N’d’IIIII,” scratching its way from center stage to the back of the house. It is her perfect note. June tends to write in easy, sly rhyme schemes reminiscent of the late John Prine, whom she eulogized last April with a solo cover of “In Spite of Ourselves,” the famous duet that they performed while touring together in 2018. For every moment when this style borders on hokey, there are others when it feels complete in its Prine-like knack for waiting until the very last word to earn the listener’s smirk. There’s an unmistakable whiff of “She’s my baby/I don’t mean maybe” when June rhymes “day we first met” with “had not one regret” and inevitably “don’t you forget” on the high-bar-setting opener “Stay.” Meanwhile, a flurry of strings and a solitary flute rise to the surface. The moment speaks for June on The Moon and Stars, simultaneously marveling at all the wonders that are out there, and at the truth that all you need is one good thing right here. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2021-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Fantasy

March 17, 2021

fc2a1dc0-48fe-4984-9098-8b60b04a4dc8

Steven Arroyo

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

The South Central rapper RJMrLA follows up his official debut album with a full-length ride-along with DJ Mustard; the fruitful collaboration features some of the producer’s best work in years.

The South Central rapper RJMrLA follows up his official debut album with a full-length ride-along with DJ Mustard; the fruitful collaboration features some of the producer’s best work in years.

RJMrLA / Mustard: The Ghetto

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rjmrla-dj-mustard-the-ghetto/

The Ghetto

After grinding out mixtape buzz over the better half of a decade, the South Central rapper RJ spent 2017 polishing his sound and his brand. Around the time of his official debut, last year’s MrLA, he even changed his stage name to RJMrLA. While it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, the new name has weight, believability, and a much higher Google ranking, even if it’s hard to shake the Pitbull-like corniness in dubbing yourself Mr. Anything. His local bona fides got a boost from the fact that MrLA, a slinky, summery record that emphasized his pop sensibilities, was released by 400 Summers, a label conglomerate of DJ Mustard’s 10 Summers and YG’s 4 Hunnid imprints. It helps his standing even more that his latest release, The Ghetto, is a full-length ride-along with Mustard himself. A few years ago, just after the uptempo sound of a DJ Mustard beat became the dominant sound of rap radio, the producer began to flounder with the album format. At his peak, his debut, 2014’s 10 Summers, crystallized his reach by pummeling listeners with bangers crowded with A-listers. He’s tried to release that same album several times over, but in the wake of an industry that imitated and then moved on from him, DJ Mustard is no longer hip-hop’s center of gravity. So it makes sense for him to share a bill with his new label’s first artist and, by extension, burrow back into his L.A. bedrock. The Ghetto is not the fleshed-out work of auteurship that hip-hop fans have come to expect from the pairing of a single producer with a single rapper. Instead, the stakes feel lower—more like a DJ Mustard compilation with a deserving host at its center. If MrLA was RJ’s breakthrough, The Ghetto sounds like his DJ Mustard-sponsored congratulations. Over 11 tracks and half as many guests, RJ is the center of the party even when he’s competing with much bigger names. Whether he’s kissing his diamonds on “Make a Million” or setting his dating ground rules on “No Pictures, No Videos,” much of the album is a showcase for RJ’s goofy tongue-wagging. More than ever—and especially with DJ Mustard’s R&B-friendly bracing—he frequently carves songs out of poppy little chunks: a chorus, a verse, a chorus. The rare breaks from the party are not sighs of relief but traumatized tales from the street. On “I Do...,” RJ sounds breathless as he unspools conspiracies over a menacing rattle of a beat: “I think my neighbor talkin’ to the federal officials/I’m paranoid, keep a loaded Tec between my pillows.” Throughout, DJ Mustard’s beats remain sparse, and he never strays far from the club. Still, The Ghetto is proof that there’s more range in the producer’s arsenal than the “Hey!” chants and strikingly crisp—and basic—percussion that defined his radio run. “Don’t Make Me Look Stupid,” a vainly anxious relationship rebuke, is not a nostalgic take on G-funk so much as a bridge to its future. Simple, menacing keyboard lines are a Mustard trademark, and several songs feature pounding, stammering piano riffs as basslines. Elsewhere, DJ Mustard softens his touch and designs atmospheres instead of rigid boxes. On “Been Hot” RJ raps in the sustained afterglow of a liquid synth that’s adorned only by sporadic snares. Like many of DJ Mustard’s beats, there’s barely anything to it, just beautiful empty space to be filled. Spare as it is, with RJ riding shotgun, The Ghetto is a concentrated batch of some of the producer’s best work in years.

2018-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

400 Summers / Interscope

January 10, 2018

fc2bcd24-3e9c-45bb-92e7-6e98f0e05141

Jay Balfour

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

On his third album, the smooth Australian rocker leaves behind the arch character studies and tries to craft something more personal and sincere.

On his third album, the smooth Australian rocker leaves behind the arch character studies and tries to craft something more personal and sincere.

Alex Cameron: Miami Memory

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-cameron-miami-memory/

Miami Memory

Edgy comedians like to say they’re testing the waters. Alex Cameron wants you to come on in ’cause the water is fine. On his 2014 debut, Jumping the Shark, the Australian rocker masqueraded as an aging, washed-up musician. His 2017 album Forced Witness was a delightful and at times outright offensive journey to the center of the male psyche, full of sleazy, self-congratulatory exploits delivered with one eyebrow arched. Now settled in a long-term relationship with Girls actress Jemima Kirke, Cameron describes his third album, Miami Memory, as a more sincere statement. For the first time in his life, he says, he feels capable of writing a genuine love song. As with most things Alex Cameron, it’s best to take “sincere” with a grain of salt. Several of these songs appear scripted for a dirtbag divorcé; others, like “Gaslight”—“Hear me out, I’m a nice guy”—are clearly tongue in cheek. The most memorable line on the record, “Eating your ass like an oyster,” is more outrageous than romantic. And musically, Miami Memory feels like a stuffy reheat of Forced Witness’ groovy ’80s synth-rock. With the assistance of saxophonist Roy Molloy, that album managed to sound sophisticated no matter how self-evidently terrible its characters. Here, blocky synth structures feel mismatched to the themes, and heavy-handed arrangements sometimes threaten to overwhelm the lyrics. Cameron’s greatest skill is cinematic evocations of pouty, insecure men in stubborn denial of their failings, like Bruce Springsteen trying to get inside the head of Brett Kavanaugh. “I got friends in Kansas City with a motherfuckin’ futon couch/If that’s how you want to play it,” he scoffs on “Divorce,” the voice of a man too mad to recognize that he’s playing himself. Miraculously, the schtick also works outside the sarcastic register. He’s maybe most affecting on “End Is Nigh,” an almost countrypolitan synth ballad about an alcoholic fatalist who’s having a bad time at 12-step meetings: “They remind me of my daddy with that Bible shit/And drinking coffee makes me wanna die more.” You don’t necessarily need firsthand experience with this kind of personal dysfunction; Cameron makes it both painfully real and bleakly comical. When Miami Memory attempts to reach outside the discomfort zone, it’s less convincing. “Far From Born Again” is feel-good disco-funk about a woman who reminds me of Candy, Maggie Gyllenhaal's scrappy, self-made pornographer on HBO’s The Deuce. But while “Far from born again/She’s doing porn again” is excellent as a one-liner, Cameron never reaches in to explore that tension, the way Candy’s relationship with her puritanical mother complicates her success in sex work. Cameron’s narrator is close enough to the action to criticize hypocritical customers—“Same men that tell her stop are the same suckers that pay”—but distant enough that he comes off as a voyeur. The best Alex Cameron songs lift—or rather sink—you into worlds created by deeply flawed characters: On Forced Witness’ “Running Outta Luck,” his misguided antihero fell for a stripper and, blinded by love and jealousy, took off on the run from her other clients. On Miami Memory’s “Bad for the Boys,” he’s singing about the trick rather than doing it: “Good old Dane, what a shame/He got done for a sexual harassment claim … Never thought I’d feel bad for the boys.” You hate to say it, but this could be a far funnier song if oblivious, predatory “Dane” wrote it, and Cameron has the rare ability to illustrate the creeper perspective while simultaneously undermining it. Instead, his last lines—“Guess I don’t feel so bad, feel so bad, feel so bad for the boys”—seem like they were supposed to be the subtext. Perhaps Cameron boxed himself in here: He’s the loudest character in his own music, but he’s also established that it would be out of character for that music to be anywhere near as self-reflective as he is in life. As in the case of Stephen Colbert, it’s hard to drop a winning irony act and remain equally entertaining. It’s easy enough to see why Cameron would like to have it both ways—it’s a lot harder to pull off. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Secretly Canadian

September 26, 2019

fc4349ea-1b2f-40e0-87bc-7c309a426056

Anna Gaca

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

Of MIKE’s four projects last year, War in My Pen is the cleanest-sounding, but the New York rapper still prizes a faraway vibe that rewards close listening.

Of MIKE’s four projects last year, War in My Pen is the cleanest-sounding, but the New York rapper still prizes a faraway vibe that rewards close listening.

MIKE: War in My Pen

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-war-in-my-pen/

War in My Pen

MIKE murmurs more than he flows. The 20-year-old rapper doesn’t mix his vocals high or bury them; he floats, cushioned and suspended, within his music. He has a lot to say, but he doesn’t seem concerned about who hears it. He shares this lack of concern with his friends and compatriots—Medhane, Adé Hakim, Navy Blue, Jazz Jodi, several others. Together, they feel more like a huddle than a movement, a group of introverted, dreamy souls trying to hold on to something intangible that they sense might be pried from them. Notably, one of those friends is Earl Sweatshirt: “I be with Mike and Med/Nowadays I be with Sage and with Six-press, ya dig?” Earl rapped on “Nowhere2go” from November’s Some Rap Songs. Earl doesn’t appear on War in My Pen, MIKE’s fourth projects of 2018, but MIKE’s name was all over Some Rap Songs, and the style they are developing in tandem feels like one complete thought that requires both of them to express. When the sound is this dreamy, and this murky, you don’t really get clear takeaways, but the dazed solitude and determined quiet of MIKE’s music taps into a general sense that there is entirely too much noise; that raising your voice to match it contributes to madness, and that the only reasonable response is to draw inward. Of MIKE’s four projects in 2018, War in My Pen is the cleanest-sounding; the drums pop more clearly but the sounds around them remain buckled, bent, unreal. The production, provided mostly by MIKE under his DJ Blackpower alias, treats samples like distant rumors: On “neverKnocked,” MIKE raps over a faraway horn section, like some lost Philly soul memory beaming in off the stars. “Rottweiler” warps a vocal snippet until it no longer sounds human; “UCR” chops up church organ into gasps and blurts. The loops are so transformed that it’s hard to tell if they actually loop or just slowly degenerate. The sounds move in the same irregular orbit as MIKE’s thoughts and verse structures— by the time the song cuts out, you are only just beginning to discern its shape. MIKE has cited King Krule as an influence on his aesthetic, but you can also hear something of Ariel Pink’s ability to turn comforting sounds into something clammy, alien and strange. MIKE’s voice is soft, but he writes with a quietly snowballing intensity that lends itself to immersion and makes quotation tricky. “Who was really there when the bliss wasn’t?” he asks on “neverKnocked.” It’s a resonant line, but it has a lot more weight coming after “Days where I was really in the crib, hungry/Really ’bout to lick something.” This wholeness, the sense that you can’t pick bits out of his music to use however you want, feels like a conscious decision. Even when the music pulls all the way back and exposes MIKE to center stage, like on the brief, hushed “Smoke,” MIKE raps like he’s obscuring his mouth with a napkin. “I remember what I did for hope,” he says, then his words turn unintelligible again. “Papa told me if I waited, I’d be there alone,” he says, later. The next two lines, static. This catch-and-release game he plays with your ears means that his plainspoken admissions hit harder: “Y’all say I look like my dad/For my mom, that’s a problem,” he deadpans on “Choco.” Few rappers who craft their words as carefully as MIKE display this little regard for their fate in the mix. You have to lean forward, focus hard. Demanding that your audience listen intensely to your music, in a cultural moment when another album is always a single finger twitch away, is its own radical act. As MIKE blurs the line separating sound from sense, dipping in and out of his own productions, he may encourage as many to tune out as to hone in. But that’s the point. If MIKE’s music has a singular overriding concern, it is devotion—to yourself, to friends and to family, devotion to craft. Small circles, dedicated listeners, strong bonds: These are MIKE’s currencies. The longer you spend time with him, the more valuable they seem. Maybe you are your truest self when only the devoted hear you.

2019-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

10k

January 4, 2019

fc5155bd-f656-44f1-a3af-bc21d4dea3a1

Jayson Greene

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

Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus devote their debut record to their singular bond. Each amplifies the other’s songwriting, enriches the detail, and heightens the emotion.

Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus devote their debut record to their singular bond. Each amplifies the other’s songwriting, enriches the detail, and heightens the emotion.

Boygenius: The Record

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boygenius-the-record/

The Record

The steadfast devotion between the women of Boygenius is a subject worthy of a dog-eared literary classic, one that’s passed from friend to friend until the pages come fluttering off the spine. In 2016, Julien Baker spotted Lucy Dacus reading Henry James in the green room of a venue and felt an immediate affinity; the two became friends and developed mutual, unspoken crushes as they wrote each other lengthy correspondences online. A month later, a similar kinship transpired between Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, who traded favorite authors and poets in their own email thread. They were three young singer-songwriters of shrewd sensitivity, tentatively navigating early-career acclaim; “Things were happening for us all at the same time and I think we’ve gravitated to each other,” Baker has said. Cut to 2018, when they got booked together on a triple bill and headed into the studio, thinking they’d record one song. They emerged with six. By all accounts, making that initial Boygenius EP was an ineffable experience, the consequence of which should not be diminished through careless simile: “It was not like falling in love,” Bridgers states. “It was falling in love.” It’s not just that Boygenius poke fun at the degree to which male artists are lionized—in the EP artwork imitating Crosby, Stills, & Nash; their recent recreation of Nirvana’s 1994 Rolling Stone cover; and the new album’s working title contenders like In Rainbows and The White Album. It’s not just that their commitment to making music together pushes against the competitive forces of patriarchy, in the same spirit as women-led supergroups from Wild Flag to the Highwomen. It is that the three women seem to actually love each other, as expressed on their long-awaited debut album, ultimately titled The Record. It’s a kind of love that rejects the ingrained impulse for women to route their emotional, spiritual, and erotic attention away from their peers and toward men—what the feminist poet Adrienne Rich diagnosed in a famous essay—but also troubles the commonly accepted division between romance and friendship. Boygenius are teammates, confidantes, soon-to-be onstage make-out partners; the songs on The Record are largely for each other, about each other, littered with inside references. This time, Dacus, Bridgers, and Baker bring in the best guys in the business: Jay Som’s Melina Duterte on bass, Autolux’s Carla Azar on drums, Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin as engineer, and Catherine Marks on co-production. The Pulitzer-nominated novelist Elif Batuman wrote the introductory essay; Oscar-nominated actress Kristen Stewart directed three Boygenius music videos. Boygenius embrace how we are always responding to and being formed by others, and how this porousness can enrich our lives. As they wonder on the album’s opener, in braided unison: “Who would I be without you, without them?” “With You Without Them” is a kitchen hymn sung under soft morning light; it is a song about history, inheritance, and in that spirit carries on with the swooning folk harmonies last heard on the EP’s closer, “Ketchum, ID.” Dacus, Baker, and Bridgers express gratitude to the preceding generations who shaped the people they love—their father, their father’s mother—and ask to take part in this lineage, sharing storylines until they and their intimates become a kind of family too. “Give me everything you’ve got/I’ll take what I can get,” the trio sings a capella, then reciprocates the request: “I’ll give everything I’ve got/Please take what I can give.” The first four tracks of The Record were written independently, and “With You Without Them” is so evidently by Dacus, a ditty she’d sing while washing dishes; it shares a bloodline with her Historian cut “Pillar of Truth.” Here and elsewhere, her voice provides a warm and sturdy foundation, cradling the others’ like a well-loved rocking chair. Being a touring musician might mean only a brief layover at home, and so the next song drags you out the front door into the Sprinter, Converse laces untied. Led by Baker, the rabble-rousing idealist who was railing against George W. Bush as a 10-year-old, “$20” is a madcap adventure that invokes the spirit of a famous Vietnam protest photo as it tells a story of youthful recklessness. The Tennessee singer taps into her past as a hardcore frontwoman, fulfilling her wish for More Sick Riffs; she also activates a combustive, daredevil streak in her bandmates, who ditch the refined patience of their EP to scream like hell. Later on, the three trade verses on the headbanging “Satanist,” in which they play adrift kids scrounging for shady ecstasy and trying on renegade poses. “Will you be an anarchist with me?/Sleep in cars and kill the bourgeoisie,” Bridgers sings—then a minute later unleashes wails that sound both like the victim trapped in a burning building and the fire engine racing to the rescue. Banter flies while Baker is at the wheel, and at other parts of the ride, it’s like the passengers have lapsed quietly into their own thoughts. Guided by the cashmere fog of Bridgers’ voice, “Revolution 0” and “Emily I’m Sorry” exist less within the Boygenius milieu than the rippling, snow-lined headspace of Punisher; the other band members seem only to enter in the form of graceful backing harmonies. Bridgers alludes to real-life incidents whose details remain obscured, former lovers who occupy an uncertain position in her life. The backdrop to the hushed, crumbling apologia “Emily I’m Sorry” seems to be a defamation lawsuit that strained an already-fraught relationship; Bridgers’ mind wanders to apocryphal wastelands, to Montreal, as she entreats the person she loves to forgive her for going astray. “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am,” she confesses. The closer you get to somebody, the more you can fail them, and The Record recoils with the humiliating reminder of our own insufficiency: Surely, we imagine, they can do better than us. On the skydiving country-pop song “Not Strong Enough,” the trio offers a rejoinder to Sheryl Crow as they profess to lack the toughness, the solidity, to be what another person needs: “I tried, I can’t/Stop staring at the ceiling fan.” It’s a cowardly and relatable strategy, preemptively curbing disappointment by shrinking away. Elsewhere, they wonder whether distance would have been better in the first place. The Simon & Garfunkel redux and album highlight “Cool About It” explores the anxious, conciliatory phase after a breakup when you emerge from a relationship into a wilderness of pleasantries and deceptions. Friendliness is its own agony: “Wishing you were kind enough to be cruel about it,” Baker sings. To be wounded, actually and acutely: this is the price of real intimacy. And real intimacy is what you find on The Record, the melding of what’s yours and mine—a favorite Joan Didion quote, songs by Iron & Wine and the Cure, passages from Ecclesiastes—until what’s left is something greater than the sum. Reimagining the EP standout “Me & My Dog” from a new and wiser vantage point, the album closer “Letter to an Old Poet” is, in one sense, an account of Bridgers moving on from a terrible crush. But it’s also subtle testament to the influence of our friends as we carry on in life. The song alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a Dacus staple, as it seems to actualize a wish in one of her best-known lyrics: “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers/Dedicated to new lovers.” As we evolve into new versions of ourselves, our friends accompany us into the unknown, bearing witness to and taking part in our transformations. They may hurt us sometimes, but it’s worth it; in the end, better than anything is being understood.

2023-03-31T00:03:00.000-04:00

2023-03-31T00:03:00.000-04:00

Rock

Interscope

March 31, 2023

fc617d9a-87c4-46b2-925f-4b4025b04d3a

Cat Zhang

https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/

On his first album under his own name, the artist behind Neon Indian returns with the funniest and most musically accomplished songs of his career.

On his first album under his own name, the artist behind Neon Indian returns with the funniest and most musically accomplished songs of his career.

Alan Palomo: World of Hassle

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alan-palomo-world-of-hassle/

World of Hassle

For Alan Palomo, the past eight years were an education. In the time since 2015’s VEGA INTL. Night School, his shimmering third LP under the Neon Indian moniker, Palomo felt the need to hone his chops. “I realized I was the least technically adept person in my band,” he recounted in a recent interview with Tone Glow. So he became a more accomplished musician, learning to sight-read and digging deeper into international pop music of the 1980s. He arrives anew on World of Hassle, his first album under his own name. Gone are the submerged vocals and nostalgic haze of his chillwave landmarks like 2009’s Psychic Chasms, and in their place is a clearer facsimile of disco, funk, and boogie: ever-present influences that were once buried in the mix. It’s been a long time since the last Palomo record, yes, but it’s because his vision required serious dedication to realize. Opener “The Wailing Mall” announces a vital touchstone: Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man. Across World of Hassle, Palomo writes in a wry, self-aware tone that injects humor into each song, and he occasionally scrapes the lower end of his register for effortlessly cool talk-singing. These tools transform songs like “Nudista Mundial ’89” into convivial party-starters. Finding a goofball compatriot in Mac DeMarco, Palomo describes reveling at a nude beach, folding in cartoonish vocals around a sticky hook. “This ain’t no place/It’s a state of mind,” he sings of their debauchery. Playing the role of hedonistic sleazeball, his commitment to the bit makes the breezy atmosphere irresistible: The dizzying synths and candied falsetto sound like a margarita-infused reverie. In the past, Palomo drenched his vocals in reverb and layers of texture, letting the grooves do the heavy lifting. On World of Hassle, his singing takes center stage alongside his sharpest storytelling to date. On “Big Night of Heartache,” Palomo aims for an economical beachside tearjerker by way of Hiroshi Sato’s 1982 city pop masterpiece Awakening. Amid romantic musical signifiers—seductively bent guitar notes, keyboards that swoop across octaves—he gets unceremoniously dumped, but not without bargaining (“I’ll lose the mustache”). The best city pop can make you feel on top of the world, and Palomo uses its luxurious setting to satirize a manchild in a moment of smallness. “I’m not crying, you’re crying,” he sheepishly retorts to an ex-lover, emasculated and ashamed. World of Hassle is Palomo’s most fun record because it’s his most accomplished. His studied approach is clear on a track like “La Madrileña,” where a loping synth melody bolsters his hypnotic vocal delivery, showcasing his newfound ability to communicate a clear mood. On “Meutrière,” French singer Flore Benguigui’s vocals ooze charm alongside laser-sharp synths, painting a neon-lit noir. World of Hassle abounds with these simple pleasures: The percussive taps in “Stay-at-Home DJ” are delightfully waggish, the saxophone across “Club People” blares with magnetic verve, and the flurrying synths in “The Return of Mickey Milan” accentuate the album’s most memorable chorus. Palomo’s previous albums sounded like the ghosts of ’80s memories. On World of Hassle he offers some unforgettable nights of his own.

2023-09-22T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-09-22T00:02:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Mom+Pop / Transgressive

September 22, 2023

fc7778e7-aa1c-472f-9ef9-95c95d28afe2

Joshua Minsoo Kim

https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/

This shadowy collective’s debut album is as nebulous as its members’ identities. An amorphous mixture of guitars, electronics, and wispy vocals, it mimics the blurriness of a dream.

This shadowy collective’s debut album is as nebulous as its members’ identities. An amorphous mixture of guitars, electronics, and wispy vocals, it mimics the blurriness of a dream.

Princ​€​ss: Princ​€​ss

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

Princ​€​ss

Can you really proclaim yourself a “supergroup” when all your members are anonymous? On Princ​€​ss’ self-titled debut, the mysterious collective teases us with this question. Going purely off their nebulous music, one could start to draw any number of guesses: Could this be the result of a one-off power trio of Tirzah, ML Buch, and Mica Levi? Or a hazy bedroom jam session helmed by Lolina and Astrid Sonne? Perhaps it’s merely a family affair from the label it emerged from, Dublin’s wherethetimegoes, which over a series of low-key releases has documented the myriad experimental sounds germinating across the city. Dabbling in disembodied drill, cloudy laptop pop, shapeless dream folk, and iridescent organ drones, the label has staged a quiet rebellion against its city’s reputation for raucous punk bands and pubs overflowing with Celtic fiddle music vying to appease the tourists. However this enigmatic collaboration came to be, the music itself feels like an amalgamation—a mutant, multi-headed half-band frozen midway through evolution. Chorus-soaked guitars seep into buzzing string drones, while vocalists seem to come and go at their leisure, sometimes appearing so distant in the mix you’ll question if you actually heard them or not. It flows with the blurry logic of a dream, yet Princ​€​ss’ hypnagogia isn’t exactly nocturnal, but shimmering and bright, more a blinding desert mirage than a foggy city street. The claustrophobic, field-recording-like nature of the mixing makes the whole thing sound as if you’re hearing it from inside your phone, yet its disconnected loose ends still give it an expansive quality that billows like a slowly shape-shifting cloud. Though Princ​€​ss occasionally flirt with more traditional song structures, rolling out echoing shoegaze guitars, those chords and vocals feel like just small pieces of the puzzle. Such seemingly song-like forms are eventually overtaken by smaller details: In “Point of View,” it’s a distorted pulse that emerges halfway through, pulling the rest of the track into its digital mulcher. On “Sometimes,” the singer’s sparse vocals and a wilted guitar line sway back and forth until a sighing synthetic tone emerges, washing everything out like an engine releasing steam. Instruments constantly seem to be breaking down; the spindling harp melody of “Hoist Point” practically collapses beneath the overblown sound of a creaking cello, until that too becomes eclipsed by a silvery ticking rhythm like coins clinking together. Rather than tearing itself apart, however, Princ​€​ss’ debut moves with a remarkable, slippery unity. “Crying” opens the record with a heaving, churning mass of strings, while quieter moments like “Wow” draw a peaceful bath of swirling, washed-out synths. It’s hard to pin down much about Princ​€​ss, but their music speaks to a sense of absence. As a “band,” they seem to lie at the very edge of whatever the term might mean these days. Guitars bleed into plastic loops, songs disintegrate into formless electronic dust, and traditional instruments are subsumed into a wall of hypnotic feedback. Princ​€​ss’ debut asks a lot of questions, but in refusing to answer any of them, they instead leave us floating, unresolved, and in between.

2024-03-21T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-03-21T00:01:00.000-04:00

Experimental

wherethetimegoes

March 21, 2024

fc7a34ce-0997-42ad-b593-17f44db418b1

Sam Goldner

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

On his debut mixtape, the Manchester rapper deploys his thick, graceful raps with expert precision. It’s a promising opening statement, crafted with candor, wit, and a slick sense of style.

On his debut mixtape, the Manchester rapper deploys his thick, graceful raps with expert precision. It’s a promising opening statement, crafted with candor, wit, and a slick sense of style.

Meekz: *Respect the Come Up *

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meekz-respect-the-come-up/

Respect the Come Up

Manchester rapper Meekz has a voice like treacle: thick and heavy, with a tang of burnt sweetness. His accent—sculpted in the city’s Gorton district—means he can rhyme “stupidly” with “luckily” and “mumsy” with “comfy.” Meekz seems to be aware of the fact that his voice is compelling, employing it sparingly and deliberately. Since first surfacing in 2018, he’s eschewed ubiquity; rather than churning out a constant stream of singles and social media posts, he’s kept his catalog to a handful of carefully crafted singles that funnel hints of No Limit, Luniz, and G-funk swagger through bottom-heavy production. He makes events of his music videos—rolling tanks across industrial wastelands for “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop;” hanging out of a helicopter above London on “Respect the Come Up”—then retreats, as if his permanently-affixed ski mask isn’t enough to fully conceal him from the world. Respect the Come Up is his first full mixtape, and relatively tight at 10 tracks. It serves as an exacting personal manifesto as much as a public broadcast, one summed up in the spare arrangement, and title, of its opening track:  “Say Less.” For all his introspection, Meekz and his producers make rap in widescreen. The sax on “Hustler’s Ambition” is pure Michael Bay; the Dave-featuring, heavy-flexing “Fresh Out the Bank” boasts strings fit for Steven Spielberg. On “Take Losses,” he channels boxing pay-per-view bluster with Tyson Fury in his corner. Lyrically, he zooms in and out with casual ease, tracing a line between street ennui and the boredom of riches: “It’s sick to imagine all these things that I think in the mansion, going into an Instagram caption,” he offers on “Instagram Caption.” A zig-zag flow makes these reflections sound idle, even as he toes a balance between blunt force and wisecracking. Such is the sheer mass of his voice: It gives a half-baked, half-sung chorus like “I need more money” a gravity it doesn’t deserve. But just as it’s easier to accept that gravity is simply there than it is to explain how it works, Meekz sweeps you along with his candor—and soon offers rewards, turning out pithy, searching lines with disarming nonchalance. The themes here are well-worn, even after less than a dozen tracks. But songs like skippy, guitar-picking highlight “Patience” suggest Meekz can speak for an audience beyond his personal confines too. And when he does, with that voice, you can’t help but listen in.

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

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

Rap

Neighbourhood

December 5, 2022

fc7c254c-8ed2-4789-89f0-3ca820eeda9a

Will Pritchard

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

The duo’s grab-bag approach continues on their third studio album, an 18-track marathon with more good than bad but little of substance.

The duo’s grab-bag approach continues on their third studio album, an 18-track marathon with more good than bad but little of substance.

Audio Push: Cloud 909

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/audio-push-cloud-909/

Cloud 909

For the Southern California rap duo Audio Push, adaptability has been a double-edged sword. Oktane and Price have been in the industry for nearly a decade, and though they’ve been signed and released by Interscope twice since 2009, and have released a dozen mixtapes, two EPs and two studio albums in that time, they remain anonymous to many rap fans. It’s not for lack of talent; more for lack of a stable identity. Since entering the industry, during the Great Jerkin’ Craze of 2009, the Inland Empire natives have tried on so many looks, from aping Tribe to aping Lil Wayne, that it’s become difficult for the casual fan to pick them out of a lineup. They have no trouble keeping up with the times; in fact, their problem is that they blend in too well with whatever’s going on. The duo’s grab-bag approach continues on their third studio album, Cloud 909, an 18-track marathon with more good than bad but little of substance. With its constant toggling between conscious, swag, and street lyricism amid its peaceful, sun-warmed beats, it splits the difference between early Kendrick and current Drake, and loses much of the charisma somewhere in the middle. Oktane and Price are strong rappers, with flexible flows and a gift for beat selection. Their music is polished and professional. But, if you have ten hours to burn, you can listen to the new record ten times over and come out knowing very little about either one of them. That’s partly because whole songs are given over to nonsense. Take “No Bad Days,” for instance, all haze and bass rumble, over which the duo are content to stay firmly within cliché. At least a portion of the album seems to be freestyled: When Price (or is it Oktane?) raps on the latter half of “Update” that he’s going off the dome, it’s a kind of eureka moment, given how little order there was in the verse that came before. And even when the rappers drop a profound line, they switch subjects so swiftly that the seriousness comes to seem like a cheap device. On the opening track, “Clouds,” we learn that in Inland Empire, funerals are so frequent “half of us stopped dressing formal.” But a couple bars later, the fact that kids are listening to Lil Yachty over Biggie is lamented in exactly the same tone. This somewhat flip feeling use of casual violence is also part of a barely legible recurring skit, in which Oktane (or is it Price?) leaves a heated situation to chill with his girl. These poorly acted moments add little to the album and it’s unclear exactly why they exist, other than to give the duo a prompt to rap from, as if they’re conducting a cipher and being offered topical suggestions. The most unintentionally comical of these moments precedes the song “Sanctified,” when the protagonist’s mother calls and leaves a message. “I heard there’s a lot going on in the streets, I need you to come to church to get sanctified,” she says, sounding just unbelievably bored, almost exactly the opposite of the tone you’d expect a worried mother to take. The message leads into this hook: “Pull up with the squad and shit/Looking like Gods and shit/All of that hatin’/I ain’t even bothered with/Everything sanctified.” It’s safe to say that the song doesn’t dwell on the sacraments or otherwise make hay out of its ostensibly religious theme. Some personality peeks through on “Honda,” a frank if somewhat self-righteous ode to financial modesty that’s reminiscent, with its spare guitar beat, of West Coast stalwart Baby Bash. The best song here, “Pump Fake,” opens with Price rapping in double-time over a snappy beat that could have made the first YG album, with its canny combination of gleaming synths, snares and bass. It’s a perfect production cue for the duo—they can ride just about anything, and the more space the beat takes up, the less heavy lifting the lyrics have to do. It’s not unusual for rappers with sharply developed flows to have a similar problem, particularly now that a marketplace that used to be saturated with lyrical lyricists has come to value a variety of other skill sets. Joey Bada$$ had a similar issue when he first emerged: the smoothness of his flow could trick you (and apparently him) into thinking he had more to say than he did. But the New Yorker was 17 when his head-turning first mixtape came out in 2012, about the age that Oktane and Price were when they first got signed. They’ve named two of their three studio albums with the area codes of their hometown, while one mixtape was simply named Inland Empire. This constant reference to where they’re from isn’t reflected by any kind of substantive pride in the music; it feels more like the person who doesn’t know what kind of tattoo to get, so they get copy after copy of their state outline or state flag. There’s nothing wrong with those tattoos, but would you get three of them?

2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Good Vibe Tribe

February 12, 2018

fc7de6de-28de-484e-97af-06ee690923a3

Jonah Bromwich

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

The Philadelphia band Nothing make gentle-sounding, springtime shoegaze with an alt-pop tinge that would seem all at odds with their gritty punk and hardcore pasts—until you listen to the lyrics.

The Philadelphia band Nothing make gentle-sounding, springtime shoegaze with an alt-pop tinge that would seem all at odds with their gritty punk and hardcore pasts—until you listen to the lyrics.

Nothing: Tired of Tomorrow

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21676-tired-of-tomorrow/

Tired of Tomorrow

On the surface, the stories that swirl around the Philadelphia band Nothing feel out of sync with the music on their second album, Tired of Tomorrow. The group’s oft-discussed past includes violence, jail time, and a mob of hardcore guys wanting to beat up singer/guitarist Domenic Palermo. Before forming Nothing, Palermo spent two years in jail for stabbing someone at a show. (Notably, the group's 2014 debut was titled Guilty of Everything). Maybe as a result of the incident, he was jumped this past year in Oakland and suffered brain trauma. Beyond the extracurricular activity, members of Nothing have played in hardcore and punk bands before their current gig—bassist Nick Bassett was in an early incarnation of Deafheaven, then founded Whirr. Nothing’s dark, sarcastic online presence (they’ve beefed with Slowdive, after all), youngish punk fanbase, and current label affiliation are the marks of a more aggressive act. But the music they make is gentle, springtime shoegaze with a '90s alt-pop sensibility. If you weren’t aware of the story around the group, you wouldn’t guess at their gritty past or present. That is, until you start digging. Life doesn’t amount to much on Tired of Tomorrow; the lyrics are filled with existential fear, boredom, anxiety, decomposition, infection, and disease. Life's seen as a nightmare with humans “made of blood and semen/piss and shit.” Elsewhere, people are empty, “useless,” and “sifting through decay.” On “Vertigo Flowers,” named for the dizziness Palermo suffered after being jumped, he angelically sings: “Watch out for those/who dare to say/that everything will be okay/Watch out for those/who want to be/anything at all.” As you may have guessed by now, “Everyone Is Happy” is not about being happy. (Weirdly, “Eaten by Worms” kind of is.) There are some love songs, too, and they don’t end well. On the fuzzed-out, hypnotic “ACD (Abcessive Compulsive Disorder)," which brings to mind Hum, Palermo, in a more romantic mode, sings: “Swallow, corrosive confection/Decay, rotting in your wound/I can, wallow in your filth/I live to” before adding “You know me and you know I am not well…/And I will leave you/With a bad taste in your mouth.” People cry, then glide or get pushed away. But those are just words, and as Palermo would be the first to tell you, words are useless. The guitars, though, are sumptuous, humming, and pure. “Curse of the Sun” sounds like My Bloody Valentine and the Smashing Pumpkins collaborating. Nothing recorded Tired with Will Yip (Title Fight, Braid, Balance and Composure), and he deserves a lot of credit for creating an invitingly deep sound. It’s familiar but new; varied but consistent; full of ambience but sturdy. The guitars are light and pretty but register plenty of muscle. A piano drifts in and away without messing up the flow. In the gorgeously warped, drifting “Nineteen Ninety Heaven,” Palermo intones, hazily, that “life’s a nightmare.” But while these sounds can often feel like outtakes from Siamese Dream with a more depressed and inward vocalist, you’d be wrong to take the bait and call the record a "Siamese Nightmare"—as dark as the lyrics are, it's not shocking or scary. It's more of a sweet reminder. In fact, Tired of Tomorrow has been my go-to warm-weather record, a collection that sounds happy, and more importantly comforting, even when you know, as you always did, that there's no point in going on, but that we all do anyhow.

2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Relapse

May 18, 2016

fc7f0166-1ac2-45c4-ac9b-f6a5106d1a03

Brandon Stosuy

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

On their first album in six years, the post-rock stalwarts bring new urgency to their signature gliding rhythms, jazz-inflected guitar lines, and analog synth tones.

On their first album in six years, the post-rock stalwarts bring new urgency to their signature gliding rhythms, jazz-inflected guitar lines, and analog synth tones.

The Sea and Cake: Any Day

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-sea-and-cake-any-day/

Any Day

The Sea and Cake have been so consistent and so singular for so long that the words “taken for granted” now turn up in their reviews as much as “Chicago” or “post-rock.” Their albums do seem to blur together, with each record subjecting the band’s signature components—John McEntire’s gliding rhythms, Archer Prewitt’s jazz-inflected guitar lines, and analog synth tones warmer than a wool sweater—to slight shifts in texture, personnel or backing instruments. But the overall quality of their discography makes a strong argument against the idea that artists must amass a canon of releases that build upon each other in linear fashion. Like a prescription refill, a new Sea and Cake album offers a fresh dose of the same soothing medicine. But there’s a new urgency to their 11th full-length, Any Day, which comes after a six-year absence. Continuing the Sea and Cake’s tradition of instantly immersive album openers, “Cover the Mountain” springs into action as though the long-dormant band has just been zapped by a defibrillator. Sam Prekop cuts immediately to the swooning chorus as McEntire locks into a brisk, galloping beat. That momentum carries them into “I Should Care,” an equally dazzling follow up whose jangly riff and gently stomping backbeat are as close as this band has ever gotten to ’70s power pop. The Sea and Cake’s post-millennial releases often saw them embedding electronic production tics into their songcraft—to the point where latter-day singles like “Weekend” and “Harps” could almost pass for Cut Copy festival jams. Any Day strips away many of those flourishes. During the band’s extended absence, they parted ways with longtime bassist Eric Claridge, and while the multitalented McEntire subbed in for him in the studio (with McEntire’s fellow Tortoise compadre Doug McCombs taking over for live shows), they’ve also filled out the space in their sound with more naturalistic elements. The title track’s breezy bossa nova gradually cascades into a quiet storm, thanks to some subtly powerful flute and clarinet work from Brian Wilson associate Paul Von Mertens. The nocturnal near-instrumental “Paper Window” forges a different sort of Beach Boys connection as it blossoms into a loopy psychedelic pastorale with wordless harmonies that suggest a post-rock Pet Sounds. “These Falling Arms” is the sort of lovely, acoustic number that might have soundtracked a slow dance at an Enchantment Under the Sea-themed prom in 1963. With Sam Prekop on vocals, though, a Sea and Cake album is genetically incapable of sounding like anything other than a Sea and Cake album. His distinctive, soulful sighs are forever the warm breaths spreading and receding across the music’s glassy surface, unmistakable and ephemeral all the same. Even as the band locks into familiar motorik grooves on “Starling” and “Circle,” Prekop’s elliptical lyrics, at once intensely intimate and deliberately evasive, keep the songs from settling into a soft-rock cul de sac. “I don’t know what clarity/Feels without setting free,” he sings on the latter track. It’s a suitably cryptic line that nonetheless perfectly summarizes the Sea and Cake’s long history—an eternal glide toward the haziest of horizons.

2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Thrill Jockey

May 12, 2018

fc89acb7-6843-44a2-8176-374346ccdfba

Stuart Berman

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

André Bratten explores the same depopulated yet emotive spans of synths, drums, and bass as his Norwegian post-disco peers, but also distinguishes himself with an ominous atmosphere and darker hues. At six tracks, his Math Ilium Ion looks like an EP, but its half-hour length and lack of filler makes it feel like an LP.

André Bratten explores the same depopulated yet emotive spans of synths, drums, and bass as his Norwegian post-disco peers, but also distinguishes himself with an ominous atmosphere and darker hues. At six tracks, his Math Ilium Ion looks like an EP, but its half-hour length and lack of filler makes it feel like an LP.

André Bratten: Math Ilium Ion EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20634-math-ilium-ion-ep/

Math Ilium Ion EP

André Bratten explores the same depopulated yet emotive spans of synths, drums, and bass as his Norwegian post-disco peers. But he also distinguishes himself with a sound you might peg as Teutonic before Scandinavian. While the likes of Prins Thomas and diskJokke range over earth and space, none cover precisely the furrowed, cratered landscape Bratten claims. Featuring dark hues and rough crags, it inspires visions of low, ore-spined mountains. In an Oslo-producer family portrait, you'd imagine Bratten as the lurking one, in the black ribbed turtleneck, looking on severely as porn-mustached Todd Terje makes bunny ears behind Lindstrøm's bucket cap. At six tracks, Math Ilium Ion looks like an EP, but its half-hour length and lack of filler makes it feel like an LP. Bratten consistently cultivates ominous tension, even as he instills a certain measure of stubborn optimism, pressing corroded frequenices into diamond-hard melodies. He avoids clear-cut builds and releases, laying parts with their own internal tension in rows and letting their ripple mete out catharsis. This is especially clear on "Trommer & Bass", where heavy basses and scissoring percussion seem to strike at a stationary target, with relentless assassin-like accuracy, for almost five minutes, until the hammering finally drops and glides. Bratten's music has a monstrous mechanical movement, but his tuned toms and chattering patterns are offset with live-feeling accents that rattle in the grid, giving the sense of someone striking a head in real space. The music feels wonderfully self-generative, as if willing itself into being. With its controlled speaker fry and choked-out melody, album highlight "Yours Sincerely, Andre Bratten" ingeniously un-crumbles together. Bratten's sounds don't just lurch in; they take shape before our ears. You can picture him slowly turning knobs to tame each wild tone into the groove, which is never far away, even when it decays into textured abstractions that keep alertly pushing it forward. Though many passages of Math Ilium Ion are highly kinetic, only "Trommer & Bass" is ready for the floor. The record's games with time are clearly built with the listener in mind. "The Little Things, Fools and Kings" opens with a terrific little near-catastrophe. Many tiny elements seem to accelerate in at different rates but arrive simultaneously at the same place, to be promptly drawn taut with one oozing lump of saw waves. By the time we get to the two "Misconception" tracks, mutated rave overtones have subsided into something more like ambient house, deep and broad and full of subtle activity. Since we are fully immersed, it's welcome. The only thing even slightly bothersome about Bratten is that sometimes he doesn’t quite nail the landings, which is strange since he takes so much care until then. The abrupt endings of several tracks are startling after all the subtle permutation we've been through, and a little unsatisfying. But that minor complaint really means that, when so much similar music is available, it's easy to stay invested in these long tracks all the way to the end. When the next groove is always one antsy keystroke away, that's saying something for Bratten.

2015-06-03T02:00:04.000-04:00

2015-06-03T02:00:04.000-04:00

Electronic

Smalltown Supersound

June 3, 2015

fc8aa2d2-eeb9-4e6e-abc2-0824e00ea080

Brian Howe

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

On a debut EP that occupies a space between the cathartic stadium pop of fun. and the vulnerability of Lorde, the young singer-producer offers the kind of love songs generations of queer kids craved.

On a debut EP that occupies a space between the cathartic stadium pop of fun. and the vulnerability of Lorde, the young singer-producer offers the kind of love songs generations of queer kids craved.

King Princess: Make My Bed EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-princess-make-my-bed-ep/

Make My Bed EP

King Princess’ breakout single, “1950,” is about as close to perfect as a pop song can get. Like Lorde’s “Royals” or Mapei’s almost-hit “Don’t Wait,” it accomplishes a lot with a little: Sparse 808 drums, sentimental piano, and hazy guitars bubble as they build to a timeless torch-song chorus. “I’ll wait for you, I’ll pray/I will keep on waiting for your love,” the 19-year-old singer and producer promises. Effortless, infectious, and anthemic, it’s a track designed to launch a career. Instead of attempting to recapture the magic of “1950,” the four other full-length songs on King Princess’ self-produced debut EP, Make My Bed, build out the world it creates. Signed to Mark Ronson’s new Zelig Recordings, the artist known offstage as Mikaela Straus writes love songs that are as self-aware and sardonic as they are pleadingly authentic. True to the dramatic emotional landscape of late adolescence and early adulthood, Make My Bed alternates between overwrought emotion and unbothered disaffection, love and loneliness, pride and sheepishness. Straus’ music is the natural descendant of the left-of-center pop that has ruled the airwaves since she was in junior high; King Princess occupies the sparkling, melodramatic space between the cathartic stadium pop of fun. and the bare-all vulnerability of Lorde. Those artists succeeded because they knew how to speak to their audiences, nailing the skyscraper highs and ocean-floor lows of teens’ emotional lives. But being a teenager now is different from being a teenager even five years ago. Straus proudly identifies as a lesbian, and she’s conscious of the political and cultural significance of using feminine pronouns to identify the objects of her affections in her songs. She cleverly frames the unrequited love at the core of “1950” as an homage to how, as she puts it, “queer love was only able to exist privately for a long time, expressed in society through coded art forms.” At a time when artists like serpentwithfeet and Lotic are expressing radical queerness by getting as far away from pop’s rigid boundaries as possible, it’s a stretch to equate Straus’ work with the protest music of the ’60s, as she did in a recent interview. Yet it packs its own kind of punch. Throughout Make My Bed, queer desire isn’t a focal point so much as a given: Like Troye Sivan, Straus’ palpable comfort with her sexuality is what makes her work transgressive. “Talia” is the kind of single past generations of queer kids longed for. Backed by hums and soft snaps, Straus bares her soul: “You’ve walked out a hundred times, how was I/Supposed to know this time that you wouldn’t call/That you wouldn’t come home,” she sings, her throaty vocals cracking with emotion. Although it’s awkwardly stapled on to the verse, the chorus soars to the same heights of romantic longing as the songs that end John Hughes movies, complete with Jack Antonoff-level power chords and pounding synth drums. Straus reveals a wicked sense of humor on the washed-out “Upper West Side,” dismissing a rich girl as “another bitch from the Upper West Side,” before arriving at a pre-chorus that captures the cognitive dissonance of an Instagram crush: “I can’t stop judging everything you do/But I can’t get enough of you.” Straus often layers her vocals with harmonic effects that recall Imogen Heap, and the result suggests a singer shyly peeking out from behind a curtain. It’s a tool, and sometimes a detriment. “Upper West Side” would have benefitted from some moments of vulnerability, but she relies on a chorus of muted “oohs” and “ahhs” to convey that feeling. Being yourself in public is scary, especially as a queer 19-year-old trying to launch a pop career, but Straus seems up to the challenge. This early on, it’s easy to see why she might be more comfortable hiding behind the boards. But, for all her talent as a producer, she’s at her best when she sings with the courage of a soldier rushing into battle, speaking frankly about the sometimes frightening, sometimes joyful, never-ending process of growing up.

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

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

Pop/R&B

Zelig Records

June 18, 2018

fc8c3f35-6844-4cbe-954b-18b44106c4de

Jackson Howard

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

The UK producer’s second album sounds more ready for the club but features the same neon, wistful, song-centric style of his debut.

The UK producer’s second album sounds more ready for the club but features the same neon, wistful, song-centric style of his debut.

George FitzGerald: All That Must Be

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-fitzgerald-all-that-must-be/

All That Must Be

The narrative around George FitzGerald’s 2015 debut Fading Love described a dance-music insider turning his back on the form. It had all the makings of a “Judas!” moment. The UK producer had gone from club-centric labels (Scuba’s Hotflush, Will Saul’s Aus) to an imprint of Domino, a fixture of the indie establishment. He’d softened his sound and traded breakdowns and build-ups for more songlike arrangements. He even admitted to Resident Advisor that he was tired of club culture and the DJ life. But if any fans did gripe about FitzGerald selling out, that would have been some truly narcissism-of-small-differences kvetching, because really, the album barely broke from his earlier work. His earliest productions leavened peak-time club fare with pastel colors and pneumatic volume, and as Fading Love moved away from the dancefloor, it doubled down on super-saturated chord stabs, wordless vocal loops, and other emotive tropes, painting a wall-to-wall picture of wistfulness. The tempos tended to be slower than before, and the track lengths shorter, without the DJ-friendly intros and outros of a 12" release. But in sound and mood, the album slotted comfortably into a long tradition of dance music made for home stereos, borrowing bits from Moderat, Jon Hopkins, Four Tet, and innumerable other artists whose reach stretches from the club to the sofa and back. It was a canny strategy: Four of the album’s 10 songs have each racked up more than a million plays on Spotify, and “Full Circle,” the album’s melancholy highlight, has more than 12 million plays—the kind of number that’s nearly unthinkable for an artist coming from his corner of the dance scene. So you can hardly blame him for sticking with that direction on All That Must Be, his second album, in which overflows with yearning. If anything, the new record inches ever so slightly back toward the dancefloor: its beats lie within house music’s typical tempo range, he’s stretched out his track lengths a bit, and the basslines feel more forceful, as though FitzGerald were writing in anticipation of how his tracks will sound on club sound systems. FitzGerald has often built his music around the snippets of voice that became ubiquitous right around the time of UK bass producer Joy Orbison’s “Hyph Mngo,” and on the last album, he began working with actual singers; two tracks on the new album—“Roll Back,” featuring the dovelike falsetto of the UK funky musician Lil Silva, and “Half-Life (Night Version),” with Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn—are the closest things to “proper” songs that he’s ever written. Even when he’s not working with singers, he tends to tie on wordless vocal strips as though they were satin ribbons, a technique that helps infuse his music with warmth. The choppy vowels of both “Burns” and “The Echo Forgets” sound directly descended from the hiccupping through-line of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” But FitzGerald hasn’t quite figured out how to get the best out of his singers yet. Thorn has one of the most distinctive voices in the business, yet on “Half-Life,” he pours on sticky-sweet synths until it sounds like she’s drowning in a honey whirlpool. And while he may nod toward song form, FitzGerald doesn’t really do verse/chorus structures: Just like his club tracks, his songs here are created by adding and subtracting layers around a beat and a bassline. That repetitive focus may lend a certain hypnotic power—in the best tracks, you feel like you’re traveling through a long, neon-lit tunnel—but it also means there are few melodic or harmonic surprises. In track after track, cycling chords encircle wistful ostinato leads, shifting between tension and release as predictably as the tide. All That Must Be feels more cohesive than his debut, but its songs also tend to blur together. The opening “Two Moons Under” and then “Frieda,” which follows, are in complementary keys, paced at nearly the same tempo, and share virtually identical elements, which continue to turn up in track after track: rumbling bass synths, muted pads, and swirls of arpeggio, all held together by those rose-tinted wisps of breath. Taking a cue from Boards of Canada, the synths are constantly slipping out of tune, as though they’d been recorded on a haywire tape recorder. But instead of conferring character, the omnipresent warble ends up sounding forced, like an Instagram feed over-reliant on filters that mimic vintage film cameras. It all adds up to a mood that can be frustratingly one-note. All that wistfulness feels like something pasted on, rather than something earned. FitzGerald would be the first to admit that his tastes gravitate toward melancholy: One of his early tracks was titled “Fernweh,” a hard-to-translate German word that denotes the longing for far-off places. But All That Must Be doesn’t quite live up to its own heartstring-tugging goals; too often, it’s just kind of comfortably glum.

2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Domino

March 20, 2018

fc9900bc-19e2-4af2-9c52-519da4dd664e

Philip Sherburne

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

The UK rapper’s first album since his disastrous appearance at last year’s NME Awards is split between welcome introspection and all-caps boasting. It’s a refreshingly candid self-assessment.

The UK rapper’s first album since his disastrous appearance at last year’s NME Awards is split between welcome introspection and all-caps boasting. It’s a refreshingly candid self-assessment.

Slowthai: TYRON

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slowthai-tyron/

TYRON

On February 12 last year, it felt like slowthai’s world was falling apart. The Northampton rapper had toasted a raft of nominations at the NME Awards and picked up a bird-flipping trophy as “Hero of the Year.” But a bad joke taken too far meant the night ended in disaster. His lewd interactions with the show’s host, comedian Katherine Ryan, and a later altercation with a member of the audience—after which slowthai was escorted from the venue—made for grim viewing as video clips circulated online, stripped of context. The condemnation that followed was widespread and immediate, his career hoisted onto a pyre erected by furious social media users. As hangovers go, the one he woke up to the next day would be monumental. He issued an apology and received vocal support from Ryan. He returned the “Hero” award, asking that it be forwarded to her. She reminded him that “a bad day on social media passes so quickly.” But a year in lockdown offers plenty of time to sit with your thoughts. Though the February 12 release date is a coincidence—pandemic-induced delays pushed it back by a week—it’s hard not to see some significance in TYRON arriving exactly a year to the day since slowthai’s reckoning. While slowthai’s debut, Nothing Great About Britain, had focused his punkish energy and confirmed him as a righteous voice for a forgotten generation, his gaze turns inward on TYRON, adopting his lyric book as a diary once again. The album is split into two halves of seven tracks each: the first half spelled out in caps lock, with all its implied yelling, and the lower-case second half providing softer moments, with a bed of pop samples and gentle guitar licks beneath slowthai’s spittle-flecked reflections. Four of these second-half tracks were recorded in 2019 and the first months of 2020, while the bulk of the first half was recorded after the disastrous awards show, and the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. As repudiations of so-called cancel culture go, “CANCELLED,” featuring Skepta, is among the more ham-fisted. While slowthai at least injects a bit of humor with tongue-in-cheek rhymes of “Harry Potter,” “lobster,” and “vodka,” Skepta’s rigid, boastful chorus (“How you gonna cancel me?/Twenty awards on the mantlepiece/Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury”) only emphasizes the joys of the mute button. “VEX,” “WOT,” and “DEAD,” on the other hand, beg for repeat plays. Here, slowthai is at his cocksure best, weaving around the beat as if it were there for his amusement only. He snarls back at the baying crowd over Kwes Darko’s zappy instrumentals with the same mischievous vim that made early tracks like “T N Biscuits” so inviting. The album’s bisected structure could be risky in terms of pacing, but the track that forms the pivot point—the cool, confessional “PLAY WITH FIRE”—strikes a deft balance. It channels Dizzee Rascal’s contemplative “Brand New Day” and bristles with witty one-liners (“I’m the next best thing since electric”) and adroit social commentary. The song itself is split in half, and ends with slowthai in dialogue with himself: “Fuck all these expectations/My heart and mind are at war, my soul’s out here playing piggy in the middle/Why do I feel like I’m holding the short straw?” His moment of self-reflection amounts to one of the album’s most revealing passages. slowthai’s dexterous, free-flowing lyricism provides the foundation of the album’s second half. “focus” is the most casual raised middle finger imaginable: Every second line is quotable, but delivered with the blasé attitude of a kid answering roll call at school. On “terms” he turns stereotypical rap boasts to weighty introspection with a mix of defiance and resignation. A couple of wafty moments—the soft anchor drop of “push”; rap lullaby “feel away”—slip by, overshadowed by two adjacent album highlights: “nhs” and “adhd.” The former, dedicated to the UK’s beloved but beleaguered National Health Service, glides between silly and serious, profound and trite, all hung together with a hooky looping chorus. “adhd,” meanwhile, encapsulates the tussle at TYRON’s core. Listen with a pair of headphones and you’ll feel like slowthai’s pacing on your shoulder, pouring himself into your ears, the coiled-up tension finally loosed as he spits, “Living and I’m dead/Caught in Charlotte’s Web/I can’t feel myself/Mind complexity/Be the death of me.” In directing his anger inward, slowthai loses some of the urgency and incisiveness that made his debut so compelling, along with the contrast that made that album’s vulnerable moments so striking. But he’s undoubtedly honed his craft, sounding slicker as he retreats from placard rap to the journaling process that got him started in the first place. TYRON’s split setup is a blunt way of showing that there’s more than one side to any person—and any story—and it works, in this instance, as a route towards a more nuanced self-portrait: one that’s honest about slowthai’s flaws, and his frustrations. 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.

2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Method / AWGE / Interscope

February 15, 2021

fca6883b-839f-4f54-a88b-3afb45f702cd

Will Pritchard

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

The triple album from Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee is their clearest personal statement yet, a shining triptych of what it looks like to be young, black, and euphoric.

The triple album from Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee is their clearest personal statement yet, a shining triptych of what it looks like to be young, black, and euphoric.

Rae Sremmurd / Swae Lee / Slim Jxmmi: SR3MM

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rae-sremmurd-swae-lee-slim-jxmmi-sr3mm/

SR3MM

Rae Sremmurd were not seen as masters of their own universe until “Black Beatles,” a song whose very premise expanded a longstanding reclamation project: Rappers are the new rock stars. The Brown brothers—Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee—have been trying to prove themselves serious artists to naysayers for years now, defending rap as serious art in the process. SR3MM has a song called “Rock N Roll Hall of Fame,” a continuation of “Black Beatles” that takes their rockstar evolution a step further, claiming the duo as entrants into the canon. “We’re the ones in charge now, who are y’all?” Lee asks, not waiting for an answer. On SR3MM and the two solo records packaged with it—Swaecation and Jxmtro—Swae and Jxmmi not only place their partying ethos in the rock-star lineage but lobby to earn the same kind of respect as artists deemed “classic rock.” In shooting that gap, SR3MM ends up being their clearest personal statement yet, finding their voices almost coincidentally. And let’s face it, few things are more rock’n’roll than releasing a triple album. Rae Sremmurd have built a reputation as one of rap’s foremost purveyors of bacchanalian splendor, a cartoonish duo living out fame in real time through their raps. Everything on their three new albums is still in service of having (and sustaining) a good time, but there are different destinations in mind: SR3MM is an all-inclusive celebration of success and excess, the full embrace of stardom, its perks and its provisions; Swaecation is a top-down California cruise into a romantic waterfront sojourn; Jxmtro is a stoned reflection mid-lapdance. Together they create a wondrous, shining triptych of what it looks like to be young, black, and euphoric. It’s tempting to compare SR3MM to OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double album in which a dichotomous rap duo separated into solo stars, exploring their respective visions while still in conversation with one another. But as Swae recently pointed out, he and his brother deepen their bond here, as opposed to unyoking: “We going three-sided. [OutKast] didn’t come together. We got to come together—we’re brothers.” And the brotherly love story isn’t just hype because SR3MM feels even more like an act of unity: not even going solo can truly divide them. The Rae Sremmurd portion of the triple album, SR3MM, with its largely off-kilter and metallic productions overseen and co-produced by Ear Drummers architect Mike WiLL Made-It, feels like a riff on the weirder moments from 2016’s SremmLife 2. It expands their catalog of oddball romps while mining the past (“Powerglide”) and envisioning an alternate rap future (“Perplexing Pegasus”). It’s a different kind of party, because the songs don’t bang so much as strobe. Where previous tracks like “Throw Sum Mo” and “Come Get Her” were club-ready trap hits, few of these songs are meant to scan in that same way. In the spirit of “Black Beatles,” these are attempts to warp the sound of rap radio. On SR3MM songs like “Rock N Roll Hall of Fame” and the Travis Scott-assisted “CLOSE,” Jxmmi and Swae get even stranger, finding more confidence as a team and achieving near-perfect balance between their two styles. SR3MM is the strongest of the three albums, further proving that the pair work best as a unit, but Swaecation and Jxmtro provide an opportunity for the brothers to stretch out and explore their impulses. Jxmmi has often been pegged as the conservative one and Swae the ambitious one, but it’s more that Jxmmi’s strength is spinning sublimity out of simplicity. When seeing their visions through, this comes to the fore: Jxmmi emerges as a snappy songwriter, and Swae burrows deeper into melody than ever before, transforming from rapper to full-on balladeer. As a newly minted heartthrob, Swae leans into the elegance of his vocals. Swaecation is about living fast and finding romance in sun-soaked spots, getting wine-drunk and opening up your heart to a fling. There is sex in Maybachs and missed connections on exotic getaways. Only rarely does he find the high of his hit with French Montana, the chart-storming “Unforgettable”—”Guatemala,” which tries somewhat desperately to replicate it, is tourist-resort dancehall—but he settles nicely into his range throughout. On “Offshore,” his stunning duet with Young Thug, he is pushed to his limits, as Thug raps, “I’ll slap the shit out Donald Trump any day” in a verse that also contains illustrative flexes like “Bentley on the side and it’s sittin’ on LeBron James.” While Swae’s blend of pop, R&B, and dancehall is more daring, Jxmmi’s Jxmtro is more consistent and reveals more of himself as an artist and person. As the more introverted (and less celebrated) of the two brothers, Jxmmi uses his opportunity to rap with fluidity, putting his ideas first for a change, rapping about growing up, outgrowing friends, and prioritizing as on “Keep God First.” He has grown into a full-fledged co-star, weaving together uncomplicated gems like, “I pay my tithes when I fuck with the strippers,” or, “I’ma stack up the cake like Obama told me.” He seems less concerned with selling himself than he is simply being himself. His casual swaggering gets played up by a rapping Zoe Kravitz on “Anti-Social Smokers Club.” When Swae rejoins him and Pharrell for “Chanel,” the song still seems focused on Jxmmi, effortlessly comfortable in the spotlight. Charmingly, Swae Lee used “Dragon Ball Z” to make sense of Rae Sremmurd’s arrangement on SR3MM: Each brother exists as a formidable artist in their own right, but they are strongest when they form a whole. They have never been apart from one another for longer than two months in their entire lives, and SR3MM is designed to facilitate that relationship, showing who the members of Rae Sremmurd really are, and who they’d like to be. They’re rock stars for the modern age trying to bend the sound of radio to their whims. Even when one takes center stage, the other is always close by.

2018-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

May 8, 2018

fcb40884-052c-47d8-b328-f4096056b4d4

Sheldon Pearce

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

Both creepy and cozy, the Pennsylvania singer-songwriter’s original score amplifies the melancholic beauty that hovers at the edges of director Jane Schoenbrun’s deeply online horror.

Both creepy and cozy, the Pennsylvania singer-songwriter’s original score amplifies the melancholic beauty that hovers at the edges of director Jane Schoenbrun’s deeply online horror.

Alex G: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-g-were-all-going-to-the-worlds-fair-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the debut film from director Jane Schoenbrun, the internet is both a safe haven for expression and a terrifying realm of artificiality. The plot follows Casey, a lonely teenager who immerses herself in a horror role-playing game called the World’s Fair Challenge and begins to upload progressively eerier videos of herself online. Soon, she draws the attention of an older man. As their uneasy relationship grows over Skype calls that teeter between fact and fiction, the fragmented narrative shifts from creepypasta horror to drifting mumblecore to harrowing drama, intimately exploring the way self-identity is both established and ruptured online. In World’s Fair, even the loading time between clips in an endless YouTube autoplay stream comes loaded with atmospheric dread. Schoenbrun’s film is highly attuned to sound: clacking keyboards, the beeping timer on a Photo Booth recording, and gentle, sleep-inducing ASMR help establish World’s Fair’s deeply online mood. Schoenbrun also listened to the music of Alex Giannascoli, aka Alex G, while writing the script, and eventually they recruited the Philadelphia songwriter to compose an original score. Giannascoli is a natural fit, an enigmatic artist whose impressionistic lyrics and scuffed indie rock taps into the same suburban ennui that Schoenbrun captures in World’s Fair. Strip malls, empty parking lots, and dirty snow banks make the setting of the film chillingly universal; Giannascoli’s homespun music amplifies the melancholic beauty that hovers at the edges of those haunted scenes. To bridge the gap between Casey’s quiet home life and unsettling discoveries on the internet, Giannascoli’s songs vacillate between gentle passages of acoustic guitar and strings and more abrasive, digital instrumentals. On “Stitch,” Giannascoli stretches a glacial synth line to its limit, letting it grow uneasily until shrieking distortion interrupts; it’s as uncomfortable as the scene of body horror it soundtracks, in which a man pulls a string of admission tickets out of a sore in his arm. The seven-minute highlight “Casey’s Walk” embraces ambiance, with formless, sullen tones punctuated by blaring synths that echo and then settle back down, simulating Casey’s closed-off existence while hinting at the turbulent personality lurking beneath the surface. “Main Theme” evokes burnt-out shoegaze, using a wistful guitar melody, fuzzy pitch-shifting, and chanted, barely comprehensible vocals that recur at crucial moments in the film. Giannascoli’s decidedly lo-fi, close-mic’d music might seem a strange choice for a film so thematically and aesthetically trained on the internet, but his fusion of acoustic and digital instrumentation helps ground the humanity of Schoenbrun’s plot and characters. That’s not to say the World’s Fair score doesn’t work on its own merits, even if it may scan as an errant side project for diehard Alex G fans. On “End Song,” which foregrounds Giannascoli’s vocals, he captures the murky danger at the film’s core with characteristically elliptical lyrics: “I tumble through my day/A fish in mud/A scarecrow full of blood,” he murmurs softly over a lone guitar, leaning into depersonalization to deepen the sense of isolation. “You know what they do to little dogs like you.” Then, halfway through, the song brightens up with an ascendant chord progression and beating drums, working its way to finish on a bittersweetly hopeful note. As Casey delves further and further into unreality, Giannascoli’s music and imagery linger like the vivid imprint of a nightmare.

2022-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Milan

April 19, 2022

fcc9f921-89c5-4726-b401-fe56265c1d8f

Eric Torres

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

Recording in Chicago with Steve Albini at the controls, Ben Frost unleashes volleys of brutalizing electronic sound as an allegory for the grim state of the world.

Recording in Chicago with Steve Albini at the controls, Ben Frost unleashes volleys of brutalizing electronic sound as an allegory for the grim state of the world.

Ben Frost: The Centre Cannot Hold

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-frost-the-centre-cannot-hold/

The Centre Cannot Hold

In June 2010, when Ben Frost announced his year-long mentorship with Brian Eno, the match-up may have appeared curious. Following a stint with Coldplay and a gospel album with David Byrne, Eno had recently co-produced U2’s latest comeback album and scored Peter Jackson’s supernatural drama The Lovely Bones. Frost’s newest works, on the other hand, were electroacoustic pieces made with the sounds of frying bacon, Swedish metal bands, orca whales, and new music composer Nico Muhly. By the Throat, Frost’s ferocious 2009 breakout album, positioned him more as a sonic thrill seeker than an artist interested in Eno’s kind of palatable brilliance. But there was some common ground. Eno’s experiments with tape loops, samples, and generative systems offered parallels with the field recordings and software Frost employed to extreme degrees. On a deeper level, the two shared a holistic and procedural approach to art. Reflecting on his time with Eno in a 2011 interview, Frost said, “It’s just been about occupying one another’s space.” No joint music ever came of that project, nor were any performances or exhibits planned. In fact, the only material produced in direct relation to the partnership was a small collection of photos, interviews, and videos. But the ensuing years have consistently been the most fruitful and interesting of Frost’s career. The Australian-born, Reykjavík-based artist developed from a gifted producer revered in underground electronic circles into a widely prolific polymath. Between 2011 and 2015, he wrote music for multiple dance performances, co-produced a video-game soundtrack, directed and composed his first opera, and scored a film and a TV series. He also contributed to the music of everyone from fellow audio deconstructionist Tim Hecker to avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson and the inimitable Swans. In 2014, he released the official follow-up to By the Throat, the intensely immersive A U R O R A. The album was yet another huge leap forward for Frost, galvanizing his brutal sound design with the physicality of live drums and the brashness of rave aesthetics. Political and social climates have drastically shifted since 2011, and so has Frost’s artistic focus. Following a trip to Democratic Republic of the Congo, recording sound for a video installation by filmmaker and photographer Richard Mosse, Frost has continued to explore the effects of war across the globe. Frost and Mosse were embedded along with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier sending warplanes to bomb ISIS, interviewing its crew and documenting the experience. Early this year, the three collaborated on the video installation Incoming, which presented the refugee crisis in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East through the lens of a military-grade, thermal imaging camera. Around the time of his mentorship with Eno, Frost called his work “the result of absorption via osmosis.” For all that’s changed since then, this part of his creative process has only become more vital in the years leading up to his fifth studio album, The Centre Cannot Hold. Whereas previous records were either global affairs or written wherever Frost was living at the time (Australia, Iceland), he recorded the entirety of The Centre Cannot Hold with Steve Albini at the latter’s storied Electrical Audio studio. Tucked away in that nondescript corner of Chicago’s North Side, the two spent 10 days in the summer of 2016 dedicating spartan live performances to tape. The first sound heard in the opening track, “Threshold of Faith,” is a marker: Albini calmly saying, “You are rolling,” before seconds of hiss-addled silence swell with expectation. It’s an introduction to this music’s unvarnished reality. An artist most interested in the tactile properties of sound, Frost has traded the tangible, surreal instrumentation of his previous work for the sense of a specific place—its reverberating walls and the context around them. He starts The Centre Cannot Hold by placing the listener there next to him, and then he rains down fury. But this rage isn’t blind, nor is it unwarranted. Where the music may lack the immediate punch of A U R O R A or the outré impulses of By the Throat, Centre nurtures a more deliberately emotional core. In the angriest moments, such as “Entropy in Blue,” blasted bass frequencies hit like thunder claps and leave blazing noise in their wake. The buzzing, chaotic “Trauma Theory” uses sounds like helicopters and alarms to fashion its oppressive anxiety. For each acrimonious stretch, Frost tempers his volatility with relative calm, albeit charged with sadness or desolation. The dark, wavering synths of “Ionia” recall the dreamlike pain that girded the Knife’s Silent Shout, as does the windswept “Healthcare.” At its best, Centre merges its emotional counterweights into a seething, howling whole. These pieces, including the centerpiece “Eurydice’s Heel,” are downright awe-inspiring, like witnessing firsthand an apocalyptic barrage fall from the heavens. If the outtakes and alternate versions on Frost’s previous EP, Threshold of Faith, sounded more like a flashy but sometimes aimless soundtrack, Centre recasts those ideas with a resonant sense of mortality, bringing the music into full, vivid relief. Taking its title from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” Centre establishes itself as an allegory for the grim state of our world. Yet, with its ambiguous references and flurries of mangled emotion, the album’s air of protest feels largely abstract, albeit impassioned. Frost does point the finger once: “A Single Hellfire Missile Costs $100,000.” Named after what’s lovingly called “one of America’s favorite missiles,” the twinkling, almost childlike track is 12 seconds long, or what could also be a missile’s flight time after launch at close range. Its miniature leitmotif returns to punctuate “All That You Love Will Be Eviscerated,” as if to highlight the cause of the titular cataclysm. “Hellfire” echoes the time Frost spent aboard a nuclear-powered warship in 2015, where he captured the dread and dissonance of organized destruction. Centre could be categorized as Frost’s first distinctly American record, and it’s a frightening, prophetic portrait that commands undivided attention.

2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic / Experimental

Mute

September 29, 2017

fccb0109-a95e-4f0f-b092-aaf8f780e734

Patric Fallon

https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/

Band's first four albums are given expanded reissues.

Band's first four albums are given expanded reissues.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: From Her to Eternity / The First Born Is Dead / Kicking Against the Pricks / Your Funeral... My Trial

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12949-from-her-to-eternity-the-first-born-is-dead-kicking-against-the-pricks-your-funeral-my-trial/

From Her to Eternity / The First Born Is Dead / Kicking Against the Pricks / Your Funeral... My Trial

Unlike his predecessors in the fraternal order of wild-child rock'n'roll frontmen, Nick Cave has shown that aging and raging are not mutually exclusive properties. Thirty years into his performing career, Cave's critical stock has arguably never been higher, following the one-two punch of 2007's Grinderman one-off and last year's Bad Seeds return Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! To wit, at similar points in their careers, Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop were stocking used-CD-store bins with the likes of Wandering Spirit and Naughty Little Doggie. Still, it can be difficult to reconcile the diaper-clad zombie doing strange things to billy goats in the "Nick the Stripper" video with the stately, sartorially blessed Renaissance man who, over the past decade, has comfortably infiltrated the pop-cultural establishment through acclaimed screenwriting efforts (2006's The Proposition), Kylie Minogue duets, and crooning Beatles songs for Sean Penn Oscar bait (I Am Sam). The 25th-anniversary reissues of his first four solo albums provide a gauzy lens on how Cave went from fronting one of rock's most volatile, destructive bands (The Birthday Party) to one of its most enduring, redoubtable ones, the Bad Seeds. (They also serve as a bittersweet end-of-an-era time capsule, what with the recently announced departure of Cave's long-time foil, Mick Harvey.) However, what you hear over the course of these albums is not the typical, linear trajectory from chaos to control, but a series of sudden reinventions and relapses. Like the temptation-plagued protagonists that figure in his songs, Nick Cave's road to redemption is marked by sharp, sudden detours back into the wild. With Cave and Harvey recruiting Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld, ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson, and guitarist Hugo Race mere months after the Birthday Party's 1983 demise, the collapsible sound of From Her to Eternity (1984) speaks to the Bad Seeds' hastily assembled origins and fluid instrumental roles. Cave may have be in the throes of an infamous heroin habit that would both fuel and plague him for most of the ensuing decade, but on From Her he sounds like he's in withdrawal from his former band, striving to distance himself from the Birthday Party's junkyard punk, but occasionally reverting to its shrieking hysterics ("Cabin Fever!"). When removed from the context of antagonizing a bar full of pissed-off Birthday Party fans, some of the album's more provocative gestures now feel diffused: While the grim reading Leonard Cohen's "Avalanche" sees Cave already aligning himself with pop's legendary outsiders, the black-cloud ambience and gnashed-teeth delivery make it more closely resemble the opening overture to Goth: The Musical! But with the unnerving piano pulse and feedback spasms of "From Her to Eternity" and the murderous, militaristic goose-step of "Saint Huck", the Bad Seeds refashion the Birthday Party's post-punk splatter into something even more devious and powerful. Here, the band aren't merely providing musical accompaniment to Cave's nightmarish narratives; they're reacting to and manifesting them, favoring space and tactility-- the lacerating scrapes of guitar strings, the tremorous vibrations of piano chords-- over noise-for-noise's-sake. And therein lies the evil genius of the early Bad Seeds: They re-imagined the rock band as foley artists. The opening track to the Bad Seeds' second album, The First Born Is Dead (1985), elevates that cinematic sensibility with the seven-minute, desert-storming thriller "Tupelo", a song that, even if Cave had succumbed to his smack habit in the mid-80s, would nonetheless have secured his legend. Where most post-punk/New Pop artists of the day had abandoned contrarian values to embrace concepts of affluence and technological progress, Cave and the Bad Seeds went about digging up the deadest of dead horses: the blues-- a music that, at the time, was being neutered into supper-club smoothness by the likes of Eric Clapton and Robert Cray. But if the back-to-roots tilt of The First Born Is Dead-- the first product of the band's four-year relocation to Berlin-- stands in stark contrast to the future-minded, sample-based pop music of the era, lyrically, "Tupelo" is no less a masterful mash-up, weaving a breathless yarn from strands of the Old Testament, the birth of Elvis and John Lee Hooker's "Tupelo Blues" (itself a re-imagination of the namesake city's history, casting it as a victim of the 1927 Mississippi River flood that, in reality, had spared it). The First Born Is Dead is never quite so bold again, adopting a more familiar bluesy swing on "Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree" and last-call piano-bar warbling on "Knocking on Joe", and when Cave bellows "I am the Black Crow King", you're more likely to picture one of the Lizard variety. But in the raging reappropriation of Bob Dylan's "Wanted Man", The First Born Is Dead feels like less of a genre exercise and more a distillation of the philosophy Cave would pursue for years to come-- i.e., when it comes to search-and-destroy deviance, punk rock's got nothing on wild-west outlaw history, old blues songs and the Bible. If the Dylan covers and Hooker references hadn't already established Cave's old-soul aspirations, for his next move, he opted for a strategy that most aged entertainers resort to when trying to revive their careers three decades in, let alone three albums: the all-covers collection. In a sense, what Cave attempted with Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) was not all that different than what any one of us do when we hit a karaoke bar: Push ourselves out of our comfort zones and have a bit of a laugh while doing so-- certainly, the Bad Seeds have never sounded more cheerful than in the sloshed group sing-along of the Velvets' "All Tomorrow's Parties" and the cheeky, cowpoke reading of country ballad "Long Black Veil". But while stacked with murder ballads that fit right into Cave's wheelhouse -- "Hey Joe", Hooker's "I'm Gonna Kill That Woman"— what's most remarkable about the album is the amount of conviction Cave invests in his more schmaltzy selections. Rather than subject AM radio golden-oldies like Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", Tom Jones' "Weeping Annaleah", and Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotten a Hold of My Heart" to contemptuous desecration, Cave sounds determined to use them as vehicles to make him a better singer, and the Bad Seeds a more sophisticated, stylistically diverse band. Their next album would yield the real fruits of the Pricks experiment: Your Funeral... My Trial (1986) showcases Cave and the Bad Seeds' various modes and models with peak-form precision, building up from the elegantly wasted reveries ("Sad Waters", "Stranger Than Kindess"), creepy cabaret set pieces ("The Carny") and exquisite murder balladry (the title track) of the album's first act before erupting into the show-stopping, whip-cracking surges ("Jack's Shadow", "She Fell Away", a definitive cover of Tim Rose's "Long Time Man") of the second. Every guise Nick Cave would assume from hereon in-- from the dignified piano balladeer of 1990's The Good Son to the mad preacher of 2004's Abattoir Blues-- can be traced back here; indeed, even Grinderman's unhinged "No Pussy Blues" seems a touch less feral once you get reacquainted with the blasphemous depravity of Your Funeral's "Hard on for Love", which intensifies its libidinous thrust into rabid bloodlust and then abruptly cuts out when Cave hits his frothy-mouthed fever pitch. The Bad Seeds' final Berlin-based recording-- 1988's Tender Prey, featuring certified Cave classics "The Mercy Seat" and "Deanna"-- is not a part of this initial remaster series, presumably so Mute could reissue the band's eight releases for the label in even blocks of four. However, its exclusion also underscores the notion that Your Funeral... My Tria**l represents the true apotheosis of the Bad Seeds, drawing from the strengths of its three quite different predecessors-- the horror-film atmosphere of From Her to Eternity, the apocalyptic oration of The First Born Is Dead, the velvet-jacket suavity of Kicking Against the Pricks-- into a superbly structured, singular work. Every bruised romantic to emerge in its wake-- from PJ Harvey to the Tindersticks, Mark Lanegan to the National-- owes it a tip of the syringe. The timeless quality of Cave's songwriting sources, and the live-in-the-room ethos employed by producer Flood mean that these albums have aged infinitely better than most bands' mid-80s output, bearing none of the technical sheen, studio gimmickry and drum compression that dates so many records of the era. But these remasters are still worthy additions for both long-time enthusiasts and recent, post-Grinderman recruits. On top of revising the tracklists to their original vinyl running orders (the old North American CD versions bizarrely interspersed B-sides into the flow mid-album), the new mixes render the Bad Seeds' mise en scenes even more nightmarishly vivid-- on From Her to Eternity's chain-gang howl "Well of Misery", Harvey's percussive hits really do sound like hammers hitting rock, while the multi-tracked madness of Your Funeral's "The Carny" is about as close as you'll get to having Cave read you a scary bedtime story in your room. The four issues are sold separately but, in a clever gambit to make you buy all four, the discs are each appended with sequential portions of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's accompanying DVD documentary, titled Do You Love Me. The films are strikingly simple, comprised entirely of uniformly barren, head-shot interviews with members of the Bad Seeds (Bargeld, Adamson), their peers (Go-Between Robert Vickers, former Birthday Party guitarist Roland S. Howard), celebrity admirers (Moby, Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner), critics (Simon Reynolds) as well as regular fans, including, most memorably, a stripper from L.A. who-- at height of Guns N Roses' late-80s peeler-bar dominance-- insisted on dancing to Cave's version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix". But beyond the revelatory anecdotes about each album's recording-- heck, I could watch Blixa Bargeld read out department-store catalogues-- the documentaries show that, for all of his songs' grandiose theatricality, Cave's music affects his fans (famous and otherwise) on the same deeply personal, intimate level. Fittingly, pretty much the only principal not interviewed about Cave is Cave himself-- because, like their subject, the filmmakers respect the distance between those who tell the myth and those who make it.

2009-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

2009-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

May 6, 2009

fcd5dac9-b0e8-485d-95b8-8bcf5bb3dfba

Stuart Berman

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

The latest mixtape from this brilliantly over-the-top R&B singer finds him mixing spirituality with salaciousness while creating a heavily Auto-Tuned space somewhere between T-Pain and SOPHIE.

The latest mixtape from this brilliantly over-the-top R&B singer finds him mixing spirituality with salaciousness while creating a heavily Auto-Tuned space somewhere between T-Pain and SOPHIE.

Ian Isiah: Shugga Sextape Vol. 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-isiah-shugga-sextape-vol-1/

Shugga Sextape Vol. 1

Dolled-up Brooklyn R&B singer Ian Isiah is a sex-positive star-in-waiting. His glam image and pansexual appeal work in tandem with his raunchy songs, panty droppas with a nod to the progressive. His music relishes overabundance, matching a voracious sexual appetite with wondrous, multi-tracked layers of Auto-Tuned artificiality. His voice is often distorted to the point of near androgyny, and he sees his look—invoking what Little Richard called “the gay thing” in an interview used as a skit here—as a political act of subversion. Isiah’s new project, his first in five years, called Shugga Sextape Vol. 1, is a showcase of casual attractions and titillating thrills. Isiah came up in New York City’s GHE20GOTH1K scene, known for its mix of hip-hop culture and electronic music, and he is both a carrier and a product of that style. Produced largely by electronic producer Sinjin Hawke, Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 hedges toward the dancefloor, with icy synths and bump-n’-grind-worthy rhythms that venture as far as dancehall. He can flip into “Love in This Club”-levels of horny excess or turn a bedroom scene into ceremonial sex magic with the erotic dream logic of Eyes Wide Shut. Isiah’s 2013 debut, The Love Champion, packed the steamy R&B of The-Dream into club-forward electronica. It was obvious he had pipes just like Terius Nash, but he wasn’t quite as sharp as a songwriter. But the songcraft was functional, and the songs almost whimsically lewd. If nothing else, that project sketched out the idea of what he wanted his music to sound like, serving as a blueprint for what has followed. Where his old songs blindly tried to reimagine what Jeremih sex jams might feel like produced by someone like Hudson Mohawke, his new songs are like transmissions from an alternate universe where the sensual and the divine not only commingle but are worshipped at the same altar. Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 doesn’t just sound sexier; it sounds more self-assured. Isiah, having performed alongside Blood Orange for years, now seems to relish the spotlight. His growing command of Auto-Tune allows him to paint with a much broader color palette. The stunning pageantry of “Bleach Report” layers his vocals as if he’s being backed back a choir, his voice refracting like light catching a colorless diamond. Throughout the ménage à trois paen “Bedroom,” Isiah’s glazed warbles melt into synth arpeggios, and he sounds completely in control dictating positions, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out who exactly he is addressing. “Killup” mixes whine-friendly dancehall with a capella, dropping out the snares so he can make a pitch-corrected sentence seem like one run-on word. The nonstop shape-warping shimmer that distorts images for much of Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 clears for a two-song serenade at the close, and the purity of Isiah’s crystalline vocals really shines through. In these instances, he makes the erotic feel like gospel. And it is in that contradiction, where sex becomes spiritual, that Ian Isiah seems to prophesy R&B’s future.

2018-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

UNO NYC

November 27, 2018

fcd758a8-9ae3-4116-825f-d5056ae9ddf8

Sheldon Pearce

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

The former Mazzy Star frontwoman presents three gentle tracks where her mature, reserved delivery gets tangled in threads of childlike whimsy.

The former Mazzy Star frontwoman presents three gentle tracks where her mature, reserved delivery gets tangled in threads of childlike whimsy.

Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions: Son of a Lady EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hope-sandoval-and-the-warm-inventions-son-of-a-lady-ep/

Son of a Lady EP

Even in Hope Sandoval’s early work with Mazzy Star, the singer, then in her twenties, did not give off an air of youthfulness. Her vocal on “Fade Into You”—the 1993 track that marked the band’s one and only foray into Hot 100 territory—sounded vaguely anesthetized; it’s the voice of a woman who’s seen plenty and knows better than to pour more feeling into the world than it could possibly give to her in return. Over the years, that world-weariness was stitched into Sandoval’s assorted recording projects, including a handful of releases with her band, the Warm Inventions, and Mazzy Star’s comeback, 2013’s Seasons of Your Day. Sandoval’s latest release with her band, Son of a Lady, comprises three gentle tracks where her mature, reserved delivery gets tangled in threads of childlike whimsy. The EP opens with a lullaby. Nursery-style word repetition and simple rhyme are the building blocks of “Sleep,” and when the first ping of glockenspiel—that old classroom favorite—hits, you almost start to wonder when the children’s chorus will join in. The lyrics tucked in between refrains of “Sleep, sleep” and “Weep, weep,” though, are more unsettling than pacifying, and Sandoval’s suggestion to sleep “until you feel desire” or “until you don’t feel alone” posits sleep as a cure-all for depressive tendencies. Above the strum of an acoustic guitar, she seems to long for the time when sleep was a routine activity celebrated in song, not a necessary refuge from the disappointments of the waking world. Where “Sleep” borrows from lullabies, “Son of a Lady” takes cues from fairy tales. Sandoval sings in hushed tones about “the son of a lady/Whose heart was betrayed”—character description that could be plucked from the pages of a child’s storybook. The tale of secret messages and locked doors is scored by glittering strings that are the sonic equivalent of twinkle lights, so gorgeous and glowing that they effectively distract from anything unsightly lurking in the shadows. The unlit corners of “Son of a Lady,” are filled with intimations of heartbreak and betrayal; and, unlike fairy tales, this song gives no indication that resolution is imminent. Sandoval’s voice here is worn as ever and does not inspire hope for a bright future. The last of the three tracks, “Let Me Get There,” feels separate from the others. It’s a solo version of a song previously released as a duet with Kurt Vile; Sandoval’s vocal melts into the warm acoustic accompaniment, but without the tempering presence of Vile’s brand of indie cool, the phrase “It’s all in the groove” sounds strange in her mouth. The irony of that insistent, recurring request of the chorus is that it embraces a kind of logic that Sandoval’s music typically rejects—the lyric implies a specific destination, an urge to move forward that rarely characterizes her songs themselves. Instead, they meander, consider, and drift in and out of focus. The languid soundscapes Sandoval and her collaborators have created over the years forgo driving production, overt emotional upheaval, or anything else overly dramatic; they revel in stasis. That is, perhaps, why we can’t fault the singer for sounding on Son of a Lady almost exactly as she did during her tenure as frontwoman of Mazzy Star, decades after the fact. Her songs aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere in particular, and neither is her artistic project as a whole; when stasis is this intoxicating, nobody cares to ask for change. The enduring sameness of Sandoval’s style also provides proper context for the nostalgic undercurrents of Son of a Lady. After all, what is nostalgia but immobility—the halting of forward motion by the insatiable desire to go back.

2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Tendril Tales

September 19, 2017

fce16158-22ae-4e1b-a8b5-b589957c6fac

Olivia Horn

https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn /

The multi-talented Floridian musician flaunts his 2000s indie and emo influences on a debut EP of perky pop that chronicles a post-breakup transformation.

The multi-talented Floridian musician flaunts his 2000s indie and emo influences on a debut EP of perky pop that chronicles a post-breakup transformation.

Yuno: Moodie EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yuno-moodie-ep/

Moodie EP

Yuno Moodie literally makes pop music in his bedroom, but “bedroom pop” doesn’t quite cover his range. The Florida native’s influences (which he’s never been reticent to shout out) are a mixed bag of 2000s indie and emo gems, encompassing AFI, Regina Spektor, Animal Collective, Flight of the Conchords, and many more. And the new Sub Pop signee doesn’t just write, perform, record, and engineer all of his music—he creates all of the accompanying visuals, from album art to music videos. His debut, Moodie, comes in the form of a breakup record. Although it is Yuno’s surname, the EP's title also suggests the spectrum of vivid emotions and dynamic instrumentation contained within its six songs. Moving on can be a process, and Moodie explores the varying degrees of acceptance, anger, and misery that ordeal entails. Yuno illuminates how the end of a relationship can create a disjointed sense of self. As painful and intense as the experience of putting oneself back together in the aftermath of heartbreak can be, it can also serve as a catalyst for reflection and growth. In Yuno’s case, the breakup turns out to be an impetus for self-discovery and innovation. Opening track “Amber” captures the sense of chaos that immediately follows a big breakup, interspersed with glimpses of future clarity and relief. It begins with a recording of Yuno preaching strength and love in Jamaican patois. His childlike nasal vocals are manipulated and filtered, as though rescued from an old warped tape from his parents’ home island. But the words themselves suggest an older and wiser version of Yuno giving his younger self a pep talk: “You must look inna di mirror, bust through the exterior, and be the superior.” In the chorus, however, he can’t help but rifle through memories saturated in melancholy. “Please call for help, I need to hear an ambulance,” he begs, amid muffled yelling and yelps that mimic the sound of a siren. The song’s vibe remains pleasant even as Yuno succumbs to hysteria, brightened by clinking glass and a hopscotching ballpark-organ riff. It’s a complementary lead-in to the defiant “No Going Back,” solidifying his resolve to resist the bittersweet memories that keep infiltrating his mind. The EP’s standout is “So Slow,” an exercise in catharsis and self-actualization buoyed by bright, balmy sounds. As clanking chimes swim around a hopping bassline, Yuno sounds as though he’s yelling into a cave (a vocal effect he employs with less success on the fierce, Sleigh Bells-style preceding track, “Why For”). “Still I have to wait for relief/I’ll be OK eventually,” he shouts, with an urgency that captures the psychological intensity of his healing process. A testament of growth, “So Slow” also recognizes that change doesn’t happen all at once. “For the ones who move fast/Time heals so slow/But soon you’ll move past,” Yuno assures the listener—and himself. Moodie is about facing the unknown and feeling lost in your own life, and in that sense, it’s more than just a breakup record. Beginning with uncertainty and ending with a newfound understanding of personal strength, its narrative of self-discovery also suggests the process of an artist developing his creative identity. In the jovial pep talk from “Amber,” Yuno concludes, “Yah haffi be somebody you are proud to be.” He both portrays and achieves this transformation on his first EP, in a triumphant combination of vulnerable, emotionally complex lyricism and perky pop.

2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Sub Pop

June 22, 2018

fce2a10c-e819-4f08-86bb-aff030b19d38

Margaret Farrell

https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/

On his third solo album, the New York producer finally proves he’s a proficient rapper, but his audacious beats take a backseat in the process.

On his third solo album, the New York producer finally proves he’s a proficient rapper, but his audacious beats take a backseat in the process.

Pi’erre Bourne: Good Movie

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pierre-bourne-good-movie/

Good Movie

Pi’erre Bourne is a producer first, even if he won’t admit that. On the deluxe edition of The Life of Pi’erre 4, released in 2020, none of the words he rapped through a glaze of Auto-Tune mattered as much as the dreamy synths or the hypnotic overload of producer tags. The beats powered that project, but that’s not the only thing that Pi’erre wants you to focus on. Since he first emerged in the mainstream landscape with lush productions for Playboi Carti’s 2017 self-titled mixtape, he’s been on a mission to have his raps taken just as seriously. On Good Movie, he accomplishes that by stripping away some of the flavor of his instrumentals and shifting attention to what he’s saying. It mostly works out—he’s a pretty good rapper, but softening his production isn’t entirely worth it. It’s not that Pi’erre is masterfully technical all of a sudden; there’s no flow that will blow you away, and if you single out a punchline or two, you’ll probably burst out laughing. But he makes up for that deficit by giving the project a strong narrative pulse. This is a breakup album, or maybe an album about wanting to fall in love after a breakup. Before this record, his lyrics felt strung-together and goofy. But on Good Movie, there’s a point when he outdoes himself; some lines are astonishingly inane. Throughout the album, he bounces between wistfulness and bitterness, reflecting on minute details and fond memories of a relationship, like when his girlfriend got her hair and nails done. It’s music that is less interested in big arguments between partners, and more in the moments that come before and after them. “Where You Going” is a formal breakup song, but there’s no melodrama. Instead, he lilts about the slow deterioration of his connection with a past fling. Over a downtempo, spaced-out groove on “Love Drills,” the writing is simple but effective: “All the love we had, now we need our space.” Unlike the vast majority of post-Future melodic heartbreak rap ballads, there’s hardly any straightforward wails here—you know, complaints along the lines of, “Oh, I’m in so much pain” or “Fuck my ex.” Refreshingly, Pi’erre’s melancholy is a bit more subtle and muddled. Meanwhile, the beats are solid: They are soothing, sweet, and build slowly to their climaxes, even if they are too clean at times. What is a Pi’erre Bourne album with tempered production? It’s like a Spike Lee movie that’s only mildly angry, or a Kevin Durant game where he passes on pull ups. Brash and busy yet sweet production is his thing. The jam-packed beats of the deluxe edition of TLOP4 too often buried his raps, but that organized chaos is missing here. “Shorty Diary” is begging for some glitchiness; the dance cut “What You Gotta Do” is too elementary. The flattened drum’n’bass rhythm on “DJ in the Car” is only saved by his lovelorn Auto-Tune croons going full Zapp and Roger on “Computer Love” at the song’s end. When the production is dry and there are too many lulls, the album struggles to sustain the energy, especially since the beats bleed into one another, as if the whole project were a single, never-ending song. There might be more vocal high points than production ones on Good Movie. Pi’erre’s hook on “Kingdom Hall” is so bad it’s good: “She pop up at my place, Jehovah’s Witness,” he coos, his voice drenched in waves of reverb, resembling K-Ci and JoJo’s “Crazy.” On “Kevin Heart,” romantic troubles lead to some of his catchiest and most heart-wrenching riffing. But Pi’erre has proven he can do so much more on the production side, an ambition that he just doesn’t demonstrate as often here. The saccharine melody on “System” is overpowering, but his opening lyrics about nostalgically scrolling through an ex’s Instagram are strong enough to stand on their own. The fluttering layers of “Hop in the Bed” push his croons to the background, but the mood doesn’t suffer. The twinkling keys and woozy synths of “Ex Factor” tell a better love-drunk story than the lyrics do. Too often, his beats aren’t this alive. He may have proved his rapping is worthy of attention, but to get there, he had to hold back his singular vision as a producer.

2022-09-08T00:02:00.000-04:00

2022-09-08T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

SossHouse / Interscope

September 8, 2022

fce3f07d-741d-4295-a37f-7dd9b82cc32f

Alphonse Pierre

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

Macklemore’s earnest yet clunky new album attempts to split the difference between high-budget stadium pop and grimy boom-bap.

Macklemore’s earnest yet clunky new album attempts to split the difference between high-budget stadium pop and grimy boom-bap.

Macklemore: Ben

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macklemore-ben/

Ben

Since The Heist, his breakout 2012 LP with Ryan Lewis, Macklemore has been painfully self-aware in his music. He’s aware of his whiteness, and how it gives him a leg up on his competition. He’s aware of his detractors, who dismiss him as a flash in the pan. He clearly hears the criticism, and in the past a lot of his raps have felt like retorts to various tweets and thinkpieces. Though he hasn’t returned to the commercial heights of hits like “Can’t Hold Us” and “Thrift Shop,” his fanbase remains sizable and hungry. His new album, Ben, finds him on the other side of a pandemic-assisted relapse, an underground rapper turned international pop star who’s now more concerned with the opinion of his wife and kids than any critic. More than any of Macklemore’s previous LPs, Ben has two parallel aesthetics: soaring pop songs with stadium-sized hooks alongside grimy DJ Premier sample-stitched boom-bap. It’s difficult to reconcile the Ed Sheeran impression of guest singer Windser on “Maniac” with Macklemore’s snarling bars on “Grime,” a stripped-down number with funky horns and strutting bass. “Grime” sits smack in the middle of a three-song run that starts with Premier’s “Heroes” and ends with “I Need,” a sarcastic send-up of the narcissists that thrive in our culture of conspicuous consumption. As a three-track EP, these songs might have been an eye-opening reminder that the man can still rap. Wedged between his “living my best life” pop and midlife crisis introspectives, the sequencing is jarring. So is Macklemore a pop star or a rapper? The two are not mutually exclusive, but they feel distinctly separate within his catalog. At times, Ben sounds like the work of three different artists, perhaps reflecting the upheaval of its recording. Macklemore started work on the album before the pandemic shut things down; at home with no shows to play or 12-step meetings to attend, he relapsed for several weeks, fracturing his life and family. The album’s scattershot approach might have worked, too, if the transition from bubblegum pop to East Coast grime weren’t so abrupt. There are some catchy melodies beneath the slick synth-pop sheen of “No Bad Days” and “1984,” but they’re also drenched in cheese. It’s juvenile by design, the perfect karaoke party-bus jam for his 7-year-old and her friends. Ben’s more personal angle also winds up underselling one of Macklemore’s greatest talents: mimicry. He possesses an innate ability to emulate other rappers’ flows, a skill honed by years of fandom. You can hear it clearly on his previous album, Gemini, where he bounces along with Lil Yachty and rolls triplets as fluently as Offset. Yet with few other rappers featured on Ben, his own flows seem to fall into two distinct patterns: buoyant exuberance on the hyped-up pop tracks and a morose monotone on the more plaintive ballads. Part of the reason Macklemore is so popular is that his perspective is familiar to huge swaths of rap fans. His diction is clear, his references are decipherable. He grew up a white kid obsessed with hip-hop, enthralled by hood tales from New York and Los Angeles, idolizing hustlers-turned-rappers from hundreds of miles away. If Eminem allowed white kids to imagine themselves on stage, rapping like their idols, Macklemore is them on stage—white kids who love rap and were told their whole lives that their version of Black music is inauthentic. His Del the Funky Homosapien flow on “Heroes” is hard, yet his idolatry of carjacking and gangster movies scans a bit silly. And while his apology to his wife (“Sorry”) feels genuine, it’s also rife with clichés. And that’s ultimately what Macklemore’s music is missing: These experiences, while certainly authentic, aren’t particularly interesting. The struggle of the wealthy and talented white rapper was never especially sympathetic. And on Ben, his trials are mostly internal, the enduring struggle of man to find meaning and leave a legacy. This Macklemore is likely the most honest version we’ve seen to date. So what if he’s a little corny? Most of us are.

2023-03-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

2023-03-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rap

Bendo

March 9, 2023

fcef123b-4792-4dce-9465-2f0ff240b9c4

Matthew Ismael Ruiz

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

First proper solo release from Crooked Fingers mastermind is full of spare and intimate folk songs.

First proper solo release from Crooked Fingers mastermind is full of spare and intimate folk songs.

Eric Bachmann: To the Races

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9373-to-the-races/

To the Races

On his first proper solo album, To the Races, Eric Bachmann continues the exploration of American folk music he initiated with Crooked Fingers. Stripped down to Bachmann's gravelly timbre accompanied by acoustic guitar, these 10 songs are restrained and unadorned, making this his most austere release. For most songwriters, boiling songs down to such spare arrangements is a risky move; there's no veneer of glossy production to hide behind. But Bachmann's elliptical picking patterns are always tasteful and his voice is rich and engaging enough to fill the space. Opener "Man O' War", in which the narrator is "caught up in a dangling sting off the shore," unfurls like a landscape at dawn. Calling to mind the density of vintage Bob Dylan lyrics, Bachmann layers image upon image in this sprawling song, set in Spain, which acts as a metaphor for displacement and loneliness. Augmented by Miranda Brown's delicate backing vocals and spacious, echoing piano accents, the naked arrangement of "Man O' War" charges the song with an affecting emotional honesty. Where To the Races falters is when Bachmann lapses into the sort of posturing that plagues many singer-songwriters. Like Dylan or, particularly on the hoarsely whispered "Home", Bruce Springsteen, Bachmann can adopt a detached and knowing persona, weathered by experience and weary of the world. When, in "Carrboro Woman", Bachmann sings, "I came upon a wounded beast/ She was laying in the sand/ Her heart held in her hand," he exudes all the self-importance and arrogance of Leonard Cohen, but lacks the same poetic elegance to pull it off. In spite of its flaws, To the Races charms with its somber atmosphere. Evenly paced and modestly scaled, the album sustains a mood that effectively supports Bachmann's vulnerable material. And by limiting outside influence to Brown's gorgeous backing vocals and Tom Hagerman's violin contributions-- most notably on the jaunty title track-- the album has a hermetic feel, recalling other intimate statements such as Cat Power's haunting Covers Record or Kristin Hersh's elegiac The Grotto. And although To the Races isn't as affecting as either of those projects, it's an admirably understated record that reveals yet another side of Bachmann's prolific career.

2006-09-05T02:00:03.000-04:00

2006-09-05T02:00:03.000-04:00

Rock

Saddle Creek

September 5, 2006

fcef4c0a-5f87-4513-b43b-872d7c153884

John Motley

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

The Philadelphia musician offers a meticulously filtered, distorted document of indie rock. Though it’s his most accessible album, his best traits remain obtuse storytelling and oddly-shaped songs.

The Philadelphia musician offers a meticulously filtered, distorted document of indie rock. Though it’s his most accessible album, his best traits remain obtuse storytelling and oddly-shaped songs.

Alex G: Rocket

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23127-rocket/

Rocket

In a sense, singer/songwriter Alex Giannascoli is the modern ideal for an indie rock throwback. The frequent comparisons with Elliott Smith or Sparklehorse are legitimate, but mostly regarding his recording process: Every production decision—whether double-tracking vocals or close-mic’ing the guitars—creates the assumption of intimacy, recalling an earlier time when instrumental or monetary limitations necessitated ingenuity. But he records on a laptop rather than a 4-track, and he was an early example of a songwriter leveraging a strong Bandcamp presence into a deal with a high-profile imprint, in his case, Domino. Beach Music, his first album for his new label, was a gorgeous and puzzling release that gained esteem throughout 2015, but it seemed determined to offer continuity with his scruffy early work rather than to serve as any kind of break out. Rocket, a record that first feels oddly soldered together, is in a sense the album that Beach Music wanted to be, the most comprehensive and accessible document of a diffuse catalog. Even the newfound stylistic hooks here are slippery things. Singles “Proud” and “Bobby” are rootsy in an unfamiliar way—there’s twang, fiddle, yearning harmonies, a duet with fellow Philadelphian singer/songwriter Emily Yacina, and the broad influence of Lucinda Williams. Otherwise, Rocket’s Americana is cobbled together from the junkyards scoured by experimentalists like Califone; “Poison Root” and “Alina” in particular imagine if “The Orchids” spawned an entire subgenre of backwoods psychedelia. There’s some eyebrow-raising Auto-Tune on the queasy piano ballad “Sportstar” and “Brick” is a welcome reminder of the evocative, hard-edged screams of his live show, though the overall experience is a little like hearing a Show Me the Body gig from outside the venue. Though the sonic diversions on Rocket are the most ephemeral draws, they provide immediate access points and a means of providing distance from a simple archetype. Both Alex G’s falsetto and the cocktail jazz arrangement of “County” obscure how its title references a gnarly prison scene. The narrator, “locked up for nothing/stealing or something” sits next to bloody wall, courtesy of a seemingly quiet kid who swallowed two bags of heroin and a razor blade. “Hey, why don’t you write that into a song/Your fans will dig that,” an officer snarks after Alex sings, “See, I got stories.” It’s unclear whether “see” is meant as an interjection or a response to the prevailing image of him as someone who goes out of his way to deflect any sort of attention or self-disclosure. How would your opinion of Alex G change if “County” was about him? Entire album narratives have been framed on lesser stories. It’s unclear how much of Rocket is autobiographical—the closer one leans into these songs, the more they confound the first assumption. “Proud” and “Sportstar” can be instantaneously read as rock ‘n’ jock archetypes if that’s what you want to use them for. When “I wanna be a star like you/Wanna make something that’s true” becomes, “I wanna be a fake like you” on “Proud,” it’s easy enough to take Alex G literally considering his touchy relationship with the press. But it’s just as likely that he’s being sarcastic, maybe about himself, maybe about the truthful nature of alt-country. That might initially seem the case when he sings, “Let me play on your team/I’m clean” on “Sportstar,” but every seemingly plainspoken lyric thereafter takes on a tone of anger, then self-hatred and emotions that are much more unsettling (“In the back of my car/Could you hit me too hard?/You’re scarred”) for their inability to be defined or described. Rocket isn’t unknowable or obtuse, just indirect—more willing to get under the skin or tug on an ear than hit directly on the nose. This kind of purposeful restraint can feel damn near novel in the current day, as efforts to illuminate the artistic process becomes its own kind of oppression—so many of Alex G’s peers feel the need to issue statements outlining the meaning behind any given song and album releases feel like the endpoint of an exhausting cycle of content creation rather than a start of a meaningful relationship. “The reason you enjoy music is because of its unlimited potential, the inability to really understand it,” he offered in a recent interview, and that’s projection to a certain degree. Sometimes, there really is no substitute for the revelations that come when an artist unlocks the mysteries of their work. But it’s certainly the reason why Rocket feels like one of the year’s most endlessly generous records, as Alex G’s restraint is our gift that keeps on giving.

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

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

Rock

Domino

May 19, 2017

fcf1c7a6-3a54-41d7-9f26-38814d64ca39

Ian Cohen

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

The noise-rock band’s fifth album features new voices, new textures, but strikes the same affected pose.

The noise-rock band’s fifth album features new voices, new textures, but strikes the same affected pose.

A Place to Bury Strangers: Pinned

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-place-to-bury-strangers-pinned/

Pinned

In a 2010 review of The Big Lebowski, film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the Coen brothers’ cult comedy was “about an attitude, not a story.” Brooklyn noise rock trio A Place to Bury Strangers can be counted among a growing number of New York bands with a similar approach to music. Just as Lebowski used its farcical plot as a scaffold for character and wit, so A Place to Bury Strangers uses songwriting as a pedestal for a certain historical flavor of cool. Album after album, the band has reinstated the same compositional logics: simple post-punk basslines; driving industrial drums; violent, brooding lyrics; and squalls and squalls of noise. They are historical actors reanimating the New York of Suicide and Sonic Youth, luxuriating in memories of a cheap, scrappy city years after CBGB’s was priced out of the neighborhood. APTBS’s fifth album, Pinned, at least folds in a few new elements to the band’s sound. It’s their first release with drummer Lia Braswell, formerly of Le Butcherettes, behind the kit, and her secondary role as a backup singer means it’s also their first release with a second voice chiming in across most tracks. Braswell makes a good foil to frontman Oliver Ackermann’s unflappable deadpan. Her light, airy delivery offsets his pained tenor, which always sounds sung through several rows of gritted teeth. Pinned also indulges more flexible vocal melodies than much of APTBS’s output; Braswell and Ackermann’s voices lilt upward over an endlessly droning two-chord progression on “Never Coming Back,” they dovetail charmingly on “Frustrated Operator,” and they crinkle vulnerably atop a reverb-heavy Cure bassline on “Situations Changes.” Pinned reels in some of APTBS’s famous noise, but it doesn’t budge Ackermann from his station as a long-standing rock’n’roll archivist. The band’s discography to date could be boxed up and sold as A History of Alternative Rock in 50 Basslines—it’s that faithful to its myriad but period-specific sources. To the uninitiated, an album like Pinned probably makes a good primer, a gateway drug into a rich history of wiry bands melting people’s eardrums out of their skulls. To listeners with very little eardrum left to melt, it can feel reiterative: entertaining not because it’s never happened before, only because it’s happening now. Though a competent quilter of established rock gestures, Ackermann has never really gotten the hang of penning lyrics to go on top of them. It is easy to sing with disaffection; harder to write words that actually sound good in the sheath of an uncaring drawl. “Never Coming Back” works because it’s chock full of vaguely dispirited phrases, like “I drift so low” and “I get so high,” that are easy to ignore in favor of riding the overall groove. “Too Tough to Kill,” with the couplet “Kill more dumb shit/Build more life forms,” sprays like masculinized bluster, and “Frustrated Operator” loses footing with the hypnagogic sequence, “Out to get us/Manipulate us/Hot potato/Operator.” “Brain flesh” (“Was It Electric”) sounds like a phrase a zombie in Wayfarers on a motorcycle might utter and I hope I never have to hear it again. A Place to Bury Strangers could do what they do indefinitely, which is great news for concertgoers who love to be walloped in the ribcage with the output of a dozen bespoke guitar pedals. It will probably always be fun to see this band live, just as it’s always fun to see a great character actor put on a show even when there’s no plot and no dialogue to speak of. APTBS songs become about poise and a pose. For them, it seems, that’s enough.

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

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

Rock

Dead Oceans

April 13, 2018

fd033bdf-3abb-483a-9b9b-be804a94a197

Sasha Geffen

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

Though it’s one of his most considered and carefully curated projects, Gucci plays it uncharacteristically safe for most of it.

Though it’s one of his most considered and carefully curated projects, Gucci plays it uncharacteristically safe for most of it.

Gucci Mane: Evil Genius

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gucci-mane-evil-genius/

Evil Genius

Evil Genius might be the first album in Gucci Mane’s enormous discography that he took his time on. It follows his last project, El Gato: The Human Glacier, by a full year, a gap that would hardly be worth mentioning for some artists but is unprecedented for Gucci, a rapper who spent three years in prison and still averaged about a mixtape a month. So Evil Genius answers a question that even the most diehard Gucci fans must have wondered by the third or fourth time he dropped a trilogy of mixtapes on the same day: What would he be capable of if he were a little more selective? After months of big talk from Gucci about his newfound high standards—“I’m trying to make this project one of my best projects ever,” he told Billboard—is Evil Genius any better than the average Gucci Mane album? Not really. There are fewer outright duds than on most of his projects, but also fewer happy accidents. His rhymes feel more rehearsed than usual, but that isn’t necessarily an improvement. On his best verses, Gucci sounds like he’s laughing at his own private joke. Here he mostly feels like he’s posing for a video shoot. For a rapper known for his recklessness, he plays it uncharacteristically safe. Save for the prim, Bruno Mars and Kodak Black-assisted soul throwback “Wake Up in the Sky,” Evil Genius sticks entirely to of-the-moment trap, with a cadre of the industry’s top producers all contributing mostly interchangeable music. The beats are hard, sometime impressively so—especially during the record’s cold, bass-heavy opening stretch, including the Quavo feature “BiPolar,” where Gucci lands the record’s greatest Gucci-ism: “I’m talking to a shrink and I’m draped in a mink.” But they’re also overfamiliar. Each song is like a round of horse against a guy who insists on sinking the same two-pointer every shot. Listeners skimming the record for something different might as well skip straight to the second half, where a few beats have a little more spin on them. A combination of alarming 808s and a gabby Kevin Gates feature jolt “I’m Not Goin’” to life, while “Lost Ya’ll Mind” is absolutely wild, with synths that play like a microwaved Super Nintendo cartridge. “Solitaire,” with Migos and Lil Yachty, has some cool, Tetris-shaded keys, too, but an album with more than two dozen credited producers really ought to have more surprises than this. Production isn’t the album’s biggest concern, though. More than any project Gucci’s recorded since he emerged from prison happy, sober, and looking like he stepped out of a Bowflex ad, Evil Genius has a past-tense problem. Too often Gucci is rapping about the things he used to do, the life he used to lead, the terror he used to be. He’s already documented all that extensively, and his raps about those darker days aren’t becoming any more revealing the further removed he is from them. Instead, it would be nice to hear him rap a little more about the man he’s become, the ab-plated, kale-devouring, self-actualized newlywed currently living out one of those most riveting second acts in rap history. Now there’s a figure we still have new things to learn about. Gucci Mane still has plenty of new ground to explore, but on Evil Genius, he opts not to go there.

2018-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Atlantic

December 11, 2018

fd0e1582-20d5-4644-93bf-9acc60e4ed3c

Evan Rytlewski

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

Following a four-year hiatus, the Chicago instrumental group Pelican return with a new guitarist and a new album, Forever Becoming, a collection that finds them raging like they never have before.

Following a four-year hiatus, the Chicago instrumental group Pelican return with a new guitarist and a new album, Forever Becoming, a collection that finds them raging like they never have before.

Pelican: Forever Becoming

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18662-pelican-forever-becoming/

Forever Becoming

Instrumental rock bands engender a feverish devotion. Groups like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor boast rabid fanbases yet get raked over the coals—much of the time by those same fans. But, perhaps none of the aforementioned groups have seen the kind of "Crossfire"-level handwringing as Chicago's Pelican. Couple the group's four-year hiatus with the fact that they often toe a line that dips into metal territory—another style that claims adherents quick to nitpick—and you’ve got a recipe for controversy. But, on Forever Becoming’s second track, Pelican seem to be issuing a gag order of sorts. Two minutes into “Deny the Absolute”, it’s apparent that the band is as heavy and anthemic as ever. Pelican can’t hear you above the din. “Deny the Absolute” is a remarkable song with an even more striking center. It chugs along ominously and fiercely like something Colonel Kilgore might have selected to play after “Ride of the Valkyries”. It’s utterly thrilling, a testament to Pelican’s present unity. Oft-maligned drummer Larry Herweg keeps a tight beat, while his brother, Bryan, unleashes a thrusting bass assault. And, to reiterate, it is heavy: the kind of track that a baseball closer might be wise to adopt as entry music. It’s the pinnacle of Forever Becoming, but the record has other worthwhile moments. “The Tundra” paces forward with a vigorous clip and ignites in its last minute. It’s further testimony that Pelican are at their best in synced-up moments. “Immutable Dusk” is more ruminative, splitting the difference between the sounds of Explosions in the Sky and, say, Isis or Neurosis. (Most of the song titles on Forever Becoming could be easily mistaken for lost Sylvia Plath poems or, at least, the wall scribblings of a Sarah Lawrence College sophomore. As a recent press release ponderously reports: “Forever Becoming is an immense, speaker-rattling meditation on the infinite cycle of death and life.”) “Dusk” is followed by another epic, “Threnody”, which adeptly explores the poles between quiet and noise. Many instrumental bands exploit builds, and while Pelican do so with tact, you can be left wanting more variation and exploration. “Threnody” moves from tickled picking into a teamed-up crescendo. It’s a trip, the quartet—which includes guitarists Trevor de Brauw and Dallas Thomas—strumming as quickly as possible. Still, it’s all a bit familiar. Haven’t others plotted out this territory previously and more effectively? And, further, hasn’t Pelican? Certainly, a track like “Autumn Into Summer”, from 2005’s Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, uses its nearly 11 minutes to expertly showcase a raw and bold post-rock. The layered guitars on it (one of them is played by Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, who departed the band last year and was replaced by Swan King’s Thomas) converse and converge with each other in a way not found on Forever Becoming. Pelican’s harder sound makes such earlier developments hazy. Yet, the band comes back to them awkwardly. The album’s closer, “Perpetual Dawn”, is a dead-ringer for a tune Mogwai would choose to cap an LP or show. But it’s that fact—that Mogwai or Godspeed or Explosions could be playing it—which is troubling. It’s an oversimplification to declare that a share of post-rock “sounds the same” but, sometimes, Pelican suffers from being too weighed down by its roots. That said, when Pelican rages—in a way they never have before—they prove they still have plenty of life left.

2013-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00

2013-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00

Metal

Southern Lord

October 18, 2013

fd107851-199f-4c4f-a34f-7028d536e066

Colin St. John

https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-st. john/

Recorded over two nights at London’s Café Oto in 2017, this live performance from the group showcases the band’s unique ability to fuse folk traditionalism with drone experimentation.

Recorded over two nights at London’s Café Oto in 2017, this live performance from the group showcases the band’s unique ability to fuse folk traditionalism with drone experimentation.

Pelt: Reticence / Resistance

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pelt-resistance-reticence/

Reticence / Resistance

Over the past 30 years, Pelt has become known for their distinct blend of Americana, drone, improvisation, and psychedelic rock. When they first formed as a rock band in Richmond, Virginia in 1993, they quickly learned that they weren’t interested in tight forms and fully composed structures, rather, they found themselves jamming in order to see where the sound would take them. And as they played more, they began absorbing the variety of styles that appeared around them. They visited places like La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, a sound and light installation in New York that explores how long-held tones and vibrant lights shift over time, and got into drone music’s immersive qualities. Over time, each band member has delved into genres such as free jazz, Indian classical, and Appalachian folk. Reticence / Resistance showcases two tracks that each explore the band’s variety of influences from a different angle: one ecstatic and one inquisitive. It sits in the sounds and styles Pelt has carefully mastered over time, patiently finding moments of joyful reflection. Pelt recorded the album over two nights at London’s Café Oto in 2017, and it provides a snapshot of how the band effortlessly melds a flurry of musical ideas into one. The band’s current lineup of fiddler Mike Gangloff, pianist Patrick Best, percussionist and banjo player Nathan Bowles, and harmonium player Mikel Dimmick play on the album. Unusual instrumentation like bowls, bells, and gongs are also scattered throughout the music, helping to generate the meditative, folk-like sound the band perfects here. “Diglossia,” the album’s opening track, is a jubilant articulation of the band’s vision. The song’s trilling piano and exuberant fiddle create a sense of exhilaration from the first few moments. Gangloff’s untamed violin, which draws equally from the style of Tony Conrad’s Four Violins and Appalachian fiddle, drives the music’s continual forward motion, while underneath, harmonium and bowed banjo hum with entrancing, long-lasting tones. It’s classic Pelt, grounded in folk traditions and spaced-out drone that fill up every second with seemingly endless layers of noise. Drone music is rooted in the idea that tones held for a very long time will morph ever so slightly, changing our perception as they unfold. Pelt highlights those moments of metamorphosis. On Reticence / Resistance’s second track, “Sundogs -> Chiming -> The Door In The Hill,” they trade cascading melodies for distant hums, choosing to explore a more muted palette. But the band’s vibrancy doesn’t quite disappear: rather, it goes through a transformation. Gangloff plays his fiddle a little slower and the bowls and bells sound more distant; they’re content to sit in that uncertainty and see where it goes for a while. But by the end of the track, Pelt’s sound becomes bright once again, finding catharsis through a gradual shift of tone. Despite their taste for sustained notes that induce a trance state, Pelt makes music that feels rooted deeply in active participation. Reticence / Resistance feels that way, too, by balancing shapeshifting, dreamy tones with robust, earthy melodies that follow the group’s already established musical paths. Through a complex layering of styles and instruments, the band chases celebratory release, and they bring you along to feel it, too. 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.

2021-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Three Lobed

November 2, 2021

fd29ce08-2595-4c5b-be87-48644a0bcbe1

Vanessa Ague

https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/

With tangled, stop-start arrangements that open to unexpected trap doors, the composer and synthesizer musician brings playfulness to the fore. You might call this her “pop” album.

With tangled, stop-start arrangements that open to unexpected trap doors, the composer and synthesizer musician brings playfulness to the fore. You might call this her “pop” album.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Let’s Turn It Into Sound

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-lets-turn-it-into-sound/

Let’s Turn It Into Sound

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith revels in the plasticity of electronic sound, stretching and twisting it with colorful, kinetic abandon. The Orcas Island native’s work isn’t ambient in the strictest sense, despite her billowing synthesizers or her affinity for yoga and meditation. Smith’s songs are too composerly, too active, her voice leaping nimbly over arpeggios that churn like candy-colored magma. Her music’s lightheartedness can be subtle, overshadowed by the aura of hushed awe that hangs over stately chord progressions, bucolically burbling waveforms, and open-armed invocations of wonder, like this mantra from 2017’s The Kid: “If I let go of holding on to my ego/Will you let go too?” But on Let’s Turn It Into Sound, her playfulness comes to the fore. You might call this Smith’s “pop” album. Her beatific overtones have morphed, giving way to sparkly-eyed whimsy and, in places, some shockingly muscular grooves. At first, the squirrelly twists and turns can be hard to follow; an air of mischief keeps things chaotic. But once you lock into the ebullient mood, its joy—her joy—is unmistakable and irresistible. To underscore just how far we’ve come from the abiding calm of a track like “Remembering,” from 2020’s mind-and-body-uniting The Mosaic of Transformation, she kicks off Let’s Turn It Into Sound with an antic burst of 8-bit bleeps. For anyone expecting the usual atmosphere of patient reverence, it feels like stumbling into a secret video arcade hidden in the backroom of the ashram. Then, a sudden shift: “Have you felt lately/The beauty that you are?” she sings, painting an unpredictable melody in zig-zagging stripes over a soft bed of organs. While you’re still meditating on that positive affirmation, an erratic beat slams into the side of our protective sanctuary, sending stained glass flying. Drums stutter and lurch, echoing the glitch techno of the Y2K era. Clarinets carve out a momentary pocket of calm. And finally, a buoyant chorus comes soaring over a slightly less scattershot iteration of that same stumbling rhythm, until downward faders usher us gently out. The whole album is like this, and it’s both disorienting and thrilling: a funhouse full of trap doors, fakeouts, and wormholes. Featuring an array of Buchla modular synthesizers along with other synths, woodwinds, and airy pads made from samples of Smith’s own voice, the record’s palette is similar to that of her last couple of albums. But the edges are sharper, the colors brighter, the textures more vivid. In “Pivot Signal,” she arrays pulsing synths and woodwinds into a gorgeous piece that recalls the kaleidoscopic spin of Philip Glass or Steve Reich, telegraphing a clear-eyed mixture of hope and resolve. “Locate” begins with wheezy reeds but soon blossoms into a lopsided hip-hop cadence arrayed in angel choir and perky sax and flute, like a three-way fusion of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Flying Lotus, and Raymond Scott. Smith has toyed with beats before—for instance, on The Mosaic of Transformation’s “Steady Heart”—but they’ve never been as foregrounded, nor as forceful, as they are here: The elliptical groove of “Is It Me or Is It You?” takes cues from both Ricardo Villalobos and Autechre, while “Unbraid: The Merge” incorporates dembow-inspired syncopations into the kind of deep-diving house rhythm that you might expect to hear pouring out of a warehouse soundsystem while the rest of the neighborhood is getting ready for work. But what most distinguishes Let’s Turn It Into Sound are its tangled, stop-start arrangements. Again and again, songs begin with one idea—a vision of phosphorus rolling in the tide or a snippet of intergalactic jazz—and then abruptly change course, making way for tumbledown drums or lofty choirs or regal fanfare, sometimes all at once. Most of these songs are really three or four discrete tracks shoehorned together, separated by a hiccup’s worth of silence or a swooping jump cut; sometimes, the parts aren’t even in the same key. The pace of these changes is dizzying yet delightful; she bounces from idea to idea like a kid flitting from present to half-opened present on Christmas morning. And while they are both formally intriguing and viscerally pleasurable, I suspect that these abrupt edits serve a deeper purpose. In Smith’s new book Somatic Hearing, a short philosophical tract on the practice of listening, she writes about the link between perception and emotional understanding, themes she picks up here on “Unbraid: The Merge.” “You are being obstructed,” she intones atop slow-moving clarinets. Dissonant orchestral sounds bubble up from below; the vocal melody whirls like a tossed polyhedron as she urges us to “change the angle/Look at it straight on instead of perpendicular,” lyrics that could have come straight from a deck of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. Then, just before a loping drumbeat sweeps the frame, she offers this: “Let’s hold this together/The merge.” It sounds a lot like a lesson she says she picked up in music school when one of her professors pointed out “that every note and every rhythm can connect. You just have to find the common ground.” With Let’s Turn It Into Sound, Smith turns her music upside down, shakes out her assumptions, and lets the pieces fall where they may, all in the interest of finding new connections between things that were never meant to go together. It’s a leap into the unknown, and her excitement is infectious.

2022-08-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

2022-08-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Ghostly International

August 29, 2022

fd2ca4a0-a3b5-4407-a392-87ba008403be

Philip Sherburne

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

Inspired by Brooklyn’s current electronic scene and ’80s acid house, the New York trio applies a sophisticated sheen to analog-driven electro-pop.

Inspired by Brooklyn’s current electronic scene and ’80s acid house, the New York trio applies a sophisticated sheen to analog-driven electro-pop.

Flash Trading: The Golden Mile EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flash-trading-the-golden-mile-ep/

The Golden Mile EP

Unpacking their influences, Flash Trading namecheck the scenes around two iconic venues: Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club and Manchester’s Haçienda. As such, you might expect the trio’s music to be a natural hybrid of the music blaring from those ’80s raves and the techno you can hear in Brooklyn today. The Golden Mile was released by TAG OUT, a new label run by DFA’s former label manager, Kris Petersen. While at DFA, the label LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy co-founded in 2001, Petersen worked with bands like Guerilla Toss and Essaie Pas, and sonically speaking, Flash Trading are the equatorial midpoint between those two acts. They traffic in the same spirit of high-energy DIY noise as Guerilla Toss, but their old-fashioned sound occupies the same world as Essaie Pas’ classic coldwave. The trio calls its own music “balearic acid sophistihouse”—a ridiculous term, on its face, but one that nevertheless helps make sense of The Golden Mile’s collage of styles. From the outset, Flash Trading present themselves as a band very much interested in two-things: nostalgia and vibe. Their sound, rough at the edges but tightly produced, is mostly made from burbling TB-303 tones and needling hi-hats cushioned by warm stabs of synth. Their instrumentation is never glossy or shiny; in fact, it’s so focused on sounding old that there are moments on the record that are the aural equivalent of dipping paper in tea to make it look like an antique. Their assortment of hardware drum machine sounds and schmaltzy synthesizers bathes the music in an unmistakably vintage light. Listening to their first EP, you might think you’ve found some grimy CD in a yard sale. That’s not a bad thing; it only lends to the strong sense of mood and atmosphere. Their songs work hard to create a space for movement: Their rhythms sway with the insistence of a rocking chair, and as hard-edged as they can get, a certain brightness pervades their work. The tracks on The Golden Mile are as sunny as rays of morning light piercing through club fog. These songs are anchored by vocalist Monae Freeman, who uses her voice intelligently and interestingly. In more house-oriented tracks, she bubbles beneath the mix, sounding almost like a well-wrought sample, and in poppier efforts like “Elmhurst” she stays up front, guiding the song. She’s an elegant performer who helps duct-tape the disparate sounds together in a way that makes sense. In their best songs, like “Acceleration” or “Vini,” they’re able to concoct a musical blend that’s equal parts aggressive acid house and plush sophistipop. On paper, it shouldn’t work, but the trio’s ability to navigate the swirling world of their own making is admirable.

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

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

Electronic

Tag Out

August 8, 2017

fd2d3a00-9509-459b-86f5-b648209a8156

Kevin Lozano

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

On last year's breakout solo collection Interstellar, Frankie Rose shifted from the character-driven garage-rock she helped create with Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and the Outs to romanticized, Reagan-era dream-pop. On her new album, Herein Wild, she tries to sound bigger and smaller at the same time.

On last year's breakout solo collection Interstellar, Frankie Rose shifted from the character-driven garage-rock she helped create with Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and the Outs to romanticized, Reagan-era dream-pop. On her new album, Herein Wild, she tries to sound bigger and smaller at the same time.

Frankie Rose: Herein Wild

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18512-frankie-rose-herein-wild/

Herein Wild

It felt like only a matter of time before Frankie Rose evolved from a bright light in New York indie rock to a legitimate star and unsurprisingly, it happened on last year’s Interstellar, the first album attributed to her and her alone. The surprising part was how she shifted from the more character-driven garage-rock she helped create with Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and the Outs to romanticized, Reagan-era dream-pop, a genre that all but requires putting form before flair (see also: DIIV, Wild Nothing, Lotus Plaza). The main lyric in the chorus of Interstellar highlight “Know Me” actually went “don’t know me,” which felt apt for a record with a sharp and subtly diverse array of songs that revealed the range of Rose’s talent but not much about herself. Unfortunately, by making an exact replica of Interstellar minus the sharp and subtly diverse array of songs, Herein Wild reveals the limitations of that range while turning its predecessor’s personality void from a cost of doing business into a serious liability. It’s futile to listen to Herein Wild without succumbing the urge to compare it to its predecessor; in fact, the sequencing is so similar that it damn near dares you to do so on a track-by-track basis. As with “Interstellar”, the leadoff here boasts a scene-chewing verse where Rose sings with the timbre of a touchtone phone before an anticipatory, on-the-one bass-drum thump guides her out of the vaporous reverb. Only you lose the knee-buckling dynamics of “Interstellar” and instead get a smooth ascent to one of Herein Wild’s 10 lilting and lightly pitched choruses. As with “Gospel/Grace”, the third song here is sleek and silvery indie-pop, but instead of flowing like liquid mercury like its Interstellar equivalent, “Into the Blue” sits in place like a glob of puffy glitter paint. Herein Wild is, once again, identically bisected by a beatless vocal showcase; previously, “Pair of Wings” wisely used Rose’s voice for texture, looping and weaving soft and silken harmonies. “Cliffs As High” at least acknowledges a new influence in Björk by demonstrating a similar obsession with altitude and surprisingly angular melody. But it’s the exact opposite of “Hyperballad” in every conceivable way, dozing off waiting for a more forceful vocalist who can counter its somnambulant string arrangement. We could seriously do this for all 10 songs, but lead single “Sorrow” about sums up the disassociation between her ambitions to sound bigger and smaller (i.e., more ostensibly “personal”) at the same time. Ignore, if you can, how “Sorrow” has the same drum pattern as “Know Me”, since that song pretty much nicked its own from the Cure’s “Close to Me”, a sort of “Be My Baby” public domain entity for artists of this stripe. It’s also easy to condone the lyrics throughout Herein Wild trying to express more individual desires through the same water/dream/sky vocabulary that kept Interstellar so purposefully vague. More important is how “Sorrow” gives you an idea of what Rose meant when discussing the influence of film soundtracks on Herein Wild, in that there are real strings rather than synthesizers and songs not entirely indebted to strict verse/chorus structure. Yet the added orchestration adds bulk rather than depth; the strings arrive exactly when you’d expect and add another layer of syrupy sheen rather than counterpoint, the bridge doesn’t introduce any new melody or dynamic shift and the fake fade-out just kills time. The misallocation of resources is even more pronounced when Rose tries to hearken back to Interstellar’s rawest rock song (“Night Swim”). “The Depths” makes a literal callback with its introductory lyric (“swimming across the water”), and its murky, bass-driven arrangement at least recalls a different iteration of the Cure (Pornography rather than Head on the Door). But even when it tries to menace, the overwhelming takeaway from Herein Wild is just how edgeless it is, bearing the consistency, texture and sickly sweetness of a circus peanut. It’s not like Frankie Rose forgot how to write a catchy song and there are enough here where you wonder if it would be heard as “promising,” had it come from a new band as opposed to someone more familiar. But that’s the paradox of Herein Wild: it might be subject to less scrutiny had it not followed Interstellar, but then again, it might not be subject to scrutiny at all, and simply filed away with any other competent and unexceptional dream-pop. Besides, what’s the point of pretending Interstellar doesn’t exist when Herein Wild does the exact opposite? As the saying goes, the strict imitation of Herein Wild sincerely flatters its predecessor; it just doesn’t do the same for the person who made it.

2013-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

2013-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Fat Possum

September 23, 2013

fd31ed78-3b68-48a7-aec9-8d984c0cb935

Ian Cohen

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

More than a simple greatest-hits collection, this box set commemorating Jamaica’s powerhouse independent label offers a well-rounded portrait of the iconic imprint’s role in reggae history.

More than a simple greatest-hits collection, this box set commemorating Jamaica’s powerhouse independent label offers a well-rounded portrait of the iconic imprint’s role in reggae history.

Various Artists: Down in Jamaica – 40 Years of VP Records

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-down-in-jamaica-40-years-of-vp-records/

Down in Jamaica – 40 Years of VP Records

Celebrating 40 years of growth in a fickle, fast-moving industry, VP Records’ Down in Jamaica draws from the label’s practically unrivaled catalog to honor the story of Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneurs Vincent and Patricia Chin, whose trajectory was remarkably synonymous with that of dancehall reggae itself. Launched from an ice-cream parlor in downtown Kingston, the Chins’ business (originally called Randy’s Records) grew from a one-stop shop for local wax into a bustling recording studio, the world’s largest independent reggae label, and a major arm of the global reggae industry, after the Chins relocated to Jamaica, Queens, in the late 1970s and turned their focus to foreign markets. Over the years, VP became the premier international distributor of Jamaican music, issuing hit singles, Grammy-winning albums, and such popular compilation series as Strictly the Best, Reggae Gold, and Riddim Driven. Few labels have played so central a role in reggae’s modern era, documenting the rise of rapping deejays and digital riddims, and in the 21st century VP has continued to grow, acquiring onetime international rival Greensleeves in 2008 and building a catalog that includes the lion’s share of dancehall hits among its 25,000 sound recordings. As such, a 40th anniversary compilation from VP offers a vital a representation of Jamaican popular music since the late ’70s. This particular selection is held together by its depiction of dancehall’s development, the genre’s relationship to the “roots and culture” scene, and the perseverance of reggae as a national feeling, style, and brand. More than a greatest-hits collection based on data or settled narrative, the compilation aims for a well-rounded portrait of VP’s role in reggae history. Still, hits abound. Nearly every song was a big tune in Jamaica during its day and remains a perennial standard wherever reggae is played. Those unfamiliar with dancehall reggae will find a fine introduction in the 82 tracks spread across four CDs, while longtime listeners will revel in the number of cherished songs. For devotees, the compilation also includes four 12" and four 7" records featuring re-pressed versions of obscure 12" “disco mixes” from the late ’70s along with unique mixes of dub classics like the Congos’ “Fisher Man,” produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose Upsetter label was distributed by VP. Such deluxe sets are often over-the-top grabs at the collectors’ market, but for a label that has spanned the vinyl to digital age (and back), the multi-format throwback vibes seem apt. While some amount of in-house production by the Chins and their sons added to the label’s stockpile, because VP was a reliable one-stop for Jamaican producers, they licensed, manufactured, and distributed many of the biggest songs coming out of Kingston’s many studios, including tracks by all of the most successful and influential producers of the last few decades: Steely & Clevie, Gussie Clarke, Philip “Fatis” Burrell, Bobby “Digital” Dixon, Dean Fraser. Among others, VP cultivated an ongoing partnership with notorious producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes in the early 1980s, distributing the massive dancehall hits on his Volcano imprint to the wider world, with audible consequences for reggae, hip-hop, and pop. The collaboration with Junjo gave rise to tunes and riddims that echo across popular music to this day. Of the many collected here, two of them feature what has come to be called the “Diseases” riddim, after Michigan & Smiley’s catchy brimstone chant of the same name about women wearing trousers (not good, in their view) and elephantiasis (also not good). On that song, the duo inveighs over bare, bouncy dub-funk by Junjo’s house band the Roots Radics—tight, spare drums, driving bass, and a jangly guitar riff that, just a few years later, would add rudeboy edge to Boogie Down Productions’ “Remix for P Is Free” and, even later, lend poignancy to Black Star’s elegiac “Definition.” Doing his own inimitable thing on a customized flip of the riddim, Yellowman offers up one of the stickiest earworms of all time on “Zungguzungguguzungguzeng.” First crossing into hip-hop as one of BDP’s weaponized reggae references, the chorus melody has since turned up in over 60 other recordings, spanning reggae, hip-hop, rock, and electronic music, most recently rearing its head in Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Ride or Die.” (The compilation includes other worthy riddim pairings, like Wayne Wonder and Bounty Killer on Lenky’s iconic “Diwali,” and Jah Cure and T.O.K. taking turns on Don Corleon’s “Drop Leaf.”) While the collection represents the dancehall era’s dazzling search for new sounds, from dubbed-out live bands to digital riddims to post-millennial pop crossover, the musical through line that unites it all is the persistence of the roots reggae sound and its righteous messaging. This thread ties together the Wailing Souls bearing witness on “Fire House Rock” in the early ’80s; protests of hypocrisy in VC’s turn-of-the-millennium “By His Deeds”; and the past decade’s “new roots” of Jah9, Chronixx, and Raging Fyah. Banner-bearing revivalists such as Garnet Silk, Buju Banton, and Luciano all bring their booming voices to the project of reinfusing dancehall with Rastafarian ideals, while roots reggae’s trademark upbeat bounce gives lift to a set of sweet songs about love and heartbreak, including Junior Kelly’s “Love So Nice,” Beres Hammond’s “Rockaway,” Sizzla’s “Just One of Those Days” and Tarrus Riley’s “She’s Royal.” (On the other hand, the likes of Ninjaman, Cutty Ranks, Spragga Benz, and Mavado assure some “badman” representation, while Sanchez, Sean Paul, and Gyptian sing of love in more secular terms.) Although the resilience of roots against a restless dancehall backdrop emerges as the central theme, the collection also touches upon the wider variety of music VP has issued, including soca and R&B fusions. (VP’s Gold Disc imprint even released early records by proto-reggaetonero El General in the early 1990s, though none appear here.) These and other recent productions round things out, in a sense, but they can seem slight next to dozens of time-honored dancehall anthems. The relative scarcity of women artists also calls attention to the challenge of doing justice to a wide swath of Jamaican music while reflecting the established canon. Although the ratio improves over the last two decades of releases—nearly one-third of the artists on the fourth disc are women, while only four appear on the first three discs—this feels like a missed opportunity. While the disparity reflects a long-standing industry prejudice that is hardly confined to reggae, VP’s vast catalog could have accommodated a more balanced mix. Despite these issues, the compilation stands as a grand monument to the dancehall era and the triumphant efforts of an enterprising family to share Jamaican music with the world. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

VP

November 12, 2019

fd383261-7f72-49d1-8e35-a75e422b82d4

Wayne Marshall

https://pitchfork.com/staff/wayne-marshall/

The Swedish producer takes the long view on his fifth album full of drifting compositions that knit together twin feelings of melancholy and hope.

The Swedish producer takes the long view on his fifth album full of drifting compositions that knit together twin feelings of melancholy and hope.

The Field: Infinite Moment

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-field-infinite-moment/

Infinite Moment

Axel Willner’s sixth album as the Field approaches slowly, like a car on a highway shredded by heat haze. Two chords oscillate; a humid bass tone rumbles a human voice, or maybe a synthesizer trained to sound like one. The voice is a scream trapped in amber, agitated but distant, a reaction far removed from its spark. Though voices dart in and out of much of the ambient techno Willner makes, this one is different from his usual samples, which tend to hold more structure—a discernible consonant, a fossil of breath. This voice sounds human and not human, fevered and at peace, calling for something just out of reach. Infinite Moment basks in motion that feels like stillness. It repeats itself, like Field albums do, but here Willner keeps his melodic arrangements simple. Often he oscillates between just two or three notes, expanding the space between them until it feels big enough to slip inside. Unlike 2016’s The Follower and 2013’s Cupid’s Head, which wove together slippery, dexterous figures, Infinite Moment maintains a plane of focus broad enough to reach the horizon. These hypnagogic compositions tend to bury the reflex to keep time. Willner’s no stranger to longer compositions—many of his songs breach ten minutes—but Infinite Moment doesn’t ask the listener to take stock of each measure or unpack its composite parts. It doesn’t pull the body into a pulse like dance music does; it washes over the body, surrounding it, lulling it into a closed environment. It’s hard to find the motivation to count seconds. A track like “Something Left, Something Right, Something Wrong” could be three minutes or 30 if you’re hearing it without a clock in sight. It’s propelled by a simple beat, but Willner destabilizes the bass drum with a shuffle of clipped synthesizers whose edges add polyrhythms. There’s one kind of time, the downbeat, and then just beyond it there’s another, blurrier time shifting in and out of focus. The vocals on “Hear Your Voice” enter the fray so slowly it feels like they’ve sneaked up on you, and the song’s synthesizer elements just peel away until the track has thinned out. “Made of Steel. Made of Stone” starts with vocals, and uses the silence between their distorted cries to set a tempo before a muted click track kicks in. Throughout Infinite Moment, Willner revels in these subtle transitions. A synth line is perceptible only once it’s obvious that it’s been playing for a while already. Even the most structured, percussive song, “Divide Now,” washes its beats over with insistent ghostly noise. No hard edges present themselves on the album. Even the snare drums sound bleary. Infinite Moment’s loose relationship with time and synchronicity follows a year full of albums with a similar drift. Recent experimental works like Yves Tumor’s Safe in the Hands of Love and Low’s Double Negative let song structures surface like ancient ruins: decayed, elliptical, present but halfway lodged in another time. Willner’s latest also evinces a sense of loss, but he’s just as interested in growing new forms in the holes he’s punched in his music. Moss covers his ruins and he recognizes it as life—not a scar on a decrepit form, but a new expression of being, another way for the earth to roll through time. The warmth of Infinite Moment radiates from its symbiotic growth of melancholy and hope. Willner doesn’t privilege one over the other, but allows them to knit together, watching from a distance to see the shapes they might take.

2018-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Kompakt

September 24, 2018

fd3bf09f-8f3d-4f13-8345-f3573a98afa2

Sasha Geffen

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

The French trio’s third album trends towards accessibility without losing its taste for the visceral pleasures of more technical post-hardcore.

The French trio’s third album trends towards accessibility without losing its taste for the visceral pleasures of more technical post-hardcore.

Birds in Row: Gris Klein

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/birds-in-row-gris-klein/

Gris Klein

Birds in Row have spent the past decade making albums about essentially the same question: How can people relate to each other as the world descends into chaos and division? This is fertile territory if you happen to make blowtorch-intense post-hardcore music. The consistency of the French trio’s subject matter demonstrates the adaptability of their artistry, because none of their three LPs have settled on the same sound or the same solution. On their 2012 debut You, Me & The Violence, there was little “post-” in their hardcore and little restraint in their ferocious antagonism. Six years later, We Already Lost the World opened up the possibility of finding common ground with opposing forces. Having realized the futility of mending fences, Birds in Row return with a new album, Gris Klein, that offers the way out: moving on and never looking back. This is the band’s first release for Red Creek, a boutique label recently launched by Swedish post-metal icons Cult of Luna. Continuing the trajectory of their relatively scant catalog, Gris Klein trends towards accessibility. But it doesn’t indulge in typical crowd-pleasers like metalcore choruses or chiming post-rock crescendos. Though Birds in Row are now making six-minute songs with clean vocals and strummed guitar chords, “Noah” and “Trompe L’oeil” take on a jittery, La Dispute-style sing-talk simmer before reaching a boil. Trusting the suggestive powers of propulsion, the band use the pent-up energy of their previous work as fuel for uplift rather than demolition. “You say you’re not one for confettis and hats,” Bart Balboa screams on “Confettis,” a kind of inverse of 2018 single “I Don’t Dance” that does away with the stop-start gymnastics, letting everyone get caught up in a pushpit of forward momentum. Though Birds in Row aren’t exactly dancing on Gris Klein, bodies are constantly in motion. “Confusing loneliness for freedom, solitude for a serum, and complaints for poetry,” Balboa shrieks, forgoing his most florid syntax for an unmistakable mission statement. To the degree that they’re immediately legible, Balboa’s lyrics convey the urgency of taking positive action towards negative energy. If there really is a better future for us out there, it won’t be based in capitalism (“Noah”) or nihilism (“Daltonians”). The band has a better grip on pacing and mood this time around, and a better sense for how to use the rhythm section as a guide. When Gris Klein shifts to a preparation phase of its mission, the beats are more menacing and tom-heavy. When it’s time to lay waste to false prophets or weak philosophies, the energy comes in rejuvenating bursts. Birds in Row haven’t lost their taste for the visceral pleasures of more technical post-hardcore; the riffs of “Rodin” are cut up like a microhouse beat, seemingly impossible in their precision. Gris Klein’s most crucial departure has little to do with the music. Previously, the band preferred to remain obscure; the members blurred their faces in photos and were identified only by their initials. This time around, they’re quite visible: Bassist Quentin Sauvé released an acoustic singer-songwriter album under his own name and Balboa can be heard chatting with former labelmate Jeremy Bolm on the Touché Amoré singer’s podcast. This all aligns with the record’s call to arms: How can Birds in Row ask the listener to drop their defenses without first showing their own faces? Rather than marking a clean break with their prior approach, Gris Klein considers the subtle but important difference between “going hard” and “moving forward.”

2022-10-21T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-10-21T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

Red Creek

October 21, 2022

fd41f8e4-724e-4948-b85a-b66cef99a47c

Ian Cohen

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

The Colorado percussionist’s debut solo album is a glitchy sound collage where drums resemble saxophones and voice memos share space with guest vocalists.

The Colorado percussionist’s debut solo album is a glitchy sound collage where drums resemble saxophones and voice memos share space with guest vocalists.

Ben Sloan: muted colors

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-sloan-muted-colors/

muted colors

Ben Sloan is a percussionist whose touch is so light and musical that it melts the border between beat and melody. In his collaborations with other artists, from the National and Moses Sumney to producers like Mouse on Mars, you can consistently hear a musical intelligence seeking the point where the drums fuse into the texture of the song. He’s on a short list of drummers, along with Liturgy’s Greg Fox, whose extended solos you can easily imagine taking center stage. On his debut full-length, muted colors, Sloan brings his impulse for melodic and rhythmic communion to a piece of software called Sensory Percussion, which can transform drumming into a blurting saxophone, a ghostly synth pad, or a crying voice, all in real time. It’s a kick to hear him wield this tool across the glitchy, dreamy surface of muted colors. Sloan says the album’s music was “culled from his digital scrapbook”—“old hard drives, folders, field recordings, studio sessions, and countless voice memos”—and he’s stitched these ephemera into a loose tapestry full of stray threads of mumbled voices and flute sounds. The music floats by in a genial haze, with bits of color and life flashing by at the edges of your attention. The mood isn’t too far off from what used to be called, in the early ’00s, “laptop pop”—Boards of Canada, the Books, Cornelius. Sloan loves incidental sounds, and the album is a tiny crawling sensorium full of them: on “Who’s Melting,” you hear what sounds like change falling out of pockets, fingers drumming a desktop, and what could be a passing car as captured on an iPhone through a pants pocket. You don’t actively listen to the result so much as notice it from time to time. Sloan invites a handful of guests and friends to drop by, and the album grows more vivid and focused whenever they appear. Serengeti and Josiah Wolf of WHY? tag “Too Much Internet” with soft, motormouth rapping, and it sounds amusingly like a Death Grips song muttering to itself at the library. Madeline Kenney’s cool-blue vocals on “1e&a” evoke Feist’s collaborations with Broken Social Scene. Moses Sumney brings his unholy charisma to “Philistine,” reminding you that any song he appears on automatically becomes his own. Sloan himself seems to have modest aims for the album—he’s called each track “a little colorful, sensational world to briefly indulge.” That feels exactly right. If you have half an hour of aimless transit and a window to stare out of, muted colors makes pleasant, and evocative, company.

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

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

Experimental

New Amsterdam

April 12, 2023

fd427c35-f8a0-4e84-a171-d711823314ce

Jayson Greene

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

Whereas the first Creed soundtrack reached for the rafters, the sequel is placeless and tame. Its only muse seems to be Mike WiLL’s contact list.

Whereas the first Creed soundtrack reached for the rafters, the sequel is placeless and tame. Its only muse seems to be Mike WiLL’s contact list.

Mike WiLL Made-It: Creed II: The Album

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-will-made-it-creed-ii-the-album/

Creed II: The Album

The standout scene in Creed isn’t a fight. It’s Adonis Creed, the main character, shadow boxing in front of a projection of his dead father fighting Rocky Balboa. Adonis has no relationship with his father, but in that brief moment he inherits the glory of his father’s career. Fueled by that distant admiration, and determined to forge his own path, he spends the rest of the movie escaping his father’s shadow, a struggle that deepens in Creed II. The film’s soundtrack isn’t as gutsy. Executive produced by Mike WiLL Made-It, the record is a bland collection of struggle raps and overwrought ballads. “Inspired by” the film to a fault, the album is so literal it hurts. In theory, Mike WiLL is a perfect fit for a film franchise about the strain of legacy. A key player in rap’s pop coup over the past decade, he’s established himself as a shrewd expansionist. Starting with trap and strategically branching out, he’s built a solid catalog of strip club anthems (“Rake It Up”; “Pour It Up”), spacey trap ditties (“Turn on the Lights”), pop bangers (“23”), and everything in between. He often speaks of this versatility as a direct product of his fear of being pigeon-holed. “I don’t want to just have a rap label. I want to have a whole label. I want to have a whole dynasty,” he said in 2015. “If you’re a super producer you can produce on all levels. Any genre of music,” he said earlier this year, “You can produce artists. You can produce clothing. You can produce movies.” Given his proven range and his will to keep on broadening, a soundtrack would presumably be an ideal platform for Mike WiLL to stretch his wings. Instead, the record is grounded to a fault. The soundbed is largely monochrome and dim, confined to a drab grayscale that’s often embellished with streaks of gloomy noodling and dull brass. Reproducing the weighty tone of the film, the vibe is generally either sad or serious—which ultimately comes across as safe. Whereas the first Creed soundtrack reached for the rafters and used Philadelphia as a muse for its pomp and brashness, this record is placeless and tame. Its only muse seems to be Mike WiLL’s contact list. While the first film’s soundtrack had the benefit of being a compilation stacked with iconic songs like Tupac’s “Hail Mary” and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody,” the original songs (one of which was produced by Mike WiLL) were more than placeholders. They embodied the spirit of the movie, channeling Adonis’ strife and determination into chest-puffing fun. Here, the performances are either remarkably phoned in or embarrassingly straightforward. Nas’ verse on “Check” is a literal plot summary. “He trying to be a father, but he lost his father to the same thing,” he raps. “Watching Me” squanders excellent, moody verses by Kodak Black and Slim Jxmmi to pad what feels like a drowsy Swaecation throwaway. Quavo raps a play-by-play narrative of a fistfight on a song imaginatively titled “F.I.G.H.T.” and it’s somehow more literal than the song name: “Knuckle up, knuckle up/Nigga got hit with the uppercut/He got a cut on his eye/Damn, now he can’t see, it done closed up.” Ari Lennox and J. Cole’s sultry “Shea Butter Baby” and Crime Mob and Slim Jxmmi’s crunk throwback “We Can Hit (Round 1)” escape all this literalism and bring some much appreciated camp. Both songs are excessive and, most importantly, amusing. There is only one knockout, though. Pharrell and Kendrick Lamar are dazzling on “The Mantra,” spitballing flows and ideas into weird, technicolor lines. For them, legacies are built both inside and outside the ring, within the intensity of competition and the looseness of play. That attitude fits Creed II, which ends with Adonis defending his title by redefining what it means to him. If this colorless cash-in is the extent of his vision, Mike WiLL, too, might want to redefine his title—for this outing, super producer doesn’t fit.

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

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

Rap

Eardruma / Interscope

November 28, 2018

fd4f0fb6-7ac9-4dd9-a2a3-fe852f2eebca

Stephen Kearse

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

Max Turnbull’s newest group takes its name from a song co-written by Eric Clapton and George Harrison—then stretches it from a three-minute pop song into a 14-minute improvisatory mission statement.

Max Turnbull’s newest group takes its name from a song co-written by Eric Clapton and George Harrison—then stretches it from a three-minute pop song into a 14-minute improvisatory mission statement.

Badge Époque Ensemble: Nature, Man & Woman EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/badge-epoque-ensemble-nature-man-and-woman-ep/

Nature, Man & Woman EP

If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that no dad-rock deity is too square to be reclaimed as cool. In recent years, the lodestars for contemporary indie rock have gradually shifted from the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Gang of Four, and Sonic Youth to Michael McDonald, Bruce Hornsby, Phil Collins, and Dire Straits. But there remains one boomer icon who’s never been considered for hipster rehabilitation: Eric Clapton. Maybe it’s the fact that Clapton is forever tethered to a blues-guitar tradition that’s increasingly unfashionable in the 21st century, or maybe it’s the unshakeable bitter aftertaste of his alcohol-fuelled misadventures in racism, but to date we have seen no chillwave cover of “Tears in Heaven,” no onstage duet with Mac DeMarco on “Wonderful Tonight”; even the Black Keys haven’t touched the guy. But on the second release from Toronto’s Badge Époque Ensemble, not only does Clapton receive a rare acknowledgement from an experimental underground act normally besotted with left-field jazz, we learn that his legacy is stitched right into the band’s name. Badge Époque Ensemble is the latest project from Max Turnbull, an artist whose DIY, Madlib-inspired approach to sound design is completely at odds with Clapton’s technical precision, yet the two share unlikely career parallels. Turnbull first surfaced in the late 2000s as Slim Twig, a highly stylized, pompadoured persona that was equal parts rockabilly rebel, avant-punk provocateur, and hip-hop-schooled sound collagist. But since the release of 2015’s Thank You for Stickin’ With Twig, he’s dropped the alias and receded into more anonymous roles, whether backing wife Meg Remy in U.S. Girls, joining her in the mondo-rock supergroup Darlene Shrugg, or moonlighting with astral-jazz travellers the Cosmic Range. Badge Époque Ensemble represents his most extreme act of self-negation yet. Where Slim Twig channelled outsized personalities like Nick Cave and Jon Spencer, Turnbull is now forging kinship with the unsung composers and faceless session players of library music, the funky, fusion-flavored stock soundtracks that permeated documentaries, cop shows, and sports telecasts in the ’70s. It’s an evolution that oddly reflects Clapton’s own sidestep out of the spotlight in the late ’60s, when—having tired of Cream’s acid-rock excess—he sought refuge in the more tuneful Blind Faith and Delaney & Bonnie, before obscuring his identity altogether in Derek and the Dominoes. So it’s rather fitting that Nature, Man & Woman should climax with a cover of “Badge,” a song that Clapton co-wrote with George Harrison for Cream’s final album—and, some 40 years later, has provided Turnbull with the inspiration for his new group’s handle. In this case, “cover” is a gross understatement—Turnbull and co. stretch “Badge” from a three-minute pop song into a 14-minute improvisatory mission statement that wholly earns its self-edifying rebrand as “Badge Theme.” After faithfully mirroring the original’s structure for three verse reps (with Alia O’Brien’s flute tracing Clapton’s vocal melody), Badge Époque leave the song in the dust and embark on an extended funk odyssey atop a lithe congas’n’clavinet groove. But while the two versions of the song couldn’t be more different, they serve the same transformative function for their creators: For Clapton, “Badge” was a gateway between his guitar-god roots and the pop-oriented songcraft that would define his career from thereon out; for Turnbull, “Badge Theme” charts a record collector’s journey from the comforts of classic rock into the bottomless abyss of rare-groove crate-digging and private-press psychedelia. If “Badge Theme” represents the totality of the Badge Époque experience, the other two tracks on Nature, Man & Woman respectively provide more discrete showcases of the band’s wandering impulses and compositional ingenuity. The smoke-covered title track doesn’t waver from its foot-dragging, 16-rpm rhythm for its entire six-minute duration, but there’s no lack of action: O’Brien’s flute alternates between sustained squeals and cosmic clusters, guitarist Chris Bezant chips off shards of bluesy guitar skronk as if he were carving a shiv, and the appearance of a high-pitched synth frequency sends the whole thing swishing left to right like a stomach in the early throes of food poisoning. By sharp contrast, the hair-raising “Zealous Child” nods more vigorously in the direction of O’Brien’s main gig in Blood Ceremony, as guest singer Dorothea Paas lends her eerie, hypnotized-cult-member voice to a song that gallops along the tightrope between pastoral prog and proto-metal. It’s the closest this band has veered toward a formal rock song, and perhaps not surprisingly, “Zealous Child” recently received the greatest validation that a group of Canadian library-music heads could ask for: last month, it was used as bumper music on a broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada. But Badge Époque’s natural utility as a soundtrack to slap shots and body checks shouldn’t obscure their true appeal: this is background music that demands your full attention.

2020-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Jazz

Telephone Explosion

January 10, 2020

fd5262b5-b3eb-4786-84ac-f266ece4ca7f

Stuart Berman

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

Conor Oberst acolyte continues to question everything from marriage to love to religion to sex but wraps much of it in a ponderous alt-rock framework.

Conor Oberst acolyte continues to question everything from marriage to love to religion to sex but wraps much of it in a ponderous alt-rock framework.

Manchester Orchestra: Simple Math

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15453-simple-math/

Simple Math

As with many young songwriters prone to lyrically oversharing, Manchester Orchestra's Andy Hull has often been paid the loaded compliment of being "precocious." It's a term that implies unfulfilled potential. But now that his latest album, Simple Math, aspires to be a culmination of his prior two bombastically titled and performed LPs, I can revisit them knowing they were fully conceived steps towards the logical endpoint, "a story about a 23-year old who questions everything from marriage to love to religion to sex." In other words, a concept album about the experience of being Andy Hull, written by Andy Hull. But hell, if there's any Conor Oberst acolyte capable of making The Merrimack to Titus Andronicus' The Monitor, it's Hull. As a frontman, he does his peers proud-- while his astringent, high lonesome warble immediately recalls the Jim James/Ben Bridwell dialect, it's flexible enough to handle both rebel yells and vulnerable self-flagellation. Hull's got a thing for drunken fuck-ups who own up to their failures, though he's far more interested in using it for autobiography rather than storytelling. His belief in his own profundity is kind of endearing as Manchester Orchestra's driving force. It's hard to imagine something like the title track, which uses infidelity as a jumping-off point to question the entire basis of human existence, even standing a chance without it. The problem lies in where Hull ends and Manchester Orchestra begins, and it's a space populated by lesser sons of the south, post-grunge good ol' boys like 3 Doors Down and Collective Soul-- tellingly, the most immediately hooky riffs of the lot ("April Fool") lay mere inches down the fretboard from those of "Shine", and "Leave It Alone" flirts too briefly with a raw tenderness before diving headfirst into the sugary dross of truck-selling power ballad "The World That I Know". It's that ponderous alt-rock framework that makes Simple Math such a drag even as the lyrics and production feel like they're racing to out-sensationalize each other. While the burly guitars on "Mighty" and "Pale Black Eye" flex some swamp-rock muscle, as a full outfit, Manchester Orchestra simply plod instead of groove, bogged down by Simple Math's favorite artificial flavor, a charmlessly and coldly recorded string section. It's indicative of Simple Math's overcooking: Most of the time, the band can't find a moment of empty space it doesn't fill with that extra guitar overdub, more string cues, or another intimacy-sapping vocal harmony. Or you get something like "Pensacola", whose stein-swinging coda comes off like a fun idea they were dying to get in somewhere rather than an organic conclusion, to say nothing of its clear resemblance to a Modest Mouse song that happens to be called "Florida". And then there's "Virgin". It clearly announces itself as Simple Math's "ambitious centerpiece" by going all in on the epic signifiers: daunting strings, a horn section at the bridge, massed vocals, and, of course, a kiddie choir to drive the hook home. But melodically and tonally, they're simply piling onto what, at its core, is an incredibly simple arrangement-- its juddering, drop-D Alice in Chains riff is too repetitive not to be catchy, but taken as a whole, it's the most glaring example of a record that's too quick to cut corners and cheat its way toward unhinged transcendence despite so convincingly having its shit together. Which ultimately is where Simple Math falters despite its admirable ambition; as the saying goes, "men plan, God laughs," and Simple Math is proof that your existential crises and epiphanies can't be micromanaged.

2011-05-27T02:00:04.000-04:00

2011-05-27T02:00:04.000-04:00

Rock

Columbia / Favorite Gentlemen

May 27, 2011

fd549d55-6124-4646-8a5d-67d8650207a8

Ian Cohen

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

Earlier this year Kieran Hebden opened a Bandcamp account, offering streams and downloads of three early Four Tet EPs and the full-length Dialogue. The material dates to the late 1990s, when Four Tet was more of a side project for Hebden, and when his attention fell mostly on his three-piece band, Fridge.

Earlier this year Kieran Hebden opened a Bandcamp account, offering streams and downloads of three early Four Tet EPs and the full-length Dialogue. The material dates to the late 1990s, when Four Tet was more of a side project for Hebden, and when his attention fell mostly on his three-piece band, Fridge.

Four Tet: Thirtysixtwentyfive / Misnomer / Glasshead / Dialogue

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18968-four-tet-thirtysixtwentyfive-misnomer-glasshead-dialogue/

Thirtysixtwentyfive / Misnomer / Glasshead / Dialogue

Kieran Hebden's been in a reflective mood of late, perhaps triggered by the fact that the benchmark Four Tet album Rounds turned 10 years old last year. Among the collection of archival material suddenly made available has been a stream of a 1999 mix for Gilles Peterson's BBC radio show, a big data dump of remix work, and the 0181 collection spanning 1997-2001. Earlier this year Hebden opened a Bandcamp account, offering streams and cheap downloads of three early EPs and the full-length Dialogue. The material dates back to the late 1990s, a period when Four Tet was more of a side project for Hebden, with his attention mostly falling on the post-rock emulation of his three-piece band, Fridge. With Rounds symbolizing the moment everything zoomed into sharp focus, this work resembles the obstacles he had to navigate to get to that place. If Hebden's group work sounded like a bunch of guys who had clutched copies of Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die a little too closely to their hearts, Four Tet hinted at a far wider range of listening happening behind the scenes. All four of these releases came out in the span of a year, but an evolutionary arc emerges over their collected two-hour runtime. Still, there's a lack of clarity, with only subtle allusions to the vision that would ultimately take Hebden out of the small circles he was running in during this era. If that sounds a little harsh, it's a fault he's acutely aware of, explaining in an interview last year that his pre-Rounds work "just sounds like I've heard some records that are really cool." Although Hebden is aware of his earlier shortcomings, he's clearly not intent on shying away from them completely. His Bandcamp page in its current state simply contains these four releases plus a series of images, one of which features a Spotify page compressed and turned upside-down. Needless to say, most of Hebden's music is not available on the service at time of writing. Objections to streaming media aside, what we get here are a series of rough sketches that highlight Hebden's obsessions over a particular period. There are trappings of the time, including shades of trip-hop and the cut-up collage of DJ Shadow, bombastic drum sounds that bear echoes of big beat, and elements of the post-rock grooves Hebden was practicing elsewhere. These records work as a sort of time capsule. There's a dip into the post-dub sound of the shortlasting illbient sub-genre on the first part of "Thirtysixtwentyfive", and it's not a stretch to imagine Hebden coming across artists such as DJ Olive, Doug Scharin, and Techno Animal during his investigations into the outer reaches of post-rock. He also touches on jazz, with a barrage of sax and drum samples providing a neat loop around to Hebden's future collaborations with drummer Steve Reid. The sense of struggle is palpable at times, indicating someone with a wide open mind who knows where he wants to go but falling just short somewhere between conception and execution. It's striking just how uneven this material can be, with little pockets of inspiration surfacing amid a tangle of material that shows an artist learning his trade. The tranquil middle section of "Fume" from the Misnomer EP has some of the itchy ambience and crisp beats that would become a hallmark of Hebden's later work. But over its 10 minute runtime it also works in hackneyed hip-hop samples and screaming sax that doesn't sit well in the mix, ultimately resembling a junior What Does Your Soul Look Like without the same sense of wild exploration. There are other tracks that attempt to pull off the same kind of epic journey-into-sound feel here, but the feeling is of an artist interested in musical transportation without fully having the skills to get there yet. Hebden's jazz impulses solidify into some of the most satisfying tracks here, notably on "Chiron" from Dialogue, which builds off a drum lift from the much-sampled Bernard Purdie, pushing it into a tranquil place that's utterly meditative by its close. Similarly, "Aying" from Misnomer (which was tacked on as a bonus cut on the CD version of Dialogue) works as a wonky pile-up of saxophone riffs and jazzy drum fills, gaining a drunken stride that resembles little Hebden has done before or since. It's noticeable that those two tracks are among the shortest over these four releases, with Hebden able to reach greater points of revelation when he got sharper with his editing. He's rarely ventured over the 10-minute mark in his subsequent output; in contrast, the longest track here ("Thirtysixtwentyfive (Part 1)") last for almost 20 minutes. The collection signs off with "Glasshead" from 1999, which finds a greater sense of purpose than Hebden's prior long-groove efforts. Over 11 minutes he keeps within a narrow frame of sound instead of taking pointless deviations into tiny cul-de-sacs, most of which fit into his self-diagnosed tendency of merely aping other records he liked at the time. "Glashead" is far from his best material, but it does hint at a way forward, where all the clutter is stripped from his music, in turn helping to bring out the refinement in his work. Hebden's use of space in Rounds is key to its success. The acres of room between beats in "Unspoken", or the way "Hands" beautifully drifts into dying embers of glazy electronics, are vital parts of that album. These tracks reflect someone with the ability to deconstruct music history, but yet to find the fantastical place that talent would take him.

2014-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

January 28, 2014

fd573e98-3143-4414-9418-7b93039ead34

Nick Neyland

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

Dirty Projectors are once again a group effort. Their new EP is helmed by singer Felicia Douglass, whose smooth voice is an antidote to the unrelenting weirdness of Dave Longstreth’s arrangements.

Dirty Projectors are once again a group effort. Their new EP is helmed by singer Felicia Douglass, whose smooth voice is an antidote to the unrelenting weirdness of Dave Longstreth’s arrangements.

Dirty Projectors: Flight Tower EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dirty-projectors-flight-tower-ep/

Flight Tower EP

Dirty Projectors has always been a balancing act—an experiment in counterweights, and the calibrated chaos that results from tipping the scales. Frontman Dave Longstreth deals in reds and blues, innocence and experience, assembling strange geometries from the building blocks of the pop idiom. But what’s remarkable about Flight Tower, the second of five planned EPs from a reinvigorated Dirty Projectors, is just how stable it feels. Across four tracks, Longstreth and his collaborators grasp at defined boundaries and solid forms, drawing on the freed-up sensibility of 2018’s Lamp Lit Prose to present long-held affectations with renewed immediacy. With three new members now officially in the lineup—Maia Friedman, Felicia Douglass, and Kristin Slipp, all accomplished solo musicians with their own projects—Dirty Projectors are a group effort for the first time since the early 2010s. Their harmonies swirl, punctuate, and hang in the air. Where Windows Open, the first of the five EPs, featured Friedman on lead vocals, Flight Tower centers Douglass (Slipp will steer the third and Longstreth the fourth, with “everyone trading verses” on the fifth). The Dirty Projectors catalog is full of flashy vocal performances and declarative multi-part harmonies, but Douglass’ voice runs cooler and subtler, its smoothness an antidote Dave Longstreth’s ceaselessly complicated arrangements. Under her aegis, the music breathes. At just over 10 minutes, the EP is short enough that its appeal is mainly textural; these are isolated glimpses of a larger sequence, vignettes that point to something more fully formed. But Flight Tower is assured enough to evoke its own themes: songs about wonder and change, the peculiar magic of involving yourself in another person and of involving that person in you. Even at their most unmoored, they’re always gesturing toward connection. The loose, jittery “Lose Your Love” recalls “Cool Your Heart,” the Dirty Projectors highlight co-written with Solange, though the palette here is softer, and hews closer to R&B. A relatively traditional verse-chorus structure anchors the track’s lovestruck, free-associative lyrics. “Inner World” takes a similar tack to more fraught emotional territory, smoldering over keyboards and wind-up clicks. “Where is it taking me?/I can only know/After the tides recede/And we are free to grow,” coos Douglass, yielding to the ebb and flow of certainty. Though it’s freighted with apprehension, its titular refrain feels like a refuge. The second half of Flight Tower is more self-consciously experimental and ambiguous, leaning harder on glitchy, splintered surfaces; the emphasis is on the fact of feeling, rather than its precise expression. On the propulsive “Empty Vessel,” Douglass carves out another moment of psychic and aesthetic respite. “We’re facing forward/Or/With our eyes closed/We are dreaming/Of the coast,” she sings, syllables shadowed by warped, echoing fragments of memory. As on Windows Open, the band eschews ten dollar words—those “grayscale conjurers” and “lifelike perjurers”—in favor of simpler confessions. The effect is mesmeric and, in spite of its fussy architecture, newly grounded. “Self Design” explores that tension with more overt digital tricks, teasing a sample of Ravel’s Miroirs before lapsing into staggered, recursive melodies. Meaning slips, but puns persist: “What’s your love but/Safe design? Self design.” Douglass’ pronunciation renders “safe” and “self” identical. There’s a line in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 about a “high magic to low puns,” the secret power of the false familiar. It was there in Bitte Orca’s “Two Doves,” as Angel Deradoorian collapsed “feather” and “failure” into a single, mystifying hybrid word. And it’s here, too, channeled through a new set of musicians. As the world folds in on itself and language fails, these songs hold fast to what’s real, to conventions and people we can be sure of. It’s no coincidence that “inner world” sounds so much like “in a world…,” a kind of call to imagination; Flight Tower is an invitation to complete the thought. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Domino

July 2, 2020

fd58ed65-2a28-4307-acb7-15b75f9bbe01

Will Gottsegen

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

Lorely Rodriguez’s fourth album is a dazzling showcase for her unexpected vocal and production approach as she experiences the peaks and valleys of heated romance.

Lorely Rodriguez’s fourth album is a dazzling showcase for her unexpected vocal and production approach as she experiences the peaks and valleys of heated romance.

Empress Of: For Your Consideration

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/empress-of-for-your-consideration/

For Your Consideration

As Empress Of, Lorely Rodriguez has spent the past decade moving between punchy, upbeat synth-pop and introspective ballads with unselfconscious ease. Even when she’s leaned toward more mainstream pop, as on 2022’s Save Me EP, the Honduran American producer and singer-songwriter’s key influences have shined through. Whether she’s channeling the vertiginous serenades of Cocteau Twins or the contorted stylings of Imogen Heap, her catalog bursts with fizzy, unpredictable love songs in English and Spanish, which have landed her spots opening for pop stars like Carly Rae Jepsen and Rina Sawayama. On her fourth album, the independently released For Your Consideration, Rodriguez dials into an insatiable new groove, reprising an effusive, sensual point of view over propulsive dance and electropop. It’s the most intricate Empress Of album to date, a dazzling showcase for Rodriguez’s unexpected vocal and production approach as she experiences the peaks and valleys of heated romance. Rodriguez executive-produced For Your Consideration and tapped a fleet of other rising songwriters and producers to assist, including Casey MQ, Umru, Cecile Believe, and Nick León. The diverse spread helps map out the album’s mischievously unpredictable backdrops: These songs corkscrew and pull Rodriguez’s vocals like taffy, twisting into structures of their own; it’s as if she took Björk’s Medúlla as a conceptual north star and ran with it at full speed to the club. An opening suite of whispers morphs into a pitch-shifted pattern on the seductive “Sucia,” whose bilingual singsong verses lead to a deliciously bawdy chorus, her voice rising to a vibrant whoop. Later, her backing vocals swarm into a more ominous, chittering turn on the standout “Preciosa,” adding texture to the song’s deep bass and passionate come-ons. “Entra a mi mar/Mójate ya/Ya tú verás/Que te enamoras” (Enter my sea/Get wet/You’ll see that you’ll fall in love) she sings gently, before her voice crumples into a cooing, stuttering rhythm. For Your Consideration thrives on the elasticity of the human voice, while its lyrics turn from underhanded lovers to the flush of new affairs. Gasps and hiccups shape the fricative beat on the tender opening title track, which dissects a series of red flags, letting her words linger with fading desire. Here she riffs on the awards-season “for your consideration” campaigns that actors and directors run as a metaphor for an unbalanced relationship; the line, repeated during the chorus, takes on a pleading tone that slowly grows more steely with confidence. “You wrote the script,” she allows, coming to the realization with sharp lucidity. “Your words, not mine.” The rest of the album bears out that romantic push-pull, narrating lustful euphoria and restless longing over an electropop framework. Mid-album highlights, like the warped “Femenine” and woozy “Fácil,” pulse with the heat of a club night packed to the walls, gilding the album with her most memorable, straight-ahead dance-pop songs since her debut. On the former track, her Spanish lyrics play with the feminine and masculine in an assertive, lustful search for a man to dom, chirping in rapid succession over a surging beat as snippets of her pitch-shifted voice skitter about during its delirious finale. Rodriguez is utterly comfortable in the flirtatious role, opening up dynamic avenues for her style to flourish while maintaining a roguish attitude. When Rodriguez leans into a more vulnerable frame of mind, the album doesn’t lose momentum. The bittersweet “Lorelei” takes on the persona of a jilted lover, adding details to her partner’s infidelity over a prickly synth flurry. “I wanna believe/That someone wasn’t here,” she implores. “I smell it on the sheets/Found earrings I don’t wear.” The song’s percussive chorus taps into an intoxicating well of jealousy: “What’s her name? What’s her name?” Rodriguez begs over a dizzying beat. “Does she know how much she made me cry?” Rodriguez’s conceptual vision and pirouetting vocals throughout hold For Your Consideration’s deft balancing act together. Even on the album’s more typical ballads, like the syrupy, 2000s pop-tinged “Kiss Me” with Rina Sawayama, or the charging closer “What’s Love” with indie pop trio MUNA, she consistently pulls you deeper into her orbit. During the latter, Rodriguez finds solace in the intricacies of loving and having loved despite being burned in the process. For Your Consideration’s prismatic palette and unabashed candor proves her point, finding beauty and vigor in every little fluctuation that desire has to offer.

2024-03-26T00:02:00.000-04:00

2024-03-26T00:02:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Giant Music

March 26, 2024

fd5fe842-872f-4403-ae42-67a8dc10dd08

Eric Torres

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

This is Lil B’s most head-turning proposition in years: an avant-garde electro-jazz album seemingly recorded with the cheapest MIDI presets on the market.

This is Lil B’s most head-turning proposition in years: an avant-garde electro-jazz album seemingly recorded with the cheapest MIDI presets on the market.

Lil B: Afrikantis

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-b-afrikantis/

Afrikantis

Perhaps you’ve lost track of Lil B. For over a decade, the Berkeley entity born Brandon McCartney held a vise grip on the internet’s attention, whether he was being crowned as hip-hop’s future or its death. Even his nonbelievers had to admit that there simply was no one else like him, and the passage of time has further vindicated his vision. Lil B’s fingerprints are everywhere today: Whether you follow Drain Gang’s transcendentally positive mantras, RXK Nephew’s never-ending stream of biblical conspiracy theories, or Certified Trapper’s self-produced DIY cartoon rap, all roads lead back to the Based God. As his offspring have seized the spotlight, Lil B has stepped into the role of godfather. He’s still released at least 15 mixtapes over the last five years (a relatively slow period for him), but for the first time since he initially unleashed his absurd self-empowerment treatises onto the rap world, it’s felt as if the sun might finally be setting on the Lil B empire. The Based economy runs on attention, and while fellow prodigal memelord Viper has continued to grab stray eyeballs with heady retrospective compilations and bizarre takes on astral drum’n’bass, Lil B’s recent tapes have offered little in the way of surprises. Afrikantis, however, is Lil B’s most head-turning proposition in years: an avant-garde electro-jazz album seemingly recorded with the cheapest MIDI presets on the market. Where his earlier “classical music” releases Choices & Flowers and Tears 4 God wafted about in a lo-fi, ambient drift, Afrikantis is even less tethered to basic concepts of melody and harmony, as Lil B’s scatterbrained digital jams spill out into Casio chaos. In spite of its putative classification as jazz, the closest comparison point for Afrikantis lies in the chintzy, orchestral vaporwave purveyed by James Ferraro and Orange Milk Records. It’s an odd full-circle moment to see Lil B, an artist who irreversibly reshaped online culture, create a record that mirrors a completely different aspect of the early 2010s internet. Afrikantis’ adventurousness is admirable, even if actually listening to it may give you minor brain damage. Amateurish, dissonant trumpets squawk endlessly over a stampede of hammering GarageBand cymbal crashes on the opening tracks, “My Fathers Drums” and “A Song for Mom.” The latter would be a struggle to get through at half of its eight grueling minutes; the entire album is 72 minutes, which sounds long until you consider that a normal Lil B mixtape runs about two hours. Afrikantis nevertheless contains flashes of Lil B’s peculiar, restless creativity. “Cricket” is the most dialed-in of the bunch, its panpipe synths leading a new-age groove that cruises into a 16-bit sunset. The pounding bongos that open “Kim” suggest what might happen if the DK Crew got ahold of Frank Zappa’s Jazz From Hell, and “Solano Stroll” rides a strange, slanted guitar riff that wouldn’t make you blink if it popped up on a Foodman record. Even the brutal atonality of “Welcome to Oakland California” feels purposeful: Arriving after a series of similarly Bay Area-themed tracks that toss warped, hip-hop-ish beats into the mix, the song’s noodling percussion unspools into a cacophony of car alarms, shattering glass, and police sirens. The cheapness of the instrumentation imbues the music with a deep uncanniness and dread, like a desperate call for help signaled on a Fisher-Price See N’ Say. It takes patience to tolerate all the blaring plastic horn samples, and even the album’s most curiously experimental gestures can’t put up a fight against the ocean of hopelessly annoying slop. Yet there is something vaguely aspirational about Lil B’s willingness to throw himself into ideas so far outside the realm of what anybody else in hip-hop is currently doing. Afrikantis reduces his free-flowing, anything-goes philosophy to purely instrumental form; the ratio of bad to good tracks is secondary to the audacity of the project, and the eccentricity of it all leaves a far deeper impression than the music itself. At a time when Lil B’s influence is arguably more relevant than ever (“based” has fully entered the public lexicon, whether or not that public knows where the term originated), Afrikantis serves as proof of his enduring outsider status. The results may be laughable, but no one ever accused Lil B of not being entertaining.

2023-01-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

2023-01-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

Rap / Experimental

Basedworld

January 12, 2023

fd621a6b-1d3f-4c48-b041-f0362f918eb5

Sam Goldner

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

Spencer Stephenson's second full-length under the Botany moniker, Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw scours away the haze of his underrated 2013 debut. Stephenson's biggest strength is his ability to weave all of his influences—Eastern-based samples, throbbing hip-hop beats, stretches of noodly ambient—into alternatingly danceable and meditative psychedelia.

Spencer Stephenson's second full-length under the Botany moniker, Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw scours away the haze of his underrated 2013 debut. Stephenson's biggest strength is his ability to weave all of his influences—Eastern-based samples, throbbing hip-hop beats, stretches of noodly ambient—into alternatingly danceable and meditative psychedelia.

Botany: Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21031-dimming-awe-the-light-is-raw/

Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw

Austin producer Spencer Stephenson, aka Botany, has lofty ambitions for his brand of warm, psych-inflected electronic music. Initially born as a side project from Stephenson's gig drumming for Denton electro-acoustic outfit Sleep Whale, Botany has since grown into a full-fledged solo act with a peculiar net of influences: sci-fi pulp novels, "emergent" music, beat architects Madlib and J Dilla, psych and krautrock, free jazz virtuosos. It’s no wonder Stephenson has described his music as "studious," and often provides long, sometimes brainy explanations in interviews about what his mood-driven soundscapes are all about. Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw, Stephenson’s second full-length under the Botany moniker, scours away the haze of his underrated 2013 debut Lava Diviner (True Story). That album, the soundtrack to an imagined sci-fi film about a "geological religious sect hell-bent on destruction", was dazed and occasionally too dense, but on Dimming Awe he winnows the widescreen approach down into what feels like a clear step forward in both quality and execution. Stephenson’s biggest strength as a producer is his ability to weave all of his influences—Eastern-based samples, throbbing hip-hop beats, stretches of noodly ambient—into alternatingly danceable and meditative psychedelia. Opening instrumental tracks "Sungblood" and "Raw Light Overture" bounce appealingly between xylophones, bright-eyed melodies, and lilting vocals, even if they hew a little close to Adult-Swim-commercial territory. The circuitous and unpredictable Chicago rapper Milo enlivens "Au Revoir" and the soporific "No Translator", the latter of which distinctly recalls FlyLo circa When the Quiet Comes. Milo is a good foil for Stephenson: The looped sampling of a laugh track and French chansons on "Au Revoir" neatly align with Milo’s meandering, stream-of-consciousness verses. "Au Revoir" and "No Translator" are also Stephenson's first time working with a rapper, an experiment that bodes well for a collaborative EP with Lushlife (featuring appearances from Shabazz Palaces and Open Mike Eagle) slated for next year. Stephenson has said that much of this album was improvised, his way of taking cues from jazz favorites like Herbie Hancock and Pharoah Sanders. You can hear it in the improv drumming that clatters around in the background of "Birthjays" and the synth ad libbing that drives "All Is Rite", little touches of ingenuity that insist upon repeat listens in order to catch all the different nuances at play. In a world as carefully constructed and satisfying as Dimming Awe, it's a worthwhile requirement.

2015-09-22T02:00:05.000-04:00

2015-09-22T02:00:05.000-04:00

Electronic

Western Vinyl

September 22, 2015

fd63ad17-0cf9-494e-8267-880dc53ed697

Eric Torres

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

A lot of what I own by Wolf Eyes is broken: Dead Hills' packaging is held together with scotch tape ...

A lot of what I own by Wolf Eyes is broken: Dead Hills' packaging is held together with scotch tape ...

Wolf Eyes: Slicer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8728-slicer/

Slicer

A lot of what I own by Wolf Eyes is broken: Dead Hills' packaging is held together with scotch tape; Dread has no cover at all; the Slicer CD's cracked, and a couple split singles have literally fallen apart. I'm not usually such a mess with my record collection, but I figure this disrepair rests well within the spirit of the Ann Arbor trio's continually expanding, forever growling discography. Wolf Eyes has fifty-some releases since 1997, and so much music is kind of intimidating if you haven't heard them yet. Like waking up and deciding to dive into one of the hundred or so linked stories and novels comprising Honore de Balzac's La Comedie Humaine. Slicer-- a reissue of a 2001 cassette-only release of the same name-- is a good starting point for the uninitiated: the liner notes list their output up to Slicer, stylistically, it's a Wolf Eyes greatest hits, and more importantly, it's pretty damn solid. I only have a couple bones to pick, actually. At a basic aesthetic level, there are no song titles, which sucks because I always saw those tags as pictograms for or overall description and dissection of each exercise. In the past, "Burn Your House Down" from Dread became a call to arms for silly gas huffers and "Dead Hills" erupted as the earth-toned backdrop for an empty, mill-whistling middle America, because I had these brief titles as points of departure. The other downer is the first track, a two-minute vocal-splice thing redolent of The Cave, Steve Reich's overwrought Old Testament oratory. Imagining it as perversely manipulated answering machine messages made it creepier and therefore more interesting, but really, it's weak. Maybe it's a warm up for an upcoming remake of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate? On the upswing-- and what a glorious upswing!-- track two is a variation on the fuzzed-out cicada stomp I've grown to adore: six minutes of splayed horns, crackling tapes, spring-reverb, sputtering shards of salty glass door hinges and that standard high-end knob-twisting that approximates a reconstituted air-raid siren. Track three uses a bass-heavy start/stop burp/blurt that begins too tightly, but shifts to a percussive two-channel palimpsest, which grows increasingly Throbbing Gristle-sinister as the song progresses. Track four's a ten minute complication of a demonic Matmos, stalking the countryside looking for kids to rip apart while archiving the ensuing sounds with well-placed contact microphones. (And the kids who escape could break-dance to the last section of this beauty while dousing themselves with battery acid!) It's as dark and driving as Joy Division or early Swans, and as patently mute as Nurse With Wound. The penultimate track, number six, is a three-minute pop song based on the sounds of the interior of ghosts and shadows. It shifts halfway through, of course, and momentarily sputters and skips into twisted high-pitch noise land before leveling back out to an ominous whisper. The crazed horn at the end doesn't make sense compositionally, but it's a nice exclamation point. Track seven will hurt your dog's ear, I can almost guarantee that. Not much percussion for the coda, just lots and lots of singularly high-end distortion: turn your amp as high as it can go, lean your guitar against the amp, return to the room in five minutes. There you go. Besides track one, these pieces are largely without discernible human voices, which is how I prefer my Wolf Eyes: things remain more mysterious that way. Slicer's varied palette of late-night creepiness doesn't lean too much towards any stylistic trope, which makes it both a solid introduction and a fine archive to remind you why you fell so hard for these guys in the first place. Coupled with the just-released Covered in Bugs DVD-- an esoteric document offering an off-kilter look into the band's process (as well as a strangely tentative art-house moshpit comprised of giggling teenagers)-- you've got yourself a certifiable Wolf Eyes starter kit!

2003-07-06T01:00:02.000-04:00

2003-07-06T01:00:02.000-04:00

Experimental

Hanson

July 6, 2003

fd764b2c-850f-42ae-aa24-43ca2be31ec6

Brandon Stosuy

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

The intensely serious post-hardcore band marks the turn from death and loss to life and love with nimble musicianship, inventive rhythms, and Kyle Durfey’s most accomplished singing yet.

The intensely serious post-hardcore band marks the turn from death and loss to life and love with nimble musicianship, inventive rhythms, and Kyle Durfey’s most accomplished singing yet.

Pianos Become the Teeth: Wait for Love

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pianos-become-the-teeth-wait-for-love/

Wait for Love

Pianos Become the Teeth have spent a solid decade reaffirming their reputation as popular post-hardcore’s most deadly serious band. On the centerpiece of their 2009 debut, Old Pride, Kyle Durfey gave an unflinching account of his father suffering from multiple sclerosis, and he commemorated him two years later on “Liquid Courage”: “On the day you died/I cut my hair for the funeral/And on Memorial Day, I started drinking.” His subject matter was rarely any less intense. But in the time since 2014’s Keep You, Durfey got married, became a dad, cut his hair for good, and greenlit videos for uptempo singles with vibrant choreography and his band in neon body paint, daring diehards to make Coldplay comparisons. Yet Wait for Love defies any expectation that this might be Pianos’ happy album, a move that would likely have alienated their fans even more than Durfey’s decision to stop screaming on Keep You. “Would you believe it? I’m a family man now,” he croons on the closing “Blue,” and he isn’t just overcome by wonder or realizing the grim inheritance of generational trauma. He’s both, and “Blue” reiterates what Wait for Love has made clear: that Pianos Become the Teeth are just as deadly serious about new life and new love as they were about death and loss. While previous Pianos Become the Teeth albums were never intended to shut people out, they weren’t exactly waiting for an audience to get on their level. Emo standards The Lack Long After and Keep You boast the most devastating music produced by this scene, but they’d be completely impenetrable to listeners who couldn’t withstand their respective scorched-earth swelter and mid-Atlantic winter chill. Wait for Love is the first time a Pianos Become the Teeth album can spin whenever the mood suits. With Will Yip behind the boards, the band hasn’t strayed too far beyond the sound that defined its jump from Topshelf to Epitaph: clean vocals and drums pushed way to the front; crosshatched guitars; a husky, muscular, but never macho sound that could’ve made them post-grunge icons in another era. But the grays in their funereal ambience are now polished silver and the fog has lifted—whereas last time around they drew unexpected comparisons to Scottish mope rock, Wait for Love sounds more like Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York. All of these changes become clear in the first minute of “Fake Lighting.” The big reveal on Keep You was that Durfey could actually sing, though melodic craftsmanship was a secondary concern. With a brief falsetto run in his first line, Durfey announces his advancement to singer, and throughout, he’s more economical with his lyrics and more generous with melody. If lacking the conceptual heft of past releases, Wait for Love is a richer, more versatile experience. Only “Blue” is subject to the same hardball tactics of Keep You, matching Durfey’s most brutally, beautifully honest lyrics with a dirge that mirrors his post-confessional exhaustion. Otherwise, Wait for Love exchanges the deadlift exertion for more nimble musicianship. Having drummer David Haik function in a purely textural or timekeeping capacity was previously a major misallocation of resources, though it was necessary on Keep You to maintain the mournful mood. While the vocals and guitars remain resonant and steely, Haik is given the freedom to set the pulse for these odd and entirely new sensations with his most inventive playing yet. While Durfey’s subject matter is universal, he still doesn’t write in a universal way. Wait for Love is about his experience, and Durfey took the unusual step of posting a preface on the band’s website that either serves as a collection of cheat codes for his densely referential lyrics. But they’re all love songs, and while Durfey freely includes suggestive post-coital imagery, Wait for Love is about love-making in the metaphysical sense: All of the empty glasses, bleary sunrises, and half-shut blinds are symbols for a kind of intimacy that’s only possible after discovering the difference between being emotional and truly vulnerable. Yet in the only funny moment to ever occur on a Pianos Become the Teeth album, the chorus of “Charisma” (“The Magothy days slip away”) could easily be heard as “my gothy days slip away,” which might actually be a better way to describe what the song is all about. The physicality of “Charisma” doesn’t appear to leave much to interpretation. It rides a straightforward, locked-in bass thrum, the kind that’s served crushed-out emo songs since Cap’n Jazz took shape. “I caught a stranger’s eye/And what a way you won me over,” Durfey yells on the chorus, and the entirety of his earlier work makes the event all the more impressive: He’s not the type that’s easily won over. “Charisma” is that kind of love song, for people who never quite saw themselves in the pop fantasy until they were blindsided by reality. And here’s the kicker: If we’re to take Durfey at his word, it’s a love song twice over, of “seeing your son pulled from the womb of the love of your life.” On their beloved “I’ll Get By,” Durfey felt resigned to a life with “no mirth, no levity, no amazing grace” while yelling, “I want to live!” The waiting was the hardest part; accepting and living in love is where Pianos find the will to go fearlessly forward.

2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Epitaph

February 16, 2018

fd8420a5-33b8-440d-91bd-c276360e6354

Ian Cohen

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

Featuring several collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, the self-produced new album from the 70-year-old songwriter is overwhelmingly bleak—but its best moments prove he can still surprise us.

Featuring several collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, the self-produced new album from the 70-year-old songwriter is overwhelmingly bleak—but its best moments prove he can still surprise us.

John Mellencamp: Strictly a One-Eyed Jack

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-mellencamp-strictly-a-one-eyed-jack/

Strictly a One-Eyed Jack

A self-described Midwestern socialist who campaigned for Bloomberg. A songwriter beloved by Republicans, who wrote multiple radio anthems criticizing the Republican party. A commercial-soundtracking 1980s icon who has collaborated on art shows with Miles Davis and Southern gothic musicals with Stephen King. John Mellencamp has always thrived in contradictions, and he makes his best music when he seems just out of step with the mainstream. In the mid-’80s, Mellencamp just happened to be what the mainstream wanted: a non-coastal elitist attacking Reagan-era greed while landing on every Midwesterner’s lake mixtape during heartland rock’s golden age. 1985’s Scarecrow, his commercial and critical peak, was the scruffy foil to the blockbuster sheen of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. If Springsteen’s record felt like the dramatic, high-stakes movie version of small-town struggles, listening to Mellencamp was more like the documentary: an earthy and straightforward snapshot of well-meaning people just trying to get through another long day. Written around the time that he co-founded Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young, Mellencamp’s work during this period marked a shift from his role as Seymour, Indiana’s biggest pop star to a heartland spokesperson, someone who paid more attention to John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie than to his peers on the charts. In recent years, he can still find his way around a singalong chorus, but beginning with 2008’s T-Bone Burnett collaboration Life, Death, Love and Freedom, Mellencamp has settled into a comfortable zone of traditional rock’n’roll, folk, and blues. Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, his self-produced 25th album, continues Mellencamp’s journey through the past, this time offering a stark take on Americana that harkens to darker times before the 70-year-old songwriter was born: less late-career depression and more Great Depression. Indeed, many of these songs sound like they could have been written and performed before World War II. Take the opener, “I Always Lie to Strangers.” Singing in a voice as old as the desert, Mellencamp is accompanied by melancholy touches of violin, piano, and upright bass, as he laments that no, the church bells will not chime for thee. As with many songs on the first half of the record, Mellencamp’s cigarette growl eerily evokes that of Tom Waits. But these songs lack Waits’ warmth and humor—the signs of a performer who knows he’s putting on a show. This is the most direct and confident that Mellencamp has sounded in years, and yet, he also sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else, with his lyrics acting as lists of grievances against modern society. Any light in the darkness comes from Mellencamp’s excellent backing band, especially Troye Kinnett’s accordion and organ playing. With a greater sense of momentum, the back half of the record acts as a rescue mission. This is where Springsteen shows up, providing welcome vocal harmonies on the electric “Did You Say Such a Thing,” climactic guitar solos on album closer “A Life Full of Rain,” and lead vocals on the main attraction, “Wasted Days.” When Mellencamp asks “How many days are lost in vain,” he sounds like someone who’s seen too much and little change; Springsteen counters with “How much sorrow is there left to climb,” summoning his belief that we’re all still capable of transcending our circumstance. Their harmonies in the chorus—“We watch our lives just fade away”—illustrate their common ground: Life is hard, and it’s worth it. It’s a touching moment, and it offers a portrait of Mellencamp’s gift for simple, intuitive melody and songwriting that has proven influential on a new generation of heartland-inspired rockers like the War on Drugs and Waxahatchee. While the rest of the record settles into a mid-tempo dirge, there are several other surprising highlights to justify a new Mellencamp album. The upbeat campfire feeling of "Chasing Rainbows" is a welcome change of pace on such a dark record, and “Lie to Me” has the potent riffs and keys of a long-lost Exile on Main St. demo. Mellencamp’s career is dotted with flawed but lovable albums, and this one lacks the consistency of more nuanced late-career gems like Life, Death, Love and Freedom or 2010’s No Better Than This. Despite the overt bleakness, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack shines when Mellencamp invites other people into his world—proof that he can still surprise us this deep into his career. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Republic

January 25, 2022

fd978d3f-cc94-4460-95e7-1a5dc804d181

Brady Gerber

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/

On his latest carefree and careworn album, the Chicago rapper turns softer and more melodic, exploring his provisional success and the unanswered questions it keeps raising.

On his latest carefree and careworn album, the Chicago rapper turns softer and more melodic, exploring his provisional success and the unanswered questions it keeps raising.

Saba: Few Good Things

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saba-few-good-things/

Few Good Things

Early on in Few Good Things, a flicker of disquiet plays across Saba’s face as he drives through his new neighborhood: “I still get nostalgic driving past houses my family lost/They wished upon a star, I caught it like I’m Randy Moss.” There’s a lot packed into that couplet—bittersweet acknowledgment, lingering fear, uneasy pride. A moment later, the music surges into the foreground again, and Saba’s moment of doubt is washed away, a passing shadow on a perfect night. Like Lupe Fiasco, one of his heroes, Saba’s muse is ambivalence. He’s attuned to the moments where a smile freezes, where two thoughts collide painfully and ripple across life’s surface. “Jesus got killed for his sins/Walter got killed for a coat,” he rapped on 2018’s CARE FOR ME, an album-length eulogy for his dead cousin. You could feel his roving mind searching for meaning the way a tongue probes a sore spot inside your mouth. On Few Good Things, Saba remains haunted, not by grief, but by his own provisional success and the unanswered questions it keeps raising. Across the album, Saba endeavors to enjoy his spoils—new houses, nice clothes, days spent doing nothing but “playing Madden”—while trying not to glance back where he came from. Every new trapping, his lyrics suggest, might just be a trap: “New crib by the seaside/On a one-way street though” (“One Way or Every Nigga With a Budget”). Over the near-bossa-nova lilt of “Simpler Time,” a beautiful song featuring the Atlanta singer-songwriter Mereba, he raps, “White picket fence and a wreath on the door/We from the basement concrete on the floor.” Like anyone traumatized by scarcity, Saba can’t quite stop retracing his fraught path to abundance, scanning for land mines. He continues to split duties on keyboards, guitars, bass, and drum programming with longtime producing partners Daoud and daedaePIVOT, and at its best, the music splits the difference between carefree and careworn. Remarkably, despite the looping, layered feel and the suggestion of vinyl crackle, almost no samples are used. Everything is handmade, from the muted boom of the kicks to the busy percussion in the margins, suggesting slapped kitchen tables and clinked spoons. Mimicking Noah “40” Shebib, they scoop out the keyboards’ midrange, leaving them to flutter from above. The overall feeling is of dreamy reverie—near the end of “2012,” we hear birds chirping. As the trio has forged their sound, Saba’s flow has softened and turned more melodic. He works best when his voice is another instrument in the mix, freely mixing up registers between melody and rhythm. He sounded incredible on his 2016 debut next to fellow Chicago legend Twista, tucking his syllables into jazzy off-beats on “GPS”; he sounds equally natural here next to Krayzie Bone, the Bone Thugz legend who he’s cited as inspiration, on “Come My Way.” He’s less convincing when attempting to follow in another idol’s footsteps. On “Survivor’s Guilt,” he clenches his teeth and spits a “DNA”-style Kendrick flow without ever quite catching K-Dot’s speaking-in-tongues fire. On “If I Had a Dollar,” he cops Kendrick’s high-pitched gremlin flow (what Schoolboy Q once dubbed his “Lord of the Rings voice”) from tracks like “Institutionalized.” In both cases, Saba comes off like an understudy. Unlike Kendrick, whose music seethes and nearly thrashes itself apart with effort, Saba stands out when he leans back. His ideal register is gentler, his scale smaller. Late in Few Good Things, Black Thought appears, foregoing his militaristic snap for a disarming verse about his “South Carolina gullah” mother, who would “dip into a mental capoeira/When she staring into your soul, and you trying not to let her.” It’s as tender and low-key as the old Roots crew capo has ever let himself sound on record, and it’s a minor revelation. You have to assume that Saba’s music, with its will towards gentleness and belief in everyday redemption, pulled it out of him.

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

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

Rap

The Orchard

February 7, 2022

fd995e8f-9f0c-4f57-bd72-21da6d44849f

Jayson Greene

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

The virtuosic beatboxer and comedian Reggie Watts teams with techno legend John Tejada for a loose, punchy set of house anthems.

The virtuosic beatboxer and comedian Reggie Watts teams with techno legend John Tejada for a loose, punchy set of house anthems.

Wajatta: Don’t Let Get You Down

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wajatta-dont-let-get-you-down/

Don’t Let Get You Down

On paper, Reggie Watts and John Tejada make a strange pair. Watts is now a household name to millions of Americans, after his virtuosic beatboxing and stand-up comedy landed him a regular gig as bandleader on The Late Late Show with James Corden. By contrast, John Tejada is a beloved techno legend whose reticent nature would make it difficult for even the most ardent raver to pick him out in a lineup. What they have in common is casual mastery of their respective crafts: performance and production. With their joint project Wajatta, the two Los Angelenos stretch out and show off that formidable musicianship. While their 2018 debut Casual High Technology was haphazard, showing off its makers’ respective talents without ever synthesizing them, Don’t Let Get You Down feels more refined. It places Watts firmly in the role of lead singer, but also percussionist, lead synthesizer, and master of ceremonies. The album’s title might look like it’s missing a word, but the absence of the noun summarizes the duo’s studio ethos: Throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, don’t sweat the details, have fun. Wajatta certainly deliver on that last principle. The title track—described by Watts as “the poppiest song we’ve ever done”—opens with a whistled melody that’s wince-inducing at first, but becomes pleasant when Watts counters it with a falsetto. So much of Watts’ artistry is wrapped up in deft improvisation that it feels somehow natural when he slips into different accents or goes on an extended riff about the cool features on his new refrigerator, as he does on “Marmite.” On that same tune, Tejada loops a segment of his bandmate’s scatting voice until it resembles a maraca. Watt’s effects-pedal-centric live show, with its vocal looping and chopping, exerts a tremendous influence on the structure of the songs. On the opening moments of “Renegade,” murmured syllables patter against Tejada’s immaculate drums; on the loping, arpeggio-heavy “Another Sun,” Watts flexes his vocal range atop his own beatboxing. He makes a refreshing sparring partner for Tejada, whose 2019 Performance Review EP only hinted at the bright, punchy house music they coalesce around on “Tonight” or “138.” Lest we forget Tejada’s years spent dabbling in hip-hop and electro, Wajatta also bring the BPM down for a few songs. Watts channels Moodymann over a subby, minimal track on “Little Man,” but neither he nor the production are quite as menacing or seductive as they could be. “Depth Has a Focus” makes great use of Watts’ versatility, but the track as a whole falls apart any time the vocal loops become focal points rather than auxiliary percussion. The most memorable song to stray from four-on-the-floor is “January,” with synth-funk grooves and R&B coos that Watts builds into stacks of lovely background vocals. Ultimately, Wajatta find the most success when they both play to their strengths, as they do on the album closer “All I Need Is You.” Watts crosses over from imitating a house diva to embodying one—dancefloor callouts and all—while Tejada shakes off any pretension to unleash some deeply satisfying tech house. Just as Tejada’s meticulous productions are a boon to Watts’ voice, the comedian-singer’s unique character and energy give Don’t Let Get You Down an ebullience. They might not be innovating the form, but their shared creative spirit has its own irresistible charm. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-03-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Brainfeeder

March 9, 2020

fda392e3-ca4c-46c3-b466-893475e2805c

Noah Yoo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/

On the latest Baths album, Will Wiesenfeld launches his beats and synths into the realm of vibrant fantasy. Of all his releases, it’s the one most rife with pure pleasure.

On the latest Baths album, Will Wiesenfeld launches his beats and synths into the realm of vibrant fantasy. Of all his releases, it’s the one most rife with pure pleasure.

Baths: Romaplasm

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baths-romaplasm/

Romaplasm

When Will Wiesenfeld announced that he had recorded the theme song to a game called “Dream Daddy”—a gay-dad dating simulator where “you play as a Dad and your goal is to meet and romance other hot Dads”—he repaired a curious schism that had lingered between the music he made as Baths and the persona he’d cultivated on platforms like Twitter and Vine. Looking back, the 2013 album Obsidian scans almost shockingly dark. There are songs about suicidal ideation, existential worry, and failed relationships in there, told in desaturated realism over intricate matrices of beats and synths. That darkness chased Wiesenfeld into 2014’s Ocean Death EP, but something in that five-song collection started to open up into a wider space. Instead of singing about sharing a toilet seat with a boyfriend for whom he’d lost all feeling, Wiesenfeld sang about being the entire damn ocean, inviting sailors to come drown themselves in his depths. Sure, it’s heavy, but “Ocean Death” mirrors the fantastical obsessions that populate Wiesenfeld’s imagination as he presents it to his social media followers. There, he delights in anime, cartoons, and video games, delirious in his escapism from the grey and somber world we call “real.” Romaplasm, Baths’ first LP in four years and third overall, dives head first into that same reverie. Of all Wiesenfeld’s music, including his muted side project Geotic, it’s the most rife with pure pleasure. Synthesizers toot like gasps from an ancient hand-cranked pneumatic organ on “Extrasolar.” They chirp and burble among intermittent piano motifs on “Abscond,” and they swarm, sparkle, and itch on “Adam Copies.” Wiesenfeld has always had an ear for delightfully complex systems of sound. Instead of draping his voice over a beat and some accompaniment, he prefers to loop it through impossible Rube Goldberg machines, making even the music he composes with no game in mind sound as though it’s intended to soundtrack a hyperkinetic pixel platformer. The bleeps, the clicks, the compressive modulations of voice—they all belong to those worlds accessed with a vintage controller and a Sega emulator. Lyrically, Wiesenfeld also launches himself into the realm of vibrant fantasy. He sets Romaplasm’s opener “Yeoman” on an airship (an airship!) as the song’s speaker and the object of his affections together traverse the skies. It’s easy enough to hear the lyrics to the ebulliently catchy hook as a metaphor for the high of falling for someone new: “Left my life on the ground/To dance with you in the clouds,” Wiesenfeld sings. Then again, it’s just as easy (and maybe more fun) to take the song literally as a story about a couple voyaging on an airship, soaring above the towns where they lived before they commanded the power of flight. While plenty of the album’s tracks invoke imagery from RPGs (“Abscond” seems to take place inside one of those evergreen, picturesque towns where wise anthropomorphic animals sell you healing potions), Wiesenfeld also indulges some of the self-doubt and self-interrogation that rippled through Obsidian. “What am I gonna do with me?” he wonders on “Out,” seeing his own failures refracted through a prism of his exes’ eye colors. On “Wilt,” he asks, “Who will house my sentiment?” And through the miasmic production of “Human Bog,” he laments himself as “queer in a way that’s failing me/I’m not enough of anything.” Wiesenfeld floats these thoughts, but he never pursues them with as much self-destructive aggression as he did four years ago. He’s gentler with himself here, as though the fantasy spaces he investigates allow him some relief from the person he plays in reality, and he can come back to himself with more patience, more compassion. Baths isn’t the first artist to write music from a place of high fantasy, but he’s arrived here in a way that inverts the paths of a few of his escapist peers. Romaplasm shares some of its vernacular with Sufjan Stevens and Owen Pallett records released before both those artists ultimately whittled down their lyrics to blunt, spare realism. Wiesenfeld, conversely, soared away from the melancholic details of his real life to see what he could absorb from fantasy. Without abandoning the conundrums that made Obsidian so emotionally indelible, he’s embellished the worlds of his songs with color from the dreams in which he’s immersed himself over the years. The setting may not be real, but the sentiment rings true.

2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Anticon

November 20, 2017

fdad6041-be50-4d4f-9728-a1c4052d1cf7

Sasha Geffen

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

Joey Anderson's take on house and techno is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all. It's hard to put your finger on the emotions his music evokes, but you're moved all the same.

Joey Anderson's take on house and techno is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all. It's hard to put your finger on the emotions his music evokes, but you're moved all the same.

Joey Anderson: Invisible Switch

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21258-invisible-switch/

Invisible Switch

Joey Anderson came to house music first as a dancer: Not your average weekend clubber, but a devoted student of a vernacular form, house dancing, that thrived in New York and New Jersey nightclubs in the 1990s—expressive, fluid, acrobatic, and competitive. You can hear that influence in the sparse, wiry productions that he has been recording since the beginning of this decade. They're not made for fist-pumping, and they don't follow neat verse/chorus structures. They ripple and writhe unpredictably, marked by an improvisational sense of movement. They seem to move of their own accord. Anderson comes from the same corner of the house and techno universe that has given us artists like Levon Vincent, Anthony Parasole, and DJ Qu, a fellow dancer. Like them, he favors analog drum machines, hardware synthesizers, and what sounds, above all, like a lot of playing of keys and twisting of knobs in real time. Much contemporary electronic music is composed visually, assembled brick by brick on a computer screen, but Anderson's snake-in-the-grass meanderings suggest live takes stacked one on top of another, thanks to the magic of multi-tracking. "18 Arms" goes straight to the heart of his approach. True to its name (leave it to a dancer to come up with a title like that), it opens with a synthesizer pattern that squirms like an octopus' tentacles, and as the track accrues its fistfuls of counterpoints and layers, it becomes easy to imagine the producer as a one-man band. At any given point on the album, three or more synthesizer parts are being woven together; drum hits are flaring up and being muted again; a hi-hat's pitch seesaws up and down. The cumulative effect of all these techniques is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all. But how the music is put together is ultimately less important than how it feels, and Anderson's music is all about feel. It's hard to put your finger on the emotions they evoke, but you're moved all the same. ("'Deep' to me is like the human condition that you don't talk about, that you hold in forever until you are in front of that right person" Anderson told Resident Advisor, which might go some way towards explaining the slipperiness of his music's emotional register.) A song might be calm and meditative: the spacious "Organ to Dust" is a study in stillness in which quietly accelerating figures move like quarters spinning to a halt on the floor. "Nabta Playa", named for a drained basin in the Egyptian desert, is fleet and mysterious; in both sound and mood, it's reminiscent of Drexciya's Afro-futurist fantasies, and the Detroit icons' fizzy textures and frantic movements also inform "Amarna", whose title refers to the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It's the album's most unhinged track, with wildly filtered drums that thrash desperately about. It sounds like music for punching mirrors; it moves like someone trying to escape his own shadow. True to the corporeal bent of Anderson's album, it locates emotion not in the mind but in the muscles.

2015-11-23T01:00:03.000-05:00

2015-11-23T01:00:03.000-05:00

Electronic

Dekmantel

November 23, 2015

fdbb80b4-c78b-4f73-9a76-1eddeab14478

Philip Sherburne

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

With garbled singing, shuffling electronics, and fragments of conversation, the Brooklyn band’s new album dwells on ordinary and universal moments of alienation.

With garbled singing, shuffling electronics, and fragments of conversation, the Brooklyn band’s new album dwells on ordinary and universal moments of alienation.

Altopalo: farawayfrom-everyoneyouknow

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/altopalo-farawayfromeveryoneyouknow/

farawayfromeveryoneyouknow

Drifting through altopalo’s farawayfromeveryoneyouknow evokes twin feelings of isolation and unity: One imagines astronauts gazing at the marbled surface of the Earth, so luminous and fragile, and remembering the place is home. Though the quartet of old friends is based in Brooklyn, in recent years they’ve toured separately with other acts to pay the bills. So in late 2018, when they collectively decamped to a family cabin beside a frozen lake in Indiana to record a new album, it was a rare opportunity to congregate under the same roof. While there, they kept the tape rolling. On “funny thoughts…,” a delicate piano line is interrupted by the clink of a metal spoon.“It’s literally louder than the fucking piano, your fucking eating,” someone yells. Stifled laughter. “Love you!” “Love you too.” altopalo’s previous record, frozenthere, also recorded in Indiana, was inspired by the intimate estrangement of laggy FaceTime calls and unblinking stares into a screen. To mimic this state, they warped and corroded the human voice, sometimes to gorgeous effect: one passage sounded like overhearing a man cry from the other side of a wall, the tragedy heightening as the wail grew soft. Farawayfromeveryoneyouknow retains many of its predecessor’s signature effects—the garbled singing, shuffling electronics, and light pentatonic flourishes—but it’s a warmer and more spacious album, thanks in part to Mike Haldeman’s languid, echoey guitar. altopalo’s glitchy blend of ambient, indie rock, and R&B recalls the work of “genre-less” auteurs like Justin Vernon or James Blake, though lead singer Rahm Silverglade’s voice is less howling and more numb, which lends the music an appealing anonymity. The group made a conscious effort to eliminate possessive language from their sessions—my bass, his drum—and so what you hear is less a singular display of virtuosity than a collective blur of experience. Farawayfromeveryoneyouknow has no proper nouns, no prickly clues from which to patch together a personal history. Instead, it dwells on ordinary and universal moments of alienation: the tedium of doing chores with a foggy mind, or the difficulty of falling asleep at night. Songs are addressed to a disembodied “you.” On “Honey,” a song inspired by bassist Jesse Bielenberg’s struggle with depression, Silverglade murmurs words of devotion to the drug Lexapro: “Never said love and then I did,” he recites hoarsely, over frayed drums and atmospheric swirls. “Never saw color and you dropped in.” Off-kilter accents, like the harsh blasts of static on “am i am,” or the hospital monitor pings that open several songs, accentuate the private strangeness of these liminal moments. Halfway through “Mud” is an absurd, wordless jumble that resembles a baby garbling through a tube. And while this particular bit seems random, other vocal fragments can be wrenchingly profound. On “Lub,” Silverglade warbles the album title in a rapidly ascending vocal line, so that syllables domino into each other. “Maybe/Stop at Safeway/Get some Pringles/And then/Maybe wander/Feeling sorry/For myself,” he screeches later, pushed to the brink by AutoTune. The mundane familiarity of the scene seems incongruous with the severity of the wail. It’s like the world you once knew has become foreign and inhospitable. farawayfromeveryoneyouknow closes on a gentler melancholy. Awash in static and feedback, the final song, “now that you’re here…,” recalls the sound of an old clock chiming slowly in the distance. It’s like staring out at the city at the crack of dawn, briefly feeling as though you have all the time in the world. It’s also designed to thwart Spotify from automatically queuing up a different album and jolting you into another landscape. Sit with me longer, it says. Stay. For all of its remoteness, farawayfromeveryoneyouknow is strangely comforting.

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

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

Experimental

Samedi

April 30, 2020

fdbc6e17-5df9-43d0-81c4-2facaca86e33

Cat Zhang

https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/

The East Atlanta artist is typically an excellent mood curator, but on his first full-length in five years, he feels uncharacteristically dull.

The East Atlanta artist is typically an excellent mood curator, but on his first full-length in five years, he feels uncharacteristically dull.

6LACK: Since I Have a Lover

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6lack-since-i-have-a-lover/

Since I Have a Lover

In 2023, every rapper sings and every singer raps, but 6LACK is one of the few who truly stands in the middle. Growing up in Atlanta’s infamous Zone 6, the artist born Ricardo Valentine was obsessed with battle rap. He started rhyming when he was a small child, and by middle school, he was taking on challengers in the lunchroom (including a pre-fame Young Thug). His voice felt metallic back then, but somewhere along the way, it became more melodic, more nonchalant: He wasn’t quite singing, but he wasn’t quite rapping, either. He signed a predatory deal with Flo Rida’s International Music Group in 2011, which forced him to live out of the studio for a time. It was his transition to Interscope and his triple-platinum hit “PRBLMS” that solidified his place in a new generation of high-fashion, ain’t-shit crooners who wear their bleeding hearts on their sleeves. He’s made a habit of bouncing between breakup songs that suck the air out of the room, or stunting on one-night stands for kicks. But Since I Have a Lover, 6LACK’s third album and first full-length in five years, considers what it’d be like to leave the player lifestyle behind for good. It’s a question with no easy answers, and one that occasionally gets lost in a sea of uncharacteristically dull songs. Lover is far from the first record to explore what happens when a wounded lothario grapples with the urge to settle down, but for 6LACK, it marks a slight change in direction. Much of his writing draws on heartbreaks and missed connections—what does it sound like when he’s locked in on new love? On “Inwood Hill Park,” he contemplates marriage before digging a bit deeper into his romantic obsession: “Can’t you see that I’ve been hostile for weeks?/Don’t you know you change the patterns of my sleep?” There’s talk of unpacking trauma and of him “gambling on paradise” in spite of himself. It isn’t exactly wife-guy R&B, but it’s new territory for a man who once compared his penis to a loaded gun. In his delivery, you can feel the excitement of building a new life with someone; his voice darts through nostalgic bars about being with his partner since they were cozy on her mother’s couch. He’s not immune to the occasional bout of backhanded honesty about past relationships (“Update your life on some iOS shit/Came three times, ain’t gotta buy yo’ ass shit,” he hisses on “Fatal Attraction”), but a more reflective stance is a good look on him. The first third of the album is its strongest, but halfway through, its grip starts to weaken. And it’s not just because some of his bars feel like they came from the Cassidy playbook he so reveres (“Never let your mouth get that diarrhea,” he sings on “Talkback”). His vocals never strain, but songs like the bubbly late album highlight “B4L,” or his collabs with now-girlfriend QUIN, are few and far between, with the writing slipping into bland—and occasionally creepy—romantic posturing. On “Decatur,” he takes credit for helping a woman see “the brighter side of things,” only to follow that up with “You mine every day, don’t try to file no restraint.” It’s a completely unromantic gesture that kills the vibe immediately. “Rent Free” revolves around the ubiquitous meme, but leaves the actual reason a person lives in your head unclear. There’s tension, but the emotional distance makes it hard to invest. At its worst, 6LACK’s songwriting here reads like ChatGPT trying to recreate a steamy text thread from memory, lines AI-generated for maximum I-feel-you-zaddy moods. Production-wise, Lover slightly elevates the Noah “40” Shebib school of aqueous, lo-fi R&B; producers Sounwave, Kill September, longtime collaborator Fwdslxsh, and EarthGang’s Olu center guitars and shimmering piano keys more than ever before in 6LACK’s music. Crisp kick drums and guitar strums add a casual spring air to the new love of the title track. “Talkback” features a fast-paced interpolation of Sting’s 1993 ballad “Shape of My Heart,” offering some much-needed vitality to the middle of the album. The skittering drums of “Temporary” bring 6LACK and Don Toliver’s generic “you’re not like other girls” platitudes to a cinematic level. But like a handful of the lyrics, some of these beats blur together, dissolving into a stream of playlist fodder. It’s unfortunate, because 6LACK is usually a fantastic mood curator. Previous projects, like Free 6LACK, East Atlanta Love Letter, and 6pc Hot, hit hard because of their brooding atmospheres and deliciously petty relationship drama. With mixed results, Lover tries to bring that eye and ear to a brighter musical palette and greener romantic pastures. To paraphrase the great Roy Kent, real love should make you feel like you’ve been struck by lightning. 6LACK manages some sparks here and there, but the tingles fade fast.

2023-03-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-03-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

LVRN / Interscope

March 29, 2023

fdd6c246-4f50-465d-a069-64b514be2483

Dylan Green

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

On her first new release in almost 20 years, Japanese composer Midori Takada joins London-based musician Lafawndah on a short but fascinating multimedia project with mythical overtones.

On her first new release in almost 20 years, Japanese composer Midori Takada joins London-based musician Lafawndah on a short but fascinating multimedia project with mythical overtones.

Midori Takada / Lafawndah: Le Renard Bleu EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/midori-takada-lafawndah-le-renard-bleu-ep/

Le Renard Bleu EP

Myths, like drum patterns, accrue force with repetition and meaning with reinterpretation. Take the myth of the blue fox, an animal with a coat so white it can turn a different color entirely. In Senegal’s Serer religion, it’s believed foxes were mischievous tricksters. The Icelandic poet and Björk collaborator Sjón devoted a novel to the blue fox, in which the beast gives the protagonist, the Reverend, a reason for living. In 20th-century Britain, the Blue Fox became a nuclear warhead. The animal particularly charmed Japan, where, fittingly, given its provocative and transitory nature, it was variously a messenger of the divine and a god itself. And now, it reappears again as Le Renard Bleu, the first new release in almost 20 years by Japanese composer Midori Takada, who knows a thing or two herself about myths and patterns. Takada’s landmark, limited-run 1983 album Through the Looking Glass sat for 35 years on the wishlists of fans who’d heard only tales of the four-track wonder. Takada created and produced the album herself, overdubbing lines of marimba, harmonium, Coke bottles, and cowbells into unsettling reveries. Its 2017 reissue established a place for her in the pantheon of minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich, along with experimental performers like Meredith Monk—and perhaps even solo studio wizards like Prince. In a way, Looking Glass was a Music for 18 Musicians, made by just one. Le Renard Bleu is something different: a series of collaborations in both content and form. Sonically, Takada has joined forces with the London-based singer/producer Lafawndah, best known for her 2016 pan-global (or even post-global) pop EP Tan. Visually, the pair took up with filmmakers and artistic directors Partel Oliva for an accompanying film, of interest mainly as a chance to see how Takada creates her sounds, and a one-sided 12" with a flip etched by Parisian illustrator Neila Czermak. Logistically, the crew found funding and distribution from cult fashion house KENZO, whose runway shows Lafawndah has soundtracked. This glittering crowd is a far cry from Takada’s nights spent alone Scotch-Taping percussive arpeggios in the 1980s. But those riffs reappear in Le Renard Bleu, after an introductory scene-setting of solitary bells. Metallic resonances like hair-raising flares cut across the eerie calm. And then Lafawndah stalks in, her voice shapeshifting between Lisa Gerrard, Anita Baker, and Kelela. “Fox sing for me,” she demands, “about how one mind learned to read another.” A conversation—between Lafawndah and the fox, and between Lafawndah and Takada—begins to take shape. Over the next 20 minutes, Takada maps for the singer vast grounds of handbells; antique cymbals; myochin hibachi, a kind of highly resonant wind chime; various drums and marimba; and even the water phone, a stainless steel and bronze ring of tonal rods surrounding an echoing pool of water, created by the fortuitously named Richard Waters. A gang of drums joins the hunt, as marimba lines play hide and seek with the vocals, and while things never quite reach the expository thrust of, say, Peter and the Wolf, it’s clear there are actions, with consequences, afoot. Eventually, bright metallic peals of bells, friendlier cousins to the early flares, cleanse the air with soft exhalations. It’s one hell of a trip, even if Le Renard Bleu’s profile might pale compared to the epic, four-part Looking Glass and its legacy. Hopefully, it’s no epigraph to Takada’s storied career. Perhaps like Sjón’s Reverend, this fox gave her something to believe in, a reason to rejoin the material world in search of new adventures. In the end, we’re just lucky to hear the tale.

2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Global

!K7

July 17, 2018

fddbda62-e455-42a4-ab19-abbe25e945b9

Jesse Dorris

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

Following up the viral hit “Vibe (If I Back It Up),” the New Jersey singer’s official debut aims to render the fast-paced, energetic sound of Jersey club in her own image.

Following up the viral hit “Vibe (If I Back It Up),” the New Jersey singer’s official debut aims to render the fast-paced, energetic sound of Jersey club in her own image.

Cookiee Kawaii: Vanice

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cookiee-kawaii-vanice/

Vanice

Jersey club hinges on breathless, exhilarating speed. It’s a style of music almost impossible to listen to without wanting to dance: The jittery, sped-up samples and seamless blend of house, R&B, and hip-hop insist on movement, even if you can’t quite keep up with the tempo. The genre has achieved mainstream recognition in fits and starts, most recently through Ciara’s DJ Telly Tellz-sampling “Level Up.” But for years the regional scene in New Jersey has been a hotbed of talent, including Irvington native Cookiee Kawaii, who’s been making club music for a decade. Kawaii’s sultry spin on the style assumed a life of its own last summer through TikTok: The ass-shaking “Vibe (If I Back It Up),” from her Club Soda, Vol. 2 EP, soundtracked footage of dancing ducks and live-action Sailor Moon riffs. With a perfectly looped hook and wispy vocals, the short, instantly gratifying track fomented enough hype to net a Tyga feature and a gold record certification. Now Kawaii returns with Vanice, an official debut that aims to spotlight the Jersey club scene as rendered in her own image. Executive-produced by house legend Junior Sanchez, the 16-song set is very much designed for turning up. The minimalist foundations that give the genre its satisfying punch—stuttering breakbeats, aggressive tempos—show up, though they’re often rooted in more offbeat production choices. Familiar percussive woofs and a bed-squeaking sample (the same one that powers “Vibe”) establish the album’s lineage and supply a welcome reminder of Kawaii’s own heat-seeking breakthrough. “H@ters Anonymous” takes those basic elements and applies them to a ballroom banger that brushes off online trolls with ease: “I ain’t worried about you but you worried about mine,” she trills over a stomping house beat, proving her ability to twist Jersey club into different shapes at will. Elsewhere, Kawaii’s pop and R&B instincts are on full display. “Planet Us,” a lovestruck ode to dancing on the moon with your boo, opens with plucky synths and speeds up at the chorus. On “Love Your Body,” Kawaii trades seductive verses with Los Angeles-based neo-soul artist Oya Noire, moving towards a laid-back R&B sound that suits her shrugged-off come-ons. The shifts don’t always land: Opener “Cookiee & the Monsters (Turn Me Up)” tries on a Rico Nasty-style emo backdrop, complete with overworked guitar riffs. The looped strings on “Violin” fare better, as Kawaii reels off a mile-a-minute verse: “I hit the bank then I cash out/Same way I hit the booth and I lash out,” she raps, giving proof in the tenacious performance. Titled after the artist’s given name, Vanice is also intended to reveal more facets of her personality alongside the self-assured floor-fillers; the album is “the root to all of this... who I am outside of being Cookiee Kawaii,” she explained in a statement. Yet for all of its delightful, shape-shifting blasts of Jersey club, the record doesn’t stretch so far in its lyrics, which remain firmly in a bossed-up mode that’s less interested in introspection. As a magnetic party-starter, Vanice clearly succeeds, but there’s room for the personality who created these songs to animate them, too. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

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

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

Electronic

The Cookiee Jar / Empire

August 4, 2021

fde7d05c-bf69-4d65-9585-70c20dafc74f

Eric Torres

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

Sharper songwriting, unbridled vocal performances, and more austere industrial textures give Luis Vasquez’s fifth album a new level of depth and candor.

Sharper songwriting, unbridled vocal performances, and more austere industrial textures give Luis Vasquez’s fifth album a new level of depth and candor.

The Soft Moon: Exister

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-soft-moon-exister/

Exister

With 2018’s Criminal, Luis Vasquez fully committed to the industrial sounds he’d long buried under his hissing, reverb-drenched post-punk. The artist better known as the Soft Moon first brought these elements to the surface on his third album, 2015’s Deeper, where he mixed mechanical darkwave into the droning, watery palette of his earlier releases. His style owes a clear debt to Nine Inch Nails, and his lyrics, which can be cringe-inducing at times, instantly transport former teen goths back to their angsty past. Over the last seven years, his push into industrial terrain has imbued these screeds of disdain and violence with body-rocking, ear-gripping urgency. But this goth aesthetic isn’t just a phase, mom: Vasquez has carried it into adulthood precisely because so much of his adolescent trauma remains unresolved. Criminal’s “Like a Father” was about his absent dad, and on the follow-up Exister, he puts his whole family in the spotlight. Here, he cautiously pulls the curtain back while deepening his foundation in industrial noise and abrasion. This reinforced commitment to the genre partially stems from his new place of residence: After Criminal, Vasquez relocated from his longtime home of Berlin to the town of Joshua Tree, California, much closer to his hometown of Oakland. It was there that he could record at full volume without bothering any neighbors for the first time, so he added live drums to the mix, pushed his voice outside of his comfort zone, and wrote his most forceful arrangements yet. Exister is his strongest work to date, even if revisiting his troubled past isn’t ridding him of his bleeding-heart, spiked-sleeve lyricism. On previous records, Vasquez usually delivered his lyrics with a sneer, within roughly the same low-pitched half-octave; his under-the-breath singing style conveyed self-loathing, but rarely righteous anger. By expanding his vocal range on Exister, his stories swell in intensity. “I’m starting to become/My other self/Again,” he growls in a pitch-shifted baritone on “Monster,” right before reaching into a new, higher register that lands with striking severity. “And I’m sorry for the lies/I told you so,” he sings, staccato synth stabs evoking a transformation from an ordinary person into an untamable beast. By the track’s end, he’s all but screaming. Where he was once content to whisper as though he was guarding dark secrets, he’s now unafraid to demand attention. Vasquez paints his past more clearly on Exister. He’s said that the album partially stems from trying to reconcile his family trauma once and for all, experiencing a “roller coaster of conflicts” with his mom, and uncovering buried secrets that caused him new pain. “Mother, will you ever let me in?” he asks on “Answers.” It’s the most directly he’s ever addressed the wounds that surround his decade-plus career; here, his voice is conversational rather than defeated and tight to the chest, which was often his default on previous records. Atop the pummeling industrial groove of “Become the Lies,” his falsetto embodies his father and the ghosts he left behind: “Won’t be long/You know, son/Once I’m gone/You’ll know.” It’s shockingly heartrending for a song this cold and austere. There are still some unimaginative turns of phrase, like “Burn my soul away” and “My face is gone, now I’m faceless” on “Sad Song” and “Face Is Gone.” In these moments, his production does the heavy lifting. “Face Is Gone” is a tornado of tumbling synths and clattering percussion, among the steeliest Soft Moon compositions to date. “The Pit” is a moshing anthem, Vasquez’s first outright venture into industrial techno. The song is entirely instrumental, minus a few “oohs” and “aahs,” and it’s so ballistic and pitch-black that he doesn’t need words to express his agony. After a brief pause toward the end of the song, the music returns, this time more distorted and convulsive. Vasquez has taken a deep breath, composed himself, stared his past right in the eye, and projected the turmoil outward. Exister is home to the Soft Moon’s first-ever guest features—it seems that Vasquez has finally learned to call in help when he needs to remove himself from his subject matter. The pop-punk musician fish narc gnashes his teeth on “Him,” a throbbing darkwave number that trembles with anxiety. Vasquez lets out his most bloodcurdling shout ever near the start of “Unforgiven,” and Special Interest’s Alli Logout continues to seethe with rage, as synths and drum machines ricochet off each other. Inviting guests into the fold is a huge step for a longtime solo artist who has previously distanced himself from the world; alongside his sharper songwriting and unrestrained performances, it’s a sign that he’s ready to welcome others into his healing process. By opening up the pit, he’s opening his heart, too.

2022-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Sacred Bones

September 27, 2022

fdeb3a42-9cba-4d5c-a09a-3f808abc0f51

Max Freedman

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

The experimental rapper from Richmond, Virginia raps, speaks, and sings over a strange amalgamation of beat sculptures, glitchy melodies, and found audio. The effect is dizzying and alluring.

The experimental rapper from Richmond, Virginia raps, speaks, and sings over a strange amalgamation of beat sculptures, glitchy melodies, and found audio. The effect is dizzying and alluring.

38Kea: Seeds, Thy Divine Thresher

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/38kea-seeds-thy-divine-thresher/

Seeds, Thy Divine Thresher

If the music that 38Kea makes can be broadly qualified as hip-hop, then it should probably be consigned to the wilder, stranger regions of that expansive territory. Throughout Seeds, Thy Divine Thresher, 38Kea raps, speaks, and sings over a strange amalgamation of beat sculptures, glitchy melodies, and found audio. Sometimes he’ll muse over a deconstructed ’90s golden age beat, while other times he’ll sing along to an elongated rock melody. His music is more concerned with the individual raw materials rather than what they might add up to. It may be ironic to call this heavily altered electronic music elemental, but that’s what it is: Beats are neglected for passages of improvised drum machines, and rapping devolves into muttered statements about the incoherence of the world. Though it may sometimes resemble an unruly sprawl, Seeds, Thy Divine Thresher contains gems of clarity for the patient listener. The album opens with spoken word by Retta Vendetta who provides a statement of purpose over a gently distorted jazz piano: “They want us to sell ourselves/Just so they can buy us back/But I don’t think I’m with that.” 38Kea is fully aware of the commodification of contemporary art (perhaps contemporary life as well), but his response is to fully isolate himself in the raw potentiality of the process of creation. A song like “Fill the Cup Up” gets its power from continual misdirection: From its title to its sample of a cup literally being filled, you might expect a party track, but instead, you get a contemplative synthetic drum stunner filled with almost quiet rhymes. Over a battery of cut-up vocals, 38Kea mixes satirical commentary (“Niggas in the system always eating up the grub”) with political critique (“They oversee the killings/Counting up they billions”), casting a side-eye both at society while also recognizing that we are all too eager to lap it up when we aren’t criticizing it. It makes complete sense that the song ends with a sample of Donald Trump trying to denigrate the Black Lives Matter movement: “You remember pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.” It’s presented with the understanding that no caricature could be as warped as the original. 38Kea’s response to being made into a consumable product is to hide, using a series of sounds as cover. It’s a risky proposition because his occlusion may seem needlessly cryptic; to put it more simply, there’s always the possibility of noise negating what you say because no one can understand what on earth you’re talking about. The heavy instrumental of a song like “Brutalaton the Murderer” (produced by collaborator Jak3) envelops 38Kea’s words in reverbed guitar and ambient static. Mood is as important here as lyrics—maybe even more so. When you do hear words, it feels like glancing at droplets of rain in a storm, you almost wonder if they would be relevant to anyone else besides you. 38Kea refuses to get specific even as he tells a narrative: “Brutalaton did do heinous wrongs to tell upon such crimes I would name/But that would make the story hella long/I must make room to harp to you about the other side of the dark moon/Far beneath the weeds, Brutalaton indeed did have seeds.” It’s uninteresting for him to give you the rap sheet of a killer, but he’s still interested in beginnings. This focus can be somewhat unnerving if you want clear answers, but 38Kea manages to make the search stimulating. Part of this comes from the sheer versatility of the production, with help from collaborators Lampgod (aka Loretta Aberdeen) and Jak3, 38Kea gets abstract. They move from doomed boom bap (“Legacy” and “The Power Inherent”) to pitch-shifted blues (“God Bless the Child”) with ease, as if they laugh at the idea of placing these sounds into separate categories. Combining this experimentation with whimsical reflections on growth might seem self-indulgent, but this rhizomatic tendency has a point. On “Spliff in Hand,” this is illustrated by the opening chorus (“Take the seeds and watch them grow so tall”) and from 38Kea’s closing lines (“Can’t stop them populating/Populating seeds/Populating seeds”). He lingers on the smallest parts of the whole, and his hope is generated by their potential. You can’t stop him from becoming enamored with a particular line or repeated drum pattern any more than you can stop a plant from winding its way to the light. It’s his nature. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock / Rap

Lost Appeal

April 12, 2021

fdf10050-4435-435e-8cd4-9e998c8a8d77

Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

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

Dave Cloud was a cult artist in Nashville, playing the raging id to Nashville's massive ego: the wild, demented offspring chained in the basement, never spoken of in polite company. Singing in a low, grainy voice that sounds like Captain Beefheart, Cloud played garage rock and noise as though the Sonics and Sonic Youth were the same band. Today Is the Day surveys his brief recording career.

Dave Cloud was a cult artist in Nashville, playing the raging id to Nashville's massive ego: the wild, demented offspring chained in the basement, never spoken of in polite company. Singing in a low, grainy voice that sounds like Captain Beefheart, Cloud played garage rock and noise as though the Sonics and Sonic Youth were the same band. Today Is the Day surveys his brief recording career.

Dave Cloud & The Gospel of Power: Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20937-today-is-the-day-that-they-take-me-away/

Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away

During the day, Dave Cloud read books to the visually impaired for the Nashville Talking Library. At night, however, he preached the gospel of rock'n'roll at small venues around town, with his crack-backing band the Gospel of Power in tow. Singing in a low, grainy voice that sounds like Captain Beefheart, Cloud played garage rock and noise as though the Sonics and Sonic Youth were the same band, adding drone and distortion to his three-minute rave-ups and pop tunes. His guitar usually sported only one string, two if he was feeling adventurous, and onstage he transmogrified into the raging id to Nashville's massive ego: the wild, demented offspring chained in the basement, never spoken of in polite company. Cloud's handful of records comprise a modest catalog that barely sold in the U.S. but established him as something of a hero in Scandinavia. There is a strong you had to be there, man aspect to artists like Cloud, whose charisma is most intense onstage and yet whose live shows don't always translate to YouTube clips or vinyl. And yet, even without the secondhand stories of onstage shenanigans, there is a great deal to admire in his brand of grouty garage rock, from his rusted-tailpipe vocals to the Gospel of Power's grimy reimaginings of '60s pop riffs and grooves. Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away surveys the breadth of Cloud's relatively brief recording career. He may have started performing at local record stores back in the '70s and his previous band the Psychotic Night Auditors may have been banned for life from the Springwater, but he finally released his debut album in 1999, followed by three more studio albums, one compilation, and a live album recorded just down I-40 at GonerFest in Memphis. Rather than mapping out the development of his sound over 16 tracks (27 on the digital version), Today Is the Day instead reveals an artist who had already refined his aesthetic and had utmost confidence in its viability over the years. In fact, he makes that small patch of garage rock sound unreasonably large: "Party Doll" sounds like Buddy Holly back from the dead, playing guitar until his hands literally fall off, while the title track layers his paranoid ramblings into a kind of incantatory warning that picks up where Napoleon XIV left off. We've heard songs like "Bimbo" and "400 Girls" before, reiterations of omnivorous male sexuality that innervated early rock'n'roll but soon became a tired ritual, a means of oppression rather than liberation. But there's something so exaggerated in Cloud's delivery that the songs sound like parodies: hetero-dude desire exploded to Tex Avery proportions. Cloud sings so often about unattainable women that romantic longing becomes the de facto theme of this collection, undermining the jokiness of "Thieving Love Bandit" and "Damn Damn Damn Damn" and suggesting a very real sense of loneliness motivating these songs. Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away is an epitaph for an unusual career, because Dave Cloud died earlier this year, age 58, of melanoma. He never achieved the fame and fortune many believed was his due, but his true destiny was to be Nashville's glorious cult icon. He obviously relished the role, and this affectionate tribute reveals an artist who managed—amazingly enough—to remake rock'n'roll in his own image.

2015-08-17T02:00:04.000-04:00

2015-08-17T02:00:04.000-04:00

Rock

Fire

August 17, 2015

fdf21f1e-2ff1-4dd2-ba13-174cbb802d6b

Stephen M. Deusner

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

The inexhaustible compilation series reaches the pot of gold at the end of Rainbow Capitalism with a bulging 84-track compendium for Pride. Even a cynical corporate package can’t quash the music’s joy.

The inexhaustible compilation series reaches the pot of gold at the end of Rainbow Capitalism with a bulging 84-track compendium for Pride. Even a cynical corporate package can’t quash the music’s joy.

Various Artists: NOW That’s What I Call Pride

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-now-thats-what-i-call-pride/

NOW That’s What I Call Pride

Who is the I who calls this Pride? Originally, the phrase “Now that’s what I call music” appeared on an antique poster advertising Danish bacon, written in the voice of a pig listening to a squawking hen. Then, it was British media mogul Richard Branson, who saw the poster and borrowed its sentiment for the long-running compilation series. The annual compendium of mainstream hits began in 1983 and runs to this day, as does the American version that launched in 1998. NOW’s authority is popularity, and that’s part of its appeal: If the market supports a track, on it goes. People around the world have bought some 250 million copies of NOW compilations. The albums have topped the U.S. Billboard charts 19 times. In the flagship series, the I is a kind of we. At times, the I became political. The American series embraced popular right-wing movements like evangelical Christianity (NOW That’s What I Call Faith) and nationalism (NOW That’s What I Call the USA: The Patriotic Country Collection, which culminates with country music’s own Triumph of the Will, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”). This summer, whether as atonement or a pot of gold at the end of Rainbow Capitalism, I is proud. NOW That’s What I Call Pride comes out in two ways: an 18-track U.S. version, and a bulging UK edition with 84 tracks spread across four CDs. Neither claim to be NOW That’s What I Call the LGBTQ+ Community. It’s about “celebrating and paying tribute to Pride,” per the press release, an orientation that allows the UK edition to slide in artists like the Weeknd as allies despite their iffy history. It includes undisputed allies, like Liza Minnelli, feeling her “Love Pains” in collaboration with the gay heroes Pet Shop Boys, who offer their revolutionary cover of “Go West” by Village People. With Village People’s own ode to cruising, “Y.M.C.A.,” positioned between Baccara’s tantalizing “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” and Chaka Khan’s masterpiece “I’m Every Woman,” the three-way is a good time. The sounds of celebration fill the fourth UK disc, which concludes on a truly fabulous run of the Scissor Sisters’ aptly-titled “Filthy/Gorgeous,” CeCe Peniston’s eternal “Finally,” and Ultra Naté’s “Free,” a pledge of allegiance to a truly queer nation. Tributes arrive on the third and strongest disc, which centers queer saints like Divine (“You Think You’re a Man,” a song that eviscerates toxic masculinity with a shit-eating grin), Grace Jones (“I Need a Man,” still voracious), and Patrick Cowley and Sylvester with their ribald, rhetorical “Do You Wanna Funk?” George Michael’s homage to public sex, “Outside” is, to this day, the fiercest retort to homophobia to ever make the pop charts. The other UK discs plumb those pop charts for fresher fruit. Disc two’s run of Miley Cyrus’ “Midnight Sky” into Christine and the Queens’ “Tilted” into Fletcher and Hayley Kiyoko’s “Cherry” into Kim Petras’ “Coconuts” seeds a new queer canon. Disc one struggles, with Lady Gaga’s earnest but counterrevolutionary paean to essentialism “Born This Way” leading into Kylie Minogue’s “Better the Devil You Know,” which is a perfect song but nothing to do with feeling proud. Both Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin have legendary queer anthems, but their “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” goes out of its way to assert that feminism is for opposite-sex lovers. Read the room. Which brings us to the conundrum of the compilation, distilled by the American single-disc version. A thesis could be written on the differences: Where the UK has bangers, the U.S. has ballads. Apart from supercharged entries by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and a censored Lil Nas X, the U.S. disc privileges this country’s tenderqueer longing for no kink at pride, swapping out George Michael’s camp house “Outside” for the fierce self-determination of “Freedom! ’90.” There seems to be not a trans person in the lineup. And while a Pride flag flaps on the UK cover, the front cover of the U.S. version is a series of rainbow-colored hearts, neither asking nor telling but relying on IYKYK. Perhaps this is by design. As the conservative takeover of America continues, a phone in a Florida classroom playing NOW’s anodyne Katy Perry ballad “Roar” might violate “Don’t Say Gay” laws. UK’s NOW includes Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down,” and now is the moment when I mention that Universal Music Group, Swift’s publisher and label, distributes the U.S. version. UMG exceeded the maximum allowable political donations to national embarrassment and Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn’s 2024 campaign. In Swift’s 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, Swift describes Blackburn as “a homophobic racist.” This is accurate. “I think it is so frilly and spineless of me to stand on stage and go, ‘Happy Pride Month, you guys’ and then not say this, when someone’s literally coming for their neck,” Swift said then. She does not appear on the U.S. compilation. It’s easy—realistic, even—to be cynical about all this. I, if not I, am guilty of it here. But if we believe in music, that pleasure is political and representation matters, that art changes and challenges its makers and audience, then we must surely marvel at this album’s existence. The UK is roiling with TERFs. The U.S. is terrorized by gun-toting bigots. And a multinational conglomerate has seen fit to stock shelves with a textbook of queer cultural production. The pinnacles are breathtaking, and none are higher than the ecstatic revelation of the late Peter Rauhofer and his Club 69 mix of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All.” Over nearly 12 minutes, we hear the best-case back-and-forth between white gay men and Black women; in the swish and boom of his circuit house and the call and response of her miraculous voice there are churches and closets, dancefloors and doctor’s offices, partners and friends. Only the dead of spirit could deny finding its strength in love. Or being given its sense of pride, even. Who is this for? Whoever needs it.

2022-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

UMG / Sony Music Entertainment

June 18, 2022

fdf5db24-f043-436a-9d93-abc682e0728a

Jesse Dorris

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

On his debut album, Zack Fox doubles down on the joke rap shtick, resulting in a collection of tracks that is as disjointed as it is unfunny.

On his debut album, Zack Fox doubles down on the joke rap shtick, resulting in a collection of tracks that is as disjointed as it is unfunny.

Zack Fox: shut the fuck up talking to me

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zack-fox-shut-the-fuck-up-talking-to-me/

shut the fuck up talking to me

When Zack Fox’s joke song “Jesus Is the One (I Got Depression)” went viral in 2019, the comedian and illustrator distanced himself from the attention. “I’m not even a rapper,” he told Rolling Stone. “This popped off because of how monotonous and how saturated rap has become in this viral-Spotify-TikTok environment.” After the relentless stream of trolls, actors, athletes, weed carriers, and one-trick ponies that memed their way to the top throughout the 2010s, Fox’s ambivalence felt refreshing. He seemed willing to relish his viral moment, yet also let it pass. On his debut album, shut the fuck up talking to me, he reverses course, stretching his joke rap shtick until it tears. “Jesus Is the One (I Got Depression)” was compiled from Fox’s gag appearance on Kenny Beats’ web series The Cave. The Cave typically recasts the rap radio freestyle as a casual hangout: Instead of subjecting visiting rappers to prodding questions and random beats, Kenny treats them as patrons, bantering with them as he tailors an instrumental to their style and whims—music-making as a trip to the barbershop, essentially. Because Fox was not a rapper, his episode was essentially a comedy skit. The resulting freestyle worked because it fit his skill set as an improviser, talking head, and slapstick comic. His toolkit as a rapper is far more narrow. He raps exclusively in punchlines and insults, an approach that yields disjointed verses comprised of canned one-liners and limp similes. “I been fuckin’ up huns like Mulan did/Said he gone slide, I’m like ooh I wish/Beat a nigga ass like you my kids/Comin’ at ya head like new ideas,” he raps on “bane.” Like, like, like, like. Every line introduces a gag then abandons it. Non sequiturs are supposed to be random, but his joke dumps are rarely subversive or surprising; he almost always goes for the lowest-hanging fruit. Too many lines are both dull and thoughtless. “I feel like a condom, ain’t nobody fuckin’ with me,” he says on “menace,” the intended joke (condoms are uncomfortable) squandered by the poor word choice. He is emphatically bad at rapping. Fox writes so much filler that there’s an almost algorithmic regularity to it: He starts fist fights, he shoots people, he gets geeked off the beans, he has sex, he drives cars, and he has sex in cars while geeked after a shootout that began as a fist fight. The redundancy might work if Fox had a sharper sense of style or continuity, or if his setups built into schemes or ideas, but he’s a styleless bore. Despite all the wisecracking, there’s no individuality to his shock-jock antics, no appetite, no direction. The beat loads, Fox raps, and nothing happens. His songs are like dud fireworks, screaming up into the sky but never exploding. Weirdly, these uneventful songs don’t even read as parodies. Other joke rappers such as Big Shaq, Supa Hot Fire, and even Big Body Bes aren’t always funny, but they are at least identifiable as personae. Fox, by comparison, completely lacks presence. He just...raps. And even when he sticks to a bit, his writing spins in place. “get off my dick,” a bouncy, SoCal-inspired Kenny Beats production, is lively, but the verses just keep time until the chorus, and Fox simply scrabbles for dick jokes in the interim. Deep down in this music, there’s vestiges of the outlandish and misanthropic debauchery of the Awful Records collective, which Fox is a part of, but shut the fuck up talking to me isn’t remotely as fun, horny, or wry as a typical Awful release. Whereas past Fox songs like “Square Up” and “Stick” at least had echoes of the crunk and snap music that Awful and Atlanta’s underground have kept alive, the songs here are automated and rootless. Humor will always be welcome in and essential to rap, but it’s best left to actual rappers. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Parasang

October 20, 2021

fdf6261b-576f-4af6-8e4e-faa27f891aa4

Stephen Kearse

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

The Los Angeles-based singer and violinist blends avant-garde experimentalism with the swagger-drenched posturing of club rap, ’90s R&B grooves, and biting introspection.

The Los Angeles-based singer and violinist blends avant-garde experimentalism with the swagger-drenched posturing of club rap, ’90s R&B grooves, and biting introspection.

Sudan Archives: Sudan Archives

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sudan-archives-sudan-archives/

Sudan Archives

Born Brittney Denise Parks—the 23-year-old singer and violinist known as Sudan Archives—employs an intuitive ear and an autodidactic curiosity to fuel the justifiably rapid rise she has enjoyed as a new fixture of the effervescent Angeleno music scene. Parks moves effortlessly within densely layered, glitchy, experimental folk landscapes across the six tracks on her self-titled debut EP, released this month on Stones Throw. Armed with little more than a digital looping station and a violin, Sudan Archives finds singularity and certain value in a sound that suggests both the depths of her ability and the untapped potential of the instrument itself. Following talents like string duo Chargaux, cellist Kelsey Lu, and harpist Brandee Younger, Sudan Archives is the latest in a growing line of avant-garde, orchestral polymaths making experimental music by obliterating commonly held perceptions of their instruments. Sudan Archives’ moniker is a reference to the minor triads and pentatonic scales at the foundation of the string dominant folk of North and West Africa, which inspired her to avoid Western musical conventions in seeking and refining her own sound. Without allegiance to any particular trend and late to learning musical theory, Sudan Archives takes a decidedly percussive and improvisational approach to playing the violin. Combined with an uncanny knack for punchy lyrics, her style is the foundation for a seminal release that doubles as an unforgettable sensory experience. The Sudan Archives EP is anchored by lyricism that mashes the swagger-drenched posturing of club rap with ’90s R&B grooves and biting introspection—best demonstrated by her one-off flip of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly single “King Kunta.” The aptly titled “Queen Kunta” is a much more spare and elegant production that plays like a warning shot beamed through the atmosphere from another dimension. lead single “Come Meh Way” is equal parts devotional chant and sassy homage to bubblegum r&b hooks, the track is a deconstructed dancehall riddim driven by claps staggered to create a rhythmic onslaught wrapped up in a rotund, buzzing low end. The only true drawback by the midpoint of the EP is the abbreviated life of the tracks—an issue that might suggest this was a collection of unfinished ideas if the release did not feel so well thought out and otherwise complete. Thankfully, the problem is alleviated by the engagement of the repeat button. “Oatmeal” also helps, a track that boasts atmospheric production and lyrics that extract the beauty from the mundane; Sudan Archives wipes away the jarring feeling of morning routine with the dulcet tone of one sentence, as she sings “Wake up, if you want some oatmeal I got you.” Pizzicato and sweeping strings intersect with her words to wash over the listener, creating what might be best described as a cleansing effect. The closing track “Wake Up” picks up where “Queen Kunta” and her 2014 cover of Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” left off as a statement of unwavering confidence. She states, “I got too much swag/That’s why I ain’t got no friends/I’m too confident.” With that, Sudan Archives doubles down on the fierce independence first displayed in her approach to musicianship and conjures revolution. It’s an appropriate conclusion given that the architect of this is an emotive, lo-fi agitator poised to buck tradition and flip what you thought you knew about the violin on its head.

2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Stones Throw

July 29, 2017

fdf8e91a-1ea2-414a-8026-b58c5e497c2f

Karas Lamb

https://pitchfork.com/staff/karas-lamb/

On this LP from New York noise-jazz trio GRID, saxophonist Matt Nelson—a collaborator on tUnE-yArDs’ w h o k i l l—puts his tones through pedals and electronics to thrilling effect.

On this LP from New York noise-jazz trio GRID, saxophonist Matt Nelson—a collaborator on tUnE-yArDs’ w h o k i l l—puts his tones through pedals and electronics to thrilling effect.

GRID: GRID

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23005-grid/

GRID

Saxophonist Matt Nelson is one of the more unpredictable virtuosos in New York’s underground. He played with a sense of ecstatic lyricism in a band assembled by Merrill Garbus for the album w h o k i l l. He’s delivered thoughtful supporting work in Battle Trance, a tenor-quartet group that plays compositions by Travis Laplante. And Nelson can also command center stage; his raging solos in Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones invite comparisons to some of experimental jazz’s most admired reed extremists. This kind of performance mobility doesn’t tend to come about casually—and it’s clear that Nelson enjoys taking on discrete roles in different ensembles. On his first record as part of GRID, a collaborative trio with drummer Nick Podgurski and bassist Tim Dahl, Nelson conceives of a different challenge. This time, he often plays the saxophone covertly. As he puts his tones through a raft of pedals and electronics, the majority of Nelson’s licks sound like the work of a lead guitarist in an avant-rock trio. On the band’s eponymous debut, Nelson’s indirect use of the saxophone is the most consistently thrilling element. During the initial minutes of the first movement (titled “(+/+)”), you might spend some time re-checking the album credits just to make sure there isn’t a guest guitarist on hand. But those slow-moving, feedbacking melodies are all Nelson. The free-improv pulses from the rhythm section create a compelling, abstract background. And when Nelson allows small bulbs of typical reed-instrument noise to flower, in the fourth minute, the listener gains a greater appreciation of the saxophonist’s command over this unusual terrain. The NNA Tapes label has used the term “doom jazz” to describe the band’s sound, though there are some precedents that predate this subgenre coinage. Starting in the ’90s, Rashied Ali—the ferocious, late-period drummer for John Coltrane—worked with bassist Bill Laswell and the guitarist-vocalist Keiji Haino in the outfit Purple Trap. And Laswell’s ’80s partnership with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, in the group Last Exit and on the duo album Low Life, is another touchstone for this school of noise-jazz. But those past ensembles have often been at pains to show how many song forms they can undermine: swinging wildly between clattering ragers, ambient soundscapes, and even some dance textures. The members of GRID take a more stable view of the style. Some passages on the album have slightly more propulsive drive (see: “(-/+)”). Others a shade of greater mystery (as on “(-/-)”). But over four movements spanning 38 minutes, the differences between these sections are not as stark as on many prior rock-meets-free-jazz outings. The benefit of this more even-keeled approach is its novelty. Though the textures are extreme in nature, and densely layered, GRID doesn’t seem primarily interested in bludgeoning listeners. That decision results in an unusually dreamy realization of the underlying aesthetic: one that brings the group’s work more in line with drone composition than with that of Laswell. The risk stalking such a choice is the fact that a listener’s attention can drift a bit. But in electing not to close with a dramatic bash of a finale, the members of this gifted trio signal that they may be fine with that reaction. Like much else on this surprising set, the quick fade-out ending creates an idiosyncratic impact that lingers well beyond the album’s running time.

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

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

Experimental

NNA Tapes

March 17, 2017

fe11a36f-8fe8-470f-96f5-81b032c54c7f

Seth Colter Walls

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

Before he became Nicolas Jaar’s foil in the electro-noir duo Darkside, guitarist Dave Harrington was immersed in the jazz world. Become Alive finds him circling back to his improv roots.

Before he became Nicolas Jaar’s foil in the electro-noir duo Darkside, guitarist Dave Harrington was immersed in the jazz world. Become Alive finds him circling back to his improv roots.

Dave Harrington Group: Become Alive

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21699-become-alive/

Become Alive

Before he became Nicolas Jaar’s foil in the electro-noir duo Darkside, guitarist Dave Harrington was immersed in the jazz world, hitting shows at the old Knitting Factory and Tonic in the late 1990s and early '00s. The New York improv scene was at the time especially vital, but like any other young, hungry player, Harrington began to dabble outside of jazz so as to have enough working gigs, doing time in metal, synth-pop, and indie bands. With Darkside now on indefinite hiatus and Harrington’s profile significantly raised, it makes sense that he would form his own band and circle back to his improvised music roots. Following the downtempo Before This There Was One Heart But a Thousand Thoughts EP is Become Alive, Harrington’s debut album as a leader, which features instrumental configurations ranging from duos to 11-piece ensembles. Opener “White Heat” is made by a five-piece, and finds Harrington’s group creating a dark, foreboding mood, as he coaxes flares of feedback that suggest a fire at the horizon. But even as it builds across its seven minutes, there’s little actual movement. Volumes swell and recede, cymbals sizzle and settle back in, but rather than resolving tension, “Heat” just dissipates. That dynamic holds true the rest of Become Alive, which accentuates texture and mood over structure and melody to a fault. The unsettling atmosphere draws you in, but there’s a sameness to the eight tracks that makes distinguishing individual parts difficult, in part because every instrument finds itself in the service of ambience rather than melody or meter. “Slides,” arranged for Harrington and John Stanesco’s bass clarinet, suggests disused industrial space, the electronics churning far in the background like discarded machinery. Its function is mainly interstitial, leading into “The Prophet,” wherein the drums and percussion clatter in an increasing pace without ever settling on an actual rhythm. The highlight is the title track, a nearly 10-minute epic that features 11 players and some new timbres: vibes, flute and soprano sax. The group works right up to a boil, the woodwinds swerving around the other instruments. Harrington’s guitar has plenty to engage with here, be it the high register of the saxophone or the rumbling percussion, suggesting Santana at his earliest and most incandescent. The piece continues to build and build, reaching a massive, full-blown climax that justifies its lengthy runtime. The album ends on a stronger note. “Spectrum” mixes vibraphone, theremin, Fender Rhodes and Harrington’s pedal steel, a curious array of instruments that come together to suggest a weightless, sparkling space that slides ever so slowly towards dissonance. The new age ambience of “All I Can Do” leads into Become Alive’s most driving and most lyrical number. Harrington’s solo shows that while he’s adept at embracing bleak, desolate atmospheres with his fretwork, he’s just as capable of moving towards the lighter side. If the first half of the album has a lethargic sense that record never quite shakes, the last two tracks suggest there may be more for the group to explore in the future.

2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Other People

April 19, 2016

fe1a47ca-9e01-4611-8c30-1020b280a32f

Andy Beta

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

The deep, distorted grooves of Stereolab’s second album mark the middle of their motorik period, an incantatory album with a darkly lit sound as if everyone played with their eyes closed.

The deep, distorted grooves of Stereolab’s second album mark the middle of their motorik period, an incantatory album with a darkly lit sound as if everyone played with their eyes closed.

Stereolab: Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-transient-random-noise-bursts-with-announcements/

Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements

A locked groove is that empty loop your needle gets trapped in when you leave a record on the turntable after the music has finished. Technically the record is still playing, but it’s only producing a soft, rhythmic hissing. It’s noise, but for many music lovers, the noise comes with a feeling and a history. A distinctly Stereolab flourish was to sample that repetitive hiss on “Lock-Groove Lullaby,” the last song on their second studio album, 1993’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements. The idea of finding romance in an incidental machine sound is Stereolab in a nutshell: As postmodern recyclers of 1960s kitsch and analog sound effects, they were never ones to let the standard definition of musicality limit their quest to invent a new and idiosyncratic kind of pop music. Stereolab was formed in 1990 by British guitarist Tim Gane (formerly of McCarthy) and French singer Lætitia Sadier, and the band’s numbers fluctuated over the years—notably, when they gained backup singer Mary Hansen in 1992 (losing her 10 years later to a cycling accident), added drummer Andy Ramsay in 1993, and gigged and recorded with master arranger Sean O’Hagan, of the High Llamas. In 1993, they were hitting their stride, still a little mired in the heavy guitar of their early material (the 1991 EP Super-Electric is essentially indie rock) but veering toward more esoteric pastures. A series of discoveries in electronic equipment launched Gane in new compositional directions: In particular, there was a secondhand Farfisa Bravo organ bought cheap and only really suitable for two-note drones. Over the course of their long run of great studio albums, from 1992’s Peng! to 2010’s Not Music, the founding Gane-Sadier dyad (a longtime couple, though they eventually split) gradually forged a sound both unmistakable and extremely difficult to describe. Some things are ineffable: How would you describe the sound of a locked groove to somebody who has never seen an LP? Memory is as much an instrument for Stereolab as the Moog. Using familiar reference points from the history of pop—lovely lounge melodies, old-timey grooves—Stereolab created a new model for what a song could be. Theirs have no real predetermined structure, apart from the fact that most (though not all) are under 10 minutes long. Instead of following the usual verse-chorus-verse shape, Stereolab songs are cyclical epics organized around musical phrases repeated so often they become incantatory. In this new form, the pleasant ambience of Muzak muddles with Sonic Youth-ish chugging guitar; nothing is new, but the combinations are unexpected. Transient Random-Noise Bursts is heavier than Stereolab’s later albums, low on the playful jangle of Emperor Tomato Ketchup and high on dark, persistent grooves. “Jenny Ondioline” and “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” are the album’s standout tracks, now classics. The former is a good encapsulation of that darker vibe: It’s dirge-like at first, with a roundabout of a hook and a steady mid-tempo thump. But Sadier’s melodic line elevates what would otherwise be odd guitar rock into something sweet and singsong. “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” is less fuzzy and more tuneful; two chief melodies, split between Sadier and a synth that sounds like her robot alter ego, achieve a rare fusion of funk and minimalism. The music is anchored by a handful of elements: Gane’s repetitive chords, synth drones, and electronic effects, unswerving motorik beats (the Neu! influence), and Sadier and Hansen’s vocals weaving prettily around it all like daisies in a hairdo. For the uninitiated, the resulting music is like nothing you’ve heard before, but also somehow something you’ve been listening to in your head your whole life. That’s partly down to the way nostalgia activates deep, animal parts of one’s brain, and partly due to Sadier’s gorgeous and often unintelligible singing. Cocteau Twins-style, she’s wont to put the stress on a strange part of a word, changing a phrase like “The greater is the beauty” into “Tha grade ari step you tee.” The effect is to break down language, turning syllables into noises and consonants into percussion, while her voice still disguises itself as yé-yé-style pop singing. You can clearly hear on Transient Noise-Bursts that Stereolab composed via a process of live improvisation, all their different elements becoming odd but easy bedfellows through practice. Because Gane provides such a solid foundation for his collaborators to extemporize around, their contributions feel natural, almost automatic or unconscious, as if everybody was playing with their eyes closed. It must be that pre-verbal vibe which makes Stereolab such an instinctive band. To me, “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” sounds exactly how it felt to sit in my teenage bedroom, deeply absorbed in some project as the time and space around me took on a repetitive looping aspect, old records playing in the background. Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements is Stereolab at a slightly more serious pitch than some prefer, but that lends the album a sense of rigor and strength—still joyful and surprising, just lit by a different color. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Duophonic

July 18, 2019

fe2cab7a-e28b-4ec3-a666-faba7648f77f

Josephine Livingstone

https://pitchfork.com/staff/josephine-livingstone/

Low End Theory associate Nosaj Thing's second album serves as a kind of twilight to its predecessor Drift's midnight, elaborating on Jason Chung's icy sound with occasional hints of pop clarity. Guests include Toro Y Moi and Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead.

Low End Theory associate Nosaj Thing's second album serves as a kind of twilight to its predecessor Drift's midnight, elaborating on Jason Chung's icy sound with occasional hints of pop clarity. Guests include Toro Y Moi and Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead.

Nosaj Thing: Home

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17557-home/

Home

As bass music has emerged from the underground in the States, it has, predictably, become warmer, brighter and more accessible. Sure, a key element of Skrillex's appeal is the enormous release that comes with the drop, but it's equally important to have pleasant sounds as contrast. The move toward warmth isn't limited to the most obvious of brostep producers. Flying Lotus isn't soundtracking raves quite yet, but he's certainly shifted towards accessibility, moving from the eerie glitchfest of Los Angeles in 2008, to the settled comfort of last year's Until the Quiet Comes. Even some of our iciest producers seem vulnerable to this gradual instrumental warming. Take FlyLo's sometime Low End Theory associate, Nosaj Thing. The Los Angeles producer's debut album, Drift, (which came out a year after Los Angeles) was an icy chasm, a shifting cave of sound that seemed as if it could have originated in the coldest reaches of space. But his new album, Home, serves as a kind of twilight to Drift's midnight, elaborating on his sound while taking a welcome turn towards the light. That's not to say that Nosaj Thing, born Jason Chung, is suddenly making full-fledged pop. The darkness hasn't disappeared entirely. But occasional hints of pop clarity lie trapped just beneath the surface of many tracks on the new album. The shift is surprising given Chung's former penchant for working in huge dark spaces and his origin in the realm of glitch-hop, a subgenre that frequently posits intricacy as its own kind of beauty. But it's not unwelcome, considering the producer has clearly retained his ability to produce the studied soundscapes that made his debut so promising. It's just the sharp edges are now complemented by some soft ones. The change is particularly obvious when Chung employs vocalists. Blonde Redhead's frontwoman Kazu Makino transforms the plaintive "Eclipse/Blue" into a particularly pillowy affair, a torrent of the kind of grey and blue sounds that are described in the lyrics. The Toro Y Moi-featuring "Try" and its accompanying "Prelude" are downright lovely; a slow tapestry of summoning synths soon gives way to epic fireworks reminiscent of the intro to M83's Hurry Up We're Dreaming. When Chaz Bundick's voice comes in about halfway through "Try", his wispy voice blows beautifully through the music, sounding aloft within the mix. What distinguishes Chung's production from that of M83 is its nuance and its lack of obvious sentimentality. Nearly every track on Home is downtempo, but multiple backbeats help to direct the flow of energy-- doubling down on bass on a song like "Snap" makes for a dynamic listen. On the surface, the song resembles something that a bombastic producer like Rustie might make for a peaceful Sunday afternoon, but upon further inspection, it isn't quite as peaceful as it first appears. A close listen reveals a busy world of secondary beats and electronic runs fluttering underneath the mix's outer membrane. "Glue" has so many ping-pong echoes and backing beats that it takes a moment to locate the rhythm that's actually moving the track along. On Drift, melodies existed to accentuate complex beats like these, as on "Fog", where chilly synthesizers wove in and out of an asthmatic gasp of a bassline. Even when light broke in on a slow descending bridge, it was still accompanied by that breathless sound, something like Gollum trying to catch his breath in Beijing. The closest comparison on Home is the title track, which opens the album. A synth line moves through a dark chorus of voices until it arrives at a shuddering epicenter that woulnd't have felt out of place on that 2009 album. "Distance", too, is somewhat cold-blooded at first, as a brief synth flutter foreshadows an ominous minor key transformation that threatens to dominate when the beat vanishes midway through. But, in a nice microcosm of the album's direction, it uses those minor keys to produce a gorgeous swirling effect that re-ups and reamps when the beat returns. If any more evidence were needed of the change in Nosaj Thing's sound, album closer "Light #3", the third in a trilogy that appears throughout Drift, would serve as proof. Numbers one and two, both of them absolutely stunning tracks in their own right, offer sharpness as beauty, a panoply of cutting sounds choreographed exquisitely. By contrast, the piano that begins the third volume leads in to a gentle mountain of strings and voices, just as beautiful as the first two, but peaceful too, never threatening to overwhelm. Jason Chung may not have put out any music in the last four years, but he appears to have used that time well. Home is an ace of a second album, one which maintains the most important elements of Chung's painstakingly crafted sound while progressing nicely into a friendlier arena.

2013-01-25T01:00:02.000-05:00

2013-01-25T01:00:02.000-05:00

Electronic

Innovative Leisure

January 25, 2013

fe36a7bd-7c6e-41f9-898c-74f98556cd80

Jonah Bromwich

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

With a newly polished sound, the indie pop group’s latest is a neatly packaged document of quarter-life angst.

With a newly polished sound, the indie pop group’s latest is a neatly packaged document of quarter-life angst.

Beach Bunny: Emotional Creature

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beach-bunny-emotional-creature/

Emotional Creature

Lili Trifilio, the leader of Beach Bunny, rose to indie-pop prominence largely thanks to teenage girls circulating her songs on TikTok. In the five years since her solo project expanded into a full lineup with guitarist Matt Henkels, bassist Anthony Vaccaro, and drummer Jon Alvarado, the 25-year-old songwriter has amassed a sea of loyal fans who attend the band’s shows en masse to participate in female-dominated mosh pits, driven largely by the mutual rage of a broken heart. It’s easy to hear why Beach Bunny’s music has garnered such devotion. Trifilio writes about widely understood experiences: the self-doubt prompted by a relationship on the fritz, the thrill of being so infatuated with someone you want the world to watch you kiss them, the malaise of feeling unfit to be prom queen. Her melodies, meanwhile, stick with the spirit of an early 2000s Radio Disney hit—memorable and pleasant, if slightly simplistic. The group’s 2020 debut, Honeymoon, was an unsophisticated but charming bible of love songs that mirrored the catharsis of sleepover gossip. When the pandemic rendered that therapeutic sense of community impossible, Trifilio spent the newly acquired free time taking in galactic sci-fi stories like Star Wars and Star Trek; perhaps feeling a bit distanced from herself, she began writing her second album, Emotional Creature. Its 12 songs attempt to capture the burden of a bleeding heart: “I feel confused by what I’m ashamed for/I feel ashamed by my human nature,” she sings on “Scream,” a synth-embellished ballad that culminates in a distant shriek. With Fall Out Boy and Motion City Soundtrack go-to Sean O’Keefe handling production, Emotional Creature is Trifilio’s neatly packaged documentation of quarter-life angst. The thematic cornerstone of Emotional Creature is “Weeds,” a mid-tempo rock ditty that builds to a sweeping, anthemic coda. “I’m tired of being anxious, broken, choking on my tears/I let the same old problems steal away my years,” she sings, and you can almost picture Trifilio talking directly to herself in her bathroom mirror: “He’s not the problem/The problem is you think you’re only viable for love when someone makes you feel complete.” Throughout the record there are subtle hints of growth—both personal and musical—but they’re often dragged down by the redundancy of her thematic concerns. From feeling a little too dependent on a partner (“Oxygen”) to finding your dream boy (“Love Song”), she’s covered a lot of this subject matter before, often better the first time. In the great pursuit for relatability, Trifilio’s lyrics are familiar and nonspecific: “But then I fall into your arms again/After all, is this the end?” she hollers on the searing “Gone.” During the pandemic, she moved back in with her parents and perhaps as a side effect, Emotional Creature is filled with vignettes of innocent bedroom scenes: “I can’t hide the letters in my bedroom,” she sings over a Michelle Branch-like chug on opener “Entropy,” before telling a love interest that their “laugh lives in [her] bedroom” on closer “Love Song.” And while it’s heartening to hear a genuinely enthusiastic underdog like Trifilio take on a more polished sound, her shortcomings become more discernible without the casual, garagey shading of her past work. Music made or revered by teenage girls doesn’t imply shallowness. Take fellow TikTok darling Olivia Rodrigo, whose debut album Sour came loaded with slick one-liners about teen heartache and angst, or Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley, whose chipper snarl on the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack remains an oft-referenced touchstone 20 years after the film’s release. There are moments when Emotional Creature approaches the high bar set by those records, like on the bouncy, whimsical “Karaoke,” which features some of Trifilio’s best melodies and one of the album’s most endearing lines: “I learn all the words to your daydreams like I’m trying to sing karaoke.” On the breezy “Eventually,” she swaps her usual schtick of young love for an anecdote about her first panic attack: “I tried to cry but I laughed cause my brain’s acting stupid,” she sings, a welcome moment of nuance. For those who’ve endured the all-encompassing apprehension of a new relationship, mourned their first real breakup, or simply wondered what to do with all these feelings, it’s easy to have a soft spot for Trifilio and the unabashed affection of Emotional Creature. But futile romance isn’t the only criteria of mid-20s dread; there’s a whole world out there to make someone want to throw caution to the wind and launch themselves into outer space. “Life looks better through my worldview,” Trifilio sings on “Oxygen.” It would be a more rewarding sentiment if she weren’t viewing the world solely from her comfort zone.

2022-07-22T00:03:00.000-04:00

2022-07-22T00:03:00.000-04:00

Rock

Mom+Pop

July 22, 2022

fe3c342c-92bb-4dc7-abfa-8912426f3663

Abby Jones

https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/

The second solo album from the Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter is musically muscular and thematically heady, a sound nerd’s project with stadium-sized panache.

The second solo album from the Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter is musically muscular and thematically heady, a sound nerd’s project with stadium-sized panache.

Brittany Howard: What Now

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brittany-howard-what-now/

What Now

Almost immediately after Alabama Shakes broke through with tasteful retro-soul style, Brittany Howard pushed back against categorization. Her band’s Grammy-winning 2015 record, Sound & Color, borrowed from touchstones as far-reaching as Y2K post-punk, Erykah Badu, and Portishead, but it was Howard’s 2019 debut solo album, Jaime, where her experimentation truly blossomed. Its sound gravitated between quiet torch songs and raucous declarations that mixed funk-rock with electronica, bound by startling lyrics mined from Howard’s biography. What Now, recorded during the pandemic in Shawn Everett’s studio, is a different beast. Its subject matter is more gestural and existential—a love gone wrong, a call for peace, a bout of depression in the near future. It feels both looser and brawnier, a sound nerd’s project with stadium-sized panache and a grab-bag approach. What Now opens calmly enough, with crystal singing bowls and a few tentative piano chords and cymbal hits, as Howard narrates her trepidation. “But will I know?/Will I feel it?/The first moment that I see it?” she sings, her voice layered over itself in a blanketing echo. Then, with a whirling synth and explosion of drums, she’s off, blasting through the atmosphere, whizzing past soul, blues, funk, jazz, psychedelia, and house music. If Howard’s lyrics make it seem like she’s still working through things, her music sounds like she’s got it all figured out. Every song here, even the slow stuff, feels giant and propulsive—a grand celestial tour of rock and R&B, guided by one of the few singers and multi-instrumentalists with the range and intuition to pull it off. Howard is studied in the Stevie Wonder school of pulling a groove out of just about anything, thanks in part to her rhythm section here, drum virtuoso Nate Smith and versatile Alabama Shakes bassist Zac Cockrell. “I Don’t” builds around a melancholy chipmunk-soul hook in the vein of Cam’ron; “Patience” morphs from a bog-standard slow jam into a dazzling showcase of warped keyboard effects; at least one song features Howard banging on a trash can. There’s the muscular, airtight funk-rock of the title track, the frenetic boxed-in percussion of “Red Flags,” and a big swing at house music on “Prove It to You.” Yet some of the album’s most inspired choices have no rhythm at all. Between nearly every track, the singing bowls return, played by sound bath practitioners Ann Sensing and Ramona Reid, providing a brief respite and sealing What Now together like spiritual glue. Shining like a beacon through it all is Howard’s extraordinary voice. On “Red Flags,” she morphs between staccato chants, defiant snarls, heavenly lilts, a show-stopping falsetto on the chorus—sometimes she’ll do it all at once, thanks to the album’s impeccable multitrack layering. Howard already had the honor of double-soloing with Prince, but she gives him a run for his money on “Power to Undo,” howling and gasping over her own razor-blade guitar licks. The way her voice and the rest of the band build off each other is wondrous in its own right; take “Samson,” where her subdued vocals weave around a trumpet line from Rod McGaha, before she fades out and lets McGaha continue on a solo in the back half. It’s an intricate give-and-take that’s easy to forget during the energized jams, but the unity between Howard and her collaborators drives home the album’s mightiness. Against its lush acoustics, the songwriting on What Now can feel like an afterthought. Howard constructs narratives that start from an impressionistic fragment of a feeling—uncertainty, indignation, crushing desire—and lets the music take you the rest of the way. Biography is obscured, leaving only the stray “you” and “girl” in songs that feel like letters never to be sent. After the soul-baring of Jaime, where Howard discussed racism and queerness through the lens of personal history, she’s putting more distance between herself and the song. The emotions she describes are no less direct, but their context is elusive. The most outward-facing themes on What Now come from Maya Angelou, whose adjuring reading of 1995’s “A Brave and Startling Truth” makes up the album’s midpoint interlude. Written for the semicentennial of the United Nations, Angelou’s poem connects the smallness of human life in the universe to an “imperative” for freedom and equality. Howard continues that thread into “Another Day”: “We were born in a time to change the paradigm/Peace is the prize of our timeline,” she declares over punchy, Thundercat-esque bass, becoming a melodic vessel for the poet’s broader message. But Howard is equally wise to humanity’s smallness, to the effort—and the rest—required to sustain until the imperative can be realized. When What Now finally comes back down to Earth on the beautiful closer “Every Color in Blue,” it’s like a freefall. Methodical guitar and stuttering beats lay the groundwork, Rod McGaha’s trumpet floats up above, and in the middle of looping piano chords, Howard draws out every syllable like she’s letting gravity pull her down: “You don’t see my injury/You don’t see the energy it takes me.” As joyful and effortless as Howard’s work can appear, these songs don’t come for free.

2024-02-13T00:02:00.000-05:00

2024-02-13T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rock

Island

February 13, 2024

fe44ae89-7933-417f-b817-f918aaa2474c

Claire Shaffer

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

Mike Kinsella’s latest is his most relentlessly morose and objectively gorgeous work as Owen to date.

Mike Kinsella’s latest is his most relentlessly morose and objectively gorgeous work as Owen to date.

Owen: The Avalanche

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/owen-the-avalanche/

The Avalanche

In case you’ve missed out on the past 20-some years of American Football and Owen and are just now checking in with Mike Kinsella for the first time, here’s where he’s at in 2020: “I’ve got friends that don’t know me/A wife that’s disowned me/Here in concept only to miss.” This comes in the middle of “Dead for Days,” a song that begins with memories of his brother Tim finding their father’s unconscious body and ends with Mike imagining himself going out the same way, hoping at least it’ll be deemed an accidental overdose. While The Avalanche is billed as an album of “unraveling marriage and big endings," it’s also, simply, “the next Owen album,” a prophecy self-fulfilled in every brutally candid song and interview acknowledging the effects of porous boundaries between songwriting and real life. “I can’t believe the lies that my mouth spits/I can’t believe she stayed as long as she did,” Kinsella softly croons, setting the course for an album spent in the most indulgent part of a breakup: plenty of self-examination and admissions of fault, but no hard lessons learned and no real desire to change just yet. It’s hard to blame anyone who lacks the emotional bandwidth to take this all in at the moment. But you don’t send back a piece of cheesecake for tasting a little too rich and you don’t tap out on an Owen album because it’s a little too self-pitying. The Avalanche wallows, but the realization rather than the anticipation of karmic retribution lends it emotional urgency even as Kinsella works in his familiar modes of meandering melodies, exquisite acoustic arpeggios, and the occasional lapse into cringe-posting that threatens to break the whole spell. When he sings, “I can’t have my cake and fuck it too,” at the top of “I Should’ve Known,” it’s not clever, but an example of how easily he can ruin a moment (“OK, I won’t make another goddamn joke/I know, how rude”). The self-awareness still can’t cancel out a line so awkward that it haunts every subsequent spin like a screenshot of a deleted tweet. But that tendency has been drastically reduced from previous Owen albums, and The Avalanche is the project’s most relentlessly morose and objectively gorgeous work to date. To the same degree American Football LP3 realized the ambitions of its more tentative predecessor, The Avalanche goes maximalist with the template Kinsella and Bon Iver collaborator S. Carey set on 2016’s The King of Whys. Justin Vernon may have abandoned these winter wonderlands nearly a decade ago, but this is where Kinsella belongs right now. He is frighteningly alone in bustling environments—a sober mind filled with horrifying memories, at a bar an hour outside of town where he won’t be seen indulging his basest desires, and in “The Contours,” sighing “I’m in therapy/She’s in therapy” to relate a heartbreaking side-by-side separateness. Even as banjos, strings, bit-crushed electronics, overdubbed coos, or Now, Now’s KC Dalager wind through the mix, they’re all rendered ghostly by Carey’s see-through sheen. Even if American Football has become Kinsella’s primary focus, it’s heightened the importance of Owen as a creative outlet, a way to counterbalance the brand with the human being. There’s no question whether the misery or the music came first; the Kinsella brothers have come to understand Cap’n Jazz’s abstract emo as functionally primal scream therapy, an outlet for the trauma they were suffering in an abusive household but couldn’t quite name. Mike Kinsella has covered the same subject far more directly in just about every album he’s made as Owen in the time since. “I’ve got a reputation for fucking up to uphold,” he sings during “On With the Show,” the most straightforward pop song he’s ever written, and one that addresses the central concern for anyone whose personal brand is contingent on being depressed in public. Are such people subliminally drawn to relational chaos as a way to uphold their brand, or is the brand itself the reason for their chaotic life? The Avalanche does not determine where the feedback loop begins, only how destructive—and how difficult to stop—it is once it gets going. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

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

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

Rock

Polyvinyl

July 14, 2020

fe47cfcb-baba-4a62-892b-03645a1fc1d7

Ian Cohen

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

Ellis Ludwig-Leone remains San Fermin's primary songwriter, composer, arranger and lyricist, but on Jackrabbit he presents his ambitious, heavily orchestrated chamber-pop as the work of a dynamic full band.

Ellis Ludwig-Leone remains San Fermin's primary songwriter, composer, arranger and lyricist, but on Jackrabbit he presents his ambitious, heavily orchestrated chamber-pop as the work of a dynamic full band.

San Fermin: Jackrabbit

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20143-jackrabbit/

Jackrabbit

Ellis Ludwig-Leone, who records as San Fermin, studied composition at Yale University, served as a musical assistant under Nico Muhly and is a young, pop-classical fixture in New York City. It all sounds quite a lot like the backstory of Dave Longstreth, and his music sounds even more like Longstreth’s: San Fermin’s breakout single "Sonsick" was essentially the Broadway version of "Stillness Is the Move", and the resultant record followed suit with highbrow, heavily orchestrated chamber indie with literary aspirations. Ludwig-Leone remains the project’s primary songwriter, composer, arranger and lyricist, but he takes the focus off himself for Jackrabbit, presenting San Fermin as a legit, eight-person touring band. Once again, the experience is more likely to make you think of other indie A-listers rather than San Fermin. This was mostly true of San Fermin as well, though it had a debut’s charm. Ludwig-Leone had chops and taste; perhaps a distinct point of view would emerge with experience and time. And besides, its unwieldy ambitions were welcome at a time when the Decemberists, Dirty Projectors, Sufjan Stevens and others were laying low. But rather than building or expanding on his foundation, Ludwig-Leone just piles on and exaggerates: everything San Fermin did, Jackrabbit does twice as loud. The vocals are still split almost equally between Charlene Kaye and Allen Tate and alternate on a song-by-song basis. But San Fermin’s storyline has been exchanged for generic signifiers. Narrators "run for the hills" on the title track, aspire for "The Glory", enter "The Cave", get lost in "The Woods",  and fall "down, down, down the rabbit hole" without much further elaboration. Kaye’s features are more enjoyable, especially when they take after "Sonsick": even if the elements are familiar, at least they’re combined in a novel way, and they allow you to indulge in some circa-2005 indie rock fantasy booking: What if Sufjan Stevens got a hold of Amber Coffman and put her at the forefront of his most bombastic Illinois orchestrations? That’s pretty much the pitch for "Jackrabbit" and "Philosopher", songs where Ludwig-Leone’s bold melodies and gushing orchestration have a vocalist who can keep up. And at the very least, Kaye’s songs tend to evoke several bands at once. Allen Tate, however, has either never heard the National or has never listened to any band other than the National. There’s no other way to explain the staggering degree to which Allen Tate sounds exactly like Matt Berninger. Not Leonard Cohen, not Mark Kozelek, or anyone else in the lineage of dour, baritone barstool bards. Just Matt Berninger. His vocals are subject to the same exact cadences, the exact melodic contours, the same wink-and-nod affectations, the same grim humor, the same vocabulary. When Tate takes the lead, San Fermin becomes the equivalent of a shaky music biopic, completely compromised by the uncanny valley effect of having someone not quite be the person he constantly reminds you of. The script, the setting, the soundtrack—all of it is rendered moot. Worse yet, the melodramatic production on "Emily" and "Woman in Red" ensures they can't even pass as pleasant mimicry. The wearying volume of Jackrabbit is the most taxing aspect of a record that already arrives intentionally overstuffed. Ludwig-Leone has revealed himself to be a pop maximalist, as even the minute-long interludes are given to Backdraft-like bursts of horns and strings. Maybe the guy's heart is truly in theater, as Jackrabbit's overwrought spectacle unintentionally doubles as "Indie Rock in the Aughts: The Musical."

2015-04-20T02:00:02.000-04:00

2015-04-20T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rock

Downtown

April 20, 2015

fe55eb0e-415b-4381-9424-2d459c94c1ba

Ian Cohen

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

The prolific noise rap project drills down on their sonic signature and remains politically agnostic and persistently agitated.

The prolific noise rap project drills down on their sonic signature and remains politically agnostic and persistently agitated.

Death Grips: Year of the Snitch

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/death-grips-year-of-the-snitch/

Year of the Snitch

In the process of trying to sabotage their career at every turn, Death Grips became career artists. Regardless of how you classify their prolific output thus far, the noise-rap art project has averaged one album per year, with enough variation and quality control to make their “will they or won’t they break up” shtick background noise. They’re industrious, downright reliable, even. So on their 10th release in seven years, Year of the Snitch, Death Grips stay politically agnostic, persistently agitated—in a word, noided. It’s kinda quaint. Maybe even comforting. Year of the Snitch makes it easier to see how their essence may have leached into today’s serrated musical landscape. The convergence of nu-metal and SoundCloud rap might’ve happened anyway—same with the bonkers, jump-cutting metalcore of bands like Code Orange and Vein—but it’s possible to hear their groundbreaking 2012 album The Money Store as a soft launch for what was to come—a context to understand the kind of heavy music either associated with high-intensity CrossFit or Mountain Dew-fueled eSports. Even still, Death Grips’ sonic signature is so completely their own that it can’t be evoked with anything short of parody. It proves to be very adaptable to an increasingly diffuse number of sounds on Year of the Snitch. Mid-’90s drum ‘n’ bass beats with shoegaze guitars? “Death Grips is Online” will certainly try to create a “Dreamcast Teenage Riot.” “What if Death Grips went rockabilly?” is a question nobody was probably asking, but god bless “Disappointed” for giving us the answer. Is “Streaky” MC Ride’s stab at trap-rap or a strip club anthem? It’s hard to tell from its actual lyrics, but when the album threatens total abstraction, that’s where a drummer as expressive and destructive as Zach Hill grounds the sound into something resembling a band playing a song. As far as what Death Grips actually have to say this time around, “Linda’s in Custody” refers to Linda Kasabian, a Manson Family member-turned-key witness for their prosecution. She turned 69 on June 21, the day that Year of the Snitch leaked. I don’t know if that was Death Grips’ intent, but at least one of their conspiracy-prone fans seems to think so on Genius. If referencing such annotations seems like an unforgivable faux pas, I would argue that it’s borderline critical malpractice to look at any Death Grips album without considering how their fans will interact with it. Acknowledging that the project’s entire existence has been an elaboration on deep internet culture is a starting point for the conversation: What Lil Pump is to SoundCloud, what Car Seat Headrest is to Bandcamp, Death Grips are to 4chan. I mean, the title of “Death Grips is Online” is a reference to one of their most viral tweets—not even Kanye’s done that yet. MC Ride’s extremely rare expressions of legible emotion—“I require privacy,” or, “This is a brand/Not your boy”—are seemingly at odds with Death Grips being firmly within the realm of fan service. Was there any point of them even making a video for “Shitshow” if it wasn’t going to get banned from YouTube for violating its decency standards? Their use of filmmaker Andrew Adamson’s voice for a spoken word interlude on “Dilemma” feels reverse engineered to grab “Death Grips Worked With the Director of Shrek” headlines. Good luck trying to spot Tool bassist Justin Chancellor’s contributions without the credits, but you could say that Death Grips linked up with maybe the only band that gets more love on the deep web than they do. The most notable contribution on the album comes from DJ Swamp, a champion turntablist who once toured with Beck and Ministry, who scatters his production throughout. Entertain the possibility that Shrek, Tool, and Beck fans might use all of the above as entry points to Death Grips, and Year of the Snitch could be viewed as their most extroverted album yet. More likely, they all showed up in large part simply for the appeal of the volatile experimentation the name Death Grips carries: violence, noise, stoned humor, surrealism. Of course, like every Death Grips album, Year of the Snitch is about 10 minutes too long. Much like 2016’s Bottomless Pit, this album isn’t a significantly weaker work than The Money Store or NO LOVE DEEP WEB, but as with everything Death Grips, context matters. “I’ve Seen Footage” and “Hacker” were relative pop songs, and their previous album covers and stunts were not significantly more shitposty than what they’re up to now. But those things came about when Death Grips were shockingly close to being a mainstream concern, a targeted Molotov cocktail compared to Year of the Snitch, an M-80 blown up in an empty clearing—explosive, fun as hell, but lacking a clear target to give it meaning.

2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rap

Third Worlds

June 28, 2018

fe589a52-dfc7-4b95-86c0-562d15f9d4cc

Ian Cohen

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

The latest compilation from Nina Kraviz’s label explores the fringes of techno with a twisted grin.

The latest compilation from Nina Kraviz’s label explores the fringes of techno with a twisted grin.

Various Artists: Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-happy-new-year-we-wish-you-happiness/

Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!

Techno may come couched in an air of deep seriousness, but it is, in the end, largely party music. For all the admirable futurism that animated the genre’s Detroit pioneers, techno’s essence comes down to high-spirited youngsters dancing to silly mechanical noises in a darkened room. трип (Trip), Nina Kraviz’s fabulously individualistic techno label, innately grasps this. The label’s latest compilation, Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!, balances techno’s brutalist electronic edges with a welcome touch of the ridiculous. Newcomer Buttechno—not the most serious name in electronic music—pulls off this tricky balancing act with aplomb. His two contributions to трип 23 are simultaneously ludicrous, pitch dark, and fascinating: “Rostokino Acid” is a mutant gabber banger made out of the kind of squelching duck noise you might encounter in a cheap child’s toy, while “Dubstepping Progression Fast” abandons the straight-up 4/4 rhythms of the dancefloor in favor of preposterous rhythmic paths that suggest Autechre getting excitable on cheap spirits and sub-bass. Spanish producer Carlota, one of three newcomers to the label, alongside Buttechno and Snazzy, shares this sense of absurdity. Her two tracks, the outstanding “Your Destination” and the chilling “Noise Psychosis,” may be darker than Buttechno’s screwy electronics, but they are so deviously twisted in their execution, riffs melting and mutating like phantoms in an electronic house of mirrors, that they both delight and disorient. The result is a kind of chilly, metallic psychedelia, rooting the genre in the frozen steppes of Siberia rather than San Francisco’s Summer of Love. трип mainstays PTU, meanwhile, show an almost childlike sense of folly in the way they throw unlikely musical ideas at a wall to see what sticks. “Mstera” emerges with metallic scuttling and a scrambled synth line stuck to its gruff 4/4 exterior; its mechanical textures, reminiscent of the British illustrator Heath Robinson’s fanciful contraptions, are far removed from techno’s slickly linear stereotype. At other moments, трип 23 falls a little flat, with the record’s appeal to the inhospitable extremities of electronic music tipping the balance too far toward unbridled thump. Nina Kraviz vs. Snazzy’s “U Ludei Est Pravo!” is dark, distorted, and rather forgettable: Like PTU’s “Mstera,” Kraviz’s collaboration is constantly shifting, balancing murky electronic riffs with vocal snippets, but none of these elements stick around in the imagination much beyond the song’s four-and-a-half-minute run time. The Mover’s “Track 1” and Vladimir Dubyshkin’s “Soviet Film,” meanwhile, feel too straight-laced for such highfalutin surroundings. “Track 1” has an ornate melodic sweep straight out of the IDM songbook that doesn’t really develop, while “Soviet Film” resembles a standard techno tool, its rumbling synth lines and linear structure in thrall to the dancefloor in a way that feels decidedly un-трип. There’s nothing really wrong with these songs. But it is a sign of how how far трип has travelled down its path of electronic singularity that a well-constructed dancefloor track and a neat IDM flashback feel like average ducklings among a cygnet parade of audacious electronic experiments. If трип can continue to deliver serious techno with a smile in the new year, expanding the mind without interrupting the party, then 2019 won’t want for lively nightclubbing.

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

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

трип

January 5, 2019

fe5bcd46-8cb6-40c9-8c5a-6f9257549945

Ben Cardew

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

This reissued box set from Prince’s unloved early-’00s period provides proof of his astounding skill as a performer and the depth of his catalog even in its shallow end.

This reissued box set from Prince’s unloved early-’00s period provides proof of his astounding skill as a performer and the depth of his catalog even in its shallow end.

Prince: Up All Nite With Prince: The One Nite Alone Collection

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-up-all-nite-with-prince-the-one-nite-alone-collection/

Up All Nite With Prince: The One Nite Alone Collection

At the turn of the millennium, the party seemed to be over for Prince. Between 2000 and 2002, he lost his father, got divorced, remarried in secret, found religion, and defended Napster in his war against a tyrannical music industry infrastructure. On top of all that, the albums he released were panned or disregarded. Even in the wake of his death, in 2016, this period was remembered as controversial or underwhelming. A reissued box set recorded during this time, composed of the 2002 album One Nite Alone…, the two-part One Nite Alone… Live!, One Nite Alone, The Aftershow: It Ain’t Over, and the Live at the Aladdin Las Vegas DVD, aims to rectify that. Taken on the whole, the box set is proof of his astounding skill as a performer, the depth of his catalog even in its shallow end, and the consistency that he brought to his concerts, night in and night out. It remains one of the few archival documents of his sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes maddeningly mercurial, but always adventurous live experience, and the most complete picture of how he put together his shows. The discs are arranged by intensity: from the intimate, heart-to-heart balladry of One Nite Alone... to the rowdy, collaborative jamming of his after-shows. Originally released exclusively through NPG Music Club, the subscription-based access portal Prince created to share his music online in the early 2000s after a battle with Warner Bros., the box set focuses on songs that are often overlooked, forgotten, or downplayed as part of a career downturn. Perhaps none of his albums from this era suffered more from this perception than One Nite Alone…, which is easy to overlook in its austerity. Just as 1998’s The Truth pared down his songs to acoustic guitar and wispy vocals, on One Nite Alone... Prince embraced a similar reduction. Its alone-at-the-piano vibe, made ethereal and informal by his stirring voice, conjured a sort of one-on-one illusion. Very few of the ballads in his catalog are stripped so bare and exhibited so nakedly. These aren’t in the realm of his best-written songs. In fact, when closely scrutinized, some are crudely scrawled love poems. But the subtle, spellbinding force of him on the bench unattended undercuts a lot of the clumsiness of the lyrics. The understated flourishes ring out resoundingly: the flowing, elegant piano solo on the title track, every audible tap of the sustain pedal; the way the minor chords from “Have a Heart” resurface late into “Objects in the Mirror”; the steady crescendo into the satisfying climax of the shrieked words holy wine on the Joni Mitchell cover “A Case of U.” “Avalanche” is a gripping song about the mounting wave that is racism and how the music business exploits Black artists, a practice this album was trying to fight with its exclusive release. The hushed atmospherics of One Nite Alone… open up into the jazzy revels of One Nite Alone… Live!, a two-disc show compilation arranged from stops on the 2002 tour. The shows, which occurred in the run-up to the official release of One Nite Alone…, featured very few songs from the album on the marquee. Instead, it focuses on his born-again 2001 gospel album, The Rainbow Children. Released in the wake of his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Rainbow Children is usually remembered as one of Prince’s most frustrating albums—a dramatic and sudden shift toward jazz with an irksome, omnipresent voice-of-God-like narration and a muddled concept to boot. In a review for Rolling Stone, Arion Berger called the record busy and portentous, “church interludes that are too mystical to carry earthly convention.” However, the same things that made those songs seem over-involved as album cuts made them perfectly suited to his live show. That kind of self-indulgent musicality and preacher’s theatricality fit the stage. There have never been funkier songs about theocratic order. Anyone unwilling to be receptive to change was kindly asked to leave: “For those of you expecting to get your Purple Rain on: You’re in the wrong house.” The shows transformed the album from misbegotten lecture to lively celebration. In these moments on stage, his virtuosity became a bridge to the divine. With a reimagined New Power Generation backing him, featuring three saxophone players (Maceo Parker, Candy Dulfer, Najee), a trombonist (Greg Boyer), Rhonda Smith on bass, John Blackwell on drums, and Renato Neto on keyboards, the songs erupt to life. The lounge-ready arrangements of these songs fill a room. “Muse 2 the Pharaoh” is a bizarre cut with a wack rap verse, but live, the keyboard glows, the guitars are heavier, and the groove is inescapable, rendering the rest moot. “1+1+1 is 3” breaks out into a full-on funk jam (“Somebody get me another suit ready, I’m about to sweat this one out!” Prince exclaims as he goes). The nearly 13-minute official debut of “Xenophobia,” a massive introduction for the band and a crash course in what patrons were getting with this tour, is as inspired as it is insulating. This was not an experience for the casual fan; this was an extension of the NPG Music Club vision. He implies as much: “If you drove up here in a Little Red Corvette/You might be surprised at what you gon’ get.” With the benefit of hindsight, it is proof that even the most inaccessible Prince music could be activated simply by establishing a direct connection between him and his public. Eventually, every Prince show had to satiate the broader audience that made him a pop icon (or at least it had to pretend to try), and so disc two of One Nite Alone… Live! is for the generalist Prince fan who hadn’t heeded his earlier warnings. He does a cursory scan of the hits and fan favorites. Of course, Prince, out of spite, would rarely commit to playing any of those songs in full. As if out of obligation, he sprinkled in abbreviated renditions of “The Beautiful Ones,” “Free,” and “Sometimes It Snows In April” while drawing out Lovesexy’s “Anna Stesia” to 13 minutes. He snuck in two seven-minute Rainbow Children deep cuts. Some folks likely got all dressed up to only hear 40 seconds of “Diamonds & Pearls” and a minute and a half of “I Wanna B Ur Lover.” This section of the main act is, strangely, the most difficult to sit with. He was not as committed to these old songs as he was sharing the messages of his newer ones. The crowd largely had the opposite desire, and that clearly frustrated him. But even his muted protest couldn’t completely stifle the showman in him. Only a few notes into “Adore” the crowd is whipped into a frenzy. His voice seems translucent, and the light that passes through it only better illuminates the baffled audience stunned by his effortless range. His sense of timing and feel for dynamics are unmistakable. Just for a moment, he transforms from religious leader to sex symbol, and there the sexual becomes sacred, which feels fitting for a song about sex so good it makes angels cry. After a sultry performance of “One Nite Alone...,” his falsetto twinkling, “Adore” forms a little suite with “I Wanna B Ur Lover” and “Do Me, Baby,” and not even their truncated lengths can nullify the building momentum or the effect they have on the crowd. He treats listeners to his interpretation of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the song that Sinéad O’Connor made famous, turning her drawn-out bridge into a fidgety fit of kinetic energy. He brings a sassiness to “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?” And even dressed down, “The Beautiful Ones” maintains much of its power, centered by his tender singing. His simpering delivery, like he’s withdrawing into a shell, only makes you yearn for more. For those willing to wait, more often came in the form of a second show, one more freewheeling than the first. This part of the experience is captured on One Nite Alone, The Aftershow: It Ain’t Over, the most essential disc in the box set. Even listeners turned away by his religious musings and his aversion to the classics can appreciate the unquestionable skill at work here, a snapshot of one of Prince’s hallowed live traditions. The after-show phenomenon was born during the Parade tour in 1986, according to Matt Thorne, the author of Prince: The Man and His Music. After debuting the after-show practice at two London gigs, Prince perfected the form with a third secret show at France’s small jazz venue Le New Morning that featured mutating arrangements and his father as a special guest pianist. After that, the after-show would become one of his signature moves, a live experience all its own. These shows were weirder, looser, more intimate, more improvisational, and more epic. Prince had a running dialogue with his band, giving orders on stage and correcting mistakes, and while at his stadium shows he liked to tease out the hits, during after-shows, B-sides, rarities, and covers could evolve into ten-minute opuses. If Prince had been a bit more discerning, he might’ve released one of his more acclaimed after-shows—the nearly mythic set at The Hague’s Het Paard Van Troje in 1988 during the Lovesexy tour, perhaps—in its entirety, as its own live album. No such document exists, and though many live songs are scattered across his titanic discography, this release is one of only four official full-length live recordings of Prince. Two of the other three, C-Note, a five-song sample of outtakes from One Nite Alone… tour soundchecks, and Indigo Nights, cut from after-show performances at indigO2 nightclub in London in 2007, feel unsubstantial and incomplete. The last and recently shared soundtrack to the 1985 concert video, Prince and the Revolution: Live, is a great set from Prince and his best band, but as a ticket to his concert exploits, it’s less comprehensive. The Aftershow remains the best (official) second-hand experience for being in his audience. The Aftershow is the rewarding culmination of the box set’s steady arc. After the solos, sermons, and serenades of the first three discs, the last is blissful excess. He completely reimagines “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” and “Girls & Boys.” The George Clinton-featuring “We Do This” is joyous funk-rap interplay between two masters. The definitive version of “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton” is far more percussive, its spring-loaded bass line and supercharged keyboards building out an unstoppable locomotive engine, prompting Prince to yell out, “I want to sing but it’s too funky.” If One Nite Alone… showcases Prince as the single-spotlight vocalist and the main act discs showcase Prince the bandleader, then The Aftershow is an exhibition for Prince as one of the greatest guitar players ever. “Joy in Repetition” is a masterclass. The deeper you get into the 11-minute “Peach (Xtended Jam),” the sturdier his rhythmic guitar becomes, even as the players around him dive in and out of solos. He amps up “Alphabet Street” and leads the band through a speed-run with some furious playing. By the end of its nearly hour-long run-time, he’d put on a clinic to rival his Super Bowl showcase. Few seemed to understand presentation the way Prince did. After his death, his former publicist and manager Jill Willis said he was always dressed in something he could feasibly wear on stage. Several people who interacted with him over the years remarked that you would smell him before you saw him, and that he smelled like lavender. Being in view so often, he took great care in selecting how he packaged himself. He took this same approach with his craft as a performer and entertainer. Across the many varying discs of the One Nite Alone… box set, a recluse puts his showmanship on display. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Rock

Sony

June 13, 2020

fe5efa6f-1890-4c1d-a45f-b37fa6bd7de7

Sheldon Pearce

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

For the second year in a row, Will Oldham drops a fully-formed, gorgeously wrapped disc with little buildup.

For the second year in a row, Will Oldham drops a fully-formed, gorgeously wrapped disc with little buildup.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Beware

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12859-beware/

Beware

In his review of last year's exceptional Lie Down in the Light, Stephen Deusner noted just how consistent Will Oldham's output had become, bemoaning somewhat Oldham's inability to truly excite. But there's a yin to that yang, that being Oldham has amassed such an army of friends and co-conspirators that he can create an album of Lie Down's quality without excessive pressure or to-do. For the second year in a row, Oldham drops a fully-formed, gorgeously wrapped disc with little buildup, though Beware will receive a promotional bump (a small tour and, in some markets, local-cable commercials) that Oldham begged off of Lie Down. Beware moves Oldham closer still to proper country music, uprooting some of Lie Down's balmy Appalachian posts for robust, quivering compositions recorded with an almost entirely new group of musicians. So Beware is Oldham's "big" record (touring, promotion, etc.), but musically the album seems in many ways smaller-- or at least more level-- than Lie Down. Beware contains no sentiment as scintillating as "So Everyone"'s ode to public intimacy, no melody quite as curvaceous as "For Every Field There's a Mole", and its considerably more ominous artwork and lyrical content feel more in line with Oldham's norms. From its imperative title to "Afraid Ain't Me"'s final instructions to "Work, baby," Oldham seems more inclined than ever to instruct and guide, a move befitting his age, experience, and the role he plays in the indie-rock community. It's a role that, predictably, Oldham turns upside down within moments of the album's first lines, circling the title's sure-handed warning around himself: "Beware of me." Oldham acolytes already know this, as Oldham often fibs-- or "sings in character," to be judicious-- but Beware still stands as Oldham's sagest album yet, with many of its poignant moments arriving as knowing declarations. It's strange to suggest that Oldham is suddenly somehow wiser, but Beware doesn't lack for perspective. He talks lovingly of children, pokes fun at his physique, and receives an "unfinal call"-- a warning-- from an angel. When on the lover's hymn "My Life's Work" Oldham says, "I take this load on/ It is my life's work," he could just as easily be talking about the burdens of cult artistry. Elsewhere, the familial comforts of Lie Down have been replaced with ribald, cowboy promiscuity. Oldham's characters' relationships with women have developed into a loving, frustrating dependence: "It's kind of easy to have some fun/ When you don't belong to anyone." He occasionally aims for the type of woebegone romanticism Jack White's been hamming at for years, singing during the goofy horn-led rocker "You Don't Love Me", "You say my kissing rates a six on a scale of one to 10/ And you wouldn't pass the time with me 'cept you're tired of all your friends." When he commits, divulging that he wants to be your "only friend," he's immediately on the defensive: "Is that scary?" Beware's backing cast might lean a bit hard on conventional arrangements, but even when Oldham's not turning American musics on their heads, he paws at them playfully. Songs spire heartily upwards ("You Are Lost") or move in fits ("Heart's Arms"); buzzing slide guitars and plucked banjos don't sound laconic, they sound nervy. Sometimes the convention-chucking is more explicit, like the flutes and flanged guitars of the ropey "I Am Goodbye" or the twiddling marimba on "You Can't Hurt Me Now". The resultant songs have a familiarity that aims them toward the back of your brain but an internal energy that prods them into prominence with repeated listens. Oldham has once again surrounded himself with voices, lending credence to the characters and modes he slips in and out of. Unlike Lie Down's Ashley Webber or The Letting Go's Dawn McCarthy, Jennifer Hutt and Emmett Kelly (among others) serve less as foils than as gatherers, doubling and tripling Oldham's creak like some gospel-not-gospel choir. It is warm and well-felt music, to the point where the message of a song like "I Don't Belong to Anyone" might differ substantially had a younger Oldham performed it sans accompaniment ("Don't Belong" is followed, incidentally, by "There Is Something I Have to Say", the lone, croaky Beware track that might've fit on Master and Everyone). The sheer number of roles that Oldham inhabits, however, should prevent anyone from drawing hard conclusions about his state of mind. Beware feels more severe and less physical than Lie Down, but Oldham still talks about his tummy on two separate occasions. It feels wise, but there's Oldham, hooting and whooping during "I Am Goodbye". It feels content in its place, but there's the commercial during "Ellen" in the New Orleans market. When Oldham sings, "I know everyone knows the trouble I have seen/ That's the thing about trouble you can love," he might well be jiggling his belly at artist-audience relationships. Impossible to say whether Oldham's being candid or goofing on despair, but either way, he's earned the right.

2009-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00

2009-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Drag City

March 27, 2009

fe6340b0-e59e-430e-a5a2-41e750322ae4

Andrew Gaerig

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

After the move toward genial folk-pop on their misstep of a third album, Dodos return to the formula that made Visiter so successful.

After the move toward genial folk-pop on their misstep of a third album, Dodos return to the formula that made Visiter so successful.

The Dodos: No Color

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15173-no-color/

No Color

In the shadow of Dodos' breakthrough LP Visiter, their 2009 follow-up Time to Die was considered a minor letdown; in a vacuum, it was actually more of a misstep. The addition of a third member had gummed up the works for original members Meric Long and Logan Kroeber went the party line. Instead, the record's achilles heel was the usually appropriate tidy economy of Phil Ek's production. Here, for perhaps the first time, it worked against one of his charges, turning down Dodos' raw idiosyncrasies and miscasting them as genial folk-pop á la Fleet Foxes or the Shins. But when a misstep is this obvious, the flipside is that troubleshooting is incredibly easy-- back to a duo and working with previous engineer John Askew, No Color isn't quite the knockout Visiter was, but it's a logical step in trying to advance beyond the untamed but thrilling sprawl of the past without slamming the door on it. The difference is obvious from the first minute: On opener "Black Night" you're immediately reminded just how magnetic Long and Kroeber can be when they're playing like they don't have to worry about waking the neighbors. The sheer physicality with which these two interact with acoustic instruments feels positively electric, a potent reminder that regardless of their unorthodox musicianship, this is above all else a rock band. And most importantly, one that avoids the usual trope of acoustic acts gunning to be forceful (i.e., strum harder) and plays off each other's virtuosity for whatever form of crowd-pleasing they want, whether it's another chorus for a beer commercial or unplugged psych-rock with the volcanic peaks of freaky companions Akron/Family. Lyrically, No Color is a step in a new direction for Dodos-- for mostly better. Catalog highlights "Jodi" and "Fools" were ultimately both driven by the same gut-level writing that also resulted in some fairly awkward woe-is-the-world accounts, and Long is noticeably more impressionistic here. The upside is in how the phrasing is rhythmically and thematically more locked in than ever with the sonics-- words acts in tandem with the dizzying momentum accumulated during "Black Night", while the odd-metered repetition of "Sleep"'s chorus mirrors the narrator's increasing self-obsession. For the most part, the autumnal glow is a good look, even if they nail that feeling a bit much in the record's most sedated and less rewarding second half. "Companions" and "Don't Stop" close No Color with Long's most pyrotechnic chops and most pedestrian melodies. But in between, "When Will You Go" and "Don't Try and Hide It" hit an anthemic stride whose subtle build and optimism feel like new wrinkles-- in particular, the latter works in a manner similar to Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle", claiming a pep talk about feeling normal can be every bit as effective as one that makes you wonder if you really have a freak flag to fly. In a weird way, "Don't Try And Hide It" feels like a thematic mission statement for No Color. For one thing, it's one of several tracks that feature backup vocals from tourmate Neko Case, but the reason I feel comfortable waiting this long to bring up what at least sounds like a huge selling point is because she's, well, kinda hidden. If you wanted to hear her do the force of nature thing, well, that's what Neko Case albums are for, and the way she fits in as a bit player drives home a line from "Black Night" where Long confidently sings "it was never that I was aiming at being someone else." Whether that's true or not, No Color is proof that Dodos are indeed at their best when they're simply being themselves.

2011-03-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-03-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Frenchkiss

March 14, 2011

fe640757-bfc4-4e80-b908-68c87cb49cc1

Ian Cohen

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